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train	51286	[ "Why does Matilda break off her engagement with Herman?", "What best summarizes Matilda’s attitude?", "What is alluring about Haron Gorka’s posting to Matilda?", "Why does no one on town know who Haron Gorka is?", "What is significant about the meal Matilda is served?", "Why does Matilda feel she was being made fun of?", "Has Matilda changed the end of the story? ", "Is Haron’s story true?" ]	[ [ "She’s looking for someone more adventurous. ", "He was too “stuffy” for Matilda.", "She doesn’t want to settle for him, as she’s too fixated on the idea of romance she has. ", "She’s afraid of commitment, as is hinted by this being another broken engagement for her. " ], [ "She’s too easily trusting of strangers and the unknown. ", "She is a lonely, unhappy person looking for an outlet via the Pen Pals column.", "She’s naive, and doesn’t understand relationship.s ", "She’s naive, and a romantic who craves excitement." ], [ "His mystique, and the ideas Matilda projects on him. ", "His ego and mystique. He doesn’t say a lot about himself. ", "He’s well traveled, so he must have important things to share.m", "His ego. She loves how much he has to say about himself, " ], [ "Haron Gorka isn’t his real name. Thus, there’s no records of him. ", "He’s not a real resident. He’s using a fake name while he stays in town. ", "He travels so much that the people in town haven’t gotten to know him. ", "He’s not a real resident, but an interstellar visitor. " ], [ "It lends credence to Gorka’s otherworldly claims. How else could it have happened? ", "She’d been starving, and it was enough to distract her from the reality of what happened to her.", "It’s exactly what she wanted to eat, and she didn’t have to ask for it. ,", "It means Gorka’s paranoid servant had been observing her, and determined her favorite foods. " ], [ "She though t Gorka was making up stories to appeal to her childish nature. ", "She thought Gorka was playing with her trusting nature by telling her lies. ", "She thought Gorka didn’t respe ct her enough, ", "She thought Gorka was trying to make her feel stupid by saying things she couldn’t disprove. " ], [ "No. She still hasn’t found a husband, and will likely be Pen Pals again. ", "No. She’s still looking for fantasies, as evidence by her looking up at the shooting star. ", "Yes. She is like Mrs. Gorky no3, chasing after impossible theories. ", "Yes. She’s more grounded now, and less naive. " ], [ "No. Haron only tells her the story in the hopes of getting his wife to come home,", "Yes. Matilda confirms when she sees the “shooting star.”", "Yes, though only his wife is aware of that. ", "No. Both he and his wife are truly delusional." ] ]	[ 2, 4, 1, 4, 1, 2, 4, 2 ]	[ 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "\"I thought so,\" she said. \"I knew this was coming when I saw that look\n in your eye at dinner. Where is Herman's engagement ring?\"\n\n\n Matilda smiled. \"It wouldn't have worked out, Ma. He was too darned\n stuffy. I gave him his ring and said thanks anyway and he smiled\n politely and said he wished I had told him sooner because his fifteenth\n college reunion was this weekend and he had already turned down the\n invitation.\"\n\n\n The widow Penshaws nodded regretfully. \"That was thoughtful of Herman\n to hide his feelings.\"\n\n\n \"Hogwash!\" said her daughter. \"He has no true feelings. He's sorry that\n he had to miss his college reunion. That's all he has to hide. A stuffy\n Victorian prude and even less of a man than the others.\"", "\"But, Matilda, that's your fifth broken engagement in three years. It\n ain't that you ain't popular, but you just don't want to cooperate.\n You don't\nfall\nin love, Matilda—no one does. Love osmoses into you\n slowly, without you even knowing, and it keeps growing all the time.\"\n\n\n Matilda admired her mother's use of the word osmosis, but she found\n nothing which was not objectionable about being unaware of the impact\n of love. She said good-night and went upstairs, climbed out of her\n light summer dress and took a cold shower.\n\n\n She began to hum to herself. She had not yet seen the pen pal section\n of the current\nLiterary Review\n, and because the subject matter of\n that magazine was somewhat highbrow and cosmopolitan, she could expect\n a gratifying selection of pen pals.", "The widow Penshaws smiled somewhat toothlessly, having neglected to put\n in both her uppers and lowers this early in the morning. \"I'm fixing\n breakfast, of course....\"\n\n\n Then the widow Penshaws told Matilda that she could never hope to sneak\n about the house without her mother knowing about it, and that even\n if she were going out in response to one of those foolish ads in the\n magazines, she would still need a good breakfast to start with like\n only mother could cook. Matilda moodily thanked the widow Penshaws.\nDriving the fifty miles to Cedar Falls in a little less than an hour,\n Matilda hummed Mendelssohn's Wedding March all the way. It was her\n favorite piece of music. Once, she told herself: Matilda Penshaws, you\n are being premature about the whole thing. But she laughed and thought\n that if she was, she was, and, meanwhile, she could only get to Cedar\n Falls and find out.", "They were mad, all right, and now Matilda wondered if, actually,\n they were husband and wife. It could readily be; maybe the madness\n was catching. Maybe if you thought too much about such things, such\n travels, you could get that way. Of course, Herman represented the\n other extreme, and Herman was even worse in his own way—but hereafter\n Matilda would seek the happy medium.\n\n\n And, above all else, she had had enough of her pen pal columns. They\n were, she realized, for kids.\nShe ate dinner in Cedar Falls and then she went out to her car again,\n preparing for the journey back home. The sun had set and it was a clear\n night, and overhead the great broad sweep of the Milky Way was a pale\n rainbow bridge in the sky.\n\n\n Matilda paused. Off in the distance there was a glow on the horizon,\n and that was the direction of Haron Gorka's place.", "It must be said to Matilda's favor that she sobbed only once. After\n that she realized that what is done is done and here, past thirty,\n she wasn't going to be girlishly timid about it. Besides, it was not\n her fault if, in his unconcern, Haron Gorka had unwittingly hired a\n neurotic servant.\n\n\n For a time Matilda paced back and forth in her room, and of what was\n going on outside she could hear nothing. In that case, she would\n pretend that there was nothing outside the little room, and presently\n she lay down on the bed to take a nap. This didn't last long, however:\n she had a nightmare in which Haron Gorka appeared as a giant with two\n heads, but, upon awaking with a start, she immediately ascribed that to\n her overwrought nerves.", "Matilda felt bad, but she had no intention of returning home this\n early. If she could not find Haron Gorka, that was one thing; but she\n knew that she'd rather not return home and face the widow Penshaws, at\n least not for a while yet. The widow Penshaws meant well, but she liked\n to analyze other people's mistakes, especially Matilda's.\n\n\n Accordingly, Matilda trudged wearily toward Cedar Falls' small and\n unimposing library. She could release some of her pent-up aggression by\n browsing through the dusty slacks.", "When she finished her meal a pleasant lethargy possessed her, and in a\n little while Matilda was asleep again. This time she did not dream at\n all. It was a deep sleep and a restful one, and when she awoke it was\n with the wonderful feeling that everything was all right.\nThe feeling did not last long. Standing over her was Haron Gorka's\n servant, and he said, \"Mr. Gorka will see you now.\"\n\n\n \"Now?\"\n\n\n \"Now. That's what you're here for, isn't it?\"\n\n\n He had a point there, but Matilda hardly even had time to fix her hair.\n She told the servant so.\n\n\n \"Miss,\" he replied, \"I assure you it will not matter in the least to\n Haron Gorka. You are here and he is ready to see you and that is all\n that matters.\"\n\n\n \"You sure?\" Matilda wanted to take no chances.", "Matilda assured her that it was, and, breathlessly, she wrote down the\n address. She thanked the librarian and then she went out to her car,\n whistling to herself.\nHaron Gorka lived in what could have been an agrarian estate, except\n that the land no longer was being tilled. The house itself had fallen\n to ruin. This surprised Matilda, but she did not let it keep her\n spirits in check. Haron Gorka, the man, was what counted, and the\n librarian's account of him certainly had been glowing enough. Perhaps\n he was too busy with his cultural pursuits to pay any real attention to\n his dwelling. That was it, of course: the conspicuous show of wealth or\n personal industry meant nothing at all to Haron Gorka. Matilda liked\n him all the more for it.", "The woman sat at her desk as Matilda had remembered her, gray,\n broom-stick figure, rigid. But now when she saw Matilda she perked up\n visibly.\n\n\n \"Hello, my dear,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Hi.\"\n\n\n \"You're back a bit sooner than I expected. But, then, the other five\n have returned, too, and I imagine your story will be similar.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know what they told you,\" Matilda said. \"But this is what\n happened to me.\"\n\n\n She quickly then related everything which had happened, completely and\n in detail. She did this first because it was a promise, and second\n because she knew it would make her feel better.\n\n\n \"So,\" she finished, \"Haron Gorka is either extremely eccentric or\n insane. I'm sorry.\"", "Matilda was not yet that far gone in years or appearance. Dressed\n properly, she could hope to make a favorable impression in person, and\n she felt it was important to beat the influx of mail to Cedar Falls.\nMatilda got out of bed at seven, tiptoed into the bathroom, showered\n with a merest wary trickle of water, tiptoed back into her bedroom,\n dressed in her very best cotton over the finest of uplifting and\n figure-moulding underthings, made sure her stocking seams were\n perfectly straight, brushed her suede shoes, admired herself in the\n mirror, read the ad again, wished for a moment she were a bit younger,\n and tiptoed downstairs.\n\n\n The widow Penshaws met her at the bottom of the stairwell.\n\n\n \"Mother,\" gasped Matilda. Matilda always gasped when she saw something\n unexpected. \"What on earth are you doing up?\"", "As she shifted into reverse and pulled out of the driveway, she saw\n the servant leaving, too. Far down the road, he was walking slowly.\n Then Haron Gorka had severed that relationship, too, and now he was all\n alone.\n\n\n As she drove back to town, the disappointment melted slowly away. There\n were, of course, two alternatives. Either Haron Gorka was an eccentric\n who enjoyed this sort of outlandish tomfoolery, or else he was plainly\n insane. She could still picture him ranting on aimlessly to no one in\n particular about places which had no existence outside of his mind, his\n voice high-pitched and eager.\nIt was not until she had passed the small library building that she\n remembered what she had promised the librarian. In her own way, the\n aging woman would be as disappointed as Matilda, but a promise was a\n promise, and Matilda turned the car in a wide U-turn and parked it\n outside the library.", "poaching in a strictly forbidden territory!\nThe best that could be said for Matilda Penshaws was that she was\n something of a paradox. She was thirty-three years old, certainly not\n aged when you consider the fact that the female life expectancy is now\n up in the sixties, but the lines were beginning to etch their permanent\n paths across her face and now she needed certain remedial undergarments\n at which she would have scoffed ten or even five years ago. Matilda was\n also looking for a husband.\n\n\n This, in itself, was not unusual—but Matilda was so completely\n wrapped up in the romantic fallacy of her day that she sought a prince\n charming, a faithful Don Juan, a man who had been everywhere and tasted\n of every worldly pleasure and who now wanted to sit on a porch and\n talk about it all to Matilda.", "\"He's neither,\" the librarian contradicted. \"Perhaps he is slightly\n eccentric by your standards, but really, my dear, he is neither.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Did he leave a message for his wife?\"\n\n\n \"Why, yes. Yes, he did. But how did you know? Oh, I suppose he told the\n five.\"\n\n\n \"No. He didn't. But you were the last and I thought he would give you a\n message for his wife—\"\n\n\n Matilda didn't understand. She didn't understand at all, but she told\n the little librarian what the message was. \"He wanted her to return,\"\n she said.\n\n\n The librarian nodded, a happy smile on her lips. \"You wouldn't believe\n me if I told you something.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"", "The name—Haron Gorka: its oddness was somehow beautiful to Matilda.\n Haron Gorka—the nationality could be anything. And that was it. He had\n no nationality for all intents and purposes; he was an international\n man, a figure among figures, a paragon....\n\n\n Matilda sighed happily as she put out the light. The moon shone in\n through the window brightly, and at such times Matilda generally would\n get up, go to the cupboard, pull out a towel, take two hairpins from\n her powder drawer, pin the towel to the screen of her window, and hence\n keep the disturbing moonlight from her eyes. But this time it did not\n disturb her, and she would let it shine. Cedar Falls was a small town\n not fifty miles from her home, and she'd get there a hop, skip, and\n jump ahead of her competitors, simply by arriving in person instead of\n writing a letter.", "\"Stop!\"\n\n\n \"What's that? Making fun of you?\" Haron Gorka's voice had been so\n eager as he spoke, high-pitched, almost like a child's, and now he\n seemed disappointed. He smiled, but it was a sad smile, a smile of\n resignation, and he said, \"Very well. I'm wrong again. You are the\n sixth, and you're no better than the other five. Perhaps you are even\n more outspoken. When you see my wife, tell her to come back. Again she\n is right and I am wrong....\"\n\n\n Haron Gorka turned his back.\n\n\n Matilda could do nothing but leave the room, walk back through the\n house, go outside and get into her car. She noticed not without\n surprise that the other five cars were now gone. She was the last of\n Haron Gorka's guests to depart.", "She also had a fetish. Matilda had received her A.B. from exclusive\n Ursula Johns College and Radcliff had yielded her Masters degree, yet\n Matilda was an avid follower of the pen pal columns. She would read\n them carefully and then read them again, looking for the masculine\n names which, through a system known only to Matilda, had an affinity\n to her own. To the gentlemen upon whom these names were affixed,\n Matilda would write, and she often told her mother, the widow Penshaws,\n that it was in this way she would find her husband. The widow Penshaws\n impatiently told her to go out and get dates.\nThat particular night, Matilda pulled her battered old sedan into the\n garage and walked up the walk to the porch. The widow Penshaws was\n rocking on the glider and Matilda said hello.\n\n\n The first thing the widow Penshaws did was to take Matilda's left hand\n in her own and examine the next-to-the-last finger.", "This she did, but it was unrewarding. Cedar Falls had what might be\n called a microscopic library, and Matilda thought that if this small\n building were filled with microfilm rather than books, the library\n still would be lacking. Hence she retraced her steps and nodded to the\n old librarian as she passed.\nThen Matilda frowned. Twenty years from now, this could be Matilda\n Penshaws—complete with plain gray dress, rimless spectacles, gray\n hair, suspicious eyes, and a broom-stick figure....", "She shut off the shower, brushed her teeth, gargled, patted herself\n dry with a towel, and jumped into bed, careful to lock the door of her\n bedroom. She dared not let the widow Penshaws know that she slept in\n the nude; the widow Penshaws would object to a girl sleeping in the\n nude, even if the nearest neighbor was three hundred yards away.\n\n\n Matilda switched her bed lamp on and dabbed some citronella on each\n ear lobe and a little droplet on her chin (how she hated insects!).\n Then she propped up her pillows—two pillows partially stopped her\n post-nasal drip; and took the latest issue of the\nLiterary Review\noff the night table.", "The fact that in all probability such a man did not exist disturbed\n Matilda not in the least. She had been known to say that there are over\n a billion men in the world, a goodly percentage of whom are eligible\n bachelors, and that the right one would come along simply because she\n had been waiting for him.\n\n\n Matilda, you see, had patience.", "\"That's easy. You're the sixth young woman who came here inquiring\n about that man today. Six of you—five others in the morning, and now\n you in the afternoon. I never did trust this Mr. Gorka....\"\n\n\n Matilda jumped as if she had been struck strategically from the rear.\n \"You know him? You know Haron Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. Of course I know him. He's our steadiest reader here at\n the library. Not a week goes by that he doesn't take out three, four\n books. Scholarly gentleman, but not without charm. If I were twenty\n years younger—\"\n\n\n Matilda thought a little flattery might be effective. \"Only ten,\" she\n assured the librarian. \"Ten years would be more than sufficient, I'm\n sure.\"" ], [ "The woman sat at her desk as Matilda had remembered her, gray,\n broom-stick figure, rigid. But now when she saw Matilda she perked up\n visibly.\n\n\n \"Hello, my dear,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Hi.\"\n\n\n \"You're back a bit sooner than I expected. But, then, the other five\n have returned, too, and I imagine your story will be similar.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know what they told you,\" Matilda said. \"But this is what\n happened to me.\"\n\n\n She quickly then related everything which had happened, completely and\n in detail. She did this first because it was a promise, and second\n because she knew it would make her feel better.\n\n\n \"So,\" she finished, \"Haron Gorka is either extremely eccentric or\n insane. I'm sorry.\"", "Matilda felt bad, but she had no intention of returning home this\n early. If she could not find Haron Gorka, that was one thing; but she\n knew that she'd rather not return home and face the widow Penshaws, at\n least not for a while yet. The widow Penshaws meant well, but she liked\n to analyze other people's mistakes, especially Matilda's.\n\n\n Accordingly, Matilda trudged wearily toward Cedar Falls' small and\n unimposing library. She could release some of her pent-up aggression by\n browsing through the dusty slacks.", "Matilda was not yet that far gone in years or appearance. Dressed\n properly, she could hope to make a favorable impression in person, and\n she felt it was important to beat the influx of mail to Cedar Falls.\nMatilda got out of bed at seven, tiptoed into the bathroom, showered\n with a merest wary trickle of water, tiptoed back into her bedroom,\n dressed in her very best cotton over the finest of uplifting and\n figure-moulding underthings, made sure her stocking seams were\n perfectly straight, brushed her suede shoes, admired herself in the\n mirror, read the ad again, wished for a moment she were a bit younger,\n and tiptoed downstairs.\n\n\n The widow Penshaws met her at the bottom of the stairwell.\n\n\n \"Mother,\" gasped Matilda. Matilda always gasped when she saw something\n unexpected. \"What on earth are you doing up?\"", "poaching in a strictly forbidden territory!\nThe best that could be said for Matilda Penshaws was that she was\n something of a paradox. She was thirty-three years old, certainly not\n aged when you consider the fact that the female life expectancy is now\n up in the sixties, but the lines were beginning to etch their permanent\n paths across her face and now she needed certain remedial undergarments\n at which she would have scoffed ten or even five years ago. Matilda was\n also looking for a husband.\n\n\n This, in itself, was not unusual—but Matilda was so completely\n wrapped up in the romantic fallacy of her day that she sought a prince\n charming, a faithful Don Juan, a man who had been everywhere and tasted\n of every worldly pleasure and who now wanted to sit on a porch and\n talk about it all to Matilda.", "The fact that in all probability such a man did not exist disturbed\n Matilda not in the least. She had been known to say that there are over\n a billion men in the world, a goodly percentage of whom are eligible\n bachelors, and that the right one would come along simply because she\n had been waiting for him.\n\n\n Matilda, you see, had patience.", "It must be said to Matilda's favor that she sobbed only once. After\n that she realized that what is done is done and here, past thirty,\n she wasn't going to be girlishly timid about it. Besides, it was not\n her fault if, in his unconcern, Haron Gorka had unwittingly hired a\n neurotic servant.\n\n\n For a time Matilda paced back and forth in her room, and of what was\n going on outside she could hear nothing. In that case, she would\n pretend that there was nothing outside the little room, and presently\n she lay down on the bed to take a nap. This didn't last long, however:\n she had a nightmare in which Haron Gorka appeared as a giant with two\n heads, but, upon awaking with a start, she immediately ascribed that to\n her overwrought nerves.", "The widow Penshaws smiled somewhat toothlessly, having neglected to put\n in both her uppers and lowers this early in the morning. \"I'm fixing\n breakfast, of course....\"\n\n\n Then the widow Penshaws told Matilda that she could never hope to sneak\n about the house without her mother knowing about it, and that even\n if she were going out in response to one of those foolish ads in the\n magazines, she would still need a good breakfast to start with like\n only mother could cook. Matilda moodily thanked the widow Penshaws.\nDriving the fifty miles to Cedar Falls in a little less than an hour,\n Matilda hummed Mendelssohn's Wedding March all the way. It was her\n favorite piece of music. Once, she told herself: Matilda Penshaws, you\n are being premature about the whole thing. But she laughed and thought\n that if she was, she was, and, meanwhile, she could only get to Cedar\n Falls and find out.", "When she finished her meal a pleasant lethargy possessed her, and in a\n little while Matilda was asleep again. This time she did not dream at\n all. It was a deep sleep and a restful one, and when she awoke it was\n with the wonderful feeling that everything was all right.\nThe feeling did not last long. Standing over her was Haron Gorka's\n servant, and he said, \"Mr. Gorka will see you now.\"\n\n\n \"Now?\"\n\n\n \"Now. That's what you're here for, isn't it?\"\n\n\n He had a point there, but Matilda hardly even had time to fix her hair.\n She told the servant so.\n\n\n \"Miss,\" he replied, \"I assure you it will not matter in the least to\n Haron Gorka. You are here and he is ready to see you and that is all\n that matters.\"\n\n\n \"You sure?\" Matilda wanted to take no chances.", "There were five cars parked in the long driveway, and now Matilda's\n made the sixth. In spite of herself, she smiled. She had not been the\n only one with the idea to visit Haron Gorka in person. With half a\n dozen of them there, the laggards who resorted to posting letters would\n be left far behind. Matilda congratulated herself for what she thought\n had been her ingenuity, and which now turned out to be something which\n she had in common with five other women. You live and learn, thought\n Matilda. And then, quite annoyedly, she berated herself for not having\n been the first. Perhaps the other five all were satisfactory; perhaps\n she wouldn't be needed; perhaps she was too late....\nAs it turned out, she wasn't. Not only that, she was welcomed with open", "Matilda assured her that it was, and, breathlessly, she wrote down the\n address. She thanked the librarian and then she went out to her car,\n whistling to herself.\nHaron Gorka lived in what could have been an agrarian estate, except\n that the land no longer was being tilled. The house itself had fallen\n to ruin. This surprised Matilda, but she did not let it keep her\n spirits in check. Haron Gorka, the man, was what counted, and the\n librarian's account of him certainly had been glowing enough. Perhaps\n he was too busy with his cultural pursuits to pay any real attention to\n his dwelling. That was it, of course: the conspicuous show of wealth or\n personal industry meant nothing at all to Haron Gorka. Matilda liked\n him all the more for it.", "\"But, Matilda, that's your fifth broken engagement in three years. It\n ain't that you ain't popular, but you just don't want to cooperate.\n You don't\nfall\nin love, Matilda—no one does. Love osmoses into you\n slowly, without you even knowing, and it keeps growing all the time.\"\n\n\n Matilda admired her mother's use of the word osmosis, but she found\n nothing which was not objectionable about being unaware of the impact\n of love. She said good-night and went upstairs, climbed out of her\n light summer dress and took a cold shower.\n\n\n She began to hum to herself. She had not yet seen the pen pal section\n of the current\nLiterary Review\n, and because the subject matter of\n that magazine was somewhat highbrow and cosmopolitan, she could expect\n a gratifying selection of pen pals.", "She shut off the shower, brushed her teeth, gargled, patted herself\n dry with a towel, and jumped into bed, careful to lock the door of her\n bedroom. She dared not let the widow Penshaws know that she slept in\n the nude; the widow Penshaws would object to a girl sleeping in the\n nude, even if the nearest neighbor was three hundred yards away.\n\n\n Matilda switched her bed lamp on and dabbed some citronella on each\n ear lobe and a little droplet on her chin (how she hated insects!).\n Then she propped up her pillows—two pillows partially stopped her\n post-nasal drip; and took the latest issue of the\nLiterary Review\noff the night table.", "\"He's neither,\" the librarian contradicted. \"Perhaps he is slightly\n eccentric by your standards, but really, my dear, he is neither.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Did he leave a message for his wife?\"\n\n\n \"Why, yes. Yes, he did. But how did you know? Oh, I suppose he told the\n five.\"\n\n\n \"No. He didn't. But you were the last and I thought he would give you a\n message for his wife—\"\n\n\n Matilda didn't understand. She didn't understand at all, but she told\n the little librarian what the message was. \"He wanted her to return,\"\n she said.\n\n\n The librarian nodded, a happy smile on her lips. \"You wouldn't believe\n me if I told you something.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"", "And so she got there.\n\n\n The man in the wire cage at the Cedar Falls post office was a\n stereotype. Matilda always liked to think in terms of stereotypes. This\n man was small, roundish, florid of face, with a pair of eyeglasses\n which hung too far down on his nose. Matilda knew he would peer over\n his glasses and answer questions grudgingly.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" said Matilda.\n\n\n The stereotype grunted and peered at her over his glasses. Matilda\n asked him where she could find Haron Gorka.\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"I said, where can I find Haron Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"Is that in the United States?\"\n\n\n \"It's not a that; it's a he. Where can I find him? Where does he live?\n What's the quickest way to get there?\"", "This she did, but it was unrewarding. Cedar Falls had what might be\n called a microscopic library, and Matilda thought that if this small\n building were filled with microfilm rather than books, the library\n still would be lacking. Hence she retraced her steps and nodded to the\n old librarian as she passed.\nThen Matilda frowned. Twenty years from now, this could be Matilda\n Penshaws—complete with plain gray dress, rimless spectacles, gray\n hair, suspicious eyes, and a broom-stick figure....", "As she shifted into reverse and pulled out of the driveway, she saw\n the servant leaving, too. Far down the road, he was walking slowly.\n Then Haron Gorka had severed that relationship, too, and now he was all\n alone.\n\n\n As she drove back to town, the disappointment melted slowly away. There\n were, of course, two alternatives. Either Haron Gorka was an eccentric\n who enjoyed this sort of outlandish tomfoolery, or else he was plainly\n insane. She could still picture him ranting on aimlessly to no one in\n particular about places which had no existence outside of his mind, his\n voice high-pitched and eager.\nIt was not until she had passed the small library building that she\n remembered what she had promised the librarian. In her own way, the\n aging woman would be as disappointed as Matilda, but a promise was a\n promise, and Matilda turned the car in a wide U-turn and parked it\n outside the library.", "They were mad, all right, and now Matilda wondered if, actually,\n they were husband and wife. It could readily be; maybe the madness\n was catching. Maybe if you thought too much about such things, such\n travels, you could get that way. Of course, Herman represented the\n other extreme, and Herman was even worse in his own way—but hereafter\n Matilda would seek the happy medium.\n\n\n And, above all else, she had had enough of her pen pal columns. They\n were, she realized, for kids.\nShe ate dinner in Cedar Falls and then she went out to her car again,\n preparing for the journey back home. The sun had set and it was a clear\n night, and overhead the great broad sweep of the Milky Way was a pale\n rainbow bridge in the sky.\n\n\n Matilda paused. Off in the distance there was a glow on the horizon,\n and that was the direction of Haron Gorka's place.", "\"They convinced me that I ought to give them his address.\"\n\n\n Matilda reached into her pocket-book and withdrew a five dollar bill.\n \"Was this the way?\" she demanded. Matilda was not very good at this\n sort of thing.\n\n\n The librarian shook her head.\n\n\n Matilda nodded shrewdly and added a twin brother to the bill in her\n hand. \"Then is this better?\"\n\n\n \"That's worse. I wouldn't take your money—\"\n\n\n \"Sorry. What then?\"", "The name—Haron Gorka: its oddness was somehow beautiful to Matilda.\n Haron Gorka—the nationality could be anything. And that was it. He had\n no nationality for all intents and purposes; he was an international\n man, a figure among figures, a paragon....\n\n\n Matilda sighed happily as she put out the light. The moon shone in\n through the window brightly, and at such times Matilda generally would\n get up, go to the cupboard, pull out a towel, take two hairpins from\n her powder drawer, pin the towel to the screen of her window, and hence\n keep the disturbing moonlight from her eyes. But this time it did not\n disturb her, and she would let it shine. Cedar Falls was a small town\n not fifty miles from her home, and she'd get there a hop, skip, and\n jump ahead of her competitors, simply by arriving in person instead of\n writing a letter.", "\"Are you? Well. Well, well.\" The librarian did something with the back\n of her hair, but it looked the same as before. \"Maybe you're right.\n Maybe you're right at that.\" Then she sighed. \"But I guess a miss is as\n good as a mile.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"I mean anyone would like to correspond with Haron Gorka. Or to know\n him well. To be considered his friend. Haron Gorka....\"\n\n\n The librarian seemed about to soar off into the air someplace, and if\n five women had been here first, Matilda was now definitely in a hurry.\n\n\n \"Um, where can I find Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not supposed to do this, you know. We're not permitted to give the\n addresses of any of our people. Against regulations, my dear.\"\n\n\n \"What about the other five women?\"" ], [ "When she finished her meal a pleasant lethargy possessed her, and in a\n little while Matilda was asleep again. This time she did not dream at\n all. It was a deep sleep and a restful one, and when she awoke it was\n with the wonderful feeling that everything was all right.\nThe feeling did not last long. Standing over her was Haron Gorka's\n servant, and he said, \"Mr. Gorka will see you now.\"\n\n\n \"Now?\"\n\n\n \"Now. That's what you're here for, isn't it?\"\n\n\n He had a point there, but Matilda hardly even had time to fix her hair.\n She told the servant so.\n\n\n \"Miss,\" he replied, \"I assure you it will not matter in the least to\n Haron Gorka. You are here and he is ready to see you and that is all\n that matters.\"\n\n\n \"You sure?\" Matilda wanted to take no chances.", "Matilda assured her that it was, and, breathlessly, she wrote down the\n address. She thanked the librarian and then she went out to her car,\n whistling to herself.\nHaron Gorka lived in what could have been an agrarian estate, except\n that the land no longer was being tilled. The house itself had fallen\n to ruin. This surprised Matilda, but she did not let it keep her\n spirits in check. Haron Gorka, the man, was what counted, and the\n librarian's account of him certainly had been glowing enough. Perhaps\n he was too busy with his cultural pursuits to pay any real attention to\n his dwelling. That was it, of course: the conspicuous show of wealth or\n personal industry meant nothing at all to Haron Gorka. Matilda liked\n him all the more for it.", "There were five cars parked in the long driveway, and now Matilda's\n made the sixth. In spite of herself, she smiled. She had not been the\n only one with the idea to visit Haron Gorka in person. With half a\n dozen of them there, the laggards who resorted to posting letters would\n be left far behind. Matilda congratulated herself for what she thought\n had been her ingenuity, and which now turned out to be something which\n she had in common with five other women. You live and learn, thought\n Matilda. And then, quite annoyedly, she berated herself for not having\n been the first. Perhaps the other five all were satisfactory; perhaps\n she wouldn't be needed; perhaps she was too late....\nAs it turned out, she wasn't. Not only that, she was welcomed with open", "The name—Haron Gorka: its oddness was somehow beautiful to Matilda.\n Haron Gorka—the nationality could be anything. And that was it. He had\n no nationality for all intents and purposes; he was an international\n man, a figure among figures, a paragon....\n\n\n Matilda sighed happily as she put out the light. The moon shone in\n through the window brightly, and at such times Matilda generally would\n get up, go to the cupboard, pull out a towel, take two hairpins from\n her powder drawer, pin the towel to the screen of her window, and hence\n keep the disturbing moonlight from her eyes. But this time it did not\n disturb her, and she would let it shine. Cedar Falls was a small town\n not fifty miles from her home, and she'd get there a hop, skip, and\n jump ahead of her competitors, simply by arriving in person instead of\n writing a letter.", "\"That's easy. You're the sixth young woman who came here inquiring\n about that man today. Six of you—five others in the morning, and now\n you in the afternoon. I never did trust this Mr. Gorka....\"\n\n\n Matilda jumped as if she had been struck strategically from the rear.\n \"You know him? You know Haron Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. Of course I know him. He's our steadiest reader here at\n the library. Not a week goes by that he doesn't take out three, four\n books. Scholarly gentleman, but not without charm. If I were twenty\n years younger—\"\n\n\n Matilda thought a little flattery might be effective. \"Only ten,\" she\n assured the librarian. \"Ten years would be more than sufficient, I'm\n sure.\"", "\"Certainly. You came in response to my ad. You want to hear me talk, do\n you not?\"\n\n\n \"I—do.\" Matilda had had visions of her prince charming sitting back\n and relaxing with her, telling her of the many things he had done and\n seen. But first she certainly would have liked to get to\nknow\nthe\n man. Well, Haron Gorka obviously had more experience along these lines\n than she did. He waited, however, as if wondering what to say, and\n Matilda, accustomed to social chatter, gave him a gambit.\n\n\n \"I must admit I was surprised when I got exactly what I wanted for\n dinner,\" she told him brightly.", "On the other hand—why not? Why couldn't the librarian help her? Why\n hadn't she thought of it before? Certainly a man as well-educated as\n Haron Gorka would be an avid reader, and unless he had a permanent\n residence here in Cedar Palls, one couldn't expect that he'd have his\n own library with him. This being the case, a third-rate collection\n of books was far better than no collection at all, and perhaps the\n librarian would know Mr. Haron Gorka.\n\n\n Matilda cleared her throat. \"Pardon me,\" she began. \"I'm looking for—\"\n\n\n \"Haron Gorka.\" The librarian nodded.\n\n\n \"How on earth did you know?\"", "It must be said to Matilda's favor that she sobbed only once. After\n that she realized that what is done is done and here, past thirty,\n she wasn't going to be girlishly timid about it. Besides, it was not\n her fault if, in his unconcern, Haron Gorka had unwittingly hired a\n neurotic servant.\n\n\n For a time Matilda paced back and forth in her room, and of what was\n going on outside she could hear nothing. In that case, she would\n pretend that there was nothing outside the little room, and presently\n she lay down on the bed to take a nap. This didn't last long, however:\n she had a nightmare in which Haron Gorka appeared as a giant with two\n heads, but, upon awaking with a start, she immediately ascribed that to\n her overwrought nerves.", "\"Yes. Come.\"\n\n\n She followed him out of the little room and across what should have\n been a spacious dining area, except that everything seemed covered with\n dust. Of the other women Matilda could see nothing, and she suddenly\n realized that each of them probably had a cubicle of a room like her\n own, and that each in her turn had already had her first visit with\n Haron Gorka. Well, then, she must see to it that she impressed him\n better than did all the rest, and, later, when she returned to tell the\n old librarian of her adventures, she could perhaps draw her out and\n compare notes.", "\"Are you? Well. Well, well.\" The librarian did something with the back\n of her hair, but it looked the same as before. \"Maybe you're right.\n Maybe you're right at that.\" Then she sighed. \"But I guess a miss is as\n good as a mile.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"I mean anyone would like to correspond with Haron Gorka. Or to know\n him well. To be considered his friend. Haron Gorka....\"\n\n\n The librarian seemed about to soar off into the air someplace, and if\n five women had been here first, Matilda was now definitely in a hurry.\n\n\n \"Um, where can I find Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not supposed to do this, you know. We're not permitted to give the\n addresses of any of our people. Against regulations, my dear.\"\n\n\n \"What about the other five women?\"", "As she shifted into reverse and pulled out of the driveway, she saw\n the servant leaving, too. Far down the road, he was walking slowly.\n Then Haron Gorka had severed that relationship, too, and now he was all\n alone.\n\n\n As she drove back to town, the disappointment melted slowly away. There\n were, of course, two alternatives. Either Haron Gorka was an eccentric\n who enjoyed this sort of outlandish tomfoolery, or else he was plainly\n insane. She could still picture him ranting on aimlessly to no one in\n particular about places which had no existence outside of his mind, his\n voice high-pitched and eager.\nIt was not until she had passed the small library building that she\n remembered what she had promised the librarian. In her own way, the\n aging woman would be as disappointed as Matilda, but a promise was a\n promise, and Matilda turned the car in a wide U-turn and parked it\n outside the library.", "And so she got there.\n\n\n The man in the wire cage at the Cedar Falls post office was a\n stereotype. Matilda always liked to think in terms of stereotypes. This\n man was small, roundish, florid of face, with a pair of eyeglasses\n which hung too far down on his nose. Matilda knew he would peer over\n his glasses and answer questions grudgingly.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" said Matilda.\n\n\n The stereotype grunted and peered at her over his glasses. Matilda\n asked him where she could find Haron Gorka.\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"I said, where can I find Haron Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"Is that in the United States?\"\n\n\n \"It's not a that; it's a he. Where can I find him? Where does he live?\n What's the quickest way to get there?\"", "The woman sat at her desk as Matilda had remembered her, gray,\n broom-stick figure, rigid. But now when she saw Matilda she perked up\n visibly.\n\n\n \"Hello, my dear,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Hi.\"\n\n\n \"You're back a bit sooner than I expected. But, then, the other five\n have returned, too, and I imagine your story will be similar.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know what they told you,\" Matilda said. \"But this is what\n happened to me.\"\n\n\n She quickly then related everything which had happened, completely and\n in detail. She did this first because it was a promise, and second\n because she knew it would make her feel better.\n\n\n \"So,\" she finished, \"Haron Gorka is either extremely eccentric or\n insane. I'm sorry.\"", "Intelligent, somewhat egotistical male who's really been around, whose\n universal experience can make the average cosmopolite look like a\n provincial hick, is in need of several female correspondents: must be\n intelligent, have gumption, be capable of listening to male who has a\n lot to say and wants to say it. All others need not apply. Wonderful\n opportunity cultural experience ... Haron Gorka, Cedar Falls, Ill.\n\n\n The man was egotistical, all right; Matilda could see that. But she had\n never minded an egotistical man, at least not when he had something\n about which he had a genuine reason to be egotistical. The man sounded\n as though he would have reason indeed. He only wanted the best because\n he was the best. Like calls to like.", "arms. Not by Haron Gorka; that she really might have liked. Instead,\n someone she could only regard as a menial met her, and when he asked\n had she come in response to the advertisement, she nodded eagerly.\n He told her that was fine and he ushered her straight into a room\n which evidently was to be her living quarters. It contained a small\n undersized bed, a table, and a chair, and, near a little slot in the\n wall, there was a button.", "Matilda felt bad, but she had no intention of returning home this\n early. If she could not find Haron Gorka, that was one thing; but she\n knew that she'd rather not return home and face the widow Penshaws, at\n least not for a while yet. The widow Penshaws meant well, but she liked\n to analyze other people's mistakes, especially Matilda's.\n\n\n Accordingly, Matilda trudged wearily toward Cedar Falls' small and\n unimposing library. She could release some of her pent-up aggression by\n browsing through the dusty slacks.", "\"If I can't enjoy an association with Haron Gorka directly, I still\n could get the vicarious pleasure of your contact with him. Report to me\n faithfully and you'll get his address. That's what the other five will\n do, and with half a dozen of you, I'll get an overall picture. Each one\n of you will tell me about Haron Gorka, sparing no details. You each\n have a distinct personality, of course, and it will color each picture\n considerably. But with six of you reporting, I should receive my share\n of vicarious enjoyment. Is it—ah—a deal?\"", "The stereotype pushed up his glasses and looked at her squarely. \"Now\n take it easy, ma'am. First place, I don't know any Haron Gorka—\"\n\n\n Matilda kept the alarm from creeping into her voice. She muttered an\noh\nunder her breath and took out the ad. This she showed to the\n stereotype, and he scratched his bald head. Then he told Matilda almost\n happily that he was sorry he couldn't help her. He grudgingly suggested\n that if it really were important, she might check with the police.\n\n\n Matilda did, only they didn't know any Haron Gorka, either. It turned\n out that no one did: Matilda tried the general store, the fire\n department, the city hall, the high school, all three Cedar Falls gas\n stations, the livery stable, and half a dozen private dwellings at\n random. As far us the gentry of Cedar Falls was concerned, Haron Gorka\n did not exist.", "They were mad, all right, and now Matilda wondered if, actually,\n they were husband and wife. It could readily be; maybe the madness\n was catching. Maybe if you thought too much about such things, such\n travels, you could get that way. Of course, Herman represented the\n other extreme, and Herman was even worse in his own way—but hereafter\n Matilda would seek the happy medium.\n\n\n And, above all else, she had had enough of her pen pal columns. They\n were, she realized, for kids.\nShe ate dinner in Cedar Falls and then she went out to her car again,\n preparing for the journey back home. The sun had set and it was a clear\n night, and overhead the great broad sweep of the Milky Way was a pale\n rainbow bridge in the sky.\n\n\n Matilda paused. Off in the distance there was a glow on the horizon,\n and that was the direction of Haron Gorka's place.", "\"Eh? What say? Oh, yes, naturally. A combination of telepathy and\n teleportation. The synthetic cookery is attuned to your mind when you\n press the buzzer, and the strength of your psychic impulses determines\n how closely the meal will adjust to your desires. The fact that the\n adjustment here was near perfect is commendable. It means either that\n you have a high psi-quotient, or that you were very hungry.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Matilda vaguely. Perhaps it might be better, after all, if\n Haron Gorka were to talk to her as he saw fit.\n\n\n \"Ready?\"\n\n\n \"Uh—ready.\"\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"Well, what, Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"What would you like me to talk about?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, anything.\"" ], [ "The stereotype pushed up his glasses and looked at her squarely. \"Now\n take it easy, ma'am. First place, I don't know any Haron Gorka—\"\n\n\n Matilda kept the alarm from creeping into her voice. She muttered an\noh\nunder her breath and took out the ad. This she showed to the\n stereotype, and he scratched his bald head. Then he told Matilda almost\n happily that he was sorry he couldn't help her. He grudgingly suggested\n that if it really were important, she might check with the police.\n\n\n Matilda did, only they didn't know any Haron Gorka, either. It turned\n out that no one did: Matilda tried the general store, the fire\n department, the city hall, the high school, all three Cedar Falls gas\n stations, the livery stable, and half a dozen private dwellings at\n random. As far us the gentry of Cedar Falls was concerned, Haron Gorka\n did not exist.", "The name—Haron Gorka: its oddness was somehow beautiful to Matilda.\n Haron Gorka—the nationality could be anything. And that was it. He had\n no nationality for all intents and purposes; he was an international\n man, a figure among figures, a paragon....\n\n\n Matilda sighed happily as she put out the light. The moon shone in\n through the window brightly, and at such times Matilda generally would\n get up, go to the cupboard, pull out a towel, take two hairpins from\n her powder drawer, pin the towel to the screen of her window, and hence\n keep the disturbing moonlight from her eyes. But this time it did not\n disturb her, and she would let it shine. Cedar Falls was a small town\n not fifty miles from her home, and she'd get there a hop, skip, and\n jump ahead of her competitors, simply by arriving in person instead of\n writing a letter.", "On the other hand—why not? Why couldn't the librarian help her? Why\n hadn't she thought of it before? Certainly a man as well-educated as\n Haron Gorka would be an avid reader, and unless he had a permanent\n residence here in Cedar Palls, one couldn't expect that he'd have his\n own library with him. This being the case, a third-rate collection\n of books was far better than no collection at all, and perhaps the\n librarian would know Mr. Haron Gorka.\n\n\n Matilda cleared her throat. \"Pardon me,\" she began. \"I'm looking for—\"\n\n\n \"Haron Gorka.\" The librarian nodded.\n\n\n \"How on earth did you know?\"", "As she shifted into reverse and pulled out of the driveway, she saw\n the servant leaving, too. Far down the road, he was walking slowly.\n Then Haron Gorka had severed that relationship, too, and now he was all\n alone.\n\n\n As she drove back to town, the disappointment melted slowly away. There\n were, of course, two alternatives. Either Haron Gorka was an eccentric\n who enjoyed this sort of outlandish tomfoolery, or else he was plainly\n insane. She could still picture him ranting on aimlessly to no one in\n particular about places which had no existence outside of his mind, his\n voice high-pitched and eager.\nIt was not until she had passed the small library building that she\n remembered what she had promised the librarian. In her own way, the\n aging woman would be as disappointed as Matilda, but a promise was a\n promise, and Matilda turned the car in a wide U-turn and parked it\n outside the library.", "\"That's easy. You're the sixth young woman who came here inquiring\n about that man today. Six of you—five others in the morning, and now\n you in the afternoon. I never did trust this Mr. Gorka....\"\n\n\n Matilda jumped as if she had been struck strategically from the rear.\n \"You know him? You know Haron Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. Of course I know him. He's our steadiest reader here at\n the library. Not a week goes by that he doesn't take out three, four\n books. Scholarly gentleman, but not without charm. If I were twenty\n years younger—\"\n\n\n Matilda thought a little flattery might be effective. \"Only ten,\" she\n assured the librarian. \"Ten years would be more than sufficient, I'm\n sure.\"", "\"Are you? Well. Well, well.\" The librarian did something with the back\n of her hair, but it looked the same as before. \"Maybe you're right.\n Maybe you're right at that.\" Then she sighed. \"But I guess a miss is as\n good as a mile.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"I mean anyone would like to correspond with Haron Gorka. Or to know\n him well. To be considered his friend. Haron Gorka....\"\n\n\n The librarian seemed about to soar off into the air someplace, and if\n five women had been here first, Matilda was now definitely in a hurry.\n\n\n \"Um, where can I find Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not supposed to do this, you know. We're not permitted to give the\n addresses of any of our people. Against regulations, my dear.\"\n\n\n \"What about the other five women?\"", "There were five cars parked in the long driveway, and now Matilda's\n made the sixth. In spite of herself, she smiled. She had not been the\n only one with the idea to visit Haron Gorka in person. With half a\n dozen of them there, the laggards who resorted to posting letters would\n be left far behind. Matilda congratulated herself for what she thought\n had been her ingenuity, and which now turned out to be something which\n she had in common with five other women. You live and learn, thought\n Matilda. And then, quite annoyedly, she berated herself for not having\n been the first. Perhaps the other five all were satisfactory; perhaps\n she wouldn't be needed; perhaps she was too late....\nAs it turned out, she wasn't. Not only that, she was welcomed with open", "Matilda assured her that it was, and, breathlessly, she wrote down the\n address. She thanked the librarian and then she went out to her car,\n whistling to herself.\nHaron Gorka lived in what could have been an agrarian estate, except\n that the land no longer was being tilled. The house itself had fallen\n to ruin. This surprised Matilda, but she did not let it keep her\n spirits in check. Haron Gorka, the man, was what counted, and the\n librarian's account of him certainly had been glowing enough. Perhaps\n he was too busy with his cultural pursuits to pay any real attention to\n his dwelling. That was it, of course: the conspicuous show of wealth or\n personal industry meant nothing at all to Haron Gorka. Matilda liked\n him all the more for it.", "It must be said to Matilda's favor that she sobbed only once. After\n that she realized that what is done is done and here, past thirty,\n she wasn't going to be girlishly timid about it. Besides, it was not\n her fault if, in his unconcern, Haron Gorka had unwittingly hired a\n neurotic servant.\n\n\n For a time Matilda paced back and forth in her room, and of what was\n going on outside she could hear nothing. In that case, she would\n pretend that there was nothing outside the little room, and presently\n she lay down on the bed to take a nap. This didn't last long, however:\n she had a nightmare in which Haron Gorka appeared as a giant with two\n heads, but, upon awaking with a start, she immediately ascribed that to\n her overwrought nerves.", "When she finished her meal a pleasant lethargy possessed her, and in a\n little while Matilda was asleep again. This time she did not dream at\n all. It was a deep sleep and a restful one, and when she awoke it was\n with the wonderful feeling that everything was all right.\nThe feeling did not last long. Standing over her was Haron Gorka's\n servant, and he said, \"Mr. Gorka will see you now.\"\n\n\n \"Now?\"\n\n\n \"Now. That's what you're here for, isn't it?\"\n\n\n He had a point there, but Matilda hardly even had time to fix her hair.\n She told the servant so.\n\n\n \"Miss,\" he replied, \"I assure you it will not matter in the least to\n Haron Gorka. You are here and he is ready to see you and that is all\n that matters.\"\n\n\n \"You sure?\" Matilda wanted to take no chances.", "arms. Not by Haron Gorka; that she really might have liked. Instead,\n someone she could only regard as a menial met her, and when he asked\n had she come in response to the advertisement, she nodded eagerly.\n He told her that was fine and he ushered her straight into a room\n which evidently was to be her living quarters. It contained a small\n undersized bed, a table, and a chair, and, near a little slot in the\n wall, there was a button.", "\"Stop!\"\n\n\n \"What's that? Making fun of you?\" Haron Gorka's voice had been so\n eager as he spoke, high-pitched, almost like a child's, and now he\n seemed disappointed. He smiled, but it was a sad smile, a smile of\n resignation, and he said, \"Very well. I'm wrong again. You are the\n sixth, and you're no better than the other five. Perhaps you are even\n more outspoken. When you see my wife, tell her to come back. Again she\n is right and I am wrong....\"\n\n\n Haron Gorka turned his back.\n\n\n Matilda could do nothing but leave the room, walk back through the\n house, go outside and get into her car. She noticed not without\n surprise that the other five cars were now gone. She was the last of\n Haron Gorka's guests to depart.", "And so she got there.\n\n\n The man in the wire cage at the Cedar Falls post office was a\n stereotype. Matilda always liked to think in terms of stereotypes. This\n man was small, roundish, florid of face, with a pair of eyeglasses\n which hung too far down on his nose. Matilda knew he would peer over\n his glasses and answer questions grudgingly.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" said Matilda.\n\n\n The stereotype grunted and peered at her over his glasses. Matilda\n asked him where she could find Haron Gorka.\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"I said, where can I find Haron Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"Is that in the United States?\"\n\n\n \"It's not a that; it's a he. Where can I find him? Where does he live?\n What's the quickest way to get there?\"", "\"Certainly. You came in response to my ad. You want to hear me talk, do\n you not?\"\n\n\n \"I—do.\" Matilda had had visions of her prince charming sitting back\n and relaxing with her, telling her of the many things he had done and\n seen. But first she certainly would have liked to get to\nknow\nthe\n man. Well, Haron Gorka obviously had more experience along these lines\n than she did. He waited, however, as if wondering what to say, and\n Matilda, accustomed to social chatter, gave him a gambit.\n\n\n \"I must admit I was surprised when I got exactly what I wanted for\n dinner,\" she told him brightly.", "\"If I can't enjoy an association with Haron Gorka directly, I still\n could get the vicarious pleasure of your contact with him. Report to me\n faithfully and you'll get his address. That's what the other five will\n do, and with half a dozen of you, I'll get an overall picture. Each one\n of you will tell me about Haron Gorka, sparing no details. You each\n have a distinct personality, of course, and it will color each picture\n considerably. But with six of you reporting, I should receive my share\n of vicarious enjoyment. Is it—ah—a deal?\"", "\"Yes. Come.\"\n\n\n She followed him out of the little room and across what should have\n been a spacious dining area, except that everything seemed covered with\n dust. Of the other women Matilda could see nothing, and she suddenly\n realized that each of them probably had a cubicle of a room like her\n own, and that each in her turn had already had her first visit with\n Haron Gorka. Well, then, she must see to it that she impressed him\n better than did all the rest, and, later, when she returned to tell the\n old librarian of her adventures, she could perhaps draw her out and\n compare notes.", "She would not admit even to herself that she was disappointed with\n Haron Gorka. It was not that he was homely and unimpressive; it was\n just that he was so\nordinary\n-looking. She almost would have preferred\n the monster of her dreams.\nHe wore a white linen suit and he had mousy hair, drab eyes, an\n almost-Roman nose, a petulant mouth with the slight arch of the egotist\n at each corner.\n\n\n He said, \"Greetings. You have come—\"\n\n\n \"In response to your ad. How do you do, Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n She hoped she wasn't being too formal. But, then, there was no sense in\n assuming that he would like informality. She could only wait and see\n and adjust her own actions to suit him. Meanwhile, it would be best to\n keep on the middle of the road.\n\n\n \"I am fine. Are you ready?\"\n\n\n \"Ready?\"", "Matilda felt bad, but she had no intention of returning home this\n early. If she could not find Haron Gorka, that was one thing; but she\n knew that she'd rather not return home and face the widow Penshaws, at\n least not for a while yet. The widow Penshaws meant well, but she liked\n to analyze other people's mistakes, especially Matilda's.\n\n\n Accordingly, Matilda trudged wearily toward Cedar Falls' small and\n unimposing library. She could release some of her pent-up aggression by\n browsing through the dusty slacks.", "The woman sat at her desk as Matilda had remembered her, gray,\n broom-stick figure, rigid. But now when she saw Matilda she perked up\n visibly.\n\n\n \"Hello, my dear,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Hi.\"\n\n\n \"You're back a bit sooner than I expected. But, then, the other five\n have returned, too, and I imagine your story will be similar.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know what they told you,\" Matilda said. \"But this is what\n happened to me.\"\n\n\n She quickly then related everything which had happened, completely and\n in detail. She did this first because it was a promise, and second\n because she knew it would make her feel better.\n\n\n \"So,\" she finished, \"Haron Gorka is either extremely eccentric or\n insane. I'm sorry.\"", "They were mad, all right, and now Matilda wondered if, actually,\n they were husband and wife. It could readily be; maybe the madness\n was catching. Maybe if you thought too much about such things, such\n travels, you could get that way. Of course, Herman represented the\n other extreme, and Herman was even worse in his own way—but hereafter\n Matilda would seek the happy medium.\n\n\n And, above all else, she had had enough of her pen pal columns. They\n were, she realized, for kids.\nShe ate dinner in Cedar Falls and then she went out to her car again,\n preparing for the journey back home. The sun had set and it was a clear\n night, and overhead the great broad sweep of the Milky Way was a pale\n rainbow bridge in the sky.\n\n\n Matilda paused. Off in the distance there was a glow on the horizon,\n and that was the direction of Haron Gorka's place." ], [ "She heard the whir of machinery. A moment later there was a soft\n sliding sound. Through the slot first came a delicious aroma, followed\n almost instantly by a tray. On the tray were a bowl of turtle soup,\n mashed potatoes, green peas, bread, a strange cocktail, root-beer, a\n parfait—and a thick tenderloin sizzling in hot butter sauce.\nMatilda gasped once and felt about to gasp again—but by then her\n salivary glands were working overtime, and she ate her meal. The fact\n that it was precisely what she would have wanted could, of course, be\n attributed to coincidence, and the further fact that everything was\n extremely palatable made her forget all about Haron Gorka's neurotic\n servant.", "When she finished her meal a pleasant lethargy possessed her, and in a\n little while Matilda was asleep again. This time she did not dream at\n all. It was a deep sleep and a restful one, and when she awoke it was\n with the wonderful feeling that everything was all right.\nThe feeling did not last long. Standing over her was Haron Gorka's\n servant, and he said, \"Mr. Gorka will see you now.\"\n\n\n \"Now?\"\n\n\n \"Now. That's what you're here for, isn't it?\"\n\n\n He had a point there, but Matilda hardly even had time to fix her hair.\n She told the servant so.\n\n\n \"Miss,\" he replied, \"I assure you it will not matter in the least to\n Haron Gorka. You are here and he is ready to see you and that is all\n that matters.\"\n\n\n \"You sure?\" Matilda wanted to take no chances.", "It must be said to Matilda's favor that she sobbed only once. After\n that she realized that what is done is done and here, past thirty,\n she wasn't going to be girlishly timid about it. Besides, it was not\n her fault if, in his unconcern, Haron Gorka had unwittingly hired a\n neurotic servant.\n\n\n For a time Matilda paced back and forth in her room, and of what was\n going on outside she could hear nothing. In that case, she would\n pretend that there was nothing outside the little room, and presently\n she lay down on the bed to take a nap. This didn't last long, however:\n she had a nightmare in which Haron Gorka appeared as a giant with two\n heads, but, upon awaking with a start, she immediately ascribed that to\n her overwrought nerves.", "\"You want any food or drink,\" the servant told her, \"and you just press\n that button. The results will surprise you.\"\n\n\n \"What about Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"When he wants you, he will send for you. Meanwhile, make yourself to\n home, lady, and I will tell him you are here.\"\n\n\n A little doubtful now, Matilda thanked him and watched him leave. He\n closed the door softly behind his retreating feet, but Matilda's ears\n had not missed the ominous click. She ran to the door and tried to open\n it, but it would not budge. It was locked—from the outside.", "Matilda was not yet that far gone in years or appearance. Dressed\n properly, she could hope to make a favorable impression in person, and\n she felt it was important to beat the influx of mail to Cedar Falls.\nMatilda got out of bed at seven, tiptoed into the bathroom, showered\n with a merest wary trickle of water, tiptoed back into her bedroom,\n dressed in her very best cotton over the finest of uplifting and\n figure-moulding underthings, made sure her stocking seams were\n perfectly straight, brushed her suede shoes, admired herself in the\n mirror, read the ad again, wished for a moment she were a bit younger,\n and tiptoed downstairs.\n\n\n The widow Penshaws met her at the bottom of the stairwell.\n\n\n \"Mother,\" gasped Matilda. Matilda always gasped when she saw something\n unexpected. \"What on earth are you doing up?\"", "The widow Penshaws smiled somewhat toothlessly, having neglected to put\n in both her uppers and lowers this early in the morning. \"I'm fixing\n breakfast, of course....\"\n\n\n Then the widow Penshaws told Matilda that she could never hope to sneak\n about the house without her mother knowing about it, and that even\n if she were going out in response to one of those foolish ads in the\n magazines, she would still need a good breakfast to start with like\n only mother could cook. Matilda moodily thanked the widow Penshaws.\nDriving the fifty miles to Cedar Falls in a little less than an hour,\n Matilda hummed Mendelssohn's Wedding March all the way. It was her\n favorite piece of music. Once, she told herself: Matilda Penshaws, you\n are being premature about the whole thing. But she laughed and thought\n that if she was, she was, and, meanwhile, she could only get to Cedar\n Falls and find out.", "The woman sat at her desk as Matilda had remembered her, gray,\n broom-stick figure, rigid. But now when she saw Matilda she perked up\n visibly.\n\n\n \"Hello, my dear,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Hi.\"\n\n\n \"You're back a bit sooner than I expected. But, then, the other five\n have returned, too, and I imagine your story will be similar.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know what they told you,\" Matilda said. \"But this is what\n happened to me.\"\n\n\n She quickly then related everything which had happened, completely and\n in detail. She did this first because it was a promise, and second\n because she knew it would make her feel better.\n\n\n \"So,\" she finished, \"Haron Gorka is either extremely eccentric or\n insane. I'm sorry.\"", "At that point she remembered what the servant had said about food and\n she thought at once of the supreme justice she could do to a juicy\n beefsteak. Well, maybe they didn't have a beefsteak. In that case, she\n would take what they had, and, accordingly, she walked to the little\n slot in the wall and pressed the button.", "\"Eh? What say? Oh, yes, naturally. A combination of telepathy and\n teleportation. The synthetic cookery is attuned to your mind when you\n press the buzzer, and the strength of your psychic impulses determines\n how closely the meal will adjust to your desires. The fact that the\n adjustment here was near perfect is commendable. It means either that\n you have a high psi-quotient, or that you were very hungry.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Matilda vaguely. Perhaps it might be better, after all, if\n Haron Gorka were to talk to her as he saw fit.\n\n\n \"Ready?\"\n\n\n \"Uh—ready.\"\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"Well, what, Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"What would you like me to talk about?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, anything.\"", "poaching in a strictly forbidden territory!\nThe best that could be said for Matilda Penshaws was that she was\n something of a paradox. She was thirty-three years old, certainly not\n aged when you consider the fact that the female life expectancy is now\n up in the sixties, but the lines were beginning to etch their permanent\n paths across her face and now she needed certain remedial undergarments\n at which she would have scoffed ten or even five years ago. Matilda was\n also looking for a husband.\n\n\n This, in itself, was not unusual—but Matilda was so completely\n wrapped up in the romantic fallacy of her day that she sought a prince\n charming, a faithful Don Juan, a man who had been everywhere and tasted\n of every worldly pleasure and who now wanted to sit on a porch and\n talk about it all to Matilda.", "She shut off the shower, brushed her teeth, gargled, patted herself\n dry with a towel, and jumped into bed, careful to lock the door of her\n bedroom. She dared not let the widow Penshaws know that she slept in\n the nude; the widow Penshaws would object to a girl sleeping in the\n nude, even if the nearest neighbor was three hundred yards away.\n\n\n Matilda switched her bed lamp on and dabbed some citronella on each\n ear lobe and a little droplet on her chin (how she hated insects!).\n Then she propped up her pillows—two pillows partially stopped her\n post-nasal drip; and took the latest issue of the\nLiterary Review\noff the night table.", "\"Certainly. You came in response to my ad. You want to hear me talk, do\n you not?\"\n\n\n \"I—do.\" Matilda had had visions of her prince charming sitting back\n and relaxing with her, telling her of the many things he had done and\n seen. But first she certainly would have liked to get to\nknow\nthe\n man. Well, Haron Gorka obviously had more experience along these lines\n than she did. He waited, however, as if wondering what to say, and\n Matilda, accustomed to social chatter, gave him a gambit.\n\n\n \"I must admit I was surprised when I got exactly what I wanted for\n dinner,\" she told him brightly.", "There were five cars parked in the long driveway, and now Matilda's\n made the sixth. In spite of herself, she smiled. She had not been the\n only one with the idea to visit Haron Gorka in person. With half a\n dozen of them there, the laggards who resorted to posting letters would\n be left far behind. Matilda congratulated herself for what she thought\n had been her ingenuity, and which now turned out to be something which\n she had in common with five other women. You live and learn, thought\n Matilda. And then, quite annoyedly, she berated herself for not having\n been the first. Perhaps the other five all were satisfactory; perhaps\n she wouldn't be needed; perhaps she was too late....\nAs it turned out, she wasn't. Not only that, she was welcomed with open", "\"Yes. Come.\"\n\n\n She followed him out of the little room and across what should have\n been a spacious dining area, except that everything seemed covered with\n dust. Of the other women Matilda could see nothing, and she suddenly\n realized that each of them probably had a cubicle of a room like her\n own, and that each in her turn had already had her first visit with\n Haron Gorka. Well, then, she must see to it that she impressed him\n better than did all the rest, and, later, when she returned to tell the\n old librarian of her adventures, she could perhaps draw her out and\n compare notes.", "As she shifted into reverse and pulled out of the driveway, she saw\n the servant leaving, too. Far down the road, he was walking slowly.\n Then Haron Gorka had severed that relationship, too, and now he was all\n alone.\n\n\n As she drove back to town, the disappointment melted slowly away. There\n were, of course, two alternatives. Either Haron Gorka was an eccentric\n who enjoyed this sort of outlandish tomfoolery, or else he was plainly\n insane. She could still picture him ranting on aimlessly to no one in\n particular about places which had no existence outside of his mind, his\n voice high-pitched and eager.\nIt was not until she had passed the small library building that she\n remembered what she had promised the librarian. In her own way, the\n aging woman would be as disappointed as Matilda, but a promise was a\n promise, and Matilda turned the car in a wide U-turn and parked it\n outside the library.", "Matilda felt bad, but she had no intention of returning home this\n early. If she could not find Haron Gorka, that was one thing; but she\n knew that she'd rather not return home and face the widow Penshaws, at\n least not for a while yet. The widow Penshaws meant well, but she liked\n to analyze other people's mistakes, especially Matilda's.\n\n\n Accordingly, Matilda trudged wearily toward Cedar Falls' small and\n unimposing library. She could release some of her pent-up aggression by\n browsing through the dusty slacks.", "\"He's neither,\" the librarian contradicted. \"Perhaps he is slightly\n eccentric by your standards, but really, my dear, he is neither.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Did he leave a message for his wife?\"\n\n\n \"Why, yes. Yes, he did. But how did you know? Oh, I suppose he told the\n five.\"\n\n\n \"No. He didn't. But you were the last and I thought he would give you a\n message for his wife—\"\n\n\n Matilda didn't understand. She didn't understand at all, but she told\n the little librarian what the message was. \"He wanted her to return,\"\n she said.\n\n\n The librarian nodded, a happy smile on her lips. \"You wouldn't believe\n me if I told you something.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"", "They were mad, all right, and now Matilda wondered if, actually,\n they were husband and wife. It could readily be; maybe the madness\n was catching. Maybe if you thought too much about such things, such\n travels, you could get that way. Of course, Herman represented the\n other extreme, and Herman was even worse in his own way—but hereafter\n Matilda would seek the happy medium.\n\n\n And, above all else, she had had enough of her pen pal columns. They\n were, she realized, for kids.\nShe ate dinner in Cedar Falls and then she went out to her car again,\n preparing for the journey back home. The sun had set and it was a clear\n night, and overhead the great broad sweep of the Milky Way was a pale\n rainbow bridge in the sky.\n\n\n Matilda paused. Off in the distance there was a glow on the horizon,\n and that was the direction of Haron Gorka's place.", "Matilda assured her that it was, and, breathlessly, she wrote down the\n address. She thanked the librarian and then she went out to her car,\n whistling to herself.\nHaron Gorka lived in what could have been an agrarian estate, except\n that the land no longer was being tilled. The house itself had fallen\n to ruin. This surprised Matilda, but she did not let it keep her\n spirits in check. Haron Gorka, the man, was what counted, and the\n librarian's account of him certainly had been glowing enough. Perhaps\n he was too busy with his cultural pursuits to pay any real attention to\n his dwelling. That was it, of course: the conspicuous show of wealth or\n personal industry meant nothing at all to Haron Gorka. Matilda liked\n him all the more for it.", "The name—Haron Gorka: its oddness was somehow beautiful to Matilda.\n Haron Gorka—the nationality could be anything. And that was it. He had\n no nationality for all intents and purposes; he was an international\n man, a figure among figures, a paragon....\n\n\n Matilda sighed happily as she put out the light. The moon shone in\n through the window brightly, and at such times Matilda generally would\n get up, go to the cupboard, pull out a towel, take two hairpins from\n her powder drawer, pin the towel to the screen of her window, and hence\n keep the disturbing moonlight from her eyes. But this time it did not\n disturb her, and she would let it shine. Cedar Falls was a small town\n not fifty miles from her home, and she'd get there a hop, skip, and\n jump ahead of her competitors, simply by arriving in person instead of\n writing a letter." ], [ "The woman sat at her desk as Matilda had remembered her, gray,\n broom-stick figure, rigid. But now when she saw Matilda she perked up\n visibly.\n\n\n \"Hello, my dear,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Hi.\"\n\n\n \"You're back a bit sooner than I expected. But, then, the other five\n have returned, too, and I imagine your story will be similar.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know what they told you,\" Matilda said. \"But this is what\n happened to me.\"\n\n\n She quickly then related everything which had happened, completely and\n in detail. She did this first because it was a promise, and second\n because she knew it would make her feel better.\n\n\n \"So,\" she finished, \"Haron Gorka is either extremely eccentric or\n insane. I'm sorry.\"", "Matilda felt bad, but she had no intention of returning home this\n early. If she could not find Haron Gorka, that was one thing; but she\n knew that she'd rather not return home and face the widow Penshaws, at\n least not for a while yet. The widow Penshaws meant well, but she liked\n to analyze other people's mistakes, especially Matilda's.\n\n\n Accordingly, Matilda trudged wearily toward Cedar Falls' small and\n unimposing library. She could release some of her pent-up aggression by\n browsing through the dusty slacks.", "It must be said to Matilda's favor that she sobbed only once. After\n that she realized that what is done is done and here, past thirty,\n she wasn't going to be girlishly timid about it. Besides, it was not\n her fault if, in his unconcern, Haron Gorka had unwittingly hired a\n neurotic servant.\n\n\n For a time Matilda paced back and forth in her room, and of what was\n going on outside she could hear nothing. In that case, she would\n pretend that there was nothing outside the little room, and presently\n she lay down on the bed to take a nap. This didn't last long, however:\n she had a nightmare in which Haron Gorka appeared as a giant with two\n heads, but, upon awaking with a start, she immediately ascribed that to\n her overwrought nerves.", "Matilda was not yet that far gone in years or appearance. Dressed\n properly, she could hope to make a favorable impression in person, and\n she felt it was important to beat the influx of mail to Cedar Falls.\nMatilda got out of bed at seven, tiptoed into the bathroom, showered\n with a merest wary trickle of water, tiptoed back into her bedroom,\n dressed in her very best cotton over the finest of uplifting and\n figure-moulding underthings, made sure her stocking seams were\n perfectly straight, brushed her suede shoes, admired herself in the\n mirror, read the ad again, wished for a moment she were a bit younger,\n and tiptoed downstairs.\n\n\n The widow Penshaws met her at the bottom of the stairwell.\n\n\n \"Mother,\" gasped Matilda. Matilda always gasped when she saw something\n unexpected. \"What on earth are you doing up?\"", "The widow Penshaws smiled somewhat toothlessly, having neglected to put\n in both her uppers and lowers this early in the morning. \"I'm fixing\n breakfast, of course....\"\n\n\n Then the widow Penshaws told Matilda that she could never hope to sneak\n about the house without her mother knowing about it, and that even\n if she were going out in response to one of those foolish ads in the\n magazines, she would still need a good breakfast to start with like\n only mother could cook. Matilda moodily thanked the widow Penshaws.\nDriving the fifty miles to Cedar Falls in a little less than an hour,\n Matilda hummed Mendelssohn's Wedding March all the way. It was her\n favorite piece of music. Once, she told herself: Matilda Penshaws, you\n are being premature about the whole thing. But she laughed and thought\n that if she was, she was, and, meanwhile, she could only get to Cedar\n Falls and find out.", "This she did, but it was unrewarding. Cedar Falls had what might be\n called a microscopic library, and Matilda thought that if this small\n building were filled with microfilm rather than books, the library\n still would be lacking. Hence she retraced her steps and nodded to the\n old librarian as she passed.\nThen Matilda frowned. Twenty years from now, this could be Matilda\n Penshaws—complete with plain gray dress, rimless spectacles, gray\n hair, suspicious eyes, and a broom-stick figure....", "\"They convinced me that I ought to give them his address.\"\n\n\n Matilda reached into her pocket-book and withdrew a five dollar bill.\n \"Was this the way?\" she demanded. Matilda was not very good at this\n sort of thing.\n\n\n The librarian shook her head.\n\n\n Matilda nodded shrewdly and added a twin brother to the bill in her\n hand. \"Then is this better?\"\n\n\n \"That's worse. I wouldn't take your money—\"\n\n\n \"Sorry. What then?\"", "\"Stop!\"\n\n\n \"What's that? Making fun of you?\" Haron Gorka's voice had been so\n eager as he spoke, high-pitched, almost like a child's, and now he\n seemed disappointed. He smiled, but it was a sad smile, a smile of\n resignation, and he said, \"Very well. I'm wrong again. You are the\n sixth, and you're no better than the other five. Perhaps you are even\n more outspoken. When you see my wife, tell her to come back. Again she\n is right and I am wrong....\"\n\n\n Haron Gorka turned his back.\n\n\n Matilda could do nothing but leave the room, walk back through the\n house, go outside and get into her car. She noticed not without\n surprise that the other five cars were now gone. She was the last of\n Haron Gorka's guests to depart.", "\"He's neither,\" the librarian contradicted. \"Perhaps he is slightly\n eccentric by your standards, but really, my dear, he is neither.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Did he leave a message for his wife?\"\n\n\n \"Why, yes. Yes, he did. But how did you know? Oh, I suppose he told the\n five.\"\n\n\n \"No. He didn't. But you were the last and I thought he would give you a\n message for his wife—\"\n\n\n Matilda didn't understand. She didn't understand at all, but she told\n the little librarian what the message was. \"He wanted her to return,\"\n she said.\n\n\n The librarian nodded, a happy smile on her lips. \"You wouldn't believe\n me if I told you something.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"", "When she finished her meal a pleasant lethargy possessed her, and in a\n little while Matilda was asleep again. This time she did not dream at\n all. It was a deep sleep and a restful one, and when she awoke it was\n with the wonderful feeling that everything was all right.\nThe feeling did not last long. Standing over her was Haron Gorka's\n servant, and he said, \"Mr. Gorka will see you now.\"\n\n\n \"Now?\"\n\n\n \"Now. That's what you're here for, isn't it?\"\n\n\n He had a point there, but Matilda hardly even had time to fix her hair.\n She told the servant so.\n\n\n \"Miss,\" he replied, \"I assure you it will not matter in the least to\n Haron Gorka. You are here and he is ready to see you and that is all\n that matters.\"\n\n\n \"You sure?\" Matilda wanted to take no chances.", "They were mad, all right, and now Matilda wondered if, actually,\n they were husband and wife. It could readily be; maybe the madness\n was catching. Maybe if you thought too much about such things, such\n travels, you could get that way. Of course, Herman represented the\n other extreme, and Herman was even worse in his own way—but hereafter\n Matilda would seek the happy medium.\n\n\n And, above all else, she had had enough of her pen pal columns. They\n were, she realized, for kids.\nShe ate dinner in Cedar Falls and then she went out to her car again,\n preparing for the journey back home. The sun had set and it was a clear\n night, and overhead the great broad sweep of the Milky Way was a pale\n rainbow bridge in the sky.\n\n\n Matilda paused. Off in the distance there was a glow on the horizon,\n and that was the direction of Haron Gorka's place.", "As she shifted into reverse and pulled out of the driveway, she saw\n the servant leaving, too. Far down the road, he was walking slowly.\n Then Haron Gorka had severed that relationship, too, and now he was all\n alone.\n\n\n As she drove back to town, the disappointment melted slowly away. There\n were, of course, two alternatives. Either Haron Gorka was an eccentric\n who enjoyed this sort of outlandish tomfoolery, or else he was plainly\n insane. She could still picture him ranting on aimlessly to no one in\n particular about places which had no existence outside of his mind, his\n voice high-pitched and eager.\nIt was not until she had passed the small library building that she\n remembered what she had promised the librarian. In her own way, the\n aging woman would be as disappointed as Matilda, but a promise was a\n promise, and Matilda turned the car in a wide U-turn and parked it\n outside the library.", "There were five cars parked in the long driveway, and now Matilda's\n made the sixth. In spite of herself, she smiled. She had not been the\n only one with the idea to visit Haron Gorka in person. With half a\n dozen of them there, the laggards who resorted to posting letters would\n be left far behind. Matilda congratulated herself for what she thought\n had been her ingenuity, and which now turned out to be something which\n she had in common with five other women. You live and learn, thought\n Matilda. And then, quite annoyedly, she berated herself for not having\n been the first. Perhaps the other five all were satisfactory; perhaps\n she wouldn't be needed; perhaps she was too late....\nAs it turned out, she wasn't. Not only that, she was welcomed with open", "She shut off the shower, brushed her teeth, gargled, patted herself\n dry with a towel, and jumped into bed, careful to lock the door of her\n bedroom. She dared not let the widow Penshaws know that she slept in\n the nude; the widow Penshaws would object to a girl sleeping in the\n nude, even if the nearest neighbor was three hundred yards away.\n\n\n Matilda switched her bed lamp on and dabbed some citronella on each\n ear lobe and a little droplet on her chin (how she hated insects!).\n Then she propped up her pillows—two pillows partially stopped her\n post-nasal drip; and took the latest issue of the\nLiterary Review\noff the night table.", "The name—Haron Gorka: its oddness was somehow beautiful to Matilda.\n Haron Gorka—the nationality could be anything. And that was it. He had\n no nationality for all intents and purposes; he was an international\n man, a figure among figures, a paragon....\n\n\n Matilda sighed happily as she put out the light. The moon shone in\n through the window brightly, and at such times Matilda generally would\n get up, go to the cupboard, pull out a towel, take two hairpins from\n her powder drawer, pin the towel to the screen of her window, and hence\n keep the disturbing moonlight from her eyes. But this time it did not\n disturb her, and she would let it shine. Cedar Falls was a small town\n not fifty miles from her home, and she'd get there a hop, skip, and\n jump ahead of her competitors, simply by arriving in person instead of\n writing a letter.", "And so she got there.\n\n\n The man in the wire cage at the Cedar Falls post office was a\n stereotype. Matilda always liked to think in terms of stereotypes. This\n man was small, roundish, florid of face, with a pair of eyeglasses\n which hung too far down on his nose. Matilda knew he would peer over\n his glasses and answer questions grudgingly.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" said Matilda.\n\n\n The stereotype grunted and peered at her over his glasses. Matilda\n asked him where she could find Haron Gorka.\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"I said, where can I find Haron Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"Is that in the United States?\"\n\n\n \"It's not a that; it's a he. Where can I find him? Where does he live?\n What's the quickest way to get there?\"", "\"Yes. Come.\"\n\n\n She followed him out of the little room and across what should have\n been a spacious dining area, except that everything seemed covered with\n dust. Of the other women Matilda could see nothing, and she suddenly\n realized that each of them probably had a cubicle of a room like her\n own, and that each in her turn had already had her first visit with\n Haron Gorka. Well, then, she must see to it that she impressed him\n better than did all the rest, and, later, when she returned to tell the\n old librarian of her adventures, she could perhaps draw her out and\n compare notes.", "\"Are you? Well. Well, well.\" The librarian did something with the back\n of her hair, but it looked the same as before. \"Maybe you're right.\n Maybe you're right at that.\" Then she sighed. \"But I guess a miss is as\n good as a mile.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"I mean anyone would like to correspond with Haron Gorka. Or to know\n him well. To be considered his friend. Haron Gorka....\"\n\n\n The librarian seemed about to soar off into the air someplace, and if\n five women had been here first, Matilda was now definitely in a hurry.\n\n\n \"Um, where can I find Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not supposed to do this, you know. We're not permitted to give the\n addresses of any of our people. Against regulations, my dear.\"\n\n\n \"What about the other five women?\"", "She heard the whir of machinery. A moment later there was a soft\n sliding sound. Through the slot first came a delicious aroma, followed\n almost instantly by a tray. On the tray were a bowl of turtle soup,\n mashed potatoes, green peas, bread, a strange cocktail, root-beer, a\n parfait—and a thick tenderloin sizzling in hot butter sauce.\nMatilda gasped once and felt about to gasp again—but by then her\n salivary glands were working overtime, and she ate her meal. The fact\n that it was precisely what she would have wanted could, of course, be\n attributed to coincidence, and the further fact that everything was\n extremely palatable made her forget all about Haron Gorka's neurotic\n servant.", "\"But, Matilda, that's your fifth broken engagement in three years. It\n ain't that you ain't popular, but you just don't want to cooperate.\n You don't\nfall\nin love, Matilda—no one does. Love osmoses into you\n slowly, without you even knowing, and it keeps growing all the time.\"\n\n\n Matilda admired her mother's use of the word osmosis, but she found\n nothing which was not objectionable about being unaware of the impact\n of love. She said good-night and went upstairs, climbed out of her\n light summer dress and took a cold shower.\n\n\n She began to hum to herself. She had not yet seen the pen pal section\n of the current\nLiterary Review\n, and because the subject matter of\n that magazine was somewhat highbrow and cosmopolitan, she could expect\n a gratifying selection of pen pals." ], [ "The woman sat at her desk as Matilda had remembered her, gray,\n broom-stick figure, rigid. But now when she saw Matilda she perked up\n visibly.\n\n\n \"Hello, my dear,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Hi.\"\n\n\n \"You're back a bit sooner than I expected. But, then, the other five\n have returned, too, and I imagine your story will be similar.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know what they told you,\" Matilda said. \"But this is what\n happened to me.\"\n\n\n She quickly then related everything which had happened, completely and\n in detail. She did this first because it was a promise, and second\n because she knew it would make her feel better.\n\n\n \"So,\" she finished, \"Haron Gorka is either extremely eccentric or\n insane. I'm sorry.\"", "\"He's neither,\" the librarian contradicted. \"Perhaps he is slightly\n eccentric by your standards, but really, my dear, he is neither.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Did he leave a message for his wife?\"\n\n\n \"Why, yes. Yes, he did. But how did you know? Oh, I suppose he told the\n five.\"\n\n\n \"No. He didn't. But you were the last and I thought he would give you a\n message for his wife—\"\n\n\n Matilda didn't understand. She didn't understand at all, but she told\n the little librarian what the message was. \"He wanted her to return,\"\n she said.\n\n\n The librarian nodded, a happy smile on her lips. \"You wouldn't believe\n me if I told you something.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"", "They were mad, all right, and now Matilda wondered if, actually,\n they were husband and wife. It could readily be; maybe the madness\n was catching. Maybe if you thought too much about such things, such\n travels, you could get that way. Of course, Herman represented the\n other extreme, and Herman was even worse in his own way—but hereafter\n Matilda would seek the happy medium.\n\n\n And, above all else, she had had enough of her pen pal columns. They\n were, she realized, for kids.\nShe ate dinner in Cedar Falls and then she went out to her car again,\n preparing for the journey back home. The sun had set and it was a clear\n night, and overhead the great broad sweep of the Milky Way was a pale\n rainbow bridge in the sky.\n\n\n Matilda paused. Off in the distance there was a glow on the horizon,\n and that was the direction of Haron Gorka's place.", "When she finished her meal a pleasant lethargy possessed her, and in a\n little while Matilda was asleep again. This time she did not dream at\n all. It was a deep sleep and a restful one, and when she awoke it was\n with the wonderful feeling that everything was all right.\nThe feeling did not last long. Standing over her was Haron Gorka's\n servant, and he said, \"Mr. Gorka will see you now.\"\n\n\n \"Now?\"\n\n\n \"Now. That's what you're here for, isn't it?\"\n\n\n He had a point there, but Matilda hardly even had time to fix her hair.\n She told the servant so.\n\n\n \"Miss,\" he replied, \"I assure you it will not matter in the least to\n Haron Gorka. You are here and he is ready to see you and that is all\n that matters.\"\n\n\n \"You sure?\" Matilda wanted to take no chances.", "Matilda felt bad, but she had no intention of returning home this\n early. If she could not find Haron Gorka, that was one thing; but she\n knew that she'd rather not return home and face the widow Penshaws, at\n least not for a while yet. The widow Penshaws meant well, but she liked\n to analyze other people's mistakes, especially Matilda's.\n\n\n Accordingly, Matilda trudged wearily toward Cedar Falls' small and\n unimposing library. She could release some of her pent-up aggression by\n browsing through the dusty slacks.", "This she did, but it was unrewarding. Cedar Falls had what might be\n called a microscopic library, and Matilda thought that if this small\n building were filled with microfilm rather than books, the library\n still would be lacking. Hence she retraced her steps and nodded to the\n old librarian as she passed.\nThen Matilda frowned. Twenty years from now, this could be Matilda\n Penshaws—complete with plain gray dress, rimless spectacles, gray\n hair, suspicious eyes, and a broom-stick figure....", "It must be said to Matilda's favor that she sobbed only once. After\n that she realized that what is done is done and here, past thirty,\n she wasn't going to be girlishly timid about it. Besides, it was not\n her fault if, in his unconcern, Haron Gorka had unwittingly hired a\n neurotic servant.\n\n\n For a time Matilda paced back and forth in her room, and of what was\n going on outside she could hear nothing. In that case, she would\n pretend that there was nothing outside the little room, and presently\n she lay down on the bed to take a nap. This didn't last long, however:\n she had a nightmare in which Haron Gorka appeared as a giant with two\n heads, but, upon awaking with a start, she immediately ascribed that to\n her overwrought nerves.", "As she shifted into reverse and pulled out of the driveway, she saw\n the servant leaving, too. Far down the road, he was walking slowly.\n Then Haron Gorka had severed that relationship, too, and now he was all\n alone.\n\n\n As she drove back to town, the disappointment melted slowly away. There\n were, of course, two alternatives. Either Haron Gorka was an eccentric\n who enjoyed this sort of outlandish tomfoolery, or else he was plainly\n insane. She could still picture him ranting on aimlessly to no one in\n particular about places which had no existence outside of his mind, his\n voice high-pitched and eager.\nIt was not until she had passed the small library building that she\n remembered what she had promised the librarian. In her own way, the\n aging woman would be as disappointed as Matilda, but a promise was a\n promise, and Matilda turned the car in a wide U-turn and parked it\n outside the library.", "There were five cars parked in the long driveway, and now Matilda's\n made the sixth. In spite of herself, she smiled. She had not been the\n only one with the idea to visit Haron Gorka in person. With half a\n dozen of them there, the laggards who resorted to posting letters would\n be left far behind. Matilda congratulated herself for what she thought\n had been her ingenuity, and which now turned out to be something which\n she had in common with five other women. You live and learn, thought\n Matilda. And then, quite annoyedly, she berated herself for not having\n been the first. Perhaps the other five all were satisfactory; perhaps\n she wouldn't be needed; perhaps she was too late....\nAs it turned out, she wasn't. Not only that, she was welcomed with open", "Matilda was not yet that far gone in years or appearance. Dressed\n properly, she could hope to make a favorable impression in person, and\n she felt it was important to beat the influx of mail to Cedar Falls.\nMatilda got out of bed at seven, tiptoed into the bathroom, showered\n with a merest wary trickle of water, tiptoed back into her bedroom,\n dressed in her very best cotton over the finest of uplifting and\n figure-moulding underthings, made sure her stocking seams were\n perfectly straight, brushed her suede shoes, admired herself in the\n mirror, read the ad again, wished for a moment she were a bit younger,\n and tiptoed downstairs.\n\n\n The widow Penshaws met her at the bottom of the stairwell.\n\n\n \"Mother,\" gasped Matilda. Matilda always gasped when she saw something\n unexpected. \"What on earth are you doing up?\"", "\"They convinced me that I ought to give them his address.\"\n\n\n Matilda reached into her pocket-book and withdrew a five dollar bill.\n \"Was this the way?\" she demanded. Matilda was not very good at this\n sort of thing.\n\n\n The librarian shook her head.\n\n\n Matilda nodded shrewdly and added a twin brother to the bill in her\n hand. \"Then is this better?\"\n\n\n \"That's worse. I wouldn't take your money—\"\n\n\n \"Sorry. What then?\"", "The widow Penshaws smiled somewhat toothlessly, having neglected to put\n in both her uppers and lowers this early in the morning. \"I'm fixing\n breakfast, of course....\"\n\n\n Then the widow Penshaws told Matilda that she could never hope to sneak\n about the house without her mother knowing about it, and that even\n if she were going out in response to one of those foolish ads in the\n magazines, she would still need a good breakfast to start with like\n only mother could cook. Matilda moodily thanked the widow Penshaws.\nDriving the fifty miles to Cedar Falls in a little less than an hour,\n Matilda hummed Mendelssohn's Wedding March all the way. It was her\n favorite piece of music. Once, she told herself: Matilda Penshaws, you\n are being premature about the whole thing. But she laughed and thought\n that if she was, she was, and, meanwhile, she could only get to Cedar\n Falls and find out.", "\"Stop!\"\n\n\n \"What's that? Making fun of you?\" Haron Gorka's voice had been so\n eager as he spoke, high-pitched, almost like a child's, and now he\n seemed disappointed. He smiled, but it was a sad smile, a smile of\n resignation, and he said, \"Very well. I'm wrong again. You are the\n sixth, and you're no better than the other five. Perhaps you are even\n more outspoken. When you see my wife, tell her to come back. Again she\n is right and I am wrong....\"\n\n\n Haron Gorka turned his back.\n\n\n Matilda could do nothing but leave the room, walk back through the\n house, go outside and get into her car. She noticed not without\n surprise that the other five cars were now gone. She was the last of\n Haron Gorka's guests to depart.", "And so she got there.\n\n\n The man in the wire cage at the Cedar Falls post office was a\n stereotype. Matilda always liked to think in terms of stereotypes. This\n man was small, roundish, florid of face, with a pair of eyeglasses\n which hung too far down on his nose. Matilda knew he would peer over\n his glasses and answer questions grudgingly.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" said Matilda.\n\n\n The stereotype grunted and peered at her over his glasses. Matilda\n asked him where she could find Haron Gorka.\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"I said, where can I find Haron Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"Is that in the United States?\"\n\n\n \"It's not a that; it's a he. Where can I find him? Where does he live?\n What's the quickest way to get there?\"", "\"You want any food or drink,\" the servant told her, \"and you just press\n that button. The results will surprise you.\"\n\n\n \"What about Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"When he wants you, he will send for you. Meanwhile, make yourself to\n home, lady, and I will tell him you are here.\"\n\n\n A little doubtful now, Matilda thanked him and watched him leave. He\n closed the door softly behind his retreating feet, but Matilda's ears\n had not missed the ominous click. She ran to the door and tried to open\n it, but it would not budge. It was locked—from the outside.", "\"Are you? Well. Well, well.\" The librarian did something with the back\n of her hair, but it looked the same as before. \"Maybe you're right.\n Maybe you're right at that.\" Then she sighed. \"But I guess a miss is as\n good as a mile.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"I mean anyone would like to correspond with Haron Gorka. Or to know\n him well. To be considered his friend. Haron Gorka....\"\n\n\n The librarian seemed about to soar off into the air someplace, and if\n five women had been here first, Matilda was now definitely in a hurry.\n\n\n \"Um, where can I find Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not supposed to do this, you know. We're not permitted to give the\n addresses of any of our people. Against regulations, my dear.\"\n\n\n \"What about the other five women?\"", "The glow increased; soon it was a bright red pulse pounding on the\n horizon. It flickered. It flickered again, and finally it was gone.\n\n\n The stars were white and brilliant in the clear country air. That was\n why Matilda liked the country better than the city, particularly on a\n clear summer night when you could see the span of the Milky Way.\n\n\n But abruptly the stars and the Milky Way were paled by the brightest\n shooting star Matilda had ever seen. It flashed suddenly and it\n remained in view for a full second, searing a bright orange path across\n the night sky.\n\n\n Matilda gasped and ran into her car. She started the gears and pressed\n the accelerator to the floor, keeping it there all the way home.\n\n\n It was the first time she had ever seen a shooting star going\nup\n.", "\"I am Mrs. Gorka.\"\n\n\n The librarian stood up and came around the desk. She opened a drawer\n and took out her hat and perched it jauntily atop her gray hair. \"You\n see, my dear, Haron expects too much. He expects entirely too much.\"\n\n\n Matilda did not say a word. One madman a day would be quite enough for\n anybody, but here she found herself confronted with two.\n\n\n \"We've been tripping for centuries, visiting every habitable star\n system from our home near Canopus. But Haron is too demanding. He\n says I am a finicky traveler, that he could do much better alone, the\n accommodations have to be just right for me, and so forth. When he\n loses his temper, he tries to convince me that any number of females of\n the particular planet would be more than thrilled if they were given\n the opportunity just to listen to him.", "She shut off the shower, brushed her teeth, gargled, patted herself\n dry with a towel, and jumped into bed, careful to lock the door of her\n bedroom. She dared not let the widow Penshaws know that she slept in\n the nude; the widow Penshaws would object to a girl sleeping in the\n nude, even if the nearest neighbor was three hundred yards away.\n\n\n Matilda switched her bed lamp on and dabbed some citronella on each\n ear lobe and a little droplet on her chin (how she hated insects!).\n Then she propped up her pillows—two pillows partially stopped her\n post-nasal drip; and took the latest issue of the\nLiterary Review\noff the night table.", "Matilda assured her that it was, and, breathlessly, she wrote down the\n address. She thanked the librarian and then she went out to her car,\n whistling to herself.\nHaron Gorka lived in what could have been an agrarian estate, except\n that the land no longer was being tilled. The house itself had fallen\n to ruin. This surprised Matilda, but she did not let it keep her\n spirits in check. Haron Gorka, the man, was what counted, and the\n librarian's account of him certainly had been glowing enough. Perhaps\n he was too busy with his cultural pursuits to pay any real attention to\n his dwelling. That was it, of course: the conspicuous show of wealth or\n personal industry meant nothing at all to Haron Gorka. Matilda liked\n him all the more for it." ], [ "It must be said to Matilda's favor that she sobbed only once. After\n that she realized that what is done is done and here, past thirty,\n she wasn't going to be girlishly timid about it. Besides, it was not\n her fault if, in his unconcern, Haron Gorka had unwittingly hired a\n neurotic servant.\n\n\n For a time Matilda paced back and forth in her room, and of what was\n going on outside she could hear nothing. In that case, she would\n pretend that there was nothing outside the little room, and presently\n she lay down on the bed to take a nap. This didn't last long, however:\n she had a nightmare in which Haron Gorka appeared as a giant with two\n heads, but, upon awaking with a start, she immediately ascribed that to\n her overwrought nerves.", "\"Certainly. You came in response to my ad. You want to hear me talk, do\n you not?\"\n\n\n \"I—do.\" Matilda had had visions of her prince charming sitting back\n and relaxing with her, telling her of the many things he had done and\n seen. But first she certainly would have liked to get to\nknow\nthe\n man. Well, Haron Gorka obviously had more experience along these lines\n than she did. He waited, however, as if wondering what to say, and\n Matilda, accustomed to social chatter, gave him a gambit.\n\n\n \"I must admit I was surprised when I got exactly what I wanted for\n dinner,\" she told him brightly.", "As she shifted into reverse and pulled out of the driveway, she saw\n the servant leaving, too. Far down the road, he was walking slowly.\n Then Haron Gorka had severed that relationship, too, and now he was all\n alone.\n\n\n As she drove back to town, the disappointment melted slowly away. There\n were, of course, two alternatives. Either Haron Gorka was an eccentric\n who enjoyed this sort of outlandish tomfoolery, or else he was plainly\n insane. She could still picture him ranting on aimlessly to no one in\n particular about places which had no existence outside of his mind, his\n voice high-pitched and eager.\nIt was not until she had passed the small library building that she\n remembered what she had promised the librarian. In her own way, the\n aging woman would be as disappointed as Matilda, but a promise was a\n promise, and Matilda turned the car in a wide U-turn and parked it\n outside the library.", "When she finished her meal a pleasant lethargy possessed her, and in a\n little while Matilda was asleep again. This time she did not dream at\n all. It was a deep sleep and a restful one, and when she awoke it was\n with the wonderful feeling that everything was all right.\nThe feeling did not last long. Standing over her was Haron Gorka's\n servant, and he said, \"Mr. Gorka will see you now.\"\n\n\n \"Now?\"\n\n\n \"Now. That's what you're here for, isn't it?\"\n\n\n He had a point there, but Matilda hardly even had time to fix her hair.\n She told the servant so.\n\n\n \"Miss,\" he replied, \"I assure you it will not matter in the least to\n Haron Gorka. You are here and he is ready to see you and that is all\n that matters.\"\n\n\n \"You sure?\" Matilda wanted to take no chances.", "The woman sat at her desk as Matilda had remembered her, gray,\n broom-stick figure, rigid. But now when she saw Matilda she perked up\n visibly.\n\n\n \"Hello, my dear,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Hi.\"\n\n\n \"You're back a bit sooner than I expected. But, then, the other five\n have returned, too, and I imagine your story will be similar.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know what they told you,\" Matilda said. \"But this is what\n happened to me.\"\n\n\n She quickly then related everything which had happened, completely and\n in detail. She did this first because it was a promise, and second\n because she knew it would make her feel better.\n\n\n \"So,\" she finished, \"Haron Gorka is either extremely eccentric or\n insane. I'm sorry.\"", "\"Stop!\"\n\n\n \"What's that? Making fun of you?\" Haron Gorka's voice had been so\n eager as he spoke, high-pitched, almost like a child's, and now he\n seemed disappointed. He smiled, but it was a sad smile, a smile of\n resignation, and he said, \"Very well. I'm wrong again. You are the\n sixth, and you're no better than the other five. Perhaps you are even\n more outspoken. When you see my wife, tell her to come back. Again she\n is right and I am wrong....\"\n\n\n Haron Gorka turned his back.\n\n\n Matilda could do nothing but leave the room, walk back through the\n house, go outside and get into her car. She noticed not without\n surprise that the other five cars were now gone. She was the last of\n Haron Gorka's guests to depart.", "The name—Haron Gorka: its oddness was somehow beautiful to Matilda.\n Haron Gorka—the nationality could be anything. And that was it. He had\n no nationality for all intents and purposes; he was an international\n man, a figure among figures, a paragon....\n\n\n Matilda sighed happily as she put out the light. The moon shone in\n through the window brightly, and at such times Matilda generally would\n get up, go to the cupboard, pull out a towel, take two hairpins from\n her powder drawer, pin the towel to the screen of her window, and hence\n keep the disturbing moonlight from her eyes. But this time it did not\n disturb her, and she would let it shine. Cedar Falls was a small town\n not fifty miles from her home, and she'd get there a hop, skip, and\n jump ahead of her competitors, simply by arriving in person instead of\n writing a letter.", "On the other hand—why not? Why couldn't the librarian help her? Why\n hadn't she thought of it before? Certainly a man as well-educated as\n Haron Gorka would be an avid reader, and unless he had a permanent\n residence here in Cedar Palls, one couldn't expect that he'd have his\n own library with him. This being the case, a third-rate collection\n of books was far better than no collection at all, and perhaps the\n librarian would know Mr. Haron Gorka.\n\n\n Matilda cleared her throat. \"Pardon me,\" she began. \"I'm looking for—\"\n\n\n \"Haron Gorka.\" The librarian nodded.\n\n\n \"How on earth did you know?\"", "\"Yes. Come.\"\n\n\n She followed him out of the little room and across what should have\n been a spacious dining area, except that everything seemed covered with\n dust. Of the other women Matilda could see nothing, and she suddenly\n realized that each of them probably had a cubicle of a room like her\n own, and that each in her turn had already had her first visit with\n Haron Gorka. Well, then, she must see to it that she impressed him\n better than did all the rest, and, later, when she returned to tell the\n old librarian of her adventures, she could perhaps draw her out and\n compare notes.", "Matilda assured her that it was, and, breathlessly, she wrote down the\n address. She thanked the librarian and then she went out to her car,\n whistling to herself.\nHaron Gorka lived in what could have been an agrarian estate, except\n that the land no longer was being tilled. The house itself had fallen\n to ruin. This surprised Matilda, but she did not let it keep her\n spirits in check. Haron Gorka, the man, was what counted, and the\n librarian's account of him certainly had been glowing enough. Perhaps\n he was too busy with his cultural pursuits to pay any real attention to\n his dwelling. That was it, of course: the conspicuous show of wealth or\n personal industry meant nothing at all to Haron Gorka. Matilda liked\n him all the more for it.", "The stereotype pushed up his glasses and looked at her squarely. \"Now\n take it easy, ma'am. First place, I don't know any Haron Gorka—\"\n\n\n Matilda kept the alarm from creeping into her voice. She muttered an\noh\nunder her breath and took out the ad. This she showed to the\n stereotype, and he scratched his bald head. Then he told Matilda almost\n happily that he was sorry he couldn't help her. He grudgingly suggested\n that if it really were important, she might check with the police.\n\n\n Matilda did, only they didn't know any Haron Gorka, either. It turned\n out that no one did: Matilda tried the general store, the fire\n department, the city hall, the high school, all three Cedar Falls gas\n stations, the livery stable, and half a dozen private dwellings at\n random. As far us the gentry of Cedar Falls was concerned, Haron Gorka\n did not exist.", "\"If I can't enjoy an association with Haron Gorka directly, I still\n could get the vicarious pleasure of your contact with him. Report to me\n faithfully and you'll get his address. That's what the other five will\n do, and with half a dozen of you, I'll get an overall picture. Each one\n of you will tell me about Haron Gorka, sparing no details. You each\n have a distinct personality, of course, and it will color each picture\n considerably. But with six of you reporting, I should receive my share\n of vicarious enjoyment. Is it—ah—a deal?\"", "\"That's easy. You're the sixth young woman who came here inquiring\n about that man today. Six of you—five others in the morning, and now\n you in the afternoon. I never did trust this Mr. Gorka....\"\n\n\n Matilda jumped as if she had been struck strategically from the rear.\n \"You know him? You know Haron Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. Of course I know him. He's our steadiest reader here at\n the library. Not a week goes by that he doesn't take out three, four\n books. Scholarly gentleman, but not without charm. If I were twenty\n years younger—\"\n\n\n Matilda thought a little flattery might be effective. \"Only ten,\" she\n assured the librarian. \"Ten years would be more than sufficient, I'm\n sure.\"", "arms. Not by Haron Gorka; that she really might have liked. Instead,\n someone she could only regard as a menial met her, and when he asked\n had she come in response to the advertisement, she nodded eagerly.\n He told her that was fine and he ushered her straight into a room\n which evidently was to be her living quarters. It contained a small\n undersized bed, a table, and a chair, and, near a little slot in the\n wall, there was a button.", "\"Are you? Well. Well, well.\" The librarian did something with the back\n of her hair, but it looked the same as before. \"Maybe you're right.\n Maybe you're right at that.\" Then she sighed. \"But I guess a miss is as\n good as a mile.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"I mean anyone would like to correspond with Haron Gorka. Or to know\n him well. To be considered his friend. Haron Gorka....\"\n\n\n The librarian seemed about to soar off into the air someplace, and if\n five women had been here first, Matilda was now definitely in a hurry.\n\n\n \"Um, where can I find Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not supposed to do this, you know. We're not permitted to give the\n addresses of any of our people. Against regulations, my dear.\"\n\n\n \"What about the other five women?\"", "She would not admit even to herself that she was disappointed with\n Haron Gorka. It was not that he was homely and unimpressive; it was\n just that he was so\nordinary\n-looking. She almost would have preferred\n the monster of her dreams.\nHe wore a white linen suit and he had mousy hair, drab eyes, an\n almost-Roman nose, a petulant mouth with the slight arch of the egotist\n at each corner.\n\n\n He said, \"Greetings. You have come—\"\n\n\n \"In response to your ad. How do you do, Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n She hoped she wasn't being too formal. But, then, there was no sense in\n assuming that he would like informality. She could only wait and see\n and adjust her own actions to suit him. Meanwhile, it would be best to\n keep on the middle of the road.\n\n\n \"I am fine. Are you ready?\"\n\n\n \"Ready?\"", "There were five cars parked in the long driveway, and now Matilda's\n made the sixth. In spite of herself, she smiled. She had not been the\n only one with the idea to visit Haron Gorka in person. With half a\n dozen of them there, the laggards who resorted to posting letters would\n be left far behind. Matilda congratulated herself for what she thought\n had been her ingenuity, and which now turned out to be something which\n she had in common with five other women. You live and learn, thought\n Matilda. And then, quite annoyedly, she berated herself for not having\n been the first. Perhaps the other five all were satisfactory; perhaps\n she wouldn't be needed; perhaps she was too late....\nAs it turned out, she wasn't. Not only that, she was welcomed with open", "\"No, no. Must you interrupt? The air-hose and the water feed, these\n were plastic. Not the rest of the suit. The point is that half of us\n were destroyed before the rescue ship could come, and the remainder\n were near death. I owe my life to the mimicry of a\nflaak\nfrom Capella\n III. It assumed the properties of plastic and led the\nthlomots\na\n merry chase across the frozen surface of D VII. You travel in the Deneb\n system now and Interstellar Ordinance makes it mandatory to carry\nflaaks\nwith you. Excellent idea, really excellent.\"\nAlmost at once, Matilda's educational background should have told her\n that Haron Gorka was mouthing gibberish. But on the other hand she\nwanted\nto believe in him and the result was that it took until now\n for her to realize it.\n\n\n \"Stop making fun of me,\" she said.\n\n\n \"So, naturally, you'll see\nflaaks\nall over that system—\"", "They were mad, all right, and now Matilda wondered if, actually,\n they were husband and wife. It could readily be; maybe the madness\n was catching. Maybe if you thought too much about such things, such\n travels, you could get that way. Of course, Herman represented the\n other extreme, and Herman was even worse in his own way—but hereafter\n Matilda would seek the happy medium.\n\n\n And, above all else, she had had enough of her pen pal columns. They\n were, she realized, for kids.\nShe ate dinner in Cedar Falls and then she went out to her car again,\n preparing for the journey back home. The sun had set and it was a clear\n night, and overhead the great broad sweep of the Milky Way was a pale\n rainbow bridge in the sky.\n\n\n Matilda paused. Off in the distance there was a glow on the horizon,\n and that was the direction of Haron Gorka's place.", "She heard the whir of machinery. A moment later there was a soft\n sliding sound. Through the slot first came a delicious aroma, followed\n almost instantly by a tray. On the tray were a bowl of turtle soup,\n mashed potatoes, green peas, bread, a strange cocktail, root-beer, a\n parfait—and a thick tenderloin sizzling in hot butter sauce.\nMatilda gasped once and felt about to gasp again—but by then her\n salivary glands were working overtime, and she ate her meal. The fact\n that it was precisely what she would have wanted could, of course, be\n attributed to coincidence, and the further fact that everything was\n extremely palatable made her forget all about Haron Gorka's neurotic\n servant." ] ]
train	51170	[ "What did Templin and Eckert find odd about the children they encountered?", "What was the mission of Eckert and Templin?", "What was said by Nayova to make Eckert feel uneasy about Pendleton?", "From the text, what can be inferred about the thoughts in Pendleton's demise?", "Who was the first attache to travel to Tunpesh?", "How did Templin find about about Pendleton's death?", "Why can we infer that Eckert had changed the office window-scenery before telling Templin about Pendleton's demise?", "How long were Eckert and Templin planning to stay on Tunpesh?", "Why was Templin leery of the children on Tunpesh?", "Why did Eckert think that one would have to view the committee member's teeth to know his age?" ]	[ [ "They all looked much younger than the children on Earth. ", "They were all more well-behaved than any children they had seen on Earth", "They were all impressively healthy. ", "They looked much older than the children on Earth" ], [ "To locate Pendleton", "To find out what happened to Pendleton", "To get to know the primitive way of life. ", "To try to cover up what happened to Pendleton" ], [ "Eckert and Templin were staying in the same house that Pendleton had stayed in when he died", "Nayova didn't like that Eckert and Templin arrived without notice. ", "Pendleton was rather rude to people and they didn't like his attitude about his accommodations. ", "Nayova didn't like that Pendleton had arrived without notice. " ], [ "The information did not match up with his cause of death being suicide. ", "Everyone was in agreement that Pendleton abandoned his position and returned home by choice. ", "Everyone was in agreement that Pendleton was still alive and in hiding. ", "The information matched up with his cause of death being suicide." ], [ "Pendleton", "Eckert", "Templin", "The information is not given within the text. " ], [ "He was told by Nayova", "He received a formal letter from the captain. ", "He received a letter from Pendleton himself. ", "He was told by Eckert. " ], [ "In order to make the scenery less dreary than the news would already seem. ", "In order to let in light to the dark room so that he could see his reaction. ", "As a last effort to convince Eckert to travel to Tunpesh and see the scenery for himself. ", "In order to show what the current state was outside. " ], [ "6 years", "6 days", "6 months", "6 weeks" ], [ "They seemed to be much older than children and only disguised as such. ", "Their appearance gave him an eerie feeling about their potential danger. ", "He knew even children were capable of doing damage with a weapon. ", "They were too eager to come near strangers and that made him uneasy. " ], [ "He seemed wise beyond his years. ", "He had disguised himself as an old man with gray hair but no wrinkles. ", "He acted too much like a small child. ", "He looked both young and old at the same time. " ] ]	[ 3, 2, 1, 1, 1, 4, 1, 3, 3, 4 ]	[ 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "\"No, I'm afraid it's not.\" Eckert started unpacking some of the boxes.\n \"You know, Ray, I got a kick out of the kids. They're a healthy-looking\n lot, aren't they?\"\n\n\n \"Too healthy,\" Templin said. \"There didn't seem to be any sick ones or\n ones with runny noses or cuts or black eyes or bruises. It doesn't seem\n natural.\"\n\n\n \"They're probably just well brought-up kids,\" Eckert said sharply.\n \"Maybe they've been taught not to get in fights or play around in the\n mud on the way home from school.\" He felt faintly irritated, annoyed at\n the way Templin had put it, as if any deviation from an Earth norm was\n potentially dangerous.\n\n\n \"Ted.\" Templin's voice was strained. \"This could be a trap, you know.\"\n\n\n \"In what way?\"", "A few adults were watching them curiously and the usual bunch of\n kids that always congregated around rocketports quickly gathered.\n Eckert stared at them for a moment, wondering what it was that seemed\n odd about them, and they stared back with all the alert dignity of\n childhood. They finally came out on the field and clustered around him\n and Templin.\n\n\n Templin studied them warily. \"Better watch them, Ted. Even kids can be\n dangerous.\"\nIt's because you never suspect kids\n, Eckert thought,\nyou never think\n they'll do any harm. But they can be taught. They could do as much\n damage with a knife as a man could, for instance. And they might have\n other weapons.\nBut the idea still didn't go with the warm sun and the blue sky and the\n piny scent of the trees.\n\n\n One of the adults of the village started to walk toward them.\n\n\n \"The reception committee,\" Templin said tightly. His hand went inside\n his tunic.", "He was polite, Eckert thought. He didn't ask what they were there\n for or how long they were going to stay. But then again, perhaps the\n natives were a better judge of that than he and Templin.\n\n\n The town was larger than he had thought at first, stretching over a\n wide expanse of the countryside. There wasn't, so far as he could see,\n much manufacturing above the level of handicrafts and simple weaving.\n Colored patches on far hillsides indicated the presence of farms, and\n practically every house in the village had its small garden.", "Eckert and Templin took a quick tour of the few rooms. They were well\n furnished, in a rustic sort of way, and what modern conveniences they\n didn't have they could easily do without. The youngsters who had\n carried their luggage left it outside and quietly faded away. It was\n getting dark; Eckert opened one of the boxes they had brought along,\n took out an electric lantern and lighted it. He turned to Jathong.\n\n\n \"You've been very kind to us and we would like to repay you. You may\n take what you wish of anything within this box.\" He opened another of\n the boxes and displayed the usual trade goods—brightly colored cloth\n and finely worked jewelry and a few mechanical contrivances that Eckert\n knew usually appealed to the primitive imagination.", "Eckert rolled up the thin, slatted blinds and stared out at the\n scenery. A hundred feet down the road, a native woman was going to\n market, leading a species of food animal by the halter.\n\n\n \"They grow their women nice, don't they?\"\n\n\n \"Physically perfect, like the men,\" Templin grumbled. \"You could get an\n inferiority complex just from watching the people here. Everybody's so\n damn perfect. Nobody's sick, nobody's unhealthy, nobody is too fat or\n too thin, nobody's unhappy. The only variation is that they don't all\n look alike. Perfection. It gets boring after a while.\"", "\"Does it? I hadn't noticed.\" Eckert turned away from the blinds. His\n voice was crisp. \"I knew Don Pendleton quite well, too,\" he said. \"But\n it isn't blinding me to what I'm here for. We came to find out what\n happened to him, not to substantiate any preconceived notions. What\n we find out may be vitally important to anybody serving here in the\n future. I would hate to see our efforts spoiled because you've already\n made up your mind.\"\n\n\n \"You knew Pendleton,\" Templin repeated grimly. \"Do you think it was\n suicide?\"\n\n\n \"I don't think there's such a thing as a suicide type, when you come\n down to it. I'm not ruling out the possibility of murder, either. I'm\n trying to keep an open mind.\"\n\n\n \"What have we accomplished so far? What have we found out?\"", "Eckert sighed and watched a fat bug waddle across a small patch of\n sunlight on the wooden floor. It was bad enough drawing an assignment\n in a totally foreign culture, even if the natives were humanoid. It\n complicated things beyond all measure when your partner in the project\n seemed likely to turn into a vendettist. It meant that Eckert would\n have to split his energies. He'd have to do what investigating he could\n among the Tunpeshans, and he'd have to watch Templin to see that he\n didn't go off half-cocked and spoil everything.\n\n\n \"You're convinced that Pendleton was murdered, aren't you?\"\n\n\n Templin nodded. \"Sure.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"", "A native fife trilled shrilly and a group of young men and women walked\n into the room. The circle broke to let them through and they came and\n knelt before Nayova. When he clapped his hands sharply, they retreated\n to the center of the circle and began the slow motions of a native\n dance.\nThe sound of the fife softened and died and the slow monotonous beat of\n drums took its place. The beat slowly increased and so did the rhythm\n of the dancers. The small fires at the corners of the hut were allowed\n to dwindle and the center of the circle became filled with the motions\n of shadows intermixed with the swift, sure movements of glistening\n limbs. Eckert felt his eyebrows crawl upward. Apparently the dance was\n the Tunpeshan version of the\nrites de passage\n. He glanced across\n the circle at Templin. Templin's face—what he could see of it by the\n flickering light—was brick red.", "He stood there for a moment, drinking in the fresh air and feeling the\n warmth of the sun against his face. It might be a pleasant six months\n at that, away from the din and the hustle and confusion, spending the\n time in a place where the sun was warm and inviting.\nI must be getting old\n, he thought,\nthinking about the warmth and\n comfort. Like old dogs and octogenarians.\nTemplin was looking at the scenery with a disappointed expression on\n his face. Eckert stole a side glance at him and for a fleeting moment\n felt vaguely concerned. \"Don't be disappointed if it doesn't look like\n cloak-and-dagger right off, Ray. What seems innocent enough on the\n surface can prove to be quite dangerous underneath.\"\n\n\n \"It's rather hard to think of danger in a setting like this.\"", "Eckert nodded agreement. \"It wouldn't fit, would it? It would be like a\n famous singer suddenly doing a jazz number in an opera, or having the\n princess in a fairy tale turn out to be ugly.\" He gestured toward the\n village. \"You could hardly class that as dangerous from its outward\n appearance, could you?\"\n\n\n The rocketport was in a small valley, surrounded by low, wooded hills.\n The village started where the port left off and crawled and wound over\n the wooded ridges. Small houses of sun-baked, white-washed mud crouched\n in the shadow of huge trees and hugged the banks of a small stream.\n\n\n It looked fairly primitive, Eckert thought, and yet it didn't have the\n earmarks, the characteristics of most primitive villages. It didn't\n seem cluttered or dirty and you didn't feel like beating a hasty\n retreat when the wind was blowing toward you.", "\"We've got six months,\" Eckert said quietly. \"Six months in which\n we'll try to live here inconspicuously and study the people and try to\n cultivate informants. We would get nowhere if we came barging in asking\n all sorts of questions. And don't forget, Ray, we're all alone on\n Tunpesh. If it is a case of murder, what happens when the natives find\n out that we know it is?\"\n\n\n Templin's eyes dueled for a moment. Then he turned his back and walked\n to the window. \"I suppose you're right,\" he said at last. \"It's nice\n living here, Ted. Maybe I've been fighting it. But I can't help\n thinking that Don must have liked it here, too.\"\nOne of the hardest things to learn in a foreign culture, Eckert\n thought, is when to enjoy yourself, when to work and when to worry.\n\n\n \"\nPelache, menshar?\n\"", "\"I don't think it's primitive at all. There are too many disparities.\n Their knowledge of a lot of things is a little more than empirical\n knowledge; they associate the growth of crops with fertilizer and\n nitrogen in the soil as well as sunlight, rather than the blessings of\n some native god. And they differ a lot in other respects. Their art and\n their music are advanced. Free art exists along with purely decorative\n art, and their techniques are finely developed.\"\n\n\n \"I'm glad you agree, then. Take a look at this.\" Templin threw a shiny\n bit of metal on the rough-hewn table. Eckert picked it up and inspected\n it. It was heavy and one side of it was extremely sharp.\n\n\n \"What's it for?\"", "Eckert and he had been chosen to go to Tunpesh and investigate. The two\n of them, working together, should be able to find out why Pendleton had\n killed himself.\nBut that wasn't the real reason. Maybe Eckert thought so, but he knew\n better. The real reason they were going there was to find out why\n Pendleton had been killed and who had killed him. That was it.\nWho had killed Cock Robin?\nThe thin red line was practically microscopic now and Templin could\n feel his lashes lying gently on his cheeks. But he wasn't asleep—not\n quite. There was something buzzing about in the dim recesses of his\n mind.\n\n\n Their information on Tunpesh was limited. They knew that it had no\n trading concessions or armed forces and that nobody from neighboring\n systems seemed to know much about it or even visited it. But a staff\n anthropologist must have been routinely assigned to Tunpesh to furnish\n data and reports.\n\n\n \"Ted?\" he murmured sleepily.", "He turned his head a little to watch Templin get ready for bed. There\n were advantages in taking him along that Templin probably didn't\n even realize. He wondered what Templin would do if he ever found out\n that the actual reason he had been chosen to go was that his own\n psychological chart was very close to Pendleton's. Pendleton's own\n feelings and emotions would almost exactly be duplicated in Templin's.\n\n\n A few stray wisps of starlight pierced through the blinds and sparkled\n for an instant on a small metal box strapped to Templin's waist. A\n power pack, Eckert saw grimly, probably leading to the buttons on his\n tunic. A very convenient, portable, and hard to detect weapon.\n\n\n There were disadvantages in taking Templin, too.\n\"Just how primitive do you think the society is, Ted?\"\n\n\n Eckert put down the chain he had been whittling and reached for his\n pipe and tobacco.", "\"Did you ever wonder what kind of weapons they might have?\"\n\n\n \"The important thing,\" Eckert mused, \"is not if they have them, but if\n they'd use them. And I rather doubt that they would. We've been here\n for two weeks now and they've been very kind to us, seeing that we've\n had food and water and what fuel we need.\"\n\n\n \"It's known in the livestock trade as being fattened up for the\n slaughter,\" Templeton said.", "nothing would happen at a banquet like this. The only actual danger lay\n in Templin's getting excited and doing something he was bound to regret\n later on. And even that danger was not quite as likely now.\nThere will be hell to pay\n, Eckert thought,\nif Templin ever finds out\n that I sabotaged his power pack.\n\"You look thoughtful,\nmenshar\nEckert.\"", "The words came out slowly. \"The people are too casual, as though\n they're playing a rehearsed part. Here we are, from an entirely\n different solar system, landed in what must be to them an unusual\n manner. They couldn't have seen rockets more than three or four\n times before. It should still be a novelty to them. And yet how much\n curiosity did they show? Hardly any. Was there any fear? No. And the\n cute, harmless little kids.\" He looked at Eckert. \"Maybe that's what\n we're supposed to think—just an idyllic, harmless society. Maybe\n that's what Pendleton thought, right to the very end.\"\n\n\n He was keyed up, jumpy, Eckert realized. He would probably be seeing\n things in every shadow and imagining danger to be lurking around every\n corner.\n\n\n \"It hasn't been established yet that Pendleton was killed, Ray. Let's\n keep an open mind until we know for certain.\"", "Nayova seemed pleased. \"We tried to do as well for\nmenshar\nPendleton\n as we could. While he was here, he had the house that you have now and\n we saw that he was supplied with food and all other necessities.\"\n\n\n Eckert had a sudden clammy feeling which quickly passed away. What\n Nayova had said was something he'd make sure Templin never heard about.\n He wiped his mouth on a broad, flat leaf that had been provided and\n took another sip of the wine.\n\n\n \"We were shocked to find out that\nmenshar\nPendleton had killed\n himself. We knew him quite well and we could not bring ourselves to\n believe he had done such a thing.\"\n\n\n Nayova's gaze slid away from him. \"Perhaps it was the will of the Great\n One,\" he said vaguely. He didn't seem anxious to talk about it.", "Eckert took another sip of the wine and turned to the Tunpeshan on his\n left. He was a tall, muscular man with sharp eyes, a firm chin and a\n certain aura of authority.\n\n\n \"I was wondering if my countryman Pendleton had offended your people in\n any way, Nayova.\" Now was as good a time as any to pump him for what he\n knew about Pendleton's death.\n\n\n \"So far as I know,\nmenshar\nPendleton offended no one. I do not know\n what duties he had to perform here, but he was a generous and courteous\n man.\"\n\n\n Eckert gnawed the dainty meat off a slender\nulami\nbone and tried to\n appear casual in his questioning.\n\n\n \"I am sure he was, Nayova. I am sure, too, that you were as kind to him\n as you have been to Templin and myself. My Government is grateful to\n you for that.\"", "Jathong ran his hand over the cloth and held some of the jewelry up to\n the light. Eckert knew by the way he looked at it that he wasn't at all\n impressed. \"I am grateful,\" he said finally, \"but there is nothing I\n want.\" He turned and walked away into the gathering darkness.\n\n\n \"The incorruptible native.\" Templin laughed sarcastically.\n\n\n Eckert shrugged. \"That's one of the things you do out of habit, try\n and buy some of the natives so you'll have friends in case you need\n them.\" He stopped for a moment, thinking. \"Did you notice the context?\n He didn't say he didn't want what we showed him. He said there was\nnothing\nthat he wanted. Implying that everything he wanted, he\n already had.\"\n\n\n \"That's not very typical of a primitive society, is it?\"" ], [ "Eckert and Templin took a quick tour of the few rooms. They were well\n furnished, in a rustic sort of way, and what modern conveniences they\n didn't have they could easily do without. The youngsters who had\n carried their luggage left it outside and quietly faded away. It was\n getting dark; Eckert opened one of the boxes they had brought along,\n took out an electric lantern and lighted it. He turned to Jathong.\n\n\n \"You've been very kind to us and we would like to repay you. You may\n take what you wish of anything within this box.\" He opened another of\n the boxes and displayed the usual trade goods—brightly colored cloth\n and finely worked jewelry and a few mechanical contrivances that Eckert\n knew usually appealed to the primitive imagination.", "\"No, I'm afraid it's not.\" Eckert started unpacking some of the boxes.\n \"You know, Ray, I got a kick out of the kids. They're a healthy-looking\n lot, aren't they?\"\n\n\n \"Too healthy,\" Templin said. \"There didn't seem to be any sick ones or\n ones with runny noses or cuts or black eyes or bruises. It doesn't seem\n natural.\"\n\n\n \"They're probably just well brought-up kids,\" Eckert said sharply.\n \"Maybe they've been taught not to get in fights or play around in the\n mud on the way home from school.\" He felt faintly irritated, annoyed at\n the way Templin had put it, as if any deviation from an Earth norm was\n potentially dangerous.\n\n\n \"Ted.\" Templin's voice was strained. \"This could be a trap, you know.\"\n\n\n \"In what way?\"", "Eckert sighed and watched a fat bug waddle across a small patch of\n sunlight on the wooden floor. It was bad enough drawing an assignment\n in a totally foreign culture, even if the natives were humanoid. It\n complicated things beyond all measure when your partner in the project\n seemed likely to turn into a vendettist. It meant that Eckert would\n have to split his energies. He'd have to do what investigating he could\n among the Tunpeshans, and he'd have to watch Templin to see that he\n didn't go off half-cocked and spoil everything.\n\n\n \"You're convinced that Pendleton was murdered, aren't you?\"\n\n\n Templin nodded. \"Sure.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"", "\"Does it? I hadn't noticed.\" Eckert turned away from the blinds. His\n voice was crisp. \"I knew Don Pendleton quite well, too,\" he said. \"But\n it isn't blinding me to what I'm here for. We came to find out what\n happened to him, not to substantiate any preconceived notions. What\n we find out may be vitally important to anybody serving here in the\n future. I would hate to see our efforts spoiled because you've already\n made up your mind.\"\n\n\n \"You knew Pendleton,\" Templin repeated grimly. \"Do you think it was\n suicide?\"\n\n\n \"I don't think there's such a thing as a suicide type, when you come\n down to it. I'm not ruling out the possibility of murder, either. I'm\n trying to keep an open mind.\"\n\n\n \"What have we accomplished so far? What have we found out?\"", "nothing would happen at a banquet like this. The only actual danger lay\n in Templin's getting excited and doing something he was bound to regret\n later on. And even that danger was not quite as likely now.\nThere will be hell to pay\n, Eckert thought,\nif Templin ever finds out\n that I sabotaged his power pack.\n\"You look thoughtful,\nmenshar\nEckert.\"", "Eckert and he had been chosen to go to Tunpesh and investigate. The two\n of them, working together, should be able to find out why Pendleton had\n killed himself.\nBut that wasn't the real reason. Maybe Eckert thought so, but he knew\n better. The real reason they were going there was to find out why\n Pendleton had been killed and who had killed him. That was it.\nWho had killed Cock Robin?\nThe thin red line was practically microscopic now and Templin could\n feel his lashes lying gently on his cheeks. But he wasn't asleep—not\n quite. There was something buzzing about in the dim recesses of his\n mind.\n\n\n Their information on Tunpesh was limited. They knew that it had no\n trading concessions or armed forces and that nobody from neighboring\n systems seemed to know much about it or even visited it. But a staff\n anthropologist must have been routinely assigned to Tunpesh to furnish\n data and reports.\n\n\n \"Ted?\" he murmured sleepily.", "He turned his head a little to watch Templin get ready for bed. There\n were advantages in taking him along that Templin probably didn't\n even realize. He wondered what Templin would do if he ever found out\n that the actual reason he had been chosen to go was that his own\n psychological chart was very close to Pendleton's. Pendleton's own\n feelings and emotions would almost exactly be duplicated in Templin's.\n\n\n A few stray wisps of starlight pierced through the blinds and sparkled\n for an instant on a small metal box strapped to Templin's waist. A\n power pack, Eckert saw grimly, probably leading to the buttons on his\n tunic. A very convenient, portable, and hard to detect weapon.\n\n\n There were disadvantages in taking Templin, too.\n\"Just how primitive do you think the society is, Ted?\"\n\n\n Eckert put down the chain he had been whittling and reached for his\n pipe and tobacco.", "A few adults were watching them curiously and the usual bunch of\n kids that always congregated around rocketports quickly gathered.\n Eckert stared at them for a moment, wondering what it was that seemed\n odd about them, and they stared back with all the alert dignity of\n childhood. They finally came out on the field and clustered around him\n and Templin.\n\n\n Templin studied them warily. \"Better watch them, Ted. Even kids can be\n dangerous.\"\nIt's because you never suspect kids\n, Eckert thought,\nyou never think\n they'll do any harm. But they can be taught. They could do as much\n damage with a knife as a man could, for instance. And they might have\n other weapons.\nBut the idea still didn't go with the warm sun and the blue sky and the\n piny scent of the trees.\n\n\n One of the adults of the village started to walk toward them.\n\n\n \"The reception committee,\" Templin said tightly. His hand went inside\n his tunic.", "He stood there for a moment, drinking in the fresh air and feeling the\n warmth of the sun against his face. It might be a pleasant six months\n at that, away from the din and the hustle and confusion, spending the\n time in a place where the sun was warm and inviting.\nI must be getting old\n, he thought,\nthinking about the warmth and\n comfort. Like old dogs and octogenarians.\nTemplin was looking at the scenery with a disappointed expression on\n his face. Eckert stole a side glance at him and for a fleeting moment\n felt vaguely concerned. \"Don't be disappointed if it doesn't look like\n cloak-and-dagger right off, Ray. What seems innocent enough on the\n surface can prove to be quite dangerous underneath.\"\n\n\n \"It's rather hard to think of danger in a setting like this.\"", "He looked at the slim, dwindling shape that was the rocket, and was\n suddenly, acutely aware that he and Templin would be stranded for six\n months on a foreign and very possibly dangerous planet. And there would\n be no way of calling for help or of leaving before the six months were\n up.", "Eckert took another sip of the wine and turned to the Tunpeshan on his\n left. He was a tall, muscular man with sharp eyes, a firm chin and a\n certain aura of authority.\n\n\n \"I was wondering if my countryman Pendleton had offended your people in\n any way, Nayova.\" Now was as good a time as any to pump him for what he\n knew about Pendleton's death.\n\n\n \"So far as I know,\nmenshar\nPendleton offended no one. I do not know\n what duties he had to perform here, but he was a generous and courteous\n man.\"\n\n\n Eckert gnawed the dainty meat off a slender\nulami\nbone and tried to\n appear casual in his questioning.\n\n\n \"I am sure he was, Nayova. I am sure, too, that you were as kind to him\n as you have been to Templin and myself. My Government is grateful to\n you for that.\"", "Eckert rolled up the thin, slatted blinds and stared out at the\n scenery. A hundred feet down the road, a native woman was going to\n market, leading a species of food animal by the halter.\n\n\n \"They grow their women nice, don't they?\"\n\n\n \"Physically perfect, like the men,\" Templin grumbled. \"You could get an\n inferiority complex just from watching the people here. Everybody's so\n damn perfect. Nobody's sick, nobody's unhealthy, nobody is too fat or\n too thin, nobody's unhappy. The only variation is that they don't all\n look alike. Perfection. It gets boring after a while.\"", "\"Did you ever wonder what kind of weapons they might have?\"\n\n\n \"The important thing,\" Eckert mused, \"is not if they have them, but if\n they'd use them. And I rather doubt that they would. We've been here\n for two weeks now and they've been very kind to us, seeing that we've\n had food and water and what fuel we need.\"\n\n\n \"It's known in the livestock trade as being fattened up for the\n slaughter,\" Templeton said.", "He was polite, Eckert thought. He didn't ask what they were there\n for or how long they were going to stay. But then again, perhaps the\n natives were a better judge of that than he and Templin.\n\n\n The town was larger than he had thought at first, stretching over a\n wide expanse of the countryside. There wasn't, so far as he could see,\n much manufacturing above the level of handicrafts and simple weaving.\n Colored patches on far hillsides indicated the presence of farms, and\n practically every house in the village had its small garden.", "Eckert had come into his office without saying a word and had watched\n his scenery-window. It had been snowing in the window, the white flakes\n making a simple pattern drifting past the glass. Eckert had fiddled\n with the controls and changed it to sunshine, then to a weird mixture\n of hail amid the brassy, golden sunlight.\n\n\n And then Eckert had told him that Pendleton had taken the short way out.\nHe shouldn't get sentimental. But how the hell else should he remember\n Pendleton? Try to forget it and drink a toast to him at the next class\n reunion? And never, never be so crude as to speculate why Pendleton\n should have done it? If, of course, he had....\nThe cabin was hazy in the reddish glow, the sleeping gas a heavy\n perfume.", "A native fife trilled shrilly and a group of young men and women walked\n into the room. The circle broke to let them through and they came and\n knelt before Nayova. When he clapped his hands sharply, they retreated\n to the center of the circle and began the slow motions of a native\n dance.\nThe sound of the fife softened and died and the slow monotonous beat of\n drums took its place. The beat slowly increased and so did the rhythm\n of the dancers. The small fires at the corners of the hut were allowed\n to dwindle and the center of the circle became filled with the motions\n of shadows intermixed with the swift, sure movements of glistening\n limbs. Eckert felt his eyebrows crawl upward. Apparently the dance was\n the Tunpeshan version of the\nrites de passage\n. He glanced across\n the circle at Templin. Templin's face—what he could see of it by the\n flickering light—was brick red.", "\"I don't think it's primitive at all. There are too many disparities.\n Their knowledge of a lot of things is a little more than empirical\n knowledge; they associate the growth of crops with fertilizer and\n nitrogen in the soil as well as sunlight, rather than the blessings of\n some native god. And they differ a lot in other respects. Their art and\n their music are advanced. Free art exists along with purely decorative\n art, and their techniques are finely developed.\"\n\n\n \"I'm glad you agree, then. Take a look at this.\" Templin threw a shiny\n bit of metal on the rough-hewn table. Eckert picked it up and inspected\n it. It was heavy and one side of it was extremely sharp.\n\n\n \"What's it for?\"", "Eckert nodded agreement. \"It wouldn't fit, would it? It would be like a\n famous singer suddenly doing a jazz number in an opera, or having the\n princess in a fairy tale turn out to be ugly.\" He gestured toward the\n village. \"You could hardly class that as dangerous from its outward\n appearance, could you?\"\n\n\n The rocketport was in a small valley, surrounded by low, wooded hills.\n The village started where the port left off and crawled and wound over\n the wooded ridges. Small houses of sun-baked, white-washed mud crouched\n in the shadow of huge trees and hugged the banks of a small stream.\n\n\n It looked fairly primitive, Eckert thought, and yet it didn't have the\n earmarks, the characteristics of most primitive villages. It didn't\n seem cluttered or dirty and you didn't feel like beating a hasty\n retreat when the wind was blowing toward you.", "\"We've got six months,\" Eckert said quietly. \"Six months in which\n we'll try to live here inconspicuously and study the people and try to\n cultivate informants. We would get nowhere if we came barging in asking\n all sorts of questions. And don't forget, Ray, we're all alone on\n Tunpesh. If it is a case of murder, what happens when the natives find\n out that we know it is?\"\n\n\n Templin's eyes dueled for a moment. Then he turned his back and walked\n to the window. \"I suppose you're right,\" he said at last. \"It's nice\n living here, Ted. Maybe I've been fighting it. But I can't help\n thinking that Don must have liked it here, too.\"\nOne of the hardest things to learn in a foreign culture, Eckert\n thought, is when to enjoy yourself, when to work and when to worry.\n\n\n \"\nPelache, menshar?\n\"", "Nayova seemed pleased. \"We tried to do as well for\nmenshar\nPendleton\n as we could. While he was here, he had the house that you have now and\n we saw that he was supplied with food and all other necessities.\"\n\n\n Eckert had a sudden clammy feeling which quickly passed away. What\n Nayova had said was something he'd make sure Templin never heard about.\n He wiped his mouth on a broad, flat leaf that had been provided and\n took another sip of the wine.\n\n\n \"We were shocked to find out that\nmenshar\nPendleton had killed\n himself. We knew him quite well and we could not bring ourselves to\n believe he had done such a thing.\"\n\n\n Nayova's gaze slid away from him. \"Perhaps it was the will of the Great\n One,\" he said vaguely. He didn't seem anxious to talk about it." ], [ "Nayova seemed pleased. \"We tried to do as well for\nmenshar\nPendleton\n as we could. While he was here, he had the house that you have now and\n we saw that he was supplied with food and all other necessities.\"\n\n\n Eckert had a sudden clammy feeling which quickly passed away. What\n Nayova had said was something he'd make sure Templin never heard about.\n He wiped his mouth on a broad, flat leaf that had been provided and\n took another sip of the wine.\n\n\n \"We were shocked to find out that\nmenshar\nPendleton had killed\n himself. We knew him quite well and we could not bring ourselves to\n believe he had done such a thing.\"\n\n\n Nayova's gaze slid away from him. \"Perhaps it was the will of the Great\n One,\" he said vaguely. He didn't seem anxious to talk about it.", "Eckert took another sip of the wine and turned to the Tunpeshan on his\n left. He was a tall, muscular man with sharp eyes, a firm chin and a\n certain aura of authority.\n\n\n \"I was wondering if my countryman Pendleton had offended your people in\n any way, Nayova.\" Now was as good a time as any to pump him for what he\n knew about Pendleton's death.\n\n\n \"So far as I know,\nmenshar\nPendleton offended no one. I do not know\n what duties he had to perform here, but he was a generous and courteous\n man.\"\n\n\n Eckert gnawed the dainty meat off a slender\nulami\nbone and tried to\n appear casual in his questioning.\n\n\n \"I am sure he was, Nayova. I am sure, too, that you were as kind to him\n as you have been to Templin and myself. My Government is grateful to\n you for that.\"", "A voice spoke in his ear. \"It is hard for us to imagine anybody doing\n what\nmenshar\nPendleton did. It is ...\" and he used a native word that\n Eckert translated as being roughly equivalent to \"\nobscene\n.\"\n\n\n The dancers at the center of the circle finally bowed out with small\n garlands of flowers on their heads that signified their reaching\n adulthood. Acrobats then took the stage and went through a dizzying\n routine, and they in turn were succeeded by a native singer.\n\n\n They were all excellent, Eckert thought. If anything, they were too\n good.\n\n\n The bowl of\npelache\nnuts made its way around again and Nayova leaned\n over to speak to him. \"If there is any possibility that I can help you\n while you are here,\nmenshar\nEckert, you have but to ask.\"", "The words came out slowly. \"The people are too casual, as though\n they're playing a rehearsed part. Here we are, from an entirely\n different solar system, landed in what must be to them an unusual\n manner. They couldn't have seen rockets more than three or four\n times before. It should still be a novelty to them. And yet how much\n curiosity did they show? Hardly any. Was there any fear? No. And the\n cute, harmless little kids.\" He looked at Eckert. \"Maybe that's what\n we're supposed to think—just an idyllic, harmless society. Maybe\n that's what Pendleton thought, right to the very end.\"\n\n\n He was keyed up, jumpy, Eckert realized. He would probably be seeing\n things in every shadow and imagining danger to be lurking around every\n corner.\n\n\n \"It hasn't been established yet that Pendleton was killed, Ray. Let's\n keep an open mind until we know for certain.\"", "\"Does it? I hadn't noticed.\" Eckert turned away from the blinds. His\n voice was crisp. \"I knew Don Pendleton quite well, too,\" he said. \"But\n it isn't blinding me to what I'm here for. We came to find out what\n happened to him, not to substantiate any preconceived notions. What\n we find out may be vitally important to anybody serving here in the\n future. I would hate to see our efforts spoiled because you've already\n made up your mind.\"\n\n\n \"You knew Pendleton,\" Templin repeated grimly. \"Do you think it was\n suicide?\"\n\n\n \"I don't think there's such a thing as a suicide type, when you come\n down to it. I'm not ruling out the possibility of murder, either. I'm\n trying to keep an open mind.\"\n\n\n \"What have we accomplished so far? What have we found out?\"", "Eckert and he had talked it out and gone over the records. Pendleton\n had come of good stock. There had been no mental instability in his\n family for as far back as the genetic records went. He had been raised\n in a middle-class neighborhood and attended a local grammar school\n where he had achieved average grades and had given his instructors the\n normal amount of trouble. Later, when he had made up his mind to enter\n the Diplomatic Service, his grades had improved. He had worked hard at\n it, though he wasn't what you would call a grind. In high school and\n later in college, he was the well-balanced type, athletic, popular,\n hard-working.\nHow long would it be before memories faded and all there was left", "Eckert sighed and watched a fat bug waddle across a small patch of\n sunlight on the wooden floor. It was bad enough drawing an assignment\n in a totally foreign culture, even if the natives were humanoid. It\n complicated things beyond all measure when your partner in the project\n seemed likely to turn into a vendettist. It meant that Eckert would\n have to split his energies. He'd have to do what investigating he could\n among the Tunpeshans, and he'd have to watch Templin to see that he\n didn't go off half-cocked and spoil everything.\n\n\n \"You're convinced that Pendleton was murdered, aren't you?\"\n\n\n Templin nodded. \"Sure.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"", "Eckert had come into his office without saying a word and had watched\n his scenery-window. It had been snowing in the window, the white flakes\n making a simple pattern drifting past the glass. Eckert had fiddled\n with the controls and changed it to sunshine, then to a weird mixture\n of hail amid the brassy, golden sunlight.\n\n\n And then Eckert had told him that Pendleton had taken the short way out.\nHe shouldn't get sentimental. But how the hell else should he remember\n Pendleton? Try to forget it and drink a toast to him at the next class\n reunion? And never, never be so crude as to speculate why Pendleton\n should have done it? If, of course, he had....\nThe cabin was hazy in the reddish glow, the sleeping gas a heavy\n perfume.", "\"No, I'm afraid it's not.\" Eckert started unpacking some of the boxes.\n \"You know, Ray, I got a kick out of the kids. They're a healthy-looking\n lot, aren't they?\"\n\n\n \"Too healthy,\" Templin said. \"There didn't seem to be any sick ones or\n ones with runny noses or cuts or black eyes or bruises. It doesn't seem\n natural.\"\n\n\n \"They're probably just well brought-up kids,\" Eckert said sharply.\n \"Maybe they've been taught not to get in fights or play around in the\n mud on the way home from school.\" He felt faintly irritated, annoyed at\n the way Templin had put it, as if any deviation from an Earth norm was\n potentially dangerous.\n\n\n \"Ted.\" Templin's voice was strained. \"This could be a trap, you know.\"\n\n\n \"In what way?\"", "He turned his head slightly so he could just see Eckert in the bank\n facing him. Eckert, one of the good gray men in the Service. The old\n reliables, the ones who could take almost anything in their stride\n because, at one time or another, they had had to.\nIt was Eckert who had come into his office several days ago and told\n him that Don Pendleton had killed himself.\nOnly Pendleton wasn't the type. He was the kind who have everything\n to live for, the kind you instinctively know will amount to something\n someday. And that was a lousy way to remember him. The clichés always\n come first. Your memory plays traitor and boils friendship down to the\n status of a breakfast food testimonial.\nThe soft red lights seemed to be dancing in the darkness of the cabin.\n Eckert was just a dull, formless blur opposite him. His cigarette was\n out.", "He stood there for a moment, drinking in the fresh air and feeling the\n warmth of the sun against his face. It might be a pleasant six months\n at that, away from the din and the hustle and confusion, spending the\n time in a place where the sun was warm and inviting.\nI must be getting old\n, he thought,\nthinking about the warmth and\n comfort. Like old dogs and octogenarians.\nTemplin was looking at the scenery with a disappointed expression on\n his face. Eckert stole a side glance at him and for a fleeting moment\n felt vaguely concerned. \"Don't be disappointed if it doesn't look like\n cloak-and-dagger right off, Ray. What seems innocent enough on the\n surface can prove to be quite dangerous underneath.\"\n\n\n \"It's rather hard to think of danger in a setting like this.\"", "He turned his head a little to watch Templin get ready for bed. There\n were advantages in taking him along that Templin probably didn't\n even realize. He wondered what Templin would do if he ever found out\n that the actual reason he had been chosen to go was that his own\n psychological chart was very close to Pendleton's. Pendleton's own\n feelings and emotions would almost exactly be duplicated in Templin's.\n\n\n A few stray wisps of starlight pierced through the blinds and sparkled\n for an instant on a small metal box strapped to Templin's waist. A\n power pack, Eckert saw grimly, probably leading to the buttons on his\n tunic. A very convenient, portable, and hard to detect weapon.\n\n\n There were disadvantages in taking Templin, too.\n\"Just how primitive do you think the society is, Ted?\"\n\n\n Eckert put down the chain he had been whittling and reached for his\n pipe and tobacco.", "He couldn't be blamed for being jumpy, Eckert realized. This was his\n first time out, his first mission like this. And, of course, Pendleton\n had been a pretty good friend of his.\n\n\n \"I'd be very careful what I did,\" Eckert said softly. \"I would hate to\n start something merely because I misunderstood their intentions.\"\n\n\n The committee of one was a middle-aged man dressed in a simple strip of\n white cloth twisted about his waist and allowed to hang freely to his\n knees. When he got closer, Eckert became less sure of his age. He had\n the firm, tanned musculature of a much younger man, though a slightly\n seamed face and white hair aged him somewhat. Eckert still had the\n feeling that if you wanted to know his exact age, you'd have to look\n at his teeth or know something about his epiphyseal closures.", "Eckert and he had been chosen to go to Tunpesh and investigate. The two\n of them, working together, should be able to find out why Pendleton had\n killed himself.\nBut that wasn't the real reason. Maybe Eckert thought so, but he knew\n better. The real reason they were going there was to find out why\n Pendleton had been killed and who had killed him. That was it.\nWho had killed Cock Robin?\nThe thin red line was practically microscopic now and Templin could\n feel his lashes lying gently on his cheeks. But he wasn't asleep—not\n quite. There was something buzzing about in the dim recesses of his\n mind.\n\n\n Their information on Tunpesh was limited. They knew that it had no\n trading concessions or armed forces and that nobody from neighboring\n systems seemed to know much about it or even visited it. But a staff\n anthropologist must have been routinely assigned to Tunpesh to furnish\n data and reports.\n\n\n \"Ted?\" he murmured sleepily.", "It would probably be a mistake to ask for a list of Pendleton's\n friends, but there was a way around that. \"I would like to meet any\n of your people who had dealings with Pendleton, either in business or\n socially. I will do everything not to inconvenience them in any way.\"\n\n\n \"I think they would be glad to help you. I shall ask them to go to you\n this coming week.\"", "A native fife trilled shrilly and a group of young men and women walked\n into the room. The circle broke to let them through and they came and\n knelt before Nayova. When he clapped his hands sharply, they retreated\n to the center of the circle and began the slow motions of a native\n dance.\nThe sound of the fife softened and died and the slow monotonous beat of\n drums took its place. The beat slowly increased and so did the rhythm\n of the dancers. The small fires at the corners of the hut were allowed\n to dwindle and the center of the circle became filled with the motions\n of shadows intermixed with the swift, sure movements of glistening\n limbs. Eckert felt his eyebrows crawl upward. Apparently the dance was\n the Tunpeshan version of the\nrites de passage\n. He glanced across\n the circle at Templin. Templin's face—what he could see of it by the\n flickering light—was brick red.", "\"The Tunpeshans know why we're here. We've dropped enough hints along\n those lines. But nobody has mentioned Pendleton; nobody has volunteered\n any information about him. And he was an attache here for three\n years. Didn't anybody know him during that time? We've let slip a few\n discreet statements that we would like to talk to Pendleton's friends,\n yet nobody's come around. Apparently, in all the three years he was\n here, Pendleton didn't make any friends. And that's a little hard to\n believe. It's more likely that his friends have been silenced and any\n information about him is being withheld for a reason.\"\n\n\n \"What reason?\"\n\n\n Templin shrugged. \"Murder. What other reason could there be?\"", "A few adults were watching them curiously and the usual bunch of\n kids that always congregated around rocketports quickly gathered.\n Eckert stared at them for a moment, wondering what it was that seemed\n odd about them, and they stared back with all the alert dignity of\n childhood. They finally came out on the field and clustered around him\n and Templin.\n\n\n Templin studied them warily. \"Better watch them, Ted. Even kids can be\n dangerous.\"\nIt's because you never suspect kids\n, Eckert thought,\nyou never think\n they'll do any harm. But they can be taught. They could do as much\n damage with a knife as a man could, for instance. And they might have\n other weapons.\nBut the idea still didn't go with the warm sun and the blue sky and the\n piny scent of the trees.\n\n\n One of the adults of the village started to walk toward them.\n\n\n \"The reception committee,\" Templin said tightly. His hand went inside\n his tunic.", "nothing would happen at a banquet like this. The only actual danger lay\n in Templin's getting excited and doing something he was bound to regret\n later on. And even that danger was not quite as likely now.\nThere will be hell to pay\n, Eckert thought,\nif Templin ever finds out\n that I sabotaged his power pack.\n\"You look thoughtful,\nmenshar\nEckert.\"", "perhaps.\nHe could smell the bitter fragrance of tobacco smoke mingling with\n the gas. Eckert had lit a cigarette and was calmly blowing the smoke\n at the neon \"No Smoking\" sign, which winked on and off in mechanical\n disapproval." ], [ "\"Does it? I hadn't noticed.\" Eckert turned away from the blinds. His\n voice was crisp. \"I knew Don Pendleton quite well, too,\" he said. \"But\n it isn't blinding me to what I'm here for. We came to find out what\n happened to him, not to substantiate any preconceived notions. What\n we find out may be vitally important to anybody serving here in the\n future. I would hate to see our efforts spoiled because you've already\n made up your mind.\"\n\n\n \"You knew Pendleton,\" Templin repeated grimly. \"Do you think it was\n suicide?\"\n\n\n \"I don't think there's such a thing as a suicide type, when you come\n down to it. I'm not ruling out the possibility of murder, either. I'm\n trying to keep an open mind.\"\n\n\n \"What have we accomplished so far? What have we found out?\"", "He turned his head slightly so he could just see Eckert in the bank\n facing him. Eckert, one of the good gray men in the Service. The old\n reliables, the ones who could take almost anything in their stride\n because, at one time or another, they had had to.\nIt was Eckert who had come into his office several days ago and told\n him that Don Pendleton had killed himself.\nOnly Pendleton wasn't the type. He was the kind who have everything\n to live for, the kind you instinctively know will amount to something\n someday. And that was a lousy way to remember him. The clichés always\n come first. Your memory plays traitor and boils friendship down to the\n status of a breakfast food testimonial.\nThe soft red lights seemed to be dancing in the darkness of the cabin.\n Eckert was just a dull, formless blur opposite him. His cigarette was\n out.", "Eckert had come into his office without saying a word and had watched\n his scenery-window. It had been snowing in the window, the white flakes\n making a simple pattern drifting past the glass. Eckert had fiddled\n with the controls and changed it to sunshine, then to a weird mixture\n of hail amid the brassy, golden sunlight.\n\n\n And then Eckert had told him that Pendleton had taken the short way out.\nHe shouldn't get sentimental. But how the hell else should he remember\n Pendleton? Try to forget it and drink a toast to him at the next class\n reunion? And never, never be so crude as to speculate why Pendleton\n should have done it? If, of course, he had....\nThe cabin was hazy in the reddish glow, the sleeping gas a heavy\n perfume.", "of Pendleton was a page of statistics? He had been on this team, he\n had been elected president of that, he had graduated with such and\n such honors. But try getting a picture of him by reading the records,\n resurrect him from a page of black print. Would he be human? Would\n he be flesh and blood? Hell, no! In the statistics Pendleton was the\n All-Around Boy, the cold marble statue with the finely chiseled muscles\n and the smooth, blank sockets where the eyes should be. Maybe someday\n fate would play a trick on a hero-worshiping public and there would\n actually be kids like that. But they wouldn't be human; they wouldn't\n be born. Parents would get them by sending in so many box tops.\nHe was drowsy; the room was filled with the gas now. It would be only a", "Eckert and he had talked it out and gone over the records. Pendleton\n had come of good stock. There had been no mental instability in his\n family for as far back as the genetic records went. He had been raised\n in a middle-class neighborhood and attended a local grammar school\n where he had achieved average grades and had given his instructors the\n normal amount of trouble. Later, when he had made up his mind to enter\n the Diplomatic Service, his grades had improved. He had worked hard at\n it, though he wasn't what you would call a grind. In high school and\n later in college, he was the well-balanced type, athletic, popular,\n hard-working.\nHow long would it be before memories faded and all there was left", "\"The Tunpeshans know why we're here. We've dropped enough hints along\n those lines. But nobody has mentioned Pendleton; nobody has volunteered\n any information about him. And he was an attache here for three\n years. Didn't anybody know him during that time? We've let slip a few\n discreet statements that we would like to talk to Pendleton's friends,\n yet nobody's come around. Apparently, in all the three years he was\n here, Pendleton didn't make any friends. And that's a little hard to\n believe. It's more likely that his friends have been silenced and any\n information about him is being withheld for a reason.\"\n\n\n \"What reason?\"\n\n\n Templin shrugged. \"Murder. What other reason could there be?\"", "Nayova seemed pleased. \"We tried to do as well for\nmenshar\nPendleton\n as we could. While he was here, he had the house that you have now and\n we saw that he was supplied with food and all other necessities.\"\n\n\n Eckert had a sudden clammy feeling which quickly passed away. What\n Nayova had said was something he'd make sure Templin never heard about.\n He wiped his mouth on a broad, flat leaf that had been provided and\n took another sip of the wine.\n\n\n \"We were shocked to find out that\nmenshar\nPendleton had killed\n himself. We knew him quite well and we could not bring ourselves to\n believe he had done such a thing.\"\n\n\n Nayova's gaze slid away from him. \"Perhaps it was the will of the Great\n One,\" he said vaguely. He didn't seem anxious to talk about it.", "Tunpesh had been Pendleton's second assignment.\nThe natives were oh-so-friendly. So friendly that he had made sure\n that a certain box was on board, filled with shiny atomic rifles,\n needle pistols, and the fat little gas guns. They might be needed.\n People like Pendleton didn't kill themselves, did they? No, they\n didn't. But sometimes they were murdered.\nIt was almost black inside the cabin now; only a thin red line around\n the ceiling told how close they were to takeoff. His head was thick\n with drowsiness, his eyelids a heavy weight that he knew he couldn't\n keep open much longer.", "The words came out slowly. \"The people are too casual, as though\n they're playing a rehearsed part. Here we are, from an entirely\n different solar system, landed in what must be to them an unusual\n manner. They couldn't have seen rockets more than three or four\n times before. It should still be a novelty to them. And yet how much\n curiosity did they show? Hardly any. Was there any fear? No. And the\n cute, harmless little kids.\" He looked at Eckert. \"Maybe that's what\n we're supposed to think—just an idyllic, harmless society. Maybe\n that's what Pendleton thought, right to the very end.\"\n\n\n He was keyed up, jumpy, Eckert realized. He would probably be seeing\n things in every shadow and imagining danger to be lurking around every\n corner.\n\n\n \"It hasn't been established yet that Pendleton was killed, Ray. Let's\n keep an open mind until we know for certain.\"", "Eckert sighed and watched a fat bug waddle across a small patch of\n sunlight on the wooden floor. It was bad enough drawing an assignment\n in a totally foreign culture, even if the natives were humanoid. It\n complicated things beyond all measure when your partner in the project\n seemed likely to turn into a vendettist. It meant that Eckert would\n have to split his energies. He'd have to do what investigating he could\n among the Tunpeshans, and he'd have to watch Templin to see that he\n didn't go off half-cocked and spoil everything.\n\n\n \"You're convinced that Pendleton was murdered, aren't you?\"\n\n\n Templin nodded. \"Sure.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"", "Eckert and he had been chosen to go to Tunpesh and investigate. The two\n of them, working together, should be able to find out why Pendleton had\n killed himself.\nBut that wasn't the real reason. Maybe Eckert thought so, but he knew\n better. The real reason they were going there was to find out why\n Pendleton had been killed and who had killed him. That was it.\nWho had killed Cock Robin?\nThe thin red line was practically microscopic now and Templin could\n feel his lashes lying gently on his cheeks. But he wasn't asleep—not\n quite. There was something buzzing about in the dim recesses of his\n mind.\n\n\n Their information on Tunpesh was limited. They knew that it had no\n trading concessions or armed forces and that nobody from neighboring\n systems seemed to know much about it or even visited it. But a staff\n anthropologist must have been routinely assigned to Tunpesh to furnish\n data and reports.\n\n\n \"Ted?\" he murmured sleepily.", "It would probably be a mistake to ask for a list of Pendleton's\n friends, but there was a way around that. \"I would like to meet any\n of your people who had dealings with Pendleton, either in business or\n socially. I will do everything not to inconvenience them in any way.\"\n\n\n \"I think they would be glad to help you. I shall ask them to go to you\n this coming week.\"", "He flicked out the light and lay back on the cool bed, letting his\n body relax completely. The cool night wind blew lazily through the\n wood slat blinds, carrying the fragrance of the trees and the grass,\n and he inhaled deeply and let his thoughts wander for a moment. It was\n going to be pleasant to live on Tunpesh for six months—even if the six\n months were all they had to live. The climate was superb and the people\n seemed a cut above the usual primitive culture. If he ever retired some\n day, he thought suddenly, he would have to remember Tunpesh. It would\n be pleasant to spend his old age here. And the fishing was probably\n excellent....", "He turned his head a little to watch Templin get ready for bed. There\n were advantages in taking him along that Templin probably didn't\n even realize. He wondered what Templin would do if he ever found out\n that the actual reason he had been chosen to go was that his own\n psychological chart was very close to Pendleton's. Pendleton's own\n feelings and emotions would almost exactly be duplicated in Templin's.\n\n\n A few stray wisps of starlight pierced through the blinds and sparkled\n for an instant on a small metal box strapped to Templin's waist. A\n power pack, Eckert saw grimly, probably leading to the buttons on his\n tunic. A very convenient, portable, and hard to detect weapon.\n\n\n There were disadvantages in taking Templin, too.\n\"Just how primitive do you think the society is, Ted?\"\n\n\n Eckert put down the chain he had been whittling and reached for his\n pipe and tobacco.", "Eckert took another sip of the wine and turned to the Tunpeshan on his\n left. He was a tall, muscular man with sharp eyes, a firm chin and a\n certain aura of authority.\n\n\n \"I was wondering if my countryman Pendleton had offended your people in\n any way, Nayova.\" Now was as good a time as any to pump him for what he\n knew about Pendleton's death.\n\n\n \"So far as I know,\nmenshar\nPendleton offended no one. I do not know\n what duties he had to perform here, but he was a generous and courteous\n man.\"\n\n\n Eckert gnawed the dainty meat off a slender\nulami\nbone and tried to\n appear casual in his questioning.\n\n\n \"I am sure he was, Nayova. I am sure, too, that you were as kind to him\n as you have been to Templin and myself. My Government is grateful to\n you for that.\"", "A faint stirring in the black bulk opposite him. \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"How come our anthropologist on Tunpesh didn't come across with more\n information?\"\n\n\n A drowsy mumble from the other cot: \"He wasn't there long enough. He\n committed suicide not long after landing.\"\n\n\n The room was a whirling pool of blackness into which his mind was\n slowly slipping. Takeoff was only seconds away.\nWhy do people commit suicide?\n\"It's a nice day, isn't it, Ted?\" Eckert took a deep and pleasurable\n breath. \"It's the type of day that makes you feel good just to be\n alive.\"", "Pendleton had been in his second year as attache on Tunpesh, a small\n planet with a G-type sun. The Service had stumbled across it recently\n and decided the system was worth diplomatic recognition of some kind,\n so Pendleton had been sent there. He had been the first attache to be\n sent and naturally he had gone alone.\n\n\n There was no need to send more. Tunpesh had been inspected and\n certified and approved. The natives were primitive and friendly. Or\n maybe the Service had slipped up, as it sometimes did, and Tunpesh had\n received something less than a thorough survey.\n\n\n And then an unscheduled freighter had put in for repairs, one of\n the very few ships that ever came by Tunpesh. The captain had tried\n to pay his respects to Pendleton. Only Pendleton wasn't there. The\n natives said he had killed himself and showed the captain the little\n flower-covered plot where they had buried him.", "He couldn't be blamed for being jumpy, Eckert realized. This was his\n first time out, his first mission like this. And, of course, Pendleton\n had been a pretty good friend of his.\n\n\n \"I'd be very careful what I did,\" Eckert said softly. \"I would hate to\n start something merely because I misunderstood their intentions.\"\n\n\n The committee of one was a middle-aged man dressed in a simple strip of\n white cloth twisted about his waist and allowed to hang freely to his\n knees. When he got closer, Eckert became less sure of his age. He had\n the firm, tanned musculature of a much younger man, though a slightly\n seamed face and white hair aged him somewhat. Eckert still had the\n feeling that if you wanted to know his exact age, you'd have to look\n at his teeth or know something about his epiphyseal closures.", "A voice spoke in his ear. \"It is hard for us to imagine anybody doing\n what\nmenshar\nPendleton did. It is ...\" and he used a native word that\n Eckert translated as being roughly equivalent to \"\nobscene\n.\"\n\n\n The dancers at the center of the circle finally bowed out with small\n garlands of flowers on their heads that signified their reaching\n adulthood. Acrobats then took the stage and went through a dizzying\n routine, and they in turn were succeeded by a native singer.\n\n\n They were all excellent, Eckert thought. If anything, they were too\n good.\n\n\n The bowl of\npelache\nnuts made its way around again and Nayova leaned\n over to speak to him. \"If there is any possibility that I can help you\n while you are here,\nmenshar\nEckert, you have but to ask.\"", "nothing would happen at a banquet like this. The only actual danger lay\n in Templin's getting excited and doing something he was bound to regret\n later on. And even that danger was not quite as likely now.\nThere will be hell to pay\n, Eckert thought,\nif Templin ever finds out\n that I sabotaged his power pack.\n\"You look thoughtful,\nmenshar\nEckert.\"" ], [ "\"The Tunpeshans know why we're here. We've dropped enough hints along\n those lines. But nobody has mentioned Pendleton; nobody has volunteered\n any information about him. And he was an attache here for three\n years. Didn't anybody know him during that time? We've let slip a few\n discreet statements that we would like to talk to Pendleton's friends,\n yet nobody's come around. Apparently, in all the three years he was\n here, Pendleton didn't make any friends. And that's a little hard to\n believe. It's more likely that his friends have been silenced and any\n information about him is being withheld for a reason.\"\n\n\n \"What reason?\"\n\n\n Templin shrugged. \"Murder. What other reason could there be?\"", "Pendleton had been in his second year as attache on Tunpesh, a small\n planet with a G-type sun. The Service had stumbled across it recently\n and decided the system was worth diplomatic recognition of some kind,\n so Pendleton had been sent there. He had been the first attache to be\n sent and naturally he had gone alone.\n\n\n There was no need to send more. Tunpesh had been inspected and\n certified and approved. The natives were primitive and friendly. Or\n maybe the Service had slipped up, as it sometimes did, and Tunpesh had\n received something less than a thorough survey.\n\n\n And then an unscheduled freighter had put in for repairs, one of\n the very few ships that ever came by Tunpesh. The captain had tried\n to pay his respects to Pendleton. Only Pendleton wasn't there. The\n natives said he had killed himself and showed the captain the little\n flower-covered plot where they had buried him.", "Tunpesh had been Pendleton's second assignment.\nThe natives were oh-so-friendly. So friendly that he had made sure\n that a certain box was on board, filled with shiny atomic rifles,\n needle pistols, and the fat little gas guns. They might be needed.\n People like Pendleton didn't kill themselves, did they? No, they\n didn't. But sometimes they were murdered.\nIt was almost black inside the cabin now; only a thin red line around\n the ceiling told how close they were to takeoff. His head was thick\n with drowsiness, his eyelids a heavy weight that he knew he couldn't\n keep open much longer.", "Eckert took another sip of the wine and turned to the Tunpeshan on his\n left. He was a tall, muscular man with sharp eyes, a firm chin and a\n certain aura of authority.\n\n\n \"I was wondering if my countryman Pendleton had offended your people in\n any way, Nayova.\" Now was as good a time as any to pump him for what he\n knew about Pendleton's death.\n\n\n \"So far as I know,\nmenshar\nPendleton offended no one. I do not know\n what duties he had to perform here, but he was a generous and courteous\n man.\"\n\n\n Eckert gnawed the dainty meat off a slender\nulami\nbone and tried to\n appear casual in his questioning.\n\n\n \"I am sure he was, Nayova. I am sure, too, that you were as kind to him\n as you have been to Templin and myself. My Government is grateful to\n you for that.\"", "Eckert and he had been chosen to go to Tunpesh and investigate. The two\n of them, working together, should be able to find out why Pendleton had\n killed himself.\nBut that wasn't the real reason. Maybe Eckert thought so, but he knew\n better. The real reason they were going there was to find out why\n Pendleton had been killed and who had killed him. That was it.\nWho had killed Cock Robin?\nThe thin red line was practically microscopic now and Templin could\n feel his lashes lying gently on his cheeks. But he wasn't asleep—not\n quite. There was something buzzing about in the dim recesses of his\n mind.\n\n\n Their information on Tunpesh was limited. They knew that it had no\n trading concessions or armed forces and that nobody from neighboring\n systems seemed to know much about it or even visited it. But a staff\n anthropologist must have been routinely assigned to Tunpesh to furnish\n data and reports.\n\n\n \"Ted?\" he murmured sleepily.", "\"We've got six months,\" Eckert said quietly. \"Six months in which\n we'll try to live here inconspicuously and study the people and try to\n cultivate informants. We would get nowhere if we came barging in asking\n all sorts of questions. And don't forget, Ray, we're all alone on\n Tunpesh. If it is a case of murder, what happens when the natives find\n out that we know it is?\"\n\n\n Templin's eyes dueled for a moment. Then he turned his back and walked\n to the window. \"I suppose you're right,\" he said at last. \"It's nice\n living here, Ted. Maybe I've been fighting it. But I can't help\n thinking that Don must have liked it here, too.\"\nOne of the hardest things to learn in a foreign culture, Eckert\n thought, is when to enjoy yourself, when to work and when to worry.\n\n\n \"\nPelache, menshar?\n\"", "He flicked out the light and lay back on the cool bed, letting his\n body relax completely. The cool night wind blew lazily through the\n wood slat blinds, carrying the fragrance of the trees and the grass,\n and he inhaled deeply and let his thoughts wander for a moment. It was\n going to be pleasant to live on Tunpesh for six months—even if the six\n months were all they had to live. The climate was superb and the people\n seemed a cut above the usual primitive culture. If he ever retired some\n day, he thought suddenly, he would have to remember Tunpesh. It would\n be pleasant to spend his old age here. And the fishing was probably\n excellent....", "Eckert sighed and watched a fat bug waddle across a small patch of\n sunlight on the wooden floor. It was bad enough drawing an assignment\n in a totally foreign culture, even if the natives were humanoid. It\n complicated things beyond all measure when your partner in the project\n seemed likely to turn into a vendettist. It meant that Eckert would\n have to split his energies. He'd have to do what investigating he could\n among the Tunpeshans, and he'd have to watch Templin to see that he\n didn't go off half-cocked and spoil everything.\n\n\n \"You're convinced that Pendleton was murdered, aren't you?\"\n\n\n Templin nodded. \"Sure.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"", "A native fife trilled shrilly and a group of young men and women walked\n into the room. The circle broke to let them through and they came and\n knelt before Nayova. When he clapped his hands sharply, they retreated\n to the center of the circle and began the slow motions of a native\n dance.\nThe sound of the fife softened and died and the slow monotonous beat of\n drums took its place. The beat slowly increased and so did the rhythm\n of the dancers. The small fires at the corners of the hut were allowed\n to dwindle and the center of the circle became filled with the motions\n of shadows intermixed with the swift, sure movements of glistening\n limbs. Eckert felt his eyebrows crawl upward. Apparently the dance was\n the Tunpeshan version of the\nrites de passage\n. He glanced across\n the circle at Templin. Templin's face—what he could see of it by the\n flickering light—was brick red.", "He turned his head a little to watch Templin get ready for bed. There\n were advantages in taking him along that Templin probably didn't\n even realize. He wondered what Templin would do if he ever found out\n that the actual reason he had been chosen to go was that his own\n psychological chart was very close to Pendleton's. Pendleton's own\n feelings and emotions would almost exactly be duplicated in Templin's.\n\n\n A few stray wisps of starlight pierced through the blinds and sparkled\n for an instant on a small metal box strapped to Templin's waist. A\n power pack, Eckert saw grimly, probably leading to the buttons on his\n tunic. A very convenient, portable, and hard to detect weapon.\n\n\n There were disadvantages in taking Templin, too.\n\"Just how primitive do you think the society is, Ted?\"\n\n\n Eckert put down the chain he had been whittling and reached for his\n pipe and tobacco.", "He looked at the slim, dwindling shape that was the rocket, and was\n suddenly, acutely aware that he and Templin would be stranded for six\n months on a foreign and very possibly dangerous planet. And there would\n be no way of calling for help or of leaving before the six months were\n up.", "The main courses started making the rounds and he took generous\n helpings of the roasted\nulami\nand the broiled\nhalunch\nand numerous\n dabs from the side dishes of steaming vegetables. Between every course,\n they passed around a small flagon of the hot, spiced native wine, but\n he noticed that nobody drank to excess.\nThe old Greek ideal\n, he thought:\nmoderation in everything.\nHe looked at Templin, sitting across from him in the huge circle, and\n shrugged mentally. Templin looked as if he was about to break down and\n enjoy himself, but there was still a slight bulge under his tunic,\n where he had strapped his power pack. Any fool should have known that", "A voice spoke in his ear. \"It is hard for us to imagine anybody doing\n what\nmenshar\nPendleton did. It is ...\" and he used a native word that\n Eckert translated as being roughly equivalent to \"\nobscene\n.\"\n\n\n The dancers at the center of the circle finally bowed out with small\n garlands of flowers on their heads that signified their reaching\n adulthood. Acrobats then took the stage and went through a dizzying\n routine, and they in turn were succeeded by a native singer.\n\n\n They were all excellent, Eckert thought. If anything, they were too\n good.\n\n\n The bowl of\npelache\nnuts made its way around again and Nayova leaned\n over to speak to him. \"If there is any possibility that I can help you\n while you are here,\nmenshar\nEckert, you have but to ask.\"", "He couldn't be blamed for being jumpy, Eckert realized. This was his\n first time out, his first mission like this. And, of course, Pendleton\n had been a pretty good friend of his.\n\n\n \"I'd be very careful what I did,\" Eckert said softly. \"I would hate to\n start something merely because I misunderstood their intentions.\"\n\n\n The committee of one was a middle-aged man dressed in a simple strip of\n white cloth twisted about his waist and allowed to hang freely to his\n knees. When he got closer, Eckert became less sure of his age. He had\n the firm, tanned musculature of a much younger man, though a slightly\n seamed face and white hair aged him somewhat. Eckert still had the\n feeling that if you wanted to know his exact age, you'd have to look\n at his teeth or know something about his epiphyseal closures.", "Eckert and Templin took a quick tour of the few rooms. They were well\n furnished, in a rustic sort of way, and what modern conveniences they\n didn't have they could easily do without. The youngsters who had\n carried their luggage left it outside and quietly faded away. It was\n getting dark; Eckert opened one of the boxes they had brought along,\n took out an electric lantern and lighted it. He turned to Jathong.\n\n\n \"You've been very kind to us and we would like to repay you. You may\n take what you wish of anything within this box.\" He opened another of\n the boxes and displayed the usual trade goods—brightly colored cloth\n and finely worked jewelry and a few mechanical contrivances that Eckert\n knew usually appealed to the primitive imagination.", "A faint stirring in the black bulk opposite him. \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"How come our anthropologist on Tunpesh didn't come across with more\n information?\"\n\n\n A drowsy mumble from the other cot: \"He wasn't there long enough. He\n committed suicide not long after landing.\"\n\n\n The room was a whirling pool of blackness into which his mind was\n slowly slipping. Takeoff was only seconds away.\nWhy do people commit suicide?\n\"It's a nice day, isn't it, Ted?\" Eckert took a deep and pleasurable\n breath. \"It's the type of day that makes you feel good just to be\n alive.\"", "A few adults were watching them curiously and the usual bunch of\n kids that always congregated around rocketports quickly gathered.\n Eckert stared at them for a moment, wondering what it was that seemed\n odd about them, and they stared back with all the alert dignity of\n childhood. They finally came out on the field and clustered around him\n and Templin.\n\n\n Templin studied them warily. \"Better watch them, Ted. Even kids can be\n dangerous.\"\nIt's because you never suspect kids\n, Eckert thought,\nyou never think\n they'll do any harm. But they can be taught. They could do as much\n damage with a knife as a man could, for instance. And they might have\n other weapons.\nBut the idea still didn't go with the warm sun and the blue sky and the\n piny scent of the trees.\n\n\n One of the adults of the village started to walk toward them.\n\n\n \"The reception committee,\" Templin said tightly. His hand went inside\n his tunic.", "What manufacturing there was seemed to be carried on in the central\n square of the town, where a few adults and children squatted in the\n warm afternoon sun and worked industriously at potter's wheels and\n weaver's looms. The other part of the square was given over to the\n native bazaar where pots and bolts of cloth were for sale, and where\n numerous stalls were loaded with dried fruits and vegetables and the\n cleaned and plucked carcasses of the local variety of fowl.\n\n\n It was late afternoon when they followed Jathong into a small,\n white-washed house midway up a hill.\n\n\n \"You are free to use this while you are here,\" he said.", "Nayova seemed pleased. \"We tried to do as well for\nmenshar\nPendleton\n as we could. While he was here, he had the house that you have now and\n we saw that he was supplied with food and all other necessities.\"\n\n\n Eckert had a sudden clammy feeling which quickly passed away. What\n Nayova had said was something he'd make sure Templin never heard about.\n He wiped his mouth on a broad, flat leaf that had been provided and\n took another sip of the wine.\n\n\n \"We were shocked to find out that\nmenshar\nPendleton had killed\n himself. We knew him quite well and we could not bring ourselves to\n believe he had done such a thing.\"\n\n\n Nayova's gaze slid away from him. \"Perhaps it was the will of the Great\n One,\" he said vaguely. He didn't seem anxious to talk about it.", "Warm breezes rustled through Eckert's graying hair and tugged gently\n at his tunic. The air smelled as if it had been washed and faintly\n perfumed with the balsamy scent of something very much like pine. A\n few hundred yards away, a forest towered straight and slim and coolly\n inviting, and brilliantly colored birds whirled and fluttered in the\n foliage.\n\n\n The rocketport, where they were standing surrounded by their luggage,\n was a grassy valley where the all too infrequent ships could land and\n discharge cargo or make repairs. There was a blackened patch on it now,\n with little blast-ignited flames dying out around the edges.\nIt won't\n be long before it will be green again\n, he thought. The grass looked\n as though it grew fast—it would certainly have plenty of time to grow\n before the next ship landed." ], [ "\"Does it? I hadn't noticed.\" Eckert turned away from the blinds. His\n voice was crisp. \"I knew Don Pendleton quite well, too,\" he said. \"But\n it isn't blinding me to what I'm here for. We came to find out what\n happened to him, not to substantiate any preconceived notions. What\n we find out may be vitally important to anybody serving here in the\n future. I would hate to see our efforts spoiled because you've already\n made up your mind.\"\n\n\n \"You knew Pendleton,\" Templin repeated grimly. \"Do you think it was\n suicide?\"\n\n\n \"I don't think there's such a thing as a suicide type, when you come\n down to it. I'm not ruling out the possibility of murder, either. I'm\n trying to keep an open mind.\"\n\n\n \"What have we accomplished so far? What have we found out?\"", "Eckert sighed and watched a fat bug waddle across a small patch of\n sunlight on the wooden floor. It was bad enough drawing an assignment\n in a totally foreign culture, even if the natives were humanoid. It\n complicated things beyond all measure when your partner in the project\n seemed likely to turn into a vendettist. It meant that Eckert would\n have to split his energies. He'd have to do what investigating he could\n among the Tunpeshans, and he'd have to watch Templin to see that he\n didn't go off half-cocked and spoil everything.\n\n\n \"You're convinced that Pendleton was murdered, aren't you?\"\n\n\n Templin nodded. \"Sure.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"", "\"The Tunpeshans know why we're here. We've dropped enough hints along\n those lines. But nobody has mentioned Pendleton; nobody has volunteered\n any information about him. And he was an attache here for three\n years. Didn't anybody know him during that time? We've let slip a few\n discreet statements that we would like to talk to Pendleton's friends,\n yet nobody's come around. Apparently, in all the three years he was\n here, Pendleton didn't make any friends. And that's a little hard to\n believe. It's more likely that his friends have been silenced and any\n information about him is being withheld for a reason.\"\n\n\n \"What reason?\"\n\n\n Templin shrugged. \"Murder. What other reason could there be?\"", "Nayova seemed pleased. \"We tried to do as well for\nmenshar\nPendleton\n as we could. While he was here, he had the house that you have now and\n we saw that he was supplied with food and all other necessities.\"\n\n\n Eckert had a sudden clammy feeling which quickly passed away. What\n Nayova had said was something he'd make sure Templin never heard about.\n He wiped his mouth on a broad, flat leaf that had been provided and\n took another sip of the wine.\n\n\n \"We were shocked to find out that\nmenshar\nPendleton had killed\n himself. We knew him quite well and we could not bring ourselves to\n believe he had done such a thing.\"\n\n\n Nayova's gaze slid away from him. \"Perhaps it was the will of the Great\n One,\" he said vaguely. He didn't seem anxious to talk about it.", "Eckert took another sip of the wine and turned to the Tunpeshan on his\n left. He was a tall, muscular man with sharp eyes, a firm chin and a\n certain aura of authority.\n\n\n \"I was wondering if my countryman Pendleton had offended your people in\n any way, Nayova.\" Now was as good a time as any to pump him for what he\n knew about Pendleton's death.\n\n\n \"So far as I know,\nmenshar\nPendleton offended no one. I do not know\n what duties he had to perform here, but he was a generous and courteous\n man.\"\n\n\n Eckert gnawed the dainty meat off a slender\nulami\nbone and tried to\n appear casual in his questioning.\n\n\n \"I am sure he was, Nayova. I am sure, too, that you were as kind to him\n as you have been to Templin and myself. My Government is grateful to\n you for that.\"", "Eckert and he had been chosen to go to Tunpesh and investigate. The two\n of them, working together, should be able to find out why Pendleton had\n killed himself.\nBut that wasn't the real reason. Maybe Eckert thought so, but he knew\n better. The real reason they were going there was to find out why\n Pendleton had been killed and who had killed him. That was it.\nWho had killed Cock Robin?\nThe thin red line was practically microscopic now and Templin could\n feel his lashes lying gently on his cheeks. But he wasn't asleep—not\n quite. There was something buzzing about in the dim recesses of his\n mind.\n\n\n Their information on Tunpesh was limited. They knew that it had no\n trading concessions or armed forces and that nobody from neighboring\n systems seemed to know much about it or even visited it. But a staff\n anthropologist must have been routinely assigned to Tunpesh to furnish\n data and reports.\n\n\n \"Ted?\" he murmured sleepily.", "He turned his head slightly so he could just see Eckert in the bank\n facing him. Eckert, one of the good gray men in the Service. The old\n reliables, the ones who could take almost anything in their stride\n because, at one time or another, they had had to.\nIt was Eckert who had come into his office several days ago and told\n him that Don Pendleton had killed himself.\nOnly Pendleton wasn't the type. He was the kind who have everything\n to live for, the kind you instinctively know will amount to something\n someday. And that was a lousy way to remember him. The clichés always\n come first. Your memory plays traitor and boils friendship down to the\n status of a breakfast food testimonial.\nThe soft red lights seemed to be dancing in the darkness of the cabin.\n Eckert was just a dull, formless blur opposite him. His cigarette was\n out.", "Tunpesh had been Pendleton's second assignment.\nThe natives were oh-so-friendly. So friendly that he had made sure\n that a certain box was on board, filled with shiny atomic rifles,\n needle pistols, and the fat little gas guns. They might be needed.\n People like Pendleton didn't kill themselves, did they? No, they\n didn't. But sometimes they were murdered.\nIt was almost black inside the cabin now; only a thin red line around\n the ceiling told how close they were to takeoff. His head was thick\n with drowsiness, his eyelids a heavy weight that he knew he couldn't\n keep open much longer.", "Eckert had come into his office without saying a word and had watched\n his scenery-window. It had been snowing in the window, the white flakes\n making a simple pattern drifting past the glass. Eckert had fiddled\n with the controls and changed it to sunshine, then to a weird mixture\n of hail amid the brassy, golden sunlight.\n\n\n And then Eckert had told him that Pendleton had taken the short way out.\nHe shouldn't get sentimental. But how the hell else should he remember\n Pendleton? Try to forget it and drink a toast to him at the next class\n reunion? And never, never be so crude as to speculate why Pendleton\n should have done it? If, of course, he had....\nThe cabin was hazy in the reddish glow, the sleeping gas a heavy\n perfume.", "It would probably be a mistake to ask for a list of Pendleton's\n friends, but there was a way around that. \"I would like to meet any\n of your people who had dealings with Pendleton, either in business or\n socially. I will do everything not to inconvenience them in any way.\"\n\n\n \"I think they would be glad to help you. I shall ask them to go to you\n this coming week.\"", "He turned his head a little to watch Templin get ready for bed. There\n were advantages in taking him along that Templin probably didn't\n even realize. He wondered what Templin would do if he ever found out\n that the actual reason he had been chosen to go was that his own\n psychological chart was very close to Pendleton's. Pendleton's own\n feelings and emotions would almost exactly be duplicated in Templin's.\n\n\n A few stray wisps of starlight pierced through the blinds and sparkled\n for an instant on a small metal box strapped to Templin's waist. A\n power pack, Eckert saw grimly, probably leading to the buttons on his\n tunic. A very convenient, portable, and hard to detect weapon.\n\n\n There were disadvantages in taking Templin, too.\n\"Just how primitive do you think the society is, Ted?\"\n\n\n Eckert put down the chain he had been whittling and reached for his\n pipe and tobacco.", "He looked at the slim, dwindling shape that was the rocket, and was\n suddenly, acutely aware that he and Templin would be stranded for six\n months on a foreign and very possibly dangerous planet. And there would\n be no way of calling for help or of leaving before the six months were\n up.", "nothing would happen at a banquet like this. The only actual danger lay\n in Templin's getting excited and doing something he was bound to regret\n later on. And even that danger was not quite as likely now.\nThere will be hell to pay\n, Eckert thought,\nif Templin ever finds out\n that I sabotaged his power pack.\n\"You look thoughtful,\nmenshar\nEckert.\"", "Pendleton had been in his second year as attache on Tunpesh, a small\n planet with a G-type sun. The Service had stumbled across it recently\n and decided the system was worth diplomatic recognition of some kind,\n so Pendleton had been sent there. He had been the first attache to be\n sent and naturally he had gone alone.\n\n\n There was no need to send more. Tunpesh had been inspected and\n certified and approved. The natives were primitive and friendly. Or\n maybe the Service had slipped up, as it sometimes did, and Tunpesh had\n received something less than a thorough survey.\n\n\n And then an unscheduled freighter had put in for repairs, one of\n the very few ships that ever came by Tunpesh. The captain had tried\n to pay his respects to Pendleton. Only Pendleton wasn't there. The\n natives said he had killed himself and showed the captain the little\n flower-covered plot where they had buried him.", "Eckert and he had talked it out and gone over the records. Pendleton\n had come of good stock. There had been no mental instability in his\n family for as far back as the genetic records went. He had been raised\n in a middle-class neighborhood and attended a local grammar school\n where he had achieved average grades and had given his instructors the\n normal amount of trouble. Later, when he had made up his mind to enter\n the Diplomatic Service, his grades had improved. He had worked hard at\n it, though he wasn't what you would call a grind. In high school and\n later in college, he was the well-balanced type, athletic, popular,\n hard-working.\nHow long would it be before memories faded and all there was left", "\"We've got six months,\" Eckert said quietly. \"Six months in which\n we'll try to live here inconspicuously and study the people and try to\n cultivate informants. We would get nowhere if we came barging in asking\n all sorts of questions. And don't forget, Ray, we're all alone on\n Tunpesh. If it is a case of murder, what happens when the natives find\n out that we know it is?\"\n\n\n Templin's eyes dueled for a moment. Then he turned his back and walked\n to the window. \"I suppose you're right,\" he said at last. \"It's nice\n living here, Ted. Maybe I've been fighting it. But I can't help\n thinking that Don must have liked it here, too.\"\nOne of the hardest things to learn in a foreign culture, Eckert\n thought, is when to enjoy yourself, when to work and when to worry.\n\n\n \"\nPelache, menshar?\n\"", "of Pendleton was a page of statistics? He had been on this team, he\n had been elected president of that, he had graduated with such and\n such honors. But try getting a picture of him by reading the records,\n resurrect him from a page of black print. Would he be human? Would\n he be flesh and blood? Hell, no! In the statistics Pendleton was the\n All-Around Boy, the cold marble statue with the finely chiseled muscles\n and the smooth, blank sockets where the eyes should be. Maybe someday\n fate would play a trick on a hero-worshiping public and there would\n actually be kids like that. But they wouldn't be human; they wouldn't\n be born. Parents would get them by sending in so many box tops.\nHe was drowsy; the room was filled with the gas now. It would be only a", "He stood there for a moment, drinking in the fresh air and feeling the\n warmth of the sun against his face. It might be a pleasant six months\n at that, away from the din and the hustle and confusion, spending the\n time in a place where the sun was warm and inviting.\nI must be getting old\n, he thought,\nthinking about the warmth and\n comfort. Like old dogs and octogenarians.\nTemplin was looking at the scenery with a disappointed expression on\n his face. Eckert stole a side glance at him and for a fleeting moment\n felt vaguely concerned. \"Don't be disappointed if it doesn't look like\n cloak-and-dagger right off, Ray. What seems innocent enough on the\n surface can prove to be quite dangerous underneath.\"\n\n\n \"It's rather hard to think of danger in a setting like this.\"", "The words came out slowly. \"The people are too casual, as though\n they're playing a rehearsed part. Here we are, from an entirely\n different solar system, landed in what must be to them an unusual\n manner. They couldn't have seen rockets more than three or four\n times before. It should still be a novelty to them. And yet how much\n curiosity did they show? Hardly any. Was there any fear? No. And the\n cute, harmless little kids.\" He looked at Eckert. \"Maybe that's what\n we're supposed to think—just an idyllic, harmless society. Maybe\n that's what Pendleton thought, right to the very end.\"\n\n\n He was keyed up, jumpy, Eckert realized. He would probably be seeing\n things in every shadow and imagining danger to be lurking around every\n corner.\n\n\n \"It hasn't been established yet that Pendleton was killed, Ray. Let's\n keep an open mind until we know for certain.\"", "He flicked out the light and lay back on the cool bed, letting his\n body relax completely. The cool night wind blew lazily through the\n wood slat blinds, carrying the fragrance of the trees and the grass,\n and he inhaled deeply and let his thoughts wander for a moment. It was\n going to be pleasant to live on Tunpesh for six months—even if the six\n months were all they had to live. The climate was superb and the people\n seemed a cut above the usual primitive culture. If he ever retired some\n day, he thought suddenly, he would have to remember Tunpesh. It would\n be pleasant to spend his old age here. And the fishing was probably\n excellent...." ], [ "Eckert had come into his office without saying a word and had watched\n his scenery-window. It had been snowing in the window, the white flakes\n making a simple pattern drifting past the glass. Eckert had fiddled\n with the controls and changed it to sunshine, then to a weird mixture\n of hail amid the brassy, golden sunlight.\n\n\n And then Eckert had told him that Pendleton had taken the short way out.\nHe shouldn't get sentimental. But how the hell else should he remember\n Pendleton? Try to forget it and drink a toast to him at the next class\n reunion? And never, never be so crude as to speculate why Pendleton\n should have done it? If, of course, he had....\nThe cabin was hazy in the reddish glow, the sleeping gas a heavy\n perfume.", "\"Does it? I hadn't noticed.\" Eckert turned away from the blinds. His\n voice was crisp. \"I knew Don Pendleton quite well, too,\" he said. \"But\n it isn't blinding me to what I'm here for. We came to find out what\n happened to him, not to substantiate any preconceived notions. What\n we find out may be vitally important to anybody serving here in the\n future. I would hate to see our efforts spoiled because you've already\n made up your mind.\"\n\n\n \"You knew Pendleton,\" Templin repeated grimly. \"Do you think it was\n suicide?\"\n\n\n \"I don't think there's such a thing as a suicide type, when you come\n down to it. I'm not ruling out the possibility of murder, either. I'm\n trying to keep an open mind.\"\n\n\n \"What have we accomplished so far? What have we found out?\"", "He turned his head slightly so he could just see Eckert in the bank\n facing him. Eckert, one of the good gray men in the Service. The old\n reliables, the ones who could take almost anything in their stride\n because, at one time or another, they had had to.\nIt was Eckert who had come into his office several days ago and told\n him that Don Pendleton had killed himself.\nOnly Pendleton wasn't the type. He was the kind who have everything\n to live for, the kind you instinctively know will amount to something\n someday. And that was a lousy way to remember him. The clichés always\n come first. Your memory plays traitor and boils friendship down to the\n status of a breakfast food testimonial.\nThe soft red lights seemed to be dancing in the darkness of the cabin.\n Eckert was just a dull, formless blur opposite him. His cigarette was\n out.", "Eckert sighed and watched a fat bug waddle across a small patch of\n sunlight on the wooden floor. It was bad enough drawing an assignment\n in a totally foreign culture, even if the natives were humanoid. It\n complicated things beyond all measure when your partner in the project\n seemed likely to turn into a vendettist. It meant that Eckert would\n have to split his energies. He'd have to do what investigating he could\n among the Tunpeshans, and he'd have to watch Templin to see that he\n didn't go off half-cocked and spoil everything.\n\n\n \"You're convinced that Pendleton was murdered, aren't you?\"\n\n\n Templin nodded. \"Sure.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"", "Eckert and he had talked it out and gone over the records. Pendleton\n had come of good stock. There had been no mental instability in his\n family for as far back as the genetic records went. He had been raised\n in a middle-class neighborhood and attended a local grammar school\n where he had achieved average grades and had given his instructors the\n normal amount of trouble. Later, when he had made up his mind to enter\n the Diplomatic Service, his grades had improved. He had worked hard at\n it, though he wasn't what you would call a grind. In high school and\n later in college, he was the well-balanced type, athletic, popular,\n hard-working.\nHow long would it be before memories faded and all there was left", "Eckert and he had been chosen to go to Tunpesh and investigate. The two\n of them, working together, should be able to find out why Pendleton had\n killed himself.\nBut that wasn't the real reason. Maybe Eckert thought so, but he knew\n better. The real reason they were going there was to find out why\n Pendleton had been killed and who had killed him. That was it.\nWho had killed Cock Robin?\nThe thin red line was practically microscopic now and Templin could\n feel his lashes lying gently on his cheeks. But he wasn't asleep—not\n quite. There was something buzzing about in the dim recesses of his\n mind.\n\n\n Their information on Tunpesh was limited. They knew that it had no\n trading concessions or armed forces and that nobody from neighboring\n systems seemed to know much about it or even visited it. But a staff\n anthropologist must have been routinely assigned to Tunpesh to furnish\n data and reports.\n\n\n \"Ted?\" he murmured sleepily.", "Nayova seemed pleased. \"We tried to do as well for\nmenshar\nPendleton\n as we could. While he was here, he had the house that you have now and\n we saw that he was supplied with food and all other necessities.\"\n\n\n Eckert had a sudden clammy feeling which quickly passed away. What\n Nayova had said was something he'd make sure Templin never heard about.\n He wiped his mouth on a broad, flat leaf that had been provided and\n took another sip of the wine.\n\n\n \"We were shocked to find out that\nmenshar\nPendleton had killed\n himself. We knew him quite well and we could not bring ourselves to\n believe he had done such a thing.\"\n\n\n Nayova's gaze slid away from him. \"Perhaps it was the will of the Great\n One,\" he said vaguely. He didn't seem anxious to talk about it.", "He stood there for a moment, drinking in the fresh air and feeling the\n warmth of the sun against his face. It might be a pleasant six months\n at that, away from the din and the hustle and confusion, spending the\n time in a place where the sun was warm and inviting.\nI must be getting old\n, he thought,\nthinking about the warmth and\n comfort. Like old dogs and octogenarians.\nTemplin was looking at the scenery with a disappointed expression on\n his face. Eckert stole a side glance at him and for a fleeting moment\n felt vaguely concerned. \"Don't be disappointed if it doesn't look like\n cloak-and-dagger right off, Ray. What seems innocent enough on the\n surface can prove to be quite dangerous underneath.\"\n\n\n \"It's rather hard to think of danger in a setting like this.\"", "Eckert took another sip of the wine and turned to the Tunpeshan on his\n left. He was a tall, muscular man with sharp eyes, a firm chin and a\n certain aura of authority.\n\n\n \"I was wondering if my countryman Pendleton had offended your people in\n any way, Nayova.\" Now was as good a time as any to pump him for what he\n knew about Pendleton's death.\n\n\n \"So far as I know,\nmenshar\nPendleton offended no one. I do not know\n what duties he had to perform here, but he was a generous and courteous\n man.\"\n\n\n Eckert gnawed the dainty meat off a slender\nulami\nbone and tried to\n appear casual in his questioning.\n\n\n \"I am sure he was, Nayova. I am sure, too, that you were as kind to him\n as you have been to Templin and myself. My Government is grateful to\n you for that.\"", "He turned his head a little to watch Templin get ready for bed. There\n were advantages in taking him along that Templin probably didn't\n even realize. He wondered what Templin would do if he ever found out\n that the actual reason he had been chosen to go was that his own\n psychological chart was very close to Pendleton's. Pendleton's own\n feelings and emotions would almost exactly be duplicated in Templin's.\n\n\n A few stray wisps of starlight pierced through the blinds and sparkled\n for an instant on a small metal box strapped to Templin's waist. A\n power pack, Eckert saw grimly, probably leading to the buttons on his\n tunic. A very convenient, portable, and hard to detect weapon.\n\n\n There were disadvantages in taking Templin, too.\n\"Just how primitive do you think the society is, Ted?\"\n\n\n Eckert put down the chain he had been whittling and reached for his\n pipe and tobacco.", "perhaps.\nHe could smell the bitter fragrance of tobacco smoke mingling with\n the gas. Eckert had lit a cigarette and was calmly blowing the smoke\n at the neon \"No Smoking\" sign, which winked on and off in mechanical\n disapproval.", "\"No, I'm afraid it's not.\" Eckert started unpacking some of the boxes.\n \"You know, Ray, I got a kick out of the kids. They're a healthy-looking\n lot, aren't they?\"\n\n\n \"Too healthy,\" Templin said. \"There didn't seem to be any sick ones or\n ones with runny noses or cuts or black eyes or bruises. It doesn't seem\n natural.\"\n\n\n \"They're probably just well brought-up kids,\" Eckert said sharply.\n \"Maybe they've been taught not to get in fights or play around in the\n mud on the way home from school.\" He felt faintly irritated, annoyed at\n the way Templin had put it, as if any deviation from an Earth norm was\n potentially dangerous.\n\n\n \"Ted.\" Templin's voice was strained. \"This could be a trap, you know.\"\n\n\n \"In what way?\"", "\"The Tunpeshans know why we're here. We've dropped enough hints along\n those lines. But nobody has mentioned Pendleton; nobody has volunteered\n any information about him. And he was an attache here for three\n years. Didn't anybody know him during that time? We've let slip a few\n discreet statements that we would like to talk to Pendleton's friends,\n yet nobody's come around. Apparently, in all the three years he was\n here, Pendleton didn't make any friends. And that's a little hard to\n believe. It's more likely that his friends have been silenced and any\n information about him is being withheld for a reason.\"\n\n\n \"What reason?\"\n\n\n Templin shrugged. \"Murder. What other reason could there be?\"", "Eckert and Templin took a quick tour of the few rooms. They were well\n furnished, in a rustic sort of way, and what modern conveniences they\n didn't have they could easily do without. The youngsters who had\n carried their luggage left it outside and quietly faded away. It was\n getting dark; Eckert opened one of the boxes they had brought along,\n took out an electric lantern and lighted it. He turned to Jathong.\n\n\n \"You've been very kind to us and we would like to repay you. You may\n take what you wish of anything within this box.\" He opened another of\n the boxes and displayed the usual trade goods—brightly colored cloth\n and finely worked jewelry and a few mechanical contrivances that Eckert\n knew usually appealed to the primitive imagination.", "nothing would happen at a banquet like this. The only actual danger lay\n in Templin's getting excited and doing something he was bound to regret\n later on. And even that danger was not quite as likely now.\nThere will be hell to pay\n, Eckert thought,\nif Templin ever finds out\n that I sabotaged his power pack.\n\"You look thoughtful,\nmenshar\nEckert.\"", "The words came out slowly. \"The people are too casual, as though\n they're playing a rehearsed part. Here we are, from an entirely\n different solar system, landed in what must be to them an unusual\n manner. They couldn't have seen rockets more than three or four\n times before. It should still be a novelty to them. And yet how much\n curiosity did they show? Hardly any. Was there any fear? No. And the\n cute, harmless little kids.\" He looked at Eckert. \"Maybe that's what\n we're supposed to think—just an idyllic, harmless society. Maybe\n that's what Pendleton thought, right to the very end.\"\n\n\n He was keyed up, jumpy, Eckert realized. He would probably be seeing\n things in every shadow and imagining danger to be lurking around every\n corner.\n\n\n \"It hasn't been established yet that Pendleton was killed, Ray. Let's\n keep an open mind until we know for certain.\"", "Eckert rolled up the thin, slatted blinds and stared out at the\n scenery. A hundred feet down the road, a native woman was going to\n market, leading a species of food animal by the halter.\n\n\n \"They grow their women nice, don't they?\"\n\n\n \"Physically perfect, like the men,\" Templin grumbled. \"You could get an\n inferiority complex just from watching the people here. Everybody's so\n damn perfect. Nobody's sick, nobody's unhealthy, nobody is too fat or\n too thin, nobody's unhappy. The only variation is that they don't all\n look alike. Perfection. It gets boring after a while.\"", "Tunpesh had been Pendleton's second assignment.\nThe natives were oh-so-friendly. So friendly that he had made sure\n that a certain box was on board, filled with shiny atomic rifles,\n needle pistols, and the fat little gas guns. They might be needed.\n People like Pendleton didn't kill themselves, did they? No, they\n didn't. But sometimes they were murdered.\nIt was almost black inside the cabin now; only a thin red line around\n the ceiling told how close they were to takeoff. His head was thick\n with drowsiness, his eyelids a heavy weight that he knew he couldn't\n keep open much longer.", "A few adults were watching them curiously and the usual bunch of\n kids that always congregated around rocketports quickly gathered.\n Eckert stared at them for a moment, wondering what it was that seemed\n odd about them, and they stared back with all the alert dignity of\n childhood. They finally came out on the field and clustered around him\n and Templin.\n\n\n Templin studied them warily. \"Better watch them, Ted. Even kids can be\n dangerous.\"\nIt's because you never suspect kids\n, Eckert thought,\nyou never think\n they'll do any harm. But they can be taught. They could do as much\n damage with a knife as a man could, for instance. And they might have\n other weapons.\nBut the idea still didn't go with the warm sun and the blue sky and the\n piny scent of the trees.\n\n\n One of the adults of the village started to walk toward them.\n\n\n \"The reception committee,\" Templin said tightly. His hand went inside\n his tunic.", "\"We've got six months,\" Eckert said quietly. \"Six months in which\n we'll try to live here inconspicuously and study the people and try to\n cultivate informants. We would get nowhere if we came barging in asking\n all sorts of questions. And don't forget, Ray, we're all alone on\n Tunpesh. If it is a case of murder, what happens when the natives find\n out that we know it is?\"\n\n\n Templin's eyes dueled for a moment. Then he turned his back and walked\n to the window. \"I suppose you're right,\" he said at last. \"It's nice\n living here, Ted. Maybe I've been fighting it. But I can't help\n thinking that Don must have liked it here, too.\"\nOne of the hardest things to learn in a foreign culture, Eckert\n thought, is when to enjoy yourself, when to work and when to worry.\n\n\n \"\nPelache, menshar?\n\"" ], [ "Eckert and he had been chosen to go to Tunpesh and investigate. The two\n of them, working together, should be able to find out why Pendleton had\n killed himself.\nBut that wasn't the real reason. Maybe Eckert thought so, but he knew\n better. The real reason they were going there was to find out why\n Pendleton had been killed and who had killed him. That was it.\nWho had killed Cock Robin?\nThe thin red line was practically microscopic now and Templin could\n feel his lashes lying gently on his cheeks. But he wasn't asleep—not\n quite. There was something buzzing about in the dim recesses of his\n mind.\n\n\n Their information on Tunpesh was limited. They knew that it had no\n trading concessions or armed forces and that nobody from neighboring\n systems seemed to know much about it or even visited it. But a staff\n anthropologist must have been routinely assigned to Tunpesh to furnish\n data and reports.\n\n\n \"Ted?\" he murmured sleepily.", "Eckert sighed and watched a fat bug waddle across a small patch of\n sunlight on the wooden floor. It was bad enough drawing an assignment\n in a totally foreign culture, even if the natives were humanoid. It\n complicated things beyond all measure when your partner in the project\n seemed likely to turn into a vendettist. It meant that Eckert would\n have to split his energies. He'd have to do what investigating he could\n among the Tunpeshans, and he'd have to watch Templin to see that he\n didn't go off half-cocked and spoil everything.\n\n\n \"You're convinced that Pendleton was murdered, aren't you?\"\n\n\n Templin nodded. \"Sure.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"", "\"We've got six months,\" Eckert said quietly. \"Six months in which\n we'll try to live here inconspicuously and study the people and try to\n cultivate informants. We would get nowhere if we came barging in asking\n all sorts of questions. And don't forget, Ray, we're all alone on\n Tunpesh. If it is a case of murder, what happens when the natives find\n out that we know it is?\"\n\n\n Templin's eyes dueled for a moment. Then he turned his back and walked\n to the window. \"I suppose you're right,\" he said at last. \"It's nice\n living here, Ted. Maybe I've been fighting it. But I can't help\n thinking that Don must have liked it here, too.\"\nOne of the hardest things to learn in a foreign culture, Eckert\n thought, is when to enjoy yourself, when to work and when to worry.\n\n\n \"\nPelache, menshar?\n\"", "Eckert and Templin took a quick tour of the few rooms. They were well\n furnished, in a rustic sort of way, and what modern conveniences they\n didn't have they could easily do without. The youngsters who had\n carried their luggage left it outside and quietly faded away. It was\n getting dark; Eckert opened one of the boxes they had brought along,\n took out an electric lantern and lighted it. He turned to Jathong.\n\n\n \"You've been very kind to us and we would like to repay you. You may\n take what you wish of anything within this box.\" He opened another of\n the boxes and displayed the usual trade goods—brightly colored cloth\n and finely worked jewelry and a few mechanical contrivances that Eckert\n knew usually appealed to the primitive imagination.", "Eckert took another sip of the wine and turned to the Tunpeshan on his\n left. He was a tall, muscular man with sharp eyes, a firm chin and a\n certain aura of authority.\n\n\n \"I was wondering if my countryman Pendleton had offended your people in\n any way, Nayova.\" Now was as good a time as any to pump him for what he\n knew about Pendleton's death.\n\n\n \"So far as I know,\nmenshar\nPendleton offended no one. I do not know\n what duties he had to perform here, but he was a generous and courteous\n man.\"\n\n\n Eckert gnawed the dainty meat off a slender\nulami\nbone and tried to\n appear casual in his questioning.\n\n\n \"I am sure he was, Nayova. I am sure, too, that you were as kind to him\n as you have been to Templin and myself. My Government is grateful to\n you for that.\"", "He flicked out the light and lay back on the cool bed, letting his\n body relax completely. The cool night wind blew lazily through the\n wood slat blinds, carrying the fragrance of the trees and the grass,\n and he inhaled deeply and let his thoughts wander for a moment. It was\n going to be pleasant to live on Tunpesh for six months—even if the six\n months were all they had to live. The climate was superb and the people\n seemed a cut above the usual primitive culture. If he ever retired some\n day, he thought suddenly, he would have to remember Tunpesh. It would\n be pleasant to spend his old age here. And the fishing was probably\n excellent....", "He looked at the slim, dwindling shape that was the rocket, and was\n suddenly, acutely aware that he and Templin would be stranded for six\n months on a foreign and very possibly dangerous planet. And there would\n be no way of calling for help or of leaving before the six months were\n up.", "Tunpesh had been Pendleton's second assignment.\nThe natives were oh-so-friendly. So friendly that he had made sure\n that a certain box was on board, filled with shiny atomic rifles,\n needle pistols, and the fat little gas guns. They might be needed.\n People like Pendleton didn't kill themselves, did they? No, they\n didn't. But sometimes they were murdered.\nIt was almost black inside the cabin now; only a thin red line around\n the ceiling told how close they were to takeoff. His head was thick\n with drowsiness, his eyelids a heavy weight that he knew he couldn't\n keep open much longer.", "\"No, I'm afraid it's not.\" Eckert started unpacking some of the boxes.\n \"You know, Ray, I got a kick out of the kids. They're a healthy-looking\n lot, aren't they?\"\n\n\n \"Too healthy,\" Templin said. \"There didn't seem to be any sick ones or\n ones with runny noses or cuts or black eyes or bruises. It doesn't seem\n natural.\"\n\n\n \"They're probably just well brought-up kids,\" Eckert said sharply.\n \"Maybe they've been taught not to get in fights or play around in the\n mud on the way home from school.\" He felt faintly irritated, annoyed at\n the way Templin had put it, as if any deviation from an Earth norm was\n potentially dangerous.\n\n\n \"Ted.\" Templin's voice was strained. \"This could be a trap, you know.\"\n\n\n \"In what way?\"", "He was polite, Eckert thought. He didn't ask what they were there\n for or how long they were going to stay. But then again, perhaps the\n natives were a better judge of that than he and Templin.\n\n\n The town was larger than he had thought at first, stretching over a\n wide expanse of the countryside. There wasn't, so far as he could see,\n much manufacturing above the level of handicrafts and simple weaving.\n Colored patches on far hillsides indicated the presence of farms, and\n practically every house in the village had its small garden.", "A native fife trilled shrilly and a group of young men and women walked\n into the room. The circle broke to let them through and they came and\n knelt before Nayova. When he clapped his hands sharply, they retreated\n to the center of the circle and began the slow motions of a native\n dance.\nThe sound of the fife softened and died and the slow monotonous beat of\n drums took its place. The beat slowly increased and so did the rhythm\n of the dancers. The small fires at the corners of the hut were allowed\n to dwindle and the center of the circle became filled with the motions\n of shadows intermixed with the swift, sure movements of glistening\n limbs. Eckert felt his eyebrows crawl upward. Apparently the dance was\n the Tunpeshan version of the\nrites de passage\n. He glanced across\n the circle at Templin. Templin's face—what he could see of it by the\n flickering light—was brick red.", "He turned his head a little to watch Templin get ready for bed. There\n were advantages in taking him along that Templin probably didn't\n even realize. He wondered what Templin would do if he ever found out\n that the actual reason he had been chosen to go was that his own\n psychological chart was very close to Pendleton's. Pendleton's own\n feelings and emotions would almost exactly be duplicated in Templin's.\n\n\n A few stray wisps of starlight pierced through the blinds and sparkled\n for an instant on a small metal box strapped to Templin's waist. A\n power pack, Eckert saw grimly, probably leading to the buttons on his\n tunic. A very convenient, portable, and hard to detect weapon.\n\n\n There were disadvantages in taking Templin, too.\n\"Just how primitive do you think the society is, Ted?\"\n\n\n Eckert put down the chain he had been whittling and reached for his\n pipe and tobacco.", "\"Does it? I hadn't noticed.\" Eckert turned away from the blinds. His\n voice was crisp. \"I knew Don Pendleton quite well, too,\" he said. \"But\n it isn't blinding me to what I'm here for. We came to find out what\n happened to him, not to substantiate any preconceived notions. What\n we find out may be vitally important to anybody serving here in the\n future. I would hate to see our efforts spoiled because you've already\n made up your mind.\"\n\n\n \"You knew Pendleton,\" Templin repeated grimly. \"Do you think it was\n suicide?\"\n\n\n \"I don't think there's such a thing as a suicide type, when you come\n down to it. I'm not ruling out the possibility of murder, either. I'm\n trying to keep an open mind.\"\n\n\n \"What have we accomplished so far? What have we found out?\"", "He stood there for a moment, drinking in the fresh air and feeling the\n warmth of the sun against his face. It might be a pleasant six months\n at that, away from the din and the hustle and confusion, spending the\n time in a place where the sun was warm and inviting.\nI must be getting old\n, he thought,\nthinking about the warmth and\n comfort. Like old dogs and octogenarians.\nTemplin was looking at the scenery with a disappointed expression on\n his face. Eckert stole a side glance at him and for a fleeting moment\n felt vaguely concerned. \"Don't be disappointed if it doesn't look like\n cloak-and-dagger right off, Ray. What seems innocent enough on the\n surface can prove to be quite dangerous underneath.\"\n\n\n \"It's rather hard to think of danger in a setting like this.\"", "nothing would happen at a banquet like this. The only actual danger lay\n in Templin's getting excited and doing something he was bound to regret\n later on. And even that danger was not quite as likely now.\nThere will be hell to pay\n, Eckert thought,\nif Templin ever finds out\n that I sabotaged his power pack.\n\"You look thoughtful,\nmenshar\nEckert.\"", "\"The Tunpeshans know why we're here. We've dropped enough hints along\n those lines. But nobody has mentioned Pendleton; nobody has volunteered\n any information about him. And he was an attache here for three\n years. Didn't anybody know him during that time? We've let slip a few\n discreet statements that we would like to talk to Pendleton's friends,\n yet nobody's come around. Apparently, in all the three years he was\n here, Pendleton didn't make any friends. And that's a little hard to\n believe. It's more likely that his friends have been silenced and any\n information about him is being withheld for a reason.\"\n\n\n \"What reason?\"\n\n\n Templin shrugged. \"Murder. What other reason could there be?\"", "A few adults were watching them curiously and the usual bunch of\n kids that always congregated around rocketports quickly gathered.\n Eckert stared at them for a moment, wondering what it was that seemed\n odd about them, and they stared back with all the alert dignity of\n childhood. They finally came out on the field and clustered around him\n and Templin.\n\n\n Templin studied them warily. \"Better watch them, Ted. Even kids can be\n dangerous.\"\nIt's because you never suspect kids\n, Eckert thought,\nyou never think\n they'll do any harm. But they can be taught. They could do as much\n damage with a knife as a man could, for instance. And they might have\n other weapons.\nBut the idea still didn't go with the warm sun and the blue sky and the\n piny scent of the trees.\n\n\n One of the adults of the village started to walk toward them.\n\n\n \"The reception committee,\" Templin said tightly. His hand went inside\n his tunic.", "\"Did you ever wonder what kind of weapons they might have?\"\n\n\n \"The important thing,\" Eckert mused, \"is not if they have them, but if\n they'd use them. And I rather doubt that they would. We've been here\n for two weeks now and they've been very kind to us, seeing that we've\n had food and water and what fuel we need.\"\n\n\n \"It's known in the livestock trade as being fattened up for the\n slaughter,\" Templeton said.", "Nayova seemed pleased. \"We tried to do as well for\nmenshar\nPendleton\n as we could. While he was here, he had the house that you have now and\n we saw that he was supplied with food and all other necessities.\"\n\n\n Eckert had a sudden clammy feeling which quickly passed away. What\n Nayova had said was something he'd make sure Templin never heard about.\n He wiped his mouth on a broad, flat leaf that had been provided and\n took another sip of the wine.\n\n\n \"We were shocked to find out that\nmenshar\nPendleton had killed\n himself. We knew him quite well and we could not bring ourselves to\n believe he had done such a thing.\"\n\n\n Nayova's gaze slid away from him. \"Perhaps it was the will of the Great\n One,\" he said vaguely. He didn't seem anxious to talk about it.", "Warm breezes rustled through Eckert's graying hair and tugged gently\n at his tunic. The air smelled as if it had been washed and faintly\n perfumed with the balsamy scent of something very much like pine. A\n few hundred yards away, a forest towered straight and slim and coolly\n inviting, and brilliantly colored birds whirled and fluttered in the\n foliage.\n\n\n The rocketport, where they were standing surrounded by their luggage,\n was a grassy valley where the all too infrequent ships could land and\n discharge cargo or make repairs. There was a blackened patch on it now,\n with little blast-ignited flames dying out around the edges.\nIt won't\n be long before it will be green again\n, he thought. The grass looked\n as though it grew fast—it would certainly have plenty of time to grow\n before the next ship landed." ], [ "A few adults were watching them curiously and the usual bunch of\n kids that always congregated around rocketports quickly gathered.\n Eckert stared at them for a moment, wondering what it was that seemed\n odd about them, and they stared back with all the alert dignity of\n childhood. They finally came out on the field and clustered around him\n and Templin.\n\n\n Templin studied them warily. \"Better watch them, Ted. Even kids can be\n dangerous.\"\nIt's because you never suspect kids\n, Eckert thought,\nyou never think\n they'll do any harm. But they can be taught. They could do as much\n damage with a knife as a man could, for instance. And they might have\n other weapons.\nBut the idea still didn't go with the warm sun and the blue sky and the\n piny scent of the trees.\n\n\n One of the adults of the village started to walk toward them.\n\n\n \"The reception committee,\" Templin said tightly. His hand went inside\n his tunic.", "\"No, I'm afraid it's not.\" Eckert started unpacking some of the boxes.\n \"You know, Ray, I got a kick out of the kids. They're a healthy-looking\n lot, aren't they?\"\n\n\n \"Too healthy,\" Templin said. \"There didn't seem to be any sick ones or\n ones with runny noses or cuts or black eyes or bruises. It doesn't seem\n natural.\"\n\n\n \"They're probably just well brought-up kids,\" Eckert said sharply.\n \"Maybe they've been taught not to get in fights or play around in the\n mud on the way home from school.\" He felt faintly irritated, annoyed at\n the way Templin had put it, as if any deviation from an Earth norm was\n potentially dangerous.\n\n\n \"Ted.\" Templin's voice was strained. \"This could be a trap, you know.\"\n\n\n \"In what way?\"", "Eckert sighed and watched a fat bug waddle across a small patch of\n sunlight on the wooden floor. It was bad enough drawing an assignment\n in a totally foreign culture, even if the natives were humanoid. It\n complicated things beyond all measure when your partner in the project\n seemed likely to turn into a vendettist. It meant that Eckert would\n have to split his energies. He'd have to do what investigating he could\n among the Tunpeshans, and he'd have to watch Templin to see that he\n didn't go off half-cocked and spoil everything.\n\n\n \"You're convinced that Pendleton was murdered, aren't you?\"\n\n\n Templin nodded. \"Sure.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"", "Tunpesh had been Pendleton's second assignment.\nThe natives were oh-so-friendly. So friendly that he had made sure\n that a certain box was on board, filled with shiny atomic rifles,\n needle pistols, and the fat little gas guns. They might be needed.\n People like Pendleton didn't kill themselves, did they? No, they\n didn't. But sometimes they were murdered.\nIt was almost black inside the cabin now; only a thin red line around\n the ceiling told how close they were to takeoff. His head was thick\n with drowsiness, his eyelids a heavy weight that he knew he couldn't\n keep open much longer.", "A native fife trilled shrilly and a group of young men and women walked\n into the room. The circle broke to let them through and they came and\n knelt before Nayova. When he clapped his hands sharply, they retreated\n to the center of the circle and began the slow motions of a native\n dance.\nThe sound of the fife softened and died and the slow monotonous beat of\n drums took its place. The beat slowly increased and so did the rhythm\n of the dancers. The small fires at the corners of the hut were allowed\n to dwindle and the center of the circle became filled with the motions\n of shadows intermixed with the swift, sure movements of glistening\n limbs. Eckert felt his eyebrows crawl upward. Apparently the dance was\n the Tunpeshan version of the\nrites de passage\n. He glanced across\n the circle at Templin. Templin's face—what he could see of it by the\n flickering light—was brick red.", "\"The Tunpeshans know why we're here. We've dropped enough hints along\n those lines. But nobody has mentioned Pendleton; nobody has volunteered\n any information about him. And he was an attache here for three\n years. Didn't anybody know him during that time? We've let slip a few\n discreet statements that we would like to talk to Pendleton's friends,\n yet nobody's come around. Apparently, in all the three years he was\n here, Pendleton didn't make any friends. And that's a little hard to\n believe. It's more likely that his friends have been silenced and any\n information about him is being withheld for a reason.\"\n\n\n \"What reason?\"\n\n\n Templin shrugged. \"Murder. What other reason could there be?\"", "\"We've got six months,\" Eckert said quietly. \"Six months in which\n we'll try to live here inconspicuously and study the people and try to\n cultivate informants. We would get nowhere if we came barging in asking\n all sorts of questions. And don't forget, Ray, we're all alone on\n Tunpesh. If it is a case of murder, what happens when the natives find\n out that we know it is?\"\n\n\n Templin's eyes dueled for a moment. Then he turned his back and walked\n to the window. \"I suppose you're right,\" he said at last. \"It's nice\n living here, Ted. Maybe I've been fighting it. But I can't help\n thinking that Don must have liked it here, too.\"\nOne of the hardest things to learn in a foreign culture, Eckert\n thought, is when to enjoy yourself, when to work and when to worry.\n\n\n \"\nPelache, menshar?\n\"", "Eckert and he had been chosen to go to Tunpesh and investigate. The two\n of them, working together, should be able to find out why Pendleton had\n killed himself.\nBut that wasn't the real reason. Maybe Eckert thought so, but he knew\n better. The real reason they were going there was to find out why\n Pendleton had been killed and who had killed him. That was it.\nWho had killed Cock Robin?\nThe thin red line was practically microscopic now and Templin could\n feel his lashes lying gently on his cheeks. But he wasn't asleep—not\n quite. There was something buzzing about in the dim recesses of his\n mind.\n\n\n Their information on Tunpesh was limited. They knew that it had no\n trading concessions or armed forces and that nobody from neighboring\n systems seemed to know much about it or even visited it. But a staff\n anthropologist must have been routinely assigned to Tunpesh to furnish\n data and reports.\n\n\n \"Ted?\" he murmured sleepily.", "He looked at the slim, dwindling shape that was the rocket, and was\n suddenly, acutely aware that he and Templin would be stranded for six\n months on a foreign and very possibly dangerous planet. And there would\n be no way of calling for help or of leaving before the six months were\n up.", "Eckert took another sip of the wine and turned to the Tunpeshan on his\n left. He was a tall, muscular man with sharp eyes, a firm chin and a\n certain aura of authority.\n\n\n \"I was wondering if my countryman Pendleton had offended your people in\n any way, Nayova.\" Now was as good a time as any to pump him for what he\n knew about Pendleton's death.\n\n\n \"So far as I know,\nmenshar\nPendleton offended no one. I do not know\n what duties he had to perform here, but he was a generous and courteous\n man.\"\n\n\n Eckert gnawed the dainty meat off a slender\nulami\nbone and tried to\n appear casual in his questioning.\n\n\n \"I am sure he was, Nayova. I am sure, too, that you were as kind to him\n as you have been to Templin and myself. My Government is grateful to\n you for that.\"", "Eckert and Templin took a quick tour of the few rooms. They were well\n furnished, in a rustic sort of way, and what modern conveniences they\n didn't have they could easily do without. The youngsters who had\n carried their luggage left it outside and quietly faded away. It was\n getting dark; Eckert opened one of the boxes they had brought along,\n took out an electric lantern and lighted it. He turned to Jathong.\n\n\n \"You've been very kind to us and we would like to repay you. You may\n take what you wish of anything within this box.\" He opened another of\n the boxes and displayed the usual trade goods—brightly colored cloth\n and finely worked jewelry and a few mechanical contrivances that Eckert\n knew usually appealed to the primitive imagination.", "He turned his head a little to watch Templin get ready for bed. There\n were advantages in taking him along that Templin probably didn't\n even realize. He wondered what Templin would do if he ever found out\n that the actual reason he had been chosen to go was that his own\n psychological chart was very close to Pendleton's. Pendleton's own\n feelings and emotions would almost exactly be duplicated in Templin's.\n\n\n A few stray wisps of starlight pierced through the blinds and sparkled\n for an instant on a small metal box strapped to Templin's waist. A\n power pack, Eckert saw grimly, probably leading to the buttons on his\n tunic. A very convenient, portable, and hard to detect weapon.\n\n\n There were disadvantages in taking Templin, too.\n\"Just how primitive do you think the society is, Ted?\"\n\n\n Eckert put down the chain he had been whittling and reached for his\n pipe and tobacco.", "He flicked out the light and lay back on the cool bed, letting his\n body relax completely. The cool night wind blew lazily through the\n wood slat blinds, carrying the fragrance of the trees and the grass,\n and he inhaled deeply and let his thoughts wander for a moment. It was\n going to be pleasant to live on Tunpesh for six months—even if the six\n months were all they had to live. The climate was superb and the people\n seemed a cut above the usual primitive culture. If he ever retired some\n day, he thought suddenly, he would have to remember Tunpesh. It would\n be pleasant to spend his old age here. And the fishing was probably\n excellent....", "He stood there for a moment, drinking in the fresh air and feeling the\n warmth of the sun against his face. It might be a pleasant six months\n at that, away from the din and the hustle and confusion, spending the\n time in a place where the sun was warm and inviting.\nI must be getting old\n, he thought,\nthinking about the warmth and\n comfort. Like old dogs and octogenarians.\nTemplin was looking at the scenery with a disappointed expression on\n his face. Eckert stole a side glance at him and for a fleeting moment\n felt vaguely concerned. \"Don't be disappointed if it doesn't look like\n cloak-and-dagger right off, Ray. What seems innocent enough on the\n surface can prove to be quite dangerous underneath.\"\n\n\n \"It's rather hard to think of danger in a setting like this.\"", "He was polite, Eckert thought. He didn't ask what they were there\n for or how long they were going to stay. But then again, perhaps the\n natives were a better judge of that than he and Templin.\n\n\n The town was larger than he had thought at first, stretching over a\n wide expanse of the countryside. There wasn't, so far as he could see,\n much manufacturing above the level of handicrafts and simple weaving.\n Colored patches on far hillsides indicated the presence of farms, and\n practically every house in the village had its small garden.", "The words came out slowly. \"The people are too casual, as though\n they're playing a rehearsed part. Here we are, from an entirely\n different solar system, landed in what must be to them an unusual\n manner. They couldn't have seen rockets more than three or four\n times before. It should still be a novelty to them. And yet how much\n curiosity did they show? Hardly any. Was there any fear? No. And the\n cute, harmless little kids.\" He looked at Eckert. \"Maybe that's what\n we're supposed to think—just an idyllic, harmless society. Maybe\n that's what Pendleton thought, right to the very end.\"\n\n\n He was keyed up, jumpy, Eckert realized. He would probably be seeing\n things in every shadow and imagining danger to be lurking around every\n corner.\n\n\n \"It hasn't been established yet that Pendleton was killed, Ray. Let's\n keep an open mind until we know for certain.\"", "Nayova seemed pleased. \"We tried to do as well for\nmenshar\nPendleton\n as we could. While he was here, he had the house that you have now and\n we saw that he was supplied with food and all other necessities.\"\n\n\n Eckert had a sudden clammy feeling which quickly passed away. What\n Nayova had said was something he'd make sure Templin never heard about.\n He wiped his mouth on a broad, flat leaf that had been provided and\n took another sip of the wine.\n\n\n \"We were shocked to find out that\nmenshar\nPendleton had killed\n himself. We knew him quite well and we could not bring ourselves to\n believe he had done such a thing.\"\n\n\n Nayova's gaze slid away from him. \"Perhaps it was the will of the Great\n One,\" he said vaguely. He didn't seem anxious to talk about it.", "Eckert rolled up the thin, slatted blinds and stared out at the\n scenery. A hundred feet down the road, a native woman was going to\n market, leading a species of food animal by the halter.\n\n\n \"They grow their women nice, don't they?\"\n\n\n \"Physically perfect, like the men,\" Templin grumbled. \"You could get an\n inferiority complex just from watching the people here. Everybody's so\n damn perfect. Nobody's sick, nobody's unhealthy, nobody is too fat or\n too thin, nobody's unhappy. The only variation is that they don't all\n look alike. Perfection. It gets boring after a while.\"", "\"Did you ever wonder what kind of weapons they might have?\"\n\n\n \"The important thing,\" Eckert mused, \"is not if they have them, but if\n they'd use them. And I rather doubt that they would. We've been here\n for two weeks now and they've been very kind to us, seeing that we've\n had food and water and what fuel we need.\"\n\n\n \"It's known in the livestock trade as being fattened up for the\n slaughter,\" Templeton said.", "nothing would happen at a banquet like this. The only actual danger lay\n in Templin's getting excited and doing something he was bound to regret\n later on. And even that danger was not quite as likely now.\nThere will be hell to pay\n, Eckert thought,\nif Templin ever finds out\n that I sabotaged his power pack.\n\"You look thoughtful,\nmenshar\nEckert.\"" ], [ "He couldn't be blamed for being jumpy, Eckert realized. This was his\n first time out, his first mission like this. And, of course, Pendleton\n had been a pretty good friend of his.\n\n\n \"I'd be very careful what I did,\" Eckert said softly. \"I would hate to\n start something merely because I misunderstood their intentions.\"\n\n\n The committee of one was a middle-aged man dressed in a simple strip of\n white cloth twisted about his waist and allowed to hang freely to his\n knees. When he got closer, Eckert became less sure of his age. He had\n the firm, tanned musculature of a much younger man, though a slightly\n seamed face and white hair aged him somewhat. Eckert still had the\n feeling that if you wanted to know his exact age, you'd have to look\n at his teeth or know something about his epiphyseal closures.", "He turned his head slightly so he could just see Eckert in the bank\n facing him. Eckert, one of the good gray men in the Service. The old\n reliables, the ones who could take almost anything in their stride\n because, at one time or another, they had had to.\nIt was Eckert who had come into his office several days ago and told\n him that Don Pendleton had killed himself.\nOnly Pendleton wasn't the type. He was the kind who have everything\n to live for, the kind you instinctively know will amount to something\n someday. And that was a lousy way to remember him. The clichés always\n come first. Your memory plays traitor and boils friendship down to the\n status of a breakfast food testimonial.\nThe soft red lights seemed to be dancing in the darkness of the cabin.\n Eckert was just a dull, formless blur opposite him. His cigarette was\n out.", "perhaps.\nHe could smell the bitter fragrance of tobacco smoke mingling with\n the gas. Eckert had lit a cigarette and was calmly blowing the smoke\n at the neon \"No Smoking\" sign, which winked on and off in mechanical\n disapproval.", "A few adults were watching them curiously and the usual bunch of\n kids that always congregated around rocketports quickly gathered.\n Eckert stared at them for a moment, wondering what it was that seemed\n odd about them, and they stared back with all the alert dignity of\n childhood. They finally came out on the field and clustered around him\n and Templin.\n\n\n Templin studied them warily. \"Better watch them, Ted. Even kids can be\n dangerous.\"\nIt's because you never suspect kids\n, Eckert thought,\nyou never think\n they'll do any harm. But they can be taught. They could do as much\n damage with a knife as a man could, for instance. And they might have\n other weapons.\nBut the idea still didn't go with the warm sun and the blue sky and the\n piny scent of the trees.\n\n\n One of the adults of the village started to walk toward them.\n\n\n \"The reception committee,\" Templin said tightly. His hand went inside\n his tunic.", "\"Does it? I hadn't noticed.\" Eckert turned away from the blinds. His\n voice was crisp. \"I knew Don Pendleton quite well, too,\" he said. \"But\n it isn't blinding me to what I'm here for. We came to find out what\n happened to him, not to substantiate any preconceived notions. What\n we find out may be vitally important to anybody serving here in the\n future. I would hate to see our efforts spoiled because you've already\n made up your mind.\"\n\n\n \"You knew Pendleton,\" Templin repeated grimly. \"Do you think it was\n suicide?\"\n\n\n \"I don't think there's such a thing as a suicide type, when you come\n down to it. I'm not ruling out the possibility of murder, either. I'm\n trying to keep an open mind.\"\n\n\n \"What have we accomplished so far? What have we found out?\"", "Eckert and he had talked it out and gone over the records. Pendleton\n had come of good stock. There had been no mental instability in his\n family for as far back as the genetic records went. He had been raised\n in a middle-class neighborhood and attended a local grammar school\n where he had achieved average grades and had given his instructors the\n normal amount of trouble. Later, when he had made up his mind to enter\n the Diplomatic Service, his grades had improved. He had worked hard at\n it, though he wasn't what you would call a grind. In high school and\n later in college, he was the well-balanced type, athletic, popular,\n hard-working.\nHow long would it be before memories faded and all there was left", "He turned his head a little to watch Templin get ready for bed. There\n were advantages in taking him along that Templin probably didn't\n even realize. He wondered what Templin would do if he ever found out\n that the actual reason he had been chosen to go was that his own\n psychological chart was very close to Pendleton's. Pendleton's own\n feelings and emotions would almost exactly be duplicated in Templin's.\n\n\n A few stray wisps of starlight pierced through the blinds and sparkled\n for an instant on a small metal box strapped to Templin's waist. A\n power pack, Eckert saw grimly, probably leading to the buttons on his\n tunic. A very convenient, portable, and hard to detect weapon.\n\n\n There were disadvantages in taking Templin, too.\n\"Just how primitive do you think the society is, Ted?\"\n\n\n Eckert put down the chain he had been whittling and reached for his\n pipe and tobacco.", "Eckert had come into his office without saying a word and had watched\n his scenery-window. It had been snowing in the window, the white flakes\n making a simple pattern drifting past the glass. Eckert had fiddled\n with the controls and changed it to sunshine, then to a weird mixture\n of hail amid the brassy, golden sunlight.\n\n\n And then Eckert had told him that Pendleton had taken the short way out.\nHe shouldn't get sentimental. But how the hell else should he remember\n Pendleton? Try to forget it and drink a toast to him at the next class\n reunion? And never, never be so crude as to speculate why Pendleton\n should have done it? If, of course, he had....\nThe cabin was hazy in the reddish glow, the sleeping gas a heavy\n perfume.", "A native fife trilled shrilly and a group of young men and women walked\n into the room. The circle broke to let them through and they came and\n knelt before Nayova. When he clapped his hands sharply, they retreated\n to the center of the circle and began the slow motions of a native\n dance.\nThe sound of the fife softened and died and the slow monotonous beat of\n drums took its place. The beat slowly increased and so did the rhythm\n of the dancers. The small fires at the corners of the hut were allowed\n to dwindle and the center of the circle became filled with the motions\n of shadows intermixed with the swift, sure movements of glistening\n limbs. Eckert felt his eyebrows crawl upward. Apparently the dance was\n the Tunpeshan version of the\nrites de passage\n. He glanced across\n the circle at Templin. Templin's face—what he could see of it by the\n flickering light—was brick red.", "A faint stirring in the black bulk opposite him. \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"How come our anthropologist on Tunpesh didn't come across with more\n information?\"\n\n\n A drowsy mumble from the other cot: \"He wasn't there long enough. He\n committed suicide not long after landing.\"\n\n\n The room was a whirling pool of blackness into which his mind was\n slowly slipping. Takeoff was only seconds away.\nWhy do people commit suicide?\n\"It's a nice day, isn't it, Ted?\" Eckert took a deep and pleasurable\n breath. \"It's the type of day that makes you feel good just to be\n alive.\"", "\"No, I'm afraid it's not.\" Eckert started unpacking some of the boxes.\n \"You know, Ray, I got a kick out of the kids. They're a healthy-looking\n lot, aren't they?\"\n\n\n \"Too healthy,\" Templin said. \"There didn't seem to be any sick ones or\n ones with runny noses or cuts or black eyes or bruises. It doesn't seem\n natural.\"\n\n\n \"They're probably just well brought-up kids,\" Eckert said sharply.\n \"Maybe they've been taught not to get in fights or play around in the\n mud on the way home from school.\" He felt faintly irritated, annoyed at\n the way Templin had put it, as if any deviation from an Earth norm was\n potentially dangerous.\n\n\n \"Ted.\" Templin's voice was strained. \"This could be a trap, you know.\"\n\n\n \"In what way?\"", "He stood there for a moment, drinking in the fresh air and feeling the\n warmth of the sun against his face. It might be a pleasant six months\n at that, away from the din and the hustle and confusion, spending the\n time in a place where the sun was warm and inviting.\nI must be getting old\n, he thought,\nthinking about the warmth and\n comfort. Like old dogs and octogenarians.\nTemplin was looking at the scenery with a disappointed expression on\n his face. Eckert stole a side glance at him and for a fleeting moment\n felt vaguely concerned. \"Don't be disappointed if it doesn't look like\n cloak-and-dagger right off, Ray. What seems innocent enough on the\n surface can prove to be quite dangerous underneath.\"\n\n\n \"It's rather hard to think of danger in a setting like this.\"", "nothing would happen at a banquet like this. The only actual danger lay\n in Templin's getting excited and doing something he was bound to regret\n later on. And even that danger was not quite as likely now.\nThere will be hell to pay\n, Eckert thought,\nif Templin ever finds out\n that I sabotaged his power pack.\n\"You look thoughtful,\nmenshar\nEckert.\"", "Eckert stared bleakly at his wine glass and tried to put the pieces of\n information together. They probably had a taboo about self-destruction\n which would make it difficult to talk about. That would make it even\n harder for him to find out by direct questioning.", "Eckert rolled up the thin, slatted blinds and stared out at the\n scenery. A hundred feet down the road, a native woman was going to\n market, leading a species of food animal by the halter.\n\n\n \"They grow their women nice, don't they?\"\n\n\n \"Physically perfect, like the men,\" Templin grumbled. \"You could get an\n inferiority complex just from watching the people here. Everybody's so\n damn perfect. Nobody's sick, nobody's unhealthy, nobody is too fat or\n too thin, nobody's unhappy. The only variation is that they don't all\n look alike. Perfection. It gets boring after a while.\"", "He was polite, Eckert thought. He didn't ask what they were there\n for or how long they were going to stay. But then again, perhaps the\n natives were a better judge of that than he and Templin.\n\n\n The town was larger than he had thought at first, stretching over a\n wide expanse of the countryside. There wasn't, so far as he could see,\n much manufacturing above the level of handicrafts and simple weaving.\n Colored patches on far hillsides indicated the presence of farms, and\n practically every house in the village had its small garden.", "of Pendleton was a page of statistics? He had been on this team, he\n had been elected president of that, he had graduated with such and\n such honors. But try getting a picture of him by reading the records,\n resurrect him from a page of black print. Would he be human? Would\n he be flesh and blood? Hell, no! In the statistics Pendleton was the\n All-Around Boy, the cold marble statue with the finely chiseled muscles\n and the smooth, blank sockets where the eyes should be. Maybe someday\n fate would play a trick on a hero-worshiping public and there would\n actually be kids like that. But they wouldn't be human; they wouldn't\n be born. Parents would get them by sending in so many box tops.\nHe was drowsy; the room was filled with the gas now. It would be only a", "A voice spoke in his ear. \"It is hard for us to imagine anybody doing\n what\nmenshar\nPendleton did. It is ...\" and he used a native word that\n Eckert translated as being roughly equivalent to \"\nobscene\n.\"\n\n\n The dancers at the center of the circle finally bowed out with small\n garlands of flowers on their heads that signified their reaching\n adulthood. Acrobats then took the stage and went through a dizzying\n routine, and they in turn were succeeded by a native singer.\n\n\n They were all excellent, Eckert thought. If anything, they were too\n good.\n\n\n The bowl of\npelache\nnuts made its way around again and Nayova leaned\n over to speak to him. \"If there is any possibility that I can help you\n while you are here,\nmenshar\nEckert, you have but to ask.\"", "The words came out slowly. \"The people are too casual, as though\n they're playing a rehearsed part. Here we are, from an entirely\n different solar system, landed in what must be to them an unusual\n manner. They couldn't have seen rockets more than three or four\n times before. It should still be a novelty to them. And yet how much\n curiosity did they show? Hardly any. Was there any fear? No. And the\n cute, harmless little kids.\" He looked at Eckert. \"Maybe that's what\n we're supposed to think—just an idyllic, harmless society. Maybe\n that's what Pendleton thought, right to the very end.\"\n\n\n He was keyed up, jumpy, Eckert realized. He would probably be seeing\n things in every shadow and imagining danger to be lurking around every\n corner.\n\n\n \"It hasn't been established yet that Pendleton was killed, Ray. Let's\n keep an open mind until we know for certain.\"", "Eckert nodded agreement. \"It wouldn't fit, would it? It would be like a\n famous singer suddenly doing a jazz number in an opera, or having the\n princess in a fairy tale turn out to be ugly.\" He gestured toward the\n village. \"You could hardly class that as dangerous from its outward\n appearance, could you?\"\n\n\n The rocketport was in a small valley, surrounded by low, wooded hills.\n The village started where the port left off and crawled and wound over\n the wooded ridges. Small houses of sun-baked, white-washed mud crouched\n in the shadow of huge trees and hugged the banks of a small stream.\n\n\n It looked fairly primitive, Eckert thought, and yet it didn't have the\n earmarks, the characteristics of most primitive villages. It didn't\n seem cluttered or dirty and you didn't feel like beating a hasty\n retreat when the wind was blowing toward you." ] ]
train	50869	[ "Which word least describes Ivan?", "What is something Glmpauszn and Joe don't have in common?", "How did Glmpauszn come to Earth?", "How was Glmpauszn communicating with Joe?", "Why couldn't Glmpauszn communicate with Joe the \"normal\" way?", "What is one thing Glmpauszn didn't struggle with when acclimating to Earth?", "What did Joe and Glmpauszn plan to do?", "How does Glmpauszn change throughout the story?", "How does Glmpauszn feel about leaving the world?", "What theme could be taken from this story?" ]	[ [ "confused", "innocent", "concerned", "angry" ], [ "their enjoyment for liquor", "their boss", "their homeland", "their ability to become invisible" ], [ "he teleported", "he was born", "he walked through a mirror", "via spaceship" ], [ "through vibrations", "through the mirror", "telepathically", "through other people" ], [ "Joe wasn't as talented as Glmpauszn", "Joe was trying to avoid Glmpauszn", "Joe had drunk too much alcohol", "Joe was moving around too much" ], [ "slang terms", "meeting people", "emotions", "appropriate clothing" ], [ "eliminate people to take over the world", "eliminate people because they were bothersome", "learn all they could about the human race", "take over and inhabit this world" ], [ "his hatred for humans continues to grow", "he begins to enjoy the customs and ways of humans", "he gets smarter and more powerful", "he begins to love women and money" ], [ "excited to leave", "sad he can't stay", "bittersweet", "angry that they must go" ], [ "enjoy all that life has to offer", "it's better to be safe than sorry", "you never know what people are truly like", "people can't be trusted" ] ]	[ 4, 4, 2, 4, 3, 2, 2, 2, 1, 3 ]	[ 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "When I heard them say that he was straightening up to come see me, I\n made a special effort and grew marvelously in one afternoon. I was 36\n not-world inches tall by evening. My not-father entered while I was\n standing by the crib examining a syringe the doctor had left behind.\n He stopped in his tracks on entering the room and seemed incapable of\n speech.\n\n\n Dredging into the treasury of knowledge I had come equipped with, I\n produced the proper phrase for occasions of this kind in the not-world.\n\n\n \"Poppa,\" I said.\n\n\n This was the first use I had made of the so-called vocal cords that\n are now part of my extended matrix. The sound I emitted sounded\n low-pitched, guttural and penetrating even to myself. It must have\n jarred on my not-father's ears, for he turned and ran shouting from the\n room.", "My kid, he reads. He says it's no joke. He wants to call the cops or\n maybe some doctor. But I say no. He reads your magazine so he says\n write to you, send you the letters. You know what to do. Now you have\n them. Maybe you print. Whatever you do, Mr. Editor, remember my place,\n the Plaza Ritz Arms, is straight establishment. I don't drink. I never\n touch junk, not even aspirin.\nYours very truly,\n\n Ivan Smernda\nBombay, India\n\n June 8\n\n\n Mr. Joe Binkle\n\n Plaza Ritz Arms\n\n New York City\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Greetings, greetings, greetings. Hold firm in your wretched projection,\n for tomorrow you will not be alone in the not-world. In two days I,\n Glmpauszn, will be born.", "This morning I have what is known medically as a syndrome ... a group\n of symptoms popularly referred to as a hangover ... Ahhh! Pardon me\n again. Strangely ... now what was I saying? Oh, yes. Ha, ha. Strangely\n enough, the reactions that come easiest to the people in this world\n came most difficult to me. Money-love, for example. It is a great thing\n here, both among those who haven't got it and those who have.\n\n\n I went out and got plenty of money. I walked invisible into a bank and\n carried away piles of it. Then I sat and looked at it. I took the money\n to a remote room of the twenty room suite I have rented in the best\n hotel here in—no, sorry—and stared at it for hours.\n\n\n Nothing happened. I didn't love the stuff or feel one way or the other\n about it. Yet all around me people are actually killing one another for\n the love of it.", "I had tremendous difficulty getting a letter off to you this time.\n My process—original with myself, by the way—is to send out feeler\n vibrations for what these people call the psychic individual. Then I\n establish contact with him while he sleeps and compel him without his\n knowledge to translate my ideas into written language. He writes my\n letter and mails it to you. Of course, he has no awareness of what he\n has done.\n\n\n My first five tries were unfortunate. Each time I took control of an\n individual who could not read or write! Finally I found my man, but\n I fear his words are limited. Ah, well. I had great things to tell\n you about my progress, but I cannot convey even a hint of how I have\n accomplished these miracles through the thick skull of this incompetent.", "Anyway.... Ahhh. Pardon me. I got myself enough money to fill ten or\n fifteen rooms. By the end of the week I should have all eighteen spare\n rooms filled with money. If I don't love it then, I'll feel I have\n failed. This alcohol is taking effect now.\n\n\n Blgftury has been goading me for reports. To hell with his reports!\n I've got a lot more emotions to try, such as romantic love. I've been\n studying this phenomenon, along with other racial characteristics of\n these people, in the movies. This is the best place to see these\n people as they really are. They all go into the movie houses and there\n do homage to their own images. Very quaint type of idolatry.\n\n\n Love. Ha! What an adventure this is becoming.", "They apprehended him on the stairs and I heard him babble something\n about my being a monster and no child of his. My not-mother appeared at\n the doorway and instead of being pleased at the progress of my growth,\n she fell down heavily. She made a distinct\nthump\non the floor.\n\n\n This brought the rest of them on the run, so I climbed out the window\n and retreated across a nearby field. A prolonged search was launched,\n but I eluded them. What unpredictable beings!\n\n\n I reported my tremendous progress back to our world, including the\n cleverness by which I managed to escape my pursuers. I received a reply\n from Blgftury which, on careful analysis, seems to be small praise\n indeed. In fact, some of his phrases apparently contain veiled threats.\n But you know old Blgftury. He wanted to go on this expedition himself\n and it's his nature never to flatter anyone.", "That was it—I had forgotten clothes. There is only one answer to this\n oversight on my part. My mind is confused by the barrage of impressions\n that assault it. I must retire now and get them all classified. Beauty,\n pain, fear, hate, love, laughter. I don't know one from the other. I\n must feel each, become accustomed to it.\n\n\n The more I think about it, the more I realize that the information I\n have been given is very unrealistic. You have been inefficient, Joe.\n What will Blgftury and the others say of this? My great mission is\n impaired. Farewell, till I find a more intelligent mind so I can write\n you with more enlightenment.\nGlmpauszn\nMoscow, Idaho\n\n June 17\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "I became alarmed, dived into a bush and used a mechanism that you\n unfortunately do not have—invisibility. I lay there and listened.\n\n\n \"He was stark naked,\" the girl with the sneakers said.\n\n\n A figure I recognized as a police officer spoke to her.\n\n\n \"Lizzy, you'll just have to keep these crackpot friends of yours out of\n this area.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No more buck-bathing, Lizzy,\" the officer ordered. \"No more speeches\n in the Square. Not when it results in riots at five in the morning. Now\n where is your naked friend? I'm going to make an example of him.\"", "A great deal has happened to me since I wrote to you last.\n Systematically, I have tested each emotion and sensation listed in\n our catalog. I have been, as has been said in this world, like a reed\n bending before the winds of passion. In fact, I'm rather badly bent\n indeed. Ah! You'll pardon me, but I just took time for what is known\n quaintly in this tongue as a \"hooker of red-eye.\" Ha! I've mastered\n even the vagaries of slang in the not-language.... Ahhh! Pardon me\n again. I feel much better now.\n\n\n You see, Joe, as I attuned myself to the various impressions that\n constantly assaulted my mind through this body, I conditioned myself to\n react exactly as our information catalog instructed me to.\n\n\n Now it is all automatic, pure reflex. A sensation comes to me when I am\n burned; then I experience a burning pain. If the sensation is a tickle,\n I experience a tickle.", "The latter atrocity is perpetrated through what these people call\n mediums, spiritualists and other fatuous names. I intend to visit one\n of them at the first opportunity to see for myself.\n\n\n Meanwhile, as to you, I would offer a few words of advice. I picked\n them up while examining the \"slang\" portion of my information catalog\n which you unfortunately caused me to use. So, for the ultimate\n cause—in this, the penultimate adventure, and for the glory and peace\n of our world—shake a leg, bub. Straighten up and fly right. In short,\n get hep.\n\n\n As far as the five bucks is concerned, no dice.\nGlmpauszn\nDes Moines, Iowa\n\n June 19\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "In simple terms then: I crept into a cave and slipped into a kind of\n sleep, directing my squhjkl ulytz & uhrytzg ... no, it won't come out.\n Anyway, I grew overnight to the size of an average person here.\n\n\n As I said before, floods of impressions are driving into my xzbyl ...\n my brain ... from various nerve and sense areas and I am having a hard\n time classifying them. My one idea was to get to a chemist and acquire\n the stuff needed for the destruction of these people.\n\n\n Sunrise came as I expected. According to my catalog of information, the\n impressions aroused by it are of beauty. It took little conditioning\n for me finally to react in this manner. This is truly an efficient\n mechanism I inhabit.", "We must use care. Stock in as much gin as you are able. I will bring\n with me all that I can. Meanwhile I must return to my original place of\n birth into this world of horrors. There I will secure the gateway, a\n large mirror, the vibrational point at which we shall meet and slowly\n climb the frequency scale to emerge into our own beautiful, now secure\n world. You and I together, Joe, conquerors, liberators.\n\n\n You say you eat little and drink as much as you can. The same with\n me. Even in this revolting world I am a sad sight. My not-world senses\n falter. This is the last letter. Tomorrow I come with the gateway. When\n the gin is gone, we will plant the mold in the hotel where you live.\n\n\n In only a single gleeb it will begin to work. The men of this queer\n world will be no more. But we can't say we didn't have some fun, can\n we, Joe?", "Now I know what difficulties you must have had with your limited\n equipment. These not-people are unpredictable and strange. Their doctor\n came in and weighed me again the day after my birth. Consternation\n reigned when it was discovered I was ten pounds heavier. What\n difference could it possibly make? Many doctors then came in to see me.\n As they arrived hourly, they found me heavier and heavier. Naturally,\n since I am growing. This is part of my instructions. My not-mother\n (Gezsltrysk!) then burst into tears. The doctors conferred, threw up\n their hands and left.\n\n\n I learned the following day that the opposite component of my\n not-mother, my not-father, had been away riding on some conveyance\n during my birth. He was out on ... what did they call it? Oh, yes, a\n bender. He did not arrive till three days after I was born.", "Then comes your letter today telling of the fate that befell you as a\n result of drinking alcohol. Our wrenchingly attuned faculties in these\n not-world bodies need the loathsome drug to escape from the reality\n of not-reality. It's true. I cannot do without it now. The day is only\n half over and I have consumed a quart and a half. And it is dulling all\n my powers as it has practically obliterated yours. I can't even become\n invisible any more.\n\n\n I must find the formula that will wipe out the not-world men quickly.\n\n\n Quickly!\nGlmpauszn\nFlorence, Italy\n\n September 10\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "There are long hours during which I am so well-integrated into this\n body and this world that I almost consider myself a member of it. Now\n I can function efficiently. I sent Blgftury some long reports today\n outlining my experiments in the realm of chemistry where we must\n finally defeat these people. Of course, I haven't made the experiments\n yet, but I will. This is not deceit, merely realistic anticipation of\n the inevitable. Anyway, what the old xbyzrt doesn't know won't muss his\n vibrations.\n\n\n I went to what they call a nightclub here and picked out a\n blonde-haired woman, the kind that the books say men prefer. She was\n attracted to me instantly. After all, the body I have devised is\n perfect in every detail ... actually a not-world ideal.", "And just let Blgftury make one crack. Just one xyzprlt. I'll have\n hgutry before the ghjdksla!\nGlmpauszn\nDear Editor:\n\n\n These guys might be queer drunk hopheads. But if not? If soon brain\n dissolve, body fall apart, how long have we got? Please, anybody who\n knows answer, write to me—Ivan Smernda, Plaza Ritz Arms—how long is a\n gleeb?", "I didn't lose any time overwhelming her susceptibilities. I remember\n distinctly that just as I stooped to pick up a large roll of money I\n had dropped, her eyes met mine and in them I could see her admiration.\n We went to my suite and I showed her one of the money rooms. Would you\n believe it? She actually took off her shoes and ran around through the\n money in her bare feet! Then we kissed.\n\n\n Concealed in the dermis of the lips are tiny, highly sensitized nerve\n ends which send sensations to the brain. The brain interprets these\n impulses in a certain manner. As a result, the fate of secretion in the\n adrenals on the ends of the kidneys increases and an enlivening of the\n entire endocrine system follows. Thus I felt the beginnings of love.\n\n\n I sat her down on a pile of money and kissed her again. Again the\n tingling, again the secretion and activation. I integrated myself\n quickly.", "Anyway, Mrs. Somebody wanted to make contact with her paternal\n grandmother, Lucy, from the beyond. The medium went into his act. He\n concentrated and sweated and suddenly something began to take form in\n the room. The best way to describe it in not-world language is a white,\n shapeless cascade of light.\n\n\n Mrs. Somebody reared to her feet and screeched, \"Grandma Lucy!\" Then I\n really took notice.\n\n\n Grandma Lucy, nothing! This medium had actually brought Blgftury\n partially across the vibration barrier. He must have been vibrating in\n the fringe area and got caught in the works. Did he look mad! His zyhku\n was open and his btgrimms were down.\n\n\n Worst of all, he saw me. Looked right at me with an unbelievable\n pattern of pain, anger, fear and amazement in his matrix. Me and the\n redhead.", "I gazed about me at the mixture of lights, forms and impressions.\n It was strange and ... now I know ... beautiful. However, I hurried\n immediately toward the nearest chemist. At the same time I looked up\n and all about me at the beauty.\n\n\n Soon an individual approached. I knew what to do from my information. I\n simply acted natural. You know, one of your earliest instructions was\n to realize that these people see nothing unusual in you if you do not\n let yourself believe they do.\n\n\n This individual I classified as a female of a singular variety here.\n Her hair was short, her upper torso clad in a woolen garment. She\n wore ... what are they? ... oh, yes, sneakers. My attention was\n diverted by a scream as I passed her. I stopped.\n\n\n The woman gesticulated and continued to scream. People hurried from\n nearby houses. I linked my hands behind me and watched the scene with\n an attitude of mild interest. They weren't interested in me, I told\n myself. But they were.", "I am now beginning to feel the effects of this alcohol again. Ha. Don't\n I wish old Blgftury were here in the vibrational pattern of an olive?\n I'd get the blonde in and have her eat him out of a Martini. That is a\n gin mixture.\n\n\n I think I'll get a hot report off to the old so-and-so right now. It'll\n take him a gleeb to figure this one out. I'll tell him I'm setting up\n an atomic reactor in the sewage systems here and that all we have to do\n is activate it and all the not-people will die of chain asphyxiation.\n\n\n Boy, what an easy job this turned out to be. It's just a vacation. Joe,\n you old gold-bricker, imagine you here all these gleebs living off the\n fat of the land. Yak, yak. Affectionately.\nGlmpauszn\nSacramento, Calif.\n\n July 25" ], [ "My kid, he reads. He says it's no joke. He wants to call the cops or\n maybe some doctor. But I say no. He reads your magazine so he says\n write to you, send you the letters. You know what to do. Now you have\n them. Maybe you print. Whatever you do, Mr. Editor, remember my place,\n the Plaza Ritz Arms, is straight establishment. I don't drink. I never\n touch junk, not even aspirin.\nYours very truly,\n\n Ivan Smernda\nBombay, India\n\n June 8\n\n\n Mr. Joe Binkle\n\n Plaza Ritz Arms\n\n New York City\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Greetings, greetings, greetings. Hold firm in your wretched projection,\n for tomorrow you will not be alone in the not-world. In two days I,\n Glmpauszn, will be born.", "Your letter was imponderable till I had thrashed through long passages\n in my information catalog that I had never imagined I would need.\n Biological functions and bodily processes which are labeled here\n \"revolting\" are used freely in your missive. You can be sure they are\n all being forwarded to Blgftury. If I were not involved in the most\n important part of my journey—completion of the weapon against the\n not-worlders—I would come to New York immediately. You would rue that\n day, I assure you.\nGlmpauszn\nBoise, Idaho\n\n July 15\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "All is well, only they shot this information file into my matrix too\n fast. I'm having a hard time sorting facts and make the right decision.\n Gezsltrysk, what a task!\n\n\n Farewell till later.\nGlmpauszn\nWichita, Kansas\n\n June 13\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Mnghjkl, fhfjgfhjklop phelnoprausynks. No. When I communicate with you,\n I see I must avoid those complexities of procedure for which there are\n no terms in this language. There is no way of describing to you in\n not-language what I had to go through during the first moments of my\n birth.", "That was it—I had forgotten clothes. There is only one answer to this\n oversight on my part. My mind is confused by the barrage of impressions\n that assault it. I must retire now and get them all classified. Beauty,\n pain, fear, hate, love, laughter. I don't know one from the other. I\n must feel each, become accustomed to it.\n\n\n The more I think about it, the more I realize that the information I\n have been given is very unrealistic. You have been inefficient, Joe.\n What will Blgftury and the others say of this? My great mission is\n impaired. Farewell, till I find a more intelligent mind so I can write\n you with more enlightenment.\nGlmpauszn\nMoscow, Idaho\n\n June 17\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "Quickly, from the not-world vibrations about you, I learned the\n not-knowledge of your location. So I must communicate with you by what\n the not-world calls \"mail\" till we meet. For this purpose I must\n utilize the feeble vibrations of various not-people through whose\n inadequate articulation I will attempt to make my moves known to you.\n Each time I will pick a city other than the one I am in at the time.\n\n\n I, Glmpauszn, come equipped with powers evolved from your fragmentary\n reports before you ceased to vibrate to us and with a vast treasury\n of facts from indirect sources. Soon our tortured people will be free\n of the fearsome not-folk and I will be their liberator. You failed in\n your task, but I will try to get you off with light punishment when we\n return again.", "The latter atrocity is perpetrated through what these people call\n mediums, spiritualists and other fatuous names. I intend to visit one\n of them at the first opportunity to see for myself.\n\n\n Meanwhile, as to you, I would offer a few words of advice. I picked\n them up while examining the \"slang\" portion of my information catalog\n which you unfortunately caused me to use. So, for the ultimate\n cause—in this, the penultimate adventure, and for the glory and peace\n of our world—shake a leg, bub. Straighten up and fly right. In short,\n get hep.\n\n\n As far as the five bucks is concerned, no dice.\nGlmpauszn\nDes Moines, Iowa\n\n June 19\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "Then comes your letter today telling of the fate that befell you as a\n result of drinking alcohol. Our wrenchingly attuned faculties in these\n not-world bodies need the loathsome drug to escape from the reality\n of not-reality. It's true. I cannot do without it now. The day is only\n half over and I have consumed a quart and a half. And it is dulling all\n my powers as it has practically obliterated yours. I can't even become\n invisible any more.\n\n\n I must find the formula that will wipe out the not-world men quickly.\n\n\n Quickly!\nGlmpauszn\nFlorence, Italy\n\n September 10\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "From now on I will refer to not-people simply as people, dropping the\n qualifying preface except where comparisons must be made between this\n alleged world and our own. It is merely an offshoot of our primitive\n mythology when this was considered a spirit world, just as these people\n refer to our world as never-never land and other anomalies. But we\n learned otherwise, while they never have.\n\n\n New sensations crowd into my consciousness and I am having a hard\n time classifying them. Anyway, I shall carry on swiftly now to the\n inevitable climax in which I singlehanded will obliterate the terror of\n the not-world and return to our world a hero. I cannot understand your\n not replying to my letters. I have given you a box number. What could\n have happened to your vibrations?\nGlmpauszn\nAlbuquerque, New Mexico\n\n June 15\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "We must use care. Stock in as much gin as you are able. I will bring\n with me all that I can. Meanwhile I must return to my original place of\n birth into this world of horrors. There I will secure the gateway, a\n large mirror, the vibrational point at which we shall meet and slowly\n climb the frequency scale to emerge into our own beautiful, now secure\n world. You and I together, Joe, conquerors, liberators.\n\n\n You say you eat little and drink as much as you can. The same with\n me. Even in this revolting world I am a sad sight. My not-world senses\n falter. This is the last letter. Tomorrow I come with the gateway. When\n the gin is gone, we will plant the mold in the hotel where you live.\n\n\n In only a single gleeb it will begin to work. The men of this queer\n world will be no more. But we can't say we didn't have some fun, can\n we, Joe?", "By the way, Joe, I'm forwarding that five dollars. You see, it won't\n cost me anything. It'll come out of the pocket of the idiot who's\n writing this letter. Pretty shrewd of me, eh?\n\n\n I'm going out and look at that money again. I think I'm at last\n learning to love it, though not as much as I admire liquor. Well, one\n simply must persevere, I always say.\nGlmpauszn\nPenobscot, Maine\n\n July 20\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Now you tell me not to drink alcohol. Why not? You never mentioned it\n in any of your vibrations to us, gleebs ago, when you first came across\n to this world. It will stint my powers? Nonsense! Already I have had a\n quart of the liquid today. I feel wonderful. Get that? I actually feel\n wonderful, in spite of this miserable imitation of a body.", "I was baffled. What could I tell him?\n\n\n \"Don't you like the rooms?\" he persisted. \"Isn't the service good?\"\n\n\n \"It's the rooms,\" I told him. \"They're—they're—\"\n\n\n \"They're what?\" he wanted to know.\n\n\n \"They're not safe.\"\n\n\n \"Not safe? But that is ridiculous. This hotel is....\"\n\n\n At this point the blast came. My nerves were a wreck from the alcohol.\n\n\n \"See?\" I screamed. \"Not safe. I knew they were going to blow up!\"\n\n\n He stood paralyzed as I ran from the lobby. Oh, well, never say die.\n Another day, another hotel. I swear I'm even beginning to think like\n the not-men, curse them.\nGlmpauszn\nRochester, New York", "Now I know what difficulties you must have had with your limited\n equipment. These not-people are unpredictable and strange. Their doctor\n came in and weighed me again the day after my birth. Consternation\n reigned when it was discovered I was ten pounds heavier. What\n difference could it possibly make? Many doctors then came in to see me.\n As they arrived hourly, they found me heavier and heavier. Naturally,\n since I am growing. This is part of my instructions. My not-mother\n (Gezsltrysk!) then burst into tears. The doctors conferred, threw up\n their hands and left.\n\n\n I learned the following day that the opposite component of my\n not-mother, my not-father, had been away riding on some conveyance\n during my birth. He was out on ... what did they call it? Oh, yes, a\n bender. He did not arrive till three days after I was born.", "Now get this. In one room, that of Joe Binkle, which maybe is an alias,\n I find nothing but a suit of clothes, some butts and the letters I\n include here in same package. Binkle had only one suit. That I know.\n And this was it laying right in the middle of the room. Inside the\n coat was the vest, inside the vest the shirt, inside the shirt the\n underwear. The pants were up in the coat and inside of them was also\n the underwear. All this was buttoned up like Binkle had melted out of\n it and dripped through a crack in the floor. In a bureau drawer were\n the letters I told you about.\n\n\n Now. In the room right under Binkle's lived another stew bum that\n checked in Thursday ... name Ed Smith, alias maybe, too. This guy was a\n real case. He brought with him a big mirror with a heavy bronze frame.\n Airloom, he says. He pays a week in advance, staggers up the stairs to\n his room with the mirror and that's the last I see of him.", "I became alarmed, dived into a bush and used a mechanism that you\n unfortunately do not have—invisibility. I lay there and listened.\n\n\n \"He was stark naked,\" the girl with the sneakers said.\n\n\n A figure I recognized as a police officer spoke to her.\n\n\n \"Lizzy, you'll just have to keep these crackpot friends of yours out of\n this area.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No more buck-bathing, Lizzy,\" the officer ordered. \"No more speeches\n in the Square. Not when it results in riots at five in the morning. Now\n where is your naked friend? I'm going to make an example of him.\"", "I am now beginning to feel the effects of this alcohol again. Ha. Don't\n I wish old Blgftury were here in the vibrational pattern of an olive?\n I'd get the blonde in and have her eat him out of a Martini. That is a\n gin mixture.\n\n\n I think I'll get a hot report off to the old so-and-so right now. It'll\n take him a gleeb to figure this one out. I'll tell him I'm setting up\n an atomic reactor in the sewage systems here and that all we have to do\n is activate it and all the not-people will die of chain asphyxiation.\n\n\n Boy, what an easy job this turned out to be. It's just a vacation. Joe,\n you old gold-bricker, imagine you here all these gleebs living off the\n fat of the land. Yak, yak. Affectionately.\nGlmpauszn\nSacramento, Calif.\n\n July 25", "And just let Blgftury make one crack. Just one xyzprlt. I'll have\n hgutry before the ghjdksla!\nGlmpauszn\nDear Editor:\n\n\n These guys might be queer drunk hopheads. But if not? If soon brain\n dissolve, body fall apart, how long have we got? Please, anybody who\n knows answer, write to me—Ivan Smernda, Plaza Ritz Arms—how long is a\n gleeb?", "This morning I have what is known medically as a syndrome ... a group\n of symptoms popularly referred to as a hangover ... Ahhh! Pardon me\n again. Strangely ... now what was I saying? Oh, yes. Ha, ha. Strangely\n enough, the reactions that come easiest to the people in this world\n came most difficult to me. Money-love, for example. It is a great thing\n here, both among those who haven't got it and those who have.\n\n\n I went out and got plenty of money. I walked invisible into a bank and\n carried away piles of it. Then I sat and looked at it. I took the money\n to a remote room of the twenty room suite I have rented in the best\n hotel here in—no, sorry—and stared at it for hours.\n\n\n Nothing happened. I didn't love the stuff or feel one way or the other\n about it. Yet all around me people are actually killing one another for\n the love of it.", "Dear Joe:\n\n\n All is lost unless we work swiftly. I received your revealing letter\n the morning after having a terrible experience of my own. I drank a\n lot of gin for two days and then decided to go to one of these seance\n things.\n\n\n Somewhere along the way I picked up a red-headed girl. When we got\n to the darkened seance room, I took the redhead into a corner and\n continued my investigations into the realm of love. I failed again\n because she said yes immediately.\n\n\n The nerves of my dermis were working overtime when suddenly I had the\n most frightening experience of my life. Now I know what a horror these\n people really are to our world.\n\n\n The medium had turned out all the lights. He said there was a strong\n psychic influence in the room somewhere. That was me, of course, but I\n was too busy with the redhead to notice.", "Even our eminent, all-high Frequency himself has often been jeopardized\n by these people. The not-world and our world are like two baskets\n as you and I see them in our present forms. Baskets woven with the\n greatest intricacy, design and color; but baskets whose convex sides\n are joined by a thin fringe of filaments. Our world, on the vibrational\n plane, extends just a bit into this, the not-world. But being a world\n of higher vibration, it is ultimately tenuous to these gross peoples.\n While we vibrate only within a restricted plane because of our purer,\n more stable existence, these people radiate widely into our world.\n\n\n They even send what they call psychic reproductions of their own selves\n into ours. And most infamous of all, they sometimes are able to force\n some of our individuals over the fringe into their world temporarily,\n causing them much agony and fright.", "They apprehended him on the stairs and I heard him babble something\n about my being a monster and no child of his. My not-mother appeared at\n the doorway and instead of being pleased at the progress of my growth,\n she fell down heavily. She made a distinct\nthump\non the floor.\n\n\n This brought the rest of them on the run, so I climbed out the window\n and retreated across a nearby field. A prolonged search was launched,\n but I eluded them. What unpredictable beings!\n\n\n I reported my tremendous progress back to our world, including the\n cleverness by which I managed to escape my pursuers. I received a reply\n from Blgftury which, on careful analysis, seems to be small praise\n indeed. In fact, some of his phrases apparently contain veiled threats.\n But you know old Blgftury. He wanted to go on this expedition himself\n and it's his nature never to flatter anyone." ], [ "Quickly, from the not-world vibrations about you, I learned the\n not-knowledge of your location. So I must communicate with you by what\n the not-world calls \"mail\" till we meet. For this purpose I must\n utilize the feeble vibrations of various not-people through whose\n inadequate articulation I will attempt to make my moves known to you.\n Each time I will pick a city other than the one I am in at the time.\n\n\n I, Glmpauszn, come equipped with powers evolved from your fragmentary\n reports before you ceased to vibrate to us and with a vast treasury\n of facts from indirect sources. Soon our tortured people will be free\n of the fearsome not-folk and I will be their liberator. You failed in\n your task, but I will try to get you off with light punishment when we\n return again.", "A Gleeb for Earth\nBy CHARLES SHAFHAUSER\n\n\n Illustrated by EMSH\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction May 1953.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nNot to be or not to not be ... that was the\n \nnot-question for the invader of the not-world.\nDear Editor:\n\n\n My 14 year old boy, Ronnie, is typing this letter for me because he\n can do it neater and use better grammar. I had to get in touch with\n somebody about this because if there is something to it, then somebody,\n everybody, is going to point finger at me, Ivan Smernda, and say, \"Why\n didn't you warn us?\"", "They apprehended him on the stairs and I heard him babble something\n about my being a monster and no child of his. My not-mother appeared at\n the doorway and instead of being pleased at the progress of my growth,\n she fell down heavily. She made a distinct\nthump\non the floor.\n\n\n This brought the rest of them on the run, so I climbed out the window\n and retreated across a nearby field. A prolonged search was launched,\n but I eluded them. What unpredictable beings!\n\n\n I reported my tremendous progress back to our world, including the\n cleverness by which I managed to escape my pursuers. I received a reply\n from Blgftury which, on careful analysis, seems to be small praise\n indeed. In fact, some of his phrases apparently contain veiled threats.\n But you know old Blgftury. He wanted to go on this expedition himself\n and it's his nature never to flatter anyone.", "Your letter was imponderable till I had thrashed through long passages\n in my information catalog that I had never imagined I would need.\n Biological functions and bodily processes which are labeled here\n \"revolting\" are used freely in your missive. You can be sure they are\n all being forwarded to Blgftury. If I were not involved in the most\n important part of my journey—completion of the weapon against the\n not-worlders—I would come to New York immediately. You would rue that\n day, I assure you.\nGlmpauszn\nBoise, Idaho\n\n July 15\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "In simple terms then: I crept into a cave and slipped into a kind of\n sleep, directing my squhjkl ulytz & uhrytzg ... no, it won't come out.\n Anyway, I grew overnight to the size of an average person here.\n\n\n As I said before, floods of impressions are driving into my xzbyl ...\n my brain ... from various nerve and sense areas and I am having a hard\n time classifying them. My one idea was to get to a chemist and acquire\n the stuff needed for the destruction of these people.\n\n\n Sunrise came as I expected. According to my catalog of information, the\n impressions aroused by it are of beauty. It took little conditioning\n for me finally to react in this manner. This is truly an efficient\n mechanism I inhabit.", "All is well, only they shot this information file into my matrix too\n fast. I'm having a hard time sorting facts and make the right decision.\n Gezsltrysk, what a task!\n\n\n Farewell till later.\nGlmpauszn\nWichita, Kansas\n\n June 13\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Mnghjkl, fhfjgfhjklop phelnoprausynks. No. When I communicate with you,\n I see I must avoid those complexities of procedure for which there are\n no terms in this language. There is no way of describing to you in\n not-language what I had to go through during the first moments of my\n birth.", "I gazed about me at the mixture of lights, forms and impressions.\n It was strange and ... now I know ... beautiful. However, I hurried\n immediately toward the nearest chemist. At the same time I looked up\n and all about me at the beauty.\n\n\n Soon an individual approached. I knew what to do from my information. I\n simply acted natural. You know, one of your earliest instructions was\n to realize that these people see nothing unusual in you if you do not\n let yourself believe they do.\n\n\n This individual I classified as a female of a singular variety here.\n Her hair was short, her upper torso clad in a woolen garment. She\n wore ... what are they? ... oh, yes, sneakers. My attention was\n diverted by a scream as I passed her. I stopped.\n\n\n The woman gesticulated and continued to scream. People hurried from\n nearby houses. I linked my hands behind me and watched the scene with\n an attitude of mild interest. They weren't interested in me, I told\n myself. But they were.", "Then comes your letter today telling of the fate that befell you as a\n result of drinking alcohol. Our wrenchingly attuned faculties in these\n not-world bodies need the loathsome drug to escape from the reality\n of not-reality. It's true. I cannot do without it now. The day is only\n half over and I have consumed a quart and a half. And it is dulling all\n my powers as it has practically obliterated yours. I can't even become\n invisible any more.\n\n\n I must find the formula that will wipe out the not-world men quickly.\n\n\n Quickly!\nGlmpauszn\nFlorence, Italy\n\n September 10\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "The hand that writes this letter is that of a boy in the not-city of\n Bombay in the not-country of India. He does not know he writes it.\n Tomorrow it will be someone else. You must never know of my exact\n location, for the not-people might have access to the information.\n\n\n I must leave off now because the not-child is about to be born. When it\n is alone in the room, it will be spirited away and I will spring from\n the pod on the gateway into its crib and will be its exact vibrational\n likeness.\n\n\n I have tremendous powers. But the not-people must never know I am among\n them. This is the only way I could arrive in the room where the gateway\n lies without arousing suspicion. I will grow up as the not-child in\n order that I might destroy the not-people completely.", "My kid, he reads. He says it's no joke. He wants to call the cops or\n maybe some doctor. But I say no. He reads your magazine so he says\n write to you, send you the letters. You know what to do. Now you have\n them. Maybe you print. Whatever you do, Mr. Editor, remember my place,\n the Plaza Ritz Arms, is straight establishment. I don't drink. I never\n touch junk, not even aspirin.\nYours very truly,\n\n Ivan Smernda\nBombay, India\n\n June 8\n\n\n Mr. Joe Binkle\n\n Plaza Ritz Arms\n\n New York City\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Greetings, greetings, greetings. Hold firm in your wretched projection,\n for tomorrow you will not be alone in the not-world. In two days I,\n Glmpauszn, will be born.", "When I heard them say that he was straightening up to come see me, I\n made a special effort and grew marvelously in one afternoon. I was 36\n not-world inches tall by evening. My not-father entered while I was\n standing by the crib examining a syringe the doctor had left behind.\n He stopped in his tracks on entering the room and seemed incapable of\n speech.\n\n\n Dredging into the treasury of knowledge I had come equipped with, I\n produced the proper phrase for occasions of this kind in the not-world.\n\n\n \"Poppa,\" I said.\n\n\n This was the first use I had made of the so-called vocal cords that\n are now part of my extended matrix. The sound I emitted sounded\n low-pitched, guttural and penetrating even to myself. It must have\n jarred on my not-father's ears, for he turned and ran shouting from the\n room.", "From now on I will refer to not-people simply as people, dropping the\n qualifying preface except where comparisons must be made between this\n alleged world and our own. It is merely an offshoot of our primitive\n mythology when this was considered a spirit world, just as these people\n refer to our world as never-never land and other anomalies. But we\n learned otherwise, while they never have.\n\n\n New sensations crowd into my consciousness and I am having a hard\n time classifying them. Anyway, I shall carry on swiftly now to the\n inevitable climax in which I singlehanded will obliterate the terror of\n the not-world and return to our world a hero. I cannot understand your\n not replying to my letters. I have given you a box number. What could\n have happened to your vibrations?\nGlmpauszn\nAlbuquerque, New Mexico\n\n June 15\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "I was baffled. What could I tell him?\n\n\n \"Don't you like the rooms?\" he persisted. \"Isn't the service good?\"\n\n\n \"It's the rooms,\" I told him. \"They're—they're—\"\n\n\n \"They're what?\" he wanted to know.\n\n\n \"They're not safe.\"\n\n\n \"Not safe? But that is ridiculous. This hotel is....\"\n\n\n At this point the blast came. My nerves were a wreck from the alcohol.\n\n\n \"See?\" I screamed. \"Not safe. I knew they were going to blow up!\"\n\n\n He stood paralyzed as I ran from the lobby. Oh, well, never say die.\n Another day, another hotel. I swear I'm even beginning to think like\n the not-men, curse them.\nGlmpauszn\nRochester, New York", "Now I know what difficulties you must have had with your limited\n equipment. These not-people are unpredictable and strange. Their doctor\n came in and weighed me again the day after my birth. Consternation\n reigned when it was discovered I was ten pounds heavier. What\n difference could it possibly make? Many doctors then came in to see me.\n As they arrived hourly, they found me heavier and heavier. Naturally,\n since I am growing. This is part of my instructions. My not-mother\n (Gezsltrysk!) then burst into tears. The doctors conferred, threw up\n their hands and left.\n\n\n I learned the following day that the opposite component of my\n not-mother, my not-father, had been away riding on some conveyance\n during my birth. He was out on ... what did they call it? Oh, yes, a\n bender. He did not arrive till three days after I was born.", "We must use care. Stock in as much gin as you are able. I will bring\n with me all that I can. Meanwhile I must return to my original place of\n birth into this world of horrors. There I will secure the gateway, a\n large mirror, the vibrational point at which we shall meet and slowly\n climb the frequency scale to emerge into our own beautiful, now secure\n world. You and I together, Joe, conquerors, liberators.\n\n\n You say you eat little and drink as much as you can. The same with\n me. Even in this revolting world I am a sad sight. My not-world senses\n falter. This is the last letter. Tomorrow I come with the gateway. When\n the gin is gone, we will plant the mold in the hotel where you live.\n\n\n In only a single gleeb it will begin to work. The men of this queer\n world will be no more. But we can't say we didn't have some fun, can\n we, Joe?", "There are long hours during which I am so well-integrated into this\n body and this world that I almost consider myself a member of it. Now\n I can function efficiently. I sent Blgftury some long reports today\n outlining my experiments in the realm of chemistry where we must\n finally defeat these people. Of course, I haven't made the experiments\n yet, but I will. This is not deceit, merely realistic anticipation of\n the inevitable. Anyway, what the old xbyzrt doesn't know won't muss his\n vibrations.\n\n\n I went to what they call a nightclub here and picked out a\n blonde-haired woman, the kind that the books say men prefer. She was\n attracted to me instantly. After all, the body I have devised is\n perfect in every detail ... actually a not-world ideal.", "Anyway, Mrs. Somebody wanted to make contact with her paternal\n grandmother, Lucy, from the beyond. The medium went into his act. He\n concentrated and sweated and suddenly something began to take form in\n the room. The best way to describe it in not-world language is a white,\n shapeless cascade of light.\n\n\n Mrs. Somebody reared to her feet and screeched, \"Grandma Lucy!\" Then I\n really took notice.\n\n\n Grandma Lucy, nothing! This medium had actually brought Blgftury\n partially across the vibration barrier. He must have been vibrating in\n the fringe area and got caught in the works. Did he look mad! His zyhku\n was open and his btgrimms were down.\n\n\n Worst of all, he saw me. Looked right at me with an unbelievable\n pattern of pain, anger, fear and amazement in his matrix. Me and the\n redhead.", "Even our eminent, all-high Frequency himself has often been jeopardized\n by these people. The not-world and our world are like two baskets\n as you and I see them in our present forms. Baskets woven with the\n greatest intricacy, design and color; but baskets whose convex sides\n are joined by a thin fringe of filaments. Our world, on the vibrational\n plane, extends just a bit into this, the not-world. But being a world\n of higher vibration, it is ultimately tenuous to these gross peoples.\n While we vibrate only within a restricted plane because of our purer,\n more stable existence, these people radiate widely into our world.\n\n\n They even send what they call psychic reproductions of their own selves\n into ours. And most infamous of all, they sometimes are able to force\n some of our individuals over the fringe into their world temporarily,\n causing them much agony and fright.", "I became alarmed, dived into a bush and used a mechanism that you\n unfortunately do not have—invisibility. I lay there and listened.\n\n\n \"He was stark naked,\" the girl with the sneakers said.\n\n\n A figure I recognized as a police officer spoke to her.\n\n\n \"Lizzy, you'll just have to keep these crackpot friends of yours out of\n this area.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No more buck-bathing, Lizzy,\" the officer ordered. \"No more speeches\n in the Square. Not when it results in riots at five in the morning. Now\n where is your naked friend? I'm going to make an example of him.\"", "That was it—I had forgotten clothes. There is only one answer to this\n oversight on my part. My mind is confused by the barrage of impressions\n that assault it. I must retire now and get them all classified. Beauty,\n pain, fear, hate, love, laughter. I don't know one from the other. I\n must feel each, become accustomed to it.\n\n\n The more I think about it, the more I realize that the information I\n have been given is very unrealistic. You have been inefficient, Joe.\n What will Blgftury and the others say of this? My great mission is\n impaired. Farewell, till I find a more intelligent mind so I can write\n you with more enlightenment.\nGlmpauszn\nMoscow, Idaho\n\n June 17\n\n\n Dear Joe:" ], [ "Quickly, from the not-world vibrations about you, I learned the\n not-knowledge of your location. So I must communicate with you by what\n the not-world calls \"mail\" till we meet. For this purpose I must\n utilize the feeble vibrations of various not-people through whose\n inadequate articulation I will attempt to make my moves known to you.\n Each time I will pick a city other than the one I am in at the time.\n\n\n I, Glmpauszn, come equipped with powers evolved from your fragmentary\n reports before you ceased to vibrate to us and with a vast treasury\n of facts from indirect sources. Soon our tortured people will be free\n of the fearsome not-folk and I will be their liberator. You failed in\n your task, but I will try to get you off with light punishment when we\n return again.", "My kid, he reads. He says it's no joke. He wants to call the cops or\n maybe some doctor. But I say no. He reads your magazine so he says\n write to you, send you the letters. You know what to do. Now you have\n them. Maybe you print. Whatever you do, Mr. Editor, remember my place,\n the Plaza Ritz Arms, is straight establishment. I don't drink. I never\n touch junk, not even aspirin.\nYours very truly,\n\n Ivan Smernda\nBombay, India\n\n June 8\n\n\n Mr. Joe Binkle\n\n Plaza Ritz Arms\n\n New York City\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Greetings, greetings, greetings. Hold firm in your wretched projection,\n for tomorrow you will not be alone in the not-world. In two days I,\n Glmpauszn, will be born.", "Your letter was imponderable till I had thrashed through long passages\n in my information catalog that I had never imagined I would need.\n Biological functions and bodily processes which are labeled here\n \"revolting\" are used freely in your missive. You can be sure they are\n all being forwarded to Blgftury. If I were not involved in the most\n important part of my journey—completion of the weapon against the\n not-worlders—I would come to New York immediately. You would rue that\n day, I assure you.\nGlmpauszn\nBoise, Idaho\n\n July 15\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "The latter atrocity is perpetrated through what these people call\n mediums, spiritualists and other fatuous names. I intend to visit one\n of them at the first opportunity to see for myself.\n\n\n Meanwhile, as to you, I would offer a few words of advice. I picked\n them up while examining the \"slang\" portion of my information catalog\n which you unfortunately caused me to use. So, for the ultimate\n cause—in this, the penultimate adventure, and for the glory and peace\n of our world—shake a leg, bub. Straighten up and fly right. In short,\n get hep.\n\n\n As far as the five bucks is concerned, no dice.\nGlmpauszn\nDes Moines, Iowa\n\n June 19\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "All is well, only they shot this information file into my matrix too\n fast. I'm having a hard time sorting facts and make the right decision.\n Gezsltrysk, what a task!\n\n\n Farewell till later.\nGlmpauszn\nWichita, Kansas\n\n June 13\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Mnghjkl, fhfjgfhjklop phelnoprausynks. No. When I communicate with you,\n I see I must avoid those complexities of procedure for which there are\n no terms in this language. There is no way of describing to you in\n not-language what I had to go through during the first moments of my\n birth.", "Then comes your letter today telling of the fate that befell you as a\n result of drinking alcohol. Our wrenchingly attuned faculties in these\n not-world bodies need the loathsome drug to escape from the reality\n of not-reality. It's true. I cannot do without it now. The day is only\n half over and I have consumed a quart and a half. And it is dulling all\n my powers as it has practically obliterated yours. I can't even become\n invisible any more.\n\n\n I must find the formula that will wipe out the not-world men quickly.\n\n\n Quickly!\nGlmpauszn\nFlorence, Italy\n\n September 10\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "We must use care. Stock in as much gin as you are able. I will bring\n with me all that I can. Meanwhile I must return to my original place of\n birth into this world of horrors. There I will secure the gateway, a\n large mirror, the vibrational point at which we shall meet and slowly\n climb the frequency scale to emerge into our own beautiful, now secure\n world. You and I together, Joe, conquerors, liberators.\n\n\n You say you eat little and drink as much as you can. The same with\n me. Even in this revolting world I am a sad sight. My not-world senses\n falter. This is the last letter. Tomorrow I come with the gateway. When\n the gin is gone, we will plant the mold in the hotel where you live.\n\n\n In only a single gleeb it will begin to work. The men of this queer\n world will be no more. But we can't say we didn't have some fun, can\n we, Joe?", "I had tremendous difficulty getting a letter off to you this time.\n My process—original with myself, by the way—is to send out feeler\n vibrations for what these people call the psychic individual. Then I\n establish contact with him while he sleeps and compel him without his\n knowledge to translate my ideas into written language. He writes my\n letter and mails it to you. Of course, he has no awareness of what he\n has done.\n\n\n My first five tries were unfortunate. Each time I took control of an\n individual who could not read or write! Finally I found my man, but\n I fear his words are limited. Ah, well. I had great things to tell\n you about my progress, but I cannot convey even a hint of how I have\n accomplished these miracles through the thick skull of this incompetent.", "By the way, Joe, I'm forwarding that five dollars. You see, it won't\n cost me anything. It'll come out of the pocket of the idiot who's\n writing this letter. Pretty shrewd of me, eh?\n\n\n I'm going out and look at that money again. I think I'm at last\n learning to love it, though not as much as I admire liquor. Well, one\n simply must persevere, I always say.\nGlmpauszn\nPenobscot, Maine\n\n July 20\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Now you tell me not to drink alcohol. Why not? You never mentioned it\n in any of your vibrations to us, gleebs ago, when you first came across\n to this world. It will stint my powers? Nonsense! Already I have had a\n quart of the liquid today. I feel wonderful. Get that? I actually feel\n wonderful, in spite of this miserable imitation of a body.", "That was it—I had forgotten clothes. There is only one answer to this\n oversight on my part. My mind is confused by the barrage of impressions\n that assault it. I must retire now and get them all classified. Beauty,\n pain, fear, hate, love, laughter. I don't know one from the other. I\n must feel each, become accustomed to it.\n\n\n The more I think about it, the more I realize that the information I\n have been given is very unrealistic. You have been inefficient, Joe.\n What will Blgftury and the others say of this? My great mission is\n impaired. Farewell, till I find a more intelligent mind so I can write\n you with more enlightenment.\nGlmpauszn\nMoscow, Idaho\n\n June 17\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "This telepathic control becomes more difficult every time. I must pick\n closer points of communication soon. I have nothing to report but\n failure. I bought a ton of equipment and went to work on the formula\n that is half complete in my instructions. Six of my hotel rooms were\n filled with tubes, pipes and apparatus of all kinds.\n\n\n I had got my mechanism as close to perfect as possible when I\n realized that, in my befuddled condition, I had set off a reaction\n that inevitably would result in an explosion. I had to leave there\n immediately, but I could not create suspicion. The management was not\n aware of the nature of my activities.\n\n\n I moved swiftly. I could not afford time to bring my baggage. I\n stuffed as much money into my pockets as I could and then sauntered\n into the hotel lobby. Assuming my most casual air, I told the manager\n I was checking out. Naturally he was stunned since I was his best\n customer.\n\n\n \"But why, sir?\" he asked plaintively.", "From now on I will refer to not-people simply as people, dropping the\n qualifying preface except where comparisons must be made between this\n alleged world and our own. It is merely an offshoot of our primitive\n mythology when this was considered a spirit world, just as these people\n refer to our world as never-never land and other anomalies. But we\n learned otherwise, while they never have.\n\n\n New sensations crowd into my consciousness and I am having a hard\n time classifying them. Anyway, I shall carry on swiftly now to the\n inevitable climax in which I singlehanded will obliterate the terror of\n the not-world and return to our world a hero. I cannot understand your\n not replying to my letters. I have given you a box number. What could\n have happened to your vibrations?\nGlmpauszn\nAlbuquerque, New Mexico\n\n June 15\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "Dear Joe:\n\n\n All is lost unless we work swiftly. I received your revealing letter\n the morning after having a terrible experience of my own. I drank a\n lot of gin for two days and then decided to go to one of these seance\n things.\n\n\n Somewhere along the way I picked up a red-headed girl. When we got\n to the darkened seance room, I took the redhead into a corner and\n continued my investigations into the realm of love. I failed again\n because she said yes immediately.\n\n\n The nerves of my dermis were working overtime when suddenly I had the\n most frightening experience of my life. Now I know what a horror these\n people really are to our world.\n\n\n The medium had turned out all the lights. He said there was a strong\n psychic influence in the room somewhere. That was me, of course, but I\n was too busy with the redhead to notice.", "Anyway, Mrs. Somebody wanted to make contact with her paternal\n grandmother, Lucy, from the beyond. The medium went into his act. He\n concentrated and sweated and suddenly something began to take form in\n the room. The best way to describe it in not-world language is a white,\n shapeless cascade of light.\n\n\n Mrs. Somebody reared to her feet and screeched, \"Grandma Lucy!\" Then I\n really took notice.\n\n\n Grandma Lucy, nothing! This medium had actually brought Blgftury\n partially across the vibration barrier. He must have been vibrating in\n the fringe area and got caught in the works. Did he look mad! His zyhku\n was open and his btgrimms were down.\n\n\n Worst of all, he saw me. Looked right at me with an unbelievable\n pattern of pain, anger, fear and amazement in his matrix. Me and the\n redhead.", "I am now beginning to feel the effects of this alcohol again. Ha. Don't\n I wish old Blgftury were here in the vibrational pattern of an olive?\n I'd get the blonde in and have her eat him out of a Martini. That is a\n gin mixture.\n\n\n I think I'll get a hot report off to the old so-and-so right now. It'll\n take him a gleeb to figure this one out. I'll tell him I'm setting up\n an atomic reactor in the sewage systems here and that all we have to do\n is activate it and all the not-people will die of chain asphyxiation.\n\n\n Boy, what an easy job this turned out to be. It's just a vacation. Joe,\n you old gold-bricker, imagine you here all these gleebs living off the\n fat of the land. Yak, yak. Affectionately.\nGlmpauszn\nSacramento, Calif.\n\n July 25", "I became alarmed, dived into a bush and used a mechanism that you\n unfortunately do not have—invisibility. I lay there and listened.\n\n\n \"He was stark naked,\" the girl with the sneakers said.\n\n\n A figure I recognized as a police officer spoke to her.\n\n\n \"Lizzy, you'll just have to keep these crackpot friends of yours out of\n this area.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No more buck-bathing, Lizzy,\" the officer ordered. \"No more speeches\n in the Square. Not when it results in riots at five in the morning. Now\n where is your naked friend? I'm going to make an example of him.\"", "I was baffled. What could I tell him?\n\n\n \"Don't you like the rooms?\" he persisted. \"Isn't the service good?\"\n\n\n \"It's the rooms,\" I told him. \"They're—they're—\"\n\n\n \"They're what?\" he wanted to know.\n\n\n \"They're not safe.\"\n\n\n \"Not safe? But that is ridiculous. This hotel is....\"\n\n\n At this point the blast came. My nerves were a wreck from the alcohol.\n\n\n \"See?\" I screamed. \"Not safe. I knew they were going to blow up!\"\n\n\n He stood paralyzed as I ran from the lobby. Oh, well, never say die.\n Another day, another hotel. I swear I'm even beginning to think like\n the not-men, curse them.\nGlmpauszn\nRochester, New York", "Now get this. In one room, that of Joe Binkle, which maybe is an alias,\n I find nothing but a suit of clothes, some butts and the letters I\n include here in same package. Binkle had only one suit. That I know.\n And this was it laying right in the middle of the room. Inside the\n coat was the vest, inside the vest the shirt, inside the shirt the\n underwear. The pants were up in the coat and inside of them was also\n the underwear. All this was buttoned up like Binkle had melted out of\n it and dripped through a crack in the floor. In a bureau drawer were\n the letters I told you about.\n\n\n Now. In the room right under Binkle's lived another stew bum that\n checked in Thursday ... name Ed Smith, alias maybe, too. This guy was a\n real case. He brought with him a big mirror with a heavy bronze frame.\n Airloom, he says. He pays a week in advance, staggers up the stairs to\n his room with the mirror and that's the last I see of him.", "And just let Blgftury make one crack. Just one xyzprlt. I'll have\n hgutry before the ghjdksla!\nGlmpauszn\nDear Editor:\n\n\n These guys might be queer drunk hopheads. But if not? If soon brain\n dissolve, body fall apart, how long have we got? Please, anybody who\n knows answer, write to me—Ivan Smernda, Plaza Ritz Arms—how long is a\n gleeb?", "A great deal has happened to me since I wrote to you last.\n Systematically, I have tested each emotion and sensation listed in\n our catalog. I have been, as has been said in this world, like a reed\n bending before the winds of passion. In fact, I'm rather badly bent\n indeed. Ah! You'll pardon me, but I just took time for what is known\n quaintly in this tongue as a \"hooker of red-eye.\" Ha! I've mastered\n even the vagaries of slang in the not-language.... Ahhh! Pardon me\n again. I feel much better now.\n\n\n You see, Joe, as I attuned myself to the various impressions that\n constantly assaulted my mind through this body, I conditioned myself to\n react exactly as our information catalog instructed me to.\n\n\n Now it is all automatic, pure reflex. A sensation comes to me when I am\n burned; then I experience a burning pain. If the sensation is a tickle,\n I experience a tickle." ], [ "Quickly, from the not-world vibrations about you, I learned the\n not-knowledge of your location. So I must communicate with you by what\n the not-world calls \"mail\" till we meet. For this purpose I must\n utilize the feeble vibrations of various not-people through whose\n inadequate articulation I will attempt to make my moves known to you.\n Each time I will pick a city other than the one I am in at the time.\n\n\n I, Glmpauszn, come equipped with powers evolved from your fragmentary\n reports before you ceased to vibrate to us and with a vast treasury\n of facts from indirect sources. Soon our tortured people will be free\n of the fearsome not-folk and I will be their liberator. You failed in\n your task, but I will try to get you off with light punishment when we\n return again.", "All is well, only they shot this information file into my matrix too\n fast. I'm having a hard time sorting facts and make the right decision.\n Gezsltrysk, what a task!\n\n\n Farewell till later.\nGlmpauszn\nWichita, Kansas\n\n June 13\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Mnghjkl, fhfjgfhjklop phelnoprausynks. No. When I communicate with you,\n I see I must avoid those complexities of procedure for which there are\n no terms in this language. There is no way of describing to you in\n not-language what I had to go through during the first moments of my\n birth.", "I had tremendous difficulty getting a letter off to you this time.\n My process—original with myself, by the way—is to send out feeler\n vibrations for what these people call the psychic individual. Then I\n establish contact with him while he sleeps and compel him without his\n knowledge to translate my ideas into written language. He writes my\n letter and mails it to you. Of course, he has no awareness of what he\n has done.\n\n\n My first five tries were unfortunate. Each time I took control of an\n individual who could not read or write! Finally I found my man, but\n I fear his words are limited. Ah, well. I had great things to tell\n you about my progress, but I cannot convey even a hint of how I have\n accomplished these miracles through the thick skull of this incompetent.", "Your letter was imponderable till I had thrashed through long passages\n in my information catalog that I had never imagined I would need.\n Biological functions and bodily processes which are labeled here\n \"revolting\" are used freely in your missive. You can be sure they are\n all being forwarded to Blgftury. If I were not involved in the most\n important part of my journey—completion of the weapon against the\n not-worlders—I would come to New York immediately. You would rue that\n day, I assure you.\nGlmpauszn\nBoise, Idaho\n\n July 15\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "My kid, he reads. He says it's no joke. He wants to call the cops or\n maybe some doctor. But I say no. He reads your magazine so he says\n write to you, send you the letters. You know what to do. Now you have\n them. Maybe you print. Whatever you do, Mr. Editor, remember my place,\n the Plaza Ritz Arms, is straight establishment. I don't drink. I never\n touch junk, not even aspirin.\nYours very truly,\n\n Ivan Smernda\nBombay, India\n\n June 8\n\n\n Mr. Joe Binkle\n\n Plaza Ritz Arms\n\n New York City\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Greetings, greetings, greetings. Hold firm in your wretched projection,\n for tomorrow you will not be alone in the not-world. In two days I,\n Glmpauszn, will be born.", "The latter atrocity is perpetrated through what these people call\n mediums, spiritualists and other fatuous names. I intend to visit one\n of them at the first opportunity to see for myself.\n\n\n Meanwhile, as to you, I would offer a few words of advice. I picked\n them up while examining the \"slang\" portion of my information catalog\n which you unfortunately caused me to use. So, for the ultimate\n cause—in this, the penultimate adventure, and for the glory and peace\n of our world—shake a leg, bub. Straighten up and fly right. In short,\n get hep.\n\n\n As far as the five bucks is concerned, no dice.\nGlmpauszn\nDes Moines, Iowa\n\n June 19\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "That was it—I had forgotten clothes. There is only one answer to this\n oversight on my part. My mind is confused by the barrage of impressions\n that assault it. I must retire now and get them all classified. Beauty,\n pain, fear, hate, love, laughter. I don't know one from the other. I\n must feel each, become accustomed to it.\n\n\n The more I think about it, the more I realize that the information I\n have been given is very unrealistic. You have been inefficient, Joe.\n What will Blgftury and the others say of this? My great mission is\n impaired. Farewell, till I find a more intelligent mind so I can write\n you with more enlightenment.\nGlmpauszn\nMoscow, Idaho\n\n June 17\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "Then comes your letter today telling of the fate that befell you as a\n result of drinking alcohol. Our wrenchingly attuned faculties in these\n not-world bodies need the loathsome drug to escape from the reality\n of not-reality. It's true. I cannot do without it now. The day is only\n half over and I have consumed a quart and a half. And it is dulling all\n my powers as it has practically obliterated yours. I can't even become\n invisible any more.\n\n\n I must find the formula that will wipe out the not-world men quickly.\n\n\n Quickly!\nGlmpauszn\nFlorence, Italy\n\n September 10\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "From now on I will refer to not-people simply as people, dropping the\n qualifying preface except where comparisons must be made between this\n alleged world and our own. It is merely an offshoot of our primitive\n mythology when this was considered a spirit world, just as these people\n refer to our world as never-never land and other anomalies. But we\n learned otherwise, while they never have.\n\n\n New sensations crowd into my consciousness and I am having a hard\n time classifying them. Anyway, I shall carry on swiftly now to the\n inevitable climax in which I singlehanded will obliterate the terror of\n the not-world and return to our world a hero. I cannot understand your\n not replying to my letters. I have given you a box number. What could\n have happened to your vibrations?\nGlmpauszn\nAlbuquerque, New Mexico\n\n June 15\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "By the way, Joe, I'm forwarding that five dollars. You see, it won't\n cost me anything. It'll come out of the pocket of the idiot who's\n writing this letter. Pretty shrewd of me, eh?\n\n\n I'm going out and look at that money again. I think I'm at last\n learning to love it, though not as much as I admire liquor. Well, one\n simply must persevere, I always say.\nGlmpauszn\nPenobscot, Maine\n\n July 20\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Now you tell me not to drink alcohol. Why not? You never mentioned it\n in any of your vibrations to us, gleebs ago, when you first came across\n to this world. It will stint my powers? Nonsense! Already I have had a\n quart of the liquid today. I feel wonderful. Get that? I actually feel\n wonderful, in spite of this miserable imitation of a body.", "We must use care. Stock in as much gin as you are able. I will bring\n with me all that I can. Meanwhile I must return to my original place of\n birth into this world of horrors. There I will secure the gateway, a\n large mirror, the vibrational point at which we shall meet and slowly\n climb the frequency scale to emerge into our own beautiful, now secure\n world. You and I together, Joe, conquerors, liberators.\n\n\n You say you eat little and drink as much as you can. The same with\n me. Even in this revolting world I am a sad sight. My not-world senses\n falter. This is the last letter. Tomorrow I come with the gateway. When\n the gin is gone, we will plant the mold in the hotel where you live.\n\n\n In only a single gleeb it will begin to work. The men of this queer\n world will be no more. But we can't say we didn't have some fun, can\n we, Joe?", "This telepathic control becomes more difficult every time. I must pick\n closer points of communication soon. I have nothing to report but\n failure. I bought a ton of equipment and went to work on the formula\n that is half complete in my instructions. Six of my hotel rooms were\n filled with tubes, pipes and apparatus of all kinds.\n\n\n I had got my mechanism as close to perfect as possible when I\n realized that, in my befuddled condition, I had set off a reaction\n that inevitably would result in an explosion. I had to leave there\n immediately, but I could not create suspicion. The management was not\n aware of the nature of my activities.\n\n\n I moved swiftly. I could not afford time to bring my baggage. I\n stuffed as much money into my pockets as I could and then sauntered\n into the hotel lobby. Assuming my most casual air, I told the manager\n I was checking out. Naturally he was stunned since I was his best\n customer.\n\n\n \"But why, sir?\" he asked plaintively.", "When I heard them say that he was straightening up to come see me, I\n made a special effort and grew marvelously in one afternoon. I was 36\n not-world inches tall by evening. My not-father entered while I was\n standing by the crib examining a syringe the doctor had left behind.\n He stopped in his tracks on entering the room and seemed incapable of\n speech.\n\n\n Dredging into the treasury of knowledge I had come equipped with, I\n produced the proper phrase for occasions of this kind in the not-world.\n\n\n \"Poppa,\" I said.\n\n\n This was the first use I had made of the so-called vocal cords that\n are now part of my extended matrix. The sound I emitted sounded\n low-pitched, guttural and penetrating even to myself. It must have\n jarred on my not-father's ears, for he turned and ran shouting from the\n room.", "Anyway, Mrs. Somebody wanted to make contact with her paternal\n grandmother, Lucy, from the beyond. The medium went into his act. He\n concentrated and sweated and suddenly something began to take form in\n the room. The best way to describe it in not-world language is a white,\n shapeless cascade of light.\n\n\n Mrs. Somebody reared to her feet and screeched, \"Grandma Lucy!\" Then I\n really took notice.\n\n\n Grandma Lucy, nothing! This medium had actually brought Blgftury\n partially across the vibration barrier. He must have been vibrating in\n the fringe area and got caught in the works. Did he look mad! His zyhku\n was open and his btgrimms were down.\n\n\n Worst of all, he saw me. Looked right at me with an unbelievable\n pattern of pain, anger, fear and amazement in his matrix. Me and the\n redhead.", "Now I know what difficulties you must have had with your limited\n equipment. These not-people are unpredictable and strange. Their doctor\n came in and weighed me again the day after my birth. Consternation\n reigned when it was discovered I was ten pounds heavier. What\n difference could it possibly make? Many doctors then came in to see me.\n As they arrived hourly, they found me heavier and heavier. Naturally,\n since I am growing. This is part of my instructions. My not-mother\n (Gezsltrysk!) then burst into tears. The doctors conferred, threw up\n their hands and left.\n\n\n I learned the following day that the opposite component of my\n not-mother, my not-father, had been away riding on some conveyance\n during my birth. He was out on ... what did they call it? Oh, yes, a\n bender. He did not arrive till three days after I was born.", "Today I hang in our newly developed not-pod just within the mirror\n gateway, torn with the agony that we calculated must go with such\n tremendous wavelength fluctuations. I have attuned myself to a fetus\n within the body of a not-woman in the not-world. Already I am static\n and for hours have looked into this weird extension of the Universe\n with fear and trepidation.\n\n\n As soon as my stasis was achieved, I tried to contact you, but got\n no response. What could have diminished your powers of articulate\n wave interaction to make you incapable of receiving my messages and\n returning them? My wave went out to yours and found it, barely pulsing\n and surrounded with an impregnable chimera.", "I became alarmed, dived into a bush and used a mechanism that you\n unfortunately do not have—invisibility. I lay there and listened.\n\n\n \"He was stark naked,\" the girl with the sneakers said.\n\n\n A figure I recognized as a police officer spoke to her.\n\n\n \"Lizzy, you'll just have to keep these crackpot friends of yours out of\n this area.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No more buck-bathing, Lizzy,\" the officer ordered. \"No more speeches\n in the Square. Not when it results in riots at five in the morning. Now\n where is your naked friend? I'm going to make an example of him.\"", "A great deal has happened to me since I wrote to you last.\n Systematically, I have tested each emotion and sensation listed in\n our catalog. I have been, as has been said in this world, like a reed\n bending before the winds of passion. In fact, I'm rather badly bent\n indeed. Ah! You'll pardon me, but I just took time for what is known\n quaintly in this tongue as a \"hooker of red-eye.\" Ha! I've mastered\n even the vagaries of slang in the not-language.... Ahhh! Pardon me\n again. I feel much better now.\n\n\n You see, Joe, as I attuned myself to the various impressions that\n constantly assaulted my mind through this body, I conditioned myself to\n react exactly as our information catalog instructed me to.\n\n\n Now it is all automatic, pure reflex. A sensation comes to me when I am\n burned; then I experience a burning pain. If the sensation is a tickle,\n I experience a tickle.", "In simple terms then: I crept into a cave and slipped into a kind of\n sleep, directing my squhjkl ulytz & uhrytzg ... no, it won't come out.\n Anyway, I grew overnight to the size of an average person here.\n\n\n As I said before, floods of impressions are driving into my xzbyl ...\n my brain ... from various nerve and sense areas and I am having a hard\n time classifying them. My one idea was to get to a chemist and acquire\n the stuff needed for the destruction of these people.\n\n\n Sunrise came as I expected. According to my catalog of information, the\n impressions aroused by it are of beauty. It took little conditioning\n for me finally to react in this manner. This is truly an efficient\n mechanism I inhabit.", "Dear Joe:\n\n\n All is lost unless we work swiftly. I received your revealing letter\n the morning after having a terrible experience of my own. I drank a\n lot of gin for two days and then decided to go to one of these seance\n things.\n\n\n Somewhere along the way I picked up a red-headed girl. When we got\n to the darkened seance room, I took the redhead into a corner and\n continued my investigations into the realm of love. I failed again\n because she said yes immediately.\n\n\n The nerves of my dermis were working overtime when suddenly I had the\n most frightening experience of my life. Now I know what a horror these\n people really are to our world.\n\n\n The medium had turned out all the lights. He said there was a strong\n psychic influence in the room somewhere. That was me, of course, but I\n was too busy with the redhead to notice." ], [ "Quickly, from the not-world vibrations about you, I learned the\n not-knowledge of your location. So I must communicate with you by what\n the not-world calls \"mail\" till we meet. For this purpose I must\n utilize the feeble vibrations of various not-people through whose\n inadequate articulation I will attempt to make my moves known to you.\n Each time I will pick a city other than the one I am in at the time.\n\n\n I, Glmpauszn, come equipped with powers evolved from your fragmentary\n reports before you ceased to vibrate to us and with a vast treasury\n of facts from indirect sources. Soon our tortured people will be free\n of the fearsome not-folk and I will be their liberator. You failed in\n your task, but I will try to get you off with light punishment when we\n return again.", "In simple terms then: I crept into a cave and slipped into a kind of\n sleep, directing my squhjkl ulytz & uhrytzg ... no, it won't come out.\n Anyway, I grew overnight to the size of an average person here.\n\n\n As I said before, floods of impressions are driving into my xzbyl ...\n my brain ... from various nerve and sense areas and I am having a hard\n time classifying them. My one idea was to get to a chemist and acquire\n the stuff needed for the destruction of these people.\n\n\n Sunrise came as I expected. According to my catalog of information, the\n impressions aroused by it are of beauty. It took little conditioning\n for me finally to react in this manner. This is truly an efficient\n mechanism I inhabit.", "I gazed about me at the mixture of lights, forms and impressions.\n It was strange and ... now I know ... beautiful. However, I hurried\n immediately toward the nearest chemist. At the same time I looked up\n and all about me at the beauty.\n\n\n Soon an individual approached. I knew what to do from my information. I\n simply acted natural. You know, one of your earliest instructions was\n to realize that these people see nothing unusual in you if you do not\n let yourself believe they do.\n\n\n This individual I classified as a female of a singular variety here.\n Her hair was short, her upper torso clad in a woolen garment. She\n wore ... what are they? ... oh, yes, sneakers. My attention was\n diverted by a scream as I passed her. I stopped.\n\n\n The woman gesticulated and continued to scream. People hurried from\n nearby houses. I linked my hands behind me and watched the scene with\n an attitude of mild interest. They weren't interested in me, I told\n myself. But they were.", "All is well, only they shot this information file into my matrix too\n fast. I'm having a hard time sorting facts and make the right decision.\n Gezsltrysk, what a task!\n\n\n Farewell till later.\nGlmpauszn\nWichita, Kansas\n\n June 13\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Mnghjkl, fhfjgfhjklop phelnoprausynks. No. When I communicate with you,\n I see I must avoid those complexities of procedure for which there are\n no terms in this language. There is no way of describing to you in\n not-language what I had to go through during the first moments of my\n birth.", "There are long hours during which I am so well-integrated into this\n body and this world that I almost consider myself a member of it. Now\n I can function efficiently. I sent Blgftury some long reports today\n outlining my experiments in the realm of chemistry where we must\n finally defeat these people. Of course, I haven't made the experiments\n yet, but I will. This is not deceit, merely realistic anticipation of\n the inevitable. Anyway, what the old xbyzrt doesn't know won't muss his\n vibrations.\n\n\n I went to what they call a nightclub here and picked out a\n blonde-haired woman, the kind that the books say men prefer. She was\n attracted to me instantly. After all, the body I have devised is\n perfect in every detail ... actually a not-world ideal.", "They apprehended him on the stairs and I heard him babble something\n about my being a monster and no child of his. My not-mother appeared at\n the doorway and instead of being pleased at the progress of my growth,\n she fell down heavily. She made a distinct\nthump\non the floor.\n\n\n This brought the rest of them on the run, so I climbed out the window\n and retreated across a nearby field. A prolonged search was launched,\n but I eluded them. What unpredictable beings!\n\n\n I reported my tremendous progress back to our world, including the\n cleverness by which I managed to escape my pursuers. I received a reply\n from Blgftury which, on careful analysis, seems to be small praise\n indeed. In fact, some of his phrases apparently contain veiled threats.\n But you know old Blgftury. He wanted to go on this expedition himself\n and it's his nature never to flatter anyone.", "When I heard them say that he was straightening up to come see me, I\n made a special effort and grew marvelously in one afternoon. I was 36\n not-world inches tall by evening. My not-father entered while I was\n standing by the crib examining a syringe the doctor had left behind.\n He stopped in his tracks on entering the room and seemed incapable of\n speech.\n\n\n Dredging into the treasury of knowledge I had come equipped with, I\n produced the proper phrase for occasions of this kind in the not-world.\n\n\n \"Poppa,\" I said.\n\n\n This was the first use I had made of the so-called vocal cords that\n are now part of my extended matrix. The sound I emitted sounded\n low-pitched, guttural and penetrating even to myself. It must have\n jarred on my not-father's ears, for he turned and ran shouting from the\n room.", "Now I know what difficulties you must have had with your limited\n equipment. These not-people are unpredictable and strange. Their doctor\n came in and weighed me again the day after my birth. Consternation\n reigned when it was discovered I was ten pounds heavier. What\n difference could it possibly make? Many doctors then came in to see me.\n As they arrived hourly, they found me heavier and heavier. Naturally,\n since I am growing. This is part of my instructions. My not-mother\n (Gezsltrysk!) then burst into tears. The doctors conferred, threw up\n their hands and left.\n\n\n I learned the following day that the opposite component of my\n not-mother, my not-father, had been away riding on some conveyance\n during my birth. He was out on ... what did they call it? Oh, yes, a\n bender. He did not arrive till three days after I was born.", "Your letter was imponderable till I had thrashed through long passages\n in my information catalog that I had never imagined I would need.\n Biological functions and bodily processes which are labeled here\n \"revolting\" are used freely in your missive. You can be sure they are\n all being forwarded to Blgftury. If I were not involved in the most\n important part of my journey—completion of the weapon against the\n not-worlders—I would come to New York immediately. You would rue that\n day, I assure you.\nGlmpauszn\nBoise, Idaho\n\n July 15\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "That was it—I had forgotten clothes. There is only one answer to this\n oversight on my part. My mind is confused by the barrage of impressions\n that assault it. I must retire now and get them all classified. Beauty,\n pain, fear, hate, love, laughter. I don't know one from the other. I\n must feel each, become accustomed to it.\n\n\n The more I think about it, the more I realize that the information I\n have been given is very unrealistic. You have been inefficient, Joe.\n What will Blgftury and the others say of this? My great mission is\n impaired. Farewell, till I find a more intelligent mind so I can write\n you with more enlightenment.\nGlmpauszn\nMoscow, Idaho\n\n June 17\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "A Gleeb for Earth\nBy CHARLES SHAFHAUSER\n\n\n Illustrated by EMSH\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction May 1953.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nNot to be or not to not be ... that was the\n \nnot-question for the invader of the not-world.\nDear Editor:\n\n\n My 14 year old boy, Ronnie, is typing this letter for me because he\n can do it neater and use better grammar. I had to get in touch with\n somebody about this because if there is something to it, then somebody,\n everybody, is going to point finger at me, Ivan Smernda, and say, \"Why\n didn't you warn us?\"", "This morning I have what is known medically as a syndrome ... a group\n of symptoms popularly referred to as a hangover ... Ahhh! Pardon me\n again. Strangely ... now what was I saying? Oh, yes. Ha, ha. Strangely\n enough, the reactions that come easiest to the people in this world\n came most difficult to me. Money-love, for example. It is a great thing\n here, both among those who haven't got it and those who have.\n\n\n I went out and got plenty of money. I walked invisible into a bank and\n carried away piles of it. Then I sat and looked at it. I took the money\n to a remote room of the twenty room suite I have rented in the best\n hotel here in—no, sorry—and stared at it for hours.\n\n\n Nothing happened. I didn't love the stuff or feel one way or the other\n about it. Yet all around me people are actually killing one another for\n the love of it.", "From now on I will refer to not-people simply as people, dropping the\n qualifying preface except where comparisons must be made between this\n alleged world and our own. It is merely an offshoot of our primitive\n mythology when this was considered a spirit world, just as these people\n refer to our world as never-never land and other anomalies. But we\n learned otherwise, while they never have.\n\n\n New sensations crowd into my consciousness and I am having a hard\n time classifying them. Anyway, I shall carry on swiftly now to the\n inevitable climax in which I singlehanded will obliterate the terror of\n the not-world and return to our world a hero. I cannot understand your\n not replying to my letters. I have given you a box number. What could\n have happened to your vibrations?\nGlmpauszn\nAlbuquerque, New Mexico\n\n June 15\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "Then comes your letter today telling of the fate that befell you as a\n result of drinking alcohol. Our wrenchingly attuned faculties in these\n not-world bodies need the loathsome drug to escape from the reality\n of not-reality. It's true. I cannot do without it now. The day is only\n half over and I have consumed a quart and a half. And it is dulling all\n my powers as it has practically obliterated yours. I can't even become\n invisible any more.\n\n\n I must find the formula that will wipe out the not-world men quickly.\n\n\n Quickly!\nGlmpauszn\nFlorence, Italy\n\n September 10\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "A great deal has happened to me since I wrote to you last.\n Systematically, I have tested each emotion and sensation listed in\n our catalog. I have been, as has been said in this world, like a reed\n bending before the winds of passion. In fact, I'm rather badly bent\n indeed. Ah! You'll pardon me, but I just took time for what is known\n quaintly in this tongue as a \"hooker of red-eye.\" Ha! I've mastered\n even the vagaries of slang in the not-language.... Ahhh! Pardon me\n again. I feel much better now.\n\n\n You see, Joe, as I attuned myself to the various impressions that\n constantly assaulted my mind through this body, I conditioned myself to\n react exactly as our information catalog instructed me to.\n\n\n Now it is all automatic, pure reflex. A sensation comes to me when I am\n burned; then I experience a burning pain. If the sensation is a tickle,\n I experience a tickle.", "My kid, he reads. He says it's no joke. He wants to call the cops or\n maybe some doctor. But I say no. He reads your magazine so he says\n write to you, send you the letters. You know what to do. Now you have\n them. Maybe you print. Whatever you do, Mr. Editor, remember my place,\n the Plaza Ritz Arms, is straight establishment. I don't drink. I never\n touch junk, not even aspirin.\nYours very truly,\n\n Ivan Smernda\nBombay, India\n\n June 8\n\n\n Mr. Joe Binkle\n\n Plaza Ritz Arms\n\n New York City\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Greetings, greetings, greetings. Hold firm in your wretched projection,\n for tomorrow you will not be alone in the not-world. In two days I,\n Glmpauszn, will be born.", "I was baffled. What could I tell him?\n\n\n \"Don't you like the rooms?\" he persisted. \"Isn't the service good?\"\n\n\n \"It's the rooms,\" I told him. \"They're—they're—\"\n\n\n \"They're what?\" he wanted to know.\n\n\n \"They're not safe.\"\n\n\n \"Not safe? But that is ridiculous. This hotel is....\"\n\n\n At this point the blast came. My nerves were a wreck from the alcohol.\n\n\n \"See?\" I screamed. \"Not safe. I knew they were going to blow up!\"\n\n\n He stood paralyzed as I ran from the lobby. Oh, well, never say die.\n Another day, another hotel. I swear I'm even beginning to think like\n the not-men, curse them.\nGlmpauszn\nRochester, New York", "I became alarmed, dived into a bush and used a mechanism that you\n unfortunately do not have—invisibility. I lay there and listened.\n\n\n \"He was stark naked,\" the girl with the sneakers said.\n\n\n A figure I recognized as a police officer spoke to her.\n\n\n \"Lizzy, you'll just have to keep these crackpot friends of yours out of\n this area.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No more buck-bathing, Lizzy,\" the officer ordered. \"No more speeches\n in the Square. Not when it results in riots at five in the morning. Now\n where is your naked friend? I'm going to make an example of him.\"", "I am now beginning to feel the effects of this alcohol again. Ha. Don't\n I wish old Blgftury were here in the vibrational pattern of an olive?\n I'd get the blonde in and have her eat him out of a Martini. That is a\n gin mixture.\n\n\n I think I'll get a hot report off to the old so-and-so right now. It'll\n take him a gleeb to figure this one out. I'll tell him I'm setting up\n an atomic reactor in the sewage systems here and that all we have to do\n is activate it and all the not-people will die of chain asphyxiation.\n\n\n Boy, what an easy job this turned out to be. It's just a vacation. Joe,\n you old gold-bricker, imagine you here all these gleebs living off the\n fat of the land. Yak, yak. Affectionately.\nGlmpauszn\nSacramento, Calif.\n\n July 25", "I didn't lose any time overwhelming her susceptibilities. I remember\n distinctly that just as I stooped to pick up a large roll of money I\n had dropped, her eyes met mine and in them I could see her admiration.\n We went to my suite and I showed her one of the money rooms. Would you\n believe it? She actually took off her shoes and ran around through the\n money in her bare feet! Then we kissed.\n\n\n Concealed in the dermis of the lips are tiny, highly sensitized nerve\n ends which send sensations to the brain. The brain interprets these\n impulses in a certain manner. As a result, the fate of secretion in the\n adrenals on the ends of the kidneys increases and an enlivening of the\n entire endocrine system follows. Thus I felt the beginnings of love.\n\n\n I sat her down on a pile of money and kissed her again. Again the\n tingling, again the secretion and activation. I integrated myself\n quickly." ], [ "Quickly, from the not-world vibrations about you, I learned the\n not-knowledge of your location. So I must communicate with you by what\n the not-world calls \"mail\" till we meet. For this purpose I must\n utilize the feeble vibrations of various not-people through whose\n inadequate articulation I will attempt to make my moves known to you.\n Each time I will pick a city other than the one I am in at the time.\n\n\n I, Glmpauszn, come equipped with powers evolved from your fragmentary\n reports before you ceased to vibrate to us and with a vast treasury\n of facts from indirect sources. Soon our tortured people will be free\n of the fearsome not-folk and I will be their liberator. You failed in\n your task, but I will try to get you off with light punishment when we\n return again.", "My kid, he reads. He says it's no joke. He wants to call the cops or\n maybe some doctor. But I say no. He reads your magazine so he says\n write to you, send you the letters. You know what to do. Now you have\n them. Maybe you print. Whatever you do, Mr. Editor, remember my place,\n the Plaza Ritz Arms, is straight establishment. I don't drink. I never\n touch junk, not even aspirin.\nYours very truly,\n\n Ivan Smernda\nBombay, India\n\n June 8\n\n\n Mr. Joe Binkle\n\n Plaza Ritz Arms\n\n New York City\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Greetings, greetings, greetings. Hold firm in your wretched projection,\n for tomorrow you will not be alone in the not-world. In two days I,\n Glmpauszn, will be born.", "Your letter was imponderable till I had thrashed through long passages\n in my information catalog that I had never imagined I would need.\n Biological functions and bodily processes which are labeled here\n \"revolting\" are used freely in your missive. You can be sure they are\n all being forwarded to Blgftury. If I were not involved in the most\n important part of my journey—completion of the weapon against the\n not-worlders—I would come to New York immediately. You would rue that\n day, I assure you.\nGlmpauszn\nBoise, Idaho\n\n July 15\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "Then comes your letter today telling of the fate that befell you as a\n result of drinking alcohol. Our wrenchingly attuned faculties in these\n not-world bodies need the loathsome drug to escape from the reality\n of not-reality. It's true. I cannot do without it now. The day is only\n half over and I have consumed a quart and a half. And it is dulling all\n my powers as it has practically obliterated yours. I can't even become\n invisible any more.\n\n\n I must find the formula that will wipe out the not-world men quickly.\n\n\n Quickly!\nGlmpauszn\nFlorence, Italy\n\n September 10\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "We must use care. Stock in as much gin as you are able. I will bring\n with me all that I can. Meanwhile I must return to my original place of\n birth into this world of horrors. There I will secure the gateway, a\n large mirror, the vibrational point at which we shall meet and slowly\n climb the frequency scale to emerge into our own beautiful, now secure\n world. You and I together, Joe, conquerors, liberators.\n\n\n You say you eat little and drink as much as you can. The same with\n me. Even in this revolting world I am a sad sight. My not-world senses\n falter. This is the last letter. Tomorrow I come with the gateway. When\n the gin is gone, we will plant the mold in the hotel where you live.\n\n\n In only a single gleeb it will begin to work. The men of this queer\n world will be no more. But we can't say we didn't have some fun, can\n we, Joe?", "The latter atrocity is perpetrated through what these people call\n mediums, spiritualists and other fatuous names. I intend to visit one\n of them at the first opportunity to see for myself.\n\n\n Meanwhile, as to you, I would offer a few words of advice. I picked\n them up while examining the \"slang\" portion of my information catalog\n which you unfortunately caused me to use. So, for the ultimate\n cause—in this, the penultimate adventure, and for the glory and peace\n of our world—shake a leg, bub. Straighten up and fly right. In short,\n get hep.\n\n\n As far as the five bucks is concerned, no dice.\nGlmpauszn\nDes Moines, Iowa\n\n June 19\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "All is well, only they shot this information file into my matrix too\n fast. I'm having a hard time sorting facts and make the right decision.\n Gezsltrysk, what a task!\n\n\n Farewell till later.\nGlmpauszn\nWichita, Kansas\n\n June 13\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Mnghjkl, fhfjgfhjklop phelnoprausynks. No. When I communicate with you,\n I see I must avoid those complexities of procedure for which there are\n no terms in this language. There is no way of describing to you in\n not-language what I had to go through during the first moments of my\n birth.", "That was it—I had forgotten clothes. There is only one answer to this\n oversight on my part. My mind is confused by the barrage of impressions\n that assault it. I must retire now and get them all classified. Beauty,\n pain, fear, hate, love, laughter. I don't know one from the other. I\n must feel each, become accustomed to it.\n\n\n The more I think about it, the more I realize that the information I\n have been given is very unrealistic. You have been inefficient, Joe.\n What will Blgftury and the others say of this? My great mission is\n impaired. Farewell, till I find a more intelligent mind so I can write\n you with more enlightenment.\nGlmpauszn\nMoscow, Idaho\n\n June 17\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "I was baffled. What could I tell him?\n\n\n \"Don't you like the rooms?\" he persisted. \"Isn't the service good?\"\n\n\n \"It's the rooms,\" I told him. \"They're—they're—\"\n\n\n \"They're what?\" he wanted to know.\n\n\n \"They're not safe.\"\n\n\n \"Not safe? But that is ridiculous. This hotel is....\"\n\n\n At this point the blast came. My nerves were a wreck from the alcohol.\n\n\n \"See?\" I screamed. \"Not safe. I knew they were going to blow up!\"\n\n\n He stood paralyzed as I ran from the lobby. Oh, well, never say die.\n Another day, another hotel. I swear I'm even beginning to think like\n the not-men, curse them.\nGlmpauszn\nRochester, New York", "By the way, Joe, I'm forwarding that five dollars. You see, it won't\n cost me anything. It'll come out of the pocket of the idiot who's\n writing this letter. Pretty shrewd of me, eh?\n\n\n I'm going out and look at that money again. I think I'm at last\n learning to love it, though not as much as I admire liquor. Well, one\n simply must persevere, I always say.\nGlmpauszn\nPenobscot, Maine\n\n July 20\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Now you tell me not to drink alcohol. Why not? You never mentioned it\n in any of your vibrations to us, gleebs ago, when you first came across\n to this world. It will stint my powers? Nonsense! Already I have had a\n quart of the liquid today. I feel wonderful. Get that? I actually feel\n wonderful, in spite of this miserable imitation of a body.", "I became alarmed, dived into a bush and used a mechanism that you\n unfortunately do not have—invisibility. I lay there and listened.\n\n\n \"He was stark naked,\" the girl with the sneakers said.\n\n\n A figure I recognized as a police officer spoke to her.\n\n\n \"Lizzy, you'll just have to keep these crackpot friends of yours out of\n this area.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No more buck-bathing, Lizzy,\" the officer ordered. \"No more speeches\n in the Square. Not when it results in riots at five in the morning. Now\n where is your naked friend? I'm going to make an example of him.\"", "September 25\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n I have it! It is done! In spite of the alcohol, in spite of Blgftury's\n niggling criticism, I have succeeded. I now have developed a form\n of mold, somewhat similar to the antibiotics of this world, that,\n transmitted to the human organism, will cause a disease whose end will\n be swift and fatal.\n\n\n First the brain will dissolve and then the body will fall apart.\n Nothing in this world can stop the spread of it once it is loose.\n Absolutely nothing.", "I am now beginning to feel the effects of this alcohol again. Ha. Don't\n I wish old Blgftury were here in the vibrational pattern of an olive?\n I'd get the blonde in and have her eat him out of a Martini. That is a\n gin mixture.\n\n\n I think I'll get a hot report off to the old so-and-so right now. It'll\n take him a gleeb to figure this one out. I'll tell him I'm setting up\n an atomic reactor in the sewage systems here and that all we have to do\n is activate it and all the not-people will die of chain asphyxiation.\n\n\n Boy, what an easy job this turned out to be. It's just a vacation. Joe,\n you old gold-bricker, imagine you here all these gleebs living off the\n fat of the land. Yak, yak. Affectionately.\nGlmpauszn\nSacramento, Calif.\n\n July 25", "From now on I will refer to not-people simply as people, dropping the\n qualifying preface except where comparisons must be made between this\n alleged world and our own. It is merely an offshoot of our primitive\n mythology when this was considered a spirit world, just as these people\n refer to our world as never-never land and other anomalies. But we\n learned otherwise, while they never have.\n\n\n New sensations crowd into my consciousness and I am having a hard\n time classifying them. Anyway, I shall carry on swiftly now to the\n inevitable climax in which I singlehanded will obliterate the terror of\n the not-world and return to our world a hero. I cannot understand your\n not replying to my letters. I have given you a box number. What could\n have happened to your vibrations?\nGlmpauszn\nAlbuquerque, New Mexico\n\n June 15\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "Dear Joe:\n\n\n All is lost unless we work swiftly. I received your revealing letter\n the morning after having a terrible experience of my own. I drank a\n lot of gin for two days and then decided to go to one of these seance\n things.\n\n\n Somewhere along the way I picked up a red-headed girl. When we got\n to the darkened seance room, I took the redhead into a corner and\n continued my investigations into the realm of love. I failed again\n because she said yes immediately.\n\n\n The nerves of my dermis were working overtime when suddenly I had the\n most frightening experience of my life. Now I know what a horror these\n people really are to our world.\n\n\n The medium had turned out all the lights. He said there was a strong\n psychic influence in the room somewhere. That was me, of course, but I\n was too busy with the redhead to notice.", "And just let Blgftury make one crack. Just one xyzprlt. I'll have\n hgutry before the ghjdksla!\nGlmpauszn\nDear Editor:\n\n\n These guys might be queer drunk hopheads. But if not? If soon brain\n dissolve, body fall apart, how long have we got? Please, anybody who\n knows answer, write to me—Ivan Smernda, Plaza Ritz Arms—how long is a\n gleeb?", "This telepathic control becomes more difficult every time. I must pick\n closer points of communication soon. I have nothing to report but\n failure. I bought a ton of equipment and went to work on the formula\n that is half complete in my instructions. Six of my hotel rooms were\n filled with tubes, pipes and apparatus of all kinds.\n\n\n I had got my mechanism as close to perfect as possible when I\n realized that, in my befuddled condition, I had set off a reaction\n that inevitably would result in an explosion. I had to leave there\n immediately, but I could not create suspicion. The management was not\n aware of the nature of my activities.\n\n\n I moved swiftly. I could not afford time to bring my baggage. I\n stuffed as much money into my pockets as I could and then sauntered\n into the hotel lobby. Assuming my most casual air, I told the manager\n I was checking out. Naturally he was stunned since I was his best\n customer.\n\n\n \"But why, sir?\" he asked plaintively.", "Now get this. In one room, that of Joe Binkle, which maybe is an alias,\n I find nothing but a suit of clothes, some butts and the letters I\n include here in same package. Binkle had only one suit. That I know.\n And this was it laying right in the middle of the room. Inside the\n coat was the vest, inside the vest the shirt, inside the shirt the\n underwear. The pants were up in the coat and inside of them was also\n the underwear. All this was buttoned up like Binkle had melted out of\n it and dripped through a crack in the floor. In a bureau drawer were\n the letters I told you about.\n\n\n Now. In the room right under Binkle's lived another stew bum that\n checked in Thursday ... name Ed Smith, alias maybe, too. This guy was a\n real case. He brought with him a big mirror with a heavy bronze frame.\n Airloom, he says. He pays a week in advance, staggers up the stairs to\n his room with the mirror and that's the last I see of him.", "They apprehended him on the stairs and I heard him babble something\n about my being a monster and no child of his. My not-mother appeared at\n the doorway and instead of being pleased at the progress of my growth,\n she fell down heavily. She made a distinct\nthump\non the floor.\n\n\n This brought the rest of them on the run, so I climbed out the window\n and retreated across a nearby field. A prolonged search was launched,\n but I eluded them. What unpredictable beings!\n\n\n I reported my tremendous progress back to our world, including the\n cleverness by which I managed to escape my pursuers. I received a reply\n from Blgftury which, on careful analysis, seems to be small praise\n indeed. In fact, some of his phrases apparently contain veiled threats.\n But you know old Blgftury. He wanted to go on this expedition himself\n and it's his nature never to flatter anyone.", "A Gleeb for Earth\nBy CHARLES SHAFHAUSER\n\n\n Illustrated by EMSH\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction May 1953.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nNot to be or not to not be ... that was the\n \nnot-question for the invader of the not-world.\nDear Editor:\n\n\n My 14 year old boy, Ronnie, is typing this letter for me because he\n can do it neater and use better grammar. I had to get in touch with\n somebody about this because if there is something to it, then somebody,\n everybody, is going to point finger at me, Ivan Smernda, and say, \"Why\n didn't you warn us?\"" ], [ "Quickly, from the not-world vibrations about you, I learned the\n not-knowledge of your location. So I must communicate with you by what\n the not-world calls \"mail\" till we meet. For this purpose I must\n utilize the feeble vibrations of various not-people through whose\n inadequate articulation I will attempt to make my moves known to you.\n Each time I will pick a city other than the one I am in at the time.\n\n\n I, Glmpauszn, come equipped with powers evolved from your fragmentary\n reports before you ceased to vibrate to us and with a vast treasury\n of facts from indirect sources. Soon our tortured people will be free\n of the fearsome not-folk and I will be their liberator. You failed in\n your task, but I will try to get you off with light punishment when we\n return again.", "My kid, he reads. He says it's no joke. He wants to call the cops or\n maybe some doctor. But I say no. He reads your magazine so he says\n write to you, send you the letters. You know what to do. Now you have\n them. Maybe you print. Whatever you do, Mr. Editor, remember my place,\n the Plaza Ritz Arms, is straight establishment. I don't drink. I never\n touch junk, not even aspirin.\nYours very truly,\n\n Ivan Smernda\nBombay, India\n\n June 8\n\n\n Mr. Joe Binkle\n\n Plaza Ritz Arms\n\n New York City\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Greetings, greetings, greetings. Hold firm in your wretched projection,\n for tomorrow you will not be alone in the not-world. In two days I,\n Glmpauszn, will be born.", "Then comes your letter today telling of the fate that befell you as a\n result of drinking alcohol. Our wrenchingly attuned faculties in these\n not-world bodies need the loathsome drug to escape from the reality\n of not-reality. It's true. I cannot do without it now. The day is only\n half over and I have consumed a quart and a half. And it is dulling all\n my powers as it has practically obliterated yours. I can't even become\n invisible any more.\n\n\n I must find the formula that will wipe out the not-world men quickly.\n\n\n Quickly!\nGlmpauszn\nFlorence, Italy\n\n September 10\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "We must use care. Stock in as much gin as you are able. I will bring\n with me all that I can. Meanwhile I must return to my original place of\n birth into this world of horrors. There I will secure the gateway, a\n large mirror, the vibrational point at which we shall meet and slowly\n climb the frequency scale to emerge into our own beautiful, now secure\n world. You and I together, Joe, conquerors, liberators.\n\n\n You say you eat little and drink as much as you can. The same with\n me. Even in this revolting world I am a sad sight. My not-world senses\n falter. This is the last letter. Tomorrow I come with the gateway. When\n the gin is gone, we will plant the mold in the hotel where you live.\n\n\n In only a single gleeb it will begin to work. The men of this queer\n world will be no more. But we can't say we didn't have some fun, can\n we, Joe?", "Your letter was imponderable till I had thrashed through long passages\n in my information catalog that I had never imagined I would need.\n Biological functions and bodily processes which are labeled here\n \"revolting\" are used freely in your missive. You can be sure they are\n all being forwarded to Blgftury. If I were not involved in the most\n important part of my journey—completion of the weapon against the\n not-worlders—I would come to New York immediately. You would rue that\n day, I assure you.\nGlmpauszn\nBoise, Idaho\n\n July 15\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "In simple terms then: I crept into a cave and slipped into a kind of\n sleep, directing my squhjkl ulytz & uhrytzg ... no, it won't come out.\n Anyway, I grew overnight to the size of an average person here.\n\n\n As I said before, floods of impressions are driving into my xzbyl ...\n my brain ... from various nerve and sense areas and I am having a hard\n time classifying them. My one idea was to get to a chemist and acquire\n the stuff needed for the destruction of these people.\n\n\n Sunrise came as I expected. According to my catalog of information, the\n impressions aroused by it are of beauty. It took little conditioning\n for me finally to react in this manner. This is truly an efficient\n mechanism I inhabit.", "That was it—I had forgotten clothes. There is only one answer to this\n oversight on my part. My mind is confused by the barrage of impressions\n that assault it. I must retire now and get them all classified. Beauty,\n pain, fear, hate, love, laughter. I don't know one from the other. I\n must feel each, become accustomed to it.\n\n\n The more I think about it, the more I realize that the information I\n have been given is very unrealistic. You have been inefficient, Joe.\n What will Blgftury and the others say of this? My great mission is\n impaired. Farewell, till I find a more intelligent mind so I can write\n you with more enlightenment.\nGlmpauszn\nMoscow, Idaho\n\n June 17\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "I became alarmed, dived into a bush and used a mechanism that you\n unfortunately do not have—invisibility. I lay there and listened.\n\n\n \"He was stark naked,\" the girl with the sneakers said.\n\n\n A figure I recognized as a police officer spoke to her.\n\n\n \"Lizzy, you'll just have to keep these crackpot friends of yours out of\n this area.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No more buck-bathing, Lizzy,\" the officer ordered. \"No more speeches\n in the Square. Not when it results in riots at five in the morning. Now\n where is your naked friend? I'm going to make an example of him.\"", "I was baffled. What could I tell him?\n\n\n \"Don't you like the rooms?\" he persisted. \"Isn't the service good?\"\n\n\n \"It's the rooms,\" I told him. \"They're—they're—\"\n\n\n \"They're what?\" he wanted to know.\n\n\n \"They're not safe.\"\n\n\n \"Not safe? But that is ridiculous. This hotel is....\"\n\n\n At this point the blast came. My nerves were a wreck from the alcohol.\n\n\n \"See?\" I screamed. \"Not safe. I knew they were going to blow up!\"\n\n\n He stood paralyzed as I ran from the lobby. Oh, well, never say die.\n Another day, another hotel. I swear I'm even beginning to think like\n the not-men, curse them.\nGlmpauszn\nRochester, New York", "They apprehended him on the stairs and I heard him babble something\n about my being a monster and no child of his. My not-mother appeared at\n the doorway and instead of being pleased at the progress of my growth,\n she fell down heavily. She made a distinct\nthump\non the floor.\n\n\n This brought the rest of them on the run, so I climbed out the window\n and retreated across a nearby field. A prolonged search was launched,\n but I eluded them. What unpredictable beings!\n\n\n I reported my tremendous progress back to our world, including the\n cleverness by which I managed to escape my pursuers. I received a reply\n from Blgftury which, on careful analysis, seems to be small praise\n indeed. In fact, some of his phrases apparently contain veiled threats.\n But you know old Blgftury. He wanted to go on this expedition himself\n and it's his nature never to flatter anyone.", "The latter atrocity is perpetrated through what these people call\n mediums, spiritualists and other fatuous names. I intend to visit one\n of them at the first opportunity to see for myself.\n\n\n Meanwhile, as to you, I would offer a few words of advice. I picked\n them up while examining the \"slang\" portion of my information catalog\n which you unfortunately caused me to use. So, for the ultimate\n cause—in this, the penultimate adventure, and for the glory and peace\n of our world—shake a leg, bub. Straighten up and fly right. In short,\n get hep.\n\n\n As far as the five bucks is concerned, no dice.\nGlmpauszn\nDes Moines, Iowa\n\n June 19\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "When I heard them say that he was straightening up to come see me, I\n made a special effort and grew marvelously in one afternoon. I was 36\n not-world inches tall by evening. My not-father entered while I was\n standing by the crib examining a syringe the doctor had left behind.\n He stopped in his tracks on entering the room and seemed incapable of\n speech.\n\n\n Dredging into the treasury of knowledge I had come equipped with, I\n produced the proper phrase for occasions of this kind in the not-world.\n\n\n \"Poppa,\" I said.\n\n\n This was the first use I had made of the so-called vocal cords that\n are now part of my extended matrix. The sound I emitted sounded\n low-pitched, guttural and penetrating even to myself. It must have\n jarred on my not-father's ears, for he turned and ran shouting from the\n room.", "Anyway.... Ahhh. Pardon me. I got myself enough money to fill ten or\n fifteen rooms. By the end of the week I should have all eighteen spare\n rooms filled with money. If I don't love it then, I'll feel I have\n failed. This alcohol is taking effect now.\n\n\n Blgftury has been goading me for reports. To hell with his reports!\n I've got a lot more emotions to try, such as romantic love. I've been\n studying this phenomenon, along with other racial characteristics of\n these people, in the movies. This is the best place to see these\n people as they really are. They all go into the movie houses and there\n do homage to their own images. Very quaint type of idolatry.\n\n\n Love. Ha! What an adventure this is becoming.", "I gazed about me at the mixture of lights, forms and impressions.\n It was strange and ... now I know ... beautiful. However, I hurried\n immediately toward the nearest chemist. At the same time I looked up\n and all about me at the beauty.\n\n\n Soon an individual approached. I knew what to do from my information. I\n simply acted natural. You know, one of your earliest instructions was\n to realize that these people see nothing unusual in you if you do not\n let yourself believe they do.\n\n\n This individual I classified as a female of a singular variety here.\n Her hair was short, her upper torso clad in a woolen garment. She\n wore ... what are they? ... oh, yes, sneakers. My attention was\n diverted by a scream as I passed her. I stopped.\n\n\n The woman gesticulated and continued to scream. People hurried from\n nearby houses. I linked my hands behind me and watched the scene with\n an attitude of mild interest. They weren't interested in me, I told\n myself. But they were.", "All is well, only they shot this information file into my matrix too\n fast. I'm having a hard time sorting facts and make the right decision.\n Gezsltrysk, what a task!\n\n\n Farewell till later.\nGlmpauszn\nWichita, Kansas\n\n June 13\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Mnghjkl, fhfjgfhjklop phelnoprausynks. No. When I communicate with you,\n I see I must avoid those complexities of procedure for which there are\n no terms in this language. There is no way of describing to you in\n not-language what I had to go through during the first moments of my\n birth.", "From now on I will refer to not-people simply as people, dropping the\n qualifying preface except where comparisons must be made between this\n alleged world and our own. It is merely an offshoot of our primitive\n mythology when this was considered a spirit world, just as these people\n refer to our world as never-never land and other anomalies. But we\n learned otherwise, while they never have.\n\n\n New sensations crowd into my consciousness and I am having a hard\n time classifying them. Anyway, I shall carry on swiftly now to the\n inevitable climax in which I singlehanded will obliterate the terror of\n the not-world and return to our world a hero. I cannot understand your\n not replying to my letters. I have given you a box number. What could\n have happened to your vibrations?\nGlmpauszn\nAlbuquerque, New Mexico\n\n June 15\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "I didn't lose any time overwhelming her susceptibilities. I remember\n distinctly that just as I stooped to pick up a large roll of money I\n had dropped, her eyes met mine and in them I could see her admiration.\n We went to my suite and I showed her one of the money rooms. Would you\n believe it? She actually took off her shoes and ran around through the\n money in her bare feet! Then we kissed.\n\n\n Concealed in the dermis of the lips are tiny, highly sensitized nerve\n ends which send sensations to the brain. The brain interprets these\n impulses in a certain manner. As a result, the fate of secretion in the\n adrenals on the ends of the kidneys increases and an enlivening of the\n entire endocrine system follows. Thus I felt the beginnings of love.\n\n\n I sat her down on a pile of money and kissed her again. Again the\n tingling, again the secretion and activation. I integrated myself\n quickly.", "There are long hours during which I am so well-integrated into this\n body and this world that I almost consider myself a member of it. Now\n I can function efficiently. I sent Blgftury some long reports today\n outlining my experiments in the realm of chemistry where we must\n finally defeat these people. Of course, I haven't made the experiments\n yet, but I will. This is not deceit, merely realistic anticipation of\n the inevitable. Anyway, what the old xbyzrt doesn't know won't muss his\n vibrations.\n\n\n I went to what they call a nightclub here and picked out a\n blonde-haired woman, the kind that the books say men prefer. She was\n attracted to me instantly. After all, the body I have devised is\n perfect in every detail ... actually a not-world ideal.", "I am now beginning to feel the effects of this alcohol again. Ha. Don't\n I wish old Blgftury were here in the vibrational pattern of an olive?\n I'd get the blonde in and have her eat him out of a Martini. That is a\n gin mixture.\n\n\n I think I'll get a hot report off to the old so-and-so right now. It'll\n take him a gleeb to figure this one out. I'll tell him I'm setting up\n an atomic reactor in the sewage systems here and that all we have to do\n is activate it and all the not-people will die of chain asphyxiation.\n\n\n Boy, what an easy job this turned out to be. It's just a vacation. Joe,\n you old gold-bricker, imagine you here all these gleebs living off the\n fat of the land. Yak, yak. Affectionately.\nGlmpauszn\nSacramento, Calif.\n\n July 25", "And just let Blgftury make one crack. Just one xyzprlt. I'll have\n hgutry before the ghjdksla!\nGlmpauszn\nDear Editor:\n\n\n These guys might be queer drunk hopheads. But if not? If soon brain\n dissolve, body fall apart, how long have we got? Please, anybody who\n knows answer, write to me—Ivan Smernda, Plaza Ritz Arms—how long is a\n gleeb?" ], [ "Quickly, from the not-world vibrations about you, I learned the\n not-knowledge of your location. So I must communicate with you by what\n the not-world calls \"mail\" till we meet. For this purpose I must\n utilize the feeble vibrations of various not-people through whose\n inadequate articulation I will attempt to make my moves known to you.\n Each time I will pick a city other than the one I am in at the time.\n\n\n I, Glmpauszn, come equipped with powers evolved from your fragmentary\n reports before you ceased to vibrate to us and with a vast treasury\n of facts from indirect sources. Soon our tortured people will be free\n of the fearsome not-folk and I will be their liberator. You failed in\n your task, but I will try to get you off with light punishment when we\n return again.", "Then comes your letter today telling of the fate that befell you as a\n result of drinking alcohol. Our wrenchingly attuned faculties in these\n not-world bodies need the loathsome drug to escape from the reality\n of not-reality. It's true. I cannot do without it now. The day is only\n half over and I have consumed a quart and a half. And it is dulling all\n my powers as it has practically obliterated yours. I can't even become\n invisible any more.\n\n\n I must find the formula that will wipe out the not-world men quickly.\n\n\n Quickly!\nGlmpauszn\nFlorence, Italy\n\n September 10\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "From now on I will refer to not-people simply as people, dropping the\n qualifying preface except where comparisons must be made between this\n alleged world and our own. It is merely an offshoot of our primitive\n mythology when this was considered a spirit world, just as these people\n refer to our world as never-never land and other anomalies. But we\n learned otherwise, while they never have.\n\n\n New sensations crowd into my consciousness and I am having a hard\n time classifying them. Anyway, I shall carry on swiftly now to the\n inevitable climax in which I singlehanded will obliterate the terror of\n the not-world and return to our world a hero. I cannot understand your\n not replying to my letters. I have given you a box number. What could\n have happened to your vibrations?\nGlmpauszn\nAlbuquerque, New Mexico\n\n June 15\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "We must use care. Stock in as much gin as you are able. I will bring\n with me all that I can. Meanwhile I must return to my original place of\n birth into this world of horrors. There I will secure the gateway, a\n large mirror, the vibrational point at which we shall meet and slowly\n climb the frequency scale to emerge into our own beautiful, now secure\n world. You and I together, Joe, conquerors, liberators.\n\n\n You say you eat little and drink as much as you can. The same with\n me. Even in this revolting world I am a sad sight. My not-world senses\n falter. This is the last letter. Tomorrow I come with the gateway. When\n the gin is gone, we will plant the mold in the hotel where you live.\n\n\n In only a single gleeb it will begin to work. The men of this queer\n world will be no more. But we can't say we didn't have some fun, can\n we, Joe?", "My kid, he reads. He says it's no joke. He wants to call the cops or\n maybe some doctor. But I say no. He reads your magazine so he says\n write to you, send you the letters. You know what to do. Now you have\n them. Maybe you print. Whatever you do, Mr. Editor, remember my place,\n the Plaza Ritz Arms, is straight establishment. I don't drink. I never\n touch junk, not even aspirin.\nYours very truly,\n\n Ivan Smernda\nBombay, India\n\n June 8\n\n\n Mr. Joe Binkle\n\n Plaza Ritz Arms\n\n New York City\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Greetings, greetings, greetings. Hold firm in your wretched projection,\n for tomorrow you will not be alone in the not-world. In two days I,\n Glmpauszn, will be born.", "Your letter was imponderable till I had thrashed through long passages\n in my information catalog that I had never imagined I would need.\n Biological functions and bodily processes which are labeled here\n \"revolting\" are used freely in your missive. You can be sure they are\n all being forwarded to Blgftury. If I were not involved in the most\n important part of my journey—completion of the weapon against the\n not-worlders—I would come to New York immediately. You would rue that\n day, I assure you.\nGlmpauszn\nBoise, Idaho\n\n July 15\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "That was it—I had forgotten clothes. There is only one answer to this\n oversight on my part. My mind is confused by the barrage of impressions\n that assault it. I must retire now and get them all classified. Beauty,\n pain, fear, hate, love, laughter. I don't know one from the other. I\n must feel each, become accustomed to it.\n\n\n The more I think about it, the more I realize that the information I\n have been given is very unrealistic. You have been inefficient, Joe.\n What will Blgftury and the others say of this? My great mission is\n impaired. Farewell, till I find a more intelligent mind so I can write\n you with more enlightenment.\nGlmpauszn\nMoscow, Idaho\n\n June 17\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "There are long hours during which I am so well-integrated into this\n body and this world that I almost consider myself a member of it. Now\n I can function efficiently. I sent Blgftury some long reports today\n outlining my experiments in the realm of chemistry where we must\n finally defeat these people. Of course, I haven't made the experiments\n yet, but I will. This is not deceit, merely realistic anticipation of\n the inevitable. Anyway, what the old xbyzrt doesn't know won't muss his\n vibrations.\n\n\n I went to what they call a nightclub here and picked out a\n blonde-haired woman, the kind that the books say men prefer. She was\n attracted to me instantly. After all, the body I have devised is\n perfect in every detail ... actually a not-world ideal.", "The latter atrocity is perpetrated through what these people call\n mediums, spiritualists and other fatuous names. I intend to visit one\n of them at the first opportunity to see for myself.\n\n\n Meanwhile, as to you, I would offer a few words of advice. I picked\n them up while examining the \"slang\" portion of my information catalog\n which you unfortunately caused me to use. So, for the ultimate\n cause—in this, the penultimate adventure, and for the glory and peace\n of our world—shake a leg, bub. Straighten up and fly right. In short,\n get hep.\n\n\n As far as the five bucks is concerned, no dice.\nGlmpauszn\nDes Moines, Iowa\n\n June 19\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "All is well, only they shot this information file into my matrix too\n fast. I'm having a hard time sorting facts and make the right decision.\n Gezsltrysk, what a task!\n\n\n Farewell till later.\nGlmpauszn\nWichita, Kansas\n\n June 13\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Mnghjkl, fhfjgfhjklop phelnoprausynks. No. When I communicate with you,\n I see I must avoid those complexities of procedure for which there are\n no terms in this language. There is no way of describing to you in\n not-language what I had to go through during the first moments of my\n birth.", "By the way, Joe, I'm forwarding that five dollars. You see, it won't\n cost me anything. It'll come out of the pocket of the idiot who's\n writing this letter. Pretty shrewd of me, eh?\n\n\n I'm going out and look at that money again. I think I'm at last\n learning to love it, though not as much as I admire liquor. Well, one\n simply must persevere, I always say.\nGlmpauszn\nPenobscot, Maine\n\n July 20\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Now you tell me not to drink alcohol. Why not? You never mentioned it\n in any of your vibrations to us, gleebs ago, when you first came across\n to this world. It will stint my powers? Nonsense! Already I have had a\n quart of the liquid today. I feel wonderful. Get that? I actually feel\n wonderful, in spite of this miserable imitation of a body.", "They apprehended him on the stairs and I heard him babble something\n about my being a monster and no child of his. My not-mother appeared at\n the doorway and instead of being pleased at the progress of my growth,\n she fell down heavily. She made a distinct\nthump\non the floor.\n\n\n This brought the rest of them on the run, so I climbed out the window\n and retreated across a nearby field. A prolonged search was launched,\n but I eluded them. What unpredictable beings!\n\n\n I reported my tremendous progress back to our world, including the\n cleverness by which I managed to escape my pursuers. I received a reply\n from Blgftury which, on careful analysis, seems to be small praise\n indeed. In fact, some of his phrases apparently contain veiled threats.\n But you know old Blgftury. He wanted to go on this expedition himself\n and it's his nature never to flatter anyone.", "When I heard them say that he was straightening up to come see me, I\n made a special effort and grew marvelously in one afternoon. I was 36\n not-world inches tall by evening. My not-father entered while I was\n standing by the crib examining a syringe the doctor had left behind.\n He stopped in his tracks on entering the room and seemed incapable of\n speech.\n\n\n Dredging into the treasury of knowledge I had come equipped with, I\n produced the proper phrase for occasions of this kind in the not-world.\n\n\n \"Poppa,\" I said.\n\n\n This was the first use I had made of the so-called vocal cords that\n are now part of my extended matrix. The sound I emitted sounded\n low-pitched, guttural and penetrating even to myself. It must have\n jarred on my not-father's ears, for he turned and ran shouting from the\n room.", "I was baffled. What could I tell him?\n\n\n \"Don't you like the rooms?\" he persisted. \"Isn't the service good?\"\n\n\n \"It's the rooms,\" I told him. \"They're—they're—\"\n\n\n \"They're what?\" he wanted to know.\n\n\n \"They're not safe.\"\n\n\n \"Not safe? But that is ridiculous. This hotel is....\"\n\n\n At this point the blast came. My nerves were a wreck from the alcohol.\n\n\n \"See?\" I screamed. \"Not safe. I knew they were going to blow up!\"\n\n\n He stood paralyzed as I ran from the lobby. Oh, well, never say die.\n Another day, another hotel. I swear I'm even beginning to think like\n the not-men, curse them.\nGlmpauszn\nRochester, New York", "I am now beginning to feel the effects of this alcohol again. Ha. Don't\n I wish old Blgftury were here in the vibrational pattern of an olive?\n I'd get the blonde in and have her eat him out of a Martini. That is a\n gin mixture.\n\n\n I think I'll get a hot report off to the old so-and-so right now. It'll\n take him a gleeb to figure this one out. I'll tell him I'm setting up\n an atomic reactor in the sewage systems here and that all we have to do\n is activate it and all the not-people will die of chain asphyxiation.\n\n\n Boy, what an easy job this turned out to be. It's just a vacation. Joe,\n you old gold-bricker, imagine you here all these gleebs living off the\n fat of the land. Yak, yak. Affectionately.\nGlmpauszn\nSacramento, Calif.\n\n July 25", "A Gleeb for Earth\nBy CHARLES SHAFHAUSER\n\n\n Illustrated by EMSH\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction May 1953.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nNot to be or not to not be ... that was the\n \nnot-question for the invader of the not-world.\nDear Editor:\n\n\n My 14 year old boy, Ronnie, is typing this letter for me because he\n can do it neater and use better grammar. I had to get in touch with\n somebody about this because if there is something to it, then somebody,\n everybody, is going to point finger at me, Ivan Smernda, and say, \"Why\n didn't you warn us?\"", "Anyway.... Ahhh. Pardon me. I got myself enough money to fill ten or\n fifteen rooms. By the end of the week I should have all eighteen spare\n rooms filled with money. If I don't love it then, I'll feel I have\n failed. This alcohol is taking effect now.\n\n\n Blgftury has been goading me for reports. To hell with his reports!\n I've got a lot more emotions to try, such as romantic love. I've been\n studying this phenomenon, along with other racial characteristics of\n these people, in the movies. This is the best place to see these\n people as they really are. They all go into the movie houses and there\n do homage to their own images. Very quaint type of idolatry.\n\n\n Love. Ha! What an adventure this is becoming.", "A great deal has happened to me since I wrote to you last.\n Systematically, I have tested each emotion and sensation listed in\n our catalog. I have been, as has been said in this world, like a reed\n bending before the winds of passion. In fact, I'm rather badly bent\n indeed. Ah! You'll pardon me, but I just took time for what is known\n quaintly in this tongue as a \"hooker of red-eye.\" Ha! I've mastered\n even the vagaries of slang in the not-language.... Ahhh! Pardon me\n again. I feel much better now.\n\n\n You see, Joe, as I attuned myself to the various impressions that\n constantly assaulted my mind through this body, I conditioned myself to\n react exactly as our information catalog instructed me to.\n\n\n Now it is all automatic, pure reflex. A sensation comes to me when I am\n burned; then I experience a burning pain. If the sensation is a tickle,\n I experience a tickle.", "Even our eminent, all-high Frequency himself has often been jeopardized\n by these people. The not-world and our world are like two baskets\n as you and I see them in our present forms. Baskets woven with the\n greatest intricacy, design and color; but baskets whose convex sides\n are joined by a thin fringe of filaments. Our world, on the vibrational\n plane, extends just a bit into this, the not-world. But being a world\n of higher vibration, it is ultimately tenuous to these gross peoples.\n While we vibrate only within a restricted plane because of our purer,\n more stable existence, these people radiate widely into our world.\n\n\n They even send what they call psychic reproductions of their own selves\n into ours. And most infamous of all, they sometimes are able to force\n some of our individuals over the fringe into their world temporarily,\n causing them much agony and fright.", "Anyway, Mrs. Somebody wanted to make contact with her paternal\n grandmother, Lucy, from the beyond. The medium went into his act. He\n concentrated and sweated and suddenly something began to take form in\n the room. The best way to describe it in not-world language is a white,\n shapeless cascade of light.\n\n\n Mrs. Somebody reared to her feet and screeched, \"Grandma Lucy!\" Then I\n really took notice.\n\n\n Grandma Lucy, nothing! This medium had actually brought Blgftury\n partially across the vibration barrier. He must have been vibrating in\n the fringe area and got caught in the works. Did he look mad! His zyhku\n was open and his btgrimms were down.\n\n\n Worst of all, he saw me. Looked right at me with an unbelievable\n pattern of pain, anger, fear and amazement in his matrix. Me and the\n redhead." ], [ "We must use care. Stock in as much gin as you are able. I will bring\n with me all that I can. Meanwhile I must return to my original place of\n birth into this world of horrors. There I will secure the gateway, a\n large mirror, the vibrational point at which we shall meet and slowly\n climb the frequency scale to emerge into our own beautiful, now secure\n world. You and I together, Joe, conquerors, liberators.\n\n\n You say you eat little and drink as much as you can. The same with\n me. Even in this revolting world I am a sad sight. My not-world senses\n falter. This is the last letter. Tomorrow I come with the gateway. When\n the gin is gone, we will plant the mold in the hotel where you live.\n\n\n In only a single gleeb it will begin to work. The men of this queer\n world will be no more. But we can't say we didn't have some fun, can\n we, Joe?", "In Smith's room on Wednesday I find only a suit of clothes, the same\n suit he wore when he came in. In the coat the vest, in the vest the\n shirt, in the shirt the underwear. Also in the pants. Also all in the\n middle of the floor. Against the far wall stands the frame of the\n mirror. Only the frame!\n\n\n What a spot to be in! Now it might have been a gag. Sometimes these\n guys get funny ideas when they are on the stuff. But then I read\n the letters. This knocks me for a loop. They are all in different\n handwritings. All from different places. Stamps all legit, my kid says.\n India, China, England, everywhere.", "They apprehended him on the stairs and I heard him babble something\n about my being a monster and no child of his. My not-mother appeared at\n the doorway and instead of being pleased at the progress of my growth,\n she fell down heavily. She made a distinct\nthump\non the floor.\n\n\n This brought the rest of them on the run, so I climbed out the window\n and retreated across a nearby field. A prolonged search was launched,\n but I eluded them. What unpredictable beings!\n\n\n I reported my tremendous progress back to our world, including the\n cleverness by which I managed to escape my pursuers. I received a reply\n from Blgftury which, on careful analysis, seems to be small praise\n indeed. In fact, some of his phrases apparently contain veiled threats.\n But you know old Blgftury. He wanted to go on this expedition himself\n and it's his nature never to flatter anyone.", "Anyway.... Ahhh. Pardon me. I got myself enough money to fill ten or\n fifteen rooms. By the end of the week I should have all eighteen spare\n rooms filled with money. If I don't love it then, I'll feel I have\n failed. This alcohol is taking effect now.\n\n\n Blgftury has been goading me for reports. To hell with his reports!\n I've got a lot more emotions to try, such as romantic love. I've been\n studying this phenomenon, along with other racial characteristics of\n these people, in the movies. This is the best place to see these\n people as they really are. They all go into the movie houses and there\n do homage to their own images. Very quaint type of idolatry.\n\n\n Love. Ha! What an adventure this is becoming.", "This morning I have what is known medically as a syndrome ... a group\n of symptoms popularly referred to as a hangover ... Ahhh! Pardon me\n again. Strangely ... now what was I saying? Oh, yes. Ha, ha. Strangely\n enough, the reactions that come easiest to the people in this world\n came most difficult to me. Money-love, for example. It is a great thing\n here, both among those who haven't got it and those who have.\n\n\n I went out and got plenty of money. I walked invisible into a bank and\n carried away piles of it. Then I sat and looked at it. I took the money\n to a remote room of the twenty room suite I have rented in the best\n hotel here in—no, sorry—and stared at it for hours.\n\n\n Nothing happened. I didn't love the stuff or feel one way or the other\n about it. Yet all around me people are actually killing one another for\n the love of it.", "When I heard them say that he was straightening up to come see me, I\n made a special effort and grew marvelously in one afternoon. I was 36\n not-world inches tall by evening. My not-father entered while I was\n standing by the crib examining a syringe the doctor had left behind.\n He stopped in his tracks on entering the room and seemed incapable of\n speech.\n\n\n Dredging into the treasury of knowledge I had come equipped with, I\n produced the proper phrase for occasions of this kind in the not-world.\n\n\n \"Poppa,\" I said.\n\n\n This was the first use I had made of the so-called vocal cords that\n are now part of my extended matrix. The sound I emitted sounded\n low-pitched, guttural and penetrating even to myself. It must have\n jarred on my not-father's ears, for he turned and ran shouting from the\n room.", "I became alarmed, dived into a bush and used a mechanism that you\n unfortunately do not have—invisibility. I lay there and listened.\n\n\n \"He was stark naked,\" the girl with the sneakers said.\n\n\n A figure I recognized as a police officer spoke to her.\n\n\n \"Lizzy, you'll just have to keep these crackpot friends of yours out of\n this area.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No more buck-bathing, Lizzy,\" the officer ordered. \"No more speeches\n in the Square. Not when it results in riots at five in the morning. Now\n where is your naked friend? I'm going to make an example of him.\"", "The hand that writes this letter is that of a boy in the not-city of\n Bombay in the not-country of India. He does not know he writes it.\n Tomorrow it will be someone else. You must never know of my exact\n location, for the not-people might have access to the information.\n\n\n I must leave off now because the not-child is about to be born. When it\n is alone in the room, it will be spirited away and I will spring from\n the pod on the gateway into its crib and will be its exact vibrational\n likeness.\n\n\n I have tremendous powers. But the not-people must never know I am among\n them. This is the only way I could arrive in the room where the gateway\n lies without arousing suspicion. I will grow up as the not-child in\n order that I might destroy the not-people completely.", "Now in all the motion pictures—true representations of life and love\n in this world—the man with a lot of money or virtue kisses the girl\n and tries to induce her to do something biological. She then refuses.\n This pleases both of them, for he wanted her to refuse. She, in turn,\n wanted him to want her, but also wanted to prevent him so that he would\n have a high opinion of her. Do I make myself clear?\n\n\n I kissed the blonde girl and gave her to understand what I then wanted.\n Well, you can imagine my surprise when she said yes! So I had failed. I\n had not found love.\n\n\n I became so abstracted by this problem that the blonde girl fell\n asleep. I thoughtfully drank quantities of excellent alcohol called gin\n and didn't even notice when the blonde girl left.", "I gazed about me at the mixture of lights, forms and impressions.\n It was strange and ... now I know ... beautiful. However, I hurried\n immediately toward the nearest chemist. At the same time I looked up\n and all about me at the beauty.\n\n\n Soon an individual approached. I knew what to do from my information. I\n simply acted natural. You know, one of your earliest instructions was\n to realize that these people see nothing unusual in you if you do not\n let yourself believe they do.\n\n\n This individual I classified as a female of a singular variety here.\n Her hair was short, her upper torso clad in a woolen garment. She\n wore ... what are they? ... oh, yes, sneakers. My attention was\n diverted by a scream as I passed her. I stopped.\n\n\n The woman gesticulated and continued to scream. People hurried from\n nearby houses. I linked my hands behind me and watched the scene with\n an attitude of mild interest. They weren't interested in me, I told\n myself. But they were.", "Now get this. In one room, that of Joe Binkle, which maybe is an alias,\n I find nothing but a suit of clothes, some butts and the letters I\n include here in same package. Binkle had only one suit. That I know.\n And this was it laying right in the middle of the room. Inside the\n coat was the vest, inside the vest the shirt, inside the shirt the\n underwear. The pants were up in the coat and inside of them was also\n the underwear. All this was buttoned up like Binkle had melted out of\n it and dripped through a crack in the floor. In a bureau drawer were\n the letters I told you about.\n\n\n Now. In the room right under Binkle's lived another stew bum that\n checked in Thursday ... name Ed Smith, alias maybe, too. This guy was a\n real case. He brought with him a big mirror with a heavy bronze frame.\n Airloom, he says. He pays a week in advance, staggers up the stairs to\n his room with the mirror and that's the last I see of him.", "I was baffled. What could I tell him?\n\n\n \"Don't you like the rooms?\" he persisted. \"Isn't the service good?\"\n\n\n \"It's the rooms,\" I told him. \"They're—they're—\"\n\n\n \"They're what?\" he wanted to know.\n\n\n \"They're not safe.\"\n\n\n \"Not safe? But that is ridiculous. This hotel is....\"\n\n\n At this point the blast came. My nerves were a wreck from the alcohol.\n\n\n \"See?\" I screamed. \"Not safe. I knew they were going to blow up!\"\n\n\n He stood paralyzed as I ran from the lobby. Oh, well, never say die.\n Another day, another hotel. I swear I'm even beginning to think like\n the not-men, curse them.\nGlmpauszn\nRochester, New York", "Then comes your letter today telling of the fate that befell you as a\n result of drinking alcohol. Our wrenchingly attuned faculties in these\n not-world bodies need the loathsome drug to escape from the reality\n of not-reality. It's true. I cannot do without it now. The day is only\n half over and I have consumed a quart and a half. And it is dulling all\n my powers as it has practically obliterated yours. I can't even become\n invisible any more.\n\n\n I must find the formula that will wipe out the not-world men quickly.\n\n\n Quickly!\nGlmpauszn\nFlorence, Italy\n\n September 10\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "In simple terms then: I crept into a cave and slipped into a kind of\n sleep, directing my squhjkl ulytz & uhrytzg ... no, it won't come out.\n Anyway, I grew overnight to the size of an average person here.\n\n\n As I said before, floods of impressions are driving into my xzbyl ...\n my brain ... from various nerve and sense areas and I am having a hard\n time classifying them. My one idea was to get to a chemist and acquire\n the stuff needed for the destruction of these people.\n\n\n Sunrise came as I expected. According to my catalog of information, the\n impressions aroused by it are of beauty. It took little conditioning\n for me finally to react in this manner. This is truly an efficient\n mechanism I inhabit.", "I didn't lose any time overwhelming her susceptibilities. I remember\n distinctly that just as I stooped to pick up a large roll of money I\n had dropped, her eyes met mine and in them I could see her admiration.\n We went to my suite and I showed her one of the money rooms. Would you\n believe it? She actually took off her shoes and ran around through the\n money in her bare feet! Then we kissed.\n\n\n Concealed in the dermis of the lips are tiny, highly sensitized nerve\n ends which send sensations to the brain. The brain interprets these\n impulses in a certain manner. As a result, the fate of secretion in the\n adrenals on the ends of the kidneys increases and an enlivening of the\n entire endocrine system follows. Thus I felt the beginnings of love.\n\n\n I sat her down on a pile of money and kissed her again. Again the\n tingling, again the secretion and activation. I integrated myself\n quickly.", "My kid, he reads. He says it's no joke. He wants to call the cops or\n maybe some doctor. But I say no. He reads your magazine so he says\n write to you, send you the letters. You know what to do. Now you have\n them. Maybe you print. Whatever you do, Mr. Editor, remember my place,\n the Plaza Ritz Arms, is straight establishment. I don't drink. I never\n touch junk, not even aspirin.\nYours very truly,\n\n Ivan Smernda\nBombay, India\n\n June 8\n\n\n Mr. Joe Binkle\n\n Plaza Ritz Arms\n\n New York City\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Greetings, greetings, greetings. Hold firm in your wretched projection,\n for tomorrow you will not be alone in the not-world. In two days I,\n Glmpauszn, will be born.", "There are long hours during which I am so well-integrated into this\n body and this world that I almost consider myself a member of it. Now\n I can function efficiently. I sent Blgftury some long reports today\n outlining my experiments in the realm of chemistry where we must\n finally defeat these people. Of course, I haven't made the experiments\n yet, but I will. This is not deceit, merely realistic anticipation of\n the inevitable. Anyway, what the old xbyzrt doesn't know won't muss his\n vibrations.\n\n\n I went to what they call a nightclub here and picked out a\n blonde-haired woman, the kind that the books say men prefer. She was\n attracted to me instantly. After all, the body I have devised is\n perfect in every detail ... actually a not-world ideal.", "Now I know what difficulties you must have had with your limited\n equipment. These not-people are unpredictable and strange. Their doctor\n came in and weighed me again the day after my birth. Consternation\n reigned when it was discovered I was ten pounds heavier. What\n difference could it possibly make? Many doctors then came in to see me.\n As they arrived hourly, they found me heavier and heavier. Naturally,\n since I am growing. This is part of my instructions. My not-mother\n (Gezsltrysk!) then burst into tears. The doctors conferred, threw up\n their hands and left.\n\n\n I learned the following day that the opposite component of my\n not-mother, my not-father, had been away riding on some conveyance\n during my birth. He was out on ... what did they call it? Oh, yes, a\n bender. He did not arrive till three days after I was born.", "That was it—I had forgotten clothes. There is only one answer to this\n oversight on my part. My mind is confused by the barrage of impressions\n that assault it. I must retire now and get them all classified. Beauty,\n pain, fear, hate, love, laughter. I don't know one from the other. I\n must feel each, become accustomed to it.\n\n\n The more I think about it, the more I realize that the information I\n have been given is very unrealistic. You have been inefficient, Joe.\n What will Blgftury and the others say of this? My great mission is\n impaired. Farewell, till I find a more intelligent mind so I can write\n you with more enlightenment.\nGlmpauszn\nMoscow, Idaho\n\n June 17\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "This telepathic control becomes more difficult every time. I must pick\n closer points of communication soon. I have nothing to report but\n failure. I bought a ton of equipment and went to work on the formula\n that is half complete in my instructions. Six of my hotel rooms were\n filled with tubes, pipes and apparatus of all kinds.\n\n\n I had got my mechanism as close to perfect as possible when I\n realized that, in my befuddled condition, I had set off a reaction\n that inevitably would result in an explosion. I had to leave there\n immediately, but I could not create suspicion. The management was not\n aware of the nature of my activities.\n\n\n I moved swiftly. I could not afford time to bring my baggage. I\n stuffed as much money into my pockets as I could and then sauntered\n into the hotel lobby. Assuming my most casual air, I told the manager\n I was checking out. Naturally he was stunned since I was his best\n customer.\n\n\n \"But why, sir?\" he asked plaintively." ] ]
train	20019	[ "How didn't the article compare gambling to smoking cigarettes?", "What isn't the gambling industry willing to do?", "What is not something the article mentioned?", "What is a theme that could be taken from this text?", "Who wasn't in support of more gambling regulations?", "What did the gambling industry hope people saw when they came to Vegas?", "Who would the gambling industry least want to hear speak at their meeting?", "Which word least describes Tom Grey?", "What is the overall tone of the passage?" ]	[ [ "they both target youth", "it's a vice being exploited", "they both have huge financial lobbyists", "they're both very addictive" ], [ "regulate online gambling", "donate money for gambling-addiction research", "donate money to improve other areas of Las Vegas", "change their term to \"gaming\"" ], [ "internet gambling is something the commission may regulate heavier", "the gambling industry is funding political campaigns", "states are allowing more methods of gambling to happen", "the commission's research on the benefits of gambling taxes" ], [ "enough money can make anything happen", "it's important to see all sides of the story", "good always triumphs over evil", "if you stand for what you believe, you will win" ], [ "Kay Coles James", "Otis Harris", "Frank Fahrenkopf", "Tom Grey" ], [ "an innocent, happy entertainment center", "a huge money-making development", "the \"other side\" of Las Vegas", "a place where unions aren't needed" ], [ "a Nevada senator", "a \"narrow\"", "a Latina housekeeper", "a union representative" ], [ "straightforward", "jaded", "passionate", "persistent" ], [ "sympathetic", "optimistic", "hopeless", "vengeful" ] ]	[ 3, 3, 4, 1, 3, 1, 2, 2, 3 ]	[ 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "The cigarette agenda will also distract the commission and the public from the true reasons for worry. A few years ago, gambling was confined to Las Vegas and Atlantic City. It is now thriving in 48 states, and there is no sign that anyone can stop it. In this election, gambling interests dropped $100 million on a single California ballot initiative, toppled governors in two states, and bought senators and representatives by the crate. What the commission ought to be investigating is whether the gambling industry has become so powerful that it's politically untouchable. But it can't, because the gambling industry has become so powerful that it's politically untouchable.", "If the comments of the pro-industry commissioners can be believed, the industry will happily endorse such a report. Gamblers don't quite accept the cigarette analogy--though commission member Bill Bible, a former chief of the Nevada Gaming Commission, did concede that gambling was like alcohol--but they're happy to sign on to the specific measures. The casino industry is even trying to get ahead of the commission. It has already established a (mostly) independent center to fund research into pathological gambling. I suspect that the industry will not only agree to the commission's recommendations but will become their strongest advocate. Casino owners will avidly lobby Congress and state legislatures to enact the recommendations into law.", "The antis, meanwhile, cry that gambling is like cigarettes: unsafe for kids, viciously addictive, deceptively marketed, unhealthy, expensive, and unacceptable unless mightily regulated. \n\n Judging by today's hearings and by conversations with most of the commissioners, the tobacco model is winning. Today's panelists tell the commission that kids are starting to gamble too young and are getting addicted too easily, that compulsive gambling appears to be increasing as gambling spreads, that gambling marketing may be designed to addict customers, and that the industry exploits problem gamblers by allowing them to draw repeated credit card advances from ATMs on casino floors. The testimony clearly impresses the commissioners and seems especially to impress the three nonaligned commissioners who will be the swing votes on the June 1999 report.", "After Tuesday's casino triumphalism, Wednesday is a comedown, eight hours of policy panels on teen gambling, compulsive gambling, gambling regulation, gambling marketing, and gambling credit practices. It is tough slogging, but for the first time I sense that this commission--though divided, underfunded, timid, and without any power beyond exhortation--isn't entirely useless. It may finally settle this question: Is gambling Hollywood or tobacco? Entertainment or vice? \n\n The sleek Vegas types, whose Strip palaces scramble casinos, theaters, restaurants, arcades, discos, cabarets, theme parks, concert halls, sports arenas, and museums into one giant orgy of amusement, have been selling the idea that gambling is just entertainment--Disney in the desert. This effort has largely succeeded, because Vegas is still the dominant image of American gambling, if not the dominant reality.", "Why should the pro-gamblers cooperate with a critical study? Because it provides superb cover for them. It medicalizes the problem of compulsive gambling, blaming it on psychological abnormality rather than industry machination. Likewise, cracking down on compulsives is also politically cost-effective. In exchange for losing a few compulsive gamblers, the casinos will (falsely) appear more concerned with the health of their customers than with profits.", "The antis can call gambling \"tobacco.\" They can call it \"vice.\" They can call it \"a big red balloon\" for all that the industry cares. As long as the commission just nibbles around the edges, the casino operators and state lotteries will be happy to indulge it. The pro-gambling folks will win credit for cooperating, without having to do anything that really hurts. The last national gambling commission was in the mid-1970s. If the gamblers play along with this commission's timid recommendations, they'll be safe for another 20 years. \n\n An Apology \n\n I owe an apology to Nevada Sen. Richard Bryan, whom I criticized yesterday for using the term \"Indian country\" during a speech critical of Indian casinos. As several readers pointed out to me, \"Indian country\" is a common phrase in the West and has no derogatory connotations. I'm sorry, Senator.", "Still, for all the Vegan triumphalism in the air, it's impossible not to be charmed by the chief gambling opponent, the Rev. Tom Grey. Grey is utterly irrepressible. A Vietnam rifleman turned Methodist minister, Grey has spent the last eight years evangelizing against gambling. He founded the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling, the primary force behind the commission's creation. (Grey, in a rare acknowledgement of defeat, has just renamed it the National Coalition Against Gambling Expansion, tacitly recognizing that gambling is here to stay.) He is a genial motormouth and shameless promoter of the cause. He wears a gigantic \"CasiNO\" button in the casino. He posed for People in a shepherd's robe. He says \"I would do anything short of lighting myself on fire in the Capitol rotunda to stop gambling.\" He is so excitable that I have to yank him out of the way of an oncoming car when he gets too wrapped up in one of his soliloquies.", "It is starting to become clear what that report will say. The commission won't (and can't) take any grand stand against gambling. Instead it will opt for small, targeted policies, concentrating on compulsive gambling. It will probably propose that casinos and state lotteries fund gambling-addiction research and that casinos take much stronger measures to bar problem gamblers from wagering. The commission may recommend that gaming taxes be used to underwrite treatment of pathological gamblers and that insurance companies be encouraged to cover gambling addiction. Similarly, the commission will try to reduce gamblers' access to cash by limiting the size of ATM advances and prodding casinos to remove the machines from their floors.", "Is <A NAME= \n\n Gambling's would-be federal regulators--the National Gambling Impact Study Commission--went to Las Vegas this week to hold hearings. In today's dispatch, we learn how gambling's foes seek to demonize wagering as a pernicious tobaccolike vice. In yesterday's dispatch, gambling's foes learn the folly of having brought their anti-sin crusade to an adult Disneyland. \n\n Tuesday's overpowering show of force by the Nevada gambling aristocracy has had at least one audible effect on the National Gambling Impact Study Commission. Wednesday, even commission Chair Kay Coles James, a gambling skeptic, succumbs to the hideous Vegas euphemism: She begins referring to the \"gaming industry.\"", "It's very grim and mostly persuasive. Still, when we turn back on to the Strip, and pass the jaw-dropping Stratosphere and Circus Circus and Bellagio and the MGM Grand--a 30 story tower bathed in fabulous emerald light, I realize why Grey's task is hopeless here. He is committing the cardinal sin of Vegas. All he wants to do is talk about losers. In Las Vegas, under the thrilling lights of the Strip, no one wants to hear about losers. In the land of gaming, not gambling, everyone is sure he's a winner.", "The commission will also push the industry to do more to prevent kids from gambling. It will call for heavier regulation of Indian gambling and will probably try to ban or severely regulate Internet gambling, perhaps by forbidding gambling companies from running online casinos. It will rebuke state lotteries for their deceptive marketing and will try to force them to post odds and stop targeting the poor. In short, it will treat gambling as a tobaccolike vice.", "There are also a fair share of gleeful gambling regulators, bookmakers, and casino employees among the panels of expert witnesses the commission hears from. Critics who gripe about the perils of sports gambling and the evils of convenience store slot machines leaven the pro-gambling folks. Everyone, including the gambling industry shills, agrees that Internet gambling is evil and should be destroyed. Everyone agrees to this because no one in Las Vegas is making any money off Internet gambling. If they were, you can be sure they would explain why it's as American as nickel slots and scratch-off games.", "In Las Vegas, the euphemizers reign. Once upon a time, the casino owners decided that \"gambling\" was too crude, too avaricious, to describe their fair business. So \"gambling\" disappeared in Las Vegas, and \"gaming\" has risen in its place. He who controls language controls ideas, and at today's commission hearing, it is perfectly clear who controls the language. Video slot machines crammed into convenience stores--perhaps the most pernicious form of legal gambling there is--are called \"retail gaming.\" People who own casinos are not \"casino owners,\" they are \"gaming visionaries.\" Pathological gamblers are \"problem gamers\"--as if they're having trouble mastering the rules of Monopoly. And the National Gambling Impact Study Commission is reborn as the National Gaming Impact Study Commission.", "(Pause for an aesthetic observation: I am sitting right behind the witnesses, and after a while I begin to separate them into the Wides and the Narrows. The Wides are men in suits with enormous backs and enormous bellies, men who eat and eat and used to play football. They all testify to their love of gambling. The Narrows are thin and generally disapprove of it. I begin to wonder whether fondness for gambling correlates with general indulgence, and dislike correlates with asceticism, and decide that they probably do.)", "Talk about quick defeats: The first sign I see outside the MGM Grand ballroom all but declares that the National Gambling Impact Study Commission has already lost. The sign reads: \"National Gaming Impact Study Commission.\" \n\n \"Gaming\"?", "\"My goodness, no politician can withstand their resources,\" Focus on the Family's James Dobson, the commission's leading gambling opponent, tells me. The industry's political clout has emasculated the commission, Dobson continues: \"Our report won't be acted on by the president or Congress. They are too heavily influenced by gambling money. Almost all the leaders of Congress are on the dole.\" It has also become obvious that the commission has too many pro-gambling members to produce a report that recommends taxes or other real penalties on the industry. \n\n So the commission's two day visit to Gomorrah has been transformed from a charged political event to a kind of victory lap for gaming. Nevada Gov. Bob Miller and the \"gaming visionaries\" have been planning for these hearings for months, hoping to use them to demonstrate the might and sanctity and goodness of the Nevada gambling industry.", "The gambling industry did everything in its power to stop the establishment of this commission two years ago, but Congress and a fervent grassroots anti-gambling group eventually foisted it on the industry. The nine member blue-ribbon panel was charged with assessing the social and economic impact of gambling, and it will issue a final report to Congress and the president in June 1999. Even though the panel was carefully balanced between pro- and anti-gambling leaders, it was supposed to be Vegas' nemesis. The industry and Las Vegas' pro-gambling media quaked in anticipation of the onerous regulations and taxes the commission might recommend.", "But they quake no more. Whatever national momentum the anti-gamblers had dissolved in last week's elections. The industry routed opponents in state after state. Missouri voters passed a ballot initiative to allow boat casinos. Californians voted to expand Indian casinos. In South Carolina and Alabama, voters expelled anti-lottery, anti-gambling Republican governors and replaced them with pro-lottery Democrats. The gambling industry spent more than $100 million on political contributions and issue ads. It has never been fatter, happier, or more secure.", "Pro-Vegas forces are also perfectly happy to take shots at Indian gambling, the chief economic threat to Nevada's prosperity. The expansion of Indian casinos resulting from last week's California voter initiative will slam Las Vegas, cutting its gambling revenues by $400 million a year. So the Vegans repeatedly swing at casinos in \"Indian country\" (that's Nevada Sen. Richard Bryan's term--I'm not joking) for being insufficiently regulated and taxed. One tribal chief I spoke to calls this \"red baiting.\"", "The MGM Grand, which is run by commission member Terrence Lanni, is itself the first exhibit of the Vegas triumphalists. It is gaudy testimony that consumers, at least, have no problem with this business. The MGM Grand, a k a \"The City of Entertainment,\" has 5,000 rooms--the corridor outside my room is 200 yards long, so long I can't see its end--to feed the endless supply of slot machines, craps tables, and roulette wheels. David Cassidy performs here every night--twice! A few steps outside on the Strip is still more overwhelming evidence that Las Vegas has won the popular vote. New York, New York is just across the street, the $1.6 billion Bellagio is one door down, and a half-scale Eiffel Tower is going up next door. The setting has, as the pro-gambling folks no doubt hoped, stunned some of the gambling opponents. I asked one anti-gambling activist who had never before been to Vegas what she thinks of it. She could only blurt out \"Wow.\"" ], [ "If the comments of the pro-industry commissioners can be believed, the industry will happily endorse such a report. Gamblers don't quite accept the cigarette analogy--though commission member Bill Bible, a former chief of the Nevada Gaming Commission, did concede that gambling was like alcohol--but they're happy to sign on to the specific measures. The casino industry is even trying to get ahead of the commission. It has already established a (mostly) independent center to fund research into pathological gambling. I suspect that the industry will not only agree to the commission's recommendations but will become their strongest advocate. Casino owners will avidly lobby Congress and state legislatures to enact the recommendations into law.", "The cigarette agenda will also distract the commission and the public from the true reasons for worry. A few years ago, gambling was confined to Las Vegas and Atlantic City. It is now thriving in 48 states, and there is no sign that anyone can stop it. In this election, gambling interests dropped $100 million on a single California ballot initiative, toppled governors in two states, and bought senators and representatives by the crate. What the commission ought to be investigating is whether the gambling industry has become so powerful that it's politically untouchable. But it can't, because the gambling industry has become so powerful that it's politically untouchable.", "\"My goodness, no politician can withstand their resources,\" Focus on the Family's James Dobson, the commission's leading gambling opponent, tells me. The industry's political clout has emasculated the commission, Dobson continues: \"Our report won't be acted on by the president or Congress. They are too heavily influenced by gambling money. Almost all the leaders of Congress are on the dole.\" It has also become obvious that the commission has too many pro-gambling members to produce a report that recommends taxes or other real penalties on the industry. \n\n So the commission's two day visit to Gomorrah has been transformed from a charged political event to a kind of victory lap for gaming. Nevada Gov. Bob Miller and the \"gaming visionaries\" have been planning for these hearings for months, hoping to use them to demonstrate the might and sanctity and goodness of the Nevada gambling industry.", "Why should the pro-gamblers cooperate with a critical study? Because it provides superb cover for them. It medicalizes the problem of compulsive gambling, blaming it on psychological abnormality rather than industry machination. Likewise, cracking down on compulsives is also politically cost-effective. In exchange for losing a few compulsive gamblers, the casinos will (falsely) appear more concerned with the health of their customers than with profits.", "The antis can call gambling \"tobacco.\" They can call it \"vice.\" They can call it \"a big red balloon\" for all that the industry cares. As long as the commission just nibbles around the edges, the casino operators and state lotteries will be happy to indulge it. The pro-gambling folks will win credit for cooperating, without having to do anything that really hurts. The last national gambling commission was in the mid-1970s. If the gamblers play along with this commission's timid recommendations, they'll be safe for another 20 years. \n\n An Apology \n\n I owe an apology to Nevada Sen. Richard Bryan, whom I criticized yesterday for using the term \"Indian country\" during a speech critical of Indian casinos. As several readers pointed out to me, \"Indian country\" is a common phrase in the West and has no derogatory connotations. I'm sorry, Senator.", "The gambling industry did everything in its power to stop the establishment of this commission two years ago, but Congress and a fervent grassroots anti-gambling group eventually foisted it on the industry. The nine member blue-ribbon panel was charged with assessing the social and economic impact of gambling, and it will issue a final report to Congress and the president in June 1999. Even though the panel was carefully balanced between pro- and anti-gambling leaders, it was supposed to be Vegas' nemesis. The industry and Las Vegas' pro-gambling media quaked in anticipation of the onerous regulations and taxes the commission might recommend.", "The commission will also push the industry to do more to prevent kids from gambling. It will call for heavier regulation of Indian gambling and will probably try to ban or severely regulate Internet gambling, perhaps by forbidding gambling companies from running online casinos. It will rebuke state lotteries for their deceptive marketing and will try to force them to post odds and stop targeting the poor. In short, it will treat gambling as a tobaccolike vice.", "After Tuesday's casino triumphalism, Wednesday is a comedown, eight hours of policy panels on teen gambling, compulsive gambling, gambling regulation, gambling marketing, and gambling credit practices. It is tough slogging, but for the first time I sense that this commission--though divided, underfunded, timid, and without any power beyond exhortation--isn't entirely useless. It may finally settle this question: Is gambling Hollywood or tobacco? Entertainment or vice? \n\n The sleek Vegas types, whose Strip palaces scramble casinos, theaters, restaurants, arcades, discos, cabarets, theme parks, concert halls, sports arenas, and museums into one giant orgy of amusement, have been selling the idea that gambling is just entertainment--Disney in the desert. This effort has largely succeeded, because Vegas is still the dominant image of American gambling, if not the dominant reality.", "There are also a fair share of gleeful gambling regulators, bookmakers, and casino employees among the panels of expert witnesses the commission hears from. Critics who gripe about the perils of sports gambling and the evils of convenience store slot machines leaven the pro-gambling folks. Everyone, including the gambling industry shills, agrees that Internet gambling is evil and should be destroyed. Everyone agrees to this because no one in Las Vegas is making any money off Internet gambling. If they were, you can be sure they would explain why it's as American as nickel slots and scratch-off games.", "Is <A NAME= \n\n Gambling's would-be federal regulators--the National Gambling Impact Study Commission--went to Las Vegas this week to hold hearings. In today's dispatch, we learn how gambling's foes seek to demonize wagering as a pernicious tobaccolike vice. In yesterday's dispatch, gambling's foes learn the folly of having brought their anti-sin crusade to an adult Disneyland. \n\n Tuesday's overpowering show of force by the Nevada gambling aristocracy has had at least one audible effect on the National Gambling Impact Study Commission. Wednesday, even commission Chair Kay Coles James, a gambling skeptic, succumbs to the hideous Vegas euphemism: She begins referring to the \"gaming industry.\"", "But they quake no more. Whatever national momentum the anti-gamblers had dissolved in last week's elections. The industry routed opponents in state after state. Missouri voters passed a ballot initiative to allow boat casinos. Californians voted to expand Indian casinos. In South Carolina and Alabama, voters expelled anti-lottery, anti-gambling Republican governors and replaced them with pro-lottery Democrats. The gambling industry spent more than $100 million on political contributions and issue ads. It has never been fatter, happier, or more secure.", "It is starting to become clear what that report will say. The commission won't (and can't) take any grand stand against gambling. Instead it will opt for small, targeted policies, concentrating on compulsive gambling. It will probably propose that casinos and state lotteries fund gambling-addiction research and that casinos take much stronger measures to bar problem gamblers from wagering. The commission may recommend that gaming taxes be used to underwrite treatment of pathological gamblers and that insurance companies be encouraged to cover gambling addiction. Similarly, the commission will try to reduce gamblers' access to cash by limiting the size of ATM advances and prodding casinos to remove the machines from their floors.", "The hearings, too, reinforce the Glorious Las Vegas theme. Frank Fahrenkopf, the industry's top lobbyist (who is paid so much he can afford monogrammed shirt cuffs --I saw them), holds forth cheerfully outside the ballroom, celebrating the electoral triumph of freedom over religious moralist tyranny. Inside, the room is packed with more than 600 people in neon lime green T-shirts that read \"Unions and Gaming: Together for a Better Life.\" They are members of the major casino union, here to cheer on their employers and their union. (Most of them, it must be said, are getting paid to do this.)", "The antis, meanwhile, cry that gambling is like cigarettes: unsafe for kids, viciously addictive, deceptively marketed, unhealthy, expensive, and unacceptable unless mightily regulated. \n\n Judging by today's hearings and by conversations with most of the commissioners, the tobacco model is winning. Today's panelists tell the commission that kids are starting to gamble too young and are getting addicted too easily, that compulsive gambling appears to be increasing as gambling spreads, that gambling marketing may be designed to addict customers, and that the industry exploits problem gamblers by allowing them to draw repeated credit card advances from ATMs on casino floors. The testimony clearly impresses the commissioners and seems especially to impress the three nonaligned commissioners who will be the swing votes on the June 1999 report.", "The MGM Grand, which is run by commission member Terrence Lanni, is itself the first exhibit of the Vegas triumphalists. It is gaudy testimony that consumers, at least, have no problem with this business. The MGM Grand, a k a \"The City of Entertainment,\" has 5,000 rooms--the corridor outside my room is 200 yards long, so long I can't see its end--to feed the endless supply of slot machines, craps tables, and roulette wheels. David Cassidy performs here every night--twice! A few steps outside on the Strip is still more overwhelming evidence that Las Vegas has won the popular vote. New York, New York is just across the street, the $1.6 billion Bellagio is one door down, and a half-scale Eiffel Tower is going up next door. The setting has, as the pro-gambling folks no doubt hoped, stunned some of the gambling opponents. I asked one anti-gambling activist who had never before been to Vegas what she thinks of it. She could only blurt out \"Wow.\"", "Pro-Vegas forces are also perfectly happy to take shots at Indian gambling, the chief economic threat to Nevada's prosperity. The expansion of Indian casinos resulting from last week's California voter initiative will slam Las Vegas, cutting its gambling revenues by $400 million a year. So the Vegans repeatedly swing at casinos in \"Indian country\" (that's Nevada Sen. Richard Bryan's term--I'm not joking) for being insufficiently regulated and taxed. One tribal chief I spoke to calls this \"red baiting.\"", "Still, for all the Vegan triumphalism in the air, it's impossible not to be charmed by the chief gambling opponent, the Rev. Tom Grey. Grey is utterly irrepressible. A Vietnam rifleman turned Methodist minister, Grey has spent the last eight years evangelizing against gambling. He founded the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling, the primary force behind the commission's creation. (Grey, in a rare acknowledgement of defeat, has just renamed it the National Coalition Against Gambling Expansion, tacitly recognizing that gambling is here to stay.) He is a genial motormouth and shameless promoter of the cause. He wears a gigantic \"CasiNO\" button in the casino. He posed for People in a shepherd's robe. He says \"I would do anything short of lighting myself on fire in the Capitol rotunda to stop gambling.\" He is so excitable that I have to yank him out of the way of an oncoming car when he gets too wrapped up in one of his soliloquies.", "It's very grim and mostly persuasive. Still, when we turn back on to the Strip, and pass the jaw-dropping Stratosphere and Circus Circus and Bellagio and the MGM Grand--a 30 story tower bathed in fabulous emerald light, I realize why Grey's task is hopeless here. He is committing the cardinal sin of Vegas. All he wants to do is talk about losers. In Las Vegas, under the thrilling lights of the Strip, no one wants to hear about losers. In the land of gaming, not gambling, everyone is sure he's a winner.", "In Las Vegas, the euphemizers reign. Once upon a time, the casino owners decided that \"gambling\" was too crude, too avaricious, to describe their fair business. So \"gambling\" disappeared in Las Vegas, and \"gaming\" has risen in its place. He who controls language controls ideas, and at today's commission hearing, it is perfectly clear who controls the language. Video slot machines crammed into convenience stores--perhaps the most pernicious form of legal gambling there is--are called \"retail gaming.\" People who own casinos are not \"casino owners,\" they are \"gaming visionaries.\" Pathological gamblers are \"problem gamers\"--as if they're having trouble mastering the rules of Monopoly. And the National Gambling Impact Study Commission is reborn as the National Gaming Impact Study Commission.", "Chairwoman Kay Coles James, a Christian conservative and skeptic of gambling, opens the hearing by assuring the crowd that the committee is toothless: \"We're not here to take anyone's job. ... We have no power to do anything except make recommendations.\" This sets the mood for most of the day: Vegas is great, so you'd better leave it alone! The local government, by all appearances a wholly owned subsidiary of the casinos, puts on a bravura performance. Gov. Miller opens the show with a 15 minute hymn to Las Vegas. It is the first of many statistical barrages about Nevada's one-ders: No. 1 in job growth, No. 1 in population growth, and No. 1 on planet Earth in per capita Girl Scout troops--and Boy Scout troops!" ], [ "The cigarette agenda will also distract the commission and the public from the true reasons for worry. A few years ago, gambling was confined to Las Vegas and Atlantic City. It is now thriving in 48 states, and there is no sign that anyone can stop it. In this election, gambling interests dropped $100 million on a single California ballot initiative, toppled governors in two states, and bought senators and representatives by the crate. What the commission ought to be investigating is whether the gambling industry has become so powerful that it's politically untouchable. But it can't, because the gambling industry has become so powerful that it's politically untouchable.", "It's very grim and mostly persuasive. Still, when we turn back on to the Strip, and pass the jaw-dropping Stratosphere and Circus Circus and Bellagio and the MGM Grand--a 30 story tower bathed in fabulous emerald light, I realize why Grey's task is hopeless here. He is committing the cardinal sin of Vegas. All he wants to do is talk about losers. In Las Vegas, under the thrilling lights of the Strip, no one wants to hear about losers. In the land of gaming, not gambling, everyone is sure he's a winner.", "Still, for all the Vegan triumphalism in the air, it's impossible not to be charmed by the chief gambling opponent, the Rev. Tom Grey. Grey is utterly irrepressible. A Vietnam rifleman turned Methodist minister, Grey has spent the last eight years evangelizing against gambling. He founded the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling, the primary force behind the commission's creation. (Grey, in a rare acknowledgement of defeat, has just renamed it the National Coalition Against Gambling Expansion, tacitly recognizing that gambling is here to stay.) He is a genial motormouth and shameless promoter of the cause. He wears a gigantic \"CasiNO\" button in the casino. He posed for People in a shepherd's robe. He says \"I would do anything short of lighting myself on fire in the Capitol rotunda to stop gambling.\" He is so excitable that I have to yank him out of the way of an oncoming car when he gets too wrapped up in one of his soliloquies.", "\"My goodness, no politician can withstand their resources,\" Focus on the Family's James Dobson, the commission's leading gambling opponent, tells me. The industry's political clout has emasculated the commission, Dobson continues: \"Our report won't be acted on by the president or Congress. They are too heavily influenced by gambling money. Almost all the leaders of Congress are on the dole.\" It has also become obvious that the commission has too many pro-gambling members to produce a report that recommends taxes or other real penalties on the industry. \n\n So the commission's two day visit to Gomorrah has been transformed from a charged political event to a kind of victory lap for gaming. Nevada Gov. Bob Miller and the \"gaming visionaries\" have been planning for these hearings for months, hoping to use them to demonstrate the might and sanctity and goodness of the Nevada gambling industry.", "(Pause for an aesthetic observation: I am sitting right behind the witnesses, and after a while I begin to separate them into the Wides and the Narrows. The Wides are men in suits with enormous backs and enormous bellies, men who eat and eat and used to play football. They all testify to their love of gambling. The Narrows are thin and generally disapprove of it. I begin to wonder whether fondness for gambling correlates with general indulgence, and dislike correlates with asceticism, and decide that they probably do.)", "Later in the day, Nevada's senators and both its congressmen appear to chew out the commission for even thinking that Nevada might have a dark side. They pay tribute to Nevada's sophisticated gambling industry, especially its regulation (much stricter than other gambling states) and its use of gambling taxes to fund state services. It is one of the ironies of Nevada politics that its Republican congressmen (Jim Gibbons and John Ensign) end up crediting their state's success to government regulation and corporate taxation.", "After Tuesday's casino triumphalism, Wednesday is a comedown, eight hours of policy panels on teen gambling, compulsive gambling, gambling regulation, gambling marketing, and gambling credit practices. It is tough slogging, but for the first time I sense that this commission--though divided, underfunded, timid, and without any power beyond exhortation--isn't entirely useless. It may finally settle this question: Is gambling Hollywood or tobacco? Entertainment or vice? \n\n The sleek Vegas types, whose Strip palaces scramble casinos, theaters, restaurants, arcades, discos, cabarets, theme parks, concert halls, sports arenas, and museums into one giant orgy of amusement, have been selling the idea that gambling is just entertainment--Disney in the desert. This effort has largely succeeded, because Vegas is still the dominant image of American gambling, if not the dominant reality.", "Chairwoman Kay Coles James, a Christian conservative and skeptic of gambling, opens the hearing by assuring the crowd that the committee is toothless: \"We're not here to take anyone's job. ... We have no power to do anything except make recommendations.\" This sets the mood for most of the day: Vegas is great, so you'd better leave it alone! The local government, by all appearances a wholly owned subsidiary of the casinos, puts on a bravura performance. Gov. Miller opens the show with a 15 minute hymn to Las Vegas. It is the first of many statistical barrages about Nevada's one-ders: No. 1 in job growth, No. 1 in population growth, and No. 1 on planet Earth in per capita Girl Scout troops--and Boy Scout troops!", "If the comments of the pro-industry commissioners can be believed, the industry will happily endorse such a report. Gamblers don't quite accept the cigarette analogy--though commission member Bill Bible, a former chief of the Nevada Gaming Commission, did concede that gambling was like alcohol--but they're happy to sign on to the specific measures. The casino industry is even trying to get ahead of the commission. It has already established a (mostly) independent center to fund research into pathological gambling. I suspect that the industry will not only agree to the commission's recommendations but will become their strongest advocate. Casino owners will avidly lobby Congress and state legislatures to enact the recommendations into law.", "The gambling industry did everything in its power to stop the establishment of this commission two years ago, but Congress and a fervent grassroots anti-gambling group eventually foisted it on the industry. The nine member blue-ribbon panel was charged with assessing the social and economic impact of gambling, and it will issue a final report to Congress and the president in June 1999. Even though the panel was carefully balanced between pro- and anti-gambling leaders, it was supposed to be Vegas' nemesis. The industry and Las Vegas' pro-gambling media quaked in anticipation of the onerous regulations and taxes the commission might recommend.", "Why should the pro-gamblers cooperate with a critical study? Because it provides superb cover for them. It medicalizes the problem of compulsive gambling, blaming it on psychological abnormality rather than industry machination. Likewise, cracking down on compulsives is also politically cost-effective. In exchange for losing a few compulsive gamblers, the casinos will (falsely) appear more concerned with the health of their customers than with profits.", "It is starting to become clear what that report will say. The commission won't (and can't) take any grand stand against gambling. Instead it will opt for small, targeted policies, concentrating on compulsive gambling. It will probably propose that casinos and state lotteries fund gambling-addiction research and that casinos take much stronger measures to bar problem gamblers from wagering. The commission may recommend that gaming taxes be used to underwrite treatment of pathological gamblers and that insurance companies be encouraged to cover gambling addiction. Similarly, the commission will try to reduce gamblers' access to cash by limiting the size of ATM advances and prodding casinos to remove the machines from their floors.", "The antis can call gambling \"tobacco.\" They can call it \"vice.\" They can call it \"a big red balloon\" for all that the industry cares. As long as the commission just nibbles around the edges, the casino operators and state lotteries will be happy to indulge it. The pro-gambling folks will win credit for cooperating, without having to do anything that really hurts. The last national gambling commission was in the mid-1970s. If the gamblers play along with this commission's timid recommendations, they'll be safe for another 20 years. \n\n An Apology \n\n I owe an apology to Nevada Sen. Richard Bryan, whom I criticized yesterday for using the term \"Indian country\" during a speech critical of Indian casinos. As several readers pointed out to me, \"Indian country\" is a common phrase in the West and has no derogatory connotations. I'm sorry, Senator.", "The MGM Grand, which is run by commission member Terrence Lanni, is itself the first exhibit of the Vegas triumphalists. It is gaudy testimony that consumers, at least, have no problem with this business. The MGM Grand, a k a \"The City of Entertainment,\" has 5,000 rooms--the corridor outside my room is 200 yards long, so long I can't see its end--to feed the endless supply of slot machines, craps tables, and roulette wheels. David Cassidy performs here every night--twice! A few steps outside on the Strip is still more overwhelming evidence that Las Vegas has won the popular vote. New York, New York is just across the street, the $1.6 billion Bellagio is one door down, and a half-scale Eiffel Tower is going up next door. The setting has, as the pro-gambling folks no doubt hoped, stunned some of the gambling opponents. I asked one anti-gambling activist who had never before been to Vegas what she thinks of it. She could only blurt out \"Wow.\"", "Is <A NAME= \n\n Gambling's would-be federal regulators--the National Gambling Impact Study Commission--went to Las Vegas this week to hold hearings. In today's dispatch, we learn how gambling's foes seek to demonize wagering as a pernicious tobaccolike vice. In yesterday's dispatch, gambling's foes learn the folly of having brought their anti-sin crusade to an adult Disneyland. \n\n Tuesday's overpowering show of force by the Nevada gambling aristocracy has had at least one audible effect on the National Gambling Impact Study Commission. Wednesday, even commission Chair Kay Coles James, a gambling skeptic, succumbs to the hideous Vegas euphemism: She begins referring to the \"gaming industry.\"", "The hearings, too, reinforce the Glorious Las Vegas theme. Frank Fahrenkopf, the industry's top lobbyist (who is paid so much he can afford monogrammed shirt cuffs --I saw them), holds forth cheerfully outside the ballroom, celebrating the electoral triumph of freedom over religious moralist tyranny. Inside, the room is packed with more than 600 people in neon lime green T-shirts that read \"Unions and Gaming: Together for a Better Life.\" They are members of the major casino union, here to cheer on their employers and their union. (Most of them, it must be said, are getting paid to do this.)", "The antis, meanwhile, cry that gambling is like cigarettes: unsafe for kids, viciously addictive, deceptively marketed, unhealthy, expensive, and unacceptable unless mightily regulated. \n\n Judging by today's hearings and by conversations with most of the commissioners, the tobacco model is winning. Today's panelists tell the commission that kids are starting to gamble too young and are getting addicted too easily, that compulsive gambling appears to be increasing as gambling spreads, that gambling marketing may be designed to addict customers, and that the industry exploits problem gamblers by allowing them to draw repeated credit card advances from ATMs on casino floors. The testimony clearly impresses the commissioners and seems especially to impress the three nonaligned commissioners who will be the swing votes on the June 1999 report.", "Talk about quick defeats: The first sign I see outside the MGM Grand ballroom all but declares that the National Gambling Impact Study Commission has already lost. The sign reads: \"National Gaming Impact Study Commission.\" \n\n \"Gaming\"?", "Pro-Vegas forces are also perfectly happy to take shots at Indian gambling, the chief economic threat to Nevada's prosperity. The expansion of Indian casinos resulting from last week's California voter initiative will slam Las Vegas, cutting its gambling revenues by $400 million a year. So the Vegans repeatedly swing at casinos in \"Indian country\" (that's Nevada Sen. Richard Bryan's term--I'm not joking) for being insufficiently regulated and taxed. One tribal chief I spoke to calls this \"red baiting.\"", "He and his Las Vegas allies, a former Las Vegas city councilman named Steve Miller and an inner city venture capitalist named Otis Harris, invite me on a tour of Las Vegas. \"Behind the Mirage,\" they call it. For two hours, we cruise the streets behind the casinos. They show me all the evidence of gambling blight you'd never want to see, from a youth-center-turned-crack-house to pawn shops to sex shops to down at heels casinos to quickie motels. All the while, they keep up a patter about how terrible a neighbor the casino industry is and how superficial Las Vegas' prosperity is." ], [ "(Pause for an aesthetic observation: I am sitting right behind the witnesses, and after a while I begin to separate them into the Wides and the Narrows. The Wides are men in suits with enormous backs and enormous bellies, men who eat and eat and used to play football. They all testify to their love of gambling. The Narrows are thin and generally disapprove of it. I begin to wonder whether fondness for gambling correlates with general indulgence, and dislike correlates with asceticism, and decide that they probably do.)", "It's very grim and mostly persuasive. Still, when we turn back on to the Strip, and pass the jaw-dropping Stratosphere and Circus Circus and Bellagio and the MGM Grand--a 30 story tower bathed in fabulous emerald light, I realize why Grey's task is hopeless here. He is committing the cardinal sin of Vegas. All he wants to do is talk about losers. In Las Vegas, under the thrilling lights of the Strip, no one wants to hear about losers. In the land of gaming, not gambling, everyone is sure he's a winner.", "The hearings, too, reinforce the Glorious Las Vegas theme. Frank Fahrenkopf, the industry's top lobbyist (who is paid so much he can afford monogrammed shirt cuffs --I saw them), holds forth cheerfully outside the ballroom, celebrating the electoral triumph of freedom over religious moralist tyranny. Inside, the room is packed with more than 600 people in neon lime green T-shirts that read \"Unions and Gaming: Together for a Better Life.\" They are members of the major casino union, here to cheer on their employers and their union. (Most of them, it must be said, are getting paid to do this.)", "After Tuesday's casino triumphalism, Wednesday is a comedown, eight hours of policy panels on teen gambling, compulsive gambling, gambling regulation, gambling marketing, and gambling credit practices. It is tough slogging, but for the first time I sense that this commission--though divided, underfunded, timid, and without any power beyond exhortation--isn't entirely useless. It may finally settle this question: Is gambling Hollywood or tobacco? Entertainment or vice? \n\n The sleek Vegas types, whose Strip palaces scramble casinos, theaters, restaurants, arcades, discos, cabarets, theme parks, concert halls, sports arenas, and museums into one giant orgy of amusement, have been selling the idea that gambling is just entertainment--Disney in the desert. This effort has largely succeeded, because Vegas is still the dominant image of American gambling, if not the dominant reality.", "Still, for all the Vegan triumphalism in the air, it's impossible not to be charmed by the chief gambling opponent, the Rev. Tom Grey. Grey is utterly irrepressible. A Vietnam rifleman turned Methodist minister, Grey has spent the last eight years evangelizing against gambling. He founded the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling, the primary force behind the commission's creation. (Grey, in a rare acknowledgement of defeat, has just renamed it the National Coalition Against Gambling Expansion, tacitly recognizing that gambling is here to stay.) He is a genial motormouth and shameless promoter of the cause. He wears a gigantic \"CasiNO\" button in the casino. He posed for People in a shepherd's robe. He says \"I would do anything short of lighting myself on fire in the Capitol rotunda to stop gambling.\" He is so excitable that I have to yank him out of the way of an oncoming car when he gets too wrapped up in one of his soliloquies.", "Chairwoman Kay Coles James, a Christian conservative and skeptic of gambling, opens the hearing by assuring the crowd that the committee is toothless: \"We're not here to take anyone's job. ... We have no power to do anything except make recommendations.\" This sets the mood for most of the day: Vegas is great, so you'd better leave it alone! The local government, by all appearances a wholly owned subsidiary of the casinos, puts on a bravura performance. Gov. Miller opens the show with a 15 minute hymn to Las Vegas. It is the first of many statistical barrages about Nevada's one-ders: No. 1 in job growth, No. 1 in population growth, and No. 1 on planet Earth in per capita Girl Scout troops--and Boy Scout troops!", "He and his Las Vegas allies, a former Las Vegas city councilman named Steve Miller and an inner city venture capitalist named Otis Harris, invite me on a tour of Las Vegas. \"Behind the Mirage,\" they call it. For two hours, we cruise the streets behind the casinos. They show me all the evidence of gambling blight you'd never want to see, from a youth-center-turned-crack-house to pawn shops to sex shops to down at heels casinos to quickie motels. All the while, they keep up a patter about how terrible a neighbor the casino industry is and how superficial Las Vegas' prosperity is.", "\"My goodness, no politician can withstand their resources,\" Focus on the Family's James Dobson, the commission's leading gambling opponent, tells me. The industry's political clout has emasculated the commission, Dobson continues: \"Our report won't be acted on by the president or Congress. They are too heavily influenced by gambling money. Almost all the leaders of Congress are on the dole.\" It has also become obvious that the commission has too many pro-gambling members to produce a report that recommends taxes or other real penalties on the industry. \n\n So the commission's two day visit to Gomorrah has been transformed from a charged political event to a kind of victory lap for gaming. Nevada Gov. Bob Miller and the \"gaming visionaries\" have been planning for these hearings for months, hoping to use them to demonstrate the might and sanctity and goodness of the Nevada gambling industry.", "The cigarette agenda will also distract the commission and the public from the true reasons for worry. A few years ago, gambling was confined to Las Vegas and Atlantic City. It is now thriving in 48 states, and there is no sign that anyone can stop it. In this election, gambling interests dropped $100 million on a single California ballot initiative, toppled governors in two states, and bought senators and representatives by the crate. What the commission ought to be investigating is whether the gambling industry has become so powerful that it's politically untouchable. But it can't, because the gambling industry has become so powerful that it's politically untouchable.", "Is <A NAME= \n\n Gambling's would-be federal regulators--the National Gambling Impact Study Commission--went to Las Vegas this week to hold hearings. In today's dispatch, we learn how gambling's foes seek to demonize wagering as a pernicious tobaccolike vice. In yesterday's dispatch, gambling's foes learn the folly of having brought their anti-sin crusade to an adult Disneyland. \n\n Tuesday's overpowering show of force by the Nevada gambling aristocracy has had at least one audible effect on the National Gambling Impact Study Commission. Wednesday, even commission Chair Kay Coles James, a gambling skeptic, succumbs to the hideous Vegas euphemism: She begins referring to the \"gaming industry.\"", "The MGM Grand, which is run by commission member Terrence Lanni, is itself the first exhibit of the Vegas triumphalists. It is gaudy testimony that consumers, at least, have no problem with this business. The MGM Grand, a k a \"The City of Entertainment,\" has 5,000 rooms--the corridor outside my room is 200 yards long, so long I can't see its end--to feed the endless supply of slot machines, craps tables, and roulette wheels. David Cassidy performs here every night--twice! A few steps outside on the Strip is still more overwhelming evidence that Las Vegas has won the popular vote. New York, New York is just across the street, the $1.6 billion Bellagio is one door down, and a half-scale Eiffel Tower is going up next door. The setting has, as the pro-gambling folks no doubt hoped, stunned some of the gambling opponents. I asked one anti-gambling activist who had never before been to Vegas what she thinks of it. She could only blurt out \"Wow.\"", "Talk about quick defeats: The first sign I see outside the MGM Grand ballroom all but declares that the National Gambling Impact Study Commission has already lost. The sign reads: \"National Gaming Impact Study Commission.\" \n\n \"Gaming\"?", "The antis, meanwhile, cry that gambling is like cigarettes: unsafe for kids, viciously addictive, deceptively marketed, unhealthy, expensive, and unacceptable unless mightily regulated. \n\n Judging by today's hearings and by conversations with most of the commissioners, the tobacco model is winning. Today's panelists tell the commission that kids are starting to gamble too young and are getting addicted too easily, that compulsive gambling appears to be increasing as gambling spreads, that gambling marketing may be designed to addict customers, and that the industry exploits problem gamblers by allowing them to draw repeated credit card advances from ATMs on casino floors. The testimony clearly impresses the commissioners and seems especially to impress the three nonaligned commissioners who will be the swing votes on the June 1999 report.", "Why should the pro-gamblers cooperate with a critical study? Because it provides superb cover for them. It medicalizes the problem of compulsive gambling, blaming it on psychological abnormality rather than industry machination. Likewise, cracking down on compulsives is also politically cost-effective. In exchange for losing a few compulsive gamblers, the casinos will (falsely) appear more concerned with the health of their customers than with profits.", "Pro-Vegas forces are also perfectly happy to take shots at Indian gambling, the chief economic threat to Nevada's prosperity. The expansion of Indian casinos resulting from last week's California voter initiative will slam Las Vegas, cutting its gambling revenues by $400 million a year. So the Vegans repeatedly swing at casinos in \"Indian country\" (that's Nevada Sen. Richard Bryan's term--I'm not joking) for being insufficiently regulated and taxed. One tribal chief I spoke to calls this \"red baiting.\"", "During the last hour of the day, the public comment period, the union sends a parade of casino employees to the microphone to hallelujah the gaming industry. Housekeepers, cooks, and slot change girls, almost all black or Latina, tell the same story: I was working a dead-end job in another state, \"then I heard about Las Vegas, where there's opportunity!\" I moved here, landed a job at a union casino with high pay, free medical insurance, a pension, and \"now I am buying a house.\" The stories are intensely moving, by far the most persuasive tribute to the Strip that I've ever heard.", "In Las Vegas, the euphemizers reign. Once upon a time, the casino owners decided that \"gambling\" was too crude, too avaricious, to describe their fair business. So \"gambling\" disappeared in Las Vegas, and \"gaming\" has risen in its place. He who controls language controls ideas, and at today's commission hearing, it is perfectly clear who controls the language. Video slot machines crammed into convenience stores--perhaps the most pernicious form of legal gambling there is--are called \"retail gaming.\" People who own casinos are not \"casino owners,\" they are \"gaming visionaries.\" Pathological gamblers are \"problem gamers\"--as if they're having trouble mastering the rules of Monopoly. And the National Gambling Impact Study Commission is reborn as the National Gaming Impact Study Commission.", "The antis can call gambling \"tobacco.\" They can call it \"vice.\" They can call it \"a big red balloon\" for all that the industry cares. As long as the commission just nibbles around the edges, the casino operators and state lotteries will be happy to indulge it. The pro-gambling folks will win credit for cooperating, without having to do anything that really hurts. The last national gambling commission was in the mid-1970s. If the gamblers play along with this commission's timid recommendations, they'll be safe for another 20 years. \n\n An Apology \n\n I owe an apology to Nevada Sen. Richard Bryan, whom I criticized yesterday for using the term \"Indian country\" during a speech critical of Indian casinos. As several readers pointed out to me, \"Indian country\" is a common phrase in the West and has no derogatory connotations. I'm sorry, Senator.", "Later in the day, Nevada's senators and both its congressmen appear to chew out the commission for even thinking that Nevada might have a dark side. They pay tribute to Nevada's sophisticated gambling industry, especially its regulation (much stricter than other gambling states) and its use of gambling taxes to fund state services. It is one of the ironies of Nevada politics that its Republican congressmen (Jim Gibbons and John Ensign) end up crediting their state's success to government regulation and corporate taxation.", "If the comments of the pro-industry commissioners can be believed, the industry will happily endorse such a report. Gamblers don't quite accept the cigarette analogy--though commission member Bill Bible, a former chief of the Nevada Gaming Commission, did concede that gambling was like alcohol--but they're happy to sign on to the specific measures. The casino industry is even trying to get ahead of the commission. It has already established a (mostly) independent center to fund research into pathological gambling. I suspect that the industry will not only agree to the commission's recommendations but will become their strongest advocate. Casino owners will avidly lobby Congress and state legislatures to enact the recommendations into law." ], [ "Later in the day, Nevada's senators and both its congressmen appear to chew out the commission for even thinking that Nevada might have a dark side. They pay tribute to Nevada's sophisticated gambling industry, especially its regulation (much stricter than other gambling states) and its use of gambling taxes to fund state services. It is one of the ironies of Nevada politics that its Republican congressmen (Jim Gibbons and John Ensign) end up crediting their state's success to government regulation and corporate taxation.", "If the comments of the pro-industry commissioners can be believed, the industry will happily endorse such a report. Gamblers don't quite accept the cigarette analogy--though commission member Bill Bible, a former chief of the Nevada Gaming Commission, did concede that gambling was like alcohol--but they're happy to sign on to the specific measures. The casino industry is even trying to get ahead of the commission. It has already established a (mostly) independent center to fund research into pathological gambling. I suspect that the industry will not only agree to the commission's recommendations but will become their strongest advocate. Casino owners will avidly lobby Congress and state legislatures to enact the recommendations into law.", "Pro-Vegas forces are also perfectly happy to take shots at Indian gambling, the chief economic threat to Nevada's prosperity. The expansion of Indian casinos resulting from last week's California voter initiative will slam Las Vegas, cutting its gambling revenues by $400 million a year. So the Vegans repeatedly swing at casinos in \"Indian country\" (that's Nevada Sen. Richard Bryan's term--I'm not joking) for being insufficiently regulated and taxed. One tribal chief I spoke to calls this \"red baiting.\"", "Still, for all the Vegan triumphalism in the air, it's impossible not to be charmed by the chief gambling opponent, the Rev. Tom Grey. Grey is utterly irrepressible. A Vietnam rifleman turned Methodist minister, Grey has spent the last eight years evangelizing against gambling. He founded the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling, the primary force behind the commission's creation. (Grey, in a rare acknowledgement of defeat, has just renamed it the National Coalition Against Gambling Expansion, tacitly recognizing that gambling is here to stay.) He is a genial motormouth and shameless promoter of the cause. He wears a gigantic \"CasiNO\" button in the casino. He posed for People in a shepherd's robe. He says \"I would do anything short of lighting myself on fire in the Capitol rotunda to stop gambling.\" He is so excitable that I have to yank him out of the way of an oncoming car when he gets too wrapped up in one of his soliloquies.", "The hearings, too, reinforce the Glorious Las Vegas theme. Frank Fahrenkopf, the industry's top lobbyist (who is paid so much he can afford monogrammed shirt cuffs --I saw them), holds forth cheerfully outside the ballroom, celebrating the electoral triumph of freedom over religious moralist tyranny. Inside, the room is packed with more than 600 people in neon lime green T-shirts that read \"Unions and Gaming: Together for a Better Life.\" They are members of the major casino union, here to cheer on their employers and their union. (Most of them, it must be said, are getting paid to do this.)", "\"My goodness, no politician can withstand their resources,\" Focus on the Family's James Dobson, the commission's leading gambling opponent, tells me. The industry's political clout has emasculated the commission, Dobson continues: \"Our report won't be acted on by the president or Congress. They are too heavily influenced by gambling money. Almost all the leaders of Congress are on the dole.\" It has also become obvious that the commission has too many pro-gambling members to produce a report that recommends taxes or other real penalties on the industry. \n\n So the commission's two day visit to Gomorrah has been transformed from a charged political event to a kind of victory lap for gaming. Nevada Gov. Bob Miller and the \"gaming visionaries\" have been planning for these hearings for months, hoping to use them to demonstrate the might and sanctity and goodness of the Nevada gambling industry.", "The gambling industry did everything in its power to stop the establishment of this commission two years ago, but Congress and a fervent grassroots anti-gambling group eventually foisted it on the industry. The nine member blue-ribbon panel was charged with assessing the social and economic impact of gambling, and it will issue a final report to Congress and the president in June 1999. Even though the panel was carefully balanced between pro- and anti-gambling leaders, it was supposed to be Vegas' nemesis. The industry and Las Vegas' pro-gambling media quaked in anticipation of the onerous regulations and taxes the commission might recommend.", "There are also a fair share of gleeful gambling regulators, bookmakers, and casino employees among the panels of expert witnesses the commission hears from. Critics who gripe about the perils of sports gambling and the evils of convenience store slot machines leaven the pro-gambling folks. Everyone, including the gambling industry shills, agrees that Internet gambling is evil and should be destroyed. Everyone agrees to this because no one in Las Vegas is making any money off Internet gambling. If they were, you can be sure they would explain why it's as American as nickel slots and scratch-off games.", "The MGM Grand, which is run by commission member Terrence Lanni, is itself the first exhibit of the Vegas triumphalists. It is gaudy testimony that consumers, at least, have no problem with this business. The MGM Grand, a k a \"The City of Entertainment,\" has 5,000 rooms--the corridor outside my room is 200 yards long, so long I can't see its end--to feed the endless supply of slot machines, craps tables, and roulette wheels. David Cassidy performs here every night--twice! A few steps outside on the Strip is still more overwhelming evidence that Las Vegas has won the popular vote. New York, New York is just across the street, the $1.6 billion Bellagio is one door down, and a half-scale Eiffel Tower is going up next door. The setting has, as the pro-gambling folks no doubt hoped, stunned some of the gambling opponents. I asked one anti-gambling activist who had never before been to Vegas what she thinks of it. She could only blurt out \"Wow.\"", "Chairwoman Kay Coles James, a Christian conservative and skeptic of gambling, opens the hearing by assuring the crowd that the committee is toothless: \"We're not here to take anyone's job. ... We have no power to do anything except make recommendations.\" This sets the mood for most of the day: Vegas is great, so you'd better leave it alone! The local government, by all appearances a wholly owned subsidiary of the casinos, puts on a bravura performance. Gov. Miller opens the show with a 15 minute hymn to Las Vegas. It is the first of many statistical barrages about Nevada's one-ders: No. 1 in job growth, No. 1 in population growth, and No. 1 on planet Earth in per capita Girl Scout troops--and Boy Scout troops!", "The antis, meanwhile, cry that gambling is like cigarettes: unsafe for kids, viciously addictive, deceptively marketed, unhealthy, expensive, and unacceptable unless mightily regulated. \n\n Judging by today's hearings and by conversations with most of the commissioners, the tobacco model is winning. Today's panelists tell the commission that kids are starting to gamble too young and are getting addicted too easily, that compulsive gambling appears to be increasing as gambling spreads, that gambling marketing may be designed to addict customers, and that the industry exploits problem gamblers by allowing them to draw repeated credit card advances from ATMs on casino floors. The testimony clearly impresses the commissioners and seems especially to impress the three nonaligned commissioners who will be the swing votes on the June 1999 report.", "After Tuesday's casino triumphalism, Wednesday is a comedown, eight hours of policy panels on teen gambling, compulsive gambling, gambling regulation, gambling marketing, and gambling credit practices. It is tough slogging, but for the first time I sense that this commission--though divided, underfunded, timid, and without any power beyond exhortation--isn't entirely useless. It may finally settle this question: Is gambling Hollywood or tobacco? Entertainment or vice? \n\n The sleek Vegas types, whose Strip palaces scramble casinos, theaters, restaurants, arcades, discos, cabarets, theme parks, concert halls, sports arenas, and museums into one giant orgy of amusement, have been selling the idea that gambling is just entertainment--Disney in the desert. This effort has largely succeeded, because Vegas is still the dominant image of American gambling, if not the dominant reality.", "The cigarette agenda will also distract the commission and the public from the true reasons for worry. A few years ago, gambling was confined to Las Vegas and Atlantic City. It is now thriving in 48 states, and there is no sign that anyone can stop it. In this election, gambling interests dropped $100 million on a single California ballot initiative, toppled governors in two states, and bought senators and representatives by the crate. What the commission ought to be investigating is whether the gambling industry has become so powerful that it's politically untouchable. But it can't, because the gambling industry has become so powerful that it's politically untouchable.", "But they quake no more. Whatever national momentum the anti-gamblers had dissolved in last week's elections. The industry routed opponents in state after state. Missouri voters passed a ballot initiative to allow boat casinos. Californians voted to expand Indian casinos. In South Carolina and Alabama, voters expelled anti-lottery, anti-gambling Republican governors and replaced them with pro-lottery Democrats. The gambling industry spent more than $100 million on political contributions and issue ads. It has never been fatter, happier, or more secure.", "(Pause for an aesthetic observation: I am sitting right behind the witnesses, and after a while I begin to separate them into the Wides and the Narrows. The Wides are men in suits with enormous backs and enormous bellies, men who eat and eat and used to play football. They all testify to their love of gambling. The Narrows are thin and generally disapprove of it. I begin to wonder whether fondness for gambling correlates with general indulgence, and dislike correlates with asceticism, and decide that they probably do.)", "The antis can call gambling \"tobacco.\" They can call it \"vice.\" They can call it \"a big red balloon\" for all that the industry cares. As long as the commission just nibbles around the edges, the casino operators and state lotteries will be happy to indulge it. The pro-gambling folks will win credit for cooperating, without having to do anything that really hurts. The last national gambling commission was in the mid-1970s. If the gamblers play along with this commission's timid recommendations, they'll be safe for another 20 years. \n\n An Apology \n\n I owe an apology to Nevada Sen. Richard Bryan, whom I criticized yesterday for using the term \"Indian country\" during a speech critical of Indian casinos. As several readers pointed out to me, \"Indian country\" is a common phrase in the West and has no derogatory connotations. I'm sorry, Senator.", "He and his Las Vegas allies, a former Las Vegas city councilman named Steve Miller and an inner city venture capitalist named Otis Harris, invite me on a tour of Las Vegas. \"Behind the Mirage,\" they call it. For two hours, we cruise the streets behind the casinos. They show me all the evidence of gambling blight you'd never want to see, from a youth-center-turned-crack-house to pawn shops to sex shops to down at heels casinos to quickie motels. All the while, they keep up a patter about how terrible a neighbor the casino industry is and how superficial Las Vegas' prosperity is.", "Is <A NAME= \n\n Gambling's would-be federal regulators--the National Gambling Impact Study Commission--went to Las Vegas this week to hold hearings. In today's dispatch, we learn how gambling's foes seek to demonize wagering as a pernicious tobaccolike vice. In yesterday's dispatch, gambling's foes learn the folly of having brought their anti-sin crusade to an adult Disneyland. \n\n Tuesday's overpowering show of force by the Nevada gambling aristocracy has had at least one audible effect on the National Gambling Impact Study Commission. Wednesday, even commission Chair Kay Coles James, a gambling skeptic, succumbs to the hideous Vegas euphemism: She begins referring to the \"gaming industry.\"", "The commission will also push the industry to do more to prevent kids from gambling. It will call for heavier regulation of Indian gambling and will probably try to ban or severely regulate Internet gambling, perhaps by forbidding gambling companies from running online casinos. It will rebuke state lotteries for their deceptive marketing and will try to force them to post odds and stop targeting the poor. In short, it will treat gambling as a tobaccolike vice.", "Why should the pro-gamblers cooperate with a critical study? Because it provides superb cover for them. It medicalizes the problem of compulsive gambling, blaming it on psychological abnormality rather than industry machination. Likewise, cracking down on compulsives is also politically cost-effective. In exchange for losing a few compulsive gamblers, the casinos will (falsely) appear more concerned with the health of their customers than with profits." ], [ "He and his Las Vegas allies, a former Las Vegas city councilman named Steve Miller and an inner city venture capitalist named Otis Harris, invite me on a tour of Las Vegas. \"Behind the Mirage,\" they call it. For two hours, we cruise the streets behind the casinos. They show me all the evidence of gambling blight you'd never want to see, from a youth-center-turned-crack-house to pawn shops to sex shops to down at heels casinos to quickie motels. All the while, they keep up a patter about how terrible a neighbor the casino industry is and how superficial Las Vegas' prosperity is.", "It's very grim and mostly persuasive. Still, when we turn back on to the Strip, and pass the jaw-dropping Stratosphere and Circus Circus and Bellagio and the MGM Grand--a 30 story tower bathed in fabulous emerald light, I realize why Grey's task is hopeless here. He is committing the cardinal sin of Vegas. All he wants to do is talk about losers. In Las Vegas, under the thrilling lights of the Strip, no one wants to hear about losers. In the land of gaming, not gambling, everyone is sure he's a winner.", "After Tuesday's casino triumphalism, Wednesday is a comedown, eight hours of policy panels on teen gambling, compulsive gambling, gambling regulation, gambling marketing, and gambling credit practices. It is tough slogging, but for the first time I sense that this commission--though divided, underfunded, timid, and without any power beyond exhortation--isn't entirely useless. It may finally settle this question: Is gambling Hollywood or tobacco? Entertainment or vice? \n\n The sleek Vegas types, whose Strip palaces scramble casinos, theaters, restaurants, arcades, discos, cabarets, theme parks, concert halls, sports arenas, and museums into one giant orgy of amusement, have been selling the idea that gambling is just entertainment--Disney in the desert. This effort has largely succeeded, because Vegas is still the dominant image of American gambling, if not the dominant reality.", "The MGM Grand, which is run by commission member Terrence Lanni, is itself the first exhibit of the Vegas triumphalists. It is gaudy testimony that consumers, at least, have no problem with this business. The MGM Grand, a k a \"The City of Entertainment,\" has 5,000 rooms--the corridor outside my room is 200 yards long, so long I can't see its end--to feed the endless supply of slot machines, craps tables, and roulette wheels. David Cassidy performs here every night--twice! A few steps outside on the Strip is still more overwhelming evidence that Las Vegas has won the popular vote. New York, New York is just across the street, the $1.6 billion Bellagio is one door down, and a half-scale Eiffel Tower is going up next door. The setting has, as the pro-gambling folks no doubt hoped, stunned some of the gambling opponents. I asked one anti-gambling activist who had never before been to Vegas what she thinks of it. She could only blurt out \"Wow.\"", "The hearings, too, reinforce the Glorious Las Vegas theme. Frank Fahrenkopf, the industry's top lobbyist (who is paid so much he can afford monogrammed shirt cuffs --I saw them), holds forth cheerfully outside the ballroom, celebrating the electoral triumph of freedom over religious moralist tyranny. Inside, the room is packed with more than 600 people in neon lime green T-shirts that read \"Unions and Gaming: Together for a Better Life.\" They are members of the major casino union, here to cheer on their employers and their union. (Most of them, it must be said, are getting paid to do this.)", "\"My goodness, no politician can withstand their resources,\" Focus on the Family's James Dobson, the commission's leading gambling opponent, tells me. The industry's political clout has emasculated the commission, Dobson continues: \"Our report won't be acted on by the president or Congress. They are too heavily influenced by gambling money. Almost all the leaders of Congress are on the dole.\" It has also become obvious that the commission has too many pro-gambling members to produce a report that recommends taxes or other real penalties on the industry. \n\n So the commission's two day visit to Gomorrah has been transformed from a charged political event to a kind of victory lap for gaming. Nevada Gov. Bob Miller and the \"gaming visionaries\" have been planning for these hearings for months, hoping to use them to demonstrate the might and sanctity and goodness of the Nevada gambling industry.", "Chairwoman Kay Coles James, a Christian conservative and skeptic of gambling, opens the hearing by assuring the crowd that the committee is toothless: \"We're not here to take anyone's job. ... We have no power to do anything except make recommendations.\" This sets the mood for most of the day: Vegas is great, so you'd better leave it alone! The local government, by all appearances a wholly owned subsidiary of the casinos, puts on a bravura performance. Gov. Miller opens the show with a 15 minute hymn to Las Vegas. It is the first of many statistical barrages about Nevada's one-ders: No. 1 in job growth, No. 1 in population growth, and No. 1 on planet Earth in per capita Girl Scout troops--and Boy Scout troops!", "Is <A NAME= \n\n Gambling's would-be federal regulators--the National Gambling Impact Study Commission--went to Las Vegas this week to hold hearings. In today's dispatch, we learn how gambling's foes seek to demonize wagering as a pernicious tobaccolike vice. In yesterday's dispatch, gambling's foes learn the folly of having brought their anti-sin crusade to an adult Disneyland. \n\n Tuesday's overpowering show of force by the Nevada gambling aristocracy has had at least one audible effect on the National Gambling Impact Study Commission. Wednesday, even commission Chair Kay Coles James, a gambling skeptic, succumbs to the hideous Vegas euphemism: She begins referring to the \"gaming industry.\"", "The gambling industry did everything in its power to stop the establishment of this commission two years ago, but Congress and a fervent grassroots anti-gambling group eventually foisted it on the industry. The nine member blue-ribbon panel was charged with assessing the social and economic impact of gambling, and it will issue a final report to Congress and the president in June 1999. Even though the panel was carefully balanced between pro- and anti-gambling leaders, it was supposed to be Vegas' nemesis. The industry and Las Vegas' pro-gambling media quaked in anticipation of the onerous regulations and taxes the commission might recommend.", "In Las Vegas, the euphemizers reign. Once upon a time, the casino owners decided that \"gambling\" was too crude, too avaricious, to describe their fair business. So \"gambling\" disappeared in Las Vegas, and \"gaming\" has risen in its place. He who controls language controls ideas, and at today's commission hearing, it is perfectly clear who controls the language. Video slot machines crammed into convenience stores--perhaps the most pernicious form of legal gambling there is--are called \"retail gaming.\" People who own casinos are not \"casino owners,\" they are \"gaming visionaries.\" Pathological gamblers are \"problem gamers\"--as if they're having trouble mastering the rules of Monopoly. And the National Gambling Impact Study Commission is reborn as the National Gaming Impact Study Commission.", "During the last hour of the day, the public comment period, the union sends a parade of casino employees to the microphone to hallelujah the gaming industry. Housekeepers, cooks, and slot change girls, almost all black or Latina, tell the same story: I was working a dead-end job in another state, \"then I heard about Las Vegas, where there's opportunity!\" I moved here, landed a job at a union casino with high pay, free medical insurance, a pension, and \"now I am buying a house.\" The stories are intensely moving, by far the most persuasive tribute to the Strip that I've ever heard.", "If the comments of the pro-industry commissioners can be believed, the industry will happily endorse such a report. Gamblers don't quite accept the cigarette analogy--though commission member Bill Bible, a former chief of the Nevada Gaming Commission, did concede that gambling was like alcohol--but they're happy to sign on to the specific measures. The casino industry is even trying to get ahead of the commission. It has already established a (mostly) independent center to fund research into pathological gambling. I suspect that the industry will not only agree to the commission's recommendations but will become their strongest advocate. Casino owners will avidly lobby Congress and state legislatures to enact the recommendations into law.", "Still, for all the Vegan triumphalism in the air, it's impossible not to be charmed by the chief gambling opponent, the Rev. Tom Grey. Grey is utterly irrepressible. A Vietnam rifleman turned Methodist minister, Grey has spent the last eight years evangelizing against gambling. He founded the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling, the primary force behind the commission's creation. (Grey, in a rare acknowledgement of defeat, has just renamed it the National Coalition Against Gambling Expansion, tacitly recognizing that gambling is here to stay.) He is a genial motormouth and shameless promoter of the cause. He wears a gigantic \"CasiNO\" button in the casino. He posed for People in a shepherd's robe. He says \"I would do anything short of lighting myself on fire in the Capitol rotunda to stop gambling.\" He is so excitable that I have to yank him out of the way of an oncoming car when he gets too wrapped up in one of his soliloquies.", "Pro-Vegas forces are also perfectly happy to take shots at Indian gambling, the chief economic threat to Nevada's prosperity. The expansion of Indian casinos resulting from last week's California voter initiative will slam Las Vegas, cutting its gambling revenues by $400 million a year. So the Vegans repeatedly swing at casinos in \"Indian country\" (that's Nevada Sen. Richard Bryan's term--I'm not joking) for being insufficiently regulated and taxed. One tribal chief I spoke to calls this \"red baiting.\"", "Later in the day, Nevada's senators and both its congressmen appear to chew out the commission for even thinking that Nevada might have a dark side. They pay tribute to Nevada's sophisticated gambling industry, especially its regulation (much stricter than other gambling states) and its use of gambling taxes to fund state services. It is one of the ironies of Nevada politics that its Republican congressmen (Jim Gibbons and John Ensign) end up crediting their state's success to government regulation and corporate taxation.", "Talk about quick defeats: The first sign I see outside the MGM Grand ballroom all but declares that the National Gambling Impact Study Commission has already lost. The sign reads: \"National Gaming Impact Study Commission.\" \n\n \"Gaming\"?", "The cigarette agenda will also distract the commission and the public from the true reasons for worry. A few years ago, gambling was confined to Las Vegas and Atlantic City. It is now thriving in 48 states, and there is no sign that anyone can stop it. In this election, gambling interests dropped $100 million on a single California ballot initiative, toppled governors in two states, and bought senators and representatives by the crate. What the commission ought to be investigating is whether the gambling industry has become so powerful that it's politically untouchable. But it can't, because the gambling industry has become so powerful that it's politically untouchable.", "(Pause for an aesthetic observation: I am sitting right behind the witnesses, and after a while I begin to separate them into the Wides and the Narrows. The Wides are men in suits with enormous backs and enormous bellies, men who eat and eat and used to play football. They all testify to their love of gambling. The Narrows are thin and generally disapprove of it. I begin to wonder whether fondness for gambling correlates with general indulgence, and dislike correlates with asceticism, and decide that they probably do.)", "Why should the pro-gamblers cooperate with a critical study? Because it provides superb cover for them. It medicalizes the problem of compulsive gambling, blaming it on psychological abnormality rather than industry machination. Likewise, cracking down on compulsives is also politically cost-effective. In exchange for losing a few compulsive gamblers, the casinos will (falsely) appear more concerned with the health of their customers than with profits.", "The antis can call gambling \"tobacco.\" They can call it \"vice.\" They can call it \"a big red balloon\" for all that the industry cares. As long as the commission just nibbles around the edges, the casino operators and state lotteries will be happy to indulge it. The pro-gambling folks will win credit for cooperating, without having to do anything that really hurts. The last national gambling commission was in the mid-1970s. If the gamblers play along with this commission's timid recommendations, they'll be safe for another 20 years. \n\n An Apology \n\n I owe an apology to Nevada Sen. Richard Bryan, whom I criticized yesterday for using the term \"Indian country\" during a speech critical of Indian casinos. As several readers pointed out to me, \"Indian country\" is a common phrase in the West and has no derogatory connotations. I'm sorry, Senator." ], [ "The hearings, too, reinforce the Glorious Las Vegas theme. Frank Fahrenkopf, the industry's top lobbyist (who is paid so much he can afford monogrammed shirt cuffs --I saw them), holds forth cheerfully outside the ballroom, celebrating the electoral triumph of freedom over religious moralist tyranny. Inside, the room is packed with more than 600 people in neon lime green T-shirts that read \"Unions and Gaming: Together for a Better Life.\" They are members of the major casino union, here to cheer on their employers and their union. (Most of them, it must be said, are getting paid to do this.)", "\"My goodness, no politician can withstand their resources,\" Focus on the Family's James Dobson, the commission's leading gambling opponent, tells me. The industry's political clout has emasculated the commission, Dobson continues: \"Our report won't be acted on by the president or Congress. They are too heavily influenced by gambling money. Almost all the leaders of Congress are on the dole.\" It has also become obvious that the commission has too many pro-gambling members to produce a report that recommends taxes or other real penalties on the industry. \n\n So the commission's two day visit to Gomorrah has been transformed from a charged political event to a kind of victory lap for gaming. Nevada Gov. Bob Miller and the \"gaming visionaries\" have been planning for these hearings for months, hoping to use them to demonstrate the might and sanctity and goodness of the Nevada gambling industry.", "Still, for all the Vegan triumphalism in the air, it's impossible not to be charmed by the chief gambling opponent, the Rev. Tom Grey. Grey is utterly irrepressible. A Vietnam rifleman turned Methodist minister, Grey has spent the last eight years evangelizing against gambling. He founded the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling, the primary force behind the commission's creation. (Grey, in a rare acknowledgement of defeat, has just renamed it the National Coalition Against Gambling Expansion, tacitly recognizing that gambling is here to stay.) He is a genial motormouth and shameless promoter of the cause. He wears a gigantic \"CasiNO\" button in the casino. He posed for People in a shepherd's robe. He says \"I would do anything short of lighting myself on fire in the Capitol rotunda to stop gambling.\" He is so excitable that I have to yank him out of the way of an oncoming car when he gets too wrapped up in one of his soliloquies.", "Chairwoman Kay Coles James, a Christian conservative and skeptic of gambling, opens the hearing by assuring the crowd that the committee is toothless: \"We're not here to take anyone's job. ... We have no power to do anything except make recommendations.\" This sets the mood for most of the day: Vegas is great, so you'd better leave it alone! The local government, by all appearances a wholly owned subsidiary of the casinos, puts on a bravura performance. Gov. Miller opens the show with a 15 minute hymn to Las Vegas. It is the first of many statistical barrages about Nevada's one-ders: No. 1 in job growth, No. 1 in population growth, and No. 1 on planet Earth in per capita Girl Scout troops--and Boy Scout troops!", "Is <A NAME= \n\n Gambling's would-be federal regulators--the National Gambling Impact Study Commission--went to Las Vegas this week to hold hearings. In today's dispatch, we learn how gambling's foes seek to demonize wagering as a pernicious tobaccolike vice. In yesterday's dispatch, gambling's foes learn the folly of having brought their anti-sin crusade to an adult Disneyland. \n\n Tuesday's overpowering show of force by the Nevada gambling aristocracy has had at least one audible effect on the National Gambling Impact Study Commission. Wednesday, even commission Chair Kay Coles James, a gambling skeptic, succumbs to the hideous Vegas euphemism: She begins referring to the \"gaming industry.\"", "If the comments of the pro-industry commissioners can be believed, the industry will happily endorse such a report. Gamblers don't quite accept the cigarette analogy--though commission member Bill Bible, a former chief of the Nevada Gaming Commission, did concede that gambling was like alcohol--but they're happy to sign on to the specific measures. The casino industry is even trying to get ahead of the commission. It has already established a (mostly) independent center to fund research into pathological gambling. I suspect that the industry will not only agree to the commission's recommendations but will become their strongest advocate. Casino owners will avidly lobby Congress and state legislatures to enact the recommendations into law.", "The gambling industry did everything in its power to stop the establishment of this commission two years ago, but Congress and a fervent grassroots anti-gambling group eventually foisted it on the industry. The nine member blue-ribbon panel was charged with assessing the social and economic impact of gambling, and it will issue a final report to Congress and the president in June 1999. Even though the panel was carefully balanced between pro- and anti-gambling leaders, it was supposed to be Vegas' nemesis. The industry and Las Vegas' pro-gambling media quaked in anticipation of the onerous regulations and taxes the commission might recommend.", "After Tuesday's casino triumphalism, Wednesday is a comedown, eight hours of policy panels on teen gambling, compulsive gambling, gambling regulation, gambling marketing, and gambling credit practices. It is tough slogging, but for the first time I sense that this commission--though divided, underfunded, timid, and without any power beyond exhortation--isn't entirely useless. It may finally settle this question: Is gambling Hollywood or tobacco? Entertainment or vice? \n\n The sleek Vegas types, whose Strip palaces scramble casinos, theaters, restaurants, arcades, discos, cabarets, theme parks, concert halls, sports arenas, and museums into one giant orgy of amusement, have been selling the idea that gambling is just entertainment--Disney in the desert. This effort has largely succeeded, because Vegas is still the dominant image of American gambling, if not the dominant reality.", "It's very grim and mostly persuasive. Still, when we turn back on to the Strip, and pass the jaw-dropping Stratosphere and Circus Circus and Bellagio and the MGM Grand--a 30 story tower bathed in fabulous emerald light, I realize why Grey's task is hopeless here. He is committing the cardinal sin of Vegas. All he wants to do is talk about losers. In Las Vegas, under the thrilling lights of the Strip, no one wants to hear about losers. In the land of gaming, not gambling, everyone is sure he's a winner.", "(Pause for an aesthetic observation: I am sitting right behind the witnesses, and after a while I begin to separate them into the Wides and the Narrows. The Wides are men in suits with enormous backs and enormous bellies, men who eat and eat and used to play football. They all testify to their love of gambling. The Narrows are thin and generally disapprove of it. I begin to wonder whether fondness for gambling correlates with general indulgence, and dislike correlates with asceticism, and decide that they probably do.)", "The antis, meanwhile, cry that gambling is like cigarettes: unsafe for kids, viciously addictive, deceptively marketed, unhealthy, expensive, and unacceptable unless mightily regulated. \n\n Judging by today's hearings and by conversations with most of the commissioners, the tobacco model is winning. Today's panelists tell the commission that kids are starting to gamble too young and are getting addicted too easily, that compulsive gambling appears to be increasing as gambling spreads, that gambling marketing may be designed to addict customers, and that the industry exploits problem gamblers by allowing them to draw repeated credit card advances from ATMs on casino floors. The testimony clearly impresses the commissioners and seems especially to impress the three nonaligned commissioners who will be the swing votes on the June 1999 report.", "The antis can call gambling \"tobacco.\" They can call it \"vice.\" They can call it \"a big red balloon\" for all that the industry cares. As long as the commission just nibbles around the edges, the casino operators and state lotteries will be happy to indulge it. The pro-gambling folks will win credit for cooperating, without having to do anything that really hurts. The last national gambling commission was in the mid-1970s. If the gamblers play along with this commission's timid recommendations, they'll be safe for another 20 years. \n\n An Apology \n\n I owe an apology to Nevada Sen. Richard Bryan, whom I criticized yesterday for using the term \"Indian country\" during a speech critical of Indian casinos. As several readers pointed out to me, \"Indian country\" is a common phrase in the West and has no derogatory connotations. I'm sorry, Senator.", "He and his Las Vegas allies, a former Las Vegas city councilman named Steve Miller and an inner city venture capitalist named Otis Harris, invite me on a tour of Las Vegas. \"Behind the Mirage,\" they call it. For two hours, we cruise the streets behind the casinos. They show me all the evidence of gambling blight you'd never want to see, from a youth-center-turned-crack-house to pawn shops to sex shops to down at heels casinos to quickie motels. All the while, they keep up a patter about how terrible a neighbor the casino industry is and how superficial Las Vegas' prosperity is.", "In Las Vegas, the euphemizers reign. Once upon a time, the casino owners decided that \"gambling\" was too crude, too avaricious, to describe their fair business. So \"gambling\" disappeared in Las Vegas, and \"gaming\" has risen in its place. He who controls language controls ideas, and at today's commission hearing, it is perfectly clear who controls the language. Video slot machines crammed into convenience stores--perhaps the most pernicious form of legal gambling there is--are called \"retail gaming.\" People who own casinos are not \"casino owners,\" they are \"gaming visionaries.\" Pathological gamblers are \"problem gamers\"--as if they're having trouble mastering the rules of Monopoly. And the National Gambling Impact Study Commission is reborn as the National Gaming Impact Study Commission.", "There are also a fair share of gleeful gambling regulators, bookmakers, and casino employees among the panels of expert witnesses the commission hears from. Critics who gripe about the perils of sports gambling and the evils of convenience store slot machines leaven the pro-gambling folks. Everyone, including the gambling industry shills, agrees that Internet gambling is evil and should be destroyed. Everyone agrees to this because no one in Las Vegas is making any money off Internet gambling. If they were, you can be sure they would explain why it's as American as nickel slots and scratch-off games.", "The cigarette agenda will also distract the commission and the public from the true reasons for worry. A few years ago, gambling was confined to Las Vegas and Atlantic City. It is now thriving in 48 states, and there is no sign that anyone can stop it. In this election, gambling interests dropped $100 million on a single California ballot initiative, toppled governors in two states, and bought senators and representatives by the crate. What the commission ought to be investigating is whether the gambling industry has become so powerful that it's politically untouchable. But it can't, because the gambling industry has become so powerful that it's politically untouchable.", "Why should the pro-gamblers cooperate with a critical study? Because it provides superb cover for them. It medicalizes the problem of compulsive gambling, blaming it on psychological abnormality rather than industry machination. Likewise, cracking down on compulsives is also politically cost-effective. In exchange for losing a few compulsive gamblers, the casinos will (falsely) appear more concerned with the health of their customers than with profits.", "The MGM Grand, which is run by commission member Terrence Lanni, is itself the first exhibit of the Vegas triumphalists. It is gaudy testimony that consumers, at least, have no problem with this business. The MGM Grand, a k a \"The City of Entertainment,\" has 5,000 rooms--the corridor outside my room is 200 yards long, so long I can't see its end--to feed the endless supply of slot machines, craps tables, and roulette wheels. David Cassidy performs here every night--twice! A few steps outside on the Strip is still more overwhelming evidence that Las Vegas has won the popular vote. New York, New York is just across the street, the $1.6 billion Bellagio is one door down, and a half-scale Eiffel Tower is going up next door. The setting has, as the pro-gambling folks no doubt hoped, stunned some of the gambling opponents. I asked one anti-gambling activist who had never before been to Vegas what she thinks of it. She could only blurt out \"Wow.\"", "Pro-Vegas forces are also perfectly happy to take shots at Indian gambling, the chief economic threat to Nevada's prosperity. The expansion of Indian casinos resulting from last week's California voter initiative will slam Las Vegas, cutting its gambling revenues by $400 million a year. So the Vegans repeatedly swing at casinos in \"Indian country\" (that's Nevada Sen. Richard Bryan's term--I'm not joking) for being insufficiently regulated and taxed. One tribal chief I spoke to calls this \"red baiting.\"", "The commission will also push the industry to do more to prevent kids from gambling. It will call for heavier regulation of Indian gambling and will probably try to ban or severely regulate Internet gambling, perhaps by forbidding gambling companies from running online casinos. It will rebuke state lotteries for their deceptive marketing and will try to force them to post odds and stop targeting the poor. In short, it will treat gambling as a tobaccolike vice." ], [ "Still, for all the Vegan triumphalism in the air, it's impossible not to be charmed by the chief gambling opponent, the Rev. Tom Grey. Grey is utterly irrepressible. A Vietnam rifleman turned Methodist minister, Grey has spent the last eight years evangelizing against gambling. He founded the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling, the primary force behind the commission's creation. (Grey, in a rare acknowledgement of defeat, has just renamed it the National Coalition Against Gambling Expansion, tacitly recognizing that gambling is here to stay.) He is a genial motormouth and shameless promoter of the cause. He wears a gigantic \"CasiNO\" button in the casino. He posed for People in a shepherd's robe. He says \"I would do anything short of lighting myself on fire in the Capitol rotunda to stop gambling.\" He is so excitable that I have to yank him out of the way of an oncoming car when he gets too wrapped up in one of his soliloquies.", "It's very grim and mostly persuasive. Still, when we turn back on to the Strip, and pass the jaw-dropping Stratosphere and Circus Circus and Bellagio and the MGM Grand--a 30 story tower bathed in fabulous emerald light, I realize why Grey's task is hopeless here. He is committing the cardinal sin of Vegas. All he wants to do is talk about losers. In Las Vegas, under the thrilling lights of the Strip, no one wants to hear about losers. In the land of gaming, not gambling, everyone is sure he's a winner.", "(Pause for an aesthetic observation: I am sitting right behind the witnesses, and after a while I begin to separate them into the Wides and the Narrows. The Wides are men in suits with enormous backs and enormous bellies, men who eat and eat and used to play football. They all testify to their love of gambling. The Narrows are thin and generally disapprove of it. I begin to wonder whether fondness for gambling correlates with general indulgence, and dislike correlates with asceticism, and decide that they probably do.)", "In Las Vegas, the euphemizers reign. Once upon a time, the casino owners decided that \"gambling\" was too crude, too avaricious, to describe their fair business. So \"gambling\" disappeared in Las Vegas, and \"gaming\" has risen in its place. He who controls language controls ideas, and at today's commission hearing, it is perfectly clear who controls the language. Video slot machines crammed into convenience stores--perhaps the most pernicious form of legal gambling there is--are called \"retail gaming.\" People who own casinos are not \"casino owners,\" they are \"gaming visionaries.\" Pathological gamblers are \"problem gamers\"--as if they're having trouble mastering the rules of Monopoly. And the National Gambling Impact Study Commission is reborn as the National Gaming Impact Study Commission.", "Talk about quick defeats: The first sign I see outside the MGM Grand ballroom all but declares that the National Gambling Impact Study Commission has already lost. The sign reads: \"National Gaming Impact Study Commission.\" \n\n \"Gaming\"?", "Is <A NAME= \n\n Gambling's would-be federal regulators--the National Gambling Impact Study Commission--went to Las Vegas this week to hold hearings. In today's dispatch, we learn how gambling's foes seek to demonize wagering as a pernicious tobaccolike vice. In yesterday's dispatch, gambling's foes learn the folly of having brought their anti-sin crusade to an adult Disneyland. \n\n Tuesday's overpowering show of force by the Nevada gambling aristocracy has had at least one audible effect on the National Gambling Impact Study Commission. Wednesday, even commission Chair Kay Coles James, a gambling skeptic, succumbs to the hideous Vegas euphemism: She begins referring to the \"gaming industry.\"", "After Tuesday's casino triumphalism, Wednesday is a comedown, eight hours of policy panels on teen gambling, compulsive gambling, gambling regulation, gambling marketing, and gambling credit practices. It is tough slogging, but for the first time I sense that this commission--though divided, underfunded, timid, and without any power beyond exhortation--isn't entirely useless. It may finally settle this question: Is gambling Hollywood or tobacco? Entertainment or vice? \n\n The sleek Vegas types, whose Strip palaces scramble casinos, theaters, restaurants, arcades, discos, cabarets, theme parks, concert halls, sports arenas, and museums into one giant orgy of amusement, have been selling the idea that gambling is just entertainment--Disney in the desert. This effort has largely succeeded, because Vegas is still the dominant image of American gambling, if not the dominant reality.", "The antis can call gambling \"tobacco.\" They can call it \"vice.\" They can call it \"a big red balloon\" for all that the industry cares. As long as the commission just nibbles around the edges, the casino operators and state lotteries will be happy to indulge it. The pro-gambling folks will win credit for cooperating, without having to do anything that really hurts. The last national gambling commission was in the mid-1970s. If the gamblers play along with this commission's timid recommendations, they'll be safe for another 20 years. \n\n An Apology \n\n I owe an apology to Nevada Sen. Richard Bryan, whom I criticized yesterday for using the term \"Indian country\" during a speech critical of Indian casinos. As several readers pointed out to me, \"Indian country\" is a common phrase in the West and has no derogatory connotations. I'm sorry, Senator.", "He and his Las Vegas allies, a former Las Vegas city councilman named Steve Miller and an inner city venture capitalist named Otis Harris, invite me on a tour of Las Vegas. \"Behind the Mirage,\" they call it. For two hours, we cruise the streets behind the casinos. They show me all the evidence of gambling blight you'd never want to see, from a youth-center-turned-crack-house to pawn shops to sex shops to down at heels casinos to quickie motels. All the while, they keep up a patter about how terrible a neighbor the casino industry is and how superficial Las Vegas' prosperity is.", "Chairwoman Kay Coles James, a Christian conservative and skeptic of gambling, opens the hearing by assuring the crowd that the committee is toothless: \"We're not here to take anyone's job. ... We have no power to do anything except make recommendations.\" This sets the mood for most of the day: Vegas is great, so you'd better leave it alone! The local government, by all appearances a wholly owned subsidiary of the casinos, puts on a bravura performance. Gov. Miller opens the show with a 15 minute hymn to Las Vegas. It is the first of many statistical barrages about Nevada's one-ders: No. 1 in job growth, No. 1 in population growth, and No. 1 on planet Earth in per capita Girl Scout troops--and Boy Scout troops!", "\"My goodness, no politician can withstand their resources,\" Focus on the Family's James Dobson, the commission's leading gambling opponent, tells me. The industry's political clout has emasculated the commission, Dobson continues: \"Our report won't be acted on by the president or Congress. They are too heavily influenced by gambling money. Almost all the leaders of Congress are on the dole.\" It has also become obvious that the commission has too many pro-gambling members to produce a report that recommends taxes or other real penalties on the industry. \n\n So the commission's two day visit to Gomorrah has been transformed from a charged political event to a kind of victory lap for gaming. Nevada Gov. Bob Miller and the \"gaming visionaries\" have been planning for these hearings for months, hoping to use them to demonstrate the might and sanctity and goodness of the Nevada gambling industry.", "The MGM Grand, which is run by commission member Terrence Lanni, is itself the first exhibit of the Vegas triumphalists. It is gaudy testimony that consumers, at least, have no problem with this business. The MGM Grand, a k a \"The City of Entertainment,\" has 5,000 rooms--the corridor outside my room is 200 yards long, so long I can't see its end--to feed the endless supply of slot machines, craps tables, and roulette wheels. David Cassidy performs here every night--twice! A few steps outside on the Strip is still more overwhelming evidence that Las Vegas has won the popular vote. New York, New York is just across the street, the $1.6 billion Bellagio is one door down, and a half-scale Eiffel Tower is going up next door. The setting has, as the pro-gambling folks no doubt hoped, stunned some of the gambling opponents. I asked one anti-gambling activist who had never before been to Vegas what she thinks of it. She could only blurt out \"Wow.\"", "The hearings, too, reinforce the Glorious Las Vegas theme. Frank Fahrenkopf, the industry's top lobbyist (who is paid so much he can afford monogrammed shirt cuffs --I saw them), holds forth cheerfully outside the ballroom, celebrating the electoral triumph of freedom over religious moralist tyranny. Inside, the room is packed with more than 600 people in neon lime green T-shirts that read \"Unions and Gaming: Together for a Better Life.\" They are members of the major casino union, here to cheer on their employers and their union. (Most of them, it must be said, are getting paid to do this.)", "Pro-Vegas forces are also perfectly happy to take shots at Indian gambling, the chief economic threat to Nevada's prosperity. The expansion of Indian casinos resulting from last week's California voter initiative will slam Las Vegas, cutting its gambling revenues by $400 million a year. So the Vegans repeatedly swing at casinos in \"Indian country\" (that's Nevada Sen. Richard Bryan's term--I'm not joking) for being insufficiently regulated and taxed. One tribal chief I spoke to calls this \"red baiting.\"", "Later in the day, Nevada's senators and both its congressmen appear to chew out the commission for even thinking that Nevada might have a dark side. They pay tribute to Nevada's sophisticated gambling industry, especially its regulation (much stricter than other gambling states) and its use of gambling taxes to fund state services. It is one of the ironies of Nevada politics that its Republican congressmen (Jim Gibbons and John Ensign) end up crediting their state's success to government regulation and corporate taxation.", "The cigarette agenda will also distract the commission and the public from the true reasons for worry. A few years ago, gambling was confined to Las Vegas and Atlantic City. It is now thriving in 48 states, and there is no sign that anyone can stop it. In this election, gambling interests dropped $100 million on a single California ballot initiative, toppled governors in two states, and bought senators and representatives by the crate. What the commission ought to be investigating is whether the gambling industry has become so powerful that it's politically untouchable. But it can't, because the gambling industry has become so powerful that it's politically untouchable.", "The antis, meanwhile, cry that gambling is like cigarettes: unsafe for kids, viciously addictive, deceptively marketed, unhealthy, expensive, and unacceptable unless mightily regulated. \n\n Judging by today's hearings and by conversations with most of the commissioners, the tobacco model is winning. Today's panelists tell the commission that kids are starting to gamble too young and are getting addicted too easily, that compulsive gambling appears to be increasing as gambling spreads, that gambling marketing may be designed to addict customers, and that the industry exploits problem gamblers by allowing them to draw repeated credit card advances from ATMs on casino floors. The testimony clearly impresses the commissioners and seems especially to impress the three nonaligned commissioners who will be the swing votes on the June 1999 report.", "The gambling industry did everything in its power to stop the establishment of this commission two years ago, but Congress and a fervent grassroots anti-gambling group eventually foisted it on the industry. The nine member blue-ribbon panel was charged with assessing the social and economic impact of gambling, and it will issue a final report to Congress and the president in June 1999. Even though the panel was carefully balanced between pro- and anti-gambling leaders, it was supposed to be Vegas' nemesis. The industry and Las Vegas' pro-gambling media quaked in anticipation of the onerous regulations and taxes the commission might recommend.", "Why should the pro-gamblers cooperate with a critical study? Because it provides superb cover for them. It medicalizes the problem of compulsive gambling, blaming it on psychological abnormality rather than industry machination. Likewise, cracking down on compulsives is also politically cost-effective. In exchange for losing a few compulsive gamblers, the casinos will (falsely) appear more concerned with the health of their customers than with profits.", "During the last hour of the day, the public comment period, the union sends a parade of casino employees to the microphone to hallelujah the gaming industry. Housekeepers, cooks, and slot change girls, almost all black or Latina, tell the same story: I was working a dead-end job in another state, \"then I heard about Las Vegas, where there's opportunity!\" I moved here, landed a job at a union casino with high pay, free medical insurance, a pension, and \"now I am buying a house.\" The stories are intensely moving, by far the most persuasive tribute to the Strip that I've ever heard." ], [ "It's very grim and mostly persuasive. Still, when we turn back on to the Strip, and pass the jaw-dropping Stratosphere and Circus Circus and Bellagio and the MGM Grand--a 30 story tower bathed in fabulous emerald light, I realize why Grey's task is hopeless here. He is committing the cardinal sin of Vegas. All he wants to do is talk about losers. In Las Vegas, under the thrilling lights of the Strip, no one wants to hear about losers. In the land of gaming, not gambling, everyone is sure he's a winner.", "(Pause for an aesthetic observation: I am sitting right behind the witnesses, and after a while I begin to separate them into the Wides and the Narrows. The Wides are men in suits with enormous backs and enormous bellies, men who eat and eat and used to play football. They all testify to their love of gambling. The Narrows are thin and generally disapprove of it. I begin to wonder whether fondness for gambling correlates with general indulgence, and dislike correlates with asceticism, and decide that they probably do.)", "Still, for all the Vegan triumphalism in the air, it's impossible not to be charmed by the chief gambling opponent, the Rev. Tom Grey. Grey is utterly irrepressible. A Vietnam rifleman turned Methodist minister, Grey has spent the last eight years evangelizing against gambling. He founded the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling, the primary force behind the commission's creation. (Grey, in a rare acknowledgement of defeat, has just renamed it the National Coalition Against Gambling Expansion, tacitly recognizing that gambling is here to stay.) He is a genial motormouth and shameless promoter of the cause. He wears a gigantic \"CasiNO\" button in the casino. He posed for People in a shepherd's robe. He says \"I would do anything short of lighting myself on fire in the Capitol rotunda to stop gambling.\" He is so excitable that I have to yank him out of the way of an oncoming car when he gets too wrapped up in one of his soliloquies.", "After Tuesday's casino triumphalism, Wednesday is a comedown, eight hours of policy panels on teen gambling, compulsive gambling, gambling regulation, gambling marketing, and gambling credit practices. It is tough slogging, but for the first time I sense that this commission--though divided, underfunded, timid, and without any power beyond exhortation--isn't entirely useless. It may finally settle this question: Is gambling Hollywood or tobacco? Entertainment or vice? \n\n The sleek Vegas types, whose Strip palaces scramble casinos, theaters, restaurants, arcades, discos, cabarets, theme parks, concert halls, sports arenas, and museums into one giant orgy of amusement, have been selling the idea that gambling is just entertainment--Disney in the desert. This effort has largely succeeded, because Vegas is still the dominant image of American gambling, if not the dominant reality.", "The hearings, too, reinforce the Glorious Las Vegas theme. Frank Fahrenkopf, the industry's top lobbyist (who is paid so much he can afford monogrammed shirt cuffs --I saw them), holds forth cheerfully outside the ballroom, celebrating the electoral triumph of freedom over religious moralist tyranny. Inside, the room is packed with more than 600 people in neon lime green T-shirts that read \"Unions and Gaming: Together for a Better Life.\" They are members of the major casino union, here to cheer on their employers and their union. (Most of them, it must be said, are getting paid to do this.)", "Chairwoman Kay Coles James, a Christian conservative and skeptic of gambling, opens the hearing by assuring the crowd that the committee is toothless: \"We're not here to take anyone's job. ... We have no power to do anything except make recommendations.\" This sets the mood for most of the day: Vegas is great, so you'd better leave it alone! The local government, by all appearances a wholly owned subsidiary of the casinos, puts on a bravura performance. Gov. Miller opens the show with a 15 minute hymn to Las Vegas. It is the first of many statistical barrages about Nevada's one-ders: No. 1 in job growth, No. 1 in population growth, and No. 1 on planet Earth in per capita Girl Scout troops--and Boy Scout troops!", "Talk about quick defeats: The first sign I see outside the MGM Grand ballroom all but declares that the National Gambling Impact Study Commission has already lost. The sign reads: \"National Gaming Impact Study Commission.\" \n\n \"Gaming\"?", "The MGM Grand, which is run by commission member Terrence Lanni, is itself the first exhibit of the Vegas triumphalists. It is gaudy testimony that consumers, at least, have no problem with this business. The MGM Grand, a k a \"The City of Entertainment,\" has 5,000 rooms--the corridor outside my room is 200 yards long, so long I can't see its end--to feed the endless supply of slot machines, craps tables, and roulette wheels. David Cassidy performs here every night--twice! A few steps outside on the Strip is still more overwhelming evidence that Las Vegas has won the popular vote. New York, New York is just across the street, the $1.6 billion Bellagio is one door down, and a half-scale Eiffel Tower is going up next door. The setting has, as the pro-gambling folks no doubt hoped, stunned some of the gambling opponents. I asked one anti-gambling activist who had never before been to Vegas what she thinks of it. She could only blurt out \"Wow.\"", "\"My goodness, no politician can withstand their resources,\" Focus on the Family's James Dobson, the commission's leading gambling opponent, tells me. The industry's political clout has emasculated the commission, Dobson continues: \"Our report won't be acted on by the president or Congress. They are too heavily influenced by gambling money. Almost all the leaders of Congress are on the dole.\" It has also become obvious that the commission has too many pro-gambling members to produce a report that recommends taxes or other real penalties on the industry. \n\n So the commission's two day visit to Gomorrah has been transformed from a charged political event to a kind of victory lap for gaming. Nevada Gov. Bob Miller and the \"gaming visionaries\" have been planning for these hearings for months, hoping to use them to demonstrate the might and sanctity and goodness of the Nevada gambling industry.", "In Las Vegas, the euphemizers reign. Once upon a time, the casino owners decided that \"gambling\" was too crude, too avaricious, to describe their fair business. So \"gambling\" disappeared in Las Vegas, and \"gaming\" has risen in its place. He who controls language controls ideas, and at today's commission hearing, it is perfectly clear who controls the language. Video slot machines crammed into convenience stores--perhaps the most pernicious form of legal gambling there is--are called \"retail gaming.\" People who own casinos are not \"casino owners,\" they are \"gaming visionaries.\" Pathological gamblers are \"problem gamers\"--as if they're having trouble mastering the rules of Monopoly. And the National Gambling Impact Study Commission is reborn as the National Gaming Impact Study Commission.", "During the last hour of the day, the public comment period, the union sends a parade of casino employees to the microphone to hallelujah the gaming industry. Housekeepers, cooks, and slot change girls, almost all black or Latina, tell the same story: I was working a dead-end job in another state, \"then I heard about Las Vegas, where there's opportunity!\" I moved here, landed a job at a union casino with high pay, free medical insurance, a pension, and \"now I am buying a house.\" The stories are intensely moving, by far the most persuasive tribute to the Strip that I've ever heard.", "The antis, meanwhile, cry that gambling is like cigarettes: unsafe for kids, viciously addictive, deceptively marketed, unhealthy, expensive, and unacceptable unless mightily regulated. \n\n Judging by today's hearings and by conversations with most of the commissioners, the tobacco model is winning. Today's panelists tell the commission that kids are starting to gamble too young and are getting addicted too easily, that compulsive gambling appears to be increasing as gambling spreads, that gambling marketing may be designed to addict customers, and that the industry exploits problem gamblers by allowing them to draw repeated credit card advances from ATMs on casino floors. The testimony clearly impresses the commissioners and seems especially to impress the three nonaligned commissioners who will be the swing votes on the June 1999 report.", "Is <A NAME= \n\n Gambling's would-be federal regulators--the National Gambling Impact Study Commission--went to Las Vegas this week to hold hearings. In today's dispatch, we learn how gambling's foes seek to demonize wagering as a pernicious tobaccolike vice. In yesterday's dispatch, gambling's foes learn the folly of having brought their anti-sin crusade to an adult Disneyland. \n\n Tuesday's overpowering show of force by the Nevada gambling aristocracy has had at least one audible effect on the National Gambling Impact Study Commission. Wednesday, even commission Chair Kay Coles James, a gambling skeptic, succumbs to the hideous Vegas euphemism: She begins referring to the \"gaming industry.\"", "He and his Las Vegas allies, a former Las Vegas city councilman named Steve Miller and an inner city venture capitalist named Otis Harris, invite me on a tour of Las Vegas. \"Behind the Mirage,\" they call it. For two hours, we cruise the streets behind the casinos. They show me all the evidence of gambling blight you'd never want to see, from a youth-center-turned-crack-house to pawn shops to sex shops to down at heels casinos to quickie motels. All the while, they keep up a patter about how terrible a neighbor the casino industry is and how superficial Las Vegas' prosperity is.", "The antis can call gambling \"tobacco.\" They can call it \"vice.\" They can call it \"a big red balloon\" for all that the industry cares. As long as the commission just nibbles around the edges, the casino operators and state lotteries will be happy to indulge it. The pro-gambling folks will win credit for cooperating, without having to do anything that really hurts. The last national gambling commission was in the mid-1970s. If the gamblers play along with this commission's timid recommendations, they'll be safe for another 20 years. \n\n An Apology \n\n I owe an apology to Nevada Sen. Richard Bryan, whom I criticized yesterday for using the term \"Indian country\" during a speech critical of Indian casinos. As several readers pointed out to me, \"Indian country\" is a common phrase in the West and has no derogatory connotations. I'm sorry, Senator.", "The gambling industry did everything in its power to stop the establishment of this commission two years ago, but Congress and a fervent grassroots anti-gambling group eventually foisted it on the industry. The nine member blue-ribbon panel was charged with assessing the social and economic impact of gambling, and it will issue a final report to Congress and the president in June 1999. Even though the panel was carefully balanced between pro- and anti-gambling leaders, it was supposed to be Vegas' nemesis. The industry and Las Vegas' pro-gambling media quaked in anticipation of the onerous regulations and taxes the commission might recommend.", "The cigarette agenda will also distract the commission and the public from the true reasons for worry. A few years ago, gambling was confined to Las Vegas and Atlantic City. It is now thriving in 48 states, and there is no sign that anyone can stop it. In this election, gambling interests dropped $100 million on a single California ballot initiative, toppled governors in two states, and bought senators and representatives by the crate. What the commission ought to be investigating is whether the gambling industry has become so powerful that it's politically untouchable. But it can't, because the gambling industry has become so powerful that it's politically untouchable.", "If the comments of the pro-industry commissioners can be believed, the industry will happily endorse such a report. Gamblers don't quite accept the cigarette analogy--though commission member Bill Bible, a former chief of the Nevada Gaming Commission, did concede that gambling was like alcohol--but they're happy to sign on to the specific measures. The casino industry is even trying to get ahead of the commission. It has already established a (mostly) independent center to fund research into pathological gambling. I suspect that the industry will not only agree to the commission's recommendations but will become their strongest advocate. Casino owners will avidly lobby Congress and state legislatures to enact the recommendations into law.", "Pro-Vegas forces are also perfectly happy to take shots at Indian gambling, the chief economic threat to Nevada's prosperity. The expansion of Indian casinos resulting from last week's California voter initiative will slam Las Vegas, cutting its gambling revenues by $400 million a year. So the Vegans repeatedly swing at casinos in \"Indian country\" (that's Nevada Sen. Richard Bryan's term--I'm not joking) for being insufficiently regulated and taxed. One tribal chief I spoke to calls this \"red baiting.\"", "Later in the day, Nevada's senators and both its congressmen appear to chew out the commission for even thinking that Nevada might have a dark side. They pay tribute to Nevada's sophisticated gambling industry, especially its regulation (much stricter than other gambling states) and its use of gambling taxes to fund state services. It is one of the ironies of Nevada politics that its Republican congressmen (Jim Gibbons and John Ensign) end up crediting their state's success to government regulation and corporate taxation." ] ]
train	20069	[ "According to the reviewer of \"American Beauty,\" the protagonist Lester has mostly lost _____.", "Based on the reviewer's description of Lester and his family, what is their likely socioeconomic status?", "The reviewer implies that the following demographic might relate most strongly to the film, \"American Beauty\":", "According to the reviewer, which motif seems to represent the precariousness of reality?", "Based on the reviewer's description of Carolyn, a viewer might assume that she values all of the following EXCEPT:", "According to the reviewer, Carolyn's preference for \"Muzak\" and \"nutritious yet savory\" food most likely symbolize:", "Which of the following terms best describes the reviewer's opinion of Bening's acting performance in \"American Beauty,\" compared to her previous acting roles: ", "According to the reviewer, the films \"American Beauty\" and \"For the Love of the Game\" share all of the following in common EXCEPT:" ]	[ [ "His manhood", "His sex drive", "His family", "His sanity" ], [ "Below poverty level", "Blue collar", "White collar", "Middle class" ], [ "Emasculated men", "Dysfunctional \"family men\"", "Sex-addicted men", "High-powered businessmen" ], [ "The rose petals in Angela's bathtub", "The undulating plastic bag", "The grainy texture of Ricky's camera film", "The raindrops falling on top of the Colonel" ], [ "social awareness", "career success", "whiteness", "heterosexuality" ], [ "The characters' desperate desire to be perceived as ordinary", "The deterioration of the American nuclear family", "The tendency for people to be consumed by what their values", "The dangers of standing out in a society that demands conformity" ], [ "empowering", "muddled", "redemptive ", "distasteful" ], [ "The first names of the protagonists", "Protagonists who glorify masculinity", "A successful portrayal of New Age Nihilism", "The first names of the directors" ] ]	[ 1, 4, 1, 3, 1, 1, 3, 3 ]	[ 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Early in American Beauty , Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a weary reporter for a media magazine, masturbates in the shower while informing us in voice-over that we're witnessing the highlight of his", "this ... sedated.\" Apparently, Lester doesn't realize that snipped roses are garden-variety symbols of castration, or he'd know what he has lost. But the makers of American Beauty are about to give Lester his roses back. At a high-school", "American Beauty is Spacey's movie, though. He gives it--how weird to write this about Spacey, who made his name playing flamboyantly self-involved psychopaths--a heart. Early on, he lets his face and posture go slack and his eyes blurry. He mugs like crazy, telegraphing Lester's \"loserness.\" But Spacey's genius is for mugging in character. He makes us believe that it's Lester who's caricaturing himself , and that bitter edge paves the way for the character's later, more comfortably Spacey-like scenes of insult and mockery. He even makes us take Lester's final, improbably rhapsodic moments straight.", "it's extraordinarily potent, at times even heartbreaking. The symbols, however, have been cunningly reversed. In movies like sex, lies, and videotape (1989), the protagonist has to put away the video camera to \"get real\"; in American Beauty ,", "But do the filmmakers take them straight? If I read it correctly, the movie is saying that American society is unjust and absurd and loveless--full of people so afraid of seeming ordinary that they lose their capacity to see. It's saying that our only hope is to cultivate a kind of stoned aesthetic detachment whereby even a man with his brains blown out becomes an object of beauty and a signpost to a Higher Power. But to scrutinize a freshly dead body and not ask how it got that way--or if there's anyone nearby with a gun who might want to add to the body count--strikes me as either moronic or insane or both. The kind of detachment the movie is peddling isn't artistic, it isn't life--it's nihilism at its most fatuous. In the end, American Beauty is New Age Nihilism.", "It's not the druggy philosophizing, however, that makes American Beauty an emotional workout. It's that the caricatures are grounded in sympathy instead of derision. Everyone on screen is in serious pain. The", "teen-ager, who likes to train his lenses on dead bodies of animals and people, sells wildly expensive marijuana to Lester and somehow passes on this notion of \"beauty.\" By the end, Lester is mouthing the same sentiments and has acquired", "The movie is convinced, too--which is odd, since the fantasy of an underage cheerleader making a middle-aged man's wilted roses bloom is a tad ... primitive. But American Beauty doesn't feel", "and twitters about Miracle-Gro to a gay yuppie (Scott Bakula) on the other side of a white picket fence. \"I have lost something,\" says Lester. \"I'm not exactly sure what it is but I know I didn't always feel", "it's Ricky Fitts, the damaged stoner videomaker next door, who sees beauty where nonartists see only horror or nothingness. In the film's most self-consciously poetic set piece, Ricky shows Lester's dour daughter Jane--in whom he recognizes a", "day. He peers through tired eyes out the window at his manicured suburban tract-house lawn, where his wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening)--whose gardening clogs, he points out, are color-coordinated with the handles of her shears--snips roses (American beauties)", "subtle?) Lester's wife, Carolyn, is even more stridently caricatured. A real-estate broker who fails to sell a big house (her only potential customers are blank-faced African-Americans, Indian-Americans, and surly lesbians), she wears a mask of perky efficiency", "A merican Beauty is so wittily written and gorgeously directed that you might think you're seeing something archetypal--maybe even the", "the first time in years, he's soon pumping iron, smoking pot, and telling off his frigid wife and faceless bosses, convinced that whatever he has lost he's getting back, baby.", "primitive. It feels lustrously hip and aware, and a lot of critics are making big claims for it. The script, by Alan Ball, a playwright and former sitcom writer, carries an invigorating blast of counterculture righteousness, along with the kind", "of pithily vicious marital bickering that makes some viewers (especially male) say, \"Yeah! Tell that bitch off!\" More important, it has a vein of metaphysical yearning, which the director, Sam Mendes, mines brilliantly. A hotshot English theater director", "through the video camera of the teen-age voyeur next door (Wes Bentley), and the graininess of the video image (along with the plangent music) suggests how unstable the molecules that constitute our \"reality\" really are. Mendes can distend the", "basketball game, Lester is transfixed by a blonde cheerleader named Angela (Mena Suvari), who is twirling alongside his daughter, Jane (Thora Burch). Ambient noise falls away, the crowd disappears, and there she is, Lester's angel, writhing in slow", "whose capaciously baggy eyes are moist with sadness over his inability to reach out. (When he stands helplessly in the rain at the end, the deluge completes him.) The character of Carolyn is so shrill as to constitute a libel", "motion--just for him. She opens her jacket (she's naked underneath) and red rose petals drift out. Later, Lester envisions her on a bed of red petals, then immersed in a bath of red petals. Back in the roses for" ], [ "subtle?) Lester's wife, Carolyn, is even more stridently caricatured. A real-estate broker who fails to sell a big house (her only potential customers are blank-faced African-Americans, Indian-Americans, and surly lesbians), she wears a mask of perky efficiency", "teen-ager, who likes to train his lenses on dead bodies of animals and people, sells wildly expensive marijuana to Lester and somehow passes on this notion of \"beauty.\" By the end, Lester is mouthing the same sentiments and has acquired", "and twitters about Miracle-Gro to a gay yuppie (Scott Bakula) on the other side of a white picket fence. \"I have lost something,\" says Lester. \"I'm not exactly sure what it is but I know I didn't always feel", "this ... sedated.\" Apparently, Lester doesn't realize that snipped roses are garden-variety symbols of castration, or he'd know what he has lost. But the makers of American Beauty are about to give Lester his roses back. At a high-school", "Early in American Beauty , Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a weary reporter for a media magazine, masturbates in the shower while informing us in voice-over that we're witnessing the highlight of his", "day. He peers through tired eyes out the window at his manicured suburban tract-house lawn, where his wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening)--whose gardening clogs, he points out, are color-coordinated with the handles of her shears--snips roses (American beauties)", "basketball game, Lester is transfixed by a blonde cheerleader named Angela (Mena Suvari), who is twirling alongside his daughter, Jane (Thora Burch). Ambient noise falls away, the crowd disappears, and there she is, Lester's angel, writhing in slow", "it's Ricky Fitts, the damaged stoner videomaker next door, who sees beauty where nonartists see only horror or nothingness. In the film's most self-consciously poetic set piece, Ricky shows Lester's dour daughter Jane--in whom he recognizes a", "and insists on listening to Muzak while she and her husband and daughter eat her \"nutritious yet savory\" dinners. It's amazing that Mendes and Ball get away with recycling so many stale and reactionary ideas under the all-purpose rubric", "underlying attitudes is smug and easy: from the corporate flunky named \"Brad\" to the interchangeable gay neighbors (they're both called \"Jim\") to the brutally homophobic patriarch next door, an ex-Marine colonel (Chris Cooper) who has reduced his wife", "whose capaciously baggy eyes are moist with sadness over his inability to reach out. (When he stands helplessly in the rain at the end, the deluge completes him.) The character of Carolyn is so shrill as to constitute a libel", "But do the filmmakers take them straight? If I read it correctly, the movie is saying that American society is unjust and absurd and loveless--full of people so afraid of seeming ordinary that they lose their capacity to see. It's saying that our only hope is to cultivate a kind of stoned aesthetic detachment whereby even a man with his brains blown out becomes an object of beauty and a signpost to a Higher Power. But to scrutinize a freshly dead body and not ask how it got that way--or if there's anyone nearby with a gun who might want to add to the body count--strikes me as either moronic or insane or both. The kind of detachment the movie is peddling isn't artistic, it isn't life--it's nihilism at its most fatuous. In the end, American Beauty is New Age Nihilism.", "motion--just for him. She opens her jacket (she's naked underneath) and red rose petals drift out. Later, Lester envisions her on a bed of red petals, then immersed in a bath of red petals. Back in the roses for", "It's not the druggy philosophizing, however, that makes American Beauty an emotional workout. It's that the caricatures are grounded in sympathy instead of derision. Everyone on screen is in serious pain. The", "American Beauty is Spacey's movie, though. He gives it--how weird to write this about Spacey, who made his name playing flamboyantly self-involved psychopaths--a heart. Early on, he lets his face and posture go slack and his eyes blurry. He mugs like crazy, telegraphing Lester's \"loserness.\" But Spacey's genius is for mugging in character. He makes us believe that it's Lester who's caricaturing himself , and that bitter edge paves the way for the character's later, more comfortably Spacey-like scenes of insult and mockery. He even makes us take Lester's final, improbably rhapsodic moments straight.", "it's extraordinarily potent, at times even heartbreaking. The symbols, however, have been cunningly reversed. In movies like sex, lies, and videotape (1989), the protagonist has to put away the video camera to \"get real\"; in American Beauty ,", "of pithily vicious marital bickering that makes some viewers (especially male) say, \"Yeah! Tell that bitch off!\" More important, it has a vein of metaphysical yearning, which the director, Sam Mendes, mines brilliantly. A hotshot English theater director", "(the normally exuberant Allison Janney) to a catatonic mummy and his son, Ricky (Bentley), to a life of subterranean deception. (The colonel's idea of bliss is watching an old Ronald Reagan military picture on television: How's that for", "the first time in years, he's soon pumping iron, smoking pot, and telling off his frigid wife and faceless bosses, convinced that whatever he has lost he's getting back, baby.", "primitive. It feels lustrously hip and aware, and a lot of critics are making big claims for it. The script, by Alan Ball, a playwright and former sitcom writer, carries an invigorating blast of counterculture righteousness, along with the kind" ], [ "The movie is convinced, too--which is odd, since the fantasy of an underage cheerleader making a middle-aged man's wilted roses bloom is a tad ... primitive. But American Beauty doesn't feel", "It's not the druggy philosophizing, however, that makes American Beauty an emotional workout. It's that the caricatures are grounded in sympathy instead of derision. Everyone on screen is in serious pain. The", "But do the filmmakers take them straight? If I read it correctly, the movie is saying that American society is unjust and absurd and loveless--full of people so afraid of seeming ordinary that they lose their capacity to see. It's saying that our only hope is to cultivate a kind of stoned aesthetic detachment whereby even a man with his brains blown out becomes an object of beauty and a signpost to a Higher Power. But to scrutinize a freshly dead body and not ask how it got that way--or if there's anyone nearby with a gun who might want to add to the body count--strikes me as either moronic or insane or both. The kind of detachment the movie is peddling isn't artistic, it isn't life--it's nihilism at its most fatuous. In the end, American Beauty is New Age Nihilism.", "American Beauty is Spacey's movie, though. He gives it--how weird to write this about Spacey, who made his name playing flamboyantly self-involved psychopaths--a heart. Early on, he lets his face and posture go slack and his eyes blurry. He mugs like crazy, telegraphing Lester's \"loserness.\" But Spacey's genius is for mugging in character. He makes us believe that it's Lester who's caricaturing himself , and that bitter edge paves the way for the character's later, more comfortably Spacey-like scenes of insult and mockery. He even makes us take Lester's final, improbably rhapsodic moments straight.", "it's extraordinarily potent, at times even heartbreaking. The symbols, however, have been cunningly reversed. In movies like sex, lies, and videotape (1989), the protagonist has to put away the video camera to \"get real\"; in American Beauty ,", "Early in American Beauty , Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a weary reporter for a media magazine, masturbates in the shower while informing us in voice-over that we're witnessing the highlight of his", "this ... sedated.\" Apparently, Lester doesn't realize that snipped roses are garden-variety symbols of castration, or he'd know what he has lost. But the makers of American Beauty are about to give Lester his roses back. At a high-school", "A merican Beauty is so wittily written and gorgeously directed that you might think you're seeing something archetypal--maybe even the", "teen-ager, who likes to train his lenses on dead bodies of animals and people, sells wildly expensive marijuana to Lester and somehow passes on this notion of \"beauty.\" By the end, Lester is mouthing the same sentiments and has acquired", "it's Ricky Fitts, the damaged stoner videomaker next door, who sees beauty where nonartists see only horror or nothingness. In the film's most self-consciously poetic set piece, Ricky shows Lester's dour daughter Jane--in whom he recognizes a", "of pithily vicious marital bickering that makes some viewers (especially male) say, \"Yeah! Tell that bitch off!\" More important, it has a vein of metaphysical yearning, which the director, Sam Mendes, mines brilliantly. A hotshot English theater director", "primitive. It feels lustrously hip and aware, and a lot of critics are making big claims for it. The script, by Alan Ball, a playwright and former sitcom writer, carries an invigorating blast of counterculture righteousness, along with the kind", "through the video camera of the teen-age voyeur next door (Wes Bentley), and the graininess of the video image (along with the plangent music) suggests how unstable the molecules that constitute our \"reality\" really are. Mendes can distend the", "day. He peers through tired eyes out the window at his manicured suburban tract-house lawn, where his wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening)--whose gardening clogs, he points out, are color-coordinated with the handles of her shears--snips roses (American beauties)", "subtle?) Lester's wife, Carolyn, is even more stridently caricatured. A real-estate broker who fails to sell a big house (her only potential customers are blank-faced African-Americans, Indian-Americans, and surly lesbians), she wears a mask of perky efficiency", "and twitters about Miracle-Gro to a gay yuppie (Scott Bakula) on the other side of a white picket fence. \"I have lost something,\" says Lester. \"I'm not exactly sure what it is but I know I didn't always feel", "(his Cabaret revival is still on the boards in New York), Mendes gives the film a patina of New Age lyricism and layer upon layer of visual irony. The movie's surface is velvety and immaculate--until the action is abruptly viewed", "underlying attitudes is smug and easy: from the corporate flunky named \"Brad\" to the interchangeable gay neighbors (they're both called \"Jim\") to the brutally homophobic patriarch next door, an ex-Marine colonel (Chris Cooper) who has reduced his wife", "Great American Movie. But when you stop and smell the roses ... Well, that scent isn't Miracle-Gro. The hairpin turns from farce to melodrama, from satire to bathos, are fresh and deftly navigated, but almost every one of the", "Slate in contemporary film in which the protagonist attempts to break through our cultural and technological anesthetization into \"the real.\" That's the theme here, too, and" ], [ "through the video camera of the teen-age voyeur next door (Wes Bentley), and the graininess of the video image (along with the plangent music) suggests how unstable the molecules that constitute our \"reality\" really are. Mendes can distend the", "it's extraordinarily potent, at times even heartbreaking. The symbols, however, have been cunningly reversed. In movies like sex, lies, and videotape (1989), the protagonist has to put away the video camera to \"get real\"; in American Beauty ,", "whose capaciously baggy eyes are moist with sadness over his inability to reach out. (When he stands helplessly in the rain at the end, the deluge completes him.) The character of Carolyn is so shrill as to constitute a libel", "Slate in contemporary film in which the protagonist attempts to break through our cultural and technological anesthetization into \"the real.\" That's the theme here, too, and", "motion--just for him. She opens her jacket (she's naked underneath) and red rose petals drift out. Later, Lester envisions her on a bed of red petals, then immersed in a bath of red petals. Back in the roses for", "this ... sedated.\" Apparently, Lester doesn't realize that snipped roses are garden-variety symbols of castration, or he'd know what he has lost. But the makers of American Beauty are about to give Lester his roses back. At a high-school", "(his Cabaret revival is still on the boards in New York), Mendes gives the film a patina of New Age lyricism and layer upon layer of visual irony. The movie's surface is velvety and immaculate--until the action is abruptly viewed", "But do the filmmakers take them straight? If I read it correctly, the movie is saying that American society is unjust and absurd and loveless--full of people so afraid of seeming ordinary that they lose their capacity to see. It's saying that our only hope is to cultivate a kind of stoned aesthetic detachment whereby even a man with his brains blown out becomes an object of beauty and a signpost to a Higher Power. But to scrutinize a freshly dead body and not ask how it got that way--or if there's anyone nearby with a gun who might want to add to the body count--strikes me as either moronic or insane or both. The kind of detachment the movie is peddling isn't artistic, it isn't life--it's nihilism at its most fatuous. In the end, American Beauty is New Age Nihilism.", "teen-ager, who likes to train his lenses on dead bodies of animals and people, sells wildly expensive marijuana to Lester and somehow passes on this notion of \"beauty.\" By the end, Lester is mouthing the same sentiments and has acquired", "of pithily vicious marital bickering that makes some viewers (especially male) say, \"Yeah! Tell that bitch off!\" More important, it has a vein of metaphysical yearning, which the director, Sam Mendes, mines brilliantly. A hotshot English theater director", "real into the surreal with imperceptible puffs. Aided by his cinematographer, Conrad Hall, and editors, Tariq Anwar and Chris Greenbury, he creates an entrancing vision of the American nuclear family on the verge of a meltdown.", "day. He peers through tired eyes out the window at his manicured suburban tract-house lawn, where his wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening)--whose gardening clogs, he points out, are color-coordinated with the handles of her shears--snips roses (American beauties)", "and insists on listening to Muzak while she and her husband and daughter eat her \"nutritious yet savory\" dinners. It's amazing that Mendes and Ball get away with recycling so many stale and reactionary ideas under the all-purpose rubric", "appear confident, composed, in control. When she fails to sell that house, she closes the shades and lets go with a naked wail--it's the sound of a vacuum crying to be filled--then furiously slaps herself while sputtering, \"Shut up--you're", "kindred spirit--a video of a plastic bag fluttering up, down, and around on invisible currents of wind. Ricky speaks of glimpsing in the bag's trajectory an \"entire life behind things\"--a \"benevolent force\" that holds the universe together. The", "it's Ricky Fitts, the damaged stoner videomaker next door, who sees beauty where nonartists see only horror or nothingness. In the film's most self-consciously poetic set piece, Ricky shows Lester's dour daughter Jane--in whom he recognizes a", "subtle?) Lester's wife, Carolyn, is even more stridently caricatured. A real-estate broker who fails to sell a big house (her only potential customers are blank-faced African-Americans, Indian-Americans, and surly lesbians), she wears a mask of perky efficiency", "Early in American Beauty , Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a weary reporter for a media magazine, masturbates in the shower while informing us in voice-over that we're witnessing the highlight of his", "primitive. It feels lustrously hip and aware, and a lot of critics are making big claims for it. The script, by Alan Ball, a playwright and former sitcom writer, carries an invigorating blast of counterculture righteousness, along with the kind", "It's not the druggy philosophizing, however, that makes American Beauty an emotional workout. It's that the caricatures are grounded in sympathy instead of derision. Everyone on screen is in serious pain. The" ], [ "whose capaciously baggy eyes are moist with sadness over his inability to reach out. (When he stands helplessly in the rain at the end, the deluge completes him.) The character of Carolyn is so shrill as to constitute a libel", "on the female sex, but there isn't a second when Bening sends the woman up. She doesn't transcend the part, she fills it to the brim, anatomizes it. You can't hate Carolyn because the woman is trying so hard--to", "subtle?) Lester's wife, Carolyn, is even more stridently caricatured. A real-estate broker who fails to sell a big house (her only potential customers are blank-faced African-Americans, Indian-Americans, and surly lesbians), she wears a mask of perky efficiency", "weak--shut up. \" Then she breathes, regains her go-get-'em poise, replaces her mask. Carolyn isn't a complicated dramatic construction, but Bening gives her a primal force. An actress who packs more psychological detail into a single gesture than others", "day. He peers through tired eyes out the window at his manicured suburban tract-house lawn, where his wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening)--whose gardening clogs, he points out, are color-coordinated with the handles of her shears--snips roses (American beauties)", "of pithily vicious marital bickering that makes some viewers (especially male) say, \"Yeah! Tell that bitch off!\" More important, it has a vein of metaphysical yearning, which the director, Sam Mendes, mines brilliantly. A hotshot English theater director", "and insists on listening to Muzak while she and her husband and daughter eat her \"nutritious yet savory\" dinners. It's amazing that Mendes and Ball get away with recycling so many stale and reactionary ideas under the all-purpose rubric", "teen-ager, who likes to train his lenses on dead bodies of animals and people, sells wildly expensive marijuana to Lester and somehow passes on this notion of \"beauty.\" By the end, Lester is mouthing the same sentiments and has acquired", "appear confident, composed, in control. When she fails to sell that house, she closes the shades and lets go with a naked wail--it's the sound of a vacuum crying to be filled--then furiously slaps herself while sputtering, \"Shut up--you're", "underlying attitudes is smug and easy: from the corporate flunky named \"Brad\" to the interchangeable gay neighbors (they're both called \"Jim\") to the brutally homophobic patriarch next door, an ex-Marine colonel (Chris Cooper) who has reduced his wife", "It's not the druggy philosophizing, however, that makes American Beauty an emotional workout. It's that the caricatures are grounded in sympathy instead of derision. Everyone on screen is in serious pain. The", "it's Ricky Fitts, the damaged stoner videomaker next door, who sees beauty where nonartists see only horror or nothingness. In the film's most self-consciously poetic set piece, Ricky shows Lester's dour daughter Jane--in whom he recognizes a", "But do the filmmakers take them straight? If I read it correctly, the movie is saying that American society is unjust and absurd and loveless--full of people so afraid of seeming ordinary that they lose their capacity to see. It's saying that our only hope is to cultivate a kind of stoned aesthetic detachment whereby even a man with his brains blown out becomes an object of beauty and a signpost to a Higher Power. But to scrutinize a freshly dead body and not ask how it got that way--or if there's anyone nearby with a gun who might want to add to the body count--strikes me as either moronic or insane or both. The kind of detachment the movie is peddling isn't artistic, it isn't life--it's nihilism at its most fatuous. In the end, American Beauty is New Age Nihilism.", "it's extraordinarily potent, at times even heartbreaking. The symbols, however, have been cunningly reversed. In movies like sex, lies, and videotape (1989), the protagonist has to put away the video camera to \"get real\"; in American Beauty ,", "through the video camera of the teen-age voyeur next door (Wes Bentley), and the graininess of the video image (along with the plangent music) suggests how unstable the molecules that constitute our \"reality\" really are. Mendes can distend the", "(the normally exuberant Allison Janney) to a catatonic mummy and his son, Ricky (Bentley), to a life of subterranean deception. (The colonel's idea of bliss is watching an old Ronald Reagan military picture on television: How's that for", "He also thinks about his Manhattan-based ex-girlfriend (Kelly Preston), who tearfully told him that morning that things were absolutely over and she was moving to London. There's an appealing flashback to how they met (he stopped to fix her car while on the way to Yankee Stadium), then it's back to the game for more nail-biting at bats. But pretty soon the relationship flashbacks start coming thick and fast, and the balance of the movie shifts to whether Kevin can commit to Kelly and Kelly can commit to Kevin or whether his only commitment could ever be to the ball and the diamond and the game.", "manipulative sexpot Angela, who taunts her friend Jane with the idea of seducing her dad, acts chiefly out of a terror of appearing ordinary. As the military martinet, Cooper goes against the grain, turning Col. Fitts into a sour bulldog", "The movie is convinced, too--which is odd, since the fantasy of an underage cheerleader making a middle-aged man's wilted roses bloom is a tad ... primitive. But American Beauty doesn't feel", "motion--just for him. She opens her jacket (she's naked underneath) and red rose petals drift out. Later, Lester envisions her on a bed of red petals, then immersed in a bath of red petals. Back in the roses for" ], [ "and insists on listening to Muzak while she and her husband and daughter eat her \"nutritious yet savory\" dinners. It's amazing that Mendes and Ball get away with recycling so many stale and reactionary ideas under the all-purpose rubric", "whose capaciously baggy eyes are moist with sadness over his inability to reach out. (When he stands helplessly in the rain at the end, the deluge completes him.) The character of Carolyn is so shrill as to constitute a libel", "day. He peers through tired eyes out the window at his manicured suburban tract-house lawn, where his wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening)--whose gardening clogs, he points out, are color-coordinated with the handles of her shears--snips roses (American beauties)", "weak--shut up. \" Then she breathes, regains her go-get-'em poise, replaces her mask. Carolyn isn't a complicated dramatic construction, but Bening gives her a primal force. An actress who packs more psychological detail into a single gesture than others", "subtle?) Lester's wife, Carolyn, is even more stridently caricatured. A real-estate broker who fails to sell a big house (her only potential customers are blank-faced African-Americans, Indian-Americans, and surly lesbians), she wears a mask of perky efficiency", "on the female sex, but there isn't a second when Bening sends the woman up. She doesn't transcend the part, she fills it to the brim, anatomizes it. You can't hate Carolyn because the woman is trying so hard--to", "it's extraordinarily potent, at times even heartbreaking. The symbols, however, have been cunningly reversed. In movies like sex, lies, and videotape (1989), the protagonist has to put away the video camera to \"get real\"; in American Beauty ,", "this ... sedated.\" Apparently, Lester doesn't realize that snipped roses are garden-variety symbols of castration, or he'd know what he has lost. But the makers of American Beauty are about to give Lester his roses back. At a high-school", "(his Cabaret revival is still on the boards in New York), Mendes gives the film a patina of New Age lyricism and layer upon layer of visual irony. The movie's surface is velvety and immaculate--until the action is abruptly viewed", "through the video camera of the teen-age voyeur next door (Wes Bentley), and the graininess of the video image (along with the plangent music) suggests how unstable the molecules that constitute our \"reality\" really are. Mendes can distend the", "of pithily vicious marital bickering that makes some viewers (especially male) say, \"Yeah! Tell that bitch off!\" More important, it has a vein of metaphysical yearning, which the director, Sam Mendes, mines brilliantly. A hotshot English theater director", "motion--just for him. She opens her jacket (she's naked underneath) and red rose petals drift out. Later, Lester envisions her on a bed of red petals, then immersed in a bath of red petals. Back in the roses for", "Early in American Beauty , Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a weary reporter for a media magazine, masturbates in the shower while informing us in voice-over that we're witnessing the highlight of his", "But do the filmmakers take them straight? If I read it correctly, the movie is saying that American society is unjust and absurd and loveless--full of people so afraid of seeming ordinary that they lose their capacity to see. It's saying that our only hope is to cultivate a kind of stoned aesthetic detachment whereby even a man with his brains blown out becomes an object of beauty and a signpost to a Higher Power. But to scrutinize a freshly dead body and not ask how it got that way--or if there's anyone nearby with a gun who might want to add to the body count--strikes me as either moronic or insane or both. The kind of detachment the movie is peddling isn't artistic, it isn't life--it's nihilism at its most fatuous. In the end, American Beauty is New Age Nihilism.", "It's not the druggy philosophizing, however, that makes American Beauty an emotional workout. It's that the caricatures are grounded in sympathy instead of derision. Everyone on screen is in serious pain. The", "appear confident, composed, in control. When she fails to sell that house, she closes the shades and lets go with a naked wail--it's the sound of a vacuum crying to be filled--then furiously slaps herself while sputtering, \"Shut up--you're", "(the normally exuberant Allison Janney) to a catatonic mummy and his son, Ricky (Bentley), to a life of subterranean deception. (The colonel's idea of bliss is watching an old Ronald Reagan military picture on television: How's that for", "underlying attitudes is smug and easy: from the corporate flunky named \"Brad\" to the interchangeable gay neighbors (they're both called \"Jim\") to the brutally homophobic patriarch next door, an ex-Marine colonel (Chris Cooper) who has reduced his wife", "The movie is convinced, too--which is odd, since the fantasy of an underage cheerleader making a middle-aged man's wilted roses bloom is a tad ... primitive. But American Beauty doesn't feel", "teen-ager, who likes to train his lenses on dead bodies of animals and people, sells wildly expensive marijuana to Lester and somehow passes on this notion of \"beauty.\" By the end, Lester is mouthing the same sentiments and has acquired" ], [ "on the female sex, but there isn't a second when Bening sends the woman up. She doesn't transcend the part, she fills it to the brim, anatomizes it. You can't hate Carolyn because the woman is trying so hard--to", "weak--shut up. \" Then she breathes, regains her go-get-'em poise, replaces her mask. Carolyn isn't a complicated dramatic construction, but Bening gives her a primal force. An actress who packs more psychological detail into a single gesture than others", "American Beauty is Spacey's movie, though. He gives it--how weird to write this about Spacey, who made his name playing flamboyantly self-involved psychopaths--a heart. Early on, he lets his face and posture go slack and his eyes blurry. He mugs like crazy, telegraphing Lester's \"loserness.\" But Spacey's genius is for mugging in character. He makes us believe that it's Lester who's caricaturing himself , and that bitter edge paves the way for the character's later, more comfortably Spacey-like scenes of insult and mockery. He even makes us take Lester's final, improbably rhapsodic moments straight.", "get into whole scenes, Bening was barreling down the road to greatness before she hit a speed bump called Warren. It's a joy to observe her--both here and in Neil Jordan's In Dreams (1999)--back at full throttle.", "day. He peers through tired eyes out the window at his manicured suburban tract-house lawn, where his wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening)--whose gardening clogs, he points out, are color-coordinated with the handles of her shears--snips roses (American beauties)", "it's extraordinarily potent, at times even heartbreaking. The symbols, however, have been cunningly reversed. In movies like sex, lies, and videotape (1989), the protagonist has to put away the video camera to \"get real\"; in American Beauty ,", "A merican Beauty is so wittily written and gorgeously directed that you might think you're seeing something archetypal--maybe even the", "of pithily vicious marital bickering that makes some viewers (especially male) say, \"Yeah! Tell that bitch off!\" More important, it has a vein of metaphysical yearning, which the director, Sam Mendes, mines brilliantly. A hotshot English theater director", "Early in American Beauty , Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a weary reporter for a media magazine, masturbates in the shower while informing us in voice-over that we're witnessing the highlight of his", "this ... sedated.\" Apparently, Lester doesn't realize that snipped roses are garden-variety symbols of castration, or he'd know what he has lost. But the makers of American Beauty are about to give Lester his roses back. At a high-school", "It's not the druggy philosophizing, however, that makes American Beauty an emotional workout. It's that the caricatures are grounded in sympathy instead of derision. Everyone on screen is in serious pain. The", "(his Cabaret revival is still on the boards in New York), Mendes gives the film a patina of New Age lyricism and layer upon layer of visual irony. The movie's surface is velvety and immaculate--until the action is abruptly viewed", "But do the filmmakers take them straight? If I read it correctly, the movie is saying that American society is unjust and absurd and loveless--full of people so afraid of seeming ordinary that they lose their capacity to see. It's saying that our only hope is to cultivate a kind of stoned aesthetic detachment whereby even a man with his brains blown out becomes an object of beauty and a signpost to a Higher Power. But to scrutinize a freshly dead body and not ask how it got that way--or if there's anyone nearby with a gun who might want to add to the body count--strikes me as either moronic or insane or both. The kind of detachment the movie is peddling isn't artistic, it isn't life--it's nihilism at its most fatuous. In the end, American Beauty is New Age Nihilism.", "primitive. It feels lustrously hip and aware, and a lot of critics are making big claims for it. The script, by Alan Ball, a playwright and former sitcom writer, carries an invigorating blast of counterculture righteousness, along with the kind", "The movie is convinced, too--which is odd, since the fantasy of an underage cheerleader making a middle-aged man's wilted roses bloom is a tad ... primitive. But American Beauty doesn't feel", "through the video camera of the teen-age voyeur next door (Wes Bentley), and the graininess of the video image (along with the plangent music) suggests how unstable the molecules that constitute our \"reality\" really are. Mendes can distend the", "Great American Movie. But when you stop and smell the roses ... Well, that scent isn't Miracle-Gro. The hairpin turns from farce to melodrama, from satire to bathos, are fresh and deftly navigated, but almost every one of the", "it's Ricky Fitts, the damaged stoner videomaker next door, who sees beauty where nonartists see only horror or nothingness. In the film's most self-consciously poetic set piece, Ricky shows Lester's dour daughter Jane--in whom he recognizes a", "whose capaciously baggy eyes are moist with sadness over his inability to reach out. (When he stands helplessly in the rain at the end, the deluge completes him.) The character of Carolyn is so shrill as to constitute a libel", "basketball game, Lester is transfixed by a blonde cheerleader named Angela (Mena Suvari), who is twirling alongside his daughter, Jane (Thora Burch). Ambient noise falls away, the crowd disappears, and there she is, Lester's angel, writhing in slow" ], [ "Kevin Costner is 11 years older than he was as Crash Davis, the over-the-hill minor-league catcher in Bull Durham (1988), but he can still get away with playing a professional ballplayer. He moves and acts like a celebrity jock, and he can make his narcissistic self-containment look as if he's keeping something in reserve--to protect his \"instrument,\" as it were. In For Love of the Game , he's a 40ish Detroit Tigers pitcher having his last hurrah: The team has been sold and the new owners don't necessarily want him back. For about half an hour, it's a great sports movie. Costner stands on the mound shaking off the signals of his longtime catcher (John C. Reilly); he forces himself to tune out the huge Yankee Stadium crowd (the background blurs before our eyes and the sound drops out); and he mutters darkly at a succession of batters, some old nemeses, some old buddies.", "it's extraordinarily potent, at times even heartbreaking. The symbols, however, have been cunningly reversed. In movies like sex, lies, and videotape (1989), the protagonist has to put away the video camera to \"get real\"; in American Beauty ,", "American Beauty is Spacey's movie, though. He gives it--how weird to write this about Spacey, who made his name playing flamboyantly self-involved psychopaths--a heart. Early on, he lets his face and posture go slack and his eyes blurry. He mugs like crazy, telegraphing Lester's \"loserness.\" But Spacey's genius is for mugging in character. He makes us believe that it's Lester who's caricaturing himself , and that bitter edge paves the way for the character's later, more comfortably Spacey-like scenes of insult and mockery. He even makes us take Lester's final, improbably rhapsodic moments straight.", "Maybe it's because I'm a baseball nut that I hated to leave the mound. But maybe it's also because the relationships scenes are soft-focus, generic, and woozily drawn-out, whereas the stuff in the stadium is sharply edited and full of texture. The rhythms of the game feel right; the rhythms of the romance feel embarrassingly Harlequin, and the picture drags on for over two hours. I can't believe that the director, Sam Raimi ( The Evil Dead , 1983; last year's A Simple Plan ) thought that all those scenes of Costner and Preston staring into space while the piano plinks would end up in the final cut, but Raimi apparently gave up control of the final cut for the sake of making his first, real mainstream picture. He might as well have stuck his head over the plate and said, \"Bean me.\"", "It's not the druggy philosophizing, however, that makes American Beauty an emotional workout. It's that the caricatures are grounded in sympathy instead of derision. Everyone on screen is in serious pain. The", "Early in American Beauty , Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a weary reporter for a media magazine, masturbates in the shower while informing us in voice-over that we're witnessing the highlight of his", "But do the filmmakers take them straight? If I read it correctly, the movie is saying that American society is unjust and absurd and loveless--full of people so afraid of seeming ordinary that they lose their capacity to see. It's saying that our only hope is to cultivate a kind of stoned aesthetic detachment whereby even a man with his brains blown out becomes an object of beauty and a signpost to a Higher Power. But to scrutinize a freshly dead body and not ask how it got that way--or if there's anyone nearby with a gun who might want to add to the body count--strikes me as either moronic or insane or both. The kind of detachment the movie is peddling isn't artistic, it isn't life--it's nihilism at its most fatuous. In the end, American Beauty is New Age Nihilism.", "of pithily vicious marital bickering that makes some viewers (especially male) say, \"Yeah! Tell that bitch off!\" More important, it has a vein of metaphysical yearning, which the director, Sam Mendes, mines brilliantly. A hotshot English theater director", "The movie is convinced, too--which is odd, since the fantasy of an underage cheerleader making a middle-aged man's wilted roses bloom is a tad ... primitive. But American Beauty doesn't feel", "He also thinks about his Manhattan-based ex-girlfriend (Kelly Preston), who tearfully told him that morning that things were absolutely over and she was moving to London. There's an appealing flashback to how they met (he stopped to fix her car while on the way to Yankee Stadium), then it's back to the game for more nail-biting at bats. But pretty soon the relationship flashbacks start coming thick and fast, and the balance of the movie shifts to whether Kevin can commit to Kelly and Kelly can commit to Kevin or whether his only commitment could ever be to the ball and the diamond and the game.", "A merican Beauty is so wittily written and gorgeously directed that you might think you're seeing something archetypal--maybe even the", "this ... sedated.\" Apparently, Lester doesn't realize that snipped roses are garden-variety symbols of castration, or he'd know what he has lost. But the makers of American Beauty are about to give Lester his roses back. At a high-school", "primitive. It feels lustrously hip and aware, and a lot of critics are making big claims for it. The script, by Alan Ball, a playwright and former sitcom writer, carries an invigorating blast of counterculture righteousness, along with the kind", "(his Cabaret revival is still on the boards in New York), Mendes gives the film a patina of New Age lyricism and layer upon layer of visual irony. The movie's surface is velvety and immaculate--until the action is abruptly viewed", "Great American Movie. But when you stop and smell the roses ... Well, that scent isn't Miracle-Gro. The hairpin turns from farce to melodrama, from satire to bathos, are fresh and deftly navigated, but almost every one of the", "basketball game, Lester is transfixed by a blonde cheerleader named Angela (Mena Suvari), who is twirling alongside his daughter, Jane (Thora Burch). Ambient noise falls away, the crowd disappears, and there she is, Lester's angel, writhing in slow", "it's Ricky Fitts, the damaged stoner videomaker next door, who sees beauty where nonartists see only horror or nothingness. In the film's most self-consciously poetic set piece, Ricky shows Lester's dour daughter Jane--in whom he recognizes a", "through the video camera of the teen-age voyeur next door (Wes Bentley), and the graininess of the video image (along with the plangent music) suggests how unstable the molecules that constitute our \"reality\" really are. Mendes can distend the", "day. He peers through tired eyes out the window at his manicured suburban tract-house lawn, where his wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening)--whose gardening clogs, he points out, are color-coordinated with the handles of her shears--snips roses (American beauties)", "teen-ager, who likes to train his lenses on dead bodies of animals and people, sells wildly expensive marijuana to Lester and somehow passes on this notion of \"beauty.\" By the end, Lester is mouthing the same sentiments and has acquired" ] ]
train	24192	[ "Why are they throwing a parade for Hank?", "What was Hank's mission?", "How did Hank die?", "Why was Hank lying down for months?", "Who invented the regenerative brain and organ process?", "Why does Hank wait for Edith to leave before he changes clothes?", "How does Edith feel about Hank's return?", "Why does Hank want to eat alone?", "Why does Edith want Hank to go out on the town?", "Why do people keep asking Hank what he saw?" ]	[ [ "Hank is back from a mission to Mars.", "Hank is back from an experimental continent-to-continent flight.", "Hank is back from the dead.", "Hank is back from beyond the Great Frontier." ], [ "Hank's mission was to touch down on Mars in preparation for a future colony.", "Hank's mission was to experience death and be brought back to life.", "Hank's mission was to build a colony on the moon.", "Hank's mission was to pilot an experimental continent-to-continent flight." ], [ "Hank's spacecraft exploded when it hit Earth's atmosphere on the way home from Mars.", "Hank's experimental continent-to-continent flight vessel exploded.", "Hank died when he crashed his car on the way to the mission launch.", "Hank's spacecraft exploded when it hit Earth's atmosphere on the way home from the moon." ], [ "Hank's body was lying in a cryostasis tank while the doctors figured out how to bring him back to life.", "Hank was lying in a stasis tank on the way back from the moon.", "Hank was lying in a stasis tank on the way back from Mars.", "Hank's body was lying in a tank designed to regenerate his body processes." ], [ "General Carlisle", "Captain Davidson", "Vasco De Gama", "Corporal Berringer" ], [ "Edith bought separate beds while he was gone. Undressing in front of her may make her uncomfortable.", "The new bedroom arrangement put them in separate beds. He doesn't want Edith to feel uncomfortable by his undressing.", "He doesn't want Edith to see the scars on his body. It will just remind her he died.", "He doesn't want Edith to see the scars on his body. Scars may put a damper on the romance." ], [ "Edith is happy that Hank has returned, but she is scared he might have changed.", "Edith is happy that Hank has returned if he is Hank. He may be a Martian shapeshifter.", "Edith is happy that Hank has returned, but she is scared that he may be a zombie or a vampire.", "Edith is happy that Hank has returned if he is Hank. He may be an experimental android developed by the Air Force." ], [ "Aunt Lucille won't shut up about the Ladies' Garden Club.", "His family is not treating him like a normal person. Hank just wants to feel normal.", "His family is talking too loudly at dinner, and there are too many people in the room. Hank is experiencing sensory overload.", "His family was watching him eat like an animal in a zoo. Hank just wants to feel normal." ], [ "Edith promised Hank's mother that she would make an effort to return to normalcy, as death had not parted them after all.", "Edith is making an effort to return to normalcy, even though she is scared. She loves Hank.", "Edith promised General Carlisle that she would make an effort to return to normalcy. She was aware of the new return-to-life policy before Hank left on the mission.", "Edith wants to get Hank out of the house so Ralphie can have his friends over. Ralphie's friends don't want to visit while Hank is at the house." ], [ "Hank was dead for months. People want to know about the afterlife.", "Hank was on the moon for months. People want to know what life was like there.", "Hank was dead for months. People want to know which religion got it right.", "Hank was out in space for months. People want to know what he saw on Mars." ] ]	[ 3, 4, 2, 4, 1, 3, 1, 2, 2, 1 ]	[ 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "Still, he was the honored home-comer, the successful returnee, the\n hometown boy who had made good in a big way, and they took the triumphal\n tour up Main Street to the new square and the grandstand. There he sat\n between the mayor and a nervous young coed chosen as homecoming queen,\n and looked out at the police and fire department bands, the National\n Guard, the boy scouts and girl scouts, the Elks and Masons. Several of\n the churches in town had shown indecision as to how to instruct their\n parishioners to treat him. But they had all come around. The tremendous\n national interest, the fact that he was the First One, had made them\n come around. It was obvious by now that they would have to adjust as\n they'd adjusted to all the other firsts taking place in these—as the\n newspapers had dubbed the start of the Twenty-first Century—the\n Galloping Twenties.", "Phil said, \"Because people are—\" And then he caught himself and waved\n his hand and muttered, \"I forgot the punch line.\"\n\n\n \"Because people are dying to get in,\" Hank said, and looked through the\n window, past the iron fence, into the large cemetery at the fleeting\n tombstones.\n\n\n The car was filled with horrified silence when there should have been\n nothing but laughter, or irritation at a too-old joke. \"Maybe you should\n let me out right here,\" Hank said. \"I'm home—or that's what everyone\n seems to think. Maybe I should lie down in an open grave. Maybe that\n would satisfy people. Maybe that's the only way to act, like Dracula or\n another monster from the movies.\"\n\n\n Edith said, \"Oh, Hank, don't, don't!\"", "Hank stood up. \"The question is not whether I want to. You both know I\n want to. The question is whether\nyou\nwant to.\"\n\n\n They answered together that of course they wanted to. But their\n eyes—his wife's and son's eyes—could not meet his, and so he said he\n was going to his room because he was, after all, very tired and would in\n all probability continue to be very tired for a long, long time and that\n they shouldn't count on him for normal social life.\n\n\n He fell asleep quickly, lying there in his clothes.\n\n\n But he didn't sleep long. Edith shook him and he opened his eyes to a\n lighted room. \"Phil and Rhona are here.\" He blinked at her. She smiled,\n and it seemed her old smile. \"They're so anxious to see you, Hank. I\n could barely keep Phil from coming up and waking you himself. They want\n to go out and do the town. Please, Hank, say you will.\"", "He sat up. \"Phil,\" he muttered. \"Phil and Rhona.\" They'd had wonderful\n times together, from grammar school on. Phil and Rhona, their oldest and\n closest friends. Perhaps this would begin his real homecoming.\n\n\n Do the town? They'd paint it and then tear it down!\nIt didn't turn out that way. He was disappointed; but then again, he'd\n also expected it. This entire first day at home had conditioned him to\n expect nothing good. They went to the bowling alleys, and Phil sounded\n very much the way he always had—soft spoken and full of laughter and\n full of jokes. He patted Edith on the head the way he always had, and\n clapped Hank on the shoulder (but not the way he always had—so much\n more gently, almost remotely), and insisted they all drink more than was\n good for them as he always had. And for once, Hank was ready to go along\n on the drinking. For once, he matched Phil shot for shot, beer for beer.", "They didn't bowl very long. At ten o'clock they crossed the road to\n Manfred's Tavern, where Phil and the girls ordered sandwiches and coffee\n and Hank went right on drinking. Edith said something to him, but he\n merely smiled and waved his hand and gulped another ounce of nirvana.\n\n\n There was dancing to a juke box in Manfred's Tavern. He'd been there\n many times before, and he was sure several of the couples recognized\n him. But except for a few abortive glances in his direction, it was as\n if he were a stranger in a city halfway around the world.", "So there he was, Henry Devers, at home with the family. So there he was,\n the hero returned, waiting to be treated as a human being.\n\n\n The grapefruit shells were cleaned away and the soup served. Uncle Joe\n began to talk. \"The greatest little development of circular uniform\n houses you ever did see,\" he boomed in his powerful salesman's voice.\n \"Still going like sixty. We'll sell out before—\" At that point he\n looked at Hank, and Hank nodded encouragement, desperately interested in\n this normalcy, and Joe's voice died away. He looked down at his plate,\n mumbled, \"Soup's getting cold,\" and began to eat. His hand shook a\n little; his ruddy face was not quite as ruddy as Hank remembered it.", "He brought his fist down on the table. The settings jumped; a glass\n overturned, spilling water. He brought it down again and again. They\n were all standing now. He sat there and pounded the table with his big\n right fist—Henry Devers, who would never have thought of making such a\n scene before, but who was now so sick and tired of being treated as the\n First One, of being stood back from, looked at in awe of, felt in fear\n of, that he could have smashed more than a table.\n\n\n Edith said, \"Hank!\"", "The house had changed. He saw that as soon as the official car let him\n off at 45 Roosevelt Street. The change was, he knew, for the better.\n They had put a porch in front. They had rehabilitated, spruced up,\n almost rebuilt the entire outside and grounds. But he was sorry. He had\n wanted it to be as before.\n\n\n The head of the American Legion and the chief of police, who had\n escorted him on this trip from the square, didn't ask to go in with him.\n He was glad. He'd had enough of strangers. Not that he was through with\n strangers. There were dozens of them up and down the street, standing\n beside parked cars, looking at him. But when he looked back at them,\n their eyes dropped, they turned away, they began moving off. He was\n still too much the First One to have his gaze met.", "They had been right to worry. He had suffered much after that blow-up.\n But now they should be rejoicing, because he had survived and made the\n long journey. Ralphie suddenly said, \"I got to go, Dad. I promised Walt\n and the others I'd pitch. It's Inter-Town Little League, you know. It's\n Harmon, you know. I got to keep my word.\" Without waiting for an answer,\n he waved his hand—it shook; a ten-year-old boy's hand that shook—and\n ran from the room and from the house.\n\n\n He and Edith sat beside each other, and he wanted badly to take her in\n his arms, and yet he didn't want to oppress her. He stood up. \"I'm very\n tired. I'd like to lie down a while.\" Which wasn't true, because he'd\n been lying down all the months of the way back.", "He finished his beef and waited. Soon Edith came in with the special\n dessert she'd been preparing half the day—a magnificent English trifle.\n She served him, and spooned out a portion for herself and Ralphie. She\n hesitated near his chair, and when he made no comment she called the\n boy. Then the three of them were sitting, facing the empty side of the\n table. They ate the trifle. Ralphie finished first and got up and said,\n \"Hey, I promised—\"\n\n\n \"You promised the boys you'd play baseball or football or handball or\n something; anything to get away from your father.\"\n\n\n Ralphie's head dropped and he muttered, \"Aw, no, Dad.\"\n\n\n Edith said, \"He'll stay home, Hank. We'll spend an evening\n together—talking, watching TV, playing Monopoly.\"\n\n\n Ralphie said, \"Gee, sure, Dad, if you want to.\"", "They turned left, to take the short cut along Hallowed Hill Road, and\n Phil finished a story about a Martian and a Hollywood sex queen and\n looked at his wife and then past her at the long, cast-iron fence\n paralleling the road. \"Hey,\" he said, pointing, \"do you know why that's\n the most popular place on earth?\"\n\n\n Rhona glanced to the left, and so did Hank and Edith. Rhona made a\n little sound, and Edith seemed to stop breathing, but Phil went on a\n while longer, not yet aware of his supposed\nfaux pas\n.\n\n\n \"You know why?\" he repeated, turning to the back seat, the laughter\n rumbling up from his chest. \"You know why, folks?\"\n\n\n Rhona said, \"Did you notice Carl Braken and his wife at—\"\n\n\n Hank said, \"No, Phil, why is it the most popular place on earth?\"", "The car raced along the road, crossed a macadam highway, went four\n blocks and pulled to a stop. He didn't bother saying good night. He\n didn't wait for Edith. He just got out and walked up the flagstone path\n and entered the house.\n\"Hank,\" Edith whispered from the guest room doorway, \"I'm so sorry—\"\n\n\n \"There's nothing to be sorry about. It's just a matter of time. It'll\n all work out in time.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" she said quickly, \"that's it. I need a little time. We all need a\n little time. Because it's so strange, Hank. Because it's so frightening.\n I should have told you that the moment you walked in. I think I've hurt\n you terribly, we've all hurt you terribly, by trying to hide that we're\n frightened.\"", "\"I'm going to stay in the guest room,\" he said, \"for as long as\n necessary. For good if need be.\"\n\n\n \"How could it be for good? How, Hank?\"\n\n\n That question was perhaps the first firm basis for hope he'd had since\n returning. And there was something else; what Carlisle had told him,\n even as Carlisle himself had reacted as all men did.", "At midnight, he was still drinking. The others wanted to leave, but he\n said, \"I haven't danced with my girl Rhona.\" His tongue was thick, his\n mind was blurred, and yet he could read the strange expression on her\n face—pretty Rhona, who'd always flirted with him, who'd made a ritual\n of flirting with him. Pretty Rhona, who now looked as if she were going\n to be sick.\n\n\n \"So let's rock,\" he said and stood up.\n\n\n They were on the dance floor. He held her close, and hummed and chatted.\n And through the alcoholic haze saw she was a stiff-smiled, stiff-bodied,\n mechanical dancing doll.\n\n\n The number finished; they walked back to the booth. Phil said,\n \"Beddy-bye time.\"\n\n\n Hank said, \"First one dance with my loving wife.\"", "So now five of them sat at the table. The meat was served—thin, rare\n slices of beef, the pink blood-juice oozing warmly from the center. He\n cut into it and raised a forkful to his mouth, then glanced at Ralphie\n and said, \"Looks fresh enough to have been killed in the back yard.\"\n Ralphie said, \"Yeah, Dad.\" Aunt Lucille put down her knife and fork and\n murmured something to her husband. Joe cleared his throat and said\n Lucille was rapidly becoming a vegetarian and he guessed she was going\n into the living room for a while. \"She'll be back for dessert, of\n course,\" he said, his laugh sounding forced.\n\n\n Hank looked at Edith; Edith was busy with her plate. Hank looked at\n Ralphie; Ralphie was busy with his plate. Hank looked at Joe; Joe was\n chewing, gazing out over their heads to the kitchen. Hank looked at\n Lucille; she was disappearing into the living room.", "Aunt Lucille made a few quavering statements about the Ladies' Tuesday\n Garden Club, and Hank looked across the table to where she sat between\n Joe and Mother—his wife and son bracketed him, and yet he felt\n alone—and said, \"I've missed fooling around with the lawn and the rose\n bushes. Here it is August and I haven't had my hand to a mower or\n trowel.\"\n\n\n Aunt Lucille smiled, if you could call it that—a pitiful twitching of\n the lips—and nodded. She threw her eyes in his direction, and past him,\n and then down to her plate. Mother, who was still sniffling, said, \"I\n have a dismal headache. I'm going to lie down in the guest room a\n while.\" She touched his shoulder in passing—his affectionate, effusive\n mother who would kiss stray dogs and strange children, who had often\n irritated him with an excess of physical and verbal caresses—she barely\n touched his shoulder and fled.", "\"Well, then, before summer vacation?\"\n\n\n \"Pretty good.\"\n\n\n Edith said, \"He made top forum the six-month period before vacation, and\n he made top forum the six-month period you went away, Hank.\"\n\n\n He nodded, remembering that, remembering everything, remembering the\n warmth of her farewell, the warmth of Ralphie's farewell, their tears as\n he left for the experimental flight station in the Aleutians. They had\n feared for him, having read of the many launchings gone wrong even in\n continent-to-continent experimental flight.", "But sometime later, as he was dozing off, a sense of reassurance began\n filtering into his mind. After all, he was still Henry Devers, the same\n man who had left home eleven months ago, with a love for family and\n friends which was, if anything, stronger than before. Once he could\n communicate this, the strangeness would disappear and the First One\n would again become good old Hank. It was little enough to ask for—a\n return to old values, old relationships, the normalcies of the backwash\n instead of the freneticisms of the lime-light. It would certainly be\n granted to him.\n\n\n He slept.\nDinner was at seven\n p.m.\n His mother came; his Uncle Joe and Aunt Lucille\n came. Together with Edith, Ralphie and himself, they made six, and ate\n in the dining room at the big table.", "Edith said, \"Yes, and I'm so grateful that you're here, Hank. Please\n believe that. Please be patient with me and Ralphie and—\" She paused.\n \"There's one question.\"\n\n\n He knew what the question was. It had been the first asked him by\n everyone from the president of the United States on down.\n\n\n \"I saw nothing,\" he said. \"It was as if I slept those six and a half\n months—slept without dreaming.\"\n\n\n She came to him and touched his face with her lips, and he was\n satisfied.\n\n\n Later, half asleep, he heard a dog howling, and remembered stories of\n how they announced death and the presence of monsters. He shivered and\n pulled the covers closer to him and luxuriated in being safe in his own\n home.\nTHE END", "He said, voice hoarse, \"Shut up. Go away. Let me eat alone. I'm sick of\n the lot of you.\"\nMother and Joe returned a few minutes later where he sat forcing food\n down his throat. Mother said, \"Henry dear—\" He didn't answer. She began\n to cry, and he was glad she left the house then. He had never said\n anything really bad to his mother. He was afraid this would have been\n the time. Joe merely cleared his throat and mumbled something about\n getting together again soon and \"drop out and see the new development\"\n and he, too, was gone. Lucille never did manage to speak to him." ], [ "Hank stood up. \"The question is not whether I want to. You both know I\n want to. The question is whether\nyou\nwant to.\"\n\n\n They answered together that of course they wanted to. But their\n eyes—his wife's and son's eyes—could not meet his, and so he said he\n was going to his room because he was, after all, very tired and would in\n all probability continue to be very tired for a long, long time and that\n they shouldn't count on him for normal social life.\n\n\n He fell asleep quickly, lying there in his clothes.\n\n\n But he didn't sleep long. Edith shook him and he opened his eyes to a\n lighted room. \"Phil and Rhona are here.\" He blinked at her. She smiled,\n and it seemed her old smile. \"They're so anxious to see you, Hank. I\n could barely keep Phil from coming up and waking you himself. They want\n to go out and do the town. Please, Hank, say you will.\"", "\"I'm going to stay in the guest room,\" he said, \"for as long as\n necessary. For good if need be.\"\n\n\n \"How could it be for good? How, Hank?\"\n\n\n That question was perhaps the first firm basis for hope he'd had since\n returning. And there was something else; what Carlisle had told him,\n even as Carlisle himself had reacted as all men did.", "Edith said, \"Yes, and I'm so grateful that you're here, Hank. Please\n believe that. Please be patient with me and Ralphie and—\" She paused.\n \"There's one question.\"\n\n\n He knew what the question was. It had been the first asked him by\n everyone from the president of the United States on down.\n\n\n \"I saw nothing,\" he said. \"It was as if I slept those six and a half\n months—slept without dreaming.\"\n\n\n She came to him and touched his face with her lips, and he was\n satisfied.\n\n\n Later, half asleep, he heard a dog howling, and remembered stories of\n how they announced death and the presence of monsters. He shivered and\n pulled the covers closer to him and luxuriated in being safe in his own\n home.\nTHE END", "So there he was, Henry Devers, at home with the family. So there he was,\n the hero returned, waiting to be treated as a human being.\n\n\n The grapefruit shells were cleaned away and the soup served. Uncle Joe\n began to talk. \"The greatest little development of circular uniform\n houses you ever did see,\" he boomed in his powerful salesman's voice.\n \"Still going like sixty. We'll sell out before—\" At that point he\n looked at Hank, and Hank nodded encouragement, desperately interested in\n this normalcy, and Joe's voice died away. He looked down at his plate,\n mumbled, \"Soup's getting cold,\" and began to eat. His hand shook a\n little; his ruddy face was not quite as ruddy as Hank remembered it.", "But sometime later, as he was dozing off, a sense of reassurance began\n filtering into his mind. After all, he was still Henry Devers, the same\n man who had left home eleven months ago, with a love for family and\n friends which was, if anything, stronger than before. Once he could\n communicate this, the strangeness would disappear and the First One\n would again become good old Hank. It was little enough to ask for—a\n return to old values, old relationships, the normalcies of the backwash\n instead of the freneticisms of the lime-light. It would certainly be\n granted to him.\n\n\n He slept.\nDinner was at seven\n p.m.\n His mother came; his Uncle Joe and Aunt Lucille\n came. Together with Edith, Ralphie and himself, they made six, and ate\n in the dining room at the big table.", "He finished his beef and waited. Soon Edith came in with the special\n dessert she'd been preparing half the day—a magnificent English trifle.\n She served him, and spooned out a portion for herself and Ralphie. She\n hesitated near his chair, and when he made no comment she called the\n boy. Then the three of them were sitting, facing the empty side of the\n table. They ate the trifle. Ralphie finished first and got up and said,\n \"Hey, I promised—\"\n\n\n \"You promised the boys you'd play baseball or football or handball or\n something; anything to get away from your father.\"\n\n\n Ralphie's head dropped and he muttered, \"Aw, no, Dad.\"\n\n\n Edith said, \"He'll stay home, Hank. We'll spend an evening\n together—talking, watching TV, playing Monopoly.\"\n\n\n Ralphie said, \"Gee, sure, Dad, if you want to.\"", "The car raced along the road, crossed a macadam highway, went four\n blocks and pulled to a stop. He didn't bother saying good night. He\n didn't wait for Edith. He just got out and walked up the flagstone path\n and entered the house.\n\"Hank,\" Edith whispered from the guest room doorway, \"I'm so sorry—\"\n\n\n \"There's nothing to be sorry about. It's just a matter of time. It'll\n all work out in time.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" she said quickly, \"that's it. I need a little time. We all need a\n little time. Because it's so strange, Hank. Because it's so frightening.\n I should have told you that the moment you walked in. I think I've hurt\n you terribly, we've all hurt you terribly, by trying to hide that we're\n frightened.\"", "They didn't bowl very long. At ten o'clock they crossed the road to\n Manfred's Tavern, where Phil and the girls ordered sandwiches and coffee\n and Hank went right on drinking. Edith said something to him, but he\n merely smiled and waved his hand and gulped another ounce of nirvana.\n\n\n There was dancing to a juke box in Manfred's Tavern. He'd been there\n many times before, and he was sure several of the couples recognized\n him. But except for a few abortive glances in his direction, it was as\n if he were a stranger in a city halfway around the world.", "They had been right to worry. He had suffered much after that blow-up.\n But now they should be rejoicing, because he had survived and made the\n long journey. Ralphie suddenly said, \"I got to go, Dad. I promised Walt\n and the others I'd pitch. It's Inter-Town Little League, you know. It's\n Harmon, you know. I got to keep my word.\" Without waiting for an answer,\n he waved his hand—it shook; a ten-year-old boy's hand that shook—and\n ran from the room and from the house.\n\n\n He and Edith sat beside each other, and he wanted badly to take her in\n his arms, and yet he didn't want to oppress her. He stood up. \"I'm very\n tired. I'd like to lie down a while.\" Which wasn't true, because he'd\n been lying down all the months of the way back.", "\"Well, then, before summer vacation?\"\n\n\n \"Pretty good.\"\n\n\n Edith said, \"He made top forum the six-month period before vacation, and\n he made top forum the six-month period you went away, Hank.\"\n\n\n He nodded, remembering that, remembering everything, remembering the\n warmth of her farewell, the warmth of Ralphie's farewell, their tears as\n he left for the experimental flight station in the Aleutians. They had\n feared for him, having read of the many launchings gone wrong even in\n continent-to-continent experimental flight.", "So now five of them sat at the table. The meat was served—thin, rare\n slices of beef, the pink blood-juice oozing warmly from the center. He\n cut into it and raised a forkful to his mouth, then glanced at Ralphie\n and said, \"Looks fresh enough to have been killed in the back yard.\"\n Ralphie said, \"Yeah, Dad.\" Aunt Lucille put down her knife and fork and\n murmured something to her husband. Joe cleared his throat and said\n Lucille was rapidly becoming a vegetarian and he guessed she was going\n into the living room for a while. \"She'll be back for dessert, of\n course,\" he said, his laugh sounding forced.\n\n\n Hank looked at Edith; Edith was busy with her plate. Hank looked at\n Ralphie; Ralphie was busy with his plate. Hank looked at Joe; Joe was\n chewing, gazing out over their heads to the kitchen. Hank looked at\n Lucille; she was disappearing into the living room.", "He brought his fist down on the table. The settings jumped; a glass\n overturned, spilling water. He brought it down again and again. They\n were all standing now. He sat there and pounded the table with his big\n right fist—Henry Devers, who would never have thought of making such a\n scene before, but who was now so sick and tired of being treated as the\n First One, of being stood back from, looked at in awe of, felt in fear\n of, that he could have smashed more than a table.\n\n\n Edith said, \"Hank!\"", "He sat up. \"Phil,\" he muttered. \"Phil and Rhona.\" They'd had wonderful\n times together, from grammar school on. Phil and Rhona, their oldest and\n closest friends. Perhaps this would begin his real homecoming.\n\n\n Do the town? They'd paint it and then tear it down!\nIt didn't turn out that way. He was disappointed; but then again, he'd\n also expected it. This entire first day at home had conditioned him to\n expect nothing good. They went to the bowling alleys, and Phil sounded\n very much the way he always had—soft spoken and full of laughter and\n full of jokes. He patted Edith on the head the way he always had, and\n clapped Hank on the shoulder (but not the way he always had—so much\n more gently, almost remotely), and insisted they all drink more than was\n good for them as he always had. And for once, Hank was ready to go along\n on the drinking. For once, he matched Phil shot for shot, beer for beer.", "At midnight, he was still drinking. The others wanted to leave, but he\n said, \"I haven't danced with my girl Rhona.\" His tongue was thick, his\n mind was blurred, and yet he could read the strange expression on her\n face—pretty Rhona, who'd always flirted with him, who'd made a ritual\n of flirting with him. Pretty Rhona, who now looked as if she were going\n to be sick.\n\n\n \"So let's rock,\" he said and stood up.\n\n\n They were on the dance floor. He held her close, and hummed and chatted.\n And through the alcoholic haze saw she was a stiff-smiled, stiff-bodied,\n mechanical dancing doll.\n\n\n The number finished; they walked back to the booth. Phil said,\n \"Beddy-bye time.\"\n\n\n Hank said, \"First one dance with my loving wife.\"", "Phil said, \"Because people are—\" And then he caught himself and waved\n his hand and muttered, \"I forgot the punch line.\"\n\n\n \"Because people are dying to get in,\" Hank said, and looked through the\n window, past the iron fence, into the large cemetery at the fleeting\n tombstones.\n\n\n The car was filled with horrified silence when there should have been\n nothing but laughter, or irritation at a too-old joke. \"Maybe you should\n let me out right here,\" Hank said. \"I'm home—or that's what everyone\n seems to think. Maybe I should lie down in an open grave. Maybe that\n would satisfy people. Maybe that's the only way to act, like Dracula or\n another monster from the movies.\"\n\n\n Edith said, \"Oh, Hank, don't, don't!\"", "Aunt Lucille made a few quavering statements about the Ladies' Tuesday\n Garden Club, and Hank looked across the table to where she sat between\n Joe and Mother—his wife and son bracketed him, and yet he felt\n alone—and said, \"I've missed fooling around with the lawn and the rose\n bushes. Here it is August and I haven't had my hand to a mower or\n trowel.\"\n\n\n Aunt Lucille smiled, if you could call it that—a pitiful twitching of\n the lips—and nodded. She threw her eyes in his direction, and past him,\n and then down to her plate. Mother, who was still sniffling, said, \"I\n have a dismal headache. I'm going to lie down in the guest room a\n while.\" She touched his shoulder in passing—his affectionate, effusive\n mother who would kiss stray dogs and strange children, who had often\n irritated him with an excess of physical and verbal caresses—she barely\n touched his shoulder and fled.", "He said, voice hoarse, \"Shut up. Go away. Let me eat alone. I'm sick of\n the lot of you.\"\nMother and Joe returned a few minutes later where he sat forcing food\n down his throat. Mother said, \"Henry dear—\" He didn't answer. She began\n to cry, and he was glad she left the house then. He had never said\n anything really bad to his mother. He was afraid this would have been\n the time. Joe merely cleared his throat and mumbled something about\n getting together again soon and \"drop out and see the new development\"\n and he, too, was gone. Lucille never did manage to speak to him.", "Still, he was the honored home-comer, the successful returnee, the\n hometown boy who had made good in a big way, and they took the triumphal\n tour up Main Street to the new square and the grandstand. There he sat\n between the mayor and a nervous young coed chosen as homecoming queen,\n and looked out at the police and fire department bands, the National\n Guard, the boy scouts and girl scouts, the Elks and Masons. Several of\n the churches in town had shown indecision as to how to instruct their\n parishioners to treat him. But they had all come around. The tremendous\n national interest, the fact that he was the First One, had made them\n come around. It was obvious by now that they would have to adjust as\n they'd adjusted to all the other firsts taking place in these—as the\n newspapers had dubbed the start of the Twenty-first Century—the\n Galloping Twenties.", "She said, \"Of course. How stupid of me, expecting you to sit around and\n make small talk and pick up just where you left off.\"\n\n\n He nodded. But that was exactly what he wanted to do—make small talk\n and pick up just where he'd left off. But they didn't expect it of him;\n they wouldn't let him; they felt he had changed too much.\nShe led him upstairs and along the foyer past Ralphie's room and past\n the small guest room to their bedroom. This, too, had changed. It was\n newly painted and it had new furniture. He saw twin beds separated by an\n ornate little table with an ornate little lamp, and this looked more\n ominous a barrier to him than the twelve-foot concrete-and-barbed-wire\n fence around the experimental station.\n\n\n \"Which one is mine,\" he asked, and tried to smile.", "\"There are others coming, Edith. Eight that I know of in the tanks right\n now. My superior, Captain Davidson, who died at the same moment I\n did—seven months ago next Wednesday—he's going to be next. He was\n smashed up worse than I was, so it took a little longer, but he's almost\n ready. And there'll be many more, Edith. The government is going to save\n all they possibly can from now on. Every time a young and healthy man\n loses his life by accident, by violence, and his body can be recovered,\n he'll go into the tanks and they'll start the regenerative brain and\n organ process—the process that made it all possible. So people have to\n get used to us. And the old stories, the old terrors, the ugly old\n superstitions have to die, because in time each place will have some of\n us; because in time it'll be an ordinary thing.\"" ], [ "Hank stood up. \"The question is not whether I want to. You both know I\n want to. The question is whether\nyou\nwant to.\"\n\n\n They answered together that of course they wanted to. But their\n eyes—his wife's and son's eyes—could not meet his, and so he said he\n was going to his room because he was, after all, very tired and would in\n all probability continue to be very tired for a long, long time and that\n they shouldn't count on him for normal social life.\n\n\n He fell asleep quickly, lying there in his clothes.\n\n\n But he didn't sleep long. Edith shook him and he opened his eyes to a\n lighted room. \"Phil and Rhona are here.\" He blinked at her. She smiled,\n and it seemed her old smile. \"They're so anxious to see you, Hank. I\n could barely keep Phil from coming up and waking you himself. They want\n to go out and do the town. Please, Hank, say you will.\"", "Edith said, \"Yes, and I'm so grateful that you're here, Hank. Please\n believe that. Please be patient with me and Ralphie and—\" She paused.\n \"There's one question.\"\n\n\n He knew what the question was. It had been the first asked him by\n everyone from the president of the United States on down.\n\n\n \"I saw nothing,\" he said. \"It was as if I slept those six and a half\n months—slept without dreaming.\"\n\n\n She came to him and touched his face with her lips, and he was\n satisfied.\n\n\n Later, half asleep, he heard a dog howling, and remembered stories of\n how they announced death and the presence of monsters. He shivered and\n pulled the covers closer to him and luxuriated in being safe in his own\n home.\nTHE END", "Phil said, \"Because people are—\" And then he caught himself and waved\n his hand and muttered, \"I forgot the punch line.\"\n\n\n \"Because people are dying to get in,\" Hank said, and looked through the\n window, past the iron fence, into the large cemetery at the fleeting\n tombstones.\n\n\n The car was filled with horrified silence when there should have been\n nothing but laughter, or irritation at a too-old joke. \"Maybe you should\n let me out right here,\" Hank said. \"I'm home—or that's what everyone\n seems to think. Maybe I should lie down in an open grave. Maybe that\n would satisfy people. Maybe that's the only way to act, like Dracula or\n another monster from the movies.\"\n\n\n Edith said, \"Oh, Hank, don't, don't!\"", "They had been right to worry. He had suffered much after that blow-up.\n But now they should be rejoicing, because he had survived and made the\n long journey. Ralphie suddenly said, \"I got to go, Dad. I promised Walt\n and the others I'd pitch. It's Inter-Town Little League, you know. It's\n Harmon, you know. I got to keep my word.\" Without waiting for an answer,\n he waved his hand—it shook; a ten-year-old boy's hand that shook—and\n ran from the room and from the house.\n\n\n He and Edith sat beside each other, and he wanted badly to take her in\n his arms, and yet he didn't want to oppress her. He stood up. \"I'm very\n tired. I'd like to lie down a while.\" Which wasn't true, because he'd\n been lying down all the months of the way back.", "So there he was, Henry Devers, at home with the family. So there he was,\n the hero returned, waiting to be treated as a human being.\n\n\n The grapefruit shells were cleaned away and the soup served. Uncle Joe\n began to talk. \"The greatest little development of circular uniform\n houses you ever did see,\" he boomed in his powerful salesman's voice.\n \"Still going like sixty. We'll sell out before—\" At that point he\n looked at Hank, and Hank nodded encouragement, desperately interested in\n this normalcy, and Joe's voice died away. He looked down at his plate,\n mumbled, \"Soup's getting cold,\" and began to eat. His hand shook a\n little; his ruddy face was not quite as ruddy as Hank remembered it.", "He finished his beef and waited. Soon Edith came in with the special\n dessert she'd been preparing half the day—a magnificent English trifle.\n She served him, and spooned out a portion for herself and Ralphie. She\n hesitated near his chair, and when he made no comment she called the\n boy. Then the three of them were sitting, facing the empty side of the\n table. They ate the trifle. Ralphie finished first and got up and said,\n \"Hey, I promised—\"\n\n\n \"You promised the boys you'd play baseball or football or handball or\n something; anything to get away from your father.\"\n\n\n Ralphie's head dropped and he muttered, \"Aw, no, Dad.\"\n\n\n Edith said, \"He'll stay home, Hank. We'll spend an evening\n together—talking, watching TV, playing Monopoly.\"\n\n\n Ralphie said, \"Gee, sure, Dad, if you want to.\"", "So now five of them sat at the table. The meat was served—thin, rare\n slices of beef, the pink blood-juice oozing warmly from the center. He\n cut into it and raised a forkful to his mouth, then glanced at Ralphie\n and said, \"Looks fresh enough to have been killed in the back yard.\"\n Ralphie said, \"Yeah, Dad.\" Aunt Lucille put down her knife and fork and\n murmured something to her husband. Joe cleared his throat and said\n Lucille was rapidly becoming a vegetarian and he guessed she was going\n into the living room for a while. \"She'll be back for dessert, of\n course,\" he said, his laugh sounding forced.\n\n\n Hank looked at Edith; Edith was busy with her plate. Hank looked at\n Ralphie; Ralphie was busy with his plate. Hank looked at Joe; Joe was\n chewing, gazing out over their heads to the kitchen. Hank looked at\n Lucille; she was disappearing into the living room.", "He sat up. \"Phil,\" he muttered. \"Phil and Rhona.\" They'd had wonderful\n times together, from grammar school on. Phil and Rhona, their oldest and\n closest friends. Perhaps this would begin his real homecoming.\n\n\n Do the town? They'd paint it and then tear it down!\nIt didn't turn out that way. He was disappointed; but then again, he'd\n also expected it. This entire first day at home had conditioned him to\n expect nothing good. They went to the bowling alleys, and Phil sounded\n very much the way he always had—soft spoken and full of laughter and\n full of jokes. He patted Edith on the head the way he always had, and\n clapped Hank on the shoulder (but not the way he always had—so much\n more gently, almost remotely), and insisted they all drink more than was\n good for them as he always had. And for once, Hank was ready to go along\n on the drinking. For once, he matched Phil shot for shot, beer for beer.", "The car raced along the road, crossed a macadam highway, went four\n blocks and pulled to a stop. He didn't bother saying good night. He\n didn't wait for Edith. He just got out and walked up the flagstone path\n and entered the house.\n\"Hank,\" Edith whispered from the guest room doorway, \"I'm so sorry—\"\n\n\n \"There's nothing to be sorry about. It's just a matter of time. It'll\n all work out in time.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" she said quickly, \"that's it. I need a little time. We all need a\n little time. Because it's so strange, Hank. Because it's so frightening.\n I should have told you that the moment you walked in. I think I've hurt\n you terribly, we've all hurt you terribly, by trying to hide that we're\n frightened.\"", "Aunt Lucille made a few quavering statements about the Ladies' Tuesday\n Garden Club, and Hank looked across the table to where she sat between\n Joe and Mother—his wife and son bracketed him, and yet he felt\n alone—and said, \"I've missed fooling around with the lawn and the rose\n bushes. Here it is August and I haven't had my hand to a mower or\n trowel.\"\n\n\n Aunt Lucille smiled, if you could call it that—a pitiful twitching of\n the lips—and nodded. She threw her eyes in his direction, and past him,\n and then down to her plate. Mother, who was still sniffling, said, \"I\n have a dismal headache. I'm going to lie down in the guest room a\n while.\" She touched his shoulder in passing—his affectionate, effusive\n mother who would kiss stray dogs and strange children, who had often\n irritated him with an excess of physical and verbal caresses—she barely\n touched his shoulder and fled.", "At midnight, he was still drinking. The others wanted to leave, but he\n said, \"I haven't danced with my girl Rhona.\" His tongue was thick, his\n mind was blurred, and yet he could read the strange expression on her\n face—pretty Rhona, who'd always flirted with him, who'd made a ritual\n of flirting with him. Pretty Rhona, who now looked as if she were going\n to be sick.\n\n\n \"So let's rock,\" he said and stood up.\n\n\n They were on the dance floor. He held her close, and hummed and chatted.\n And through the alcoholic haze saw she was a stiff-smiled, stiff-bodied,\n mechanical dancing doll.\n\n\n The number finished; they walked back to the booth. Phil said,\n \"Beddy-bye time.\"\n\n\n Hank said, \"First one dance with my loving wife.\"", "He said, voice hoarse, \"Shut up. Go away. Let me eat alone. I'm sick of\n the lot of you.\"\nMother and Joe returned a few minutes later where he sat forcing food\n down his throat. Mother said, \"Henry dear—\" He didn't answer. She began\n to cry, and he was glad she left the house then. He had never said\n anything really bad to his mother. He was afraid this would have been\n the time. Joe merely cleared his throat and mumbled something about\n getting together again soon and \"drop out and see the new development\"\n and he, too, was gone. Lucille never did manage to speak to him.", "They didn't bowl very long. At ten o'clock they crossed the road to\n Manfred's Tavern, where Phil and the girls ordered sandwiches and coffee\n and Hank went right on drinking. Edith said something to him, but he\n merely smiled and waved his hand and gulped another ounce of nirvana.\n\n\n There was dancing to a juke box in Manfred's Tavern. He'd been there\n many times before, and he was sure several of the couples recognized\n him. But except for a few abortive glances in his direction, it was as\n if he were a stranger in a city halfway around the world.", "\"I'm going to stay in the guest room,\" he said, \"for as long as\n necessary. For good if need be.\"\n\n\n \"How could it be for good? How, Hank?\"\n\n\n That question was perhaps the first firm basis for hope he'd had since\n returning. And there was something else; what Carlisle had told him,\n even as Carlisle himself had reacted as all men did.", "He brought his fist down on the table. The settings jumped; a glass\n overturned, spilling water. He brought it down again and again. They\n were all standing now. He sat there and pounded the table with his big\n right fist—Henry Devers, who would never have thought of making such a\n scene before, but who was now so sick and tired of being treated as the\n First One, of being stood back from, looked at in awe of, felt in fear\n of, that he could have smashed more than a table.\n\n\n Edith said, \"Hank!\"", "But sometime later, as he was dozing off, a sense of reassurance began\n filtering into his mind. After all, he was still Henry Devers, the same\n man who had left home eleven months ago, with a love for family and\n friends which was, if anything, stronger than before. Once he could\n communicate this, the strangeness would disappear and the First One\n would again become good old Hank. It was little enough to ask for—a\n return to old values, old relationships, the normalcies of the backwash\n instead of the freneticisms of the lime-light. It would certainly be\n granted to him.\n\n\n He slept.\nDinner was at seven\n p.m.\n His mother came; his Uncle Joe and Aunt Lucille\n came. Together with Edith, Ralphie and himself, they made six, and ate\n in the dining room at the big table.", "\"Well, then, before summer vacation?\"\n\n\n \"Pretty good.\"\n\n\n Edith said, \"He made top forum the six-month period before vacation, and\n he made top forum the six-month period you went away, Hank.\"\n\n\n He nodded, remembering that, remembering everything, remembering the\n warmth of her farewell, the warmth of Ralphie's farewell, their tears as\n he left for the experimental flight station in the Aleutians. They had\n feared for him, having read of the many launchings gone wrong even in\n continent-to-continent experimental flight.", "\"There are others coming, Edith. Eight that I know of in the tanks right\n now. My superior, Captain Davidson, who died at the same moment I\n did—seven months ago next Wednesday—he's going to be next. He was\n smashed up worse than I was, so it took a little longer, but he's almost\n ready. And there'll be many more, Edith. The government is going to save\n all they possibly can from now on. Every time a young and healthy man\n loses his life by accident, by violence, and his body can be recovered,\n he'll go into the tanks and they'll start the regenerative brain and\n organ process—the process that made it all possible. So people have to\n get used to us. And the old stories, the old terrors, the ugly old\n superstitions have to die, because in time each place will have some of\n us; because in time it'll be an ordinary thing.\"", "They turned left, to take the short cut along Hallowed Hill Road, and\n Phil finished a story about a Martian and a Hollywood sex queen and\n looked at his wife and then past her at the long, cast-iron fence\n paralleling the road. \"Hey,\" he said, pointing, \"do you know why that's\n the most popular place on earth?\"\n\n\n Rhona glanced to the left, and so did Hank and Edith. Rhona made a\n little sound, and Edith seemed to stop breathing, but Phil went on a\n while longer, not yet aware of his supposed\nfaux pas\n.\n\n\n \"You know why?\" he repeated, turning to the back seat, the laughter\n rumbling up from his chest. \"You know why, folks?\"\n\n\n Rhona said, \"Did you notice Carl Braken and his wife at—\"\n\n\n Hank said, \"No, Phil, why is it the most popular place on earth?\"", "He and Edith danced. He didn't hold her close as he had Rhona. He waited\n for her to come close on her own, and she did, and yet she didn't.\n Because while she put herself against him, there was something in her\n face—no, in her eyes; it always showed in the eyes—that made him know\n she was trying to be the old Edith and not succeeding. This time when\n the music ended, he was ready to go home.\n\n\n They rode back to town along Route Nine, he and Edith in the rear of\n Phil's car, Rhona driving because Phil had drunk just a little too much,\n Phil singing and telling an occasional bad joke, and somehow not his old\n self. No one was his old self. No one would ever be his old self with\n the First One." ], [ "They had been right to worry. He had suffered much after that blow-up.\n But now they should be rejoicing, because he had survived and made the\n long journey. Ralphie suddenly said, \"I got to go, Dad. I promised Walt\n and the others I'd pitch. It's Inter-Town Little League, you know. It's\n Harmon, you know. I got to keep my word.\" Without waiting for an answer,\n he waved his hand—it shook; a ten-year-old boy's hand that shook—and\n ran from the room and from the house.\n\n\n He and Edith sat beside each other, and he wanted badly to take her in\n his arms, and yet he didn't want to oppress her. He stood up. \"I'm very\n tired. I'd like to lie down a while.\" Which wasn't true, because he'd\n been lying down all the months of the way back.", "Hank stood up. \"The question is not whether I want to. You both know I\n want to. The question is whether\nyou\nwant to.\"\n\n\n They answered together that of course they wanted to. But their\n eyes—his wife's and son's eyes—could not meet his, and so he said he\n was going to his room because he was, after all, very tired and would in\n all probability continue to be very tired for a long, long time and that\n they shouldn't count on him for normal social life.\n\n\n He fell asleep quickly, lying there in his clothes.\n\n\n But he didn't sleep long. Edith shook him and he opened his eyes to a\n lighted room. \"Phil and Rhona are here.\" He blinked at her. She smiled,\n and it seemed her old smile. \"They're so anxious to see you, Hank. I\n could barely keep Phil from coming up and waking you himself. They want\n to go out and do the town. Please, Hank, say you will.\"", "\"I'm going to stay in the guest room,\" he said, \"for as long as\n necessary. For good if need be.\"\n\n\n \"How could it be for good? How, Hank?\"\n\n\n That question was perhaps the first firm basis for hope he'd had since\n returning. And there was something else; what Carlisle had told him,\n even as Carlisle himself had reacted as all men did.", "Edith said, \"Yes, and I'm so grateful that you're here, Hank. Please\n believe that. Please be patient with me and Ralphie and—\" She paused.\n \"There's one question.\"\n\n\n He knew what the question was. It had been the first asked him by\n everyone from the president of the United States on down.\n\n\n \"I saw nothing,\" he said. \"It was as if I slept those six and a half\n months—slept without dreaming.\"\n\n\n She came to him and touched his face with her lips, and he was\n satisfied.\n\n\n Later, half asleep, he heard a dog howling, and remembered stories of\n how they announced death and the presence of monsters. He shivered and\n pulled the covers closer to him and luxuriated in being safe in his own\n home.\nTHE END", "Aunt Lucille made a few quavering statements about the Ladies' Tuesday\n Garden Club, and Hank looked across the table to where she sat between\n Joe and Mother—his wife and son bracketed him, and yet he felt\n alone—and said, \"I've missed fooling around with the lawn and the rose\n bushes. Here it is August and I haven't had my hand to a mower or\n trowel.\"\n\n\n Aunt Lucille smiled, if you could call it that—a pitiful twitching of\n the lips—and nodded. She threw her eyes in his direction, and past him,\n and then down to her plate. Mother, who was still sniffling, said, \"I\n have a dismal headache. I'm going to lie down in the guest room a\n while.\" She touched his shoulder in passing—his affectionate, effusive\n mother who would kiss stray dogs and strange children, who had often\n irritated him with an excess of physical and verbal caresses—she barely\n touched his shoulder and fled.", "So there he was, Henry Devers, at home with the family. So there he was,\n the hero returned, waiting to be treated as a human being.\n\n\n The grapefruit shells were cleaned away and the soup served. Uncle Joe\n began to talk. \"The greatest little development of circular uniform\n houses you ever did see,\" he boomed in his powerful salesman's voice.\n \"Still going like sixty. We'll sell out before—\" At that point he\n looked at Hank, and Hank nodded encouragement, desperately interested in\n this normalcy, and Joe's voice died away. He looked down at his plate,\n mumbled, \"Soup's getting cold,\" and began to eat. His hand shook a\n little; his ruddy face was not quite as ruddy as Hank remembered it.", "Phil said, \"Because people are—\" And then he caught himself and waved\n his hand and muttered, \"I forgot the punch line.\"\n\n\n \"Because people are dying to get in,\" Hank said, and looked through the\n window, past the iron fence, into the large cemetery at the fleeting\n tombstones.\n\n\n The car was filled with horrified silence when there should have been\n nothing but laughter, or irritation at a too-old joke. \"Maybe you should\n let me out right here,\" Hank said. \"I'm home—or that's what everyone\n seems to think. Maybe I should lie down in an open grave. Maybe that\n would satisfy people. Maybe that's the only way to act, like Dracula or\n another monster from the movies.\"\n\n\n Edith said, \"Oh, Hank, don't, don't!\"", "Which was not what he'd considered at all important on leaving Walter\n Reed Hospital early this morning; which was something he found\n distasteful, something he felt beneath them both. And, at the same time,\n he began to understand that there would be many things, previously\n beneath them both, which would have to be considered. She had changed;\n Ralphie had changed; all the people he knew had probably\n changed—because they thought\nhe\nhad changed.\n\n\n He was tired of thinking. He lay down and closed his eyes. He let\n himself taste bitterness, unhappiness, a loneliness he had never known\n before.", "The car raced along the road, crossed a macadam highway, went four\n blocks and pulled to a stop. He didn't bother saying good night. He\n didn't wait for Edith. He just got out and walked up the flagstone path\n and entered the house.\n\"Hank,\" Edith whispered from the guest room doorway, \"I'm so sorry—\"\n\n\n \"There's nothing to be sorry about. It's just a matter of time. It'll\n all work out in time.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" she said quickly, \"that's it. I need a little time. We all need a\n little time. Because it's so strange, Hank. Because it's so frightening.\n I should have told you that the moment you walked in. I think I've hurt\n you terribly, we've all hurt you terribly, by trying to hide that we're\n frightened.\"", "But sometime later, as he was dozing off, a sense of reassurance began\n filtering into his mind. After all, he was still Henry Devers, the same\n man who had left home eleven months ago, with a love for family and\n friends which was, if anything, stronger than before. Once he could\n communicate this, the strangeness would disappear and the First One\n would again become good old Hank. It was little enough to ask for—a\n return to old values, old relationships, the normalcies of the backwash\n instead of the freneticisms of the lime-light. It would certainly be\n granted to him.\n\n\n He slept.\nDinner was at seven\n p.m.\n His mother came; his Uncle Joe and Aunt Lucille\n came. Together with Edith, Ralphie and himself, they made six, and ate\n in the dining room at the big table.", "He finished his beef and waited. Soon Edith came in with the special\n dessert she'd been preparing half the day—a magnificent English trifle.\n She served him, and spooned out a portion for herself and Ralphie. She\n hesitated near his chair, and when he made no comment she called the\n boy. Then the three of them were sitting, facing the empty side of the\n table. They ate the trifle. Ralphie finished first and got up and said,\n \"Hey, I promised—\"\n\n\n \"You promised the boys you'd play baseball or football or handball or\n something; anything to get away from your father.\"\n\n\n Ralphie's head dropped and he muttered, \"Aw, no, Dad.\"\n\n\n Edith said, \"He'll stay home, Hank. We'll spend an evening\n together—talking, watching TV, playing Monopoly.\"\n\n\n Ralphie said, \"Gee, sure, Dad, if you want to.\"", "He sat up. \"Phil,\" he muttered. \"Phil and Rhona.\" They'd had wonderful\n times together, from grammar school on. Phil and Rhona, their oldest and\n closest friends. Perhaps this would begin his real homecoming.\n\n\n Do the town? They'd paint it and then tear it down!\nIt didn't turn out that way. He was disappointed; but then again, he'd\n also expected it. This entire first day at home had conditioned him to\n expect nothing good. They went to the bowling alleys, and Phil sounded\n very much the way he always had—soft spoken and full of laughter and\n full of jokes. He patted Edith on the head the way he always had, and\n clapped Hank on the shoulder (but not the way he always had—so much\n more gently, almost remotely), and insisted they all drink more than was\n good for them as he always had. And for once, Hank was ready to go along\n on the drinking. For once, he matched Phil shot for shot, beer for beer.", "He said, voice hoarse, \"Shut up. Go away. Let me eat alone. I'm sick of\n the lot of you.\"\nMother and Joe returned a few minutes later where he sat forcing food\n down his throat. Mother said, \"Henry dear—\" He didn't answer. She began\n to cry, and he was glad she left the house then. He had never said\n anything really bad to his mother. He was afraid this would have been\n the time. Joe merely cleared his throat and mumbled something about\n getting together again soon and \"drop out and see the new development\"\n and he, too, was gone. Lucille never did manage to speak to him.", "He brought his fist down on the table. The settings jumped; a glass\n overturned, spilling water. He brought it down again and again. They\n were all standing now. He sat there and pounded the table with his big\n right fist—Henry Devers, who would never have thought of making such a\n scene before, but who was now so sick and tired of being treated as the\n First One, of being stood back from, looked at in awe of, felt in fear\n of, that he could have smashed more than a table.\n\n\n Edith said, \"Hank!\"", "At midnight, he was still drinking. The others wanted to leave, but he\n said, \"I haven't danced with my girl Rhona.\" His tongue was thick, his\n mind was blurred, and yet he could read the strange expression on her\n face—pretty Rhona, who'd always flirted with him, who'd made a ritual\n of flirting with him. Pretty Rhona, who now looked as if she were going\n to be sick.\n\n\n \"So let's rock,\" he said and stood up.\n\n\n They were on the dance floor. He held her close, and hummed and chatted.\n And through the alcoholic haze saw she was a stiff-smiled, stiff-bodied,\n mechanical dancing doll.\n\n\n The number finished; they walked back to the booth. Phil said,\n \"Beddy-bye time.\"\n\n\n Hank said, \"First one dance with my loving wife.\"", "They didn't bowl very long. At ten o'clock they crossed the road to\n Manfred's Tavern, where Phil and the girls ordered sandwiches and coffee\n and Hank went right on drinking. Edith said something to him, but he\n merely smiled and waved his hand and gulped another ounce of nirvana.\n\n\n There was dancing to a juke box in Manfred's Tavern. He'd been there\n many times before, and he was sure several of the couples recognized\n him. But except for a few abortive glances in his direction, it was as\n if he were a stranger in a city halfway around the world.", "So now five of them sat at the table. The meat was served—thin, rare\n slices of beef, the pink blood-juice oozing warmly from the center. He\n cut into it and raised a forkful to his mouth, then glanced at Ralphie\n and said, \"Looks fresh enough to have been killed in the back yard.\"\n Ralphie said, \"Yeah, Dad.\" Aunt Lucille put down her knife and fork and\n murmured something to her husband. Joe cleared his throat and said\n Lucille was rapidly becoming a vegetarian and he guessed she was going\n into the living room for a while. \"She'll be back for dessert, of\n course,\" he said, his laugh sounding forced.\n\n\n Hank looked at Edith; Edith was busy with her plate. Hank looked at\n Ralphie; Ralphie was busy with his plate. Hank looked at Joe; Joe was\n chewing, gazing out over their heads to the kitchen. Hank looked at\n Lucille; she was disappearing into the living room.", "She said, \"Well then, rest up, dear,\" and went out.\n\n\n He took off his shirt and saw himself in the mirror on the opposite\n wall; and then took off his under-shirt. The body scars were faint, the\n scars running in long lines, one dissecting his chest, the other slicing\n diagonally across his upper abdomen to disappear under his trousers.\n There were several more on his back, and one on his right thigh. They'd\n been treated properly and would soon disappear. But she had never seen\n them.\n\n\n Perhaps she never would. Perhaps pajamas and robes and dark rooms would\n keep them from her until they were gone.", "So he put him down and told himself that it would all change, that\n everything would loosen up just as his commanding officer, General\n Carlisle, had said it would early this morning before he left\n Washington.\n\n\n \"Give it some time,\" Carlisle had said. \"You need the time; they need\n the time. And for the love of heaven, don't be sensitive.\"\nEdith was leading him into the living room, her hand lying still in his,\n a cool, dead bird lying still in his. He sat down on the couch, she sat\n down beside him—but she had hesitated. He\nwasn't\nbeing sensitive; she\n had hesitated. His wife had hesitated before sitting down beside him.", "She said, \"Of course. How stupid of me, expecting you to sit around and\n make small talk and pick up just where you left off.\"\n\n\n He nodded. But that was exactly what he wanted to do—make small talk\n and pick up just where he'd left off. But they didn't expect it of him;\n they wouldn't let him; they felt he had changed too much.\nShe led him upstairs and along the foyer past Ralphie's room and past\n the small guest room to their bedroom. This, too, had changed. It was\n newly painted and it had new furniture. He saw twin beds separated by an\n ornate little table with an ornate little lamp, and this looked more\n ominous a barrier to him than the twelve-foot concrete-and-barbed-wire\n fence around the experimental station.\n\n\n \"Which one is mine,\" he asked, and tried to smile." ], [ "\"There are others coming, Edith. Eight that I know of in the tanks right\n now. My superior, Captain Davidson, who died at the same moment I\n did—seven months ago next Wednesday—he's going to be next. He was\n smashed up worse than I was, so it took a little longer, but he's almost\n ready. And there'll be many more, Edith. The government is going to save\n all they possibly can from now on. Every time a young and healthy man\n loses his life by accident, by violence, and his body can be recovered,\n he'll go into the tanks and they'll start the regenerative brain and\n organ process—the process that made it all possible. So people have to\n get used to us. And the old stories, the old terrors, the ugly old\n superstitions have to die, because in time each place will have some of\n us; because in time it'll be an ordinary thing.\"", "But sometime later, as he was dozing off, a sense of reassurance began\n filtering into his mind. After all, he was still Henry Devers, the same\n man who had left home eleven months ago, with a love for family and\n friends which was, if anything, stronger than before. Once he could\n communicate this, the strangeness would disappear and the First One\n would again become good old Hank. It was little enough to ask for—a\n return to old values, old relationships, the normalcies of the backwash\n instead of the freneticisms of the lime-light. It would certainly be\n granted to him.\n\n\n He slept.\nDinner was at seven\n p.m.\n His mother came; his Uncle Joe and Aunt Lucille\n came. Together with Edith, Ralphie and himself, they made six, and ate\n in the dining room at the big table.", "She said, \"Well then, rest up, dear,\" and went out.\n\n\n He took off his shirt and saw himself in the mirror on the opposite\n wall; and then took off his under-shirt. The body scars were faint, the\n scars running in long lines, one dissecting his chest, the other slicing\n diagonally across his upper abdomen to disappear under his trousers.\n There were several more on his back, and one on his right thigh. They'd\n been treated properly and would soon disappear. But she had never seen\n them.\n\n\n Perhaps she never would. Perhaps pajamas and robes and dark rooms would\n keep them from her until they were gone.", "Hank stood up. \"The question is not whether I want to. You both know I\n want to. The question is whether\nyou\nwant to.\"\n\n\n They answered together that of course they wanted to. But their\n eyes—his wife's and son's eyes—could not meet his, and so he said he\n was going to his room because he was, after all, very tired and would in\n all probability continue to be very tired for a long, long time and that\n they shouldn't count on him for normal social life.\n\n\n He fell asleep quickly, lying there in his clothes.\n\n\n But he didn't sleep long. Edith shook him and he opened his eyes to a\n lighted room. \"Phil and Rhona are here.\" He blinked at her. She smiled,\n and it seemed her old smile. \"They're so anxious to see you, Hank. I\n could barely keep Phil from coming up and waking you himself. They want\n to go out and do the town. Please, Hank, say you will.\"", "At midnight, he was still drinking. The others wanted to leave, but he\n said, \"I haven't danced with my girl Rhona.\" His tongue was thick, his\n mind was blurred, and yet he could read the strange expression on her\n face—pretty Rhona, who'd always flirted with him, who'd made a ritual\n of flirting with him. Pretty Rhona, who now looked as if she were going\n to be sick.\n\n\n \"So let's rock,\" he said and stood up.\n\n\n They were on the dance floor. He held her close, and hummed and chatted.\n And through the alcoholic haze saw she was a stiff-smiled, stiff-bodied,\n mechanical dancing doll.\n\n\n The number finished; they walked back to the booth. Phil said,\n \"Beddy-bye time.\"\n\n\n Hank said, \"First one dance with my loving wife.\"", "She said, \"Of course. How stupid of me, expecting you to sit around and\n make small talk and pick up just where you left off.\"\n\n\n He nodded. But that was exactly what he wanted to do—make small talk\n and pick up just where he'd left off. But they didn't expect it of him;\n they wouldn't let him; they felt he had changed too much.\nShe led him upstairs and along the foyer past Ralphie's room and past\n the small guest room to their bedroom. This, too, had changed. It was\n newly painted and it had new furniture. He saw twin beds separated by an\n ornate little table with an ornate little lamp, and this looked more\n ominous a barrier to him than the twelve-foot concrete-and-barbed-wire\n fence around the experimental station.\n\n\n \"Which one is mine,\" he asked, and tried to smile.", "The car raced along the road, crossed a macadam highway, went four\n blocks and pulled to a stop. He didn't bother saying good night. He\n didn't wait for Edith. He just got out and walked up the flagstone path\n and entered the house.\n\"Hank,\" Edith whispered from the guest room doorway, \"I'm so sorry—\"\n\n\n \"There's nothing to be sorry about. It's just a matter of time. It'll\n all work out in time.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" she said quickly, \"that's it. I need a little time. We all need a\n little time. Because it's so strange, Hank. Because it's so frightening.\n I should have told you that the moment you walked in. I think I've hurt\n you terribly, we've all hurt you terribly, by trying to hide that we're\n frightened.\"", "Carlisle had said his position was analogous to Columbus', to Vasco De\n Gama's, to Preshoff's when the Russian returned from the Moon—but more\n so. Carlisle had said lots of things, but even Carlisle who had worked\n with him all the way, who had engineered the entire fantastic\n journey—even Carlisle the Nobel prize winner, the multi-degreed genius\n in uniform, had not actually spoken to him as one man to another.\nThe eyes. It always showed in their eyes.\nHe looked across the room at Ralphie, standing in the doorway, a boy\n already tall, already widening in the shoulders, already large of\n feature. It was like looking into the mirror and seeing himself\n twenty-five years ago. But Ralphie's face was drawn, was worried in a\n way that few ten-year-old faces are.\n\n\n \"How's it going in school?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Gee, Dad, it's the second month of summer vacation.\"", "They began with grapefruit, Edith and Mother serving quickly,\n efficiently from the kitchen, then sitting down at the table. He looked\n at Mother as he raised his first spoonful of chilled fruit, and said,\n \"Younger than ever.\" It was nothing new; he'd said it many many times\n before, but his mother had always reacted with a bright smile and a quip\n something like, \"Young for the Golden Age Center, you mean.\" This time\n she burst into tears. It shocked him. But what shocked him even more was\n the fact that no one looked up, commented, made any attempt to comfort\n her; no one indicated in any way that a woman was sobbing at the table.\n\n\n He was sitting directly across from Mother, and reached out and touched\n her left hand which lay limply beside the silverware. She didn't move\n it—she hadn't touched him once beyond that first, quick, strangely-cool\n embrace at the door—then a few seconds later she withdrew it and let it\n drop out of sight.", "Edith said, \"Yes, and I'm so grateful that you're here, Hank. Please\n believe that. Please be patient with me and Ralphie and—\" She paused.\n \"There's one question.\"\n\n\n He knew what the question was. It had been the first asked him by\n everyone from the president of the United States on down.\n\n\n \"I saw nothing,\" he said. \"It was as if I slept those six and a half\n months—slept without dreaming.\"\n\n\n She came to him and touched his face with her lips, and he was\n satisfied.\n\n\n Later, half asleep, he heard a dog howling, and remembered stories of\n how they announced death and the presence of monsters. He shivered and\n pulled the covers closer to him and luxuriated in being safe in his own\n home.\nTHE END", "They turned left, to take the short cut along Hallowed Hill Road, and\n Phil finished a story about a Martian and a Hollywood sex queen and\n looked at his wife and then past her at the long, cast-iron fence\n paralleling the road. \"Hey,\" he said, pointing, \"do you know why that's\n the most popular place on earth?\"\n\n\n Rhona glanced to the left, and so did Hank and Edith. Rhona made a\n little sound, and Edith seemed to stop breathing, but Phil went on a\n while longer, not yet aware of his supposed\nfaux pas\n.\n\n\n \"You know why?\" he repeated, turning to the back seat, the laughter\n rumbling up from his chest. \"You know why, folks?\"\n\n\n Rhona said, \"Did you notice Carl Braken and his wife at—\"\n\n\n Hank said, \"No, Phil, why is it the most popular place on earth?\"", "She also tried to smile. \"The one near the window. You always liked the\n fresh air, the sunshine in the morning. You always said it helped you\n to get up on time when you were stationed at the base outside of town.\n You always said it reminded you—being able to see the sky—that you\n were going to go up in it, and that you were going to come down from it\n to this bed again.\"\n\n\n \"Not this bed,\" he murmured, and was a little sorry afterward.\n\n\n \"No, not this bed,\" she said quickly. \"Your lodge donated the bedroom\n set and I really didn't know—\" She waved her hand, her face white.\n\n\n He was sure then that she\nhad\nknown, and that the beds and the barrier\n between them were her own choice, if only an unconscious choice. He went\n to the bed near the window, stripped off his Air Force blue jacket,\n began to take off his shirt, but then remembered that some arm scars\n still showed. He waited for her to leave the room.", "Still, he was the honored home-comer, the successful returnee, the\n hometown boy who had made good in a big way, and they took the triumphal\n tour up Main Street to the new square and the grandstand. There he sat\n between the mayor and a nervous young coed chosen as homecoming queen,\n and looked out at the police and fire department bands, the National\n Guard, the boy scouts and girl scouts, the Elks and Masons. Several of\n the churches in town had shown indecision as to how to instruct their\n parishioners to treat him. But they had all come around. The tremendous\n national interest, the fact that he was the First One, had made them\n come around. It was obvious by now that they would have to adjust as\n they'd adjusted to all the other firsts taking place in these—as the\n newspapers had dubbed the start of the Twenty-first Century—the\n Galloping Twenties.", "They had been right to worry. He had suffered much after that blow-up.\n But now they should be rejoicing, because he had survived and made the\n long journey. Ralphie suddenly said, \"I got to go, Dad. I promised Walt\n and the others I'd pitch. It's Inter-Town Little League, you know. It's\n Harmon, you know. I got to keep my word.\" Without waiting for an answer,\n he waved his hand—it shook; a ten-year-old boy's hand that shook—and\n ran from the room and from the house.\n\n\n He and Edith sat beside each other, and he wanted badly to take her in\n his arms, and yet he didn't want to oppress her. He stood up. \"I'm very\n tired. I'd like to lie down a while.\" Which wasn't true, because he'd\n been lying down all the months of the way back.", "He was glad when the official greeting was over. He was a very tired man\n and he had come farther, traveled longer and over darker country, than\n any man who'd ever lived before. He wanted a meal at his own table, a\n kiss from his wife, a word from his son, and later to see some old\n friends and a relative or two. He didn't want to talk about the journey.\n He wanted to forget the immediacy, the urgency, the terror; then perhaps\n he would talk.\n\n\n Or would he? For he had very little to tell. He had traveled and he had\n returned and his voyage was very much like the voyages of the great\n mariners, from Columbus onward—long, dull periods of time passing,\n passing, and then the arrival.", "So there he was, Henry Devers, at home with the family. So there he was,\n the hero returned, waiting to be treated as a human being.\n\n\n The grapefruit shells were cleaned away and the soup served. Uncle Joe\n began to talk. \"The greatest little development of circular uniform\n houses you ever did see,\" he boomed in his powerful salesman's voice.\n \"Still going like sixty. We'll sell out before—\" At that point he\n looked at Hank, and Hank nodded encouragement, desperately interested in\n this normalcy, and Joe's voice died away. He looked down at his plate,\n mumbled, \"Soup's getting cold,\" and began to eat. His hand shook a\n little; his ruddy face was not quite as ruddy as Hank remembered it.", "Phil said, \"Because people are—\" And then he caught himself and waved\n his hand and muttered, \"I forgot the punch line.\"\n\n\n \"Because people are dying to get in,\" Hank said, and looked through the\n window, past the iron fence, into the large cemetery at the fleeting\n tombstones.\n\n\n The car was filled with horrified silence when there should have been\n nothing but laughter, or irritation at a too-old joke. \"Maybe you should\n let me out right here,\" Hank said. \"I'm home—or that's what everyone\n seems to think. Maybe I should lie down in an open grave. Maybe that\n would satisfy people. Maybe that's the only way to act, like Dracula or\n another monster from the movies.\"\n\n\n Edith said, \"Oh, Hank, don't, don't!\"", "Which was not what he'd considered at all important on leaving Walter\n Reed Hospital early this morning; which was something he found\n distasteful, something he felt beneath them both. And, at the same time,\n he began to understand that there would be many things, previously\n beneath them both, which would have to be considered. She had changed;\n Ralphie had changed; all the people he knew had probably\n changed—because they thought\nhe\nhad changed.\n\n\n He was tired of thinking. He lay down and closed his eyes. He let\n himself taste bitterness, unhappiness, a loneliness he had never known\n before.", "He and Edith danced. He didn't hold her close as he had Rhona. He waited\n for her to come close on her own, and she did, and yet she didn't.\n Because while she put herself against him, there was something in her\n face—no, in her eyes; it always showed in the eyes—that made him know\n she was trying to be the old Edith and not succeeding. This time when\n the music ended, he was ready to go home.\n\n\n They rode back to town along Route Nine, he and Edith in the rear of\n Phil's car, Rhona driving because Phil had drunk just a little too much,\n Phil singing and telling an occasional bad joke, and somehow not his old\n self. No one was his old self. No one would ever be his old self with\n the First One.", "Aunt Lucille made a few quavering statements about the Ladies' Tuesday\n Garden Club, and Hank looked across the table to where she sat between\n Joe and Mother—his wife and son bracketed him, and yet he felt\n alone—and said, \"I've missed fooling around with the lawn and the rose\n bushes. Here it is August and I haven't had my hand to a mower or\n trowel.\"\n\n\n Aunt Lucille smiled, if you could call it that—a pitiful twitching of\n the lips—and nodded. She threw her eyes in his direction, and past him,\n and then down to her plate. Mother, who was still sniffling, said, \"I\n have a dismal headache. I'm going to lie down in the guest room a\n while.\" She touched his shoulder in passing—his affectionate, effusive\n mother who would kiss stray dogs and strange children, who had often\n irritated him with an excess of physical and verbal caresses—she barely\n touched his shoulder and fled." ], [ "Hank stood up. \"The question is not whether I want to. You both know I\n want to. The question is whether\nyou\nwant to.\"\n\n\n They answered together that of course they wanted to. But their\n eyes—his wife's and son's eyes—could not meet his, and so he said he\n was going to his room because he was, after all, very tired and would in\n all probability continue to be very tired for a long, long time and that\n they shouldn't count on him for normal social life.\n\n\n He fell asleep quickly, lying there in his clothes.\n\n\n But he didn't sleep long. Edith shook him and he opened his eyes to a\n lighted room. \"Phil and Rhona are here.\" He blinked at her. She smiled,\n and it seemed her old smile. \"They're so anxious to see you, Hank. I\n could barely keep Phil from coming up and waking you himself. They want\n to go out and do the town. Please, Hank, say you will.\"", "The car raced along the road, crossed a macadam highway, went four\n blocks and pulled to a stop. He didn't bother saying good night. He\n didn't wait for Edith. He just got out and walked up the flagstone path\n and entered the house.\n\"Hank,\" Edith whispered from the guest room doorway, \"I'm so sorry—\"\n\n\n \"There's nothing to be sorry about. It's just a matter of time. It'll\n all work out in time.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" she said quickly, \"that's it. I need a little time. We all need a\n little time. Because it's so strange, Hank. Because it's so frightening.\n I should have told you that the moment you walked in. I think I've hurt\n you terribly, we've all hurt you terribly, by trying to hide that we're\n frightened.\"", "So he put him down and told himself that it would all change, that\n everything would loosen up just as his commanding officer, General\n Carlisle, had said it would early this morning before he left\n Washington.\n\n\n \"Give it some time,\" Carlisle had said. \"You need the time; they need\n the time. And for the love of heaven, don't be sensitive.\"\nEdith was leading him into the living room, her hand lying still in his,\n a cool, dead bird lying still in his. He sat down on the couch, she sat\n down beside him—but she had hesitated. He\nwasn't\nbeing sensitive; she\n had hesitated. His wife had hesitated before sitting down beside him.", "He finished his beef and waited. Soon Edith came in with the special\n dessert she'd been preparing half the day—a magnificent English trifle.\n She served him, and spooned out a portion for herself and Ralphie. She\n hesitated near his chair, and when he made no comment she called the\n boy. Then the three of them were sitting, facing the empty side of the\n table. They ate the trifle. Ralphie finished first and got up and said,\n \"Hey, I promised—\"\n\n\n \"You promised the boys you'd play baseball or football or handball or\n something; anything to get away from your father.\"\n\n\n Ralphie's head dropped and he muttered, \"Aw, no, Dad.\"\n\n\n Edith said, \"He'll stay home, Hank. We'll spend an evening\n together—talking, watching TV, playing Monopoly.\"\n\n\n Ralphie said, \"Gee, sure, Dad, if you want to.\"", "\"I'm going to stay in the guest room,\" he said, \"for as long as\n necessary. For good if need be.\"\n\n\n \"How could it be for good? How, Hank?\"\n\n\n That question was perhaps the first firm basis for hope he'd had since\n returning. And there was something else; what Carlisle had told him,\n even as Carlisle himself had reacted as all men did.", "They had been right to worry. He had suffered much after that blow-up.\n But now they should be rejoicing, because he had survived and made the\n long journey. Ralphie suddenly said, \"I got to go, Dad. I promised Walt\n and the others I'd pitch. It's Inter-Town Little League, you know. It's\n Harmon, you know. I got to keep my word.\" Without waiting for an answer,\n he waved his hand—it shook; a ten-year-old boy's hand that shook—and\n ran from the room and from the house.\n\n\n He and Edith sat beside each other, and he wanted badly to take her in\n his arms, and yet he didn't want to oppress her. He stood up. \"I'm very\n tired. I'd like to lie down a while.\" Which wasn't true, because he'd\n been lying down all the months of the way back.", "He sat up. \"Phil,\" he muttered. \"Phil and Rhona.\" They'd had wonderful\n times together, from grammar school on. Phil and Rhona, their oldest and\n closest friends. Perhaps this would begin his real homecoming.\n\n\n Do the town? They'd paint it and then tear it down!\nIt didn't turn out that way. He was disappointed; but then again, he'd\n also expected it. This entire first day at home had conditioned him to\n expect nothing good. They went to the bowling alleys, and Phil sounded\n very much the way he always had—soft spoken and full of laughter and\n full of jokes. He patted Edith on the head the way he always had, and\n clapped Hank on the shoulder (but not the way he always had—so much\n more gently, almost remotely), and insisted they all drink more than was\n good for them as he always had. And for once, Hank was ready to go along\n on the drinking. For once, he matched Phil shot for shot, beer for beer.", "So now five of them sat at the table. The meat was served—thin, rare\n slices of beef, the pink blood-juice oozing warmly from the center. He\n cut into it and raised a forkful to his mouth, then glanced at Ralphie\n and said, \"Looks fresh enough to have been killed in the back yard.\"\n Ralphie said, \"Yeah, Dad.\" Aunt Lucille put down her knife and fork and\n murmured something to her husband. Joe cleared his throat and said\n Lucille was rapidly becoming a vegetarian and he guessed she was going\n into the living room for a while. \"She'll be back for dessert, of\n course,\" he said, his laugh sounding forced.\n\n\n Hank looked at Edith; Edith was busy with her plate. Hank looked at\n Ralphie; Ralphie was busy with his plate. Hank looked at Joe; Joe was\n chewing, gazing out over their heads to the kitchen. Hank looked at\n Lucille; she was disappearing into the living room.", "They didn't bowl very long. At ten o'clock they crossed the road to\n Manfred's Tavern, where Phil and the girls ordered sandwiches and coffee\n and Hank went right on drinking. Edith said something to him, but he\n merely smiled and waved his hand and gulped another ounce of nirvana.\n\n\n There was dancing to a juke box in Manfred's Tavern. He'd been there\n many times before, and he was sure several of the couples recognized\n him. But except for a few abortive glances in his direction, it was as\n if he were a stranger in a city halfway around the world.", "Phil said, \"Because people are—\" And then he caught himself and waved\n his hand and muttered, \"I forgot the punch line.\"\n\n\n \"Because people are dying to get in,\" Hank said, and looked through the\n window, past the iron fence, into the large cemetery at the fleeting\n tombstones.\n\n\n The car was filled with horrified silence when there should have been\n nothing but laughter, or irritation at a too-old joke. \"Maybe you should\n let me out right here,\" Hank said. \"I'm home—or that's what everyone\n seems to think. Maybe I should lie down in an open grave. Maybe that\n would satisfy people. Maybe that's the only way to act, like Dracula or\n another monster from the movies.\"\n\n\n Edith said, \"Oh, Hank, don't, don't!\"", "He walked up what had once been a concrete path and was now an ornate\n flagstone path. He climbed the new porch and raised the ornamental\n knocker on the new door and heard the soft music sound within. He was\n surprised that he'd had to do this. He'd thought Edith would be watching\n at a window.\n\n\n And perhaps she\nhad\nbeen watching ... but she hadn't opened the door.\n\n\n The door opened; he looked at her. It hadn't been too long and she\n hadn't changed at all. She was still the small, slender girl he'd loved\n in high school, the small, slender woman he'd married twelve years ago.\n Ralphie was with her. They held onto each other as if seeking mutual\n support, the thirty-three-year old woman and ten-year-old boy. They\n looked at him, and then both moved forward, still together. He said,\n \"It's good to be home!\"", "\"Well, then, before summer vacation?\"\n\n\n \"Pretty good.\"\n\n\n Edith said, \"He made top forum the six-month period before vacation, and\n he made top forum the six-month period you went away, Hank.\"\n\n\n He nodded, remembering that, remembering everything, remembering the\n warmth of her farewell, the warmth of Ralphie's farewell, their tears as\n he left for the experimental flight station in the Aleutians. They had\n feared for him, having read of the many launchings gone wrong even in\n continent-to-continent experimental flight.", "She also tried to smile. \"The one near the window. You always liked the\n fresh air, the sunshine in the morning. You always said it helped you\n to get up on time when you were stationed at the base outside of town.\n You always said it reminded you—being able to see the sky—that you\n were going to go up in it, and that you were going to come down from it\n to this bed again.\"\n\n\n \"Not this bed,\" he murmured, and was a little sorry afterward.\n\n\n \"No, not this bed,\" she said quickly. \"Your lodge donated the bedroom\n set and I really didn't know—\" She waved her hand, her face white.\n\n\n He was sure then that she\nhad\nknown, and that the beds and the barrier\n between them were her own choice, if only an unconscious choice. He went\n to the bed near the window, stripped off his Air Force blue jacket,\n began to take off his shirt, but then remembered that some arm scars\n still showed. He waited for her to leave the room.", "He and Edith danced. He didn't hold her close as he had Rhona. He waited\n for her to come close on her own, and she did, and yet she didn't.\n Because while she put herself against him, there was something in her\n face—no, in her eyes; it always showed in the eyes—that made him know\n she was trying to be the old Edith and not succeeding. This time when\n the music ended, he was ready to go home.\n\n\n They rode back to town along Route Nine, he and Edith in the rear of\n Phil's car, Rhona driving because Phil had drunk just a little too much,\n Phil singing and telling an occasional bad joke, and somehow not his old\n self. No one was his old self. No one would ever be his old self with\n the First One.", "At midnight, he was still drinking. The others wanted to leave, but he\n said, \"I haven't danced with my girl Rhona.\" His tongue was thick, his\n mind was blurred, and yet he could read the strange expression on her\n face—pretty Rhona, who'd always flirted with him, who'd made a ritual\n of flirting with him. Pretty Rhona, who now looked as if she were going\n to be sick.\n\n\n \"So let's rock,\" he said and stood up.\n\n\n They were on the dance floor. He held her close, and hummed and chatted.\n And through the alcoholic haze saw she was a stiff-smiled, stiff-bodied,\n mechanical dancing doll.\n\n\n The number finished; they walked back to the booth. Phil said,\n \"Beddy-bye time.\"\n\n\n Hank said, \"First one dance with my loving wife.\"", "He brought his fist down on the table. The settings jumped; a glass\n overturned, spilling water. He brought it down again and again. They\n were all standing now. He sat there and pounded the table with his big\n right fist—Henry Devers, who would never have thought of making such a\n scene before, but who was now so sick and tired of being treated as the\n First One, of being stood back from, looked at in awe of, felt in fear\n of, that he could have smashed more than a table.\n\n\n Edith said, \"Hank!\"", "Edith nodded and, still holding to Ralphie with one hand, put the other\n arm around him. He kissed her—her neck, her cheek—and all the old\n jokes came to mind, the jokes of travel-weary, battle-weary men, the\n and-\nthen\n-I'll-put-my-pack-aside jokes that spoke of terrible hunger.\n She was trembling, and even as her lips came up to touch his he felt the\n difference, and because of this difference he turned with urgency to\n Ralphie and picked him up and hugged him and said, because he could\n think of nothing else to say, \"What a big fella, what a big fella.\"\n\n\n Ralphie stood in his arms as if his feet were still planted on the\n floor, and he didn't look at his father but somewhere beyond him. \"I\n didn't grow much while you were gone, Dad, Mom says I don't eat enough.\"", "Edith said, \"Yes, and I'm so grateful that you're here, Hank. Please\n believe that. Please be patient with me and Ralphie and—\" She paused.\n \"There's one question.\"\n\n\n He knew what the question was. It had been the first asked him by\n everyone from the president of the United States on down.\n\n\n \"I saw nothing,\" he said. \"It was as if I slept those six and a half\n months—slept without dreaming.\"\n\n\n She came to him and touched his face with her lips, and he was\n satisfied.\n\n\n Later, half asleep, he heard a dog howling, and remembered stories of\n how they announced death and the presence of monsters. He shivered and\n pulled the covers closer to him and luxuriated in being safe in his own\n home.\nTHE END", "She said, \"Of course. How stupid of me, expecting you to sit around and\n make small talk and pick up just where you left off.\"\n\n\n He nodded. But that was exactly what he wanted to do—make small talk\n and pick up just where he'd left off. But they didn't expect it of him;\n they wouldn't let him; they felt he had changed too much.\nShe led him upstairs and along the foyer past Ralphie's room and past\n the small guest room to their bedroom. This, too, had changed. It was\n newly painted and it had new furniture. He saw twin beds separated by an\n ornate little table with an ornate little lamp, and this looked more\n ominous a barrier to him than the twelve-foot concrete-and-barbed-wire\n fence around the experimental station.\n\n\n \"Which one is mine,\" he asked, and tried to smile.", "Aunt Lucille made a few quavering statements about the Ladies' Tuesday\n Garden Club, and Hank looked across the table to where she sat between\n Joe and Mother—his wife and son bracketed him, and yet he felt\n alone—and said, \"I've missed fooling around with the lawn and the rose\n bushes. Here it is August and I haven't had my hand to a mower or\n trowel.\"\n\n\n Aunt Lucille smiled, if you could call it that—a pitiful twitching of\n the lips—and nodded. She threw her eyes in his direction, and past him,\n and then down to her plate. Mother, who was still sniffling, said, \"I\n have a dismal headache. I'm going to lie down in the guest room a\n while.\" She touched his shoulder in passing—his affectionate, effusive\n mother who would kiss stray dogs and strange children, who had often\n irritated him with an excess of physical and verbal caresses—she barely\n touched his shoulder and fled." ], [ "Hank stood up. \"The question is not whether I want to. You both know I\n want to. The question is whether\nyou\nwant to.\"\n\n\n They answered together that of course they wanted to. But their\n eyes—his wife's and son's eyes—could not meet his, and so he said he\n was going to his room because he was, after all, very tired and would in\n all probability continue to be very tired for a long, long time and that\n they shouldn't count on him for normal social life.\n\n\n He fell asleep quickly, lying there in his clothes.\n\n\n But he didn't sleep long. Edith shook him and he opened his eyes to a\n lighted room. \"Phil and Rhona are here.\" He blinked at her. She smiled,\n and it seemed her old smile. \"They're so anxious to see you, Hank. I\n could barely keep Phil from coming up and waking you himself. They want\n to go out and do the town. Please, Hank, say you will.\"", "He walked up what had once been a concrete path and was now an ornate\n flagstone path. He climbed the new porch and raised the ornamental\n knocker on the new door and heard the soft music sound within. He was\n surprised that he'd had to do this. He'd thought Edith would be watching\n at a window.\n\n\n And perhaps she\nhad\nbeen watching ... but she hadn't opened the door.\n\n\n The door opened; he looked at her. It hadn't been too long and she\n hadn't changed at all. She was still the small, slender girl he'd loved\n in high school, the small, slender woman he'd married twelve years ago.\n Ralphie was with her. They held onto each other as if seeking mutual\n support, the thirty-three-year old woman and ten-year-old boy. They\n looked at him, and then both moved forward, still together. He said,\n \"It's good to be home!\"", "They had been right to worry. He had suffered much after that blow-up.\n But now they should be rejoicing, because he had survived and made the\n long journey. Ralphie suddenly said, \"I got to go, Dad. I promised Walt\n and the others I'd pitch. It's Inter-Town Little League, you know. It's\n Harmon, you know. I got to keep my word.\" Without waiting for an answer,\n he waved his hand—it shook; a ten-year-old boy's hand that shook—and\n ran from the room and from the house.\n\n\n He and Edith sat beside each other, and he wanted badly to take her in\n his arms, and yet he didn't want to oppress her. He stood up. \"I'm very\n tired. I'd like to lie down a while.\" Which wasn't true, because he'd\n been lying down all the months of the way back.", "The car raced along the road, crossed a macadam highway, went four\n blocks and pulled to a stop. He didn't bother saying good night. He\n didn't wait for Edith. He just got out and walked up the flagstone path\n and entered the house.\n\"Hank,\" Edith whispered from the guest room doorway, \"I'm so sorry—\"\n\n\n \"There's nothing to be sorry about. It's just a matter of time. It'll\n all work out in time.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" she said quickly, \"that's it. I need a little time. We all need a\n little time. Because it's so strange, Hank. Because it's so frightening.\n I should have told you that the moment you walked in. I think I've hurt\n you terribly, we've all hurt you terribly, by trying to hide that we're\n frightened.\"", "He sat up. \"Phil,\" he muttered. \"Phil and Rhona.\" They'd had wonderful\n times together, from grammar school on. Phil and Rhona, their oldest and\n closest friends. Perhaps this would begin his real homecoming.\n\n\n Do the town? They'd paint it and then tear it down!\nIt didn't turn out that way. He was disappointed; but then again, he'd\n also expected it. This entire first day at home had conditioned him to\n expect nothing good. They went to the bowling alleys, and Phil sounded\n very much the way he always had—soft spoken and full of laughter and\n full of jokes. He patted Edith on the head the way he always had, and\n clapped Hank on the shoulder (but not the way he always had—so much\n more gently, almost remotely), and insisted they all drink more than was\n good for them as he always had. And for once, Hank was ready to go along\n on the drinking. For once, he matched Phil shot for shot, beer for beer.", "Edith said, \"Yes, and I'm so grateful that you're here, Hank. Please\n believe that. Please be patient with me and Ralphie and—\" She paused.\n \"There's one question.\"\n\n\n He knew what the question was. It had been the first asked him by\n everyone from the president of the United States on down.\n\n\n \"I saw nothing,\" he said. \"It was as if I slept those six and a half\n months—slept without dreaming.\"\n\n\n She came to him and touched his face with her lips, and he was\n satisfied.\n\n\n Later, half asleep, he heard a dog howling, and remembered stories of\n how they announced death and the presence of monsters. He shivered and\n pulled the covers closer to him and luxuriated in being safe in his own\n home.\nTHE END", "Edith nodded and, still holding to Ralphie with one hand, put the other\n arm around him. He kissed her—her neck, her cheek—and all the old\n jokes came to mind, the jokes of travel-weary, battle-weary men, the\n and-\nthen\n-I'll-put-my-pack-aside jokes that spoke of terrible hunger.\n She was trembling, and even as her lips came up to touch his he felt the\n difference, and because of this difference he turned with urgency to\n Ralphie and picked him up and hugged him and said, because he could\n think of nothing else to say, \"What a big fella, what a big fella.\"\n\n\n Ralphie stood in his arms as if his feet were still planted on the\n floor, and he didn't look at his father but somewhere beyond him. \"I\n didn't grow much while you were gone, Dad, Mom says I don't eat enough.\"", "\"Well, then, before summer vacation?\"\n\n\n \"Pretty good.\"\n\n\n Edith said, \"He made top forum the six-month period before vacation, and\n he made top forum the six-month period you went away, Hank.\"\n\n\n He nodded, remembering that, remembering everything, remembering the\n warmth of her farewell, the warmth of Ralphie's farewell, their tears as\n he left for the experimental flight station in the Aleutians. They had\n feared for him, having read of the many launchings gone wrong even in\n continent-to-continent experimental flight.", "He finished his beef and waited. Soon Edith came in with the special\n dessert she'd been preparing half the day—a magnificent English trifle.\n She served him, and spooned out a portion for herself and Ralphie. She\n hesitated near his chair, and when he made no comment she called the\n boy. Then the three of them were sitting, facing the empty side of the\n table. They ate the trifle. Ralphie finished first and got up and said,\n \"Hey, I promised—\"\n\n\n \"You promised the boys you'd play baseball or football or handball or\n something; anything to get away from your father.\"\n\n\n Ralphie's head dropped and he muttered, \"Aw, no, Dad.\"\n\n\n Edith said, \"He'll stay home, Hank. We'll spend an evening\n together—talking, watching TV, playing Monopoly.\"\n\n\n Ralphie said, \"Gee, sure, Dad, if you want to.\"", "So he put him down and told himself that it would all change, that\n everything would loosen up just as his commanding officer, General\n Carlisle, had said it would early this morning before he left\n Washington.\n\n\n \"Give it some time,\" Carlisle had said. \"You need the time; they need\n the time. And for the love of heaven, don't be sensitive.\"\nEdith was leading him into the living room, her hand lying still in his,\n a cool, dead bird lying still in his. He sat down on the couch, she sat\n down beside him—but she had hesitated. He\nwasn't\nbeing sensitive; she\n had hesitated. His wife had hesitated before sitting down beside him.", "\"I'm going to stay in the guest room,\" he said, \"for as long as\n necessary. For good if need be.\"\n\n\n \"How could it be for good? How, Hank?\"\n\n\n That question was perhaps the first firm basis for hope he'd had since\n returning. And there was something else; what Carlisle had told him,\n even as Carlisle himself had reacted as all men did.", "He and Edith danced. He didn't hold her close as he had Rhona. He waited\n for her to come close on her own, and she did, and yet she didn't.\n Because while she put herself against him, there was something in her\n face—no, in her eyes; it always showed in the eyes—that made him know\n she was trying to be the old Edith and not succeeding. This time when\n the music ended, he was ready to go home.\n\n\n They rode back to town along Route Nine, he and Edith in the rear of\n Phil's car, Rhona driving because Phil had drunk just a little too much,\n Phil singing and telling an occasional bad joke, and somehow not his old\n self. No one was his old self. No one would ever be his old self with\n the First One.", "She said, \"Of course. How stupid of me, expecting you to sit around and\n make small talk and pick up just where you left off.\"\n\n\n He nodded. But that was exactly what he wanted to do—make small talk\n and pick up just where he'd left off. But they didn't expect it of him;\n they wouldn't let him; they felt he had changed too much.\nShe led him upstairs and along the foyer past Ralphie's room and past\n the small guest room to their bedroom. This, too, had changed. It was\n newly painted and it had new furniture. He saw twin beds separated by an\n ornate little table with an ornate little lamp, and this looked more\n ominous a barrier to him than the twelve-foot concrete-and-barbed-wire\n fence around the experimental station.\n\n\n \"Which one is mine,\" he asked, and tried to smile.", "They didn't bowl very long. At ten o'clock they crossed the road to\n Manfred's Tavern, where Phil and the girls ordered sandwiches and coffee\n and Hank went right on drinking. Edith said something to him, but he\n merely smiled and waved his hand and gulped another ounce of nirvana.\n\n\n There was dancing to a juke box in Manfred's Tavern. He'd been there\n many times before, and he was sure several of the couples recognized\n him. But except for a few abortive glances in his direction, it was as\n if he were a stranger in a city halfway around the world.", "Phil said, \"Because people are—\" And then he caught himself and waved\n his hand and muttered, \"I forgot the punch line.\"\n\n\n \"Because people are dying to get in,\" Hank said, and looked through the\n window, past the iron fence, into the large cemetery at the fleeting\n tombstones.\n\n\n The car was filled with horrified silence when there should have been\n nothing but laughter, or irritation at a too-old joke. \"Maybe you should\n let me out right here,\" Hank said. \"I'm home—or that's what everyone\n seems to think. Maybe I should lie down in an open grave. Maybe that\n would satisfy people. Maybe that's the only way to act, like Dracula or\n another monster from the movies.\"\n\n\n Edith said, \"Oh, Hank, don't, don't!\"", "So there he was, Henry Devers, at home with the family. So there he was,\n the hero returned, waiting to be treated as a human being.\n\n\n The grapefruit shells were cleaned away and the soup served. Uncle Joe\n began to talk. \"The greatest little development of circular uniform\n houses you ever did see,\" he boomed in his powerful salesman's voice.\n \"Still going like sixty. We'll sell out before—\" At that point he\n looked at Hank, and Hank nodded encouragement, desperately interested in\n this normalcy, and Joe's voice died away. He looked down at his plate,\n mumbled, \"Soup's getting cold,\" and began to eat. His hand shook a\n little; his ruddy face was not quite as ruddy as Hank remembered it.", "So now five of them sat at the table. The meat was served—thin, rare\n slices of beef, the pink blood-juice oozing warmly from the center. He\n cut into it and raised a forkful to his mouth, then glanced at Ralphie\n and said, \"Looks fresh enough to have been killed in the back yard.\"\n Ralphie said, \"Yeah, Dad.\" Aunt Lucille put down her knife and fork and\n murmured something to her husband. Joe cleared his throat and said\n Lucille was rapidly becoming a vegetarian and he guessed she was going\n into the living room for a while. \"She'll be back for dessert, of\n course,\" he said, his laugh sounding forced.\n\n\n Hank looked at Edith; Edith was busy with her plate. Hank looked at\n Ralphie; Ralphie was busy with his plate. Hank looked at Joe; Joe was\n chewing, gazing out over their heads to the kitchen. Hank looked at\n Lucille; she was disappearing into the living room.", "Aunt Lucille made a few quavering statements about the Ladies' Tuesday\n Garden Club, and Hank looked across the table to where she sat between\n Joe and Mother—his wife and son bracketed him, and yet he felt\n alone—and said, \"I've missed fooling around with the lawn and the rose\n bushes. Here it is August and I haven't had my hand to a mower or\n trowel.\"\n\n\n Aunt Lucille smiled, if you could call it that—a pitiful twitching of\n the lips—and nodded. She threw her eyes in his direction, and past him,\n and then down to her plate. Mother, who was still sniffling, said, \"I\n have a dismal headache. I'm going to lie down in the guest room a\n while.\" She touched his shoulder in passing—his affectionate, effusive\n mother who would kiss stray dogs and strange children, who had often\n irritated him with an excess of physical and verbal caresses—she barely\n touched his shoulder and fled.", "But sometime later, as he was dozing off, a sense of reassurance began\n filtering into his mind. After all, he was still Henry Devers, the same\n man who had left home eleven months ago, with a love for family and\n friends which was, if anything, stronger than before. Once he could\n communicate this, the strangeness would disappear and the First One\n would again become good old Hank. It was little enough to ask for—a\n return to old values, old relationships, the normalcies of the backwash\n instead of the freneticisms of the lime-light. It would certainly be\n granted to him.\n\n\n He slept.\nDinner was at seven\n p.m.\n His mother came; his Uncle Joe and Aunt Lucille\n came. Together with Edith, Ralphie and himself, they made six, and ate\n in the dining room at the big table.", "He brought his fist down on the table. The settings jumped; a glass\n overturned, spilling water. He brought it down again and again. They\n were all standing now. He sat there and pounded the table with his big\n right fist—Henry Devers, who would never have thought of making such a\n scene before, but who was now so sick and tired of being treated as the\n First One, of being stood back from, looked at in awe of, felt in fear\n of, that he could have smashed more than a table.\n\n\n Edith said, \"Hank!\"" ], [ "He said, voice hoarse, \"Shut up. Go away. Let me eat alone. I'm sick of\n the lot of you.\"\nMother and Joe returned a few minutes later where he sat forcing food\n down his throat. Mother said, \"Henry dear—\" He didn't answer. She began\n to cry, and he was glad she left the house then. He had never said\n anything really bad to his mother. He was afraid this would have been\n the time. Joe merely cleared his throat and mumbled something about\n getting together again soon and \"drop out and see the new development\"\n and he, too, was gone. Lucille never did manage to speak to him.", "So now five of them sat at the table. The meat was served—thin, rare\n slices of beef, the pink blood-juice oozing warmly from the center. He\n cut into it and raised a forkful to his mouth, then glanced at Ralphie\n and said, \"Looks fresh enough to have been killed in the back yard.\"\n Ralphie said, \"Yeah, Dad.\" Aunt Lucille put down her knife and fork and\n murmured something to her husband. Joe cleared his throat and said\n Lucille was rapidly becoming a vegetarian and he guessed she was going\n into the living room for a while. \"She'll be back for dessert, of\n course,\" he said, his laugh sounding forced.\n\n\n Hank looked at Edith; Edith was busy with her plate. Hank looked at\n Ralphie; Ralphie was busy with his plate. Hank looked at Joe; Joe was\n chewing, gazing out over their heads to the kitchen. Hank looked at\n Lucille; she was disappearing into the living room.", "He finished his beef and waited. Soon Edith came in with the special\n dessert she'd been preparing half the day—a magnificent English trifle.\n She served him, and spooned out a portion for herself and Ralphie. She\n hesitated near his chair, and when he made no comment she called the\n boy. Then the three of them were sitting, facing the empty side of the\n table. They ate the trifle. Ralphie finished first and got up and said,\n \"Hey, I promised—\"\n\n\n \"You promised the boys you'd play baseball or football or handball or\n something; anything to get away from your father.\"\n\n\n Ralphie's head dropped and he muttered, \"Aw, no, Dad.\"\n\n\n Edith said, \"He'll stay home, Hank. We'll spend an evening\n together—talking, watching TV, playing Monopoly.\"\n\n\n Ralphie said, \"Gee, sure, Dad, if you want to.\"", "Hank stood up. \"The question is not whether I want to. You both know I\n want to. The question is whether\nyou\nwant to.\"\n\n\n They answered together that of course they wanted to. But their\n eyes—his wife's and son's eyes—could not meet his, and so he said he\n was going to his room because he was, after all, very tired and would in\n all probability continue to be very tired for a long, long time and that\n they shouldn't count on him for normal social life.\n\n\n He fell asleep quickly, lying there in his clothes.\n\n\n But he didn't sleep long. Edith shook him and he opened his eyes to a\n lighted room. \"Phil and Rhona are here.\" He blinked at her. She smiled,\n and it seemed her old smile. \"They're so anxious to see you, Hank. I\n could barely keep Phil from coming up and waking you himself. They want\n to go out and do the town. Please, Hank, say you will.\"", "Aunt Lucille made a few quavering statements about the Ladies' Tuesday\n Garden Club, and Hank looked across the table to where she sat between\n Joe and Mother—his wife and son bracketed him, and yet he felt\n alone—and said, \"I've missed fooling around with the lawn and the rose\n bushes. Here it is August and I haven't had my hand to a mower or\n trowel.\"\n\n\n Aunt Lucille smiled, if you could call it that—a pitiful twitching of\n the lips—and nodded. She threw her eyes in his direction, and past him,\n and then down to her plate. Mother, who was still sniffling, said, \"I\n have a dismal headache. I'm going to lie down in the guest room a\n while.\" She touched his shoulder in passing—his affectionate, effusive\n mother who would kiss stray dogs and strange children, who had often\n irritated him with an excess of physical and verbal caresses—she barely\n touched his shoulder and fled.", "\"I'm going to stay in the guest room,\" he said, \"for as long as\n necessary. For good if need be.\"\n\n\n \"How could it be for good? How, Hank?\"\n\n\n That question was perhaps the first firm basis for hope he'd had since\n returning. And there was something else; what Carlisle had told him,\n even as Carlisle himself had reacted as all men did.", "Phil said, \"Because people are—\" And then he caught himself and waved\n his hand and muttered, \"I forgot the punch line.\"\n\n\n \"Because people are dying to get in,\" Hank said, and looked through the\n window, past the iron fence, into the large cemetery at the fleeting\n tombstones.\n\n\n The car was filled with horrified silence when there should have been\n nothing but laughter, or irritation at a too-old joke. \"Maybe you should\n let me out right here,\" Hank said. \"I'm home—or that's what everyone\n seems to think. Maybe I should lie down in an open grave. Maybe that\n would satisfy people. Maybe that's the only way to act, like Dracula or\n another monster from the movies.\"\n\n\n Edith said, \"Oh, Hank, don't, don't!\"", "So there he was, Henry Devers, at home with the family. So there he was,\n the hero returned, waiting to be treated as a human being.\n\n\n The grapefruit shells were cleaned away and the soup served. Uncle Joe\n began to talk. \"The greatest little development of circular uniform\n houses you ever did see,\" he boomed in his powerful salesman's voice.\n \"Still going like sixty. We'll sell out before—\" At that point he\n looked at Hank, and Hank nodded encouragement, desperately interested in\n this normalcy, and Joe's voice died away. He looked down at his plate,\n mumbled, \"Soup's getting cold,\" and began to eat. His hand shook a\n little; his ruddy face was not quite as ruddy as Hank remembered it.", "He brought his fist down on the table. The settings jumped; a glass\n overturned, spilling water. He brought it down again and again. They\n were all standing now. He sat there and pounded the table with his big\n right fist—Henry Devers, who would never have thought of making such a\n scene before, but who was now so sick and tired of being treated as the\n First One, of being stood back from, looked at in awe of, felt in fear\n of, that he could have smashed more than a table.\n\n\n Edith said, \"Hank!\"", "They didn't bowl very long. At ten o'clock they crossed the road to\n Manfred's Tavern, where Phil and the girls ordered sandwiches and coffee\n and Hank went right on drinking. Edith said something to him, but he\n merely smiled and waved his hand and gulped another ounce of nirvana.\n\n\n There was dancing to a juke box in Manfred's Tavern. He'd been there\n many times before, and he was sure several of the couples recognized\n him. But except for a few abortive glances in his direction, it was as\n if he were a stranger in a city halfway around the world.", "He sat up. \"Phil,\" he muttered. \"Phil and Rhona.\" They'd had wonderful\n times together, from grammar school on. Phil and Rhona, their oldest and\n closest friends. Perhaps this would begin his real homecoming.\n\n\n Do the town? They'd paint it and then tear it down!\nIt didn't turn out that way. He was disappointed; but then again, he'd\n also expected it. This entire first day at home had conditioned him to\n expect nothing good. They went to the bowling alleys, and Phil sounded\n very much the way he always had—soft spoken and full of laughter and\n full of jokes. He patted Edith on the head the way he always had, and\n clapped Hank on the shoulder (but not the way he always had—so much\n more gently, almost remotely), and insisted they all drink more than was\n good for them as he always had. And for once, Hank was ready to go along\n on the drinking. For once, he matched Phil shot for shot, beer for beer.", "They had been right to worry. He had suffered much after that blow-up.\n But now they should be rejoicing, because he had survived and made the\n long journey. Ralphie suddenly said, \"I got to go, Dad. I promised Walt\n and the others I'd pitch. It's Inter-Town Little League, you know. It's\n Harmon, you know. I got to keep my word.\" Without waiting for an answer,\n he waved his hand—it shook; a ten-year-old boy's hand that shook—and\n ran from the room and from the house.\n\n\n He and Edith sat beside each other, and he wanted badly to take her in\n his arms, and yet he didn't want to oppress her. He stood up. \"I'm very\n tired. I'd like to lie down a while.\" Which wasn't true, because he'd\n been lying down all the months of the way back.", "The car raced along the road, crossed a macadam highway, went four\n blocks and pulled to a stop. He didn't bother saying good night. He\n didn't wait for Edith. He just got out and walked up the flagstone path\n and entered the house.\n\"Hank,\" Edith whispered from the guest room doorway, \"I'm so sorry—\"\n\n\n \"There's nothing to be sorry about. It's just a matter of time. It'll\n all work out in time.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" she said quickly, \"that's it. I need a little time. We all need a\n little time. Because it's so strange, Hank. Because it's so frightening.\n I should have told you that the moment you walked in. I think I've hurt\n you terribly, we've all hurt you terribly, by trying to hide that we're\n frightened.\"", "At midnight, he was still drinking. The others wanted to leave, but he\n said, \"I haven't danced with my girl Rhona.\" His tongue was thick, his\n mind was blurred, and yet he could read the strange expression on her\n face—pretty Rhona, who'd always flirted with him, who'd made a ritual\n of flirting with him. Pretty Rhona, who now looked as if she were going\n to be sick.\n\n\n \"So let's rock,\" he said and stood up.\n\n\n They were on the dance floor. He held her close, and hummed and chatted.\n And through the alcoholic haze saw she was a stiff-smiled, stiff-bodied,\n mechanical dancing doll.\n\n\n The number finished; they walked back to the booth. Phil said,\n \"Beddy-bye time.\"\n\n\n Hank said, \"First one dance with my loving wife.\"", "Before he'd become the First One, it would have been a noisy affair. His\n family had never been noted for a lack of ebullience, a lack of\n talkativeness, and Ralphie had always chosen mealtimes—especially with\n company present—to describe everything and anything that had happened\n to him during the day. And Edith herself had always chatted, especially\n with his mother, though they didn't agree about much. Still, it had been\n good-natured; the general tone of their lives had been good-natured.\n\n\n This wasn't good-natured. Exactly what it was he wasn't sure. \"Stiff\"\n was perhaps the word.", "But sometime later, as he was dozing off, a sense of reassurance began\n filtering into his mind. After all, he was still Henry Devers, the same\n man who had left home eleven months ago, with a love for family and\n friends which was, if anything, stronger than before. Once he could\n communicate this, the strangeness would disappear and the First One\n would again become good old Hank. It was little enough to ask for—a\n return to old values, old relationships, the normalcies of the backwash\n instead of the freneticisms of the lime-light. It would certainly be\n granted to him.\n\n\n He slept.\nDinner was at seven\n p.m.\n His mother came; his Uncle Joe and Aunt Lucille\n came. Together with Edith, Ralphie and himself, they made six, and ate\n in the dining room at the big table.", "They began with grapefruit, Edith and Mother serving quickly,\n efficiently from the kitchen, then sitting down at the table. He looked\n at Mother as he raised his first spoonful of chilled fruit, and said,\n \"Younger than ever.\" It was nothing new; he'd said it many many times\n before, but his mother had always reacted with a bright smile and a quip\n something like, \"Young for the Golden Age Center, you mean.\" This time\n she burst into tears. It shocked him. But what shocked him even more was\n the fact that no one looked up, commented, made any attempt to comfort\n her; no one indicated in any way that a woman was sobbing at the table.\n\n\n He was sitting directly across from Mother, and reached out and touched\n her left hand which lay limply beside the silverware. She didn't move\n it—she hadn't touched him once beyond that first, quick, strangely-cool\n embrace at the door—then a few seconds later she withdrew it and let it\n drop out of sight.", "Edith nodded and, still holding to Ralphie with one hand, put the other\n arm around him. He kissed her—her neck, her cheek—and all the old\n jokes came to mind, the jokes of travel-weary, battle-weary men, the\n and-\nthen\n-I'll-put-my-pack-aside jokes that spoke of terrible hunger.\n She was trembling, and even as her lips came up to touch his he felt the\n difference, and because of this difference he turned with urgency to\n Ralphie and picked him up and hugged him and said, because he could\n think of nothing else to say, \"What a big fella, what a big fella.\"\n\n\n Ralphie stood in his arms as if his feet were still planted on the\n floor, and he didn't look at his father but somewhere beyond him. \"I\n didn't grow much while you were gone, Dad, Mom says I don't eat enough.\"", "She said, \"Of course. How stupid of me, expecting you to sit around and\n make small talk and pick up just where you left off.\"\n\n\n He nodded. But that was exactly what he wanted to do—make small talk\n and pick up just where he'd left off. But they didn't expect it of him;\n they wouldn't let him; they felt he had changed too much.\nShe led him upstairs and along the foyer past Ralphie's room and past\n the small guest room to their bedroom. This, too, had changed. It was\n newly painted and it had new furniture. He saw twin beds separated by an\n ornate little table with an ornate little lamp, and this looked more\n ominous a barrier to him than the twelve-foot concrete-and-barbed-wire\n fence around the experimental station.\n\n\n \"Which one is mine,\" he asked, and tried to smile.", "Edith said, \"Yes, and I'm so grateful that you're here, Hank. Please\n believe that. Please be patient with me and Ralphie and—\" She paused.\n \"There's one question.\"\n\n\n He knew what the question was. It had been the first asked him by\n everyone from the president of the United States on down.\n\n\n \"I saw nothing,\" he said. \"It was as if I slept those six and a half\n months—slept without dreaming.\"\n\n\n She came to him and touched his face with her lips, and he was\n satisfied.\n\n\n Later, half asleep, he heard a dog howling, and remembered stories of\n how they announced death and the presence of monsters. He shivered and\n pulled the covers closer to him and luxuriated in being safe in his own\n home.\nTHE END" ], [ "Hank stood up. \"The question is not whether I want to. You both know I\n want to. The question is whether\nyou\nwant to.\"\n\n\n They answered together that of course they wanted to. But their\n eyes—his wife's and son's eyes—could not meet his, and so he said he\n was going to his room because he was, after all, very tired and would in\n all probability continue to be very tired for a long, long time and that\n they shouldn't count on him for normal social life.\n\n\n He fell asleep quickly, lying there in his clothes.\n\n\n But he didn't sleep long. Edith shook him and he opened his eyes to a\n lighted room. \"Phil and Rhona are here.\" He blinked at her. She smiled,\n and it seemed her old smile. \"They're so anxious to see you, Hank. I\n could barely keep Phil from coming up and waking you himself. They want\n to go out and do the town. Please, Hank, say you will.\"", "Phil said, \"Because people are—\" And then he caught himself and waved\n his hand and muttered, \"I forgot the punch line.\"\n\n\n \"Because people are dying to get in,\" Hank said, and looked through the\n window, past the iron fence, into the large cemetery at the fleeting\n tombstones.\n\n\n The car was filled with horrified silence when there should have been\n nothing but laughter, or irritation at a too-old joke. \"Maybe you should\n let me out right here,\" Hank said. \"I'm home—or that's what everyone\n seems to think. Maybe I should lie down in an open grave. Maybe that\n would satisfy people. Maybe that's the only way to act, like Dracula or\n another monster from the movies.\"\n\n\n Edith said, \"Oh, Hank, don't, don't!\"", "They didn't bowl very long. At ten o'clock they crossed the road to\n Manfred's Tavern, where Phil and the girls ordered sandwiches and coffee\n and Hank went right on drinking. Edith said something to him, but he\n merely smiled and waved his hand and gulped another ounce of nirvana.\n\n\n There was dancing to a juke box in Manfred's Tavern. He'd been there\n many times before, and he was sure several of the couples recognized\n him. But except for a few abortive glances in his direction, it was as\n if he were a stranger in a city halfway around the world.", "The car raced along the road, crossed a macadam highway, went four\n blocks and pulled to a stop. He didn't bother saying good night. He\n didn't wait for Edith. He just got out and walked up the flagstone path\n and entered the house.\n\"Hank,\" Edith whispered from the guest room doorway, \"I'm so sorry—\"\n\n\n \"There's nothing to be sorry about. It's just a matter of time. It'll\n all work out in time.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" she said quickly, \"that's it. I need a little time. We all need a\n little time. Because it's so strange, Hank. Because it's so frightening.\n I should have told you that the moment you walked in. I think I've hurt\n you terribly, we've all hurt you terribly, by trying to hide that we're\n frightened.\"", "He sat up. \"Phil,\" he muttered. \"Phil and Rhona.\" They'd had wonderful\n times together, from grammar school on. Phil and Rhona, their oldest and\n closest friends. Perhaps this would begin his real homecoming.\n\n\n Do the town? They'd paint it and then tear it down!\nIt didn't turn out that way. He was disappointed; but then again, he'd\n also expected it. This entire first day at home had conditioned him to\n expect nothing good. They went to the bowling alleys, and Phil sounded\n very much the way he always had—soft spoken and full of laughter and\n full of jokes. He patted Edith on the head the way he always had, and\n clapped Hank on the shoulder (but not the way he always had—so much\n more gently, almost remotely), and insisted they all drink more than was\n good for them as he always had. And for once, Hank was ready to go along\n on the drinking. For once, he matched Phil shot for shot, beer for beer.", "He finished his beef and waited. Soon Edith came in with the special\n dessert she'd been preparing half the day—a magnificent English trifle.\n She served him, and spooned out a portion for herself and Ralphie. She\n hesitated near his chair, and when he made no comment she called the\n boy. Then the three of them were sitting, facing the empty side of the\n table. They ate the trifle. Ralphie finished first and got up and said,\n \"Hey, I promised—\"\n\n\n \"You promised the boys you'd play baseball or football or handball or\n something; anything to get away from your father.\"\n\n\n Ralphie's head dropped and he muttered, \"Aw, no, Dad.\"\n\n\n Edith said, \"He'll stay home, Hank. We'll spend an evening\n together—talking, watching TV, playing Monopoly.\"\n\n\n Ralphie said, \"Gee, sure, Dad, if you want to.\"", "He and Edith danced. He didn't hold her close as he had Rhona. He waited\n for her to come close on her own, and she did, and yet she didn't.\n Because while she put herself against him, there was something in her\n face—no, in her eyes; it always showed in the eyes—that made him know\n she was trying to be the old Edith and not succeeding. This time when\n the music ended, he was ready to go home.\n\n\n They rode back to town along Route Nine, he and Edith in the rear of\n Phil's car, Rhona driving because Phil had drunk just a little too much,\n Phil singing and telling an occasional bad joke, and somehow not his old\n self. No one was his old self. No one would ever be his old self with\n the First One.", "They had been right to worry. He had suffered much after that blow-up.\n But now they should be rejoicing, because he had survived and made the\n long journey. Ralphie suddenly said, \"I got to go, Dad. I promised Walt\n and the others I'd pitch. It's Inter-Town Little League, you know. It's\n Harmon, you know. I got to keep my word.\" Without waiting for an answer,\n he waved his hand—it shook; a ten-year-old boy's hand that shook—and\n ran from the room and from the house.\n\n\n He and Edith sat beside each other, and he wanted badly to take her in\n his arms, and yet he didn't want to oppress her. He stood up. \"I'm very\n tired. I'd like to lie down a while.\" Which wasn't true, because he'd\n been lying down all the months of the way back.", "So now five of them sat at the table. The meat was served—thin, rare\n slices of beef, the pink blood-juice oozing warmly from the center. He\n cut into it and raised a forkful to his mouth, then glanced at Ralphie\n and said, \"Looks fresh enough to have been killed in the back yard.\"\n Ralphie said, \"Yeah, Dad.\" Aunt Lucille put down her knife and fork and\n murmured something to her husband. Joe cleared his throat and said\n Lucille was rapidly becoming a vegetarian and he guessed she was going\n into the living room for a while. \"She'll be back for dessert, of\n course,\" he said, his laugh sounding forced.\n\n\n Hank looked at Edith; Edith was busy with her plate. Hank looked at\n Ralphie; Ralphie was busy with his plate. Hank looked at Joe; Joe was\n chewing, gazing out over their heads to the kitchen. Hank looked at\n Lucille; she was disappearing into the living room.", "At midnight, he was still drinking. The others wanted to leave, but he\n said, \"I haven't danced with my girl Rhona.\" His tongue was thick, his\n mind was blurred, and yet he could read the strange expression on her\n face—pretty Rhona, who'd always flirted with him, who'd made a ritual\n of flirting with him. Pretty Rhona, who now looked as if she were going\n to be sick.\n\n\n \"So let's rock,\" he said and stood up.\n\n\n They were on the dance floor. He held her close, and hummed and chatted.\n And through the alcoholic haze saw she was a stiff-smiled, stiff-bodied,\n mechanical dancing doll.\n\n\n The number finished; they walked back to the booth. Phil said,\n \"Beddy-bye time.\"\n\n\n Hank said, \"First one dance with my loving wife.\"", "\"Well, then, before summer vacation?\"\n\n\n \"Pretty good.\"\n\n\n Edith said, \"He made top forum the six-month period before vacation, and\n he made top forum the six-month period you went away, Hank.\"\n\n\n He nodded, remembering that, remembering everything, remembering the\n warmth of her farewell, the warmth of Ralphie's farewell, their tears as\n he left for the experimental flight station in the Aleutians. They had\n feared for him, having read of the many launchings gone wrong even in\n continent-to-continent experimental flight.", "So he put him down and told himself that it would all change, that\n everything would loosen up just as his commanding officer, General\n Carlisle, had said it would early this morning before he left\n Washington.\n\n\n \"Give it some time,\" Carlisle had said. \"You need the time; they need\n the time. And for the love of heaven, don't be sensitive.\"\nEdith was leading him into the living room, her hand lying still in his,\n a cool, dead bird lying still in his. He sat down on the couch, she sat\n down beside him—but she had hesitated. He\nwasn't\nbeing sensitive; she\n had hesitated. His wife had hesitated before sitting down beside him.", "He brought his fist down on the table. The settings jumped; a glass\n overturned, spilling water. He brought it down again and again. They\n were all standing now. He sat there and pounded the table with his big\n right fist—Henry Devers, who would never have thought of making such a\n scene before, but who was now so sick and tired of being treated as the\n First One, of being stood back from, looked at in awe of, felt in fear\n of, that he could have smashed more than a table.\n\n\n Edith said, \"Hank!\"", "\"I'm going to stay in the guest room,\" he said, \"for as long as\n necessary. For good if need be.\"\n\n\n \"How could it be for good? How, Hank?\"\n\n\n That question was perhaps the first firm basis for hope he'd had since\n returning. And there was something else; what Carlisle had told him,\n even as Carlisle himself had reacted as all men did.", "Aunt Lucille made a few quavering statements about the Ladies' Tuesday\n Garden Club, and Hank looked across the table to where she sat between\n Joe and Mother—his wife and son bracketed him, and yet he felt\n alone—and said, \"I've missed fooling around with the lawn and the rose\n bushes. Here it is August and I haven't had my hand to a mower or\n trowel.\"\n\n\n Aunt Lucille smiled, if you could call it that—a pitiful twitching of\n the lips—and nodded. She threw her eyes in his direction, and past him,\n and then down to her plate. Mother, who was still sniffling, said, \"I\n have a dismal headache. I'm going to lie down in the guest room a\n while.\" She touched his shoulder in passing—his affectionate, effusive\n mother who would kiss stray dogs and strange children, who had often\n irritated him with an excess of physical and verbal caresses—she barely\n touched his shoulder and fled.", "He walked up what had once been a concrete path and was now an ornate\n flagstone path. He climbed the new porch and raised the ornamental\n knocker on the new door and heard the soft music sound within. He was\n surprised that he'd had to do this. He'd thought Edith would be watching\n at a window.\n\n\n And perhaps she\nhad\nbeen watching ... but she hadn't opened the door.\n\n\n The door opened; he looked at her. It hadn't been too long and she\n hadn't changed at all. She was still the small, slender girl he'd loved\n in high school, the small, slender woman he'd married twelve years ago.\n Ralphie was with her. They held onto each other as if seeking mutual\n support, the thirty-three-year old woman and ten-year-old boy. They\n looked at him, and then both moved forward, still together. He said,\n \"It's good to be home!\"", "Edith said, \"Yes, and I'm so grateful that you're here, Hank. Please\n believe that. Please be patient with me and Ralphie and—\" She paused.\n \"There's one question.\"\n\n\n He knew what the question was. It had been the first asked him by\n everyone from the president of the United States on down.\n\n\n \"I saw nothing,\" he said. \"It was as if I slept those six and a half\n months—slept without dreaming.\"\n\n\n She came to him and touched his face with her lips, and he was\n satisfied.\n\n\n Later, half asleep, he heard a dog howling, and remembered stories of\n how they announced death and the presence of monsters. He shivered and\n pulled the covers closer to him and luxuriated in being safe in his own\n home.\nTHE END", "They turned left, to take the short cut along Hallowed Hill Road, and\n Phil finished a story about a Martian and a Hollywood sex queen and\n looked at his wife and then past her at the long, cast-iron fence\n paralleling the road. \"Hey,\" he said, pointing, \"do you know why that's\n the most popular place on earth?\"\n\n\n Rhona glanced to the left, and so did Hank and Edith. Rhona made a\n little sound, and Edith seemed to stop breathing, but Phil went on a\n while longer, not yet aware of his supposed\nfaux pas\n.\n\n\n \"You know why?\" he repeated, turning to the back seat, the laughter\n rumbling up from his chest. \"You know why, folks?\"\n\n\n Rhona said, \"Did you notice Carl Braken and his wife at—\"\n\n\n Hank said, \"No, Phil, why is it the most popular place on earth?\"", "Edith nodded and, still holding to Ralphie with one hand, put the other\n arm around him. He kissed her—her neck, her cheek—and all the old\n jokes came to mind, the jokes of travel-weary, battle-weary men, the\n and-\nthen\n-I'll-put-my-pack-aside jokes that spoke of terrible hunger.\n She was trembling, and even as her lips came up to touch his he felt the\n difference, and because of this difference he turned with urgency to\n Ralphie and picked him up and hugged him and said, because he could\n think of nothing else to say, \"What a big fella, what a big fella.\"\n\n\n Ralphie stood in his arms as if his feet were still planted on the\n floor, and he didn't look at his father but somewhere beyond him. \"I\n didn't grow much while you were gone, Dad, Mom says I don't eat enough.\"", "She said, \"Of course. How stupid of me, expecting you to sit around and\n make small talk and pick up just where you left off.\"\n\n\n He nodded. But that was exactly what he wanted to do—make small talk\n and pick up just where he'd left off. But they didn't expect it of him;\n they wouldn't let him; they felt he had changed too much.\nShe led him upstairs and along the foyer past Ralphie's room and past\n the small guest room to their bedroom. This, too, had changed. It was\n newly painted and it had new furniture. He saw twin beds separated by an\n ornate little table with an ornate little lamp, and this looked more\n ominous a barrier to him than the twelve-foot concrete-and-barbed-wire\n fence around the experimental station.\n\n\n \"Which one is mine,\" he asked, and tried to smile." ], [ "Hank stood up. \"The question is not whether I want to. You both know I\n want to. The question is whether\nyou\nwant to.\"\n\n\n They answered together that of course they wanted to. But their\n eyes—his wife's and son's eyes—could not meet his, and so he said he\n was going to his room because he was, after all, very tired and would in\n all probability continue to be very tired for a long, long time and that\n they shouldn't count on him for normal social life.\n\n\n He fell asleep quickly, lying there in his clothes.\n\n\n But he didn't sleep long. Edith shook him and he opened his eyes to a\n lighted room. \"Phil and Rhona are here.\" He blinked at her. She smiled,\n and it seemed her old smile. \"They're so anxious to see you, Hank. I\n could barely keep Phil from coming up and waking you himself. They want\n to go out and do the town. Please, Hank, say you will.\"", "Edith said, \"Yes, and I'm so grateful that you're here, Hank. Please\n believe that. Please be patient with me and Ralphie and—\" She paused.\n \"There's one question.\"\n\n\n He knew what the question was. It had been the first asked him by\n everyone from the president of the United States on down.\n\n\n \"I saw nothing,\" he said. \"It was as if I slept those six and a half\n months—slept without dreaming.\"\n\n\n She came to him and touched his face with her lips, and he was\n satisfied.\n\n\n Later, half asleep, he heard a dog howling, and remembered stories of\n how they announced death and the presence of monsters. He shivered and\n pulled the covers closer to him and luxuriated in being safe in his own\n home.\nTHE END", "\"I'm going to stay in the guest room,\" he said, \"for as long as\n necessary. For good if need be.\"\n\n\n \"How could it be for good? How, Hank?\"\n\n\n That question was perhaps the first firm basis for hope he'd had since\n returning. And there was something else; what Carlisle had told him,\n even as Carlisle himself had reacted as all men did.", "Phil said, \"Because people are—\" And then he caught himself and waved\n his hand and muttered, \"I forgot the punch line.\"\n\n\n \"Because people are dying to get in,\" Hank said, and looked through the\n window, past the iron fence, into the large cemetery at the fleeting\n tombstones.\n\n\n The car was filled with horrified silence when there should have been\n nothing but laughter, or irritation at a too-old joke. \"Maybe you should\n let me out right here,\" Hank said. \"I'm home—or that's what everyone\n seems to think. Maybe I should lie down in an open grave. Maybe that\n would satisfy people. Maybe that's the only way to act, like Dracula or\n another monster from the movies.\"\n\n\n Edith said, \"Oh, Hank, don't, don't!\"", "They didn't bowl very long. At ten o'clock they crossed the road to\n Manfred's Tavern, where Phil and the girls ordered sandwiches and coffee\n and Hank went right on drinking. Edith said something to him, but he\n merely smiled and waved his hand and gulped another ounce of nirvana.\n\n\n There was dancing to a juke box in Manfred's Tavern. He'd been there\n many times before, and he was sure several of the couples recognized\n him. But except for a few abortive glances in his direction, it was as\n if he were a stranger in a city halfway around the world.", "So there he was, Henry Devers, at home with the family. So there he was,\n the hero returned, waiting to be treated as a human being.\n\n\n The grapefruit shells were cleaned away and the soup served. Uncle Joe\n began to talk. \"The greatest little development of circular uniform\n houses you ever did see,\" he boomed in his powerful salesman's voice.\n \"Still going like sixty. We'll sell out before—\" At that point he\n looked at Hank, and Hank nodded encouragement, desperately interested in\n this normalcy, and Joe's voice died away. He looked down at his plate,\n mumbled, \"Soup's getting cold,\" and began to eat. His hand shook a\n little; his ruddy face was not quite as ruddy as Hank remembered it.", "The car raced along the road, crossed a macadam highway, went four\n blocks and pulled to a stop. He didn't bother saying good night. He\n didn't wait for Edith. He just got out and walked up the flagstone path\n and entered the house.\n\"Hank,\" Edith whispered from the guest room doorway, \"I'm so sorry—\"\n\n\n \"There's nothing to be sorry about. It's just a matter of time. It'll\n all work out in time.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" she said quickly, \"that's it. I need a little time. We all need a\n little time. Because it's so strange, Hank. Because it's so frightening.\n I should have told you that the moment you walked in. I think I've hurt\n you terribly, we've all hurt you terribly, by trying to hide that we're\n frightened.\"", "He brought his fist down on the table. The settings jumped; a glass\n overturned, spilling water. He brought it down again and again. They\n were all standing now. He sat there and pounded the table with his big\n right fist—Henry Devers, who would never have thought of making such a\n scene before, but who was now so sick and tired of being treated as the\n First One, of being stood back from, looked at in awe of, felt in fear\n of, that he could have smashed more than a table.\n\n\n Edith said, \"Hank!\"", "They turned left, to take the short cut along Hallowed Hill Road, and\n Phil finished a story about a Martian and a Hollywood sex queen and\n looked at his wife and then past her at the long, cast-iron fence\n paralleling the road. \"Hey,\" he said, pointing, \"do you know why that's\n the most popular place on earth?\"\n\n\n Rhona glanced to the left, and so did Hank and Edith. Rhona made a\n little sound, and Edith seemed to stop breathing, but Phil went on a\n while longer, not yet aware of his supposed\nfaux pas\n.\n\n\n \"You know why?\" he repeated, turning to the back seat, the laughter\n rumbling up from his chest. \"You know why, folks?\"\n\n\n Rhona said, \"Did you notice Carl Braken and his wife at—\"\n\n\n Hank said, \"No, Phil, why is it the most popular place on earth?\"", "So now five of them sat at the table. The meat was served—thin, rare\n slices of beef, the pink blood-juice oozing warmly from the center. He\n cut into it and raised a forkful to his mouth, then glanced at Ralphie\n and said, \"Looks fresh enough to have been killed in the back yard.\"\n Ralphie said, \"Yeah, Dad.\" Aunt Lucille put down her knife and fork and\n murmured something to her husband. Joe cleared his throat and said\n Lucille was rapidly becoming a vegetarian and he guessed she was going\n into the living room for a while. \"She'll be back for dessert, of\n course,\" he said, his laugh sounding forced.\n\n\n Hank looked at Edith; Edith was busy with her plate. Hank looked at\n Ralphie; Ralphie was busy with his plate. Hank looked at Joe; Joe was\n chewing, gazing out over their heads to the kitchen. Hank looked at\n Lucille; she was disappearing into the living room.", "They had been right to worry. He had suffered much after that blow-up.\n But now they should be rejoicing, because he had survived and made the\n long journey. Ralphie suddenly said, \"I got to go, Dad. I promised Walt\n and the others I'd pitch. It's Inter-Town Little League, you know. It's\n Harmon, you know. I got to keep my word.\" Without waiting for an answer,\n he waved his hand—it shook; a ten-year-old boy's hand that shook—and\n ran from the room and from the house.\n\n\n He and Edith sat beside each other, and he wanted badly to take her in\n his arms, and yet he didn't want to oppress her. He stood up. \"I'm very\n tired. I'd like to lie down a while.\" Which wasn't true, because he'd\n been lying down all the months of the way back.", "The house had changed. He saw that as soon as the official car let him\n off at 45 Roosevelt Street. The change was, he knew, for the better.\n They had put a porch in front. They had rehabilitated, spruced up,\n almost rebuilt the entire outside and grounds. But he was sorry. He had\n wanted it to be as before.\n\n\n The head of the American Legion and the chief of police, who had\n escorted him on this trip from the square, didn't ask to go in with him.\n He was glad. He'd had enough of strangers. Not that he was through with\n strangers. There were dozens of them up and down the street, standing\n beside parked cars, looking at him. But when he looked back at them,\n their eyes dropped, they turned away, they began moving off. He was\n still too much the First One to have his gaze met.", "But sometime later, as he was dozing off, a sense of reassurance began\n filtering into his mind. After all, he was still Henry Devers, the same\n man who had left home eleven months ago, with a love for family and\n friends which was, if anything, stronger than before. Once he could\n communicate this, the strangeness would disappear and the First One\n would again become good old Hank. It was little enough to ask for—a\n return to old values, old relationships, the normalcies of the backwash\n instead of the freneticisms of the lime-light. It would certainly be\n granted to him.\n\n\n He slept.\nDinner was at seven\n p.m.\n His mother came; his Uncle Joe and Aunt Lucille\n came. Together with Edith, Ralphie and himself, they made six, and ate\n in the dining room at the big table.", "At midnight, he was still drinking. The others wanted to leave, but he\n said, \"I haven't danced with my girl Rhona.\" His tongue was thick, his\n mind was blurred, and yet he could read the strange expression on her\n face—pretty Rhona, who'd always flirted with him, who'd made a ritual\n of flirting with him. Pretty Rhona, who now looked as if she were going\n to be sick.\n\n\n \"So let's rock,\" he said and stood up.\n\n\n They were on the dance floor. He held her close, and hummed and chatted.\n And through the alcoholic haze saw she was a stiff-smiled, stiff-bodied,\n mechanical dancing doll.\n\n\n The number finished; they walked back to the booth. Phil said,\n \"Beddy-bye time.\"\n\n\n Hank said, \"First one dance with my loving wife.\"", "He sat up. \"Phil,\" he muttered. \"Phil and Rhona.\" They'd had wonderful\n times together, from grammar school on. Phil and Rhona, their oldest and\n closest friends. Perhaps this would begin his real homecoming.\n\n\n Do the town? They'd paint it and then tear it down!\nIt didn't turn out that way. He was disappointed; but then again, he'd\n also expected it. This entire first day at home had conditioned him to\n expect nothing good. They went to the bowling alleys, and Phil sounded\n very much the way he always had—soft spoken and full of laughter and\n full of jokes. He patted Edith on the head the way he always had, and\n clapped Hank on the shoulder (but not the way he always had—so much\n more gently, almost remotely), and insisted they all drink more than was\n good for them as he always had. And for once, Hank was ready to go along\n on the drinking. For once, he matched Phil shot for shot, beer for beer.", "He said, voice hoarse, \"Shut up. Go away. Let me eat alone. I'm sick of\n the lot of you.\"\nMother and Joe returned a few minutes later where he sat forcing food\n down his throat. Mother said, \"Henry dear—\" He didn't answer. She began\n to cry, and he was glad she left the house then. He had never said\n anything really bad to his mother. He was afraid this would have been\n the time. Joe merely cleared his throat and mumbled something about\n getting together again soon and \"drop out and see the new development\"\n and he, too, was gone. Lucille never did manage to speak to him.", "He finished his beef and waited. Soon Edith came in with the special\n dessert she'd been preparing half the day—a magnificent English trifle.\n She served him, and spooned out a portion for herself and Ralphie. She\n hesitated near his chair, and when he made no comment she called the\n boy. Then the three of them were sitting, facing the empty side of the\n table. They ate the trifle. Ralphie finished first and got up and said,\n \"Hey, I promised—\"\n\n\n \"You promised the boys you'd play baseball or football or handball or\n something; anything to get away from your father.\"\n\n\n Ralphie's head dropped and he muttered, \"Aw, no, Dad.\"\n\n\n Edith said, \"He'll stay home, Hank. We'll spend an evening\n together—talking, watching TV, playing Monopoly.\"\n\n\n Ralphie said, \"Gee, sure, Dad, if you want to.\"", "Still, he was the honored home-comer, the successful returnee, the\n hometown boy who had made good in a big way, and they took the triumphal\n tour up Main Street to the new square and the grandstand. There he sat\n between the mayor and a nervous young coed chosen as homecoming queen,\n and looked out at the police and fire department bands, the National\n Guard, the boy scouts and girl scouts, the Elks and Masons. Several of\n the churches in town had shown indecision as to how to instruct their\n parishioners to treat him. But they had all come around. The tremendous\n national interest, the fact that he was the First One, had made them\n come around. It was obvious by now that they would have to adjust as\n they'd adjusted to all the other firsts taking place in these—as the\n newspapers had dubbed the start of the Twenty-first Century—the\n Galloping Twenties.", "\"Well, then, before summer vacation?\"\n\n\n \"Pretty good.\"\n\n\n Edith said, \"He made top forum the six-month period before vacation, and\n he made top forum the six-month period you went away, Hank.\"\n\n\n He nodded, remembering that, remembering everything, remembering the\n warmth of her farewell, the warmth of Ralphie's farewell, their tears as\n he left for the experimental flight station in the Aleutians. They had\n feared for him, having read of the many launchings gone wrong even in\n continent-to-continent experimental flight.", "She said, \"Of course. How stupid of me, expecting you to sit around and\n make small talk and pick up just where you left off.\"\n\n\n He nodded. But that was exactly what he wanted to do—make small talk\n and pick up just where he'd left off. But they didn't expect it of him;\n they wouldn't let him; they felt he had changed too much.\nShe led him upstairs and along the foyer past Ralphie's room and past\n the small guest room to their bedroom. This, too, had changed. It was\n newly painted and it had new furniture. He saw twin beds separated by an\n ornate little table with an ornate little lamp, and this looked more\n ominous a barrier to him than the twelve-foot concrete-and-barbed-wire\n fence around the experimental station.\n\n\n \"Which one is mine,\" he asked, and tried to smile." ] ]
train	60283	[ "How is the book \"Living a Normal Sex Life\" seen by these people?", "What does this society think about breasts?", "Which is the best representation of Melia and Xeon's relationship?", "Which is least likely contributing to Xeon's request to move to the fields before the Oracle of Delni? ", "Which is the most accurate description of why Xeon is in trouble?", "Which was probably the biggest motivator for Melia to volunteer?", "Which is most true about how the volunteers are seen by the rest of their society?", "Why are Melia and Xeon considered noble by the end of the story?" ]	[ [ "It is frightening in an exciting way, for the people to learn something new", "They respect its truths but are nervous about its implications", "It is an important historical text appreciated from a research perspective", "It is a rare artefact of a less-understood time" ], [ "They are appreciated from an aesthetic standpoint but not a sexual one", "They are considered to be milk-producing devices but nothing else", "They are seen as vistigial structures", "They are well-regarded because they are so rare" ], [ "They are close friends and will always be that and not much else", "They are siblings, which is not odd for this society", "They are close but have to hide their romantic relationship from the rest of society", "They are dear to one another in an evolving way" ], [ "The urge to make the event less of a spectacle", "The general desire to maintain some control in the situation", "The general level of comfort of lying on marble", "The pressure from Sias to keep the situation private" ], [ "He was not supposed to pursue a relationship with a woman", "He was not supposed to point out any flaws in the current government structure", "He publicly declared untrue things to be true", "The suggestions he made were against the societal ideals" ], [ "The chance to be closer with Xeon", "The chance to fulfill societal expectations", "The chance to help her friend Xeon discover something new", "The chance to help her friend escape an unfortunate situation" ], [ "They are appreciated for their level of discretion", "They are respected for their dedication to each other above anything else", "They are considered brave for undertaking such a disapproved task", "They are disgraced for their choice to participate in such vile acts" ], [ "Because they discovered the truth about reproduction and brought it to the society", "Because they did not tell others in the society what happened in detail, protecting them from the truth", "Because they were willing to continue learning about this ill-understood act", "Because they want to increase the efforts towards learning more about these historical acts" ] ]	[ 2, 3, 4, 4, 4, 4, 3, 3 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "\"I have indeed discovered the secret of reproduction,\" he began. \"After\n many searchings, I came upon this—\" and he held forth the object he\n had carried in. \"It is a book. It is entitled, 'Living a Normal Sex\n Life.' It seems to be some sort of a do-it-yourself pamphlet.\" He\n dropped the book on the table and rubbed his hands over his eyes.", "There was something in the man's behavior that commanded everyone's\n attention. He went on, speaking low. \"The word 'Sex' is not defined,\n but it seems to mean....\" His words trailed off. He was obviously\n unsure of how to continue. \"I had better start at the beginning, I\n suppose,\" he said. \"You see, once upon a time there were birds and\n bees....\"\nWhen he finished the Conclave sat in horrified silence. His words,\n with all their horror, had the ring of truth and there were no cries of\n 'Heresy'. There was only stunned disbelief and the beginnings of nausea.\n\n\n It is the mark of honor that a leader shall carry on when others fear\n to move. I cleared my throat.\n\n\n \"Shall not these organs which you mention have atrophied by now? With\n no use throughout all these generations, will they not have evolved\n into nothingness?\"", "\"Sias,\" he said. Then stopped, embarrassed.\n\n\n I waited, and Rocsates was silent, and he continued.\n\n\n \"Sias, we come to tell.... We will....\" He raised his eyes to mine and\n said manfully, \"We shall try again.\"\n\n\n I am afraid that tears came to my eyes. Such sacrifice—\n\n\n \"We beg one favor,\" Xeon went on. \"We are agreed that—Well, we should\n like to be left alone, in private, to try.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" I replied. Anything they might want they could have. My\n relief and gratitude must have showed, for Xeon took a deep breath and\n spoke again.\n\n\n \"We do not deserve praise, Sias,\" he said. \"The truth is, we ... we\n sort of enjoy it.\"\n\n\n I watched them turn and wander off together under the stars.", "\"That there was indeed a time before the machines, in fact the books\n were created in that time, for not one of them mentions the machines.\n Then reproduction was carried on by individuals, without help of the\n then nonexistent machines. The She's are not wanderers from another\n land, but they have lived with us for all time; they are not another\n race, but we are all types of one race. And the fact of reproduction is\n somehow intimately related to the physical distinctions of the She's!\"\n\n\n These last sentences were shouted to be heard above the roar of the\n crowd. Yet when Rocsates stopped, so also did the noise, so shocked and\n amazed at his words were they. And I confess, myself also.\n\n\n \"In fact,\" Rocsates added, sitting down, \"this process of reproduction\n seems to have been so simple that there was once a problem of\n over-population.\"", "\"How, indeed? And is there not a legend—admitted only a legend—that\n says there was a time before the machines, and before the Maternite\n Machine, and that at such a time both the animals and Men reproduced\n from within their own bodies?\"\n\n\n At this two members of the Conclave fell immediately into a faint, and\n I would gladly have joined them. I hoped that the youngsters, Xeon\n and Melia, had not heard, but as I turned they were listening most\n attentively to Rocsates, who, amid cries of \"Heresy\" and \"Treason\",\n went on:\n\n\n \"I should like to ask the Conclave for permission to search the ancient\n records, in the hope of finding some such knowledge that would prove or\n disprove my words.\"\n\n\n \"You wish to search the films—\" I began.\n\n\n \"Not the films, Sias, but the books.\"", "Order was lost among the Conclave as each man turned to speak to his\n neighbor, and for some time I could not restore order. I realized that\n something had to be done to save Rocsates before the outrage of the\n assembled overwhelmed him.\n\n\n \"It seems,\" I shouted, \"that there is a flaw in your logic.\" For if\n such there was, I was hopeful of dismissing the entire affair with\n no harm done. \"For if people reproduced too often, why then this\n reproduction must have been a pleasant thing to do; otherwise they\n would not have done so to excess. And if it was a pleasant thing to do,\n where is the necessity for the machines, and why were they created?\"\n\n\n Rocsates seemed perplexed by this problem, whereupon Xeon, who together\n with Melia were at the Conclave without permission, shouted, \"Perhaps\n the process of reproduction was of\nsuch\na pleasure that the Conclave\n ruled it to be a sin? And therefore the machines were necessary!\"", "I voiced my assent, and the entire Conclave adjourned to the fields.\nIt was nearly dark when we walked home, Rocsates and I, arm in arm. It\n had been a horrible day. The inhuman indignity, the cries—\n\n\n We tarried before my home, leaned on the stone, stared at the first\n stars.\n\n\n \"They seemed finally to accomplish all the book described,\" I muttered.\n\n\n \"They may indeed have succeeded,\" Rocsates replied. \"There is mentioned\n a time lapse which is necessary. The child does not appear immediately.\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter,\" I said disconsolately. \"Who could ask them to go\n through such an ordeal again?\"\n\n\n And then I looked down to earth again, and saw them standing before me.\n Melia cast her eyes down, and would not raise them. Xeon held his arm\n about her shoulders, as if to protect her, but I know not from whom.", "But of course there were no cousins. There was nothing. And Man\n returned, and settled down to live. Saddened, but resigned and content\n to live in peace with his knowledge and his power. Gone now are all the\n ancient evils, wars, emergencies.\n\n\n \"Sias! Sias—\" And they were upon me.\n\n\n That is, Xeon was upon me. But I knew that where Xeon is, Melia must\n soon appear. And indeed it was but a moment before Melia slipped\n through the high grass to stand at his side. Their youthful voices were\n babbling in excitement.\n\n\n Melia was a She, with the swelling breasts that were, so tradition\n states, quite prevalent among members of the race long ago, and are\n seldom seen today. Indeed, Melia was on this account made the butt of\n many jokes and, I fear, would have had a lonely life of it had it not\n been for the friendship of Xeon.", "Cries of \"Treason\" sprang up, and I fear it might have gone hard for\n the priest had I not been able to insure order.\n\n\n \"That is not the worst,\" he cried, as if in defiance. \"All the Prelife\n has been dried up. It will not function. There is no more. And there\n will be no more children!\"\n\n\n At this I feared the Conclave was about to riot. It is at such times\n that I most revere the wisdom of the ancients, who decreed seventy\n years the minimum age for a member of the Conclave. They shouted and\n began to beat their fists, but for how long can a man of seventy years\n roar like a youngster? They quieted, breathing heavily, and I asked,\n\n\n \"Is there no way, then, to produce more Prelife in order that the\n machines may produce more children for us?", "\"Some among you She's have the swelling of the breasts. And does there\n exist no reason for this? Was there not, perhaps in ancient times, a\n cause for this? Do you not wonder, She's, whence you come and for what\n reason?\"\n\n\n \"Rocsates,\" I interrupted. \"All this is fascinating, of course. But if\n you could be quick—\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" he replied. \"In the course of my reading I have read\n many books, and while they are all vague on the subject, this I have\n discovered:", "Rocsates, it is suspected, will never ask a question unless he knows\n the answer beforehand. And so I acquiesced, and agreed, and granted\n permission. And with much misgiving and foreboding of evil, the\n Conclave adjourned.\nSeveral weeks elapsed before Rocsates requested that the Conclave meet.\n I called the meeting at dawn and so it was yet early in the afternoon\n when formalities were concluded and Rocsates granted leave to speak.\n\n\n \"Some of those among you are She's,\" he began. \"And you know you are\n different from the rest of us. To the advantage, your skin is fairer\n and your features more often handsomer than ours. To the disadvantage,\n your excretory system is not so mechanically dextrous as ours. And, you\n may say, why should this not be so? There is, indeed, no reason why we\n should all be identical. Perforce you have the advantage, perforce we\n do. Yet there is one other distinction.", "Rocsates' voice made itself heard. \"It is true. Such creatures did\n indeed exist. It is recorded most scientifically in the films.\"\n\n\n \"If it be so,\" I said, quieting the hub-bub that followed, \"and I would\n not doubt your word, Rocsates, for all know you are the wisest of\n men—if it were so, then, what of it?\"\n\n\n \"May it not be,\" Rocsates put in, \"that these animals had no machines\n to reproduce their kind? For surely the gods would not grant machines\n to such creatures. And indeed, if they had Maternite Machines, why then\n we would yet have these animals among us.\"\n\n\n \"And how, then, did these animals reproduce?\" I asked.", "Well, you know how these things are. At such a time, many men feel\n impelled to make speeches, and one must not be disrespectful. Prayers\n and supplications were offered to the gods, priests were sent to\n sacrifice, and finally, as the light of the sun was falling between the\n pillars, the High Priest of the Maternite Machine was heard.\n\n\n He rambled through the customary opening remarks and then, continually\n smoothing his white beard—of which he is excessively proud—approached\n the crux of the matter and the Conclave finally heard the facts it had\n assembled to hear. By this time, unfortunately, many of the Conclave\n had departed for home and supper. Yet perhaps it is for the best, for\n those left were the most earnest and intelligent.", "\"I do not think so,\" Rocsates replied after a while. \"What to us is\n an eon, to evolution is but an instant. And then the swelling of the\n breasts, I believe, proves that there is still reproductive activity in\n some, at least, of the She's.\"\n\n\n We sat shaking our heads, bowed under terrible reality.\n\n\n \"Then we must experiment,\" I said. \"But whom could we ask to submit to\n such horror?\"\n\n\n \"I have already taken the liberty of asking for volunteers,\" Rocsates\n replied. \"The She, of course, must be one with the swelling of the\n breasts. Melia has volunteered, on condition that Xeon be released from\n dungeon. Are there any objections?\"\nThere were none, of course. Who would refuse a boon to one who would\n undergo such an ordeal for the City?\n\n\n \"And who will be the partner?\" I asked.", "\"In all honor, could Xeon allow Melia to surpass him in courage? It\n shall be he,\" Rocsates said. And with his word the two entered the Hall\n and stood, noble and naked.\n\n\n Rocsates gestured to the table, and Melia started to climb upon it,\n but Xeon stepped forward.\n\n\n \"My lords,\" he said, \"would not better results be obtained were we to\n conduct the experiment in the fields before the Oracle of Delni, that\n the gods may help us?\"\n\n\n His glance reached into my soul, and I was proud of Xeon. A true\n friend, he thought even now of the comfort of Melia. The marble table\n was indeed hard, and from Rocsates' description it seemed that Melia's\n position would be as uncomfortable as it would be undignified. The soft\n fields might be some slight help.", "\"I would not bore you,\" he said, \"with details of which only the gods\n are sure. Know, then, that once granted a few cells of Prelife, it is\n an easy matter for the Maternite Machine to add more and more; thus\n assuring us, as has always been, a continuous source of Prelife to be\n born by the Generating Machine as children. The machines bear the exact\n number of children each year to balance the number of us whom the gods\n claim. Such it has always been from time immemorial.\"\n\n\n A murmur of assent and approval of these virtuous words whispered\n around the Hall.\n\n\n \"But now,\" he continued, however, with less assurance and indeed with\n even a stutter here and there, \"an unprecedented situation has arisen.\n Indeed, I might call it an emergency. For the M-Maternite Machine has\n actually failed.\"", "Gods, this Rocsates! The books, as well he knows, are so ancient,\n and so delicate, that they are kept in an air-tight tomb; lest,\n being handled, they be destroyed and all knowledge within them lost.\n Therefore, they have not been read in the known history of our race.\n And Rocsates has been anxious for an excuse—\n\n\n \"Sias,\" he went on, \"if there exists such knowledge as I seek, is it\n not indeed lost to the memory of Man? And if so, are not the books the\n only place where it may be found?\"", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI was wandering among the tall grass of the slopes, listening to the\n soft whistling of the wind; allowing the grass to caress my toga and\n thighs. It was a day soft and clear; a day accepted by the young,\n cherished by we old. Across the gently undulating hills stood the\n magnificent Melopolis, encradling the Oracle of Delni. I do not, of\n course, believe in the gods per se; still there is a grandeur in the\n very stones that transcends their human sculptors, and it is no wonder\n to me that many cling tenaciously, and ignorantly, to the old religion.\n Cling to the gods of old, who drew man upward from wherever he began.\n In whose names Man killed and plundered, while struggling up. In whose\n names Man finally left this earth, to seek his cousins among the stars.", "\"That is for the priests to say, not I,\" I replied. In moments of\n emergency, it is wise to speak with caution. That is, I suppose so. I\n have never before been in a real emergency.\nA man my age does not hurry in the heat of the midday sun—maddugs\n nenglishmin go out in the midday sun, as the ancients say, although I\n often wonder why—but Xeon and Melia ran all the way down to the city.\n They are of an age to enter manhood, and have all the energy such young\n men do.\n\n\n As we entered the city, we were surrounded by confusion and\n consternation. And can the simple people be blamed? They were aware\n that they stood in the midst of an unprecedented happening; indeed, an\n emergency. For a machine had failed!", "\"Are not riddles often the beginning of knowledge?\" he asked, in that\n irritating dumber-than-thou attitude of his. \"Must there not, long ago,\n have been a source of Prelife: a source now forgotten? And may it not\n even now—should we discover it—be available to us? I am reminded of\n the story of the animals of old—\"\n\n\n \"I fear your mind is wandering, Rocsates,\" I was forced to interrupt.\n \"I know well the legend of the animals, but what does it have to\n do—\" The heads of the Conclave were turning to me, quizzically. I\n hastened to explain the legend of the animals. \"It is said that many\n thousands of years ago, time without reckoning, there existed on the\n earth creatures who were alive like us, and yet not like us. It is said\n they had four legs or more, and no arms, were covered with hair, and\n although not mute, they could not speak.\"" ], [ "\"Some among you She's have the swelling of the breasts. And does there\n exist no reason for this? Was there not, perhaps in ancient times, a\n cause for this? Do you not wonder, She's, whence you come and for what\n reason?\"\n\n\n \"Rocsates,\" I interrupted. \"All this is fascinating, of course. But if\n you could be quick—\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" he replied. \"In the course of my reading I have read\n many books, and while they are all vague on the subject, this I have\n discovered:", "\"I do not think so,\" Rocsates replied after a while. \"What to us is\n an eon, to evolution is but an instant. And then the swelling of the\n breasts, I believe, proves that there is still reproductive activity in\n some, at least, of the She's.\"\n\n\n We sat shaking our heads, bowed under terrible reality.\n\n\n \"Then we must experiment,\" I said. \"But whom could we ask to submit to\n such horror?\"\n\n\n \"I have already taken the liberty of asking for volunteers,\" Rocsates\n replied. \"The She, of course, must be one with the swelling of the\n breasts. Melia has volunteered, on condition that Xeon be released from\n dungeon. Are there any objections?\"\nThere were none, of course. Who would refuse a boon to one who would\n undergo such an ordeal for the City?\n\n\n \"And who will be the partner?\" I asked.", "There was something in the man's behavior that commanded everyone's\n attention. He went on, speaking low. \"The word 'Sex' is not defined,\n but it seems to mean....\" His words trailed off. He was obviously\n unsure of how to continue. \"I had better start at the beginning, I\n suppose,\" he said. \"You see, once upon a time there were birds and\n bees....\"\nWhen he finished the Conclave sat in horrified silence. His words,\n with all their horror, had the ring of truth and there were no cries of\n 'Heresy'. There was only stunned disbelief and the beginnings of nausea.\n\n\n It is the mark of honor that a leader shall carry on when others fear\n to move. I cleared my throat.\n\n\n \"Shall not these organs which you mention have atrophied by now? With\n no use throughout all these generations, will they not have evolved\n into nothingness?\"", "Well, you know how these things are. At such a time, many men feel\n impelled to make speeches, and one must not be disrespectful. Prayers\n and supplications were offered to the gods, priests were sent to\n sacrifice, and finally, as the light of the sun was falling between the\n pillars, the High Priest of the Maternite Machine was heard.\n\n\n He rambled through the customary opening remarks and then, continually\n smoothing his white beard—of which he is excessively proud—approached\n the crux of the matter and the Conclave finally heard the facts it had\n assembled to hear. By this time, unfortunately, many of the Conclave\n had departed for home and supper. Yet perhaps it is for the best, for\n those left were the most earnest and intelligent.", "\"I have indeed discovered the secret of reproduction,\" he began. \"After\n many searchings, I came upon this—\" and he held forth the object he\n had carried in. \"It is a book. It is entitled, 'Living a Normal Sex\n Life.' It seems to be some sort of a do-it-yourself pamphlet.\" He\n dropped the book on the table and rubbed his hands over his eyes.", "\"In all honor, could Xeon allow Melia to surpass him in courage? It\n shall be he,\" Rocsates said. And with his word the two entered the Hall\n and stood, noble and naked.\n\n\n Rocsates gestured to the table, and Melia started to climb upon it,\n but Xeon stepped forward.\n\n\n \"My lords,\" he said, \"would not better results be obtained were we to\n conduct the experiment in the fields before the Oracle of Delni, that\n the gods may help us?\"\n\n\n His glance reached into my soul, and I was proud of Xeon. A true\n friend, he thought even now of the comfort of Melia. The marble table\n was indeed hard, and from Rocsates' description it seemed that Melia's\n position would be as uncomfortable as it would be undignified. The soft\n fields might be some slight help.", "But of course there were no cousins. There was nothing. And Man\n returned, and settled down to live. Saddened, but resigned and content\n to live in peace with his knowledge and his power. Gone now are all the\n ancient evils, wars, emergencies.\n\n\n \"Sias! Sias—\" And they were upon me.\n\n\n That is, Xeon was upon me. But I knew that where Xeon is, Melia must\n soon appear. And indeed it was but a moment before Melia slipped\n through the high grass to stand at his side. Their youthful voices were\n babbling in excitement.\n\n\n Melia was a She, with the swelling breasts that were, so tradition\n states, quite prevalent among members of the race long ago, and are\n seldom seen today. Indeed, Melia was on this account made the butt of\n many jokes and, I fear, would have had a lonely life of it had it not\n been for the friendship of Xeon.", "Rocsates, it is suspected, will never ask a question unless he knows\n the answer beforehand. And so I acquiesced, and agreed, and granted\n permission. And with much misgiving and foreboding of evil, the\n Conclave adjourned.\nSeveral weeks elapsed before Rocsates requested that the Conclave meet.\n I called the meeting at dawn and so it was yet early in the afternoon\n when formalities were concluded and Rocsates granted leave to speak.\n\n\n \"Some of those among you are She's,\" he began. \"And you know you are\n different from the rest of us. To the advantage, your skin is fairer\n and your features more often handsomer than ours. To the disadvantage,\n your excretory system is not so mechanically dextrous as ours. And, you\n may say, why should this not be so? There is, indeed, no reason why we\n should all be identical. Perforce you have the advantage, perforce we\n do. Yet there is one other distinction.", "\"How, indeed? And is there not a legend—admitted only a legend—that\n says there was a time before the machines, and before the Maternite\n Machine, and that at such a time both the animals and Men reproduced\n from within their own bodies?\"\n\n\n At this two members of the Conclave fell immediately into a faint, and\n I would gladly have joined them. I hoped that the youngsters, Xeon\n and Melia, had not heard, but as I turned they were listening most\n attentively to Rocsates, who, amid cries of \"Heresy\" and \"Treason\",\n went on:\n\n\n \"I should like to ask the Conclave for permission to search the ancient\n records, in the hope of finding some such knowledge that would prove or\n disprove my words.\"\n\n\n \"You wish to search the films—\" I began.\n\n\n \"Not the films, Sias, but the books.\"", "\"That there was indeed a time before the machines, in fact the books\n were created in that time, for not one of them mentions the machines.\n Then reproduction was carried on by individuals, without help of the\n then nonexistent machines. The She's are not wanderers from another\n land, but they have lived with us for all time; they are not another\n race, but we are all types of one race. And the fact of reproduction is\n somehow intimately related to the physical distinctions of the She's!\"\n\n\n These last sentences were shouted to be heard above the roar of the\n crowd. Yet when Rocsates stopped, so also did the noise, so shocked and\n amazed at his words were they. And I confess, myself also.\n\n\n \"In fact,\" Rocsates added, sitting down, \"this process of reproduction\n seems to have been so simple that there was once a problem of\n over-population.\"", "Rocsates' voice made itself heard. \"It is true. Such creatures did\n indeed exist. It is recorded most scientifically in the films.\"\n\n\n \"If it be so,\" I said, quieting the hub-bub that followed, \"and I would\n not doubt your word, Rocsates, for all know you are the wisest of\n men—if it were so, then, what of it?\"\n\n\n \"May it not be,\" Rocsates put in, \"that these animals had no machines\n to reproduce their kind? For surely the gods would not grant machines\n to such creatures. And indeed, if they had Maternite Machines, why then\n we would yet have these animals among us.\"\n\n\n \"And how, then, did these animals reproduce?\" I asked.", "I voiced my assent, and the entire Conclave adjourned to the fields.\nIt was nearly dark when we walked home, Rocsates and I, arm in arm. It\n had been a horrible day. The inhuman indignity, the cries—\n\n\n We tarried before my home, leaned on the stone, stared at the first\n stars.\n\n\n \"They seemed finally to accomplish all the book described,\" I muttered.\n\n\n \"They may indeed have succeeded,\" Rocsates replied. \"There is mentioned\n a time lapse which is necessary. The child does not appear immediately.\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter,\" I said disconsolately. \"Who could ask them to go\n through such an ordeal again?\"\n\n\n And then I looked down to earth again, and saw them standing before me.\n Melia cast her eyes down, and would not raise them. Xeon held his arm\n about her shoulders, as if to protect her, but I know not from whom.", "Order was lost among the Conclave as each man turned to speak to his\n neighbor, and for some time I could not restore order. I realized that\n something had to be done to save Rocsates before the outrage of the\n assembled overwhelmed him.\n\n\n \"It seems,\" I shouted, \"that there is a flaw in your logic.\" For if\n such there was, I was hopeful of dismissing the entire affair with\n no harm done. \"For if people reproduced too often, why then this\n reproduction must have been a pleasant thing to do; otherwise they\n would not have done so to excess. And if it was a pleasant thing to do,\n where is the necessity for the machines, and why were they created?\"\n\n\n Rocsates seemed perplexed by this problem, whereupon Xeon, who together\n with Melia were at the Conclave without permission, shouted, \"Perhaps\n the process of reproduction was of\nsuch\na pleasure that the Conclave\n ruled it to be a sin? And therefore the machines were necessary!\"", "\"Sias,\" he said. Then stopped, embarrassed.\n\n\n I waited, and Rocsates was silent, and he continued.\n\n\n \"Sias, we come to tell.... We will....\" He raised his eyes to mine and\n said manfully, \"We shall try again.\"\n\n\n I am afraid that tears came to my eyes. Such sacrifice—\n\n\n \"We beg one favor,\" Xeon went on. \"We are agreed that—Well, we should\n like to be left alone, in private, to try.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" I replied. Anything they might want they could have. My\n relief and gratitude must have showed, for Xeon took a deep breath and\n spoke again.\n\n\n \"We do not deserve praise, Sias,\" he said. \"The truth is, we ... we\n sort of enjoy it.\"\n\n\n I watched them turn and wander off together under the stars.", "Gods, this Rocsates! The books, as well he knows, are so ancient,\n and so delicate, that they are kept in an air-tight tomb; lest,\n being handled, they be destroyed and all knowledge within them lost.\n Therefore, they have not been read in the known history of our race.\n And Rocsates has been anxious for an excuse—\n\n\n \"Sias,\" he went on, \"if there exists such knowledge as I seek, is it\n not indeed lost to the memory of Man? And if so, are not the books the\n only place where it may be found?\"", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI was wandering among the tall grass of the slopes, listening to the\n soft whistling of the wind; allowing the grass to caress my toga and\n thighs. It was a day soft and clear; a day accepted by the young,\n cherished by we old. Across the gently undulating hills stood the\n magnificent Melopolis, encradling the Oracle of Delni. I do not, of\n course, believe in the gods per se; still there is a grandeur in the\n very stones that transcends their human sculptors, and it is no wonder\n to me that many cling tenaciously, and ignorantly, to the old religion.\n Cling to the gods of old, who drew man upward from wherever he began.\n In whose names Man killed and plundered, while struggling up. In whose\n names Man finally left this earth, to seek his cousins among the stars.", "\"I would not bore you,\" he said, \"with details of which only the gods\n are sure. Know, then, that once granted a few cells of Prelife, it is\n an easy matter for the Maternite Machine to add more and more; thus\n assuring us, as has always been, a continuous source of Prelife to be\n born by the Generating Machine as children. The machines bear the exact\n number of children each year to balance the number of us whom the gods\n claim. Such it has always been from time immemorial.\"\n\n\n A murmur of assent and approval of these virtuous words whispered\n around the Hall.\n\n\n \"But now,\" he continued, however, with less assurance and indeed with\n even a stutter here and there, \"an unprecedented situation has arisen.\n Indeed, I might call it an emergency. For the M-Maternite Machine has\n actually failed.\"", "\"That is for the priests to say, not I,\" I replied. In moments of\n emergency, it is wise to speak with caution. That is, I suppose so. I\n have never before been in a real emergency.\nA man my age does not hurry in the heat of the midday sun—maddugs\n nenglishmin go out in the midday sun, as the ancients say, although I\n often wonder why—but Xeon and Melia ran all the way down to the city.\n They are of an age to enter manhood, and have all the energy such young\n men do.\n\n\n As we entered the city, we were surrounded by confusion and\n consternation. And can the simple people be blamed? They were aware\n that they stood in the midst of an unprecedented happening; indeed, an\n emergency. For a machine had failed!", "Cries of \"Treason\" sprang up, and I fear it might have gone hard for\n the priest had I not been able to insure order.\n\n\n \"That is not the worst,\" he cried, as if in defiance. \"All the Prelife\n has been dried up. It will not function. There is no more. And there\n will be no more children!\"\n\n\n At this I feared the Conclave was about to riot. It is at such times\n that I most revere the wisdom of the ancients, who decreed seventy\n years the minimum age for a member of the Conclave. They shouted and\n began to beat their fists, but for how long can a man of seventy years\n roar like a youngster? They quieted, breathing heavily, and I asked,\n\n\n \"Is there no way, then, to produce more Prelife in order that the\n machines may produce more children for us?", "\"Are not riddles often the beginning of knowledge?\" he asked, in that\n irritating dumber-than-thou attitude of his. \"Must there not, long ago,\n have been a source of Prelife: a source now forgotten? And may it not\n even now—should we discover it—be available to us? I am reminded of\n the story of the animals of old—\"\n\n\n \"I fear your mind is wandering, Rocsates,\" I was forced to interrupt.\n \"I know well the legend of the animals, but what does it have to\n do—\" The heads of the Conclave were turning to me, quizzically. I\n hastened to explain the legend of the animals. \"It is said that many\n thousands of years ago, time without reckoning, there existed on the\n earth creatures who were alive like us, and yet not like us. It is said\n they had four legs or more, and no arms, were covered with hair, and\n although not mute, they could not speak.\"" ], [ "\"In all honor, could Xeon allow Melia to surpass him in courage? It\n shall be he,\" Rocsates said. And with his word the two entered the Hall\n and stood, noble and naked.\n\n\n Rocsates gestured to the table, and Melia started to climb upon it,\n but Xeon stepped forward.\n\n\n \"My lords,\" he said, \"would not better results be obtained were we to\n conduct the experiment in the fields before the Oracle of Delni, that\n the gods may help us?\"\n\n\n His glance reached into my soul, and I was proud of Xeon. A true\n friend, he thought even now of the comfort of Melia. The marble table\n was indeed hard, and from Rocsates' description it seemed that Melia's\n position would be as uncomfortable as it would be undignified. The soft\n fields might be some slight help.", "But of course there were no cousins. There was nothing. And Man\n returned, and settled down to live. Saddened, but resigned and content\n to live in peace with his knowledge and his power. Gone now are all the\n ancient evils, wars, emergencies.\n\n\n \"Sias! Sias—\" And they were upon me.\n\n\n That is, Xeon was upon me. But I knew that where Xeon is, Melia must\n soon appear. And indeed it was but a moment before Melia slipped\n through the high grass to stand at his side. Their youthful voices were\n babbling in excitement.\n\n\n Melia was a She, with the swelling breasts that were, so tradition\n states, quite prevalent among members of the race long ago, and are\n seldom seen today. Indeed, Melia was on this account made the butt of\n many jokes and, I fear, would have had a lonely life of it had it not\n been for the friendship of Xeon.", "I voiced my assent, and the entire Conclave adjourned to the fields.\nIt was nearly dark when we walked home, Rocsates and I, arm in arm. It\n had been a horrible day. The inhuman indignity, the cries—\n\n\n We tarried before my home, leaned on the stone, stared at the first\n stars.\n\n\n \"They seemed finally to accomplish all the book described,\" I muttered.\n\n\n \"They may indeed have succeeded,\" Rocsates replied. \"There is mentioned\n a time lapse which is necessary. The child does not appear immediately.\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter,\" I said disconsolately. \"Who could ask them to go\n through such an ordeal again?\"\n\n\n And then I looked down to earth again, and saw them standing before me.\n Melia cast her eyes down, and would not raise them. Xeon held his arm\n about her shoulders, as if to protect her, but I know not from whom.", "\"Sias,\" he said. Then stopped, embarrassed.\n\n\n I waited, and Rocsates was silent, and he continued.\n\n\n \"Sias, we come to tell.... We will....\" He raised his eyes to mine and\n said manfully, \"We shall try again.\"\n\n\n I am afraid that tears came to my eyes. Such sacrifice—\n\n\n \"We beg one favor,\" Xeon went on. \"We are agreed that—Well, we should\n like to be left alone, in private, to try.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" I replied. Anything they might want they could have. My\n relief and gratitude must have showed, for Xeon took a deep breath and\n spoke again.\n\n\n \"We do not deserve praise, Sias,\" he said. \"The truth is, we ... we\n sort of enjoy it.\"\n\n\n I watched them turn and wander off together under the stars.", "\"I do not think so,\" Rocsates replied after a while. \"What to us is\n an eon, to evolution is but an instant. And then the swelling of the\n breasts, I believe, proves that there is still reproductive activity in\n some, at least, of the She's.\"\n\n\n We sat shaking our heads, bowed under terrible reality.\n\n\n \"Then we must experiment,\" I said. \"But whom could we ask to submit to\n such horror?\"\n\n\n \"I have already taken the liberty of asking for volunteers,\" Rocsates\n replied. \"The She, of course, must be one with the swelling of the\n breasts. Melia has volunteered, on condition that Xeon be released from\n dungeon. Are there any objections?\"\nThere were none, of course. Who would refuse a boon to one who would\n undergo such an ordeal for the City?\n\n\n \"And who will be the partner?\" I asked.", "Not in the memory of the eldest among us has a machine failed. They\n were created so long ago, indeed, that the ignorant believe them\n to have been constructed by the gods themselves. And never, so far\n as I know, has one failed. Small wonder that the watcher had been\n negligent. Indeed, the watcher is more a tradition than a necessity.\n Besides, had he been sober, he would not have known what to do. For who\n knows the mysterious workings of the machines?\nI hastened to the City Hall and found the Conclave assembled, waiting\n for me to bring them to order. Xeon and Melia stopped as I mounted the\n steps, but I smiled and motioned them in. They accompanied me past\n the marble pillars into the cool recesses of the Hall, then seated\n themselves on the floor as I took my place by the great table.", "\"That is for the priests to say, not I,\" I replied. In moments of\n emergency, it is wise to speak with caution. That is, I suppose so. I\n have never before been in a real emergency.\nA man my age does not hurry in the heat of the midday sun—maddugs\n nenglishmin go out in the midday sun, as the ancients say, although I\n often wonder why—but Xeon and Melia ran all the way down to the city.\n They are of an age to enter manhood, and have all the energy such young\n men do.\n\n\n As we entered the city, we were surrounded by confusion and\n consternation. And can the simple people be blamed? They were aware\n that they stood in the midst of an unprecedented happening; indeed, an\n emergency. For a machine had failed!", "Order was lost among the Conclave as each man turned to speak to his\n neighbor, and for some time I could not restore order. I realized that\n something had to be done to save Rocsates before the outrage of the\n assembled overwhelmed him.\n\n\n \"It seems,\" I shouted, \"that there is a flaw in your logic.\" For if\n such there was, I was hopeful of dismissing the entire affair with\n no harm done. \"For if people reproduced too often, why then this\n reproduction must have been a pleasant thing to do; otherwise they\n would not have done so to excess. And if it was a pleasant thing to do,\n where is the necessity for the machines, and why were they created?\"\n\n\n Rocsates seemed perplexed by this problem, whereupon Xeon, who together\n with Melia were at the Conclave without permission, shouted, \"Perhaps\n the process of reproduction was of\nsuch\na pleasure that the Conclave\n ruled it to be a sin? And therefore the machines were necessary!\"", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI was wandering among the tall grass of the slopes, listening to the\n soft whistling of the wind; allowing the grass to caress my toga and\n thighs. It was a day soft and clear; a day accepted by the young,\n cherished by we old. Across the gently undulating hills stood the\n magnificent Melopolis, encradling the Oracle of Delni. I do not, of\n course, believe in the gods per se; still there is a grandeur in the\n very stones that transcends their human sculptors, and it is no wonder\n to me that many cling tenaciously, and ignorantly, to the old religion.\n Cling to the gods of old, who drew man upward from wherever he began.\n In whose names Man killed and plundered, while struggling up. In whose\n names Man finally left this earth, to seek his cousins among the stars.", "At this impudence the Conclave dissolved in an uproar, and I was beyond\n power to restrain them from placing Xeon under arrest. Privately,\n however, I had to admit that his supposition was a possibility, and\n thus I authorized Rocsates to continue his search.\nNow indeed I was sorely worried concerning Xeon, for he must languish\n in the dungeon until the Conclave is satisfied to release him, and this\n they cannot do until they meet again.\n\n\n I needed a sufficient excuse to call a meeting of the Conclave,\n whereupon I might argue for the lad. When I heard that Rocsates again\n desired audience, I immediately proclaimed a meeting of the Conclave\n to be held the next day at dawn, and so that night slept well.", "\"How, indeed? And is there not a legend—admitted only a legend—that\n says there was a time before the machines, and before the Maternite\n Machine, and that at such a time both the animals and Men reproduced\n from within their own bodies?\"\n\n\n At this two members of the Conclave fell immediately into a faint, and\n I would gladly have joined them. I hoped that the youngsters, Xeon\n and Melia, had not heard, but as I turned they were listening most\n attentively to Rocsates, who, amid cries of \"Heresy\" and \"Treason\",\n went on:\n\n\n \"I should like to ask the Conclave for permission to search the ancient\n records, in the hope of finding some such knowledge that would prove or\n disprove my words.\"\n\n\n \"You wish to search the films—\" I began.\n\n\n \"Not the films, Sias, but the books.\"", "The Conclave had come to order and formalities had been initiated when\n Rocsates entered and took his place. He clutched under one shoulder\n a thin, rectangular object, but that is not what impressed me. His\n appearance—he looked as if he had not slept of late, nor eaten either.\n His eyes were sunken, and his features had doubled in age. He was bent\n and tired. But it was his eyes. There was a horror in them.\n\n\n I was shocked, and could not help staring at him. And then the\n formalities were over. I intended to speak for Xeon, but Rocsates was\n on his feet and I gave way.", "\"I have indeed discovered the secret of reproduction,\" he began. \"After\n many searchings, I came upon this—\" and he held forth the object he\n had carried in. \"It is a book. It is entitled, 'Living a Normal Sex\n Life.' It seems to be some sort of a do-it-yourself pamphlet.\" He\n dropped the book on the table and rubbed his hands over his eyes.", "There was something in the man's behavior that commanded everyone's\n attention. He went on, speaking low. \"The word 'Sex' is not defined,\n but it seems to mean....\" His words trailed off. He was obviously\n unsure of how to continue. \"I had better start at the beginning, I\n suppose,\" he said. \"You see, once upon a time there were birds and\n bees....\"\nWhen he finished the Conclave sat in horrified silence. His words,\n with all their horror, had the ring of truth and there were no cries of\n 'Heresy'. There was only stunned disbelief and the beginnings of nausea.\n\n\n It is the mark of honor that a leader shall carry on when others fear\n to move. I cleared my throat.\n\n\n \"Shall not these organs which you mention have atrophied by now? With\n no use throughout all these generations, will they not have evolved\n into nothingness?\"", "Well, you know how these things are. At such a time, many men feel\n impelled to make speeches, and one must not be disrespectful. Prayers\n and supplications were offered to the gods, priests were sent to\n sacrifice, and finally, as the light of the sun was falling between the\n pillars, the High Priest of the Maternite Machine was heard.\n\n\n He rambled through the customary opening remarks and then, continually\n smoothing his white beard—of which he is excessively proud—approached\n the crux of the matter and the Conclave finally heard the facts it had\n assembled to hear. By this time, unfortunately, many of the Conclave\n had departed for home and supper. Yet perhaps it is for the best, for\n those left were the most earnest and intelligent.", "Gods, this Rocsates! The books, as well he knows, are so ancient,\n and so delicate, that they are kept in an air-tight tomb; lest,\n being handled, they be destroyed and all knowledge within them lost.\n Therefore, they have not been read in the known history of our race.\n And Rocsates has been anxious for an excuse—\n\n\n \"Sias,\" he went on, \"if there exists such knowledge as I seek, is it\n not indeed lost to the memory of Man? And if so, are not the books the\n only place where it may be found?\"", "\"Sias,\" they were saying, \"the Maternite's gone.\"\n\n\n I stared in amazement.\n\n\n \"Gone? It cannot be gone. It has always been—\"\n\n\n \"Oh my gods!\" Xeon shouted. \"I tell you it's gone! Will you—\"\n\n\n Melia interrupted him quietly. \"Xeon, will you lose all respect for\n the Elder?\" Then turned to me, and said calmly, \"The watcher at the\n Maternite Machine, it appears, has been drunk. The heat rose above the\n warning, continued to rise, and then—poof. Everything has evaporated\n in Maternite. All the Prelife is gone.\"\n\n\n \"All of it?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"There is nothing left,\" Melia insisted. \"Can more be made? And if not,\n what will happen with no more children?\"", "\"That there was indeed a time before the machines, in fact the books\n were created in that time, for not one of them mentions the machines.\n Then reproduction was carried on by individuals, without help of the\n then nonexistent machines. The She's are not wanderers from another\n land, but they have lived with us for all time; they are not another\n race, but we are all types of one race. And the fact of reproduction is\n somehow intimately related to the physical distinctions of the She's!\"\n\n\n These last sentences were shouted to be heard above the roar of the\n crowd. Yet when Rocsates stopped, so also did the noise, so shocked and\n amazed at his words were they. And I confess, myself also.\n\n\n \"In fact,\" Rocsates added, sitting down, \"this process of reproduction\n seems to have been so simple that there was once a problem of\n over-population.\"", "\"Some among you She's have the swelling of the breasts. And does there\n exist no reason for this? Was there not, perhaps in ancient times, a\n cause for this? Do you not wonder, She's, whence you come and for what\n reason?\"\n\n\n \"Rocsates,\" I interrupted. \"All this is fascinating, of course. But if\n you could be quick—\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" he replied. \"In the course of my reading I have read\n many books, and while they are all vague on the subject, this I have\n discovered:", "\"Are not riddles often the beginning of knowledge?\" he asked, in that\n irritating dumber-than-thou attitude of his. \"Must there not, long ago,\n have been a source of Prelife: a source now forgotten? And may it not\n even now—should we discover it—be available to us? I am reminded of\n the story of the animals of old—\"\n\n\n \"I fear your mind is wandering, Rocsates,\" I was forced to interrupt.\n \"I know well the legend of the animals, but what does it have to\n do—\" The heads of the Conclave were turning to me, quizzically. I\n hastened to explain the legend of the animals. \"It is said that many\n thousands of years ago, time without reckoning, there existed on the\n earth creatures who were alive like us, and yet not like us. It is said\n they had four legs or more, and no arms, were covered with hair, and\n although not mute, they could not speak.\"" ], [ "\"In all honor, could Xeon allow Melia to surpass him in courage? It\n shall be he,\" Rocsates said. And with his word the two entered the Hall\n and stood, noble and naked.\n\n\n Rocsates gestured to the table, and Melia started to climb upon it,\n but Xeon stepped forward.\n\n\n \"My lords,\" he said, \"would not better results be obtained were we to\n conduct the experiment in the fields before the Oracle of Delni, that\n the gods may help us?\"\n\n\n His glance reached into my soul, and I was proud of Xeon. A true\n friend, he thought even now of the comfort of Melia. The marble table\n was indeed hard, and from Rocsates' description it seemed that Melia's\n position would be as uncomfortable as it would be undignified. The soft\n fields might be some slight help.", "At this impudence the Conclave dissolved in an uproar, and I was beyond\n power to restrain them from placing Xeon under arrest. Privately,\n however, I had to admit that his supposition was a possibility, and\n thus I authorized Rocsates to continue his search.\nNow indeed I was sorely worried concerning Xeon, for he must languish\n in the dungeon until the Conclave is satisfied to release him, and this\n they cannot do until they meet again.\n\n\n I needed a sufficient excuse to call a meeting of the Conclave,\n whereupon I might argue for the lad. When I heard that Rocsates again\n desired audience, I immediately proclaimed a meeting of the Conclave\n to be held the next day at dawn, and so that night slept well.", "\"That is for the priests to say, not I,\" I replied. In moments of\n emergency, it is wise to speak with caution. That is, I suppose so. I\n have never before been in a real emergency.\nA man my age does not hurry in the heat of the midday sun—maddugs\n nenglishmin go out in the midday sun, as the ancients say, although I\n often wonder why—but Xeon and Melia ran all the way down to the city.\n They are of an age to enter manhood, and have all the energy such young\n men do.\n\n\n As we entered the city, we were surrounded by confusion and\n consternation. And can the simple people be blamed? They were aware\n that they stood in the midst of an unprecedented happening; indeed, an\n emergency. For a machine had failed!", "Gods, this Rocsates! The books, as well he knows, are so ancient,\n and so delicate, that they are kept in an air-tight tomb; lest,\n being handled, they be destroyed and all knowledge within them lost.\n Therefore, they have not been read in the known history of our race.\n And Rocsates has been anxious for an excuse—\n\n\n \"Sias,\" he went on, \"if there exists such knowledge as I seek, is it\n not indeed lost to the memory of Man? And if so, are not the books the\n only place where it may be found?\"", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI was wandering among the tall grass of the slopes, listening to the\n soft whistling of the wind; allowing the grass to caress my toga and\n thighs. It was a day soft and clear; a day accepted by the young,\n cherished by we old. Across the gently undulating hills stood the\n magnificent Melopolis, encradling the Oracle of Delni. I do not, of\n course, believe in the gods per se; still there is a grandeur in the\n very stones that transcends their human sculptors, and it is no wonder\n to me that many cling tenaciously, and ignorantly, to the old religion.\n Cling to the gods of old, who drew man upward from wherever he began.\n In whose names Man killed and plundered, while struggling up. In whose\n names Man finally left this earth, to seek his cousins among the stars.", "Not in the memory of the eldest among us has a machine failed. They\n were created so long ago, indeed, that the ignorant believe them\n to have been constructed by the gods themselves. And never, so far\n as I know, has one failed. Small wonder that the watcher had been\n negligent. Indeed, the watcher is more a tradition than a necessity.\n Besides, had he been sober, he would not have known what to do. For who\n knows the mysterious workings of the machines?\nI hastened to the City Hall and found the Conclave assembled, waiting\n for me to bring them to order. Xeon and Melia stopped as I mounted the\n steps, but I smiled and motioned them in. They accompanied me past\n the marble pillars into the cool recesses of the Hall, then seated\n themselves on the floor as I took my place by the great table.", "Well, you know how these things are. At such a time, many men feel\n impelled to make speeches, and one must not be disrespectful. Prayers\n and supplications were offered to the gods, priests were sent to\n sacrifice, and finally, as the light of the sun was falling between the\n pillars, the High Priest of the Maternite Machine was heard.\n\n\n He rambled through the customary opening remarks and then, continually\n smoothing his white beard—of which he is excessively proud—approached\n the crux of the matter and the Conclave finally heard the facts it had\n assembled to hear. By this time, unfortunately, many of the Conclave\n had departed for home and supper. Yet perhaps it is for the best, for\n those left were the most earnest and intelligent.", "I voiced my assent, and the entire Conclave adjourned to the fields.\nIt was nearly dark when we walked home, Rocsates and I, arm in arm. It\n had been a horrible day. The inhuman indignity, the cries—\n\n\n We tarried before my home, leaned on the stone, stared at the first\n stars.\n\n\n \"They seemed finally to accomplish all the book described,\" I muttered.\n\n\n \"They may indeed have succeeded,\" Rocsates replied. \"There is mentioned\n a time lapse which is necessary. The child does not appear immediately.\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter,\" I said disconsolately. \"Who could ask them to go\n through such an ordeal again?\"\n\n\n And then I looked down to earth again, and saw them standing before me.\n Melia cast her eyes down, and would not raise them. Xeon held his arm\n about her shoulders, as if to protect her, but I know not from whom.", "The Conclave had come to order and formalities had been initiated when\n Rocsates entered and took his place. He clutched under one shoulder\n a thin, rectangular object, but that is not what impressed me. His\n appearance—he looked as if he had not slept of late, nor eaten either.\n His eyes were sunken, and his features had doubled in age. He was bent\n and tired. But it was his eyes. There was a horror in them.\n\n\n I was shocked, and could not help staring at him. And then the\n formalities were over. I intended to speak for Xeon, but Rocsates was\n on his feet and I gave way.", "But of course there were no cousins. There was nothing. And Man\n returned, and settled down to live. Saddened, but resigned and content\n to live in peace with his knowledge and his power. Gone now are all the\n ancient evils, wars, emergencies.\n\n\n \"Sias! Sias—\" And they were upon me.\n\n\n That is, Xeon was upon me. But I knew that where Xeon is, Melia must\n soon appear. And indeed it was but a moment before Melia slipped\n through the high grass to stand at his side. Their youthful voices were\n babbling in excitement.\n\n\n Melia was a She, with the swelling breasts that were, so tradition\n states, quite prevalent among members of the race long ago, and are\n seldom seen today. Indeed, Melia was on this account made the butt of\n many jokes and, I fear, would have had a lonely life of it had it not\n been for the friendship of Xeon.", "Rocsates, it is suspected, will never ask a question unless he knows\n the answer beforehand. And so I acquiesced, and agreed, and granted\n permission. And with much misgiving and foreboding of evil, the\n Conclave adjourned.\nSeveral weeks elapsed before Rocsates requested that the Conclave meet.\n I called the meeting at dawn and so it was yet early in the afternoon\n when formalities were concluded and Rocsates granted leave to speak.\n\n\n \"Some of those among you are She's,\" he began. \"And you know you are\n different from the rest of us. To the advantage, your skin is fairer\n and your features more often handsomer than ours. To the disadvantage,\n your excretory system is not so mechanically dextrous as ours. And, you\n may say, why should this not be so? There is, indeed, no reason why we\n should all be identical. Perforce you have the advantage, perforce we\n do. Yet there is one other distinction.", "Order was lost among the Conclave as each man turned to speak to his\n neighbor, and for some time I could not restore order. I realized that\n something had to be done to save Rocsates before the outrage of the\n assembled overwhelmed him.\n\n\n \"It seems,\" I shouted, \"that there is a flaw in your logic.\" For if\n such there was, I was hopeful of dismissing the entire affair with\n no harm done. \"For if people reproduced too often, why then this\n reproduction must have been a pleasant thing to do; otherwise they\n would not have done so to excess. And if it was a pleasant thing to do,\n where is the necessity for the machines, and why were they created?\"\n\n\n Rocsates seemed perplexed by this problem, whereupon Xeon, who together\n with Melia were at the Conclave without permission, shouted, \"Perhaps\n the process of reproduction was of\nsuch\na pleasure that the Conclave\n ruled it to be a sin? And therefore the machines were necessary!\"", "\"How, indeed? And is there not a legend—admitted only a legend—that\n says there was a time before the machines, and before the Maternite\n Machine, and that at such a time both the animals and Men reproduced\n from within their own bodies?\"\n\n\n At this two members of the Conclave fell immediately into a faint, and\n I would gladly have joined them. I hoped that the youngsters, Xeon\n and Melia, had not heard, but as I turned they were listening most\n attentively to Rocsates, who, amid cries of \"Heresy\" and \"Treason\",\n went on:\n\n\n \"I should like to ask the Conclave for permission to search the ancient\n records, in the hope of finding some such knowledge that would prove or\n disprove my words.\"\n\n\n \"You wish to search the films—\" I began.\n\n\n \"Not the films, Sias, but the books.\"", "\"Sias,\" he said. Then stopped, embarrassed.\n\n\n I waited, and Rocsates was silent, and he continued.\n\n\n \"Sias, we come to tell.... We will....\" He raised his eyes to mine and\n said manfully, \"We shall try again.\"\n\n\n I am afraid that tears came to my eyes. Such sacrifice—\n\n\n \"We beg one favor,\" Xeon went on. \"We are agreed that—Well, we should\n like to be left alone, in private, to try.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" I replied. Anything they might want they could have. My\n relief and gratitude must have showed, for Xeon took a deep breath and\n spoke again.\n\n\n \"We do not deserve praise, Sias,\" he said. \"The truth is, we ... we\n sort of enjoy it.\"\n\n\n I watched them turn and wander off together under the stars.", "\"Are not riddles often the beginning of knowledge?\" he asked, in that\n irritating dumber-than-thou attitude of his. \"Must there not, long ago,\n have been a source of Prelife: a source now forgotten? And may it not\n even now—should we discover it—be available to us? I am reminded of\n the story of the animals of old—\"\n\n\n \"I fear your mind is wandering, Rocsates,\" I was forced to interrupt.\n \"I know well the legend of the animals, but what does it have to\n do—\" The heads of the Conclave were turning to me, quizzically. I\n hastened to explain the legend of the animals. \"It is said that many\n thousands of years ago, time without reckoning, there existed on the\n earth creatures who were alive like us, and yet not like us. It is said\n they had four legs or more, and no arms, were covered with hair, and\n although not mute, they could not speak.\"", "\"I do not think so,\" Rocsates replied after a while. \"What to us is\n an eon, to evolution is but an instant. And then the swelling of the\n breasts, I believe, proves that there is still reproductive activity in\n some, at least, of the She's.\"\n\n\n We sat shaking our heads, bowed under terrible reality.\n\n\n \"Then we must experiment,\" I said. \"But whom could we ask to submit to\n such horror?\"\n\n\n \"I have already taken the liberty of asking for volunteers,\" Rocsates\n replied. \"The She, of course, must be one with the swelling of the\n breasts. Melia has volunteered, on condition that Xeon be released from\n dungeon. Are there any objections?\"\nThere were none, of course. Who would refuse a boon to one who would\n undergo such an ordeal for the City?\n\n\n \"And who will be the partner?\" I asked.", "\"As I have said,\" he replied, \"give the machines but a bit of Prelife\n and they will produce more. But take away that least bit, and they are\n helpless.\"\n\n\n Such heresy could have brought a sad end to the priest had not the\n Conclave been so exhausted by the events of the day. We leaned back to\n think.\n\n\n Rocsates leaned forward and asked, \"Must there not—must there not have\n been a beginning to Prelife? For the Machine, it seems, cannot make it;\n and yet it came from somewhere.\"\n\n\n \"Riddles are not called for,\" I answered severely.", "There was something in the man's behavior that commanded everyone's\n attention. He went on, speaking low. \"The word 'Sex' is not defined,\n but it seems to mean....\" His words trailed off. He was obviously\n unsure of how to continue. \"I had better start at the beginning, I\n suppose,\" he said. \"You see, once upon a time there were birds and\n bees....\"\nWhen he finished the Conclave sat in horrified silence. His words,\n with all their horror, had the ring of truth and there were no cries of\n 'Heresy'. There was only stunned disbelief and the beginnings of nausea.\n\n\n It is the mark of honor that a leader shall carry on when others fear\n to move. I cleared my throat.\n\n\n \"Shall not these organs which you mention have atrophied by now? With\n no use throughout all these generations, will they not have evolved\n into nothingness?\"", "\"Some among you She's have the swelling of the breasts. And does there\n exist no reason for this? Was there not, perhaps in ancient times, a\n cause for this? Do you not wonder, She's, whence you come and for what\n reason?\"\n\n\n \"Rocsates,\" I interrupted. \"All this is fascinating, of course. But if\n you could be quick—\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" he replied. \"In the course of my reading I have read\n many books, and while they are all vague on the subject, this I have\n discovered:", "\"I would not bore you,\" he said, \"with details of which only the gods\n are sure. Know, then, that once granted a few cells of Prelife, it is\n an easy matter for the Maternite Machine to add more and more; thus\n assuring us, as has always been, a continuous source of Prelife to be\n born by the Generating Machine as children. The machines bear the exact\n number of children each year to balance the number of us whom the gods\n claim. Such it has always been from time immemorial.\"\n\n\n A murmur of assent and approval of these virtuous words whispered\n around the Hall.\n\n\n \"But now,\" he continued, however, with less assurance and indeed with\n even a stutter here and there, \"an unprecedented situation has arisen.\n Indeed, I might call it an emergency. For the M-Maternite Machine has\n actually failed.\"" ], [ "At this impudence the Conclave dissolved in an uproar, and I was beyond\n power to restrain them from placing Xeon under arrest. Privately,\n however, I had to admit that his supposition was a possibility, and\n thus I authorized Rocsates to continue his search.\nNow indeed I was sorely worried concerning Xeon, for he must languish\n in the dungeon until the Conclave is satisfied to release him, and this\n they cannot do until they meet again.\n\n\n I needed a sufficient excuse to call a meeting of the Conclave,\n whereupon I might argue for the lad. When I heard that Rocsates again\n desired audience, I immediately proclaimed a meeting of the Conclave\n to be held the next day at dawn, and so that night slept well.", "\"That is for the priests to say, not I,\" I replied. In moments of\n emergency, it is wise to speak with caution. That is, I suppose so. I\n have never before been in a real emergency.\nA man my age does not hurry in the heat of the midday sun—maddugs\n nenglishmin go out in the midday sun, as the ancients say, although I\n often wonder why—but Xeon and Melia ran all the way down to the city.\n They are of an age to enter manhood, and have all the energy such young\n men do.\n\n\n As we entered the city, we were surrounded by confusion and\n consternation. And can the simple people be blamed? They were aware\n that they stood in the midst of an unprecedented happening; indeed, an\n emergency. For a machine had failed!", "The Conclave had come to order and formalities had been initiated when\n Rocsates entered and took his place. He clutched under one shoulder\n a thin, rectangular object, but that is not what impressed me. His\n appearance—he looked as if he had not slept of late, nor eaten either.\n His eyes were sunken, and his features had doubled in age. He was bent\n and tired. But it was his eyes. There was a horror in them.\n\n\n I was shocked, and could not help staring at him. And then the\n formalities were over. I intended to speak for Xeon, but Rocsates was\n on his feet and I gave way.", "\"In all honor, could Xeon allow Melia to surpass him in courage? It\n shall be he,\" Rocsates said. And with his word the two entered the Hall\n and stood, noble and naked.\n\n\n Rocsates gestured to the table, and Melia started to climb upon it,\n but Xeon stepped forward.\n\n\n \"My lords,\" he said, \"would not better results be obtained were we to\n conduct the experiment in the fields before the Oracle of Delni, that\n the gods may help us?\"\n\n\n His glance reached into my soul, and I was proud of Xeon. A true\n friend, he thought even now of the comfort of Melia. The marble table\n was indeed hard, and from Rocsates' description it seemed that Melia's\n position would be as uncomfortable as it would be undignified. The soft\n fields might be some slight help.", "Not in the memory of the eldest among us has a machine failed. They\n were created so long ago, indeed, that the ignorant believe them\n to have been constructed by the gods themselves. And never, so far\n as I know, has one failed. Small wonder that the watcher had been\n negligent. Indeed, the watcher is more a tradition than a necessity.\n Besides, had he been sober, he would not have known what to do. For who\n knows the mysterious workings of the machines?\nI hastened to the City Hall and found the Conclave assembled, waiting\n for me to bring them to order. Xeon and Melia stopped as I mounted the\n steps, but I smiled and motioned them in. They accompanied me past\n the marble pillars into the cool recesses of the Hall, then seated\n themselves on the floor as I took my place by the great table.", "Order was lost among the Conclave as each man turned to speak to his\n neighbor, and for some time I could not restore order. I realized that\n something had to be done to save Rocsates before the outrage of the\n assembled overwhelmed him.\n\n\n \"It seems,\" I shouted, \"that there is a flaw in your logic.\" For if\n such there was, I was hopeful of dismissing the entire affair with\n no harm done. \"For if people reproduced too often, why then this\n reproduction must have been a pleasant thing to do; otherwise they\n would not have done so to excess. And if it was a pleasant thing to do,\n where is the necessity for the machines, and why were they created?\"\n\n\n Rocsates seemed perplexed by this problem, whereupon Xeon, who together\n with Melia were at the Conclave without permission, shouted, \"Perhaps\n the process of reproduction was of\nsuch\na pleasure that the Conclave\n ruled it to be a sin? And therefore the machines were necessary!\"", "But of course there were no cousins. There was nothing. And Man\n returned, and settled down to live. Saddened, but resigned and content\n to live in peace with his knowledge and his power. Gone now are all the\n ancient evils, wars, emergencies.\n\n\n \"Sias! Sias—\" And they were upon me.\n\n\n That is, Xeon was upon me. But I knew that where Xeon is, Melia must\n soon appear. And indeed it was but a moment before Melia slipped\n through the high grass to stand at his side. Their youthful voices were\n babbling in excitement.\n\n\n Melia was a She, with the swelling breasts that were, so tradition\n states, quite prevalent among members of the race long ago, and are\n seldom seen today. Indeed, Melia was on this account made the butt of\n many jokes and, I fear, would have had a lonely life of it had it not\n been for the friendship of Xeon.", "Well, you know how these things are. At such a time, many men feel\n impelled to make speeches, and one must not be disrespectful. Prayers\n and supplications were offered to the gods, priests were sent to\n sacrifice, and finally, as the light of the sun was falling between the\n pillars, the High Priest of the Maternite Machine was heard.\n\n\n He rambled through the customary opening remarks and then, continually\n smoothing his white beard—of which he is excessively proud—approached\n the crux of the matter and the Conclave finally heard the facts it had\n assembled to hear. By this time, unfortunately, many of the Conclave\n had departed for home and supper. Yet perhaps it is for the best, for\n those left were the most earnest and intelligent.", "\"Sias,\" he said. Then stopped, embarrassed.\n\n\n I waited, and Rocsates was silent, and he continued.\n\n\n \"Sias, we come to tell.... We will....\" He raised his eyes to mine and\n said manfully, \"We shall try again.\"\n\n\n I am afraid that tears came to my eyes. Such sacrifice—\n\n\n \"We beg one favor,\" Xeon went on. \"We are agreed that—Well, we should\n like to be left alone, in private, to try.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" I replied. Anything they might want they could have. My\n relief and gratitude must have showed, for Xeon took a deep breath and\n spoke again.\n\n\n \"We do not deserve praise, Sias,\" he said. \"The truth is, we ... we\n sort of enjoy it.\"\n\n\n I watched them turn and wander off together under the stars.", "Gods, this Rocsates! The books, as well he knows, are so ancient,\n and so delicate, that they are kept in an air-tight tomb; lest,\n being handled, they be destroyed and all knowledge within them lost.\n Therefore, they have not been read in the known history of our race.\n And Rocsates has been anxious for an excuse—\n\n\n \"Sias,\" he went on, \"if there exists such knowledge as I seek, is it\n not indeed lost to the memory of Man? And if so, are not the books the\n only place where it may be found?\"", "There was something in the man's behavior that commanded everyone's\n attention. He went on, speaking low. \"The word 'Sex' is not defined,\n but it seems to mean....\" His words trailed off. He was obviously\n unsure of how to continue. \"I had better start at the beginning, I\n suppose,\" he said. \"You see, once upon a time there were birds and\n bees....\"\nWhen he finished the Conclave sat in horrified silence. His words,\n with all their horror, had the ring of truth and there were no cries of\n 'Heresy'. There was only stunned disbelief and the beginnings of nausea.\n\n\n It is the mark of honor that a leader shall carry on when others fear\n to move. I cleared my throat.\n\n\n \"Shall not these organs which you mention have atrophied by now? With\n no use throughout all these generations, will they not have evolved\n into nothingness?\"", "I voiced my assent, and the entire Conclave adjourned to the fields.\nIt was nearly dark when we walked home, Rocsates and I, arm in arm. It\n had been a horrible day. The inhuman indignity, the cries—\n\n\n We tarried before my home, leaned on the stone, stared at the first\n stars.\n\n\n \"They seemed finally to accomplish all the book described,\" I muttered.\n\n\n \"They may indeed have succeeded,\" Rocsates replied. \"There is mentioned\n a time lapse which is necessary. The child does not appear immediately.\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter,\" I said disconsolately. \"Who could ask them to go\n through such an ordeal again?\"\n\n\n And then I looked down to earth again, and saw them standing before me.\n Melia cast her eyes down, and would not raise them. Xeon held his arm\n about her shoulders, as if to protect her, but I know not from whom.", "\"I do not think so,\" Rocsates replied after a while. \"What to us is\n an eon, to evolution is but an instant. And then the swelling of the\n breasts, I believe, proves that there is still reproductive activity in\n some, at least, of the She's.\"\n\n\n We sat shaking our heads, bowed under terrible reality.\n\n\n \"Then we must experiment,\" I said. \"But whom could we ask to submit to\n such horror?\"\n\n\n \"I have already taken the liberty of asking for volunteers,\" Rocsates\n replied. \"The She, of course, must be one with the swelling of the\n breasts. Melia has volunteered, on condition that Xeon be released from\n dungeon. Are there any objections?\"\nThere were none, of course. Who would refuse a boon to one who would\n undergo such an ordeal for the City?\n\n\n \"And who will be the partner?\" I asked.", "Cries of \"Treason\" sprang up, and I fear it might have gone hard for\n the priest had I not been able to insure order.\n\n\n \"That is not the worst,\" he cried, as if in defiance. \"All the Prelife\n has been dried up. It will not function. There is no more. And there\n will be no more children!\"\n\n\n At this I feared the Conclave was about to riot. It is at such times\n that I most revere the wisdom of the ancients, who decreed seventy\n years the minimum age for a member of the Conclave. They shouted and\n began to beat their fists, but for how long can a man of seventy years\n roar like a youngster? They quieted, breathing heavily, and I asked,\n\n\n \"Is there no way, then, to produce more Prelife in order that the\n machines may produce more children for us?", "Rocsates, it is suspected, will never ask a question unless he knows\n the answer beforehand. And so I acquiesced, and agreed, and granted\n permission. And with much misgiving and foreboding of evil, the\n Conclave adjourned.\nSeveral weeks elapsed before Rocsates requested that the Conclave meet.\n I called the meeting at dawn and so it was yet early in the afternoon\n when formalities were concluded and Rocsates granted leave to speak.\n\n\n \"Some of those among you are She's,\" he began. \"And you know you are\n different from the rest of us. To the advantage, your skin is fairer\n and your features more often handsomer than ours. To the disadvantage,\n your excretory system is not so mechanically dextrous as ours. And, you\n may say, why should this not be so? There is, indeed, no reason why we\n should all be identical. Perforce you have the advantage, perforce we\n do. Yet there is one other distinction.", "\"I would not bore you,\" he said, \"with details of which only the gods\n are sure. Know, then, that once granted a few cells of Prelife, it is\n an easy matter for the Maternite Machine to add more and more; thus\n assuring us, as has always been, a continuous source of Prelife to be\n born by the Generating Machine as children. The machines bear the exact\n number of children each year to balance the number of us whom the gods\n claim. Such it has always been from time immemorial.\"\n\n\n A murmur of assent and approval of these virtuous words whispered\n around the Hall.\n\n\n \"But now,\" he continued, however, with less assurance and indeed with\n even a stutter here and there, \"an unprecedented situation has arisen.\n Indeed, I might call it an emergency. For the M-Maternite Machine has\n actually failed.\"", "\"How, indeed? And is there not a legend—admitted only a legend—that\n says there was a time before the machines, and before the Maternite\n Machine, and that at such a time both the animals and Men reproduced\n from within their own bodies?\"\n\n\n At this two members of the Conclave fell immediately into a faint, and\n I would gladly have joined them. I hoped that the youngsters, Xeon\n and Melia, had not heard, but as I turned they were listening most\n attentively to Rocsates, who, amid cries of \"Heresy\" and \"Treason\",\n went on:\n\n\n \"I should like to ask the Conclave for permission to search the ancient\n records, in the hope of finding some such knowledge that would prove or\n disprove my words.\"\n\n\n \"You wish to search the films—\" I began.\n\n\n \"Not the films, Sias, but the books.\"", "\"I have indeed discovered the secret of reproduction,\" he began. \"After\n many searchings, I came upon this—\" and he held forth the object he\n had carried in. \"It is a book. It is entitled, 'Living a Normal Sex\n Life.' It seems to be some sort of a do-it-yourself pamphlet.\" He\n dropped the book on the table and rubbed his hands over his eyes.", "\"Sias,\" they were saying, \"the Maternite's gone.\"\n\n\n I stared in amazement.\n\n\n \"Gone? It cannot be gone. It has always been—\"\n\n\n \"Oh my gods!\" Xeon shouted. \"I tell you it's gone! Will you—\"\n\n\n Melia interrupted him quietly. \"Xeon, will you lose all respect for\n the Elder?\" Then turned to me, and said calmly, \"The watcher at the\n Maternite Machine, it appears, has been drunk. The heat rose above the\n warning, continued to rise, and then—poof. Everything has evaporated\n in Maternite. All the Prelife is gone.\"\n\n\n \"All of it?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"There is nothing left,\" Melia insisted. \"Can more be made? And if not,\n what will happen with no more children?\"", "\"As I have said,\" he replied, \"give the machines but a bit of Prelife\n and they will produce more. But take away that least bit, and they are\n helpless.\"\n\n\n Such heresy could have brought a sad end to the priest had not the\n Conclave been so exhausted by the events of the day. We leaned back to\n think.\n\n\n Rocsates leaned forward and asked, \"Must there not—must there not have\n been a beginning to Prelife? For the Machine, it seems, cannot make it;\n and yet it came from somewhere.\"\n\n\n \"Riddles are not called for,\" I answered severely." ], [ "\"In all honor, could Xeon allow Melia to surpass him in courage? It\n shall be he,\" Rocsates said. And with his word the two entered the Hall\n and stood, noble and naked.\n\n\n Rocsates gestured to the table, and Melia started to climb upon it,\n but Xeon stepped forward.\n\n\n \"My lords,\" he said, \"would not better results be obtained were we to\n conduct the experiment in the fields before the Oracle of Delni, that\n the gods may help us?\"\n\n\n His glance reached into my soul, and I was proud of Xeon. A true\n friend, he thought even now of the comfort of Melia. The marble table\n was indeed hard, and from Rocsates' description it seemed that Melia's\n position would be as uncomfortable as it would be undignified. The soft\n fields might be some slight help.", "But of course there were no cousins. There was nothing. And Man\n returned, and settled down to live. Saddened, but resigned and content\n to live in peace with his knowledge and his power. Gone now are all the\n ancient evils, wars, emergencies.\n\n\n \"Sias! Sias—\" And they were upon me.\n\n\n That is, Xeon was upon me. But I knew that where Xeon is, Melia must\n soon appear. And indeed it was but a moment before Melia slipped\n through the high grass to stand at his side. Their youthful voices were\n babbling in excitement.\n\n\n Melia was a She, with the swelling breasts that were, so tradition\n states, quite prevalent among members of the race long ago, and are\n seldom seen today. Indeed, Melia was on this account made the butt of\n many jokes and, I fear, would have had a lonely life of it had it not\n been for the friendship of Xeon.", "\"I do not think so,\" Rocsates replied after a while. \"What to us is\n an eon, to evolution is but an instant. And then the swelling of the\n breasts, I believe, proves that there is still reproductive activity in\n some, at least, of the She's.\"\n\n\n We sat shaking our heads, bowed under terrible reality.\n\n\n \"Then we must experiment,\" I said. \"But whom could we ask to submit to\n such horror?\"\n\n\n \"I have already taken the liberty of asking for volunteers,\" Rocsates\n replied. \"The She, of course, must be one with the swelling of the\n breasts. Melia has volunteered, on condition that Xeon be released from\n dungeon. Are there any objections?\"\nThere were none, of course. Who would refuse a boon to one who would\n undergo such an ordeal for the City?\n\n\n \"And who will be the partner?\" I asked.", "I voiced my assent, and the entire Conclave adjourned to the fields.\nIt was nearly dark when we walked home, Rocsates and I, arm in arm. It\n had been a horrible day. The inhuman indignity, the cries—\n\n\n We tarried before my home, leaned on the stone, stared at the first\n stars.\n\n\n \"They seemed finally to accomplish all the book described,\" I muttered.\n\n\n \"They may indeed have succeeded,\" Rocsates replied. \"There is mentioned\n a time lapse which is necessary. The child does not appear immediately.\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter,\" I said disconsolately. \"Who could ask them to go\n through such an ordeal again?\"\n\n\n And then I looked down to earth again, and saw them standing before me.\n Melia cast her eyes down, and would not raise them. Xeon held his arm\n about her shoulders, as if to protect her, but I know not from whom.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI was wandering among the tall grass of the slopes, listening to the\n soft whistling of the wind; allowing the grass to caress my toga and\n thighs. It was a day soft and clear; a day accepted by the young,\n cherished by we old. Across the gently undulating hills stood the\n magnificent Melopolis, encradling the Oracle of Delni. I do not, of\n course, believe in the gods per se; still there is a grandeur in the\n very stones that transcends their human sculptors, and it is no wonder\n to me that many cling tenaciously, and ignorantly, to the old religion.\n Cling to the gods of old, who drew man upward from wherever he began.\n In whose names Man killed and plundered, while struggling up. In whose\n names Man finally left this earth, to seek his cousins among the stars.", "Well, you know how these things are. At such a time, many men feel\n impelled to make speeches, and one must not be disrespectful. Prayers\n and supplications were offered to the gods, priests were sent to\n sacrifice, and finally, as the light of the sun was falling between the\n pillars, the High Priest of the Maternite Machine was heard.\n\n\n He rambled through the customary opening remarks and then, continually\n smoothing his white beard—of which he is excessively proud—approached\n the crux of the matter and the Conclave finally heard the facts it had\n assembled to hear. By this time, unfortunately, many of the Conclave\n had departed for home and supper. Yet perhaps it is for the best, for\n those left were the most earnest and intelligent.", "\"That is for the priests to say, not I,\" I replied. In moments of\n emergency, it is wise to speak with caution. That is, I suppose so. I\n have never before been in a real emergency.\nA man my age does not hurry in the heat of the midday sun—maddugs\n nenglishmin go out in the midday sun, as the ancients say, although I\n often wonder why—but Xeon and Melia ran all the way down to the city.\n They are of an age to enter manhood, and have all the energy such young\n men do.\n\n\n As we entered the city, we were surrounded by confusion and\n consternation. And can the simple people be blamed? They were aware\n that they stood in the midst of an unprecedented happening; indeed, an\n emergency. For a machine had failed!", "\"Some among you She's have the swelling of the breasts. And does there\n exist no reason for this? Was there not, perhaps in ancient times, a\n cause for this? Do you not wonder, She's, whence you come and for what\n reason?\"\n\n\n \"Rocsates,\" I interrupted. \"All this is fascinating, of course. But if\n you could be quick—\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" he replied. \"In the course of my reading I have read\n many books, and while they are all vague on the subject, this I have\n discovered:", "Order was lost among the Conclave as each man turned to speak to his\n neighbor, and for some time I could not restore order. I realized that\n something had to be done to save Rocsates before the outrage of the\n assembled overwhelmed him.\n\n\n \"It seems,\" I shouted, \"that there is a flaw in your logic.\" For if\n such there was, I was hopeful of dismissing the entire affair with\n no harm done. \"For if people reproduced too often, why then this\n reproduction must have been a pleasant thing to do; otherwise they\n would not have done so to excess. And if it was a pleasant thing to do,\n where is the necessity for the machines, and why were they created?\"\n\n\n Rocsates seemed perplexed by this problem, whereupon Xeon, who together\n with Melia were at the Conclave without permission, shouted, \"Perhaps\n the process of reproduction was of\nsuch\na pleasure that the Conclave\n ruled it to be a sin? And therefore the machines were necessary!\"", "Not in the memory of the eldest among us has a machine failed. They\n were created so long ago, indeed, that the ignorant believe them\n to have been constructed by the gods themselves. And never, so far\n as I know, has one failed. Small wonder that the watcher had been\n negligent. Indeed, the watcher is more a tradition than a necessity.\n Besides, had he been sober, he would not have known what to do. For who\n knows the mysterious workings of the machines?\nI hastened to the City Hall and found the Conclave assembled, waiting\n for me to bring them to order. Xeon and Melia stopped as I mounted the\n steps, but I smiled and motioned them in. They accompanied me past\n the marble pillars into the cool recesses of the Hall, then seated\n themselves on the floor as I took my place by the great table.", "\"Sias,\" he said. Then stopped, embarrassed.\n\n\n I waited, and Rocsates was silent, and he continued.\n\n\n \"Sias, we come to tell.... We will....\" He raised his eyes to mine and\n said manfully, \"We shall try again.\"\n\n\n I am afraid that tears came to my eyes. Such sacrifice—\n\n\n \"We beg one favor,\" Xeon went on. \"We are agreed that—Well, we should\n like to be left alone, in private, to try.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" I replied. Anything they might want they could have. My\n relief and gratitude must have showed, for Xeon took a deep breath and\n spoke again.\n\n\n \"We do not deserve praise, Sias,\" he said. \"The truth is, we ... we\n sort of enjoy it.\"\n\n\n I watched them turn and wander off together under the stars.", "Gods, this Rocsates! The books, as well he knows, are so ancient,\n and so delicate, that they are kept in an air-tight tomb; lest,\n being handled, they be destroyed and all knowledge within them lost.\n Therefore, they have not been read in the known history of our race.\n And Rocsates has been anxious for an excuse—\n\n\n \"Sias,\" he went on, \"if there exists such knowledge as I seek, is it\n not indeed lost to the memory of Man? And if so, are not the books the\n only place where it may be found?\"", "There was something in the man's behavior that commanded everyone's\n attention. He went on, speaking low. \"The word 'Sex' is not defined,\n but it seems to mean....\" His words trailed off. He was obviously\n unsure of how to continue. \"I had better start at the beginning, I\n suppose,\" he said. \"You see, once upon a time there were birds and\n bees....\"\nWhen he finished the Conclave sat in horrified silence. His words,\n with all their horror, had the ring of truth and there were no cries of\n 'Heresy'. There was only stunned disbelief and the beginnings of nausea.\n\n\n It is the mark of honor that a leader shall carry on when others fear\n to move. I cleared my throat.\n\n\n \"Shall not these organs which you mention have atrophied by now? With\n no use throughout all these generations, will they not have evolved\n into nothingness?\"", "The Conclave had come to order and formalities had been initiated when\n Rocsates entered and took his place. He clutched under one shoulder\n a thin, rectangular object, but that is not what impressed me. His\n appearance—he looked as if he had not slept of late, nor eaten either.\n His eyes were sunken, and his features had doubled in age. He was bent\n and tired. But it was his eyes. There was a horror in them.\n\n\n I was shocked, and could not help staring at him. And then the\n formalities were over. I intended to speak for Xeon, but Rocsates was\n on his feet and I gave way.", "\"How, indeed? And is there not a legend—admitted only a legend—that\n says there was a time before the machines, and before the Maternite\n Machine, and that at such a time both the animals and Men reproduced\n from within their own bodies?\"\n\n\n At this two members of the Conclave fell immediately into a faint, and\n I would gladly have joined them. I hoped that the youngsters, Xeon\n and Melia, had not heard, but as I turned they were listening most\n attentively to Rocsates, who, amid cries of \"Heresy\" and \"Treason\",\n went on:\n\n\n \"I should like to ask the Conclave for permission to search the ancient\n records, in the hope of finding some such knowledge that would prove or\n disprove my words.\"\n\n\n \"You wish to search the films—\" I began.\n\n\n \"Not the films, Sias, but the books.\"", "Rocsates, it is suspected, will never ask a question unless he knows\n the answer beforehand. And so I acquiesced, and agreed, and granted\n permission. And with much misgiving and foreboding of evil, the\n Conclave adjourned.\nSeveral weeks elapsed before Rocsates requested that the Conclave meet.\n I called the meeting at dawn and so it was yet early in the afternoon\n when formalities were concluded and Rocsates granted leave to speak.\n\n\n \"Some of those among you are She's,\" he began. \"And you know you are\n different from the rest of us. To the advantage, your skin is fairer\n and your features more often handsomer than ours. To the disadvantage,\n your excretory system is not so mechanically dextrous as ours. And, you\n may say, why should this not be so? There is, indeed, no reason why we\n should all be identical. Perforce you have the advantage, perforce we\n do. Yet there is one other distinction.", "\"Sias,\" they were saying, \"the Maternite's gone.\"\n\n\n I stared in amazement.\n\n\n \"Gone? It cannot be gone. It has always been—\"\n\n\n \"Oh my gods!\" Xeon shouted. \"I tell you it's gone! Will you—\"\n\n\n Melia interrupted him quietly. \"Xeon, will you lose all respect for\n the Elder?\" Then turned to me, and said calmly, \"The watcher at the\n Maternite Machine, it appears, has been drunk. The heat rose above the\n warning, continued to rise, and then—poof. Everything has evaporated\n in Maternite. All the Prelife is gone.\"\n\n\n \"All of it?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"There is nothing left,\" Melia insisted. \"Can more be made? And if not,\n what will happen with no more children?\"", "At this impudence the Conclave dissolved in an uproar, and I was beyond\n power to restrain them from placing Xeon under arrest. Privately,\n however, I had to admit that his supposition was a possibility, and\n thus I authorized Rocsates to continue his search.\nNow indeed I was sorely worried concerning Xeon, for he must languish\n in the dungeon until the Conclave is satisfied to release him, and this\n they cannot do until they meet again.\n\n\n I needed a sufficient excuse to call a meeting of the Conclave,\n whereupon I might argue for the lad. When I heard that Rocsates again\n desired audience, I immediately proclaimed a meeting of the Conclave\n to be held the next day at dawn, and so that night slept well.", "My heart has a warmth in it, and I no longer fear for the future of our\n race when our young people can show such nobility and sacrifice.", "\"I have indeed discovered the secret of reproduction,\" he began. \"After\n many searchings, I came upon this—\" and he held forth the object he\n had carried in. \"It is a book. It is entitled, 'Living a Normal Sex\n Life.' It seems to be some sort of a do-it-yourself pamphlet.\" He\n dropped the book on the table and rubbed his hands over his eyes." ], [ "Well, you know how these things are. At such a time, many men feel\n impelled to make speeches, and one must not be disrespectful. Prayers\n and supplications were offered to the gods, priests were sent to\n sacrifice, and finally, as the light of the sun was falling between the\n pillars, the High Priest of the Maternite Machine was heard.\n\n\n He rambled through the customary opening remarks and then, continually\n smoothing his white beard—of which he is excessively proud—approached\n the crux of the matter and the Conclave finally heard the facts it had\n assembled to hear. By this time, unfortunately, many of the Conclave\n had departed for home and supper. Yet perhaps it is for the best, for\n those left were the most earnest and intelligent.", "\"That is for the priests to say, not I,\" I replied. In moments of\n emergency, it is wise to speak with caution. That is, I suppose so. I\n have never before been in a real emergency.\nA man my age does not hurry in the heat of the midday sun—maddugs\n nenglishmin go out in the midday sun, as the ancients say, although I\n often wonder why—but Xeon and Melia ran all the way down to the city.\n They are of an age to enter manhood, and have all the energy such young\n men do.\n\n\n As we entered the city, we were surrounded by confusion and\n consternation. And can the simple people be blamed? They were aware\n that they stood in the midst of an unprecedented happening; indeed, an\n emergency. For a machine had failed!", "\"In all honor, could Xeon allow Melia to surpass him in courage? It\n shall be he,\" Rocsates said. And with his word the two entered the Hall\n and stood, noble and naked.\n\n\n Rocsates gestured to the table, and Melia started to climb upon it,\n but Xeon stepped forward.\n\n\n \"My lords,\" he said, \"would not better results be obtained were we to\n conduct the experiment in the fields before the Oracle of Delni, that\n the gods may help us?\"\n\n\n His glance reached into my soul, and I was proud of Xeon. A true\n friend, he thought even now of the comfort of Melia. The marble table\n was indeed hard, and from Rocsates' description it seemed that Melia's\n position would be as uncomfortable as it would be undignified. The soft\n fields might be some slight help.", "But of course there were no cousins. There was nothing. And Man\n returned, and settled down to live. Saddened, but resigned and content\n to live in peace with his knowledge and his power. Gone now are all the\n ancient evils, wars, emergencies.\n\n\n \"Sias! Sias—\" And they were upon me.\n\n\n That is, Xeon was upon me. But I knew that where Xeon is, Melia must\n soon appear. And indeed it was but a moment before Melia slipped\n through the high grass to stand at his side. Their youthful voices were\n babbling in excitement.\n\n\n Melia was a She, with the swelling breasts that were, so tradition\n states, quite prevalent among members of the race long ago, and are\n seldom seen today. Indeed, Melia was on this account made the butt of\n many jokes and, I fear, would have had a lonely life of it had it not\n been for the friendship of Xeon.", "Rocsates, it is suspected, will never ask a question unless he knows\n the answer beforehand. And so I acquiesced, and agreed, and granted\n permission. And with much misgiving and foreboding of evil, the\n Conclave adjourned.\nSeveral weeks elapsed before Rocsates requested that the Conclave meet.\n I called the meeting at dawn and so it was yet early in the afternoon\n when formalities were concluded and Rocsates granted leave to speak.\n\n\n \"Some of those among you are She's,\" he began. \"And you know you are\n different from the rest of us. To the advantage, your skin is fairer\n and your features more often handsomer than ours. To the disadvantage,\n your excretory system is not so mechanically dextrous as ours. And, you\n may say, why should this not be so? There is, indeed, no reason why we\n should all be identical. Perforce you have the advantage, perforce we\n do. Yet there is one other distinction.", "My heart has a warmth in it, and I no longer fear for the future of our\n race when our young people can show such nobility and sacrifice.", "There was something in the man's behavior that commanded everyone's\n attention. He went on, speaking low. \"The word 'Sex' is not defined,\n but it seems to mean....\" His words trailed off. He was obviously\n unsure of how to continue. \"I had better start at the beginning, I\n suppose,\" he said. \"You see, once upon a time there were birds and\n bees....\"\nWhen he finished the Conclave sat in horrified silence. His words,\n with all their horror, had the ring of truth and there were no cries of\n 'Heresy'. There was only stunned disbelief and the beginnings of nausea.\n\n\n It is the mark of honor that a leader shall carry on when others fear\n to move. I cleared my throat.\n\n\n \"Shall not these organs which you mention have atrophied by now? With\n no use throughout all these generations, will they not have evolved\n into nothingness?\"", "\"Sias,\" he said. Then stopped, embarrassed.\n\n\n I waited, and Rocsates was silent, and he continued.\n\n\n \"Sias, we come to tell.... We will....\" He raised his eyes to mine and\n said manfully, \"We shall try again.\"\n\n\n I am afraid that tears came to my eyes. Such sacrifice—\n\n\n \"We beg one favor,\" Xeon went on. \"We are agreed that—Well, we should\n like to be left alone, in private, to try.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" I replied. Anything they might want they could have. My\n relief and gratitude must have showed, for Xeon took a deep breath and\n spoke again.\n\n\n \"We do not deserve praise, Sias,\" he said. \"The truth is, we ... we\n sort of enjoy it.\"\n\n\n I watched them turn and wander off together under the stars.", "Not in the memory of the eldest among us has a machine failed. They\n were created so long ago, indeed, that the ignorant believe them\n to have been constructed by the gods themselves. And never, so far\n as I know, has one failed. Small wonder that the watcher had been\n negligent. Indeed, the watcher is more a tradition than a necessity.\n Besides, had he been sober, he would not have known what to do. For who\n knows the mysterious workings of the machines?\nI hastened to the City Hall and found the Conclave assembled, waiting\n for me to bring them to order. Xeon and Melia stopped as I mounted the\n steps, but I smiled and motioned them in. They accompanied me past\n the marble pillars into the cool recesses of the Hall, then seated\n themselves on the floor as I took my place by the great table.", "I voiced my assent, and the entire Conclave adjourned to the fields.\nIt was nearly dark when we walked home, Rocsates and I, arm in arm. It\n had been a horrible day. The inhuman indignity, the cries—\n\n\n We tarried before my home, leaned on the stone, stared at the first\n stars.\n\n\n \"They seemed finally to accomplish all the book described,\" I muttered.\n\n\n \"They may indeed have succeeded,\" Rocsates replied. \"There is mentioned\n a time lapse which is necessary. The child does not appear immediately.\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter,\" I said disconsolately. \"Who could ask them to go\n through such an ordeal again?\"\n\n\n And then I looked down to earth again, and saw them standing before me.\n Melia cast her eyes down, and would not raise them. Xeon held his arm\n about her shoulders, as if to protect her, but I know not from whom.", "Gods, this Rocsates! The books, as well he knows, are so ancient,\n and so delicate, that they are kept in an air-tight tomb; lest,\n being handled, they be destroyed and all knowledge within them lost.\n Therefore, they have not been read in the known history of our race.\n And Rocsates has been anxious for an excuse—\n\n\n \"Sias,\" he went on, \"if there exists such knowledge as I seek, is it\n not indeed lost to the memory of Man? And if so, are not the books the\n only place where it may be found?\"", "\"I do not think so,\" Rocsates replied after a while. \"What to us is\n an eon, to evolution is but an instant. And then the swelling of the\n breasts, I believe, proves that there is still reproductive activity in\n some, at least, of the She's.\"\n\n\n We sat shaking our heads, bowed under terrible reality.\n\n\n \"Then we must experiment,\" I said. \"But whom could we ask to submit to\n such horror?\"\n\n\n \"I have already taken the liberty of asking for volunteers,\" Rocsates\n replied. \"The She, of course, must be one with the swelling of the\n breasts. Melia has volunteered, on condition that Xeon be released from\n dungeon. Are there any objections?\"\nThere were none, of course. Who would refuse a boon to one who would\n undergo such an ordeal for the City?\n\n\n \"And who will be the partner?\" I asked.", "\"That there was indeed a time before the machines, in fact the books\n were created in that time, for not one of them mentions the machines.\n Then reproduction was carried on by individuals, without help of the\n then nonexistent machines. The She's are not wanderers from another\n land, but they have lived with us for all time; they are not another\n race, but we are all types of one race. And the fact of reproduction is\n somehow intimately related to the physical distinctions of the She's!\"\n\n\n These last sentences were shouted to be heard above the roar of the\n crowd. Yet when Rocsates stopped, so also did the noise, so shocked and\n amazed at his words were they. And I confess, myself also.\n\n\n \"In fact,\" Rocsates added, sitting down, \"this process of reproduction\n seems to have been so simple that there was once a problem of\n over-population.\"", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI was wandering among the tall grass of the slopes, listening to the\n soft whistling of the wind; allowing the grass to caress my toga and\n thighs. It was a day soft and clear; a day accepted by the young,\n cherished by we old. Across the gently undulating hills stood the\n magnificent Melopolis, encradling the Oracle of Delni. I do not, of\n course, believe in the gods per se; still there is a grandeur in the\n very stones that transcends their human sculptors, and it is no wonder\n to me that many cling tenaciously, and ignorantly, to the old religion.\n Cling to the gods of old, who drew man upward from wherever he began.\n In whose names Man killed and plundered, while struggling up. In whose\n names Man finally left this earth, to seek his cousins among the stars.", "Order was lost among the Conclave as each man turned to speak to his\n neighbor, and for some time I could not restore order. I realized that\n something had to be done to save Rocsates before the outrage of the\n assembled overwhelmed him.\n\n\n \"It seems,\" I shouted, \"that there is a flaw in your logic.\" For if\n such there was, I was hopeful of dismissing the entire affair with\n no harm done. \"For if people reproduced too often, why then this\n reproduction must have been a pleasant thing to do; otherwise they\n would not have done so to excess. And if it was a pleasant thing to do,\n where is the necessity for the machines, and why were they created?\"\n\n\n Rocsates seemed perplexed by this problem, whereupon Xeon, who together\n with Melia were at the Conclave without permission, shouted, \"Perhaps\n the process of reproduction was of\nsuch\na pleasure that the Conclave\n ruled it to be a sin? And therefore the machines were necessary!\"", "\"Some among you She's have the swelling of the breasts. And does there\n exist no reason for this? Was there not, perhaps in ancient times, a\n cause for this? Do you not wonder, She's, whence you come and for what\n reason?\"\n\n\n \"Rocsates,\" I interrupted. \"All this is fascinating, of course. But if\n you could be quick—\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" he replied. \"In the course of my reading I have read\n many books, and while they are all vague on the subject, this I have\n discovered:", "Rocsates' voice made itself heard. \"It is true. Such creatures did\n indeed exist. It is recorded most scientifically in the films.\"\n\n\n \"If it be so,\" I said, quieting the hub-bub that followed, \"and I would\n not doubt your word, Rocsates, for all know you are the wisest of\n men—if it were so, then, what of it?\"\n\n\n \"May it not be,\" Rocsates put in, \"that these animals had no machines\n to reproduce their kind? For surely the gods would not grant machines\n to such creatures. And indeed, if they had Maternite Machines, why then\n we would yet have these animals among us.\"\n\n\n \"And how, then, did these animals reproduce?\" I asked.", "The Conclave had come to order and formalities had been initiated when\n Rocsates entered and took his place. He clutched under one shoulder\n a thin, rectangular object, but that is not what impressed me. His\n appearance—he looked as if he had not slept of late, nor eaten either.\n His eyes were sunken, and his features had doubled in age. He was bent\n and tired. But it was his eyes. There was a horror in them.\n\n\n I was shocked, and could not help staring at him. And then the\n formalities were over. I intended to speak for Xeon, but Rocsates was\n on his feet and I gave way.", "\"How, indeed? And is there not a legend—admitted only a legend—that\n says there was a time before the machines, and before the Maternite\n Machine, and that at such a time both the animals and Men reproduced\n from within their own bodies?\"\n\n\n At this two members of the Conclave fell immediately into a faint, and\n I would gladly have joined them. I hoped that the youngsters, Xeon\n and Melia, had not heard, but as I turned they were listening most\n attentively to Rocsates, who, amid cries of \"Heresy\" and \"Treason\",\n went on:\n\n\n \"I should like to ask the Conclave for permission to search the ancient\n records, in the hope of finding some such knowledge that would prove or\n disprove my words.\"\n\n\n \"You wish to search the films—\" I began.\n\n\n \"Not the films, Sias, but the books.\"", "\"Are not riddles often the beginning of knowledge?\" he asked, in that\n irritating dumber-than-thou attitude of his. \"Must there not, long ago,\n have been a source of Prelife: a source now forgotten? And may it not\n even now—should we discover it—be available to us? I am reminded of\n the story of the animals of old—\"\n\n\n \"I fear your mind is wandering, Rocsates,\" I was forced to interrupt.\n \"I know well the legend of the animals, but what does it have to\n do—\" The heads of the Conclave were turning to me, quizzically. I\n hastened to explain the legend of the animals. \"It is said that many\n thousands of years ago, time without reckoning, there existed on the\n earth creatures who were alive like us, and yet not like us. It is said\n they had four legs or more, and no arms, were covered with hair, and\n although not mute, they could not speak.\"" ], [ "\"In all honor, could Xeon allow Melia to surpass him in courage? It\n shall be he,\" Rocsates said. And with his word the two entered the Hall\n and stood, noble and naked.\n\n\n Rocsates gestured to the table, and Melia started to climb upon it,\n but Xeon stepped forward.\n\n\n \"My lords,\" he said, \"would not better results be obtained were we to\n conduct the experiment in the fields before the Oracle of Delni, that\n the gods may help us?\"\n\n\n His glance reached into my soul, and I was proud of Xeon. A true\n friend, he thought even now of the comfort of Melia. The marble table\n was indeed hard, and from Rocsates' description it seemed that Melia's\n position would be as uncomfortable as it would be undignified. The soft\n fields might be some slight help.", "But of course there were no cousins. There was nothing. And Man\n returned, and settled down to live. Saddened, but resigned and content\n to live in peace with his knowledge and his power. Gone now are all the\n ancient evils, wars, emergencies.\n\n\n \"Sias! Sias—\" And they were upon me.\n\n\n That is, Xeon was upon me. But I knew that where Xeon is, Melia must\n soon appear. And indeed it was but a moment before Melia slipped\n through the high grass to stand at his side. Their youthful voices were\n babbling in excitement.\n\n\n Melia was a She, with the swelling breasts that were, so tradition\n states, quite prevalent among members of the race long ago, and are\n seldom seen today. Indeed, Melia was on this account made the butt of\n many jokes and, I fear, would have had a lonely life of it had it not\n been for the friendship of Xeon.", "I voiced my assent, and the entire Conclave adjourned to the fields.\nIt was nearly dark when we walked home, Rocsates and I, arm in arm. It\n had been a horrible day. The inhuman indignity, the cries—\n\n\n We tarried before my home, leaned on the stone, stared at the first\n stars.\n\n\n \"They seemed finally to accomplish all the book described,\" I muttered.\n\n\n \"They may indeed have succeeded,\" Rocsates replied. \"There is mentioned\n a time lapse which is necessary. The child does not appear immediately.\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter,\" I said disconsolately. \"Who could ask them to go\n through such an ordeal again?\"\n\n\n And then I looked down to earth again, and saw them standing before me.\n Melia cast her eyes down, and would not raise them. Xeon held his arm\n about her shoulders, as if to protect her, but I know not from whom.", "\"That is for the priests to say, not I,\" I replied. In moments of\n emergency, it is wise to speak with caution. That is, I suppose so. I\n have never before been in a real emergency.\nA man my age does not hurry in the heat of the midday sun—maddugs\n nenglishmin go out in the midday sun, as the ancients say, although I\n often wonder why—but Xeon and Melia ran all the way down to the city.\n They are of an age to enter manhood, and have all the energy such young\n men do.\n\n\n As we entered the city, we were surrounded by confusion and\n consternation. And can the simple people be blamed? They were aware\n that they stood in the midst of an unprecedented happening; indeed, an\n emergency. For a machine had failed!", "Not in the memory of the eldest among us has a machine failed. They\n were created so long ago, indeed, that the ignorant believe them\n to have been constructed by the gods themselves. And never, so far\n as I know, has one failed. Small wonder that the watcher had been\n negligent. Indeed, the watcher is more a tradition than a necessity.\n Besides, had he been sober, he would not have known what to do. For who\n knows the mysterious workings of the machines?\nI hastened to the City Hall and found the Conclave assembled, waiting\n for me to bring them to order. Xeon and Melia stopped as I mounted the\n steps, but I smiled and motioned them in. They accompanied me past\n the marble pillars into the cool recesses of the Hall, then seated\n themselves on the floor as I took my place by the great table.", "At this impudence the Conclave dissolved in an uproar, and I was beyond\n power to restrain them from placing Xeon under arrest. Privately,\n however, I had to admit that his supposition was a possibility, and\n thus I authorized Rocsates to continue his search.\nNow indeed I was sorely worried concerning Xeon, for he must languish\n in the dungeon until the Conclave is satisfied to release him, and this\n they cannot do until they meet again.\n\n\n I needed a sufficient excuse to call a meeting of the Conclave,\n whereupon I might argue for the lad. When I heard that Rocsates again\n desired audience, I immediately proclaimed a meeting of the Conclave\n to be held the next day at dawn, and so that night slept well.", "\"Sias,\" he said. Then stopped, embarrassed.\n\n\n I waited, and Rocsates was silent, and he continued.\n\n\n \"Sias, we come to tell.... We will....\" He raised his eyes to mine and\n said manfully, \"We shall try again.\"\n\n\n I am afraid that tears came to my eyes. Such sacrifice—\n\n\n \"We beg one favor,\" Xeon went on. \"We are agreed that—Well, we should\n like to be left alone, in private, to try.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" I replied. Anything they might want they could have. My\n relief and gratitude must have showed, for Xeon took a deep breath and\n spoke again.\n\n\n \"We do not deserve praise, Sias,\" he said. \"The truth is, we ... we\n sort of enjoy it.\"\n\n\n I watched them turn and wander off together under the stars.", "Order was lost among the Conclave as each man turned to speak to his\n neighbor, and for some time I could not restore order. I realized that\n something had to be done to save Rocsates before the outrage of the\n assembled overwhelmed him.\n\n\n \"It seems,\" I shouted, \"that there is a flaw in your logic.\" For if\n such there was, I was hopeful of dismissing the entire affair with\n no harm done. \"For if people reproduced too often, why then this\n reproduction must have been a pleasant thing to do; otherwise they\n would not have done so to excess. And if it was a pleasant thing to do,\n where is the necessity for the machines, and why were they created?\"\n\n\n Rocsates seemed perplexed by this problem, whereupon Xeon, who together\n with Melia were at the Conclave without permission, shouted, \"Perhaps\n the process of reproduction was of\nsuch\na pleasure that the Conclave\n ruled it to be a sin? And therefore the machines were necessary!\"", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI was wandering among the tall grass of the slopes, listening to the\n soft whistling of the wind; allowing the grass to caress my toga and\n thighs. It was a day soft and clear; a day accepted by the young,\n cherished by we old. Across the gently undulating hills stood the\n magnificent Melopolis, encradling the Oracle of Delni. I do not, of\n course, believe in the gods per se; still there is a grandeur in the\n very stones that transcends their human sculptors, and it is no wonder\n to me that many cling tenaciously, and ignorantly, to the old religion.\n Cling to the gods of old, who drew man upward from wherever he began.\n In whose names Man killed and plundered, while struggling up. In whose\n names Man finally left this earth, to seek his cousins among the stars.", "\"I do not think so,\" Rocsates replied after a while. \"What to us is\n an eon, to evolution is but an instant. And then the swelling of the\n breasts, I believe, proves that there is still reproductive activity in\n some, at least, of the She's.\"\n\n\n We sat shaking our heads, bowed under terrible reality.\n\n\n \"Then we must experiment,\" I said. \"But whom could we ask to submit to\n such horror?\"\n\n\n \"I have already taken the liberty of asking for volunteers,\" Rocsates\n replied. \"The She, of course, must be one with the swelling of the\n breasts. Melia has volunteered, on condition that Xeon be released from\n dungeon. Are there any objections?\"\nThere were none, of course. Who would refuse a boon to one who would\n undergo such an ordeal for the City?\n\n\n \"And who will be the partner?\" I asked.", "\"How, indeed? And is there not a legend—admitted only a legend—that\n says there was a time before the machines, and before the Maternite\n Machine, and that at such a time both the animals and Men reproduced\n from within their own bodies?\"\n\n\n At this two members of the Conclave fell immediately into a faint, and\n I would gladly have joined them. I hoped that the youngsters, Xeon\n and Melia, had not heard, but as I turned they were listening most\n attentively to Rocsates, who, amid cries of \"Heresy\" and \"Treason\",\n went on:\n\n\n \"I should like to ask the Conclave for permission to search the ancient\n records, in the hope of finding some such knowledge that would prove or\n disprove my words.\"\n\n\n \"You wish to search the films—\" I began.\n\n\n \"Not the films, Sias, but the books.\"", "The Conclave had come to order and formalities had been initiated when\n Rocsates entered and took his place. He clutched under one shoulder\n a thin, rectangular object, but that is not what impressed me. His\n appearance—he looked as if he had not slept of late, nor eaten either.\n His eyes were sunken, and his features had doubled in age. He was bent\n and tired. But it was his eyes. There was a horror in them.\n\n\n I was shocked, and could not help staring at him. And then the\n formalities were over. I intended to speak for Xeon, but Rocsates was\n on his feet and I gave way.", "My heart has a warmth in it, and I no longer fear for the future of our\n race when our young people can show such nobility and sacrifice.", "Well, you know how these things are. At such a time, many men feel\n impelled to make speeches, and one must not be disrespectful. Prayers\n and supplications were offered to the gods, priests were sent to\n sacrifice, and finally, as the light of the sun was falling between the\n pillars, the High Priest of the Maternite Machine was heard.\n\n\n He rambled through the customary opening remarks and then, continually\n smoothing his white beard—of which he is excessively proud—approached\n the crux of the matter and the Conclave finally heard the facts it had\n assembled to hear. By this time, unfortunately, many of the Conclave\n had departed for home and supper. Yet perhaps it is for the best, for\n those left were the most earnest and intelligent.", "There was something in the man's behavior that commanded everyone's\n attention. He went on, speaking low. \"The word 'Sex' is not defined,\n but it seems to mean....\" His words trailed off. He was obviously\n unsure of how to continue. \"I had better start at the beginning, I\n suppose,\" he said. \"You see, once upon a time there were birds and\n bees....\"\nWhen he finished the Conclave sat in horrified silence. His words,\n with all their horror, had the ring of truth and there were no cries of\n 'Heresy'. There was only stunned disbelief and the beginnings of nausea.\n\n\n It is the mark of honor that a leader shall carry on when others fear\n to move. I cleared my throat.\n\n\n \"Shall not these organs which you mention have atrophied by now? With\n no use throughout all these generations, will they not have evolved\n into nothingness?\"", "\"Sias,\" they were saying, \"the Maternite's gone.\"\n\n\n I stared in amazement.\n\n\n \"Gone? It cannot be gone. It has always been—\"\n\n\n \"Oh my gods!\" Xeon shouted. \"I tell you it's gone! Will you—\"\n\n\n Melia interrupted him quietly. \"Xeon, will you lose all respect for\n the Elder?\" Then turned to me, and said calmly, \"The watcher at the\n Maternite Machine, it appears, has been drunk. The heat rose above the\n warning, continued to rise, and then—poof. Everything has evaporated\n in Maternite. All the Prelife is gone.\"\n\n\n \"All of it?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"There is nothing left,\" Melia insisted. \"Can more be made? And if not,\n what will happen with no more children?\"", "Gods, this Rocsates! The books, as well he knows, are so ancient,\n and so delicate, that they are kept in an air-tight tomb; lest,\n being handled, they be destroyed and all knowledge within them lost.\n Therefore, they have not been read in the known history of our race.\n And Rocsates has been anxious for an excuse—\n\n\n \"Sias,\" he went on, \"if there exists such knowledge as I seek, is it\n not indeed lost to the memory of Man? And if so, are not the books the\n only place where it may be found?\"", "Rocsates, it is suspected, will never ask a question unless he knows\n the answer beforehand. And so I acquiesced, and agreed, and granted\n permission. And with much misgiving and foreboding of evil, the\n Conclave adjourned.\nSeveral weeks elapsed before Rocsates requested that the Conclave meet.\n I called the meeting at dawn and so it was yet early in the afternoon\n when formalities were concluded and Rocsates granted leave to speak.\n\n\n \"Some of those among you are She's,\" he began. \"And you know you are\n different from the rest of us. To the advantage, your skin is fairer\n and your features more often handsomer than ours. To the disadvantage,\n your excretory system is not so mechanically dextrous as ours. And, you\n may say, why should this not be so? There is, indeed, no reason why we\n should all be identical. Perforce you have the advantage, perforce we\n do. Yet there is one other distinction.", "\"Are not riddles often the beginning of knowledge?\" he asked, in that\n irritating dumber-than-thou attitude of his. \"Must there not, long ago,\n have been a source of Prelife: a source now forgotten? And may it not\n even now—should we discover it—be available to us? I am reminded of\n the story of the animals of old—\"\n\n\n \"I fear your mind is wandering, Rocsates,\" I was forced to interrupt.\n \"I know well the legend of the animals, but what does it have to\n do—\" The heads of the Conclave were turning to me, quizzically. I\n hastened to explain the legend of the animals. \"It is said that many\n thousands of years ago, time without reckoning, there existed on the\n earth creatures who were alive like us, and yet not like us. It is said\n they had four legs or more, and no arms, were covered with hair, and\n although not mute, they could not speak.\"", "\"That there was indeed a time before the machines, in fact the books\n were created in that time, for not one of them mentions the machines.\n Then reproduction was carried on by individuals, without help of the\n then nonexistent machines. The She's are not wanderers from another\n land, but they have lived with us for all time; they are not another\n race, but we are all types of one race. And the fact of reproduction is\n somehow intimately related to the physical distinctions of the She's!\"\n\n\n These last sentences were shouted to be heard above the roar of the\n crowd. Yet when Rocsates stopped, so also did the noise, so shocked and\n amazed at his words were they. And I confess, myself also.\n\n\n \"In fact,\" Rocsates added, sitting down, \"this process of reproduction\n seems to have been so simple that there was once a problem of\n over-population.\"" ] ]
train	99912	[ "What does the Tydeman tube do?", "What is Desperate Debra?", "What was Desperate Debra originally designed for?", "What percentage of cesarean births in the UK every year are classified as emergencies?", "What is one consequence caused by the concern over the increased number of babies born by cesarian?", "When doing a cesarian for an impacted fetus, what might a doctor see?", "How often do doctors request a push-up during an unplanned cesarian?", "What inspired Dr. Tydeman's device?", "What was Desperate Debra originally made of?", "When was the earliest childbirth simulator developed?" ]	[ [ "The Tydeman tube is placed in the uterus near the baby's head. The tube opens into a soft silicone cup, which is placed on the part of the head that is exposed through the cervix. Pushing air in through the tube releases suction forces that may be holding the baby in place.", "The Tydeman tube is placed in the uterus near the baby's head. The doctor can inflate or deflate the tube as necessary to help ease the baby out of the birth canal.", "The Tydeman tube is placed in the uterus near the baby's head. The tube opens into a soft silicone cup, which is placed on the part of the head that is exposed through the cervix. Pulling air out through the tube releases suction forces that may be holding the baby in place.", "The Tydeman tube is placed in the uterus near the baby's head. Pushing air in to inflate the tube keeps the umbilical cord from closing around the baby's neck." ], [ "Desperate Debra is a training device obstetricians use to simulate delivering babies.", "Desperate Debra is a training device obstetricians use to simulate delivering an impacted fetus.", "Desperate Debra is a training device used to simulate cesarean deliveries.", "Desperate Debra is a training device obstetricians use to simulate delivering a baby when the mother has preeclampsia." ], [ "She was originally designed for autopsy simulations.", "She was originally designed to test the Tyedeman tube.", "She was originally designed as a crash test dummy.", "She was originally designed for practicing CPR." ], [ "Nearly one half", "Nearly two thirds", "Nearly one quarter", "Nearly three quarters" ], [ "Mothers who chose cesarian delivery may be shunned.", "Doctors may refuse to do a cesarian for fear of being sued.", "Medical staff may allow a difficult birth to continue for longer before resorting to surgery.", "Doctors are warier about doing cesareans." ], [ "An arm", "A shoulder", "The torso", "A leg" ], [ "5 percent of deliveries", "10 percent of deliveries", "15 percent of deliveries", "20 percent of deliveries" ], [ "The sound of a Wellington boot being pulled out of the mud.", "The sound of the dentists' suction tube.", "His own wife's emergency cesarian.", "The sound of a Wellington boot being pulled out of quicksand." ], [ "Ballistics gel over a plastic tube scaffolding", "Silicone over a plastic tube scaffolding", "Latex over a plastic tube scaffolding", "A neoprene wetsuit over a plastic tube scaffolding" ], [ "Sometime in the fourth century", "Sometime in the eighteenth century", "Sometime in the thirteenth century", "Sometime in the first century" ] ]	[ 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 4, 1, 4, 2 ]	[ 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "The inventor of the tube and of Desperate Debra is Dr Graham Tydeman, a consultant in obstetrics and gynaecology at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy, Fife. Only after he'd built Debra did he realise that she might serve a purpose beyond his original intention. His is a decade-long tale of inspired insights, thwarted aims and shifting purposes; but with a good outcome. Although the Tydeman tube is still in gestation, Desperate Debra herself is now thriving.\nTo understand the desperation of Debra and how the Tydeman tube might help to relieve it requires a brief foray into basic obstetric knowhow. Evolution has endowed us with heads proportionally so large that even when labour runs according to plan, the delivery process involves a bit of a squeeze. For the baby's head to get stuck on the way out may not be usual, but it's by no means a rarity.", "Tydeman didn't do much with the idea until 10 years ago when one trainee, who was experiencing real difficulty getting heads out, prompted him to think again about the problem. Around the same time, he met professor of obstetrics Andrew Shennan and consultant midwife Annette Briley, both of the Women's Health Academic Centre at St Thomas's hospital. Between them they came up with a device – the Tydeman tube – to make pushing on the foetus more controlled while simultaneously releasing any vacuum that might be holding it in place.", "If a baby's head is jammed down in the mother's pelvic region, common sense suggests that it might help if a second person gives a gentle backward push on the area of its head visible through the mother's dilated cervix. \"In our unit,\" says Tydeman, \"when the woman is fully dilated and you'd expect the baby to come out normally [but it doesn't]… a registrar will be asking for a push-up about one in five times.\" Although registrars are doctors still in training, they're nonetheless experienced; which suggests requests for push-ups during unplanned caesareans are far from uncommon. The Tydeman tube is a gadget intended to make this manoeuvre safer and more effective.", "The clever and sophisticated simulator I'm playing with started life as a lash-up in an obstetrician's home workshop: a Heath Robinson-style contraption barely recognisable as a model of the human body. But it wasn't at that stage intended as a simulator for training medical staff. Its sole purpose was to test the effectiveness of a novel device called a Tydeman tube. Paradoxically, although the testing equipment, Debra, is now commercially available, the device it was intended to test has yet to reach the market.", "That Tydeman was able to do this comes as no great surprise once you've glanced at his website. His career may be rooted in medicine but his interests encompass sculpture, furniture making and much else. He works in wood, glass, metals and plastic. \"I've got a big workshop with a lathe and a forge,\" he says. \"I make stuff. I always have, ever since I was a child. My dad was a woodwork teacher, my mum was very creative with fabric.\"", "When originally conceived, remember, Debra was simply a means of testing the effectiveness of the tube. What she looked like was neither here nor there. It was only once Debra was reborn as a teaching aid that she needed sprucing up. \n\n Tydeman can remember the exact moment when the idea of her having a greater role dawned on him. \"I was on the sleeper train down from Scotland to London,\" he says. \"Debra was with me because the first Tydeman tube had become available at St Thomas's… It was about midnight, I'd had my free whisky and I suddenly thought, 'Blow me! Even if the tube doesn't work, Debra could be useful as a teaching aid'.\"\nThe following morning, at St Thomas's, Tydeman asked a visiting professor of obstetrics to have a look at Debra and tell him what she thought. She put her hand into Debra's womb, grasped the foetal head and said it felt just like the real thing. \"Terribly flattering,\" Tydeman laughs.", "Creativity and innovation have many unlikely sources. What seems to have inspired Tydeman to develop his device was the characteristic sound of a Wellington boot being pulled free of wet, muddy ground: a slurpy, sucking, gurgling noise. When an impacted foetal head is pulled free of the uterus it's often accompanied by a similar sucking noise, the result of air rushing in between the obstetrician's fingers to fill the space vacated. \"What occurred to me years ago was that if the air can't get in, why not put a tube up into the vagina so that it can get in from below the baby's head.\" From time to time, if he felt he felt the baby might stick, Tydeman would slip a length of sterile silicone tubing through the woman's vagina and up into the womb next to the baby's head. Allowing air in by this route would release any suction forces tending to hold it where it was.", "Although tests carried out with the Debra prototype showed that the tube would work as intended, Tydeman and his colleagues then faced what he calls a kind of medical catch-22. \"We had the tube finished about three years ago… but we were more interested in trying to save lives than selling a product. We thought that the right thing to do before commercialising it was to be sure we'd got the best design.\" They tried it on a dozen or so women in labour, and concluded that it did what it supposed to. But they held off trying to market it because they wanted to do more extensive, more rigorous clinical studies.\nThis presented a problem. \"If you've applied for research money,\" says Tydeman, \"but you've already got what seems to be a commercially viable design, potential funders are going to say that the company aiming to sell it should pay for the work.\" On the other hand, commercial interest is easier to drum up if you've already got evidence that a device is safe and effective.", "A proper study of the clinical effectiveness of the Tydeman tube will necessarily involve women giving birth. Assessing the value of Debra as a simulator didn't require human subjects; and the team has already conducted such a study. Thirty obstetricians, from three NHS maternity units and with varying levels of experience, took part. They all received a brief explanation of how Debra works, and were then asked to try a timed removal of the foetal head at three different levels of difficulty. Overall, 87 per cent reported that the simulator offered a realistic experience of dealing with an impacted head, and 93 per cent thought it would be valuable as a training device.", "That said, the team didn't want to leave the tube sitting on the shelf. So they eventually decided to go ahead and find a commercial partner willing to manufacture and market it. They have now identified one, and are fairly confident it will soon be in production. With sufficient users it should then be possible to compile factual – as opposed to anecdotal – evidence of benefit. Not ideal, Tydeman concedes, but the best they can do at present. \n\n In the meantime, back to Desperate Debra: so named, Tydeman says, not after any particular person but because the appellation is memorably alliterative. He put together the original Debra in a weekend. The skin was made out of a neoprene wetsuit fixed to a scaffolding formed from plastic tubing he'd found 20 years ago in skip outside a Glasgow pub; the head was cast in silicone from a model he'd made in plasticine, and the rest comprised old springs and other bits of stuff lying around his workshop. \"It wasn't actually that difficult,\" Tydeman says.", "The instrument is made up of a rigid plastic tube opening into a softer silicone cup. Pressure to the foetal head is applied using four pads projecting forward from the cup's interior. Holding the device by the tube, the user places the cup against the part of the head exposed through the dilated cervix, and presses. This pushes the baby back up into the uterus while releasing any suction pressure that may have been holding it, so allowing the obstetrician to extract it more easily. Because pressure is distributed equally between the four pads with a greater combined surface area than that of a user's fingertips, the risk of inadvertent damage is minimised. \n\n The team found some money to employ a product designer who used computer-aided design technology and 3D printing to make a prototype. \"We were at the point of getting one made in silicone,\" says Tydeman, \"when we realised that before we started experimenting on women we really ought to test it on a simulator.\" No such simulator existed – so he decided to make one himself.", "As the material for a convincing simulation, glass clearly has its drawbacks. But another 18th-century contraption used a pink cloth-covered mannequin comprising a female torso complete with genitalia, a set of implantable foetuses of various ages, and even – a real\ncoup de théâtre\n, this – a facility for exuding suitably coloured liquids at the appropriate moment.\nOddly, as medicine became more scientific, most of these devices fell by the wayside. As an academic review of these and other devices has pointed out, much of the 20th century was something of Dark Ages for simulation. Its value in professional training has had to be rediscovered: an endeavour in which inventive people like Graham Tydeman, sometimes with workshops rich in discarded junk, are still fruitfully engaged.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "With a grant from the Guy's and St Thomas's Charity fund they made Debra more presentable. Tydeman showed the prototype to Adam Rouilly, an established company specialising in medical models and simulators. They were impressed. A year later, the first of Debra's smartened-up sisters was on the market. \n\n In Debra as she is now, the precise extent and nature of her desperation can be fine-tuned according to need. The foetal head inside her uterus can be moved to mimic the various positions that an unborn baby may adopt. By tightening a spring inside Debra's body, it's also possible vary the degree of impaction from mild to so severe that the head is virtually impossible to extract. In this way she simulates the full range of difficulty that obstetricians are likely to encounter.", "So you can stop worrying. Debra – Desperate Debra to use her full trade name – is a simulator designed to help doctors practise their skill at dealing with impacted foetuses: babies that get stuck trying to exit the womb by the normal route. She comprises the lower two thirds (ie from the mid-chest region downwards) of a life-sized but limbless female torso made of flesh-coloured silicone rubber. She comes with a vulva, a pre-cut incision in her abdomen and, most importantly, a uterus containing a foetal head that should, in the normal way of things, be free to emerge between her legs. But this fetus is going nowhere until an obstetrician – or in this case me – can successfully grasp and pull it out.", "One of the treatments of choice in that era was, naturally, acupuncture. But how to teach tyro-acupuncturists where to place the needles? Simple. A life-size bronze statue dotted with small holes indicated the points of insertion. And how then to test the students' grasp of their subject? If the statute was hollow, filled with liquid and given an outer coating of wax to mask the holes, a correct needle insertion would be followed by a leak. \n\n Given the universality of childbirth it's no surprise that, then as now, the womb turns out to be the most simulated of our organs. For the benefit of 18th-century midwives and doctors-in-training, the Bologna surgeon Giovanni Antonio Galli devised a birthing simulator comprising a glass uterus supported by an artificial pelvis and containing a flexible foetus. Trainees had to deliver the baby while wearing a blindfold. Only the tutor could witness the fumbling of their hands.", "The use of simulators to teach technical skills is now common in medical schools. You can learn to sew up a knife wound, catheterise a bladder or intubate an airway. You can practise cardiopulmonary resuscitation or ear syringing or even go through the motions of a keyhole surgical procedure. The technology required to do these things may cost a few pounds, or tens of thousands. Either way, given that most of these devices were invented during the past three or four decades, it comes as something of a surprise to learn that simulation for medical purposes can be traced back as far as the Chinese Song dynasty of 960-1279 AD.", "It's still too soon to make a final judgement about Debra’s impact. \"When we first brought Debra out,\" Briley recalls, \"some of the really experienced professors said things like, 'We always managed without one. Why would you need this?' But ask them to have a go at using it and then they admit it's really good.\" Medicine as a whole has an oddly ambivalent relationship to innovation. Some new findings, techniques or equipment take years to penetrate the profession; others are seized upon immediately.", "When obstetricians doing planned caesareans slice open a mother's womb, what they usually see is the baby's head. By slipping a hand round and below it they can easily guide the baby out. \"When you do a caesarean for an impacted baby,\" says Tydeman, \"you make the incision in the same place, but what you might come across is a shoulder because the baby's so much further down [the birth canal].\" As I'd discovered for myself, sliding a hand around the baby's head is then far more difficult. \"It makes your fingers hurt,\" says Tydeman. \"It makes your pulse rate go up to about 200, and you break out in a sweat because know you've only got about five or 10 minutes before there are serious consequences. The clock is ticking.\"", "So how valuable in training medical staff is a simulator like this? Very, according to Annette Briley. Imagine it's the middle of the night and an unplanned emergency caesarean is required: \"Some poor junior doctor might find himself trying to manage it on his own.\" To have practised the knack of extracting a firmly impacted baby from a simulator is lot better than first honing your skill on a real woman.", "At St Thomas's, midwives in training also get an opportunity to practise on Debra. The chances that midwives will find themselves having to do the actual extraction of an infant are slim; but they're quite likely to be asked to help the obstetrician by pushing a stuck baby from below. Debra's anatomy allows them to practise this skill; and to learn where and how hard to push on the infant skull. \"Any practice you've done in the cold light of day will help you stay calm and composed in an emergency, and that's what we're aiming for,\" says Briley." ], [ "So you can stop worrying. Debra – Desperate Debra to use her full trade name – is a simulator designed to help doctors practise their skill at dealing with impacted foetuses: babies that get stuck trying to exit the womb by the normal route. She comprises the lower two thirds (ie from the mid-chest region downwards) of a life-sized but limbless female torso made of flesh-coloured silicone rubber. She comes with a vulva, a pre-cut incision in her abdomen and, most importantly, a uterus containing a foetal head that should, in the normal way of things, be free to emerge between her legs. But this fetus is going nowhere until an obstetrician – or in this case me – can successfully grasp and pull it out.", "The inventor of the tube and of Desperate Debra is Dr Graham Tydeman, a consultant in obstetrics and gynaecology at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy, Fife. Only after he'd built Debra did he realise that she might serve a purpose beyond his original intention. His is a decade-long tale of inspired insights, thwarted aims and shifting purposes; but with a good outcome. Although the Tydeman tube is still in gestation, Desperate Debra herself is now thriving.\nTo understand the desperation of Debra and how the Tydeman tube might help to relieve it requires a brief foray into basic obstetric knowhow. Evolution has endowed us with heads proportionally so large that even when labour runs according to plan, the delivery process involves a bit of a squeeze. For the baby's head to get stuck on the way out may not be usual, but it's by no means a rarity.", "When originally conceived, remember, Debra was simply a means of testing the effectiveness of the tube. What she looked like was neither here nor there. It was only once Debra was reborn as a teaching aid that she needed sprucing up. \n\n Tydeman can remember the exact moment when the idea of her having a greater role dawned on him. \"I was on the sleeper train down from Scotland to London,\" he says. \"Debra was with me because the first Tydeman tube had become available at St Thomas's… It was about midnight, I'd had my free whisky and I suddenly thought, 'Blow me! Even if the tube doesn't work, Debra could be useful as a teaching aid'.\"\nThe following morning, at St Thomas's, Tydeman asked a visiting professor of obstetrics to have a look at Debra and tell him what she thought. She put her hand into Debra's womb, grasped the foetal head and said it felt just like the real thing. \"Terribly flattering,\" Tydeman laughs.", "With a grant from the Guy's and St Thomas's Charity fund they made Debra more presentable. Tydeman showed the prototype to Adam Rouilly, an established company specialising in medical models and simulators. They were impressed. A year later, the first of Debra's smartened-up sisters was on the market. \n\n In Debra as she is now, the precise extent and nature of her desperation can be fine-tuned according to need. The foetal head inside her uterus can be moved to mimic the various positions that an unborn baby may adopt. By tightening a spring inside Debra's body, it's also possible vary the degree of impaction from mild to so severe that the head is virtually impossible to extract. In this way she simulates the full range of difficulty that obstetricians are likely to encounter.", "That said, the team didn't want to leave the tube sitting on the shelf. So they eventually decided to go ahead and find a commercial partner willing to manufacture and market it. They have now identified one, and are fairly confident it will soon be in production. With sufficient users it should then be possible to compile factual – as opposed to anecdotal – evidence of benefit. Not ideal, Tydeman concedes, but the best they can do at present. \n\n In the meantime, back to Desperate Debra: so named, Tydeman says, not after any particular person but because the appellation is memorably alliterative. He put together the original Debra in a weekend. The skin was made out of a neoprene wetsuit fixed to a scaffolding formed from plastic tubing he'd found 20 years ago in skip outside a Glasgow pub; the head was cast in silicone from a model he'd made in plasticine, and the rest comprised old springs and other bits of stuff lying around his workshop. \"It wasn't actually that difficult,\" Tydeman says.", "It's still too soon to make a final judgement about Debra’s impact. \"When we first brought Debra out,\" Briley recalls, \"some of the really experienced professors said things like, 'We always managed without one. Why would you need this?' But ask them to have a go at using it and then they admit it's really good.\" Medicine as a whole has an oddly ambivalent relationship to innovation. Some new findings, techniques or equipment take years to penetrate the profession; others are seized upon immediately.", "The clever and sophisticated simulator I'm playing with started life as a lash-up in an obstetrician's home workshop: a Heath Robinson-style contraption barely recognisable as a model of the human body. But it wasn't at that stage intended as a simulator for training medical staff. Its sole purpose was to test the effectiveness of a novel device called a Tydeman tube. Paradoxically, although the testing equipment, Debra, is now commercially available, the device it was intended to test has yet to reach the market.", "Although tests carried out with the Debra prototype showed that the tube would work as intended, Tydeman and his colleagues then faced what he calls a kind of medical catch-22. \"We had the tube finished about three years ago… but we were more interested in trying to save lives than selling a product. We thought that the right thing to do before commercialising it was to be sure we'd got the best design.\" They tried it on a dozen or so women in labour, and concluded that it did what it supposed to. But they held off trying to market it because they wanted to do more extensive, more rigorous clinical studies.\nThis presented a problem. \"If you've applied for research money,\" says Tydeman, \"but you've already got what seems to be a commercially viable design, potential funders are going to say that the company aiming to sell it should pay for the work.\" On the other hand, commercial interest is easier to drum up if you've already got evidence that a device is safe and effective.", "A proper study of the clinical effectiveness of the Tydeman tube will necessarily involve women giving birth. Assessing the value of Debra as a simulator didn't require human subjects; and the team has already conducted such a study. Thirty obstetricians, from three NHS maternity units and with varying levels of experience, took part. They all received a brief explanation of how Debra works, and were then asked to try a timed removal of the foetal head at three different levels of difficulty. Overall, 87 per cent reported that the simulator offered a realistic experience of dealing with an impacted head, and 93 per cent thought it would be valuable as a training device.", "At St Thomas's, midwives in training also get an opportunity to practise on Debra. The chances that midwives will find themselves having to do the actual extraction of an infant are slim; but they're quite likely to be asked to help the obstetrician by pushing a stuck baby from below. Debra's anatomy allows them to practise this skill; and to learn where and how hard to push on the infant skull. \"Any practice you've done in the cold light of day will help you stay calm and composed in an emergency, and that's what we're aiming for,\" says Briley.", "Obstetrics for beginners\nIt's my first go at delivering a baby by caesarean section – and the foetal head is impacted, jammed in its mother's pelvis. To be honest I'm struggling. \n\n Incisions have been made in the lower part of the mother's abdomen and womb. I've pushed my gloved hand inside and managed to slide my fingers between the baby's head and the surrounding uterine tissue. But it's difficult. The baby is tightly wedged in. I've had to push hard to get my hand to the far side of its head, and even though I'm now cupping and grasping it in the approved manner, I can't seem to pull it out. Dare I grip its head more firmly? Dare I pull harder? \n\n The baby's mother – she's called Debra – remains impassive throughout these agonised fumblings. Her face reveals nothing of what she may be feeling. But then Debra has no feelings. Indeed she has no face…", "So how valuable in training medical staff is a simulator like this? Very, according to Annette Briley. Imagine it's the middle of the night and an unplanned emergency caesarean is required: \"Some poor junior doctor might find himself trying to manage it on his own.\" To have practised the knack of extracting a firmly impacted baby from a simulator is lot better than first honing your skill on a real woman.", "As the material for a convincing simulation, glass clearly has its drawbacks. But another 18th-century contraption used a pink cloth-covered mannequin comprising a female torso complete with genitalia, a set of implantable foetuses of various ages, and even – a real\ncoup de théâtre\n, this – a facility for exuding suitably coloured liquids at the appropriate moment.\nOddly, as medicine became more scientific, most of these devices fell by the wayside. As an academic review of these and other devices has pointed out, much of the 20th century was something of Dark Ages for simulation. Its value in professional training has had to be rediscovered: an endeavour in which inventive people like Graham Tydeman, sometimes with workshops rich in discarded junk, are still fruitfully engaged.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "The instrument is made up of a rigid plastic tube opening into a softer silicone cup. Pressure to the foetal head is applied using four pads projecting forward from the cup's interior. Holding the device by the tube, the user places the cup against the part of the head exposed through the dilated cervix, and presses. This pushes the baby back up into the uterus while releasing any suction pressure that may have been holding it, so allowing the obstetrician to extract it more easily. Because pressure is distributed equally between the four pads with a greater combined surface area than that of a user's fingertips, the risk of inadvertent damage is minimised. \n\n The team found some money to employ a product designer who used computer-aided design technology and 3D printing to make a prototype. \"We were at the point of getting one made in silicone,\" says Tydeman, \"when we realised that before we started experimenting on women we really ought to test it on a simulator.\" No such simulator existed – so he decided to make one himself.", "If a baby's head is jammed down in the mother's pelvic region, common sense suggests that it might help if a second person gives a gentle backward push on the area of its head visible through the mother's dilated cervix. \"In our unit,\" says Tydeman, \"when the woman is fully dilated and you'd expect the baby to come out normally [but it doesn't]… a registrar will be asking for a push-up about one in five times.\" Although registrars are doctors still in training, they're nonetheless experienced; which suggests requests for push-ups during unplanned caesareans are far from uncommon. The Tydeman tube is a gadget intended to make this manoeuvre safer and more effective.", "Creativity and innovation have many unlikely sources. What seems to have inspired Tydeman to develop his device was the characteristic sound of a Wellington boot being pulled free of wet, muddy ground: a slurpy, sucking, gurgling noise. When an impacted foetal head is pulled free of the uterus it's often accompanied by a similar sucking noise, the result of air rushing in between the obstetrician's fingers to fill the space vacated. \"What occurred to me years ago was that if the air can't get in, why not put a tube up into the vagina so that it can get in from below the baby's head.\" From time to time, if he felt he felt the baby might stick, Tydeman would slip a length of sterile silicone tubing through the woman's vagina and up into the womb next to the baby's head. Allowing air in by this route would release any suction forces tending to hold it where it was.", "Tydeman didn't do much with the idea until 10 years ago when one trainee, who was experiencing real difficulty getting heads out, prompted him to think again about the problem. Around the same time, he met professor of obstetrics Andrew Shennan and consultant midwife Annette Briley, both of the Women's Health Academic Centre at St Thomas's hospital. Between them they came up with a device – the Tydeman tube – to make pushing on the foetus more controlled while simultaneously releasing any vacuum that might be holding it in place.", "When obstetricians doing planned caesareans slice open a mother's womb, what they usually see is the baby's head. By slipping a hand round and below it they can easily guide the baby out. \"When you do a caesarean for an impacted baby,\" says Tydeman, \"you make the incision in the same place, but what you might come across is a shoulder because the baby's so much further down [the birth canal].\" As I'd discovered for myself, sliding a hand around the baby's head is then far more difficult. \"It makes your fingers hurt,\" says Tydeman. \"It makes your pulse rate go up to about 200, and you break out in a sweat because know you've only got about five or 10 minutes before there are serious consequences. The clock is ticking.\"", "That Tydeman was able to do this comes as no great surprise once you've glanced at his website. His career may be rooted in medicine but his interests encompass sculpture, furniture making and much else. He works in wood, glass, metals and plastic. \"I've got a big workshop with a lathe and a forge,\" he says. \"I make stuff. I always have, ever since I was a child. My dad was a woodwork teacher, my mum was very creative with fabric.\"", "The standard response is to perform a caesarean section. Every year some 160,000 babies are born in the UK this way, with almost two thirds of them classified as emergencies. One audit has suggested that roughly 8,000 babies get stuck and have to be delivered by caesarean at a stage when their mothers are fully dilated. \"Some of the babies will be so close to coming out by the normal route,\" says Tydeman, \"that it's then difficult to get them back up and remove them through the hole in the woman's tummy.\" Which women are most at risk of this setback seems to be largely unpredictable. \"We just observe that it happens… It's been discussed in the medical literature since the 1940s, but until 10 years ago, and throughout my training and most of my life as a consultant, it wasn't really talked about.\"" ], [ "When originally conceived, remember, Debra was simply a means of testing the effectiveness of the tube. What she looked like was neither here nor there. It was only once Debra was reborn as a teaching aid that she needed sprucing up. \n\n Tydeman can remember the exact moment when the idea of her having a greater role dawned on him. \"I was on the sleeper train down from Scotland to London,\" he says. \"Debra was with me because the first Tydeman tube had become available at St Thomas's… It was about midnight, I'd had my free whisky and I suddenly thought, 'Blow me! Even if the tube doesn't work, Debra could be useful as a teaching aid'.\"\nThe following morning, at St Thomas's, Tydeman asked a visiting professor of obstetrics to have a look at Debra and tell him what she thought. She put her hand into Debra's womb, grasped the foetal head and said it felt just like the real thing. \"Terribly flattering,\" Tydeman laughs.", "So you can stop worrying. Debra – Desperate Debra to use her full trade name – is a simulator designed to help doctors practise their skill at dealing with impacted foetuses: babies that get stuck trying to exit the womb by the normal route. She comprises the lower two thirds (ie from the mid-chest region downwards) of a life-sized but limbless female torso made of flesh-coloured silicone rubber. She comes with a vulva, a pre-cut incision in her abdomen and, most importantly, a uterus containing a foetal head that should, in the normal way of things, be free to emerge between her legs. But this fetus is going nowhere until an obstetrician – or in this case me – can successfully grasp and pull it out.", "That said, the team didn't want to leave the tube sitting on the shelf. So they eventually decided to go ahead and find a commercial partner willing to manufacture and market it. They have now identified one, and are fairly confident it will soon be in production. With sufficient users it should then be possible to compile factual – as opposed to anecdotal – evidence of benefit. Not ideal, Tydeman concedes, but the best they can do at present. \n\n In the meantime, back to Desperate Debra: so named, Tydeman says, not after any particular person but because the appellation is memorably alliterative. He put together the original Debra in a weekend. The skin was made out of a neoprene wetsuit fixed to a scaffolding formed from plastic tubing he'd found 20 years ago in skip outside a Glasgow pub; the head was cast in silicone from a model he'd made in plasticine, and the rest comprised old springs and other bits of stuff lying around his workshop. \"It wasn't actually that difficult,\" Tydeman says.", "With a grant from the Guy's and St Thomas's Charity fund they made Debra more presentable. Tydeman showed the prototype to Adam Rouilly, an established company specialising in medical models and simulators. They were impressed. A year later, the first of Debra's smartened-up sisters was on the market. \n\n In Debra as she is now, the precise extent and nature of her desperation can be fine-tuned according to need. The foetal head inside her uterus can be moved to mimic the various positions that an unborn baby may adopt. By tightening a spring inside Debra's body, it's also possible vary the degree of impaction from mild to so severe that the head is virtually impossible to extract. In this way she simulates the full range of difficulty that obstetricians are likely to encounter.", "The inventor of the tube and of Desperate Debra is Dr Graham Tydeman, a consultant in obstetrics and gynaecology at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy, Fife. Only after he'd built Debra did he realise that she might serve a purpose beyond his original intention. His is a decade-long tale of inspired insights, thwarted aims and shifting purposes; but with a good outcome. Although the Tydeman tube is still in gestation, Desperate Debra herself is now thriving.\nTo understand the desperation of Debra and how the Tydeman tube might help to relieve it requires a brief foray into basic obstetric knowhow. Evolution has endowed us with heads proportionally so large that even when labour runs according to plan, the delivery process involves a bit of a squeeze. For the baby's head to get stuck on the way out may not be usual, but it's by no means a rarity.", "The clever and sophisticated simulator I'm playing with started life as a lash-up in an obstetrician's home workshop: a Heath Robinson-style contraption barely recognisable as a model of the human body. But it wasn't at that stage intended as a simulator for training medical staff. Its sole purpose was to test the effectiveness of a novel device called a Tydeman tube. Paradoxically, although the testing equipment, Debra, is now commercially available, the device it was intended to test has yet to reach the market.", "Although tests carried out with the Debra prototype showed that the tube would work as intended, Tydeman and his colleagues then faced what he calls a kind of medical catch-22. \"We had the tube finished about three years ago… but we were more interested in trying to save lives than selling a product. We thought that the right thing to do before commercialising it was to be sure we'd got the best design.\" They tried it on a dozen or so women in labour, and concluded that it did what it supposed to. But they held off trying to market it because they wanted to do more extensive, more rigorous clinical studies.\nThis presented a problem. \"If you've applied for research money,\" says Tydeman, \"but you've already got what seems to be a commercially viable design, potential funders are going to say that the company aiming to sell it should pay for the work.\" On the other hand, commercial interest is easier to drum up if you've already got evidence that a device is safe and effective.", "It's still too soon to make a final judgement about Debra’s impact. \"When we first brought Debra out,\" Briley recalls, \"some of the really experienced professors said things like, 'We always managed without one. Why would you need this?' But ask them to have a go at using it and then they admit it's really good.\" Medicine as a whole has an oddly ambivalent relationship to innovation. Some new findings, techniques or equipment take years to penetrate the profession; others are seized upon immediately.", "A proper study of the clinical effectiveness of the Tydeman tube will necessarily involve women giving birth. Assessing the value of Debra as a simulator didn't require human subjects; and the team has already conducted such a study. Thirty obstetricians, from three NHS maternity units and with varying levels of experience, took part. They all received a brief explanation of how Debra works, and were then asked to try a timed removal of the foetal head at three different levels of difficulty. Overall, 87 per cent reported that the simulator offered a realistic experience of dealing with an impacted head, and 93 per cent thought it would be valuable as a training device.", "The instrument is made up of a rigid plastic tube opening into a softer silicone cup. Pressure to the foetal head is applied using four pads projecting forward from the cup's interior. Holding the device by the tube, the user places the cup against the part of the head exposed through the dilated cervix, and presses. This pushes the baby back up into the uterus while releasing any suction pressure that may have been holding it, so allowing the obstetrician to extract it more easily. Because pressure is distributed equally between the four pads with a greater combined surface area than that of a user's fingertips, the risk of inadvertent damage is minimised. \n\n The team found some money to employ a product designer who used computer-aided design technology and 3D printing to make a prototype. \"We were at the point of getting one made in silicone,\" says Tydeman, \"when we realised that before we started experimenting on women we really ought to test it on a simulator.\" No such simulator existed – so he decided to make one himself.", "At St Thomas's, midwives in training also get an opportunity to practise on Debra. The chances that midwives will find themselves having to do the actual extraction of an infant are slim; but they're quite likely to be asked to help the obstetrician by pushing a stuck baby from below. Debra's anatomy allows them to practise this skill; and to learn where and how hard to push on the infant skull. \"Any practice you've done in the cold light of day will help you stay calm and composed in an emergency, and that's what we're aiming for,\" says Briley.", "As the material for a convincing simulation, glass clearly has its drawbacks. But another 18th-century contraption used a pink cloth-covered mannequin comprising a female torso complete with genitalia, a set of implantable foetuses of various ages, and even – a real\ncoup de théâtre\n, this – a facility for exuding suitably coloured liquids at the appropriate moment.\nOddly, as medicine became more scientific, most of these devices fell by the wayside. As an academic review of these and other devices has pointed out, much of the 20th century was something of Dark Ages for simulation. Its value in professional training has had to be rediscovered: an endeavour in which inventive people like Graham Tydeman, sometimes with workshops rich in discarded junk, are still fruitfully engaged.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "Obstetrics for beginners\nIt's my first go at delivering a baby by caesarean section – and the foetal head is impacted, jammed in its mother's pelvis. To be honest I'm struggling. \n\n Incisions have been made in the lower part of the mother's abdomen and womb. I've pushed my gloved hand inside and managed to slide my fingers between the baby's head and the surrounding uterine tissue. But it's difficult. The baby is tightly wedged in. I've had to push hard to get my hand to the far side of its head, and even though I'm now cupping and grasping it in the approved manner, I can't seem to pull it out. Dare I grip its head more firmly? Dare I pull harder? \n\n The baby's mother – she's called Debra – remains impassive throughout these agonised fumblings. Her face reveals nothing of what she may be feeling. But then Debra has no feelings. Indeed she has no face…", "That Tydeman was able to do this comes as no great surprise once you've glanced at his website. His career may be rooted in medicine but his interests encompass sculpture, furniture making and much else. He works in wood, glass, metals and plastic. \"I've got a big workshop with a lathe and a forge,\" he says. \"I make stuff. I always have, ever since I was a child. My dad was a woodwork teacher, my mum was very creative with fabric.\"", "One of the treatments of choice in that era was, naturally, acupuncture. But how to teach tyro-acupuncturists where to place the needles? Simple. A life-size bronze statue dotted with small holes indicated the points of insertion. And how then to test the students' grasp of their subject? If the statute was hollow, filled with liquid and given an outer coating of wax to mask the holes, a correct needle insertion would be followed by a leak. \n\n Given the universality of childbirth it's no surprise that, then as now, the womb turns out to be the most simulated of our organs. For the benefit of 18th-century midwives and doctors-in-training, the Bologna surgeon Giovanni Antonio Galli devised a birthing simulator comprising a glass uterus supported by an artificial pelvis and containing a flexible foetus. Trainees had to deliver the baby while wearing a blindfold. Only the tutor could witness the fumbling of their hands.", "So how valuable in training medical staff is a simulator like this? Very, according to Annette Briley. Imagine it's the middle of the night and an unplanned emergency caesarean is required: \"Some poor junior doctor might find himself trying to manage it on his own.\" To have practised the knack of extracting a firmly impacted baby from a simulator is lot better than first honing your skill on a real woman.", "Creativity and innovation have many unlikely sources. What seems to have inspired Tydeman to develop his device was the characteristic sound of a Wellington boot being pulled free of wet, muddy ground: a slurpy, sucking, gurgling noise. When an impacted foetal head is pulled free of the uterus it's often accompanied by a similar sucking noise, the result of air rushing in between the obstetrician's fingers to fill the space vacated. \"What occurred to me years ago was that if the air can't get in, why not put a tube up into the vagina so that it can get in from below the baby's head.\" From time to time, if he felt he felt the baby might stick, Tydeman would slip a length of sterile silicone tubing through the woman's vagina and up into the womb next to the baby's head. Allowing air in by this route would release any suction forces tending to hold it where it was.", "If a baby's head is jammed down in the mother's pelvic region, common sense suggests that it might help if a second person gives a gentle backward push on the area of its head visible through the mother's dilated cervix. \"In our unit,\" says Tydeman, \"when the woman is fully dilated and you'd expect the baby to come out normally [but it doesn't]… a registrar will be asking for a push-up about one in five times.\" Although registrars are doctors still in training, they're nonetheless experienced; which suggests requests for push-ups during unplanned caesareans are far from uncommon. The Tydeman tube is a gadget intended to make this manoeuvre safer and more effective.", "Tydeman didn't do much with the idea until 10 years ago when one trainee, who was experiencing real difficulty getting heads out, prompted him to think again about the problem. Around the same time, he met professor of obstetrics Andrew Shennan and consultant midwife Annette Briley, both of the Women's Health Academic Centre at St Thomas's hospital. Between them they came up with a device – the Tydeman tube – to make pushing on the foetus more controlled while simultaneously releasing any vacuum that might be holding it in place.", "The use of simulators to teach technical skills is now common in medical schools. You can learn to sew up a knife wound, catheterise a bladder or intubate an airway. You can practise cardiopulmonary resuscitation or ear syringing or even go through the motions of a keyhole surgical procedure. The technology required to do these things may cost a few pounds, or tens of thousands. Either way, given that most of these devices were invented during the past three or four decades, it comes as something of a surprise to learn that simulation for medical purposes can be traced back as far as the Chinese Song dynasty of 960-1279 AD." ], [ "The standard response is to perform a caesarean section. Every year some 160,000 babies are born in the UK this way, with almost two thirds of them classified as emergencies. One audit has suggested that roughly 8,000 babies get stuck and have to be delivered by caesarean at a stage when their mothers are fully dilated. \"Some of the babies will be so close to coming out by the normal route,\" says Tydeman, \"that it's then difficult to get them back up and remove them through the hole in the woman's tummy.\" Which women are most at risk of this setback seems to be largely unpredictable. \"We just observe that it happens… It's been discussed in the medical literature since the 1940s, but until 10 years ago, and throughout my training and most of my life as a consultant, it wasn't really talked about.\"", "When obstetricians doing planned caesareans slice open a mother's womb, what they usually see is the baby's head. By slipping a hand round and below it they can easily guide the baby out. \"When you do a caesarean for an impacted baby,\" says Tydeman, \"you make the incision in the same place, but what you might come across is a shoulder because the baby's so much further down [the birth canal].\" As I'd discovered for myself, sliding a hand around the baby's head is then far more difficult. \"It makes your fingers hurt,\" says Tydeman. \"It makes your pulse rate go up to about 200, and you break out in a sweat because know you've only got about five or 10 minutes before there are serious consequences. The clock is ticking.\"", "Obstetrics for beginners\nIt's my first go at delivering a baby by caesarean section – and the foetal head is impacted, jammed in its mother's pelvis. To be honest I'm struggling. \n\n Incisions have been made in the lower part of the mother's abdomen and womb. I've pushed my gloved hand inside and managed to slide my fingers between the baby's head and the surrounding uterine tissue. But it's difficult. The baby is tightly wedged in. I've had to push hard to get my hand to the far side of its head, and even though I'm now cupping and grasping it in the approved manner, I can't seem to pull it out. Dare I grip its head more firmly? Dare I pull harder? \n\n The baby's mother – she's called Debra – remains impassive throughout these agonised fumblings. Her face reveals nothing of what she may be feeling. But then Debra has no feelings. Indeed she has no face…", "In a protracted birth that's destined to end with a caesarean, the longer the labour is allowed to go on before the obstetrician decides to intervene, the greater the likelihood that the baby's head will become impacted. However, concern over the rising number of babies born by caesarean has made doctors more wary of doing them – one consequence of which is that medical staff may allow a difficult birth to continue for longer before they resort to surgery. This could be boosting the frequency of impaction. But, again, no one is certain.", "The inventor of the tube and of Desperate Debra is Dr Graham Tydeman, a consultant in obstetrics and gynaecology at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy, Fife. Only after he'd built Debra did he realise that she might serve a purpose beyond his original intention. His is a decade-long tale of inspired insights, thwarted aims and shifting purposes; but with a good outcome. Although the Tydeman tube is still in gestation, Desperate Debra herself is now thriving.\nTo understand the desperation of Debra and how the Tydeman tube might help to relieve it requires a brief foray into basic obstetric knowhow. Evolution has endowed us with heads proportionally so large that even when labour runs according to plan, the delivery process involves a bit of a squeeze. For the baby's head to get stuck on the way out may not be usual, but it's by no means a rarity.", "At St Thomas's, midwives in training also get an opportunity to practise on Debra. The chances that midwives will find themselves having to do the actual extraction of an infant are slim; but they're quite likely to be asked to help the obstetrician by pushing a stuck baby from below. Debra's anatomy allows them to practise this skill; and to learn where and how hard to push on the infant skull. \"Any practice you've done in the cold light of day will help you stay calm and composed in an emergency, and that's what we're aiming for,\" says Briley.", "If a baby's head is jammed down in the mother's pelvic region, common sense suggests that it might help if a second person gives a gentle backward push on the area of its head visible through the mother's dilated cervix. \"In our unit,\" says Tydeman, \"when the woman is fully dilated and you'd expect the baby to come out normally [but it doesn't]… a registrar will be asking for a push-up about one in five times.\" Although registrars are doctors still in training, they're nonetheless experienced; which suggests requests for push-ups during unplanned caesareans are far from uncommon. The Tydeman tube is a gadget intended to make this manoeuvre safer and more effective.", "So you can stop worrying. Debra – Desperate Debra to use her full trade name – is a simulator designed to help doctors practise their skill at dealing with impacted foetuses: babies that get stuck trying to exit the womb by the normal route. She comprises the lower two thirds (ie from the mid-chest region downwards) of a life-sized but limbless female torso made of flesh-coloured silicone rubber. She comes with a vulva, a pre-cut incision in her abdomen and, most importantly, a uterus containing a foetal head that should, in the normal way of things, be free to emerge between her legs. But this fetus is going nowhere until an obstetrician – or in this case me – can successfully grasp and pull it out.", "So how valuable in training medical staff is a simulator like this? Very, according to Annette Briley. Imagine it's the middle of the night and an unplanned emergency caesarean is required: \"Some poor junior doctor might find himself trying to manage it on his own.\" To have practised the knack of extracting a firmly impacted baby from a simulator is lot better than first honing your skill on a real woman.", "A proper study of the clinical effectiveness of the Tydeman tube will necessarily involve women giving birth. Assessing the value of Debra as a simulator didn't require human subjects; and the team has already conducted such a study. Thirty obstetricians, from three NHS maternity units and with varying levels of experience, took part. They all received a brief explanation of how Debra works, and were then asked to try a timed removal of the foetal head at three different levels of difficulty. Overall, 87 per cent reported that the simulator offered a realistic experience of dealing with an impacted head, and 93 per cent thought it would be valuable as a training device.", "Considering the universality of childbirth, impaction and the best way of dealing with it are topics that seem to have gone remarkably unstudied. \"There are strong opinions about why it happens and what to do, but very little research evidence,\" says Tydeman, adding that many of these opinions are contradictory.", "Tydeman didn't do much with the idea until 10 years ago when one trainee, who was experiencing real difficulty getting heads out, prompted him to think again about the problem. Around the same time, he met professor of obstetrics Andrew Shennan and consultant midwife Annette Briley, both of the Women's Health Academic Centre at St Thomas's hospital. Between them they came up with a device – the Tydeman tube – to make pushing on the foetus more controlled while simultaneously releasing any vacuum that might be holding it in place.", "With a grant from the Guy's and St Thomas's Charity fund they made Debra more presentable. Tydeman showed the prototype to Adam Rouilly, an established company specialising in medical models and simulators. They were impressed. A year later, the first of Debra's smartened-up sisters was on the market. \n\n In Debra as she is now, the precise extent and nature of her desperation can be fine-tuned according to need. The foetal head inside her uterus can be moved to mimic the various positions that an unborn baby may adopt. By tightening a spring inside Debra's body, it's also possible vary the degree of impaction from mild to so severe that the head is virtually impossible to extract. In this way she simulates the full range of difficulty that obstetricians are likely to encounter.", "Creativity and innovation have many unlikely sources. What seems to have inspired Tydeman to develop his device was the characteristic sound of a Wellington boot being pulled free of wet, muddy ground: a slurpy, sucking, gurgling noise. When an impacted foetal head is pulled free of the uterus it's often accompanied by a similar sucking noise, the result of air rushing in between the obstetrician's fingers to fill the space vacated. \"What occurred to me years ago was that if the air can't get in, why not put a tube up into the vagina so that it can get in from below the baby's head.\" From time to time, if he felt he felt the baby might stick, Tydeman would slip a length of sterile silicone tubing through the woman's vagina and up into the womb next to the baby's head. Allowing air in by this route would release any suction forces tending to hold it where it was.", "When originally conceived, remember, Debra was simply a means of testing the effectiveness of the tube. What she looked like was neither here nor there. It was only once Debra was reborn as a teaching aid that she needed sprucing up. \n\n Tydeman can remember the exact moment when the idea of her having a greater role dawned on him. \"I was on the sleeper train down from Scotland to London,\" he says. \"Debra was with me because the first Tydeman tube had become available at St Thomas's… It was about midnight, I'd had my free whisky and I suddenly thought, 'Blow me! Even if the tube doesn't work, Debra could be useful as a teaching aid'.\"\nThe following morning, at St Thomas's, Tydeman asked a visiting professor of obstetrics to have a look at Debra and tell him what she thought. She put her hand into Debra's womb, grasped the foetal head and said it felt just like the real thing. \"Terribly flattering,\" Tydeman laughs.", "Although tests carried out with the Debra prototype showed that the tube would work as intended, Tydeman and his colleagues then faced what he calls a kind of medical catch-22. \"We had the tube finished about three years ago… but we were more interested in trying to save lives than selling a product. We thought that the right thing to do before commercialising it was to be sure we'd got the best design.\" They tried it on a dozen or so women in labour, and concluded that it did what it supposed to. But they held off trying to market it because they wanted to do more extensive, more rigorous clinical studies.\nThis presented a problem. \"If you've applied for research money,\" says Tydeman, \"but you've already got what seems to be a commercially viable design, potential funders are going to say that the company aiming to sell it should pay for the work.\" On the other hand, commercial interest is easier to drum up if you've already got evidence that a device is safe and effective.", "The clever and sophisticated simulator I'm playing with started life as a lash-up in an obstetrician's home workshop: a Heath Robinson-style contraption barely recognisable as a model of the human body. But it wasn't at that stage intended as a simulator for training medical staff. Its sole purpose was to test the effectiveness of a novel device called a Tydeman tube. Paradoxically, although the testing equipment, Debra, is now commercially available, the device it was intended to test has yet to reach the market.", "As the material for a convincing simulation, glass clearly has its drawbacks. But another 18th-century contraption used a pink cloth-covered mannequin comprising a female torso complete with genitalia, a set of implantable foetuses of various ages, and even – a real\ncoup de théâtre\n, this – a facility for exuding suitably coloured liquids at the appropriate moment.\nOddly, as medicine became more scientific, most of these devices fell by the wayside. As an academic review of these and other devices has pointed out, much of the 20th century was something of Dark Ages for simulation. Its value in professional training has had to be rediscovered: an endeavour in which inventive people like Graham Tydeman, sometimes with workshops rich in discarded junk, are still fruitfully engaged.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "The instrument is made up of a rigid plastic tube opening into a softer silicone cup. Pressure to the foetal head is applied using four pads projecting forward from the cup's interior. Holding the device by the tube, the user places the cup against the part of the head exposed through the dilated cervix, and presses. This pushes the baby back up into the uterus while releasing any suction pressure that may have been holding it, so allowing the obstetrician to extract it more easily. Because pressure is distributed equally between the four pads with a greater combined surface area than that of a user's fingertips, the risk of inadvertent damage is minimised. \n\n The team found some money to employ a product designer who used computer-aided design technology and 3D printing to make a prototype. \"We were at the point of getting one made in silicone,\" says Tydeman, \"when we realised that before we started experimenting on women we really ought to test it on a simulator.\" No such simulator existed – so he decided to make one himself.", "One of the treatments of choice in that era was, naturally, acupuncture. But how to teach tyro-acupuncturists where to place the needles? Simple. A life-size bronze statue dotted with small holes indicated the points of insertion. And how then to test the students' grasp of their subject? If the statute was hollow, filled with liquid and given an outer coating of wax to mask the holes, a correct needle insertion would be followed by a leak. \n\n Given the universality of childbirth it's no surprise that, then as now, the womb turns out to be the most simulated of our organs. For the benefit of 18th-century midwives and doctors-in-training, the Bologna surgeon Giovanni Antonio Galli devised a birthing simulator comprising a glass uterus supported by an artificial pelvis and containing a flexible foetus. Trainees had to deliver the baby while wearing a blindfold. Only the tutor could witness the fumbling of their hands." ], [ "In a protracted birth that's destined to end with a caesarean, the longer the labour is allowed to go on before the obstetrician decides to intervene, the greater the likelihood that the baby's head will become impacted. However, concern over the rising number of babies born by caesarean has made doctors more wary of doing them – one consequence of which is that medical staff may allow a difficult birth to continue for longer before they resort to surgery. This could be boosting the frequency of impaction. But, again, no one is certain.", "When obstetricians doing planned caesareans slice open a mother's womb, what they usually see is the baby's head. By slipping a hand round and below it they can easily guide the baby out. \"When you do a caesarean for an impacted baby,\" says Tydeman, \"you make the incision in the same place, but what you might come across is a shoulder because the baby's so much further down [the birth canal].\" As I'd discovered for myself, sliding a hand around the baby's head is then far more difficult. \"It makes your fingers hurt,\" says Tydeman. \"It makes your pulse rate go up to about 200, and you break out in a sweat because know you've only got about five or 10 minutes before there are serious consequences. The clock is ticking.\"", "The standard response is to perform a caesarean section. Every year some 160,000 babies are born in the UK this way, with almost two thirds of them classified as emergencies. One audit has suggested that roughly 8,000 babies get stuck and have to be delivered by caesarean at a stage when their mothers are fully dilated. \"Some of the babies will be so close to coming out by the normal route,\" says Tydeman, \"that it's then difficult to get them back up and remove them through the hole in the woman's tummy.\" Which women are most at risk of this setback seems to be largely unpredictable. \"We just observe that it happens… It's been discussed in the medical literature since the 1940s, but until 10 years ago, and throughout my training and most of my life as a consultant, it wasn't really talked about.\"", "So you can stop worrying. Debra – Desperate Debra to use her full trade name – is a simulator designed to help doctors practise their skill at dealing with impacted foetuses: babies that get stuck trying to exit the womb by the normal route. She comprises the lower two thirds (ie from the mid-chest region downwards) of a life-sized but limbless female torso made of flesh-coloured silicone rubber. She comes with a vulva, a pre-cut incision in her abdomen and, most importantly, a uterus containing a foetal head that should, in the normal way of things, be free to emerge between her legs. But this fetus is going nowhere until an obstetrician – or in this case me – can successfully grasp and pull it out.", "Obstetrics for beginners\nIt's my first go at delivering a baby by caesarean section – and the foetal head is impacted, jammed in its mother's pelvis. To be honest I'm struggling. \n\n Incisions have been made in the lower part of the mother's abdomen and womb. I've pushed my gloved hand inside and managed to slide my fingers between the baby's head and the surrounding uterine tissue. But it's difficult. The baby is tightly wedged in. I've had to push hard to get my hand to the far side of its head, and even though I'm now cupping and grasping it in the approved manner, I can't seem to pull it out. Dare I grip its head more firmly? Dare I pull harder? \n\n The baby's mother – she's called Debra – remains impassive throughout these agonised fumblings. Her face reveals nothing of what she may be feeling. But then Debra has no feelings. Indeed she has no face…", "At St Thomas's, midwives in training also get an opportunity to practise on Debra. The chances that midwives will find themselves having to do the actual extraction of an infant are slim; but they're quite likely to be asked to help the obstetrician by pushing a stuck baby from below. Debra's anatomy allows them to practise this skill; and to learn where and how hard to push on the infant skull. \"Any practice you've done in the cold light of day will help you stay calm and composed in an emergency, and that's what we're aiming for,\" says Briley.", "So how valuable in training medical staff is a simulator like this? Very, according to Annette Briley. Imagine it's the middle of the night and an unplanned emergency caesarean is required: \"Some poor junior doctor might find himself trying to manage it on his own.\" To have practised the knack of extracting a firmly impacted baby from a simulator is lot better than first honing your skill on a real woman.", "If a baby's head is jammed down in the mother's pelvic region, common sense suggests that it might help if a second person gives a gentle backward push on the area of its head visible through the mother's dilated cervix. \"In our unit,\" says Tydeman, \"when the woman is fully dilated and you'd expect the baby to come out normally [but it doesn't]… a registrar will be asking for a push-up about one in five times.\" Although registrars are doctors still in training, they're nonetheless experienced; which suggests requests for push-ups during unplanned caesareans are far from uncommon. The Tydeman tube is a gadget intended to make this manoeuvre safer and more effective.", "Considering the universality of childbirth, impaction and the best way of dealing with it are topics that seem to have gone remarkably unstudied. \"There are strong opinions about why it happens and what to do, but very little research evidence,\" says Tydeman, adding that many of these opinions are contradictory.", "The inventor of the tube and of Desperate Debra is Dr Graham Tydeman, a consultant in obstetrics and gynaecology at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy, Fife. Only after he'd built Debra did he realise that she might serve a purpose beyond his original intention. His is a decade-long tale of inspired insights, thwarted aims and shifting purposes; but with a good outcome. Although the Tydeman tube is still in gestation, Desperate Debra herself is now thriving.\nTo understand the desperation of Debra and how the Tydeman tube might help to relieve it requires a brief foray into basic obstetric knowhow. Evolution has endowed us with heads proportionally so large that even when labour runs according to plan, the delivery process involves a bit of a squeeze. For the baby's head to get stuck on the way out may not be usual, but it's by no means a rarity.", "Tydeman didn't do much with the idea until 10 years ago when one trainee, who was experiencing real difficulty getting heads out, prompted him to think again about the problem. Around the same time, he met professor of obstetrics Andrew Shennan and consultant midwife Annette Briley, both of the Women's Health Academic Centre at St Thomas's hospital. Between them they came up with a device – the Tydeman tube – to make pushing on the foetus more controlled while simultaneously releasing any vacuum that might be holding it in place.", "With a grant from the Guy's and St Thomas's Charity fund they made Debra more presentable. Tydeman showed the prototype to Adam Rouilly, an established company specialising in medical models and simulators. They were impressed. A year later, the first of Debra's smartened-up sisters was on the market. \n\n In Debra as she is now, the precise extent and nature of her desperation can be fine-tuned according to need. The foetal head inside her uterus can be moved to mimic the various positions that an unborn baby may adopt. By tightening a spring inside Debra's body, it's also possible vary the degree of impaction from mild to so severe that the head is virtually impossible to extract. In this way she simulates the full range of difficulty that obstetricians are likely to encounter.", "A proper study of the clinical effectiveness of the Tydeman tube will necessarily involve women giving birth. Assessing the value of Debra as a simulator didn't require human subjects; and the team has already conducted such a study. Thirty obstetricians, from three NHS maternity units and with varying levels of experience, took part. They all received a brief explanation of how Debra works, and were then asked to try a timed removal of the foetal head at three different levels of difficulty. Overall, 87 per cent reported that the simulator offered a realistic experience of dealing with an impacted head, and 93 per cent thought it would be valuable as a training device.", "Creativity and innovation have many unlikely sources. What seems to have inspired Tydeman to develop his device was the characteristic sound of a Wellington boot being pulled free of wet, muddy ground: a slurpy, sucking, gurgling noise. When an impacted foetal head is pulled free of the uterus it's often accompanied by a similar sucking noise, the result of air rushing in between the obstetrician's fingers to fill the space vacated. \"What occurred to me years ago was that if the air can't get in, why not put a tube up into the vagina so that it can get in from below the baby's head.\" From time to time, if he felt he felt the baby might stick, Tydeman would slip a length of sterile silicone tubing through the woman's vagina and up into the womb next to the baby's head. Allowing air in by this route would release any suction forces tending to hold it where it was.", "Although tests carried out with the Debra prototype showed that the tube would work as intended, Tydeman and his colleagues then faced what he calls a kind of medical catch-22. \"We had the tube finished about three years ago… but we were more interested in trying to save lives than selling a product. We thought that the right thing to do before commercialising it was to be sure we'd got the best design.\" They tried it on a dozen or so women in labour, and concluded that it did what it supposed to. But they held off trying to market it because they wanted to do more extensive, more rigorous clinical studies.\nThis presented a problem. \"If you've applied for research money,\" says Tydeman, \"but you've already got what seems to be a commercially viable design, potential funders are going to say that the company aiming to sell it should pay for the work.\" On the other hand, commercial interest is easier to drum up if you've already got evidence that a device is safe and effective.", "When originally conceived, remember, Debra was simply a means of testing the effectiveness of the tube. What she looked like was neither here nor there. It was only once Debra was reborn as a teaching aid that she needed sprucing up. \n\n Tydeman can remember the exact moment when the idea of her having a greater role dawned on him. \"I was on the sleeper train down from Scotland to London,\" he says. \"Debra was with me because the first Tydeman tube had become available at St Thomas's… It was about midnight, I'd had my free whisky and I suddenly thought, 'Blow me! Even if the tube doesn't work, Debra could be useful as a teaching aid'.\"\nThe following morning, at St Thomas's, Tydeman asked a visiting professor of obstetrics to have a look at Debra and tell him what she thought. She put her hand into Debra's womb, grasped the foetal head and said it felt just like the real thing. \"Terribly flattering,\" Tydeman laughs.", "The instrument is made up of a rigid plastic tube opening into a softer silicone cup. Pressure to the foetal head is applied using four pads projecting forward from the cup's interior. Holding the device by the tube, the user places the cup against the part of the head exposed through the dilated cervix, and presses. This pushes the baby back up into the uterus while releasing any suction pressure that may have been holding it, so allowing the obstetrician to extract it more easily. Because pressure is distributed equally between the four pads with a greater combined surface area than that of a user's fingertips, the risk of inadvertent damage is minimised. \n\n The team found some money to employ a product designer who used computer-aided design technology and 3D printing to make a prototype. \"We were at the point of getting one made in silicone,\" says Tydeman, \"when we realised that before we started experimenting on women we really ought to test it on a simulator.\" No such simulator existed – so he decided to make one himself.", "The clever and sophisticated simulator I'm playing with started life as a lash-up in an obstetrician's home workshop: a Heath Robinson-style contraption barely recognisable as a model of the human body. But it wasn't at that stage intended as a simulator for training medical staff. Its sole purpose was to test the effectiveness of a novel device called a Tydeman tube. Paradoxically, although the testing equipment, Debra, is now commercially available, the device it was intended to test has yet to reach the market.", "As the material for a convincing simulation, glass clearly has its drawbacks. But another 18th-century contraption used a pink cloth-covered mannequin comprising a female torso complete with genitalia, a set of implantable foetuses of various ages, and even – a real\ncoup de théâtre\n, this – a facility for exuding suitably coloured liquids at the appropriate moment.\nOddly, as medicine became more scientific, most of these devices fell by the wayside. As an academic review of these and other devices has pointed out, much of the 20th century was something of Dark Ages for simulation. Its value in professional training has had to be rediscovered: an endeavour in which inventive people like Graham Tydeman, sometimes with workshops rich in discarded junk, are still fruitfully engaged.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "It's still too soon to make a final judgement about Debra’s impact. \"When we first brought Debra out,\" Briley recalls, \"some of the really experienced professors said things like, 'We always managed without one. Why would you need this?' But ask them to have a go at using it and then they admit it's really good.\" Medicine as a whole has an oddly ambivalent relationship to innovation. Some new findings, techniques or equipment take years to penetrate the profession; others are seized upon immediately." ], [ "When obstetricians doing planned caesareans slice open a mother's womb, what they usually see is the baby's head. By slipping a hand round and below it they can easily guide the baby out. \"When you do a caesarean for an impacted baby,\" says Tydeman, \"you make the incision in the same place, but what you might come across is a shoulder because the baby's so much further down [the birth canal].\" As I'd discovered for myself, sliding a hand around the baby's head is then far more difficult. \"It makes your fingers hurt,\" says Tydeman. \"It makes your pulse rate go up to about 200, and you break out in a sweat because know you've only got about five or 10 minutes before there are serious consequences. The clock is ticking.\"", "Obstetrics for beginners\nIt's my first go at delivering a baby by caesarean section – and the foetal head is impacted, jammed in its mother's pelvis. To be honest I'm struggling. \n\n Incisions have been made in the lower part of the mother's abdomen and womb. I've pushed my gloved hand inside and managed to slide my fingers between the baby's head and the surrounding uterine tissue. But it's difficult. The baby is tightly wedged in. I've had to push hard to get my hand to the far side of its head, and even though I'm now cupping and grasping it in the approved manner, I can't seem to pull it out. Dare I grip its head more firmly? Dare I pull harder? \n\n The baby's mother – she's called Debra – remains impassive throughout these agonised fumblings. Her face reveals nothing of what she may be feeling. But then Debra has no feelings. Indeed she has no face…", "So you can stop worrying. Debra – Desperate Debra to use her full trade name – is a simulator designed to help doctors practise their skill at dealing with impacted foetuses: babies that get stuck trying to exit the womb by the normal route. She comprises the lower two thirds (ie from the mid-chest region downwards) of a life-sized but limbless female torso made of flesh-coloured silicone rubber. She comes with a vulva, a pre-cut incision in her abdomen and, most importantly, a uterus containing a foetal head that should, in the normal way of things, be free to emerge between her legs. But this fetus is going nowhere until an obstetrician – or in this case me – can successfully grasp and pull it out.", "In a protracted birth that's destined to end with a caesarean, the longer the labour is allowed to go on before the obstetrician decides to intervene, the greater the likelihood that the baby's head will become impacted. However, concern over the rising number of babies born by caesarean has made doctors more wary of doing them – one consequence of which is that medical staff may allow a difficult birth to continue for longer before they resort to surgery. This could be boosting the frequency of impaction. But, again, no one is certain.", "The standard response is to perform a caesarean section. Every year some 160,000 babies are born in the UK this way, with almost two thirds of them classified as emergencies. One audit has suggested that roughly 8,000 babies get stuck and have to be delivered by caesarean at a stage when their mothers are fully dilated. \"Some of the babies will be so close to coming out by the normal route,\" says Tydeman, \"that it's then difficult to get them back up and remove them through the hole in the woman's tummy.\" Which women are most at risk of this setback seems to be largely unpredictable. \"We just observe that it happens… It's been discussed in the medical literature since the 1940s, but until 10 years ago, and throughout my training and most of my life as a consultant, it wasn't really talked about.\"", "At St Thomas's, midwives in training also get an opportunity to practise on Debra. The chances that midwives will find themselves having to do the actual extraction of an infant are slim; but they're quite likely to be asked to help the obstetrician by pushing a stuck baby from below. Debra's anatomy allows them to practise this skill; and to learn where and how hard to push on the infant skull. \"Any practice you've done in the cold light of day will help you stay calm and composed in an emergency, and that's what we're aiming for,\" says Briley.", "If a baby's head is jammed down in the mother's pelvic region, common sense suggests that it might help if a second person gives a gentle backward push on the area of its head visible through the mother's dilated cervix. \"In our unit,\" says Tydeman, \"when the woman is fully dilated and you'd expect the baby to come out normally [but it doesn't]… a registrar will be asking for a push-up about one in five times.\" Although registrars are doctors still in training, they're nonetheless experienced; which suggests requests for push-ups during unplanned caesareans are far from uncommon. The Tydeman tube is a gadget intended to make this manoeuvre safer and more effective.", "So how valuable in training medical staff is a simulator like this? Very, according to Annette Briley. Imagine it's the middle of the night and an unplanned emergency caesarean is required: \"Some poor junior doctor might find himself trying to manage it on his own.\" To have practised the knack of extracting a firmly impacted baby from a simulator is lot better than first honing your skill on a real woman.", "Considering the universality of childbirth, impaction and the best way of dealing with it are topics that seem to have gone remarkably unstudied. \"There are strong opinions about why it happens and what to do, but very little research evidence,\" says Tydeman, adding that many of these opinions are contradictory.", "Creativity and innovation have many unlikely sources. What seems to have inspired Tydeman to develop his device was the characteristic sound of a Wellington boot being pulled free of wet, muddy ground: a slurpy, sucking, gurgling noise. When an impacted foetal head is pulled free of the uterus it's often accompanied by a similar sucking noise, the result of air rushing in between the obstetrician's fingers to fill the space vacated. \"What occurred to me years ago was that if the air can't get in, why not put a tube up into the vagina so that it can get in from below the baby's head.\" From time to time, if he felt he felt the baby might stick, Tydeman would slip a length of sterile silicone tubing through the woman's vagina and up into the womb next to the baby's head. Allowing air in by this route would release any suction forces tending to hold it where it was.", "Tydeman didn't do much with the idea until 10 years ago when one trainee, who was experiencing real difficulty getting heads out, prompted him to think again about the problem. Around the same time, he met professor of obstetrics Andrew Shennan and consultant midwife Annette Briley, both of the Women's Health Academic Centre at St Thomas's hospital. Between them they came up with a device – the Tydeman tube – to make pushing on the foetus more controlled while simultaneously releasing any vacuum that might be holding it in place.", "The inventor of the tube and of Desperate Debra is Dr Graham Tydeman, a consultant in obstetrics and gynaecology at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy, Fife. Only after he'd built Debra did he realise that she might serve a purpose beyond his original intention. His is a decade-long tale of inspired insights, thwarted aims and shifting purposes; but with a good outcome. Although the Tydeman tube is still in gestation, Desperate Debra herself is now thriving.\nTo understand the desperation of Debra and how the Tydeman tube might help to relieve it requires a brief foray into basic obstetric knowhow. Evolution has endowed us with heads proportionally so large that even when labour runs according to plan, the delivery process involves a bit of a squeeze. For the baby's head to get stuck on the way out may not be usual, but it's by no means a rarity.", "With a grant from the Guy's and St Thomas's Charity fund they made Debra more presentable. Tydeman showed the prototype to Adam Rouilly, an established company specialising in medical models and simulators. They were impressed. A year later, the first of Debra's smartened-up sisters was on the market. \n\n In Debra as she is now, the precise extent and nature of her desperation can be fine-tuned according to need. The foetal head inside her uterus can be moved to mimic the various positions that an unborn baby may adopt. By tightening a spring inside Debra's body, it's also possible vary the degree of impaction from mild to so severe that the head is virtually impossible to extract. In this way she simulates the full range of difficulty that obstetricians are likely to encounter.", "A proper study of the clinical effectiveness of the Tydeman tube will necessarily involve women giving birth. Assessing the value of Debra as a simulator didn't require human subjects; and the team has already conducted such a study. Thirty obstetricians, from three NHS maternity units and with varying levels of experience, took part. They all received a brief explanation of how Debra works, and were then asked to try a timed removal of the foetal head at three different levels of difficulty. Overall, 87 per cent reported that the simulator offered a realistic experience of dealing with an impacted head, and 93 per cent thought it would be valuable as a training device.", "The instrument is made up of a rigid plastic tube opening into a softer silicone cup. Pressure to the foetal head is applied using four pads projecting forward from the cup's interior. Holding the device by the tube, the user places the cup against the part of the head exposed through the dilated cervix, and presses. This pushes the baby back up into the uterus while releasing any suction pressure that may have been holding it, so allowing the obstetrician to extract it more easily. Because pressure is distributed equally between the four pads with a greater combined surface area than that of a user's fingertips, the risk of inadvertent damage is minimised. \n\n The team found some money to employ a product designer who used computer-aided design technology and 3D printing to make a prototype. \"We were at the point of getting one made in silicone,\" says Tydeman, \"when we realised that before we started experimenting on women we really ought to test it on a simulator.\" No such simulator existed – so he decided to make one himself.", "One of the treatments of choice in that era was, naturally, acupuncture. But how to teach tyro-acupuncturists where to place the needles? Simple. A life-size bronze statue dotted with small holes indicated the points of insertion. And how then to test the students' grasp of their subject? If the statute was hollow, filled with liquid and given an outer coating of wax to mask the holes, a correct needle insertion would be followed by a leak. \n\n Given the universality of childbirth it's no surprise that, then as now, the womb turns out to be the most simulated of our organs. For the benefit of 18th-century midwives and doctors-in-training, the Bologna surgeon Giovanni Antonio Galli devised a birthing simulator comprising a glass uterus supported by an artificial pelvis and containing a flexible foetus. Trainees had to deliver the baby while wearing a blindfold. Only the tutor could witness the fumbling of their hands.", "When originally conceived, remember, Debra was simply a means of testing the effectiveness of the tube. What she looked like was neither here nor there. It was only once Debra was reborn as a teaching aid that she needed sprucing up. \n\n Tydeman can remember the exact moment when the idea of her having a greater role dawned on him. \"I was on the sleeper train down from Scotland to London,\" he says. \"Debra was with me because the first Tydeman tube had become available at St Thomas's… It was about midnight, I'd had my free whisky and I suddenly thought, 'Blow me! Even if the tube doesn't work, Debra could be useful as a teaching aid'.\"\nThe following morning, at St Thomas's, Tydeman asked a visiting professor of obstetrics to have a look at Debra and tell him what she thought. She put her hand into Debra's womb, grasped the foetal head and said it felt just like the real thing. \"Terribly flattering,\" Tydeman laughs.", "As the material for a convincing simulation, glass clearly has its drawbacks. But another 18th-century contraption used a pink cloth-covered mannequin comprising a female torso complete with genitalia, a set of implantable foetuses of various ages, and even – a real\ncoup de théâtre\n, this – a facility for exuding suitably coloured liquids at the appropriate moment.\nOddly, as medicine became more scientific, most of these devices fell by the wayside. As an academic review of these and other devices has pointed out, much of the 20th century was something of Dark Ages for simulation. Its value in professional training has had to be rediscovered: an endeavour in which inventive people like Graham Tydeman, sometimes with workshops rich in discarded junk, are still fruitfully engaged.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "The clever and sophisticated simulator I'm playing with started life as a lash-up in an obstetrician's home workshop: a Heath Robinson-style contraption barely recognisable as a model of the human body. But it wasn't at that stage intended as a simulator for training medical staff. Its sole purpose was to test the effectiveness of a novel device called a Tydeman tube. Paradoxically, although the testing equipment, Debra, is now commercially available, the device it was intended to test has yet to reach the market.", "Although tests carried out with the Debra prototype showed that the tube would work as intended, Tydeman and his colleagues then faced what he calls a kind of medical catch-22. \"We had the tube finished about three years ago… but we were more interested in trying to save lives than selling a product. We thought that the right thing to do before commercialising it was to be sure we'd got the best design.\" They tried it on a dozen or so women in labour, and concluded that it did what it supposed to. But they held off trying to market it because they wanted to do more extensive, more rigorous clinical studies.\nThis presented a problem. \"If you've applied for research money,\" says Tydeman, \"but you've already got what seems to be a commercially viable design, potential funders are going to say that the company aiming to sell it should pay for the work.\" On the other hand, commercial interest is easier to drum up if you've already got evidence that a device is safe and effective." ], [ "If a baby's head is jammed down in the mother's pelvic region, common sense suggests that it might help if a second person gives a gentle backward push on the area of its head visible through the mother's dilated cervix. \"In our unit,\" says Tydeman, \"when the woman is fully dilated and you'd expect the baby to come out normally [but it doesn't]… a registrar will be asking for a push-up about one in five times.\" Although registrars are doctors still in training, they're nonetheless experienced; which suggests requests for push-ups during unplanned caesareans are far from uncommon. The Tydeman tube is a gadget intended to make this manoeuvre safer and more effective.", "The standard response is to perform a caesarean section. Every year some 160,000 babies are born in the UK this way, with almost two thirds of them classified as emergencies. One audit has suggested that roughly 8,000 babies get stuck and have to be delivered by caesarean at a stage when their mothers are fully dilated. \"Some of the babies will be so close to coming out by the normal route,\" says Tydeman, \"that it's then difficult to get them back up and remove them through the hole in the woman's tummy.\" Which women are most at risk of this setback seems to be largely unpredictable. \"We just observe that it happens… It's been discussed in the medical literature since the 1940s, but until 10 years ago, and throughout my training and most of my life as a consultant, it wasn't really talked about.\"", "When obstetricians doing planned caesareans slice open a mother's womb, what they usually see is the baby's head. By slipping a hand round and below it they can easily guide the baby out. \"When you do a caesarean for an impacted baby,\" says Tydeman, \"you make the incision in the same place, but what you might come across is a shoulder because the baby's so much further down [the birth canal].\" As I'd discovered for myself, sliding a hand around the baby's head is then far more difficult. \"It makes your fingers hurt,\" says Tydeman. \"It makes your pulse rate go up to about 200, and you break out in a sweat because know you've only got about five or 10 minutes before there are serious consequences. The clock is ticking.\"", "At St Thomas's, midwives in training also get an opportunity to practise on Debra. The chances that midwives will find themselves having to do the actual extraction of an infant are slim; but they're quite likely to be asked to help the obstetrician by pushing a stuck baby from below. Debra's anatomy allows them to practise this skill; and to learn where and how hard to push on the infant skull. \"Any practice you've done in the cold light of day will help you stay calm and composed in an emergency, and that's what we're aiming for,\" says Briley.", "So how valuable in training medical staff is a simulator like this? Very, according to Annette Briley. Imagine it's the middle of the night and an unplanned emergency caesarean is required: \"Some poor junior doctor might find himself trying to manage it on his own.\" To have practised the knack of extracting a firmly impacted baby from a simulator is lot better than first honing your skill on a real woman.", "So you can stop worrying. Debra – Desperate Debra to use her full trade name – is a simulator designed to help doctors practise their skill at dealing with impacted foetuses: babies that get stuck trying to exit the womb by the normal route. She comprises the lower two thirds (ie from the mid-chest region downwards) of a life-sized but limbless female torso made of flesh-coloured silicone rubber. She comes with a vulva, a pre-cut incision in her abdomen and, most importantly, a uterus containing a foetal head that should, in the normal way of things, be free to emerge between her legs. But this fetus is going nowhere until an obstetrician – or in this case me – can successfully grasp and pull it out.", "Considering the universality of childbirth, impaction and the best way of dealing with it are topics that seem to have gone remarkably unstudied. \"There are strong opinions about why it happens and what to do, but very little research evidence,\" says Tydeman, adding that many of these opinions are contradictory.", "Obstetrics for beginners\nIt's my first go at delivering a baby by caesarean section – and the foetal head is impacted, jammed in its mother's pelvis. To be honest I'm struggling. \n\n Incisions have been made in the lower part of the mother's abdomen and womb. I've pushed my gloved hand inside and managed to slide my fingers between the baby's head and the surrounding uterine tissue. But it's difficult. The baby is tightly wedged in. I've had to push hard to get my hand to the far side of its head, and even though I'm now cupping and grasping it in the approved manner, I can't seem to pull it out. Dare I grip its head more firmly? Dare I pull harder? \n\n The baby's mother – she's called Debra – remains impassive throughout these agonised fumblings. Her face reveals nothing of what she may be feeling. But then Debra has no feelings. Indeed she has no face…", "Tydeman didn't do much with the idea until 10 years ago when one trainee, who was experiencing real difficulty getting heads out, prompted him to think again about the problem. Around the same time, he met professor of obstetrics Andrew Shennan and consultant midwife Annette Briley, both of the Women's Health Academic Centre at St Thomas's hospital. Between them they came up with a device – the Tydeman tube – to make pushing on the foetus more controlled while simultaneously releasing any vacuum that might be holding it in place.", "In a protracted birth that's destined to end with a caesarean, the longer the labour is allowed to go on before the obstetrician decides to intervene, the greater the likelihood that the baby's head will become impacted. However, concern over the rising number of babies born by caesarean has made doctors more wary of doing them – one consequence of which is that medical staff may allow a difficult birth to continue for longer before they resort to surgery. This could be boosting the frequency of impaction. But, again, no one is certain.", "The inventor of the tube and of Desperate Debra is Dr Graham Tydeman, a consultant in obstetrics and gynaecology at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy, Fife. Only after he'd built Debra did he realise that she might serve a purpose beyond his original intention. His is a decade-long tale of inspired insights, thwarted aims and shifting purposes; but with a good outcome. Although the Tydeman tube is still in gestation, Desperate Debra herself is now thriving.\nTo understand the desperation of Debra and how the Tydeman tube might help to relieve it requires a brief foray into basic obstetric knowhow. Evolution has endowed us with heads proportionally so large that even when labour runs according to plan, the delivery process involves a bit of a squeeze. For the baby's head to get stuck on the way out may not be usual, but it's by no means a rarity.", "A proper study of the clinical effectiveness of the Tydeman tube will necessarily involve women giving birth. Assessing the value of Debra as a simulator didn't require human subjects; and the team has already conducted such a study. Thirty obstetricians, from three NHS maternity units and with varying levels of experience, took part. They all received a brief explanation of how Debra works, and were then asked to try a timed removal of the foetal head at three different levels of difficulty. Overall, 87 per cent reported that the simulator offered a realistic experience of dealing with an impacted head, and 93 per cent thought it would be valuable as a training device.", "Creativity and innovation have many unlikely sources. What seems to have inspired Tydeman to develop his device was the characteristic sound of a Wellington boot being pulled free of wet, muddy ground: a slurpy, sucking, gurgling noise. When an impacted foetal head is pulled free of the uterus it's often accompanied by a similar sucking noise, the result of air rushing in between the obstetrician's fingers to fill the space vacated. \"What occurred to me years ago was that if the air can't get in, why not put a tube up into the vagina so that it can get in from below the baby's head.\" From time to time, if he felt he felt the baby might stick, Tydeman would slip a length of sterile silicone tubing through the woman's vagina and up into the womb next to the baby's head. Allowing air in by this route would release any suction forces tending to hold it where it was.", "With a grant from the Guy's and St Thomas's Charity fund they made Debra more presentable. Tydeman showed the prototype to Adam Rouilly, an established company specialising in medical models and simulators. They were impressed. A year later, the first of Debra's smartened-up sisters was on the market. \n\n In Debra as she is now, the precise extent and nature of her desperation can be fine-tuned according to need. The foetal head inside her uterus can be moved to mimic the various positions that an unborn baby may adopt. By tightening a spring inside Debra's body, it's also possible vary the degree of impaction from mild to so severe that the head is virtually impossible to extract. In this way she simulates the full range of difficulty that obstetricians are likely to encounter.", "The instrument is made up of a rigid plastic tube opening into a softer silicone cup. Pressure to the foetal head is applied using four pads projecting forward from the cup's interior. Holding the device by the tube, the user places the cup against the part of the head exposed through the dilated cervix, and presses. This pushes the baby back up into the uterus while releasing any suction pressure that may have been holding it, so allowing the obstetrician to extract it more easily. Because pressure is distributed equally between the four pads with a greater combined surface area than that of a user's fingertips, the risk of inadvertent damage is minimised. \n\n The team found some money to employ a product designer who used computer-aided design technology and 3D printing to make a prototype. \"We were at the point of getting one made in silicone,\" says Tydeman, \"when we realised that before we started experimenting on women we really ought to test it on a simulator.\" No such simulator existed – so he decided to make one himself.", "The clever and sophisticated simulator I'm playing with started life as a lash-up in an obstetrician's home workshop: a Heath Robinson-style contraption barely recognisable as a model of the human body. But it wasn't at that stage intended as a simulator for training medical staff. Its sole purpose was to test the effectiveness of a novel device called a Tydeman tube. Paradoxically, although the testing equipment, Debra, is now commercially available, the device it was intended to test has yet to reach the market.", "Although tests carried out with the Debra prototype showed that the tube would work as intended, Tydeman and his colleagues then faced what he calls a kind of medical catch-22. \"We had the tube finished about three years ago… but we were more interested in trying to save lives than selling a product. We thought that the right thing to do before commercialising it was to be sure we'd got the best design.\" They tried it on a dozen or so women in labour, and concluded that it did what it supposed to. But they held off trying to market it because they wanted to do more extensive, more rigorous clinical studies.\nThis presented a problem. \"If you've applied for research money,\" says Tydeman, \"but you've already got what seems to be a commercially viable design, potential funders are going to say that the company aiming to sell it should pay for the work.\" On the other hand, commercial interest is easier to drum up if you've already got evidence that a device is safe and effective.", "When originally conceived, remember, Debra was simply a means of testing the effectiveness of the tube. What she looked like was neither here nor there. It was only once Debra was reborn as a teaching aid that she needed sprucing up. \n\n Tydeman can remember the exact moment when the idea of her having a greater role dawned on him. \"I was on the sleeper train down from Scotland to London,\" he says. \"Debra was with me because the first Tydeman tube had become available at St Thomas's… It was about midnight, I'd had my free whisky and I suddenly thought, 'Blow me! Even if the tube doesn't work, Debra could be useful as a teaching aid'.\"\nThe following morning, at St Thomas's, Tydeman asked a visiting professor of obstetrics to have a look at Debra and tell him what she thought. She put her hand into Debra's womb, grasped the foetal head and said it felt just like the real thing. \"Terribly flattering,\" Tydeman laughs.", "One of the treatments of choice in that era was, naturally, acupuncture. But how to teach tyro-acupuncturists where to place the needles? Simple. A life-size bronze statue dotted with small holes indicated the points of insertion. And how then to test the students' grasp of their subject? If the statute was hollow, filled with liquid and given an outer coating of wax to mask the holes, a correct needle insertion would be followed by a leak. \n\n Given the universality of childbirth it's no surprise that, then as now, the womb turns out to be the most simulated of our organs. For the benefit of 18th-century midwives and doctors-in-training, the Bologna surgeon Giovanni Antonio Galli devised a birthing simulator comprising a glass uterus supported by an artificial pelvis and containing a flexible foetus. Trainees had to deliver the baby while wearing a blindfold. Only the tutor could witness the fumbling of their hands.", "It's still too soon to make a final judgement about Debra’s impact. \"When we first brought Debra out,\" Briley recalls, \"some of the really experienced professors said things like, 'We always managed without one. Why would you need this?' But ask them to have a go at using it and then they admit it's really good.\" Medicine as a whole has an oddly ambivalent relationship to innovation. Some new findings, techniques or equipment take years to penetrate the profession; others are seized upon immediately." ], [ "That Tydeman was able to do this comes as no great surprise once you've glanced at his website. His career may be rooted in medicine but his interests encompass sculpture, furniture making and much else. He works in wood, glass, metals and plastic. \"I've got a big workshop with a lathe and a forge,\" he says. \"I make stuff. I always have, ever since I was a child. My dad was a woodwork teacher, my mum was very creative with fabric.\"", "When originally conceived, remember, Debra was simply a means of testing the effectiveness of the tube. What she looked like was neither here nor there. It was only once Debra was reborn as a teaching aid that she needed sprucing up. \n\n Tydeman can remember the exact moment when the idea of her having a greater role dawned on him. \"I was on the sleeper train down from Scotland to London,\" he says. \"Debra was with me because the first Tydeman tube had become available at St Thomas's… It was about midnight, I'd had my free whisky and I suddenly thought, 'Blow me! Even if the tube doesn't work, Debra could be useful as a teaching aid'.\"\nThe following morning, at St Thomas's, Tydeman asked a visiting professor of obstetrics to have a look at Debra and tell him what she thought. She put her hand into Debra's womb, grasped the foetal head and said it felt just like the real thing. \"Terribly flattering,\" Tydeman laughs.", "The clever and sophisticated simulator I'm playing with started life as a lash-up in an obstetrician's home workshop: a Heath Robinson-style contraption barely recognisable as a model of the human body. But it wasn't at that stage intended as a simulator for training medical staff. Its sole purpose was to test the effectiveness of a novel device called a Tydeman tube. Paradoxically, although the testing equipment, Debra, is now commercially available, the device it was intended to test has yet to reach the market.", "Creativity and innovation have many unlikely sources. What seems to have inspired Tydeman to develop his device was the characteristic sound of a Wellington boot being pulled free of wet, muddy ground: a slurpy, sucking, gurgling noise. When an impacted foetal head is pulled free of the uterus it's often accompanied by a similar sucking noise, the result of air rushing in between the obstetrician's fingers to fill the space vacated. \"What occurred to me years ago was that if the air can't get in, why not put a tube up into the vagina so that it can get in from below the baby's head.\" From time to time, if he felt he felt the baby might stick, Tydeman would slip a length of sterile silicone tubing through the woman's vagina and up into the womb next to the baby's head. Allowing air in by this route would release any suction forces tending to hold it where it was.", "As the material for a convincing simulation, glass clearly has its drawbacks. But another 18th-century contraption used a pink cloth-covered mannequin comprising a female torso complete with genitalia, a set of implantable foetuses of various ages, and even – a real\ncoup de théâtre\n, this – a facility for exuding suitably coloured liquids at the appropriate moment.\nOddly, as medicine became more scientific, most of these devices fell by the wayside. As an academic review of these and other devices has pointed out, much of the 20th century was something of Dark Ages for simulation. Its value in professional training has had to be rediscovered: an endeavour in which inventive people like Graham Tydeman, sometimes with workshops rich in discarded junk, are still fruitfully engaged.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "The inventor of the tube and of Desperate Debra is Dr Graham Tydeman, a consultant in obstetrics and gynaecology at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy, Fife. Only after he'd built Debra did he realise that she might serve a purpose beyond his original intention. His is a decade-long tale of inspired insights, thwarted aims and shifting purposes; but with a good outcome. Although the Tydeman tube is still in gestation, Desperate Debra herself is now thriving.\nTo understand the desperation of Debra and how the Tydeman tube might help to relieve it requires a brief foray into basic obstetric knowhow. Evolution has endowed us with heads proportionally so large that even when labour runs according to plan, the delivery process involves a bit of a squeeze. For the baby's head to get stuck on the way out may not be usual, but it's by no means a rarity.", "Tydeman didn't do much with the idea until 10 years ago when one trainee, who was experiencing real difficulty getting heads out, prompted him to think again about the problem. Around the same time, he met professor of obstetrics Andrew Shennan and consultant midwife Annette Briley, both of the Women's Health Academic Centre at St Thomas's hospital. Between them they came up with a device – the Tydeman tube – to make pushing on the foetus more controlled while simultaneously releasing any vacuum that might be holding it in place.", "That said, the team didn't want to leave the tube sitting on the shelf. So they eventually decided to go ahead and find a commercial partner willing to manufacture and market it. They have now identified one, and are fairly confident it will soon be in production. With sufficient users it should then be possible to compile factual – as opposed to anecdotal – evidence of benefit. Not ideal, Tydeman concedes, but the best they can do at present. \n\n In the meantime, back to Desperate Debra: so named, Tydeman says, not after any particular person but because the appellation is memorably alliterative. He put together the original Debra in a weekend. The skin was made out of a neoprene wetsuit fixed to a scaffolding formed from plastic tubing he'd found 20 years ago in skip outside a Glasgow pub; the head was cast in silicone from a model he'd made in plasticine, and the rest comprised old springs and other bits of stuff lying around his workshop. \"It wasn't actually that difficult,\" Tydeman says.", "Although tests carried out with the Debra prototype showed that the tube would work as intended, Tydeman and his colleagues then faced what he calls a kind of medical catch-22. \"We had the tube finished about three years ago… but we were more interested in trying to save lives than selling a product. We thought that the right thing to do before commercialising it was to be sure we'd got the best design.\" They tried it on a dozen or so women in labour, and concluded that it did what it supposed to. But they held off trying to market it because they wanted to do more extensive, more rigorous clinical studies.\nThis presented a problem. \"If you've applied for research money,\" says Tydeman, \"but you've already got what seems to be a commercially viable design, potential funders are going to say that the company aiming to sell it should pay for the work.\" On the other hand, commercial interest is easier to drum up if you've already got evidence that a device is safe and effective.", "If a baby's head is jammed down in the mother's pelvic region, common sense suggests that it might help if a second person gives a gentle backward push on the area of its head visible through the mother's dilated cervix. \"In our unit,\" says Tydeman, \"when the woman is fully dilated and you'd expect the baby to come out normally [but it doesn't]… a registrar will be asking for a push-up about one in five times.\" Although registrars are doctors still in training, they're nonetheless experienced; which suggests requests for push-ups during unplanned caesareans are far from uncommon. The Tydeman tube is a gadget intended to make this manoeuvre safer and more effective.", "The instrument is made up of a rigid plastic tube opening into a softer silicone cup. Pressure to the foetal head is applied using four pads projecting forward from the cup's interior. Holding the device by the tube, the user places the cup against the part of the head exposed through the dilated cervix, and presses. This pushes the baby back up into the uterus while releasing any suction pressure that may have been holding it, so allowing the obstetrician to extract it more easily. Because pressure is distributed equally between the four pads with a greater combined surface area than that of a user's fingertips, the risk of inadvertent damage is minimised. \n\n The team found some money to employ a product designer who used computer-aided design technology and 3D printing to make a prototype. \"We were at the point of getting one made in silicone,\" says Tydeman, \"when we realised that before we started experimenting on women we really ought to test it on a simulator.\" No such simulator existed – so he decided to make one himself.", "A proper study of the clinical effectiveness of the Tydeman tube will necessarily involve women giving birth. Assessing the value of Debra as a simulator didn't require human subjects; and the team has already conducted such a study. Thirty obstetricians, from three NHS maternity units and with varying levels of experience, took part. They all received a brief explanation of how Debra works, and were then asked to try a timed removal of the foetal head at three different levels of difficulty. Overall, 87 per cent reported that the simulator offered a realistic experience of dealing with an impacted head, and 93 per cent thought it would be valuable as a training device.", "With a grant from the Guy's and St Thomas's Charity fund they made Debra more presentable. Tydeman showed the prototype to Adam Rouilly, an established company specialising in medical models and simulators. They were impressed. A year later, the first of Debra's smartened-up sisters was on the market. \n\n In Debra as she is now, the precise extent and nature of her desperation can be fine-tuned according to need. The foetal head inside her uterus can be moved to mimic the various positions that an unborn baby may adopt. By tightening a spring inside Debra's body, it's also possible vary the degree of impaction from mild to so severe that the head is virtually impossible to extract. In this way she simulates the full range of difficulty that obstetricians are likely to encounter.", "One of the treatments of choice in that era was, naturally, acupuncture. But how to teach tyro-acupuncturists where to place the needles? Simple. A life-size bronze statue dotted with small holes indicated the points of insertion. And how then to test the students' grasp of their subject? If the statute was hollow, filled with liquid and given an outer coating of wax to mask the holes, a correct needle insertion would be followed by a leak. \n\n Given the universality of childbirth it's no surprise that, then as now, the womb turns out to be the most simulated of our organs. For the benefit of 18th-century midwives and doctors-in-training, the Bologna surgeon Giovanni Antonio Galli devised a birthing simulator comprising a glass uterus supported by an artificial pelvis and containing a flexible foetus. Trainees had to deliver the baby while wearing a blindfold. Only the tutor could witness the fumbling of their hands.", "It's still too soon to make a final judgement about Debra’s impact. \"When we first brought Debra out,\" Briley recalls, \"some of the really experienced professors said things like, 'We always managed without one. Why would you need this?' But ask them to have a go at using it and then they admit it's really good.\" Medicine as a whole has an oddly ambivalent relationship to innovation. Some new findings, techniques or equipment take years to penetrate the profession; others are seized upon immediately.", "The use of simulators to teach technical skills is now common in medical schools. You can learn to sew up a knife wound, catheterise a bladder or intubate an airway. You can practise cardiopulmonary resuscitation or ear syringing or even go through the motions of a keyhole surgical procedure. The technology required to do these things may cost a few pounds, or tens of thousands. Either way, given that most of these devices were invented during the past three or four decades, it comes as something of a surprise to learn that simulation for medical purposes can be traced back as far as the Chinese Song dynasty of 960-1279 AD.", "So you can stop worrying. Debra – Desperate Debra to use her full trade name – is a simulator designed to help doctors practise their skill at dealing with impacted foetuses: babies that get stuck trying to exit the womb by the normal route. She comprises the lower two thirds (ie from the mid-chest region downwards) of a life-sized but limbless female torso made of flesh-coloured silicone rubber. She comes with a vulva, a pre-cut incision in her abdomen and, most importantly, a uterus containing a foetal head that should, in the normal way of things, be free to emerge between her legs. But this fetus is going nowhere until an obstetrician – or in this case me – can successfully grasp and pull it out.", "So how valuable in training medical staff is a simulator like this? Very, according to Annette Briley. Imagine it's the middle of the night and an unplanned emergency caesarean is required: \"Some poor junior doctor might find himself trying to manage it on his own.\" To have practised the knack of extracting a firmly impacted baby from a simulator is lot better than first honing your skill on a real woman.", "Obstetrics for beginners\nIt's my first go at delivering a baby by caesarean section – and the foetal head is impacted, jammed in its mother's pelvis. To be honest I'm struggling. \n\n Incisions have been made in the lower part of the mother's abdomen and womb. I've pushed my gloved hand inside and managed to slide my fingers between the baby's head and the surrounding uterine tissue. But it's difficult. The baby is tightly wedged in. I've had to push hard to get my hand to the far side of its head, and even though I'm now cupping and grasping it in the approved manner, I can't seem to pull it out. Dare I grip its head more firmly? Dare I pull harder? \n\n The baby's mother – she's called Debra – remains impassive throughout these agonised fumblings. Her face reveals nothing of what she may be feeling. But then Debra has no feelings. Indeed she has no face…", "When obstetricians doing planned caesareans slice open a mother's womb, what they usually see is the baby's head. By slipping a hand round and below it they can easily guide the baby out. \"When you do a caesarean for an impacted baby,\" says Tydeman, \"you make the incision in the same place, but what you might come across is a shoulder because the baby's so much further down [the birth canal].\" As I'd discovered for myself, sliding a hand around the baby's head is then far more difficult. \"It makes your fingers hurt,\" says Tydeman. \"It makes your pulse rate go up to about 200, and you break out in a sweat because know you've only got about five or 10 minutes before there are serious consequences. The clock is ticking.\"" ], [ "So you can stop worrying. Debra – Desperate Debra to use her full trade name – is a simulator designed to help doctors practise their skill at dealing with impacted foetuses: babies that get stuck trying to exit the womb by the normal route. She comprises the lower two thirds (ie from the mid-chest region downwards) of a life-sized but limbless female torso made of flesh-coloured silicone rubber. She comes with a vulva, a pre-cut incision in her abdomen and, most importantly, a uterus containing a foetal head that should, in the normal way of things, be free to emerge between her legs. But this fetus is going nowhere until an obstetrician – or in this case me – can successfully grasp and pull it out.", "When originally conceived, remember, Debra was simply a means of testing the effectiveness of the tube. What she looked like was neither here nor there. It was only once Debra was reborn as a teaching aid that she needed sprucing up. \n\n Tydeman can remember the exact moment when the idea of her having a greater role dawned on him. \"I was on the sleeper train down from Scotland to London,\" he says. \"Debra was with me because the first Tydeman tube had become available at St Thomas's… It was about midnight, I'd had my free whisky and I suddenly thought, 'Blow me! Even if the tube doesn't work, Debra could be useful as a teaching aid'.\"\nThe following morning, at St Thomas's, Tydeman asked a visiting professor of obstetrics to have a look at Debra and tell him what she thought. She put her hand into Debra's womb, grasped the foetal head and said it felt just like the real thing. \"Terribly flattering,\" Tydeman laughs.", "That said, the team didn't want to leave the tube sitting on the shelf. So they eventually decided to go ahead and find a commercial partner willing to manufacture and market it. They have now identified one, and are fairly confident it will soon be in production. With sufficient users it should then be possible to compile factual – as opposed to anecdotal – evidence of benefit. Not ideal, Tydeman concedes, but the best they can do at present. \n\n In the meantime, back to Desperate Debra: so named, Tydeman says, not after any particular person but because the appellation is memorably alliterative. He put together the original Debra in a weekend. The skin was made out of a neoprene wetsuit fixed to a scaffolding formed from plastic tubing he'd found 20 years ago in skip outside a Glasgow pub; the head was cast in silicone from a model he'd made in plasticine, and the rest comprised old springs and other bits of stuff lying around his workshop. \"It wasn't actually that difficult,\" Tydeman says.", "With a grant from the Guy's and St Thomas's Charity fund they made Debra more presentable. Tydeman showed the prototype to Adam Rouilly, an established company specialising in medical models and simulators. They were impressed. A year later, the first of Debra's smartened-up sisters was on the market. \n\n In Debra as she is now, the precise extent and nature of her desperation can be fine-tuned according to need. The foetal head inside her uterus can be moved to mimic the various positions that an unborn baby may adopt. By tightening a spring inside Debra's body, it's also possible vary the degree of impaction from mild to so severe that the head is virtually impossible to extract. In this way she simulates the full range of difficulty that obstetricians are likely to encounter.", "The inventor of the tube and of Desperate Debra is Dr Graham Tydeman, a consultant in obstetrics and gynaecology at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy, Fife. Only after he'd built Debra did he realise that she might serve a purpose beyond his original intention. His is a decade-long tale of inspired insights, thwarted aims and shifting purposes; but with a good outcome. Although the Tydeman tube is still in gestation, Desperate Debra herself is now thriving.\nTo understand the desperation of Debra and how the Tydeman tube might help to relieve it requires a brief foray into basic obstetric knowhow. Evolution has endowed us with heads proportionally so large that even when labour runs according to plan, the delivery process involves a bit of a squeeze. For the baby's head to get stuck on the way out may not be usual, but it's by no means a rarity.", "The clever and sophisticated simulator I'm playing with started life as a lash-up in an obstetrician's home workshop: a Heath Robinson-style contraption barely recognisable as a model of the human body. But it wasn't at that stage intended as a simulator for training medical staff. Its sole purpose was to test the effectiveness of a novel device called a Tydeman tube. Paradoxically, although the testing equipment, Debra, is now commercially available, the device it was intended to test has yet to reach the market.", "It's still too soon to make a final judgement about Debra’s impact. \"When we first brought Debra out,\" Briley recalls, \"some of the really experienced professors said things like, 'We always managed without one. Why would you need this?' But ask them to have a go at using it and then they admit it's really good.\" Medicine as a whole has an oddly ambivalent relationship to innovation. Some new findings, techniques or equipment take years to penetrate the profession; others are seized upon immediately.", "Although tests carried out with the Debra prototype showed that the tube would work as intended, Tydeman and his colleagues then faced what he calls a kind of medical catch-22. \"We had the tube finished about three years ago… but we were more interested in trying to save lives than selling a product. We thought that the right thing to do before commercialising it was to be sure we'd got the best design.\" They tried it on a dozen or so women in labour, and concluded that it did what it supposed to. But they held off trying to market it because they wanted to do more extensive, more rigorous clinical studies.\nThis presented a problem. \"If you've applied for research money,\" says Tydeman, \"but you've already got what seems to be a commercially viable design, potential funders are going to say that the company aiming to sell it should pay for the work.\" On the other hand, commercial interest is easier to drum up if you've already got evidence that a device is safe and effective.", "A proper study of the clinical effectiveness of the Tydeman tube will necessarily involve women giving birth. Assessing the value of Debra as a simulator didn't require human subjects; and the team has already conducted such a study. Thirty obstetricians, from three NHS maternity units and with varying levels of experience, took part. They all received a brief explanation of how Debra works, and were then asked to try a timed removal of the foetal head at three different levels of difficulty. Overall, 87 per cent reported that the simulator offered a realistic experience of dealing with an impacted head, and 93 per cent thought it would be valuable as a training device.", "At St Thomas's, midwives in training also get an opportunity to practise on Debra. The chances that midwives will find themselves having to do the actual extraction of an infant are slim; but they're quite likely to be asked to help the obstetrician by pushing a stuck baby from below. Debra's anatomy allows them to practise this skill; and to learn where and how hard to push on the infant skull. \"Any practice you've done in the cold light of day will help you stay calm and composed in an emergency, and that's what we're aiming for,\" says Briley.", "The instrument is made up of a rigid plastic tube opening into a softer silicone cup. Pressure to the foetal head is applied using four pads projecting forward from the cup's interior. Holding the device by the tube, the user places the cup against the part of the head exposed through the dilated cervix, and presses. This pushes the baby back up into the uterus while releasing any suction pressure that may have been holding it, so allowing the obstetrician to extract it more easily. Because pressure is distributed equally between the four pads with a greater combined surface area than that of a user's fingertips, the risk of inadvertent damage is minimised. \n\n The team found some money to employ a product designer who used computer-aided design technology and 3D printing to make a prototype. \"We were at the point of getting one made in silicone,\" says Tydeman, \"when we realised that before we started experimenting on women we really ought to test it on a simulator.\" No such simulator existed – so he decided to make one himself.", "As the material for a convincing simulation, glass clearly has its drawbacks. But another 18th-century contraption used a pink cloth-covered mannequin comprising a female torso complete with genitalia, a set of implantable foetuses of various ages, and even – a real\ncoup de théâtre\n, this – a facility for exuding suitably coloured liquids at the appropriate moment.\nOddly, as medicine became more scientific, most of these devices fell by the wayside. As an academic review of these and other devices has pointed out, much of the 20th century was something of Dark Ages for simulation. Its value in professional training has had to be rediscovered: an endeavour in which inventive people like Graham Tydeman, sometimes with workshops rich in discarded junk, are still fruitfully engaged.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "That Tydeman was able to do this comes as no great surprise once you've glanced at his website. His career may be rooted in medicine but his interests encompass sculpture, furniture making and much else. He works in wood, glass, metals and plastic. \"I've got a big workshop with a lathe and a forge,\" he says. \"I make stuff. I always have, ever since I was a child. My dad was a woodwork teacher, my mum was very creative with fabric.\"", "Obstetrics for beginners\nIt's my first go at delivering a baby by caesarean section – and the foetal head is impacted, jammed in its mother's pelvis. To be honest I'm struggling. \n\n Incisions have been made in the lower part of the mother's abdomen and womb. I've pushed my gloved hand inside and managed to slide my fingers between the baby's head and the surrounding uterine tissue. But it's difficult. The baby is tightly wedged in. I've had to push hard to get my hand to the far side of its head, and even though I'm now cupping and grasping it in the approved manner, I can't seem to pull it out. Dare I grip its head more firmly? Dare I pull harder? \n\n The baby's mother – she's called Debra – remains impassive throughout these agonised fumblings. Her face reveals nothing of what she may be feeling. But then Debra has no feelings. Indeed she has no face…", "One of the treatments of choice in that era was, naturally, acupuncture. But how to teach tyro-acupuncturists where to place the needles? Simple. A life-size bronze statue dotted with small holes indicated the points of insertion. And how then to test the students' grasp of their subject? If the statute was hollow, filled with liquid and given an outer coating of wax to mask the holes, a correct needle insertion would be followed by a leak. \n\n Given the universality of childbirth it's no surprise that, then as now, the womb turns out to be the most simulated of our organs. For the benefit of 18th-century midwives and doctors-in-training, the Bologna surgeon Giovanni Antonio Galli devised a birthing simulator comprising a glass uterus supported by an artificial pelvis and containing a flexible foetus. Trainees had to deliver the baby while wearing a blindfold. Only the tutor could witness the fumbling of their hands.", "Creativity and innovation have many unlikely sources. What seems to have inspired Tydeman to develop his device was the characteristic sound of a Wellington boot being pulled free of wet, muddy ground: a slurpy, sucking, gurgling noise. When an impacted foetal head is pulled free of the uterus it's often accompanied by a similar sucking noise, the result of air rushing in between the obstetrician's fingers to fill the space vacated. \"What occurred to me years ago was that if the air can't get in, why not put a tube up into the vagina so that it can get in from below the baby's head.\" From time to time, if he felt he felt the baby might stick, Tydeman would slip a length of sterile silicone tubing through the woman's vagina and up into the womb next to the baby's head. Allowing air in by this route would release any suction forces tending to hold it where it was.", "So how valuable in training medical staff is a simulator like this? Very, according to Annette Briley. Imagine it's the middle of the night and an unplanned emergency caesarean is required: \"Some poor junior doctor might find himself trying to manage it on his own.\" To have practised the knack of extracting a firmly impacted baby from a simulator is lot better than first honing your skill on a real woman.", "If a baby's head is jammed down in the mother's pelvic region, common sense suggests that it might help if a second person gives a gentle backward push on the area of its head visible through the mother's dilated cervix. \"In our unit,\" says Tydeman, \"when the woman is fully dilated and you'd expect the baby to come out normally [but it doesn't]… a registrar will be asking for a push-up about one in five times.\" Although registrars are doctors still in training, they're nonetheless experienced; which suggests requests for push-ups during unplanned caesareans are far from uncommon. The Tydeman tube is a gadget intended to make this manoeuvre safer and more effective.", "Tydeman didn't do much with the idea until 10 years ago when one trainee, who was experiencing real difficulty getting heads out, prompted him to think again about the problem. Around the same time, he met professor of obstetrics Andrew Shennan and consultant midwife Annette Briley, both of the Women's Health Academic Centre at St Thomas's hospital. Between them they came up with a device – the Tydeman tube – to make pushing on the foetus more controlled while simultaneously releasing any vacuum that might be holding it in place.", "The use of simulators to teach technical skills is now common in medical schools. You can learn to sew up a knife wound, catheterise a bladder or intubate an airway. You can practise cardiopulmonary resuscitation or ear syringing or even go through the motions of a keyhole surgical procedure. The technology required to do these things may cost a few pounds, or tens of thousands. Either way, given that most of these devices were invented during the past three or four decades, it comes as something of a surprise to learn that simulation for medical purposes can be traced back as far as the Chinese Song dynasty of 960-1279 AD." ], [ "The clever and sophisticated simulator I'm playing with started life as a lash-up in an obstetrician's home workshop: a Heath Robinson-style contraption barely recognisable as a model of the human body. But it wasn't at that stage intended as a simulator for training medical staff. Its sole purpose was to test the effectiveness of a novel device called a Tydeman tube. Paradoxically, although the testing equipment, Debra, is now commercially available, the device it was intended to test has yet to reach the market.", "One of the treatments of choice in that era was, naturally, acupuncture. But how to teach tyro-acupuncturists where to place the needles? Simple. A life-size bronze statue dotted with small holes indicated the points of insertion. And how then to test the students' grasp of their subject? If the statute was hollow, filled with liquid and given an outer coating of wax to mask the holes, a correct needle insertion would be followed by a leak. \n\n Given the universality of childbirth it's no surprise that, then as now, the womb turns out to be the most simulated of our organs. For the benefit of 18th-century midwives and doctors-in-training, the Bologna surgeon Giovanni Antonio Galli devised a birthing simulator comprising a glass uterus supported by an artificial pelvis and containing a flexible foetus. Trainees had to deliver the baby while wearing a blindfold. Only the tutor could witness the fumbling of their hands.", "As the material for a convincing simulation, glass clearly has its drawbacks. But another 18th-century contraption used a pink cloth-covered mannequin comprising a female torso complete with genitalia, a set of implantable foetuses of various ages, and even – a real\ncoup de théâtre\n, this – a facility for exuding suitably coloured liquids at the appropriate moment.\nOddly, as medicine became more scientific, most of these devices fell by the wayside. As an academic review of these and other devices has pointed out, much of the 20th century was something of Dark Ages for simulation. Its value in professional training has had to be rediscovered: an endeavour in which inventive people like Graham Tydeman, sometimes with workshops rich in discarded junk, are still fruitfully engaged.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "With a grant from the Guy's and St Thomas's Charity fund they made Debra more presentable. Tydeman showed the prototype to Adam Rouilly, an established company specialising in medical models and simulators. They were impressed. A year later, the first of Debra's smartened-up sisters was on the market. \n\n In Debra as she is now, the precise extent and nature of her desperation can be fine-tuned according to need. The foetal head inside her uterus can be moved to mimic the various positions that an unborn baby may adopt. By tightening a spring inside Debra's body, it's also possible vary the degree of impaction from mild to so severe that the head is virtually impossible to extract. In this way she simulates the full range of difficulty that obstetricians are likely to encounter.", "The use of simulators to teach technical skills is now common in medical schools. You can learn to sew up a knife wound, catheterise a bladder or intubate an airway. You can practise cardiopulmonary resuscitation or ear syringing or even go through the motions of a keyhole surgical procedure. The technology required to do these things may cost a few pounds, or tens of thousands. Either way, given that most of these devices were invented during the past three or four decades, it comes as something of a surprise to learn that simulation for medical purposes can be traced back as far as the Chinese Song dynasty of 960-1279 AD.", "So how valuable in training medical staff is a simulator like this? Very, according to Annette Briley. Imagine it's the middle of the night and an unplanned emergency caesarean is required: \"Some poor junior doctor might find himself trying to manage it on his own.\" To have practised the knack of extracting a firmly impacted baby from a simulator is lot better than first honing your skill on a real woman.", "A proper study of the clinical effectiveness of the Tydeman tube will necessarily involve women giving birth. Assessing the value of Debra as a simulator didn't require human subjects; and the team has already conducted such a study. Thirty obstetricians, from three NHS maternity units and with varying levels of experience, took part. They all received a brief explanation of how Debra works, and were then asked to try a timed removal of the foetal head at three different levels of difficulty. Overall, 87 per cent reported that the simulator offered a realistic experience of dealing with an impacted head, and 93 per cent thought it would be valuable as a training device.", "So you can stop worrying. Debra – Desperate Debra to use her full trade name – is a simulator designed to help doctors practise their skill at dealing with impacted foetuses: babies that get stuck trying to exit the womb by the normal route. She comprises the lower two thirds (ie from the mid-chest region downwards) of a life-sized but limbless female torso made of flesh-coloured silicone rubber. She comes with a vulva, a pre-cut incision in her abdomen and, most importantly, a uterus containing a foetal head that should, in the normal way of things, be free to emerge between her legs. But this fetus is going nowhere until an obstetrician – or in this case me – can successfully grasp and pull it out.", "The instrument is made up of a rigid plastic tube opening into a softer silicone cup. Pressure to the foetal head is applied using four pads projecting forward from the cup's interior. Holding the device by the tube, the user places the cup against the part of the head exposed through the dilated cervix, and presses. This pushes the baby back up into the uterus while releasing any suction pressure that may have been holding it, so allowing the obstetrician to extract it more easily. Because pressure is distributed equally between the four pads with a greater combined surface area than that of a user's fingertips, the risk of inadvertent damage is minimised. \n\n The team found some money to employ a product designer who used computer-aided design technology and 3D printing to make a prototype. \"We were at the point of getting one made in silicone,\" says Tydeman, \"when we realised that before we started experimenting on women we really ought to test it on a simulator.\" No such simulator existed – so he decided to make one himself.", "When originally conceived, remember, Debra was simply a means of testing the effectiveness of the tube. What she looked like was neither here nor there. It was only once Debra was reborn as a teaching aid that she needed sprucing up. \n\n Tydeman can remember the exact moment when the idea of her having a greater role dawned on him. \"I was on the sleeper train down from Scotland to London,\" he says. \"Debra was with me because the first Tydeman tube had become available at St Thomas's… It was about midnight, I'd had my free whisky and I suddenly thought, 'Blow me! Even if the tube doesn't work, Debra could be useful as a teaching aid'.\"\nThe following morning, at St Thomas's, Tydeman asked a visiting professor of obstetrics to have a look at Debra and tell him what she thought. She put her hand into Debra's womb, grasped the foetal head and said it felt just like the real thing. \"Terribly flattering,\" Tydeman laughs.", "At St Thomas's, midwives in training also get an opportunity to practise on Debra. The chances that midwives will find themselves having to do the actual extraction of an infant are slim; but they're quite likely to be asked to help the obstetrician by pushing a stuck baby from below. Debra's anatomy allows them to practise this skill; and to learn where and how hard to push on the infant skull. \"Any practice you've done in the cold light of day will help you stay calm and composed in an emergency, and that's what we're aiming for,\" says Briley.", "Obstetrics for beginners\nIt's my first go at delivering a baby by caesarean section – and the foetal head is impacted, jammed in its mother's pelvis. To be honest I'm struggling. \n\n Incisions have been made in the lower part of the mother's abdomen and womb. I've pushed my gloved hand inside and managed to slide my fingers between the baby's head and the surrounding uterine tissue. But it's difficult. The baby is tightly wedged in. I've had to push hard to get my hand to the far side of its head, and even though I'm now cupping and grasping it in the approved manner, I can't seem to pull it out. Dare I grip its head more firmly? Dare I pull harder? \n\n The baby's mother – she's called Debra – remains impassive throughout these agonised fumblings. Her face reveals nothing of what she may be feeling. But then Debra has no feelings. Indeed she has no face…", "Tydeman didn't do much with the idea until 10 years ago when one trainee, who was experiencing real difficulty getting heads out, prompted him to think again about the problem. Around the same time, he met professor of obstetrics Andrew Shennan and consultant midwife Annette Briley, both of the Women's Health Academic Centre at St Thomas's hospital. Between them they came up with a device – the Tydeman tube – to make pushing on the foetus more controlled while simultaneously releasing any vacuum that might be holding it in place.", "Creativity and innovation have many unlikely sources. What seems to have inspired Tydeman to develop his device was the characteristic sound of a Wellington boot being pulled free of wet, muddy ground: a slurpy, sucking, gurgling noise. When an impacted foetal head is pulled free of the uterus it's often accompanied by a similar sucking noise, the result of air rushing in between the obstetrician's fingers to fill the space vacated. \"What occurred to me years ago was that if the air can't get in, why not put a tube up into the vagina so that it can get in from below the baby's head.\" From time to time, if he felt he felt the baby might stick, Tydeman would slip a length of sterile silicone tubing through the woman's vagina and up into the womb next to the baby's head. Allowing air in by this route would release any suction forces tending to hold it where it was.", "The inventor of the tube and of Desperate Debra is Dr Graham Tydeman, a consultant in obstetrics and gynaecology at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy, Fife. Only after he'd built Debra did he realise that she might serve a purpose beyond his original intention. His is a decade-long tale of inspired insights, thwarted aims and shifting purposes; but with a good outcome. Although the Tydeman tube is still in gestation, Desperate Debra herself is now thriving.\nTo understand the desperation of Debra and how the Tydeman tube might help to relieve it requires a brief foray into basic obstetric knowhow. Evolution has endowed us with heads proportionally so large that even when labour runs according to plan, the delivery process involves a bit of a squeeze. For the baby's head to get stuck on the way out may not be usual, but it's by no means a rarity.", "If a baby's head is jammed down in the mother's pelvic region, common sense suggests that it might help if a second person gives a gentle backward push on the area of its head visible through the mother's dilated cervix. \"In our unit,\" says Tydeman, \"when the woman is fully dilated and you'd expect the baby to come out normally [but it doesn't]… a registrar will be asking for a push-up about one in five times.\" Although registrars are doctors still in training, they're nonetheless experienced; which suggests requests for push-ups during unplanned caesareans are far from uncommon. The Tydeman tube is a gadget intended to make this manoeuvre safer and more effective.", "Although tests carried out with the Debra prototype showed that the tube would work as intended, Tydeman and his colleagues then faced what he calls a kind of medical catch-22. \"We had the tube finished about three years ago… but we were more interested in trying to save lives than selling a product. We thought that the right thing to do before commercialising it was to be sure we'd got the best design.\" They tried it on a dozen or so women in labour, and concluded that it did what it supposed to. But they held off trying to market it because they wanted to do more extensive, more rigorous clinical studies.\nThis presented a problem. \"If you've applied for research money,\" says Tydeman, \"but you've already got what seems to be a commercially viable design, potential funders are going to say that the company aiming to sell it should pay for the work.\" On the other hand, commercial interest is easier to drum up if you've already got evidence that a device is safe and effective.", "Considering the universality of childbirth, impaction and the best way of dealing with it are topics that seem to have gone remarkably unstudied. \"There are strong opinions about why it happens and what to do, but very little research evidence,\" says Tydeman, adding that many of these opinions are contradictory.", "It's still too soon to make a final judgement about Debra’s impact. \"When we first brought Debra out,\" Briley recalls, \"some of the really experienced professors said things like, 'We always managed without one. Why would you need this?' But ask them to have a go at using it and then they admit it's really good.\" Medicine as a whole has an oddly ambivalent relationship to innovation. Some new findings, techniques or equipment take years to penetrate the profession; others are seized upon immediately.", "That said, the team didn't want to leave the tube sitting on the shelf. So they eventually decided to go ahead and find a commercial partner willing to manufacture and market it. They have now identified one, and are fairly confident it will soon be in production. With sufficient users it should then be possible to compile factual – as opposed to anecdotal – evidence of benefit. Not ideal, Tydeman concedes, but the best they can do at present. \n\n In the meantime, back to Desperate Debra: so named, Tydeman says, not after any particular person but because the appellation is memorably alliterative. He put together the original Debra in a weekend. The skin was made out of a neoprene wetsuit fixed to a scaffolding formed from plastic tubing he'd found 20 years ago in skip outside a Glasgow pub; the head was cast in silicone from a model he'd made in plasticine, and the rest comprised old springs and other bits of stuff lying around his workshop. \"It wasn't actually that difficult,\" Tydeman says." ] ]
train	24275	[ "Relationship between Harry Zeckler and Paul Meyeroff?", "What crime has Zeckler committed to warrant imprisonment?", "What motivates people like Zeckler to commit such crimes as he committed?", "Why was Altair regarded at once by the Trading Commission as a commercial prize of tremendous value?", "The proceedings of Altairian trial defy which tenet of the modern western legal system?", "Altairian's economy is most likely representative of which system:", "What does the outcome of Zeckler's trial suggest about the modern legal system?" ]	[ [ "Meyeroff is Zeckler's legal representation", "Meyeroff is an official sent to extradite Zeckler", "Zeckler is a con man for Meyeroff", "Zeckler abetted in a crime that Meyeroff perpetrated" ], [ "embezzlement", "fraud", "encroachment", "indecent exposure" ], [ "New interplanetary laws created more incentive to commit crimes in vulnerable areas than they offered protection from such crimes.", "Representatives from the Trading Commission set up an operation to hire and arrest con men in order to secure resources without being indicted.", "The interplanetary laws made it easy for wealthy corporations and entities to prey upon those they considered less civilized and intelligent.", "The Trading Commission offered monetary compensation for whoever was willing to secure unexploited trading ground on neighboring planets." ], [ "They do not understand the loopholes in the trading laws", "They have a large amount of 'unclaimed' land", "They were an ideal location for an interplanetary prison system", "They have a large reservoir of 'unclaimed' uranium" ], [ "a defendant is innocent until proven guilty", "a defendant has a right to due process", "no warrant shall be issued without just cause", "no one shall be subject to self-incrimination" ], [ "capitalism", "laissez faire", "socialism", "Keynesian" ], [ "The legal system is set up to benefit those with more power and wealth.", "For a defendant in the legal system, there is no desirable outcome.", "The better lawyer a defendant has, the more likely they are to clear their names.", "Sometimes it is more optimal to lie and make a guilty plea, than to tell the truth and be found guilty." ] ]	[ 2, 2, 1, 4, 1, 2, 3 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "\"Look, Zeckler, the name is Meyerhoff, and I'm not your\n pal,\" Meyerhoff snapped. \"And you've been here for two\n weeks, three days, and approximately four hours. You're getting\n as bad as your gentle guards when it comes to bandying\n the truth around.\" He peered through the dim light at the\n gaunt face of the prisoner. Zeckler's face was dark with a\n week's beard, and his bloodshot eyes belied the cocky grin\n on his lips. His clothes were smeared and sodden, streaked\n with great splotches of mud and moss. Meyerhoff's face softened\n a little. \"So Harry Zeckler's in a jam again,\" he said.\n \"You\nlook\nas if they'd treated you like a brother.\"", "Meyerhoff's eyes were worried, too. For some reason, he\n felt a surge of pity and admiration for the haggard con-man.\n \"It's worse than I'd anticipated,\" he admitted glumly. \"That\n was a good try, but you just don't know enough about them\n and their Goddess.\" He sat down wearily. \"I don't see what\n you can do. They want your blood, and they're going to have\n it. They just won't believe you, no matter\nhow\nbig a lie you\n tell.\"\n\n\n Zeckler sat in silence for a moment. \"This lying business,\"\n he said finally, \"exactly how does it work?\"", "Zeckler was on his feet, his eyes suddenly bright with excitement.\n \"Wait a minute,\" he said tensely. \"To tell them a lie\n that they'd have to believe—a lie they simply couldn't\nhelp\nbut believe—\" He turned on Meyerhoff, his hands trembling.\n \"Do they\nthink\nthe way we do? I mean, with logic, cause and\n effect, examining evidence and drawing conclusions? Given\n certain evidence, would they have to draw the same conclusions\n that we have to draw?\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff blinked. \"Well—yes. Oh, yes, they're perfectly\n logical.\"\n\n\n Zeckler's eyes flashed, and a huge grin broke out on his\n sallow face. His thin body fairly shook. He started hopping\n up and down on one foot, staring idiotically into space. \"If I\n could only think—\" he muttered. \"Somebody—somewhere—something\n I read.\"\n\n\n \"Whatever are you talking about?\"", "Zeckler puffed nervously on his cigarette, his narrow face\n a study in troubled concentration. \"But I didn't\ndo\nanything!\"\n he exploded finally. \"So I pulled an old con game. So what?\n Why should they get so excited? So I clipped a few thousand\n credits, pulled a little fast business.\" He shrugged eloquently,\n spreading his hands. \"Everybody's doing it. They do it to each\n other without batting an eye. You should\nsee\nthese critters\n operate on each other. Why, my little scheme was peanuts by\n comparison.\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff pulled a pipe from his pocket, and began stuffing\n the bowl with infinite patience. \"And precisely what sort of\n con game was it?\" he asked quietly.", "Zeckler jerked around abruptly as he heard his name bellowed\n out. \"Does the defendant have anything to say before\n the jury delivers the verdict?\"\n\n\n \"Do I have—\" Zeckler was across the room in a flash, his\n pale cheeks suddenly taking on a feverish glow. He sat down\n gingerly on the witness chair, facing the judge, his eyes bright\n with fear and excitement. \"Your—Your Honor, I—I have a\n statement to make which will have a most important bearing\n on this case. You must listen with the greatest care.\" He\n glanced quickly at Meyerhoff, and back to the judge. \"Your\n Honor,\" he said in a hushed voice. \"You are in gravest of\n danger. All of you. Your lives—your very land is at stake.\"\n\n\n The judge blinked, and shuffled through his notes hurriedly\n as a murmur arose in the court. \"Our land?\"", "\"I never saw him before in my life,\" Zeckler moaned to\n Meyerhoff. \"Listen to him! Why should I care where their\n Goddess—\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff gave him a stony look. \"The Goddess runs things\n around here. She makes it rain. If it doesn't rain, somebody's\n insulted her. It's very simple.\"\n\n\n \"But how can I fight testimony like that?\"\n\n\n \"I doubt if you\ncan\nfight it.\"", "Zeckler was visibly shaken. \"Look,\" he said weakly, \"so I\n wasn't so smart. What am I going to do? I mean, are you\n going to sit quietly by and let them butcher me? How could\n I defend myself in a legal setup like\nthis\n?\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff smiled coolly. \"You're going to get your sly little\n con-man brain to working, I think,\" he said softly. \"By Interplanetary\n Rules, they have to give you a trial in Terran legal\n form—judge, jury, court procedure, all that folderol. They\n think it's a big joke—after all, what could a judicial oath mean\n to them?—but they agreed. Only thing is, they're going to\n hang you, if they die trying. So you'd better get those stunted\n little wits of yours clicking—and if you try to implicate\nme\n,\n even a little bit, I'll be out of there so fast you won't know\n what happened.\"", "Meyerhoff grinned unpleasantly. \"I mean precisely that.\n You've committed a crime here—a major crime. The Altairians\n are sore about it. And the Terran Consulate isn't willing\n to sell all the trading possibilities here down the river just to\n get you out of a mess. You're going to stand trial—and these\n natives are out to get you. Personally, I think they're\ngoing\nto get you.\"\n\n\n Zeckler stood up shakily. \"You can't believe anything the\n natives say,\" he said uneasily. \"They're pathological liars.\n Why, you should see what they tried to sell\nme\n! You've never\n seen such a pack of liars as these critters.\" He glanced up at\n Meyerhoff. \"They'll probably drop a little fine on me and let\n me go.\"", "There was a startled gasp from within, and a skinny, gnarled\n little man suddenly appeared in the guard's light, like a grotesque,\n twisted ghost out of the blackness. Wide blue eyes\n regarded Meyerhoff from beneath uneven black eyebrows, and\n then the little man's face broke into a crafty grin. \"Paul! So\n they sent\nyou\n! I knew I could count on it!\" He executed a\n deep, awkward bow, motioning Meyerhoff into the dark\n cubicle. \"Not much to offer you,\" he said slyly, \"but it's the\n best I can do under the circumstances.\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff scowled, and turned abruptly to the guard. \"We'll\n have some privacy now, if you please. Interplanetary ruling.\n And leave us the light.\"", "Zeckler's grin broadened, and he leaned back luxuriously.\n \"Ah, well. After all, the Trading Alliance was\nyour\noutlook,\n wasn't it? What a pity!\" He clucked his tongue sadly. \"Me,\n I've got a fortune in credits sitting back at the consulate waiting\n for me—enough to keep me on silk for quite a while, I\n might say. I think I'll just take a nice, long vacation.\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff turned to him, and a twinkle of malignant glee\n appeared in his eyes. \"Yes, I think you will. I'm quite sure of\n it, in fact. Won't cost you a cent, either.\"\n\n\n \"Eh?\"", "The guard waved a heavy paw vaguely into the blackness\n ahead. Quite suddenly the corridor took a sharp bend, and the\n Altairian stopped, producing a huge key ring from some obscure\n fold of his hairy hide. \"I still don't see any reason for\n all the fuss,\" he grumbled in a wounded tone. \"We've treated\n him like a brother.\"\n\n\n One of the huge steel doors clicked open. Meyerhoff peered\n into the blackness, catching a vaguely human outline against\n the back wall. \"Harry?\" he called sharply.", "The little con-man's jaw sagged lower and lower, the color\n draining from his face. He turned, wide-eyed, to Meyerhoff,\n then back to the judge.\n\n\n \"The Chairman of the Jury,\" said the Judge succinctly, \"will\n read the verdict.\"\n\n\n The little native in the front of the jury-box popped up like\n a puppet on a string. \"Defendant found guilty on all counts,\"\n he said.\n\n\n \"Defendant is guilty! The court will pronounce sentence—\"\n\n\n \"\nNow wait a minute!\n\" Zeckler was on his feet, wild-eyed.\n \"What kind of railroad job—\"\n\n\n The judge blinked disappointedly at Paul Meyerhoff. \"Not\n yet?\" he asked, unhappily.", "\"Your lives, your land, everything you hold dear,\" Zeckler\n said quickly, licking his lips nervously. \"You must try to\n understand me—\" he glanced apprehensively over his shoulder\n \"now, because I may not live long enough to repeat what\n I am about to tell you—\"\n\n\n The murmur quieted down, all ears straining in their headsets\n to hear his words. \"These charges,\" he continued, \"all of\n them—they're perfectly true. At least, they\nseem\nto be perfectly\n true. But in every instance, I was working with heart and\n soul, risking my life, for the welfare of your beautiful planet.\"", "Zeckler shrugged again. \"The simplest, tiredest, moldiest\n old racket that ever made a quick nickel. Remember the old\n Terran gag about the Brooklyn Bridge? The same thing. Only\n these critters didn't want bridges. They wanted land—this\n gooey, slimy swamp they call 'farm land.' So I gave them\n what they wanted. I just sold them some land.\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff nodded fiercely. \"You sure did. A hundred square\n kilos at a swipe. Only you sold the same hundred square kilos\n to a dozen different natives.\" Suddenly he threw back his hands\n and roared. \"Of all the things you\nshouldn't\nhave done—\"\n\n\n \"But what's a chunk of land?\"", "\"A little fine of one Terran neck.\" Meyerhoff grinned nastily.\n \"You've committed the most heinous crime these creatures can\n imagine, and they're going to get you for it if it's the last thing\n they do. I'm afraid, my friend, that your con-man days are\n over.\"\n\n\n Zeckler fished in the other man's pocket, extracted a cigarette,\n and lighted it with trembling fingers. \"It's bad, then,\"\n he said finally.\n\n\n \"It's bad, all right.\"\n\n\n Some shadow of the sly, elfin grin crept over the little con-man's\n face. \"Well, at any rate, I'm glad they sent you over,\"\n he said weakly. \"Nothing like a good lawyer to handle a trial.\"", "\"Unless the defendant wishes to take up more of our precious\n time with these ridiculous lies, the jury—\"\n\n\n \"Wait! Your Honor, I request a short recess before I present\n my final plea.\"\n\n\n \"Recess?\"\n\n\n \"A few moments to collect my thoughts, to arrange my\n case.\"\n\n\n The judge settled back with a disgusted snarl. \"Do I have\n to?\" he asked Meyerhoff.\n\n\n Meyerhoff nodded. The judge shrugged, pointing over his\n shoulder to the anteroom. \"You can go in there,\" he said.\n\n\n Somehow, Zeckler managed to stumble from the witness\n stand, amid riotous boos and hisses, and tottered into the anteroom.\nZeckler puffed hungrily on a cigarette, and looked up at\n Meyerhoff with haunted eyes. \"It—it doesn't look so good,\"\n he muttered.", "With that Meyerhoff walked to the door. He jerked it inward\n sharply, and spilled two guards over on their faces.\n \"Privacy,\" he grunted, and started back up the slippery corridor.\nIt certainly\nlooked\nlike a courtroom, at any rate. In the front\n of the long, damp stone room was a bench, with a seat behind\n it, and a small straight chair to the right. To the left was a stand\n with twelve chairs—larger chairs, with a railing running along\n the front. The rest of the room was filled almost to the door\n with seats facing the bench. Zeckler followed the shaggy-haired\n guard into the room, nodding approvingly. \"Not such a bad\n arrangement,\" he said. \"They must have gotten the idea fast.\"", "\"But they can't prove a word of it—\" He looked at the jury,\n who were listening enraptured to the second witness on the\n stand. This one was testifying regarding the butcherous slaughter\n of eighteen (or was it twenty-three? Oh, yes, twenty-three)\n women and children in the suburban village of Karzan. The\n pogrom, it seemed, had been accomplished by an energy\n weapon which ate great, gaping holes in the sides of buildings.\n A third witness took the stand, continuing the drone as the\n room grew hotter and muggier. Zeckler grew paler and paler,\n his eyes turning glassy as the testimony piled up. \"But it's not\ntrue\n,\" he whispered to Meyerhoff.\n\n\n \"Of course it isn't! Can't you understand?\nThese people\n have no regard for truth.\nIt's stupid, to them, silly, a mark of\n low intelligence. The only thing in the world they have any\n respect for is a liar bigger and more skillful than they are.\"", "One of the jurymen let out a little squeak, and fainted dead\n away. It took, all in all, about ten seconds for the statement\n to soak in.\n\n\n And then pandemonium broke loose in the courtroom.\n\"Really,\" said Harry Zeckler loftily, \"it was so obvious I'm\n amazed that it didn't occur to me first thing.\" He settled himself\n down comfortably in the control cabin of the Interplanetary\n Rocket and grinned at the outline of Altair IV looming larger\n in the view screen.\n\n\n Paul Meyerhoff stared stonily at the controls, his lips compressed\n angrily. \"You might at least have told me what you\n were planning.\"", "Zeckler's eyes widened. \"What do you mean, fool? So I\n spend a couple of weeks in this pneumonia trap. The deal was\n worth it! I've got three million credits sitting in the Terran\n Consulate on Altair V, just waiting for me to walk in and pick\n them up. Three million credits—do you hear? That's enough\n to set me up for life!\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff nodded grimly. \"\nIf\nyou live long enough to walk\n in and pick them up, that is.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, if?\"" ], [ "\"Look, Zeckler, the name is Meyerhoff, and I'm not your\n pal,\" Meyerhoff snapped. \"And you've been here for two\n weeks, three days, and approximately four hours. You're getting\n as bad as your gentle guards when it comes to bandying\n the truth around.\" He peered through the dim light at the\n gaunt face of the prisoner. Zeckler's face was dark with a\n week's beard, and his bloodshot eyes belied the cocky grin\n on his lips. His clothes were smeared and sodden, streaked\n with great splotches of mud and moss. Meyerhoff's face softened\n a little. \"So Harry Zeckler's in a jam again,\" he said.\n \"You\nlook\nas if they'd treated you like a brother.\"", "Zeckler looked sharply around the hushed room. \"You want\n to convict me,\" he said softly, \"in the worst sort of way. Isn't\n that right?\"\n\n\n Eyes swung toward him. The judge broke into an evil grin.\n \"That's right.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't really convict me until you've considered\n carefully any statement I make in my own defense. Isn't that\n right?\"\n\n\n The judge looked uncomfortable. \"If you've got something\n to say, go ahead and say it.\"", "Zeckler jerked around abruptly as he heard his name bellowed\n out. \"Does the defendant have anything to say before\n the jury delivers the verdict?\"\n\n\n \"Do I have—\" Zeckler was across the room in a flash, his\n pale cheeks suddenly taking on a feverish glow. He sat down\n gingerly on the witness chair, facing the judge, his eyes bright\n with fear and excitement. \"Your—Your Honor, I—I have a\n statement to make which will have a most important bearing\n on this case. You must listen with the greatest care.\" He\n glanced quickly at Meyerhoff, and back to the judge. \"Your\n Honor,\" he said in a hushed voice. \"You are in gravest of\n danger. All of you. Your lives—your very land is at stake.\"\n\n\n The judge blinked, and shuffled through his notes hurriedly\n as a murmur arose in the court. \"Our land?\"", "\"Your lives, your land, everything you hold dear,\" Zeckler\n said quickly, licking his lips nervously. \"You must try to\n understand me—\" he glanced apprehensively over his shoulder\n \"now, because I may not live long enough to repeat what\n I am about to tell you—\"\n\n\n The murmur quieted down, all ears straining in their headsets\n to hear his words. \"These charges,\" he continued, \"all of\n them—they're perfectly true. At least, they\nseem\nto be perfectly\n true. But in every instance, I was working with heart and\n soul, risking my life, for the welfare of your beautiful planet.\"", "Zeckler was visibly shaken. \"Look,\" he said weakly, \"so I\n wasn't so smart. What am I going to do? I mean, are you\n going to sit quietly by and let them butcher me? How could\n I defend myself in a legal setup like\nthis\n?\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff smiled coolly. \"You're going to get your sly little\n con-man brain to working, I think,\" he said softly. \"By Interplanetary\n Rules, they have to give you a trial in Terran legal\n form—judge, jury, court procedure, all that folderol. They\n think it's a big joke—after all, what could a judicial oath mean\n to them?—but they agreed. Only thing is, they're going to\n hang you, if they die trying. So you'd better get those stunted\n little wits of yours clicking—and if you try to implicate\nme\n,\n even a little bit, I'll be out of there so fast you won't know\n what happened.\"", "\"Unless the defendant wishes to take up more of our precious\n time with these ridiculous lies, the jury—\"\n\n\n \"Wait! Your Honor, I request a short recess before I present\n my final plea.\"\n\n\n \"Recess?\"\n\n\n \"A few moments to collect my thoughts, to arrange my\n case.\"\n\n\n The judge settled back with a disgusted snarl. \"Do I have\n to?\" he asked Meyerhoff.\n\n\n Meyerhoff nodded. The judge shrugged, pointing over his\n shoulder to the anteroom. \"You can go in there,\" he said.\n\n\n Somehow, Zeckler managed to stumble from the witness\n stand, amid riotous boos and hisses, and tottered into the anteroom.\nZeckler puffed hungrily on a cigarette, and looked up at\n Meyerhoff with haunted eyes. \"It—it doesn't look so good,\"\n he muttered.", "The little con-man's jaw sagged lower and lower, the color\n draining from his face. He turned, wide-eyed, to Meyerhoff,\n then back to the judge.\n\n\n \"The Chairman of the Jury,\" said the Judge succinctly, \"will\n read the verdict.\"\n\n\n The little native in the front of the jury-box popped up like\n a puppet on a string. \"Defendant found guilty on all counts,\"\n he said.\n\n\n \"Defendant is guilty! The court will pronounce sentence—\"\n\n\n \"\nNow wait a minute!\n\" Zeckler was on his feet, wild-eyed.\n \"What kind of railroad job—\"\n\n\n The judge blinked disappointedly at Paul Meyerhoff. \"Not\n yet?\" he asked, unhappily.", "Meyerhoff grinned unpleasantly. \"I mean precisely that.\n You've committed a crime here—a major crime. The Altairians\n are sore about it. And the Terran Consulate isn't willing\n to sell all the trading possibilities here down the river just to\n get you out of a mess. You're going to stand trial—and these\n natives are out to get you. Personally, I think they're\ngoing\nto get you.\"\n\n\n Zeckler stood up shakily. \"You can't believe anything the\n natives say,\" he said uneasily. \"They're pathological liars.\n Why, you should see what they tried to sell\nme\n! You've never\n seen such a pack of liars as these critters.\" He glanced up at\n Meyerhoff. \"They'll probably drop a little fine on me and let\n me go.\"", "\"I never saw him before in my life,\" Zeckler moaned to\n Meyerhoff. \"Listen to him! Why should I care where their\n Goddess—\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff gave him a stony look. \"The Goddess runs things\n around here. She makes it rain. If it doesn't rain, somebody's\n insulted her. It's very simple.\"\n\n\n \"But how can I fight testimony like that?\"\n\n\n \"I doubt if you\ncan\nfight it.\"", "Zeckler was on his feet, his eyes suddenly bright with excitement.\n \"Wait a minute,\" he said tensely. \"To tell them a lie\n that they'd have to believe—a lie they simply couldn't\nhelp\nbut believe—\" He turned on Meyerhoff, his hands trembling.\n \"Do they\nthink\nthe way we do? I mean, with logic, cause and\n effect, examining evidence and drawing conclusions? Given\n certain evidence, would they have to draw the same conclusions\n that we have to draw?\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff blinked. \"Well—yes. Oh, yes, they're perfectly\n logical.\"\n\n\n Zeckler's eyes flashed, and a huge grin broke out on his\n sallow face. His thin body fairly shook. He started hopping\n up and down on one foot, staring idiotically into space. \"If I\n could only think—\" he muttered. \"Somebody—somewhere—something\n I read.\"\n\n\n \"Whatever are you talking about?\"", "\"A little fine of one Terran neck.\" Meyerhoff grinned nastily.\n \"You've committed the most heinous crime these creatures can\n imagine, and they're going to get you for it if it's the last thing\n they do. I'm afraid, my friend, that your con-man days are\n over.\"\n\n\n Zeckler fished in the other man's pocket, extracted a cigarette,\n and lighted it with trembling fingers. \"It's bad, then,\"\n he said finally.\n\n\n \"It's bad, all right.\"\n\n\n Some shadow of the sly, elfin grin crept over the little con-man's\n face. \"Well, at any rate, I'm glad they sent you over,\"\n he said weakly. \"Nothing like a good lawyer to handle a trial.\"", "Zeckler puffed nervously on his cigarette, his narrow face\n a study in troubled concentration. \"But I didn't\ndo\nanything!\"\n he exploded finally. \"So I pulled an old con game. So what?\n Why should they get so excited? So I clipped a few thousand\n credits, pulled a little fast business.\" He shrugged eloquently,\n spreading his hands. \"Everybody's doing it. They do it to each\n other without batting an eye. You should\nsee\nthese critters\n operate on each other. Why, my little scheme was peanuts by\n comparison.\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff pulled a pipe from his pocket, and began stuffing\n the bowl with infinite patience. \"And precisely what sort of\n con game was it?\" he asked quietly.", "\"We are reading the case of the people of Altair I,\" the\n judge's voice roared out, \"against one Harry Zeckler—\" he\n paused for a long, impressive moment—\"Terran.\" The courtroom\n immediately burst into an angry growl, until the judge\n pounded the bench five or six times more. \"This—creature—is\n hereby accused of the following crimes,\" the judge bellowed.\n \"Conspiracy to overthrow the government of Altair I. Brutal\n murder of seventeen law-abiding citizens of the village of\n Karzan at the third hour before dawn in the second period\n after his arrival. Desecration of the Temple of our beloved\n Goddess Zermat, Queen of the Harvest. Conspiracy with the", "\"Oh, yes. Didn't I tell you? Conspiring to undermine the\n authority of the Terran Trading Commission. Serious charge,\n you know. Yes, I think we'll take a nice long vacation together,\n straight back to Terra. And there I think you'll face a jury\n trial.\"\n\n\n Zeckler spluttered. \"There's no evidence—you've got nothing\n on me! What kind of a frame are you trying to pull?\"", "With that Meyerhoff walked to the door. He jerked it inward\n sharply, and spilled two guards over on their faces.\n \"Privacy,\" he grunted, and started back up the slippery corridor.\nIt certainly\nlooked\nlike a courtroom, at any rate. In the front\n of the long, damp stone room was a bench, with a seat behind\n it, and a small straight chair to the right. To the left was a stand\n with twelve chairs—larger chairs, with a railing running along\n the front. The rest of the room was filled almost to the door\n with seats facing the bench. Zeckler followed the shaggy-haired\n guard into the room, nodding approvingly. \"Not such a bad\n arrangement,\" he said. \"They must have gotten the idea fast.\"", "The witness settled back into the chair, fixing one eye on\n Zeckler's face, another on the prosecutor, and closing the third\n as if in meditation. \"I think it happened on the fourth night\n of the seventh crossing of Altair II (may the Goddess cast\n a drought upon it)—or was it the seventh night of the fourth\n crossing?—\" he grinned apologetically at the judge—\"when I\n was making my way back through town toward my blessed\n land-plot, minding my own business, Your Honor, after weeks\n of bargaining for the crop I was harvesting. Suddenly from the\n shadow of the building, this creature—\" he waved a paw at\n Zeckler—\"stopped me in my tracks with a vicious cry. He had\n a weapon I'd never seen before, and before I could find my\n voice he forced me back against the wall. I could see by the\n cruel glint in his eyes that there was no warmth, no sympathy\n in his heart, that I was—\"", "\"Objection!\" Zeckler squealed plaintively, jumping to his\n feet. \"This witness can't even remember what night he's talking\n about!\"\n\n\n The judge looked startled. Then he pawed feverishly through\n his bundle of notes. \"Overruled,\" he said abruptly. \"Continue,\n please.\"\n\n\n The witness glowered at Zeckler. \"As I was saying before\n this loutish interruption,\" he muttered, \"I could see that I was\n face to face with the most desperate of criminal types, even\n for Terrans. Note the shape of his head, the flabbiness of his\n ears. I was petrified with fear. And then, helpless as I was, this\n two-legged abomination began to shower me with threats of\n evil to my blessed home, dark threats of poisoning my land\n unless I would tell him where he could find the resting place\n of our blessed Goddess—\"", "Zeckler's grin broadened, and he leaned back luxuriously.\n \"Ah, well. After all, the Trading Alliance was\nyour\noutlook,\n wasn't it? What a pity!\" He clucked his tongue sadly. \"Me,\n I've got a fortune in credits sitting back at the consulate waiting\n for me—enough to keep me on silk for quite a while, I\n might say. I think I'll just take a nice, long vacation.\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff turned to him, and a twinkle of malignant glee\n appeared in his eyes. \"Yes, I think you will. I'm quite sure of\n it, in fact. Won't cost you a cent, either.\"\n\n\n \"Eh?\"", "Meyerhoff grinned unpleasantly. He brushed an imaginary\n lint fleck from his lapel, and looked up at Zeckler slyly. \"That—uh—jury\n trial. The Altairians weren't any too happy to\n oblige. They wanted to execute you outright. Thought a trial\n was awfully silly—until they got their money back, of course.\n Not too much—just three million credits.\"\n\n\n Zeckler went white. \"But that money was in banking custody!\"\n\n\n \"Is that right? My goodness. You don't suppose they could\n have lost those papers, do you?\" Meyerhoff grinned at the\n little con-man. \"And incidentally, you're under arrest, you\n know.\"\n\n\n A choking sound came from Zeckler's throat. \"\nArrest!\n\"", "\"It was a Greek, I think—\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff stared at him. \"Oh, come now. Have you gone\n off your rocker completely? You've got a problem on your\n hands, man.\"\n\n\n \"No, no, I've got a problem in the bag!\" Zeckler's cheeks\n flushed. \"Let's go back in there—I think I've got an answer!\"\n\n\n The courtroom quieted the moment they opened the door,\n and the judge banged the gavel for silence. As soon as Zeckler\n had taken his seat on the witness stand, the judge turned to\n the head juryman. \"Now, then,\" he said with happy finality.\n \"The jury—\"\n\n\n \"Hold on! Just one minute more.\"\n\n\n The judge stared down at Zeckler as if he were a bug on a\n rock. \"Oh, yes. You had something else to say. Well, go ahead\n and say it.\"" ], [ "\"Your lives, your land, everything you hold dear,\" Zeckler\n said quickly, licking his lips nervously. \"You must try to\n understand me—\" he glanced apprehensively over his shoulder\n \"now, because I may not live long enough to repeat what\n I am about to tell you—\"\n\n\n The murmur quieted down, all ears straining in their headsets\n to hear his words. \"These charges,\" he continued, \"all of\n them—they're perfectly true. At least, they\nseem\nto be perfectly\n true. But in every instance, I was working with heart and\n soul, risking my life, for the welfare of your beautiful planet.\"", "Zeckler was on his feet, his eyes suddenly bright with excitement.\n \"Wait a minute,\" he said tensely. \"To tell them a lie\n that they'd have to believe—a lie they simply couldn't\nhelp\nbut believe—\" He turned on Meyerhoff, his hands trembling.\n \"Do they\nthink\nthe way we do? I mean, with logic, cause and\n effect, examining evidence and drawing conclusions? Given\n certain evidence, would they have to draw the same conclusions\n that we have to draw?\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff blinked. \"Well—yes. Oh, yes, they're perfectly\n logical.\"\n\n\n Zeckler's eyes flashed, and a huge grin broke out on his\n sallow face. His thin body fairly shook. He started hopping\n up and down on one foot, staring idiotically into space. \"If I\n could only think—\" he muttered. \"Somebody—somewhere—something\n I read.\"\n\n\n \"Whatever are you talking about?\"", "Zeckler looked sharply around the hushed room. \"You want\n to convict me,\" he said softly, \"in the worst sort of way. Isn't\n that right?\"\n\n\n Eyes swung toward him. The judge broke into an evil grin.\n \"That's right.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't really convict me until you've considered\n carefully any statement I make in my own defense. Isn't that\n right?\"\n\n\n The judge looked uncomfortable. \"If you've got something\n to say, go ahead and say it.\"", "Zeckler jerked around abruptly as he heard his name bellowed\n out. \"Does the defendant have anything to say before\n the jury delivers the verdict?\"\n\n\n \"Do I have—\" Zeckler was across the room in a flash, his\n pale cheeks suddenly taking on a feverish glow. He sat down\n gingerly on the witness chair, facing the judge, his eyes bright\n with fear and excitement. \"Your—Your Honor, I—I have a\n statement to make which will have a most important bearing\n on this case. You must listen with the greatest care.\" He\n glanced quickly at Meyerhoff, and back to the judge. \"Your\n Honor,\" he said in a hushed voice. \"You are in gravest of\n danger. All of you. Your lives—your very land is at stake.\"\n\n\n The judge blinked, and shuffled through his notes hurriedly\n as a murmur arose in the court. \"Our land?\"", "\"Look, Zeckler, the name is Meyerhoff, and I'm not your\n pal,\" Meyerhoff snapped. \"And you've been here for two\n weeks, three days, and approximately four hours. You're getting\n as bad as your gentle guards when it comes to bandying\n the truth around.\" He peered through the dim light at the\n gaunt face of the prisoner. Zeckler's face was dark with a\n week's beard, and his bloodshot eyes belied the cocky grin\n on his lips. His clothes were smeared and sodden, streaked\n with great splotches of mud and moss. Meyerhoff's face softened\n a little. \"So Harry Zeckler's in a jam again,\" he said.\n \"You\nlook\nas if they'd treated you like a brother.\"", "\"I never saw him before in my life,\" Zeckler moaned to\n Meyerhoff. \"Listen to him! Why should I care where their\n Goddess—\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff gave him a stony look. \"The Goddess runs things\n around here. She makes it rain. If it doesn't rain, somebody's\n insulted her. It's very simple.\"\n\n\n \"But how can I fight testimony like that?\"\n\n\n \"I doubt if you\ncan\nfight it.\"", "\"But they can't prove a word of it—\" He looked at the jury,\n who were listening enraptured to the second witness on the\n stand. This one was testifying regarding the butcherous slaughter\n of eighteen (or was it twenty-three? Oh, yes, twenty-three)\n women and children in the suburban village of Karzan. The\n pogrom, it seemed, had been accomplished by an energy\n weapon which ate great, gaping holes in the sides of buildings.\n A third witness took the stand, continuing the drone as the\n room grew hotter and muggier. Zeckler grew paler and paler,\n his eyes turning glassy as the testimony piled up. \"But it's not\ntrue\n,\" he whispered to Meyerhoff.\n\n\n \"Of course it isn't! Can't you understand?\nThese people\n have no regard for truth.\nIt's stupid, to them, silly, a mark of\n low intelligence. The only thing in the world they have any\n respect for is a liar bigger and more skillful than they are.\"", "Zeckler puffed nervously on his cigarette, his narrow face\n a study in troubled concentration. \"But I didn't\ndo\nanything!\"\n he exploded finally. \"So I pulled an old con game. So what?\n Why should they get so excited? So I clipped a few thousand\n credits, pulled a little fast business.\" He shrugged eloquently,\n spreading his hands. \"Everybody's doing it. They do it to each\n other without batting an eye. You should\nsee\nthese critters\n operate on each other. Why, my little scheme was peanuts by\n comparison.\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff pulled a pipe from his pocket, and began stuffing\n the bowl with infinite patience. \"And precisely what sort of\n con game was it?\" he asked quietly.", "Meyerhoff grinned unpleasantly. \"I mean precisely that.\n You've committed a crime here—a major crime. The Altairians\n are sore about it. And the Terran Consulate isn't willing\n to sell all the trading possibilities here down the river just to\n get you out of a mess. You're going to stand trial—and these\n natives are out to get you. Personally, I think they're\ngoing\nto get you.\"\n\n\n Zeckler stood up shakily. \"You can't believe anything the\n natives say,\" he said uneasily. \"They're pathological liars.\n Why, you should see what they tried to sell\nme\n! You've never\n seen such a pack of liars as these critters.\" He glanced up at\n Meyerhoff. \"They'll probably drop a little fine on me and let\n me go.\"", "\"We are reading the case of the people of Altair I,\" the\n judge's voice roared out, \"against one Harry Zeckler—\" he\n paused for a long, impressive moment—\"Terran.\" The courtroom\n immediately burst into an angry growl, until the judge\n pounded the bench five or six times more. \"This—creature—is\n hereby accused of the following crimes,\" the judge bellowed.\n \"Conspiracy to overthrow the government of Altair I. Brutal\n murder of seventeen law-abiding citizens of the village of\n Karzan at the third hour before dawn in the second period\n after his arrival. Desecration of the Temple of our beloved\n Goddess Zermat, Queen of the Harvest. Conspiracy with the", "Meyerhoff's eyes were worried, too. For some reason, he\n felt a surge of pity and admiration for the haggard con-man.\n \"It's worse than I'd anticipated,\" he admitted glumly. \"That\n was a good try, but you just don't know enough about them\n and their Goddess.\" He sat down wearily. \"I don't see what\n you can do. They want your blood, and they're going to have\n it. They just won't believe you, no matter\nhow\nbig a lie you\n tell.\"\n\n\n Zeckler sat in silence for a moment. \"This lying business,\"\n he said finally, \"exactly how does it work?\"", "Zeckler was visibly shaken. \"Look,\" he said weakly, \"so I\n wasn't so smart. What am I going to do? I mean, are you\n going to sit quietly by and let them butcher me? How could\n I defend myself in a legal setup like\nthis\n?\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff smiled coolly. \"You're going to get your sly little\n con-man brain to working, I think,\" he said softly. \"By Interplanetary\n Rules, they have to give you a trial in Terran legal\n form—judge, jury, court procedure, all that folderol. They\n think it's a big joke—after all, what could a judicial oath mean\n to them?—but they agreed. Only thing is, they're going to\n hang you, if they die trying. So you'd better get those stunted\n little wits of yours clicking—and if you try to implicate\nme\n,\n even a little bit, I'll be out of there so fast you won't know\n what happened.\"", "\"Objection!\" Zeckler squealed plaintively, jumping to his\n feet. \"This witness can't even remember what night he's talking\n about!\"\n\n\n The judge looked startled. Then he pawed feverishly through\n his bundle of notes. \"Overruled,\" he said abruptly. \"Continue,\n please.\"\n\n\n The witness glowered at Zeckler. \"As I was saying before\n this loutish interruption,\" he muttered, \"I could see that I was\n face to face with the most desperate of criminal types, even\n for Terrans. Note the shape of his head, the flabbiness of his\n ears. I was petrified with fear. And then, helpless as I was, this\n two-legged abomination began to shower me with threats of\n evil to my blessed home, dark threats of poisoning my land\n unless I would tell him where he could find the resting place\n of our blessed Goddess—\"", "\"Unless the defendant wishes to take up more of our precious\n time with these ridiculous lies, the jury—\"\n\n\n \"Wait! Your Honor, I request a short recess before I present\n my final plea.\"\n\n\n \"Recess?\"\n\n\n \"A few moments to collect my thoughts, to arrange my\n case.\"\n\n\n The judge settled back with a disgusted snarl. \"Do I have\n to?\" he asked Meyerhoff.\n\n\n Meyerhoff nodded. The judge shrugged, pointing over his\n shoulder to the anteroom. \"You can go in there,\" he said.\n\n\n Somehow, Zeckler managed to stumble from the witness\n stand, amid riotous boos and hisses, and tottered into the anteroom.\nZeckler puffed hungrily on a cigarette, and looked up at\n Meyerhoff with haunted eyes. \"It—it doesn't look so good,\"\n he muttered.", "Zeckler shrugged again. \"The simplest, tiredest, moldiest\n old racket that ever made a quick nickel. Remember the old\n Terran gag about the Brooklyn Bridge? The same thing. Only\n these critters didn't want bridges. They wanted land—this\n gooey, slimy swamp they call 'farm land.' So I gave them\n what they wanted. I just sold them some land.\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff nodded fiercely. \"You sure did. A hundred square\n kilos at a swipe. Only you sold the same hundred square kilos\n to a dozen different natives.\" Suddenly he threw back his hands\n and roared. \"Of all the things you\nshouldn't\nhave done—\"\n\n\n \"But what's a chunk of land?\"", "\"The biggest, most convincing liar wins. It's as simple as\n that. It doesn't matter how outlandish a whopper you tell.\n Unless, of course, they've made up their minds that you just\n naturally aren't as big a liar as they are. And it looks like that's\n just what they've done. It wouldn't make any difference to\n them\nwhat\nyou say—unless, somehow, you could\nmake\nthem\n believe it.\"\n\n\n Zeckler frowned. \"And how do they regard the—the biggest\n liar? I mean, how do they feel toward him?\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff shifted uneasily. \"It's hard to say. It's been my\n experience that they respect him highly—maybe even fear him\n a little. After all, the most convincing liar always wins in any\n transaction, so he gets more land, more food, more power.\n Yes, I think the biggest liar could go where he pleased without\n any interference.\"", "The witness settled back into the chair, fixing one eye on\n Zeckler's face, another on the prosecutor, and closing the third\n as if in meditation. \"I think it happened on the fourth night\n of the seventh crossing of Altair II (may the Goddess cast\n a drought upon it)—or was it the seventh night of the fourth\n crossing?—\" he grinned apologetically at the judge—\"when I\n was making my way back through town toward my blessed\n land-plot, minding my own business, Your Honor, after weeks\n of bargaining for the crop I was harvesting. Suddenly from the\n shadow of the building, this creature—\" he waved a paw at\n Zeckler—\"stopped me in my tracks with a vicious cry. He had\n a weapon I'd never seen before, and before I could find my\n voice he forced me back against the wall. I could see by the\n cruel glint in his eyes that there was no warmth, no sympathy\n in his heart, that I was—\"", "There was a loud hiss from the back of the court. Zeckler\n frowned and rubbed his hands together. \"It was my misfortune,\"\n he said, \"to go to the wrong planet when I first came to\n Altair from my homeland on Terra. I—I landed on Altair II,\n a grave mistake, but as it turned out, a very fortunate error.\n Because in attempting to arrange trading in that frightful place,\n I made certain contacts.\" His voice trembled, and sank lower.\n \"I learned the horrible thing which is about to happen to this\n planet, at the hands of those barbarians. The conspiracy is\n theirs, not mine. They have bribed your Goddess, flattered her\n and lied to her, coerced her all-powerful goodness to their own\n evil interests, preparing for the day when they could persuade\n her to cast your land into the fiery furnace of a ten-year-drought—\"", "\"A little fine of one Terran neck.\" Meyerhoff grinned nastily.\n \"You've committed the most heinous crime these creatures can\n imagine, and they're going to get you for it if it's the last thing\n they do. I'm afraid, my friend, that your con-man days are\n over.\"\n\n\n Zeckler fished in the other man's pocket, extracted a cigarette,\n and lighted it with trembling fingers. \"It's bad, then,\"\n he said finally.\n\n\n \"It's bad, all right.\"\n\n\n Some shadow of the sly, elfin grin crept over the little con-man's\n face. \"Well, at any rate, I'm glad they sent you over,\"\n he said weakly. \"Nothing like a good lawyer to handle a trial.\"", "Zeckler's grin broadened, and he leaned back luxuriously.\n \"Ah, well. After all, the Trading Alliance was\nyour\noutlook,\n wasn't it? What a pity!\" He clucked his tongue sadly. \"Me,\n I've got a fortune in credits sitting back at the consulate waiting\n for me—enough to keep me on silk for quite a while, I\n might say. I think I'll just take a nice, long vacation.\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff turned to him, and a twinkle of malignant glee\n appeared in his eyes. \"Yes, I think you will. I'm quite sure of\n it, in fact. Won't cost you a cent, either.\"\n\n\n \"Eh?\"" ], [ "But occasionally a situation arose where the civilization and\n social practices of the alien victims made it unwise to tamper\n with them. Altair I had been recognized at once by the Trading\n Commission as a commercial prize of tremendous value, but\n early reports had warned of the danger of wildcat trading on\n the little, musty, jungle-like planet with its shaggy, three-eyed\n inhabitants—warned specifically against the confidence tactics\n so frequently used—but there was always somebody, Meyerhoff\n reflected sourly, who just didn't get the word.", "Meyerhoff grinned at the little man's horrified face. \"Never\n heard of that, had you? And you've never heard of other things,\n too. You've probably never heard that there are just too many\n Altairians here for the food their planet can supply, and their\n diet is so finicky that they just can't live on anything that\n doesn't grow here. And consequently, land is the key factor\n in their economy, not money; nothing but land. To get land,\n it's every man for himself, and the loser starves, and their\n entire legal and monetary system revolves on that principle.\n They've built up the most confusing and impossible system of\n barter and trade imaginable, aimed at individual survival, with", "Meyerhoff's face was purple with anger. \"Oh, indeed it did!\n And it put\nall\nEarthmen in exactly the same class, too.\"\n\n\n \"So what's honor among thieves? I got off, didn't I?\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff turned on him fiercely. \"Oh, you got off just fine.\n You scared the living daylights out of them. And in an eon of\n lying they never have run up against a short-circuit like that.\n You've also completely botched any hope of ever setting up\n a trading alliance with Altair I, and that includes uranium, too.\n Smart people don't gamble with loaded dice. You scared them\n so badly they don't want anything to do with us.\"", "Meyerhoff shrugged. \"As we understand legal systems, I\n suppose they don't have one. They have only the haziest idea\n what truth represents, and they've shrugged off the idea as\n impossible and useless.\" He chuckled maliciously. \"So you\n went out and found a chunk of ground in the uplands, and\n sold it to a dozen separate, self-centered, half-starved natives!\n Encroachment on private property is legal grounds for murder\n on this planet, and twelve of them descended on the same\n chunk of land at the same time, all armed with title-deeds.\"\n Meyerhoff sighed. \"You've got twelve mad Altairians in your\n hair. You've got a mad planet in your hair. And in the meantime,\n Terra's most valuable uranium source in five centuries\n is threatening to cut off supply unless they see your blood\n splattered liberally all the way from here to the equator.\"", "\"We are reading the case of the people of Altair I,\" the\n judge's voice roared out, \"against one Harry Zeckler—\" he\n paused for a long, impressive moment—\"Terran.\" The courtroom\n immediately burst into an angry growl, until the judge\n pounded the bench five or six times more. \"This—creature—is\n hereby accused of the following crimes,\" the judge bellowed.\n \"Conspiracy to overthrow the government of Altair I. Brutal\n murder of seventeen law-abiding citizens of the village of\n Karzan at the third hour before dawn in the second period\n after his arrival. Desecration of the Temple of our beloved\n Goddess Zermat, Queen of the Harvest. Conspiracy with the", "Meyerhoff grinned unpleasantly. \"I mean precisely that.\n You've committed a crime here—a major crime. The Altairians\n are sore about it. And the Terran Consulate isn't willing\n to sell all the trading possibilities here down the river just to\n get you out of a mess. You're going to stand trial—and these\n natives are out to get you. Personally, I think they're\ngoing\nto get you.\"\n\n\n Zeckler stood up shakily. \"You can't believe anything the\n natives say,\" he said uneasily. \"They're pathological liars.\n Why, you should see what they tried to sell\nme\n! You've never\n seen such a pack of liars as these critters.\" He glanced up at\n Meyerhoff. \"They'll probably drop a little fine on me and let\n me go.\"", "In a way, he thought, it was a pity to see such a change in the\n rosy-cheeked, dapper, cocksure little man who had talked his\n way glibly in and out of more jams than Meyerhoff could\n count. Trading brought scalpers; it was almost inevitable that\n where rich and unexploited trading ground was uncovered, it\n would first fall prey to the fast-trading boys. They spread out\n from Terra with the first wave of exploration—the slick, fast-talking\n con-men who could work new territories unfettered by\n the legal restrictions that soon closed down the more established\n planets. The first men in were the richest out, and\n through some curious quirk of the Terrestrial mind, they knew\n they could count on Terran protection, however crooked and", "There was a loud hiss from the back of the court. Zeckler\n frowned and rubbed his hands together. \"It was my misfortune,\"\n he said, \"to go to the wrong planet when I first came to\n Altair from my homeland on Terra. I—I landed on Altair II,\n a grave mistake, but as it turned out, a very fortunate error.\n Because in attempting to arrange trading in that frightful place,\n I made certain contacts.\" His voice trembled, and sank lower.\n \"I learned the horrible thing which is about to happen to this\n planet, at the hands of those barbarians. The conspiracy is\n theirs, not mine. They have bribed your Goddess, flattered her\n and lied to her, coerced her all-powerful goodness to their own\n evil interests, preparing for the day when they could persuade\n her to cast your land into the fiery furnace of a ten-year-drought—\"", "One of the jurymen let out a little squeak, and fainted dead\n away. It took, all in all, about ten seconds for the statement\n to soak in.\n\n\n And then pandemonium broke loose in the courtroom.\n\"Really,\" said Harry Zeckler loftily, \"it was so obvious I'm\n amazed that it didn't occur to me first thing.\" He settled himself\n down comfortably in the control cabin of the Interplanetary\n Rocket and grinned at the outline of Altair IV looming larger\n in the view screen.\n\n\n Paul Meyerhoff stared stonily at the controls, his lips compressed\n angrily. \"You might at least have told me what you\n were planning.\"", "Zeckler's eyes widened. \"What do you mean, fool? So I\n spend a couple of weeks in this pneumonia trap. The deal was\n worth it! I've got three million credits sitting in the Terran\n Consulate on Altair V, just waiting for me to walk in and pick\n them up. Three million credits—do you hear? That's enough\n to set me up for life!\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff nodded grimly. \"\nIf\nyou live long enough to walk\n in and pick them up, that is.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, if?\"", "\"No.\" Meyerhoff's hands twitched nervously. \"Not yet, Your\n Honor. Later, Your Honor. The trial comes\nfirst\n.\"\n\n\n The judge looked as if his candy had been stolen. \"But you\nsaid\nI should call for the verdict.\"\n\n\n \"Later. You have to have the trial before you can have the\n verdict.\"\n\n\n The Altairian shrugged indifferently. \"Now—later—\" he\n muttered.\n\n\n \"Have the prosecutor call his first witness,\" said Meyerhoff.\n\n\n Zeckler leaned over, his face ashen. \"These charges,\" he\n whispered. \"They're insane!\"\n\n\n \"Of course they are,\" Meyerhoff whispered back.\n\n\n \"But what am I going to—\"\n\n\n \"Sit tight. Let\nthem\nset things up.\"", "In the back of the room a door burst open with a bang.\n Loud, harsh voices were heard as half a dozen of the huge\n Altairians attempted to push through the door at once. Zeckler\n clamped on the headset to his translator unit, and watched the\n hubbub in the anteroom with growing alarm. Finally the question\n of precedent seemed to be settled, and a group of the\n Altairians filed in, in order of stature, stalking across the room\n in flowing black robes, pug-nosed faces glowering with self-importance.\n They descended upon the jury box, grunting and\n scrapping with each other for the first-row seats, and the judge\n took his place with obvious satisfaction behind the heavy\n wooden bench. Finally, the prosecuting attorney appeared,\n flanked by two clerks, who took their places beside him. The\n prosecutor eyed Zeckler with cold malevolence, then turned\n and delivered a sly wink at the judge.", "Meyerhoff grinned unpleasantly. He brushed an imaginary\n lint fleck from his lapel, and looked up at Zeckler slyly. \"That—uh—jury\n trial. The Altairians weren't any too happy to\n oblige. They wanted to execute you outright. Thought a trial\n was awfully silly—until they got their money back, of course.\n Not too much—just three million credits.\"\n\n\n Zeckler went white. \"But that money was in banking custody!\"\n\n\n \"Is that right? My goodness. You don't suppose they could\n have lost those papers, do you?\" Meyerhoff grinned at the\n little con-man. \"And incidentally, you're under arrest, you\n know.\"\n\n\n A choking sound came from Zeckler's throat. \"\nArrest!\n\"", "The guard waved a heavy paw vaguely into the blackness\n ahead. Quite suddenly the corridor took a sharp bend, and the\n Altairian stopped, producing a huge key ring from some obscure\n fold of his hairy hide. \"I still don't see any reason for\n all the fuss,\" he grumbled in a wounded tone. \"We've treated\n him like a brother.\"\n\n\n One of the huge steel doors clicked open. Meyerhoff peered\n into the blackness, catching a vaguely human outline against\n the back wall. \"Harry?\" he called sharply.", "\"Oh, yes. Didn't I tell you? Conspiring to undermine the\n authority of the Terran Trading Commission. Serious charge,\n you know. Yes, I think we'll take a nice long vacation together,\n straight back to Terra. And there I think you'll face a jury\n trial.\"\n\n\n Zeckler spluttered. \"There's no evidence—you've got nothing\n on me! What kind of a frame are you trying to pull?\"", "Zeckler's grin broadened, and he leaned back luxuriously.\n \"Ah, well. After all, the Trading Alliance was\nyour\noutlook,\n wasn't it? What a pity!\" He clucked his tongue sadly. \"Me,\n I've got a fortune in credits sitting back at the consulate waiting\n for me—enough to keep me on silk for quite a while, I\n might say. I think I'll just take a nice, long vacation.\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff turned to him, and a twinkle of malignant glee\n appeared in his eyes. \"Yes, I think you will. I'm quite sure of\n it, in fact. Won't cost you a cent, either.\"\n\n\n \"Eh?\"", "There was a startled gasp from within, and a skinny, gnarled\n little man suddenly appeared in the guard's light, like a grotesque,\n twisted ghost out of the blackness. Wide blue eyes\n regarded Meyerhoff from beneath uneven black eyebrows, and\n then the little man's face broke into a crafty grin. \"Paul! So\n they sent\nyou\n! I knew I could count on it!\" He executed a\n deep, awkward bow, motioning Meyerhoff into the dark\n cubicle. \"Not much to offer you,\" he said slyly, \"but it's the\n best I can do under the circumstances.\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff scowled, and turned abruptly to the guard. \"We'll\n have some privacy now, if you please. Interplanetary ruling.\n And leave us the light.\"", "Zeckler shrugged again. \"The simplest, tiredest, moldiest\n old racket that ever made a quick nickel. Remember the old\n Terran gag about the Brooklyn Bridge? The same thing. Only\n these critters didn't want bridges. They wanted land—this\n gooey, slimy swamp they call 'farm land.' So I gave them\n what they wanted. I just sold them some land.\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff nodded fiercely. \"You sure did. A hundred square\n kilos at a swipe. Only you sold the same hundred square kilos\n to a dozen different natives.\" Suddenly he threw back his hands\n and roared. \"Of all the things you\nshouldn't\nhave done—\"\n\n\n \"But what's a chunk of land?\"", "\"A little fine of one Terran neck.\" Meyerhoff grinned nastily.\n \"You've committed the most heinous crime these creatures can\n imagine, and they're going to get you for it if it's the last thing\n they do. I'm afraid, my friend, that your con-man days are\n over.\"\n\n\n Zeckler fished in the other man's pocket, extracted a cigarette,\n and lighted it with trembling fingers. \"It's bad, then,\"\n he said finally.\n\n\n \"It's bad, all right.\"\n\n\n Some shadow of the sly, elfin grin crept over the little con-man's\n face. \"Well, at any rate, I'm glad they sent you over,\"\n he said weakly. \"Nothing like a good lawyer to handle a trial.\"", "Letter\n\n of\n\n the\n\n Law\nby Alan E. Nourse\nThe\n place was dark and damp, and smelled like moldy leaves.\n Meyerhoff followed the huge, bear-like Altairian guard\n down the slippery flagstones of the corridor, sniffing the\n dead, musty air with distaste. He drew his carefully tailored\n Terran-styled jacket closer about his shoulders, shivering as his\n eyes avoided the black, yawning cell-holes they were passing.\n His foot slipped on the slimy flags from time to time, and\n finally he paused to wipe the caked mud from his trouser leg.\n \"How much farther is it?\" he shouted angrily." ], [ "\"No.\" Meyerhoff's hands twitched nervously. \"Not yet, Your\n Honor. Later, Your Honor. The trial comes\nfirst\n.\"\n\n\n The judge looked as if his candy had been stolen. \"But you\nsaid\nI should call for the verdict.\"\n\n\n \"Later. You have to have the trial before you can have the\n verdict.\"\n\n\n The Altairian shrugged indifferently. \"Now—later—\" he\n muttered.\n\n\n \"Have the prosecutor call his first witness,\" said Meyerhoff.\n\n\n Zeckler leaned over, his face ashen. \"These charges,\" he\n whispered. \"They're insane!\"\n\n\n \"Of course they are,\" Meyerhoff whispered back.\n\n\n \"But what am I going to—\"\n\n\n \"Sit tight. Let\nthem\nset things up.\"", "\"We are reading the case of the people of Altair I,\" the\n judge's voice roared out, \"against one Harry Zeckler—\" he\n paused for a long, impressive moment—\"Terran.\" The courtroom\n immediately burst into an angry growl, until the judge\n pounded the bench five or six times more. \"This—creature—is\n hereby accused of the following crimes,\" the judge bellowed.\n \"Conspiracy to overthrow the government of Altair I. Brutal\n murder of seventeen law-abiding citizens of the village of\n Karzan at the third hour before dawn in the second period\n after his arrival. Desecration of the Temple of our beloved\n Goddess Zermat, Queen of the Harvest. Conspiracy with the", "In the back of the room a door burst open with a bang.\n Loud, harsh voices were heard as half a dozen of the huge\n Altairians attempted to push through the door at once. Zeckler\n clamped on the headset to his translator unit, and watched the\n hubbub in the anteroom with growing alarm. Finally the question\n of precedent seemed to be settled, and a group of the\n Altairians filed in, in order of stature, stalking across the room\n in flowing black robes, pug-nosed faces glowering with self-importance.\n They descended upon the jury box, grunting and\n scrapping with each other for the first-row seats, and the judge\n took his place with obvious satisfaction behind the heavy\n wooden bench. Finally, the prosecuting attorney appeared,\n flanked by two clerks, who took their places beside him. The\n prosecutor eyed Zeckler with cold malevolence, then turned\n and delivered a sly wink at the judge.", "Zeckler was visibly shaken. \"Look,\" he said weakly, \"so I\n wasn't so smart. What am I going to do? I mean, are you\n going to sit quietly by and let them butcher me? How could\n I defend myself in a legal setup like\nthis\n?\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff smiled coolly. \"You're going to get your sly little\n con-man brain to working, I think,\" he said softly. \"By Interplanetary\n Rules, they have to give you a trial in Terran legal\n form—judge, jury, court procedure, all that folderol. They\n think it's a big joke—after all, what could a judicial oath mean\n to them?—but they agreed. Only thing is, they're going to\n hang you, if they die trying. So you'd better get those stunted\n little wits of yours clicking—and if you try to implicate\nme\n,\n even a little bit, I'll be out of there so fast you won't know\n what happened.\"", "Meyerhoff shrugged. \"As we understand legal systems, I\n suppose they don't have one. They have only the haziest idea\n what truth represents, and they've shrugged off the idea as\n impossible and useless.\" He chuckled maliciously. \"So you\n went out and found a chunk of ground in the uplands, and\n sold it to a dozen separate, self-centered, half-starved natives!\n Encroachment on private property is legal grounds for murder\n on this planet, and twelve of them descended on the same\n chunk of land at the same time, all armed with title-deeds.\"\n Meyerhoff sighed. \"You've got twelve mad Altairians in your\n hair. You've got a mad planet in your hair. And in the meantime,\n Terra's most valuable uranium source in five centuries\n is threatening to cut off supply unless they see your blood\n splattered liberally all the way from here to the equator.\"", "The witness settled back into the chair, fixing one eye on\n Zeckler's face, another on the prosecutor, and closing the third\n as if in meditation. \"I think it happened on the fourth night\n of the seventh crossing of Altair II (may the Goddess cast\n a drought upon it)—or was it the seventh night of the fourth\n crossing?—\" he grinned apologetically at the judge—\"when I\n was making my way back through town toward my blessed\n land-plot, minding my own business, Your Honor, after weeks\n of bargaining for the crop I was harvesting. Suddenly from the\n shadow of the building, this creature—\" he waved a paw at\n Zeckler—\"stopped me in my tracks with a vicious cry. He had\n a weapon I'd never seen before, and before I could find my\n voice he forced me back against the wall. I could see by the\n cruel glint in his eyes that there was no warmth, no sympathy\n in his heart, that I was—\"", "Somebody in the middle of the court burst out laughing.\n One by one the natives nudged one another, and booed, and\n guffawed, until the rising tide of racket drowned out Zeckler's\n words. \"The defendant is obviously lying,\" roared the prosecutor\n over the pandemonium. \"Any fool knows that the Goddess\n can't be bribed. How could she be a Goddess if she could?\"\n\n\n Zeckler grew paler. \"But—perhaps they were very clever—\"\n\n\n \"And how could they flatter her, when she knows, beyond\n doubt, that she is the most exquisitely radiant creature in all\n the Universe? And\nyou\ndare to insult her, drag her name in\n the dirt.\"\n\n\n The hisses grew louder, more belligerent. Cries of \"Butcher\n him!\" and \"Scald his bowels!\" rose from the courtroom. The\n judge banged for silence, his eyes angry.", "Meyerhoff grinned unpleasantly. \"I mean precisely that.\n You've committed a crime here—a major crime. The Altairians\n are sore about it. And the Terran Consulate isn't willing\n to sell all the trading possibilities here down the river just to\n get you out of a mess. You're going to stand trial—and these\n natives are out to get you. Personally, I think they're\ngoing\nto get you.\"\n\n\n Zeckler stood up shakily. \"You can't believe anything the\n natives say,\" he said uneasily. \"They're pathological liars.\n Why, you should see what they tried to sell\nme\n! You've never\n seen such a pack of liars as these critters.\" He glanced up at\n Meyerhoff. \"They'll probably drop a little fine on me and let\n me go.\"", "One of the jurymen let out a little squeak, and fainted dead\n away. It took, all in all, about ten seconds for the statement\n to soak in.\n\n\n And then pandemonium broke loose in the courtroom.\n\"Really,\" said Harry Zeckler loftily, \"it was so obvious I'm\n amazed that it didn't occur to me first thing.\" He settled himself\n down comfortably in the control cabin of the Interplanetary\n Rocket and grinned at the outline of Altair IV looming larger\n in the view screen.\n\n\n Paul Meyerhoff stared stonily at the controls, his lips compressed\n angrily. \"You might at least have told me what you\n were planning.\"", "There was a loud hiss from the back of the court. Zeckler\n frowned and rubbed his hands together. \"It was my misfortune,\"\n he said, \"to go to the wrong planet when I first came to\n Altair from my homeland on Terra. I—I landed on Altair II,\n a grave mistake, but as it turned out, a very fortunate error.\n Because in attempting to arrange trading in that frightful place,\n I made certain contacts.\" His voice trembled, and sank lower.\n \"I learned the horrible thing which is about to happen to this\n planet, at the hands of those barbarians. The conspiracy is\n theirs, not mine. They have bribed your Goddess, flattered her\n and lied to her, coerced her all-powerful goodness to their own\n evil interests, preparing for the day when they could persuade\n her to cast your land into the fiery furnace of a ten-year-drought—\"", "The prosecutor nodded, and four natives moved forward,\n carrying huge inscribed marble slabs to the front of the court.\n One by one the chunks were reverently piled in a heap at the\n witness's feet. The witness placed a huge, hairy paw on the\n cairn, and the prosecutor said, \"Do you swear to tell the truth,\n the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you—\" he\n paused to squint at the paper in his hand, and finished on a\n puzzled note, \"—Goddess?\"\n\n\n The witness removed the paw from the rock pile long enough\n to scratch his ear. Then he replaced it, and replied, \"Of course,\"\n in an injured tone.\n\n\n \"Then tell this court what you have seen of the activities of\n this abominable wretch.\"", "lesser gods to cause the unprecedented drought in the Dermatti\n section of our fair globe. Obscene exposure of his pouch-marks\n in a public square. Four separate and distinct charges of jail-break\n and bribery—\" The judge pounded the bench for order—\"Espionage\n with the accursed scum of Altair II in preparation\n for interplanetary invasion.\"", "\"But they can't prove a word of it—\" He looked at the jury,\n who were listening enraptured to the second witness on the\n stand. This one was testifying regarding the butcherous slaughter\n of eighteen (or was it twenty-three? Oh, yes, twenty-three)\n women and children in the suburban village of Karzan. The\n pogrom, it seemed, had been accomplished by an energy\n weapon which ate great, gaping holes in the sides of buildings.\n A third witness took the stand, continuing the drone as the\n room grew hotter and muggier. Zeckler grew paler and paler,\n his eyes turning glassy as the testimony piled up. \"But it's not\ntrue\n,\" he whispered to Meyerhoff.\n\n\n \"Of course it isn't! Can't you understand?\nThese people\n have no regard for truth.\nIt's stupid, to them, silly, a mark of\n low intelligence. The only thing in the world they have any\n respect for is a liar bigger and more skillful than they are.\"", "\"I've got just one statement to make. Short and sweet. But\n you'd better listen to it, and think it out carefully before you\n decide that you really want to convict me.\" He paused, and\n glanced slyly at the judge. \"You don't think much of those\n who tell the truth, it seems. Well, put\nthis\nstatement in your\n record, then.\" His voice was loud and clear in the still room.\n \"\nAll Earthmen are absolutely incapable of telling the truth.\n\"\n\n\n Puzzled frowns appeared on the jury's faces. One or two\n exchanged startled glances, and the room was still as death.\n The judge stared at him, and then at Meyerhoff, then back.\n \"But you\"—he stammered. \"You're\"—He stopped in mid-sentence,\n his jaw sagging.", "Meyerhoff grinned at the little man's horrified face. \"Never\n heard of that, had you? And you've never heard of other things,\n too. You've probably never heard that there are just too many\n Altairians here for the food their planet can supply, and their\n diet is so finicky that they just can't live on anything that\n doesn't grow here. And consequently, land is the key factor\n in their economy, not money; nothing but land. To get land,\n it's every man for himself, and the loser starves, and their\n entire legal and monetary system revolves on that principle.\n They've built up the most confusing and impossible system of\n barter and trade imaginable, aimed at individual survival, with", "\"But those\nlies\n. They're liars, the whole pack of them—\" He\n broke off as the prosecutor roared a name.\n\n\n The shaggy brute who took the stand was wearing a bright\n purple hat which sat rakishly over one ear. He grinned the\n Altairian equivalent of a hungry grin at the prosecutor. Then\n he cleared his throat and started. \"This Terran riffraff—\"\n\n\n \"The oath,\" muttered the judge. \"We've got to have the\n oath.\"", "Letter\n\n of\n\n the\n\n Law\nby Alan E. Nourse\nThe\n place was dark and damp, and smelled like moldy leaves.\n Meyerhoff followed the huge, bear-like Altairian guard\n down the slippery flagstones of the corridor, sniffing the\n dead, musty air with distaste. He drew his carefully tailored\n Terran-styled jacket closer about his shoulders, shivering as his\n eyes avoided the black, yawning cell-holes they were passing.\n His foot slipped on the slimy flags from time to time, and\n finally he paused to wipe the caked mud from his trouser leg.\n \"How much farther is it?\" he shouted angrily.", "Zeckler looked sharply around the hushed room. \"You want\n to convict me,\" he said softly, \"in the worst sort of way. Isn't\n that right?\"\n\n\n Eyes swung toward him. The judge broke into an evil grin.\n \"That's right.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't really convict me until you've considered\n carefully any statement I make in my own defense. Isn't that\n right?\"\n\n\n The judge looked uncomfortable. \"If you've got something\n to say, go ahead and say it.\"", "\"Objection!\" Zeckler squealed plaintively, jumping to his\n feet. \"This witness can't even remember what night he's talking\n about!\"\n\n\n The judge looked startled. Then he pawed feverishly through\n his bundle of notes. \"Overruled,\" he said abruptly. \"Continue,\n please.\"\n\n\n The witness glowered at Zeckler. \"As I was saying before\n this loutish interruption,\" he muttered, \"I could see that I was\n face to face with the most desperate of criminal types, even\n for Terrans. Note the shape of his head, the flabbiness of his\n ears. I was petrified with fear. And then, helpless as I was, this\n two-legged abomination began to shower me with threats of\n evil to my blessed home, dark threats of poisoning my land\n unless I would tell him where he could find the resting place\n of our blessed Goddess—\"", "With that Meyerhoff walked to the door. He jerked it inward\n sharply, and spilled two guards over on their faces.\n \"Privacy,\" he grunted, and started back up the slippery corridor.\nIt certainly\nlooked\nlike a courtroom, at any rate. In the front\n of the long, damp stone room was a bench, with a seat behind\n it, and a small straight chair to the right. To the left was a stand\n with twelve chairs—larger chairs, with a railing running along\n the front. The rest of the room was filled almost to the door\n with seats facing the bench. Zeckler followed the shaggy-haired\n guard into the room, nodding approvingly. \"Not such a bad\n arrangement,\" he said. \"They must have gotten the idea fast.\"" ], [ "Meyerhoff grinned at the little man's horrified face. \"Never\n heard of that, had you? And you've never heard of other things,\n too. You've probably never heard that there are just too many\n Altairians here for the food their planet can supply, and their\n diet is so finicky that they just can't live on anything that\n doesn't grow here. And consequently, land is the key factor\n in their economy, not money; nothing but land. To get land,\n it's every man for himself, and the loser starves, and their\n entire legal and monetary system revolves on that principle.\n They've built up the most confusing and impossible system of\n barter and trade imaginable, aimed at individual survival, with", "Meyerhoff shrugged. \"As we understand legal systems, I\n suppose they don't have one. They have only the haziest idea\n what truth represents, and they've shrugged off the idea as\n impossible and useless.\" He chuckled maliciously. \"So you\n went out and found a chunk of ground in the uplands, and\n sold it to a dozen separate, self-centered, half-starved natives!\n Encroachment on private property is legal grounds for murder\n on this planet, and twelve of them descended on the same\n chunk of land at the same time, all armed with title-deeds.\"\n Meyerhoff sighed. \"You've got twelve mad Altairians in your\n hair. You've got a mad planet in your hair. And in the meantime,\n Terra's most valuable uranium source in five centuries\n is threatening to cut off supply unless they see your blood\n splattered liberally all the way from here to the equator.\"", "\"We are reading the case of the people of Altair I,\" the\n judge's voice roared out, \"against one Harry Zeckler—\" he\n paused for a long, impressive moment—\"Terran.\" The courtroom\n immediately burst into an angry growl, until the judge\n pounded the bench five or six times more. \"This—creature—is\n hereby accused of the following crimes,\" the judge bellowed.\n \"Conspiracy to overthrow the government of Altair I. Brutal\n murder of seventeen law-abiding citizens of the village of\n Karzan at the third hour before dawn in the second period\n after his arrival. Desecration of the Temple of our beloved\n Goddess Zermat, Queen of the Harvest. Conspiracy with the", "But occasionally a situation arose where the civilization and\n social practices of the alien victims made it unwise to tamper\n with them. Altair I had been recognized at once by the Trading\n Commission as a commercial prize of tremendous value, but\n early reports had warned of the danger of wildcat trading on\n the little, musty, jungle-like planet with its shaggy, three-eyed\n inhabitants—warned specifically against the confidence tactics\n so frequently used—but there was always somebody, Meyerhoff\n reflected sourly, who just didn't get the word.", "There was a loud hiss from the back of the court. Zeckler\n frowned and rubbed his hands together. \"It was my misfortune,\"\n he said, \"to go to the wrong planet when I first came to\n Altair from my homeland on Terra. I—I landed on Altair II,\n a grave mistake, but as it turned out, a very fortunate error.\n Because in attempting to arrange trading in that frightful place,\n I made certain contacts.\" His voice trembled, and sank lower.\n \"I learned the horrible thing which is about to happen to this\n planet, at the hands of those barbarians. The conspiracy is\n theirs, not mine. They have bribed your Goddess, flattered her\n and lied to her, coerced her all-powerful goodness to their own\n evil interests, preparing for the day when they could persuade\n her to cast your land into the fiery furnace of a ten-year-drought—\"", "Meyerhoff's face was purple with anger. \"Oh, indeed it did!\n And it put\nall\nEarthmen in exactly the same class, too.\"\n\n\n \"So what's honor among thieves? I got off, didn't I?\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff turned on him fiercely. \"Oh, you got off just fine.\n You scared the living daylights out of them. And in an eon of\n lying they never have run up against a short-circuit like that.\n You've also completely botched any hope of ever setting up\n a trading alliance with Altair I, and that includes uranium, too.\n Smart people don't gamble with loaded dice. You scared them\n so badly they don't want anything to do with us.\"", "Meyerhoff grinned unpleasantly. \"I mean precisely that.\n You've committed a crime here—a major crime. The Altairians\n are sore about it. And the Terran Consulate isn't willing\n to sell all the trading possibilities here down the river just to\n get you out of a mess. You're going to stand trial—and these\n natives are out to get you. Personally, I think they're\ngoing\nto get you.\"\n\n\n Zeckler stood up shakily. \"You can't believe anything the\n natives say,\" he said uneasily. \"They're pathological liars.\n Why, you should see what they tried to sell\nme\n! You've never\n seen such a pack of liars as these critters.\" He glanced up at\n Meyerhoff. \"They'll probably drop a little fine on me and let\n me go.\"", "Zeckler's eyes widened. \"What do you mean, fool? So I\n spend a couple of weeks in this pneumonia trap. The deal was\n worth it! I've got three million credits sitting in the Terran\n Consulate on Altair V, just waiting for me to walk in and pick\n them up. Three million credits—do you hear? That's enough\n to set me up for life!\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff nodded grimly. \"\nIf\nyou live long enough to walk\n in and pick them up, that is.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, if?\"", "Meyerhoff grinned unpleasantly. He brushed an imaginary\n lint fleck from his lapel, and looked up at Zeckler slyly. \"That—uh—jury\n trial. The Altairians weren't any too happy to\n oblige. They wanted to execute you outright. Thought a trial\n was awfully silly—until they got their money back, of course.\n Not too much—just three million credits.\"\n\n\n Zeckler went white. \"But that money was in banking custody!\"\n\n\n \"Is that right? My goodness. You don't suppose they could\n have lost those papers, do you?\" Meyerhoff grinned at the\n little con-man. \"And incidentally, you're under arrest, you\n know.\"\n\n\n A choking sound came from Zeckler's throat. \"\nArrest!\n\"", "One of the jurymen let out a little squeak, and fainted dead\n away. It took, all in all, about ten seconds for the statement\n to soak in.\n\n\n And then pandemonium broke loose in the courtroom.\n\"Really,\" said Harry Zeckler loftily, \"it was so obvious I'm\n amazed that it didn't occur to me first thing.\" He settled himself\n down comfortably in the control cabin of the Interplanetary\n Rocket and grinned at the outline of Altair IV looming larger\n in the view screen.\n\n\n Paul Meyerhoff stared stonily at the controls, his lips compressed\n angrily. \"You might at least have told me what you\n were planning.\"", "In a way, he thought, it was a pity to see such a change in the\n rosy-cheeked, dapper, cocksure little man who had talked his\n way glibly in and out of more jams than Meyerhoff could\n count. Trading brought scalpers; it was almost inevitable that\n where rich and unexploited trading ground was uncovered, it\n would first fall prey to the fast-trading boys. They spread out\n from Terra with the first wave of exploration—the slick, fast-talking\n con-men who could work new territories unfettered by\n the legal restrictions that soon closed down the more established\n planets. The first men in were the richest out, and\n through some curious quirk of the Terrestrial mind, they knew\n they could count on Terran protection, however crooked and", "lesser gods to cause the unprecedented drought in the Dermatti\n section of our fair globe. Obscene exposure of his pouch-marks\n in a public square. Four separate and distinct charges of jail-break\n and bribery—\" The judge pounded the bench for order—\"Espionage\n with the accursed scum of Altair II in preparation\n for interplanetary invasion.\"", "In the back of the room a door burst open with a bang.\n Loud, harsh voices were heard as half a dozen of the huge\n Altairians attempted to push through the door at once. Zeckler\n clamped on the headset to his translator unit, and watched the\n hubbub in the anteroom with growing alarm. Finally the question\n of precedent seemed to be settled, and a group of the\n Altairians filed in, in order of stature, stalking across the room\n in flowing black robes, pug-nosed faces glowering with self-importance.\n They descended upon the jury box, grunting and\n scrapping with each other for the first-row seats, and the judge\n took his place with obvious satisfaction behind the heavy\n wooden bench. Finally, the prosecuting attorney appeared,\n flanked by two clerks, who took their places beside him. The\n prosecutor eyed Zeckler with cold malevolence, then turned\n and delivered a sly wink at the judge.", "\"No.\" Meyerhoff's hands twitched nervously. \"Not yet, Your\n Honor. Later, Your Honor. The trial comes\nfirst\n.\"\n\n\n The judge looked as if his candy had been stolen. \"But you\nsaid\nI should call for the verdict.\"\n\n\n \"Later. You have to have the trial before you can have the\n verdict.\"\n\n\n The Altairian shrugged indifferently. \"Now—later—\" he\n muttered.\n\n\n \"Have the prosecutor call his first witness,\" said Meyerhoff.\n\n\n Zeckler leaned over, his face ashen. \"These charges,\" he\n whispered. \"They're insane!\"\n\n\n \"Of course they are,\" Meyerhoff whispered back.\n\n\n \"But what am I going to—\"\n\n\n \"Sit tight. Let\nthem\nset things up.\"", "\"But those\nlies\n. They're liars, the whole pack of them—\" He\n broke off as the prosecutor roared a name.\n\n\n The shaggy brute who took the stand was wearing a bright\n purple hat which sat rakishly over one ear. He grinned the\n Altairian equivalent of a hungry grin at the prosecutor. Then\n he cleared his throat and started. \"This Terran riffraff—\"\n\n\n \"The oath,\" muttered the judge. \"We've got to have the\n oath.\"", "Letter\n\n of\n\n the\n\n Law\nby Alan E. Nourse\nThe\n place was dark and damp, and smelled like moldy leaves.\n Meyerhoff followed the huge, bear-like Altairian guard\n down the slippery flagstones of the corridor, sniffing the\n dead, musty air with distaste. He drew his carefully tailored\n Terran-styled jacket closer about his shoulders, shivering as his\n eyes avoided the black, yawning cell-holes they were passing.\n His foot slipped on the slimy flags from time to time, and\n finally he paused to wipe the caked mud from his trouser leg.\n \"How much farther is it?\" he shouted angrily.", "Zeckler shrugged again. \"The simplest, tiredest, moldiest\n old racket that ever made a quick nickel. Remember the old\n Terran gag about the Brooklyn Bridge? The same thing. Only\n these critters didn't want bridges. They wanted land—this\n gooey, slimy swamp they call 'farm land.' So I gave them\n what they wanted. I just sold them some land.\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff nodded fiercely. \"You sure did. A hundred square\n kilos at a swipe. Only you sold the same hundred square kilos\n to a dozen different natives.\" Suddenly he threw back his hands\n and roared. \"Of all the things you\nshouldn't\nhave done—\"\n\n\n \"But what's a chunk of land?\"", "The guard waved a heavy paw vaguely into the blackness\n ahead. Quite suddenly the corridor took a sharp bend, and the\n Altairian stopped, producing a huge key ring from some obscure\n fold of his hairy hide. \"I still don't see any reason for\n all the fuss,\" he grumbled in a wounded tone. \"We've treated\n him like a brother.\"\n\n\n One of the huge steel doors clicked open. Meyerhoff peered\n into the blackness, catching a vaguely human outline against\n the back wall. \"Harry?\" he called sharply.", "\"A little fine of one Terran neck.\" Meyerhoff grinned nastily.\n \"You've committed the most heinous crime these creatures can\n imagine, and they're going to get you for it if it's the last thing\n they do. I'm afraid, my friend, that your con-man days are\n over.\"\n\n\n Zeckler fished in the other man's pocket, extracted a cigarette,\n and lighted it with trembling fingers. \"It's bad, then,\"\n he said finally.\n\n\n \"It's bad, all right.\"\n\n\n Some shadow of the sly, elfin grin crept over the little con-man's\n face. \"Well, at any rate, I'm glad they sent you over,\"\n he said weakly. \"Nothing like a good lawyer to handle a trial.\"", "land as the value behind the credit. That explains the lying—of\n course they're liars, with an economy like that. They've\n completely missed the concept of truth. Pathological? You bet\n they're pathological! Only a fool would tell the truth when his\n life depended on his being a better liar than the next guy!\n Lying is the time-honored tradition, with their entire legal\n system built around it.\"" ], [ "Zeckler was visibly shaken. \"Look,\" he said weakly, \"so I\n wasn't so smart. What am I going to do? I mean, are you\n going to sit quietly by and let them butcher me? How could\n I defend myself in a legal setup like\nthis\n?\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff smiled coolly. \"You're going to get your sly little\n con-man brain to working, I think,\" he said softly. \"By Interplanetary\n Rules, they have to give you a trial in Terran legal\n form—judge, jury, court procedure, all that folderol. They\n think it's a big joke—after all, what could a judicial oath mean\n to them?—but they agreed. Only thing is, they're going to\n hang you, if they die trying. So you'd better get those stunted\n little wits of yours clicking—and if you try to implicate\nme\n,\n even a little bit, I'll be out of there so fast you won't know\n what happened.\"", "Zeckler jerked around abruptly as he heard his name bellowed\n out. \"Does the defendant have anything to say before\n the jury delivers the verdict?\"\n\n\n \"Do I have—\" Zeckler was across the room in a flash, his\n pale cheeks suddenly taking on a feverish glow. He sat down\n gingerly on the witness chair, facing the judge, his eyes bright\n with fear and excitement. \"Your—Your Honor, I—I have a\n statement to make which will have a most important bearing\n on this case. You must listen with the greatest care.\" He\n glanced quickly at Meyerhoff, and back to the judge. \"Your\n Honor,\" he said in a hushed voice. \"You are in gravest of\n danger. All of you. Your lives—your very land is at stake.\"\n\n\n The judge blinked, and shuffled through his notes hurriedly\n as a murmur arose in the court. \"Our land?\"", "Zeckler looked sharply around the hushed room. \"You want\n to convict me,\" he said softly, \"in the worst sort of way. Isn't\n that right?\"\n\n\n Eyes swung toward him. The judge broke into an evil grin.\n \"That's right.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't really convict me until you've considered\n carefully any statement I make in my own defense. Isn't that\n right?\"\n\n\n The judge looked uncomfortable. \"If you've got something\n to say, go ahead and say it.\"", "\"Unless the defendant wishes to take up more of our precious\n time with these ridiculous lies, the jury—\"\n\n\n \"Wait! Your Honor, I request a short recess before I present\n my final plea.\"\n\n\n \"Recess?\"\n\n\n \"A few moments to collect my thoughts, to arrange my\n case.\"\n\n\n The judge settled back with a disgusted snarl. \"Do I have\n to?\" he asked Meyerhoff.\n\n\n Meyerhoff nodded. The judge shrugged, pointing over his\n shoulder to the anteroom. \"You can go in there,\" he said.\n\n\n Somehow, Zeckler managed to stumble from the witness\n stand, amid riotous boos and hisses, and tottered into the anteroom.\nZeckler puffed hungrily on a cigarette, and looked up at\n Meyerhoff with haunted eyes. \"It—it doesn't look so good,\"\n he muttered.", "The little con-man's jaw sagged lower and lower, the color\n draining from his face. He turned, wide-eyed, to Meyerhoff,\n then back to the judge.\n\n\n \"The Chairman of the Jury,\" said the Judge succinctly, \"will\n read the verdict.\"\n\n\n The little native in the front of the jury-box popped up like\n a puppet on a string. \"Defendant found guilty on all counts,\"\n he said.\n\n\n \"Defendant is guilty! The court will pronounce sentence—\"\n\n\n \"\nNow wait a minute!\n\" Zeckler was on his feet, wild-eyed.\n \"What kind of railroad job—\"\n\n\n The judge blinked disappointedly at Paul Meyerhoff. \"Not\n yet?\" he asked, unhappily.", "\"It was a Greek, I think—\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff stared at him. \"Oh, come now. Have you gone\n off your rocker completely? You've got a problem on your\n hands, man.\"\n\n\n \"No, no, I've got a problem in the bag!\" Zeckler's cheeks\n flushed. \"Let's go back in there—I think I've got an answer!\"\n\n\n The courtroom quieted the moment they opened the door,\n and the judge banged the gavel for silence. As soon as Zeckler\n had taken his seat on the witness stand, the judge turned to\n the head juryman. \"Now, then,\" he said with happy finality.\n \"The jury—\"\n\n\n \"Hold on! Just one minute more.\"\n\n\n The judge stared down at Zeckler as if he were a bug on a\n rock. \"Oh, yes. You had something else to say. Well, go ahead\n and say it.\"", "\"No.\" Meyerhoff's hands twitched nervously. \"Not yet, Your\n Honor. Later, Your Honor. The trial comes\nfirst\n.\"\n\n\n The judge looked as if his candy had been stolen. \"But you\nsaid\nI should call for the verdict.\"\n\n\n \"Later. You have to have the trial before you can have the\n verdict.\"\n\n\n The Altairian shrugged indifferently. \"Now—later—\" he\n muttered.\n\n\n \"Have the prosecutor call his first witness,\" said Meyerhoff.\n\n\n Zeckler leaned over, his face ashen. \"These charges,\" he\n whispered. \"They're insane!\"\n\n\n \"Of course they are,\" Meyerhoff whispered back.\n\n\n \"But what am I going to—\"\n\n\n \"Sit tight. Let\nthem\nset things up.\"", "\"I never saw him before in my life,\" Zeckler moaned to\n Meyerhoff. \"Listen to him! Why should I care where their\n Goddess—\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff gave him a stony look. \"The Goddess runs things\n around here. She makes it rain. If it doesn't rain, somebody's\n insulted her. It's very simple.\"\n\n\n \"But how can I fight testimony like that?\"\n\n\n \"I doubt if you\ncan\nfight it.\"", "With that Meyerhoff walked to the door. He jerked it inward\n sharply, and spilled two guards over on their faces.\n \"Privacy,\" he grunted, and started back up the slippery corridor.\nIt certainly\nlooked\nlike a courtroom, at any rate. In the front\n of the long, damp stone room was a bench, with a seat behind\n it, and a small straight chair to the right. To the left was a stand\n with twelve chairs—larger chairs, with a railing running along\n the front. The rest of the room was filled almost to the door\n with seats facing the bench. Zeckler followed the shaggy-haired\n guard into the room, nodding approvingly. \"Not such a bad\n arrangement,\" he said. \"They must have gotten the idea fast.\"", "Zeckler snorted. \"But how could they\npossibly\nhave a legal\n system? I mean, if they don't recognize the truth when it slaps\n them in the face?\"", "\"But they can't prove a word of it—\" He looked at the jury,\n who were listening enraptured to the second witness on the\n stand. This one was testifying regarding the butcherous slaughter\n of eighteen (or was it twenty-three? Oh, yes, twenty-three)\n women and children in the suburban village of Karzan. The\n pogrom, it seemed, had been accomplished by an energy\n weapon which ate great, gaping holes in the sides of buildings.\n A third witness took the stand, continuing the drone as the\n room grew hotter and muggier. Zeckler grew paler and paler,\n his eyes turning glassy as the testimony piled up. \"But it's not\ntrue\n,\" he whispered to Meyerhoff.\n\n\n \"Of course it isn't! Can't you understand?\nThese people\n have no regard for truth.\nIt's stupid, to them, silly, a mark of\n low intelligence. The only thing in the world they have any\n respect for is a liar bigger and more skillful than they are.\"", "Zeckler was on his feet, his eyes suddenly bright with excitement.\n \"Wait a minute,\" he said tensely. \"To tell them a lie\n that they'd have to believe—a lie they simply couldn't\nhelp\nbut believe—\" He turned on Meyerhoff, his hands trembling.\n \"Do they\nthink\nthe way we do? I mean, with logic, cause and\n effect, examining evidence and drawing conclusions? Given\n certain evidence, would they have to draw the same conclusions\n that we have to draw?\"\n\n\n Meyerhoff blinked. \"Well—yes. Oh, yes, they're perfectly\n logical.\"\n\n\n Zeckler's eyes flashed, and a huge grin broke out on his\n sallow face. His thin body fairly shook. He started hopping\n up and down on one foot, staring idiotically into space. \"If I\n could only think—\" he muttered. \"Somebody—somewhere—something\n I read.\"\n\n\n \"Whatever are you talking about?\"", "\"Look, Zeckler, the name is Meyerhoff, and I'm not your\n pal,\" Meyerhoff snapped. \"And you've been here for two\n weeks, three days, and approximately four hours. You're getting\n as bad as your gentle guards when it comes to bandying\n the truth around.\" He peered through the dim light at the\n gaunt face of the prisoner. Zeckler's face was dark with a\n week's beard, and his bloodshot eyes belied the cocky grin\n on his lips. His clothes were smeared and sodden, streaked\n with great splotches of mud and moss. Meyerhoff's face softened\n a little. \"So Harry Zeckler's in a jam again,\" he said.\n \"You\nlook\nas if they'd treated you like a brother.\"", "\"Your lives, your land, everything you hold dear,\" Zeckler\n said quickly, licking his lips nervously. \"You must try to\n understand me—\" he glanced apprehensively over his shoulder\n \"now, because I may not live long enough to repeat what\n I am about to tell you—\"\n\n\n The murmur quieted down, all ears straining in their headsets\n to hear his words. \"These charges,\" he continued, \"all of\n them—they're perfectly true. At least, they\nseem\nto be perfectly\n true. But in every instance, I was working with heart and\n soul, risking my life, for the welfare of your beautiful planet.\"", "Meyerhoff grinned unpleasantly. \"I mean precisely that.\n You've committed a crime here—a major crime. The Altairians\n are sore about it. And the Terran Consulate isn't willing\n to sell all the trading possibilities here down the river just to\n get you out of a mess. You're going to stand trial—and these\n natives are out to get you. Personally, I think they're\ngoing\nto get you.\"\n\n\n Zeckler stood up shakily. \"You can't believe anything the\n natives say,\" he said uneasily. \"They're pathological liars.\n Why, you should see what they tried to sell\nme\n! You've never\n seen such a pack of liars as these critters.\" He glanced up at\n Meyerhoff. \"They'll probably drop a little fine on me and let\n me go.\"", "\"We are reading the case of the people of Altair I,\" the\n judge's voice roared out, \"against one Harry Zeckler—\" he\n paused for a long, impressive moment—\"Terran.\" The courtroom\n immediately burst into an angry growl, until the judge\n pounded the bench five or six times more. \"This—creature—is\n hereby accused of the following crimes,\" the judge bellowed.\n \"Conspiracy to overthrow the government of Altair I. Brutal\n murder of seventeen law-abiding citizens of the village of\n Karzan at the third hour before dawn in the second period\n after his arrival. Desecration of the Temple of our beloved\n Goddess Zermat, Queen of the Harvest. Conspiracy with the", "Somebody in the middle of the court burst out laughing.\n One by one the natives nudged one another, and booed, and\n guffawed, until the rising tide of racket drowned out Zeckler's\n words. \"The defendant is obviously lying,\" roared the prosecutor\n over the pandemonium. \"Any fool knows that the Goddess\n can't be bribed. How could she be a Goddess if she could?\"\n\n\n Zeckler grew paler. \"But—perhaps they were very clever—\"\n\n\n \"And how could they flatter her, when she knows, beyond\n doubt, that she is the most exquisitely radiant creature in all\n the Universe? And\nyou\ndare to insult her, drag her name in\n the dirt.\"\n\n\n The hisses grew louder, more belligerent. Cries of \"Butcher\n him!\" and \"Scald his bowels!\" rose from the courtroom. The\n judge banged for silence, his eyes angry.", "\"A little fine of one Terran neck.\" Meyerhoff grinned nastily.\n \"You've committed the most heinous crime these creatures can\n imagine, and they're going to get you for it if it's the last thing\n they do. I'm afraid, my friend, that your con-man days are\n over.\"\n\n\n Zeckler fished in the other man's pocket, extracted a cigarette,\n and lighted it with trembling fingers. \"It's bad, then,\"\n he said finally.\n\n\n \"It's bad, all right.\"\n\n\n Some shadow of the sly, elfin grin crept over the little con-man's\n face. \"Well, at any rate, I'm glad they sent you over,\"\n he said weakly. \"Nothing like a good lawyer to handle a trial.\"", "The witness settled back into the chair, fixing one eye on\n Zeckler's face, another on the prosecutor, and closing the third\n as if in meditation. \"I think it happened on the fourth night\n of the seventh crossing of Altair II (may the Goddess cast\n a drought upon it)—or was it the seventh night of the fourth\n crossing?—\" he grinned apologetically at the judge—\"when I\n was making my way back through town toward my blessed\n land-plot, minding my own business, Your Honor, after weeks\n of bargaining for the crop I was harvesting. Suddenly from the\n shadow of the building, this creature—\" he waved a paw at\n Zeckler—\"stopped me in my tracks with a vicious cry. He had\n a weapon I'd never seen before, and before I could find my\n voice he forced me back against the wall. I could see by the\n cruel glint in his eyes that there was no warmth, no sympathy\n in his heart, that I was—\"", "\"Objection!\" Zeckler squealed plaintively, jumping to his\n feet. \"This witness can't even remember what night he's talking\n about!\"\n\n\n The judge looked startled. Then he pawed feverishly through\n his bundle of notes. \"Overruled,\" he said abruptly. \"Continue,\n please.\"\n\n\n The witness glowered at Zeckler. \"As I was saying before\n this loutish interruption,\" he muttered, \"I could see that I was\n face to face with the most desperate of criminal types, even\n for Terrans. Note the shape of his head, the flabbiness of his\n ears. I was petrified with fear. And then, helpless as I was, this\n two-legged abomination began to shower me with threats of\n evil to my blessed home, dark threats of poisoning my land\n unless I would tell him where he could find the resting place\n of our blessed Goddess—\"" ] ]
valid	62261	[ "What was the overall relationship like between Splinter and Kerry?\n", "Which of the characters receives the most medical intervention during the course of the story?", "What can be inferred about the size of the ship the characters travelled in?", "How did the author illustrate the planet of Venus upon their arrival?", "What are the islands of Venus?", "How do the space travellers navigate around the planet of Venus?", "How did Splinter feel about being with Kerry on the turtle-shaped island?", "Why did Kerry come out of retirement for the mission?" ]	[ [ "Splinter is a new space cadet with a chip on his shoulder, and Kerry can’t stand to be with him", "Kerry is an elder family member to Splinter", "Splinter despises being assigned an old space companion like Kerry so he picks fights with him", "Kerry is a veteran space traveller who took Splinter under his wing" ], [ "The unnamed space warriors", "Kerry and Splinter receive about equal medical intervention", "Splinter", "Kerry" ], [ "It was very small, only a single person cruiser", "It was relatively small, only large enough for two people", "It was large enough to have held a crew of a dozen", "It was a ship capable of bringing smaller cruisers inside of the cargo bay" ], [ "Covered almost entirely in multi-colored water", "Covered in clouds, with an amount of land similar to Earth", "Covered almost entirely in a pitch black ocean", "Barren, empty seabed" ], [ "Floating pads covered in jungle", "Exposed continental plates risen to the surface from tectonics", "Volcanic mountains poking out of the sea", "Moons" ], [ "Only by sight", "Radar", "Using a search and rescue flight pattern", "Using magnetic poles" ], [ "Angry with him that they had crashed", "Terrified to be alone with him", "Pitiful that he had broken his arm", "Relieved to have his experience at hand" ], [ "He wanted to feel like his old self again", "He was strictly following orders ", "He didn’t care whether he lived or died", "He thought that Splinter would screw it up alone" ] ]	[ 4, 4, 2, 1, 1, 1, 4, 1 ]	[ 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "\"Splinter\" Wood grinned.\n\n\n \"Seems to me, Kerry,\" he remarked humorously, \"that you don't like much\n of anything!\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane growled unintelligibly, batted the injector lever with a\n calloused hand. His grizzled hair was a stiff wiry mop on his small\n head, and his oversize jaw was thrust belligerently forward. But deep\n within his eyes, where he hoped it was hidden, was a friendly twinkle\n that gave the lie to his speech.\n\n\n \"You're a squirt!\" he snapped disagreeably. \"You're not dry behind\n the ears, yet. You're like the rest of these kids who call themselves\n pilots—only more so! And why the hell the chief had to sic you on me,\n on an exploration trip this important—well, I'll never understand.\"", "\"\nMe!\nYou've got orders to take care of\nme\n?\" Kerry Blane choked\n incoherently for a moment, red tiding cholerically upward from his\n loosened collar.\n\n\n \"Of course!\" Splinter grinned.\n\n\n Kerry Blane exploded, words spewing volcanically forth. Splinter\n relaxed, his booted foot beating out a dull rhythm to the colorful\n language learned through almost fifty years of spacing. And at last,\n when Kerry Blane had quieted until he but smoldered, he leaned over and\n touched the old spacer on the sleeve.\n\n\n \"Seventy-eight!\" he remarked pleasantly.\n\n\n \"Seventy-eight what?\" Kerry Blane asked sullenly, the old twinkle\n beginning to light again deep in his eyes.", "And then the scaly monster flashed in a half-turn, drove forward with\n jaws agape, wrenched and ripped at the smooth black throat of the other\n creature. The second creature rippled and undulated in agony, whipping\n the ocean to foam, then went limp. The victorious monster circled the\n body of its dead foe, then, majestically, plunged from sight into the\n ocean's depths. An instant later, the water frothed, as hundreds of\n lesser marine monsters attacked and fed on the floating corpse.\n\n\n \"Brrrr!\" Splinter shivered in sudden horror.\n\n\n Kerry Blane chuckled dryly. \"Feel like going for a swim?\" he asked\n conversationally.\n\n\n Splinter shook his head, watched the scene disappear from view to the\n rear of the line of flight, then sank back onto his bunk.\n\n\n \"Not me!\" he said deprecatingly.", "Splinter buckled on his dis-gun, excitement flaring in his eyes.\n\n\n \"Let's do a little exploring?\" he said eagerly.\n\n\n Kerry Blane shook his head, swung the cruiser north again.\n\n\n \"Plenty of time for that later,\" he said mildly. \"We'll find this\n turtle-island, make a landing, and take a look around. Later, if we're\n lucky enough to blow our objective to Kingdom Come, we'll do a little\n exploring of the other islands.\"\n\n\n \"Hell!\" Splinter scowled in mock disgust. \"An old woman like you should\n be taking in knitting for a living!\"", "\"Orders are orders!\" Kerry Blane shrugged.\nHe swung the cruiser in a wide arc to the north, trebling the flying\n speed within minutes, handling the controls with a familiar dexterity.\n He said nothing, searched the gleaming ocean for the smudge of\n blackness that would denote another island. His gaze flicked amusedly,\n now and then, to the lanky Splinter who scowled moodily and toyed with\n the dis-gun in his long hands.\n\n\n \"Cheer up, lad,\" Kerry Blane said finally. \"I think you'll find plenty\n to occupy your time shortly.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe?\" Splinter said gloomily.\n\n\n He idly swallowed another vitamin capsule, grinned, when he saw Kerry\n Blane's automatic grimace of distaste. Then he yawned hugely, twisted\n into a comfortable position, dozed sleepily.", "Finally, as a last resort so that he would not be thrown entirely\n aside, he had taken a desk job in the squadron offices. For six years\n he had dry-rotted there, waiting hopefully for the moment when his\n active services would be needed again.\n\n\n It was there that he had met and liked the ungainly Splinter Wood.\n There was something in the boy that had found a kindred spirit in Kerry\n Blane's heart, and he had taken the youngster in hand to give him the\n benefits of experience that had become legendary.\n\n\n Splinter Wood was a probationary pilot, had been admitted to the\n Interplanetary Squadron because of his inherent skill, even though his\n formal education had been fairly well neglected.\nNow, the two of them rode the pounding jets of a DX cruiser, bound\n for Venus to make a personal survey of its floating islands for the\n Interplanetary Squadron's Medical Division.", "\"All right, all right!\" Splinter tucked the capsule box back into his\n pocket, grinned mockingly. \"But don't say I didn't warn you. With this\n shielded ship, and with no sunlight reaching Venus' surface, you're\n gonna be begging for some of my vitamin, super-concentrated pills\n before we get back to Earth.\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane made a rich, ripe noise with his mouth.\n\n\n \"Pfuii!\" he said very distinctly.\n\n\n \"Gracious!\" Splinter said in mock horror.\nThey made a strange contrast as they lay in their air bunks. Splinter\n was fully a head taller than the dour Irishman, and his lanky build\n gave a false impression of awkwardness. While the vitriolic Kerry Blane\n was short and compact, strength and quickness evident in every movement.", "\"I've had the bends before, and lived through them!\" he said, still\n weakly defiant.\n\n\n \"That's the past,\" Splinter said quietly. \"This is the present, and you\n take your pills every day, just as I do—from now on.\"\n\n\n \"All right—and thanks!\"\n\n\n \"Forget it!\" Splinter flushed in quick embarrassment.\n\n\n A buzzer sounded from the instrument panel, and a tiny light glowed\n redly.\n\n\n \"Six hours more,\" Splinter said, turned to the instrument panel.\n\n\n His long hands played over the instrument panel, checking, controlling\n the rocket fire, adjusting delicate instruments to hairline marks.\n Kerry Blane nodded in silent approval.", "His body arced again and again against the restraining straps, and his\n mouth was open in a soundless scream. He sensed dimly that his partner\n had wrenched open a wall door, removed metal medicine kits, and was\n fumbling through their contents. He felt the bite of the hypodermic,\n felt a deadly numbness replace the raging torment that had been his\n for seconds. He swallowed three capsules automatically, passed into a\n coma-like sleep, woke hours later to stare clear-eyed into Splinter's\n concerned face.\n\n\n \"Close, wasn't it?\" he said weakly, conversationally.\n\n\n \"Close enough!\" Splinter agreed relievedly. \"If you had followed my\n advice and taken those vitamin capsules, you'd never have had the\n bends.\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane grinned, winced when he felt the dull ache in his body.", "Kerry Blane crouched over the control panel, his hands moving deftly,\n his eyes flicking from one instrument to another. Tiny lines of\n concentration etched themselves about his mouth, and perspiration\n beaded his forehead. He rode that cruiser through the miles of clouds\n through sheer instinctive ability, seeming to fly it as though he were\n an integral part of the ship.\n\n\n Splinter Wood watched him with awe in his eyes, seeing for the first\n time the incredible instinct that had made Kerry Blane the idol of a\n billion people. He relaxed visibly, all instinctive fear allayed by the\n brilliant competence of his companion.", "\"Seventy-eight new words—and you swore them beautifully!\" Splinter\n beamed. \"Some day you can teach them to me.\"\n\n\n They laughed then, Old Kerry Blane and young Splinter Wood, and\n the warmth of their friendship was a tangible thing in the small\n control-room of the cruiser.\n\n\n And in the midst of their laughter, Old Kerry Blane choked in agony,\n surged desperately against his bunk straps.\n\n\n He screamed unknowingly, feeling only the horrible excruciating agony\n of his body, tasting the blood that gushed from his mouth and nostrils.\n His muscles were knotted cords that he could not loosen, and his blood\n was a surging stream that pounded at his throbbing temples. The air he\n breathed seemed to be molten flame.", "\"Ten to one we don't get back!\" Splinter said pessimistically.\n\n\n Kerry Blane scrubbed out his cigarette, scowled bleakly at the\n instrument panel. He sensed the faint thread of fear in the youngster's\n tone, and a nostalgic twinge touched his heart, for he was remembering\n the days of his youth when he had a full life to look forward to.\n\n\n \"If you're afraid, you can get out and walk back,\" he snapped\n disagreeably.\n\n\n A grin lifted the corners of Splinter's long mouth, spread into his\n eyes. His hand unconsciously came up, touched the tiny squadron pin on\n his lapel.\n\n\n \"Sorry to disappoint you, glory grabber,\" he said mockingly, \"but I've\n got definite orders to take care of you.\"", "\"Forget it, lad,\" he said more kindly, \"those things happen. Now, if\n you'll bind a splint about my arm, we'll see what we can do about\n righting the ship.\"\n\n\n Splinter nodded, opened the medical locker, worked with tape and\n splints for minutes. Great beads of perspiration stood out in high\n relief on Kerry Blane's forehead, but he made no sound. At last,\n Splinter finished, tucked the supplies away.\n\n\n \"Now what?\" he asked subduedly.\n\n\n \"Let's take a look outside, maybe set up the Zelta guns. Can't tell but\n what that protoplasmic nightmare might take a notion to pay us a visit\n in the near future!\"\n\n\n \"Right!\" Splinter unscrewed the port cogs, swung the portal back.", "Now, his aged but steady fingers rested lightly on the controls,\n brought the patrol cruiser closer to the cloud-banks on the line of\n demarcation between the sunward and sunless sides of the planet. He\n hummed tunelessly, strangely happy, as he peered ahead.\n\n\n \"Val Kenton died there,\" Splinter whispered softly, \"Died to save the\n lives of three other people!\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane nodded. \"Yes,\" he agreed, and his voice changed subtly.\n \"Val was a blackguard, a criminal; but he died in the best traditions\n of the service.\" He sighed. \"He never had a chance.\"\n\n\n \"Murdered!\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane smiled grimly. \"I guess I used too broad an interpretation\n of the word,\" he said gently. \"Anyway, one of our main tasks is to\n destroy the thing that killed him.\"\n\n\n His lean fingers tightened unconsciously.", "He stood, leaning against the ship, watching as Splinter picked up\n the first gun and leveled it at a gigantic tree. Splinter sighted\n carefully, winked at the older man, then pressed the firing stud.\n\n\n Nothing happened; there was no hissing crackle of released energy.\n\n\n Kerry Blane strode forward, puzzlement on his lined face, his hand\n out-stretched toward the defective weapon. Splinter gaped at the gun in\n his hands, held it out wordlessly.\n\n\n \"The crash must have broken something,\" Kerry Blane said slowly.\n\n\n Splinter shook his head. \"There's only one moving part,\" he said, \"and\n that's the force gate on the firing stud.\"\n\n\n \"Try the other,\" Kerry Blane said slowly.\n\n\n \"Okay!\"", "\"Everything is more or less okay,\" he said. \"The board will have to\n be rewired, but nothing else seems to be damaged so that repairs are\n needed.\"\n\n\n Splinter looked up from his task of bandaging his leg. \"What caused\n the crash?\" he asked. \"One minute, everything was all right; the next,\n Blooey!\"\n\n\n Anger suddenly mottled Kerry Blane's face; he swore monotonously and\n bitterly for a moment.\n\n\n \"Those gol-damned pills you been taking caused the crash!\" he roared.\n \"One of them broke and shorted out the control board.\" He scowled at\n the incredulous Splinter. \"By the three tails of a Martian sand-pup, I\n ought to cram the rest of them down your throat, boxes and all!\"\n\n\n Splinter flushed, seemed to be fumbling for words. After a bit, Kerry\n Blane grinned.", "Kerry Blane rode the controls for the next three hours, searching the\n limitless ocean for the few specks of islands that followed the slow\n currents of the water planet. Always, there was the same misty light\n surrounding the ship, never dimming, giving a sense of unreality to the\n scene below. Nowhere was there the slightest sign of life until, in the\n fourth hour of flight, a tiny dot of blackness came slowly over the\n horizon's water line.\n\n\n Kerry Blane spun the ship in a tight circle, sent it flashing to the\n west. His keen eyes lighted, when he finally made out the turtle-like\n outline of the island, and he whistled softly, off-key, as he nudged\n the snoring Splinter.\n\n\n \"This is it, Sleeping Beauty,\" he called. \"Snap out of it!\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Whuzzat?\" Splinter grunted, rolled to his elbow.\n\n\n \"Here's the island.\"", "\"Oh!\" Splinter swung his feet from the bunk, peered from the vision\n port, sleepiness instantly erased from his face.\n\n\n \"Hot damn!\" he chortled. \"Now we'll see a little action!\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane grinned, tried to conceal the excitement he felt. He shook\n his head, his fingers flickering over the control studs.\n\n\n \"Don't get your hopes too high, lad,\" he counseled. \"With those super\n Zelta guns, it won't take ten minutes to wipe out that monster.\"\n\n\n Splinter rubbed his hands together, sighed like a boy seeing his first\n circus. \"Listen, for ten minutes of that, I'd ride this chunk of metal\n for a year!\"\n\n\n \"Could be!\" Kerry Blane agreed.", "Belts parted like rotten string; they were thrown forward with crushing\n force against the control panel. They groped feebly for support, their\n bodies twisting involuntarily, as the ship cartwheeled a dozen times in\n a few seconds. Almost instantly, consciousness was battered from them.\n\n\n With one final, grinding bounce, the cruiser rolled to its side,\n twisted over and over for a hundred yards, then came to a metal-ripping\n stop against a moss-grown boulder at the water's edge.\nIII\n\n\n Kerry Blane choked, tried to turn his head from the water that trickled\n into his face. He opened his eyes, stared blankly, uncomprehendingly\n into the bloody features of the man bending over him.\n\n\n \"What happened?\" he gasped.\n\n\n Splinter Wood laughed, almost hysterically, mopped at his forehead with\n a wet handkerchief.", "Splinter rolled his six foot three of lanky body into a more\n comfortable position on the air-bunk. He yawned tremendously, fumbled a\n small box from his shirt pocket, and removed a marble-like capsule.\n\n\n \"Better take one of these,\" he warned. \"You're liable to get the space\n bends at any moment.\"\n\n\n Old Kerry Blane snorted, batted the box aside impatiently, scowled\n moodily at the capsules that bounced for a moment against the pilot\n room's walls before hanging motionless in the air.\n\n\n \"Mister Wood,\" he said icily, \"I was flying a space ship while they\n were changing your pants twenty times a day. When I want advice on how\n to fly a ship, how to cure space bends, how to handle a Zelta ray, or\n how to spit—I'll ask you! Until then, you and your bloody marbles can\n go plumb straight to the devil!\"" ], [ "His body arced again and again against the restraining straps, and his\n mouth was open in a soundless scream. He sensed dimly that his partner\n had wrenched open a wall door, removed metal medicine kits, and was\n fumbling through their contents. He felt the bite of the hypodermic,\n felt a deadly numbness replace the raging torment that had been his\n for seconds. He swallowed three capsules automatically, passed into a\n coma-like sleep, woke hours later to stare clear-eyed into Splinter's\n concerned face.\n\n\n \"Close, wasn't it?\" he said weakly, conversationally.\n\n\n \"Close enough!\" Splinter agreed relievedly. \"If you had followed my\n advice and taken those vitamin capsules, you'd never have had the\n bends.\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane grinned, winced when he felt the dull ache in his body.", "\"I've had the bends before, and lived through them!\" he said, still\n weakly defiant.\n\n\n \"That's the past,\" Splinter said quietly. \"This is the present, and you\n take your pills every day, just as I do—from now on.\"\n\n\n \"All right—and thanks!\"\n\n\n \"Forget it!\" Splinter flushed in quick embarrassment.\n\n\n A buzzer sounded from the instrument panel, and a tiny light glowed\n redly.\n\n\n \"Six hours more,\" Splinter said, turned to the instrument panel.\n\n\n His long hands played over the instrument panel, checking, controlling\n the rocket fire, adjusting delicate instruments to hairline marks.\n Kerry Blane nodded in silent approval.", "\"Everything is more or less okay,\" he said. \"The board will have to\n be rewired, but nothing else seems to be damaged so that repairs are\n needed.\"\n\n\n Splinter looked up from his task of bandaging his leg. \"What caused\n the crash?\" he asked. \"One minute, everything was all right; the next,\n Blooey!\"\n\n\n Anger suddenly mottled Kerry Blane's face; he swore monotonously and\n bitterly for a moment.\n\n\n \"Those gol-damned pills you been taking caused the crash!\" he roared.\n \"One of them broke and shorted out the control board.\" He scowled at\n the incredulous Splinter. \"By the three tails of a Martian sand-pup, I\n ought to cram the rest of them down your throat, boxes and all!\"\n\n\n Splinter flushed, seemed to be fumbling for words. After a bit, Kerry\n Blane grinned.", "\"Seventy-eight new words—and you swore them beautifully!\" Splinter\n beamed. \"Some day you can teach them to me.\"\n\n\n They laughed then, Old Kerry Blane and young Splinter Wood, and\n the warmth of their friendship was a tangible thing in the small\n control-room of the cruiser.\n\n\n And in the midst of their laughter, Old Kerry Blane choked in agony,\n surged desperately against his bunk straps.\n\n\n He screamed unknowingly, feeling only the horrible excruciating agony\n of his body, tasting the blood that gushed from his mouth and nostrils.\n His muscles were knotted cords that he could not loosen, and his blood\n was a surging stream that pounded at his throbbing temples. The air he\n breathed seemed to be molten flame.", "\"Tsk! Tsk! Tsk!\" Splinter reached out lazily, plucked the capsules from\n the air, one by one.\n\n\n Kerry Blane lit one of the five allotted cigarettes of the day.\n\n\n \"Don't 'tsk' me, you young squirt,\" he grunted around a mouthful of\n fragrant smoke. \"I know all the arguments you can put up; ain't that\n all I been hearing for a week? You take your vitamins A, B, C, D, all\n you want, but you leave me alone—or I'll stuff your head down your\n throat, P.D.Q.!\"", "Finally, as a last resort so that he would not be thrown entirely\n aside, he had taken a desk job in the squadron offices. For six years\n he had dry-rotted there, waiting hopefully for the moment when his\n active services would be needed again.\n\n\n It was there that he had met and liked the ungainly Splinter Wood.\n There was something in the boy that had found a kindred spirit in Kerry\n Blane's heart, and he had taken the youngster in hand to give him the\n benefits of experience that had become legendary.\n\n\n Splinter Wood was a probationary pilot, had been admitted to the\n Interplanetary Squadron because of his inherent skill, even though his\n formal education had been fairly well neglected.\nNow, the two of them rode the pounding jets of a DX cruiser, bound\n for Venus to make a personal survey of its floating islands for the\n Interplanetary Squadron's Medical Division.", "\"Forget it, lad,\" he said more kindly, \"those things happen. Now, if\n you'll bind a splint about my arm, we'll see what we can do about\n righting the ship.\"\n\n\n Splinter nodded, opened the medical locker, worked with tape and\n splints for minutes. Great beads of perspiration stood out in high\n relief on Kerry Blane's forehead, but he made no sound. At last,\n Splinter finished, tucked the supplies away.\n\n\n \"Now what?\" he asked subduedly.\n\n\n \"Let's take a look outside, maybe set up the Zelta guns. Can't tell but\n what that protoplasmic nightmare might take a notion to pay us a visit\n in the near future!\"\n\n\n \"Right!\" Splinter unscrewed the port cogs, swung the portal back.", "Splinter rolled his six foot three of lanky body into a more\n comfortable position on the air-bunk. He yawned tremendously, fumbled a\n small box from his shirt pocket, and removed a marble-like capsule.\n\n\n \"Better take one of these,\" he warned. \"You're liable to get the space\n bends at any moment.\"\n\n\n Old Kerry Blane snorted, batted the box aside impatiently, scowled\n moodily at the capsules that bounced for a moment against the pilot\n room's walls before hanging motionless in the air.\n\n\n \"Mister Wood,\" he said icily, \"I was flying a space ship while they\n were changing your pants twenty times a day. When I want advice on how\n to fly a ship, how to cure space bends, how to handle a Zelta ray, or\n how to spit—I'll ask you! Until then, you and your bloody marbles can\n go plumb straight to the devil!\"", "\"All right, all right!\" Splinter tucked the capsule box back into his\n pocket, grinned mockingly. \"But don't say I didn't warn you. With this\n shielded ship, and with no sunlight reaching Venus' surface, you're\n gonna be begging for some of my vitamin, super-concentrated pills\n before we get back to Earth.\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane made a rich, ripe noise with his mouth.\n\n\n \"Pfuii!\" he said very distinctly.\n\n\n \"Gracious!\" Splinter said in mock horror.\nThey made a strange contrast as they lay in their air bunks. Splinter\n was fully a head taller than the dour Irishman, and his lanky build\n gave a false impression of awkwardness. While the vitriolic Kerry Blane\n was short and compact, strength and quickness evident in every movement.", "And then the scaly monster flashed in a half-turn, drove forward with\n jaws agape, wrenched and ripped at the smooth black throat of the other\n creature. The second creature rippled and undulated in agony, whipping\n the ocean to foam, then went limp. The victorious monster circled the\n body of its dead foe, then, majestically, plunged from sight into the\n ocean's depths. An instant later, the water frothed, as hundreds of\n lesser marine monsters attacked and fed on the floating corpse.\n\n\n \"Brrrr!\" Splinter shivered in sudden horror.\n\n\n Kerry Blane chuckled dryly. \"Feel like going for a swim?\" he asked\n conversationally.\n\n\n Splinter shook his head, watched the scene disappear from view to the\n rear of the line of flight, then sank back onto his bunk.\n\n\n \"Not me!\" he said deprecatingly.", "Belts parted like rotten string; they were thrown forward with crushing\n force against the control panel. They groped feebly for support, their\n bodies twisting involuntarily, as the ship cartwheeled a dozen times in\n a few seconds. Almost instantly, consciousness was battered from them.\n\n\n With one final, grinding bounce, the cruiser rolled to its side,\n twisted over and over for a hundred yards, then came to a metal-ripping\n stop against a moss-grown boulder at the water's edge.\nIII\n\n\n Kerry Blane choked, tried to turn his head from the water that trickled\n into his face. He opened his eyes, stared blankly, uncomprehendingly\n into the bloody features of the man bending over him.\n\n\n \"What happened?\" he gasped.\n\n\n Splinter Wood laughed, almost hysterically, mopped at his forehead with\n a wet handkerchief.", "\"I thought you were dead!\" he said simply.\n\n\n Kerry Blane moved his arm experimentally, felt broken bones grate in\n an exquisite wave of pain. He fought back the nausea, gazed about the\n cabin, realized the ship lay on its side.\n\n\n \"Maybe I am,\" he said ruefully. \"No man could live through that crash.\"\n\n\n Splinter moved away, sat down tiredly on the edge of a bunk. He shook\n his head dazedly, inspected the long cut on his leg.\n\n\n \"We seem to have done it,\" he said dully.\n\n\n Kerry Blane nodded, clambered to his feet, favoring his broken arm.\n He leaned over the control panel, inspecting the dials with a worried\n gaze. Slowly, his eyes lightened, and his voice was almost cheerful as\n he swung about.", "He peered through the port, seeking any spot clear enough for a landing\n field. Except for a strip of open beach, the island was a solid mass of\n heavy fern-like growth.\n\n\n \"Belt yourself,\" Kerry Blane warned. \"If that beach isn't solid, I'll\n have to lift the ship in a hell of a hurry.\"\n\n\n \"Right!\" Splinter's fingers were all thumbs in his excitement.\n\n\n Kerry Blane set the controls for a shallow glide, his fingers moving\n like a concert pianist's. The cruiser yawed slightly, settled slowly\n in a flat shallow glide.\n\n\n \"We're going in,\" Kerry Blane said quietly.\n\n\n He closed a knife switch, seeing too late the vitamin capsule that was\n lodged in the slot. There was the sharp splutter of a short-circuit,\n and a thin tendril of smoke drifted upward.", "Seconds flowed into moments, and the moments merged into one another,\n and still the clouds pressed with a visible strength against the\n ports. The rockets drummed steadily, holding the ship aloft, dropping\n it slowly toward the planet below. Then the clouds thinned, and,\n incredibly, were permeated with a dim and glowing light. A second\n later, and the clouds were gone, and a thousand feet below tumbled and\n tossed in a majestic display of ruthless strength an ocean that seemed\n to be composed of liquid fluorescence.\n\n\n Kerry Blane heard Splinter's instant sigh of unbelief.\n\n\n \"Good Lord!\" Splinter said, \"What—\"", "\"Splinter\" Wood grinned.\n\n\n \"Seems to me, Kerry,\" he remarked humorously, \"that you don't like much\n of anything!\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane growled unintelligibly, batted the injector lever with a\n calloused hand. His grizzled hair was a stiff wiry mop on his small\n head, and his oversize jaw was thrust belligerently forward. But deep\n within his eyes, where he hoped it was hidden, was a friendly twinkle\n that gave the lie to his speech.\n\n\n \"You're a squirt!\" he snapped disagreeably. \"You're not dry behind\n the ears, yet. You're like the rest of these kids who call themselves\n pilots—only more so! And why the hell the chief had to sic you on me,\n on an exploration trip this important—well, I'll never understand.\"", "They could feel the first tug of gravity on their bodies, and through\n the vision port could see the greenish ball that was cloud-covered\n Venus. Excitement lifted their spirits, brought light to their eyes as\n they peered eagerly ahead.\n\n\n \"What's it really like?\" Splinter asked impatiently.\n\n\n Kerry Blane yawned, settled back luxuriously. \"I'll tell you later,\" he\n said, \"I'm going to take a nap and try to ease this bellyache of mine.\n Wake me up so that I can take over, when we land; Venus is a tricky\n place to set a ship on.\"\n\n\n He yawned again, drifted instantly into sleep, relaxing with the\n ability of a spaceman who sleeps when and if he can. Splinter smiled\n down at his sleeping partner, then turned back to the quartzite port.\n He shook his head a bit, remembering the stories he had heard about the\n water planet, wondering—wondering—\nII", "\"Damn!\" Kerry Blane swore briefly.\n\n\n There was an instant, terrific explosion of the stern jets, and the\n cruiser hurtled toward the beach like a gravity-crazed comet.\n\n\n Kerry Blane said absolutely nothing, his breath driven from him by the\n suck of inertia. His hands darted for the controls, seeking to balance\n the forces that threw the ship about like a toy. He cut all rockets\n with a smashing swoop of his hand, tried to fire the bow rockets. But\n the short had ruined the entire control system.\n\n\n For one interminable second, he saw the uncanny uprush of the island\n below. He flicked his gaze about, saw the instant terror that wiped\n all other expression from his young companion's face. Then the cruiser\n plowed into the silvery sand.", "\"\nMe!\nYou've got orders to take care of\nme\n?\" Kerry Blane choked\n incoherently for a moment, red tiding cholerically upward from his\n loosened collar.\n\n\n \"Of course!\" Splinter grinned.\n\n\n Kerry Blane exploded, words spewing volcanically forth. Splinter\n relaxed, his booted foot beating out a dull rhythm to the colorful\n language learned through almost fifty years of spacing. And at last,\n when Kerry Blane had quieted until he but smoldered, he leaned over and\n touched the old spacer on the sleeve.\n\n\n \"Seventy-eight!\" he remarked pleasantly.\n\n\n \"Seventy-eight what?\" Kerry Blane asked sullenly, the old twinkle\n beginning to light again deep in his eyes.", "Now, his aged but steady fingers rested lightly on the controls,\n brought the patrol cruiser closer to the cloud-banks on the line of\n demarcation between the sunward and sunless sides of the planet. He\n hummed tunelessly, strangely happy, as he peered ahead.\n\n\n \"Val Kenton died there,\" Splinter whispered softly, \"Died to save the\n lives of three other people!\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane nodded. \"Yes,\" he agreed, and his voice changed subtly.\n \"Val was a blackguard, a criminal; but he died in the best traditions\n of the service.\" He sighed. \"He never had a chance.\"\n\n\n \"Murdered!\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane smiled grimly. \"I guess I used too broad an interpretation\n of the word,\" he said gently. \"Anyway, one of our main tasks is to\n destroy the thing that killed him.\"\n\n\n His lean fingers tightened unconsciously.", "\"Ten to one we don't get back!\" Splinter said pessimistically.\n\n\n Kerry Blane scrubbed out his cigarette, scowled bleakly at the\n instrument panel. He sensed the faint thread of fear in the youngster's\n tone, and a nostalgic twinge touched his heart, for he was remembering\n the days of his youth when he had a full life to look forward to.\n\n\n \"If you're afraid, you can get out and walk back,\" he snapped\n disagreeably.\n\n\n A grin lifted the corners of Splinter's long mouth, spread into his\n eyes. His hand unconsciously came up, touched the tiny squadron pin on\n his lapel.\n\n\n \"Sorry to disappoint you, glory grabber,\" he said mockingly, \"but I've\n got definite orders to take care of you.\"" ], [ "He swung lithely from the portal, reached down a hand to help the\n older man. After much puffing and grunting, Kerry Blane managed to\n clamber through the port. They stood for a moment in silent wonder,\n staring at the long lazy rollers of milky fluorescence that rolled\n endlessly toward the beach, then turned to gaze at the great fern-like\n trees that towered two hundred feet into the air.\n\n\n \"How big do you feel now?\" Kerry Blane asked quietly.\n\n\n Splinter Wood was silent, awed by the beauty and the tremendous size of\n the growths on the water world.\n\n\n Kerry Blane walked the length of the cruiser, examining the slight\n damage done by the crash, evaluating the situation with a practiced\n gaze. He nodded slowly, retraced his steps, and stood looking at the\n furrow plowed in the sand.", "Kerry Blane rode the controls for the next three hours, searching the\n limitless ocean for the few specks of islands that followed the slow\n currents of the water planet. Always, there was the same misty light\n surrounding the ship, never dimming, giving a sense of unreality to the\n scene below. Nowhere was there the slightest sign of life until, in the\n fourth hour of flight, a tiny dot of blackness came slowly over the\n horizon's water line.\n\n\n Kerry Blane spun the ship in a tight circle, sent it flashing to the\n west. His keen eyes lighted, when he finally made out the turtle-like\n outline of the island, and he whistled softly, off-key, as he nudged\n the snoring Splinter.\n\n\n \"This is it, Sleeping Beauty,\" he called. \"Snap out of it!\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Whuzzat?\" Splinter grunted, rolled to his elbow.\n\n\n \"Here's the island.\"", "Seconds flowed into moments, and the moments merged into one another,\n and still the clouds pressed with a visible strength against the\n ports. The rockets drummed steadily, holding the ship aloft, dropping\n it slowly toward the planet below. Then the clouds thinned, and,\n incredibly, were permeated with a dim and glowing light. A second\n later, and the clouds were gone, and a thousand feet below tumbled and\n tossed in a majestic display of ruthless strength an ocean that seemed\n to be composed of liquid fluorescence.\n\n\n Kerry Blane heard Splinter's instant sigh of unbelief.\n\n\n \"Good Lord!\" Splinter said, \"What—\"", "And then the scaly monster flashed in a half-turn, drove forward with\n jaws agape, wrenched and ripped at the smooth black throat of the other\n creature. The second creature rippled and undulated in agony, whipping\n the ocean to foam, then went limp. The victorious monster circled the\n body of its dead foe, then, majestically, plunged from sight into the\n ocean's depths. An instant later, the water frothed, as hundreds of\n lesser marine monsters attacked and fed on the floating corpse.\n\n\n \"Brrrr!\" Splinter shivered in sudden horror.\n\n\n Kerry Blane chuckled dryly. \"Feel like going for a swim?\" he asked\n conversationally.\n\n\n Splinter shook his head, watched the scene disappear from view to the\n rear of the line of flight, then sank back onto his bunk.\n\n\n \"Not me!\" he said deprecatingly.", "They could feel the first tug of gravity on their bodies, and through\n the vision port could see the greenish ball that was cloud-covered\n Venus. Excitement lifted their spirits, brought light to their eyes as\n they peered eagerly ahead.\n\n\n \"What's it really like?\" Splinter asked impatiently.\n\n\n Kerry Blane yawned, settled back luxuriously. \"I'll tell you later,\" he\n said, \"I'm going to take a nap and try to ease this bellyache of mine.\n Wake me up so that I can take over, when we land; Venus is a tricky\n place to set a ship on.\"\n\n\n He yawned again, drifted instantly into sleep, relaxing with the\n ability of a spaceman who sleeps when and if he can. Splinter smiled\n down at his sleeping partner, then turned back to the quartzite port.\n He shook his head a bit, remembering the stories he had heard about the\n water planet, wondering—wondering—\nII", "\"I thought you were dead!\" he said simply.\n\n\n Kerry Blane moved his arm experimentally, felt broken bones grate in\n an exquisite wave of pain. He fought back the nausea, gazed about the\n cabin, realized the ship lay on its side.\n\n\n \"Maybe I am,\" he said ruefully. \"No man could live through that crash.\"\n\n\n Splinter moved away, sat down tiredly on the edge of a bunk. He shook\n his head dazedly, inspected the long cut on his leg.\n\n\n \"We seem to have done it,\" he said dully.\n\n\n Kerry Blane nodded, clambered to his feet, favoring his broken arm.\n He leaned over the control panel, inspecting the dials with a worried\n gaze. Slowly, his eyes lightened, and his voice was almost cheerful as\n he swung about.", "He peered through the port, seeking any spot clear enough for a landing\n field. Except for a strip of open beach, the island was a solid mass of\n heavy fern-like growth.\n\n\n \"Belt yourself,\" Kerry Blane warned. \"If that beach isn't solid, I'll\n have to lift the ship in a hell of a hurry.\"\n\n\n \"Right!\" Splinter's fingers were all thumbs in his excitement.\n\n\n Kerry Blane set the controls for a shallow glide, his fingers moving\n like a concert pianist's. The cruiser yawed slightly, settled slowly\n in a flat shallow glide.\n\n\n \"We're going in,\" Kerry Blane said quietly.\n\n\n He closed a knife switch, seeing too late the vitamin capsule that was\n lodged in the slot. There was the sharp splutter of a short-circuit,\n and a thin tendril of smoke drifted upward.", "\"Damn!\" Kerry Blane swore briefly.\n\n\n There was an instant, terrific explosion of the stern jets, and the\n cruiser hurtled toward the beach like a gravity-crazed comet.\n\n\n Kerry Blane said absolutely nothing, his breath driven from him by the\n suck of inertia. His hands darted for the controls, seeking to balance\n the forces that threw the ship about like a toy. He cut all rockets\n with a smashing swoop of his hand, tried to fire the bow rockets. But\n the short had ruined the entire control system.\n\n\n For one interminable second, he saw the uncanny uprush of the island\n below. He flicked his gaze about, saw the instant terror that wiped\n all other expression from his young companion's face. Then the cruiser\n plowed into the silvery sand.", "Kerry Blane crouched over the control panel, his hands moving deftly,\n his eyes flicking from one instrument to another. Tiny lines of\n concentration etched themselves about his mouth, and perspiration\n beaded his forehead. He rode that cruiser through the miles of clouds\n through sheer instinctive ability, seeming to fly it as though he were\n an integral part of the ship.\n\n\n Splinter Wood watched him with awe in his eyes, seeing for the first\n time the incredible instinct that had made Kerry Blane the idol of a\n billion people. He relaxed visibly, all instinctive fear allayed by the\n brilliant competence of his companion.", "\"Orders are orders!\" Kerry Blane shrugged.\nHe swung the cruiser in a wide arc to the north, trebling the flying\n speed within minutes, handling the controls with a familiar dexterity.\n He said nothing, searched the gleaming ocean for the smudge of\n blackness that would denote another island. His gaze flicked amusedly,\n now and then, to the lanky Splinter who scowled moodily and toyed with\n the dis-gun in his long hands.\n\n\n \"Cheer up, lad,\" Kerry Blane said finally. \"I think you'll find plenty\n to occupy your time shortly.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe?\" Splinter said gloomily.\n\n\n He idly swallowed another vitamin capsule, grinned, when he saw Kerry\n Blane's automatic grimace of distaste. Then he yawned hugely, twisted\n into a comfortable position, dozed sleepily.", "\"All right, all right!\" Splinter tucked the capsule box back into his\n pocket, grinned mockingly. \"But don't say I didn't warn you. With this\n shielded ship, and with no sunlight reaching Venus' surface, you're\n gonna be begging for some of my vitamin, super-concentrated pills\n before we get back to Earth.\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane made a rich, ripe noise with his mouth.\n\n\n \"Pfuii!\" he said very distinctly.\n\n\n \"Gracious!\" Splinter said in mock horror.\nThey made a strange contrast as they lay in their air bunks. Splinter\n was fully a head taller than the dour Irishman, and his lanky build\n gave a false impression of awkwardness. While the vitriolic Kerry Blane\n was short and compact, strength and quickness evident in every movement.", "\"Won't be any trouble at all to lift the ship,\" he called. \"After\n rewiring the board, we'll turn the ship with an underjet, swing it\n about, and head her toward the sea.\"\n\n\n Splinter nodded, dropped into the open port. A moment later, he flipped\n a rope ladder outside, where it dangled to the ground, then climbed out\n himself, carrying the two Zelta guns.\n\n\n \"We'd better test these,\" he said. \"We don't want any slip-ups when we\n do go into action.\"\n\n\n He climbed down the ladder, laid the guns aside, then reached up a\n hand to aid Kerry Blane's descent. Kerry Blane came down slowly and\n awkwardly, jumped the last few feet. He felt surprisingly light and\n strong in the lesser gravity.", "\"Oh!\" Splinter swung his feet from the bunk, peered from the vision\n port, sleepiness instantly erased from his face.\n\n\n \"Hot damn!\" he chortled. \"Now we'll see a little action!\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane grinned, tried to conceal the excitement he felt. He shook\n his head, his fingers flickering over the control studs.\n\n\n \"Don't get your hopes too high, lad,\" he counseled. \"With those super\n Zelta guns, it won't take ten minutes to wipe out that monster.\"\n\n\n Splinter rubbed his hands together, sighed like a boy seeing his first\n circus. \"Listen, for ten minutes of that, I'd ride this chunk of metal\n for a year!\"\n\n\n \"Could be!\" Kerry Blane agreed.", "\"I've had the bends before, and lived through them!\" he said, still\n weakly defiant.\n\n\n \"That's the past,\" Splinter said quietly. \"This is the present, and you\n take your pills every day, just as I do—from now on.\"\n\n\n \"All right—and thanks!\"\n\n\n \"Forget it!\" Splinter flushed in quick embarrassment.\n\n\n A buzzer sounded from the instrument panel, and a tiny light glowed\n redly.\n\n\n \"Six hours more,\" Splinter said, turned to the instrument panel.\n\n\n His long hands played over the instrument panel, checking, controlling\n the rocket fire, adjusting delicate instruments to hairline marks.\n Kerry Blane nodded in silent approval.", "\"Forget it, lad,\" he said more kindly, \"those things happen. Now, if\n you'll bind a splint about my arm, we'll see what we can do about\n righting the ship.\"\n\n\n Splinter nodded, opened the medical locker, worked with tape and\n splints for minutes. Great beads of perspiration stood out in high\n relief on Kerry Blane's forehead, but he made no sound. At last,\n Splinter finished, tucked the supplies away.\n\n\n \"Now what?\" he asked subduedly.\n\n\n \"Let's take a look outside, maybe set up the Zelta guns. Can't tell but\n what that protoplasmic nightmare might take a notion to pay us a visit\n in the near future!\"\n\n\n \"Right!\" Splinter unscrewed the port cogs, swung the portal back.", "The great cottony batts of roiling clouds rushed up to meet the ship,\n bringing the first sense of violent movement in more than a week of\n flying. There was something awesome and breath-taking in the speed with\n which the ship dropped toward the planet.\n\n\n Tendrils of vapor touched the ports, were whipped aside, then were\n replaced by heavier fingers of cloud. Kerry Blane pressed a firing\n stud, and nose rockets thrummed in a rising crescendo as the free fall\n of the cruiser was checked. Heat rose in the cabin from the friction of\n the outer air, then dissipated, as the force-screen voltometer leaped\n higher.\n\n\n Then, as though it had never been, the sun disappeared, and there was\n only a gray blankness pressing about the ship. Gone was all sense of\n movement, and the ship seemed to hover in a gray nothingness.", "Splinter rolled his six foot three of lanky body into a more\n comfortable position on the air-bunk. He yawned tremendously, fumbled a\n small box from his shirt pocket, and removed a marble-like capsule.\n\n\n \"Better take one of these,\" he warned. \"You're liable to get the space\n bends at any moment.\"\n\n\n Old Kerry Blane snorted, batted the box aside impatiently, scowled\n moodily at the capsules that bounced for a moment against the pilot\n room's walls before hanging motionless in the air.\n\n\n \"Mister Wood,\" he said icily, \"I was flying a space ship while they\n were changing your pants twenty times a day. When I want advice on how\n to fly a ship, how to cure space bends, how to handle a Zelta ray, or\n how to spit—I'll ask you! Until then, you and your bloody marbles can\n go plumb straight to the devil!\"", "\"I'd like nothing better than to turn a Zelta-blaster on that chunk of\n living protoplasm and cremate it.\"\n\n\n Splinters shivered slightly. \"Do you think we'll find it?\" he asked.\n\n\n Kerry Blane nodded. \"I think it will find us; after all, it's just an\n animated appetite looking for food.\"\n\n\n He turned back to the controls, flipped a switch, and the cutting of\n the nose rocket dropped the ship in an angling glide toward the clouds\n a few miles below. Gravity was full strength now, and although not as\n great as Earth's, was still strong enough to bring a sense of giddiness\n to the men.\n\n\n \"Here we go!\" Splinter said tonelessly.", "Belts parted like rotten string; they were thrown forward with crushing\n force against the control panel. They groped feebly for support, their\n bodies twisting involuntarily, as the ship cartwheeled a dozen times in\n a few seconds. Almost instantly, consciousness was battered from them.\n\n\n With one final, grinding bounce, the cruiser rolled to its side,\n twisted over and over for a hundred yards, then came to a metal-ripping\n stop against a moss-grown boulder at the water's edge.\nIII\n\n\n Kerry Blane choked, tried to turn his head from the water that trickled\n into his face. He opened his eyes, stared blankly, uncomprehendingly\n into the bloody features of the man bending over him.\n\n\n \"What happened?\" he gasped.\n\n\n Splinter Wood laughed, almost hysterically, mopped at his forehead with\n a wet handkerchief.", "Venus was a fluffy cotton ball hanging motionless in bottomless\n space. Far to the left, Mercury gleamed like a polished diamond in\n the sunlight. Kerry Blane cut the driving rockets, let the cruiser\n sink into a fast gravity-dive, guiding it only now and then by a brief\n flicker of a side jet.\n\n\n Splinter Wood watched breathlessly from the vision port, his long face\n eager and reckless, his eyes seeking to pierce the clouds that roiled\n and twisted uneasily over the surface of the planet.\n\n\n Kerry Blane glanced tolerantly at his young companion, felt a nostalgic\n tug at his heart when he remembered the first time he had approached\n the water-planet years before. Then, he had been a young and reckless\n firebrand, his fame already spreading, an unquenchable fire of\n adventure flaming in his heart." ], [ "Venus was a fluffy cotton ball hanging motionless in bottomless\n space. Far to the left, Mercury gleamed like a polished diamond in\n the sunlight. Kerry Blane cut the driving rockets, let the cruiser\n sink into a fast gravity-dive, guiding it only now and then by a brief\n flicker of a side jet.\n\n\n Splinter Wood watched breathlessly from the vision port, his long face\n eager and reckless, his eyes seeking to pierce the clouds that roiled\n and twisted uneasily over the surface of the planet.\n\n\n Kerry Blane glanced tolerantly at his young companion, felt a nostalgic\n tug at his heart when he remembered the first time he had approached\n the water-planet years before. Then, he had been a young and reckless\n firebrand, his fame already spreading, an unquenchable fire of\n adventure flaming in his heart.", "They could feel the first tug of gravity on their bodies, and through\n the vision port could see the greenish ball that was cloud-covered\n Venus. Excitement lifted their spirits, brought light to their eyes as\n they peered eagerly ahead.\n\n\n \"What's it really like?\" Splinter asked impatiently.\n\n\n Kerry Blane yawned, settled back luxuriously. \"I'll tell you later,\" he\n said, \"I'm going to take a nap and try to ease this bellyache of mine.\n Wake me up so that I can take over, when we land; Venus is a tricky\n place to set a ship on.\"\n\n\n He yawned again, drifted instantly into sleep, relaxing with the\n ability of a spaceman who sleeps when and if he can. Splinter smiled\n down at his sleeping partner, then turned back to the quartzite port.\n He shook his head a bit, remembering the stories he had heard about the\n water planet, wondering—wondering—\nII", "His voice stilled, and he was silent, his eyes drinking in the weird\n incredible scene below.\nThe ocean was a shifting, white-capped wash of silvery light that\n gleamed with a bright phosphorescence of a hundred, intermingled,\n kaleidoscopic colors. And the unreal, unearthly light continued\n unbroken everywhere, reflected from the low-hanging clouds, reaching\n to the far horizon, bathing every detail of the planet in a brilliance\n more bright than moonlight.\n\n\n Splinter turned a wondering face. \"But the official reports say that\n there is no light on Venus,\" he exclaimed. \"That was one of the reasons\n given when exploration was forbidden!\"", "Seconds flowed into moments, and the moments merged into one another,\n and still the clouds pressed with a visible strength against the\n ports. The rockets drummed steadily, holding the ship aloft, dropping\n it slowly toward the planet below. Then the clouds thinned, and,\n incredibly, were permeated with a dim and glowing light. A second\n later, and the clouds were gone, and a thousand feet below tumbled and\n tossed in a majestic display of ruthless strength an ocean that seemed\n to be composed of liquid fluorescence.\n\n\n Kerry Blane heard Splinter's instant sigh of unbelief.\n\n\n \"Good Lord!\" Splinter said, \"What—\"", "Kerry Blane nodded. \"That was merely a pretext to keep foolhardy\n spacemen from losing their lives on the planet. In reality, the\n ocean is alive with an incredibly tiny marine worm that glows\n phosphorescently. The light generated from those billions of worms is\n reflected back from the clouds, makes Venus eternally lighted.\"\n\n\n He turned the ship to the North, relaxed a bit on the air bunk. He\n felt tired and worn, his body aching from the space bends of a few\n hours before.\n\n\n \"Take over,\" he said wearily. \"Take the ship North, and watch for any\n island.\"\n\n\n Splinter nodded, rested his long hands on the controls. The space\n cruiser lifted a bit in a sudden spurt of speed, and the rocket-sound\n was a solid thrum of unleashed power.", "He swung lithely from the portal, reached down a hand to help the\n older man. After much puffing and grunting, Kerry Blane managed to\n clamber through the port. They stood for a moment in silent wonder,\n staring at the long lazy rollers of milky fluorescence that rolled\n endlessly toward the beach, then turned to gaze at the great fern-like\n trees that towered two hundred feet into the air.\n\n\n \"How big do you feel now?\" Kerry Blane asked quietly.\n\n\n Splinter Wood was silent, awed by the beauty and the tremendous size of\n the growths on the water world.\n\n\n Kerry Blane walked the length of the cruiser, examining the slight\n damage done by the crash, evaluating the situation with a practiced\n gaze. He nodded slowly, retraced his steps, and stood looking at the\n furrow plowed in the sand.", "The great cottony batts of roiling clouds rushed up to meet the ship,\n bringing the first sense of violent movement in more than a week of\n flying. There was something awesome and breath-taking in the speed with\n which the ship dropped toward the planet.\n\n\n Tendrils of vapor touched the ports, were whipped aside, then were\n replaced by heavier fingers of cloud. Kerry Blane pressed a firing\n stud, and nose rockets thrummed in a rising crescendo as the free fall\n of the cruiser was checked. Heat rose in the cabin from the friction of\n the outer air, then dissipated, as the force-screen voltometer leaped\n higher.\n\n\n Then, as though it had never been, the sun disappeared, and there was\n only a gray blankness pressing about the ship. Gone was all sense of\n movement, and the ship seemed to hover in a gray nothingness.", "Planet of No-Return\nBy WILBUR S. PEACOCK\nThe orders were explicit: \"Destroy the\n\n 'THING' of Venus.\" But Patrolmen Kerry\n\n Blane and Splinter Wood, their space-ship\n\n wrecked, could not follow orders—their\n\n weapons were useless on the Water-world.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Winter 1942.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nOld Kerry Blane exploded.\n\n\n \"Damn it!\" he roared. \"I don't like you; and I don't like this ship;\n and I don't like the assignment; and I don't like those infernal pills\n you keep eating; and I—\"", "\"I'd like nothing better than to turn a Zelta-blaster on that chunk of\n living protoplasm and cremate it.\"\n\n\n Splinters shivered slightly. \"Do you think we'll find it?\" he asked.\n\n\n Kerry Blane nodded. \"I think it will find us; after all, it's just an\n animated appetite looking for food.\"\n\n\n He turned back to the controls, flipped a switch, and the cutting of\n the nose rocket dropped the ship in an angling glide toward the clouds\n a few miles below. Gravity was full strength now, and although not as\n great as Earth's, was still strong enough to bring a sense of giddiness\n to the men.\n\n\n \"Here we go!\" Splinter said tonelessly.", "Splinter lifted the second gun, pressed the stud, gazed white-faced at\n his companion.\n\n\n \"It won't work, either,\" he said stupidly. \"I don't get it? The source\n of power is limitless. Solar rays never—\"\n\n\n Old Kerry Blane dropped the first gun to his side, swore harshly.\n\n\n \"Damn it,\" he said. \"They didn't think of it; you didn't think of it;\n and I most certainly forgot! Solar rays can't penetrate the miles of\n clouds on Venus. Those guns are utterly useless as weapons!\"", "Kerry Blane rode the controls for the next three hours, searching the\n limitless ocean for the few specks of islands that followed the slow\n currents of the water planet. Always, there was the same misty light\n surrounding the ship, never dimming, giving a sense of unreality to the\n scene below. Nowhere was there the slightest sign of life until, in the\n fourth hour of flight, a tiny dot of blackness came slowly over the\n horizon's water line.\n\n\n Kerry Blane spun the ship in a tight circle, sent it flashing to the\n west. His keen eyes lighted, when he finally made out the turtle-like\n outline of the island, and he whistled softly, off-key, as he nudged\n the snoring Splinter.\n\n\n \"This is it, Sleeping Beauty,\" he called. \"Snap out of it!\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Whuzzat?\" Splinter grunted, rolled to his elbow.\n\n\n \"Here's the island.\"", "He peered through the port, seeking any spot clear enough for a landing\n field. Except for a strip of open beach, the island was a solid mass of\n heavy fern-like growth.\n\n\n \"Belt yourself,\" Kerry Blane warned. \"If that beach isn't solid, I'll\n have to lift the ship in a hell of a hurry.\"\n\n\n \"Right!\" Splinter's fingers were all thumbs in his excitement.\n\n\n Kerry Blane set the controls for a shallow glide, his fingers moving\n like a concert pianist's. The cruiser yawed slightly, settled slowly\n in a flat shallow glide.\n\n\n \"We're going in,\" Kerry Blane said quietly.\n\n\n He closed a knife switch, seeing too late the vitamin capsule that was\n lodged in the slot. There was the sharp splutter of a short-circuit,\n and a thin tendril of smoke drifted upward.", "Finally, as a last resort so that he would not be thrown entirely\n aside, he had taken a desk job in the squadron offices. For six years\n he had dry-rotted there, waiting hopefully for the moment when his\n active services would be needed again.\n\n\n It was there that he had met and liked the ungainly Splinter Wood.\n There was something in the boy that had found a kindred spirit in Kerry\n Blane's heart, and he had taken the youngster in hand to give him the\n benefits of experience that had become legendary.\n\n\n Splinter Wood was a probationary pilot, had been admitted to the\n Interplanetary Squadron because of his inherent skill, even though his\n formal education had been fairly well neglected.\nNow, the two of them rode the pounding jets of a DX cruiser, bound\n for Venus to make a personal survey of its floating islands for the\n Interplanetary Squadron's Medical Division.", "\"All right, all right!\" Splinter tucked the capsule box back into his\n pocket, grinned mockingly. \"But don't say I didn't warn you. With this\n shielded ship, and with no sunlight reaching Venus' surface, you're\n gonna be begging for some of my vitamin, super-concentrated pills\n before we get back to Earth.\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane made a rich, ripe noise with his mouth.\n\n\n \"Pfuii!\" he said very distinctly.\n\n\n \"Gracious!\" Splinter said in mock horror.\nThey made a strange contrast as they lay in their air bunks. Splinter\n was fully a head taller than the dour Irishman, and his lanky build\n gave a false impression of awkwardness. While the vitriolic Kerry Blane\n was short and compact, strength and quickness evident in every movement.", "Now, his aged but steady fingers rested lightly on the controls,\n brought the patrol cruiser closer to the cloud-banks on the line of\n demarcation between the sunward and sunless sides of the planet. He\n hummed tunelessly, strangely happy, as he peered ahead.\n\n\n \"Val Kenton died there,\" Splinter whispered softly, \"Died to save the\n lives of three other people!\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane nodded. \"Yes,\" he agreed, and his voice changed subtly.\n \"Val was a blackguard, a criminal; but he died in the best traditions\n of the service.\" He sighed. \"He never had a chance.\"\n\n\n \"Murdered!\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane smiled grimly. \"I guess I used too broad an interpretation\n of the word,\" he said gently. \"Anyway, one of our main tasks is to\n destroy the thing that killed him.\"\n\n\n His lean fingers tightened unconsciously.", "Belts parted like rotten string; they were thrown forward with crushing\n force against the control panel. They groped feebly for support, their\n bodies twisting involuntarily, as the ship cartwheeled a dozen times in\n a few seconds. Almost instantly, consciousness was battered from them.\n\n\n With one final, grinding bounce, the cruiser rolled to its side,\n twisted over and over for a hundred yards, then came to a metal-ripping\n stop against a moss-grown boulder at the water's edge.\nIII\n\n\n Kerry Blane choked, tried to turn his head from the water that trickled\n into his face. He opened his eyes, stared blankly, uncomprehendingly\n into the bloody features of the man bending over him.\n\n\n \"What happened?\" he gasped.\n\n\n Splinter Wood laughed, almost hysterically, mopped at his forehead with\n a wet handkerchief.", "\"Damn!\" Kerry Blane swore briefly.\n\n\n There was an instant, terrific explosion of the stern jets, and the\n cruiser hurtled toward the beach like a gravity-crazed comet.\n\n\n Kerry Blane said absolutely nothing, his breath driven from him by the\n suck of inertia. His hands darted for the controls, seeking to balance\n the forces that threw the ship about like a toy. He cut all rockets\n with a smashing swoop of his hand, tried to fire the bow rockets. But\n the short had ruined the entire control system.\n\n\n For one interminable second, he saw the uncanny uprush of the island\n below. He flicked his gaze about, saw the instant terror that wiped\n all other expression from his young companion's face. Then the cruiser\n plowed into the silvery sand.", "Kerry Blane lit a cigarette, leaned toward a vision port. He felt again\n that thrill he had experienced when he had first flashed his single-man\n cruiser through the clouds years before. Then the breath caught in his\n throat, and he tapped his companion's arm.\n\n\n \"Take a look!\" he called excitedly.\n\n\n They fought in the ocean below, fought in a never-ending splashing of\n what seemed to be liquid fire. It was like watching a tri-dim screen of\n a news event, except for the utter lack of sound.", "\"Oh!\" Splinter swung his feet from the bunk, peered from the vision\n port, sleepiness instantly erased from his face.\n\n\n \"Hot damn!\" he chortled. \"Now we'll see a little action!\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane grinned, tried to conceal the excitement he felt. He shook\n his head, his fingers flickering over the control studs.\n\n\n \"Don't get your hopes too high, lad,\" he counseled. \"With those super\n Zelta guns, it won't take ten minutes to wipe out that monster.\"\n\n\n Splinter rubbed his hands together, sighed like a boy seeing his first\n circus. \"Listen, for ten minutes of that, I'd ride this chunk of metal\n for a year!\"\n\n\n \"Could be!\" Kerry Blane agreed.", "And then the scaly monster flashed in a half-turn, drove forward with\n jaws agape, wrenched and ripped at the smooth black throat of the other\n creature. The second creature rippled and undulated in agony, whipping\n the ocean to foam, then went limp. The victorious monster circled the\n body of its dead foe, then, majestically, plunged from sight into the\n ocean's depths. An instant later, the water frothed, as hundreds of\n lesser marine monsters attacked and fed on the floating corpse.\n\n\n \"Brrrr!\" Splinter shivered in sudden horror.\n\n\n Kerry Blane chuckled dryly. \"Feel like going for a swim?\" he asked\n conversationally.\n\n\n Splinter shook his head, watched the scene disappear from view to the\n rear of the line of flight, then sank back onto his bunk.\n\n\n \"Not me!\" he said deprecatingly." ], [ "Kerry Blane nodded. \"That was merely a pretext to keep foolhardy\n spacemen from losing their lives on the planet. In reality, the\n ocean is alive with an incredibly tiny marine worm that glows\n phosphorescently. The light generated from those billions of worms is\n reflected back from the clouds, makes Venus eternally lighted.\"\n\n\n He turned the ship to the North, relaxed a bit on the air bunk. He\n felt tired and worn, his body aching from the space bends of a few\n hours before.\n\n\n \"Take over,\" he said wearily. \"Take the ship North, and watch for any\n island.\"\n\n\n Splinter nodded, rested his long hands on the controls. The space\n cruiser lifted a bit in a sudden spurt of speed, and the rocket-sound\n was a solid thrum of unleashed power.", "Venus was a fluffy cotton ball hanging motionless in bottomless\n space. Far to the left, Mercury gleamed like a polished diamond in\n the sunlight. Kerry Blane cut the driving rockets, let the cruiser\n sink into a fast gravity-dive, guiding it only now and then by a brief\n flicker of a side jet.\n\n\n Splinter Wood watched breathlessly from the vision port, his long face\n eager and reckless, his eyes seeking to pierce the clouds that roiled\n and twisted uneasily over the surface of the planet.\n\n\n Kerry Blane glanced tolerantly at his young companion, felt a nostalgic\n tug at his heart when he remembered the first time he had approached\n the water-planet years before. Then, he had been a young and reckless\n firebrand, his fame already spreading, an unquenchable fire of\n adventure flaming in his heart.", "They could feel the first tug of gravity on their bodies, and through\n the vision port could see the greenish ball that was cloud-covered\n Venus. Excitement lifted their spirits, brought light to their eyes as\n they peered eagerly ahead.\n\n\n \"What's it really like?\" Splinter asked impatiently.\n\n\n Kerry Blane yawned, settled back luxuriously. \"I'll tell you later,\" he\n said, \"I'm going to take a nap and try to ease this bellyache of mine.\n Wake me up so that I can take over, when we land; Venus is a tricky\n place to set a ship on.\"\n\n\n He yawned again, drifted instantly into sleep, relaxing with the\n ability of a spaceman who sleeps when and if he can. Splinter smiled\n down at his sleeping partner, then turned back to the quartzite port.\n He shook his head a bit, remembering the stories he had heard about the\n water planet, wondering—wondering—\nII", "Kerry Blane rode the controls for the next three hours, searching the\n limitless ocean for the few specks of islands that followed the slow\n currents of the water planet. Always, there was the same misty light\n surrounding the ship, never dimming, giving a sense of unreality to the\n scene below. Nowhere was there the slightest sign of life until, in the\n fourth hour of flight, a tiny dot of blackness came slowly over the\n horizon's water line.\n\n\n Kerry Blane spun the ship in a tight circle, sent it flashing to the\n west. His keen eyes lighted, when he finally made out the turtle-like\n outline of the island, and he whistled softly, off-key, as he nudged\n the snoring Splinter.\n\n\n \"This is it, Sleeping Beauty,\" he called. \"Snap out of it!\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Whuzzat?\" Splinter grunted, rolled to his elbow.\n\n\n \"Here's the island.\"", "Finally, as a last resort so that he would not be thrown entirely\n aside, he had taken a desk job in the squadron offices. For six years\n he had dry-rotted there, waiting hopefully for the moment when his\n active services would be needed again.\n\n\n It was there that he had met and liked the ungainly Splinter Wood.\n There was something in the boy that had found a kindred spirit in Kerry\n Blane's heart, and he had taken the youngster in hand to give him the\n benefits of experience that had become legendary.\n\n\n Splinter Wood was a probationary pilot, had been admitted to the\n Interplanetary Squadron because of his inherent skill, even though his\n formal education had been fairly well neglected.\nNow, the two of them rode the pounding jets of a DX cruiser, bound\n for Venus to make a personal survey of its floating islands for the\n Interplanetary Squadron's Medical Division.", "His voice stilled, and he was silent, his eyes drinking in the weird\n incredible scene below.\nThe ocean was a shifting, white-capped wash of silvery light that\n gleamed with a bright phosphorescence of a hundred, intermingled,\n kaleidoscopic colors. And the unreal, unearthly light continued\n unbroken everywhere, reflected from the low-hanging clouds, reaching\n to the far horizon, bathing every detail of the planet in a brilliance\n more bright than moonlight.\n\n\n Splinter turned a wondering face. \"But the official reports say that\n there is no light on Venus,\" he exclaimed. \"That was one of the reasons\n given when exploration was forbidden!\"", "Kerry Blane chuckled again, swung the cruiser toward the tiny smudge of\n black on the horizon. Glowing water flashed beneath the ship, seeming\n to smooth into a gleaming mirror shot with dancing colors. There was no\n sign of life anywhere.\n\n\n Thirty minutes later, Kerry Blane circled the island that floated\n free in the phosphorescent ocean. His keen eyes searched the tangled\n luxuriant growth of the jungle below, searching for some indication\n that the protoplasmic monster he seeked was there.\n\n\n \"I don't see anything suspicious,\" Splinter contributed.\n\n\n \"There's nothing special to see,\" Kerry Blane said shortly. \"As I\n understand it, anyway, this chunk of animated appetite hangs around an\n island shaped like a turtle. However, our orders are to investigate\n every island, just in case there might be more than one of the\n monsters.\"", "Splinter lifted the second gun, pressed the stud, gazed white-faced at\n his companion.\n\n\n \"It won't work, either,\" he said stupidly. \"I don't get it? The source\n of power is limitless. Solar rays never—\"\n\n\n Old Kerry Blane dropped the first gun to his side, swore harshly.\n\n\n \"Damn it,\" he said. \"They didn't think of it; you didn't think of it;\n and I most certainly forgot! Solar rays can't penetrate the miles of\n clouds on Venus. Those guns are utterly useless as weapons!\"", "Splinter buckled on his dis-gun, excitement flaring in his eyes.\n\n\n \"Let's do a little exploring?\" he said eagerly.\n\n\n Kerry Blane shook his head, swung the cruiser north again.\n\n\n \"Plenty of time for that later,\" he said mildly. \"We'll find this\n turtle-island, make a landing, and take a look around. Later, if we're\n lucky enough to blow our objective to Kingdom Come, we'll do a little\n exploring of the other islands.\"\n\n\n \"Hell!\" Splinter scowled in mock disgust. \"An old woman like you should\n be taking in knitting for a living!\"", "He peered through the port, seeking any spot clear enough for a landing\n field. Except for a strip of open beach, the island was a solid mass of\n heavy fern-like growth.\n\n\n \"Belt yourself,\" Kerry Blane warned. \"If that beach isn't solid, I'll\n have to lift the ship in a hell of a hurry.\"\n\n\n \"Right!\" Splinter's fingers were all thumbs in his excitement.\n\n\n Kerry Blane set the controls for a shallow glide, his fingers moving\n like a concert pianist's. The cruiser yawed slightly, settled slowly\n in a flat shallow glide.\n\n\n \"We're going in,\" Kerry Blane said quietly.\n\n\n He closed a knife switch, seeing too late the vitamin capsule that was\n lodged in the slot. There was the sharp splutter of a short-circuit,\n and a thin tendril of smoke drifted upward.", "Planet of No-Return\nBy WILBUR S. PEACOCK\nThe orders were explicit: \"Destroy the\n\n 'THING' of Venus.\" But Patrolmen Kerry\n\n Blane and Splinter Wood, their space-ship\n\n wrecked, could not follow orders—their\n\n weapons were useless on the Water-world.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Winter 1942.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nOld Kerry Blane exploded.\n\n\n \"Damn it!\" he roared. \"I don't like you; and I don't like this ship;\n and I don't like the assignment; and I don't like those infernal pills\n you keep eating; and I—\"", "\"Orders are orders!\" Kerry Blane shrugged.\nHe swung the cruiser in a wide arc to the north, trebling the flying\n speed within minutes, handling the controls with a familiar dexterity.\n He said nothing, searched the gleaming ocean for the smudge of\n blackness that would denote another island. His gaze flicked amusedly,\n now and then, to the lanky Splinter who scowled moodily and toyed with\n the dis-gun in his long hands.\n\n\n \"Cheer up, lad,\" Kerry Blane said finally. \"I think you'll find plenty\n to occupy your time shortly.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe?\" Splinter said gloomily.\n\n\n He idly swallowed another vitamin capsule, grinned, when he saw Kerry\n Blane's automatic grimace of distaste. Then he yawned hugely, twisted\n into a comfortable position, dozed sleepily.", "Seconds flowed into moments, and the moments merged into one another,\n and still the clouds pressed with a visible strength against the\n ports. The rockets drummed steadily, holding the ship aloft, dropping\n it slowly toward the planet below. Then the clouds thinned, and,\n incredibly, were permeated with a dim and glowing light. A second\n later, and the clouds were gone, and a thousand feet below tumbled and\n tossed in a majestic display of ruthless strength an ocean that seemed\n to be composed of liquid fluorescence.\n\n\n Kerry Blane heard Splinter's instant sigh of unbelief.\n\n\n \"Good Lord!\" Splinter said, \"What—\"", "\"All right, all right!\" Splinter tucked the capsule box back into his\n pocket, grinned mockingly. \"But don't say I didn't warn you. With this\n shielded ship, and with no sunlight reaching Venus' surface, you're\n gonna be begging for some of my vitamin, super-concentrated pills\n before we get back to Earth.\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane made a rich, ripe noise with his mouth.\n\n\n \"Pfuii!\" he said very distinctly.\n\n\n \"Gracious!\" Splinter said in mock horror.\nThey made a strange contrast as they lay in their air bunks. Splinter\n was fully a head taller than the dour Irishman, and his lanky build\n gave a false impression of awkwardness. While the vitriolic Kerry Blane\n was short and compact, strength and quickness evident in every movement.", "He swung lithely from the portal, reached down a hand to help the\n older man. After much puffing and grunting, Kerry Blane managed to\n clamber through the port. They stood for a moment in silent wonder,\n staring at the long lazy rollers of milky fluorescence that rolled\n endlessly toward the beach, then turned to gaze at the great fern-like\n trees that towered two hundred feet into the air.\n\n\n \"How big do you feel now?\" Kerry Blane asked quietly.\n\n\n Splinter Wood was silent, awed by the beauty and the tremendous size of\n the growths on the water world.\n\n\n Kerry Blane walked the length of the cruiser, examining the slight\n damage done by the crash, evaluating the situation with a practiced\n gaze. He nodded slowly, retraced his steps, and stood looking at the\n furrow plowed in the sand.", "\"Damn!\" Kerry Blane swore briefly.\n\n\n There was an instant, terrific explosion of the stern jets, and the\n cruiser hurtled toward the beach like a gravity-crazed comet.\n\n\n Kerry Blane said absolutely nothing, his breath driven from him by the\n suck of inertia. His hands darted for the controls, seeking to balance\n the forces that threw the ship about like a toy. He cut all rockets\n with a smashing swoop of his hand, tried to fire the bow rockets. But\n the short had ruined the entire control system.\n\n\n For one interminable second, he saw the uncanny uprush of the island\n below. He flicked his gaze about, saw the instant terror that wiped\n all other expression from his young companion's face. Then the cruiser\n plowed into the silvery sand.", "Kerry Blane lit a cigarette, leaned toward a vision port. He felt again\n that thrill he had experienced when he had first flashed his single-man\n cruiser through the clouds years before. Then the breath caught in his\n throat, and he tapped his companion's arm.\n\n\n \"Take a look!\" he called excitedly.\n\n\n They fought in the ocean below, fought in a never-ending splashing of\n what seemed to be liquid fire. It was like watching a tri-dim screen of\n a news event, except for the utter lack of sound.", "Now, his aged but steady fingers rested lightly on the controls,\n brought the patrol cruiser closer to the cloud-banks on the line of\n demarcation between the sunward and sunless sides of the planet. He\n hummed tunelessly, strangely happy, as he peered ahead.\n\n\n \"Val Kenton died there,\" Splinter whispered softly, \"Died to save the\n lives of three other people!\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane nodded. \"Yes,\" he agreed, and his voice changed subtly.\n \"Val was a blackguard, a criminal; but he died in the best traditions\n of the service.\" He sighed. \"He never had a chance.\"\n\n\n \"Murdered!\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane smiled grimly. \"I guess I used too broad an interpretation\n of the word,\" he said gently. \"Anyway, one of our main tasks is to\n destroy the thing that killed him.\"\n\n\n His lean fingers tightened unconsciously.", "And then the scaly monster flashed in a half-turn, drove forward with\n jaws agape, wrenched and ripped at the smooth black throat of the other\n creature. The second creature rippled and undulated in agony, whipping\n the ocean to foam, then went limp. The victorious monster circled the\n body of its dead foe, then, majestically, plunged from sight into the\n ocean's depths. An instant later, the water frothed, as hundreds of\n lesser marine monsters attacked and fed on the floating corpse.\n\n\n \"Brrrr!\" Splinter shivered in sudden horror.\n\n\n Kerry Blane chuckled dryly. \"Feel like going for a swim?\" he asked\n conversationally.\n\n\n Splinter shook his head, watched the scene disappear from view to the\n rear of the line of flight, then sank back onto his bunk.\n\n\n \"Not me!\" he said deprecatingly.", "\"I'd like nothing better than to turn a Zelta-blaster on that chunk of\n living protoplasm and cremate it.\"\n\n\n Splinters shivered slightly. \"Do you think we'll find it?\" he asked.\n\n\n Kerry Blane nodded. \"I think it will find us; after all, it's just an\n animated appetite looking for food.\"\n\n\n He turned back to the controls, flipped a switch, and the cutting of\n the nose rocket dropped the ship in an angling glide toward the clouds\n a few miles below. Gravity was full strength now, and although not as\n great as Earth's, was still strong enough to bring a sense of giddiness\n to the men.\n\n\n \"Here we go!\" Splinter said tonelessly." ], [ "Venus was a fluffy cotton ball hanging motionless in bottomless\n space. Far to the left, Mercury gleamed like a polished diamond in\n the sunlight. Kerry Blane cut the driving rockets, let the cruiser\n sink into a fast gravity-dive, guiding it only now and then by a brief\n flicker of a side jet.\n\n\n Splinter Wood watched breathlessly from the vision port, his long face\n eager and reckless, his eyes seeking to pierce the clouds that roiled\n and twisted uneasily over the surface of the planet.\n\n\n Kerry Blane glanced tolerantly at his young companion, felt a nostalgic\n tug at his heart when he remembered the first time he had approached\n the water-planet years before. Then, he had been a young and reckless\n firebrand, his fame already spreading, an unquenchable fire of\n adventure flaming in his heart.", "They could feel the first tug of gravity on their bodies, and through\n the vision port could see the greenish ball that was cloud-covered\n Venus. Excitement lifted their spirits, brought light to their eyes as\n they peered eagerly ahead.\n\n\n \"What's it really like?\" Splinter asked impatiently.\n\n\n Kerry Blane yawned, settled back luxuriously. \"I'll tell you later,\" he\n said, \"I'm going to take a nap and try to ease this bellyache of mine.\n Wake me up so that I can take over, when we land; Venus is a tricky\n place to set a ship on.\"\n\n\n He yawned again, drifted instantly into sleep, relaxing with the\n ability of a spaceman who sleeps when and if he can. Splinter smiled\n down at his sleeping partner, then turned back to the quartzite port.\n He shook his head a bit, remembering the stories he had heard about the\n water planet, wondering—wondering—\nII", "Kerry Blane nodded. \"That was merely a pretext to keep foolhardy\n spacemen from losing their lives on the planet. In reality, the\n ocean is alive with an incredibly tiny marine worm that glows\n phosphorescently. The light generated from those billions of worms is\n reflected back from the clouds, makes Venus eternally lighted.\"\n\n\n He turned the ship to the North, relaxed a bit on the air bunk. He\n felt tired and worn, his body aching from the space bends of a few\n hours before.\n\n\n \"Take over,\" he said wearily. \"Take the ship North, and watch for any\n island.\"\n\n\n Splinter nodded, rested his long hands on the controls. The space\n cruiser lifted a bit in a sudden spurt of speed, and the rocket-sound\n was a solid thrum of unleashed power.", "His voice stilled, and he was silent, his eyes drinking in the weird\n incredible scene below.\nThe ocean was a shifting, white-capped wash of silvery light that\n gleamed with a bright phosphorescence of a hundred, intermingled,\n kaleidoscopic colors. And the unreal, unearthly light continued\n unbroken everywhere, reflected from the low-hanging clouds, reaching\n to the far horizon, bathing every detail of the planet in a brilliance\n more bright than moonlight.\n\n\n Splinter turned a wondering face. \"But the official reports say that\n there is no light on Venus,\" he exclaimed. \"That was one of the reasons\n given when exploration was forbidden!\"", "Splinter lifted the second gun, pressed the stud, gazed white-faced at\n his companion.\n\n\n \"It won't work, either,\" he said stupidly. \"I don't get it? The source\n of power is limitless. Solar rays never—\"\n\n\n Old Kerry Blane dropped the first gun to his side, swore harshly.\n\n\n \"Damn it,\" he said. \"They didn't think of it; you didn't think of it;\n and I most certainly forgot! Solar rays can't penetrate the miles of\n clouds on Venus. Those guns are utterly useless as weapons!\"", "The great cottony batts of roiling clouds rushed up to meet the ship,\n bringing the first sense of violent movement in more than a week of\n flying. There was something awesome and breath-taking in the speed with\n which the ship dropped toward the planet.\n\n\n Tendrils of vapor touched the ports, were whipped aside, then were\n replaced by heavier fingers of cloud. Kerry Blane pressed a firing\n stud, and nose rockets thrummed in a rising crescendo as the free fall\n of the cruiser was checked. Heat rose in the cabin from the friction of\n the outer air, then dissipated, as the force-screen voltometer leaped\n higher.\n\n\n Then, as though it had never been, the sun disappeared, and there was\n only a gray blankness pressing about the ship. Gone was all sense of\n movement, and the ship seemed to hover in a gray nothingness.", "He swung lithely from the portal, reached down a hand to help the\n older man. After much puffing and grunting, Kerry Blane managed to\n clamber through the port. They stood for a moment in silent wonder,\n staring at the long lazy rollers of milky fluorescence that rolled\n endlessly toward the beach, then turned to gaze at the great fern-like\n trees that towered two hundred feet into the air.\n\n\n \"How big do you feel now?\" Kerry Blane asked quietly.\n\n\n Splinter Wood was silent, awed by the beauty and the tremendous size of\n the growths on the water world.\n\n\n Kerry Blane walked the length of the cruiser, examining the slight\n damage done by the crash, evaluating the situation with a practiced\n gaze. He nodded slowly, retraced his steps, and stood looking at the\n furrow plowed in the sand.", "Seconds flowed into moments, and the moments merged into one another,\n and still the clouds pressed with a visible strength against the\n ports. The rockets drummed steadily, holding the ship aloft, dropping\n it slowly toward the planet below. Then the clouds thinned, and,\n incredibly, were permeated with a dim and glowing light. A second\n later, and the clouds were gone, and a thousand feet below tumbled and\n tossed in a majestic display of ruthless strength an ocean that seemed\n to be composed of liquid fluorescence.\n\n\n Kerry Blane heard Splinter's instant sigh of unbelief.\n\n\n \"Good Lord!\" Splinter said, \"What—\"", "He peered through the port, seeking any spot clear enough for a landing\n field. Except for a strip of open beach, the island was a solid mass of\n heavy fern-like growth.\n\n\n \"Belt yourself,\" Kerry Blane warned. \"If that beach isn't solid, I'll\n have to lift the ship in a hell of a hurry.\"\n\n\n \"Right!\" Splinter's fingers were all thumbs in his excitement.\n\n\n Kerry Blane set the controls for a shallow glide, his fingers moving\n like a concert pianist's. The cruiser yawed slightly, settled slowly\n in a flat shallow glide.\n\n\n \"We're going in,\" Kerry Blane said quietly.\n\n\n He closed a knife switch, seeing too late the vitamin capsule that was\n lodged in the slot. There was the sharp splutter of a short-circuit,\n and a thin tendril of smoke drifted upward.", "Finally, as a last resort so that he would not be thrown entirely\n aside, he had taken a desk job in the squadron offices. For six years\n he had dry-rotted there, waiting hopefully for the moment when his\n active services would be needed again.\n\n\n It was there that he had met and liked the ungainly Splinter Wood.\n There was something in the boy that had found a kindred spirit in Kerry\n Blane's heart, and he had taken the youngster in hand to give him the\n benefits of experience that had become legendary.\n\n\n Splinter Wood was a probationary pilot, had been admitted to the\n Interplanetary Squadron because of his inherent skill, even though his\n formal education had been fairly well neglected.\nNow, the two of them rode the pounding jets of a DX cruiser, bound\n for Venus to make a personal survey of its floating islands for the\n Interplanetary Squadron's Medical Division.", "\"I'd like nothing better than to turn a Zelta-blaster on that chunk of\n living protoplasm and cremate it.\"\n\n\n Splinters shivered slightly. \"Do you think we'll find it?\" he asked.\n\n\n Kerry Blane nodded. \"I think it will find us; after all, it's just an\n animated appetite looking for food.\"\n\n\n He turned back to the controls, flipped a switch, and the cutting of\n the nose rocket dropped the ship in an angling glide toward the clouds\n a few miles below. Gravity was full strength now, and although not as\n great as Earth's, was still strong enough to bring a sense of giddiness\n to the men.\n\n\n \"Here we go!\" Splinter said tonelessly.", "Now, his aged but steady fingers rested lightly on the controls,\n brought the patrol cruiser closer to the cloud-banks on the line of\n demarcation between the sunward and sunless sides of the planet. He\n hummed tunelessly, strangely happy, as he peered ahead.\n\n\n \"Val Kenton died there,\" Splinter whispered softly, \"Died to save the\n lives of three other people!\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane nodded. \"Yes,\" he agreed, and his voice changed subtly.\n \"Val was a blackguard, a criminal; but he died in the best traditions\n of the service.\" He sighed. \"He never had a chance.\"\n\n\n \"Murdered!\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane smiled grimly. \"I guess I used too broad an interpretation\n of the word,\" he said gently. \"Anyway, one of our main tasks is to\n destroy the thing that killed him.\"\n\n\n His lean fingers tightened unconsciously.", "Kerry Blane rode the controls for the next three hours, searching the\n limitless ocean for the few specks of islands that followed the slow\n currents of the water planet. Always, there was the same misty light\n surrounding the ship, never dimming, giving a sense of unreality to the\n scene below. Nowhere was there the slightest sign of life until, in the\n fourth hour of flight, a tiny dot of blackness came slowly over the\n horizon's water line.\n\n\n Kerry Blane spun the ship in a tight circle, sent it flashing to the\n west. His keen eyes lighted, when he finally made out the turtle-like\n outline of the island, and he whistled softly, off-key, as he nudged\n the snoring Splinter.\n\n\n \"This is it, Sleeping Beauty,\" he called. \"Snap out of it!\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Whuzzat?\" Splinter grunted, rolled to his elbow.\n\n\n \"Here's the island.\"", "\"All right, all right!\" Splinter tucked the capsule box back into his\n pocket, grinned mockingly. \"But don't say I didn't warn you. With this\n shielded ship, and with no sunlight reaching Venus' surface, you're\n gonna be begging for some of my vitamin, super-concentrated pills\n before we get back to Earth.\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane made a rich, ripe noise with his mouth.\n\n\n \"Pfuii!\" he said very distinctly.\n\n\n \"Gracious!\" Splinter said in mock horror.\nThey made a strange contrast as they lay in their air bunks. Splinter\n was fully a head taller than the dour Irishman, and his lanky build\n gave a false impression of awkwardness. While the vitriolic Kerry Blane\n was short and compact, strength and quickness evident in every movement.", "Planet of No-Return\nBy WILBUR S. PEACOCK\nThe orders were explicit: \"Destroy the\n\n 'THING' of Venus.\" But Patrolmen Kerry\n\n Blane and Splinter Wood, their space-ship\n\n wrecked, could not follow orders—their\n\n weapons were useless on the Water-world.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Winter 1942.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nOld Kerry Blane exploded.\n\n\n \"Damn it!\" he roared. \"I don't like you; and I don't like this ship;\n and I don't like the assignment; and I don't like those infernal pills\n you keep eating; and I—\"", "Kerry Blane crouched over the control panel, his hands moving deftly,\n his eyes flicking from one instrument to another. Tiny lines of\n concentration etched themselves about his mouth, and perspiration\n beaded his forehead. He rode that cruiser through the miles of clouds\n through sheer instinctive ability, seeming to fly it as though he were\n an integral part of the ship.\n\n\n Splinter Wood watched him with awe in his eyes, seeing for the first\n time the incredible instinct that had made Kerry Blane the idol of a\n billion people. He relaxed visibly, all instinctive fear allayed by the\n brilliant competence of his companion.", "\"Won't be any trouble at all to lift the ship,\" he called. \"After\n rewiring the board, we'll turn the ship with an underjet, swing it\n about, and head her toward the sea.\"\n\n\n Splinter nodded, dropped into the open port. A moment later, he flipped\n a rope ladder outside, where it dangled to the ground, then climbed out\n himself, carrying the two Zelta guns.\n\n\n \"We'd better test these,\" he said. \"We don't want any slip-ups when we\n do go into action.\"\n\n\n He climbed down the ladder, laid the guns aside, then reached up a\n hand to aid Kerry Blane's descent. Kerry Blane came down slowly and\n awkwardly, jumped the last few feet. He felt surprisingly light and\n strong in the lesser gravity.", "Splinter rolled his six foot three of lanky body into a more\n comfortable position on the air-bunk. He yawned tremendously, fumbled a\n small box from his shirt pocket, and removed a marble-like capsule.\n\n\n \"Better take one of these,\" he warned. \"You're liable to get the space\n bends at any moment.\"\n\n\n Old Kerry Blane snorted, batted the box aside impatiently, scowled\n moodily at the capsules that bounced for a moment against the pilot\n room's walls before hanging motionless in the air.\n\n\n \"Mister Wood,\" he said icily, \"I was flying a space ship while they\n were changing your pants twenty times a day. When I want advice on how\n to fly a ship, how to cure space bends, how to handle a Zelta ray, or\n how to spit—I'll ask you! Until then, you and your bloody marbles can\n go plumb straight to the devil!\"", "\"Damn!\" Kerry Blane swore briefly.\n\n\n There was an instant, terrific explosion of the stern jets, and the\n cruiser hurtled toward the beach like a gravity-crazed comet.\n\n\n Kerry Blane said absolutely nothing, his breath driven from him by the\n suck of inertia. His hands darted for the controls, seeking to balance\n the forces that threw the ship about like a toy. He cut all rockets\n with a smashing swoop of his hand, tried to fire the bow rockets. But\n the short had ruined the entire control system.\n\n\n For one interminable second, he saw the uncanny uprush of the island\n below. He flicked his gaze about, saw the instant terror that wiped\n all other expression from his young companion's face. Then the cruiser\n plowed into the silvery sand.", "Kerry Blane lit a cigarette, leaned toward a vision port. He felt again\n that thrill he had experienced when he had first flashed his single-man\n cruiser through the clouds years before. Then the breath caught in his\n throat, and he tapped his companion's arm.\n\n\n \"Take a look!\" he called excitedly.\n\n\n They fought in the ocean below, fought in a never-ending splashing of\n what seemed to be liquid fire. It was like watching a tri-dim screen of\n a news event, except for the utter lack of sound." ], [ "And then the scaly monster flashed in a half-turn, drove forward with\n jaws agape, wrenched and ripped at the smooth black throat of the other\n creature. The second creature rippled and undulated in agony, whipping\n the ocean to foam, then went limp. The victorious monster circled the\n body of its dead foe, then, majestically, plunged from sight into the\n ocean's depths. An instant later, the water frothed, as hundreds of\n lesser marine monsters attacked and fed on the floating corpse.\n\n\n \"Brrrr!\" Splinter shivered in sudden horror.\n\n\n Kerry Blane chuckled dryly. \"Feel like going for a swim?\" he asked\n conversationally.\n\n\n Splinter shook his head, watched the scene disappear from view to the\n rear of the line of flight, then sank back onto his bunk.\n\n\n \"Not me!\" he said deprecatingly.", "Splinter buckled on his dis-gun, excitement flaring in his eyes.\n\n\n \"Let's do a little exploring?\" he said eagerly.\n\n\n Kerry Blane shook his head, swung the cruiser north again.\n\n\n \"Plenty of time for that later,\" he said mildly. \"We'll find this\n turtle-island, make a landing, and take a look around. Later, if we're\n lucky enough to blow our objective to Kingdom Come, we'll do a little\n exploring of the other islands.\"\n\n\n \"Hell!\" Splinter scowled in mock disgust. \"An old woman like you should\n be taking in knitting for a living!\"", "\"Splinter\" Wood grinned.\n\n\n \"Seems to me, Kerry,\" he remarked humorously, \"that you don't like much\n of anything!\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane growled unintelligibly, batted the injector lever with a\n calloused hand. His grizzled hair was a stiff wiry mop on his small\n head, and his oversize jaw was thrust belligerently forward. But deep\n within his eyes, where he hoped it was hidden, was a friendly twinkle\n that gave the lie to his speech.\n\n\n \"You're a squirt!\" he snapped disagreeably. \"You're not dry behind\n the ears, yet. You're like the rest of these kids who call themselves\n pilots—only more so! And why the hell the chief had to sic you on me,\n on an exploration trip this important—well, I'll never understand.\"", "His body arced again and again against the restraining straps, and his\n mouth was open in a soundless scream. He sensed dimly that his partner\n had wrenched open a wall door, removed metal medicine kits, and was\n fumbling through their contents. He felt the bite of the hypodermic,\n felt a deadly numbness replace the raging torment that had been his\n for seconds. He swallowed three capsules automatically, passed into a\n coma-like sleep, woke hours later to stare clear-eyed into Splinter's\n concerned face.\n\n\n \"Close, wasn't it?\" he said weakly, conversationally.\n\n\n \"Close enough!\" Splinter agreed relievedly. \"If you had followed my\n advice and taken those vitamin capsules, you'd never have had the\n bends.\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane grinned, winced when he felt the dull ache in his body.", "Kerry Blane rode the controls for the next three hours, searching the\n limitless ocean for the few specks of islands that followed the slow\n currents of the water planet. Always, there was the same misty light\n surrounding the ship, never dimming, giving a sense of unreality to the\n scene below. Nowhere was there the slightest sign of life until, in the\n fourth hour of flight, a tiny dot of blackness came slowly over the\n horizon's water line.\n\n\n Kerry Blane spun the ship in a tight circle, sent it flashing to the\n west. His keen eyes lighted, when he finally made out the turtle-like\n outline of the island, and he whistled softly, off-key, as he nudged\n the snoring Splinter.\n\n\n \"This is it, Sleeping Beauty,\" he called. \"Snap out of it!\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Whuzzat?\" Splinter grunted, rolled to his elbow.\n\n\n \"Here's the island.\"", "\"\nMe!\nYou've got orders to take care of\nme\n?\" Kerry Blane choked\n incoherently for a moment, red tiding cholerically upward from his\n loosened collar.\n\n\n \"Of course!\" Splinter grinned.\n\n\n Kerry Blane exploded, words spewing volcanically forth. Splinter\n relaxed, his booted foot beating out a dull rhythm to the colorful\n language learned through almost fifty years of spacing. And at last,\n when Kerry Blane had quieted until he but smoldered, he leaned over and\n touched the old spacer on the sleeve.\n\n\n \"Seventy-eight!\" he remarked pleasantly.\n\n\n \"Seventy-eight what?\" Kerry Blane asked sullenly, the old twinkle\n beginning to light again deep in his eyes.", "\"Seventy-eight new words—and you swore them beautifully!\" Splinter\n beamed. \"Some day you can teach them to me.\"\n\n\n They laughed then, Old Kerry Blane and young Splinter Wood, and\n the warmth of their friendship was a tangible thing in the small\n control-room of the cruiser.\n\n\n And in the midst of their laughter, Old Kerry Blane choked in agony,\n surged desperately against his bunk straps.\n\n\n He screamed unknowingly, feeling only the horrible excruciating agony\n of his body, tasting the blood that gushed from his mouth and nostrils.\n His muscles were knotted cords that he could not loosen, and his blood\n was a surging stream that pounded at his throbbing temples. The air he\n breathed seemed to be molten flame.", "\"I've had the bends before, and lived through them!\" he said, still\n weakly defiant.\n\n\n \"That's the past,\" Splinter said quietly. \"This is the present, and you\n take your pills every day, just as I do—from now on.\"\n\n\n \"All right—and thanks!\"\n\n\n \"Forget it!\" Splinter flushed in quick embarrassment.\n\n\n A buzzer sounded from the instrument panel, and a tiny light glowed\n redly.\n\n\n \"Six hours more,\" Splinter said, turned to the instrument panel.\n\n\n His long hands played over the instrument panel, checking, controlling\n the rocket fire, adjusting delicate instruments to hairline marks.\n Kerry Blane nodded in silent approval.", "\"All right, all right!\" Splinter tucked the capsule box back into his\n pocket, grinned mockingly. \"But don't say I didn't warn you. With this\n shielded ship, and with no sunlight reaching Venus' surface, you're\n gonna be begging for some of my vitamin, super-concentrated pills\n before we get back to Earth.\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane made a rich, ripe noise with his mouth.\n\n\n \"Pfuii!\" he said very distinctly.\n\n\n \"Gracious!\" Splinter said in mock horror.\nThey made a strange contrast as they lay in their air bunks. Splinter\n was fully a head taller than the dour Irishman, and his lanky build\n gave a false impression of awkwardness. While the vitriolic Kerry Blane\n was short and compact, strength and quickness evident in every movement.", "\"Ten to one we don't get back!\" Splinter said pessimistically.\n\n\n Kerry Blane scrubbed out his cigarette, scowled bleakly at the\n instrument panel. He sensed the faint thread of fear in the youngster's\n tone, and a nostalgic twinge touched his heart, for he was remembering\n the days of his youth when he had a full life to look forward to.\n\n\n \"If you're afraid, you can get out and walk back,\" he snapped\n disagreeably.\n\n\n A grin lifted the corners of Splinter's long mouth, spread into his\n eyes. His hand unconsciously came up, touched the tiny squadron pin on\n his lapel.\n\n\n \"Sorry to disappoint you, glory grabber,\" he said mockingly, \"but I've\n got definite orders to take care of you.\"", "Kerry Blane crouched over the control panel, his hands moving deftly,\n his eyes flicking from one instrument to another. Tiny lines of\n concentration etched themselves about his mouth, and perspiration\n beaded his forehead. He rode that cruiser through the miles of clouds\n through sheer instinctive ability, seeming to fly it as though he were\n an integral part of the ship.\n\n\n Splinter Wood watched him with awe in his eyes, seeing for the first\n time the incredible instinct that had made Kerry Blane the idol of a\n billion people. He relaxed visibly, all instinctive fear allayed by the\n brilliant competence of his companion.", "\"Forget it, lad,\" he said more kindly, \"those things happen. Now, if\n you'll bind a splint about my arm, we'll see what we can do about\n righting the ship.\"\n\n\n Splinter nodded, opened the medical locker, worked with tape and\n splints for minutes. Great beads of perspiration stood out in high\n relief on Kerry Blane's forehead, but he made no sound. At last,\n Splinter finished, tucked the supplies away.\n\n\n \"Now what?\" he asked subduedly.\n\n\n \"Let's take a look outside, maybe set up the Zelta guns. Can't tell but\n what that protoplasmic nightmare might take a notion to pay us a visit\n in the near future!\"\n\n\n \"Right!\" Splinter unscrewed the port cogs, swung the portal back.", "Finally, as a last resort so that he would not be thrown entirely\n aside, he had taken a desk job in the squadron offices. For six years\n he had dry-rotted there, waiting hopefully for the moment when his\n active services would be needed again.\n\n\n It was there that he had met and liked the ungainly Splinter Wood.\n There was something in the boy that had found a kindred spirit in Kerry\n Blane's heart, and he had taken the youngster in hand to give him the\n benefits of experience that had become legendary.\n\n\n Splinter Wood was a probationary pilot, had been admitted to the\n Interplanetary Squadron because of his inherent skill, even though his\n formal education had been fairly well neglected.\nNow, the two of them rode the pounding jets of a DX cruiser, bound\n for Venus to make a personal survey of its floating islands for the\n Interplanetary Squadron's Medical Division.", "\"Orders are orders!\" Kerry Blane shrugged.\nHe swung the cruiser in a wide arc to the north, trebling the flying\n speed within minutes, handling the controls with a familiar dexterity.\n He said nothing, searched the gleaming ocean for the smudge of\n blackness that would denote another island. His gaze flicked amusedly,\n now and then, to the lanky Splinter who scowled moodily and toyed with\n the dis-gun in his long hands.\n\n\n \"Cheer up, lad,\" Kerry Blane said finally. \"I think you'll find plenty\n to occupy your time shortly.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe?\" Splinter said gloomily.\n\n\n He idly swallowed another vitamin capsule, grinned, when he saw Kerry\n Blane's automatic grimace of distaste. Then he yawned hugely, twisted\n into a comfortable position, dozed sleepily.", "He stood, leaning against the ship, watching as Splinter picked up\n the first gun and leveled it at a gigantic tree. Splinter sighted\n carefully, winked at the older man, then pressed the firing stud.\n\n\n Nothing happened; there was no hissing crackle of released energy.\n\n\n Kerry Blane strode forward, puzzlement on his lined face, his hand\n out-stretched toward the defective weapon. Splinter gaped at the gun in\n his hands, held it out wordlessly.\n\n\n \"The crash must have broken something,\" Kerry Blane said slowly.\n\n\n Splinter shook his head. \"There's only one moving part,\" he said, \"and\n that's the force gate on the firing stud.\"\n\n\n \"Try the other,\" Kerry Blane said slowly.\n\n\n \"Okay!\"", "\"Everything is more or less okay,\" he said. \"The board will have to\n be rewired, but nothing else seems to be damaged so that repairs are\n needed.\"\n\n\n Splinter looked up from his task of bandaging his leg. \"What caused\n the crash?\" he asked. \"One minute, everything was all right; the next,\n Blooey!\"\n\n\n Anger suddenly mottled Kerry Blane's face; he swore monotonously and\n bitterly for a moment.\n\n\n \"Those gol-damned pills you been taking caused the crash!\" he roared.\n \"One of them broke and shorted out the control board.\" He scowled at\n the incredulous Splinter. \"By the three tails of a Martian sand-pup, I\n ought to cram the rest of them down your throat, boxes and all!\"\n\n\n Splinter flushed, seemed to be fumbling for words. After a bit, Kerry\n Blane grinned.", "\"Oh!\" Splinter swung his feet from the bunk, peered from the vision\n port, sleepiness instantly erased from his face.\n\n\n \"Hot damn!\" he chortled. \"Now we'll see a little action!\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane grinned, tried to conceal the excitement he felt. He shook\n his head, his fingers flickering over the control studs.\n\n\n \"Don't get your hopes too high, lad,\" he counseled. \"With those super\n Zelta guns, it won't take ten minutes to wipe out that monster.\"\n\n\n Splinter rubbed his hands together, sighed like a boy seeing his first\n circus. \"Listen, for ten minutes of that, I'd ride this chunk of metal\n for a year!\"\n\n\n \"Could be!\" Kerry Blane agreed.", "Now, his aged but steady fingers rested lightly on the controls,\n brought the patrol cruiser closer to the cloud-banks on the line of\n demarcation between the sunward and sunless sides of the planet. He\n hummed tunelessly, strangely happy, as he peered ahead.\n\n\n \"Val Kenton died there,\" Splinter whispered softly, \"Died to save the\n lives of three other people!\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane nodded. \"Yes,\" he agreed, and his voice changed subtly.\n \"Val was a blackguard, a criminal; but he died in the best traditions\n of the service.\" He sighed. \"He never had a chance.\"\n\n\n \"Murdered!\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane smiled grimly. \"I guess I used too broad an interpretation\n of the word,\" he said gently. \"Anyway, one of our main tasks is to\n destroy the thing that killed him.\"\n\n\n His lean fingers tightened unconsciously.", "They could feel the first tug of gravity on their bodies, and through\n the vision port could see the greenish ball that was cloud-covered\n Venus. Excitement lifted their spirits, brought light to their eyes as\n they peered eagerly ahead.\n\n\n \"What's it really like?\" Splinter asked impatiently.\n\n\n Kerry Blane yawned, settled back luxuriously. \"I'll tell you later,\" he\n said, \"I'm going to take a nap and try to ease this bellyache of mine.\n Wake me up so that I can take over, when we land; Venus is a tricky\n place to set a ship on.\"\n\n\n He yawned again, drifted instantly into sleep, relaxing with the\n ability of a spaceman who sleeps when and if he can. Splinter smiled\n down at his sleeping partner, then turned back to the quartzite port.\n He shook his head a bit, remembering the stories he had heard about the\n water planet, wondering—wondering—\nII", "Seconds flowed into moments, and the moments merged into one another,\n and still the clouds pressed with a visible strength against the\n ports. The rockets drummed steadily, holding the ship aloft, dropping\n it slowly toward the planet below. Then the clouds thinned, and,\n incredibly, were permeated with a dim and glowing light. A second\n later, and the clouds were gone, and a thousand feet below tumbled and\n tossed in a majestic display of ruthless strength an ocean that seemed\n to be composed of liquid fluorescence.\n\n\n Kerry Blane heard Splinter's instant sigh of unbelief.\n\n\n \"Good Lord!\" Splinter said, \"What—\"" ], [ "Kerry Blane had flown every type of ship that rode in space. In the\n passing years, he had flight-tested almost every new experimental ship,\n had flown them with increasing skill, had earned a reputation as a\n trouble shooter on any kind of craft.\n\n\n But even Kerry Blane had to retire eventually.\n\n\n A great retirement banquet had been given in his honor by the\n Interplanetary Squadron. There had been the usual speeches and\n presentations; and Kerry Blane had heard them all, had thanked the\n donors of the gifts. But it was not until the next morning, when he was\n dressed in civilian clothes for the first time in forty years, that he\n realized the enormity of the thing that had happened to his life.\n\n\n Something died within Kerry Blane's heart that morning, shriveled and\n passed away, leaving him suddenly shrunken and old. He had become like\n a rusty old freighter couched between the gleaming bodies of great\n space warriors.", "Now, his aged but steady fingers rested lightly on the controls,\n brought the patrol cruiser closer to the cloud-banks on the line of\n demarcation between the sunward and sunless sides of the planet. He\n hummed tunelessly, strangely happy, as he peered ahead.\n\n\n \"Val Kenton died there,\" Splinter whispered softly, \"Died to save the\n lives of three other people!\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane nodded. \"Yes,\" he agreed, and his voice changed subtly.\n \"Val was a blackguard, a criminal; but he died in the best traditions\n of the service.\" He sighed. \"He never had a chance.\"\n\n\n \"Murdered!\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane smiled grimly. \"I guess I used too broad an interpretation\n of the word,\" he said gently. \"Anyway, one of our main tasks is to\n destroy the thing that killed him.\"\n\n\n His lean fingers tightened unconsciously.", "Finally, as a last resort so that he would not be thrown entirely\n aside, he had taken a desk job in the squadron offices. For six years\n he had dry-rotted there, waiting hopefully for the moment when his\n active services would be needed again.\n\n\n It was there that he had met and liked the ungainly Splinter Wood.\n There was something in the boy that had found a kindred spirit in Kerry\n Blane's heart, and he had taken the youngster in hand to give him the\n benefits of experience that had become legendary.\n\n\n Splinter Wood was a probationary pilot, had been admitted to the\n Interplanetary Squadron because of his inherent skill, even though his\n formal education had been fairly well neglected.\nNow, the two of them rode the pounding jets of a DX cruiser, bound\n for Venus to make a personal survey of its floating islands for the\n Interplanetary Squadron's Medical Division.", "\"Ten to one we don't get back!\" Splinter said pessimistically.\n\n\n Kerry Blane scrubbed out his cigarette, scowled bleakly at the\n instrument panel. He sensed the faint thread of fear in the youngster's\n tone, and a nostalgic twinge touched his heart, for he was remembering\n the days of his youth when he had a full life to look forward to.\n\n\n \"If you're afraid, you can get out and walk back,\" he snapped\n disagreeably.\n\n\n A grin lifted the corners of Splinter's long mouth, spread into his\n eyes. His hand unconsciously came up, touched the tiny squadron pin on\n his lapel.\n\n\n \"Sorry to disappoint you, glory grabber,\" he said mockingly, \"but I've\n got definite orders to take care of you.\"", "\"\nMe!\nYou've got orders to take care of\nme\n?\" Kerry Blane choked\n incoherently for a moment, red tiding cholerically upward from his\n loosened collar.\n\n\n \"Of course!\" Splinter grinned.\n\n\n Kerry Blane exploded, words spewing volcanically forth. Splinter\n relaxed, his booted foot beating out a dull rhythm to the colorful\n language learned through almost fifty years of spacing. And at last,\n when Kerry Blane had quieted until he but smoldered, he leaned over and\n touched the old spacer on the sleeve.\n\n\n \"Seventy-eight!\" he remarked pleasantly.\n\n\n \"Seventy-eight what?\" Kerry Blane asked sullenly, the old twinkle\n beginning to light again deep in his eyes.", "Splinter buckled on his dis-gun, excitement flaring in his eyes.\n\n\n \"Let's do a little exploring?\" he said eagerly.\n\n\n Kerry Blane shook his head, swung the cruiser north again.\n\n\n \"Plenty of time for that later,\" he said mildly. \"We'll find this\n turtle-island, make a landing, and take a look around. Later, if we're\n lucky enough to blow our objective to Kingdom Come, we'll do a little\n exploring of the other islands.\"\n\n\n \"Hell!\" Splinter scowled in mock disgust. \"An old woman like you should\n be taking in knitting for a living!\"", "\"I've had the bends before, and lived through them!\" he said, still\n weakly defiant.\n\n\n \"That's the past,\" Splinter said quietly. \"This is the present, and you\n take your pills every day, just as I do—from now on.\"\n\n\n \"All right—and thanks!\"\n\n\n \"Forget it!\" Splinter flushed in quick embarrassment.\n\n\n A buzzer sounded from the instrument panel, and a tiny light glowed\n redly.\n\n\n \"Six hours more,\" Splinter said, turned to the instrument panel.\n\n\n His long hands played over the instrument panel, checking, controlling\n the rocket fire, adjusting delicate instruments to hairline marks.\n Kerry Blane nodded in silent approval.", "Kerry Blane crouched over the control panel, his hands moving deftly,\n his eyes flicking from one instrument to another. Tiny lines of\n concentration etched themselves about his mouth, and perspiration\n beaded his forehead. He rode that cruiser through the miles of clouds\n through sheer instinctive ability, seeming to fly it as though he were\n an integral part of the ship.\n\n\n Splinter Wood watched him with awe in his eyes, seeing for the first\n time the incredible instinct that had made Kerry Blane the idol of a\n billion people. He relaxed visibly, all instinctive fear allayed by the\n brilliant competence of his companion.", "\"Orders are orders!\" Kerry Blane shrugged.\nHe swung the cruiser in a wide arc to the north, trebling the flying\n speed within minutes, handling the controls with a familiar dexterity.\n He said nothing, searched the gleaming ocean for the smudge of\n blackness that would denote another island. His gaze flicked amusedly,\n now and then, to the lanky Splinter who scowled moodily and toyed with\n the dis-gun in his long hands.\n\n\n \"Cheer up, lad,\" Kerry Blane said finally. \"I think you'll find plenty\n to occupy your time shortly.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe?\" Splinter said gloomily.\n\n\n He idly swallowed another vitamin capsule, grinned, when he saw Kerry\n Blane's automatic grimace of distaste. Then he yawned hugely, twisted\n into a comfortable position, dozed sleepily.", "\"Damn!\" Kerry Blane swore briefly.\n\n\n There was an instant, terrific explosion of the stern jets, and the\n cruiser hurtled toward the beach like a gravity-crazed comet.\n\n\n Kerry Blane said absolutely nothing, his breath driven from him by the\n suck of inertia. His hands darted for the controls, seeking to balance\n the forces that threw the ship about like a toy. He cut all rockets\n with a smashing swoop of his hand, tried to fire the bow rockets. But\n the short had ruined the entire control system.\n\n\n For one interminable second, he saw the uncanny uprush of the island\n below. He flicked his gaze about, saw the instant terror that wiped\n all other expression from his young companion's face. Then the cruiser\n plowed into the silvery sand.", "Kerry Blane rode the controls for the next three hours, searching the\n limitless ocean for the few specks of islands that followed the slow\n currents of the water planet. Always, there was the same misty light\n surrounding the ship, never dimming, giving a sense of unreality to the\n scene below. Nowhere was there the slightest sign of life until, in the\n fourth hour of flight, a tiny dot of blackness came slowly over the\n horizon's water line.\n\n\n Kerry Blane spun the ship in a tight circle, sent it flashing to the\n west. His keen eyes lighted, when he finally made out the turtle-like\n outline of the island, and he whistled softly, off-key, as he nudged\n the snoring Splinter.\n\n\n \"This is it, Sleeping Beauty,\" he called. \"Snap out of it!\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Whuzzat?\" Splinter grunted, rolled to his elbow.\n\n\n \"Here's the island.\"", "\"Splinter\" Wood grinned.\n\n\n \"Seems to me, Kerry,\" he remarked humorously, \"that you don't like much\n of anything!\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane growled unintelligibly, batted the injector lever with a\n calloused hand. His grizzled hair was a stiff wiry mop on his small\n head, and his oversize jaw was thrust belligerently forward. But deep\n within his eyes, where he hoped it was hidden, was a friendly twinkle\n that gave the lie to his speech.\n\n\n \"You're a squirt!\" he snapped disagreeably. \"You're not dry behind\n the ears, yet. You're like the rest of these kids who call themselves\n pilots—only more so! And why the hell the chief had to sic you on me,\n on an exploration trip this important—well, I'll never understand.\"", "His body arced again and again against the restraining straps, and his\n mouth was open in a soundless scream. He sensed dimly that his partner\n had wrenched open a wall door, removed metal medicine kits, and was\n fumbling through their contents. He felt the bite of the hypodermic,\n felt a deadly numbness replace the raging torment that had been his\n for seconds. He swallowed three capsules automatically, passed into a\n coma-like sleep, woke hours later to stare clear-eyed into Splinter's\n concerned face.\n\n\n \"Close, wasn't it?\" he said weakly, conversationally.\n\n\n \"Close enough!\" Splinter agreed relievedly. \"If you had followed my\n advice and taken those vitamin capsules, you'd never have had the\n bends.\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane grinned, winced when he felt the dull ache in his body.", "\"Won't be any trouble at all to lift the ship,\" he called. \"After\n rewiring the board, we'll turn the ship with an underjet, swing it\n about, and head her toward the sea.\"\n\n\n Splinter nodded, dropped into the open port. A moment later, he flipped\n a rope ladder outside, where it dangled to the ground, then climbed out\n himself, carrying the two Zelta guns.\n\n\n \"We'd better test these,\" he said. \"We don't want any slip-ups when we\n do go into action.\"\n\n\n He climbed down the ladder, laid the guns aside, then reached up a\n hand to aid Kerry Blane's descent. Kerry Blane came down slowly and\n awkwardly, jumped the last few feet. He felt surprisingly light and\n strong in the lesser gravity.", "And then the scaly monster flashed in a half-turn, drove forward with\n jaws agape, wrenched and ripped at the smooth black throat of the other\n creature. The second creature rippled and undulated in agony, whipping\n the ocean to foam, then went limp. The victorious monster circled the\n body of its dead foe, then, majestically, plunged from sight into the\n ocean's depths. An instant later, the water frothed, as hundreds of\n lesser marine monsters attacked and fed on the floating corpse.\n\n\n \"Brrrr!\" Splinter shivered in sudden horror.\n\n\n Kerry Blane chuckled dryly. \"Feel like going for a swim?\" he asked\n conversationally.\n\n\n Splinter shook his head, watched the scene disappear from view to the\n rear of the line of flight, then sank back onto his bunk.\n\n\n \"Not me!\" he said deprecatingly.", "Belts parted like rotten string; they were thrown forward with crushing\n force against the control panel. They groped feebly for support, their\n bodies twisting involuntarily, as the ship cartwheeled a dozen times in\n a few seconds. Almost instantly, consciousness was battered from them.\n\n\n With one final, grinding bounce, the cruiser rolled to its side,\n twisted over and over for a hundred yards, then came to a metal-ripping\n stop against a moss-grown boulder at the water's edge.\nIII\n\n\n Kerry Blane choked, tried to turn his head from the water that trickled\n into his face. He opened his eyes, stared blankly, uncomprehendingly\n into the bloody features of the man bending over him.\n\n\n \"What happened?\" he gasped.\n\n\n Splinter Wood laughed, almost hysterically, mopped at his forehead with\n a wet handkerchief.", "\"I thought you were dead!\" he said simply.\n\n\n Kerry Blane moved his arm experimentally, felt broken bones grate in\n an exquisite wave of pain. He fought back the nausea, gazed about the\n cabin, realized the ship lay on its side.\n\n\n \"Maybe I am,\" he said ruefully. \"No man could live through that crash.\"\n\n\n Splinter moved away, sat down tiredly on the edge of a bunk. He shook\n his head dazedly, inspected the long cut on his leg.\n\n\n \"We seem to have done it,\" he said dully.\n\n\n Kerry Blane nodded, clambered to his feet, favoring his broken arm.\n He leaned over the control panel, inspecting the dials with a worried\n gaze. Slowly, his eyes lightened, and his voice was almost cheerful as\n he swung about.", "Seconds flowed into moments, and the moments merged into one another,\n and still the clouds pressed with a visible strength against the\n ports. The rockets drummed steadily, holding the ship aloft, dropping\n it slowly toward the planet below. Then the clouds thinned, and,\n incredibly, were permeated with a dim and glowing light. A second\n later, and the clouds were gone, and a thousand feet below tumbled and\n tossed in a majestic display of ruthless strength an ocean that seemed\n to be composed of liquid fluorescence.\n\n\n Kerry Blane heard Splinter's instant sigh of unbelief.\n\n\n \"Good Lord!\" Splinter said, \"What—\"", "\"Oh!\" Splinter swung his feet from the bunk, peered from the vision\n port, sleepiness instantly erased from his face.\n\n\n \"Hot damn!\" he chortled. \"Now we'll see a little action!\"\n\n\n Kerry Blane grinned, tried to conceal the excitement he felt. He shook\n his head, his fingers flickering over the control studs.\n\n\n \"Don't get your hopes too high, lad,\" he counseled. \"With those super\n Zelta guns, it won't take ten minutes to wipe out that monster.\"\n\n\n Splinter rubbed his hands together, sighed like a boy seeing his first\n circus. \"Listen, for ten minutes of that, I'd ride this chunk of metal\n for a year!\"\n\n\n \"Could be!\" Kerry Blane agreed.", "\"Everything is more or less okay,\" he said. \"The board will have to\n be rewired, but nothing else seems to be damaged so that repairs are\n needed.\"\n\n\n Splinter looked up from his task of bandaging his leg. \"What caused\n the crash?\" he asked. \"One minute, everything was all right; the next,\n Blooey!\"\n\n\n Anger suddenly mottled Kerry Blane's face; he swore monotonously and\n bitterly for a moment.\n\n\n \"Those gol-damned pills you been taking caused the crash!\" he roared.\n \"One of them broke and shorted out the control board.\" He scowled at\n the incredulous Splinter. \"By the three tails of a Martian sand-pup, I\n ought to cram the rest of them down your throat, boxes and all!\"\n\n\n Splinter flushed, seemed to be fumbling for words. After a bit, Kerry\n Blane grinned." ] ]
valid	63473	[ "Where was the city located?", "How much time passed between the discovery of the city and Wass activating the switchboard?", "How did the crew discover the shield?", "Why did Martin smile?", "How many times did Martin open the hatch?", "Why did Martin feel sick when they were able to escape?" ]	[ [ "At the equator", "The location is not disclosed", "At the north pole", "At the south pole" ], [ "13 hours", "10 hours", "12 hours", "11 hours" ], [ "They went to the roof of the tallest building", "Wass tried to cross to retrieve forgotten equipment", "Martin and Rodney tried to move past the city's edge", "They activated it using the switchboard" ], [ "He felt amused picturing the aliens crawling everywhere they went", "He felt silly imagining the aliens were man's ancestors", "He felt happy to be exploring the city", "He felt rueful that he left the camera in the lifeboat" ], [ "1", "0", "2", "3" ], [ "He knew Wass had sacrificed his life", "The black city disturbed him", "He had to crawl for an hour through a pipe", "He saw Rodney was upset" ] ]	[ 4, 4, 2, 2, 3, 1 ]	[ 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "Martin adjusted his torch, began to lead the way down the metal ramp.\n The incline was gentle, apparently constructed for legs shorter, feet\n perhaps less broad than their own. The metal, without mark of any sort,\n gleamed under the combined light of the torches, unrolling out of the\n darkness before the men.\n\n\n At length the incline melted smoothly into the next level of the city.\n\n\n Martin shined his light upward, and the others followed his example.\n Metal as smooth and featureless as that on which they stood shone down\n on them.\n\n\n Wass turned his light parallel with the floor, and then moved slowly in\n a circle. \"No supports. No supports anywhere. What keeps all that up\n there?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. I have no idea.\" Martin gestured toward the ramp with\n his light. \"Does all this, this whole place, look at all familiar to\n you?\"", "After a time, Wass said, \"Here, too. How far do you think it goes?\"\n\n\n Martin shrugged. \"Clear around the city? I'd like to know what it\n is—was—for.\"\n\n\n \"Defense,\" Rodney, several yards behind, suggested.\n\n\n \"Could be,\" Martin said. \"Let's go in.\"\n\n\n The three crossed the metal band and walked abreast down a street,\n their broad soft soled boots making no sound on the dull metal. They\n passed doors and arches and windows and separate buildings. They moved\n cautiously across five intersections. And they stood in a square\n surrounded by the tallest buildings in the city.\n\n\n Rodney broke the silence, hesitantly. \"Not—not very big. Is it?\"\n\n\n Wass looked at him shrewdly. \"Neither were the—well, shall we call\n them, people? Have you noticed how low everything is?\"", "Martin was in the lead. Wass followed him silently. Rodney, tall,\n matchstick thin, even in his cumbersome suit, swayed with jaunty\n triumph in the rear.\n\n\n Martin looked at the metal street lined with its metal objects and he\n sighed. He remembered how the dark buildings of the city looked at\n surface level, how the city itself looked when they were landing, and\n then when they were walking toward it. The dream was gone again for\n now. Idealism died in him, again and again, yet it was always reborn.\n But—The only city, so far as anyone knew, on the first planet they'd\n ever explored. And it had to be like this. Nightmares, Wass said, and\n Martin thought perhaps the city was built by a race of beings who at\n some point twisted away from their evolutionary spiral, plagued by a\n sort of racial insanity.", "Rodney's gulp was clearly audible through the radio receivers. \"Here?\"\n\n\n \"No, no,\" Martin answered impatiently, \"not just here. I mean the whole\n city.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Wass said dryly, \"it does. I'm sure this is where all my\n nightmares stay when they're not on shift.\"\n\n\n Martin turned on his heel and started down a metal avenue which, he\n thought, paralleled the street above. And Rodney and Wass followed him\n silently. They moved along the metal, past unfamiliar shapes made more\n so by gloom and moving shadows, past doors dancing grotesquely in the\n three lights, past openings in the occasional high metal partitions,\n past something which was perhaps a conveyor belt, past another\n something which could have been anything at all.\n\n\n The metal street ended eventually in a blank metal wall.", "\"Out there, too, Rodney, they must have had illumination.\" Martin\n looked back along the straight, metal street they'd walked on, and past\n that out over the bleak, furrowed slopes where the ship's lifeboat\n lay ... and he thought everything outside the city seemed, somehow,\n from here, a little dim, a little hazy.\n\n\n He straightened his shoulders. The city was alien, of course, and that\n explained most of it ... most of it. But he felt the black city was\n something familiar, yet twisted and distorted.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Wass said, his nose wrinkling a bit, \"now that we're here....\"\n\n\n \"Pictures,\" Martin decided. \"We have twelve hours. We'll start here.\n What's the matter, Wass?\"", "They reached the center of the city, ahead of the small, slight Wass,\n and stood watching him labor along the metal toward them.\n\n\n Wass' face, Martin saw, was sober. \"I tried to call the ship. No luck.\"\n\n\n \"The shield?\"\n\n\n Wass nodded. \"What else?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know—\"\n\n\n \"If we went to the roof of the tallest building,\" Rodney offered, \"we\n might—\"\n\n\n Martin shook his head. \"No. To be effective, the shield would have to\n cover the city.\"\n\n\n Wass stared down at the metal street, as if he could look through it.\n \"I wonder where it gets its power?\"\n\n\n \"Down below, probably. If there is a down below.\" Martin hesitated. \"We\n may have to....\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Rodney prompted.", "The slight, blond man stood unmoving. \"I'm with you, Martin, but, as\n a last resort it might be better to be blown sky high than to die\n gradually—\"\n\n\n Martin was watching Rodney, struggling to get up. \"I agree. As a last\n resort. We still have a little time.\"\n\n\n Rodney's tall, spare figure looked bowed and tired in the torchlight,\n now that he was up again. \"Martin, I—\"\n\n\n Martin turned his back. \"Skip it, Rodney,\" he said gently.\n\n\n \"Water,\" Wass said thoughtfully. \"There must be reservoirs under this\n city somewhere.\"\n\n\n Rodney said, \"How does water help us get out?\"\n\n\n Martin glanced at Wass, then started out of the switchboard room, not\n looking back. \"It got in and out of the city some way. Perhaps we can\n leave the same way.\"", "The torch came to rest about thirty feet down. It shone on gently\n rolling mounds of fine, white stuff.\n\n\n Martin anchored the rope soundly, and paused, half across the lip\n of the hatch to stare coldly at Wass. \"You'd rather monkey with the\n switches and blow yourself to smithereens?\"\n\n\n Wass sighed and refused to meet Martin's gaze. Martin looked at him\n disgustedly, and then began to descend the rope, slowly, peering into\n the infinite, sparkling darkness pressing around him. At the bottom\n of the rope he sank to his knees in dust, and then was held even. He\n stamped his feet, and then, as well as he was able, did a standing\n jump. He sank no farther than his knees.\n\n\n He sighted a path parallel with the avenue above, toward the nearest\n edge of the city. \"I think we'll be all right,\" he called out, \"as long\n as we avoid the drifts.\"", "The men from the ship knew only the surface facts about this waiting\n geometric discovery. Theirs was the eleventh inter-planetary flight,\n and the previous ten, in the time allowed them for exploration while\n this planet was still close enough to their own to permit a safe return\n in their ships, had not spotted the city. But the eleventh expedition\n had, an hour ago, with just thirteen hours left during which a return\n flight could be safely started. So far as was known, this was the only\n city on the planet—the planet without any life at all, save tiny\n mosses, for a million years or more. And no matter which direction from\n the city a man moved, he would always be going north.\n\n\n \"Hey, Martin!\" Rodney called through his helmet radio. Martin paused.\n \"Wind,\" Rodney said, coming abreast of him. He glanced toward the black\n pile, as if sharing Martin's thoughts. \"That's all we need, isn't it?\"", "He saw the dull, black walls of buildings shouldering grimly into the\n twilight sky, saw the sheared edge where the metal city ended and the\n barren earth began ... and he remembered observing, even before they\n landed, the too-strict geometry imposed on the entire construction.\n\n\n He frowned. The first impression was ... malignant.\n\n\n Wass, blond and slight, with enough nose for three or four men,\n unbuckled his safety belt and stood up. \"Shall we, gentlemen?\" and with\n a graceful movement of hand and arm he indicated the waiting city.\n\n\n Martin led Wass, and the gangling, scarecrow-like Rodney, through the\n stillness overlaying the barren ground. There was only the twilight\n sky, and harsh and black against it, the convoluted earth. And the\n city. Malignant. He wondered, again, what beings would choose to build\n a city—even a city like this one—in such surroundings.", "The blond man grinned ruefully. \"I left the camera in the lifeboat.\"\n There was a pause. Then Wass, defensively—\"It's almost as if the city\n didn't want to be photographed.\"\n\n\n Martin ignored the remark. \"Go get it. Rodney and I will be somewhere\n along this street.\"\n\n\n Wass turned away. Martin and Rodney started slowly down the wide metal\n street, at right angles to their path of entrance.\n\n\n Again Martin felt a tug of twisted, distorted familiarity. It was\n almost as if ... they were human up to a certain point, the point\n being, perhaps, some part of their minds.... Alien things, dark and\n subtle, things no man could ever comprehend.", "The three advanced to the end of the central corridor, pausing before a\n great arch, outlined in the too-careful geometrical figures Martin had\n come to associate with the city builders. The three torches, shining\n through the arch, picked out a bank of buttons, handles ... and a thick\n rope of cables which ran upward to vanish unexpectedly in the metal\n roof.\n\n\n \"Is this it,\" Wass murmured, \"or an auxiliary?\"\n\n\n Martin shrugged. \"The whole city's no more than a machine, apparently.\"\n\n\n \"Another assumption,\" Wass said. \"We have done nothing but make\n assumptions ever since we got here.\"\n\n\n \"What would you suggest, instead?\" Martin asked calmly.\n\n\n Rodney furtively, extended one hand toward a switch.\n\n\n \"No!\" Martin said, sharply. That was one assumption they dared not make.\n\n\n Rodney turned. \"But—\"", "The edge of the city—the city which was a dome of force above and a\n bowl of metal below.\n\n\n After a long time, Wass sighed. \"Well, skipper...?\"\n\n\n \"We go back, I guess,\" Martin said.\n\n\n Rodney turned swiftly to face him. Martin thought the tall man was\n holding his gun. \"To the switchboard, Martin?\"\n\n\n \"Unless someone has a better idea,\" Martin conceded. He waited. But\n Rodney was holding the gun ... and Wass was.... Then—\"I can't think of\n anything else.\"\n\n\n They began to retrace their steps along the metal street, back past\n the same dancing shapes of metal, the partitions, the odd windows, all\n looking different now in the new angles of illumination.", "Martin clapped a hand on Rodney's shoulder again, starting him moving,\n toward the city's edge, past the black, silent buildings.\n\n\n The glittering band was here, too, like a halo around a silhouette.\n\n\n \"No go,\" Martin said to Wass. He bit at his lower lip. \"I think it must\n be all around us.\" He was silent for a time, exploring the consequences\n of this. Then—\"We'll meet you in the middle of the city, where we\n separated.\"\n\n\n Walking with Rodney, Martin heard Wass' voice, flat and metallic\n through the radio receiver against his ear. \"What do you suppose caused\n this?\"\n\n\n He shook his head angrily, saying, \"Judging by reports of the rest of\n the planet, it must have been horribly radioactive at one time. All of\n it.\"\n\n\n \"Man-made radiation, you mean.\"", "Martin looked at the semi-transparent figures of wind and dust\n cavorting in the distance, moving toward them. He grinned a little,\n adjusting his radio. \"Worried?\"\n\n\n Rodney's bony face was without expression. \"Gives me the creeps, kind\n of. I wonder what they were like?\"\n\n\n Wass murmured, \"Let us hope they aren't immortal.\"\n\n\n Three feet from the edge of the city Martin stopped and stubbed at the\n sand with the toe of his boot, clearing earth from part of a shining\n metal band.\n\n\n Wass watched him, and then shoved aside more sand, several feet away.\n \"It's here, too.\"\n\n\n Martin stood up. \"Let's try farther on. Rodney, radio the ship, tell\n them we're going in.\"\n\n\n Rodney nodded.", "DUST UNTO DUST\nBy LYMAN D. HINCKLEY\nIt was alien but was it dead, this towering, sinister\n\n city of metal that glittered malignantly before the\n\n cautious advance of three awed space-scouters.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Summer 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMartin set the lifeboat down carefully, with all the attention one\n usually exercises in a situation where the totally unexpected has\n occurred, and he and his two companions sat and stared in awed silence\n at the city a quarter-mile away.", "Martin shrugged. \"Let's look.\"\n\n\n He led the way through a shoulder-high arch in one of the tall\n buildings surrounding the square. The corridor inside was dim and\n plain, and he switched on his flashlight, the other two immediately\n following his example. The walls and the rounded ceiling of the\n corridor were of the same dull metal as the buildings' facades, and\n the streets. There were a multitude of doors and arches set into\n either side of the corridor.\n\n\n It was rather like ... entering a gigantic metal beehive.\n\n\n Martin chose an arch, with beyond it a metal ramp, which tilted\n downward, gleaming in the pale circle of his torch.\n\n\n A call from Rodney halted him. \"Back here,\" the tall man repeated. \"It\n looks like a switchboard.\"", "Rodney nodded, jerkily. \"He pulled three more switches. I couldn't\n understand it all. But—Martin, dying alone like that in a place like\n this—!\"\n\n\n Martin crawled into the circular pipe behind the grate. It tilted up\n toward the surface. \"Come on, Rodney. Last lap.\"\n\n\n An hour later they surfaced about two hundred yards away from the\n edge of the city. Behind them the black pile rose, the dome of force\n shimmering, almost invisible, about it.\n\n\n Ahead of them were the other two scoutships from the mother ship.\n Martin called out faintly, pulling Rodney out of the pipe. Crew members\n standing by the scoutships, and at the edge of the city, began to run\n toward them.\n\n\n \"Radio picked you up as soon as you entered the pipe,\" someone said. It\n was the last thing Martin heard before he collapsed.", "After a moment, Wass switched his flashlight back on. He said quietly,\n \"He's right, Rodney. It would be sure death to monkey around in here.\"\n\n\n \"Well....\" Rodney turned quickly toward the black arch. \"Let's get out\n of here, then!\"\n\n\n Martin hung back waiting for the others to go ahead of him down the\n metal hall. At the other arch, where the ramp led downward, he called a\n halt. \"If the dome, or whatever it is, is a radiation screen there must\n be at least half-a-dozen emergency exits around the city.\"\n\n\n Rodney said, \"To search every building next to the dome clean around\n the city would take years.\"\n\n\n Martin nodded. \"But there must be central roads beneath this main level\n leading to them. Up here there are too many roads.\"\n\n\n Wass laughed rudely.\n\n\n \"Have you a better idea?\"", "Wass ignored that, as Martin hoped he would. He said slowly, \"That\n leads to another idea. If the band around the city is responsible for\n the dome, does it project down into the ground as well?\"\n\n\n \"You mean\ndig\nout?\" Martin asked.\n\n\n \"Sure. Why not?\"\n\n\n \"We're wearing heavy suits and bulky breathing units. We have no\n equipment.\"\n\n\n \"That shouldn't be hard to come by.\"\n\n\n Martin smiled, banishing Wass' idea.\n\n\n Rodney said, \"They may have had their digging equipment built right in\n to themselves.\"\n\n\n \"Anyway,\" Martin decided, \"we can take a look down below.\"\n\n\n \"In the pitch dark,\" Wass added." ], [ "\"Ten hours and forty-five minutes,\" Wass disagreed softly. \"Minus the\n time it takes us to get to the lifeboat, fly to the ship, land, stow\n it, get ourselves aboard, and get the big ship away from the planet.\n And Captain Morgan can't wait for us, Martin.\"\n\n\n \"You too, Wass?\"\n\n\n \"Up to the point of accuracy, yes.\"\n\n\n Martin said, \"Not necessarily. You go the way the wind does, always\n thinking of your own tender hide, of course.\"\n\n\n Rodney cursed. \"And every second we stand here doing nothing gives us\n that much less time to find a way out. Martin—\"\n\n\n \"Make one move toward that switchboard and I'll stop you where you\n stand!\"\nWass moved silently through the darkness beyond the torches. \"We all\n have guns, Martin.\"\n\n\n \"I'm holding mine.\" Martin waited.", "After a time, Wass said, \"Here, too. How far do you think it goes?\"\n\n\n Martin shrugged. \"Clear around the city? I'd like to know what it\n is—was—for.\"\n\n\n \"Defense,\" Rodney, several yards behind, suggested.\n\n\n \"Could be,\" Martin said. \"Let's go in.\"\n\n\n The three crossed the metal band and walked abreast down a street,\n their broad soft soled boots making no sound on the dull metal. They\n passed doors and arches and windows and separate buildings. They moved\n cautiously across five intersections. And they stood in a square\n surrounded by the tallest buildings in the city.\n\n\n Rodney broke the silence, hesitantly. \"Not—not very big. Is it?\"\n\n\n Wass looked at him shrewdly. \"Neither were the—well, shall we call\n them, people? Have you noticed how low everything is?\"", "The three advanced to the end of the central corridor, pausing before a\n great arch, outlined in the too-careful geometrical figures Martin had\n come to associate with the city builders. The three torches, shining\n through the arch, picked out a bank of buttons, handles ... and a thick\n rope of cables which ran upward to vanish unexpectedly in the metal\n roof.\n\n\n \"Is this it,\" Wass murmured, \"or an auxiliary?\"\n\n\n Martin shrugged. \"The whole city's no more than a machine, apparently.\"\n\n\n \"Another assumption,\" Wass said. \"We have done nothing but make\n assumptions ever since we got here.\"\n\n\n \"What would you suggest, instead?\" Martin asked calmly.\n\n\n Rodney furtively, extended one hand toward a switch.\n\n\n \"No!\" Martin said, sharply. That was one assumption they dared not make.\n\n\n Rodney turned. \"But—\"", "The torch came to rest about thirty feet down. It shone on gently\n rolling mounds of fine, white stuff.\n\n\n Martin anchored the rope soundly, and paused, half across the lip\n of the hatch to stare coldly at Wass. \"You'd rather monkey with the\n switches and blow yourself to smithereens?\"\n\n\n Wass sighed and refused to meet Martin's gaze. Martin looked at him\n disgustedly, and then began to descend the rope, slowly, peering into\n the infinite, sparkling darkness pressing around him. At the bottom\n of the rope he sank to his knees in dust, and then was held even. He\n stamped his feet, and then, as well as he was able, did a standing\n jump. He sank no farther than his knees.\n\n\n He sighted a path parallel with the avenue above, toward the nearest\n edge of the city. \"I think we'll be all right,\" he called out, \"as long\n as we avoid the drifts.\"", "The slight, blond man stood unmoving. \"I'm with you, Martin, but, as\n a last resort it might be better to be blown sky high than to die\n gradually—\"\n\n\n Martin was watching Rodney, struggling to get up. \"I agree. As a last\n resort. We still have a little time.\"\n\n\n Rodney's tall, spare figure looked bowed and tired in the torchlight,\n now that he was up again. \"Martin, I—\"\n\n\n Martin turned his back. \"Skip it, Rodney,\" he said gently.\n\n\n \"Water,\" Wass said thoughtfully. \"There must be reservoirs under this\n city somewhere.\"\n\n\n Rodney said, \"How does water help us get out?\"\n\n\n Martin glanced at Wass, then started out of the switchboard room, not\n looking back. \"It got in and out of the city some way. Perhaps we can\n leave the same way.\"", "Martin shrugged. \"Let's look.\"\n\n\n He led the way through a shoulder-high arch in one of the tall\n buildings surrounding the square. The corridor inside was dim and\n plain, and he switched on his flashlight, the other two immediately\n following his example. The walls and the rounded ceiling of the\n corridor were of the same dull metal as the buildings' facades, and\n the streets. There were a multitude of doors and arches set into\n either side of the corridor.\n\n\n It was rather like ... entering a gigantic metal beehive.\n\n\n Martin chose an arch, with beyond it a metal ramp, which tilted\n downward, gleaming in the pale circle of his torch.\n\n\n A call from Rodney halted him. \"Back here,\" the tall man repeated. \"It\n looks like a switchboard.\"", "They reached the center of the city, ahead of the small, slight Wass,\n and stood watching him labor along the metal toward them.\n\n\n Wass' face, Martin saw, was sober. \"I tried to call the ship. No luck.\"\n\n\n \"The shield?\"\n\n\n Wass nodded. \"What else?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know—\"\n\n\n \"If we went to the roof of the tallest building,\" Rodney offered, \"we\n might—\"\n\n\n Martin shook his head. \"No. To be effective, the shield would have to\n cover the city.\"\n\n\n Wass stared down at the metal street, as if he could look through it.\n \"I wonder where it gets its power?\"\n\n\n \"Down below, probably. If there is a down below.\" Martin hesitated. \"We\n may have to....\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Rodney prompted.", "Rodney's gulp was clearly audible through the radio receivers. \"Here?\"\n\n\n \"No, no,\" Martin answered impatiently, \"not just here. I mean the whole\n city.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Wass said dryly, \"it does. I'm sure this is where all my\n nightmares stay when they're not on shift.\"\n\n\n Martin turned on his heel and started down a metal avenue which, he\n thought, paralleled the street above. And Rodney and Wass followed him\n silently. They moved along the metal, past unfamiliar shapes made more\n so by gloom and moving shadows, past doors dancing grotesquely in the\n three lights, past openings in the occasional high metal partitions,\n past something which was perhaps a conveyor belt, past another\n something which could have been anything at all.\n\n\n The metal street ended eventually in a blank metal wall.", "There was silence again, the silence of almost-exhausted determination.\n The two men lifted their feet out of the dust, and then laboriously\n plunged forward, to sink again to the knees, repeated the act, times\n without number.\n\n\n Then Wass broke his silence, taunting. \"The ship leaves in two hours,\n Martin. Two hours. Hear me, Rodney?\"\n\n\n Martin pulled his left foot from the sand and growled deep in his\n throat. Ahead, through the confusing patterns of the sparkling dust,\n his flashlight gleamed against metal. He grabbed Rodney's arm, pointed.\n\n\n A grate.\n\n\n Rodney stared. \"Wass!\" he shouted. \"We've found a way out!\"\n\n\n Their radios recorded Wass' laughter. \"I'm at the switchboard now,\n Martin. I—\"\n\n\n There was a tinkle of breaking glass, breaking faceplate.", "The edge of the city—the city which was a dome of force above and a\n bowl of metal below.\n\n\n After a long time, Wass sighed. \"Well, skipper...?\"\n\n\n \"We go back, I guess,\" Martin said.\n\n\n Rodney turned swiftly to face him. Martin thought the tall man was\n holding his gun. \"To the switchboard, Martin?\"\n\n\n \"Unless someone has a better idea,\" Martin conceded. He waited. But\n Rodney was holding the gun ... and Wass was.... Then—\"I can't think of\n anything else.\"\n\n\n They began to retrace their steps along the metal street, back past\n the same dancing shapes of metal, the partitions, the odd windows, all\n looking different now in the new angles of illumination.", "\"Out there, too, Rodney, they must have had illumination.\" Martin\n looked back along the straight, metal street they'd walked on, and past\n that out over the bleak, furrowed slopes where the ship's lifeboat\n lay ... and he thought everything outside the city seemed, somehow,\n from here, a little dim, a little hazy.\n\n\n He straightened his shoulders. The city was alien, of course, and that\n explained most of it ... most of it. But he felt the black city was\n something familiar, yet twisted and distorted.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Wass said, his nose wrinkling a bit, \"now that we're here....\"\n\n\n \"Pictures,\" Martin decided. \"We have twelve hours. We'll start here.\n What's the matter, Wass?\"", "After a moment, Wass switched his flashlight back on. He said quietly,\n \"He's right, Rodney. It would be sure death to monkey around in here.\"\n\n\n \"Well....\" Rodney turned quickly toward the black arch. \"Let's get out\n of here, then!\"\n\n\n Martin hung back waiting for the others to go ahead of him down the\n metal hall. At the other arch, where the ramp led downward, he called a\n halt. \"If the dome, or whatever it is, is a radiation screen there must\n be at least half-a-dozen emergency exits around the city.\"\n\n\n Rodney said, \"To search every building next to the dome clean around\n the city would take years.\"\n\n\n Martin nodded. \"But there must be central roads beneath this main level\n leading to them. Up here there are too many roads.\"\n\n\n Wass laughed rudely.\n\n\n \"Have you a better idea?\"", "\"No. Wass, how much time have we?\"\n\n\n \"The ship leaves in eleven hours.\"\n\n\n \"Eleven hours,\" Rodney repeated. \"Eleven hours!\" He reached out for the\n switch again. Martin swore, stepped forward, pulled him back roughly.\n\n\n He directed his flashlight at Rodney's thin, pale face. \"What do you\n think you're doing?\"\n\n\n \"We have to find out what all this stuff's for!\"\n\n\n \"Going at it blindly, we'd probably execute ourselves.\"\n\n\n \"We've got to—\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Then, more quietly—\"We still have eleven hours to find a way\n out.\"", "Down the ramp again.\n\n\n \"There's another ramp,\" Wass murmured.\n\n\n Rodney looked down it. \"I wonder how many there are, all told.\"\n\n\n Martin placed one foot on the metal incline. He angled his torch down,\n picking out shadowy, geometrical shapes, duplicates of the ones on the\n present level. \"We'll find out,\" he said, \"how many there are.\"\n\n\n Eleven levels later Rodney asked, \"How much time have we now?\"\n\n\n \"Seven hours,\" Wass said quietly, \"until take-off.\"\n\n\n \"One more level,\" Martin said, ignoring the reference to time. \"I ...\n think it's the last.\"\n\n\n They walked down the ramp and stood together, silent in a dim pool of\n artificial light on the bottom level of the alien city.", "Wass ignored that, as Martin hoped he would. He said slowly, \"That\n leads to another idea. If the band around the city is responsible for\n the dome, does it project down into the ground as well?\"\n\n\n \"You mean\ndig\nout?\" Martin asked.\n\n\n \"Sure. Why not?\"\n\n\n \"We're wearing heavy suits and bulky breathing units. We have no\n equipment.\"\n\n\n \"That shouldn't be hard to come by.\"\n\n\n Martin smiled, banishing Wass' idea.\n\n\n Rodney said, \"They may have had their digging equipment built right in\n to themselves.\"\n\n\n \"Anyway,\" Martin decided, \"we can take a look down below.\"\n\n\n \"In the pitch dark,\" Wass added.", "Martin was in the lead. Wass followed him silently. Rodney, tall,\n matchstick thin, even in his cumbersome suit, swayed with jaunty\n triumph in the rear.\n\n\n Martin looked at the metal street lined with its metal objects and he\n sighed. He remembered how the dark buildings of the city looked at\n surface level, how the city itself looked when they were landing, and\n then when they were walking toward it. The dream was gone again for\n now. Idealism died in him, again and again, yet it was always reborn.\n But—The only city, so far as anyone knew, on the first planet they'd\n ever explored. And it had to be like this. Nightmares, Wass said, and\n Martin thought perhaps the city was built by a race of beings who at\n some point twisted away from their evolutionary spiral, plagued by a\n sort of racial insanity.", "\"I wonder what the pattern was.\"\n\n\n \"... The reservoirs, Wass. The pattern will still be here for later\n expeditions to study. So will we if we don't find a way to get out.\"\n\n\n Their radios recorded Rodney's gasp. Then—\"Martin! Martin! I think\n I've found something!\"\n\n\n Martin began to run. After a moment's hesitation, Wass swung in behind\n him.\n\n\n \"Here,\" Rodney said, as they came up to him, out of breath. \"Here. See?\n Right here.\"\n\n\n Three flashlights centered on a dark, metal disk raised a foot or more\n from the floor.\n\n\n \"Well, they had hands.\" With his torch Wass indicated a small wheel of\n the same metal as everything else in the city, set beside the disk.", "Martin clapped a hand on Rodney's shoulder again, starting him moving,\n toward the city's edge, past the black, silent buildings.\n\n\n The glittering band was here, too, like a halo around a silhouette.\n\n\n \"No go,\" Martin said to Wass. He bit at his lower lip. \"I think it must\n be all around us.\" He was silent for a time, exploring the consequences\n of this. Then—\"We'll meet you in the middle of the city, where we\n separated.\"\n\n\n Walking with Rodney, Martin heard Wass' voice, flat and metallic\n through the radio receiver against his ear. \"What do you suppose caused\n this?\"\n\n\n He shook his head angrily, saying, \"Judging by reports of the rest of\n the planet, it must have been horribly radioactive at one time. All of\n it.\"\n\n\n \"Man-made radiation, you mean.\"", "\"In a minute,\" Martin said, too irritably, \"we'll have a sentient\n planet.\" From the corner of his eye he saw Rodney start at that. \"Knock\n it off, Wass. We're looking for reservoirs, you know.\"\n\n\n They moved slowly down the metal avenue, between the twisted shadow\n shapes, looking carefully about them.\n\n\n Rodney paused. \"We might not recognize one.\"\n\n\n Martin urged him on. \"You know what a man-hole cover looks like.\" He\n added dryly, \"Use your imagination.\"\n\n\n They reached the metal wall at the end of the avenue and paused again,\n uncertain.\n\n\n Martin swung his flashlight, illuminating the distorted metal shapes.\n\n\n Wass said, \"All this had a purpose, once....\"\n\n\n \"We'll disperse and search carefully,\" Martin said.", "Martin made a final effort. \"Rodney, it's still almost nine hours to\n take off. Let's search awhile first. Let this be a last resort.\"\n\n\n Rodney jerked his head negatively. \"No. Now, I know you, Martin.\n Postpone and postpone until it's too late, and the ship leaves without\n us and we're stranded here to eat seeds and gradually dehydrate\n ourselves and God only knows what else and—\"\n\n\n He reached out convulsively and yanked a switch.\n\n\n Martin leaped, knocking him to the floor. Rodney's gun skittered away\n silently, like a live thing, out of the range of the torches.\n\n\n The radio receivers impersonally recorded the grating sounds of\n Rodney's sobs.\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" Martin said, without feeling. He turned quickly. \"Wass?\"" ], [ "From its design Martin assumed that the disk was meant to be grasped\n and turned. He wondered what precisely they were standing over.\n\n\n \"Well, Skipper, are you going to do the honors?\"\n\n\n Martin kneeled, grasped the wheel. It turned easily—almost too\n easily—rotating the disk as it turned.\n\n\n Suddenly, without a sound, the disk rose, like a hatch, on a concealed\n hinge.\n\n\n The three men, clad in their suits and helmets, grouped around the\n six-foot opening, shining their torches down into the thing that\n drifted and eddied directly beneath them.\n\n\n Rodney's sudden grip on Martin's wrist nearly shattered the bone.\n \"Martin! It's all alive! It's moving!\"\n\n\n Martin hesitated long enough for a coil to move sinuously up toward the\n opening. Then he spun the wheel and the hatch slammed down.", "They reached the center of the city, ahead of the small, slight Wass,\n and stood watching him labor along the metal toward them.\n\n\n Wass' face, Martin saw, was sober. \"I tried to call the ship. No luck.\"\n\n\n \"The shield?\"\n\n\n Wass nodded. \"What else?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know—\"\n\n\n \"If we went to the roof of the tallest building,\" Rodney offered, \"we\n might—\"\n\n\n Martin shook his head. \"No. To be effective, the shield would have to\n cover the city.\"\n\n\n Wass stared down at the metal street, as if he could look through it.\n \"I wonder where it gets its power?\"\n\n\n \"Down below, probably. If there is a down below.\" Martin hesitated. \"We\n may have to....\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Rodney prompted.", "Martin shrugged. \"Let's look.\"\n\n\n He led the way through a shoulder-high arch in one of the tall\n buildings surrounding the square. The corridor inside was dim and\n plain, and he switched on his flashlight, the other two immediately\n following his example. The walls and the rounded ceiling of the\n corridor were of the same dull metal as the buildings' facades, and\n the streets. There were a multitude of doors and arches set into\n either side of the corridor.\n\n\n It was rather like ... entering a gigantic metal beehive.\n\n\n Martin chose an arch, with beyond it a metal ramp, which tilted\n downward, gleaming in the pale circle of his torch.\n\n\n A call from Rodney halted him. \"Back here,\" the tall man repeated. \"It\n looks like a switchboard.\"", "He was shaking.\nAfter a time he said, \"Rodney, Wass, it's dust, down there. Remember\n the wind? Air currents are moving it.\"\n\n\n Rodney sat down on the metal flooring. For a long time he said nothing.\n Then—\"It wasn't.... Why did you close the hatch then?\"\n\n\n Martin did not say he thought the other two would have shot him,\n otherwise. He said merely, \"At first I wasn't sure myself.\"\n\n\n Rodney stood up, backing away from the closed hatch. He held his gun\n loosely, and his hand shook. \"Then prove it. Open it again.\"\n\n\n Martin went to the wheel. He noticed Wass was standing behind Rodney\n and he, too, had drawn his gun.\n\n\n The hatch rose again at Martin's direction. He stood beside it,\n outlined in the light of two torches.\n\n\n For a little while he was alone.", "Rodney nodded, jerkily. \"He pulled three more switches. I couldn't\n understand it all. But—Martin, dying alone like that in a place like\n this—!\"\n\n\n Martin crawled into the circular pipe behind the grate. It tilted up\n toward the surface. \"Come on, Rodney. Last lap.\"\n\n\n An hour later they surfaced about two hundred yards away from the\n edge of the city. Behind them the black pile rose, the dome of force\n shimmering, almost invisible, about it.\n\n\n Ahead of them were the other two scoutships from the mother ship.\n Martin called out faintly, pulling Rodney out of the pipe. Crew members\n standing by the scoutships, and at the edge of the city, began to run\n toward them.\n\n\n \"Radio picked you up as soon as you entered the pipe,\" someone said. It\n was the last thing Martin heard before he collapsed.", "\"I wonder what the pattern was.\"\n\n\n \"... The reservoirs, Wass. The pattern will still be here for later\n expeditions to study. So will we if we don't find a way to get out.\"\n\n\n Their radios recorded Rodney's gasp. Then—\"Martin! Martin! I think\n I've found something!\"\n\n\n Martin began to run. After a moment's hesitation, Wass swung in behind\n him.\n\n\n \"Here,\" Rodney said, as they came up to him, out of breath. \"Here. See?\n Right here.\"\n\n\n Three flashlights centered on a dark, metal disk raised a foot or more\n from the floor.\n\n\n \"Well, they had hands.\" With his torch Wass indicated a small wheel of\n the same metal as everything else in the city, set beside the disk.", "\"In a minute,\" Martin said, too irritably, \"we'll have a sentient\n planet.\" From the corner of his eye he saw Rodney start at that. \"Knock\n it off, Wass. We're looking for reservoirs, you know.\"\n\n\n They moved slowly down the metal avenue, between the twisted shadow\n shapes, looking carefully about them.\n\n\n Rodney paused. \"We might not recognize one.\"\n\n\n Martin urged him on. \"You know what a man-hole cover looks like.\" He\n added dryly, \"Use your imagination.\"\n\n\n They reached the metal wall at the end of the avenue and paused again,\n uncertain.\n\n\n Martin swung his flashlight, illuminating the distorted metal shapes.\n\n\n Wass said, \"All this had a purpose, once....\"\n\n\n \"We'll disperse and search carefully,\" Martin said.", "After a time, Wass said, \"Here, too. How far do you think it goes?\"\n\n\n Martin shrugged. \"Clear around the city? I'd like to know what it\n is—was—for.\"\n\n\n \"Defense,\" Rodney, several yards behind, suggested.\n\n\n \"Could be,\" Martin said. \"Let's go in.\"\n\n\n The three crossed the metal band and walked abreast down a street,\n their broad soft soled boots making no sound on the dull metal. They\n passed doors and arches and windows and separate buildings. They moved\n cautiously across five intersections. And they stood in a square\n surrounded by the tallest buildings in the city.\n\n\n Rodney broke the silence, hesitantly. \"Not—not very big. Is it?\"\n\n\n Wass looked at him shrewdly. \"Neither were the—well, shall we call\n them, people? Have you noticed how low everything is?\"", "Then—causing a gasp from Wass, a harsh expletive from Rodney—a\n tenuous, questing alien limb edged through the hatch, curling about\n Martin, sparkling in ten thousand separate particles in the torchlight,\n obscuring the dimly seen backdrop of geometrical processions of strange\n objects.\nMartin raised an arm, and the particles swirled in stately, shimmering\n spirals.\n\n\n Rodney leaned forward and looked over the edge of the hatch. He said\n nothing. He eyed the sparkling particles swirling about Martin, and\n now, himself.\n\n\n \"How deep,\" Wass said, from his safe distance.\n\n\n \"We'll have to lower a flashlight,\" Martin answered.\n\n\n Rodney, all eagerness to be of assistance now, lowered a rope with a\n torch swinging wildly on the end of it.", "Martin grinned faintly. Wass, too, had an active imagination. \"Well,\n alien-made, anyhow. Perhaps they had a war.\"\n\n\n Wass' voice sounded startled. \"Anti-radiation screen?\"\n\n\n Rodney interrupted, \"There hasn't been enough radiation around here for\n hundreds of thousands of years to activate such a screen.\"\n\n\n Wass said coldly, \"He's right, Martin.\"\n\n\n Martin crossed an intersection, Rodney slightly behind him. \"You're\n both wrong,\" he said. \"We landed here today.\"\n\n\n Rodney stopped in the middle of the metal street and stared down at\n Martin. \"The wind—?\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\"\n\n\n \"That would explain why it stopped so suddenly, then.\" Rodney stood\n straighter. When he walked again, his steps were firmer.", "There was silence again, the silence of almost-exhausted determination.\n The two men lifted their feet out of the dust, and then laboriously\n plunged forward, to sink again to the knees, repeated the act, times\n without number.\n\n\n Then Wass broke his silence, taunting. \"The ship leaves in two hours,\n Martin. Two hours. Hear me, Rodney?\"\n\n\n Martin pulled his left foot from the sand and growled deep in his\n throat. Ahead, through the confusing patterns of the sparkling dust,\n his flashlight gleamed against metal. He grabbed Rodney's arm, pointed.\n\n\n A grate.\n\n\n Rodney stared. \"Wass!\" he shouted. \"We've found a way out!\"\n\n\n Their radios recorded Wass' laughter. \"I'm at the switchboard now,\n Martin. I—\"\n\n\n There was a tinkle of breaking glass, breaking faceplate.", "Wass ignored that, as Martin hoped he would. He said slowly, \"That\n leads to another idea. If the band around the city is responsible for\n the dome, does it project down into the ground as well?\"\n\n\n \"You mean\ndig\nout?\" Martin asked.\n\n\n \"Sure. Why not?\"\n\n\n \"We're wearing heavy suits and bulky breathing units. We have no\n equipment.\"\n\n\n \"That shouldn't be hard to come by.\"\n\n\n Martin smiled, banishing Wass' idea.\n\n\n Rodney said, \"They may have had their digging equipment built right in\n to themselves.\"\n\n\n \"Anyway,\" Martin decided, \"we can take a look down below.\"\n\n\n \"In the pitch dark,\" Wass added.", "Rodney's laughter rose, too. Then, sobering—\"Maybe they crawled.\"\n\n\n A nebulous image, product of childhood's vivid imagination, moved\n slowly across Martin's mind. \"All right!\" he rapped out—and the image\n faded.\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" Rodney murmured, his throat working beneath his lantern jaw.\n Then—\"I wonder what it's like here in the winter when there's no light\n at all?\"\n\n\n \"I imagine they had illumination of some sort,\" Martin answered, dryly.\n \"If we don't hurry up and get through this place and back to the ship,\n we're very likely to find out.\"\n\n\n Rodney said quickly, \"I mean outside.\"", "Martin made a final effort. \"Rodney, it's still almost nine hours to\n take off. Let's search awhile first. Let this be a last resort.\"\n\n\n Rodney jerked his head negatively. \"No. Now, I know you, Martin.\n Postpone and postpone until it's too late, and the ship leaves without\n us and we're stranded here to eat seeds and gradually dehydrate\n ourselves and God only knows what else and—\"\n\n\n He reached out convulsively and yanked a switch.\n\n\n Martin leaped, knocking him to the floor. Rodney's gun skittered away\n silently, like a live thing, out of the range of the torches.\n\n\n The radio receivers impersonally recorded the grating sounds of\n Rodney's sobs.\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" Martin said, without feeling. He turned quickly. \"Wass?\"", "The men from the ship knew only the surface facts about this waiting\n geometric discovery. Theirs was the eleventh inter-planetary flight,\n and the previous ten, in the time allowed them for exploration while\n this planet was still close enough to their own to permit a safe return\n in their ships, had not spotted the city. But the eleventh expedition\n had, an hour ago, with just thirteen hours left during which a return\n flight could be safely started. So far as was known, this was the only\n city on the planet—the planet without any life at all, save tiny\n mosses, for a million years or more. And no matter which direction from\n the city a man moved, he would always be going north.\n\n\n \"Hey, Martin!\" Rodney called through his helmet radio. Martin paused.\n \"Wind,\" Rodney said, coming abreast of him. He glanced toward the black\n pile, as if sharing Martin's thoughts. \"That's all we need, isn't it?\"", "No, Martin thought, shaking his head. No, that couldn't be.\n Viewpoint ... his viewpoint. It was the haunting sense of familiarity,\n a faint strain through all this broad jumble, the junkpile of alien\n metal, which was making him theorize so wildly.\n\n\n Then Wass touched his elbow. \"Look there, Martin. Left of the ramp.\"\n\n\n Light from their torches was reflected, as from glass.\n\n\n \"All right,\" Rodney said belligerently into his radio. \"What's holding\n up the procession?\"\n\n\n Martin was silent.\n\n\n Wass undertook to explain. Why not, after all? Martin asked himself. It\n was in Wass' own interest. In a moment, all three were standing before\n a bank of glass cases which stretched off into the distance as far as\n the combined light of their torches would reach.", "The three advanced to the end of the central corridor, pausing before a\n great arch, outlined in the too-careful geometrical figures Martin had\n come to associate with the city builders. The three torches, shining\n through the arch, picked out a bank of buttons, handles ... and a thick\n rope of cables which ran upward to vanish unexpectedly in the metal\n roof.\n\n\n \"Is this it,\" Wass murmured, \"or an auxiliary?\"\n\n\n Martin shrugged. \"The whole city's no more than a machine, apparently.\"\n\n\n \"Another assumption,\" Wass said. \"We have done nothing but make\n assumptions ever since we got here.\"\n\n\n \"What would you suggest, instead?\" Martin asked calmly.\n\n\n Rodney furtively, extended one hand toward a switch.\n\n\n \"No!\" Martin said, sharply. That was one assumption they dared not make.\n\n\n Rodney turned. \"But—\"", "Martin looked at the semi-transparent figures of wind and dust\n cavorting in the distance, moving toward them. He grinned a little,\n adjusting his radio. \"Worried?\"\n\n\n Rodney's bony face was without expression. \"Gives me the creeps, kind\n of. I wonder what they were like?\"\n\n\n Wass murmured, \"Let us hope they aren't immortal.\"\n\n\n Three feet from the edge of the city Martin stopped and stubbed at the\n sand with the toe of his boot, clearing earth from part of a shining\n metal band.\n\n\n Wass watched him, and then shoved aside more sand, several feet away.\n \"It's here, too.\"\n\n\n Martin stood up. \"Let's try farther on. Rodney, radio the ship, tell\n them we're going in.\"\n\n\n Rodney nodded.", "Rodney's gulp was clearly audible through the radio receivers. \"Here?\"\n\n\n \"No, no,\" Martin answered impatiently, \"not just here. I mean the whole\n city.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Wass said dryly, \"it does. I'm sure this is where all my\n nightmares stay when they're not on shift.\"\n\n\n Martin turned on his heel and started down a metal avenue which, he\n thought, paralleled the street above. And Rodney and Wass followed him\n silently. They moved along the metal, past unfamiliar shapes made more\n so by gloom and moving shadows, past doors dancing grotesquely in the\n three lights, past openings in the occasional high metal partitions,\n past something which was perhaps a conveyor belt, past another\n something which could have been anything at all.\n\n\n The metal street ended eventually in a blank metal wall.", "\"Ten hours and forty-five minutes,\" Wass disagreed softly. \"Minus the\n time it takes us to get to the lifeboat, fly to the ship, land, stow\n it, get ourselves aboard, and get the big ship away from the planet.\n And Captain Morgan can't wait for us, Martin.\"\n\n\n \"You too, Wass?\"\n\n\n \"Up to the point of accuracy, yes.\"\n\n\n Martin said, \"Not necessarily. You go the way the wind does, always\n thinking of your own tender hide, of course.\"\n\n\n Rodney cursed. \"And every second we stand here doing nothing gives us\n that much less time to find a way out. Martin—\"\n\n\n \"Make one move toward that switchboard and I'll stop you where you\n stand!\"\nWass moved silently through the darkness beyond the torches. \"We all\n have guns, Martin.\"\n\n\n \"I'm holding mine.\" Martin waited." ], [ "He was shaking.\nAfter a time he said, \"Rodney, Wass, it's dust, down there. Remember\n the wind? Air currents are moving it.\"\n\n\n Rodney sat down on the metal flooring. For a long time he said nothing.\n Then—\"It wasn't.... Why did you close the hatch then?\"\n\n\n Martin did not say he thought the other two would have shot him,\n otherwise. He said merely, \"At first I wasn't sure myself.\"\n\n\n Rodney stood up, backing away from the closed hatch. He held his gun\n loosely, and his hand shook. \"Then prove it. Open it again.\"\n\n\n Martin went to the wheel. He noticed Wass was standing behind Rodney\n and he, too, had drawn his gun.\n\n\n The hatch rose again at Martin's direction. He stood beside it,\n outlined in the light of two torches.\n\n\n For a little while he was alone.", "The blond man grinned ruefully. \"I left the camera in the lifeboat.\"\n There was a pause. Then Wass, defensively—\"It's almost as if the city\n didn't want to be photographed.\"\n\n\n Martin ignored the remark. \"Go get it. Rodney and I will be somewhere\n along this street.\"\n\n\n Wass turned away. Martin and Rodney started slowly down the wide metal\n street, at right angles to their path of entrance.\n\n\n Again Martin felt a tug of twisted, distorted familiarity. It was\n almost as if ... they were human up to a certain point, the point\n being, perhaps, some part of their minds.... Alien things, dark and\n subtle, things no man could ever comprehend.", "Martin made a final effort. \"Rodney, it's still almost nine hours to\n take off. Let's search awhile first. Let this be a last resort.\"\n\n\n Rodney jerked his head negatively. \"No. Now, I know you, Martin.\n Postpone and postpone until it's too late, and the ship leaves without\n us and we're stranded here to eat seeds and gradually dehydrate\n ourselves and God only knows what else and—\"\n\n\n He reached out convulsively and yanked a switch.\n\n\n Martin leaped, knocking him to the floor. Rodney's gun skittered away\n silently, like a live thing, out of the range of the torches.\n\n\n The radio receivers impersonally recorded the grating sounds of\n Rodney's sobs.\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" Martin said, without feeling. He turned quickly. \"Wass?\"", "Martin was in the lead. Wass followed him silently. Rodney, tall,\n matchstick thin, even in his cumbersome suit, swayed with jaunty\n triumph in the rear.\n\n\n Martin looked at the metal street lined with its metal objects and he\n sighed. He remembered how the dark buildings of the city looked at\n surface level, how the city itself looked when they were landing, and\n then when they were walking toward it. The dream was gone again for\n now. Idealism died in him, again and again, yet it was always reborn.\n But—The only city, so far as anyone knew, on the first planet they'd\n ever explored. And it had to be like this. Nightmares, Wass said, and\n Martin thought perhaps the city was built by a race of beings who at\n some point twisted away from their evolutionary spiral, plagued by a\n sort of racial insanity.", "Martin grinned faintly. Wass, too, had an active imagination. \"Well,\n alien-made, anyhow. Perhaps they had a war.\"\n\n\n Wass' voice sounded startled. \"Anti-radiation screen?\"\n\n\n Rodney interrupted, \"There hasn't been enough radiation around here for\n hundreds of thousands of years to activate such a screen.\"\n\n\n Wass said coldly, \"He's right, Martin.\"\n\n\n Martin crossed an intersection, Rodney slightly behind him. \"You're\n both wrong,\" he said. \"We landed here today.\"\n\n\n Rodney stopped in the middle of the metal street and stared down at\n Martin. \"The wind—?\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\"\n\n\n \"That would explain why it stopped so suddenly, then.\" Rodney stood\n straighter. When he walked again, his steps were firmer.", "Rodney began the descent. Looking up, Martin saw Wass above Rodney.\n\n\n \"All right, Wass,\" Martin said quietly, as Rodney released the rope and\n sank into the dust.\n\n\n \"Not me,\" the answer came back quickly. \"You two fools go your way,\n I'll go mine.\"\n\n\n \"Wass!\"\n\n\n There was no answer. The light faded swiftly away from the opening.\n\n\n The going was hard. The dust clung like honey to their feet, and eddied\n and swirled about them until the purifying systems in their suits were\n hard-pressed to remove the fine stuff working in at joints and valves.\n\n\n \"Are we going straight?\" Rodney asked.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Martin growled.", "The grate groaned upward and stopped.\n\n\n Wass babbled incoherently into the radio for a moment, and then he\n began to scream.\n\n\n Martin switched off his radio, sick.\n\n\n He turned it on again when they reached the opening in the metal wall.\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"I've been trying to get you,\" Rodney said, frantically. \"Why didn't\n you answer?\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't do anything for him.\"\n\n\n Rodney's face was white and drawn. \"But he did this for us.\"\n\n\n \"So he did,\" Martin said, very quietly.\n\n\n Rodney said nothing.\n\n\n Then Martin said, \"Did you listen until the end?\"", "There was silence again, the silence of almost-exhausted determination.\n The two men lifted their feet out of the dust, and then laboriously\n plunged forward, to sink again to the knees, repeated the act, times\n without number.\n\n\n Then Wass broke his silence, taunting. \"The ship leaves in two hours,\n Martin. Two hours. Hear me, Rodney?\"\n\n\n Martin pulled his left foot from the sand and growled deep in his\n throat. Ahead, through the confusing patterns of the sparkling dust,\n his flashlight gleamed against metal. He grabbed Rodney's arm, pointed.\n\n\n A grate.\n\n\n Rodney stared. \"Wass!\" he shouted. \"We've found a way out!\"\n\n\n Their radios recorded Wass' laughter. \"I'm at the switchboard now,\n Martin. I—\"\n\n\n There was a tinkle of breaking glass, breaking faceplate.", "The torch came to rest about thirty feet down. It shone on gently\n rolling mounds of fine, white stuff.\n\n\n Martin anchored the rope soundly, and paused, half across the lip\n of the hatch to stare coldly at Wass. \"You'd rather monkey with the\n switches and blow yourself to smithereens?\"\n\n\n Wass sighed and refused to meet Martin's gaze. Martin looked at him\n disgustedly, and then began to descend the rope, slowly, peering into\n the infinite, sparkling darkness pressing around him. At the bottom\n of the rope he sank to his knees in dust, and then was held even. He\n stamped his feet, and then, as well as he was able, did a standing\n jump. He sank no farther than his knees.\n\n\n He sighted a path parallel with the avenue above, toward the nearest\n edge of the city. \"I think we'll be all right,\" he called out, \"as long\n as we avoid the drifts.\"", "Martin clapped a hand on Rodney's shoulder again, starting him moving,\n toward the city's edge, past the black, silent buildings.\n\n\n The glittering band was here, too, like a halo around a silhouette.\n\n\n \"No go,\" Martin said to Wass. He bit at his lower lip. \"I think it must\n be all around us.\" He was silent for a time, exploring the consequences\n of this. Then—\"We'll meet you in the middle of the city, where we\n separated.\"\n\n\n Walking with Rodney, Martin heard Wass' voice, flat and metallic\n through the radio receiver against his ear. \"What do you suppose caused\n this?\"\n\n\n He shook his head angrily, saying, \"Judging by reports of the rest of\n the planet, it must have been horribly radioactive at one time. All of\n it.\"\n\n\n \"Man-made radiation, you mean.\"", "Wass ignored that, as Martin hoped he would. He said slowly, \"That\n leads to another idea. If the band around the city is responsible for\n the dome, does it project down into the ground as well?\"\n\n\n \"You mean\ndig\nout?\" Martin asked.\n\n\n \"Sure. Why not?\"\n\n\n \"We're wearing heavy suits and bulky breathing units. We have no\n equipment.\"\n\n\n \"That shouldn't be hard to come by.\"\n\n\n Martin smiled, banishing Wass' idea.\n\n\n Rodney said, \"They may have had their digging equipment built right in\n to themselves.\"\n\n\n \"Anyway,\" Martin decided, \"we can take a look down below.\"\n\n\n \"In the pitch dark,\" Wass added.", "Rodney's laughter rose, too. Then, sobering—\"Maybe they crawled.\"\n\n\n A nebulous image, product of childhood's vivid imagination, moved\n slowly across Martin's mind. \"All right!\" he rapped out—and the image\n faded.\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" Rodney murmured, his throat working beneath his lantern jaw.\n Then—\"I wonder what it's like here in the winter when there's no light\n at all?\"\n\n\n \"I imagine they had illumination of some sort,\" Martin answered, dryly.\n \"If we don't hurry up and get through this place and back to the ship,\n we're very likely to find out.\"\n\n\n Rodney said quickly, \"I mean outside.\"", "No, Martin thought, shaking his head. No, that couldn't be.\n Viewpoint ... his viewpoint. It was the haunting sense of familiarity,\n a faint strain through all this broad jumble, the junkpile of alien\n metal, which was making him theorize so wildly.\n\n\n Then Wass touched his elbow. \"Look there, Martin. Left of the ramp.\"\n\n\n Light from their torches was reflected, as from glass.\n\n\n \"All right,\" Rodney said belligerently into his radio. \"What's holding\n up the procession?\"\n\n\n Martin was silent.\n\n\n Wass undertook to explain. Why not, after all? Martin asked himself. It\n was in Wass' own interest. In a moment, all three were standing before\n a bank of glass cases which stretched off into the distance as far as\n the combined light of their torches would reach.", "From its design Martin assumed that the disk was meant to be grasped\n and turned. He wondered what precisely they were standing over.\n\n\n \"Well, Skipper, are you going to do the honors?\"\n\n\n Martin kneeled, grasped the wheel. It turned easily—almost too\n easily—rotating the disk as it turned.\n\n\n Suddenly, without a sound, the disk rose, like a hatch, on a concealed\n hinge.\n\n\n The three men, clad in their suits and helmets, grouped around the\n six-foot opening, shining their torches down into the thing that\n drifted and eddied directly beneath them.\n\n\n Rodney's sudden grip on Martin's wrist nearly shattered the bone.\n \"Martin! It's all alive! It's moving!\"\n\n\n Martin hesitated long enough for a coil to move sinuously up toward the\n opening. Then he spun the wheel and the hatch slammed down.", "Martin shrugged. \"Let's look.\"\n\n\n He led the way through a shoulder-high arch in one of the tall\n buildings surrounding the square. The corridor inside was dim and\n plain, and he switched on his flashlight, the other two immediately\n following his example. The walls and the rounded ceiling of the\n corridor were of the same dull metal as the buildings' facades, and\n the streets. There were a multitude of doors and arches set into\n either side of the corridor.\n\n\n It was rather like ... entering a gigantic metal beehive.\n\n\n Martin chose an arch, with beyond it a metal ramp, which tilted\n downward, gleaming in the pale circle of his torch.\n\n\n A call from Rodney halted him. \"Back here,\" the tall man repeated. \"It\n looks like a switchboard.\"", "Rodney nodded, jerkily. \"He pulled three more switches. I couldn't\n understand it all. But—Martin, dying alone like that in a place like\n this—!\"\n\n\n Martin crawled into the circular pipe behind the grate. It tilted up\n toward the surface. \"Come on, Rodney. Last lap.\"\n\n\n An hour later they surfaced about two hundred yards away from the\n edge of the city. Behind them the black pile rose, the dome of force\n shimmering, almost invisible, about it.\n\n\n Ahead of them were the other two scoutships from the mother ship.\n Martin called out faintly, pulling Rodney out of the pipe. Crew members\n standing by the scoutships, and at the edge of the city, began to run\n toward them.\n\n\n \"Radio picked you up as soon as you entered the pipe,\" someone said. It\n was the last thing Martin heard before he collapsed.", "Martin adjusted his torch, began to lead the way down the metal ramp.\n The incline was gentle, apparently constructed for legs shorter, feet\n perhaps less broad than their own. The metal, without mark of any sort,\n gleamed under the combined light of the torches, unrolling out of the\n darkness before the men.\n\n\n At length the incline melted smoothly into the next level of the city.\n\n\n Martin shined his light upward, and the others followed his example.\n Metal as smooth and featureless as that on which they stood shone down\n on them.\n\n\n Wass turned his light parallel with the floor, and then moved slowly in\n a circle. \"No supports. No supports anywhere. What keeps all that up\n there?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. I have no idea.\" Martin gestured toward the ramp with\n his light. \"Does all this, this whole place, look at all familiar to\n you?\"", "\"In a minute,\" Martin said, too irritably, \"we'll have a sentient\n planet.\" From the corner of his eye he saw Rodney start at that. \"Knock\n it off, Wass. We're looking for reservoirs, you know.\"\n\n\n They moved slowly down the metal avenue, between the twisted shadow\n shapes, looking carefully about them.\n\n\n Rodney paused. \"We might not recognize one.\"\n\n\n Martin urged him on. \"You know what a man-hole cover looks like.\" He\n added dryly, \"Use your imagination.\"\n\n\n They reached the metal wall at the end of the avenue and paused again,\n uncertain.\n\n\n Martin swung his flashlight, illuminating the distorted metal shapes.\n\n\n Wass said, \"All this had a purpose, once....\"\n\n\n \"We'll disperse and search carefully,\" Martin said.", "Martin looked at the semi-transparent figures of wind and dust\n cavorting in the distance, moving toward them. He grinned a little,\n adjusting his radio. \"Worried?\"\n\n\n Rodney's bony face was without expression. \"Gives me the creeps, kind\n of. I wonder what they were like?\"\n\n\n Wass murmured, \"Let us hope they aren't immortal.\"\n\n\n Three feet from the edge of the city Martin stopped and stubbed at the\n sand with the toe of his boot, clearing earth from part of a shining\n metal band.\n\n\n Wass watched him, and then shoved aside more sand, several feet away.\n \"It's here, too.\"\n\n\n Martin stood up. \"Let's try farther on. Rodney, radio the ship, tell\n them we're going in.\"\n\n\n Rodney nodded.", "The three advanced to the end of the central corridor, pausing before a\n great arch, outlined in the too-careful geometrical figures Martin had\n come to associate with the city builders. The three torches, shining\n through the arch, picked out a bank of buttons, handles ... and a thick\n rope of cables which ran upward to vanish unexpectedly in the metal\n roof.\n\n\n \"Is this it,\" Wass murmured, \"or an auxiliary?\"\n\n\n Martin shrugged. \"The whole city's no more than a machine, apparently.\"\n\n\n \"Another assumption,\" Wass said. \"We have done nothing but make\n assumptions ever since we got here.\"\n\n\n \"What would you suggest, instead?\" Martin asked calmly.\n\n\n Rodney furtively, extended one hand toward a switch.\n\n\n \"No!\" Martin said, sharply. That was one assumption they dared not make.\n\n\n Rodney turned. \"But—\"" ], [ "He was shaking.\nAfter a time he said, \"Rodney, Wass, it's dust, down there. Remember\n the wind? Air currents are moving it.\"\n\n\n Rodney sat down on the metal flooring. For a long time he said nothing.\n Then—\"It wasn't.... Why did you close the hatch then?\"\n\n\n Martin did not say he thought the other two would have shot him,\n otherwise. He said merely, \"At first I wasn't sure myself.\"\n\n\n Rodney stood up, backing away from the closed hatch. He held his gun\n loosely, and his hand shook. \"Then prove it. Open it again.\"\n\n\n Martin went to the wheel. He noticed Wass was standing behind Rodney\n and he, too, had drawn his gun.\n\n\n The hatch rose again at Martin's direction. He stood beside it,\n outlined in the light of two torches.\n\n\n For a little while he was alone.", "From its design Martin assumed that the disk was meant to be grasped\n and turned. He wondered what precisely they were standing over.\n\n\n \"Well, Skipper, are you going to do the honors?\"\n\n\n Martin kneeled, grasped the wheel. It turned easily—almost too\n easily—rotating the disk as it turned.\n\n\n Suddenly, without a sound, the disk rose, like a hatch, on a concealed\n hinge.\n\n\n The three men, clad in their suits and helmets, grouped around the\n six-foot opening, shining their torches down into the thing that\n drifted and eddied directly beneath them.\n\n\n Rodney's sudden grip on Martin's wrist nearly shattered the bone.\n \"Martin! It's all alive! It's moving!\"\n\n\n Martin hesitated long enough for a coil to move sinuously up toward the\n opening. Then he spun the wheel and the hatch slammed down.", "Rodney began the descent. Looking up, Martin saw Wass above Rodney.\n\n\n \"All right, Wass,\" Martin said quietly, as Rodney released the rope and\n sank into the dust.\n\n\n \"Not me,\" the answer came back quickly. \"You two fools go your way,\n I'll go mine.\"\n\n\n \"Wass!\"\n\n\n There was no answer. The light faded swiftly away from the opening.\n\n\n The going was hard. The dust clung like honey to their feet, and eddied\n and swirled about them until the purifying systems in their suits were\n hard-pressed to remove the fine stuff working in at joints and valves.\n\n\n \"Are we going straight?\" Rodney asked.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Martin growled.", "Martin made a final effort. \"Rodney, it's still almost nine hours to\n take off. Let's search awhile first. Let this be a last resort.\"\n\n\n Rodney jerked his head negatively. \"No. Now, I know you, Martin.\n Postpone and postpone until it's too late, and the ship leaves without\n us and we're stranded here to eat seeds and gradually dehydrate\n ourselves and God only knows what else and—\"\n\n\n He reached out convulsively and yanked a switch.\n\n\n Martin leaped, knocking him to the floor. Rodney's gun skittered away\n silently, like a live thing, out of the range of the torches.\n\n\n The radio receivers impersonally recorded the grating sounds of\n Rodney's sobs.\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" Martin said, without feeling. He turned quickly. \"Wass?\"", "The torch came to rest about thirty feet down. It shone on gently\n rolling mounds of fine, white stuff.\n\n\n Martin anchored the rope soundly, and paused, half across the lip\n of the hatch to stare coldly at Wass. \"You'd rather monkey with the\n switches and blow yourself to smithereens?\"\n\n\n Wass sighed and refused to meet Martin's gaze. Martin looked at him\n disgustedly, and then began to descend the rope, slowly, peering into\n the infinite, sparkling darkness pressing around him. At the bottom\n of the rope he sank to his knees in dust, and then was held even. He\n stamped his feet, and then, as well as he was able, did a standing\n jump. He sank no farther than his knees.\n\n\n He sighted a path parallel with the avenue above, toward the nearest\n edge of the city. \"I think we'll be all right,\" he called out, \"as long\n as we avoid the drifts.\"", "\"Ten hours and forty-five minutes,\" Wass disagreed softly. \"Minus the\n time it takes us to get to the lifeboat, fly to the ship, land, stow\n it, get ourselves aboard, and get the big ship away from the planet.\n And Captain Morgan can't wait for us, Martin.\"\n\n\n \"You too, Wass?\"\n\n\n \"Up to the point of accuracy, yes.\"\n\n\n Martin said, \"Not necessarily. You go the way the wind does, always\n thinking of your own tender hide, of course.\"\n\n\n Rodney cursed. \"And every second we stand here doing nothing gives us\n that much less time to find a way out. Martin—\"\n\n\n \"Make one move toward that switchboard and I'll stop you where you\n stand!\"\nWass moved silently through the darkness beyond the torches. \"We all\n have guns, Martin.\"\n\n\n \"I'm holding mine.\" Martin waited.", "There was silence again, the silence of almost-exhausted determination.\n The two men lifted their feet out of the dust, and then laboriously\n plunged forward, to sink again to the knees, repeated the act, times\n without number.\n\n\n Then Wass broke his silence, taunting. \"The ship leaves in two hours,\n Martin. Two hours. Hear me, Rodney?\"\n\n\n Martin pulled his left foot from the sand and growled deep in his\n throat. Ahead, through the confusing patterns of the sparkling dust,\n his flashlight gleamed against metal. He grabbed Rodney's arm, pointed.\n\n\n A grate.\n\n\n Rodney stared. \"Wass!\" he shouted. \"We've found a way out!\"\n\n\n Their radios recorded Wass' laughter. \"I'm at the switchboard now,\n Martin. I—\"\n\n\n There was a tinkle of breaking glass, breaking faceplate.", "Martin raised his arm tensely. \"Opening a seed bank doesn't help us\n find a way out of here.\" He started up the ramp. \"Besides, we've no\n water.\"\n\n\n Rodney came last up the ramp, less jaunty now, but still holding the\n gun. His mind, too, was taken up with childhood's imaginings. \"For\n a plant to grow in this environment, it wouldn't need much water.\n Maybe—\" he had a vision of evil plants attacking them, growing with\n super-swiftness at the air valves and joints of their suits \"—only the\n little moisture in the atmosphere.\"\nThey stood before the switchboard again. Martin and Wass side by side,\n Rodney, still holding his gun, slightly to the rear.\n\n\n Rodney moved forward a little toward the switches. His breathing was\n loud and rather uneven in the radio receivers.", "Then—causing a gasp from Wass, a harsh expletive from Rodney—a\n tenuous, questing alien limb edged through the hatch, curling about\n Martin, sparkling in ten thousand separate particles in the torchlight,\n obscuring the dimly seen backdrop of geometrical processions of strange\n objects.\nMartin raised an arm, and the particles swirled in stately, shimmering\n spirals.\n\n\n Rodney leaned forward and looked over the edge of the hatch. He said\n nothing. He eyed the sparkling particles swirling about Martin, and\n now, himself.\n\n\n \"How deep,\" Wass said, from his safe distance.\n\n\n \"We'll have to lower a flashlight,\" Martin answered.\n\n\n Rodney, all eagerness to be of assistance now, lowered a rope with a\n torch swinging wildly on the end of it.", "The three advanced to the end of the central corridor, pausing before a\n great arch, outlined in the too-careful geometrical figures Martin had\n come to associate with the city builders. The three torches, shining\n through the arch, picked out a bank of buttons, handles ... and a thick\n rope of cables which ran upward to vanish unexpectedly in the metal\n roof.\n\n\n \"Is this it,\" Wass murmured, \"or an auxiliary?\"\n\n\n Martin shrugged. \"The whole city's no more than a machine, apparently.\"\n\n\n \"Another assumption,\" Wass said. \"We have done nothing but make\n assumptions ever since we got here.\"\n\n\n \"What would you suggest, instead?\" Martin asked calmly.\n\n\n Rodney furtively, extended one hand toward a switch.\n\n\n \"No!\" Martin said, sharply. That was one assumption they dared not make.\n\n\n Rodney turned. \"But—\"", "\"In a minute,\" Martin said, too irritably, \"we'll have a sentient\n planet.\" From the corner of his eye he saw Rodney start at that. \"Knock\n it off, Wass. We're looking for reservoirs, you know.\"\n\n\n They moved slowly down the metal avenue, between the twisted shadow\n shapes, looking carefully about them.\n\n\n Rodney paused. \"We might not recognize one.\"\n\n\n Martin urged him on. \"You know what a man-hole cover looks like.\" He\n added dryly, \"Use your imagination.\"\n\n\n They reached the metal wall at the end of the avenue and paused again,\n uncertain.\n\n\n Martin swung his flashlight, illuminating the distorted metal shapes.\n\n\n Wass said, \"All this had a purpose, once....\"\n\n\n \"We'll disperse and search carefully,\" Martin said.", "Down the ramp again.\n\n\n \"There's another ramp,\" Wass murmured.\n\n\n Rodney looked down it. \"I wonder how many there are, all told.\"\n\n\n Martin placed one foot on the metal incline. He angled his torch down,\n picking out shadowy, geometrical shapes, duplicates of the ones on the\n present level. \"We'll find out,\" he said, \"how many there are.\"\n\n\n Eleven levels later Rodney asked, \"How much time have we now?\"\n\n\n \"Seven hours,\" Wass said quietly, \"until take-off.\"\n\n\n \"One more level,\" Martin said, ignoring the reference to time. \"I ...\n think it's the last.\"\n\n\n They walked down the ramp and stood together, silent in a dim pool of\n artificial light on the bottom level of the alien city.", "Martin shrugged. \"Let's look.\"\n\n\n He led the way through a shoulder-high arch in one of the tall\n buildings surrounding the square. The corridor inside was dim and\n plain, and he switched on his flashlight, the other two immediately\n following his example. The walls and the rounded ceiling of the\n corridor were of the same dull metal as the buildings' facades, and\n the streets. There were a multitude of doors and arches set into\n either side of the corridor.\n\n\n It was rather like ... entering a gigantic metal beehive.\n\n\n Martin chose an arch, with beyond it a metal ramp, which tilted\n downward, gleaming in the pale circle of his torch.\n\n\n A call from Rodney halted him. \"Back here,\" the tall man repeated. \"It\n looks like a switchboard.\"", "Rodney nodded, jerkily. \"He pulled three more switches. I couldn't\n understand it all. But—Martin, dying alone like that in a place like\n this—!\"\n\n\n Martin crawled into the circular pipe behind the grate. It tilted up\n toward the surface. \"Come on, Rodney. Last lap.\"\n\n\n An hour later they surfaced about two hundred yards away from the\n edge of the city. Behind them the black pile rose, the dome of force\n shimmering, almost invisible, about it.\n\n\n Ahead of them were the other two scoutships from the mother ship.\n Martin called out faintly, pulling Rodney out of the pipe. Crew members\n standing by the scoutships, and at the edge of the city, began to run\n toward them.\n\n\n \"Radio picked you up as soon as you entered the pipe,\" someone said. It\n was the last thing Martin heard before he collapsed.", "After a moment, Wass switched his flashlight back on. He said quietly,\n \"He's right, Rodney. It would be sure death to monkey around in here.\"\n\n\n \"Well....\" Rodney turned quickly toward the black arch. \"Let's get out\n of here, then!\"\n\n\n Martin hung back waiting for the others to go ahead of him down the\n metal hall. At the other arch, where the ramp led downward, he called a\n halt. \"If the dome, or whatever it is, is a radiation screen there must\n be at least half-a-dozen emergency exits around the city.\"\n\n\n Rodney said, \"To search every building next to the dome clean around\n the city would take years.\"\n\n\n Martin nodded. \"But there must be central roads beneath this main level\n leading to them. Up here there are too many roads.\"\n\n\n Wass laughed rudely.\n\n\n \"Have you a better idea?\"", "The grate groaned upward and stopped.\n\n\n Wass babbled incoherently into the radio for a moment, and then he\n began to scream.\n\n\n Martin switched off his radio, sick.\n\n\n He turned it on again when they reached the opening in the metal wall.\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"I've been trying to get you,\" Rodney said, frantically. \"Why didn't\n you answer?\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't do anything for him.\"\n\n\n Rodney's face was white and drawn. \"But he did this for us.\"\n\n\n \"So he did,\" Martin said, very quietly.\n\n\n Rodney said nothing.\n\n\n Then Martin said, \"Did you listen until the end?\"", "Martin was in the lead. Wass followed him silently. Rodney, tall,\n matchstick thin, even in his cumbersome suit, swayed with jaunty\n triumph in the rear.\n\n\n Martin looked at the metal street lined with its metal objects and he\n sighed. He remembered how the dark buildings of the city looked at\n surface level, how the city itself looked when they were landing, and\n then when they were walking toward it. The dream was gone again for\n now. Idealism died in him, again and again, yet it was always reborn.\n But—The only city, so far as anyone knew, on the first planet they'd\n ever explored. And it had to be like this. Nightmares, Wass said, and\n Martin thought perhaps the city was built by a race of beings who at\n some point twisted away from their evolutionary spiral, plagued by a\n sort of racial insanity.", "Wass ignored that, as Martin hoped he would. He said slowly, \"That\n leads to another idea. If the band around the city is responsible for\n the dome, does it project down into the ground as well?\"\n\n\n \"You mean\ndig\nout?\" Martin asked.\n\n\n \"Sure. Why not?\"\n\n\n \"We're wearing heavy suits and bulky breathing units. We have no\n equipment.\"\n\n\n \"That shouldn't be hard to come by.\"\n\n\n Martin smiled, banishing Wass' idea.\n\n\n Rodney said, \"They may have had their digging equipment built right in\n to themselves.\"\n\n\n \"Anyway,\" Martin decided, \"we can take a look down below.\"\n\n\n \"In the pitch dark,\" Wass added.", "The slight, blond man stood unmoving. \"I'm with you, Martin, but, as\n a last resort it might be better to be blown sky high than to die\n gradually—\"\n\n\n Martin was watching Rodney, struggling to get up. \"I agree. As a last\n resort. We still have a little time.\"\n\n\n Rodney's tall, spare figure looked bowed and tired in the torchlight,\n now that he was up again. \"Martin, I—\"\n\n\n Martin turned his back. \"Skip it, Rodney,\" he said gently.\n\n\n \"Water,\" Wass said thoughtfully. \"There must be reservoirs under this\n city somewhere.\"\n\n\n Rodney said, \"How does water help us get out?\"\n\n\n Martin glanced at Wass, then started out of the switchboard room, not\n looking back. \"It got in and out of the city some way. Perhaps we can\n leave the same way.\"", "Rodney's laughter rose, too. Then, sobering—\"Maybe they crawled.\"\n\n\n A nebulous image, product of childhood's vivid imagination, moved\n slowly across Martin's mind. \"All right!\" he rapped out—and the image\n faded.\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" Rodney murmured, his throat working beneath his lantern jaw.\n Then—\"I wonder what it's like here in the winter when there's no light\n at all?\"\n\n\n \"I imagine they had illumination of some sort,\" Martin answered, dryly.\n \"If we don't hurry up and get through this place and back to the ship,\n we're very likely to find out.\"\n\n\n Rodney said quickly, \"I mean outside.\"" ], [ "Martin made a final effort. \"Rodney, it's still almost nine hours to\n take off. Let's search awhile first. Let this be a last resort.\"\n\n\n Rodney jerked his head negatively. \"No. Now, I know you, Martin.\n Postpone and postpone until it's too late, and the ship leaves without\n us and we're stranded here to eat seeds and gradually dehydrate\n ourselves and God only knows what else and—\"\n\n\n He reached out convulsively and yanked a switch.\n\n\n Martin leaped, knocking him to the floor. Rodney's gun skittered away\n silently, like a live thing, out of the range of the torches.\n\n\n The radio receivers impersonally recorded the grating sounds of\n Rodney's sobs.\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" Martin said, without feeling. He turned quickly. \"Wass?\"", "There was silence again, the silence of almost-exhausted determination.\n The two men lifted their feet out of the dust, and then laboriously\n plunged forward, to sink again to the knees, repeated the act, times\n without number.\n\n\n Then Wass broke his silence, taunting. \"The ship leaves in two hours,\n Martin. Two hours. Hear me, Rodney?\"\n\n\n Martin pulled his left foot from the sand and growled deep in his\n throat. Ahead, through the confusing patterns of the sparkling dust,\n his flashlight gleamed against metal. He grabbed Rodney's arm, pointed.\n\n\n A grate.\n\n\n Rodney stared. \"Wass!\" he shouted. \"We've found a way out!\"\n\n\n Their radios recorded Wass' laughter. \"I'm at the switchboard now,\n Martin. I—\"\n\n\n There was a tinkle of breaking glass, breaking faceplate.", "He was shaking.\nAfter a time he said, \"Rodney, Wass, it's dust, down there. Remember\n the wind? Air currents are moving it.\"\n\n\n Rodney sat down on the metal flooring. For a long time he said nothing.\n Then—\"It wasn't.... Why did you close the hatch then?\"\n\n\n Martin did not say he thought the other two would have shot him,\n otherwise. He said merely, \"At first I wasn't sure myself.\"\n\n\n Rodney stood up, backing away from the closed hatch. He held his gun\n loosely, and his hand shook. \"Then prove it. Open it again.\"\n\n\n Martin went to the wheel. He noticed Wass was standing behind Rodney\n and he, too, had drawn his gun.\n\n\n The hatch rose again at Martin's direction. He stood beside it,\n outlined in the light of two torches.\n\n\n For a little while he was alone.", "Rodney began the descent. Looking up, Martin saw Wass above Rodney.\n\n\n \"All right, Wass,\" Martin said quietly, as Rodney released the rope and\n sank into the dust.\n\n\n \"Not me,\" the answer came back quickly. \"You two fools go your way,\n I'll go mine.\"\n\n\n \"Wass!\"\n\n\n There was no answer. The light faded swiftly away from the opening.\n\n\n The going was hard. The dust clung like honey to their feet, and eddied\n and swirled about them until the purifying systems in their suits were\n hard-pressed to remove the fine stuff working in at joints and valves.\n\n\n \"Are we going straight?\" Rodney asked.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Martin growled.", "Martin was in the lead. Wass followed him silently. Rodney, tall,\n matchstick thin, even in his cumbersome suit, swayed with jaunty\n triumph in the rear.\n\n\n Martin looked at the metal street lined with its metal objects and he\n sighed. He remembered how the dark buildings of the city looked at\n surface level, how the city itself looked when they were landing, and\n then when they were walking toward it. The dream was gone again for\n now. Idealism died in him, again and again, yet it was always reborn.\n But—The only city, so far as anyone knew, on the first planet they'd\n ever explored. And it had to be like this. Nightmares, Wass said, and\n Martin thought perhaps the city was built by a race of beings who at\n some point twisted away from their evolutionary spiral, plagued by a\n sort of racial insanity.", "The slight, blond man stood unmoving. \"I'm with you, Martin, but, as\n a last resort it might be better to be blown sky high than to die\n gradually—\"\n\n\n Martin was watching Rodney, struggling to get up. \"I agree. As a last\n resort. We still have a little time.\"\n\n\n Rodney's tall, spare figure looked bowed and tired in the torchlight,\n now that he was up again. \"Martin, I—\"\n\n\n Martin turned his back. \"Skip it, Rodney,\" he said gently.\n\n\n \"Water,\" Wass said thoughtfully. \"There must be reservoirs under this\n city somewhere.\"\n\n\n Rodney said, \"How does water help us get out?\"\n\n\n Martin glanced at Wass, then started out of the switchboard room, not\n looking back. \"It got in and out of the city some way. Perhaps we can\n leave the same way.\"", "Rodney's laughter rose, too. Then, sobering—\"Maybe they crawled.\"\n\n\n A nebulous image, product of childhood's vivid imagination, moved\n slowly across Martin's mind. \"All right!\" he rapped out—and the image\n faded.\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" Rodney murmured, his throat working beneath his lantern jaw.\n Then—\"I wonder what it's like here in the winter when there's no light\n at all?\"\n\n\n \"I imagine they had illumination of some sort,\" Martin answered, dryly.\n \"If we don't hurry up and get through this place and back to the ship,\n we're very likely to find out.\"\n\n\n Rodney said quickly, \"I mean outside.\"", "The grate groaned upward and stopped.\n\n\n Wass babbled incoherently into the radio for a moment, and then he\n began to scream.\n\n\n Martin switched off his radio, sick.\n\n\n He turned it on again when they reached the opening in the metal wall.\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"I've been trying to get you,\" Rodney said, frantically. \"Why didn't\n you answer?\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't do anything for him.\"\n\n\n Rodney's face was white and drawn. \"But he did this for us.\"\n\n\n \"So he did,\" Martin said, very quietly.\n\n\n Rodney said nothing.\n\n\n Then Martin said, \"Did you listen until the end?\"", "Martin clapped a hand on Rodney's shoulder again, starting him moving,\n toward the city's edge, past the black, silent buildings.\n\n\n The glittering band was here, too, like a halo around a silhouette.\n\n\n \"No go,\" Martin said to Wass. He bit at his lower lip. \"I think it must\n be all around us.\" He was silent for a time, exploring the consequences\n of this. Then—\"We'll meet you in the middle of the city, where we\n separated.\"\n\n\n Walking with Rodney, Martin heard Wass' voice, flat and metallic\n through the radio receiver against his ear. \"What do you suppose caused\n this?\"\n\n\n He shook his head angrily, saying, \"Judging by reports of the rest of\n the planet, it must have been horribly radioactive at one time. All of\n it.\"\n\n\n \"Man-made radiation, you mean.\"", "The torch came to rest about thirty feet down. It shone on gently\n rolling mounds of fine, white stuff.\n\n\n Martin anchored the rope soundly, and paused, half across the lip\n of the hatch to stare coldly at Wass. \"You'd rather monkey with the\n switches and blow yourself to smithereens?\"\n\n\n Wass sighed and refused to meet Martin's gaze. Martin looked at him\n disgustedly, and then began to descend the rope, slowly, peering into\n the infinite, sparkling darkness pressing around him. At the bottom\n of the rope he sank to his knees in dust, and then was held even. He\n stamped his feet, and then, as well as he was able, did a standing\n jump. He sank no farther than his knees.\n\n\n He sighted a path parallel with the avenue above, toward the nearest\n edge of the city. \"I think we'll be all right,\" he called out, \"as long\n as we avoid the drifts.\"", "\"Ten hours and forty-five minutes,\" Wass disagreed softly. \"Minus the\n time it takes us to get to the lifeboat, fly to the ship, land, stow\n it, get ourselves aboard, and get the big ship away from the planet.\n And Captain Morgan can't wait for us, Martin.\"\n\n\n \"You too, Wass?\"\n\n\n \"Up to the point of accuracy, yes.\"\n\n\n Martin said, \"Not necessarily. You go the way the wind does, always\n thinking of your own tender hide, of course.\"\n\n\n Rodney cursed. \"And every second we stand here doing nothing gives us\n that much less time to find a way out. Martin—\"\n\n\n \"Make one move toward that switchboard and I'll stop you where you\n stand!\"\nWass moved silently through the darkness beyond the torches. \"We all\n have guns, Martin.\"\n\n\n \"I'm holding mine.\" Martin waited.", "Wass ignored that, as Martin hoped he would. He said slowly, \"That\n leads to another idea. If the band around the city is responsible for\n the dome, does it project down into the ground as well?\"\n\n\n \"You mean\ndig\nout?\" Martin asked.\n\n\n \"Sure. Why not?\"\n\n\n \"We're wearing heavy suits and bulky breathing units. We have no\n equipment.\"\n\n\n \"That shouldn't be hard to come by.\"\n\n\n Martin smiled, banishing Wass' idea.\n\n\n Rodney said, \"They may have had their digging equipment built right in\n to themselves.\"\n\n\n \"Anyway,\" Martin decided, \"we can take a look down below.\"\n\n\n \"In the pitch dark,\" Wass added.", "The blond man grinned ruefully. \"I left the camera in the lifeboat.\"\n There was a pause. Then Wass, defensively—\"It's almost as if the city\n didn't want to be photographed.\"\n\n\n Martin ignored the remark. \"Go get it. Rodney and I will be somewhere\n along this street.\"\n\n\n Wass turned away. Martin and Rodney started slowly down the wide metal\n street, at right angles to their path of entrance.\n\n\n Again Martin felt a tug of twisted, distorted familiarity. It was\n almost as if ... they were human up to a certain point, the point\n being, perhaps, some part of their minds.... Alien things, dark and\n subtle, things no man could ever comprehend.", "Rodney's gulp was clearly audible through the radio receivers. \"Here?\"\n\n\n \"No, no,\" Martin answered impatiently, \"not just here. I mean the whole\n city.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Wass said dryly, \"it does. I'm sure this is where all my\n nightmares stay when they're not on shift.\"\n\n\n Martin turned on his heel and started down a metal avenue which, he\n thought, paralleled the street above. And Rodney and Wass followed him\n silently. They moved along the metal, past unfamiliar shapes made more\n so by gloom and moving shadows, past doors dancing grotesquely in the\n three lights, past openings in the occasional high metal partitions,\n past something which was perhaps a conveyor belt, past another\n something which could have been anything at all.\n\n\n The metal street ended eventually in a blank metal wall.", "From its design Martin assumed that the disk was meant to be grasped\n and turned. He wondered what precisely they were standing over.\n\n\n \"Well, Skipper, are you going to do the honors?\"\n\n\n Martin kneeled, grasped the wheel. It turned easily—almost too\n easily—rotating the disk as it turned.\n\n\n Suddenly, without a sound, the disk rose, like a hatch, on a concealed\n hinge.\n\n\n The three men, clad in their suits and helmets, grouped around the\n six-foot opening, shining their torches down into the thing that\n drifted and eddied directly beneath them.\n\n\n Rodney's sudden grip on Martin's wrist nearly shattered the bone.\n \"Martin! It's all alive! It's moving!\"\n\n\n Martin hesitated long enough for a coil to move sinuously up toward the\n opening. Then he spun the wheel and the hatch slammed down.", "Rodney nodded, jerkily. \"He pulled three more switches. I couldn't\n understand it all. But—Martin, dying alone like that in a place like\n this—!\"\n\n\n Martin crawled into the circular pipe behind the grate. It tilted up\n toward the surface. \"Come on, Rodney. Last lap.\"\n\n\n An hour later they surfaced about two hundred yards away from the\n edge of the city. Behind them the black pile rose, the dome of force\n shimmering, almost invisible, about it.\n\n\n Ahead of them were the other two scoutships from the mother ship.\n Martin called out faintly, pulling Rodney out of the pipe. Crew members\n standing by the scoutships, and at the edge of the city, began to run\n toward them.\n\n\n \"Radio picked you up as soon as you entered the pipe,\" someone said. It\n was the last thing Martin heard before he collapsed.", "He saw the dull, black walls of buildings shouldering grimly into the\n twilight sky, saw the sheared edge where the metal city ended and the\n barren earth began ... and he remembered observing, even before they\n landed, the too-strict geometry imposed on the entire construction.\n\n\n He frowned. The first impression was ... malignant.\n\n\n Wass, blond and slight, with enough nose for three or four men,\n unbuckled his safety belt and stood up. \"Shall we, gentlemen?\" and with\n a graceful movement of hand and arm he indicated the waiting city.\n\n\n Martin led Wass, and the gangling, scarecrow-like Rodney, through the\n stillness overlaying the barren ground. There was only the twilight\n sky, and harsh and black against it, the convoluted earth. And the\n city. Malignant. He wondered, again, what beings would choose to build\n a city—even a city like this one—in such surroundings.", "\"No. Wass, how much time have we?\"\n\n\n \"The ship leaves in eleven hours.\"\n\n\n \"Eleven hours,\" Rodney repeated. \"Eleven hours!\" He reached out for the\n switch again. Martin swore, stepped forward, pulled him back roughly.\n\n\n He directed his flashlight at Rodney's thin, pale face. \"What do you\n think you're doing?\"\n\n\n \"We have to find out what all this stuff's for!\"\n\n\n \"Going at it blindly, we'd probably execute ourselves.\"\n\n\n \"We've got to—\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Then, more quietly—\"We still have eleven hours to find a way\n out.\"", "After a moment, Wass switched his flashlight back on. He said quietly,\n \"He's right, Rodney. It would be sure death to monkey around in here.\"\n\n\n \"Well....\" Rodney turned quickly toward the black arch. \"Let's get out\n of here, then!\"\n\n\n Martin hung back waiting for the others to go ahead of him down the\n metal hall. At the other arch, where the ramp led downward, he called a\n halt. \"If the dome, or whatever it is, is a radiation screen there must\n be at least half-a-dozen emergency exits around the city.\"\n\n\n Rodney said, \"To search every building next to the dome clean around\n the city would take years.\"\n\n\n Martin nodded. \"But there must be central roads beneath this main level\n leading to them. Up here there are too many roads.\"\n\n\n Wass laughed rudely.\n\n\n \"Have you a better idea?\"", "They reached the center of the city, ahead of the small, slight Wass,\n and stood watching him labor along the metal toward them.\n\n\n Wass' face, Martin saw, was sober. \"I tried to call the ship. No luck.\"\n\n\n \"The shield?\"\n\n\n Wass nodded. \"What else?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know—\"\n\n\n \"If we went to the roof of the tallest building,\" Rodney offered, \"we\n might—\"\n\n\n Martin shook his head. \"No. To be effective, the shield would have to\n cover the city.\"\n\n\n Wass stared down at the metal street, as if he could look through it.\n \"I wonder where it gets its power?\"\n\n\n \"Down below, probably. If there is a down below.\" Martin hesitated. \"We\n may have to....\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Rodney prompted." ] ]
valid	40965	[ "Of the following options, which three traits best describe Ninon?", "What best describes the relationship between Ninon and Robert?", "Is there a romantic connection between Ninon and Robert?", "Of the following options, what best summarizes this story?", "Of the following options, which is not a technology used in this story?", "If Ninon hadn't had as many procedures, what would've happened?", "If Robert had refused to take Ninon with him, what would've most likely happened?", "What was the narrative purpose of the video that Ninon shows Robert?" ]	[ [ "focused, smart, and forgiving", "charismatic, beautiful, and kind", "desperate, omniscient, prepared", "eager, cunning, and desperate" ], [ "Neither character knows about or cares for the other too much.", "They're friends with benefits but each wants a more committed relationship with the other person.", "They're lifelong friends who care for each other.", "They become rivals who'll stop at nothing to ensure the other fails to accomplish their goal." ], [ "Yes. He cares dearly for her and spends his last night with her and she wants him because of the resources and access he can provide for her.", "Not really. Ninon sees him as a pawn to hijack the flight, and if Robert truly loved Ninon he probably wouldn't end up participating in the space travel.", "Somewhat. They both care for each other but in different ways, it's unclear if they would survive a long-term relationship given Robert's space travel.", "No. Robert only went to Ninon for sex before his takeoff, he wouldn't actually leave if he cared about Ninon's wellbeing." ], [ "A woman attempts to hijack the flight of an astronaut she's in love with so they can both stay young and beautiful together forever.", "A vain woman has a tough time accepting the natural aging process but eventually succeeds.", "A woman has a plan to reverse her aging process and the reader sees her follow through with it.", "A woman tries to benevolently prove that people can become younger through space travel." ], [ "Guns that cause people to disintegrate rapidly", "Guns that freeze people in time to prevent them from aging", "Cosmetic procedures to enhance youthfulness", "Long-distance space travel" ], [ "She would've dated somebody her age rather than Robert and would be happy anyway.", "She wouldn't have been able to hijack the flight because Robert wouldn't want to date someone as old as her.", "She would've looked older and probably would've felt more fulfilled.", "She wouldn't have been able to hijack the flight because her body would've been too old to take on the damage that space travel causes." ], [ "Robert would've sneakily gone by himself to the takeoff and ditched Ninon.", "Ninon would've shot and killed him because he'd become useless in her endeavors.", "Ninon would've held him at gunpoint or drugged him until they had successfully completed takeoff.", "Ninon would've talked him into it anyway because he's so dearly in love with her." ], [ "It was to show Ninon's love and dedication to Robert as a potential lifelong partner.", "It was to prove that Ninon thinks little of Robert because he's can easily be replaced as a romantic partner.", "It was to show how much thought Ninon has put into making her plan and how determined she is to see it succeed.", "It was to prove that everyone makes mistakes, and that Ninon is comfortable admitting that she's not perfect." ] ]	[ 4, 1, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3 ]	[ 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "He gazed at her in silent curiosity for a moment, then said, \"Come to\n think of it, you've never told me. About twenty-two or -three, I'd say.\"\n\n\n \"Tomorrow is my birthday. I'll be fifty-two.\"\n\n\n He stared at her in shocked amazement. Then, as his gaze went over the\n smooth lines of her body, the amazement gave way to disbelief, and he\n chuckled. \"The way you said it, Ninon, almost had me believing you. You\n can't possibly be that old, or anywhere near it. You're joking.\"\n\n\n Ninon's voice was cold. She repeated it: \"I am fifty-two years old. I\n knew your father, before you were born.\"", "This time she could see that he believed it. The horror he felt was easy\n to read on his face while he struggled to speak. \"Then ... God help\n me ... I've been making love to ... an old woman!\" His voice was low,\n bitter, accusing.\n\n\n Ninon slapped him.\n\n\n He swayed slightly, then his features froze as the red marks of her\n fingers traced across his left cheek. At last he bowed, mockingly, and\n said, \"Your pardon, Madame. I forgot myself. My father taught me to be\n respectful to my elders.\"\n\n\n For that Ninon could have killed him. As he turned to leave, her hand\n sought the tiny, feather-light beta-gun cunningly concealed in the folds\n of her gown. But the driving force of her desire made her stay her hand.\n\n\n \"Robert!\" she said in peremptory tones.", "\"Ninon, my darling,\" he whispered huskily.\n\n\n Ninon did not have to make her voice throaty any more, and that annoyed\n her too. Once she had had to do it deliberately. But now, through the\n years, it had deepened.\n\n\n \"Not yet, Robert,\" she whispered. She let him feel the slight but firm\n resistance so nicely calculated to breach his own; watched the deepening\n flush of his cheeks with the clinical sureness that a thousand such\n experiences with men had given her.\n\n\n Then, \"Come in, Robert,\" she said, moving back a step. \"I've been\n waiting for you.\"\n\n\n She noted, approvingly, that Robert was in his spaceman's uniform, ready\n for the morrow's flight, as he went past her to the couch. She pushed\n the button which closed and locked the door, then seated herself beside\n the young spaceman on the silken couch.", "Ninon said, \"But that's three hours, Robert.\"\n\n\n \"But I haven't slept yet tonight. There's been so much to do. I should\n rest a little.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be more than rest for you.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Ninon.... Oh, yes.\"\n\n\n \"Not yet, darling.\" Again her hands were between them. \"First, tell me\n about the flight tomorrow.\"\n\n\n The young spaceman's eyes were puzzled, hurt. \"But Ninon, I've told you\n before ... there is so much of you that I want to remember ... so little\n time left ... and you'll be gone when I get back....\"\n\n\n Ninon let her gray-green eyes narrow ever so slightly as she leaned away\n from him. But he blundered on.", "Ninon wanted to smile. But smiles made wrinkles, too. She was content to\n feel that sureness of power in her grasp—the certain knowledge that\n she, first of all people, would turn Time on itself and destroy it. She\n would be youthful again. She would thread through the ages to come, like\n a silver needle drawing a golden filament through the layer on layer of\n the cloth of years that would engarment her eternal youth. Ninon knew\n how.\n\n\n Her shining, gray-green eyes strayed to the one door in her apartment\n through which no man had ever gone. There the exercising machines; the\n lotions; the unguents; the diets; the radioactive drugs; the records of\n endocrine transplantations, of blood transfusions. She dismissed them\n contemptuously. Toys! The mirages of a pseudo-youth. She would leave\n them here for someone else to use in masking the downhill years.", "Ninon laughed mirthlessly, and pressed buttons again. The screen\n changed, went blank for a moment, then figures appeared again. On the\n couch were she and a man, middle-aged, dignified in appearance,\n uniformed. Blane Pritchard, Commandant of Space Research. His arms were\n around her, and his face was buried in her hair. She let the recording\n run for a moment, then shut it off and turned up the lights.\n\n\n To Robert, she said, \"I think Commander Pritchard would be here in five\n minutes if I called and told him that I have information which seriously\n affects the success of the flight.\"\n\n\n The young spaceman's face was white and stricken as he stared for long\n moments, wordless, at Ninon. Then in defeated tones he said, \"You\n scheming witch! What do you want?\"", "The youth paused at the door and glanced back, making no effort to\n conceal the loathing she had aroused in him. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\n Ninon said, \"You'll never make that flight without me.... Watch!\"\n\n\n Swiftly she pushed buttons again. The room darkened, as before. Curtains\n at one end divided and rustled back, and a glowing screen sprang to life\n on the wall revealed behind them. And there, in life and movement and\n color and sound and dimension, she—and Robert—projected themselves,\n together on the couch, beginning at the moment Ninon had pressed the\n three buttons earlier. Robert's arms were around her, his face buried in\n the hair falling over her shoulders....", "TIME and the WOMAN\nBy Dewey, G. Gordon\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Orbit volume 1 number\n 2, 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\nHER ONLY PASSION WAS BEAUTY—BEAUTY WHICH WOULD LAST FOREVER.\n AND FOR IT—SHE'D DO ANYTHING!\n\n Ninon stretched. And purred, almost. There was something lazily catlike\n in her flexing; languid, yet ferally alert. The silken softness of her\n couch yielded to her body as she rubbed against it in sensual delight.\n There was almost the litheness of youth in her movements.", "\"It's time to go, Robert,\" she said.\n\n\n Robert fought back from the stubborn grasp of sleep. \"So soon?\" he\n mumbled.\n\n\n \"And I'm going with you,\" Ninon said.\n\n\n This brought him fully awake. \"I'm sorry, Ninon. You can't!\" He sat up\n and yawned, stretched, the healthy stretch of resilient youth. Then he\n reached for the jacket he had tossed over on a chair.\n\n\n Ninon watched him with envious eyes, waiting until he was fully alert.\n\n\n \"Robert!\" she said, and the youth paused at the sharpness of her voice.\n \"How old are you?\"\n\n\n \"I've told you before, darling—twenty-four.\"\n\n\n \"How old do you think I am?\"", "Ninon snatched out the little beta-gun, then, leveled it and fired. And\n watched without remorse as the hungry electrons streamed forth to strike\n the young spaceman, turning him into a motionless, glowing figure which\n rapidly became misty and wraith-like, at last to disappear, leaving only\n a swirl of sparkling haze where he had stood. This too disappeared as\n its separate particles drifted to the metallite walls of the space ship,\n discharged their energy and ceased to sparkle, leaving only a thin film\n of dust over all.\nAfter a while Ninon got up again from the sling and made her way to the\n wall. She polished the dust away from a small area of it, trying to make\n the spot gleam enough so that she could use it for a mirror. She\n polished a long time, until at last she could see a ghostly reflection\n of her face in the rubbed spot.", "But what was this? Not Mars! Not any planet she knew, or had seen\n before. Yet there, ahead, was Mars! A new planet, where the asteroids\n had been when she left! Was this the same system? Had there been a\n mistake in the calculations of the scientists and engineers who had\n plotted the course of the ship? Was something wrong?\n\n\n But no matter—she was still Ninon. She was young and beautiful. And\n wherever she landed there would be excitement and rushing about as she\n told her story. And men would flock to her. Young, handsome men!", "Robert said, \"So that's what's in your mind.\" He busied himself with\n parking the car at the spaceport, then went on: \"You want to go back in\n the past thirty years, and be a girl again. While I grow younger, too,\n into a boy, then a child, a baby, at last nothing....\"\n\n\n \"I'll try to be sorry for you, Robert.\"\n\n\n Ninon felt again for her beta-gun as he stared at her for a long minute,\n his gaze a curious mixture of amusement and pity. Then, \"Come on,\" he\n said flatly, turning to lead the way to the gleaming space ship which\n poised, towering like a spire, in the center of the blast-off basin. And\n added, \"I think I shall enjoy this trip, Madame, more than you will.\"", "The young man's words seemed to imply a secret knowledge that Ninon did\n not possess. A sudden chill of apprehension rippled through her, and\n almost she turned back. But no ... there was the ship! There was youth;\n and beauty; and the admiration of men, real admiration. Suppleness in\n her muscles and joints again. No more diets. No more transfusions. No\n more transplantations. No more the bio-knife. She could smile again, or\n frown again. And after a few years she could make the trip again ... and\n again....\nThe space ship stood on fiery tiptoes and leaped from Earth, high into\n the heavens, and out and away. Past rusted Mars. Past the busy\n asteroids. Past the sleeping giants, Jupiter and Saturn. Past pale", "His hands rested on her shoulders and he turned her until they faced\n each other.\n\n\n \"Ninon,\" he said, \"you are so beautiful. Let me look at you for a long\n time—to carry your image with me through all of time and space.\"\n\n\n Again Ninon let him feel just a hint of resistance, and risked a tiny\n pout. \"If you could just take me with you, Robert....\"\n\n\n Robert's face clouded. \"If I only could!\" he said wistfully. \"If there\n were only room. But this is an experimental flight—no more than two can\n go.\"\n\n\n Again his arms went around her and he leaned closer.\n\n\n \"Wait!\" Ninon said, pushing him back.\n\n\n \"Wait? Wait for what?\" Robert glanced at his watch. \"Time is running\n out. I have to be at the spaceport by dawn—three hours from now.\"", "The mocking gravity in his voice infuriated her. \"Then you shall be my\n mirror,\" she said. \"Tell me, Robert, am I not now much younger? Am I not\n becoming more and more beautiful? Am I not in truth the most desirable\n of women?... But I forget. After all, you are only a boy, by now.\"\n\n\n He said, \"I'm afraid our scientists will have some new and interesting\n data on the effects of time in relation to time. Before long we'll begin\n to decelerate. It won't be easy or pleasant. I'll try to make you as\n comfortable as possible.\"\n\n\n Ninon felt her face go white and stiff with rage. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n Robert said, coldly brutal, \"You're looking your age, Ninon. Every year\n of your fifty-two!\"", "indeed. It made her very happy, very, very happy—for there is a smile\n on her face.\"", "There, on the floor beside her, was the answer she had sought so long. A\n book. \"Time in Relation to Time.\" The name of the author, his academic\n record in theoretical physics, the cautious, scientific wording of his\n postulates, meant nothing to her. The one thing that had meaning for her\n was that Time could be manipulated. And she would manipulate it. For\n Ninon!\n\n\n The door chimes tinkled intimately. Ninon glanced at her watch—Robert\n was on time. She arose from the couch, made sure that the light was\n behind her at just the right angle so he could see the outlines of her\n figure through the sheerness of her gown, then went to the door and\n opened it.\n\n\n A young man stood there. Young, handsome, strong, his eyes aglow with\n the desire he felt, Ninon knew, when he saw her. He took one quick step\n forward to clasp her in his strong young arms.", "It was true that some of her joints seemed to have a hint of stiffness\n in them, but only\nshe\nknew it. And if some of the muscles beneath her\n polished skin did not respond with quite the resilience of the youth\n they once had, only\nshe\nknew that, too.\nBut they would again\n, she\n told herself fiercely.\n\n\n She caught herself. She had let down her guard for an instant, and a\n frown had started. She banished it imperiously. Frowns—just one\n frown—could start a wrinkle! And nothing was as stubborn as a wrinkle.\n One soft, round, white, long-nailed finger touched here, and here, and\n there—the corners of her eyes, the corners of her mouth, smoothing\n them.", "Wrinkles acknowledged only one master, the bio-knife of the facial\n surgeons. But the bio-knife could not thrust deep enough to excise the\n stiffness in a joint; was not clever enough to remold the outlines of a\n figure where they were beginning to blur and—sag.\n\n\n No one else could see it—yet. But Ninon could!\n\n\n Again the frown almost came, and again she scourged it fiercely into the\n back of her mind. Time was her enemy. But she had had other enemies, and\n destroyed them, one way or another, cleverly or ruthlessly as\n circumstances demanded. Time, too, could be destroyed. Or enslaved.\n Ninon sorted through her meagre store of remembered reading. Some old\n philosopher had said, \"If you can't whip 'em, join 'em!\" Crude, but apt.", "Venomous with triumph, Ninon's voice was harsh even to her ears. \"On the\n contrary, my proud and impetuous young spaceman, I have much to gain,\n more than you could ever understand. When it was announced that you were\n to be trained to command this experimental flight I made it my business\n to find out everything possible about you. One other man is going. He\n too has had the same training, and could take over in your place. A\n third man has also been trained, to stand by in reserve. You are\n supposed to have rested and slept the entire night. If the Commandant of\n Space Research knew that you had not....\"\n\n\n \"I see. That's why you recorded my visit tonight. But I leave in less\n than an hour. You'd never be able to tell Commander Pritchard in time to\n make any difference, and he'd never come here to see....\"" ], [ "This time she could see that he believed it. The horror he felt was easy\n to read on his face while he struggled to speak. \"Then ... God help\n me ... I've been making love to ... an old woman!\" His voice was low,\n bitter, accusing.\n\n\n Ninon slapped him.\n\n\n He swayed slightly, then his features froze as the red marks of her\n fingers traced across his left cheek. At last he bowed, mockingly, and\n said, \"Your pardon, Madame. I forgot myself. My father taught me to be\n respectful to my elders.\"\n\n\n For that Ninon could have killed him. As he turned to leave, her hand\n sought the tiny, feather-light beta-gun cunningly concealed in the folds\n of her gown. But the driving force of her desire made her stay her hand.\n\n\n \"Robert!\" she said in peremptory tones.", "\"Ninon, my darling,\" he whispered huskily.\n\n\n Ninon did not have to make her voice throaty any more, and that annoyed\n her too. Once she had had to do it deliberately. But now, through the\n years, it had deepened.\n\n\n \"Not yet, Robert,\" she whispered. She let him feel the slight but firm\n resistance so nicely calculated to breach his own; watched the deepening\n flush of his cheeks with the clinical sureness that a thousand such\n experiences with men had given her.\n\n\n Then, \"Come in, Robert,\" she said, moving back a step. \"I've been\n waiting for you.\"\n\n\n She noted, approvingly, that Robert was in his spaceman's uniform, ready\n for the morrow's flight, as he went past her to the couch. She pushed\n the button which closed and locked the door, then seated herself beside\n the young spaceman on the silken couch.", "Ninon said, \"But that's three hours, Robert.\"\n\n\n \"But I haven't slept yet tonight. There's been so much to do. I should\n rest a little.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be more than rest for you.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Ninon.... Oh, yes.\"\n\n\n \"Not yet, darling.\" Again her hands were between them. \"First, tell me\n about the flight tomorrow.\"\n\n\n The young spaceman's eyes were puzzled, hurt. \"But Ninon, I've told you\n before ... there is so much of you that I want to remember ... so little\n time left ... and you'll be gone when I get back....\"\n\n\n Ninon let her gray-green eyes narrow ever so slightly as she leaned away\n from him. But he blundered on.", "\"It's time to go, Robert,\" she said.\n\n\n Robert fought back from the stubborn grasp of sleep. \"So soon?\" he\n mumbled.\n\n\n \"And I'm going with you,\" Ninon said.\n\n\n This brought him fully awake. \"I'm sorry, Ninon. You can't!\" He sat up\n and yawned, stretched, the healthy stretch of resilient youth. Then he\n reached for the jacket he had tossed over on a chair.\n\n\n Ninon watched him with envious eyes, waiting until he was fully alert.\n\n\n \"Robert!\" she said, and the youth paused at the sharpness of her voice.\n \"How old are you?\"\n\n\n \"I've told you before, darling—twenty-four.\"\n\n\n \"How old do you think I am?\"", "He gazed at her in silent curiosity for a moment, then said, \"Come to\n think of it, you've never told me. About twenty-two or -three, I'd say.\"\n\n\n \"Tomorrow is my birthday. I'll be fifty-two.\"\n\n\n He stared at her in shocked amazement. Then, as his gaze went over the\n smooth lines of her body, the amazement gave way to disbelief, and he\n chuckled. \"The way you said it, Ninon, almost had me believing you. You\n can't possibly be that old, or anywhere near it. You're joking.\"\n\n\n Ninon's voice was cold. She repeated it: \"I am fifty-two years old. I\n knew your father, before you were born.\"", "The youth paused at the door and glanced back, making no effort to\n conceal the loathing she had aroused in him. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\n Ninon said, \"You'll never make that flight without me.... Watch!\"\n\n\n Swiftly she pushed buttons again. The room darkened, as before. Curtains\n at one end divided and rustled back, and a glowing screen sprang to life\n on the wall revealed behind them. And there, in life and movement and\n color and sound and dimension, she—and Robert—projected themselves,\n together on the couch, beginning at the moment Ninon had pressed the\n three buttons earlier. Robert's arms were around her, his face buried in\n the hair falling over her shoulders....", "Ninon laughed mirthlessly, and pressed buttons again. The screen\n changed, went blank for a moment, then figures appeared again. On the\n couch were she and a man, middle-aged, dignified in appearance,\n uniformed. Blane Pritchard, Commandant of Space Research. His arms were\n around her, and his face was buried in her hair. She let the recording\n run for a moment, then shut it off and turned up the lights.\n\n\n To Robert, she said, \"I think Commander Pritchard would be here in five\n minutes if I called and told him that I have information which seriously\n affects the success of the flight.\"\n\n\n The young spaceman's face was white and stricken as he stared for long\n moments, wordless, at Ninon. Then in defeated tones he said, \"You\n scheming witch! What do you want?\"", "His hands rested on her shoulders and he turned her until they faced\n each other.\n\n\n \"Ninon,\" he said, \"you are so beautiful. Let me look at you for a long\n time—to carry your image with me through all of time and space.\"\n\n\n Again Ninon let him feel just a hint of resistance, and risked a tiny\n pout. \"If you could just take me with you, Robert....\"\n\n\n Robert's face clouded. \"If I only could!\" he said wistfully. \"If there\n were only room. But this is an experimental flight—no more than two can\n go.\"\n\n\n Again his arms went around her and he leaned closer.\n\n\n \"Wait!\" Ninon said, pushing him back.\n\n\n \"Wait? Wait for what?\" Robert glanced at his watch. \"Time is running\n out. I have to be at the spaceport by dawn—three hours from now.\"", "The mocking gravity in his voice infuriated her. \"Then you shall be my\n mirror,\" she said. \"Tell me, Robert, am I not now much younger? Am I not\n becoming more and more beautiful? Am I not in truth the most desirable\n of women?... But I forget. After all, you are only a boy, by now.\"\n\n\n He said, \"I'm afraid our scientists will have some new and interesting\n data on the effects of time in relation to time. Before long we'll begin\n to decelerate. It won't be easy or pleasant. I'll try to make you as\n comfortable as possible.\"\n\n\n Ninon felt her face go white and stiff with rage. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n Robert said, coldly brutal, \"You're looking your age, Ninon. Every year\n of your fifty-two!\"", "There, on the floor beside her, was the answer she had sought so long. A\n book. \"Time in Relation to Time.\" The name of the author, his academic\n record in theoretical physics, the cautious, scientific wording of his\n postulates, meant nothing to her. The one thing that had meaning for her\n was that Time could be manipulated. And she would manipulate it. For\n Ninon!\n\n\n The door chimes tinkled intimately. Ninon glanced at her watch—Robert\n was on time. She arose from the couch, made sure that the light was\n behind her at just the right angle so he could see the outlines of her\n figure through the sheerness of her gown, then went to the door and\n opened it.\n\n\n A young man stood there. Young, handsome, strong, his eyes aglow with\n the desire he felt, Ninon knew, when he saw her. He took one quick step\n forward to clasp her in his strong young arms.", "Robert said, \"So that's what's in your mind.\" He busied himself with\n parking the car at the spaceport, then went on: \"You want to go back in\n the past thirty years, and be a girl again. While I grow younger, too,\n into a boy, then a child, a baby, at last nothing....\"\n\n\n \"I'll try to be sorry for you, Robert.\"\n\n\n Ninon felt again for her beta-gun as he stared at her for a long minute,\n his gaze a curious mixture of amusement and pity. Then, \"Come on,\" he\n said flatly, turning to lead the way to the gleaming space ship which\n poised, towering like a spire, in the center of the blast-off basin. And\n added, \"I think I shall enjoy this trip, Madame, more than you will.\"", "He did not answer.\nNinon lay in the acceleration sling, gaining strength, and—she\n knew—youth. Her lost youth, coming back, to be spent all over again.\n How wonderful! No woman in all of time and history had ever done it. She\n would be immortal; forever young and lovely. She hardly noticed the\n stiffness in her joints when she got to her feet again—it was just from\n lying in the sling so long.\n\n\n She made her voice light and gay. \"Are we not going very, very fast,\n now, Robert?\"\n\n\n He answered without turning. \"Yes. Many times the speed of light.\"\n\n\n \"I knew it ... I knew it! Already I feel much younger. Don't you feel it\n too?\"\n\n\n He did not answer, and Ninon kept on talking. \"How long have we been\n going, Robert?\"\n\n\n He said, \"I don't know ... depends on where you are.\"", "\"... or very old, no longer the Ninon I know ... oh, all right. But you\n know all this already. We've had space flight for years, but only\n rocket-powered, restricting us to our own system. Now we have a new kind\n of drive. Theoretically we can travel faster than light—how many times\n faster we don't know yet. I'll start finding out tomorrow, with the\n first test flight of the ship in which the new drive is installed. If it\n works, the universe is ours—we can go anywhere.\"\n\n\n \"Will it work?\" Ninon could not keep the avid greediness out of her\n voice.\n\n\n Robert said, hesitantly, \"We think it will. I'll know better by this\n time tomorrow.\"\n\n\n \"What of you—of me—. What does this mean to us—to people?\"", "The yammering rockets cut off, and the ship seemed to poise on the ebon\n lip of a vast Stygian abyss.\n\n\n Joints creaking, muscles protesting, Ninon pushed herself up and out of\n the sling against the artificial gravity of the ship. Robert was already\n seated at the controls.\n\n\n \"How fast are we going?\" she asked; and her voice was rusty and harsh.\n\n\n \"Barely crawling, astronomically,\" he said shortly. \"About forty-six\n thousand miles a minute.\"\n\n\n \"Is that as fast as the speed of light?\"\n\n\n \"Hardly, Madame,\" he said, with a condescending chuckle.\n\n\n \"Then make it go faster!\" she screamed. \"And faster and faster—hurry!\n What are we waiting for?\"", "There was no time to gloat over her victory. That would come later.\n Right now minutes counted. She snatched up a cloak, pushed Robert out\n through the door and hurried him along the hall and out into the street\n where his car waited.\n\n\n \"We must hurry,\" she said breathlessly. \"We can get to the spaceship\n ahead of schedule, before your flight partner arrives, and be gone from\n Earth before anyone knows what is happening. I'll be with you, in his\n place.\"\n\n\n Robert did not offer to help her into the car, but got in first and\n waited until she closed the door behind her, then sped away from the\n curb and through the streets to the spaceport.\n\n\n Ninon said, \"Tell me, Robert, isn't it true that if a clock recedes from\n Earth at the speed of light, and if we could watch it as it did so, it\n would still be running but it would never show later time?\"", "She reached behind her, over the end of the couch, and pushed three\n buttons. The light, already soft, dimmed slowly to the faintest of\n glows; a suave, perfumed dusk as precisely calculated as was the exact\n rate at which she let all resistance ebb from her body.\n\n\n Robert's voice was muffled through her hair. \"What were those clicks?\"\n he asked.\n\n\n Ninon's arms stole around his neck. \"The lights,\" she whispered, \"and a\n little automatic warning to tell you when it's time to go....\"\n\n\n The boy did not seem to remember about the third click. Ninon was not\n quite ready to tell him, yet. But she would....\nTwo hours later a golden-voiced bell chimed, softly, musically. The\n lights slowly brightened to no more than the lambent glow which was all\n that Ninon permitted. She ran her fingers through the young spaceman's\n tousled hair and shook him gently.", "Ninon wanted to smile. But smiles made wrinkles, too. She was content to\n feel that sureness of power in her grasp—the certain knowledge that\n she, first of all people, would turn Time on itself and destroy it. She\n would be youthful again. She would thread through the ages to come, like\n a silver needle drawing a golden filament through the layer on layer of\n the cloth of years that would engarment her eternal youth. Ninon knew\n how.\n\n\n Her shining, gray-green eyes strayed to the one door in her apartment\n through which no man had ever gone. There the exercising machines; the\n lotions; the unguents; the diets; the radioactive drugs; the records of\n endocrine transplantations, of blood transfusions. She dismissed them\n contemptuously. Toys! The mirages of a pseudo-youth. She would leave\n them here for someone else to use in masking the downhill years.", "Again the young spaceman hesitated. \"We ... we don't know, yet. We think\n that time won't have the same meaning to everyone....\"\n\n\n \"... When you travel faster than light. Is that it?\"\n\n\n \"Well ... yes. Something like that.\"\n\n\n \"And I'll be—old—or dead, when you get back? If you get back?\"\n\n\n Robert leaned forward and buried his face in the silvery-blonde hair\n which swept down over Ninon's shoulders.\n\n\n \"Don't say it, darling,\" he murmured.\n\n\n This time Ninon permitted herself a wrinkling smile. If she was right,\n and she knew she was, it could make no difference now. There would be no\n wrinkles—there would be only the soft flexible skin, naturally soft and\n flexible, of real youth.", "Ninon snatched out the little beta-gun, then, leveled it and fired. And\n watched without remorse as the hungry electrons streamed forth to strike\n the young spaceman, turning him into a motionless, glowing figure which\n rapidly became misty and wraith-like, at last to disappear, leaving only\n a swirl of sparkling haze where he had stood. This too disappeared as\n its separate particles drifted to the metallite walls of the space ship,\n discharged their energy and ceased to sparkle, leaving only a thin film\n of dust over all.\nAfter a while Ninon got up again from the sling and made her way to the\n wall. She polished the dust away from a small area of it, trying to make\n the spot gleam enough so that she could use it for a mirror. She\n polished a long time, until at last she could see a ghostly reflection\n of her face in the rubbed spot.", "But what was this? Not Mars! Not any planet she knew, or had seen\n before. Yet there, ahead, was Mars! A new planet, where the asteroids\n had been when she left! Was this the same system? Had there been a\n mistake in the calculations of the scientists and engineers who had\n plotted the course of the ship? Was something wrong?\n\n\n But no matter—she was still Ninon. She was young and beautiful. And\n wherever she landed there would be excitement and rushing about as she\n told her story. And men would flock to her. Young, handsome men!" ], [ "This time she could see that he believed it. The horror he felt was easy\n to read on his face while he struggled to speak. \"Then ... God help\n me ... I've been making love to ... an old woman!\" His voice was low,\n bitter, accusing.\n\n\n Ninon slapped him.\n\n\n He swayed slightly, then his features froze as the red marks of her\n fingers traced across his left cheek. At last he bowed, mockingly, and\n said, \"Your pardon, Madame. I forgot myself. My father taught me to be\n respectful to my elders.\"\n\n\n For that Ninon could have killed him. As he turned to leave, her hand\n sought the tiny, feather-light beta-gun cunningly concealed in the folds\n of her gown. But the driving force of her desire made her stay her hand.\n\n\n \"Robert!\" she said in peremptory tones.", "Ninon said, \"But that's three hours, Robert.\"\n\n\n \"But I haven't slept yet tonight. There's been so much to do. I should\n rest a little.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be more than rest for you.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Ninon.... Oh, yes.\"\n\n\n \"Not yet, darling.\" Again her hands were between them. \"First, tell me\n about the flight tomorrow.\"\n\n\n The young spaceman's eyes were puzzled, hurt. \"But Ninon, I've told you\n before ... there is so much of you that I want to remember ... so little\n time left ... and you'll be gone when I get back....\"\n\n\n Ninon let her gray-green eyes narrow ever so slightly as she leaned away\n from him. But he blundered on.", "\"It's time to go, Robert,\" she said.\n\n\n Robert fought back from the stubborn grasp of sleep. \"So soon?\" he\n mumbled.\n\n\n \"And I'm going with you,\" Ninon said.\n\n\n This brought him fully awake. \"I'm sorry, Ninon. You can't!\" He sat up\n and yawned, stretched, the healthy stretch of resilient youth. Then he\n reached for the jacket he had tossed over on a chair.\n\n\n Ninon watched him with envious eyes, waiting until he was fully alert.\n\n\n \"Robert!\" she said, and the youth paused at the sharpness of her voice.\n \"How old are you?\"\n\n\n \"I've told you before, darling—twenty-four.\"\n\n\n \"How old do you think I am?\"", "\"Ninon, my darling,\" he whispered huskily.\n\n\n Ninon did not have to make her voice throaty any more, and that annoyed\n her too. Once she had had to do it deliberately. But now, through the\n years, it had deepened.\n\n\n \"Not yet, Robert,\" she whispered. She let him feel the slight but firm\n resistance so nicely calculated to breach his own; watched the deepening\n flush of his cheeks with the clinical sureness that a thousand such\n experiences with men had given her.\n\n\n Then, \"Come in, Robert,\" she said, moving back a step. \"I've been\n waiting for you.\"\n\n\n She noted, approvingly, that Robert was in his spaceman's uniform, ready\n for the morrow's flight, as he went past her to the couch. She pushed\n the button which closed and locked the door, then seated herself beside\n the young spaceman on the silken couch.", "He gazed at her in silent curiosity for a moment, then said, \"Come to\n think of it, you've never told me. About twenty-two or -three, I'd say.\"\n\n\n \"Tomorrow is my birthday. I'll be fifty-two.\"\n\n\n He stared at her in shocked amazement. Then, as his gaze went over the\n smooth lines of her body, the amazement gave way to disbelief, and he\n chuckled. \"The way you said it, Ninon, almost had me believing you. You\n can't possibly be that old, or anywhere near it. You're joking.\"\n\n\n Ninon's voice was cold. She repeated it: \"I am fifty-two years old. I\n knew your father, before you were born.\"", "His hands rested on her shoulders and he turned her until they faced\n each other.\n\n\n \"Ninon,\" he said, \"you are so beautiful. Let me look at you for a long\n time—to carry your image with me through all of time and space.\"\n\n\n Again Ninon let him feel just a hint of resistance, and risked a tiny\n pout. \"If you could just take me with you, Robert....\"\n\n\n Robert's face clouded. \"If I only could!\" he said wistfully. \"If there\n were only room. But this is an experimental flight—no more than two can\n go.\"\n\n\n Again his arms went around her and he leaned closer.\n\n\n \"Wait!\" Ninon said, pushing him back.\n\n\n \"Wait? Wait for what?\" Robert glanced at his watch. \"Time is running\n out. I have to be at the spaceport by dawn—three hours from now.\"", "The youth paused at the door and glanced back, making no effort to\n conceal the loathing she had aroused in him. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\n Ninon said, \"You'll never make that flight without me.... Watch!\"\n\n\n Swiftly she pushed buttons again. The room darkened, as before. Curtains\n at one end divided and rustled back, and a glowing screen sprang to life\n on the wall revealed behind them. And there, in life and movement and\n color and sound and dimension, she—and Robert—projected themselves,\n together on the couch, beginning at the moment Ninon had pressed the\n three buttons earlier. Robert's arms were around her, his face buried in\n the hair falling over her shoulders....", "Ninon laughed mirthlessly, and pressed buttons again. The screen\n changed, went blank for a moment, then figures appeared again. On the\n couch were she and a man, middle-aged, dignified in appearance,\n uniformed. Blane Pritchard, Commandant of Space Research. His arms were\n around her, and his face was buried in her hair. She let the recording\n run for a moment, then shut it off and turned up the lights.\n\n\n To Robert, she said, \"I think Commander Pritchard would be here in five\n minutes if I called and told him that I have information which seriously\n affects the success of the flight.\"\n\n\n The young spaceman's face was white and stricken as he stared for long\n moments, wordless, at Ninon. Then in defeated tones he said, \"You\n scheming witch! What do you want?\"", "There, on the floor beside her, was the answer she had sought so long. A\n book. \"Time in Relation to Time.\" The name of the author, his academic\n record in theoretical physics, the cautious, scientific wording of his\n postulates, meant nothing to her. The one thing that had meaning for her\n was that Time could be manipulated. And she would manipulate it. For\n Ninon!\n\n\n The door chimes tinkled intimately. Ninon glanced at her watch—Robert\n was on time. She arose from the couch, made sure that the light was\n behind her at just the right angle so he could see the outlines of her\n figure through the sheerness of her gown, then went to the door and\n opened it.\n\n\n A young man stood there. Young, handsome, strong, his eyes aglow with\n the desire he felt, Ninon knew, when he saw her. He took one quick step\n forward to clasp her in his strong young arms.", "The mocking gravity in his voice infuriated her. \"Then you shall be my\n mirror,\" she said. \"Tell me, Robert, am I not now much younger? Am I not\n becoming more and more beautiful? Am I not in truth the most desirable\n of women?... But I forget. After all, you are only a boy, by now.\"\n\n\n He said, \"I'm afraid our scientists will have some new and interesting\n data on the effects of time in relation to time. Before long we'll begin\n to decelerate. It won't be easy or pleasant. I'll try to make you as\n comfortable as possible.\"\n\n\n Ninon felt her face go white and stiff with rage. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n Robert said, coldly brutal, \"You're looking your age, Ninon. Every year\n of your fifty-two!\"", "Robert said, \"So that's what's in your mind.\" He busied himself with\n parking the car at the spaceport, then went on: \"You want to go back in\n the past thirty years, and be a girl again. While I grow younger, too,\n into a boy, then a child, a baby, at last nothing....\"\n\n\n \"I'll try to be sorry for you, Robert.\"\n\n\n Ninon felt again for her beta-gun as he stared at her for a long minute,\n his gaze a curious mixture of amusement and pity. Then, \"Come on,\" he\n said flatly, turning to lead the way to the gleaming space ship which\n poised, towering like a spire, in the center of the blast-off basin. And\n added, \"I think I shall enjoy this trip, Madame, more than you will.\"", "He did not answer.\nNinon lay in the acceleration sling, gaining strength, and—she\n knew—youth. Her lost youth, coming back, to be spent all over again.\n How wonderful! No woman in all of time and history had ever done it. She\n would be immortal; forever young and lovely. She hardly noticed the\n stiffness in her joints when she got to her feet again—it was just from\n lying in the sling so long.\n\n\n She made her voice light and gay. \"Are we not going very, very fast,\n now, Robert?\"\n\n\n He answered without turning. \"Yes. Many times the speed of light.\"\n\n\n \"I knew it ... I knew it! Already I feel much younger. Don't you feel it\n too?\"\n\n\n He did not answer, and Ninon kept on talking. \"How long have we been\n going, Robert?\"\n\n\n He said, \"I don't know ... depends on where you are.\"", "She reached behind her, over the end of the couch, and pushed three\n buttons. The light, already soft, dimmed slowly to the faintest of\n glows; a suave, perfumed dusk as precisely calculated as was the exact\n rate at which she let all resistance ebb from her body.\n\n\n Robert's voice was muffled through her hair. \"What were those clicks?\"\n he asked.\n\n\n Ninon's arms stole around his neck. \"The lights,\" she whispered, \"and a\n little automatic warning to tell you when it's time to go....\"\n\n\n The boy did not seem to remember about the third click. Ninon was not\n quite ready to tell him, yet. But she would....\nTwo hours later a golden-voiced bell chimed, softly, musically. The\n lights slowly brightened to no more than the lambent glow which was all\n that Ninon permitted. She ran her fingers through the young spaceman's\n tousled hair and shook him gently.", "\"... or very old, no longer the Ninon I know ... oh, all right. But you\n know all this already. We've had space flight for years, but only\n rocket-powered, restricting us to our own system. Now we have a new kind\n of drive. Theoretically we can travel faster than light—how many times\n faster we don't know yet. I'll start finding out tomorrow, with the\n first test flight of the ship in which the new drive is installed. If it\n works, the universe is ours—we can go anywhere.\"\n\n\n \"Will it work?\" Ninon could not keep the avid greediness out of her\n voice.\n\n\n Robert said, hesitantly, \"We think it will. I'll know better by this\n time tomorrow.\"\n\n\n \"What of you—of me—. What does this mean to us—to people?\"", "There was no time to gloat over her victory. That would come later.\n Right now minutes counted. She snatched up a cloak, pushed Robert out\n through the door and hurried him along the hall and out into the street\n where his car waited.\n\n\n \"We must hurry,\" she said breathlessly. \"We can get to the spaceship\n ahead of schedule, before your flight partner arrives, and be gone from\n Earth before anyone knows what is happening. I'll be with you, in his\n place.\"\n\n\n Robert did not offer to help her into the car, but got in first and\n waited until she closed the door behind her, then sped away from the\n curb and through the streets to the spaceport.\n\n\n Ninon said, \"Tell me, Robert, isn't it true that if a clock recedes from\n Earth at the speed of light, and if we could watch it as it did so, it\n would still be running but it would never show later time?\"", "Ninon wanted to smile. But smiles made wrinkles, too. She was content to\n feel that sureness of power in her grasp—the certain knowledge that\n she, first of all people, would turn Time on itself and destroy it. She\n would be youthful again. She would thread through the ages to come, like\n a silver needle drawing a golden filament through the layer on layer of\n the cloth of years that would engarment her eternal youth. Ninon knew\n how.\n\n\n Her shining, gray-green eyes strayed to the one door in her apartment\n through which no man had ever gone. There the exercising machines; the\n lotions; the unguents; the diets; the radioactive drugs; the records of\n endocrine transplantations, of blood transfusions. She dismissed them\n contemptuously. Toys! The mirages of a pseudo-youth. She would leave\n them here for someone else to use in masking the downhill years.", "But what was this? Not Mars! Not any planet she knew, or had seen\n before. Yet there, ahead, was Mars! A new planet, where the asteroids\n had been when she left! Was this the same system? Had there been a\n mistake in the calculations of the scientists and engineers who had\n plotted the course of the ship? Was something wrong?\n\n\n But no matter—she was still Ninon. She was young and beautiful. And\n wherever she landed there would be excitement and rushing about as she\n told her story. And men would flock to her. Young, handsome men!", "The yammering rockets cut off, and the ship seemed to poise on the ebon\n lip of a vast Stygian abyss.\n\n\n Joints creaking, muscles protesting, Ninon pushed herself up and out of\n the sling against the artificial gravity of the ship. Robert was already\n seated at the controls.\n\n\n \"How fast are we going?\" she asked; and her voice was rusty and harsh.\n\n\n \"Barely crawling, astronomically,\" he said shortly. \"About forty-six\n thousand miles a minute.\"\n\n\n \"Is that as fast as the speed of light?\"\n\n\n \"Hardly, Madame,\" he said, with a condescending chuckle.\n\n\n \"Then make it go faster!\" she screamed. \"And faster and faster—hurry!\n What are we waiting for?\"", "Again the young spaceman hesitated. \"We ... we don't know, yet. We think\n that time won't have the same meaning to everyone....\"\n\n\n \"... When you travel faster than light. Is that it?\"\n\n\n \"Well ... yes. Something like that.\"\n\n\n \"And I'll be—old—or dead, when you get back? If you get back?\"\n\n\n Robert leaned forward and buried his face in the silvery-blonde hair\n which swept down over Ninon's shoulders.\n\n\n \"Don't say it, darling,\" he murmured.\n\n\n This time Ninon permitted herself a wrinkling smile. If she was right,\n and she knew she was, it could make no difference now. There would be no\n wrinkles—there would be only the soft flexible skin, naturally soft and\n flexible, of real youth.", "Yes, unquestionably she was younger, more beautiful. Unquestionably Time\n was being kind to her, giving her back her youth. She was not sorry that\n Robert was gone—there would be many young men, men her own age, when\n she got back to Earth. And that would be soon. She must rest more, and\n be ready.\n\n\n The light drive cut off, and the great ship slowly decelerated as it\n found its way back into the galaxy from which it had started. Found its\n way back into the System which had borne it. Ninon watched through the\n port as it slid in past the outer planets. Had they changed? No, she\n could not see that they had—only she had changed—until Saturn loomed\n up through the port, so close by, it looked, that she might touch it.\n But Saturn had no rings. Here was change. She puzzled over it a moment,\n frowning then forgot it when she recognized Jupiter again as Saturn fell\n behind. Next would be Mars...." ], [ "indeed. It made her very happy, very, very happy—for there is a smile\n on her face.\"", "He slipped an arm around her. \"Of course. You know, Nina, our\n scientists say that if one could travel faster than the speed of light\n one could live in reverse. So when we get old we'll go out in space,\n very, very fast, and we'll grow young again, together!\"\nThen a shout went up from the two men who had gone up the ramp into the\n ship to greet whoever was aboard. They came hurrying down, and Robin and\n Nina crowded forward to hear what they had to report.\nThey were puffing from the rush of their excitement. \"There is no one\n alive on the ship,\" they cried. \"Only an old, withered, white-haired\n lady, lying dead ... and alone. She must have fared long and far to have\n lived so long, to be so old in death. Space travel must be pleasant,", "She reached behind her, over the end of the couch, and pushed three\n buttons. The light, already soft, dimmed slowly to the faintest of\n glows; a suave, perfumed dusk as precisely calculated as was the exact\n rate at which she let all resistance ebb from her body.\n\n\n Robert's voice was muffled through her hair. \"What were those clicks?\"\n he asked.\n\n\n Ninon's arms stole around his neck. \"The lights,\" she whispered, \"and a\n little automatic warning to tell you when it's time to go....\"\n\n\n The boy did not seem to remember about the third click. Ninon was not\n quite ready to tell him, yet. But she would....\nTwo hours later a golden-voiced bell chimed, softly, musically. The\n lights slowly brightened to no more than the lambent glow which was all\n that Ninon permitted. She ran her fingers through the young spaceman's\n tousled hair and shook him gently.", "The mocking gravity in his voice infuriated her. \"Then you shall be my\n mirror,\" she said. \"Tell me, Robert, am I not now much younger? Am I not\n becoming more and more beautiful? Am I not in truth the most desirable\n of women?... But I forget. After all, you are only a boy, by now.\"\n\n\n He said, \"I'm afraid our scientists will have some new and interesting\n data on the effects of time in relation to time. Before long we'll begin\n to decelerate. It won't be easy or pleasant. I'll try to make you as\n comfortable as possible.\"\n\n\n Ninon felt her face go white and stiff with rage. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n Robert said, coldly brutal, \"You're looking your age, Ninon. Every year\n of your fifty-two!\"", "\"Ninon, my darling,\" he whispered huskily.\n\n\n Ninon did not have to make her voice throaty any more, and that annoyed\n her too. Once she had had to do it deliberately. But now, through the\n years, it had deepened.\n\n\n \"Not yet, Robert,\" she whispered. She let him feel the slight but firm\n resistance so nicely calculated to breach his own; watched the deepening\n flush of his cheeks with the clinical sureness that a thousand such\n experiences with men had given her.\n\n\n Then, \"Come in, Robert,\" she said, moving back a step. \"I've been\n waiting for you.\"\n\n\n She noted, approvingly, that Robert was in his spaceman's uniform, ready\n for the morrow's flight, as he went past her to the couch. She pushed\n the button which closed and locked the door, then seated herself beside\n the young spaceman on the silken couch.", "\"It's time to go, Robert,\" she said.\n\n\n Robert fought back from the stubborn grasp of sleep. \"So soon?\" he\n mumbled.\n\n\n \"And I'm going with you,\" Ninon said.\n\n\n This brought him fully awake. \"I'm sorry, Ninon. You can't!\" He sat up\n and yawned, stretched, the healthy stretch of resilient youth. Then he\n reached for the jacket he had tossed over on a chair.\n\n\n Ninon watched him with envious eyes, waiting until he was fully alert.\n\n\n \"Robert!\" she said, and the youth paused at the sharpness of her voice.\n \"How old are you?\"\n\n\n \"I've told you before, darling—twenty-four.\"\n\n\n \"How old do you think I am?\"", "There, on the floor beside her, was the answer she had sought so long. A\n book. \"Time in Relation to Time.\" The name of the author, his academic\n record in theoretical physics, the cautious, scientific wording of his\n postulates, meant nothing to her. The one thing that had meaning for her\n was that Time could be manipulated. And she would manipulate it. For\n Ninon!\n\n\n The door chimes tinkled intimately. Ninon glanced at her watch—Robert\n was on time. She arose from the couch, made sure that the light was\n behind her at just the right angle so he could see the outlines of her\n figure through the sheerness of her gown, then went to the door and\n opened it.\n\n\n A young man stood there. Young, handsome, strong, his eyes aglow with\n the desire he felt, Ninon knew, when he saw her. He took one quick step\n forward to clasp her in his strong young arms.", "\"It must be hours ... days ... weeks. I should be hungry. Yes, I think I\n am hungry. I'll need food, lots of food. Young people have good\n appetites, don't they, Robert?\"\n\n\n He pointed to the provisions locker, and she got food out and made it\n ready. But she could eat but a few mouthfuls.\nIt's the excitement\n, she\n told herself. After all, no other woman, ever, had gone back through the\n years to be young again....\nLong hours she rested in the sling, gaining more strength for the day\n when they would land back on Earth and she could step out in all the\n springy vitality of a girl of twenty. And then as she watched through\n the ingenious ports she saw the stars of the far galaxies beginning to\n wheel about through space, and she knew that the ship had reached the\n halfway point and was turning to speed back through space to Earth,\n uncounted light-years behind them—or before them. And she would still\n continue to grow younger and younger....", "There was no time to gloat over her victory. That would come later.\n Right now minutes counted. She snatched up a cloak, pushed Robert out\n through the door and hurried him along the hall and out into the street\n where his car waited.\n\n\n \"We must hurry,\" she said breathlessly. \"We can get to the spaceship\n ahead of schedule, before your flight partner arrives, and be gone from\n Earth before anyone knows what is happening. I'll be with you, in his\n place.\"\n\n\n Robert did not offer to help her into the car, but got in first and\n waited until she closed the door behind her, then sped away from the\n curb and through the streets to the spaceport.\n\n\n Ninon said, \"Tell me, Robert, isn't it true that if a clock recedes from\n Earth at the speed of light, and if we could watch it as it did so, it\n would still be running but it would never show later time?\"", "The yammering rockets cut off, and the ship seemed to poise on the ebon\n lip of a vast Stygian abyss.\n\n\n Joints creaking, muscles protesting, Ninon pushed herself up and out of\n the sling against the artificial gravity of the ship. Robert was already\n seated at the controls.\n\n\n \"How fast are we going?\" she asked; and her voice was rusty and harsh.\n\n\n \"Barely crawling, astronomically,\" he said shortly. \"About forty-six\n thousand miles a minute.\"\n\n\n \"Is that as fast as the speed of light?\"\n\n\n \"Hardly, Madame,\" he said, with a condescending chuckle.\n\n\n \"Then make it go faster!\" she screamed. \"And faster and faster—hurry!\n What are we waiting for?\"", "pitted—it has traveled from afar.\"\nAn old man cried: \"It is a demon ship. It has come to destroy us all.\"\nA murmur went through the crowd, and some moved farther back for\n safety, watching with alert curiosity.\nThen an engineer ventured close, and said, \"The workmanship is similar\n to that in the space ship we are building, yet not the same. It is\n obviously not of our Aerth.\"\nAnd a savant said, \"Yes, not of this Aerth. But perhaps it is from a\n parallel time stream, where there is a system with planets and peoples\n like us.\"\nThen a hatch opened in the towering flank of the ship, and a ramp slid\n forth and slanted to the ground. The mingled voices of the crowd\n attended it. The fearful ones backed farther away. Some stood their", "\"Make it go faster!\" she cried. \"Faster! Faster!\"\n\n\n She looked out the ports again; looked back behind them—and saw shining\n specks of glittering blackness falling away to melt into the sootiness\n of space. She shuddered, and knew without asking that these were stars\n dropping behind at a rate greater than light speed.\n\n\n \"Now how fast are we going?\" she asked. She was sure that her voice was\n stronger; that strength was flowing back into her muscles and bones.\n\n\n \"Nearly twice light speed.\"\n\n\n \"Faster!\" she cried. \"We must go much faster! I must be young again.\n Youthful, and gay, and alive and happy.... Tell me, Robert, do you feel\n younger yet?\"", "Ninon said, \"But that's three hours, Robert.\"\n\n\n \"But I haven't slept yet tonight. There's been so much to do. I should\n rest a little.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be more than rest for you.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Ninon.... Oh, yes.\"\n\n\n \"Not yet, darling.\" Again her hands were between them. \"First, tell me\n about the flight tomorrow.\"\n\n\n The young spaceman's eyes were puzzled, hurt. \"But Ninon, I've told you\n before ... there is so much of you that I want to remember ... so little\n time left ... and you'll be gone when I get back....\"\n\n\n Ninon let her gray-green eyes narrow ever so slightly as she leaned away\n from him. But he blundered on.", "The youth paused at the door and glanced back, making no effort to\n conceal the loathing she had aroused in him. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\n Ninon said, \"You'll never make that flight without me.... Watch!\"\n\n\n Swiftly she pushed buttons again. The room darkened, as before. Curtains\n at one end divided and rustled back, and a glowing screen sprang to life\n on the wall revealed behind them. And there, in life and movement and\n color and sound and dimension, she—and Robert—projected themselves,\n together on the couch, beginning at the moment Ninon had pressed the\n three buttons earlier. Robert's arms were around her, his face buried in\n the hair falling over her shoulders....", "Ninon wanted to smile. But smiles made wrinkles, too. She was content to\n feel that sureness of power in her grasp—the certain knowledge that\n she, first of all people, would turn Time on itself and destroy it. She\n would be youthful again. She would thread through the ages to come, like\n a silver needle drawing a golden filament through the layer on layer of\n the cloth of years that would engarment her eternal youth. Ninon knew\n how.\n\n\n Her shining, gray-green eyes strayed to the one door in her apartment\n through which no man had ever gone. There the exercising machines; the\n lotions; the unguents; the diets; the radioactive drugs; the records of\n endocrine transplantations, of blood transfusions. She dismissed them\n contemptuously. Toys! The mirages of a pseudo-youth. She would leave\n them here for someone else to use in masking the downhill years.", "Robert said, \"So that's what's in your mind.\" He busied himself with\n parking the car at the spaceport, then went on: \"You want to go back in\n the past thirty years, and be a girl again. While I grow younger, too,\n into a boy, then a child, a baby, at last nothing....\"\n\n\n \"I'll try to be sorry for you, Robert.\"\n\n\n Ninon felt again for her beta-gun as he stared at her for a long minute,\n his gaze a curious mixture of amusement and pity. Then, \"Come on,\" he\n said flatly, turning to lead the way to the gleaming space ship which\n poised, towering like a spire, in the center of the blast-off basin. And\n added, \"I think I shall enjoy this trip, Madame, more than you will.\"", "This time she could see that he believed it. The horror he felt was easy\n to read on his face while he struggled to speak. \"Then ... God help\n me ... I've been making love to ... an old woman!\" His voice was low,\n bitter, accusing.\n\n\n Ninon slapped him.\n\n\n He swayed slightly, then his features froze as the red marks of her\n fingers traced across his left cheek. At last he bowed, mockingly, and\n said, \"Your pardon, Madame. I forgot myself. My father taught me to be\n respectful to my elders.\"\n\n\n For that Ninon could have killed him. As he turned to leave, her hand\n sought the tiny, feather-light beta-gun cunningly concealed in the folds\n of her gown. But the driving force of her desire made her stay her hand.\n\n\n \"Robert!\" she said in peremptory tones.", "The young man's words seemed to imply a secret knowledge that Ninon did\n not possess. A sudden chill of apprehension rippled through her, and\n almost she turned back. But no ... there was the ship! There was youth;\n and beauty; and the admiration of men, real admiration. Suppleness in\n her muscles and joints again. No more diets. No more transfusions. No\n more transplantations. No more the bio-knife. She could smile again, or\n frown again. And after a few years she could make the trip again ... and\n again....\nThe space ship stood on fiery tiptoes and leaped from Earth, high into\n the heavens, and out and away. Past rusted Mars. Past the busy\n asteroids. Past the sleeping giants, Jupiter and Saturn. Past pale", "Ninon laughed mirthlessly, and pressed buttons again. The screen\n changed, went blank for a moment, then figures appeared again. On the\n couch were she and a man, middle-aged, dignified in appearance,\n uniformed. Blane Pritchard, Commandant of Space Research. His arms were\n around her, and his face was buried in her hair. She let the recording\n run for a moment, then shut it off and turned up the lights.\n\n\n To Robert, she said, \"I think Commander Pritchard would be here in five\n minutes if I called and told him that I have information which seriously\n affects the success of the flight.\"\n\n\n The young spaceman's face was white and stricken as he stared for long\n moments, wordless, at Ninon. Then in defeated tones he said, \"You\n scheming witch! What do you want?\"", "Ninon snatched out the little beta-gun, then, leveled it and fired. And\n watched without remorse as the hungry electrons streamed forth to strike\n the young spaceman, turning him into a motionless, glowing figure which\n rapidly became misty and wraith-like, at last to disappear, leaving only\n a swirl of sparkling haze where he had stood. This too disappeared as\n its separate particles drifted to the metallite walls of the space ship,\n discharged their energy and ceased to sparkle, leaving only a thin film\n of dust over all.\nAfter a while Ninon got up again from the sling and made her way to the\n wall. She polished the dust away from a small area of it, trying to make\n the spot gleam enough so that she could use it for a mirror. She\n polished a long time, until at last she could see a ghostly reflection\n of her face in the rubbed spot." ], [ "She reached behind her, over the end of the couch, and pushed three\n buttons. The light, already soft, dimmed slowly to the faintest of\n glows; a suave, perfumed dusk as precisely calculated as was the exact\n rate at which she let all resistance ebb from her body.\n\n\n Robert's voice was muffled through her hair. \"What were those clicks?\"\n he asked.\n\n\n Ninon's arms stole around his neck. \"The lights,\" she whispered, \"and a\n little automatic warning to tell you when it's time to go....\"\n\n\n The boy did not seem to remember about the third click. Ninon was not\n quite ready to tell him, yet. But she would....\nTwo hours later a golden-voiced bell chimed, softly, musically. The\n lights slowly brightened to no more than the lambent glow which was all\n that Ninon permitted. She ran her fingers through the young spaceman's\n tousled hair and shook him gently.", "Ninon snatched out the little beta-gun, then, leveled it and fired. And\n watched without remorse as the hungry electrons streamed forth to strike\n the young spaceman, turning him into a motionless, glowing figure which\n rapidly became misty and wraith-like, at last to disappear, leaving only\n a swirl of sparkling haze where he had stood. This too disappeared as\n its separate particles drifted to the metallite walls of the space ship,\n discharged their energy and ceased to sparkle, leaving only a thin film\n of dust over all.\nAfter a while Ninon got up again from the sling and made her way to the\n wall. She polished the dust away from a small area of it, trying to make\n the spot gleam enough so that she could use it for a mirror. She\n polished a long time, until at last she could see a ghostly reflection\n of her face in the rubbed spot.", "Ninon laughed mirthlessly, and pressed buttons again. The screen\n changed, went blank for a moment, then figures appeared again. On the\n couch were she and a man, middle-aged, dignified in appearance,\n uniformed. Blane Pritchard, Commandant of Space Research. His arms were\n around her, and his face was buried in her hair. She let the recording\n run for a moment, then shut it off and turned up the lights.\n\n\n To Robert, she said, \"I think Commander Pritchard would be here in five\n minutes if I called and told him that I have information which seriously\n affects the success of the flight.\"\n\n\n The young spaceman's face was white and stricken as he stared for long\n moments, wordless, at Ninon. Then in defeated tones he said, \"You\n scheming witch! What do you want?\"", "The youth paused at the door and glanced back, making no effort to\n conceal the loathing she had aroused in him. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\n Ninon said, \"You'll never make that flight without me.... Watch!\"\n\n\n Swiftly she pushed buttons again. The room darkened, as before. Curtains\n at one end divided and rustled back, and a glowing screen sprang to life\n on the wall revealed behind them. And there, in life and movement and\n color and sound and dimension, she—and Robert—projected themselves,\n together on the couch, beginning at the moment Ninon had pressed the\n three buttons earlier. Robert's arms were around her, his face buried in\n the hair falling over her shoulders....", "The spaceman's voice was doubly bitter in the darkened room. \"So that's\n it,\" he said. \"A recording! Another one for your collection, I suppose.\n But of what use is it to you? I have neither money nor power. I'll be\n gone from this Earth in an hour. And you'll be gone from it,\n permanently—at your age—before I get back. I have nothing to lose, and\n you have nothing to gain.\"", "\"Ninon, my darling,\" he whispered huskily.\n\n\n Ninon did not have to make her voice throaty any more, and that annoyed\n her too. Once she had had to do it deliberately. But now, through the\n years, it had deepened.\n\n\n \"Not yet, Robert,\" she whispered. She let him feel the slight but firm\n resistance so nicely calculated to breach his own; watched the deepening\n flush of his cheeks with the clinical sureness that a thousand such\n experiences with men had given her.\n\n\n Then, \"Come in, Robert,\" she said, moving back a step. \"I've been\n waiting for you.\"\n\n\n She noted, approvingly, that Robert was in his spaceman's uniform, ready\n for the morrow's flight, as he went past her to the couch. She pushed\n the button which closed and locked the door, then seated herself beside\n the young spaceman on the silken couch.", "The yammering rockets cut off, and the ship seemed to poise on the ebon\n lip of a vast Stygian abyss.\n\n\n Joints creaking, muscles protesting, Ninon pushed herself up and out of\n the sling against the artificial gravity of the ship. Robert was already\n seated at the controls.\n\n\n \"How fast are we going?\" she asked; and her voice was rusty and harsh.\n\n\n \"Barely crawling, astronomically,\" he said shortly. \"About forty-six\n thousand miles a minute.\"\n\n\n \"Is that as fast as the speed of light?\"\n\n\n \"Hardly, Madame,\" he said, with a condescending chuckle.\n\n\n \"Then make it go faster!\" she screamed. \"And faster and faster—hurry!\n What are we waiting for?\"", "The young spaceman swivelled about in his seat. He looked haggard and\n drawn from the strain of the long acceleration. Despite herself, Ninon\n could feel the sagging in her own face; the sunkenness of her eyes. She\n felt tired, hating herself for it—hating having this young man see\n her.\n\n\n He said, \"The ship is on automatic control throughout. The course is\n plotted in advance; all operations are plotted. There is nothing we can\n do but wait. The light drive will cut in at the planned time.\"\n\n\n \"Time! Wait! That's all I hear!\" Ninon shrieked. \"Do something!\"", "He slipped an arm around her. \"Of course. You know, Nina, our\n scientists say that if one could travel faster than the speed of light\n one could live in reverse. So when we get old we'll go out in space,\n very, very fast, and we'll grow young again, together!\"\nThen a shout went up from the two men who had gone up the ramp into the\n ship to greet whoever was aboard. They came hurrying down, and Robin and\n Nina crowded forward to hear what they had to report.\nThey were puffing from the rush of their excitement. \"There is no one\n alive on the ship,\" they cried. \"Only an old, withered, white-haired\n lady, lying dead ... and alone. She must have fared long and far to have\n lived so long, to be so old in death. Space travel must be pleasant,", "The young man's words seemed to imply a secret knowledge that Ninon did\n not possess. A sudden chill of apprehension rippled through her, and\n almost she turned back. But no ... there was the ship! There was youth;\n and beauty; and the admiration of men, real admiration. Suppleness in\n her muscles and joints again. No more diets. No more transfusions. No\n more transplantations. No more the bio-knife. She could smile again, or\n frown again. And after a few years she could make the trip again ... and\n again....\nThe space ship stood on fiery tiptoes and leaped from Earth, high into\n the heavens, and out and away. Past rusted Mars. Past the busy\n asteroids. Past the sleeping giants, Jupiter and Saturn. Past pale", "She tottered back to the sling, sank gratefully into the comfort of it,\n closed her eyes, and waited.\nThe ship landed automatically, lowering itself to the land on a pillar\n of rushing flame, needing no help from its passenger. Then the flame\n died away—and the ship—and Ninon—rested, quietly, serenely, while the\n rocket tubes crackled and cooled. The people outside gathered at a safe\n distance from it, waiting until they could come closer and greet the\n brave passengers who had voyaged through space from no one knew where.\nThere was shouting and laughing and talking, and much speculation.\n\"The ship is from Maris, the red planet,\" someone said.\nAnd another: \"No, no! It is not of this system. See how the hull is", "There was no time to gloat over her victory. That would come later.\n Right now minutes counted. She snatched up a cloak, pushed Robert out\n through the door and hurried him along the hall and out into the street\n where his car waited.\n\n\n \"We must hurry,\" she said breathlessly. \"We can get to the spaceship\n ahead of schedule, before your flight partner arrives, and be gone from\n Earth before anyone knows what is happening. I'll be with you, in his\n place.\"\n\n\n Robert did not offer to help her into the car, but got in first and\n waited until she closed the door behind her, then sped away from the\n curb and through the streets to the spaceport.\n\n\n Ninon said, \"Tell me, Robert, isn't it true that if a clock recedes from\n Earth at the speed of light, and if we could watch it as it did so, it\n would still be running but it would never show later time?\"", "pitted—it has traveled from afar.\"\nAn old man cried: \"It is a demon ship. It has come to destroy us all.\"\nA murmur went through the crowd, and some moved farther back for\n safety, watching with alert curiosity.\nThen an engineer ventured close, and said, \"The workmanship is similar\n to that in the space ship we are building, yet not the same. It is\n obviously not of our Aerth.\"\nAnd a savant said, \"Yes, not of this Aerth. But perhaps it is from a\n parallel time stream, where there is a system with planets and peoples\n like us.\"\nThen a hatch opened in the towering flank of the ship, and a ramp slid\n forth and slanted to the ground. The mingled voices of the crowd\n attended it. The fearful ones backed farther away. Some stood their", "He did not answer.\nNinon lay in the acceleration sling, gaining strength, and—she\n knew—youth. Her lost youth, coming back, to be spent all over again.\n How wonderful! No woman in all of time and history had ever done it. She\n would be immortal; forever young and lovely. She hardly noticed the\n stiffness in her joints when she got to her feet again—it was just from\n lying in the sling so long.\n\n\n She made her voice light and gay. \"Are we not going very, very fast,\n now, Robert?\"\n\n\n He answered without turning. \"Yes. Many times the speed of light.\"\n\n\n \"I knew it ... I knew it! Already I feel much younger. Don't you feel it\n too?\"\n\n\n He did not answer, and Ninon kept on talking. \"How long have we been\n going, Robert?\"\n\n\n He said, \"I don't know ... depends on where you are.\"", "The mocking gravity in his voice infuriated her. \"Then you shall be my\n mirror,\" she said. \"Tell me, Robert, am I not now much younger? Am I not\n becoming more and more beautiful? Am I not in truth the most desirable\n of women?... But I forget. After all, you are only a boy, by now.\"\n\n\n He said, \"I'm afraid our scientists will have some new and interesting\n data on the effects of time in relation to time. Before long we'll begin\n to decelerate. It won't be easy or pleasant. I'll try to make you as\n comfortable as possible.\"\n\n\n Ninon felt her face go white and stiff with rage. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n Robert said, coldly brutal, \"You're looking your age, Ninon. Every year\n of your fifty-two!\"", "\"Make it go faster!\" she cried. \"Faster! Faster!\"\n\n\n She looked out the ports again; looked back behind them—and saw shining\n specks of glittering blackness falling away to melt into the sootiness\n of space. She shuddered, and knew without asking that these were stars\n dropping behind at a rate greater than light speed.\n\n\n \"Now how fast are we going?\" she asked. She was sure that her voice was\n stronger; that strength was flowing back into her muscles and bones.\n\n\n \"Nearly twice light speed.\"\n\n\n \"Faster!\" she cried. \"We must go much faster! I must be young again.\n Youthful, and gay, and alive and happy.... Tell me, Robert, do you feel\n younger yet?\"", "Ninon wanted to smile. But smiles made wrinkles, too. She was content to\n feel that sureness of power in her grasp—the certain knowledge that\n she, first of all people, would turn Time on itself and destroy it. She\n would be youthful again. She would thread through the ages to come, like\n a silver needle drawing a golden filament through the layer on layer of\n the cloth of years that would engarment her eternal youth. Ninon knew\n how.\n\n\n Her shining, gray-green eyes strayed to the one door in her apartment\n through which no man had ever gone. There the exercising machines; the\n lotions; the unguents; the diets; the radioactive drugs; the records of\n endocrine transplantations, of blood transfusions. She dismissed them\n contemptuously. Toys! The mirages of a pseudo-youth. She would leave\n them here for someone else to use in masking the downhill years.", "Then she heard it. A low moan, starting from below the limit of\n audibility, then climbing, up and up and up and up, until it was a\n nerve-plucking whine that tore into her brain like a white-hot tuning\n fork. And still it climbed, up beyond the range of hearing, and up and\n up still more, till it could no longer be felt. But Ninon, as she\n stumbled back into the acceleration sling, sick and shaken, knew it was\n still there. The light drive!\n\n\n She watched through the ports. The motionless, silent stars were moving\n now, coming toward them, faster and faster, as the ship swept out of the\n galaxy, shooting into her face like blazing pebbles from a giant\n slingshot.\n\n\n She asked, \"How fast are we going now?\"\n\n\n Robert's voice sounded far off as he replied, \"We are approaching the\n speed of light.\"", "She gazed at the slightly-blurred figure of the young spaceman on the\n far side of the compartment, focussing her eyes with effort. \"You are\n looking much younger, Robert,\" she said. \"Yes, I think you are becoming\n quite boyish, almost childish, in appearance.\"\n\n\n He nodded slightly. \"You may be right,\" he said.\n\n\n \"I must have a mirror,\" she cried. \"I must see for myself how much\n younger I have become. I'll hardly recognize myself....\"\n\n\n \"There is no mirror,\" he told her.\n\n\n \"No mirror? But how can I see....\"\n\n\n \"Non-essentials were not included in the supplies on this ship. Mirrors\n are not essential—to men.\"", "Ninon said, \"But that's three hours, Robert.\"\n\n\n \"But I haven't slept yet tonight. There's been so much to do. I should\n rest a little.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be more than rest for you.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Ninon.... Oh, yes.\"\n\n\n \"Not yet, darling.\" Again her hands were between them. \"First, tell me\n about the flight tomorrow.\"\n\n\n The young spaceman's eyes were puzzled, hurt. \"But Ninon, I've told you\n before ... there is so much of you that I want to remember ... so little\n time left ... and you'll be gone when I get back....\"\n\n\n Ninon let her gray-green eyes narrow ever so slightly as she leaned away\n from him. But he blundered on." ], [ "This time she could see that he believed it. The horror he felt was easy\n to read on his face while he struggled to speak. \"Then ... God help\n me ... I've been making love to ... an old woman!\" His voice was low,\n bitter, accusing.\n\n\n Ninon slapped him.\n\n\n He swayed slightly, then his features froze as the red marks of her\n fingers traced across his left cheek. At last he bowed, mockingly, and\n said, \"Your pardon, Madame. I forgot myself. My father taught me to be\n respectful to my elders.\"\n\n\n For that Ninon could have killed him. As he turned to leave, her hand\n sought the tiny, feather-light beta-gun cunningly concealed in the folds\n of her gown. But the driving force of her desire made her stay her hand.\n\n\n \"Robert!\" she said in peremptory tones.", "Ninon wanted to smile. But smiles made wrinkles, too. She was content to\n feel that sureness of power in her grasp—the certain knowledge that\n she, first of all people, would turn Time on itself and destroy it. She\n would be youthful again. She would thread through the ages to come, like\n a silver needle drawing a golden filament through the layer on layer of\n the cloth of years that would engarment her eternal youth. Ninon knew\n how.\n\n\n Her shining, gray-green eyes strayed to the one door in her apartment\n through which no man had ever gone. There the exercising machines; the\n lotions; the unguents; the diets; the radioactive drugs; the records of\n endocrine transplantations, of blood transfusions. She dismissed them\n contemptuously. Toys! The mirages of a pseudo-youth. She would leave\n them here for someone else to use in masking the downhill years.", "Ninon said, \"But that's three hours, Robert.\"\n\n\n \"But I haven't slept yet tonight. There's been so much to do. I should\n rest a little.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be more than rest for you.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Ninon.... Oh, yes.\"\n\n\n \"Not yet, darling.\" Again her hands were between them. \"First, tell me\n about the flight tomorrow.\"\n\n\n The young spaceman's eyes were puzzled, hurt. \"But Ninon, I've told you\n before ... there is so much of you that I want to remember ... so little\n time left ... and you'll be gone when I get back....\"\n\n\n Ninon let her gray-green eyes narrow ever so slightly as she leaned away\n from him. But he blundered on.", "\"Ninon, my darling,\" he whispered huskily.\n\n\n Ninon did not have to make her voice throaty any more, and that annoyed\n her too. Once she had had to do it deliberately. But now, through the\n years, it had deepened.\n\n\n \"Not yet, Robert,\" she whispered. She let him feel the slight but firm\n resistance so nicely calculated to breach his own; watched the deepening\n flush of his cheeks with the clinical sureness that a thousand such\n experiences with men had given her.\n\n\n Then, \"Come in, Robert,\" she said, moving back a step. \"I've been\n waiting for you.\"\n\n\n She noted, approvingly, that Robert was in his spaceman's uniform, ready\n for the morrow's flight, as he went past her to the couch. She pushed\n the button which closed and locked the door, then seated herself beside\n the young spaceman on the silken couch.", "Ninon laughed mirthlessly, and pressed buttons again. The screen\n changed, went blank for a moment, then figures appeared again. On the\n couch were she and a man, middle-aged, dignified in appearance,\n uniformed. Blane Pritchard, Commandant of Space Research. His arms were\n around her, and his face was buried in her hair. She let the recording\n run for a moment, then shut it off and turned up the lights.\n\n\n To Robert, she said, \"I think Commander Pritchard would be here in five\n minutes if I called and told him that I have information which seriously\n affects the success of the flight.\"\n\n\n The young spaceman's face was white and stricken as he stared for long\n moments, wordless, at Ninon. Then in defeated tones he said, \"You\n scheming witch! What do you want?\"", "The youth paused at the door and glanced back, making no effort to\n conceal the loathing she had aroused in him. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\n Ninon said, \"You'll never make that flight without me.... Watch!\"\n\n\n Swiftly she pushed buttons again. The room darkened, as before. Curtains\n at one end divided and rustled back, and a glowing screen sprang to life\n on the wall revealed behind them. And there, in life and movement and\n color and sound and dimension, she—and Robert—projected themselves,\n together on the couch, beginning at the moment Ninon had pressed the\n three buttons earlier. Robert's arms were around her, his face buried in\n the hair falling over her shoulders....", "He gazed at her in silent curiosity for a moment, then said, \"Come to\n think of it, you've never told me. About twenty-two or -three, I'd say.\"\n\n\n \"Tomorrow is my birthday. I'll be fifty-two.\"\n\n\n He stared at her in shocked amazement. Then, as his gaze went over the\n smooth lines of her body, the amazement gave way to disbelief, and he\n chuckled. \"The way you said it, Ninon, almost had me believing you. You\n can't possibly be that old, or anywhere near it. You're joking.\"\n\n\n Ninon's voice was cold. She repeated it: \"I am fifty-two years old. I\n knew your father, before you were born.\"", "The young man's words seemed to imply a secret knowledge that Ninon did\n not possess. A sudden chill of apprehension rippled through her, and\n almost she turned back. But no ... there was the ship! There was youth;\n and beauty; and the admiration of men, real admiration. Suppleness in\n her muscles and joints again. No more diets. No more transfusions. No\n more transplantations. No more the bio-knife. She could smile again, or\n frown again. And after a few years she could make the trip again ... and\n again....\nThe space ship stood on fiery tiptoes and leaped from Earth, high into\n the heavens, and out and away. Past rusted Mars. Past the busy\n asteroids. Past the sleeping giants, Jupiter and Saturn. Past pale", "He did not answer.\nNinon lay in the acceleration sling, gaining strength, and—she\n knew—youth. Her lost youth, coming back, to be spent all over again.\n How wonderful! No woman in all of time and history had ever done it. She\n would be immortal; forever young and lovely. She hardly noticed the\n stiffness in her joints when she got to her feet again—it was just from\n lying in the sling so long.\n\n\n She made her voice light and gay. \"Are we not going very, very fast,\n now, Robert?\"\n\n\n He answered without turning. \"Yes. Many times the speed of light.\"\n\n\n \"I knew it ... I knew it! Already I feel much younger. Don't you feel it\n too?\"\n\n\n He did not answer, and Ninon kept on talking. \"How long have we been\n going, Robert?\"\n\n\n He said, \"I don't know ... depends on where you are.\"", "Ninon snatched out the little beta-gun, then, leveled it and fired. And\n watched without remorse as the hungry electrons streamed forth to strike\n the young spaceman, turning him into a motionless, glowing figure which\n rapidly became misty and wraith-like, at last to disappear, leaving only\n a swirl of sparkling haze where he had stood. This too disappeared as\n its separate particles drifted to the metallite walls of the space ship,\n discharged their energy and ceased to sparkle, leaving only a thin film\n of dust over all.\nAfter a while Ninon got up again from the sling and made her way to the\n wall. She polished the dust away from a small area of it, trying to make\n the spot gleam enough so that she could use it for a mirror. She\n polished a long time, until at last she could see a ghostly reflection\n of her face in the rubbed spot.", "\"It's time to go, Robert,\" she said.\n\n\n Robert fought back from the stubborn grasp of sleep. \"So soon?\" he\n mumbled.\n\n\n \"And I'm going with you,\" Ninon said.\n\n\n This brought him fully awake. \"I'm sorry, Ninon. You can't!\" He sat up\n and yawned, stretched, the healthy stretch of resilient youth. Then he\n reached for the jacket he had tossed over on a chair.\n\n\n Ninon watched him with envious eyes, waiting until he was fully alert.\n\n\n \"Robert!\" she said, and the youth paused at the sharpness of her voice.\n \"How old are you?\"\n\n\n \"I've told you before, darling—twenty-four.\"\n\n\n \"How old do you think I am?\"", "Wrinkles acknowledged only one master, the bio-knife of the facial\n surgeons. But the bio-knife could not thrust deep enough to excise the\n stiffness in a joint; was not clever enough to remold the outlines of a\n figure where they were beginning to blur and—sag.\n\n\n No one else could see it—yet. But Ninon could!\n\n\n Again the frown almost came, and again she scourged it fiercely into the\n back of her mind. Time was her enemy. But she had had other enemies, and\n destroyed them, one way or another, cleverly or ruthlessly as\n circumstances demanded. Time, too, could be destroyed. Or enslaved.\n Ninon sorted through her meagre store of remembered reading. Some old\n philosopher had said, \"If you can't whip 'em, join 'em!\" Crude, but apt.", "There, on the floor beside her, was the answer she had sought so long. A\n book. \"Time in Relation to Time.\" The name of the author, his academic\n record in theoretical physics, the cautious, scientific wording of his\n postulates, meant nothing to her. The one thing that had meaning for her\n was that Time could be manipulated. And she would manipulate it. For\n Ninon!\n\n\n The door chimes tinkled intimately. Ninon glanced at her watch—Robert\n was on time. She arose from the couch, made sure that the light was\n behind her at just the right angle so he could see the outlines of her\n figure through the sheerness of her gown, then went to the door and\n opened it.\n\n\n A young man stood there. Young, handsome, strong, his eyes aglow with\n the desire he felt, Ninon knew, when he saw her. He took one quick step\n forward to clasp her in his strong young arms.", "His hands rested on her shoulders and he turned her until they faced\n each other.\n\n\n \"Ninon,\" he said, \"you are so beautiful. Let me look at you for a long\n time—to carry your image with me through all of time and space.\"\n\n\n Again Ninon let him feel just a hint of resistance, and risked a tiny\n pout. \"If you could just take me with you, Robert....\"\n\n\n Robert's face clouded. \"If I only could!\" he said wistfully. \"If there\n were only room. But this is an experimental flight—no more than two can\n go.\"\n\n\n Again his arms went around her and he leaned closer.\n\n\n \"Wait!\" Ninon said, pushing him back.\n\n\n \"Wait? Wait for what?\" Robert glanced at his watch. \"Time is running\n out. I have to be at the spaceport by dawn—three hours from now.\"", "The mocking gravity in his voice infuriated her. \"Then you shall be my\n mirror,\" she said. \"Tell me, Robert, am I not now much younger? Am I not\n becoming more and more beautiful? Am I not in truth the most desirable\n of women?... But I forget. After all, you are only a boy, by now.\"\n\n\n He said, \"I'm afraid our scientists will have some new and interesting\n data on the effects of time in relation to time. Before long we'll begin\n to decelerate. It won't be easy or pleasant. I'll try to make you as\n comfortable as possible.\"\n\n\n Ninon felt her face go white and stiff with rage. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n Robert said, coldly brutal, \"You're looking your age, Ninon. Every year\n of your fifty-two!\"", "The young spaceman swivelled about in his seat. He looked haggard and\n drawn from the strain of the long acceleration. Despite herself, Ninon\n could feel the sagging in her own face; the sunkenness of her eyes. She\n felt tired, hating herself for it—hating having this young man see\n her.\n\n\n He said, \"The ship is on automatic control throughout. The course is\n plotted in advance; all operations are plotted. There is nothing we can\n do but wait. The light drive will cut in at the planned time.\"\n\n\n \"Time! Wait! That's all I hear!\" Ninon shrieked. \"Do something!\"", "Venomous with triumph, Ninon's voice was harsh even to her ears. \"On the\n contrary, my proud and impetuous young spaceman, I have much to gain,\n more than you could ever understand. When it was announced that you were\n to be trained to command this experimental flight I made it my business\n to find out everything possible about you. One other man is going. He\n too has had the same training, and could take over in your place. A\n third man has also been trained, to stand by in reserve. You are\n supposed to have rested and slept the entire night. If the Commandant of\n Space Research knew that you had not....\"\n\n\n \"I see. That's why you recorded my visit tonight. But I leave in less\n than an hour. You'd never be able to tell Commander Pritchard in time to\n make any difference, and he'd never come here to see....\"", "But what was this? Not Mars! Not any planet she knew, or had seen\n before. Yet there, ahead, was Mars! A new planet, where the asteroids\n had been when she left! Was this the same system? Had there been a\n mistake in the calculations of the scientists and engineers who had\n plotted the course of the ship? Was something wrong?\n\n\n But no matter—she was still Ninon. She was young and beautiful. And\n wherever she landed there would be excitement and rushing about as she\n told her story. And men would flock to her. Young, handsome men!", "There was no time to gloat over her victory. That would come later.\n Right now minutes counted. She snatched up a cloak, pushed Robert out\n through the door and hurried him along the hall and out into the street\n where his car waited.\n\n\n \"We must hurry,\" she said breathlessly. \"We can get to the spaceship\n ahead of schedule, before your flight partner arrives, and be gone from\n Earth before anyone knows what is happening. I'll be with you, in his\n place.\"\n\n\n Robert did not offer to help her into the car, but got in first and\n waited until she closed the door behind her, then sped away from the\n curb and through the streets to the spaceport.\n\n\n Ninon said, \"Tell me, Robert, isn't it true that if a clock recedes from\n Earth at the speed of light, and if we could watch it as it did so, it\n would still be running but it would never show later time?\"", "Robert said, \"So that's what's in your mind.\" He busied himself with\n parking the car at the spaceport, then went on: \"You want to go back in\n the past thirty years, and be a girl again. While I grow younger, too,\n into a boy, then a child, a baby, at last nothing....\"\n\n\n \"I'll try to be sorry for you, Robert.\"\n\n\n Ninon felt again for her beta-gun as he stared at her for a long minute,\n his gaze a curious mixture of amusement and pity. Then, \"Come on,\" he\n said flatly, turning to lead the way to the gleaming space ship which\n poised, towering like a spire, in the center of the blast-off basin. And\n added, \"I think I shall enjoy this trip, Madame, more than you will.\"" ], [ "This time she could see that he believed it. The horror he felt was easy\n to read on his face while he struggled to speak. \"Then ... God help\n me ... I've been making love to ... an old woman!\" His voice was low,\n bitter, accusing.\n\n\n Ninon slapped him.\n\n\n He swayed slightly, then his features froze as the red marks of her\n fingers traced across his left cheek. At last he bowed, mockingly, and\n said, \"Your pardon, Madame. I forgot myself. My father taught me to be\n respectful to my elders.\"\n\n\n For that Ninon could have killed him. As he turned to leave, her hand\n sought the tiny, feather-light beta-gun cunningly concealed in the folds\n of her gown. But the driving force of her desire made her stay her hand.\n\n\n \"Robert!\" she said in peremptory tones.", "\"It's time to go, Robert,\" she said.\n\n\n Robert fought back from the stubborn grasp of sleep. \"So soon?\" he\n mumbled.\n\n\n \"And I'm going with you,\" Ninon said.\n\n\n This brought him fully awake. \"I'm sorry, Ninon. You can't!\" He sat up\n and yawned, stretched, the healthy stretch of resilient youth. Then he\n reached for the jacket he had tossed over on a chair.\n\n\n Ninon watched him with envious eyes, waiting until he was fully alert.\n\n\n \"Robert!\" she said, and the youth paused at the sharpness of her voice.\n \"How old are you?\"\n\n\n \"I've told you before, darling—twenty-four.\"\n\n\n \"How old do you think I am?\"", "Ninon said, \"But that's three hours, Robert.\"\n\n\n \"But I haven't slept yet tonight. There's been so much to do. I should\n rest a little.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be more than rest for you.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Ninon.... Oh, yes.\"\n\n\n \"Not yet, darling.\" Again her hands were between them. \"First, tell me\n about the flight tomorrow.\"\n\n\n The young spaceman's eyes were puzzled, hurt. \"But Ninon, I've told you\n before ... there is so much of you that I want to remember ... so little\n time left ... and you'll be gone when I get back....\"\n\n\n Ninon let her gray-green eyes narrow ever so slightly as she leaned away\n from him. But he blundered on.", "His hands rested on her shoulders and he turned her until they faced\n each other.\n\n\n \"Ninon,\" he said, \"you are so beautiful. Let me look at you for a long\n time—to carry your image with me through all of time and space.\"\n\n\n Again Ninon let him feel just a hint of resistance, and risked a tiny\n pout. \"If you could just take me with you, Robert....\"\n\n\n Robert's face clouded. \"If I only could!\" he said wistfully. \"If there\n were only room. But this is an experimental flight—no more than two can\n go.\"\n\n\n Again his arms went around her and he leaned closer.\n\n\n \"Wait!\" Ninon said, pushing him back.\n\n\n \"Wait? Wait for what?\" Robert glanced at his watch. \"Time is running\n out. I have to be at the spaceport by dawn—three hours from now.\"", "The youth paused at the door and glanced back, making no effort to\n conceal the loathing she had aroused in him. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\n Ninon said, \"You'll never make that flight without me.... Watch!\"\n\n\n Swiftly she pushed buttons again. The room darkened, as before. Curtains\n at one end divided and rustled back, and a glowing screen sprang to life\n on the wall revealed behind them. And there, in life and movement and\n color and sound and dimension, she—and Robert—projected themselves,\n together on the couch, beginning at the moment Ninon had pressed the\n three buttons earlier. Robert's arms were around her, his face buried in\n the hair falling over her shoulders....", "\"Ninon, my darling,\" he whispered huskily.\n\n\n Ninon did not have to make her voice throaty any more, and that annoyed\n her too. Once she had had to do it deliberately. But now, through the\n years, it had deepened.\n\n\n \"Not yet, Robert,\" she whispered. She let him feel the slight but firm\n resistance so nicely calculated to breach his own; watched the deepening\n flush of his cheeks with the clinical sureness that a thousand such\n experiences with men had given her.\n\n\n Then, \"Come in, Robert,\" she said, moving back a step. \"I've been\n waiting for you.\"\n\n\n She noted, approvingly, that Robert was in his spaceman's uniform, ready\n for the morrow's flight, as he went past her to the couch. She pushed\n the button which closed and locked the door, then seated herself beside\n the young spaceman on the silken couch.", "Ninon laughed mirthlessly, and pressed buttons again. The screen\n changed, went blank for a moment, then figures appeared again. On the\n couch were she and a man, middle-aged, dignified in appearance,\n uniformed. Blane Pritchard, Commandant of Space Research. His arms were\n around her, and his face was buried in her hair. She let the recording\n run for a moment, then shut it off and turned up the lights.\n\n\n To Robert, she said, \"I think Commander Pritchard would be here in five\n minutes if I called and told him that I have information which seriously\n affects the success of the flight.\"\n\n\n The young spaceman's face was white and stricken as he stared for long\n moments, wordless, at Ninon. Then in defeated tones he said, \"You\n scheming witch! What do you want?\"", "He did not answer.\nNinon lay in the acceleration sling, gaining strength, and—she\n knew—youth. Her lost youth, coming back, to be spent all over again.\n How wonderful! No woman in all of time and history had ever done it. She\n would be immortal; forever young and lovely. She hardly noticed the\n stiffness in her joints when she got to her feet again—it was just from\n lying in the sling so long.\n\n\n She made her voice light and gay. \"Are we not going very, very fast,\n now, Robert?\"\n\n\n He answered without turning. \"Yes. Many times the speed of light.\"\n\n\n \"I knew it ... I knew it! Already I feel much younger. Don't you feel it\n too?\"\n\n\n He did not answer, and Ninon kept on talking. \"How long have we been\n going, Robert?\"\n\n\n He said, \"I don't know ... depends on where you are.\"", "Robert said, \"So that's what's in your mind.\" He busied himself with\n parking the car at the spaceport, then went on: \"You want to go back in\n the past thirty years, and be a girl again. While I grow younger, too,\n into a boy, then a child, a baby, at last nothing....\"\n\n\n \"I'll try to be sorry for you, Robert.\"\n\n\n Ninon felt again for her beta-gun as he stared at her for a long minute,\n his gaze a curious mixture of amusement and pity. Then, \"Come on,\" he\n said flatly, turning to lead the way to the gleaming space ship which\n poised, towering like a spire, in the center of the blast-off basin. And\n added, \"I think I shall enjoy this trip, Madame, more than you will.\"", "He gazed at her in silent curiosity for a moment, then said, \"Come to\n think of it, you've never told me. About twenty-two or -three, I'd say.\"\n\n\n \"Tomorrow is my birthday. I'll be fifty-two.\"\n\n\n He stared at her in shocked amazement. Then, as his gaze went over the\n smooth lines of her body, the amazement gave way to disbelief, and he\n chuckled. \"The way you said it, Ninon, almost had me believing you. You\n can't possibly be that old, or anywhere near it. You're joking.\"\n\n\n Ninon's voice was cold. She repeated it: \"I am fifty-two years old. I\n knew your father, before you were born.\"", "There was no time to gloat over her victory. That would come later.\n Right now minutes counted. She snatched up a cloak, pushed Robert out\n through the door and hurried him along the hall and out into the street\n where his car waited.\n\n\n \"We must hurry,\" she said breathlessly. \"We can get to the spaceship\n ahead of schedule, before your flight partner arrives, and be gone from\n Earth before anyone knows what is happening. I'll be with you, in his\n place.\"\n\n\n Robert did not offer to help her into the car, but got in first and\n waited until she closed the door behind her, then sped away from the\n curb and through the streets to the spaceport.\n\n\n Ninon said, \"Tell me, Robert, isn't it true that if a clock recedes from\n Earth at the speed of light, and if we could watch it as it did so, it\n would still be running but it would never show later time?\"", "The mocking gravity in his voice infuriated her. \"Then you shall be my\n mirror,\" she said. \"Tell me, Robert, am I not now much younger? Am I not\n becoming more and more beautiful? Am I not in truth the most desirable\n of women?... But I forget. After all, you are only a boy, by now.\"\n\n\n He said, \"I'm afraid our scientists will have some new and interesting\n data on the effects of time in relation to time. Before long we'll begin\n to decelerate. It won't be easy or pleasant. I'll try to make you as\n comfortable as possible.\"\n\n\n Ninon felt her face go white and stiff with rage. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n Robert said, coldly brutal, \"You're looking your age, Ninon. Every year\n of your fifty-two!\"", "There, on the floor beside her, was the answer she had sought so long. A\n book. \"Time in Relation to Time.\" The name of the author, his academic\n record in theoretical physics, the cautious, scientific wording of his\n postulates, meant nothing to her. The one thing that had meaning for her\n was that Time could be manipulated. And she would manipulate it. For\n Ninon!\n\n\n The door chimes tinkled intimately. Ninon glanced at her watch—Robert\n was on time. She arose from the couch, made sure that the light was\n behind her at just the right angle so he could see the outlines of her\n figure through the sheerness of her gown, then went to the door and\n opened it.\n\n\n A young man stood there. Young, handsome, strong, his eyes aglow with\n the desire he felt, Ninon knew, when he saw her. He took one quick step\n forward to clasp her in his strong young arms.", "Ninon wanted to smile. But smiles made wrinkles, too. She was content to\n feel that sureness of power in her grasp—the certain knowledge that\n she, first of all people, would turn Time on itself and destroy it. She\n would be youthful again. She would thread through the ages to come, like\n a silver needle drawing a golden filament through the layer on layer of\n the cloth of years that would engarment her eternal youth. Ninon knew\n how.\n\n\n Her shining, gray-green eyes strayed to the one door in her apartment\n through which no man had ever gone. There the exercising machines; the\n lotions; the unguents; the diets; the radioactive drugs; the records of\n endocrine transplantations, of blood transfusions. She dismissed them\n contemptuously. Toys! The mirages of a pseudo-youth. She would leave\n them here for someone else to use in masking the downhill years.", "\"... or very old, no longer the Ninon I know ... oh, all right. But you\n know all this already. We've had space flight for years, but only\n rocket-powered, restricting us to our own system. Now we have a new kind\n of drive. Theoretically we can travel faster than light—how many times\n faster we don't know yet. I'll start finding out tomorrow, with the\n first test flight of the ship in which the new drive is installed. If it\n works, the universe is ours—we can go anywhere.\"\n\n\n \"Will it work?\" Ninon could not keep the avid greediness out of her\n voice.\n\n\n Robert said, hesitantly, \"We think it will. I'll know better by this\n time tomorrow.\"\n\n\n \"What of you—of me—. What does this mean to us—to people?\"", "Venomous with triumph, Ninon's voice was harsh even to her ears. \"On the\n contrary, my proud and impetuous young spaceman, I have much to gain,\n more than you could ever understand. When it was announced that you were\n to be trained to command this experimental flight I made it my business\n to find out everything possible about you. One other man is going. He\n too has had the same training, and could take over in your place. A\n third man has also been trained, to stand by in reserve. You are\n supposed to have rested and slept the entire night. If the Commandant of\n Space Research knew that you had not....\"\n\n\n \"I see. That's why you recorded my visit tonight. But I leave in less\n than an hour. You'd never be able to tell Commander Pritchard in time to\n make any difference, and he'd never come here to see....\"", "Again the young spaceman hesitated. \"We ... we don't know, yet. We think\n that time won't have the same meaning to everyone....\"\n\n\n \"... When you travel faster than light. Is that it?\"\n\n\n \"Well ... yes. Something like that.\"\n\n\n \"And I'll be—old—or dead, when you get back? If you get back?\"\n\n\n Robert leaned forward and buried his face in the silvery-blonde hair\n which swept down over Ninon's shoulders.\n\n\n \"Don't say it, darling,\" he murmured.\n\n\n This time Ninon permitted herself a wrinkling smile. If she was right,\n and she knew she was, it could make no difference now. There would be no\n wrinkles—there would be only the soft flexible skin, naturally soft and\n flexible, of real youth.", "But what was this? Not Mars! Not any planet she knew, or had seen\n before. Yet there, ahead, was Mars! A new planet, where the asteroids\n had been when she left! Was this the same system? Had there been a\n mistake in the calculations of the scientists and engineers who had\n plotted the course of the ship? Was something wrong?\n\n\n But no matter—she was still Ninon. She was young and beautiful. And\n wherever she landed there would be excitement and rushing about as she\n told her story. And men would flock to her. Young, handsome men!", "The yammering rockets cut off, and the ship seemed to poise on the ebon\n lip of a vast Stygian abyss.\n\n\n Joints creaking, muscles protesting, Ninon pushed herself up and out of\n the sling against the artificial gravity of the ship. Robert was already\n seated at the controls.\n\n\n \"How fast are we going?\" she asked; and her voice was rusty and harsh.\n\n\n \"Barely crawling, astronomically,\" he said shortly. \"About forty-six\n thousand miles a minute.\"\n\n\n \"Is that as fast as the speed of light?\"\n\n\n \"Hardly, Madame,\" he said, with a condescending chuckle.\n\n\n \"Then make it go faster!\" she screamed. \"And faster and faster—hurry!\n What are we waiting for?\"", "The young man said gruffly, \"Roughly so, according to theory.\"\n\n\n \"And if the clock went away from Earth faster than the speed of light,\n wouldn't it run backwards?\"\n\n\n The answer was curtly cautious. \"It might appear to.\"\n\n\n \"Then if people travel at the speed of light they won't get any older?\"\n\n\n Robert flicked a curious glance at her. \"If you could watch them from\n Earth they appear not to. But it's a matter of relativity....\"\n\n\n Ninon rushed on. She had studied that book carefully. \"And if people\n travel faster than light, a lot faster, they'll grow younger, won't\n they?\"" ], [ "The youth paused at the door and glanced back, making no effort to\n conceal the loathing she had aroused in him. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\n Ninon said, \"You'll never make that flight without me.... Watch!\"\n\n\n Swiftly she pushed buttons again. The room darkened, as before. Curtains\n at one end divided and rustled back, and a glowing screen sprang to life\n on the wall revealed behind them. And there, in life and movement and\n color and sound and dimension, she—and Robert—projected themselves,\n together on the couch, beginning at the moment Ninon had pressed the\n three buttons earlier. Robert's arms were around her, his face buried in\n the hair falling over her shoulders....", "Ninon laughed mirthlessly, and pressed buttons again. The screen\n changed, went blank for a moment, then figures appeared again. On the\n couch were she and a man, middle-aged, dignified in appearance,\n uniformed. Blane Pritchard, Commandant of Space Research. His arms were\n around her, and his face was buried in her hair. She let the recording\n run for a moment, then shut it off and turned up the lights.\n\n\n To Robert, she said, \"I think Commander Pritchard would be here in five\n minutes if I called and told him that I have information which seriously\n affects the success of the flight.\"\n\n\n The young spaceman's face was white and stricken as he stared for long\n moments, wordless, at Ninon. Then in defeated tones he said, \"You\n scheming witch! What do you want?\"", "This time she could see that he believed it. The horror he felt was easy\n to read on his face while he struggled to speak. \"Then ... God help\n me ... I've been making love to ... an old woman!\" His voice was low,\n bitter, accusing.\n\n\n Ninon slapped him.\n\n\n He swayed slightly, then his features froze as the red marks of her\n fingers traced across his left cheek. At last he bowed, mockingly, and\n said, \"Your pardon, Madame. I forgot myself. My father taught me to be\n respectful to my elders.\"\n\n\n For that Ninon could have killed him. As he turned to leave, her hand\n sought the tiny, feather-light beta-gun cunningly concealed in the folds\n of her gown. But the driving force of her desire made her stay her hand.\n\n\n \"Robert!\" she said in peremptory tones.", "\"Ninon, my darling,\" he whispered huskily.\n\n\n Ninon did not have to make her voice throaty any more, and that annoyed\n her too. Once she had had to do it deliberately. But now, through the\n years, it had deepened.\n\n\n \"Not yet, Robert,\" she whispered. She let him feel the slight but firm\n resistance so nicely calculated to breach his own; watched the deepening\n flush of his cheeks with the clinical sureness that a thousand such\n experiences with men had given her.\n\n\n Then, \"Come in, Robert,\" she said, moving back a step. \"I've been\n waiting for you.\"\n\n\n She noted, approvingly, that Robert was in his spaceman's uniform, ready\n for the morrow's flight, as he went past her to the couch. She pushed\n the button which closed and locked the door, then seated herself beside\n the young spaceman on the silken couch.", "Ninon said, \"But that's three hours, Robert.\"\n\n\n \"But I haven't slept yet tonight. There's been so much to do. I should\n rest a little.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be more than rest for you.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Ninon.... Oh, yes.\"\n\n\n \"Not yet, darling.\" Again her hands were between them. \"First, tell me\n about the flight tomorrow.\"\n\n\n The young spaceman's eyes were puzzled, hurt. \"But Ninon, I've told you\n before ... there is so much of you that I want to remember ... so little\n time left ... and you'll be gone when I get back....\"\n\n\n Ninon let her gray-green eyes narrow ever so slightly as she leaned away\n from him. But he blundered on.", "\"It's time to go, Robert,\" she said.\n\n\n Robert fought back from the stubborn grasp of sleep. \"So soon?\" he\n mumbled.\n\n\n \"And I'm going with you,\" Ninon said.\n\n\n This brought him fully awake. \"I'm sorry, Ninon. You can't!\" He sat up\n and yawned, stretched, the healthy stretch of resilient youth. Then he\n reached for the jacket he had tossed over on a chair.\n\n\n Ninon watched him with envious eyes, waiting until he was fully alert.\n\n\n \"Robert!\" she said, and the youth paused at the sharpness of her voice.\n \"How old are you?\"\n\n\n \"I've told you before, darling—twenty-four.\"\n\n\n \"How old do you think I am?\"", "Robert said, \"So that's what's in your mind.\" He busied himself with\n parking the car at the spaceport, then went on: \"You want to go back in\n the past thirty years, and be a girl again. While I grow younger, too,\n into a boy, then a child, a baby, at last nothing....\"\n\n\n \"I'll try to be sorry for you, Robert.\"\n\n\n Ninon felt again for her beta-gun as he stared at her for a long minute,\n his gaze a curious mixture of amusement and pity. Then, \"Come on,\" he\n said flatly, turning to lead the way to the gleaming space ship which\n poised, towering like a spire, in the center of the blast-off basin. And\n added, \"I think I shall enjoy this trip, Madame, more than you will.\"", "The mocking gravity in his voice infuriated her. \"Then you shall be my\n mirror,\" she said. \"Tell me, Robert, am I not now much younger? Am I not\n becoming more and more beautiful? Am I not in truth the most desirable\n of women?... But I forget. After all, you are only a boy, by now.\"\n\n\n He said, \"I'm afraid our scientists will have some new and interesting\n data on the effects of time in relation to time. Before long we'll begin\n to decelerate. It won't be easy or pleasant. I'll try to make you as\n comfortable as possible.\"\n\n\n Ninon felt her face go white and stiff with rage. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n Robert said, coldly brutal, \"You're looking your age, Ninon. Every year\n of your fifty-two!\"", "His hands rested on her shoulders and he turned her until they faced\n each other.\n\n\n \"Ninon,\" he said, \"you are so beautiful. Let me look at you for a long\n time—to carry your image with me through all of time and space.\"\n\n\n Again Ninon let him feel just a hint of resistance, and risked a tiny\n pout. \"If you could just take me with you, Robert....\"\n\n\n Robert's face clouded. \"If I only could!\" he said wistfully. \"If there\n were only room. But this is an experimental flight—no more than two can\n go.\"\n\n\n Again his arms went around her and he leaned closer.\n\n\n \"Wait!\" Ninon said, pushing him back.\n\n\n \"Wait? Wait for what?\" Robert glanced at his watch. \"Time is running\n out. I have to be at the spaceport by dawn—three hours from now.\"", "He gazed at her in silent curiosity for a moment, then said, \"Come to\n think of it, you've never told me. About twenty-two or -three, I'd say.\"\n\n\n \"Tomorrow is my birthday. I'll be fifty-two.\"\n\n\n He stared at her in shocked amazement. Then, as his gaze went over the\n smooth lines of her body, the amazement gave way to disbelief, and he\n chuckled. \"The way you said it, Ninon, almost had me believing you. You\n can't possibly be that old, or anywhere near it. You're joking.\"\n\n\n Ninon's voice was cold. She repeated it: \"I am fifty-two years old. I\n knew your father, before you were born.\"", "He did not answer.\nNinon lay in the acceleration sling, gaining strength, and—she\n knew—youth. Her lost youth, coming back, to be spent all over again.\n How wonderful! No woman in all of time and history had ever done it. She\n would be immortal; forever young and lovely. She hardly noticed the\n stiffness in her joints when she got to her feet again—it was just from\n lying in the sling so long.\n\n\n She made her voice light and gay. \"Are we not going very, very fast,\n now, Robert?\"\n\n\n He answered without turning. \"Yes. Many times the speed of light.\"\n\n\n \"I knew it ... I knew it! Already I feel much younger. Don't you feel it\n too?\"\n\n\n He did not answer, and Ninon kept on talking. \"How long have we been\n going, Robert?\"\n\n\n He said, \"I don't know ... depends on where you are.\"", "There, on the floor beside her, was the answer she had sought so long. A\n book. \"Time in Relation to Time.\" The name of the author, his academic\n record in theoretical physics, the cautious, scientific wording of his\n postulates, meant nothing to her. The one thing that had meaning for her\n was that Time could be manipulated. And she would manipulate it. For\n Ninon!\n\n\n The door chimes tinkled intimately. Ninon glanced at her watch—Robert\n was on time. She arose from the couch, made sure that the light was\n behind her at just the right angle so he could see the outlines of her\n figure through the sheerness of her gown, then went to the door and\n opened it.\n\n\n A young man stood there. Young, handsome, strong, his eyes aglow with\n the desire he felt, Ninon knew, when he saw her. He took one quick step\n forward to clasp her in his strong young arms.", "She reached behind her, over the end of the couch, and pushed three\n buttons. The light, already soft, dimmed slowly to the faintest of\n glows; a suave, perfumed dusk as precisely calculated as was the exact\n rate at which she let all resistance ebb from her body.\n\n\n Robert's voice was muffled through her hair. \"What were those clicks?\"\n he asked.\n\n\n Ninon's arms stole around his neck. \"The lights,\" she whispered, \"and a\n little automatic warning to tell you when it's time to go....\"\n\n\n The boy did not seem to remember about the third click. Ninon was not\n quite ready to tell him, yet. But she would....\nTwo hours later a golden-voiced bell chimed, softly, musically. The\n lights slowly brightened to no more than the lambent glow which was all\n that Ninon permitted. She ran her fingers through the young spaceman's\n tousled hair and shook him gently.", "There was no time to gloat over her victory. That would come later.\n Right now minutes counted. She snatched up a cloak, pushed Robert out\n through the door and hurried him along the hall and out into the street\n where his car waited.\n\n\n \"We must hurry,\" she said breathlessly. \"We can get to the spaceship\n ahead of schedule, before your flight partner arrives, and be gone from\n Earth before anyone knows what is happening. I'll be with you, in his\n place.\"\n\n\n Robert did not offer to help her into the car, but got in first and\n waited until she closed the door behind her, then sped away from the\n curb and through the streets to the spaceport.\n\n\n Ninon said, \"Tell me, Robert, isn't it true that if a clock recedes from\n Earth at the speed of light, and if we could watch it as it did so, it\n would still be running but it would never show later time?\"", "Ninon snatched out the little beta-gun, then, leveled it and fired. And\n watched without remorse as the hungry electrons streamed forth to strike\n the young spaceman, turning him into a motionless, glowing figure which\n rapidly became misty and wraith-like, at last to disappear, leaving only\n a swirl of sparkling haze where he had stood. This too disappeared as\n its separate particles drifted to the metallite walls of the space ship,\n discharged their energy and ceased to sparkle, leaving only a thin film\n of dust over all.\nAfter a while Ninon got up again from the sling and made her way to the\n wall. She polished the dust away from a small area of it, trying to make\n the spot gleam enough so that she could use it for a mirror. She\n polished a long time, until at last she could see a ghostly reflection\n of her face in the rubbed spot.", "Ninon wanted to smile. But smiles made wrinkles, too. She was content to\n feel that sureness of power in her grasp—the certain knowledge that\n she, first of all people, would turn Time on itself and destroy it. She\n would be youthful again. She would thread through the ages to come, like\n a silver needle drawing a golden filament through the layer on layer of\n the cloth of years that would engarment her eternal youth. Ninon knew\n how.\n\n\n Her shining, gray-green eyes strayed to the one door in her apartment\n through which no man had ever gone. There the exercising machines; the\n lotions; the unguents; the diets; the radioactive drugs; the records of\n endocrine transplantations, of blood transfusions. She dismissed them\n contemptuously. Toys! The mirages of a pseudo-youth. She would leave\n them here for someone else to use in masking the downhill years.", "The yammering rockets cut off, and the ship seemed to poise on the ebon\n lip of a vast Stygian abyss.\n\n\n Joints creaking, muscles protesting, Ninon pushed herself up and out of\n the sling against the artificial gravity of the ship. Robert was already\n seated at the controls.\n\n\n \"How fast are we going?\" she asked; and her voice was rusty and harsh.\n\n\n \"Barely crawling, astronomically,\" he said shortly. \"About forty-six\n thousand miles a minute.\"\n\n\n \"Is that as fast as the speed of light?\"\n\n\n \"Hardly, Madame,\" he said, with a condescending chuckle.\n\n\n \"Then make it go faster!\" she screamed. \"And faster and faster—hurry!\n What are we waiting for?\"", "Venomous with triumph, Ninon's voice was harsh even to her ears. \"On the\n contrary, my proud and impetuous young spaceman, I have much to gain,\n more than you could ever understand. When it was announced that you were\n to be trained to command this experimental flight I made it my business\n to find out everything possible about you. One other man is going. He\n too has had the same training, and could take over in your place. A\n third man has also been trained, to stand by in reserve. You are\n supposed to have rested and slept the entire night. If the Commandant of\n Space Research knew that you had not....\"\n\n\n \"I see. That's why you recorded my visit tonight. But I leave in less\n than an hour. You'd never be able to tell Commander Pritchard in time to\n make any difference, and he'd never come here to see....\"", "The young spaceman swivelled about in his seat. He looked haggard and\n drawn from the strain of the long acceleration. Despite herself, Ninon\n could feel the sagging in her own face; the sunkenness of her eyes. She\n felt tired, hating herself for it—hating having this young man see\n her.\n\n\n He said, \"The ship is on automatic control throughout. The course is\n plotted in advance; all operations are plotted. There is nothing we can\n do but wait. The light drive will cut in at the planned time.\"\n\n\n \"Time! Wait! That's all I hear!\" Ninon shrieked. \"Do something!\"", "Then she heard it. A low moan, starting from below the limit of\n audibility, then climbing, up and up and up and up, until it was a\n nerve-plucking whine that tore into her brain like a white-hot tuning\n fork. And still it climbed, up beyond the range of hearing, and up and\n up still more, till it could no longer be felt. But Ninon, as she\n stumbled back into the acceleration sling, sick and shaken, knew it was\n still there. The light drive!\n\n\n She watched through the ports. The motionless, silent stars were moving\n now, coming toward them, faster and faster, as the ship swept out of the\n galaxy, shooting into her face like blazing pebbles from a giant\n slingshot.\n\n\n She asked, \"How fast are we going now?\"\n\n\n Robert's voice sounded far off as he replied, \"We are approaching the\n speed of light.\"" ] ]
valid	51027	[ "What does \"jaywalker\" refer to in this story?", "Why did the woman have Nellie take a physical in her place?", "What was the woman's plan in going into space?", "Why was the woman afraid to get on the spaceship and take off?", "Why did the woman not like the flight attendant?", "What made the woman want to fight with her husband?", "For humans, what is the most dangerous part of the trip to the moon?", "Why does Jack say his wife watches him all the time when he is in space?", "Why did the woman wish she had listened more carefully to her husband talking about his job?", "Why was the woman afraid to be pregnant?" ]	[ [ "A person who does an illegal spacewalk", "A person who illegally gains passage into space", "A person who crosses the street illegally", "A person who illegally lives on the moon" ], [ "She was expecting a baby", "She was a scheming woman", "She was brave and adventurous", "She was wanting to surprise her husband" ], [ "To have her baby on the moon", "To spy on her husband without him knowing", "To kill herself", "For her husband to fall back in love with her" ], [ "She was feeling sick", "She didn't know anyone who had been to space", "She thought her husband would be mad", "Her dad had died in a rocket launch" ], [ "The attendant was emotionless", "She thought her husband loved the attendant", "The attendant found out her true identity", "The attendant forced her to take a medical exam" ], [ "She resented that he wanted to leave her and go to space", "She thought he was having an affair with a flight attendant", "She thought he didn't care about their baby", "She thought he was not very skilled at his work" ], [ "Freefall", "Take off", "Landing", "Orbit" ], [ "She is suspicious of his relationship with the flight attendant", "She questions his skills, decisions, and abilities", "She nags him not to leave and to return quickly", "The Earth in the sky is the same color as her eyes" ], [ "So he would not be attracted to the flight attendant", "So he wouldn't fight with her", "So she would know exactly when to enact her plan", "So he would feel like he was important to her" ], [ "Her husband had left her", "Pregnant women always die during the trip to the moon", "She didn't want to be a mother", "Pregnant women sometimes die during the trip to the moon" ] ]	[ 2, 1, 4, 4, 2, 1, 1, 4, 3, 2 ]	[ 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "JAYWALKER\nBY ROSS ROCKLYNNE\n\n\n Illustrated by DON DIBLEY\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction December 1950.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nWomen may be against progress because it means new", "Miss Eagen's arched nostrils seemed pinched and white. \"You really want\n me to speak my piece?\"\nIn answer Marcia leaned back against the bulkhead and folded her arms.\n Miss Eagen gazed at her for a moment, nodded as if to herself, and\n said, \"I suppose there always will be people who don't pay attention\n to the rules. Jaywalkers. But out here jaywalkers don't have as much\n margin for error as they do crossing against a traffic light on Earth.\"\n She looked Marcia straight in the eye. \"What makes a jaywalker isn't\n ignorance. It's a combination of stupidity and stubbornness. The\n jaywalker does\nknow\nbetter. In your case....\"", "Marcia bounced resentfully off the cot and stood aside. Petrucelli\n looked at her, cocked an eyebrow, looked at Miss Eagen, and asked,\n \"Jaywalker?\"\n\n\n \"Please hurry, Pet.\" She turned to Marcia. \"I've got to explain to the\n passengers that there won't be any free fall. Most of them are looking\n forward to it.\" She went out.\n\n\n Marcia watched the big man work for a moment. \"Why are you putting the\n bed on the wall?\"\n\n\n He looked at her and away, quickly. \"Because, lady, when we start to\n spin, that outside bulkhead is going to be\ndown\n. Centrifugal force,\n see?\" And before she could answer him he added, \"I can't talk and work\n at the same time.\"", "\"The\nElsinore\n?\" She'd said it viciously, to taunt him, and something\n in her had been pleased at the dull flush that rose to his face.\n Everyone knew about the\nElsinore\n, the 500-foot Moon-ferry that almost\n missed the Moon.\n\n\n \"That,\" he said bitterly, \"was human damnfoolishness botching up the\n equations. Too many lobbyists have holdings on the Moon and don't\n want to risk not being able to go there in a hurry. So they haven't\n passed legislation to keep physically unfit people off spaceships.\n One of the passengers got aboard the\nElsinore\non somebody else's\n validation—which meant that nobody knew he was taking endocrine\n treatments to put hair on his brainless head and restore his—Oh, the\nJaywalker\n!\" Jack spat in disgust. \"Anyway, he was the kind of idiot\n who never realizes that certain glandular conditions are fatal in free\n fall.\"", "Miss Eagen was standing by the hospital door, watching her. When Marcia\n turned away without speaking to Jack, Miss Eagen smiled and held out\n her hand.\n\n\n Marcia went to her and took the hand. They went into the hospital. Miss\n Eagen didn't speak; she seemed to be waiting.\n\n\n \"Yes, I know who Jack's spinning the ship for,\" said Marcia.\n\n\n Miss Eagen looked an unspoken question.\n\n\n Marcia said, painfully, \"He's like the Captain of the\nElsinore\n. He's\n risking his life for a—a stranger. A jaywalker. Not for me. Not even\n for his baby.\"\n\n\n \"Does it hurt to know that?\"\n\n\n Marcia looked into the smooth, strong face and said with genuine\n astonishment, \"Hurt? Oh, no! It's so—so big!\"", "She turned her face away from the aisle, covered her cheek with her\n hand to hide it. Her gaze went out through the ray-proof glass port to\n the field, to the laboring beetle of a red tractor bearing the gangway\n on its busy back, to the low, blast-proof administration building. When\n her gaze came to the tall sign over the entrance, she hurried it past;\n it was too late to think about that now, the square, shouting type that\n read:\nCAUTION\n\n HAVE YOU PASSED YOUR PHYSICAL EXAMINATION?\nAvoiding It May Cost Your Life!\n\"May I see your validation, please?\"", "Feeling very much put-upon, Marcia waited silently until he was\n finished, and the bed hung ludicrously to the wall like a walking fly.\n She thanked him timidly, and he ignored it and went out.\n\n\n Miss Eagen returned.\n\n\n \"That man was very rude,\" said Marcia.\n\n\n Miss Eagen looked at her coolly. \"I'm sorry,\" she said, obviously not\n meaning sorry at all.\n\n\n Marcia wet her lips. \"I asked you a question before,\" she said evenly.\n \"About you and the captain.\"\n\n\n \"You did,\" said Sue Eagen. \"Please don't.\"\n\n\n \"And why not?\"", "\"Because,\" said Miss Eagen, and in that moment she looked almost as\n drawn as Jack had, \"I'm supposed to be of service to the passengers at\n all times no matter what. If I have feelings at all, part of my job is\n to keep them to myself.\"\n\n\n \"Very courteous, I'm sure. However, I want to release you from your\n sense of duty. I'm\nmost\ninterested in what you have to say.\"", "Miss Eagen (which, her neat lapel button attested, was her name) made\n a penciled frown as lovely as her machined smile. \"Some day,\" she told\n Marcia, \"we won't have to ask the passengers if they're well. It's so\n easy to come aboard on someone else's validation, and people don't seem\n to realize how dangerous that is.\"\n\n\n As Miss Eagen moved to the next seat, Marcia shrank into a small\n huddle, fumbling with the card until it was crammed shapeless into her\n purse. Then from the depths of her guilt came rebellion. It was going\n to be all right. She was doing the biggest thing she'd ever done, and\n Jack would rise to the occasion, and it would be all right.\n\n\n It\nhad\nto be all right....", "Even now she distinctly recalled the beginnings of the interplanetary\n cold that always seeped into the warm house when he talked about space,\n when he was about to leave her for it. And this time it was worse than\n ever before.\n\n\n He went on remorselessly, \"Once the\nElsinore\nreached the free-fall\n flight, where power could be shut off, the skipper had to put the\n ferry into an axial spin under power, creating artificial gravity\n to save the worthless life of that fool. So of course he lost his\n trajectory, and had to warp her in as best he could, without passing\n the Moon or crashing into it. And of course you're not listening.\"\n\n\n \"It's all so dull!\" she had flared, and then, \"How can I be interested\n in what some blundering space-jockey did?\"", "\"Blun—Marcia, you really don't realize what that skipper did was the\n finest piece of shiphandling since mankind got off the ground.\"\n\n\n \"Was it?\" she'd yawned. \"Could you do it?\"\n\n\n \"I—like to think I could,\" he said. \"I'd hate to have to try.\"\n\n\n She'd shrugged. \"Then it can't be very difficult, darling.\"\n\n\n She hadn't meant to be so cruel. Or so stupid. But when they were\n quarreling, or when he talked that repugnant, dedicated, other-world\n garble, something always went cold and furious and—lonely inside her,\n and made her fight back unfairly.", "The flash walls on the field were being raised to keep the blow-by from\n the ship's jets from searing the administration building and the area\n beyond. Marcia realized with crushing suddenness that the ship was\n about to blast off in seconds. She half-rose, then sank back, biting\n her lip. Silly ... Jack had said that—her fear of space was silly.\n He'd said it during the quarrel, and he'd roared at her, \"And that's\n why you want me to come back—ground myself, be an Earth-lubber—so I\n can spare you the anguish of sitting home wondering if I'll come back\n alive!\"\nAnd then he'd been sorry he'd shouted, and he sat by her, taking her", "outside again and the sky was no longer deep blue, but black. She\n pressed herself up out of the soft chair—it was difficult, because of\n the one-and-a-half gravities the ship was holding—and plodded heavily\n up the aisle. Miss Eagen was just rising from the chair in which she\n sat for the take-off.", "chin in his hand. \"Marcia, Marcia,\" he'd said gently, \"you're so\nsilly\n! It's been nineteen whole years since your father died in the\n explosion of a Moon-rocket. Rocket motors just don't explode any more,\n honey! Ships travel to the Moon and back on iron-clad, mathematical\n orbits that are figured before the ship puffs a jet—\"", "There was a stiff silence. Marcia looked up at Miss Eagen. \"It's true,\n you know,\" she said. \"A man grows to love the things he has to defend,\n no matter how he felt about them before.\"\n\n\n The stewardess looked at her, her face registering a strange mixture of\n detachment and wonder. \"You really believe that, don't you?\"\n\n\n Marcia's patience, snapped. \"You don't have to look so superior. I know\n what's bothering\nyou\n. Well, he's\nmy\nhusband, and don't you forget\n it.\"\nMiss Eagen's breath hissed in. Her eyes grew bright and she shook her\n head slightly. Then she turned on her heel and went to the intercom.\n Marcia thought for a frightened moment that she was going to call Jack\n back again. Instead she dialed and said, \"Hospital to Maintenance.\n Petrucelli?\"\n\n\n \"Petrucelli here.\"", "pseudo-widowhoods. Space-widowhood, for instance....\nAt last she was on the gangplank, entering the mouth of the\n spaceship—and nothing could ever stop her now. Not unless she broke\n down completely in front of all these hurrying, Moon-bound passengers,\n in plain sight of the scattered crowd which clustered on the other\n side of the space-field barriers. Even that possibility was denied her\n when two gently insistent middle-aged ladies indicated she was blocking\n the way....\nSomehow, dizzily, she was at her seat, led there by a smiling,\n brown-clad stewardess; and her azure-tipped fingers were clutching at\n the pearl-gray plasta-leather of the chair arm. Her eyes, the azure", "It was snatched away—the buildings, the trees, the roads surrounding\n the field seemed to pour in upon it, shrinking as they ran together.\n Roads dried up like parched rivers, thinning and vanishing into the\n circle of her horrified vision. A great, soft, uniform weight pressed\n her down and back; she fought it, but it was too big and too soft.\n\n\n Now Earth's surface was vague and Sun-splashed. Marcia's sense of loss\n tore at her. She put up her hands, heavily, and pressed the glass as\n if she could push it out, push herself out, go back, back to Earth\n and solidity. Clouds shot by like bullets, fell away until they were\n snowflakes roiling in violet haze. Then, in the purling universe that\n had grown around the ship, Earth was a mystic circle, a shallow dish\n floating darkly and heavily below.\n\n\n \"We are now,\" said Miss Eagen's calm voice, \"thirty-seven miles over\n Los Angeles.\"", "Marcia lay down gratefully. She closed her eyes tightly and said, \"I'm\n not Mrs. Foster. It doesn't hurt.\"\n\n\n \"You're not—\" Miss Eagen apparently decided to take one thing at a\n time. \"How do you feel?\"\n\n\n \"Scared,\" said Marcia.\n\n\n \"Why, what—is there to be scared of?\"\n\n\n \"I'm pregnant.\"\n\n\n \"Well, that's no—You're\nwhat\n?\"\n\n\n \"I'm Mrs. McHenry. I'm Jack's wife.\"\n\n\n There was such a long pause that Marcia opened her eyes. Miss Eagen was\n looking at her levelly. She said, \"I'll have to examine you.\"\n\n\n \"I know. Go ahead.\"", "She found herself at the entrance to the pilot room. In one sweeping\n glance she saw a curved, silver board. Before it a man sat tranquilly.\n Nearer to her was Jack, hunched over the keyboard of a complex, compact\n machine, like a harried bookkeeper on the last day of the month.\n\n\n Her lips formed his name, but she was silent. She watched him, his\n square, competent hands, his detached and distant face. Through the\n forward view-plate she saw a harsh, jagged line, the very edge of the\n Moon's disc. Next to it, and below, was the rear viewer, holding the\n shimmering azure shape of Earth.\n\n\n \"\nAll Earth watches me when I work, but with your eyes.\n\"\n\n\n Jack had said that to her once, long ago, when he still loved her.\n\n\n \"... human damnfoolishness botching up the equations....\" He had said\n that once, too.", "of her nails, the azure (so she had been told) of Earth seen from\n interplanetary space, grew hot. She closed them, and for a moment\n gave herself up to an almost physical yearning for the Toluca Lake\n house—the comfort, the safety, the—the\nsanity\nof it.\nStubbornly she forced herself back to reality. At any moment Jack,\n dark-eyed and scrappy, might come swinging down the long, shining\n aisle. Jack—Captain Jack McHenry, if you please—must not know, yet,\n what she was doing to patch up their marriage." ], [ "After this—if this didn't work—there just would be nothing else she\n could do. She wasn't a scheming woman. No one would ever know how\n difficult it had been for her to think up the whole plan, to find\n Nellie Foster (someone Jack had never met) and to persuade Nellie to\n register for the trip and take the physical for her. She'd had to lie\n to Nellie, to make Nellie think she was brave and adventurous, and that\n she was just doing it to surprise Jack.\n\n\n Oh, he'd be surprised, all right.", "She turned her face away from the aisle, covered her cheek with her\n hand to hide it. Her gaze went out through the ray-proof glass port to\n the field, to the laboring beetle of a red tractor bearing the gangway\n on its busy back, to the low, blast-proof administration building. When\n her gaze came to the tall sign over the entrance, she hurried it past;\n it was too late to think about that now, the square, shouting type that\n read:\nCAUTION\n\n HAVE YOU PASSED YOUR PHYSICAL EXAMINATION?\nAvoiding It May Cost Your Life!\n\"May I see your validation, please?\"", "Marcia McHenry stiffened. Had she read the sign aloud? She turned\n startled eyes up to the smiling stewardess, who was holding out a\n well-groomed hand. Marcia responded weakly to the smile, overcame a\n sudden urge to blurt out that she had no validation—not her own,\n anyway. But her stiff fingers were already holding out the pink card\n with Nellie Foster's name on it.\n\n\n \"You're feeling well, Mrs. Foster?\"\nFeeling well? Yes, of course. Except for the—usual sickness. But\n that's so very normal\n.... Her numb lips moved. \"I'm fine,\" she said.", "Miss Eagen did, swiftly and thoroughly. \"You're so right,\" she\n breathed. She went to the small sink, stripping off her rubber gloves.\n With her back to Marcia, she said, \"I'll have to tell the captain, you\n know.\"\n\n\n \"I know. I'd rather ... tell him myself.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" said Miss Eagen flatly. Marcia felt as if she'd been slapped.\n Miss Eagen dried her hands and crossed to an intercom. \"Eagen to\n Captain.\"\n\n\n \"McHenry here.\"\n\n\n \"Captain McHenry, could you come back to the hospital right away?\"\n\n\n \"Not right away, Sue.\"\nSue! No wonder he had found it so easy to walk\n out!\nShe looked at the trim girl with hating eyes. The intercom said,\n \"You know I've got course-correction computations from here to yonder.\n Give me another forty minutes.\"", "Marcia lay down gratefully. She closed her eyes tightly and said, \"I'm\n not Mrs. Foster. It doesn't hurt.\"\n\n\n \"You're not—\" Miss Eagen apparently decided to take one thing at a\n time. \"How do you feel?\"\n\n\n \"Scared,\" said Marcia.\n\n\n \"Why, what—is there to be scared of?\"\n\n\n \"I'm pregnant.\"\n\n\n \"Well, that's no—You're\nwhat\n?\"\n\n\n \"I'm Mrs. McHenry. I'm Jack's wife.\"\n\n\n There was such a long pause that Marcia opened her eyes. Miss Eagen was\n looking at her levelly. She said, \"I'll have to examine you.\"\n\n\n \"I know. Go ahead.\"", "Feeling very much put-upon, Marcia waited silently until he was\n finished, and the bed hung ludicrously to the wall like a walking fly.\n She thanked him timidly, and he ignored it and went out.\n\n\n Miss Eagen returned.\n\n\n \"That man was very rude,\" said Marcia.\n\n\n Miss Eagen looked at her coolly. \"I'm sorry,\" she said, obviously not\n meaning sorry at all.\n\n\n Marcia wet her lips. \"I asked you a question before,\" she said evenly.\n \"About you and the captain.\"\n\n\n \"You did,\" said Sue Eagen. \"Please don't.\"\n\n\n \"And why not?\"", "Miss Eagen was standing by the hospital door, watching her. When Marcia\n turned away without speaking to Jack, Miss Eagen smiled and held out\n her hand.\n\n\n Marcia went to her and took the hand. They went into the hospital. Miss\n Eagen didn't speak; she seemed to be waiting.\n\n\n \"Yes, I know who Jack's spinning the ship for,\" said Marcia.\n\n\n Miss Eagen looked an unspoken question.\n\n\n Marcia said, painfully, \"He's like the Captain of the\nElsinore\n. He's\n risking his life for a—a stranger. A jaywalker. Not for me. Not even\n for his baby.\"\n\n\n \"Does it hurt to know that?\"\n\n\n Marcia looked into the smooth, strong face and said with genuine\n astonishment, \"Hurt? Oh, no! It's so—so big!\"", "\"Miss Eagen—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Mrs. Fos—why, what's the matter?\"\n\n\n Seeing the startled expression on the stewardess' face, Marcia realized\n she must be looking like a ghost. She put a hand to her cheek and found\n it clammy.\n\n\n \"Come along,\" said Miss Eagen cheerfully. She put a firm arm around\n Marcia's shoulder. \"Just a touch of space-sickness. This way.\nThat's\nit. We'll have you fixed up in a jiffy.\"\n\n\n \"It isn't s-space sickness,\" said Marcia in a very small and very\n positive voice. She let herself be led forward, through the door and to\n the left, where there was a small and compact ship's hospital.\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" said Miss Eagen briskly, \"just you lie down there, Mrs.\n Foster. Does it hurt any special place?\"", "\"Because,\" said Miss Eagen, and in that moment she looked almost as\n drawn as Jack had, \"I'm supposed to be of service to the passengers at\n all times no matter what. If I have feelings at all, part of my job is\n to keep them to myself.\"\n\n\n \"Very courteous, I'm sure. However, I want to release you from your\n sense of duty. I'm\nmost\ninterested in what you have to say.\"", "Miss Eagen (which, her neat lapel button attested, was her name) made\n a penciled frown as lovely as her machined smile. \"Some day,\" she told\n Marcia, \"we won't have to ask the passengers if they're well. It's so\n easy to come aboard on someone else's validation, and people don't seem\n to realize how dangerous that is.\"\n\n\n As Miss Eagen moved to the next seat, Marcia shrank into a small\n huddle, fumbling with the card until it was crammed shapeless into her\n purse. Then from the depths of her guilt came rebellion. It was going\n to be all right. She was doing the biggest thing she'd ever done, and\n Jack would rise to the occasion, and it would be all right.\n\n\n It\nhad\nto be all right....", "\"Don't\nhave\nto?\" He rose, bent over her, and slid his arms around\n her. He put his face into the shadowed warmth between her hair and her\n neck and said, \"Listen, egghead, there's no absolute scale for courage.\n We had a bad time, both of us. After it was over, and I had a chance\n to think, I used it trying to look at things through your eyes. And\n that way I found out that when you walked up that gangway, you did the\n bravest thing I've ever known anyone to do. And you did it for me. It\n doesn't matter what else happened. Sue told me a lot about you that I\n didn't know, darling. You're ... real huge for your size. As for the\n bad part of what happened—nothing like it can ever happen again, can\n it?\"", "\"You\nare\n? You—we—\" He turned to Miss Eagen, who nodded once, her\n face wooden. \"Just find it out?\"\n\n\n This time Miss Eagen didn't react at all, and Marcia knew that she had\n to speak up. \"No, Jack. I knew weeks ago.\"\n\n\n There was no describable change in his face, but the taut skin of his\n space-tanned cheek seemed, somehow, to draw inward. His eyebrow ridges\n seemed to be more prominent, and he looked older, and very tired.\n Softly and slowly he asked, \"What in God's name made you get on the\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"I had to, Jack. I had to.\"\n\n\n \"Had to kill yourself?\" he demanded brutally. \"This tears it. This ties\n it up in a box with a bloody ribbon-bow. I suppose you know what this\n means—what I've got to do now?\"", "of her nails, the azure (so she had been told) of Earth seen from\n interplanetary space, grew hot. She closed them, and for a moment\n gave herself up to an almost physical yearning for the Toluca Lake\n house—the comfort, the safety, the—the\nsanity\nof it.\nStubbornly she forced herself back to reality. At any moment Jack,\n dark-eyed and scrappy, might come swinging down the long, shining\n aisle. Jack—Captain Jack McHenry, if you please—must not know, yet,\n what she was doing to patch up their marriage.", "There was a stiff silence. Marcia looked up at Miss Eagen. \"It's true,\n you know,\" she said. \"A man grows to love the things he has to defend,\n no matter how he felt about them before.\"\n\n\n The stewardess looked at her, her face registering a strange mixture of\n detachment and wonder. \"You really believe that, don't you?\"\n\n\n Marcia's patience, snapped. \"You don't have to look so superior. I know\n what's bothering\nyou\n. Well, he's\nmy\nhusband, and don't you forget\n it.\"\nMiss Eagen's breath hissed in. Her eyes grew bright and she shook her\n head slightly. Then she turned on her heel and went to the intercom.\n Marcia thought for a frightened moment that she was going to call Jack\n back again. Instead she dialed and said, \"Hospital to Maintenance.\n Petrucelli?\"\n\n\n \"Petrucelli here.\"", "Sue Eagen was there, too, and the thing she shared with Jack. Of course\n there was something between them—so big a thing that there was\n nothing for her to fear in it.\n\n\n Jack and Sue Eagen had always had it, and always would have; and now\n Marcia had it too. And with understanding replacing fear, Marcia was\n free to recall that Jack had worked with Sue Eagen—but it was Marcia\n that he had loved and married.\nThere was a long time of blackness, and then a time of agony, when\n she was falling, falling, and her lungs wanted to split, explode,\n disintegrate, and someone kept saying, \"Hold tight, Marcia; hold tight\n to me,\" and she found Sue Eagen's cool strong hands in hers.\nMarcia. She called me Marcia.\nMore blackness, more pain—but not so much this time; and then a long,\n deep sleep.", "outside again and the sky was no longer deep blue, but black. She\n pressed herself up out of the soft chair—it was difficult, because of\n the one-and-a-half gravities the ship was holding—and plodded heavily\n up the aisle. Miss Eagen was just rising from the chair in which she\n sat for the take-off.", "Marcia forced herself away from the bulkhead with a small whimper of\n hurt and hatred—hatred of the stars, of this knowledgeable, inspired\n girl, and—even more so—of herself. She darted toward the door.\n\n\n Miss Eagen was beside her in an instant, a hard small hand on her arm.\n \"Where are you going?\"\n\n\n \"I'm going to stop him. He can't take that chance with his ship, with\n these people....\"\n\n\n \"He will and he must. You surely know your husband.\"\n\n\n \"I know him as well as you do.\"\nMiss Eagen's firm lips shut in a thin hard line. \"Do as you like,\" she\n whispered. \"And while you're doing it—think about whom he's spinning\n ship for.\" She took her hand from Marcia's arm.\n\n\n Marcia twisted away and went into the corridor.", "\"That's quite a different situation. 'Down' exists when you're\n swimming. Free-fall means that everything around you is 'up.' The\n body's reactions to free-fall go much deeper than space-nausea and a\n mild feeling of panic. When there's a glandular imbalance of certain\n kinds, the results can be drastic. Apparently some instinctual part\n of the mind reacts as if there were a violent emergency, when no\n emergency is recognized by the reasoning part of the mind. There\n are sudden floods of adrenalin; the 17-kesteroids begin spastic\n secretions; the—well, it varies in individuals. But it's pretty well\n established that the results can be fatal. It kills men with prostate\n trouble—sometimes. It kills women in menopause—often. It kills women\n in the early stages of pregnancy—\nalways\n.\"\n\n\n \"But how?\" asked Marcia, interested in spite of her resentment.", "Marcia bounced resentfully off the cot and stood aside. Petrucelli\n looked at her, cocked an eyebrow, looked at Miss Eagen, and asked,\n \"Jaywalker?\"\n\n\n \"Please hurry, Pet.\" She turned to Marcia. \"I've got to explain to the\n passengers that there won't be any free fall. Most of them are looking\n forward to it.\" She went out.\n\n\n Marcia watched the big man work for a moment. \"Why are you putting the\n bed on the wall?\"\n\n\n He looked at her and away, quickly. \"Because, lady, when we start to\n spin, that outside bulkhead is going to be\ndown\n. Centrifugal force,\n see?\" And before she could answer him he added, \"I can't talk and work\n at the same time.\"", "\"Spin ship,\" she replied immediately, and looked up at him pertly, like\n a kindergarten child who knows she has the right answer.\n\n\n He groaned.\n\n\n \"You said you could do it.\"\n\n\n \"I can ... try,\" he said hollowly. \"But—why,\nwhy\n?\"\n\n\n \"Because,\" she said bleakly, \"I learned long ago that a man grows to\n love what he has to fight for.\"\n\n\n \"And you were going to make me fight for you and the child—even if the\n lives of a hundred and seventy people were involved?\"\n\n\n \"You said you could handle it. I thought you could.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try,\" he said wearily. \"Oh, I'll try.\" He went out, dragging his\n feet, his shoulders down, without looking at her." ], [ "After that, there was scarcely room for thought—even for fear, though\n it lurked nearby, ready to leap. There was the ascent, the quiet,\n sleeplike ascent into space. Marcia very nearly forgot to breathe. She\n had been prepared for almost anything except this quality of peace and\n awe.\nShe didn't know how long she had been sitting there, awestruck,\n spellbound, when she realized that she had to finish the job she'd\n started, and do it right now, this minute. It might already be too\n late ... she wished, suddenly, and for the very first time, that she'd\n paid more attention to Jack's ramblings about orbits and turn-over\n points and correction blasts, and all that gobbledegook. She glanced", "Marcia forced herself away from the bulkhead with a small whimper of\n hurt and hatred—hatred of the stars, of this knowledgeable, inspired\n girl, and—even more so—of herself. She darted toward the door.\n\n\n Miss Eagen was beside her in an instant, a hard small hand on her arm.\n \"Where are you going?\"\n\n\n \"I'm going to stop him. He can't take that chance with his ship, with\n these people....\"\n\n\n \"He will and he must. You surely know your husband.\"\n\n\n \"I know him as well as you do.\"\nMiss Eagen's firm lips shut in a thin hard line. \"Do as you like,\" she\n whispered. \"And while you're doing it—think about whom he's spinning\n ship for.\" She took her hand from Marcia's arm.\n\n\n Marcia twisted away and went into the corridor.", "After he'd gone—for good, he said—her anger had sustained her for a\n few weeks. Then, bleakly, she knew she'd go to the ends of Earth for\n Jack. Or even to the Moon....\nSitting rigid in the tense stillness of a rocket ship that was about\n to leap from Earth, Marcia started as an officer ducked his head into\n the passenger compartment from the pilot room's deep glow. But it\n wasn't Jack. The officer's lips moved hurriedly as he counted over the\n seats. He ducked back out of sight. From the bulk-heads, the overhead,\n everywhere, came a deep, quiet rumble. Some of the passengers looked\n anxious, some excited, and some just leafed casually through magazines.\n\n\n Now the brown-clad Miss Eagen was speaking from the head of the aisle.", "Even now she distinctly recalled the beginnings of the interplanetary\n cold that always seeped into the warm house when he talked about space,\n when he was about to leave her for it. And this time it was worse than\n ever before.\n\n\n He went on remorselessly, \"Once the\nElsinore\nreached the free-fall\n flight, where power could be shut off, the skipper had to put the\n ferry into an axial spin under power, creating artificial gravity\n to save the worthless life of that fool. So of course he lost his\n trajectory, and had to warp her in as best he could, without passing\n the Moon or crashing into it. And of course you're not listening.\"\n\n\n \"It's all so dull!\" she had flared, and then, \"How can I be interested\n in what some blundering space-jockey did?\"", "pseudo-widowhoods. Space-widowhood, for instance....\nAt last she was on the gangplank, entering the mouth of the\n spaceship—and nothing could ever stop her now. Not unless she broke\n down completely in front of all these hurrying, Moon-bound passengers,\n in plain sight of the scattered crowd which clustered on the other\n side of the space-field barriers. Even that possibility was denied her\n when two gently insistent middle-aged ladies indicated she was blocking\n the way....\nSomehow, dizzily, she was at her seat, led there by a smiling,\n brown-clad stewardess; and her azure-tipped fingers were clutching at\n the pearl-gray plasta-leather of the chair arm. Her eyes, the azure", "outside again and the sky was no longer deep blue, but black. She\n pressed herself up out of the soft chair—it was difficult, because of\n the one-and-a-half gravities the ship was holding—and plodded heavily\n up the aisle. Miss Eagen was just rising from the chair in which she\n sat for the take-off.", "The flash walls on the field were being raised to keep the blow-by from\n the ship's jets from searing the administration building and the area\n beyond. Marcia realized with crushing suddenness that the ship was\n about to blast off in seconds. She half-rose, then sank back, biting\n her lip. Silly ... Jack had said that—her fear of space was silly.\n He'd said it during the quarrel, and he'd roared at her, \"And that's\n why you want me to come back—ground myself, be an Earth-lubber—so I\n can spare you the anguish of sitting home wondering if I'll come back\n alive!\"\nAnd then he'd been sorry he'd shouted, and he sat by her, taking her", "It was snatched away—the buildings, the trees, the roads surrounding\n the field seemed to pour in upon it, shrinking as they ran together.\n Roads dried up like parched rivers, thinning and vanishing into the\n circle of her horrified vision. A great, soft, uniform weight pressed\n her down and back; she fought it, but it was too big and too soft.\n\n\n Now Earth's surface was vague and Sun-splashed. Marcia's sense of loss\n tore at her. She put up her hands, heavily, and pressed the glass as\n if she could push it out, push herself out, go back, back to Earth\n and solidity. Clouds shot by like bullets, fell away until they were\n snowflakes roiling in violet haze. Then, in the purling universe that\n had grown around the ship, Earth was a mystic circle, a shallow dish\n floating darkly and heavily below.\n\n\n \"We are now,\" said Miss Eagen's calm voice, \"thirty-seven miles over\n Los Angeles.\"", "There was a sudden thunder. Over Miss Eagen's shoulder, through the\n port, Marcia saw the stars begin to move. Miss Eagen followed her gaze.\n \"He's started the spin. You'll be all right now.\"\nMarcia could never recall the rest of the details of the trip. There\n was the outboard bulkhead that drew her like a magnet, increasingly,\n until suddenly it wasn't an attracting wall, but normally and naturally\n \"down.\" Then a needle, and another one, and a long period of deep\n drowsiness and unreality.\n\n\n But through and through that drugged, relaxed period, Jack and the\n stars, the Moon and Sue Eagen danced and wove. Words slipped in and out\n of it like shreds of melody:\n\n\n \"A man comes to love the things he has to fight for.\" And Jack\n fighting—for his ship, for the Moon, for the new-building traditions\n of the great ones who would carry humanity out to the stars.", "She found herself at the entrance to the pilot room. In one sweeping\n glance she saw a curved, silver board. Before it a man sat tranquilly.\n Nearer to her was Jack, hunched over the keyboard of a complex, compact\n machine, like a harried bookkeeper on the last day of the month.\n\n\n Her lips formed his name, but she was silent. She watched him, his\n square, competent hands, his detached and distant face. Through the\n forward view-plate she saw a harsh, jagged line, the very edge of the\n Moon's disc. Next to it, and below, was the rear viewer, holding the\n shimmering azure shape of Earth.\n\n\n \"\nAll Earth watches me when I work, but with your eyes.\n\"\n\n\n Jack had said that to her once, long ago, when he still loved her.\n\n\n \"... human damnfoolishness botching up the equations....\" He had said\n that once, too.", "\"You\nare\n? You—we—\" He turned to Miss Eagen, who nodded once, her\n face wooden. \"Just find it out?\"\n\n\n This time Miss Eagen didn't react at all, and Marcia knew that she had\n to speak up. \"No, Jack. I knew weeks ago.\"\n\n\n There was no describable change in his face, but the taut skin of his\n space-tanned cheek seemed, somehow, to draw inward. His eyebrow ridges\n seemed to be more prominent, and he looked older, and very tired.\n Softly and slowly he asked, \"What in God's name made you get on the\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"I had to, Jack. I had to.\"\n\n\n \"Had to kill yourself?\" he demanded brutally. \"This tears it. This ties\n it up in a box with a bloody ribbon-bow. I suppose you know what this\n means—what I've got to do now?\"", "Miss Eagen's arched nostrils seemed pinched and white. \"You really want\n me to speak my piece?\"\nIn answer Marcia leaned back against the bulkhead and folded her arms.\n Miss Eagen gazed at her for a moment, nodded as if to herself, and\n said, \"I suppose there always will be people who don't pay attention\n to the rules. Jaywalkers. But out here jaywalkers don't have as much\n margin for error as they do crossing against a traffic light on Earth.\"\n She looked Marcia straight in the eye. \"What makes a jaywalker isn't\n ignorance. It's a combination of stupidity and stubbornness. The\n jaywalker does\nknow\nbetter. In your case....\"", "\"Spin ship,\" she replied immediately, and looked up at him pertly, like\n a kindergarten child who knows she has the right answer.\n\n\n He groaned.\n\n\n \"You said you could do it.\"\n\n\n \"I can ... try,\" he said hollowly. \"But—why,\nwhy\n?\"\n\n\n \"Because,\" she said bleakly, \"I learned long ago that a man grows to\n love what he has to fight for.\"\n\n\n \"And you were going to make me fight for you and the child—even if the\n lives of a hundred and seventy people were involved?\"\n\n\n \"You said you could handle it. I thought you could.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try,\" he said wearily. \"Oh, I'll try.\" He went out, dragging his\n feet, his shoulders down, without looking at her.", "\"Those of you who haven't been in a rocket before won't find it much\n different from being in an airplane. At the same time—\" She paused,\n quiet brown eyes solemn. \"What you are about to experience is something\n that will make you proud to belong to the human race.\"\nThat\nagain! thought Marcia furiously; and then all emotion left her\n but cold, ravening fear as the rumble heightened. She tried to close\n her eyes, her ears against it, but her mind wouldn't respond. She\n squirmed in her chair and found herself staring down at the field.\n It looked the way she felt—flat and pale and devoid of life, with a\n monstrous structure of terror squatting in it. The scene was abruptly\n splashed with a rushing sheet of flame that darkened the daytime sky.\n Then it was torn from her vision.", "She sighed. \"It's well known—even by you—that the free-fall condition\n has a weird effect on certain people. The human body is in an\n unprecedented situation in free fall. Biologically it has experienced\n the condition for very short periods—falling out of trees, or on\n delayed parachute jumps. But it isn't constituted to take hour after\n hour of fall.\"\n\n\n \"What about floating in a pool for hours?\" asked Marcia sullenly.", "He'll come up on the Moon obliquely, pass it, stop the spin, turn over\n once to check the speed of the ship, and once again to put the tail\n down when the Moon's gravity begins to draw us in. There'll be two\n short periods of free-fall there, but they won't be long enough to\n bother you much. And if we can do all that with the fuel we've got, it\n will be a miracle. A miracle from the brain of Captain McHenry.\"", "\"He'll spin the ship on its long axis,\" said the stewardess with\n exaggerated patience. \"That means that the steering jet tubes in the\n nose and tail are spinning, too. You don't just turn with a blast on\n one tube or another. The blasts have to be let off in hundreds of short\n bursts, timed to the hundredth of a second, to be able to make even a\n slight course correction. The sighting instruments are wheeling round\n and round while you're checking your position. Your fuel has to be\n calculated to the last ounce—because enough fuel for a Moon flight,\n with hours of fuelless free-fall, and enough fuel for a power spin\n and course corrections while spinning, are two very different things.\n Captain McHenry won't be able to maneuver to a landing on the Moon.\n He'll do it exactly right the first time, or not at all.\"\n\n\n Marcia was white and still. \"I—I never—\"", "\"I think,\" said Sue Eagen into the mike, \"that the computations can\n wait.\"\n\n\n \"The hell you do!\" The red contact light on the intercom went out.\n\n\n \"He'll be right here,\" said Miss Eagen.\nMarcia sat up slowly, clumsily. Miss Eagen did not offer to help.\n Marcia's hands strayed to her hair, patted it futilely.\n\n\n He came in, moving fast and purposefully, as always. \"Sue, what in time\n do you think you—\nMarcia!\n\" His dark face broke into a delighted grin\n and he put his arms out. \"You—you're here—\nhere\n, on my ship!\"\n\n\n \"I'm pregnant, Jack,\" she said. She put out a hand to ward him off. She\n couldn't bear the thought of his realizing what she had done while he\n had his arms around her.", "\"Blun—Marcia, you really don't realize what that skipper did was the\n finest piece of shiphandling since mankind got off the ground.\"\n\n\n \"Was it?\" she'd yawned. \"Could you do it?\"\n\n\n \"I—like to think I could,\" he said. \"I'd hate to have to try.\"\n\n\n She'd shrugged. \"Then it can't be very difficult, darling.\"\n\n\n She hadn't meant to be so cruel. Or so stupid. But when they were\n quarreling, or when he talked that repugnant, dedicated, other-world\n garble, something always went cold and furious and—lonely inside her,\n and made her fight back unfairly.", "of her nails, the azure (so she had been told) of Earth seen from\n interplanetary space, grew hot. She closed them, and for a moment\n gave herself up to an almost physical yearning for the Toluca Lake\n house—the comfort, the safety, the—the\nsanity\nof it.\nStubbornly she forced herself back to reality. At any moment Jack,\n dark-eyed and scrappy, might come swinging down the long, shining\n aisle. Jack—Captain Jack McHenry, if you please—must not know, yet,\n what she was doing to patch up their marriage." ], [ "The flash walls on the field were being raised to keep the blow-by from\n the ship's jets from searing the administration building and the area\n beyond. Marcia realized with crushing suddenness that the ship was\n about to blast off in seconds. She half-rose, then sank back, biting\n her lip. Silly ... Jack had said that—her fear of space was silly.\n He'd said it during the quarrel, and he'd roared at her, \"And that's\n why you want me to come back—ground myself, be an Earth-lubber—so I\n can spare you the anguish of sitting home wondering if I'll come back\n alive!\"\nAnd then he'd been sorry he'd shouted, and he sat by her, taking her", "outside again and the sky was no longer deep blue, but black. She\n pressed herself up out of the soft chair—it was difficult, because of\n the one-and-a-half gravities the ship was holding—and plodded heavily\n up the aisle. Miss Eagen was just rising from the chair in which she\n sat for the take-off.", "Marcia forced herself away from the bulkhead with a small whimper of\n hurt and hatred—hatred of the stars, of this knowledgeable, inspired\n girl, and—even more so—of herself. She darted toward the door.\n\n\n Miss Eagen was beside her in an instant, a hard small hand on her arm.\n \"Where are you going?\"\n\n\n \"I'm going to stop him. He can't take that chance with his ship, with\n these people....\"\n\n\n \"He will and he must. You surely know your husband.\"\n\n\n \"I know him as well as you do.\"\nMiss Eagen's firm lips shut in a thin hard line. \"Do as you like,\" she\n whispered. \"And while you're doing it—think about whom he's spinning\n ship for.\" She took her hand from Marcia's arm.\n\n\n Marcia twisted away and went into the corridor.", "After that, there was scarcely room for thought—even for fear, though\n it lurked nearby, ready to leap. There was the ascent, the quiet,\n sleeplike ascent into space. Marcia very nearly forgot to breathe. She\n had been prepared for almost anything except this quality of peace and\n awe.\nShe didn't know how long she had been sitting there, awestruck,\n spellbound, when she realized that she had to finish the job she'd\n started, and do it right now, this minute. It might already be too\n late ... she wished, suddenly, and for the very first time, that she'd\n paid more attention to Jack's ramblings about orbits and turn-over\n points and correction blasts, and all that gobbledegook. She glanced", "After he'd gone—for good, he said—her anger had sustained her for a\n few weeks. Then, bleakly, she knew she'd go to the ends of Earth for\n Jack. Or even to the Moon....\nSitting rigid in the tense stillness of a rocket ship that was about\n to leap from Earth, Marcia started as an officer ducked his head into\n the passenger compartment from the pilot room's deep glow. But it\n wasn't Jack. The officer's lips moved hurriedly as he counted over the\n seats. He ducked back out of sight. From the bulk-heads, the overhead,\n everywhere, came a deep, quiet rumble. Some of the passengers looked\n anxious, some excited, and some just leafed casually through magazines.\n\n\n Now the brown-clad Miss Eagen was speaking from the head of the aisle.", "\"Those of you who haven't been in a rocket before won't find it much\n different from being in an airplane. At the same time—\" She paused,\n quiet brown eyes solemn. \"What you are about to experience is something\n that will make you proud to belong to the human race.\"\nThat\nagain! thought Marcia furiously; and then all emotion left her\n but cold, ravening fear as the rumble heightened. She tried to close\n her eyes, her ears against it, but her mind wouldn't respond. She\n squirmed in her chair and found herself staring down at the field.\n It looked the way she felt—flat and pale and devoid of life, with a\n monstrous structure of terror squatting in it. The scene was abruptly\n splashed with a rushing sheet of flame that darkened the daytime sky.\n Then it was torn from her vision.", "pseudo-widowhoods. Space-widowhood, for instance....\nAt last she was on the gangplank, entering the mouth of the\n spaceship—and nothing could ever stop her now. Not unless she broke\n down completely in front of all these hurrying, Moon-bound passengers,\n in plain sight of the scattered crowd which clustered on the other\n side of the space-field barriers. Even that possibility was denied her\n when two gently insistent middle-aged ladies indicated she was blocking\n the way....\nSomehow, dizzily, she was at her seat, led there by a smiling,\n brown-clad stewardess; and her azure-tipped fingers were clutching at\n the pearl-gray plasta-leather of the chair arm. Her eyes, the azure", "Even now she distinctly recalled the beginnings of the interplanetary\n cold that always seeped into the warm house when he talked about space,\n when he was about to leave her for it. And this time it was worse than\n ever before.\n\n\n He went on remorselessly, \"Once the\nElsinore\nreached the free-fall\n flight, where power could be shut off, the skipper had to put the\n ferry into an axial spin under power, creating artificial gravity\n to save the worthless life of that fool. So of course he lost his\n trajectory, and had to warp her in as best he could, without passing\n the Moon or crashing into it. And of course you're not listening.\"\n\n\n \"It's all so dull!\" she had flared, and then, \"How can I be interested\n in what some blundering space-jockey did?\"", "It was snatched away—the buildings, the trees, the roads surrounding\n the field seemed to pour in upon it, shrinking as they ran together.\n Roads dried up like parched rivers, thinning and vanishing into the\n circle of her horrified vision. A great, soft, uniform weight pressed\n her down and back; she fought it, but it was too big and too soft.\n\n\n Now Earth's surface was vague and Sun-splashed. Marcia's sense of loss\n tore at her. She put up her hands, heavily, and pressed the glass as\n if she could push it out, push herself out, go back, back to Earth\n and solidity. Clouds shot by like bullets, fell away until they were\n snowflakes roiling in violet haze. Then, in the purling universe that\n had grown around the ship, Earth was a mystic circle, a shallow dish\n floating darkly and heavily below.\n\n\n \"We are now,\" said Miss Eagen's calm voice, \"thirty-seven miles over\n Los Angeles.\"", "\"Spin ship,\" she replied immediately, and looked up at him pertly, like\n a kindergarten child who knows she has the right answer.\n\n\n He groaned.\n\n\n \"You said you could do it.\"\n\n\n \"I can ... try,\" he said hollowly. \"But—why,\nwhy\n?\"\n\n\n \"Because,\" she said bleakly, \"I learned long ago that a man grows to\n love what he has to fight for.\"\n\n\n \"And you were going to make me fight for you and the child—even if the\n lives of a hundred and seventy people were involved?\"\n\n\n \"You said you could handle it. I thought you could.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try,\" he said wearily. \"Oh, I'll try.\" He went out, dragging his\n feet, his shoulders down, without looking at her.", "\"But what?\" Miss Eagen's composure seemed to have been blasted to\n shreds by the powerful currents of her indignation. Her eyes flashed.\n \"You mean, but why doesn't he just work the ship while it's spinning\n the same way he does when it isn't?\"\n\n\n Through a growing fear, Marcia nodded mutely.", "Marcia bounced resentfully off the cot and stood aside. Petrucelli\n looked at her, cocked an eyebrow, looked at Miss Eagen, and asked,\n \"Jaywalker?\"\n\n\n \"Please hurry, Pet.\" She turned to Marcia. \"I've got to explain to the\n passengers that there won't be any free fall. Most of them are looking\n forward to it.\" She went out.\n\n\n Marcia watched the big man work for a moment. \"Why are you putting the\n bed on the wall?\"\n\n\n He looked at her and away, quickly. \"Because, lady, when we start to\n spin, that outside bulkhead is going to be\ndown\n. Centrifugal force,\n see?\" And before she could answer him he added, \"I can't talk and work\n at the same time.\"", "\"Convulsions. A battle royal between a glandular-level panic and a\n violent and useless effort of the will to control the situation.\n Muscles tear, working against one another. Lungs rupture and air\n is forced into the blood-stream, causing embolism and death. Not\n everything is known about it, but I would guess that pregnant women are\n especially susceptible because their protective reflexes, through and\n through, are much more easily stimulated.\"\n\n\n \"And the only thing that can be done about it is to supply gravity?\"\n\n\n \"Or centrifugal force (or centripetal, depending on where you're\n standing, but why be technical?)—or, better yet, keep those people\n off the ships.\"\n\n\n \"So now Jack will spin the ship until I'm pressed against the walls\n with the same force as gravity, and then everything will be all right.\"\n\n\n \"You make it sound so simple.\"", "\"Miss Eagen—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Mrs. Fos—why, what's the matter?\"\n\n\n Seeing the startled expression on the stewardess' face, Marcia realized\n she must be looking like a ghost. She put a hand to her cheek and found\n it clammy.\n\n\n \"Come along,\" said Miss Eagen cheerfully. She put a firm arm around\n Marcia's shoulder. \"Just a touch of space-sickness. This way.\nThat's\nit. We'll have you fixed up in a jiffy.\"\n\n\n \"It isn't s-space sickness,\" said Marcia in a very small and very\n positive voice. She let herself be led forward, through the door and to\n the left, where there was a small and compact ship's hospital.\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" said Miss Eagen briskly, \"just you lie down there, Mrs.\n Foster. Does it hurt any special place?\"", "\"Blun—Marcia, you really don't realize what that skipper did was the\n finest piece of shiphandling since mankind got off the ground.\"\n\n\n \"Was it?\" she'd yawned. \"Could you do it?\"\n\n\n \"I—like to think I could,\" he said. \"I'd hate to have to try.\"\n\n\n She'd shrugged. \"Then it can't be very difficult, darling.\"\n\n\n She hadn't meant to be so cruel. Or so stupid. But when they were\n quarreling, or when he talked that repugnant, dedicated, other-world\n garble, something always went cold and furious and—lonely inside her,\n and made her fight back unfairly.", "There was a sudden thunder. Over Miss Eagen's shoulder, through the\n port, Marcia saw the stars begin to move. Miss Eagen followed her gaze.\n \"He's started the spin. You'll be all right now.\"\nMarcia could never recall the rest of the details of the trip. There\n was the outboard bulkhead that drew her like a magnet, increasingly,\n until suddenly it wasn't an attracting wall, but normally and naturally\n \"down.\" Then a needle, and another one, and a long period of deep\n drowsiness and unreality.\n\n\n But through and through that drugged, relaxed period, Jack and the\n stars, the Moon and Sue Eagen danced and wove. Words slipped in and out\n of it like shreds of melody:\n\n\n \"A man comes to love the things he has to fight for.\" And Jack\n fighting—for his ship, for the Moon, for the new-building traditions\n of the great ones who would carry humanity out to the stars.", "\"You\nare\n? You—we—\" He turned to Miss Eagen, who nodded once, her\n face wooden. \"Just find it out?\"\n\n\n This time Miss Eagen didn't react at all, and Marcia knew that she had\n to speak up. \"No, Jack. I knew weeks ago.\"\n\n\n There was no describable change in his face, but the taut skin of his\n space-tanned cheek seemed, somehow, to draw inward. His eyebrow ridges\n seemed to be more prominent, and he looked older, and very tired.\n Softly and slowly he asked, \"What in God's name made you get on the\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"I had to, Jack. I had to.\"\n\n\n \"Had to kill yourself?\" he demanded brutally. \"This tears it. This ties\n it up in a box with a bloody ribbon-bow. I suppose you know what this\n means—what I've got to do now?\"", "\"He'll spin the ship on its long axis,\" said the stewardess with\n exaggerated patience. \"That means that the steering jet tubes in the\n nose and tail are spinning, too. You don't just turn with a blast on\n one tube or another. The blasts have to be let off in hundreds of short\n bursts, timed to the hundredth of a second, to be able to make even a\n slight course correction. The sighting instruments are wheeling round\n and round while you're checking your position. Your fuel has to be\n calculated to the last ounce—because enough fuel for a Moon flight,\n with hours of fuelless free-fall, and enough fuel for a power spin\n and course corrections while spinning, are two very different things.\n Captain McHenry won't be able to maneuver to a landing on the Moon.\n He'll do it exactly right the first time, or not at all.\"\n\n\n Marcia was white and still. \"I—I never—\"", "\"The\nElsinore\n?\" She'd said it viciously, to taunt him, and something\n in her had been pleased at the dull flush that rose to his face.\n Everyone knew about the\nElsinore\n, the 500-foot Moon-ferry that almost\n missed the Moon.\n\n\n \"That,\" he said bitterly, \"was human damnfoolishness botching up the\n equations. Too many lobbyists have holdings on the Moon and don't\n want to risk not being able to go there in a hurry. So they haven't\n passed legislation to keep physically unfit people off spaceships.\n One of the passengers got aboard the\nElsinore\non somebody else's\n validation—which meant that nobody knew he was taking endocrine\n treatments to put hair on his brainless head and restore his—Oh, the\nJaywalker\n!\" Jack spat in disgust. \"Anyway, he was the kind of idiot\n who never realizes that certain glandular conditions are fatal in free\n fall.\"", "She found herself at the entrance to the pilot room. In one sweeping\n glance she saw a curved, silver board. Before it a man sat tranquilly.\n Nearer to her was Jack, hunched over the keyboard of a complex, compact\n machine, like a harried bookkeeper on the last day of the month.\n\n\n Her lips formed his name, but she was silent. She watched him, his\n square, competent hands, his detached and distant face. Through the\n forward view-plate she saw a harsh, jagged line, the very edge of the\n Moon's disc. Next to it, and below, was the rear viewer, holding the\n shimmering azure shape of Earth.\n\n\n \"\nAll Earth watches me when I work, but with your eyes.\n\"\n\n\n Jack had said that to her once, long ago, when he still loved her.\n\n\n \"... human damnfoolishness botching up the equations....\" He had said\n that once, too." ], [ "\"Because,\" said Miss Eagen, and in that moment she looked almost as\n drawn as Jack had, \"I'm supposed to be of service to the passengers at\n all times no matter what. If I have feelings at all, part of my job is\n to keep them to myself.\"\n\n\n \"Very courteous, I'm sure. However, I want to release you from your\n sense of duty. I'm\nmost\ninterested in what you have to say.\"", "Feeling very much put-upon, Marcia waited silently until he was\n finished, and the bed hung ludicrously to the wall like a walking fly.\n She thanked him timidly, and he ignored it and went out.\n\n\n Miss Eagen returned.\n\n\n \"That man was very rude,\" said Marcia.\n\n\n Miss Eagen looked at her coolly. \"I'm sorry,\" she said, obviously not\n meaning sorry at all.\n\n\n Marcia wet her lips. \"I asked you a question before,\" she said evenly.\n \"About you and the captain.\"\n\n\n \"You did,\" said Sue Eagen. \"Please don't.\"\n\n\n \"And why not?\"", "There was a stiff silence. Marcia looked up at Miss Eagen. \"It's true,\n you know,\" she said. \"A man grows to love the things he has to defend,\n no matter how he felt about them before.\"\n\n\n The stewardess looked at her, her face registering a strange mixture of\n detachment and wonder. \"You really believe that, don't you?\"\n\n\n Marcia's patience, snapped. \"You don't have to look so superior. I know\n what's bothering\nyou\n. Well, he's\nmy\nhusband, and don't you forget\n it.\"\nMiss Eagen's breath hissed in. Her eyes grew bright and she shook her\n head slightly. Then she turned on her heel and went to the intercom.\n Marcia thought for a frightened moment that she was going to call Jack\n back again. Instead she dialed and said, \"Hospital to Maintenance.\n Petrucelli?\"\n\n\n \"Petrucelli here.\"", "Marcia McHenry stiffened. Had she read the sign aloud? She turned\n startled eyes up to the smiling stewardess, who was holding out a\n well-groomed hand. Marcia responded weakly to the smile, overcame a\n sudden urge to blurt out that she had no validation—not her own,\n anyway. But her stiff fingers were already holding out the pink card\n with Nellie Foster's name on it.\n\n\n \"You're feeling well, Mrs. Foster?\"\nFeeling well? Yes, of course. Except for the—usual sickness. But\n that's so very normal\n.... Her numb lips moved. \"I'm fine,\" she said.", "Marcia bounced resentfully off the cot and stood aside. Petrucelli\n looked at her, cocked an eyebrow, looked at Miss Eagen, and asked,\n \"Jaywalker?\"\n\n\n \"Please hurry, Pet.\" She turned to Marcia. \"I've got to explain to the\n passengers that there won't be any free fall. Most of them are looking\n forward to it.\" She went out.\n\n\n Marcia watched the big man work for a moment. \"Why are you putting the\n bed on the wall?\"\n\n\n He looked at her and away, quickly. \"Because, lady, when we start to\n spin, that outside bulkhead is going to be\ndown\n. Centrifugal force,\n see?\" And before she could answer him he added, \"I can't talk and work\n at the same time.\"", "outside again and the sky was no longer deep blue, but black. She\n pressed herself up out of the soft chair—it was difficult, because of\n the one-and-a-half gravities the ship was holding—and plodded heavily\n up the aisle. Miss Eagen was just rising from the chair in which she\n sat for the take-off.", "\"Blun—Marcia, you really don't realize what that skipper did was the\n finest piece of shiphandling since mankind got off the ground.\"\n\n\n \"Was it?\" she'd yawned. \"Could you do it?\"\n\n\n \"I—like to think I could,\" he said. \"I'd hate to have to try.\"\n\n\n She'd shrugged. \"Then it can't be very difficult, darling.\"\n\n\n She hadn't meant to be so cruel. Or so stupid. But when they were\n quarreling, or when he talked that repugnant, dedicated, other-world\n garble, something always went cold and furious and—lonely inside her,\n and made her fight back unfairly.", "Miss Eagen's arched nostrils seemed pinched and white. \"You really want\n me to speak my piece?\"\nIn answer Marcia leaned back against the bulkhead and folded her arms.\n Miss Eagen gazed at her for a moment, nodded as if to herself, and\n said, \"I suppose there always will be people who don't pay attention\n to the rules. Jaywalkers. But out here jaywalkers don't have as much\n margin for error as they do crossing against a traffic light on Earth.\"\n She looked Marcia straight in the eye. \"What makes a jaywalker isn't\n ignorance. It's a combination of stupidity and stubbornness. The\n jaywalker does\nknow\nbetter. In your case....\"", "After he'd gone—for good, he said—her anger had sustained her for a\n few weeks. Then, bleakly, she knew she'd go to the ends of Earth for\n Jack. Or even to the Moon....\nSitting rigid in the tense stillness of a rocket ship that was about\n to leap from Earth, Marcia started as an officer ducked his head into\n the passenger compartment from the pilot room's deep glow. But it\n wasn't Jack. The officer's lips moved hurriedly as he counted over the\n seats. He ducked back out of sight. From the bulk-heads, the overhead,\n everywhere, came a deep, quiet rumble. Some of the passengers looked\n anxious, some excited, and some just leafed casually through magazines.\n\n\n Now the brown-clad Miss Eagen was speaking from the head of the aisle.", "Miss Eagen did, swiftly and thoroughly. \"You're so right,\" she\n breathed. She went to the small sink, stripping off her rubber gloves.\n With her back to Marcia, she said, \"I'll have to tell the captain, you\n know.\"\n\n\n \"I know. I'd rather ... tell him myself.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" said Miss Eagen flatly. Marcia felt as if she'd been slapped.\n Miss Eagen dried her hands and crossed to an intercom. \"Eagen to\n Captain.\"\n\n\n \"McHenry here.\"\n\n\n \"Captain McHenry, could you come back to the hospital right away?\"\n\n\n \"Not right away, Sue.\"\nSue! No wonder he had found it so easy to walk\n out!\nShe looked at the trim girl with hating eyes. The intercom said,\n \"You know I've got course-correction computations from here to yonder.\n Give me another forty minutes.\"", "Miss Eagen (which, her neat lapel button attested, was her name) made\n a penciled frown as lovely as her machined smile. \"Some day,\" she told\n Marcia, \"we won't have to ask the passengers if they're well. It's so\n easy to come aboard on someone else's validation, and people don't seem\n to realize how dangerous that is.\"\n\n\n As Miss Eagen moved to the next seat, Marcia shrank into a small\n huddle, fumbling with the card until it was crammed shapeless into her\n purse. Then from the depths of her guilt came rebellion. It was going\n to be all right. She was doing the biggest thing she'd ever done, and\n Jack would rise to the occasion, and it would be all right.\n\n\n It\nhad\nto be all right....", "\"But what?\" Miss Eagen's composure seemed to have been blasted to\n shreds by the powerful currents of her indignation. Her eyes flashed.\n \"You mean, but why doesn't he just work the ship while it's spinning\n the same way he does when it isn't?\"\n\n\n Through a growing fear, Marcia nodded mutely.", "\"Spin ship,\" she replied immediately, and looked up at him pertly, like\n a kindergarten child who knows she has the right answer.\n\n\n He groaned.\n\n\n \"You said you could do it.\"\n\n\n \"I can ... try,\" he said hollowly. \"But—why,\nwhy\n?\"\n\n\n \"Because,\" she said bleakly, \"I learned long ago that a man grows to\n love what he has to fight for.\"\n\n\n \"And you were going to make me fight for you and the child—even if the\n lives of a hundred and seventy people were involved?\"\n\n\n \"You said you could handle it. I thought you could.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try,\" he said wearily. \"Oh, I'll try.\" He went out, dragging his\n feet, his shoulders down, without looking at her.", "Even now she distinctly recalled the beginnings of the interplanetary\n cold that always seeped into the warm house when he talked about space,\n when he was about to leave her for it. And this time it was worse than\n ever before.\n\n\n He went on remorselessly, \"Once the\nElsinore\nreached the free-fall\n flight, where power could be shut off, the skipper had to put the\n ferry into an axial spin under power, creating artificial gravity\n to save the worthless life of that fool. So of course he lost his\n trajectory, and had to warp her in as best he could, without passing\n the Moon or crashing into it. And of course you're not listening.\"\n\n\n \"It's all so dull!\" she had flared, and then, \"How can I be interested\n in what some blundering space-jockey did?\"", "She found herself at the entrance to the pilot room. In one sweeping\n glance she saw a curved, silver board. Before it a man sat tranquilly.\n Nearer to her was Jack, hunched over the keyboard of a complex, compact\n machine, like a harried bookkeeper on the last day of the month.\n\n\n Her lips formed his name, but she was silent. She watched him, his\n square, competent hands, his detached and distant face. Through the\n forward view-plate she saw a harsh, jagged line, the very edge of the\n Moon's disc. Next to it, and below, was the rear viewer, holding the\n shimmering azure shape of Earth.\n\n\n \"\nAll Earth watches me when I work, but with your eyes.\n\"\n\n\n Jack had said that to her once, long ago, when he still loved her.\n\n\n \"... human damnfoolishness botching up the equations....\" He had said\n that once, too.", "\"Those of you who haven't been in a rocket before won't find it much\n different from being in an airplane. At the same time—\" She paused,\n quiet brown eyes solemn. \"What you are about to experience is something\n that will make you proud to belong to the human race.\"\nThat\nagain! thought Marcia furiously; and then all emotion left her\n but cold, ravening fear as the rumble heightened. She tried to close\n her eyes, her ears against it, but her mind wouldn't respond. She\n squirmed in her chair and found herself staring down at the field.\n It looked the way she felt—flat and pale and devoid of life, with a\n monstrous structure of terror squatting in it. The scene was abruptly\n splashed with a rushing sheet of flame that darkened the daytime sky.\n Then it was torn from her vision.", "Marcia forced herself away from the bulkhead with a small whimper of\n hurt and hatred—hatred of the stars, of this knowledgeable, inspired\n girl, and—even more so—of herself. She darted toward the door.\n\n\n Miss Eagen was beside her in an instant, a hard small hand on her arm.\n \"Where are you going?\"\n\n\n \"I'm going to stop him. He can't take that chance with his ship, with\n these people....\"\n\n\n \"He will and he must. You surely know your husband.\"\n\n\n \"I know him as well as you do.\"\nMiss Eagen's firm lips shut in a thin hard line. \"Do as you like,\" she\n whispered. \"And while you're doing it—think about whom he's spinning\n ship for.\" She took her hand from Marcia's arm.\n\n\n Marcia twisted away and went into the corridor.", "After this—if this didn't work—there just would be nothing else she\n could do. She wasn't a scheming woman. No one would ever know how\n difficult it had been for her to think up the whole plan, to find\n Nellie Foster (someone Jack had never met) and to persuade Nellie to\n register for the trip and take the physical for her. She'd had to lie\n to Nellie, to make Nellie think she was brave and adventurous, and that\n she was just doing it to surprise Jack.\n\n\n Oh, he'd be surprised, all right.", "She turned her face away from the aisle, covered her cheek with her\n hand to hide it. Her gaze went out through the ray-proof glass port to\n the field, to the laboring beetle of a red tractor bearing the gangway\n on its busy back, to the low, blast-proof administration building. When\n her gaze came to the tall sign over the entrance, she hurried it past;\n it was too late to think about that now, the square, shouting type that\n read:\nCAUTION\n\n HAVE YOU PASSED YOUR PHYSICAL EXAMINATION?\nAvoiding It May Cost Your Life!\n\"May I see your validation, please?\"", "\"Come up with a crescent wrench, will you, Pet?\"\n\n\n Another stiff silence. A question curled into Marcia's mind and she\n asked it. \"Do you work on all these ships at one time or another?\"\n\n\n Miss Eagen did not beat around the bush. \"I've been with Captain\n McHenry for three years. I hope to work with him always. I think he's\n the finest in the Service.\"\n\n\n \"He—th-thinks as well of you, no doubt.\"\n\n\n Petrucelli lounged in, a big man, easy-going, powerful. \"What's busted,\n muscles?\"\n\n\n \"Bolt the bed to the bulkhead, Pet. Mrs. McHenry—I'm sorry, but you'll\n have to get up.\"" ], [ "\"Spin ship,\" she replied immediately, and looked up at him pertly, like\n a kindergarten child who knows she has the right answer.\n\n\n He groaned.\n\n\n \"You said you could do it.\"\n\n\n \"I can ... try,\" he said hollowly. \"But—why,\nwhy\n?\"\n\n\n \"Because,\" she said bleakly, \"I learned long ago that a man grows to\n love what he has to fight for.\"\n\n\n \"And you were going to make me fight for you and the child—even if the\n lives of a hundred and seventy people were involved?\"\n\n\n \"You said you could handle it. I thought you could.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try,\" he said wearily. \"Oh, I'll try.\" He went out, dragging his\n feet, his shoulders down, without looking at her.", "Feeling very much put-upon, Marcia waited silently until he was\n finished, and the bed hung ludicrously to the wall like a walking fly.\n She thanked him timidly, and he ignored it and went out.\n\n\n Miss Eagen returned.\n\n\n \"That man was very rude,\" said Marcia.\n\n\n Miss Eagen looked at her coolly. \"I'm sorry,\" she said, obviously not\n meaning sorry at all.\n\n\n Marcia wet her lips. \"I asked you a question before,\" she said evenly.\n \"About you and the captain.\"\n\n\n \"You did,\" said Sue Eagen. \"Please don't.\"\n\n\n \"And why not?\"", "There was a stiff silence. Marcia looked up at Miss Eagen. \"It's true,\n you know,\" she said. \"A man grows to love the things he has to defend,\n no matter how he felt about them before.\"\n\n\n The stewardess looked at her, her face registering a strange mixture of\n detachment and wonder. \"You really believe that, don't you?\"\n\n\n Marcia's patience, snapped. \"You don't have to look so superior. I know\n what's bothering\nyou\n. Well, he's\nmy\nhusband, and don't you forget\n it.\"\nMiss Eagen's breath hissed in. Her eyes grew bright and she shook her\n head slightly. Then she turned on her heel and went to the intercom.\n Marcia thought for a frightened moment that she was going to call Jack\n back again. Instead she dialed and said, \"Hospital to Maintenance.\n Petrucelli?\"\n\n\n \"Petrucelli here.\"", "\"Blun—Marcia, you really don't realize what that skipper did was the\n finest piece of shiphandling since mankind got off the ground.\"\n\n\n \"Was it?\" she'd yawned. \"Could you do it?\"\n\n\n \"I—like to think I could,\" he said. \"I'd hate to have to try.\"\n\n\n She'd shrugged. \"Then it can't be very difficult, darling.\"\n\n\n She hadn't meant to be so cruel. Or so stupid. But when they were\n quarreling, or when he talked that repugnant, dedicated, other-world\n garble, something always went cold and furious and—lonely inside her,\n and made her fight back unfairly.", "Even now she distinctly recalled the beginnings of the interplanetary\n cold that always seeped into the warm house when he talked about space,\n when he was about to leave her for it. And this time it was worse than\n ever before.\n\n\n He went on remorselessly, \"Once the\nElsinore\nreached the free-fall\n flight, where power could be shut off, the skipper had to put the\n ferry into an axial spin under power, creating artificial gravity\n to save the worthless life of that fool. So of course he lost his\n trajectory, and had to warp her in as best he could, without passing\n the Moon or crashing into it. And of course you're not listening.\"\n\n\n \"It's all so dull!\" she had flared, and then, \"How can I be interested\n in what some blundering space-jockey did?\"", "\"Don't\nhave\nto?\" He rose, bent over her, and slid his arms around\n her. He put his face into the shadowed warmth between her hair and her\n neck and said, \"Listen, egghead, there's no absolute scale for courage.\n We had a bad time, both of us. After it was over, and I had a chance\n to think, I used it trying to look at things through your eyes. And\n that way I found out that when you walked up that gangway, you did the\n bravest thing I've ever known anyone to do. And you did it for me. It\n doesn't matter what else happened. Sue told me a lot about you that I\n didn't know, darling. You're ... real huge for your size. As for the\n bad part of what happened—nothing like it can ever happen again, can\n it?\"", "Marcia forced herself away from the bulkhead with a small whimper of\n hurt and hatred—hatred of the stars, of this knowledgeable, inspired\n girl, and—even more so—of herself. She darted toward the door.\n\n\n Miss Eagen was beside her in an instant, a hard small hand on her arm.\n \"Where are you going?\"\n\n\n \"I'm going to stop him. He can't take that chance with his ship, with\n these people....\"\n\n\n \"He will and he must. You surely know your husband.\"\n\n\n \"I know him as well as you do.\"\nMiss Eagen's firm lips shut in a thin hard line. \"Do as you like,\" she\n whispered. \"And while you're doing it—think about whom he's spinning\n ship for.\" She took her hand from Marcia's arm.\n\n\n Marcia twisted away and went into the corridor.", "of her nails, the azure (so she had been told) of Earth seen from\n interplanetary space, grew hot. She closed them, and for a moment\n gave herself up to an almost physical yearning for the Toluca Lake\n house—the comfort, the safety, the—the\nsanity\nof it.\nStubbornly she forced herself back to reality. At any moment Jack,\n dark-eyed and scrappy, might come swinging down the long, shining\n aisle. Jack—Captain Jack McHenry, if you please—must not know, yet,\n what she was doing to patch up their marriage.", "Sue Eagen was there, too, and the thing she shared with Jack. Of course\n there was something between them—so big a thing that there was\n nothing for her to fear in it.\n\n\n Jack and Sue Eagen had always had it, and always would have; and now\n Marcia had it too. And with understanding replacing fear, Marcia was\n free to recall that Jack had worked with Sue Eagen—but it was Marcia\n that he had loved and married.\nThere was a long time of blackness, and then a time of agony, when\n she was falling, falling, and her lungs wanted to split, explode,\n disintegrate, and someone kept saying, \"Hold tight, Marcia; hold tight\n to me,\" and she found Sue Eagen's cool strong hands in hers.\nMarcia. She called me Marcia.\nMore blackness, more pain—but not so much this time; and then a long,\n deep sleep.", "\"But what?\" Miss Eagen's composure seemed to have been blasted to\n shreds by the powerful currents of her indignation. Her eyes flashed.\n \"You mean, but why doesn't he just work the ship while it's spinning\n the same way he does when it isn't?\"\n\n\n Through a growing fear, Marcia nodded mutely.", "Marcia lay down gratefully. She closed her eyes tightly and said, \"I'm\n not Mrs. Foster. It doesn't hurt.\"\n\n\n \"You're not—\" Miss Eagen apparently decided to take one thing at a\n time. \"How do you feel?\"\n\n\n \"Scared,\" said Marcia.\n\n\n \"Why, what—is there to be scared of?\"\n\n\n \"I'm pregnant.\"\n\n\n \"Well, that's no—You're\nwhat\n?\"\n\n\n \"I'm Mrs. McHenry. I'm Jack's wife.\"\n\n\n There was such a long pause that Marcia opened her eyes. Miss Eagen was\n looking at her levelly. She said, \"I'll have to examine you.\"\n\n\n \"I know. Go ahead.\"", "After this—if this didn't work—there just would be nothing else she\n could do. She wasn't a scheming woman. No one would ever know how\n difficult it had been for her to think up the whole plan, to find\n Nellie Foster (someone Jack had never met) and to persuade Nellie to\n register for the trip and take the physical for her. She'd had to lie\n to Nellie, to make Nellie think she was brave and adventurous, and that\n she was just doing it to surprise Jack.\n\n\n Oh, he'd be surprised, all right.", "After he'd gone—for good, he said—her anger had sustained her for a\n few weeks. Then, bleakly, she knew she'd go to the ends of Earth for\n Jack. Or even to the Moon....\nSitting rigid in the tense stillness of a rocket ship that was about\n to leap from Earth, Marcia started as an officer ducked his head into\n the passenger compartment from the pilot room's deep glow. But it\n wasn't Jack. The officer's lips moved hurriedly as he counted over the\n seats. He ducked back out of sight. From the bulk-heads, the overhead,\n everywhere, came a deep, quiet rumble. Some of the passengers looked\n anxious, some excited, and some just leafed casually through magazines.\n\n\n Now the brown-clad Miss Eagen was speaking from the head of the aisle.", "There was a sudden thunder. Over Miss Eagen's shoulder, through the\n port, Marcia saw the stars begin to move. Miss Eagen followed her gaze.\n \"He's started the spin. You'll be all right now.\"\nMarcia could never recall the rest of the details of the trip. There\n was the outboard bulkhead that drew her like a magnet, increasingly,\n until suddenly it wasn't an attracting wall, but normally and naturally\n \"down.\" Then a needle, and another one, and a long period of deep\n drowsiness and unreality.\n\n\n But through and through that drugged, relaxed period, Jack and the\n stars, the Moon and Sue Eagen danced and wove. Words slipped in and out\n of it like shreds of melody:\n\n\n \"A man comes to love the things he has to fight for.\" And Jack\n fighting—for his ship, for the Moon, for the new-building traditions\n of the great ones who would carry humanity out to the stars.", "Miss Eagen was standing by the hospital door, watching her. When Marcia\n turned away without speaking to Jack, Miss Eagen smiled and held out\n her hand.\n\n\n Marcia went to her and took the hand. They went into the hospital. Miss\n Eagen didn't speak; she seemed to be waiting.\n\n\n \"Yes, I know who Jack's spinning the ship for,\" said Marcia.\n\n\n Miss Eagen looked an unspoken question.\n\n\n Marcia said, painfully, \"He's like the Captain of the\nElsinore\n. He's\n risking his life for a—a stranger. A jaywalker. Not for me. Not even\n for his baby.\"\n\n\n \"Does it hurt to know that?\"\n\n\n Marcia looked into the smooth, strong face and said with genuine\n astonishment, \"Hurt? Oh, no! It's so—so big!\"", "Miss Eagen did, swiftly and thoroughly. \"You're so right,\" she\n breathed. She went to the small sink, stripping off her rubber gloves.\n With her back to Marcia, she said, \"I'll have to tell the captain, you\n know.\"\n\n\n \"I know. I'd rather ... tell him myself.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" said Miss Eagen flatly. Marcia felt as if she'd been slapped.\n Miss Eagen dried her hands and crossed to an intercom. \"Eagen to\n Captain.\"\n\n\n \"McHenry here.\"\n\n\n \"Captain McHenry, could you come back to the hospital right away?\"\n\n\n \"Not right away, Sue.\"\nSue! No wonder he had found it so easy to walk\n out!\nShe looked at the trim girl with hating eyes. The intercom said,\n \"You know I've got course-correction computations from here to yonder.\n Give me another forty minutes.\"", "\"You\nare\n? You—we—\" He turned to Miss Eagen, who nodded once, her\n face wooden. \"Just find it out?\"\n\n\n This time Miss Eagen didn't react at all, and Marcia knew that she had\n to speak up. \"No, Jack. I knew weeks ago.\"\n\n\n There was no describable change in his face, but the taut skin of his\n space-tanned cheek seemed, somehow, to draw inward. His eyebrow ridges\n seemed to be more prominent, and he looked older, and very tired.\n Softly and slowly he asked, \"What in God's name made you get on the\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"I had to, Jack. I had to.\"\n\n\n \"Had to kill yourself?\" he demanded brutally. \"This tears it. This ties\n it up in a box with a bloody ribbon-bow. I suppose you know what this\n means—what I've got to do now?\"", "\"Come up with a crescent wrench, will you, Pet?\"\n\n\n Another stiff silence. A question curled into Marcia's mind and she\n asked it. \"Do you work on all these ships at one time or another?\"\n\n\n Miss Eagen did not beat around the bush. \"I've been with Captain\n McHenry for three years. I hope to work with him always. I think he's\n the finest in the Service.\"\n\n\n \"He—th-thinks as well of you, no doubt.\"\n\n\n Petrucelli lounged in, a big man, easy-going, powerful. \"What's busted,\n muscles?\"\n\n\n \"Bolt the bed to the bulkhead, Pet. Mrs. McHenry—I'm sorry, but you'll\n have to get up.\"", "\"Because,\" said Miss Eagen, and in that moment she looked almost as\n drawn as Jack had, \"I'm supposed to be of service to the passengers at\n all times no matter what. If I have feelings at all, part of my job is\n to keep them to myself.\"\n\n\n \"Very courteous, I'm sure. However, I want to release you from your\n sense of duty. I'm\nmost\ninterested in what you have to say.\"", "Marcia bounced resentfully off the cot and stood aside. Petrucelli\n looked at her, cocked an eyebrow, looked at Miss Eagen, and asked,\n \"Jaywalker?\"\n\n\n \"Please hurry, Pet.\" She turned to Marcia. \"I've got to explain to the\n passengers that there won't be any free fall. Most of them are looking\n forward to it.\" She went out.\n\n\n Marcia watched the big man work for a moment. \"Why are you putting the\n bed on the wall?\"\n\n\n He looked at her and away, quickly. \"Because, lady, when we start to\n spin, that outside bulkhead is going to be\ndown\n. Centrifugal force,\n see?\" And before she could answer him he added, \"I can't talk and work\n at the same time.\"" ], [ "He'll come up on the Moon obliquely, pass it, stop the spin, turn over\n once to check the speed of the ship, and once again to put the tail\n down when the Moon's gravity begins to draw us in. There'll be two\n short periods of free-fall there, but they won't be long enough to\n bother you much. And if we can do all that with the fuel we've got, it\n will be a miracle. A miracle from the brain of Captain McHenry.\"", "After that, there was scarcely room for thought—even for fear, though\n it lurked nearby, ready to leap. There was the ascent, the quiet,\n sleeplike ascent into space. Marcia very nearly forgot to breathe. She\n had been prepared for almost anything except this quality of peace and\n awe.\nShe didn't know how long she had been sitting there, awestruck,\n spellbound, when she realized that she had to finish the job she'd\n started, and do it right now, this minute. It might already be too\n late ... she wished, suddenly, and for the very first time, that she'd\n paid more attention to Jack's ramblings about orbits and turn-over\n points and correction blasts, and all that gobbledegook. She glanced", "\"The\nElsinore\n?\" She'd said it viciously, to taunt him, and something\n in her had been pleased at the dull flush that rose to his face.\n Everyone knew about the\nElsinore\n, the 500-foot Moon-ferry that almost\n missed the Moon.\n\n\n \"That,\" he said bitterly, \"was human damnfoolishness botching up the\n equations. Too many lobbyists have holdings on the Moon and don't\n want to risk not being able to go there in a hurry. So they haven't\n passed legislation to keep physically unfit people off spaceships.\n One of the passengers got aboard the\nElsinore\non somebody else's\n validation—which meant that nobody knew he was taking endocrine\n treatments to put hair on his brainless head and restore his—Oh, the\nJaywalker\n!\" Jack spat in disgust. \"Anyway, he was the kind of idiot\n who never realizes that certain glandular conditions are fatal in free\n fall.\"", "\"Those of you who haven't been in a rocket before won't find it much\n different from being in an airplane. At the same time—\" She paused,\n quiet brown eyes solemn. \"What you are about to experience is something\n that will make you proud to belong to the human race.\"\nThat\nagain! thought Marcia furiously; and then all emotion left her\n but cold, ravening fear as the rumble heightened. She tried to close\n her eyes, her ears against it, but her mind wouldn't respond. She\n squirmed in her chair and found herself staring down at the field.\n It looked the way she felt—flat and pale and devoid of life, with a\n monstrous structure of terror squatting in it. The scene was abruptly\n splashed with a rushing sheet of flame that darkened the daytime sky.\n Then it was torn from her vision.", "After he'd gone—for good, he said—her anger had sustained her for a\n few weeks. Then, bleakly, she knew she'd go to the ends of Earth for\n Jack. Or even to the Moon....\nSitting rigid in the tense stillness of a rocket ship that was about\n to leap from Earth, Marcia started as an officer ducked his head into\n the passenger compartment from the pilot room's deep glow. But it\n wasn't Jack. The officer's lips moved hurriedly as he counted over the\n seats. He ducked back out of sight. From the bulk-heads, the overhead,\n everywhere, came a deep, quiet rumble. Some of the passengers looked\n anxious, some excited, and some just leafed casually through magazines.\n\n\n Now the brown-clad Miss Eagen was speaking from the head of the aisle.", "There was a sudden thunder. Over Miss Eagen's shoulder, through the\n port, Marcia saw the stars begin to move. Miss Eagen followed her gaze.\n \"He's started the spin. You'll be all right now.\"\nMarcia could never recall the rest of the details of the trip. There\n was the outboard bulkhead that drew her like a magnet, increasingly,\n until suddenly it wasn't an attracting wall, but normally and naturally\n \"down.\" Then a needle, and another one, and a long period of deep\n drowsiness and unreality.\n\n\n But through and through that drugged, relaxed period, Jack and the\n stars, the Moon and Sue Eagen danced and wove. Words slipped in and out\n of it like shreds of melody:\n\n\n \"A man comes to love the things he has to fight for.\" And Jack\n fighting—for his ship, for the Moon, for the new-building traditions\n of the great ones who would carry humanity out to the stars.", "\"He'll spin the ship on its long axis,\" said the stewardess with\n exaggerated patience. \"That means that the steering jet tubes in the\n nose and tail are spinning, too. You don't just turn with a blast on\n one tube or another. The blasts have to be let off in hundreds of short\n bursts, timed to the hundredth of a second, to be able to make even a\n slight course correction. The sighting instruments are wheeling round\n and round while you're checking your position. Your fuel has to be\n calculated to the last ounce—because enough fuel for a Moon flight,\n with hours of fuelless free-fall, and enough fuel for a power spin\n and course corrections while spinning, are two very different things.\n Captain McHenry won't be able to maneuver to a landing on the Moon.\n He'll do it exactly right the first time, or not at all.\"\n\n\n Marcia was white and still. \"I—I never—\"", "She found herself at the entrance to the pilot room. In one sweeping\n glance she saw a curved, silver board. Before it a man sat tranquilly.\n Nearer to her was Jack, hunched over the keyboard of a complex, compact\n machine, like a harried bookkeeper on the last day of the month.\n\n\n Her lips formed his name, but she was silent. She watched him, his\n square, competent hands, his detached and distant face. Through the\n forward view-plate she saw a harsh, jagged line, the very edge of the\n Moon's disc. Next to it, and below, was the rear viewer, holding the\n shimmering azure shape of Earth.\n\n\n \"\nAll Earth watches me when I work, but with your eyes.\n\"\n\n\n Jack had said that to her once, long ago, when he still loved her.\n\n\n \"... human damnfoolishness botching up the equations....\" He had said\n that once, too.", "It was snatched away—the buildings, the trees, the roads surrounding\n the field seemed to pour in upon it, shrinking as they ran together.\n Roads dried up like parched rivers, thinning and vanishing into the\n circle of her horrified vision. A great, soft, uniform weight pressed\n her down and back; she fought it, but it was too big and too soft.\n\n\n Now Earth's surface was vague and Sun-splashed. Marcia's sense of loss\n tore at her. She put up her hands, heavily, and pressed the glass as\n if she could push it out, push herself out, go back, back to Earth\n and solidity. Clouds shot by like bullets, fell away until they were\n snowflakes roiling in violet haze. Then, in the purling universe that\n had grown around the ship, Earth was a mystic circle, a shallow dish\n floating darkly and heavily below.\n\n\n \"We are now,\" said Miss Eagen's calm voice, \"thirty-seven miles over\n Los Angeles.\"", "\"But I haven't told you the toughest part of it yet,\" Miss Eagen went\n on inexorably. \"A ship as massive as this, spinning on its long axis,\n is a pretty fair gyroscope. It doesn't want to turn. Any force that\n tries to make it turn is resisted at right angles to the force applied.\n When that force is applied momentarily from jets, as they swing into\n position and away again, the firing formulas get—well, complex. And\n the ship's course and landing approach are completely new. Instead\n of letting the ship fall to the Moon, turning over and approaching\n tail-first with the main jets as brakes, Captain McHenry is going to\n have to start the spin first and go almost the whole way nose-first.", "The flash walls on the field were being raised to keep the blow-by from\n the ship's jets from searing the administration building and the area\n beyond. Marcia realized with crushing suddenness that the ship was\n about to blast off in seconds. She half-rose, then sank back, biting\n her lip. Silly ... Jack had said that—her fear of space was silly.\n He'd said it during the quarrel, and he'd roared at her, \"And that's\n why you want me to come back—ground myself, be an Earth-lubber—so I\n can spare you the anguish of sitting home wondering if I'll come back\n alive!\"\nAnd then he'd been sorry he'd shouted, and he sat by her, taking her", "Even now she distinctly recalled the beginnings of the interplanetary\n cold that always seeped into the warm house when he talked about space,\n when he was about to leave her for it. And this time it was worse than\n ever before.\n\n\n He went on remorselessly, \"Once the\nElsinore\nreached the free-fall\n flight, where power could be shut off, the skipper had to put the\n ferry into an axial spin under power, creating artificial gravity\n to save the worthless life of that fool. So of course he lost his\n trajectory, and had to warp her in as best he could, without passing\n the Moon or crashing into it. And of course you're not listening.\"\n\n\n \"It's all so dull!\" she had flared, and then, \"How can I be interested\n in what some blundering space-jockey did?\"", "\"That's quite a different situation. 'Down' exists when you're\n swimming. Free-fall means that everything around you is 'up.' The\n body's reactions to free-fall go much deeper than space-nausea and a\n mild feeling of panic. When there's a glandular imbalance of certain\n kinds, the results can be drastic. Apparently some instinctual part\n of the mind reacts as if there were a violent emergency, when no\n emergency is recognized by the reasoning part of the mind. There\n are sudden floods of adrenalin; the 17-kesteroids begin spastic\n secretions; the—well, it varies in individuals. But it's pretty well\n established that the results can be fatal. It kills men with prostate\n trouble—sometimes. It kills women in menopause—often. It kills women\n in the early stages of pregnancy—\nalways\n.\"\n\n\n \"But how?\" asked Marcia, interested in spite of her resentment.", "\"Convulsions. A battle royal between a glandular-level panic and a\n violent and useless effort of the will to control the situation.\n Muscles tear, working against one another. Lungs rupture and air\n is forced into the blood-stream, causing embolism and death. Not\n everything is known about it, but I would guess that pregnant women are\n especially susceptible because their protective reflexes, through and\n through, are much more easily stimulated.\"\n\n\n \"And the only thing that can be done about it is to supply gravity?\"\n\n\n \"Or centrifugal force (or centripetal, depending on where you're\n standing, but why be technical?)—or, better yet, keep those people\n off the ships.\"\n\n\n \"So now Jack will spin the ship until I'm pressed against the walls\n with the same force as gravity, and then everything will be all right.\"\n\n\n \"You make it sound so simple.\"", "outside again and the sky was no longer deep blue, but black. She\n pressed herself up out of the soft chair—it was difficult, because of\n the one-and-a-half gravities the ship was holding—and plodded heavily\n up the aisle. Miss Eagen was just rising from the chair in which she\n sat for the take-off.", "She sighed. \"It's well known—even by you—that the free-fall condition\n has a weird effect on certain people. The human body is in an\n unprecedented situation in free fall. Biologically it has experienced\n the condition for very short periods—falling out of trees, or on\n delayed parachute jumps. But it isn't constituted to take hour after\n hour of fall.\"\n\n\n \"What about floating in a pool for hours?\" asked Marcia sullenly.", "chin in his hand. \"Marcia, Marcia,\" he'd said gently, \"you're so\nsilly\n! It's been nineteen whole years since your father died in the\n explosion of a Moon-rocket. Rocket motors just don't explode any more,\n honey! Ships travel to the Moon and back on iron-clad, mathematical\n orbits that are figured before the ship puffs a jet—\"", "\"Blun—Marcia, you really don't realize what that skipper did was the\n finest piece of shiphandling since mankind got off the ground.\"\n\n\n \"Was it?\" she'd yawned. \"Could you do it?\"\n\n\n \"I—like to think I could,\" he said. \"I'd hate to have to try.\"\n\n\n She'd shrugged. \"Then it can't be very difficult, darling.\"\n\n\n She hadn't meant to be so cruel. Or so stupid. But when they were\n quarreling, or when he talked that repugnant, dedicated, other-world\n garble, something always went cold and furious and—lonely inside her,\n and made her fight back unfairly.", "Marcia forced herself away from the bulkhead with a small whimper of\n hurt and hatred—hatred of the stars, of this knowledgeable, inspired\n girl, and—even more so—of herself. She darted toward the door.\n\n\n Miss Eagen was beside her in an instant, a hard small hand on her arm.\n \"Where are you going?\"\n\n\n \"I'm going to stop him. He can't take that chance with his ship, with\n these people....\"\n\n\n \"He will and he must. You surely know your husband.\"\n\n\n \"I know him as well as you do.\"\nMiss Eagen's firm lips shut in a thin hard line. \"Do as you like,\" she\n whispered. \"And while you're doing it—think about whom he's spinning\n ship for.\" She took her hand from Marcia's arm.\n\n\n Marcia twisted away and went into the corridor.", "Miss Eagen's arched nostrils seemed pinched and white. \"You really want\n me to speak my piece?\"\nIn answer Marcia leaned back against the bulkhead and folded her arms.\n Miss Eagen gazed at her for a moment, nodded as if to herself, and\n said, \"I suppose there always will be people who don't pay attention\n to the rules. Jaywalkers. But out here jaywalkers don't have as much\n margin for error as they do crossing against a traffic light on Earth.\"\n She looked Marcia straight in the eye. \"What makes a jaywalker isn't\n ignorance. It's a combination of stupidity and stubbornness. The\n jaywalker does\nknow\nbetter. In your case....\"" ], [ "She found herself at the entrance to the pilot room. In one sweeping\n glance she saw a curved, silver board. Before it a man sat tranquilly.\n Nearer to her was Jack, hunched over the keyboard of a complex, compact\n machine, like a harried bookkeeper on the last day of the month.\n\n\n Her lips formed his name, but she was silent. She watched him, his\n square, competent hands, his detached and distant face. Through the\n forward view-plate she saw a harsh, jagged line, the very edge of the\n Moon's disc. Next to it, and below, was the rear viewer, holding the\n shimmering azure shape of Earth.\n\n\n \"\nAll Earth watches me when I work, but with your eyes.\n\"\n\n\n Jack had said that to her once, long ago, when he still loved her.\n\n\n \"... human damnfoolishness botching up the equations....\" He had said\n that once, too.", "After he'd gone—for good, he said—her anger had sustained her for a\n few weeks. Then, bleakly, she knew she'd go to the ends of Earth for\n Jack. Or even to the Moon....\nSitting rigid in the tense stillness of a rocket ship that was about\n to leap from Earth, Marcia started as an officer ducked his head into\n the passenger compartment from the pilot room's deep glow. But it\n wasn't Jack. The officer's lips moved hurriedly as he counted over the\n seats. He ducked back out of sight. From the bulk-heads, the overhead,\n everywhere, came a deep, quiet rumble. Some of the passengers looked\n anxious, some excited, and some just leafed casually through magazines.\n\n\n Now the brown-clad Miss Eagen was speaking from the head of the aisle.", "Even now she distinctly recalled the beginnings of the interplanetary\n cold that always seeped into the warm house when he talked about space,\n when he was about to leave her for it. And this time it was worse than\n ever before.\n\n\n He went on remorselessly, \"Once the\nElsinore\nreached the free-fall\n flight, where power could be shut off, the skipper had to put the\n ferry into an axial spin under power, creating artificial gravity\n to save the worthless life of that fool. So of course he lost his\n trajectory, and had to warp her in as best he could, without passing\n the Moon or crashing into it. And of course you're not listening.\"\n\n\n \"It's all so dull!\" she had flared, and then, \"How can I be interested\n in what some blundering space-jockey did?\"", "The flash walls on the field were being raised to keep the blow-by from\n the ship's jets from searing the administration building and the area\n beyond. Marcia realized with crushing suddenness that the ship was\n about to blast off in seconds. She half-rose, then sank back, biting\n her lip. Silly ... Jack had said that—her fear of space was silly.\n He'd said it during the quarrel, and he'd roared at her, \"And that's\n why you want me to come back—ground myself, be an Earth-lubber—so I\n can spare you the anguish of sitting home wondering if I'll come back\n alive!\"\nAnd then he'd been sorry he'd shouted, and he sat by her, taking her", "\"You\nare\n? You—we—\" He turned to Miss Eagen, who nodded once, her\n face wooden. \"Just find it out?\"\n\n\n This time Miss Eagen didn't react at all, and Marcia knew that she had\n to speak up. \"No, Jack. I knew weeks ago.\"\n\n\n There was no describable change in his face, but the taut skin of his\n space-tanned cheek seemed, somehow, to draw inward. His eyebrow ridges\n seemed to be more prominent, and he looked older, and very tired.\n Softly and slowly he asked, \"What in God's name made you get on the\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"I had to, Jack. I had to.\"\n\n\n \"Had to kill yourself?\" he demanded brutally. \"This tears it. This ties\n it up in a box with a bloody ribbon-bow. I suppose you know what this\n means—what I've got to do now?\"", "Miss Eagen was standing by the hospital door, watching her. When Marcia\n turned away without speaking to Jack, Miss Eagen smiled and held out\n her hand.\n\n\n Marcia went to her and took the hand. They went into the hospital. Miss\n Eagen didn't speak; she seemed to be waiting.\n\n\n \"Yes, I know who Jack's spinning the ship for,\" said Marcia.\n\n\n Miss Eagen looked an unspoken question.\n\n\n Marcia said, painfully, \"He's like the Captain of the\nElsinore\n. He's\n risking his life for a—a stranger. A jaywalker. Not for me. Not even\n for his baby.\"\n\n\n \"Does it hurt to know that?\"\n\n\n Marcia looked into the smooth, strong face and said with genuine\n astonishment, \"Hurt? Oh, no! It's so—so big!\"", "After that, there was scarcely room for thought—even for fear, though\n it lurked nearby, ready to leap. There was the ascent, the quiet,\n sleeplike ascent into space. Marcia very nearly forgot to breathe. She\n had been prepared for almost anything except this quality of peace and\n awe.\nShe didn't know how long she had been sitting there, awestruck,\n spellbound, when she realized that she had to finish the job she'd\n started, and do it right now, this minute. It might already be too\n late ... she wished, suddenly, and for the very first time, that she'd\n paid more attention to Jack's ramblings about orbits and turn-over\n points and correction blasts, and all that gobbledegook. She glanced", "\"There's no need to be sarcastic!\" Marcia blurted. \"Jack can do it. You\n think he can, don't you? Don't you?\"\n\n\n \"He can do anything any space skipper has ever done, and more,\"\n said Sue Eagen, and her face glowed. \"But it isn't easy. Right this\n minute he's working over the computer—a small, simple, ship-board\n computer—working out orbital and positional and blast-intensity data\n that would be a hard nut for the giant calculators on Earth to crack.\n And he's doing it in half the time—or less—than it would take the\n average mathematician, because he has to; because it's a life-and-death\n matter if he makes a mistake or takes too long.\"\n\"But—but—\"", "of her nails, the azure (so she had been told) of Earth seen from\n interplanetary space, grew hot. She closed them, and for a moment\n gave herself up to an almost physical yearning for the Toluca Lake\n house—the comfort, the safety, the—the\nsanity\nof it.\nStubbornly she forced herself back to reality. At any moment Jack,\n dark-eyed and scrappy, might come swinging down the long, shining\n aisle. Jack—Captain Jack McHenry, if you please—must not know, yet,\n what she was doing to patch up their marriage.", "There was a sudden thunder. Over Miss Eagen's shoulder, through the\n port, Marcia saw the stars begin to move. Miss Eagen followed her gaze.\n \"He's started the spin. You'll be all right now.\"\nMarcia could never recall the rest of the details of the trip. There\n was the outboard bulkhead that drew her like a magnet, increasingly,\n until suddenly it wasn't an attracting wall, but normally and naturally\n \"down.\" Then a needle, and another one, and a long period of deep\n drowsiness and unreality.\n\n\n But through and through that drugged, relaxed period, Jack and the\n stars, the Moon and Sue Eagen danced and wove. Words slipped in and out\n of it like shreds of melody:\n\n\n \"A man comes to love the things he has to fight for.\" And Jack\n fighting—for his ship, for the Moon, for the new-building traditions\n of the great ones who would carry humanity out to the stars.", "\"Blun—Marcia, you really don't realize what that skipper did was the\n finest piece of shiphandling since mankind got off the ground.\"\n\n\n \"Was it?\" she'd yawned. \"Could you do it?\"\n\n\n \"I—like to think I could,\" he said. \"I'd hate to have to try.\"\n\n\n She'd shrugged. \"Then it can't be very difficult, darling.\"\n\n\n She hadn't meant to be so cruel. Or so stupid. But when they were\n quarreling, or when he talked that repugnant, dedicated, other-world\n garble, something always went cold and furious and—lonely inside her,\n and made her fight back unfairly.", "\"I think,\" said Sue Eagen into the mike, \"that the computations can\n wait.\"\n\n\n \"The hell you do!\" The red contact light on the intercom went out.\n\n\n \"He'll be right here,\" said Miss Eagen.\nMarcia sat up slowly, clumsily. Miss Eagen did not offer to help.\n Marcia's hands strayed to her hair, patted it futilely.\n\n\n He came in, moving fast and purposefully, as always. \"Sue, what in time\n do you think you—\nMarcia!\n\" His dark face broke into a delighted grin\n and he put his arms out. \"You—you're here—\nhere\n, on my ship!\"\n\n\n \"I'm pregnant, Jack,\" she said. She put out a hand to ward him off. She\n couldn't bear the thought of his realizing what she had done while he\n had his arms around her.", "Sue Eagen was there, too, and the thing she shared with Jack. Of course\n there was something between them—so big a thing that there was\n nothing for her to fear in it.\n\n\n Jack and Sue Eagen had always had it, and always would have; and now\n Marcia had it too. And with understanding replacing fear, Marcia was\n free to recall that Jack had worked with Sue Eagen—but it was Marcia\n that he had loved and married.\nThere was a long time of blackness, and then a time of agony, when\n she was falling, falling, and her lungs wanted to split, explode,\n disintegrate, and someone kept saying, \"Hold tight, Marcia; hold tight\n to me,\" and she found Sue Eagen's cool strong hands in hers.\nMarcia. She called me Marcia.\nMore blackness, more pain—but not so much this time; and then a long,\n deep sleep.", "Marcia forced herself away from the bulkhead with a small whimper of\n hurt and hatred—hatred of the stars, of this knowledgeable, inspired\n girl, and—even more so—of herself. She darted toward the door.\n\n\n Miss Eagen was beside her in an instant, a hard small hand on her arm.\n \"Where are you going?\"\n\n\n \"I'm going to stop him. He can't take that chance with his ship, with\n these people....\"\n\n\n \"He will and he must. You surely know your husband.\"\n\n\n \"I know him as well as you do.\"\nMiss Eagen's firm lips shut in a thin hard line. \"Do as you like,\" she\n whispered. \"And while you're doing it—think about whom he's spinning\n ship for.\" She took her hand from Marcia's arm.\n\n\n Marcia twisted away and went into the corridor.", "A curved ceiling, but a new curve, and soft rose instead of the\n gunmetal-and-chrome of the ship. White sheets, a new feeling of \"down\"\n that was unlike either Earth or the ship, a novel and exhilarating\n buoyancy. And kneeling by the bed—\n\n\n \"Jack!\"\n\n\n \"You're all right, honey.\"\n\n\n She raised herself on her elbow and looked out through the unglazed\n window at the ordered streets of the great Luna Dome. \"The Moon....\n Jack, you did it!\"\n\n\n He snapped his fingers. He looked like a high-school kid. \"Nothin' to\n it.\" She could see he was very proud. Very tired, too. He reached out\n to touch her.\n\n\n She drew back. \"You don't have to be sweet to me,\" she said quietly. \"I\n understand how you must feel.\"", "There was a stiff silence. Marcia looked up at Miss Eagen. \"It's true,\n you know,\" she said. \"A man grows to love the things he has to defend,\n no matter how he felt about them before.\"\n\n\n The stewardess looked at her, her face registering a strange mixture of\n detachment and wonder. \"You really believe that, don't you?\"\n\n\n Marcia's patience, snapped. \"You don't have to look so superior. I know\n what's bothering\nyou\n. Well, he's\nmy\nhusband, and don't you forget\n it.\"\nMiss Eagen's breath hissed in. Her eyes grew bright and she shook her\n head slightly. Then she turned on her heel and went to the intercom.\n Marcia thought for a frightened moment that she was going to call Jack\n back again. Instead she dialed and said, \"Hospital to Maintenance.\n Petrucelli?\"\n\n\n \"Petrucelli here.\"", "\"Because,\" said Miss Eagen, and in that moment she looked almost as\n drawn as Jack had, \"I'm supposed to be of service to the passengers at\n all times no matter what. If I have feelings at all, part of my job is\n to keep them to myself.\"\n\n\n \"Very courteous, I'm sure. However, I want to release you from your\n sense of duty. I'm\nmost\ninterested in what you have to say.\"", "chin in his hand. \"Marcia, Marcia,\" he'd said gently, \"you're so\nsilly\n! It's been nineteen whole years since your father died in the\n explosion of a Moon-rocket. Rocket motors just don't explode any more,\n honey! Ships travel to the Moon and back on iron-clad, mathematical\n orbits that are figured before the ship puffs a jet—\"", "It was snatched away—the buildings, the trees, the roads surrounding\n the field seemed to pour in upon it, shrinking as they ran together.\n Roads dried up like parched rivers, thinning and vanishing into the\n circle of her horrified vision. A great, soft, uniform weight pressed\n her down and back; she fought it, but it was too big and too soft.\n\n\n Now Earth's surface was vague and Sun-splashed. Marcia's sense of loss\n tore at her. She put up her hands, heavily, and pressed the glass as\n if she could push it out, push herself out, go back, back to Earth\n and solidity. Clouds shot by like bullets, fell away until they were\n snowflakes roiling in violet haze. Then, in the purling universe that\n had grown around the ship, Earth was a mystic circle, a shallow dish\n floating darkly and heavily below.\n\n\n \"We are now,\" said Miss Eagen's calm voice, \"thirty-seven miles over\n Los Angeles.\"", "pseudo-widowhoods. Space-widowhood, for instance....\nAt last she was on the gangplank, entering the mouth of the\n spaceship—and nothing could ever stop her now. Not unless she broke\n down completely in front of all these hurrying, Moon-bound passengers,\n in plain sight of the scattered crowd which clustered on the other\n side of the space-field barriers. Even that possibility was denied her\n when two gently insistent middle-aged ladies indicated she was blocking\n the way....\nSomehow, dizzily, she was at her seat, led there by a smiling,\n brown-clad stewardess; and her azure-tipped fingers were clutching at\n the pearl-gray plasta-leather of the chair arm. Her eyes, the azure" ], [ "Even now she distinctly recalled the beginnings of the interplanetary\n cold that always seeped into the warm house when he talked about space,\n when he was about to leave her for it. And this time it was worse than\n ever before.\n\n\n He went on remorselessly, \"Once the\nElsinore\nreached the free-fall\n flight, where power could be shut off, the skipper had to put the\n ferry into an axial spin under power, creating artificial gravity\n to save the worthless life of that fool. So of course he lost his\n trajectory, and had to warp her in as best he could, without passing\n the Moon or crashing into it. And of course you're not listening.\"\n\n\n \"It's all so dull!\" she had flared, and then, \"How can I be interested\n in what some blundering space-jockey did?\"", "\"Blun—Marcia, you really don't realize what that skipper did was the\n finest piece of shiphandling since mankind got off the ground.\"\n\n\n \"Was it?\" she'd yawned. \"Could you do it?\"\n\n\n \"I—like to think I could,\" he said. \"I'd hate to have to try.\"\n\n\n She'd shrugged. \"Then it can't be very difficult, darling.\"\n\n\n She hadn't meant to be so cruel. Or so stupid. But when they were\n quarreling, or when he talked that repugnant, dedicated, other-world\n garble, something always went cold and furious and—lonely inside her,\n and made her fight back unfairly.", "Feeling very much put-upon, Marcia waited silently until he was\n finished, and the bed hung ludicrously to the wall like a walking fly.\n She thanked him timidly, and he ignored it and went out.\n\n\n Miss Eagen returned.\n\n\n \"That man was very rude,\" said Marcia.\n\n\n Miss Eagen looked at her coolly. \"I'm sorry,\" she said, obviously not\n meaning sorry at all.\n\n\n Marcia wet her lips. \"I asked you a question before,\" she said evenly.\n \"About you and the captain.\"\n\n\n \"You did,\" said Sue Eagen. \"Please don't.\"\n\n\n \"And why not?\"", "There was a stiff silence. Marcia looked up at Miss Eagen. \"It's true,\n you know,\" she said. \"A man grows to love the things he has to defend,\n no matter how he felt about them before.\"\n\n\n The stewardess looked at her, her face registering a strange mixture of\n detachment and wonder. \"You really believe that, don't you?\"\n\n\n Marcia's patience, snapped. \"You don't have to look so superior. I know\n what's bothering\nyou\n. Well, he's\nmy\nhusband, and don't you forget\n it.\"\nMiss Eagen's breath hissed in. Her eyes grew bright and she shook her\n head slightly. Then she turned on her heel and went to the intercom.\n Marcia thought for a frightened moment that she was going to call Jack\n back again. Instead she dialed and said, \"Hospital to Maintenance.\n Petrucelli?\"\n\n\n \"Petrucelli here.\"", "\"Because,\" said Miss Eagen, and in that moment she looked almost as\n drawn as Jack had, \"I'm supposed to be of service to the passengers at\n all times no matter what. If I have feelings at all, part of my job is\n to keep them to myself.\"\n\n\n \"Very courteous, I'm sure. However, I want to release you from your\n sense of duty. I'm\nmost\ninterested in what you have to say.\"", "After this—if this didn't work—there just would be nothing else she\n could do. She wasn't a scheming woman. No one would ever know how\n difficult it had been for her to think up the whole plan, to find\n Nellie Foster (someone Jack had never met) and to persuade Nellie to\n register for the trip and take the physical for her. She'd had to lie\n to Nellie, to make Nellie think she was brave and adventurous, and that\n she was just doing it to surprise Jack.\n\n\n Oh, he'd be surprised, all right.", "\"But what?\" Miss Eagen's composure seemed to have been blasted to\n shreds by the powerful currents of her indignation. Her eyes flashed.\n \"You mean, but why doesn't he just work the ship while it's spinning\n the same way he does when it isn't?\"\n\n\n Through a growing fear, Marcia nodded mutely.", "After that, there was scarcely room for thought—even for fear, though\n it lurked nearby, ready to leap. There was the ascent, the quiet,\n sleeplike ascent into space. Marcia very nearly forgot to breathe. She\n had been prepared for almost anything except this quality of peace and\n awe.\nShe didn't know how long she had been sitting there, awestruck,\n spellbound, when she realized that she had to finish the job she'd\n started, and do it right now, this minute. It might already be too\n late ... she wished, suddenly, and for the very first time, that she'd\n paid more attention to Jack's ramblings about orbits and turn-over\n points and correction blasts, and all that gobbledegook. She glanced", "Sue Eagen was there, too, and the thing she shared with Jack. Of course\n there was something between them—so big a thing that there was\n nothing for her to fear in it.\n\n\n Jack and Sue Eagen had always had it, and always would have; and now\n Marcia had it too. And with understanding replacing fear, Marcia was\n free to recall that Jack had worked with Sue Eagen—but it was Marcia\n that he had loved and married.\nThere was a long time of blackness, and then a time of agony, when\n she was falling, falling, and her lungs wanted to split, explode,\n disintegrate, and someone kept saying, \"Hold tight, Marcia; hold tight\n to me,\" and she found Sue Eagen's cool strong hands in hers.\nMarcia. She called me Marcia.\nMore blackness, more pain—but not so much this time; and then a long,\n deep sleep.", "She turned her face away from the aisle, covered her cheek with her\n hand to hide it. Her gaze went out through the ray-proof glass port to\n the field, to the laboring beetle of a red tractor bearing the gangway\n on its busy back, to the low, blast-proof administration building. When\n her gaze came to the tall sign over the entrance, she hurried it past;\n it was too late to think about that now, the square, shouting type that\n read:\nCAUTION\n\n HAVE YOU PASSED YOUR PHYSICAL EXAMINATION?\nAvoiding It May Cost Your Life!\n\"May I see your validation, please?\"", "Miss Eagen was standing by the hospital door, watching her. When Marcia\n turned away without speaking to Jack, Miss Eagen smiled and held out\n her hand.\n\n\n Marcia went to her and took the hand. They went into the hospital. Miss\n Eagen didn't speak; she seemed to be waiting.\n\n\n \"Yes, I know who Jack's spinning the ship for,\" said Marcia.\n\n\n Miss Eagen looked an unspoken question.\n\n\n Marcia said, painfully, \"He's like the Captain of the\nElsinore\n. He's\n risking his life for a—a stranger. A jaywalker. Not for me. Not even\n for his baby.\"\n\n\n \"Does it hurt to know that?\"\n\n\n Marcia looked into the smooth, strong face and said with genuine\n astonishment, \"Hurt? Oh, no! It's so—so big!\"", "Marcia forced herself away from the bulkhead with a small whimper of\n hurt and hatred—hatred of the stars, of this knowledgeable, inspired\n girl, and—even more so—of herself. She darted toward the door.\n\n\n Miss Eagen was beside her in an instant, a hard small hand on her arm.\n \"Where are you going?\"\n\n\n \"I'm going to stop him. He can't take that chance with his ship, with\n these people....\"\n\n\n \"He will and he must. You surely know your husband.\"\n\n\n \"I know him as well as you do.\"\nMiss Eagen's firm lips shut in a thin hard line. \"Do as you like,\" she\n whispered. \"And while you're doing it—think about whom he's spinning\n ship for.\" She took her hand from Marcia's arm.\n\n\n Marcia twisted away and went into the corridor.", "After he'd gone—for good, he said—her anger had sustained her for a\n few weeks. Then, bleakly, she knew she'd go to the ends of Earth for\n Jack. Or even to the Moon....\nSitting rigid in the tense stillness of a rocket ship that was about\n to leap from Earth, Marcia started as an officer ducked his head into\n the passenger compartment from the pilot room's deep glow. But it\n wasn't Jack. The officer's lips moved hurriedly as he counted over the\n seats. He ducked back out of sight. From the bulk-heads, the overhead,\n everywhere, came a deep, quiet rumble. Some of the passengers looked\n anxious, some excited, and some just leafed casually through magazines.\n\n\n Now the brown-clad Miss Eagen was speaking from the head of the aisle.", "\"You\nare\n? You—we—\" He turned to Miss Eagen, who nodded once, her\n face wooden. \"Just find it out?\"\n\n\n This time Miss Eagen didn't react at all, and Marcia knew that she had\n to speak up. \"No, Jack. I knew weeks ago.\"\n\n\n There was no describable change in his face, but the taut skin of his\n space-tanned cheek seemed, somehow, to draw inward. His eyebrow ridges\n seemed to be more prominent, and he looked older, and very tired.\n Softly and slowly he asked, \"What in God's name made you get on the\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"I had to, Jack. I had to.\"\n\n\n \"Had to kill yourself?\" he demanded brutally. \"This tears it. This ties\n it up in a box with a bloody ribbon-bow. I suppose you know what this\n means—what I've got to do now?\"", "Miss Eagen did, swiftly and thoroughly. \"You're so right,\" she\n breathed. She went to the small sink, stripping off her rubber gloves.\n With her back to Marcia, she said, \"I'll have to tell the captain, you\n know.\"\n\n\n \"I know. I'd rather ... tell him myself.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" said Miss Eagen flatly. Marcia felt as if she'd been slapped.\n Miss Eagen dried her hands and crossed to an intercom. \"Eagen to\n Captain.\"\n\n\n \"McHenry here.\"\n\n\n \"Captain McHenry, could you come back to the hospital right away?\"\n\n\n \"Not right away, Sue.\"\nSue! No wonder he had found it so easy to walk\n out!\nShe looked at the trim girl with hating eyes. The intercom said,\n \"You know I've got course-correction computations from here to yonder.\n Give me another forty minutes.\"", "She found herself at the entrance to the pilot room. In one sweeping\n glance she saw a curved, silver board. Before it a man sat tranquilly.\n Nearer to her was Jack, hunched over the keyboard of a complex, compact\n machine, like a harried bookkeeper on the last day of the month.\n\n\n Her lips formed his name, but she was silent. She watched him, his\n square, competent hands, his detached and distant face. Through the\n forward view-plate she saw a harsh, jagged line, the very edge of the\n Moon's disc. Next to it, and below, was the rear viewer, holding the\n shimmering azure shape of Earth.\n\n\n \"\nAll Earth watches me when I work, but with your eyes.\n\"\n\n\n Jack had said that to her once, long ago, when he still loved her.\n\n\n \"... human damnfoolishness botching up the equations....\" He had said\n that once, too.", "\"Don't\nhave\nto?\" He rose, bent over her, and slid his arms around\n her. He put his face into the shadowed warmth between her hair and her\n neck and said, \"Listen, egghead, there's no absolute scale for courage.\n We had a bad time, both of us. After it was over, and I had a chance\n to think, I used it trying to look at things through your eyes. And\n that way I found out that when you walked up that gangway, you did the\n bravest thing I've ever known anyone to do. And you did it for me. It\n doesn't matter what else happened. Sue told me a lot about you that I\n didn't know, darling. You're ... real huge for your size. As for the\n bad part of what happened—nothing like it can ever happen again, can\n it?\"", "\"Spin ship,\" she replied immediately, and looked up at him pertly, like\n a kindergarten child who knows she has the right answer.\n\n\n He groaned.\n\n\n \"You said you could do it.\"\n\n\n \"I can ... try,\" he said hollowly. \"But—why,\nwhy\n?\"\n\n\n \"Because,\" she said bleakly, \"I learned long ago that a man grows to\n love what he has to fight for.\"\n\n\n \"And you were going to make me fight for you and the child—even if the\n lives of a hundred and seventy people were involved?\"\n\n\n \"You said you could handle it. I thought you could.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try,\" he said wearily. \"Oh, I'll try.\" He went out, dragging his\n feet, his shoulders down, without looking at her.", "of her nails, the azure (so she had been told) of Earth seen from\n interplanetary space, grew hot. She closed them, and for a moment\n gave herself up to an almost physical yearning for the Toluca Lake\n house—the comfort, the safety, the—the\nsanity\nof it.\nStubbornly she forced herself back to reality. At any moment Jack,\n dark-eyed and scrappy, might come swinging down the long, shining\n aisle. Jack—Captain Jack McHenry, if you please—must not know, yet,\n what she was doing to patch up their marriage.", "Marcia lay down gratefully. She closed her eyes tightly and said, \"I'm\n not Mrs. Foster. It doesn't hurt.\"\n\n\n \"You're not—\" Miss Eagen apparently decided to take one thing at a\n time. \"How do you feel?\"\n\n\n \"Scared,\" said Marcia.\n\n\n \"Why, what—is there to be scared of?\"\n\n\n \"I'm pregnant.\"\n\n\n \"Well, that's no—You're\nwhat\n?\"\n\n\n \"I'm Mrs. McHenry. I'm Jack's wife.\"\n\n\n There was such a long pause that Marcia opened her eyes. Miss Eagen was\n looking at her levelly. She said, \"I'll have to examine you.\"\n\n\n \"I know. Go ahead.\"" ], [ "Marcia lay down gratefully. She closed her eyes tightly and said, \"I'm\n not Mrs. Foster. It doesn't hurt.\"\n\n\n \"You're not—\" Miss Eagen apparently decided to take one thing at a\n time. \"How do you feel?\"\n\n\n \"Scared,\" said Marcia.\n\n\n \"Why, what—is there to be scared of?\"\n\n\n \"I'm pregnant.\"\n\n\n \"Well, that's no—You're\nwhat\n?\"\n\n\n \"I'm Mrs. McHenry. I'm Jack's wife.\"\n\n\n There was such a long pause that Marcia opened her eyes. Miss Eagen was\n looking at her levelly. She said, \"I'll have to examine you.\"\n\n\n \"I know. Go ahead.\"", "\"That's quite a different situation. 'Down' exists when you're\n swimming. Free-fall means that everything around you is 'up.' The\n body's reactions to free-fall go much deeper than space-nausea and a\n mild feeling of panic. When there's a glandular imbalance of certain\n kinds, the results can be drastic. Apparently some instinctual part\n of the mind reacts as if there were a violent emergency, when no\n emergency is recognized by the reasoning part of the mind. There\n are sudden floods of adrenalin; the 17-kesteroids begin spastic\n secretions; the—well, it varies in individuals. But it's pretty well\n established that the results can be fatal. It kills men with prostate\n trouble—sometimes. It kills women in menopause—often. It kills women\n in the early stages of pregnancy—\nalways\n.\"\n\n\n \"But how?\" asked Marcia, interested in spite of her resentment.", "Feeling very much put-upon, Marcia waited silently until he was\n finished, and the bed hung ludicrously to the wall like a walking fly.\n She thanked him timidly, and he ignored it and went out.\n\n\n Miss Eagen returned.\n\n\n \"That man was very rude,\" said Marcia.\n\n\n Miss Eagen looked at her coolly. \"I'm sorry,\" she said, obviously not\n meaning sorry at all.\n\n\n Marcia wet her lips. \"I asked you a question before,\" she said evenly.\n \"About you and the captain.\"\n\n\n \"You did,\" said Sue Eagen. \"Please don't.\"\n\n\n \"And why not?\"", "\"I think,\" said Sue Eagen into the mike, \"that the computations can\n wait.\"\n\n\n \"The hell you do!\" The red contact light on the intercom went out.\n\n\n \"He'll be right here,\" said Miss Eagen.\nMarcia sat up slowly, clumsily. Miss Eagen did not offer to help.\n Marcia's hands strayed to her hair, patted it futilely.\n\n\n He came in, moving fast and purposefully, as always. \"Sue, what in time\n do you think you—\nMarcia!\n\" His dark face broke into a delighted grin\n and he put his arms out. \"You—you're here—\nhere\n, on my ship!\"\n\n\n \"I'm pregnant, Jack,\" she said. She put out a hand to ward him off. She\n couldn't bear the thought of his realizing what she had done while he\n had his arms around her.", "Miss Eagen was standing by the hospital door, watching her. When Marcia\n turned away without speaking to Jack, Miss Eagen smiled and held out\n her hand.\n\n\n Marcia went to her and took the hand. They went into the hospital. Miss\n Eagen didn't speak; she seemed to be waiting.\n\n\n \"Yes, I know who Jack's spinning the ship for,\" said Marcia.\n\n\n Miss Eagen looked an unspoken question.\n\n\n Marcia said, painfully, \"He's like the Captain of the\nElsinore\n. He's\n risking his life for a—a stranger. A jaywalker. Not for me. Not even\n for his baby.\"\n\n\n \"Does it hurt to know that?\"\n\n\n Marcia looked into the smooth, strong face and said with genuine\n astonishment, \"Hurt? Oh, no! It's so—so big!\"", "Marcia McHenry stiffened. Had she read the sign aloud? She turned\n startled eyes up to the smiling stewardess, who was holding out a\n well-groomed hand. Marcia responded weakly to the smile, overcame a\n sudden urge to blurt out that she had no validation—not her own,\n anyway. But her stiff fingers were already holding out the pink card\n with Nellie Foster's name on it.\n\n\n \"You're feeling well, Mrs. Foster?\"\nFeeling well? Yes, of course. Except for the—usual sickness. But\n that's so very normal\n.... Her numb lips moved. \"I'm fine,\" she said.", "\"Spin ship,\" she replied immediately, and looked up at him pertly, like\n a kindergarten child who knows she has the right answer.\n\n\n He groaned.\n\n\n \"You said you could do it.\"\n\n\n \"I can ... try,\" he said hollowly. \"But—why,\nwhy\n?\"\n\n\n \"Because,\" she said bleakly, \"I learned long ago that a man grows to\n love what he has to fight for.\"\n\n\n \"And you were going to make me fight for you and the child—even if the\n lives of a hundred and seventy people were involved?\"\n\n\n \"You said you could handle it. I thought you could.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try,\" he said wearily. \"Oh, I'll try.\" He went out, dragging his\n feet, his shoulders down, without looking at her.", "Sue Eagen was there, too, and the thing she shared with Jack. Of course\n there was something between them—so big a thing that there was\n nothing for her to fear in it.\n\n\n Jack and Sue Eagen had always had it, and always would have; and now\n Marcia had it too. And with understanding replacing fear, Marcia was\n free to recall that Jack had worked with Sue Eagen—but it was Marcia\n that he had loved and married.\nThere was a long time of blackness, and then a time of agony, when\n she was falling, falling, and her lungs wanted to split, explode,\n disintegrate, and someone kept saying, \"Hold tight, Marcia; hold tight\n to me,\" and she found Sue Eagen's cool strong hands in hers.\nMarcia. She called me Marcia.\nMore blackness, more pain—but not so much this time; and then a long,\n deep sleep.", "She turned her face away from the aisle, covered her cheek with her\n hand to hide it. Her gaze went out through the ray-proof glass port to\n the field, to the laboring beetle of a red tractor bearing the gangway\n on its busy back, to the low, blast-proof administration building. When\n her gaze came to the tall sign over the entrance, she hurried it past;\n it was too late to think about that now, the square, shouting type that\n read:\nCAUTION\n\n HAVE YOU PASSED YOUR PHYSICAL EXAMINATION?\nAvoiding It May Cost Your Life!\n\"May I see your validation, please?\"", "\"Convulsions. A battle royal between a glandular-level panic and a\n violent and useless effort of the will to control the situation.\n Muscles tear, working against one another. Lungs rupture and air\n is forced into the blood-stream, causing embolism and death. Not\n everything is known about it, but I would guess that pregnant women are\n especially susceptible because their protective reflexes, through and\n through, are much more easily stimulated.\"\n\n\n \"And the only thing that can be done about it is to supply gravity?\"\n\n\n \"Or centrifugal force (or centripetal, depending on where you're\n standing, but why be technical?)—or, better yet, keep those people\n off the ships.\"\n\n\n \"So now Jack will spin the ship until I'm pressed against the walls\n with the same force as gravity, and then everything will be all right.\"\n\n\n \"You make it sound so simple.\"", "After this—if this didn't work—there just would be nothing else she\n could do. She wasn't a scheming woman. No one would ever know how\n difficult it had been for her to think up the whole plan, to find\n Nellie Foster (someone Jack had never met) and to persuade Nellie to\n register for the trip and take the physical for her. She'd had to lie\n to Nellie, to make Nellie think she was brave and adventurous, and that\n she was just doing it to surprise Jack.\n\n\n Oh, he'd be surprised, all right.", "\"But what?\" Miss Eagen's composure seemed to have been blasted to\n shreds by the powerful currents of her indignation. Her eyes flashed.\n \"You mean, but why doesn't he just work the ship while it's spinning\n the same way he does when it isn't?\"\n\n\n Through a growing fear, Marcia nodded mutely.", "\"Miss Eagen—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Mrs. Fos—why, what's the matter?\"\n\n\n Seeing the startled expression on the stewardess' face, Marcia realized\n she must be looking like a ghost. She put a hand to her cheek and found\n it clammy.\n\n\n \"Come along,\" said Miss Eagen cheerfully. She put a firm arm around\n Marcia's shoulder. \"Just a touch of space-sickness. This way.\nThat's\nit. We'll have you fixed up in a jiffy.\"\n\n\n \"It isn't s-space sickness,\" said Marcia in a very small and very\n positive voice. She let herself be led forward, through the door and to\n the left, where there was a small and compact ship's hospital.\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" said Miss Eagen briskly, \"just you lie down there, Mrs.\n Foster. Does it hurt any special place?\"", "There was a stiff silence. Marcia looked up at Miss Eagen. \"It's true,\n you know,\" she said. \"A man grows to love the things he has to defend,\n no matter how he felt about them before.\"\n\n\n The stewardess looked at her, her face registering a strange mixture of\n detachment and wonder. \"You really believe that, don't you?\"\n\n\n Marcia's patience, snapped. \"You don't have to look so superior. I know\n what's bothering\nyou\n. Well, he's\nmy\nhusband, and don't you forget\n it.\"\nMiss Eagen's breath hissed in. Her eyes grew bright and she shook her\n head slightly. Then she turned on her heel and went to the intercom.\n Marcia thought for a frightened moment that she was going to call Jack\n back again. Instead she dialed and said, \"Hospital to Maintenance.\n Petrucelli?\"\n\n\n \"Petrucelli here.\"", "\"Those of you who haven't been in a rocket before won't find it much\n different from being in an airplane. At the same time—\" She paused,\n quiet brown eyes solemn. \"What you are about to experience is something\n that will make you proud to belong to the human race.\"\nThat\nagain! thought Marcia furiously; and then all emotion left her\n but cold, ravening fear as the rumble heightened. She tried to close\n her eyes, her ears against it, but her mind wouldn't respond. She\n squirmed in her chair and found herself staring down at the field.\n It looked the way she felt—flat and pale and devoid of life, with a\n monstrous structure of terror squatting in it. The scene was abruptly\n splashed with a rushing sheet of flame that darkened the daytime sky.\n Then it was torn from her vision.", "\"You\nare\n? You—we—\" He turned to Miss Eagen, who nodded once, her\n face wooden. \"Just find it out?\"\n\n\n This time Miss Eagen didn't react at all, and Marcia knew that she had\n to speak up. \"No, Jack. I knew weeks ago.\"\n\n\n There was no describable change in his face, but the taut skin of his\n space-tanned cheek seemed, somehow, to draw inward. His eyebrow ridges\n seemed to be more prominent, and he looked older, and very tired.\n Softly and slowly he asked, \"What in God's name made you get on the\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"I had to, Jack. I had to.\"\n\n\n \"Had to kill yourself?\" he demanded brutally. \"This tears it. This ties\n it up in a box with a bloody ribbon-bow. I suppose you know what this\n means—what I've got to do now?\"", "Miss Eagen did, swiftly and thoroughly. \"You're so right,\" she\n breathed. She went to the small sink, stripping off her rubber gloves.\n With her back to Marcia, she said, \"I'll have to tell the captain, you\n know.\"\n\n\n \"I know. I'd rather ... tell him myself.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" said Miss Eagen flatly. Marcia felt as if she'd been slapped.\n Miss Eagen dried her hands and crossed to an intercom. \"Eagen to\n Captain.\"\n\n\n \"McHenry here.\"\n\n\n \"Captain McHenry, could you come back to the hospital right away?\"\n\n\n \"Not right away, Sue.\"\nSue! No wonder he had found it so easy to walk\n out!\nShe looked at the trim girl with hating eyes. The intercom said,\n \"You know I've got course-correction computations from here to yonder.\n Give me another forty minutes.\"", "Marcia forced herself away from the bulkhead with a small whimper of\n hurt and hatred—hatred of the stars, of this knowledgeable, inspired\n girl, and—even more so—of herself. She darted toward the door.\n\n\n Miss Eagen was beside her in an instant, a hard small hand on her arm.\n \"Where are you going?\"\n\n\n \"I'm going to stop him. He can't take that chance with his ship, with\n these people....\"\n\n\n \"He will and he must. You surely know your husband.\"\n\n\n \"I know him as well as you do.\"\nMiss Eagen's firm lips shut in a thin hard line. \"Do as you like,\" she\n whispered. \"And while you're doing it—think about whom he's spinning\n ship for.\" She took her hand from Marcia's arm.\n\n\n Marcia twisted away and went into the corridor.", "He hugged her. After a time he reached down and touched her swelling\n waist. It was like a benediction. \"He'll be born on the Moon,\" he\n whispered, \"and he'll have eyes the color of all Earth when it looks\n out to the stars.\"\n\n\n \"\nShe'll\nbe born on the Moon,\" corrected Marcia, \"and her name will be\n Sue, and ... and she'll be almost as good as her father.\"", "\"Blun—Marcia, you really don't realize what that skipper did was the\n finest piece of shiphandling since mankind got off the ground.\"\n\n\n \"Was it?\" she'd yawned. \"Could you do it?\"\n\n\n \"I—like to think I could,\" he said. \"I'd hate to have to try.\"\n\n\n She'd shrugged. \"Then it can't be very difficult, darling.\"\n\n\n She hadn't meant to be so cruel. Or so stupid. But when they were\n quarreling, or when he talked that repugnant, dedicated, other-world\n garble, something always went cold and furious and—lonely inside her,\n and made her fight back unfairly." ] ]
valid	20055	[ "Why does Tannen say her book is not about civility?", "What two fields does the author say Tannen mixes together?", "What does the author feel is contradictory about Tannen's work?", "How did the author feel about Tannen's book?", "What is not a lesson the author gleaned from the book?", "Why does the author think Tannen is wrong?", "What does the author think investigative journalism accomplishes?", "What mistake does Tannen make when discussing the military?", "Which statement resonates most with Tannen's viewpoint?", "How does Tannen feel about the Bill of Rights?" ]	[ [ "She doesn't think books about civility are worth reading", "She doesn't believe people are capable of civil discourse", "She thinks civility is too superficial of a solution", "She doesn't believe civil discourse is effective" ], [ "linguistics and politics", "men and women", "personal communication and public communication", "speaking and writing" ], [ "Supporting Bill Clinton ", "Thinking she can apply linguistics to intergender communication", "Being against email and mass communication while using it herself", "Saying not to criticize others while criticizing people herself" ], [ "They found nothing worthwhile in it", "They found the whole thing very worthwhile", "They found a small list of things that were worthwhile in it", "They found it to be the best of all of her books" ], [ "Look on all sides of a discussion", "Extremists are usually the most courageous people", "Innovating is better than criticizing", "Don't misrepresent things or people will stop listening to you" ], [ "She believes people should be critical of everything they disagree with, no matter how small", "She exercises her right to free speech", "She expects men and women to communicate well", "She advocates treating a terrorist the same way you treat your best friend" ], [ "Driving people to suicide", "Nothing", "Stopping people from abusing their power", "Tearing down people who are just trying to do good" ], [ "seeing the world as too dangerous", "oversimplification", "equating police and military", "denying the holocaust" ], [ "Hear no evil", "See no evil", "Speak no evil", "Do no evil" ], [ "She supports it fully", "She thinks the rights are used responsibly by the majority of people", "She expresses a preference for dictatorship", "She thinks only those who agree with her should have rights" ] ]	[ 3, 3, 4, 3, 2, 4, 4, 2, 3, 3 ]	[ 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "We Do Understand \n\n \"This is not another book about civility,\" Deborah Tannen promises in the first sentence of The Argument Culture . \"Civility,\" she explains, suggests a \"veneer of politeness spread thin over human relations like a layer of marmalade over toast.\" Instead, Tannen has written something less: a book about other books about civility. Quoting from Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, political scientist Larry Sabato, and others who have studied the rise of belligerence in politics, journalism, and law, Tannen spreads their insights thin over all human relations, painting a general theory of discord. The whole is less perceptive than its parts and more pernicious.", "In her previous books-- That's Not What I Meant! (1986), You Just Don't Understand (1990), and Talking From 9 to 5 (1994)--Tannen carved out a niche as the nation's pre-eminent intergender translator and couples counselor. A professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, she transformed the comparative study of male and female conversational patterns from a linguistic subdiscipline into a self-help movement. Until recently, though, Tannen confined her analysis to conversations among dysfunctional individuals. (For an illustration, click .) But in The Argument Culture , she takes her movement one step further, peddling the elixir of mutual understanding as a remedy for the whole damned dysfunctional country. This is necessary, she argues, because \"contentious public discourse\" not only poisons the political atmosphere, it also risks infecting our most intimate relationships.", "Tannen, like some grandmotherly creature from an Aesop fable, admonishes us to recognize what is good in the work of others, and it is only fair to extend her the same courtesy. Here's what's worth gleaning from her book: \n\n Don't just quarrel; listen and learn. \n\n Don't nit-pick other people's ideas; build your own. \n\n Don't argue for the sake of arguing. \n\n Truth and courage often lie in the middle, not the extremes. \n\n Many issues are multisided. \n\n Focus on the substance of debates, not on strategy, theater, or the opponents' personal flaws. \n\n Don't fight over small issues. \n\n Don't obstruct good ideas just so you can win.", "Tannen even wants to protect us from the possibility of unpleasant confrontations in the courtroom. \"The purpose of most cross-examinations\" is \"not to establish facts but to discredit the witness,\" she asserts,", "Tannen's main mistake is failing to appreciate the difference between two distinct social spheres: the sphere of snuggle and the sphere of struggle. Some people--say, your spouse or your kids--you should snuggle with. Others--say, Saddam Hussein--you shouldn't. Tannen's antagonism toward antagonism makes sense in the former case but not in the latter. Among her illustrations of belligerence are William Safire's \"kick 'em when they're up\" philosophy of journalism and the media's use of war metaphors to describe Alan Greenspan's policies against inflation. To which one might sensibly reply: Good for Greenspan and Safire--and for us. The Federal Reserve's war on inflation and the press corps' scrutiny of powerful people safeguard the country. Some things are worth fighting for, and some things are worth fighting.", "If you portray everything as a scandal, no one will care when something really is scandalous. \n\n All this is sage advice--for couples, for families, for bosses and employees, maybe even for book reviewers. But when she applies her precepts to our great national conversation, Tannen gets confused. She conflates belligerence, divisiveness, polarization, titillation, jealousy, incivility, aloofness, ruthlessness, cruelty, savagery, contempt, glibness, cynicism, anomie, partisanship, obstructionism, and gridlock. She makes culprits out of answering machines, electronic mail, campaign money, malpractice litigation, HMOs, corporate takeovers, and the demise of house calls by the family doctor.", "\"When there is a need to make others wrong,\" Tannen argues, \"the temptation is great to oversimplify\" and to \"seize upon the weakest examples, ignore facts that support your opponent's views, and focus only on those that support yours.\" In her need to make the \"argument culture\" wrong, she succumbs to these temptations. She blames the mainstream press, not just the paparazzi , for torturing Princess Diana and driving Adm. Mike Boorda to suicide. She compares to the propaganda of \"totalitarian countries\" (because falsehoods are spread) and to the dehumanization involved in \"ethnically motivated assaults\" (because reporters hound politicians). She blames communications technology for obscene and threatening phone calls made by former university President Richard Berendzen and former Judge Sol Wachtler.", "Given this oddly paternalistic (or maternalistic) diagnosis, it's not surprising that Tannen should wish to cover our ears, filtering out strife, deception, and debate. She assures us that all reasonable people can agree that disseminating birth control and sex education is the best way to reduce the abortion rate; that stiff sentences for small drug offenses don't reduce drug abuse; that global warming is producing \"disastrous consequences.\" Partial-birth abortion is \"surely not\" a \"very important\" issue, and Congress should not have let the Republican \"politics of obstruction\" defeat President Clinton's health care proposal in 1994, given the \"broad bipartisan and public consensus that it was desperately needed.\" The \"view of government as the enemy\" isn't worth debating; it's just \"another troubling aspect of the argument culture.\" Indeed, Tannen embraces a colleague's claim that \"right-wing talk radio\" deploys phrases \"similar to verbal manipulations employed by propagandists in the Nazi era.\"", "in the words of Arkansas journalist Gene Lyons, \"the result of the nastiest and most successful political 'dirty tricks' campaign in recent American history.\" Is Tannen a Clinton apologist? She rules that criticism out of bounds. \"The very fact that", "The First Amendment, in Tannen's view, has often become \"a pretext to justify the airing of just those views that make for the most entertaining fights.\" As an alternative, she offers Asian authoritarianism: \"Disputation was rejected in ancient China as 'incompatible with the decorum and harmony cultivated by the true sage.' \" Similarly, \"the minimal human unit in Japan is not the individual but the group.\" Instead of the American practice of having two guests debate policy questions on TV news programs, she suggests a Japanese format, which \"typically features a single guest.\" (Click to learn how she puts this into practice.)", "Tannen doesn't trust in the power of good argumentation to keep society honest, much less correct itself, because she rather shockingly insists \"\" that people can distinguish lies from the truth. Nor does she trust our competence to manage unfettered communication: \"E-mail makes it too easy to forward messages, too easy to reply before your temper cools, too easy to broadcast messages to large numbers of people without thinking about how every sentence will strike every recipient.\" Lexis-Nexis is an equally unwelcome troublemaker: \"Technology also exacerbates the culture of critique by making it much easier for politicians or journalists to ferret out inconsistencies in a public person's statements over time.\"", "Tannen finds it particularly unseemly that reporters and independent counsels treat the nation's ultimate father figure with such irreverence. She complains that Clinton's weekly radio address \"is followed immediately by a Republican", "If you missed the links within the review, click to read: 1) an illustration of ; 2) Tannen's that American journalism is just like propaganda from totalitarian regimes, plus William Saletan's disclosure that \"several of these propagandists now infest Slate \"; 3) the for her contention that there is no evidence that people can distinguish lies from truth; 4) and an example of how Tannen from a one-guest format on TV and radio talk shows.", "Likewise, Tannen recalls the trial of a Canadian man who had denied the Holocaust. The defendant's lawyer interrogated concentration camp survivors, asking whether they had seen their parents gassed. The adversarial system permitted such questions to be asked and answered--admittedly a vexatious experience for the survivors but one that does entail an airing of the facts of the Holocaust. Tannen, however, treats it only as a display of the \"cruelty of cross-examination.\" She raises no objection to the Canadian hate-speech ban under which the defendant was prosecuted. Would Tannen argue that the United States should adopt such a law, along with, say, a ban on the cross-examination of accusers? If so, she'd be wrong. But hey, so far, it's still a free country.", "Vigilance and combat are particularly essential to law enforcement and foreign policy, which must deal with thugs and tyrants, not thoughtless husbands. Tannen laments that cops and soldiers have been \"trained to overcome their resistance to kill\" by trying \"not to think of their opponents as human beings.\" She neglects to mention that our safety depends on the ability of these officers to kill their adversaries. Comparing Vietnam to World War II, Tannen focuses strictly on the soldiers' social experience. In World War II, she observes, they trained, served, and went home together. \"Vietnam, in contrast, was a 'lonely war' of individuals assigned to constantly shifting units for year-long tours of duty.\" She ignores the more important difference: In World War II, they were fighting Hitler.", "Instead of the American system, Tannen proposes consideration of the French and German systems. Under French law, after Princess Diana's death: \n\n The photographers were held for two days without charges being filed and without being allowed to confer with lawyers. ... The judges do most of the questioning; though lawyers can also ask questions, they cannot cross-examine witnesses. Guilt ... need not be established 'beyond a reasonable doubt' but simply by ... the judge's intimate belief, or deeply held sense, of what happened.", "as though the two objectives were unrelated. Thus, \"the adversary system ... is inhumane to the victims of cross-examination.\" She simply assumes the very thing the trial is supposed to prove and what cross-examination might disprove (if this is, in", "response,\" which \"weakens the public's ability to see leaders as leaders.\" A reporter's skeptical question to Clinton \"broke the spell\" of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's remarks upon being nominated to the Supreme Court, thereby injuring citizens' \"sense of connection\" to", "defending our nation's elected leader makes one suspect--an 'apologist'--is in itself evidence of the culture of critique,\" she writes.", "rape can appear to be consensual sex,\" she ignores the reverse implication--that it is easy to make consensual sex look like rape. She complains that when Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, \"Framing these hearings as a" ], [ "In her previous books-- That's Not What I Meant! (1986), You Just Don't Understand (1990), and Talking From 9 to 5 (1994)--Tannen carved out a niche as the nation's pre-eminent intergender translator and couples counselor. A professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, she transformed the comparative study of male and female conversational patterns from a linguistic subdiscipline into a self-help movement. Until recently, though, Tannen confined her analysis to conversations among dysfunctional individuals. (For an illustration, click .) But in The Argument Culture , she takes her movement one step further, peddling the elixir of mutual understanding as a remedy for the whole damned dysfunctional country. This is necessary, she argues, because \"contentious public discourse\" not only poisons the political atmosphere, it also risks infecting our most intimate relationships.", "We Do Understand \n\n \"This is not another book about civility,\" Deborah Tannen promises in the first sentence of The Argument Culture . \"Civility,\" she explains, suggests a \"veneer of politeness spread thin over human relations like a layer of marmalade over toast.\" Instead, Tannen has written something less: a book about other books about civility. Quoting from Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, political scientist Larry Sabato, and others who have studied the rise of belligerence in politics, journalism, and law, Tannen spreads their insights thin over all human relations, painting a general theory of discord. The whole is less perceptive than its parts and more pernicious.", "Tannen's main mistake is failing to appreciate the difference between two distinct social spheres: the sphere of snuggle and the sphere of struggle. Some people--say, your spouse or your kids--you should snuggle with. Others--say, Saddam Hussein--you shouldn't. Tannen's antagonism toward antagonism makes sense in the former case but not in the latter. Among her illustrations of belligerence are William Safire's \"kick 'em when they're up\" philosophy of journalism and the media's use of war metaphors to describe Alan Greenspan's policies against inflation. To which one might sensibly reply: Good for Greenspan and Safire--and for us. The Federal Reserve's war on inflation and the press corps' scrutiny of powerful people safeguard the country. Some things are worth fighting for, and some things are worth fighting.", "If you portray everything as a scandal, no one will care when something really is scandalous. \n\n All this is sage advice--for couples, for families, for bosses and employees, maybe even for book reviewers. But when she applies her precepts to our great national conversation, Tannen gets confused. She conflates belligerence, divisiveness, polarization, titillation, jealousy, incivility, aloofness, ruthlessness, cruelty, savagery, contempt, glibness, cynicism, anomie, partisanship, obstructionism, and gridlock. She makes culprits out of answering machines, electronic mail, campaign money, malpractice litigation, HMOs, corporate takeovers, and the demise of house calls by the family doctor.", "If you missed the links within the review, click to read: 1) an illustration of ; 2) Tannen's that American journalism is just like propaganda from totalitarian regimes, plus William Saletan's disclosure that \"several of these propagandists now infest Slate \"; 3) the for her contention that there is no evidence that people can distinguish lies from truth; 4) and an example of how Tannen from a one-guest format on TV and radio talk shows.", "\"When there is a need to make others wrong,\" Tannen argues, \"the temptation is great to oversimplify\" and to \"seize upon the weakest examples, ignore facts that support your opponent's views, and focus only on those that support yours.\" In her need to make the \"argument culture\" wrong, she succumbs to these temptations. She blames the mainstream press, not just the paparazzi , for torturing Princess Diana and driving Adm. Mike Boorda to suicide. She compares to the propaganda of \"totalitarian countries\" (because falsehoods are spread) and to the dehumanization involved in \"ethnically motivated assaults\" (because reporters hound politicians). She blames communications technology for obscene and threatening phone calls made by former university President Richard Berendzen and former Judge Sol Wachtler.", "Tannen even wants to protect us from the possibility of unpleasant confrontations in the courtroom. \"The purpose of most cross-examinations\" is \"not to establish facts but to discredit the witness,\" she asserts,", "Tannen, like some grandmotherly creature from an Aesop fable, admonishes us to recognize what is good in the work of others, and it is only fair to extend her the same courtesy. Here's what's worth gleaning from her book: \n\n Don't just quarrel; listen and learn. \n\n Don't nit-pick other people's ideas; build your own. \n\n Don't argue for the sake of arguing. \n\n Truth and courage often lie in the middle, not the extremes. \n\n Many issues are multisided. \n\n Focus on the substance of debates, not on strategy, theater, or the opponents' personal flaws. \n\n Don't fight over small issues. \n\n Don't obstruct good ideas just so you can win.", "Given this oddly paternalistic (or maternalistic) diagnosis, it's not surprising that Tannen should wish to cover our ears, filtering out strife, deception, and debate. She assures us that all reasonable people can agree that disseminating birth control and sex education is the best way to reduce the abortion rate; that stiff sentences for small drug offenses don't reduce drug abuse; that global warming is producing \"disastrous consequences.\" Partial-birth abortion is \"surely not\" a \"very important\" issue, and Congress should not have let the Republican \"politics of obstruction\" defeat President Clinton's health care proposal in 1994, given the \"broad bipartisan and public consensus that it was desperately needed.\" The \"view of government as the enemy\" isn't worth debating; it's just \"another troubling aspect of the argument culture.\" Indeed, Tannen embraces a colleague's claim that \"right-wing talk radio\" deploys phrases \"similar to verbal manipulations employed by propagandists in the Nazi era.\"", "in the words of Arkansas journalist Gene Lyons, \"the result of the nastiest and most successful political 'dirty tricks' campaign in recent American history.\" Is Tannen a Clinton apologist? She rules that criticism out of bounds. \"The very fact that", "Tannen doesn't trust in the power of good argumentation to keep society honest, much less correct itself, because she rather shockingly insists \"\" that people can distinguish lies from the truth. Nor does she trust our competence to manage unfettered communication: \"E-mail makes it too easy to forward messages, too easy to reply before your temper cools, too easy to broadcast messages to large numbers of people without thinking about how every sentence will strike every recipient.\" Lexis-Nexis is an equally unwelcome troublemaker: \"Technology also exacerbates the culture of critique by making it much easier for politicians or journalists to ferret out inconsistencies in a public person's statements over time.\"", "Tannen finds it particularly unseemly that reporters and independent counsels treat the nation's ultimate father figure with such irreverence. She complains that Clinton's weekly radio address \"is followed immediately by a Republican", "Likewise, Tannen recalls the trial of a Canadian man who had denied the Holocaust. The defendant's lawyer interrogated concentration camp survivors, asking whether they had seen their parents gassed. The adversarial system permitted such questions to be asked and answered--admittedly a vexatious experience for the survivors but one that does entail an airing of the facts of the Holocaust. Tannen, however, treats it only as a display of the \"cruelty of cross-examination.\" She raises no objection to the Canadian hate-speech ban under which the defendant was prosecuted. Would Tannen argue that the United States should adopt such a law, along with, say, a ban on the cross-examination of accusers? If so, she'd be wrong. But hey, so far, it's still a free country.", "The First Amendment, in Tannen's view, has often become \"a pretext to justify the airing of just those views that make for the most entertaining fights.\" As an alternative, she offers Asian authoritarianism: \"Disputation was rejected in ancient China as 'incompatible with the decorum and harmony cultivated by the true sage.' \" Similarly, \"the minimal human unit in Japan is not the individual but the group.\" Instead of the American practice of having two guests debate policy questions on TV news programs, she suggests a Japanese format, which \"typically features a single guest.\" (Click to learn how she puts this into practice.)", "Instead of the American system, Tannen proposes consideration of the French and German systems. Under French law, after Princess Diana's death: \n\n The photographers were held for two days without charges being filed and without being allowed to confer with lawyers. ... The judges do most of the questioning; though lawyers can also ask questions, they cannot cross-examine witnesses. Guilt ... need not be established 'beyond a reasonable doubt' but simply by ... the judge's intimate belief, or deeply held sense, of what happened.", "Vigilance and combat are particularly essential to law enforcement and foreign policy, which must deal with thugs and tyrants, not thoughtless husbands. Tannen laments that cops and soldiers have been \"trained to overcome their resistance to kill\" by trying \"not to think of their opponents as human beings.\" She neglects to mention that our safety depends on the ability of these officers to kill their adversaries. Comparing Vietnam to World War II, Tannen focuses strictly on the soldiers' social experience. In World War II, she observes, they trained, served, and went home together. \"Vietnam, in contrast, was a 'lonely war' of individuals assigned to constantly shifting units for year-long tours of duty.\" She ignores the more important difference: In World War II, they were fighting Hitler.", "rape can appear to be consensual sex,\" she ignores the reverse implication--that it is easy to make consensual sex look like rape. She complains that when Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, \"Framing these hearings as a", "as though the two objectives were unrelated. Thus, \"the adversary system ... is inhumane to the victims of cross-examination.\" She simply assumes the very thing the trial is supposed to prove and what cross-examination might disprove (if this is, in", "defending our nation's elected leader makes one suspect--an 'apologist'--is in itself evidence of the culture of critique,\" she writes.", "response,\" which \"weakens the public's ability to see leaders as leaders.\" A reporter's skeptical question to Clinton \"broke the spell\" of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's remarks upon being nominated to the Supreme Court, thereby injuring citizens' \"sense of connection\" to" ], [ "In her previous books-- That's Not What I Meant! (1986), You Just Don't Understand (1990), and Talking From 9 to 5 (1994)--Tannen carved out a niche as the nation's pre-eminent intergender translator and couples counselor. A professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, she transformed the comparative study of male and female conversational patterns from a linguistic subdiscipline into a self-help movement. Until recently, though, Tannen confined her analysis to conversations among dysfunctional individuals. (For an illustration, click .) But in The Argument Culture , she takes her movement one step further, peddling the elixir of mutual understanding as a remedy for the whole damned dysfunctional country. This is necessary, she argues, because \"contentious public discourse\" not only poisons the political atmosphere, it also risks infecting our most intimate relationships.", "Tannen even wants to protect us from the possibility of unpleasant confrontations in the courtroom. \"The purpose of most cross-examinations\" is \"not to establish facts but to discredit the witness,\" she asserts,", "\"When there is a need to make others wrong,\" Tannen argues, \"the temptation is great to oversimplify\" and to \"seize upon the weakest examples, ignore facts that support your opponent's views, and focus only on those that support yours.\" In her need to make the \"argument culture\" wrong, she succumbs to these temptations. She blames the mainstream press, not just the paparazzi , for torturing Princess Diana and driving Adm. Mike Boorda to suicide. She compares to the propaganda of \"totalitarian countries\" (because falsehoods are spread) and to the dehumanization involved in \"ethnically motivated assaults\" (because reporters hound politicians). She blames communications technology for obscene and threatening phone calls made by former university President Richard Berendzen and former Judge Sol Wachtler.", "Given this oddly paternalistic (or maternalistic) diagnosis, it's not surprising that Tannen should wish to cover our ears, filtering out strife, deception, and debate. She assures us that all reasonable people can agree that disseminating birth control and sex education is the best way to reduce the abortion rate; that stiff sentences for small drug offenses don't reduce drug abuse; that global warming is producing \"disastrous consequences.\" Partial-birth abortion is \"surely not\" a \"very important\" issue, and Congress should not have let the Republican \"politics of obstruction\" defeat President Clinton's health care proposal in 1994, given the \"broad bipartisan and public consensus that it was desperately needed.\" The \"view of government as the enemy\" isn't worth debating; it's just \"another troubling aspect of the argument culture.\" Indeed, Tannen embraces a colleague's claim that \"right-wing talk radio\" deploys phrases \"similar to verbal manipulations employed by propagandists in the Nazi era.\"", "We Do Understand \n\n \"This is not another book about civility,\" Deborah Tannen promises in the first sentence of The Argument Culture . \"Civility,\" she explains, suggests a \"veneer of politeness spread thin over human relations like a layer of marmalade over toast.\" Instead, Tannen has written something less: a book about other books about civility. Quoting from Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, political scientist Larry Sabato, and others who have studied the rise of belligerence in politics, journalism, and law, Tannen spreads their insights thin over all human relations, painting a general theory of discord. The whole is less perceptive than its parts and more pernicious.", "If you portray everything as a scandal, no one will care when something really is scandalous. \n\n All this is sage advice--for couples, for families, for bosses and employees, maybe even for book reviewers. But when she applies her precepts to our great national conversation, Tannen gets confused. She conflates belligerence, divisiveness, polarization, titillation, jealousy, incivility, aloofness, ruthlessness, cruelty, savagery, contempt, glibness, cynicism, anomie, partisanship, obstructionism, and gridlock. She makes culprits out of answering machines, electronic mail, campaign money, malpractice litigation, HMOs, corporate takeovers, and the demise of house calls by the family doctor.", "Tannen doesn't trust in the power of good argumentation to keep society honest, much less correct itself, because she rather shockingly insists \"\" that people can distinguish lies from the truth. Nor does she trust our competence to manage unfettered communication: \"E-mail makes it too easy to forward messages, too easy to reply before your temper cools, too easy to broadcast messages to large numbers of people without thinking about how every sentence will strike every recipient.\" Lexis-Nexis is an equally unwelcome troublemaker: \"Technology also exacerbates the culture of critique by making it much easier for politicians or journalists to ferret out inconsistencies in a public person's statements over time.\"", "Tannen, like some grandmotherly creature from an Aesop fable, admonishes us to recognize what is good in the work of others, and it is only fair to extend her the same courtesy. Here's what's worth gleaning from her book: \n\n Don't just quarrel; listen and learn. \n\n Don't nit-pick other people's ideas; build your own. \n\n Don't argue for the sake of arguing. \n\n Truth and courage often lie in the middle, not the extremes. \n\n Many issues are multisided. \n\n Focus on the substance of debates, not on strategy, theater, or the opponents' personal flaws. \n\n Don't fight over small issues. \n\n Don't obstruct good ideas just so you can win.", "Tannen finds it particularly unseemly that reporters and independent counsels treat the nation's ultimate father figure with such irreverence. She complains that Clinton's weekly radio address \"is followed immediately by a Republican", "Tannen's main mistake is failing to appreciate the difference between two distinct social spheres: the sphere of snuggle and the sphere of struggle. Some people--say, your spouse or your kids--you should snuggle with. Others--say, Saddam Hussein--you shouldn't. Tannen's antagonism toward antagonism makes sense in the former case but not in the latter. Among her illustrations of belligerence are William Safire's \"kick 'em when they're up\" philosophy of journalism and the media's use of war metaphors to describe Alan Greenspan's policies against inflation. To which one might sensibly reply: Good for Greenspan and Safire--and for us. The Federal Reserve's war on inflation and the press corps' scrutiny of powerful people safeguard the country. Some things are worth fighting for, and some things are worth fighting.", "in the words of Arkansas journalist Gene Lyons, \"the result of the nastiest and most successful political 'dirty tricks' campaign in recent American history.\" Is Tannen a Clinton apologist? She rules that criticism out of bounds. \"The very fact that", "If you missed the links within the review, click to read: 1) an illustration of ; 2) Tannen's that American journalism is just like propaganda from totalitarian regimes, plus William Saletan's disclosure that \"several of these propagandists now infest Slate \"; 3) the for her contention that there is no evidence that people can distinguish lies from truth; 4) and an example of how Tannen from a one-guest format on TV and radio talk shows.", "Likewise, Tannen recalls the trial of a Canadian man who had denied the Holocaust. The defendant's lawyer interrogated concentration camp survivors, asking whether they had seen their parents gassed. The adversarial system permitted such questions to be asked and answered--admittedly a vexatious experience for the survivors but one that does entail an airing of the facts of the Holocaust. Tannen, however, treats it only as a display of the \"cruelty of cross-examination.\" She raises no objection to the Canadian hate-speech ban under which the defendant was prosecuted. Would Tannen argue that the United States should adopt such a law, along with, say, a ban on the cross-examination of accusers? If so, she'd be wrong. But hey, so far, it's still a free country.", "Vigilance and combat are particularly essential to law enforcement and foreign policy, which must deal with thugs and tyrants, not thoughtless husbands. Tannen laments that cops and soldiers have been \"trained to overcome their resistance to kill\" by trying \"not to think of their opponents as human beings.\" She neglects to mention that our safety depends on the ability of these officers to kill their adversaries. Comparing Vietnam to World War II, Tannen focuses strictly on the soldiers' social experience. In World War II, she observes, they trained, served, and went home together. \"Vietnam, in contrast, was a 'lonely war' of individuals assigned to constantly shifting units for year-long tours of duty.\" She ignores the more important difference: In World War II, they were fighting Hitler.", "The First Amendment, in Tannen's view, has often become \"a pretext to justify the airing of just those views that make for the most entertaining fights.\" As an alternative, she offers Asian authoritarianism: \"Disputation was rejected in ancient China as 'incompatible with the decorum and harmony cultivated by the true sage.' \" Similarly, \"the minimal human unit in Japan is not the individual but the group.\" Instead of the American practice of having two guests debate policy questions on TV news programs, she suggests a Japanese format, which \"typically features a single guest.\" (Click to learn how she puts this into practice.)", "Instead of the American system, Tannen proposes consideration of the French and German systems. Under French law, after Princess Diana's death: \n\n The photographers were held for two days without charges being filed and without being allowed to confer with lawyers. ... The judges do most of the questioning; though lawyers can also ask questions, they cannot cross-examine witnesses. Guilt ... need not be established 'beyond a reasonable doubt' but simply by ... the judge's intimate belief, or deeply held sense, of what happened.", "as though the two objectives were unrelated. Thus, \"the adversary system ... is inhumane to the victims of cross-examination.\" She simply assumes the very thing the trial is supposed to prove and what cross-examination might disprove (if this is, in", "rape can appear to be consensual sex,\" she ignores the reverse implication--that it is easy to make consensual sex look like rape. She complains that when Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, \"Framing these hearings as a", "defending our nation's elected leader makes one suspect--an 'apologist'--is in itself evidence of the culture of critique,\" she writes.", "response,\" which \"weakens the public's ability to see leaders as leaders.\" A reporter's skeptical question to Clinton \"broke the spell\" of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's remarks upon being nominated to the Supreme Court, thereby injuring citizens' \"sense of connection\" to" ], [ "In her previous books-- That's Not What I Meant! (1986), You Just Don't Understand (1990), and Talking From 9 to 5 (1994)--Tannen carved out a niche as the nation's pre-eminent intergender translator and couples counselor. A professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, she transformed the comparative study of male and female conversational patterns from a linguistic subdiscipline into a self-help movement. Until recently, though, Tannen confined her analysis to conversations among dysfunctional individuals. (For an illustration, click .) But in The Argument Culture , she takes her movement one step further, peddling the elixir of mutual understanding as a remedy for the whole damned dysfunctional country. This is necessary, she argues, because \"contentious public discourse\" not only poisons the political atmosphere, it also risks infecting our most intimate relationships.", "We Do Understand \n\n \"This is not another book about civility,\" Deborah Tannen promises in the first sentence of The Argument Culture . \"Civility,\" she explains, suggests a \"veneer of politeness spread thin over human relations like a layer of marmalade over toast.\" Instead, Tannen has written something less: a book about other books about civility. Quoting from Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, political scientist Larry Sabato, and others who have studied the rise of belligerence in politics, journalism, and law, Tannen spreads their insights thin over all human relations, painting a general theory of discord. The whole is less perceptive than its parts and more pernicious.", "If you missed the links within the review, click to read: 1) an illustration of ; 2) Tannen's that American journalism is just like propaganda from totalitarian regimes, plus William Saletan's disclosure that \"several of these propagandists now infest Slate \"; 3) the for her contention that there is no evidence that people can distinguish lies from truth; 4) and an example of how Tannen from a one-guest format on TV and radio talk shows.", "\"When there is a need to make others wrong,\" Tannen argues, \"the temptation is great to oversimplify\" and to \"seize upon the weakest examples, ignore facts that support your opponent's views, and focus only on those that support yours.\" In her need to make the \"argument culture\" wrong, she succumbs to these temptations. She blames the mainstream press, not just the paparazzi , for torturing Princess Diana and driving Adm. Mike Boorda to suicide. She compares to the propaganda of \"totalitarian countries\" (because falsehoods are spread) and to the dehumanization involved in \"ethnically motivated assaults\" (because reporters hound politicians). She blames communications technology for obscene and threatening phone calls made by former university President Richard Berendzen and former Judge Sol Wachtler.", "Given this oddly paternalistic (or maternalistic) diagnosis, it's not surprising that Tannen should wish to cover our ears, filtering out strife, deception, and debate. She assures us that all reasonable people can agree that disseminating birth control and sex education is the best way to reduce the abortion rate; that stiff sentences for small drug offenses don't reduce drug abuse; that global warming is producing \"disastrous consequences.\" Partial-birth abortion is \"surely not\" a \"very important\" issue, and Congress should not have let the Republican \"politics of obstruction\" defeat President Clinton's health care proposal in 1994, given the \"broad bipartisan and public consensus that it was desperately needed.\" The \"view of government as the enemy\" isn't worth debating; it's just \"another troubling aspect of the argument culture.\" Indeed, Tannen embraces a colleague's claim that \"right-wing talk radio\" deploys phrases \"similar to verbal manipulations employed by propagandists in the Nazi era.\"", "If you portray everything as a scandal, no one will care when something really is scandalous. \n\n All this is sage advice--for couples, for families, for bosses and employees, maybe even for book reviewers. But when she applies her precepts to our great national conversation, Tannen gets confused. She conflates belligerence, divisiveness, polarization, titillation, jealousy, incivility, aloofness, ruthlessness, cruelty, savagery, contempt, glibness, cynicism, anomie, partisanship, obstructionism, and gridlock. She makes culprits out of answering machines, electronic mail, campaign money, malpractice litigation, HMOs, corporate takeovers, and the demise of house calls by the family doctor.", "in the words of Arkansas journalist Gene Lyons, \"the result of the nastiest and most successful political 'dirty tricks' campaign in recent American history.\" Is Tannen a Clinton apologist? She rules that criticism out of bounds. \"The very fact that", "Tannen, like some grandmotherly creature from an Aesop fable, admonishes us to recognize what is good in the work of others, and it is only fair to extend her the same courtesy. Here's what's worth gleaning from her book: \n\n Don't just quarrel; listen and learn. \n\n Don't nit-pick other people's ideas; build your own. \n\n Don't argue for the sake of arguing. \n\n Truth and courage often lie in the middle, not the extremes. \n\n Many issues are multisided. \n\n Focus on the substance of debates, not on strategy, theater, or the opponents' personal flaws. \n\n Don't fight over small issues. \n\n Don't obstruct good ideas just so you can win.", "Tannen doesn't trust in the power of good argumentation to keep society honest, much less correct itself, because she rather shockingly insists \"\" that people can distinguish lies from the truth. Nor does she trust our competence to manage unfettered communication: \"E-mail makes it too easy to forward messages, too easy to reply before your temper cools, too easy to broadcast messages to large numbers of people without thinking about how every sentence will strike every recipient.\" Lexis-Nexis is an equally unwelcome troublemaker: \"Technology also exacerbates the culture of critique by making it much easier for politicians or journalists to ferret out inconsistencies in a public person's statements over time.\"", "Tannen's main mistake is failing to appreciate the difference between two distinct social spheres: the sphere of snuggle and the sphere of struggle. Some people--say, your spouse or your kids--you should snuggle with. Others--say, Saddam Hussein--you shouldn't. Tannen's antagonism toward antagonism makes sense in the former case but not in the latter. Among her illustrations of belligerence are William Safire's \"kick 'em when they're up\" philosophy of journalism and the media's use of war metaphors to describe Alan Greenspan's policies against inflation. To which one might sensibly reply: Good for Greenspan and Safire--and for us. The Federal Reserve's war on inflation and the press corps' scrutiny of powerful people safeguard the country. Some things are worth fighting for, and some things are worth fighting.", "Tannen even wants to protect us from the possibility of unpleasant confrontations in the courtroom. \"The purpose of most cross-examinations\" is \"not to establish facts but to discredit the witness,\" she asserts,", "Likewise, Tannen recalls the trial of a Canadian man who had denied the Holocaust. The defendant's lawyer interrogated concentration camp survivors, asking whether they had seen their parents gassed. The adversarial system permitted such questions to be asked and answered--admittedly a vexatious experience for the survivors but one that does entail an airing of the facts of the Holocaust. Tannen, however, treats it only as a display of the \"cruelty of cross-examination.\" She raises no objection to the Canadian hate-speech ban under which the defendant was prosecuted. Would Tannen argue that the United States should adopt such a law, along with, say, a ban on the cross-examination of accusers? If so, she'd be wrong. But hey, so far, it's still a free country.", "Tannen finds it particularly unseemly that reporters and independent counsels treat the nation's ultimate father figure with such irreverence. She complains that Clinton's weekly radio address \"is followed immediately by a Republican", "The First Amendment, in Tannen's view, has often become \"a pretext to justify the airing of just those views that make for the most entertaining fights.\" As an alternative, she offers Asian authoritarianism: \"Disputation was rejected in ancient China as 'incompatible with the decorum and harmony cultivated by the true sage.' \" Similarly, \"the minimal human unit in Japan is not the individual but the group.\" Instead of the American practice of having two guests debate policy questions on TV news programs, she suggests a Japanese format, which \"typically features a single guest.\" (Click to learn how she puts this into practice.)", "Vigilance and combat are particularly essential to law enforcement and foreign policy, which must deal with thugs and tyrants, not thoughtless husbands. Tannen laments that cops and soldiers have been \"trained to overcome their resistance to kill\" by trying \"not to think of their opponents as human beings.\" She neglects to mention that our safety depends on the ability of these officers to kill their adversaries. Comparing Vietnam to World War II, Tannen focuses strictly on the soldiers' social experience. In World War II, she observes, they trained, served, and went home together. \"Vietnam, in contrast, was a 'lonely war' of individuals assigned to constantly shifting units for year-long tours of duty.\" She ignores the more important difference: In World War II, they were fighting Hitler.", "Instead of the American system, Tannen proposes consideration of the French and German systems. Under French law, after Princess Diana's death: \n\n The photographers were held for two days without charges being filed and without being allowed to confer with lawyers. ... The judges do most of the questioning; though lawyers can also ask questions, they cannot cross-examine witnesses. Guilt ... need not be established 'beyond a reasonable doubt' but simply by ... the judge's intimate belief, or deeply held sense, of what happened.", "response,\" which \"weakens the public's ability to see leaders as leaders.\" A reporter's skeptical question to Clinton \"broke the spell\" of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's remarks upon being nominated to the Supreme Court, thereby injuring citizens' \"sense of connection\" to", "rape can appear to be consensual sex,\" she ignores the reverse implication--that it is easy to make consensual sex look like rape. She complains that when Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, \"Framing these hearings as a", "as though the two objectives were unrelated. Thus, \"the adversary system ... is inhumane to the victims of cross-examination.\" She simply assumes the very thing the trial is supposed to prove and what cross-examination might disprove (if this is, in", "defending our nation's elected leader makes one suspect--an 'apologist'--is in itself evidence of the culture of critique,\" she writes." ], [ "Tannen, like some grandmotherly creature from an Aesop fable, admonishes us to recognize what is good in the work of others, and it is only fair to extend her the same courtesy. Here's what's worth gleaning from her book: \n\n Don't just quarrel; listen and learn. \n\n Don't nit-pick other people's ideas; build your own. \n\n Don't argue for the sake of arguing. \n\n Truth and courage often lie in the middle, not the extremes. \n\n Many issues are multisided. \n\n Focus on the substance of debates, not on strategy, theater, or the opponents' personal flaws. \n\n Don't fight over small issues. \n\n Don't obstruct good ideas just so you can win.", "We Do Understand \n\n \"This is not another book about civility,\" Deborah Tannen promises in the first sentence of The Argument Culture . \"Civility,\" she explains, suggests a \"veneer of politeness spread thin over human relations like a layer of marmalade over toast.\" Instead, Tannen has written something less: a book about other books about civility. Quoting from Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, political scientist Larry Sabato, and others who have studied the rise of belligerence in politics, journalism, and law, Tannen spreads their insights thin over all human relations, painting a general theory of discord. The whole is less perceptive than its parts and more pernicious.", "In her previous books-- That's Not What I Meant! (1986), You Just Don't Understand (1990), and Talking From 9 to 5 (1994)--Tannen carved out a niche as the nation's pre-eminent intergender translator and couples counselor. A professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, she transformed the comparative study of male and female conversational patterns from a linguistic subdiscipline into a self-help movement. Until recently, though, Tannen confined her analysis to conversations among dysfunctional individuals. (For an illustration, click .) But in The Argument Culture , she takes her movement one step further, peddling the elixir of mutual understanding as a remedy for the whole damned dysfunctional country. This is necessary, she argues, because \"contentious public discourse\" not only poisons the political atmosphere, it also risks infecting our most intimate relationships.", "\"When there is a need to make others wrong,\" Tannen argues, \"the temptation is great to oversimplify\" and to \"seize upon the weakest examples, ignore facts that support your opponent's views, and focus only on those that support yours.\" In her need to make the \"argument culture\" wrong, she succumbs to these temptations. She blames the mainstream press, not just the paparazzi , for torturing Princess Diana and driving Adm. Mike Boorda to suicide. She compares to the propaganda of \"totalitarian countries\" (because falsehoods are spread) and to the dehumanization involved in \"ethnically motivated assaults\" (because reporters hound politicians). She blames communications technology for obscene and threatening phone calls made by former university President Richard Berendzen and former Judge Sol Wachtler.", "If you portray everything as a scandal, no one will care when something really is scandalous. \n\n All this is sage advice--for couples, for families, for bosses and employees, maybe even for book reviewers. But when she applies her precepts to our great national conversation, Tannen gets confused. She conflates belligerence, divisiveness, polarization, titillation, jealousy, incivility, aloofness, ruthlessness, cruelty, savagery, contempt, glibness, cynicism, anomie, partisanship, obstructionism, and gridlock. She makes culprits out of answering machines, electronic mail, campaign money, malpractice litigation, HMOs, corporate takeovers, and the demise of house calls by the family doctor.", "If you missed the links within the review, click to read: 1) an illustration of ; 2) Tannen's that American journalism is just like propaganda from totalitarian regimes, plus William Saletan's disclosure that \"several of these propagandists now infest Slate \"; 3) the for her contention that there is no evidence that people can distinguish lies from truth; 4) and an example of how Tannen from a one-guest format on TV and radio talk shows.", "Tannen even wants to protect us from the possibility of unpleasant confrontations in the courtroom. \"The purpose of most cross-examinations\" is \"not to establish facts but to discredit the witness,\" she asserts,", "Tannen's main mistake is failing to appreciate the difference between two distinct social spheres: the sphere of snuggle and the sphere of struggle. Some people--say, your spouse or your kids--you should snuggle with. Others--say, Saddam Hussein--you shouldn't. Tannen's antagonism toward antagonism makes sense in the former case but not in the latter. Among her illustrations of belligerence are William Safire's \"kick 'em when they're up\" philosophy of journalism and the media's use of war metaphors to describe Alan Greenspan's policies against inflation. To which one might sensibly reply: Good for Greenspan and Safire--and for us. The Federal Reserve's war on inflation and the press corps' scrutiny of powerful people safeguard the country. Some things are worth fighting for, and some things are worth fighting.", "Given this oddly paternalistic (or maternalistic) diagnosis, it's not surprising that Tannen should wish to cover our ears, filtering out strife, deception, and debate. She assures us that all reasonable people can agree that disseminating birth control and sex education is the best way to reduce the abortion rate; that stiff sentences for small drug offenses don't reduce drug abuse; that global warming is producing \"disastrous consequences.\" Partial-birth abortion is \"surely not\" a \"very important\" issue, and Congress should not have let the Republican \"politics of obstruction\" defeat President Clinton's health care proposal in 1994, given the \"broad bipartisan and public consensus that it was desperately needed.\" The \"view of government as the enemy\" isn't worth debating; it's just \"another troubling aspect of the argument culture.\" Indeed, Tannen embraces a colleague's claim that \"right-wing talk radio\" deploys phrases \"similar to verbal manipulations employed by propagandists in the Nazi era.\"", "Tannen doesn't trust in the power of good argumentation to keep society honest, much less correct itself, because she rather shockingly insists \"\" that people can distinguish lies from the truth. Nor does she trust our competence to manage unfettered communication: \"E-mail makes it too easy to forward messages, too easy to reply before your temper cools, too easy to broadcast messages to large numbers of people without thinking about how every sentence will strike every recipient.\" Lexis-Nexis is an equally unwelcome troublemaker: \"Technology also exacerbates the culture of critique by making it much easier for politicians or journalists to ferret out inconsistencies in a public person's statements over time.\"", "in the words of Arkansas journalist Gene Lyons, \"the result of the nastiest and most successful political 'dirty tricks' campaign in recent American history.\" Is Tannen a Clinton apologist? She rules that criticism out of bounds. \"The very fact that", "The First Amendment, in Tannen's view, has often become \"a pretext to justify the airing of just those views that make for the most entertaining fights.\" As an alternative, she offers Asian authoritarianism: \"Disputation was rejected in ancient China as 'incompatible with the decorum and harmony cultivated by the true sage.' \" Similarly, \"the minimal human unit in Japan is not the individual but the group.\" Instead of the American practice of having two guests debate policy questions on TV news programs, she suggests a Japanese format, which \"typically features a single guest.\" (Click to learn how she puts this into practice.)", "Likewise, Tannen recalls the trial of a Canadian man who had denied the Holocaust. The defendant's lawyer interrogated concentration camp survivors, asking whether they had seen their parents gassed. The adversarial system permitted such questions to be asked and answered--admittedly a vexatious experience for the survivors but one that does entail an airing of the facts of the Holocaust. Tannen, however, treats it only as a display of the \"cruelty of cross-examination.\" She raises no objection to the Canadian hate-speech ban under which the defendant was prosecuted. Would Tannen argue that the United States should adopt such a law, along with, say, a ban on the cross-examination of accusers? If so, she'd be wrong. But hey, so far, it's still a free country.", "Vigilance and combat are particularly essential to law enforcement and foreign policy, which must deal with thugs and tyrants, not thoughtless husbands. Tannen laments that cops and soldiers have been \"trained to overcome their resistance to kill\" by trying \"not to think of their opponents as human beings.\" She neglects to mention that our safety depends on the ability of these officers to kill their adversaries. Comparing Vietnam to World War II, Tannen focuses strictly on the soldiers' social experience. In World War II, she observes, they trained, served, and went home together. \"Vietnam, in contrast, was a 'lonely war' of individuals assigned to constantly shifting units for year-long tours of duty.\" She ignores the more important difference: In World War II, they were fighting Hitler.", "as though the two objectives were unrelated. Thus, \"the adversary system ... is inhumane to the victims of cross-examination.\" She simply assumes the very thing the trial is supposed to prove and what cross-examination might disprove (if this is, in", "Instead of the American system, Tannen proposes consideration of the French and German systems. Under French law, after Princess Diana's death: \n\n The photographers were held for two days without charges being filed and without being allowed to confer with lawyers. ... The judges do most of the questioning; though lawyers can also ask questions, they cannot cross-examine witnesses. Guilt ... need not be established 'beyond a reasonable doubt' but simply by ... the judge's intimate belief, or deeply held sense, of what happened.", "Tannen finds it particularly unseemly that reporters and independent counsels treat the nation's ultimate father figure with such irreverence. She complains that Clinton's weekly radio address \"is followed immediately by a Republican", "response,\" which \"weakens the public's ability to see leaders as leaders.\" A reporter's skeptical question to Clinton \"broke the spell\" of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's remarks upon being nominated to the Supreme Court, thereby injuring citizens' \"sense of connection\" to", "rape can appear to be consensual sex,\" she ignores the reverse implication--that it is easy to make consensual sex look like rape. She complains that when Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, \"Framing these hearings as a", "two-sides dispute between Hill and Thomas allowed the senators to focus their investigation on cross-examining Hill rather than seeking other sorts of evidence.\" Did the dispute not have two sides? Should Hill not have been cross-examined?" ], [ "\"When there is a need to make others wrong,\" Tannen argues, \"the temptation is great to oversimplify\" and to \"seize upon the weakest examples, ignore facts that support your opponent's views, and focus only on those that support yours.\" In her need to make the \"argument culture\" wrong, she succumbs to these temptations. She blames the mainstream press, not just the paparazzi , for torturing Princess Diana and driving Adm. Mike Boorda to suicide. She compares to the propaganda of \"totalitarian countries\" (because falsehoods are spread) and to the dehumanization involved in \"ethnically motivated assaults\" (because reporters hound politicians). She blames communications technology for obscene and threatening phone calls made by former university President Richard Berendzen and former Judge Sol Wachtler.", "In her previous books-- That's Not What I Meant! (1986), You Just Don't Understand (1990), and Talking From 9 to 5 (1994)--Tannen carved out a niche as the nation's pre-eminent intergender translator and couples counselor. A professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, she transformed the comparative study of male and female conversational patterns from a linguistic subdiscipline into a self-help movement. Until recently, though, Tannen confined her analysis to conversations among dysfunctional individuals. (For an illustration, click .) But in The Argument Culture , she takes her movement one step further, peddling the elixir of mutual understanding as a remedy for the whole damned dysfunctional country. This is necessary, she argues, because \"contentious public discourse\" not only poisons the political atmosphere, it also risks infecting our most intimate relationships.", "Tannen even wants to protect us from the possibility of unpleasant confrontations in the courtroom. \"The purpose of most cross-examinations\" is \"not to establish facts but to discredit the witness,\" she asserts,", "Tannen's main mistake is failing to appreciate the difference between two distinct social spheres: the sphere of snuggle and the sphere of struggle. Some people--say, your spouse or your kids--you should snuggle with. Others--say, Saddam Hussein--you shouldn't. Tannen's antagonism toward antagonism makes sense in the former case but not in the latter. Among her illustrations of belligerence are William Safire's \"kick 'em when they're up\" philosophy of journalism and the media's use of war metaphors to describe Alan Greenspan's policies against inflation. To which one might sensibly reply: Good for Greenspan and Safire--and for us. The Federal Reserve's war on inflation and the press corps' scrutiny of powerful people safeguard the country. Some things are worth fighting for, and some things are worth fighting.", "Given this oddly paternalistic (or maternalistic) diagnosis, it's not surprising that Tannen should wish to cover our ears, filtering out strife, deception, and debate. She assures us that all reasonable people can agree that disseminating birth control and sex education is the best way to reduce the abortion rate; that stiff sentences for small drug offenses don't reduce drug abuse; that global warming is producing \"disastrous consequences.\" Partial-birth abortion is \"surely not\" a \"very important\" issue, and Congress should not have let the Republican \"politics of obstruction\" defeat President Clinton's health care proposal in 1994, given the \"broad bipartisan and public consensus that it was desperately needed.\" The \"view of government as the enemy\" isn't worth debating; it's just \"another troubling aspect of the argument culture.\" Indeed, Tannen embraces a colleague's claim that \"right-wing talk radio\" deploys phrases \"similar to verbal manipulations employed by propagandists in the Nazi era.\"", "We Do Understand \n\n \"This is not another book about civility,\" Deborah Tannen promises in the first sentence of The Argument Culture . \"Civility,\" she explains, suggests a \"veneer of politeness spread thin over human relations like a layer of marmalade over toast.\" Instead, Tannen has written something less: a book about other books about civility. Quoting from Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, political scientist Larry Sabato, and others who have studied the rise of belligerence in politics, journalism, and law, Tannen spreads their insights thin over all human relations, painting a general theory of discord. The whole is less perceptive than its parts and more pernicious.", "Tannen doesn't trust in the power of good argumentation to keep society honest, much less correct itself, because she rather shockingly insists \"\" that people can distinguish lies from the truth. Nor does she trust our competence to manage unfettered communication: \"E-mail makes it too easy to forward messages, too easy to reply before your temper cools, too easy to broadcast messages to large numbers of people without thinking about how every sentence will strike every recipient.\" Lexis-Nexis is an equally unwelcome troublemaker: \"Technology also exacerbates the culture of critique by making it much easier for politicians or journalists to ferret out inconsistencies in a public person's statements over time.\"", "If you portray everything as a scandal, no one will care when something really is scandalous. \n\n All this is sage advice--for couples, for families, for bosses and employees, maybe even for book reviewers. But when she applies her precepts to our great national conversation, Tannen gets confused. She conflates belligerence, divisiveness, polarization, titillation, jealousy, incivility, aloofness, ruthlessness, cruelty, savagery, contempt, glibness, cynicism, anomie, partisanship, obstructionism, and gridlock. She makes culprits out of answering machines, electronic mail, campaign money, malpractice litigation, HMOs, corporate takeovers, and the demise of house calls by the family doctor.", "If you missed the links within the review, click to read: 1) an illustration of ; 2) Tannen's that American journalism is just like propaganda from totalitarian regimes, plus William Saletan's disclosure that \"several of these propagandists now infest Slate \"; 3) the for her contention that there is no evidence that people can distinguish lies from truth; 4) and an example of how Tannen from a one-guest format on TV and radio talk shows.", "Tannen finds it particularly unseemly that reporters and independent counsels treat the nation's ultimate father figure with such irreverence. She complains that Clinton's weekly radio address \"is followed immediately by a Republican", "Tannen, like some grandmotherly creature from an Aesop fable, admonishes us to recognize what is good in the work of others, and it is only fair to extend her the same courtesy. Here's what's worth gleaning from her book: \n\n Don't just quarrel; listen and learn. \n\n Don't nit-pick other people's ideas; build your own. \n\n Don't argue for the sake of arguing. \n\n Truth and courage often lie in the middle, not the extremes. \n\n Many issues are multisided. \n\n Focus on the substance of debates, not on strategy, theater, or the opponents' personal flaws. \n\n Don't fight over small issues. \n\n Don't obstruct good ideas just so you can win.", "in the words of Arkansas journalist Gene Lyons, \"the result of the nastiest and most successful political 'dirty tricks' campaign in recent American history.\" Is Tannen a Clinton apologist? She rules that criticism out of bounds. \"The very fact that", "Likewise, Tannen recalls the trial of a Canadian man who had denied the Holocaust. The defendant's lawyer interrogated concentration camp survivors, asking whether they had seen their parents gassed. The adversarial system permitted such questions to be asked and answered--admittedly a vexatious experience for the survivors but one that does entail an airing of the facts of the Holocaust. Tannen, however, treats it only as a display of the \"cruelty of cross-examination.\" She raises no objection to the Canadian hate-speech ban under which the defendant was prosecuted. Would Tannen argue that the United States should adopt such a law, along with, say, a ban on the cross-examination of accusers? If so, she'd be wrong. But hey, so far, it's still a free country.", "The First Amendment, in Tannen's view, has often become \"a pretext to justify the airing of just those views that make for the most entertaining fights.\" As an alternative, she offers Asian authoritarianism: \"Disputation was rejected in ancient China as 'incompatible with the decorum and harmony cultivated by the true sage.' \" Similarly, \"the minimal human unit in Japan is not the individual but the group.\" Instead of the American practice of having two guests debate policy questions on TV news programs, she suggests a Japanese format, which \"typically features a single guest.\" (Click to learn how she puts this into practice.)", "Instead of the American system, Tannen proposes consideration of the French and German systems. Under French law, after Princess Diana's death: \n\n The photographers were held for two days without charges being filed and without being allowed to confer with lawyers. ... The judges do most of the questioning; though lawyers can also ask questions, they cannot cross-examine witnesses. Guilt ... need not be established 'beyond a reasonable doubt' but simply by ... the judge's intimate belief, or deeply held sense, of what happened.", "Vigilance and combat are particularly essential to law enforcement and foreign policy, which must deal with thugs and tyrants, not thoughtless husbands. Tannen laments that cops and soldiers have been \"trained to overcome their resistance to kill\" by trying \"not to think of their opponents as human beings.\" She neglects to mention that our safety depends on the ability of these officers to kill their adversaries. Comparing Vietnam to World War II, Tannen focuses strictly on the soldiers' social experience. In World War II, she observes, they trained, served, and went home together. \"Vietnam, in contrast, was a 'lonely war' of individuals assigned to constantly shifting units for year-long tours of duty.\" She ignores the more important difference: In World War II, they were fighting Hitler.", "rape can appear to be consensual sex,\" she ignores the reverse implication--that it is easy to make consensual sex look like rape. She complains that when Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, \"Framing these hearings as a", "as though the two objectives were unrelated. Thus, \"the adversary system ... is inhumane to the victims of cross-examination.\" She simply assumes the very thing the trial is supposed to prove and what cross-examination might disprove (if this is, in", "defending our nation's elected leader makes one suspect--an 'apologist'--is in itself evidence of the culture of critique,\" she writes.", "response,\" which \"weakens the public's ability to see leaders as leaders.\" A reporter's skeptical question to Clinton \"broke the spell\" of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's remarks upon being nominated to the Supreme Court, thereby injuring citizens' \"sense of connection\" to" ], [ "Tannen doesn't trust in the power of good argumentation to keep society honest, much less correct itself, because she rather shockingly insists \"\" that people can distinguish lies from the truth. Nor does she trust our competence to manage unfettered communication: \"E-mail makes it too easy to forward messages, too easy to reply before your temper cools, too easy to broadcast messages to large numbers of people without thinking about how every sentence will strike every recipient.\" Lexis-Nexis is an equally unwelcome troublemaker: \"Technology also exacerbates the culture of critique by making it much easier for politicians or journalists to ferret out inconsistencies in a public person's statements over time.\"", "If you missed the links within the review, click to read: 1) an illustration of ; 2) Tannen's that American journalism is just like propaganda from totalitarian regimes, plus William Saletan's disclosure that \"several of these propagandists now infest Slate \"; 3) the for her contention that there is no evidence that people can distinguish lies from truth; 4) and an example of how Tannen from a one-guest format on TV and radio talk shows.", "\"When there is a need to make others wrong,\" Tannen argues, \"the temptation is great to oversimplify\" and to \"seize upon the weakest examples, ignore facts that support your opponent's views, and focus only on those that support yours.\" In her need to make the \"argument culture\" wrong, she succumbs to these temptations. She blames the mainstream press, not just the paparazzi , for torturing Princess Diana and driving Adm. Mike Boorda to suicide. She compares to the propaganda of \"totalitarian countries\" (because falsehoods are spread) and to the dehumanization involved in \"ethnically motivated assaults\" (because reporters hound politicians). She blames communications technology for obscene and threatening phone calls made by former university President Richard Berendzen and former Judge Sol Wachtler.", "Instead of the American system, Tannen proposes consideration of the French and German systems. Under French law, after Princess Diana's death: \n\n The photographers were held for two days without charges being filed and without being allowed to confer with lawyers. ... The judges do most of the questioning; though lawyers can also ask questions, they cannot cross-examine witnesses. Guilt ... need not be established 'beyond a reasonable doubt' but simply by ... the judge's intimate belief, or deeply held sense, of what happened.", "If you portray everything as a scandal, no one will care when something really is scandalous. \n\n All this is sage advice--for couples, for families, for bosses and employees, maybe even for book reviewers. But when she applies her precepts to our great national conversation, Tannen gets confused. She conflates belligerence, divisiveness, polarization, titillation, jealousy, incivility, aloofness, ruthlessness, cruelty, savagery, contempt, glibness, cynicism, anomie, partisanship, obstructionism, and gridlock. She makes culprits out of answering machines, electronic mail, campaign money, malpractice litigation, HMOs, corporate takeovers, and the demise of house calls by the family doctor.", "We Do Understand \n\n \"This is not another book about civility,\" Deborah Tannen promises in the first sentence of The Argument Culture . \"Civility,\" she explains, suggests a \"veneer of politeness spread thin over human relations like a layer of marmalade over toast.\" Instead, Tannen has written something less: a book about other books about civility. Quoting from Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, political scientist Larry Sabato, and others who have studied the rise of belligerence in politics, journalism, and law, Tannen spreads their insights thin over all human relations, painting a general theory of discord. The whole is less perceptive than its parts and more pernicious.", "Tannen even wants to protect us from the possibility of unpleasant confrontations in the courtroom. \"The purpose of most cross-examinations\" is \"not to establish facts but to discredit the witness,\" she asserts,", "The First Amendment, in Tannen's view, has often become \"a pretext to justify the airing of just those views that make for the most entertaining fights.\" As an alternative, she offers Asian authoritarianism: \"Disputation was rejected in ancient China as 'incompatible with the decorum and harmony cultivated by the true sage.' \" Similarly, \"the minimal human unit in Japan is not the individual but the group.\" Instead of the American practice of having two guests debate policy questions on TV news programs, she suggests a Japanese format, which \"typically features a single guest.\" (Click to learn how she puts this into practice.)", "Given this oddly paternalistic (or maternalistic) diagnosis, it's not surprising that Tannen should wish to cover our ears, filtering out strife, deception, and debate. She assures us that all reasonable people can agree that disseminating birth control and sex education is the best way to reduce the abortion rate; that stiff sentences for small drug offenses don't reduce drug abuse; that global warming is producing \"disastrous consequences.\" Partial-birth abortion is \"surely not\" a \"very important\" issue, and Congress should not have let the Republican \"politics of obstruction\" defeat President Clinton's health care proposal in 1994, given the \"broad bipartisan and public consensus that it was desperately needed.\" The \"view of government as the enemy\" isn't worth debating; it's just \"another troubling aspect of the argument culture.\" Indeed, Tannen embraces a colleague's claim that \"right-wing talk radio\" deploys phrases \"similar to verbal manipulations employed by propagandists in the Nazi era.\"", "Tannen finds it particularly unseemly that reporters and independent counsels treat the nation's ultimate father figure with such irreverence. She complains that Clinton's weekly radio address \"is followed immediately by a Republican", "Tannen's main mistake is failing to appreciate the difference between two distinct social spheres: the sphere of snuggle and the sphere of struggle. Some people--say, your spouse or your kids--you should snuggle with. Others--say, Saddam Hussein--you shouldn't. Tannen's antagonism toward antagonism makes sense in the former case but not in the latter. Among her illustrations of belligerence are William Safire's \"kick 'em when they're up\" philosophy of journalism and the media's use of war metaphors to describe Alan Greenspan's policies against inflation. To which one might sensibly reply: Good for Greenspan and Safire--and for us. The Federal Reserve's war on inflation and the press corps' scrutiny of powerful people safeguard the country. Some things are worth fighting for, and some things are worth fighting.", "Vigilance and combat are particularly essential to law enforcement and foreign policy, which must deal with thugs and tyrants, not thoughtless husbands. Tannen laments that cops and soldiers have been \"trained to overcome their resistance to kill\" by trying \"not to think of their opponents as human beings.\" She neglects to mention that our safety depends on the ability of these officers to kill their adversaries. Comparing Vietnam to World War II, Tannen focuses strictly on the soldiers' social experience. In World War II, she observes, they trained, served, and went home together. \"Vietnam, in contrast, was a 'lonely war' of individuals assigned to constantly shifting units for year-long tours of duty.\" She ignores the more important difference: In World War II, they were fighting Hitler.", "response,\" which \"weakens the public's ability to see leaders as leaders.\" A reporter's skeptical question to Clinton \"broke the spell\" of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's remarks upon being nominated to the Supreme Court, thereby injuring citizens' \"sense of connection\" to", "in the words of Arkansas journalist Gene Lyons, \"the result of the nastiest and most successful political 'dirty tricks' campaign in recent American history.\" Is Tannen a Clinton apologist? She rules that criticism out of bounds. \"The very fact that", "In her previous books-- That's Not What I Meant! (1986), You Just Don't Understand (1990), and Talking From 9 to 5 (1994)--Tannen carved out a niche as the nation's pre-eminent intergender translator and couples counselor. A professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, she transformed the comparative study of male and female conversational patterns from a linguistic subdiscipline into a self-help movement. Until recently, though, Tannen confined her analysis to conversations among dysfunctional individuals. (For an illustration, click .) But in The Argument Culture , she takes her movement one step further, peddling the elixir of mutual understanding as a remedy for the whole damned dysfunctional country. This is necessary, she argues, because \"contentious public discourse\" not only poisons the political atmosphere, it also risks infecting our most intimate relationships.", "as though the two objectives were unrelated. Thus, \"the adversary system ... is inhumane to the victims of cross-examination.\" She simply assumes the very thing the trial is supposed to prove and what cross-examination might disprove (if this is, in", "Likewise, Tannen recalls the trial of a Canadian man who had denied the Holocaust. The defendant's lawyer interrogated concentration camp survivors, asking whether they had seen their parents gassed. The adversarial system permitted such questions to be asked and answered--admittedly a vexatious experience for the survivors but one that does entail an airing of the facts of the Holocaust. Tannen, however, treats it only as a display of the \"cruelty of cross-examination.\" She raises no objection to the Canadian hate-speech ban under which the defendant was prosecuted. Would Tannen argue that the United States should adopt such a law, along with, say, a ban on the cross-examination of accusers? If so, she'd be wrong. But hey, so far, it's still a free country.", "Tannen, like some grandmotherly creature from an Aesop fable, admonishes us to recognize what is good in the work of others, and it is only fair to extend her the same courtesy. Here's what's worth gleaning from her book: \n\n Don't just quarrel; listen and learn. \n\n Don't nit-pick other people's ideas; build your own. \n\n Don't argue for the sake of arguing. \n\n Truth and courage often lie in the middle, not the extremes. \n\n Many issues are multisided. \n\n Focus on the substance of debates, not on strategy, theater, or the opponents' personal flaws. \n\n Don't fight over small issues. \n\n Don't obstruct good ideas just so you can win.", "\"our judicial system.\" The investigation of former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy was excessive, the campaign against former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders was \"cruelly unfair,\" and the Whitewater investigation--led by \"a prominent Republican known for his animosity toward the president\"--is,", "defending our nation's elected leader makes one suspect--an 'apologist'--is in itself evidence of the culture of critique,\" she writes." ], [ "Tannen's main mistake is failing to appreciate the difference between two distinct social spheres: the sphere of snuggle and the sphere of struggle. Some people--say, your spouse or your kids--you should snuggle with. Others--say, Saddam Hussein--you shouldn't. Tannen's antagonism toward antagonism makes sense in the former case but not in the latter. Among her illustrations of belligerence are William Safire's \"kick 'em when they're up\" philosophy of journalism and the media's use of war metaphors to describe Alan Greenspan's policies against inflation. To which one might sensibly reply: Good for Greenspan and Safire--and for us. The Federal Reserve's war on inflation and the press corps' scrutiny of powerful people safeguard the country. Some things are worth fighting for, and some things are worth fighting.", "\"When there is a need to make others wrong,\" Tannen argues, \"the temptation is great to oversimplify\" and to \"seize upon the weakest examples, ignore facts that support your opponent's views, and focus only on those that support yours.\" In her need to make the \"argument culture\" wrong, she succumbs to these temptations. She blames the mainstream press, not just the paparazzi , for torturing Princess Diana and driving Adm. Mike Boorda to suicide. She compares to the propaganda of \"totalitarian countries\" (because falsehoods are spread) and to the dehumanization involved in \"ethnically motivated assaults\" (because reporters hound politicians). She blames communications technology for obscene and threatening phone calls made by former university President Richard Berendzen and former Judge Sol Wachtler.", "In her previous books-- That's Not What I Meant! (1986), You Just Don't Understand (1990), and Talking From 9 to 5 (1994)--Tannen carved out a niche as the nation's pre-eminent intergender translator and couples counselor. A professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, she transformed the comparative study of male and female conversational patterns from a linguistic subdiscipline into a self-help movement. Until recently, though, Tannen confined her analysis to conversations among dysfunctional individuals. (For an illustration, click .) But in The Argument Culture , she takes her movement one step further, peddling the elixir of mutual understanding as a remedy for the whole damned dysfunctional country. This is necessary, she argues, because \"contentious public discourse\" not only poisons the political atmosphere, it also risks infecting our most intimate relationships.", "If you portray everything as a scandal, no one will care when something really is scandalous. \n\n All this is sage advice--for couples, for families, for bosses and employees, maybe even for book reviewers. But when she applies her precepts to our great national conversation, Tannen gets confused. She conflates belligerence, divisiveness, polarization, titillation, jealousy, incivility, aloofness, ruthlessness, cruelty, savagery, contempt, glibness, cynicism, anomie, partisanship, obstructionism, and gridlock. She makes culprits out of answering machines, electronic mail, campaign money, malpractice litigation, HMOs, corporate takeovers, and the demise of house calls by the family doctor.", "We Do Understand \n\n \"This is not another book about civility,\" Deborah Tannen promises in the first sentence of The Argument Culture . \"Civility,\" she explains, suggests a \"veneer of politeness spread thin over human relations like a layer of marmalade over toast.\" Instead, Tannen has written something less: a book about other books about civility. Quoting from Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, political scientist Larry Sabato, and others who have studied the rise of belligerence in politics, journalism, and law, Tannen spreads their insights thin over all human relations, painting a general theory of discord. The whole is less perceptive than its parts and more pernicious.", "Tannen even wants to protect us from the possibility of unpleasant confrontations in the courtroom. \"The purpose of most cross-examinations\" is \"not to establish facts but to discredit the witness,\" she asserts,", "Vigilance and combat are particularly essential to law enforcement and foreign policy, which must deal with thugs and tyrants, not thoughtless husbands. Tannen laments that cops and soldiers have been \"trained to overcome their resistance to kill\" by trying \"not to think of their opponents as human beings.\" She neglects to mention that our safety depends on the ability of these officers to kill their adversaries. Comparing Vietnam to World War II, Tannen focuses strictly on the soldiers' social experience. In World War II, she observes, they trained, served, and went home together. \"Vietnam, in contrast, was a 'lonely war' of individuals assigned to constantly shifting units for year-long tours of duty.\" She ignores the more important difference: In World War II, they were fighting Hitler.", "Tannen finds it particularly unseemly that reporters and independent counsels treat the nation's ultimate father figure with such irreverence. She complains that Clinton's weekly radio address \"is followed immediately by a Republican", "Given this oddly paternalistic (or maternalistic) diagnosis, it's not surprising that Tannen should wish to cover our ears, filtering out strife, deception, and debate. She assures us that all reasonable people can agree that disseminating birth control and sex education is the best way to reduce the abortion rate; that stiff sentences for small drug offenses don't reduce drug abuse; that global warming is producing \"disastrous consequences.\" Partial-birth abortion is \"surely not\" a \"very important\" issue, and Congress should not have let the Republican \"politics of obstruction\" defeat President Clinton's health care proposal in 1994, given the \"broad bipartisan and public consensus that it was desperately needed.\" The \"view of government as the enemy\" isn't worth debating; it's just \"another troubling aspect of the argument culture.\" Indeed, Tannen embraces a colleague's claim that \"right-wing talk radio\" deploys phrases \"similar to verbal manipulations employed by propagandists in the Nazi era.\"", "Tannen, like some grandmotherly creature from an Aesop fable, admonishes us to recognize what is good in the work of others, and it is only fair to extend her the same courtesy. Here's what's worth gleaning from her book: \n\n Don't just quarrel; listen and learn. \n\n Don't nit-pick other people's ideas; build your own. \n\n Don't argue for the sake of arguing. \n\n Truth and courage often lie in the middle, not the extremes. \n\n Many issues are multisided. \n\n Focus on the substance of debates, not on strategy, theater, or the opponents' personal flaws. \n\n Don't fight over small issues. \n\n Don't obstruct good ideas just so you can win.", "If you missed the links within the review, click to read: 1) an illustration of ; 2) Tannen's that American journalism is just like propaganda from totalitarian regimes, plus William Saletan's disclosure that \"several of these propagandists now infest Slate \"; 3) the for her contention that there is no evidence that people can distinguish lies from truth; 4) and an example of how Tannen from a one-guest format on TV and radio talk shows.", "Tannen doesn't trust in the power of good argumentation to keep society honest, much less correct itself, because she rather shockingly insists \"\" that people can distinguish lies from the truth. Nor does she trust our competence to manage unfettered communication: \"E-mail makes it too easy to forward messages, too easy to reply before your temper cools, too easy to broadcast messages to large numbers of people without thinking about how every sentence will strike every recipient.\" Lexis-Nexis is an equally unwelcome troublemaker: \"Technology also exacerbates the culture of critique by making it much easier for politicians or journalists to ferret out inconsistencies in a public person's statements over time.\"", "Likewise, Tannen recalls the trial of a Canadian man who had denied the Holocaust. The defendant's lawyer interrogated concentration camp survivors, asking whether they had seen their parents gassed. The adversarial system permitted such questions to be asked and answered--admittedly a vexatious experience for the survivors but one that does entail an airing of the facts of the Holocaust. Tannen, however, treats it only as a display of the \"cruelty of cross-examination.\" She raises no objection to the Canadian hate-speech ban under which the defendant was prosecuted. Would Tannen argue that the United States should adopt such a law, along with, say, a ban on the cross-examination of accusers? If so, she'd be wrong. But hey, so far, it's still a free country.", "The First Amendment, in Tannen's view, has often become \"a pretext to justify the airing of just those views that make for the most entertaining fights.\" As an alternative, she offers Asian authoritarianism: \"Disputation was rejected in ancient China as 'incompatible with the decorum and harmony cultivated by the true sage.' \" Similarly, \"the minimal human unit in Japan is not the individual but the group.\" Instead of the American practice of having two guests debate policy questions on TV news programs, she suggests a Japanese format, which \"typically features a single guest.\" (Click to learn how she puts this into practice.)", "in the words of Arkansas journalist Gene Lyons, \"the result of the nastiest and most successful political 'dirty tricks' campaign in recent American history.\" Is Tannen a Clinton apologist? She rules that criticism out of bounds. \"The very fact that", "Instead of the American system, Tannen proposes consideration of the French and German systems. Under French law, after Princess Diana's death: \n\n The photographers were held for two days without charges being filed and without being allowed to confer with lawyers. ... The judges do most of the questioning; though lawyers can also ask questions, they cannot cross-examine witnesses. Guilt ... need not be established 'beyond a reasonable doubt' but simply by ... the judge's intimate belief, or deeply held sense, of what happened.", "as though the two objectives were unrelated. Thus, \"the adversary system ... is inhumane to the victims of cross-examination.\" She simply assumes the very thing the trial is supposed to prove and what cross-examination might disprove (if this is, in", "rape can appear to be consensual sex,\" she ignores the reverse implication--that it is easy to make consensual sex look like rape. She complains that when Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, \"Framing these hearings as a", "response,\" which \"weakens the public's ability to see leaders as leaders.\" A reporter's skeptical question to Clinton \"broke the spell\" of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's remarks upon being nominated to the Supreme Court, thereby injuring citizens' \"sense of connection\" to", "defending our nation's elected leader makes one suspect--an 'apologist'--is in itself evidence of the culture of critique,\" she writes." ], [ "In her previous books-- That's Not What I Meant! (1986), You Just Don't Understand (1990), and Talking From 9 to 5 (1994)--Tannen carved out a niche as the nation's pre-eminent intergender translator and couples counselor. A professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, she transformed the comparative study of male and female conversational patterns from a linguistic subdiscipline into a self-help movement. Until recently, though, Tannen confined her analysis to conversations among dysfunctional individuals. (For an illustration, click .) But in The Argument Culture , she takes her movement one step further, peddling the elixir of mutual understanding as a remedy for the whole damned dysfunctional country. This is necessary, she argues, because \"contentious public discourse\" not only poisons the political atmosphere, it also risks infecting our most intimate relationships.", "Tannen even wants to protect us from the possibility of unpleasant confrontations in the courtroom. \"The purpose of most cross-examinations\" is \"not to establish facts but to discredit the witness,\" she asserts,", "\"When there is a need to make others wrong,\" Tannen argues, \"the temptation is great to oversimplify\" and to \"seize upon the weakest examples, ignore facts that support your opponent's views, and focus only on those that support yours.\" In her need to make the \"argument culture\" wrong, she succumbs to these temptations. She blames the mainstream press, not just the paparazzi , for torturing Princess Diana and driving Adm. Mike Boorda to suicide. She compares to the propaganda of \"totalitarian countries\" (because falsehoods are spread) and to the dehumanization involved in \"ethnically motivated assaults\" (because reporters hound politicians). She blames communications technology for obscene and threatening phone calls made by former university President Richard Berendzen and former Judge Sol Wachtler.", "Tannen's main mistake is failing to appreciate the difference between two distinct social spheres: the sphere of snuggle and the sphere of struggle. Some people--say, your spouse or your kids--you should snuggle with. Others--say, Saddam Hussein--you shouldn't. Tannen's antagonism toward antagonism makes sense in the former case but not in the latter. Among her illustrations of belligerence are William Safire's \"kick 'em when they're up\" philosophy of journalism and the media's use of war metaphors to describe Alan Greenspan's policies against inflation. To which one might sensibly reply: Good for Greenspan and Safire--and for us. The Federal Reserve's war on inflation and the press corps' scrutiny of powerful people safeguard the country. Some things are worth fighting for, and some things are worth fighting.", "Given this oddly paternalistic (or maternalistic) diagnosis, it's not surprising that Tannen should wish to cover our ears, filtering out strife, deception, and debate. She assures us that all reasonable people can agree that disseminating birth control and sex education is the best way to reduce the abortion rate; that stiff sentences for small drug offenses don't reduce drug abuse; that global warming is producing \"disastrous consequences.\" Partial-birth abortion is \"surely not\" a \"very important\" issue, and Congress should not have let the Republican \"politics of obstruction\" defeat President Clinton's health care proposal in 1994, given the \"broad bipartisan and public consensus that it was desperately needed.\" The \"view of government as the enemy\" isn't worth debating; it's just \"another troubling aspect of the argument culture.\" Indeed, Tannen embraces a colleague's claim that \"right-wing talk radio\" deploys phrases \"similar to verbal manipulations employed by propagandists in the Nazi era.\"", "If you missed the links within the review, click to read: 1) an illustration of ; 2) Tannen's that American journalism is just like propaganda from totalitarian regimes, plus William Saletan's disclosure that \"several of these propagandists now infest Slate \"; 3) the for her contention that there is no evidence that people can distinguish lies from truth; 4) and an example of how Tannen from a one-guest format on TV and radio talk shows.", "We Do Understand \n\n \"This is not another book about civility,\" Deborah Tannen promises in the first sentence of The Argument Culture . \"Civility,\" she explains, suggests a \"veneer of politeness spread thin over human relations like a layer of marmalade over toast.\" Instead, Tannen has written something less: a book about other books about civility. Quoting from Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, political scientist Larry Sabato, and others who have studied the rise of belligerence in politics, journalism, and law, Tannen spreads their insights thin over all human relations, painting a general theory of discord. The whole is less perceptive than its parts and more pernicious.", "If you portray everything as a scandal, no one will care when something really is scandalous. \n\n All this is sage advice--for couples, for families, for bosses and employees, maybe even for book reviewers. But when she applies her precepts to our great national conversation, Tannen gets confused. She conflates belligerence, divisiveness, polarization, titillation, jealousy, incivility, aloofness, ruthlessness, cruelty, savagery, contempt, glibness, cynicism, anomie, partisanship, obstructionism, and gridlock. She makes culprits out of answering machines, electronic mail, campaign money, malpractice litigation, HMOs, corporate takeovers, and the demise of house calls by the family doctor.", "Tannen, like some grandmotherly creature from an Aesop fable, admonishes us to recognize what is good in the work of others, and it is only fair to extend her the same courtesy. Here's what's worth gleaning from her book: \n\n Don't just quarrel; listen and learn. \n\n Don't nit-pick other people's ideas; build your own. \n\n Don't argue for the sake of arguing. \n\n Truth and courage often lie in the middle, not the extremes. \n\n Many issues are multisided. \n\n Focus on the substance of debates, not on strategy, theater, or the opponents' personal flaws. \n\n Don't fight over small issues. \n\n Don't obstruct good ideas just so you can win.", "Tannen doesn't trust in the power of good argumentation to keep society honest, much less correct itself, because she rather shockingly insists \"\" that people can distinguish lies from the truth. Nor does she trust our competence to manage unfettered communication: \"E-mail makes it too easy to forward messages, too easy to reply before your temper cools, too easy to broadcast messages to large numbers of people without thinking about how every sentence will strike every recipient.\" Lexis-Nexis is an equally unwelcome troublemaker: \"Technology also exacerbates the culture of critique by making it much easier for politicians or journalists to ferret out inconsistencies in a public person's statements over time.\"", "The First Amendment, in Tannen's view, has often become \"a pretext to justify the airing of just those views that make for the most entertaining fights.\" As an alternative, she offers Asian authoritarianism: \"Disputation was rejected in ancient China as 'incompatible with the decorum and harmony cultivated by the true sage.' \" Similarly, \"the minimal human unit in Japan is not the individual but the group.\" Instead of the American practice of having two guests debate policy questions on TV news programs, she suggests a Japanese format, which \"typically features a single guest.\" (Click to learn how she puts this into practice.)", "Tannen finds it particularly unseemly that reporters and independent counsels treat the nation's ultimate father figure with such irreverence. She complains that Clinton's weekly radio address \"is followed immediately by a Republican", "in the words of Arkansas journalist Gene Lyons, \"the result of the nastiest and most successful political 'dirty tricks' campaign in recent American history.\" Is Tannen a Clinton apologist? She rules that criticism out of bounds. \"The very fact that", "Likewise, Tannen recalls the trial of a Canadian man who had denied the Holocaust. The defendant's lawyer interrogated concentration camp survivors, asking whether they had seen their parents gassed. The adversarial system permitted such questions to be asked and answered--admittedly a vexatious experience for the survivors but one that does entail an airing of the facts of the Holocaust. Tannen, however, treats it only as a display of the \"cruelty of cross-examination.\" She raises no objection to the Canadian hate-speech ban under which the defendant was prosecuted. Would Tannen argue that the United States should adopt such a law, along with, say, a ban on the cross-examination of accusers? If so, she'd be wrong. But hey, so far, it's still a free country.", "Vigilance and combat are particularly essential to law enforcement and foreign policy, which must deal with thugs and tyrants, not thoughtless husbands. Tannen laments that cops and soldiers have been \"trained to overcome their resistance to kill\" by trying \"not to think of their opponents as human beings.\" She neglects to mention that our safety depends on the ability of these officers to kill their adversaries. Comparing Vietnam to World War II, Tannen focuses strictly on the soldiers' social experience. In World War II, she observes, they trained, served, and went home together. \"Vietnam, in contrast, was a 'lonely war' of individuals assigned to constantly shifting units for year-long tours of duty.\" She ignores the more important difference: In World War II, they were fighting Hitler.", "Instead of the American system, Tannen proposes consideration of the French and German systems. Under French law, after Princess Diana's death: \n\n The photographers were held for two days without charges being filed and without being allowed to confer with lawyers. ... The judges do most of the questioning; though lawyers can also ask questions, they cannot cross-examine witnesses. Guilt ... need not be established 'beyond a reasonable doubt' but simply by ... the judge's intimate belief, or deeply held sense, of what happened.", "response,\" which \"weakens the public's ability to see leaders as leaders.\" A reporter's skeptical question to Clinton \"broke the spell\" of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's remarks upon being nominated to the Supreme Court, thereby injuring citizens' \"sense of connection\" to", "rape can appear to be consensual sex,\" she ignores the reverse implication--that it is easy to make consensual sex look like rape. She complains that when Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, \"Framing these hearings as a", "as though the two objectives were unrelated. Thus, \"the adversary system ... is inhumane to the victims of cross-examination.\" She simply assumes the very thing the trial is supposed to prove and what cross-examination might disprove (if this is, in", "fact, the point of the trial): that the witness is a victim. Conversely, she assumes that the defendant cannot be a victim. While objecting to cross-examination of alleged rape victims because \"it is easy to distort events so that a" ], [ "Tannen finds it particularly unseemly that reporters and independent counsels treat the nation's ultimate father figure with such irreverence. She complains that Clinton's weekly radio address \"is followed immediately by a Republican", "The First Amendment, in Tannen's view, has often become \"a pretext to justify the airing of just those views that make for the most entertaining fights.\" As an alternative, she offers Asian authoritarianism: \"Disputation was rejected in ancient China as 'incompatible with the decorum and harmony cultivated by the true sage.' \" Similarly, \"the minimal human unit in Japan is not the individual but the group.\" Instead of the American practice of having two guests debate policy questions on TV news programs, she suggests a Japanese format, which \"typically features a single guest.\" (Click to learn how she puts this into practice.)", "Given this oddly paternalistic (or maternalistic) diagnosis, it's not surprising that Tannen should wish to cover our ears, filtering out strife, deception, and debate. She assures us that all reasonable people can agree that disseminating birth control and sex education is the best way to reduce the abortion rate; that stiff sentences for small drug offenses don't reduce drug abuse; that global warming is producing \"disastrous consequences.\" Partial-birth abortion is \"surely not\" a \"very important\" issue, and Congress should not have let the Republican \"politics of obstruction\" defeat President Clinton's health care proposal in 1994, given the \"broad bipartisan and public consensus that it was desperately needed.\" The \"view of government as the enemy\" isn't worth debating; it's just \"another troubling aspect of the argument culture.\" Indeed, Tannen embraces a colleague's claim that \"right-wing talk radio\" deploys phrases \"similar to verbal manipulations employed by propagandists in the Nazi era.\"", "Likewise, Tannen recalls the trial of a Canadian man who had denied the Holocaust. The defendant's lawyer interrogated concentration camp survivors, asking whether they had seen their parents gassed. The adversarial system permitted such questions to be asked and answered--admittedly a vexatious experience for the survivors but one that does entail an airing of the facts of the Holocaust. Tannen, however, treats it only as a display of the \"cruelty of cross-examination.\" She raises no objection to the Canadian hate-speech ban under which the defendant was prosecuted. Would Tannen argue that the United States should adopt such a law, along with, say, a ban on the cross-examination of accusers? If so, she'd be wrong. But hey, so far, it's still a free country.", "Tannen even wants to protect us from the possibility of unpleasant confrontations in the courtroom. \"The purpose of most cross-examinations\" is \"not to establish facts but to discredit the witness,\" she asserts,", "Tannen doesn't trust in the power of good argumentation to keep society honest, much less correct itself, because she rather shockingly insists \"\" that people can distinguish lies from the truth. Nor does she trust our competence to manage unfettered communication: \"E-mail makes it too easy to forward messages, too easy to reply before your temper cools, too easy to broadcast messages to large numbers of people without thinking about how every sentence will strike every recipient.\" Lexis-Nexis is an equally unwelcome troublemaker: \"Technology also exacerbates the culture of critique by making it much easier for politicians or journalists to ferret out inconsistencies in a public person's statements over time.\"", "Tannen's main mistake is failing to appreciate the difference between two distinct social spheres: the sphere of snuggle and the sphere of struggle. Some people--say, your spouse or your kids--you should snuggle with. Others--say, Saddam Hussein--you shouldn't. Tannen's antagonism toward antagonism makes sense in the former case but not in the latter. Among her illustrations of belligerence are William Safire's \"kick 'em when they're up\" philosophy of journalism and the media's use of war metaphors to describe Alan Greenspan's policies against inflation. To which one might sensibly reply: Good for Greenspan and Safire--and for us. The Federal Reserve's war on inflation and the press corps' scrutiny of powerful people safeguard the country. Some things are worth fighting for, and some things are worth fighting.", "\"When there is a need to make others wrong,\" Tannen argues, \"the temptation is great to oversimplify\" and to \"seize upon the weakest examples, ignore facts that support your opponent's views, and focus only on those that support yours.\" In her need to make the \"argument culture\" wrong, she succumbs to these temptations. She blames the mainstream press, not just the paparazzi , for torturing Princess Diana and driving Adm. Mike Boorda to suicide. She compares to the propaganda of \"totalitarian countries\" (because falsehoods are spread) and to the dehumanization involved in \"ethnically motivated assaults\" (because reporters hound politicians). She blames communications technology for obscene and threatening phone calls made by former university President Richard Berendzen and former Judge Sol Wachtler.", "in the words of Arkansas journalist Gene Lyons, \"the result of the nastiest and most successful political 'dirty tricks' campaign in recent American history.\" Is Tannen a Clinton apologist? She rules that criticism out of bounds. \"The very fact that", "We Do Understand \n\n \"This is not another book about civility,\" Deborah Tannen promises in the first sentence of The Argument Culture . \"Civility,\" she explains, suggests a \"veneer of politeness spread thin over human relations like a layer of marmalade over toast.\" Instead, Tannen has written something less: a book about other books about civility. Quoting from Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, political scientist Larry Sabato, and others who have studied the rise of belligerence in politics, journalism, and law, Tannen spreads their insights thin over all human relations, painting a general theory of discord. The whole is less perceptive than its parts and more pernicious.", "In her previous books-- That's Not What I Meant! (1986), You Just Don't Understand (1990), and Talking From 9 to 5 (1994)--Tannen carved out a niche as the nation's pre-eminent intergender translator and couples counselor. A professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, she transformed the comparative study of male and female conversational patterns from a linguistic subdiscipline into a self-help movement. Until recently, though, Tannen confined her analysis to conversations among dysfunctional individuals. (For an illustration, click .) But in The Argument Culture , she takes her movement one step further, peddling the elixir of mutual understanding as a remedy for the whole damned dysfunctional country. This is necessary, she argues, because \"contentious public discourse\" not only poisons the political atmosphere, it also risks infecting our most intimate relationships.", "If you portray everything as a scandal, no one will care when something really is scandalous. \n\n All this is sage advice--for couples, for families, for bosses and employees, maybe even for book reviewers. But when she applies her precepts to our great national conversation, Tannen gets confused. She conflates belligerence, divisiveness, polarization, titillation, jealousy, incivility, aloofness, ruthlessness, cruelty, savagery, contempt, glibness, cynicism, anomie, partisanship, obstructionism, and gridlock. She makes culprits out of answering machines, electronic mail, campaign money, malpractice litigation, HMOs, corporate takeovers, and the demise of house calls by the family doctor.", "Instead of the American system, Tannen proposes consideration of the French and German systems. Under French law, after Princess Diana's death: \n\n The photographers were held for two days without charges being filed and without being allowed to confer with lawyers. ... The judges do most of the questioning; though lawyers can also ask questions, they cannot cross-examine witnesses. Guilt ... need not be established 'beyond a reasonable doubt' but simply by ... the judge's intimate belief, or deeply held sense, of what happened.", "If you missed the links within the review, click to read: 1) an illustration of ; 2) Tannen's that American journalism is just like propaganda from totalitarian regimes, plus William Saletan's disclosure that \"several of these propagandists now infest Slate \"; 3) the for her contention that there is no evidence that people can distinguish lies from truth; 4) and an example of how Tannen from a one-guest format on TV and radio talk shows.", "Vigilance and combat are particularly essential to law enforcement and foreign policy, which must deal with thugs and tyrants, not thoughtless husbands. Tannen laments that cops and soldiers have been \"trained to overcome their resistance to kill\" by trying \"not to think of their opponents as human beings.\" She neglects to mention that our safety depends on the ability of these officers to kill their adversaries. Comparing Vietnam to World War II, Tannen focuses strictly on the soldiers' social experience. In World War II, she observes, they trained, served, and went home together. \"Vietnam, in contrast, was a 'lonely war' of individuals assigned to constantly shifting units for year-long tours of duty.\" She ignores the more important difference: In World War II, they were fighting Hitler.", "Tannen, like some grandmotherly creature from an Aesop fable, admonishes us to recognize what is good in the work of others, and it is only fair to extend her the same courtesy. Here's what's worth gleaning from her book: \n\n Don't just quarrel; listen and learn. \n\n Don't nit-pick other people's ideas; build your own. \n\n Don't argue for the sake of arguing. \n\n Truth and courage often lie in the middle, not the extremes. \n\n Many issues are multisided. \n\n Focus on the substance of debates, not on strategy, theater, or the opponents' personal flaws. \n\n Don't fight over small issues. \n\n Don't obstruct good ideas just so you can win.", "response,\" which \"weakens the public's ability to see leaders as leaders.\" A reporter's skeptical question to Clinton \"broke the spell\" of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's remarks upon being nominated to the Supreme Court, thereby injuring citizens' \"sense of connection\" to", "\"our judicial system.\" The investigation of former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy was excessive, the campaign against former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders was \"cruelly unfair,\" and the Whitewater investigation--led by \"a prominent Republican known for his animosity toward the president\"--is,", "as though the two objectives were unrelated. Thus, \"the adversary system ... is inhumane to the victims of cross-examination.\" She simply assumes the very thing the trial is supposed to prove and what cross-examination might disprove (if this is, in", "rape can appear to be consensual sex,\" she ignores the reverse implication--that it is easy to make consensual sex look like rape. She complains that when Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, \"Framing these hearings as a" ] ]
valid	20051	[ "Where was the turning point for inaugural speeches no longer revealing humility in the author’s view?", "What stages does the author describe the inaugural addresses going through over time?", "Which is a true thesis that the author presents in their piece?", "How is the topic of slavery treated in inaugural speeches?", "What is the author’s overall thesis about inaugural speeches?", "What is the most spoken about topic in inaugural speeches that were analyzed?", "How do the most recent speeches that were analyzed compare to the earlier speeches?", "What are the elements that the author seems most perplexed by in the inaugural speeches?", "What does the author think about inaugural speech writers compared with the delivering presidents?" ]	[ [ "After Wilson", "After Lincoln", "After Roosevelt", "After Washington" ], [ "Modesty, inspirational, executive portrayal", "Flaunting of executive power, modesty, inspiration", "Modesty, inspiration", "Modesty, executive portrayal, inspirational" ], [ "Presidents recycle sentiments from past speeches without crediting the original speaker", "Presidents do not treat the inaugural speech with enough sincerity", "Presidents rely on focus groups to direct the content of the speech", "Presidents have almost never written their own speeches" ], [ "It is not treated with proper gravity, and referred to only in terms of progress", "Is was mentioned 17 times in the Roosevelt address", "It is often referenced in inaugural speeches from the 1850s through the 1960s", "Its reference depends on the political party in power" ], [ "They are largely useless", "They present a snapshot of the views and beliefs of their time", "They are a cryptic way to interpret history", "They are the standard to hold the president accountable to" ], [ "Foreign wars", "Slavery", "Women's rights", "Taxes" ], [ "They are getting longer overall, but with less substance", "They contain less jargon than prior years", "They contain shorter sentences and try to unite people", "They are generally becoming more humble as time goes on" ], [ "The lack of coverage of taxes as a public issue", "The consistent use of one phrase through all of the inaugural speeches", "The increasing amount of words per sentence over time", "The lack of discussion of hot topics by presidents inaugurated during those eras" ], [ "The writers are considered to be just as important as the delivering president", "The writers are highly applauded", "The writers are cast aside as unimportant in the process", "The subject is not covered" ] ]	[ 2, 4, 1, 1, 2, 4, 3, 4, 4 ]	[ 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "The stance and style of the inaugurals seem to have gone through three phases. The first, lasting until Lincoln, was that of the modest, classic public servant. The second, lasting through William Howard Taft, was of the prosaic government executive. The third, in which we are still, is the phase of the assertive, theatrical leader-preacher. This classification is not waterproof. Theodore Roosevelt may belong in the third phase and Warren G. Harding-Calvin Coolidge-Herbert Hoover in the second. But the trend is clear. \n\n On picking up Washington's first inaugural, one is immediately struck by the modesty. He had just been elected unanimously by the Electoral College. He was more respected than any subsequent president has been at the time of his inauguration. And what does he say?", "[T]he magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies. \n\n None of his successors has made the point as forcefully as that. But echoes are to be found in almost every president for the next 68 years. (John Adams was an exception. He was apparently so envious of Washington that he spent a large part of his address spelling out his own excellent qualifications for the job.) That era ended with Lincoln. Subsequent inaugurals routinely contain protestations of humility, but they are perfunctory and do not sound sincere.", "In the third phase, the Inaugural Address metamorphosed from describing the government's policy to inspiring the public's behavior. Presidents recognized--or, at least, believed--that the country had problems they ought to deal with but could not manage by using the instruments of government alone. Thus, in his first inaugural, Woodrow Wilson said: \"At last a vision has been vouchsafed us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good, the debased and decadent with the sound and the vital. With this vision we approach new affairs.\" \n\n If the country is debased and decadent, the cure has to come from uplifting the people, not from acts of government. Similar diagnoses and prescriptions appear in later inaugurals.", "The antebellum modesty, while in part a reflection of the conventional etiquette of the time, may also have served a political objective: to alleviate the concerns of those who--in the early days of the republic--feared it might be transformed into a monarchy, and the president into a king. A little later, perhaps after 1820, a new worry arose. Would the power of the federal government be used to interfere with the \"peculiar domestic institution\" of the Southern states? The presidents' assurance of the limitation of their powers may have been intended to give comfort to those states. \n\n Lincoln faced a different situation. With the South already seceding, he could only \"preserve, protect and defend the Constitution\" by asserting the power of the federal government and his own power as chief executive. It was no time for modesty. Lincoln's successors inherited a federal government with much more authority--and more need to use it--than before the war, and they had less motivation to belittle themselves and their powers.", "Presidents derived their license to serve as leader-preacher from Theodore Roosevelt's remark that the presidency was \"a bully pulpit,\" a remark that did not appear in his Inaugural Address. The metaphor of the pulpit suggests not reading but oral and visual contact between the preacher and his flock. Radio and--even more--television made this possible on a national scale. A telltale sign of the leader-preacher inaugural is the use of the phrase, \"Let us ... \"--meaning, \"You do as I say.\" This expression appears occasionally throughout the history of inaugurals, but it has hit its stride in recent years. John F. Kennedy repeated it 16 times in his Inaugural Address, and Richard Nixon has it 22 times in his second one.", "The most disturbing aspect of the whole series of inaugurals is what is said and unsaid on the subject of race relations, which Arthur Schlesinger Jr. calls \"the supreme American problem.\" The words \"black,\" \"blacks,\" \"Negro,\" or \"race\" (as applied to blacks) do not appear at all until Rutherford Hayes, 1877. James Monroe asked in 1817, \"On whom has oppression fallen in any quarter of our Union? Who has been deprived of any right of person or property?\" These were rhetorical questions, intended to get the answer \"No one!\"--as if there were not millions of slaves in America.", "The change in literary style from classical to colloquial can be demonstrated by one statistic. In all the inaugurals from Washington through James Buchanan, the average number of words per sentence was 44. From Lincoln to Wilson it was 34, and since Wilson it has been 25. I do not consider this a deterioration (this article has an average of 17 words per sentence), but it does reflect the change in the size and character of the audience and in the means of communication. William Henry Harrison could talk about the governments of Athens, Rome, and the Helvetic Confederacy and expect his audience to know what he was talking about. That wouldn't be true today. But Harrison's audience would not have known what the Internet was.", "There is much more to ponder in these speeches than I have suggested here. There is much to be proud of, in what we have endured and achieved, in the peaceful transference of power, and in the reasonableness and moderation of the presidents we have elected. But there is also much humility to be learned. We look back with amazement at the ignorance and moral obtuseness revealed by what our past leaders have said and our past citizens believed. We should recognize that 50 or 100 years from now, readers will shake their heads at what we are saying and believing today. \n\n \n\n POSTSCRIPT: To read Herbert Stein's analysis of President Clinton's second Inaugural Address, click .", "Many an issue frets its hour on the inaugural stage and then is heard no more. That includes the Indians, the coastal fortifications, territorial expansion, the Isthmus Canal, civil-service reform, polygamy, and Prohibition. Some subjects that you expect to appear, don't. Hoover's inaugural, March 4, 1929, gives no hint of economic vulnerability. Roosevelt's second inaugural, Jan. 20, 1937, contains no reference to Hitler or to Germany. But what is most amazing, at least to a reader in 1997, is the silence of the inaugurals on the subject of women. The word \"women\" does not appear at all until Wilson's first inaugural, and it always appears as part of the phrase \"men and women,\" never as referring to any special concerns of women. Even Harding, the first president to be chosen in an election in which women voted nationally, does not remark on the uniqueness of the fact in his inaugural.", "Reading the Inaugurals \n\n President Clinton's Inaugural Address this month is the 53 rd in the series that began in 1789. All are worth a read--not just the highlights, such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR. They will give you a feeling of being there, not as an omniscient historian of 1997 looking back at 1837 or 1897 but as an ordinary citizen who shares--and is limited by--the information, the concerns, and the values of those times. (Thanks to Columbia University, all the addresses can be found on the Web.) \n\n Among all the past presidents and their speech writers there was only one literary genius: Lincoln. After 132 years, his second inaugural still brings tears to your eyes and chills your blood. None of the other inaugural addresses are in that league. But by and large they are dignified and intelligent speeches given by articulate men, each in touch with his times and aware that his inauguration was the most solemn occasion of his life.", "After World War II the subject came back to inaugural addresses, but in a weak and abstract form. That is true even of the presidents we think of as being most concerned with race relations in America--like Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton. Perhaps each thought he had made a sufficient statement by having a black woman--Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price, or Maya Angelou--perform at his ceremony. In Clinton's first inaugural, the only allusion to the race problem is in this sentence: \"From our revolution, the Civil War, to the Great Depression to the civil rights movement, our people have always mustered the determination to construct from these crises the pillars of our history.\" I recall this not to suggest that their concern was not deep and sincere, but only to indicate what is acceptable to say in a speech intended to appeal to the values shared by Americans.", "One subject that does get ample treatment is taxes. \"Taxes,\" or some equivalent word, appears in 43 of the 52 inaugural addresses to date. Coolidge said in 1925: \"The time is arriving when we can have further tax reduction. ... I am opposed to extremely high rates, because they produce little or no revenue, because they are bad for the country, and, finally, because they are wrong.\" Federal taxes were then about 3 percent of the gross domestic product. Ronald Reagan said essentially the same thing in 1981, when they were 20 percent.", "Presidents and their speech writers have mined their predecessors for memorable words and repeated them without attribution. Kennedy's trumpet call, \"Ask not what your country can do for you: Ask what you can do for your country,\" has an ironic history. In his inaugural, Harding, surely no model for Kennedy, had said, \"Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too little of government, and at the same time do for it too little.\" And even before he became president, in a speech in 1916, Harding had said, \"In the great fulfillment we must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the nation.\"", "to fade. William McKinley said in his first Inaugural Address, March 4, 1897, \"Lynchings must not be tolerated in a great and civilized country like the United States,\" but he said it without horror. Taft raised the subject of", "and in order to preserve the Union, should not be interfered with. But although generally unmentionable, the subject was boiling, and would boil over in 1861. After the Civil War, it is in the inaugurals of Hayes, James Garfield", "Before the Civil War the word \"slavery\" appears only in the Inaugural Address of Martin Van Buren, 1837, and Buchanan, 1857, and then only as something that, pursuant to the Constitution", "race relations in 1909 only to express satisfaction at the progress that had been made. And then the subject disappeared. FDR never mentioned it in any of his four inaugurals.", "(1881), and Benjamin Harrison (1889) that we find the most explicit and positive discussion of the need to convert into reality the rights and freedom granted to the \"freedmen\" on paper by the 13 th , 14 th , and", "15 th amendments. Garfield's was the strongest among these. (He had been a student at Williams College in the 1850s, 80 years before me, when the college had been a station on the underground railway.) But the subject then began" ], [ "The stance and style of the inaugurals seem to have gone through three phases. The first, lasting until Lincoln, was that of the modest, classic public servant. The second, lasting through William Howard Taft, was of the prosaic government executive. The third, in which we are still, is the phase of the assertive, theatrical leader-preacher. This classification is not waterproof. Theodore Roosevelt may belong in the third phase and Warren G. Harding-Calvin Coolidge-Herbert Hoover in the second. But the trend is clear. \n\n On picking up Washington's first inaugural, one is immediately struck by the modesty. He had just been elected unanimously by the Electoral College. He was more respected than any subsequent president has been at the time of his inauguration. And what does he say?", "In the third phase, the Inaugural Address metamorphosed from describing the government's policy to inspiring the public's behavior. Presidents recognized--or, at least, believed--that the country had problems they ought to deal with but could not manage by using the instruments of government alone. Thus, in his first inaugural, Woodrow Wilson said: \"At last a vision has been vouchsafed us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good, the debased and decadent with the sound and the vital. With this vision we approach new affairs.\" \n\n If the country is debased and decadent, the cure has to come from uplifting the people, not from acts of government. Similar diagnoses and prescriptions appear in later inaugurals.", "[T]he magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies. \n\n None of his successors has made the point as forcefully as that. But echoes are to be found in almost every president for the next 68 years. (John Adams was an exception. He was apparently so envious of Washington that he spent a large part of his address spelling out his own excellent qualifications for the job.) That era ended with Lincoln. Subsequent inaugurals routinely contain protestations of humility, but they are perfunctory and do not sound sincere.", "Many an issue frets its hour on the inaugural stage and then is heard no more. That includes the Indians, the coastal fortifications, territorial expansion, the Isthmus Canal, civil-service reform, polygamy, and Prohibition. Some subjects that you expect to appear, don't. Hoover's inaugural, March 4, 1929, gives no hint of economic vulnerability. Roosevelt's second inaugural, Jan. 20, 1937, contains no reference to Hitler or to Germany. But what is most amazing, at least to a reader in 1997, is the silence of the inaugurals on the subject of women. The word \"women\" does not appear at all until Wilson's first inaugural, and it always appears as part of the phrase \"men and women,\" never as referring to any special concerns of women. Even Harding, the first president to be chosen in an election in which women voted nationally, does not remark on the uniqueness of the fact in his inaugural.", "Presidents derived their license to serve as leader-preacher from Theodore Roosevelt's remark that the presidency was \"a bully pulpit,\" a remark that did not appear in his Inaugural Address. The metaphor of the pulpit suggests not reading but oral and visual contact between the preacher and his flock. Radio and--even more--television made this possible on a national scale. A telltale sign of the leader-preacher inaugural is the use of the phrase, \"Let us ... \"--meaning, \"You do as I say.\" This expression appears occasionally throughout the history of inaugurals, but it has hit its stride in recent years. John F. Kennedy repeated it 16 times in his Inaugural Address, and Richard Nixon has it 22 times in his second one.", "One subject that does get ample treatment is taxes. \"Taxes,\" or some equivalent word, appears in 43 of the 52 inaugural addresses to date. Coolidge said in 1925: \"The time is arriving when we can have further tax reduction. ... I am opposed to extremely high rates, because they produce little or no revenue, because they are bad for the country, and, finally, because they are wrong.\" Federal taxes were then about 3 percent of the gross domestic product. Ronald Reagan said essentially the same thing in 1981, when they were 20 percent.", "The change in literary style from classical to colloquial can be demonstrated by one statistic. In all the inaugurals from Washington through James Buchanan, the average number of words per sentence was 44. From Lincoln to Wilson it was 34, and since Wilson it has been 25. I do not consider this a deterioration (this article has an average of 17 words per sentence), but it does reflect the change in the size and character of the audience and in the means of communication. William Henry Harrison could talk about the governments of Athens, Rome, and the Helvetic Confederacy and expect his audience to know what he was talking about. That wouldn't be true today. But Harrison's audience would not have known what the Internet was.", "Reading the Inaugurals \n\n President Clinton's Inaugural Address this month is the 53 rd in the series that began in 1789. All are worth a read--not just the highlights, such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR. They will give you a feeling of being there, not as an omniscient historian of 1997 looking back at 1837 or 1897 but as an ordinary citizen who shares--and is limited by--the information, the concerns, and the values of those times. (Thanks to Columbia University, all the addresses can be found on the Web.) \n\n Among all the past presidents and their speech writers there was only one literary genius: Lincoln. After 132 years, his second inaugural still brings tears to your eyes and chills your blood. None of the other inaugural addresses are in that league. But by and large they are dignified and intelligent speeches given by articulate men, each in touch with his times and aware that his inauguration was the most solemn occasion of his life.", "The most disturbing aspect of the whole series of inaugurals is what is said and unsaid on the subject of race relations, which Arthur Schlesinger Jr. calls \"the supreme American problem.\" The words \"black,\" \"blacks,\" \"Negro,\" or \"race\" (as applied to blacks) do not appear at all until Rutherford Hayes, 1877. James Monroe asked in 1817, \"On whom has oppression fallen in any quarter of our Union? Who has been deprived of any right of person or property?\" These were rhetorical questions, intended to get the answer \"No one!\"--as if there were not millions of slaves in America.", "There is much more to ponder in these speeches than I have suggested here. There is much to be proud of, in what we have endured and achieved, in the peaceful transference of power, and in the reasonableness and moderation of the presidents we have elected. But there is also much humility to be learned. We look back with amazement at the ignorance and moral obtuseness revealed by what our past leaders have said and our past citizens believed. We should recognize that 50 or 100 years from now, readers will shake their heads at what we are saying and believing today. \n\n \n\n POSTSCRIPT: To read Herbert Stein's analysis of President Clinton's second Inaugural Address, click .", "After World War II the subject came back to inaugural addresses, but in a weak and abstract form. That is true even of the presidents we think of as being most concerned with race relations in America--like Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton. Perhaps each thought he had made a sufficient statement by having a black woman--Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price, or Maya Angelou--perform at his ceremony. In Clinton's first inaugural, the only allusion to the race problem is in this sentence: \"From our revolution, the Civil War, to the Great Depression to the civil rights movement, our people have always mustered the determination to construct from these crises the pillars of our history.\" I recall this not to suggest that their concern was not deep and sincere, but only to indicate what is acceptable to say in a speech intended to appeal to the values shared by Americans.", "to fade. William McKinley said in his first Inaugural Address, March 4, 1897, \"Lynchings must not be tolerated in a great and civilized country like the United States,\" but he said it without horror. Taft raised the subject of", "The antebellum modesty, while in part a reflection of the conventional etiquette of the time, may also have served a political objective: to alleviate the concerns of those who--in the early days of the republic--feared it might be transformed into a monarchy, and the president into a king. A little later, perhaps after 1820, a new worry arose. Would the power of the federal government be used to interfere with the \"peculiar domestic institution\" of the Southern states? The presidents' assurance of the limitation of their powers may have been intended to give comfort to those states. \n\n Lincoln faced a different situation. With the South already seceding, he could only \"preserve, protect and defend the Constitution\" by asserting the power of the federal government and his own power as chief executive. It was no time for modesty. Lincoln's successors inherited a federal government with much more authority--and more need to use it--than before the war, and they had less motivation to belittle themselves and their powers.", "Presidents and their speech writers have mined their predecessors for memorable words and repeated them without attribution. Kennedy's trumpet call, \"Ask not what your country can do for you: Ask what you can do for your country,\" has an ironic history. In his inaugural, Harding, surely no model for Kennedy, had said, \"Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too little of government, and at the same time do for it too little.\" And even before he became president, in a speech in 1916, Harding had said, \"In the great fulfillment we must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the nation.\"", "and in order to preserve the Union, should not be interfered with. But although generally unmentionable, the subject was boiling, and would boil over in 1861. After the Civil War, it is in the inaugurals of Hayes, James Garfield", "Before the Civil War the word \"slavery\" appears only in the Inaugural Address of Martin Van Buren, 1837, and Buchanan, 1857, and then only as something that, pursuant to the Constitution", "race relations in 1909 only to express satisfaction at the progress that had been made. And then the subject disappeared. FDR never mentioned it in any of his four inaugurals.", "(1881), and Benjamin Harrison (1889) that we find the most explicit and positive discussion of the need to convert into reality the rights and freedom granted to the \"freedmen\" on paper by the 13 th , 14 th , and", "15 th amendments. Garfield's was the strongest among these. (He had been a student at Williams College in the 1850s, 80 years before me, when the college had been a station on the underground railway.) But the subject then began" ], [ "The stance and style of the inaugurals seem to have gone through three phases. The first, lasting until Lincoln, was that of the modest, classic public servant. The second, lasting through William Howard Taft, was of the prosaic government executive. The third, in which we are still, is the phase of the assertive, theatrical leader-preacher. This classification is not waterproof. Theodore Roosevelt may belong in the third phase and Warren G. Harding-Calvin Coolidge-Herbert Hoover in the second. But the trend is clear. \n\n On picking up Washington's first inaugural, one is immediately struck by the modesty. He had just been elected unanimously by the Electoral College. He was more respected than any subsequent president has been at the time of his inauguration. And what does he say?", "[T]he magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies. \n\n None of his successors has made the point as forcefully as that. But echoes are to be found in almost every president for the next 68 years. (John Adams was an exception. He was apparently so envious of Washington that he spent a large part of his address spelling out his own excellent qualifications for the job.) That era ended with Lincoln. Subsequent inaugurals routinely contain protestations of humility, but they are perfunctory and do not sound sincere.", "One subject that does get ample treatment is taxes. \"Taxes,\" or some equivalent word, appears in 43 of the 52 inaugural addresses to date. Coolidge said in 1925: \"The time is arriving when we can have further tax reduction. ... I am opposed to extremely high rates, because they produce little or no revenue, because they are bad for the country, and, finally, because they are wrong.\" Federal taxes were then about 3 percent of the gross domestic product. Ronald Reagan said essentially the same thing in 1981, when they were 20 percent.", "After World War II the subject came back to inaugural addresses, but in a weak and abstract form. That is true even of the presidents we think of as being most concerned with race relations in America--like Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton. Perhaps each thought he had made a sufficient statement by having a black woman--Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price, or Maya Angelou--perform at his ceremony. In Clinton's first inaugural, the only allusion to the race problem is in this sentence: \"From our revolution, the Civil War, to the Great Depression to the civil rights movement, our people have always mustered the determination to construct from these crises the pillars of our history.\" I recall this not to suggest that their concern was not deep and sincere, but only to indicate what is acceptable to say in a speech intended to appeal to the values shared by Americans.", "The change in literary style from classical to colloquial can be demonstrated by one statistic. In all the inaugurals from Washington through James Buchanan, the average number of words per sentence was 44. From Lincoln to Wilson it was 34, and since Wilson it has been 25. I do not consider this a deterioration (this article has an average of 17 words per sentence), but it does reflect the change in the size and character of the audience and in the means of communication. William Henry Harrison could talk about the governments of Athens, Rome, and the Helvetic Confederacy and expect his audience to know what he was talking about. That wouldn't be true today. But Harrison's audience would not have known what the Internet was.", "In the third phase, the Inaugural Address metamorphosed from describing the government's policy to inspiring the public's behavior. Presidents recognized--or, at least, believed--that the country had problems they ought to deal with but could not manage by using the instruments of government alone. Thus, in his first inaugural, Woodrow Wilson said: \"At last a vision has been vouchsafed us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good, the debased and decadent with the sound and the vital. With this vision we approach new affairs.\" \n\n If the country is debased and decadent, the cure has to come from uplifting the people, not from acts of government. Similar diagnoses and prescriptions appear in later inaugurals.", "Presidents derived their license to serve as leader-preacher from Theodore Roosevelt's remark that the presidency was \"a bully pulpit,\" a remark that did not appear in his Inaugural Address. The metaphor of the pulpit suggests not reading but oral and visual contact between the preacher and his flock. Radio and--even more--television made this possible on a national scale. A telltale sign of the leader-preacher inaugural is the use of the phrase, \"Let us ... \"--meaning, \"You do as I say.\" This expression appears occasionally throughout the history of inaugurals, but it has hit its stride in recent years. John F. Kennedy repeated it 16 times in his Inaugural Address, and Richard Nixon has it 22 times in his second one.", "Many an issue frets its hour on the inaugural stage and then is heard no more. That includes the Indians, the coastal fortifications, territorial expansion, the Isthmus Canal, civil-service reform, polygamy, and Prohibition. Some subjects that you expect to appear, don't. Hoover's inaugural, March 4, 1929, gives no hint of economic vulnerability. Roosevelt's second inaugural, Jan. 20, 1937, contains no reference to Hitler or to Germany. But what is most amazing, at least to a reader in 1997, is the silence of the inaugurals on the subject of women. The word \"women\" does not appear at all until Wilson's first inaugural, and it always appears as part of the phrase \"men and women,\" never as referring to any special concerns of women. Even Harding, the first president to be chosen in an election in which women voted nationally, does not remark on the uniqueness of the fact in his inaugural.", "Presidents and their speech writers have mined their predecessors for memorable words and repeated them without attribution. Kennedy's trumpet call, \"Ask not what your country can do for you: Ask what you can do for your country,\" has an ironic history. In his inaugural, Harding, surely no model for Kennedy, had said, \"Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too little of government, and at the same time do for it too little.\" And even before he became president, in a speech in 1916, Harding had said, \"In the great fulfillment we must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the nation.\"", "The most disturbing aspect of the whole series of inaugurals is what is said and unsaid on the subject of race relations, which Arthur Schlesinger Jr. calls \"the supreme American problem.\" The words \"black,\" \"blacks,\" \"Negro,\" or \"race\" (as applied to blacks) do not appear at all until Rutherford Hayes, 1877. James Monroe asked in 1817, \"On whom has oppression fallen in any quarter of our Union? Who has been deprived of any right of person or property?\" These were rhetorical questions, intended to get the answer \"No one!\"--as if there were not millions of slaves in America.", "Reading the Inaugurals \n\n President Clinton's Inaugural Address this month is the 53 rd in the series that began in 1789. All are worth a read--not just the highlights, such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR. They will give you a feeling of being there, not as an omniscient historian of 1997 looking back at 1837 or 1897 but as an ordinary citizen who shares--and is limited by--the information, the concerns, and the values of those times. (Thanks to Columbia University, all the addresses can be found on the Web.) \n\n Among all the past presidents and their speech writers there was only one literary genius: Lincoln. After 132 years, his second inaugural still brings tears to your eyes and chills your blood. None of the other inaugural addresses are in that league. But by and large they are dignified and intelligent speeches given by articulate men, each in touch with his times and aware that his inauguration was the most solemn occasion of his life.", "The antebellum modesty, while in part a reflection of the conventional etiquette of the time, may also have served a political objective: to alleviate the concerns of those who--in the early days of the republic--feared it might be transformed into a monarchy, and the president into a king. A little later, perhaps after 1820, a new worry arose. Would the power of the federal government be used to interfere with the \"peculiar domestic institution\" of the Southern states? The presidents' assurance of the limitation of their powers may have been intended to give comfort to those states. \n\n Lincoln faced a different situation. With the South already seceding, he could only \"preserve, protect and defend the Constitution\" by asserting the power of the federal government and his own power as chief executive. It was no time for modesty. Lincoln's successors inherited a federal government with much more authority--and more need to use it--than before the war, and they had less motivation to belittle themselves and their powers.", "There is much more to ponder in these speeches than I have suggested here. There is much to be proud of, in what we have endured and achieved, in the peaceful transference of power, and in the reasonableness and moderation of the presidents we have elected. But there is also much humility to be learned. We look back with amazement at the ignorance and moral obtuseness revealed by what our past leaders have said and our past citizens believed. We should recognize that 50 or 100 years from now, readers will shake their heads at what we are saying and believing today. \n\n \n\n POSTSCRIPT: To read Herbert Stein's analysis of President Clinton's second Inaugural Address, click .", "to fade. William McKinley said in his first Inaugural Address, March 4, 1897, \"Lynchings must not be tolerated in a great and civilized country like the United States,\" but he said it without horror. Taft raised the subject of", "15 th amendments. Garfield's was the strongest among these. (He had been a student at Williams College in the 1850s, 80 years before me, when the college had been a station on the underground railway.) But the subject then began", "and in order to preserve the Union, should not be interfered with. But although generally unmentionable, the subject was boiling, and would boil over in 1861. After the Civil War, it is in the inaugurals of Hayes, James Garfield", "(1881), and Benjamin Harrison (1889) that we find the most explicit and positive discussion of the need to convert into reality the rights and freedom granted to the \"freedmen\" on paper by the 13 th , 14 th , and", "Before the Civil War the word \"slavery\" appears only in the Inaugural Address of Martin Van Buren, 1837, and Buchanan, 1857, and then only as something that, pursuant to the Constitution", "race relations in 1909 only to express satisfaction at the progress that had been made. And then the subject disappeared. FDR never mentioned it in any of his four inaugurals." ], [ "The most disturbing aspect of the whole series of inaugurals is what is said and unsaid on the subject of race relations, which Arthur Schlesinger Jr. calls \"the supreme American problem.\" The words \"black,\" \"blacks,\" \"Negro,\" or \"race\" (as applied to blacks) do not appear at all until Rutherford Hayes, 1877. James Monroe asked in 1817, \"On whom has oppression fallen in any quarter of our Union? Who has been deprived of any right of person or property?\" These were rhetorical questions, intended to get the answer \"No one!\"--as if there were not millions of slaves in America.", "Before the Civil War the word \"slavery\" appears only in the Inaugural Address of Martin Van Buren, 1837, and Buchanan, 1857, and then only as something that, pursuant to the Constitution", "Many an issue frets its hour on the inaugural stage and then is heard no more. That includes the Indians, the coastal fortifications, territorial expansion, the Isthmus Canal, civil-service reform, polygamy, and Prohibition. Some subjects that you expect to appear, don't. Hoover's inaugural, March 4, 1929, gives no hint of economic vulnerability. Roosevelt's second inaugural, Jan. 20, 1937, contains no reference to Hitler or to Germany. But what is most amazing, at least to a reader in 1997, is the silence of the inaugurals on the subject of women. The word \"women\" does not appear at all until Wilson's first inaugural, and it always appears as part of the phrase \"men and women,\" never as referring to any special concerns of women. Even Harding, the first president to be chosen in an election in which women voted nationally, does not remark on the uniqueness of the fact in his inaugural.", "After World War II the subject came back to inaugural addresses, but in a weak and abstract form. That is true even of the presidents we think of as being most concerned with race relations in America--like Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton. Perhaps each thought he had made a sufficient statement by having a black woman--Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price, or Maya Angelou--perform at his ceremony. In Clinton's first inaugural, the only allusion to the race problem is in this sentence: \"From our revolution, the Civil War, to the Great Depression to the civil rights movement, our people have always mustered the determination to construct from these crises the pillars of our history.\" I recall this not to suggest that their concern was not deep and sincere, but only to indicate what is acceptable to say in a speech intended to appeal to the values shared by Americans.", "One subject that does get ample treatment is taxes. \"Taxes,\" or some equivalent word, appears in 43 of the 52 inaugural addresses to date. Coolidge said in 1925: \"The time is arriving when we can have further tax reduction. ... I am opposed to extremely high rates, because they produce little or no revenue, because they are bad for the country, and, finally, because they are wrong.\" Federal taxes were then about 3 percent of the gross domestic product. Ronald Reagan said essentially the same thing in 1981, when they were 20 percent.", "and in order to preserve the Union, should not be interfered with. But although generally unmentionable, the subject was boiling, and would boil over in 1861. After the Civil War, it is in the inaugurals of Hayes, James Garfield", "The stance and style of the inaugurals seem to have gone through three phases. The first, lasting until Lincoln, was that of the modest, classic public servant. The second, lasting through William Howard Taft, was of the prosaic government executive. The third, in which we are still, is the phase of the assertive, theatrical leader-preacher. This classification is not waterproof. Theodore Roosevelt may belong in the third phase and Warren G. Harding-Calvin Coolidge-Herbert Hoover in the second. But the trend is clear. \n\n On picking up Washington's first inaugural, one is immediately struck by the modesty. He had just been elected unanimously by the Electoral College. He was more respected than any subsequent president has been at the time of his inauguration. And what does he say?", "Reading the Inaugurals \n\n President Clinton's Inaugural Address this month is the 53 rd in the series that began in 1789. All are worth a read--not just the highlights, such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR. They will give you a feeling of being there, not as an omniscient historian of 1997 looking back at 1837 or 1897 but as an ordinary citizen who shares--and is limited by--the information, the concerns, and the values of those times. (Thanks to Columbia University, all the addresses can be found on the Web.) \n\n Among all the past presidents and their speech writers there was only one literary genius: Lincoln. After 132 years, his second inaugural still brings tears to your eyes and chills your blood. None of the other inaugural addresses are in that league. But by and large they are dignified and intelligent speeches given by articulate men, each in touch with his times and aware that his inauguration was the most solemn occasion of his life.", "[T]he magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies. \n\n None of his successors has made the point as forcefully as that. But echoes are to be found in almost every president for the next 68 years. (John Adams was an exception. He was apparently so envious of Washington that he spent a large part of his address spelling out his own excellent qualifications for the job.) That era ended with Lincoln. Subsequent inaugurals routinely contain protestations of humility, but they are perfunctory and do not sound sincere.", "There is much more to ponder in these speeches than I have suggested here. There is much to be proud of, in what we have endured and achieved, in the peaceful transference of power, and in the reasonableness and moderation of the presidents we have elected. But there is also much humility to be learned. We look back with amazement at the ignorance and moral obtuseness revealed by what our past leaders have said and our past citizens believed. We should recognize that 50 or 100 years from now, readers will shake their heads at what we are saying and believing today. \n\n \n\n POSTSCRIPT: To read Herbert Stein's analysis of President Clinton's second Inaugural Address, click .", "In the third phase, the Inaugural Address metamorphosed from describing the government's policy to inspiring the public's behavior. Presidents recognized--or, at least, believed--that the country had problems they ought to deal with but could not manage by using the instruments of government alone. Thus, in his first inaugural, Woodrow Wilson said: \"At last a vision has been vouchsafed us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good, the debased and decadent with the sound and the vital. With this vision we approach new affairs.\" \n\n If the country is debased and decadent, the cure has to come from uplifting the people, not from acts of government. Similar diagnoses and prescriptions appear in later inaugurals.", "to fade. William McKinley said in his first Inaugural Address, March 4, 1897, \"Lynchings must not be tolerated in a great and civilized country like the United States,\" but he said it without horror. Taft raised the subject of", "Presidents derived their license to serve as leader-preacher from Theodore Roosevelt's remark that the presidency was \"a bully pulpit,\" a remark that did not appear in his Inaugural Address. The metaphor of the pulpit suggests not reading but oral and visual contact between the preacher and his flock. Radio and--even more--television made this possible on a national scale. A telltale sign of the leader-preacher inaugural is the use of the phrase, \"Let us ... \"--meaning, \"You do as I say.\" This expression appears occasionally throughout the history of inaugurals, but it has hit its stride in recent years. John F. Kennedy repeated it 16 times in his Inaugural Address, and Richard Nixon has it 22 times in his second one.", "race relations in 1909 only to express satisfaction at the progress that had been made. And then the subject disappeared. FDR never mentioned it in any of his four inaugurals.", "The change in literary style from classical to colloquial can be demonstrated by one statistic. In all the inaugurals from Washington through James Buchanan, the average number of words per sentence was 44. From Lincoln to Wilson it was 34, and since Wilson it has been 25. I do not consider this a deterioration (this article has an average of 17 words per sentence), but it does reflect the change in the size and character of the audience and in the means of communication. William Henry Harrison could talk about the governments of Athens, Rome, and the Helvetic Confederacy and expect his audience to know what he was talking about. That wouldn't be true today. But Harrison's audience would not have known what the Internet was.", "Presidents and their speech writers have mined their predecessors for memorable words and repeated them without attribution. Kennedy's trumpet call, \"Ask not what your country can do for you: Ask what you can do for your country,\" has an ironic history. In his inaugural, Harding, surely no model for Kennedy, had said, \"Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too little of government, and at the same time do for it too little.\" And even before he became president, in a speech in 1916, Harding had said, \"In the great fulfillment we must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the nation.\"", "The antebellum modesty, while in part a reflection of the conventional etiquette of the time, may also have served a political objective: to alleviate the concerns of those who--in the early days of the republic--feared it might be transformed into a monarchy, and the president into a king. A little later, perhaps after 1820, a new worry arose. Would the power of the federal government be used to interfere with the \"peculiar domestic institution\" of the Southern states? The presidents' assurance of the limitation of their powers may have been intended to give comfort to those states. \n\n Lincoln faced a different situation. With the South already seceding, he could only \"preserve, protect and defend the Constitution\" by asserting the power of the federal government and his own power as chief executive. It was no time for modesty. Lincoln's successors inherited a federal government with much more authority--and more need to use it--than before the war, and they had less motivation to belittle themselves and their powers.", "(1881), and Benjamin Harrison (1889) that we find the most explicit and positive discussion of the need to convert into reality the rights and freedom granted to the \"freedmen\" on paper by the 13 th , 14 th , and", "15 th amendments. Garfield's was the strongest among these. (He had been a student at Williams College in the 1850s, 80 years before me, when the college had been a station on the underground railway.) But the subject then began" ], [ "The stance and style of the inaugurals seem to have gone through three phases. The first, lasting until Lincoln, was that of the modest, classic public servant. The second, lasting through William Howard Taft, was of the prosaic government executive. The third, in which we are still, is the phase of the assertive, theatrical leader-preacher. This classification is not waterproof. Theodore Roosevelt may belong in the third phase and Warren G. Harding-Calvin Coolidge-Herbert Hoover in the second. But the trend is clear. \n\n On picking up Washington's first inaugural, one is immediately struck by the modesty. He had just been elected unanimously by the Electoral College. He was more respected than any subsequent president has been at the time of his inauguration. And what does he say?", "Presidents derived their license to serve as leader-preacher from Theodore Roosevelt's remark that the presidency was \"a bully pulpit,\" a remark that did not appear in his Inaugural Address. The metaphor of the pulpit suggests not reading but oral and visual contact between the preacher and his flock. Radio and--even more--television made this possible on a national scale. A telltale sign of the leader-preacher inaugural is the use of the phrase, \"Let us ... \"--meaning, \"You do as I say.\" This expression appears occasionally throughout the history of inaugurals, but it has hit its stride in recent years. John F. Kennedy repeated it 16 times in his Inaugural Address, and Richard Nixon has it 22 times in his second one.", "Reading the Inaugurals \n\n President Clinton's Inaugural Address this month is the 53 rd in the series that began in 1789. All are worth a read--not just the highlights, such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR. They will give you a feeling of being there, not as an omniscient historian of 1997 looking back at 1837 or 1897 but as an ordinary citizen who shares--and is limited by--the information, the concerns, and the values of those times. (Thanks to Columbia University, all the addresses can be found on the Web.) \n\n Among all the past presidents and their speech writers there was only one literary genius: Lincoln. After 132 years, his second inaugural still brings tears to your eyes and chills your blood. None of the other inaugural addresses are in that league. But by and large they are dignified and intelligent speeches given by articulate men, each in touch with his times and aware that his inauguration was the most solemn occasion of his life.", "In the third phase, the Inaugural Address metamorphosed from describing the government's policy to inspiring the public's behavior. Presidents recognized--or, at least, believed--that the country had problems they ought to deal with but could not manage by using the instruments of government alone. Thus, in his first inaugural, Woodrow Wilson said: \"At last a vision has been vouchsafed us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good, the debased and decadent with the sound and the vital. With this vision we approach new affairs.\" \n\n If the country is debased and decadent, the cure has to come from uplifting the people, not from acts of government. Similar diagnoses and prescriptions appear in later inaugurals.", "[T]he magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies. \n\n None of his successors has made the point as forcefully as that. But echoes are to be found in almost every president for the next 68 years. (John Adams was an exception. He was apparently so envious of Washington that he spent a large part of his address spelling out his own excellent qualifications for the job.) That era ended with Lincoln. Subsequent inaugurals routinely contain protestations of humility, but they are perfunctory and do not sound sincere.", "The most disturbing aspect of the whole series of inaugurals is what is said and unsaid on the subject of race relations, which Arthur Schlesinger Jr. calls \"the supreme American problem.\" The words \"black,\" \"blacks,\" \"Negro,\" or \"race\" (as applied to blacks) do not appear at all until Rutherford Hayes, 1877. James Monroe asked in 1817, \"On whom has oppression fallen in any quarter of our Union? Who has been deprived of any right of person or property?\" These were rhetorical questions, intended to get the answer \"No one!\"--as if there were not millions of slaves in America.", "One subject that does get ample treatment is taxes. \"Taxes,\" or some equivalent word, appears in 43 of the 52 inaugural addresses to date. Coolidge said in 1925: \"The time is arriving when we can have further tax reduction. ... I am opposed to extremely high rates, because they produce little or no revenue, because they are bad for the country, and, finally, because they are wrong.\" Federal taxes were then about 3 percent of the gross domestic product. Ronald Reagan said essentially the same thing in 1981, when they were 20 percent.", "There is much more to ponder in these speeches than I have suggested here. There is much to be proud of, in what we have endured and achieved, in the peaceful transference of power, and in the reasonableness and moderation of the presidents we have elected. But there is also much humility to be learned. We look back with amazement at the ignorance and moral obtuseness revealed by what our past leaders have said and our past citizens believed. We should recognize that 50 or 100 years from now, readers will shake their heads at what we are saying and believing today. \n\n \n\n POSTSCRIPT: To read Herbert Stein's analysis of President Clinton's second Inaugural Address, click .", "Many an issue frets its hour on the inaugural stage and then is heard no more. That includes the Indians, the coastal fortifications, territorial expansion, the Isthmus Canal, civil-service reform, polygamy, and Prohibition. Some subjects that you expect to appear, don't. Hoover's inaugural, March 4, 1929, gives no hint of economic vulnerability. Roosevelt's second inaugural, Jan. 20, 1937, contains no reference to Hitler or to Germany. But what is most amazing, at least to a reader in 1997, is the silence of the inaugurals on the subject of women. The word \"women\" does not appear at all until Wilson's first inaugural, and it always appears as part of the phrase \"men and women,\" never as referring to any special concerns of women. Even Harding, the first president to be chosen in an election in which women voted nationally, does not remark on the uniqueness of the fact in his inaugural.", "After World War II the subject came back to inaugural addresses, but in a weak and abstract form. That is true even of the presidents we think of as being most concerned with race relations in America--like Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton. Perhaps each thought he had made a sufficient statement by having a black woman--Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price, or Maya Angelou--perform at his ceremony. In Clinton's first inaugural, the only allusion to the race problem is in this sentence: \"From our revolution, the Civil War, to the Great Depression to the civil rights movement, our people have always mustered the determination to construct from these crises the pillars of our history.\" I recall this not to suggest that their concern was not deep and sincere, but only to indicate what is acceptable to say in a speech intended to appeal to the values shared by Americans.", "The change in literary style from classical to colloquial can be demonstrated by one statistic. In all the inaugurals from Washington through James Buchanan, the average number of words per sentence was 44. From Lincoln to Wilson it was 34, and since Wilson it has been 25. I do not consider this a deterioration (this article has an average of 17 words per sentence), but it does reflect the change in the size and character of the audience and in the means of communication. William Henry Harrison could talk about the governments of Athens, Rome, and the Helvetic Confederacy and expect his audience to know what he was talking about. That wouldn't be true today. But Harrison's audience would not have known what the Internet was.", "Presidents and their speech writers have mined their predecessors for memorable words and repeated them without attribution. Kennedy's trumpet call, \"Ask not what your country can do for you: Ask what you can do for your country,\" has an ironic history. In his inaugural, Harding, surely no model for Kennedy, had said, \"Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too little of government, and at the same time do for it too little.\" And even before he became president, in a speech in 1916, Harding had said, \"In the great fulfillment we must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the nation.\"", "and in order to preserve the Union, should not be interfered with. But although generally unmentionable, the subject was boiling, and would boil over in 1861. After the Civil War, it is in the inaugurals of Hayes, James Garfield", "The antebellum modesty, while in part a reflection of the conventional etiquette of the time, may also have served a political objective: to alleviate the concerns of those who--in the early days of the republic--feared it might be transformed into a monarchy, and the president into a king. A little later, perhaps after 1820, a new worry arose. Would the power of the federal government be used to interfere with the \"peculiar domestic institution\" of the Southern states? The presidents' assurance of the limitation of their powers may have been intended to give comfort to those states. \n\n Lincoln faced a different situation. With the South already seceding, he could only \"preserve, protect and defend the Constitution\" by asserting the power of the federal government and his own power as chief executive. It was no time for modesty. Lincoln's successors inherited a federal government with much more authority--and more need to use it--than before the war, and they had less motivation to belittle themselves and their powers.", "to fade. William McKinley said in his first Inaugural Address, March 4, 1897, \"Lynchings must not be tolerated in a great and civilized country like the United States,\" but he said it without horror. Taft raised the subject of", "Before the Civil War the word \"slavery\" appears only in the Inaugural Address of Martin Van Buren, 1837, and Buchanan, 1857, and then only as something that, pursuant to the Constitution", "race relations in 1909 only to express satisfaction at the progress that had been made. And then the subject disappeared. FDR never mentioned it in any of his four inaugurals.", "(1881), and Benjamin Harrison (1889) that we find the most explicit and positive discussion of the need to convert into reality the rights and freedom granted to the \"freedmen\" on paper by the 13 th , 14 th , and", "15 th amendments. Garfield's was the strongest among these. (He had been a student at Williams College in the 1850s, 80 years before me, when the college had been a station on the underground railway.) But the subject then began" ], [ "One subject that does get ample treatment is taxes. \"Taxes,\" or some equivalent word, appears in 43 of the 52 inaugural addresses to date. Coolidge said in 1925: \"The time is arriving when we can have further tax reduction. ... I am opposed to extremely high rates, because they produce little or no revenue, because they are bad for the country, and, finally, because they are wrong.\" Federal taxes were then about 3 percent of the gross domestic product. Ronald Reagan said essentially the same thing in 1981, when they were 20 percent.", "Many an issue frets its hour on the inaugural stage and then is heard no more. That includes the Indians, the coastal fortifications, territorial expansion, the Isthmus Canal, civil-service reform, polygamy, and Prohibition. Some subjects that you expect to appear, don't. Hoover's inaugural, March 4, 1929, gives no hint of economic vulnerability. Roosevelt's second inaugural, Jan. 20, 1937, contains no reference to Hitler or to Germany. But what is most amazing, at least to a reader in 1997, is the silence of the inaugurals on the subject of women. The word \"women\" does not appear at all until Wilson's first inaugural, and it always appears as part of the phrase \"men and women,\" never as referring to any special concerns of women. Even Harding, the first president to be chosen in an election in which women voted nationally, does not remark on the uniqueness of the fact in his inaugural.", "The most disturbing aspect of the whole series of inaugurals is what is said and unsaid on the subject of race relations, which Arthur Schlesinger Jr. calls \"the supreme American problem.\" The words \"black,\" \"blacks,\" \"Negro,\" or \"race\" (as applied to blacks) do not appear at all until Rutherford Hayes, 1877. James Monroe asked in 1817, \"On whom has oppression fallen in any quarter of our Union? Who has been deprived of any right of person or property?\" These were rhetorical questions, intended to get the answer \"No one!\"--as if there were not millions of slaves in America.", "The stance and style of the inaugurals seem to have gone through three phases. The first, lasting until Lincoln, was that of the modest, classic public servant. The second, lasting through William Howard Taft, was of the prosaic government executive. The third, in which we are still, is the phase of the assertive, theatrical leader-preacher. This classification is not waterproof. Theodore Roosevelt may belong in the third phase and Warren G. Harding-Calvin Coolidge-Herbert Hoover in the second. But the trend is clear. \n\n On picking up Washington's first inaugural, one is immediately struck by the modesty. He had just been elected unanimously by the Electoral College. He was more respected than any subsequent president has been at the time of his inauguration. And what does he say?", "Presidents derived their license to serve as leader-preacher from Theodore Roosevelt's remark that the presidency was \"a bully pulpit,\" a remark that did not appear in his Inaugural Address. The metaphor of the pulpit suggests not reading but oral and visual contact between the preacher and his flock. Radio and--even more--television made this possible on a national scale. A telltale sign of the leader-preacher inaugural is the use of the phrase, \"Let us ... \"--meaning, \"You do as I say.\" This expression appears occasionally throughout the history of inaugurals, but it has hit its stride in recent years. John F. Kennedy repeated it 16 times in his Inaugural Address, and Richard Nixon has it 22 times in his second one.", "After World War II the subject came back to inaugural addresses, but in a weak and abstract form. That is true even of the presidents we think of as being most concerned with race relations in America--like Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton. Perhaps each thought he had made a sufficient statement by having a black woman--Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price, or Maya Angelou--perform at his ceremony. In Clinton's first inaugural, the only allusion to the race problem is in this sentence: \"From our revolution, the Civil War, to the Great Depression to the civil rights movement, our people have always mustered the determination to construct from these crises the pillars of our history.\" I recall this not to suggest that their concern was not deep and sincere, but only to indicate what is acceptable to say in a speech intended to appeal to the values shared by Americans.", "There is much more to ponder in these speeches than I have suggested here. There is much to be proud of, in what we have endured and achieved, in the peaceful transference of power, and in the reasonableness and moderation of the presidents we have elected. But there is also much humility to be learned. We look back with amazement at the ignorance and moral obtuseness revealed by what our past leaders have said and our past citizens believed. We should recognize that 50 or 100 years from now, readers will shake their heads at what we are saying and believing today. \n\n \n\n POSTSCRIPT: To read Herbert Stein's analysis of President Clinton's second Inaugural Address, click .", "In the third phase, the Inaugural Address metamorphosed from describing the government's policy to inspiring the public's behavior. Presidents recognized--or, at least, believed--that the country had problems they ought to deal with but could not manage by using the instruments of government alone. Thus, in his first inaugural, Woodrow Wilson said: \"At last a vision has been vouchsafed us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good, the debased and decadent with the sound and the vital. With this vision we approach new affairs.\" \n\n If the country is debased and decadent, the cure has to come from uplifting the people, not from acts of government. Similar diagnoses and prescriptions appear in later inaugurals.", "Reading the Inaugurals \n\n President Clinton's Inaugural Address this month is the 53 rd in the series that began in 1789. All are worth a read--not just the highlights, such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR. They will give you a feeling of being there, not as an omniscient historian of 1997 looking back at 1837 or 1897 but as an ordinary citizen who shares--and is limited by--the information, the concerns, and the values of those times. (Thanks to Columbia University, all the addresses can be found on the Web.) \n\n Among all the past presidents and their speech writers there was only one literary genius: Lincoln. After 132 years, his second inaugural still brings tears to your eyes and chills your blood. None of the other inaugural addresses are in that league. But by and large they are dignified and intelligent speeches given by articulate men, each in touch with his times and aware that his inauguration was the most solemn occasion of his life.", "[T]he magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies. \n\n None of his successors has made the point as forcefully as that. But echoes are to be found in almost every president for the next 68 years. (John Adams was an exception. He was apparently so envious of Washington that he spent a large part of his address spelling out his own excellent qualifications for the job.) That era ended with Lincoln. Subsequent inaugurals routinely contain protestations of humility, but they are perfunctory and do not sound sincere.", "and in order to preserve the Union, should not be interfered with. But although generally unmentionable, the subject was boiling, and would boil over in 1861. After the Civil War, it is in the inaugurals of Hayes, James Garfield", "The change in literary style from classical to colloquial can be demonstrated by one statistic. In all the inaugurals from Washington through James Buchanan, the average number of words per sentence was 44. From Lincoln to Wilson it was 34, and since Wilson it has been 25. I do not consider this a deterioration (this article has an average of 17 words per sentence), but it does reflect the change in the size and character of the audience and in the means of communication. William Henry Harrison could talk about the governments of Athens, Rome, and the Helvetic Confederacy and expect his audience to know what he was talking about. That wouldn't be true today. But Harrison's audience would not have known what the Internet was.", "Presidents and their speech writers have mined their predecessors for memorable words and repeated them without attribution. Kennedy's trumpet call, \"Ask not what your country can do for you: Ask what you can do for your country,\" has an ironic history. In his inaugural, Harding, surely no model for Kennedy, had said, \"Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too little of government, and at the same time do for it too little.\" And even before he became president, in a speech in 1916, Harding had said, \"In the great fulfillment we must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the nation.\"", "Before the Civil War the word \"slavery\" appears only in the Inaugural Address of Martin Van Buren, 1837, and Buchanan, 1857, and then only as something that, pursuant to the Constitution", "to fade. William McKinley said in his first Inaugural Address, March 4, 1897, \"Lynchings must not be tolerated in a great and civilized country like the United States,\" but he said it without horror. Taft raised the subject of", "The antebellum modesty, while in part a reflection of the conventional etiquette of the time, may also have served a political objective: to alleviate the concerns of those who--in the early days of the republic--feared it might be transformed into a monarchy, and the president into a king. A little later, perhaps after 1820, a new worry arose. Would the power of the federal government be used to interfere with the \"peculiar domestic institution\" of the Southern states? The presidents' assurance of the limitation of their powers may have been intended to give comfort to those states. \n\n Lincoln faced a different situation. With the South already seceding, he could only \"preserve, protect and defend the Constitution\" by asserting the power of the federal government and his own power as chief executive. It was no time for modesty. Lincoln's successors inherited a federal government with much more authority--and more need to use it--than before the war, and they had less motivation to belittle themselves and their powers.", "race relations in 1909 only to express satisfaction at the progress that had been made. And then the subject disappeared. FDR never mentioned it in any of his four inaugurals.", "(1881), and Benjamin Harrison (1889) that we find the most explicit and positive discussion of the need to convert into reality the rights and freedom granted to the \"freedmen\" on paper by the 13 th , 14 th , and", "15 th amendments. Garfield's was the strongest among these. (He had been a student at Williams College in the 1850s, 80 years before me, when the college had been a station on the underground railway.) But the subject then began" ], [ "The stance and style of the inaugurals seem to have gone through three phases. The first, lasting until Lincoln, was that of the modest, classic public servant. The second, lasting through William Howard Taft, was of the prosaic government executive. The third, in which we are still, is the phase of the assertive, theatrical leader-preacher. This classification is not waterproof. Theodore Roosevelt may belong in the third phase and Warren G. Harding-Calvin Coolidge-Herbert Hoover in the second. But the trend is clear. \n\n On picking up Washington's first inaugural, one is immediately struck by the modesty. He had just been elected unanimously by the Electoral College. He was more respected than any subsequent president has been at the time of his inauguration. And what does he say?", "There is much more to ponder in these speeches than I have suggested here. There is much to be proud of, in what we have endured and achieved, in the peaceful transference of power, and in the reasonableness and moderation of the presidents we have elected. But there is also much humility to be learned. We look back with amazement at the ignorance and moral obtuseness revealed by what our past leaders have said and our past citizens believed. We should recognize that 50 or 100 years from now, readers will shake their heads at what we are saying and believing today. \n\n \n\n POSTSCRIPT: To read Herbert Stein's analysis of President Clinton's second Inaugural Address, click .", "[T]he magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies. \n\n None of his successors has made the point as forcefully as that. But echoes are to be found in almost every president for the next 68 years. (John Adams was an exception. He was apparently so envious of Washington that he spent a large part of his address spelling out his own excellent qualifications for the job.) That era ended with Lincoln. Subsequent inaugurals routinely contain protestations of humility, but they are perfunctory and do not sound sincere.", "In the third phase, the Inaugural Address metamorphosed from describing the government's policy to inspiring the public's behavior. Presidents recognized--or, at least, believed--that the country had problems they ought to deal with but could not manage by using the instruments of government alone. Thus, in his first inaugural, Woodrow Wilson said: \"At last a vision has been vouchsafed us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good, the debased and decadent with the sound and the vital. With this vision we approach new affairs.\" \n\n If the country is debased and decadent, the cure has to come from uplifting the people, not from acts of government. Similar diagnoses and prescriptions appear in later inaugurals.", "The change in literary style from classical to colloquial can be demonstrated by one statistic. In all the inaugurals from Washington through James Buchanan, the average number of words per sentence was 44. From Lincoln to Wilson it was 34, and since Wilson it has been 25. I do not consider this a deterioration (this article has an average of 17 words per sentence), but it does reflect the change in the size and character of the audience and in the means of communication. William Henry Harrison could talk about the governments of Athens, Rome, and the Helvetic Confederacy and expect his audience to know what he was talking about. That wouldn't be true today. But Harrison's audience would not have known what the Internet was.", "Presidents derived their license to serve as leader-preacher from Theodore Roosevelt's remark that the presidency was \"a bully pulpit,\" a remark that did not appear in his Inaugural Address. The metaphor of the pulpit suggests not reading but oral and visual contact between the preacher and his flock. Radio and--even more--television made this possible on a national scale. A telltale sign of the leader-preacher inaugural is the use of the phrase, \"Let us ... \"--meaning, \"You do as I say.\" This expression appears occasionally throughout the history of inaugurals, but it has hit its stride in recent years. John F. Kennedy repeated it 16 times in his Inaugural Address, and Richard Nixon has it 22 times in his second one.", "The most disturbing aspect of the whole series of inaugurals is what is said and unsaid on the subject of race relations, which Arthur Schlesinger Jr. calls \"the supreme American problem.\" The words \"black,\" \"blacks,\" \"Negro,\" or \"race\" (as applied to blacks) do not appear at all until Rutherford Hayes, 1877. James Monroe asked in 1817, \"On whom has oppression fallen in any quarter of our Union? Who has been deprived of any right of person or property?\" These were rhetorical questions, intended to get the answer \"No one!\"--as if there were not millions of slaves in America.", "Reading the Inaugurals \n\n President Clinton's Inaugural Address this month is the 53 rd in the series that began in 1789. All are worth a read--not just the highlights, such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR. They will give you a feeling of being there, not as an omniscient historian of 1997 looking back at 1837 or 1897 but as an ordinary citizen who shares--and is limited by--the information, the concerns, and the values of those times. (Thanks to Columbia University, all the addresses can be found on the Web.) \n\n Among all the past presidents and their speech writers there was only one literary genius: Lincoln. After 132 years, his second inaugural still brings tears to your eyes and chills your blood. None of the other inaugural addresses are in that league. But by and large they are dignified and intelligent speeches given by articulate men, each in touch with his times and aware that his inauguration was the most solemn occasion of his life.", "Presidents and their speech writers have mined their predecessors for memorable words and repeated them without attribution. Kennedy's trumpet call, \"Ask not what your country can do for you: Ask what you can do for your country,\" has an ironic history. In his inaugural, Harding, surely no model for Kennedy, had said, \"Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too little of government, and at the same time do for it too little.\" And even before he became president, in a speech in 1916, Harding had said, \"In the great fulfillment we must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the nation.\"", "One subject that does get ample treatment is taxes. \"Taxes,\" or some equivalent word, appears in 43 of the 52 inaugural addresses to date. Coolidge said in 1925: \"The time is arriving when we can have further tax reduction. ... I am opposed to extremely high rates, because they produce little or no revenue, because they are bad for the country, and, finally, because they are wrong.\" Federal taxes were then about 3 percent of the gross domestic product. Ronald Reagan said essentially the same thing in 1981, when they were 20 percent.", "Many an issue frets its hour on the inaugural stage and then is heard no more. That includes the Indians, the coastal fortifications, territorial expansion, the Isthmus Canal, civil-service reform, polygamy, and Prohibition. Some subjects that you expect to appear, don't. Hoover's inaugural, March 4, 1929, gives no hint of economic vulnerability. Roosevelt's second inaugural, Jan. 20, 1937, contains no reference to Hitler or to Germany. But what is most amazing, at least to a reader in 1997, is the silence of the inaugurals on the subject of women. The word \"women\" does not appear at all until Wilson's first inaugural, and it always appears as part of the phrase \"men and women,\" never as referring to any special concerns of women. Even Harding, the first president to be chosen in an election in which women voted nationally, does not remark on the uniqueness of the fact in his inaugural.", "The antebellum modesty, while in part a reflection of the conventional etiquette of the time, may also have served a political objective: to alleviate the concerns of those who--in the early days of the republic--feared it might be transformed into a monarchy, and the president into a king. A little later, perhaps after 1820, a new worry arose. Would the power of the federal government be used to interfere with the \"peculiar domestic institution\" of the Southern states? The presidents' assurance of the limitation of their powers may have been intended to give comfort to those states. \n\n Lincoln faced a different situation. With the South already seceding, he could only \"preserve, protect and defend the Constitution\" by asserting the power of the federal government and his own power as chief executive. It was no time for modesty. Lincoln's successors inherited a federal government with much more authority--and more need to use it--than before the war, and they had less motivation to belittle themselves and their powers.", "After World War II the subject came back to inaugural addresses, but in a weak and abstract form. That is true even of the presidents we think of as being most concerned with race relations in America--like Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton. Perhaps each thought he had made a sufficient statement by having a black woman--Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price, or Maya Angelou--perform at his ceremony. In Clinton's first inaugural, the only allusion to the race problem is in this sentence: \"From our revolution, the Civil War, to the Great Depression to the civil rights movement, our people have always mustered the determination to construct from these crises the pillars of our history.\" I recall this not to suggest that their concern was not deep and sincere, but only to indicate what is acceptable to say in a speech intended to appeal to the values shared by Americans.", "to fade. William McKinley said in his first Inaugural Address, March 4, 1897, \"Lynchings must not be tolerated in a great and civilized country like the United States,\" but he said it without horror. Taft raised the subject of", "and in order to preserve the Union, should not be interfered with. But although generally unmentionable, the subject was boiling, and would boil over in 1861. After the Civil War, it is in the inaugurals of Hayes, James Garfield", "Before the Civil War the word \"slavery\" appears only in the Inaugural Address of Martin Van Buren, 1837, and Buchanan, 1857, and then only as something that, pursuant to the Constitution", "(1881), and Benjamin Harrison (1889) that we find the most explicit and positive discussion of the need to convert into reality the rights and freedom granted to the \"freedmen\" on paper by the 13 th , 14 th , and", "15 th amendments. Garfield's was the strongest among these. (He had been a student at Williams College in the 1850s, 80 years before me, when the college had been a station on the underground railway.) But the subject then began", "race relations in 1909 only to express satisfaction at the progress that had been made. And then the subject disappeared. FDR never mentioned it in any of his four inaugurals." ], [ "The stance and style of the inaugurals seem to have gone through three phases. The first, lasting until Lincoln, was that of the modest, classic public servant. The second, lasting through William Howard Taft, was of the prosaic government executive. The third, in which we are still, is the phase of the assertive, theatrical leader-preacher. This classification is not waterproof. Theodore Roosevelt may belong in the third phase and Warren G. Harding-Calvin Coolidge-Herbert Hoover in the second. But the trend is clear. \n\n On picking up Washington's first inaugural, one is immediately struck by the modesty. He had just been elected unanimously by the Electoral College. He was more respected than any subsequent president has been at the time of his inauguration. And what does he say?", "[T]he magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies. \n\n None of his successors has made the point as forcefully as that. But echoes are to be found in almost every president for the next 68 years. (John Adams was an exception. He was apparently so envious of Washington that he spent a large part of his address spelling out his own excellent qualifications for the job.) That era ended with Lincoln. Subsequent inaugurals routinely contain protestations of humility, but they are perfunctory and do not sound sincere.", "The most disturbing aspect of the whole series of inaugurals is what is said and unsaid on the subject of race relations, which Arthur Schlesinger Jr. calls \"the supreme American problem.\" The words \"black,\" \"blacks,\" \"Negro,\" or \"race\" (as applied to blacks) do not appear at all until Rutherford Hayes, 1877. James Monroe asked in 1817, \"On whom has oppression fallen in any quarter of our Union? Who has been deprived of any right of person or property?\" These were rhetorical questions, intended to get the answer \"No one!\"--as if there were not millions of slaves in America.", "There is much more to ponder in these speeches than I have suggested here. There is much to be proud of, in what we have endured and achieved, in the peaceful transference of power, and in the reasonableness and moderation of the presidents we have elected. But there is also much humility to be learned. We look back with amazement at the ignorance and moral obtuseness revealed by what our past leaders have said and our past citizens believed. We should recognize that 50 or 100 years from now, readers will shake their heads at what we are saying and believing today. \n\n \n\n POSTSCRIPT: To read Herbert Stein's analysis of President Clinton's second Inaugural Address, click .", "Many an issue frets its hour on the inaugural stage and then is heard no more. That includes the Indians, the coastal fortifications, territorial expansion, the Isthmus Canal, civil-service reform, polygamy, and Prohibition. Some subjects that you expect to appear, don't. Hoover's inaugural, March 4, 1929, gives no hint of economic vulnerability. Roosevelt's second inaugural, Jan. 20, 1937, contains no reference to Hitler or to Germany. But what is most amazing, at least to a reader in 1997, is the silence of the inaugurals on the subject of women. The word \"women\" does not appear at all until Wilson's first inaugural, and it always appears as part of the phrase \"men and women,\" never as referring to any special concerns of women. Even Harding, the first president to be chosen in an election in which women voted nationally, does not remark on the uniqueness of the fact in his inaugural.", "After World War II the subject came back to inaugural addresses, but in a weak and abstract form. That is true even of the presidents we think of as being most concerned with race relations in America--like Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton. Perhaps each thought he had made a sufficient statement by having a black woman--Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price, or Maya Angelou--perform at his ceremony. In Clinton's first inaugural, the only allusion to the race problem is in this sentence: \"From our revolution, the Civil War, to the Great Depression to the civil rights movement, our people have always mustered the determination to construct from these crises the pillars of our history.\" I recall this not to suggest that their concern was not deep and sincere, but only to indicate what is acceptable to say in a speech intended to appeal to the values shared by Americans.", "Reading the Inaugurals \n\n President Clinton's Inaugural Address this month is the 53 rd in the series that began in 1789. All are worth a read--not just the highlights, such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR. They will give you a feeling of being there, not as an omniscient historian of 1997 looking back at 1837 or 1897 but as an ordinary citizen who shares--and is limited by--the information, the concerns, and the values of those times. (Thanks to Columbia University, all the addresses can be found on the Web.) \n\n Among all the past presidents and their speech writers there was only one literary genius: Lincoln. After 132 years, his second inaugural still brings tears to your eyes and chills your blood. None of the other inaugural addresses are in that league. But by and large they are dignified and intelligent speeches given by articulate men, each in touch with his times and aware that his inauguration was the most solemn occasion of his life.", "Presidents derived their license to serve as leader-preacher from Theodore Roosevelt's remark that the presidency was \"a bully pulpit,\" a remark that did not appear in his Inaugural Address. The metaphor of the pulpit suggests not reading but oral and visual contact between the preacher and his flock. Radio and--even more--television made this possible on a national scale. A telltale sign of the leader-preacher inaugural is the use of the phrase, \"Let us ... \"--meaning, \"You do as I say.\" This expression appears occasionally throughout the history of inaugurals, but it has hit its stride in recent years. John F. Kennedy repeated it 16 times in his Inaugural Address, and Richard Nixon has it 22 times in his second one.", "In the third phase, the Inaugural Address metamorphosed from describing the government's policy to inspiring the public's behavior. Presidents recognized--or, at least, believed--that the country had problems they ought to deal with but could not manage by using the instruments of government alone. Thus, in his first inaugural, Woodrow Wilson said: \"At last a vision has been vouchsafed us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good, the debased and decadent with the sound and the vital. With this vision we approach new affairs.\" \n\n If the country is debased and decadent, the cure has to come from uplifting the people, not from acts of government. Similar diagnoses and prescriptions appear in later inaugurals.", "One subject that does get ample treatment is taxes. \"Taxes,\" or some equivalent word, appears in 43 of the 52 inaugural addresses to date. Coolidge said in 1925: \"The time is arriving when we can have further tax reduction. ... I am opposed to extremely high rates, because they produce little or no revenue, because they are bad for the country, and, finally, because they are wrong.\" Federal taxes were then about 3 percent of the gross domestic product. Ronald Reagan said essentially the same thing in 1981, when they were 20 percent.", "The change in literary style from classical to colloquial can be demonstrated by one statistic. In all the inaugurals from Washington through James Buchanan, the average number of words per sentence was 44. From Lincoln to Wilson it was 34, and since Wilson it has been 25. I do not consider this a deterioration (this article has an average of 17 words per sentence), but it does reflect the change in the size and character of the audience and in the means of communication. William Henry Harrison could talk about the governments of Athens, Rome, and the Helvetic Confederacy and expect his audience to know what he was talking about. That wouldn't be true today. But Harrison's audience would not have known what the Internet was.", "Presidents and their speech writers have mined their predecessors for memorable words and repeated them without attribution. Kennedy's trumpet call, \"Ask not what your country can do for you: Ask what you can do for your country,\" has an ironic history. In his inaugural, Harding, surely no model for Kennedy, had said, \"Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too little of government, and at the same time do for it too little.\" And even before he became president, in a speech in 1916, Harding had said, \"In the great fulfillment we must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the nation.\"", "and in order to preserve the Union, should not be interfered with. But although generally unmentionable, the subject was boiling, and would boil over in 1861. After the Civil War, it is in the inaugurals of Hayes, James Garfield", "The antebellum modesty, while in part a reflection of the conventional etiquette of the time, may also have served a political objective: to alleviate the concerns of those who--in the early days of the republic--feared it might be transformed into a monarchy, and the president into a king. A little later, perhaps after 1820, a new worry arose. Would the power of the federal government be used to interfere with the \"peculiar domestic institution\" of the Southern states? The presidents' assurance of the limitation of their powers may have been intended to give comfort to those states. \n\n Lincoln faced a different situation. With the South already seceding, he could only \"preserve, protect and defend the Constitution\" by asserting the power of the federal government and his own power as chief executive. It was no time for modesty. Lincoln's successors inherited a federal government with much more authority--and more need to use it--than before the war, and they had less motivation to belittle themselves and their powers.", "to fade. William McKinley said in his first Inaugural Address, March 4, 1897, \"Lynchings must not be tolerated in a great and civilized country like the United States,\" but he said it without horror. Taft raised the subject of", "Before the Civil War the word \"slavery\" appears only in the Inaugural Address of Martin Van Buren, 1837, and Buchanan, 1857, and then only as something that, pursuant to the Constitution", "race relations in 1909 only to express satisfaction at the progress that had been made. And then the subject disappeared. FDR never mentioned it in any of his four inaugurals.", "(1881), and Benjamin Harrison (1889) that we find the most explicit and positive discussion of the need to convert into reality the rights and freedom granted to the \"freedmen\" on paper by the 13 th , 14 th , and", "15 th amendments. Garfield's was the strongest among these. (He had been a student at Williams College in the 1850s, 80 years before me, when the college had been a station on the underground railway.) But the subject then began" ], [ "The stance and style of the inaugurals seem to have gone through three phases. The first, lasting until Lincoln, was that of the modest, classic public servant. The second, lasting through William Howard Taft, was of the prosaic government executive. The third, in which we are still, is the phase of the assertive, theatrical leader-preacher. This classification is not waterproof. Theodore Roosevelt may belong in the third phase and Warren G. Harding-Calvin Coolidge-Herbert Hoover in the second. But the trend is clear. \n\n On picking up Washington's first inaugural, one is immediately struck by the modesty. He had just been elected unanimously by the Electoral College. He was more respected than any subsequent president has been at the time of his inauguration. And what does he say?", "Reading the Inaugurals \n\n President Clinton's Inaugural Address this month is the 53 rd in the series that began in 1789. All are worth a read--not just the highlights, such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR. They will give you a feeling of being there, not as an omniscient historian of 1997 looking back at 1837 or 1897 but as an ordinary citizen who shares--and is limited by--the information, the concerns, and the values of those times. (Thanks to Columbia University, all the addresses can be found on the Web.) \n\n Among all the past presidents and their speech writers there was only one literary genius: Lincoln. After 132 years, his second inaugural still brings tears to your eyes and chills your blood. None of the other inaugural addresses are in that league. But by and large they are dignified and intelligent speeches given by articulate men, each in touch with his times and aware that his inauguration was the most solemn occasion of his life.", "[T]he magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies. \n\n None of his successors has made the point as forcefully as that. But echoes are to be found in almost every president for the next 68 years. (John Adams was an exception. He was apparently so envious of Washington that he spent a large part of his address spelling out his own excellent qualifications for the job.) That era ended with Lincoln. Subsequent inaugurals routinely contain protestations of humility, but they are perfunctory and do not sound sincere.", "There is much more to ponder in these speeches than I have suggested here. There is much to be proud of, in what we have endured and achieved, in the peaceful transference of power, and in the reasonableness and moderation of the presidents we have elected. But there is also much humility to be learned. We look back with amazement at the ignorance and moral obtuseness revealed by what our past leaders have said and our past citizens believed. We should recognize that 50 or 100 years from now, readers will shake their heads at what we are saying and believing today. \n\n \n\n POSTSCRIPT: To read Herbert Stein's analysis of President Clinton's second Inaugural Address, click .", "Presidents derived their license to serve as leader-preacher from Theodore Roosevelt's remark that the presidency was \"a bully pulpit,\" a remark that did not appear in his Inaugural Address. The metaphor of the pulpit suggests not reading but oral and visual contact between the preacher and his flock. Radio and--even more--television made this possible on a national scale. A telltale sign of the leader-preacher inaugural is the use of the phrase, \"Let us ... \"--meaning, \"You do as I say.\" This expression appears occasionally throughout the history of inaugurals, but it has hit its stride in recent years. John F. Kennedy repeated it 16 times in his Inaugural Address, and Richard Nixon has it 22 times in his second one.", "In the third phase, the Inaugural Address metamorphosed from describing the government's policy to inspiring the public's behavior. Presidents recognized--or, at least, believed--that the country had problems they ought to deal with but could not manage by using the instruments of government alone. Thus, in his first inaugural, Woodrow Wilson said: \"At last a vision has been vouchsafed us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good, the debased and decadent with the sound and the vital. With this vision we approach new affairs.\" \n\n If the country is debased and decadent, the cure has to come from uplifting the people, not from acts of government. Similar diagnoses and prescriptions appear in later inaugurals.", "After World War II the subject came back to inaugural addresses, but in a weak and abstract form. That is true even of the presidents we think of as being most concerned with race relations in America--like Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton. Perhaps each thought he had made a sufficient statement by having a black woman--Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price, or Maya Angelou--perform at his ceremony. In Clinton's first inaugural, the only allusion to the race problem is in this sentence: \"From our revolution, the Civil War, to the Great Depression to the civil rights movement, our people have always mustered the determination to construct from these crises the pillars of our history.\" I recall this not to suggest that their concern was not deep and sincere, but only to indicate what is acceptable to say in a speech intended to appeal to the values shared by Americans.", "Presidents and their speech writers have mined their predecessors for memorable words and repeated them without attribution. Kennedy's trumpet call, \"Ask not what your country can do for you: Ask what you can do for your country,\" has an ironic history. In his inaugural, Harding, surely no model for Kennedy, had said, \"Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too little of government, and at the same time do for it too little.\" And even before he became president, in a speech in 1916, Harding had said, \"In the great fulfillment we must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the nation.\"", "One subject that does get ample treatment is taxes. \"Taxes,\" or some equivalent word, appears in 43 of the 52 inaugural addresses to date. Coolidge said in 1925: \"The time is arriving when we can have further tax reduction. ... I am opposed to extremely high rates, because they produce little or no revenue, because they are bad for the country, and, finally, because they are wrong.\" Federal taxes were then about 3 percent of the gross domestic product. Ronald Reagan said essentially the same thing in 1981, when they were 20 percent.", "Many an issue frets its hour on the inaugural stage and then is heard no more. That includes the Indians, the coastal fortifications, territorial expansion, the Isthmus Canal, civil-service reform, polygamy, and Prohibition. Some subjects that you expect to appear, don't. Hoover's inaugural, March 4, 1929, gives no hint of economic vulnerability. Roosevelt's second inaugural, Jan. 20, 1937, contains no reference to Hitler or to Germany. But what is most amazing, at least to a reader in 1997, is the silence of the inaugurals on the subject of women. The word \"women\" does not appear at all until Wilson's first inaugural, and it always appears as part of the phrase \"men and women,\" never as referring to any special concerns of women. Even Harding, the first president to be chosen in an election in which women voted nationally, does not remark on the uniqueness of the fact in his inaugural.", "The change in literary style from classical to colloquial can be demonstrated by one statistic. In all the inaugurals from Washington through James Buchanan, the average number of words per sentence was 44. From Lincoln to Wilson it was 34, and since Wilson it has been 25. I do not consider this a deterioration (this article has an average of 17 words per sentence), but it does reflect the change in the size and character of the audience and in the means of communication. William Henry Harrison could talk about the governments of Athens, Rome, and the Helvetic Confederacy and expect his audience to know what he was talking about. That wouldn't be true today. But Harrison's audience would not have known what the Internet was.", "The most disturbing aspect of the whole series of inaugurals is what is said and unsaid on the subject of race relations, which Arthur Schlesinger Jr. calls \"the supreme American problem.\" The words \"black,\" \"blacks,\" \"Negro,\" or \"race\" (as applied to blacks) do not appear at all until Rutherford Hayes, 1877. James Monroe asked in 1817, \"On whom has oppression fallen in any quarter of our Union? Who has been deprived of any right of person or property?\" These were rhetorical questions, intended to get the answer \"No one!\"--as if there were not millions of slaves in America.", "The antebellum modesty, while in part a reflection of the conventional etiquette of the time, may also have served a political objective: to alleviate the concerns of those who--in the early days of the republic--feared it might be transformed into a monarchy, and the president into a king. A little later, perhaps after 1820, a new worry arose. Would the power of the federal government be used to interfere with the \"peculiar domestic institution\" of the Southern states? The presidents' assurance of the limitation of their powers may have been intended to give comfort to those states. \n\n Lincoln faced a different situation. With the South already seceding, he could only \"preserve, protect and defend the Constitution\" by asserting the power of the federal government and his own power as chief executive. It was no time for modesty. Lincoln's successors inherited a federal government with much more authority--and more need to use it--than before the war, and they had less motivation to belittle themselves and their powers.", "and in order to preserve the Union, should not be interfered with. But although generally unmentionable, the subject was boiling, and would boil over in 1861. After the Civil War, it is in the inaugurals of Hayes, James Garfield", "to fade. William McKinley said in his first Inaugural Address, March 4, 1897, \"Lynchings must not be tolerated in a great and civilized country like the United States,\" but he said it without horror. Taft raised the subject of", "Before the Civil War the word \"slavery\" appears only in the Inaugural Address of Martin Van Buren, 1837, and Buchanan, 1857, and then only as something that, pursuant to the Constitution", "race relations in 1909 only to express satisfaction at the progress that had been made. And then the subject disappeared. FDR never mentioned it in any of his four inaugurals.", "(1881), and Benjamin Harrison (1889) that we find the most explicit and positive discussion of the need to convert into reality the rights and freedom granted to the \"freedmen\" on paper by the 13 th , 14 th , and", "15 th amendments. Garfield's was the strongest among these. (He had been a student at Williams College in the 1850s, 80 years before me, when the college had been a station on the underground railway.) But the subject then began" ] ]
valid	20077	[ "Does the author think that Topsy-Turvy is a good movie?", "Does the author think that Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred D. Leuchter, Jr. is a good documentary?", "According to the author, what is Topsy-Turvy about?", "Does Morris dislike Leuchter?", "Why does they author write about these two different movies within the same article?", "Which of the following is shared between Topsy-Turvy and Mr. Death?", "Which of the following did Topsy-Turvy do better than Mr. Death?", "How does Leigh likely feel about Gilbert and Sullivan?", "Why is Leuchter a hero to neo-Nazis?" ]	[ [ "Yes, the end redeems the rest of the movie", "Yes, the entire movie is excellent", "No, the beginning is a mess", "No, there are too many loose ends" ], [ "No, the emotional tone of the movie is too removed", "No, the entire movie is insensitive", "Yes, the beginning sets the stage to study an excellent specimen in Leuchter", "Yes, it correctly paints Leuchter in a negative light" ], [ "It is about the relationship between Gilbert and Sullivan", "It is about the lives of artists", "It is about English actors playing Japanese characters", "It is about the details of the creation of The Mikado" ], [ "No, Leuchter is innocent", "No, Leuchter is just a subject to study", "Yes, Leuchter defiled Auschwitz", "Yes, Leuchter is an anti-Semite" ], [ "The movies have a similar theme", "The directors have a similar process", "The directors worked together", "The movies have similar criticisms" ], [ "Plot structure", "Character behavior", "Cultural insensitivity", "Primary theme" ], [ "Exposition", "Narrative tension", "Accuracy of subject matter", "Emotional release" ], [ "Resentment", "Disdain", "Neutral", "Great respect" ], [ "He chiseled the walls of Auschwitz", "He tried to disprove the genocide of the Holocaust", "He advocates for better capital punishment practices", "He doesn't like Jewish people" ] ]	[ 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 2 ]	[ 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "Only a lunatic would call Topsy-Turvy , with its lame first hour and host of loose ends, a masterpiece, but by the finale I was ready to have myself committed. The finale itself", "Topsy-Turvy broadly recounts the creation of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera The Mikado at", "Leigh's movies, born of actors' improvisations and loosely shaped, always take a while to find their rhythm--and, frequently, their point. This one finds everything. By the end of its two hours and 40 minutes, Topsy-Turvy has evolved into something", "camera pulls back over the orchestra and the audience, this movie feels like one of the saddest and loveliest tributes to the lives of artists ever made. Topsy-Turvy leaves you upside down and breathless.", "A central section of the drama is missing. What exactly fired Sullivan up about doing The Mikado ? What was different about this collaboration? No answer. Topsy-Turvy turns into something other than the", "The wake-up call comes an hour into the movie. Gilbert attends a popular exposition of Japanese culture at Knightsbridge and watches Kabuki routines and women in kimonos pouring green tea (\"spinach water\"). When a Japanese sword he has purchased falls off his wall, he hefts it; mimes a fight while issuing strangled, samurailike cries; then has a brainstorm. We hear the horns of The Mikado overture, then Leigh cuts to the fully realized opening scene on stage at the Savoy: \"We are gentlemen of Japan …\" Just that chorus is enough to reanimate the audience--to make people sit up and grin. And Leigh's technique of leaping back and forth between the finished Mikado and painstaking scenes of rehearsal has magic in it: You're watching straw, then gold, then straw, then gold. And you see the connection.", "disguised English bureaucrats; the joke of Topsy-Turvy is that the opera's English performers seem culturally incapable of playing Japanese. They rehearse in long coats and top hats, and some of the women (and men!) express horror at appearing on", "Sullivan's duds, has its premiere, and Gilbert fumes over a review that calls him the monarch of \"topsy-turvydom\"--of formulaic plots involving magical elixirs and coins. A heat wave has hit London, theater attendance is down, and Sullivan is", "must have done it. Leigh's endings are often wondrous, and this one is up there with the rooftop scene in High Hopes (1988). The Mikado is a triumph--it would be the Savoy's biggest hit--but there's no transformation in", "Like Mike Leigh, Errol Morris rarely begins a project with a clear idea of what he wants it to be. Sometimes he doesn't end a project with a clear idea of what he wants it to be, either. His newest documentary, \n\n Mr. Death : The Rise and Fall of Fred D. Leuchter, Jr. , kicks up all sorts of messy emotions that his coolly ironic technique can't begin to handle.", "the lives of its makers. Gilbert can't bring himself to reach out to his brokenhearted wife (Lesley Manville), and Sullivan has a melancholy inkling that he has reached his artistic peak. The ingénue, Leonora, is drinking again, toasting herself", "and a glowering dedication to process. Gilbert haggles with his actors over small things that shouldn't resonate but which somehow add up. Leigh's small things add up, too. The joke of The Mikado is that its Japanese lords are thinly", "Who would have predicted that Leigh would make Gilbert and Sullivan into Mike Leigh characters? Gilbert could be a stand-in for Leigh himself--a haughty, ill-humored man with an obsession for tiny details", "After my rage at Leuchter had subsided, I began to get angry at Morris for aestheticizing that violation--turning it into an ironic art object. The director's beautiful detachment suggests a kind of cowardice. His technique is based on standing back--maintaining a fixed distance--while his subjects hang themselves, and for a while that works stunningly. But at a certain point, isn't it only human to want to engage this man? You don't need to play Mike Wallace and demolish Leuchter on camera. You could just ask him what he makes of, say, van Pelt's assertion that the answer to the riddle of the gas chambers was all over the archives, or what he thought of the chemist's declaration that the test performed for cyanide was the wrong test. Morris can be heard asking one question only: \"Have you ever thought you might be wrong or that you made a mistake?\"--sufficiently broad that Leuchter can casually affirm his own inanity.", "itching to go off and become the English Mendelssohn--to write operas and symphonies instead of comic \"soufflés.\" Leigh evidently loves the bloodless formality of the scenes between Gilbert and Sullivan, men of opposite tastes and temperaments who only overlap", "in their work. He must also love that those scenes are narrative dead ends: \"How's this for conflict?--you bourgeois slaves to melodrama.\"", "London's Savoy Theatre in 1885. Perhaps \"broadly\" is putting too fine a point on it. The first hour, in which Arthur Sullivan (Allan Corduner) attempts to sever his ties with W.S. Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) and the owner of", "The director is in his weird element only in the first half-hour, in which he sits his subject down and gets out of his way. Leuchter, who looks a little like the archetypal", "Grand Finale \n\n Mike Leigh's", "Gilbert and Sullivan story: a portrait of life in the theater. A group portrait. D'Oyly Carte becomes a quiet third protagonist, a humane businessman. He softly negotiates a salary increase with the company's lead comic (Martin Savage), a neurasthenic" ], [ "Like Mike Leigh, Errol Morris rarely begins a project with a clear idea of what he wants it to be. Sometimes he doesn't end a project with a clear idea of what he wants it to be, either. His newest documentary, \n\n Mr. Death : The Rise and Fall of Fred D. Leuchter, Jr. , kicks up all sorts of messy emotions that his coolly ironic technique can't begin to handle.", "The director is in his weird element only in the first half-hour, in which he sits his subject down and gets out of his way. Leuchter, who looks a little like the archetypal", "Is Leuchter a raving anti-Semite or a pathetic pawn who thrived on having--for the first time in his life--a bit of celebrity? The film suggests the latter. It certainly produces no evidence", "M r. Death gets into deeper waters when it recounts the trial of Ernst Zundel in Canada for proclaiming that the Holocaust never happened. Zundel hired Leuchter to go to Auschwitz and", "After my rage at Leuchter had subsided, I began to get angry at Morris for aestheticizing that violation--turning it into an ironic art object. The director's beautiful detachment suggests a kind of cowardice. His technique is based on standing back--maintaining a fixed distance--while his subjects hang themselves, and for a while that works stunningly. But at a certain point, isn't it only human to want to engage this man? You don't need to play Mike Wallace and demolish Leuchter on camera. You could just ask him what he makes of, say, van Pelt's assertion that the answer to the riddle of the gas chambers was all over the archives, or what he thought of the chemist's declaration that the test performed for cyanide was the wrong test. Morris can be heard asking one question only: \"Have you ever thought you might be wrong or that you made a mistake?\"--sufficiently broad that Leuchter can casually affirm his own inanity.", "My concern here isn't so much for Leuchter or even the Holocaust revisionists, who'll just think he was sandbagged. The problem is that when a documentary filmmaker seems too scared or cool or arty to violate his own immaculate aesthetic, he ends up weakening his case. He also provides no emotional release, which isn't a small matter when the subject is Holocaust denial. Morris was close enough to Leuchter to have gotten something more, to have gone a little deeper in search of a poison that does penetrate surfaces.", "of malice. Plenty of monstrous insensitivity and hubris, though. Morris uses the Dutch historian Robert Jan van Pelt as a counternarrator: He calls Leuchter \"a fffool \" who didn't have a clue what to look for in a place", "about his redesigns for lethal-injection systems, gas chambers, and even a gallows, while underneath, Caleb Sampson provides macabre funhouse music and wistful calliope waltzes. Morris' distance from his subject implies condescension--Leuchter looks like something in a jar.", "occasions where a great amount of current has been applied, and the meat actually will come off the executee's bone like the meat coming off a cooked chicken.\" Leuchter set about making capital punishment more \"humane.\" He moves on to talking", "hair is 100 microns thick), so by crushing the samples (standard procedure), he had effectively diluted the cyanide 100,000 times. Against all this, Morris shows footage of Leuchter chiseling at Auschwitz and even adds some of his own,", "Report\" became the backbone of Zundel's defense (he lost anyway) and of the burgeoning revisionist movement led by David Irving. But if Leuchter became a hero to neo-Nazis, he also became a target of Jewish groups and a pariah", "where chemical analysis revealed no cyanide gas. Furthermore, Leuchter can't figure out how the gas would even have been administered without killing the Nazis themselves--proof, he argues, that mass extermination at Auschwitz never took place. The subsequent \"Leuchter", "But that's OK, because the man is an interesting specimen. Is he a monster or a humanist committed to eliminating the \"deplawrable tawchaw\" of capital punishment? It could go either way.", "movie dweeb Charles Martin Smith and has a heavy exurbs-of-Boston accent, explains how he became involved in redesigning problematic electric chairs. \"Excess current cooks the tissue,\" he says, barely suppressing a smirk at his own expertise. \"There've been", "examine the \"alleged\" gas chambers: Footage (taken by Zundel's cameraman) shows the little man chiseling at walls, vandalizing what even he admits are international shrines. Leuchter smuggled specimens of rock and concrete back to the United States,", "that had changed enormously in 50 years. \"If he had spent time in the archives,\" says van Pelt, \"he would have found evidence about ventilation systems, ways to introduce Zyclon B into these buildings--but of course I don't think he", "Leigh's movies, born of actors' improvisations and loosely shaped, always take a while to find their rhythm--and, frequently, their point. This one finds everything. By the end of its two hours and 40 minutes, Topsy-Turvy has evolved into something", "in their work. He must also love that those scenes are narrative dead ends: \"How's this for conflict?--you bourgeois slaves to melodrama.\"", "even in the execution business. When Morris hooks up with him for the last time, he's in hiding from creditors.", "The wake-up call comes an hour into the movie. Gilbert attends a popular exposition of Japanese culture at Knightsbridge and watches Kabuki routines and women in kimonos pouring green tea (\"spinach water\"). When a Japanese sword he has purchased falls off his wall, he hefts it; mimes a fight while issuing strangled, samurailike cries; then has a brainstorm. We hear the horns of The Mikado overture, then Leigh cuts to the fully realized opening scene on stage at the Savoy: \"We are gentlemen of Japan …\" Just that chorus is enough to reanimate the audience--to make people sit up and grin. And Leigh's technique of leaping back and forth between the finished Mikado and painstaking scenes of rehearsal has magic in it: You're watching straw, then gold, then straw, then gold. And you see the connection." ], [ "Topsy-Turvy broadly recounts the creation of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera The Mikado at", "Only a lunatic would call Topsy-Turvy , with its lame first hour and host of loose ends, a masterpiece, but by the finale I was ready to have myself committed. The finale itself", "disguised English bureaucrats; the joke of Topsy-Turvy is that the opera's English performers seem culturally incapable of playing Japanese. They rehearse in long coats and top hats, and some of the women (and men!) express horror at appearing on", "Sullivan's duds, has its premiere, and Gilbert fumes over a review that calls him the monarch of \"topsy-turvydom\"--of formulaic plots involving magical elixirs and coins. A heat wave has hit London, theater attendance is down, and Sullivan is", "A central section of the drama is missing. What exactly fired Sullivan up about doing The Mikado ? What was different about this collaboration? No answer. Topsy-Turvy turns into something other than the", "Leigh's movies, born of actors' improvisations and loosely shaped, always take a while to find their rhythm--and, frequently, their point. This one finds everything. By the end of its two hours and 40 minutes, Topsy-Turvy has evolved into something", "camera pulls back over the orchestra and the audience, this movie feels like one of the saddest and loveliest tributes to the lives of artists ever made. Topsy-Turvy leaves you upside down and breathless.", "The wake-up call comes an hour into the movie. Gilbert attends a popular exposition of Japanese culture at Knightsbridge and watches Kabuki routines and women in kimonos pouring green tea (\"spinach water\"). When a Japanese sword he has purchased falls off his wall, he hefts it; mimes a fight while issuing strangled, samurailike cries; then has a brainstorm. We hear the horns of The Mikado overture, then Leigh cuts to the fully realized opening scene on stage at the Savoy: \"We are gentlemen of Japan …\" Just that chorus is enough to reanimate the audience--to make people sit up and grin. And Leigh's technique of leaping back and forth between the finished Mikado and painstaking scenes of rehearsal has magic in it: You're watching straw, then gold, then straw, then gold. And you see the connection.", "must have done it. Leigh's endings are often wondrous, and this one is up there with the rooftop scene in High Hopes (1988). The Mikado is a triumph--it would be the Savoy's biggest hit--but there's no transformation in", "the lives of its makers. Gilbert can't bring himself to reach out to his brokenhearted wife (Lesley Manville), and Sullivan has a melancholy inkling that he has reached his artistic peak. The ingénue, Leonora, is drinking again, toasting herself", "in the mirror and praising the loveliness of Nature--a Nature that will, of course, destroy her. The final image is of Art: Leonora on stage singing Yum-Yum's sublime \"The sun whose rays are all ablaze …\" As Leigh's", "itching to go off and become the English Mendelssohn--to write operas and symphonies instead of comic \"soufflés.\" Leigh evidently loves the bloodless formality of the scenes between Gilbert and Sullivan, men of opposite tastes and temperaments who only overlap", "Like Mike Leigh, Errol Morris rarely begins a project with a clear idea of what he wants it to be. Sometimes he doesn't end a project with a clear idea of what he wants it to be, either. His newest documentary, \n\n Mr. Death : The Rise and Fall of Fred D. Leuchter, Jr. , kicks up all sorts of messy emotions that his coolly ironic technique can't begin to handle.", "Gilbert and Sullivan story: a portrait of life in the theater. A group portrait. D'Oyly Carte becomes a quiet third protagonist, a humane businessman. He softly negotiates a salary increase with the company's lead comic (Martin Savage), a neurasthenic", "and a glowering dedication to process. Gilbert haggles with his actors over small things that shouldn't resonate but which somehow add up. Leigh's small things add up, too. The joke of The Mikado is that its Japanese lords are thinly", "Savoy Theatre lifting and peering under every seat. That's every seat. You can almost hear Leigh cackling: \"How's this for a fast start?--you bourgeois slaves to narrative.\" Inevitably, something does happen: Princess Ida , one of Gilbert and", "about his redesigns for lethal-injection systems, gas chambers, and even a gallows, while underneath, Caleb Sampson provides macabre funhouse music and wistful calliope waltzes. Morris' distance from his subject implies condescension--Leuchter looks like something in a jar.", "in their work. He must also love that those scenes are narrative dead ends: \"How's this for conflict?--you bourgeois slaves to melodrama.\"", "Who would have predicted that Leigh would make Gilbert and Sullivan into Mike Leigh characters? Gilbert could be a stand-in for Leigh himself--a haughty, ill-humored man with an obsession for tiny details", "whom he drills on pronunciation and poise. The chorus is presented as some sort of collective folk conscience when it lobbies Gilbert to restore the rashly cut solo (\"A more humane Mikado never did in Japan exist\") of the sad," ], [ "After my rage at Leuchter had subsided, I began to get angry at Morris for aestheticizing that violation--turning it into an ironic art object. The director's beautiful detachment suggests a kind of cowardice. His technique is based on standing back--maintaining a fixed distance--while his subjects hang themselves, and for a while that works stunningly. But at a certain point, isn't it only human to want to engage this man? You don't need to play Mike Wallace and demolish Leuchter on camera. You could just ask him what he makes of, say, van Pelt's assertion that the answer to the riddle of the gas chambers was all over the archives, or what he thought of the chemist's declaration that the test performed for cyanide was the wrong test. Morris can be heard asking one question only: \"Have you ever thought you might be wrong or that you made a mistake?\"--sufficiently broad that Leuchter can casually affirm his own inanity.", "about his redesigns for lethal-injection systems, gas chambers, and even a gallows, while underneath, Caleb Sampson provides macabre funhouse music and wistful calliope waltzes. Morris' distance from his subject implies condescension--Leuchter looks like something in a jar.", "of malice. Plenty of monstrous insensitivity and hubris, though. Morris uses the Dutch historian Robert Jan van Pelt as a counternarrator: He calls Leuchter \"a fffool \" who didn't have a clue what to look for in a place", "The director is in his weird element only in the first half-hour, in which he sits his subject down and gets out of his way. Leuchter, who looks a little like the archetypal", "My concern here isn't so much for Leuchter or even the Holocaust revisionists, who'll just think he was sandbagged. The problem is that when a documentary filmmaker seems too scared or cool or arty to violate his own immaculate aesthetic, he ends up weakening his case. He also provides no emotional release, which isn't a small matter when the subject is Holocaust denial. Morris was close enough to Leuchter to have gotten something more, to have gone a little deeper in search of a poison that does penetrate surfaces.", "Like Mike Leigh, Errol Morris rarely begins a project with a clear idea of what he wants it to be. Sometimes he doesn't end a project with a clear idea of what he wants it to be, either. His newest documentary, \n\n Mr. Death : The Rise and Fall of Fred D. Leuchter, Jr. , kicks up all sorts of messy emotions that his coolly ironic technique can't begin to handle.", "Is Leuchter a raving anti-Semite or a pathetic pawn who thrived on having--for the first time in his life--a bit of celebrity? The film suggests the latter. It certainly produces no evidence", "even in the execution business. When Morris hooks up with him for the last time, he's in hiding from creditors.", "hair is 100 microns thick), so by crushing the samples (standard procedure), he had effectively diluted the cyanide 100,000 times. Against all this, Morris shows footage of Leuchter chiseling at Auschwitz and even adds some of his own,", "itching to go off and become the English Mendelssohn--to write operas and symphonies instead of comic \"soufflés.\" Leigh evidently loves the bloodless formality of the scenes between Gilbert and Sullivan, men of opposite tastes and temperaments who only overlap", "M r. Death gets into deeper waters when it recounts the trial of Ernst Zundel in Canada for proclaiming that the Holocaust never happened. Zundel hired Leuchter to go to Auschwitz and", "where chemical analysis revealed no cyanide gas. Furthermore, Leuchter can't figure out how the gas would even have been administered without killing the Nazis themselves--proof, he argues, that mass extermination at Auschwitz never took place. The subsequent \"Leuchter", "occasions where a great amount of current has been applied, and the meat actually will come off the executee's bone like the meat coming off a cooked chicken.\" Leuchter set about making capital punishment more \"humane.\" He moves on to talking", "Report\" became the backbone of Zundel's defense (he lost anyway) and of the burgeoning revisionist movement led by David Irving. But if Leuchter became a hero to neo-Nazis, he also became a target of Jewish groups and a pariah", "in their work. He must also love that those scenes are narrative dead ends: \"How's this for conflict?--you bourgeois slaves to melodrama.\"", "But that's OK, because the man is an interesting specimen. Is he a monster or a humanist committed to eliminating the \"deplawrable tawchaw\" of capital punishment? It could go either way.", "must have done it. Leigh's endings are often wondrous, and this one is up there with the rooftop scene in High Hopes (1988). The Mikado is a triumph--it would be the Savoy's biggest hit--but there's no transformation in", "Who would have predicted that Leigh would make Gilbert and Sullivan into Mike Leigh characters? Gilbert could be a stand-in for Leigh himself--a haughty, ill-humored man with an obsession for tiny details", "and a glowering dedication to process. Gilbert haggles with his actors over small things that shouldn't resonate but which somehow add up. Leigh's small things add up, too. The joke of The Mikado is that its Japanese lords are thinly", "Leigh's movies, born of actors' improvisations and loosely shaped, always take a while to find their rhythm--and, frequently, their point. This one finds everything. By the end of its two hours and 40 minutes, Topsy-Turvy has evolved into something" ], [ "in their work. He must also love that those scenes are narrative dead ends: \"How's this for conflict?--you bourgeois slaves to melodrama.\"", "It would be charitable to attribute the shapelessness of the early scenes to the characters' own lack of focus, but it would also be inane. As Elvis Mitchell pointed out in", "The wake-up call comes an hour into the movie. Gilbert attends a popular exposition of Japanese culture at Knightsbridge and watches Kabuki routines and women in kimonos pouring green tea (\"spinach water\"). When a Japanese sword he has purchased falls off his wall, he hefts it; mimes a fight while issuing strangled, samurailike cries; then has a brainstorm. We hear the horns of The Mikado overture, then Leigh cuts to the fully realized opening scene on stage at the Savoy: \"We are gentlemen of Japan …\" Just that chorus is enough to reanimate the audience--to make people sit up and grin. And Leigh's technique of leaping back and forth between the finished Mikado and painstaking scenes of rehearsal has magic in it: You're watching straw, then gold, then straw, then gold. And you see the connection.", "Leigh's movies, born of actors' improvisations and loosely shaped, always take a while to find their rhythm--and, frequently, their point. This one finds everything. By the end of its two hours and 40 minutes, Topsy-Turvy has evolved into something", "Like Mike Leigh, Errol Morris rarely begins a project with a clear idea of what he wants it to be. Sometimes he doesn't end a project with a clear idea of what he wants it to be, either. His newest documentary, \n\n Mr. Death : The Rise and Fall of Fred D. Leuchter, Jr. , kicks up all sorts of messy emotions that his coolly ironic technique can't begin to handle.", "camera pulls back over the orchestra and the audience, this movie feels like one of the saddest and loveliest tributes to the lives of artists ever made. Topsy-Turvy leaves you upside down and breathless.", "After my rage at Leuchter had subsided, I began to get angry at Morris for aestheticizing that violation--turning it into an ironic art object. The director's beautiful detachment suggests a kind of cowardice. His technique is based on standing back--maintaining a fixed distance--while his subjects hang themselves, and for a while that works stunningly. But at a certain point, isn't it only human to want to engage this man? You don't need to play Mike Wallace and demolish Leuchter on camera. You could just ask him what he makes of, say, van Pelt's assertion that the answer to the riddle of the gas chambers was all over the archives, or what he thought of the chemist's declaration that the test performed for cyanide was the wrong test. Morris can be heard asking one question only: \"Have you ever thought you might be wrong or that you made a mistake?\"--sufficiently broad that Leuchter can casually affirm his own inanity.", "along with slow-motion shots of hammers bashing rocks, walls, floors, etc. It's an obscenity.", "movie dweeb Charles Martin Smith and has a heavy exurbs-of-Boston accent, explains how he became involved in redesigning problematic electric chairs. \"Excess current cooks the tissue,\" he says, barely suppressing a smirk at his own expertise. \"There've been", "and a glowering dedication to process. Gilbert haggles with his actors over small things that shouldn't resonate but which somehow add up. Leigh's small things add up, too. The joke of The Mikado is that its Japanese lords are thinly", "the lives of its makers. Gilbert can't bring himself to reach out to his brokenhearted wife (Lesley Manville), and Sullivan has a melancholy inkling that he has reached his artistic peak. The ingénue, Leonora, is drinking again, toasting herself", "about his redesigns for lethal-injection systems, gas chambers, and even a gallows, while underneath, Caleb Sampson provides macabre funhouse music and wistful calliope waltzes. Morris' distance from his subject implies condescension--Leuchter looks like something in a jar.", "The director is in his weird element only in the first half-hour, in which he sits his subject down and gets out of his way. Leuchter, who looks a little like the archetypal", "My concern here isn't so much for Leuchter or even the Holocaust revisionists, who'll just think he was sandbagged. The problem is that when a documentary filmmaker seems too scared or cool or arty to violate his own immaculate aesthetic, he ends up weakening his case. He also provides no emotional release, which isn't a small matter when the subject is Holocaust denial. Morris was close enough to Leuchter to have gotten something more, to have gone a little deeper in search of a poison that does penetrate surfaces.", "itching to go off and become the English Mendelssohn--to write operas and symphonies instead of comic \"soufflés.\" Leigh evidently loves the bloodless formality of the scenes between Gilbert and Sullivan, men of opposite tastes and temperaments who only overlap", "Sullivan's duds, has its premiere, and Gilbert fumes over a review that calls him the monarch of \"topsy-turvydom\"--of formulaic plots involving magical elixirs and coins. A heat wave has hit London, theater attendance is down, and Sullivan is", "even in the execution business. When Morris hooks up with him for the last time, he's in hiding from creditors.", "casts strive to be \"microcosms\" of society, so issues of class are ever present. You see it in Sullivan's banter with the working-class musicians in the pit and in Gilbert's with the uppity actors (the movie's posturing middle class),", "But that's OK, because the man is an interesting specimen. Is he a monster or a humanist committed to eliminating the \"deplawrable tawchaw\" of capital punishment? It could go either way.", "must have done it. Leigh's endings are often wondrous, and this one is up there with the rooftop scene in High Hopes (1988). The Mikado is a triumph--it would be the Savoy's biggest hit--but there's no transformation in" ], [ "Topsy-Turvy broadly recounts the creation of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera The Mikado at", "camera pulls back over the orchestra and the audience, this movie feels like one of the saddest and loveliest tributes to the lives of artists ever made. Topsy-Turvy leaves you upside down and breathless.", "Like Mike Leigh, Errol Morris rarely begins a project with a clear idea of what he wants it to be. Sometimes he doesn't end a project with a clear idea of what he wants it to be, either. His newest documentary, \n\n Mr. Death : The Rise and Fall of Fred D. Leuchter, Jr. , kicks up all sorts of messy emotions that his coolly ironic technique can't begin to handle.", "disguised English bureaucrats; the joke of Topsy-Turvy is that the opera's English performers seem culturally incapable of playing Japanese. They rehearse in long coats and top hats, and some of the women (and men!) express horror at appearing on", "Only a lunatic would call Topsy-Turvy , with its lame first hour and host of loose ends, a masterpiece, but by the finale I was ready to have myself committed. The finale itself", "Leigh's movies, born of actors' improvisations and loosely shaped, always take a while to find their rhythm--and, frequently, their point. This one finds everything. By the end of its two hours and 40 minutes, Topsy-Turvy has evolved into something", "M r. Death gets into deeper waters when it recounts the trial of Ernst Zundel in Canada for proclaiming that the Holocaust never happened. Zundel hired Leuchter to go to Auschwitz and", "about his redesigns for lethal-injection systems, gas chambers, and even a gallows, while underneath, Caleb Sampson provides macabre funhouse music and wistful calliope waltzes. Morris' distance from his subject implies condescension--Leuchter looks like something in a jar.", "Sullivan's duds, has its premiere, and Gilbert fumes over a review that calls him the monarch of \"topsy-turvydom\"--of formulaic plots involving magical elixirs and coins. A heat wave has hit London, theater attendance is down, and Sullivan is", "A central section of the drama is missing. What exactly fired Sullivan up about doing The Mikado ? What was different about this collaboration? No answer. Topsy-Turvy turns into something other than the", "the lives of its makers. Gilbert can't bring himself to reach out to his brokenhearted wife (Lesley Manville), and Sullivan has a melancholy inkling that he has reached his artistic peak. The ingénue, Leonora, is drinking again, toasting herself", "must have done it. Leigh's endings are often wondrous, and this one is up there with the rooftop scene in High Hopes (1988). The Mikado is a triumph--it would be the Savoy's biggest hit--but there's no transformation in", "in their work. He must also love that those scenes are narrative dead ends: \"How's this for conflict?--you bourgeois slaves to melodrama.\"", "The wake-up call comes an hour into the movie. Gilbert attends a popular exposition of Japanese culture at Knightsbridge and watches Kabuki routines and women in kimonos pouring green tea (\"spinach water\"). When a Japanese sword he has purchased falls off his wall, he hefts it; mimes a fight while issuing strangled, samurailike cries; then has a brainstorm. We hear the horns of The Mikado overture, then Leigh cuts to the fully realized opening scene on stage at the Savoy: \"We are gentlemen of Japan …\" Just that chorus is enough to reanimate the audience--to make people sit up and grin. And Leigh's technique of leaping back and forth between the finished Mikado and painstaking scenes of rehearsal has magic in it: You're watching straw, then gold, then straw, then gold. And you see the connection.", "in the mirror and praising the loveliness of Nature--a Nature that will, of course, destroy her. The final image is of Art: Leonora on stage singing Yum-Yum's sublime \"The sun whose rays are all ablaze …\" As Leigh's", "and a glowering dedication to process. Gilbert haggles with his actors over small things that shouldn't resonate but which somehow add up. Leigh's small things add up, too. The joke of The Mikado is that its Japanese lords are thinly", "itching to go off and become the English Mendelssohn--to write operas and symphonies instead of comic \"soufflés.\" Leigh evidently loves the bloodless formality of the scenes between Gilbert and Sullivan, men of opposite tastes and temperaments who only overlap", "The director is in his weird element only in the first half-hour, in which he sits his subject down and gets out of his way. Leuchter, who looks a little like the archetypal", "After my rage at Leuchter had subsided, I began to get angry at Morris for aestheticizing that violation--turning it into an ironic art object. The director's beautiful detachment suggests a kind of cowardice. His technique is based on standing back--maintaining a fixed distance--while his subjects hang themselves, and for a while that works stunningly. But at a certain point, isn't it only human to want to engage this man? You don't need to play Mike Wallace and demolish Leuchter on camera. You could just ask him what he makes of, say, van Pelt's assertion that the answer to the riddle of the gas chambers was all over the archives, or what he thought of the chemist's declaration that the test performed for cyanide was the wrong test. Morris can be heard asking one question only: \"Have you ever thought you might be wrong or that you made a mistake?\"--sufficiently broad that Leuchter can casually affirm his own inanity.", "Gilbert and Sullivan story: a portrait of life in the theater. A group portrait. D'Oyly Carte becomes a quiet third protagonist, a humane businessman. He softly negotiates a salary increase with the company's lead comic (Martin Savage), a neurasthenic" ], [ "Only a lunatic would call Topsy-Turvy , with its lame first hour and host of loose ends, a masterpiece, but by the finale I was ready to have myself committed. The finale itself", "Topsy-Turvy broadly recounts the creation of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera The Mikado at", "M r. Death gets into deeper waters when it recounts the trial of Ernst Zundel in Canada for proclaiming that the Holocaust never happened. Zundel hired Leuchter to go to Auschwitz and", "Leigh's movies, born of actors' improvisations and loosely shaped, always take a while to find their rhythm--and, frequently, their point. This one finds everything. By the end of its two hours and 40 minutes, Topsy-Turvy has evolved into something", "Sullivan's duds, has its premiere, and Gilbert fumes over a review that calls him the monarch of \"topsy-turvydom\"--of formulaic plots involving magical elixirs and coins. A heat wave has hit London, theater attendance is down, and Sullivan is", "disguised English bureaucrats; the joke of Topsy-Turvy is that the opera's English performers seem culturally incapable of playing Japanese. They rehearse in long coats and top hats, and some of the women (and men!) express horror at appearing on", "A central section of the drama is missing. What exactly fired Sullivan up about doing The Mikado ? What was different about this collaboration? No answer. Topsy-Turvy turns into something other than the", "camera pulls back over the orchestra and the audience, this movie feels like one of the saddest and loveliest tributes to the lives of artists ever made. Topsy-Turvy leaves you upside down and breathless.", "about his redesigns for lethal-injection systems, gas chambers, and even a gallows, while underneath, Caleb Sampson provides macabre funhouse music and wistful calliope waltzes. Morris' distance from his subject implies condescension--Leuchter looks like something in a jar.", "Like Mike Leigh, Errol Morris rarely begins a project with a clear idea of what he wants it to be. Sometimes he doesn't end a project with a clear idea of what he wants it to be, either. His newest documentary, \n\n Mr. Death : The Rise and Fall of Fred D. Leuchter, Jr. , kicks up all sorts of messy emotions that his coolly ironic technique can't begin to handle.", "must have done it. Leigh's endings are often wondrous, and this one is up there with the rooftop scene in High Hopes (1988). The Mikado is a triumph--it would be the Savoy's biggest hit--but there's no transformation in", "After my rage at Leuchter had subsided, I began to get angry at Morris for aestheticizing that violation--turning it into an ironic art object. The director's beautiful detachment suggests a kind of cowardice. His technique is based on standing back--maintaining a fixed distance--while his subjects hang themselves, and for a while that works stunningly. But at a certain point, isn't it only human to want to engage this man? You don't need to play Mike Wallace and demolish Leuchter on camera. You could just ask him what he makes of, say, van Pelt's assertion that the answer to the riddle of the gas chambers was all over the archives, or what he thought of the chemist's declaration that the test performed for cyanide was the wrong test. Morris can be heard asking one question only: \"Have you ever thought you might be wrong or that you made a mistake?\"--sufficiently broad that Leuchter can casually affirm his own inanity.", "occasions where a great amount of current has been applied, and the meat actually will come off the executee's bone like the meat coming off a cooked chicken.\" Leuchter set about making capital punishment more \"humane.\" He moves on to talking", "The wake-up call comes an hour into the movie. Gilbert attends a popular exposition of Japanese culture at Knightsbridge and watches Kabuki routines and women in kimonos pouring green tea (\"spinach water\"). When a Japanese sword he has purchased falls off his wall, he hefts it; mimes a fight while issuing strangled, samurailike cries; then has a brainstorm. We hear the horns of The Mikado overture, then Leigh cuts to the fully realized opening scene on stage at the Savoy: \"We are gentlemen of Japan …\" Just that chorus is enough to reanimate the audience--to make people sit up and grin. And Leigh's technique of leaping back and forth between the finished Mikado and painstaking scenes of rehearsal has magic in it: You're watching straw, then gold, then straw, then gold. And you see the connection.", "in their work. He must also love that those scenes are narrative dead ends: \"How's this for conflict?--you bourgeois slaves to melodrama.\"", "The director is in his weird element only in the first half-hour, in which he sits his subject down and gets out of his way. Leuchter, who looks a little like the archetypal", "movie dweeb Charles Martin Smith and has a heavy exurbs-of-Boston accent, explains how he became involved in redesigning problematic electric chairs. \"Excess current cooks the tissue,\" he says, barely suppressing a smirk at his own expertise. \"There've been", "But that's OK, because the man is an interesting specimen. Is he a monster or a humanist committed to eliminating the \"deplawrable tawchaw\" of capital punishment? It could go either way.", "the lives of its makers. Gilbert can't bring himself to reach out to his brokenhearted wife (Lesley Manville), and Sullivan has a melancholy inkling that he has reached his artistic peak. The ingénue, Leonora, is drinking again, toasting herself", "My concern here isn't so much for Leuchter or even the Holocaust revisionists, who'll just think he was sandbagged. The problem is that when a documentary filmmaker seems too scared or cool or arty to violate his own immaculate aesthetic, he ends up weakening his case. He also provides no emotional release, which isn't a small matter when the subject is Holocaust denial. Morris was close enough to Leuchter to have gotten something more, to have gone a little deeper in search of a poison that does penetrate surfaces." ], [ "itching to go off and become the English Mendelssohn--to write operas and symphonies instead of comic \"soufflés.\" Leigh evidently loves the bloodless formality of the scenes between Gilbert and Sullivan, men of opposite tastes and temperaments who only overlap", "Who would have predicted that Leigh would make Gilbert and Sullivan into Mike Leigh characters? Gilbert could be a stand-in for Leigh himself--a haughty, ill-humored man with an obsession for tiny details", "the lives of its makers. Gilbert can't bring himself to reach out to his brokenhearted wife (Lesley Manville), and Sullivan has a melancholy inkling that he has reached his artistic peak. The ingénue, Leonora, is drinking again, toasting herself", "must have done it. Leigh's endings are often wondrous, and this one is up there with the rooftop scene in High Hopes (1988). The Mikado is a triumph--it would be the Savoy's biggest hit--but there's no transformation in", "The wake-up call comes an hour into the movie. Gilbert attends a popular exposition of Japanese culture at Knightsbridge and watches Kabuki routines and women in kimonos pouring green tea (\"spinach water\"). When a Japanese sword he has purchased falls off his wall, he hefts it; mimes a fight while issuing strangled, samurailike cries; then has a brainstorm. We hear the horns of The Mikado overture, then Leigh cuts to the fully realized opening scene on stage at the Savoy: \"We are gentlemen of Japan …\" Just that chorus is enough to reanimate the audience--to make people sit up and grin. And Leigh's technique of leaping back and forth between the finished Mikado and painstaking scenes of rehearsal has magic in it: You're watching straw, then gold, then straw, then gold. And you see the connection.", "London's Savoy Theatre in 1885. Perhaps \"broadly\" is putting too fine a point on it. The first hour, in which Arthur Sullivan (Allan Corduner) attempts to sever his ties with W.S. Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) and the owner of", "Sullivan's duds, has its premiere, and Gilbert fumes over a review that calls him the monarch of \"topsy-turvydom\"--of formulaic plots involving magical elixirs and coins. A heat wave has hit London, theater attendance is down, and Sullivan is", "and a glowering dedication to process. Gilbert haggles with his actors over small things that shouldn't resonate but which somehow add up. Leigh's small things add up, too. The joke of The Mikado is that its Japanese lords are thinly", "Savoy Theatre lifting and peering under every seat. That's every seat. You can almost hear Leigh cackling: \"How's this for a fast start?--you bourgeois slaves to narrative.\" Inevitably, something does happen: Princess Ida , one of Gilbert and", "Gilbert and Sullivan story: a portrait of life in the theater. A group portrait. D'Oyly Carte becomes a quiet third protagonist, a humane businessman. He softly negotiates a salary increase with the company's lead comic (Martin Savage), a neurasthenic", "stage without corsets. Behind the satire, however, is a reverence for Gilbert and Sullivan: The tempos are slower than modern audiences are used to, and the staging has been stripped of high-camp accretions. I saw a D'Oyly Carte production", "Topsy-Turvy broadly recounts the creation of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera The Mikado at", "in the mirror and praising the loveliness of Nature--a Nature that will, of course, destroy her. The final image is of Art: Leonora on stage singing Yum-Yum's sublime \"The sun whose rays are all ablaze …\" As Leigh's", "A central section of the drama is missing. What exactly fired Sullivan up about doing The Mikado ? What was different about this collaboration? No answer. Topsy-Turvy turns into something other than the", "Leigh's movies, born of actors' improvisations and loosely shaped, always take a while to find their rhythm--and, frequently, their point. This one finds everything. By the end of its two hours and 40 minutes, Topsy-Turvy has evolved into something", "the Savoy, Richard D'Oyly Carte (Ron Cook), is a mess: The order of scenes feels arbitrary, and characters pop up and vanish with bewildering frequency. You might be tempted to vanish, too. (Friends of mine did.) Be patient.", "whom he drills on pronunciation and poise. The chorus is presented as some sort of collective folk conscience when it lobbies Gilbert to restore the rashly cut solo (\"A more humane Mikado never did in Japan exist\") of the sad,", "camera pulls back over the orchestra and the audience, this movie feels like one of the saddest and loveliest tributes to the lives of artists ever made. Topsy-Turvy leaves you upside down and breathless.", "about his redesigns for lethal-injection systems, gas chambers, and even a gallows, while underneath, Caleb Sampson provides macabre funhouse music and wistful calliope waltzes. Morris' distance from his subject implies condescension--Leuchter looks like something in a jar.", "casts strive to be \"microcosms\" of society, so issues of class are ever present. You see it in Sullivan's banter with the working-class musicians in the pit and in Gilbert's with the uppity actors (the movie's posturing middle class)," ], [ "Report\" became the backbone of Zundel's defense (he lost anyway) and of the burgeoning revisionist movement led by David Irving. But if Leuchter became a hero to neo-Nazis, he also became a target of Jewish groups and a pariah", "Is Leuchter a raving anti-Semite or a pathetic pawn who thrived on having--for the first time in his life--a bit of celebrity? The film suggests the latter. It certainly produces no evidence", "where chemical analysis revealed no cyanide gas. Furthermore, Leuchter can't figure out how the gas would even have been administered without killing the Nazis themselves--proof, he argues, that mass extermination at Auschwitz never took place. The subsequent \"Leuchter", "The director is in his weird element only in the first half-hour, in which he sits his subject down and gets out of his way. Leuchter, who looks a little like the archetypal", "M r. Death gets into deeper waters when it recounts the trial of Ernst Zundel in Canada for proclaiming that the Holocaust never happened. Zundel hired Leuchter to go to Auschwitz and", "of malice. Plenty of monstrous insensitivity and hubris, though. Morris uses the Dutch historian Robert Jan van Pelt as a counternarrator: He calls Leuchter \"a fffool \" who didn't have a clue what to look for in a place", "hair is 100 microns thick), so by crushing the samples (standard procedure), he had effectively diluted the cyanide 100,000 times. Against all this, Morris shows footage of Leuchter chiseling at Auschwitz and even adds some of his own,", "After my rage at Leuchter had subsided, I began to get angry at Morris for aestheticizing that violation--turning it into an ironic art object. The director's beautiful detachment suggests a kind of cowardice. His technique is based on standing back--maintaining a fixed distance--while his subjects hang themselves, and for a while that works stunningly. But at a certain point, isn't it only human to want to engage this man? You don't need to play Mike Wallace and demolish Leuchter on camera. You could just ask him what he makes of, say, van Pelt's assertion that the answer to the riddle of the gas chambers was all over the archives, or what he thought of the chemist's declaration that the test performed for cyanide was the wrong test. Morris can be heard asking one question only: \"Have you ever thought you might be wrong or that you made a mistake?\"--sufficiently broad that Leuchter can casually affirm his own inanity.", "occasions where a great amount of current has been applied, and the meat actually will come off the executee's bone like the meat coming off a cooked chicken.\" Leuchter set about making capital punishment more \"humane.\" He moves on to talking", "about his redesigns for lethal-injection systems, gas chambers, and even a gallows, while underneath, Caleb Sampson provides macabre funhouse music and wistful calliope waltzes. Morris' distance from his subject implies condescension--Leuchter looks like something in a jar.", "examine the \"alleged\" gas chambers: Footage (taken by Zundel's cameraman) shows the little man chiseling at walls, vandalizing what even he admits are international shrines. Leuchter smuggled specimens of rock and concrete back to the United States,", "My concern here isn't so much for Leuchter or even the Holocaust revisionists, who'll just think he was sandbagged. The problem is that when a documentary filmmaker seems too scared or cool or arty to violate his own immaculate aesthetic, he ends up weakening his case. He also provides no emotional release, which isn't a small matter when the subject is Holocaust denial. Morris was close enough to Leuchter to have gotten something more, to have gone a little deeper in search of a poison that does penetrate surfaces.", "Like Mike Leigh, Errol Morris rarely begins a project with a clear idea of what he wants it to be. Sometimes he doesn't end a project with a clear idea of what he wants it to be, either. His newest documentary, \n\n Mr. Death : The Rise and Fall of Fred D. Leuchter, Jr. , kicks up all sorts of messy emotions that his coolly ironic technique can't begin to handle.", "that had changed enormously in 50 years. \"If he had spent time in the archives,\" says van Pelt, \"he would have found evidence about ventilation systems, ways to introduce Zyclon B into these buildings--but of course I don't think he", "knows German so it wouldn't have helped very much.\" The most devastating rebuttal is from the chemist in charge of the Auschwitz analysis, who explains that the gas wouldn't have penetrated more than 10 microns into the wall (a human", "But that's OK, because the man is an interesting specimen. Is he a monster or a humanist committed to eliminating the \"deplawrable tawchaw\" of capital punishment? It could go either way.", "itching to go off and become the English Mendelssohn--to write operas and symphonies instead of comic \"soufflés.\" Leigh evidently loves the bloodless formality of the scenes between Gilbert and Sullivan, men of opposite tastes and temperaments who only overlap", "in their work. He must also love that those scenes are narrative dead ends: \"How's this for conflict?--you bourgeois slaves to melodrama.\"", "in the mirror and praising the loveliness of Nature--a Nature that will, of course, destroy her. The final image is of Art: Leonora on stage singing Yum-Yum's sublime \"The sun whose rays are all ablaze …\" As Leigh's", "movie dweeb Charles Martin Smith and has a heavy exurbs-of-Boston accent, explains how he became involved in redesigning problematic electric chairs. \"Excess current cooks the tissue,\" he says, barely suppressing a smirk at his own expertise. \"There've been" ] ]
valid	22218	[ "Which of the following words best describes Mr. Jonathan Chambers?", "Why was Mr. Chambers fired from his university?", "How does Dr. Harcourt likely feel about Mr. Chambers' book now?", "How do Mr. Chambers' dreams connect with the events of the story?", "How does Mr. Chambers' favorite picture symbolize the events in the story?", "How is the other universe taking over Mr. Chambers' universe?", "Why did Mr. Chambers' room last so much longer than other parts of the neighborhood?", "Why doesn't Mr. Chambers talk to anyone?", "Why doesn't Mr. Chambers' read or listen to the news?", "What is Mr. Chambers' first indication that something is wrong?" ]	[ [ "Habitual", "Mad", "Mean", "Shy" ], [ "He was too unsociable.", "Dr. Harcourt did not like him.", "He exposed students to a philosophy.", "He wrote a book." ], [ "He does not like it.", "He likes it, but does not believe it could be true.", "He ridicules it.", "He has decided that it could be true." ], [ "The island is his job at the university, and the snakes are the people who fired him.", "The island is his solitude, and the snakes are people who want to talk to him.", "The dreams are unrelated.", "The island is his room, and the snakes are the other minds." ], [ "Mr. Chambers is the ship in the foreground and the other universe is the vague outline of the larger ship.", "The picture does not symbolize any events in the story.", "Mr. Chambers is the ship in the foreground, and his old life is the vague outline of the larger ship.", "Mr. Chambers is the ship in the foreground, and other people are the vague outline of the larger ship." ], [ "Thousands of minds from another universe are working together.", "All of these factors contribute.", "War and plague wiped out billions of people.", "One powerful mind set its sights and machinations on Mr. Chambers' universe." ], [ "He is actually only imagining this.", "His mind is unusually strong.", "He has spend so much time and attention in this room.", "The other minds are worried about him." ], [ "He wants to, but other people don't want to talk to him.", "He is shy.", "He gave up on relationships after losing his job.", "He does not like people." ], [ "He does not like the news.", "He does not like to be tricked by radio dramas.", "He does read and listen to the news.", "He gave up on current events after losing his job." ], [ "He arrives home early.", "He overhears upsetting news about the Empire State Building.", "He forgot a cigar.", "He is having bad dreams." ] ]	[ 1, 3, 4, 4, 1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 1 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "Mr. Chambers shivered, reached to turn up the collar of his coat,\n then stopped as he realized the room must be warm. A fire blazed\n merrily in the grate. The cold he felt came from something ...\n somewhere else. The cold of fear and horror, the chill of a half\n whispered thought.\n\n\n A deathly silence had fallen, a silence still measured by the\n pendulum clock. And yet a silence that held a different tenor than\n he had ever sensed before. Not a homey, comfortable silence ... but\n a silence that hinted at emptiness and nothingness.", "Mr. Chambers loved that picture. It had depth, he always said. It\n showed an old sailing ship in the foreground on a placid sea. Far\n in the distance, almost on the horizon line, was the vague\n outline of a larger vessel.\n\n\n There were other pictures, too. The forest scene above the\n fireplace, the old English prints in the corner where he sat, the\n Currier and Ives above the radio. But the ship print was directly\n in his line of vision. He could see it without turning his head.\n He had put it there because he liked it best.\n\n\n Further reverie became an effort as Mr. Chambers felt himself\n succumbing to weariness. He undressed and went to bed. For an\n hour he lay awake, assailed by vague fears he could neither\n define nor understand.", "He didn't walk fast. He took his time. He always returned to his\n front door at exactly 7:45. No one ever stopped to talk with\n him. Even the man at the Red Star confectionery, where he bought\n his cigar, remained silent while the purchase was being made. Mr.\n Chambers merely tapped on the glass top of the counter with a\n coin, the man reached in and brought forth the box, and Mr.\n Chambers took his cigar. That was all.\n\n\n For people long ago had gathered that Mr. Chambers desired to be\n left alone. The newer generation of townsfolk called it\n eccentricity. Certain uncouth persons had a different word for\n it. The oldsters remembered that this queer looking individual\n with his black silk muffler, rosewood cane and bowler hat once\n had been a professor at State University.", "But as Mr. Chambers neared them they fell into what seemed an\n abashed silence and watched him pass. He, on his part, gave them\n no sign of recognition. That was the way it had been for many\n years, ever since the people had become convinced that he did not\n wish to talk.\n\n\n One of the men half started forward as if to speak to him, but\n then stepped back and Mr. Chambers continued on his walk.\n\n\n Back at his own front door he stopped and as he had done a\n thousand times before drew forth the heavy gold watch from his\n pocket.\n\n\n He started violently. It was only 7:30!\n\n\n For long minutes he stood there staring at the watch in\n accusation. The timepiece hadn't stopped, for it still ticked\n audibly.\n\n\n But 15 minutes too soon! For twenty years, day in, day out, he\n had started out at seven and returned at a quarter of eight.\n Now....", "A professor of metaphysics, they seemed to recall, or some such\n outlandish subject. At any rate a furore of some sort was\n connected with his name ... at the time an academic scandal. He\n had written a book, and he had taught the subject matter of that\n volume to his classes. What that subject matter was, had long been\n forgotten, but whatever it was had been considered sufficiently\n revolutionary to cost Mr. Chambers his post at the university.\n\n\n A silver moon shone over the chimney tops and a chill, impish\n October wind was rustling the dead leaves when Mr. Chambers\n started out at seven o'clock.\n\n\n It was a good night, he told himself, smelling the clean, crisp\n air of autumn and the faint pungence of distant wood smoke.", "It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as\n merely the vagaries of an over-zealous mind.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover and began\n thumbing slowly through the pages. For a moment the memory of\n happier days swept over him.", "The light through the windows slowly grew brighter. Mr. Chambers\n slid out of bed, slowly crossed to the window, the cold of the\n floor biting into his bare feet. He forced himself to look out.\n\n\n There was nothing outside the window. No shadows. As if there\n might be a fog. But no fog, however, thick, could hide the apple\n tree that grew close against the house.\n\n\n But the tree was there ... shadowy, indistinct in the gray, with\n a few withered apples still clinging to its boughs, a few\n shriveled leaves reluctant to leave the parent branch.", "He went on until he came to the corner of Lexington. There, on\n the curb, he stopped and stared. The gray wall was thicker there\n but he did not realize how close it was until he glanced down at\n his feet and saw there was nothing, nothing at all beyond the\n curbstone. No dull gleam of wet asphalt, no sign of a street. It\n was as if all eternity ended here at the corner of Maple and\n Lexington.\n\n\n With a wild cry, Mr. Chambers turned and ran. Back down the\n street he raced, coat streaming after him in the wind, bowler hat\n bouncing on his head.\n\n\n Panting, he reached the gate and stumbled up the walk, thankful\n that it still was there.", "And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through\n him. Rigid, he sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minutes\n later he arose and almost ran across the room to the old mahogany\n bookcase that stood against the wall.\n\n\n There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on the\n first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The\n second shelf contained but one book. And it was around this book\n that Mr. Chambers' entire life was centered.\n\n\n Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach\n its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he\n remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had\n been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand\n either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent\n of some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the\n school.", "The same thing, at the same time, day after day. He had not\n deliberately set upon such a life of routine. A bachelor, living\n alone with sufficient money to supply his humble needs, the timed\n existence had grown on him gradually.\n\n\n So he turned on Lexington and back on Oak. The dog at the corner\n of Oak and Jefferson was waiting for him once again and came out\n snarling and growling, snapping at his heels. But Mr. Chambers\n pretended not to notice and the beast gave up the chase.\n\n\n A radio was blaring down the street and faint wisps of what it\n was blurting floated to Mr. Chambers.\n\n\n \"... still taking place ... Empire State building disappeared ...\n thin air ... famed scientist, Dr. Edmund Harcourt....\"", "But silence was no strange thing to Mr. Chambers. Once he had\n loved music ... the kind of music he could get by tuning in\n symphonic orchestras on the radio. But the radio stood silent in\n the corner, the cord out of its socket. Mr. Chambers had pulled\n it out many years before. To be precise, upon the night when the\n symphonic broadcast had been interrupted to give a news flash.\n\n\n He had stopped reading newspapers and magazines too, had exiled\n himself to a few city blocks. And as the years flowed by, that\n self exile had become a prison, an intangible, impassable wall\n bounded by four city blocks by three. Beyond them lay utter,\n unexplainable terror. Beyond them he never went.\n\n\n But recluse though he was, he could not on occasion escape from\n hearing things. Things the newsboy shouted on the streets, things\n the men talked about on the drugstore corner when they didn't see\n him coming.", "And somehow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his own\n experience. Something, somewhere, some part of his earlier life,\n seemed to hold an explanation. But try as he would his befuddled\n brain failed to find the answer.\n\n\n The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime as usual\n setting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stood\n upon the mantel.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers got to his feet, strode to the door, opened it and\n looked out.\n\n\n Moonlight tesselated the street in black and silver, etching the\n chimneys and trees against a silvered sky.\n\n\n But the house directly across the street was not the same. It was\n strangely lop-sided, its dimensions out of proportion, like a\n house that suddenly had gone mad.", "It wasn't until then that he realized something else was wrong.\n He had no cigar. For the first time he had neglected to purchase\n his evening smoke.\n\n\n Shaken, muttering to himself, Mr. Chambers let himself in his\n house and locked the door behind him.\n\n\n He hung his hat and coat on the rack in the hall and walked\n slowly into the living room. Dropping into his favorite chair, he\n shook his head in bewilderment.\n\n\n Silence filled the room. A silence that was measured by the\n ticking of the old fashioned pendulum clock on the mantelpiece.", "For the first time in twenty years, Mr. Chambers retraced his\n steps. He walked back to Jefferson, then turned around and went\n back to Grant again and on to Lexington. Then back to Grant\n again, where he stood astounded while a single, incredible fact\n grew slowly in his brain:\nThere wasn't any confectionery! The block from Marshall to Grant\n had disappeared!\nNow he understood why he had missed the store on the night\n before, why he had arrived home fifteen minutes early.\n\n\n On legs that were dead things he stumbled back to his home. He\n slammed and locked the door behind him and made his way\n unsteadily to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivable\n necromancy could a paved street with houses, trees and buildings\n be spirited away and the space it had occupied be closed up?\n\n\n Was something happening in the world which he, in his secluded\n life, knew nothing about?", "Mr. Chambers started. The clock had stopped. Funny ... the first\n time in twenty years.\n\n\n He leaped from his chair and then sat down again.\n\n\n The clock hadn't stopped.\n\n\n It wasn't there.\n\n\n There was a tingling sensation in his feet.", "The wind whipped the muted words away and Mr. Chambers grumbled\n to himself. Another one of those fantastic radio dramas,\n probably. He remembered one from many years before, something\n about the Martians. And Harcourt! What did Harcourt have to do\n with it? He was one of the men who had ridiculed the book\n Mr. Chambers had written.\n\n\n But he pushed speculation away, sniffed the clean, crisp air again,\n looked at the familiar things that materialized out of the late\n autumn darkness as he walked along. For there was nothing ...\n absolutely nothing in the world ... that he would let upset him.\n That was a tenet he had laid down twenty years ago.\nThere was a crowd of men in front of the drugstore at the corner\n of Oak and Lincoln and they were talking excitedly. Mr. Chambers\n caught some excited words: \"It's happening everywhere.... What\n do you think it is.... The scientists can't explain....\"", "On the stoop he stood for a moment, breathing hard. He glanced\n back over his shoulder and a queer feeling of inner numbness\n seemed to well over him. At that moment the gray nothingness\n appeared to thin ... the enveloping curtain fell away, and he\n saw....\n\n\n Vague and indistinct, yet cast in stereoscopic outline, a\n gigantic city was lined against the darkling sky. It was a city\n fantastic with cubed domes, spires, and aerial bridges and flying\n buttresses. Tunnel-like streets, flanked on either side by\n shining metallic ramps and runways, stretched endlessly to the\n vanishing point. Great shafts of multicolored light probed huge\n streamers and ellipses above the higher levels.\n\n\n And beyond, like a final backdrop, rose a titanic wall. It was\n from that wall ... from its crenelated parapets and battlements\n that Mr. Chambers felt the eyes peering at him.", "He could see it all now. By an insidious mass hypnosis minions from\n that other dimension ... or was it one supreme intelligence ... had\n deliberately sown the seeds of dissension. The reduction of the\n world's mental power had been carefully planned with diabolic\n premeditation.\n\n\n On impulse he suddenly turned, crossed the room and opened the\n connecting door to the bedroom. He stopped on the threshold and a\n sob forced its way to his lips.\n\n\n There was no bedroom. Where his stolid four poster and dresser\n had been there was greyish nothingness.\n\n\n Like an automaton he turned again and paced to the hall door.\n Here, too, he found what he had expected. There was no hall, no\n familiar hat rack and umbrella stand.\n\n\n Nothing....\n\n\n Weakly Mr. Chambers moved back to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n \"So here I am,\" he said, half aloud.", "The tree was there now. But it hadn't been when he first had\n looked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that.\nAnd now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbor's house ... but\n those outlines were all wrong. They didn't jibe and fit together ...\n they were out of plumb. As if some giant hand had grasped the house\n and wrenched it out of true. Like the house he had seen across the\n street the night before, the house that had painfully righted itself\n when he thought of how it should look.\n\n\n Perhaps if he thought of how his neighbor's house should look, it\n too might right itself. But Mr. Chambers was very weary. Too\n weary to think about the house.\n\n\n He turned from the window and dressed slowly. In the living room\n he slumped into his chair, put his feet on the old cracked\n ottoman. For a long time he sat, trying to think.", "Mr. Chambers turned his eyes back into the room. The clock was\n ticking slowly, steadily. The greyness was stealing into the\n room.\n\n\n The table and radio were the first to go. They simply faded away\n and with them went one corner of the room.\n\n\n And then the elephant ash tray.\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" said Mr. Chambers, \"I never did like that very well.\"\n\n\n Now as he sat there it didn't seem queer to be without the table\n or the radio. It was as if it were something quite normal.\n Something one could expect to happen.\n\n\n Perhaps, if he thought hard enough, he could bring them back.\n\n\n But, after all, what was the use? One man, alone, could not stand\n off the irresistible march of nothingness. One man, all alone,\n simply couldn't do it." ], [ "A professor of metaphysics, they seemed to recall, or some such\n outlandish subject. At any rate a furore of some sort was\n connected with his name ... at the time an academic scandal. He\n had written a book, and he had taught the subject matter of that\n volume to his classes. What that subject matter was, had long been\n forgotten, but whatever it was had been considered sufficiently\n revolutionary to cost Mr. Chambers his post at the university.\n\n\n A silver moon shone over the chimney tops and a chill, impish\n October wind was rustling the dead leaves when Mr. Chambers\n started out at seven o'clock.\n\n\n It was a good night, he told himself, smelling the clean, crisp\n air of autumn and the faint pungence of distant wood smoke.", "And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through\n him. Rigid, he sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minutes\n later he arose and almost ran across the room to the old mahogany\n bookcase that stood against the wall.\n\n\n There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on the\n first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The\n second shelf contained but one book. And it was around this book\n that Mr. Chambers' entire life was centered.\n\n\n Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach\n its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he\n remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had\n been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand\n either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent\n of some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the\n school.", "He didn't walk fast. He took his time. He always returned to his\n front door at exactly 7:45. No one ever stopped to talk with\n him. Even the man at the Red Star confectionery, where he bought\n his cigar, remained silent while the purchase was being made. Mr.\n Chambers merely tapped on the glass top of the counter with a\n coin, the man reached in and brought forth the box, and Mr.\n Chambers took his cigar. That was all.\n\n\n For people long ago had gathered that Mr. Chambers desired to be\n left alone. The newer generation of townsfolk called it\n eccentricity. Certain uncouth persons had a different word for\n it. The oldsters remembered that this queer looking individual\n with his black silk muffler, rosewood cane and bowler hat once\n had been a professor at State University.", "had written that. And because of those words he had been\n called a heretic, had been compelled to resign his position at\n the university, had been forced into this hermit life.", "Mr. Chambers loved that picture. It had depth, he always said. It\n showed an old sailing ship in the foreground on a placid sea. Far\n in the distance, almost on the horizon line, was the vague\n outline of a larger vessel.\n\n\n There were other pictures, too. The forest scene above the\n fireplace, the old English prints in the corner where he sat, the\n Currier and Ives above the radio. But the ship print was directly\n in his line of vision. He could see it without turning his head.\n He had put it there because he liked it best.\n\n\n Further reverie became an effort as Mr. Chambers felt himself\n succumbing to weariness. He undressed and went to bed. For an\n hour he lay awake, assailed by vague fears he could neither\n define nor understand.", "It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as\n merely the vagaries of an over-zealous mind.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover and began\n thumbing slowly through the pages. For a moment the memory of\n happier days swept over him.", "But silence was no strange thing to Mr. Chambers. Once he had\n loved music ... the kind of music he could get by tuning in\n symphonic orchestras on the radio. But the radio stood silent in\n the corner, the cord out of its socket. Mr. Chambers had pulled\n it out many years before. To be precise, upon the night when the\n symphonic broadcast had been interrupted to give a news flash.\n\n\n He had stopped reading newspapers and magazines too, had exiled\n himself to a few city blocks. And as the years flowed by, that\n self exile had become a prison, an intangible, impassable wall\n bounded by four city blocks by three. Beyond them lay utter,\n unexplainable terror. Beyond them he never went.\n\n\n But recluse though he was, he could not on occasion escape from\n hearing things. Things the newsboy shouted on the streets, things\n the men talked about on the drugstore corner when they didn't see\n him coming.", "The same thing, at the same time, day after day. He had not\n deliberately set upon such a life of routine. A bachelor, living\n alone with sufficient money to supply his humble needs, the timed\n existence had grown on him gradually.\n\n\n So he turned on Lexington and back on Oak. The dog at the corner\n of Oak and Jefferson was waiting for him once again and came out\n snarling and growling, snapping at his heels. But Mr. Chambers\n pretended not to notice and the beast gave up the chase.\n\n\n A radio was blaring down the street and faint wisps of what it\n was blurting floated to Mr. Chambers.\n\n\n \"... still taking place ... Empire State building disappeared ...\n thin air ... famed scientist, Dr. Edmund Harcourt....\"", "Mr. Chambers shivered, reached to turn up the collar of his coat,\n then stopped as he realized the room must be warm. A fire blazed\n merrily in the grate. The cold he felt came from something ...\n somewhere else. The cold of fear and horror, the chill of a half\n whispered thought.\n\n\n A deathly silence had fallen, a silence still measured by the\n pendulum clock. And yet a silence that held a different tenor than\n he had ever sensed before. Not a homey, comfortable silence ... but\n a silence that hinted at emptiness and nothingness.", "There was something back of this, Mr. Chambers told himself.\n Something that reached far back into one corner of his brain and\n demanded recognition. Something tied up with the fragments of\n talk he had heard on the drugstore corner, bits of news\n broadcasts he had heard as he walked along the street, the\n shrieking of the newsboy calling his papers. Something to do with\n the happenings in the world from which he had excluded himself.\nHe brought them back to mind now and lingered over the one\n central theme of the talk he overheard: the wars and plagues.\n Hints of a Europe and Asia swept almost clean of human life, of\n the plague ravaging Africa, of its appearance in South America,\n of the frantic efforts of the United States to prevent its spread\n into that nation's boundaries.\n\n\n Millions of people were dead in Europe and Asia, Africa and South\n America. Billions, perhaps.", "But as Mr. Chambers neared them they fell into what seemed an\n abashed silence and watched him pass. He, on his part, gave them\n no sign of recognition. That was the way it had been for many\n years, ever since the people had become convinced that he did not\n wish to talk.\n\n\n One of the men half started forward as if to speak to him, but\n then stepped back and Mr. Chambers continued on his walk.\n\n\n Back at his own front door he stopped and as he had done a\n thousand times before drew forth the heavy gold watch from his\n pocket.\n\n\n He started violently. It was only 7:30!\n\n\n For long minutes he stood there staring at the watch in\n accusation. The timepiece hadn't stopped, for it still ticked\n audibly.\n\n\n But 15 minutes too soon! For twenty years, day in, day out, he\n had started out at seven and returned at a quarter of eight.\n Now....", "Mr. Chambers started. The clock had stopped. Funny ... the first\n time in twenty years.\n\n\n He leaped from his chair and then sat down again.\n\n\n The clock hadn't stopped.\n\n\n It wasn't there.\n\n\n There was a tingling sensation in his feet.", "For the first time in twenty years, Mr. Chambers retraced his\n steps. He walked back to Jefferson, then turned around and went\n back to Grant again and on to Lexington. Then back to Grant\n again, where he stood astounded while a single, incredible fact\n grew slowly in his brain:\nThere wasn't any confectionery! The block from Marshall to Grant\n had disappeared!\nNow he understood why he had missed the store on the night\n before, why he had arrived home fifteen minutes early.\n\n\n On legs that were dead things he stumbled back to his home. He\n slammed and locked the door behind him and made his way\n unsteadily to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivable\n necromancy could a paved street with houses, trees and buildings\n be spirited away and the space it had occupied be closed up?\n\n\n Was something happening in the world which he, in his secluded\n life, knew nothing about?", "The wind whipped the muted words away and Mr. Chambers grumbled\n to himself. Another one of those fantastic radio dramas,\n probably. He remembered one from many years before, something\n about the Martians. And Harcourt! What did Harcourt have to do\n with it? He was one of the men who had ridiculed the book\n Mr. Chambers had written.\n\n\n But he pushed speculation away, sniffed the clean, crisp air again,\n looked at the familiar things that materialized out of the late\n autumn darkness as he walked along. For there was nothing ...\n absolutely nothing in the world ... that he would let upset him.\n That was a tenet he had laid down twenty years ago.\nThere was a crowd of men in front of the drugstore at the corner\n of Oak and Lincoln and they were talking excitedly. Mr. Chambers\n caught some excited words: \"It's happening everywhere.... What\n do you think it is.... The scientists can't explain....\"", "Mr. Chambers stared at the marine print and for a moment a little\n breath of reassurance returned to him.\nThey\ncouldn't take this\n away. The rest of the world might dissolve because there was\n insufficient power of thought to retain its outward form.\n\n\n But this room was his. He alone had furnished it. He alone, since\n he had first planned the house's building, had lived here.\n\n\n This room would stay. It must stay on ... it must....\n\n\n He rose from his chair and walked across the room to the book\n case, stood staring at the second shelf with its single volume.\n His eyes shifted to the top shelf and swift terror gripped him.\n\n\n For all the books weren't there. A lot of books weren't there!\n Only the most beloved, the most familiar ones.", "He went on until he came to the corner of Lexington. There, on\n the curb, he stopped and stared. The gray wall was thicker there\n but he did not realize how close it was until he glanced down at\n his feet and saw there was nothing, nothing at all beyond the\n curbstone. No dull gleam of wet asphalt, no sign of a street. It\n was as if all eternity ended here at the corner of Maple and\n Lexington.\n\n\n With a wild cry, Mr. Chambers turned and ran. Back down the\n street he raced, coat streaming after him in the wind, bowler hat\n bouncing on his head.\n\n\n Panting, he reached the gate and stumbled up the walk, thankful\n that it still was there.", "Mr. Chambers turned his eyes back into the room. The clock was\n ticking slowly, steadily. The greyness was stealing into the\n room.\n\n\n The table and radio were the first to go. They simply faded away\n and with them went one corner of the room.\n\n\n And then the elephant ash tray.\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" said Mr. Chambers, \"I never did like that very well.\"\n\n\n Now as he sat there it didn't seem queer to be without the table\n or the radio. It was as if it were something quite normal.\n Something one could expect to happen.\n\n\n Perhaps, if he thought hard enough, he could bring them back.\n\n\n But, after all, what was the use? One man, alone, could not stand\n off the irresistible march of nothingness. One man, all alone,\n simply couldn't do it.", "He could see it all now. By an insidious mass hypnosis minions from\n that other dimension ... or was it one supreme intelligence ... had\n deliberately sown the seeds of dissension. The reduction of the\n world's mental power had been carefully planned with diabolic\n premeditation.\n\n\n On impulse he suddenly turned, crossed the room and opened the\n connecting door to the bedroom. He stopped on the threshold and a\n sob forced its way to his lips.\n\n\n There was no bedroom. Where his stolid four poster and dresser\n had been there was greyish nothingness.\n\n\n Like an automaton he turned again and paced to the hall door.\n Here, too, he found what he had expected. There was no hall, no\n familiar hat rack and umbrella stand.\n\n\n Nothing....\n\n\n Weakly Mr. Chambers moved back to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n \"So here I am,\" he said, half aloud.", "The light through the windows slowly grew brighter. Mr. Chambers\n slid out of bed, slowly crossed to the window, the cold of the\n floor biting into his bare feet. He forced himself to look out.\n\n\n There was nothing outside the window. No shadows. As if there\n might be a fog. But no fog, however, thick, could hide the apple\n tree that grew close against the house.\n\n\n But the tree was there ... shadowy, indistinct in the gray, with\n a few withered apples still clinging to its boughs, a few\n shriveled leaves reluctant to leave the parent branch.", "And somehow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his own\n experience. Something, somewhere, some part of his earlier life,\n seemed to hold an explanation. But try as he would his befuddled\n brain failed to find the answer.\n\n\n The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime as usual\n setting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stood\n upon the mantel.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers got to his feet, strode to the door, opened it and\n looked out.\n\n\n Moonlight tesselated the street in black and silver, etching the\n chimneys and trees against a silvered sky.\n\n\n But the house directly across the street was not the same. It was\n strangely lop-sided, its dimensions out of proportion, like a\n house that suddenly had gone mad." ], [ "And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through\n him. Rigid, he sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minutes\n later he arose and almost ran across the room to the old mahogany\n bookcase that stood against the wall.\n\n\n There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on the\n first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The\n second shelf contained but one book. And it was around this book\n that Mr. Chambers' entire life was centered.\n\n\n Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach\n its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he\n remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had\n been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand\n either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent\n of some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the\n school.", "It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as\n merely the vagaries of an over-zealous mind.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover and began\n thumbing slowly through the pages. For a moment the memory of\n happier days swept over him.", "Mr. Chambers shivered, reached to turn up the collar of his coat,\n then stopped as he realized the room must be warm. A fire blazed\n merrily in the grate. The cold he felt came from something ...\n somewhere else. The cold of fear and horror, the chill of a half\n whispered thought.\n\n\n A deathly silence had fallen, a silence still measured by the\n pendulum clock. And yet a silence that held a different tenor than\n he had ever sensed before. Not a homey, comfortable silence ... but\n a silence that hinted at emptiness and nothingness.", "A professor of metaphysics, they seemed to recall, or some such\n outlandish subject. At any rate a furore of some sort was\n connected with his name ... at the time an academic scandal. He\n had written a book, and he had taught the subject matter of that\n volume to his classes. What that subject matter was, had long been\n forgotten, but whatever it was had been considered sufficiently\n revolutionary to cost Mr. Chambers his post at the university.\n\n\n A silver moon shone over the chimney tops and a chill, impish\n October wind was rustling the dead leaves when Mr. Chambers\n started out at seven o'clock.\n\n\n It was a good night, he told himself, smelling the clean, crisp\n air of autumn and the faint pungence of distant wood smoke.", "The same thing, at the same time, day after day. He had not\n deliberately set upon such a life of routine. A bachelor, living\n alone with sufficient money to supply his humble needs, the timed\n existence had grown on him gradually.\n\n\n So he turned on Lexington and back on Oak. The dog at the corner\n of Oak and Jefferson was waiting for him once again and came out\n snarling and growling, snapping at his heels. But Mr. Chambers\n pretended not to notice and the beast gave up the chase.\n\n\n A radio was blaring down the street and faint wisps of what it\n was blurting floated to Mr. Chambers.\n\n\n \"... still taking place ... Empire State building disappeared ...\n thin air ... famed scientist, Dr. Edmund Harcourt....\"", "The wind whipped the muted words away and Mr. Chambers grumbled\n to himself. Another one of those fantastic radio dramas,\n probably. He remembered one from many years before, something\n about the Martians. And Harcourt! What did Harcourt have to do\n with it? He was one of the men who had ridiculed the book\n Mr. Chambers had written.\n\n\n But he pushed speculation away, sniffed the clean, crisp air again,\n looked at the familiar things that materialized out of the late\n autumn darkness as he walked along. For there was nothing ...\n absolutely nothing in the world ... that he would let upset him.\n That was a tenet he had laid down twenty years ago.\nThere was a crowd of men in front of the drugstore at the corner\n of Oak and Lincoln and they were talking excitedly. Mr. Chambers\n caught some excited words: \"It's happening everywhere.... What\n do you think it is.... The scientists can't explain....\"", "Mr. Chambers loved that picture. It had depth, he always said. It\n showed an old sailing ship in the foreground on a placid sea. Far\n in the distance, almost on the horizon line, was the vague\n outline of a larger vessel.\n\n\n There were other pictures, too. The forest scene above the\n fireplace, the old English prints in the corner where he sat, the\n Currier and Ives above the radio. But the ship print was directly\n in his line of vision. He could see it without turning his head.\n He had put it there because he liked it best.\n\n\n Further reverie became an effort as Mr. Chambers felt himself\n succumbing to weariness. He undressed and went to bed. For an\n hour he lay awake, assailed by vague fears he could neither\n define nor understand.", "Mr. Chambers stared at the marine print and for a moment a little\n breath of reassurance returned to him.\nThey\ncouldn't take this\n away. The rest of the world might dissolve because there was\n insufficient power of thought to retain its outward form.\n\n\n But this room was his. He alone had furnished it. He alone, since\n he had first planned the house's building, had lived here.\n\n\n This room would stay. It must stay on ... it must....\n\n\n He rose from his chair and walked across the room to the book\n case, stood staring at the second shelf with its single volume.\n His eyes shifted to the top shelf and swift terror gripped him.\n\n\n For all the books weren't there. A lot of books weren't there!\n Only the most beloved, the most familiar ones.", "But as Mr. Chambers neared them they fell into what seemed an\n abashed silence and watched him pass. He, on his part, gave them\n no sign of recognition. That was the way it had been for many\n years, ever since the people had become convinced that he did not\n wish to talk.\n\n\n One of the men half started forward as if to speak to him, but\n then stepped back and Mr. Chambers continued on his walk.\n\n\n Back at his own front door he stopped and as he had done a\n thousand times before drew forth the heavy gold watch from his\n pocket.\n\n\n He started violently. It was only 7:30!\n\n\n For long minutes he stood there staring at the watch in\n accusation. The timepiece hadn't stopped, for it still ticked\n audibly.\n\n\n But 15 minutes too soon! For twenty years, day in, day out, he\n had started out at seven and returned at a quarter of eight.\n Now....", "For the first time in twenty years, Mr. Chambers retraced his\n steps. He walked back to Jefferson, then turned around and went\n back to Grant again and on to Lexington. Then back to Grant\n again, where he stood astounded while a single, incredible fact\n grew slowly in his brain:\nThere wasn't any confectionery! The block from Marshall to Grant\n had disappeared!\nNow he understood why he had missed the store on the night\n before, why he had arrived home fifteen minutes early.\n\n\n On legs that were dead things he stumbled back to his home. He\n slammed and locked the door behind him and made his way\n unsteadily to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivable\n necromancy could a paved street with houses, trees and buildings\n be spirited away and the space it had occupied be closed up?\n\n\n Was something happening in the world which he, in his secluded\n life, knew nothing about?", "He went on until he came to the corner of Lexington. There, on\n the curb, he stopped and stared. The gray wall was thicker there\n but he did not realize how close it was until he glanced down at\n his feet and saw there was nothing, nothing at all beyond the\n curbstone. No dull gleam of wet asphalt, no sign of a street. It\n was as if all eternity ended here at the corner of Maple and\n Lexington.\n\n\n With a wild cry, Mr. Chambers turned and ran. Back down the\n street he raced, coat streaming after him in the wind, bowler hat\n bouncing on his head.\n\n\n Panting, he reached the gate and stumbled up the walk, thankful\n that it still was there.", "He could see it all now. By an insidious mass hypnosis minions from\n that other dimension ... or was it one supreme intelligence ... had\n deliberately sown the seeds of dissension. The reduction of the\n world's mental power had been carefully planned with diabolic\n premeditation.\n\n\n On impulse he suddenly turned, crossed the room and opened the\n connecting door to the bedroom. He stopped on the threshold and a\n sob forced its way to his lips.\n\n\n There was no bedroom. Where his stolid four poster and dresser\n had been there was greyish nothingness.\n\n\n Like an automaton he turned again and paced to the hall door.\n Here, too, he found what he had expected. There was no hall, no\n familiar hat rack and umbrella stand.\n\n\n Nothing....\n\n\n Weakly Mr. Chambers moved back to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n \"So here I am,\" he said, half aloud.", "The tree was there now. But it hadn't been when he first had\n looked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that.\nAnd now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbor's house ... but\n those outlines were all wrong. They didn't jibe and fit together ...\n they were out of plumb. As if some giant hand had grasped the house\n and wrenched it out of true. Like the house he had seen across the\n street the night before, the house that had painfully righted itself\n when he thought of how it should look.\n\n\n Perhaps if he thought of how his neighbor's house should look, it\n too might right itself. But Mr. Chambers was very weary. Too\n weary to think about the house.\n\n\n He turned from the window and dressed slowly. In the living room\n he slumped into his chair, put his feet on the old cracked\n ottoman. For a long time he sat, trying to think.", "He didn't walk fast. He took his time. He always returned to his\n front door at exactly 7:45. No one ever stopped to talk with\n him. Even the man at the Red Star confectionery, where he bought\n his cigar, remained silent while the purchase was being made. Mr.\n Chambers merely tapped on the glass top of the counter with a\n coin, the man reached in and brought forth the box, and Mr.\n Chambers took his cigar. That was all.\n\n\n For people long ago had gathered that Mr. Chambers desired to be\n left alone. The newer generation of townsfolk called it\n eccentricity. Certain uncouth persons had a different word for\n it. The oldsters remembered that this queer looking individual\n with his black silk muffler, rosewood cane and bowler hat once\n had been a professor at State University.", "Mr. Chambers started. The clock had stopped. Funny ... the first\n time in twenty years.\n\n\n He leaped from his chair and then sat down again.\n\n\n The clock hadn't stopped.\n\n\n It wasn't there.\n\n\n There was a tingling sensation in his feet.", "The light through the windows slowly grew brighter. Mr. Chambers\n slid out of bed, slowly crossed to the window, the cold of the\n floor biting into his bare feet. He forced himself to look out.\n\n\n There was nothing outside the window. No shadows. As if there\n might be a fog. But no fog, however, thick, could hide the apple\n tree that grew close against the house.\n\n\n But the tree was there ... shadowy, indistinct in the gray, with\n a few withered apples still clinging to its boughs, a few\n shriveled leaves reluctant to leave the parent branch.", "On the stoop he stood for a moment, breathing hard. He glanced\n back over his shoulder and a queer feeling of inner numbness\n seemed to well over him. At that moment the gray nothingness\n appeared to thin ... the enveloping curtain fell away, and he\n saw....\n\n\n Vague and indistinct, yet cast in stereoscopic outline, a\n gigantic city was lined against the darkling sky. It was a city\n fantastic with cubed domes, spires, and aerial bridges and flying\n buttresses. Tunnel-like streets, flanked on either side by\n shining metallic ramps and runways, stretched endlessly to the\n vanishing point. Great shafts of multicolored light probed huge\n streamers and ellipses above the higher levels.\n\n\n And beyond, like a final backdrop, rose a titanic wall. It was\n from that wall ... from its crenelated parapets and battlements\n that Mr. Chambers felt the eyes peering at him.", "But silence was no strange thing to Mr. Chambers. Once he had\n loved music ... the kind of music he could get by tuning in\n symphonic orchestras on the radio. But the radio stood silent in\n the corner, the cord out of its socket. Mr. Chambers had pulled\n it out many years before. To be precise, upon the night when the\n symphonic broadcast had been interrupted to give a news flash.\n\n\n He had stopped reading newspapers and magazines too, had exiled\n himself to a few city blocks. And as the years flowed by, that\n self exile had become a prison, an intangible, impassable wall\n bounded by four city blocks by three. Beyond them lay utter,\n unexplainable terror. Beyond them he never went.\n\n\n But recluse though he was, he could not on occasion escape from\n hearing things. Things the newsboy shouted on the streets, things\n the men talked about on the drugstore corner when they didn't see\n him coming.", "And somehow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his own\n experience. Something, somewhere, some part of his earlier life,\n seemed to hold an explanation. But try as he would his befuddled\n brain failed to find the answer.\n\n\n The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime as usual\n setting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stood\n upon the mantel.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers got to his feet, strode to the door, opened it and\n looked out.\n\n\n Moonlight tesselated the street in black and silver, etching the\n chimneys and trees against a silvered sky.\n\n\n But the house directly across the street was not the same. It was\n strangely lop-sided, its dimensions out of proportion, like a\n house that suddenly had gone mad.", "There was something back of this, Mr. Chambers told himself.\n Something that reached far back into one corner of his brain and\n demanded recognition. Something tied up with the fragments of\n talk he had heard on the drugstore corner, bits of news\n broadcasts he had heard as he walked along the street, the\n shrieking of the newsboy calling his papers. Something to do with\n the happenings in the world from which he had excluded himself.\nHe brought them back to mind now and lingered over the one\n central theme of the talk he overheard: the wars and plagues.\n Hints of a Europe and Asia swept almost clean of human life, of\n the plague ravaging Africa, of its appearance in South America,\n of the frantic efforts of the United States to prevent its spread\n into that nation's boundaries.\n\n\n Millions of people were dead in Europe and Asia, Africa and South\n America. Billions, perhaps." ], [ "Mr. Chambers loved that picture. It had depth, he always said. It\n showed an old sailing ship in the foreground on a placid sea. Far\n in the distance, almost on the horizon line, was the vague\n outline of a larger vessel.\n\n\n There were other pictures, too. The forest scene above the\n fireplace, the old English prints in the corner where he sat, the\n Currier and Ives above the radio. But the ship print was directly\n in his line of vision. He could see it without turning his head.\n He had put it there because he liked it best.\n\n\n Further reverie became an effort as Mr. Chambers felt himself\n succumbing to weariness. He undressed and went to bed. For an\n hour he lay awake, assailed by vague fears he could neither\n define nor understand.", "Mr. Chambers shivered, reached to turn up the collar of his coat,\n then stopped as he realized the room must be warm. A fire blazed\n merrily in the grate. The cold he felt came from something ...\n somewhere else. The cold of fear and horror, the chill of a half\n whispered thought.\n\n\n A deathly silence had fallen, a silence still measured by the\n pendulum clock. And yet a silence that held a different tenor than\n he had ever sensed before. Not a homey, comfortable silence ... but\n a silence that hinted at emptiness and nothingness.", "The tree was there now. But it hadn't been when he first had\n looked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that.\nAnd now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbor's house ... but\n those outlines were all wrong. They didn't jibe and fit together ...\n they were out of plumb. As if some giant hand had grasped the house\n and wrenched it out of true. Like the house he had seen across the\n street the night before, the house that had painfully righted itself\n when he thought of how it should look.\n\n\n Perhaps if he thought of how his neighbor's house should look, it\n too might right itself. But Mr. Chambers was very weary. Too\n weary to think about the house.\n\n\n He turned from the window and dressed slowly. In the living room\n he slumped into his chair, put his feet on the old cracked\n ottoman. For a long time he sat, trying to think.", "The light through the windows slowly grew brighter. Mr. Chambers\n slid out of bed, slowly crossed to the window, the cold of the\n floor biting into his bare feet. He forced himself to look out.\n\n\n There was nothing outside the window. No shadows. As if there\n might be a fog. But no fog, however, thick, could hide the apple\n tree that grew close against the house.\n\n\n But the tree was there ... shadowy, indistinct in the gray, with\n a few withered apples still clinging to its boughs, a few\n shriveled leaves reluctant to leave the parent branch.", "And somehow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his own\n experience. Something, somewhere, some part of his earlier life,\n seemed to hold an explanation. But try as he would his befuddled\n brain failed to find the answer.\n\n\n The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime as usual\n setting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stood\n upon the mantel.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers got to his feet, strode to the door, opened it and\n looked out.\n\n\n Moonlight tesselated the street in black and silver, etching the\n chimneys and trees against a silvered sky.\n\n\n But the house directly across the street was not the same. It was\n strangely lop-sided, its dimensions out of proportion, like a\n house that suddenly had gone mad.", "But silence was no strange thing to Mr. Chambers. Once he had\n loved music ... the kind of music he could get by tuning in\n symphonic orchestras on the radio. But the radio stood silent in\n the corner, the cord out of its socket. Mr. Chambers had pulled\n it out many years before. To be precise, upon the night when the\n symphonic broadcast had been interrupted to give a news flash.\n\n\n He had stopped reading newspapers and magazines too, had exiled\n himself to a few city blocks. And as the years flowed by, that\n self exile had become a prison, an intangible, impassable wall\n bounded by four city blocks by three. Beyond them lay utter,\n unexplainable terror. Beyond them he never went.\n\n\n But recluse though he was, he could not on occasion escape from\n hearing things. Things the newsboy shouted on the streets, things\n the men talked about on the drugstore corner when they didn't see\n him coming.", "There was something back of this, Mr. Chambers told himself.\n Something that reached far back into one corner of his brain and\n demanded recognition. Something tied up with the fragments of\n talk he had heard on the drugstore corner, bits of news\n broadcasts he had heard as he walked along the street, the\n shrieking of the newsboy calling his papers. Something to do with\n the happenings in the world from which he had excluded himself.\nHe brought them back to mind now and lingered over the one\n central theme of the talk he overheard: the wars and plagues.\n Hints of a Europe and Asia swept almost clean of human life, of\n the plague ravaging Africa, of its appearance in South America,\n of the frantic efforts of the United States to prevent its spread\n into that nation's boundaries.\n\n\n Millions of people were dead in Europe and Asia, Africa and South\n America. Billions, perhaps.", "Mr. Chambers started. The clock had stopped. Funny ... the first\n time in twenty years.\n\n\n He leaped from his chair and then sat down again.\n\n\n The clock hadn't stopped.\n\n\n It wasn't there.\n\n\n There was a tingling sensation in his feet.", "The same thing, at the same time, day after day. He had not\n deliberately set upon such a life of routine. A bachelor, living\n alone with sufficient money to supply his humble needs, the timed\n existence had grown on him gradually.\n\n\n So he turned on Lexington and back on Oak. The dog at the corner\n of Oak and Jefferson was waiting for him once again and came out\n snarling and growling, snapping at his heels. But Mr. Chambers\n pretended not to notice and the beast gave up the chase.\n\n\n A radio was blaring down the street and faint wisps of what it\n was blurting floated to Mr. Chambers.\n\n\n \"... still taking place ... Empire State building disappeared ...\n thin air ... famed scientist, Dr. Edmund Harcourt....\"", "A professor of metaphysics, they seemed to recall, or some such\n outlandish subject. At any rate a furore of some sort was\n connected with his name ... at the time an academic scandal. He\n had written a book, and he had taught the subject matter of that\n volume to his classes. What that subject matter was, had long been\n forgotten, but whatever it was had been considered sufficiently\n revolutionary to cost Mr. Chambers his post at the university.\n\n\n A silver moon shone over the chimney tops and a chill, impish\n October wind was rustling the dead leaves when Mr. Chambers\n started out at seven o'clock.\n\n\n It was a good night, he told himself, smelling the clean, crisp\n air of autumn and the faint pungence of distant wood smoke.", "For the first time in twenty years, Mr. Chambers retraced his\n steps. He walked back to Jefferson, then turned around and went\n back to Grant again and on to Lexington. Then back to Grant\n again, where he stood astounded while a single, incredible fact\n grew slowly in his brain:\nThere wasn't any confectionery! The block from Marshall to Grant\n had disappeared!\nNow he understood why he had missed the store on the night\n before, why he had arrived home fifteen minutes early.\n\n\n On legs that were dead things he stumbled back to his home. He\n slammed and locked the door behind him and made his way\n unsteadily to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivable\n necromancy could a paved street with houses, trees and buildings\n be spirited away and the space it had occupied be closed up?\n\n\n Was something happening in the world which he, in his secluded\n life, knew nothing about?", "But as Mr. Chambers neared them they fell into what seemed an\n abashed silence and watched him pass. He, on his part, gave them\n no sign of recognition. That was the way it had been for many\n years, ever since the people had become convinced that he did not\n wish to talk.\n\n\n One of the men half started forward as if to speak to him, but\n then stepped back and Mr. Chambers continued on his walk.\n\n\n Back at his own front door he stopped and as he had done a\n thousand times before drew forth the heavy gold watch from his\n pocket.\n\n\n He started violently. It was only 7:30!\n\n\n For long minutes he stood there staring at the watch in\n accusation. The timepiece hadn't stopped, for it still ticked\n audibly.\n\n\n But 15 minutes too soon! For twenty years, day in, day out, he\n had started out at seven and returned at a quarter of eight.\n Now....", "He didn't walk fast. He took his time. He always returned to his\n front door at exactly 7:45. No one ever stopped to talk with\n him. Even the man at the Red Star confectionery, where he bought\n his cigar, remained silent while the purchase was being made. Mr.\n Chambers merely tapped on the glass top of the counter with a\n coin, the man reached in and brought forth the box, and Mr.\n Chambers took his cigar. That was all.\n\n\n For people long ago had gathered that Mr. Chambers desired to be\n left alone. The newer generation of townsfolk called it\n eccentricity. Certain uncouth persons had a different word for\n it. The oldsters remembered that this queer looking individual\n with his black silk muffler, rosewood cane and bowler hat once\n had been a professor at State University.", "It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as\n merely the vagaries of an over-zealous mind.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover and began\n thumbing slowly through the pages. For a moment the memory of\n happier days swept over him.", "He went on until he came to the corner of Lexington. There, on\n the curb, he stopped and stared. The gray wall was thicker there\n but he did not realize how close it was until he glanced down at\n his feet and saw there was nothing, nothing at all beyond the\n curbstone. No dull gleam of wet asphalt, no sign of a street. It\n was as if all eternity ended here at the corner of Maple and\n Lexington.\n\n\n With a wild cry, Mr. Chambers turned and ran. Back down the\n street he raced, coat streaming after him in the wind, bowler hat\n bouncing on his head.\n\n\n Panting, he reached the gate and stumbled up the walk, thankful\n that it still was there.", "He could see it all now. By an insidious mass hypnosis minions from\n that other dimension ... or was it one supreme intelligence ... had\n deliberately sown the seeds of dissension. The reduction of the\n world's mental power had been carefully planned with diabolic\n premeditation.\n\n\n On impulse he suddenly turned, crossed the room and opened the\n connecting door to the bedroom. He stopped on the threshold and a\n sob forced its way to his lips.\n\n\n There was no bedroom. Where his stolid four poster and dresser\n had been there was greyish nothingness.\n\n\n Like an automaton he turned again and paced to the hall door.\n Here, too, he found what he had expected. There was no hall, no\n familiar hat rack and umbrella stand.\n\n\n Nothing....\n\n\n Weakly Mr. Chambers moved back to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n \"So here I am,\" he said, half aloud.", "The wind whipped the muted words away and Mr. Chambers grumbled\n to himself. Another one of those fantastic radio dramas,\n probably. He remembered one from many years before, something\n about the Martians. And Harcourt! What did Harcourt have to do\n with it? He was one of the men who had ridiculed the book\n Mr. Chambers had written.\n\n\n But he pushed speculation away, sniffed the clean, crisp air again,\n looked at the familiar things that materialized out of the late\n autumn darkness as he walked along. For there was nothing ...\n absolutely nothing in the world ... that he would let upset him.\n That was a tenet he had laid down twenty years ago.\nThere was a crowd of men in front of the drugstore at the corner\n of Oak and Lincoln and they were talking excitedly. Mr. Chambers\n caught some excited words: \"It's happening everywhere.... What\n do you think it is.... The scientists can't explain....\"", "On the stoop he stood for a moment, breathing hard. He glanced\n back over his shoulder and a queer feeling of inner numbness\n seemed to well over him. At that moment the gray nothingness\n appeared to thin ... the enveloping curtain fell away, and he\n saw....\n\n\n Vague and indistinct, yet cast in stereoscopic outline, a\n gigantic city was lined against the darkling sky. It was a city\n fantastic with cubed domes, spires, and aerial bridges and flying\n buttresses. Tunnel-like streets, flanked on either side by\n shining metallic ramps and runways, stretched endlessly to the\n vanishing point. Great shafts of multicolored light probed huge\n streamers and ellipses above the higher levels.\n\n\n And beyond, like a final backdrop, rose a titanic wall. It was\n from that wall ... from its crenelated parapets and battlements\n that Mr. Chambers felt the eyes peering at him.", "And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through\n him. Rigid, he sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minutes\n later he arose and almost ran across the room to the old mahogany\n bookcase that stood against the wall.\n\n\n There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on the\n first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The\n second shelf contained but one book. And it was around this book\n that Mr. Chambers' entire life was centered.\n\n\n Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach\n its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he\n remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had\n been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand\n either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent\n of some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the\n school.", "Mr. Chambers stared at the marine print and for a moment a little\n breath of reassurance returned to him.\nThey\ncouldn't take this\n away. The rest of the world might dissolve because there was\n insufficient power of thought to retain its outward form.\n\n\n But this room was his. He alone had furnished it. He alone, since\n he had first planned the house's building, had lived here.\n\n\n This room would stay. It must stay on ... it must....\n\n\n He rose from his chair and walked across the room to the book\n case, stood staring at the second shelf with its single volume.\n His eyes shifted to the top shelf and swift terror gripped him.\n\n\n For all the books weren't there. A lot of books weren't there!\n Only the most beloved, the most familiar ones." ], [ "Mr. Chambers loved that picture. It had depth, he always said. It\n showed an old sailing ship in the foreground on a placid sea. Far\n in the distance, almost on the horizon line, was the vague\n outline of a larger vessel.\n\n\n There were other pictures, too. The forest scene above the\n fireplace, the old English prints in the corner where he sat, the\n Currier and Ives above the radio. But the ship print was directly\n in his line of vision. He could see it without turning his head.\n He had put it there because he liked it best.\n\n\n Further reverie became an effort as Mr. Chambers felt himself\n succumbing to weariness. He undressed and went to bed. For an\n hour he lay awake, assailed by vague fears he could neither\n define nor understand.", "Mr. Chambers shivered, reached to turn up the collar of his coat,\n then stopped as he realized the room must be warm. A fire blazed\n merrily in the grate. The cold he felt came from something ...\n somewhere else. The cold of fear and horror, the chill of a half\n whispered thought.\n\n\n A deathly silence had fallen, a silence still measured by the\n pendulum clock. And yet a silence that held a different tenor than\n he had ever sensed before. Not a homey, comfortable silence ... but\n a silence that hinted at emptiness and nothingness.", "The light through the windows slowly grew brighter. Mr. Chambers\n slid out of bed, slowly crossed to the window, the cold of the\n floor biting into his bare feet. He forced himself to look out.\n\n\n There was nothing outside the window. No shadows. As if there\n might be a fog. But no fog, however, thick, could hide the apple\n tree that grew close against the house.\n\n\n But the tree was there ... shadowy, indistinct in the gray, with\n a few withered apples still clinging to its boughs, a few\n shriveled leaves reluctant to leave the parent branch.", "But as Mr. Chambers neared them they fell into what seemed an\n abashed silence and watched him pass. He, on his part, gave them\n no sign of recognition. That was the way it had been for many\n years, ever since the people had become convinced that he did not\n wish to talk.\n\n\n One of the men half started forward as if to speak to him, but\n then stepped back and Mr. Chambers continued on his walk.\n\n\n Back at his own front door he stopped and as he had done a\n thousand times before drew forth the heavy gold watch from his\n pocket.\n\n\n He started violently. It was only 7:30!\n\n\n For long minutes he stood there staring at the watch in\n accusation. The timepiece hadn't stopped, for it still ticked\n audibly.\n\n\n But 15 minutes too soon! For twenty years, day in, day out, he\n had started out at seven and returned at a quarter of eight.\n Now....", "It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as\n merely the vagaries of an over-zealous mind.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover and began\n thumbing slowly through the pages. For a moment the memory of\n happier days swept over him.", "Mr. Chambers stared at the marine print and for a moment a little\n breath of reassurance returned to him.\nThey\ncouldn't take this\n away. The rest of the world might dissolve because there was\n insufficient power of thought to retain its outward form.\n\n\n But this room was his. He alone had furnished it. He alone, since\n he had first planned the house's building, had lived here.\n\n\n This room would stay. It must stay on ... it must....\n\n\n He rose from his chair and walked across the room to the book\n case, stood staring at the second shelf with its single volume.\n His eyes shifted to the top shelf and swift terror gripped him.\n\n\n For all the books weren't there. A lot of books weren't there!\n Only the most beloved, the most familiar ones.", "But silence was no strange thing to Mr. Chambers. Once he had\n loved music ... the kind of music he could get by tuning in\n symphonic orchestras on the radio. But the radio stood silent in\n the corner, the cord out of its socket. Mr. Chambers had pulled\n it out many years before. To be precise, upon the night when the\n symphonic broadcast had been interrupted to give a news flash.\n\n\n He had stopped reading newspapers and magazines too, had exiled\n himself to a few city blocks. And as the years flowed by, that\n self exile had become a prison, an intangible, impassable wall\n bounded by four city blocks by three. Beyond them lay utter,\n unexplainable terror. Beyond them he never went.\n\n\n But recluse though he was, he could not on occasion escape from\n hearing things. Things the newsboy shouted on the streets, things\n the men talked about on the drugstore corner when they didn't see\n him coming.", "And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through\n him. Rigid, he sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minutes\n later he arose and almost ran across the room to the old mahogany\n bookcase that stood against the wall.\n\n\n There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on the\n first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The\n second shelf contained but one book. And it was around this book\n that Mr. Chambers' entire life was centered.\n\n\n Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach\n its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he\n remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had\n been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand\n either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent\n of some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the\n school.", "And somehow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his own\n experience. Something, somewhere, some part of his earlier life,\n seemed to hold an explanation. But try as he would his befuddled\n brain failed to find the answer.\n\n\n The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime as usual\n setting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stood\n upon the mantel.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers got to his feet, strode to the door, opened it and\n looked out.\n\n\n Moonlight tesselated the street in black and silver, etching the\n chimneys and trees against a silvered sky.\n\n\n But the house directly across the street was not the same. It was\n strangely lop-sided, its dimensions out of proportion, like a\n house that suddenly had gone mad.", "He went on until he came to the corner of Lexington. There, on\n the curb, he stopped and stared. The gray wall was thicker there\n but he did not realize how close it was until he glanced down at\n his feet and saw there was nothing, nothing at all beyond the\n curbstone. No dull gleam of wet asphalt, no sign of a street. It\n was as if all eternity ended here at the corner of Maple and\n Lexington.\n\n\n With a wild cry, Mr. Chambers turned and ran. Back down the\n street he raced, coat streaming after him in the wind, bowler hat\n bouncing on his head.\n\n\n Panting, he reached the gate and stumbled up the walk, thankful\n that it still was there.", "He didn't walk fast. He took his time. He always returned to his\n front door at exactly 7:45. No one ever stopped to talk with\n him. Even the man at the Red Star confectionery, where he bought\n his cigar, remained silent while the purchase was being made. Mr.\n Chambers merely tapped on the glass top of the counter with a\n coin, the man reached in and brought forth the box, and Mr.\n Chambers took his cigar. That was all.\n\n\n For people long ago had gathered that Mr. Chambers desired to be\n left alone. The newer generation of townsfolk called it\n eccentricity. Certain uncouth persons had a different word for\n it. The oldsters remembered that this queer looking individual\n with his black silk muffler, rosewood cane and bowler hat once\n had been a professor at State University.", "Mr. Chambers turned his eyes back into the room. The clock was\n ticking slowly, steadily. The greyness was stealing into the\n room.\n\n\n The table and radio were the first to go. They simply faded away\n and with them went one corner of the room.\n\n\n And then the elephant ash tray.\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" said Mr. Chambers, \"I never did like that very well.\"\n\n\n Now as he sat there it didn't seem queer to be without the table\n or the radio. It was as if it were something quite normal.\n Something one could expect to happen.\n\n\n Perhaps, if he thought hard enough, he could bring them back.\n\n\n But, after all, what was the use? One man, alone, could not stand\n off the irresistible march of nothingness. One man, all alone,\n simply couldn't do it.", "Huddled in the chair, he frowned slowly. It was disquieting to\n have something like that happen. There must be something wrong.\n Had his long exile finally turned his mind ... perhaps just a\n very little ... enough to make him queer? Had he lost his sense\n of proportion, of perspective?\n\n\n No, he hadn't. Take this room, for example. After twenty years it\n had come to be as much a part of him as the clothes he wore.\n Every detail of the room was engraved in his mind with ...\n clarity; the old center leg table with its green covering and\n stained glass lamp; the mantelpiece with the dusty bric-a-brac;\n the pendulum clock that told the time of day as well as the day\n of the week and month; the elephant ash tray on the tabaret and,\n most important of all, the marine print.", "Mr. Chambers started. The clock had stopped. Funny ... the first\n time in twenty years.\n\n\n He leaped from his chair and then sat down again.\n\n\n The clock hadn't stopped.\n\n\n It wasn't there.\n\n\n There was a tingling sensation in his feet.", "The tree was there now. But it hadn't been when he first had\n looked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that.\nAnd now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbor's house ... but\n those outlines were all wrong. They didn't jibe and fit together ...\n they were out of plumb. As if some giant hand had grasped the house\n and wrenched it out of true. Like the house he had seen across the\n street the night before, the house that had painfully righted itself\n when he thought of how it should look.\n\n\n Perhaps if he thought of how his neighbor's house should look, it\n too might right itself. But Mr. Chambers was very weary. Too\n weary to think about the house.\n\n\n He turned from the window and dressed slowly. In the living room\n he slumped into his chair, put his feet on the old cracked\n ottoman. For a long time he sat, trying to think.", "The same thing, at the same time, day after day. He had not\n deliberately set upon such a life of routine. A bachelor, living\n alone with sufficient money to supply his humble needs, the timed\n existence had grown on him gradually.\n\n\n So he turned on Lexington and back on Oak. The dog at the corner\n of Oak and Jefferson was waiting for him once again and came out\n snarling and growling, snapping at his heels. But Mr. Chambers\n pretended not to notice and the beast gave up the chase.\n\n\n A radio was blaring down the street and faint wisps of what it\n was blurting floated to Mr. Chambers.\n\n\n \"... still taking place ... Empire State building disappeared ...\n thin air ... famed scientist, Dr. Edmund Harcourt....\"", "It wasn't until then that he realized something else was wrong.\n He had no cigar. For the first time he had neglected to purchase\n his evening smoke.\n\n\n Shaken, muttering to himself, Mr. Chambers let himself in his\n house and locked the door behind him.\n\n\n He hung his hat and coat on the rack in the hall and walked\n slowly into the living room. Dropping into his favorite chair, he\n shook his head in bewilderment.\n\n\n Silence filled the room. A silence that was measured by the\n ticking of the old fashioned pendulum clock on the mantelpiece.", "A professor of metaphysics, they seemed to recall, or some such\n outlandish subject. At any rate a furore of some sort was\n connected with his name ... at the time an academic scandal. He\n had written a book, and he had taught the subject matter of that\n volume to his classes. What that subject matter was, had long been\n forgotten, but whatever it was had been considered sufficiently\n revolutionary to cost Mr. Chambers his post at the university.\n\n\n A silver moon shone over the chimney tops and a chill, impish\n October wind was rustling the dead leaves when Mr. Chambers\n started out at seven o'clock.\n\n\n It was a good night, he told himself, smelling the clean, crisp\n air of autumn and the faint pungence of distant wood smoke.", "For the first time in twenty years, Mr. Chambers retraced his\n steps. He walked back to Jefferson, then turned around and went\n back to Grant again and on to Lexington. Then back to Grant\n again, where he stood astounded while a single, incredible fact\n grew slowly in his brain:\nThere wasn't any confectionery! The block from Marshall to Grant\n had disappeared!\nNow he understood why he had missed the store on the night\n before, why he had arrived home fifteen minutes early.\n\n\n On legs that were dead things he stumbled back to his home. He\n slammed and locked the door behind him and made his way\n unsteadily to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivable\n necromancy could a paved street with houses, trees and buildings\n be spirited away and the space it had occupied be closed up?\n\n\n Was something happening in the world which he, in his secluded\n life, knew nothing about?", "On the stoop he stood for a moment, breathing hard. He glanced\n back over his shoulder and a queer feeling of inner numbness\n seemed to well over him. At that moment the gray nothingness\n appeared to thin ... the enveloping curtain fell away, and he\n saw....\n\n\n Vague and indistinct, yet cast in stereoscopic outline, a\n gigantic city was lined against the darkling sky. It was a city\n fantastic with cubed domes, spires, and aerial bridges and flying\n buttresses. Tunnel-like streets, flanked on either side by\n shining metallic ramps and runways, stretched endlessly to the\n vanishing point. Great shafts of multicolored light probed huge\n streamers and ellipses above the higher levels.\n\n\n And beyond, like a final backdrop, rose a titanic wall. It was\n from that wall ... from its crenelated parapets and battlements\n that Mr. Chambers felt the eyes peering at him." ], [ "He could see it all now. By an insidious mass hypnosis minions from\n that other dimension ... or was it one supreme intelligence ... had\n deliberately sown the seeds of dissension. The reduction of the\n world's mental power had been carefully planned with diabolic\n premeditation.\n\n\n On impulse he suddenly turned, crossed the room and opened the\n connecting door to the bedroom. He stopped on the threshold and a\n sob forced its way to his lips.\n\n\n There was no bedroom. Where his stolid four poster and dresser\n had been there was greyish nothingness.\n\n\n Like an automaton he turned again and paced to the hall door.\n Here, too, he found what he had expected. There was no hall, no\n familiar hat rack and umbrella stand.\n\n\n Nothing....\n\n\n Weakly Mr. Chambers moved back to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n \"So here I am,\" he said, half aloud.", "For the first time in twenty years, Mr. Chambers retraced his\n steps. He walked back to Jefferson, then turned around and went\n back to Grant again and on to Lexington. Then back to Grant\n again, where he stood astounded while a single, incredible fact\n grew slowly in his brain:\nThere wasn't any confectionery! The block from Marshall to Grant\n had disappeared!\nNow he understood why he had missed the store on the night\n before, why he had arrived home fifteen minutes early.\n\n\n On legs that were dead things he stumbled back to his home. He\n slammed and locked the door behind him and made his way\n unsteadily to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivable\n necromancy could a paved street with houses, trees and buildings\n be spirited away and the space it had occupied be closed up?\n\n\n Was something happening in the world which he, in his secluded\n life, knew nothing about?", "There were not sufficient minds in existence to retain the\n material world in its mundane form. Some other power from another\n dimension was fighting to supersede man's control\nand take his\n universe into its own plane!\nAbruptly Mr. Chambers closed the book, shoved it back in the case\n and picked up his hat and coat.\n\n\n He had to know more. He had to find someone who could tell him.\n\n\n He moved through the hall to the door, emerged into the street.\n On the walk he looked skyward, trying to make out the sun. But\n there wasn't any sun ... only an all pervading grayness that\n shrouded everything ... not a gray fog, but a gray emptiness that\n seemed devoid of life, of any movement.\n\n\n The walk led to his gate and there it ended, but as he moved\n forward the sidewalk came into view and the house ahead loomed\n out of the gray, but a house with differences.", "Mr. Chambers turned his eyes back into the room. The clock was\n ticking slowly, steadily. The greyness was stealing into the\n room.\n\n\n The table and radio were the first to go. They simply faded away\n and with them went one corner of the room.\n\n\n And then the elephant ash tray.\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" said Mr. Chambers, \"I never did like that very well.\"\n\n\n Now as he sat there it didn't seem queer to be without the table\n or the radio. It was as if it were something quite normal.\n Something one could expect to happen.\n\n\n Perhaps, if he thought hard enough, he could bring them back.\n\n\n But, after all, what was the use? One man, alone, could not stand\n off the irresistible march of nothingness. One man, all alone,\n simply couldn't do it.", "The tree was there now. But it hadn't been when he first had\n looked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that.\nAnd now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbor's house ... but\n those outlines were all wrong. They didn't jibe and fit together ...\n they were out of plumb. As if some giant hand had grasped the house\n and wrenched it out of true. Like the house he had seen across the\n street the night before, the house that had painfully righted itself\n when he thought of how it should look.\n\n\n Perhaps if he thought of how his neighbor's house should look, it\n too might right itself. But Mr. Chambers was very weary. Too\n weary to think about the house.\n\n\n He turned from the window and dressed slowly. In the living room\n he slumped into his chair, put his feet on the old cracked\n ottoman. For a long time he sat, trying to think.", "Mr. Chambers stared at the marine print and for a moment a little\n breath of reassurance returned to him.\nThey\ncouldn't take this\n away. The rest of the world might dissolve because there was\n insufficient power of thought to retain its outward form.\n\n\n But this room was his. He alone had furnished it. He alone, since\n he had first planned the house's building, had lived here.\n\n\n This room would stay. It must stay on ... it must....\n\n\n He rose from his chair and walked across the room to the book\n case, stood staring at the second shelf with its single volume.\n His eyes shifted to the top shelf and swift terror gripped him.\n\n\n For all the books weren't there. A lot of books weren't there!\n Only the most beloved, the most familiar ones.", "The wind whipped the muted words away and Mr. Chambers grumbled\n to himself. Another one of those fantastic radio dramas,\n probably. He remembered one from many years before, something\n about the Martians. And Harcourt! What did Harcourt have to do\n with it? He was one of the men who had ridiculed the book\n Mr. Chambers had written.\n\n\n But he pushed speculation away, sniffed the clean, crisp air again,\n looked at the familiar things that materialized out of the late\n autumn darkness as he walked along. For there was nothing ...\n absolutely nothing in the world ... that he would let upset him.\n That was a tenet he had laid down twenty years ago.\nThere was a crowd of men in front of the drugstore at the corner\n of Oak and Lincoln and they were talking excitedly. Mr. Chambers\n caught some excited words: \"It's happening everywhere.... What\n do you think it is.... The scientists can't explain....\"", "Mr. Chambers shivered, reached to turn up the collar of his coat,\n then stopped as he realized the room must be warm. A fire blazed\n merrily in the grate. The cold he felt came from something ...\n somewhere else. The cold of fear and horror, the chill of a half\n whispered thought.\n\n\n A deathly silence had fallen, a silence still measured by the\n pendulum clock. And yet a silence that held a different tenor than\n he had ever sensed before. Not a homey, comfortable silence ... but\n a silence that hinted at emptiness and nothingness.", "Mr. Chambers started. The clock had stopped. Funny ... the first\n time in twenty years.\n\n\n He leaped from his chair and then sat down again.\n\n\n The clock hadn't stopped.\n\n\n It wasn't there.\n\n\n There was a tingling sensation in his feet.", "There was something back of this, Mr. Chambers told himself.\n Something that reached far back into one corner of his brain and\n demanded recognition. Something tied up with the fragments of\n talk he had heard on the drugstore corner, bits of news\n broadcasts he had heard as he walked along the street, the\n shrieking of the newsboy calling his papers. Something to do with\n the happenings in the world from which he had excluded himself.\nHe brought them back to mind now and lingered over the one\n central theme of the talk he overheard: the wars and plagues.\n Hints of a Europe and Asia swept almost clean of human life, of\n the plague ravaging Africa, of its appearance in South America,\n of the frantic efforts of the United States to prevent its spread\n into that nation's boundaries.\n\n\n Millions of people were dead in Europe and Asia, Africa and South\n America. Billions, perhaps.", "But silence was no strange thing to Mr. Chambers. Once he had\n loved music ... the kind of music he could get by tuning in\n symphonic orchestras on the radio. But the radio stood silent in\n the corner, the cord out of its socket. Mr. Chambers had pulled\n it out many years before. To be precise, upon the night when the\n symphonic broadcast had been interrupted to give a news flash.\n\n\n He had stopped reading newspapers and magazines too, had exiled\n himself to a few city blocks. And as the years flowed by, that\n self exile had become a prison, an intangible, impassable wall\n bounded by four city blocks by three. Beyond them lay utter,\n unexplainable terror. Beyond them he never went.\n\n\n But recluse though he was, he could not on occasion escape from\n hearing things. Things the newsboy shouted on the streets, things\n the men talked about on the drugstore corner when they didn't see\n him coming.", "On the stoop he stood for a moment, breathing hard. He glanced\n back over his shoulder and a queer feeling of inner numbness\n seemed to well over him. At that moment the gray nothingness\n appeared to thin ... the enveloping curtain fell away, and he\n saw....\n\n\n Vague and indistinct, yet cast in stereoscopic outline, a\n gigantic city was lined against the darkling sky. It was a city\n fantastic with cubed domes, spires, and aerial bridges and flying\n buttresses. Tunnel-like streets, flanked on either side by\n shining metallic ramps and runways, stretched endlessly to the\n vanishing point. Great shafts of multicolored light probed huge\n streamers and ellipses above the higher levels.\n\n\n And beyond, like a final backdrop, rose a titanic wall. It was\n from that wall ... from its crenelated parapets and battlements\n that Mr. Chambers felt the eyes peering at him.", "So the change already had started here! The unfamiliar books were\n gone and that fitted in the pattern ... for it would be the least\n familiar things that would go first.\n\n\n Wheeling, he stared across the room. Was it his imagination, or\n did the lamp on the table blur and begin to fade away?\n\n\n But as he stared at it, it became clear again, a solid,\n substantial thing.\n\n\n For a moment real fear reached out and touched him with chilly\n fingers. For he knew that this room no longer was proof against\n the thing that had happened out there on the street.\n\n\n Or had it really happened? Might not all this exist within his\n own mind? Might not the street be as it always was, with laughing\n children and barking dogs? Might not the Red Star confectionery\n still exist, splashing the street with the red of its neon sign?", "The same thing, at the same time, day after day. He had not\n deliberately set upon such a life of routine. A bachelor, living\n alone with sufficient money to supply his humble needs, the timed\n existence had grown on him gradually.\n\n\n So he turned on Lexington and back on Oak. The dog at the corner\n of Oak and Jefferson was waiting for him once again and came out\n snarling and growling, snapping at his heels. But Mr. Chambers\n pretended not to notice and the beast gave up the chase.\n\n\n A radio was blaring down the street and faint wisps of what it\n was blurting floated to Mr. Chambers.\n\n\n \"... still taking place ... Empire State building disappeared ...\n thin air ... famed scientist, Dr. Edmund Harcourt....\"", "He went on until he came to the corner of Lexington. There, on\n the curb, he stopped and stared. The gray wall was thicker there\n but he did not realize how close it was until he glanced down at\n his feet and saw there was nothing, nothing at all beyond the\n curbstone. No dull gleam of wet asphalt, no sign of a street. It\n was as if all eternity ended here at the corner of Maple and\n Lexington.\n\n\n With a wild cry, Mr. Chambers turned and ran. Back down the\n street he raced, coat streaming after him in the wind, bowler hat\n bouncing on his head.\n\n\n Panting, he reached the gate and stumbled up the walk, thankful\n that it still was there.", "For the matter of which the street and everything upon it had\n been formed would now be cast in a different mold, stolen by\n different minds in a different dimension.\nPerhaps we shall come upon a day, far distant, when our plane,\n our world will dissolve beneath our feet and before our eyes as\n some stronger intelligence reaches out from the dimensional\n shadows of the very space we live in and wrests from us the\n matter which we know to be our own.\nBut there had been no need to wait for that distant day. Scant\n years after he had written those prophetic words the thing was\n happening. Man had played unwittingly into the hands of those\n other minds in the other dimension. Man had waged a war and war\n had bred a pestilence. And the whole vast cycle of events was but\n a detail of a cyclopean plan.", "Mr. Chambers loved that picture. It had depth, he always said. It\n showed an old sailing ship in the foreground on a placid sea. Far\n in the distance, almost on the horizon line, was the vague\n outline of a larger vessel.\n\n\n There were other pictures, too. The forest scene above the\n fireplace, the old English prints in the corner where he sat, the\n Currier and Ives above the radio. But the ship print was directly\n in his line of vision. He could see it without turning his head.\n He had put it there because he liked it best.\n\n\n Further reverie became an effort as Mr. Chambers felt himself\n succumbing to weariness. He undressed and went to bed. For an\n hour he lay awake, assailed by vague fears he could neither\n define nor understand.", "And somehow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his own\n experience. Something, somewhere, some part of his earlier life,\n seemed to hold an explanation. But try as he would his befuddled\n brain failed to find the answer.\n\n\n The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime as usual\n setting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stood\n upon the mantel.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers got to his feet, strode to the door, opened it and\n looked out.\n\n\n Moonlight tesselated the street in black and silver, etching the\n chimneys and trees against a silvered sky.\n\n\n But the house directly across the street was not the same. It was\n strangely lop-sided, its dimensions out of proportion, like a\n house that suddenly had gone mad.", "go farther and envision other minds in some other plane watching\n us, waiting, waiting craftily for the time they can take over the\n domination of matter? Such a concept is not impossible. It is a\n natural conclusion if we accept the double hypothesis: that mind\n does control the formation of all matter; and that other worlds\n lie in juxtaposition with ours.\nPerhaps we shall come upon a day, far distant, when our plane,\n our world will dissolve beneath our feet and before our eyes as\n some stronger intelligence reaches out from the dimensional\n shadows of the very space we live in and wrests from us the\n matter which we know to be our own.\nHe stood astounded beside the bookcase, his eyes staring unseeing\n into the fire upon the hearth.\nHe", "The light through the windows slowly grew brighter. Mr. Chambers\n slid out of bed, slowly crossed to the window, the cold of the\n floor biting into his bare feet. He forced himself to look out.\n\n\n There was nothing outside the window. No shadows. As if there\n might be a fog. But no fog, however, thick, could hide the apple\n tree that grew close against the house.\n\n\n But the tree was there ... shadowy, indistinct in the gray, with\n a few withered apples still clinging to its boughs, a few\n shriveled leaves reluctant to leave the parent branch." ], [ "Mr. Chambers shivered, reached to turn up the collar of his coat,\n then stopped as he realized the room must be warm. A fire blazed\n merrily in the grate. The cold he felt came from something ...\n somewhere else. The cold of fear and horror, the chill of a half\n whispered thought.\n\n\n A deathly silence had fallen, a silence still measured by the\n pendulum clock. And yet a silence that held a different tenor than\n he had ever sensed before. Not a homey, comfortable silence ... but\n a silence that hinted at emptiness and nothingness.", "He didn't walk fast. He took his time. He always returned to his\n front door at exactly 7:45. No one ever stopped to talk with\n him. Even the man at the Red Star confectionery, where he bought\n his cigar, remained silent while the purchase was being made. Mr.\n Chambers merely tapped on the glass top of the counter with a\n coin, the man reached in and brought forth the box, and Mr.\n Chambers took his cigar. That was all.\n\n\n For people long ago had gathered that Mr. Chambers desired to be\n left alone. The newer generation of townsfolk called it\n eccentricity. Certain uncouth persons had a different word for\n it. The oldsters remembered that this queer looking individual\n with his black silk muffler, rosewood cane and bowler hat once\n had been a professor at State University.", "For the first time in twenty years, Mr. Chambers retraced his\n steps. He walked back to Jefferson, then turned around and went\n back to Grant again and on to Lexington. Then back to Grant\n again, where he stood astounded while a single, incredible fact\n grew slowly in his brain:\nThere wasn't any confectionery! The block from Marshall to Grant\n had disappeared!\nNow he understood why he had missed the store on the night\n before, why he had arrived home fifteen minutes early.\n\n\n On legs that were dead things he stumbled back to his home. He\n slammed and locked the door behind him and made his way\n unsteadily to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivable\n necromancy could a paved street with houses, trees and buildings\n be spirited away and the space it had occupied be closed up?\n\n\n Was something happening in the world which he, in his secluded\n life, knew nothing about?", "And somehow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his own\n experience. Something, somewhere, some part of his earlier life,\n seemed to hold an explanation. But try as he would his befuddled\n brain failed to find the answer.\n\n\n The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime as usual\n setting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stood\n upon the mantel.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers got to his feet, strode to the door, opened it and\n looked out.\n\n\n Moonlight tesselated the street in black and silver, etching the\n chimneys and trees against a silvered sky.\n\n\n But the house directly across the street was not the same. It was\n strangely lop-sided, its dimensions out of proportion, like a\n house that suddenly had gone mad.", "But as Mr. Chambers neared them they fell into what seemed an\n abashed silence and watched him pass. He, on his part, gave them\n no sign of recognition. That was the way it had been for many\n years, ever since the people had become convinced that he did not\n wish to talk.\n\n\n One of the men half started forward as if to speak to him, but\n then stepped back and Mr. Chambers continued on his walk.\n\n\n Back at his own front door he stopped and as he had done a\n thousand times before drew forth the heavy gold watch from his\n pocket.\n\n\n He started violently. It was only 7:30!\n\n\n For long minutes he stood there staring at the watch in\n accusation. The timepiece hadn't stopped, for it still ticked\n audibly.\n\n\n But 15 minutes too soon! For twenty years, day in, day out, he\n had started out at seven and returned at a quarter of eight.\n Now....", "But silence was no strange thing to Mr. Chambers. Once he had\n loved music ... the kind of music he could get by tuning in\n symphonic orchestras on the radio. But the radio stood silent in\n the corner, the cord out of its socket. Mr. Chambers had pulled\n it out many years before. To be precise, upon the night when the\n symphonic broadcast had been interrupted to give a news flash.\n\n\n He had stopped reading newspapers and magazines too, had exiled\n himself to a few city blocks. And as the years flowed by, that\n self exile had become a prison, an intangible, impassable wall\n bounded by four city blocks by three. Beyond them lay utter,\n unexplainable terror. Beyond them he never went.\n\n\n But recluse though he was, he could not on occasion escape from\n hearing things. Things the newsboy shouted on the streets, things\n the men talked about on the drugstore corner when they didn't see\n him coming.", "The light through the windows slowly grew brighter. Mr. Chambers\n slid out of bed, slowly crossed to the window, the cold of the\n floor biting into his bare feet. He forced himself to look out.\n\n\n There was nothing outside the window. No shadows. As if there\n might be a fog. But no fog, however, thick, could hide the apple\n tree that grew close against the house.\n\n\n But the tree was there ... shadowy, indistinct in the gray, with\n a few withered apples still clinging to its boughs, a few\n shriveled leaves reluctant to leave the parent branch.", "The tree was there now. But it hadn't been when he first had\n looked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that.\nAnd now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbor's house ... but\n those outlines were all wrong. They didn't jibe and fit together ...\n they were out of plumb. As if some giant hand had grasped the house\n and wrenched it out of true. Like the house he had seen across the\n street the night before, the house that had painfully righted itself\n when he thought of how it should look.\n\n\n Perhaps if he thought of how his neighbor's house should look, it\n too might right itself. But Mr. Chambers was very weary. Too\n weary to think about the house.\n\n\n He turned from the window and dressed slowly. In the living room\n he slumped into his chair, put his feet on the old cracked\n ottoman. For a long time he sat, trying to think.", "He went on until he came to the corner of Lexington. There, on\n the curb, he stopped and stared. The gray wall was thicker there\n but he did not realize how close it was until he glanced down at\n his feet and saw there was nothing, nothing at all beyond the\n curbstone. No dull gleam of wet asphalt, no sign of a street. It\n was as if all eternity ended here at the corner of Maple and\n Lexington.\n\n\n With a wild cry, Mr. Chambers turned and ran. Back down the\n street he raced, coat streaming after him in the wind, bowler hat\n bouncing on his head.\n\n\n Panting, he reached the gate and stumbled up the walk, thankful\n that it still was there.", "Mr. Chambers started. The clock had stopped. Funny ... the first\n time in twenty years.\n\n\n He leaped from his chair and then sat down again.\n\n\n The clock hadn't stopped.\n\n\n It wasn't there.\n\n\n There was a tingling sensation in his feet.", "Mr. Chambers loved that picture. It had depth, he always said. It\n showed an old sailing ship in the foreground on a placid sea. Far\n in the distance, almost on the horizon line, was the vague\n outline of a larger vessel.\n\n\n There were other pictures, too. The forest scene above the\n fireplace, the old English prints in the corner where he sat, the\n Currier and Ives above the radio. But the ship print was directly\n in his line of vision. He could see it without turning his head.\n He had put it there because he liked it best.\n\n\n Further reverie became an effort as Mr. Chambers felt himself\n succumbing to weariness. He undressed and went to bed. For an\n hour he lay awake, assailed by vague fears he could neither\n define nor understand.", "Mr. Chambers turned his eyes back into the room. The clock was\n ticking slowly, steadily. The greyness was stealing into the\n room.\n\n\n The table and radio were the first to go. They simply faded away\n and with them went one corner of the room.\n\n\n And then the elephant ash tray.\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" said Mr. Chambers, \"I never did like that very well.\"\n\n\n Now as he sat there it didn't seem queer to be without the table\n or the radio. It was as if it were something quite normal.\n Something one could expect to happen.\n\n\n Perhaps, if he thought hard enough, he could bring them back.\n\n\n But, after all, what was the use? One man, alone, could not stand\n off the irresistible march of nothingness. One man, all alone,\n simply couldn't do it.", "The same thing, at the same time, day after day. He had not\n deliberately set upon such a life of routine. A bachelor, living\n alone with sufficient money to supply his humble needs, the timed\n existence had grown on him gradually.\n\n\n So he turned on Lexington and back on Oak. The dog at the corner\n of Oak and Jefferson was waiting for him once again and came out\n snarling and growling, snapping at his heels. But Mr. Chambers\n pretended not to notice and the beast gave up the chase.\n\n\n A radio was blaring down the street and faint wisps of what it\n was blurting floated to Mr. Chambers.\n\n\n \"... still taking place ... Empire State building disappeared ...\n thin air ... famed scientist, Dr. Edmund Harcourt....\"", "Mr. Chambers stared at the marine print and for a moment a little\n breath of reassurance returned to him.\nThey\ncouldn't take this\n away. The rest of the world might dissolve because there was\n insufficient power of thought to retain its outward form.\n\n\n But this room was his. He alone had furnished it. He alone, since\n he had first planned the house's building, had lived here.\n\n\n This room would stay. It must stay on ... it must....\n\n\n He rose from his chair and walked across the room to the book\n case, stood staring at the second shelf with its single volume.\n His eyes shifted to the top shelf and swift terror gripped him.\n\n\n For all the books weren't there. A lot of books weren't there!\n Only the most beloved, the most familiar ones.", "It wasn't until then that he realized something else was wrong.\n He had no cigar. For the first time he had neglected to purchase\n his evening smoke.\n\n\n Shaken, muttering to himself, Mr. Chambers let himself in his\n house and locked the door behind him.\n\n\n He hung his hat and coat on the rack in the hall and walked\n slowly into the living room. Dropping into his favorite chair, he\n shook his head in bewilderment.\n\n\n Silence filled the room. A silence that was measured by the\n ticking of the old fashioned pendulum clock on the mantelpiece.", "It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as\n merely the vagaries of an over-zealous mind.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover and began\n thumbing slowly through the pages. For a moment the memory of\n happier days swept over him.", "He could see it all now. By an insidious mass hypnosis minions from\n that other dimension ... or was it one supreme intelligence ... had\n deliberately sown the seeds of dissension. The reduction of the\n world's mental power had been carefully planned with diabolic\n premeditation.\n\n\n On impulse he suddenly turned, crossed the room and opened the\n connecting door to the bedroom. He stopped on the threshold and a\n sob forced its way to his lips.\n\n\n There was no bedroom. Where his stolid four poster and dresser\n had been there was greyish nothingness.\n\n\n Like an automaton he turned again and paced to the hall door.\n Here, too, he found what he had expected. There was no hall, no\n familiar hat rack and umbrella stand.\n\n\n Nothing....\n\n\n Weakly Mr. Chambers moved back to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n \"So here I am,\" he said, half aloud.", "There was something back of this, Mr. Chambers told himself.\n Something that reached far back into one corner of his brain and\n demanded recognition. Something tied up with the fragments of\n talk he had heard on the drugstore corner, bits of news\n broadcasts he had heard as he walked along the street, the\n shrieking of the newsboy calling his papers. Something to do with\n the happenings in the world from which he had excluded himself.\nHe brought them back to mind now and lingered over the one\n central theme of the talk he overheard: the wars and plagues.\n Hints of a Europe and Asia swept almost clean of human life, of\n the plague ravaging Africa, of its appearance in South America,\n of the frantic efforts of the United States to prevent its spread\n into that nation's boundaries.\n\n\n Millions of people were dead in Europe and Asia, Africa and South\n America. Billions, perhaps.", "And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through\n him. Rigid, he sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minutes\n later he arose and almost ran across the room to the old mahogany\n bookcase that stood against the wall.\n\n\n There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on the\n first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The\n second shelf contained but one book. And it was around this book\n that Mr. Chambers' entire life was centered.\n\n\n Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach\n its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he\n remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had\n been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand\n either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent\n of some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the\n school.", "Huddled in the chair, he frowned slowly. It was disquieting to\n have something like that happen. There must be something wrong.\n Had his long exile finally turned his mind ... perhaps just a\n very little ... enough to make him queer? Had he lost his sense\n of proportion, of perspective?\n\n\n No, he hadn't. Take this room, for example. After twenty years it\n had come to be as much a part of him as the clothes he wore.\n Every detail of the room was engraved in his mind with ...\n clarity; the old center leg table with its green covering and\n stained glass lamp; the mantelpiece with the dusty bric-a-brac;\n the pendulum clock that told the time of day as well as the day\n of the week and month; the elephant ash tray on the tabaret and,\n most important of all, the marine print." ], [ "He didn't walk fast. He took his time. He always returned to his\n front door at exactly 7:45. No one ever stopped to talk with\n him. Even the man at the Red Star confectionery, where he bought\n his cigar, remained silent while the purchase was being made. Mr.\n Chambers merely tapped on the glass top of the counter with a\n coin, the man reached in and brought forth the box, and Mr.\n Chambers took his cigar. That was all.\n\n\n For people long ago had gathered that Mr. Chambers desired to be\n left alone. The newer generation of townsfolk called it\n eccentricity. Certain uncouth persons had a different word for\n it. The oldsters remembered that this queer looking individual\n with his black silk muffler, rosewood cane and bowler hat once\n had been a professor at State University.", "But silence was no strange thing to Mr. Chambers. Once he had\n loved music ... the kind of music he could get by tuning in\n symphonic orchestras on the radio. But the radio stood silent in\n the corner, the cord out of its socket. Mr. Chambers had pulled\n it out many years before. To be precise, upon the night when the\n symphonic broadcast had been interrupted to give a news flash.\n\n\n He had stopped reading newspapers and magazines too, had exiled\n himself to a few city blocks. And as the years flowed by, that\n self exile had become a prison, an intangible, impassable wall\n bounded by four city blocks by three. Beyond them lay utter,\n unexplainable terror. Beyond them he never went.\n\n\n But recluse though he was, he could not on occasion escape from\n hearing things. Things the newsboy shouted on the streets, things\n the men talked about on the drugstore corner when they didn't see\n him coming.", "Mr. Chambers shivered, reached to turn up the collar of his coat,\n then stopped as he realized the room must be warm. A fire blazed\n merrily in the grate. The cold he felt came from something ...\n somewhere else. The cold of fear and horror, the chill of a half\n whispered thought.\n\n\n A deathly silence had fallen, a silence still measured by the\n pendulum clock. And yet a silence that held a different tenor than\n he had ever sensed before. Not a homey, comfortable silence ... but\n a silence that hinted at emptiness and nothingness.", "But as Mr. Chambers neared them they fell into what seemed an\n abashed silence and watched him pass. He, on his part, gave them\n no sign of recognition. That was the way it had been for many\n years, ever since the people had become convinced that he did not\n wish to talk.\n\n\n One of the men half started forward as if to speak to him, but\n then stepped back and Mr. Chambers continued on his walk.\n\n\n Back at his own front door he stopped and as he had done a\n thousand times before drew forth the heavy gold watch from his\n pocket.\n\n\n He started violently. It was only 7:30!\n\n\n For long minutes he stood there staring at the watch in\n accusation. The timepiece hadn't stopped, for it still ticked\n audibly.\n\n\n But 15 minutes too soon! For twenty years, day in, day out, he\n had started out at seven and returned at a quarter of eight.\n Now....", "And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through\n him. Rigid, he sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minutes\n later he arose and almost ran across the room to the old mahogany\n bookcase that stood against the wall.\n\n\n There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on the\n first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The\n second shelf contained but one book. And it was around this book\n that Mr. Chambers' entire life was centered.\n\n\n Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach\n its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he\n remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had\n been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand\n either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent\n of some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the\n school.", "The same thing, at the same time, day after day. He had not\n deliberately set upon such a life of routine. A bachelor, living\n alone with sufficient money to supply his humble needs, the timed\n existence had grown on him gradually.\n\n\n So he turned on Lexington and back on Oak. The dog at the corner\n of Oak and Jefferson was waiting for him once again and came out\n snarling and growling, snapping at his heels. But Mr. Chambers\n pretended not to notice and the beast gave up the chase.\n\n\n A radio was blaring down the street and faint wisps of what it\n was blurting floated to Mr. Chambers.\n\n\n \"... still taking place ... Empire State building disappeared ...\n thin air ... famed scientist, Dr. Edmund Harcourt....\"", "Mr. Chambers loved that picture. It had depth, he always said. It\n showed an old sailing ship in the foreground on a placid sea. Far\n in the distance, almost on the horizon line, was the vague\n outline of a larger vessel.\n\n\n There were other pictures, too. The forest scene above the\n fireplace, the old English prints in the corner where he sat, the\n Currier and Ives above the radio. But the ship print was directly\n in his line of vision. He could see it without turning his head.\n He had put it there because he liked it best.\n\n\n Further reverie became an effort as Mr. Chambers felt himself\n succumbing to weariness. He undressed and went to bed. For an\n hour he lay awake, assailed by vague fears he could neither\n define nor understand.", "He went on until he came to the corner of Lexington. There, on\n the curb, he stopped and stared. The gray wall was thicker there\n but he did not realize how close it was until he glanced down at\n his feet and saw there was nothing, nothing at all beyond the\n curbstone. No dull gleam of wet asphalt, no sign of a street. It\n was as if all eternity ended here at the corner of Maple and\n Lexington.\n\n\n With a wild cry, Mr. Chambers turned and ran. Back down the\n street he raced, coat streaming after him in the wind, bowler hat\n bouncing on his head.\n\n\n Panting, he reached the gate and stumbled up the walk, thankful\n that it still was there.", "The light through the windows slowly grew brighter. Mr. Chambers\n slid out of bed, slowly crossed to the window, the cold of the\n floor biting into his bare feet. He forced himself to look out.\n\n\n There was nothing outside the window. No shadows. As if there\n might be a fog. But no fog, however, thick, could hide the apple\n tree that grew close against the house.\n\n\n But the tree was there ... shadowy, indistinct in the gray, with\n a few withered apples still clinging to its boughs, a few\n shriveled leaves reluctant to leave the parent branch.", "It wasn't until then that he realized something else was wrong.\n He had no cigar. For the first time he had neglected to purchase\n his evening smoke.\n\n\n Shaken, muttering to himself, Mr. Chambers let himself in his\n house and locked the door behind him.\n\n\n He hung his hat and coat on the rack in the hall and walked\n slowly into the living room. Dropping into his favorite chair, he\n shook his head in bewilderment.\n\n\n Silence filled the room. A silence that was measured by the\n ticking of the old fashioned pendulum clock on the mantelpiece.", "Mr. Chambers started. The clock had stopped. Funny ... the first\n time in twenty years.\n\n\n He leaped from his chair and then sat down again.\n\n\n The clock hadn't stopped.\n\n\n It wasn't there.\n\n\n There was a tingling sensation in his feet.", "Mr. Chambers turned his eyes back into the room. The clock was\n ticking slowly, steadily. The greyness was stealing into the\n room.\n\n\n The table and radio were the first to go. They simply faded away\n and with them went one corner of the room.\n\n\n And then the elephant ash tray.\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" said Mr. Chambers, \"I never did like that very well.\"\n\n\n Now as he sat there it didn't seem queer to be without the table\n or the radio. It was as if it were something quite normal.\n Something one could expect to happen.\n\n\n Perhaps, if he thought hard enough, he could bring them back.\n\n\n But, after all, what was the use? One man, alone, could not stand\n off the irresistible march of nothingness. One man, all alone,\n simply couldn't do it.", "There was something back of this, Mr. Chambers told himself.\n Something that reached far back into one corner of his brain and\n demanded recognition. Something tied up with the fragments of\n talk he had heard on the drugstore corner, bits of news\n broadcasts he had heard as he walked along the street, the\n shrieking of the newsboy calling his papers. Something to do with\n the happenings in the world from which he had excluded himself.\nHe brought them back to mind now and lingered over the one\n central theme of the talk he overheard: the wars and plagues.\n Hints of a Europe and Asia swept almost clean of human life, of\n the plague ravaging Africa, of its appearance in South America,\n of the frantic efforts of the United States to prevent its spread\n into that nation's boundaries.\n\n\n Millions of people were dead in Europe and Asia, Africa and South\n America. Billions, perhaps.", "The wind whipped the muted words away and Mr. Chambers grumbled\n to himself. Another one of those fantastic radio dramas,\n probably. He remembered one from many years before, something\n about the Martians. And Harcourt! What did Harcourt have to do\n with it? He was one of the men who had ridiculed the book\n Mr. Chambers had written.\n\n\n But he pushed speculation away, sniffed the clean, crisp air again,\n looked at the familiar things that materialized out of the late\n autumn darkness as he walked along. For there was nothing ...\n absolutely nothing in the world ... that he would let upset him.\n That was a tenet he had laid down twenty years ago.\nThere was a crowd of men in front of the drugstore at the corner\n of Oak and Lincoln and they were talking excitedly. Mr. Chambers\n caught some excited words: \"It's happening everywhere.... What\n do you think it is.... The scientists can't explain....\"", "A professor of metaphysics, they seemed to recall, or some such\n outlandish subject. At any rate a furore of some sort was\n connected with his name ... at the time an academic scandal. He\n had written a book, and he had taught the subject matter of that\n volume to his classes. What that subject matter was, had long been\n forgotten, but whatever it was had been considered sufficiently\n revolutionary to cost Mr. Chambers his post at the university.\n\n\n A silver moon shone over the chimney tops and a chill, impish\n October wind was rustling the dead leaves when Mr. Chambers\n started out at seven o'clock.\n\n\n It was a good night, he told himself, smelling the clean, crisp\n air of autumn and the faint pungence of distant wood smoke.", "He could see it all now. By an insidious mass hypnosis minions from\n that other dimension ... or was it one supreme intelligence ... had\n deliberately sown the seeds of dissension. The reduction of the\n world's mental power had been carefully planned with diabolic\n premeditation.\n\n\n On impulse he suddenly turned, crossed the room and opened the\n connecting door to the bedroom. He stopped on the threshold and a\n sob forced its way to his lips.\n\n\n There was no bedroom. Where his stolid four poster and dresser\n had been there was greyish nothingness.\n\n\n Like an automaton he turned again and paced to the hall door.\n Here, too, he found what he had expected. There was no hall, no\n familiar hat rack and umbrella stand.\n\n\n Nothing....\n\n\n Weakly Mr. Chambers moved back to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n \"So here I am,\" he said, half aloud.", "The tree was there now. But it hadn't been when he first had\n looked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that.\nAnd now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbor's house ... but\n those outlines were all wrong. They didn't jibe and fit together ...\n they were out of plumb. As if some giant hand had grasped the house\n and wrenched it out of true. Like the house he had seen across the\n street the night before, the house that had painfully righted itself\n when he thought of how it should look.\n\n\n Perhaps if he thought of how his neighbor's house should look, it\n too might right itself. But Mr. Chambers was very weary. Too\n weary to think about the house.\n\n\n He turned from the window and dressed slowly. In the living room\n he slumped into his chair, put his feet on the old cracked\n ottoman. For a long time he sat, trying to think.", "For the first time in twenty years, Mr. Chambers retraced his\n steps. He walked back to Jefferson, then turned around and went\n back to Grant again and on to Lexington. Then back to Grant\n again, where he stood astounded while a single, incredible fact\n grew slowly in his brain:\nThere wasn't any confectionery! The block from Marshall to Grant\n had disappeared!\nNow he understood why he had missed the store on the night\n before, why he had arrived home fifteen minutes early.\n\n\n On legs that were dead things he stumbled back to his home. He\n slammed and locked the door behind him and made his way\n unsteadily to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivable\n necromancy could a paved street with houses, trees and buildings\n be spirited away and the space it had occupied be closed up?\n\n\n Was something happening in the world which he, in his secluded\n life, knew nothing about?", "And somehow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his own\n experience. Something, somewhere, some part of his earlier life,\n seemed to hold an explanation. But try as he would his befuddled\n brain failed to find the answer.\n\n\n The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime as usual\n setting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stood\n upon the mantel.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers got to his feet, strode to the door, opened it and\n looked out.\n\n\n Moonlight tesselated the street in black and silver, etching the\n chimneys and trees against a silvered sky.\n\n\n But the house directly across the street was not the same. It was\n strangely lop-sided, its dimensions out of proportion, like a\n house that suddenly had gone mad.", "It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as\n merely the vagaries of an over-zealous mind.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover and began\n thumbing slowly through the pages. For a moment the memory of\n happier days swept over him." ], [ "But silence was no strange thing to Mr. Chambers. Once he had\n loved music ... the kind of music he could get by tuning in\n symphonic orchestras on the radio. But the radio stood silent in\n the corner, the cord out of its socket. Mr. Chambers had pulled\n it out many years before. To be precise, upon the night when the\n symphonic broadcast had been interrupted to give a news flash.\n\n\n He had stopped reading newspapers and magazines too, had exiled\n himself to a few city blocks. And as the years flowed by, that\n self exile had become a prison, an intangible, impassable wall\n bounded by four city blocks by three. Beyond them lay utter,\n unexplainable terror. Beyond them he never went.\n\n\n But recluse though he was, he could not on occasion escape from\n hearing things. Things the newsboy shouted on the streets, things\n the men talked about on the drugstore corner when they didn't see\n him coming.", "The same thing, at the same time, day after day. He had not\n deliberately set upon such a life of routine. A bachelor, living\n alone with sufficient money to supply his humble needs, the timed\n existence had grown on him gradually.\n\n\n So he turned on Lexington and back on Oak. The dog at the corner\n of Oak and Jefferson was waiting for him once again and came out\n snarling and growling, snapping at his heels. But Mr. Chambers\n pretended not to notice and the beast gave up the chase.\n\n\n A radio was blaring down the street and faint wisps of what it\n was blurting floated to Mr. Chambers.\n\n\n \"... still taking place ... Empire State building disappeared ...\n thin air ... famed scientist, Dr. Edmund Harcourt....\"", "He didn't walk fast. He took his time. He always returned to his\n front door at exactly 7:45. No one ever stopped to talk with\n him. Even the man at the Red Star confectionery, where he bought\n his cigar, remained silent while the purchase was being made. Mr.\n Chambers merely tapped on the glass top of the counter with a\n coin, the man reached in and brought forth the box, and Mr.\n Chambers took his cigar. That was all.\n\n\n For people long ago had gathered that Mr. Chambers desired to be\n left alone. The newer generation of townsfolk called it\n eccentricity. Certain uncouth persons had a different word for\n it. The oldsters remembered that this queer looking individual\n with his black silk muffler, rosewood cane and bowler hat once\n had been a professor at State University.", "There was something back of this, Mr. Chambers told himself.\n Something that reached far back into one corner of his brain and\n demanded recognition. Something tied up with the fragments of\n talk he had heard on the drugstore corner, bits of news\n broadcasts he had heard as he walked along the street, the\n shrieking of the newsboy calling his papers. Something to do with\n the happenings in the world from which he had excluded himself.\nHe brought them back to mind now and lingered over the one\n central theme of the talk he overheard: the wars and plagues.\n Hints of a Europe and Asia swept almost clean of human life, of\n the plague ravaging Africa, of its appearance in South America,\n of the frantic efforts of the United States to prevent its spread\n into that nation's boundaries.\n\n\n Millions of people were dead in Europe and Asia, Africa and South\n America. Billions, perhaps.", "Mr. Chambers loved that picture. It had depth, he always said. It\n showed an old sailing ship in the foreground on a placid sea. Far\n in the distance, almost on the horizon line, was the vague\n outline of a larger vessel.\n\n\n There were other pictures, too. The forest scene above the\n fireplace, the old English prints in the corner where he sat, the\n Currier and Ives above the radio. But the ship print was directly\n in his line of vision. He could see it without turning his head.\n He had put it there because he liked it best.\n\n\n Further reverie became an effort as Mr. Chambers felt himself\n succumbing to weariness. He undressed and went to bed. For an\n hour he lay awake, assailed by vague fears he could neither\n define nor understand.", "Mr. Chambers shivered, reached to turn up the collar of his coat,\n then stopped as he realized the room must be warm. A fire blazed\n merrily in the grate. The cold he felt came from something ...\n somewhere else. The cold of fear and horror, the chill of a half\n whispered thought.\n\n\n A deathly silence had fallen, a silence still measured by the\n pendulum clock. And yet a silence that held a different tenor than\n he had ever sensed before. Not a homey, comfortable silence ... but\n a silence that hinted at emptiness and nothingness.", "But as Mr. Chambers neared them they fell into what seemed an\n abashed silence and watched him pass. He, on his part, gave them\n no sign of recognition. That was the way it had been for many\n years, ever since the people had become convinced that he did not\n wish to talk.\n\n\n One of the men half started forward as if to speak to him, but\n then stepped back and Mr. Chambers continued on his walk.\n\n\n Back at his own front door he stopped and as he had done a\n thousand times before drew forth the heavy gold watch from his\n pocket.\n\n\n He started violently. It was only 7:30!\n\n\n For long minutes he stood there staring at the watch in\n accusation. The timepiece hadn't stopped, for it still ticked\n audibly.\n\n\n But 15 minutes too soon! For twenty years, day in, day out, he\n had started out at seven and returned at a quarter of eight.\n Now....", "The wind whipped the muted words away and Mr. Chambers grumbled\n to himself. Another one of those fantastic radio dramas,\n probably. He remembered one from many years before, something\n about the Martians. And Harcourt! What did Harcourt have to do\n with it? He was one of the men who had ridiculed the book\n Mr. Chambers had written.\n\n\n But he pushed speculation away, sniffed the clean, crisp air again,\n looked at the familiar things that materialized out of the late\n autumn darkness as he walked along. For there was nothing ...\n absolutely nothing in the world ... that he would let upset him.\n That was a tenet he had laid down twenty years ago.\nThere was a crowd of men in front of the drugstore at the corner\n of Oak and Lincoln and they were talking excitedly. Mr. Chambers\n caught some excited words: \"It's happening everywhere.... What\n do you think it is.... The scientists can't explain....\"", "And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through\n him. Rigid, he sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minutes\n later he arose and almost ran across the room to the old mahogany\n bookcase that stood against the wall.\n\n\n There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on the\n first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The\n second shelf contained but one book. And it was around this book\n that Mr. Chambers' entire life was centered.\n\n\n Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach\n its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he\n remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had\n been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand\n either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent\n of some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the\n school.", "For the first time in twenty years, Mr. Chambers retraced his\n steps. He walked back to Jefferson, then turned around and went\n back to Grant again and on to Lexington. Then back to Grant\n again, where he stood astounded while a single, incredible fact\n grew slowly in his brain:\nThere wasn't any confectionery! The block from Marshall to Grant\n had disappeared!\nNow he understood why he had missed the store on the night\n before, why he had arrived home fifteen minutes early.\n\n\n On legs that were dead things he stumbled back to his home. He\n slammed and locked the door behind him and made his way\n unsteadily to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivable\n necromancy could a paved street with houses, trees and buildings\n be spirited away and the space it had occupied be closed up?\n\n\n Was something happening in the world which he, in his secluded\n life, knew nothing about?", "Mr. Chambers started. The clock had stopped. Funny ... the first\n time in twenty years.\n\n\n He leaped from his chair and then sat down again.\n\n\n The clock hadn't stopped.\n\n\n It wasn't there.\n\n\n There was a tingling sensation in his feet.", "He went on until he came to the corner of Lexington. There, on\n the curb, he stopped and stared. The gray wall was thicker there\n but he did not realize how close it was until he glanced down at\n his feet and saw there was nothing, nothing at all beyond the\n curbstone. No dull gleam of wet asphalt, no sign of a street. It\n was as if all eternity ended here at the corner of Maple and\n Lexington.\n\n\n With a wild cry, Mr. Chambers turned and ran. Back down the\n street he raced, coat streaming after him in the wind, bowler hat\n bouncing on his head.\n\n\n Panting, he reached the gate and stumbled up the walk, thankful\n that it still was there.", "The light through the windows slowly grew brighter. Mr. Chambers\n slid out of bed, slowly crossed to the window, the cold of the\n floor biting into his bare feet. He forced himself to look out.\n\n\n There was nothing outside the window. No shadows. As if there\n might be a fog. But no fog, however, thick, could hide the apple\n tree that grew close against the house.\n\n\n But the tree was there ... shadowy, indistinct in the gray, with\n a few withered apples still clinging to its boughs, a few\n shriveled leaves reluctant to leave the parent branch.", "It wasn't until then that he realized something else was wrong.\n He had no cigar. For the first time he had neglected to purchase\n his evening smoke.\n\n\n Shaken, muttering to himself, Mr. Chambers let himself in his\n house and locked the door behind him.\n\n\n He hung his hat and coat on the rack in the hall and walked\n slowly into the living room. Dropping into his favorite chair, he\n shook his head in bewilderment.\n\n\n Silence filled the room. A silence that was measured by the\n ticking of the old fashioned pendulum clock on the mantelpiece.", "Mr. Chambers turned his eyes back into the room. The clock was\n ticking slowly, steadily. The greyness was stealing into the\n room.\n\n\n The table and radio were the first to go. They simply faded away\n and with them went one corner of the room.\n\n\n And then the elephant ash tray.\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" said Mr. Chambers, \"I never did like that very well.\"\n\n\n Now as he sat there it didn't seem queer to be without the table\n or the radio. It was as if it were something quite normal.\n Something one could expect to happen.\n\n\n Perhaps, if he thought hard enough, he could bring them back.\n\n\n But, after all, what was the use? One man, alone, could not stand\n off the irresistible march of nothingness. One man, all alone,\n simply couldn't do it.", "A professor of metaphysics, they seemed to recall, or some such\n outlandish subject. At any rate a furore of some sort was\n connected with his name ... at the time an academic scandal. He\n had written a book, and he had taught the subject matter of that\n volume to his classes. What that subject matter was, had long been\n forgotten, but whatever it was had been considered sufficiently\n revolutionary to cost Mr. Chambers his post at the university.\n\n\n A silver moon shone over the chimney tops and a chill, impish\n October wind was rustling the dead leaves when Mr. Chambers\n started out at seven o'clock.\n\n\n It was a good night, he told himself, smelling the clean, crisp\n air of autumn and the faint pungence of distant wood smoke.", "He could see it all now. By an insidious mass hypnosis minions from\n that other dimension ... or was it one supreme intelligence ... had\n deliberately sown the seeds of dissension. The reduction of the\n world's mental power had been carefully planned with diabolic\n premeditation.\n\n\n On impulse he suddenly turned, crossed the room and opened the\n connecting door to the bedroom. He stopped on the threshold and a\n sob forced its way to his lips.\n\n\n There was no bedroom. Where his stolid four poster and dresser\n had been there was greyish nothingness.\n\n\n Like an automaton he turned again and paced to the hall door.\n Here, too, he found what he had expected. There was no hall, no\n familiar hat rack and umbrella stand.\n\n\n Nothing....\n\n\n Weakly Mr. Chambers moved back to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n \"So here I am,\" he said, half aloud.", "It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as\n merely the vagaries of an over-zealous mind.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover and began\n thumbing slowly through the pages. For a moment the memory of\n happier days swept over him.", "Mr. Chambers stared at the marine print and for a moment a little\n breath of reassurance returned to him.\nThey\ncouldn't take this\n away. The rest of the world might dissolve because there was\n insufficient power of thought to retain its outward form.\n\n\n But this room was his. He alone had furnished it. He alone, since\n he had first planned the house's building, had lived here.\n\n\n This room would stay. It must stay on ... it must....\n\n\n He rose from his chair and walked across the room to the book\n case, stood staring at the second shelf with its single volume.\n His eyes shifted to the top shelf and swift terror gripped him.\n\n\n For all the books weren't there. A lot of books weren't there!\n Only the most beloved, the most familiar ones.", "The tree was there now. But it hadn't been when he first had\n looked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that.\nAnd now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbor's house ... but\n those outlines were all wrong. They didn't jibe and fit together ...\n they were out of plumb. As if some giant hand had grasped the house\n and wrenched it out of true. Like the house he had seen across the\n street the night before, the house that had painfully righted itself\n when he thought of how it should look.\n\n\n Perhaps if he thought of how his neighbor's house should look, it\n too might right itself. But Mr. Chambers was very weary. Too\n weary to think about the house.\n\n\n He turned from the window and dressed slowly. In the living room\n he slumped into his chair, put his feet on the old cracked\n ottoman. For a long time he sat, trying to think." ], [ "Mr. Chambers shivered, reached to turn up the collar of his coat,\n then stopped as he realized the room must be warm. A fire blazed\n merrily in the grate. The cold he felt came from something ...\n somewhere else. The cold of fear and horror, the chill of a half\n whispered thought.\n\n\n A deathly silence had fallen, a silence still measured by the\n pendulum clock. And yet a silence that held a different tenor than\n he had ever sensed before. Not a homey, comfortable silence ... but\n a silence that hinted at emptiness and nothingness.", "Mr. Chambers started. The clock had stopped. Funny ... the first\n time in twenty years.\n\n\n He leaped from his chair and then sat down again.\n\n\n The clock hadn't stopped.\n\n\n It wasn't there.\n\n\n There was a tingling sensation in his feet.", "Mr. Chambers loved that picture. It had depth, he always said. It\n showed an old sailing ship in the foreground on a placid sea. Far\n in the distance, almost on the horizon line, was the vague\n outline of a larger vessel.\n\n\n There were other pictures, too. The forest scene above the\n fireplace, the old English prints in the corner where he sat, the\n Currier and Ives above the radio. But the ship print was directly\n in his line of vision. He could see it without turning his head.\n He had put it there because he liked it best.\n\n\n Further reverie became an effort as Mr. Chambers felt himself\n succumbing to weariness. He undressed and went to bed. For an\n hour he lay awake, assailed by vague fears he could neither\n define nor understand.", "But as Mr. Chambers neared them they fell into what seemed an\n abashed silence and watched him pass. He, on his part, gave them\n no sign of recognition. That was the way it had been for many\n years, ever since the people had become convinced that he did not\n wish to talk.\n\n\n One of the men half started forward as if to speak to him, but\n then stepped back and Mr. Chambers continued on his walk.\n\n\n Back at his own front door he stopped and as he had done a\n thousand times before drew forth the heavy gold watch from his\n pocket.\n\n\n He started violently. It was only 7:30!\n\n\n For long minutes he stood there staring at the watch in\n accusation. The timepiece hadn't stopped, for it still ticked\n audibly.\n\n\n But 15 minutes too soon! For twenty years, day in, day out, he\n had started out at seven and returned at a quarter of eight.\n Now....", "And somehow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his own\n experience. Something, somewhere, some part of his earlier life,\n seemed to hold an explanation. But try as he would his befuddled\n brain failed to find the answer.\n\n\n The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime as usual\n setting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stood\n upon the mantel.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers got to his feet, strode to the door, opened it and\n looked out.\n\n\n Moonlight tesselated the street in black and silver, etching the\n chimneys and trees against a silvered sky.\n\n\n But the house directly across the street was not the same. It was\n strangely lop-sided, its dimensions out of proportion, like a\n house that suddenly had gone mad.", "The light through the windows slowly grew brighter. Mr. Chambers\n slid out of bed, slowly crossed to the window, the cold of the\n floor biting into his bare feet. He forced himself to look out.\n\n\n There was nothing outside the window. No shadows. As if there\n might be a fog. But no fog, however, thick, could hide the apple\n tree that grew close against the house.\n\n\n But the tree was there ... shadowy, indistinct in the gray, with\n a few withered apples still clinging to its boughs, a few\n shriveled leaves reluctant to leave the parent branch.", "But silence was no strange thing to Mr. Chambers. Once he had\n loved music ... the kind of music he could get by tuning in\n symphonic orchestras on the radio. But the radio stood silent in\n the corner, the cord out of its socket. Mr. Chambers had pulled\n it out many years before. To be precise, upon the night when the\n symphonic broadcast had been interrupted to give a news flash.\n\n\n He had stopped reading newspapers and magazines too, had exiled\n himself to a few city blocks. And as the years flowed by, that\n self exile had become a prison, an intangible, impassable wall\n bounded by four city blocks by three. Beyond them lay utter,\n unexplainable terror. Beyond them he never went.\n\n\n But recluse though he was, he could not on occasion escape from\n hearing things. Things the newsboy shouted on the streets, things\n the men talked about on the drugstore corner when they didn't see\n him coming.", "The tree was there now. But it hadn't been when he first had\n looked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that.\nAnd now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbor's house ... but\n those outlines were all wrong. They didn't jibe and fit together ...\n they were out of plumb. As if some giant hand had grasped the house\n and wrenched it out of true. Like the house he had seen across the\n street the night before, the house that had painfully righted itself\n when he thought of how it should look.\n\n\n Perhaps if he thought of how his neighbor's house should look, it\n too might right itself. But Mr. Chambers was very weary. Too\n weary to think about the house.\n\n\n He turned from the window and dressed slowly. In the living room\n he slumped into his chair, put his feet on the old cracked\n ottoman. For a long time he sat, trying to think.", "It wasn't until then that he realized something else was wrong.\n He had no cigar. For the first time he had neglected to purchase\n his evening smoke.\n\n\n Shaken, muttering to himself, Mr. Chambers let himself in his\n house and locked the door behind him.\n\n\n He hung his hat and coat on the rack in the hall and walked\n slowly into the living room. Dropping into his favorite chair, he\n shook his head in bewilderment.\n\n\n Silence filled the room. A silence that was measured by the\n ticking of the old fashioned pendulum clock on the mantelpiece.", "He didn't walk fast. He took his time. He always returned to his\n front door at exactly 7:45. No one ever stopped to talk with\n him. Even the man at the Red Star confectionery, where he bought\n his cigar, remained silent while the purchase was being made. Mr.\n Chambers merely tapped on the glass top of the counter with a\n coin, the man reached in and brought forth the box, and Mr.\n Chambers took his cigar. That was all.\n\n\n For people long ago had gathered that Mr. Chambers desired to be\n left alone. The newer generation of townsfolk called it\n eccentricity. Certain uncouth persons had a different word for\n it. The oldsters remembered that this queer looking individual\n with his black silk muffler, rosewood cane and bowler hat once\n had been a professor at State University.", "For the first time in twenty years, Mr. Chambers retraced his\n steps. He walked back to Jefferson, then turned around and went\n back to Grant again and on to Lexington. Then back to Grant\n again, where he stood astounded while a single, incredible fact\n grew slowly in his brain:\nThere wasn't any confectionery! The block from Marshall to Grant\n had disappeared!\nNow he understood why he had missed the store on the night\n before, why he had arrived home fifteen minutes early.\n\n\n On legs that were dead things he stumbled back to his home. He\n slammed and locked the door behind him and made his way\n unsteadily to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivable\n necromancy could a paved street with houses, trees and buildings\n be spirited away and the space it had occupied be closed up?\n\n\n Was something happening in the world which he, in his secluded\n life, knew nothing about?", "He went on until he came to the corner of Lexington. There, on\n the curb, he stopped and stared. The gray wall was thicker there\n but he did not realize how close it was until he glanced down at\n his feet and saw there was nothing, nothing at all beyond the\n curbstone. No dull gleam of wet asphalt, no sign of a street. It\n was as if all eternity ended here at the corner of Maple and\n Lexington.\n\n\n With a wild cry, Mr. Chambers turned and ran. Back down the\n street he raced, coat streaming after him in the wind, bowler hat\n bouncing on his head.\n\n\n Panting, he reached the gate and stumbled up the walk, thankful\n that it still was there.", "It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as\n merely the vagaries of an over-zealous mind.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover and began\n thumbing slowly through the pages. For a moment the memory of\n happier days swept over him.", "A professor of metaphysics, they seemed to recall, or some such\n outlandish subject. At any rate a furore of some sort was\n connected with his name ... at the time an academic scandal. He\n had written a book, and he had taught the subject matter of that\n volume to his classes. What that subject matter was, had long been\n forgotten, but whatever it was had been considered sufficiently\n revolutionary to cost Mr. Chambers his post at the university.\n\n\n A silver moon shone over the chimney tops and a chill, impish\n October wind was rustling the dead leaves when Mr. Chambers\n started out at seven o'clock.\n\n\n It was a good night, he told himself, smelling the clean, crisp\n air of autumn and the faint pungence of distant wood smoke.", "And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through\n him. Rigid, he sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minutes\n later he arose and almost ran across the room to the old mahogany\n bookcase that stood against the wall.\n\n\n There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on the\n first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The\n second shelf contained but one book. And it was around this book\n that Mr. Chambers' entire life was centered.\n\n\n Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach\n its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he\n remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had\n been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand\n either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent\n of some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the\n school.", "He could see it all now. By an insidious mass hypnosis minions from\n that other dimension ... or was it one supreme intelligence ... had\n deliberately sown the seeds of dissension. The reduction of the\n world's mental power had been carefully planned with diabolic\n premeditation.\n\n\n On impulse he suddenly turned, crossed the room and opened the\n connecting door to the bedroom. He stopped on the threshold and a\n sob forced its way to his lips.\n\n\n There was no bedroom. Where his stolid four poster and dresser\n had been there was greyish nothingness.\n\n\n Like an automaton he turned again and paced to the hall door.\n Here, too, he found what he had expected. There was no hall, no\n familiar hat rack and umbrella stand.\n\n\n Nothing....\n\n\n Weakly Mr. Chambers moved back to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n \"So here I am,\" he said, half aloud.", "The same thing, at the same time, day after day. He had not\n deliberately set upon such a life of routine. A bachelor, living\n alone with sufficient money to supply his humble needs, the timed\n existence had grown on him gradually.\n\n\n So he turned on Lexington and back on Oak. The dog at the corner\n of Oak and Jefferson was waiting for him once again and came out\n snarling and growling, snapping at his heels. But Mr. Chambers\n pretended not to notice and the beast gave up the chase.\n\n\n A radio was blaring down the street and faint wisps of what it\n was blurting floated to Mr. Chambers.\n\n\n \"... still taking place ... Empire State building disappeared ...\n thin air ... famed scientist, Dr. Edmund Harcourt....\"", "The wind whipped the muted words away and Mr. Chambers grumbled\n to himself. Another one of those fantastic radio dramas,\n probably. He remembered one from many years before, something\n about the Martians. And Harcourt! What did Harcourt have to do\n with it? He was one of the men who had ridiculed the book\n Mr. Chambers had written.\n\n\n But he pushed speculation away, sniffed the clean, crisp air again,\n looked at the familiar things that materialized out of the late\n autumn darkness as he walked along. For there was nothing ...\n absolutely nothing in the world ... that he would let upset him.\n That was a tenet he had laid down twenty years ago.\nThere was a crowd of men in front of the drugstore at the corner\n of Oak and Lincoln and they were talking excitedly. Mr. Chambers\n caught some excited words: \"It's happening everywhere.... What\n do you think it is.... The scientists can't explain....\"", "On the stoop he stood for a moment, breathing hard. He glanced\n back over his shoulder and a queer feeling of inner numbness\n seemed to well over him. At that moment the gray nothingness\n appeared to thin ... the enveloping curtain fell away, and he\n saw....\n\n\n Vague and indistinct, yet cast in stereoscopic outline, a\n gigantic city was lined against the darkling sky. It was a city\n fantastic with cubed domes, spires, and aerial bridges and flying\n buttresses. Tunnel-like streets, flanked on either side by\n shining metallic ramps and runways, stretched endlessly to the\n vanishing point. Great shafts of multicolored light probed huge\n streamers and ellipses above the higher levels.\n\n\n And beyond, like a final backdrop, rose a titanic wall. It was\n from that wall ... from its crenelated parapets and battlements\n that Mr. Chambers felt the eyes peering at him.", "There was something back of this, Mr. Chambers told himself.\n Something that reached far back into one corner of his brain and\n demanded recognition. Something tied up with the fragments of\n talk he had heard on the drugstore corner, bits of news\n broadcasts he had heard as he walked along the street, the\n shrieking of the newsboy calling his papers. Something to do with\n the happenings in the world from which he had excluded himself.\nHe brought them back to mind now and lingered over the one\n central theme of the talk he overheard: the wars and plagues.\n Hints of a Europe and Asia swept almost clean of human life, of\n the plague ravaging Africa, of its appearance in South America,\n of the frantic efforts of the United States to prevent its spread\n into that nation's boundaries.\n\n\n Millions of people were dead in Europe and Asia, Africa and South\n America. Billions, perhaps." ] ]
valid	99930	[ "Why does the author think the issue of Green OA is important?", "Who does the author think that the issue of Green OA is important to? ", "What is the main concern of publishers about green OA policies?", "What does the author use as a counterpoint to the concerns of the publishers about subscription cancelations? ", "What does the author use as a synonym for OA ", "What does the author argue the relationship between downloads and subscriptions are?", "What does the author believe that information provided by using physics as an example of OA practices imply?", "Why does the author believe that universities should not worry about the effects of their OA practices?", "What did the research show as the main reason for libraries canceling publication subscriptions?", "In which scenarios did OA increase subscription retention? " ]	[ [ "It will lead to increased use of toll-access publications ", "It will decrease the risk of publisher monopoly", "It would increase publisher profits ", "It will increase access to published literature" ], [ "Activists ", "All of the other answers are correct", "Publishers", "Media Consumers" ], [ "Increased number of downloads of journals ", "A replacement of the standard Gold OA policies", "Negatively affecting the relationship between publishers and academia ", "Decreased subscriptions to journals" ], [ "The success of Gold OA policies for publishers ", "A lack of empirical evidence ", "The systematic requirement of waivers ", "The fact that green OA practices were the standard in the past " ], [ "APS", "IOP", "Subscription cancellations ", "Self-archiving" ], [ "As downloads increase, subscriptions decrease", "Downloads and subscriptions are both effected my OA", "There is no correlation between downloads and subscriptions", "As downloads increase, subscriptions increase" ], [ "That OA practices would increase journal subscriptions ", "That OA practices would decrease journal subscriptions ", "The author makes no further implications from the data provided about physics ", "That OA practices would not affect publishers profits at all" ], [ "Universities do not publish enough material that the public would want to access", "University OA practices have been proven to increase revenue for publishers", "Publishers already have the ability to protect themselves ", "Universities are a too small of a portion of publishers markets " ], [ "The presence of extra media such as photos and commentary in the publication", "Whether or not the published content was completely free", "The length of content embargo that the subscription publisher used ", "The cost and amount of use related to the subscription" ], [ "When the publication used a short embargo followed by OA", "Only in hypothetical scenarios, not in actual data ", "When libraries decided to embrace the practice of embargo", "When publishers decided to switch to Gold OA instead of Green" ] ]	[ 4, 2, 4, 2, 4, 3, 4, 3, 4, 1 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "In fact, OA publishing might be more sustainable than TA publishing, as toll-access prices and the volume of research both grow faster than library budgets. (See section 2.1 on problems.) If publishers acknowledge that gold OA can be sustainable, and even profitable, and merely wish to avoid making lower margins than they make today, then their objection takes on a very different color. They’re not at risk of insolvency, just reduced profits, and they’re not asserting a need for self-protection, just an entitlement to current levels of profit. There’s no reason for public funding agencies acting in the public interest, or private funders acting for charitable purposes, to compromise their missions in order to satisfy that sense of publisher entitlement.\n10. Green OA policies are justified even if they do create risks for toll-access journals.", "When users know about OA and toll-access editions of the same article, many will prefer to click through to the OA edition, either because they aren’t affiliated with a subscribing institution or because authentication is a hassle. Moreover, when users find an OA edition, most stop looking. But decreased downloads are not the same thing as decreased or canceled subscriptions.\nMoreover, decreased downloads of toll-access editions from publisher web sites are not the same thing as decreased downloads overall. No one suggests that green OA leads to decreased overall downloads, that is, fewer readers and less reading. On the contrary, the same evidence suggesting that OA increases citation impact also suggests that it increases readers and reading.\n5. Most publishers voluntarily permit green OA.", "If we’re only interested in the effect of rising levels of green OA on toll-access publishers, then we can stop at points 1–9. But if we’re interested in good policy, then we must add one more factor: Even if green OA does eventually threaten toll-access journal subscriptions, green OA policies are still justified.\nI won’t elaborate this point here, since it takes us beyond the topic of casualties to the full case for OA, which is spread throughout the rest of the book. But here’s one way to put the debate in perspective: There are good reasons to want to know whether rising levels of green OA will trigger cancellations of toll-access journals, and perhaps even to modify our policies in light of what we learn. But there are no good reasons to put the thriving of incumbent toll-access journals and publishers ahead of the thriving of research itself.", "The three most important factors used to determine journals for cancellation, in declining order of importance, are that the faculty no longer require it . . . , usage and price. Next, availability of the content via open access (OA) archives and availability via aggregators were ranked equal fourth, but some way behind the first three factors. The journal’s impact factor and availability via delayed OA were ranked relatively unimportant. . . . With regard to OA archives, there was a great deal of support for the idea that they would not directly impact journal subscriptions.\nIn short, toll-access journals have more to fear from their own price increases than from rising levels of green OA. Publishers who keep raising their prices aggravate the access problem for researchers and aggravate the sustainability problem for themselves. If the same publishers blame green OA and lobby against green OA policies, then they obstruct the solution for researchers and do very little to improve their own sustainability.\n8. OA may increase submissions and subscriptions.", "Hence, publishers who worry about the effect of university OA policies on subscriptions have the remedy in their own hands. Faculty needn’t paternalize publishers by voting down OA policies when publishers can protect themselves whenever they see the need to do so. The experience at Harvard since February 2008 is that very few publishers see the need to do so. Fewer than a handful systematically require waivers from Harvard authors.\nThis chapter, then, focuses on the strongest green OA mandates at funding agencies, like the Wellcome Trust and NIH, which allow no opt-outs for publishers or grantees. Will strong green OA policies of that kind trigger cancellations of toll-access journals? Here are 10 parts of any complete answer.\n1. Nobody knows yet how green OA policies will affect journal subscriptions.\nRising levels of green OA may trigger toll-access journal cancellations, or they may not. So far they haven’t.\n2. The evidence from physics is the most relevant.", "Physics has the highest levels and longest history of green OA. The evidence from physics to date is that high levels of green OA don’t cause journal cancellations. On the contrary, the relationship between arXiv (the OA repository for physics) and toll-access physics journals is more symbiotic than antagonistic.\nPhysicists have been self-archiving since 1991, far longer than in any other field. In some subfields, such as particle physics, the rate of OA archiving approaches 100 percent, far higher than in any other field. If high-volume green OA caused journal cancellations, we’d see the effect first in physics. But it hasn’t happened. Two leading publishers of physics journals, the American Physical Society (APS) and Institute of Physics (IOP), have publicly acknowledged that they’ve seen no cancellations attributable to OA archiving. In fact, the APS and IOP have not only made peace with arXiv but now accept submissions from it and even host their own mirrors of it.", "Open Access: Casualties\nWill a general shift to OA leave casualties?\n \n For example, will rising levels of green OA trigger cancellations of toll-access journals?\nThis question matters for those publishers (not all publishers) who fear the answer is yes and for those activists (not all activists) who hope the answer is yes. So far, unfortunately, it doesn’t have a simple yes-or-no answer, and most discussions replace evidence with fearful or hopeful predictions.\nThe primary drivers of green OA are policies at universities and funding agencies. Remember, all university policies allow publishers to protect themselves at will. (See section 4.1 on policies.) For example, universities with loophole or deposit mandates will not provide green OA when publishers do not allow it. Universities with Harvard-style rights-retention mandates will not provide OA when authors obtain waivers or when publishers require authors to obtain waivers as a condition of publication.", "(an Elsevier journal) called on the publishing lobby to do better. “[A]s editors of a journal that publishes research funded by the NIH, we disagree with [Association of American Publishers President Patricia Schroeder’s] central claim. Widening access to research [through green OA mandates] is unlikely to bring the edifice of scientific publishing crashing down. Schroeder provides no evidence that it would do so; she merely asserts the threat. This style of rebuttal will not do. . . .”\nFor more than eight years, green OA mandates have applied to research in many fields outside physics. These mandates are natural experiments and we’re still monitoring their effects. At Congressional hearings in 2008 and 2010, legislators asked publishers directly whether green OA was triggering cancellations. In both cases, publishers pointed to decreased downloads but not to increased cancellations.\n4. There is evidence that green OA decreases downloads from publishers’ web sites.", "3. Other fields may not behave like physics.\nWe won’t know more until the levels of green OA in other fields approach those in physics.\nIt would definitely help to understand why the experience in physics has gone as it has and how far it might predict the experience in other fields. But so far it’s fair to say that we don’t know all the variables and that publishers who oppose green OA mandates are not among those showing a serious interest in them. When publisher lobbyists argue that high-volume green OA will undermine toll-access journal subscriptions, they don’t offer evidence, don’t acknowledge the countervailing evidence from physics, don’t rebut the evidence from physics, and don’t qualify their own conclusions in light of it. They would act more like scientific publishers if they acknowledged the evidence from physics and then argued, as well as they could, either that the experience in physics will change or that fields other than physics will have a different experience.\nAn October 2004 editorial in\nThe Lancet", "Some subscription journals have found that OA after an embargo period, even a very short one like two months, actually increases submissions and subscriptions. For example, this was the experience of the American Society for Cell Biology and its journal,\nMolecular Biology of the Cell.\nMedknow saw its submissions and subscriptions increase when it began offering unembargoed full-text editions of its journals alongside its toll-access print journals.\n \n Hindawi Publishing saw its submissions rise steadily after it converted all its peer-reviewed journals to OA in 2007. Looking back on several years of rapidly growing submissions, company founder and CEO Ahmed Hindawi said in January 2010, “It is clear now more than ever that our open access conversion . . . was the best management decision we have taken. . . .”\n9. Some publishers fear that green OA will increase pressure to convert to gold OA.", "Supplementing the natural experiments of green OA mandates are the natural experiments of publishers who voluntarily permit green OA. The Nature Publishing Group is more conservative than most toll-access publishers by requiring a six-month embargo on green OA, but more progressive than most by positively encouraging green OA. NPG reported the latest results of its multidisciplinary natural experiment in January 2011: “We have, to date, found author self-archiving compatible with subscription business models, and so we have been actively encouraging self-archiving since 2005.”\nThis or something similar to it must be the experience of the majority of toll-access publishers who voluntarily permit green OA. Even if they don’t actively encourage green OA, most permit it without embargo. If they found that it triggered cancellations, they would stop.\n6. Green OA mandates leave standing at least four library incentives to maintain their subscriptions to toll-access journals.", "Some publishers fear that rising levels of green OA will not only trigger toll-access journal cancellations but also increase pressure to convert to gold OA. (Likewise, some OA activists hope for this outcome.)\nThere are two responses to this two-fold fear. The fear of toll-access cancellations disregards the relevant evidence in points 1–8 above. The fear of conversion to gold OA also disregards relevant evidence, such as Ahmed Hindawi’s testimony above, and the testimony of Springer CEO Derk Haank. In 2008 when Springer bought BioMed Central and became the world’s largest OA publisher, Haank said: “[W]e see open access publishing as a sustainable part of STM publishing, and not an ideological crusade.” (Also see chapter 7 on economics.)\nPublishers inexperienced with gold OA needn’t defer to publishers with more experience, but they should at least study them.", "The purpose of these two policy provisions is precisely to protect publishers against cancellations. They are deliberate concessions to publishers, adopted voluntarily by funding agencies as compromises with the public interest in immediate OA to the best editions. When we put the two together, we see that funder-mandated OA copies of peer-reviewed manuscripts won’t compete with toll-access copies of the published editions for six to twelve months, and there will never be OA copies of the more desirable published editions unless publishers voluntarily allow them. Publishers retain life-of-copyright exclusivity on the published editions. Even if OA archiving does eventually erode subscriptions outside physics, publishers have longer and better protection from these effects than their lobbyists ever acknowledge.\nThird, funder OA mandates only apply to research articles, not to the many other kinds of content published in scholarly journals, such as letters, editorials, review articles, book reviews, announcements, news, conference information, and so on. Libraries wanting to provide access to these other kinds of content will still have an incentive to subscribe.", "The Association of College and Research Libraries addressed subscription incentives in a 2004 open letter on the NIH policy: “We wish to emphasize, above all, that academic libraries will not cancel journal subscriptions as a result of this plan. . . . Even if libraries wished to consider the availability of NIH-funded articles when making journal cancellation decisions, they would have no reasonable way of determining what articles in specific journals would become openly accessible after the embargo period.”\n7. Some studies bear on the question of whether increased OA archiving will increase journal cancellations.", "Fourth, funder OA mandates only apply to articles arising from research funded by the mandating agency. Very few journals publish nothing but articles from a single funder, or even from a set of funders all of whom have OA mandates. Libraries wanting to provide access to all the research articles in a journal, regardless of the sources of funding, will still have an incentive to subscribe. This incentive will weaken as more and more funders adopt OA mandates, but we’re very far from universal funder mandates. As we get closer, unfunded research will still fall outside this category and the three other incentives above will still stand.", "Even the strongest no-loophole, no-waiver policies preserve incentives to maintain toll-access journal subscriptions.\nFirst, all funder OA mandates include an embargo period to protect publishers. For example, the OA mandates at the Research Councils UK allow an embargo of up to six months after publication. The NIH allows an embargo of up to twelve months. Libraries wanting to provide immediate access will still have an incentive to subscribe.\nSecond, all funder OA mandates apply to the final version of the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript, not to the published version. If the journal provides copyediting after peer review, then the policies do not apply to the copyedited version, let alone to the formatted, paginated published edition. Libraries wanting to provide access to copyedited published editions will still have an incentive to subscribe.", "In a 2006 study from the Publishing Research Consortium (PRC), Chris Beckett and Simon Inger asked 400 librarians about the relative weight of different factors in their decisions to cancel subscriptions. Other things being equal, the librarians preferred free content to priced content and short embargoes to longer ones. Publishers interpret this to mean that the rise of OA archiving will cause cancellations. The chief flaw with the study is its artificiality. For example, the survey did not ask about specific journals by name but only about resources with abstractly stipulated levels of quality. It also disregarded faculty input on cancellation decisions when all librarians acknowledge that faculty input is decisive. The result was a study of hypothetical preferences, not actual cancellation decisions.\nA less hypothetical study was commissioned by publishers themselves in the same year. From the summary:" ], [ "If we’re only interested in the effect of rising levels of green OA on toll-access publishers, then we can stop at points 1–9. But if we’re interested in good policy, then we must add one more factor: Even if green OA does eventually threaten toll-access journal subscriptions, green OA policies are still justified.\nI won’t elaborate this point here, since it takes us beyond the topic of casualties to the full case for OA, which is spread throughout the rest of the book. But here’s one way to put the debate in perspective: There are good reasons to want to know whether rising levels of green OA will trigger cancellations of toll-access journals, and perhaps even to modify our policies in light of what we learn. But there are no good reasons to put the thriving of incumbent toll-access journals and publishers ahead of the thriving of research itself.", "In fact, OA publishing might be more sustainable than TA publishing, as toll-access prices and the volume of research both grow faster than library budgets. (See section 2.1 on problems.) If publishers acknowledge that gold OA can be sustainable, and even profitable, and merely wish to avoid making lower margins than they make today, then their objection takes on a very different color. They’re not at risk of insolvency, just reduced profits, and they’re not asserting a need for self-protection, just an entitlement to current levels of profit. There’s no reason for public funding agencies acting in the public interest, or private funders acting for charitable purposes, to compromise their missions in order to satisfy that sense of publisher entitlement.\n10. Green OA policies are justified even if they do create risks for toll-access journals.", "When users know about OA and toll-access editions of the same article, many will prefer to click through to the OA edition, either because they aren’t affiliated with a subscribing institution or because authentication is a hassle. Moreover, when users find an OA edition, most stop looking. But decreased downloads are not the same thing as decreased or canceled subscriptions.\nMoreover, decreased downloads of toll-access editions from publisher web sites are not the same thing as decreased downloads overall. No one suggests that green OA leads to decreased overall downloads, that is, fewer readers and less reading. On the contrary, the same evidence suggesting that OA increases citation impact also suggests that it increases readers and reading.\n5. Most publishers voluntarily permit green OA.", "The three most important factors used to determine journals for cancellation, in declining order of importance, are that the faculty no longer require it . . . , usage and price. Next, availability of the content via open access (OA) archives and availability via aggregators were ranked equal fourth, but some way behind the first three factors. The journal’s impact factor and availability via delayed OA were ranked relatively unimportant. . . . With regard to OA archives, there was a great deal of support for the idea that they would not directly impact journal subscriptions.\nIn short, toll-access journals have more to fear from their own price increases than from rising levels of green OA. Publishers who keep raising their prices aggravate the access problem for researchers and aggravate the sustainability problem for themselves. If the same publishers blame green OA and lobby against green OA policies, then they obstruct the solution for researchers and do very little to improve their own sustainability.\n8. OA may increase submissions and subscriptions.", "Hence, publishers who worry about the effect of university OA policies on subscriptions have the remedy in their own hands. Faculty needn’t paternalize publishers by voting down OA policies when publishers can protect themselves whenever they see the need to do so. The experience at Harvard since February 2008 is that very few publishers see the need to do so. Fewer than a handful systematically require waivers from Harvard authors.\nThis chapter, then, focuses on the strongest green OA mandates at funding agencies, like the Wellcome Trust and NIH, which allow no opt-outs for publishers or grantees. Will strong green OA policies of that kind trigger cancellations of toll-access journals? Here are 10 parts of any complete answer.\n1. Nobody knows yet how green OA policies will affect journal subscriptions.\nRising levels of green OA may trigger toll-access journal cancellations, or they may not. So far they haven’t.\n2. The evidence from physics is the most relevant.", "Open Access: Casualties\nWill a general shift to OA leave casualties?\n \n For example, will rising levels of green OA trigger cancellations of toll-access journals?\nThis question matters for those publishers (not all publishers) who fear the answer is yes and for those activists (not all activists) who hope the answer is yes. So far, unfortunately, it doesn’t have a simple yes-or-no answer, and most discussions replace evidence with fearful or hopeful predictions.\nThe primary drivers of green OA are policies at universities and funding agencies. Remember, all university policies allow publishers to protect themselves at will. (See section 4.1 on policies.) For example, universities with loophole or deposit mandates will not provide green OA when publishers do not allow it. Universities with Harvard-style rights-retention mandates will not provide OA when authors obtain waivers or when publishers require authors to obtain waivers as a condition of publication.", "3. Other fields may not behave like physics.\nWe won’t know more until the levels of green OA in other fields approach those in physics.\nIt would definitely help to understand why the experience in physics has gone as it has and how far it might predict the experience in other fields. But so far it’s fair to say that we don’t know all the variables and that publishers who oppose green OA mandates are not among those showing a serious interest in them. When publisher lobbyists argue that high-volume green OA will undermine toll-access journal subscriptions, they don’t offer evidence, don’t acknowledge the countervailing evidence from physics, don’t rebut the evidence from physics, and don’t qualify their own conclusions in light of it. They would act more like scientific publishers if they acknowledged the evidence from physics and then argued, as well as they could, either that the experience in physics will change or that fields other than physics will have a different experience.\nAn October 2004 editorial in\nThe Lancet", "(an Elsevier journal) called on the publishing lobby to do better. “[A]s editors of a journal that publishes research funded by the NIH, we disagree with [Association of American Publishers President Patricia Schroeder’s] central claim. Widening access to research [through green OA mandates] is unlikely to bring the edifice of scientific publishing crashing down. Schroeder provides no evidence that it would do so; she merely asserts the threat. This style of rebuttal will not do. . . .”\nFor more than eight years, green OA mandates have applied to research in many fields outside physics. These mandates are natural experiments and we’re still monitoring their effects. At Congressional hearings in 2008 and 2010, legislators asked publishers directly whether green OA was triggering cancellations. In both cases, publishers pointed to decreased downloads but not to increased cancellations.\n4. There is evidence that green OA decreases downloads from publishers’ web sites.", "Physics has the highest levels and longest history of green OA. The evidence from physics to date is that high levels of green OA don’t cause journal cancellations. On the contrary, the relationship between arXiv (the OA repository for physics) and toll-access physics journals is more symbiotic than antagonistic.\nPhysicists have been self-archiving since 1991, far longer than in any other field. In some subfields, such as particle physics, the rate of OA archiving approaches 100 percent, far higher than in any other field. If high-volume green OA caused journal cancellations, we’d see the effect first in physics. But it hasn’t happened. Two leading publishers of physics journals, the American Physical Society (APS) and Institute of Physics (IOP), have publicly acknowledged that they’ve seen no cancellations attributable to OA archiving. In fact, the APS and IOP have not only made peace with arXiv but now accept submissions from it and even host their own mirrors of it.", "Supplementing the natural experiments of green OA mandates are the natural experiments of publishers who voluntarily permit green OA. The Nature Publishing Group is more conservative than most toll-access publishers by requiring a six-month embargo on green OA, but more progressive than most by positively encouraging green OA. NPG reported the latest results of its multidisciplinary natural experiment in January 2011: “We have, to date, found author self-archiving compatible with subscription business models, and so we have been actively encouraging self-archiving since 2005.”\nThis or something similar to it must be the experience of the majority of toll-access publishers who voluntarily permit green OA. Even if they don’t actively encourage green OA, most permit it without embargo. If they found that it triggered cancellations, they would stop.\n6. Green OA mandates leave standing at least four library incentives to maintain their subscriptions to toll-access journals.", "Some subscription journals have found that OA after an embargo period, even a very short one like two months, actually increases submissions and subscriptions. For example, this was the experience of the American Society for Cell Biology and its journal,\nMolecular Biology of the Cell.\nMedknow saw its submissions and subscriptions increase when it began offering unembargoed full-text editions of its journals alongside its toll-access print journals.\n \n Hindawi Publishing saw its submissions rise steadily after it converted all its peer-reviewed journals to OA in 2007. Looking back on several years of rapidly growing submissions, company founder and CEO Ahmed Hindawi said in January 2010, “It is clear now more than ever that our open access conversion . . . was the best management decision we have taken. . . .”\n9. Some publishers fear that green OA will increase pressure to convert to gold OA.", "The purpose of these two policy provisions is precisely to protect publishers against cancellations. They are deliberate concessions to publishers, adopted voluntarily by funding agencies as compromises with the public interest in immediate OA to the best editions. When we put the two together, we see that funder-mandated OA copies of peer-reviewed manuscripts won’t compete with toll-access copies of the published editions for six to twelve months, and there will never be OA copies of the more desirable published editions unless publishers voluntarily allow them. Publishers retain life-of-copyright exclusivity on the published editions. Even if OA archiving does eventually erode subscriptions outside physics, publishers have longer and better protection from these effects than their lobbyists ever acknowledge.\nThird, funder OA mandates only apply to research articles, not to the many other kinds of content published in scholarly journals, such as letters, editorials, review articles, book reviews, announcements, news, conference information, and so on. Libraries wanting to provide access to these other kinds of content will still have an incentive to subscribe.", "Some publishers fear that rising levels of green OA will not only trigger toll-access journal cancellations but also increase pressure to convert to gold OA. (Likewise, some OA activists hope for this outcome.)\nThere are two responses to this two-fold fear. The fear of toll-access cancellations disregards the relevant evidence in points 1–8 above. The fear of conversion to gold OA also disregards relevant evidence, such as Ahmed Hindawi’s testimony above, and the testimony of Springer CEO Derk Haank. In 2008 when Springer bought BioMed Central and became the world’s largest OA publisher, Haank said: “[W]e see open access publishing as a sustainable part of STM publishing, and not an ideological crusade.” (Also see chapter 7 on economics.)\nPublishers inexperienced with gold OA needn’t defer to publishers with more experience, but they should at least study them.", "The Association of College and Research Libraries addressed subscription incentives in a 2004 open letter on the NIH policy: “We wish to emphasize, above all, that academic libraries will not cancel journal subscriptions as a result of this plan. . . . Even if libraries wished to consider the availability of NIH-funded articles when making journal cancellation decisions, they would have no reasonable way of determining what articles in specific journals would become openly accessible after the embargo period.”\n7. Some studies bear on the question of whether increased OA archiving will increase journal cancellations.", "Even the strongest no-loophole, no-waiver policies preserve incentives to maintain toll-access journal subscriptions.\nFirst, all funder OA mandates include an embargo period to protect publishers. For example, the OA mandates at the Research Councils UK allow an embargo of up to six months after publication. The NIH allows an embargo of up to twelve months. Libraries wanting to provide immediate access will still have an incentive to subscribe.\nSecond, all funder OA mandates apply to the final version of the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript, not to the published version. If the journal provides copyediting after peer review, then the policies do not apply to the copyedited version, let alone to the formatted, paginated published edition. Libraries wanting to provide access to copyedited published editions will still have an incentive to subscribe.", "Fourth, funder OA mandates only apply to articles arising from research funded by the mandating agency. Very few journals publish nothing but articles from a single funder, or even from a set of funders all of whom have OA mandates. Libraries wanting to provide access to all the research articles in a journal, regardless of the sources of funding, will still have an incentive to subscribe. This incentive will weaken as more and more funders adopt OA mandates, but we’re very far from universal funder mandates. As we get closer, unfunded research will still fall outside this category and the three other incentives above will still stand.", "In a 2006 study from the Publishing Research Consortium (PRC), Chris Beckett and Simon Inger asked 400 librarians about the relative weight of different factors in their decisions to cancel subscriptions. Other things being equal, the librarians preferred free content to priced content and short embargoes to longer ones. Publishers interpret this to mean that the rise of OA archiving will cause cancellations. The chief flaw with the study is its artificiality. For example, the survey did not ask about specific journals by name but only about resources with abstractly stipulated levels of quality. It also disregarded faculty input on cancellation decisions when all librarians acknowledge that faculty input is decisive. The result was a study of hypothetical preferences, not actual cancellation decisions.\nA less hypothetical study was commissioned by publishers themselves in the same year. From the summary:" ], [ "Open Access: Casualties\nWill a general shift to OA leave casualties?\n \n For example, will rising levels of green OA trigger cancellations of toll-access journals?\nThis question matters for those publishers (not all publishers) who fear the answer is yes and for those activists (not all activists) who hope the answer is yes. So far, unfortunately, it doesn’t have a simple yes-or-no answer, and most discussions replace evidence with fearful or hopeful predictions.\nThe primary drivers of green OA are policies at universities and funding agencies. Remember, all university policies allow publishers to protect themselves at will. (See section 4.1 on policies.) For example, universities with loophole or deposit mandates will not provide green OA when publishers do not allow it. Universities with Harvard-style rights-retention mandates will not provide OA when authors obtain waivers or when publishers require authors to obtain waivers as a condition of publication.", "Hence, publishers who worry about the effect of university OA policies on subscriptions have the remedy in their own hands. Faculty needn’t paternalize publishers by voting down OA policies when publishers can protect themselves whenever they see the need to do so. The experience at Harvard since February 2008 is that very few publishers see the need to do so. Fewer than a handful systematically require waivers from Harvard authors.\nThis chapter, then, focuses on the strongest green OA mandates at funding agencies, like the Wellcome Trust and NIH, which allow no opt-outs for publishers or grantees. Will strong green OA policies of that kind trigger cancellations of toll-access journals? Here are 10 parts of any complete answer.\n1. Nobody knows yet how green OA policies will affect journal subscriptions.\nRising levels of green OA may trigger toll-access journal cancellations, or they may not. So far they haven’t.\n2. The evidence from physics is the most relevant.", "In fact, OA publishing might be more sustainable than TA publishing, as toll-access prices and the volume of research both grow faster than library budgets. (See section 2.1 on problems.) If publishers acknowledge that gold OA can be sustainable, and even profitable, and merely wish to avoid making lower margins than they make today, then their objection takes on a very different color. They’re not at risk of insolvency, just reduced profits, and they’re not asserting a need for self-protection, just an entitlement to current levels of profit. There’s no reason for public funding agencies acting in the public interest, or private funders acting for charitable purposes, to compromise their missions in order to satisfy that sense of publisher entitlement.\n10. Green OA policies are justified even if they do create risks for toll-access journals.", "If we’re only interested in the effect of rising levels of green OA on toll-access publishers, then we can stop at points 1–9. But if we’re interested in good policy, then we must add one more factor: Even if green OA does eventually threaten toll-access journal subscriptions, green OA policies are still justified.\nI won’t elaborate this point here, since it takes us beyond the topic of casualties to the full case for OA, which is spread throughout the rest of the book. But here’s one way to put the debate in perspective: There are good reasons to want to know whether rising levels of green OA will trigger cancellations of toll-access journals, and perhaps even to modify our policies in light of what we learn. But there are no good reasons to put the thriving of incumbent toll-access journals and publishers ahead of the thriving of research itself.", "When users know about OA and toll-access editions of the same article, many will prefer to click through to the OA edition, either because they aren’t affiliated with a subscribing institution or because authentication is a hassle. Moreover, when users find an OA edition, most stop looking. But decreased downloads are not the same thing as decreased or canceled subscriptions.\nMoreover, decreased downloads of toll-access editions from publisher web sites are not the same thing as decreased downloads overall. No one suggests that green OA leads to decreased overall downloads, that is, fewer readers and less reading. On the contrary, the same evidence suggesting that OA increases citation impact also suggests that it increases readers and reading.\n5. Most publishers voluntarily permit green OA.", "Some publishers fear that rising levels of green OA will not only trigger toll-access journal cancellations but also increase pressure to convert to gold OA. (Likewise, some OA activists hope for this outcome.)\nThere are two responses to this two-fold fear. The fear of toll-access cancellations disregards the relevant evidence in points 1–8 above. The fear of conversion to gold OA also disregards relevant evidence, such as Ahmed Hindawi’s testimony above, and the testimony of Springer CEO Derk Haank. In 2008 when Springer bought BioMed Central and became the world’s largest OA publisher, Haank said: “[W]e see open access publishing as a sustainable part of STM publishing, and not an ideological crusade.” (Also see chapter 7 on economics.)\nPublishers inexperienced with gold OA needn’t defer to publishers with more experience, but they should at least study them.", "The purpose of these two policy provisions is precisely to protect publishers against cancellations. They are deliberate concessions to publishers, adopted voluntarily by funding agencies as compromises with the public interest in immediate OA to the best editions. When we put the two together, we see that funder-mandated OA copies of peer-reviewed manuscripts won’t compete with toll-access copies of the published editions for six to twelve months, and there will never be OA copies of the more desirable published editions unless publishers voluntarily allow them. Publishers retain life-of-copyright exclusivity on the published editions. Even if OA archiving does eventually erode subscriptions outside physics, publishers have longer and better protection from these effects than their lobbyists ever acknowledge.\nThird, funder OA mandates only apply to research articles, not to the many other kinds of content published in scholarly journals, such as letters, editorials, review articles, book reviews, announcements, news, conference information, and so on. Libraries wanting to provide access to these other kinds of content will still have an incentive to subscribe.", "(an Elsevier journal) called on the publishing lobby to do better. “[A]s editors of a journal that publishes research funded by the NIH, we disagree with [Association of American Publishers President Patricia Schroeder’s] central claim. Widening access to research [through green OA mandates] is unlikely to bring the edifice of scientific publishing crashing down. Schroeder provides no evidence that it would do so; she merely asserts the threat. This style of rebuttal will not do. . . .”\nFor more than eight years, green OA mandates have applied to research in many fields outside physics. These mandates are natural experiments and we’re still monitoring their effects. At Congressional hearings in 2008 and 2010, legislators asked publishers directly whether green OA was triggering cancellations. In both cases, publishers pointed to decreased downloads but not to increased cancellations.\n4. There is evidence that green OA decreases downloads from publishers’ web sites.", "Some subscription journals have found that OA after an embargo period, even a very short one like two months, actually increases submissions and subscriptions. For example, this was the experience of the American Society for Cell Biology and its journal,\nMolecular Biology of the Cell.\nMedknow saw its submissions and subscriptions increase when it began offering unembargoed full-text editions of its journals alongside its toll-access print journals.\n \n Hindawi Publishing saw its submissions rise steadily after it converted all its peer-reviewed journals to OA in 2007. Looking back on several years of rapidly growing submissions, company founder and CEO Ahmed Hindawi said in January 2010, “It is clear now more than ever that our open access conversion . . . was the best management decision we have taken. . . .”\n9. Some publishers fear that green OA will increase pressure to convert to gold OA.", "Physics has the highest levels and longest history of green OA. The evidence from physics to date is that high levels of green OA don’t cause journal cancellations. On the contrary, the relationship between arXiv (the OA repository for physics) and toll-access physics journals is more symbiotic than antagonistic.\nPhysicists have been self-archiving since 1991, far longer than in any other field. In some subfields, such as particle physics, the rate of OA archiving approaches 100 percent, far higher than in any other field. If high-volume green OA caused journal cancellations, we’d see the effect first in physics. But it hasn’t happened. Two leading publishers of physics journals, the American Physical Society (APS) and Institute of Physics (IOP), have publicly acknowledged that they’ve seen no cancellations attributable to OA archiving. In fact, the APS and IOP have not only made peace with arXiv but now accept submissions from it and even host their own mirrors of it.", "Supplementing the natural experiments of green OA mandates are the natural experiments of publishers who voluntarily permit green OA. The Nature Publishing Group is more conservative than most toll-access publishers by requiring a six-month embargo on green OA, but more progressive than most by positively encouraging green OA. NPG reported the latest results of its multidisciplinary natural experiment in January 2011: “We have, to date, found author self-archiving compatible with subscription business models, and so we have been actively encouraging self-archiving since 2005.”\nThis or something similar to it must be the experience of the majority of toll-access publishers who voluntarily permit green OA. Even if they don’t actively encourage green OA, most permit it without embargo. If they found that it triggered cancellations, they would stop.\n6. Green OA mandates leave standing at least four library incentives to maintain their subscriptions to toll-access journals.", "Even the strongest no-loophole, no-waiver policies preserve incentives to maintain toll-access journal subscriptions.\nFirst, all funder OA mandates include an embargo period to protect publishers. For example, the OA mandates at the Research Councils UK allow an embargo of up to six months after publication. The NIH allows an embargo of up to twelve months. Libraries wanting to provide immediate access will still have an incentive to subscribe.\nSecond, all funder OA mandates apply to the final version of the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript, not to the published version. If the journal provides copyediting after peer review, then the policies do not apply to the copyedited version, let alone to the formatted, paginated published edition. Libraries wanting to provide access to copyedited published editions will still have an incentive to subscribe.", "3. Other fields may not behave like physics.\nWe won’t know more until the levels of green OA in other fields approach those in physics.\nIt would definitely help to understand why the experience in physics has gone as it has and how far it might predict the experience in other fields. But so far it’s fair to say that we don’t know all the variables and that publishers who oppose green OA mandates are not among those showing a serious interest in them. When publisher lobbyists argue that high-volume green OA will undermine toll-access journal subscriptions, they don’t offer evidence, don’t acknowledge the countervailing evidence from physics, don’t rebut the evidence from physics, and don’t qualify their own conclusions in light of it. They would act more like scientific publishers if they acknowledged the evidence from physics and then argued, as well as they could, either that the experience in physics will change or that fields other than physics will have a different experience.\nAn October 2004 editorial in\nThe Lancet", "The three most important factors used to determine journals for cancellation, in declining order of importance, are that the faculty no longer require it . . . , usage and price. Next, availability of the content via open access (OA) archives and availability via aggregators were ranked equal fourth, but some way behind the first three factors. The journal’s impact factor and availability via delayed OA were ranked relatively unimportant. . . . With regard to OA archives, there was a great deal of support for the idea that they would not directly impact journal subscriptions.\nIn short, toll-access journals have more to fear from their own price increases than from rising levels of green OA. Publishers who keep raising their prices aggravate the access problem for researchers and aggravate the sustainability problem for themselves. If the same publishers blame green OA and lobby against green OA policies, then they obstruct the solution for researchers and do very little to improve their own sustainability.\n8. OA may increase submissions and subscriptions.", "In a 2006 study from the Publishing Research Consortium (PRC), Chris Beckett and Simon Inger asked 400 librarians about the relative weight of different factors in their decisions to cancel subscriptions. Other things being equal, the librarians preferred free content to priced content and short embargoes to longer ones. Publishers interpret this to mean that the rise of OA archiving will cause cancellations. The chief flaw with the study is its artificiality. For example, the survey did not ask about specific journals by name but only about resources with abstractly stipulated levels of quality. It also disregarded faculty input on cancellation decisions when all librarians acknowledge that faculty input is decisive. The result was a study of hypothetical preferences, not actual cancellation decisions.\nA less hypothetical study was commissioned by publishers themselves in the same year. From the summary:", "The Association of College and Research Libraries addressed subscription incentives in a 2004 open letter on the NIH policy: “We wish to emphasize, above all, that academic libraries will not cancel journal subscriptions as a result of this plan. . . . Even if libraries wished to consider the availability of NIH-funded articles when making journal cancellation decisions, they would have no reasonable way of determining what articles in specific journals would become openly accessible after the embargo period.”\n7. Some studies bear on the question of whether increased OA archiving will increase journal cancellations.", "Fourth, funder OA mandates only apply to articles arising from research funded by the mandating agency. Very few journals publish nothing but articles from a single funder, or even from a set of funders all of whom have OA mandates. Libraries wanting to provide access to all the research articles in a journal, regardless of the sources of funding, will still have an incentive to subscribe. This incentive will weaken as more and more funders adopt OA mandates, but we’re very far from universal funder mandates. As we get closer, unfunded research will still fall outside this category and the three other incentives above will still stand." ], [ "The purpose of these two policy provisions is precisely to protect publishers against cancellations. They are deliberate concessions to publishers, adopted voluntarily by funding agencies as compromises with the public interest in immediate OA to the best editions. When we put the two together, we see that funder-mandated OA copies of peer-reviewed manuscripts won’t compete with toll-access copies of the published editions for six to twelve months, and there will never be OA copies of the more desirable published editions unless publishers voluntarily allow them. Publishers retain life-of-copyright exclusivity on the published editions. Even if OA archiving does eventually erode subscriptions outside physics, publishers have longer and better protection from these effects than their lobbyists ever acknowledge.\nThird, funder OA mandates only apply to research articles, not to the many other kinds of content published in scholarly journals, such as letters, editorials, review articles, book reviews, announcements, news, conference information, and so on. Libraries wanting to provide access to these other kinds of content will still have an incentive to subscribe.", "If we’re only interested in the effect of rising levels of green OA on toll-access publishers, then we can stop at points 1–9. But if we’re interested in good policy, then we must add one more factor: Even if green OA does eventually threaten toll-access journal subscriptions, green OA policies are still justified.\nI won’t elaborate this point here, since it takes us beyond the topic of casualties to the full case for OA, which is spread throughout the rest of the book. But here’s one way to put the debate in perspective: There are good reasons to want to know whether rising levels of green OA will trigger cancellations of toll-access journals, and perhaps even to modify our policies in light of what we learn. But there are no good reasons to put the thriving of incumbent toll-access journals and publishers ahead of the thriving of research itself.", "In a 2006 study from the Publishing Research Consortium (PRC), Chris Beckett and Simon Inger asked 400 librarians about the relative weight of different factors in their decisions to cancel subscriptions. Other things being equal, the librarians preferred free content to priced content and short embargoes to longer ones. Publishers interpret this to mean that the rise of OA archiving will cause cancellations. The chief flaw with the study is its artificiality. For example, the survey did not ask about specific journals by name but only about resources with abstractly stipulated levels of quality. It also disregarded faculty input on cancellation decisions when all librarians acknowledge that faculty input is decisive. The result was a study of hypothetical preferences, not actual cancellation decisions.\nA less hypothetical study was commissioned by publishers themselves in the same year. From the summary:", "Hence, publishers who worry about the effect of university OA policies on subscriptions have the remedy in their own hands. Faculty needn’t paternalize publishers by voting down OA policies when publishers can protect themselves whenever they see the need to do so. The experience at Harvard since February 2008 is that very few publishers see the need to do so. Fewer than a handful systematically require waivers from Harvard authors.\nThis chapter, then, focuses on the strongest green OA mandates at funding agencies, like the Wellcome Trust and NIH, which allow no opt-outs for publishers or grantees. Will strong green OA policies of that kind trigger cancellations of toll-access journals? Here are 10 parts of any complete answer.\n1. Nobody knows yet how green OA policies will affect journal subscriptions.\nRising levels of green OA may trigger toll-access journal cancellations, or they may not. So far they haven’t.\n2. The evidence from physics is the most relevant.", "The Association of College and Research Libraries addressed subscription incentives in a 2004 open letter on the NIH policy: “We wish to emphasize, above all, that academic libraries will not cancel journal subscriptions as a result of this plan. . . . Even if libraries wished to consider the availability of NIH-funded articles when making journal cancellation decisions, they would have no reasonable way of determining what articles in specific journals would become openly accessible after the embargo period.”\n7. Some studies bear on the question of whether increased OA archiving will increase journal cancellations.", "The three most important factors used to determine journals for cancellation, in declining order of importance, are that the faculty no longer require it . . . , usage and price. Next, availability of the content via open access (OA) archives and availability via aggregators were ranked equal fourth, but some way behind the first three factors. The journal’s impact factor and availability via delayed OA were ranked relatively unimportant. . . . With regard to OA archives, there was a great deal of support for the idea that they would not directly impact journal subscriptions.\nIn short, toll-access journals have more to fear from their own price increases than from rising levels of green OA. Publishers who keep raising their prices aggravate the access problem for researchers and aggravate the sustainability problem for themselves. If the same publishers blame green OA and lobby against green OA policies, then they obstruct the solution for researchers and do very little to improve their own sustainability.\n8. OA may increase submissions and subscriptions.", "Some publishers fear that rising levels of green OA will not only trigger toll-access journal cancellations but also increase pressure to convert to gold OA. (Likewise, some OA activists hope for this outcome.)\nThere are two responses to this two-fold fear. The fear of toll-access cancellations disregards the relevant evidence in points 1–8 above. The fear of conversion to gold OA also disregards relevant evidence, such as Ahmed Hindawi’s testimony above, and the testimony of Springer CEO Derk Haank. In 2008 when Springer bought BioMed Central and became the world’s largest OA publisher, Haank said: “[W]e see open access publishing as a sustainable part of STM publishing, and not an ideological crusade.” (Also see chapter 7 on economics.)\nPublishers inexperienced with gold OA needn’t defer to publishers with more experience, but they should at least study them.", "(an Elsevier journal) called on the publishing lobby to do better. “[A]s editors of a journal that publishes research funded by the NIH, we disagree with [Association of American Publishers President Patricia Schroeder’s] central claim. Widening access to research [through green OA mandates] is unlikely to bring the edifice of scientific publishing crashing down. Schroeder provides no evidence that it would do so; she merely asserts the threat. This style of rebuttal will not do. . . .”\nFor more than eight years, green OA mandates have applied to research in many fields outside physics. These mandates are natural experiments and we’re still monitoring their effects. At Congressional hearings in 2008 and 2010, legislators asked publishers directly whether green OA was triggering cancellations. In both cases, publishers pointed to decreased downloads but not to increased cancellations.\n4. There is evidence that green OA decreases downloads from publishers’ web sites.", "Even the strongest no-loophole, no-waiver policies preserve incentives to maintain toll-access journal subscriptions.\nFirst, all funder OA mandates include an embargo period to protect publishers. For example, the OA mandates at the Research Councils UK allow an embargo of up to six months after publication. The NIH allows an embargo of up to twelve months. Libraries wanting to provide immediate access will still have an incentive to subscribe.\nSecond, all funder OA mandates apply to the final version of the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript, not to the published version. If the journal provides copyediting after peer review, then the policies do not apply to the copyedited version, let alone to the formatted, paginated published edition. Libraries wanting to provide access to copyedited published editions will still have an incentive to subscribe.", "Physics has the highest levels and longest history of green OA. The evidence from physics to date is that high levels of green OA don’t cause journal cancellations. On the contrary, the relationship between arXiv (the OA repository for physics) and toll-access physics journals is more symbiotic than antagonistic.\nPhysicists have been self-archiving since 1991, far longer than in any other field. In some subfields, such as particle physics, the rate of OA archiving approaches 100 percent, far higher than in any other field. If high-volume green OA caused journal cancellations, we’d see the effect first in physics. But it hasn’t happened. Two leading publishers of physics journals, the American Physical Society (APS) and Institute of Physics (IOP), have publicly acknowledged that they’ve seen no cancellations attributable to OA archiving. In fact, the APS and IOP have not only made peace with arXiv but now accept submissions from it and even host their own mirrors of it.", "Fourth, funder OA mandates only apply to articles arising from research funded by the mandating agency. Very few journals publish nothing but articles from a single funder, or even from a set of funders all of whom have OA mandates. Libraries wanting to provide access to all the research articles in a journal, regardless of the sources of funding, will still have an incentive to subscribe. This incentive will weaken as more and more funders adopt OA mandates, but we’re very far from universal funder mandates. As we get closer, unfunded research will still fall outside this category and the three other incentives above will still stand.", "Supplementing the natural experiments of green OA mandates are the natural experiments of publishers who voluntarily permit green OA. The Nature Publishing Group is more conservative than most toll-access publishers by requiring a six-month embargo on green OA, but more progressive than most by positively encouraging green OA. NPG reported the latest results of its multidisciplinary natural experiment in January 2011: “We have, to date, found author self-archiving compatible with subscription business models, and so we have been actively encouraging self-archiving since 2005.”\nThis or something similar to it must be the experience of the majority of toll-access publishers who voluntarily permit green OA. Even if they don’t actively encourage green OA, most permit it without embargo. If they found that it triggered cancellations, they would stop.\n6. Green OA mandates leave standing at least four library incentives to maintain their subscriptions to toll-access journals.", "Open Access: Casualties\nWill a general shift to OA leave casualties?\n \n For example, will rising levels of green OA trigger cancellations of toll-access journals?\nThis question matters for those publishers (not all publishers) who fear the answer is yes and for those activists (not all activists) who hope the answer is yes. So far, unfortunately, it doesn’t have a simple yes-or-no answer, and most discussions replace evidence with fearful or hopeful predictions.\nThe primary drivers of green OA are policies at universities and funding agencies. Remember, all university policies allow publishers to protect themselves at will. (See section 4.1 on policies.) For example, universities with loophole or deposit mandates will not provide green OA when publishers do not allow it. Universities with Harvard-style rights-retention mandates will not provide OA when authors obtain waivers or when publishers require authors to obtain waivers as a condition of publication.", "3. Other fields may not behave like physics.\nWe won’t know more until the levels of green OA in other fields approach those in physics.\nIt would definitely help to understand why the experience in physics has gone as it has and how far it might predict the experience in other fields. But so far it’s fair to say that we don’t know all the variables and that publishers who oppose green OA mandates are not among those showing a serious interest in them. When publisher lobbyists argue that high-volume green OA will undermine toll-access journal subscriptions, they don’t offer evidence, don’t acknowledge the countervailing evidence from physics, don’t rebut the evidence from physics, and don’t qualify their own conclusions in light of it. They would act more like scientific publishers if they acknowledged the evidence from physics and then argued, as well as they could, either that the experience in physics will change or that fields other than physics will have a different experience.\nAn October 2004 editorial in\nThe Lancet", "When users know about OA and toll-access editions of the same article, many will prefer to click through to the OA edition, either because they aren’t affiliated with a subscribing institution or because authentication is a hassle. Moreover, when users find an OA edition, most stop looking. But decreased downloads are not the same thing as decreased or canceled subscriptions.\nMoreover, decreased downloads of toll-access editions from publisher web sites are not the same thing as decreased downloads overall. No one suggests that green OA leads to decreased overall downloads, that is, fewer readers and less reading. On the contrary, the same evidence suggesting that OA increases citation impact also suggests that it increases readers and reading.\n5. Most publishers voluntarily permit green OA.", "Some subscription journals have found that OA after an embargo period, even a very short one like two months, actually increases submissions and subscriptions. For example, this was the experience of the American Society for Cell Biology and its journal,\nMolecular Biology of the Cell.\nMedknow saw its submissions and subscriptions increase when it began offering unembargoed full-text editions of its journals alongside its toll-access print journals.\n \n Hindawi Publishing saw its submissions rise steadily after it converted all its peer-reviewed journals to OA in 2007. Looking back on several years of rapidly growing submissions, company founder and CEO Ahmed Hindawi said in January 2010, “It is clear now more than ever that our open access conversion . . . was the best management decision we have taken. . . .”\n9. Some publishers fear that green OA will increase pressure to convert to gold OA.", "In fact, OA publishing might be more sustainable than TA publishing, as toll-access prices and the volume of research both grow faster than library budgets. (See section 2.1 on problems.) If publishers acknowledge that gold OA can be sustainable, and even profitable, and merely wish to avoid making lower margins than they make today, then their objection takes on a very different color. They’re not at risk of insolvency, just reduced profits, and they’re not asserting a need for self-protection, just an entitlement to current levels of profit. There’s no reason for public funding agencies acting in the public interest, or private funders acting for charitable purposes, to compromise their missions in order to satisfy that sense of publisher entitlement.\n10. Green OA policies are justified even if they do create risks for toll-access journals." ], [ "If we’re only interested in the effect of rising levels of green OA on toll-access publishers, then we can stop at points 1–9. But if we’re interested in good policy, then we must add one more factor: Even if green OA does eventually threaten toll-access journal subscriptions, green OA policies are still justified.\nI won’t elaborate this point here, since it takes us beyond the topic of casualties to the full case for OA, which is spread throughout the rest of the book. But here’s one way to put the debate in perspective: There are good reasons to want to know whether rising levels of green OA will trigger cancellations of toll-access journals, and perhaps even to modify our policies in light of what we learn. But there are no good reasons to put the thriving of incumbent toll-access journals and publishers ahead of the thriving of research itself.", "Physics has the highest levels and longest history of green OA. The evidence from physics to date is that high levels of green OA don’t cause journal cancellations. On the contrary, the relationship between arXiv (the OA repository for physics) and toll-access physics journals is more symbiotic than antagonistic.\nPhysicists have been self-archiving since 1991, far longer than in any other field. In some subfields, such as particle physics, the rate of OA archiving approaches 100 percent, far higher than in any other field. If high-volume green OA caused journal cancellations, we’d see the effect first in physics. But it hasn’t happened. Two leading publishers of physics journals, the American Physical Society (APS) and Institute of Physics (IOP), have publicly acknowledged that they’ve seen no cancellations attributable to OA archiving. In fact, the APS and IOP have not only made peace with arXiv but now accept submissions from it and even host their own mirrors of it.", "3. Other fields may not behave like physics.\nWe won’t know more until the levels of green OA in other fields approach those in physics.\nIt would definitely help to understand why the experience in physics has gone as it has and how far it might predict the experience in other fields. But so far it’s fair to say that we don’t know all the variables and that publishers who oppose green OA mandates are not among those showing a serious interest in them. When publisher lobbyists argue that high-volume green OA will undermine toll-access journal subscriptions, they don’t offer evidence, don’t acknowledge the countervailing evidence from physics, don’t rebut the evidence from physics, and don’t qualify their own conclusions in light of it. They would act more like scientific publishers if they acknowledged the evidence from physics and then argued, as well as they could, either that the experience in physics will change or that fields other than physics will have a different experience.\nAn October 2004 editorial in\nThe Lancet", "The purpose of these two policy provisions is precisely to protect publishers against cancellations. They are deliberate concessions to publishers, adopted voluntarily by funding agencies as compromises with the public interest in immediate OA to the best editions. When we put the two together, we see that funder-mandated OA copies of peer-reviewed manuscripts won’t compete with toll-access copies of the published editions for six to twelve months, and there will never be OA copies of the more desirable published editions unless publishers voluntarily allow them. Publishers retain life-of-copyright exclusivity on the published editions. Even if OA archiving does eventually erode subscriptions outside physics, publishers have longer and better protection from these effects than their lobbyists ever acknowledge.\nThird, funder OA mandates only apply to research articles, not to the many other kinds of content published in scholarly journals, such as letters, editorials, review articles, book reviews, announcements, news, conference information, and so on. Libraries wanting to provide access to these other kinds of content will still have an incentive to subscribe.", "When users know about OA and toll-access editions of the same article, many will prefer to click through to the OA edition, either because they aren’t affiliated with a subscribing institution or because authentication is a hassle. Moreover, when users find an OA edition, most stop looking. But decreased downloads are not the same thing as decreased or canceled subscriptions.\nMoreover, decreased downloads of toll-access editions from publisher web sites are not the same thing as decreased downloads overall. No one suggests that green OA leads to decreased overall downloads, that is, fewer readers and less reading. On the contrary, the same evidence suggesting that OA increases citation impact also suggests that it increases readers and reading.\n5. Most publishers voluntarily permit green OA.", "Open Access: Casualties\nWill a general shift to OA leave casualties?\n \n For example, will rising levels of green OA trigger cancellations of toll-access journals?\nThis question matters for those publishers (not all publishers) who fear the answer is yes and for those activists (not all activists) who hope the answer is yes. So far, unfortunately, it doesn’t have a simple yes-or-no answer, and most discussions replace evidence with fearful or hopeful predictions.\nThe primary drivers of green OA are policies at universities and funding agencies. Remember, all university policies allow publishers to protect themselves at will. (See section 4.1 on policies.) For example, universities with loophole or deposit mandates will not provide green OA when publishers do not allow it. Universities with Harvard-style rights-retention mandates will not provide OA when authors obtain waivers or when publishers require authors to obtain waivers as a condition of publication.", "In fact, OA publishing might be more sustainable than TA publishing, as toll-access prices and the volume of research both grow faster than library budgets. (See section 2.1 on problems.) If publishers acknowledge that gold OA can be sustainable, and even profitable, and merely wish to avoid making lower margins than they make today, then their objection takes on a very different color. They’re not at risk of insolvency, just reduced profits, and they’re not asserting a need for self-protection, just an entitlement to current levels of profit. There’s no reason for public funding agencies acting in the public interest, or private funders acting for charitable purposes, to compromise their missions in order to satisfy that sense of publisher entitlement.\n10. Green OA policies are justified even if they do create risks for toll-access journals.", "Hence, publishers who worry about the effect of university OA policies on subscriptions have the remedy in their own hands. Faculty needn’t paternalize publishers by voting down OA policies when publishers can protect themselves whenever they see the need to do so. The experience at Harvard since February 2008 is that very few publishers see the need to do so. Fewer than a handful systematically require waivers from Harvard authors.\nThis chapter, then, focuses on the strongest green OA mandates at funding agencies, like the Wellcome Trust and NIH, which allow no opt-outs for publishers or grantees. Will strong green OA policies of that kind trigger cancellations of toll-access journals? Here are 10 parts of any complete answer.\n1. Nobody knows yet how green OA policies will affect journal subscriptions.\nRising levels of green OA may trigger toll-access journal cancellations, or they may not. So far they haven’t.\n2. The evidence from physics is the most relevant.", "Even the strongest no-loophole, no-waiver policies preserve incentives to maintain toll-access journal subscriptions.\nFirst, all funder OA mandates include an embargo period to protect publishers. For example, the OA mandates at the Research Councils UK allow an embargo of up to six months after publication. The NIH allows an embargo of up to twelve months. Libraries wanting to provide immediate access will still have an incentive to subscribe.\nSecond, all funder OA mandates apply to the final version of the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript, not to the published version. If the journal provides copyediting after peer review, then the policies do not apply to the copyedited version, let alone to the formatted, paginated published edition. Libraries wanting to provide access to copyedited published editions will still have an incentive to subscribe.", "In a 2006 study from the Publishing Research Consortium (PRC), Chris Beckett and Simon Inger asked 400 librarians about the relative weight of different factors in their decisions to cancel subscriptions. Other things being equal, the librarians preferred free content to priced content and short embargoes to longer ones. Publishers interpret this to mean that the rise of OA archiving will cause cancellations. The chief flaw with the study is its artificiality. For example, the survey did not ask about specific journals by name but only about resources with abstractly stipulated levels of quality. It also disregarded faculty input on cancellation decisions when all librarians acknowledge that faculty input is decisive. The result was a study of hypothetical preferences, not actual cancellation decisions.\nA less hypothetical study was commissioned by publishers themselves in the same year. From the summary:", "(an Elsevier journal) called on the publishing lobby to do better. “[A]s editors of a journal that publishes research funded by the NIH, we disagree with [Association of American Publishers President Patricia Schroeder’s] central claim. Widening access to research [through green OA mandates] is unlikely to bring the edifice of scientific publishing crashing down. Schroeder provides no evidence that it would do so; she merely asserts the threat. This style of rebuttal will not do. . . .”\nFor more than eight years, green OA mandates have applied to research in many fields outside physics. These mandates are natural experiments and we’re still monitoring their effects. At Congressional hearings in 2008 and 2010, legislators asked publishers directly whether green OA was triggering cancellations. In both cases, publishers pointed to decreased downloads but not to increased cancellations.\n4. There is evidence that green OA decreases downloads from publishers’ web sites.", "The Association of College and Research Libraries addressed subscription incentives in a 2004 open letter on the NIH policy: “We wish to emphasize, above all, that academic libraries will not cancel journal subscriptions as a result of this plan. . . . Even if libraries wished to consider the availability of NIH-funded articles when making journal cancellation decisions, they would have no reasonable way of determining what articles in specific journals would become openly accessible after the embargo period.”\n7. Some studies bear on the question of whether increased OA archiving will increase journal cancellations.", "Some publishers fear that rising levels of green OA will not only trigger toll-access journal cancellations but also increase pressure to convert to gold OA. (Likewise, some OA activists hope for this outcome.)\nThere are two responses to this two-fold fear. The fear of toll-access cancellations disregards the relevant evidence in points 1–8 above. The fear of conversion to gold OA also disregards relevant evidence, such as Ahmed Hindawi’s testimony above, and the testimony of Springer CEO Derk Haank. In 2008 when Springer bought BioMed Central and became the world’s largest OA publisher, Haank said: “[W]e see open access publishing as a sustainable part of STM publishing, and not an ideological crusade.” (Also see chapter 7 on economics.)\nPublishers inexperienced with gold OA needn’t defer to publishers with more experience, but they should at least study them.", "The three most important factors used to determine journals for cancellation, in declining order of importance, are that the faculty no longer require it . . . , usage and price. Next, availability of the content via open access (OA) archives and availability via aggregators were ranked equal fourth, but some way behind the first three factors. The journal’s impact factor and availability via delayed OA were ranked relatively unimportant. . . . With regard to OA archives, there was a great deal of support for the idea that they would not directly impact journal subscriptions.\nIn short, toll-access journals have more to fear from their own price increases than from rising levels of green OA. Publishers who keep raising their prices aggravate the access problem for researchers and aggravate the sustainability problem for themselves. If the same publishers blame green OA and lobby against green OA policies, then they obstruct the solution for researchers and do very little to improve their own sustainability.\n8. OA may increase submissions and subscriptions.", "Supplementing the natural experiments of green OA mandates are the natural experiments of publishers who voluntarily permit green OA. The Nature Publishing Group is more conservative than most toll-access publishers by requiring a six-month embargo on green OA, but more progressive than most by positively encouraging green OA. NPG reported the latest results of its multidisciplinary natural experiment in January 2011: “We have, to date, found author self-archiving compatible with subscription business models, and so we have been actively encouraging self-archiving since 2005.”\nThis or something similar to it must be the experience of the majority of toll-access publishers who voluntarily permit green OA. Even if they don’t actively encourage green OA, most permit it without embargo. If they found that it triggered cancellations, they would stop.\n6. Green OA mandates leave standing at least four library incentives to maintain their subscriptions to toll-access journals.", "Some subscription journals have found that OA after an embargo period, even a very short one like two months, actually increases submissions and subscriptions. For example, this was the experience of the American Society for Cell Biology and its journal,\nMolecular Biology of the Cell.\nMedknow saw its submissions and subscriptions increase when it began offering unembargoed full-text editions of its journals alongside its toll-access print journals.\n \n Hindawi Publishing saw its submissions rise steadily after it converted all its peer-reviewed journals to OA in 2007. Looking back on several years of rapidly growing submissions, company founder and CEO Ahmed Hindawi said in January 2010, “It is clear now more than ever that our open access conversion . . . was the best management decision we have taken. . . .”\n9. Some publishers fear that green OA will increase pressure to convert to gold OA.", "Fourth, funder OA mandates only apply to articles arising from research funded by the mandating agency. Very few journals publish nothing but articles from a single funder, or even from a set of funders all of whom have OA mandates. Libraries wanting to provide access to all the research articles in a journal, regardless of the sources of funding, will still have an incentive to subscribe. This incentive will weaken as more and more funders adopt OA mandates, but we’re very far from universal funder mandates. As we get closer, unfunded research will still fall outside this category and the three other incentives above will still stand." ], [ "When users know about OA and toll-access editions of the same article, many will prefer to click through to the OA edition, either because they aren’t affiliated with a subscribing institution or because authentication is a hassle. Moreover, when users find an OA edition, most stop looking. But decreased downloads are not the same thing as decreased or canceled subscriptions.\nMoreover, decreased downloads of toll-access editions from publisher web sites are not the same thing as decreased downloads overall. No one suggests that green OA leads to decreased overall downloads, that is, fewer readers and less reading. On the contrary, the same evidence suggesting that OA increases citation impact also suggests that it increases readers and reading.\n5. Most publishers voluntarily permit green OA.", "(an Elsevier journal) called on the publishing lobby to do better. “[A]s editors of a journal that publishes research funded by the NIH, we disagree with [Association of American Publishers President Patricia Schroeder’s] central claim. Widening access to research [through green OA mandates] is unlikely to bring the edifice of scientific publishing crashing down. Schroeder provides no evidence that it would do so; she merely asserts the threat. This style of rebuttal will not do. . . .”\nFor more than eight years, green OA mandates have applied to research in many fields outside physics. These mandates are natural experiments and we’re still monitoring their effects. At Congressional hearings in 2008 and 2010, legislators asked publishers directly whether green OA was triggering cancellations. In both cases, publishers pointed to decreased downloads but not to increased cancellations.\n4. There is evidence that green OA decreases downloads from publishers’ web sites.", "Hence, publishers who worry about the effect of university OA policies on subscriptions have the remedy in their own hands. Faculty needn’t paternalize publishers by voting down OA policies when publishers can protect themselves whenever they see the need to do so. The experience at Harvard since February 2008 is that very few publishers see the need to do so. Fewer than a handful systematically require waivers from Harvard authors.\nThis chapter, then, focuses on the strongest green OA mandates at funding agencies, like the Wellcome Trust and NIH, which allow no opt-outs for publishers or grantees. Will strong green OA policies of that kind trigger cancellations of toll-access journals? Here are 10 parts of any complete answer.\n1. Nobody knows yet how green OA policies will affect journal subscriptions.\nRising levels of green OA may trigger toll-access journal cancellations, or they may not. So far they haven’t.\n2. The evidence from physics is the most relevant.", "If we’re only interested in the effect of rising levels of green OA on toll-access publishers, then we can stop at points 1–9. But if we’re interested in good policy, then we must add one more factor: Even if green OA does eventually threaten toll-access journal subscriptions, green OA policies are still justified.\nI won’t elaborate this point here, since it takes us beyond the topic of casualties to the full case for OA, which is spread throughout the rest of the book. But here’s one way to put the debate in perspective: There are good reasons to want to know whether rising levels of green OA will trigger cancellations of toll-access journals, and perhaps even to modify our policies in light of what we learn. But there are no good reasons to put the thriving of incumbent toll-access journals and publishers ahead of the thriving of research itself.", "The purpose of these two policy provisions is precisely to protect publishers against cancellations. They are deliberate concessions to publishers, adopted voluntarily by funding agencies as compromises with the public interest in immediate OA to the best editions. When we put the two together, we see that funder-mandated OA copies of peer-reviewed manuscripts won’t compete with toll-access copies of the published editions for six to twelve months, and there will never be OA copies of the more desirable published editions unless publishers voluntarily allow them. Publishers retain life-of-copyright exclusivity on the published editions. Even if OA archiving does eventually erode subscriptions outside physics, publishers have longer and better protection from these effects than their lobbyists ever acknowledge.\nThird, funder OA mandates only apply to research articles, not to the many other kinds of content published in scholarly journals, such as letters, editorials, review articles, book reviews, announcements, news, conference information, and so on. Libraries wanting to provide access to these other kinds of content will still have an incentive to subscribe.", "The Association of College and Research Libraries addressed subscription incentives in a 2004 open letter on the NIH policy: “We wish to emphasize, above all, that academic libraries will not cancel journal subscriptions as a result of this plan. . . . Even if libraries wished to consider the availability of NIH-funded articles when making journal cancellation decisions, they would have no reasonable way of determining what articles in specific journals would become openly accessible after the embargo period.”\n7. Some studies bear on the question of whether increased OA archiving will increase journal cancellations.", "In a 2006 study from the Publishing Research Consortium (PRC), Chris Beckett and Simon Inger asked 400 librarians about the relative weight of different factors in their decisions to cancel subscriptions. Other things being equal, the librarians preferred free content to priced content and short embargoes to longer ones. Publishers interpret this to mean that the rise of OA archiving will cause cancellations. The chief flaw with the study is its artificiality. For example, the survey did not ask about specific journals by name but only about resources with abstractly stipulated levels of quality. It also disregarded faculty input on cancellation decisions when all librarians acknowledge that faculty input is decisive. The result was a study of hypothetical preferences, not actual cancellation decisions.\nA less hypothetical study was commissioned by publishers themselves in the same year. From the summary:", "Fourth, funder OA mandates only apply to articles arising from research funded by the mandating agency. Very few journals publish nothing but articles from a single funder, or even from a set of funders all of whom have OA mandates. Libraries wanting to provide access to all the research articles in a journal, regardless of the sources of funding, will still have an incentive to subscribe. This incentive will weaken as more and more funders adopt OA mandates, but we’re very far from universal funder mandates. As we get closer, unfunded research will still fall outside this category and the three other incentives above will still stand.", "The three most important factors used to determine journals for cancellation, in declining order of importance, are that the faculty no longer require it . . . , usage and price. Next, availability of the content via open access (OA) archives and availability via aggregators were ranked equal fourth, but some way behind the first three factors. The journal’s impact factor and availability via delayed OA were ranked relatively unimportant. . . . With regard to OA archives, there was a great deal of support for the idea that they would not directly impact journal subscriptions.\nIn short, toll-access journals have more to fear from their own price increases than from rising levels of green OA. Publishers who keep raising their prices aggravate the access problem for researchers and aggravate the sustainability problem for themselves. If the same publishers blame green OA and lobby against green OA policies, then they obstruct the solution for researchers and do very little to improve their own sustainability.\n8. OA may increase submissions and subscriptions.", "Physics has the highest levels and longest history of green OA. The evidence from physics to date is that high levels of green OA don’t cause journal cancellations. On the contrary, the relationship between arXiv (the OA repository for physics) and toll-access physics journals is more symbiotic than antagonistic.\nPhysicists have been self-archiving since 1991, far longer than in any other field. In some subfields, such as particle physics, the rate of OA archiving approaches 100 percent, far higher than in any other field. If high-volume green OA caused journal cancellations, we’d see the effect first in physics. But it hasn’t happened. Two leading publishers of physics journals, the American Physical Society (APS) and Institute of Physics (IOP), have publicly acknowledged that they’ve seen no cancellations attributable to OA archiving. In fact, the APS and IOP have not only made peace with arXiv but now accept submissions from it and even host their own mirrors of it.", "Even the strongest no-loophole, no-waiver policies preserve incentives to maintain toll-access journal subscriptions.\nFirst, all funder OA mandates include an embargo period to protect publishers. For example, the OA mandates at the Research Councils UK allow an embargo of up to six months after publication. The NIH allows an embargo of up to twelve months. Libraries wanting to provide immediate access will still have an incentive to subscribe.\nSecond, all funder OA mandates apply to the final version of the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript, not to the published version. If the journal provides copyediting after peer review, then the policies do not apply to the copyedited version, let alone to the formatted, paginated published edition. Libraries wanting to provide access to copyedited published editions will still have an incentive to subscribe.", "Supplementing the natural experiments of green OA mandates are the natural experiments of publishers who voluntarily permit green OA. The Nature Publishing Group is more conservative than most toll-access publishers by requiring a six-month embargo on green OA, but more progressive than most by positively encouraging green OA. NPG reported the latest results of its multidisciplinary natural experiment in January 2011: “We have, to date, found author self-archiving compatible with subscription business models, and so we have been actively encouraging self-archiving since 2005.”\nThis or something similar to it must be the experience of the majority of toll-access publishers who voluntarily permit green OA. Even if they don’t actively encourage green OA, most permit it without embargo. If they found that it triggered cancellations, they would stop.\n6. Green OA mandates leave standing at least four library incentives to maintain their subscriptions to toll-access journals.", "Some subscription journals have found that OA after an embargo period, even a very short one like two months, actually increases submissions and subscriptions. For example, this was the experience of the American Society for Cell Biology and its journal,\nMolecular Biology of the Cell.\nMedknow saw its submissions and subscriptions increase when it began offering unembargoed full-text editions of its journals alongside its toll-access print journals.\n \n Hindawi Publishing saw its submissions rise steadily after it converted all its peer-reviewed journals to OA in 2007. Looking back on several years of rapidly growing submissions, company founder and CEO Ahmed Hindawi said in January 2010, “It is clear now more than ever that our open access conversion . . . was the best management decision we have taken. . . .”\n9. Some publishers fear that green OA will increase pressure to convert to gold OA.", "Some publishers fear that rising levels of green OA will not only trigger toll-access journal cancellations but also increase pressure to convert to gold OA. (Likewise, some OA activists hope for this outcome.)\nThere are two responses to this two-fold fear. The fear of toll-access cancellations disregards the relevant evidence in points 1–8 above. The fear of conversion to gold OA also disregards relevant evidence, such as Ahmed Hindawi’s testimony above, and the testimony of Springer CEO Derk Haank. In 2008 when Springer bought BioMed Central and became the world’s largest OA publisher, Haank said: “[W]e see open access publishing as a sustainable part of STM publishing, and not an ideological crusade.” (Also see chapter 7 on economics.)\nPublishers inexperienced with gold OA needn’t defer to publishers with more experience, but they should at least study them.", "3. Other fields may not behave like physics.\nWe won’t know more until the levels of green OA in other fields approach those in physics.\nIt would definitely help to understand why the experience in physics has gone as it has and how far it might predict the experience in other fields. But so far it’s fair to say that we don’t know all the variables and that publishers who oppose green OA mandates are not among those showing a serious interest in them. When publisher lobbyists argue that high-volume green OA will undermine toll-access journal subscriptions, they don’t offer evidence, don’t acknowledge the countervailing evidence from physics, don’t rebut the evidence from physics, and don’t qualify their own conclusions in light of it. They would act more like scientific publishers if they acknowledged the evidence from physics and then argued, as well as they could, either that the experience in physics will change or that fields other than physics will have a different experience.\nAn October 2004 editorial in\nThe Lancet", "Open Access: Casualties\nWill a general shift to OA leave casualties?\n \n For example, will rising levels of green OA trigger cancellations of toll-access journals?\nThis question matters for those publishers (not all publishers) who fear the answer is yes and for those activists (not all activists) who hope the answer is yes. So far, unfortunately, it doesn’t have a simple yes-or-no answer, and most discussions replace evidence with fearful or hopeful predictions.\nThe primary drivers of green OA are policies at universities and funding agencies. Remember, all university policies allow publishers to protect themselves at will. (See section 4.1 on policies.) For example, universities with loophole or deposit mandates will not provide green OA when publishers do not allow it. Universities with Harvard-style rights-retention mandates will not provide OA when authors obtain waivers or when publishers require authors to obtain waivers as a condition of publication.", "In fact, OA publishing might be more sustainable than TA publishing, as toll-access prices and the volume of research both grow faster than library budgets. (See section 2.1 on problems.) If publishers acknowledge that gold OA can be sustainable, and even profitable, and merely wish to avoid making lower margins than they make today, then their objection takes on a very different color. They’re not at risk of insolvency, just reduced profits, and they’re not asserting a need for self-protection, just an entitlement to current levels of profit. There’s no reason for public funding agencies acting in the public interest, or private funders acting for charitable purposes, to compromise their missions in order to satisfy that sense of publisher entitlement.\n10. Green OA policies are justified even if they do create risks for toll-access journals." ], [ "Physics has the highest levels and longest history of green OA. The evidence from physics to date is that high levels of green OA don’t cause journal cancellations. On the contrary, the relationship between arXiv (the OA repository for physics) and toll-access physics journals is more symbiotic than antagonistic.\nPhysicists have been self-archiving since 1991, far longer than in any other field. In some subfields, such as particle physics, the rate of OA archiving approaches 100 percent, far higher than in any other field. If high-volume green OA caused journal cancellations, we’d see the effect first in physics. But it hasn’t happened. Two leading publishers of physics journals, the American Physical Society (APS) and Institute of Physics (IOP), have publicly acknowledged that they’ve seen no cancellations attributable to OA archiving. In fact, the APS and IOP have not only made peace with arXiv but now accept submissions from it and even host their own mirrors of it.", "3. Other fields may not behave like physics.\nWe won’t know more until the levels of green OA in other fields approach those in physics.\nIt would definitely help to understand why the experience in physics has gone as it has and how far it might predict the experience in other fields. But so far it’s fair to say that we don’t know all the variables and that publishers who oppose green OA mandates are not among those showing a serious interest in them. When publisher lobbyists argue that high-volume green OA will undermine toll-access journal subscriptions, they don’t offer evidence, don’t acknowledge the countervailing evidence from physics, don’t rebut the evidence from physics, and don’t qualify their own conclusions in light of it. They would act more like scientific publishers if they acknowledged the evidence from physics and then argued, as well as they could, either that the experience in physics will change or that fields other than physics will have a different experience.\nAn October 2004 editorial in\nThe Lancet", "The purpose of these two policy provisions is precisely to protect publishers against cancellations. They are deliberate concessions to publishers, adopted voluntarily by funding agencies as compromises with the public interest in immediate OA to the best editions. When we put the two together, we see that funder-mandated OA copies of peer-reviewed manuscripts won’t compete with toll-access copies of the published editions for six to twelve months, and there will never be OA copies of the more desirable published editions unless publishers voluntarily allow them. Publishers retain life-of-copyright exclusivity on the published editions. Even if OA archiving does eventually erode subscriptions outside physics, publishers have longer and better protection from these effects than their lobbyists ever acknowledge.\nThird, funder OA mandates only apply to research articles, not to the many other kinds of content published in scholarly journals, such as letters, editorials, review articles, book reviews, announcements, news, conference information, and so on. Libraries wanting to provide access to these other kinds of content will still have an incentive to subscribe.", "Hence, publishers who worry about the effect of university OA policies on subscriptions have the remedy in their own hands. Faculty needn’t paternalize publishers by voting down OA policies when publishers can protect themselves whenever they see the need to do so. The experience at Harvard since February 2008 is that very few publishers see the need to do so. Fewer than a handful systematically require waivers from Harvard authors.\nThis chapter, then, focuses on the strongest green OA mandates at funding agencies, like the Wellcome Trust and NIH, which allow no opt-outs for publishers or grantees. Will strong green OA policies of that kind trigger cancellations of toll-access journals? Here are 10 parts of any complete answer.\n1. Nobody knows yet how green OA policies will affect journal subscriptions.\nRising levels of green OA may trigger toll-access journal cancellations, or they may not. So far they haven’t.\n2. The evidence from physics is the most relevant.", "If we’re only interested in the effect of rising levels of green OA on toll-access publishers, then we can stop at points 1–9. But if we’re interested in good policy, then we must add one more factor: Even if green OA does eventually threaten toll-access journal subscriptions, green OA policies are still justified.\nI won’t elaborate this point here, since it takes us beyond the topic of casualties to the full case for OA, which is spread throughout the rest of the book. But here’s one way to put the debate in perspective: There are good reasons to want to know whether rising levels of green OA will trigger cancellations of toll-access journals, and perhaps even to modify our policies in light of what we learn. But there are no good reasons to put the thriving of incumbent toll-access journals and publishers ahead of the thriving of research itself.", "(an Elsevier journal) called on the publishing lobby to do better. “[A]s editors of a journal that publishes research funded by the NIH, we disagree with [Association of American Publishers President Patricia Schroeder’s] central claim. Widening access to research [through green OA mandates] is unlikely to bring the edifice of scientific publishing crashing down. Schroeder provides no evidence that it would do so; she merely asserts the threat. This style of rebuttal will not do. . . .”\nFor more than eight years, green OA mandates have applied to research in many fields outside physics. These mandates are natural experiments and we’re still monitoring their effects. At Congressional hearings in 2008 and 2010, legislators asked publishers directly whether green OA was triggering cancellations. In both cases, publishers pointed to decreased downloads but not to increased cancellations.\n4. There is evidence that green OA decreases downloads from publishers’ web sites.", "When users know about OA and toll-access editions of the same article, many will prefer to click through to the OA edition, either because they aren’t affiliated with a subscribing institution or because authentication is a hassle. Moreover, when users find an OA edition, most stop looking. But decreased downloads are not the same thing as decreased or canceled subscriptions.\nMoreover, decreased downloads of toll-access editions from publisher web sites are not the same thing as decreased downloads overall. No one suggests that green OA leads to decreased overall downloads, that is, fewer readers and less reading. On the contrary, the same evidence suggesting that OA increases citation impact also suggests that it increases readers and reading.\n5. Most publishers voluntarily permit green OA.", "Open Access: Casualties\nWill a general shift to OA leave casualties?\n \n For example, will rising levels of green OA trigger cancellations of toll-access journals?\nThis question matters for those publishers (not all publishers) who fear the answer is yes and for those activists (not all activists) who hope the answer is yes. So far, unfortunately, it doesn’t have a simple yes-or-no answer, and most discussions replace evidence with fearful or hopeful predictions.\nThe primary drivers of green OA are policies at universities and funding agencies. Remember, all university policies allow publishers to protect themselves at will. (See section 4.1 on policies.) For example, universities with loophole or deposit mandates will not provide green OA when publishers do not allow it. Universities with Harvard-style rights-retention mandates will not provide OA when authors obtain waivers or when publishers require authors to obtain waivers as a condition of publication.", "In fact, OA publishing might be more sustainable than TA publishing, as toll-access prices and the volume of research both grow faster than library budgets. (See section 2.1 on problems.) If publishers acknowledge that gold OA can be sustainable, and even profitable, and merely wish to avoid making lower margins than they make today, then their objection takes on a very different color. They’re not at risk of insolvency, just reduced profits, and they’re not asserting a need for self-protection, just an entitlement to current levels of profit. There’s no reason for public funding agencies acting in the public interest, or private funders acting for charitable purposes, to compromise their missions in order to satisfy that sense of publisher entitlement.\n10. Green OA policies are justified even if they do create risks for toll-access journals.", "In a 2006 study from the Publishing Research Consortium (PRC), Chris Beckett and Simon Inger asked 400 librarians about the relative weight of different factors in their decisions to cancel subscriptions. Other things being equal, the librarians preferred free content to priced content and short embargoes to longer ones. Publishers interpret this to mean that the rise of OA archiving will cause cancellations. The chief flaw with the study is its artificiality. For example, the survey did not ask about specific journals by name but only about resources with abstractly stipulated levels of quality. It also disregarded faculty input on cancellation decisions when all librarians acknowledge that faculty input is decisive. The result was a study of hypothetical preferences, not actual cancellation decisions.\nA less hypothetical study was commissioned by publishers themselves in the same year. From the summary:", "Some publishers fear that rising levels of green OA will not only trigger toll-access journal cancellations but also increase pressure to convert to gold OA. (Likewise, some OA activists hope for this outcome.)\nThere are two responses to this two-fold fear. The fear of toll-access cancellations disregards the relevant evidence in points 1–8 above. The fear of conversion to gold OA also disregards relevant evidence, such as Ahmed Hindawi’s testimony above, and the testimony of Springer CEO Derk Haank. In 2008 when Springer bought BioMed Central and became the world’s largest OA publisher, Haank said: “[W]e see open access publishing as a sustainable part of STM publishing, and not an ideological crusade.” (Also see chapter 7 on economics.)\nPublishers inexperienced with gold OA needn’t defer to publishers with more experience, but they should at least study them.", "The Association of College and Research Libraries addressed subscription incentives in a 2004 open letter on the NIH policy: “We wish to emphasize, above all, that academic libraries will not cancel journal subscriptions as a result of this plan. . . . Even if libraries wished to consider the availability of NIH-funded articles when making journal cancellation decisions, they would have no reasonable way of determining what articles in specific journals would become openly accessible after the embargo period.”\n7. Some studies bear on the question of whether increased OA archiving will increase journal cancellations.", "Some subscription journals have found that OA after an embargo period, even a very short one like two months, actually increases submissions and subscriptions. For example, this was the experience of the American Society for Cell Biology and its journal,\nMolecular Biology of the Cell.\nMedknow saw its submissions and subscriptions increase when it began offering unembargoed full-text editions of its journals alongside its toll-access print journals.\n \n Hindawi Publishing saw its submissions rise steadily after it converted all its peer-reviewed journals to OA in 2007. Looking back on several years of rapidly growing submissions, company founder and CEO Ahmed Hindawi said in January 2010, “It is clear now more than ever that our open access conversion . . . was the best management decision we have taken. . . .”\n9. Some publishers fear that green OA will increase pressure to convert to gold OA.", "Even the strongest no-loophole, no-waiver policies preserve incentives to maintain toll-access journal subscriptions.\nFirst, all funder OA mandates include an embargo period to protect publishers. For example, the OA mandates at the Research Councils UK allow an embargo of up to six months after publication. The NIH allows an embargo of up to twelve months. Libraries wanting to provide immediate access will still have an incentive to subscribe.\nSecond, all funder OA mandates apply to the final version of the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript, not to the published version. If the journal provides copyediting after peer review, then the policies do not apply to the copyedited version, let alone to the formatted, paginated published edition. Libraries wanting to provide access to copyedited published editions will still have an incentive to subscribe.", "The three most important factors used to determine journals for cancellation, in declining order of importance, are that the faculty no longer require it . . . , usage and price. Next, availability of the content via open access (OA) archives and availability via aggregators were ranked equal fourth, but some way behind the first three factors. The journal’s impact factor and availability via delayed OA were ranked relatively unimportant. . . . With regard to OA archives, there was a great deal of support for the idea that they would not directly impact journal subscriptions.\nIn short, toll-access journals have more to fear from their own price increases than from rising levels of green OA. Publishers who keep raising their prices aggravate the access problem for researchers and aggravate the sustainability problem for themselves. If the same publishers blame green OA and lobby against green OA policies, then they obstruct the solution for researchers and do very little to improve their own sustainability.\n8. OA may increase submissions and subscriptions.", "Supplementing the natural experiments of green OA mandates are the natural experiments of publishers who voluntarily permit green OA. The Nature Publishing Group is more conservative than most toll-access publishers by requiring a six-month embargo on green OA, but more progressive than most by positively encouraging green OA. NPG reported the latest results of its multidisciplinary natural experiment in January 2011: “We have, to date, found author self-archiving compatible with subscription business models, and so we have been actively encouraging self-archiving since 2005.”\nThis or something similar to it must be the experience of the majority of toll-access publishers who voluntarily permit green OA. Even if they don’t actively encourage green OA, most permit it without embargo. If they found that it triggered cancellations, they would stop.\n6. Green OA mandates leave standing at least four library incentives to maintain their subscriptions to toll-access journals.", "Fourth, funder OA mandates only apply to articles arising from research funded by the mandating agency. Very few journals publish nothing but articles from a single funder, or even from a set of funders all of whom have OA mandates. Libraries wanting to provide access to all the research articles in a journal, regardless of the sources of funding, will still have an incentive to subscribe. This incentive will weaken as more and more funders adopt OA mandates, but we’re very far from universal funder mandates. As we get closer, unfunded research will still fall outside this category and the three other incentives above will still stand." ], [ "Hence, publishers who worry about the effect of university OA policies on subscriptions have the remedy in their own hands. Faculty needn’t paternalize publishers by voting down OA policies when publishers can protect themselves whenever they see the need to do so. The experience at Harvard since February 2008 is that very few publishers see the need to do so. Fewer than a handful systematically require waivers from Harvard authors.\nThis chapter, then, focuses on the strongest green OA mandates at funding agencies, like the Wellcome Trust and NIH, which allow no opt-outs for publishers or grantees. Will strong green OA policies of that kind trigger cancellations of toll-access journals? Here are 10 parts of any complete answer.\n1. Nobody knows yet how green OA policies will affect journal subscriptions.\nRising levels of green OA may trigger toll-access journal cancellations, or they may not. So far they haven’t.\n2. The evidence from physics is the most relevant.", "Open Access: Casualties\nWill a general shift to OA leave casualties?\n \n For example, will rising levels of green OA trigger cancellations of toll-access journals?\nThis question matters for those publishers (not all publishers) who fear the answer is yes and for those activists (not all activists) who hope the answer is yes. So far, unfortunately, it doesn’t have a simple yes-or-no answer, and most discussions replace evidence with fearful or hopeful predictions.\nThe primary drivers of green OA are policies at universities and funding agencies. Remember, all university policies allow publishers to protect themselves at will. (See section 4.1 on policies.) For example, universities with loophole or deposit mandates will not provide green OA when publishers do not allow it. Universities with Harvard-style rights-retention mandates will not provide OA when authors obtain waivers or when publishers require authors to obtain waivers as a condition of publication.", "If we’re only interested in the effect of rising levels of green OA on toll-access publishers, then we can stop at points 1–9. But if we’re interested in good policy, then we must add one more factor: Even if green OA does eventually threaten toll-access journal subscriptions, green OA policies are still justified.\nI won’t elaborate this point here, since it takes us beyond the topic of casualties to the full case for OA, which is spread throughout the rest of the book. But here’s one way to put the debate in perspective: There are good reasons to want to know whether rising levels of green OA will trigger cancellations of toll-access journals, and perhaps even to modify our policies in light of what we learn. But there are no good reasons to put the thriving of incumbent toll-access journals and publishers ahead of the thriving of research itself.", "When users know about OA and toll-access editions of the same article, many will prefer to click through to the OA edition, either because they aren’t affiliated with a subscribing institution or because authentication is a hassle. Moreover, when users find an OA edition, most stop looking. But decreased downloads are not the same thing as decreased or canceled subscriptions.\nMoreover, decreased downloads of toll-access editions from publisher web sites are not the same thing as decreased downloads overall. No one suggests that green OA leads to decreased overall downloads, that is, fewer readers and less reading. On the contrary, the same evidence suggesting that OA increases citation impact also suggests that it increases readers and reading.\n5. Most publishers voluntarily permit green OA.", "Physics has the highest levels and longest history of green OA. The evidence from physics to date is that high levels of green OA don’t cause journal cancellations. On the contrary, the relationship between arXiv (the OA repository for physics) and toll-access physics journals is more symbiotic than antagonistic.\nPhysicists have been self-archiving since 1991, far longer than in any other field. In some subfields, such as particle physics, the rate of OA archiving approaches 100 percent, far higher than in any other field. If high-volume green OA caused journal cancellations, we’d see the effect first in physics. But it hasn’t happened. Two leading publishers of physics journals, the American Physical Society (APS) and Institute of Physics (IOP), have publicly acknowledged that they’ve seen no cancellations attributable to OA archiving. In fact, the APS and IOP have not only made peace with arXiv but now accept submissions from it and even host their own mirrors of it.", "The purpose of these two policy provisions is precisely to protect publishers against cancellations. They are deliberate concessions to publishers, adopted voluntarily by funding agencies as compromises with the public interest in immediate OA to the best editions. When we put the two together, we see that funder-mandated OA copies of peer-reviewed manuscripts won’t compete with toll-access copies of the published editions for six to twelve months, and there will never be OA copies of the more desirable published editions unless publishers voluntarily allow them. Publishers retain life-of-copyright exclusivity on the published editions. Even if OA archiving does eventually erode subscriptions outside physics, publishers have longer and better protection from these effects than their lobbyists ever acknowledge.\nThird, funder OA mandates only apply to research articles, not to the many other kinds of content published in scholarly journals, such as letters, editorials, review articles, book reviews, announcements, news, conference information, and so on. Libraries wanting to provide access to these other kinds of content will still have an incentive to subscribe.", "In fact, OA publishing might be more sustainable than TA publishing, as toll-access prices and the volume of research both grow faster than library budgets. (See section 2.1 on problems.) If publishers acknowledge that gold OA can be sustainable, and even profitable, and merely wish to avoid making lower margins than they make today, then their objection takes on a very different color. They’re not at risk of insolvency, just reduced profits, and they’re not asserting a need for self-protection, just an entitlement to current levels of profit. There’s no reason for public funding agencies acting in the public interest, or private funders acting for charitable purposes, to compromise their missions in order to satisfy that sense of publisher entitlement.\n10. Green OA policies are justified even if they do create risks for toll-access journals.", "The Association of College and Research Libraries addressed subscription incentives in a 2004 open letter on the NIH policy: “We wish to emphasize, above all, that academic libraries will not cancel journal subscriptions as a result of this plan. . . . Even if libraries wished to consider the availability of NIH-funded articles when making journal cancellation decisions, they would have no reasonable way of determining what articles in specific journals would become openly accessible after the embargo period.”\n7. Some studies bear on the question of whether increased OA archiving will increase journal cancellations.", "(an Elsevier journal) called on the publishing lobby to do better. “[A]s editors of a journal that publishes research funded by the NIH, we disagree with [Association of American Publishers President Patricia Schroeder’s] central claim. Widening access to research [through green OA mandates] is unlikely to bring the edifice of scientific publishing crashing down. Schroeder provides no evidence that it would do so; she merely asserts the threat. This style of rebuttal will not do. . . .”\nFor more than eight years, green OA mandates have applied to research in many fields outside physics. These mandates are natural experiments and we’re still monitoring their effects. At Congressional hearings in 2008 and 2010, legislators asked publishers directly whether green OA was triggering cancellations. In both cases, publishers pointed to decreased downloads but not to increased cancellations.\n4. There is evidence that green OA decreases downloads from publishers’ web sites.", "The three most important factors used to determine journals for cancellation, in declining order of importance, are that the faculty no longer require it . . . , usage and price. Next, availability of the content via open access (OA) archives and availability via aggregators were ranked equal fourth, but some way behind the first three factors. The journal’s impact factor and availability via delayed OA were ranked relatively unimportant. . . . With regard to OA archives, there was a great deal of support for the idea that they would not directly impact journal subscriptions.\nIn short, toll-access journals have more to fear from their own price increases than from rising levels of green OA. Publishers who keep raising their prices aggravate the access problem for researchers and aggravate the sustainability problem for themselves. If the same publishers blame green OA and lobby against green OA policies, then they obstruct the solution for researchers and do very little to improve their own sustainability.\n8. OA may increase submissions and subscriptions.", "Even the strongest no-loophole, no-waiver policies preserve incentives to maintain toll-access journal subscriptions.\nFirst, all funder OA mandates include an embargo period to protect publishers. For example, the OA mandates at the Research Councils UK allow an embargo of up to six months after publication. The NIH allows an embargo of up to twelve months. Libraries wanting to provide immediate access will still have an incentive to subscribe.\nSecond, all funder OA mandates apply to the final version of the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript, not to the published version. If the journal provides copyediting after peer review, then the policies do not apply to the copyedited version, let alone to the formatted, paginated published edition. Libraries wanting to provide access to copyedited published editions will still have an incentive to subscribe.", "Supplementing the natural experiments of green OA mandates are the natural experiments of publishers who voluntarily permit green OA. The Nature Publishing Group is more conservative than most toll-access publishers by requiring a six-month embargo on green OA, but more progressive than most by positively encouraging green OA. NPG reported the latest results of its multidisciplinary natural experiment in January 2011: “We have, to date, found author self-archiving compatible with subscription business models, and so we have been actively encouraging self-archiving since 2005.”\nThis or something similar to it must be the experience of the majority of toll-access publishers who voluntarily permit green OA. Even if they don’t actively encourage green OA, most permit it without embargo. If they found that it triggered cancellations, they would stop.\n6. Green OA mandates leave standing at least four library incentives to maintain their subscriptions to toll-access journals.", "Some subscription journals have found that OA after an embargo period, even a very short one like two months, actually increases submissions and subscriptions. For example, this was the experience of the American Society for Cell Biology and its journal,\nMolecular Biology of the Cell.\nMedknow saw its submissions and subscriptions increase when it began offering unembargoed full-text editions of its journals alongside its toll-access print journals.\n \n Hindawi Publishing saw its submissions rise steadily after it converted all its peer-reviewed journals to OA in 2007. Looking back on several years of rapidly growing submissions, company founder and CEO Ahmed Hindawi said in January 2010, “It is clear now more than ever that our open access conversion . . . was the best management decision we have taken. . . .”\n9. Some publishers fear that green OA will increase pressure to convert to gold OA.", "Some publishers fear that rising levels of green OA will not only trigger toll-access journal cancellations but also increase pressure to convert to gold OA. (Likewise, some OA activists hope for this outcome.)\nThere are two responses to this two-fold fear. The fear of toll-access cancellations disregards the relevant evidence in points 1–8 above. The fear of conversion to gold OA also disregards relevant evidence, such as Ahmed Hindawi’s testimony above, and the testimony of Springer CEO Derk Haank. In 2008 when Springer bought BioMed Central and became the world’s largest OA publisher, Haank said: “[W]e see open access publishing as a sustainable part of STM publishing, and not an ideological crusade.” (Also see chapter 7 on economics.)\nPublishers inexperienced with gold OA needn’t defer to publishers with more experience, but they should at least study them.", "3. Other fields may not behave like physics.\nWe won’t know more until the levels of green OA in other fields approach those in physics.\nIt would definitely help to understand why the experience in physics has gone as it has and how far it might predict the experience in other fields. But so far it’s fair to say that we don’t know all the variables and that publishers who oppose green OA mandates are not among those showing a serious interest in them. When publisher lobbyists argue that high-volume green OA will undermine toll-access journal subscriptions, they don’t offer evidence, don’t acknowledge the countervailing evidence from physics, don’t rebut the evidence from physics, and don’t qualify their own conclusions in light of it. They would act more like scientific publishers if they acknowledged the evidence from physics and then argued, as well as they could, either that the experience in physics will change or that fields other than physics will have a different experience.\nAn October 2004 editorial in\nThe Lancet", "Fourth, funder OA mandates only apply to articles arising from research funded by the mandating agency. Very few journals publish nothing but articles from a single funder, or even from a set of funders all of whom have OA mandates. Libraries wanting to provide access to all the research articles in a journal, regardless of the sources of funding, will still have an incentive to subscribe. This incentive will weaken as more and more funders adopt OA mandates, but we’re very far from universal funder mandates. As we get closer, unfunded research will still fall outside this category and the three other incentives above will still stand.", "In a 2006 study from the Publishing Research Consortium (PRC), Chris Beckett and Simon Inger asked 400 librarians about the relative weight of different factors in their decisions to cancel subscriptions. Other things being equal, the librarians preferred free content to priced content and short embargoes to longer ones. Publishers interpret this to mean that the rise of OA archiving will cause cancellations. The chief flaw with the study is its artificiality. For example, the survey did not ask about specific journals by name but only about resources with abstractly stipulated levels of quality. It also disregarded faculty input on cancellation decisions when all librarians acknowledge that faculty input is decisive. The result was a study of hypothetical preferences, not actual cancellation decisions.\nA less hypothetical study was commissioned by publishers themselves in the same year. From the summary:" ], [ "In a 2006 study from the Publishing Research Consortium (PRC), Chris Beckett and Simon Inger asked 400 librarians about the relative weight of different factors in their decisions to cancel subscriptions. Other things being equal, the librarians preferred free content to priced content and short embargoes to longer ones. Publishers interpret this to mean that the rise of OA archiving will cause cancellations. The chief flaw with the study is its artificiality. For example, the survey did not ask about specific journals by name but only about resources with abstractly stipulated levels of quality. It also disregarded faculty input on cancellation decisions when all librarians acknowledge that faculty input is decisive. The result was a study of hypothetical preferences, not actual cancellation decisions.\nA less hypothetical study was commissioned by publishers themselves in the same year. From the summary:", "The Association of College and Research Libraries addressed subscription incentives in a 2004 open letter on the NIH policy: “We wish to emphasize, above all, that academic libraries will not cancel journal subscriptions as a result of this plan. . . . Even if libraries wished to consider the availability of NIH-funded articles when making journal cancellation decisions, they would have no reasonable way of determining what articles in specific journals would become openly accessible after the embargo period.”\n7. Some studies bear on the question of whether increased OA archiving will increase journal cancellations.", "The three most important factors used to determine journals for cancellation, in declining order of importance, are that the faculty no longer require it . . . , usage and price. Next, availability of the content via open access (OA) archives and availability via aggregators were ranked equal fourth, but some way behind the first three factors. The journal’s impact factor and availability via delayed OA were ranked relatively unimportant. . . . With regard to OA archives, there was a great deal of support for the idea that they would not directly impact journal subscriptions.\nIn short, toll-access journals have more to fear from their own price increases than from rising levels of green OA. Publishers who keep raising their prices aggravate the access problem for researchers and aggravate the sustainability problem for themselves. If the same publishers blame green OA and lobby against green OA policies, then they obstruct the solution for researchers and do very little to improve their own sustainability.\n8. OA may increase submissions and subscriptions.", "Fourth, funder OA mandates only apply to articles arising from research funded by the mandating agency. Very few journals publish nothing but articles from a single funder, or even from a set of funders all of whom have OA mandates. Libraries wanting to provide access to all the research articles in a journal, regardless of the sources of funding, will still have an incentive to subscribe. This incentive will weaken as more and more funders adopt OA mandates, but we’re very far from universal funder mandates. As we get closer, unfunded research will still fall outside this category and the three other incentives above will still stand.", "The purpose of these two policy provisions is precisely to protect publishers against cancellations. They are deliberate concessions to publishers, adopted voluntarily by funding agencies as compromises with the public interest in immediate OA to the best editions. When we put the two together, we see that funder-mandated OA copies of peer-reviewed manuscripts won’t compete with toll-access copies of the published editions for six to twelve months, and there will never be OA copies of the more desirable published editions unless publishers voluntarily allow them. Publishers retain life-of-copyright exclusivity on the published editions. Even if OA archiving does eventually erode subscriptions outside physics, publishers have longer and better protection from these effects than their lobbyists ever acknowledge.\nThird, funder OA mandates only apply to research articles, not to the many other kinds of content published in scholarly journals, such as letters, editorials, review articles, book reviews, announcements, news, conference information, and so on. Libraries wanting to provide access to these other kinds of content will still have an incentive to subscribe.", "Hence, publishers who worry about the effect of university OA policies on subscriptions have the remedy in their own hands. Faculty needn’t paternalize publishers by voting down OA policies when publishers can protect themselves whenever they see the need to do so. The experience at Harvard since February 2008 is that very few publishers see the need to do so. Fewer than a handful systematically require waivers from Harvard authors.\nThis chapter, then, focuses on the strongest green OA mandates at funding agencies, like the Wellcome Trust and NIH, which allow no opt-outs for publishers or grantees. Will strong green OA policies of that kind trigger cancellations of toll-access journals? Here are 10 parts of any complete answer.\n1. Nobody knows yet how green OA policies will affect journal subscriptions.\nRising levels of green OA may trigger toll-access journal cancellations, or they may not. So far they haven’t.\n2. The evidence from physics is the most relevant.", "(an Elsevier journal) called on the publishing lobby to do better. “[A]s editors of a journal that publishes research funded by the NIH, we disagree with [Association of American Publishers President Patricia Schroeder’s] central claim. Widening access to research [through green OA mandates] is unlikely to bring the edifice of scientific publishing crashing down. Schroeder provides no evidence that it would do so; she merely asserts the threat. This style of rebuttal will not do. . . .”\nFor more than eight years, green OA mandates have applied to research in many fields outside physics. These mandates are natural experiments and we’re still monitoring their effects. At Congressional hearings in 2008 and 2010, legislators asked publishers directly whether green OA was triggering cancellations. In both cases, publishers pointed to decreased downloads but not to increased cancellations.\n4. There is evidence that green OA decreases downloads from publishers’ web sites.", "Physics has the highest levels and longest history of green OA. The evidence from physics to date is that high levels of green OA don’t cause journal cancellations. On the contrary, the relationship between arXiv (the OA repository for physics) and toll-access physics journals is more symbiotic than antagonistic.\nPhysicists have been self-archiving since 1991, far longer than in any other field. In some subfields, such as particle physics, the rate of OA archiving approaches 100 percent, far higher than in any other field. If high-volume green OA caused journal cancellations, we’d see the effect first in physics. But it hasn’t happened. Two leading publishers of physics journals, the American Physical Society (APS) and Institute of Physics (IOP), have publicly acknowledged that they’ve seen no cancellations attributable to OA archiving. In fact, the APS and IOP have not only made peace with arXiv but now accept submissions from it and even host their own mirrors of it.", "Supplementing the natural experiments of green OA mandates are the natural experiments of publishers who voluntarily permit green OA. The Nature Publishing Group is more conservative than most toll-access publishers by requiring a six-month embargo on green OA, but more progressive than most by positively encouraging green OA. NPG reported the latest results of its multidisciplinary natural experiment in January 2011: “We have, to date, found author self-archiving compatible with subscription business models, and so we have been actively encouraging self-archiving since 2005.”\nThis or something similar to it must be the experience of the majority of toll-access publishers who voluntarily permit green OA. Even if they don’t actively encourage green OA, most permit it without embargo. If they found that it triggered cancellations, they would stop.\n6. Green OA mandates leave standing at least four library incentives to maintain their subscriptions to toll-access journals.", "If we’re only interested in the effect of rising levels of green OA on toll-access publishers, then we can stop at points 1–9. But if we’re interested in good policy, then we must add one more factor: Even if green OA does eventually threaten toll-access journal subscriptions, green OA policies are still justified.\nI won’t elaborate this point here, since it takes us beyond the topic of casualties to the full case for OA, which is spread throughout the rest of the book. But here’s one way to put the debate in perspective: There are good reasons to want to know whether rising levels of green OA will trigger cancellations of toll-access journals, and perhaps even to modify our policies in light of what we learn. But there are no good reasons to put the thriving of incumbent toll-access journals and publishers ahead of the thriving of research itself.", "Even the strongest no-loophole, no-waiver policies preserve incentives to maintain toll-access journal subscriptions.\nFirst, all funder OA mandates include an embargo period to protect publishers. For example, the OA mandates at the Research Councils UK allow an embargo of up to six months after publication. The NIH allows an embargo of up to twelve months. Libraries wanting to provide immediate access will still have an incentive to subscribe.\nSecond, all funder OA mandates apply to the final version of the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript, not to the published version. If the journal provides copyediting after peer review, then the policies do not apply to the copyedited version, let alone to the formatted, paginated published edition. Libraries wanting to provide access to copyedited published editions will still have an incentive to subscribe.", "When users know about OA and toll-access editions of the same article, many will prefer to click through to the OA edition, either because they aren’t affiliated with a subscribing institution or because authentication is a hassle. Moreover, when users find an OA edition, most stop looking. But decreased downloads are not the same thing as decreased or canceled subscriptions.\nMoreover, decreased downloads of toll-access editions from publisher web sites are not the same thing as decreased downloads overall. No one suggests that green OA leads to decreased overall downloads, that is, fewer readers and less reading. On the contrary, the same evidence suggesting that OA increases citation impact also suggests that it increases readers and reading.\n5. Most publishers voluntarily permit green OA.", "Open Access: Casualties\nWill a general shift to OA leave casualties?\n \n For example, will rising levels of green OA trigger cancellations of toll-access journals?\nThis question matters for those publishers (not all publishers) who fear the answer is yes and for those activists (not all activists) who hope the answer is yes. So far, unfortunately, it doesn’t have a simple yes-or-no answer, and most discussions replace evidence with fearful or hopeful predictions.\nThe primary drivers of green OA are policies at universities and funding agencies. Remember, all university policies allow publishers to protect themselves at will. (See section 4.1 on policies.) For example, universities with loophole or deposit mandates will not provide green OA when publishers do not allow it. Universities with Harvard-style rights-retention mandates will not provide OA when authors obtain waivers or when publishers require authors to obtain waivers as a condition of publication.", "In fact, OA publishing might be more sustainable than TA publishing, as toll-access prices and the volume of research both grow faster than library budgets. (See section 2.1 on problems.) If publishers acknowledge that gold OA can be sustainable, and even profitable, and merely wish to avoid making lower margins than they make today, then their objection takes on a very different color. They’re not at risk of insolvency, just reduced profits, and they’re not asserting a need for self-protection, just an entitlement to current levels of profit. There’s no reason for public funding agencies acting in the public interest, or private funders acting for charitable purposes, to compromise their missions in order to satisfy that sense of publisher entitlement.\n10. Green OA policies are justified even if they do create risks for toll-access journals.", "Some publishers fear that rising levels of green OA will not only trigger toll-access journal cancellations but also increase pressure to convert to gold OA. (Likewise, some OA activists hope for this outcome.)\nThere are two responses to this two-fold fear. The fear of toll-access cancellations disregards the relevant evidence in points 1–8 above. The fear of conversion to gold OA also disregards relevant evidence, such as Ahmed Hindawi’s testimony above, and the testimony of Springer CEO Derk Haank. In 2008 when Springer bought BioMed Central and became the world’s largest OA publisher, Haank said: “[W]e see open access publishing as a sustainable part of STM publishing, and not an ideological crusade.” (Also see chapter 7 on economics.)\nPublishers inexperienced with gold OA needn’t defer to publishers with more experience, but they should at least study them.", "3. Other fields may not behave like physics.\nWe won’t know more until the levels of green OA in other fields approach those in physics.\nIt would definitely help to understand why the experience in physics has gone as it has and how far it might predict the experience in other fields. But so far it’s fair to say that we don’t know all the variables and that publishers who oppose green OA mandates are not among those showing a serious interest in them. When publisher lobbyists argue that high-volume green OA will undermine toll-access journal subscriptions, they don’t offer evidence, don’t acknowledge the countervailing evidence from physics, don’t rebut the evidence from physics, and don’t qualify their own conclusions in light of it. They would act more like scientific publishers if they acknowledged the evidence from physics and then argued, as well as they could, either that the experience in physics will change or that fields other than physics will have a different experience.\nAn October 2004 editorial in\nThe Lancet", "Some subscription journals have found that OA after an embargo period, even a very short one like two months, actually increases submissions and subscriptions. For example, this was the experience of the American Society for Cell Biology and its journal,\nMolecular Biology of the Cell.\nMedknow saw its submissions and subscriptions increase when it began offering unembargoed full-text editions of its journals alongside its toll-access print journals.\n \n Hindawi Publishing saw its submissions rise steadily after it converted all its peer-reviewed journals to OA in 2007. Looking back on several years of rapidly growing submissions, company founder and CEO Ahmed Hindawi said in January 2010, “It is clear now more than ever that our open access conversion . . . was the best management decision we have taken. . . .”\n9. Some publishers fear that green OA will increase pressure to convert to gold OA." ], [ "The three most important factors used to determine journals for cancellation, in declining order of importance, are that the faculty no longer require it . . . , usage and price. Next, availability of the content via open access (OA) archives and availability via aggregators were ranked equal fourth, but some way behind the first three factors. The journal’s impact factor and availability via delayed OA were ranked relatively unimportant. . . . With regard to OA archives, there was a great deal of support for the idea that they would not directly impact journal subscriptions.\nIn short, toll-access journals have more to fear from their own price increases than from rising levels of green OA. Publishers who keep raising their prices aggravate the access problem for researchers and aggravate the sustainability problem for themselves. If the same publishers blame green OA and lobby against green OA policies, then they obstruct the solution for researchers and do very little to improve their own sustainability.\n8. OA may increase submissions and subscriptions.", "The Association of College and Research Libraries addressed subscription incentives in a 2004 open letter on the NIH policy: “We wish to emphasize, above all, that academic libraries will not cancel journal subscriptions as a result of this plan. . . . Even if libraries wished to consider the availability of NIH-funded articles when making journal cancellation decisions, they would have no reasonable way of determining what articles in specific journals would become openly accessible after the embargo period.”\n7. Some studies bear on the question of whether increased OA archiving will increase journal cancellations.", "The purpose of these two policy provisions is precisely to protect publishers against cancellations. They are deliberate concessions to publishers, adopted voluntarily by funding agencies as compromises with the public interest in immediate OA to the best editions. When we put the two together, we see that funder-mandated OA copies of peer-reviewed manuscripts won’t compete with toll-access copies of the published editions for six to twelve months, and there will never be OA copies of the more desirable published editions unless publishers voluntarily allow them. Publishers retain life-of-copyright exclusivity on the published editions. Even if OA archiving does eventually erode subscriptions outside physics, publishers have longer and better protection from these effects than their lobbyists ever acknowledge.\nThird, funder OA mandates only apply to research articles, not to the many other kinds of content published in scholarly journals, such as letters, editorials, review articles, book reviews, announcements, news, conference information, and so on. Libraries wanting to provide access to these other kinds of content will still have an incentive to subscribe.", "Hence, publishers who worry about the effect of university OA policies on subscriptions have the remedy in their own hands. Faculty needn’t paternalize publishers by voting down OA policies when publishers can protect themselves whenever they see the need to do so. The experience at Harvard since February 2008 is that very few publishers see the need to do so. Fewer than a handful systematically require waivers from Harvard authors.\nThis chapter, then, focuses on the strongest green OA mandates at funding agencies, like the Wellcome Trust and NIH, which allow no opt-outs for publishers or grantees. Will strong green OA policies of that kind trigger cancellations of toll-access journals? Here are 10 parts of any complete answer.\n1. Nobody knows yet how green OA policies will affect journal subscriptions.\nRising levels of green OA may trigger toll-access journal cancellations, or they may not. So far they haven’t.\n2. The evidence from physics is the most relevant.", "If we’re only interested in the effect of rising levels of green OA on toll-access publishers, then we can stop at points 1–9. But if we’re interested in good policy, then we must add one more factor: Even if green OA does eventually threaten toll-access journal subscriptions, green OA policies are still justified.\nI won’t elaborate this point here, since it takes us beyond the topic of casualties to the full case for OA, which is spread throughout the rest of the book. But here’s one way to put the debate in perspective: There are good reasons to want to know whether rising levels of green OA will trigger cancellations of toll-access journals, and perhaps even to modify our policies in light of what we learn. But there are no good reasons to put the thriving of incumbent toll-access journals and publishers ahead of the thriving of research itself.", "When users know about OA and toll-access editions of the same article, many will prefer to click through to the OA edition, either because they aren’t affiliated with a subscribing institution or because authentication is a hassle. Moreover, when users find an OA edition, most stop looking. But decreased downloads are not the same thing as decreased or canceled subscriptions.\nMoreover, decreased downloads of toll-access editions from publisher web sites are not the same thing as decreased downloads overall. No one suggests that green OA leads to decreased overall downloads, that is, fewer readers and less reading. On the contrary, the same evidence suggesting that OA increases citation impact also suggests that it increases readers and reading.\n5. Most publishers voluntarily permit green OA.", "Fourth, funder OA mandates only apply to articles arising from research funded by the mandating agency. Very few journals publish nothing but articles from a single funder, or even from a set of funders all of whom have OA mandates. Libraries wanting to provide access to all the research articles in a journal, regardless of the sources of funding, will still have an incentive to subscribe. This incentive will weaken as more and more funders adopt OA mandates, but we’re very far from universal funder mandates. As we get closer, unfunded research will still fall outside this category and the three other incentives above will still stand.", "Some subscription journals have found that OA after an embargo period, even a very short one like two months, actually increases submissions and subscriptions. For example, this was the experience of the American Society for Cell Biology and its journal,\nMolecular Biology of the Cell.\nMedknow saw its submissions and subscriptions increase when it began offering unembargoed full-text editions of its journals alongside its toll-access print journals.\n \n Hindawi Publishing saw its submissions rise steadily after it converted all its peer-reviewed journals to OA in 2007. Looking back on several years of rapidly growing submissions, company founder and CEO Ahmed Hindawi said in January 2010, “It is clear now more than ever that our open access conversion . . . was the best management decision we have taken. . . .”\n9. Some publishers fear that green OA will increase pressure to convert to gold OA.", "Even the strongest no-loophole, no-waiver policies preserve incentives to maintain toll-access journal subscriptions.\nFirst, all funder OA mandates include an embargo period to protect publishers. For example, the OA mandates at the Research Councils UK allow an embargo of up to six months after publication. The NIH allows an embargo of up to twelve months. Libraries wanting to provide immediate access will still have an incentive to subscribe.\nSecond, all funder OA mandates apply to the final version of the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript, not to the published version. If the journal provides copyediting after peer review, then the policies do not apply to the copyedited version, let alone to the formatted, paginated published edition. Libraries wanting to provide access to copyedited published editions will still have an incentive to subscribe.", "Physics has the highest levels and longest history of green OA. The evidence from physics to date is that high levels of green OA don’t cause journal cancellations. On the contrary, the relationship between arXiv (the OA repository for physics) and toll-access physics journals is more symbiotic than antagonistic.\nPhysicists have been self-archiving since 1991, far longer than in any other field. In some subfields, such as particle physics, the rate of OA archiving approaches 100 percent, far higher than in any other field. If high-volume green OA caused journal cancellations, we’d see the effect first in physics. But it hasn’t happened. Two leading publishers of physics journals, the American Physical Society (APS) and Institute of Physics (IOP), have publicly acknowledged that they’ve seen no cancellations attributable to OA archiving. In fact, the APS and IOP have not only made peace with arXiv but now accept submissions from it and even host their own mirrors of it.", "Supplementing the natural experiments of green OA mandates are the natural experiments of publishers who voluntarily permit green OA. The Nature Publishing Group is more conservative than most toll-access publishers by requiring a six-month embargo on green OA, but more progressive than most by positively encouraging green OA. NPG reported the latest results of its multidisciplinary natural experiment in January 2011: “We have, to date, found author self-archiving compatible with subscription business models, and so we have been actively encouraging self-archiving since 2005.”\nThis or something similar to it must be the experience of the majority of toll-access publishers who voluntarily permit green OA. Even if they don’t actively encourage green OA, most permit it without embargo. If they found that it triggered cancellations, they would stop.\n6. Green OA mandates leave standing at least four library incentives to maintain their subscriptions to toll-access journals.", "(an Elsevier journal) called on the publishing lobby to do better. “[A]s editors of a journal that publishes research funded by the NIH, we disagree with [Association of American Publishers President Patricia Schroeder’s] central claim. Widening access to research [through green OA mandates] is unlikely to bring the edifice of scientific publishing crashing down. Schroeder provides no evidence that it would do so; she merely asserts the threat. This style of rebuttal will not do. . . .”\nFor more than eight years, green OA mandates have applied to research in many fields outside physics. These mandates are natural experiments and we’re still monitoring their effects. At Congressional hearings in 2008 and 2010, legislators asked publishers directly whether green OA was triggering cancellations. In both cases, publishers pointed to decreased downloads but not to increased cancellations.\n4. There is evidence that green OA decreases downloads from publishers’ web sites.", "Open Access: Casualties\nWill a general shift to OA leave casualties?\n \n For example, will rising levels of green OA trigger cancellations of toll-access journals?\nThis question matters for those publishers (not all publishers) who fear the answer is yes and for those activists (not all activists) who hope the answer is yes. So far, unfortunately, it doesn’t have a simple yes-or-no answer, and most discussions replace evidence with fearful or hopeful predictions.\nThe primary drivers of green OA are policies at universities and funding agencies. Remember, all university policies allow publishers to protect themselves at will. (See section 4.1 on policies.) For example, universities with loophole or deposit mandates will not provide green OA when publishers do not allow it. Universities with Harvard-style rights-retention mandates will not provide OA when authors obtain waivers or when publishers require authors to obtain waivers as a condition of publication.", "In a 2006 study from the Publishing Research Consortium (PRC), Chris Beckett and Simon Inger asked 400 librarians about the relative weight of different factors in their decisions to cancel subscriptions. Other things being equal, the librarians preferred free content to priced content and short embargoes to longer ones. Publishers interpret this to mean that the rise of OA archiving will cause cancellations. The chief flaw with the study is its artificiality. For example, the survey did not ask about specific journals by name but only about resources with abstractly stipulated levels of quality. It also disregarded faculty input on cancellation decisions when all librarians acknowledge that faculty input is decisive. The result was a study of hypothetical preferences, not actual cancellation decisions.\nA less hypothetical study was commissioned by publishers themselves in the same year. From the summary:", "Some publishers fear that rising levels of green OA will not only trigger toll-access journal cancellations but also increase pressure to convert to gold OA. (Likewise, some OA activists hope for this outcome.)\nThere are two responses to this two-fold fear. The fear of toll-access cancellations disregards the relevant evidence in points 1–8 above. The fear of conversion to gold OA also disregards relevant evidence, such as Ahmed Hindawi’s testimony above, and the testimony of Springer CEO Derk Haank. In 2008 when Springer bought BioMed Central and became the world’s largest OA publisher, Haank said: “[W]e see open access publishing as a sustainable part of STM publishing, and not an ideological crusade.” (Also see chapter 7 on economics.)\nPublishers inexperienced with gold OA needn’t defer to publishers with more experience, but they should at least study them.", "3. Other fields may not behave like physics.\nWe won’t know more until the levels of green OA in other fields approach those in physics.\nIt would definitely help to understand why the experience in physics has gone as it has and how far it might predict the experience in other fields. But so far it’s fair to say that we don’t know all the variables and that publishers who oppose green OA mandates are not among those showing a serious interest in them. When publisher lobbyists argue that high-volume green OA will undermine toll-access journal subscriptions, they don’t offer evidence, don’t acknowledge the countervailing evidence from physics, don’t rebut the evidence from physics, and don’t qualify their own conclusions in light of it. They would act more like scientific publishers if they acknowledged the evidence from physics and then argued, as well as they could, either that the experience in physics will change or that fields other than physics will have a different experience.\nAn October 2004 editorial in\nThe Lancet", "In fact, OA publishing might be more sustainable than TA publishing, as toll-access prices and the volume of research both grow faster than library budgets. (See section 2.1 on problems.) If publishers acknowledge that gold OA can be sustainable, and even profitable, and merely wish to avoid making lower margins than they make today, then their objection takes on a very different color. They’re not at risk of insolvency, just reduced profits, and they’re not asserting a need for self-protection, just an entitlement to current levels of profit. There’s no reason for public funding agencies acting in the public interest, or private funders acting for charitable purposes, to compromise their missions in order to satisfy that sense of publisher entitlement.\n10. Green OA policies are justified even if they do create risks for toll-access journals." ] ]
test	63867	[ "How many men started the trip on the captain's ship?", "What happened to the captain's fortune?", "What shape best describes the path that space ships customarily took from the inner solar system to the Jovian planets?", "How is the metal sample from the derelict ship that the captain tests turned into gold? ", "Which of these phrases best captures the moral of this story?", "What would happen to the derelict space ship if the Martian Maid's weapons were fired at it?", "Which of the technologies described in this story most clearly mark the story as being published in the first half of the twentieth century?", "Why did the crew of the Martian Maid carry snow on their trip?", "What does the author suggest by repeatedly referring to the \"glittering whorls\" on the surface of the derelict ship, and on the chunks of hull brought to him?" ]	[ [ "The ship had automatic controls, so only the captain and Spinelli were needed.", "The ship left Mars with fourteen men aboard.", "There were six men on the ship.", "Five men were on the ship." ], [ "He was just bragging about money he never really had.", "The salvage ship's crew outran the Martian Maid and stole the gold.", "The crew on the salvaged ship died and the treasure drifted out of reach.", "He went bankrupt from health care costs." ], [ "They travelled a carefully marked and maintained route through the asteroid belt.", "The path was approximately a half-circle rising out of the plane that all the planets travelled in.", "The space ships went in a straight line through space from Mars to where Jupiter would be when they had travelled the distance between the two planets.", "They went around the sun in a slingshot maneuver so that they could move faster than the outer planets and get there sooner." ], [ "The metal is draining energy from the captain's body to turn itself into gold.", "Cosmic rays caused the piece of metal to turn to gold.", "The metal oxidized when it was exposed to the atmosphere inside the ship.", "The chemicals that the captain used to test the piece of metal turned it into gold." ], [ "Trust but verify.", "A stitch in time saves nine.", "There's no free lunch.", "The crew that works together, stays together." ], [ "Nothing would happen to the ship, since the Martian Maid's weapons only affect living organisms.", "What was left of the derelict ship would explode and be unrecoverable.", "The weapons would break the ship down into manageable pieces that could be more easily brought aboard the Martian Maid for storage.", "The derelict ship would be pushed away from the Martian Maid by the force of the weapons, and the Maid would not be able to catch up." ], [ "The reference to atomic drives for space ships.", "The supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret.", "The poor health care received by the captain in old age.", "The manual calculation of the abandoned ship's orbit." ], [ "Snow was a slang term for drugs that they intended to sell at their destination.", "The crew intended to stop at Venus, where snow was a popular and special treat for colonists.", "Snow was necessary for the operation of the supersonic projectors.", "The snow was kept in an unheated section of the ship as ballast." ], [ "This is the author's poetic way of describing a reflection.", "The author is referring to the vibrations of atoms.", "The author suggests the possibility that the ship itself was alive in some unknown, alien way.", "The author indicates that the hull was made of a particularly beautiful silver metal before it changed to gold." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them\n so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for\n high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski.\n There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul\n for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different.\n That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe\n all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe.\n There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or\n anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that\n pushes the frontier outward.", "For a few moments I pondered the advisability of making good my threat\n to clap Spinelli into irons, but I decided against it. In the first\n place I couldn't prove he had told Zaleski about the gold and in the\n second place I needed Spinelli to help run the Maid.\n\n\n I felt that the Third Officer and Zaleski were planning something, and\n I was just as sure that Spinelli was watching Zaleski to see to it that\n there was no double-cross.\n\n\n I figured that I could handle the Third Officer alone so I assigned the\n rest, Marvin and Chelly, to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk.\n That way Zaleski would be outnumbered if he tried to skip with the\n treasure ship. But, of course, I couldn't risk telling them that they\n were to be handling a vessel practically made of gold.", "I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on\n the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n\n\n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n\n\n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize\n crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n\n\n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a\n first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would\n need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me\n to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me,\n Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n\n\n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning\n slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat\n him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.", "\"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n\n\n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ...\n sir.\"\n\n\n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand\n that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were\n failing.\n\n\n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ...\n WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ...\n CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly,\n in mid-word.\n\n\n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n\n\n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.", "\"We will say nothing to the rest of the crew about the gold, Mister\n Spinelli,\" I said deliberately, \"Or you'll go to Callisto in irons. Is\n that clear?\"\n\n\n \"Aye, sir,\" murmured Spinelli. The black expression had left his face\n and there was a faintly scornful smile playing about his mouth as he\n turned away. I began wondering then what he had in mind. It wasn't like\n him to let it go at that.\n\n\n Suddenly I became conscious of being very tired. My mind wasn't\n functioning quite clearly. And my arm and hand ached painfully. I\n rubbed the fingers to get some life back into them, still wondering\n about Spinelli.\n\n\n Spinelli talked. I saw him murmuring something to big Zaleski, and\n after that there was tension in the air. Distrust.", "And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of\n this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have\n been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\nA slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the\n doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black\n eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table.\n He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me\n that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was\n the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n\n\n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my\n quarters!\"\n\n\n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the\n derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last\n two words.", "I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with\n that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally\n I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had\n set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\nTogether, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw\n of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish\n fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a\n great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid\n followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls\n on automatic.", "But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to\n all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no\n part of the world of men, thick with danger—and horror.\nIf you doubt that—and I can see you do—just look at me. I suppose\n you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story\n of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much\n of an answer.\nI\nwas her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the\n sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are\n greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold.\n They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their", "There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds\n uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ...\n you think it came from the\nstars\n, Captain?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n\n\n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The\n first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon\n every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be\n worth money ... lots of money.\n\n\n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n\n\n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth\n plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.", "I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching\n the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last\n flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either.\n It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night\n that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative\n security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt\n into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.", "Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six\n inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were\n nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a\n man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that\n it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and\n keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance\n against Zaleski.\n\n\n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to\n blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from\n the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come\n between him and that mountain of gold.", "Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski\n told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard\n for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty\n of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand\n tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked.\n Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up\n a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't\n seemed likely before, but now—\n\n\n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n\n\n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well\n within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of\n messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid\n eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken\n the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.", "\"Like hell they are!\" I snapped irritably, \"Something's gone wrong....\"\n\n\n \"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!\"\n\n\n I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. \"Then you did disobey\n my orders. You told him about the gold!\"\n\n\n \"Sure I did,\" he sneered. \"Did you expect me to shut up and let you\n land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share?\nI\nfound her, and\n she's mine!\"\n\n\n I fought to control my temper and said: \"Let's see what's going on in\n her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli.\"\n\n\n Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on\n the image of the starship on the viewplate.\n\n\n A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.", "He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in\n the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though\n the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n\n\n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the\n corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in\n sight.\n\n\n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They\n won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing\n console of the supersonic rifle.\n\n\n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n\n\n \"\nSpinelli!\n\"\n\n\n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him\n away from the panel.\n\n\n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.", "There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that\n Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one\n of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All\n this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n\n\n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope\n I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a\n distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass,\n but I could see that the hulk was big—bigger than any ship I'd ever\n seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my\n slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the\n derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something\n about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer,\n and showed him my figures.\n\n\n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to\n you?\"", "\"You'll hang for mutiny, Spinelli!\" I said.\nHe spat out a foul name and leaped for me. I side-stepped his charge\n and brought my joined fists down hard on the back of his neck. He\n stumbled against the bulkhead and his eyes were glazed. He charged\n again, roaring. I stepped aside and smashed him in the mouth with my\n right fist, then crossing with an open-handed left to the throat. He\n staggered, spun and came for me again. I sank a hard left into his\n stomach and nailed him on the point of the jaw with a right from my\n shoe-tops. He straightened up and sprawled heavily to the deck, still\n trying to get at me. I aimed a hard kick at his temple and let it go.\n My metal shod boot caught him squarely and he rolled over on his face\n and lay still.", "The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed\n by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared\n a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth\n millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and\n crossed to her.\n\n\n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their\n faces.\n\n\n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit\n her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives.\n She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage\n compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n\n\n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was\n nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull\n alone was left.", "Cohn's dark eyes lit up as they always did when he worked with figures.\n It didn't take him long to check me. \"The math is quite correct,\n Captain,\" he said. I could see that he hadn't missed the inference of\n those figures on the chart.\n\n\n \"Assemble the ship's company, Mister Cohn,\" I ordered.\n\n\n The assembly horn sounded throughout the Maid and I could feel the tug\n of the automatics taking over as the crew left their stations. Soon\n they were assembled in Control.\n\n\n \"You have all heard about Mister Spinelli's find,\" I said, \"I have\n computed the orbit and inspected the object through the glass. It seems\n to be a spacer ... either abandoned or in distress....\" Reaching into\n the book rack above my desk I took down a copy of the Foundation's\nSpace Regulations\nand opened it to the section concerning salvage.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nGold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go\n hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course,\n there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get\n any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain,\n sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great\n treasure....\n\n\n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis\n seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans\n in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit.\n We're still a greedy lot....", "He didn't say a thing, but his big shoulders hunched angrily and\n he moved across the deck toward me, his hands opening and closing\n spasmodically. His eyes were wild with rage and avarice." ], [ "And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of\n this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have\n been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\nA slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the\n doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black\n eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table.\n He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me\n that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was\n the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n\n\n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my\n quarters!\"\n\n\n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the\n derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last\n two words.", "\"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n\n\n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ...\n sir.\"\n\n\n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand\n that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were\n failing.\n\n\n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ...\n WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ...\n CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly,\n in mid-word.\n\n\n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n\n\n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.", "For a few moments I pondered the advisability of making good my threat\n to clap Spinelli into irons, but I decided against it. In the first\n place I couldn't prove he had told Zaleski about the gold and in the\n second place I needed Spinelli to help run the Maid.\n\n\n I felt that the Third Officer and Zaleski were planning something, and\n I was just as sure that Spinelli was watching Zaleski to see to it that\n there was no double-cross.\n\n\n I figured that I could handle the Third Officer alone so I assigned the\n rest, Marvin and Chelly, to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk.\n That way Zaleski would be outnumbered if he tried to skip with the\n treasure ship. But, of course, I couldn't risk telling them that they\n were to be handling a vessel practically made of gold.", "\"We will say nothing to the rest of the crew about the gold, Mister\n Spinelli,\" I said deliberately, \"Or you'll go to Callisto in irons. Is\n that clear?\"\n\n\n \"Aye, sir,\" murmured Spinelli. The black expression had left his face\n and there was a faintly scornful smile playing about his mouth as he\n turned away. I began wondering then what he had in mind. It wasn't like\n him to let it go at that.\n\n\n Suddenly I became conscious of being very tired. My mind wasn't\n functioning quite clearly. And my arm and hand ached painfully. I\n rubbed the fingers to get some life back into them, still wondering\n about Spinelli.\n\n\n Spinelli talked. I saw him murmuring something to big Zaleski, and\n after that there was tension in the air. Distrust.", "He didn't say a thing, but his big shoulders hunched angrily and\n he moved across the deck toward me, his hands opening and closing\n spasmodically. His eyes were wild with rage and avarice.", "I'm a queer one to be saying these things, but then, who has more\n right? Look at me. My hair is gray and my face ... my face is a mask.\n The flesh hangs on my bones like a yellow cloth on a rickety frame. I\n am old, old. And I wait here on my hospital cot—wait for the weight of\n years I never lived to drag me under and let me forget the awful things\n my eyes have seen.\n\n\n I'm poor, too, or else I wouldn't be here in this place of dying for\n old spacemen. I haven't a dime except for the pittance the Holcomb\n Foundation calls a spaceman's pension. Yet I had millions in my hands.\n Treasure beyond your wildest dreams! Cursed treasure....", "I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on\n the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n\n\n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n\n\n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize\n crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n\n\n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a\n first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would\n need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me\n to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me,\n Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n\n\n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning\n slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat\n him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.", "\"Like hell they are!\" I snapped irritably, \"Something's gone wrong....\"\n\n\n \"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!\"\n\n\n I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. \"Then you did disobey\n my orders. You told him about the gold!\"\n\n\n \"Sure I did,\" he sneered. \"Did you expect me to shut up and let you\n land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share?\nI\nfound her, and\n she's mine!\"\n\n\n I fought to control my temper and said: \"Let's see what's going on in\n her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli.\"\n\n\n Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on\n the image of the starship on the viewplate.\n\n\n A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.", "CAPTAIN MIDAS\nBy ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\nThe captain of the Martian Maid stared avidly at\n\n the torn derelict floating against the velvet void.\n\n Here was treasure beyond his wildest dreams! How\n\n could he know his dreams should have been nightmares?\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1949.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that", "Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski\n told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard\n for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty\n of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand\n tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked.\n Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up\n a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't\n seemed likely before, but now—\n\n\n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n\n\n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well\n within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of\n messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid\n eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken\n the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.", "There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds\n uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ...\n you think it came from the\nstars\n, Captain?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n\n\n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The\n first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon\n every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be\n worth money ... lots of money.\n\n\n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n\n\n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth\n plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.", "I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with\n that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally\n I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had\n set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\nTogether, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw\n of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish\n fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a\n great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid\n followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls\n on automatic.", "Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and\n ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would\n have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n\n\n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if\n I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my\n hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined\n to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no\n telling what can happen to a man in space....\n\n\n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through\n garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal.\n Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours\n later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an\n animal suspicion.\n\n\n \"They're faking!\"", "The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed\n by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared\n a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth\n millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and\n crossed to her.\n\n\n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their\n faces.\n\n\n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit\n her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives.\n She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage\n compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n\n\n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was\n nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull\n alone was left.", "Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six\n inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were\n nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a\n man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that\n it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and\n keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance\n against Zaleski.\n\n\n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to\n blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from\n the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come\n between him and that mountain of gold.", "But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to\n all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no\n part of the world of men, thick with danger—and horror.\nIf you doubt that—and I can see you do—just look at me. I suppose\n you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story\n of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much\n of an answer.\nI\nwas her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the\n sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are\n greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold.\n They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their", "He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in\n the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though\n the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n\n\n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the\n corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in\n sight.\n\n\n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They\n won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing\n console of the supersonic rifle.\n\n\n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n\n\n \"\nSpinelli!\n\"\n\n\n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him\n away from the panel.\n\n\n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.", "There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that\n Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one\n of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All\n this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n\n\n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope\n I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a\n distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass,\n but I could see that the hulk was big—bigger than any ship I'd ever\n seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my\n slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the\n derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something\n about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer,\n and showed him my figures.\n\n\n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to\n you?\"", "My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them\n so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for\n high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski.\n There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul\n for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different.\n That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe\n all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe.\n There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or\n anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that\n pushes the frontier outward.", "Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps\n yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip\n that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We\n would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond\n the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know\n what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she\n was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ...\n but of what?\n\n\n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would\n have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better\n equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by\n men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank.\n Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and\n brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things\n figured." ], [ "In those days the asteroid belt was\nthe\nprimary danger and menace to\n astrogation. For a long while it held men back from deep space, but as\n fuels improved a few ships were sent out over the top. A few million\n miles up out of the ecliptic plane brings you to a region of space\n that's pretty thinly strewn with asteroids, and that's the way we used\n to make the flight between the outer systems and the EMV Triangle. It\n took a long while for hyperdrives to be developed and of course atomics\n never panned out because of the weight problem.", "So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High\n and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval\n blackness is where we found the derelict.\nI didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported\n it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation\n ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of\n developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole\n responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never\n in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial\n intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just\n assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of\n unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.", "It was readily apparent to all of us that she had never been built for\n inter-planetary flight. She was a starship. Origin unknown. An aura of\n mystery surrounded her like a shroud, protecting the world that gave\n her birth mutely but effectively. The distance she must have come was\n unthinkable. And the time it had taken...? Aeons. Millennia. For she\n was drifting, dead in space, slowly spinning end over end as she swung\n about Sol in a hyperbolic orbit that would soon take her out and away\n again into the inter-stellar deeps.", "It wasn't too long ago that I lifted the Maid off Solis Lacus on\n that last flight. Not many of you will remember her class of ship,\n so many advances have been made in the last few years. The Maid was\n two hundred feet from tip to tail, and as sleek a spacer as ever came\n out of the Foundation Yards. Chemical fueled, she was nothing at all\n like the spherical hyperdrives we see today. She was armed, too. The\n Foundation still thought of space as a possible stamping ground for\n alien creatures though no evidence of any extra-terrestrial life had\n ever been found ... then.", "I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with\n that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally\n I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had\n set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\nTogether, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw\n of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish\n fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a\n great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid\n followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls\n on automatic.", "I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching\n the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last\n flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either.\n It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night\n that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative\n security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt\n into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.", "My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them\n so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for\n high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski.\n There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul\n for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different.\n That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe\n all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe.\n There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or\n anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that\n pushes the frontier outward.", "\"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary\n Astrogation and Commerce,\" I read, \"Any vessel or part of vessel found\n in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space\n not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars\n Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the\n vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases\n as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily\n ascertained....\" I looked up and closed the book. \"Simply stated, that\n means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to\n claim it as salvage.\"\n\n\n \"Unless it already belongs to someone?\" asked Spinelli.\n\n\n \"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger\n of that,\" I replied quietly. \"My figures show that hulk out there came\n in from the direction of Coma Berenices....\"", "There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that\n Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one\n of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All\n this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n\n\n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope\n I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a\n distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass,\n but I could see that the hulk was big—bigger than any ship I'd ever\n seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my\n slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the\n derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something\n about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer,\n and showed him my figures.\n\n\n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to\n you?\"", "Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six\n inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were\n nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a\n man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that\n it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and\n keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance\n against Zaleski.\n\n\n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to\n blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from\n the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come\n between him and that mountain of gold.", "I stood there, watching the lights of Canalopolis in the distance. For\n just a moment I was ... well, touched. It looked beautiful and unreal\n under the racing moons. The lights of the gin mills and houses made a\n sparkling filigree pattern on the dark waters of the ancient canal, and\n the moons cast their shifting shadows across the silted banks. I was\n too far away to see the space-fevered bums and smell the shanties, and\n for a little while I felt the wonder of standing on the soil of a world\n that man had made his own with his rapacity and his sheer guts and\n gimme.\n\n\n I thought of our half empty cargo hold and the sweet payload we would\n pick up on Callisto. And I counted the extra cash my packets of snow\n would bring from those lonely men up there on the barren moonlets of\n the outer Systems. There were plenty of cargoes carried on the Maid\n that the Holcomb Foundation snoopers never heard about, you can be sure\n of that.", "Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps\n yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip\n that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We\n would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond\n the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know\n what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she\n was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ...\n but of what?\n\n\n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would\n have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better\n equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by\n men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank.\n Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and\n brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things\n figured.", "\"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli,\" I said sharply.\n \"Certainly!\"\nThe first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was\n her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained\n such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand\n feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable\n alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully\n in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with\n something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff\n were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some\n strange and alien way.", "He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples\n of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this\n stuff....\"\n\n\n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The\n carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and\n Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her\n down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check\n those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When\n it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n\n\n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a\n metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff\n is worth anything....\"\n\n\n The metal was heavy—too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship\n construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that\n distant world where this metal was made?", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nGold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go\n hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course,\n there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get\n any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain,\n sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great\n treasure....\n\n\n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis\n seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans\n in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit.\n We're still a greedy lot....", "But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to\n all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no\n part of the world of men, thick with danger—and horror.\nIf you doubt that—and I can see you do—just look at me. I suppose\n you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story\n of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much\n of an answer.\nI\nwas her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the\n sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are\n greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold.\n They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their", "The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed\n by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared\n a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth\n millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and\n crossed to her.\n\n\n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their\n faces.\n\n\n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit\n her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives.\n She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage\n compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n\n\n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was\n nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull\n alone was left.", "He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in\n the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though\n the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n\n\n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the\n corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in\n sight.\n\n\n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They\n won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing\n console of the supersonic rifle.\n\n\n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n\n\n \"\nSpinelli!\n\"\n\n\n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him\n away from the panel.\n\n\n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.", "You smile. You are thinking that I'm just an old man, beached\n earthside, spinning tall tales to impress the youngsters. Maybe,\n thinking about the kind of spacemen my generation produced, you have\n the idea that if ever we'd so much as laid a hand on anything of value\n out in space we'd not let go until Hell froze over! Well, you're\n right about that. We didn't seek the spaceways for the advancement of\n civilization or any of that Foundation bushwah, you can be certain of\n that. We did it for\nus\n... for Number One. That's the kind of men we\n were, and we were proud of it. We hung onto what we found because the\n risks were high and we were entitled to keep what we could out there.", "There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds\n uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ...\n you think it came from the\nstars\n, Captain?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n\n\n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The\n first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon\n every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be\n worth money ... lots of money.\n\n\n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n\n\n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth\n plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me." ], [ "For a long while I just sat and stared. Then I began testing, trying\n all the while to quiet the trembling of my hands. I weighed it on a\n balance. I tested it with acids. It had changed unquestionably. It\n was no longer the same as when I had carried it into my quarters. The\n whorls of force were gone. It was no longer alive with a questing\n vibrancy ... it was inert, stable. From somewhere, somehow, it had\n drawn the energy necessary for transmutation. The unknown metal—the\n stuff of which that whole mammoth spaceship from the stars was\n built—was now....\nGold!\nI scarcely dared believe it, but there it was staring at me from my\n table-top.\nGold!\nI searched my mind for an explanation. Contra-terrene matter, perhaps,\n from some distant island universe where matter reacted differently ...\n drawing energy from somewhere, the energy it needed to find stability\n in its new environment. Stability as a terrene element—wonderfully,\n miraculously gold!", "And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of\n this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have\n been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\nA slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the\n doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black\n eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table.\n He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me\n that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was\n the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n\n\n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my\n quarters!\"\n\n\n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the\n derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last\n two words.", "He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples\n of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this\n stuff....\"\n\n\n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The\n carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and\n Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her\n down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check\n those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When\n it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n\n\n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a\n metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff\n is worth anything....\"\n\n\n The metal was heavy—too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship\n construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that\n distant world where this metal was made?", "Under the bright fluorescent over my work-table, the chunks of metal\n torn from a random bulkhead of the starship gleamed like pale silver;\n those strange little whorls that I had noticed on the outer hull were\n there too, like tiny magnetic lines of force, making the surface of\n the metal seem to dance. I held the stuff in my bare hand.\nIt had a\n yellowish tinge, and it was heavier\n....\n\n\n Even as I watched, the metal grew yellower, and the hand that held\n it grew bone weary, little tongues of fatigue licking up my forearm.\n Suddenly terrified, I dropped the chunk as though it were white hot. It\n struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, a rich yellow lump of\n metallic lustre.", "Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and\n ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would\n have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n\n\n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if\n I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my\n hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined\n to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no\n telling what can happen to a man in space....\n\n\n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through\n garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal.\n Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours\n later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an\n animal suspicion.\n\n\n \"They're faking!\"", "There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds\n uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ...\n you think it came from the\nstars\n, Captain?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n\n\n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The\n first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon\n every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be\n worth money ... lots of money.\n\n\n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n\n\n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth\n plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.", "\"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli,\" I said sharply.\n \"Certainly!\"\nThe first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was\n her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained\n such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand\n feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable\n alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully\n in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with\n something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff\n were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some\n strange and alien way.", "Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski\n told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard\n for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty\n of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand\n tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked.\n Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up\n a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't\n seemed likely before, but now—\n\n\n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n\n\n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well\n within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of\n messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid\n eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken\n the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.", "CAPTAIN MIDAS\nBy ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\nThe captain of the Martian Maid stared avidly at\n\n the torn derelict floating against the velvet void.\n\n Here was treasure beyond his wildest dreams! How\n\n could he know his dreams should have been nightmares?\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1949.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that", "\"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n\n\n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ...\n sir.\"\n\n\n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand\n that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were\n failing.\n\n\n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ...\n WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ...\n CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly,\n in mid-word.\n\n\n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n\n\n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.", "I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on\n the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n\n\n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n\n\n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize\n crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n\n\n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a\n first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would\n need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me\n to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me,\n Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n\n\n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning\n slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat\n him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.", "\"Like hell they are!\" I snapped irritably, \"Something's gone wrong....\"\n\n\n \"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!\"\n\n\n I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. \"Then you did disobey\n my orders. You told him about the gold!\"\n\n\n \"Sure I did,\" he sneered. \"Did you expect me to shut up and let you\n land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share?\nI\nfound her, and\n she's mine!\"\n\n\n I fought to control my temper and said: \"Let's see what's going on in\n her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli.\"\n\n\n Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on\n the image of the starship on the viewplate.\n\n\n A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.", "Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six\n inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were\n nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a\n man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that\n it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and\n keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance\n against Zaleski.\n\n\n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to\n blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from\n the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come\n between him and that mountain of gold.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nGold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go\n hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course,\n there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get\n any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain,\n sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great\n treasure....\n\n\n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis\n seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans\n in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit.\n We're still a greedy lot....", "Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps\n yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip\n that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We\n would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond\n the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know\n what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she\n was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ...\n but of what?\n\n\n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would\n have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better\n equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by\n men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank.\n Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and\n brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things\n figured.", "\"We will say nothing to the rest of the crew about the gold, Mister\n Spinelli,\" I said deliberately, \"Or you'll go to Callisto in irons. Is\n that clear?\"\n\n\n \"Aye, sir,\" murmured Spinelli. The black expression had left his face\n and there was a faintly scornful smile playing about his mouth as he\n turned away. I began wondering then what he had in mind. It wasn't like\n him to let it go at that.\n\n\n Suddenly I became conscious of being very tired. My mind wasn't\n functioning quite clearly. And my arm and hand ached painfully. I\n rubbed the fingers to get some life back into them, still wondering\n about Spinelli.\n\n\n Spinelli talked. I saw him murmuring something to big Zaleski, and\n after that there was tension in the air. Distrust.", "\"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary\n Astrogation and Commerce,\" I read, \"Any vessel or part of vessel found\n in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space\n not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars\n Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the\n vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases\n as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily\n ascertained....\" I looked up and closed the book. \"Simply stated, that\n means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to\n claim it as salvage.\"\n\n\n \"Unless it already belongs to someone?\" asked Spinelli.\n\n\n \"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger\n of that,\" I replied quietly. \"My figures show that hulk out there came\n in from the direction of Coma Berenices....\"", "But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to\n all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no\n part of the world of men, thick with danger—and horror.\nIf you doubt that—and I can see you do—just look at me. I suppose\n you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story\n of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much\n of an answer.\nI\nwas her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the\n sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are\n greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold.\n They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their", "There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that\n Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one\n of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All\n this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n\n\n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope\n I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a\n distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass,\n but I could see that the hulk was big—bigger than any ship I'd ever\n seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my\n slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the\n derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something\n about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer,\n and showed him my figures.\n\n\n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to\n you?\"", "The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed\n by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared\n a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth\n millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and\n crossed to her.\n\n\n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their\n faces.\n\n\n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit\n her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives.\n She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage\n compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n\n\n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was\n nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull\n alone was left." ], [ "I'm a queer one to be saying these things, but then, who has more\n right? Look at me. My hair is gray and my face ... my face is a mask.\n The flesh hangs on my bones like a yellow cloth on a rickety frame. I\n am old, old. And I wait here on my hospital cot—wait for the weight of\n years I never lived to drag me under and let me forget the awful things\n my eyes have seen.\n\n\n I'm poor, too, or else I wouldn't be here in this place of dying for\n old spacemen. I haven't a dime except for the pittance the Holcomb\n Foundation calls a spaceman's pension. Yet I had millions in my hands.\n Treasure beyond your wildest dreams! Cursed treasure....", "\"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n\n\n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ...\n sir.\"\n\n\n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand\n that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were\n failing.\n\n\n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ...\n WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ...\n CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly,\n in mid-word.\n\n\n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n\n\n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.", "But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to\n all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no\n part of the world of men, thick with danger—and horror.\nIf you doubt that—and I can see you do—just look at me. I suppose\n you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story\n of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much\n of an answer.\nI\nwas her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the\n sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are\n greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold.\n They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nGold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go\n hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course,\n there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get\n any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain,\n sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great\n treasure....\n\n\n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis\n seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans\n in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit.\n We're still a greedy lot....", "My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them\n so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for\n high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski.\n There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul\n for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different.\n That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe\n all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe.\n There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or\n anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that\n pushes the frontier outward.", "He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in\n the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though\n the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n\n\n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the\n corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in\n sight.\n\n\n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They\n won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing\n console of the supersonic rifle.\n\n\n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n\n\n \"\nSpinelli!\n\"\n\n\n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him\n away from the panel.\n\n\n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.", "And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of\n this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have\n been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\nA slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the\n doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black\n eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table.\n He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me\n that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was\n the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n\n\n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my\n quarters!\"\n\n\n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the\n derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last\n two words.", "lives. It's all theirs now. Bought and paid for.", "There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds\n uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ...\n you think it came from the\nstars\n, Captain?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n\n\n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The\n first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon\n every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be\n worth money ... lots of money.\n\n\n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n\n\n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth\n plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.", "\"Like hell they are!\" I snapped irritably, \"Something's gone wrong....\"\n\n\n \"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!\"\n\n\n I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. \"Then you did disobey\n my orders. You told him about the gold!\"\n\n\n \"Sure I did,\" he sneered. \"Did you expect me to shut up and let you\n land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share?\nI\nfound her, and\n she's mine!\"\n\n\n I fought to control my temper and said: \"Let's see what's going on in\n her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli.\"\n\n\n Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on\n the image of the starship on the viewplate.\n\n\n A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.", "Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and\n ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would\n have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n\n\n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if\n I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my\n hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined\n to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no\n telling what can happen to a man in space....\n\n\n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through\n garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal.\n Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours\n later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an\n animal suspicion.\n\n\n \"They're faking!\"", "I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on\n the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n\n\n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n\n\n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize\n crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n\n\n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a\n first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would\n need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me\n to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me,\n Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n\n\n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning\n slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat\n him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.", "\"We will say nothing to the rest of the crew about the gold, Mister\n Spinelli,\" I said deliberately, \"Or you'll go to Callisto in irons. Is\n that clear?\"\n\n\n \"Aye, sir,\" murmured Spinelli. The black expression had left his face\n and there was a faintly scornful smile playing about his mouth as he\n turned away. I began wondering then what he had in mind. It wasn't like\n him to let it go at that.\n\n\n Suddenly I became conscious of being very tired. My mind wasn't\n functioning quite clearly. And my arm and hand ached painfully. I\n rubbed the fingers to get some life back into them, still wondering\n about Spinelli.\n\n\n Spinelli talked. I saw him murmuring something to big Zaleski, and\n after that there was tension in the air. Distrust.", "You smile. You are thinking that I'm just an old man, beached\n earthside, spinning tall tales to impress the youngsters. Maybe,\n thinking about the kind of spacemen my generation produced, you have\n the idea that if ever we'd so much as laid a hand on anything of value\n out in space we'd not let go until Hell froze over! Well, you're\n right about that. We didn't seek the spaceways for the advancement of\n civilization or any of that Foundation bushwah, you can be certain of\n that. We did it for\nus\n... for Number One. That's the kind of men we\n were, and we were proud of it. We hung onto what we found because the\n risks were high and we were entitled to keep what we could out there.", "Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six\n inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were\n nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a\n man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that\n it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and\n keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance\n against Zaleski.\n\n\n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to\n blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from\n the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come\n between him and that mountain of gold.", "He didn't say a thing, but his big shoulders hunched angrily and\n he moved across the deck toward me, his hands opening and closing\n spasmodically. His eyes were wild with rage and avarice.", "Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps\n yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip\n that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We\n would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond\n the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know\n what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she\n was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ...\n but of what?\n\n\n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would\n have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better\n equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by\n men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank.\n Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and\n brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things\n figured.", "\"You'll hang for mutiny, Spinelli!\" I said.\nHe spat out a foul name and leaped for me. I side-stepped his charge\n and brought my joined fists down hard on the back of his neck. He\n stumbled against the bulkhead and his eyes were glazed. He charged\n again, roaring. I stepped aside and smashed him in the mouth with my\n right fist, then crossing with an open-handed left to the throat. He\n staggered, spun and came for me again. I sank a hard left into his\n stomach and nailed him on the point of the jaw with a right from my\n shoe-tops. He straightened up and sprawled heavily to the deck, still\n trying to get at me. I aimed a hard kick at his temple and let it go.\n My metal shod boot caught him squarely and he rolled over on his face\n and lay still.", "I stood there, watching the lights of Canalopolis in the distance. For\n just a moment I was ... well, touched. It looked beautiful and unreal\n under the racing moons. The lights of the gin mills and houses made a\n sparkling filigree pattern on the dark waters of the ancient canal, and\n the moons cast their shifting shadows across the silted banks. I was\n too far away to see the space-fevered bums and smell the shanties, and\n for a little while I felt the wonder of standing on the soil of a world\n that man had made his own with his rapacity and his sheer guts and\n gimme.\n\n\n I thought of our half empty cargo hold and the sweet payload we would\n pick up on Callisto. And I counted the extra cash my packets of snow\n would bring from those lonely men up there on the barren moonlets of\n the outer Systems. There were plenty of cargoes carried on the Maid\n that the Holcomb Foundation snoopers never heard about, you can be sure\n of that.", "Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski\n told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard\n for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty\n of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand\n tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked.\n Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up\n a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't\n seemed likely before, but now—\n\n\n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n\n\n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well\n within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of\n messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid\n eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken\n the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators." ], [ "Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six\n inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were\n nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a\n man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that\n it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and\n keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance\n against Zaleski.\n\n\n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to\n blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from\n the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come\n between him and that mountain of gold.", "There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that\n Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one\n of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All\n this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n\n\n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope\n I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a\n distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass,\n but I could see that the hulk was big—bigger than any ship I'd ever\n seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my\n slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the\n derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something\n about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer,\n and showed him my figures.\n\n\n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to\n you?\"", "So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High\n and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval\n blackness is where we found the derelict.\nI didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported\n it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation\n ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of\n developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole\n responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never\n in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial\n intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just\n assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of\n unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.", "The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed\n by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared\n a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth\n millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and\n crossed to her.\n\n\n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their\n faces.\n\n\n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit\n her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives.\n She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage\n compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n\n\n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was\n nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull\n alone was left.", "I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with\n that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally\n I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had\n set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\nTogether, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw\n of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish\n fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a\n great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid\n followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls\n on automatic.", "He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in\n the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though\n the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n\n\n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the\n corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in\n sight.\n\n\n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They\n won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing\n console of the supersonic rifle.\n\n\n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n\n\n \"\nSpinelli!\n\"\n\n\n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him\n away from the panel.\n\n\n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.", "\"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary\n Astrogation and Commerce,\" I read, \"Any vessel or part of vessel found\n in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space\n not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars\n Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the\n vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases\n as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily\n ascertained....\" I looked up and closed the book. \"Simply stated, that\n means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to\n claim it as salvage.\"\n\n\n \"Unless it already belongs to someone?\" asked Spinelli.\n\n\n \"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger\n of that,\" I replied quietly. \"My figures show that hulk out there came\n in from the direction of Coma Berenices....\"", "It was readily apparent to all of us that she had never been built for\n inter-planetary flight. She was a starship. Origin unknown. An aura of\n mystery surrounded her like a shroud, protecting the world that gave\n her birth mutely but effectively. The distance she must have come was\n unthinkable. And the time it had taken...? Aeons. Millennia. For she\n was drifting, dead in space, slowly spinning end over end as she swung\n about Sol in a hyperbolic orbit that would soon take her out and away\n again into the inter-stellar deeps.", "\"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli,\" I said sharply.\n \"Certainly!\"\nThe first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was\n her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained\n such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand\n feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable\n alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully\n in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with\n something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff\n were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some\n strange and alien way.", "Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski\n told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard\n for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty\n of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand\n tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked.\n Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up\n a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't\n seemed likely before, but now—\n\n\n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n\n\n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well\n within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of\n messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid\n eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken\n the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.", "And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of\n this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have\n been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\nA slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the\n doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black\n eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table.\n He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me\n that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was\n the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n\n\n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my\n quarters!\"\n\n\n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the\n derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last\n two words.", "CAPTAIN MIDAS\nBy ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\nThe captain of the Martian Maid stared avidly at\n\n the torn derelict floating against the velvet void.\n\n Here was treasure beyond his wildest dreams! How\n\n could he know his dreams should have been nightmares?\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1949.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that", "It wasn't too long ago that I lifted the Maid off Solis Lacus on\n that last flight. Not many of you will remember her class of ship,\n so many advances have been made in the last few years. The Maid was\n two hundred feet from tip to tail, and as sleek a spacer as ever came\n out of the Foundation Yards. Chemical fueled, she was nothing at all\n like the spherical hyperdrives we see today. She was armed, too. The\n Foundation still thought of space as a possible stamping ground for\n alien creatures though no evidence of any extra-terrestrial life had\n ever been found ... then.", "But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to\n all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no\n part of the world of men, thick with danger—and horror.\nIf you doubt that—and I can see you do—just look at me. I suppose\n you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story\n of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much\n of an answer.\nI\nwas her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the\n sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are\n greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold.\n They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their", "Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps\n yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip\n that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We\n would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond\n the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know\n what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she\n was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ...\n but of what?\n\n\n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would\n have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better\n equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by\n men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank.\n Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and\n brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things\n figured.", "Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and\n ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would\n have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n\n\n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if\n I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my\n hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined\n to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no\n telling what can happen to a man in space....\n\n\n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through\n garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal.\n Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours\n later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an\n animal suspicion.\n\n\n \"They're faking!\"", "He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples\n of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this\n stuff....\"\n\n\n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The\n carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and\n Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her\n down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check\n those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When\n it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n\n\n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a\n metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff\n is worth anything....\"\n\n\n The metal was heavy—too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship\n construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that\n distant world where this metal was made?", "I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching\n the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last\n flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either.\n It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night\n that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative\n security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt\n into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.", "There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds\n uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ...\n you think it came from the\nstars\n, Captain?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n\n\n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The\n first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon\n every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be\n worth money ... lots of money.\n\n\n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n\n\n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth\n plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.", "I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on\n the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n\n\n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n\n\n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize\n crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n\n\n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a\n first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would\n need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me\n to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me,\n Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n\n\n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning\n slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat\n him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship." ], [ "But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to\n all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no\n part of the world of men, thick with danger—and horror.\nIf you doubt that—and I can see you do—just look at me. I suppose\n you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story\n of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much\n of an answer.\nI\nwas her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the\n sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are\n greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold.\n They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their", "Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six\n inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were\n nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a\n man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that\n it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and\n keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance\n against Zaleski.\n\n\n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to\n blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from\n the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come\n between him and that mountain of gold.", "Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and\n ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would\n have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n\n\n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if\n I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my\n hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined\n to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no\n telling what can happen to a man in space....\n\n\n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through\n garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal.\n Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours\n later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an\n animal suspicion.\n\n\n \"They're faking!\"", "There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds\n uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ...\n you think it came from the\nstars\n, Captain?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n\n\n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The\n first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon\n every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be\n worth money ... lots of money.\n\n\n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n\n\n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth\n plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.", "I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching\n the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last\n flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either.\n It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night\n that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative\n security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt\n into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.", "It wasn't too long ago that I lifted the Maid off Solis Lacus on\n that last flight. Not many of you will remember her class of ship,\n so many advances have been made in the last few years. The Maid was\n two hundred feet from tip to tail, and as sleek a spacer as ever came\n out of the Foundation Yards. Chemical fueled, she was nothing at all\n like the spherical hyperdrives we see today. She was armed, too. The\n Foundation still thought of space as a possible stamping ground for\n alien creatures though no evidence of any extra-terrestrial life had\n ever been found ... then.", "I'm a queer one to be saying these things, but then, who has more\n right? Look at me. My hair is gray and my face ... my face is a mask.\n The flesh hangs on my bones like a yellow cloth on a rickety frame. I\n am old, old. And I wait here on my hospital cot—wait for the weight of\n years I never lived to drag me under and let me forget the awful things\n my eyes have seen.\n\n\n I'm poor, too, or else I wouldn't be here in this place of dying for\n old spacemen. I haven't a dime except for the pittance the Holcomb\n Foundation calls a spaceman's pension. Yet I had millions in my hands.\n Treasure beyond your wildest dreams! Cursed treasure....", "And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of\n this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have\n been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\nA slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the\n doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black\n eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table.\n He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me\n that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was\n the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n\n\n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my\n quarters!\"\n\n\n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the\n derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last\n two words.", "I stood there, watching the lights of Canalopolis in the distance. For\n just a moment I was ... well, touched. It looked beautiful and unreal\n under the racing moons. The lights of the gin mills and houses made a\n sparkling filigree pattern on the dark waters of the ancient canal, and\n the moons cast their shifting shadows across the silted banks. I was\n too far away to see the space-fevered bums and smell the shanties, and\n for a little while I felt the wonder of standing on the soil of a world\n that man had made his own with his rapacity and his sheer guts and\n gimme.\n\n\n I thought of our half empty cargo hold and the sweet payload we would\n pick up on Callisto. And I counted the extra cash my packets of snow\n would bring from those lonely men up there on the barren moonlets of\n the outer Systems. There were plenty of cargoes carried on the Maid\n that the Holcomb Foundation snoopers never heard about, you can be sure\n of that.", "Under the bright fluorescent over my work-table, the chunks of metal\n torn from a random bulkhead of the starship gleamed like pale silver;\n those strange little whorls that I had noticed on the outer hull were\n there too, like tiny magnetic lines of force, making the surface of\n the metal seem to dance. I held the stuff in my bare hand.\nIt had a\n yellowish tinge, and it was heavier\n....\n\n\n Even as I watched, the metal grew yellower, and the hand that held\n it grew bone weary, little tongues of fatigue licking up my forearm.\n Suddenly terrified, I dropped the chunk as though it were white hot. It\n struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, a rich yellow lump of\n metallic lustre.", "He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in\n the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though\n the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n\n\n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the\n corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in\n sight.\n\n\n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They\n won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing\n console of the supersonic rifle.\n\n\n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n\n\n \"\nSpinelli!\n\"\n\n\n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him\n away from the panel.\n\n\n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.", "My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them\n so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for\n high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski.\n There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul\n for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different.\n That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe\n all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe.\n There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or\n anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that\n pushes the frontier outward.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nGold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go\n hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course,\n there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get\n any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain,\n sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great\n treasure....\n\n\n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis\n seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans\n in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit.\n We're still a greedy lot....", "\"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n\n\n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ...\n sir.\"\n\n\n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand\n that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were\n failing.\n\n\n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ...\n WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ...\n CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly,\n in mid-word.\n\n\n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n\n\n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.", "Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps\n yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip\n that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We\n would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond\n the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know\n what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she\n was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ...\n but of what?\n\n\n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would\n have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better\n equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by\n men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank.\n Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and\n brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things\n figured.", "He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples\n of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this\n stuff....\"\n\n\n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The\n carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and\n Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her\n down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check\n those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When\n it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n\n\n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a\n metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff\n is worth anything....\"\n\n\n The metal was heavy—too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship\n construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that\n distant world where this metal was made?", "\"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli,\" I said sharply.\n \"Certainly!\"\nThe first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was\n her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained\n such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand\n feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable\n alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully\n in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with\n something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff\n were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some\n strange and alien way.", "There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that\n Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one\n of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All\n this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n\n\n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope\n I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a\n distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass,\n but I could see that the hulk was big—bigger than any ship I'd ever\n seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my\n slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the\n derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something\n about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer,\n and showed him my figures.\n\n\n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to\n you?\"", "So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High\n and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval\n blackness is where we found the derelict.\nI didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported\n it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation\n ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of\n developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole\n responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never\n in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial\n intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just\n assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of\n unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.", "For a long while I just sat and stared. Then I began testing, trying\n all the while to quiet the trembling of my hands. I weighed it on a\n balance. I tested it with acids. It had changed unquestionably. It\n was no longer the same as when I had carried it into my quarters. The\n whorls of force were gone. It was no longer alive with a questing\n vibrancy ... it was inert, stable. From somewhere, somehow, it had\n drawn the energy necessary for transmutation. The unknown metal—the\n stuff of which that whole mammoth spaceship from the stars was\n built—was now....\nGold!\nI scarcely dared believe it, but there it was staring at me from my\n table-top.\nGold!\nI searched my mind for an explanation. Contra-terrene matter, perhaps,\n from some distant island universe where matter reacted differently ...\n drawing energy from somewhere, the energy it needed to find stability\n in its new environment. Stability as a terrene element—wonderfully,\n miraculously gold!" ], [ "I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching\n the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last\n flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either.\n It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night\n that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative\n security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt\n into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.", "Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six\n inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were\n nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a\n man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that\n it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and\n keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance\n against Zaleski.\n\n\n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to\n blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from\n the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come\n between him and that mountain of gold.", "But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to\n all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no\n part of the world of men, thick with danger—and horror.\nIf you doubt that—and I can see you do—just look at me. I suppose\n you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story\n of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much\n of an answer.\nI\nwas her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the\n sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are\n greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold.\n They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their", "I stood there, watching the lights of Canalopolis in the distance. For\n just a moment I was ... well, touched. It looked beautiful and unreal\n under the racing moons. The lights of the gin mills and houses made a\n sparkling filigree pattern on the dark waters of the ancient canal, and\n the moons cast their shifting shadows across the silted banks. I was\n too far away to see the space-fevered bums and smell the shanties, and\n for a little while I felt the wonder of standing on the soil of a world\n that man had made his own with his rapacity and his sheer guts and\n gimme.\n\n\n I thought of our half empty cargo hold and the sweet payload we would\n pick up on Callisto. And I counted the extra cash my packets of snow\n would bring from those lonely men up there on the barren moonlets of\n the outer Systems. There were plenty of cargoes carried on the Maid\n that the Holcomb Foundation snoopers never heard about, you can be sure\n of that.", "My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them\n so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for\n high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski.\n There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul\n for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different.\n That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe\n all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe.\n There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or\n anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that\n pushes the frontier outward.", "He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples\n of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this\n stuff....\"\n\n\n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The\n carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and\n Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her\n down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check\n those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When\n it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n\n\n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a\n metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff\n is worth anything....\"\n\n\n The metal was heavy—too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship\n construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that\n distant world where this metal was made?", "And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of\n this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have\n been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\nA slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the\n doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black\n eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table.\n He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me\n that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was\n the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n\n\n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my\n quarters!\"\n\n\n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the\n derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last\n two words.", "I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with\n that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally\n I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had\n set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\nTogether, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw\n of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish\n fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a\n great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid\n followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls\n on automatic.", "Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski\n told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard\n for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty\n of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand\n tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked.\n Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up\n a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't\n seemed likely before, but now—\n\n\n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n\n\n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well\n within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of\n messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid\n eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken\n the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.", "The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed\n by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared\n a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth\n millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and\n crossed to her.\n\n\n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their\n faces.\n\n\n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit\n her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives.\n She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage\n compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n\n\n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was\n nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull\n alone was left.", "It wasn't too long ago that I lifted the Maid off Solis Lacus on\n that last flight. Not many of you will remember her class of ship,\n so many advances have been made in the last few years. The Maid was\n two hundred feet from tip to tail, and as sleek a spacer as ever came\n out of the Foundation Yards. Chemical fueled, she was nothing at all\n like the spherical hyperdrives we see today. She was armed, too. The\n Foundation still thought of space as a possible stamping ground for\n alien creatures though no evidence of any extra-terrestrial life had\n ever been found ... then.", "There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds\n uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ...\n you think it came from the\nstars\n, Captain?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n\n\n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The\n first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon\n every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be\n worth money ... lots of money.\n\n\n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n\n\n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth\n plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.", "He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in\n the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though\n the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.\n\n\n Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the\n corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in\n sight.\n\n\n \"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!\" he breathed furiously. \"They\n won't shake loose that easy!\" His hands started down for the firing\n console of the supersonic rifle.\n\n\n I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.\n\n\n \"\nSpinelli!\n\"\n\n\n My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him\n away from the panel.\n\n\n \"Get to your quarters!\" I cracked.", "So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High\n and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval\n blackness is where we found the derelict.\nI didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported\n it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation\n ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of\n developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole\n responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never\n in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial\n intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just\n assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of\n unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nGold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go\n hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course,\n there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get\n any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain,\n sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great\n treasure....\n\n\n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis\n seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans\n in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit.\n We're still a greedy lot....", "\"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary\n Astrogation and Commerce,\" I read, \"Any vessel or part of vessel found\n in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space\n not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars\n Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the\n vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases\n as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily\n ascertained....\" I looked up and closed the book. \"Simply stated, that\n means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to\n claim it as salvage.\"\n\n\n \"Unless it already belongs to someone?\" asked Spinelli.\n\n\n \"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger\n of that,\" I replied quietly. \"My figures show that hulk out there came\n in from the direction of Coma Berenices....\"", "I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on\n the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n\n\n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n\n\n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize\n crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n\n\n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a\n first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would\n need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me\n to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me,\n Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n\n\n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning\n slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat\n him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.", "For a few moments I pondered the advisability of making good my threat\n to clap Spinelli into irons, but I decided against it. In the first\n place I couldn't prove he had told Zaleski about the gold and in the\n second place I needed Spinelli to help run the Maid.\n\n\n I felt that the Third Officer and Zaleski were planning something, and\n I was just as sure that Spinelli was watching Zaleski to see to it that\n there was no double-cross.\n\n\n I figured that I could handle the Third Officer alone so I assigned the\n rest, Marvin and Chelly, to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk.\n That way Zaleski would be outnumbered if he tried to skip with the\n treasure ship. But, of course, I couldn't risk telling them that they\n were to be handling a vessel practically made of gold.", "Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and\n ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would\n have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n\n\n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if\n I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my\n hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined\n to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no\n telling what can happen to a man in space....\n\n\n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through\n garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal.\n Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours\n later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an\n animal suspicion.\n\n\n \"They're faking!\"", "Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps\n yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip\n that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We\n would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond\n the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know\n what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she\n was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ...\n but of what?\n\n\n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would\n have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better\n equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by\n men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank.\n Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and\n brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things\n figured." ], [ "\"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli,\" I said sharply.\n \"Certainly!\"\nThe first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was\n her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained\n such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand\n feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable\n alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully\n in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with\n something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff\n were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some\n strange and alien way.", "And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of\n this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have\n been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....\nA slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the\n doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black\n eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table.\n He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me\n that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was\n the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.\n\n\n \"Mister Spinelli!\" I snapped, \"In the future knock before entering my\n quarters!\"\n\n\n Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. \"From the\n derelict, Captain?\" There was an imperceptible pause between the last\n two words.", "Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and\n ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would\n have when the starship was cut up and sold.\n\n\n My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if\n I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my\n hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined\n to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no\n telling what can happen to a man in space....\n\n\n Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through\n garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal.\n Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours\n later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an\n animal suspicion.\n\n\n \"They're faking!\"", "He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. \"I brought back some samples\n of her pressure hull,\" he said, \"The whole thing is made of this\n stuff....\"\n\n\n \"We'll still take her in,\" I said, hiding my disappointment. \"The\n carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and\n Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her\n down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check\n those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When\n it's done report to me in my quarters.\"\n\n\n I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a\n metallurgical testing kit. \"I'm going to try and find out if this stuff\n is worth anything....\"\n\n\n The metal was heavy—too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship\n construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that\n distant world where this metal was made?", "Under the bright fluorescent over my work-table, the chunks of metal\n torn from a random bulkhead of the starship gleamed like pale silver;\n those strange little whorls that I had noticed on the outer hull were\n there too, like tiny magnetic lines of force, making the surface of\n the metal seem to dance. I held the stuff in my bare hand.\nIt had a\n yellowish tinge, and it was heavier\n....\n\n\n Even as I watched, the metal grew yellower, and the hand that held\n it grew bone weary, little tongues of fatigue licking up my forearm.\n Suddenly terrified, I dropped the chunk as though it were white hot. It\n struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, a rich yellow lump of\n metallic lustre.", "\"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary\n Astrogation and Commerce,\" I read, \"Any vessel or part of vessel found\n in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space\n not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars\n Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the\n vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases\n as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily\n ascertained....\" I looked up and closed the book. \"Simply stated, that\n means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to\n claim it as salvage.\"\n\n\n \"Unless it already belongs to someone?\" asked Spinelli.\n\n\n \"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger\n of that,\" I replied quietly. \"My figures show that hulk out there came\n in from the direction of Coma Berenices....\"", "There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that\n Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one\n of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All\n this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!\n\n\n All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope\n I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a\n distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass,\n but I could see that the hulk was big—bigger than any ship I'd ever\n seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my\n slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the\n derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something\n about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer,\n and showed him my figures.\n\n\n \"Mister Cohn,\" I said, chart in hand, \"do these figures look right to\n you?\"", "It was readily apparent to all of us that she had never been built for\n inter-planetary flight. She was a starship. Origin unknown. An aura of\n mystery surrounded her like a shroud, protecting the world that gave\n her birth mutely but effectively. The distance she must have come was\n unthinkable. And the time it had taken...? Aeons. Millennia. For she\n was drifting, dead in space, slowly spinning end over end as she swung\n about Sol in a hyperbolic orbit that would soon take her out and away\n again into the inter-stellar deeps.", "There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds\n uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. \"You think ...\n you think it came from the\nstars\n, Captain?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe even from beyond the stars,\" Cohn said in a low voice.\n\n\n Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The\n first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon\n every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be\n worth money ... lots of money.\n\n\n Spinelli said, \"Do we look her over, Captain?\"\n\n\n They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth\n plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.", "So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High\n and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval\n blackness is where we found the derelict.\nI didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported\n it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation\n ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of\n developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole\n responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never\n in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial\n intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just\n assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of\n unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.", "Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps\n yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip\n that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We\n would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond\n the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know\n what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she\n was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ...\n but of what?\n\n\n We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would\n have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better\n equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by\n men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank.\n Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and\n brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things\n figured.", "Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six\n inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were\n nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a\n man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that\n it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and\n keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance\n against Zaleski.\n\n\n When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to\n blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from\n the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come\n between him and that mountain of gold.", "The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed\n by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared\n a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth\n millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and\n crossed to her.\n\n\n In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their\n faces.\n\n\n \"There's nothing left of her, Captain,\" Cohn reported, \"Whatever hit\n her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives.\n She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage\n compartments that are still unbroken.\"\n\n\n She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was\n nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull\n alone was left.", "\"Get this down, Spinelli!\"\n\n\n The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: \"Aye ...\n sir.\"\n\n\n The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand\n that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were\n failing.\n\n\n \"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ...\n WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ...\n CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA....\" The light stopped flashing, abruptly,\n in mid-word.\n\n\n \"What the hell?\" demanded Spinelli thickly.\n\n\n \"Order them to heave to, Mister,\" I ordered.", "I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on\n the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.\n\n\n \"Speak your piece, Mister,\" I ordered sharply.\n\n\n \"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize\n crew ... sir,\" he said slowly. \"I'd like to volunteer for that detail.\"\n\n\n I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a\n first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would\n need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me\n to beware. I shook my head. \"You will stay on board the Maid with me,\n Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship.\"\n\n\n Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning\n slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat\n him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.", "\"Like hell they are!\" I snapped irritably, \"Something's gone wrong....\"\n\n\n \"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!\"\n\n\n I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. \"Then you did disobey\n my orders. You told him about the gold!\"\n\n\n \"Sure I did,\" he sneered. \"Did you expect me to shut up and let you\n land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share?\nI\nfound her, and\n she's mine!\"\n\n\n I fought to control my temper and said: \"Let's see what's going on in\n her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli.\"\n\n\n Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on\n the image of the starship on the viewplate.\n\n\n A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.", "Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski\n told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard\n for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty\n of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand\n tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked.\n Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up\n a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't\n seemed likely before, but now—\n\n\n The gun-pointer remained as it was.\n\n\n As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well\n within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of\n messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid\n eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken\n the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.", "I'm a queer one to be saying these things, but then, who has more\n right? Look at me. My hair is gray and my face ... my face is a mask.\n The flesh hangs on my bones like a yellow cloth on a rickety frame. I\n am old, old. And I wait here on my hospital cot—wait for the weight of\n years I never lived to drag me under and let me forget the awful things\n my eyes have seen.\n\n\n I'm poor, too, or else I wouldn't be here in this place of dying for\n old spacemen. I haven't a dime except for the pittance the Holcomb\n Foundation calls a spaceman's pension. Yet I had millions in my hands.\n Treasure beyond your wildest dreams! Cursed treasure....", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nGold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go\n hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course,\n there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get\n any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain,\n sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great\n treasure....\n\n\n These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis\n seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans\n in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit.\n We're still a greedy lot....", "I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with\n that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally\n I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had\n set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.\nTogether, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw\n of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish\n fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a\n great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid\n followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls\n on automatic." ] ]
test	63062	[ "Who was Iron Mike?", "What was the knocking sound Lundy heard after crash-landing?", "Why had it been so long since Lundy had slept?", "Why was Lundy unsure he knew exactly where he was?", "Why did the flowers most likely let go of Lundy?", "Why did Farrell stop screaming?", "How did \"It\" originally arrive on Venus?", "How was Jackie Smith injured?", "What was the cold knot that Lundy kept feeling inside of him?" ]	[ [ "A figment of Lundy's hallucinations.", "An officer with the Tri-World Police.", "Lundy's co-pilot.", "An aero-space convertible." ], [ "Jackie Smith knocking on the chamber door for help.", "Jackie Smith's corpse butting up against the chamber door.", "\"It\" trying to get into the room to kill Lundy.", "Farrell trying to get into the room where Lundy was." ], [ "He had been searching for Farrell and \"It\" for quite some time.", "He knew if he slept, he might die.", "He couldn't sleep with the flowers along the road watching him all night.", "He had been walking on the weed-choked road for hours." ], [ "The navigational equipment on the ship was damaged in the crash-landing. ", "He kept fading in and out of consciousness.", "He was unfamiliar with Venusian terrain.", "\"It\" might have already been playing with his mind." ], [ "The arrival of the cloud-like creatures fended them off. ", "They could sense the fear inside of him.", "They were afraid of the dull black curtain surrounding Lundy's mind.", "He had injured them with his blaster." ], [ "The Dream Woman came to him and told him to no longer be afraid.", "He escaped from his restraints and came to free \"It.\"", "He had died.", "He was no longer beholden to \"It.\"" ], [ "\"It\" crash-landed in a spaceship.", "\"It\" was pulled out of its space-dust home by the force of the planet's gravity.", "\"It\" was taken there as a prisoner by the Tri-World Police.", "Farrell chased it there." ], [ "The climate on Venus was too cold for his Mercurian acclimatization. ", "\"It\" attacked him.", "He was hurt while attempting to wrangle Farrell.", "Lundy had to restrain him, and he injured himself trying to break free." ], [ "A symptom of having sat flying the ship for so long.", "A physical reaction to the temperature inside the spaceship.", "Fear.", "\"It\" was beginning to take over his body and mind." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "The anaesthetic needles hit Lundy across the chest. They didn't hurt\n much. Just a stinging prick. He kept going. No reason. It was just\n something he seemed to be doing at the time.\n\n\n Behind him Farrell whimpered once like a puppy and lay down across the\n little safe. He didn't move again. Lundy got down on his hands and\n knees and reached in a vague sort of way for the controls. Jackie Smith\n watched him with dazed green eyes.\n\n\n Quite suddenly, Iron Mike blew his guts out.\n\n\n The control panel let go a burst of blue flame. The glare and heat of\n it knocked Lundy backward. Things hissed and snarled and ran together,\n and the convertible began to dance like a leaf in a gale. The automatic\n safety cut the rockets dead.\n\n\n The ship began to fall.", "\"Nuts. I've got one hand. I can hang onto this lousy tin fish that\n long.\"\nLundy scowled. He knew Smith wasn't kidding about the cold. The\n temperatures on Mercury made the first-generation colonists sensitive\n to anything below the range of an electric furnace. With the wound and\n all, Smith might, wind up with pneumonia if he wasn't covered.\n\n\n \"Okay.\" Lundy reached out and closed the switch marked A. \"But I'll let\n Mike do the flying. He can probably last five minutes before he blows\n his guts out.\"\n\n\n Iron Mike was just a pattycake when it came to Venusian atmosphere\n flying. The constant magnetic compensation heated the robot coils to\n the fusing point in practically no time at all.\n\n\n Lundy thought fleetingly that it was nice to know there were still a\n couple of things men could do better than machinery.", "Farrell went on screaming. His throat seemed to be lined with\n impervium. Screaming and fighting the straps, because\nIt\nwas locked\n up and calling for help.\n\n\n Jackie Smith stirred slightly, groaned, and opened his pale green eyes.\n\n\n \"I'm cold,\" he said. \"Hi, Midget.\"\n\n\n Lundy turned his head. Normally he had a round, fresh, merry face, with\n bright dark eyes and a white, small-boyish grin. Now he looked like\n something the waiter had swept out from under a table at four A.M. on\n New Year's Day.\n\n\n \"You're cold,\" he said sourly. He licked sweat off his lips. \"Oh, fine!\n That was all I needed.\"", "Lundy had tied him down to the bunk with four heavy straps. Breast,\n belly, thighs, and feet. The marks of them were on Farrell. They were\n cut into his shirt and pants, into his flesh and sinew, deep enough\n to show his bare white ribs. There was blood. A lot of blood. Farrell\n didn't mind.\n\n\n \"I broke the straps,\" he said. He smiled at Lundy. \"She called me and I\n broke the straps.\"\n\n\n He started to walk to the safe in the corner of the cabin. Lundy gagged\n and pulled himself up out of a cold black cloud and got his feet to\n moving.", "Jackie Smith stirred slightly, groaned, to joggle himself. His black\n tunic was open over his chest, showing the white strapping of bandages,\n and his left hand was thrust in over the locked top of the tunic's\n zipper. He was a big man, not any older than Lundy, with big, ugly,\n pleasant features, a shock of coarse pale hair, and a skin like old\n leather.\n\n\n \"On Mercury, where I was born,\" he said, \"the climate is suitable for\n human beings. You Old-World pantywaists....\" He broke off, turned white\n under the leathery burn, and said through set teeth, \"Oi! Farrell sure\n did a good job on me.\"", "And\nShe\nwas a whiz at hypnosis and mind-control. That's why\nShe\n, or\nIt\n, hadn't been caught alive before. Not before Lundy and Smith, with\n every scientific aid Special could give them, had tracked down Farrell\n and managed to get the breaks.\n\n\n The breaks. Plain fool luck. Lundy moved his throbbing head stiffly on\n his aching neck, blinked sweat out of his bloodshot eyes, and wished to\n hell he was home in bed.\n\n\n Jackie Smith said suddenly, \"Midget, I'm cold. Get me a blanket.\"\n\n\n Lundy looked at him. His pale green eyes were half open, but not as\n though they saw anything. He was shivering.\n\n\n \"I can't leave the controls, Jackie.\"", "A nice guy, crazy blind in love with somebody that didn't exist. A\n decent hard-working guy with a wife and two kids who'd lost his mind,\n heart, and soul to a Thing from outer space, so that he was willing to\n kill to protect It.\nOh, hell!\nthought Lundy wearily,\nwon't he ever stop screaming?\nThe rockets beat and thundered. The torn grey sky whipped past. Jackie\n Smith sat rigid, with closed eyes, white around the lips and breathing\n in shallow, careful gasps. And Vhia was still a long way off.\n\n\n Maybe farther off than he knew. Maybe he wasn't heading toward Vhia\n at all. Maybe\nIt\nwas working on him, and he'd never know it till he\n crashed.\n\n\n The cold knot tightened in his belly like a cold blade stabbing.\n\n\n Lundy cursed. Thinking things like that was a sure way to punch your\n ticket right straight to blazes.", "\"You'll live,\" said Lundy. He tried not to think about how nearly both\n he and Smith had come to not living. Farrell had put up one hell of a\n fight, when they caught up with him in a native village high up in the\n Mountains of White Cloud.\nLundy still felt sick about that. The bull-meat, the hard boys, you\n didn't mind kicking around. But Farrell wasn't that kind. He was just a\n nice guy that got trapped by something too big for him.", "Lundy didn't like them.\n\n\n The weeds grew in thicker and closer. They bulged out from their roots,\n in over the stone edges. The flowers opened their bright hungry mouths\n and yearned at Lundy, reaching.\n\n\n Reaching. Not quite touching. Not yet. He was tired. The brandy and the\n benzedrine began to die in him. He changed his oxygen cylinder. That\n helped, but not much. He took more dope, but he was afraid to go heavy\n on it lest he drive his heart too hard. His legs turned numb.\n\n\n He hadn't slept for a long time. Tracking Farrell hadn't been any\n breeze, and taking him—and\nIt\n—had been plain and fancy hell. Lundy\n was only human. He was tired. Bushed. Cooked. Beat to the socks.", "The second thing was his body. It hurt like hell, and it was hot, and\n it didn't like the thick, foul air it was getting. Lundy pushed himself\n into a sitting position and tried to boot his brain into action. It was\n hard work, because someone had split his head open four ways with an\n axe.\n\n\n It wasn't really dark in the cabin. A wavering silver glow almost like\n moonlight came in through the ports. Lundy could see pretty well. He\n could see Farrell's body sprawled out on the floor, and a mess of junk\n that had once been equipment.\n\n\n He could see the safe.\n\n\n He looked at it a long time. There wasn't much to look at. Just an open\n safe with nothing in it, and a piece of black cloth dropped on the\n floor.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord,\" whispered Lundy. \"Oh, my Lord!\"", "He'd been screaming a long time. Ever since the shot of\navertin\nLundy\n had given him after he was taken had begun to wear thin. Fighting the\n straps and screaming, a hoarse jarring sound with no sense in it.\n\n\n Screaming to be free, because of\nIt\n.\n\n\n Somewhere inside of Lundy, inside the rumpled, sweat-soaked black\n uniform of the Tri-World Police, Special Branch, and the five-foot-six\n of thick springy muscle under it, there was a knot. It was a large\n knot, and it was very, very cold in spite of the sweltering heat in\n the cabin, and it had a nasty habit of yanking itself tight every few\n minutes, causing Lundy to jerk and sweat as though he'd been spiked.", "Jackie Smith said quietly, \"Hold it, Midget. She doesn't like it there\n in the safe. She's cold, and she wants to come out.\"\nLundy looked over his shoulder. Smith was hunched around in his seat,\n holding the needle-gun from Lundy's holster on the pilot's chair. His\n pale green eyes had a distant, dreamy glow, but Lundy knew better than\n to trust it.\n\n\n He said, without inflection, \"You've seen her.\"\n\n\n \"No. No, but—I've heard her.\" Smith's heavy lips twitched and parted.\n The breath sucked through between them, hoarse and slow.\n\n\n Farrell went down on his knees beside the safe. He put his hands on its\n blank and gleaming face and turned to Lundy. He was crying.\n\n\n \"Open it. You've got to open it. She wants to come out. She's\n frightened.\"", "Lundy didn't like that cold tight knot in his belly. It meant he was\n afraid. He'd been afraid before, plenty of times, and he wasn't ashamed\n of it. But right now he needed all the brains and guts he had to get\nIt\nback to Special headquarters at Vhia, and he didn't want to have\n to fight himself, too.\n\n\n Fear can screw things for you. It can make you weak when you need to be\n strong, if you're going to go on living. You, and the two other guys\n depending on you.\n\n\n Lundy hoped he could keep from getting too much afraid, and too\n tired—because\nIt\nwas sitting back there in its little strongbox in\n the safe, waiting for somebody to crack.", "Jackie Smith raised the gun, a fraction of an inch. \"Open it, Midget,\"\n he whispered. \"She's cold in there.\"\n\n\n Lundy stood still. The sweat ran on him and he was colder than a frog's\n belly in the rain; and for no reason at all he said thickly,\n\n\n \"No. She's hot. She can't breathe in there. She's hot.\"\n\n\n Then he jerked his head up and yelled. He came around to face Smith,\n unsteady but fast, and started for him.\n\n\n Smith's ugly face twisted as though he might be going to cry. \"Midget!\n I don't want to shoot you. Open the safe!\"\n\n\n Lundy said, \"You damned fool,\" with no voice at all, and went on.\n\n\n Smith hit the firing stud.", "He got up, feeling like something that had stood outside rusting for\n four hundred years or so. Smith didn't turn his head. Lundy growled at\n him.\n\n\n \"Next time, sonny, you wear your long woolen undies and let me alone!\"\n\n\n Then he stopped. The knot jerked tight in his stomach. Cold sweat\n needled him, and his nerves stung in a swift rush of fire.\n\n\n Farrell had quit screaming.\n\n\n There was silence in the ship. Nothing touched it. The rockets were\n outside it and didn't matter. Even Jackie Smith's careful breathing had\n stopped. Lundy went forward slowly, toward the door. Two steps.\n\n\n It opened. Lundy stopped again, quite still.\n\n\n Farrell was standing in the opening. A nice guy with a wife and two\n kids. His face still looked like that, but the eyes in it were not\n sane, nor even human.", "Being under water wouldn't bother a Thing from outer space. He reached\n up and lifted the net of tight-woven metal-mesh down off its hook and\n fastened it on his belt. Then he walked over and opened the airlock\n door.\n\n\n Black water swirled in around his weighted boots, and then the door\n opened wide and Jackie Smith came in.\n\n\n He'd been waiting in the flooded lock chamber. Kicking his boots\n against the inner door, easy, with the slow breathing of the sea. Now\n the water pushed his feet down and held him upright from behind, so he\n could walk in and stand looking at Lundy. A big blond man with green\n eyes, and white bandages strapped under his open black tunic, looking\n at Lundy. Not long. Only for a second. But long enough.", "Smith said something that sounded like\nShe\nand folded up in his\n chair. Lundy rubbed his hand across his face. The lines of it were\n blurred and stupid. His dark eyes had no sense in them.\n\n\n He began to crawl over the lurching floor toward the safe.\n\n\n The clouds outside ripped and tore across the ship's nose, and\n presently only water showed. Black, still, tideless water dotted with\n little islands of floating weed that stirred and slithered with a life\n of their own.\n\n\n Black water, rushing up.\n\n\n Lundy didn't care. He crawled through Farrell's blood, and he didn't\n care about that, either. He pushed Farrell's body back against the\n cabin wall and began to scratch at the shiny door, making noises like a\n hound shut out and not happy about it.", "Then he turned and went very fast to the port locker and got a quart\n bottle out of its shock cradle, and raised it. It took both hands.\n\n\n After a while he dropped the bottle and stood still, not looking at\n anything, until he stopped shaking. Then he pulled his vac-suit down\n off its hook and climbed into it. His face was grey and quite blank.\n\n\n He took all the oxygen cylinders he could carry, emergency rations,\n and all the benzedrine in the medicine kit. He put the limit dose\n of the stimulant down on top of the brandy before he locked his\n helmet. He didn't bother with the needle gun. He took the two Service\n blasters—his own, and Smith's. The gentle knocking didn't stop.\n\n\n He stood for a moment looking at the open safe and the black cloth\n dropped beside it. Something cruel came into his face. A tightness, a\n twitching and setting of the muscles, and a terrible look of patience.", "Everything hit him at once then. There wasn't much in him but his\n stomach, and that was tied down. But it tried hard to come up.\n Presently the spasms stopped, and then Lundy heard the knocking.\n\n\n It wasn't very loud. It had a slow, easy rhythm, as though the knocker\n had a lot of time and didn't care when he got in. It came from the\n airlock panel.\n\n\n Lundy got up. Slowly, cold as a toad's belly and as white. His lips\n drew back from his teeth and stayed there, frozen.\n\n\n The knocking kept on. A sleepy kind of sound. The guy outside could\n afford to wait. Sometime that locked door was going to open, and he\n could wait. He wasn't in a hurry. He would never be in a hurry.", "Lundy stopped himself after the third scream. He had to, because he\n knew if he screamed again he'd never stop. By that time the black water\n had pushed Jackie Smith away, over to the opposite wall, and covered\n his face.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord,\" whispered Lundy. \"Oh Lord,\nwhat did he see before he\n drowned\n?\"\n\n\n No one answered. The black water pushed at Lundy, rising high around\n him, trying to take him over to Jackie Smith. Lundy's mouth began to\n twitch.\n\n\n He shut his teeth on his lower lip, holding it, holding his throat. He\n began to run, clumsily, fighting the water, and then he stopped that,\n too. He walked, not looking behind him, out into the flooded lock. The\n door slid shut behind him, automatically." ], [ "Everything hit him at once then. There wasn't much in him but his\n stomach, and that was tied down. But it tried hard to come up.\n Presently the spasms stopped, and then Lundy heard the knocking.\n\n\n It wasn't very loud. It had a slow, easy rhythm, as though the knocker\n had a lot of time and didn't care when he got in. It came from the\n airlock panel.\n\n\n Lundy got up. Slowly, cold as a toad's belly and as white. His lips\n drew back from his teeth and stayed there, frozen.\n\n\n The knocking kept on. A sleepy kind of sound. The guy outside could\n afford to wait. Sometime that locked door was going to open, and he\n could wait. He wasn't in a hurry. He would never be in a hurry.", "Smith said something that sounded like\nShe\nand folded up in his\n chair. Lundy rubbed his hand across his face. The lines of it were\n blurred and stupid. His dark eyes had no sense in them.\n\n\n He began to crawl over the lurching floor toward the safe.\n\n\n The clouds outside ripped and tore across the ship's nose, and\n presently only water showed. Black, still, tideless water dotted with\n little islands of floating weed that stirred and slithered with a life\n of their own.\n\n\n Black water, rushing up.\n\n\n Lundy didn't care. He crawled through Farrell's blood, and he didn't\n care about that, either. He pushed Farrell's body back against the\n cabin wall and began to scratch at the shiny door, making noises like a\n hound shut out and not happy about it.", "The ship hit the water with a terrific smack. Spray geysered up, dead\n white against the black sea, fell back, and closed in. Presently even\n the ripples went away.\n\n\n Dark green weed-islands twined sinuously upon themselves, a flock of\n small sea-dragons flapped their jeweled wings down and began to fish,\n and none of them cared at all about the ship sinking away under them.\n\n\n Not even Lundy cared, out cold in the space-tight cabin, with his body\n wedged up against the safe and tears drying with the sweat on his\n stubbled cheeks.\nII\n\n\n The first thing Lundy knew about was the stillness. A dead feeling, as\n though everything in creation had stopped breathing.", "The anaesthetic needles hit Lundy across the chest. They didn't hurt\n much. Just a stinging prick. He kept going. No reason. It was just\n something he seemed to be doing at the time.\n\n\n Behind him Farrell whimpered once like a puppy and lay down across the\n little safe. He didn't move again. Lundy got down on his hands and\n knees and reached in a vague sort of way for the controls. Jackie Smith\n watched him with dazed green eyes.\n\n\n Quite suddenly, Iron Mike blew his guts out.\n\n\n The control panel let go a burst of blue flame. The glare and heat of\n it knocked Lundy backward. Things hissed and snarled and ran together,\n and the convertible began to dance like a leaf in a gale. The automatic\n safety cut the rockets dead.\n\n\n The ship began to fall.", "Lundy looked all around the cabin. He didn't speak. He looked sideways\n out of the port. There was water out there. The black sea-water of\n Venus; clear and black, like deep night.\n\n\n There was level sand spreading away from the ship. The silver light\n came up out of it. Some kind of phosphorescence, as bright as moonlight\n and faintly tinged with green.\n\n\n Black sea-water. Silver sand. The guy kept on knocking at the door.\n Slow and easy. Patient. One—two. One—two. Just off beat with Lundy's\n heart.\n\n\n Lundy went to the inner cabin, walking steadily. He looked around\n carefully and then went back. He stopped by the lock panel.\n\n\n \"Okay, Jackie,\" he said. \"In a minute. In a minute, boy.\"", "The second thing was his body. It hurt like hell, and it was hot, and\n it didn't like the thick, foul air it was getting. Lundy pushed himself\n into a sitting position and tried to boot his brain into action. It was\n hard work, because someone had split his head open four ways with an\n axe.\n\n\n It wasn't really dark in the cabin. A wavering silver glow almost like\n moonlight came in through the ports. Lundy could see pretty well. He\n could see Farrell's body sprawled out on the floor, and a mess of junk\n that had once been equipment.\n\n\n He could see the safe.\n\n\n He looked at it a long time. There wasn't much to look at. Just an open\n safe with nothing in it, and a piece of black cloth dropped on the\n floor.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord,\" whispered Lundy. \"Oh, my Lord!\"", "A nice guy, crazy blind in love with somebody that didn't exist. A\n decent hard-working guy with a wife and two kids who'd lost his mind,\n heart, and soul to a Thing from outer space, so that he was willing to\n kill to protect It.\nOh, hell!\nthought Lundy wearily,\nwon't he ever stop screaming?\nThe rockets beat and thundered. The torn grey sky whipped past. Jackie\n Smith sat rigid, with closed eyes, white around the lips and breathing\n in shallow, careful gasps. And Vhia was still a long way off.\n\n\n Maybe farther off than he knew. Maybe he wasn't heading toward Vhia\n at all. Maybe\nIt\nwas working on him, and he'd never know it till he\n crashed.\n\n\n The cold knot tightened in his belly like a cold blade stabbing.\n\n\n Lundy cursed. Thinking things like that was a sure way to punch your\n ticket right straight to blazes.", "He got up, feeling like something that had stood outside rusting for\n four hundred years or so. Smith didn't turn his head. Lundy growled at\n him.\n\n\n \"Next time, sonny, you wear your long woolen undies and let me alone!\"\n\n\n Then he stopped. The knot jerked tight in his stomach. Cold sweat\n needled him, and his nerves stung in a swift rush of fire.\n\n\n Farrell had quit screaming.\n\n\n There was silence in the ship. Nothing touched it. The rockets were\n outside it and didn't matter. Even Jackie Smith's careful breathing had\n stopped. Lundy went forward slowly, toward the door. Two steps.\n\n\n It opened. Lundy stopped again, quite still.\n\n\n Farrell was standing in the opening. A nice guy with a wife and two\n kids. His face still looked like that, but the eyes in it were not\n sane, nor even human.", "He'd been screaming a long time. Ever since the shot of\navertin\nLundy\n had given him after he was taken had begun to wear thin. Fighting the\n straps and screaming, a hoarse jarring sound with no sense in it.\n\n\n Screaming to be free, because of\nIt\n.\n\n\n Somewhere inside of Lundy, inside the rumpled, sweat-soaked black\n uniform of the Tri-World Police, Special Branch, and the five-foot-six\n of thick springy muscle under it, there was a knot. It was a large\n knot, and it was very, very cold in spite of the sweltering heat in\n the cabin, and it had a nasty habit of yanking itself tight every few\n minutes, causing Lundy to jerk and sweat as though he'd been spiked.", "Lundy had tied him down to the bunk with four heavy straps. Breast,\n belly, thighs, and feet. The marks of them were on Farrell. They were\n cut into his shirt and pants, into his flesh and sinew, deep enough\n to show his bare white ribs. There was blood. A lot of blood. Farrell\n didn't mind.\n\n\n \"I broke the straps,\" he said. He smiled at Lundy. \"She called me and I\n broke the straps.\"\n\n\n He started to walk to the safe in the corner of the cabin. Lundy gagged\n and pulled himself up out of a cold black cloud and got his feet to\n moving.", "Lundy stopped himself after the third scream. He had to, because he\n knew if he screamed again he'd never stop. By that time the black water\n had pushed Jackie Smith away, over to the opposite wall, and covered\n his face.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord,\" whispered Lundy. \"Oh Lord,\nwhat did he see before he\n drowned\n?\"\n\n\n No one answered. The black water pushed at Lundy, rising high around\n him, trying to take him over to Jackie Smith. Lundy's mouth began to\n twitch.\n\n\n He shut his teeth on his lower lip, holding it, holding his throat. He\n began to run, clumsily, fighting the water, and then he stopped that,\n too. He walked, not looking behind him, out into the flooded lock. The\n door slid shut behind him, automatically.", "It was beautiful down there. Like the dream-worlds you see when you're\n doped or delirious. The phosphorescence rose up into the black water\n and danced there in wavering whorls of cold fire. Fish, queer gaudy\n little things with jewelled eyes, flicked past Lundy in darts of\n sudden color, and there were great stands of weed like young forests,\n spangling the dark water and the phosphorescent glow with huge burning\n spots of blue and purple and green and silver.\n\n\n Flowers. Lundy got too close to some of them once. They reached out and\n opened round mouths full of spines and sucked at him hungrily. The\n fish gave them a wide berth. After that, so did Lundy.\n\n\n He hadn't been walking more than half an hour when he hit the road.", "Jackie Smith stirred slightly, groaned, to joggle himself. His black\n tunic was open over his chest, showing the white strapping of bandages,\n and his left hand was thrust in over the locked top of the tunic's\n zipper. He was a big man, not any older than Lundy, with big, ugly,\n pleasant features, a shock of coarse pale hair, and a skin like old\n leather.\n\n\n \"On Mercury, where I was born,\" he said, \"the climate is suitable for\n human beings. You Old-World pantywaists....\" He broke off, turned white\n under the leathery burn, and said through set teeth, \"Oi! Farrell sure\n did a good job on me.\"", "Lundy didn't like them.\n\n\n The weeds grew in thicker and closer. They bulged out from their roots,\n in over the stone edges. The flowers opened their bright hungry mouths\n and yearned at Lundy, reaching.\n\n\n Reaching. Not quite touching. Not yet. He was tired. The brandy and the\n benzedrine began to die in him. He changed his oxygen cylinder. That\n helped, but not much. He took more dope, but he was afraid to go heavy\n on it lest he drive his heart too hard. His legs turned numb.\n\n\n He hadn't slept for a long time. Tracking Farrell hadn't been any\n breeze, and taking him—and\nIt\n—had been plain and fancy hell. Lundy\n was only human. He was tired. Bushed. Cooked. Beat to the socks.", "Farrell was cracked wide open, of course, but he was tied down. Jackie\n Smith had begun to show signs before he passed out, so that Lundy had\n kept one hand over the anaesthetic needle gun holstered on the side of\n his chair. And Lundy thought,\nThe hell of it is, you don't know when\nIt\nstarts to work on you.\n There's no set pattern, or if there is we don't know it. Maybe right\n now the readings I see on those dials aren't there at all....\nDown below the torn grey clouds he could see occasional small patches\n of ocean. The black, still, tideless water of Venus, that covers so\n many secrets of the planet's past.\n\n\n It didn't help Lundy any. It could be right or wrong, depending on\n what part of the ocean it was—and there was no way to tell. He hoped\n nothing would happen to the motors. A guy could get awfully wet, out in\n the middle of that still black water.", "Lundy tripped and fell, cracking his head against the back of his\n helmet. For a moment all he could see was bright light flashing. Then\n that stopped, and he realized he must have jarred a connection loose\n somewhere because his own light was out.\n\n\n He began to crawl over a great tilted block. The flowers burned bright\n in the darkness. Bright and close. Very close. Lundy opened his mouth.\n Nothing came out but a hoarse animal whimper. He was still holding the\n blaster. He fired it off a couple of times, and then he was on top of\n the block, lying flat on his belly.\n\n\n He knew it was the end of the line, because he couldn't move any more.\n\n\n The bright flowers came down through the dark. Lundy lay watching them.\n His face was quite blank. His dark eyes held a stubborn hatred, but\n nothing else.", "\"Nuts. I've got one hand. I can hang onto this lousy tin fish that\n long.\"\nLundy scowled. He knew Smith wasn't kidding about the cold. The\n temperatures on Mercury made the first-generation colonists sensitive\n to anything below the range of an electric furnace. With the wound and\n all, Smith might, wind up with pneumonia if he wasn't covered.\n\n\n \"Okay.\" Lundy reached out and closed the switch marked A. \"But I'll let\n Mike do the flying. He can probably last five minutes before he blows\n his guts out.\"\n\n\n Iron Mike was just a pattycake when it came to Venusian atmosphere\n flying. The constant magnetic compensation heated the robot coils to\n the fusing point in practically no time at all.\n\n\n Lundy thought fleetingly that it was nice to know there were still a\n couple of things men could do better than machinery.", "Lundy didn't like that cold tight knot in his belly. It meant he was\n afraid. He'd been afraid before, plenty of times, and he wasn't ashamed\n of it. But right now he needed all the brains and guts he had to get\nIt\nback to Special headquarters at Vhia, and he didn't want to have\n to fight himself, too.\n\n\n Fear can screw things for you. It can make you weak when you need to be\n strong, if you're going to go on living. You, and the two other guys\n depending on you.\n\n\n Lundy hoped he could keep from getting too much afraid, and too\n tired—because\nIt\nwas sitting back there in its little strongbox in\n the safe, waiting for somebody to crack.", "He stepped slow and careful, like a man coming alone down the aisle of\n an empty church.\n\n\n He walked on the road for a long time. The weeds crowded in thicker\n along its edges. It seemed to run right through a dense forest of them\n that spread away as far as Lundy could see on either side. He was glad\n of the road. It was wide, and if he stayed in the middle of it the\n flowers couldn't reach him.\nIt got darker, because of the weeds covering the sand. Whatever made\n the phosphorescence didn't like being crowded that way, and pretty soon\n it was so dark that Lundy had to switch on the light in the top of his\n helmet. In the edges of the beam he could see the weed fronds moving\n lazily with the slow breathing of the sea.\n\n\n The flowers were brighter here. They hung like lamps in the black\n water, burning with a light that seemed to come out of themselves.\n Sullen reds and angry yellows, and coldly vicious blues.", "Farrell went on screaming. His throat seemed to be lined with\n impervium. Screaming and fighting the straps, because\nIt\nwas locked\n up and calling for help.\n\n\n Jackie Smith stirred slightly, groaned, and opened his pale green eyes.\n\n\n \"I'm cold,\" he said. \"Hi, Midget.\"\n\n\n Lundy turned his head. Normally he had a round, fresh, merry face, with\n bright dark eyes and a white, small-boyish grin. Now he looked like\n something the waiter had swept out from under a table at four A.M. on\n New Year's Day.\n\n\n \"You're cold,\" he said sourly. He licked sweat off his lips. \"Oh, fine!\n That was all I needed.\"" ], [ "Lundy didn't like them.\n\n\n The weeds grew in thicker and closer. They bulged out from their roots,\n in over the stone edges. The flowers opened their bright hungry mouths\n and yearned at Lundy, reaching.\n\n\n Reaching. Not quite touching. Not yet. He was tired. The brandy and the\n benzedrine began to die in him. He changed his oxygen cylinder. That\n helped, but not much. He took more dope, but he was afraid to go heavy\n on it lest he drive his heart too hard. His legs turned numb.\n\n\n He hadn't slept for a long time. Tracking Farrell hadn't been any\n breeze, and taking him—and\nIt\n—had been plain and fancy hell. Lundy\n was only human. He was tired. Bushed. Cooked. Beat to the socks.", "He'd been screaming a long time. Ever since the shot of\navertin\nLundy\n had given him after he was taken had begun to wear thin. Fighting the\n straps and screaming, a hoarse jarring sound with no sense in it.\n\n\n Screaming to be free, because of\nIt\n.\n\n\n Somewhere inside of Lundy, inside the rumpled, sweat-soaked black\n uniform of the Tri-World Police, Special Branch, and the five-foot-six\n of thick springy muscle under it, there was a knot. It was a large\n knot, and it was very, very cold in spite of the sweltering heat in\n the cabin, and it had a nasty habit of yanking itself tight every few\n minutes, causing Lundy to jerk and sweat as though he'd been spiked.", "Lundy had tied him down to the bunk with four heavy straps. Breast,\n belly, thighs, and feet. The marks of them were on Farrell. They were\n cut into his shirt and pants, into his flesh and sinew, deep enough\n to show his bare white ribs. There was blood. A lot of blood. Farrell\n didn't mind.\n\n\n \"I broke the straps,\" he said. He smiled at Lundy. \"She called me and I\n broke the straps.\"\n\n\n He started to walk to the safe in the corner of the cabin. Lundy gagged\n and pulled himself up out of a cold black cloud and got his feet to\n moving.", "It was beautiful down there. Like the dream-worlds you see when you're\n doped or delirious. The phosphorescence rose up into the black water\n and danced there in wavering whorls of cold fire. Fish, queer gaudy\n little things with jewelled eyes, flicked past Lundy in darts of\n sudden color, and there were great stands of weed like young forests,\n spangling the dark water and the phosphorescent glow with huge burning\n spots of blue and purple and green and silver.\n\n\n Flowers. Lundy got too close to some of them once. They reached out and\n opened round mouths full of spines and sucked at him hungrily. The\n fish gave them a wide berth. After that, so did Lundy.\n\n\n He hadn't been walking more than half an hour when he hit the road.", "The second thing was his body. It hurt like hell, and it was hot, and\n it didn't like the thick, foul air it was getting. Lundy pushed himself\n into a sitting position and tried to boot his brain into action. It was\n hard work, because someone had split his head open four ways with an\n axe.\n\n\n It wasn't really dark in the cabin. A wavering silver glow almost like\n moonlight came in through the ports. Lundy could see pretty well. He\n could see Farrell's body sprawled out on the floor, and a mess of junk\n that had once been equipment.\n\n\n He could see the safe.\n\n\n He looked at it a long time. There wasn't much to look at. Just an open\n safe with nothing in it, and a piece of black cloth dropped on the\n floor.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord,\" whispered Lundy. \"Oh, my Lord!\"", "And\nShe\nwas a whiz at hypnosis and mind-control. That's why\nShe\n, or\nIt\n, hadn't been caught alive before. Not before Lundy and Smith, with\n every scientific aid Special could give them, had tracked down Farrell\n and managed to get the breaks.\n\n\n The breaks. Plain fool luck. Lundy moved his throbbing head stiffly on\n his aching neck, blinked sweat out of his bloodshot eyes, and wished to\n hell he was home in bed.\n\n\n Jackie Smith said suddenly, \"Midget, I'm cold. Get me a blanket.\"\n\n\n Lundy looked at him. His pale green eyes were half open, but not as\n though they saw anything. He was shivering.\n\n\n \"I can't leave the controls, Jackie.\"", "Farrell went on screaming. His throat seemed to be lined with\n impervium. Screaming and fighting the straps, because\nIt\nwas locked\n up and calling for help.\n\n\n Jackie Smith stirred slightly, groaned, and opened his pale green eyes.\n\n\n \"I'm cold,\" he said. \"Hi, Midget.\"\n\n\n Lundy turned his head. Normally he had a round, fresh, merry face, with\n bright dark eyes and a white, small-boyish grin. Now he looked like\n something the waiter had swept out from under a table at four A.M. on\n New Year's Day.\n\n\n \"You're cold,\" he said sourly. He licked sweat off his lips. \"Oh, fine!\n That was all I needed.\"", "The ship hit the water with a terrific smack. Spray geysered up, dead\n white against the black sea, fell back, and closed in. Presently even\n the ripples went away.\n\n\n Dark green weed-islands twined sinuously upon themselves, a flock of\n small sea-dragons flapped their jeweled wings down and began to fish,\n and none of them cared at all about the ship sinking away under them.\n\n\n Not even Lundy cared, out cold in the space-tight cabin, with his body\n wedged up against the safe and tears drying with the sweat on his\n stubbled cheeks.\nII\n\n\n The first thing Lundy knew about was the stillness. A dead feeling, as\n though everything in creation had stopped breathing.", "Lundy didn't like that cold tight knot in his belly. It meant he was\n afraid. He'd been afraid before, plenty of times, and he wasn't ashamed\n of it. But right now he needed all the brains and guts he had to get\nIt\nback to Special headquarters at Vhia, and he didn't want to have\n to fight himself, too.\n\n\n Fear can screw things for you. It can make you weak when you need to be\n strong, if you're going to go on living. You, and the two other guys\n depending on you.\n\n\n Lundy hoped he could keep from getting too much afraid, and too\n tired—because\nIt\nwas sitting back there in its little strongbox in\n the safe, waiting for somebody to crack.", "Everything hit him at once then. There wasn't much in him but his\n stomach, and that was tied down. But it tried hard to come up.\n Presently the spasms stopped, and then Lundy heard the knocking.\n\n\n It wasn't very loud. It had a slow, easy rhythm, as though the knocker\n had a lot of time and didn't care when he got in. It came from the\n airlock panel.\n\n\n Lundy got up. Slowly, cold as a toad's belly and as white. His lips\n drew back from his teeth and stayed there, frozen.\n\n\n The knocking kept on. A sleepy kind of sound. The guy outside could\n afford to wait. Sometime that locked door was going to open, and he\n could wait. He wasn't in a hurry. He would never be in a hurry.", "Lundy stopped himself after the third scream. He had to, because he\n knew if he screamed again he'd never stop. By that time the black water\n had pushed Jackie Smith away, over to the opposite wall, and covered\n his face.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord,\" whispered Lundy. \"Oh Lord,\nwhat did he see before he\n drowned\n?\"\n\n\n No one answered. The black water pushed at Lundy, rising high around\n him, trying to take him over to Jackie Smith. Lundy's mouth began to\n twitch.\n\n\n He shut his teeth on his lower lip, holding it, holding his throat. He\n began to run, clumsily, fighting the water, and then he stopped that,\n too. He walked, not looking behind him, out into the flooded lock. The\n door slid shut behind him, automatically.", "Smith said something that sounded like\nShe\nand folded up in his\n chair. Lundy rubbed his hand across his face. The lines of it were\n blurred and stupid. His dark eyes had no sense in them.\n\n\n He began to crawl over the lurching floor toward the safe.\n\n\n The clouds outside ripped and tore across the ship's nose, and\n presently only water showed. Black, still, tideless water dotted with\n little islands of floating weed that stirred and slithered with a life\n of their own.\n\n\n Black water, rushing up.\n\n\n Lundy didn't care. He crawled through Farrell's blood, and he didn't\n care about that, either. He pushed Farrell's body back against the\n cabin wall and began to scratch at the shiny door, making noises like a\n hound shut out and not happy about it.", "He got up, feeling like something that had stood outside rusting for\n four hundred years or so. Smith didn't turn his head. Lundy growled at\n him.\n\n\n \"Next time, sonny, you wear your long woolen undies and let me alone!\"\n\n\n Then he stopped. The knot jerked tight in his stomach. Cold sweat\n needled him, and his nerves stung in a swift rush of fire.\n\n\n Farrell had quit screaming.\n\n\n There was silence in the ship. Nothing touched it. The rockets were\n outside it and didn't matter. Even Jackie Smith's careful breathing had\n stopped. Lundy went forward slowly, toward the door. Two steps.\n\n\n It opened. Lundy stopped again, quite still.\n\n\n Farrell was standing in the opening. A nice guy with a wife and two\n kids. His face still looked like that, but the eyes in it were not\n sane, nor even human.", "Farrell was cracked wide open, of course, but he was tied down. Jackie\n Smith had begun to show signs before he passed out, so that Lundy had\n kept one hand over the anaesthetic needle gun holstered on the side of\n his chair. And Lundy thought,\nThe hell of it is, you don't know when\nIt\nstarts to work on you.\n There's no set pattern, or if there is we don't know it. Maybe right\n now the readings I see on those dials aren't there at all....\nDown below the torn grey clouds he could see occasional small patches\n of ocean. The black, still, tideless water of Venus, that covers so\n many secrets of the planet's past.\n\n\n It didn't help Lundy any. It could be right or wrong, depending on\n what part of the ocean it was—and there was no way to tell. He hoped\n nothing would happen to the motors. A guy could get awfully wet, out in\n the middle of that still black water.", "A nice guy, crazy blind in love with somebody that didn't exist. A\n decent hard-working guy with a wife and two kids who'd lost his mind,\n heart, and soul to a Thing from outer space, so that he was willing to\n kill to protect It.\nOh, hell!\nthought Lundy wearily,\nwon't he ever stop screaming?\nThe rockets beat and thundered. The torn grey sky whipped past. Jackie\n Smith sat rigid, with closed eyes, white around the lips and breathing\n in shallow, careful gasps. And Vhia was still a long way off.\n\n\n Maybe farther off than he knew. Maybe he wasn't heading toward Vhia\n at all. Maybe\nIt\nwas working on him, and he'd never know it till he\n crashed.\n\n\n The cold knot tightened in his belly like a cold blade stabbing.\n\n\n Lundy cursed. Thinking things like that was a sure way to punch your\n ticket right straight to blazes.", "Jackie Smith stirred slightly, groaned, to joggle himself. His black\n tunic was open over his chest, showing the white strapping of bandages,\n and his left hand was thrust in over the locked top of the tunic's\n zipper. He was a big man, not any older than Lundy, with big, ugly,\n pleasant features, a shock of coarse pale hair, and a skin like old\n leather.\n\n\n \"On Mercury, where I was born,\" he said, \"the climate is suitable for\n human beings. You Old-World pantywaists....\" He broke off, turned white\n under the leathery burn, and said through set teeth, \"Oi! Farrell sure\n did a good job on me.\"", "\"You'll live,\" said Lundy. He tried not to think about how nearly both\n he and Smith had come to not living. Farrell had put up one hell of a\n fight, when they caught up with him in a native village high up in the\n Mountains of White Cloud.\nLundy still felt sick about that. The bull-meat, the hard boys, you\n didn't mind kicking around. But Farrell wasn't that kind. He was just a\n nice guy that got trapped by something too big for him.", "Lundy began to fight. His lips peeled back off his teeth, but he didn't\n make any noise except his heavy breathing. He fought the flowers,\n partly with the blaster, partly with brute strength. No science, no\n thought. Just the last blind struggle of an animal that didn't want to\n die.\n\n\n The flowers held him. They smothered him, crushed him down, wrapped him\n in lovely burning petals of destruction. He seared a lot of them, but\n there were always more. Lundy didn't fight long.\n\n\n He lay on his back, his knees drawn up a little toward a rigid, knotted\n belly, blind with sweat, his heart kicking him like a logger's boot.\n Cold, tense—waiting.\n\n\n And then the flowers went away.\n\n\n They didn't want to. They let go reluctantly, drawing back and snarling\n like cats robbed of a fat mouse, making small hungry feints at him. But\n they went.", "The anaesthetic needles hit Lundy across the chest. They didn't hurt\n much. Just a stinging prick. He kept going. No reason. It was just\n something he seemed to be doing at the time.\n\n\n Behind him Farrell whimpered once like a puppy and lay down across the\n little safe. He didn't move again. Lundy got down on his hands and\n knees and reached in a vague sort of way for the controls. Jackie Smith\n watched him with dazed green eyes.\n\n\n Quite suddenly, Iron Mike blew his guts out.\n\n\n The control panel let go a burst of blue flame. The glare and heat of\n it knocked Lundy backward. Things hissed and snarled and ran together,\n and the convertible began to dance like a leaf in a gale. The automatic\n safety cut the rockets dead.\n\n\n The ship began to fall.", "He stepped slow and careful, like a man coming alone down the aisle of\n an empty church.\n\n\n He walked on the road for a long time. The weeds crowded in thicker\n along its edges. It seemed to run right through a dense forest of them\n that spread away as far as Lundy could see on either side. He was glad\n of the road. It was wide, and if he stayed in the middle of it the\n flowers couldn't reach him.\nIt got darker, because of the weeds covering the sand. Whatever made\n the phosphorescence didn't like being crowded that way, and pretty soon\n it was so dark that Lundy had to switch on the light in the top of his\n helmet. In the edges of the beam he could see the weed fronds moving\n lazily with the slow breathing of the sea.\n\n\n The flowers were brighter here. They hung like lamps in the black\n water, burning with a light that seemed to come out of themselves.\n Sullen reds and angry yellows, and coldly vicious blues." ], [ "It was beautiful down there. Like the dream-worlds you see when you're\n doped or delirious. The phosphorescence rose up into the black water\n and danced there in wavering whorls of cold fire. Fish, queer gaudy\n little things with jewelled eyes, flicked past Lundy in darts of\n sudden color, and there were great stands of weed like young forests,\n spangling the dark water and the phosphorescent glow with huge burning\n spots of blue and purple and green and silver.\n\n\n Flowers. Lundy got too close to some of them once. They reached out and\n opened round mouths full of spines and sucked at him hungrily. The\n fish gave them a wide berth. After that, so did Lundy.\n\n\n He hadn't been walking more than half an hour when he hit the road.", "He'd been screaming a long time. Ever since the shot of\navertin\nLundy\n had given him after he was taken had begun to wear thin. Fighting the\n straps and screaming, a hoarse jarring sound with no sense in it.\n\n\n Screaming to be free, because of\nIt\n.\n\n\n Somewhere inside of Lundy, inside the rumpled, sweat-soaked black\n uniform of the Tri-World Police, Special Branch, and the five-foot-six\n of thick springy muscle under it, there was a knot. It was a large\n knot, and it was very, very cold in spite of the sweltering heat in\n the cabin, and it had a nasty habit of yanking itself tight every few\n minutes, causing Lundy to jerk and sweat as though he'd been spiked.", "Lundy didn't like them.\n\n\n The weeds grew in thicker and closer. They bulged out from their roots,\n in over the stone edges. The flowers opened their bright hungry mouths\n and yearned at Lundy, reaching.\n\n\n Reaching. Not quite touching. Not yet. He was tired. The brandy and the\n benzedrine began to die in him. He changed his oxygen cylinder. That\n helped, but not much. He took more dope, but he was afraid to go heavy\n on it lest he drive his heart too hard. His legs turned numb.\n\n\n He hadn't slept for a long time. Tracking Farrell hadn't been any\n breeze, and taking him—and\nIt\n—had been plain and fancy hell. Lundy\n was only human. He was tired. Bushed. Cooked. Beat to the socks.", "The second thing was his body. It hurt like hell, and it was hot, and\n it didn't like the thick, foul air it was getting. Lundy pushed himself\n into a sitting position and tried to boot his brain into action. It was\n hard work, because someone had split his head open four ways with an\n axe.\n\n\n It wasn't really dark in the cabin. A wavering silver glow almost like\n moonlight came in through the ports. Lundy could see pretty well. He\n could see Farrell's body sprawled out on the floor, and a mess of junk\n that had once been equipment.\n\n\n He could see the safe.\n\n\n He looked at it a long time. There wasn't much to look at. Just an open\n safe with nothing in it, and a piece of black cloth dropped on the\n floor.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord,\" whispered Lundy. \"Oh, my Lord!\"", "Lundy had tied him down to the bunk with four heavy straps. Breast,\n belly, thighs, and feet. The marks of them were on Farrell. They were\n cut into his shirt and pants, into his flesh and sinew, deep enough\n to show his bare white ribs. There was blood. A lot of blood. Farrell\n didn't mind.\n\n\n \"I broke the straps,\" he said. He smiled at Lundy. \"She called me and I\n broke the straps.\"\n\n\n He started to walk to the safe in the corner of the cabin. Lundy gagged\n and pulled himself up out of a cold black cloud and got his feet to\n moving.", "Lundy couldn't see much of it, because of the weeds. But it seemed to\n be a big city. There was a wall around it, of green marble veined with\n dusky rose, the edges worn round by centuries of water. There were\n broad gates of pure untarnished gold, standing open on golden pintles.\n Beyond them was a vast square paved in cloud-grey quartz, and the\n buildings rose around it like the castles Lundy remembered from Earth\n and his childhood, when there were clouds of a certain kind at sunset.\n\n\n That's what the whole place looked like, under the flaring golden\n light. Cloud-cuckoo land at sunset. Remote, dreaming in beauty, with\n the black water drawn across it like a veil—something never destroyed\n because it never existed.\n\n\n The creatures who came from between the golden gates and down the road\n were like tiny wisps of those clouds, torn free by some cold wandering\n breeze and driven away from the light.", "So once upon a time this road had crossed a plain under a hot\n pearl-grey sky, going somewhere. Taking caravans from the seacoast,\n probably. Bales of spices and spider-silk and casks of\nvakhi\nfrom the\n Nahali canebrakes, and silver-haired slave-girls from the high lands\n of the Cloud People, going along under sultry green\nliha\n-trees to be\n sold.\n\n\n Now it crossed a plain of glowing sand under still black water. The\n only trees that shadowed it were tall weeds with brilliant, hungry\n flowers, and the only creatures that followed it were little fish\n with jewelled eyes. But it was still there, still ready, still going\n somewhere.\n\n\n It was headed the same way Lundy was. It must have made a bend\n somewhere and turned to meet him. Lundy licked cold sweat off his lips\n and stepped out on it.", "Smith said something that sounded like\nShe\nand folded up in his\n chair. Lundy rubbed his hand across his face. The lines of it were\n blurred and stupid. His dark eyes had no sense in them.\n\n\n He began to crawl over the lurching floor toward the safe.\n\n\n The clouds outside ripped and tore across the ship's nose, and\n presently only water showed. Black, still, tideless water dotted with\n little islands of floating weed that stirred and slithered with a life\n of their own.\n\n\n Black water, rushing up.\n\n\n Lundy didn't care. He crawled through Farrell's blood, and he didn't\n care about that, either. He pushed Farrell's body back against the\n cabin wall and began to scratch at the shiny door, making noises like a\n hound shut out and not happy about it.", "The ship hit the water with a terrific smack. Spray geysered up, dead\n white against the black sea, fell back, and closed in. Presently even\n the ripples went away.\n\n\n Dark green weed-islands twined sinuously upon themselves, a flock of\n small sea-dragons flapped their jeweled wings down and began to fish,\n and none of them cared at all about the ship sinking away under them.\n\n\n Not even Lundy cared, out cold in the space-tight cabin, with his body\n wedged up against the safe and tears drying with the sweat on his\n stubbled cheeks.\nII\n\n\n The first thing Lundy knew about was the stillness. A dead feeling, as\n though everything in creation had stopped breathing.", "A nice guy, crazy blind in love with somebody that didn't exist. A\n decent hard-working guy with a wife and two kids who'd lost his mind,\n heart, and soul to a Thing from outer space, so that he was willing to\n kill to protect It.\nOh, hell!\nthought Lundy wearily,\nwon't he ever stop screaming?\nThe rockets beat and thundered. The torn grey sky whipped past. Jackie\n Smith sat rigid, with closed eyes, white around the lips and breathing\n in shallow, careful gasps. And Vhia was still a long way off.\n\n\n Maybe farther off than he knew. Maybe he wasn't heading toward Vhia\n at all. Maybe\nIt\nwas working on him, and he'd never know it till he\n crashed.\n\n\n The cold knot tightened in his belly like a cold blade stabbing.\n\n\n Lundy cursed. Thinking things like that was a sure way to punch your\n ticket right straight to blazes.", "Jackie Smith stirred slightly, groaned, to joggle himself. His black\n tunic was open over his chest, showing the white strapping of bandages,\n and his left hand was thrust in over the locked top of the tunic's\n zipper. He was a big man, not any older than Lundy, with big, ugly,\n pleasant features, a shock of coarse pale hair, and a skin like old\n leather.\n\n\n \"On Mercury, where I was born,\" he said, \"the climate is suitable for\n human beings. You Old-World pantywaists....\" He broke off, turned white\n under the leathery burn, and said through set teeth, \"Oi! Farrell sure\n did a good job on me.\"", "Farrell was cracked wide open, of course, but he was tied down. Jackie\n Smith had begun to show signs before he passed out, so that Lundy had\n kept one hand over the anaesthetic needle gun holstered on the side of\n his chair. And Lundy thought,\nThe hell of it is, you don't know when\nIt\nstarts to work on you.\n There's no set pattern, or if there is we don't know it. Maybe right\n now the readings I see on those dials aren't there at all....\nDown below the torn grey clouds he could see occasional small patches\n of ocean. The black, still, tideless water of Venus, that covers so\n many secrets of the planet's past.\n\n\n It didn't help Lundy any. It could be right or wrong, depending on\n what part of the ocean it was—and there was no way to tell. He hoped\n nothing would happen to the motors. A guy could get awfully wet, out in\n the middle of that still black water.", "Lundy didn't like that cold tight knot in his belly. It meant he was\n afraid. He'd been afraid before, plenty of times, and he wasn't ashamed\n of it. But right now he needed all the brains and guts he had to get\nIt\nback to Special headquarters at Vhia, and he didn't want to have\n to fight himself, too.\n\n\n Fear can screw things for you. It can make you weak when you need to be\n strong, if you're going to go on living. You, and the two other guys\n depending on you.\n\n\n Lundy hoped he could keep from getting too much afraid, and too\n tired—because\nIt\nwas sitting back there in its little strongbox in\n the safe, waiting for somebody to crack.", "He stepped slow and careful, like a man coming alone down the aisle of\n an empty church.\n\n\n He walked on the road for a long time. The weeds crowded in thicker\n along its edges. It seemed to run right through a dense forest of them\n that spread away as far as Lundy could see on either side. He was glad\n of the road. It was wide, and if he stayed in the middle of it the\n flowers couldn't reach him.\nIt got darker, because of the weeds covering the sand. Whatever made\n the phosphorescence didn't like being crowded that way, and pretty soon\n it was so dark that Lundy had to switch on the light in the top of his\n helmet. In the edges of the beam he could see the weed fronds moving\n lazily with the slow breathing of the sea.\n\n\n The flowers were brighter here. They hung like lamps in the black\n water, burning with a light that seemed to come out of themselves.\n Sullen reds and angry yellows, and coldly vicious blues.", "Lundy stopped himself after the third scream. He had to, because he\n knew if he screamed again he'd never stop. By that time the black water\n had pushed Jackie Smith away, over to the opposite wall, and covered\n his face.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord,\" whispered Lundy. \"Oh Lord,\nwhat did he see before he\n drowned\n?\"\n\n\n No one answered. The black water pushed at Lundy, rising high around\n him, trying to take him over to Jackie Smith. Lundy's mouth began to\n twitch.\n\n\n He shut his teeth on his lower lip, holding it, holding his throat. He\n began to run, clumsily, fighting the water, and then he stopped that,\n too. He walked, not looking behind him, out into the flooded lock. The\n door slid shut behind him, automatically.", "He watched the flowers fasten on his vac-suit and start working. Then,\n from up ahead, through the dark close tunnel of the weeds, he saw the\n light.\n\n\n It flared out suddenly, like lightning. A sheet of hot, bright gold\n cracking out like a whipped banner, lighting the end of the road.\n\n\n Lighting the city, and the little procession coming out of it.\n\n\n Lundy didn't believe any of it. He was half dead already, with his\n mind floating free of his body and beginning to be wrapped up in dark\n clouds. He watched what he saw incuriously.\n\n\n The golden light died down, and then flared out twice more,\n rhythmically. The road ran smooth again beyond the end of the tunnel,\n straight across a narrow plain. Beyond that, the city rose.", "Lundy tripped and fell, cracking his head against the back of his\n helmet. For a moment all he could see was bright light flashing. Then\n that stopped, and he realized he must have jarred a connection loose\n somewhere because his own light was out.\n\n\n He began to crawl over a great tilted block. The flowers burned bright\n in the darkness. Bright and close. Very close. Lundy opened his mouth.\n Nothing came out but a hoarse animal whimper. He was still holding the\n blaster. He fired it off a couple of times, and then he was on top of\n the block, lying flat on his belly.\n\n\n He knew it was the end of the line, because he couldn't move any more.\n\n\n The bright flowers came down through the dark. Lundy lay watching them.\n His face was quite blank. His dark eyes held a stubborn hatred, but\n nothing else.", "Everything hit him at once then. There wasn't much in him but his\n stomach, and that was tied down. But it tried hard to come up.\n Presently the spasms stopped, and then Lundy heard the knocking.\n\n\n It wasn't very loud. It had a slow, easy rhythm, as though the knocker\n had a lot of time and didn't care when he got in. It came from the\n airlock panel.\n\n\n Lundy got up. Slowly, cold as a toad's belly and as white. His lips\n drew back from his teeth and stayed there, frozen.\n\n\n The knocking kept on. A sleepy kind of sound. The guy outside could\n afford to wait. Sometime that locked door was going to open, and he\n could wait. He wasn't in a hurry. He would never be in a hurry.", "\"You'll live,\" said Lundy. He tried not to think about how nearly both\n he and Smith had come to not living. Farrell had put up one hell of a\n fight, when they caught up with him in a native village high up in the\n Mountains of White Cloud.\nLundy still felt sick about that. The bull-meat, the hard boys, you\n didn't mind kicking around. But Farrell wasn't that kind. He was just a\n nice guy that got trapped by something too big for him.", "Lundy ran clumsily for a long time between the dark and pressing walls.\n The flowers got closer. They got close enough to catch his vac-suit,\n like hands grasping and slipping and grasping again. He began using the\n blaster.\n\n\n He burned off a lot of them that way. They didn't like it. They began\n swaying in from their roots and down from the laced ceiling over his\n head. They hurt. They were angry. Lundy ran, sobbing without tears.\n\n\n The road did him in. It crossed him up, suddenly, without warning. It\n ran along smoothly under the tunnel of weeds, and then it was a broken,\n jumbled mass of huge stone blocks, tipped up and thrown around like\n something a giant's kid got tired of playing with.\n\n\n And the weeds had found places to stand in between them." ], [ "Lundy began to fight. His lips peeled back off his teeth, but he didn't\n make any noise except his heavy breathing. He fought the flowers,\n partly with the blaster, partly with brute strength. No science, no\n thought. Just the last blind struggle of an animal that didn't want to\n die.\n\n\n The flowers held him. They smothered him, crushed him down, wrapped him\n in lovely burning petals of destruction. He seared a lot of them, but\n there were always more. Lundy didn't fight long.\n\n\n He lay on his back, his knees drawn up a little toward a rigid, knotted\n belly, blind with sweat, his heart kicking him like a logger's boot.\n Cold, tense—waiting.\n\n\n And then the flowers went away.\n\n\n They didn't want to. They let go reluctantly, drawing back and snarling\n like cats robbed of a fat mouse, making small hungry feints at him. But\n they went.", "Lundy didn't like them.\n\n\n The weeds grew in thicker and closer. They bulged out from their roots,\n in over the stone edges. The flowers opened their bright hungry mouths\n and yearned at Lundy, reaching.\n\n\n Reaching. Not quite touching. Not yet. He was tired. The brandy and the\n benzedrine began to die in him. He changed his oxygen cylinder. That\n helped, but not much. He took more dope, but he was afraid to go heavy\n on it lest he drive his heart too hard. His legs turned numb.\n\n\n He hadn't slept for a long time. Tracking Farrell hadn't been any\n breeze, and taking him—and\nIt\n—had been plain and fancy hell. Lundy\n was only human. He was tired. Bushed. Cooked. Beat to the socks.", "Lundy tripped and fell, cracking his head against the back of his\n helmet. For a moment all he could see was bright light flashing. Then\n that stopped, and he realized he must have jarred a connection loose\n somewhere because his own light was out.\n\n\n He began to crawl over a great tilted block. The flowers burned bright\n in the darkness. Bright and close. Very close. Lundy opened his mouth.\n Nothing came out but a hoarse animal whimper. He was still holding the\n blaster. He fired it off a couple of times, and then he was on top of\n the block, lying flat on his belly.\n\n\n He knew it was the end of the line, because he couldn't move any more.\n\n\n The bright flowers came down through the dark. Lundy lay watching them.\n His face was quite blank. His dark eyes held a stubborn hatred, but\n nothing else.", "Lundy ran clumsily for a long time between the dark and pressing walls.\n The flowers got closer. They got close enough to catch his vac-suit,\n like hands grasping and slipping and grasping again. He began using the\n blaster.\n\n\n He burned off a lot of them that way. They didn't like it. They began\n swaying in from their roots and down from the laced ceiling over his\n head. They hurt. They were angry. Lundy ran, sobbing without tears.\n\n\n The road did him in. It crossed him up, suddenly, without warning. It\n ran along smoothly under the tunnel of weeds, and then it was a broken,\n jumbled mass of huge stone blocks, tipped up and thrown around like\n something a giant's kid got tired of playing with.\n\n\n And the weeds had found places to stand in between them.", "He sat down and rested a while, turning off his light to save the\n battery. The flowers watched him, glowing in the dark. He closed his\n eyes, but he could still feel them, watching and waiting.\n\n\n After a minute or two he got up and went on.\n\n\n The weeds grew thicker, and taller, and heavier with flowers.\n\n\n More benzedrine, and damn the heart. The helmet light cut a cold white\n tunnel through the blackness. He followed it, walking faster. Weed\n fronds met and interlaced high above him, closing him in. Flowers bent\n inward, downward. Their petals almost brushed him. Fleshy petals,\n hungry and alive.\n\n\n He started to run, over the wheel-ruts and the worn hollows of the road\n that still went somewhere, under the black sea.", "He watched the flowers fasten on his vac-suit and start working. Then,\n from up ahead, through the dark close tunnel of the weeds, he saw the\n light.\n\n\n It flared out suddenly, like lightning. A sheet of hot, bright gold\n cracking out like a whipped banner, lighting the end of the road.\n\n\n Lighting the city, and the little procession coming out of it.\n\n\n Lundy didn't believe any of it. He was half dead already, with his\n mind floating free of his body and beginning to be wrapped up in dark\n clouds. He watched what he saw incuriously.\n\n\n The golden light died down, and then flared out twice more,\n rhythmically. The road ran smooth again beyond the end of the tunnel,\n straight across a narrow plain. Beyond that, the city rose.", "They came drifting toward Lundy. They didn't seem to be moving fast,\n but they must have been because quite suddenly they were among the\n weeds. There were a lot of them; maybe forty or fifty. They seemed to\n be between three and four feet tall, and they were all the same sad,\n blue-grey, twilight color.\n\n\n Lundy couldn't see what they were. They were vaguely man-shaped, and\n vaguely finny, and something that was more than vaguely something else,\n only he couldn't place it.\n\n\n He was suddenly beyond caring. The dull black curtain around his mind\n got a hole in it, and fear came shrieking through it. He could feel the\n working and pulling of his vac-suit where the flowers were chewing on\n it as though it were his own skin.\n\n\n He could feel sweat running cold on his body. In a minute that would be\n sea water running, and then....", "Lundy stopped himself after the third scream. He had to, because he\n knew if he screamed again he'd never stop. By that time the black water\n had pushed Jackie Smith away, over to the opposite wall, and covered\n his face.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord,\" whispered Lundy. \"Oh Lord,\nwhat did he see before he\n drowned\n?\"\n\n\n No one answered. The black water pushed at Lundy, rising high around\n him, trying to take him over to Jackie Smith. Lundy's mouth began to\n twitch.\n\n\n He shut his teeth on his lower lip, holding it, holding his throat. He\n began to run, clumsily, fighting the water, and then he stopped that,\n too. He walked, not looking behind him, out into the flooded lock. The\n door slid shut behind him, automatically.", "It was beautiful down there. Like the dream-worlds you see when you're\n doped or delirious. The phosphorescence rose up into the black water\n and danced there in wavering whorls of cold fire. Fish, queer gaudy\n little things with jewelled eyes, flicked past Lundy in darts of\n sudden color, and there were great stands of weed like young forests,\n spangling the dark water and the phosphorescent glow with huge burning\n spots of blue and purple and green and silver.\n\n\n Flowers. Lundy got too close to some of them once. They reached out and\n opened round mouths full of spines and sucked at him hungrily. The\n fish gave them a wide berth. After that, so did Lundy.\n\n\n He hadn't been walking more than half an hour when he hit the road.", "He stepped slow and careful, like a man coming alone down the aisle of\n an empty church.\n\n\n He walked on the road for a long time. The weeds crowded in thicker\n along its edges. It seemed to run right through a dense forest of them\n that spread away as far as Lundy could see on either side. He was glad\n of the road. It was wide, and if he stayed in the middle of it the\n flowers couldn't reach him.\nIt got darker, because of the weeds covering the sand. Whatever made\n the phosphorescence didn't like being crowded that way, and pretty soon\n it was so dark that Lundy had to switch on the light in the top of his\n helmet. In the edges of the beam he could see the weed fronds moving\n lazily with the slow breathing of the sea.\n\n\n The flowers were brighter here. They hung like lamps in the black\n water, burning with a light that seemed to come out of themselves.\n Sullen reds and angry yellows, and coldly vicious blues.", "Lundy had tied him down to the bunk with four heavy straps. Breast,\n belly, thighs, and feet. The marks of them were on Farrell. They were\n cut into his shirt and pants, into his flesh and sinew, deep enough\n to show his bare white ribs. There was blood. A lot of blood. Farrell\n didn't mind.\n\n\n \"I broke the straps,\" he said. He smiled at Lundy. \"She called me and I\n broke the straps.\"\n\n\n He started to walk to the safe in the corner of the cabin. Lundy gagged\n and pulled himself up out of a cold black cloud and got his feet to\n moving.", "He'd been screaming a long time. Ever since the shot of\navertin\nLundy\n had given him after he was taken had begun to wear thin. Fighting the\n straps and screaming, a hoarse jarring sound with no sense in it.\n\n\n Screaming to be free, because of\nIt\n.\n\n\n Somewhere inside of Lundy, inside the rumpled, sweat-soaked black\n uniform of the Tri-World Police, Special Branch, and the five-foot-six\n of thick springy muscle under it, there was a knot. It was a large\n knot, and it was very, very cold in spite of the sweltering heat in\n the cabin, and it had a nasty habit of yanking itself tight every few\n minutes, causing Lundy to jerk and sweat as though he'd been spiked.", "So once upon a time this road had crossed a plain under a hot\n pearl-grey sky, going somewhere. Taking caravans from the seacoast,\n probably. Bales of spices and spider-silk and casks of\nvakhi\nfrom the\n Nahali canebrakes, and silver-haired slave-girls from the high lands\n of the Cloud People, going along under sultry green\nliha\n-trees to be\n sold.\n\n\n Now it crossed a plain of glowing sand under still black water. The\n only trees that shadowed it were tall weeds with brilliant, hungry\n flowers, and the only creatures that followed it were little fish\n with jewelled eyes. But it was still there, still ready, still going\n somewhere.\n\n\n It was headed the same way Lundy was. It must have made a bend\n somewhere and turned to meet him. Lundy licked cold sweat off his lips\n and stepped out on it.", "The anaesthetic needles hit Lundy across the chest. They didn't hurt\n much. Just a stinging prick. He kept going. No reason. It was just\n something he seemed to be doing at the time.\n\n\n Behind him Farrell whimpered once like a puppy and lay down across the\n little safe. He didn't move again. Lundy got down on his hands and\n knees and reached in a vague sort of way for the controls. Jackie Smith\n watched him with dazed green eyes.\n\n\n Quite suddenly, Iron Mike blew his guts out.\n\n\n The control panel let go a burst of blue flame. The glare and heat of\n it knocked Lundy backward. Things hissed and snarled and ran together,\n and the convertible began to dance like a leaf in a gale. The automatic\n safety cut the rockets dead.\n\n\n The ship began to fall.", "Smith said something that sounded like\nShe\nand folded up in his\n chair. Lundy rubbed his hand across his face. The lines of it were\n blurred and stupid. His dark eyes had no sense in them.\n\n\n He began to crawl over the lurching floor toward the safe.\n\n\n The clouds outside ripped and tore across the ship's nose, and\n presently only water showed. Black, still, tideless water dotted with\n little islands of floating weed that stirred and slithered with a life\n of their own.\n\n\n Black water, rushing up.\n\n\n Lundy didn't care. He crawled through Farrell's blood, and he didn't\n care about that, either. He pushed Farrell's body back against the\n cabin wall and began to scratch at the shiny door, making noises like a\n hound shut out and not happy about it.", "The second thing was his body. It hurt like hell, and it was hot, and\n it didn't like the thick, foul air it was getting. Lundy pushed himself\n into a sitting position and tried to boot his brain into action. It was\n hard work, because someone had split his head open four ways with an\n axe.\n\n\n It wasn't really dark in the cabin. A wavering silver glow almost like\n moonlight came in through the ports. Lundy could see pretty well. He\n could see Farrell's body sprawled out on the floor, and a mess of junk\n that had once been equipment.\n\n\n He could see the safe.\n\n\n He looked at it a long time. There wasn't much to look at. Just an open\n safe with nothing in it, and a piece of black cloth dropped on the\n floor.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord,\" whispered Lundy. \"Oh, my Lord!\"", "\"You'll live,\" said Lundy. He tried not to think about how nearly both\n he and Smith had come to not living. Farrell had put up one hell of a\n fight, when they caught up with him in a native village high up in the\n Mountains of White Cloud.\nLundy still felt sick about that. The bull-meat, the hard boys, you\n didn't mind kicking around. But Farrell wasn't that kind. He was just a\n nice guy that got trapped by something too big for him.", "And\nShe\nwas a whiz at hypnosis and mind-control. That's why\nShe\n, or\nIt\n, hadn't been caught alive before. Not before Lundy and Smith, with\n every scientific aid Special could give them, had tracked down Farrell\n and managed to get the breaks.\n\n\n The breaks. Plain fool luck. Lundy moved his throbbing head stiffly on\n his aching neck, blinked sweat out of his bloodshot eyes, and wished to\n hell he was home in bed.\n\n\n Jackie Smith said suddenly, \"Midget, I'm cold. Get me a blanket.\"\n\n\n Lundy looked at him. His pale green eyes were half open, but not as\n though they saw anything. He was shivering.\n\n\n \"I can't leave the controls, Jackie.\"", "A nice guy, crazy blind in love with somebody that didn't exist. A\n decent hard-working guy with a wife and two kids who'd lost his mind,\n heart, and soul to a Thing from outer space, so that he was willing to\n kill to protect It.\nOh, hell!\nthought Lundy wearily,\nwon't he ever stop screaming?\nThe rockets beat and thundered. The torn grey sky whipped past. Jackie\n Smith sat rigid, with closed eyes, white around the lips and breathing\n in shallow, careful gasps. And Vhia was still a long way off.\n\n\n Maybe farther off than he knew. Maybe he wasn't heading toward Vhia\n at all. Maybe\nIt\nwas working on him, and he'd never know it till he\n crashed.\n\n\n The cold knot tightened in his belly like a cold blade stabbing.\n\n\n Lundy cursed. Thinking things like that was a sure way to punch your\n ticket right straight to blazes.", "Lundy couldn't see much of it, because of the weeds. But it seemed to\n be a big city. There was a wall around it, of green marble veined with\n dusky rose, the edges worn round by centuries of water. There were\n broad gates of pure untarnished gold, standing open on golden pintles.\n Beyond them was a vast square paved in cloud-grey quartz, and the\n buildings rose around it like the castles Lundy remembered from Earth\n and his childhood, when there were clouds of a certain kind at sunset.\n\n\n That's what the whole place looked like, under the flaring golden\n light. Cloud-cuckoo land at sunset. Remote, dreaming in beauty, with\n the black water drawn across it like a veil—something never destroyed\n because it never existed.\n\n\n The creatures who came from between the golden gates and down the road\n were like tiny wisps of those clouds, torn free by some cold wandering\n breeze and driven away from the light." ], [ "Farrell went on screaming. His throat seemed to be lined with\n impervium. Screaming and fighting the straps, because\nIt\nwas locked\n up and calling for help.\n\n\n Jackie Smith stirred slightly, groaned, and opened his pale green eyes.\n\n\n \"I'm cold,\" he said. \"Hi, Midget.\"\n\n\n Lundy turned his head. Normally he had a round, fresh, merry face, with\n bright dark eyes and a white, small-boyish grin. Now he looked like\n something the waiter had swept out from under a table at four A.M. on\n New Year's Day.\n\n\n \"You're cold,\" he said sourly. He licked sweat off his lips. \"Oh, fine!\n That was all I needed.\"", "He got up, feeling like something that had stood outside rusting for\n four hundred years or so. Smith didn't turn his head. Lundy growled at\n him.\n\n\n \"Next time, sonny, you wear your long woolen undies and let me alone!\"\n\n\n Then he stopped. The knot jerked tight in his stomach. Cold sweat\n needled him, and his nerves stung in a swift rush of fire.\n\n\n Farrell had quit screaming.\n\n\n There was silence in the ship. Nothing touched it. The rockets were\n outside it and didn't matter. Even Jackie Smith's careful breathing had\n stopped. Lundy went forward slowly, toward the door. Two steps.\n\n\n It opened. Lundy stopped again, quite still.\n\n\n Farrell was standing in the opening. A nice guy with a wife and two\n kids. His face still looked like that, but the eyes in it were not\n sane, nor even human.", "Lundy had tied him down to the bunk with four heavy straps. Breast,\n belly, thighs, and feet. The marks of them were on Farrell. They were\n cut into his shirt and pants, into his flesh and sinew, deep enough\n to show his bare white ribs. There was blood. A lot of blood. Farrell\n didn't mind.\n\n\n \"I broke the straps,\" he said. He smiled at Lundy. \"She called me and I\n broke the straps.\"\n\n\n He started to walk to the safe in the corner of the cabin. Lundy gagged\n and pulled himself up out of a cold black cloud and got his feet to\n moving.", "Lundy stopped himself after the third scream. He had to, because he\n knew if he screamed again he'd never stop. By that time the black water\n had pushed Jackie Smith away, over to the opposite wall, and covered\n his face.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord,\" whispered Lundy. \"Oh Lord,\nwhat did he see before he\n drowned\n?\"\n\n\n No one answered. The black water pushed at Lundy, rising high around\n him, trying to take him over to Jackie Smith. Lundy's mouth began to\n twitch.\n\n\n He shut his teeth on his lower lip, holding it, holding his throat. He\n began to run, clumsily, fighting the water, and then he stopped that,\n too. He walked, not looking behind him, out into the flooded lock. The\n door slid shut behind him, automatically.", "He'd been screaming a long time. Ever since the shot of\navertin\nLundy\n had given him after he was taken had begun to wear thin. Fighting the\n straps and screaming, a hoarse jarring sound with no sense in it.\n\n\n Screaming to be free, because of\nIt\n.\n\n\n Somewhere inside of Lundy, inside the rumpled, sweat-soaked black\n uniform of the Tri-World Police, Special Branch, and the five-foot-six\n of thick springy muscle under it, there was a knot. It was a large\n knot, and it was very, very cold in spite of the sweltering heat in\n the cabin, and it had a nasty habit of yanking itself tight every few\n minutes, causing Lundy to jerk and sweat as though he'd been spiked.", "The anaesthetic needles hit Lundy across the chest. They didn't hurt\n much. Just a stinging prick. He kept going. No reason. It was just\n something he seemed to be doing at the time.\n\n\n Behind him Farrell whimpered once like a puppy and lay down across the\n little safe. He didn't move again. Lundy got down on his hands and\n knees and reached in a vague sort of way for the controls. Jackie Smith\n watched him with dazed green eyes.\n\n\n Quite suddenly, Iron Mike blew his guts out.\n\n\n The control panel let go a burst of blue flame. The glare and heat of\n it knocked Lundy backward. Things hissed and snarled and ran together,\n and the convertible began to dance like a leaf in a gale. The automatic\n safety cut the rockets dead.\n\n\n The ship began to fall.", "Farrell was cracked wide open, of course, but he was tied down. Jackie\n Smith had begun to show signs before he passed out, so that Lundy had\n kept one hand over the anaesthetic needle gun holstered on the side of\n his chair. And Lundy thought,\nThe hell of it is, you don't know when\nIt\nstarts to work on you.\n There's no set pattern, or if there is we don't know it. Maybe right\n now the readings I see on those dials aren't there at all....\nDown below the torn grey clouds he could see occasional small patches\n of ocean. The black, still, tideless water of Venus, that covers so\n many secrets of the planet's past.\n\n\n It didn't help Lundy any. It could be right or wrong, depending on\n what part of the ocean it was—and there was no way to tell. He hoped\n nothing would happen to the motors. A guy could get awfully wet, out in\n the middle of that still black water.", "Jackie Smith stirred slightly, groaned, to joggle himself. His black\n tunic was open over his chest, showing the white strapping of bandages,\n and his left hand was thrust in over the locked top of the tunic's\n zipper. He was a big man, not any older than Lundy, with big, ugly,\n pleasant features, a shock of coarse pale hair, and a skin like old\n leather.\n\n\n \"On Mercury, where I was born,\" he said, \"the climate is suitable for\n human beings. You Old-World pantywaists....\" He broke off, turned white\n under the leathery burn, and said through set teeth, \"Oi! Farrell sure\n did a good job on me.\"", "Smith said something that sounded like\nShe\nand folded up in his\n chair. Lundy rubbed his hand across his face. The lines of it were\n blurred and stupid. His dark eyes had no sense in them.\n\n\n He began to crawl over the lurching floor toward the safe.\n\n\n The clouds outside ripped and tore across the ship's nose, and\n presently only water showed. Black, still, tideless water dotted with\n little islands of floating weed that stirred and slithered with a life\n of their own.\n\n\n Black water, rushing up.\n\n\n Lundy didn't care. He crawled through Farrell's blood, and he didn't\n care about that, either. He pushed Farrell's body back against the\n cabin wall and began to scratch at the shiny door, making noises like a\n hound shut out and not happy about it.", "And\nShe\nwas a whiz at hypnosis and mind-control. That's why\nShe\n, or\nIt\n, hadn't been caught alive before. Not before Lundy and Smith, with\n every scientific aid Special could give them, had tracked down Farrell\n and managed to get the breaks.\n\n\n The breaks. Plain fool luck. Lundy moved his throbbing head stiffly on\n his aching neck, blinked sweat out of his bloodshot eyes, and wished to\n hell he was home in bed.\n\n\n Jackie Smith said suddenly, \"Midget, I'm cold. Get me a blanket.\"\n\n\n Lundy looked at him. His pale green eyes were half open, but not as\n though they saw anything. He was shivering.\n\n\n \"I can't leave the controls, Jackie.\"", "Lundy didn't like them.\n\n\n The weeds grew in thicker and closer. They bulged out from their roots,\n in over the stone edges. The flowers opened their bright hungry mouths\n and yearned at Lundy, reaching.\n\n\n Reaching. Not quite touching. Not yet. He was tired. The brandy and the\n benzedrine began to die in him. He changed his oxygen cylinder. That\n helped, but not much. He took more dope, but he was afraid to go heavy\n on it lest he drive his heart too hard. His legs turned numb.\n\n\n He hadn't slept for a long time. Tracking Farrell hadn't been any\n breeze, and taking him—and\nIt\n—had been plain and fancy hell. Lundy\n was only human. He was tired. Bushed. Cooked. Beat to the socks.", "Jackie Smith said quietly, \"Hold it, Midget. She doesn't like it there\n in the safe. She's cold, and she wants to come out.\"\nLundy looked over his shoulder. Smith was hunched around in his seat,\n holding the needle-gun from Lundy's holster on the pilot's chair. His\n pale green eyes had a distant, dreamy glow, but Lundy knew better than\n to trust it.\n\n\n He said, without inflection, \"You've seen her.\"\n\n\n \"No. No, but—I've heard her.\" Smith's heavy lips twitched and parted.\n The breath sucked through between them, hoarse and slow.\n\n\n Farrell went down on his knees beside the safe. He put his hands on its\n blank and gleaming face and turned to Lundy. He was crying.\n\n\n \"Open it. You've got to open it. She wants to come out. She's\n frightened.\"", "A nice guy, crazy blind in love with somebody that didn't exist. A\n decent hard-working guy with a wife and two kids who'd lost his mind,\n heart, and soul to a Thing from outer space, so that he was willing to\n kill to protect It.\nOh, hell!\nthought Lundy wearily,\nwon't he ever stop screaming?\nThe rockets beat and thundered. The torn grey sky whipped past. Jackie\n Smith sat rigid, with closed eyes, white around the lips and breathing\n in shallow, careful gasps. And Vhia was still a long way off.\n\n\n Maybe farther off than he knew. Maybe he wasn't heading toward Vhia\n at all. Maybe\nIt\nwas working on him, and he'd never know it till he\n crashed.\n\n\n The cold knot tightened in his belly like a cold blade stabbing.\n\n\n Lundy cursed. Thinking things like that was a sure way to punch your\n ticket right straight to blazes.", "\"You'll live,\" said Lundy. He tried not to think about how nearly both\n he and Smith had come to not living. Farrell had put up one hell of a\n fight, when they caught up with him in a native village high up in the\n Mountains of White Cloud.\nLundy still felt sick about that. The bull-meat, the hard boys, you\n didn't mind kicking around. But Farrell wasn't that kind. He was just a\n nice guy that got trapped by something too big for him.", "The second thing was his body. It hurt like hell, and it was hot, and\n it didn't like the thick, foul air it was getting. Lundy pushed himself\n into a sitting position and tried to boot his brain into action. It was\n hard work, because someone had split his head open four ways with an\n axe.\n\n\n It wasn't really dark in the cabin. A wavering silver glow almost like\n moonlight came in through the ports. Lundy could see pretty well. He\n could see Farrell's body sprawled out on the floor, and a mess of junk\n that had once been equipment.\n\n\n He could see the safe.\n\n\n He looked at it a long time. There wasn't much to look at. Just an open\n safe with nothing in it, and a piece of black cloth dropped on the\n floor.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord,\" whispered Lundy. \"Oh, my Lord!\"", "Then he turned and went very fast to the port locker and got a quart\n bottle out of its shock cradle, and raised it. It took both hands.\n\n\n After a while he dropped the bottle and stood still, not looking at\n anything, until he stopped shaking. Then he pulled his vac-suit down\n off its hook and climbed into it. His face was grey and quite blank.\n\n\n He took all the oxygen cylinders he could carry, emergency rations,\n and all the benzedrine in the medicine kit. He put the limit dose\n of the stimulant down on top of the brandy before he locked his\n helmet. He didn't bother with the needle gun. He took the two Service\n blasters—his own, and Smith's. The gentle knocking didn't stop.\n\n\n He stood for a moment looking at the open safe and the black cloth\n dropped beside it. Something cruel came into his face. A tightness, a\n twitching and setting of the muscles, and a terrible look of patience.", "Lundy began to fight. His lips peeled back off his teeth, but he didn't\n make any noise except his heavy breathing. He fought the flowers,\n partly with the blaster, partly with brute strength. No science, no\n thought. Just the last blind struggle of an animal that didn't want to\n die.\n\n\n The flowers held him. They smothered him, crushed him down, wrapped him\n in lovely burning petals of destruction. He seared a lot of them, but\n there were always more. Lundy didn't fight long.\n\n\n He lay on his back, his knees drawn up a little toward a rigid, knotted\n belly, blind with sweat, his heart kicking him like a logger's boot.\n Cold, tense—waiting.\n\n\n And then the flowers went away.\n\n\n They didn't want to. They let go reluctantly, drawing back and snarling\n like cats robbed of a fat mouse, making small hungry feints at him. But\n they went.", "Everything hit him at once then. There wasn't much in him but his\n stomach, and that was tied down. But it tried hard to come up.\n Presently the spasms stopped, and then Lundy heard the knocking.\n\n\n It wasn't very loud. It had a slow, easy rhythm, as though the knocker\n had a lot of time and didn't care when he got in. It came from the\n airlock panel.\n\n\n Lundy got up. Slowly, cold as a toad's belly and as white. His lips\n drew back from his teeth and stayed there, frozen.\n\n\n The knocking kept on. A sleepy kind of sound. The guy outside could\n afford to wait. Sometime that locked door was going to open, and he\n could wait. He wasn't in a hurry. He would never be in a hurry.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nLundy was flying the aero-space convertible by himself. He'd been doing\n it for a long time. So long that the bottom half of him was dead to the\n toes and the top half even deader, except for two separate aches like\n ulcerated teeth; one in his back, one in his head.\n\n\n Thick pearly-grey Venusian sky went past the speeding flier in\n streamers of torn cloud. The rockets throbbed and pounded. Instruments\n jerked erratically under the swirl of magnetic currents that makes the\n Venusian atmosphere such a swell place for pilots to go nuts in.\n\n\n Jackie Smith was still out cold in the co-pilot's seat. From in back,\n beyond the closed door to the tiny inner cabin, Lundy could hear\n Farrell screaming and fighting.", "But you couldn't help thinking, about\nIt\n. The Thing you had caught in\n a special net of tight-woven metal mesh, aiming at something Farrell\n could see but you couldn't. The Thing you had forced into the glassite\n box and covered up with a black cloth, because you had been warned not\n to look at\nIt\n.\n\n\n Lundy's hands tingled and burned, not unpleasantly. He could still feel\n the small savage Thing fighting him, hidden in the net. It had felt\n vaguely cylindrical, and terribly alive.\n\n\n Life. Life from outer space, swept out of a cloud of cosmic dust by the\n gravitic pull of Venus. Since Venus had hit the cloud there had been a\n wave of strange madness on the planet. Madness like Farrell's, that had\n led to murder, and some things even worse." ], [ "But you couldn't help thinking, about\nIt\n. The Thing you had caught in\n a special net of tight-woven metal mesh, aiming at something Farrell\n could see but you couldn't. The Thing you had forced into the glassite\n box and covered up with a black cloth, because you had been warned not\n to look at\nIt\n.\n\n\n Lundy's hands tingled and burned, not unpleasantly. He could still feel\n the small savage Thing fighting him, hidden in the net. It had felt\n vaguely cylindrical, and terribly alive.\n\n\n Life. Life from outer space, swept out of a cloud of cosmic dust by the\n gravitic pull of Venus. Since Venus had hit the cloud there had been a\n wave of strange madness on the planet. Madness like Farrell's, that had\n led to murder, and some things even worse.", "It was a perfectly good road, running straight across the sand. Here\n and there it was cracked, with some of the huge square blocks pushed up\n or tipped aside, but it was still a good road, going somewhere.\n\n\n Lundy stood looking at it with cold prickles running up and down his\n spine. He'd heard about things like this. Nobody knew an awful lot\n about Venus yet. It was a young, tough, be-damned-to-you planet, and it\n was apt to give the snoopy scientific guys a good swift boot in their\n store teeth.\n\n\n But even a young planet has a long past, and stories get around.\n Legends, songs, folk tales. It was pretty well accepted that a lot of\n Venus that was under water now hadn't been once, and vice versa. The\n old girl had her little whimsies while doing the preliminary mock-up of\n her permanent face.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nLundy was flying the aero-space convertible by himself. He'd been doing\n it for a long time. So long that the bottom half of him was dead to the\n toes and the top half even deader, except for two separate aches like\n ulcerated teeth; one in his back, one in his head.\n\n\n Thick pearly-grey Venusian sky went past the speeding flier in\n streamers of torn cloud. The rockets throbbed and pounded. Instruments\n jerked erratically under the swirl of magnetic currents that makes the\n Venusian atmosphere such a swell place for pilots to go nuts in.\n\n\n Jackie Smith was still out cold in the co-pilot's seat. From in back,\n beyond the closed door to the tiny inner cabin, Lundy could hear\n Farrell screaming and fighting.", "He walked out across the firm green-silver sand, swallowing the blood\n that ran in his mouth and choked him.\nHe didn't hurry. He was going to be walking for a long, long time. From\n the position of the ship when it fell he ought to be able to make it to\n the coast—unless\nIt\nhad been working on him so the figures on the\n dials hadn't been there at all.\n\n\n He checked his direction, adjusted the pressure-control in his\n vac-suit, and plodded on in the eerie undersea moonlight. It wasn't\n hard going. If he didn't hit a deep somewhere, or meet something too\n big to handle, or furnish a meal for some species of hungry Venus-weed,\n he ought to live to face up to the Old Man at H.Q. and tell him two men\n were dead, the ship lost, and the job messed to hell and gone.", "Lundy looked all around the cabin. He didn't speak. He looked sideways\n out of the port. There was water out there. The black sea-water of\n Venus; clear and black, like deep night.\n\n\n There was level sand spreading away from the ship. The silver light\n came up out of it. Some kind of phosphorescence, as bright as moonlight\n and faintly tinged with green.\n\n\n Black sea-water. Silver sand. The guy kept on knocking at the door.\n Slow and easy. Patient. One—two. One—two. Just off beat with Lundy's\n heart.\n\n\n Lundy went to the inner cabin, walking steadily. He looked around\n carefully and then went back. He stopped by the lock panel.\n\n\n \"Okay, Jackie,\" he said. \"In a minute. In a minute, boy.\"", "\"Nuts. I've got one hand. I can hang onto this lousy tin fish that\n long.\"\nLundy scowled. He knew Smith wasn't kidding about the cold. The\n temperatures on Mercury made the first-generation colonists sensitive\n to anything below the range of an electric furnace. With the wound and\n all, Smith might, wind up with pneumonia if he wasn't covered.\n\n\n \"Okay.\" Lundy reached out and closed the switch marked A. \"But I'll let\n Mike do the flying. He can probably last five minutes before he blows\n his guts out.\"\n\n\n Iron Mike was just a pattycake when it came to Venusian atmosphere\n flying. The constant magnetic compensation heated the robot coils to\n the fusing point in practically no time at all.\n\n\n Lundy thought fleetingly that it was nice to know there were still a\n couple of things men could do better than machinery.", "Scientists had some ideas about that life from Out There. They'd had\n a lucky break and found one of The Things, dead, and there were vague\n stories going around of a crystalline-appearing substance that wasn't\n really crystal, about three inches long and magnificently etched and\n fluted, and supplied with some odd little gadgets nobody would venture\n an opinion about.\n\n\n But the Thing didn't do them much good, dead. They had to have one\n alive, if they were going to find out what made it tick and learn how\n to put a stop to what the telecommentators had chosen to call The\n Madness from Beyond, or The Vampire Lure.\n\n\n One thing about it everybody knew. The guys who suddenly went sluggy\n and charged off the rails all made it clear that they had met the\n ultimate Dream Woman of all women and all dreams. Nobody else could see\n her, but that didn't bother them any. They saw her, and she was—\nShe\n.\n And her eyes were always veiled.", "Farrell was cracked wide open, of course, but he was tied down. Jackie\n Smith had begun to show signs before he passed out, so that Lundy had\n kept one hand over the anaesthetic needle gun holstered on the side of\n his chair. And Lundy thought,\nThe hell of it is, you don't know when\nIt\nstarts to work on you.\n There's no set pattern, or if there is we don't know it. Maybe right\n now the readings I see on those dials aren't there at all....\nDown below the torn grey clouds he could see occasional small patches\n of ocean. The black, still, tideless water of Venus, that covers so\n many secrets of the planet's past.\n\n\n It didn't help Lundy any. It could be right or wrong, depending on\n what part of the ocean it was—and there was no way to tell. He hoped\n nothing would happen to the motors. A guy could get awfully wet, out in\n the middle of that still black water.", "A nice guy, crazy blind in love with somebody that didn't exist. A\n decent hard-working guy with a wife and two kids who'd lost his mind,\n heart, and soul to a Thing from outer space, so that he was willing to\n kill to protect It.\nOh, hell!\nthought Lundy wearily,\nwon't he ever stop screaming?\nThe rockets beat and thundered. The torn grey sky whipped past. Jackie\n Smith sat rigid, with closed eyes, white around the lips and breathing\n in shallow, careful gasps. And Vhia was still a long way off.\n\n\n Maybe farther off than he knew. Maybe he wasn't heading toward Vhia\n at all. Maybe\nIt\nwas working on him, and he'd never know it till he\n crashed.\n\n\n The cold knot tightened in his belly like a cold blade stabbing.\n\n\n Lundy cursed. Thinking things like that was a sure way to punch your\n ticket right straight to blazes.", "Everything hit him at once then. There wasn't much in him but his\n stomach, and that was tied down. But it tried hard to come up.\n Presently the spasms stopped, and then Lundy heard the knocking.\n\n\n It wasn't very loud. It had a slow, easy rhythm, as though the knocker\n had a lot of time and didn't care when he got in. It came from the\n airlock panel.\n\n\n Lundy got up. Slowly, cold as a toad's belly and as white. His lips\n drew back from his teeth and stayed there, frozen.\n\n\n The knocking kept on. A sleepy kind of sound. The guy outside could\n afford to wait. Sometime that locked door was going to open, and he\n could wait. He wasn't in a hurry. He would never be in a hurry.", "He got up, feeling like something that had stood outside rusting for\n four hundred years or so. Smith didn't turn his head. Lundy growled at\n him.\n\n\n \"Next time, sonny, you wear your long woolen undies and let me alone!\"\n\n\n Then he stopped. The knot jerked tight in his stomach. Cold sweat\n needled him, and his nerves stung in a swift rush of fire.\n\n\n Farrell had quit screaming.\n\n\n There was silence in the ship. Nothing touched it. The rockets were\n outside it and didn't matter. Even Jackie Smith's careful breathing had\n stopped. Lundy went forward slowly, toward the door. Two steps.\n\n\n It opened. Lundy stopped again, quite still.\n\n\n Farrell was standing in the opening. A nice guy with a wife and two\n kids. His face still looked like that, but the eyes in it were not\n sane, nor even human.", "TERROR OUT OF SPACE\nby LEIGH BRACKETT\nAn eerie story of a silver land beneath the black\n\n Venusian seas. A grim tale of brooding terror whirling out of space to\n\n drive men mad, of a menace without name or form, and of the man, Lundy,\n\n who fought the horror, his eyes blinded by his will. For to see the\n\n terror was to become its slave—a mindless automaton whose only wish\n\n was to see behind the shadowed mysterious eyelids of \"\nIT\n\".\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Summer 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that", "Lundy began to fight. His lips peeled back off his teeth, but he didn't\n make any noise except his heavy breathing. He fought the flowers,\n partly with the blaster, partly with brute strength. No science, no\n thought. Just the last blind struggle of an animal that didn't want to\n die.\n\n\n The flowers held him. They smothered him, crushed him down, wrapped him\n in lovely burning petals of destruction. He seared a lot of them, but\n there were always more. Lundy didn't fight long.\n\n\n He lay on his back, his knees drawn up a little toward a rigid, knotted\n belly, blind with sweat, his heart kicking him like a logger's boot.\n Cold, tense—waiting.\n\n\n And then the flowers went away.\n\n\n They didn't want to. They let go reluctantly, drawing back and snarling\n like cats robbed of a fat mouse, making small hungry feints at him. But\n they went.", "He watched the flowers fasten on his vac-suit and start working. Then,\n from up ahead, through the dark close tunnel of the weeds, he saw the\n light.\n\n\n It flared out suddenly, like lightning. A sheet of hot, bright gold\n cracking out like a whipped banner, lighting the end of the road.\n\n\n Lighting the city, and the little procession coming out of it.\n\n\n Lundy didn't believe any of it. He was half dead already, with his\n mind floating free of his body and beginning to be wrapped up in dark\n clouds. He watched what he saw incuriously.\n\n\n The golden light died down, and then flared out twice more,\n rhythmically. The road ran smooth again beyond the end of the tunnel,\n straight across a narrow plain. Beyond that, the city rose.", "The ship hit the water with a terrific smack. Spray geysered up, dead\n white against the black sea, fell back, and closed in. Presently even\n the ripples went away.\n\n\n Dark green weed-islands twined sinuously upon themselves, a flock of\n small sea-dragons flapped their jeweled wings down and began to fish,\n and none of them cared at all about the ship sinking away under them.\n\n\n Not even Lundy cared, out cold in the space-tight cabin, with his body\n wedged up against the safe and tears drying with the sweat on his\n stubbled cheeks.\nII\n\n\n The first thing Lundy knew about was the stillness. A dead feeling, as\n though everything in creation had stopped breathing.", "He'd been screaming a long time. Ever since the shot of\navertin\nLundy\n had given him after he was taken had begun to wear thin. Fighting the\n straps and screaming, a hoarse jarring sound with no sense in it.\n\n\n Screaming to be free, because of\nIt\n.\n\n\n Somewhere inside of Lundy, inside the rumpled, sweat-soaked black\n uniform of the Tri-World Police, Special Branch, and the five-foot-six\n of thick springy muscle under it, there was a knot. It was a large\n knot, and it was very, very cold in spite of the sweltering heat in\n the cabin, and it had a nasty habit of yanking itself tight every few\n minutes, causing Lundy to jerk and sweat as though he'd been spiked.", "Lundy couldn't see much of it, because of the weeds. But it seemed to\n be a big city. There was a wall around it, of green marble veined with\n dusky rose, the edges worn round by centuries of water. There were\n broad gates of pure untarnished gold, standing open on golden pintles.\n Beyond them was a vast square paved in cloud-grey quartz, and the\n buildings rose around it like the castles Lundy remembered from Earth\n and his childhood, when there were clouds of a certain kind at sunset.\n\n\n That's what the whole place looked like, under the flaring golden\n light. Cloud-cuckoo land at sunset. Remote, dreaming in beauty, with\n the black water drawn across it like a veil—something never destroyed\n because it never existed.\n\n\n The creatures who came from between the golden gates and down the road\n were like tiny wisps of those clouds, torn free by some cold wandering\n breeze and driven away from the light.", "Farrell went on screaming. His throat seemed to be lined with\n impervium. Screaming and fighting the straps, because\nIt\nwas locked\n up and calling for help.\n\n\n Jackie Smith stirred slightly, groaned, and opened his pale green eyes.\n\n\n \"I'm cold,\" he said. \"Hi, Midget.\"\n\n\n Lundy turned his head. Normally he had a round, fresh, merry face, with\n bright dark eyes and a white, small-boyish grin. Now he looked like\n something the waiter had swept out from under a table at four A.M. on\n New Year's Day.\n\n\n \"You're cold,\" he said sourly. He licked sweat off his lips. \"Oh, fine!\n That was all I needed.\"", "They came drifting toward Lundy. They didn't seem to be moving fast,\n but they must have been because quite suddenly they were among the\n weeds. There were a lot of them; maybe forty or fifty. They seemed to\n be between three and four feet tall, and they were all the same sad,\n blue-grey, twilight color.\n\n\n Lundy couldn't see what they were. They were vaguely man-shaped, and\n vaguely finny, and something that was more than vaguely something else,\n only he couldn't place it.\n\n\n He was suddenly beyond caring. The dull black curtain around his mind\n got a hole in it, and fear came shrieking through it. He could feel the\n working and pulling of his vac-suit where the flowers were chewing on\n it as though it were his own skin.\n\n\n He could feel sweat running cold on his body. In a minute that would be\n sea water running, and then....", "The anaesthetic needles hit Lundy across the chest. They didn't hurt\n much. Just a stinging prick. He kept going. No reason. It was just\n something he seemed to be doing at the time.\n\n\n Behind him Farrell whimpered once like a puppy and lay down across the\n little safe. He didn't move again. Lundy got down on his hands and\n knees and reached in a vague sort of way for the controls. Jackie Smith\n watched him with dazed green eyes.\n\n\n Quite suddenly, Iron Mike blew his guts out.\n\n\n The control panel let go a burst of blue flame. The glare and heat of\n it knocked Lundy backward. Things hissed and snarled and ran together,\n and the convertible began to dance like a leaf in a gale. The automatic\n safety cut the rockets dead.\n\n\n The ship began to fall." ], [ "Jackie Smith stirred slightly, groaned, to joggle himself. His black\n tunic was open over his chest, showing the white strapping of bandages,\n and his left hand was thrust in over the locked top of the tunic's\n zipper. He was a big man, not any older than Lundy, with big, ugly,\n pleasant features, a shock of coarse pale hair, and a skin like old\n leather.\n\n\n \"On Mercury, where I was born,\" he said, \"the climate is suitable for\n human beings. You Old-World pantywaists....\" He broke off, turned white\n under the leathery burn, and said through set teeth, \"Oi! Farrell sure\n did a good job on me.\"", "Farrell went on screaming. His throat seemed to be lined with\n impervium. Screaming and fighting the straps, because\nIt\nwas locked\n up and calling for help.\n\n\n Jackie Smith stirred slightly, groaned, and opened his pale green eyes.\n\n\n \"I'm cold,\" he said. \"Hi, Midget.\"\n\n\n Lundy turned his head. Normally he had a round, fresh, merry face, with\n bright dark eyes and a white, small-boyish grin. Now he looked like\n something the waiter had swept out from under a table at four A.M. on\n New Year's Day.\n\n\n \"You're cold,\" he said sourly. He licked sweat off his lips. \"Oh, fine!\n That was all I needed.\"", "A nice guy, crazy blind in love with somebody that didn't exist. A\n decent hard-working guy with a wife and two kids who'd lost his mind,\n heart, and soul to a Thing from outer space, so that he was willing to\n kill to protect It.\nOh, hell!\nthought Lundy wearily,\nwon't he ever stop screaming?\nThe rockets beat and thundered. The torn grey sky whipped past. Jackie\n Smith sat rigid, with closed eyes, white around the lips and breathing\n in shallow, careful gasps. And Vhia was still a long way off.\n\n\n Maybe farther off than he knew. Maybe he wasn't heading toward Vhia\n at all. Maybe\nIt\nwas working on him, and he'd never know it till he\n crashed.\n\n\n The cold knot tightened in his belly like a cold blade stabbing.\n\n\n Lundy cursed. Thinking things like that was a sure way to punch your\n ticket right straight to blazes.", "Jackie Smith raised the gun, a fraction of an inch. \"Open it, Midget,\"\n he whispered. \"She's cold in there.\"\n\n\n Lundy stood still. The sweat ran on him and he was colder than a frog's\n belly in the rain; and for no reason at all he said thickly,\n\n\n \"No. She's hot. She can't breathe in there. She's hot.\"\n\n\n Then he jerked his head up and yelled. He came around to face Smith,\n unsteady but fast, and started for him.\n\n\n Smith's ugly face twisted as though he might be going to cry. \"Midget!\n I don't want to shoot you. Open the safe!\"\n\n\n Lundy said, \"You damned fool,\" with no voice at all, and went on.\n\n\n Smith hit the firing stud.", "Jackie Smith said quietly, \"Hold it, Midget. She doesn't like it there\n in the safe. She's cold, and she wants to come out.\"\nLundy looked over his shoulder. Smith was hunched around in his seat,\n holding the needle-gun from Lundy's holster on the pilot's chair. His\n pale green eyes had a distant, dreamy glow, but Lundy knew better than\n to trust it.\n\n\n He said, without inflection, \"You've seen her.\"\n\n\n \"No. No, but—I've heard her.\" Smith's heavy lips twitched and parted.\n The breath sucked through between them, hoarse and slow.\n\n\n Farrell went down on his knees beside the safe. He put his hands on its\n blank and gleaming face and turned to Lundy. He was crying.\n\n\n \"Open it. You've got to open it. She wants to come out. She's\n frightened.\"", "The anaesthetic needles hit Lundy across the chest. They didn't hurt\n much. Just a stinging prick. He kept going. No reason. It was just\n something he seemed to be doing at the time.\n\n\n Behind him Farrell whimpered once like a puppy and lay down across the\n little safe. He didn't move again. Lundy got down on his hands and\n knees and reached in a vague sort of way for the controls. Jackie Smith\n watched him with dazed green eyes.\n\n\n Quite suddenly, Iron Mike blew his guts out.\n\n\n The control panel let go a burst of blue flame. The glare and heat of\n it knocked Lundy backward. Things hissed and snarled and ran together,\n and the convertible began to dance like a leaf in a gale. The automatic\n safety cut the rockets dead.\n\n\n The ship began to fall.", "Farrell was cracked wide open, of course, but he was tied down. Jackie\n Smith had begun to show signs before he passed out, so that Lundy had\n kept one hand over the anaesthetic needle gun holstered on the side of\n his chair. And Lundy thought,\nThe hell of it is, you don't know when\nIt\nstarts to work on you.\n There's no set pattern, or if there is we don't know it. Maybe right\n now the readings I see on those dials aren't there at all....\nDown below the torn grey clouds he could see occasional small patches\n of ocean. The black, still, tideless water of Venus, that covers so\n many secrets of the planet's past.\n\n\n It didn't help Lundy any. It could be right or wrong, depending on\n what part of the ocean it was—and there was no way to tell. He hoped\n nothing would happen to the motors. A guy could get awfully wet, out in\n the middle of that still black water.", "And\nShe\nwas a whiz at hypnosis and mind-control. That's why\nShe\n, or\nIt\n, hadn't been caught alive before. Not before Lundy and Smith, with\n every scientific aid Special could give them, had tracked down Farrell\n and managed to get the breaks.\n\n\n The breaks. Plain fool luck. Lundy moved his throbbing head stiffly on\n his aching neck, blinked sweat out of his bloodshot eyes, and wished to\n hell he was home in bed.\n\n\n Jackie Smith said suddenly, \"Midget, I'm cold. Get me a blanket.\"\n\n\n Lundy looked at him. His pale green eyes were half open, but not as\n though they saw anything. He was shivering.\n\n\n \"I can't leave the controls, Jackie.\"", "Lundy stopped himself after the third scream. He had to, because he\n knew if he screamed again he'd never stop. By that time the black water\n had pushed Jackie Smith away, over to the opposite wall, and covered\n his face.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord,\" whispered Lundy. \"Oh Lord,\nwhat did he see before he\n drowned\n?\"\n\n\n No one answered. The black water pushed at Lundy, rising high around\n him, trying to take him over to Jackie Smith. Lundy's mouth began to\n twitch.\n\n\n He shut his teeth on his lower lip, holding it, holding his throat. He\n began to run, clumsily, fighting the water, and then he stopped that,\n too. He walked, not looking behind him, out into the flooded lock. The\n door slid shut behind him, automatically.", "He got up, feeling like something that had stood outside rusting for\n four hundred years or so. Smith didn't turn his head. Lundy growled at\n him.\n\n\n \"Next time, sonny, you wear your long woolen undies and let me alone!\"\n\n\n Then he stopped. The knot jerked tight in his stomach. Cold sweat\n needled him, and his nerves stung in a swift rush of fire.\n\n\n Farrell had quit screaming.\n\n\n There was silence in the ship. Nothing touched it. The rockets were\n outside it and didn't matter. Even Jackie Smith's careful breathing had\n stopped. Lundy went forward slowly, toward the door. Two steps.\n\n\n It opened. Lundy stopped again, quite still.\n\n\n Farrell was standing in the opening. A nice guy with a wife and two\n kids. His face still looked like that, but the eyes in it were not\n sane, nor even human.", "Being under water wouldn't bother a Thing from outer space. He reached\n up and lifted the net of tight-woven metal-mesh down off its hook and\n fastened it on his belt. Then he walked over and opened the airlock\n door.\n\n\n Black water swirled in around his weighted boots, and then the door\n opened wide and Jackie Smith came in.\n\n\n He'd been waiting in the flooded lock chamber. Kicking his boots\n against the inner door, easy, with the slow breathing of the sea. Now\n the water pushed his feet down and held him upright from behind, so he\n could walk in and stand looking at Lundy. A big blond man with green\n eyes, and white bandages strapped under his open black tunic, looking\n at Lundy. Not long. Only for a second. But long enough.", "Smith said something that sounded like\nShe\nand folded up in his\n chair. Lundy rubbed his hand across his face. The lines of it were\n blurred and stupid. His dark eyes had no sense in them.\n\n\n He began to crawl over the lurching floor toward the safe.\n\n\n The clouds outside ripped and tore across the ship's nose, and\n presently only water showed. Black, still, tideless water dotted with\n little islands of floating weed that stirred and slithered with a life\n of their own.\n\n\n Black water, rushing up.\n\n\n Lundy didn't care. He crawled through Farrell's blood, and he didn't\n care about that, either. He pushed Farrell's body back against the\n cabin wall and began to scratch at the shiny door, making noises like a\n hound shut out and not happy about it.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nLundy was flying the aero-space convertible by himself. He'd been doing\n it for a long time. So long that the bottom half of him was dead to the\n toes and the top half even deader, except for two separate aches like\n ulcerated teeth; one in his back, one in his head.\n\n\n Thick pearly-grey Venusian sky went past the speeding flier in\n streamers of torn cloud. The rockets throbbed and pounded. Instruments\n jerked erratically under the swirl of magnetic currents that makes the\n Venusian atmosphere such a swell place for pilots to go nuts in.\n\n\n Jackie Smith was still out cold in the co-pilot's seat. From in back,\n beyond the closed door to the tiny inner cabin, Lundy could hear\n Farrell screaming and fighting.", "\"You'll live,\" said Lundy. He tried not to think about how nearly both\n he and Smith had come to not living. Farrell had put up one hell of a\n fight, when they caught up with him in a native village high up in the\n Mountains of White Cloud.\nLundy still felt sick about that. The bull-meat, the hard boys, you\n didn't mind kicking around. But Farrell wasn't that kind. He was just a\n nice guy that got trapped by something too big for him.", "The second thing was his body. It hurt like hell, and it was hot, and\n it didn't like the thick, foul air it was getting. Lundy pushed himself\n into a sitting position and tried to boot his brain into action. It was\n hard work, because someone had split his head open four ways with an\n axe.\n\n\n It wasn't really dark in the cabin. A wavering silver glow almost like\n moonlight came in through the ports. Lundy could see pretty well. He\n could see Farrell's body sprawled out on the floor, and a mess of junk\n that had once been equipment.\n\n\n He could see the safe.\n\n\n He looked at it a long time. There wasn't much to look at. Just an open\n safe with nothing in it, and a piece of black cloth dropped on the\n floor.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord,\" whispered Lundy. \"Oh, my Lord!\"", "Lundy had tied him down to the bunk with four heavy straps. Breast,\n belly, thighs, and feet. The marks of them were on Farrell. They were\n cut into his shirt and pants, into his flesh and sinew, deep enough\n to show his bare white ribs. There was blood. A lot of blood. Farrell\n didn't mind.\n\n\n \"I broke the straps,\" he said. He smiled at Lundy. \"She called me and I\n broke the straps.\"\n\n\n He started to walk to the safe in the corner of the cabin. Lundy gagged\n and pulled himself up out of a cold black cloud and got his feet to\n moving.", "Then he turned and went very fast to the port locker and got a quart\n bottle out of its shock cradle, and raised it. It took both hands.\n\n\n After a while he dropped the bottle and stood still, not looking at\n anything, until he stopped shaking. Then he pulled his vac-suit down\n off its hook and climbed into it. His face was grey and quite blank.\n\n\n He took all the oxygen cylinders he could carry, emergency rations,\n and all the benzedrine in the medicine kit. He put the limit dose\n of the stimulant down on top of the brandy before he locked his\n helmet. He didn't bother with the needle gun. He took the two Service\n blasters—his own, and Smith's. The gentle knocking didn't stop.\n\n\n He stood for a moment looking at the open safe and the black cloth\n dropped beside it. Something cruel came into his face. A tightness, a\n twitching and setting of the muscles, and a terrible look of patience.", "Lundy tripped and fell, cracking his head against the back of his\n helmet. For a moment all he could see was bright light flashing. Then\n that stopped, and he realized he must have jarred a connection loose\n somewhere because his own light was out.\n\n\n He began to crawl over a great tilted block. The flowers burned bright\n in the darkness. Bright and close. Very close. Lundy opened his mouth.\n Nothing came out but a hoarse animal whimper. He was still holding the\n blaster. He fired it off a couple of times, and then he was on top of\n the block, lying flat on his belly.\n\n\n He knew it was the end of the line, because he couldn't move any more.\n\n\n The bright flowers came down through the dark. Lundy lay watching them.\n His face was quite blank. His dark eyes held a stubborn hatred, but\n nothing else.", "Lundy didn't like them.\n\n\n The weeds grew in thicker and closer. They bulged out from their roots,\n in over the stone edges. The flowers opened their bright hungry mouths\n and yearned at Lundy, reaching.\n\n\n Reaching. Not quite touching. Not yet. He was tired. The brandy and the\n benzedrine began to die in him. He changed his oxygen cylinder. That\n helped, but not much. He took more dope, but he was afraid to go heavy\n on it lest he drive his heart too hard. His legs turned numb.\n\n\n He hadn't slept for a long time. Tracking Farrell hadn't been any\n breeze, and taking him—and\nIt\n—had been plain and fancy hell. Lundy\n was only human. He was tired. Bushed. Cooked. Beat to the socks.", "\"Nuts. I've got one hand. I can hang onto this lousy tin fish that\n long.\"\nLundy scowled. He knew Smith wasn't kidding about the cold. The\n temperatures on Mercury made the first-generation colonists sensitive\n to anything below the range of an electric furnace. With the wound and\n all, Smith might, wind up with pneumonia if he wasn't covered.\n\n\n \"Okay.\" Lundy reached out and closed the switch marked A. \"But I'll let\n Mike do the flying. He can probably last five minutes before he blows\n his guts out.\"\n\n\n Iron Mike was just a pattycake when it came to Venusian atmosphere\n flying. The constant magnetic compensation heated the robot coils to\n the fusing point in practically no time at all.\n\n\n Lundy thought fleetingly that it was nice to know there were still a\n couple of things men could do better than machinery." ], [ "He'd been screaming a long time. Ever since the shot of\navertin\nLundy\n had given him after he was taken had begun to wear thin. Fighting the\n straps and screaming, a hoarse jarring sound with no sense in it.\n\n\n Screaming to be free, because of\nIt\n.\n\n\n Somewhere inside of Lundy, inside the rumpled, sweat-soaked black\n uniform of the Tri-World Police, Special Branch, and the five-foot-six\n of thick springy muscle under it, there was a knot. It was a large\n knot, and it was very, very cold in spite of the sweltering heat in\n the cabin, and it had a nasty habit of yanking itself tight every few\n minutes, causing Lundy to jerk and sweat as though he'd been spiked.", "Lundy didn't like that cold tight knot in his belly. It meant he was\n afraid. He'd been afraid before, plenty of times, and he wasn't ashamed\n of it. But right now he needed all the brains and guts he had to get\nIt\nback to Special headquarters at Vhia, and he didn't want to have\n to fight himself, too.\n\n\n Fear can screw things for you. It can make you weak when you need to be\n strong, if you're going to go on living. You, and the two other guys\n depending on you.\n\n\n Lundy hoped he could keep from getting too much afraid, and too\n tired—because\nIt\nwas sitting back there in its little strongbox in\n the safe, waiting for somebody to crack.", "Lundy had tied him down to the bunk with four heavy straps. Breast,\n belly, thighs, and feet. The marks of them were on Farrell. They were\n cut into his shirt and pants, into his flesh and sinew, deep enough\n to show his bare white ribs. There was blood. A lot of blood. Farrell\n didn't mind.\n\n\n \"I broke the straps,\" he said. He smiled at Lundy. \"She called me and I\n broke the straps.\"\n\n\n He started to walk to the safe in the corner of the cabin. Lundy gagged\n and pulled himself up out of a cold black cloud and got his feet to\n moving.", "Everything hit him at once then. There wasn't much in him but his\n stomach, and that was tied down. But it tried hard to come up.\n Presently the spasms stopped, and then Lundy heard the knocking.\n\n\n It wasn't very loud. It had a slow, easy rhythm, as though the knocker\n had a lot of time and didn't care when he got in. It came from the\n airlock panel.\n\n\n Lundy got up. Slowly, cold as a toad's belly and as white. His lips\n drew back from his teeth and stayed there, frozen.\n\n\n The knocking kept on. A sleepy kind of sound. The guy outside could\n afford to wait. Sometime that locked door was going to open, and he\n could wait. He wasn't in a hurry. He would never be in a hurry.", "He got up, feeling like something that had stood outside rusting for\n four hundred years or so. Smith didn't turn his head. Lundy growled at\n him.\n\n\n \"Next time, sonny, you wear your long woolen undies and let me alone!\"\n\n\n Then he stopped. The knot jerked tight in his stomach. Cold sweat\n needled him, and his nerves stung in a swift rush of fire.\n\n\n Farrell had quit screaming.\n\n\n There was silence in the ship. Nothing touched it. The rockets were\n outside it and didn't matter. Even Jackie Smith's careful breathing had\n stopped. Lundy went forward slowly, toward the door. Two steps.\n\n\n It opened. Lundy stopped again, quite still.\n\n\n Farrell was standing in the opening. A nice guy with a wife and two\n kids. His face still looked like that, but the eyes in it were not\n sane, nor even human.", "The second thing was his body. It hurt like hell, and it was hot, and\n it didn't like the thick, foul air it was getting. Lundy pushed himself\n into a sitting position and tried to boot his brain into action. It was\n hard work, because someone had split his head open four ways with an\n axe.\n\n\n It wasn't really dark in the cabin. A wavering silver glow almost like\n moonlight came in through the ports. Lundy could see pretty well. He\n could see Farrell's body sprawled out on the floor, and a mess of junk\n that had once been equipment.\n\n\n He could see the safe.\n\n\n He looked at it a long time. There wasn't much to look at. Just an open\n safe with nothing in it, and a piece of black cloth dropped on the\n floor.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord,\" whispered Lundy. \"Oh, my Lord!\"", "Lundy didn't like them.\n\n\n The weeds grew in thicker and closer. They bulged out from their roots,\n in over the stone edges. The flowers opened their bright hungry mouths\n and yearned at Lundy, reaching.\n\n\n Reaching. Not quite touching. Not yet. He was tired. The brandy and the\n benzedrine began to die in him. He changed his oxygen cylinder. That\n helped, but not much. He took more dope, but he was afraid to go heavy\n on it lest he drive his heart too hard. His legs turned numb.\n\n\n He hadn't slept for a long time. Tracking Farrell hadn't been any\n breeze, and taking him—and\nIt\n—had been plain and fancy hell. Lundy\n was only human. He was tired. Bushed. Cooked. Beat to the socks.", "Jackie Smith raised the gun, a fraction of an inch. \"Open it, Midget,\"\n he whispered. \"She's cold in there.\"\n\n\n Lundy stood still. The sweat ran on him and he was colder than a frog's\n belly in the rain; and for no reason at all he said thickly,\n\n\n \"No. She's hot. She can't breathe in there. She's hot.\"\n\n\n Then he jerked his head up and yelled. He came around to face Smith,\n unsteady but fast, and started for him.\n\n\n Smith's ugly face twisted as though he might be going to cry. \"Midget!\n I don't want to shoot you. Open the safe!\"\n\n\n Lundy said, \"You damned fool,\" with no voice at all, and went on.\n\n\n Smith hit the firing stud.", "A nice guy, crazy blind in love with somebody that didn't exist. A\n decent hard-working guy with a wife and two kids who'd lost his mind,\n heart, and soul to a Thing from outer space, so that he was willing to\n kill to protect It.\nOh, hell!\nthought Lundy wearily,\nwon't he ever stop screaming?\nThe rockets beat and thundered. The torn grey sky whipped past. Jackie\n Smith sat rigid, with closed eyes, white around the lips and breathing\n in shallow, careful gasps. And Vhia was still a long way off.\n\n\n Maybe farther off than he knew. Maybe he wasn't heading toward Vhia\n at all. Maybe\nIt\nwas working on him, and he'd never know it till he\n crashed.\n\n\n The cold knot tightened in his belly like a cold blade stabbing.\n\n\n Lundy cursed. Thinking things like that was a sure way to punch your\n ticket right straight to blazes.", "Lundy stopped himself after the third scream. He had to, because he\n knew if he screamed again he'd never stop. By that time the black water\n had pushed Jackie Smith away, over to the opposite wall, and covered\n his face.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord,\" whispered Lundy. \"Oh Lord,\nwhat did he see before he\n drowned\n?\"\n\n\n No one answered. The black water pushed at Lundy, rising high around\n him, trying to take him over to Jackie Smith. Lundy's mouth began to\n twitch.\n\n\n He shut his teeth on his lower lip, holding it, holding his throat. He\n began to run, clumsily, fighting the water, and then he stopped that,\n too. He walked, not looking behind him, out into the flooded lock. The\n door slid shut behind him, automatically.", "Farrell went on screaming. His throat seemed to be lined with\n impervium. Screaming and fighting the straps, because\nIt\nwas locked\n up and calling for help.\n\n\n Jackie Smith stirred slightly, groaned, and opened his pale green eyes.\n\n\n \"I'm cold,\" he said. \"Hi, Midget.\"\n\n\n Lundy turned his head. Normally he had a round, fresh, merry face, with\n bright dark eyes and a white, small-boyish grin. Now he looked like\n something the waiter had swept out from under a table at four A.M. on\n New Year's Day.\n\n\n \"You're cold,\" he said sourly. He licked sweat off his lips. \"Oh, fine!\n That was all I needed.\"", "Smith said something that sounded like\nShe\nand folded up in his\n chair. Lundy rubbed his hand across his face. The lines of it were\n blurred and stupid. His dark eyes had no sense in them.\n\n\n He began to crawl over the lurching floor toward the safe.\n\n\n The clouds outside ripped and tore across the ship's nose, and\n presently only water showed. Black, still, tideless water dotted with\n little islands of floating weed that stirred and slithered with a life\n of their own.\n\n\n Black water, rushing up.\n\n\n Lundy didn't care. He crawled through Farrell's blood, and he didn't\n care about that, either. He pushed Farrell's body back against the\n cabin wall and began to scratch at the shiny door, making noises like a\n hound shut out and not happy about it.", "\"You'll live,\" said Lundy. He tried not to think about how nearly both\n he and Smith had come to not living. Farrell had put up one hell of a\n fight, when they caught up with him in a native village high up in the\n Mountains of White Cloud.\nLundy still felt sick about that. The bull-meat, the hard boys, you\n didn't mind kicking around. But Farrell wasn't that kind. He was just a\n nice guy that got trapped by something too big for him.", "The ship hit the water with a terrific smack. Spray geysered up, dead\n white against the black sea, fell back, and closed in. Presently even\n the ripples went away.\n\n\n Dark green weed-islands twined sinuously upon themselves, a flock of\n small sea-dragons flapped their jeweled wings down and began to fish,\n and none of them cared at all about the ship sinking away under them.\n\n\n Not even Lundy cared, out cold in the space-tight cabin, with his body\n wedged up against the safe and tears drying with the sweat on his\n stubbled cheeks.\nII\n\n\n The first thing Lundy knew about was the stillness. A dead feeling, as\n though everything in creation had stopped breathing.", "It was beautiful down there. Like the dream-worlds you see when you're\n doped or delirious. The phosphorescence rose up into the black water\n and danced there in wavering whorls of cold fire. Fish, queer gaudy\n little things with jewelled eyes, flicked past Lundy in darts of\n sudden color, and there were great stands of weed like young forests,\n spangling the dark water and the phosphorescent glow with huge burning\n spots of blue and purple and green and silver.\n\n\n Flowers. Lundy got too close to some of them once. They reached out and\n opened round mouths full of spines and sucked at him hungrily. The\n fish gave them a wide berth. After that, so did Lundy.\n\n\n He hadn't been walking more than half an hour when he hit the road.", "And\nShe\nwas a whiz at hypnosis and mind-control. That's why\nShe\n, or\nIt\n, hadn't been caught alive before. Not before Lundy and Smith, with\n every scientific aid Special could give them, had tracked down Farrell\n and managed to get the breaks.\n\n\n The breaks. Plain fool luck. Lundy moved his throbbing head stiffly on\n his aching neck, blinked sweat out of his bloodshot eyes, and wished to\n hell he was home in bed.\n\n\n Jackie Smith said suddenly, \"Midget, I'm cold. Get me a blanket.\"\n\n\n Lundy looked at him. His pale green eyes were half open, but not as\n though they saw anything. He was shivering.\n\n\n \"I can't leave the controls, Jackie.\"", "They came drifting toward Lundy. They didn't seem to be moving fast,\n but they must have been because quite suddenly they were among the\n weeds. There were a lot of them; maybe forty or fifty. They seemed to\n be between three and four feet tall, and they were all the same sad,\n blue-grey, twilight color.\n\n\n Lundy couldn't see what they were. They were vaguely man-shaped, and\n vaguely finny, and something that was more than vaguely something else,\n only he couldn't place it.\n\n\n He was suddenly beyond caring. The dull black curtain around his mind\n got a hole in it, and fear came shrieking through it. He could feel the\n working and pulling of his vac-suit where the flowers were chewing on\n it as though it were his own skin.\n\n\n He could feel sweat running cold on his body. In a minute that would be\n sea water running, and then....", "The anaesthetic needles hit Lundy across the chest. They didn't hurt\n much. Just a stinging prick. He kept going. No reason. It was just\n something he seemed to be doing at the time.\n\n\n Behind him Farrell whimpered once like a puppy and lay down across the\n little safe. He didn't move again. Lundy got down on his hands and\n knees and reached in a vague sort of way for the controls. Jackie Smith\n watched him with dazed green eyes.\n\n\n Quite suddenly, Iron Mike blew his guts out.\n\n\n The control panel let go a burst of blue flame. The glare and heat of\n it knocked Lundy backward. Things hissed and snarled and ran together,\n and the convertible began to dance like a leaf in a gale. The automatic\n safety cut the rockets dead.\n\n\n The ship began to fall.", "Lundy began to fight. His lips peeled back off his teeth, but he didn't\n make any noise except his heavy breathing. He fought the flowers,\n partly with the blaster, partly with brute strength. No science, no\n thought. Just the last blind struggle of an animal that didn't want to\n die.\n\n\n The flowers held him. They smothered him, crushed him down, wrapped him\n in lovely burning petals of destruction. He seared a lot of them, but\n there were always more. Lundy didn't fight long.\n\n\n He lay on his back, his knees drawn up a little toward a rigid, knotted\n belly, blind with sweat, his heart kicking him like a logger's boot.\n Cold, tense—waiting.\n\n\n And then the flowers went away.\n\n\n They didn't want to. They let go reluctantly, drawing back and snarling\n like cats robbed of a fat mouse, making small hungry feints at him. But\n they went.", "Jackie Smith stirred slightly, groaned, to joggle himself. His black\n tunic was open over his chest, showing the white strapping of bandages,\n and his left hand was thrust in over the locked top of the tunic's\n zipper. He was a big man, not any older than Lundy, with big, ugly,\n pleasant features, a shock of coarse pale hair, and a skin like old\n leather.\n\n\n \"On Mercury, where I was born,\" he said, \"the climate is suitable for\n human beings. You Old-World pantywaists....\" He broke off, turned white\n under the leathery burn, and said through set teeth, \"Oi! Farrell sure\n did a good job on me.\"" ] ]
test	55243	[ "How does Judy feel when her husband leaves for work each time?", "How is Judy's grandmother's house symbolic of the life Judy hopes to lead?", "Why was the library, as were the majority of the buildings in the town?", "What type of adventure do Judy and Holly end up having that day?", "What was odd about the birthday that Judy gave Holly the typewriter?", "Is Holly a convincing witness to the robbery? Why or why not?", "Why is Judy's brother considered to be a hero?", "After Judy's family home was destroyed, what did they find when they returned to the house?", "What does Mr. Sammis laugh at Judy for wanting to purchase?" ]	[ [ "She wants him to come back home to her safe at the day's end so they can continue their lives together.", "She is excited to be able to spend time with the other man in her life.", "She is relieved to be away from his control for just a little while.", "She is happy to know he is keeping the community safe." ], [ "The house overlooks the rest of the town, much like Just looks down on those that live down the hill.", "It is old, and she hopes she can live that long on her own.", "It holds memories from generations, and Judy is hopeful of retaining memories for that long.", "It had withstood storms and came out in one piece when others were not as fortunate. It will no doubt stand on the hill for many years to come. Judy hopes to weather life's storms in the same way." ], [ "The dam broke and flooded the majority of the town.", "A bomb exploded in the center of the town.", "A tornado came through and destroyed the majority of the town.", "A fire destroyed the majority of the town." ], [ "Doris was assaulted by the man who broke into their house, so they went hunting him down.", "Holly's house was broken into, and they go on the hunt for what was stolen.", "Judy's house gets broken into, and they go on the hunt for what was stolen.", "They go in search of the Joe Mott Gang." ], [ "Holly decided she would not celebrate her birthday that year, but Judy gave her a surprise party.", "Holly's birthday was also the day that Judy's grandmother died.", "They traded birthdays that year.", "Judy wanted Holly to have two birthdays that year, so the typewriter was given on Holly's half-birthday." ], [ "Yes, she saw the entire occurrence, and she got a good look at the thief.", "Yes, she walked in on the thief, and she saw him run out with the items in question.", "No, she is not even 100% sure there was a robbery.", "No, after she thought about it, her sister could have stolen her items." ], [ "He caught the thief and retrieved the stolen items.", "He caught the Joe Mott Gang.", "He let the town know that the dam was going to break, preparing them.", "He is a war hero." ], [ "They found the lost typewriter.", "They found the body of her grandmother, who died in the tragedy.", "They found the majority of their home's contents scattered around the area, and they could retrieve the majority of their items.", "They did not find anything because their home had been looted." ], [ "An old typewriter.", "A broken table.", "A piece of his school memorabilia.", "A luster cream pitcher." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "“Take care,” was what she usually said, but in her\n heart the words meant, “Take care of our future. Let\n all our dreams for our married life in this house come\n true.”\n\n\n The house had been willed to Judy by her grandmother,\n and it was so sturdy and well built that she\n felt sure it would stand there on the slope overlooking\n Dry Brook as long as the hills themselves.\n\n\n Peter had left the stair door open, and soon Judy\n heard Blackberry padding up to keep her company.\n He looked around, the way cats will, and then came\n into the storeroom to see what Judy was doing.", "And suddenly, like rain from a clear blue sky, Holly\n burst into tears. She was crying over more important\n things than a stolen typewriter, Judy knew. It wasn’t\n easy living with a married sister whose whole interest\n centered on her own husband and baby. Holly’s other\n sister was on her way to a teaching job at some private\n school in Maine. The girls’ uncle had died while Judy\n and Peter were in Washington. Holly said she had\n never felt more lost and alone.\n\n\n “First it was my parents and then Uncle David. It’s\n always this way,” she sobbed. “I told my sisters I\n wouldn’t dare love them. It’s bad luck for me to love\n anybody. Even the\nthings\nI love have to be taken.”\n\n\n “We’ll find your typewriter,” Judy resolved as she\n drove on toward Farringdon as fast as safety allowed.\n\n9\nCHAPTER II", "She turned left at the main road and sped up the\n long slope out of Dry Brook Hollow. At the top of\n the hill the world seemed to end but, instead of driving\n on into the sky the way it looked as if she might,\n Judy drove down again with miles and miles of winding\n road ahead of her. There wasn’t a green car in\n sight.\n\n\n “I’m afraid we’ve lost him,” Judy began.\n\n\n “But I’m sure he went this way,” Holly insisted. “I\n would have seen him myself if he’d turned toward\n Roulsville. You know how our road angles off in that\n direction. Well, I thought if I raced along the shortcut\n and we took your road maybe we could head him\n off if he turned toward Farringdon. I\nhave\nto get my\n typewriter back. Can’t you drive a little faster?”", "“You’ve made a good start. I wish I could stay and\n help you. I always liked treasure hunting,” Peter confessed,\n “but Uncle Sam expects me to hunt criminals\n today. We’ll be using an official car, so I’ll leave the\n Beetle for you to transport your exhibit to the library\n if you do get it ready. ’Bye, Angel. See you at six.”\n\n\n “You hope,” Judy added as he bent to kiss her.\n\n3\n\n Peter’s time was not his own. Working out of the\n Resident FBI Agency in the Farringdon Post Office,\n he might be sent anywhere in the territory. His assignment\n now was to round up the Joe Mott gang. Judy\n knew that much, although his work was confidential.\n It was also dangerous. Each time he left the house she\n breathed a little prayer for his safe return.", "Thinking back, Judy realized that since Horace\n had become a hero, he had changed. There wasn’t a\n note of timidity in his voice as he talked with the\n police officer who later came in and quietly seated\n himself at their table. It was Holly who was frightened.\n “I—I didn’t think they’d send a policeman,”\n were her first words. “I can’t be sure of anything.\n Maybe it’s all a big mistake.”\n\n\n “We’ll take that chance,” the officer replied, smiling\n as he wrote out his report.\n\n\n “Tell you what, Judy,” Horace suggested as they\n were leaving the restaurant. “Why don’t you and\n Holly drive on a ways? Maybe you’ll see that\n green car parked somewhere along the road. I’ll finish\n up a little job I’m doing and tell Mr. Lee this looks like\n a story. He’ll give me the afternoon off to follow it\n up.”", "“Not without turning the car over. We’ll pick up\n speed on the straight road. Then, if we can’t find him,\n we’ll report the stolen typewriter when we get to\n Farringdon. Did he take anything else?” Judy asked.\n\n\n “No, just the typewriter.”\n\n\n “That’s strange.” Judy couldn’t quite picture a\n thief running into Holly’s house, grabbing her typewriter,\n and not touching anything else. She had a rare\n old paperweight and a brand-new tape recorder in\n the first-floor room she called her study. Either of\n these things would have been worth more than her\n typewriter, to say nothing of the valuables stored in\n what she had once called her forbidden chest.\n\n8", "And yet she and Peter had made changes. It was a\n rambling old farmhouse too big for just the two of\n them so only the downstairs rooms had been changed.\n Up here in the attic nothing had been disturbed except\n by Blackberry as he played with the spools in Judy’s\n sewing room or searched for mice in the other two\n rooms where her grandmother’s keepsakes were\n stored. She liked having him for company as she\n worked. Attics and black cats seemed to go together.\n\n\n Judy smiled at this thought. She was so absorbed in\n what she was doing that at first she didn’t hear the\n front doorbell ringing downstairs. It rang again more\n insistently, and she gathered Blackberry in her arms\n and hurried down the two flights of stairs. It wouldn’t\n do to leave the cat alone among the things she had\n collected for the exhibit.\n\n5\n\n “I can’t trust you,” she told him, “even if you are a\n famous cat.”", "“That’s the name I gave it when I was a little girl.\n There were ladies carved on the legs. They held the\n marble table top on their heads. They had such quiet,\n patient faces.”\n\n\n Now Judy was thinking back in spite of herself.\n\n\n It had been exciting, furnishing the so-called\n Haunted House in Farringdon and exposing its\n “ghosts.” New furniture had been bought, and a few\n good antiques had been discovered in out-of-the-way\n shops. Dr. Bolton’s massive oak desk was one such\n piece. Judy’s dresser with the secret drawer was\n another. Buying it all by herself had been a real adventure.\n Only gradually had she come to realize their\n loss.", "“Careful there!” Mr. Sammis warned again.\n\n\n It was his own elbow that knocked over the little\n table with the claw feet, but he looked at Judy as if\n she had done it. One foot with a claw clutching a glass\n ball fell to the floor. He picked it up and waved it in\n Judy’s face.\n\n\n “Now see what you’ve done,” he charged unreasonably.\n “I told you you’d have to pay for anything\n you broke. Young people nowadays are all alike. Careless,\n blundering fools, the lot of them. Come in\n here for junk and break up my best furniture! This\n table is fragile—”\n\n\n “I can see it is,” Judy interrupted. “The claw fell off\n because the table leg was already broken. I can see\n where it’s been glued. The top is warped, too. It looks\n as if it had been left out in the rain.”", "Blackberry wore a life-saving medal on his collar,\n and just recently he had worked for the government,\n or so Judy insisted, ridding the Capitol Building of\n mice. But when she opened the door he fled through it\n to prowl around outside like any ordinary cat.\n\n\n The cat startled Holly Potter, Judy’s sixteen-year-old\n neighbor, who had rung the bell. Obviously she\n had been running at break-neck speed along the shortcut\n from her house to Judy’s.\n\n\n “What took you so long? I thought you’d never answer\n the bell. Quick!” she urged breathlessly.\n “Maybe we can still head off that green car! There’s\n a thief in it. He stole my typewriter!”\n\n\n “Your typewriter?” gasped Judy.", "“We are—I mean we were following that green\n car, and I think my typewriter is in it. It’s just that I—I\n mean I haven’t told you everything.”\n\n\n “I should say you haven’t,” Judy agreed. “Maybe\n Horace would help us for the sake of the story.”\n\n\n “I’d be glad to have his help,” declared Holly almost\n too enthusiastically. “There he is now, walking down\n Grove Street. Oh dear! Is that Honey with him?”\n\n\n “It usually is,” replied Judy. “They’re practically\n engaged, you know.”\n\n\n “No, I didn’t know. Good things happen to everyone\n but me,” was Holly’s doleful comment. “I’ll\n probably be an old maid and live all alone without\n even a cat for company.”", "“We can try,” replied Judy, “but I’m not making\n any rash promises. Didn’t you just tell me you’re not\n sure he is the thief? You didn’t actually see him take\n your typewriter, did you?”\n\n\n “No, but I did see him running toward that green\n car, and when I turned around my desk top was\n empty. Ruth said maybe Doris took it. You know the\n way sisters are, always borrowing things without asking.\n But I don’t believe it. Doris knows I need my\n typewriter. Please drive on, Judy,” Holly pleaded.\n “We can’t let that boy get away with it.”\n\n\n “I’m afraid he did get away with it,” Horace told\n her. “If he did take your typewriter, he must be half-way\n to Ulysses with it by now.”", "“Let’s go before he puts the price any higher,”\n Holly urged, pulling at Judy’s arm.", "“But that’s for the close of school,” Holly objected,\n reading over her shoulder. The illuminated verse read:\nOh! Swift the time has fled away\nAs fleeting as the rose\nSince school began its opening day\nTill now its day of close.\n\n\n The verse was followed by the name of the teacher\n and pupils in some long-ago country school. Hugh\n Sammis was one of the names.\n\n\n “Is this for sale?” Judy asked, sure he wouldn’t want\n to part with it.\n\n21\n\n He laughed, an unpleasant sort of laugh as if he were\n making fun of her. “It’s junk. I was going to throw it\n out. You can have it for a quarter.”\n\n\n “I’ll take it then,” Judy decided. “It’s for the beginning\n of school, too,” she pointed out as she and\n Holly made their way back to the front of the shop.", "“So did I,” agreed Judy, “but maybe he’s being\n watched in the hope he will lead the FBI to the rest\n of the gang. Peter’s work is so secret that half the\n time he can’t even discuss it with me.”\n\n\n “Please don’t discuss it now,” implored Holly. “If\n we’re going to follow that green car—”\n\n\n “You’ll never catch him,” Horace predicted, “and\n how would you get your typewriter back if you did?\n A couple of girls couldn’t handle a thief, especially if\n he’s got a gun on him. I don’t suppose you can make a\n federal case out of it, but couldn’t you report it to the\n local police? I’ll call them right now if you say the\n word.”\n\n\n “What do you think, Judy?” Holly asked.\n\n\n “I’d do it if I were you, Holly,” she advised.", "While Horace went to telephone, the three girls\n ordered lunch. Holly was still jumpy. She kept tossing\n her mane of thick brown hair like a restless colt. She\n wore it perfectly straight in a long pony tail. Judy’s\n red curls were cut a little shorter than usual, but\n Honey had let her lovely honey-colored hair grow\n long to please Horace. Today she wore it loose about\n her shoulders.\n\n\n The three girls were very different in appearance,\n but they had one thing in common. All three of them\n adored Judy’s brother, Horace Bolton. He was a shy-appearing\n young man. To look at him, no one would\n suspect that he had once startled the town of Roulsville\n out of its complacency by racing through the\n streets on Judy’s ginger colt and crying out, “The\n dam is breaking! Run for the hills.”", "“What if it was? Where else could I leave it when\n the roadmakers took half my house? I won’t charge\n you much for it. Only fifteen dollars.”\n\n\n “Fifteen dollars! What are you talking about, Mr.\n Sammis? I’ll never pay for a table I didn’t break,” Judy\n declared with indignation.\n\n22\n\n “You won’t, eh? We’ll see about that. You’re Dr.\n Bolton’s daughter, aren’t you? I’ll just send him a bill\n for twenty dollars,” the shopkeeper announced with a\n satisfied chuckle. “Then, if he won’t pay his bill, I\n won’t pay mine.”\n\n\n “But that isn’t fair!” Judy cried, her gray eyes blazing.\n\n\n “No? Then I’ll make it twenty-five.”", "“There aren’t any others?” Holly’s voice held disappointment.\n\n\n “No, that’s all we have.”\n\n\n His tone of voice plainly told the girls he wished\n they’d go, but Judy wasn’t ready to leave until she had\n done a little more exploring.\n\n\n “I’m collecting old cards and calendars for a library\n exhibit,” she explained. “Do you have anything I can\n use?”\n\n\n “In the box over there. But don’t be all day looking\n them over. Your car’s parked right in front of mine.”\n\n\n Mr. Sammis had just seen it through the window.\n\n20\n\n “Oh, is that your car?” Judy asked innocently. “We\n saw a boy driving it this morning.”\n\n\n “Impossible!” he snorted. “It’s been parked right\n where it is all day.”", "“I do think of her as Miss Pringle,” confessed Judy,\n “and she probably thinks of me as that noisy Judy\n Bolton. Prim Miss Pringle is what I used to call her.\n She left everything in such perfect order, it’s hard for\n me to believe she and Bob Wheatley lived in our house\n for two whole months. We won’t ever rent it again,\n will we, Peter?”\n\n\n “You’re not asking me to promise we won’t, are\n you?” he countered. “You know how I feel about\n promises.”\n\n\n “You’re right, too,” declared Judy, reaching into\n the drawer for another one of Grandmother Smeed’s\n treasured keepsakes. “Here’s a sewing card worked in\n cross-stitch. It says: ‘\n Promise Little. Do Much.\n ’ Do\n you think it would do for the September exhibit?”", "“Okay, then,” Horace said with a satisfied gleam\n in his eyes. “Just give me all the details. Then we’ll relax\n and let the police handle it. Honey and I were on\n our way to lunch. How about joining us?”\n\n\n Judy looked up at the courthouse clock. “Oh dear!\n The morning’s gone. I didn’t think it was lunchtime\n already. I am hungry. Aren’t you, Holly?”\n\n\n The younger girl insisted that she couldn’t eat a\n thing, but once they were inside the restaurant she\n changed her mind. “I guess I could eat a hamburger,”\n she conceded.\n\n13" ], [ "“Take care,” was what she usually said, but in her\n heart the words meant, “Take care of our future. Let\n all our dreams for our married life in this house come\n true.”\n\n\n The house had been willed to Judy by her grandmother,\n and it was so sturdy and well built that she\n felt sure it would stand there on the slope overlooking\n Dry Brook as long as the hills themselves.\n\n\n Peter had left the stair door open, and soon Judy\n heard Blackberry padding up to keep her company.\n He looked around, the way cats will, and then came\n into the storeroom to see what Judy was doing.", "And yet she and Peter had made changes. It was a\n rambling old farmhouse too big for just the two of\n them so only the downstairs rooms had been changed.\n Up here in the attic nothing had been disturbed except\n by Blackberry as he played with the spools in Judy’s\n sewing room or searched for mice in the other two\n rooms where her grandmother’s keepsakes were\n stored. She liked having him for company as she\n worked. Attics and black cats seemed to go together.\n\n\n Judy smiled at this thought. She was so absorbed in\n what she was doing that at first she didn’t hear the\n front doorbell ringing downstairs. It rang again more\n insistently, and she gathered Blackberry in her arms\n and hurried down the two flights of stairs. It wouldn’t\n do to leave the cat alone among the things she had\n collected for the exhibit.\n\n5\n\n “I can’t trust you,” she told him, “even if you are a\n famous cat.”", "“I do think of her as Miss Pringle,” confessed Judy,\n “and she probably thinks of me as that noisy Judy\n Bolton. Prim Miss Pringle is what I used to call her.\n She left everything in such perfect order, it’s hard for\n me to believe she and Bob Wheatley lived in our house\n for two whole months. We won’t ever rent it again,\n will we, Peter?”\n\n\n “You’re not asking me to promise we won’t, are\n you?” he countered. “You know how I feel about\n promises.”\n\n\n “You’re right, too,” declared Judy, reaching into\n the drawer for another one of Grandmother Smeed’s\n treasured keepsakes. “Here’s a sewing card worked in\n cross-stitch. It says: ‘\n Promise Little. Do Much.\n ’ Do\n you think it would do for the September exhibit?”", "The library was new, and the built-in exhibit cases\n were still empty. Nearly all the buildings in Roulsville\n were new since the flood that had swept the valley\n and started Judy on the trail of her first mystery. Her\n own home had been swept away, and her father, Dr.\n Bolton, had been obliged to move to Farringdon\n where he still lived and practiced. Only her grandmother’s\n house, two miles above the broken dam, had\n stayed the same.\n\n\n “Maybe that’s why I love it,” she thought.", "And suddenly, like rain from a clear blue sky, Holly\n burst into tears. She was crying over more important\n things than a stolen typewriter, Judy knew. It wasn’t\n easy living with a married sister whose whole interest\n centered on her own husband and baby. Holly’s other\n sister was on her way to a teaching job at some private\n school in Maine. The girls’ uncle had died while Judy\n and Peter were in Washington. Holly said she had\n never felt more lost and alone.\n\n\n “First it was my parents and then Uncle David. It’s\n always this way,” she sobbed. “I told my sisters I\n wouldn’t dare love them. It’s bad luck for me to love\n anybody. Even the\nthings\nI love have to be taken.”\n\n\n “We’ll find your typewriter,” Judy resolved as she\n drove on toward Farringdon as fast as safety allowed.\n\n9\nCHAPTER II", "“That’s the name I gave it when I was a little girl.\n There were ladies carved on the legs. They held the\n marble table top on their heads. They had such quiet,\n patient faces.”\n\n\n Now Judy was thinking back in spite of herself.\n\n\n It had been exciting, furnishing the so-called\n Haunted House in Farringdon and exposing its\n “ghosts.” New furniture had been bought, and a few\n good antiques had been discovered in out-of-the-way\n shops. Dr. Bolton’s massive oak desk was one such\n piece. Judy’s dresser with the secret drawer was\n another. Buying it all by herself had been a real adventure.\n Only gradually had she come to realize their\n loss.", "Judy’s thoughts broke off as she suddenly stopped\n the car. They had been driving through a small town\n to the north of Farringdon. A dingy row of gray\n houses lined the road. Some of their porches had been\n sheared off in order to widen the highway, and some\n had been made into shops. Judy had noticed one of\n the signs:\nH. SAMMIS\n\n Antiques, Used Furniture Bought and Sold\n\n\n “And there’s a green car in the driveway!” exclaimed\n Holly. “Oh, Judy! Luck is with us after all.\n That boy may be inside right now trying to sell my\n typewriter!”\n\n\n “Maybe it’s still in the car. Let’s have a look,” Judy\n suggested.\n\n18\n\n She parked the Beetle right behind the green car,\n blocking the driveway. No one seemed to be around\n so Judy and Holly carefully examined the interior.", "“I suppose it would, but we never found it.\n Grandma wanted us to take some of her things,” Judy\n remembered, “but we thought it would be better to\n leave her house the way it was and buy everything\n new. Of course we couldn’t replace the beautiful\n fruitwood bench Dad had in his reception room or the\n lady table. That was a lovely period piece that had\n been in the Bolton family for generations.”\n\n\n “What period?” asked Holly, who was something\n of an expert on antique furniture. She once had lived\n with a cousin who collected antique glassware.\n\n\n “Empire, I believe.”\n\n\n “Empire furniture is valuable. Usually it’s pretty\n solid, too. Why did you call it the lady table?” Holly\n wanted to know.\n\n17", "“Careful there!” Mr. Sammis warned again.\n\n\n It was his own elbow that knocked over the little\n table with the claw feet, but he looked at Judy as if\n she had done it. One foot with a claw clutching a glass\n ball fell to the floor. He picked it up and waved it in\n Judy’s face.\n\n\n “Now see what you’ve done,” he charged unreasonably.\n “I told you you’d have to pay for anything\n you broke. Young people nowadays are all alike. Careless,\n blundering fools, the lot of them. Come in\n here for junk and break up my best furniture! This\n table is fragile—”\n\n\n “I can see it is,” Judy interrupted. “The claw fell off\n because the table leg was already broken. I can see\n where it’s been glued. The top is warped, too. It looks\n as if it had been left out in the rain.”", "“I should think so,” Peter replied thoughtfully. “A\n maxim like that would do for any time of the year.\n Does the library plan to exhibit a few of these things\n each month?”\n\n\n “Yes, but just for the school year. Miss Pringle—I\n mean Mrs. Wheatley says she wants me to arrange\n them in that little glass case near the library door.\n These reward-of-merit cards used to be given out at\n school when Grandma was a little girl. The other\n card was a sewing lesson. ‘Promise little. Do much,’”\n Judy repeated, “but how much can a person do in a\n day? Maybe I won’t try to sort all these treasures this\n morning.”", "“What about you, Honey? Do you have to go back\n to work?” asked Judy.\n\n14\n\n “Oh, I guess Mr. Dean would give me the afternoon\n off if I asked him. I can’t do any work with all\n that hammering going on anyway. Where shall we\n meet you?” Honey asked.\n\n\n “At the beaver dam!” exclaimed Judy, suddenly enthusiastic.\n “Remember, Honey? Violetta said she’d\n show it to us. I have my camera in the car. Maybe we\n could take pictures of the beavers.”\n\n\n “It’s a date! Violetta is the younger of the two\n Jewell sisters,” Honey explained to Holly, “though\n neither of them is young. They’re such dears! They\n live in one of the oldest houses in this section of\n Pennsylvania. It’s like stepping back in time just to\n visit them.”", "“Look at all the lovely old glassware in the windows,”\n Holly pointed out as they walked around to\n the front of the shop. “There’s a blue glass hen just\n like the one Cousin Cleo has in her collection. And\n look at those chalkware lambs and that beautiful\n luster cream pitcher!”\n\n\n Inside the shop it was hard to move around because\n of all the old furniture crowded into every inch of\n floor space. Judy had to move a chair to reach the\n cream pitcher Holly had admired. Before she could\n touch it, a voice barked at her.\n\n\n “Careful there! You’ll have to pay for anything you\n break.”\n\n19\n\n “I have no intention of breaking anything,” replied\n Judy. “I just wanted to see that luster cream pitcher.”\n\n\n “That’s eighty dollars!”", "Blackberry wore a life-saving medal on his collar,\n and just recently he had worked for the government,\n or so Judy insisted, ridding the Capitol Building of\n mice. But when she opened the door he fled through it\n to prowl around outside like any ordinary cat.\n\n\n The cat startled Holly Potter, Judy’s sixteen-year-old\n neighbor, who had rung the bell. Obviously she\n had been running at break-neck speed along the shortcut\n from her house to Judy’s.\n\n\n “What took you so long? I thought you’d never answer\n the bell. Quick!” she urged breathlessly.\n “Maybe we can still head off that green car! There’s\n a thief in it. He stole my typewriter!”\n\n\n “Your typewriter?” gasped Judy.", "“We are—I mean we were following that green\n car, and I think my typewriter is in it. It’s just that I—I\n mean I haven’t told you everything.”\n\n\n “I should say you haven’t,” Judy agreed. “Maybe\n Horace would help us for the sake of the story.”\n\n\n “I’d be glad to have his help,” declared Holly almost\n too enthusiastically. “There he is now, walking down\n Grove Street. Oh dear! Is that Honey with him?”\n\n\n “It usually is,” replied Judy. “They’re practically\n engaged, you know.”\n\n\n “No, I didn’t know. Good things happen to everyone\n but me,” was Holly’s doleful comment. “I’ll\n probably be an old maid and live all alone without\n even a cat for company.”", "She turned left at the main road and sped up the\n long slope out of Dry Brook Hollow. At the top of\n the hill the world seemed to end but, instead of driving\n on into the sky the way it looked as if she might,\n Judy drove down again with miles and miles of winding\n road ahead of her. There wasn’t a green car in\n sight.\n\n\n “I’m afraid we’ve lost him,” Judy began.\n\n\n “But I’m sure he went this way,” Holly insisted. “I\n would have seen him myself if he’d turned toward\n Roulsville. You know how our road angles off in that\n direction. Well, I thought if I raced along the shortcut\n and we took your road maybe we could head him\n off if he turned toward Farringdon. I\nhave\nto get my\n typewriter back. Can’t you drive a little faster?”", "“Not without turning the car over. We’ll pick up\n speed on the straight road. Then, if we can’t find him,\n we’ll report the stolen typewriter when we get to\n Farringdon. Did he take anything else?” Judy asked.\n\n\n “No, just the typewriter.”\n\n\n “That’s strange.” Judy couldn’t quite picture a\n thief running into Holly’s house, grabbing her typewriter,\n and not touching anything else. She had a rare\n old paperweight and a brand-new tape recorder in\n the first-floor room she called her study. Either of\n these things would have been worth more than her\n typewriter, to say nothing of the valuables stored in\n what she had once called her forbidden chest.\n\n8", "“Hi, Blackberry! You can’t play with these things,”\n she told him as she continued sorting and arranging\n the cards that were to be exhibited at the library. The\n theme for September would be school. She found a\n few Hallowe’en things and a Columbus Day card\n which she put aside for October. There were turkeys\n and prayers of Thanksgiving for November, a pile of\n Christmas things for December, and a stack of old\n calendars for January. The stack grew higher and\n higher.\n\n4\n\n “I do believe Grandma saved a calendar for every\n year. This is wonderful,” Judy said to herself. “I’ll\n find some recent calendars and complete the collection.\n It will be just perfect for the January exhibit.”", "“Oh dear! I guess I don’t want it then. We really\n came in to look at typewriters. You do sell typewriters,\n don’t you?” Judy asked, looking around the shop\n to see if the driver of the green car had come in.\n\n\n “New ones,” Holly added. Her typewriter was almost\n new.\n\n\n “You came to the wrong place for a new typewriter.\n We sell anything and everything so long as it’s\n old.” The shopkeeper, a stout, balding man, looked at\n the two girls as if he considered them slightly stupid.\n\n\n “I meant—almost new,” Holly stammered.\n\n\n “Are you Mr. Sammis? Will you let us see what you\n have, please?” Judy asked.\n\n\n He showed them a row of ancient typewriters in\n the back of the shop. They were all of the same make,\n and all were equally old and dusty.", "“But that’s for the close of school,” Holly objected,\n reading over her shoulder. The illuminated verse read:\nOh! Swift the time has fled away\nAs fleeting as the rose\nSince school began its opening day\nTill now its day of close.\n\n\n The verse was followed by the name of the teacher\n and pupils in some long-ago country school. Hugh\n Sammis was one of the names.\n\n\n “Is this for sale?” Judy asked, sure he wouldn’t want\n to part with it.\n\n21\n\n He laughed, an unpleasant sort of laugh as if he were\n making fun of her. “It’s junk. I was going to throw it\n out. You can have it for a quarter.”\n\n\n “I’ll take it then,” Judy decided. “It’s for the beginning\n of school, too,” she pointed out as she and\n Holly made their way back to the front of the shop.", "Thinking back, Judy realized that since Horace\n had become a hero, he had changed. There wasn’t a\n note of timidity in his voice as he talked with the\n police officer who later came in and quietly seated\n himself at their table. It was Holly who was frightened.\n “I—I didn’t think they’d send a policeman,”\n were her first words. “I can’t be sure of anything.\n Maybe it’s all a big mistake.”\n\n\n “We’ll take that chance,” the officer replied, smiling\n as he wrote out his report.\n\n\n “Tell you what, Judy,” Horace suggested as they\n were leaving the restaurant. “Why don’t you and\n Holly drive on a ways? Maybe you’ll see that\n green car parked somewhere along the road. I’ll finish\n up a little job I’m doing and tell Mr. Lee this looks like\n a story. He’ll give me the afternoon off to follow it\n up.”" ], [ "The library was new, and the built-in exhibit cases\n were still empty. Nearly all the buildings in Roulsville\n were new since the flood that had swept the valley\n and started Judy on the trail of her first mystery. Her\n own home had been swept away, and her father, Dr.\n Bolton, had been obliged to move to Farringdon\n where he still lived and practiced. Only her grandmother’s\n house, two miles above the broken dam, had\n stayed the same.\n\n\n “Maybe that’s why I love it,” she thought.", "“I’ll ask them if they have anything for the library\n exhibit. I have the job of choosing the displays for\n those new cases in the Roulsville library,” Judy explained.\n “All right, Horace, we’ll see you and Honey\n at the beaver dam.”\n\n15\nCHAPTER III\n\n A Rude Shopkeeper\n“I hope the beaver dam holds better than that one\n just above Roulsville,” Holly commented as they\n started off again. “We have to pass it on the way to\n school. I remember how it was last term. The boys\n and girls in the school bus quiet down fast if they happen\n to glance out the window and see those big pieces\n of broken concrete. A lot of them lost their homes\n when that dam broke, just the way you did, Judy.\n Did you go back afterwards to see if anything could\n be saved?”\n\n16", "While Horace went to telephone, the three girls\n ordered lunch. Holly was still jumpy. She kept tossing\n her mane of thick brown hair like a restless colt. She\n wore it perfectly straight in a long pony tail. Judy’s\n red curls were cut a little shorter than usual, but\n Honey had let her lovely honey-colored hair grow\n long to please Horace. Today she wore it loose about\n her shoulders.\n\n\n The three girls were very different in appearance,\n but they had one thing in common. All three of them\n adored Judy’s brother, Horace Bolton. He was a shy-appearing\n young man. To look at him, no one would\n suspect that he had once startled the town of Roulsville\n out of its complacency by racing through the\n streets on Judy’s ginger colt and crying out, “The\n dam is breaking! Run for the hills.”", "“We went back too late, I guess. We didn’t find\n much of anything. There’s always some looting after\n a big disaster like that. People are too interested in\n making sure all their loved ones are safe to worry\n about their possessions.” Judy paused. She had been\n younger than Holly was now when the Bolton family’s\n home in Roulsville had been swept away in the\n flood, but it still hurt to think about it.\n\n\n “Dad had to treat a lot of people for shock,” she\n continued as they drove past the Post Office, where\n Peter’s office was, and entered the outskirts of Farringdon.\n “Our house was turned over and one\n wall smashed in. I guess the furniture just floated\n away.”\n\n\n “It would have to float somewhere, wouldn’t\n it?” Holly questioned.", "“Take care,” was what she usually said, but in her\n heart the words meant, “Take care of our future. Let\n all our dreams for our married life in this house come\n true.”\n\n\n The house had been willed to Judy by her grandmother,\n and it was so sturdy and well built that she\n felt sure it would stand there on the slope overlooking\n Dry Brook as long as the hills themselves.\n\n\n Peter had left the stair door open, and soon Judy\n heard Blackberry padding up to keep her company.\n He looked around, the way cats will, and then came\n into the storeroom to see what Judy was doing.", "“You’ve made a good start. I wish I could stay and\n help you. I always liked treasure hunting,” Peter confessed,\n “but Uncle Sam expects me to hunt criminals\n today. We’ll be using an official car, so I’ll leave the\n Beetle for you to transport your exhibit to the library\n if you do get it ready. ’Bye, Angel. See you at six.”\n\n\n “You hope,” Judy added as he bent to kiss her.\n\n3\n\n Peter’s time was not his own. Working out of the\n Resident FBI Agency in the Farringdon Post Office,\n he might be sent anywhere in the territory. His assignment\n now was to round up the Joe Mott gang. Judy\n knew that much, although his work was confidential.\n It was also dangerous. Each time he left the house she\n breathed a little prayer for his safe return.", "“That’s the town where we turned off when we\n visited the Jewell sisters,” Honey put in, “on our secret\n quest, didn’t we, Judy?”\n\n\n “I heard about that. You two girls have all the fun,”\n Holly complained.\n\n\n “Fun!” Judy echoed, remembering how frightened\n she and Honey had been. “If that’s fun—” She shivered,\n and her voice trailed off into thoughts of their\n latest mystery.\n\n\n “We were drenched to the skin and that criminal,\n Joe Mott, was after us. I’m glad he’s back in prison. I\n can’t understand it, though,” Honey continued in a\n puzzled voice. “Aldin Launt, that artist who works at\n the Dean Studios, was never picked up. He works\n right near me, and every time he passes my desk I get\n the shivers. I thought Peter was going to arrest him.”\n\n12", "“Hi, Blackberry! You can’t play with these things,”\n she told him as she continued sorting and arranging\n the cards that were to be exhibited at the library. The\n theme for September would be school. She found a\n few Hallowe’en things and a Columbus Day card\n which she put aside for October. There were turkeys\n and prayers of Thanksgiving for November, a pile of\n Christmas things for December, and a stack of old\n calendars for January. The stack grew higher and\n higher.\n\n4\n\n “I do believe Grandma saved a calendar for every\n year. This is wonderful,” Judy said to herself. “I’ll\n find some recent calendars and complete the collection.\n It will be just perfect for the January exhibit.”", "And yet she and Peter had made changes. It was a\n rambling old farmhouse too big for just the two of\n them so only the downstairs rooms had been changed.\n Up here in the attic nothing had been disturbed except\n by Blackberry as he played with the spools in Judy’s\n sewing room or searched for mice in the other two\n rooms where her grandmother’s keepsakes were\n stored. She liked having him for company as she\n worked. Attics and black cats seemed to go together.\n\n\n Judy smiled at this thought. She was so absorbed in\n what she was doing that at first she didn’t hear the\n front doorbell ringing downstairs. It rang again more\n insistently, and she gathered Blackberry in her arms\n and hurried down the two flights of stairs. It wouldn’t\n do to leave the cat alone among the things she had\n collected for the exhibit.\n\n5\n\n “I can’t trust you,” she told him, “even if you are a\n famous cat.”", "“There aren’t any others?” Holly’s voice held disappointment.\n\n\n “No, that’s all we have.”\n\n\n His tone of voice plainly told the girls he wished\n they’d go, but Judy wasn’t ready to leave until she had\n done a little more exploring.\n\n\n “I’m collecting old cards and calendars for a library\n exhibit,” she explained. “Do you have anything I can\n use?”\n\n\n “In the box over there. But don’t be all day looking\n them over. Your car’s parked right in front of mine.”\n\n\n Mr. Sammis had just seen it through the window.\n\n20\n\n “Oh, is that your car?” Judy asked innocently. “We\n saw a boy driving it this morning.”\n\n\n “Impossible!” he snorted. “It’s been parked right\n where it is all day.”", "“I should think so,” Peter replied thoughtfully. “A\n maxim like that would do for any time of the year.\n Does the library plan to exhibit a few of these things\n each month?”\n\n\n “Yes, but just for the school year. Miss Pringle—I\n mean Mrs. Wheatley says she wants me to arrange\n them in that little glass case near the library door.\n These reward-of-merit cards used to be given out at\n school when Grandma was a little girl. The other\n card was a sewing lesson. ‘Promise little. Do much,’”\n Judy repeated, “but how much can a person do in a\n day? Maybe I won’t try to sort all these treasures this\n morning.”", "Help for Holly\nFarringdon was a much larger town than Roulsville.\n Actually, it was a small city and the county seat\n of a hilly county in northern Pennsylvania. The courthouse,\n tall and imposing with its clock tower, stood\n at the corner of Main and Grove streets. Just opposite\n was the office of the\nFarringdon Daily Herald\nwhere\n Judy’s brother Horace worked as a reporter. Farther\n up Grove Street was Dr. Bolton’s combined home and\n office.\n\n\n “Which way shall we turn?” Judy asked when they\n came to the corner.\n\n\n Holly shook her head. “I guess it doesn’t matter.\n Maybe my typewriter wasn’t stolen after all.”\n\n10\n\n “\nWhat?\n” Judy was so surprised that she nearly hit\n the curb as they turned the corner. “If we aren’t following\n a typewriter thief, then what are we doing in\n Farringdon?”", "“Oh dear! I guess I don’t want it then. We really\n came in to look at typewriters. You do sell typewriters,\n don’t you?” Judy asked, looking around the shop\n to see if the driver of the green car had come in.\n\n\n “New ones,” Holly added. Her typewriter was almost\n new.\n\n\n “You came to the wrong place for a new typewriter.\n We sell anything and everything so long as it’s\n old.” The shopkeeper, a stout, balding man, looked at\n the two girls as if he considered them slightly stupid.\n\n\n “I meant—almost new,” Holly stammered.\n\n\n “Are you Mr. Sammis? Will you let us see what you\n have, please?” Judy asked.\n\n\n He showed them a row of ancient typewriters in\n the back of the shop. They were all of the same make,\n and all were equally old and dusty.", "“That’s the name I gave it when I was a little girl.\n There were ladies carved on the legs. They held the\n marble table top on their heads. They had such quiet,\n patient faces.”\n\n\n Now Judy was thinking back in spite of herself.\n\n\n It had been exciting, furnishing the so-called\n Haunted House in Farringdon and exposing its\n “ghosts.” New furniture had been bought, and a few\n good antiques had been discovered in out-of-the-way\n shops. Dr. Bolton’s massive oak desk was one such\n piece. Judy’s dresser with the secret drawer was\n another. Buying it all by herself had been a real adventure.\n Only gradually had she come to realize their\n loss.", "Judy’s thoughts broke off as she suddenly stopped\n the car. They had been driving through a small town\n to the north of Farringdon. A dingy row of gray\n houses lined the road. Some of their porches had been\n sheared off in order to widen the highway, and some\n had been made into shops. Judy had noticed one of\n the signs:\nH. SAMMIS\n\n Antiques, Used Furniture Bought and Sold\n\n\n “And there’s a green car in the driveway!” exclaimed\n Holly. “Oh, Judy! Luck is with us after all.\n That boy may be inside right now trying to sell my\n typewriter!”\n\n\n “Maybe it’s still in the car. Let’s have a look,” Judy\n suggested.\n\n18\n\n She parked the Beetle right behind the green car,\n blocking the driveway. No one seemed to be around\n so Judy and Holly carefully examined the interior.", "Judy and Holly looked at each other. They could\n have made a mistake. Green cars were common, just\n as Horace had said. The typewriter wasn’t in the shop,\n and neither was the boy who had been seen driving a\n green car. Voices came from the upper floor, but they\n were indistinct. Then, suddenly, something was\n dropped with a loud thud. Holly jumped.\n\n\n “My wife,” Mr. Sammis explained. “She’s always\n dropping things. Did you find anything you want?”\n\n\n “Not yet,” Judy replied. She and Holly had been\n looking through the box of old cards. Near the bottom\n Judy found a little booklet marked\nSchool Souvenir\n.\n\n\n “Here’s something for the September exhibit,” she\n said as she opened it.", "“But that’s for the close of school,” Holly objected,\n reading over her shoulder. The illuminated verse read:\nOh! Swift the time has fled away\nAs fleeting as the rose\nSince school began its opening day\nTill now its day of close.\n\n\n The verse was followed by the name of the teacher\n and pupils in some long-ago country school. Hugh\n Sammis was one of the names.\n\n\n “Is this for sale?” Judy asked, sure he wouldn’t want\n to part with it.\n\n21\n\n He laughed, an unpleasant sort of laugh as if he were\n making fun of her. “It’s junk. I was going to throw it\n out. You can have it for a quarter.”\n\n\n “I’ll take it then,” Judy decided. “It’s for the beginning\n of school, too,” she pointed out as she and\n Holly made their way back to the front of the shop.", "And suddenly, like rain from a clear blue sky, Holly\n burst into tears. She was crying over more important\n things than a stolen typewriter, Judy knew. It wasn’t\n easy living with a married sister whose whole interest\n centered on her own husband and baby. Holly’s other\n sister was on her way to a teaching job at some private\n school in Maine. The girls’ uncle had died while Judy\n and Peter were in Washington. Holly said she had\n never felt more lost and alone.\n\n\n “First it was my parents and then Uncle David. It’s\n always this way,” she sobbed. “I told my sisters I\n wouldn’t dare love them. It’s bad luck for me to love\n anybody. Even the\nthings\nI love have to be taken.”\n\n\n “We’ll find your typewriter,” Judy resolved as she\n drove on toward Farringdon as fast as safety allowed.\n\n9\nCHAPTER II", "She turned left at the main road and sped up the\n long slope out of Dry Brook Hollow. At the top of\n the hill the world seemed to end but, instead of driving\n on into the sky the way it looked as if she might,\n Judy drove down again with miles and miles of winding\n road ahead of her. There wasn’t a green car in\n sight.\n\n\n “I’m afraid we’ve lost him,” Judy began.\n\n\n “But I’m sure he went this way,” Holly insisted. “I\n would have seen him myself if he’d turned toward\n Roulsville. You know how our road angles off in that\n direction. Well, I thought if I raced along the shortcut\n and we took your road maybe we could head him\n off if he turned toward Farringdon. I\nhave\nto get my\n typewriter back. Can’t you drive a little faster?”", "“Careful there!” Mr. Sammis warned again.\n\n\n It was his own elbow that knocked over the little\n table with the claw feet, but he looked at Judy as if\n she had done it. One foot with a claw clutching a glass\n ball fell to the floor. He picked it up and waved it in\n Judy’s face.\n\n\n “Now see what you’ve done,” he charged unreasonably.\n “I told you you’d have to pay for anything\n you broke. Young people nowadays are all alike. Careless,\n blundering fools, the lot of them. Come in\n here for junk and break up my best furniture! This\n table is fragile—”\n\n\n “I can see it is,” Judy interrupted. “The claw fell off\n because the table leg was already broken. I can see\n where it’s been glued. The top is warped, too. It looks\n as if it had been left out in the rain.”" ], [ "“Empty! He’s probably trying to sell it. Come on\n inside,” Holly urged, pulling Judy along with her.\n\n\n “Don’t be in such a hurry. He can’t get out while\n we’re parked there, and I want to take down his license\n number! There!” Judy announced when she\n had it. “Now we’ll go in like any other customers and\n pretend we want to buy something.”\n\n\n “A typewriter!” agreed Holly. “We’ll just ask.\n Then, if we see mine, we’ll call the police.”\n\n\n Judy shook her head. She didn’t think it would be\n that easy, but she was willing to go along with Holly\n just for the adventure. “If we don’t find your typewriter,”\n she told her, “we may find some old cards\n for my collection. Anyway, it will do no harm to go\n in and look around.”", "Judy’s thoughts broke off as she suddenly stopped\n the car. They had been driving through a small town\n to the north of Farringdon. A dingy row of gray\n houses lined the road. Some of their porches had been\n sheared off in order to widen the highway, and some\n had been made into shops. Judy had noticed one of\n the signs:\nH. SAMMIS\n\n Antiques, Used Furniture Bought and Sold\n\n\n “And there’s a green car in the driveway!” exclaimed\n Holly. “Oh, Judy! Luck is with us after all.\n That boy may be inside right now trying to sell my\n typewriter!”\n\n\n “Maybe it’s still in the car. Let’s have a look,” Judy\n suggested.\n\n18\n\n She parked the Beetle right behind the green car,\n blocking the driveway. No one seemed to be around\n so Judy and Holly carefully examined the interior.", "And suddenly, like rain from a clear blue sky, Holly\n burst into tears. She was crying over more important\n things than a stolen typewriter, Judy knew. It wasn’t\n easy living with a married sister whose whole interest\n centered on her own husband and baby. Holly’s other\n sister was on her way to a teaching job at some private\n school in Maine. The girls’ uncle had died while Judy\n and Peter were in Washington. Holly said she had\n never felt more lost and alone.\n\n\n “First it was my parents and then Uncle David. It’s\n always this way,” she sobbed. “I told my sisters I\n wouldn’t dare love them. It’s bad luck for me to love\n anybody. Even the\nthings\nI love have to be taken.”\n\n\n “We’ll find your typewriter,” Judy resolved as she\n drove on toward Farringdon as fast as safety allowed.\n\n9\nCHAPTER II", "“What about you, Honey? Do you have to go back\n to work?” asked Judy.\n\n14\n\n “Oh, I guess Mr. Dean would give me the afternoon\n off if I asked him. I can’t do any work with all\n that hammering going on anyway. Where shall we\n meet you?” Honey asked.\n\n\n “At the beaver dam!” exclaimed Judy, suddenly enthusiastic.\n “Remember, Honey? Violetta said she’d\n show it to us. I have my camera in the car. Maybe we\n could take pictures of the beavers.”\n\n\n “It’s a date! Violetta is the younger of the two\n Jewell sisters,” Honey explained to Holly, “though\n neither of them is young. They’re such dears! They\n live in one of the oldest houses in this section of\n Pennsylvania. It’s like stepping back in time just to\n visit them.”", "“We are—I mean we were following that green\n car, and I think my typewriter is in it. It’s just that I—I\n mean I haven’t told you everything.”\n\n\n “I should say you haven’t,” Judy agreed. “Maybe\n Horace would help us for the sake of the story.”\n\n\n “I’d be glad to have his help,” declared Holly almost\n too enthusiastically. “There he is now, walking down\n Grove Street. Oh dear! Is that Honey with him?”\n\n\n “It usually is,” replied Judy. “They’re practically\n engaged, you know.”\n\n\n “No, I didn’t know. Good things happen to everyone\n but me,” was Holly’s doleful comment. “I’ll\n probably be an old maid and live all alone without\n even a cat for company.”", "“There aren’t any others?” Holly’s voice held disappointment.\n\n\n “No, that’s all we have.”\n\n\n His tone of voice plainly told the girls he wished\n they’d go, but Judy wasn’t ready to leave until she had\n done a little more exploring.\n\n\n “I’m collecting old cards and calendars for a library\n exhibit,” she explained. “Do you have anything I can\n use?”\n\n\n “In the box over there. But don’t be all day looking\n them over. Your car’s parked right in front of mine.”\n\n\n Mr. Sammis had just seen it through the window.\n\n20\n\n “Oh, is that your car?” Judy asked innocently. “We\n saw a boy driving it this morning.”\n\n\n “Impossible!” he snorted. “It’s been parked right\n where it is all day.”", "Thinking back, Judy realized that since Horace\n had become a hero, he had changed. There wasn’t a\n note of timidity in his voice as he talked with the\n police officer who later came in and quietly seated\n himself at their table. It was Holly who was frightened.\n “I—I didn’t think they’d send a policeman,”\n were her first words. “I can’t be sure of anything.\n Maybe it’s all a big mistake.”\n\n\n “We’ll take that chance,” the officer replied, smiling\n as he wrote out his report.\n\n\n “Tell you what, Judy,” Horace suggested as they\n were leaving the restaurant. “Why don’t you and\n Holly drive on a ways? Maybe you’ll see that\n green car parked somewhere along the road. I’ll finish\n up a little job I’m doing and tell Mr. Lee this looks like\n a story. He’ll give me the afternoon off to follow it\n up.”", "“Oh dear! I guess I don’t want it then. We really\n came in to look at typewriters. You do sell typewriters,\n don’t you?” Judy asked, looking around the shop\n to see if the driver of the green car had come in.\n\n\n “New ones,” Holly added. Her typewriter was almost\n new.\n\n\n “You came to the wrong place for a new typewriter.\n We sell anything and everything so long as it’s\n old.” The shopkeeper, a stout, balding man, looked at\n the two girls as if he considered them slightly stupid.\n\n\n “I meant—almost new,” Holly stammered.\n\n\n “Are you Mr. Sammis? Will you let us see what you\n have, please?” Judy asked.\n\n\n He showed them a row of ancient typewriters in\n the back of the shop. They were all of the same make,\n and all were equally old and dusty.", "She turned left at the main road and sped up the\n long slope out of Dry Brook Hollow. At the top of\n the hill the world seemed to end but, instead of driving\n on into the sky the way it looked as if she might,\n Judy drove down again with miles and miles of winding\n road ahead of her. There wasn’t a green car in\n sight.\n\n\n “I’m afraid we’ve lost him,” Judy began.\n\n\n “But I’m sure he went this way,” Holly insisted. “I\n would have seen him myself if he’d turned toward\n Roulsville. You know how our road angles off in that\n direction. Well, I thought if I raced along the shortcut\n and we took your road maybe we could head him\n off if he turned toward Farringdon. I\nhave\nto get my\n typewriter back. Can’t you drive a little faster?”", "Help for Holly\nFarringdon was a much larger town than Roulsville.\n Actually, it was a small city and the county seat\n of a hilly county in northern Pennsylvania. The courthouse,\n tall and imposing with its clock tower, stood\n at the corner of Main and Grove streets. Just opposite\n was the office of the\nFarringdon Daily Herald\nwhere\n Judy’s brother Horace worked as a reporter. Farther\n up Grove Street was Dr. Bolton’s combined home and\n office.\n\n\n “Which way shall we turn?” Judy asked when they\n came to the corner.\n\n\n Holly shook her head. “I guess it doesn’t matter.\n Maybe my typewriter wasn’t stolen after all.”\n\n10\n\n “\nWhat?\n” Judy was so surprised that she nearly hit\n the curb as they turned the corner. “If we aren’t following\n a typewriter thief, then what are we doing in\n Farringdon?”", "“Yes, the one you gave me for my birthday. Remember\n when we traded birthdays so mine wouldn’t\n come on Christmas? I loved that typewriter, and\n now—”\n\n\n “We’ll try and get it back,” Judy reassured her.\n “Come on, Holly!”\n\n\n They were off down the road in the Beetle before\n Holly had finished telling Judy which way the green\n car went. “Try Farringdon,” she suggested. “You\n could see it from the top of the hill if it went toward\n Farringdon, couldn’t you?”\n\n\n “That would depend on how fast he was going, I\n should think, but we’ll try it,” Judy promised.\n\n6\n“Quick!” Holly urged breathlessly.\n7", "Judy and Holly looked at each other. They could\n have made a mistake. Green cars were common, just\n as Horace had said. The typewriter wasn’t in the shop,\n and neither was the boy who had been seen driving a\n green car. Voices came from the upper floor, but they\n were indistinct. Then, suddenly, something was\n dropped with a loud thud. Holly jumped.\n\n\n “My wife,” Mr. Sammis explained. “She’s always\n dropping things. Did you find anything you want?”\n\n\n “Not yet,” Judy replied. She and Holly had been\n looking through the box of old cards. Near the bottom\n Judy found a little booklet marked\nSchool Souvenir\n.\n\n\n “Here’s something for the September exhibit,” she\n said as she opened it.", "While Horace went to telephone, the three girls\n ordered lunch. Holly was still jumpy. She kept tossing\n her mane of thick brown hair like a restless colt. She\n wore it perfectly straight in a long pony tail. Judy’s\n red curls were cut a little shorter than usual, but\n Honey had let her lovely honey-colored hair grow\n long to please Horace. Today she wore it loose about\n her shoulders.\n\n\n The three girls were very different in appearance,\n but they had one thing in common. All three of them\n adored Judy’s brother, Horace Bolton. He was a shy-appearing\n young man. To look at him, no one would\n suspect that he had once startled the town of Roulsville\n out of its complacency by racing through the\n streets on Judy’s ginger colt and crying out, “The\n dam is breaking! Run for the hills.”", "“We can try,” replied Judy, “but I’m not making\n any rash promises. Didn’t you just tell me you’re not\n sure he is the thief? You didn’t actually see him take\n your typewriter, did you?”\n\n\n “No, but I did see him running toward that green\n car, and when I turned around my desk top was\n empty. Ruth said maybe Doris took it. You know the\n way sisters are, always borrowing things without asking.\n But I don’t believe it. Doris knows I need my\n typewriter. Please drive on, Judy,” Holly pleaded.\n “We can’t let that boy get away with it.”\n\n\n “I’m afraid he did get away with it,” Horace told\n her. “If he did take your typewriter, he must be half-way\n to Ulysses with it by now.”", "Blackberry wore a life-saving medal on his collar,\n and just recently he had worked for the government,\n or so Judy insisted, ridding the Capitol Building of\n mice. But when she opened the door he fled through it\n to prowl around outside like any ordinary cat.\n\n\n The cat startled Holly Potter, Judy’s sixteen-year-old\n neighbor, who had rung the bell. Obviously she\n had been running at break-neck speed along the shortcut\n from her house to Judy’s.\n\n\n “What took you so long? I thought you’d never answer\n the bell. Quick!” she urged breathlessly.\n “Maybe we can still head off that green car! There’s\n a thief in it. He stole my typewriter!”\n\n\n “Your typewriter?” gasped Judy.", "“Okay, then,” Horace said with a satisfied gleam\n in his eyes. “Just give me all the details. Then we’ll relax\n and let the police handle it. Honey and I were on\n our way to lunch. How about joining us?”\n\n\n Judy looked up at the courthouse clock. “Oh dear!\n The morning’s gone. I didn’t think it was lunchtime\n already. I am hungry. Aren’t you, Holly?”\n\n\n The younger girl insisted that she couldn’t eat a\n thing, but once they were inside the restaurant she\n changed her mind. “I guess I could eat a hamburger,”\n she conceded.\n\n13", "“Let’s go before he puts the price any higher,”\n Holly urged, pulling at Judy’s arm.", "“There was nothing strange about it,” declared\n Holly. “He would have taken more if I hadn’t surprised\n him and called Ruth. She was busy with the\n baby and didn’t pay any attention. Doris had just left\n in her car—”\n\n\n “That’s it!” Judy interrupted. “The thief probably\n saw your sister Doris leaving and figured you were all\n out.”\n\n\n “Well, we weren’t. I was there, and I saw him run\n out of the house toward a green car. Please drive\n faster, Judy! I have to get my typewriter back.”", "“But that’s for the close of school,” Holly objected,\n reading over her shoulder. The illuminated verse read:\nOh! Swift the time has fled away\nAs fleeting as the rose\nSince school began its opening day\nTill now its day of close.\n\n\n The verse was followed by the name of the teacher\n and pupils in some long-ago country school. Hugh\n Sammis was one of the names.\n\n\n “Is this for sale?” Judy asked, sure he wouldn’t want\n to part with it.\n\n21\n\n He laughed, an unpleasant sort of laugh as if he were\n making fun of her. “It’s junk. I was going to throw it\n out. You can have it for a quarter.”\n\n\n “I’ll take it then,” Judy decided. “It’s for the beginning\n of school, too,” she pointed out as she and\n Holly made their way back to the front of the shop.", "“Not without turning the car over. We’ll pick up\n speed on the straight road. Then, if we can’t find him,\n we’ll report the stolen typewriter when we get to\n Farringdon. Did he take anything else?” Judy asked.\n\n\n “No, just the typewriter.”\n\n\n “That’s strange.” Judy couldn’t quite picture a\n thief running into Holly’s house, grabbing her typewriter,\n and not touching anything else. She had a rare\n old paperweight and a brand-new tape recorder in\n the first-floor room she called her study. Either of\n these things would have been worth more than her\n typewriter, to say nothing of the valuables stored in\n what she had once called her forbidden chest.\n\n8" ], [ "And suddenly, like rain from a clear blue sky, Holly\n burst into tears. She was crying over more important\n things than a stolen typewriter, Judy knew. It wasn’t\n easy living with a married sister whose whole interest\n centered on her own husband and baby. Holly’s other\n sister was on her way to a teaching job at some private\n school in Maine. The girls’ uncle had died while Judy\n and Peter were in Washington. Holly said she had\n never felt more lost and alone.\n\n\n “First it was my parents and then Uncle David. It’s\n always this way,” she sobbed. “I told my sisters I\n wouldn’t dare love them. It’s bad luck for me to love\n anybody. Even the\nthings\nI love have to be taken.”\n\n\n “We’ll find your typewriter,” Judy resolved as she\n drove on toward Farringdon as fast as safety allowed.\n\n9\nCHAPTER II", "“Not without turning the car over. We’ll pick up\n speed on the straight road. Then, if we can’t find him,\n we’ll report the stolen typewriter when we get to\n Farringdon. Did he take anything else?” Judy asked.\n\n\n “No, just the typewriter.”\n\n\n “That’s strange.” Judy couldn’t quite picture a\n thief running into Holly’s house, grabbing her typewriter,\n and not touching anything else. She had a rare\n old paperweight and a brand-new tape recorder in\n the first-floor room she called her study. Either of\n these things would have been worth more than her\n typewriter, to say nothing of the valuables stored in\n what she had once called her forbidden chest.\n\n8", "“Yes, the one you gave me for my birthday. Remember\n when we traded birthdays so mine wouldn’t\n come on Christmas? I loved that typewriter, and\n now—”\n\n\n “We’ll try and get it back,” Judy reassured her.\n “Come on, Holly!”\n\n\n They were off down the road in the Beetle before\n Holly had finished telling Judy which way the green\n car went. “Try Farringdon,” she suggested. “You\n could see it from the top of the hill if it went toward\n Farringdon, couldn’t you?”\n\n\n “That would depend on how fast he was going, I\n should think, but we’ll try it,” Judy promised.\n\n6\n“Quick!” Holly urged breathlessly.\n7", "“Oh dear! I guess I don’t want it then. We really\n came in to look at typewriters. You do sell typewriters,\n don’t you?” Judy asked, looking around the shop\n to see if the driver of the green car had come in.\n\n\n “New ones,” Holly added. Her typewriter was almost\n new.\n\n\n “You came to the wrong place for a new typewriter.\n We sell anything and everything so long as it’s\n old.” The shopkeeper, a stout, balding man, looked at\n the two girls as if he considered them slightly stupid.\n\n\n “I meant—almost new,” Holly stammered.\n\n\n “Are you Mr. Sammis? Will you let us see what you\n have, please?” Judy asked.\n\n\n He showed them a row of ancient typewriters in\n the back of the shop. They were all of the same make,\n and all were equally old and dusty.", "“We are—I mean we were following that green\n car, and I think my typewriter is in it. It’s just that I—I\n mean I haven’t told you everything.”\n\n\n “I should say you haven’t,” Judy agreed. “Maybe\n Horace would help us for the sake of the story.”\n\n\n “I’d be glad to have his help,” declared Holly almost\n too enthusiastically. “There he is now, walking down\n Grove Street. Oh dear! Is that Honey with him?”\n\n\n “It usually is,” replied Judy. “They’re practically\n engaged, you know.”\n\n\n “No, I didn’t know. Good things happen to everyone\n but me,” was Holly’s doleful comment. “I’ll\n probably be an old maid and live all alone without\n even a cat for company.”", "“Empty! He’s probably trying to sell it. Come on\n inside,” Holly urged, pulling Judy along with her.\n\n\n “Don’t be in such a hurry. He can’t get out while\n we’re parked there, and I want to take down his license\n number! There!” Judy announced when she\n had it. “Now we’ll go in like any other customers and\n pretend we want to buy something.”\n\n\n “A typewriter!” agreed Holly. “We’ll just ask.\n Then, if we see mine, we’ll call the police.”\n\n\n Judy shook her head. She didn’t think it would be\n that easy, but she was willing to go along with Holly\n just for the adventure. “If we don’t find your typewriter,”\n she told her, “we may find some old cards\n for my collection. Anyway, it will do no harm to go\n in and look around.”", "Judy’s thoughts broke off as she suddenly stopped\n the car. They had been driving through a small town\n to the north of Farringdon. A dingy row of gray\n houses lined the road. Some of their porches had been\n sheared off in order to widen the highway, and some\n had been made into shops. Judy had noticed one of\n the signs:\nH. SAMMIS\n\n Antiques, Used Furniture Bought and Sold\n\n\n “And there’s a green car in the driveway!” exclaimed\n Holly. “Oh, Judy! Luck is with us after all.\n That boy may be inside right now trying to sell my\n typewriter!”\n\n\n “Maybe it’s still in the car. Let’s have a look,” Judy\n suggested.\n\n18\n\n She parked the Beetle right behind the green car,\n blocking the driveway. No one seemed to be around\n so Judy and Holly carefully examined the interior.", "“There was nothing strange about it,” declared\n Holly. “He would have taken more if I hadn’t surprised\n him and called Ruth. She was busy with the\n baby and didn’t pay any attention. Doris had just left\n in her car—”\n\n\n “That’s it!” Judy interrupted. “The thief probably\n saw your sister Doris leaving and figured you were all\n out.”\n\n\n “Well, we weren’t. I was there, and I saw him run\n out of the house toward a green car. Please drive\n faster, Judy! I have to get my typewriter back.”", "Judy and Holly looked at each other. They could\n have made a mistake. Green cars were common, just\n as Horace had said. The typewriter wasn’t in the shop,\n and neither was the boy who had been seen driving a\n green car. Voices came from the upper floor, but they\n were indistinct. Then, suddenly, something was\n dropped with a loud thud. Holly jumped.\n\n\n “My wife,” Mr. Sammis explained. “She’s always\n dropping things. Did you find anything you want?”\n\n\n “Not yet,” Judy replied. She and Holly had been\n looking through the box of old cards. Near the bottom\n Judy found a little booklet marked\nSchool Souvenir\n.\n\n\n “Here’s something for the September exhibit,” she\n said as she opened it.", "Blackberry wore a life-saving medal on his collar,\n and just recently he had worked for the government,\n or so Judy insisted, ridding the Capitol Building of\n mice. But when she opened the door he fled through it\n to prowl around outside like any ordinary cat.\n\n\n The cat startled Holly Potter, Judy’s sixteen-year-old\n neighbor, who had rung the bell. Obviously she\n had been running at break-neck speed along the shortcut\n from her house to Judy’s.\n\n\n “What took you so long? I thought you’d never answer\n the bell. Quick!” she urged breathlessly.\n “Maybe we can still head off that green car! There’s\n a thief in it. He stole my typewriter!”\n\n\n “Your typewriter?” gasped Judy.", "She turned left at the main road and sped up the\n long slope out of Dry Brook Hollow. At the top of\n the hill the world seemed to end but, instead of driving\n on into the sky the way it looked as if she might,\n Judy drove down again with miles and miles of winding\n road ahead of her. There wasn’t a green car in\n sight.\n\n\n “I’m afraid we’ve lost him,” Judy began.\n\n\n “But I’m sure he went this way,” Holly insisted. “I\n would have seen him myself if he’d turned toward\n Roulsville. You know how our road angles off in that\n direction. Well, I thought if I raced along the shortcut\n and we took your road maybe we could head him\n off if he turned toward Farringdon. I\nhave\nto get my\n typewriter back. Can’t you drive a little faster?”", "Help for Holly\nFarringdon was a much larger town than Roulsville.\n Actually, it was a small city and the county seat\n of a hilly county in northern Pennsylvania. The courthouse,\n tall and imposing with its clock tower, stood\n at the corner of Main and Grove streets. Just opposite\n was the office of the\nFarringdon Daily Herald\nwhere\n Judy’s brother Horace worked as a reporter. Farther\n up Grove Street was Dr. Bolton’s combined home and\n office.\n\n\n “Which way shall we turn?” Judy asked when they\n came to the corner.\n\n\n Holly shook her head. “I guess it doesn’t matter.\n Maybe my typewriter wasn’t stolen after all.”\n\n10\n\n “\nWhat?\n” Judy was so surprised that she nearly hit\n the curb as they turned the corner. “If we aren’t following\n a typewriter thief, then what are we doing in\n Farringdon?”", "“We can try,” replied Judy, “but I’m not making\n any rash promises. Didn’t you just tell me you’re not\n sure he is the thief? You didn’t actually see him take\n your typewriter, did you?”\n\n\n “No, but I did see him running toward that green\n car, and when I turned around my desk top was\n empty. Ruth said maybe Doris took it. You know the\n way sisters are, always borrowing things without asking.\n But I don’t believe it. Doris knows I need my\n typewriter. Please drive on, Judy,” Holly pleaded.\n “We can’t let that boy get away with it.”\n\n\n “I’m afraid he did get away with it,” Horace told\n her. “If he did take your typewriter, he must be half-way\n to Ulysses with it by now.”", "“But that’s for the close of school,” Holly objected,\n reading over her shoulder. The illuminated verse read:\nOh! Swift the time has fled away\nAs fleeting as the rose\nSince school began its opening day\nTill now its day of close.\n\n\n The verse was followed by the name of the teacher\n and pupils in some long-ago country school. Hugh\n Sammis was one of the names.\n\n\n “Is this for sale?” Judy asked, sure he wouldn’t want\n to part with it.\n\n21\n\n He laughed, an unpleasant sort of laugh as if he were\n making fun of her. “It’s junk. I was going to throw it\n out. You can have it for a quarter.”\n\n\n “I’ll take it then,” Judy decided. “It’s for the beginning\n of school, too,” she pointed out as she and\n Holly made their way back to the front of the shop.", "“So did I,” agreed Judy, “but maybe he’s being\n watched in the hope he will lead the FBI to the rest\n of the gang. Peter’s work is so secret that half the\n time he can’t even discuss it with me.”\n\n\n “Please don’t discuss it now,” implored Holly. “If\n we’re going to follow that green car—”\n\n\n “You’ll never catch him,” Horace predicted, “and\n how would you get your typewriter back if you did?\n A couple of girls couldn’t handle a thief, especially if\n he’s got a gun on him. I don’t suppose you can make a\n federal case out of it, but couldn’t you report it to the\n local police? I’ll call them right now if you say the\n word.”\n\n\n “What do you think, Judy?” Holly asked.\n\n\n “I’d do it if I were you, Holly,” she advised.", "“There aren’t any others?” Holly’s voice held disappointment.\n\n\n “No, that’s all we have.”\n\n\n His tone of voice plainly told the girls he wished\n they’d go, but Judy wasn’t ready to leave until she had\n done a little more exploring.\n\n\n “I’m collecting old cards and calendars for a library\n exhibit,” she explained. “Do you have anything I can\n use?”\n\n\n “In the box over there. But don’t be all day looking\n them over. Your car’s parked right in front of mine.”\n\n\n Mr. Sammis had just seen it through the window.\n\n20\n\n “Oh, is that your car?” Judy asked innocently. “We\n saw a boy driving it this morning.”\n\n\n “Impossible!” he snorted. “It’s been parked right\n where it is all day.”", "“That’s up to you, isn’t it?” Judy hailed her brother.\n He and Peter’s sister came over to the side of the car.\n\n\n “Holly thinks her typewriter was stolen,” Judy explained.\n “On top of all the other trouble she’s had, this\n was just too much. Have you seen a green car?”\n\n\n “Several of them,” replied Horace. “They’re quite\n common, or haven’t you noticed? Come to think of it,\n a green car did roar up Main Street about ten minutes\n ago. The driver was a boy of about sixteen. Dark\n hair, striped T-shirt—”\n\n\n “He’s the one,” Holly interrupted. “Do you think\n we can still overtake him?”\n\n11", "The Puzzle in the Pond\n1\nCHAPTER I\n\n A Stolen Typewriter\n“Here’s something Miss Pringle can use!”\n\n\n Judy ran her fingers over the tiny, embossed\n Reward\n of Merit\n card as if she couldn’t bear to part\n with it even for the short time it would be on exhibit\n at the Roulsville library.\n\n\n “Mrs. Wheatley is still Miss Pringle to you, isn’t\n she?” asked Peter Dobbs, smiling at his young wife\n as she knelt beside the open drawer of the old chest\n where her grandmother’s keepsakes were stored.\n\n2", "Thinking back, Judy realized that since Horace\n had become a hero, he had changed. There wasn’t a\n note of timidity in his voice as he talked with the\n police officer who later came in and quietly seated\n himself at their table. It was Holly who was frightened.\n “I—I didn’t think they’d send a policeman,”\n were her first words. “I can’t be sure of anything.\n Maybe it’s all a big mistake.”\n\n\n “We’ll take that chance,” the officer replied, smiling\n as he wrote out his report.\n\n\n “Tell you what, Judy,” Horace suggested as they\n were leaving the restaurant. “Why don’t you and\n Holly drive on a ways? Maybe you’ll see that\n green car parked somewhere along the road. I’ll finish\n up a little job I’m doing and tell Mr. Lee this looks like\n a story. He’ll give me the afternoon off to follow it\n up.”", "“That’s the name I gave it when I was a little girl.\n There were ladies carved on the legs. They held the\n marble table top on their heads. They had such quiet,\n patient faces.”\n\n\n Now Judy was thinking back in spite of herself.\n\n\n It had been exciting, furnishing the so-called\n Haunted House in Farringdon and exposing its\n “ghosts.” New furniture had been bought, and a few\n good antiques had been discovered in out-of-the-way\n shops. Dr. Bolton’s massive oak desk was one such\n piece. Judy’s dresser with the secret drawer was\n another. Buying it all by herself had been a real adventure.\n Only gradually had she come to realize their\n loss." ], [ "Thinking back, Judy realized that since Horace\n had become a hero, he had changed. There wasn’t a\n note of timidity in his voice as he talked with the\n police officer who later came in and quietly seated\n himself at their table. It was Holly who was frightened.\n “I—I didn’t think they’d send a policeman,”\n were her first words. “I can’t be sure of anything.\n Maybe it’s all a big mistake.”\n\n\n “We’ll take that chance,” the officer replied, smiling\n as he wrote out his report.\n\n\n “Tell you what, Judy,” Horace suggested as they\n were leaving the restaurant. “Why don’t you and\n Holly drive on a ways? Maybe you’ll see that\n green car parked somewhere along the road. I’ll finish\n up a little job I’m doing and tell Mr. Lee this looks like\n a story. He’ll give me the afternoon off to follow it\n up.”", "“We are—I mean we were following that green\n car, and I think my typewriter is in it. It’s just that I—I\n mean I haven’t told you everything.”\n\n\n “I should say you haven’t,” Judy agreed. “Maybe\n Horace would help us for the sake of the story.”\n\n\n “I’d be glad to have his help,” declared Holly almost\n too enthusiastically. “There he is now, walking down\n Grove Street. Oh dear! Is that Honey with him?”\n\n\n “It usually is,” replied Judy. “They’re practically\n engaged, you know.”\n\n\n “No, I didn’t know. Good things happen to everyone\n but me,” was Holly’s doleful comment. “I’ll\n probably be an old maid and live all alone without\n even a cat for company.”", "“Not without turning the car over. We’ll pick up\n speed on the straight road. Then, if we can’t find him,\n we’ll report the stolen typewriter when we get to\n Farringdon. Did he take anything else?” Judy asked.\n\n\n “No, just the typewriter.”\n\n\n “That’s strange.” Judy couldn’t quite picture a\n thief running into Holly’s house, grabbing her typewriter,\n and not touching anything else. She had a rare\n old paperweight and a brand-new tape recorder in\n the first-floor room she called her study. Either of\n these things would have been worth more than her\n typewriter, to say nothing of the valuables stored in\n what she had once called her forbidden chest.\n\n8", "“Okay, then,” Horace said with a satisfied gleam\n in his eyes. “Just give me all the details. Then we’ll relax\n and let the police handle it. Honey and I were on\n our way to lunch. How about joining us?”\n\n\n Judy looked up at the courthouse clock. “Oh dear!\n The morning’s gone. I didn’t think it was lunchtime\n already. I am hungry. Aren’t you, Holly?”\n\n\n The younger girl insisted that she couldn’t eat a\n thing, but once they were inside the restaurant she\n changed her mind. “I guess I could eat a hamburger,”\n she conceded.\n\n13", "“So did I,” agreed Judy, “but maybe he’s being\n watched in the hope he will lead the FBI to the rest\n of the gang. Peter’s work is so secret that half the\n time he can’t even discuss it with me.”\n\n\n “Please don’t discuss it now,” implored Holly. “If\n we’re going to follow that green car—”\n\n\n “You’ll never catch him,” Horace predicted, “and\n how would you get your typewriter back if you did?\n A couple of girls couldn’t handle a thief, especially if\n he’s got a gun on him. I don’t suppose you can make a\n federal case out of it, but couldn’t you report it to the\n local police? I’ll call them right now if you say the\n word.”\n\n\n “What do you think, Judy?” Holly asked.\n\n\n “I’d do it if I were you, Holly,” she advised.", "“Empty! He’s probably trying to sell it. Come on\n inside,” Holly urged, pulling Judy along with her.\n\n\n “Don’t be in such a hurry. He can’t get out while\n we’re parked there, and I want to take down his license\n number! There!” Judy announced when she\n had it. “Now we’ll go in like any other customers and\n pretend we want to buy something.”\n\n\n “A typewriter!” agreed Holly. “We’ll just ask.\n Then, if we see mine, we’ll call the police.”\n\n\n Judy shook her head. She didn’t think it would be\n that easy, but she was willing to go along with Holly\n just for the adventure. “If we don’t find your typewriter,”\n she told her, “we may find some old cards\n for my collection. Anyway, it will do no harm to go\n in and look around.”", "Help for Holly\nFarringdon was a much larger town than Roulsville.\n Actually, it was a small city and the county seat\n of a hilly county in northern Pennsylvania. The courthouse,\n tall and imposing with its clock tower, stood\n at the corner of Main and Grove streets. Just opposite\n was the office of the\nFarringdon Daily Herald\nwhere\n Judy’s brother Horace worked as a reporter. Farther\n up Grove Street was Dr. Bolton’s combined home and\n office.\n\n\n “Which way shall we turn?” Judy asked when they\n came to the corner.\n\n\n Holly shook her head. “I guess it doesn’t matter.\n Maybe my typewriter wasn’t stolen after all.”\n\n10\n\n “\nWhat?\n” Judy was so surprised that she nearly hit\n the curb as they turned the corner. “If we aren’t following\n a typewriter thief, then what are we doing in\n Farringdon?”", "“We can try,” replied Judy, “but I’m not making\n any rash promises. Didn’t you just tell me you’re not\n sure he is the thief? You didn’t actually see him take\n your typewriter, did you?”\n\n\n “No, but I did see him running toward that green\n car, and when I turned around my desk top was\n empty. Ruth said maybe Doris took it. You know the\n way sisters are, always borrowing things without asking.\n But I don’t believe it. Doris knows I need my\n typewriter. Please drive on, Judy,” Holly pleaded.\n “We can’t let that boy get away with it.”\n\n\n “I’m afraid he did get away with it,” Horace told\n her. “If he did take your typewriter, he must be half-way\n to Ulysses with it by now.”", "Judy and Holly looked at each other. They could\n have made a mistake. Green cars were common, just\n as Horace had said. The typewriter wasn’t in the shop,\n and neither was the boy who had been seen driving a\n green car. Voices came from the upper floor, but they\n were indistinct. Then, suddenly, something was\n dropped with a loud thud. Holly jumped.\n\n\n “My wife,” Mr. Sammis explained. “She’s always\n dropping things. Did you find anything you want?”\n\n\n “Not yet,” Judy replied. She and Holly had been\n looking through the box of old cards. Near the bottom\n Judy found a little booklet marked\nSchool Souvenir\n.\n\n\n “Here’s something for the September exhibit,” she\n said as she opened it.", "“There aren’t any others?” Holly’s voice held disappointment.\n\n\n “No, that’s all we have.”\n\n\n His tone of voice plainly told the girls he wished\n they’d go, but Judy wasn’t ready to leave until she had\n done a little more exploring.\n\n\n “I’m collecting old cards and calendars for a library\n exhibit,” she explained. “Do you have anything I can\n use?”\n\n\n “In the box over there. But don’t be all day looking\n them over. Your car’s parked right in front of mine.”\n\n\n Mr. Sammis had just seen it through the window.\n\n20\n\n “Oh, is that your car?” Judy asked innocently. “We\n saw a boy driving it this morning.”\n\n\n “Impossible!” he snorted. “It’s been parked right\n where it is all day.”", "And suddenly, like rain from a clear blue sky, Holly\n burst into tears. She was crying over more important\n things than a stolen typewriter, Judy knew. It wasn’t\n easy living with a married sister whose whole interest\n centered on her own husband and baby. Holly’s other\n sister was on her way to a teaching job at some private\n school in Maine. The girls’ uncle had died while Judy\n and Peter were in Washington. Holly said she had\n never felt more lost and alone.\n\n\n “First it was my parents and then Uncle David. It’s\n always this way,” she sobbed. “I told my sisters I\n wouldn’t dare love them. It’s bad luck for me to love\n anybody. Even the\nthings\nI love have to be taken.”\n\n\n “We’ll find your typewriter,” Judy resolved as she\n drove on toward Farringdon as fast as safety allowed.\n\n9\nCHAPTER II", "Blackberry wore a life-saving medal on his collar,\n and just recently he had worked for the government,\n or so Judy insisted, ridding the Capitol Building of\n mice. But when she opened the door he fled through it\n to prowl around outside like any ordinary cat.\n\n\n The cat startled Holly Potter, Judy’s sixteen-year-old\n neighbor, who had rung the bell. Obviously she\n had been running at break-neck speed along the shortcut\n from her house to Judy’s.\n\n\n “What took you so long? I thought you’d never answer\n the bell. Quick!” she urged breathlessly.\n “Maybe we can still head off that green car! There’s\n a thief in it. He stole my typewriter!”\n\n\n “Your typewriter?” gasped Judy.", "“Yes, the one you gave me for my birthday. Remember\n when we traded birthdays so mine wouldn’t\n come on Christmas? I loved that typewriter, and\n now—”\n\n\n “We’ll try and get it back,” Judy reassured her.\n “Come on, Holly!”\n\n\n They were off down the road in the Beetle before\n Holly had finished telling Judy which way the green\n car went. “Try Farringdon,” she suggested. “You\n could see it from the top of the hill if it went toward\n Farringdon, couldn’t you?”\n\n\n “That would depend on how fast he was going, I\n should think, but we’ll try it,” Judy promised.\n\n6\n“Quick!” Holly urged breathlessly.\n7", "“That’s up to you, isn’t it?” Judy hailed her brother.\n He and Peter’s sister came over to the side of the car.\n\n\n “Holly thinks her typewriter was stolen,” Judy explained.\n “On top of all the other trouble she’s had, this\n was just too much. Have you seen a green car?”\n\n\n “Several of them,” replied Horace. “They’re quite\n common, or haven’t you noticed? Come to think of it,\n a green car did roar up Main Street about ten minutes\n ago. The driver was a boy of about sixteen. Dark\n hair, striped T-shirt—”\n\n\n “He’s the one,” Holly interrupted. “Do you think\n we can still overtake him?”\n\n11", "“There was nothing strange about it,” declared\n Holly. “He would have taken more if I hadn’t surprised\n him and called Ruth. She was busy with the\n baby and didn’t pay any attention. Doris had just left\n in her car—”\n\n\n “That’s it!” Judy interrupted. “The thief probably\n saw your sister Doris leaving and figured you were all\n out.”\n\n\n “Well, we weren’t. I was there, and I saw him run\n out of the house toward a green car. Please drive\n faster, Judy! I have to get my typewriter back.”", "She turned left at the main road and sped up the\n long slope out of Dry Brook Hollow. At the top of\n the hill the world seemed to end but, instead of driving\n on into the sky the way it looked as if she might,\n Judy drove down again with miles and miles of winding\n road ahead of her. There wasn’t a green car in\n sight.\n\n\n “I’m afraid we’ve lost him,” Judy began.\n\n\n “But I’m sure he went this way,” Holly insisted. “I\n would have seen him myself if he’d turned toward\n Roulsville. You know how our road angles off in that\n direction. Well, I thought if I raced along the shortcut\n and we took your road maybe we could head him\n off if he turned toward Farringdon. I\nhave\nto get my\n typewriter back. Can’t you drive a little faster?”", "While Horace went to telephone, the three girls\n ordered lunch. Holly was still jumpy. She kept tossing\n her mane of thick brown hair like a restless colt. She\n wore it perfectly straight in a long pony tail. Judy’s\n red curls were cut a little shorter than usual, but\n Honey had let her lovely honey-colored hair grow\n long to please Horace. Today she wore it loose about\n her shoulders.\n\n\n The three girls were very different in appearance,\n but they had one thing in common. All three of them\n adored Judy’s brother, Horace Bolton. He was a shy-appearing\n young man. To look at him, no one would\n suspect that he had once startled the town of Roulsville\n out of its complacency by racing through the\n streets on Judy’s ginger colt and crying out, “The\n dam is breaking! Run for the hills.”", "“Oh dear! I guess I don’t want it then. We really\n came in to look at typewriters. You do sell typewriters,\n don’t you?” Judy asked, looking around the shop\n to see if the driver of the green car had come in.\n\n\n “New ones,” Holly added. Her typewriter was almost\n new.\n\n\n “You came to the wrong place for a new typewriter.\n We sell anything and everything so long as it’s\n old.” The shopkeeper, a stout, balding man, looked at\n the two girls as if he considered them slightly stupid.\n\n\n “I meant—almost new,” Holly stammered.\n\n\n “Are you Mr. Sammis? Will you let us see what you\n have, please?” Judy asked.\n\n\n He showed them a row of ancient typewriters in\n the back of the shop. They were all of the same make,\n and all were equally old and dusty.", "“That’s the town where we turned off when we\n visited the Jewell sisters,” Honey put in, “on our secret\n quest, didn’t we, Judy?”\n\n\n “I heard about that. You two girls have all the fun,”\n Holly complained.\n\n\n “Fun!” Judy echoed, remembering how frightened\n she and Honey had been. “If that’s fun—” She shivered,\n and her voice trailed off into thoughts of their\n latest mystery.\n\n\n “We were drenched to the skin and that criminal,\n Joe Mott, was after us. I’m glad he’s back in prison. I\n can’t understand it, though,” Honey continued in a\n puzzled voice. “Aldin Launt, that artist who works at\n the Dean Studios, was never picked up. He works\n right near me, and every time he passes my desk I get\n the shivers. I thought Peter was going to arrest him.”\n\n12", "Judy’s thoughts broke off as she suddenly stopped\n the car. They had been driving through a small town\n to the north of Farringdon. A dingy row of gray\n houses lined the road. Some of their porches had been\n sheared off in order to widen the highway, and some\n had been made into shops. Judy had noticed one of\n the signs:\nH. SAMMIS\n\n Antiques, Used Furniture Bought and Sold\n\n\n “And there’s a green car in the driveway!” exclaimed\n Holly. “Oh, Judy! Luck is with us after all.\n That boy may be inside right now trying to sell my\n typewriter!”\n\n\n “Maybe it’s still in the car. Let’s have a look,” Judy\n suggested.\n\n18\n\n She parked the Beetle right behind the green car,\n blocking the driveway. No one seemed to be around\n so Judy and Holly carefully examined the interior." ], [ "Thinking back, Judy realized that since Horace\n had become a hero, he had changed. There wasn’t a\n note of timidity in his voice as he talked with the\n police officer who later came in and quietly seated\n himself at their table. It was Holly who was frightened.\n “I—I didn’t think they’d send a policeman,”\n were her first words. “I can’t be sure of anything.\n Maybe it’s all a big mistake.”\n\n\n “We’ll take that chance,” the officer replied, smiling\n as he wrote out his report.\n\n\n “Tell you what, Judy,” Horace suggested as they\n were leaving the restaurant. “Why don’t you and\n Holly drive on a ways? Maybe you’ll see that\n green car parked somewhere along the road. I’ll finish\n up a little job I’m doing and tell Mr. Lee this looks like\n a story. He’ll give me the afternoon off to follow it\n up.”", "And suddenly, like rain from a clear blue sky, Holly\n burst into tears. She was crying over more important\n things than a stolen typewriter, Judy knew. It wasn’t\n easy living with a married sister whose whole interest\n centered on her own husband and baby. Holly’s other\n sister was on her way to a teaching job at some private\n school in Maine. The girls’ uncle had died while Judy\n and Peter were in Washington. Holly said she had\n never felt more lost and alone.\n\n\n “First it was my parents and then Uncle David. It’s\n always this way,” she sobbed. “I told my sisters I\n wouldn’t dare love them. It’s bad luck for me to love\n anybody. Even the\nthings\nI love have to be taken.”\n\n\n “We’ll find your typewriter,” Judy resolved as she\n drove on toward Farringdon as fast as safety allowed.\n\n9\nCHAPTER II", "“That’s up to you, isn’t it?” Judy hailed her brother.\n He and Peter’s sister came over to the side of the car.\n\n\n “Holly thinks her typewriter was stolen,” Judy explained.\n “On top of all the other trouble she’s had, this\n was just too much. Have you seen a green car?”\n\n\n “Several of them,” replied Horace. “They’re quite\n common, or haven’t you noticed? Come to think of it,\n a green car did roar up Main Street about ten minutes\n ago. The driver was a boy of about sixteen. Dark\n hair, striped T-shirt—”\n\n\n “He’s the one,” Holly interrupted. “Do you think\n we can still overtake him?”\n\n11", "“We can try,” replied Judy, “but I’m not making\n any rash promises. Didn’t you just tell me you’re not\n sure he is the thief? You didn’t actually see him take\n your typewriter, did you?”\n\n\n “No, but I did see him running toward that green\n car, and when I turned around my desk top was\n empty. Ruth said maybe Doris took it. You know the\n way sisters are, always borrowing things without asking.\n But I don’t believe it. Doris knows I need my\n typewriter. Please drive on, Judy,” Holly pleaded.\n “We can’t let that boy get away with it.”\n\n\n “I’m afraid he did get away with it,” Horace told\n her. “If he did take your typewriter, he must be half-way\n to Ulysses with it by now.”", "While Horace went to telephone, the three girls\n ordered lunch. Holly was still jumpy. She kept tossing\n her mane of thick brown hair like a restless colt. She\n wore it perfectly straight in a long pony tail. Judy’s\n red curls were cut a little shorter than usual, but\n Honey had let her lovely honey-colored hair grow\n long to please Horace. Today she wore it loose about\n her shoulders.\n\n\n The three girls were very different in appearance,\n but they had one thing in common. All three of them\n adored Judy’s brother, Horace Bolton. He was a shy-appearing\n young man. To look at him, no one would\n suspect that he had once startled the town of Roulsville\n out of its complacency by racing through the\n streets on Judy’s ginger colt and crying out, “The\n dam is breaking! Run for the hills.”", "“You’ve made a good start. I wish I could stay and\n help you. I always liked treasure hunting,” Peter confessed,\n “but Uncle Sam expects me to hunt criminals\n today. We’ll be using an official car, so I’ll leave the\n Beetle for you to transport your exhibit to the library\n if you do get it ready. ’Bye, Angel. See you at six.”\n\n\n “You hope,” Judy added as he bent to kiss her.\n\n3\n\n Peter’s time was not his own. Working out of the\n Resident FBI Agency in the Farringdon Post Office,\n he might be sent anywhere in the territory. His assignment\n now was to round up the Joe Mott gang. Judy\n knew that much, although his work was confidential.\n It was also dangerous. Each time he left the house she\n breathed a little prayer for his safe return.", "Blackberry wore a life-saving medal on his collar,\n and just recently he had worked for the government,\n or so Judy insisted, ridding the Capitol Building of\n mice. But when she opened the door he fled through it\n to prowl around outside like any ordinary cat.\n\n\n The cat startled Holly Potter, Judy’s sixteen-year-old\n neighbor, who had rung the bell. Obviously she\n had been running at break-neck speed along the shortcut\n from her house to Judy’s.\n\n\n “What took you so long? I thought you’d never answer\n the bell. Quick!” she urged breathlessly.\n “Maybe we can still head off that green car! There’s\n a thief in it. He stole my typewriter!”\n\n\n “Your typewriter?” gasped Judy.", "Judy’s thoughts broke off as she suddenly stopped\n the car. They had been driving through a small town\n to the north of Farringdon. A dingy row of gray\n houses lined the road. Some of their porches had been\n sheared off in order to widen the highway, and some\n had been made into shops. Judy had noticed one of\n the signs:\nH. SAMMIS\n\n Antiques, Used Furniture Bought and Sold\n\n\n “And there’s a green car in the driveway!” exclaimed\n Holly. “Oh, Judy! Luck is with us after all.\n That boy may be inside right now trying to sell my\n typewriter!”\n\n\n “Maybe it’s still in the car. Let’s have a look,” Judy\n suggested.\n\n18\n\n She parked the Beetle right behind the green car,\n blocking the driveway. No one seemed to be around\n so Judy and Holly carefully examined the interior.", "“Careful there!” Mr. Sammis warned again.\n\n\n It was his own elbow that knocked over the little\n table with the claw feet, but he looked at Judy as if\n she had done it. One foot with a claw clutching a glass\n ball fell to the floor. He picked it up and waved it in\n Judy’s face.\n\n\n “Now see what you’ve done,” he charged unreasonably.\n “I told you you’d have to pay for anything\n you broke. Young people nowadays are all alike. Careless,\n blundering fools, the lot of them. Come in\n here for junk and break up my best furniture! This\n table is fragile—”\n\n\n “I can see it is,” Judy interrupted. “The claw fell off\n because the table leg was already broken. I can see\n where it’s been glued. The top is warped, too. It looks\n as if it had been left out in the rain.”", "And yet she and Peter had made changes. It was a\n rambling old farmhouse too big for just the two of\n them so only the downstairs rooms had been changed.\n Up here in the attic nothing had been disturbed except\n by Blackberry as he played with the spools in Judy’s\n sewing room or searched for mice in the other two\n rooms where her grandmother’s keepsakes were\n stored. She liked having him for company as she\n worked. Attics and black cats seemed to go together.\n\n\n Judy smiled at this thought. She was so absorbed in\n what she was doing that at first she didn’t hear the\n front doorbell ringing downstairs. It rang again more\n insistently, and she gathered Blackberry in her arms\n and hurried down the two flights of stairs. It wouldn’t\n do to leave the cat alone among the things she had\n collected for the exhibit.\n\n5\n\n “I can’t trust you,” she told him, “even if you are a\n famous cat.”", "Judy and Holly looked at each other. They could\n have made a mistake. Green cars were common, just\n as Horace had said. The typewriter wasn’t in the shop,\n and neither was the boy who had been seen driving a\n green car. Voices came from the upper floor, but they\n were indistinct. Then, suddenly, something was\n dropped with a loud thud. Holly jumped.\n\n\n “My wife,” Mr. Sammis explained. “She’s always\n dropping things. Did you find anything you want?”\n\n\n “Not yet,” Judy replied. She and Holly had been\n looking through the box of old cards. Near the bottom\n Judy found a little booklet marked\nSchool Souvenir\n.\n\n\n “Here’s something for the September exhibit,” she\n said as she opened it.", "She turned left at the main road and sped up the\n long slope out of Dry Brook Hollow. At the top of\n the hill the world seemed to end but, instead of driving\n on into the sky the way it looked as if she might,\n Judy drove down again with miles and miles of winding\n road ahead of her. There wasn’t a green car in\n sight.\n\n\n “I’m afraid we’ve lost him,” Judy began.\n\n\n “But I’m sure he went this way,” Holly insisted. “I\n would have seen him myself if he’d turned toward\n Roulsville. You know how our road angles off in that\n direction. Well, I thought if I raced along the shortcut\n and we took your road maybe we could head him\n off if he turned toward Farringdon. I\nhave\nto get my\n typewriter back. Can’t you drive a little faster?”", "“But that’s for the close of school,” Holly objected,\n reading over her shoulder. The illuminated verse read:\nOh! Swift the time has fled away\nAs fleeting as the rose\nSince school began its opening day\nTill now its day of close.\n\n\n The verse was followed by the name of the teacher\n and pupils in some long-ago country school. Hugh\n Sammis was one of the names.\n\n\n “Is this for sale?” Judy asked, sure he wouldn’t want\n to part with it.\n\n21\n\n He laughed, an unpleasant sort of laugh as if he were\n making fun of her. “It’s junk. I was going to throw it\n out. You can have it for a quarter.”\n\n\n “I’ll take it then,” Judy decided. “It’s for the beginning\n of school, too,” she pointed out as she and\n Holly made their way back to the front of the shop.", "“Take care,” was what she usually said, but in her\n heart the words meant, “Take care of our future. Let\n all our dreams for our married life in this house come\n true.”\n\n\n The house had been willed to Judy by her grandmother,\n and it was so sturdy and well built that she\n felt sure it would stand there on the slope overlooking\n Dry Brook as long as the hills themselves.\n\n\n Peter had left the stair door open, and soon Judy\n heard Blackberry padding up to keep her company.\n He looked around, the way cats will, and then came\n into the storeroom to see what Judy was doing.", "“We are—I mean we were following that green\n car, and I think my typewriter is in it. It’s just that I—I\n mean I haven’t told you everything.”\n\n\n “I should say you haven’t,” Judy agreed. “Maybe\n Horace would help us for the sake of the story.”\n\n\n “I’d be glad to have his help,” declared Holly almost\n too enthusiastically. “There he is now, walking down\n Grove Street. Oh dear! Is that Honey with him?”\n\n\n “It usually is,” replied Judy. “They’re practically\n engaged, you know.”\n\n\n “No, I didn’t know. Good things happen to everyone\n but me,” was Holly’s doleful comment. “I’ll\n probably be an old maid and live all alone without\n even a cat for company.”", "“Empty! He’s probably trying to sell it. Come on\n inside,” Holly urged, pulling Judy along with her.\n\n\n “Don’t be in such a hurry. He can’t get out while\n we’re parked there, and I want to take down his license\n number! There!” Judy announced when she\n had it. “Now we’ll go in like any other customers and\n pretend we want to buy something.”\n\n\n “A typewriter!” agreed Holly. “We’ll just ask.\n Then, if we see mine, we’ll call the police.”\n\n\n Judy shook her head. She didn’t think it would be\n that easy, but she was willing to go along with Holly\n just for the adventure. “If we don’t find your typewriter,”\n she told her, “we may find some old cards\n for my collection. Anyway, it will do no harm to go\n in and look around.”", "“There aren’t any others?” Holly’s voice held disappointment.\n\n\n “No, that’s all we have.”\n\n\n His tone of voice plainly told the girls he wished\n they’d go, but Judy wasn’t ready to leave until she had\n done a little more exploring.\n\n\n “I’m collecting old cards and calendars for a library\n exhibit,” she explained. “Do you have anything I can\n use?”\n\n\n “In the box over there. But don’t be all day looking\n them over. Your car’s parked right in front of mine.”\n\n\n Mr. Sammis had just seen it through the window.\n\n20\n\n “Oh, is that your car?” Judy asked innocently. “We\n saw a boy driving it this morning.”\n\n\n “Impossible!” he snorted. “It’s been parked right\n where it is all day.”", "“That’s the town where we turned off when we\n visited the Jewell sisters,” Honey put in, “on our secret\n quest, didn’t we, Judy?”\n\n\n “I heard about that. You two girls have all the fun,”\n Holly complained.\n\n\n “Fun!” Judy echoed, remembering how frightened\n she and Honey had been. “If that’s fun—” She shivered,\n and her voice trailed off into thoughts of their\n latest mystery.\n\n\n “We were drenched to the skin and that criminal,\n Joe Mott, was after us. I’m glad he’s back in prison. I\n can’t understand it, though,” Honey continued in a\n puzzled voice. “Aldin Launt, that artist who works at\n the Dean Studios, was never picked up. He works\n right near me, and every time he passes my desk I get\n the shivers. I thought Peter was going to arrest him.”\n\n12", "The library was new, and the built-in exhibit cases\n were still empty. Nearly all the buildings in Roulsville\n were new since the flood that had swept the valley\n and started Judy on the trail of her first mystery. Her\n own home had been swept away, and her father, Dr.\n Bolton, had been obliged to move to Farringdon\n where he still lived and practiced. Only her grandmother’s\n house, two miles above the broken dam, had\n stayed the same.\n\n\n “Maybe that’s why I love it,” she thought.", "“Not without turning the car over. We’ll pick up\n speed on the straight road. Then, if we can’t find him,\n we’ll report the stolen typewriter when we get to\n Farringdon. Did he take anything else?” Judy asked.\n\n\n “No, just the typewriter.”\n\n\n “That’s strange.” Judy couldn’t quite picture a\n thief running into Holly’s house, grabbing her typewriter,\n and not touching anything else. She had a rare\n old paperweight and a brand-new tape recorder in\n the first-floor room she called her study. Either of\n these things would have been worth more than her\n typewriter, to say nothing of the valuables stored in\n what she had once called her forbidden chest.\n\n8" ], [ "“We went back too late, I guess. We didn’t find\n much of anything. There’s always some looting after\n a big disaster like that. People are too interested in\n making sure all their loved ones are safe to worry\n about their possessions.” Judy paused. She had been\n younger than Holly was now when the Bolton family’s\n home in Roulsville had been swept away in the\n flood, but it still hurt to think about it.\n\n\n “Dad had to treat a lot of people for shock,” she\n continued as they drove past the Post Office, where\n Peter’s office was, and entered the outskirts of Farringdon.\n “Our house was turned over and one\n wall smashed in. I guess the furniture just floated\n away.”\n\n\n “It would have to float somewhere, wouldn’t\n it?” Holly questioned.", "And suddenly, like rain from a clear blue sky, Holly\n burst into tears. She was crying over more important\n things than a stolen typewriter, Judy knew. It wasn’t\n easy living with a married sister whose whole interest\n centered on her own husband and baby. Holly’s other\n sister was on her way to a teaching job at some private\n school in Maine. The girls’ uncle had died while Judy\n and Peter were in Washington. Holly said she had\n never felt more lost and alone.\n\n\n “First it was my parents and then Uncle David. It’s\n always this way,” she sobbed. “I told my sisters I\n wouldn’t dare love them. It’s bad luck for me to love\n anybody. Even the\nthings\nI love have to be taken.”\n\n\n “We’ll find your typewriter,” Judy resolved as she\n drove on toward Farringdon as fast as safety allowed.\n\n9\nCHAPTER II", "Judy’s thoughts broke off as she suddenly stopped\n the car. They had been driving through a small town\n to the north of Farringdon. A dingy row of gray\n houses lined the road. Some of their porches had been\n sheared off in order to widen the highway, and some\n had been made into shops. Judy had noticed one of\n the signs:\nH. SAMMIS\n\n Antiques, Used Furniture Bought and Sold\n\n\n “And there’s a green car in the driveway!” exclaimed\n Holly. “Oh, Judy! Luck is with us after all.\n That boy may be inside right now trying to sell my\n typewriter!”\n\n\n “Maybe it’s still in the car. Let’s have a look,” Judy\n suggested.\n\n18\n\n She parked the Beetle right behind the green car,\n blocking the driveway. No one seemed to be around\n so Judy and Holly carefully examined the interior.", "“That’s the name I gave it when I was a little girl.\n There were ladies carved on the legs. They held the\n marble table top on their heads. They had such quiet,\n patient faces.”\n\n\n Now Judy was thinking back in spite of herself.\n\n\n It had been exciting, furnishing the so-called\n Haunted House in Farringdon and exposing its\n “ghosts.” New furniture had been bought, and a few\n good antiques had been discovered in out-of-the-way\n shops. Dr. Bolton’s massive oak desk was one such\n piece. Judy’s dresser with the secret drawer was\n another. Buying it all by herself had been a real adventure.\n Only gradually had she come to realize their\n loss.", "Judy and Holly looked at each other. They could\n have made a mistake. Green cars were common, just\n as Horace had said. The typewriter wasn’t in the shop,\n and neither was the boy who had been seen driving a\n green car. Voices came from the upper floor, but they\n were indistinct. Then, suddenly, something was\n dropped with a loud thud. Holly jumped.\n\n\n “My wife,” Mr. Sammis explained. “She’s always\n dropping things. Did you find anything you want?”\n\n\n “Not yet,” Judy replied. She and Holly had been\n looking through the box of old cards. Near the bottom\n Judy found a little booklet marked\nSchool Souvenir\n.\n\n\n “Here’s something for the September exhibit,” she\n said as she opened it.", "“Take care,” was what she usually said, but in her\n heart the words meant, “Take care of our future. Let\n all our dreams for our married life in this house come\n true.”\n\n\n The house had been willed to Judy by her grandmother,\n and it was so sturdy and well built that she\n felt sure it would stand there on the slope overlooking\n Dry Brook as long as the hills themselves.\n\n\n Peter had left the stair door open, and soon Judy\n heard Blackberry padding up to keep her company.\n He looked around, the way cats will, and then came\n into the storeroom to see what Judy was doing.", "And yet she and Peter had made changes. It was a\n rambling old farmhouse too big for just the two of\n them so only the downstairs rooms had been changed.\n Up here in the attic nothing had been disturbed except\n by Blackberry as he played with the spools in Judy’s\n sewing room or searched for mice in the other two\n rooms where her grandmother’s keepsakes were\n stored. She liked having him for company as she\n worked. Attics and black cats seemed to go together.\n\n\n Judy smiled at this thought. She was so absorbed in\n what she was doing that at first she didn’t hear the\n front doorbell ringing downstairs. It rang again more\n insistently, and she gathered Blackberry in her arms\n and hurried down the two flights of stairs. It wouldn’t\n do to leave the cat alone among the things she had\n collected for the exhibit.\n\n5\n\n “I can’t trust you,” she told him, “even if you are a\n famous cat.”", "“Not without turning the car over. We’ll pick up\n speed on the straight road. Then, if we can’t find him,\n we’ll report the stolen typewriter when we get to\n Farringdon. Did he take anything else?” Judy asked.\n\n\n “No, just the typewriter.”\n\n\n “That’s strange.” Judy couldn’t quite picture a\n thief running into Holly’s house, grabbing her typewriter,\n and not touching anything else. She had a rare\n old paperweight and a brand-new tape recorder in\n the first-floor room she called her study. Either of\n these things would have been worth more than her\n typewriter, to say nothing of the valuables stored in\n what she had once called her forbidden chest.\n\n8", "The library was new, and the built-in exhibit cases\n were still empty. Nearly all the buildings in Roulsville\n were new since the flood that had swept the valley\n and started Judy on the trail of her first mystery. Her\n own home had been swept away, and her father, Dr.\n Bolton, had been obliged to move to Farringdon\n where he still lived and practiced. Only her grandmother’s\n house, two miles above the broken dam, had\n stayed the same.\n\n\n “Maybe that’s why I love it,” she thought.", "“There aren’t any others?” Holly’s voice held disappointment.\n\n\n “No, that’s all we have.”\n\n\n His tone of voice plainly told the girls he wished\n they’d go, but Judy wasn’t ready to leave until she had\n done a little more exploring.\n\n\n “I’m collecting old cards and calendars for a library\n exhibit,” she explained. “Do you have anything I can\n use?”\n\n\n “In the box over there. But don’t be all day looking\n them over. Your car’s parked right in front of mine.”\n\n\n Mr. Sammis had just seen it through the window.\n\n20\n\n “Oh, is that your car?” Judy asked innocently. “We\n saw a boy driving it this morning.”\n\n\n “Impossible!” he snorted. “It’s been parked right\n where it is all day.”", "“I suppose it would, but we never found it.\n Grandma wanted us to take some of her things,” Judy\n remembered, “but we thought it would be better to\n leave her house the way it was and buy everything\n new. Of course we couldn’t replace the beautiful\n fruitwood bench Dad had in his reception room or the\n lady table. That was a lovely period piece that had\n been in the Bolton family for generations.”\n\n\n “What period?” asked Holly, who was something\n of an expert on antique furniture. She once had lived\n with a cousin who collected antique glassware.\n\n\n “Empire, I believe.”\n\n\n “Empire furniture is valuable. Usually it’s pretty\n solid, too. Why did you call it the lady table?” Holly\n wanted to know.\n\n17", "Thinking back, Judy realized that since Horace\n had become a hero, he had changed. There wasn’t a\n note of timidity in his voice as he talked with the\n police officer who later came in and quietly seated\n himself at their table. It was Holly who was frightened.\n “I—I didn’t think they’d send a policeman,”\n were her first words. “I can’t be sure of anything.\n Maybe it’s all a big mistake.”\n\n\n “We’ll take that chance,” the officer replied, smiling\n as he wrote out his report.\n\n\n “Tell you what, Judy,” Horace suggested as they\n were leaving the restaurant. “Why don’t you and\n Holly drive on a ways? Maybe you’ll see that\n green car parked somewhere along the road. I’ll finish\n up a little job I’m doing and tell Mr. Lee this looks like\n a story. He’ll give me the afternoon off to follow it\n up.”", "“Empty! He’s probably trying to sell it. Come on\n inside,” Holly urged, pulling Judy along with her.\n\n\n “Don’t be in such a hurry. He can’t get out while\n we’re parked there, and I want to take down his license\n number! There!” Judy announced when she\n had it. “Now we’ll go in like any other customers and\n pretend we want to buy something.”\n\n\n “A typewriter!” agreed Holly. “We’ll just ask.\n Then, if we see mine, we’ll call the police.”\n\n\n Judy shook her head. She didn’t think it would be\n that easy, but she was willing to go along with Holly\n just for the adventure. “If we don’t find your typewriter,”\n she told her, “we may find some old cards\n for my collection. Anyway, it will do no harm to go\n in and look around.”", "“I’ll ask them if they have anything for the library\n exhibit. I have the job of choosing the displays for\n those new cases in the Roulsville library,” Judy explained.\n “All right, Horace, we’ll see you and Honey\n at the beaver dam.”\n\n15\nCHAPTER III\n\n A Rude Shopkeeper\n“I hope the beaver dam holds better than that one\n just above Roulsville,” Holly commented as they\n started off again. “We have to pass it on the way to\n school. I remember how it was last term. The boys\n and girls in the school bus quiet down fast if they happen\n to glance out the window and see those big pieces\n of broken concrete. A lot of them lost their homes\n when that dam broke, just the way you did, Judy.\n Did you go back afterwards to see if anything could\n be saved?”\n\n16", "“I do think of her as Miss Pringle,” confessed Judy,\n “and she probably thinks of me as that noisy Judy\n Bolton. Prim Miss Pringle is what I used to call her.\n She left everything in such perfect order, it’s hard for\n me to believe she and Bob Wheatley lived in our house\n for two whole months. We won’t ever rent it again,\n will we, Peter?”\n\n\n “You’re not asking me to promise we won’t, are\n you?” he countered. “You know how I feel about\n promises.”\n\n\n “You’re right, too,” declared Judy, reaching into\n the drawer for another one of Grandmother Smeed’s\n treasured keepsakes. “Here’s a sewing card worked in\n cross-stitch. It says: ‘\n Promise Little. Do Much.\n ’ Do\n you think it would do for the September exhibit?”", "“Careful there!” Mr. Sammis warned again.\n\n\n It was his own elbow that knocked over the little\n table with the claw feet, but he looked at Judy as if\n she had done it. One foot with a claw clutching a glass\n ball fell to the floor. He picked it up and waved it in\n Judy’s face.\n\n\n “Now see what you’ve done,” he charged unreasonably.\n “I told you you’d have to pay for anything\n you broke. Young people nowadays are all alike. Careless,\n blundering fools, the lot of them. Come in\n here for junk and break up my best furniture! This\n table is fragile—”\n\n\n “I can see it is,” Judy interrupted. “The claw fell off\n because the table leg was already broken. I can see\n where it’s been glued. The top is warped, too. It looks\n as if it had been left out in the rain.”", "She turned left at the main road and sped up the\n long slope out of Dry Brook Hollow. At the top of\n the hill the world seemed to end but, instead of driving\n on into the sky the way it looked as if she might,\n Judy drove down again with miles and miles of winding\n road ahead of her. There wasn’t a green car in\n sight.\n\n\n “I’m afraid we’ve lost him,” Judy began.\n\n\n “But I’m sure he went this way,” Holly insisted. “I\n would have seen him myself if he’d turned toward\n Roulsville. You know how our road angles off in that\n direction. Well, I thought if I raced along the shortcut\n and we took your road maybe we could head him\n off if he turned toward Farringdon. I\nhave\nto get my\n typewriter back. Can’t you drive a little faster?”", "“What about you, Honey? Do you have to go back\n to work?” asked Judy.\n\n14\n\n “Oh, I guess Mr. Dean would give me the afternoon\n off if I asked him. I can’t do any work with all\n that hammering going on anyway. Where shall we\n meet you?” Honey asked.\n\n\n “At the beaver dam!” exclaimed Judy, suddenly enthusiastic.\n “Remember, Honey? Violetta said she’d\n show it to us. I have my camera in the car. Maybe we\n could take pictures of the beavers.”\n\n\n “It’s a date! Violetta is the younger of the two\n Jewell sisters,” Honey explained to Holly, “though\n neither of them is young. They’re such dears! They\n live in one of the oldest houses in this section of\n Pennsylvania. It’s like stepping back in time just to\n visit them.”", "“You’ve made a good start. I wish I could stay and\n help you. I always liked treasure hunting,” Peter confessed,\n “but Uncle Sam expects me to hunt criminals\n today. We’ll be using an official car, so I’ll leave the\n Beetle for you to transport your exhibit to the library\n if you do get it ready. ’Bye, Angel. See you at six.”\n\n\n “You hope,” Judy added as he bent to kiss her.\n\n3\n\n Peter’s time was not his own. Working out of the\n Resident FBI Agency in the Farringdon Post Office,\n he might be sent anywhere in the territory. His assignment\n now was to round up the Joe Mott gang. Judy\n knew that much, although his work was confidential.\n It was also dangerous. Each time he left the house she\n breathed a little prayer for his safe return.", "“Okay, then,” Horace said with a satisfied gleam\n in his eyes. “Just give me all the details. Then we’ll relax\n and let the police handle it. Honey and I were on\n our way to lunch. How about joining us?”\n\n\n Judy looked up at the courthouse clock. “Oh dear!\n The morning’s gone. I didn’t think it was lunchtime\n already. I am hungry. Aren’t you, Holly?”\n\n\n The younger girl insisted that she couldn’t eat a\n thing, but once they were inside the restaurant she\n changed her mind. “I guess I could eat a hamburger,”\n she conceded.\n\n13" ], [ "“Careful there!” Mr. Sammis warned again.\n\n\n It was his own elbow that knocked over the little\n table with the claw feet, but he looked at Judy as if\n she had done it. One foot with a claw clutching a glass\n ball fell to the floor. He picked it up and waved it in\n Judy’s face.\n\n\n “Now see what you’ve done,” he charged unreasonably.\n “I told you you’d have to pay for anything\n you broke. Young people nowadays are all alike. Careless,\n blundering fools, the lot of them. Come in\n here for junk and break up my best furniture! This\n table is fragile—”\n\n\n “I can see it is,” Judy interrupted. “The claw fell off\n because the table leg was already broken. I can see\n where it’s been glued. The top is warped, too. It looks\n as if it had been left out in the rain.”", "“Oh dear! I guess I don’t want it then. We really\n came in to look at typewriters. You do sell typewriters,\n don’t you?” Judy asked, looking around the shop\n to see if the driver of the green car had come in.\n\n\n “New ones,” Holly added. Her typewriter was almost\n new.\n\n\n “You came to the wrong place for a new typewriter.\n We sell anything and everything so long as it’s\n old.” The shopkeeper, a stout, balding man, looked at\n the two girls as if he considered them slightly stupid.\n\n\n “I meant—almost new,” Holly stammered.\n\n\n “Are you Mr. Sammis? Will you let us see what you\n have, please?” Judy asked.\n\n\n He showed them a row of ancient typewriters in\n the back of the shop. They were all of the same make,\n and all were equally old and dusty.", "“But that’s for the close of school,” Holly objected,\n reading over her shoulder. The illuminated verse read:\nOh! Swift the time has fled away\nAs fleeting as the rose\nSince school began its opening day\nTill now its day of close.\n\n\n The verse was followed by the name of the teacher\n and pupils in some long-ago country school. Hugh\n Sammis was one of the names.\n\n\n “Is this for sale?” Judy asked, sure he wouldn’t want\n to part with it.\n\n21\n\n He laughed, an unpleasant sort of laugh as if he were\n making fun of her. “It’s junk. I was going to throw it\n out. You can have it for a quarter.”\n\n\n “I’ll take it then,” Judy decided. “It’s for the beginning\n of school, too,” she pointed out as she and\n Holly made their way back to the front of the shop.", "“What if it was? Where else could I leave it when\n the roadmakers took half my house? I won’t charge\n you much for it. Only fifteen dollars.”\n\n\n “Fifteen dollars! What are you talking about, Mr.\n Sammis? I’ll never pay for a table I didn’t break,” Judy\n declared with indignation.\n\n22\n\n “You won’t, eh? We’ll see about that. You’re Dr.\n Bolton’s daughter, aren’t you? I’ll just send him a bill\n for twenty dollars,” the shopkeeper announced with a\n satisfied chuckle. “Then, if he won’t pay his bill, I\n won’t pay mine.”\n\n\n “But that isn’t fair!” Judy cried, her gray eyes blazing.\n\n\n “No? Then I’ll make it twenty-five.”", "Judy’s thoughts broke off as she suddenly stopped\n the car. They had been driving through a small town\n to the north of Farringdon. A dingy row of gray\n houses lined the road. Some of their porches had been\n sheared off in order to widen the highway, and some\n had been made into shops. Judy had noticed one of\n the signs:\nH. SAMMIS\n\n Antiques, Used Furniture Bought and Sold\n\n\n “And there’s a green car in the driveway!” exclaimed\n Holly. “Oh, Judy! Luck is with us after all.\n That boy may be inside right now trying to sell my\n typewriter!”\n\n\n “Maybe it’s still in the car. Let’s have a look,” Judy\n suggested.\n\n18\n\n She parked the Beetle right behind the green car,\n blocking the driveway. No one seemed to be around\n so Judy and Holly carefully examined the interior.", "“There aren’t any others?” Holly’s voice held disappointment.\n\n\n “No, that’s all we have.”\n\n\n His tone of voice plainly told the girls he wished\n they’d go, but Judy wasn’t ready to leave until she had\n done a little more exploring.\n\n\n “I’m collecting old cards and calendars for a library\n exhibit,” she explained. “Do you have anything I can\n use?”\n\n\n “In the box over there. But don’t be all day looking\n them over. Your car’s parked right in front of mine.”\n\n\n Mr. Sammis had just seen it through the window.\n\n20\n\n “Oh, is that your car?” Judy asked innocently. “We\n saw a boy driving it this morning.”\n\n\n “Impossible!” he snorted. “It’s been parked right\n where it is all day.”", "Judy and Holly looked at each other. They could\n have made a mistake. Green cars were common, just\n as Horace had said. The typewriter wasn’t in the shop,\n and neither was the boy who had been seen driving a\n green car. Voices came from the upper floor, but they\n were indistinct. Then, suddenly, something was\n dropped with a loud thud. Holly jumped.\n\n\n “My wife,” Mr. Sammis explained. “She’s always\n dropping things. Did you find anything you want?”\n\n\n “Not yet,” Judy replied. She and Holly had been\n looking through the box of old cards. Near the bottom\n Judy found a little booklet marked\nSchool Souvenir\n.\n\n\n “Here’s something for the September exhibit,” she\n said as she opened it.", "“Look at all the lovely old glassware in the windows,”\n Holly pointed out as they walked around to\n the front of the shop. “There’s a blue glass hen just\n like the one Cousin Cleo has in her collection. And\n look at those chalkware lambs and that beautiful\n luster cream pitcher!”\n\n\n Inside the shop it was hard to move around because\n of all the old furniture crowded into every inch of\n floor space. Judy had to move a chair to reach the\n cream pitcher Holly had admired. Before she could\n touch it, a voice barked at her.\n\n\n “Careful there! You’ll have to pay for anything you\n break.”\n\n19\n\n “I have no intention of breaking anything,” replied\n Judy. “I just wanted to see that luster cream pitcher.”\n\n\n “That’s eighty dollars!”", "“I do think of her as Miss Pringle,” confessed Judy,\n “and she probably thinks of me as that noisy Judy\n Bolton. Prim Miss Pringle is what I used to call her.\n She left everything in such perfect order, it’s hard for\n me to believe she and Bob Wheatley lived in our house\n for two whole months. We won’t ever rent it again,\n will we, Peter?”\n\n\n “You’re not asking me to promise we won’t, are\n you?” he countered. “You know how I feel about\n promises.”\n\n\n “You’re right, too,” declared Judy, reaching into\n the drawer for another one of Grandmother Smeed’s\n treasured keepsakes. “Here’s a sewing card worked in\n cross-stitch. It says: ‘\n Promise Little. Do Much.\n ’ Do\n you think it would do for the September exhibit?”", "And yet she and Peter had made changes. It was a\n rambling old farmhouse too big for just the two of\n them so only the downstairs rooms had been changed.\n Up here in the attic nothing had been disturbed except\n by Blackberry as he played with the spools in Judy’s\n sewing room or searched for mice in the other two\n rooms where her grandmother’s keepsakes were\n stored. She liked having him for company as she\n worked. Attics and black cats seemed to go together.\n\n\n Judy smiled at this thought. She was so absorbed in\n what she was doing that at first she didn’t hear the\n front doorbell ringing downstairs. It rang again more\n insistently, and she gathered Blackberry in her arms\n and hurried down the two flights of stairs. It wouldn’t\n do to leave the cat alone among the things she had\n collected for the exhibit.\n\n5\n\n “I can’t trust you,” she told him, “even if you are a\n famous cat.”", "“Let’s go before he puts the price any higher,”\n Holly urged, pulling at Judy’s arm.", "“Empty! He’s probably trying to sell it. Come on\n inside,” Holly urged, pulling Judy along with her.\n\n\n “Don’t be in such a hurry. He can’t get out while\n we’re parked there, and I want to take down his license\n number! There!” Judy announced when she\n had it. “Now we’ll go in like any other customers and\n pretend we want to buy something.”\n\n\n “A typewriter!” agreed Holly. “We’ll just ask.\n Then, if we see mine, we’ll call the police.”\n\n\n Judy shook her head. She didn’t think it would be\n that easy, but she was willing to go along with Holly\n just for the adventure. “If we don’t find your typewriter,”\n she told her, “we may find some old cards\n for my collection. Anyway, it will do no harm to go\n in and look around.”", "“That’s the name I gave it when I was a little girl.\n There were ladies carved on the legs. They held the\n marble table top on their heads. They had such quiet,\n patient faces.”\n\n\n Now Judy was thinking back in spite of herself.\n\n\n It had been exciting, furnishing the so-called\n Haunted House in Farringdon and exposing its\n “ghosts.” New furniture had been bought, and a few\n good antiques had been discovered in out-of-the-way\n shops. Dr. Bolton’s massive oak desk was one such\n piece. Judy’s dresser with the secret drawer was\n another. Buying it all by herself had been a real adventure.\n Only gradually had she come to realize their\n loss.", "“Not without turning the car over. We’ll pick up\n speed on the straight road. Then, if we can’t find him,\n we’ll report the stolen typewriter when we get to\n Farringdon. Did he take anything else?” Judy asked.\n\n\n “No, just the typewriter.”\n\n\n “That’s strange.” Judy couldn’t quite picture a\n thief running into Holly’s house, grabbing her typewriter,\n and not touching anything else. She had a rare\n old paperweight and a brand-new tape recorder in\n the first-floor room she called her study. Either of\n these things would have been worth more than her\n typewriter, to say nothing of the valuables stored in\n what she had once called her forbidden chest.\n\n8", "And suddenly, like rain from a clear blue sky, Holly\n burst into tears. She was crying over more important\n things than a stolen typewriter, Judy knew. It wasn’t\n easy living with a married sister whose whole interest\n centered on her own husband and baby. Holly’s other\n sister was on her way to a teaching job at some private\n school in Maine. The girls’ uncle had died while Judy\n and Peter were in Washington. Holly said she had\n never felt more lost and alone.\n\n\n “First it was my parents and then Uncle David. It’s\n always this way,” she sobbed. “I told my sisters I\n wouldn’t dare love them. It’s bad luck for me to love\n anybody. Even the\nthings\nI love have to be taken.”\n\n\n “We’ll find your typewriter,” Judy resolved as she\n drove on toward Farringdon as fast as safety allowed.\n\n9\nCHAPTER II", "“We are—I mean we were following that green\n car, and I think my typewriter is in it. It’s just that I—I\n mean I haven’t told you everything.”\n\n\n “I should say you haven’t,” Judy agreed. “Maybe\n Horace would help us for the sake of the story.”\n\n\n “I’d be glad to have his help,” declared Holly almost\n too enthusiastically. “There he is now, walking down\n Grove Street. Oh dear! Is that Honey with him?”\n\n\n “It usually is,” replied Judy. “They’re practically\n engaged, you know.”\n\n\n “No, I didn’t know. Good things happen to everyone\n but me,” was Holly’s doleful comment. “I’ll\n probably be an old maid and live all alone without\n even a cat for company.”", "“I suppose it would, but we never found it.\n Grandma wanted us to take some of her things,” Judy\n remembered, “but we thought it would be better to\n leave her house the way it was and buy everything\n new. Of course we couldn’t replace the beautiful\n fruitwood bench Dad had in his reception room or the\n lady table. That was a lovely period piece that had\n been in the Bolton family for generations.”\n\n\n “What period?” asked Holly, who was something\n of an expert on antique furniture. She once had lived\n with a cousin who collected antique glassware.\n\n\n “Empire, I believe.”\n\n\n “Empire furniture is valuable. Usually it’s pretty\n solid, too. Why did you call it the lady table?” Holly\n wanted to know.\n\n17", "“I should think so,” Peter replied thoughtfully. “A\n maxim like that would do for any time of the year.\n Does the library plan to exhibit a few of these things\n each month?”\n\n\n “Yes, but just for the school year. Miss Pringle—I\n mean Mrs. Wheatley says she wants me to arrange\n them in that little glass case near the library door.\n These reward-of-merit cards used to be given out at\n school when Grandma was a little girl. The other\n card was a sewing lesson. ‘Promise little. Do much,’”\n Judy repeated, “but how much can a person do in a\n day? Maybe I won’t try to sort all these treasures this\n morning.”", "While Horace went to telephone, the three girls\n ordered lunch. Holly was still jumpy. She kept tossing\n her mane of thick brown hair like a restless colt. She\n wore it perfectly straight in a long pony tail. Judy’s\n red curls were cut a little shorter than usual, but\n Honey had let her lovely honey-colored hair grow\n long to please Horace. Today she wore it loose about\n her shoulders.\n\n\n The three girls were very different in appearance,\n but they had one thing in common. All three of them\n adored Judy’s brother, Horace Bolton. He was a shy-appearing\n young man. To look at him, no one would\n suspect that he had once startled the town of Roulsville\n out of its complacency by racing through the\n streets on Judy’s ginger colt and crying out, “The\n dam is breaking! Run for the hills.”", "Blackberry wore a life-saving medal on his collar,\n and just recently he had worked for the government,\n or so Judy insisted, ridding the Capitol Building of\n mice. But when she opened the door he fled through it\n to prowl around outside like any ordinary cat.\n\n\n The cat startled Holly Potter, Judy’s sixteen-year-old\n neighbor, who had rung the bell. Obviously she\n had been running at break-neck speed along the shortcut\n from her house to Judy’s.\n\n\n “What took you so long? I thought you’d never answer\n the bell. Quick!” she urged breathlessly.\n “Maybe we can still head off that green car! There’s\n a thief in it. He stole my typewriter!”\n\n\n “Your typewriter?” gasped Judy." ] ]
test	50905	[ "What is the relationship like between the professor and his wife?", "What is the relationship between the professor and his student like going into the passage?", "What is the relationship between Jack and Mary Alice Pope?", "Which of the following best summarizes the passage?", "Which of the following is a moral that one could conclude from the passage?", "Does the passage have a happy ending?", "Which of the following traits best describe Jack?", "Which of the following traits best describe Mary Alice Pope?", "Which of the following traits describe Professor Kesserich?", "Which of the following traits best describe Professor Kesserich's wife?" ]	[ [ "They love each other dearly (they're high school sweethearts)", "They love each other very much", "They have a complicated relationship", "They have a strained relationship" ], [ "The student admires the professor's work and is excited for the apprenticeship", "The professor is close friends with the student's parents, so he's seen the student grow up and is excited to be his mentor", "The student is completing the apprenticeship solely out of necessity", "The student is wary of the professor's current research" ], [ "They start as friends and end as lovers", "They start as strangers and end as friends", "They start as strangers and end as family", "They start as lovers and end as rivals" ], [ "A student competes with his professor to woo a girl.", "A student explores an area and tries to take a risky action.", "A student explores an area and tries to report his findings to his professor.", "A student works closely with his professor and meets a girl." ], [ "Comfort is the best use of wealth", "Letting go of loved ones is important", "Money cannot buy success", "Exploration is crucial to formation of identity" ], [ "It left off on an uncertain note", "Certainly not", "It was bittersweet", "Definitely" ], [ "Intuitive and social", "Obedient and studious", "Attractive and charming", "Cautious and charming" ], [ "Beautiful and smart", "Naive and fair", "Stubborn yet kind", "Brave and bold" ], [ "Obsessive and geeky", "Brilliant but impulsive", "Brave and stalwart", "Brilliant but obsessive" ], [ "Frustrated and scared", "Quiet and swift", "Cautious and dedicated", "Careful and brilliant" ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "\"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud—I\n don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a\n servant—and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They\n showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't\n realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with\n Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without\n marrying, he was safe.", "She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a\n home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful\n future for them as well—not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by\n year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos\n Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would\n teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where\n he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so\n on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been\n away. His research was keeping him very busy—\"\n\n\n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive\n work on growth and fertilization?\"", "In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming\n furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless\n black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack\n think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered\n again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n\n\n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the\n uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were\n still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been\n watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\nHe asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named\n Mary Alice Pope?\"", "\"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred\n British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point\n very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did\n everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was\n afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani\n and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her\n fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But—and\n here is where Mary's wisdom fell short—her brave gesture did not\n pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n\n\n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love.\n It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as\n narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\nWith a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him\n all this.", "Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering\n darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early\n evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to\n the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary\n rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering\n to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the\n saddle to welcome him home.\n\n\n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station\n wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I\n drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"", "A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened\n and was silent. Jack turned.\n\n\n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall—a seemingly young,\n sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was\n a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray\n hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive\n mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the\n youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n\n\n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n\n\n The great biologist had come home.\nIII\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called\n individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much\n about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n\n\n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.", "\"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\"\n the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the\n one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n \"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I\n won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n\n\n Jack looked at him blankly.\n\n\n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist\n explained.\nIV\n\n\n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass\n on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old\n hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked\n the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering\n about Kesserich and his wife—things said and half said last night—but\n found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as\n if to a farthest island in a world of people.", "He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the\n table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\nHe'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his\n thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said\n awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n\n\n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own\n toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n\n\n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been\n working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here\n to do research in marine ecology—that's sort of sea-life patterns—of\n the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You\n know about him, of course?\"", "The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to\n reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the\n gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with\n what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n\n\n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n\n\n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question—he\n was much too dazed for that—he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her\n position on the edge of the sofa.\n\n\n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love\n of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as\n you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he\n first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda,\n there was a cloak of loneliness about him—or rather about the three of\n them.", "She shook her head.\n\n\n \"Probably the greatest living biologist,\" he was proud to inform\n her. \"Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class\n with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich—he lives over there\n at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.\" He\n grinned. \"Matter of fact, I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for\n Mrs. Kesserich.\"\n\n\n The girl looked puzzled.\n\n\n Jack explained, \"The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences,\n won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow.\n When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich—she's a drab sort of\n person—said to me, 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of\n course, I had to. By the way, you still haven't told me your name.\"", "She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to\n pound.\n\n\n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack\n thought he could hear the faint\nchug\nof a motorboat. She pushed open\n the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark\n after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a\n fireplace with brass andirons.\n\n\n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day\n before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n\n\n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm\n around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice\n was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio\n loudspeaker.\n\n\n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her\n gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.", "\"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why\n are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\nShe seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know\n why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell\n you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest\n trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me—you're\n right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a\n little box.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n\n\n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures,\n or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the\n poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,", "The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some\n bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall\n cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel,\n opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and\n handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked\n in his breath with surprise.\n\n\n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same\n flat-bosomed dress—flowered rather than white—no bandeau, same beads.\n Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n\n\n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat\n voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident\n in 1933.\"", "'Ah, love, let us be true\nTo one another! for the world, which seems\nTo lie before us like a land of dreams,\nSo various, so beautiful, so new,\nHath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\nNor certitude—'\"\n\n \"Wait a minute,\" he interrupted. \"Who sends you these boxes?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"But how are the notes signed?\"\n\n\n \"They're wonderful notes,\" she said. \"So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd\n imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but how are they signed?\"\n\n\n She hesitated. \"Never anything but 'Your Lover.'\"\n\n\n \"And so when you first saw me, you thought—\" He began, then stopped\n because she was blushing.\n\n\n \"How long have you been getting them?\"", "She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table\n between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across\n the lawn.\nThe man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and\n walked toward her.\n\n\n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had\n stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him\n there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not\n so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an\n ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n\n\n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath\n was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician\n face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy\n that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than\n eighteen.", "Then, with the air of a clock-work toy coming to life, the white door\n opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged\n dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the\n Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug\n bravely, gravel skittered, and the car rolled off between the trees.\n\n\n The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a\n white silk dress that fell straight from square neck-line to hip-height\n waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound\n with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark\n necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked\n under her arm.", "He stopped short of the table. Before he could speak, she stammered\n out, \"Are you he?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\" he asked, smiling puzzledly.\n\n\n \"The one who sends me the little boxes.\"\n\n\n \"I was out sailing and I happened to land in the far cove. I didn't\n dream that anyone lived on this island, or even came here.\"\n\n\n \"No one ever does come here,\" she replied. Her manner had changed,\n becoming at once more wary and less agitated, though still eerily\n curious.\n\n\n \"It startled me tremendously to find this place,\" he blundered on.\n \"Especially the road and the car. Why, this island can't be more than a\n quarter of a mile wide.\"\n\n\n \"The road goes down to the wharf,\" she explained, \"and up to the top of\n the island, where my aunts have a tree-house.\"", "\"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that\n you're here.\"\n\n\n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n\n\n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n\n\n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n\n\n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn,\n mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle\n Shylock.\"\n\n\n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the\n girl growing stranger still.\n\n\n \"You must go before they see you.\"", "But just then the motorboat swung around in a turn that sent waves\n drenching over it, and headed back toward the island. He watched it for\n a minute in wonder, then his attention was jolted by an angry hail.\n\n\n Three fishing smacks, also headed toward town, were about to cross\n his bow. He came around into the wind and waited with shaking sail,\n watching a man in a lumpy sweater shake a fist at him. Then he turned\n and gratefully followed the dark, wide, fanlike sterns and age-yellowed\n sails.\nII\n\n\n The exterior of Martin Kesserich's home—a weathered white cube with\n narrow, sharp-paned windows, topped by a cupola—was nothing like its\n lavish interior.", "This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the\n innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd\n brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence\n when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n\n\n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the\n same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n\n\n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to\n speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never\n come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've\n been watching for you all morning.\"\n\n\n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read\n them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the\n headlines.\"" ], [ "He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the\n table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\nHe'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his\n thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said\n awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n\n\n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own\n toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n\n\n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been\n working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here\n to do research in marine ecology—that's sort of sea-life patterns—of\n the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You\n know about him, of course?\"", "She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a\n home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful\n future for them as well—not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by\n year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos\n Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would\n teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where\n he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so\n on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been\n away. His research was keeping him very busy—\"\n\n\n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive\n work on growth and fertilization?\"", "\"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that\n you're here.\"\n\n\n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n\n\n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n\n\n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n\n\n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn,\n mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle\n Shylock.\"\n\n\n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the\n girl growing stranger still.\n\n\n \"You must go before they see you.\"", "She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table\n between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across\n the lawn.\nThe man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and\n walked toward her.\n\n\n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had\n stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him\n there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not\n so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an\n ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n\n\n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath\n was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician\n face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy\n that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than\n eighteen.", "She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to\n pound.\n\n\n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack\n thought he could hear the faint\nchug\nof a motorboat. She pushed open\n the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark\n after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a\n fireplace with brass andirons.\n\n\n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day\n before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n\n\n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm\n around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice\n was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio\n loudspeaker.\n\n\n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her\n gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.", "In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming\n furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless\n black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack\n think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered\n again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n\n\n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the\n uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were\n still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been\n watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\nHe asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named\n Mary Alice Pope?\"", "\"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred\n British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point\n very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did\n everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was\n afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani\n and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her\n fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But—and\n here is where Mary's wisdom fell short—her brave gesture did not\n pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n\n\n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love.\n It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as\n narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\nWith a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him\n all this.", "A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened\n and was silent. Jack turned.\n\n\n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall—a seemingly young,\n sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was\n a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray\n hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive\n mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the\n youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n\n\n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n\n\n The great biologist had come home.\nIII\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called\n individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much\n about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n\n\n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.", "'Ah, love, let us be true\nTo one another! for the world, which seems\nTo lie before us like a land of dreams,\nSo various, so beautiful, so new,\nHath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\nNor certitude—'\"\n\n \"Wait a minute,\" he interrupted. \"Who sends you these boxes?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"But how are the notes signed?\"\n\n\n \"They're wonderful notes,\" she said. \"So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd\n imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but how are they signed?\"\n\n\n She hesitated. \"Never anything but 'Your Lover.'\"\n\n\n \"And so when you first saw me, you thought—\" He began, then stopped\n because she was blushing.\n\n\n \"How long have you been getting them?\"", "She shook her head.\n\n\n \"Probably the greatest living biologist,\" he was proud to inform\n her. \"Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class\n with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich—he lives over there\n at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.\" He\n grinned. \"Matter of fact, I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for\n Mrs. Kesserich.\"\n\n\n The girl looked puzzled.\n\n\n Jack explained, \"The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences,\n won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow.\n When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich—she's a drab sort of\n person—said to me, 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of\n course, I had to. By the way, you still haven't told me your name.\"", "Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering\n darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early\n evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to\n the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary\n rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering\n to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the\n saddle to welcome him home.\n\n\n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station\n wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I\n drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"", "\"Not especially, sir,\" he mumbled.\n\n\n The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival,\n Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew\n why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their\n conversation to the professor.\n\n\n Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more\n important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if\n it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had\n suddenly posed this question about individuality.\n\n\n \"You know what I mean, of course,\" Kesserich pressed. \"The factors that\n make you you, and me me.\"\n\n\n \"Heredity and environment,\" Jack parroted like a freshman.\n\n\n Kesserich nodded. \"Suppose—this is just speculation—that we could\n control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same\n individual at will.\"", "\"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud—I\n don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a\n servant—and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They\n showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't\n realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with\n Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without\n marrying, he was safe.", "\"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\"\n the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the\n one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n \"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I\n won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n\n\n Jack looked at him blankly.\n\n\n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist\n explained.\nIV\n\n\n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass\n on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old\n hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked\n the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering\n about Kesserich and his wife—things said and half said last night—but\n found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as\n if to a farthest island in a world of people.", "He stopped short of the table. Before he could speak, she stammered\n out, \"Are you he?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\" he asked, smiling puzzledly.\n\n\n \"The one who sends me the little boxes.\"\n\n\n \"I was out sailing and I happened to land in the far cove. I didn't\n dream that anyone lived on this island, or even came here.\"\n\n\n \"No one ever does come here,\" she replied. Her manner had changed,\n becoming at once more wary and less agitated, though still eerily\n curious.\n\n\n \"It startled me tremendously to find this place,\" he blundered on.\n \"Especially the road and the car. Why, this island can't be more than a\n quarter of a mile wide.\"\n\n\n \"The road goes down to the wharf,\" she explained, \"and up to the top of\n the island, where my aunts have a tree-house.\"", "The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so\n near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the\nAnnie\n O.\nits full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the\n sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait\n made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge\n came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surface by the\n sloop's prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had\n to reach out his hand.", "\"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why\n are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\nShe seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know\n why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell\n you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest\n trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me—you're\n right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a\n little box.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n\n\n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures,\n or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the\n poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,", "She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold\n line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were\n waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the\n station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the\n gravel of the crossing.\n\n\n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and\n Hilda followed—to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage\n that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as\n her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n\n\n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he\n was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In\n fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary—I mean, what had been\n Mary—and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"", "This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the\n innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd\n brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence\n when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n\n\n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the\n same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n\n\n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to\n speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never\n come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've\n been watching for you all morning.\"\n\n\n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read\n them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the\n headlines.\"", "The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to\n reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the\n gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with\n what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n\n\n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n\n\n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question—he\n was much too dazed for that—he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her\n position on the edge of the sofa.\n\n\n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love\n of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as\n you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he\n first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda,\n there was a cloak of loneliness about him—or rather about the three of\n them." ], [ "In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming\n furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless\n black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack\n think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered\n again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n\n\n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the\n uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were\n still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been\n watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\nHe asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named\n Mary Alice Pope?\"", "\"Mary Alice Pope,\" she said, speaking slowly and with an odd wonder, as\n if she were saying it for the first time.\n\n\n \"You're pretty shy, aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"How would I know?\"\n\n\n The question stopped Jack. He couldn't think of anything to say to this\n strangely attractive girl dressed almost like a \"flapper.\"\n\n\n \"Will you sit down?\" she asked him gravely.\n\n\n The rattan chair sighed under his weight. He made another effort to\n talk. \"I'll bet you'll be glad when summer's over.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"So you'll be able to go back to the mainland.\"\n\n\n \"But I never go to the mainland.\"", "\"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud—I\n don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a\n servant—and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They\n showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't\n realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with\n Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without\n marrying, he was safe.", "This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the\n innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd\n brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence\n when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n\n\n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the\n same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n\n\n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to\n speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never\n come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've\n been watching for you all morning.\"\n\n\n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read\n them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the\n headlines.\"", "\"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred\n British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point\n very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did\n everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was\n afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani\n and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her\n fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But—and\n here is where Mary's wisdom fell short—her brave gesture did not\n pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n\n\n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love.\n It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as\n narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\nWith a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him\n all this.", "The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to\n reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the\n gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with\n what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n\n\n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n\n\n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question—he\n was much too dazed for that—he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her\n position on the edge of the sofa.\n\n\n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love\n of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as\n you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he\n first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda,\n there was a cloak of loneliness about him—or rather about the three of\n them.", "\"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\"\n the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the\n one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n \"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I\n won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n\n\n Jack looked at him blankly.\n\n\n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist\n explained.\nIV\n\n\n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass\n on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old\n hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked\n the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering\n about Kesserich and his wife—things said and half said last night—but\n found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as\n if to a farthest island in a world of people.", "The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some\n bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall\n cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel,\n opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and\n handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked\n in his breath with surprise.\n\n\n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same\n flat-bosomed dress—flowered rather than white—no bandeau, same beads.\n Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n\n\n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat\n voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident\n in 1933.\"", "She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a\n home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful\n future for them as well—not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by\n year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos\n Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would\n teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where\n he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so\n on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been\n away. His research was keeping him very busy—\"\n\n\n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive\n work on growth and fertilization?\"", "Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering\n darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early\n evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to\n the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary\n rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering\n to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the\n saddle to welcome him home.\n\n\n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station\n wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I\n drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"", "\"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why\n are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\nShe seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know\n why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell\n you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest\n trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me—you're\n right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a\n little box.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n\n\n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures,\n or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the\n poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,", "\"\nThese\npapers might be faked,\" she said, pointing to where she'd let\n them drop on the ground.\n\n\n \"They're new,\" he said. \"Only old papers get yellow.\"\n\n\n \"But why would they do it to me?\nWhy?\n\"\n\n\n \"Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That'll set you straight quicker\n than anything.\"\n\n\n \"I couldn't,\" she said, drawing back. \"He's coming tonight.\"\n\n\n \"He?\"\n\n\n \"The man who sends me the boxes ... and my life.\"\n\n\n Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. \"A life\n that's completely a lie, that's cut you off from the world. Come with\n me, Mary.\"", "She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to\n pound.\n\n\n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack\n thought he could hear the faint\nchug\nof a motorboat. She pushed open\n the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark\n after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a\n fireplace with brass andirons.\n\n\n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day\n before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n\n\n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm\n around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice\n was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio\n loudspeaker.\n\n\n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her\n gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.", "\"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that\n you're here.\"\n\n\n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n\n\n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n\n\n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n\n\n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn,\n mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle\n Shylock.\"\n\n\n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the\n girl growing stranger still.\n\n\n \"You must go before they see you.\"", "She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold\n line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were\n waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the\n station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the\n gravel of the crossing.\n\n\n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and\n Hilda followed—to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage\n that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as\n her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n\n\n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he\n was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In\n fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary—I mean, what had been\n Mary—and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"", "He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the\n table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\nHe'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his\n thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said\n awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n\n\n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own\n toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n\n\n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been\n working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here\n to do research in marine ecology—that's sort of sea-life patterns—of\n the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You\n know about him, of course?\"", "A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened\n and was silent. Jack turned.\n\n\n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall—a seemingly young,\n sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was\n a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray\n hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive\n mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the\n youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n\n\n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n\n\n The great biologist had come home.\nIII\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called\n individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much\n about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n\n\n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.", "She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table\n between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across\n the lawn.\nThe man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and\n walked toward her.\n\n\n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had\n stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him\n there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not\n so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an\n ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n\n\n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath\n was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician\n face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy\n that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than\n eighteen.", "Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind\n of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him\n had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders,\n the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his\n nostrils. He could still hear the faint\nchop-chop\nof the waves.\n\n\n And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape\n glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to\n a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the\n newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read:\n\n\n HITLER IN NEW DEFIANCE\n\n\n Under the big black banner of that head swam smaller ones:\n\n\n Foes of Machado Riot in Havana\n\n\n Big NRA Parade Planned", "Balbo Speaks in New York\nSuddenly he felt a surge of relief. He had noticed that the paper was\n yellow and brittle-edged.\n\n\n \"Why are you so interested in old newspapers?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"I wouldn't call day-before-yesterday's paper old,\" the girl objected,\n pointing at the dateline: July 20, 1933.\n\n\n \"You're trying to joke,\" Jack told her.\n\n\n \"No, I'm not.\"\n\n\n \"But it's 1953.\"\n\n\n \"Now it's you who are joking.\"\n\n\n \"But the paper's yellow.\"\n\n\n \"The paper's always yellow.\"" ], [ "\"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why\n are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\nShe seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know\n why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell\n you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest\n trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me—you're\n right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a\n little box.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n\n\n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures,\n or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the\n poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,", "She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold\n line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were\n waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the\n station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the\n gravel of the crossing.\n\n\n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and\n Hilda followed—to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage\n that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as\n her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n\n\n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he\n was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In\n fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary—I mean, what had been\n Mary—and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"", "She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table\n between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across\n the lawn.\nThe man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and\n walked toward her.\n\n\n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had\n stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him\n there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not\n so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an\n ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n\n\n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath\n was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician\n face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy\n that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than\n eighteen.", "\"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred\n British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point\n very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did\n everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was\n afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani\n and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her\n fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But—and\n here is where Mary's wisdom fell short—her brave gesture did not\n pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n\n\n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love.\n It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as\n narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\nWith a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him\n all this.", "He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw the\n line around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through the\n cove's high and rocky mouth at the gray-green scattering of islands\n and the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughed\n in satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thing\n every man yearns to do once in his lifetime—gone to the farthest\n island out.\n\n\n He must have looked longer than he realized, because by the time he\n dropped his gaze the cove was again as glassy as if the\nAnnie O.\nhad\n always been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rock\n had faded in the hot sun. There was something very unusual about the\n quietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically,\n paused here to rest. As if all changes were erased on this one bit of\n Earth.", "\"Flash! Wiley Post has just completed his solo circuit of the Globe,\n after a record-breaking flight of 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes.\n Asked how he felt after the energy-draining feat, Post quipped....\"\nHe was halfway across the lawn before he realized the terror into which\n the grating radio voice had thrown him.\n\n\n He leaped for the branch over-hanging the fence, vaulted up with the\n risky help of a foot on the barbed top. A surprised squirrel, lacking\n time to make its escape up the trunk, sprang to the ground ahead of\n him. With terrible suddenness, two steel-jawed semicircles clanked\n together just over the squirrel's head. Jack landed with one foot to\n either side of the sprung trap, while the squirrel darted off with a\n squeak.", "The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so\n near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the\nAnnie\n O.\nits full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the\n sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait\n made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge\n came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surface by the\n sloop's prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had\n to reach out his hand.", "Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet—he\n felt behind it, but the key was gone—he hurried down to the\n waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and, as an\n afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers.\n\n\n The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the\nAnnie O.\nThere\n was eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the\n mast. And when he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous\n with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir.\n\n\n After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky\n spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures\n struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory.", "But just then the motorboat swung around in a turn that sent waves\n drenching over it, and headed back toward the island. He watched it for\n a minute in wonder, then his attention was jolted by an angry hail.\n\n\n Three fishing smacks, also headed toward town, were about to cross\n his bow. He came around into the wind and waited with shaking sail,\n watching a man in a lumpy sweater shake a fist at him. Then he turned\n and gratefully followed the dark, wide, fanlike sterns and age-yellowed\n sails.\nII\n\n\n The exterior of Martin Kesserich's home—a weathered white cube with\n narrow, sharp-paned windows, topped by a cupola—was nothing like its\n lavish interior.", "In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming\n furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless\n black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack\n think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered\n again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n\n\n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the\n uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were\n still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been\n watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\nHe asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named\n Mary Alice Pope?\"", "\"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud—I\n don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a\n servant—and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They\n showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't\n realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with\n Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without\n marrying, he was safe.", "He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the\n table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\nHe'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his\n thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said\n awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n\n\n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own\n toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n\n\n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been\n working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here\n to do research in marine ecology—that's sort of sea-life patterns—of\n the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You\n know about him, of course?\"", "She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a\n home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful\n future for them as well—not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by\n year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos\n Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would\n teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where\n he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so\n on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been\n away. His research was keeping him very busy—\"\n\n\n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive\n work on growth and fertilization?\"", "\"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\"\n the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the\n one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n \"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I\n won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n\n\n Jack looked at him blankly.\n\n\n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist\n explained.\nIV\n\n\n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass\n on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old\n hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked\n the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering\n about Kesserich and his wife—things said and half said last night—but\n found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as\n if to a farthest island in a world of people.", "She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to\n pound.\n\n\n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack\n thought he could hear the faint\nchug\nof a motorboat. She pushed open\n the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark\n after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a\n fireplace with brass andirons.\n\n\n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day\n before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n\n\n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm\n around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice\n was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio\n loudspeaker.\n\n\n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her\n gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.", "\"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that\n you're here.\"\n\n\n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n\n\n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n\n\n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n\n\n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn,\n mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle\n Shylock.\"\n\n\n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the\n girl growing stranger still.\n\n\n \"You must go before they see you.\"", "Then, with the air of a clock-work toy coming to life, the white door\n opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged\n dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the\n Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug\n bravely, gravel skittered, and the car rolled off between the trees.\n\n\n The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a\n white silk dress that fell straight from square neck-line to hip-height\n waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound\n with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark\n necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked\n under her arm.", "Without pausing for surprise—in fact, in his holiday mood, using\n surprise as a goad—he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk\n touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side\n of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher\n branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n\n\n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first\n surprise could really sink in, had another.\nA closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white\n Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the\n length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just\n in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he\n recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole\n scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove.", "To the landward side of the spine, the water was fairly still. It even\n began with another deep cove, in which he glimpsed the spiny spheres\n of sea urchins. But from seaward the waves chopped in, sprinkling his\n trousers to the knees and making him wince pleasurably at the thought\n of what vast wings of spray and towers of solid water must crash up\n from here in a storm.\n\n\n He crossed the rocks at a trot, ran up a short grassy slope, raced\n through a fringe of trees—and came straight up against an eight-foot\n fence of heavy mesh topped with barbed wire and backed at a short\n distance with high, heavy shrubbery.", "This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the\n innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd\n brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence\n when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n\n\n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the\n same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n\n\n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to\n speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never\n come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've\n been watching for you all morning.\"\n\n\n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read\n them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the\n headlines.\"" ], [ "\"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why\n are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\nShe seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know\n why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell\n you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest\n trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me—you're\n right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a\n little box.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n\n\n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures,\n or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the\n poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,", "\"Flash! Wiley Post has just completed his solo circuit of the Globe,\n after a record-breaking flight of 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes.\n Asked how he felt after the energy-draining feat, Post quipped....\"\nHe was halfway across the lawn before he realized the terror into which\n the grating radio voice had thrown him.\n\n\n He leaped for the branch over-hanging the fence, vaulted up with the\n risky help of a foot on the barbed top. A surprised squirrel, lacking\n time to make its escape up the trunk, sprang to the ground ahead of\n him. With terrible suddenness, two steel-jawed semicircles clanked\n together just over the squirrel's head. Jack landed with one foot to\n either side of the sprung trap, while the squirrel darted off with a\n squeak.", "She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold\n line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were\n waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the\n station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the\n gravel of the crossing.\n\n\n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and\n Hilda followed—to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage\n that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as\n her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n\n\n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he\n was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In\n fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary—I mean, what had been\n Mary—and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"", "\"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred\n British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point\n very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did\n everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was\n afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani\n and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her\n fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But—and\n here is where Mary's wisdom fell short—her brave gesture did not\n pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n\n\n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love.\n It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as\n narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\nWith a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him\n all this.", "He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw the\n line around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through the\n cove's high and rocky mouth at the gray-green scattering of islands\n and the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughed\n in satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thing\n every man yearns to do once in his lifetime—gone to the farthest\n island out.\n\n\n He must have looked longer than he realized, because by the time he\n dropped his gaze the cove was again as glassy as if the\nAnnie O.\nhad\n always been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rock\n had faded in the hot sun. There was something very unusual about the\n quietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically,\n paused here to rest. As if all changes were erased on this one bit of\n Earth.", "The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so\n near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the\nAnnie\n O.\nits full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the\n sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait\n made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge\n came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surface by the\n sloop's prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had\n to reach out his hand.", "\"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that\n you're here.\"\n\n\n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n\n\n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n\n\n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n\n\n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn,\n mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle\n Shylock.\"\n\n\n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the\n girl growing stranger still.\n\n\n \"You must go before they see you.\"", "'Ah, love, let us be true\nTo one another! for the world, which seems\nTo lie before us like a land of dreams,\nSo various, so beautiful, so new,\nHath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\nNor certitude—'\"\n\n \"Wait a minute,\" he interrupted. \"Who sends you these boxes?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"But how are the notes signed?\"\n\n\n \"They're wonderful notes,\" she said. \"So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd\n imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but how are they signed?\"\n\n\n She hesitated. \"Never anything but 'Your Lover.'\"\n\n\n \"And so when you first saw me, you thought—\" He began, then stopped\n because she was blushing.\n\n\n \"How long have you been getting them?\"", "For a long while, Jack was satisfied to think of nothing but the wind\n and the waves and the sail and speed and danger, to have all his\n attention taken up balancing one against the other, so that he wouldn't\n have to ask himself what year it was and whether time was an illusion,\n and wonder about flappers and hidden traps.\n\n\n When he finally looked back at the island, he was amazed to see how\n tiny it had grown, as distant as the mainland.\n\n\n Then he saw a gray motorboat astern. He watched it as it slowly\n overtook him. It was built like a lifeboat, with a sturdy low cabin in\n the bow and wheel amidship. Whoever was at the wheel had long gray hair\n that whipped in the wind. The longer he looked, the surer he was that\n it was a woman wearing a lace dress. Something that stuck up inches\n over the cabin flashed darkly beside her. Only when she lifted it to\n the roof of the cabin did it occur to him that it might be a rifle.", "In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming\n furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless\n black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack\n think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered\n again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n\n\n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the\n uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were\n still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been\n watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\nHe asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named\n Mary Alice Pope?\"", "\"But environment would change things,\" Jack objected. \"The duplicate\n would be bound to develop differently.\"\n\n\n \"Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical\n twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met\n by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman.\n Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox\n terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments\n similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of\n them had exactly the same experiences at the same times....\"\n\n\n For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering,\n becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich's\n sphinx-like face.", "\"Not especially, sir,\" he mumbled.\n\n\n The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival,\n Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew\n why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their\n conversation to the professor.\n\n\n Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more\n important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if\n it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had\n suddenly posed this question about individuality.\n\n\n \"You know what I mean, of course,\" Kesserich pressed. \"The factors that\n make you you, and me me.\"\n\n\n \"Heredity and environment,\" Jack parroted like a freshman.\n\n\n Kesserich nodded. \"Suppose—this is just speculation—that we could\n control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same\n individual at will.\"", "\"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\"\n the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the\n one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n \"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I\n won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n\n\n Jack looked at him blankly.\n\n\n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist\n explained.\nIV\n\n\n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass\n on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old\n hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked\n the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering\n about Kesserich and his wife—things said and half said last night—but\n found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as\n if to a farthest island in a world of people.", "She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table\n between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across\n the lawn.\nThe man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and\n walked toward her.\n\n\n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had\n stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him\n there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not\n so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an\n ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n\n\n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath\n was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician\n face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy\n that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than\n eighteen.", "\"\nThese\npapers might be faked,\" she said, pointing to where she'd let\n them drop on the ground.\n\n\n \"They're new,\" he said. \"Only old papers get yellow.\"\n\n\n \"But why would they do it to me?\nWhy?\n\"\n\n\n \"Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That'll set you straight quicker\n than anything.\"\n\n\n \"I couldn't,\" she said, drawing back. \"He's coming tonight.\"\n\n\n \"He?\"\n\n\n \"The man who sends me the boxes ... and my life.\"\n\n\n Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. \"A life\n that's completely a lie, that's cut you off from the world. Come with\n me, Mary.\"", "A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened\n and was silent. Jack turned.\n\n\n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall—a seemingly young,\n sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was\n a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray\n hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive\n mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the\n youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n\n\n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n\n\n The great biologist had come home.\nIII\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called\n individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much\n about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n\n\n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.", "This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the\n innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd\n brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence\n when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n\n\n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the\n same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n\n\n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to\n speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never\n come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've\n been watching for you all morning.\"\n\n\n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read\n them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the\n headlines.\"", "Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet—he\n felt behind it, but the key was gone—he hurried down to the\n waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and, as an\n afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers.\n\n\n The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the\nAnnie O.\nThere\n was eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the\n mast. And when he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous\n with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir.\n\n\n After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky\n spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures\n struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory.", "Without pausing for surprise—in fact, in his holiday mood, using\n surprise as a goad—he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk\n touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side\n of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher\n branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n\n\n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first\n surprise could really sink in, had another.\nA closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white\n Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the\n length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just\n in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he\n recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole\n scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove.", "To the landward side of the spine, the water was fairly still. It even\n began with another deep cove, in which he glimpsed the spiny spheres\n of sea urchins. But from seaward the waves chopped in, sprinkling his\n trousers to the knees and making him wince pleasurably at the thought\n of what vast wings of spray and towers of solid water must crash up\n from here in a storm.\n\n\n He crossed the rocks at a trot, ran up a short grassy slope, raced\n through a fringe of trees—and came straight up against an eight-foot\n fence of heavy mesh topped with barbed wire and backed at a short\n distance with high, heavy shrubbery." ], [ "\"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why\n are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\nShe seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know\n why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell\n you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest\n trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me—you're\n right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a\n little box.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n\n\n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures,\n or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the\n poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,", "She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold\n line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were\n waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the\n station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the\n gravel of the crossing.\n\n\n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and\n Hilda followed—to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage\n that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as\n her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n\n\n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he\n was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In\n fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary—I mean, what had been\n Mary—and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"", "Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering\n darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early\n evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to\n the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary\n rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering\n to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the\n saddle to welcome him home.\n\n\n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station\n wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I\n drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"", "She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a\n home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful\n future for them as well—not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by\n year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos\n Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would\n teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where\n he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so\n on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been\n away. His research was keeping him very busy—\"\n\n\n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive\n work on growth and fertilization?\"", "The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so\n near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the\nAnnie\n O.\nits full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the\n sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait\n made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge\n came nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surface by the\n sloop's prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly had\n to reach out his hand.", "\"You mean you stay out here all winter?\" he asked incredulously, his\n mind filled with a vision of snow and frozen spray and great gray waves.\n\n\n \"Oh, yes. We get all our supplies on hand before winter. My aunts are\n very capable. They don't always wear long lace dresses. And now I help\n them.\"\n\n\n \"But that's impossible!\" he said with sudden sympathetic anger. \"You\n can't be shut off this way from people your own age!\"\n\n\n \"You're the first one I ever met.\" She hesitated. \"I never saw a boy or\n a man before, except in movies.\"\n\n\n \"You're joking!\"\n\n\n \"No, it's true.\"", "Without pausing for surprise—in fact, in his holiday mood, using\n surprise as a goad—he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk\n touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side\n of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher\n branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n\n\n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first\n surprise could really sink in, had another.\nA closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white\n Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the\n length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just\n in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he\n recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole\n scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove.", "She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to\n pound.\n\n\n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack\n thought he could hear the faint\nchug\nof a motorboat. She pushed open\n the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark\n after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a\n fireplace with brass andirons.\n\n\n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day\n before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n\n\n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm\n around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice\n was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio\n loudspeaker.\n\n\n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her\n gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.", "The man's lean, melancholy face crinkled into a grin at the banal\n fancy. He turned his back on his new friend, the little green sloop,\n without one thought for his nets and specimen bottles, and set out to\n explore. The ground rose steeply at first and the oaks were close, but\n after a little way things went downhill and the leaves thinned and he\n came out on more rocks—and realized that he hadn't quite gone to the\n farthest one out.\nJoined to this island by a rocky spine, which at the present low tide\n would have been dry but for the spray, was another green, high island\n that the first had masked from him all the while he had been sailing.\n He felt a thrill of discovery, just as he'd wondered back in the woods\n whether his might not be the first human feet to kick through the\n underbrush. After all, there were thousands of these islands.\n\n\n Then he was dropping down the rocks, his lanky limbs now moving\n smoothly enough.", "The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some\n bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall\n cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel,\n opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and\n handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked\n in his breath with surprise.\n\n\n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same\n flat-bosomed dress—flowered rather than white—no bandeau, same beads.\n Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n\n\n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat\n voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident\n in 1933.\"", "For a long while, Jack was satisfied to think of nothing but the wind\n and the waves and the sail and speed and danger, to have all his\n attention taken up balancing one against the other, so that he wouldn't\n have to ask himself what year it was and whether time was an illusion,\n and wonder about flappers and hidden traps.\n\n\n When he finally looked back at the island, he was amazed to see how\n tiny it had grown, as distant as the mainland.\n\n\n Then he saw a gray motorboat astern. He watched it as it slowly\n overtook him. It was built like a lifeboat, with a sturdy low cabin in\n the bow and wheel amidship. Whoever was at the wheel had long gray hair\n that whipped in the wind. The longer he looked, the surer he was that\n it was a woman wearing a lace dress. Something that stuck up inches\n over the cabin flashed darkly beside her. Only when she lifted it to\n the roof of the cabin did it occur to him that it might be a rifle.", "He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw the\n line around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through the\n cove's high and rocky mouth at the gray-green scattering of islands\n and the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughed\n in satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thing\n every man yearns to do once in his lifetime—gone to the farthest\n island out.\n\n\n He must have looked longer than he realized, because by the time he\n dropped his gaze the cove was again as glassy as if the\nAnnie O.\nhad\n always been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rock\n had faded in the hot sun. There was something very unusual about the\n quietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically,\n paused here to rest. As if all changes were erased on this one bit of\n Earth.", "She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table\n between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across\n the lawn.\nThe man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and\n walked toward her.\n\n\n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had\n stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him\n there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not\n so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an\n ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n\n\n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath\n was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician\n face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy\n that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than\n eighteen.", "The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to\n reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the\n gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with\n what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n\n\n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n\n\n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question—he\n was much too dazed for that—he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her\n position on the edge of the sofa.\n\n\n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love\n of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as\n you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he\n first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda,\n there was a cloak of loneliness about him—or rather about the three of\n them.", "\"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred\n British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point\n very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did\n everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was\n afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani\n and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her\n fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But—and\n here is where Mary's wisdom fell short—her brave gesture did not\n pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n\n\n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love.\n It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as\n narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\nWith a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him\n all this.", "\"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that\n you're here.\"\n\n\n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n\n\n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n\n\n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n\n\n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn,\n mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle\n Shylock.\"\n\n\n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the\n girl growing stranger still.\n\n\n \"You must go before they see you.\"", "\"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud—I\n don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a\n servant—and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They\n showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't\n realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with\n Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without\n marrying, he was safe.", "\"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\"\n the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the\n one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n \"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I\n won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n\n\n Jack looked at him blankly.\n\n\n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist\n explained.\nIV\n\n\n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass\n on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old\n hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked\n the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering\n about Kesserich and his wife—things said and half said last night—but\n found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as\n if to a farthest island in a world of people.", "He stopped short of the table. Before he could speak, she stammered\n out, \"Are you he?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\" he asked, smiling puzzledly.\n\n\n \"The one who sends me the little boxes.\"\n\n\n \"I was out sailing and I happened to land in the far cove. I didn't\n dream that anyone lived on this island, or even came here.\"\n\n\n \"No one ever does come here,\" she replied. Her manner had changed,\n becoming at once more wary and less agitated, though still eerily\n curious.\n\n\n \"It startled me tremendously to find this place,\" he blundered on.\n \"Especially the road and the car. Why, this island can't be more than a\n quarter of a mile wide.\"\n\n\n \"The road goes down to the wharf,\" she explained, \"and up to the top of\n the island, where my aunts have a tree-house.\"", "Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet—he\n felt behind it, but the key was gone—he hurried down to the\n waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and, as an\n afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers.\n\n\n The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the\nAnnie O.\nThere\n was eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the\n mast. And when he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous\n with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir.\n\n\n After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky\n spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures\n struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory." ], [ "Jack plunged down the slope to the rocky spine and ran across it, spray\n from the rising waves spattering him to the waist. Panting now, he\n stumbled up into the oaks and undergrowth of the first island, fought\n his way through it, finally reached the silent cove. He loosed the line\n of the\nAnnie O.\n, dragged it as near to the cove's mouth as he could,\n plunged knee-deep in freezing water to give it a final shove, scrambled\n aboard, snatched up the boathook and punched at the rocks.\n\n\n As soon as the\nAnnie O.\nwas nosing out of the cove into the cross\n waves, he yanked up the sail. The freshening wind filled it and sent\n the sloop heeling over, with inches of white water over the lee rail,\n and plunging ahead.", "For a long while, Jack was satisfied to think of nothing but the wind\n and the waves and the sail and speed and danger, to have all his\n attention taken up balancing one against the other, so that he wouldn't\n have to ask himself what year it was and whether time was an illusion,\n and wonder about flappers and hidden traps.\n\n\n When he finally looked back at the island, he was amazed to see how\n tiny it had grown, as distant as the mainland.\n\n\n Then he saw a gray motorboat astern. He watched it as it slowly\n overtook him. It was built like a lifeboat, with a sturdy low cabin in\n the bow and wheel amidship. Whoever was at the wheel had long gray hair\n that whipped in the wind. The longer he looked, the surer he was that\n it was a woman wearing a lace dress. Something that stuck up inches\n over the cabin flashed darkly beside her. Only when she lifted it to\n the roof of the cabin did it occur to him that it might be a rifle.", "In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming\n furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless\n black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack\n think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered\n again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n\n\n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the\n uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were\n still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been\n watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\nHe asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named\n Mary Alice Pope?\"", "\"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred\n British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point\n very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did\n everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was\n afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani\n and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her\n fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But—and\n here is where Mary's wisdom fell short—her brave gesture did not\n pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n\n\n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love.\n It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as\n narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\nWith a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him\n all this.", "She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a\n home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful\n future for them as well—not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by\n year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos\n Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would\n teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where\n he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so\n on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been\n away. His research was keeping him very busy—\"\n\n\n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive\n work on growth and fertilization?\"", "She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to\n pound.\n\n\n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack\n thought he could hear the faint\nchug\nof a motorboat. She pushed open\n the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark\n after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a\n fireplace with brass andirons.\n\n\n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day\n before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n\n\n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm\n around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice\n was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio\n loudspeaker.\n\n\n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her\n gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.", "A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened\n and was silent. Jack turned.\n\n\n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall—a seemingly young,\n sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was\n a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray\n hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive\n mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the\n youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n\n\n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n\n\n The great biologist had come home.\nIII\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called\n individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much\n about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n\n\n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.", "\"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\"\n the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the\n one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n \"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I\n won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n\n\n Jack looked at him blankly.\n\n\n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist\n explained.\nIV\n\n\n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass\n on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old\n hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked\n the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering\n about Kesserich and his wife—things said and half said last night—but\n found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as\n if to a farthest island in a world of people.", "\"Mary Alice Pope,\" she said, speaking slowly and with an odd wonder, as\n if she were saying it for the first time.\n\n\n \"You're pretty shy, aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"How would I know?\"\n\n\n The question stopped Jack. He couldn't think of anything to say to this\n strangely attractive girl dressed almost like a \"flapper.\"\n\n\n \"Will you sit down?\" she asked him gravely.\n\n\n The rattan chair sighed under his weight. He made another effort to\n talk. \"I'll bet you'll be glad when summer's over.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"So you'll be able to go back to the mainland.\"\n\n\n \"But I never go to the mainland.\"", "\"Not especially, sir,\" he mumbled.\n\n\n The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival,\n Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew\n why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their\n conversation to the professor.\n\n\n Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more\n important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if\n it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had\n suddenly posed this question about individuality.\n\n\n \"You know what I mean, of course,\" Kesserich pressed. \"The factors that\n make you you, and me me.\"\n\n\n \"Heredity and environment,\" Jack parroted like a freshman.\n\n\n Kesserich nodded. \"Suppose—this is just speculation—that we could\n control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same\n individual at will.\"", "He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the\n table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\nHe'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his\n thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said\n awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n\n\n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own\n toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n\n\n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been\n working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here\n to do research in marine ecology—that's sort of sea-life patterns—of\n the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You\n know about him, of course?\"", "Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering\n darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early\n evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to\n the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary\n rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering\n to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the\n saddle to welcome him home.\n\n\n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station\n wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I\n drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"", "\"But environment would change things,\" Jack objected. \"The duplicate\n would be bound to develop differently.\"\n\n\n \"Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical\n twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met\n by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman.\n Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox\n terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments\n similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of\n them had exactly the same experiences at the same times....\"\n\n\n For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering,\n becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich's\n sphinx-like face.", "\"I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that\n you're here.\"\n\n\n \"All right they won't like it.\"\n\n\n Her agitation grew. \"No, you must go.\"\n\n\n \"I'll come back tomorrow,\" he heard himself saying.\n\n\n \"Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn,\n mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle\n Shylock.\"\n\n\n Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the\n girl growing stranger still.\n\n\n \"You must go before they see you.\"", "Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind\n of terror he'd never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him\n had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders,\n the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his\n nostrils. He could still hear the faint\nchop-chop\nof the waves.\n\n\n And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape\n glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to\n a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the\n newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read:\n\n\n HITLER IN NEW DEFIANCE\n\n\n Under the big black banner of that head swam smaller ones:\n\n\n Foes of Machado Riot in Havana\n\n\n Big NRA Parade Planned", "\"Flash! Wiley Post has just completed his solo circuit of the Globe,\n after a record-breaking flight of 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes.\n Asked how he felt after the energy-draining feat, Post quipped....\"\nHe was halfway across the lawn before he realized the terror into which\n the grating radio voice had thrown him.\n\n\n He leaped for the branch over-hanging the fence, vaulted up with the\n risky help of a foot on the barbed top. A surprised squirrel, lacking\n time to make its escape up the trunk, sprang to the ground ahead of\n him. With terrible suddenness, two steel-jawed semicircles clanked\n together just over the squirrel's head. Jack landed with one foot to\n either side of the sprung trap, while the squirrel darted off with a\n squeak.", "Without pausing for surprise—in fact, in his holiday mood, using\n surprise as a goad—he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk\n touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side\n of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher\n branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n\n\n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first\n surprise could really sink in, had another.\nA closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white\n Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the\n length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just\n in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he\n recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole\n scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove.", "The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to\n reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the\n gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with\n what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n\n\n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n\n\n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question—he\n was much too dazed for that—he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her\n position on the edge of the sofa.\n\n\n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love\n of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as\n you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he\n first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda,\n there was a cloak of loneliness about him—or rather about the three of\n them.", "Jack felt a shiver go through him. \"To get exactly the same pattern of\n hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us.\"\n\n\n \"What about identical twins?\" Kesserich pointed out. \"And then there's\n parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the\n mother without the intervention of the male.\" Although his voice had\n grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling\n secretly. \"There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say\n nothing of the technique by which Loeb caused a sea urchin to reproduce\n with no more stimulus than a salt solution.\"\n\n\n Jack felt the hair rising on his neck. \"Even then you wouldn't get\n exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits.\"\n\n\n \"Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some\n special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the\n mother's traits?\"", "She shook her head.\n\n\n \"Probably the greatest living biologist,\" he was proud to inform\n her. \"Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class\n with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich—he lives over there\n at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.\" He\n grinned. \"Matter of fact, I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for\n Mrs. Kesserich.\"\n\n\n The girl looked puzzled.\n\n\n Jack explained, \"The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences,\n won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow.\n When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich—she's a drab sort of\n person—said to me, 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of\n course, I had to. By the way, you still haven't told me your name.\"" ], [ "In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming\n furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless\n black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack\n think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered\n again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n\n\n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the\n uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were\n still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been\n watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\nHe asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named\n Mary Alice Pope?\"", "\"Mary Alice Pope,\" she said, speaking slowly and with an odd wonder, as\n if she were saying it for the first time.\n\n\n \"You're pretty shy, aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"How would I know?\"\n\n\n The question stopped Jack. He couldn't think of anything to say to this\n strangely attractive girl dressed almost like a \"flapper.\"\n\n\n \"Will you sit down?\" she asked him gravely.\n\n\n The rattan chair sighed under his weight. He made another effort to\n talk. \"I'll bet you'll be glad when summer's over.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"So you'll be able to go back to the mainland.\"\n\n\n \"But I never go to the mainland.\"", "\"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud—I\n don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a\n servant—and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They\n showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't\n realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with\n Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without\n marrying, he was safe.", "The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some\n bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall\n cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel,\n opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and\n handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked\n in his breath with surprise.\n\n\n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same\n flat-bosomed dress—flowered rather than white—no bandeau, same beads.\n Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n\n\n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat\n voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident\n in 1933.\"", "This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the\n innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he'd\n brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence\n when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.\n\n\n He hadn't realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the\n same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.\n\n\n The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to\n speak in a hushed, hurried voice. \"You must go away at once and never\n come back. You're a wicked man, but I don't want you to be hurt. I've\n been watching for you all morning.\"\n\n\n He tossed the newspapers over the fence. \"You don't have to read\n them now,\" he told her. \"Just look at the datelines and a few of the\n headlines.\"", "\"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred\n British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point\n very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did\n everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was\n afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani\n and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her\n fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But—and\n here is where Mary's wisdom fell short—her brave gesture did not\n pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n\n\n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love.\n It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as\n narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\nWith a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him\n all this.", "\"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\"\n the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the\n one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n \"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I\n won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n\n\n Jack looked at him blankly.\n\n\n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist\n explained.\nIV\n\n\n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass\n on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old\n hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked\n the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering\n about Kesserich and his wife—things said and half said last night—but\n found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as\n if to a farthest island in a world of people.", "The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to\n reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the\n gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with\n what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n\n\n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n\n\n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question—he\n was much too dazed for that—he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her\n position on the edge of the sofa.\n\n\n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love\n of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as\n you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he\n first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda,\n there was a cloak of loneliness about him—or rather about the three of\n them.", "\"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why\n are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\nShe seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know\n why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell\n you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest\n trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me—you're\n right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a\n little box.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n\n\n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures,\n or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the\n poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,", "She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table\n between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across\n the lawn.\nThe man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and\n walked toward her.\n\n\n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had\n stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him\n there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not\n so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an\n ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n\n\n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath\n was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician\n face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy\n that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than\n eighteen.", "She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold\n line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were\n waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the\n station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the\n gravel of the crossing.\n\n\n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and\n Hilda followed—to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage\n that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as\n her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n\n\n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he\n was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In\n fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary—I mean, what had been\n Mary—and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"", "\"\nThese\npapers might be faked,\" she said, pointing to where she'd let\n them drop on the ground.\n\n\n \"They're new,\" he said. \"Only old papers get yellow.\"\n\n\n \"But why would they do it to me?\nWhy?\n\"\n\n\n \"Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That'll set you straight quicker\n than anything.\"\n\n\n \"I couldn't,\" she said, drawing back. \"He's coming tonight.\"\n\n\n \"He?\"\n\n\n \"The man who sends me the boxes ... and my life.\"\n\n\n Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. \"A life\n that's completely a lie, that's cut you off from the world. Come with\n me, Mary.\"", "Then, with the air of a clock-work toy coming to life, the white door\n opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged\n dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the\n Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug\n bravely, gravel skittered, and the car rolled off between the trees.\n\n\n The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a\n white silk dress that fell straight from square neck-line to hip-height\n waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound\n with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark\n necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked\n under her arm.", "Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering\n darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early\n evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to\n the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary\n rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering\n to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the\n saddle to welcome him home.\n\n\n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station\n wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I\n drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"", "She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a\n home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful\n future for them as well—not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by\n year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos\n Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would\n teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where\n he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so\n on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been\n away. His research was keeping him very busy—\"\n\n\n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive\n work on growth and fertilization?\"", "He tore his mind away from the picture of a woman dressed like Queen\n Mary clambering up a tree. \"Was that your aunt I saw driving off?\"\n\n\n \"One of them. The other's taken the motorboat in for supplies.\" She\n looked at him doubtfully. \"I'm not sure they'll like it if they find\n someone here.\"\n\n\n \"There are just the three of you?\" he cut in quickly, looking down the\n empty road that vanished among the oaks.\n\n\n She nodded.\n\n\n \"I suppose you go in to the mainland with your aunts quite often?\"\n\n\n She shook her head.\n\n\n \"It must get pretty dull for you.\"\n\n\n \"Not very,\" she said, smiling. \"My aunts bring me the papers and other\n things. Even movies. We've got a projector. My favorite stars are\n Antonio Morino and Alice Terry. I like her better even than Clara Bow.\"", "She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to\n pound.\n\n\n At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack\n thought he could hear the faint\nchug\nof a motorboat. She pushed open\n the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark\n after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a\n fireplace with brass andirons.\n\n\n \"Flash!\" croaked a gritty voice. \"After their disastrous break day\n before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues....\"\n\n\n Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm\n around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice\n was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio\n loudspeaker.\n\n\n The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her\n gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere.", "Without pausing for surprise—in fact, in his holiday mood, using\n surprise as a goad—he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk\n touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side\n of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher\n branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n\n\n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first\n surprise could really sink in, had another.\nA closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white\n Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the\n length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just\n in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he\n recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole\n scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove.", "He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the\n table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\nHe'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his\n thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said\n awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n\n\n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own\n toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n\n\n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been\n working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here\n to do research in marine ecology—that's sort of sea-life patterns—of\n the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You\n know about him, of course?\"", "A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened\n and was silent. Jack turned.\n\n\n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall—a seemingly young,\n sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was\n a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray\n hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive\n mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the\n youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n\n\n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n\n\n The great biologist had come home.\nIII\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called\n individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much\n about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n\n\n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far." ], [ "In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming\n furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless\n black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack\n think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered\n again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n\n\n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the\n uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were\n still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been\n watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\nHe asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named\n Mary Alice Pope?\"", "\"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred\n British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point\n very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did\n everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was\n afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani\n and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her\n fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But—and\n here is where Mary's wisdom fell short—her brave gesture did not\n pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n\n\n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love.\n It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as\n narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\nWith a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him\n all this.", "A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened\n and was silent. Jack turned.\n\n\n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall—a seemingly young,\n sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was\n a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray\n hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive\n mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the\n youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n\n\n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n\n\n The great biologist had come home.\nIII\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called\n individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much\n about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n\n\n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.", "\"Not especially, sir,\" he mumbled.\n\n\n The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival,\n Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew\n why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their\n conversation to the professor.\n\n\n Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more\n important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if\n it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had\n suddenly posed this question about individuality.\n\n\n \"You know what I mean, of course,\" Kesserich pressed. \"The factors that\n make you you, and me me.\"\n\n\n \"Heredity and environment,\" Jack parroted like a freshman.\n\n\n Kesserich nodded. \"Suppose—this is just speculation—that we could\n control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same\n individual at will.\"", "Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering\n darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early\n evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to\n the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary\n rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering\n to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the\n saddle to welcome him home.\n\n\n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station\n wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I\n drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"", "But just then the motorboat swung around in a turn that sent waves\n drenching over it, and headed back toward the island. He watched it for\n a minute in wonder, then his attention was jolted by an angry hail.\n\n\n Three fishing smacks, also headed toward town, were about to cross\n his bow. He came around into the wind and waited with shaking sail,\n watching a man in a lumpy sweater shake a fist at him. Then he turned\n and gratefully followed the dark, wide, fanlike sterns and age-yellowed\n sails.\nII\n\n\n The exterior of Martin Kesserich's home—a weathered white cube with\n narrow, sharp-paned windows, topped by a cupola—was nothing like its\n lavish interior.", "She shook her head.\n\n\n \"Probably the greatest living biologist,\" he was proud to inform\n her. \"Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class\n with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich—he lives over there\n at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.\" He\n grinned. \"Matter of fact, I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for\n Mrs. Kesserich.\"\n\n\n The girl looked puzzled.\n\n\n Jack explained, \"The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences,\n won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow.\n When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich—she's a drab sort of\n person—said to me, 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of\n course, I had to. By the way, you still haven't told me your name.\"", "The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some\n bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall\n cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel,\n opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and\n handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked\n in his breath with surprise.\n\n\n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same\n flat-bosomed dress—flowered rather than white—no bandeau, same beads.\n Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n\n\n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat\n voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident\n in 1933.\"", "The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to\n reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the\n gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with\n what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n\n\n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n\n\n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question—he\n was much too dazed for that—he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her\n position on the edge of the sofa.\n\n\n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love\n of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as\n you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he\n first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda,\n there was a cloak of loneliness about him—or rather about the three of\n them.", "\"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\"\n the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the\n one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n \"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I\n won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n\n\n Jack looked at him blankly.\n\n\n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist\n explained.\nIV\n\n\n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass\n on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old\n hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked\n the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering\n about Kesserich and his wife—things said and half said last night—but\n found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as\n if to a farthest island in a world of people.", "He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the\n table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\nHe'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his\n thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said\n awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n\n\n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own\n toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n\n\n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been\n working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here\n to do research in marine ecology—that's sort of sea-life patterns—of\n the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You\n know about him, of course?\"", "\"But environment would change things,\" Jack objected. \"The duplicate\n would be bound to develop differently.\"\n\n\n \"Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical\n twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met\n by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman.\n Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox\n terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments\n similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of\n them had exactly the same experiences at the same times....\"\n\n\n For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering,\n becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich's\n sphinx-like face.", "Jack felt a shiver go through him. \"To get exactly the same pattern of\n hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us.\"\n\n\n \"What about identical twins?\" Kesserich pointed out. \"And then there's\n parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the\n mother without the intervention of the male.\" Although his voice had\n grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling\n secretly. \"There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say\n nothing of the technique by which Loeb caused a sea urchin to reproduce\n with no more stimulus than a salt solution.\"\n\n\n Jack felt the hair rising on his neck. \"Even then you wouldn't get\n exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits.\"\n\n\n \"Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some\n special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the\n mother's traits?\"", "\"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud—I\n don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a\n servant—and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They\n showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't\n realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with\n Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without\n marrying, he was safe.", "She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a\n home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful\n future for them as well—not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by\n year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos\n Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would\n teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where\n he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so\n on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been\n away. His research was keeping him very busy—\"\n\n\n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive\n work on growth and fertilization?\"", "Then, with the air of a clock-work toy coming to life, the white door\n opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged\n dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the\n Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug\n bravely, gravel skittered, and the car rolled off between the trees.\n\n\n The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a\n white silk dress that fell straight from square neck-line to hip-height\n waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound\n with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark\n necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked\n under her arm.", "She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table\n between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across\n the lawn.\nThe man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and\n walked toward her.\n\n\n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had\n stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him\n there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not\n so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an\n ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n\n\n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath\n was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician\n face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy\n that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than\n eighteen.", "He laughed uneasily. \"Well, if you actually think it's 1933, perhaps\n you're to be envied,\" he said, with a sardonic humor he didn't quite\n feel. \"Then you can't know anything about the Second World War, or\n television, or the V-2s, or Bikini bathing suits, or the atomic bomb,\n or—\"\n\n\n \"Stop!\" She had sprung up and retreated around her chair, white-faced.\n \"I don't like what you're saying.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No, please! Jokes that may be quite harmless on the mainland sound\n different here.\"\n\n\n \"I'm really not joking,\" he said after a moment.\n\n\n She grew quite frantic at that. \"I can show you all last week's papers!\n I can show you magazines and other things. I can prove it!\"", "'Ah, love, let us be true\nTo one another! for the world, which seems\nTo lie before us like a land of dreams,\nSo various, so beautiful, so new,\nHath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\nNor certitude—'\"\n\n \"Wait a minute,\" he interrupted. \"Who sends you these boxes?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"But how are the notes signed?\"\n\n\n \"They're wonderful notes,\" she said. \"So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd\n imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but how are they signed?\"\n\n\n She hesitated. \"Never anything but 'Your Lover.'\"\n\n\n \"And so when you first saw me, you thought—\" He began, then stopped\n because she was blushing.\n\n\n \"How long have you been getting them?\"", "Without pausing for surprise—in fact, in his holiday mood, using\n surprise as a goad—he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunk\n touched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side\n of the tree. Then he drew himself up, worked his way to some higher\n branches that crossed the fence, and dropped down inside.\n\n\n Suddenly cautious, he gently parted the shrubbery and, before the first\n surprise could really sink in, had another.\nA closely mown lawn dotted with more shrubbery ran up to a snug white\n Cape Cod cottage. The single strand of a radio aerial stretched the\n length of the roof. Parked on a neat gravel driveway that crossed just\n in front of the cottage was a short, square-lined touring car that he\n recognized from remembered pictures as an ancient Essex. The whole\n scene had about it the same odd quietness as the cove." ], [ "In much the same way, Mrs. Kesserich clashed with the darkly gleaming\n furniture, persian rugs and bronze vases around her. Her shapeless\n black form, poised awkwardly on the edge of a huge sofa, made Jack\n think of a cow that had strayed into the drawing room. He wondered\n again how a man like Kesserich had come to marry such a creature.\n\n\n Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the\n uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him. The eyes were\n still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been\n watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.\nHe asked abruptly, \"Do you know anything of a girl around here named\n Mary Alice Pope?\"", "\"Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred\n British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point\n very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda's feelings right away and did\n everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was\n afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani\n and Hilda's favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her\n fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But—and\n here is where Mary's wisdom fell short—her brave gesture did not\n pacify them: it only increased their hatred.\n\n\n \"Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love.\n It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as\n narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.\"\nWith a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him\n all this.", "Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering\n darkness. \"But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early\n evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to\n the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary\n rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering\n to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the\n saddle to welcome him home.\n\n\n \"Of course there was Martin's luggage to be considered, so the station\n wagon had to be sent down for that.\" She looked defiantly at Jack. \"I\n drove the station wagon. I was Martin's laboratory assistant.\"", "The silence lasted so long that he began to think she'd gone into some\n bovine trance. Then, without a word, she got up and went over to a tall\n cabinet. Feeling on a ledge behind it for a key, she opened a panel,\n opened a cardboard box inside it, took something from the box and\n handed him a photograph. He held it up to the failing light and sucked\n in his breath with surprise.\n\n\n It was a picture of the girl he'd met that afternoon. Same\n flat-bosomed dress—flowered rather than white—no bandeau, same beads.\n Same proud, demure expression, perhaps a bit happier.\n\n\n \"That is Mary Alice Pope,\" Mrs. Kesserich said in a strangely flat\n voice. \"She was Martin's fiancee. She was killed in a railway accident\n in 1933.\"", "The small sound of the cabinet door closing brought Jack back to\n reality. He realized that he no longer had the photograph. Against the\n gloom by the cabinet, Mrs. Kesserich's white face looked at him with\n what seemed a malicious eagerness.\n\n\n \"Sit down,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you about it.\"\n\n\n Without a thought as to why she hadn't asked him a single question—he\n was much too dazed for that—he obeyed. Mrs. Kesserich resumed her\n position on the edge of the sofa.\n\n\n \"You must understand, Mr. Barr, that Mary Alice Pope was the one love\n of Martin's life. He is a man of very deep and strong feelings, yet as\n you probably know, anything but kindly or demonstrative. Even when he\n first came here from Hungary with his older sisters Hani and Hilda,\n there was a cloak of loneliness about him—or rather about the three of\n them.", "A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened\n and was silent. Jack turned.\n\n\n The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall—a seemingly young,\n sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was\n a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray\n hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive\n mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the\n youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.\n\n\n \"Hello, Barr,\" Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.\n\n\n The great biologist had come home.\nIII\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called\n individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much\n about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?\"\n\n\n Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.", "She shook her head.\n\n\n \"Probably the greatest living biologist,\" he was proud to inform\n her. \"Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class\n with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich—he lives over there\n at town. I'm staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.\" He\n grinned. \"Matter of fact, I'd never have met you if it hadn't been for\n Mrs. Kesserich.\"\n\n\n The girl looked puzzled.\n\n\n Jack explained, \"The old boy's been off to Europe on some conferences,\n won't be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow.\n When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich—she's a drab sort of\n person—said to me, 'Don't try to sail to the farther islands.' So, of\n course, I had to. By the way, you still haven't told me your name.\"", "But just then the motorboat swung around in a turn that sent waves\n drenching over it, and headed back toward the island. He watched it for\n a minute in wonder, then his attention was jolted by an angry hail.\n\n\n Three fishing smacks, also headed toward town, were about to cross\n his bow. He came around into the wind and waited with shaking sail,\n watching a man in a lumpy sweater shake a fist at him. Then he turned\n and gratefully followed the dark, wide, fanlike sterns and age-yellowed\n sails.\nII\n\n\n The exterior of Martin Kesserich's home—a weathered white cube with\n narrow, sharp-paned windows, topped by a cupola—was nothing like its\n lavish interior.", "\"Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud—I\n don't imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a\n servant—and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They\n showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn't\n realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with\n Mary Alice Pope. They'd thought that since he'd reached forty without\n marrying, he was safe.", "\"Not especially, sir,\" he mumbled.\n\n\n The house was still. A few minutes after the professor's arrival,\n Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew\n why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their\n conversation to the professor.\n\n\n Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more\n important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if\n it were a teacher's trick to show up a pupil's inattention, he had\n suddenly posed this question about individuality.\n\n\n \"You know what I mean, of course,\" Kesserich pressed. \"The factors that\n make you you, and me me.\"\n\n\n \"Heredity and environment,\" Jack parroted like a freshman.\n\n\n Kesserich nodded. \"Suppose—this is just speculation—that we could\n control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same\n individual at will.\"", "\"Well, we've escaped quite far enough from Jamieson's marine worms,\"\n the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the\n one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels.\n \"Let's get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I\n won't have any time for it tomorrow.\"\n\n\n Jack looked at him blankly.\n\n\n \"Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,\" the biologist\n explained.\nIV\n\n\n Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass\n on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old\n hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked\n the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering\n about Kesserich and his wife—things said and half said last night—but\n found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as\n if to a farthest island in a world of people.", "Then, with the air of a clock-work toy coming to life, the white door\n opened and an elderly woman came out, dressed in a long, lace-edged\n dress and wide, lacy hat. She climbed into the driver's seat of the\n Essex, sitting there very stiff and tall. The motor began to chug\n bravely, gravel skittered, and the car rolled off between the trees.\n\n\n The door of the house opened again and a slim girl emerged. She wore a\n white silk dress that fell straight from square neck-line to hip-height\n waistline, making the skirt seem very short. Her dark hair was bound\n with a white bandeau so that it curved close to her cheeks. A dark\n necklace dangled against the white of the dress. A newspaper was tucked\n under her arm.", "He looked at her hard for a moment. \"I suppose you read a lot?\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"Fitzgerald's my favorite author.\" She started around the\n table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. \"Would you like some lemonade?\"\nHe'd noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his\n thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said\n awkwardly, \"I haven't introduced myself. I'm Jack Barry.\"\n\n\n She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own\n toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.\n\n\n He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. \"I'm a biology student. Been\n working at Wood's Hole the first part of the summer. But now I'm here\n to do research in marine ecology—that's sort of sea-life patterns—of\n the in-shore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You\n know about him, of course?\"", "She went on, \"Martin's love directed his every move. He was building a\n home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful\n future for them as well—not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by\n year, month by month. This winter, he'd plan, they would visit Buenos\n Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would\n teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where\n he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months ... and so\n on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been\n away. His research was keeping him very busy—\"\n\n\n Jack broke in with, \"Wasn't that about the time he did his definitive\n work on growth and fertilization?\"", "She crossed the driveway and tossed the paper down on a rattan table\n between three rattan chairs and stood watching a squirrel zigzag across\n the lawn.\nThe man stepped through the wall of shrubbery, called, \"hello!\" and\n walked toward her.\n\n\n She whirled around and stared at him as still as if her heart had\n stopped beating. Then she darted behind the table and waited for him\n there. Granting the surprise of his appearance, her alarm seemed not\n so much excessive as eerie. As if, the man thought, he were not an\n ordinary stranger, but a visitor from another planet.\n\n\n Approaching closer, he saw that she was trembling and that her breath\n was coming in rapid, irregular gasps. Yet the slim, sweet, patrician\n face that stared into his had an underlying expression of expectancy\n that reminded him of the cove. She couldn't have been more than\n eighteen.", "Jack felt a shiver go through him. \"To get exactly the same pattern of\n hereditary traits. That'd be far beyond us.\"\n\n\n \"What about identical twins?\" Kesserich pointed out. \"And then there's\n parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the\n mother without the intervention of the male.\" Although his voice had\n grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling\n secretly. \"There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say\n nothing of the technique by which Loeb caused a sea urchin to reproduce\n with no more stimulus than a salt solution.\"\n\n\n Jack felt the hair rising on his neck. \"Even then you wouldn't get\n exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits.\"\n\n\n \"Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some\n special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the\n mother's traits?\"", "'Ah, love, let us be true\nTo one another! for the world, which seems\nTo lie before us like a land of dreams,\nSo various, so beautiful, so new,\nHath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\nNor certitude—'\"\n\n \"Wait a minute,\" he interrupted. \"Who sends you these boxes?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"But how are the notes signed?\"\n\n\n \"They're wonderful notes,\" she said. \"So wise, so gay, so tender, you'd\n imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but how are they signed?\"\n\n\n She hesitated. \"Never anything but 'Your Lover.'\"\n\n\n \"And so when you first saw me, you thought—\" He began, then stopped\n because she was blushing.\n\n\n \"How long have you been getting them?\"", "\"But why are they doing it to you?\" he demanded, leaning forward. \"Why\n are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?\"\nShe seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. \"I don't know\n why. I'm to find out soon. But actually I'm not lonely. May I tell\n you a secret?\" She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest\n trembling. \"Every night the loneliness gathers in around me—you're\n right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a\n little box.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\" he said sharply.\n\n\n \"Sometimes there's a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures,\n or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the\n poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,", "\"But environment would change things,\" Jack objected. \"The duplicate\n would be bound to develop differently.\"\n\n\n \"Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical\n twins separated from birth, unaware of each other's existence. They met\n by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman.\n Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox\n terrier called 'Trixie.' That's without trying to make environments\n similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of\n them had exactly the same experiences at the same times....\"\n\n\n For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering,\n becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich's\n sphinx-like face.", "She paused. \"It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold\n line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were\n waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the\n station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the\n gravel of the crossing.\n\n\n \"Suddenly Mary's horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and\n Hilda followed—to try to catch her, they said, but they didn't manage\n that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as\n her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight's glare.\n\n\n \"Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he\n was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In\n fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary—I mean, what had been\n Mary—and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.\"" ] ]
test	50848	[ "Why was Dylan's ship unable to depart after loading it with the half-naked colonists?", "What finally connected Dylan emotionally to the colonists?", "How was the wire cut?", "Why had Dylan never fired a gun?", "How had Dylan lost his sense of urgency regarding his military duties?", "Why had Dylan originally joined the army?", "Why was the army unable to pinpoint the culprit of the wire cutting?", "What happened to Bossio?", "Why was Dylan bitter about Bossio's death?", "What was Dylan's attitude towards pioneers?" ]	[ [ "He was too drunk to operate the controls.", "The Alien had remotely handicapped its capabilities.", "The added weight of the colonists was too heavy.", "The ship was stuck in the deepening snow and ice." ], [ "The fear of the impending Alien attack and possible death highlighted their shared humanity. ", "Bossio's death helped him realize what was important.", "A woman brought him coffee when he withdrew into the radio shack.", "He was unexpectedly moved by Rossel's death." ], [ "The Alien controlled a colonist via telepathy.", "The viggle chewed the wire to cut it.", "The Alien used special technology operated from the safety of its subterranean hiding place.", "Bossio got drunk and cut the wire himself." ], [ "The army soldiers were not trusted with military equipment due to their lack of sobriety.", "He did not have clearance from his command to do so.", "He had to ask Rossel first.", "After five hundred years of peace, there had never been an occasion for him to do so." ], [ "He became depressed after drinking too much.", "The death of his father drove him to despair.", "He was tired of evacuating colonies and investigating cut wires.", "He became desensitized after years of inaction and disrespect." ], [ "So that he could spend more time drinking.", "Following the death of his father, he was inspired by the idea of protecting the galactic colonies.", "He wanted to honor his father, who had also fought bravely with the army.", "He had studied military tactics in school." ], [ "Centuries of peace had exacerbated dislike of the military and consequently dwindled their resources.", "The majority of their soldiers were incapacitated.", "They were too busy delivering important messages between the colonies.", "The majority of their resources were committed to directly defending Earth." ], [ "He was killed on Planet Three during the Alien assault.", "He had to strip his clothes and remain with the other colonists awaiting rescue.", "He was killed by The Alien buried in its hideout underneath the antenna tree.", "He got too drunk and crashed the ship on his way to Planet Three." ], [ "Bossio had been insufficiently trained to handle the mission.", "Bossio was his best friend, and he had not said a proper goodbye.", "Because of his youth and the family he left behind.", "The colonists harbored anti-military sentiment, and yet Bossio risked his life to go save them anyway." ], [ "He admired their hard work purging planets of disease, harvesting plants, and carving homes out of rocks.", "He was disgusted by their peace-loving ways.", "He respected their embrace of a peaceful lifestyle, but he did not like the plastic houses they built on their settlements.", "He liked them better than city dwellers, but he mocked the automation with which they established their settlements. " ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him\n standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried\n in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected,\n rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went\n slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never\n understood before, because he had never once been among men in great\n trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while\n there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and\n the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp\n burning smell—she couldn't get off the ground.", "By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much\n to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus,\n Lupus—doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n\n\n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very\n possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for\n discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the\n hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n\n\n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of\n women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their\n anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and\n confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.", "Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what\n he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said\n hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the\n men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and\n he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what\n would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But\n even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he\n realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then\n that he thought of Bossio.", "For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and\n the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two\n stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man\n said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off\n his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to\n check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n\n\n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the\n radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the\n wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and\n it felt fine.", "Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. \"You're sure? No baggage, no\n iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?\"\n\n\n \"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck—she's all we\n could afford.\"\n\n\n Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. \"It 'pears that\n somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like.\"\n\n\n It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. \"All right,\" he said\n quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, \"we'll do what we can.\n Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask.\"\n\n\n The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around\n him and the scurrying people.\n\n\n \"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?\"", "\"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that\n were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for\n the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\nDylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted\n the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was\n not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be\n coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had\n realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history\n of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble\n dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n\n\n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n \"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of\n this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed\n to have you gone by then.\"", "Dylan had been called up out of a bar—he and Bossio—and told what had\n happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This\n would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him.\n After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk,\n a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like\n that. It would take time.\n\n\n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n\n\n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain.\n Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty\n years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way\n along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled\n and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot\n of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and\n he had done them all.\n\n\n Once he had even studied military tactics.", "Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those\n in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan\n grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake\n it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly\n and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and\n impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set\n up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever\n having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home\n out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But\n at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n\n\n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all\n by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an\n outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing.\n He stirred restlessly.", "He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it\n was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they\n wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their\n ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put\n a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only\n answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and\n he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you\n could not blame him.\n\n\n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man—who turned out to\n be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically\n cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n\n\n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might\n get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n\n\n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"", "Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with\n uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was\n distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could\n take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single\n button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling\n of the colonists' ship.\nWhen Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow,\n thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later\n the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three\n had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard\n the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was\n all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered.\n There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He\n checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the\n air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.", "Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it\n threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire\n had just been cut.\nDylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his\n hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and\n then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real,\n there was no time for that.\n\n\n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he\n did not notice the wire.\n\n\n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n\n\n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with\n more'n ten. Why?\"\n\n\n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n \"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take\n forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"", "\"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a\n message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n\n\n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you\n want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n\n\n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes.\n Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel.\n It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He\n was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the\n hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man\n appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n\n\n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n\n\n Dylan turned and nodded.", "This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth\n with a bottle on his hip.\nAn obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven\n face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and\n listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists\n were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great\n suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait,\n between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.", "Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three\n was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was\n gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow.\n More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken,\n unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead—the one\n thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had.\n In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his\n friendship and his trust.\n\n\n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the\n people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were\n beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him\n with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.", "By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to\n try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still\n didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window\n through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which\n were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still\n drunk—maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan\n held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind\n of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be\n waiting....\n\n\n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the\n shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like\n to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but\n he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at\n the same time, because now they were coming to him.", "They were thinking of him now, he knew, because they were thinking of\n everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like\n that, he told himself. He had not had anything to eat all day and the\n coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the\n ship.\n\n\n It was stripped down now and they were loading. He was startled to see\n a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes.\n Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the\n weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some\n of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and\n were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went\n automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The\n elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep\n themselves warm. Some of them were laughing to keep their spirits up.\n\n\n In the end, the ship took forty-six people.", "There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the\n colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore\n grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had\n convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but\n no one went out to greet them.\n\n\n After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship\n and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained\n there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly\n thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or\n just plain orneriness.\n\n\n \"Well, I never,\" a nice lady said.\n\n\n \"What's he just\nstanding\nthere for?\" another lady said.", "\"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our\nhome\n. We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been\n paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you\n earned your keep. We demand....\"\n\n\n It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped\n that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him\n now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, \"soldier boy.\" The\n gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.", "Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n \"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises,\n within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five\n minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"", "Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\"\n Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but\n he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or\n another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n\n\n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had\n happened.\n\n\n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then\n buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n\n\n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n\n\n \"Who?\"\n\n\n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on\n a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n\n\n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n\n\n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"" ], [ "Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those\n in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan\n grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake\n it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly\n and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and\n impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set\n up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever\n having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home\n out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But\n at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n\n\n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all\n by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an\n outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing.\n He stirred restlessly.", "By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much\n to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus,\n Lupus—doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n\n\n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very\n possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for\n discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the\n hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n\n\n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of\n women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their\n anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and\n confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.", "Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him\n standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried\n in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected,\n rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went\n slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never\n understood before, because he had never once been among men in great\n trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while\n there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and\n the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp\n burning smell—she couldn't get off the ground.", "For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and\n the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two\n stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man\n said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off\n his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to\n check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n\n\n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the\n radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the\n wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and\n it felt fine.", "Dylan had been called up out of a bar—he and Bossio—and told what had\n happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This\n would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him.\n After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk,\n a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like\n that. It would take time.\n\n\n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n\n\n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain.\n Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty\n years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way\n along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled\n and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot\n of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and\n he had done them all.\n\n\n Once he had even studied military tactics.", "Bossio—a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no\n grudges—Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried\n to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days\n of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and\n die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four\n hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now,\n when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\nBut in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had\n ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that\n the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders,\n still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no\n conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be\n learned. So he could not hate these people.", "Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what\n he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said\n hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the\n men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and\n he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what\n would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But\n even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he\n realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then\n that he thought of Bossio.", "Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three\n was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was\n gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow.\n More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken,\n unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead—the one\n thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had.\n In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his\n friendship and his trust.\n\n\n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the\n people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were\n beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him\n with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.", "This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth\n with a bottle on his hip.\nAn obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven\n face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and\n listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists\n were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great\n suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait,\n between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.", "By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to\n try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still\n didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window\n through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which\n were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still\n drunk—maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan\n held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind\n of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be\n waiting....\n\n\n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the\n shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like\n to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but\n he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at\n the same time, because now they were coming to him.", "\"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that\n a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that\n something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the\n center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then\n walked right out again.\"\n\n\n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n\n\n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n\n\n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them.\n I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n\n\n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his\n hands.", "There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the\n colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore\n grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had\n convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but\n no one went out to greet them.\n\n\n After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship\n and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained\n there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly\n thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or\n just plain orneriness.\n\n\n \"Well, I never,\" a nice lady said.\n\n\n \"What's he just\nstanding\nthere for?\" another lady said.", "He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it\n was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they\n wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their\n ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put\n a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only\n answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and\n he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you\n could not blame him.\n\n\n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man—who turned out to\n be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically\n cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n\n\n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might\n get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n\n\n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"", "Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with\n uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was\n distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could\n take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single\n button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling\n of the colonists' ship.\nWhen Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow,\n thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later\n the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three\n had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard\n the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was\n all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered.\n There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He\n checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the\n air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.", "Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it\n threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire\n had just been cut.\nDylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his\n hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and\n then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real,\n there was no time for that.\n\n\n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he\n did not notice the wire.\n\n\n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n\n\n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with\n more'n ten. Why?\"\n\n\n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n \"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take\n forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"", "Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\"\n Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but\n he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or\n another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n\n\n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had\n happened.\n\n\n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then\n buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n\n\n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n\n\n \"Who?\"\n\n\n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on\n a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n\n\n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n\n\n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"", "Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. \"You're sure? No baggage, no\n iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?\"\n\n\n \"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck—she's all we\n could afford.\"\n\n\n Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. \"It 'pears that\n somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like.\"\n\n\n It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. \"All right,\" he said\n quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, \"we'll do what we can.\n Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask.\"\n\n\n The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around\n him and the scurrying people.\n\n\n \"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?\"", "Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n \"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises,\n within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five\n minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"", "And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a\n soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk.\n The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children\n and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so\n carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally,\n to despise soldiers.\n\n\n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\nEventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and\n pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out\n in that miserable cold to meet him.\n\n\n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not\n too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than\n Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were\n tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.", "\"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that\n were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for\n the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\nDylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted\n the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was\n not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be\n coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had\n realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history\n of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble\n dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n\n\n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n \"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of\n this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed\n to have you gone by then.\"" ], [ "\"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that\n a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that\n something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the\n center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then\n walked right out again.\"\n\n\n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n\n\n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n\n\n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them.\n I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n\n\n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his\n hands.", "\"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like\n most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids....\"\nIt was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel was\n silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily,\n \"Maybe an animal?\"\n\n\n Dylan shook his head. \"No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it, or\n found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think?\n The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this one\n is cut too—newly cut.\"\n\n\n The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white.", "Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\"\n Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but\n he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or\n another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n\n\n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had\n happened.\n\n\n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then\n buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n\n\n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n\n\n \"Who?\"\n\n\n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on\n a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n\n\n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n\n\n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"", "Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it\n threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire\n had just been cut.\nDylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his\n hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and\n then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real,\n there was no time for that.\n\n\n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he\n did not notice the wire.\n\n\n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n\n\n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with\n more'n ten. Why?\"\n\n\n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n \"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take\n forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"", "He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that\n he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was\n perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire.\n\n\n All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How?\n Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us?\n\n\n No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then there\n would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't really\n know.\n\n\n Were they small? Little animals?\n\n\n Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable\n brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large\n as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened long\n before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly\n shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it.", "For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and\n the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two\n stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man\n said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off\n his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to\n check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n\n\n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the\n radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the\n wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and\n it felt fine.", "He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait\n and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days\n was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell\n with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of\n the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults\n which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the\n core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point:\n it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed\n nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something\n pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.", "In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of\n earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.\n\n\n The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five\n hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small,\n weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread\n the news, and Man began to fall back.\n\n\n In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won\n stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of\n the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died\n in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those\n ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a\n society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only\n defense Earth had.", "\"But they have a contract!\"\n\n\n The soldier grinned.\n\n\n The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said:\n \"Who cut that wire, Cap?\"\nDylan swung slowly to look at him. \"As far as I can figure, an alien\n cut it.\"\n\n\n Rush shook his head. \"No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and\n no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no\n unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year\n ago.\" He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. \"Uh-uh. One of\n us did it.\"\n\n\n The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet.\n\n\n \"Telepathy?\" asked Dylan.\n\n\n \"Might be.\"", "When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists,\n thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children,\n were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines,\n even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were\n the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had,\n nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier\n finally stumbled on something.\n\n\n For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main\n buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be\n buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow\n a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn\n vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb\n at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The\n detonating wire had been cut.", "He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.\n\n\n He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he\n straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out\n his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last\n time he had fired it. He never had—he never had fired a gun.\nThe snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do\n but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing\n wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until\n there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights\n and the snow.", "Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with\n uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was\n distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could\n take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single\n button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling\n of the colonists' ship.\nWhen Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow,\n thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later\n the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three\n had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard\n the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was\n all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered.\n There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He\n checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the\n air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.", "But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went\n into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might\n be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see\n the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and\n tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.\n\n\n After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was\n a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and\n he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he\n must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a\n mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.", "He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it\n was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they\n wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their\n ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put\n a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only\n answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and\n he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you\n could not blame him.\n\n\n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man—who turned out to\n be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically\n cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n\n\n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might\n get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n\n\n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"", "Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three\n was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was\n gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow.\n More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken,\n unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead—the one\n thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had.\n In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his\n friendship and his trust.\n\n\n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the\n people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were\n beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him\n with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.", "Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. \"You're sure? No baggage, no\n iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?\"\n\n\n \"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck—she's all we\n could afford.\"\n\n\n Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. \"It 'pears that\n somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like.\"\n\n\n It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. \"All right,\" he said\n quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, \"we'll do what we can.\n Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask.\"\n\n\n The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around\n him and the scurrying people.\n\n\n \"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?\"", "By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much\n to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus,\n Lupus—doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n\n\n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very\n possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for\n discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the\n hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n\n\n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of\n women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their\n anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and\n confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.", "That was unfortunate. The attack was not scheduled until late that\n night and he could not, of course, press the assault by day. But\nflexibility\n, he reminded himself sternly,\nis the first principle of\n absorption\n, and therefore he moved to alter his plans. A projection\n reached out to dial several knobs on a large box before him, and the\n hour of assault was moved forward to dusk. A glance at the chronometer\n told him that it was already well into the night on Planet Three, and\n that the attack there had probably begun.\n\n\n The Alien felt the first tenuous pulsing of anticipation. He lay\n quietly, watching the small square lights of windows against the snow,\n thanking the Unexplainable that matters had been so devised that he\n would not have to venture out into that miserable cold.", "Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n \"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises,\n within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five\n minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"", "Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him\n standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried\n in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected,\n rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went\n slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never\n understood before, because he had never once been among men in great\n trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while\n there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and\n the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp\n burning smell—she couldn't get off the ground." ], [ "Bossio—a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no\n grudges—Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried\n to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days\n of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and\n die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four\n hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now,\n when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\nBut in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had\n ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that\n the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders,\n still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no\n conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be\n learned. So he could not hate these people.", "Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those\n in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan\n grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake\n it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly\n and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and\n impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set\n up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever\n having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home\n out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But\n at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n\n\n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all\n by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an\n outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing.\n He stirred restlessly.", "For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and\n the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two\n stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man\n said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off\n his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to\n check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n\n\n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the\n radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the\n wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and\n it felt fine.", "Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three\n was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was\n gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow.\n More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken,\n unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead—the one\n thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had.\n In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his\n friendship and his trust.\n\n\n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the\n people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were\n beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him\n with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.", "He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.\n\n\n He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he\n straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out\n his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last\n time he had fired it. He never had—he never had fired a gun.\nThe snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do\n but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing\n wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until\n there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights\n and the snow.", "Dylan had been called up out of a bar—he and Bossio—and told what had\n happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This\n would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him.\n After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk,\n a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like\n that. It would take time.\n\n\n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n\n\n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain.\n Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty\n years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way\n along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled\n and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot\n of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and\n he had done them all.\n\n\n Once he had even studied military tactics.", "By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much\n to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus,\n Lupus—doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n\n\n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very\n possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for\n discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the\n hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n\n\n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of\n women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their\n anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and\n confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.", "\"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that\n a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that\n something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the\n center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then\n walked right out again.\"\n\n\n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n\n\n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n\n\n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them.\n I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n\n\n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his\n hands.", "Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what\n he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said\n hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the\n men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and\n he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what\n would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But\n even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he\n realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then\n that he thought of Bossio.", "By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to\n try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still\n didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window\n through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which\n were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still\n drunk—maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan\n held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind\n of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be\n waiting....\n\n\n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the\n shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like\n to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but\n he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at\n the same time, because now they were coming to him.", "He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it\n was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they\n wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their\n ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put\n a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only\n answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and\n he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you\n could not blame him.\n\n\n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man—who turned out to\n be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically\n cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n\n\n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might\n get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n\n\n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"", "After a pause, Rush answered. \"Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like\n a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we\n landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky.\" He rose slowly,\n the rifle held under his arm. \"I b'lieve we might just as well go post\n them sentries.\"\n\n\n Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to\n say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained\n expression on his face, to put through that call to Three.\n\n\n When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, \"Where you want them sentries? I got\n Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up.\"", "Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\"\n Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but\n he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or\n another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n\n\n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had\n happened.\n\n\n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then\n buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n\n\n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n\n\n \"Who?\"\n\n\n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on\n a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n\n\n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n\n\n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"", "This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth\n with a bottle on his hip.\nAn obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven\n face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and\n listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists\n were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great\n suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait,\n between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.", "\"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that\n were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for\n the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\nDylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted\n the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was\n not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be\n coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had\n realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history\n of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble\n dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n\n\n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n \"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of\n this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed\n to have you gone by then.\"", "Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him\n standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried\n in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected,\n rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went\n slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never\n understood before, because he had never once been among men in great\n trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while\n there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and\n the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp\n burning smell—she couldn't get off the ground.", "And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a\n soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk.\n The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children\n and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so\n carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally,\n to despise soldiers.\n\n\n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\nEventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and\n pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out\n in that miserable cold to meet him.\n\n\n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not\n too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than\n Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were\n tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.", "Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n \"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises,\n within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five\n minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"", "Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it\n threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire\n had just been cut.\nDylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his\n hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and\n then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real,\n there was no time for that.\n\n\n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he\n did not notice the wire.\n\n\n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n\n\n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with\n more'n ten. Why?\"\n\n\n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n \"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take\n forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"", "\"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our\nhome\n. We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been\n paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you\n earned your keep. We demand....\"\n\n\n It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped\n that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him\n now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, \"soldier boy.\" The\n gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was." ], [ "Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those\n in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan\n grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake\n it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly\n and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and\n impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set\n up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever\n having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home\n out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But\n at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n\n\n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all\n by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an\n outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing.\n He stirred restlessly.", "Dylan had been called up out of a bar—he and Bossio—and told what had\n happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This\n would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him.\n After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk,\n a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like\n that. It would take time.\n\n\n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n\n\n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain.\n Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty\n years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way\n along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled\n and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot\n of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and\n he had done them all.\n\n\n Once he had even studied military tactics.", "For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and\n the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two\n stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man\n said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off\n his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to\n check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n\n\n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the\n radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the\n wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and\n it felt fine.", "Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what\n he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said\n hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the\n men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and\n he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what\n would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But\n even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he\n realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then\n that he thought of Bossio.", "By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to\n try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still\n didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window\n through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which\n were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still\n drunk—maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan\n held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind\n of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be\n waiting....\n\n\n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the\n shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like\n to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but\n he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at\n the same time, because now they were coming to him.", "Bossio—a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no\n grudges—Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried\n to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days\n of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and\n die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four\n hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now,\n when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\nBut in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had\n ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that\n the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders,\n still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no\n conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be\n learned. So he could not hate these people.", "\"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that\n a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that\n something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the\n center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then\n walked right out again.\"\n\n\n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n\n\n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n\n\n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them.\n I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n\n\n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his\n hands.", "He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it\n was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they\n wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their\n ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put\n a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only\n answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and\n he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you\n could not blame him.\n\n\n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man—who turned out to\n be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically\n cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n\n\n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might\n get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n\n\n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"", "By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much\n to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus,\n Lupus—doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n\n\n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very\n possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for\n discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the\n hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n\n\n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of\n women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their\n anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and\n confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.", "Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\"\n Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but\n he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or\n another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n\n\n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had\n happened.\n\n\n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then\n buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n\n\n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n\n\n \"Who?\"\n\n\n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on\n a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n\n\n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n\n\n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"", "This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth\n with a bottle on his hip.\nAn obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven\n face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and\n listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists\n were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great\n suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait,\n between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.", "Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three\n was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was\n gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow.\n More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken,\n unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead—the one\n thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had.\n In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his\n friendship and his trust.\n\n\n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the\n people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were\n beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him\n with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.", "\"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our\nhome\n. We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been\n paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you\n earned your keep. We demand....\"\n\n\n It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped\n that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him\n now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, \"soldier boy.\" The\n gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.", "\"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that\n were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for\n the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\nDylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted\n the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was\n not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be\n coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had\n realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history\n of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble\n dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n\n\n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n \"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of\n this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed\n to have you gone by then.\"", "\"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a\n message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n\n\n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you\n want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n\n\n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes.\n Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel.\n It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He\n was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the\n hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man\n appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n\n\n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n\n\n Dylan turned and nodded.", "He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait\n and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days\n was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell\n with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of\n the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults\n which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the\n core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point:\n it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed\n nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something\n pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.", "After a pause, Rush answered. \"Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like\n a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we\n landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky.\" He rose slowly,\n the rifle held under his arm. \"I b'lieve we might just as well go post\n them sentries.\"\n\n\n Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to\n say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained\n expression on his face, to put through that call to Three.\n\n\n When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, \"Where you want them sentries? I got\n Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up.\"", "Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him\n standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried\n in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected,\n rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went\n slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never\n understood before, because he had never once been among men in great\n trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while\n there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and\n the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp\n burning smell—she couldn't get off the ground.", "And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a\n soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk.\n The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children\n and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so\n carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally,\n to despise soldiers.\n\n\n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\nEventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and\n pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out\n in that miserable cold to meet him.\n\n\n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not\n too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than\n Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were\n tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.", "Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with\n uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was\n distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could\n take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single\n button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling\n of the colonists' ship.\nWhen Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow,\n thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later\n the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three\n had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard\n the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was\n all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered.\n There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He\n checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the\n air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan." ], [ "Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those\n in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan\n grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake\n it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly\n and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and\n impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set\n up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever\n having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home\n out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But\n at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n\n\n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all\n by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an\n outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing.\n He stirred restlessly.", "Bossio—a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no\n grudges—Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried\n to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days\n of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and\n die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four\n hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now,\n when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\nBut in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had\n ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that\n the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders,\n still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no\n conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be\n learned. So he could not hate these people.", "Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what\n he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said\n hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the\n men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and\n he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what\n would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But\n even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he\n realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then\n that he thought of Bossio.", "\"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that\n a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that\n something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the\n center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then\n walked right out again.\"\n\n\n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n\n\n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n\n\n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them.\n I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n\n\n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his\n hands.", "\"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our\nhome\n. We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been\n paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you\n earned your keep. We demand....\"\n\n\n It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped\n that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him\n now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, \"soldier boy.\" The\n gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.", "For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and\n the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two\n stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man\n said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off\n his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to\n check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n\n\n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the\n radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the\n wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and\n it felt fine.", "Dylan had been called up out of a bar—he and Bossio—and told what had\n happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This\n would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him.\n After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk,\n a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like\n that. It would take time.\n\n\n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n\n\n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain.\n Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty\n years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way\n along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled\n and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot\n of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and\n he had done them all.\n\n\n Once he had even studied military tactics.", "By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much\n to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus,\n Lupus—doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n\n\n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very\n possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for\n discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the\n hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n\n\n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of\n women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their\n anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and\n confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.", "Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three\n was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was\n gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow.\n More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken,\n unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead—the one\n thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had.\n In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his\n friendship and his trust.\n\n\n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the\n people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were\n beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him\n with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.", "By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to\n try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still\n didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window\n through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which\n were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still\n drunk—maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan\n held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind\n of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be\n waiting....\n\n\n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the\n shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like\n to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but\n he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at\n the same time, because now they were coming to him.", "And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a\n soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk.\n The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children\n and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so\n carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally,\n to despise soldiers.\n\n\n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\nEventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and\n pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out\n in that miserable cold to meet him.\n\n\n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not\n too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than\n Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were\n tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.", "This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth\n with a bottle on his hip.\nAn obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven\n face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and\n listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists\n were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great\n suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait,\n between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.", "\"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that\n were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for\n the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\nDylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted\n the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was\n not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be\n coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had\n realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history\n of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble\n dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n\n\n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n \"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of\n this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed\n to have you gone by then.\"", "Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\"\n Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but\n he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or\n another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n\n\n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had\n happened.\n\n\n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then\n buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n\n\n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n\n\n \"Who?\"\n\n\n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on\n a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n\n\n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n\n\n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"", "He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it\n was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they\n wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their\n ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put\n a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only\n answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and\n he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you\n could not blame him.\n\n\n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man—who turned out to\n be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically\n cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n\n\n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might\n get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n\n\n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"", "\"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a\n message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n\n\n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you\n want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n\n\n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes.\n Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel.\n It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He\n was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the\n hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man\n appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n\n\n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n\n\n Dylan turned and nodded.", "Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it\n threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire\n had just been cut.\nDylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his\n hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and\n then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real,\n there was no time for that.\n\n\n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he\n did not notice the wire.\n\n\n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n\n\n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with\n more'n ten. Why?\"\n\n\n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n \"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take\n forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"", "Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him\n standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried\n in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected,\n rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went\n slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never\n understood before, because he had never once been among men in great\n trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while\n there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and\n the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp\n burning smell—she couldn't get off the ground.", "Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n \"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises,\n within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five\n minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"", "He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait\n and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days\n was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell\n with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of\n the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults\n which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the\n core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point:\n it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed\n nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something\n pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands." ], [ "Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\"\n Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but\n he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or\n another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n\n\n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had\n happened.\n\n\n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then\n buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n\n\n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n\n\n \"Who?\"\n\n\n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on\n a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n\n\n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n\n\n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"", "\"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that\n a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that\n something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the\n center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then\n walked right out again.\"\n\n\n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n\n\n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n\n\n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them.\n I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n\n\n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his\n hands.", "\"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like\n most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids....\"\nIt was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel was\n silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily,\n \"Maybe an animal?\"\n\n\n Dylan shook his head. \"No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it, or\n found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think?\n The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this one\n is cut too—newly cut.\"\n\n\n The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white.", "In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of\n earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.\n\n\n The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five\n hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small,\n weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread\n the news, and Man began to fall back.\n\n\n In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won\n stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of\n the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died\n in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those\n ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a\n society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only\n defense Earth had.", "He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that\n he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was\n perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire.\n\n\n All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How?\n Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us?\n\n\n No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then there\n would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't really\n know.\n\n\n Were they small? Little animals?\n\n\n Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable\n brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large\n as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened long\n before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had suddenly\n shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it.", "He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait\n and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days\n was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell\n with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of\n the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults\n which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the\n core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point:\n it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed\n nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something\n pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.", "When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists,\n thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children,\n were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines,\n even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were\n the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had,\n nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier\n finally stumbled on something.\n\n\n For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main\n buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be\n buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow\n a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn\n vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb\n at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The\n detonating wire had been cut.", "But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went\n into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might\n be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see\n the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and\n tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.\n\n\n After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was\n a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and\n he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he\n must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a\n mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.", "Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it\n threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire\n had just been cut.\nDylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his\n hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and\n then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real,\n there was no time for that.\n\n\n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he\n did not notice the wire.\n\n\n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n\n\n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with\n more'n ten. Why?\"\n\n\n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n \"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take\n forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"", "\"But they have a contract!\"\n\n\n The soldier grinned.\n\n\n The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he said:\n \"Who cut that wire, Cap?\"\nDylan swung slowly to look at him. \"As far as I can figure, an alien\n cut it.\"\n\n\n Rush shook his head. \"No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and\n no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no\n unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year\n ago.\" He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. \"Uh-uh. One of\n us did it.\"\n\n\n The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet.\n\n\n \"Telepathy?\" asked Dylan.\n\n\n \"Might be.\"", "For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and\n the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two\n stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man\n said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off\n his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to\n check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n\n\n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the\n radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the\n wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and\n it felt fine.", "And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a\n soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk.\n The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children\n and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so\n carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally,\n to despise soldiers.\n\n\n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\nEventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and\n pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out\n in that miserable cold to meet him.\n\n\n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not\n too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than\n Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were\n tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.", "He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.\n\n\n He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he\n straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out\n his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last\n time he had fired it. He never had—he never had fired a gun.\nThe snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do\n but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing\n wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until\n there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights\n and the snow.", "Bossio—a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no\n grudges—Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried\n to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days\n of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and\n die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four\n hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now,\n when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\nBut in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had\n ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that\n the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders,\n still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no\n conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be\n learned. So he could not hate these people.", "Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with\n uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was\n distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could\n take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single\n button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling\n of the colonists' ship.\nWhen Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow,\n thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later\n the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three\n had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard\n the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was\n all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered.\n There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He\n checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the\n air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.", "He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it\n was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they\n wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their\n ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put\n a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only\n answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and\n he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you\n could not blame him.\n\n\n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man—who turned out to\n be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically\n cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n\n\n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might\n get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n\n\n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"", "the morning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy,\n snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were\n all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee\n and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from the north. It\n was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an army ship landed\n in a field near the settlement.", "There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the\n colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore\n grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had\n convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but\n no one went out to greet them.\n\n\n After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship\n and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained\n there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly\n thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or\n just plain orneriness.\n\n\n \"Well, I never,\" a nice lady said.\n\n\n \"What's he just\nstanding\nthere for?\" another lady said.", "By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much\n to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus,\n Lupus—doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n\n\n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very\n possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for\n discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the\n hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n\n\n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of\n women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their\n anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and\n confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.", "Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three\n was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was\n gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow.\n More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken,\n unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead—the one\n thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had.\n In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his\n friendship and his trust.\n\n\n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the\n people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were\n beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him\n with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore." ], [ "Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three\n was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was\n gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow.\n More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken,\n unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead—the one\n thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had.\n In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his\n friendship and his trust.\n\n\n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the\n people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were\n beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him\n with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.", "Bossio—a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no\n grudges—Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried\n to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days\n of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and\n die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four\n hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now,\n when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\nBut in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had\n ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that\n the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders,\n still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no\n conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be\n learned. So he could not hate these people.", "But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went\n into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might\n be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see\n the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and\n tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.\n\n\n After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was\n a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and\n he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he\n must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a\n mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.", "Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what\n he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said\n hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the\n men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and\n he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what\n would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But\n even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he\n realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then\n that he thought of Bossio.", "He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it\n was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they\n wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their\n ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put\n a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only\n answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and\n he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you\n could not blame him.\n\n\n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man—who turned out to\n be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically\n cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n\n\n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might\n get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n\n\n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"", "Dylan had been called up out of a bar—he and Bossio—and told what had\n happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This\n would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him.\n After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk,\n a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like\n that. It would take time.\n\n\n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n\n\n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain.\n Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty\n years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way\n along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled\n and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot\n of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and\n he had done them all.\n\n\n Once he had even studied military tactics.", "By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to\n try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still\n didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window\n through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which\n were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still\n drunk—maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan\n held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind\n of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be\n waiting....\n\n\n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the\n shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like\n to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but\n he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at\n the same time, because now they were coming to him.", "Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\"\n Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but\n he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or\n another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n\n\n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had\n happened.\n\n\n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then\n buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n\n\n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n\n\n \"Who?\"\n\n\n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on\n a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n\n\n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n\n\n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"", "By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much\n to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus,\n Lupus—doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n\n\n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very\n possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for\n discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the\n hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n\n\n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of\n women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their\n anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and\n confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.", "He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.\n\n\n He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he\n straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled out\n his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the last\n time he had fired it. He never had—he never had fired a gun.\nThe snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do\n but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing\n wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until\n there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights\n and the snow.", "\"Be back for you tonight,\" the young man called, and then, grinning,\n he yelled \"Catch\" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it and\n put it unconcernedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in disgust. A\n moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to lift.\n\n\n \"Was he\ndrunk\n?\" Rossel began angrily. \"Was that a bottle of\nliquor\n?\"\n\n\n The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the\n envelope in Rossel's hand. \"You'd better read that and get moving. We\n haven't much time.\"", "Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him\n standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried\n in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected,\n rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went\n slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never\n understood before, because he had never once been among men in great\n trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while\n there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and\n the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp\n burning smell—she couldn't get off the ground.", "\"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that\n a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that\n something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the\n center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then\n walked right out again.\"\n\n\n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n\n\n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n\n\n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them.\n I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n\n\n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his\n hands.", "They were thinking of him now, he knew, because they were thinking of\n everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like\n that, he told himself. He had not had anything to eat all day and the\n coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the\n ship.\n\n\n It was stripped down now and they were loading. He was startled to see\n a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes.\n Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the\n weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some\n of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and\n were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went\n automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The\n elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep\n themselves warm. Some of them were laughing to keep their spirits up.\n\n\n In the end, the ship took forty-six people.", "Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it\n threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire\n had just been cut.\nDylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his\n hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and\n then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real,\n there was no time for that.\n\n\n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he\n did not notice the wire.\n\n\n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n\n\n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with\n more'n ten. Why?\"\n\n\n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n \"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take\n forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"", "And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a\n soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk.\n The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children\n and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so\n carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally,\n to despise soldiers.\n\n\n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\nEventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and\n pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out\n in that miserable cold to meet him.\n\n\n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not\n too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than\n Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were\n tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.", "\"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a\n message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n\n\n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you\n want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n\n\n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes.\n Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel.\n It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He\n was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the\n hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man\n appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n\n\n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n\n\n Dylan turned and nodded.", "Presently an alarming thought struck him. These humans moved with\n uncommon speed for intelligent creatures. Even without devices, it was\n distinctly possible that they could be gone before nightfall. He could\n take no chance, of course. He spun more dials and pressed a single\n button, and lay back again comfortably, warmly, to watch the disabling\n of the colonists' ship.\nWhen Three did not answer, Rossel was nervously gazing at the snow,\n thinking of other things, and he called again. Several moments later\n the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three\n had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard\n the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was\n all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered.\n There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He\n checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the\n air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.", "\"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that\n were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for\n the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\nDylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted\n the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was\n not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be\n coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had\n realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history\n of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble\n dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n\n\n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n \"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of\n this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed\n to have you gone by then.\"", "For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and\n the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two\n stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man\n said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off\n his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to\n check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n\n\n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the\n radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the\n wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and\n it felt fine." ], [ "Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three\n was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was\n gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow.\n More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken,\n unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead—the one\n thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had.\n In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his\n friendship and his trust.\n\n\n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the\n people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were\n beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him\n with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.", "Bossio—a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no\n grudges—Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried\n to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days\n of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and\n die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four\n hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now,\n when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\nBut in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had\n ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that\n the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders,\n still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no\n conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be\n learned. So he could not hate these people.", "Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what\n he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said\n hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the\n men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and\n he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what\n would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But\n even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he\n realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then\n that he thought of Bossio.", "By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much\n to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus,\n Lupus—doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n\n\n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very\n possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for\n discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the\n hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n\n\n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of\n women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their\n anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and\n confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.", "By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to\n try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still\n didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window\n through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which\n were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still\n drunk—maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan\n held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind\n of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be\n waiting....\n\n\n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the\n shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like\n to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but\n he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at\n the same time, because now they were coming to him.", "Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those\n in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan\n grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake\n it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly\n and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and\n impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set\n up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever\n having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home\n out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But\n at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n\n\n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all\n by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an\n outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing.\n He stirred restlessly.", "Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\"\n Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but\n he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or\n another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n\n\n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had\n happened.\n\n\n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then\n buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n\n\n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n\n\n \"Who?\"\n\n\n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on\n a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n\n\n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n\n\n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"", "Dylan had been called up out of a bar—he and Bossio—and told what had\n happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This\n would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him.\n After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk,\n a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like\n that. It would take time.\n\n\n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n\n\n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain.\n Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty\n years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way\n along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled\n and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot\n of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and\n he had done them all.\n\n\n Once he had even studied military tactics.", "He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it\n was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they\n wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their\n ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put\n a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only\n answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and\n he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you\n could not blame him.\n\n\n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man—who turned out to\n be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically\n cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n\n\n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might\n get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n\n\n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"", "\"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that\n a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that\n something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the\n center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then\n walked right out again.\"\n\n\n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n\n\n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n\n\n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them.\n I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n\n\n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his\n hands.", "For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and\n the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two\n stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man\n said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off\n his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to\n check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n\n\n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the\n radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the\n wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and\n it felt fine.", "Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him\n standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried\n in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected,\n rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went\n slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never\n understood before, because he had never once been among men in great\n trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while\n there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and\n the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp\n burning smell—she couldn't get off the ground.", "But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went\n into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might\n be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see\n the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and\n tried, for the last time, to call Bossio.\n\n\n After a while, an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was\n a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and\n he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he\n must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a\n mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone.", "\"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a\n message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n\n\n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you\n want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n\n\n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes.\n Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel.\n It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He\n was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the\n hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man\n appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n\n\n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n\n\n Dylan turned and nodded.", "Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it\n threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire\n had just been cut.\nDylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his\n hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and\n then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real,\n there was no time for that.\n\n\n When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he\n did not notice the wire.\n\n\n \"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?\"\n\n\n Dylan looked at him vaguely. \"She sleeps two and won't take off with\n more'n ten. Why?\"\n\n\n His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.\n \"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take\n forty. We came out in groups, we never thought....\"", "\"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that\n were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for\n the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\nDylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted\n the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was\n not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be\n coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had\n realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history\n of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble\n dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n\n\n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n \"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of\n this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed\n to have you gone by then.\"", "And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a\n soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk.\n The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children\n and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so\n carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally,\n to despise soldiers.\n\n\n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\nEventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and\n pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out\n in that miserable cold to meet him.\n\n\n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not\n too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than\n Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were\n tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.", "This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth\n with a bottle on his hip.\nAn obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven\n face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and\n listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists\n were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great\n suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait,\n between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.", "He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait\n and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days\n was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell\n with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of\n the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults\n which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the\n core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point:\n it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed\n nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something\n pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.", "Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n \"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises,\n within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five\n minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"" ], [ "Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those\n in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan\n grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake\n it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly\n and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and\n impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set\n up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever\n having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home\n out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But\n at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.\n\n\n This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all\n by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an\n outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing.\n He stirred restlessly.", "By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much\n to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: \"Lupus,\n Lupus—doesn't that mean wolves or something?\"\n\n\n Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very\n possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for\n discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the\n hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.\n\n\n But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of\n women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their\n anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and\n confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.", "Bossio—a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no\n grudges—Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried\n to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days\n of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and\n die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four\n hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now,\n when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.\nBut in the end, damn it, he could not hate these people. All they had\n ever wanted was peace, and even though they had never understood that\n the Universe is unknowable and that you must always have big shoulders,\n still they had always sought only for peace. If peace leads to no\n conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be\n learned. So he could not hate these people.", "For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and\n the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two\n stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man\n said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off\n his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to\n check the bomb, grateful for the action.\n\n\n Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the\n radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the\n wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and\n it felt fine.", "Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three\n was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was\n gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow.\n More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken,\n unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead—the one\n thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had.\n In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his\n friendship and his trust.\n\n\n He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the\n people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were\n beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him\n with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.", "By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to\n try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still\n didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window\n through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which\n were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still\n drunk—maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan\n held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind\n of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be\n waiting....\n\n\n A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the\n shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like\n to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but\n he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at\n the same time, because now they were coming to him.", "Dylan had been called up out of a bar—he and Bossio—and told what had\n happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This\n would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him.\n After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk,\n a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like\n that. It would take time.\n\n\n He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.\n\n\n Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain.\n Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty\n years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way\n along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled\n and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot\n of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and\n he had done them all.\n\n\n Once he had even studied military tactics.", "This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth\n with a bottle on his hip.\nAn obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven\n face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and\n listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists\n were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great\n suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait,\n between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.", "Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what\n he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said\n hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the\n men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and\n he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what\n would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But\n even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he\n realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then\n that he thought of Bossio.", "Dylan shook his head. \"The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays.\"\n Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but\n he said, as kindly as he could, \"We'll get 'em all out. One way or\n another, we won't leave anybody.\"\n\n\n It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had\n happened.\n\n\n Dylan showed him the two clean ends. \"Somebody dug it up, cut it, then\n buried it again and packed it down real nice.\"\n\n\n \"The damn fool!\" Rossel exploded.\n\n\n \"Who?\"\n\n\n \"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on\n a live bomb like this, but I never....\"\n\n\n \"You think one of your people did it?\"\n\n\n Rossel stared at him. \"Isn't that obvious?\"", "Rossel was one of the ones that would not be going. Dylan saw him\n standing by the airlock holding his wife in his arms, his face buried\n in her soft brown hair. A sense of great sympathy, totally unexpected,\n rose up in Dylan, and a little of the lostness of thirty years went\n slipping away. These were his people. It was a thing he had never\n understood before, because he had never once been among men in great\n trouble. He waited and watched, learning, trying to digest this while\n there was still time. Then the semi-naked colonists were inside and\n the airlock closed. But when the ship tried to lift, there was a sharp\n burning smell—she couldn't get off the ground.", "He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it\n was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they\n wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their\n ship and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put\n a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only\n answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room, and\n he wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you\n could not blame him.\n\n\n Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man—who turned out to\n be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically\n cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope.\n\n\n \"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might\n get the rest of the folks out on that.\"\n\n\n Dylan shrugged. \"Don't count on it.\"", "\"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our\nhome\n. We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been\n paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you\n earned your keep. We demand....\"\n\n\n It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped\n that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him\n now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, \"soldier boy.\" The\n gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.", "\"Captain Dylan, sir.\" His voice was low and did not carry. \"I have a\n message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?\"\n\n\n Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. \"Nobody's in charge here. If you\n want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?\"\n\n\n The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes.\n Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel.\n It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He\n was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the\n hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man\n appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.\n\n\n \"C'n I go now, Jim?\"\n\n\n Dylan turned and nodded.", "\"So something,\" said Dylan, \"knew enough about this camp to know that\n a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And that\n something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right into the\n center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it. And then\n walked right out again.\"\n\n\n \"Listen,\" said Rossel, \"I'd better go ask.\"\n\n\n He started away but Dylan caught his arm.\n\n\n \"Tell them to arm,\" he said, \"and try not to scare hell out of them.\n I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire.\"\n\n\n Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in his\n hands.", "\"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that\n were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for\n the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is.\"\nDylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted\n the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was\n not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be\n coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had\n realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history\n of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble\n dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.\n\n\n \"We'd better get going,\" he finally said, and there was quiet.\n \"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of\n this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed\n to have you gone by then.\"", "\"Can't see it. You people live too close, you'd notice right away if\n one of you wasn't ... himself. And, if they've got one, why not all?\"\n\n\n Rush calmly—at least outwardly calmly—lit his pipe. There was a\n strength in this man that Dylan had missed before.\n\n\n \"Don't know,\" he said gruffly. \"But these are aliens, mister. And until\n I know different I'm keepin' an eye on my neighbor.\"\n\n\n He gave Rossel a sour look and Rossel stared back, uncomprehending.\n\n\n Then Rossel jumped. \"My God!\"\n\n\n Dylan moved to quiet him. \"Look, is there any animal at all that ever\n comes near here that's as large as a dog?\"", "Dylan stopped and looked around grimly at the circling wall of snow.\n \"You know the site better than I do. Post 'em in a ring, on rises,\n within calling distance. Have 'em check with each other every five\n minutes. I'll go help your people at the ship.\"", "After a pause, Rush answered. \"Yep, there's one. The viggle. It's like\n a reg'lar monkey but with four legs. Biology cleared 'em before we\n landed. We shoot one now and then when they get pesky.\" He rose slowly,\n the rifle held under his arm. \"I b'lieve we might just as well go post\n them sentries.\"\n\n\n Dylan wanted to go on with this but there was nothing much else to\n say. Rossel went with them as far as the radio shack, with a strained\n expression on his face, to put through that call to Three.\n\n\n When he was gone Rush asked Dylan, \"Where you want them sentries? I got\n Walt Halloran and Web Eggers and six others lined up.\"", "And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a\n soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk.\n The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children\n and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so\n carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally,\n to despise soldiers.\n\n\n The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.\nEventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and\n pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out\n in that miserable cold to meet him.\n\n\n The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not\n too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than\n Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were\n tears gathering in the ends of his eyes." ] ]
test	20023	[ "In what way does the author suggest the Myers-Briggs test is relevant to daily life?", "What is unique about Sulloway's approach to assessing one's personality?", "What is \"The Gandhi Explanation\"?", "Why does Gardner link the designation of Intelligence with schools?", "What was the true purpose of D'Adamo's blood type personality test?", "How were assessments of personality traits in conflict amongst ancient Greek philosophers?", "How might one self-identify one's intelligence type?", "Why does the writer not wish to follow the bloody type test?", "Which personality test developer understands Gandhi the least?", "What are the two enduring types of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator?" ]	[ [ "It can help a person understand one's own behavior and come to understand the actions of others as well.", "It provides alternative personality types for people who are not satisfied with the assessments currently available.", "It reveals the personality types of famous people such as Bill Clinton.", "It makes proper use of the Temperament Sorter II as well as the Character Sorter." ], [ "He believes the tendency toward conflict amongst brothers and sisters reveals much about a person's personality and society in general.", "He believes that one's birth order is pre-determined, and therefore one's personality is fixed from birth.", "He believes that conflict between the parent and their children is the determining factor in how the child will behave as he or she gets older.", "He believes the oldest child is the best candidate for leadership positions in the worlds of business and government." ], [ "\"The Gandhi Explanation\" is a discussion in which the writer explores what Gandhi would have thought about each of the four major focus areas of the personality tests.", "For each of the four areas the writer explores, Gandhi has elucidated his own explanation about how each area affects a person's personality. These thoughts are shared in the article.", "Gandhi is a frequent subject of personality test developers to demonstrate that their process works, so the writer rates each developer's success in this regard.", "This is an explanation of how well Gandhi incorporated these four tenets into his daily life and practice as a peacemaker." ], [ "He believes one may find the most diverse resource of intelligence types within the walls of a school.", "He believes this is the most obvious location for intellectual debate regarding his theories.", "Schools tend to be the most philosophical, and therefore, they would understand his mission with the most precision.", "He believes it has the most relevant application there since schools are generally populated by people with a limited view of the concept of intelligence." ], [ "He was trying to sell weight-loss books.", "To educate the public about the ancient history of blood types.", "He was attempting to share Dr. Eric Meikle's theory of human origins as studied at the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University.", "To share the ways in which the Japanese culture incorporated blood types into its corporate life." ], [ "Plato believed the answer was external, while Hippocrates believed it was internal.", "Hippocrates believed in the balance of the four bodily fluids, while Plato believed there were far more fluids than that.", "Hippocrates believed people were born a specific way and could never break that mold. Plato believed people's behavior proved otherwise.", "Plato designated four social and behavioral states exhibited by humans, and Hippocrates believed there were far more existing in nature." ], [ "By rehearsing tongue twisters, nursery rhymes, and puns.", "By taking the Myers-Briggs personality test.", "Receiving input from others regarding one's own personality, self-reflection, and basic reasoning.", "By taking a personality quiz on Keirsey's website." ], [ "He thought it was \"completely worthless.\"", "He does not want to eat snails.", "He doesn't know his blood type.", "He doesn't need to lose any weight." ], [ "D'Adamo because he doesn't even try to understand him.", "Sulloway because Gandhi was not in fact the youngest of four siblings.", "Kiersey because he claims Gandhi is an idealist when in fact his is quite practical.", "Gardner because he misattributes Gandhi's interpersonal intelligence to his career choice." ], [ "Expressive and reserved", "Introverted and extroverted", "Scheduling and probing", "Observant and introspective" ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Keirsey does not muck around in your excretions in order to determine your personality. His criteria come from Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung by way of an American mother-daughter team named Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, who created the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The two women translated Jung's idea that personality is composed of four pairs of preferences--the most famous being extroverted and introverted--and created a systematic test to discern people's types. Keirsey has redefined these four pairs this way: \n\n Expressive (E) or Reserved (I) \n\n Observant (S) or Introspective (N) \n\n Tough-minded (T) or Friendly (F) \n\n Scheduling (J) or Probing (P) [Probing might better be defined as looking for alternatives]", "The four sets of pairs can be matched up 16 different ways--with Keirsey organizing these into those Platonic groups of four. For example, I'm an NT, which makes me a Rational, therefore naturally curious, restless, and doubting. More specifically I'm an ENTP. As Keirsey writes: \"A rough draft is all they need to feel confident and ready to proceed into action. ... [They] have been known to engage in brinkmanship with their superiors. ... [ENTPs] like to spar verbally with their loved ones.\"", "Applicability: High. I feel I now understand better why I keep acting that way. It's also given me the sly sense that I know why other people are acting their way. Of course, that's very ENTP of me. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: According to Keirsey, Gandhi is an Idealist (an NF), what else? More specifically, an INFJ. \"INFJs have an unusually strong desire to contribute to the welfare of others. ... INFJs are scarce, little more than one percent of the population, which is too bad, considering their usefulness in the social order.\" \n\n \n\n INTELLIGENCE", "OK, he nailed me. As an example of how uncanny the type sorter can be, take Bill Clinton, who Keirsey classifies as an ESFP. In Keirsey's book Please Understand Me II , ESFP's are described as \"inclined to be impulsive and self-indulgent, which makes them vulnerable to seduction. ... Pleasure seems to be an end in itself ... they will do what they feel like in the moment rather than what is good for them in the long run ... blaming someone else if things don't turn out well. ... Intent on pleasing everybody, [ESFPs] can appear fickle, even promiscuous, to other types.\" On the other hand, maybe Clinton is just too hotblooded. \n\n Ease of Use: Good. I recommend taking the Temperament Sorter II and ignoring the Character Sorter, which I found confusing and not particularly accurate.", "Why do people act like that? Hippocrates believed the answer was in the balance of four bodily fluids, or humors--blood, black bile, phlegm, and yellow bile. This notion lives on in our language today. We all know people who are essentially hotblooded, or melancholy (which literally means \"black bile\"), or phlegmatic, or who view the world with a jaundiced eye. Plato, less interested in humans' inner states than in their behavior as members of the state, redefined the four humors in social terms: as artisans, guardians, rationals, and idealists. According to psychologist David Keirsey, you are one of Plato's four types, you were born that way, you will always be that way, and you can find out which one you are by taking the temperament sorter quiz on his Web site. Sample questions: When the phone rings do you: a) hurry to get it first? or b) hope someone else will answer? Do you find visionaries and theorists: a) somewhat annoying? or b) rather fascinating?", "Why You're So Screwed Up \n\n Let's stipulate that you are unique, unfathomable, singular, sui generis. Now, let's find out how to categorize you, classify you, and sort you into a group that explains your temperament, your career choices, the strength of your immune system, and your ability to make up puns. \n\n Here follows an admittedly random guide to four popular methods designed to explain who you really are. I deliberately picked systems that purport to pinpoint something intrinsic in our natures. I judged the ease of use and applicability of each system, and since all of them illustrate their points with the lives of famous people, I also gauged how successfully each one explains the process by which Gandhi became Gandhi . \n\n BIRTH ORDER \n\n Would your friends and family say you are more like: a) Carlos the Jackal or b) Martin Luther King Jr.?; a) Phyllis Schlafly or b) Florence Nightingale?", "The seven original intelligences are: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal (my favorite, since I have a genius for self-absorption). The latest addition is naturalist intelligence. Gardner defines it as \"the ability to recognize and classify plants, minerals and animals.\" Gardner says you can see it in action in people who know every kind of dinosaur, or sneaker, or automobile. He is also considering adding existential intelligence, which, he says, refers to the inclination to ask: \"Who are we? Where do we come from? What's it all about? Why do we die?\" This could also be known as the \"Oy gevalt \" intelligence. Since I felt that his theory left out people who are skilled at the use of the senses of taste and smell, I lobbied him to add culinary intelligence. Gardner wasn't biting. I decided to forgo making a pitch for my own area of brilliance: procrastination intelligence.", "Applicability: As a method of understanding yourself and others, Sulloway's theory seems rather limited, except if you're in charge of hiring for Slobodan Milosevic. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: He was the youngest of four. \n\n \n\n PERSONALITY", "Ease of Use: Fair. Gardner says, \"Common sense, self-observation, and talking to others should suffice to tell you what is distinctive about your mind.\" But we want a quiz, Dr. Gardner! One is available in the book 7 Kinds of Smart: Identifying and Developing Your Many Intelligences , by Thomas Armstrong, which offers choices such as, \"I enjoy entertaining myself or others with tongue twisters, nonsense rhymes, or puns\" and \"I find it difficult to sit still for long periods of time.\" The MIDAS Web site provides descriptions of the intelligences, links to other multiple intelligence sites, and sells multiple intelligence testing materials (prices range from $10 to $35). \n\n Applicability: Assessing multiple intelligences probably has most value for schoolchildren or people who feel they have made a wrong career choice. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: In Frames of Mind Gardner writes that Gandhi exemplified interpersonal intelligence.", "One of Gardner's missions is to apply his work to the classroom, since he believes schools are designed by people excelling in linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences to reward people who share those intelligences. He also believes that while our propensity toward certain types of intelligence is inborn, our abilities are not fixed. Understanding our areas of strength and weakness, he says, can provide more self-awareness and help users move to a \"higher level of skill.\"", "Sulloway (surprise! he's the third of four) also thinks his findings should be applied to selecting corporate leaders. In a nutshell: Oldests need not apply. As devoted as he is to birth order as a personality determinant, Sulloway allows other variables to creep into his theory to account for those rare firstborn revolutionaries. \"Whenever one encounters a firstborn radical (and family life does occasionally produce them), such individuals are likely to have experienced substantial conflict with a parent. Parent-offspring conflict makes honorary laterborns out of some firstborns.\" This is a little like saying all men prefer dogs and all women prefer cats. So a man with a cat is either an honorary woman, or the cat is an honorary dog. \n\n Ease of Use: Excellent. You already know your own status and it's easy to ask others, \"Do you have siblings?\" Sulloway also provides a 10-variable formula to measure \"Your Own Propensity To Rebel.\"", "According to Frank J. Sulloway, author of Born To Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives , if your loved ones chose a), you are a typical firstborn--an achieving, status conscious, defensive, incipient fascist terrorist. If you're a b), you are certainly a \"laterborn\"--a bold, compassionate iconoclast. \n\n Sulloway is hardly the first to extract personality distinctions from birth order. His twist is to use Darwinism to show how the familial struggle among siblings for parental attention accounts for everything in society from social rebellions to scientific revolutions. In Sulloway's universe, firstborns are dictatorial types who just don't get it, but they're happy to oppress freedom-loving laterborns who do. So how does Sulloway explain that the greatest scientific revolutionary of the 20 th century, Albert Einstein, is a firstborn? He doesn't.", "Until Harvard professor Howard Gardner came along, intelligence was like the Soviet Union: It was large, permanent, and unified. Then in 1983 he published his book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences , which cleaved intelligence into seven components. Recently, like a breakaway republic, Gardner has added an eighth intelligence and is considering a ninth.", "Gardner rejects the notion that intelligence is a \"single, general capacity\" that can be measured by taking a test. He believes an intelligence is the ability to \"solve problems or create products\" in a way that society values--that having it must have conferred an evolutionary advantage to us, and that there is biological evidence for it. That is, an intelligence can be destroyed due to brain injury, which could be called the \"man who mistook his wife for a hat\" criterion. Gardner says if you excel at one type of intelligence, it has no bearing on whether you'll be skilled at another. Instead of burdening people with eight ways to be inadequate instead of one, multiple intelligence advocates says the theory liberates people to find their own set of strengths.", "BLOOD TYPE \n\n What would Hippocrates think of a recent best seller that asserted that our health, diet, and even our personality are determined by our blood type? He would probably get to work on The Bile Bible . But if Hippocrates were Japanese, he wouldn't be at all surprised. They've been obsessed with blood type and personality for almost 30 years. They also choose mates with \"compatible\" blood types and their corporations assemble work teams based on blood type. Luckily, the Japanese economy died in time to save us from the corporate bloodletting fad. Until now.", "In Eat Right for Your Type , naturopath Peter J. D'Adamo writes that our ancient genetic heritage is represented today in the four human blood groups--O, A, B, and AB--and that we must follow the nutritional dictates that evolution laid down. He says Type O is the most ancient blood group, the one of the carnivorous big-game hunter, the self-reliant, risk-taking optimist. A later mutation is Type A, he writes, that of people adapting to an agrarian diet, who were cooperative, law-abiding, yet high-strung. Next came Type B from the Mongolian nomads, the most flexible and creative of the blood types. Finally, a modern quirk, is the rare AB, people who are somewhat confused, edgy, sensitive, yet charismatic. According to D'Adamo, eat the right foods for your type and your immune system will be strengthened and you'll lose weight.", "Gandhi Explanation: None. But D'Adamo's promotional materials do quote Elizabeth Hurley (Type O), in a Cosmopolitan interview, saying she read D'Adamo's \"absurd book,\" followed his plan, and \"lost an astounding amount of weight.\"", "Not surprisingly, this kind of information is of little interest when you've got a new companion volume ( Cook Right for Your Type ) to your best seller. Greg Kelly, a naturopath who works in D'Adamo's practice says, \"It's not a productive way for me to spend my time debating with people who have a different belief system. We try to help sick people get better.\" \n\n Ease of Use: Ouch. If you know your blood type, it is easy. If you don't, march down to the Red Cross, donate a pint, and they'll tell you. \n\n Applicability: Scientific questions aside, I'm an AB (OK, OK, I am charismatic), and I'm not following any diet that encourages me to eat a lot of snails.", "Unfortunately, D'Adamo's understanding of human origins is, according to Dr. Eric Meikle of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, \"completely worthless.\" According to Meikle, there is no evidence that Type O is the earliest blood type--quite the opposite since A and B occur in chimpanzees. Nor is it likely that humans went from being primarily carnivores to omnivores. Among living hunter-gatherers, he says, most of their calories come from vegetable matter, because bagging game is difficult. \"People who are able to eat the most meat are agriculturists,\" says Meikle. \"They keep [animals], raise them, and eat them.\"" ], [ "Applicability: As a method of understanding yourself and others, Sulloway's theory seems rather limited, except if you're in charge of hiring for Slobodan Milosevic. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: He was the youngest of four. \n\n \n\n PERSONALITY", "Sulloway (surprise! he's the third of four) also thinks his findings should be applied to selecting corporate leaders. In a nutshell: Oldests need not apply. As devoted as he is to birth order as a personality determinant, Sulloway allows other variables to creep into his theory to account for those rare firstborn revolutionaries. \"Whenever one encounters a firstborn radical (and family life does occasionally produce them), such individuals are likely to have experienced substantial conflict with a parent. Parent-offspring conflict makes honorary laterborns out of some firstborns.\" This is a little like saying all men prefer dogs and all women prefer cats. So a man with a cat is either an honorary woman, or the cat is an honorary dog. \n\n Ease of Use: Excellent. You already know your own status and it's easy to ask others, \"Do you have siblings?\" Sulloway also provides a 10-variable formula to measure \"Your Own Propensity To Rebel.\"", "According to Frank J. Sulloway, author of Born To Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives , if your loved ones chose a), you are a typical firstborn--an achieving, status conscious, defensive, incipient fascist terrorist. If you're a b), you are certainly a \"laterborn\"--a bold, compassionate iconoclast. \n\n Sulloway is hardly the first to extract personality distinctions from birth order. His twist is to use Darwinism to show how the familial struggle among siblings for parental attention accounts for everything in society from social rebellions to scientific revolutions. In Sulloway's universe, firstborns are dictatorial types who just don't get it, but they're happy to oppress freedom-loving laterborns who do. So how does Sulloway explain that the greatest scientific revolutionary of the 20 th century, Albert Einstein, is a firstborn? He doesn't.", "Until Harvard professor Howard Gardner came along, intelligence was like the Soviet Union: It was large, permanent, and unified. Then in 1983 he published his book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences , which cleaved intelligence into seven components. Recently, like a breakaway republic, Gardner has added an eighth intelligence and is considering a ninth.", "Why You're So Screwed Up \n\n Let's stipulate that you are unique, unfathomable, singular, sui generis. Now, let's find out how to categorize you, classify you, and sort you into a group that explains your temperament, your career choices, the strength of your immune system, and your ability to make up puns. \n\n Here follows an admittedly random guide to four popular methods designed to explain who you really are. I deliberately picked systems that purport to pinpoint something intrinsic in our natures. I judged the ease of use and applicability of each system, and since all of them illustrate their points with the lives of famous people, I also gauged how successfully each one explains the process by which Gandhi became Gandhi . \n\n BIRTH ORDER \n\n Would your friends and family say you are more like: a) Carlos the Jackal or b) Martin Luther King Jr.?; a) Phyllis Schlafly or b) Florence Nightingale?", "One of Gardner's missions is to apply his work to the classroom, since he believes schools are designed by people excelling in linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences to reward people who share those intelligences. He also believes that while our propensity toward certain types of intelligence is inborn, our abilities are not fixed. Understanding our areas of strength and weakness, he says, can provide more self-awareness and help users move to a \"higher level of skill.\"", "Gardner rejects the notion that intelligence is a \"single, general capacity\" that can be measured by taking a test. He believes an intelligence is the ability to \"solve problems or create products\" in a way that society values--that having it must have conferred an evolutionary advantage to us, and that there is biological evidence for it. That is, an intelligence can be destroyed due to brain injury, which could be called the \"man who mistook his wife for a hat\" criterion. Gardner says if you excel at one type of intelligence, it has no bearing on whether you'll be skilled at another. Instead of burdening people with eight ways to be inadequate instead of one, multiple intelligence advocates says the theory liberates people to find their own set of strengths.", "Why do people act like that? Hippocrates believed the answer was in the balance of four bodily fluids, or humors--blood, black bile, phlegm, and yellow bile. This notion lives on in our language today. We all know people who are essentially hotblooded, or melancholy (which literally means \"black bile\"), or phlegmatic, or who view the world with a jaundiced eye. Plato, less interested in humans' inner states than in their behavior as members of the state, redefined the four humors in social terms: as artisans, guardians, rationals, and idealists. According to psychologist David Keirsey, you are one of Plato's four types, you were born that way, you will always be that way, and you can find out which one you are by taking the temperament sorter quiz on his Web site. Sample questions: When the phone rings do you: a) hurry to get it first? or b) hope someone else will answer? Do you find visionaries and theorists: a) somewhat annoying? or b) rather fascinating?", "The seven original intelligences are: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal (my favorite, since I have a genius for self-absorption). The latest addition is naturalist intelligence. Gardner defines it as \"the ability to recognize and classify plants, minerals and animals.\" Gardner says you can see it in action in people who know every kind of dinosaur, or sneaker, or automobile. He is also considering adding existential intelligence, which, he says, refers to the inclination to ask: \"Who are we? Where do we come from? What's it all about? Why do we die?\" This could also be known as the \"Oy gevalt \" intelligence. Since I felt that his theory left out people who are skilled at the use of the senses of taste and smell, I lobbied him to add culinary intelligence. Gardner wasn't biting. I decided to forgo making a pitch for my own area of brilliance: procrastination intelligence.", "Keirsey does not muck around in your excretions in order to determine your personality. His criteria come from Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung by way of an American mother-daughter team named Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, who created the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The two women translated Jung's idea that personality is composed of four pairs of preferences--the most famous being extroverted and introverted--and created a systematic test to discern people's types. Keirsey has redefined these four pairs this way: \n\n Expressive (E) or Reserved (I) \n\n Observant (S) or Introspective (N) \n\n Tough-minded (T) or Friendly (F) \n\n Scheduling (J) or Probing (P) [Probing might better be defined as looking for alternatives]", "Ease of Use: Fair. Gardner says, \"Common sense, self-observation, and talking to others should suffice to tell you what is distinctive about your mind.\" But we want a quiz, Dr. Gardner! One is available in the book 7 Kinds of Smart: Identifying and Developing Your Many Intelligences , by Thomas Armstrong, which offers choices such as, \"I enjoy entertaining myself or others with tongue twisters, nonsense rhymes, or puns\" and \"I find it difficult to sit still for long periods of time.\" The MIDAS Web site provides descriptions of the intelligences, links to other multiple intelligence sites, and sells multiple intelligence testing materials (prices range from $10 to $35). \n\n Applicability: Assessing multiple intelligences probably has most value for schoolchildren or people who feel they have made a wrong career choice. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: In Frames of Mind Gardner writes that Gandhi exemplified interpersonal intelligence.", "Applicability: High. I feel I now understand better why I keep acting that way. It's also given me the sly sense that I know why other people are acting their way. Of course, that's very ENTP of me. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: According to Keirsey, Gandhi is an Idealist (an NF), what else? More specifically, an INFJ. \"INFJs have an unusually strong desire to contribute to the welfare of others. ... INFJs are scarce, little more than one percent of the population, which is too bad, considering their usefulness in the social order.\" \n\n \n\n INTELLIGENCE", "OK, he nailed me. As an example of how uncanny the type sorter can be, take Bill Clinton, who Keirsey classifies as an ESFP. In Keirsey's book Please Understand Me II , ESFP's are described as \"inclined to be impulsive and self-indulgent, which makes them vulnerable to seduction. ... Pleasure seems to be an end in itself ... they will do what they feel like in the moment rather than what is good for them in the long run ... blaming someone else if things don't turn out well. ... Intent on pleasing everybody, [ESFPs] can appear fickle, even promiscuous, to other types.\" On the other hand, maybe Clinton is just too hotblooded. \n\n Ease of Use: Good. I recommend taking the Temperament Sorter II and ignoring the Character Sorter, which I found confusing and not particularly accurate.", "The four sets of pairs can be matched up 16 different ways--with Keirsey organizing these into those Platonic groups of four. For example, I'm an NT, which makes me a Rational, therefore naturally curious, restless, and doubting. More specifically I'm an ENTP. As Keirsey writes: \"A rough draft is all they need to feel confident and ready to proceed into action. ... [They] have been known to engage in brinkmanship with their superiors. ... [ENTPs] like to spar verbally with their loved ones.\"", "BLOOD TYPE \n\n What would Hippocrates think of a recent best seller that asserted that our health, diet, and even our personality are determined by our blood type? He would probably get to work on The Bile Bible . But if Hippocrates were Japanese, he wouldn't be at all surprised. They've been obsessed with blood type and personality for almost 30 years. They also choose mates with \"compatible\" blood types and their corporations assemble work teams based on blood type. Luckily, the Japanese economy died in time to save us from the corporate bloodletting fad. Until now.", "In Eat Right for Your Type , naturopath Peter J. D'Adamo writes that our ancient genetic heritage is represented today in the four human blood groups--O, A, B, and AB--and that we must follow the nutritional dictates that evolution laid down. He says Type O is the most ancient blood group, the one of the carnivorous big-game hunter, the self-reliant, risk-taking optimist. A later mutation is Type A, he writes, that of people adapting to an agrarian diet, who were cooperative, law-abiding, yet high-strung. Next came Type B from the Mongolian nomads, the most flexible and creative of the blood types. Finally, a modern quirk, is the rare AB, people who are somewhat confused, edgy, sensitive, yet charismatic. According to D'Adamo, eat the right foods for your type and your immune system will be strengthened and you'll lose weight.", "Unfortunately, D'Adamo's understanding of human origins is, according to Dr. Eric Meikle of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, \"completely worthless.\" According to Meikle, there is no evidence that Type O is the earliest blood type--quite the opposite since A and B occur in chimpanzees. Nor is it likely that humans went from being primarily carnivores to omnivores. Among living hunter-gatherers, he says, most of their calories come from vegetable matter, because bagging game is difficult. \"People who are able to eat the most meat are agriculturists,\" says Meikle. \"They keep [animals], raise them, and eat them.\"", "Gandhi Explanation: None. But D'Adamo's promotional materials do quote Elizabeth Hurley (Type O), in a Cosmopolitan interview, saying she read D'Adamo's \"absurd book,\" followed his plan, and \"lost an astounding amount of weight.\"", "Not surprisingly, this kind of information is of little interest when you've got a new companion volume ( Cook Right for Your Type ) to your best seller. Greg Kelly, a naturopath who works in D'Adamo's practice says, \"It's not a productive way for me to spend my time debating with people who have a different belief system. We try to help sick people get better.\" \n\n Ease of Use: Ouch. If you know your blood type, it is easy. If you don't, march down to the Red Cross, donate a pint, and they'll tell you. \n\n Applicability: Scientific questions aside, I'm an AB (OK, OK, I am charismatic), and I'm not following any diet that encourages me to eat a lot of snails." ], [ "Gandhi Explanation: None. But D'Adamo's promotional materials do quote Elizabeth Hurley (Type O), in a Cosmopolitan interview, saying she read D'Adamo's \"absurd book,\" followed his plan, and \"lost an astounding amount of weight.\"", "Applicability: As a method of understanding yourself and others, Sulloway's theory seems rather limited, except if you're in charge of hiring for Slobodan Milosevic. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: He was the youngest of four. \n\n \n\n PERSONALITY", "Ease of Use: Fair. Gardner says, \"Common sense, self-observation, and talking to others should suffice to tell you what is distinctive about your mind.\" But we want a quiz, Dr. Gardner! One is available in the book 7 Kinds of Smart: Identifying and Developing Your Many Intelligences , by Thomas Armstrong, which offers choices such as, \"I enjoy entertaining myself or others with tongue twisters, nonsense rhymes, or puns\" and \"I find it difficult to sit still for long periods of time.\" The MIDAS Web site provides descriptions of the intelligences, links to other multiple intelligence sites, and sells multiple intelligence testing materials (prices range from $10 to $35). \n\n Applicability: Assessing multiple intelligences probably has most value for schoolchildren or people who feel they have made a wrong career choice. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: In Frames of Mind Gardner writes that Gandhi exemplified interpersonal intelligence.", "Applicability: High. I feel I now understand better why I keep acting that way. It's also given me the sly sense that I know why other people are acting their way. Of course, that's very ENTP of me. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: According to Keirsey, Gandhi is an Idealist (an NF), what else? More specifically, an INFJ. \"INFJs have an unusually strong desire to contribute to the welfare of others. ... INFJs are scarce, little more than one percent of the population, which is too bad, considering their usefulness in the social order.\" \n\n \n\n INTELLIGENCE", "Why You're So Screwed Up \n\n Let's stipulate that you are unique, unfathomable, singular, sui generis. Now, let's find out how to categorize you, classify you, and sort you into a group that explains your temperament, your career choices, the strength of your immune system, and your ability to make up puns. \n\n Here follows an admittedly random guide to four popular methods designed to explain who you really are. I deliberately picked systems that purport to pinpoint something intrinsic in our natures. I judged the ease of use and applicability of each system, and since all of them illustrate their points with the lives of famous people, I also gauged how successfully each one explains the process by which Gandhi became Gandhi . \n\n BIRTH ORDER \n\n Would your friends and family say you are more like: a) Carlos the Jackal or b) Martin Luther King Jr.?; a) Phyllis Schlafly or b) Florence Nightingale?", "Gardner rejects the notion that intelligence is a \"single, general capacity\" that can be measured by taking a test. He believes an intelligence is the ability to \"solve problems or create products\" in a way that society values--that having it must have conferred an evolutionary advantage to us, and that there is biological evidence for it. That is, an intelligence can be destroyed due to brain injury, which could be called the \"man who mistook his wife for a hat\" criterion. Gardner says if you excel at one type of intelligence, it has no bearing on whether you'll be skilled at another. Instead of burdening people with eight ways to be inadequate instead of one, multiple intelligence advocates says the theory liberates people to find their own set of strengths.", "The seven original intelligences are: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal (my favorite, since I have a genius for self-absorption). The latest addition is naturalist intelligence. Gardner defines it as \"the ability to recognize and classify plants, minerals and animals.\" Gardner says you can see it in action in people who know every kind of dinosaur, or sneaker, or automobile. He is also considering adding existential intelligence, which, he says, refers to the inclination to ask: \"Who are we? Where do we come from? What's it all about? Why do we die?\" This could also be known as the \"Oy gevalt \" intelligence. Since I felt that his theory left out people who are skilled at the use of the senses of taste and smell, I lobbied him to add culinary intelligence. Gardner wasn't biting. I decided to forgo making a pitch for my own area of brilliance: procrastination intelligence.", "Until Harvard professor Howard Gardner came along, intelligence was like the Soviet Union: It was large, permanent, and unified. Then in 1983 he published his book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences , which cleaved intelligence into seven components. Recently, like a breakaway republic, Gardner has added an eighth intelligence and is considering a ninth.", "One of Gardner's missions is to apply his work to the classroom, since he believes schools are designed by people excelling in linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences to reward people who share those intelligences. He also believes that while our propensity toward certain types of intelligence is inborn, our abilities are not fixed. Understanding our areas of strength and weakness, he says, can provide more self-awareness and help users move to a \"higher level of skill.\"", "Keirsey does not muck around in your excretions in order to determine your personality. His criteria come from Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung by way of an American mother-daughter team named Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, who created the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The two women translated Jung's idea that personality is composed of four pairs of preferences--the most famous being extroverted and introverted--and created a systematic test to discern people's types. Keirsey has redefined these four pairs this way: \n\n Expressive (E) or Reserved (I) \n\n Observant (S) or Introspective (N) \n\n Tough-minded (T) or Friendly (F) \n\n Scheduling (J) or Probing (P) [Probing might better be defined as looking for alternatives]", "According to Frank J. Sulloway, author of Born To Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives , if your loved ones chose a), you are a typical firstborn--an achieving, status conscious, defensive, incipient fascist terrorist. If you're a b), you are certainly a \"laterborn\"--a bold, compassionate iconoclast. \n\n Sulloway is hardly the first to extract personality distinctions from birth order. His twist is to use Darwinism to show how the familial struggle among siblings for parental attention accounts for everything in society from social rebellions to scientific revolutions. In Sulloway's universe, firstborns are dictatorial types who just don't get it, but they're happy to oppress freedom-loving laterborns who do. So how does Sulloway explain that the greatest scientific revolutionary of the 20 th century, Albert Einstein, is a firstborn? He doesn't.", "The four sets of pairs can be matched up 16 different ways--with Keirsey organizing these into those Platonic groups of four. For example, I'm an NT, which makes me a Rational, therefore naturally curious, restless, and doubting. More specifically I'm an ENTP. As Keirsey writes: \"A rough draft is all they need to feel confident and ready to proceed into action. ... [They] have been known to engage in brinkmanship with their superiors. ... [ENTPs] like to spar verbally with their loved ones.\"", "Why do people act like that? Hippocrates believed the answer was in the balance of four bodily fluids, or humors--blood, black bile, phlegm, and yellow bile. This notion lives on in our language today. We all know people who are essentially hotblooded, or melancholy (which literally means \"black bile\"), or phlegmatic, or who view the world with a jaundiced eye. Plato, less interested in humans' inner states than in their behavior as members of the state, redefined the four humors in social terms: as artisans, guardians, rationals, and idealists. According to psychologist David Keirsey, you are one of Plato's four types, you were born that way, you will always be that way, and you can find out which one you are by taking the temperament sorter quiz on his Web site. Sample questions: When the phone rings do you: a) hurry to get it first? or b) hope someone else will answer? Do you find visionaries and theorists: a) somewhat annoying? or b) rather fascinating?", "Sulloway (surprise! he's the third of four) also thinks his findings should be applied to selecting corporate leaders. In a nutshell: Oldests need not apply. As devoted as he is to birth order as a personality determinant, Sulloway allows other variables to creep into his theory to account for those rare firstborn revolutionaries. \"Whenever one encounters a firstborn radical (and family life does occasionally produce them), such individuals are likely to have experienced substantial conflict with a parent. Parent-offspring conflict makes honorary laterborns out of some firstborns.\" This is a little like saying all men prefer dogs and all women prefer cats. So a man with a cat is either an honorary woman, or the cat is an honorary dog. \n\n Ease of Use: Excellent. You already know your own status and it's easy to ask others, \"Do you have siblings?\" Sulloway also provides a 10-variable formula to measure \"Your Own Propensity To Rebel.\"", "OK, he nailed me. As an example of how uncanny the type sorter can be, take Bill Clinton, who Keirsey classifies as an ESFP. In Keirsey's book Please Understand Me II , ESFP's are described as \"inclined to be impulsive and self-indulgent, which makes them vulnerable to seduction. ... Pleasure seems to be an end in itself ... they will do what they feel like in the moment rather than what is good for them in the long run ... blaming someone else if things don't turn out well. ... Intent on pleasing everybody, [ESFPs] can appear fickle, even promiscuous, to other types.\" On the other hand, maybe Clinton is just too hotblooded. \n\n Ease of Use: Good. I recommend taking the Temperament Sorter II and ignoring the Character Sorter, which I found confusing and not particularly accurate.", "Unfortunately, D'Adamo's understanding of human origins is, according to Dr. Eric Meikle of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, \"completely worthless.\" According to Meikle, there is no evidence that Type O is the earliest blood type--quite the opposite since A and B occur in chimpanzees. Nor is it likely that humans went from being primarily carnivores to omnivores. Among living hunter-gatherers, he says, most of their calories come from vegetable matter, because bagging game is difficult. \"People who are able to eat the most meat are agriculturists,\" says Meikle. \"They keep [animals], raise them, and eat them.\"", "In Eat Right for Your Type , naturopath Peter J. D'Adamo writes that our ancient genetic heritage is represented today in the four human blood groups--O, A, B, and AB--and that we must follow the nutritional dictates that evolution laid down. He says Type O is the most ancient blood group, the one of the carnivorous big-game hunter, the self-reliant, risk-taking optimist. A later mutation is Type A, he writes, that of people adapting to an agrarian diet, who were cooperative, law-abiding, yet high-strung. Next came Type B from the Mongolian nomads, the most flexible and creative of the blood types. Finally, a modern quirk, is the rare AB, people who are somewhat confused, edgy, sensitive, yet charismatic. According to D'Adamo, eat the right foods for your type and your immune system will be strengthened and you'll lose weight.", "Not surprisingly, this kind of information is of little interest when you've got a new companion volume ( Cook Right for Your Type ) to your best seller. Greg Kelly, a naturopath who works in D'Adamo's practice says, \"It's not a productive way for me to spend my time debating with people who have a different belief system. We try to help sick people get better.\" \n\n Ease of Use: Ouch. If you know your blood type, it is easy. If you don't, march down to the Red Cross, donate a pint, and they'll tell you. \n\n Applicability: Scientific questions aside, I'm an AB (OK, OK, I am charismatic), and I'm not following any diet that encourages me to eat a lot of snails.", "BLOOD TYPE \n\n What would Hippocrates think of a recent best seller that asserted that our health, diet, and even our personality are determined by our blood type? He would probably get to work on The Bile Bible . But if Hippocrates were Japanese, he wouldn't be at all surprised. They've been obsessed with blood type and personality for almost 30 years. They also choose mates with \"compatible\" blood types and their corporations assemble work teams based on blood type. Luckily, the Japanese economy died in time to save us from the corporate bloodletting fad. Until now." ], [ "One of Gardner's missions is to apply his work to the classroom, since he believes schools are designed by people excelling in linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences to reward people who share those intelligences. He also believes that while our propensity toward certain types of intelligence is inborn, our abilities are not fixed. Understanding our areas of strength and weakness, he says, can provide more self-awareness and help users move to a \"higher level of skill.\"", "Until Harvard professor Howard Gardner came along, intelligence was like the Soviet Union: It was large, permanent, and unified. Then in 1983 he published his book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences , which cleaved intelligence into seven components. Recently, like a breakaway republic, Gardner has added an eighth intelligence and is considering a ninth.", "Gardner rejects the notion that intelligence is a \"single, general capacity\" that can be measured by taking a test. He believes an intelligence is the ability to \"solve problems or create products\" in a way that society values--that having it must have conferred an evolutionary advantage to us, and that there is biological evidence for it. That is, an intelligence can be destroyed due to brain injury, which could be called the \"man who mistook his wife for a hat\" criterion. Gardner says if you excel at one type of intelligence, it has no bearing on whether you'll be skilled at another. Instead of burdening people with eight ways to be inadequate instead of one, multiple intelligence advocates says the theory liberates people to find their own set of strengths.", "Ease of Use: Fair. Gardner says, \"Common sense, self-observation, and talking to others should suffice to tell you what is distinctive about your mind.\" But we want a quiz, Dr. Gardner! One is available in the book 7 Kinds of Smart: Identifying and Developing Your Many Intelligences , by Thomas Armstrong, which offers choices such as, \"I enjoy entertaining myself or others with tongue twisters, nonsense rhymes, or puns\" and \"I find it difficult to sit still for long periods of time.\" The MIDAS Web site provides descriptions of the intelligences, links to other multiple intelligence sites, and sells multiple intelligence testing materials (prices range from $10 to $35). \n\n Applicability: Assessing multiple intelligences probably has most value for schoolchildren or people who feel they have made a wrong career choice. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: In Frames of Mind Gardner writes that Gandhi exemplified interpersonal intelligence.", "The seven original intelligences are: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal (my favorite, since I have a genius for self-absorption). The latest addition is naturalist intelligence. Gardner defines it as \"the ability to recognize and classify plants, minerals and animals.\" Gardner says you can see it in action in people who know every kind of dinosaur, or sneaker, or automobile. He is also considering adding existential intelligence, which, he says, refers to the inclination to ask: \"Who are we? Where do we come from? What's it all about? Why do we die?\" This could also be known as the \"Oy gevalt \" intelligence. Since I felt that his theory left out people who are skilled at the use of the senses of taste and smell, I lobbied him to add culinary intelligence. Gardner wasn't biting. I decided to forgo making a pitch for my own area of brilliance: procrastination intelligence.", "Applicability: High. I feel I now understand better why I keep acting that way. It's also given me the sly sense that I know why other people are acting their way. Of course, that's very ENTP of me. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: According to Keirsey, Gandhi is an Idealist (an NF), what else? More specifically, an INFJ. \"INFJs have an unusually strong desire to contribute to the welfare of others. ... INFJs are scarce, little more than one percent of the population, which is too bad, considering their usefulness in the social order.\" \n\n \n\n INTELLIGENCE", "Keirsey does not muck around in your excretions in order to determine your personality. His criteria come from Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung by way of an American mother-daughter team named Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, who created the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The two women translated Jung's idea that personality is composed of four pairs of preferences--the most famous being extroverted and introverted--and created a systematic test to discern people's types. Keirsey has redefined these four pairs this way: \n\n Expressive (E) or Reserved (I) \n\n Observant (S) or Introspective (N) \n\n Tough-minded (T) or Friendly (F) \n\n Scheduling (J) or Probing (P) [Probing might better be defined as looking for alternatives]", "The four sets of pairs can be matched up 16 different ways--with Keirsey organizing these into those Platonic groups of four. For example, I'm an NT, which makes me a Rational, therefore naturally curious, restless, and doubting. More specifically I'm an ENTP. As Keirsey writes: \"A rough draft is all they need to feel confident and ready to proceed into action. ... [They] have been known to engage in brinkmanship with their superiors. ... [ENTPs] like to spar verbally with their loved ones.\"", "Applicability: As a method of understanding yourself and others, Sulloway's theory seems rather limited, except if you're in charge of hiring for Slobodan Milosevic. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: He was the youngest of four. \n\n \n\n PERSONALITY", "Why You're So Screwed Up \n\n Let's stipulate that you are unique, unfathomable, singular, sui generis. Now, let's find out how to categorize you, classify you, and sort you into a group that explains your temperament, your career choices, the strength of your immune system, and your ability to make up puns. \n\n Here follows an admittedly random guide to four popular methods designed to explain who you really are. I deliberately picked systems that purport to pinpoint something intrinsic in our natures. I judged the ease of use and applicability of each system, and since all of them illustrate their points with the lives of famous people, I also gauged how successfully each one explains the process by which Gandhi became Gandhi . \n\n BIRTH ORDER \n\n Would your friends and family say you are more like: a) Carlos the Jackal or b) Martin Luther King Jr.?; a) Phyllis Schlafly or b) Florence Nightingale?", "According to Frank J. Sulloway, author of Born To Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives , if your loved ones chose a), you are a typical firstborn--an achieving, status conscious, defensive, incipient fascist terrorist. If you're a b), you are certainly a \"laterborn\"--a bold, compassionate iconoclast. \n\n Sulloway is hardly the first to extract personality distinctions from birth order. His twist is to use Darwinism to show how the familial struggle among siblings for parental attention accounts for everything in society from social rebellions to scientific revolutions. In Sulloway's universe, firstborns are dictatorial types who just don't get it, but they're happy to oppress freedom-loving laterborns who do. So how does Sulloway explain that the greatest scientific revolutionary of the 20 th century, Albert Einstein, is a firstborn? He doesn't.", "Why do people act like that? Hippocrates believed the answer was in the balance of four bodily fluids, or humors--blood, black bile, phlegm, and yellow bile. This notion lives on in our language today. We all know people who are essentially hotblooded, or melancholy (which literally means \"black bile\"), or phlegmatic, or who view the world with a jaundiced eye. Plato, less interested in humans' inner states than in their behavior as members of the state, redefined the four humors in social terms: as artisans, guardians, rationals, and idealists. According to psychologist David Keirsey, you are one of Plato's four types, you were born that way, you will always be that way, and you can find out which one you are by taking the temperament sorter quiz on his Web site. Sample questions: When the phone rings do you: a) hurry to get it first? or b) hope someone else will answer? Do you find visionaries and theorists: a) somewhat annoying? or b) rather fascinating?", "Sulloway (surprise! he's the third of four) also thinks his findings should be applied to selecting corporate leaders. In a nutshell: Oldests need not apply. As devoted as he is to birth order as a personality determinant, Sulloway allows other variables to creep into his theory to account for those rare firstborn revolutionaries. \"Whenever one encounters a firstborn radical (and family life does occasionally produce them), such individuals are likely to have experienced substantial conflict with a parent. Parent-offspring conflict makes honorary laterborns out of some firstborns.\" This is a little like saying all men prefer dogs and all women prefer cats. So a man with a cat is either an honorary woman, or the cat is an honorary dog. \n\n Ease of Use: Excellent. You already know your own status and it's easy to ask others, \"Do you have siblings?\" Sulloway also provides a 10-variable formula to measure \"Your Own Propensity To Rebel.\"", "Gandhi Explanation: None. But D'Adamo's promotional materials do quote Elizabeth Hurley (Type O), in a Cosmopolitan interview, saying she read D'Adamo's \"absurd book,\" followed his plan, and \"lost an astounding amount of weight.\"", "OK, he nailed me. As an example of how uncanny the type sorter can be, take Bill Clinton, who Keirsey classifies as an ESFP. In Keirsey's book Please Understand Me II , ESFP's are described as \"inclined to be impulsive and self-indulgent, which makes them vulnerable to seduction. ... Pleasure seems to be an end in itself ... they will do what they feel like in the moment rather than what is good for them in the long run ... blaming someone else if things don't turn out well. ... Intent on pleasing everybody, [ESFPs] can appear fickle, even promiscuous, to other types.\" On the other hand, maybe Clinton is just too hotblooded. \n\n Ease of Use: Good. I recommend taking the Temperament Sorter II and ignoring the Character Sorter, which I found confusing and not particularly accurate.", "BLOOD TYPE \n\n What would Hippocrates think of a recent best seller that asserted that our health, diet, and even our personality are determined by our blood type? He would probably get to work on The Bile Bible . But if Hippocrates were Japanese, he wouldn't be at all surprised. They've been obsessed with blood type and personality for almost 30 years. They also choose mates with \"compatible\" blood types and their corporations assemble work teams based on blood type. Luckily, the Japanese economy died in time to save us from the corporate bloodletting fad. Until now.", "In Eat Right for Your Type , naturopath Peter J. D'Adamo writes that our ancient genetic heritage is represented today in the four human blood groups--O, A, B, and AB--and that we must follow the nutritional dictates that evolution laid down. He says Type O is the most ancient blood group, the one of the carnivorous big-game hunter, the self-reliant, risk-taking optimist. A later mutation is Type A, he writes, that of people adapting to an agrarian diet, who were cooperative, law-abiding, yet high-strung. Next came Type B from the Mongolian nomads, the most flexible and creative of the blood types. Finally, a modern quirk, is the rare AB, people who are somewhat confused, edgy, sensitive, yet charismatic. According to D'Adamo, eat the right foods for your type and your immune system will be strengthened and you'll lose weight.", "Unfortunately, D'Adamo's understanding of human origins is, according to Dr. Eric Meikle of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, \"completely worthless.\" According to Meikle, there is no evidence that Type O is the earliest blood type--quite the opposite since A and B occur in chimpanzees. Nor is it likely that humans went from being primarily carnivores to omnivores. Among living hunter-gatherers, he says, most of their calories come from vegetable matter, because bagging game is difficult. \"People who are able to eat the most meat are agriculturists,\" says Meikle. \"They keep [animals], raise them, and eat them.\"", "Not surprisingly, this kind of information is of little interest when you've got a new companion volume ( Cook Right for Your Type ) to your best seller. Greg Kelly, a naturopath who works in D'Adamo's practice says, \"It's not a productive way for me to spend my time debating with people who have a different belief system. We try to help sick people get better.\" \n\n Ease of Use: Ouch. If you know your blood type, it is easy. If you don't, march down to the Red Cross, donate a pint, and they'll tell you. \n\n Applicability: Scientific questions aside, I'm an AB (OK, OK, I am charismatic), and I'm not following any diet that encourages me to eat a lot of snails." ], [ "Gandhi Explanation: None. But D'Adamo's promotional materials do quote Elizabeth Hurley (Type O), in a Cosmopolitan interview, saying she read D'Adamo's \"absurd book,\" followed his plan, and \"lost an astounding amount of weight.\"", "Unfortunately, D'Adamo's understanding of human origins is, according to Dr. Eric Meikle of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, \"completely worthless.\" According to Meikle, there is no evidence that Type O is the earliest blood type--quite the opposite since A and B occur in chimpanzees. Nor is it likely that humans went from being primarily carnivores to omnivores. Among living hunter-gatherers, he says, most of their calories come from vegetable matter, because bagging game is difficult. \"People who are able to eat the most meat are agriculturists,\" says Meikle. \"They keep [animals], raise them, and eat them.\"", "In Eat Right for Your Type , naturopath Peter J. D'Adamo writes that our ancient genetic heritage is represented today in the four human blood groups--O, A, B, and AB--and that we must follow the nutritional dictates that evolution laid down. He says Type O is the most ancient blood group, the one of the carnivorous big-game hunter, the self-reliant, risk-taking optimist. A later mutation is Type A, he writes, that of people adapting to an agrarian diet, who were cooperative, law-abiding, yet high-strung. Next came Type B from the Mongolian nomads, the most flexible and creative of the blood types. Finally, a modern quirk, is the rare AB, people who are somewhat confused, edgy, sensitive, yet charismatic. According to D'Adamo, eat the right foods for your type and your immune system will be strengthened and you'll lose weight.", "Not surprisingly, this kind of information is of little interest when you've got a new companion volume ( Cook Right for Your Type ) to your best seller. Greg Kelly, a naturopath who works in D'Adamo's practice says, \"It's not a productive way for me to spend my time debating with people who have a different belief system. We try to help sick people get better.\" \n\n Ease of Use: Ouch. If you know your blood type, it is easy. If you don't, march down to the Red Cross, donate a pint, and they'll tell you. \n\n Applicability: Scientific questions aside, I'm an AB (OK, OK, I am charismatic), and I'm not following any diet that encourages me to eat a lot of snails.", "BLOOD TYPE \n\n What would Hippocrates think of a recent best seller that asserted that our health, diet, and even our personality are determined by our blood type? He would probably get to work on The Bile Bible . But if Hippocrates were Japanese, he wouldn't be at all surprised. They've been obsessed with blood type and personality for almost 30 years. They also choose mates with \"compatible\" blood types and their corporations assemble work teams based on blood type. Luckily, the Japanese economy died in time to save us from the corporate bloodletting fad. Until now.", "Why do people act like that? Hippocrates believed the answer was in the balance of four bodily fluids, or humors--blood, black bile, phlegm, and yellow bile. This notion lives on in our language today. We all know people who are essentially hotblooded, or melancholy (which literally means \"black bile\"), or phlegmatic, or who view the world with a jaundiced eye. Plato, less interested in humans' inner states than in their behavior as members of the state, redefined the four humors in social terms: as artisans, guardians, rationals, and idealists. According to psychologist David Keirsey, you are one of Plato's four types, you were born that way, you will always be that way, and you can find out which one you are by taking the temperament sorter quiz on his Web site. Sample questions: When the phone rings do you: a) hurry to get it first? or b) hope someone else will answer? Do you find visionaries and theorists: a) somewhat annoying? or b) rather fascinating?", "Keirsey does not muck around in your excretions in order to determine your personality. His criteria come from Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung by way of an American mother-daughter team named Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, who created the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The two women translated Jung's idea that personality is composed of four pairs of preferences--the most famous being extroverted and introverted--and created a systematic test to discern people's types. Keirsey has redefined these four pairs this way: \n\n Expressive (E) or Reserved (I) \n\n Observant (S) or Introspective (N) \n\n Tough-minded (T) or Friendly (F) \n\n Scheduling (J) or Probing (P) [Probing might better be defined as looking for alternatives]", "Why You're So Screwed Up \n\n Let's stipulate that you are unique, unfathomable, singular, sui generis. Now, let's find out how to categorize you, classify you, and sort you into a group that explains your temperament, your career choices, the strength of your immune system, and your ability to make up puns. \n\n Here follows an admittedly random guide to four popular methods designed to explain who you really are. I deliberately picked systems that purport to pinpoint something intrinsic in our natures. I judged the ease of use and applicability of each system, and since all of them illustrate their points with the lives of famous people, I also gauged how successfully each one explains the process by which Gandhi became Gandhi . \n\n BIRTH ORDER \n\n Would your friends and family say you are more like: a) Carlos the Jackal or b) Martin Luther King Jr.?; a) Phyllis Schlafly or b) Florence Nightingale?", "OK, he nailed me. As an example of how uncanny the type sorter can be, take Bill Clinton, who Keirsey classifies as an ESFP. In Keirsey's book Please Understand Me II , ESFP's are described as \"inclined to be impulsive and self-indulgent, which makes them vulnerable to seduction. ... Pleasure seems to be an end in itself ... they will do what they feel like in the moment rather than what is good for them in the long run ... blaming someone else if things don't turn out well. ... Intent on pleasing everybody, [ESFPs] can appear fickle, even promiscuous, to other types.\" On the other hand, maybe Clinton is just too hotblooded. \n\n Ease of Use: Good. I recommend taking the Temperament Sorter II and ignoring the Character Sorter, which I found confusing and not particularly accurate.", "The four sets of pairs can be matched up 16 different ways--with Keirsey organizing these into those Platonic groups of four. For example, I'm an NT, which makes me a Rational, therefore naturally curious, restless, and doubting. More specifically I'm an ENTP. As Keirsey writes: \"A rough draft is all they need to feel confident and ready to proceed into action. ... [They] have been known to engage in brinkmanship with their superiors. ... [ENTPs] like to spar verbally with their loved ones.\"", "Applicability: High. I feel I now understand better why I keep acting that way. It's also given me the sly sense that I know why other people are acting their way. Of course, that's very ENTP of me. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: According to Keirsey, Gandhi is an Idealist (an NF), what else? More specifically, an INFJ. \"INFJs have an unusually strong desire to contribute to the welfare of others. ... INFJs are scarce, little more than one percent of the population, which is too bad, considering their usefulness in the social order.\" \n\n \n\n INTELLIGENCE", "Applicability: As a method of understanding yourself and others, Sulloway's theory seems rather limited, except if you're in charge of hiring for Slobodan Milosevic. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: He was the youngest of four. \n\n \n\n PERSONALITY", "According to Frank J. Sulloway, author of Born To Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives , if your loved ones chose a), you are a typical firstborn--an achieving, status conscious, defensive, incipient fascist terrorist. If you're a b), you are certainly a \"laterborn\"--a bold, compassionate iconoclast. \n\n Sulloway is hardly the first to extract personality distinctions from birth order. His twist is to use Darwinism to show how the familial struggle among siblings for parental attention accounts for everything in society from social rebellions to scientific revolutions. In Sulloway's universe, firstborns are dictatorial types who just don't get it, but they're happy to oppress freedom-loving laterborns who do. So how does Sulloway explain that the greatest scientific revolutionary of the 20 th century, Albert Einstein, is a firstborn? He doesn't.", "The seven original intelligences are: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal (my favorite, since I have a genius for self-absorption). The latest addition is naturalist intelligence. Gardner defines it as \"the ability to recognize and classify plants, minerals and animals.\" Gardner says you can see it in action in people who know every kind of dinosaur, or sneaker, or automobile. He is also considering adding existential intelligence, which, he says, refers to the inclination to ask: \"Who are we? Where do we come from? What's it all about? Why do we die?\" This could also be known as the \"Oy gevalt \" intelligence. Since I felt that his theory left out people who are skilled at the use of the senses of taste and smell, I lobbied him to add culinary intelligence. Gardner wasn't biting. I decided to forgo making a pitch for my own area of brilliance: procrastination intelligence.", "Sulloway (surprise! he's the third of four) also thinks his findings should be applied to selecting corporate leaders. In a nutshell: Oldests need not apply. As devoted as he is to birth order as a personality determinant, Sulloway allows other variables to creep into his theory to account for those rare firstborn revolutionaries. \"Whenever one encounters a firstborn radical (and family life does occasionally produce them), such individuals are likely to have experienced substantial conflict with a parent. Parent-offspring conflict makes honorary laterborns out of some firstborns.\" This is a little like saying all men prefer dogs and all women prefer cats. So a man with a cat is either an honorary woman, or the cat is an honorary dog. \n\n Ease of Use: Excellent. You already know your own status and it's easy to ask others, \"Do you have siblings?\" Sulloway also provides a 10-variable formula to measure \"Your Own Propensity To Rebel.\"", "One of Gardner's missions is to apply his work to the classroom, since he believes schools are designed by people excelling in linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences to reward people who share those intelligences. He also believes that while our propensity toward certain types of intelligence is inborn, our abilities are not fixed. Understanding our areas of strength and weakness, he says, can provide more self-awareness and help users move to a \"higher level of skill.\"", "Until Harvard professor Howard Gardner came along, intelligence was like the Soviet Union: It was large, permanent, and unified. Then in 1983 he published his book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences , which cleaved intelligence into seven components. Recently, like a breakaway republic, Gardner has added an eighth intelligence and is considering a ninth.", "Gardner rejects the notion that intelligence is a \"single, general capacity\" that can be measured by taking a test. He believes an intelligence is the ability to \"solve problems or create products\" in a way that society values--that having it must have conferred an evolutionary advantage to us, and that there is biological evidence for it. That is, an intelligence can be destroyed due to brain injury, which could be called the \"man who mistook his wife for a hat\" criterion. Gardner says if you excel at one type of intelligence, it has no bearing on whether you'll be skilled at another. Instead of burdening people with eight ways to be inadequate instead of one, multiple intelligence advocates says the theory liberates people to find their own set of strengths.", "Ease of Use: Fair. Gardner says, \"Common sense, self-observation, and talking to others should suffice to tell you what is distinctive about your mind.\" But we want a quiz, Dr. Gardner! One is available in the book 7 Kinds of Smart: Identifying and Developing Your Many Intelligences , by Thomas Armstrong, which offers choices such as, \"I enjoy entertaining myself or others with tongue twisters, nonsense rhymes, or puns\" and \"I find it difficult to sit still for long periods of time.\" The MIDAS Web site provides descriptions of the intelligences, links to other multiple intelligence sites, and sells multiple intelligence testing materials (prices range from $10 to $35). \n\n Applicability: Assessing multiple intelligences probably has most value for schoolchildren or people who feel they have made a wrong career choice. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: In Frames of Mind Gardner writes that Gandhi exemplified interpersonal intelligence." ], [ "Why do people act like that? Hippocrates believed the answer was in the balance of four bodily fluids, or humors--blood, black bile, phlegm, and yellow bile. This notion lives on in our language today. We all know people who are essentially hotblooded, or melancholy (which literally means \"black bile\"), or phlegmatic, or who view the world with a jaundiced eye. Plato, less interested in humans' inner states than in their behavior as members of the state, redefined the four humors in social terms: as artisans, guardians, rationals, and idealists. According to psychologist David Keirsey, you are one of Plato's four types, you were born that way, you will always be that way, and you can find out which one you are by taking the temperament sorter quiz on his Web site. Sample questions: When the phone rings do you: a) hurry to get it first? or b) hope someone else will answer? Do you find visionaries and theorists: a) somewhat annoying? or b) rather fascinating?", "Keirsey does not muck around in your excretions in order to determine your personality. His criteria come from Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung by way of an American mother-daughter team named Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, who created the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The two women translated Jung's idea that personality is composed of four pairs of preferences--the most famous being extroverted and introverted--and created a systematic test to discern people's types. Keirsey has redefined these four pairs this way: \n\n Expressive (E) or Reserved (I) \n\n Observant (S) or Introspective (N) \n\n Tough-minded (T) or Friendly (F) \n\n Scheduling (J) or Probing (P) [Probing might better be defined as looking for alternatives]", "The four sets of pairs can be matched up 16 different ways--with Keirsey organizing these into those Platonic groups of four. For example, I'm an NT, which makes me a Rational, therefore naturally curious, restless, and doubting. More specifically I'm an ENTP. As Keirsey writes: \"A rough draft is all they need to feel confident and ready to proceed into action. ... [They] have been known to engage in brinkmanship with their superiors. ... [ENTPs] like to spar verbally with their loved ones.\"", "Applicability: As a method of understanding yourself and others, Sulloway's theory seems rather limited, except if you're in charge of hiring for Slobodan Milosevic. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: He was the youngest of four. \n\n \n\n PERSONALITY", "OK, he nailed me. As an example of how uncanny the type sorter can be, take Bill Clinton, who Keirsey classifies as an ESFP. In Keirsey's book Please Understand Me II , ESFP's are described as \"inclined to be impulsive and self-indulgent, which makes them vulnerable to seduction. ... Pleasure seems to be an end in itself ... they will do what they feel like in the moment rather than what is good for them in the long run ... blaming someone else if things don't turn out well. ... Intent on pleasing everybody, [ESFPs] can appear fickle, even promiscuous, to other types.\" On the other hand, maybe Clinton is just too hotblooded. \n\n Ease of Use: Good. I recommend taking the Temperament Sorter II and ignoring the Character Sorter, which I found confusing and not particularly accurate.", "Applicability: High. I feel I now understand better why I keep acting that way. It's also given me the sly sense that I know why other people are acting their way. Of course, that's very ENTP of me. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: According to Keirsey, Gandhi is an Idealist (an NF), what else? More specifically, an INFJ. \"INFJs have an unusually strong desire to contribute to the welfare of others. ... INFJs are scarce, little more than one percent of the population, which is too bad, considering their usefulness in the social order.\" \n\n \n\n INTELLIGENCE", "Why You're So Screwed Up \n\n Let's stipulate that you are unique, unfathomable, singular, sui generis. Now, let's find out how to categorize you, classify you, and sort you into a group that explains your temperament, your career choices, the strength of your immune system, and your ability to make up puns. \n\n Here follows an admittedly random guide to four popular methods designed to explain who you really are. I deliberately picked systems that purport to pinpoint something intrinsic in our natures. I judged the ease of use and applicability of each system, and since all of them illustrate their points with the lives of famous people, I also gauged how successfully each one explains the process by which Gandhi became Gandhi . \n\n BIRTH ORDER \n\n Would your friends and family say you are more like: a) Carlos the Jackal or b) Martin Luther King Jr.?; a) Phyllis Schlafly or b) Florence Nightingale?", "Until Harvard professor Howard Gardner came along, intelligence was like the Soviet Union: It was large, permanent, and unified. Then in 1983 he published his book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences , which cleaved intelligence into seven components. Recently, like a breakaway republic, Gardner has added an eighth intelligence and is considering a ninth.", "According to Frank J. Sulloway, author of Born To Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives , if your loved ones chose a), you are a typical firstborn--an achieving, status conscious, defensive, incipient fascist terrorist. If you're a b), you are certainly a \"laterborn\"--a bold, compassionate iconoclast. \n\n Sulloway is hardly the first to extract personality distinctions from birth order. His twist is to use Darwinism to show how the familial struggle among siblings for parental attention accounts for everything in society from social rebellions to scientific revolutions. In Sulloway's universe, firstborns are dictatorial types who just don't get it, but they're happy to oppress freedom-loving laterborns who do. So how does Sulloway explain that the greatest scientific revolutionary of the 20 th century, Albert Einstein, is a firstborn? He doesn't.", "Sulloway (surprise! he's the third of four) also thinks his findings should be applied to selecting corporate leaders. In a nutshell: Oldests need not apply. As devoted as he is to birth order as a personality determinant, Sulloway allows other variables to creep into his theory to account for those rare firstborn revolutionaries. \"Whenever one encounters a firstborn radical (and family life does occasionally produce them), such individuals are likely to have experienced substantial conflict with a parent. Parent-offspring conflict makes honorary laterborns out of some firstborns.\" This is a little like saying all men prefer dogs and all women prefer cats. So a man with a cat is either an honorary woman, or the cat is an honorary dog. \n\n Ease of Use: Excellent. You already know your own status and it's easy to ask others, \"Do you have siblings?\" Sulloway also provides a 10-variable formula to measure \"Your Own Propensity To Rebel.\"", "One of Gardner's missions is to apply his work to the classroom, since he believes schools are designed by people excelling in linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences to reward people who share those intelligences. He also believes that while our propensity toward certain types of intelligence is inborn, our abilities are not fixed. Understanding our areas of strength and weakness, he says, can provide more self-awareness and help users move to a \"higher level of skill.\"", "Gardner rejects the notion that intelligence is a \"single, general capacity\" that can be measured by taking a test. He believes an intelligence is the ability to \"solve problems or create products\" in a way that society values--that having it must have conferred an evolutionary advantage to us, and that there is biological evidence for it. That is, an intelligence can be destroyed due to brain injury, which could be called the \"man who mistook his wife for a hat\" criterion. Gardner says if you excel at one type of intelligence, it has no bearing on whether you'll be skilled at another. Instead of burdening people with eight ways to be inadequate instead of one, multiple intelligence advocates says the theory liberates people to find their own set of strengths.", "BLOOD TYPE \n\n What would Hippocrates think of a recent best seller that asserted that our health, diet, and even our personality are determined by our blood type? He would probably get to work on The Bile Bible . But if Hippocrates were Japanese, he wouldn't be at all surprised. They've been obsessed with blood type and personality for almost 30 years. They also choose mates with \"compatible\" blood types and their corporations assemble work teams based on blood type. Luckily, the Japanese economy died in time to save us from the corporate bloodletting fad. Until now.", "Ease of Use: Fair. Gardner says, \"Common sense, self-observation, and talking to others should suffice to tell you what is distinctive about your mind.\" But we want a quiz, Dr. Gardner! One is available in the book 7 Kinds of Smart: Identifying and Developing Your Many Intelligences , by Thomas Armstrong, which offers choices such as, \"I enjoy entertaining myself or others with tongue twisters, nonsense rhymes, or puns\" and \"I find it difficult to sit still for long periods of time.\" The MIDAS Web site provides descriptions of the intelligences, links to other multiple intelligence sites, and sells multiple intelligence testing materials (prices range from $10 to $35). \n\n Applicability: Assessing multiple intelligences probably has most value for schoolchildren or people who feel they have made a wrong career choice. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: In Frames of Mind Gardner writes that Gandhi exemplified interpersonal intelligence.", "In Eat Right for Your Type , naturopath Peter J. D'Adamo writes that our ancient genetic heritage is represented today in the four human blood groups--O, A, B, and AB--and that we must follow the nutritional dictates that evolution laid down. He says Type O is the most ancient blood group, the one of the carnivorous big-game hunter, the self-reliant, risk-taking optimist. A later mutation is Type A, he writes, that of people adapting to an agrarian diet, who were cooperative, law-abiding, yet high-strung. Next came Type B from the Mongolian nomads, the most flexible and creative of the blood types. Finally, a modern quirk, is the rare AB, people who are somewhat confused, edgy, sensitive, yet charismatic. According to D'Adamo, eat the right foods for your type and your immune system will be strengthened and you'll lose weight.", "The seven original intelligences are: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal (my favorite, since I have a genius for self-absorption). The latest addition is naturalist intelligence. Gardner defines it as \"the ability to recognize and classify plants, minerals and animals.\" Gardner says you can see it in action in people who know every kind of dinosaur, or sneaker, or automobile. He is also considering adding existential intelligence, which, he says, refers to the inclination to ask: \"Who are we? Where do we come from? What's it all about? Why do we die?\" This could also be known as the \"Oy gevalt \" intelligence. Since I felt that his theory left out people who are skilled at the use of the senses of taste and smell, I lobbied him to add culinary intelligence. Gardner wasn't biting. I decided to forgo making a pitch for my own area of brilliance: procrastination intelligence.", "Gandhi Explanation: None. But D'Adamo's promotional materials do quote Elizabeth Hurley (Type O), in a Cosmopolitan interview, saying she read D'Adamo's \"absurd book,\" followed his plan, and \"lost an astounding amount of weight.\"", "Unfortunately, D'Adamo's understanding of human origins is, according to Dr. Eric Meikle of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, \"completely worthless.\" According to Meikle, there is no evidence that Type O is the earliest blood type--quite the opposite since A and B occur in chimpanzees. Nor is it likely that humans went from being primarily carnivores to omnivores. Among living hunter-gatherers, he says, most of their calories come from vegetable matter, because bagging game is difficult. \"People who are able to eat the most meat are agriculturists,\" says Meikle. \"They keep [animals], raise them, and eat them.\"", "Not surprisingly, this kind of information is of little interest when you've got a new companion volume ( Cook Right for Your Type ) to your best seller. Greg Kelly, a naturopath who works in D'Adamo's practice says, \"It's not a productive way for me to spend my time debating with people who have a different belief system. We try to help sick people get better.\" \n\n Ease of Use: Ouch. If you know your blood type, it is easy. If you don't, march down to the Red Cross, donate a pint, and they'll tell you. \n\n Applicability: Scientific questions aside, I'm an AB (OK, OK, I am charismatic), and I'm not following any diet that encourages me to eat a lot of snails." ], [ "One of Gardner's missions is to apply his work to the classroom, since he believes schools are designed by people excelling in linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences to reward people who share those intelligences. He also believes that while our propensity toward certain types of intelligence is inborn, our abilities are not fixed. Understanding our areas of strength and weakness, he says, can provide more self-awareness and help users move to a \"higher level of skill.\"", "Until Harvard professor Howard Gardner came along, intelligence was like the Soviet Union: It was large, permanent, and unified. Then in 1983 he published his book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences , which cleaved intelligence into seven components. Recently, like a breakaway republic, Gardner has added an eighth intelligence and is considering a ninth.", "The four sets of pairs can be matched up 16 different ways--with Keirsey organizing these into those Platonic groups of four. For example, I'm an NT, which makes me a Rational, therefore naturally curious, restless, and doubting. More specifically I'm an ENTP. As Keirsey writes: \"A rough draft is all they need to feel confident and ready to proceed into action. ... [They] have been known to engage in brinkmanship with their superiors. ... [ENTPs] like to spar verbally with their loved ones.\"", "Applicability: High. I feel I now understand better why I keep acting that way. It's also given me the sly sense that I know why other people are acting their way. Of course, that's very ENTP of me. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: According to Keirsey, Gandhi is an Idealist (an NF), what else? More specifically, an INFJ. \"INFJs have an unusually strong desire to contribute to the welfare of others. ... INFJs are scarce, little more than one percent of the population, which is too bad, considering their usefulness in the social order.\" \n\n \n\n INTELLIGENCE", "Keirsey does not muck around in your excretions in order to determine your personality. His criteria come from Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung by way of an American mother-daughter team named Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, who created the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The two women translated Jung's idea that personality is composed of four pairs of preferences--the most famous being extroverted and introverted--and created a systematic test to discern people's types. Keirsey has redefined these four pairs this way: \n\n Expressive (E) or Reserved (I) \n\n Observant (S) or Introspective (N) \n\n Tough-minded (T) or Friendly (F) \n\n Scheduling (J) or Probing (P) [Probing might better be defined as looking for alternatives]", "Ease of Use: Fair. Gardner says, \"Common sense, self-observation, and talking to others should suffice to tell you what is distinctive about your mind.\" But we want a quiz, Dr. Gardner! One is available in the book 7 Kinds of Smart: Identifying and Developing Your Many Intelligences , by Thomas Armstrong, which offers choices such as, \"I enjoy entertaining myself or others with tongue twisters, nonsense rhymes, or puns\" and \"I find it difficult to sit still for long periods of time.\" The MIDAS Web site provides descriptions of the intelligences, links to other multiple intelligence sites, and sells multiple intelligence testing materials (prices range from $10 to $35). \n\n Applicability: Assessing multiple intelligences probably has most value for schoolchildren or people who feel they have made a wrong career choice. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: In Frames of Mind Gardner writes that Gandhi exemplified interpersonal intelligence.", "The seven original intelligences are: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal (my favorite, since I have a genius for self-absorption). The latest addition is naturalist intelligence. Gardner defines it as \"the ability to recognize and classify plants, minerals and animals.\" Gardner says you can see it in action in people who know every kind of dinosaur, or sneaker, or automobile. He is also considering adding existential intelligence, which, he says, refers to the inclination to ask: \"Who are we? Where do we come from? What's it all about? Why do we die?\" This could also be known as the \"Oy gevalt \" intelligence. Since I felt that his theory left out people who are skilled at the use of the senses of taste and smell, I lobbied him to add culinary intelligence. Gardner wasn't biting. I decided to forgo making a pitch for my own area of brilliance: procrastination intelligence.", "Gardner rejects the notion that intelligence is a \"single, general capacity\" that can be measured by taking a test. He believes an intelligence is the ability to \"solve problems or create products\" in a way that society values--that having it must have conferred an evolutionary advantage to us, and that there is biological evidence for it. That is, an intelligence can be destroyed due to brain injury, which could be called the \"man who mistook his wife for a hat\" criterion. Gardner says if you excel at one type of intelligence, it has no bearing on whether you'll be skilled at another. Instead of burdening people with eight ways to be inadequate instead of one, multiple intelligence advocates says the theory liberates people to find their own set of strengths.", "OK, he nailed me. As an example of how uncanny the type sorter can be, take Bill Clinton, who Keirsey classifies as an ESFP. In Keirsey's book Please Understand Me II , ESFP's are described as \"inclined to be impulsive and self-indulgent, which makes them vulnerable to seduction. ... Pleasure seems to be an end in itself ... they will do what they feel like in the moment rather than what is good for them in the long run ... blaming someone else if things don't turn out well. ... Intent on pleasing everybody, [ESFPs] can appear fickle, even promiscuous, to other types.\" On the other hand, maybe Clinton is just too hotblooded. \n\n Ease of Use: Good. I recommend taking the Temperament Sorter II and ignoring the Character Sorter, which I found confusing and not particularly accurate.", "Why do people act like that? Hippocrates believed the answer was in the balance of four bodily fluids, or humors--blood, black bile, phlegm, and yellow bile. This notion lives on in our language today. We all know people who are essentially hotblooded, or melancholy (which literally means \"black bile\"), or phlegmatic, or who view the world with a jaundiced eye. Plato, less interested in humans' inner states than in their behavior as members of the state, redefined the four humors in social terms: as artisans, guardians, rationals, and idealists. According to psychologist David Keirsey, you are one of Plato's four types, you were born that way, you will always be that way, and you can find out which one you are by taking the temperament sorter quiz on his Web site. Sample questions: When the phone rings do you: a) hurry to get it first? or b) hope someone else will answer? Do you find visionaries and theorists: a) somewhat annoying? or b) rather fascinating?", "Why You're So Screwed Up \n\n Let's stipulate that you are unique, unfathomable, singular, sui generis. Now, let's find out how to categorize you, classify you, and sort you into a group that explains your temperament, your career choices, the strength of your immune system, and your ability to make up puns. \n\n Here follows an admittedly random guide to four popular methods designed to explain who you really are. I deliberately picked systems that purport to pinpoint something intrinsic in our natures. I judged the ease of use and applicability of each system, and since all of them illustrate their points with the lives of famous people, I also gauged how successfully each one explains the process by which Gandhi became Gandhi . \n\n BIRTH ORDER \n\n Would your friends and family say you are more like: a) Carlos the Jackal or b) Martin Luther King Jr.?; a) Phyllis Schlafly or b) Florence Nightingale?", "In Eat Right for Your Type , naturopath Peter J. D'Adamo writes that our ancient genetic heritage is represented today in the four human blood groups--O, A, B, and AB--and that we must follow the nutritional dictates that evolution laid down. He says Type O is the most ancient blood group, the one of the carnivorous big-game hunter, the self-reliant, risk-taking optimist. A later mutation is Type A, he writes, that of people adapting to an agrarian diet, who were cooperative, law-abiding, yet high-strung. Next came Type B from the Mongolian nomads, the most flexible and creative of the blood types. Finally, a modern quirk, is the rare AB, people who are somewhat confused, edgy, sensitive, yet charismatic. According to D'Adamo, eat the right foods for your type and your immune system will be strengthened and you'll lose weight.", "BLOOD TYPE \n\n What would Hippocrates think of a recent best seller that asserted that our health, diet, and even our personality are determined by our blood type? He would probably get to work on The Bile Bible . But if Hippocrates were Japanese, he wouldn't be at all surprised. They've been obsessed with blood type and personality for almost 30 years. They also choose mates with \"compatible\" blood types and their corporations assemble work teams based on blood type. Luckily, the Japanese economy died in time to save us from the corporate bloodletting fad. Until now.", "According to Frank J. Sulloway, author of Born To Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives , if your loved ones chose a), you are a typical firstborn--an achieving, status conscious, defensive, incipient fascist terrorist. If you're a b), you are certainly a \"laterborn\"--a bold, compassionate iconoclast. \n\n Sulloway is hardly the first to extract personality distinctions from birth order. His twist is to use Darwinism to show how the familial struggle among siblings for parental attention accounts for everything in society from social rebellions to scientific revolutions. In Sulloway's universe, firstborns are dictatorial types who just don't get it, but they're happy to oppress freedom-loving laterborns who do. So how does Sulloway explain that the greatest scientific revolutionary of the 20 th century, Albert Einstein, is a firstborn? He doesn't.", "Sulloway (surprise! he's the third of four) also thinks his findings should be applied to selecting corporate leaders. In a nutshell: Oldests need not apply. As devoted as he is to birth order as a personality determinant, Sulloway allows other variables to creep into his theory to account for those rare firstborn revolutionaries. \"Whenever one encounters a firstborn radical (and family life does occasionally produce them), such individuals are likely to have experienced substantial conflict with a parent. Parent-offspring conflict makes honorary laterborns out of some firstborns.\" This is a little like saying all men prefer dogs and all women prefer cats. So a man with a cat is either an honorary woman, or the cat is an honorary dog. \n\n Ease of Use: Excellent. You already know your own status and it's easy to ask others, \"Do you have siblings?\" Sulloway also provides a 10-variable formula to measure \"Your Own Propensity To Rebel.\"", "Applicability: As a method of understanding yourself and others, Sulloway's theory seems rather limited, except if you're in charge of hiring for Slobodan Milosevic. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: He was the youngest of four. \n\n \n\n PERSONALITY", "Gandhi Explanation: None. But D'Adamo's promotional materials do quote Elizabeth Hurley (Type O), in a Cosmopolitan interview, saying she read D'Adamo's \"absurd book,\" followed his plan, and \"lost an astounding amount of weight.\"", "Not surprisingly, this kind of information is of little interest when you've got a new companion volume ( Cook Right for Your Type ) to your best seller. Greg Kelly, a naturopath who works in D'Adamo's practice says, \"It's not a productive way for me to spend my time debating with people who have a different belief system. We try to help sick people get better.\" \n\n Ease of Use: Ouch. If you know your blood type, it is easy. If you don't, march down to the Red Cross, donate a pint, and they'll tell you. \n\n Applicability: Scientific questions aside, I'm an AB (OK, OK, I am charismatic), and I'm not following any diet that encourages me to eat a lot of snails.", "Unfortunately, D'Adamo's understanding of human origins is, according to Dr. Eric Meikle of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, \"completely worthless.\" According to Meikle, there is no evidence that Type O is the earliest blood type--quite the opposite since A and B occur in chimpanzees. Nor is it likely that humans went from being primarily carnivores to omnivores. Among living hunter-gatherers, he says, most of their calories come from vegetable matter, because bagging game is difficult. \"People who are able to eat the most meat are agriculturists,\" says Meikle. \"They keep [animals], raise them, and eat them.\"" ], [ "BLOOD TYPE \n\n What would Hippocrates think of a recent best seller that asserted that our health, diet, and even our personality are determined by our blood type? He would probably get to work on The Bile Bible . But if Hippocrates were Japanese, he wouldn't be at all surprised. They've been obsessed with blood type and personality for almost 30 years. They also choose mates with \"compatible\" blood types and their corporations assemble work teams based on blood type. Luckily, the Japanese economy died in time to save us from the corporate bloodletting fad. Until now.", "Not surprisingly, this kind of information is of little interest when you've got a new companion volume ( Cook Right for Your Type ) to your best seller. Greg Kelly, a naturopath who works in D'Adamo's practice says, \"It's not a productive way for me to spend my time debating with people who have a different belief system. We try to help sick people get better.\" \n\n Ease of Use: Ouch. If you know your blood type, it is easy. If you don't, march down to the Red Cross, donate a pint, and they'll tell you. \n\n Applicability: Scientific questions aside, I'm an AB (OK, OK, I am charismatic), and I'm not following any diet that encourages me to eat a lot of snails.", "Keirsey does not muck around in your excretions in order to determine your personality. His criteria come from Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung by way of an American mother-daughter team named Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, who created the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The two women translated Jung's idea that personality is composed of four pairs of preferences--the most famous being extroverted and introverted--and created a systematic test to discern people's types. Keirsey has redefined these four pairs this way: \n\n Expressive (E) or Reserved (I) \n\n Observant (S) or Introspective (N) \n\n Tough-minded (T) or Friendly (F) \n\n Scheduling (J) or Probing (P) [Probing might better be defined as looking for alternatives]", "Gandhi Explanation: None. But D'Adamo's promotional materials do quote Elizabeth Hurley (Type O), in a Cosmopolitan interview, saying she read D'Adamo's \"absurd book,\" followed his plan, and \"lost an astounding amount of weight.\"", "In Eat Right for Your Type , naturopath Peter J. D'Adamo writes that our ancient genetic heritage is represented today in the four human blood groups--O, A, B, and AB--and that we must follow the nutritional dictates that evolution laid down. He says Type O is the most ancient blood group, the one of the carnivorous big-game hunter, the self-reliant, risk-taking optimist. A later mutation is Type A, he writes, that of people adapting to an agrarian diet, who were cooperative, law-abiding, yet high-strung. Next came Type B from the Mongolian nomads, the most flexible and creative of the blood types. Finally, a modern quirk, is the rare AB, people who are somewhat confused, edgy, sensitive, yet charismatic. According to D'Adamo, eat the right foods for your type and your immune system will be strengthened and you'll lose weight.", "Unfortunately, D'Adamo's understanding of human origins is, according to Dr. Eric Meikle of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, \"completely worthless.\" According to Meikle, there is no evidence that Type O is the earliest blood type--quite the opposite since A and B occur in chimpanzees. Nor is it likely that humans went from being primarily carnivores to omnivores. Among living hunter-gatherers, he says, most of their calories come from vegetable matter, because bagging game is difficult. \"People who are able to eat the most meat are agriculturists,\" says Meikle. \"They keep [animals], raise them, and eat them.\"", "Why do people act like that? Hippocrates believed the answer was in the balance of four bodily fluids, or humors--blood, black bile, phlegm, and yellow bile. This notion lives on in our language today. We all know people who are essentially hotblooded, or melancholy (which literally means \"black bile\"), or phlegmatic, or who view the world with a jaundiced eye. Plato, less interested in humans' inner states than in their behavior as members of the state, redefined the four humors in social terms: as artisans, guardians, rationals, and idealists. According to psychologist David Keirsey, you are one of Plato's four types, you were born that way, you will always be that way, and you can find out which one you are by taking the temperament sorter quiz on his Web site. Sample questions: When the phone rings do you: a) hurry to get it first? or b) hope someone else will answer? Do you find visionaries and theorists: a) somewhat annoying? or b) rather fascinating?", "The four sets of pairs can be matched up 16 different ways--with Keirsey organizing these into those Platonic groups of four. For example, I'm an NT, which makes me a Rational, therefore naturally curious, restless, and doubting. More specifically I'm an ENTP. As Keirsey writes: \"A rough draft is all they need to feel confident and ready to proceed into action. ... [They] have been known to engage in brinkmanship with their superiors. ... [ENTPs] like to spar verbally with their loved ones.\"", "OK, he nailed me. As an example of how uncanny the type sorter can be, take Bill Clinton, who Keirsey classifies as an ESFP. In Keirsey's book Please Understand Me II , ESFP's are described as \"inclined to be impulsive and self-indulgent, which makes them vulnerable to seduction. ... Pleasure seems to be an end in itself ... they will do what they feel like in the moment rather than what is good for them in the long run ... blaming someone else if things don't turn out well. ... Intent on pleasing everybody, [ESFPs] can appear fickle, even promiscuous, to other types.\" On the other hand, maybe Clinton is just too hotblooded. \n\n Ease of Use: Good. I recommend taking the Temperament Sorter II and ignoring the Character Sorter, which I found confusing and not particularly accurate.", "Applicability: High. I feel I now understand better why I keep acting that way. It's also given me the sly sense that I know why other people are acting their way. Of course, that's very ENTP of me. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: According to Keirsey, Gandhi is an Idealist (an NF), what else? More specifically, an INFJ. \"INFJs have an unusually strong desire to contribute to the welfare of others. ... INFJs are scarce, little more than one percent of the population, which is too bad, considering their usefulness in the social order.\" \n\n \n\n INTELLIGENCE", "Why You're So Screwed Up \n\n Let's stipulate that you are unique, unfathomable, singular, sui generis. Now, let's find out how to categorize you, classify you, and sort you into a group that explains your temperament, your career choices, the strength of your immune system, and your ability to make up puns. \n\n Here follows an admittedly random guide to four popular methods designed to explain who you really are. I deliberately picked systems that purport to pinpoint something intrinsic in our natures. I judged the ease of use and applicability of each system, and since all of them illustrate their points with the lives of famous people, I also gauged how successfully each one explains the process by which Gandhi became Gandhi . \n\n BIRTH ORDER \n\n Would your friends and family say you are more like: a) Carlos the Jackal or b) Martin Luther King Jr.?; a) Phyllis Schlafly or b) Florence Nightingale?", "According to Frank J. Sulloway, author of Born To Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives , if your loved ones chose a), you are a typical firstborn--an achieving, status conscious, defensive, incipient fascist terrorist. If you're a b), you are certainly a \"laterborn\"--a bold, compassionate iconoclast. \n\n Sulloway is hardly the first to extract personality distinctions from birth order. His twist is to use Darwinism to show how the familial struggle among siblings for parental attention accounts for everything in society from social rebellions to scientific revolutions. In Sulloway's universe, firstborns are dictatorial types who just don't get it, but they're happy to oppress freedom-loving laterborns who do. So how does Sulloway explain that the greatest scientific revolutionary of the 20 th century, Albert Einstein, is a firstborn? He doesn't.", "Sulloway (surprise! he's the third of four) also thinks his findings should be applied to selecting corporate leaders. In a nutshell: Oldests need not apply. As devoted as he is to birth order as a personality determinant, Sulloway allows other variables to creep into his theory to account for those rare firstborn revolutionaries. \"Whenever one encounters a firstborn radical (and family life does occasionally produce them), such individuals are likely to have experienced substantial conflict with a parent. Parent-offspring conflict makes honorary laterborns out of some firstborns.\" This is a little like saying all men prefer dogs and all women prefer cats. So a man with a cat is either an honorary woman, or the cat is an honorary dog. \n\n Ease of Use: Excellent. You already know your own status and it's easy to ask others, \"Do you have siblings?\" Sulloway also provides a 10-variable formula to measure \"Your Own Propensity To Rebel.\"", "Applicability: As a method of understanding yourself and others, Sulloway's theory seems rather limited, except if you're in charge of hiring for Slobodan Milosevic. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: He was the youngest of four. \n\n \n\n PERSONALITY", "Gardner rejects the notion that intelligence is a \"single, general capacity\" that can be measured by taking a test. He believes an intelligence is the ability to \"solve problems or create products\" in a way that society values--that having it must have conferred an evolutionary advantage to us, and that there is biological evidence for it. That is, an intelligence can be destroyed due to brain injury, which could be called the \"man who mistook his wife for a hat\" criterion. Gardner says if you excel at one type of intelligence, it has no bearing on whether you'll be skilled at another. Instead of burdening people with eight ways to be inadequate instead of one, multiple intelligence advocates says the theory liberates people to find their own set of strengths.", "The seven original intelligences are: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal (my favorite, since I have a genius for self-absorption). The latest addition is naturalist intelligence. Gardner defines it as \"the ability to recognize and classify plants, minerals and animals.\" Gardner says you can see it in action in people who know every kind of dinosaur, or sneaker, or automobile. He is also considering adding existential intelligence, which, he says, refers to the inclination to ask: \"Who are we? Where do we come from? What's it all about? Why do we die?\" This could also be known as the \"Oy gevalt \" intelligence. Since I felt that his theory left out people who are skilled at the use of the senses of taste and smell, I lobbied him to add culinary intelligence. Gardner wasn't biting. I decided to forgo making a pitch for my own area of brilliance: procrastination intelligence.", "One of Gardner's missions is to apply his work to the classroom, since he believes schools are designed by people excelling in linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences to reward people who share those intelligences. He also believes that while our propensity toward certain types of intelligence is inborn, our abilities are not fixed. Understanding our areas of strength and weakness, he says, can provide more self-awareness and help users move to a \"higher level of skill.\"", "Ease of Use: Fair. Gardner says, \"Common sense, self-observation, and talking to others should suffice to tell you what is distinctive about your mind.\" But we want a quiz, Dr. Gardner! One is available in the book 7 Kinds of Smart: Identifying and Developing Your Many Intelligences , by Thomas Armstrong, which offers choices such as, \"I enjoy entertaining myself or others with tongue twisters, nonsense rhymes, or puns\" and \"I find it difficult to sit still for long periods of time.\" The MIDAS Web site provides descriptions of the intelligences, links to other multiple intelligence sites, and sells multiple intelligence testing materials (prices range from $10 to $35). \n\n Applicability: Assessing multiple intelligences probably has most value for schoolchildren or people who feel they have made a wrong career choice. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: In Frames of Mind Gardner writes that Gandhi exemplified interpersonal intelligence.", "Until Harvard professor Howard Gardner came along, intelligence was like the Soviet Union: It was large, permanent, and unified. Then in 1983 he published his book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences , which cleaved intelligence into seven components. Recently, like a breakaway republic, Gardner has added an eighth intelligence and is considering a ninth." ], [ "Applicability: High. I feel I now understand better why I keep acting that way. It's also given me the sly sense that I know why other people are acting their way. Of course, that's very ENTP of me. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: According to Keirsey, Gandhi is an Idealist (an NF), what else? More specifically, an INFJ. \"INFJs have an unusually strong desire to contribute to the welfare of others. ... INFJs are scarce, little more than one percent of the population, which is too bad, considering their usefulness in the social order.\" \n\n \n\n INTELLIGENCE", "Keirsey does not muck around in your excretions in order to determine your personality. His criteria come from Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung by way of an American mother-daughter team named Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, who created the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The two women translated Jung's idea that personality is composed of four pairs of preferences--the most famous being extroverted and introverted--and created a systematic test to discern people's types. Keirsey has redefined these four pairs this way: \n\n Expressive (E) or Reserved (I) \n\n Observant (S) or Introspective (N) \n\n Tough-minded (T) or Friendly (F) \n\n Scheduling (J) or Probing (P) [Probing might better be defined as looking for alternatives]", "Applicability: As a method of understanding yourself and others, Sulloway's theory seems rather limited, except if you're in charge of hiring for Slobodan Milosevic. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: He was the youngest of four. \n\n \n\n PERSONALITY", "Ease of Use: Fair. Gardner says, \"Common sense, self-observation, and talking to others should suffice to tell you what is distinctive about your mind.\" But we want a quiz, Dr. Gardner! One is available in the book 7 Kinds of Smart: Identifying and Developing Your Many Intelligences , by Thomas Armstrong, which offers choices such as, \"I enjoy entertaining myself or others with tongue twisters, nonsense rhymes, or puns\" and \"I find it difficult to sit still for long periods of time.\" The MIDAS Web site provides descriptions of the intelligences, links to other multiple intelligence sites, and sells multiple intelligence testing materials (prices range from $10 to $35). \n\n Applicability: Assessing multiple intelligences probably has most value for schoolchildren or people who feel they have made a wrong career choice. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: In Frames of Mind Gardner writes that Gandhi exemplified interpersonal intelligence.", "The four sets of pairs can be matched up 16 different ways--with Keirsey organizing these into those Platonic groups of four. For example, I'm an NT, which makes me a Rational, therefore naturally curious, restless, and doubting. More specifically I'm an ENTP. As Keirsey writes: \"A rough draft is all they need to feel confident and ready to proceed into action. ... [They] have been known to engage in brinkmanship with their superiors. ... [ENTPs] like to spar verbally with their loved ones.\"", "OK, he nailed me. As an example of how uncanny the type sorter can be, take Bill Clinton, who Keirsey classifies as an ESFP. In Keirsey's book Please Understand Me II , ESFP's are described as \"inclined to be impulsive and self-indulgent, which makes them vulnerable to seduction. ... Pleasure seems to be an end in itself ... they will do what they feel like in the moment rather than what is good for them in the long run ... blaming someone else if things don't turn out well. ... Intent on pleasing everybody, [ESFPs] can appear fickle, even promiscuous, to other types.\" On the other hand, maybe Clinton is just too hotblooded. \n\n Ease of Use: Good. I recommend taking the Temperament Sorter II and ignoring the Character Sorter, which I found confusing and not particularly accurate.", "Why You're So Screwed Up \n\n Let's stipulate that you are unique, unfathomable, singular, sui generis. Now, let's find out how to categorize you, classify you, and sort you into a group that explains your temperament, your career choices, the strength of your immune system, and your ability to make up puns. \n\n Here follows an admittedly random guide to four popular methods designed to explain who you really are. I deliberately picked systems that purport to pinpoint something intrinsic in our natures. I judged the ease of use and applicability of each system, and since all of them illustrate their points with the lives of famous people, I also gauged how successfully each one explains the process by which Gandhi became Gandhi . \n\n BIRTH ORDER \n\n Would your friends and family say you are more like: a) Carlos the Jackal or b) Martin Luther King Jr.?; a) Phyllis Schlafly or b) Florence Nightingale?", "Gandhi Explanation: None. But D'Adamo's promotional materials do quote Elizabeth Hurley (Type O), in a Cosmopolitan interview, saying she read D'Adamo's \"absurd book,\" followed his plan, and \"lost an astounding amount of weight.\"", "Why do people act like that? Hippocrates believed the answer was in the balance of four bodily fluids, or humors--blood, black bile, phlegm, and yellow bile. This notion lives on in our language today. We all know people who are essentially hotblooded, or melancholy (which literally means \"black bile\"), or phlegmatic, or who view the world with a jaundiced eye. Plato, less interested in humans' inner states than in their behavior as members of the state, redefined the four humors in social terms: as artisans, guardians, rationals, and idealists. According to psychologist David Keirsey, you are one of Plato's four types, you were born that way, you will always be that way, and you can find out which one you are by taking the temperament sorter quiz on his Web site. Sample questions: When the phone rings do you: a) hurry to get it first? or b) hope someone else will answer? Do you find visionaries and theorists: a) somewhat annoying? or b) rather fascinating?", "One of Gardner's missions is to apply his work to the classroom, since he believes schools are designed by people excelling in linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences to reward people who share those intelligences. He also believes that while our propensity toward certain types of intelligence is inborn, our abilities are not fixed. Understanding our areas of strength and weakness, he says, can provide more self-awareness and help users move to a \"higher level of skill.\"", "According to Frank J. Sulloway, author of Born To Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives , if your loved ones chose a), you are a typical firstborn--an achieving, status conscious, defensive, incipient fascist terrorist. If you're a b), you are certainly a \"laterborn\"--a bold, compassionate iconoclast. \n\n Sulloway is hardly the first to extract personality distinctions from birth order. His twist is to use Darwinism to show how the familial struggle among siblings for parental attention accounts for everything in society from social rebellions to scientific revolutions. In Sulloway's universe, firstborns are dictatorial types who just don't get it, but they're happy to oppress freedom-loving laterborns who do. So how does Sulloway explain that the greatest scientific revolutionary of the 20 th century, Albert Einstein, is a firstborn? He doesn't.", "Until Harvard professor Howard Gardner came along, intelligence was like the Soviet Union: It was large, permanent, and unified. Then in 1983 he published his book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences , which cleaved intelligence into seven components. Recently, like a breakaway republic, Gardner has added an eighth intelligence and is considering a ninth.", "Gardner rejects the notion that intelligence is a \"single, general capacity\" that can be measured by taking a test. He believes an intelligence is the ability to \"solve problems or create products\" in a way that society values--that having it must have conferred an evolutionary advantage to us, and that there is biological evidence for it. That is, an intelligence can be destroyed due to brain injury, which could be called the \"man who mistook his wife for a hat\" criterion. Gardner says if you excel at one type of intelligence, it has no bearing on whether you'll be skilled at another. Instead of burdening people with eight ways to be inadequate instead of one, multiple intelligence advocates says the theory liberates people to find their own set of strengths.", "Sulloway (surprise! he's the third of four) also thinks his findings should be applied to selecting corporate leaders. In a nutshell: Oldests need not apply. As devoted as he is to birth order as a personality determinant, Sulloway allows other variables to creep into his theory to account for those rare firstborn revolutionaries. \"Whenever one encounters a firstborn radical (and family life does occasionally produce them), such individuals are likely to have experienced substantial conflict with a parent. Parent-offspring conflict makes honorary laterborns out of some firstborns.\" This is a little like saying all men prefer dogs and all women prefer cats. So a man with a cat is either an honorary woman, or the cat is an honorary dog. \n\n Ease of Use: Excellent. You already know your own status and it's easy to ask others, \"Do you have siblings?\" Sulloway also provides a 10-variable formula to measure \"Your Own Propensity To Rebel.\"", "BLOOD TYPE \n\n What would Hippocrates think of a recent best seller that asserted that our health, diet, and even our personality are determined by our blood type? He would probably get to work on The Bile Bible . But if Hippocrates were Japanese, he wouldn't be at all surprised. They've been obsessed with blood type and personality for almost 30 years. They also choose mates with \"compatible\" blood types and their corporations assemble work teams based on blood type. Luckily, the Japanese economy died in time to save us from the corporate bloodletting fad. Until now.", "The seven original intelligences are: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal (my favorite, since I have a genius for self-absorption). The latest addition is naturalist intelligence. Gardner defines it as \"the ability to recognize and classify plants, minerals and animals.\" Gardner says you can see it in action in people who know every kind of dinosaur, or sneaker, or automobile. He is also considering adding existential intelligence, which, he says, refers to the inclination to ask: \"Who are we? Where do we come from? What's it all about? Why do we die?\" This could also be known as the \"Oy gevalt \" intelligence. Since I felt that his theory left out people who are skilled at the use of the senses of taste and smell, I lobbied him to add culinary intelligence. Gardner wasn't biting. I decided to forgo making a pitch for my own area of brilliance: procrastination intelligence.", "In Eat Right for Your Type , naturopath Peter J. D'Adamo writes that our ancient genetic heritage is represented today in the four human blood groups--O, A, B, and AB--and that we must follow the nutritional dictates that evolution laid down. He says Type O is the most ancient blood group, the one of the carnivorous big-game hunter, the self-reliant, risk-taking optimist. A later mutation is Type A, he writes, that of people adapting to an agrarian diet, who were cooperative, law-abiding, yet high-strung. Next came Type B from the Mongolian nomads, the most flexible and creative of the blood types. Finally, a modern quirk, is the rare AB, people who are somewhat confused, edgy, sensitive, yet charismatic. According to D'Adamo, eat the right foods for your type and your immune system will be strengthened and you'll lose weight.", "Unfortunately, D'Adamo's understanding of human origins is, according to Dr. Eric Meikle of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, \"completely worthless.\" According to Meikle, there is no evidence that Type O is the earliest blood type--quite the opposite since A and B occur in chimpanzees. Nor is it likely that humans went from being primarily carnivores to omnivores. Among living hunter-gatherers, he says, most of their calories come from vegetable matter, because bagging game is difficult. \"People who are able to eat the most meat are agriculturists,\" says Meikle. \"They keep [animals], raise them, and eat them.\"", "Not surprisingly, this kind of information is of little interest when you've got a new companion volume ( Cook Right for Your Type ) to your best seller. Greg Kelly, a naturopath who works in D'Adamo's practice says, \"It's not a productive way for me to spend my time debating with people who have a different belief system. We try to help sick people get better.\" \n\n Ease of Use: Ouch. If you know your blood type, it is easy. If you don't, march down to the Red Cross, donate a pint, and they'll tell you. \n\n Applicability: Scientific questions aside, I'm an AB (OK, OK, I am charismatic), and I'm not following any diet that encourages me to eat a lot of snails." ], [ "The four sets of pairs can be matched up 16 different ways--with Keirsey organizing these into those Platonic groups of four. For example, I'm an NT, which makes me a Rational, therefore naturally curious, restless, and doubting. More specifically I'm an ENTP. As Keirsey writes: \"A rough draft is all they need to feel confident and ready to proceed into action. ... [They] have been known to engage in brinkmanship with their superiors. ... [ENTPs] like to spar verbally with their loved ones.\"", "Keirsey does not muck around in your excretions in order to determine your personality. His criteria come from Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung by way of an American mother-daughter team named Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, who created the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The two women translated Jung's idea that personality is composed of four pairs of preferences--the most famous being extroverted and introverted--and created a systematic test to discern people's types. Keirsey has redefined these four pairs this way: \n\n Expressive (E) or Reserved (I) \n\n Observant (S) or Introspective (N) \n\n Tough-minded (T) or Friendly (F) \n\n Scheduling (J) or Probing (P) [Probing might better be defined as looking for alternatives]", "Applicability: High. I feel I now understand better why I keep acting that way. It's also given me the sly sense that I know why other people are acting their way. Of course, that's very ENTP of me. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: According to Keirsey, Gandhi is an Idealist (an NF), what else? More specifically, an INFJ. \"INFJs have an unusually strong desire to contribute to the welfare of others. ... INFJs are scarce, little more than one percent of the population, which is too bad, considering their usefulness in the social order.\" \n\n \n\n INTELLIGENCE", "OK, he nailed me. As an example of how uncanny the type sorter can be, take Bill Clinton, who Keirsey classifies as an ESFP. In Keirsey's book Please Understand Me II , ESFP's are described as \"inclined to be impulsive and self-indulgent, which makes them vulnerable to seduction. ... Pleasure seems to be an end in itself ... they will do what they feel like in the moment rather than what is good for them in the long run ... blaming someone else if things don't turn out well. ... Intent on pleasing everybody, [ESFPs] can appear fickle, even promiscuous, to other types.\" On the other hand, maybe Clinton is just too hotblooded. \n\n Ease of Use: Good. I recommend taking the Temperament Sorter II and ignoring the Character Sorter, which I found confusing and not particularly accurate.", "Why do people act like that? Hippocrates believed the answer was in the balance of four bodily fluids, or humors--blood, black bile, phlegm, and yellow bile. This notion lives on in our language today. We all know people who are essentially hotblooded, or melancholy (which literally means \"black bile\"), or phlegmatic, or who view the world with a jaundiced eye. Plato, less interested in humans' inner states than in their behavior as members of the state, redefined the four humors in social terms: as artisans, guardians, rationals, and idealists. According to psychologist David Keirsey, you are one of Plato's four types, you were born that way, you will always be that way, and you can find out which one you are by taking the temperament sorter quiz on his Web site. Sample questions: When the phone rings do you: a) hurry to get it first? or b) hope someone else will answer? Do you find visionaries and theorists: a) somewhat annoying? or b) rather fascinating?", "Why You're So Screwed Up \n\n Let's stipulate that you are unique, unfathomable, singular, sui generis. Now, let's find out how to categorize you, classify you, and sort you into a group that explains your temperament, your career choices, the strength of your immune system, and your ability to make up puns. \n\n Here follows an admittedly random guide to four popular methods designed to explain who you really are. I deliberately picked systems that purport to pinpoint something intrinsic in our natures. I judged the ease of use and applicability of each system, and since all of them illustrate their points with the lives of famous people, I also gauged how successfully each one explains the process by which Gandhi became Gandhi . \n\n BIRTH ORDER \n\n Would your friends and family say you are more like: a) Carlos the Jackal or b) Martin Luther King Jr.?; a) Phyllis Schlafly or b) Florence Nightingale?", "The seven original intelligences are: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal (my favorite, since I have a genius for self-absorption). The latest addition is naturalist intelligence. Gardner defines it as \"the ability to recognize and classify plants, minerals and animals.\" Gardner says you can see it in action in people who know every kind of dinosaur, or sneaker, or automobile. He is also considering adding existential intelligence, which, he says, refers to the inclination to ask: \"Who are we? Where do we come from? What's it all about? Why do we die?\" This could also be known as the \"Oy gevalt \" intelligence. Since I felt that his theory left out people who are skilled at the use of the senses of taste and smell, I lobbied him to add culinary intelligence. Gardner wasn't biting. I decided to forgo making a pitch for my own area of brilliance: procrastination intelligence.", "One of Gardner's missions is to apply his work to the classroom, since he believes schools are designed by people excelling in linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences to reward people who share those intelligences. He also believes that while our propensity toward certain types of intelligence is inborn, our abilities are not fixed. Understanding our areas of strength and weakness, he says, can provide more self-awareness and help users move to a \"higher level of skill.\"", "Applicability: As a method of understanding yourself and others, Sulloway's theory seems rather limited, except if you're in charge of hiring for Slobodan Milosevic. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: He was the youngest of four. \n\n \n\n PERSONALITY", "Until Harvard professor Howard Gardner came along, intelligence was like the Soviet Union: It was large, permanent, and unified. Then in 1983 he published his book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences , which cleaved intelligence into seven components. Recently, like a breakaway republic, Gardner has added an eighth intelligence and is considering a ninth.", "According to Frank J. Sulloway, author of Born To Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives , if your loved ones chose a), you are a typical firstborn--an achieving, status conscious, defensive, incipient fascist terrorist. If you're a b), you are certainly a \"laterborn\"--a bold, compassionate iconoclast. \n\n Sulloway is hardly the first to extract personality distinctions from birth order. His twist is to use Darwinism to show how the familial struggle among siblings for parental attention accounts for everything in society from social rebellions to scientific revolutions. In Sulloway's universe, firstborns are dictatorial types who just don't get it, but they're happy to oppress freedom-loving laterborns who do. So how does Sulloway explain that the greatest scientific revolutionary of the 20 th century, Albert Einstein, is a firstborn? He doesn't.", "In Eat Right for Your Type , naturopath Peter J. D'Adamo writes that our ancient genetic heritage is represented today in the four human blood groups--O, A, B, and AB--and that we must follow the nutritional dictates that evolution laid down. He says Type O is the most ancient blood group, the one of the carnivorous big-game hunter, the self-reliant, risk-taking optimist. A later mutation is Type A, he writes, that of people adapting to an agrarian diet, who were cooperative, law-abiding, yet high-strung. Next came Type B from the Mongolian nomads, the most flexible and creative of the blood types. Finally, a modern quirk, is the rare AB, people who are somewhat confused, edgy, sensitive, yet charismatic. According to D'Adamo, eat the right foods for your type and your immune system will be strengthened and you'll lose weight.", "BLOOD TYPE \n\n What would Hippocrates think of a recent best seller that asserted that our health, diet, and even our personality are determined by our blood type? He would probably get to work on The Bile Bible . But if Hippocrates were Japanese, he wouldn't be at all surprised. They've been obsessed with blood type and personality for almost 30 years. They also choose mates with \"compatible\" blood types and their corporations assemble work teams based on blood type. Luckily, the Japanese economy died in time to save us from the corporate bloodletting fad. Until now.", "Sulloway (surprise! he's the third of four) also thinks his findings should be applied to selecting corporate leaders. In a nutshell: Oldests need not apply. As devoted as he is to birth order as a personality determinant, Sulloway allows other variables to creep into his theory to account for those rare firstborn revolutionaries. \"Whenever one encounters a firstborn radical (and family life does occasionally produce them), such individuals are likely to have experienced substantial conflict with a parent. Parent-offspring conflict makes honorary laterborns out of some firstborns.\" This is a little like saying all men prefer dogs and all women prefer cats. So a man with a cat is either an honorary woman, or the cat is an honorary dog. \n\n Ease of Use: Excellent. You already know your own status and it's easy to ask others, \"Do you have siblings?\" Sulloway also provides a 10-variable formula to measure \"Your Own Propensity To Rebel.\"", "Ease of Use: Fair. Gardner says, \"Common sense, self-observation, and talking to others should suffice to tell you what is distinctive about your mind.\" But we want a quiz, Dr. Gardner! One is available in the book 7 Kinds of Smart: Identifying and Developing Your Many Intelligences , by Thomas Armstrong, which offers choices such as, \"I enjoy entertaining myself or others with tongue twisters, nonsense rhymes, or puns\" and \"I find it difficult to sit still for long periods of time.\" The MIDAS Web site provides descriptions of the intelligences, links to other multiple intelligence sites, and sells multiple intelligence testing materials (prices range from $10 to $35). \n\n Applicability: Assessing multiple intelligences probably has most value for schoolchildren or people who feel they have made a wrong career choice. \n\n Gandhi Explanation: In Frames of Mind Gardner writes that Gandhi exemplified interpersonal intelligence.", "Gardner rejects the notion that intelligence is a \"single, general capacity\" that can be measured by taking a test. He believes an intelligence is the ability to \"solve problems or create products\" in a way that society values--that having it must have conferred an evolutionary advantage to us, and that there is biological evidence for it. That is, an intelligence can be destroyed due to brain injury, which could be called the \"man who mistook his wife for a hat\" criterion. Gardner says if you excel at one type of intelligence, it has no bearing on whether you'll be skilled at another. Instead of burdening people with eight ways to be inadequate instead of one, multiple intelligence advocates says the theory liberates people to find their own set of strengths.", "Gandhi Explanation: None. But D'Adamo's promotional materials do quote Elizabeth Hurley (Type O), in a Cosmopolitan interview, saying she read D'Adamo's \"absurd book,\" followed his plan, and \"lost an astounding amount of weight.\"", "Unfortunately, D'Adamo's understanding of human origins is, according to Dr. Eric Meikle of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, \"completely worthless.\" According to Meikle, there is no evidence that Type O is the earliest blood type--quite the opposite since A and B occur in chimpanzees. Nor is it likely that humans went from being primarily carnivores to omnivores. Among living hunter-gatherers, he says, most of their calories come from vegetable matter, because bagging game is difficult. \"People who are able to eat the most meat are agriculturists,\" says Meikle. \"They keep [animals], raise them, and eat them.\"", "Not surprisingly, this kind of information is of little interest when you've got a new companion volume ( Cook Right for Your Type ) to your best seller. Greg Kelly, a naturopath who works in D'Adamo's practice says, \"It's not a productive way for me to spend my time debating with people who have a different belief system. We try to help sick people get better.\" \n\n Ease of Use: Ouch. If you know your blood type, it is easy. If you don't, march down to the Red Cross, donate a pint, and they'll tell you. \n\n Applicability: Scientific questions aside, I'm an AB (OK, OK, I am charismatic), and I'm not following any diet that encourages me to eat a lot of snails." ] ]
test	50998	[ "Where is the planet that Cassal is trying to go to?", "What is Cassal's mission when he reaches his destination?", "Why is Cassal attacked?", "Who is Dimanche?", "How did Cassal \"kill\" his attacker?", "What explains the fact that the attacker was not actually dead, as reported?", "Who does the story imply was the man who boarded the Rickrock C in Cassal's place?", "What does the Travel Bureau director say whose irony Cassal understands, but she is oblivious to?", "How quickly will Cassal be able to get off Godolph and continue his journey to Tunney 21, having missed the RickRock C?", "What was supposed to be Dimanche's primary purpose?" ]	[ [ "His destination planet is located near the center of the galaxy, inside the third ring. ", "He is trying to reach Godolph, which is a waystation on the path to his final destination near the center of the galaxy.", "He is trying to reach Tunney 21, a planet at the tip of a spiral arm on the other side of the galaxy from Earth.", "He is headed back to Earth for a vacation after a complex and demanding mission to Tunney 21." ], [ "HIs company wants to buy out a small research company on Godolph.", "He is to try to recruit a certain research scientist who can help Cassal's own company develop instantaneous radio for cross-galaxy communication.", "He is to conduct industrial espionage to bring home technology secrets that his company has not been able to unlock through their own research.", "Tunney 21 is an untapped market for his company's products, and he is to establish a sales office and a foothold in the market there." ], [ "Nativist groups on Godolph oppose galactic travel and immigration and choose off-worlders as targets of their violence to create a fearful attitude toward travel to Godolph.", "An operative for a company that is a direct competitor of Cassal's company wants to stop him from doing business on Tunney 21.", "It is an ordinary thug, preying on a vulnerable-looking person alone on a deserted street after dusk.", "The attacker steals Cassal's ID tab, which enables him to board the ship to Tunney 21 and disembark there, which is not permitted without the tab due to overcrowding of the inner planets." ], [ "Dimanche is Cassal's human handler, providing advice through a cochlear implant based on remote-controlled drones that Cassal releases wherever he goes.", "Dimanche is a specialized electronic device that works with Cassals as a source of instant information about people around him.", "Dimanche is one of the counselors at the Travel Bureau on Godolph, trying to help him stay safe.", "Dimanche is Cassal's junior assistant." ], [ "It took only a single, mighty upward stabbing motion to catch the attacker under the ribs and stab up into the heart.", "Actually, it was Dimanche who killed the attacker.", "With repeated thrusts of a small, thin knife.", "Dimanche launched an attack drone, which blinded the attacker, and Cassal felled him with a rock he'd picked up." ], [ "Dimanche reported that there was no heartbeat, and when it turned out the man was still alive, claimed that the problem is that some species can feign death by suspending their bodily functions, such as the heart beating.", "Dimanche wasn't sure the man was dead. Cassal gave a cursory check of the pulse and, finding none, assumed the man was dead.", "Dimanche reported that there was no heartbeat, but it turned out to be because the attacker-turned-victim had an electronic shield that made his pulse and respiration temporarily undetectable.", "The man actually was dead, but an accomplice dragged him away and then attacked Cassal himself when Cassal came back to check on the original stabbing victim." ], [ "The CEO of Neuronics, Inc.", "The head of a local Godolphian gang.", "The previous director of the Travel Bureau.", "An intelligence operative from Tunney 21, trying to protect their scientists from being recruited by off-worlders." ], [ "That sales talent is mostly being in the right place at the right price.", "That if everyone had an electronic personal assistant, they could accomplish more and reduce confusion.", "That the travel system - reservations, credit, identification - would be improved if instantaneous radio were available.", "That no one ever leaves the planets in the center of the galaxy unless they get an offer they can't refuse to go to Earth." ], [ "It could be years - or forever, judging by the old sign maker's question about Cassal's presence on the planet and in the Travel Aid bureau.", "It will be faster if Cassal gives generously to the Traveler's Aid Bureau.", "The RickRock C visits Godolph once per earth year, so it will be one year.", "It will probably only be a few more weeks, in spite of the dire predictions of the First Counselor, because Godolph is a major travel hub." ], [ "To give an edge to Cassal during the sale process.", "To act as a mobile general information source for Cassal.", "To supervise Cassal and report back to Earth on his activities.", "To keep Cassal company." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher\n to come to Earth,\nif he could\n. Literally, he had to guess the\n Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition,\n the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their\n arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working\n for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as\n Dimanche was a key factor.\n\n\n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n\n\n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've\n been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n 21.\"\n\n\n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the\n screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \"\nRickrock C\narrived\n yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"", "Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was\n too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for\n anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n\n\n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as\n dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't\n involve too much risk.\n\n\n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n\n\n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of\n that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually\n was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives\n like rain.", "\"Departed?\" He got up and sat down again, swallowing hard. \"When will\n the next ship arrive?\"\n\n\n \"Do you know how many stars there are in the Galaxy?\" she asked.\n\n\n He didn't answer.\n\"That's right,\" she said. \"Billions. Tunney, according to the notation,\n is near the center of the Galaxy, inside the third ring. You've\n covered about a third of the distance to it. Local traffic, anything\n within a thousand light-years, is relatively easy to manage. At longer\n distances, you take a chance. You've had yours and missed it. Frankly,\n Cassal, I don't know when another ship bound for Tunney will show up on\n or near Godolph. Within the next five years—maybe.\"\nHe blanched. \"How long would it take to get there using local\n transportation, star-hopping?\"\n\n\n \"Take my advice: don't try it. Five years, if you're lucky.\"", "\"You've traveled outside, where there are still free planets waiting to\n be settled. Where a man is welcome, if he's able to work.\" She paused.\n \"The center is different. Populations are excessive. Inside the third\n ring, no man is allowed off a ship without an identification tab. They\n don't encourage immigration.\"\n\n\n In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a\n passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of\n having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be rid of when\n his money was gone.\n\n\n Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney 21 was inside the third ring.\n\n\n \"Next time,\" she said, \"don't let anyone take your identification.\"", "\"You are speaking to her,\" she said. Her face disappeared from the\n screen.\n\n\n Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression.\n\n\n Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundantly\n supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him,\n Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of\n him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and\n answers. One thing he drew the line at—why he wanted to go to Tunney\n 21 was his own business.", "\"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you\n don't believe it, send back to—\" He stopped. It had taken him four\n months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for\n a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances\n such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for\n anything.\n\n\n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The\n spaceport records indicate that when\nRickrock C\ntook off this\n morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who\n had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became\n clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten\n it.", "\"His motivation is connected somehow with your being marooned here. For\n some reason you can't get off this planet.\"\n\n\n That was startling information, though not strictly true. A thousand\n star systems were waiting for him, and a ship to take him to each one.\n\n\n Of course, the one ship he wanted hadn't come in. Godolph was a\n transfer point for stars nearer the center of the Galaxy. When he\n had left Earth, he had known he would have to wait a few days here.\n He hadn't expected a delay of nearly three weeks. Still, it wasn't\n unusual. Interstellar schedules over great distances were not as\n reliable as they might be.", "He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't.\n\n\n \"You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can\n guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study\n under them.\"\n\n\n Close—but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not\n necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could\n build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even\n less likely.\n\n\n There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21\n that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies\n that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he\n could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that\n could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag\n could set its own price, which could be control of all communications,\n transport, trade—a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of\n all that.", "\"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible\n to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on\n the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the\n habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n\n\n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it\n safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n\n\n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around\n apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n\"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise\n display.\"\n\n\n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was\n accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple\n bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all\n travelers were crazy.", "The exit path guided him firmly to an inconspicuous and yet inescapable\n contribution station. He began to doubt the philanthropic aspect of the\n bureau.\n\"I've got it,\" said Dimanche as Cassal gloomily counted out the sum the\n first counselor had named.\n\n\n \"Got what?\" asked Cassal. He rolled the currency into a neat bundle,\n attached his name, and dropped it into the chute.\n\n\n \"The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner.\"\n\n\n \"What's a Huntner?\"\n\n\n \"A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing\n about her home planet when I managed to locate her.\"\n\n\n \"Any other information?\"\n\n\n \"None. Electronic guards were sliding into place as soon as I reached\n her. I got out as fast as I could.\"", "Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude\n him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the\n streets would be brightly lighted—for native eyes. A human would\n consider it dim.\n\n\n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be\n something he hopes to gain.\"\n\n\n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations.\n At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret\n physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report\n what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in\n finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem\n over to the godawful police.\"\n\n\n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.", "The first counselor reappeared. Age, indeterminate. Not, he supposed,\n that anyone would be curious about it. Slightly taller than average,\n rather on the slender side. Face was broad at the brow, narrow at the\n chin and her eyes were enigmatic. A dangerous woman.\nShe glanced down at the data. \"Denton Cassal, native of Earth.\n Destination, Tunney 21.\" She looked up at him. \"Occupation, sales\n engineer. Isn't that an odd combination?\" Her smile was quite superior.\n\n\n \"Not at all. Scientific training as an engineer. Special knowledge of\n customer relations.\"\n\n\n \"Special knowledge of a thousand races? How convenient.\" Her eyebrows\n arched.\n\n\n \"I think so,\" he agreed blandly. \"Anything else you'd like to know?\"\n\n\n \"Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you.\"", "A white card fluttered from the clip. He caught it as it fell.\n Curiously he examined it. Blank except for one crudely printed word,\n STAB. His unknown assailant certainly had tried.\nThe old man stared at the door, an obsolete visual projector wobbling\n precariously on his head. He closed his eyes and the lettering on the\n door disappeared. Cassal was too far away to see what it had been. The\n technician opened his eyes and concentrated. Slowly a new sign formed\n on the door.\nTRAVELERS AID BUREAU\n\n Murra Foray, First Counselor\n\n\n It was a drab sign, but, then, it was a dismal, backward planet. The\n old technician passed on to the next door and closed his eyes again.\n\n\n With a sinking feeling, Cassal walked toward the entrance. He needed\n help and he had to find it in this dingy rathole.", "\"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting\n for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n \"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency.\n Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency\n were new.\"\n\n\n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor\n resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one\n didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n\n\n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n\n\n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed\n overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away.", "Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk.\n It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he\ncould\nwalk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n\n\n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was\n peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was\n at a definite disadvantage.\n\n\n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in\n mind.\"\n\n\n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look\n unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and\n stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside,\n he might find safety for a time.", "\"I don't need that kind of luck.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose not.\" She hesitated. \"You're determined to go on?\" At the\n emphatic nod, she sighed. \"If that's your decision, we'll try to help\n you. To start things moving, we'll need a print of your identification\n tab.\"\n\n\n \"There's something funny about her,\" Dimanche decided. It was the usual\n speaking voice of the instrument, no louder than the noise the blood\n made in coursing through arteries and veins. Cassal could hear it\n plainly, because it was virtually inside his ear.\n\n\n Cassal ignored his private voice. \"Identification tab? I don't have it\n with me. In fact, I may have lost it.\"", "Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of\n this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body\n data—a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n\n\n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles\n of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount\n of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A\n picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which\n resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n\n\n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed\n to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of\n getting to Tunney 21.", "Inside, though, it wasn't dingy and it wasn't a rathole. More like a\n maze, an approved scientific one. Efficient, though not comfortable.\n Travelers Aid was busier than he thought it would be. Eventually he\n managed to squeeze into one of the many small counseling rooms.\n\n\n A woman appeared on the screen, crisp and cool. \"Please answer\n everything the machine asks. When the tape is complete, I'll be\n available for consultation.\"\n\n\n Cassal wasn't sure he was going to like her. \"Is this necessary?\" he\n asked. \"It's merely a matter of information.\"\n\n\n \"We have certain regulations we abide by.\" The woman smiled frostily.\n \"I can't give you any information until you comply with them.\"\n\n\n \"Sometimes regulations are silly,\" said Cassal firmly. \"Let me speak to\n the first counselor.\"", "Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job,\n afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He\n shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but\n he didn't intend to depend on that alone.", "Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with\n that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was\n self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\nDenton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself.\n He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched\n to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the\n basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long\n journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go\n to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the\n company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n\n\n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his\n mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money\n wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What\ndid\nthe\n thug want?" ], [ "Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few\n seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected\n stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical\n instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its\n function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n\n\n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but\n he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare.\n What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep\n you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n\n\n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against\n the wall.\n\n\n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet.\n Low.\"", "\"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand.\n He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness\n assumed an even more sinister quality.\n\n\n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n\n\n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask\n me for a light.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I\n hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n\n\n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't\n there any clue?\"", "Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal\n stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n\n\n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything\n on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted\n intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n\n\n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said\n Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on\n getting back to the hotel?\"\n\n\n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n\n\n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that\n intersection, he turned there.\n\n\n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily\n slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on\n the other.", "Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was\n too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for\n anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n\n\n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as\n dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't\n involve too much risk.\n\n\n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n\n\n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of\n that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually\n was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives\n like rain.", "Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job,\n afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He\n shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but\n he didn't intend to depend on that alone.", "Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with\n that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was\n self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\nDenton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself.\n He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched\n to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the\n basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long\n journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go\n to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the\n company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n\n\n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his\n mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money\n wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What\ndid\nthe\n thug want?", "His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher\n to come to Earth,\nif he could\n. Literally, he had to guess the\n Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition,\n the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their\n arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working\n for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as\n Dimanche was a key factor.\n\n\n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n\n\n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've\n been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n 21.\"\n\n\n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the\n screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \"\nRickrock C\narrived\n yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"", "He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all\n very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was\n also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an\n electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n\n\n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking\n fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n\n\n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased.\n Not just now.\"\n\n\n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism\n concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n \"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like\n this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is\n critical.\"", "\"You are speaking to her,\" she said. Her face disappeared from the\n screen.\n\n\n Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression.\n\n\n Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundantly\n supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him,\n Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of\n him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and\n answers. One thing he drew the line at—why he wanted to go to Tunney\n 21 was his own business.", "\"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely\n perceptible.\"\n\n\n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n\n\n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed\n from cuts on the face.\n\n\n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\nHorrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but\n would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to\n investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would\n question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what\n could he do about it?\n\n\n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n 21?", "\"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at\n closer range.\"\nObediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive\n in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful\n out of her element, though.\n\n\n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal\n retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow,\n physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with\n it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A\n scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got\n close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed.\n Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans.\n That makes the knife definite.\"", "That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give\n the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various\n reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called\n Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own,\n say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the\n proper approach, either.\n\n\n \"Weapons?\"\n\n\n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long\n knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n\n\n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in\n semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could\n die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of\n protection himself.\n\n\n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on\n tenuous evidence.\"\n\n\n \"Let's have it anyway.\"", "\"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn\n around.\"\nCassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him\n feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n\n\n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the\n alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant\n shot by.\n\n\n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n\n\n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling\n that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n\n\n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he\n missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n\n\n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n\n\n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"", "\"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible\n to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on\n the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the\n habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n\n\n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it\n safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n\n\n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around\n apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n\"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise\n display.\"\n\n\n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was\n accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple\n bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all\n travelers were crazy.", "\"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you\n don't believe it, send back to—\" He stopped. It had taken him four\n months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for\n a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances\n such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for\n anything.\n\n\n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The\n spaceport records indicate that when\nRickrock C\ntook off this\n morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who\n had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became\n clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten\n it.", "Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude\n him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the\n streets would be brightly lighted—for native eyes. A human would\n consider it dim.\n\n\n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be\n something he hopes to gain.\"\n\n\n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations.\n At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret\n physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report\n what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in\n finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem\n over to the godawful police.\"\n\n\n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.", "Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk.\n It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he\ncould\nwalk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n\n\n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was\n peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was\n at a definite disadvantage.\n\n\n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in\n mind.\"\n\n\n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look\n unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and\n stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside,\n he might find safety for a time.", "Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of\n this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body\n data—a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n\n\n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles\n of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount\n of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A\n picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which\n resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n\n\n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed\n to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of\n getting to Tunney 21.", "He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't.\n\n\n \"You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can\n guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study\n under them.\"\n\n\n Close—but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not\n necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could\n build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even\n less likely.\n\n\n There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21\n that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies\n that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he\n could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that\n could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag\n could set its own price, which could be control of all communications,\n transport, trade—a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of\n all that.", "\"I see.\" The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless,\n it sounded depressing.\n\n\n \"What I want to know is,\" said Dimanche, \"why such precautions as\n electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?\"\n\n\n Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly\n inquisitive at times.\n\n\n Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on\n the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man\n was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed\n every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was\n removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him.\n He turned and peered.\n\n\n \"You stuck here, too?\" he asked in the uneven voice of the aged." ], [ "\"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand.\n He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness\n assumed an even more sinister quality.\n\n\n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n\n\n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask\n me for a light.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I\n hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n\n\n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't\n there any clue?\"", "\"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn\n around.\"\nCassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him\n feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n\n\n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the\n alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant\n shot by.\n\n\n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n\n\n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling\n that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n\n\n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he\n missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n\n\n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n\n\n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"", "Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job,\n afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He\n shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but\n he didn't intend to depend on that alone.", "Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal\n stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n\n\n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything\n on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted\n intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n\n\n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said\n Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on\n getting back to the hotel?\"\n\n\n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n\n\n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that\n intersection, he turned there.\n\n\n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily\n slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on\n the other.", "Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few\n seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected\n stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical\n instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its\n function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n\n\n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but\n he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare.\n What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep\n you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n\n\n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against\n the wall.\n\n\n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet.\n Low.\"", "\"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at\n closer range.\"\nObediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive\n in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful\n out of her element, though.\n\n\n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal\n retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow,\n physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with\n it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A\n scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got\n close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed.\n Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans.\n That makes the knife definite.\"", "Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was\n too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for\n anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n\n\n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as\n dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't\n involve too much risk.\n\n\n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n\n\n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of\n that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually\n was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives\n like rain.", "Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of\n a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately,\n his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance,\n the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His\n opponent gasped and broke away.\n\n\n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got\n him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's\n afraid.\"\n\n\n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some\n didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent\n fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n\n\n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near\n the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't\n move.", "He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all\n very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was\n also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an\n electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n\n\n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking\n fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n\n\n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased.\n Not just now.\"\n\n\n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism\n concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n \"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like\n this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is\n critical.\"", "Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk.\n It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he\ncould\nwalk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n\n\n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was\n peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was\n at a definite disadvantage.\n\n\n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in\n mind.\"\n\n\n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look\n unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and\n stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside,\n he might find safety for a time.", "\"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible\n to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on\n the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the\n habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n\n\n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it\n safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n\n\n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around\n apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n\"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise\n display.\"\n\n\n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was\n accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple\n bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all\n travelers were crazy.", "That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give\n the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various\n reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called\n Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own,\n say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the\n proper approach, either.\n\n\n \"Weapons?\"\n\n\n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long\n knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n\n\n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in\n semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could\n die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of\n protection himself.\n\n\n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on\n tenuous evidence.\"\n\n\n \"Let's have it anyway.\"", "Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with\n that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was\n self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\nDenton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself.\n He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched\n to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the\n basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long\n journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go\n to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the\n company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n\n\n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his\n mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money\n wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What\ndid\nthe\n thug want?", "Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the\n boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n\n\n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him.\n Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly\n trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he\n was forced to the ground.\n\n\n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps\n rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping\n by way of water.\n\n\n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in\n sight.\n\n\n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man\n I've ever been strangled by.\"", "Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude\n him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the\n streets would be brightly lighted—for native eyes. A human would\n consider it dim.\n\n\n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be\n something he hopes to gain.\"\n\n\n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations.\n At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret\n physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report\n what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in\n finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem\n over to the godawful police.\"\n\n\n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.", "Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of\n this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body\n data—a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n\n\n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles\n of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount\n of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A\n picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which\n resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n\n\n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed\n to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of\n getting to Tunney 21.", "\"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely\n perceptible.\"\n\n\n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n\n\n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed\n from cuts on the face.\n\n\n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\nHorrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but\n would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to\n investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would\n question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what\n could he do about it?\n\n\n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n 21?", "\"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting\n for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n \"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency.\n Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency\n were new.\"\n\n\n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor\n resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one\n didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n\n\n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n\n\n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed\n overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away.", "\"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you\n don't believe it, send back to—\" He stopped. It had taken him four\n months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for\n a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances\n such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for\n anything.\n\n\n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The\n spaceport records indicate that when\nRickrock C\ntook off this\n morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who\n had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became\n clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten\n it.", "\"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the\n basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I\n checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n\n\n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted\n Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't\nwanted\nto kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the\n police.\n\n\n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second\n time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was\n successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He\n squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n\n\n Something, however, was missing—his wallet.\n\n\n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle.\n Persistent fellow. Damned persistent." ], [ "\"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn\n around.\"\nCassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him\n feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n\n\n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the\n alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant\n shot by.\n\n\n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n\n\n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling\n that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n\n\n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he\n missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n\n\n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n\n\n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"", "\"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand.\n He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness\n assumed an even more sinister quality.\n\n\n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n\n\n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask\n me for a light.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I\n hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n\n\n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't\n there any clue?\"", "That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give\n the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various\n reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called\n Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own,\n say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the\n proper approach, either.\n\n\n \"Weapons?\"\n\n\n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long\n knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n\n\n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in\n semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could\n die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of\n protection himself.\n\n\n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on\n tenuous evidence.\"\n\n\n \"Let's have it anyway.\"", "Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was\n too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for\n anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n\n\n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as\n dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't\n involve too much risk.\n\n\n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n\n\n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of\n that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually\n was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives\n like rain.", "He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all\n very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was\n also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an\n electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n\n\n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking\n fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n\n\n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased.\n Not just now.\"\n\n\n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism\n concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n \"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like\n this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is\n critical.\"", "Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the\n boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n\n\n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him.\n Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly\n trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he\n was forced to the ground.\n\n\n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps\n rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping\n by way of water.\n\n\n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in\n sight.\n\n\n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man\n I've ever been strangled by.\"", "\"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at\n closer range.\"\nObediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive\n in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful\n out of her element, though.\n\n\n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal\n retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow,\n physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with\n it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A\n scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got\n close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed.\n Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans.\n That makes the knife definite.\"", "\"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely\n perceptible.\"\n\n\n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n\n\n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed\n from cuts on the face.\n\n\n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\nHorrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but\n would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to\n investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would\n question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what\n could he do about it?\n\n\n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n 21?", "Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few\n seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected\n stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical\n instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its\n function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n\n\n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but\n he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare.\n What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep\n you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n\n\n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against\n the wall.\n\n\n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet.\n Low.\"", "Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with\n that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was\n self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\nDenton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself.\n He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched\n to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the\n basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long\n journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go\n to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the\n company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n\n\n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his\n mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money\n wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What\ndid\nthe\n thug want?", "She smiled in instant disbelief. \"We're not trying to pry into any\n part of your past you may wish concealed. However, it's much easier\n for us to help you if you have your identification. Now if you can't\nremember\nyour real name and where you put your identification—\" She\n arose and left the screen. \"Just a moment.\"\n\n\n He glared uneasily at the spot where the first counselor wasn't. His\nreal\nname!\n\n\n \"Relax,\" Dimanche suggested. \"She didn't mean it as a personal insult.\"\n\n\n Presently she returned.\n\n\n \"I have news for you, whoever you are.\"", "Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal\n stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n\n\n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything\n on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted\n intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n\n\n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said\n Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on\n getting back to the hotel?\"\n\n\n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n\n\n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that\n intersection, he turned there.\n\n\n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily\n slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on\n the other.", "Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of\n this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body\n data—a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n\n\n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles\n of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount\n of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A\n picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which\n resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n\n\n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed\n to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of\n getting to Tunney 21.", "Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of\n a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately,\n his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance,\n the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His\n opponent gasped and broke away.\n\n\n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got\n him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's\n afraid.\"\n\n\n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some\n didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent\n fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n\n\n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near\n the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't\n move.", "\"As a salesman?\" she asked. \"I'm afraid you'll find it difficult to do\n business with Godolphians.\"\n\n\n Irony wasn't called for at a time like this, he thought reproachfully.\n\n\n \"Not just another salesman,\" he answered definitely. \"I have special\n knowledge of customer reactions. I can tell exactly—\"\n\n\n He stopped abruptly. Was she baiting him? For what reason? The\n instrument he called Dimanche was not known to the Galaxy at large.\n From the business angle, it would be poor policy to hand out that\n information at random. Aside from that, he needed every advantage he\n could get. Dimanche was his special advantage.\n\n\n \"Anyway,\" he finished lamely, \"I'm a first class engineer. I can\n always find something in that line.\"", "Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude\n him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the\n streets would be brightly lighted—for native eyes. A human would\n consider it dim.\n\n\n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be\n something he hopes to gain.\"\n\n\n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations.\n At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret\n physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report\n what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in\n finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem\n over to the godawful police.\"\n\n\n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.", "\"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the\n basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I\n checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n\n\n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted\n Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't\nwanted\nto kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the\n police.\n\n\n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second\n time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was\n successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He\n squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n\n\n Something, however, was missing—his wallet.\n\n\n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle.\n Persistent fellow. Damned persistent.", "His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher\n to come to Earth,\nif he could\n. Literally, he had to guess the\n Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition,\n the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their\n arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working\n for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as\n Dimanche was a key factor.\n\n\n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n\n\n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've\n been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n 21.\"\n\n\n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the\n screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \"\nRickrock C\narrived\n yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"", "\"I see.\" The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless,\n it sounded depressing.\n\n\n \"What I want to know is,\" said Dimanche, \"why such precautions as\n electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?\"\n\n\n Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly\n inquisitive at times.\n\n\n Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on\n the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man\n was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed\n every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was\n removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him.\n He turned and peered.\n\n\n \"You stuck here, too?\" he asked in the uneven voice of the aged.", "\"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible\n to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on\n the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the\n habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n\n\n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it\n safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n\n\n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around\n apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n\"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise\n display.\"\n\n\n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was\n accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple\n bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all\n travelers were crazy." ], [ "Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of\n a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately,\n his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance,\n the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His\n opponent gasped and broke away.\n\n\n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got\n him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's\n afraid.\"\n\n\n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some\n didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent\n fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n\n\n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near\n the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't\n move.", "Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few\n seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected\n stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical\n instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its\n function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n\n\n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but\n he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare.\n What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep\n you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n\n\n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against\n the wall.\n\n\n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet.\n Low.\"", "\"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn\n around.\"\nCassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him\n feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n\n\n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the\n alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant\n shot by.\n\n\n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n\n\n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling\n that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n\n\n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he\n missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n\n\n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n\n\n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"", "\"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand.\n He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness\n assumed an even more sinister quality.\n\n\n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n\n\n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask\n me for a light.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I\n hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n\n\n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't\n there any clue?\"", "Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the\n boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n\n\n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him.\n Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly\n trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he\n was forced to the ground.\n\n\n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps\n rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping\n by way of water.\n\n\n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in\n sight.\n\n\n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man\n I've ever been strangled by.\"", "\"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely\n perceptible.\"\n\n\n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n\n\n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed\n from cuts on the face.\n\n\n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\nHorrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but\n would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to\n investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would\n question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what\n could he do about it?\n\n\n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n 21?", "\"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the\n basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I\n checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n\n\n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted\n Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't\nwanted\nto kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the\n police.\n\n\n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second\n time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was\n successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He\n squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n\n\n Something, however, was missing—his wallet.\n\n\n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle.\n Persistent fellow. Damned persistent.", "\"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at\n closer range.\"\nObediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive\n in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful\n out of her element, though.\n\n\n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal\n retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow,\n physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with\n it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A\n scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got\n close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed.\n Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans.\n That makes the knife definite.\"", "Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal\n stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n\n\n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything\n on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted\n intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n\n\n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said\n Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on\n getting back to the hotel?\"\n\n\n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n\n\n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that\n intersection, he turned there.\n\n\n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily\n slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on\n the other.", "That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give\n the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various\n reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called\n Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own,\n say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the\n proper approach, either.\n\n\n \"Weapons?\"\n\n\n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long\n knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n\n\n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in\n semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could\n die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of\n protection himself.\n\n\n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on\n tenuous evidence.\"\n\n\n \"Let's have it anyway.\"", "Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of\n this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body\n data—a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n\n\n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles\n of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount\n of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A\n picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which\n resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n\n\n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed\n to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of\n getting to Tunney 21.", "He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all\n very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was\n also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an\n electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n\n\n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking\n fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n\n\n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased.\n Not just now.\"\n\n\n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism\n concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n \"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like\n this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is\n critical.\"", "Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was\n too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for\n anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n\n\n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as\n dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't\n involve too much risk.\n\n\n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n\n\n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of\n that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually\n was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives\n like rain.", "Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job,\n afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He\n shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but\n he didn't intend to depend on that alone.", "\"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible\n to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on\n the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the\n habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n\n\n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it\n safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n\n\n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around\n apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n\"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise\n display.\"\n\n\n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was\n accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple\n bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all\n travelers were crazy.", "Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude\n him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the\n streets would be brightly lighted—for native eyes. A human would\n consider it dim.\n\n\n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be\n something he hopes to gain.\"\n\n\n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations.\n At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret\n physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report\n what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in\n finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem\n over to the godawful police.\"\n\n\n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.", "Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk.\n It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he\ncould\nwalk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n\n\n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was\n peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was\n at a definite disadvantage.\n\n\n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in\n mind.\"\n\n\n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look\n unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and\n stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside,\n he might find safety for a time.", "\"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you\n don't believe it, send back to—\" He stopped. It had taken him four\n months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for\n a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances\n such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for\n anything.\n\n\n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The\n spaceport records indicate that when\nRickrock C\ntook off this\n morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who\n had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became\n clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten\n it.", "Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with\n that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was\n self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\nDenton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself.\n He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched\n to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the\n basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long\n journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go\n to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the\n company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n\n\n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his\n mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money\n wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What\ndid\nthe\n thug want?", "\"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting\n for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n \"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency.\n Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency\n were new.\"\n\n\n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor\n resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one\n didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n\n\n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n\n\n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed\n overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away." ], [ "\"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the\n basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I\n checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n\n\n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted\n Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't\nwanted\nto kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the\n police.\n\n\n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second\n time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was\n successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He\n squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n\n\n Something, however, was missing—his wallet.\n\n\n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle.\n Persistent fellow. Damned persistent.", "\"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely\n perceptible.\"\n\n\n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n\n\n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed\n from cuts on the face.\n\n\n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\nHorrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but\n would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to\n investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would\n question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what\n could he do about it?\n\n\n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n 21?", "Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of\n a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately,\n his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance,\n the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His\n opponent gasped and broke away.\n\n\n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got\n him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's\n afraid.\"\n\n\n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some\n didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent\n fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n\n\n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near\n the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't\n move.", "Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the\n boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n\n\n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him.\n Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly\n trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he\n was forced to the ground.\n\n\n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps\n rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping\n by way of water.\n\n\n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in\n sight.\n\n\n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man\n I've ever been strangled by.\"", "\"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn\n around.\"\nCassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him\n feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n\n\n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the\n alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant\n shot by.\n\n\n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n\n\n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling\n that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n\n\n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he\n missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n\n\n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n\n\n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"", "\"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand.\n He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness\n assumed an even more sinister quality.\n\n\n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n\n\n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask\n me for a light.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I\n hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n\n\n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't\n there any clue?\"", "That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give\n the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various\n reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called\n Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own,\n say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the\n proper approach, either.\n\n\n \"Weapons?\"\n\n\n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long\n knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n\n\n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in\n semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could\n die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of\n protection himself.\n\n\n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on\n tenuous evidence.\"\n\n\n \"Let's have it anyway.\"", "Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of\n this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body\n data—a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n\n\n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles\n of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount\n of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A\n picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which\n resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n\n\n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed\n to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of\n getting to Tunney 21.", "\"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at\n closer range.\"\nObediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive\n in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful\n out of her element, though.\n\n\n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal\n retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow,\n physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with\n it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A\n scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got\n close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed.\n Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans.\n That makes the knife definite.\"", "He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all\n very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was\n also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an\n electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n\n\n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking\n fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n\n\n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased.\n Not just now.\"\n\n\n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism\n concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n \"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like\n this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is\n critical.\"", "Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few\n seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected\n stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical\n instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its\n function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n\n\n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but\n he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare.\n What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep\n you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n\n\n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against\n the wall.\n\n\n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet.\n Low.\"", "It really didn't matter. He fingered the clip he had taken from the\n supposedly dead body. He had intended to turn it over to the police.\n Now he might as well keep it to reimburse him for his loss. It\n contained more money than his wallet had.\n\n\n Except for the identification tab he always carried in his wallet, it\n was more than a fair exchange. The identification, a rectangular piece\n of plastic, was useful in establishing credit, but with the money he\n now had, he wouldn't need credit. If he did, he could always send for\n another tab.", "Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal\n stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n\n\n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything\n on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted\n intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n\n\n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said\n Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on\n getting back to the hotel?\"\n\n\n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n\n\n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that\n intersection, he turned there.\n\n\n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily\n slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on\n the other.", "\"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible\n to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on\n the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the\n habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n\n\n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it\n safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n\n\n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around\n apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n\"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise\n display.\"\n\n\n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was\n accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple\n bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all\n travelers were crazy.", "Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude\n him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the\n streets would be brightly lighted—for native eyes. A human would\n consider it dim.\n\n\n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be\n something he hopes to gain.\"\n\n\n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations.\n At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret\n physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report\n what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in\n finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem\n over to the godawful police.\"\n\n\n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.", "DELAY IN TRANSIT\nBy F. L. WALLACE\n\n\n Illustrated by SIBLEY\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nAn unprovoked, meaningless night attack is\n \nterrifying enough on your own home planet, worse\n \non a world across the Galaxy. But the horror\n \nis the offer of help that cannot be accepted!\n\"Muscles tense,\" said Dimanche. \"Neural index 1.76, unusually high.\n Adrenalin squirting through his system. In effect, he's stalking you.\n Intent: probably assault with a deadly weapon.\"", "Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with\n that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was\n self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\nDenton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself.\n He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched\n to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the\n basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long\n journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go\n to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the\n company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n\n\n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his\n mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money\n wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What\ndid\nthe\n thug want?", "She smiled in instant disbelief. \"We're not trying to pry into any\n part of your past you may wish concealed. However, it's much easier\n for us to help you if you have your identification. Now if you can't\nremember\nyour real name and where you put your identification—\" She\n arose and left the screen. \"Just a moment.\"\n\n\n He glared uneasily at the spot where the first counselor wasn't. His\nreal\nname!\n\n\n \"Relax,\" Dimanche suggested. \"She didn't mean it as a personal insult.\"\n\n\n Presently she returned.\n\n\n \"I have news for you, whoever you are.\"", "Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was\n too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for\n anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n\n\n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as\n dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't\n involve too much risk.\n\n\n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n\n\n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of\n that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually\n was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives\n like rain.", "Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk.\n It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he\ncould\nwalk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n\n\n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was\n peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was\n at a definite disadvantage.\n\n\n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in\n mind.\"\n\n\n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look\n unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and\n stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside,\n he might find safety for a time." ], [ "His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher\n to come to Earth,\nif he could\n. Literally, he had to guess the\n Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition,\n the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their\n arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working\n for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as\n Dimanche was a key factor.\n\n\n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n\n\n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've\n been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n 21.\"\n\n\n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the\n screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \"\nRickrock C\narrived\n yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"", "\"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you\n don't believe it, send back to—\" He stopped. It had taken him four\n months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for\n a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances\n such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for\n anything.\n\n\n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The\n spaceport records indicate that when\nRickrock C\ntook off this\n morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who\n had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became\n clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten\n it.", "\"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand.\n He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness\n assumed an even more sinister quality.\n\n\n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n\n\n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask\n me for a light.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I\n hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n\n\n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't\n there any clue?\"", "\"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely\n perceptible.\"\n\n\n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n\n\n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed\n from cuts on the face.\n\n\n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\nHorrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but\n would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to\n investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would\n question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what\n could he do about it?\n\n\n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n 21?", "Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal\n stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n\n\n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything\n on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted\n intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n\n\n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said\n Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on\n getting back to the hotel?\"\n\n\n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n\n\n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that\n intersection, he turned there.\n\n\n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily\n slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on\n the other.", "Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was\n too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for\n anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n\n\n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as\n dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't\n involve too much risk.\n\n\n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n\n\n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of\n that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually\n was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives\n like rain.", "\"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting\n for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n \"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency.\n Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency\n were new.\"\n\n\n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor\n resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one\n didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n\n\n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n\n\n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed\n overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away.", "Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of\n this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body\n data—a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n\n\n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles\n of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount\n of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A\n picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which\n resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n\n\n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed\n to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of\n getting to Tunney 21.", "Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few\n seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected\n stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical\n instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its\n function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n\n\n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but\n he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare.\n What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep\n you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n\n\n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against\n the wall.\n\n\n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet.\n Low.\"", "That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give\n the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various\n reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called\n Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own,\n say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the\n proper approach, either.\n\n\n \"Weapons?\"\n\n\n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long\n knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n\n\n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in\n semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could\n die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of\n protection himself.\n\n\n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on\n tenuous evidence.\"\n\n\n \"Let's have it anyway.\"", "Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with\n that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was\n self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\nDenton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself.\n He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched\n to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the\n basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long\n journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go\n to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the\n company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n\n\n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his\n mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money\n wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What\ndid\nthe\n thug want?", "\"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at\n closer range.\"\nObediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive\n in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful\n out of her element, though.\n\n\n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal\n retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow,\n physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with\n it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A\n scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got\n close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed.\n Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans.\n That makes the knife definite.\"", "Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job,\n afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He\n shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but\n he didn't intend to depend on that alone.", "\"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the\n basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I\n checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n\n\n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted\n Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't\nwanted\nto kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the\n police.\n\n\n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second\n time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was\n successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He\n squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n\n\n Something, however, was missing—his wallet.\n\n\n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle.\n Persistent fellow. Damned persistent.", "Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude\n him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the\n streets would be brightly lighted—for native eyes. A human would\n consider it dim.\n\n\n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be\n something he hopes to gain.\"\n\n\n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations.\n At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret\n physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report\n what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in\n finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem\n over to the godawful police.\"\n\n\n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.", "\"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn\n around.\"\nCassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him\n feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n\n\n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the\n alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant\n shot by.\n\n\n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n\n\n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling\n that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n\n\n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he\n missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n\n\n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n\n\n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"", "Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of\n a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately,\n his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance,\n the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His\n opponent gasped and broke away.\n\n\n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got\n him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's\n afraid.\"\n\n\n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some\n didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent\n fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n\n\n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near\n the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't\n move.", "He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all\n very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was\n also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an\n electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n\n\n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking\n fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n\n\n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased.\n Not just now.\"\n\n\n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism\n concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n \"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like\n this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is\n critical.\"", "\"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible\n to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on\n the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the\n habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n\n\n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it\n safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n\n\n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around\n apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n\"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise\n display.\"\n\n\n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was\n accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple\n bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all\n travelers were crazy.", "Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the\n boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n\n\n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him.\n Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly\n trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he\n was forced to the ground.\n\n\n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps\n rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping\n by way of water.\n\n\n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in\n sight.\n\n\n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man\n I've ever been strangled by.\"" ], [ "\"You are speaking to her,\" she said. Her face disappeared from the\n screen.\n\n\n Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression.\n\n\n Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundantly\n supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him,\n Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of\n him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and\n answers. One thing he drew the line at—why he wanted to go to Tunney\n 21 was his own business.", "\"I see.\" The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless,\n it sounded depressing.\n\n\n \"What I want to know is,\" said Dimanche, \"why such precautions as\n electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?\"\n\n\n Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly\n inquisitive at times.\n\n\n Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on\n the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man\n was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed\n every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was\n removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him.\n He turned and peered.\n\n\n \"You stuck here, too?\" he asked in the uneven voice of the aged.", "\"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting\n for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n \"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency.\n Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency\n were new.\"\n\n\n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor\n resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one\n didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n\n\n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n\n\n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed\n overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away.", "Inside, though, it wasn't dingy and it wasn't a rathole. More like a\n maze, an approved scientific one. Efficient, though not comfortable.\n Travelers Aid was busier than he thought it would be. Eventually he\n managed to squeeze into one of the many small counseling rooms.\n\n\n A woman appeared on the screen, crisp and cool. \"Please answer\n everything the machine asks. When the tape is complete, I'll be\n available for consultation.\"\n\n\n Cassal wasn't sure he was going to like her. \"Is this necessary?\" he\n asked. \"It's merely a matter of information.\"\n\n\n \"We have certain regulations we abide by.\" The woman smiled frostily.\n \"I can't give you any information until you comply with them.\"\n\n\n \"Sometimes regulations are silly,\" said Cassal firmly. \"Let me speak to\n the first counselor.\"", "\"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand.\n He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness\n assumed an even more sinister quality.\n\n\n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n\n\n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask\n me for a light.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I\n hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n\n\n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't\n there any clue?\"", "Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job,\n afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He\n shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but\n he didn't intend to depend on that alone.", "\"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible\n to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on\n the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the\n habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n\n\n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it\n safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n\n\n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around\n apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n\"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise\n display.\"\n\n\n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was\n accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple\n bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all\n travelers were crazy.", "The exit path guided him firmly to an inconspicuous and yet inescapable\n contribution station. He began to doubt the philanthropic aspect of the\n bureau.\n\"I've got it,\" said Dimanche as Cassal gloomily counted out the sum the\n first counselor had named.\n\n\n \"Got what?\" asked Cassal. He rolled the currency into a neat bundle,\n attached his name, and dropped it into the chute.\n\n\n \"The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner.\"\n\n\n \"What's a Huntner?\"\n\n\n \"A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing\n about her home planet when I managed to locate her.\"\n\n\n \"Any other information?\"\n\n\n \"None. Electronic guards were sliding into place as soon as I reached\n her. I got out as fast as I could.\"", "The first counselor reappeared. Age, indeterminate. Not, he supposed,\n that anyone would be curious about it. Slightly taller than average,\n rather on the slender side. Face was broad at the brow, narrow at the\n chin and her eyes were enigmatic. A dangerous woman.\nShe glanced down at the data. \"Denton Cassal, native of Earth.\n Destination, Tunney 21.\" She looked up at him. \"Occupation, sales\n engineer. Isn't that an odd combination?\" Her smile was quite superior.\n\n\n \"Not at all. Scientific training as an engineer. Special knowledge of\n customer relations.\"\n\n\n \"Special knowledge of a thousand races? How convenient.\" Her eyebrows\n arched.\n\n\n \"I think so,\" he agreed blandly. \"Anything else you'd like to know?\"\n\n\n \"Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you.\"", "\"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at\n closer range.\"\nObediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive\n in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful\n out of her element, though.\n\n\n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal\n retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow,\n physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with\n it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A\n scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got\n close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed.\n Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans.\n That makes the knife definite.\"", "\"I don't need that kind of luck.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose not.\" She hesitated. \"You're determined to go on?\" At the\n emphatic nod, she sighed. \"If that's your decision, we'll try to help\n you. To start things moving, we'll need a print of your identification\n tab.\"\n\n\n \"There's something funny about her,\" Dimanche decided. It was the usual\n speaking voice of the instrument, no louder than the noise the blood\n made in coursing through arteries and veins. Cassal could hear it\n plainly, because it was virtually inside his ear.\n\n\n Cassal ignored his private voice. \"Identification tab? I don't have it\n with me. In fact, I may have lost it.\"", "Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few\n seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected\n stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical\n instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its\n function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n\n\n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but\n he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare.\n What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep\n you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n\n\n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against\n the wall.\n\n\n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet.\n Low.\"", "Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal\n stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n\n\n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything\n on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted\n intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n\n\n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said\n Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on\n getting back to the hotel?\"\n\n\n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n\n\n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that\n intersection, he turned there.\n\n\n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily\n slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on\n the other.", "A white card fluttered from the clip. He caught it as it fell.\n Curiously he examined it. Blank except for one crudely printed word,\n STAB. His unknown assailant certainly had tried.\nThe old man stared at the door, an obsolete visual projector wobbling\n precariously on his head. He closed his eyes and the lettering on the\n door disappeared. Cassal was too far away to see what it had been. The\n technician opened his eyes and concentrated. Slowly a new sign formed\n on the door.\nTRAVELERS AID BUREAU\n\n Murra Foray, First Counselor\n\n\n It was a drab sign, but, then, it was a dismal, backward planet. The\n old technician passed on to the next door and closed his eyes again.\n\n\n With a sinking feeling, Cassal walked toward the entrance. He needed\n help and he had to find it in this dingy rathole.", "His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher\n to come to Earth,\nif he could\n. Literally, he had to guess the\n Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition,\n the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their\n arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working\n for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as\n Dimanche was a key factor.\n\n\n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n\n\n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've\n been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n 21.\"\n\n\n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the\n screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \"\nRickrock C\narrived\n yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"", "Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was\n too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for\n anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n\n\n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as\n dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't\n involve too much risk.\n\n\n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n\n\n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of\n that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually\n was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives\n like rain.", "Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with\n that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was\n self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\nDenton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself.\n He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched\n to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the\n basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long\n journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go\n to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the\n company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n\n\n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his\n mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money\n wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What\ndid\nthe\n thug want?", "He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't.\n\n\n \"You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can\n guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study\n under them.\"\n\n\n Close—but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not\n necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could\n build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even\n less likely.\n\n\n There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21\n that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies\n that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he\n could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that\n could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag\n could set its own price, which could be control of all communications,\n transport, trade—a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of\n all that.", "He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all\n very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was\n also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an\n electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n\n\n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking\n fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n\n\n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased.\n Not just now.\"\n\n\n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism\n concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n \"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like\n this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is\n critical.\"", "\"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn\n around.\"\nCassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him\n feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n\n\n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the\n alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant\n shot by.\n\n\n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n\n\n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling\n that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n\n\n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he\n missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n\n\n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n\n\n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"" ], [ "His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher\n to come to Earth,\nif he could\n. Literally, he had to guess the\n Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition,\n the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their\n arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working\n for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as\n Dimanche was a key factor.\n\n\n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n\n\n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've\n been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n 21.\"\n\n\n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the\n screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \"\nRickrock C\narrived\n yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"", "\"Departed?\" He got up and sat down again, swallowing hard. \"When will\n the next ship arrive?\"\n\n\n \"Do you know how many stars there are in the Galaxy?\" she asked.\n\n\n He didn't answer.\n\"That's right,\" she said. \"Billions. Tunney, according to the notation,\n is near the center of the Galaxy, inside the third ring. You've\n covered about a third of the distance to it. Local traffic, anything\n within a thousand light-years, is relatively easy to manage. At longer\n distances, you take a chance. You've had yours and missed it. Frankly,\n Cassal, I don't know when another ship bound for Tunney will show up on\n or near Godolph. Within the next five years—maybe.\"\nHe blanched. \"How long would it take to get there using local\n transportation, star-hopping?\"\n\n\n \"Take my advice: don't try it. Five years, if you're lucky.\"", "\"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely\n perceptible.\"\n\n\n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n\n\n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed\n from cuts on the face.\n\n\n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\nHorrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but\n would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to\n investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would\n question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what\n could he do about it?\n\n\n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n 21?", "Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal\n stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n\n\n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything\n on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted\n intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n\n\n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said\n Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on\n getting back to the hotel?\"\n\n\n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n\n\n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that\n intersection, he turned there.\n\n\n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily\n slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on\n the other.", "Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was\n too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for\n anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n\n\n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as\n dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't\n involve too much risk.\n\n\n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n\n\n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of\n that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually\n was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives\n like rain.", "Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk.\n It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he\ncould\nwalk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea?\n\n\n A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was\n peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was\n at a definite disadvantage.\n\n\n \"Correction,\" said Dimanche. \"Not simple assault. He has murder in\n mind.\"\n\n\n \"It still doesn't appeal to me,\" said Cassal. Striving to look\n unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and\n stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside,\n he might find safety for a time.", "\"Cassal,\" he said firmly. \"Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you\n don't believe it, send back to—\" He stopped. It had taken him four\n months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for\n a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances\n such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for\n anything.\n\n\n \"I see you understand.\" She glanced at the card in her hand. \"The\n spaceport records indicate that when\nRickrock C\ntook off this\n morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't I,\" he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who\n had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became\n clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten\n it.", "\"You are speaking to her,\" she said. Her face disappeared from the\n screen.\n\n\n Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression.\n\n\n Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundantly\n supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him,\n Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of\n him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and\n answers. One thing he drew the line at—why he wanted to go to Tunney\n 21 was his own business.", "Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude\n him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the\n streets would be brightly lighted—for native eyes. A human would\n consider it dim.\n\n\n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be\n something he hopes to gain.\"\n\n\n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations.\n At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret\n physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report\n what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in\n finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem\n over to the godawful police.\"\n\n\n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.", "\"You've traveled outside, where there are still free planets waiting to\n be settled. Where a man is welcome, if he's able to work.\" She paused.\n \"The center is different. Populations are excessive. Inside the third\n ring, no man is allowed off a ship without an identification tab. They\n don't encourage immigration.\"\n\n\n In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a\n passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of\n having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be rid of when\n his money was gone.\n\n\n Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney 21 was inside the third ring.\n\n\n \"Next time,\" she said, \"don't let anyone take your identification.\"", "Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of\n this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body\n data—a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n\n\n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles\n of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount\n of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A\n picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which\n resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n\n\n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed\n to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of\n getting to Tunney 21.", "\"Not interested,\" said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible\n to anyone but Dimanche. \"I'm not the victim type. He was standing on\n the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the\n habitat hotel and sit tight.\"\n\n\n \"First you have to get there,\" Dimanche pointed out. \"I mean, is it\n safe for a stranger to walk through the city?\"\n\n\n \"Now that you mention it, no,\" answered Cassal. He looked around\n apprehensively. \"Where is he?\"\n\"Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise\n display.\"\n\n\n A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was\n accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple\n bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all\n travelers were crazy.", "\"His motivation is connected somehow with your being marooned here. For\n some reason you can't get off this planet.\"\n\n\n That was startling information, though not strictly true. A thousand\n star systems were waiting for him, and a ship to take him to each one.\n\n\n Of course, the one ship he wanted hadn't come in. Godolph was a\n transfer point for stars nearer the center of the Galaxy. When he\n had left Earth, he had known he would have to wait a few days here.\n He hadn't expected a delay of nearly three weeks. Still, it wasn't\n unusual. Interstellar schedules over great distances were not as\n reliable as they might be.", "Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with\n that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was\n self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\nDenton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself.\n He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched\n to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the\n basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long\n journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go\n to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the\n company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n\n\n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his\n mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money\n wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What\ndid\nthe\n thug want?", "He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't.\n\n\n \"You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can\n guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study\n under them.\"\n\n\n Close—but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not\n necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could\n build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even\n less likely.\n\n\n There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21\n that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies\n that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he\n could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that\n could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag\n could set its own price, which could be control of all communications,\n transport, trade—a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of\n all that.", "\"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand.\n He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness\n assumed an even more sinister quality.\n\n\n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n\n\n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask\n me for a light.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I\n hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n\n\n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't\n there any clue?\"", "Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few\n seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected\n stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical\n instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its\n function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n\n\n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but\n he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare.\n What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep\n you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n\n\n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against\n the wall.\n\n\n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet.\n Low.\"", "\"Stuck?\" repeated Cassal. \"I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting\n for my ship.\" He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions.\n \"Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency.\n Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency\n were new.\"\n\n\n The old man chuckled. \"Re-organization. The previous first counselor\n resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one\n didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed.\"\n\n\n She would do just that, thought Cassal. \"What about this Murra Foray?\"\n\n\n The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed\n overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away.", "Water. It was a perfect engineering material. Simple, cheap, infinitely\n flexible. With a minimum of mechanism and at break-neck speed, the\n ribbon of the transport tide flowed at different levels throughout\n the city. The Godolphian merely plunged in and was carried swiftly\n and noiselessly to his destination. Whereas a human—Cassal shivered.\n If he were found drowned, it would be considered an accident. No\n investigation would be made. The thug who was trailing him had\n certainly picked the right place.\n\n\n The Godolphian girl passed. She wore a sleek brown fur, her own. Cassal\n was almost positive she muttered a polite \"Arf?\" as she sloshed by.\n What she meant by that, he didn't know and didn't intend to find out.", "\"I don't need that kind of luck.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose not.\" She hesitated. \"You're determined to go on?\" At the\n emphatic nod, she sighed. \"If that's your decision, we'll try to help\n you. To start things moving, we'll need a print of your identification\n tab.\"\n\n\n \"There's something funny about her,\" Dimanche decided. It was the usual\n speaking voice of the instrument, no louder than the noise the blood\n made in coursing through arteries and veins. Cassal could hear it\n plainly, because it was virtually inside his ear.\n\n\n Cassal ignored his private voice. \"Identification tab? I don't have it\n with me. In fact, I may have lost it.\"" ], [ "That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give\n the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various\n reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called\n Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own,\n say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the\n proper approach, either.\n\n\n \"Weapons?\"\n\n\n \"The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long\n knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person.\"\n\n\n Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in\n semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could\n die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of\n protection himself.\n\n\n \"Report,\" said Dimanche. \"Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on\n tenuous evidence.\"\n\n\n \"Let's have it anyway.\"", "Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was\n too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for\n anyone this far away to have learned about it.\n\n\n And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as\n dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't\n involve too much risk.\n\n\n \"Better start moving.\" That was Dimanche. \"He's getting suspicious.\"\n\n\n Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of\n that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually\n was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives\n like rain.", "\"None at all,\" admitted Dimanche. \"He's very close. You'd better turn\n around.\"\nCassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him\n feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little.\n\n\n A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the\n alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant\n shot by.\n\n\n \"Hey!\" shouted Cassal.\n\n\n Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling\n that no one was going to come to his assistance.\n\n\n \"He wasn't expecting that reaction,\" explained Dimanche. \"That's why he\n missed. He's turned around and is coming back.\"\n\n\n \"I'm armed!\" shouted Cassal.\n\n\n \"That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you.\"", "\"That's no lie,\" agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand.\n He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness\n assumed an even more sinister quality.\n\n\n \"Quiet,\" said Dimanche. \"He's verbalizing about you.\"\n\n\n \"He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask\n me for a light.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think so,\" answered Dimanche. \"He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I\n hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'.\"\n\n\n \"He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't\n there any clue?\"", "Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with\n that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was\n self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't?\nDenton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself.\n He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched\n to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the\n basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long\n journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go\n to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the\n company that employed him, and possibly not even to them.\n\n\n The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his\n mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money\n wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What\ndid\nthe\n thug want?", "He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all\n very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was\n also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an\n electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that.\n\n\n \"Easy,\" warned Dimanche. \"He's at the entrance to the alley, walking\n fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route.\"\n\n\n \"I'm surprised, too,\" remarked Cassal. \"But I wouldn't say I'm pleased.\n Not just now.\"\n\n\n \"Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting.\" The mechanism\n concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued:\n \"His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like\n this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is\n critical.\"", "\"Follow her,\" instructed Dimanche. \"We've got to investigate our man at\n closer range.\"\nObediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive\n in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful\n out of her element, though.\n\n\n The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal\n retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow,\n physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with\n it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A\n scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder.\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" said Dimanche disgustedly. \"His mind froze when we got\n close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed.\n Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans.\n That makes the knife definite.\"", "Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few\n seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected\n stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical\n instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its\n function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto.\n\n\n \"Twenty feet away,\" advised Dimanche. \"He knows you can't see him, but\n he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare.\n What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep\n you posted below the level of his hearing.\"\n\n\n \"Stay on him,\" growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against\n the wall.\n\n\n \"To the right,\" whispered Dimanche. \"Lunge forward. About five feet.\n Low.\"", "\"Heartbeat slow,\" said Dimanche solemnly. \"Breathing barely\n perceptible.\"\n\n\n \"Then he's not dead,\" said Cassal in relief.\n\n\n Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed\n from cuts on the face.\n\n\n \"Respiration none, heartbeat absent,\" stated Dimanche.\nHorrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but\n would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to\n investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would\n question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what\n could he do about it?\n\n\n Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney\n 21?", "\"As a salesman?\" she asked. \"I'm afraid you'll find it difficult to do\n business with Godolphians.\"\n\n\n Irony wasn't called for at a time like this, he thought reproachfully.\n\n\n \"Not just another salesman,\" he answered definitely. \"I have special\n knowledge of customer reactions. I can tell exactly—\"\n\n\n He stopped abruptly. Was she baiting him? For what reason? The\n instrument he called Dimanche was not known to the Galaxy at large.\n From the business angle, it would be poor policy to hand out that\n information at random. Aside from that, he needed every advantage he\n could get. Dimanche was his special advantage.\n\n\n \"Anyway,\" he finished lamely, \"I'm a first class engineer. I can\n always find something in that line.\"", "Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the\n boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence.\n\n\n He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him.\n Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly\n trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he\n was forced to the ground.\n\n\n He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps\n rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping\n by way of water.\n\n\n Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in\n sight.\n\n\n \"Interpret body data, do you?\" muttered Cassal. \"Liveliest dead man\n I've ever been strangled by.\"", "She smiled in instant disbelief. \"We're not trying to pry into any\n part of your past you may wish concealed. However, it's much easier\n for us to help you if you have your identification. Now if you can't\nremember\nyour real name and where you put your identification—\" She\n arose and left the screen. \"Just a moment.\"\n\n\n He glared uneasily at the spot where the first counselor wasn't. His\nreal\nname!\n\n\n \"Relax,\" Dimanche suggested. \"She didn't mean it as a personal insult.\"\n\n\n Presently she returned.\n\n\n \"I have news for you, whoever you are.\"", "Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal\n stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter.\n\n\n \"Excellent thinking,\" commended Dimanche. \"He won't attempt anything\n on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted\n intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette.\"\n\n\n The lighter flared in his hand. \"That's one way of finding out,\" said\n Cassal. \"But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on\n getting back to the hotel?\"\n\n\n \"I'm curious. Turn here.\"\n\n\n \"Go to hell,\" said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that\n intersection, he turned there.\n\n\n It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily\n slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on\n the other.", "His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher\n to come to Earth,\nif he could\n. Literally, he had to guess the\n Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition,\n the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their\n arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working\n for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as\n Dimanche was a key factor.\n\n\n Her voice broke through his thoughts. \"Now, then, what's your problem?\"\n\n\n \"I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've\n been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney\n 21.\"\n\n\n \"Just a moment.\" She glanced at something below the angle of the\n screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. \"\nRickrock C\narrived\n yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning.\"", "Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of\n this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want?\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" replied Dimanche irritably. \"I can interpret body\n data—a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat.\"\n\n\n Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles\n of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount\n of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A\n picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which\n resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all.\n\n\n Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed\n to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of\n getting to Tunney 21.", "\"I see.\" The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless,\n it sounded depressing.\n\n\n \"What I want to know is,\" said Dimanche, \"why such precautions as\n electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?\"\n\n\n Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly\n inquisitive at times.\n\n\n Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on\n the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man\n was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed\n every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was\n removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him.\n He turned and peered.\n\n\n \"You stuck here, too?\" he asked in the uneven voice of the aged.", "He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't.\n\n\n \"You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can\n guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study\n under them.\"\n\n\n Close—but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not\n necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could\n build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even\n less likely.\n\n\n There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21\n that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies\n that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he\n could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that\n could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag\n could set its own price, which could be control of all communications,\n transport, trade—a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of\n all that.", "Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude\n him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the\n streets would be brightly lighted—for native eyes. A human would\n consider it dim.\n\n\n \"Why did he choose me?\" asked Cassal plaintively. \"There must be\n something he hopes to gain.\"\n\n\n \"I'm working on it,\" said Dimanche. \"But remember, I have limitations.\n At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret\n physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report\n what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in\n finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem\n over to the godawful police.\"\n\n\n \"Godolph, not godawful,\" corrected Cassal absently.", "\"It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the\n basic functions of their body,\" said Dimanche defensively. \"When I\n checked him, he had no heartbeat.\"\n\n\n \"Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely,\" grunted\n Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't\nwanted\nto kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the\n police.\n\n\n He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second\n time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was\n successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He\n squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away.\n\n\n Something, however, was missing—his wallet.\n\n\n The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle.\n Persistent fellow. Damned persistent.", "Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of\n a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately,\n his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance,\n the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His\n opponent gasped and broke away.\n\n\n \"Attack!\" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. \"You've got\n him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's\n afraid.\"\n\n\n Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some\n didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent\n fell to the ground, gasped and was silent.\n\n\n Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near\n the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't\n move." ] ]
test	51336	[ "Why do people seem to not take note of the POSAT ads?", "What was Bill Evans REALLY looking for when he applied for POSAT?", "Miss Elizabeth Arnable wants to join POSAT because", "Donald Alford fills out the POSAT form for what reason?", "Out of the three applicants, which one was reluctant to fill out the next part of the application POSAT mails to them and why?", "Why was Don so shocked to receive correspondence \n from POSAT at his office?", "What was the deciding factor in Don's decision to keep his appointment with POSAT?", "In the waiting room, Don finds something so unbelievable that he ", "When he sees the atomic reactor, Don is not as shocked by its presence as he is", "Why does Don ultimately agree to become a member of POSAT?" ]	[ [ "They are so small and usually only found in the back of publications where no one reads, so no one really sees them.", "They have saturated the market with their ads, and they have been around for so long that no one pays attention to them anymore.", "You have to have special glasses to even see them, so they are not noticed.", "They are written so that only certain people can understand them, so no one pays attention to them." ], [ "A job. He knew with their connections, they could help him find work.", "He is looking for hope. He is going through such a rough time, he feels they might give him something to hold on to.", "A wife. He knew that being a member of POSAT would make him attractive to women. It would give him social status.", "He wants the answers that they are promising." ], [ "Her father and sister are members, so she wants to become one in order to follow tradition.", "she wants to feel accepted by something...anything.", "They share the same beliefs she does: cats are deities.", "she wants to know the answers they promise." ], [ "He wants the answers they promise.", "His wife dared him to.", "His wife encouraged him to.", "He simply does it out of curiosity." ], [ "Don Alford. It is asking him questions he is really not comfortable answering.", "Miss Elizabeth Arnable. She is afraid they will not find her interesting, and she really has nothing to add to the application.", "Donald Alford. His wife convinced him that they want the national secrets he carries.", "Bill Evens. He now has all the hope he needs with his new dream job. He doesn't see a point." ], [ "They SHOULD NOT have any idea where works based on their correspondence.", "He is afraid his wife will think he is keeping secrets when she finds out they sent it to the office. He asked them specifically NOT to send anything to his work.", "His boss does not like the employees to do any sort of personal business at work.", "He was embarrassed for the people at his job to know he had an interest in POSAT" ], [ "He needed to give them a piece of his mind for sending that letter to his job after he had specifically asked them not to do that.", "They told him if he didn't then they would hurt his wife.", "His curiosity about them was even greater after they sent the letter to his job. He had to find out what they were all about.", "His wife once again encourages him." ], [ "picks up the thing that surprises him and tries to steal it, but he is stopped when he cannot get out of the door.", "tries to simply leave the building, but the doors are locked.", "faints.", "calls the authorities." ], [ "to see how little coverage there is protecting the people from the radiation it produces.", "amazed by the fact that it fits inside the building.", "is shocked to see how many people are working on it. It should only take one.", "the fact that they did this in secrecy when Don's company was the only one with the technology to build such a thing." ], [ "He believes that smart men should rule the world.", "He knows that he can never leave the building unless he agrees to join them.", "His wife's influence.", "They proved they could do the things they claim by finding the right way to motivate him to join, just the way they do all the people they need to join them" ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the\nAntivivisectionist Gazette\nthe day before. She pounced upon the POSAT\n ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having\n filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that\n would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post\n it as soon as possible.\n\n\n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at\n the bottom of a column in\nThe Bulletin of Physical Research\n. He was\n engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired\n from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research\n worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT\n ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.", "He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that\n some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his\n brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that\n couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n\n\n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his\n attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small\n black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr\n atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the\n printed matter that accompanied it.", "What is POSAT?\nBy PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH\n\n\n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nOf course coming events cast their shadows\n\n before, but this shadow was 400 years long!\nThe following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several\n magazines:\nMASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS!\nWhat is the secret source of those profound\n\n principles that can solve the problems of life?\n\n Send for our FREE booklet of explanation.\nDo not be a leaf in the wind! YOU", "\"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your\n imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give\n for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n\n\n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest\n pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n\n\n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the\n contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of\n POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n\n\n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed\n gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They\n were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no\n help to him.", "\"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which\n we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the\n newest of the sciences—that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready\n to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one\n respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to\n save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to\n do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n\n\n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a\n weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just\n anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work\n for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why\n haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work\n on this project—before it's too late?\"", "can alter the course of your life!\nTap the treasury of Wisdom through the ages!\nThe Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth\nPOSAT\nan ancient secret society\n\n\n Most readers passed it by with scarcely a glance. It was, after all,\n similar to the many that had appeared through the years under the\n name of that same society. Other readers, as their eyes slid over the\n familiar format of the ad, speculated idly about the persistent and\n mildly mysterious organization behind it. A few even resolved to clip\n the attached coupon and send for the booklet—sometime—when a pen or\n pencil was nearer at hand.", "\"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter\n was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted\n it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted\n lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it.\n He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and\n promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was\n entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his\n other letters.\n\n\n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in\n response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information\n than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more\n volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the\n key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself—if he would\n merely fill out the enclosed form.", "Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like\n an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about\n my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know\n what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures\n attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n\n\n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be—a secret\n society—and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n\n\n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade\n after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n\n\n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the\n dilemmas before him.\n\n\n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and,\n paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n\n\n Dear Doctor Alford:", "Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that!\n But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is\n to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely\n disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this\n building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached\n the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if\n they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!", "His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring?\n Subversive agents?\"\n\n\n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His\n conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too\n melodramatic.\n\n\n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he\n knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n\n\n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not\n be at work on Tuesday.\nAt first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters.\n It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall\n was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete\n construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the\n street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings\n of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and\n was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.", "\"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of\n advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to\n prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are,\n still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats—and we've caught\n up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that\n time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n\n\n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n\n\n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a\n steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw\n what must have been the world's largest computing machine.", "Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not\n only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that\n one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it\n contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and\n black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an\n active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month;\n please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled\n contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n\n\n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy\n it, too.\n\n\n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown\n contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded\n sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with\n sharp surprise.\n\"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on\n the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"", "Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical\n composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the\n information that she wished to give—all about her poor, dear father\n who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt\n toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were\n reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a\n religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete\n and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their\n booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately.\n Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial\n situation.\n\n\n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that\n POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in\n his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his\n curiosity.", "He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the\n envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him,\n unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number\n of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given\n them!\n\n\n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some\n perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the\n directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of\n the university. Or—or—\"\n\n\n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His\n laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble\n of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that\n particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own,\n POSAT had unearthed the information.", "It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door\n marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n\n\n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced\n a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him\n a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way\n up through the murky stairwell.\n\n\n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk\n facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the\n pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of\n the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom\n somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here\n that he had come to expect.\n\n\n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary.\nNot\n the Mata-Hari type\n, thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own\n suspicions. He handed her the letter.", "Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for\n several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had\n mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he\n had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were\n almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by\n something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n\n\n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay\n heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested\n information—about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his\n reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without\n quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some\n of his desperation and sense of futility.", "Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right\n about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization\n has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself\n before the day is over.\"\n\n\n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n\n\n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n\n\n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long\n story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to\n trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of\n what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the\n most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have\n stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n\n\n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.", "\"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you\n again.\"\n\n\n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \"\nYou're\nthe Grand\n Chairman of POSAT?\"\n\n\n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which\n Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and\n his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure\n of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous\n place—didn't anything make sense any longer?\n\n\n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His\n voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any\n evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and—yes—afraid.\"\nDon stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm\n his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.", "She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he\n supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n\n\n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room,\n which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted\n outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where\n a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\nBut Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of\n the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of\n which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar\n to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had\n ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that\n this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments\n did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.", "His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he\n had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap.\n When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a\n position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older\n industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place\n to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was\n hope for the future.\n\n\n It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the\n other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind\n alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence\n in them." ], [ "Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for\n several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had\n mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he\n had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were\n almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by\n something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n\n\n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay\n heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested\n information—about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his\n reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without\n quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some\n of his desperation and sense of futility.", "\"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your\n imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give\n for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n\n\n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest\n pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n\n\n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the\n contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of\n POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n\n\n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed\n gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They\n were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no\n help to him.", "Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of\nYour\n Life and Psychology\nthat had been abandoned on his seat in the bus.\n He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil.\n \"You can alter the course of your life!\" he read again. He particularly\n liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe\n it. He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he\n had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time.\n\n\n Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement\n was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine.\n The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always\n liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading\n would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what\n the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said.", "Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like\n an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about\n my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know\n what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures\n attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n\n\n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be—a secret\n society—and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n\n\n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade\n after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n\n\n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the\n dilemmas before him.\n\n\n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and,\n paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n\n\n Dear Doctor Alford:", "It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the\nAntivivisectionist Gazette\nthe day before. She pounced upon the POSAT\n ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having\n filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that\n would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post\n it as soon as possible.\n\n\n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at\n the bottom of a column in\nThe Bulletin of Physical Research\n. He was\n engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired\n from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research\n worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT\n ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.", "\"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which\n we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the\n newest of the sciences—that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready\n to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one\n respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to\n save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to\n do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n\n\n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a\n weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just\n anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work\n for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why\n haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work\n on this project—before it's too late?\"", "Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical\n composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the\n information that she wished to give—all about her poor, dear father\n who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt\n toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were\n reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a\n religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete\n and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their\n booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately.\n Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial\n situation.\n\n\n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that\n POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in\n his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his\n curiosity.", "Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right\n about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization\n has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself\n before the day is over.\"\n\n\n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n\n\n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n\n\n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long\n story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to\n trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of\n what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the\n most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have\n stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n\n\n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.", "He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the\n envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him,\n unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number\n of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given\n them!\n\n\n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some\n perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the\n directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of\n the university. Or—or—\"\n\n\n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His\n laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble\n of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that\n particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own,\n POSAT had unearthed the information.", "Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that!\n But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is\n to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely\n disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this\n building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached\n the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if\n they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!", "\"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you\n again.\"\n\n\n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \"\nYou're\nthe Grand\n Chairman of POSAT?\"\n\n\n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which\n Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and\n his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure\n of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous\n place—didn't anything make sense any longer?\n\n\n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His\n voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any\n evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and—yes—afraid.\"\nDon stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm\n his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.", "\"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter\n was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted\n it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted\n lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it.\n He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and\n promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was\n entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his\n other letters.\n\n\n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in\n response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information\n than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more\n volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the\n key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself—if he would\n merely fill out the enclosed form.", "He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that\n some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his\n brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that\n couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n\n\n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his\n attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small\n black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr\n atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the\n printed matter that accompanied it.", "What is POSAT?\nBy PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH\n\n\n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nOf course coming events cast their shadows\n\n before, but this shadow was 400 years long!\nThe following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several\n magazines:\nMASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS!\nWhat is the secret source of those profound\n\n principles that can solve the problems of life?\n\n Send for our FREE booklet of explanation.\nDo not be a leaf in the wind! YOU", "His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he\n had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap.\n When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a\n position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older\n industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place\n to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was\n hope for the future.\n\n\n It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the\n other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind\n alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence\n in them.", "It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door\n marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n\n\n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced\n a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him\n a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way\n up through the murky stairwell.\n\n\n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk\n facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the\n pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of\n the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom\n somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here\n that he had come to expect.\n\n\n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary.\nNot\n the Mata-Hari type\n, thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own\n suspicions. He handed her the letter.", "Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not\n only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that\n one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it\n contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and\n black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an\n active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month;\n please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled\n contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n\n\n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy\n it, too.\n\n\n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown\n contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded\n sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with\n sharp surprise.\n\"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on\n the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"", "His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring?\n Subversive agents?\"\n\n\n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His\n conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too\n melodramatic.\n\n\n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he\n knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n\n\n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not\n be at work on Tuesday.\nAt first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters.\n It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall\n was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete\n construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the\n street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings\n of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and\n was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.", "\"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We\n enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in\n line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep,\n if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if\n they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we\n can act when the time finally comes.\n\n\n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last\n resort—lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we\n put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate\n them—anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's\n good practice for us.\n\n\n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't\n answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n\n\n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him.\n He had one more question.", "\"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of\n advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to\n prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are,\n still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats—and we've caught\n up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that\n time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n\n\n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n\n\n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a\n steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw\n what must have been the world's largest computing machine." ], [ "Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical\n composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the\n information that she wished to give—all about her poor, dear father\n who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt\n toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were\n reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a\n religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete\n and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their\n booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately.\n Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial\n situation.\n\n\n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that\n POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in\n his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his\n curiosity.", "Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not\n only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that\n one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it\n contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and\n black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an\n active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month;\n please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled\n contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n\n\n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy\n it, too.\n\n\n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown\n contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded\n sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with\n sharp surprise.\n\"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on\n the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"", "\"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which\n we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the\n newest of the sciences—that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready\n to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one\n respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to\n save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to\n do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n\n\n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a\n weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just\n anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work\n for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why\n haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work\n on this project—before it's too late?\"", "It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the\nAntivivisectionist Gazette\nthe day before. She pounced upon the POSAT\n ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having\n filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that\n would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post\n it as soon as possible.\n\n\n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at\n the bottom of a column in\nThe Bulletin of Physical Research\n. He was\n engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired\n from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research\n worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT\n ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.", "Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that!\n But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is\n to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely\n disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this\n building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached\n the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if\n they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!", "Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of\nYour\n Life and Psychology\nthat had been abandoned on his seat in the bus.\n He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil.\n \"You can alter the course of your life!\" he read again. He particularly\n liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe\n it. He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he\n had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time.\n\n\n Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement\n was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine.\n The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always\n liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading\n would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what\n the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said.", "Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right\n about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization\n has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself\n before the day is over.\"\n\n\n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n\n\n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n\n\n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long\n story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to\n trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of\n what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the\n most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have\n stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n\n\n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.", "It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door\n marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n\n\n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced\n a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him\n a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way\n up through the murky stairwell.\n\n\n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk\n facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the\n pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of\n the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom\n somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here\n that he had come to expect.\n\n\n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary.\nNot\n the Mata-Hari type\n, thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own\n suspicions. He handed her the letter.", "\"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We\n enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in\n line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep,\n if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if\n they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we\n can act when the time finally comes.\n\n\n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last\n resort—lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we\n put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate\n them—anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's\n good practice for us.\n\n\n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't\n answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n\n\n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him.\n He had one more question.", "Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like\n an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about\n my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know\n what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures\n attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n\n\n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be—a secret\n society—and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n\n\n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade\n after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n\n\n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the\n dilemmas before him.\n\n\n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and,\n paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n\n\n Dear Doctor Alford:", "\"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you\n again.\"\n\n\n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \"\nYou're\nthe Grand\n Chairman of POSAT?\"\n\n\n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which\n Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and\n his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure\n of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous\n place—didn't anything make sense any longer?\n\n\n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His\n voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any\n evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and—yes—afraid.\"\nDon stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm\n his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.", "\"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your\n imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give\n for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n\n\n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest\n pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n\n\n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the\n contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of\n POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n\n\n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed\n gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They\n were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no\n help to him.", "She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he\n supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n\n\n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room,\n which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted\n outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where\n a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\nBut Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of\n the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of\n which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar\n to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had\n ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that\n this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments\n did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.", "What is POSAT?\nBy PHYLLIS STERLING SMITH\n\n\n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction September 1951.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nOf course coming events cast their shadows\n\n before, but this shadow was 400 years long!\nThe following advertisement appeared in the July 1953 issue of several\n magazines:\nMASTERY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE CAN BE YOURS!\nWhat is the secret source of those profound\n\n principles that can solve the problems of life?\n\n Send for our FREE booklet of explanation.\nDo not be a leaf in the wind! YOU", "The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one\n for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the\n laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his\n research problems home with him and worried over them half the night,\n they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for\n pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was\n in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a\n whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n\n\n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be\n disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been\n sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her\n about it without telephoning.\nSince the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home!\nBut it was impossible!", "\"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of\n advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to\n prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are,\n still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats—and we've caught\n up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that\n time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n\n\n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n\n\n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a\n steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw\n what must have been the world's largest computing machine.", "can alter the course of your life!\nTap the treasury of Wisdom through the ages!\nThe Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth\nPOSAT\nan ancient secret society\n\n\n Most readers passed it by with scarcely a glance. It was, after all,\n similar to the many that had appeared through the years under the\n name of that same society. Other readers, as their eyes slid over the\n familiar format of the ad, speculated idly about the persistent and\n mildly mysterious organization behind it. A few even resolved to clip\n the attached coupon and send for the booklet—sometime—when a pen or\n pencil was nearer at hand.", "His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring?\n Subversive agents?\"\n\n\n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His\n conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too\n melodramatic.\n\n\n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he\n knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n\n\n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not\n be at work on Tuesday.\nAt first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters.\n It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall\n was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete\n construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the\n street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings\n of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and\n was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.", "\"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter\n was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted\n it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted\n lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it.\n He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and\n promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was\n entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his\n other letters.\n\n\n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in\n response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information\n than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more\n volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the\n key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself—if he would\n merely fill out the enclosed form.", "He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that\n some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his\n brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that\n couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n\n\n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his\n attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small\n black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr\n atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the\n printed matter that accompanied it." ], [ "Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like\n an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about\n my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know\n what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures\n attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n\n\n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be—a secret\n society—and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n\n\n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade\n after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n\n\n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the\n dilemmas before him.\n\n\n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and,\n paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n\n\n Dear Doctor Alford:", "It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the\nAntivivisectionist Gazette\nthe day before. She pounced upon the POSAT\n ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having\n filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that\n would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post\n it as soon as possible.\n\n\n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at\n the bottom of a column in\nThe Bulletin of Physical Research\n. He was\n engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired\n from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research\n worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT\n ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.", "Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical\n composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the\n information that she wished to give—all about her poor, dear father\n who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt\n toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were\n reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a\n religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete\n and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their\n booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately.\n Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial\n situation.\n\n\n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that\n POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in\n his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his\n curiosity.", "Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not\n only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that\n one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it\n contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and\n black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an\n active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month;\n please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled\n contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n\n\n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy\n it, too.\n\n\n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown\n contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded\n sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with\n sharp surprise.\n\"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on\n the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"", "\"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you\n again.\"\n\n\n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \"\nYou're\nthe Grand\n Chairman of POSAT?\"\n\n\n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which\n Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and\n his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure\n of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous\n place—didn't anything make sense any longer?\n\n\n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His\n voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any\n evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and—yes—afraid.\"\nDon stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm\n his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.", "His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring?\n Subversive agents?\"\n\n\n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His\n conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too\n melodramatic.\n\n\n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he\n knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n\n\n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not\n be at work on Tuesday.\nAt first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters.\n It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall\n was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete\n construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the\n street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings\n of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and\n was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.", "\"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your\n imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give\n for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n\n\n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest\n pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n\n\n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the\n contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of\n POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n\n\n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed\n gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They\n were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no\n help to him.", "\"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which\n we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the\n newest of the sciences—that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready\n to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one\n respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to\n save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to\n do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n\n\n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a\n weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just\n anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work\n for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why\n haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work\n on this project—before it's too late?\"", "Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right\n about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization\n has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself\n before the day is over.\"\n\n\n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n\n\n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n\n\n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long\n story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to\n trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of\n what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the\n most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have\n stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n\n\n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.", "Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for\n several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had\n mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he\n had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were\n almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by\n something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n\n\n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay\n heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested\n information—about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his\n reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without\n quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some\n of his desperation and sense of futility.", "It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door\n marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n\n\n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced\n a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him\n a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way\n up through the murky stairwell.\n\n\n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk\n facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the\n pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of\n the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom\n somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here\n that he had come to expect.\n\n\n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary.\nNot\n the Mata-Hari type\n, thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own\n suspicions. He handed her the letter.", "\"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter\n was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted\n it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted\n lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it.\n He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and\n promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was\n entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his\n other letters.\n\n\n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in\n response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information\n than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more\n volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the\n key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself—if he would\n merely fill out the enclosed form.", "Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that!\n But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is\n to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely\n disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this\n building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached\n the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if\n they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!", "\"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We\n enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in\n line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep,\n if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if\n they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we\n can act when the time finally comes.\n\n\n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last\n resort—lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we\n put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate\n them—anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's\n good practice for us.\n\n\n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't\n answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n\n\n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him.\n He had one more question.", "He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the\n envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him,\n unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number\n of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given\n them!\n\n\n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some\n perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the\n directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of\n the university. Or—or—\"\n\n\n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His\n laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble\n of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that\n particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own,\n POSAT had unearthed the information.", "\"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of\n advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to\n prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are,\n still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats—and we've caught\n up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that\n time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n\n\n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n\n\n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a\n steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw\n what must have been the world's largest computing machine.", "She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he\n supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n\n\n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room,\n which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted\n outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where\n a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\nBut Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of\n the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of\n which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar\n to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had\n ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that\n this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments\n did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.", "The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one\n for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the\n laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his\n research problems home with him and worried over them half the night,\n they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for\n pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was\n in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a\n whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n\n\n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be\n disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been\n sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her\n about it without telephoning.\nSince the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home!\nBut it was impossible!", "She smiled. \"We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll just step\n into the next room—\"\n\n\n She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it.\n\n\n The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the\n shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and\n the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing.\n The rug—Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum.\n The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were\n surely old masters—of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he\n recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the\n artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian.\n Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities\n of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of\n Operational Circuit Analysis.", "\"What do you suppose they're driving at?\" he asked his wife Betty,\n handing her the booklet and questionnaire.\n\n\n \"I don't really know what to say,\" she answered, squinting a little as\n she usually did when puzzled. \"I know one thing, though, and that's\n that you won't stop until you find out!\"\n\n\n \"The scientific attitude,\" he acknowledged with a grin.\n\n\n \"Why don't you fill out this questionnaire incognito, though?\" she\n suggested. \"Pretend that we're wealthy and see if they try to get our\n money. Do they have anything yet except your name and address?\"\n\n\n Don was shocked. \"If I send this back to them, it will have to be with\n correct answers!\"" ], [ "Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for\n several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had\n mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he\n had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were\n almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by\n something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n\n\n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay\n heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested\n information—about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his\n reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without\n quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some\n of his desperation and sense of futility.", "Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like\n an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about\n my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know\n what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures\n attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n\n\n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be—a secret\n society—and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n\n\n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade\n after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n\n\n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the\n dilemmas before him.\n\n\n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and,\n paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n\n\n Dear Doctor Alford:", "It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the\nAntivivisectionist Gazette\nthe day before. She pounced upon the POSAT\n ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having\n filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that\n would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post\n it as soon as possible.\n\n\n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at\n the bottom of a column in\nThe Bulletin of Physical Research\n. He was\n engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired\n from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research\n worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT\n ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.", "Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical\n composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the\n information that she wished to give—all about her poor, dear father\n who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt\n toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were\n reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a\n religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete\n and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their\n booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately.\n Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial\n situation.\n\n\n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that\n POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in\n his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his\n curiosity.", "\"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your\n imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give\n for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n\n\n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest\n pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n\n\n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the\n contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of\n POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n\n\n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed\n gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They\n were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no\n help to him.", "He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the\n envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him,\n unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number\n of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given\n them!\n\n\n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some\n perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the\n directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of\n the university. Or—or—\"\n\n\n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His\n laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble\n of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that\n particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own,\n POSAT had unearthed the information.", "\"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter\n was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted\n it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted\n lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it.\n He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and\n promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was\n entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his\n other letters.\n\n\n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in\n response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information\n than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more\n volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the\n key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself—if he would\n merely fill out the enclosed form.", "Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not\n only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that\n one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it\n contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and\n black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an\n active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month;\n please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled\n contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n\n\n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy\n it, too.\n\n\n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown\n contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded\n sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with\n sharp surprise.\n\"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on\n the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"", "His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he\n had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap.\n When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a\n position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older\n industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place\n to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was\n hope for the future.\n\n\n It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the\n other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind\n alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence\n in them.", "It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door\n marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n\n\n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced\n a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him\n a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way\n up through the murky stairwell.\n\n\n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk\n facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the\n pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of\n the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom\n somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here\n that he had come to expect.\n\n\n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary.\nNot\n the Mata-Hari type\n, thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own\n suspicions. He handed her the letter.", "Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that!\n But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is\n to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely\n disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this\n building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached\n the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if\n they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!", "\"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which\n we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the\n newest of the sciences—that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready\n to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one\n respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to\n save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to\n do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n\n\n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a\n weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just\n anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work\n for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why\n haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work\n on this project—before it's too late?\"", "The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one\n for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the\n laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his\n research problems home with him and worried over them half the night,\n they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for\n pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was\n in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a\n whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n\n\n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be\n disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been\n sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her\n about it without telephoning.\nSince the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home!\nBut it was impossible!", "Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right\n about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization\n has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself\n before the day is over.\"\n\n\n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n\n\n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n\n\n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long\n story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to\n trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of\n what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the\n most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have\n stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n\n\n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.", "We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to\n us. We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the\n requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After\n Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable\n secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal\n interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n\n\n Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand\n Chairman on Tuesday, July 10, at 2:30 P.M. Please let us know if this\n arrangement is acceptable to you. If not, we will attempt to make\n another appointment for you.", "\"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you\n again.\"\n\n\n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \"\nYou're\nthe Grand\n Chairman of POSAT?\"\n\n\n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which\n Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and\n his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure\n of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous\n place—didn't anything make sense any longer?\n\n\n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His\n voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any\n evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and—yes—afraid.\"\nDon stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm\n his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.", "\"What do you suppose they're driving at?\" he asked his wife Betty,\n handing her the booklet and questionnaire.\n\n\n \"I don't really know what to say,\" she answered, squinting a little as\n she usually did when puzzled. \"I know one thing, though, and that's\n that you won't stop until you find out!\"\n\n\n \"The scientific attitude,\" he acknowledged with a grin.\n\n\n \"Why don't you fill out this questionnaire incognito, though?\" she\n suggested. \"Pretend that we're wealthy and see if they try to get our\n money. Do they have anything yet except your name and address?\"\n\n\n Don was shocked. \"If I send this back to them, it will have to be with\n correct answers!\"", "\"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We\n enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in\n line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep,\n if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if\n they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we\n can act when the time finally comes.\n\n\n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last\n resort—lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we\n put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate\n them—anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's\n good practice for us.\n\n\n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't\n answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n\n\n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him.\n He had one more question.", "His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring?\n Subversive agents?\"\n\n\n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His\n conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too\n melodramatic.\n\n\n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he\n knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n\n\n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not\n be at work on Tuesday.\nAt first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters.\n It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall\n was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete\n construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the\n street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings\n of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and\n was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.", "He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that\n some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his\n brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that\n couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n\n\n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his\n attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small\n black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr\n atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the\n printed matter that accompanied it." ], [ "It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door\n marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n\n\n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced\n a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him\n a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way\n up through the murky stairwell.\n\n\n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk\n facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the\n pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of\n the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom\n somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here\n that he had come to expect.\n\n\n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary.\nNot\n the Mata-Hari type\n, thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own\n suspicions. He handed her the letter.", "Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like\n an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about\n my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know\n what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures\n attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n\n\n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be—a secret\n society—and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n\n\n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade\n after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n\n\n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the\n dilemmas before him.\n\n\n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and,\n paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n\n\n Dear Doctor Alford:", "He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the\n envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him,\n unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number\n of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given\n them!\n\n\n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some\n perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the\n directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of\n the university. Or—or—\"\n\n\n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His\n laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble\n of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that\n particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own,\n POSAT had unearthed the information.", "His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring?\n Subversive agents?\"\n\n\n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His\n conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too\n melodramatic.\n\n\n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he\n knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n\n\n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not\n be at work on Tuesday.\nAt first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters.\n It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall\n was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete\n construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the\n street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings\n of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and\n was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.", "She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he\n supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n\n\n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room,\n which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted\n outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where\n a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\nBut Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of\n the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of\n which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar\n to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had\n ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that\n this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments\n did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.", "The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one\n for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the\n laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his\n research problems home with him and worried over them half the night,\n they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for\n pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was\n in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a\n whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n\n\n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be\n disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been\n sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her\n about it without telephoning.\nSince the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home!\nBut it was impossible!", "Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right\n about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization\n has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself\n before the day is over.\"\n\n\n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n\n\n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n\n\n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long\n story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to\n trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of\n what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the\n most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have\n stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n\n\n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.", "\"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your\n imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give\n for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n\n\n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest\n pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n\n\n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the\n contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of\n POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n\n\n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed\n gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They\n were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no\n help to him.", "\"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you\n again.\"\n\n\n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \"\nYou're\nthe Grand\n Chairman of POSAT?\"\n\n\n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which\n Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and\n his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure\n of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous\n place—didn't anything make sense any longer?\n\n\n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His\n voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any\n evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and—yes—afraid.\"\nDon stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm\n his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.", "Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not\n only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that\n one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it\n contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and\n black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an\n active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month;\n please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled\n contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n\n\n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy\n it, too.\n\n\n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown\n contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded\n sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with\n sharp surprise.\n\"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on\n the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"", "It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the\nAntivivisectionist Gazette\nthe day before. She pounced upon the POSAT\n ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having\n filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that\n would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post\n it as soon as possible.\n\n\n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at\n the bottom of a column in\nThe Bulletin of Physical Research\n. He was\n engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired\n from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research\n worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT\n ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.", "His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he\n had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap.\n When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a\n position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older\n industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place\n to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was\n hope for the future.\n\n\n It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the\n other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind\n alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence\n in them.", "Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical\n composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the\n information that she wished to give—all about her poor, dear father\n who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt\n toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were\n reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a\n religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete\n and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their\n booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately.\n Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial\n situation.\n\n\n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that\n POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in\n his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his\n curiosity.", "Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for\n several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had\n mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he\n had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were\n almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by\n something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n\n\n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay\n heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested\n information—about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his\n reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without\n quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some\n of his desperation and sense of futility.", "\"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which\n we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the\n newest of the sciences—that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready\n to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one\n respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to\n save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to\n do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n\n\n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a\n weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just\n anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work\n for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why\n haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work\n on this project—before it's too late?\"", "\"I wonder what their racket is,\" he mused. Then, because his typewriter\n was conveniently at hand, he carefully tore out the coupon and inserted\n it in the machine. The spacing of the typewriter didn't fit the dotted\n lines on the coupon, of course, but he didn't bother to correct it.\n He addressed an envelope, laid it with other mail to be posted, and\n promptly forgot all about it. Since he was a methodical man, it was\n entrusted to the U.S. mail early the next morning, together with his\n other letters.\n\n\n Three identical forms accompanied the booklet which POSAT sent in\n response to the three inquiries. The booklet gave no more information\n than had the original advertisement, but with considerable more\n volubility. It promised the recipient the secrets of the Cosmos and the\n key that would unlock the hidden knowledge within himself—if he would\n merely fill out the enclosed form.", "\"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of\n advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to\n prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are,\n still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats—and we've caught\n up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that\n time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n\n\n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n\n\n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a\n steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw\n what must have been the world's largest computing machine.", "We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to\n us. We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the\n requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After\n Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable\n secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal\n interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n\n\n Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand\n Chairman on Tuesday, July 10, at 2:30 P.M. Please let us know if this\n arrangement is acceptable to you. If not, we will attempt to make\n another appointment for you.", "\"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?\"\n\n\n Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.\n\n\n \"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part\n of his personal collection—which, incidentally, he bought from the\n artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for\n power here in the laboratory.\"\n\n\n \"Then the pictures are modern,\" said Don, aware that his mouth was\n hanging open foolishly. \"I thought one was a Titian—\"\n\n\n \"It is,\" said Crandon. \"We have several original Titians, although I\n really don't know too much about them.\"\n\n\n \"But how could a man alive\ntoday\nbuy paintings from an artist of the\n Renaissance?\"\n\n\n \"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements\n claim—an\nancient\nsecret society. Our founder has been dead for over\n four centuries.\"", "With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and\n stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it\n impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His\n impatience changed to panic. It was locked!\n\n\n A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had\n entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light\n bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still\n as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer\n seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was\n distressingly ominous.\n\n\n \"Our Grand Chairman will see you now,\" she said in a quiet voice.\n\n\n Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal\n expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage\n to find." ], [ "Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right\n about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization\n has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself\n before the day is over.\"\n\n\n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n\n\n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n\n\n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long\n story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to\n trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of\n what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the\n most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have\n stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n\n\n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.", "\"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you\n again.\"\n\n\n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \"\nYou're\nthe Grand\n Chairman of POSAT?\"\n\n\n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which\n Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and\n his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure\n of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous\n place—didn't anything make sense any longer?\n\n\n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His\n voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any\n evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and—yes—afraid.\"\nDon stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm\n his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.", "His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring?\n Subversive agents?\"\n\n\n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His\n conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too\n melodramatic.\n\n\n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he\n knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n\n\n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not\n be at work on Tuesday.\nAt first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters.\n It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall\n was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete\n construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the\n street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings\n of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and\n was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.", "The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one\n for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the\n laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his\n research problems home with him and worried over them half the night,\n they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for\n pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was\n in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a\n whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n\n\n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be\n disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been\n sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her\n about it without telephoning.\nSince the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home!\nBut it was impossible!", "Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like\n an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about\n my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know\n what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures\n attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n\n\n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be—a secret\n society—and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n\n\n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade\n after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n\n\n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the\n dilemmas before him.\n\n\n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and,\n paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n\n\n Dear Doctor Alford:", "\"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which\n we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the\n newest of the sciences—that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready\n to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one\n respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to\n save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to\n do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n\n\n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a\n weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just\n anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work\n for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why\n haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work\n on this project—before it's too late?\"", "She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he\n supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n\n\n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room,\n which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted\n outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where\n a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\nBut Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of\n the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of\n which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar\n to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had\n ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that\n this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments\n did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.", "\"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your\n imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give\n for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n\n\n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest\n pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n\n\n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the\n contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of\n POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n\n\n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed\n gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They\n were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no\n help to him.", "Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical\n composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the\n information that she wished to give—all about her poor, dear father\n who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt\n toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were\n reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a\n religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete\n and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their\n booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately.\n Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial\n situation.\n\n\n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that\n POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in\n his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his\n curiosity.", "It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the\nAntivivisectionist Gazette\nthe day before. She pounced upon the POSAT\n ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having\n filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that\n would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post\n it as soon as possible.\n\n\n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at\n the bottom of a column in\nThe Bulletin of Physical Research\n. He was\n engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired\n from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research\n worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT\n ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.", "It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door\n marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n\n\n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced\n a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him\n a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way\n up through the murky stairwell.\n\n\n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk\n facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the\n pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of\n the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom\n somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here\n that he had come to expect.\n\n\n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary.\nNot\n the Mata-Hari type\n, thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own\n suspicions. He handed her the letter.", "\"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of\n advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to\n prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are,\n still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats—and we've caught\n up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that\n time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n\n\n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n\n\n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a\n steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw\n what must have been the world's largest computing machine.", "His disappointment was tempered, however, by the knowledge that he\n had unexpectedly found a job. Or, rather, it had fallen into his lap.\n When he had thought that every avenue of employment had been tried, a\n position had been offered him in a wholesale pharmacy in the older\n industrial part of the city. It was not a particularly attractive place\n to work, located as it was next to a large warehouse, but to him it was\n hope for the future.\n\n\n It amused him to discover that the offices of POSAT were located on the\n other side of the same warehouse, at the end of a blind alley. Blind\n alley indeed! He felt vaguely ashamed for having placed any confidence\n in them.", "Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that!\n But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is\n to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely\n disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this\n building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached\n the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if\n they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!", "\"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We\n enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in\n line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep,\n if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if\n they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we\n can act when the time finally comes.\n\n\n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last\n resort—lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we\n put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate\n them—anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's\n good practice for us.\n\n\n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't\n answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n\n\n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him.\n He had one more question.", "He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that\n some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his\n brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that\n couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n\n\n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his\n attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small\n black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr\n atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the\n printed matter that accompanied it.", "Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for\n several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had\n mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he\n had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were\n almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by\n something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n\n\n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay\n heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested\n information—about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his\n reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without\n quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some\n of his desperation and sense of futility.", "He searched feverishly through his pile of daily mail for the\n envelope in which the letter had come. The address stared up at him,\n unmistakably and fearfully legible. The name of his company. The number\n of the room he worked in. In short, the address that he had never given\n them!\n\n\n \"Get hold of yourself,\" he commanded his frightened mind. \"There's some\n perfectly logical, easy explanation for this. They looked it up in the\n directory of the Institute of Physics. Or in the alumni directory of\n the university. Or—or—\"\n\n\n But the more he thought about it, the more sinister it seemed. His\n laboratory address was available, but why should POSAT take the trouble\n of looking it up? Some prudent impulse had led him to withhold that\n particular bit of information, yet now, for some reason of their own,\n POSAT had unearthed the information.", "With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and\n stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it\n impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His\n impatience changed to panic. It was locked!\n\n\n A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had\n entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light\n bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still\n as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer\n seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was\n distressingly ominous.\n\n\n \"Our Grand Chairman will see you now,\" she said in a quiet voice.\n\n\n Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal\n expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage\n to find.", "Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not\n only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that\n one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it\n contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and\n black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an\n active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month;\n please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled\n contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n\n\n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy\n it, too.\n\n\n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown\n contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded\n sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with\n sharp surprise.\n\"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on\n the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"" ], [ "\"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you\n again.\"\n\n\n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \"\nYou're\nthe Grand\n Chairman of POSAT?\"\n\n\n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which\n Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and\n his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure\n of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous\n place—didn't anything make sense any longer?\n\n\n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His\n voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any\n evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and—yes—afraid.\"\nDon stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm\n his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.", "With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and\n stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it\n impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His\n impatience changed to panic. It was locked!\n\n\n A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had\n entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light\n bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still\n as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer\n seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was\n distressingly ominous.\n\n\n \"Our Grand Chairman will see you now,\" she said in a quiet voice.\n\n\n Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal\n expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage\n to find.", "She smiled. \"We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll just step\n into the next room—\"\n\n\n She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it.\n\n\n The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the\n shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and\n the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing.\n The rug—Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum.\n The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were\n surely old masters—of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he\n recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the\n artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian.\n Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities\n of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of\n Operational Circuit Analysis.", "She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he\n supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n\n\n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room,\n which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted\n outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where\n a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\nBut Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of\n the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of\n which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar\n to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had\n ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that\n this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments\n did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.", "\"But by one man,\" Don argued.\n\n\n Crandon shrugged. \"Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men.\n So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had\n come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know\n that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based\n on the one that preceded it. We are all aware of the phenomenon of\n simultaneous invention. The path to truth is a straight one. It is only\n our own stupidity that makes it seem slow and tortuous.\n\n\n \"He merely followed the straight path,\" Crandon finished simply.\nDon's incredulity thawed a little. It was not entirely beyond the realm\n of possibility.\n\n\n But if it were true! A vast panorama of possible achievements spread\n before him.", "\"Good Lord!\" Don gasped. \"That's an atomic reactor down there!\" There\n could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely\n through the bluish-green plastic shielding it.\n\n\n His thoughts were so clamorous that he hardly realized that he had\n spoken aloud, or that the door at the end of the balcony had opened.\n\n\n He was only dimly aware of the approaching footsteps as he speculated\n wildly on the nature of the shielding material. What could be so dense\n that only an inch would provide adequate shielding and yet remain\n semitransparent?\n\n\n His scientist's mind applauded the genius who had developed it, even as\n the alarming conviction grew that he wouldn't—couldn't—be allowed to\n leave here any more. Surely no man would be allowed to leave this place\n alive to tell the fantastic story to the world!", "Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right\n about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization\n has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself\n before the day is over.\"\n\n\n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n\n\n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n\n\n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long\n story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to\n trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of\n what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the\n most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have\n stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n\n\n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.", "\"The super-genius who was our founder was not a semanticist. He was\n a physical scientist and mathematician. Starting with the meager\n heritage that existed in these fields in his time, he began tackling\n physical puzzles one by one. Sitting in his study, using as his\n principal tool his own great mind, he invented calculus, developed the\n quantum theory of light, moved on to electromagnetic radiation and what\n we call Maxwell's equations—although, of course, he antedated Maxwell\n by centuries—developed the special and general theories of relativity,\n the tool of wave mechanics, and finally, toward the end of his life, he\n mathematically derived the packing fraction that describes the binding\n energy of nuclei—\"\n\n\n \"But it can't be done,\" Don objected. \"It's an observed phenomenon. It\n hasn't been derived.\" Every conservative instinct that he possessed\n cried out against this impossible fantasy. And yet—there sat the\n reactor, sheathed in its strange shield. Crandon watched the direction\n of Don's glance.", "\"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?\"\n\n\n Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.\n\n\n \"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part\n of his personal collection—which, incidentally, he bought from the\n artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for\n power here in the laboratory.\"\n\n\n \"Then the pictures are modern,\" said Don, aware that his mouth was\n hanging open foolishly. \"I thought one was a Titian—\"\n\n\n \"It is,\" said Crandon. \"We have several original Titians, although I\n really don't know too much about them.\"\n\n\n \"But how could a man alive\ntoday\nbuy paintings from an artist of the\n Renaissance?\"\n\n\n \"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements\n claim—an\nancient\nsecret society. Our founder has been dead for over\n four centuries.\"", "The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one\n for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the\n laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his\n research problems home with him and worried over them half the night,\n they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for\n pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was\n in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a\n whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n\n\n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be\n disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been\n sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her\n about it without telephoning.\nSince the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home!\nBut it was impossible!", "It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door\n marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n\n\n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced\n a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him\n a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way\n up through the murky stairwell.\n\n\n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk\n facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the\n pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of\n the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom\n somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here\n that he had come to expect.\n\n\n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary.\nNot\n the Mata-Hari type\n, thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own\n suspicions. He handed her the letter.", "\"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your\n imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give\n for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n\n\n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest\n pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n\n\n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the\n contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of\n POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n\n\n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed\n gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They\n were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no\n help to him.", "His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring?\n Subversive agents?\"\n\n\n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His\n conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too\n melodramatic.\n\n\n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he\n knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n\n\n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not\n be at work on Tuesday.\nAt first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters.\n It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall\n was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete\n construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the\n street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings\n of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and\n was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.", "\"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of\n advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to\n prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are,\n still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats—and we've caught\n up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that\n time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n\n\n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n\n\n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a\n steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw\n what must have been the world's largest computing machine.", "Bill Evans, an unemployed pharmacist, saw the ad in a copy of\nYour\n Life and Psychology\nthat had been abandoned on his seat in the bus.\n He filled out the blanks on the coupon with a scrap of stubby pencil.\n \"You can alter the course of your life!\" he read again. He particularly\n liked that thought, even though he had long since ceased to believe\n it. He actually took the trouble to mail the coupon. After all, he\n had, literally, nothing to lose, and nothing else to occupy his time.\n\n\n Miss Elizabeth Arnable was one of the few to whom the advertisement\n was unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, she very seldom read a magazine.\n The radio in her room took the place of reading matter, and she always\n liked to think that it amused her cats as well as herself. Reading\n would be so selfish under the circumstances, wouldn't it? Not but what\n the cats weren't almost smart enough to read, she always said.", "Right now, two of his colleagues back in the laboratory would still\n be searching for the right combination of fluorescent material\n and radioactive salts with which to make the simple, efficient,\n self-contained lighting unit that he was holding in his hand at this\n moment!\nBut this is impossible!\nhe thought.\nWe're the only company that's\n working on this, and it's secret. There can't be any in actual\n production!\nAnd even if one had actually been successfully produced, how would it\n have fallen into the possession of POSAT, an Ancient Secret Society,\n The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth?\n\n\n The conviction grew in Don's mind that here was something much deeper\n and more sinister than he would be able to cope with. He should have\n asked for help, should have stated his suspicions to the police or the\n F.B.I. Even now—", "Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not\n only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that\n one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it\n contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and\n black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an\n active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month;\n please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled\n contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n\n\n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy\n it, too.\n\n\n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown\n contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded\n sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with\n sharp surprise.\n\"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on\n the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"", "Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for\n several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had\n mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he\n had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were\n almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by\n something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n\n\n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay\n heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested\n information—about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his\n reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without\n quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some\n of his desperation and sense of futility.", "The girl opened a filing cabinet, the front of which was set flush with\n the wall, and, selecting a folder from it, disappeared through another\n door.\n\n\n Don sprang to examine the picture near the corner. It was hung at eye\n level—that is, at the eye level of the average person. Don had to bend\n over a bit to see it properly. He searched for a signature. Apparently\n there was none. But did artists sign their pictures back in those\n days? He wished he knew more about such things.\n\n\n Each of the paintings was individually lighted by a fluorescent tube\n held on brackets directly above it. As Don straightened up from his\n scrutiny of the picture, he inadvertently hit his head against the\n light. The tube, dislodged from its brackets, fell to the rug with a\n muffled thud.\nNow I've done it!\nthought Don with dismay. But at least the tube\n hadn't shattered.", "\"What should he have done? Let his secrets die with him? He\n didn't think so. No one else in his age could have\nderived\nthe\n knowledge that he did. But it was an age of brilliant men. Leonardo.\n Michelangelo. There were men capable of\nlearning\nhis science, even as\n men can learn it today. He gathered some of them together and founded\n this society. It served two purposes. It perpetuated his discoveries\n and at the same time it maintained the greatest secrecy about them. He\n urged that the secrets be kept until the time when men could use them\n safely. The other purpose was to make that time come about as soon as\n possible.\"\n\n\n Crandon looked at Don's unbelieving face. \"How can I make you see that\n it is the truth? Think of the eons that man or manlike creatures have\n walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four\n hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a\n little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?\"" ], [ "\"Good Lord!\" Don gasped. \"That's an atomic reactor down there!\" There\n could be no doubt about it, even though he could see it only obscurely\n through the bluish-green plastic shielding it.\n\n\n His thoughts were so clamorous that he hardly realized that he had\n spoken aloud, or that the door at the end of the balcony had opened.\n\n\n He was only dimly aware of the approaching footsteps as he speculated\n wildly on the nature of the shielding material. What could be so dense\n that only an inch would provide adequate shielding and yet remain\n semitransparent?\n\n\n His scientist's mind applauded the genius who had developed it, even as\n the alarming conviction grew that he wouldn't—couldn't—be allowed to\n leave here any more. Surely no man would be allowed to leave this place\n alive to tell the fantastic story to the world!", "\"But you said that he designed your atomic reactor.\"\n\n\n \"Yes. This particular one has been in use for only twenty years,\n however.\"\n\n\n Don's confusion was complete. Crandon looked at him kindly. \"Let's\n start at the beginning,\" he said, and Don was back again in the\n classroom with the deep voice of Professor Crandon unfolding the\n pages of knowledge in clear and logical manner. \"Four hundred years\n ago, in the time of the Italian Renaissance, a man lived who was a\n super-genius. His was the kind of incredible mentality that appears not\n in every generation, or even every century, but once in thousands of\n years.", "\"The super-genius who was our founder was not a semanticist. He was\n a physical scientist and mathematician. Starting with the meager\n heritage that existed in these fields in his time, he began tackling\n physical puzzles one by one. Sitting in his study, using as his\n principal tool his own great mind, he invented calculus, developed the\n quantum theory of light, moved on to electromagnetic radiation and what\n we call Maxwell's equations—although, of course, he antedated Maxwell\n by centuries—developed the special and general theories of relativity,\n the tool of wave mechanics, and finally, toward the end of his life, he\n mathematically derived the packing fraction that describes the binding\n energy of nuclei—\"\n\n\n \"But it can't be done,\" Don objected. \"It's an observed phenomenon. It\n hasn't been derived.\" Every conservative instinct that he possessed\n cried out against this impossible fantasy. And yet—there sat the\n reactor, sheathed in its strange shield. Crandon watched the direction\n of Don's glance.", "\"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of\n advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to\n prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are,\n still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats—and we've caught\n up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that\n time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n\n\n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n\n\n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a\n steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw\n what must have been the world's largest computing machine.", "\"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you\n again.\"\n\n\n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \"\nYou're\nthe Grand\n Chairman of POSAT?\"\n\n\n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which\n Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and\n his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure\n of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous\n place—didn't anything make sense any longer?\n\n\n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His\n voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any\n evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and—yes—afraid.\"\nDon stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm\n his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.", "She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he\n supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n\n\n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room,\n which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted\n outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where\n a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\nBut Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of\n the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of\n which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar\n to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had\n ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that\n this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments\n did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.", "\"Four hundred years!\" he murmured with awe. \"You've had four hundred\n years head-start on the rest of the world! What wonders you must have\n uncovered in that time!\"\n\n\n \"Our technical achievements may disappoint you,\" warned Crandon.\n \"Oh, they're way beyond anything that you are familiar with. You've\n undoubtedly noticed the shielding material on the reactor. That's a\n fairly recent development of our metallurgical department. There are\n other things in the laboratory that I can't even explain to you until\n you have caught up on the technical basis for understanding them.\n\n\n \"Our emphasis has not been on physical sciences, however, except as\n they contribute to our central project. We want to change civilization\n so that it can use physical science without disaster.\"\n\n\n For a moment Don had been fired with enthusiasm. But at these words his\n heart sank.", "In fact—it was still glowing brightly! His eyes registered the fact,\n even while his mind refused to believe it. He raised his eyes to the\n brackets. They were simple pieces of solid hardware designed to support\n the tube.\n\n\n There were no wires!\n\n\n Don picked up the slender, glowing cylinder and held it between\n trembling fingers. Although it was delivering as much light as a two\n or three hundred watt bulb, it was cool to the touch. He examined it\n minutely. There was no possibility of concealed batteries.\n\n\n The thumping of his heart was caused not by the fact that he had never\n seen a similar tube before, but because he had. He had never held\n one in his hands, though. The ones which his company had produced as\n experimental models had been unsuccessful at converting all of the\n radioactivity into light, and had, of necessity, been heavily shielded.", "\"Yes, the reactor,\" said Crandon. \"He built one like it. It confirmed\n his theories. His calculations showed him something else too. He saw\n the destructive potentialities of an atomic explosion. He himself could\n not have built an atomic bomb; he didn't have the facilities. But his\n knowledge would have enabled other men to do so. He looked about\n him. He saw a political setup of warring principalities, rival states,\n intrigue, and squabbles over political power. Giving the men of his\n time atomic energy would have been like handing a baby a firecracker\n with a lighted fuse.", "\"What should he have done? Let his secrets die with him? He\n didn't think so. No one else in his age could have\nderived\nthe\n knowledge that he did. But it was an age of brilliant men. Leonardo.\n Michelangelo. There were men capable of\nlearning\nhis science, even as\n men can learn it today. He gathered some of them together and founded\n this society. It served two purposes. It perpetuated his discoveries\n and at the same time it maintained the greatest secrecy about them. He\n urged that the secrets be kept until the time when men could use them\n safely. The other purpose was to make that time come about as soon as\n possible.\"\n\n\n Crandon looked at Don's unbelieving face. \"How can I make you see that\n it is the truth? Think of the eons that man or manlike creatures have\n walked the Earth. Think what a small fraction of that time is four\n hundred years. Is it so strange that atomic energy was discovered a\n little early, by this displacement in time that is so tiny after all?\"", "With sudden decision, he thrust the lighting tube into his pocket and\n stepped swiftly to the outer door. He grasped the knob and shook it\n impatiently when it stuck and refused to turn. He yanked at it. His\n impatience changed to panic. It was locked!\n\n\n A soft sound behind him made him whirl about. The secretary had\n entered again through the inner door. She glanced at the vacant light\n bracket, then significantly at his bulging pocket. Her gaze was still\n as bland and innocent as when he had entered, but to Don she no longer\n seemed ordinary. Her very calmness in the face of his odd actions was\n distressingly ominous.\n\n\n \"Our Grand Chairman will see you now,\" she said in a quiet voice.\n\n\n Don realized that he was half crouched in the position of an animal\n expecting attack. He straightened up with what dignity he could manage\n to find.", "His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring?\n Subversive agents?\"\n\n\n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His\n conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too\n melodramatic.\n\n\n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he\n knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n\n\n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not\n be at work on Tuesday.\nAt first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters.\n It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall\n was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete\n construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the\n street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings\n of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and\n was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.", "Right now, two of his colleagues back in the laboratory would still\n be searching for the right combination of fluorescent material\n and radioactive salts with which to make the simple, efficient,\n self-contained lighting unit that he was holding in his hand at this\n moment!\nBut this is impossible!\nhe thought.\nWe're the only company that's\n working on this, and it's secret. There can't be any in actual\n production!\nAnd even if one had actually been successfully produced, how would it\n have fallen into the possession of POSAT, an Ancient Secret Society,\n The Perpetual Order of Seekers After Truth?\n\n\n The conviction grew in Don's mind that here was something much deeper\n and more sinister than he would be able to cope with. He should have\n asked for help, should have stated his suspicions to the police or the\n F.B.I. Even now—", "It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door\n marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n\n\n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced\n a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him\n a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way\n up through the murky stairwell.\n\n\n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk\n facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the\n pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of\n the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom\n somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here\n that he had come to expect.\n\n\n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary.\nNot\n the Mata-Hari type\n, thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own\n suspicions. He handed her the letter.", "Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right\n about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization\n has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself\n before the day is over.\"\n\n\n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n\n\n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n\n\n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long\n story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to\n trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of\n what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the\n most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have\n stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n\n\n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.", "\"But by one man,\" Don argued.\n\n\n Crandon shrugged. \"Compared with him, Don, you and I are stupid men.\n So are the scientists who slowly plodded down the same road he had\n come, stumbling first on one truth and then the succeeding one. We know\n that inventions and discoveries do not occur at random. Each is based\n on the one that preceded it. We are all aware of the phenomenon of\n simultaneous invention. The path to truth is a straight one. It is only\n our own stupidity that makes it seem slow and tortuous.\n\n\n \"He merely followed the straight path,\" Crandon finished simply.\nDon's incredulity thawed a little. It was not entirely beyond the realm\n of possibility.\n\n\n But if it were true! A vast panorama of possible achievements spread\n before him.", "She smiled. \"We've been expecting you, Dr. Alford. If you'll just step\n into the next room—\"\n\n\n She opened a door opposite the stairwell, and Don stepped through it.\n\n\n The sight of the luxurious room before him struck his eyes with the\n shock of a dentist's drill, so great was the contrast between it and\n the shabby reception room. For a moment Don had difficulty breathing.\n The rug—Don had seen one like it before, but it had been in a museum.\n The paintings on the walls, ornately framed in gilt carving, were\n surely old masters—of the Renaissance period, he guessed. Although he\n recognized none of the pictures, he felt that he could almost name the\n artists. That glowing one near the corner would probably be a Titian.\n Or was it Tintorretto? He regretted for a moment the lost opportunities\n of his college days, when he had passed up Art History in favor of\n Operational Circuit Analysis.", "\"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?\"\n\n\n Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.\n\n\n \"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part\n of his personal collection—which, incidentally, he bought from the\n artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for\n power here in the laboratory.\"\n\n\n \"Then the pictures are modern,\" said Don, aware that his mouth was\n hanging open foolishly. \"I thought one was a Titian—\"\n\n\n \"It is,\" said Crandon. \"We have several original Titians, although I\n really don't know too much about them.\"\n\n\n \"But how could a man alive\ntoday\nbuy paintings from an artist of the\n Renaissance?\"\n\n\n \"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements\n claim—an\nancient\nsecret society. Our founder has been dead for over\n four centuries.\"", "He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that\n some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his\n brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that\n couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n\n\n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his\n attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small\n black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr\n atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the\n printed matter that accompanied it.", "\"Do you recall the questionnaires that you answered before you were\n invited here? We fed the answers to this machine and, as a result, we\n know more about how you will react in any given situation than you do\n yourself. Even if you should fail to join us, our secrets would be\n safe with you. Of course, we miss a few of the scientists who might\n be perfect material for our organization. You'd be surprised, though,\n at how clever our advertisements are at attracting exactly the men we\n want. With the help of our new science, we have baited our ads well,\n and we know how to maintain interest. Curiosity is, to the men we want,\n a powerful motivator.\"\n\n\n \"But what about the others?\" asked Don. \"There must be hundreds of\n applicants who would be of no use to you at all.\"" ], [ "Crandon's voice suddenly hardened, became abrupt. \"You're partly right\n about us, of course. I hate to think how many laws this organization\n has broken. Don't condemn us yet, though. You'll be a member yourself\n before the day is over.\"\n\n\n Don was shocked by such confidence in his corruptibility.\n\n\n \"What do you use?\" he asked bitterly. \"Drugs? Hypnosis?\"\n\n\n Crandon sighed. \"I forgot how little you know, Don. I have a long\n story to tell you. You'll find it hard to believe at first. But try to\n trust me. Try to believe me, as you once did. When I say that much of\n what POSAT does is illegal, I do not mean immoral. We're probably the\n most moral organization in the world. Get over the idea that you have\n stumbled into a den of thieves.\"\n\n\n Crandon paused as though searching for words with which to continue.", "\"This is our answer,\" said Crandon. \"Oh, rather, it's the tool by which\n we find our answer. For two centuries we have been working on the\n newest of the sciences—that of human motivation. Soon we will be ready\n to put some of our new knowledge to work. But you are right in one\n respect, we are working now against time. We must hurry if we are to\n save our civilization. That's why you are here. We have work for you to\n do. Will you join us, Don?\"\n\n\n \"But why the hocus-pocus?\" asked Don. \"Why do you hide behind such a\n weird front as POSAT? Why do you advertise in magazines and invite just\n anyone to join? Why didn't you approach me directly, if you have work\n for me to do? And if you really have the answers to our problems, why\n haven't you gathered together all the scientists in the world to work\n on this project—before it's too late?\"", "\"Oh, yes,\" replied Crandon. \"There are the mild religious fanatics. We\n enroll them as members and keep them interested by sending pamphlets in\n line with their interests. We even let them contribute to our upkeep,\n if they seem to want to. They never get beyond the reception room if\n they come to call on us. But they are additional people through whom we\n can act when the time finally comes.\n\n\n \"There are also the desperate people who try POSAT as a last\n resort—lost ones who can't find their direction in life. For them we\n put into practice some of our newly won knowledge. We rehabilitate\n them—anonymously, of course. Even find jobs or patch up homes. It's\n good practice for us.\n\n\n \"I think I've answered most of your questions, Don. But you haven't\n answered mine. Will you join us?\"\n\n\n Don looked solemnly at the orderly array of the computer before him.\n He had one more question.", "\"Hello, Don,\" said a quiet voice beside him. \"It's good to see you\n again.\"\n\n\n \"Dr. Crandon!\" he heard his own voice reply. \"\nYou're\nthe Grand\n Chairman of POSAT?\"\n\n\n He felt betrayed and sick at heart. The very voice with which\n Crandon had spoken conjured up visions of quiet lecture halls and\n his own youthful excitement at the masterful and orderly disclosure\n of scientific facts. To find him here in this mad and treacherous\n place—didn't anything make sense any longer?\n\n\n \"I think we have rather abused you, Don,\" Dr. Crandon continued. His\n voice sounded so gentle that Don found it hard to think there was any\n evil in it. \"I can see that you are suspicious of us, and—yes—afraid.\"\nDon stared at the scene below him. After his initial glance to confirm\n his identification of Crandon, Don could not bear to look at him.", "Don scanned the papers quickly. \"There's nothing here that looks like\n an attempt to get information. Besides, I've told them nothing about\n my work except that I do research in physics. They don't even know\n what company I work for. If this is a psychological test, it measures\n attitudes, nothing else. Why should they want to know my attitudes?\"\n\n\n \"Do you suppose that POSAT is really what it claims to be—a secret\n society—and that they actually screen their applicants?\"\n\n\n He smiled wryly. \"Wouldn't it be interesting if I didn't make the grade\n after starting out to expose their racket?\"\n\n\n He pulled out his pen and sat down to the task of resolving the\n dilemmas before him.\n\n\n His next communication from POSAT came to his business address and,\n paradoxically, was more personal than its forerunners.\n\n\n Dear Doctor Alford:", "Miss Arnable was delighted with the opportunity for autobiographical\n composition. It required five extra sheets of paper to convey all the\n information that she wished to give—all about her poor, dear father\n who had been a missionary to China, and the kinship that she felt\n toward the mystic cults of the East, her belief that her cats were\n reincarnations of her loved ones (which, she stated, derived from a\n religion of the Persians; or was it the Egyptians?) and in her complete\n and absolute acceptance of everything that POSAT had stated in their\n booklet. And what would the dues be? She wished to join immediately.\n Fortunately, dear father had left her in a comfortable financial\n situation.\n\n\n To Donald Alford, the booklet seemed to confirm his suspicion that\n POSAT was a racket of some sort. Why else would they be interested in\n his employment or financial position? It also served to increase his\n curiosity.", "His wife's words echoed in his mind, \"Could they be a spy ring?\n Subversive agents?\"\n\n\n Don shook his head as though to clear away the confusion. His\n conservative habit of thought made him reject that explanation as too\n melodramatic.\n\n\n At least one decision was easier to reach because of his doubts. Now he\n knew he had to keep his appointment with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n\n\n He scribbled a memo to the department office stating that he would not\n be at work on Tuesday.\nAt first Don Alford had some trouble locating the POSAT headquarters.\n It seemed to him that the block in which the street number would fall\n was occupied entirely by a huge sprawling warehouse, of concrete\n construction, and almost entirely windowless. It was recessed from the\n street in several places to make room for the small, shabby buildings\n of a wholesale pharmacy, a printer's plant, an upholstering shop, and\n was also indented by alleys lined with loading platforms.", "It was at the back of one of the alleys that he finally found a door\n marked with the now familiar emblem of POSAT.\n\n\n He opened the frosted glass door with a feeling of misgiving, and faced\n a dark flight of stairs leading to the upper floor. Somewhere above him\n a buzzer sounded, evidently indicating his arrival. He picked his way\n up through the murky stairwell.\n\n\n The reception room was hardly a cheerful place, with its battered desk\n facing the view of the empty alley, and a film of dust obscuring the\n pattern of the gray-looking wallpaper and worn rug. But the light of\n the summer afternoon filtering through the window scattered the gloom\n somewhat, enough to help Don doubt that he would find the menace here\n that he had come to expect.\n\n\n The girl addressing envelopes at the desk looked very ordinary.\nNot\n the Mata-Hari type\n, thought Don, with an inward chuckle at his own\n suspicions. He handed her the letter.", "\"The scientific attitude again,\" Betty sighed. \"Don't you ever let your\n imagination run away with the facts a bit? What are you going to give\n for your reasons for asking about POSAT?\"\n\n\n \"Curiosity,\" he replied, and, pulling his fountain pen from his vest\n pocket, he wrote exactly that, in small, neat script.\n\n\n It was unfortunate for his curiosity that Don could not see the\n contents of the three envelopes that were mailed from the offices of\n POSAT the following week. For this time they differed.\n\n\n Bill Evans was once again disappointed. The pamphlet that was enclosed\n gave what apparently meant to be final answers to life's problems. They\n were couched in vaguely metaphysical terms and offered absolutely no\n help to him.", "She opened the inner door again and Don followed her into what he\n supposed to be the office of the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n\n\n Instead he found himself on a balcony along the side of a vast room,\n which must have been the interior of the warehouse that he had noted\n outside. The girl motioned him toward the far end of the balcony, where\n a frosted glass door marked the office of the Grand Chairman.\nBut Don could not will his legs to move. His heart beat at the sight of\n the room below him. It was a laboratory, but a laboratory the like of\n which he had never seen before. Most of the equipment was unfamiliar\n to him. Whatever he did recognize was of a different design than he had\n ever used, and there was something about it that convinced him that\n this was more advanced. The men who bent busily over their instruments\n did not raise their eyes to the figures on the balcony.", "Crandon took a sighing breath. \"How I wish that we could do just that!\n But you forget that one of the prime purposes of our organization is\n to maintain the secrecy of our discoveries until they can be safely\n disclosed. We must be absolutely certain that anyone who enters this\n building will have joined POSAT before he leaves. What if we approached\n the wrong scientist? Centuries of accomplishment might be wasted if\n they attempted either to reveal it or to exploit it!", "Miss Arnable was thrilled to discover that her envelope contained not\n only several pamphlets, (she scanned the titles rapidly and found that\n one of them concerned the sacred cats of ancient Egypt), but that it\n contained also a small pin with the symbol of POSAT wrought in gold and\n black enamel. The covering letter said that she had been accepted as an\n active member of POSAT and that the dues were five dollars per month;\n please remit by return mail. She wrote a check immediately, and settled\n contentedly into a chair to peruse the article on sacred cats.\n\n\n After a while she began to read aloud so that her own cats could enjoy\n it, too.\n\n\n Don Alford would not have been surprised if his envelope had shown\n contents similar to the ones that the others received. The folded\n sheets of paper that he pulled forth, however, made him stiffen with\n sharp surprise.\n\"Come here a minute, Betty,\" he called, spreading them out carefully on\n the dining room table. \"What do you make of these?\"", "It just so happened, however, that she had bought a copy of the\nAntivivisectionist Gazette\nthe day before. She pounced upon the POSAT\n ad as a trout might snap at a particularly attractive fly. Having\n filled out the coupon with violet ink, she invented an errand that\n would take her past the neighborhood post office so that she could post\n it as soon as possible.\n\n\n Donald Alford, research physicist, came across the POSAT ad tucked at\n the bottom of a column in\nThe Bulletin of Physical Research\n. He was\n engrossed in the latest paper by Dr. Crandon, a man whom he admired\n from the point of view of both a former student and a fellow research\n worker. Consequently, he was one of the many who passed over the POSAT\n ad with the disregard accorded to any common object.", "\"Then you've failed,\" he said bitterly. \"In spite of centuries of\n advance warning, you've failed to change the rest of us enough to\n prevent us from trying to blow ourselves off the Earth. Here we are,\n still snarling and snapping at our neighbors' throats—and we've caught\n up with you. We have the atomic bomb. What's POSAT been doing all that\n time? Or have you found that human nature really can't be changed?\"\n\n\n \"Come with me,\" said Crandon.\n\n\n He led the way along the narrow balcony to another door, then down a\n steep flight of stairs. He opened a door at the bottom, and Don saw\n what must have been the world's largest computing machine.", "\"Will it really work? Can it actually tell you how to motivate the\n stubborn, quarrelsome, opinionated people one finds on this Earth?\"\n\n\n Crandon smiled. \"You're here, aren't you?\"\n\n\n Don nodded, his tense features relaxing.\n\n\n \"Enroll me as a member,\" he said.", "The time specified for the appointment was hardly a convenient one\n for Don. At 2:30 P.M. on most Tuesdays, he would be at work in the\n laboratory. And while his employers made no complaint if he took his\n research problems home with him and worried over them half the night,\n they were not equally enthusiastic when he used working hours for\n pursuing unrelated interests. Moreover, the headquarters of POSAT was\n in a town almost a hundred miles distant. Could he afford to take a\n whole day off for chasing will-o-wisps?\n\n\n It hardly seemed worth the trouble. He wondered if Betty would be\n disappointed if he dropped the whole matter. Since the letter had been\n sent to the laboratory instead of his home, he couldn't consult her\n about it without telephoning.\nSince the letter had been sent to the laboratory instead of his home!\nBut it was impossible!", "\"Did you notice the paintings in the waiting room as you entered?\"\n\n\n Don nodded, too bewildered to speak.\n\n\n \"They were donated by the founder of our Organization. They were part\n of his personal collection—which, incidentally, he bought from the\n artists themselves. He also designed the atomic reactor we use for\n power here in the laboratory.\"\n\n\n \"Then the pictures are modern,\" said Don, aware that his mouth was\n hanging open foolishly. \"I thought one was a Titian—\"\n\n\n \"It is,\" said Crandon. \"We have several original Titians, although I\n really don't know too much about them.\"\n\n\n \"But how could a man alive\ntoday\nbuy paintings from an artist of the\n Renaissance?\"\n\n\n \"He is not alive today. POSAT is actually what our advertisements\n claim—an\nancient\nsecret society. Our founder has been dead for over\n four centuries.\"", "We have examined with interest the information that you have sent to\n us. We are happy to inform you that, thus far, you have satisfied the\n requirements for membership in the Perpetual Order of Seekers After\n Truth. Before accepting new members into this ancient and honorable\n secret society, we find it desirable that they have a personal\n interview with the Grand Chairman of POSAT.\n\n\n Accordingly, you are cordially invited to an audience with our Grand\n Chairman on Tuesday, July 10, at 2:30 P.M. Please let us know if this\n arrangement is acceptable to you. If not, we will attempt to make\n another appointment for you.", "Bill Evans, the unemployed pharmacist, let the paper lie unanswered for\n several days. To be quite honest, he was disappointed. Although he had\n mentally disclaimed all belief in anything that POSAT might offer, he\n had watched the return mails with anticipation. His own resources were\n almost at an end, and he had reached the point where intervention by\n something supernatural, or at least superhuman, seemed the only hope.\n\n\n He had hoped, unreasonably, that POSAT had an answer. But time lay\n heavily upon him, and he used it one evening to write the requested\n information—about his employment (ha!), his religious beliefs, his\n reason for inquiring about POSAT, his financial situation. Without\n quite knowing that he did so, he communicated in his terse answers some\n of his desperation and sense of futility.", "He read with interest to the end of the article before he realized that\n some component of the advertisement had been noted by a region of his\n brain just beyond consciousness. It teased at him like a tickle that\n couldn't be scratched until he turned back to the page.\n\n\n It was the symbol or emblem of POSAT, he realized, that had caught his\n attention. The perpendicularly crossed ellipses centered with a small\n black circle might almost be a conventionalized version of the Bohr\n atom of helium. He smiled with mild skepticism as he read through the\n printed matter that accompanied it." ] ]
test	59418	[ "Which of the following signifies that Steven was a nonconformist?", "Why did Denise and Steven split up?", "Which of the following is not a value of the Happy Clown society?", "What do people learn from doing a “Happy Tour”?", "What is the “group experimentation”?", "Why does every person and object have a nickname?", "How old was Steven when he started therapy?", "Why was it “wise” for Steven to appear unintelligent?", "Why was Steven a lonely man?", "Why was Denise given the Styner?" ]	[ [ "He went to college.", "He enjoyed old silver utensils.", "He acted as the Happy Clown.", "He used nicknames for people and objects." ], [ "He had happy affairs with other girls.", "They moved thousands of miles away from each other.", "She couldn’t understand his breakdown.", "He was unhappy that she had changed." ], [ "Harmony is promoted through interaction with others.", "The world is a wonderful place to be appreciated.", "One should honor and respect the past.", "Society should be perfect." ], [ "How to work and earn a living", "How to speak another language", "How to understand and live in harmony with others", "How to express one’s opinions" ], [ "The Styner", "Kiddie-garden classes", "Re-education / counseling", "Sexual relations" ], [ "To sound cute", "To sound like children", "To promote friendship and harmony", "To confuse outsiders" ], [ "Five, but acts older", "An adult", "Fifteen, but acts younger", "Twelve" ], [ "To attend college", "To blend in and hide his true self", "To be accepted for acting roles", "To please the sponsors" ], [ "He couldn’t find like-minded people.", "He had a Styner.", "He traveled a lot.", "He couldn’t find a spouse / partner." ], [ "To relieve her appendicitis", "To make her forget about Steven", "To help her forget Steven’s outburst", "To correct her rebellious thinking" ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "Steven met no nonconformists at the School of Television Arts, and none\n while he was acting in \"The Happy Life\" until Denise Cottrell joined\n the cast. Denise—called Denny, of course—was a pleasantly plain young\n woman with a whimsical face which photographed pretty, and remarkable\n dark blue eyes. It was her eyes which first made Steven wonder. They\n mirrored his own hope, and longing, and the desperate loneliness of the\n exile.\n\n\n For two months they were together as often as they could be, talking\n intellectual treason in public under cover of conventional faces,\n and talking intellectual treason in private with excitement and\n laughter and sometimes tears—falling in love. They planned, after\n much discussion, to be married and to bring up a dozen clever rebel\n children. Denise said soberly, \"They'd better be clever, because\n they'll have to learn to hide.\"", "He managed his life well enough. He had a few affairs with girls, it\n was expected of one, and he did not have to work very hard at it since\n they always threw themselves at him; and he got along well with other\n young men, who forgave him for being so handsome because he did not\n work at it except on camera; but he was lonely. Surrounded by people,\n intruded and trespassed upon, continually touched in ways other than\n physical, he was yet lonely.\nDuring his life he had met a few other nonconformists, shy, like him,\n wary of revealing themselves, but something always seemed to happen\n to them. Some were miserable being nonconformists and asked pitifully\n for the Steyner, some were detected, as Steven had been, and some\n were unfortunately surprised in hospitals. Under the anesthetic they\n sometimes talked, and then, if they were adults, they were immediately\n corrected by means of Steyner's lobotomy. It had been learned that\n adults did not respond to therapy.", "Being, as the Director had said, a brilliant kiddie, Steven soon\n understood much of what was kept from him. It did not take him long\n to learn what was making his Dadsie look stern and white and what was\n making his Mumsie cry. He loved his parents and did not want them to be\n unhappy, and he certainly did not want to have his head cut open, and\n so he began to act. Even at five, Steven discovered in himself a fine\n talent for acting. He began to conform, to adjust, to merge. He became\n social and cooperative and acquired the proper attitudes for successful\n community living. He gave up the old silver voluntarily, he accepted\n the Youth Bed, he looked at the Happy Clown, and he did much better in\n kiddie-garden. He even joined in the group experimentation and was not\n sick any more, though he could not keep himself from losing color.", "Steven was not happy in kiddie-garden. The enthusiasm the other kiddies\n showed for the lessons appalled him. The kiddies themselves appalled\n him. They joined so passionately in the group play, clutching each\n other with their hot moist hands, panting and grinning into each\n others' faces. They were always clutching and panting and grinning, in\n large noisy groups, with large community smiles. They confused him; he\n could not tell them apart. Steven retired to a corner and turned his\n back, and when they clutched and panted and grinned at him he hit them.", "Steven did not like the Happy Clown or the Jolly Kitten or the\n Dancing Dogsie. Sometimes he began to grow interested in the cowboys\n or spacemen, but when they stopped in the middle of an adventure to\n talk about how they could not possibly rope the steers or shoot the\n asteroids without a good breakfast of Cornsies and Choko-Milko, which\n everybody ate, just everybody, Steven climbed out of bed and slept on\n the floor.\n\n\n Steven did not like the records or the talking books, and when he went\n to kiddie-garden he viewed the televised lessons with a cold eye. For\n some reason which he could not have explained, he wanted to learn to\n read, but they would not teach him till he was seven, and so he taught\n himself, from the letters on the jarsies. But then there was nothing\n to read except the newspapers and the magazines, which he puzzled over\n patiently, getting most of the words right after a while. The many\n advertisements were easiest; they used pictures and the simplest of\n language.", "The Happy Clown\nBY ALICE ELEANOR JONES\nThis was a century of peace, plethora and\n \nperfection, and little Steven was a misfit,\n \na nonconformist, who hated perfection.\n \nHe had to learn the hard way....\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, December 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nSteven Russell was born a misfit, a nonconformist, and for the first\n five years of his life he made himself and his parents extremely\n unhappy. The twenty-first century was perfect, and this inexplicable\n child did not like perfection.", "Richard tried to comfort her. \"Never mind, Harry, he'll outgrow it.\"\nSteven did not outgrow it. When he became too big for the curly spoon\n and dish and cup he demanded a knife and fork and spoon from the bureau\n drawer and ate his meals from the plainest dish he could find. He ate\n them with his back stubbornly turned to the television set, away from\n the morning cartoons and the noontime Kiddies' Lunch Club and the\n evening Happy Clown.", "They were pleased with him at the clinic and after a few months\n discharged him. By the time Steven was twelve and had made the Happy\n Tour and joined the Happy Scouts and had a happy affair, involving\n experimentation, with a neighbor's daughter, Harriet and Richard ceased\n to worry about him. If sometimes he felt so tightly strung-up that a\n storm of tears was his only relief, he kept the tears quiet.\nHe was graduated from high school at sixteen and from college at\n twenty, having read all he could of the silent books in the scant high\n school library and the more ample university one, and having wisely\n elected to appear more stupid than he was. Even his I.Q. was now\n judged to be only slightly above normal. He left college with honors,", "For a while Steven considered confessing to somebody that he was\n a—what?—an unacceptable member of society. Then they would make him\n like Denise. He shuddered. Did he really want to be like Denise? Some\n stubborn pride in him refused it.\n\n\n When Denise left the hospital for the hotel where she would stay until\n the wedding, Steven was more gentle with her than ever, kinder and\n more loving. He made her very happy. He made love to her again, and it\n was like loving a ghost—no, it was like loving a fine beautiful body\n without the ghost, without the spirit. He returned to the HYM to lie\n sleepless amid the breathings and mutterings of the other young men,\n turning restlessly in his bed, feeling oppressed, tormented, strung on\n wires.", "He took her to meet his family—Denise's family lived three thousand\n miles away—and she behaved with such perfect decorum and charm that\n Richard and Harriet were delighted and as eager as Steven for the\n wedding. Steven had agreed reluctantly to put it off until Denise\n had a chance to introduce him to her parents; they were coming East\n at Christmas. She laughed over it and said, \"I'm being terribly\n conventional, darling, but that's one convention I like.\"\nWhile they waited, Steven's agent secured a really unprecedented\n opportunity for so young and relatively untried an actor. The current\n Happy Clown was unhappily retiring, by reason of age and infirmity, and\n Steven's agent arranged a tryout for the part. He said, \"Give it all\n you got, kid; it's the chance of the century.\"", "Steven did not like his Rockabye Crib, that joggled him gently and sang\n him songs about the Happy Clown all night long; and he howled until\n they turned it off. He was a clean boy, and to his mother's amazement\n trained himself to be dry day and night by the age of fourteen months,\n without the aid of the Singing Toidey or the Happy Clown Alarm; so she\n bought him a Little Folks Youth Bed, with a built-in joggler, and Happy\n Clowns on the corners, and a television set in the footboard. It was a\n smaller copy of his parents' bed, even to the Happy Clowns. Steven did\n not like that either, and if his parents persisted in turning the bed\n on after he had learned to turn it off, he climbed out and slept on the\n floor.\nHarriet said worriedly to her husband, \"I don't know what could be the\n matter with him. Dickie, he's peculiar!\"", "The first trouble arose over his food. His mother did not nurse\n him, since the doctors had proved that Baby-Lac, and the soft\n rainbow-colored plastic containers in which it was warmed and offered,\n were both a vast improvement on nature. Steven drank the Baby-Lac, but\n though it was hard to credit in so young a child, sometimes his face\n wore an expression of pure distaste.\n\n\n A little later he rejected the Baby Oatsies and Fruitsies and Meatsies,\n and his large half-focused eyes wept at the jolly pictures on the\n jarsies. He disliked his plastic dish made like a curled-up Jolly\n Kitten, and his spoon with the Happy Clown's head on the handle. He\n turned his face away determinedly and began to pine, reducing his\n mother to tears and his father to frightened anger.", "At the end of the tests the Director said seriously to Steven's\n parents, \"I'll be frank with you. You have a brilliant kiddie\n here—right now he has the intelligence of a twelve-year-old—but\n brilliance has to be channeled in the right direction. Just now—well,\n frankly, it's channeled in the wrong direction. We'll give it a year or\n so, and then if things don't clear up I'm afraid we'll have to correct\n him.\"\n\n\n Richard said through dry lips, \"You mean a Steyner?\"\n\n\n The Director nodded. \"The only thing.\"\n\n\n Harriet shuddered and began to cry. \"But there's never been anything\n like that in our family! The disgrace—oh, Dickie, it would kill me!\"", "His parents thought it was very cunning of him to look at the printing\n like that, so wisely, as if he could read it! He said once to Harriet,\n \"I can read it,\" but she said, \"Oh, Stevie, you're teasing Mumsie!\"\n and looked so frightened at this fresh peculiarity that the child said\n gravely, \"Yes, teasing.\" He wished he had a silent book. He knew there\n were such things, but there were none at home. There were few silent\n books anywhere. There were none in kiddie-garden.", "popularity and a reputation as an actor. He took the lead in all the\n dramatic club plays, having particular success in the reproduction\n of a Happy Clown program. Steven, of course, was the Happy Clown. He\n enrolled at once in the New York School of Television Arts, and his\n mother cried when he left home to live in the School dormitory.", "The psychiatrist said reasonably, \"But nobody can live by himself,\n Stevie.\" He had apparently forgotten Steven, and the boy did not\n correct him again. \"You have to learn to live with other people, to\n work and play with them, to know them, and the only way you can learn\n is by being with them. When you can't be with them personally, there's\n always television. That's how you learn, Stevie. You can't be by\n yourself.\"\n\n\n The boy looked up and said starkly, \"Never?\"\n\n\n The gleaming teeth showed. \"But why should you want to?\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"I don't know.\"\n\n\n The doctor said, slowly and with emphasis, \"Stevie, long before you\n were born the world was a very bad place. There were wars all the time.\n Do you know why?\"\n\n\n The boy shook his head.", "He rehearsed feverishly for the part of the Happy Clown, and because he\n was a fine craftsman and a conscientious artist he continued to give\n it all he had. The sponsors were pleased. A week before Christmas the\n current Happy Clown retired and hobbled off to a nursing home. There\n was no fanfare—the public was not to realize that the Happy Clown was\n mortal—and Steven took over with no visible change. For five days he\n played the part to perfection.\n\n\n On the sixth day he performed as usual, perhaps a little better. His\n commercials had a special fervor, and the sponsors exchanged happy\n glances. Denise was sitting in the booth with them; she smiled at\n Steven lovingly through the glass.", "Fortunately nobody heard the last three sentences. The paralyzed\n engineer had recovered in time to cut him off during the pause, and\n had signalled the stagehand to draw the curtain and the sound man to\n play the Happy Clown sign-off record—loud. Steven finished himself\n thoroughly, however, by repeating the same sentiments, with some others\n he happened to think of, to Denise and the sponsors, when they all came\n pouring out of the booth. Then he collapsed.\nSteven's Steyner was a complete success. He recovered from it a\n subdued, agreeable and thoroughly conventional young man, who had the\n impression that he had suffered a nervous breakdown. He was discharged\n from the Happy Hour at the end of January, innocently leaving behind", "Steven did well at Television Arts, soon taking more leads than was\n customary in School productions, which were organized on a strictly\n repertory basis. He did not stay to graduate, being snatched away in\n his first year by a talent scout for a popular daytime serial, \"The\n Happy Life.\"", "Richard said firmly, \"We'll take him to the clinic. They'll know what\n to do.\"\nThe first thing they did to Steven was to talk to him. The psychiatrist\n made him lie down on a foam rubber couch, kiddies' model, with the\n Happy Clown motif on the slip-cover, and said with a beaming face,\n \"Now, Stevie, what seems to be the trouble?\"\n\n\n The boy turned his head away from the psychiatrist's shining teeth and\n said, \"My name's not Stevie. It's Steven.\" He was a thin little boy,\n rather undersized. The baby fat had melted away fast when he began\n to be exposed to kiddie-garden. He had dark hair and big eyes and an\n uncommonly precise way of speaking for a child of five." ], [ "Denise was lost to him. The outburst in the studio, and the Steyner,\n and the loss of the Happy Clown part were cumulatively too much for\n her. She broke the engagement and was heard to say that Stevie Russell\n had proved himself an absolute fool. He was miserable over it, though\n he had only a hazy idea of what he had done or why Denny should\n suddenly be so unkind to him.", "For a while Steven considered confessing to somebody that he was\n a—what?—an unacceptable member of society. Then they would make him\n like Denise. He shuddered. Did he really want to be like Denise? Some\n stubborn pride in him refused it.\n\n\n When Denise left the hospital for the hotel where she would stay until\n the wedding, Steven was more gentle with her than ever, kinder and\n more loving. He made her very happy. He made love to her again, and it\n was like loving a ghost—no, it was like loving a fine beautiful body\n without the ghost, without the spirit. He returned to the HYM to lie\n sleepless amid the breathings and mutterings of the other young men,\n turning restlessly in his bed, feeling oppressed, tormented, strung on\n wires.", "They made love in Denise's apartment when her roommate\n Pauline—Polly—was out, as awkwardly as if there had never been any\n group experimentation or happy affairs. Denise said wonderingly, \"When\n you really love someone it's all new. Isn't that strange?\" and Steven\n said, kissing her, \"No, not strange at all.\"", "He took her to meet his family—Denise's family lived three thousand\n miles away—and she behaved with such perfect decorum and charm that\n Richard and Harriet were delighted and as eager as Steven for the\n wedding. Steven had agreed reluctantly to put it off until Denise\n had a chance to introduce him to her parents; they were coming East\n at Christmas. She laughed over it and said, \"I'm being terribly\n conventional, darling, but that's one convention I like.\"\nWhile they waited, Steven's agent secured a really unprecedented\n opportunity for so young and relatively untried an actor. The current\n Happy Clown was unhappily retiring, by reason of age and infirmity, and\n Steven's agent arranged a tryout for the part. He said, \"Give it all\n you got, kid; it's the chance of the century.\"", "At last the doctor came out to him and said what was always said in\n such cases. \"It was necessary to do something—you understand, no\n mention—\" and for a moment Steven felt so ill that he was grateful\n for the little ampoule the doctor broke and held under his nose. They\n always carried those when they had to give news of a Steyner to\n relatives or sweethearts or friends.\n\n\n The doctor said, \"All right now? Good .... You'll be careful, of\n course. She may be conscious for a minute; there's no harm in it yet,\n she won't move or touch the—\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"I'll be careful.\"\n\n\n He was still feeling ill when they let him in to see Denise. He sat\n down beside her bed and spoke to her urgently. \"Denise, talk to me.\n Please, Denise!\"", "That night in the HYM dormitory Steven did not sleep. He lay quiet,\n tense, hoping for the relief of tears, but it did not come.\nSteven went to see Denise every day though after the first time she\n was not awake to know him. The doctors were keeping her under sedation\n until the head bandage could be removed. So far as Denise was to\n know, she had gone to the hospital simply for a rather protracted\n appendectomy. Looking at her, Steven knew that he could never leave\n her. He had loved her completely; he would love her now with as much of\n himself as she would need or understand.\n\n\n For a while he waited to be kindly questioned, to be thoroughly\n examined, to be tenderly given the shot in the arm and to awake like\n her, but nobody came. Denise had apparently said nothing about him.\n Some censor or other—perhaps it was the censor of love—had kept her\n from even saying his name.", "Steven met no nonconformists at the School of Television Arts, and none\n while he was acting in \"The Happy Life\" until Denise Cottrell joined\n the cast. Denise—called Denny, of course—was a pleasantly plain young\n woman with a whimsical face which photographed pretty, and remarkable\n dark blue eyes. It was her eyes which first made Steven wonder. They\n mirrored his own hope, and longing, and the desperate loneliness of the\n exile.\n\n\n For two months they were together as often as they could be, talking\n intellectual treason in public under cover of conventional faces,\n and talking intellectual treason in private with excitement and\n laughter and sometimes tears—falling in love. They planned, after\n much discussion, to be married and to bring up a dozen clever rebel\n children. Denise said soberly, \"They'd better be clever, because\n they'll have to learn to hide.\"", "But, around the studios Steven was dead. Steyner or no Steyner—and\n of course that part of it was never openly discussed—sponsors had\n long memories, and the consensus seemed to be that it was best to\n let sleeping sheep lie. Steven did not care. He no longer had any\n particular desire to be an actor.\n\n\n Steven went to work in his father's supermarket and was happy among\n the shelves of Oatsies and Cornsies and Jellsies. He got over Denise\n after a while and met a girl named Frances—Franny—whom he loved and\n who loved him. They were married in the summer and had a little house\n with as much furniture in it as they could afford. The first thing they\n bought was a television set. After all, as Stevie said, he would not\n want to miss the Happy Clown.", "Steven said, \"Sure, Joey,\" and allowed his sensitive face to register\n all the proper emotions. Actually his emotions were, in the vernacular\n of a previous century, mixed. He loathed the whole concept of the Happy\n Clown—but there was money in it, and Steven was not rebel enough to\n despise money. With money he could retire early, go away somewhere with\n Denise, to some country place where they could be relatively free of\n pressure.\n\n\n Over staggering competition he got the part. He called Denise up at\n once from a booth at the studio to tell her. Polly answered the phone,\n looking pale and frightened over the viewer, and said rapidly, \"Oh,\n Stevie, I've been trying to get you for an hour. Denny's sick. They\n took her to the hospital!\"\n\n\n Steven sat back against the hard wall of the booth, feeling cold, the\n receiver slack in his hand. He said, \"What's the matter with her? Which\n hospital?\"", "He rehearsed feverishly for the part of the Happy Clown, and because he\n was a fine craftsman and a conscientious artist he continued to give\n it all he had. The sponsors were pleased. A week before Christmas the\n current Happy Clown retired and hobbled off to a nursing home. There\n was no fanfare—the public was not to realize that the Happy Clown was\n mortal—and Steven took over with no visible change. For five days he\n played the part to perfection.\n\n\n On the sixth day he performed as usual, perhaps a little better. His\n commercials had a special fervor, and the sponsors exchanged happy\n glances. Denise was sitting in the booth with them; she smiled at\n Steven lovingly through the glass.", "Steven was not happy in kiddie-garden. The enthusiasm the other kiddies\n showed for the lessons appalled him. The kiddies themselves appalled\n him. They joined so passionately in the group play, clutching each\n other with their hot moist hands, panting and grinning into each\n others' faces. They were always clutching and panting and grinning, in\n large noisy groups, with large community smiles. They confused him; he\n could not tell them apart. Steven retired to a corner and turned his\n back, and when they clutched and panted and grinned at him he hit them.", "She opened her eyes, looked at him drowsily and smiled. \"Oh, Stevie,\n I'm so glad you came. I've been wanting you, darling.\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"Denise—\"\n\n\n She frowned. \"Why do you call me that? Call me Denny. Did you get the\n part, darling?\"\n\n\n He drew back a little. \"Yes, I got it.\"\n\n\n She gave him a radiant smile. \"That's wonderful! I'm so proud of you,\n Stevie.\" She slept again.", "\"Ap-pendicitis. Happy Hour.\" Polly began to cry. \"Oh, Stevie, I feel\n so—\"\n\n\n \"I'll go right over.\" He cut her off abruptly and went.\n\n\n The doctors caught Denise's appendix in time to avoid the necessary but\n rarely fatal complications ... but under the anesthetic she talked,\n revealing enough about her opinion of television, and the Happy Clown\n cult, and the state of society in general, to cause her doctors to\n raise their eyebrows pityingly and perform the Steyner at once. While\n Steven sat unknowing in the waiting room, smoking a full pack of\n Marquis cigarettes, the thing was done.", "Fortunately nobody heard the last three sentences. The paralyzed\n engineer had recovered in time to cut him off during the pause, and\n had signalled the stagehand to draw the curtain and the sound man to\n play the Happy Clown sign-off record—loud. Steven finished himself\n thoroughly, however, by repeating the same sentiments, with some others\n he happened to think of, to Denise and the sponsors, when they all came\n pouring out of the booth. Then he collapsed.\nSteven's Steyner was a complete success. He recovered from it a\n subdued, agreeable and thoroughly conventional young man, who had the\n impression that he had suffered a nervous breakdown. He was discharged\n from the Happy Hour at the end of January, innocently leaving behind", "Being, as the Director had said, a brilliant kiddie, Steven soon\n understood much of what was kept from him. It did not take him long\n to learn what was making his Dadsie look stern and white and what was\n making his Mumsie cry. He loved his parents and did not want them to be\n unhappy, and he certainly did not want to have his head cut open, and\n so he began to act. Even at five, Steven discovered in himself a fine\n talent for acting. He began to conform, to adjust, to merge. He became\n social and cooperative and acquired the proper attitudes for successful\n community living. He gave up the old silver voluntarily, he accepted\n the Youth Bed, he looked at the Happy Clown, and he did much better in\n kiddie-garden. He even joined in the group experimentation and was not\n sick any more, though he could not keep himself from losing color.", "Steven did not like the Happy Clown or the Jolly Kitten or the\n Dancing Dogsie. Sometimes he began to grow interested in the cowboys\n or spacemen, but when they stopped in the middle of an adventure to\n talk about how they could not possibly rope the steers or shoot the\n asteroids without a good breakfast of Cornsies and Choko-Milko, which\n everybody ate, just everybody, Steven climbed out of bed and slept on\n the floor.\n\n\n Steven did not like the records or the talking books, and when he went\n to kiddie-garden he viewed the televised lessons with a cold eye. For\n some reason which he could not have explained, he wanted to learn to\n read, but they would not teach him till he was seven, and so he taught\n himself, from the letters on the jarsies. But then there was nothing\n to read except the newspapers and the magazines, which he puzzled over\n patiently, getting most of the words right after a while. The many\n advertisements were easiest; they used pictures and the simplest of\n language.", "Richard tried to comfort her. \"Never mind, Harry, he'll outgrow it.\"\nSteven did not outgrow it. When he became too big for the curly spoon\n and dish and cup he demanded a knife and fork and spoon from the bureau\n drawer and ate his meals from the plainest dish he could find. He ate\n them with his back stubbornly turned to the television set, away from\n the morning cartoons and the noontime Kiddies' Lunch Club and the\n evening Happy Clown.", "He managed his life well enough. He had a few affairs with girls, it\n was expected of one, and he did not have to work very hard at it since\n they always threw themselves at him; and he got along well with other\n young men, who forgave him for being so handsome because he did not\n work at it except on camera; but he was lonely. Surrounded by people,\n intruded and trespassed upon, continually touched in ways other than\n physical, he was yet lonely.\nDuring his life he had met a few other nonconformists, shy, like him,\n wary of revealing themselves, but something always seemed to happen\n to them. Some were miserable being nonconformists and asked pitifully\n for the Steyner, some were detected, as Steven had been, and some\n were unfortunately surprised in hospitals. Under the anesthetic they\n sometimes talked, and then, if they were adults, they were immediately\n corrected by means of Steyner's lobotomy. It had been learned that\n adults did not respond to therapy.", "The doctor said cheerily, \"There's nothing the matter with him. He'll\n eat when he gets hungry enough,\" and Steven did, to a degree, but not\n as if he enjoyed it.\n\n\n One day when he was nearly a year old, his mother carried his Kiddie\n Korner with the Dancing Dogsies on the pad into her bedroom, put him in\n it, and began to take things out of the bottom bureau drawer. They were\n old things, and Harriet Russell was ashamed of them. She had said more\n than once to her husband Richard, only half joking, \"I couldn't give\n them away, and I'd be ashamed for anybody to see them in our trash!\"\n They were old silver, knives and forks and spoons that looked like what\n they were, unadorned, and a child's plain silver dish and cup, and one\n small spoon with a useful curly handle. They had belonged to Harriet's\n great-grandmother. Once a year Harriet took the things out and polished\n them and furtively put them back.", "Richard said firmly, \"We'll take him to the clinic. They'll know what\n to do.\"\nThe first thing they did to Steven was to talk to him. The psychiatrist\n made him lie down on a foam rubber couch, kiddies' model, with the\n Happy Clown motif on the slip-cover, and said with a beaming face,\n \"Now, Stevie, what seems to be the trouble?\"\n\n\n The boy turned his head away from the psychiatrist's shining teeth and\n said, \"My name's not Stevie. It's Steven.\" He was a thin little boy,\n rather undersized. The baby fat had melted away fast when he began\n to be exposed to kiddie-garden. He had dark hair and big eyes and an\n uncommonly precise way of speaking for a child of five." ], [ "The Happy Clown had been an American institution for thirty years. He\n was on television for an hour every night at dinner time, with puppets\n and movies and live singers and dancers and his own inimitable brand\n of philosophy and humor. Everybody loved the Happy Clown. He had been\n several different actors in thirty years, but his makeup never changed:\n the beaming face drawn in vivid colors, the rotund body that shook when\n he laughed like a bowlful of Jellsies, and the chuckling infectious\n laugh. The Happy Clown was always so cheerful and folksy and sincere.\n He believed passionately in all the products he instructed his viewers\n to buy, and one was entirely certain that he used them all himself.", "He rehearsed feverishly for the part of the Happy Clown, and because he\n was a fine craftsman and a conscientious artist he continued to give\n it all he had. The sponsors were pleased. A week before Christmas the\n current Happy Clown retired and hobbled off to a nursing home. There\n was no fanfare—the public was not to realize that the Happy Clown was\n mortal—and Steven took over with no visible change. For five days he\n played the part to perfection.\n\n\n On the sixth day he performed as usual, perhaps a little better. His\n commercials had a special fervor, and the sponsors exchanged happy\n glances. Denise was sitting in the booth with them; she smiled at\n Steven lovingly through the glass.", "He said, \"Are you all happy? You are, aren't you?—everybody's happy,\n because you're all sheep! All sheep, in a nice safe pasture. All\n alike—you eat alike and dress alike and think alike. If any of you has\n an original thought you'd better suppress it, or they'll cut it out of\n you with a knife.\" He leaned forward and made a horrible face at the\n camera. Under the jolly makeup and the artful padding, his mouth was\n shockingly twisted, and tears were running out of his eyes. \"A long\n sharp knife, folks!\" He paused momentarily to recover his voice, which\n had begun to shake. \"Go on being happy, go on being sheep. Wear the\n clothesies, and eat the foodsies, and don't dare think! Me—I'd rather\n be dead, and damned, and in hell!\"", "The Happy Clown\nBY ALICE ELEANOR JONES\nThis was a century of peace, plethora and\n \nperfection, and little Steven was a misfit,\n \na nonconformist, who hated perfection.\n \nHe had to learn the hard way....\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, December 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nSteven Russell was born a misfit, a nonconformist, and for the first\n five years of his life he made himself and his parents extremely\n unhappy. The twenty-first century was perfect, and this inexplicable\n child did not like perfection.", "Steven said, \"Sure, Joey,\" and allowed his sensitive face to register\n all the proper emotions. Actually his emotions were, in the vernacular\n of a previous century, mixed. He loathed the whole concept of the Happy\n Clown—but there was money in it, and Steven was not rebel enough to\n despise money. With money he could retire early, go away somewhere with\n Denise, to some country place where they could be relatively free of\n pressure.\n\n\n Over staggering competition he got the part. He called Denise up at\n once from a booth at the studio to tell her. Polly answered the phone,\n looking pale and frightened over the viewer, and said rapidly, \"Oh,\n Stevie, I've been trying to get you for an hour. Denny's sick. They\n took her to the hospital!\"\n\n\n Steven sat back against the hard wall of the booth, feeling cold, the\n receiver slack in his hand. He said, \"What's the matter with her? Which\n hospital?\"", "Being, as the Director had said, a brilliant kiddie, Steven soon\n understood much of what was kept from him. It did not take him long\n to learn what was making his Dadsie look stern and white and what was\n making his Mumsie cry. He loved his parents and did not want them to be\n unhappy, and he certainly did not want to have his head cut open, and\n so he began to act. Even at five, Steven discovered in himself a fine\n talent for acting. He began to conform, to adjust, to merge. He became\n social and cooperative and acquired the proper attitudes for successful\n community living. He gave up the old silver voluntarily, he accepted\n the Youth Bed, he looked at the Happy Clown, and he did much better in\n kiddie-garden. He even joined in the group experimentation and was not\n sick any more, though he could not keep himself from losing color.", "Fortunately nobody heard the last three sentences. The paralyzed\n engineer had recovered in time to cut him off during the pause, and\n had signalled the stagehand to draw the curtain and the sound man to\n play the Happy Clown sign-off record—loud. Steven finished himself\n thoroughly, however, by repeating the same sentiments, with some others\n he happened to think of, to Denise and the sponsors, when they all came\n pouring out of the booth. Then he collapsed.\nSteven's Steyner was a complete success. He recovered from it a\n subdued, agreeable and thoroughly conventional young man, who had the\n impression that he had suffered a nervous breakdown. He was discharged\n from the Happy Hour at the end of January, innocently leaving behind", "There was never any organization, any underground, of misfits. An\n underground presupposes injustice to be fought, cruelty to be resisted,\n and there was no injustice and no cruelty. The mass of people were\n kind, and their leaders, duly and fairly elected, were kind. They\n all sincerely believed in the gospel of efficiency and conformity\n and kindness. It had made the world a wonderful place to live in,\n full of wonderful things to make and buy and consume (all wonderfully\n advertised), and if one were a misfit and the doctors found it out and\n gave one a Steyner, it was only to make one happy, so that one could\n appreciate what a wonderful world it was.", "\"Ap-pendicitis. Happy Hour.\" Polly began to cry. \"Oh, Stevie, I feel\n so—\"\n\n\n \"I'll go right over.\" He cut her off abruptly and went.\n\n\n The doctors caught Denise's appendix in time to avoid the necessary but\n rarely fatal complications ... but under the anesthetic she talked,\n revealing enough about her opinion of television, and the Happy Clown\n cult, and the state of society in general, to cause her doctors to\n raise their eyebrows pityingly and perform the Steyner at once. While\n Steven sat unknowing in the waiting room, smoking a full pack of\n Marquis cigarettes, the thing was done.", "He gave one much more than advertising, though. Some of his nightly\n gems of wisdom (he called them nuggets) were really wonderful; they\n made one think. A favorite nugget, which people were always writing\n in and asking him to repeat, went like this: \"We're all alike inside,\n folks, and we ought to be all alike outside.\" The Happy Clown's\n viewers were not children and adults, they were kiddies and folks.\n\n\n After the Happy Clown went off the air the happy kiddies went to bed,\n to lie for a while looking at the Jolly Kitten and the Dancing Dogsie,\n until, lulled by the joggler, they went gently to sleep. After that\n came the cowboys and spacemen, carryovers for any happy kiddies with\n insomnia. For really meaty programs one had to stay up past ten.\n Then the spectaculars began, and the quiz shows, and the boxing and\n wrestling.", "\"It was because people were different from each other, and didn't\n understand each other, and didn't know each other. They had to learn\n how to be alike, and understand, and know, so that they would be able\n to live together. They learned in many ways, Stevie. One way was by\n visiting each other—you've heard about the visitors who come from—\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"You mean the Happy Tours.\"\n\n\n \"Yes. When you're twelve years old you can go on a Happy Tour. Won't\n that be fun?\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"If I could go alone.\"\n\n\n The doctor looked at him sharply. \"But you can't. Try to understand,\n Stevie, you can't. Now tell me—why don't you like to be with other\n people?\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"All the time—not all the\ntime\n.\"\n\n\n The doctor repeated patiently, \"Why?\"", "The Happy Clown incident had passed off well—immediately after\n it occurred, a powerful battery of comedians, including the Jolly\n Kitten and the Dancing Dogsie, forgetting rivalries to rally 'round\n in a crisis, went on the air to insure that it passed off well. They\n made certain that every viewer should regard the whole thing as a\n tremendously funny if rather mystifying joke. The viewers fell in with\n this opinion easily and laughed about the sheep joke a good deal,\n admiring the Happy Clown's sense of humor—a little sharp, to be sure,\n not so folksy and down-to-earth as usual, but the Happy Clown could do\n no wrong. They said to each other, \"He laughed till he cried, did you\n notice? So did I!\" For a while teenagers addressed each other as, \"Hi,\n sheep!\" (girls were, \"Hi, lamb!\"), and a novelty company in Des Moines\n made a quick killing with scatter pins fashioned like sheep and/or\n lambs.", "They were pleased with him at the clinic and after a few months\n discharged him. By the time Steven was twelve and had made the Happy\n Tour and joined the Happy Scouts and had a happy affair, involving\n experimentation, with a neighbor's daughter, Harriet and Richard ceased\n to worry about him. If sometimes he felt so tightly strung-up that a\n storm of tears was his only relief, he kept the tears quiet.\nHe was graduated from high school at sixteen and from college at\n twenty, having read all he could of the silent books in the scant high\n school library and the more ample university one, and having wisely\n elected to appear more stupid than he was. Even his I.Q. was now\n judged to be only slightly above normal. He left college with honors,", "Steven was not happy in kiddie-garden. The enthusiasm the other kiddies\n showed for the lessons appalled him. The kiddies themselves appalled\n him. They joined so passionately in the group play, clutching each\n other with their hot moist hands, panting and grinning into each\n others' faces. They were always clutching and panting and grinning, in\n large noisy groups, with large community smiles. They confused him; he\n could not tell them apart. Steven retired to a corner and turned his\n back, and when they clutched and panted and grinned at him he hit them.", "Steven did not like the Happy Clown or the Jolly Kitten or the\n Dancing Dogsie. Sometimes he began to grow interested in the cowboys\n or spacemen, but when they stopped in the middle of an adventure to\n talk about how they could not possibly rope the steers or shoot the\n asteroids without a good breakfast of Cornsies and Choko-Milko, which\n everybody ate, just everybody, Steven climbed out of bed and slept on\n the floor.\n\n\n Steven did not like the records or the talking books, and when he went\n to kiddie-garden he viewed the televised lessons with a cold eye. For\n some reason which he could not have explained, he wanted to learn to\n read, but they would not teach him till he was seven, and so he taught\n himself, from the letters on the jarsies. But then there was nothing\n to read except the newspapers and the magazines, which he puzzled over\n patiently, getting most of the words right after a while. The many\n advertisements were easiest; they used pictures and the simplest of\n language.", "popularity and a reputation as an actor. He took the lead in all the\n dramatic club plays, having particular success in the reproduction\n of a Happy Clown program. Steven, of course, was the Happy Clown. He\n enrolled at once in the New York School of Television Arts, and his\n mother cried when he left home to live in the School dormitory.", "He took her to meet his family—Denise's family lived three thousand\n miles away—and she behaved with such perfect decorum and charm that\n Richard and Harriet were delighted and as eager as Steven for the\n wedding. Steven had agreed reluctantly to put it off until Denise\n had a chance to introduce him to her parents; they were coming East\n at Christmas. She laughed over it and said, \"I'm being terribly\n conventional, darling, but that's one convention I like.\"\nWhile they waited, Steven's agent secured a really unprecedented\n opportunity for so young and relatively untried an actor. The current\n Happy Clown was unhappily retiring, by reason of age and infirmity, and\n Steven's agent arranged a tryout for the part. He said, \"Give it all\n you got, kid; it's the chance of the century.\"", "But, around the studios Steven was dead. Steyner or no Steyner—and\n of course that part of it was never openly discussed—sponsors had\n long memories, and the consensus seemed to be that it was best to\n let sleeping sheep lie. Steven did not care. He no longer had any\n particular desire to be an actor.\n\n\n Steven went to work in his father's supermarket and was happy among\n the shelves of Oatsies and Cornsies and Jellsies. He got over Denise\n after a while and met a girl named Frances—Franny—whom he loved and\n who loved him. They were married in the summer and had a little house\n with as much furniture in it as they could afford. The first thing they\n bought was a television set. After all, as Stevie said, he would not\n want to miss the Happy Clown.", "Richard said firmly, \"We'll take him to the clinic. They'll know what\n to do.\"\nThe first thing they did to Steven was to talk to him. The psychiatrist\n made him lie down on a foam rubber couch, kiddies' model, with the\n Happy Clown motif on the slip-cover, and said with a beaming face,\n \"Now, Stevie, what seems to be the trouble?\"\n\n\n The boy turned his head away from the psychiatrist's shining teeth and\n said, \"My name's not Stevie. It's Steven.\" He was a thin little boy,\n rather undersized. The baby fat had melted away fast when he began\n to be exposed to kiddie-garden. He had dark hair and big eyes and an\n uncommonly precise way of speaking for a child of five.", "Steven did not like his Rockabye Crib, that joggled him gently and sang\n him songs about the Happy Clown all night long; and he howled until\n they turned it off. He was a clean boy, and to his mother's amazement\n trained himself to be dry day and night by the age of fourteen months,\n without the aid of the Singing Toidey or the Happy Clown Alarm; so she\n bought him a Little Folks Youth Bed, with a built-in joggler, and Happy\n Clowns on the corners, and a television set in the footboard. It was a\n smaller copy of his parents' bed, even to the Happy Clowns. Steven did\n not like that either, and if his parents persisted in turning the bed\n on after he had learned to turn it off, he climbed out and slept on the\n floor.\nHarriet said worriedly to her husband, \"I don't know what could be the\n matter with him. Dickie, he's peculiar!\"" ], [ "\"It was because people were different from each other, and didn't\n understand each other, and didn't know each other. They had to learn\n how to be alike, and understand, and know, so that they would be able\n to live together. They learned in many ways, Stevie. One way was by\n visiting each other—you've heard about the visitors who come from—\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"You mean the Happy Tours.\"\n\n\n \"Yes. When you're twelve years old you can go on a Happy Tour. Won't\n that be fun?\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"If I could go alone.\"\n\n\n The doctor looked at him sharply. \"But you can't. Try to understand,\n Stevie, you can't. Now tell me—why don't you like to be with other\n people?\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"All the time—not all the\ntime\n.\"\n\n\n The doctor repeated patiently, \"Why?\"", "They were pleased with him at the clinic and after a few months\n discharged him. By the time Steven was twelve and had made the Happy\n Tour and joined the Happy Scouts and had a happy affair, involving\n experimentation, with a neighbor's daughter, Harriet and Richard ceased\n to worry about him. If sometimes he felt so tightly strung-up that a\n storm of tears was his only relief, he kept the tears quiet.\nHe was graduated from high school at sixteen and from college at\n twenty, having read all he could of the silent books in the scant high\n school library and the more ample university one, and having wisely\n elected to appear more stupid than he was. Even his I.Q. was now\n judged to be only slightly above normal. He left college with honors,", "He said, \"Are you all happy? You are, aren't you?—everybody's happy,\n because you're all sheep! All sheep, in a nice safe pasture. All\n alike—you eat alike and dress alike and think alike. If any of you has\n an original thought you'd better suppress it, or they'll cut it out of\n you with a knife.\" He leaned forward and made a horrible face at the\n camera. Under the jolly makeup and the artful padding, his mouth was\n shockingly twisted, and tears were running out of his eyes. \"A long\n sharp knife, folks!\" He paused momentarily to recover his voice, which\n had begun to shake. \"Go on being happy, go on being sheep. Wear the\n clothesies, and eat the foodsies, and don't dare think! Me—I'd rather\n be dead, and damned, and in hell!\"", "He rehearsed feverishly for the part of the Happy Clown, and because he\n was a fine craftsman and a conscientious artist he continued to give\n it all he had. The sponsors were pleased. A week before Christmas the\n current Happy Clown retired and hobbled off to a nursing home. There\n was no fanfare—the public was not to realize that the Happy Clown was\n mortal—and Steven took over with no visible change. For five days he\n played the part to perfection.\n\n\n On the sixth day he performed as usual, perhaps a little better. His\n commercials had a special fervor, and the sponsors exchanged happy\n glances. Denise was sitting in the booth with them; she smiled at\n Steven lovingly through the glass.", "The Happy Clown had been an American institution for thirty years. He\n was on television for an hour every night at dinner time, with puppets\n and movies and live singers and dancers and his own inimitable brand\n of philosophy and humor. Everybody loved the Happy Clown. He had been\n several different actors in thirty years, but his makeup never changed:\n the beaming face drawn in vivid colors, the rotund body that shook when\n he laughed like a bowlful of Jellsies, and the chuckling infectious\n laugh. The Happy Clown was always so cheerful and folksy and sincere.\n He believed passionately in all the products he instructed his viewers\n to buy, and one was entirely certain that he used them all himself.", "Being, as the Director had said, a brilliant kiddie, Steven soon\n understood much of what was kept from him. It did not take him long\n to learn what was making his Dadsie look stern and white and what was\n making his Mumsie cry. He loved his parents and did not want them to be\n unhappy, and he certainly did not want to have his head cut open, and\n so he began to act. Even at five, Steven discovered in himself a fine\n talent for acting. He began to conform, to adjust, to merge. He became\n social and cooperative and acquired the proper attitudes for successful\n community living. He gave up the old silver voluntarily, he accepted\n the Youth Bed, he looked at the Happy Clown, and he did much better in\n kiddie-garden. He even joined in the group experimentation and was not\n sick any more, though he could not keep himself from losing color.", "The Happy Clown incident had passed off well—immediately after\n it occurred, a powerful battery of comedians, including the Jolly\n Kitten and the Dancing Dogsie, forgetting rivalries to rally 'round\n in a crisis, went on the air to insure that it passed off well. They\n made certain that every viewer should regard the whole thing as a\n tremendously funny if rather mystifying joke. The viewers fell in with\n this opinion easily and laughed about the sheep joke a good deal,\n admiring the Happy Clown's sense of humor—a little sharp, to be sure,\n not so folksy and down-to-earth as usual, but the Happy Clown could do\n no wrong. They said to each other, \"He laughed till he cried, did you\n notice? So did I!\" For a while teenagers addressed each other as, \"Hi,\n sheep!\" (girls were, \"Hi, lamb!\"), and a novelty company in Des Moines\n made a quick killing with scatter pins fashioned like sheep and/or\n lambs.", "Fortunately nobody heard the last three sentences. The paralyzed\n engineer had recovered in time to cut him off during the pause, and\n had signalled the stagehand to draw the curtain and the sound man to\n play the Happy Clown sign-off record—loud. Steven finished himself\n thoroughly, however, by repeating the same sentiments, with some others\n he happened to think of, to Denise and the sponsors, when they all came\n pouring out of the booth. Then he collapsed.\nSteven's Steyner was a complete success. He recovered from it a\n subdued, agreeable and thoroughly conventional young man, who had the\n impression that he had suffered a nervous breakdown. He was discharged\n from the Happy Hour at the end of January, innocently leaving behind", "The psychiatrist said reasonably, \"But nobody can live by himself,\n Stevie.\" He had apparently forgotten Steven, and the boy did not\n correct him again. \"You have to learn to live with other people, to\n work and play with them, to know them, and the only way you can learn\n is by being with them. When you can't be with them personally, there's\n always television. That's how you learn, Stevie. You can't be by\n yourself.\"\n\n\n The boy looked up and said starkly, \"Never?\"\n\n\n The gleaming teeth showed. \"But why should you want to?\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"I don't know.\"\n\n\n The doctor said, slowly and with emphasis, \"Stevie, long before you\n were born the world was a very bad place. There were wars all the time.\n Do you know why?\"\n\n\n The boy shook his head.", "There was never any organization, any underground, of misfits. An\n underground presupposes injustice to be fought, cruelty to be resisted,\n and there was no injustice and no cruelty. The mass of people were\n kind, and their leaders, duly and fairly elected, were kind. They\n all sincerely believed in the gospel of efficiency and conformity\n and kindness. It had made the world a wonderful place to live in,\n full of wonderful things to make and buy and consume (all wonderfully\n advertised), and if one were a misfit and the doctors found it out and\n gave one a Steyner, it was only to make one happy, so that one could\n appreciate what a wonderful world it was.", "Steven did not like the Happy Clown or the Jolly Kitten or the\n Dancing Dogsie. Sometimes he began to grow interested in the cowboys\n or spacemen, but when they stopped in the middle of an adventure to\n talk about how they could not possibly rope the steers or shoot the\n asteroids without a good breakfast of Cornsies and Choko-Milko, which\n everybody ate, just everybody, Steven climbed out of bed and slept on\n the floor.\n\n\n Steven did not like the records or the talking books, and when he went\n to kiddie-garden he viewed the televised lessons with a cold eye. For\n some reason which he could not have explained, he wanted to learn to\n read, but they would not teach him till he was seven, and so he taught\n himself, from the letters on the jarsies. But then there was nothing\n to read except the newspapers and the magazines, which he puzzled over\n patiently, getting most of the words right after a while. The many\n advertisements were easiest; they used pictures and the simplest of\n language.", "\"Ap-pendicitis. Happy Hour.\" Polly began to cry. \"Oh, Stevie, I feel\n so—\"\n\n\n \"I'll go right over.\" He cut her off abruptly and went.\n\n\n The doctors caught Denise's appendix in time to avoid the necessary but\n rarely fatal complications ... but under the anesthetic she talked,\n revealing enough about her opinion of television, and the Happy Clown\n cult, and the state of society in general, to cause her doctors to\n raise their eyebrows pityingly and perform the Steyner at once. While\n Steven sat unknowing in the waiting room, smoking a full pack of\n Marquis cigarettes, the thing was done.", "Steven said, \"Sure, Joey,\" and allowed his sensitive face to register\n all the proper emotions. Actually his emotions were, in the vernacular\n of a previous century, mixed. He loathed the whole concept of the Happy\n Clown—but there was money in it, and Steven was not rebel enough to\n despise money. With money he could retire early, go away somewhere with\n Denise, to some country place where they could be relatively free of\n pressure.\n\n\n Over staggering competition he got the part. He called Denise up at\n once from a booth at the studio to tell her. Polly answered the phone,\n looking pale and frightened over the viewer, and said rapidly, \"Oh,\n Stevie, I've been trying to get you for an hour. Denny's sick. They\n took her to the hospital!\"\n\n\n Steven sat back against the hard wall of the booth, feeling cold, the\n receiver slack in his hand. He said, \"What's the matter with her? Which\n hospital?\"", "He managed his life well enough. He had a few affairs with girls, it\n was expected of one, and he did not have to work very hard at it since\n they always threw themselves at him; and he got along well with other\n young men, who forgave him for being so handsome because he did not\n work at it except on camera; but he was lonely. Surrounded by people,\n intruded and trespassed upon, continually touched in ways other than\n physical, he was yet lonely.\nDuring his life he had met a few other nonconformists, shy, like him,\n wary of revealing themselves, but something always seemed to happen\n to them. Some were miserable being nonconformists and asked pitifully\n for the Steyner, some were detected, as Steven had been, and some\n were unfortunately surprised in hospitals. Under the anesthetic they\n sometimes talked, and then, if they were adults, they were immediately\n corrected by means of Steyner's lobotomy. It had been learned that\n adults did not respond to therapy.", "Steven was not happy in kiddie-garden. The enthusiasm the other kiddies\n showed for the lessons appalled him. The kiddies themselves appalled\n him. They joined so passionately in the group play, clutching each\n other with their hot moist hands, panting and grinning into each\n others' faces. They were always clutching and panting and grinning, in\n large noisy groups, with large community smiles. They confused him; he\n could not tell them apart. Steven retired to a corner and turned his\n back, and when they clutched and panted and grinned at him he hit them.", "He gave one much more than advertising, though. Some of his nightly\n gems of wisdom (he called them nuggets) were really wonderful; they\n made one think. A favorite nugget, which people were always writing\n in and asking him to repeat, went like this: \"We're all alike inside,\n folks, and we ought to be all alike outside.\" The Happy Clown's\n viewers were not children and adults, they were kiddies and folks.\n\n\n After the Happy Clown went off the air the happy kiddies went to bed,\n to lie for a while looking at the Jolly Kitten and the Dancing Dogsie,\n until, lulled by the joggler, they went gently to sleep. After that\n came the cowboys and spacemen, carryovers for any happy kiddies with\n insomnia. For really meaty programs one had to stay up past ten.\n Then the spectaculars began, and the quiz shows, and the boxing and\n wrestling.", "Steven did not like his Rockabye Crib, that joggled him gently and sang\n him songs about the Happy Clown all night long; and he howled until\n they turned it off. He was a clean boy, and to his mother's amazement\n trained himself to be dry day and night by the age of fourteen months,\n without the aid of the Singing Toidey or the Happy Clown Alarm; so she\n bought him a Little Folks Youth Bed, with a built-in joggler, and Happy\n Clowns on the corners, and a television set in the footboard. It was a\n smaller copy of his parents' bed, even to the Happy Clowns. Steven did\n not like that either, and if his parents persisted in turning the bed\n on after he had learned to turn it off, he climbed out and slept on the\n floor.\nHarriet said worriedly to her husband, \"I don't know what could be the\n matter with him. Dickie, he's peculiar!\"", "popularity and a reputation as an actor. He took the lead in all the\n dramatic club plays, having particular success in the reproduction\n of a Happy Clown program. Steven, of course, was the Happy Clown. He\n enrolled at once in the New York School of Television Arts, and his\n mother cried when he left home to live in the School dormitory.", "Steven met no nonconformists at the School of Television Arts, and none\n while he was acting in \"The Happy Life\" until Denise Cottrell joined\n the cast. Denise—called Denny, of course—was a pleasantly plain young\n woman with a whimsical face which photographed pretty, and remarkable\n dark blue eyes. It was her eyes which first made Steven wonder. They\n mirrored his own hope, and longing, and the desperate loneliness of the\n exile.\n\n\n For two months they were together as often as they could be, talking\n intellectual treason in public under cover of conventional faces,\n and talking intellectual treason in private with excitement and\n laughter and sometimes tears—falling in love. They planned, after\n much discussion, to be married and to bring up a dozen clever rebel\n children. Denise said soberly, \"They'd better be clever, because\n they'll have to learn to hide.\"", "But, around the studios Steven was dead. Steyner or no Steyner—and\n of course that part of it was never openly discussed—sponsors had\n long memories, and the consensus seemed to be that it was best to\n let sleeping sheep lie. Steven did not care. He no longer had any\n particular desire to be an actor.\n\n\n Steven went to work in his father's supermarket and was happy among\n the shelves of Oatsies and Cornsies and Jellsies. He got over Denise\n after a while and met a girl named Frances—Franny—whom he loved and\n who loved him. They were married in the summer and had a little house\n with as much furniture in it as they could afford. The first thing they\n bought was a television set. After all, as Stevie said, he would not\n want to miss the Happy Clown." ], [ "Being, as the Director had said, a brilliant kiddie, Steven soon\n understood much of what was kept from him. It did not take him long\n to learn what was making his Dadsie look stern and white and what was\n making his Mumsie cry. He loved his parents and did not want them to be\n unhappy, and he certainly did not want to have his head cut open, and\n so he began to act. Even at five, Steven discovered in himself a fine\n talent for acting. He began to conform, to adjust, to merge. He became\n social and cooperative and acquired the proper attitudes for successful\n community living. He gave up the old silver voluntarily, he accepted\n the Youth Bed, he looked at the Happy Clown, and he did much better in\n kiddie-garden. He even joined in the group experimentation and was not\n sick any more, though he could not keep himself from losing color.", "They made love in Denise's apartment when her roommate\n Pauline—Polly—was out, as awkwardly as if there had never been any\n group experimentation or happy affairs. Denise said wonderingly, \"When\n you really love someone it's all new. Isn't that strange?\" and Steven\n said, kissing her, \"No, not strange at all.\"", "Steven was not happy in kiddie-garden. The enthusiasm the other kiddies\n showed for the lessons appalled him. The kiddies themselves appalled\n him. They joined so passionately in the group play, clutching each\n other with their hot moist hands, panting and grinning into each\n others' faces. They were always clutching and panting and grinning, in\n large noisy groups, with large community smiles. They confused him; he\n could not tell them apart. Steven retired to a corner and turned his\n back, and when they clutched and panted and grinned at him he hit them.", "The kiddie-garden monitor had to report of him to his unhappy parents\n that he was uncooperative and anti-social. He would not merge with\n the group, he would not acquire the proper attitudes for successful\n community living, he would not adjust. Most shocking of all, when the\n lesson about the birdsies and beesies was telecast, he not only refused\n to participate in the ensuing period of group experimentation, but lost\n color and disgraced himself by being sick in his corner. It was a\n painful interview. At the end of it the monitor recommended the clinic.\n Richard appreciated her delicacy. The clinic would be less expensive\n than private psychiatry, and after all, the manager of a supermarket\n was no millionaire.\n\n\n Harriet said to Richard when they were alone, \"Dickie, he isn't\n outgrowing it, he's getting worse! What are we going to do?\" It was a\n special tragedy, since Harriet was unable to have any more kiddies, and\n if this one turned out wrong ...", "He managed his life well enough. He had a few affairs with girls, it\n was expected of one, and he did not have to work very hard at it since\n they always threw themselves at him; and he got along well with other\n young men, who forgave him for being so handsome because he did not\n work at it except on camera; but he was lonely. Surrounded by people,\n intruded and trespassed upon, continually touched in ways other than\n physical, he was yet lonely.\nDuring his life he had met a few other nonconformists, shy, like him,\n wary of revealing themselves, but something always seemed to happen\n to them. Some were miserable being nonconformists and asked pitifully\n for the Steyner, some were detected, as Steven had been, and some\n were unfortunately surprised in hospitals. Under the anesthetic they\n sometimes talked, and then, if they were adults, they were immediately\n corrected by means of Steyner's lobotomy. It had been learned that\n adults did not respond to therapy.", "There was never any organization, any underground, of misfits. An\n underground presupposes injustice to be fought, cruelty to be resisted,\n and there was no injustice and no cruelty. The mass of people were\n kind, and their leaders, duly and fairly elected, were kind. They\n all sincerely believed in the gospel of efficiency and conformity\n and kindness. It had made the world a wonderful place to live in,\n full of wonderful things to make and buy and consume (all wonderfully\n advertised), and if one were a misfit and the doctors found it out and\n gave one a Steyner, it was only to make one happy, so that one could\n appreciate what a wonderful world it was.", "He said, \"Are you all happy? You are, aren't you?—everybody's happy,\n because you're all sheep! All sheep, in a nice safe pasture. All\n alike—you eat alike and dress alike and think alike. If any of you has\n an original thought you'd better suppress it, or they'll cut it out of\n you with a knife.\" He leaned forward and made a horrible face at the\n camera. Under the jolly makeup and the artful padding, his mouth was\n shockingly twisted, and tears were running out of his eyes. \"A long\n sharp knife, folks!\" He paused momentarily to recover his voice, which\n had begun to shake. \"Go on being happy, go on being sheep. Wear the\n clothesies, and eat the foodsies, and don't dare think! Me—I'd rather\n be dead, and damned, and in hell!\"", "They were pleased with him at the clinic and after a few months\n discharged him. By the time Steven was twelve and had made the Happy\n Tour and joined the Happy Scouts and had a happy affair, involving\n experimentation, with a neighbor's daughter, Harriet and Richard ceased\n to worry about him. If sometimes he felt so tightly strung-up that a\n storm of tears was his only relief, he kept the tears quiet.\nHe was graduated from high school at sixteen and from college at\n twenty, having read all he could of the silent books in the scant high\n school library and the more ample university one, and having wisely\n elected to appear more stupid than he was. Even his I.Q. was now\n judged to be only slightly above normal. He left college with honors,", "Steven looked at the doctor and said a very strange thing. \"They touch\n me.\" He seemed to shrink into himself. \"Not just with their hands.\"\n\n\n The doctor shook his head sadly. \"Of course they do, that's just—well,\n maybe you're too young to understand.\"\n\n\n The interview went on for quite a while, and at the end of it Steven\n was given a series of tests which took a week. The psychiatrist had\n not told the truth; what the boy said, during the first interview and\n all the tests, was fully recorded on concealed machines. The complete\n transcript made a fat dossier in the office of the Clinic Director.", "\"It was because people were different from each other, and didn't\n understand each other, and didn't know each other. They had to learn\n how to be alike, and understand, and know, so that they would be able\n to live together. They learned in many ways, Stevie. One way was by\n visiting each other—you've heard about the visitors who come from—\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"You mean the Happy Tours.\"\n\n\n \"Yes. When you're twelve years old you can go on a Happy Tour. Won't\n that be fun?\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"If I could go alone.\"\n\n\n The doctor looked at him sharply. \"But you can't. Try to understand,\n Stevie, you can't. Now tell me—why don't you like to be with other\n people?\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"All the time—not all the\ntime\n.\"\n\n\n The doctor repeated patiently, \"Why?\"", "Richard said firmly, \"We'll take him to the clinic. They'll know what\n to do.\"\nThe first thing they did to Steven was to talk to him. The psychiatrist\n made him lie down on a foam rubber couch, kiddies' model, with the\n Happy Clown motif on the slip-cover, and said with a beaming face,\n \"Now, Stevie, what seems to be the trouble?\"\n\n\n The boy turned his head away from the psychiatrist's shining teeth and\n said, \"My name's not Stevie. It's Steven.\" He was a thin little boy,\n rather undersized. The baby fat had melted away fast when he began\n to be exposed to kiddie-garden. He had dark hair and big eyes and an\n uncommonly precise way of speaking for a child of five.", "The psychiatrist said reasonably, \"But nobody can live by himself,\n Stevie.\" He had apparently forgotten Steven, and the boy did not\n correct him again. \"You have to learn to live with other people, to\n work and play with them, to know them, and the only way you can learn\n is by being with them. When you can't be with them personally, there's\n always television. That's how you learn, Stevie. You can't be by\n yourself.\"\n\n\n The boy looked up and said starkly, \"Never?\"\n\n\n The gleaming teeth showed. \"But why should you want to?\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"I don't know.\"\n\n\n The doctor said, slowly and with emphasis, \"Stevie, long before you\n were born the world was a very bad place. There were wars all the time.\n Do you know why?\"\n\n\n The boy shook his head.", "The boy sat up and regarded him warily. The doctor had a kind face, a\n really kind face in spite of all those shining teeth, and Steven was\n only five years old, after all, and there was nobody to talk to, and he\n was desperately unhappy. Perhaps.... He said, \"You'll tell them.\"\n\n\n The doctor shook his head. \"Nothing goes farther than this room,\n Stevie—Steven.\"\n\n\n The child leaned forward, pressing his knees together, hugging himself\n with his arms, bowing his head. His position was almost foetal. He\n said, \"I'm never by myself. They never let me be by myself.\"", "The Director said kindly, \"There's no disgrace, Mrs. Russell.\n That's a mistaken idea many people have. These things happen\n occasionally—nobody knows why—and there's absolutely no disgrace in a\n Steyner. Nothing is altered but the personality, and afterward you have\n a happy normal kiddie who hardly remembers that anything was ever wrong\n with him. Naturally nobody ever mentions it.... But there's no hurry;\n in the case of a kiddie we can wait a while. Bring Stevie in once a\n week; we'll try therapy first.\"", "For a while Steven considered confessing to somebody that he was\n a—what?—an unacceptable member of society. Then they would make him\n like Denise. He shuddered. Did he really want to be like Denise? Some\n stubborn pride in him refused it.\n\n\n When Denise left the hospital for the hotel where she would stay until\n the wedding, Steven was more gentle with her than ever, kinder and\n more loving. He made her very happy. He made love to her again, and it\n was like loving a ghost—no, it was like loving a fine beautiful body\n without the ghost, without the spirit. He returned to the HYM to lie\n sleepless amid the breathings and mutterings of the other young men,\n turning restlessly in his bed, feeling oppressed, tormented, strung on\n wires.", "He rehearsed feverishly for the part of the Happy Clown, and because he\n was a fine craftsman and a conscientious artist he continued to give\n it all he had. The sponsors were pleased. A week before Christmas the\n current Happy Clown retired and hobbled off to a nursing home. There\n was no fanfare—the public was not to realize that the Happy Clown was\n mortal—and Steven took over with no visible change. For five days he\n played the part to perfection.\n\n\n On the sixth day he performed as usual, perhaps a little better. His\n commercials had a special fervor, and the sponsors exchanged happy\n glances. Denise was sitting in the booth with them; she smiled at\n Steven lovingly through the glass.", "The Happy Clown incident had passed off well—immediately after\n it occurred, a powerful battery of comedians, including the Jolly\n Kitten and the Dancing Dogsie, forgetting rivalries to rally 'round\n in a crisis, went on the air to insure that it passed off well. They\n made certain that every viewer should regard the whole thing as a\n tremendously funny if rather mystifying joke. The viewers fell in with\n this opinion easily and laughed about the sheep joke a good deal,\n admiring the Happy Clown's sense of humor—a little sharp, to be sure,\n not so folksy and down-to-earth as usual, but the Happy Clown could do\n no wrong. They said to each other, \"He laughed till he cried, did you\n notice? So did I!\" For a while teenagers addressed each other as, \"Hi,\n sheep!\" (girls were, \"Hi, lamb!\"), and a novelty company in Des Moines\n made a quick killing with scatter pins fashioned like sheep and/or\n lambs.", "Fortunately nobody heard the last three sentences. The paralyzed\n engineer had recovered in time to cut him off during the pause, and\n had signalled the stagehand to draw the curtain and the sound man to\n play the Happy Clown sign-off record—loud. Steven finished himself\n thoroughly, however, by repeating the same sentiments, with some others\n he happened to think of, to Denise and the sponsors, when they all came\n pouring out of the booth. Then he collapsed.\nSteven's Steyner was a complete success. He recovered from it a\n subdued, agreeable and thoroughly conventional young man, who had the\n impression that he had suffered a nervous breakdown. He was discharged\n from the Happy Hour at the end of January, innocently leaving behind", "Steven did not like the Happy Clown or the Jolly Kitten or the\n Dancing Dogsie. Sometimes he began to grow interested in the cowboys\n or spacemen, but when they stopped in the middle of an adventure to\n talk about how they could not possibly rope the steers or shoot the\n asteroids without a good breakfast of Cornsies and Choko-Milko, which\n everybody ate, just everybody, Steven climbed out of bed and slept on\n the floor.\n\n\n Steven did not like the records or the talking books, and when he went\n to kiddie-garden he viewed the televised lessons with a cold eye. For\n some reason which he could not have explained, he wanted to learn to\n read, but they would not teach him till he was seven, and so he taught\n himself, from the letters on the jarsies. But then there was nothing\n to read except the newspapers and the magazines, which he puzzled over\n patiently, getting most of the words right after a while. The many\n advertisements were easiest; they used pictures and the simplest of\n language.", "The psychiatrist said, \"Oh, but we're going to be friends, Stevie,\n and friends always use nicknames, don't they? My name's William, but\n everybody calls me Willie. You can call me Uncle Willie.\"\n\n\n The boy said politely, \"I'd rather not, please.\"\n\n\n The doctor was undismayed. \"I want to help you. You believe that, don't\n you, Stevie?\"\n\n\n The child said, \"Steven. Do I have to lie down?\"\n\n\n The doctor said agreeably, \"It's more usual to lie down, but you may\n sit up if you want to. Why don't you like kiddie-garden, Steven?\"" ], [ "The psychiatrist said, \"Oh, but we're going to be friends, Stevie,\n and friends always use nicknames, don't they? My name's William, but\n everybody calls me Willie. You can call me Uncle Willie.\"\n\n\n The boy said politely, \"I'd rather not, please.\"\n\n\n The doctor was undismayed. \"I want to help you. You believe that, don't\n you, Stevie?\"\n\n\n The child said, \"Steven. Do I have to lie down?\"\n\n\n The doctor said agreeably, \"It's more usual to lie down, but you may\n sit up if you want to. Why don't you like kiddie-garden, Steven?\"", "The Happy Clown had been an American institution for thirty years. He\n was on television for an hour every night at dinner time, with puppets\n and movies and live singers and dancers and his own inimitable brand\n of philosophy and humor. Everybody loved the Happy Clown. He had been\n several different actors in thirty years, but his makeup never changed:\n the beaming face drawn in vivid colors, the rotund body that shook when\n he laughed like a bowlful of Jellsies, and the chuckling infectious\n laugh. The Happy Clown was always so cheerful and folksy and sincere.\n He believed passionately in all the products he instructed his viewers\n to buy, and one was entirely certain that he used them all himself.", "He gave one much more than advertising, though. Some of his nightly\n gems of wisdom (he called them nuggets) were really wonderful; they\n made one think. A favorite nugget, which people were always writing\n in and asking him to repeat, went like this: \"We're all alike inside,\n folks, and we ought to be all alike outside.\" The Happy Clown's\n viewers were not children and adults, they were kiddies and folks.\n\n\n After the Happy Clown went off the air the happy kiddies went to bed,\n to lie for a while looking at the Jolly Kitten and the Dancing Dogsie,\n until, lulled by the joggler, they went gently to sleep. After that\n came the cowboys and spacemen, carryovers for any happy kiddies with\n insomnia. For really meaty programs one had to stay up past ten.\n Then the spectaculars began, and the quiz shows, and the boxing and\n wrestling.", "Steven did not like the Happy Clown or the Jolly Kitten or the\n Dancing Dogsie. Sometimes he began to grow interested in the cowboys\n or spacemen, but when they stopped in the middle of an adventure to\n talk about how they could not possibly rope the steers or shoot the\n asteroids without a good breakfast of Cornsies and Choko-Milko, which\n everybody ate, just everybody, Steven climbed out of bed and slept on\n the floor.\n\n\n Steven did not like the records or the talking books, and when he went\n to kiddie-garden he viewed the televised lessons with a cold eye. For\n some reason which he could not have explained, he wanted to learn to\n read, but they would not teach him till he was seven, and so he taught\n himself, from the letters on the jarsies. But then there was nothing\n to read except the newspapers and the magazines, which he puzzled over\n patiently, getting most of the words right after a while. The many\n advertisements were easiest; they used pictures and the simplest of\n language.", "She opened her eyes, looked at him drowsily and smiled. \"Oh, Stevie,\n I'm so glad you came. I've been wanting you, darling.\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"Denise—\"\n\n\n She frowned. \"Why do you call me that? Call me Denny. Did you get the\n part, darling?\"\n\n\n He drew back a little. \"Yes, I got it.\"\n\n\n She gave him a radiant smile. \"That's wonderful! I'm so proud of you,\n Stevie.\" She slept again.", "The Happy Clown incident had passed off well—immediately after\n it occurred, a powerful battery of comedians, including the Jolly\n Kitten and the Dancing Dogsie, forgetting rivalries to rally 'round\n in a crisis, went on the air to insure that it passed off well. They\n made certain that every viewer should regard the whole thing as a\n tremendously funny if rather mystifying joke. The viewers fell in with\n this opinion easily and laughed about the sheep joke a good deal,\n admiring the Happy Clown's sense of humor—a little sharp, to be sure,\n not so folksy and down-to-earth as usual, but the Happy Clown could do\n no wrong. They said to each other, \"He laughed till he cried, did you\n notice? So did I!\" For a while teenagers addressed each other as, \"Hi,\n sheep!\" (girls were, \"Hi, lamb!\"), and a novelty company in Des Moines\n made a quick killing with scatter pins fashioned like sheep and/or\n lambs.", "This year Steven cried, \"Ma!\" stretching out his hands toward the\n silver and uttering a string of determined sounds which were perfectly\n clear to his mother. She smiled at him lovingly but shook her head.\n \"No, Stevie. Mumsie's precious baby doesn't want those nasty old\n things, no he doesn't! Play with your Happy Clown, sweetheart.\"\n\n\n Steven's face got red, and he squeezed his eyes shut, opened his mouth\n and howled until his mother passed him the dish and cup and curly\n spoon to play with. At meal-time he would not be parted from them, and\n Harriet had to put away the plastic dish and spoon. Thereafter, for the\n sake of the container, he tolerated the thing contained, and thrived\n and grew fat.", "He rehearsed feverishly for the part of the Happy Clown, and because he\n was a fine craftsman and a conscientious artist he continued to give\n it all he had. The sponsors were pleased. A week before Christmas the\n current Happy Clown retired and hobbled off to a nursing home. There\n was no fanfare—the public was not to realize that the Happy Clown was\n mortal—and Steven took over with no visible change. For five days he\n played the part to perfection.\n\n\n On the sixth day he performed as usual, perhaps a little better. His\n commercials had a special fervor, and the sponsors exchanged happy\n glances. Denise was sitting in the booth with them; she smiled at\n Steven lovingly through the glass.", "Richard said firmly, \"We'll take him to the clinic. They'll know what\n to do.\"\nThe first thing they did to Steven was to talk to him. The psychiatrist\n made him lie down on a foam rubber couch, kiddies' model, with the\n Happy Clown motif on the slip-cover, and said with a beaming face,\n \"Now, Stevie, what seems to be the trouble?\"\n\n\n The boy turned his head away from the psychiatrist's shining teeth and\n said, \"My name's not Stevie. It's Steven.\" He was a thin little boy,\n rather undersized. The baby fat had melted away fast when he began\n to be exposed to kiddie-garden. He had dark hair and big eyes and an\n uncommonly precise way of speaking for a child of five.", "Steven did not like his Rockabye Crib, that joggled him gently and sang\n him songs about the Happy Clown all night long; and he howled until\n they turned it off. He was a clean boy, and to his mother's amazement\n trained himself to be dry day and night by the age of fourteen months,\n without the aid of the Singing Toidey or the Happy Clown Alarm; so she\n bought him a Little Folks Youth Bed, with a built-in joggler, and Happy\n Clowns on the corners, and a television set in the footboard. It was a\n smaller copy of his parents' bed, even to the Happy Clowns. Steven did\n not like that either, and if his parents persisted in turning the bed\n on after he had learned to turn it off, he climbed out and slept on the\n floor.\nHarriet said worriedly to her husband, \"I don't know what could be the\n matter with him. Dickie, he's peculiar!\"", "Richard tried to comfort her. \"Never mind, Harry, he'll outgrow it.\"\nSteven did not outgrow it. When he became too big for the curly spoon\n and dish and cup he demanded a knife and fork and spoon from the bureau\n drawer and ate his meals from the plainest dish he could find. He ate\n them with his back stubbornly turned to the television set, away from\n the morning cartoons and the noontime Kiddies' Lunch Club and the\n evening Happy Clown.", "There was never any organization, any underground, of misfits. An\n underground presupposes injustice to be fought, cruelty to be resisted,\n and there was no injustice and no cruelty. The mass of people were\n kind, and their leaders, duly and fairly elected, were kind. They\n all sincerely believed in the gospel of efficiency and conformity\n and kindness. It had made the world a wonderful place to live in,\n full of wonderful things to make and buy and consume (all wonderfully\n advertised), and if one were a misfit and the doctors found it out and\n gave one a Steyner, it was only to make one happy, so that one could\n appreciate what a wonderful world it was.", "He said, \"Are you all happy? You are, aren't you?—everybody's happy,\n because you're all sheep! All sheep, in a nice safe pasture. All\n alike—you eat alike and dress alike and think alike. If any of you has\n an original thought you'd better suppress it, or they'll cut it out of\n you with a knife.\" He leaned forward and made a horrible face at the\n camera. Under the jolly makeup and the artful padding, his mouth was\n shockingly twisted, and tears were running out of his eyes. \"A long\n sharp knife, folks!\" He paused momentarily to recover his voice, which\n had begun to shake. \"Go on being happy, go on being sheep. Wear the\n clothesies, and eat the foodsies, and don't dare think! Me—I'd rather\n be dead, and damned, and in hell!\"", "His parents thought it was very cunning of him to look at the printing\n like that, so wisely, as if he could read it! He said once to Harriet,\n \"I can read it,\" but she said, \"Oh, Stevie, you're teasing Mumsie!\"\n and looked so frightened at this fresh peculiarity that the child said\n gravely, \"Yes, teasing.\" He wished he had a silent book. He knew there\n were such things, but there were none at home. There were few silent\n books anywhere. There were none in kiddie-garden.", "Steven was running a little fast tonight. The engineer made stretching\n motions with his hands to slow him down, but he used up all his\n material, even the nugget, with three minutes to spare. Then he said,\n \"All right, folks, now I have a special treat for you,\" and moved\n quickly to the center mike. Before the sponsors, or the engineers, or\n the studio audience, or anybody in the whole American nation knew what\n was happening, he began rapidly to talk.", "The doctor said cheerily, \"There's nothing the matter with him. He'll\n eat when he gets hungry enough,\" and Steven did, to a degree, but not\n as if he enjoyed it.\n\n\n One day when he was nearly a year old, his mother carried his Kiddie\n Korner with the Dancing Dogsies on the pad into her bedroom, put him in\n it, and began to take things out of the bottom bureau drawer. They were\n old things, and Harriet Russell was ashamed of them. She had said more\n than once to her husband Richard, only half joking, \"I couldn't give\n them away, and I'd be ashamed for anybody to see them in our trash!\"\n They were old silver, knives and forks and spoons that looked like what\n they were, unadorned, and a child's plain silver dish and cup, and one\n small spoon with a useful curly handle. They had belonged to Harriet's\n great-grandmother. Once a year Harriet took the things out and polished\n them and furtively put them back.", "\"It was because people were different from each other, and didn't\n understand each other, and didn't know each other. They had to learn\n how to be alike, and understand, and know, so that they would be able\n to live together. They learned in many ways, Stevie. One way was by\n visiting each other—you've heard about the visitors who come from—\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"You mean the Happy Tours.\"\n\n\n \"Yes. When you're twelve years old you can go on a Happy Tour. Won't\n that be fun?\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"If I could go alone.\"\n\n\n The doctor looked at him sharply. \"But you can't. Try to understand,\n Stevie, you can't. Now tell me—why don't you like to be with other\n people?\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"All the time—not all the\ntime\n.\"\n\n\n The doctor repeated patiently, \"Why?\"", "They were pleased with him at the clinic and after a few months\n discharged him. By the time Steven was twelve and had made the Happy\n Tour and joined the Happy Scouts and had a happy affair, involving\n experimentation, with a neighbor's daughter, Harriet and Richard ceased\n to worry about him. If sometimes he felt so tightly strung-up that a\n storm of tears was his only relief, he kept the tears quiet.\nHe was graduated from high school at sixteen and from college at\n twenty, having read all he could of the silent books in the scant high\n school library and the more ample university one, and having wisely\n elected to appear more stupid than he was. Even his I.Q. was now\n judged to be only slightly above normal. He left college with honors,", "\"Ap-pendicitis. Happy Hour.\" Polly began to cry. \"Oh, Stevie, I feel\n so—\"\n\n\n \"I'll go right over.\" He cut her off abruptly and went.\n\n\n The doctors caught Denise's appendix in time to avoid the necessary but\n rarely fatal complications ... but under the anesthetic she talked,\n revealing enough about her opinion of television, and the Happy Clown\n cult, and the state of society in general, to cause her doctors to\n raise their eyebrows pityingly and perform the Steyner at once. While\n Steven sat unknowing in the waiting room, smoking a full pack of\n Marquis cigarettes, the thing was done.", "Being, as the Director had said, a brilliant kiddie, Steven soon\n understood much of what was kept from him. It did not take him long\n to learn what was making his Dadsie look stern and white and what was\n making his Mumsie cry. He loved his parents and did not want them to be\n unhappy, and he certainly did not want to have his head cut open, and\n so he began to act. Even at five, Steven discovered in himself a fine\n talent for acting. He began to conform, to adjust, to merge. He became\n social and cooperative and acquired the proper attitudes for successful\n community living. He gave up the old silver voluntarily, he accepted\n the Youth Bed, he looked at the Happy Clown, and he did much better in\n kiddie-garden. He even joined in the group experimentation and was not\n sick any more, though he could not keep himself from losing color." ], [ "Richard said firmly, \"We'll take him to the clinic. They'll know what\n to do.\"\nThe first thing they did to Steven was to talk to him. The psychiatrist\n made him lie down on a foam rubber couch, kiddies' model, with the\n Happy Clown motif on the slip-cover, and said with a beaming face,\n \"Now, Stevie, what seems to be the trouble?\"\n\n\n The boy turned his head away from the psychiatrist's shining teeth and\n said, \"My name's not Stevie. It's Steven.\" He was a thin little boy,\n rather undersized. The baby fat had melted away fast when he began\n to be exposed to kiddie-garden. He had dark hair and big eyes and an\n uncommonly precise way of speaking for a child of five.", "The boy sat up and regarded him warily. The doctor had a kind face, a\n really kind face in spite of all those shining teeth, and Steven was\n only five years old, after all, and there was nobody to talk to, and he\n was desperately unhappy. Perhaps.... He said, \"You'll tell them.\"\n\n\n The doctor shook his head. \"Nothing goes farther than this room,\n Stevie—Steven.\"\n\n\n The child leaned forward, pressing his knees together, hugging himself\n with his arms, bowing his head. His position was almost foetal. He\n said, \"I'm never by myself. They never let me be by myself.\"", "Being, as the Director had said, a brilliant kiddie, Steven soon\n understood much of what was kept from him. It did not take him long\n to learn what was making his Dadsie look stern and white and what was\n making his Mumsie cry. He loved his parents and did not want them to be\n unhappy, and he certainly did not want to have his head cut open, and\n so he began to act. Even at five, Steven discovered in himself a fine\n talent for acting. He began to conform, to adjust, to merge. He became\n social and cooperative and acquired the proper attitudes for successful\n community living. He gave up the old silver voluntarily, he accepted\n the Youth Bed, he looked at the Happy Clown, and he did much better in\n kiddie-garden. He even joined in the group experimentation and was not\n sick any more, though he could not keep himself from losing color.", "They were pleased with him at the clinic and after a few months\n discharged him. By the time Steven was twelve and had made the Happy\n Tour and joined the Happy Scouts and had a happy affair, involving\n experimentation, with a neighbor's daughter, Harriet and Richard ceased\n to worry about him. If sometimes he felt so tightly strung-up that a\n storm of tears was his only relief, he kept the tears quiet.\nHe was graduated from high school at sixteen and from college at\n twenty, having read all he could of the silent books in the scant high\n school library and the more ample university one, and having wisely\n elected to appear more stupid than he was. Even his I.Q. was now\n judged to be only slightly above normal. He left college with honors,", "Steven looked at the doctor and said a very strange thing. \"They touch\n me.\" He seemed to shrink into himself. \"Not just with their hands.\"\n\n\n The doctor shook his head sadly. \"Of course they do, that's just—well,\n maybe you're too young to understand.\"\n\n\n The interview went on for quite a while, and at the end of it Steven\n was given a series of tests which took a week. The psychiatrist had\n not told the truth; what the boy said, during the first interview and\n all the tests, was fully recorded on concealed machines. The complete\n transcript made a fat dossier in the office of the Clinic Director.", "He managed his life well enough. He had a few affairs with girls, it\n was expected of one, and he did not have to work very hard at it since\n they always threw themselves at him; and he got along well with other\n young men, who forgave him for being so handsome because he did not\n work at it except on camera; but he was lonely. Surrounded by people,\n intruded and trespassed upon, continually touched in ways other than\n physical, he was yet lonely.\nDuring his life he had met a few other nonconformists, shy, like him,\n wary of revealing themselves, but something always seemed to happen\n to them. Some were miserable being nonconformists and asked pitifully\n for the Steyner, some were detected, as Steven had been, and some\n were unfortunately surprised in hospitals. Under the anesthetic they\n sometimes talked, and then, if they were adults, they were immediately\n corrected by means of Steyner's lobotomy. It had been learned that\n adults did not respond to therapy.", "The psychiatrist said, \"Oh, but we're going to be friends, Stevie,\n and friends always use nicknames, don't they? My name's William, but\n everybody calls me Willie. You can call me Uncle Willie.\"\n\n\n The boy said politely, \"I'd rather not, please.\"\n\n\n The doctor was undismayed. \"I want to help you. You believe that, don't\n you, Stevie?\"\n\n\n The child said, \"Steven. Do I have to lie down?\"\n\n\n The doctor said agreeably, \"It's more usual to lie down, but you may\n sit up if you want to. Why don't you like kiddie-garden, Steven?\"", "At the end of the tests the Director said seriously to Steven's\n parents, \"I'll be frank with you. You have a brilliant kiddie\n here—right now he has the intelligence of a twelve-year-old—but\n brilliance has to be channeled in the right direction. Just now—well,\n frankly, it's channeled in the wrong direction. We'll give it a year or\n so, and then if things don't clear up I'm afraid we'll have to correct\n him.\"\n\n\n Richard said through dry lips, \"You mean a Steyner?\"\n\n\n The Director nodded. \"The only thing.\"\n\n\n Harriet shuddered and began to cry. \"But there's never been anything\n like that in our family! The disgrace—oh, Dickie, it would kill me!\"", "The psychiatrist said reasonably, \"But nobody can live by himself,\n Stevie.\" He had apparently forgotten Steven, and the boy did not\n correct him again. \"You have to learn to live with other people, to\n work and play with them, to know them, and the only way you can learn\n is by being with them. When you can't be with them personally, there's\n always television. That's how you learn, Stevie. You can't be by\n yourself.\"\n\n\n The boy looked up and said starkly, \"Never?\"\n\n\n The gleaming teeth showed. \"But why should you want to?\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"I don't know.\"\n\n\n The doctor said, slowly and with emphasis, \"Stevie, long before you\n were born the world was a very bad place. There were wars all the time.\n Do you know why?\"\n\n\n The boy shook his head.", "The doctor said cheerily, \"There's nothing the matter with him. He'll\n eat when he gets hungry enough,\" and Steven did, to a degree, but not\n as if he enjoyed it.\n\n\n One day when he was nearly a year old, his mother carried his Kiddie\n Korner with the Dancing Dogsies on the pad into her bedroom, put him in\n it, and began to take things out of the bottom bureau drawer. They were\n old things, and Harriet Russell was ashamed of them. She had said more\n than once to her husband Richard, only half joking, \"I couldn't give\n them away, and I'd be ashamed for anybody to see them in our trash!\"\n They were old silver, knives and forks and spoons that looked like what\n they were, unadorned, and a child's plain silver dish and cup, and one\n small spoon with a useful curly handle. They had belonged to Harriet's\n great-grandmother. Once a year Harriet took the things out and polished\n them and furtively put them back.", "The Director said kindly, \"There's no disgrace, Mrs. Russell.\n That's a mistaken idea many people have. These things happen\n occasionally—nobody knows why—and there's absolutely no disgrace in a\n Steyner. Nothing is altered but the personality, and afterward you have\n a happy normal kiddie who hardly remembers that anything was ever wrong\n with him. Naturally nobody ever mentions it.... But there's no hurry;\n in the case of a kiddie we can wait a while. Bring Stevie in once a\n week; we'll try therapy first.\"", "\"It was because people were different from each other, and didn't\n understand each other, and didn't know each other. They had to learn\n how to be alike, and understand, and know, so that they would be able\n to live together. They learned in many ways, Stevie. One way was by\n visiting each other—you've heard about the visitors who come from—\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"You mean the Happy Tours.\"\n\n\n \"Yes. When you're twelve years old you can go on a Happy Tour. Won't\n that be fun?\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"If I could go alone.\"\n\n\n The doctor looked at him sharply. \"But you can't. Try to understand,\n Stevie, you can't. Now tell me—why don't you like to be with other\n people?\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"All the time—not all the\ntime\n.\"\n\n\n The doctor repeated patiently, \"Why?\"", "Steven was not happy in kiddie-garden. The enthusiasm the other kiddies\n showed for the lessons appalled him. The kiddies themselves appalled\n him. They joined so passionately in the group play, clutching each\n other with their hot moist hands, panting and grinning into each\n others' faces. They were always clutching and panting and grinning, in\n large noisy groups, with large community smiles. They confused him; he\n could not tell them apart. Steven retired to a corner and turned his\n back, and when they clutched and panted and grinned at him he hit them.", "Steven did not like the Happy Clown or the Jolly Kitten or the\n Dancing Dogsie. Sometimes he began to grow interested in the cowboys\n or spacemen, but when they stopped in the middle of an adventure to\n talk about how they could not possibly rope the steers or shoot the\n asteroids without a good breakfast of Cornsies and Choko-Milko, which\n everybody ate, just everybody, Steven climbed out of bed and slept on\n the floor.\n\n\n Steven did not like the records or the talking books, and when he went\n to kiddie-garden he viewed the televised lessons with a cold eye. For\n some reason which he could not have explained, he wanted to learn to\n read, but they would not teach him till he was seven, and so he taught\n himself, from the letters on the jarsies. But then there was nothing\n to read except the newspapers and the magazines, which he puzzled over\n patiently, getting most of the words right after a while. The many\n advertisements were easiest; they used pictures and the simplest of\n language.", "For a while Steven considered confessing to somebody that he was\n a—what?—an unacceptable member of society. Then they would make him\n like Denise. He shuddered. Did he really want to be like Denise? Some\n stubborn pride in him refused it.\n\n\n When Denise left the hospital for the hotel where she would stay until\n the wedding, Steven was more gentle with her than ever, kinder and\n more loving. He made her very happy. He made love to her again, and it\n was like loving a ghost—no, it was like loving a fine beautiful body\n without the ghost, without the spirit. He returned to the HYM to lie\n sleepless amid the breathings and mutterings of the other young men,\n turning restlessly in his bed, feeling oppressed, tormented, strung on\n wires.", "Richard tried to comfort her. \"Never mind, Harry, he'll outgrow it.\"\nSteven did not outgrow it. When he became too big for the curly spoon\n and dish and cup he demanded a knife and fork and spoon from the bureau\n drawer and ate his meals from the plainest dish he could find. He ate\n them with his back stubbornly turned to the television set, away from\n the morning cartoons and the noontime Kiddies' Lunch Club and the\n evening Happy Clown.", "He took her to meet his family—Denise's family lived three thousand\n miles away—and she behaved with such perfect decorum and charm that\n Richard and Harriet were delighted and as eager as Steven for the\n wedding. Steven had agreed reluctantly to put it off until Denise\n had a chance to introduce him to her parents; they were coming East\n at Christmas. She laughed over it and said, \"I'm being terribly\n conventional, darling, but that's one convention I like.\"\nWhile they waited, Steven's agent secured a really unprecedented\n opportunity for so young and relatively untried an actor. The current\n Happy Clown was unhappily retiring, by reason of age and infirmity, and\n Steven's agent arranged a tryout for the part. He said, \"Give it all\n you got, kid; it's the chance of the century.\"", "Fortunately nobody heard the last three sentences. The paralyzed\n engineer had recovered in time to cut him off during the pause, and\n had signalled the stagehand to draw the curtain and the sound man to\n play the Happy Clown sign-off record—loud. Steven finished himself\n thoroughly, however, by repeating the same sentiments, with some others\n he happened to think of, to Denise and the sponsors, when they all came\n pouring out of the booth. Then he collapsed.\nSteven's Steyner was a complete success. He recovered from it a\n subdued, agreeable and thoroughly conventional young man, who had the\n impression that he had suffered a nervous breakdown. He was discharged\n from the Happy Hour at the end of January, innocently leaving behind", "This year Steven cried, \"Ma!\" stretching out his hands toward the\n silver and uttering a string of determined sounds which were perfectly\n clear to his mother. She smiled at him lovingly but shook her head.\n \"No, Stevie. Mumsie's precious baby doesn't want those nasty old\n things, no he doesn't! Play with your Happy Clown, sweetheart.\"\n\n\n Steven's face got red, and he squeezed his eyes shut, opened his mouth\n and howled until his mother passed him the dish and cup and curly\n spoon to play with. At meal-time he would not be parted from them, and\n Harriet had to put away the plastic dish and spoon. Thereafter, for the\n sake of the container, he tolerated the thing contained, and thrived\n and grew fat.", "That night in the HYM dormitory Steven did not sleep. He lay quiet,\n tense, hoping for the relief of tears, but it did not come.\nSteven went to see Denise every day though after the first time she\n was not awake to know him. The doctors were keeping her under sedation\n until the head bandage could be removed. So far as Denise was to\n know, she had gone to the hospital simply for a rather protracted\n appendectomy. Looking at her, Steven knew that he could never leave\n her. He had loved her completely; he would love her now with as much of\n himself as she would need or understand.\n\n\n For a while he waited to be kindly questioned, to be thoroughly\n examined, to be tenderly given the shot in the arm and to awake like\n her, but nobody came. Denise had apparently said nothing about him.\n Some censor or other—perhaps it was the censor of love—had kept her\n from even saying his name." ], [ "They were pleased with him at the clinic and after a few months\n discharged him. By the time Steven was twelve and had made the Happy\n Tour and joined the Happy Scouts and had a happy affair, involving\n experimentation, with a neighbor's daughter, Harriet and Richard ceased\n to worry about him. If sometimes he felt so tightly strung-up that a\n storm of tears was his only relief, he kept the tears quiet.\nHe was graduated from high school at sixteen and from college at\n twenty, having read all he could of the silent books in the scant high\n school library and the more ample university one, and having wisely\n elected to appear more stupid than he was. Even his I.Q. was now\n judged to be only slightly above normal. He left college with honors,", "Being, as the Director had said, a brilliant kiddie, Steven soon\n understood much of what was kept from him. It did not take him long\n to learn what was making his Dadsie look stern and white and what was\n making his Mumsie cry. He loved his parents and did not want them to be\n unhappy, and he certainly did not want to have his head cut open, and\n so he began to act. Even at five, Steven discovered in himself a fine\n talent for acting. He began to conform, to adjust, to merge. He became\n social and cooperative and acquired the proper attitudes for successful\n community living. He gave up the old silver voluntarily, he accepted\n the Youth Bed, he looked at the Happy Clown, and he did much better in\n kiddie-garden. He even joined in the group experimentation and was not\n sick any more, though he could not keep himself from losing color.", "At the end of the tests the Director said seriously to Steven's\n parents, \"I'll be frank with you. You have a brilliant kiddie\n here—right now he has the intelligence of a twelve-year-old—but\n brilliance has to be channeled in the right direction. Just now—well,\n frankly, it's channeled in the wrong direction. We'll give it a year or\n so, and then if things don't clear up I'm afraid we'll have to correct\n him.\"\n\n\n Richard said through dry lips, \"You mean a Steyner?\"\n\n\n The Director nodded. \"The only thing.\"\n\n\n Harriet shuddered and began to cry. \"But there's never been anything\n like that in our family! The disgrace—oh, Dickie, it would kill me!\"", "He managed his life well enough. He had a few affairs with girls, it\n was expected of one, and he did not have to work very hard at it since\n they always threw themselves at him; and he got along well with other\n young men, who forgave him for being so handsome because he did not\n work at it except on camera; but he was lonely. Surrounded by people,\n intruded and trespassed upon, continually touched in ways other than\n physical, he was yet lonely.\nDuring his life he had met a few other nonconformists, shy, like him,\n wary of revealing themselves, but something always seemed to happen\n to them. Some were miserable being nonconformists and asked pitifully\n for the Steyner, some were detected, as Steven had been, and some\n were unfortunately surprised in hospitals. Under the anesthetic they\n sometimes talked, and then, if they were adults, they were immediately\n corrected by means of Steyner's lobotomy. It had been learned that\n adults did not respond to therapy.", "Steven met no nonconformists at the School of Television Arts, and none\n while he was acting in \"The Happy Life\" until Denise Cottrell joined\n the cast. Denise—called Denny, of course—was a pleasantly plain young\n woman with a whimsical face which photographed pretty, and remarkable\n dark blue eyes. It was her eyes which first made Steven wonder. They\n mirrored his own hope, and longing, and the desperate loneliness of the\n exile.\n\n\n For two months they were together as often as they could be, talking\n intellectual treason in public under cover of conventional faces,\n and talking intellectual treason in private with excitement and\n laughter and sometimes tears—falling in love. They planned, after\n much discussion, to be married and to bring up a dozen clever rebel\n children. Denise said soberly, \"They'd better be clever, because\n they'll have to learn to hide.\"", "His parents thought it was very cunning of him to look at the printing\n like that, so wisely, as if he could read it! He said once to Harriet,\n \"I can read it,\" but she said, \"Oh, Stevie, you're teasing Mumsie!\"\n and looked so frightened at this fresh peculiarity that the child said\n gravely, \"Yes, teasing.\" He wished he had a silent book. He knew there\n were such things, but there were none at home. There were few silent\n books anywhere. There were none in kiddie-garden.", "The psychiatrist said reasonably, \"But nobody can live by himself,\n Stevie.\" He had apparently forgotten Steven, and the boy did not\n correct him again. \"You have to learn to live with other people, to\n work and play with them, to know them, and the only way you can learn\n is by being with them. When you can't be with them personally, there's\n always television. That's how you learn, Stevie. You can't be by\n yourself.\"\n\n\n The boy looked up and said starkly, \"Never?\"\n\n\n The gleaming teeth showed. \"But why should you want to?\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"I don't know.\"\n\n\n The doctor said, slowly and with emphasis, \"Stevie, long before you\n were born the world was a very bad place. There were wars all the time.\n Do you know why?\"\n\n\n The boy shook his head.", "Steven was not happy in kiddie-garden. The enthusiasm the other kiddies\n showed for the lessons appalled him. The kiddies themselves appalled\n him. They joined so passionately in the group play, clutching each\n other with their hot moist hands, panting and grinning into each\n others' faces. They were always clutching and panting and grinning, in\n large noisy groups, with large community smiles. They confused him; he\n could not tell them apart. Steven retired to a corner and turned his\n back, and when they clutched and panted and grinned at him he hit them.", "For a while Steven considered confessing to somebody that he was\n a—what?—an unacceptable member of society. Then they would make him\n like Denise. He shuddered. Did he really want to be like Denise? Some\n stubborn pride in him refused it.\n\n\n When Denise left the hospital for the hotel where she would stay until\n the wedding, Steven was more gentle with her than ever, kinder and\n more loving. He made her very happy. He made love to her again, and it\n was like loving a ghost—no, it was like loving a fine beautiful body\n without the ghost, without the spirit. He returned to the HYM to lie\n sleepless amid the breathings and mutterings of the other young men,\n turning restlessly in his bed, feeling oppressed, tormented, strung on\n wires.", "Steven did not like the Happy Clown or the Jolly Kitten or the\n Dancing Dogsie. Sometimes he began to grow interested in the cowboys\n or spacemen, but when they stopped in the middle of an adventure to\n talk about how they could not possibly rope the steers or shoot the\n asteroids without a good breakfast of Cornsies and Choko-Milko, which\n everybody ate, just everybody, Steven climbed out of bed and slept on\n the floor.\n\n\n Steven did not like the records or the talking books, and when he went\n to kiddie-garden he viewed the televised lessons with a cold eye. For\n some reason which he could not have explained, he wanted to learn to\n read, but they would not teach him till he was seven, and so he taught\n himself, from the letters on the jarsies. But then there was nothing\n to read except the newspapers and the magazines, which he puzzled over\n patiently, getting most of the words right after a while. The many\n advertisements were easiest; they used pictures and the simplest of\n language.", "\"It was because people were different from each other, and didn't\n understand each other, and didn't know each other. They had to learn\n how to be alike, and understand, and know, so that they would be able\n to live together. They learned in many ways, Stevie. One way was by\n visiting each other—you've heard about the visitors who come from—\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"You mean the Happy Tours.\"\n\n\n \"Yes. When you're twelve years old you can go on a Happy Tour. Won't\n that be fun?\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"If I could go alone.\"\n\n\n The doctor looked at him sharply. \"But you can't. Try to understand,\n Stevie, you can't. Now tell me—why don't you like to be with other\n people?\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"All the time—not all the\ntime\n.\"\n\n\n The doctor repeated patiently, \"Why?\"", "Fortunately nobody heard the last three sentences. The paralyzed\n engineer had recovered in time to cut him off during the pause, and\n had signalled the stagehand to draw the curtain and the sound man to\n play the Happy Clown sign-off record—loud. Steven finished himself\n thoroughly, however, by repeating the same sentiments, with some others\n he happened to think of, to Denise and the sponsors, when they all came\n pouring out of the booth. Then he collapsed.\nSteven's Steyner was a complete success. He recovered from it a\n subdued, agreeable and thoroughly conventional young man, who had the\n impression that he had suffered a nervous breakdown. He was discharged\n from the Happy Hour at the end of January, innocently leaving behind", "He took her to meet his family—Denise's family lived three thousand\n miles away—and she behaved with such perfect decorum and charm that\n Richard and Harriet were delighted and as eager as Steven for the\n wedding. Steven had agreed reluctantly to put it off until Denise\n had a chance to introduce him to her parents; they were coming East\n at Christmas. She laughed over it and said, \"I'm being terribly\n conventional, darling, but that's one convention I like.\"\nWhile they waited, Steven's agent secured a really unprecedented\n opportunity for so young and relatively untried an actor. The current\n Happy Clown was unhappily retiring, by reason of age and infirmity, and\n Steven's agent arranged a tryout for the part. He said, \"Give it all\n you got, kid; it's the chance of the century.\"", "At last the doctor came out to him and said what was always said in\n such cases. \"It was necessary to do something—you understand, no\n mention—\" and for a moment Steven felt so ill that he was grateful\n for the little ampoule the doctor broke and held under his nose. They\n always carried those when they had to give news of a Steyner to\n relatives or sweethearts or friends.\n\n\n The doctor said, \"All right now? Good .... You'll be careful, of\n course. She may be conscious for a minute; there's no harm in it yet,\n she won't move or touch the—\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"I'll be careful.\"\n\n\n He was still feeling ill when they let him in to see Denise. He sat\n down beside her bed and spoke to her urgently. \"Denise, talk to me.\n Please, Denise!\"", "The psychiatrist said, \"Oh, but we're going to be friends, Stevie,\n and friends always use nicknames, don't they? My name's William, but\n everybody calls me Willie. You can call me Uncle Willie.\"\n\n\n The boy said politely, \"I'd rather not, please.\"\n\n\n The doctor was undismayed. \"I want to help you. You believe that, don't\n you, Stevie?\"\n\n\n The child said, \"Steven. Do I have to lie down?\"\n\n\n The doctor said agreeably, \"It's more usual to lie down, but you may\n sit up if you want to. Why don't you like kiddie-garden, Steven?\"", "popularity and a reputation as an actor. He took the lead in all the\n dramatic club plays, having particular success in the reproduction\n of a Happy Clown program. Steven, of course, was the Happy Clown. He\n enrolled at once in the New York School of Television Arts, and his\n mother cried when he left home to live in the School dormitory.", "If Steven had moments of bewilderment, of self-loathing, of despair,\n when the tears were real and the jaw muscles jumped to keep the mouth\n from screaming, no one in the Happy Young Men's dormitory where he\n slept ever knew it.", "The boy sat up and regarded him warily. The doctor had a kind face, a\n really kind face in spite of all those shining teeth, and Steven was\n only five years old, after all, and there was nobody to talk to, and he\n was desperately unhappy. Perhaps.... He said, \"You'll tell them.\"\n\n\n The doctor shook his head. \"Nothing goes farther than this room,\n Stevie—Steven.\"\n\n\n The child leaned forward, pressing his knees together, hugging himself\n with his arms, bowing his head. His position was almost foetal. He\n said, \"I'm never by myself. They never let me be by myself.\"", "Richard said firmly, \"We'll take him to the clinic. They'll know what\n to do.\"\nThe first thing they did to Steven was to talk to him. The psychiatrist\n made him lie down on a foam rubber couch, kiddies' model, with the\n Happy Clown motif on the slip-cover, and said with a beaming face,\n \"Now, Stevie, what seems to be the trouble?\"\n\n\n The boy turned his head away from the psychiatrist's shining teeth and\n said, \"My name's not Stevie. It's Steven.\" He was a thin little boy,\n rather undersized. The baby fat had melted away fast when he began\n to be exposed to kiddie-garden. He had dark hair and big eyes and an\n uncommonly precise way of speaking for a child of five.", "That night in the HYM dormitory Steven did not sleep. He lay quiet,\n tense, hoping for the relief of tears, but it did not come.\nSteven went to see Denise every day though after the first time she\n was not awake to know him. The doctors were keeping her under sedation\n until the head bandage could be removed. So far as Denise was to\n know, she had gone to the hospital simply for a rather protracted\n appendectomy. Looking at her, Steven knew that he could never leave\n her. He had loved her completely; he would love her now with as much of\n himself as she would need or understand.\n\n\n For a while he waited to be kindly questioned, to be thoroughly\n examined, to be tenderly given the shot in the arm and to awake like\n her, but nobody came. Denise had apparently said nothing about him.\n Some censor or other—perhaps it was the censor of love—had kept her\n from even saying his name." ], [ "He managed his life well enough. He had a few affairs with girls, it\n was expected of one, and he did not have to work very hard at it since\n they always threw themselves at him; and he got along well with other\n young men, who forgave him for being so handsome because he did not\n work at it except on camera; but he was lonely. Surrounded by people,\n intruded and trespassed upon, continually touched in ways other than\n physical, he was yet lonely.\nDuring his life he had met a few other nonconformists, shy, like him,\n wary of revealing themselves, but something always seemed to happen\n to them. Some were miserable being nonconformists and asked pitifully\n for the Steyner, some were detected, as Steven had been, and some\n were unfortunately surprised in hospitals. Under the anesthetic they\n sometimes talked, and then, if they were adults, they were immediately\n corrected by means of Steyner's lobotomy. It had been learned that\n adults did not respond to therapy.", "The psychiatrist said reasonably, \"But nobody can live by himself,\n Stevie.\" He had apparently forgotten Steven, and the boy did not\n correct him again. \"You have to learn to live with other people, to\n work and play with them, to know them, and the only way you can learn\n is by being with them. When you can't be with them personally, there's\n always television. That's how you learn, Stevie. You can't be by\n yourself.\"\n\n\n The boy looked up and said starkly, \"Never?\"\n\n\n The gleaming teeth showed. \"But why should you want to?\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"I don't know.\"\n\n\n The doctor said, slowly and with emphasis, \"Stevie, long before you\n were born the world was a very bad place. There were wars all the time.\n Do you know why?\"\n\n\n The boy shook his head.", "Steven was not happy in kiddie-garden. The enthusiasm the other kiddies\n showed for the lessons appalled him. The kiddies themselves appalled\n him. They joined so passionately in the group play, clutching each\n other with their hot moist hands, panting and grinning into each\n others' faces. They were always clutching and panting and grinning, in\n large noisy groups, with large community smiles. They confused him; he\n could not tell them apart. Steven retired to a corner and turned his\n back, and when they clutched and panted and grinned at him he hit them.", "\"It was because people were different from each other, and didn't\n understand each other, and didn't know each other. They had to learn\n how to be alike, and understand, and know, so that they would be able\n to live together. They learned in many ways, Stevie. One way was by\n visiting each other—you've heard about the visitors who come from—\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"You mean the Happy Tours.\"\n\n\n \"Yes. When you're twelve years old you can go on a Happy Tour. Won't\n that be fun?\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"If I could go alone.\"\n\n\n The doctor looked at him sharply. \"But you can't. Try to understand,\n Stevie, you can't. Now tell me—why don't you like to be with other\n people?\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"All the time—not all the\ntime\n.\"\n\n\n The doctor repeated patiently, \"Why?\"", "The boy sat up and regarded him warily. The doctor had a kind face, a\n really kind face in spite of all those shining teeth, and Steven was\n only five years old, after all, and there was nobody to talk to, and he\n was desperately unhappy. Perhaps.... He said, \"You'll tell them.\"\n\n\n The doctor shook his head. \"Nothing goes farther than this room,\n Stevie—Steven.\"\n\n\n The child leaned forward, pressing his knees together, hugging himself\n with his arms, bowing his head. His position was almost foetal. He\n said, \"I'm never by myself. They never let me be by myself.\"", "For a while Steven considered confessing to somebody that he was\n a—what?—an unacceptable member of society. Then they would make him\n like Denise. He shuddered. Did he really want to be like Denise? Some\n stubborn pride in him refused it.\n\n\n When Denise left the hospital for the hotel where she would stay until\n the wedding, Steven was more gentle with her than ever, kinder and\n more loving. He made her very happy. He made love to her again, and it\n was like loving a ghost—no, it was like loving a fine beautiful body\n without the ghost, without the spirit. He returned to the HYM to lie\n sleepless amid the breathings and mutterings of the other young men,\n turning restlessly in his bed, feeling oppressed, tormented, strung on\n wires.", "Steven did not like the Happy Clown or the Jolly Kitten or the\n Dancing Dogsie. Sometimes he began to grow interested in the cowboys\n or spacemen, but when they stopped in the middle of an adventure to\n talk about how they could not possibly rope the steers or shoot the\n asteroids without a good breakfast of Cornsies and Choko-Milko, which\n everybody ate, just everybody, Steven climbed out of bed and slept on\n the floor.\n\n\n Steven did not like the records or the talking books, and when he went\n to kiddie-garden he viewed the televised lessons with a cold eye. For\n some reason which he could not have explained, he wanted to learn to\n read, but they would not teach him till he was seven, and so he taught\n himself, from the letters on the jarsies. But then there was nothing\n to read except the newspapers and the magazines, which he puzzled over\n patiently, getting most of the words right after a while. The many\n advertisements were easiest; they used pictures and the simplest of\n language.", "If Steven had moments of bewilderment, of self-loathing, of despair,\n when the tears were real and the jaw muscles jumped to keep the mouth\n from screaming, no one in the Happy Young Men's dormitory where he\n slept ever knew it.", "He rehearsed feverishly for the part of the Happy Clown, and because he\n was a fine craftsman and a conscientious artist he continued to give\n it all he had. The sponsors were pleased. A week before Christmas the\n current Happy Clown retired and hobbled off to a nursing home. There\n was no fanfare—the public was not to realize that the Happy Clown was\n mortal—and Steven took over with no visible change. For five days he\n played the part to perfection.\n\n\n On the sixth day he performed as usual, perhaps a little better. His\n commercials had a special fervor, and the sponsors exchanged happy\n glances. Denise was sitting in the booth with them; she smiled at\n Steven lovingly through the glass.", "But, around the studios Steven was dead. Steyner or no Steyner—and\n of course that part of it was never openly discussed—sponsors had\n long memories, and the consensus seemed to be that it was best to\n let sleeping sheep lie. Steven did not care. He no longer had any\n particular desire to be an actor.\n\n\n Steven went to work in his father's supermarket and was happy among\n the shelves of Oatsies and Cornsies and Jellsies. He got over Denise\n after a while and met a girl named Frances—Franny—whom he loved and\n who loved him. They were married in the summer and had a little house\n with as much furniture in it as they could afford. The first thing they\n bought was a television set. After all, as Stevie said, he would not\n want to miss the Happy Clown.", "They were pleased with him at the clinic and after a few months\n discharged him. By the time Steven was twelve and had made the Happy\n Tour and joined the Happy Scouts and had a happy affair, involving\n experimentation, with a neighbor's daughter, Harriet and Richard ceased\n to worry about him. If sometimes he felt so tightly strung-up that a\n storm of tears was his only relief, he kept the tears quiet.\nHe was graduated from high school at sixteen and from college at\n twenty, having read all he could of the silent books in the scant high\n school library and the more ample university one, and having wisely\n elected to appear more stupid than he was. Even his I.Q. was now\n judged to be only slightly above normal. He left college with honors,", "Steven said, \"Sure, Joey,\" and allowed his sensitive face to register\n all the proper emotions. Actually his emotions were, in the vernacular\n of a previous century, mixed. He loathed the whole concept of the Happy\n Clown—but there was money in it, and Steven was not rebel enough to\n despise money. With money he could retire early, go away somewhere with\n Denise, to some country place where they could be relatively free of\n pressure.\n\n\n Over staggering competition he got the part. He called Denise up at\n once from a booth at the studio to tell her. Polly answered the phone,\n looking pale and frightened over the viewer, and said rapidly, \"Oh,\n Stevie, I've been trying to get you for an hour. Denny's sick. They\n took her to the hospital!\"\n\n\n Steven sat back against the hard wall of the booth, feeling cold, the\n receiver slack in his hand. He said, \"What's the matter with her? Which\n hospital?\"", "He took her to meet his family—Denise's family lived three thousand\n miles away—and she behaved with such perfect decorum and charm that\n Richard and Harriet were delighted and as eager as Steven for the\n wedding. Steven had agreed reluctantly to put it off until Denise\n had a chance to introduce him to her parents; they were coming East\n at Christmas. She laughed over it and said, \"I'm being terribly\n conventional, darling, but that's one convention I like.\"\nWhile they waited, Steven's agent secured a really unprecedented\n opportunity for so young and relatively untried an actor. The current\n Happy Clown was unhappily retiring, by reason of age and infirmity, and\n Steven's agent arranged a tryout for the part. He said, \"Give it all\n you got, kid; it's the chance of the century.\"", "Steven met no nonconformists at the School of Television Arts, and none\n while he was acting in \"The Happy Life\" until Denise Cottrell joined\n the cast. Denise—called Denny, of course—was a pleasantly plain young\n woman with a whimsical face which photographed pretty, and remarkable\n dark blue eyes. It was her eyes which first made Steven wonder. They\n mirrored his own hope, and longing, and the desperate loneliness of the\n exile.\n\n\n For two months they were together as often as they could be, talking\n intellectual treason in public under cover of conventional faces,\n and talking intellectual treason in private with excitement and\n laughter and sometimes tears—falling in love. They planned, after\n much discussion, to be married and to bring up a dozen clever rebel\n children. Denise said soberly, \"They'd better be clever, because\n they'll have to learn to hide.\"", "That night in the HYM dormitory Steven did not sleep. He lay quiet,\n tense, hoping for the relief of tears, but it did not come.\nSteven went to see Denise every day though after the first time she\n was not awake to know him. The doctors were keeping her under sedation\n until the head bandage could be removed. So far as Denise was to\n know, she had gone to the hospital simply for a rather protracted\n appendectomy. Looking at her, Steven knew that he could never leave\n her. He had loved her completely; he would love her now with as much of\n himself as she would need or understand.\n\n\n For a while he waited to be kindly questioned, to be thoroughly\n examined, to be tenderly given the shot in the arm and to awake like\n her, but nobody came. Denise had apparently said nothing about him.\n Some censor or other—perhaps it was the censor of love—had kept her\n from even saying his name.", "Being, as the Director had said, a brilliant kiddie, Steven soon\n understood much of what was kept from him. It did not take him long\n to learn what was making his Dadsie look stern and white and what was\n making his Mumsie cry. He loved his parents and did not want them to be\n unhappy, and he certainly did not want to have his head cut open, and\n so he began to act. Even at five, Steven discovered in himself a fine\n talent for acting. He began to conform, to adjust, to merge. He became\n social and cooperative and acquired the proper attitudes for successful\n community living. He gave up the old silver voluntarily, he accepted\n the Youth Bed, he looked at the Happy Clown, and he did much better in\n kiddie-garden. He even joined in the group experimentation and was not\n sick any more, though he could not keep himself from losing color.", "The doctor said cheerily, \"There's nothing the matter with him. He'll\n eat when he gets hungry enough,\" and Steven did, to a degree, but not\n as if he enjoyed it.\n\n\n One day when he was nearly a year old, his mother carried his Kiddie\n Korner with the Dancing Dogsies on the pad into her bedroom, put him in\n it, and began to take things out of the bottom bureau drawer. They were\n old things, and Harriet Russell was ashamed of them. She had said more\n than once to her husband Richard, only half joking, \"I couldn't give\n them away, and I'd be ashamed for anybody to see them in our trash!\"\n They were old silver, knives and forks and spoons that looked like what\n they were, unadorned, and a child's plain silver dish and cup, and one\n small spoon with a useful curly handle. They had belonged to Harriet's\n great-grandmother. Once a year Harriet took the things out and polished\n them and furtively put them back.", "Denise was lost to him. The outburst in the studio, and the Steyner,\n and the loss of the Happy Clown part were cumulatively too much for\n her. She broke the engagement and was heard to say that Stevie Russell\n had proved himself an absolute fool. He was miserable over it, though\n he had only a hazy idea of what he had done or why Denny should\n suddenly be so unkind to him.", "popularity and a reputation as an actor. He took the lead in all the\n dramatic club plays, having particular success in the reproduction\n of a Happy Clown program. Steven, of course, was the Happy Clown. He\n enrolled at once in the New York School of Television Arts, and his\n mother cried when he left home to live in the School dormitory.", "Fortunately nobody heard the last three sentences. The paralyzed\n engineer had recovered in time to cut him off during the pause, and\n had signalled the stagehand to draw the curtain and the sound man to\n play the Happy Clown sign-off record—loud. Steven finished himself\n thoroughly, however, by repeating the same sentiments, with some others\n he happened to think of, to Denise and the sponsors, when they all came\n pouring out of the booth. Then he collapsed.\nSteven's Steyner was a complete success. He recovered from it a\n subdued, agreeable and thoroughly conventional young man, who had the\n impression that he had suffered a nervous breakdown. He was discharged\n from the Happy Hour at the end of January, innocently leaving behind" ], [ "At last the doctor came out to him and said what was always said in\n such cases. \"It was necessary to do something—you understand, no\n mention—\" and for a moment Steven felt so ill that he was grateful\n for the little ampoule the doctor broke and held under his nose. They\n always carried those when they had to give news of a Steyner to\n relatives or sweethearts or friends.\n\n\n The doctor said, \"All right now? Good .... You'll be careful, of\n course. She may be conscious for a minute; there's no harm in it yet,\n she won't move or touch the—\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"I'll be careful.\"\n\n\n He was still feeling ill when they let him in to see Denise. He sat\n down beside her bed and spoke to her urgently. \"Denise, talk to me.\n Please, Denise!\"", "For a while Steven considered confessing to somebody that he was\n a—what?—an unacceptable member of society. Then they would make him\n like Denise. He shuddered. Did he really want to be like Denise? Some\n stubborn pride in him refused it.\n\n\n When Denise left the hospital for the hotel where she would stay until\n the wedding, Steven was more gentle with her than ever, kinder and\n more loving. He made her very happy. He made love to her again, and it\n was like loving a ghost—no, it was like loving a fine beautiful body\n without the ghost, without the spirit. He returned to the HYM to lie\n sleepless amid the breathings and mutterings of the other young men,\n turning restlessly in his bed, feeling oppressed, tormented, strung on\n wires.", "Denise was lost to him. The outburst in the studio, and the Steyner,\n and the loss of the Happy Clown part were cumulatively too much for\n her. She broke the engagement and was heard to say that Stevie Russell\n had proved himself an absolute fool. He was miserable over it, though\n he had only a hazy idea of what he had done or why Denny should\n suddenly be so unkind to him.", "He took her to meet his family—Denise's family lived three thousand\n miles away—and she behaved with such perfect decorum and charm that\n Richard and Harriet were delighted and as eager as Steven for the\n wedding. Steven had agreed reluctantly to put it off until Denise\n had a chance to introduce him to her parents; they were coming East\n at Christmas. She laughed over it and said, \"I'm being terribly\n conventional, darling, but that's one convention I like.\"\nWhile they waited, Steven's agent secured a really unprecedented\n opportunity for so young and relatively untried an actor. The current\n Happy Clown was unhappily retiring, by reason of age and infirmity, and\n Steven's agent arranged a tryout for the part. He said, \"Give it all\n you got, kid; it's the chance of the century.\"", "They made love in Denise's apartment when her roommate\n Pauline—Polly—was out, as awkwardly as if there had never been any\n group experimentation or happy affairs. Denise said wonderingly, \"When\n you really love someone it's all new. Isn't that strange?\" and Steven\n said, kissing her, \"No, not strange at all.\"", "He rehearsed feverishly for the part of the Happy Clown, and because he\n was a fine craftsman and a conscientious artist he continued to give\n it all he had. The sponsors were pleased. A week before Christmas the\n current Happy Clown retired and hobbled off to a nursing home. There\n was no fanfare—the public was not to realize that the Happy Clown was\n mortal—and Steven took over with no visible change. For five days he\n played the part to perfection.\n\n\n On the sixth day he performed as usual, perhaps a little better. His\n commercials had a special fervor, and the sponsors exchanged happy\n glances. Denise was sitting in the booth with them; she smiled at\n Steven lovingly through the glass.", "That night in the HYM dormitory Steven did not sleep. He lay quiet,\n tense, hoping for the relief of tears, but it did not come.\nSteven went to see Denise every day though after the first time she\n was not awake to know him. The doctors were keeping her under sedation\n until the head bandage could be removed. So far as Denise was to\n know, she had gone to the hospital simply for a rather protracted\n appendectomy. Looking at her, Steven knew that he could never leave\n her. He had loved her completely; he would love her now with as much of\n himself as she would need or understand.\n\n\n For a while he waited to be kindly questioned, to be thoroughly\n examined, to be tenderly given the shot in the arm and to awake like\n her, but nobody came. Denise had apparently said nothing about him.\n Some censor or other—perhaps it was the censor of love—had kept her\n from even saying his name.", "Steven met no nonconformists at the School of Television Arts, and none\n while he was acting in \"The Happy Life\" until Denise Cottrell joined\n the cast. Denise—called Denny, of course—was a pleasantly plain young\n woman with a whimsical face which photographed pretty, and remarkable\n dark blue eyes. It was her eyes which first made Steven wonder. They\n mirrored his own hope, and longing, and the desperate loneliness of the\n exile.\n\n\n For two months they were together as often as they could be, talking\n intellectual treason in public under cover of conventional faces,\n and talking intellectual treason in private with excitement and\n laughter and sometimes tears—falling in love. They planned, after\n much discussion, to be married and to bring up a dozen clever rebel\n children. Denise said soberly, \"They'd better be clever, because\n they'll have to learn to hide.\"", "Steven said, \"Sure, Joey,\" and allowed his sensitive face to register\n all the proper emotions. Actually his emotions were, in the vernacular\n of a previous century, mixed. He loathed the whole concept of the Happy\n Clown—but there was money in it, and Steven was not rebel enough to\n despise money. With money he could retire early, go away somewhere with\n Denise, to some country place where they could be relatively free of\n pressure.\n\n\n Over staggering competition he got the part. He called Denise up at\n once from a booth at the studio to tell her. Polly answered the phone,\n looking pale and frightened over the viewer, and said rapidly, \"Oh,\n Stevie, I've been trying to get you for an hour. Denny's sick. They\n took her to the hospital!\"\n\n\n Steven sat back against the hard wall of the booth, feeling cold, the\n receiver slack in his hand. He said, \"What's the matter with her? Which\n hospital?\"", "Being, as the Director had said, a brilliant kiddie, Steven soon\n understood much of what was kept from him. It did not take him long\n to learn what was making his Dadsie look stern and white and what was\n making his Mumsie cry. He loved his parents and did not want them to be\n unhappy, and he certainly did not want to have his head cut open, and\n so he began to act. Even at five, Steven discovered in himself a fine\n talent for acting. He began to conform, to adjust, to merge. He became\n social and cooperative and acquired the proper attitudes for successful\n community living. He gave up the old silver voluntarily, he accepted\n the Youth Bed, he looked at the Happy Clown, and he did much better in\n kiddie-garden. He even joined in the group experimentation and was not\n sick any more, though he could not keep himself from losing color.", "She opened her eyes, looked at him drowsily and smiled. \"Oh, Stevie,\n I'm so glad you came. I've been wanting you, darling.\"\n\n\n Steven said, \"Denise—\"\n\n\n She frowned. \"Why do you call me that? Call me Denny. Did you get the\n part, darling?\"\n\n\n He drew back a little. \"Yes, I got it.\"\n\n\n She gave him a radiant smile. \"That's wonderful! I'm so proud of you,\n Stevie.\" She slept again.", "But, around the studios Steven was dead. Steyner or no Steyner—and\n of course that part of it was never openly discussed—sponsors had\n long memories, and the consensus seemed to be that it was best to\n let sleeping sheep lie. Steven did not care. He no longer had any\n particular desire to be an actor.\n\n\n Steven went to work in his father's supermarket and was happy among\n the shelves of Oatsies and Cornsies and Jellsies. He got over Denise\n after a while and met a girl named Frances—Franny—whom he loved and\n who loved him. They were married in the summer and had a little house\n with as much furniture in it as they could afford. The first thing they\n bought was a television set. After all, as Stevie said, he would not\n want to miss the Happy Clown.", "\"Ap-pendicitis. Happy Hour.\" Polly began to cry. \"Oh, Stevie, I feel\n so—\"\n\n\n \"I'll go right over.\" He cut her off abruptly and went.\n\n\n The doctors caught Denise's appendix in time to avoid the necessary but\n rarely fatal complications ... but under the anesthetic she talked,\n revealing enough about her opinion of television, and the Happy Clown\n cult, and the state of society in general, to cause her doctors to\n raise their eyebrows pityingly and perform the Steyner at once. While\n Steven sat unknowing in the waiting room, smoking a full pack of\n Marquis cigarettes, the thing was done.", "The Director said kindly, \"There's no disgrace, Mrs. Russell.\n That's a mistaken idea many people have. These things happen\n occasionally—nobody knows why—and there's absolutely no disgrace in a\n Steyner. Nothing is altered but the personality, and afterward you have\n a happy normal kiddie who hardly remembers that anything was ever wrong\n with him. Naturally nobody ever mentions it.... But there's no hurry;\n in the case of a kiddie we can wait a while. Bring Stevie in once a\n week; we'll try therapy first.\"", "The doctor said cheerily, \"There's nothing the matter with him. He'll\n eat when he gets hungry enough,\" and Steven did, to a degree, but not\n as if he enjoyed it.\n\n\n One day when he was nearly a year old, his mother carried his Kiddie\n Korner with the Dancing Dogsies on the pad into her bedroom, put him in\n it, and began to take things out of the bottom bureau drawer. They were\n old things, and Harriet Russell was ashamed of them. She had said more\n than once to her husband Richard, only half joking, \"I couldn't give\n them away, and I'd be ashamed for anybody to see them in our trash!\"\n They were old silver, knives and forks and spoons that looked like what\n they were, unadorned, and a child's plain silver dish and cup, and one\n small spoon with a useful curly handle. They had belonged to Harriet's\n great-grandmother. Once a year Harriet took the things out and polished\n them and furtively put them back.", "There was never any organization, any underground, of misfits. An\n underground presupposes injustice to be fought, cruelty to be resisted,\n and there was no injustice and no cruelty. The mass of people were\n kind, and their leaders, duly and fairly elected, were kind. They\n all sincerely believed in the gospel of efficiency and conformity\n and kindness. It had made the world a wonderful place to live in,\n full of wonderful things to make and buy and consume (all wonderfully\n advertised), and if one were a misfit and the doctors found it out and\n gave one a Steyner, it was only to make one happy, so that one could\n appreciate what a wonderful world it was.", "At the end of the tests the Director said seriously to Steven's\n parents, \"I'll be frank with you. You have a brilliant kiddie\n here—right now he has the intelligence of a twelve-year-old—but\n brilliance has to be channeled in the right direction. Just now—well,\n frankly, it's channeled in the wrong direction. We'll give it a year or\n so, and then if things don't clear up I'm afraid we'll have to correct\n him.\"\n\n\n Richard said through dry lips, \"You mean a Steyner?\"\n\n\n The Director nodded. \"The only thing.\"\n\n\n Harriet shuddered and began to cry. \"But there's never been anything\n like that in our family! The disgrace—oh, Dickie, it would kill me!\"", "Richard said firmly, \"We'll take him to the clinic. They'll know what\n to do.\"\nThe first thing they did to Steven was to talk to him. The psychiatrist\n made him lie down on a foam rubber couch, kiddies' model, with the\n Happy Clown motif on the slip-cover, and said with a beaming face,\n \"Now, Stevie, what seems to be the trouble?\"\n\n\n The boy turned his head away from the psychiatrist's shining teeth and\n said, \"My name's not Stevie. It's Steven.\" He was a thin little boy,\n rather undersized. The baby fat had melted away fast when he began\n to be exposed to kiddie-garden. He had dark hair and big eyes and an\n uncommonly precise way of speaking for a child of five.", "He managed his life well enough. He had a few affairs with girls, it\n was expected of one, and he did not have to work very hard at it since\n they always threw themselves at him; and he got along well with other\n young men, who forgave him for being so handsome because he did not\n work at it except on camera; but he was lonely. Surrounded by people,\n intruded and trespassed upon, continually touched in ways other than\n physical, he was yet lonely.\nDuring his life he had met a few other nonconformists, shy, like him,\n wary of revealing themselves, but something always seemed to happen\n to them. Some were miserable being nonconformists and asked pitifully\n for the Steyner, some were detected, as Steven had been, and some\n were unfortunately surprised in hospitals. Under the anesthetic they\n sometimes talked, and then, if they were adults, they were immediately\n corrected by means of Steyner's lobotomy. It had been learned that\n adults did not respond to therapy.", "They were pleased with him at the clinic and after a few months\n discharged him. By the time Steven was twelve and had made the Happy\n Tour and joined the Happy Scouts and had a happy affair, involving\n experimentation, with a neighbor's daughter, Harriet and Richard ceased\n to worry about him. If sometimes he felt so tightly strung-up that a\n storm of tears was his only relief, he kept the tears quiet.\nHe was graduated from high school at sixteen and from college at\n twenty, having read all he could of the silent books in the scant high\n school library and the more ample university one, and having wisely\n elected to appear more stupid than he was. Even his I.Q. was now\n judged to be only slightly above normal. He left college with honors," ] ]
test	31612	[ "How was Alice able to get off work early in order to meet Pete at the bar?", "Why was Riuku unable to break the bond with Alice's mind? ", "Why were Pete and Alice pulled over by the police?", "What was Riuku's overall feeling about Alice as the vessel for his probing activities?", "Why did Pete say, \"The slip of a lip . . . \" before being cut off by Alice?", "What was the essential function of the secret weapon being built in the factory?", "Why was Nagor in such a rush to leave their location close to Earth?", "What was Alice's role in the development of the secret weapon?", "Why do most of the girls seek jobs at the factory in spite of its secrecy?", "What does Alice discover about Pete Ganley?" ]	[ [ "She flirted with Tommy in order to distract him from the fact that she was leaving work earlier than normal.", "Every factory employee must go through a weekly Shielding process to boost their mind shields against the probing activities of their alien enemies. Alice switched out the marker identifying the day of her booster.", "Because her mind shield charge was in the safe zone, it was not necessary for her to complete the booster on any specific day, so long as she completed the charge before it reached the danger zone.", "Because of the factory requirement to receive the mind shield booster once a week, Alice simply changed her identifying marker to yellow to trick the guard into thinking she was part of the Friday group." ], [ "Because Alice's mind was weaker than Riuku's, it functioned as a kind of parasite that latched onto Riuku and would not allow him to escape.", "The power of Alice's sadness over losing Pete Ganley strengthened the connection between her mind and Rikuku's.", "The Shield booster had forged a permanent attachment to Alice's mind from which Riuku was unable to escape.", "The secret weapon developed in the factory was an enhancement to the Shield booster that trapped any enemies who had discovered a way around it." ], [ "Susan had hired a detective to wire Pete's copter in order to expose his infidelity, and the detective pulled Pete over so that Susan could confront the two.", "The copter Pete had been using for his evening rendezvouses with Alice belonged to the company they both worked for, so the police pulled him over for a citation.", "Adultery was considered a social taboo, the discovery of which would be widely circulated in print media. Susan enjoyed this kind of exposure, so she hired the police to help her catch Pete and Alice in the act.", "The secret weapon developed in the factory had a special function that triggered an alarm when the Shield had been breached, so the police had discovered Riuku's plot." ], [ "As he spent more time inside Alice's mind, he found himself sympathizing more with humans and began to feel regret about his subversive behavior.", "He was annoyed by human sexuality and what he regarded as Alice's general uselessness when it came to uncovering helpful information about the secret weapon.", "Although he was irritated by her general ignorance about the identity of the secret weapon, its purpose, and its machinations, he found her natural curiosity to be useful in his fact-finding mission.", "He appreciated her flippancy with the rules that allowed him access to her mind and enabled him to easily control the questions she asked people that provided him with good information to report back to Nagor." ], [ "He wanted to warn Alice discreetly not to talk about their affair because he had learned that one of Susan's friends had seen them at the bar the night before, and he was worried about being exposed.", "He was growing suspicious of Alice's questions since she had never before shown a curiosity in his job; he worried she might have succumbed to alien probing.", "He was reminding Alice that it was forbidden for any factory employee to discuss any aspect of the workings of the factory in the name of Earth's defense.", "He wanted to prevent Alice from revealing too much information to him about the specific functions of her job soldering 731 wires." ], [ "It transmitted lethal pulse waves through Corcoran force fields designed and built by workers in the factory.", "It allowed Earth control over the minds of their alien enemies by utilizing force fields and a control panel headquartered in the factory.", "It was a force field that could be used to make Earth's spaceships undetectable by their alien enemies and make sneak attacks easier.", "It was a force field that was completely impervious to aggressive attacks by the alien enemies stationed just outside Earth's atmosphere." ], [ "Because of Riuku's findings through Alice's mind, Nagor realized Earth was close to implementing their lethal weapon, so he wanted to ensure the safety of their fleet.", "Other ships in their fleet were beginning to disappear, suggesting Earth was systematically eliminating them by using the Corcoran force field weapon.", "The deadline previously agreed upon with Riuku was rapidly approaching, and Nagor knew extending their presence past the deadline would mean certain death.", "Like Riuku, he was irritated by the Shield technology employed by humans to protect themselves from alien probing, and he wanted to seek out other planets." ], [ "She filled 731 plugs with solder and fused the wires into the correct position for Corcoran assemblies that ultimately helped produce a force field.", "She used a soldering iron to fuse together white, red, and yellow wires used in the assembly of the Corcoran force field.", "She filled plugs with solder and passed them along to Lois, Marge, and Coralie so that they could fuse them together with 731 wires.", "She worked with Lois, Marge, and Coralie at the Line 73 Plug table to inspect wires and plugs for eventual use in the Corcoran assemblies." ], [ "It is a good place to meet and flirt with men like Pete and Tommy.", "It pays really well compared to similar jobs.", "Working at the factory is considered prestigious and offers better opportunities for advancement.", "They are allowed several breaks per shift and can take naps on the couch in the restroom lobby." ], [ "He doesn't know as much about the development of the secret weapon as he pretends to know.", "His mind has also been taken over by an alien.", "He had been cheating on her with a large number of women.", "This is not the first time he has cheated on Susan." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Why, he asked himself irritably, couldn't those scientists figure out\n some way to keep the shields up longer than a week? Or else why didn't\n they have boosting night the same for all departments? He had to stay\n late every Friday and Alice every Thursday, and all the time there was\n Susan at home ready to jump him if he wasn't in at a reasonable\n time....\n\n\n \"Surprised, Pete?\" Alice Hendricks said at his elbow.\n\n\n He swung about, grinned at her. \"Am I? You said it. And here I was\n about to go. I never thought you'd make it before one.\" His grin faded\n a little. \"How'd you do it? Sweet-talk one of the guards into letting\n you in at the head of the line?\"", "That night after work Pete Ganley was waiting outside the gate again.\n Alice spotted his copter right away, even though he had the lights\n turned way down.\n\n\n \"Gee, Pete, I didn't think....\"\n\n\n \"Get in. Quick.\"\n\n\n \"What's the matter?\" She climbed in beside him. He didn't answer until\n the copter had lifted itself into the air, away from the factory\n landing lots and the bright overhead lights and the home-bound\n workers.\n\n\n \"It's Susan, who else,\" he said grimly. \"She was really sounding off\n today. She kept saying she had a lot of evidence and I'd better be\n careful. And, well, I sure didn't want you turning up at the bar\n tonight of all nights.\"\n\n\n He didn't sound like Pete.\n\n\n \"Why?\" Alice said. \"Are you afraid she'll divorce you?\"", "\"In a little while. Just a little while.\" Stop thinking about Susan,\n you biological schizo. Change the subject. You'll never get anything\n out of that man by having hysterics....\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" Alice cried bitterly, \"you've been leading me on all the\n time. You don't love me. You'd rather have\nher\n!\"\n\n\n \"That's not so. Hell, baby....\"\nHe's angry. He's not even going to kiss me. I'm just cutting my own\n throat when I act like that....\n\"Okay, Pete. I'm sorry. I know it's tough on you. Let's have a drink,\n okay? Still got some in the glove compartment?\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Oh, sure.\"", "She poured two drinks, neat, and he swallowed his with one impatient\n gulp. She poured him another.\nRiuku prodded. The drink made his job easier. Alice's thoughts calmed,\n swirled away from Susan and what am I going to do and why didn't I\n pick up with some single guy, anyway? A single guy, like Tommy maybe.\n Tommy and his spot welder, over there by the Restricted Area. The\n Restricted Area....\n\n\n \"Pete.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, baby?\"\n\n\n \"How come they let so much voltage loose in the plant, so we can't\n even go over in the Restricted Area?\"\n\n\n \"Whatever made you think of that?\" He laughed suddenly. He turned to\n her, still laughing. He was the old Pete again, she thought, with his\n face happy and his mouth quirked up at the corner. \"Voltage loose ...\n oh, baby, baby. Don't you know what that is?\"", "He twisted, trying to pull free of Alice's fear, away from the\n integration of their separate terrors. But he couldn't push her\n thoughts back from his. She was too frightened. He was too frightened.\n The bond held.\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete, Pete, what did you do?\"\n\n\n He didn't answer. He landed the copter, stepped out of it, walked back\n to the other copter that was just dropping down behind him. \"But\n officer, what's the matter?\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks huddled down in the seat, already seeing tomorrow's\n papers, and her picture, and she wasn't really photogenic, either....\n And then, from the other copter, she heard the woman laugh.\n\n\n \"Pete Ganley, you fall for anything, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Susan!\"", "...\nPete. Gee, he must have got home awful late last night. Wonder\n what Susan said to him. Why does he keep taking her lip, anyway?\nRiuku waited. He prodded. He understood the Restricted Area as she\n understood it—which was not at all. He found out some things about\n the 731 plugs—that a lot of them were real crummy ones the fool day\n shift girls had set up wrong, and besides she'd rather solder on the\n 717's any day. He got her talking about the weapon again, and he found\n out what the other girls thought about it.\n\n\n Nothing.\n\n\n Except where else could you get twelve-fifty an hour soldering?\n\n\n She was stretched out on the couch in the restroom lobby taking a\n short nap—on company time, old Liverlips being tied up with the new\n girls down at the other end of the line—when Riuku finally managed to\n call Nagor again.", "Alice Hendricks listened. For some reason she wanted to listen. She\n was really curious about the field. But, gee, how did he expect her to\n understand all that stuff? He sounded like her algebra teacher, or was\n it chemistry? Lord, how she'd hated school. Maybe she shouldn't have\n quit.\n... Corcoran fields. E and IR and nine-space something or other.\n She'd never seen Pete like this before. He looked real different. Sort\n of like a professor, or something. He must be real smart. And\n so—well, not good-looking especially but, well, appealing. Real SA,\n he had....\n\"So that's how it works,\" Pete Ganley said. \"Quite a weapon, against\n them. It wouldn't work on a human being, of course.\" She was staring\n at him dreamy-eyed. He laughed. \"Silly, I bet you haven't understood a\n word I said.\"\n\n\n \"I have too.\"", "\"You didn't expect me to follow you, did you? Didn't it ever occur to\n you that detectives could put a bug in your copter? My, what we've\n been hearing!\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" the detective who was driving said. \"And those pictures we\n took last night weren't bad either.\"\n\n\n \"Susan, I can explain everything....\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you can, Pete. You always try. But as for you—you little—\"\n\n\n Alice ducked down away from her. Pictures. Oh God, what it would make\n her look like. Still, this hag with the pinched up face who couldn't\n hold a man with all the cosmetics in the drugstore to camouflage\n her—she had her nerve, yelling like that.\n\n\n \"Yeah, and I know a lot about you too!\" Alice Hendricks cried.\n\n\n \"Why, let me get my hands on you....\"", "Alice shrugged....\nWhat a mealy-mouthed little snip Lois could be,\n sometimes. You'd think to hear her that she was better than any of\n them, and luckier too, with her Joe and the kids. What a laugh! Joe\n was probably the only guy who'd ever looked at her, and she'd hooked\n him right out of school, and now with three kids in five years and her\n working nights....\nAlice finished soldering the first row of wires in the plug and\n started in on the second. So old Liverlips thought she wasted time,\n did he? Well, she'd show him. She'd get out her sixteen plugs tonight.\n\n\n \"Junior kept me up all night last night,\" Lois said. \"He's cutting a\n tooth.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Coralie said, \"It's pretty rough at that age. I remember right\n after Mike was born....\"", "\"So what? I'm getting tired of checking in every night, like a baby.\n Besides, one of her pals did see us, last night, at the bar.\"\nFear. What'll she do? Susan's a hellcat. I know she is. But maybe\n Pete'll get really sick and tired of her. He looks it. He looks mad.\n I'd sure hate to have him mad at me....\n\"Let's go for a spin, baby. Out in the suburbs somewhere. How about\n it?\"\n\n\n \"Well—why sure, Pete....\"", "Alice followed his gaze. She giggled. \"It was easy,\" she said. \"The\n guards don't do more than glance at us, you know. And everyone who's\n supposed to go through Shielding on Thursday has the department number\n stamped on a yellow background. So all I did was make a red\n background, like yours, and slip it on in the restroom at Clean-up\n time.\"\n\n\n \"But Alice....\" Pete Ganley swallowed his beer and signaled for\n another. \"This is serious. You've got to keep the shields up. The\n enemy is everywhere. Why, right now, one could be probing you.\"\n\n\n \"So what? The dial isn't down to Danger yet. And tomorrow I'll just\n put the red tag back on over the yellow one and go through Shielding\n in the same line with you. They won't notice.\" She giggled again. \"I\n thought it was smart, Petey. You oughta think so too. You know why I\n did it, don't you?\"", "\"Sure,\" Alice said. \"And you should of seen Pete's face when I walked\n in.\"\n\n\n She took the soldering iron out of her locker, plugged it in, and\n reached out for the pan of 731 wires. \"You know, it's funny. Pete's\n not so good looking, and he's sort of a careless dresser and all that,\n but oh, what he does to me.\" She filled the 731 plug with solder and\n reached for the white, black, red wire.\n\n\n \"You'd better watch out,\" Lois said. \"Or Susan's going to be doing\n something to you.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, her.\" Alice touched the tip of the iron to the solder filled pin,\n worked the wire down into position. \"What can she do? Pete doesn't\n give a damn about her.\"\n\n\n \"He's still living with her, isn't he?\" Lois said.", "\"But surely you can find out through the girl,\" Nagor insisted from\n far away, almost out of phase altogether.\n\n\n \"No, Pete!\" Alice Hendricks said aloud.\n\n\n \"Riuku, you're the only one of us with any possible sort of contact.\n You've got to find out, if we're to stay here at all.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Alice Hendricks thought, \"maybe....\"", "She looked past him, toward the corner where the big panels were with\n all the dials and the meters and the chart that was almost like the\n kind they drew pictures of earthquakes on. What was it for, anyway?\n And why couldn't anyone go over to it except those longhairs? High\n voltage her foot....\n\n\n \"What're you looking at, Alice?\" Tommy said.\n\n\n \"Oh, that.\" She pointed. \"Wonder what it's for? It doesn't look like\n much of anything, really.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't know. I've got something better to look at.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\nyou\n!\"\n\n\n Compared to Pete, he didn't have anything, not anything at all.", "\"Riuku!\"\n\n\n Riuku prodded. Calm down, you fool. You're not gaining anything this\n way. Calm down, so I can get out of here....\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stopped yelling abruptly.\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Susan said. \"Pete, your taste in women gets worse\n each time. I don't know why I always take you back.\"\n\n\n \"I can explain everything.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete,\" Alice Hendricks whispered. \"Petey, you're not—\"\n\n\n \"Sure he is,\" Susan Ganley said. \"He's coming with me. The nice\n detectives will take you home, dear. But I don't think you'd better\n try anything with them—they're not your type. They're single.\"", "Sitting beside him in the copter.\nAll alone up here. Real romantic,\n like something on the video. But I shouldn't with him married, and all\n that. It's not right. But it's different, with Susan such a mean\n thing. Poor Petey....\nRiuku prodded. He found it so much easier since the Shielding boost.\n If only these Earthmen were more telepathic, so that they could be\n controlled directly. Still, perhaps with this new integration he could\n accomplish the same results. He prodded again.\n\n\n \"Pete,\" Alice said suddenly. \"What are we working on, anyway?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, working on?\" He frowned at her.\n\n\n \"At the plant. All I ever do is sit there soldering plugs, and no one\n ever tells me what for.\"\n\n\n \"Course not. You're not supposed to talk about any part of the job\n except your own. You know that. The slip of a lip—\"", "\"Pete....\" But he wouldn't meet Alice's eyes. And when Susan took his\n arm, he followed her.\n\n\n \"How could you do it, Petey....\" Numb whispers, numb thoughts, over\n and over, but no longer frightened, no longer binding on Riuku.\n\n\n Fools, he thought. Idiotic Earthmen. If it weren't for your ridiculous\n reproductive habits I'd have found out everything. As it is....\n \"Nagor, I'm coming! I didn't get anything. This woman—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on then. We're leaving. Right now. There'll be other\n systems.\"\nPetey, Petey, Petey....\nContact thinned as he reached out away from her, toward Nagor, toward\n the ship. He fought his way out through the Shielding, away from her\n and her thoughts and every detestable thing about her. Break free,\n break free....", "She shook her bandanaed head, slid onto the stool beside him and\n crossed her knees—a not very convincing sign of femininity in a woman\n wearing baggy denim coveralls. \"Aren't you going to buy me a drink,\n honey?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, sure.\" He glanced over at the bartender. \"Another beer. No, make\n it two.\" He pulled the five dollars out of his pocket, shoved it\n across the bar, and looked back at Alice, more closely this time. The\n ID badge, pinned to her hip. The badge, with her name, number,\n department, and picture—and the little meter that measured the\n strength of her Mind Shield.\n\n\n The dial should have pointed to full charge. It didn't. It registered\n about seventy per cent loss.", "Don't they ever think of anything but their kids? Alice thought. She\n stopped listening to them. She heard Pete's voice again, husky and\n sending little chills all through her, and his face came between her\n and the plug and the white green wire she was soldering. His face,\n with those blue eyes that went right through a girl and that little\n scar that quirked up the corner of his mouth....\n\n\n \"Oh, oh,\" Alice said suddenly. \"I've got solder on the outside of the\n pin.\" She looked around for the alcohol.\n\n\n Riuku probed. Her thoughts were easy enough to read, but just try to\n translate them into anything useful.... He probed deeper. The plugs\n she was soldering. He could get a good picture of them, of the wires,\n of the harness lacing that Coralie was doing. But it meant nothing.\n They could be making anything. Radios, monitor units, sound equipment.", "Riuku cursed her again, in the lingua franca of a dozen systems.\n Nagor's voice faded. Riuku switched back to English.\nSaturday. Into the plant at 3:58. Jean's diamond again....\nWish it\n would choke her; she's got a horsey enough face for it to. Where's old\n Liverlips? Don't see him around. Might as well go to the restroom for\n a while....\nThat's it, Riuku thought. Get her over past the machine shop, over by\n that Restricted Area. There must be something there we can go on....\n\n\n \"Hello, Tommy,\" Alice Hendricks said. \"How's the love life?\"\n\n\n \"It could be better if someone I know would, uh, cooperate....\"" ], [ "\"What's the matter, Riuku? Why don't you come? Have the police caught\n you?\"\n\n\n The others were fleeing, getting farther away even as he listened to\n Nagor's call. Contact was hard to maintain now; he could feel\n communication fading.\n\n\n \"Riuku, if you don't come now....\"\n\n\n He fought, but Alice's thoughts were still with him; Alice's tears\n still kept bringing him back into full awareness of her.\n\n\n \"Riuku!\"\n\n\n \"I—I can't!\"\n\n\n The Shielding boost, that had integrated him so completely with Alice\n Hendricks, would never let him go.\n\n\n \"Oh, Petey, I've lost you....\"\n\n\n And Nagor's sad farewell slipped completely out of phase, leaving him\n alone, with her.", "But she was asleep at last. Riuku was free enough of her thoughts to\n break contact, partially of course, since if he broke it completely he\n wouldn't be able to get back through the Shielding. It was hard enough\n to reach out through it. He sent a painful probing feeler out into\n space, to the spot where Nagor and the others waited for his report.\n\n\n \"Nagor....\"\n\n\n \"Riuku? Is that you?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I've got a contact. A girl. But I haven't learned anything yet\n that can help us.\"\n\n\n \"Louder, Riuku. I can hardly hear you....\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stirred in her sleep. The dream images slipped through\n her subconscious, almost waking her, beating against Riuku.\n\n\n Pete, baby, you shouldn't be like that....", "\"But surely you can find out through the girl,\" Nagor insisted from\n far away, almost out of phase altogether.\n\n\n \"No, Pete!\" Alice Hendricks said aloud.\n\n\n \"Riuku, you're the only one of us with any possible sort of contact.\n You've got to find out, if we're to stay here at all.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Alice Hendricks thought, \"maybe....\"", "The plant. The Restricted Area. The useless secret of Earth's now\n unneeded weapon. Alice Hendricks glancing past it, at the spot welding\n machine, at Tommy.\n\n\n \"How's the love life?\"\n\n\n \"You really interested in finding out, Alice?\"\n\n\n \"Well—maybe—\"\n\n\n And Riuku gibbered unheard in her mind.", "\"Riuku!\"\n\n\n Riuku prodded. Calm down, you fool. You're not gaining anything this\n way. Calm down, so I can get out of here....\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stopped yelling abruptly.\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Susan said. \"Pete, your taste in women gets worse\n each time. I don't know why I always take you back.\"\n\n\n \"I can explain everything.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete,\" Alice Hendricks whispered. \"Petey, you're not—\"\n\n\n \"Sure he is,\" Susan Ganley said. \"He's coming with me. The nice\n detectives will take you home, dear. But I don't think you'd better\n try anything with them—they're not your type. They're single.\"", "\"Liar.\" He locked the automatic pilot on the copter and held out his\n arms. \"Come here, you.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Petey....\"\n\n\n Who cared about the weapon? He was right, even if she wouldn't admit\n it. She hadn't even listened, hardly. She hadn't understood.\n\n\n And neither had Riuku.\nRiuku waited until she'd fallen soundly asleep that night before he\n tried contacting Nagor. He'd learned nothing useful. He'd picked up\n nothing in her mind except more thoughts of Pete, and gee, maybe\n someday they'd get married, if he only had guts enough to tell Susan\n where to get off....", "Only they weren't. They were making a weapon, and this bit of\n electronic equipment was part of that weapon. What part? What did the\n 731 plug do?\n\n\n Alice Hendricks didn't know. Alice Hendricks didn't care.\n\n\n The first break. Ten minutes away from work. Alice was walking back\n along the aisle that separated Assembly from the men's Machine Shop. A\n chance, perhaps. She was looking at the machines, or rather past them,\n at the men.\n\n\n \"Hello, Tommy. How's the love life?\" He's not bad at all. Real cute.\n Though not like Pete, oh no.\n\n\n The machines. Riuku prodded at her thoughts, wishing he could\n influence them, wishing that just for a moment he could see, hear,\n feel,\nthink\nas she would never think.", "The line. Alice's nervousness....\nOh, oh, there's that guy with the\n meter—the one from maintenance. What's he want?\n\"Whaddya mean, my shield's low? How could it be?\"\n... If he checks\n the tag I'll be fired for sure. It's a lot of nonsense anyway. The\n enemy is everywhere, they keep telling us. Whoever saw one of them?\n\"No, honest, I didn't notice anything. Can I help it if.... It's okay,\n huh? It'll pass....\"\n\n\n Down to fifteen per cent, the guy said. Well, that's safe, I guess.\n Whew.\n\n\n \"Oh, hello, Paula. Whatcha talking about, what am I doing here\n tonight? Shut up....\"\n\n\n And then, in the midst of her thoughts, the pain, driving deep into\n Riuku, twisting at him, wrenching at him, until there was no\n consciousness of anything at all.", "\"Pete....\" But he wouldn't meet Alice's eyes. And when Susan took his\n arm, he followed her.\n\n\n \"How could you do it, Petey....\" Numb whispers, numb thoughts, over\n and over, but no longer frightened, no longer binding on Riuku.\n\n\n Fools, he thought. Idiotic Earthmen. If it weren't for your ridiculous\n reproductive habits I'd have found out everything. As it is....\n \"Nagor, I'm coming! I didn't get anything. This woman—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on then. We're leaving. Right now. There'll be other\n systems.\"\nPetey, Petey, Petey....\nContact thinned as he reached out away from her, toward Nagor, toward\n the ship. He fought his way out through the Shielding, away from her\n and her thoughts and every detestable thing about her. Break free,\n break free....", "\"—a very simple power source, once you get the basics of it. You—oh,\n oh!\" He grabbed her arm. \"Duck, Alice!\"\n\n\n A spotlight flashed out of the darkness, turned on them, outlined\n them. A siren whirred briefly, and then another copter pulled up\n beside them and a loudspeaker blared tinnily.\n\n\n \"Okay, bud, pull down to the landing lane.\"\n\n\n The police.\n\n\n Police. Fear, all the way through Alice's thoughts, all the way\n through Riuku. Police. Earth law. That meant—it must mean he'd been\n discovered, that they had some other means of protection besides the\n Shielding....\n\n\n \"Nagor! I've been discovered!\"\n\n\n \"Come away then, you fool!\"", "Riuku listened to her half of the conversation. Stupid Earthman. If\n only she'd start thinking about the job. Or if only his contact with\n her were better. If he could use her sense perceptions, see through\n her eyes, hear through her ears, feel through her fingers, then\n everything would be easy. But he couldn't. All he could do was read\n her thoughts. Earth thoughts at that....\n... The time clock. Where's my card? Oh, here it is. Only 3:57. Why\n did I have to hurry so? I had lots of time....\n\"Why, Mary, how nice you look today. That's a new hairdo, isn't it? A\n permanent? Yeah, what kind?\"\n... What a microbe! Looks like pink", "Riuku cursed the bisexual species in their own language.\n\n\n \"Riuku!\" Nagor's call was harsh, urgent. \"You've got to find out. We\n haven't much time. We lost three more ships today, and there wasn't a\n sign of danger. No Earthman nearby, no force fields, nothing. You've\n got to find out why.\" Those ships just disappeared.\n\n\n Riuku forced his way up through the erotic dreams of Alice Hendricks.\n \"I know a little,\" he said. \"They damp their thought waves somehow,\n and keep us from spotting the Corcoran field.\"\n\n\n \"Corcoran field? What's that?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\" Alice's thoughts washed over him, pulling him back\n into complete integration, away from Nagor, into a medley of heroic\n Petes with gleaming eyes and clutching hands and good little Alices\n pushing them away—for the moment.", "He struggled back. He was confused, and there was blankness around\n him, and for a moment he thought he'd lost contact altogether. Then he\n came into focus again. Alice's thoughts were clearer than ever\n suddenly. He could feel her emotions; they were a part of him now. He\n smiled. The Shielding boost had helped him. Integration—much more\n complete integration than he had ever known before.\n\n\n \"But Pete, honey,\" Alice said. \"What did you come over to the gate\n for? You shouldn't of done it.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? I wanted to see you.\"\n\n\n \"What if one of Susan's pals sees us?\"", "Her round, smooth face looked up at him, wide-eyed and full-lipped.\n She had no worry wrinkles like Susan's, no mouth pulled down at the\n corners like Susan's, and under that shapeless coverall....\n\n\n \"Sure, baby, I'm glad you did it,\" Pete Ganley said huskily.\n\n\n Riuku was glad too, the next afternoon when the swing shift started\n pouring through the gates.\n\n\n It was easy, once he'd found her. He had tested hundreds, all\n shielded, some almost accessible to him, but none vulnerable enough.\n Then this one came. The shield was so far down that contact was almost\n easy. Painful, tiring, but not really difficult. He could feel her\n momentary sense of alarm, of nausea, and then he was through,\n integrated with her, his thoughts at home with her thoughts.\n\n\n He rested, inside her mind.", "\"Oh, Alice, you're as bad as—look, baby, don't you see? It would be\n awful for you. All the publicity, the things she'd call you, maybe\n even in the papers....\"\n\n\n He was staring straight ahead, his hands locked about the controls. He\n was sort of—well, distant. Not her Petey any more. Someone else's\n Pete. Susan's Pete....\n\n\n \"I think we should be more careful,\" he said.\n\n\n Riuku twisted his way through her thoughts, tried to push them\n down....\nDoes he love me, he's got to love me, sure he does, he just\n doesn't want me to get hurt....\nAnd far away, almost completely out of phase, Nagor's call. \"Riuku,\n another ship's gone. You'd better come back. Bring what you've learned\n so far and we can withdraw from the system and maybe piece it\n together....\"", "He twisted, trying to pull free of Alice's fear, away from the\n integration of their separate terrors. But he couldn't push her\n thoughts back from his. She was too frightened. He was too frightened.\n The bond held.\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete, Pete, what did you do?\"\n\n\n He didn't answer. He landed the copter, stepped out of it, walked back\n to the other copter that was just dropping down behind him. \"But\n officer, what's the matter?\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks huddled down in the seat, already seeing tomorrow's\n papers, and her picture, and she wasn't really photogenic, either....\n And then, from the other copter, she heard the woman laugh.\n\n\n \"Pete Ganley, you fall for anything, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Susan!\"", "Sitting beside him in the copter.\nAll alone up here. Real romantic,\n like something on the video. But I shouldn't with him married, and all\n that. It's not right. But it's different, with Susan such a mean\n thing. Poor Petey....\nRiuku prodded. He found it so much easier since the Shielding boost.\n If only these Earthmen were more telepathic, so that they could be\n controlled directly. Still, perhaps with this new integration he could\n accomplish the same results. He prodded again.\n\n\n \"Pete,\" Alice said suddenly. \"What are we working on, anyway?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, working on?\" He frowned at her.\n\n\n \"At the plant. All I ever do is sit there soldering plugs, and no one\n ever tells me what for.\"\n\n\n \"Course not. You're not supposed to talk about any part of the job\n except your own. You know that. The slip of a lip—\"", "...\nPete. Gee, he must have got home awful late last night. Wonder\n what Susan said to him. Why does he keep taking her lip, anyway?\nRiuku waited. He prodded. He understood the Restricted Area as she\n understood it—which was not at all. He found out some things about\n the 731 plugs—that a lot of them were real crummy ones the fool day\n shift girls had set up wrong, and besides she'd rather solder on the\n 717's any day. He got her talking about the weapon again, and he found\n out what the other girls thought about it.\n\n\n Nothing.\n\n\n Except where else could you get twelve-fifty an hour soldering?\n\n\n She was stretched out on the couch in the restroom lobby taking a\n short nap—on company time, old Liverlips being tied up with the new\n girls down at the other end of the line—when Riuku finally managed to\n call Nagor again.", "She poured two drinks, neat, and he swallowed his with one impatient\n gulp. She poured him another.\nRiuku prodded. The drink made his job easier. Alice's thoughts calmed,\n swirled away from Susan and what am I going to do and why didn't I\n pick up with some single guy, anyway? A single guy, like Tommy maybe.\n Tommy and his spot welder, over there by the Restricted Area. The\n Restricted Area....\n\n\n \"Pete.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, baby?\"\n\n\n \"How come they let so much voltage loose in the plant, so we can't\n even go over in the Restricted Area?\"\n\n\n \"Whatever made you think of that?\" He laughed suddenly. He turned to\n her, still laughing. He was the old Pete again, she thought, with his\n face happy and his mouth quirked up at the corner. \"Voltage loose ...\n oh, baby, baby. Don't you know what that is?\"", "Don't they ever think of anything but their kids? Alice thought. She\n stopped listening to them. She heard Pete's voice again, husky and\n sending little chills all through her, and his face came between her\n and the plug and the white green wire she was soldering. His face,\n with those blue eyes that went right through a girl and that little\n scar that quirked up the corner of his mouth....\n\n\n \"Oh, oh,\" Alice said suddenly. \"I've got solder on the outside of the\n pin.\" She looked around for the alcohol.\n\n\n Riuku probed. Her thoughts were easy enough to read, but just try to\n translate them into anything useful.... He probed deeper. The plugs\n she was soldering. He could get a good picture of them, of the wires,\n of the harness lacing that Coralie was doing. But it meant nothing.\n They could be making anything. Radios, monitor units, sound equipment." ], [ "\"In a little while. Just a little while.\" Stop thinking about Susan,\n you biological schizo. Change the subject. You'll never get anything\n out of that man by having hysterics....\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" Alice cried bitterly, \"you've been leading me on all the\n time. You don't love me. You'd rather have\nher\n!\"\n\n\n \"That's not so. Hell, baby....\"\nHe's angry. He's not even going to kiss me. I'm just cutting my own\n throat when I act like that....\n\"Okay, Pete. I'm sorry. I know it's tough on you. Let's have a drink,\n okay? Still got some in the glove compartment?\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Oh, sure.\"", "He twisted, trying to pull free of Alice's fear, away from the\n integration of their separate terrors. But he couldn't push her\n thoughts back from his. She was too frightened. He was too frightened.\n The bond held.\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete, Pete, what did you do?\"\n\n\n He didn't answer. He landed the copter, stepped out of it, walked back\n to the other copter that was just dropping down behind him. \"But\n officer, what's the matter?\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks huddled down in the seat, already seeing tomorrow's\n papers, and her picture, and she wasn't really photogenic, either....\n And then, from the other copter, she heard the woman laugh.\n\n\n \"Pete Ganley, you fall for anything, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Susan!\"", "That night after work Pete Ganley was waiting outside the gate again.\n Alice spotted his copter right away, even though he had the lights\n turned way down.\n\n\n \"Gee, Pete, I didn't think....\"\n\n\n \"Get in. Quick.\"\n\n\n \"What's the matter?\" She climbed in beside him. He didn't answer until\n the copter had lifted itself into the air, away from the factory\n landing lots and the bright overhead lights and the home-bound\n workers.\n\n\n \"It's Susan, who else,\" he said grimly. \"She was really sounding off\n today. She kept saying she had a lot of evidence and I'd better be\n careful. And, well, I sure didn't want you turning up at the bar\n tonight of all nights.\"\n\n\n He didn't sound like Pete.\n\n\n \"Why?\" Alice said. \"Are you afraid she'll divorce you?\"", "\"You didn't expect me to follow you, did you? Didn't it ever occur to\n you that detectives could put a bug in your copter? My, what we've\n been hearing!\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" the detective who was driving said. \"And those pictures we\n took last night weren't bad either.\"\n\n\n \"Susan, I can explain everything....\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you can, Pete. You always try. But as for you—you little—\"\n\n\n Alice ducked down away from her. Pictures. Oh God, what it would make\n her look like. Still, this hag with the pinched up face who couldn't\n hold a man with all the cosmetics in the drugstore to camouflage\n her—she had her nerve, yelling like that.\n\n\n \"Yeah, and I know a lot about you too!\" Alice Hendricks cried.\n\n\n \"Why, let me get my hands on you....\"", "\"Riuku!\"\n\n\n Riuku prodded. Calm down, you fool. You're not gaining anything this\n way. Calm down, so I can get out of here....\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stopped yelling abruptly.\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Susan said. \"Pete, your taste in women gets worse\n each time. I don't know why I always take you back.\"\n\n\n \"I can explain everything.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete,\" Alice Hendricks whispered. \"Petey, you're not—\"\n\n\n \"Sure he is,\" Susan Ganley said. \"He's coming with me. The nice\n detectives will take you home, dear. But I don't think you'd better\n try anything with them—they're not your type. They're single.\"", "Alice Hendricks listened. For some reason she wanted to listen. She\n was really curious about the field. But, gee, how did he expect her to\n understand all that stuff? He sounded like her algebra teacher, or was\n it chemistry? Lord, how she'd hated school. Maybe she shouldn't have\n quit.\n... Corcoran fields. E and IR and nine-space something or other.\n She'd never seen Pete like this before. He looked real different. Sort\n of like a professor, or something. He must be real smart. And\n so—well, not good-looking especially but, well, appealing. Real SA,\n he had....\n\"So that's how it works,\" Pete Ganley said. \"Quite a weapon, against\n them. It wouldn't work on a human being, of course.\" She was staring\n at him dreamy-eyed. He laughed. \"Silly, I bet you haven't understood a\n word I said.\"\n\n\n \"I have too.\"", "Sitting beside him in the copter.\nAll alone up here. Real romantic,\n like something on the video. But I shouldn't with him married, and all\n that. It's not right. But it's different, with Susan such a mean\n thing. Poor Petey....\nRiuku prodded. He found it so much easier since the Shielding boost.\n If only these Earthmen were more telepathic, so that they could be\n controlled directly. Still, perhaps with this new integration he could\n accomplish the same results. He prodded again.\n\n\n \"Pete,\" Alice said suddenly. \"What are we working on, anyway?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, working on?\" He frowned at her.\n\n\n \"At the plant. All I ever do is sit there soldering plugs, and no one\n ever tells me what for.\"\n\n\n \"Course not. You're not supposed to talk about any part of the job\n except your own. You know that. The slip of a lip—\"", "She poured two drinks, neat, and he swallowed his with one impatient\n gulp. She poured him another.\nRiuku prodded. The drink made his job easier. Alice's thoughts calmed,\n swirled away from Susan and what am I going to do and why didn't I\n pick up with some single guy, anyway? A single guy, like Tommy maybe.\n Tommy and his spot welder, over there by the Restricted Area. The\n Restricted Area....\n\n\n \"Pete.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, baby?\"\n\n\n \"How come they let so much voltage loose in the plant, so we can't\n even go over in the Restricted Area?\"\n\n\n \"Whatever made you think of that?\" He laughed suddenly. He turned to\n her, still laughing. He was the old Pete again, she thought, with his\n face happy and his mouth quirked up at the corner. \"Voltage loose ...\n oh, baby, baby. Don't you know what that is?\"", "\"—a very simple power source, once you get the basics of it. You—oh,\n oh!\" He grabbed her arm. \"Duck, Alice!\"\n\n\n A spotlight flashed out of the darkness, turned on them, outlined\n them. A siren whirred briefly, and then another copter pulled up\n beside them and a loudspeaker blared tinnily.\n\n\n \"Okay, bud, pull down to the landing lane.\"\n\n\n The police.\n\n\n Police. Fear, all the way through Alice's thoughts, all the way\n through Riuku. Police. Earth law. That meant—it must mean he'd been\n discovered, that they had some other means of protection besides the\n Shielding....\n\n\n \"Nagor! I've been discovered!\"\n\n\n \"Come away then, you fool!\"", "\"So what? I'm getting tired of checking in every night, like a baby.\n Besides, one of her pals did see us, last night, at the bar.\"\nFear. What'll she do? Susan's a hellcat. I know she is. But maybe\n Pete'll get really sick and tired of her. He looks it. He looks mad.\n I'd sure hate to have him mad at me....\n\"Let's go for a spin, baby. Out in the suburbs somewhere. How about\n it?\"\n\n\n \"Well—why sure, Pete....\"", "She looked past him, toward the corner where the big panels were with\n all the dials and the meters and the chart that was almost like the\n kind they drew pictures of earthquakes on. What was it for, anyway?\n And why couldn't anyone go over to it except those longhairs? High\n voltage her foot....\n\n\n \"What're you looking at, Alice?\" Tommy said.\n\n\n \"Oh, that.\" She pointed. \"Wonder what it's for? It doesn't look like\n much of anything, really.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't know. I've got something better to look at.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\nyou\n!\"\n\n\n Compared to Pete, he didn't have anything, not anything at all.", "Don't they ever think of anything but their kids? Alice thought. She\n stopped listening to them. She heard Pete's voice again, husky and\n sending little chills all through her, and his face came between her\n and the plug and the white green wire she was soldering. His face,\n with those blue eyes that went right through a girl and that little\n scar that quirked up the corner of his mouth....\n\n\n \"Oh, oh,\" Alice said suddenly. \"I've got solder on the outside of the\n pin.\" She looked around for the alcohol.\n\n\n Riuku probed. Her thoughts were easy enough to read, but just try to\n translate them into anything useful.... He probed deeper. The plugs\n she was soldering. He could get a good picture of them, of the wires,\n of the harness lacing that Coralie was doing. But it meant nothing.\n They could be making anything. Radios, monitor units, sound equipment.", "He struggled back. He was confused, and there was blankness around\n him, and for a moment he thought he'd lost contact altogether. Then he\n came into focus again. Alice's thoughts were clearer than ever\n suddenly. He could feel her emotions; they were a part of him now. He\n smiled. The Shielding boost had helped him. Integration—much more\n complete integration than he had ever known before.\n\n\n \"But Pete, honey,\" Alice said. \"What did you come over to the gate\n for? You shouldn't of done it.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? I wanted to see you.\"\n\n\n \"What if one of Susan's pals sees us?\"", "\"What's the matter, Riuku? Why don't you come? Have the police caught\n you?\"\n\n\n The others were fleeing, getting farther away even as he listened to\n Nagor's call. Contact was hard to maintain now; he could feel\n communication fading.\n\n\n \"Riuku, if you don't come now....\"\n\n\n He fought, but Alice's thoughts were still with him; Alice's tears\n still kept bringing him back into full awareness of her.\n\n\n \"Riuku!\"\n\n\n \"I—I can't!\"\n\n\n The Shielding boost, that had integrated him so completely with Alice\n Hendricks, would never let him go.\n\n\n \"Oh, Petey, I've lost you....\"\n\n\n And Nagor's sad farewell slipped completely out of phase, leaving him\n alone, with her.", "Why, he asked himself irritably, couldn't those scientists figure out\n some way to keep the shields up longer than a week? Or else why didn't\n they have boosting night the same for all departments? He had to stay\n late every Friday and Alice every Thursday, and all the time there was\n Susan at home ready to jump him if he wasn't in at a reasonable\n time....\n\n\n \"Surprised, Pete?\" Alice Hendricks said at his elbow.\n\n\n He swung about, grinned at her. \"Am I? You said it. And here I was\n about to go. I never thought you'd make it before one.\" His grin faded\n a little. \"How'd you do it? Sweet-talk one of the guards into letting\n you in at the head of the line?\"", "\"Pete....\" But he wouldn't meet Alice's eyes. And when Susan took his\n arm, he followed her.\n\n\n \"How could you do it, Petey....\" Numb whispers, numb thoughts, over\n and over, but no longer frightened, no longer binding on Riuku.\n\n\n Fools, he thought. Idiotic Earthmen. If it weren't for your ridiculous\n reproductive habits I'd have found out everything. As it is....\n \"Nagor, I'm coming! I didn't get anything. This woman—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on then. We're leaving. Right now. There'll be other\n systems.\"\nPetey, Petey, Petey....\nContact thinned as he reached out away from her, toward Nagor, toward\n the ship. He fought his way out through the Shielding, away from her\n and her thoughts and every detestable thing about her. Break free,\n break free....", "...\nPete. Gee, he must have got home awful late last night. Wonder\n what Susan said to him. Why does he keep taking her lip, anyway?\nRiuku waited. He prodded. He understood the Restricted Area as she\n understood it—which was not at all. He found out some things about\n the 731 plugs—that a lot of them were real crummy ones the fool day\n shift girls had set up wrong, and besides she'd rather solder on the\n 717's any day. He got her talking about the weapon again, and he found\n out what the other girls thought about it.\n\n\n Nothing.\n\n\n Except where else could you get twelve-fifty an hour soldering?\n\n\n She was stretched out on the couch in the restroom lobby taking a\n short nap—on company time, old Liverlips being tied up with the new\n girls down at the other end of the line—when Riuku finally managed to\n call Nagor again.", "Alice followed his gaze. She giggled. \"It was easy,\" she said. \"The\n guards don't do more than glance at us, you know. And everyone who's\n supposed to go through Shielding on Thursday has the department number\n stamped on a yellow background. So all I did was make a red\n background, like yours, and slip it on in the restroom at Clean-up\n time.\"\n\n\n \"But Alice....\" Pete Ganley swallowed his beer and signaled for\n another. \"This is serious. You've got to keep the shields up. The\n enemy is everywhere. Why, right now, one could be probing you.\"\n\n\n \"So what? The dial isn't down to Danger yet. And tomorrow I'll just\n put the red tag back on over the yellow one and go through Shielding\n in the same line with you. They won't notice.\" She giggled again. \"I\n thought it was smart, Petey. You oughta think so too. You know why I\n did it, don't you?\"", "\"Oh, Alice, you're as bad as—look, baby, don't you see? It would be\n awful for you. All the publicity, the things she'd call you, maybe\n even in the papers....\"\n\n\n He was staring straight ahead, his hands locked about the controls. He\n was sort of—well, distant. Not her Petey any more. Someone else's\n Pete. Susan's Pete....\n\n\n \"I think we should be more careful,\" he said.\n\n\n Riuku twisted his way through her thoughts, tried to push them\n down....\nDoes he love me, he's got to love me, sure he does, he just\n doesn't want me to get hurt....\nAnd far away, almost completely out of phase, Nagor's call. \"Riuku,\n another ship's gone. You'd better come back. Bring what you've learned\n so far and we can withdraw from the system and maybe piece it\n together....\"", "\"But surely you can find out through the girl,\" Nagor insisted from\n far away, almost out of phase altogether.\n\n\n \"No, Pete!\" Alice Hendricks said aloud.\n\n\n \"Riuku, you're the only one of us with any possible sort of contact.\n You've got to find out, if we're to stay here at all.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Alice Hendricks thought, \"maybe....\"" ], [ "\"But surely you can find out through the girl,\" Nagor insisted from\n far away, almost out of phase altogether.\n\n\n \"No, Pete!\" Alice Hendricks said aloud.\n\n\n \"Riuku, you're the only one of us with any possible sort of contact.\n You've got to find out, if we're to stay here at all.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Alice Hendricks thought, \"maybe....\"", "But she was asleep at last. Riuku was free enough of her thoughts to\n break contact, partially of course, since if he broke it completely he\n wouldn't be able to get back through the Shielding. It was hard enough\n to reach out through it. He sent a painful probing feeler out into\n space, to the spot where Nagor and the others waited for his report.\n\n\n \"Nagor....\"\n\n\n \"Riuku? Is that you?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I've got a contact. A girl. But I haven't learned anything yet\n that can help us.\"\n\n\n \"Louder, Riuku. I can hardly hear you....\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stirred in her sleep. The dream images slipped through\n her subconscious, almost waking her, beating against Riuku.\n\n\n Pete, baby, you shouldn't be like that....", "Only they weren't. They were making a weapon, and this bit of\n electronic equipment was part of that weapon. What part? What did the\n 731 plug do?\n\n\n Alice Hendricks didn't know. Alice Hendricks didn't care.\n\n\n The first break. Ten minutes away from work. Alice was walking back\n along the aisle that separated Assembly from the men's Machine Shop. A\n chance, perhaps. She was looking at the machines, or rather past them,\n at the men.\n\n\n \"Hello, Tommy. How's the love life?\" He's not bad at all. Real cute.\n Though not like Pete, oh no.\n\n\n The machines. Riuku prodded at her thoughts, wishing he could\n influence them, wishing that just for a moment he could see, hear,\n feel,\nthink\nas she would never think.", "Don't they ever think of anything but their kids? Alice thought. She\n stopped listening to them. She heard Pete's voice again, husky and\n sending little chills all through her, and his face came between her\n and the plug and the white green wire she was soldering. His face,\n with those blue eyes that went right through a girl and that little\n scar that quirked up the corner of his mouth....\n\n\n \"Oh, oh,\" Alice said suddenly. \"I've got solder on the outside of the\n pin.\" She looked around for the alcohol.\n\n\n Riuku probed. Her thoughts were easy enough to read, but just try to\n translate them into anything useful.... He probed deeper. The plugs\n she was soldering. He could get a good picture of them, of the wires,\n of the harness lacing that Coralie was doing. But it meant nothing.\n They could be making anything. Radios, monitor units, sound equipment.", "Her round, smooth face looked up at him, wide-eyed and full-lipped.\n She had no worry wrinkles like Susan's, no mouth pulled down at the\n corners like Susan's, and under that shapeless coverall....\n\n\n \"Sure, baby, I'm glad you did it,\" Pete Ganley said huskily.\n\n\n Riuku was glad too, the next afternoon when the swing shift started\n pouring through the gates.\n\n\n It was easy, once he'd found her. He had tested hundreds, all\n shielded, some almost accessible to him, but none vulnerable enough.\n Then this one came. The shield was so far down that contact was almost\n easy. Painful, tiring, but not really difficult. He could feel her\n momentary sense of alarm, of nausea, and then he was through,\n integrated with her, his thoughts at home with her thoughts.\n\n\n He rested, inside her mind.", "The plant. The Restricted Area. The useless secret of Earth's now\n unneeded weapon. Alice Hendricks glancing past it, at the spot welding\n machine, at Tommy.\n\n\n \"How's the love life?\"\n\n\n \"You really interested in finding out, Alice?\"\n\n\n \"Well—maybe—\"\n\n\n And Riuku gibbered unheard in her mind.", "\"Riuku!\"\n\n\n Riuku prodded. Calm down, you fool. You're not gaining anything this\n way. Calm down, so I can get out of here....\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stopped yelling abruptly.\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Susan said. \"Pete, your taste in women gets worse\n each time. I don't know why I always take you back.\"\n\n\n \"I can explain everything.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete,\" Alice Hendricks whispered. \"Petey, you're not—\"\n\n\n \"Sure he is,\" Susan Ganley said. \"He's coming with me. The nice\n detectives will take you home, dear. But I don't think you'd better\n try anything with them—they're not your type. They're single.\"", "The line. Alice's nervousness....\nOh, oh, there's that guy with the\n meter—the one from maintenance. What's he want?\n\"Whaddya mean, my shield's low? How could it be?\"\n... If he checks\n the tag I'll be fired for sure. It's a lot of nonsense anyway. The\n enemy is everywhere, they keep telling us. Whoever saw one of them?\n\"No, honest, I didn't notice anything. Can I help it if.... It's okay,\n huh? It'll pass....\"\n\n\n Down to fifteen per cent, the guy said. Well, that's safe, I guess.\n Whew.\n\n\n \"Oh, hello, Paula. Whatcha talking about, what am I doing here\n tonight? Shut up....\"\n\n\n And then, in the midst of her thoughts, the pain, driving deep into\n Riuku, twisting at him, wrenching at him, until there was no\n consciousness of anything at all.", "She poured two drinks, neat, and he swallowed his with one impatient\n gulp. She poured him another.\nRiuku prodded. The drink made his job easier. Alice's thoughts calmed,\n swirled away from Susan and what am I going to do and why didn't I\n pick up with some single guy, anyway? A single guy, like Tommy maybe.\n Tommy and his spot welder, over there by the Restricted Area. The\n Restricted Area....\n\n\n \"Pete.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, baby?\"\n\n\n \"How come they let so much voltage loose in the plant, so we can't\n even go over in the Restricted Area?\"\n\n\n \"Whatever made you think of that?\" He laughed suddenly. He turned to\n her, still laughing. He was the old Pete again, she thought, with his\n face happy and his mouth quirked up at the corner. \"Voltage loose ...\n oh, baby, baby. Don't you know what that is?\"", "Sitting beside him in the copter.\nAll alone up here. Real romantic,\n like something on the video. But I shouldn't with him married, and all\n that. It's not right. But it's different, with Susan such a mean\n thing. Poor Petey....\nRiuku prodded. He found it so much easier since the Shielding boost.\n If only these Earthmen were more telepathic, so that they could be\n controlled directly. Still, perhaps with this new integration he could\n accomplish the same results. He prodded again.\n\n\n \"Pete,\" Alice said suddenly. \"What are we working on, anyway?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, working on?\" He frowned at her.\n\n\n \"At the plant. All I ever do is sit there soldering plugs, and no one\n ever tells me what for.\"\n\n\n \"Course not. You're not supposed to talk about any part of the job\n except your own. You know that. The slip of a lip—\"", "\"What's the matter, Riuku? Why don't you come? Have the police caught\n you?\"\n\n\n The others were fleeing, getting farther away even as he listened to\n Nagor's call. Contact was hard to maintain now; he could feel\n communication fading.\n\n\n \"Riuku, if you don't come now....\"\n\n\n He fought, but Alice's thoughts were still with him; Alice's tears\n still kept bringing him back into full awareness of her.\n\n\n \"Riuku!\"\n\n\n \"I—I can't!\"\n\n\n The Shielding boost, that had integrated him so completely with Alice\n Hendricks, would never let him go.\n\n\n \"Oh, Petey, I've lost you....\"\n\n\n And Nagor's sad farewell slipped completely out of phase, leaving him\n alone, with her.", "...\nPete. Gee, he must have got home awful late last night. Wonder\n what Susan said to him. Why does he keep taking her lip, anyway?\nRiuku waited. He prodded. He understood the Restricted Area as she\n understood it—which was not at all. He found out some things about\n the 731 plugs—that a lot of them were real crummy ones the fool day\n shift girls had set up wrong, and besides she'd rather solder on the\n 717's any day. He got her talking about the weapon again, and he found\n out what the other girls thought about it.\n\n\n Nothing.\n\n\n Except where else could you get twelve-fifty an hour soldering?\n\n\n She was stretched out on the couch in the restroom lobby taking a\n short nap—on company time, old Liverlips being tied up with the new\n girls down at the other end of the line—when Riuku finally managed to\n call Nagor again.", "Riuku listened to her half of the conversation. Stupid Earthman. If\n only she'd start thinking about the job. Or if only his contact with\n her were better. If he could use her sense perceptions, see through\n her eyes, hear through her ears, feel through her fingers, then\n everything would be easy. But he couldn't. All he could do was read\n her thoughts. Earth thoughts at that....\n... The time clock. Where's my card? Oh, here it is. Only 3:57. Why\n did I have to hurry so? I had lots of time....\n\"Why, Mary, how nice you look today. That's a new hairdo, isn't it? A\n permanent? Yeah, what kind?\"\n... What a microbe! Looks like pink", "\"Oh, Alice, you're as bad as—look, baby, don't you see? It would be\n awful for you. All the publicity, the things she'd call you, maybe\n even in the papers....\"\n\n\n He was staring straight ahead, his hands locked about the controls. He\n was sort of—well, distant. Not her Petey any more. Someone else's\n Pete. Susan's Pete....\n\n\n \"I think we should be more careful,\" he said.\n\n\n Riuku twisted his way through her thoughts, tried to push them\n down....\nDoes he love me, he's got to love me, sure he does, he just\n doesn't want me to get hurt....\nAnd far away, almost completely out of phase, Nagor's call. \"Riuku,\n another ship's gone. You'd better come back. Bring what you've learned\n so far and we can withdraw from the system and maybe piece it\n together....\"", "Riuku cursed the bisexual species in their own language.\n\n\n \"Riuku!\" Nagor's call was harsh, urgent. \"You've got to find out. We\n haven't much time. We lost three more ships today, and there wasn't a\n sign of danger. No Earthman nearby, no force fields, nothing. You've\n got to find out why.\" Those ships just disappeared.\n\n\n Riuku forced his way up through the erotic dreams of Alice Hendricks.\n \"I know a little,\" he said. \"They damp their thought waves somehow,\n and keep us from spotting the Corcoran field.\"\n\n\n \"Corcoran field? What's that?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\" Alice's thoughts washed over him, pulling him back\n into complete integration, away from Nagor, into a medley of heroic\n Petes with gleaming eyes and clutching hands and good little Alices\n pushing them away—for the moment.", "He struggled back. He was confused, and there was blankness around\n him, and for a moment he thought he'd lost contact altogether. Then he\n came into focus again. Alice's thoughts were clearer than ever\n suddenly. He could feel her emotions; they were a part of him now. He\n smiled. The Shielding boost had helped him. Integration—much more\n complete integration than he had ever known before.\n\n\n \"But Pete, honey,\" Alice said. \"What did you come over to the gate\n for? You shouldn't of done it.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? I wanted to see you.\"\n\n\n \"What if one of Susan's pals sees us?\"", "She was walking down the aisle to her station now. A procession of\n names:\nMaisie, and Edith, and that fat slob Natalie, and if Jean\n Andrews comes around tonight flashing that diamond in my face again,\n I'll—I'll kill her....\n\"Oh hello, Clinton. What do you mean, late? The whistle just blew. Of\n course I'm ready to go to work.\"\nLiverlips, that's what you are. And\n still in that same blue shirt. What a wife you must have. Probably as\n sloppy as you are....\nGood, Riuku thought. Now she'll be working. Now he'd find out whatever\n it was she was doing. Not that it would be important, of course, but\n let him learn what her job was, and what those other girls' jobs were,\n and in a little while he'd have all the data he needed. Maybe even\n before the shift ended tonight, before she went through the Shielding\n boost.", "\"Pete....\" But he wouldn't meet Alice's eyes. And when Susan took his\n arm, he followed her.\n\n\n \"How could you do it, Petey....\" Numb whispers, numb thoughts, over\n and over, but no longer frightened, no longer binding on Riuku.\n\n\n Fools, he thought. Idiotic Earthmen. If it weren't for your ridiculous\n reproductive habits I'd have found out everything. As it is....\n \"Nagor, I'm coming! I didn't get anything. This woman—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on then. We're leaving. Right now. There'll be other\n systems.\"\nPetey, Petey, Petey....\nContact thinned as he reached out away from her, toward Nagor, toward\n the ship. He fought his way out through the Shielding, away from her\n and her thoughts and every detestable thing about her. Break free,\n break free....", "Riuku cursed her again, in the lingua franca of a dozen systems.\n Nagor's voice faded. Riuku switched back to English.\nSaturday. Into the plant at 3:58. Jean's diamond again....\nWish it\n would choke her; she's got a horsey enough face for it to. Where's old\n Liverlips? Don't see him around. Might as well go to the restroom for\n a while....\nThat's it, Riuku thought. Get her over past the machine shop, over by\n that Restricted Area. There must be something there we can go on....\n\n\n \"Hello, Tommy,\" Alice Hendricks said. \"How's the love life?\"\n\n\n \"It could be better if someone I know would, uh, cooperate....\"", "He shivered a little, thinking of the boost. He'd survive it, of\n course. He'd be too well integrated with her by then. But it was\n nothing to look forward to.\n\n\n Still, he needn't worry about it. He had the whole shift to find out\n what the weapon was. The whole shift, here inside Alice's mind, inside\n the most closely guarded factory on or under or above the surface of\n the Earth. He settled down and waited, expectantly.\n\n\n Alice Hendricks turned her back on the lead man and looked down the\n work table to her place. The other girls were there already. Lois and\n Marge and Coralie, the other three members of the Plug table, Line 73.\n\n\n \"Hey, how'd you make out?\" Marge said. She glanced around to make sure\n none of the lead men or timekeepers were close enough to overhear her,\n then went on. \"Did you get away with it?\"" ], [ "\"In a little while. Just a little while.\" Stop thinking about Susan,\n you biological schizo. Change the subject. You'll never get anything\n out of that man by having hysterics....\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" Alice cried bitterly, \"you've been leading me on all the\n time. You don't love me. You'd rather have\nher\n!\"\n\n\n \"That's not so. Hell, baby....\"\nHe's angry. He's not even going to kiss me. I'm just cutting my own\n throat when I act like that....\n\"Okay, Pete. I'm sorry. I know it's tough on you. Let's have a drink,\n okay? Still got some in the glove compartment?\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Oh, sure.\"", "\"Sure,\" Alice said. \"And you should of seen Pete's face when I walked\n in.\"\n\n\n She took the soldering iron out of her locker, plugged it in, and\n reached out for the pan of 731 wires. \"You know, it's funny. Pete's\n not so good looking, and he's sort of a careless dresser and all that,\n but oh, what he does to me.\" She filled the 731 plug with solder and\n reached for the white, black, red wire.\n\n\n \"You'd better watch out,\" Lois said. \"Or Susan's going to be doing\n something to you.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, her.\" Alice touched the tip of the iron to the solder filled pin,\n worked the wire down into position. \"What can she do? Pete doesn't\n give a damn about her.\"\n\n\n \"He's still living with her, isn't he?\" Lois said.", "...\nPete. Gee, he must have got home awful late last night. Wonder\n what Susan said to him. Why does he keep taking her lip, anyway?\nRiuku waited. He prodded. He understood the Restricted Area as she\n understood it—which was not at all. He found out some things about\n the 731 plugs—that a lot of them were real crummy ones the fool day\n shift girls had set up wrong, and besides she'd rather solder on the\n 717's any day. He got her talking about the weapon again, and he found\n out what the other girls thought about it.\n\n\n Nothing.\n\n\n Except where else could you get twelve-fifty an hour soldering?\n\n\n She was stretched out on the couch in the restroom lobby taking a\n short nap—on company time, old Liverlips being tied up with the new\n girls down at the other end of the line—when Riuku finally managed to\n call Nagor again.", "She poured two drinks, neat, and he swallowed his with one impatient\n gulp. She poured him another.\nRiuku prodded. The drink made his job easier. Alice's thoughts calmed,\n swirled away from Susan and what am I going to do and why didn't I\n pick up with some single guy, anyway? A single guy, like Tommy maybe.\n Tommy and his spot welder, over there by the Restricted Area. The\n Restricted Area....\n\n\n \"Pete.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, baby?\"\n\n\n \"How come they let so much voltage loose in the plant, so we can't\n even go over in the Restricted Area?\"\n\n\n \"Whatever made you think of that?\" He laughed suddenly. He turned to\n her, still laughing. He was the old Pete again, she thought, with his\n face happy and his mouth quirked up at the corner. \"Voltage loose ...\n oh, baby, baby. Don't you know what that is?\"", "Alice Hendricks listened. For some reason she wanted to listen. She\n was really curious about the field. But, gee, how did he expect her to\n understand all that stuff? He sounded like her algebra teacher, or was\n it chemistry? Lord, how she'd hated school. Maybe she shouldn't have\n quit.\n... Corcoran fields. E and IR and nine-space something or other.\n She'd never seen Pete like this before. He looked real different. Sort\n of like a professor, or something. He must be real smart. And\n so—well, not good-looking especially but, well, appealing. Real SA,\n he had....\n\"So that's how it works,\" Pete Ganley said. \"Quite a weapon, against\n them. It wouldn't work on a human being, of course.\" She was staring\n at him dreamy-eyed. He laughed. \"Silly, I bet you haven't understood a\n word I said.\"\n\n\n \"I have too.\"", "\"You didn't expect me to follow you, did you? Didn't it ever occur to\n you that detectives could put a bug in your copter? My, what we've\n been hearing!\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" the detective who was driving said. \"And those pictures we\n took last night weren't bad either.\"\n\n\n \"Susan, I can explain everything....\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you can, Pete. You always try. But as for you—you little—\"\n\n\n Alice ducked down away from her. Pictures. Oh God, what it would make\n her look like. Still, this hag with the pinched up face who couldn't\n hold a man with all the cosmetics in the drugstore to camouflage\n her—she had her nerve, yelling like that.\n\n\n \"Yeah, and I know a lot about you too!\" Alice Hendricks cried.\n\n\n \"Why, let me get my hands on you....\"", "\"Oh, Alice, you're as bad as—look, baby, don't you see? It would be\n awful for you. All the publicity, the things she'd call you, maybe\n even in the papers....\"\n\n\n He was staring straight ahead, his hands locked about the controls. He\n was sort of—well, distant. Not her Petey any more. Someone else's\n Pete. Susan's Pete....\n\n\n \"I think we should be more careful,\" he said.\n\n\n Riuku twisted his way through her thoughts, tried to push them\n down....\nDoes he love me, he's got to love me, sure he does, he just\n doesn't want me to get hurt....\nAnd far away, almost completely out of phase, Nagor's call. \"Riuku,\n another ship's gone. You'd better come back. Bring what you've learned\n so far and we can withdraw from the system and maybe piece it\n together....\"", "Sitting beside him in the copter.\nAll alone up here. Real romantic,\n like something on the video. But I shouldn't with him married, and all\n that. It's not right. But it's different, with Susan such a mean\n thing. Poor Petey....\nRiuku prodded. He found it so much easier since the Shielding boost.\n If only these Earthmen were more telepathic, so that they could be\n controlled directly. Still, perhaps with this new integration he could\n accomplish the same results. He prodded again.\n\n\n \"Pete,\" Alice said suddenly. \"What are we working on, anyway?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, working on?\" He frowned at her.\n\n\n \"At the plant. All I ever do is sit there soldering plugs, and no one\n ever tells me what for.\"\n\n\n \"Course not. You're not supposed to talk about any part of the job\n except your own. You know that. The slip of a lip—\"", "He twisted, trying to pull free of Alice's fear, away from the\n integration of their separate terrors. But he couldn't push her\n thoughts back from his. She was too frightened. He was too frightened.\n The bond held.\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete, Pete, what did you do?\"\n\n\n He didn't answer. He landed the copter, stepped out of it, walked back\n to the other copter that was just dropping down behind him. \"But\n officer, what's the matter?\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks huddled down in the seat, already seeing tomorrow's\n papers, and her picture, and she wasn't really photogenic, either....\n And then, from the other copter, she heard the woman laugh.\n\n\n \"Pete Ganley, you fall for anything, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Susan!\"", "That night after work Pete Ganley was waiting outside the gate again.\n Alice spotted his copter right away, even though he had the lights\n turned way down.\n\n\n \"Gee, Pete, I didn't think....\"\n\n\n \"Get in. Quick.\"\n\n\n \"What's the matter?\" She climbed in beside him. He didn't answer until\n the copter had lifted itself into the air, away from the factory\n landing lots and the bright overhead lights and the home-bound\n workers.\n\n\n \"It's Susan, who else,\" he said grimly. \"She was really sounding off\n today. She kept saying she had a lot of evidence and I'd better be\n careful. And, well, I sure didn't want you turning up at the bar\n tonight of all nights.\"\n\n\n He didn't sound like Pete.\n\n\n \"Why?\" Alice said. \"Are you afraid she'll divorce you?\"", "\"Riuku!\"\n\n\n Riuku prodded. Calm down, you fool. You're not gaining anything this\n way. Calm down, so I can get out of here....\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stopped yelling abruptly.\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Susan said. \"Pete, your taste in women gets worse\n each time. I don't know why I always take you back.\"\n\n\n \"I can explain everything.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete,\" Alice Hendricks whispered. \"Petey, you're not—\"\n\n\n \"Sure he is,\" Susan Ganley said. \"He's coming with me. The nice\n detectives will take you home, dear. But I don't think you'd better\n try anything with them—they're not your type. They're single.\"", "Alice shrugged....\nWhat a mealy-mouthed little snip Lois could be,\n sometimes. You'd think to hear her that she was better than any of\n them, and luckier too, with her Joe and the kids. What a laugh! Joe\n was probably the only guy who'd ever looked at her, and she'd hooked\n him right out of school, and now with three kids in five years and her\n working nights....\nAlice finished soldering the first row of wires in the plug and\n started in on the second. So old Liverlips thought she wasted time,\n did he? Well, she'd show him. She'd get out her sixteen plugs tonight.\n\n\n \"Junior kept me up all night last night,\" Lois said. \"He's cutting a\n tooth.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Coralie said, \"It's pretty rough at that age. I remember right\n after Mike was born....\"", "\"Pete....\" But he wouldn't meet Alice's eyes. And when Susan took his\n arm, he followed her.\n\n\n \"How could you do it, Petey....\" Numb whispers, numb thoughts, over\n and over, but no longer frightened, no longer binding on Riuku.\n\n\n Fools, he thought. Idiotic Earthmen. If it weren't for your ridiculous\n reproductive habits I'd have found out everything. As it is....\n \"Nagor, I'm coming! I didn't get anything. This woman—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on then. We're leaving. Right now. There'll be other\n systems.\"\nPetey, Petey, Petey....\nContact thinned as he reached out away from her, toward Nagor, toward\n the ship. He fought his way out through the Shielding, away from her\n and her thoughts and every detestable thing about her. Break free,\n break free....", "Why, he asked himself irritably, couldn't those scientists figure out\n some way to keep the shields up longer than a week? Or else why didn't\n they have boosting night the same for all departments? He had to stay\n late every Friday and Alice every Thursday, and all the time there was\n Susan at home ready to jump him if he wasn't in at a reasonable\n time....\n\n\n \"Surprised, Pete?\" Alice Hendricks said at his elbow.\n\n\n He swung about, grinned at her. \"Am I? You said it. And here I was\n about to go. I never thought you'd make it before one.\" His grin faded\n a little. \"How'd you do it? Sweet-talk one of the guards into letting\n you in at the head of the line?\"", "Alice followed his gaze. She giggled. \"It was easy,\" she said. \"The\n guards don't do more than glance at us, you know. And everyone who's\n supposed to go through Shielding on Thursday has the department number\n stamped on a yellow background. So all I did was make a red\n background, like yours, and slip it on in the restroom at Clean-up\n time.\"\n\n\n \"But Alice....\" Pete Ganley swallowed his beer and signaled for\n another. \"This is serious. You've got to keep the shields up. The\n enemy is everywhere. Why, right now, one could be probing you.\"\n\n\n \"So what? The dial isn't down to Danger yet. And tomorrow I'll just\n put the red tag back on over the yellow one and go through Shielding\n in the same line with you. They won't notice.\" She giggled again. \"I\n thought it was smart, Petey. You oughta think so too. You know why I\n did it, don't you?\"", "\"So what? I'm getting tired of checking in every night, like a baby.\n Besides, one of her pals did see us, last night, at the bar.\"\nFear. What'll she do? Susan's a hellcat. I know she is. But maybe\n Pete'll get really sick and tired of her. He looks it. He looks mad.\n I'd sure hate to have him mad at me....\n\"Let's go for a spin, baby. Out in the suburbs somewhere. How about\n it?\"\n\n\n \"Well—why sure, Pete....\"", "She looked past him, toward the corner where the big panels were with\n all the dials and the meters and the chart that was almost like the\n kind they drew pictures of earthquakes on. What was it for, anyway?\n And why couldn't anyone go over to it except those longhairs? High\n voltage her foot....\n\n\n \"What're you looking at, Alice?\" Tommy said.\n\n\n \"Oh, that.\" She pointed. \"Wonder what it's for? It doesn't look like\n much of anything, really.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't know. I've got something better to look at.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\nyou\n!\"\n\n\n Compared to Pete, he didn't have anything, not anything at all.", "Don't they ever think of anything but their kids? Alice thought. She\n stopped listening to them. She heard Pete's voice again, husky and\n sending little chills all through her, and his face came between her\n and the plug and the white green wire she was soldering. His face,\n with those blue eyes that went right through a girl and that little\n scar that quirked up the corner of his mouth....\n\n\n \"Oh, oh,\" Alice said suddenly. \"I've got solder on the outside of the\n pin.\" She looked around for the alcohol.\n\n\n Riuku probed. Her thoughts were easy enough to read, but just try to\n translate them into anything useful.... He probed deeper. The plugs\n she was soldering. He could get a good picture of them, of the wires,\n of the harness lacing that Coralie was doing. But it meant nothing.\n They could be making anything. Radios, monitor units, sound equipment.", "He struggled back. He was confused, and there was blankness around\n him, and for a moment he thought he'd lost contact altogether. Then he\n came into focus again. Alice's thoughts were clearer than ever\n suddenly. He could feel her emotions; they were a part of him now. He\n smiled. The Shielding boost had helped him. Integration—much more\n complete integration than he had ever known before.\n\n\n \"But Pete, honey,\" Alice said. \"What did you come over to the gate\n for? You shouldn't of done it.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? I wanted to see you.\"\n\n\n \"What if one of Susan's pals sees us?\"", "She was walking down the aisle to her station now. A procession of\n names:\nMaisie, and Edith, and that fat slob Natalie, and if Jean\n Andrews comes around tonight flashing that diamond in my face again,\n I'll—I'll kill her....\n\"Oh hello, Clinton. What do you mean, late? The whistle just blew. Of\n course I'm ready to go to work.\"\nLiverlips, that's what you are. And\n still in that same blue shirt. What a wife you must have. Probably as\n sloppy as you are....\nGood, Riuku thought. Now she'll be working. Now he'd find out whatever\n it was she was doing. Not that it would be important, of course, but\n let him learn what her job was, and what those other girls' jobs were,\n and in a little while he'd have all the data he needed. Maybe even\n before the shift ended tonight, before she went through the Shielding\n boost." ], [ "\"Easily. It's the right one. The parking lot attendant knows there's a\n new weapon being produced in there. The waitress at the Jumbo Burger\n Grill across the street knows it. Everybody I reached knows it. But\n not one knows anything about what it is.\"\n\n\n Nagor looked out through the ports of the spaceship, which didn't in\n the least resemble an Earth spaceship, any more than what Nagor\n considered sight resembled the corresponding Earth sense perception.\n He frowned.\n\n\n \"What about the research scientists? We know who some of them are. The\n supervisors? The technicians?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Riuku said flatly. \"They're shielded. Perfectly I can't make\n contact with a single mind down there that has the faintest inkling of\n what's going on. We never should have let them develop the shield.\"\n\n\n \"Have you tried contacting everyone? What about the workers?\"", "Only they weren't. They were making a weapon, and this bit of\n electronic equipment was part of that weapon. What part? What did the\n 731 plug do?\n\n\n Alice Hendricks didn't know. Alice Hendricks didn't care.\n\n\n The first break. Ten minutes away from work. Alice was walking back\n along the aisle that separated Assembly from the men's Machine Shop. A\n chance, perhaps. She was looking at the machines, or rather past them,\n at the men.\n\n\n \"Hello, Tommy. How's the love life?\" He's not bad at all. Real cute.\n Though not like Pete, oh no.\n\n\n The machines. Riuku prodded at her thoughts, wishing he could\n influence them, wishing that just for a moment he could see, hear,\n feel,\nthink\nas she would never think.", "He shivered a little, thinking of the boost. He'd survive it, of\n course. He'd be too well integrated with her by then. But it was\n nothing to look forward to.\n\n\n Still, he needn't worry about it. He had the whole shift to find out\n what the weapon was. The whole shift, here inside Alice's mind, inside\n the most closely guarded factory on or under or above the surface of\n the Earth. He settled down and waited, expectantly.\n\n\n Alice Hendricks turned her back on the lead man and looked down the\n work table to her place. The other girls were there already. Lois and\n Marge and Coralie, the other three members of the Plug table, Line 73.\n\n\n \"Hey, how'd you make out?\" Marge said. She glanced around to make sure\n none of the lead men or timekeepers were close enough to overhear her,\n then went on. \"Did you get away with it?\"", "The plant. The Restricted Area. The useless secret of Earth's now\n unneeded weapon. Alice Hendricks glancing past it, at the spot welding\n machine, at Tommy.\n\n\n \"How's the love life?\"\n\n\n \"You really interested in finding out, Alice?\"\n\n\n \"Well—maybe—\"\n\n\n And Riuku gibbered unheard in her mind.", "...\nPete. Gee, he must have got home awful late last night. Wonder\n what Susan said to him. Why does he keep taking her lip, anyway?\nRiuku waited. He prodded. He understood the Restricted Area as she\n understood it—which was not at all. He found out some things about\n the 731 plugs—that a lot of them were real crummy ones the fool day\n shift girls had set up wrong, and besides she'd rather solder on the\n 717's any day. He got her talking about the weapon again, and he found\n out what the other girls thought about it.\n\n\n Nothing.\n\n\n Except where else could you get twelve-fifty an hour soldering?\n\n\n She was stretched out on the couch in the restroom lobby taking a\n short nap—on company time, old Liverlips being tied up with the new\n girls down at the other end of the line—when Riuku finally managed to\n call Nagor again.", "Transcriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction November 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nTHE VERY SECRET AGENT\nBY MARI WOLF\nIllustrated by Ed Emsh\nPoor Riuku!... Not being a member of the human race, how\n was he supposed to understand what goes on in a woman's mind\n when the male of the same species didn't even know?\nIn their ship just beyond the orbit of Mars the two aliens sat looking\n at each other.\n\n\n \"No,\" Riuku said. \"I haven't had any luck. And I can tell you right\n now that I'm not going to have any, and no one else is going to have\n any either. The Earthmen are too well shielded.\"\n\n\n \"You contacted the factory?\" Nagor asked.", "\"No. What?\"\n\n\n \"That's the control panel for one of the weapons, silly. It's only a\n duplicate, actually—a monitor station. But it's tuned to the\n frequencies of all the ships in this sector and—\"\n\n\n She listened. She wanted to listen. She had to want to listen, now.\n\n\n \"Nagor, I'm getting it,\" Riuku called. \"I'll bring it all back with\n me. Just a minute and I'll have it.\"\n\n\n \"How does it work, honey?\" Alice Hendricks said.\n\n\n \"You really want to know? Okay. Now the Corcoran field is generated\n between the ships and areas like that one, only a lot more powerful,\n by—\"\n\n\n \"It's coming through now, Nagor.\"", "Sitting beside him in the copter.\nAll alone up here. Real romantic,\n like something on the video. But I shouldn't with him married, and all\n that. It's not right. But it's different, with Susan such a mean\n thing. Poor Petey....\nRiuku prodded. He found it so much easier since the Shielding boost.\n If only these Earthmen were more telepathic, so that they could be\n controlled directly. Still, perhaps with this new integration he could\n accomplish the same results. He prodded again.\n\n\n \"Pete,\" Alice said suddenly. \"What are we working on, anyway?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, working on?\" He frowned at her.\n\n\n \"At the plant. All I ever do is sit there soldering plugs, and no one\n ever tells me what for.\"\n\n\n \"Course not. You're not supposed to talk about any part of the job\n except your own. You know that. The slip of a lip—\"", "Alice Hendricks listened. For some reason she wanted to listen. She\n was really curious about the field. But, gee, how did he expect her to\n understand all that stuff? He sounded like her algebra teacher, or was\n it chemistry? Lord, how she'd hated school. Maybe she shouldn't have\n quit.\n... Corcoran fields. E and IR and nine-space something or other.\n She'd never seen Pete like this before. He looked real different. Sort\n of like a professor, or something. He must be real smart. And\n so—well, not good-looking especially but, well, appealing. Real SA,\n he had....\n\"So that's how it works,\" Pete Ganley said. \"Quite a weapon, against\n them. It wouldn't work on a human being, of course.\" She was staring\n at him dreamy-eyed. He laughed. \"Silly, I bet you haven't understood a\n word I said.\"\n\n\n \"I have too.\"", "Alice followed his gaze. She giggled. \"It was easy,\" she said. \"The\n guards don't do more than glance at us, you know. And everyone who's\n supposed to go through Shielding on Thursday has the department number\n stamped on a yellow background. So all I did was make a red\n background, like yours, and slip it on in the restroom at Clean-up\n time.\"\n\n\n \"But Alice....\" Pete Ganley swallowed his beer and signaled for\n another. \"This is serious. You've got to keep the shields up. The\n enemy is everywhere. Why, right now, one could be probing you.\"\n\n\n \"So what? The dial isn't down to Danger yet. And tomorrow I'll just\n put the red tag back on over the yellow one and go through Shielding\n in the same line with you. They won't notice.\" She giggled again. \"I\n thought it was smart, Petey. You oughta think so too. You know why I\n did it, don't you?\"", "Riuku cursed her again, in the lingua franca of a dozen systems.\n Nagor's voice faded. Riuku switched back to English.\nSaturday. Into the plant at 3:58. Jean's diamond again....\nWish it\n would choke her; she's got a horsey enough face for it to. Where's old\n Liverlips? Don't see him around. Might as well go to the restroom for\n a while....\nThat's it, Riuku thought. Get her over past the machine shop, over by\n that Restricted Area. There must be something there we can go on....\n\n\n \"Hello, Tommy,\" Alice Hendricks said. \"How's the love life?\"\n\n\n \"It could be better if someone I know would, uh, cooperate....\"", "She looked past him, toward the corner where the big panels were with\n all the dials and the meters and the chart that was almost like the\n kind they drew pictures of earthquakes on. What was it for, anyway?\n And why couldn't anyone go over to it except those longhairs? High\n voltage her foot....\n\n\n \"What're you looking at, Alice?\" Tommy said.\n\n\n \"Oh, that.\" She pointed. \"Wonder what it's for? It doesn't look like\n much of anything, really.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't know. I've got something better to look at.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\nyou\n!\"\n\n\n Compared to Pete, he didn't have anything, not anything at all.", "The machines were—machines. That big funny one where Ned works, and\n Tommy's spot welder, and over in the corner where the superintendent\n is—he's a snappy dresser, tie and everything.\n\n\n The corner. Restricted area. Can't go over. High voltage or\n something....\n\n\n Her thoughts slid away from the restricted area. Should she go out for\n lunch or eat off the sandwich machine? And Riuku curled inside her\n mind and cursed her with his rapidly growing Earthwoman's vocabulary.", "\"It's a simple enough gadget,\" Pete Ganley said. \"A new type of force\n field weapon that the enemy can't spot until it hits them. They don't\n even know there's an Earth ship within a million miles, until\nBingo\n!...\"\n\n\n She drank it in, and in her mind Riuku did too. Wonderful integration,\n wonderful. Partial thought control. And now, he'd learn the secret....\n\n\n \"You really want to know how it works?\" Pete Ganley said. When she\n nodded he couldn't help grinning. \"Well, it's analogous to the field\n set up by animal neurones, in a way. You've just got to damp that\n field, and not only damp it but blot it out, so that the frequency\n shows nothing at all there, and then—well, that's where those\n Corcoran assemblies you're soldering on come in. You produce the\n field....\"", "She was walking down the aisle to her station now. A procession of\n names:\nMaisie, and Edith, and that fat slob Natalie, and if Jean\n Andrews comes around tonight flashing that diamond in my face again,\n I'll—I'll kill her....\n\"Oh hello, Clinton. What do you mean, late? The whistle just blew. Of\n course I'm ready to go to work.\"\nLiverlips, that's what you are. And\n still in that same blue shirt. What a wife you must have. Probably as\n sloppy as you are....\nGood, Riuku thought. Now she'll be working. Now he'd find out whatever\n it was she was doing. Not that it would be important, of course, but\n let him learn what her job was, and what those other girls' jobs were,\n and in a little while he'd have all the data he needed. Maybe even\n before the shift ended tonight, before she went through the Shielding\n boost.", "Don't they ever think of anything but their kids? Alice thought. She\n stopped listening to them. She heard Pete's voice again, husky and\n sending little chills all through her, and his face came between her\n and the plug and the white green wire she was soldering. His face,\n with those blue eyes that went right through a girl and that little\n scar that quirked up the corner of his mouth....\n\n\n \"Oh, oh,\" Alice said suddenly. \"I've got solder on the outside of the\n pin.\" She looked around for the alcohol.\n\n\n Riuku probed. Her thoughts were easy enough to read, but just try to\n translate them into anything useful.... He probed deeper. The plugs\n she was soldering. He could get a good picture of them, of the wires,\n of the harness lacing that Coralie was doing. But it meant nothing.\n They could be making anything. Radios, monitor units, sound equipment.", "\"Can cost Earth a ship. I know. Quit spouting poster talk at me, Pete\n Ganley. The enemy isn't even human. And there aren't any around here.\"\n\n\n Pete looked over at her. She was pouting, the upper lip drawn under\n the lower. Someone must have told her that was cute. Well, so what—it\n was cute.\n\n\n \"What makes you think I know anything more than you do?\" he said.\n\n\n \"Well, gee.\" She looked up at him, so near to her in the moonlight\n that she wondered why she wanted to talk about the plant anyway.\n \"You're in Final Assembly, aren't you? You check the whatsits before\n they go out.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" he said. No harm in telling her. No spies now, not in this\n kind of war. Besides, she was too dumb to know anything.", "At the end of the shift he had learned nothing. Nothing about the\n weapon, that is. He had found out a good deal about the sex life of\n Genus Homo—information that made him even more glad than before that\n his was a one-sexed race.\nWith work over and tools put away and Alice in the restroom gleefully\n thinking about the red Friday night tag she was slipping onto her ID\n badge, he was as far from success as ever. For a moment he considered\n leaving her, looking for another subject. But he'd probably not be\n able to find one. No, the only thing to do was stay with her, curl\n deep in her mind and go through the Shielding boost, and later on....", "The line. Alice's nervousness....\nOh, oh, there's that guy with the\n meter—the one from maintenance. What's he want?\n\"Whaddya mean, my shield's low? How could it be?\"\n... If he checks\n the tag I'll be fired for sure. It's a lot of nonsense anyway. The\n enemy is everywhere, they keep telling us. Whoever saw one of them?\n\"No, honest, I didn't notice anything. Can I help it if.... It's okay,\n huh? It'll pass....\"\n\n\n Down to fifteen per cent, the guy said. Well, that's safe, I guess.\n Whew.\n\n\n \"Oh, hello, Paula. Whatcha talking about, what am I doing here\n tonight? Shut up....\"\n\n\n And then, in the midst of her thoughts, the pain, driving deep into\n Riuku, twisting at him, wrenching at him, until there was no\n consciousness of anything at all.", "\"Shielded. All ten thousand of them. Of course I haven't checked all\n of them yet, but—\"\n\n\n \"Do it,\" Nagor said grimly. \"We've got to find out what that weapon\n is. Or else get out of this solar system.\"\n\n\n Riuku sighed. \"I'll try,\" he said.\nSomeone put another dollar in the juke box, and the theremins started\n in on Mare Indrium Mary for the tenth time since Pete Ganley had come\n into the bar. \"Aw shut up,\" he said, wishing there was some way to\n turn them off. Twelve-ten. Alice got off work at Houston's at twelve.\n She ought to be here by now. She would be, if it weren't Thursday.\n Shield boosting night for her." ], [ "\"Easily. It's the right one. The parking lot attendant knows there's a\n new weapon being produced in there. The waitress at the Jumbo Burger\n Grill across the street knows it. Everybody I reached knows it. But\n not one knows anything about what it is.\"\n\n\n Nagor looked out through the ports of the spaceship, which didn't in\n the least resemble an Earth spaceship, any more than what Nagor\n considered sight resembled the corresponding Earth sense perception.\n He frowned.\n\n\n \"What about the research scientists? We know who some of them are. The\n supervisors? The technicians?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Riuku said flatly. \"They're shielded. Perfectly I can't make\n contact with a single mind down there that has the faintest inkling of\n what's going on. We never should have let them develop the shield.\"\n\n\n \"Have you tried contacting everyone? What about the workers?\"", "\"—a very simple power source, once you get the basics of it. You—oh,\n oh!\" He grabbed her arm. \"Duck, Alice!\"\n\n\n A spotlight flashed out of the darkness, turned on them, outlined\n them. A siren whirred briefly, and then another copter pulled up\n beside them and a loudspeaker blared tinnily.\n\n\n \"Okay, bud, pull down to the landing lane.\"\n\n\n The police.\n\n\n Police. Fear, all the way through Alice's thoughts, all the way\n through Riuku. Police. Earth law. That meant—it must mean he'd been\n discovered, that they had some other means of protection besides the\n Shielding....\n\n\n \"Nagor! I've been discovered!\"\n\n\n \"Come away then, you fool!\"", "\"Pete....\" But he wouldn't meet Alice's eyes. And when Susan took his\n arm, he followed her.\n\n\n \"How could you do it, Petey....\" Numb whispers, numb thoughts, over\n and over, but no longer frightened, no longer binding on Riuku.\n\n\n Fools, he thought. Idiotic Earthmen. If it weren't for your ridiculous\n reproductive habits I'd have found out everything. As it is....\n \"Nagor, I'm coming! I didn't get anything. This woman—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on then. We're leaving. Right now. There'll be other\n systems.\"\nPetey, Petey, Petey....\nContact thinned as he reached out away from her, toward Nagor, toward\n the ship. He fought his way out through the Shielding, away from her\n and her thoughts and every detestable thing about her. Break free,\n break free....", "Transcriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction November 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nTHE VERY SECRET AGENT\nBY MARI WOLF\nIllustrated by Ed Emsh\nPoor Riuku!... Not being a member of the human race, how\n was he supposed to understand what goes on in a woman's mind\n when the male of the same species didn't even know?\nIn their ship just beyond the orbit of Mars the two aliens sat looking\n at each other.\n\n\n \"No,\" Riuku said. \"I haven't had any luck. And I can tell you right\n now that I'm not going to have any, and no one else is going to have\n any either. The Earthmen are too well shielded.\"\n\n\n \"You contacted the factory?\" Nagor asked.", "\"No. What?\"\n\n\n \"That's the control panel for one of the weapons, silly. It's only a\n duplicate, actually—a monitor station. But it's tuned to the\n frequencies of all the ships in this sector and—\"\n\n\n She listened. She wanted to listen. She had to want to listen, now.\n\n\n \"Nagor, I'm getting it,\" Riuku called. \"I'll bring it all back with\n me. Just a minute and I'll have it.\"\n\n\n \"How does it work, honey?\" Alice Hendricks said.\n\n\n \"You really want to know? Okay. Now the Corcoran field is generated\n between the ships and areas like that one, only a lot more powerful,\n by—\"\n\n\n \"It's coming through now, Nagor.\"", "\"But surely you can find out through the girl,\" Nagor insisted from\n far away, almost out of phase altogether.\n\n\n \"No, Pete!\" Alice Hendricks said aloud.\n\n\n \"Riuku, you're the only one of us with any possible sort of contact.\n You've got to find out, if we're to stay here at all.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Alice Hendricks thought, \"maybe....\"", "\"Have you found out anything, Riuku?\"\n\n\n \"Not yet.\"\n\n\n Silence. Then: \"We've lost another ship. Maybe you'd better turn her\n loose and come on back. It looks as if we'll have to run for it, after\n all.\"\n\n\n Defeat. The long, interstellar search for another race, a race less\n technologically advanced than this one, and all because of a stupid\n Earth female.\n\n\n \"Not yet, Nagor,\" he said. \"Her boy friend knows. I'll find out. I'll\n make her listen to him.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Nagor said doubtfully. \"All right. But hurry. We haven't much\n time at all.\"\n\n\n \"I'll hurry,\" Riuku promised. \"I'll be back with you tonight.\"", "\"Oh, Alice, you're as bad as—look, baby, don't you see? It would be\n awful for you. All the publicity, the things she'd call you, maybe\n even in the papers....\"\n\n\n He was staring straight ahead, his hands locked about the controls. He\n was sort of—well, distant. Not her Petey any more. Someone else's\n Pete. Susan's Pete....\n\n\n \"I think we should be more careful,\" he said.\n\n\n Riuku twisted his way through her thoughts, tried to push them\n down....\nDoes he love me, he's got to love me, sure he does, he just\n doesn't want me to get hurt....\nAnd far away, almost completely out of phase, Nagor's call. \"Riuku,\n another ship's gone. You'd better come back. Bring what you've learned\n so far and we can withdraw from the system and maybe piece it\n together....\"", "Riuku cursed the bisexual species in their own language.\n\n\n \"Riuku!\" Nagor's call was harsh, urgent. \"You've got to find out. We\n haven't much time. We lost three more ships today, and there wasn't a\n sign of danger. No Earthman nearby, no force fields, nothing. You've\n got to find out why.\" Those ships just disappeared.\n\n\n Riuku forced his way up through the erotic dreams of Alice Hendricks.\n \"I know a little,\" he said. \"They damp their thought waves somehow,\n and keep us from spotting the Corcoran field.\"\n\n\n \"Corcoran field? What's that?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\" Alice's thoughts washed over him, pulling him back\n into complete integration, away from Nagor, into a medley of heroic\n Petes with gleaming eyes and clutching hands and good little Alices\n pushing them away—for the moment.", "\"Shielded. All ten thousand of them. Of course I haven't checked all\n of them yet, but—\"\n\n\n \"Do it,\" Nagor said grimly. \"We've got to find out what that weapon\n is. Or else get out of this solar system.\"\n\n\n Riuku sighed. \"I'll try,\" he said.\nSomeone put another dollar in the juke box, and the theremins started\n in on Mare Indrium Mary for the tenth time since Pete Ganley had come\n into the bar. \"Aw shut up,\" he said, wishing there was some way to\n turn them off. Twelve-ten. Alice got off work at Houston's at twelve.\n She ought to be here by now. She would be, if it weren't Thursday.\n Shield boosting night for her.", "\"What's the matter, Riuku? Why don't you come? Have the police caught\n you?\"\n\n\n The others were fleeing, getting farther away even as he listened to\n Nagor's call. Contact was hard to maintain now; he could feel\n communication fading.\n\n\n \"Riuku, if you don't come now....\"\n\n\n He fought, but Alice's thoughts were still with him; Alice's tears\n still kept bringing him back into full awareness of her.\n\n\n \"Riuku!\"\n\n\n \"I—I can't!\"\n\n\n The Shielding boost, that had integrated him so completely with Alice\n Hendricks, would never let him go.\n\n\n \"Oh, Petey, I've lost you....\"\n\n\n And Nagor's sad farewell slipped completely out of phase, leaving him\n alone, with her.", "\"Liar.\" He locked the automatic pilot on the copter and held out his\n arms. \"Come here, you.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Petey....\"\n\n\n Who cared about the weapon? He was right, even if she wouldn't admit\n it. She hadn't even listened, hardly. She hadn't understood.\n\n\n And neither had Riuku.\nRiuku waited until she'd fallen soundly asleep that night before he\n tried contacting Nagor. He'd learned nothing useful. He'd picked up\n nothing in her mind except more thoughts of Pete, and gee, maybe\n someday they'd get married, if he only had guts enough to tell Susan\n where to get off....", "But she was asleep at last. Riuku was free enough of her thoughts to\n break contact, partially of course, since if he broke it completely he\n wouldn't be able to get back through the Shielding. It was hard enough\n to reach out through it. He sent a painful probing feeler out into\n space, to the spot where Nagor and the others waited for his report.\n\n\n \"Nagor....\"\n\n\n \"Riuku? Is that you?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I've got a contact. A girl. But I haven't learned anything yet\n that can help us.\"\n\n\n \"Louder, Riuku. I can hardly hear you....\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stirred in her sleep. The dream images slipped through\n her subconscious, almost waking her, beating against Riuku.\n\n\n Pete, baby, you shouldn't be like that....", "The line. Alice's nervousness....\nOh, oh, there's that guy with the\n meter—the one from maintenance. What's he want?\n\"Whaddya mean, my shield's low? How could it be?\"\n... If he checks\n the tag I'll be fired for sure. It's a lot of nonsense anyway. The\n enemy is everywhere, they keep telling us. Whoever saw one of them?\n\"No, honest, I didn't notice anything. Can I help it if.... It's okay,\n huh? It'll pass....\"\n\n\n Down to fifteen per cent, the guy said. Well, that's safe, I guess.\n Whew.\n\n\n \"Oh, hello, Paula. Whatcha talking about, what am I doing here\n tonight? Shut up....\"\n\n\n And then, in the midst of her thoughts, the pain, driving deep into\n Riuku, twisting at him, wrenching at him, until there was no\n consciousness of anything at all.", "The machines were—machines. That big funny one where Ned works, and\n Tommy's spot welder, and over in the corner where the superintendent\n is—he's a snappy dresser, tie and everything.\n\n\n The corner. Restricted area. Can't go over. High voltage or\n something....\n\n\n Her thoughts slid away from the restricted area. Should she go out for\n lunch or eat off the sandwich machine? And Riuku curled inside her\n mind and cursed her with his rapidly growing Earthwoman's vocabulary.", "\"Can cost Earth a ship. I know. Quit spouting poster talk at me, Pete\n Ganley. The enemy isn't even human. And there aren't any around here.\"\n\n\n Pete looked over at her. She was pouting, the upper lip drawn under\n the lower. Someone must have told her that was cute. Well, so what—it\n was cute.\n\n\n \"What makes you think I know anything more than you do?\" he said.\n\n\n \"Well, gee.\" She looked up at him, so near to her in the moonlight\n that she wondered why she wanted to talk about the plant anyway.\n \"You're in Final Assembly, aren't you? You check the whatsits before\n they go out.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" he said. No harm in telling her. No spies now, not in this\n kind of war. Besides, she was too dumb to know anything.", "Riuku cursed her again, in the lingua franca of a dozen systems.\n Nagor's voice faded. Riuku switched back to English.\nSaturday. Into the plant at 3:58. Jean's diamond again....\nWish it\n would choke her; she's got a horsey enough face for it to. Where's old\n Liverlips? Don't see him around. Might as well go to the restroom for\n a while....\nThat's it, Riuku thought. Get her over past the machine shop, over by\n that Restricted Area. There must be something there we can go on....\n\n\n \"Hello, Tommy,\" Alice Hendricks said. \"How's the love life?\"\n\n\n \"It could be better if someone I know would, uh, cooperate....\"", "The plant. The Restricted Area. The useless secret of Earth's now\n unneeded weapon. Alice Hendricks glancing past it, at the spot welding\n machine, at Tommy.\n\n\n \"How's the love life?\"\n\n\n \"You really interested in finding out, Alice?\"\n\n\n \"Well—maybe—\"\n\n\n And Riuku gibbered unheard in her mind.", "Riuku listened to her half of the conversation. Stupid Earthman. If\n only she'd start thinking about the job. Or if only his contact with\n her were better. If he could use her sense perceptions, see through\n her eyes, hear through her ears, feel through her fingers, then\n everything would be easy. But he couldn't. All he could do was read\n her thoughts. Earth thoughts at that....\n... The time clock. Where's my card? Oh, here it is. Only 3:57. Why\n did I have to hurry so? I had lots of time....\n\"Why, Mary, how nice you look today. That's a new hairdo, isn't it? A\n permanent? Yeah, what kind?\"\n... What a microbe! Looks like pink", "Sitting beside him in the copter.\nAll alone up here. Real romantic,\n like something on the video. But I shouldn't with him married, and all\n that. It's not right. But it's different, with Susan such a mean\n thing. Poor Petey....\nRiuku prodded. He found it so much easier since the Shielding boost.\n If only these Earthmen were more telepathic, so that they could be\n controlled directly. Still, perhaps with this new integration he could\n accomplish the same results. He prodded again.\n\n\n \"Pete,\" Alice said suddenly. \"What are we working on, anyway?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, working on?\" He frowned at her.\n\n\n \"At the plant. All I ever do is sit there soldering plugs, and no one\n ever tells me what for.\"\n\n\n \"Course not. You're not supposed to talk about any part of the job\n except your own. You know that. The slip of a lip—\"" ], [ "Only they weren't. They were making a weapon, and this bit of\n electronic equipment was part of that weapon. What part? What did the\n 731 plug do?\n\n\n Alice Hendricks didn't know. Alice Hendricks didn't care.\n\n\n The first break. Ten minutes away from work. Alice was walking back\n along the aisle that separated Assembly from the men's Machine Shop. A\n chance, perhaps. She was looking at the machines, or rather past them,\n at the men.\n\n\n \"Hello, Tommy. How's the love life?\" He's not bad at all. Real cute.\n Though not like Pete, oh no.\n\n\n The machines. Riuku prodded at her thoughts, wishing he could\n influence them, wishing that just for a moment he could see, hear,\n feel,\nthink\nas she would never think.", "He shivered a little, thinking of the boost. He'd survive it, of\n course. He'd be too well integrated with her by then. But it was\n nothing to look forward to.\n\n\n Still, he needn't worry about it. He had the whole shift to find out\n what the weapon was. The whole shift, here inside Alice's mind, inside\n the most closely guarded factory on or under or above the surface of\n the Earth. He settled down and waited, expectantly.\n\n\n Alice Hendricks turned her back on the lead man and looked down the\n work table to her place. The other girls were there already. Lois and\n Marge and Coralie, the other three members of the Plug table, Line 73.\n\n\n \"Hey, how'd you make out?\" Marge said. She glanced around to make sure\n none of the lead men or timekeepers were close enough to overhear her,\n then went on. \"Did you get away with it?\"", "The plant. The Restricted Area. The useless secret of Earth's now\n unneeded weapon. Alice Hendricks glancing past it, at the spot welding\n machine, at Tommy.\n\n\n \"How's the love life?\"\n\n\n \"You really interested in finding out, Alice?\"\n\n\n \"Well—maybe—\"\n\n\n And Riuku gibbered unheard in her mind.", "Alice Hendricks listened. For some reason she wanted to listen. She\n was really curious about the field. But, gee, how did he expect her to\n understand all that stuff? He sounded like her algebra teacher, or was\n it chemistry? Lord, how she'd hated school. Maybe she shouldn't have\n quit.\n... Corcoran fields. E and IR and nine-space something or other.\n She'd never seen Pete like this before. He looked real different. Sort\n of like a professor, or something. He must be real smart. And\n so—well, not good-looking especially but, well, appealing. Real SA,\n he had....\n\"So that's how it works,\" Pete Ganley said. \"Quite a weapon, against\n them. It wouldn't work on a human being, of course.\" She was staring\n at him dreamy-eyed. He laughed. \"Silly, I bet you haven't understood a\n word I said.\"\n\n\n \"I have too.\"", "Sitting beside him in the copter.\nAll alone up here. Real romantic,\n like something on the video. But I shouldn't with him married, and all\n that. It's not right. But it's different, with Susan such a mean\n thing. Poor Petey....\nRiuku prodded. He found it so much easier since the Shielding boost.\n If only these Earthmen were more telepathic, so that they could be\n controlled directly. Still, perhaps with this new integration he could\n accomplish the same results. He prodded again.\n\n\n \"Pete,\" Alice said suddenly. \"What are we working on, anyway?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, working on?\" He frowned at her.\n\n\n \"At the plant. All I ever do is sit there soldering plugs, and no one\n ever tells me what for.\"\n\n\n \"Course not. You're not supposed to talk about any part of the job\n except your own. You know that. The slip of a lip—\"", "Alice followed his gaze. She giggled. \"It was easy,\" she said. \"The\n guards don't do more than glance at us, you know. And everyone who's\n supposed to go through Shielding on Thursday has the department number\n stamped on a yellow background. So all I did was make a red\n background, like yours, and slip it on in the restroom at Clean-up\n time.\"\n\n\n \"But Alice....\" Pete Ganley swallowed his beer and signaled for\n another. \"This is serious. You've got to keep the shields up. The\n enemy is everywhere. Why, right now, one could be probing you.\"\n\n\n \"So what? The dial isn't down to Danger yet. And tomorrow I'll just\n put the red tag back on over the yellow one and go through Shielding\n in the same line with you. They won't notice.\" She giggled again. \"I\n thought it was smart, Petey. You oughta think so too. You know why I\n did it, don't you?\"", "Riuku cursed her again, in the lingua franca of a dozen systems.\n Nagor's voice faded. Riuku switched back to English.\nSaturday. Into the plant at 3:58. Jean's diamond again....\nWish it\n would choke her; she's got a horsey enough face for it to. Where's old\n Liverlips? Don't see him around. Might as well go to the restroom for\n a while....\nThat's it, Riuku thought. Get her over past the machine shop, over by\n that Restricted Area. There must be something there we can go on....\n\n\n \"Hello, Tommy,\" Alice Hendricks said. \"How's the love life?\"\n\n\n \"It could be better if someone I know would, uh, cooperate....\"", "\"Easily. It's the right one. The parking lot attendant knows there's a\n new weapon being produced in there. The waitress at the Jumbo Burger\n Grill across the street knows it. Everybody I reached knows it. But\n not one knows anything about what it is.\"\n\n\n Nagor looked out through the ports of the spaceship, which didn't in\n the least resemble an Earth spaceship, any more than what Nagor\n considered sight resembled the corresponding Earth sense perception.\n He frowned.\n\n\n \"What about the research scientists? We know who some of them are. The\n supervisors? The technicians?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Riuku said flatly. \"They're shielded. Perfectly I can't make\n contact with a single mind down there that has the faintest inkling of\n what's going on. We never should have let them develop the shield.\"\n\n\n \"Have you tried contacting everyone? What about the workers?\"", "Don't they ever think of anything but their kids? Alice thought. She\n stopped listening to them. She heard Pete's voice again, husky and\n sending little chills all through her, and his face came between her\n and the plug and the white green wire she was soldering. His face,\n with those blue eyes that went right through a girl and that little\n scar that quirked up the corner of his mouth....\n\n\n \"Oh, oh,\" Alice said suddenly. \"I've got solder on the outside of the\n pin.\" She looked around for the alcohol.\n\n\n Riuku probed. Her thoughts were easy enough to read, but just try to\n translate them into anything useful.... He probed deeper. The plugs\n she was soldering. He could get a good picture of them, of the wires,\n of the harness lacing that Coralie was doing. But it meant nothing.\n They could be making anything. Radios, monitor units, sound equipment.", "He twisted, trying to pull free of Alice's fear, away from the\n integration of their separate terrors. But he couldn't push her\n thoughts back from his. She was too frightened. He was too frightened.\n The bond held.\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete, Pete, what did you do?\"\n\n\n He didn't answer. He landed the copter, stepped out of it, walked back\n to the other copter that was just dropping down behind him. \"But\n officer, what's the matter?\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks huddled down in the seat, already seeing tomorrow's\n papers, and her picture, and she wasn't really photogenic, either....\n And then, from the other copter, she heard the woman laugh.\n\n\n \"Pete Ganley, you fall for anything, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Susan!\"", "The line. Alice's nervousness....\nOh, oh, there's that guy with the\n meter—the one from maintenance. What's he want?\n\"Whaddya mean, my shield's low? How could it be?\"\n... If he checks\n the tag I'll be fired for sure. It's a lot of nonsense anyway. The\n enemy is everywhere, they keep telling us. Whoever saw one of them?\n\"No, honest, I didn't notice anything. Can I help it if.... It's okay,\n huh? It'll pass....\"\n\n\n Down to fifteen per cent, the guy said. Well, that's safe, I guess.\n Whew.\n\n\n \"Oh, hello, Paula. Whatcha talking about, what am I doing here\n tonight? Shut up....\"\n\n\n And then, in the midst of her thoughts, the pain, driving deep into\n Riuku, twisting at him, wrenching at him, until there was no\n consciousness of anything at all.", "She looked past him, toward the corner where the big panels were with\n all the dials and the meters and the chart that was almost like the\n kind they drew pictures of earthquakes on. What was it for, anyway?\n And why couldn't anyone go over to it except those longhairs? High\n voltage her foot....\n\n\n \"What're you looking at, Alice?\" Tommy said.\n\n\n \"Oh, that.\" She pointed. \"Wonder what it's for? It doesn't look like\n much of anything, really.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't know. I've got something better to look at.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\nyou\n!\"\n\n\n Compared to Pete, he didn't have anything, not anything at all.", "At the end of the shift he had learned nothing. Nothing about the\n weapon, that is. He had found out a good deal about the sex life of\n Genus Homo—information that made him even more glad than before that\n his was a one-sexed race.\nWith work over and tools put away and Alice in the restroom gleefully\n thinking about the red Friday night tag she was slipping onto her ID\n badge, he was as far from success as ever. For a moment he considered\n leaving her, looking for another subject. But he'd probably not be\n able to find one. No, the only thing to do was stay with her, curl\n deep in her mind and go through the Shielding boost, and later on....", "...\nPete. Gee, he must have got home awful late last night. Wonder\n what Susan said to him. Why does he keep taking her lip, anyway?\nRiuku waited. He prodded. He understood the Restricted Area as she\n understood it—which was not at all. He found out some things about\n the 731 plugs—that a lot of them were real crummy ones the fool day\n shift girls had set up wrong, and besides she'd rather solder on the\n 717's any day. He got her talking about the weapon again, and he found\n out what the other girls thought about it.\n\n\n Nothing.\n\n\n Except where else could you get twelve-fifty an hour soldering?\n\n\n She was stretched out on the couch in the restroom lobby taking a\n short nap—on company time, old Liverlips being tied up with the new\n girls down at the other end of the line—when Riuku finally managed to\n call Nagor again.", "She poured two drinks, neat, and he swallowed his with one impatient\n gulp. She poured him another.\nRiuku prodded. The drink made his job easier. Alice's thoughts calmed,\n swirled away from Susan and what am I going to do and why didn't I\n pick up with some single guy, anyway? A single guy, like Tommy maybe.\n Tommy and his spot welder, over there by the Restricted Area. The\n Restricted Area....\n\n\n \"Pete.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, baby?\"\n\n\n \"How come they let so much voltage loose in the plant, so we can't\n even go over in the Restricted Area?\"\n\n\n \"Whatever made you think of that?\" He laughed suddenly. He turned to\n her, still laughing. He was the old Pete again, she thought, with his\n face happy and his mouth quirked up at the corner. \"Voltage loose ...\n oh, baby, baby. Don't you know what that is?\"", "\"You didn't expect me to follow you, did you? Didn't it ever occur to\n you that detectives could put a bug in your copter? My, what we've\n been hearing!\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" the detective who was driving said. \"And those pictures we\n took last night weren't bad either.\"\n\n\n \"Susan, I can explain everything....\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you can, Pete. You always try. But as for you—you little—\"\n\n\n Alice ducked down away from her. Pictures. Oh God, what it would make\n her look like. Still, this hag with the pinched up face who couldn't\n hold a man with all the cosmetics in the drugstore to camouflage\n her—she had her nerve, yelling like that.\n\n\n \"Yeah, and I know a lot about you too!\" Alice Hendricks cried.\n\n\n \"Why, let me get my hands on you....\"", "He struggled back. He was confused, and there was blankness around\n him, and for a moment he thought he'd lost contact altogether. Then he\n came into focus again. Alice's thoughts were clearer than ever\n suddenly. He could feel her emotions; they were a part of him now. He\n smiled. The Shielding boost had helped him. Integration—much more\n complete integration than he had ever known before.\n\n\n \"But Pete, honey,\" Alice said. \"What did you come over to the gate\n for? You shouldn't of done it.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? I wanted to see you.\"\n\n\n \"What if one of Susan's pals sees us?\"", "\"No. What?\"\n\n\n \"That's the control panel for one of the weapons, silly. It's only a\n duplicate, actually—a monitor station. But it's tuned to the\n frequencies of all the ships in this sector and—\"\n\n\n She listened. She wanted to listen. She had to want to listen, now.\n\n\n \"Nagor, I'm getting it,\" Riuku called. \"I'll bring it all back with\n me. Just a minute and I'll have it.\"\n\n\n \"How does it work, honey?\" Alice Hendricks said.\n\n\n \"You really want to know? Okay. Now the Corcoran field is generated\n between the ships and areas like that one, only a lot more powerful,\n by—\"\n\n\n \"It's coming through now, Nagor.\"", "\"But surely you can find out through the girl,\" Nagor insisted from\n far away, almost out of phase altogether.\n\n\n \"No, Pete!\" Alice Hendricks said aloud.\n\n\n \"Riuku, you're the only one of us with any possible sort of contact.\n You've got to find out, if we're to stay here at all.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Alice Hendricks thought, \"maybe....\"", "That night after work Pete Ganley was waiting outside the gate again.\n Alice spotted his copter right away, even though he had the lights\n turned way down.\n\n\n \"Gee, Pete, I didn't think....\"\n\n\n \"Get in. Quick.\"\n\n\n \"What's the matter?\" She climbed in beside him. He didn't answer until\n the copter had lifted itself into the air, away from the factory\n landing lots and the bright overhead lights and the home-bound\n workers.\n\n\n \"It's Susan, who else,\" he said grimly. \"She was really sounding off\n today. She kept saying she had a lot of evidence and I'd better be\n careful. And, well, I sure didn't want you turning up at the bar\n tonight of all nights.\"\n\n\n He didn't sound like Pete.\n\n\n \"Why?\" Alice said. \"Are you afraid she'll divorce you?\"" ], [ "...\nPete. Gee, he must have got home awful late last night. Wonder\n what Susan said to him. Why does he keep taking her lip, anyway?\nRiuku waited. He prodded. He understood the Restricted Area as she\n understood it—which was not at all. He found out some things about\n the 731 plugs—that a lot of them were real crummy ones the fool day\n shift girls had set up wrong, and besides she'd rather solder on the\n 717's any day. He got her talking about the weapon again, and he found\n out what the other girls thought about it.\n\n\n Nothing.\n\n\n Except where else could you get twelve-fifty an hour soldering?\n\n\n She was stretched out on the couch in the restroom lobby taking a\n short nap—on company time, old Liverlips being tied up with the new\n girls down at the other end of the line—when Riuku finally managed to\n call Nagor again.", "He shivered a little, thinking of the boost. He'd survive it, of\n course. He'd be too well integrated with her by then. But it was\n nothing to look forward to.\n\n\n Still, he needn't worry about it. He had the whole shift to find out\n what the weapon was. The whole shift, here inside Alice's mind, inside\n the most closely guarded factory on or under or above the surface of\n the Earth. He settled down and waited, expectantly.\n\n\n Alice Hendricks turned her back on the lead man and looked down the\n work table to her place. The other girls were there already. Lois and\n Marge and Coralie, the other three members of the Plug table, Line 73.\n\n\n \"Hey, how'd you make out?\" Marge said. She glanced around to make sure\n none of the lead men or timekeepers were close enough to overhear her,\n then went on. \"Did you get away with it?\"", "She was walking down the aisle to her station now. A procession of\n names:\nMaisie, and Edith, and that fat slob Natalie, and if Jean\n Andrews comes around tonight flashing that diamond in my face again,\n I'll—I'll kill her....\n\"Oh hello, Clinton. What do you mean, late? The whistle just blew. Of\n course I'm ready to go to work.\"\nLiverlips, that's what you are. And\n still in that same blue shirt. What a wife you must have. Probably as\n sloppy as you are....\nGood, Riuku thought. Now she'll be working. Now he'd find out whatever\n it was she was doing. Not that it would be important, of course, but\n let him learn what her job was, and what those other girls' jobs were,\n and in a little while he'd have all the data he needed. Maybe even\n before the shift ended tonight, before she went through the Shielding\n boost.", "\"Easily. It's the right one. The parking lot attendant knows there's a\n new weapon being produced in there. The waitress at the Jumbo Burger\n Grill across the street knows it. Everybody I reached knows it. But\n not one knows anything about what it is.\"\n\n\n Nagor looked out through the ports of the spaceship, which didn't in\n the least resemble an Earth spaceship, any more than what Nagor\n considered sight resembled the corresponding Earth sense perception.\n He frowned.\n\n\n \"What about the research scientists? We know who some of them are. The\n supervisors? The technicians?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Riuku said flatly. \"They're shielded. Perfectly I can't make\n contact with a single mind down there that has the faintest inkling of\n what's going on. We never should have let them develop the shield.\"\n\n\n \"Have you tried contacting everyone? What about the workers?\"", "The plant. The Restricted Area. The useless secret of Earth's now\n unneeded weapon. Alice Hendricks glancing past it, at the spot welding\n machine, at Tommy.\n\n\n \"How's the love life?\"\n\n\n \"You really interested in finding out, Alice?\"\n\n\n \"Well—maybe—\"\n\n\n And Riuku gibbered unheard in her mind.", "Only they weren't. They were making a weapon, and this bit of\n electronic equipment was part of that weapon. What part? What did the\n 731 plug do?\n\n\n Alice Hendricks didn't know. Alice Hendricks didn't care.\n\n\n The first break. Ten minutes away from work. Alice was walking back\n along the aisle that separated Assembly from the men's Machine Shop. A\n chance, perhaps. She was looking at the machines, or rather past them,\n at the men.\n\n\n \"Hello, Tommy. How's the love life?\" He's not bad at all. Real cute.\n Though not like Pete, oh no.\n\n\n The machines. Riuku prodded at her thoughts, wishing he could\n influence them, wishing that just for a moment he could see, hear,\n feel,\nthink\nas she would never think.", "She looked past him, toward the corner where the big panels were with\n all the dials and the meters and the chart that was almost like the\n kind they drew pictures of earthquakes on. What was it for, anyway?\n And why couldn't anyone go over to it except those longhairs? High\n voltage her foot....\n\n\n \"What're you looking at, Alice?\" Tommy said.\n\n\n \"Oh, that.\" She pointed. \"Wonder what it's for? It doesn't look like\n much of anything, really.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't know. I've got something better to look at.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\nyou\n!\"\n\n\n Compared to Pete, he didn't have anything, not anything at all.", "Sitting beside him in the copter.\nAll alone up here. Real romantic,\n like something on the video. But I shouldn't with him married, and all\n that. It's not right. But it's different, with Susan such a mean\n thing. Poor Petey....\nRiuku prodded. He found it so much easier since the Shielding boost.\n If only these Earthmen were more telepathic, so that they could be\n controlled directly. Still, perhaps with this new integration he could\n accomplish the same results. He prodded again.\n\n\n \"Pete,\" Alice said suddenly. \"What are we working on, anyway?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, working on?\" He frowned at her.\n\n\n \"At the plant. All I ever do is sit there soldering plugs, and no one\n ever tells me what for.\"\n\n\n \"Course not. You're not supposed to talk about any part of the job\n except your own. You know that. The slip of a lip—\"", "Transcriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction November 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nTHE VERY SECRET AGENT\nBY MARI WOLF\nIllustrated by Ed Emsh\nPoor Riuku!... Not being a member of the human race, how\n was he supposed to understand what goes on in a woman's mind\n when the male of the same species didn't even know?\nIn their ship just beyond the orbit of Mars the two aliens sat looking\n at each other.\n\n\n \"No,\" Riuku said. \"I haven't had any luck. And I can tell you right\n now that I'm not going to have any, and no one else is going to have\n any either. The Earthmen are too well shielded.\"\n\n\n \"You contacted the factory?\" Nagor asked.", "Riuku cursed her again, in the lingua franca of a dozen systems.\n Nagor's voice faded. Riuku switched back to English.\nSaturday. Into the plant at 3:58. Jean's diamond again....\nWish it\n would choke her; she's got a horsey enough face for it to. Where's old\n Liverlips? Don't see him around. Might as well go to the restroom for\n a while....\nThat's it, Riuku thought. Get her over past the machine shop, over by\n that Restricted Area. There must be something there we can go on....\n\n\n \"Hello, Tommy,\" Alice Hendricks said. \"How's the love life?\"\n\n\n \"It could be better if someone I know would, uh, cooperate....\"", "Why, he asked himself irritably, couldn't those scientists figure out\n some way to keep the shields up longer than a week? Or else why didn't\n they have boosting night the same for all departments? He had to stay\n late every Friday and Alice every Thursday, and all the time there was\n Susan at home ready to jump him if he wasn't in at a reasonable\n time....\n\n\n \"Surprised, Pete?\" Alice Hendricks said at his elbow.\n\n\n He swung about, grinned at her. \"Am I? You said it. And here I was\n about to go. I never thought you'd make it before one.\" His grin faded\n a little. \"How'd you do it? Sweet-talk one of the guards into letting\n you in at the head of the line?\"", "Alice followed his gaze. She giggled. \"It was easy,\" she said. \"The\n guards don't do more than glance at us, you know. And everyone who's\n supposed to go through Shielding on Thursday has the department number\n stamped on a yellow background. So all I did was make a red\n background, like yours, and slip it on in the restroom at Clean-up\n time.\"\n\n\n \"But Alice....\" Pete Ganley swallowed his beer and signaled for\n another. \"This is serious. You've got to keep the shields up. The\n enemy is everywhere. Why, right now, one could be probing you.\"\n\n\n \"So what? The dial isn't down to Danger yet. And tomorrow I'll just\n put the red tag back on over the yellow one and go through Shielding\n in the same line with you. They won't notice.\" She giggled again. \"I\n thought it was smart, Petey. You oughta think so too. You know why I\n did it, don't you?\"", "Don't they ever think of anything but their kids? Alice thought. She\n stopped listening to them. She heard Pete's voice again, husky and\n sending little chills all through her, and his face came between her\n and the plug and the white green wire she was soldering. His face,\n with those blue eyes that went right through a girl and that little\n scar that quirked up the corner of his mouth....\n\n\n \"Oh, oh,\" Alice said suddenly. \"I've got solder on the outside of the\n pin.\" She looked around for the alcohol.\n\n\n Riuku probed. Her thoughts were easy enough to read, but just try to\n translate them into anything useful.... He probed deeper. The plugs\n she was soldering. He could get a good picture of them, of the wires,\n of the harness lacing that Coralie was doing. But it meant nothing.\n They could be making anything. Radios, monitor units, sound equipment.", "Alice shrugged....\nWhat a mealy-mouthed little snip Lois could be,\n sometimes. You'd think to hear her that she was better than any of\n them, and luckier too, with her Joe and the kids. What a laugh! Joe\n was probably the only guy who'd ever looked at her, and she'd hooked\n him right out of school, and now with three kids in five years and her\n working nights....\nAlice finished soldering the first row of wires in the plug and\n started in on the second. So old Liverlips thought she wasted time,\n did he? Well, she'd show him. She'd get out her sixteen plugs tonight.\n\n\n \"Junior kept me up all night last night,\" Lois said. \"He's cutting a\n tooth.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Coralie said, \"It's pretty rough at that age. I remember right\n after Mike was born....\"", "The line. Alice's nervousness....\nOh, oh, there's that guy with the\n meter—the one from maintenance. What's he want?\n\"Whaddya mean, my shield's low? How could it be?\"\n... If he checks\n the tag I'll be fired for sure. It's a lot of nonsense anyway. The\n enemy is everywhere, they keep telling us. Whoever saw one of them?\n\"No, honest, I didn't notice anything. Can I help it if.... It's okay,\n huh? It'll pass....\"\n\n\n Down to fifteen per cent, the guy said. Well, that's safe, I guess.\n Whew.\n\n\n \"Oh, hello, Paula. Whatcha talking about, what am I doing here\n tonight? Shut up....\"\n\n\n And then, in the midst of her thoughts, the pain, driving deep into\n Riuku, twisting at him, wrenching at him, until there was no\n consciousness of anything at all.", "Alice Hendricks listened. For some reason she wanted to listen. She\n was really curious about the field. But, gee, how did he expect her to\n understand all that stuff? He sounded like her algebra teacher, or was\n it chemistry? Lord, how she'd hated school. Maybe she shouldn't have\n quit.\n... Corcoran fields. E and IR and nine-space something or other.\n She'd never seen Pete like this before. He looked real different. Sort\n of like a professor, or something. He must be real smart. And\n so—well, not good-looking especially but, well, appealing. Real SA,\n he had....\n\"So that's how it works,\" Pete Ganley said. \"Quite a weapon, against\n them. It wouldn't work on a human being, of course.\" She was staring\n at him dreamy-eyed. He laughed. \"Silly, I bet you haven't understood a\n word I said.\"\n\n\n \"I have too.\"", "That night after work Pete Ganley was waiting outside the gate again.\n Alice spotted his copter right away, even though he had the lights\n turned way down.\n\n\n \"Gee, Pete, I didn't think....\"\n\n\n \"Get in. Quick.\"\n\n\n \"What's the matter?\" She climbed in beside him. He didn't answer until\n the copter had lifted itself into the air, away from the factory\n landing lots and the bright overhead lights and the home-bound\n workers.\n\n\n \"It's Susan, who else,\" he said grimly. \"She was really sounding off\n today. She kept saying she had a lot of evidence and I'd better be\n careful. And, well, I sure didn't want you turning up at the bar\n tonight of all nights.\"\n\n\n He didn't sound like Pete.\n\n\n \"Why?\" Alice said. \"Are you afraid she'll divorce you?\"", "\"Sure,\" Alice said. \"And you should of seen Pete's face when I walked\n in.\"\n\n\n She took the soldering iron out of her locker, plugged it in, and\n reached out for the pan of 731 wires. \"You know, it's funny. Pete's\n not so good looking, and he's sort of a careless dresser and all that,\n but oh, what he does to me.\" She filled the 731 plug with solder and\n reached for the white, black, red wire.\n\n\n \"You'd better watch out,\" Lois said. \"Or Susan's going to be doing\n something to you.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, her.\" Alice touched the tip of the iron to the solder filled pin,\n worked the wire down into position. \"What can she do? Pete doesn't\n give a damn about her.\"\n\n\n \"He's still living with her, isn't he?\" Lois said.", "The machines were—machines. That big funny one where Ned works, and\n Tommy's spot welder, and over in the corner where the superintendent\n is—he's a snappy dresser, tie and everything.\n\n\n The corner. Restricted area. Can't go over. High voltage or\n something....\n\n\n Her thoughts slid away from the restricted area. Should she go out for\n lunch or eat off the sandwich machine? And Riuku curled inside her\n mind and cursed her with his rapidly growing Earthwoman's vocabulary.", "\"Can cost Earth a ship. I know. Quit spouting poster talk at me, Pete\n Ganley. The enemy isn't even human. And there aren't any around here.\"\n\n\n Pete looked over at her. She was pouting, the upper lip drawn under\n the lower. Someone must have told her that was cute. Well, so what—it\n was cute.\n\n\n \"What makes you think I know anything more than you do?\" he said.\n\n\n \"Well, gee.\" She looked up at him, so near to her in the moonlight\n that she wondered why she wanted to talk about the plant anyway.\n \"You're in Final Assembly, aren't you? You check the whatsits before\n they go out.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" he said. No harm in telling her. No spies now, not in this\n kind of war. Besides, she was too dumb to know anything." ], [ "That night after work Pete Ganley was waiting outside the gate again.\n Alice spotted his copter right away, even though he had the lights\n turned way down.\n\n\n \"Gee, Pete, I didn't think....\"\n\n\n \"Get in. Quick.\"\n\n\n \"What's the matter?\" She climbed in beside him. He didn't answer until\n the copter had lifted itself into the air, away from the factory\n landing lots and the bright overhead lights and the home-bound\n workers.\n\n\n \"It's Susan, who else,\" he said grimly. \"She was really sounding off\n today. She kept saying she had a lot of evidence and I'd better be\n careful. And, well, I sure didn't want you turning up at the bar\n tonight of all nights.\"\n\n\n He didn't sound like Pete.\n\n\n \"Why?\" Alice said. \"Are you afraid she'll divorce you?\"", "He twisted, trying to pull free of Alice's fear, away from the\n integration of their separate terrors. But he couldn't push her\n thoughts back from his. She was too frightened. He was too frightened.\n The bond held.\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete, Pete, what did you do?\"\n\n\n He didn't answer. He landed the copter, stepped out of it, walked back\n to the other copter that was just dropping down behind him. \"But\n officer, what's the matter?\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks huddled down in the seat, already seeing tomorrow's\n papers, and her picture, and she wasn't really photogenic, either....\n And then, from the other copter, she heard the woman laugh.\n\n\n \"Pete Ganley, you fall for anything, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Susan!\"", "Alice Hendricks listened. For some reason she wanted to listen. She\n was really curious about the field. But, gee, how did he expect her to\n understand all that stuff? He sounded like her algebra teacher, or was\n it chemistry? Lord, how she'd hated school. Maybe she shouldn't have\n quit.\n... Corcoran fields. E and IR and nine-space something or other.\n She'd never seen Pete like this before. He looked real different. Sort\n of like a professor, or something. He must be real smart. And\n so—well, not good-looking especially but, well, appealing. Real SA,\n he had....\n\"So that's how it works,\" Pete Ganley said. \"Quite a weapon, against\n them. It wouldn't work on a human being, of course.\" She was staring\n at him dreamy-eyed. He laughed. \"Silly, I bet you haven't understood a\n word I said.\"\n\n\n \"I have too.\"", "\"Riuku!\"\n\n\n Riuku prodded. Calm down, you fool. You're not gaining anything this\n way. Calm down, so I can get out of here....\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stopped yelling abruptly.\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Susan said. \"Pete, your taste in women gets worse\n each time. I don't know why I always take you back.\"\n\n\n \"I can explain everything.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete,\" Alice Hendricks whispered. \"Petey, you're not—\"\n\n\n \"Sure he is,\" Susan Ganley said. \"He's coming with me. The nice\n detectives will take you home, dear. But I don't think you'd better\n try anything with them—they're not your type. They're single.\"", "\"In a little while. Just a little while.\" Stop thinking about Susan,\n you biological schizo. Change the subject. You'll never get anything\n out of that man by having hysterics....\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" Alice cried bitterly, \"you've been leading me on all the\n time. You don't love me. You'd rather have\nher\n!\"\n\n\n \"That's not so. Hell, baby....\"\nHe's angry. He's not even going to kiss me. I'm just cutting my own\n throat when I act like that....\n\"Okay, Pete. I'm sorry. I know it's tough on you. Let's have a drink,\n okay? Still got some in the glove compartment?\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Oh, sure.\"", "\"You didn't expect me to follow you, did you? Didn't it ever occur to\n you that detectives could put a bug in your copter? My, what we've\n been hearing!\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" the detective who was driving said. \"And those pictures we\n took last night weren't bad either.\"\n\n\n \"Susan, I can explain everything....\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you can, Pete. You always try. But as for you—you little—\"\n\n\n Alice ducked down away from her. Pictures. Oh God, what it would make\n her look like. Still, this hag with the pinched up face who couldn't\n hold a man with all the cosmetics in the drugstore to camouflage\n her—she had her nerve, yelling like that.\n\n\n \"Yeah, and I know a lot about you too!\" Alice Hendricks cried.\n\n\n \"Why, let me get my hands on you....\"", "He struggled back. He was confused, and there was blankness around\n him, and for a moment he thought he'd lost contact altogether. Then he\n came into focus again. Alice's thoughts were clearer than ever\n suddenly. He could feel her emotions; they were a part of him now. He\n smiled. The Shielding boost had helped him. Integration—much more\n complete integration than he had ever known before.\n\n\n \"But Pete, honey,\" Alice said. \"What did you come over to the gate\n for? You shouldn't of done it.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? I wanted to see you.\"\n\n\n \"What if one of Susan's pals sees us?\"", "Sitting beside him in the copter.\nAll alone up here. Real romantic,\n like something on the video. But I shouldn't with him married, and all\n that. It's not right. But it's different, with Susan such a mean\n thing. Poor Petey....\nRiuku prodded. He found it so much easier since the Shielding boost.\n If only these Earthmen were more telepathic, so that they could be\n controlled directly. Still, perhaps with this new integration he could\n accomplish the same results. He prodded again.\n\n\n \"Pete,\" Alice said suddenly. \"What are we working on, anyway?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, working on?\" He frowned at her.\n\n\n \"At the plant. All I ever do is sit there soldering plugs, and no one\n ever tells me what for.\"\n\n\n \"Course not. You're not supposed to talk about any part of the job\n except your own. You know that. The slip of a lip—\"", "Alice followed his gaze. She giggled. \"It was easy,\" she said. \"The\n guards don't do more than glance at us, you know. And everyone who's\n supposed to go through Shielding on Thursday has the department number\n stamped on a yellow background. So all I did was make a red\n background, like yours, and slip it on in the restroom at Clean-up\n time.\"\n\n\n \"But Alice....\" Pete Ganley swallowed his beer and signaled for\n another. \"This is serious. You've got to keep the shields up. The\n enemy is everywhere. Why, right now, one could be probing you.\"\n\n\n \"So what? The dial isn't down to Danger yet. And tomorrow I'll just\n put the red tag back on over the yellow one and go through Shielding\n in the same line with you. They won't notice.\" She giggled again. \"I\n thought it was smart, Petey. You oughta think so too. You know why I\n did it, don't you?\"", "She poured two drinks, neat, and he swallowed his with one impatient\n gulp. She poured him another.\nRiuku prodded. The drink made his job easier. Alice's thoughts calmed,\n swirled away from Susan and what am I going to do and why didn't I\n pick up with some single guy, anyway? A single guy, like Tommy maybe.\n Tommy and his spot welder, over there by the Restricted Area. The\n Restricted Area....\n\n\n \"Pete.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, baby?\"\n\n\n \"How come they let so much voltage loose in the plant, so we can't\n even go over in the Restricted Area?\"\n\n\n \"Whatever made you think of that?\" He laughed suddenly. He turned to\n her, still laughing. He was the old Pete again, she thought, with his\n face happy and his mouth quirked up at the corner. \"Voltage loose ...\n oh, baby, baby. Don't you know what that is?\"", "\"But surely you can find out through the girl,\" Nagor insisted from\n far away, almost out of phase altogether.\n\n\n \"No, Pete!\" Alice Hendricks said aloud.\n\n\n \"Riuku, you're the only one of us with any possible sort of contact.\n You've got to find out, if we're to stay here at all.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Alice Hendricks thought, \"maybe....\"", "\"Pete....\" But he wouldn't meet Alice's eyes. And when Susan took his\n arm, he followed her.\n\n\n \"How could you do it, Petey....\" Numb whispers, numb thoughts, over\n and over, but no longer frightened, no longer binding on Riuku.\n\n\n Fools, he thought. Idiotic Earthmen. If it weren't for your ridiculous\n reproductive habits I'd have found out everything. As it is....\n \"Nagor, I'm coming! I didn't get anything. This woman—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on then. We're leaving. Right now. There'll be other\n systems.\"\nPetey, Petey, Petey....\nContact thinned as he reached out away from her, toward Nagor, toward\n the ship. He fought his way out through the Shielding, away from her\n and her thoughts and every detestable thing about her. Break free,\n break free....", "...\nPete. Gee, he must have got home awful late last night. Wonder\n what Susan said to him. Why does he keep taking her lip, anyway?\nRiuku waited. He prodded. He understood the Restricted Area as she\n understood it—which was not at all. He found out some things about\n the 731 plugs—that a lot of them were real crummy ones the fool day\n shift girls had set up wrong, and besides she'd rather solder on the\n 717's any day. He got her talking about the weapon again, and he found\n out what the other girls thought about it.\n\n\n Nothing.\n\n\n Except where else could you get twelve-fifty an hour soldering?\n\n\n She was stretched out on the couch in the restroom lobby taking a\n short nap—on company time, old Liverlips being tied up with the new\n girls down at the other end of the line—when Riuku finally managed to\n call Nagor again.", "\"Oh, Alice, you're as bad as—look, baby, don't you see? It would be\n awful for you. All the publicity, the things she'd call you, maybe\n even in the papers....\"\n\n\n He was staring straight ahead, his hands locked about the controls. He\n was sort of—well, distant. Not her Petey any more. Someone else's\n Pete. Susan's Pete....\n\n\n \"I think we should be more careful,\" he said.\n\n\n Riuku twisted his way through her thoughts, tried to push them\n down....\nDoes he love me, he's got to love me, sure he does, he just\n doesn't want me to get hurt....\nAnd far away, almost completely out of phase, Nagor's call. \"Riuku,\n another ship's gone. You'd better come back. Bring what you've learned\n so far and we can withdraw from the system and maybe piece it\n together....\"", "\"Sure,\" Alice said. \"And you should of seen Pete's face when I walked\n in.\"\n\n\n She took the soldering iron out of her locker, plugged it in, and\n reached out for the pan of 731 wires. \"You know, it's funny. Pete's\n not so good looking, and he's sort of a careless dresser and all that,\n but oh, what he does to me.\" She filled the 731 plug with solder and\n reached for the white, black, red wire.\n\n\n \"You'd better watch out,\" Lois said. \"Or Susan's going to be doing\n something to you.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, her.\" Alice touched the tip of the iron to the solder filled pin,\n worked the wire down into position. \"What can she do? Pete doesn't\n give a damn about her.\"\n\n\n \"He's still living with her, isn't he?\" Lois said.", "\"Can cost Earth a ship. I know. Quit spouting poster talk at me, Pete\n Ganley. The enemy isn't even human. And there aren't any around here.\"\n\n\n Pete looked over at her. She was pouting, the upper lip drawn under\n the lower. Someone must have told her that was cute. Well, so what—it\n was cute.\n\n\n \"What makes you think I know anything more than you do?\" he said.\n\n\n \"Well, gee.\" She looked up at him, so near to her in the moonlight\n that she wondered why she wanted to talk about the plant anyway.\n \"You're in Final Assembly, aren't you? You check the whatsits before\n they go out.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" he said. No harm in telling her. No spies now, not in this\n kind of war. Besides, she was too dumb to know anything.", "She looked past him, toward the corner where the big panels were with\n all the dials and the meters and the chart that was almost like the\n kind they drew pictures of earthquakes on. What was it for, anyway?\n And why couldn't anyone go over to it except those longhairs? High\n voltage her foot....\n\n\n \"What're you looking at, Alice?\" Tommy said.\n\n\n \"Oh, that.\" She pointed. \"Wonder what it's for? It doesn't look like\n much of anything, really.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't know. I've got something better to look at.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\nyou\n!\"\n\n\n Compared to Pete, he didn't have anything, not anything at all.", "Don't they ever think of anything but their kids? Alice thought. She\n stopped listening to them. She heard Pete's voice again, husky and\n sending little chills all through her, and his face came between her\n and the plug and the white green wire she was soldering. His face,\n with those blue eyes that went right through a girl and that little\n scar that quirked up the corner of his mouth....\n\n\n \"Oh, oh,\" Alice said suddenly. \"I've got solder on the outside of the\n pin.\" She looked around for the alcohol.\n\n\n Riuku probed. Her thoughts were easy enough to read, but just try to\n translate them into anything useful.... He probed deeper. The plugs\n she was soldering. He could get a good picture of them, of the wires,\n of the harness lacing that Coralie was doing. But it meant nothing.\n They could be making anything. Radios, monitor units, sound equipment.", "\"Liar.\" He locked the automatic pilot on the copter and held out his\n arms. \"Come here, you.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Petey....\"\n\n\n Who cared about the weapon? He was right, even if she wouldn't admit\n it. She hadn't even listened, hardly. She hadn't understood.\n\n\n And neither had Riuku.\nRiuku waited until she'd fallen soundly asleep that night before he\n tried contacting Nagor. He'd learned nothing useful. He'd picked up\n nothing in her mind except more thoughts of Pete, and gee, maybe\n someday they'd get married, if he only had guts enough to tell Susan\n where to get off....", "Why, he asked himself irritably, couldn't those scientists figure out\n some way to keep the shields up longer than a week? Or else why didn't\n they have boosting night the same for all departments? He had to stay\n late every Friday and Alice every Thursday, and all the time there was\n Susan at home ready to jump him if he wasn't in at a reasonable\n time....\n\n\n \"Surprised, Pete?\" Alice Hendricks said at his elbow.\n\n\n He swung about, grinned at her. \"Am I? You said it. And here I was\n about to go. I never thought you'd make it before one.\" His grin faded\n a little. \"How'd you do it? Sweet-talk one of the guards into letting\n you in at the head of the line?\"" ] ]
train	63109	[ "What effects do the Green Flame rocks have?\n", "Why is Grannie Annie so concerned about the Green Flame’s whereabouts?", "What makes Grannie Annie's writing remarkable?", "Why is Billy so drawn to Grannie Annie? ", "What is Grannie Annie referring to when she says \"the I.P men aren't strong enough?\" ", "What is true about Doctor Universe?", "Why are people after Grannie Annie? ", "How will the story likely continue?" ]	[ [ "It makes people lethargic and easily manipulated.\n", "They spread radioactivity to people and make them ill. ", "They influence people to take power over other people. ", "They are electromagnetic and shock people. " ], [ "She wants to finish writing her story about them and needs to see them again.", "She believes that Doctor Universe is using to for his show to manipulate people.", "The current political climate is restless, and if used Green Flames could lead to a disaster.", "She wants it for herself and to continue researching the effects of Green Flame." ], [ "She isn't a writer of any notararitey. ", "She is an esteemed actor on top of being a writer. ", "She writes intense science fiction. ", "Her science fiction stories are typical, but she visits the locations she writes about and does so authentically. " ], [ "She knows about the Green Flame and Billy wants to know more about them. ", "Her writing wows him. ", "She's a famous author. He's naturally drawn to that fame. ", "She's an eccentric adventurer at heart, and compelling. " ], [ "She doesn't feel that the I.P men are serving well enough. ", "Just that - that the local law enforcement should be stronger. ", "She knows that as the politcal climate worsens, the I.P won't be able to keep up with the chaos. ", "The I.P men weren't quick enough to protect Billy and her from the attack. " ], [ "His audience reacts so well to him because much of the population is under the influence of Green Flame. ", "He knows about the whereabouts of Green Flame and is hiding it from Grannie Annie. ", "There is nothing of note to him. He is just a popular TV personaility. ", "He is using Green Flame himsel to influence his audience and force them to watch. He is the one who stole it. " ], [ "She entered the Spacemen's Club, which she was not allowed to do as a woman. ", "She was on Doctor Universe's show. ", "She knows too much about the Green Flames and they want to prevent her from obtaining it. ", "As a prolific author who travel a lot, she's made a lot of enemies. " ], [ "The group will continue to search for a way to get to the Green Flames. ", "The Green Flames will make Grannie Annie lose her drive to obtain them. ", "Grannie Annie will leave the storage of Green Flame behind, since she can’t get through the glass.", "arn will betray the duo and take the lot for himself." ] ]	[ 1, 3, 4, 4, 3, 1, 3, 1 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "\"And you can lay it all to the Green Flames. It seems incredible that a\n single shipload of the ore could effect such a wide ranged area, but in\n my opinion someone has found a means of making that quantity a thousand\n times more potent and is transmiting it\nen masse\n.\"\n\n\n If it had been anyone but Grannie Annie there before me, I would\n have called her a fool. And then all at once I got an odd feeling of\n approaching danger.\n\n\n \"Let's get out of here,\" I said, getting up.\nZinnng-whack!\n\"All right!\"\n\n\n On the mirror behind the bar a small circle with radiating cracks\n appeared. On the booth wall a scant inch above Grannie's head the\n fresco seemed to melt away suddenly.\n\n\n A heat ray!", "\"When any form of life is exposed to these\nGamma\nrays from the Green\n Flame rock, they produce in the creature's brain a certain lassitude\n and lack of energy. As the period of exposure increases, this condition\n develops into a sense of impotence and a desire for leadership or\n guidance. Occasionally, as with the weak-willed, there is a spirit of\n intolerance. The Green Flames might be said to be an inorganic opiate,\n a thousand times more subtle and more powerful than any known drug.\"\n\n\n I was sitting up now, hanging on to the woman's every word.\n\n\n \"Now in 2710, as you'd know if you studied your history, the three\n planets of Earth, Venus, and Mars were under governmental bondage. The\n cruel dictatorship of Vennox I was short-lived, but it lasted long\n enough to endanger all civilized life.", "\"An old prospector who lives out in the deep marsh on the outskirts of\n Varsoom country. To make a long story short, I got him talking about\n his adventures, and he told me plenty.\"\n\n\n The old woman paused. \"Did you ever hear of the Green Flames?\" she\n asked abruptly.\n\n\n I shook my head. \"Some new kind of ...\"\n\n\n \"It's not a new kind of anything. The Green Flame is a radio-active\n rock once found on Mercury. The\nAlpha\nrays of this rock are similar\n to radium in that they consist of streams of material particles\n projected at high speed. But the character of the\nGamma\nrays has\n never been completely analyzed. Like those set up by radium, they are\n electromagnetic pulsations, but they are also a strange combination of\nBeta\nor cathode rays with negatively charged electrons.", "\"So everything, Billy-boy. Do you realize what such a thing would mean\n if it were true? Green Flames were supposedly destroyed on all planets\n after the Vennox regime crashed. If a quantity of the rock were in\n existence, and it fell into the wrong hands, there'd be trouble.\n\n\n \"Of course, I regarded Karn's story as a wild dream, but it made\n corking good story material. I wrote it into a novel, and a week after\n it was completed, the manuscript was stolen from my study back on\n Earth.\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" I said as she lapsed into silence. \"And now you've come to the\n conclusion that the details of your story were true and that someone is\n attempting to put your plot into action.\"\n\n\n Grannie nodded. \"Yes,\" she said. \"That's exactly what I think.\"", "\"You'll never do it that way,\" Grannie said. \"Nothing short of an\n atomic blast will shatter that wall. It explains why there are no\n guards here. The mechanism is entirely self-operating. Let's see if the\n Green Flames are more accessible.\"\n\n\n In the lower hold disappointment again confronted us. Visible in\n the feeble shafts of daylight that filtered through cracks in the\n vessel's hull were tiers of rectangular ingots of green iridescent ore.\n Suspended by insulators from the ceiling over them was a thick metal\n plate.\n\n\n But between was a barrier. A wall of impenetrable stepto glass.\n\n\n Grannie stamped her foot. \"It's maddening,\" she said. \"Here we are at\n the crux of the whole matter, and we're powerless to make a single\n move.\"", "We had traveled this far by\nganet\n, the tough little two headed pack\n animal of the Venus hinterland. Any form of plane or rocket would have\n had its motor instantly destroyed, of course, by the magnetic force\n belt that encircled the planet's equator. Now our drivers changed to\n boatmen, and we loaded our supplies into three clumsy\njagua\ncanoes.\n\n\n It was around the camp fire that night that Grannie took me into her\n confidence for the first time since we had left Swamp City.\n\n\n \"We're heading directly for Varsoom country,\" she said. \"If we find\n Ezra Karn so much the better. If we don't, we follow his directions to\n the lost space ship. Our job is to find that ore and destroy it. You\n see, I'm positive the Green Flames have never been removed from the\n ship.\"", "\"The archives tell us that one of the first acts of the overthrowing\n government was to cast out all Green Flames, two of which Vennox had\n ordered must be kept in each household. The effect on the people was\n immediate. Representative government, individual enterprise, freedom\n followed.\"\n\n\n Grannie Annie lit a cigarette and flipped the match to the floor.\n\n\n \"To go back to my first trip to Venus. As I said, I met Ezra Karn, an\n old prospector there in the marsh. Karn told me that on one of his\n travels into the Varsoom district he had come upon the wreckage of\n an old space ship. The hold of that space ship was packed with Green\n Flames!\"\n\n\n If Grannie expected me to show surprise at that, she was disappointed.\n I said, \"So what?\"", "Grannie Annie came to the point abruptly. When she had explained the\n object of our trip, the prospector became thoughtful.\n\n\n \"Green Flames, eh?\" he repeated slowly. \"Well yes, I suppose I could\n find that space ship again. That is, if I wanted to.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\" Grannie paused in the act of rolling herself a\n cigarette. \"You know where it is, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Ye-s,\" Karn nodded. \"But like I told you before, that ship lies in\n Varsoom country, and that isn't exactly a summer vacation spot.\"\n\n\n \"What are the Varsoom?\" I asked. \"A native tribe?\"\n\n\n Karn shook his head. \"They're a form of life that's never been seen by\n Earthmen. Strictly speaking, they're no more than a form of energy.\"\n\n\n \"Dangerous?\"", "Somebody had. Before us stretched a narrow corridor, flanked on the\n left side by a wall of impenetrable stepto glass. The corridor was\n bare of furnishings. But beyond the glass, revealed to us in mocking\n clarity, was a high panel, studded with dials and gauges. Even as we\n looked, we could see liquid pulse in glass tubes, indicator needles\n swing slowly to and fro.\n\n\n Grannie nodded. \"Some kind of a broadcasting unit. The Green Flames in\n the lower hold are probably exposed to a\ntholpane\nplate and their\n radiations stepped up by an electro-phosicalic process.\"\n\n\n Karn raised the butt of his pistol and brought it crashing against the\n glass wall. His arm jumped in recoil, but the glass remained intact.", "Abruptly I stiffened. The familiar drone of the marsh was gone. In its\n place a ringing silence blanketed everything.\n\n\n And then out in the gloom a darker shadow appeared, moving in\n undulating sweeps toward the center of the camp. Fascinated, I watched\n it advance and retreat, saw two hyalescent eyes swim out of the murk.\n It charged, and with but a split second to act, I threw myself flat.\n There was a rush of mighty wings as the thing swept over me. Sharp\n talons raked my clothing. Again it came, and again I rolled swiftly,\n missing the thing by the narrowest of margins.\n\n\n From the tent opposite a gaunt figure clad in a familiar dress\n appeared. Grannie gave a single warning:\n\n\n \"Stand still!\"", "The thing in the darkness turned like a cam on a rod and drove at us\n again. This time the old woman's heat gun clicked, and a tracery of\n purple flame shot outward. A horrible soul-chilling scream rent the\n air. A moment later something huge and heavy scrabbled across the\n ground and shot aloft.\nGrannie Annie fired with deliberate speed.\nI stood frozen as the diminuendo of its wild cries echoed back to me.\n\n\n \"In heaven's name, what was it?\"\n\n\n \"Hunter-bird,\" Grannie said calmly. \"A form of avian life found here\n in the swamp. Harmless in its wild state, but when captured, it can be\n trained to pursue a quarry until it kills. It has a single unit brain\n and follows with a relentless purpose.\"\n\n\n \"Then that would mean...?\"", "\"That it was sent by our enemy, the same enemy that shot at us in the\n cafe in Swamp City. Exactly.\" Grannie Annie halted at the door of her\n tent and faced me with earnest eyes. \"Billy-boy, our every move is\n being watched. From now on it's the survival of the fittest.\"\nThe following day was our seventh in the swamp. The water here\n resembled a vast mosaic, striped and cross-striped with long winding\n ribbons of yellowish substance that floated a few inches below the\n surface. The mold balls coming into contact with the evonium water of\n the swamp had undergone a chemical change and evolved into a cohesive\n multi-celled marine life that lived and died within a space of hours.\n The Venusians paddled with extreme care. Had one of them dipped his\n hand into one of those yellow streaks, he would have been devoured in\n a matter of seconds.", "There she stood before a frantically gesticulating desk clerk, leaning\n on her faded green umbrella. A little wisp of a woman clad in a\n voluminous black dress with one of those doily-like caps on her head,\n tied by a ribbon under her chin. Her high-topped button shoes were\n planted firmly on the varpla carpet and her wrinkled face was set in\n calm defiance.\n\n\n I barged across the lounge and seized her hand. \"Grannie Annie! I\n haven't seen you in two years.\"\n\n\n \"Hi, Billy-boy,\" she greeted calmly. \"Will you please tell this\n fish-face to shut up.\"\n\n\n The desk clerk went white. \"Mithter Trenwith, if thith lady ith a\n friend of yourth, you'll have to take her away. It'th abtholutely\n againth the ruleth....\"", "Grannie Annie leaped to her feet, grasped my arm and raced for the\n door. Outside a driverless hydrocar stood with idling motors. The old\n woman threw herself into the control seat, yanked me in after her and\n threw over the starting stud.\n\n\n An instant later we were plunging through the dark night.\nSix days after leaving Swamp City we reached Level Five, the last\n outpost of firm ground. Ahead lay the inner marsh, stretching as far as\n the eye could reach. Low islands projected at intervals from the thick\n water. Mold balls, two feet across, drifted down from the slate-gray\n sky like puffs of cotton.", "It was the same show I had witnessed back in Swamp City. Once again I\n heard questions filter in from the far outposts of the System. Once\n again I saw the commanding figure of the quiz master as he strode back\n and forth across the stage. And as I sat there, looking into the visi\n screen, a curious numbing drowsiness seemed to steal over me and lead\n my thoughts far away.\nHalf an hour later we headed into the unknown. The Venusian boatmen\n were ill-at-ease now and jabbered among themselves constantly. We\n camped that night on a miserable little island where insects swarmed\n about us in hordes. The next day an indefinable wave of weariness and\n despondency beset our entire party. I caught myself musing over the\n futility of the venture. Only the pleadings of Grannie Annie kept me\n from turning back. On the morrow I realized the truth in her warning,\n that all of us had been exposed to the insidious radiations.", "And so it went. Questions from Mars, from Earth, from Saturn flowed in\n the visi sets. Isolated miners on Jupiter, dancers in swank Plutonian\n cafes strove to stump the experts. With Doctor Universe offering\n bantering side play, the experts gave their answers. When they failed,\n or when the Truthicator flashed a red light, he announced the name of\n the winner.\n\n\n It grew a little tiresome after a while and I wondered why Grannie had\n brought me here. And then I began to notice things.\n\n\n The audience in the\nSatellite\nseemed to have lost much of its\n original fervor. They applauded as before but they did so only at the\n signal of Doctor Universe. The spell created by the man was complete.\n\n\n Pompous and erect, he strode back and forth across the stage like a\n general surveying his army. His black eyes gleamed, and his thin lips\n were turned in a smile of satisfaction.", "Moments later an official hydrocar roared up and a dozen I.P. men\n rushed out and scattered the crowd. But a few stragglers lingered to\n shout derisive epithets.\n\n\n Grannie Annie came out from behind the box office then. She took my arm\n and led me around a corner and through a doorway under a sign that read\n THE JET. Inside was a deep room with booths along one wall. The place\n was all but deserted.\n\n\n In a booth well toward the rear the old lady surveyed me with sober\n eyes.\n\n\n \"Billy-boy, did you see the way that crowd acted?\"\n\n\n I nodded. \"As disgraceful an exhibition as I've ever seen. The I.P. men\n ought to clamp down.\"\n\n\n \"The I.P. men aren't strong enough.\"", "After that I lost track of time. Day after day of incessant rain ... of\n steaming swamp.... But at length we reached firm ground and began our\n advance on foot.\n\n\n It was Karn who first sighted the ship. Striding in the lead, he\n suddenly halted at the top of a hill and leveled his arm before him.\n There it lay, a huge cigar-shaped vessel of blackened\narelium\nsteel,\n half buried in the swamp soil.\n\n\n \"What's that thing on top?\" Karn demanded, puzzled.\n\n\n A rectangular metal envelope had been constructed over the stern\n quarters of the ship. Above this structure were three tall masts. And\n suspended between them was a network of copper wire studded with white\n insulators.", "\"As most of you are familiar with our program, it will be unnecessary\n to give any advance explanation. I will only say that on this stage are\n nine visi sets, each tuned to one of the nine planets. At transmitting\n sets all over these planets listeners will appear and voice questions.\n These questions, my nine experts will endeavor to answer. For every\n question missed, the sender will receive a check for one thousand\nplanetoles\n.\n\n\n \"One thing more. As usual we have with us a guest star who will match\n her wits with the experts. May I present that renowned writer of\n science fiction, Annabella C. Flowers.\"\n\n\n From the left wing Grannie Annie appeared. She bowed and took her place\n on the dais.", "The piano struck a chord in G, and the curtain went rattling up. On the\n stage four Earthmen, two Martians, two Venusians, and one Mercurian\n sat on an upraised dais. That is to say, eight of them sat. The\n Mercurian, a huge lump of granite-like flesh, sprawled there, palpably\n uncomfortable. On the right were nine visi sets, each with its new\n improved pantascope panel and switchboard. Before each set stood an\n Earthman operator.\nA tall man, clad in a claw-hammer coat, came out from the wings and\n advanced to the footlights.\n\n\n \"People of Swamp City,\" he said, bowing, \"permit me to introduce\n myself. I am Doctor Universe, and these are my nine experts.\"\n\n\n There was a roar of applause from the\nSatellite\naudience. When it had\n subsided, the man continued:" ], [ "\"So everything, Billy-boy. Do you realize what such a thing would mean\n if it were true? Green Flames were supposedly destroyed on all planets\n after the Vennox regime crashed. If a quantity of the rock were in\n existence, and it fell into the wrong hands, there'd be trouble.\n\n\n \"Of course, I regarded Karn's story as a wild dream, but it made\n corking good story material. I wrote it into a novel, and a week after\n it was completed, the manuscript was stolen from my study back on\n Earth.\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" I said as she lapsed into silence. \"And now you've come to the\n conclusion that the details of your story were true and that someone is\n attempting to put your plot into action.\"\n\n\n Grannie nodded. \"Yes,\" she said. \"That's exactly what I think.\"", "\"And you can lay it all to the Green Flames. It seems incredible that a\n single shipload of the ore could effect such a wide ranged area, but in\n my opinion someone has found a means of making that quantity a thousand\n times more potent and is transmiting it\nen masse\n.\"\n\n\n If it had been anyone but Grannie Annie there before me, I would\n have called her a fool. And then all at once I got an odd feeling of\n approaching danger.\n\n\n \"Let's get out of here,\" I said, getting up.\nZinnng-whack!\n\"All right!\"\n\n\n On the mirror behind the bar a small circle with radiating cracks\n appeared. On the booth wall a scant inch above Grannie's head the\n fresco seemed to melt away suddenly.\n\n\n A heat ray!", "Grannie Annie came to the point abruptly. When she had explained the\n object of our trip, the prospector became thoughtful.\n\n\n \"Green Flames, eh?\" he repeated slowly. \"Well yes, I suppose I could\n find that space ship again. That is, if I wanted to.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\" Grannie paused in the act of rolling herself a\n cigarette. \"You know where it is, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Ye-s,\" Karn nodded. \"But like I told you before, that ship lies in\n Varsoom country, and that isn't exactly a summer vacation spot.\"\n\n\n \"What are the Varsoom?\" I asked. \"A native tribe?\"\n\n\n Karn shook his head. \"They're a form of life that's never been seen by\n Earthmen. Strictly speaking, they're no more than a form of energy.\"\n\n\n \"Dangerous?\"", "\"The archives tell us that one of the first acts of the overthrowing\n government was to cast out all Green Flames, two of which Vennox had\n ordered must be kept in each household. The effect on the people was\n immediate. Representative government, individual enterprise, freedom\n followed.\"\n\n\n Grannie Annie lit a cigarette and flipped the match to the floor.\n\n\n \"To go back to my first trip to Venus. As I said, I met Ezra Karn, an\n old prospector there in the marsh. Karn told me that on one of his\n travels into the Varsoom district he had come upon the wreckage of\n an old space ship. The hold of that space ship was packed with Green\n Flames!\"\n\n\n If Grannie expected me to show surprise at that, she was disappointed.\n I said, \"So what?\"", "\"You'll never do it that way,\" Grannie said. \"Nothing short of an\n atomic blast will shatter that wall. It explains why there are no\n guards here. The mechanism is entirely self-operating. Let's see if the\n Green Flames are more accessible.\"\n\n\n In the lower hold disappointment again confronted us. Visible in\n the feeble shafts of daylight that filtered through cracks in the\n vessel's hull were tiers of rectangular ingots of green iridescent ore.\n Suspended by insulators from the ceiling over them was a thick metal\n plate.\n\n\n But between was a barrier. A wall of impenetrable stepto glass.\n\n\n Grannie stamped her foot. \"It's maddening,\" she said. \"Here we are at\n the crux of the whole matter, and we're powerless to make a single\n move.\"", "\"Beg pardon, thir,\" he said with his racial lisp, \"thereth thome one to\n thee you in the main lounge.\" His eyes rolled as he added, \"A lady!\"\n\n\n A woman here...! The\nSpacemen's\nwas a sanctuary, a rest club where\n in-coming pilots and crewmen could relax before leaving for another\n voyage. The rule that no females could pass its portals was strictly\n enforced.\n\n\n I followed the bellhop down the long corridor that led to the main\n lounge. At the threshold I jerked to a halt and stared incredulously.\n\n\n Grannie Annie!", "There she stood before a frantically gesticulating desk clerk, leaning\n on her faded green umbrella. A little wisp of a woman clad in a\n voluminous black dress with one of those doily-like caps on her head,\n tied by a ribbon under her chin. Her high-topped button shoes were\n planted firmly on the varpla carpet and her wrinkled face was set in\n calm defiance.\n\n\n I barged across the lounge and seized her hand. \"Grannie Annie! I\n haven't seen you in two years.\"\n\n\n \"Hi, Billy-boy,\" she greeted calmly. \"Will you please tell this\n fish-face to shut up.\"\n\n\n The desk clerk went white. \"Mithter Trenwith, if thith lady ith a\n friend of yourth, you'll have to take her away. It'th abtholutely\n againth the ruleth....\"", "We had traveled this far by\nganet\n, the tough little two headed pack\n animal of the Venus hinterland. Any form of plane or rocket would have\n had its motor instantly destroyed, of course, by the magnetic force\n belt that encircled the planet's equator. Now our drivers changed to\n boatmen, and we loaded our supplies into three clumsy\njagua\ncanoes.\n\n\n It was around the camp fire that night that Grannie took me into her\n confidence for the first time since we had left Swamp City.\n\n\n \"We're heading directly for Varsoom country,\" she said. \"If we find\n Ezra Karn so much the better. If we don't, we follow his directions to\n the lost space ship. Our job is to find that ore and destroy it. You\n see, I'm positive the Green Flames have never been removed from the\n ship.\"", "Moments later an official hydrocar roared up and a dozen I.P. men\n rushed out and scattered the crowd. But a few stragglers lingered to\n shout derisive epithets.\n\n\n Grannie Annie came out from behind the box office then. She took my arm\n and led me around a corner and through a doorway under a sign that read\n THE JET. Inside was a deep room with booths along one wall. The place\n was all but deserted.\n\n\n In a booth well toward the rear the old lady surveyed me with sober\n eyes.\n\n\n \"Billy-boy, did you see the way that crowd acted?\"\n\n\n I nodded. \"As disgraceful an exhibition as I've ever seen. The I.P. men\n ought to clamp down.\"\n\n\n \"The I.P. men aren't strong enough.\"", "The thing in the darkness turned like a cam on a rod and drove at us\n again. This time the old woman's heat gun clicked, and a tracery of\n purple flame shot outward. A horrible soul-chilling scream rent the\n air. A moment later something huge and heavy scrabbled across the\n ground and shot aloft.\nGrannie Annie fired with deliberate speed.\nI stood frozen as the diminuendo of its wild cries echoed back to me.\n\n\n \"In heaven's name, what was it?\"\n\n\n \"Hunter-bird,\" Grannie said calmly. \"A form of avian life found here\n in the swamp. Harmless in its wild state, but when captured, it can be\n trained to pursue a quarry until it kills. It has a single unit brain\n and follows with a relentless purpose.\"\n\n\n \"Then that would mean...?\"", "Grannie Annie leaped to her feet, grasped my arm and raced for the\n door. Outside a driverless hydrocar stood with idling motors. The old\n woman threw herself into the control seat, yanked me in after her and\n threw over the starting stud.\n\n\n An instant later we were plunging through the dark night.\nSix days after leaving Swamp City we reached Level Five, the last\n outpost of firm ground. Ahead lay the inner marsh, stretching as far as\n the eye could reach. Low islands projected at intervals from the thick\n water. Mold balls, two feet across, drifted down from the slate-gray\n sky like puffs of cotton.", "\"As most of you are familiar with our program, it will be unnecessary\n to give any advance explanation. I will only say that on this stage are\n nine visi sets, each tuned to one of the nine planets. At transmitting\n sets all over these planets listeners will appear and voice questions.\n These questions, my nine experts will endeavor to answer. For every\n question missed, the sender will receive a check for one thousand\nplanetoles\n.\n\n\n \"One thing more. As usual we have with us a guest star who will match\n her wits with the experts. May I present that renowned writer of\n science fiction, Annabella C. Flowers.\"\n\n\n From the left wing Grannie Annie appeared. She bowed and took her place\n on the dais.", "\"Okay, okay,\" I grinned. \"Look, we'll go into the grille. There's no\n one there at this hour.\"\n\n\n In the grille an equally astonished waiter served us—me a lime rickey\n and Grannie Annie her usual whisky sour—I waited until she had tossed\n the drink off at a gulp before I set off a chain of questions:\n\n\n \"What the devil are you doing on Venus? Don't you know women aren't\n allowed in the\nSpacemen's\n? What happened to the book you were\n writing?\"\n\n\n \"Hold it, Billy-boy.\" Laughingly she threw up both hands. \"Sure, I knew\n this place had some antiquated laws. Pure fiddle-faddle, that's what\n they are. Anyway, I've been thrown out of better places.\"", "\"That it was sent by our enemy, the same enemy that shot at us in the\n cafe in Swamp City. Exactly.\" Grannie Annie halted at the door of her\n tent and faced me with earnest eyes. \"Billy-boy, our every move is\n being watched. From now on it's the survival of the fittest.\"\nThe following day was our seventh in the swamp. The water here\n resembled a vast mosaic, striped and cross-striped with long winding\n ribbons of yellowish substance that floated a few inches below the\n surface. The mold balls coming into contact with the evonium water of\n the swamp had undergone a chemical change and evolved into a cohesive\n multi-celled marine life that lived and died within a space of hours.\n The Venusians paddled with extreme care. Had one of them dipped his\n hand into one of those yellow streaks, he would have been devoured in\n a matter of seconds.", "Grannie frowned in annoyance, but the prospector was adamant. He\n flipped a stud, twisted a dial and a moment later was leaning back in a\n chair, listening with avid interest.", "She was the most completely delightful crackpot I had ever known.\n\n\n \"What happened to\nGuns for Ganymede\n?\" I asked. \"That was the title of\n your last, wasn't it?\"\nGrannie spilled a few shreds of Martian tobacco onto a paper and deftly\n rolled herself a cigarette.\n\n\n \"It wasn't\nGuns\n, it was\nPistols\n; and it wasn't\nGanymede\n, it was\nPluto\n.\"\n\n\n I grinned. \"All complete, I'll bet, with threats against the universe\n and beautiful Earth heroines dragged in by the hair.\"\n\n\n \"What else is there in science fiction?\" she demanded. \"You can't have\n your hero fall in love with a bug-eyed monster.\"\n\n\n Up on the wall a clock chimed the hour. The old woman jerked to her\n feet.", "Somebody had. Before us stretched a narrow corridor, flanked on the\n left side by a wall of impenetrable stepto glass. The corridor was\n bare of furnishings. But beyond the glass, revealed to us in mocking\n clarity, was a high panel, studded with dials and gauges. Even as we\n looked, we could see liquid pulse in glass tubes, indicator needles\n swing slowly to and fro.\n\n\n Grannie nodded. \"Some kind of a broadcasting unit. The Green Flames in\n the lower hold are probably exposed to a\ntholpane\nplate and their\n radiations stepped up by an electro-phosicalic process.\"\n\n\n Karn raised the butt of his pistol and brought it crashing against the\n glass wall. His arm jumped in recoil, but the glass remained intact.", "\"An old prospector who lives out in the deep marsh on the outskirts of\n Varsoom country. To make a long story short, I got him talking about\n his adventures, and he told me plenty.\"\n\n\n The old woman paused. \"Did you ever hear of the Green Flames?\" she\n asked abruptly.\n\n\n I shook my head. \"Some new kind of ...\"\n\n\n \"It's not a new kind of anything. The Green Flame is a radio-active\n rock once found on Mercury. The\nAlpha\nrays of this rock are similar\n to radium in that they consist of streams of material particles\n projected at high speed. But the character of the\nGamma\nrays has\n never been completely analyzed. Like those set up by radium, they are\n electromagnetic pulsations, but they are also a strange combination of\nBeta\nor cathode rays with negatively charged electrons.", "At high noon by my Earth watch I sighted a low white structure on one\n of the distant islands. Moments later we made a landing at a rude\n jetty, and Grannie Annie was introducing me to Ezra Karn.\n\n\n He was not as old a man as I had expected, but he was ragged and\n unkempt with iron gray hair falling almost to his shoulders. He was\n dressed in\nvarpa\ncloth, the Venus equivalent of buckskin, and on his\n head was an enormous flop-brimmed hat.\n\n\n \"Glad to meet you,\" he said, shaking my hand. \"Any friend of Miss\n Flowers is a friend of mine.\" He ushered us down the catwalk into his\n hut.\n\n\n The place was a two room affair, small but comfortable. The latest\n type of visi set in one corner showed that Karn was not isolated from\n civilization entirely.", "\"When any form of life is exposed to these\nGamma\nrays from the Green\n Flame rock, they produce in the creature's brain a certain lassitude\n and lack of energy. As the period of exposure increases, this condition\n develops into a sense of impotence and a desire for leadership or\n guidance. Occasionally, as with the weak-willed, there is a spirit of\n intolerance. The Green Flames might be said to be an inorganic opiate,\n a thousand times more subtle and more powerful than any known drug.\"\n\n\n I was sitting up now, hanging on to the woman's every word.\n\n\n \"Now in 2710, as you'd know if you studied your history, the three\n planets of Earth, Venus, and Mars were under governmental bondage. The\n cruel dictatorship of Vennox I was short-lived, but it lasted long\n enough to endanger all civilized life." ], [ "She hadn't changed. To her publishers and her readers she might be\n Annabella C. Flowers, author of a long list of science fiction novels.\n But to me she was still Grannie Annie, as old-fashioned as last year's\n hat, as modern as an atomic motor. She had probably written more drivel\n in the name of science fiction than anyone alive.\n\n\n But the public loved it. They ate up her stories, and they clamored for\n more. Her annual income totaled into six figures, and her publishers\n sat back and massaged their digits, watching their earnings mount.\n\n\n One thing you had to admit about her books. They may have been dime\n novels, but they weren't synthetic. If Annabella C. Flowers wrote a\n novel, and the locale was the desert of Mars, she packed her carpet bag\n and hopped a liner for Craterville. If she cooked up a feud between two\n expeditions on Callisto, she went to Callisto.", "\"Beg pardon, thir,\" he said with his racial lisp, \"thereth thome one to\n thee you in the main lounge.\" His eyes rolled as he added, \"A lady!\"\n\n\n A woman here...! The\nSpacemen's\nwas a sanctuary, a rest club where\n in-coming pilots and crewmen could relax before leaving for another\n voyage. The rule that no females could pass its portals was strictly\n enforced.\n\n\n I followed the bellhop down the long corridor that led to the main\n lounge. At the threshold I jerked to a halt and stared incredulously.\n\n\n Grannie Annie!", "\"As most of you are familiar with our program, it will be unnecessary\n to give any advance explanation. I will only say that on this stage are\n nine visi sets, each tuned to one of the nine planets. At transmitting\n sets all over these planets listeners will appear and voice questions.\n These questions, my nine experts will endeavor to answer. For every\n question missed, the sender will receive a check for one thousand\nplanetoles\n.\n\n\n \"One thing more. As usual we have with us a guest star who will match\n her wits with the experts. May I present that renowned writer of\n science fiction, Annabella C. Flowers.\"\n\n\n From the left wing Grannie Annie appeared. She bowed and took her place\n on the dais.", "There she stood before a frantically gesticulating desk clerk, leaning\n on her faded green umbrella. A little wisp of a woman clad in a\n voluminous black dress with one of those doily-like caps on her head,\n tied by a ribbon under her chin. Her high-topped button shoes were\n planted firmly on the varpla carpet and her wrinkled face was set in\n calm defiance.\n\n\n I barged across the lounge and seized her hand. \"Grannie Annie! I\n haven't seen you in two years.\"\n\n\n \"Hi, Billy-boy,\" she greeted calmly. \"Will you please tell this\n fish-face to shut up.\"\n\n\n The desk clerk went white. \"Mithter Trenwith, if thith lady ith a\n friend of yourth, you'll have to take her away. It'th abtholutely\n againth the ruleth....\"", "\"Okay, okay,\" I grinned. \"Look, we'll go into the grille. There's no\n one there at this hour.\"\n\n\n In the grille an equally astonished waiter served us—me a lime rickey\n and Grannie Annie her usual whisky sour—I waited until she had tossed\n the drink off at a gulp before I set off a chain of questions:\n\n\n \"What the devil are you doing on Venus? Don't you know women aren't\n allowed in the\nSpacemen's\n? What happened to the book you were\n writing?\"\n\n\n \"Hold it, Billy-boy.\" Laughingly she threw up both hands. \"Sure, I knew\n this place had some antiquated laws. Pure fiddle-faddle, that's what\n they are. Anyway, I've been thrown out of better places.\"", "She was the most completely delightful crackpot I had ever known.\n\n\n \"What happened to\nGuns for Ganymede\n?\" I asked. \"That was the title of\n your last, wasn't it?\"\nGrannie spilled a few shreds of Martian tobacco onto a paper and deftly\n rolled herself a cigarette.\n\n\n \"It wasn't\nGuns\n, it was\nPistols\n; and it wasn't\nGanymede\n, it was\nPluto\n.\"\n\n\n I grinned. \"All complete, I'll bet, with threats against the universe\n and beautiful Earth heroines dragged in by the hair.\"\n\n\n \"What else is there in science fiction?\" she demanded. \"You can't have\n your hero fall in love with a bug-eyed monster.\"\n\n\n Up on the wall a clock chimed the hour. The old woman jerked to her\n feet.", "Grannie Annie leaped to her feet, grasped my arm and raced for the\n door. Outside a driverless hydrocar stood with idling motors. The old\n woman threw herself into the control seat, yanked me in after her and\n threw over the starting stud.\n\n\n An instant later we were plunging through the dark night.\nSix days after leaving Swamp City we reached Level Five, the last\n outpost of firm ground. Ahead lay the inner marsh, stretching as far as\n the eye could reach. Low islands projected at intervals from the thick\n water. Mold balls, two feet across, drifted down from the slate-gray\n sky like puffs of cotton.", "At high noon by my Earth watch I sighted a low white structure on one\n of the distant islands. Moments later we made a landing at a rude\n jetty, and Grannie Annie was introducing me to Ezra Karn.\n\n\n He was not as old a man as I had expected, but he was ragged and\n unkempt with iron gray hair falling almost to his shoulders. He was\n dressed in\nvarpa\ncloth, the Venus equivalent of buckskin, and on his\n head was an enormous flop-brimmed hat.\n\n\n \"Glad to meet you,\" he said, shaking my hand. \"Any friend of Miss\n Flowers is a friend of mine.\" He ushered us down the catwalk into his\n hut.\n\n\n The place was a two room affair, small but comfortable. The latest\n type of visi set in one corner showed that Karn was not isolated from\n civilization entirely.", "Grannie frowned in annoyance, but the prospector was adamant. He\n flipped a stud, twisted a dial and a moment later was leaning back in a\n chair, listening with avid interest.", "\"And you can lay it all to the Green Flames. It seems incredible that a\n single shipload of the ore could effect such a wide ranged area, but in\n my opinion someone has found a means of making that quantity a thousand\n times more potent and is transmiting it\nen masse\n.\"\n\n\n If it had been anyone but Grannie Annie there before me, I would\n have called her a fool. And then all at once I got an odd feeling of\n approaching danger.\n\n\n \"Let's get out of here,\" I said, getting up.\nZinnng-whack!\n\"All right!\"\n\n\n On the mirror behind the bar a small circle with radiating cracks\n appeared. On the booth wall a scant inch above Grannie's head the\n fresco seemed to melt away suddenly.\n\n\n A heat ray!", "Moments later an official hydrocar roared up and a dozen I.P. men\n rushed out and scattered the crowd. But a few stragglers lingered to\n shout derisive epithets.\n\n\n Grannie Annie came out from behind the box office then. She took my arm\n and led me around a corner and through a doorway under a sign that read\n THE JET. Inside was a deep room with booths along one wall. The place\n was all but deserted.\n\n\n In a booth well toward the rear the old lady surveyed me with sober\n eyes.\n\n\n \"Billy-boy, did you see the way that crowd acted?\"\n\n\n I nodded. \"As disgraceful an exhibition as I've ever seen. The I.P. men\n ought to clamp down.\"\n\n\n \"The I.P. men aren't strong enough.\"", "Grannie Annie came to the point abruptly. When she had explained the\n object of our trip, the prospector became thoughtful.\n\n\n \"Green Flames, eh?\" he repeated slowly. \"Well yes, I suppose I could\n find that space ship again. That is, if I wanted to.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\" Grannie paused in the act of rolling herself a\n cigarette. \"You know where it is, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Ye-s,\" Karn nodded. \"But like I told you before, that ship lies in\n Varsoom country, and that isn't exactly a summer vacation spot.\"\n\n\n \"What are the Varsoom?\" I asked. \"A native tribe?\"\n\n\n Karn shook his head. \"They're a form of life that's never been seen by\n Earthmen. Strictly speaking, they're no more than a form of energy.\"\n\n\n \"Dangerous?\"", "Doctor Universe\nBy CARL JACOBI\nGrannie Annie, who wrote science fiction\n\n under the nom de plume of Annabella C. Flowers,\n\n had stumbled onto a murderous plot more\n\n hair-raising than any she had ever concocted.\n\n And the danger from the villain of the piece\n\n didn't worry her—I was the guy he was shooting at.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI was killing an hour in the billiard room of the\nSpacemen's Club\nin Swamp City when the Venusian bellboy came and tapped me on the\n shoulder.", "The thing in the darkness turned like a cam on a rod and drove at us\n again. This time the old woman's heat gun clicked, and a tracery of\n purple flame shot outward. A horrible soul-chilling scream rent the\n air. A moment later something huge and heavy scrabbled across the\n ground and shot aloft.\nGrannie Annie fired with deliberate speed.\nI stood frozen as the diminuendo of its wild cries echoed back to me.\n\n\n \"In heaven's name, what was it?\"\n\n\n \"Hunter-bird,\" Grannie said calmly. \"A form of avian life found here\n in the swamp. Harmless in its wild state, but when captured, it can be\n trained to pursue a quarry until it kills. It has a single unit brain\n and follows with a relentless purpose.\"\n\n\n \"Then that would mean...?\"", "\"So everything, Billy-boy. Do you realize what such a thing would mean\n if it were true? Green Flames were supposedly destroyed on all planets\n after the Vennox regime crashed. If a quantity of the rock were in\n existence, and it fell into the wrong hands, there'd be trouble.\n\n\n \"Of course, I regarded Karn's story as a wild dream, but it made\n corking good story material. I wrote it into a novel, and a week after\n it was completed, the manuscript was stolen from my study back on\n Earth.\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" I said as she lapsed into silence. \"And now you've come to the\n conclusion that the details of your story were true and that someone is\n attempting to put your plot into action.\"\n\n\n Grannie nodded. \"Yes,\" she said. \"That's exactly what I think.\"", "\"That it was sent by our enemy, the same enemy that shot at us in the\n cafe in Swamp City. Exactly.\" Grannie Annie halted at the door of her\n tent and faced me with earnest eyes. \"Billy-boy, our every move is\n being watched. From now on it's the survival of the fittest.\"\nThe following day was our seventh in the swamp. The water here\n resembled a vast mosaic, striped and cross-striped with long winding\n ribbons of yellowish substance that floated a few inches below the\n surface. The mold balls coming into contact with the evonium water of\n the swamp had undergone a chemical change and evolved into a cohesive\n multi-celled marine life that lived and died within a space of hours.\n The Venusians paddled with extreme care. Had one of them dipped his\n hand into one of those yellow streaks, he would have been devoured in\n a matter of seconds.", "Abruptly I stiffened. The familiar drone of the marsh was gone. In its\n place a ringing silence blanketed everything.\n\n\n And then out in the gloom a darker shadow appeared, moving in\n undulating sweeps toward the center of the camp. Fascinated, I watched\n it advance and retreat, saw two hyalescent eyes swim out of the murk.\n It charged, and with but a split second to act, I threw myself flat.\n There was a rush of mighty wings as the thing swept over me. Sharp\n talons raked my clothing. Again it came, and again I rolled swiftly,\n missing the thing by the narrowest of margins.\n\n\n From the tent opposite a gaunt figure clad in a familiar dress\n appeared. Grannie gave a single warning:\n\n\n \"Stand still!\"", "Grannie gazed a long moment through binoculars. \"Billy-boy, take three\n Venusians and head across the knoll,\" she ordered. \"Ezra and I will\n circle in from the west. Fire a gun if you strike trouble.\"\n\n\n But we found no trouble. The scene before us lay steeped in silence.\n Moments later our two parties converged at the base of the great ship.\n\n\n A metal ladder extended from the envelope down the side of the vessel.\n Mid-way we could see a circular hatch-like door.\n\n\n \"Up we go, Billy-boy.\" Heat gun in readiness, Grannie Annie began to\n climb slowly.\n\n\n The silence remained absolute. We reached the door and pulled it open.\n There was no sign of life.\n\n\n \"Somebody's gone to a lot of trouble here,\" Ezra Karn observed.", "NINE GENIUSES\n\n THE QUESTION PROGRAM OF\n\n THE SYSTEM\n\n\n As we strode down the aisle a mangy-looking Venusian began to pound a\n tinpan piano in the pit. Grannie Annie pushed me into a seat in the\n front row.\n\n\n \"Sit here,\" she said. \"I'm sorry about all this rush, but I'm one of\n the players in this shindig. As soon as the show is over, we'll go\n somewhere and talk.\" She minced lightly down the aisle, climbed the\n stage steps and disappeared in the wings.\n\n\n \"That damned fossilized dynamo,\" I muttered. \"She'll be the death of me\n yet.\"", "\"The archives tell us that one of the first acts of the overthrowing\n government was to cast out all Green Flames, two of which Vennox had\n ordered must be kept in each household. The effect on the people was\n immediate. Representative government, individual enterprise, freedom\n followed.\"\n\n\n Grannie Annie lit a cigarette and flipped the match to the floor.\n\n\n \"To go back to my first trip to Venus. As I said, I met Ezra Karn, an\n old prospector there in the marsh. Karn told me that on one of his\n travels into the Varsoom district he had come upon the wreckage of\n an old space ship. The hold of that space ship was packed with Green\n Flames!\"\n\n\n If Grannie expected me to show surprise at that, she was disappointed.\n I said, \"So what?\"" ], [ "\"So everything, Billy-boy. Do you realize what such a thing would mean\n if it were true? Green Flames were supposedly destroyed on all planets\n after the Vennox regime crashed. If a quantity of the rock were in\n existence, and it fell into the wrong hands, there'd be trouble.\n\n\n \"Of course, I regarded Karn's story as a wild dream, but it made\n corking good story material. I wrote it into a novel, and a week after\n it was completed, the manuscript was stolen from my study back on\n Earth.\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" I said as she lapsed into silence. \"And now you've come to the\n conclusion that the details of your story were true and that someone is\n attempting to put your plot into action.\"\n\n\n Grannie nodded. \"Yes,\" she said. \"That's exactly what I think.\"", "There she stood before a frantically gesticulating desk clerk, leaning\n on her faded green umbrella. A little wisp of a woman clad in a\n voluminous black dress with one of those doily-like caps on her head,\n tied by a ribbon under her chin. Her high-topped button shoes were\n planted firmly on the varpla carpet and her wrinkled face was set in\n calm defiance.\n\n\n I barged across the lounge and seized her hand. \"Grannie Annie! I\n haven't seen you in two years.\"\n\n\n \"Hi, Billy-boy,\" she greeted calmly. \"Will you please tell this\n fish-face to shut up.\"\n\n\n The desk clerk went white. \"Mithter Trenwith, if thith lady ith a\n friend of yourth, you'll have to take her away. It'th abtholutely\n againth the ruleth....\"", "\"Beg pardon, thir,\" he said with his racial lisp, \"thereth thome one to\n thee you in the main lounge.\" His eyes rolled as he added, \"A lady!\"\n\n\n A woman here...! The\nSpacemen's\nwas a sanctuary, a rest club where\n in-coming pilots and crewmen could relax before leaving for another\n voyage. The rule that no females could pass its portals was strictly\n enforced.\n\n\n I followed the bellhop down the long corridor that led to the main\n lounge. At the threshold I jerked to a halt and stared incredulously.\n\n\n Grannie Annie!", "Moments later an official hydrocar roared up and a dozen I.P. men\n rushed out and scattered the crowd. But a few stragglers lingered to\n shout derisive epithets.\n\n\n Grannie Annie came out from behind the box office then. She took my arm\n and led me around a corner and through a doorway under a sign that read\n THE JET. Inside was a deep room with booths along one wall. The place\n was all but deserted.\n\n\n In a booth well toward the rear the old lady surveyed me with sober\n eyes.\n\n\n \"Billy-boy, did you see the way that crowd acted?\"\n\n\n I nodded. \"As disgraceful an exhibition as I've ever seen. The I.P. men\n ought to clamp down.\"\n\n\n \"The I.P. men aren't strong enough.\"", "\"Okay, okay,\" I grinned. \"Look, we'll go into the grille. There's no\n one there at this hour.\"\n\n\n In the grille an equally astonished waiter served us—me a lime rickey\n and Grannie Annie her usual whisky sour—I waited until she had tossed\n the drink off at a gulp before I set off a chain of questions:\n\n\n \"What the devil are you doing on Venus? Don't you know women aren't\n allowed in the\nSpacemen's\n? What happened to the book you were\n writing?\"\n\n\n \"Hold it, Billy-boy.\" Laughingly she threw up both hands. \"Sure, I knew\n this place had some antiquated laws. Pure fiddle-faddle, that's what\n they are. Anyway, I've been thrown out of better places.\"", "\"I almost forgot, Billy-boy. I'm due at the\nSatellite\nTheater in ten\n minutes. Come on, you're going with me.\"\n\n\n Before I realized it, I was following her through the lounge and out to\n the jetty front. Grannie Annie hailed a hydrocar. Five minutes later we\n drew up before the big doors of the\nSatellite\n.\n\n\n They don't go in for style in Swamp City. A theater to the grizzled\n colonials on this side of the planet meant a shack on stilts over the\n muck,\nzilcon\nwood seats and dingy atobide lamps. But the place was\n packed with miners, freight-crew-men—all the tide and wash of humanity\n that made Swamp City the frontier post it is.\n\n\n In front was a big sign. It read:\nONE NIGHT ONLY\n\n DOCTOR UNIVERSE AND HIS", "She hadn't changed. To her publishers and her readers she might be\n Annabella C. Flowers, author of a long list of science fiction novels.\n But to me she was still Grannie Annie, as old-fashioned as last year's\n hat, as modern as an atomic motor. She had probably written more drivel\n in the name of science fiction than anyone alive.\n\n\n But the public loved it. They ate up her stories, and they clamored for\n more. Her annual income totaled into six figures, and her publishers\n sat back and massaged their digits, watching their earnings mount.\n\n\n One thing you had to admit about her books. They may have been dime\n novels, but they weren't synthetic. If Annabella C. Flowers wrote a\n novel, and the locale was the desert of Mars, she packed her carpet bag\n and hopped a liner for Craterville. If she cooked up a feud between two\n expeditions on Callisto, she went to Callisto.", "Grannie frowned in annoyance, but the prospector was adamant. He\n flipped a stud, twisted a dial and a moment later was leaning back in a\n chair, listening with avid interest.", "At high noon by my Earth watch I sighted a low white structure on one\n of the distant islands. Moments later we made a landing at a rude\n jetty, and Grannie Annie was introducing me to Ezra Karn.\n\n\n He was not as old a man as I had expected, but he was ragged and\n unkempt with iron gray hair falling almost to his shoulders. He was\n dressed in\nvarpa\ncloth, the Venus equivalent of buckskin, and on his\n head was an enormous flop-brimmed hat.\n\n\n \"Glad to meet you,\" he said, shaking my hand. \"Any friend of Miss\n Flowers is a friend of mine.\" He ushered us down the catwalk into his\n hut.\n\n\n The place was a two room affair, small but comfortable. The latest\n type of visi set in one corner showed that Karn was not isolated from\n civilization entirely.", "Grannie Annie leaped to her feet, grasped my arm and raced for the\n door. Outside a driverless hydrocar stood with idling motors. The old\n woman threw herself into the control seat, yanked me in after her and\n threw over the starting stud.\n\n\n An instant later we were plunging through the dark night.\nSix days after leaving Swamp City we reached Level Five, the last\n outpost of firm ground. Ahead lay the inner marsh, stretching as far as\n the eye could reach. Low islands projected at intervals from the thick\n water. Mold balls, two feet across, drifted down from the slate-gray\n sky like puffs of cotton.", "Grannie Annie came to the point abruptly. When she had explained the\n object of our trip, the prospector became thoughtful.\n\n\n \"Green Flames, eh?\" he repeated slowly. \"Well yes, I suppose I could\n find that space ship again. That is, if I wanted to.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\" Grannie paused in the act of rolling herself a\n cigarette. \"You know where it is, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Ye-s,\" Karn nodded. \"But like I told you before, that ship lies in\n Varsoom country, and that isn't exactly a summer vacation spot.\"\n\n\n \"What are the Varsoom?\" I asked. \"A native tribe?\"\n\n\n Karn shook his head. \"They're a form of life that's never been seen by\n Earthmen. Strictly speaking, they're no more than a form of energy.\"\n\n\n \"Dangerous?\"", "Grannie gazed a long moment through binoculars. \"Billy-boy, take three\n Venusians and head across the knoll,\" she ordered. \"Ezra and I will\n circle in from the west. Fire a gun if you strike trouble.\"\n\n\n But we found no trouble. The scene before us lay steeped in silence.\n Moments later our two parties converged at the base of the great ship.\n\n\n A metal ladder extended from the envelope down the side of the vessel.\n Mid-way we could see a circular hatch-like door.\n\n\n \"Up we go, Billy-boy.\" Heat gun in readiness, Grannie Annie began to\n climb slowly.\n\n\n The silence remained absolute. We reached the door and pulled it open.\n There was no sign of life.\n\n\n \"Somebody's gone to a lot of trouble here,\" Ezra Karn observed.", "\"That it was sent by our enemy, the same enemy that shot at us in the\n cafe in Swamp City. Exactly.\" Grannie Annie halted at the door of her\n tent and faced me with earnest eyes. \"Billy-boy, our every move is\n being watched. From now on it's the survival of the fittest.\"\nThe following day was our seventh in the swamp. The water here\n resembled a vast mosaic, striped and cross-striped with long winding\n ribbons of yellowish substance that floated a few inches below the\n surface. The mold balls coming into contact with the evonium water of\n the swamp had undergone a chemical change and evolved into a cohesive\n multi-celled marine life that lived and died within a space of hours.\n The Venusians paddled with extreme care. Had one of them dipped his\n hand into one of those yellow streaks, he would have been devoured in\n a matter of seconds.", "\"And you can lay it all to the Green Flames. It seems incredible that a\n single shipload of the ore could effect such a wide ranged area, but in\n my opinion someone has found a means of making that quantity a thousand\n times more potent and is transmiting it\nen masse\n.\"\n\n\n If it had been anyone but Grannie Annie there before me, I would\n have called her a fool. And then all at once I got an odd feeling of\n approaching danger.\n\n\n \"Let's get out of here,\" I said, getting up.\nZinnng-whack!\n\"All right!\"\n\n\n On the mirror behind the bar a small circle with radiating cracks\n appeared. On the booth wall a scant inch above Grannie's head the\n fresco seemed to melt away suddenly.\n\n\n A heat ray!", "She was the most completely delightful crackpot I had ever known.\n\n\n \"What happened to\nGuns for Ganymede\n?\" I asked. \"That was the title of\n your last, wasn't it?\"\nGrannie spilled a few shreds of Martian tobacco onto a paper and deftly\n rolled herself a cigarette.\n\n\n \"It wasn't\nGuns\n, it was\nPistols\n; and it wasn't\nGanymede\n, it was\nPluto\n.\"\n\n\n I grinned. \"All complete, I'll bet, with threats against the universe\n and beautiful Earth heroines dragged in by the hair.\"\n\n\n \"What else is there in science fiction?\" she demanded. \"You can't have\n your hero fall in love with a bug-eyed monster.\"\n\n\n Up on the wall a clock chimed the hour. The old woman jerked to her\n feet.", "The thing in the darkness turned like a cam on a rod and drove at us\n again. This time the old woman's heat gun clicked, and a tracery of\n purple flame shot outward. A horrible soul-chilling scream rent the\n air. A moment later something huge and heavy scrabbled across the\n ground and shot aloft.\nGrannie Annie fired with deliberate speed.\nI stood frozen as the diminuendo of its wild cries echoed back to me.\n\n\n \"In heaven's name, what was it?\"\n\n\n \"Hunter-bird,\" Grannie said calmly. \"A form of avian life found here\n in the swamp. Harmless in its wild state, but when captured, it can be\n trained to pursue a quarry until it kills. It has a single unit brain\n and follows with a relentless purpose.\"\n\n\n \"Then that would mean...?\"", "\"As most of you are familiar with our program, it will be unnecessary\n to give any advance explanation. I will only say that on this stage are\n nine visi sets, each tuned to one of the nine planets. At transmitting\n sets all over these planets listeners will appear and voice questions.\n These questions, my nine experts will endeavor to answer. For every\n question missed, the sender will receive a check for one thousand\nplanetoles\n.\n\n\n \"One thing more. As usual we have with us a guest star who will match\n her wits with the experts. May I present that renowned writer of\n science fiction, Annabella C. Flowers.\"\n\n\n From the left wing Grannie Annie appeared. She bowed and took her place\n on the dais.", "Doctor Universe\nBy CARL JACOBI\nGrannie Annie, who wrote science fiction\n\n under the nom de plume of Annabella C. Flowers,\n\n had stumbled onto a murderous plot more\n\n hair-raising than any she had ever concocted.\n\n And the danger from the villain of the piece\n\n didn't worry her—I was the guy he was shooting at.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI was killing an hour in the billiard room of the\nSpacemen's Club\nin Swamp City when the Venusian bellboy came and tapped me on the\n shoulder.", "And so it went. Questions from Mars, from Earth, from Saturn flowed in\n the visi sets. Isolated miners on Jupiter, dancers in swank Plutonian\n cafes strove to stump the experts. With Doctor Universe offering\n bantering side play, the experts gave their answers. When they failed,\n or when the Truthicator flashed a red light, he announced the name of\n the winner.\n\n\n It grew a little tiresome after a while and I wondered why Grannie had\n brought me here. And then I began to notice things.\n\n\n The audience in the\nSatellite\nseemed to have lost much of its\n original fervor. They applauded as before but they did so only at the\n signal of Doctor Universe. The spell created by the man was complete.\n\n\n Pompous and erect, he strode back and forth across the stage like a\n general surveying his army. His black eyes gleamed, and his thin lips\n were turned in a smile of satisfaction.", "Abruptly I stiffened. The familiar drone of the marsh was gone. In its\n place a ringing silence blanketed everything.\n\n\n And then out in the gloom a darker shadow appeared, moving in\n undulating sweeps toward the center of the camp. Fascinated, I watched\n it advance and retreat, saw two hyalescent eyes swim out of the murk.\n It charged, and with but a split second to act, I threw myself flat.\n There was a rush of mighty wings as the thing swept over me. Sharp\n talons raked my clothing. Again it came, and again I rolled swiftly,\n missing the thing by the narrowest of margins.\n\n\n From the tent opposite a gaunt figure clad in a familiar dress\n appeared. Grannie gave a single warning:\n\n\n \"Stand still!\"" ], [ "Moments later an official hydrocar roared up and a dozen I.P. men\n rushed out and scattered the crowd. But a few stragglers lingered to\n shout derisive epithets.\n\n\n Grannie Annie came out from behind the box office then. She took my arm\n and led me around a corner and through a doorway under a sign that read\n THE JET. Inside was a deep room with booths along one wall. The place\n was all but deserted.\n\n\n In a booth well toward the rear the old lady surveyed me with sober\n eyes.\n\n\n \"Billy-boy, did you see the way that crowd acted?\"\n\n\n I nodded. \"As disgraceful an exhibition as I've ever seen. The I.P. men\n ought to clamp down.\"\n\n\n \"The I.P. men aren't strong enough.\"", "\"Beg pardon, thir,\" he said with his racial lisp, \"thereth thome one to\n thee you in the main lounge.\" His eyes rolled as he added, \"A lady!\"\n\n\n A woman here...! The\nSpacemen's\nwas a sanctuary, a rest club where\n in-coming pilots and crewmen could relax before leaving for another\n voyage. The rule that no females could pass its portals was strictly\n enforced.\n\n\n I followed the bellhop down the long corridor that led to the main\n lounge. At the threshold I jerked to a halt and stared incredulously.\n\n\n Grannie Annie!", "There she stood before a frantically gesticulating desk clerk, leaning\n on her faded green umbrella. A little wisp of a woman clad in a\n voluminous black dress with one of those doily-like caps on her head,\n tied by a ribbon under her chin. Her high-topped button shoes were\n planted firmly on the varpla carpet and her wrinkled face was set in\n calm defiance.\n\n\n I barged across the lounge and seized her hand. \"Grannie Annie! I\n haven't seen you in two years.\"\n\n\n \"Hi, Billy-boy,\" she greeted calmly. \"Will you please tell this\n fish-face to shut up.\"\n\n\n The desk clerk went white. \"Mithter Trenwith, if thith lady ith a\n friend of yourth, you'll have to take her away. It'th abtholutely\n againth the ruleth....\"", "\"And you can lay it all to the Green Flames. It seems incredible that a\n single shipload of the ore could effect such a wide ranged area, but in\n my opinion someone has found a means of making that quantity a thousand\n times more potent and is transmiting it\nen masse\n.\"\n\n\n If it had been anyone but Grannie Annie there before me, I would\n have called her a fool. And then all at once I got an odd feeling of\n approaching danger.\n\n\n \"Let's get out of here,\" I said, getting up.\nZinnng-whack!\n\"All right!\"\n\n\n On the mirror behind the bar a small circle with radiating cracks\n appeared. On the booth wall a scant inch above Grannie's head the\n fresco seemed to melt away suddenly.\n\n\n A heat ray!", "\"Okay, okay,\" I grinned. \"Look, we'll go into the grille. There's no\n one there at this hour.\"\n\n\n In the grille an equally astonished waiter served us—me a lime rickey\n and Grannie Annie her usual whisky sour—I waited until she had tossed\n the drink off at a gulp before I set off a chain of questions:\n\n\n \"What the devil are you doing on Venus? Don't you know women aren't\n allowed in the\nSpacemen's\n? What happened to the book you were\n writing?\"\n\n\n \"Hold it, Billy-boy.\" Laughingly she threw up both hands. \"Sure, I knew\n this place had some antiquated laws. Pure fiddle-faddle, that's what\n they are. Anyway, I've been thrown out of better places.\"", "Grannie Annie came to the point abruptly. When she had explained the\n object of our trip, the prospector became thoughtful.\n\n\n \"Green Flames, eh?\" he repeated slowly. \"Well yes, I suppose I could\n find that space ship again. That is, if I wanted to.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\" Grannie paused in the act of rolling herself a\n cigarette. \"You know where it is, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Ye-s,\" Karn nodded. \"But like I told you before, that ship lies in\n Varsoom country, and that isn't exactly a summer vacation spot.\"\n\n\n \"What are the Varsoom?\" I asked. \"A native tribe?\"\n\n\n Karn shook his head. \"They're a form of life that's never been seen by\n Earthmen. Strictly speaking, they're no more than a form of energy.\"\n\n\n \"Dangerous?\"", "\"So everything, Billy-boy. Do you realize what such a thing would mean\n if it were true? Green Flames were supposedly destroyed on all planets\n after the Vennox regime crashed. If a quantity of the rock were in\n existence, and it fell into the wrong hands, there'd be trouble.\n\n\n \"Of course, I regarded Karn's story as a wild dream, but it made\n corking good story material. I wrote it into a novel, and a week after\n it was completed, the manuscript was stolen from my study back on\n Earth.\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" I said as she lapsed into silence. \"And now you've come to the\n conclusion that the details of your story were true and that someone is\n attempting to put your plot into action.\"\n\n\n Grannie nodded. \"Yes,\" she said. \"That's exactly what I think.\"", "\"As most of you are familiar with our program, it will be unnecessary\n to give any advance explanation. I will only say that on this stage are\n nine visi sets, each tuned to one of the nine planets. At transmitting\n sets all over these planets listeners will appear and voice questions.\n These questions, my nine experts will endeavor to answer. For every\n question missed, the sender will receive a check for one thousand\nplanetoles\n.\n\n\n \"One thing more. As usual we have with us a guest star who will match\n her wits with the experts. May I present that renowned writer of\n science fiction, Annabella C. Flowers.\"\n\n\n From the left wing Grannie Annie appeared. She bowed and took her place\n on the dais.", "Grannie Annie leaped to her feet, grasped my arm and raced for the\n door. Outside a driverless hydrocar stood with idling motors. The old\n woman threw herself into the control seat, yanked me in after her and\n threw over the starting stud.\n\n\n An instant later we were plunging through the dark night.\nSix days after leaving Swamp City we reached Level Five, the last\n outpost of firm ground. Ahead lay the inner marsh, stretching as far as\n the eye could reach. Low islands projected at intervals from the thick\n water. Mold balls, two feet across, drifted down from the slate-gray\n sky like puffs of cotton.", "The thing in the darkness turned like a cam on a rod and drove at us\n again. This time the old woman's heat gun clicked, and a tracery of\n purple flame shot outward. A horrible soul-chilling scream rent the\n air. A moment later something huge and heavy scrabbled across the\n ground and shot aloft.\nGrannie Annie fired with deliberate speed.\nI stood frozen as the diminuendo of its wild cries echoed back to me.\n\n\n \"In heaven's name, what was it?\"\n\n\n \"Hunter-bird,\" Grannie said calmly. \"A form of avian life found here\n in the swamp. Harmless in its wild state, but when captured, it can be\n trained to pursue a quarry until it kills. It has a single unit brain\n and follows with a relentless purpose.\"\n\n\n \"Then that would mean...?\"", "She was the most completely delightful crackpot I had ever known.\n\n\n \"What happened to\nGuns for Ganymede\n?\" I asked. \"That was the title of\n your last, wasn't it?\"\nGrannie spilled a few shreds of Martian tobacco onto a paper and deftly\n rolled herself a cigarette.\n\n\n \"It wasn't\nGuns\n, it was\nPistols\n; and it wasn't\nGanymede\n, it was\nPluto\n.\"\n\n\n I grinned. \"All complete, I'll bet, with threats against the universe\n and beautiful Earth heroines dragged in by the hair.\"\n\n\n \"What else is there in science fiction?\" she demanded. \"You can't have\n your hero fall in love with a bug-eyed monster.\"\n\n\n Up on the wall a clock chimed the hour. The old woman jerked to her\n feet.", "\"That it was sent by our enemy, the same enemy that shot at us in the\n cafe in Swamp City. Exactly.\" Grannie Annie halted at the door of her\n tent and faced me with earnest eyes. \"Billy-boy, our every move is\n being watched. From now on it's the survival of the fittest.\"\nThe following day was our seventh in the swamp. The water here\n resembled a vast mosaic, striped and cross-striped with long winding\n ribbons of yellowish substance that floated a few inches below the\n surface. The mold balls coming into contact with the evonium water of\n the swamp had undergone a chemical change and evolved into a cohesive\n multi-celled marine life that lived and died within a space of hours.\n The Venusians paddled with extreme care. Had one of them dipped his\n hand into one of those yellow streaks, he would have been devoured in\n a matter of seconds.", "NINE GENIUSES\n\n THE QUESTION PROGRAM OF\n\n THE SYSTEM\n\n\n As we strode down the aisle a mangy-looking Venusian began to pound a\n tinpan piano in the pit. Grannie Annie pushed me into a seat in the\n front row.\n\n\n \"Sit here,\" she said. \"I'm sorry about all this rush, but I'm one of\n the players in this shindig. As soon as the show is over, we'll go\n somewhere and talk.\" She minced lightly down the aisle, climbed the\n stage steps and disappeared in the wings.\n\n\n \"That damned fossilized dynamo,\" I muttered. \"She'll be the death of me\n yet.\"", "\"You'll never do it that way,\" Grannie said. \"Nothing short of an\n atomic blast will shatter that wall. It explains why there are no\n guards here. The mechanism is entirely self-operating. Let's see if the\n Green Flames are more accessible.\"\n\n\n In the lower hold disappointment again confronted us. Visible in\n the feeble shafts of daylight that filtered through cracks in the\n vessel's hull were tiers of rectangular ingots of green iridescent ore.\n Suspended by insulators from the ceiling over them was a thick metal\n plate.\n\n\n But between was a barrier. A wall of impenetrable stepto glass.\n\n\n Grannie stamped her foot. \"It's maddening,\" she said. \"Here we are at\n the crux of the whole matter, and we're powerless to make a single\n move.\"", "\"The archives tell us that one of the first acts of the overthrowing\n government was to cast out all Green Flames, two of which Vennox had\n ordered must be kept in each household. The effect on the people was\n immediate. Representative government, individual enterprise, freedom\n followed.\"\n\n\n Grannie Annie lit a cigarette and flipped the match to the floor.\n\n\n \"To go back to my first trip to Venus. As I said, I met Ezra Karn, an\n old prospector there in the marsh. Karn told me that on one of his\n travels into the Varsoom district he had come upon the wreckage of\n an old space ship. The hold of that space ship was packed with Green\n Flames!\"\n\n\n If Grannie expected me to show surprise at that, she was disappointed.\n I said, \"So what?\"", "Grannie frowned in annoyance, but the prospector was adamant. He\n flipped a stud, twisted a dial and a moment later was leaning back in a\n chair, listening with avid interest.", "She hadn't changed. To her publishers and her readers she might be\n Annabella C. Flowers, author of a long list of science fiction novels.\n But to me she was still Grannie Annie, as old-fashioned as last year's\n hat, as modern as an atomic motor. She had probably written more drivel\n in the name of science fiction than anyone alive.\n\n\n But the public loved it. They ate up her stories, and they clamored for\n more. Her annual income totaled into six figures, and her publishers\n sat back and massaged their digits, watching their earnings mount.\n\n\n One thing you had to admit about her books. They may have been dime\n novels, but they weren't synthetic. If Annabella C. Flowers wrote a\n novel, and the locale was the desert of Mars, she packed her carpet bag\n and hopped a liner for Craterville. If she cooked up a feud between two\n expeditions on Callisto, she went to Callisto.", "At high noon by my Earth watch I sighted a low white structure on one\n of the distant islands. Moments later we made a landing at a rude\n jetty, and Grannie Annie was introducing me to Ezra Karn.\n\n\n He was not as old a man as I had expected, but he was ragged and\n unkempt with iron gray hair falling almost to his shoulders. He was\n dressed in\nvarpa\ncloth, the Venus equivalent of buckskin, and on his\n head was an enormous flop-brimmed hat.\n\n\n \"Glad to meet you,\" he said, shaking my hand. \"Any friend of Miss\n Flowers is a friend of mine.\" He ushered us down the catwalk into his\n hut.\n\n\n The place was a two room affair, small but comfortable. The latest\n type of visi set in one corner showed that Karn was not isolated from\n civilization entirely.", "Somebody had. Before us stretched a narrow corridor, flanked on the\n left side by a wall of impenetrable stepto glass. The corridor was\n bare of furnishings. But beyond the glass, revealed to us in mocking\n clarity, was a high panel, studded with dials and gauges. Even as we\n looked, we could see liquid pulse in glass tubes, indicator needles\n swing slowly to and fro.\n\n\n Grannie nodded. \"Some kind of a broadcasting unit. The Green Flames in\n the lower hold are probably exposed to a\ntholpane\nplate and their\n radiations stepped up by an electro-phosicalic process.\"\n\n\n Karn raised the butt of his pistol and brought it crashing against the\n glass wall. His arm jumped in recoil, but the glass remained intact.", "Sleep had never bothered me, yet that night I lay awake for hours\n tossing restlessly. The thousand sounds of the blue marsh droned\n steadily. And the news broadcast I had heard over the portable visi\n just before retiring still lingered in my mind. To a casual observer\n that broadcast would have meant little, a slight rebellion here, an\n isolated crime there. But viewed from the perspective Grannie had\n given me, everything dovetailed. The situation on Jupiter was swiftly\n coming to a head. Not only had the people on that planet demanded that\n representative government be abolished, but a forum was now being held\n to find a leader who might take complete dictatorial control.\n\n\n Outside a whisper-worm hissed softly. I got up and strode out of my\n tent. For some time I stood there, lost in thought. Could I believe\n Grannie's incredible story? Or was this another of her fantastic plots\n which she had skilfully blended into a novel?" ], [ "And so it went. Questions from Mars, from Earth, from Saturn flowed in\n the visi sets. Isolated miners on Jupiter, dancers in swank Plutonian\n cafes strove to stump the experts. With Doctor Universe offering\n bantering side play, the experts gave their answers. When they failed,\n or when the Truthicator flashed a red light, he announced the name of\n the winner.\n\n\n It grew a little tiresome after a while and I wondered why Grannie had\n brought me here. And then I began to notice things.\n\n\n The audience in the\nSatellite\nseemed to have lost much of its\n original fervor. They applauded as before but they did so only at the\n signal of Doctor Universe. The spell created by the man was complete.\n\n\n Pompous and erect, he strode back and forth across the stage like a\n general surveying his army. His black eyes gleamed, and his thin lips\n were turned in a smile of satisfaction.", "\"Yes and no. Only man I ever heard of who escaped their country outside\n of myself was the explorer, Darthier, three years ago. I got away\n because I was alone, and they didn't notice me, and Darthier escaped\n because he made 'em laugh.\"\n\n\n \"Laugh?\" A scowl crossed Grannie's face.\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Karn said. \"The Varsoom have a strange nervous reaction\n that's manifested by laughing. But just what it is that makes them\n laugh, I don't know.\"\n\n\n Food supplies and fresh drinking water were replenished at the hut.\n Several mold guns were borrowed from the prospector's supply to arm the\n Venusians. And then as we were about to leave, Karn suddenly turned.\n\n\n \"The Doctor Universe program,\" he said. \"I ain't missed one in months.\n You gotta wait 'til I hear it.\"", "The Doctor's program began. The operator of the Earth visi twisted his\n dials and nodded. Blue light flickered on the pantascope panel to\n coalesce slowly into the face of a red-haired man. Sharp and dear his\n voice echoed through the theater:\n\n\n \"\nWho was the first Earthman to titter the sunward side of Mercury?\n\"\n\n\n Doctor Universe nodded and turned to Grannie Annie who had raised her\n hand. She said quietly:\n\n\n \"Charles Zanner in the year 2012. In a specially constructed\n tracto-car.\"", "Doctor Universe\nBy CARL JACOBI\nGrannie Annie, who wrote science fiction\n\n under the nom de plume of Annabella C. Flowers,\n\n had stumbled onto a murderous plot more\n\n hair-raising than any she had ever concocted.\n\n And the danger from the villain of the piece\n\n didn't worry her—I was the guy he was shooting at.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI was killing an hour in the billiard room of the\nSpacemen's Club\nin Swamp City when the Venusian bellboy came and tapped me on the\n shoulder.", "The piano struck a chord in G, and the curtain went rattling up. On the\n stage four Earthmen, two Martians, two Venusians, and one Mercurian\n sat on an upraised dais. That is to say, eight of them sat. The\n Mercurian, a huge lump of granite-like flesh, sprawled there, palpably\n uncomfortable. On the right were nine visi sets, each with its new\n improved pantascope panel and switchboard. Before each set stood an\n Earthman operator.\nA tall man, clad in a claw-hammer coat, came out from the wings and\n advanced to the footlights.\n\n\n \"People of Swamp City,\" he said, bowing, \"permit me to introduce\n myself. I am Doctor Universe, and these are my nine experts.\"\n\n\n There was a roar of applause from the\nSatellite\naudience. When it had\n subsided, the man continued:", "\"I almost forgot, Billy-boy. I'm due at the\nSatellite\nTheater in ten\n minutes. Come on, you're going with me.\"\n\n\n Before I realized it, I was following her through the lounge and out to\n the jetty front. Grannie Annie hailed a hydrocar. Five minutes later we\n drew up before the big doors of the\nSatellite\n.\n\n\n They don't go in for style in Swamp City. A theater to the grizzled\n colonials on this side of the planet meant a shack on stilts over the\n muck,\nzilcon\nwood seats and dingy atobide lamps. But the place was\n packed with miners, freight-crew-men—all the tide and wash of humanity\n that made Swamp City the frontier post it is.\n\n\n In front was a big sign. It read:\nONE NIGHT ONLY\n\n DOCTOR UNIVERSE AND HIS", "I got my pipe out of my pocket, tamped Martian tobacco into the bowl\n and laughed heartily. \"The same old Flowers,\" I said. \"Tell me, who's\n your thief ... Doctor Universe?\"\n\n\n She regarded me evenly. \"What makes you say that?\"\n\n\n I shrugged.\n\n\n \"The way the theater crowd acted. It all ties in.\"\n\n\n The old woman shook her head. \"No, this is a lot bigger than a simple\n quiz program. The theater crowd was but a cross-section of what is\n happening all over the System. There have been riots on Earth and Mars,\n police officials murdered on Pluto and a demand that government by\n representation be abolished on Jupiter. The time is ripe for a military\n dictator to step in.", "She said it quietly, but there was a glitter in her eyes and a harsh\n line about her usually smiling lips.\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\nFor a moment the old lady sat there in silence; then she leaned back,\n closed her eyes, and I knew there was a story coming.\n\n\n \"My last book,\nDeath In The Atom\n, hit the stands last January,\"\n she began. \"When it was finished I had planned to take a six months'\n vacation, but those fool publishers of mine insisted I do a sequel.\n Well, I'd used Mars and Pluto and Ganymede as settings for novels, so\n for this one I decided on Venus. I went to Venus City, and I spent six\n weeks in-country. I got some swell background material, and I met Ezra\n Karn....\"\n\n\n \"Who?\" I interrupted.", "Sleep had never bothered me, yet that night I lay awake for hours\n tossing restlessly. The thousand sounds of the blue marsh droned\n steadily. And the news broadcast I had heard over the portable visi\n just before retiring still lingered in my mind. To a casual observer\n that broadcast would have meant little, a slight rebellion here, an\n isolated crime there. But viewed from the perspective Grannie had\n given me, everything dovetailed. The situation on Jupiter was swiftly\n coming to a head. Not only had the people on that planet demanded that\n representative government be abolished, but a forum was now being held\n to find a leader who might take complete dictatorial control.\n\n\n Outside a whisper-worm hissed softly. I got up and strode out of my\n tent. For some time I stood there, lost in thought. Could I believe\n Grannie's incredible story? Or was this another of her fantastic plots\n which she had skilfully blended into a novel?", "\"As most of you are familiar with our program, it will be unnecessary\n to give any advance explanation. I will only say that on this stage are\n nine visi sets, each tuned to one of the nine planets. At transmitting\n sets all over these planets listeners will appear and voice questions.\n These questions, my nine experts will endeavor to answer. For every\n question missed, the sender will receive a check for one thousand\nplanetoles\n.\n\n\n \"One thing more. As usual we have with us a guest star who will match\n her wits with the experts. May I present that renowned writer of\n science fiction, Annabella C. Flowers.\"\n\n\n From the left wing Grannie Annie appeared. She bowed and took her place\n on the dais.", "It was the same show I had witnessed back in Swamp City. Once again I\n heard questions filter in from the far outposts of the System. Once\n again I saw the commanding figure of the quiz master as he strode back\n and forth across the stage. And as I sat there, looking into the visi\n screen, a curious numbing drowsiness seemed to steal over me and lead\n my thoughts far away.\nHalf an hour later we headed into the unknown. The Venusian boatmen\n were ill-at-ease now and jabbered among themselves constantly. We\n camped that night on a miserable little island where insects swarmed\n about us in hordes. The next day an indefinable wave of weariness and\n despondency beset our entire party. I caught myself musing over the\n futility of the venture. Only the pleadings of Grannie Annie kept me\n from turning back. On the morrow I realized the truth in her warning,\n that all of us had been exposed to the insidious radiations.", "She was the most completely delightful crackpot I had ever known.\n\n\n \"What happened to\nGuns for Ganymede\n?\" I asked. \"That was the title of\n your last, wasn't it?\"\nGrannie spilled a few shreds of Martian tobacco onto a paper and deftly\n rolled herself a cigarette.\n\n\n \"It wasn't\nGuns\n, it was\nPistols\n; and it wasn't\nGanymede\n, it was\nPluto\n.\"\n\n\n I grinned. \"All complete, I'll bet, with threats against the universe\n and beautiful Earth heroines dragged in by the hair.\"\n\n\n \"What else is there in science fiction?\" she demanded. \"You can't have\n your hero fall in love with a bug-eyed monster.\"\n\n\n Up on the wall a clock chimed the hour. The old woman jerked to her\n feet.", "\"So everything, Billy-boy. Do you realize what such a thing would mean\n if it were true? Green Flames were supposedly destroyed on all planets\n after the Vennox regime crashed. If a quantity of the rock were in\n existence, and it fell into the wrong hands, there'd be trouble.\n\n\n \"Of course, I regarded Karn's story as a wild dream, but it made\n corking good story material. I wrote it into a novel, and a week after\n it was completed, the manuscript was stolen from my study back on\n Earth.\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" I said as she lapsed into silence. \"And now you've come to the\n conclusion that the details of your story were true and that someone is\n attempting to put your plot into action.\"\n\n\n Grannie nodded. \"Yes,\" she said. \"That's exactly what I think.\"", "NINE GENIUSES\n\n THE QUESTION PROGRAM OF\n\n THE SYSTEM\n\n\n As we strode down the aisle a mangy-looking Venusian began to pound a\n tinpan piano in the pit. Grannie Annie pushed me into a seat in the\n front row.\n\n\n \"Sit here,\" she said. \"I'm sorry about all this rush, but I'm one of\n the players in this shindig. As soon as the show is over, we'll go\n somewhere and talk.\" She minced lightly down the aisle, climbed the\n stage steps and disappeared in the wings.\n\n\n \"That damned fossilized dynamo,\" I muttered. \"She'll be the death of me\n yet.\"", "At high noon by my Earth watch I sighted a low white structure on one\n of the distant islands. Moments later we made a landing at a rude\n jetty, and Grannie Annie was introducing me to Ezra Karn.\n\n\n He was not as old a man as I had expected, but he was ragged and\n unkempt with iron gray hair falling almost to his shoulders. He was\n dressed in\nvarpa\ncloth, the Venus equivalent of buckskin, and on his\n head was an enormous flop-brimmed hat.\n\n\n \"Glad to meet you,\" he said, shaking my hand. \"Any friend of Miss\n Flowers is a friend of mine.\" He ushered us down the catwalk into his\n hut.\n\n\n The place was a two room affair, small but comfortable. The latest\n type of visi set in one corner showed that Karn was not isolated from\n civilization entirely.", "When the last question had been answered I joined the exit-moving\n crowd. It was outside under the street marquee that a strange incident\n occurred.\n\n\n A yellow-faced Kagor from the upper Martian desert country shuffled by,\n dragging his cumbersome third leg behind him. Kagors, of course, had an\n unpleasant history of persecution since the early colonization days of\n the Red Planet. But the thing that happened there was a throw back to\n an earlier era.\n\n\n Someone shouted, \"Yah, yellow-face! Down with all Kagors!\" As one\n man the crowd took up the cry and surged forward. The helpless Kagor\n was seized and flung to the pavement. A knife appeared from nowhere,\n snipped the Martian's single lock of hair. A booted foot bludgeoned\n into his mouth.", "\"When any form of life is exposed to these\nGamma\nrays from the Green\n Flame rock, they produce in the creature's brain a certain lassitude\n and lack of energy. As the period of exposure increases, this condition\n develops into a sense of impotence and a desire for leadership or\n guidance. Occasionally, as with the weak-willed, there is a spirit of\n intolerance. The Green Flames might be said to be an inorganic opiate,\n a thousand times more subtle and more powerful than any known drug.\"\n\n\n I was sitting up now, hanging on to the woman's every word.\n\n\n \"Now in 2710, as you'd know if you studied your history, the three\n planets of Earth, Venus, and Mars were under governmental bondage. The\n cruel dictatorship of Vennox I was short-lived, but it lasted long\n enough to endanger all civilized life.", "Somebody had. Before us stretched a narrow corridor, flanked on the\n left side by a wall of impenetrable stepto glass. The corridor was\n bare of furnishings. But beyond the glass, revealed to us in mocking\n clarity, was a high panel, studded with dials and gauges. Even as we\n looked, we could see liquid pulse in glass tubes, indicator needles\n swing slowly to and fro.\n\n\n Grannie nodded. \"Some kind of a broadcasting unit. The Green Flames in\n the lower hold are probably exposed to a\ntholpane\nplate and their\n radiations stepped up by an electro-phosicalic process.\"\n\n\n Karn raised the butt of his pistol and brought it crashing against the\n glass wall. His arm jumped in recoil, but the glass remained intact.", "We had traveled this far by\nganet\n, the tough little two headed pack\n animal of the Venus hinterland. Any form of plane or rocket would have\n had its motor instantly destroyed, of course, by the magnetic force\n belt that encircled the planet's equator. Now our drivers changed to\n boatmen, and we loaded our supplies into three clumsy\njagua\ncanoes.\n\n\n It was around the camp fire that night that Grannie took me into her\n confidence for the first time since we had left Swamp City.\n\n\n \"We're heading directly for Varsoom country,\" she said. \"If we find\n Ezra Karn so much the better. If we don't, we follow his directions to\n the lost space ship. Our job is to find that ore and destroy it. You\n see, I'm positive the Green Flames have never been removed from the\n ship.\"", "\"And you can lay it all to the Green Flames. It seems incredible that a\n single shipload of the ore could effect such a wide ranged area, but in\n my opinion someone has found a means of making that quantity a thousand\n times more potent and is transmiting it\nen masse\n.\"\n\n\n If it had been anyone but Grannie Annie there before me, I would\n have called her a fool. And then all at once I got an odd feeling of\n approaching danger.\n\n\n \"Let's get out of here,\" I said, getting up.\nZinnng-whack!\n\"All right!\"\n\n\n On the mirror behind the bar a small circle with radiating cracks\n appeared. On the booth wall a scant inch above Grannie's head the\n fresco seemed to melt away suddenly.\n\n\n A heat ray!" ], [ "Moments later an official hydrocar roared up and a dozen I.P. men\n rushed out and scattered the crowd. But a few stragglers lingered to\n shout derisive epithets.\n\n\n Grannie Annie came out from behind the box office then. She took my arm\n and led me around a corner and through a doorway under a sign that read\n THE JET. Inside was a deep room with booths along one wall. The place\n was all but deserted.\n\n\n In a booth well toward the rear the old lady surveyed me with sober\n eyes.\n\n\n \"Billy-boy, did you see the way that crowd acted?\"\n\n\n I nodded. \"As disgraceful an exhibition as I've ever seen. The I.P. men\n ought to clamp down.\"\n\n\n \"The I.P. men aren't strong enough.\"", "\"Beg pardon, thir,\" he said with his racial lisp, \"thereth thome one to\n thee you in the main lounge.\" His eyes rolled as he added, \"A lady!\"\n\n\n A woman here...! The\nSpacemen's\nwas a sanctuary, a rest club where\n in-coming pilots and crewmen could relax before leaving for another\n voyage. The rule that no females could pass its portals was strictly\n enforced.\n\n\n I followed the bellhop down the long corridor that led to the main\n lounge. At the threshold I jerked to a halt and stared incredulously.\n\n\n Grannie Annie!", "Grannie Annie came to the point abruptly. When she had explained the\n object of our trip, the prospector became thoughtful.\n\n\n \"Green Flames, eh?\" he repeated slowly. \"Well yes, I suppose I could\n find that space ship again. That is, if I wanted to.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\" Grannie paused in the act of rolling herself a\n cigarette. \"You know where it is, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Ye-s,\" Karn nodded. \"But like I told you before, that ship lies in\n Varsoom country, and that isn't exactly a summer vacation spot.\"\n\n\n \"What are the Varsoom?\" I asked. \"A native tribe?\"\n\n\n Karn shook his head. \"They're a form of life that's never been seen by\n Earthmen. Strictly speaking, they're no more than a form of energy.\"\n\n\n \"Dangerous?\"", "\"So everything, Billy-boy. Do you realize what such a thing would mean\n if it were true? Green Flames were supposedly destroyed on all planets\n after the Vennox regime crashed. If a quantity of the rock were in\n existence, and it fell into the wrong hands, there'd be trouble.\n\n\n \"Of course, I regarded Karn's story as a wild dream, but it made\n corking good story material. I wrote it into a novel, and a week after\n it was completed, the manuscript was stolen from my study back on\n Earth.\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" I said as she lapsed into silence. \"And now you've come to the\n conclusion that the details of your story were true and that someone is\n attempting to put your plot into action.\"\n\n\n Grannie nodded. \"Yes,\" she said. \"That's exactly what I think.\"", "The thing in the darkness turned like a cam on a rod and drove at us\n again. This time the old woman's heat gun clicked, and a tracery of\n purple flame shot outward. A horrible soul-chilling scream rent the\n air. A moment later something huge and heavy scrabbled across the\n ground and shot aloft.\nGrannie Annie fired with deliberate speed.\nI stood frozen as the diminuendo of its wild cries echoed back to me.\n\n\n \"In heaven's name, what was it?\"\n\n\n \"Hunter-bird,\" Grannie said calmly. \"A form of avian life found here\n in the swamp. Harmless in its wild state, but when captured, it can be\n trained to pursue a quarry until it kills. It has a single unit brain\n and follows with a relentless purpose.\"\n\n\n \"Then that would mean...?\"", "There she stood before a frantically gesticulating desk clerk, leaning\n on her faded green umbrella. A little wisp of a woman clad in a\n voluminous black dress with one of those doily-like caps on her head,\n tied by a ribbon under her chin. Her high-topped button shoes were\n planted firmly on the varpla carpet and her wrinkled face was set in\n calm defiance.\n\n\n I barged across the lounge and seized her hand. \"Grannie Annie! I\n haven't seen you in two years.\"\n\n\n \"Hi, Billy-boy,\" she greeted calmly. \"Will you please tell this\n fish-face to shut up.\"\n\n\n The desk clerk went white. \"Mithter Trenwith, if thith lady ith a\n friend of yourth, you'll have to take her away. It'th abtholutely\n againth the ruleth....\"", "\"And you can lay it all to the Green Flames. It seems incredible that a\n single shipload of the ore could effect such a wide ranged area, but in\n my opinion someone has found a means of making that quantity a thousand\n times more potent and is transmiting it\nen masse\n.\"\n\n\n If it had been anyone but Grannie Annie there before me, I would\n have called her a fool. And then all at once I got an odd feeling of\n approaching danger.\n\n\n \"Let's get out of here,\" I said, getting up.\nZinnng-whack!\n\"All right!\"\n\n\n On the mirror behind the bar a small circle with radiating cracks\n appeared. On the booth wall a scant inch above Grannie's head the\n fresco seemed to melt away suddenly.\n\n\n A heat ray!", "Grannie Annie leaped to her feet, grasped my arm and raced for the\n door. Outside a driverless hydrocar stood with idling motors. The old\n woman threw herself into the control seat, yanked me in after her and\n threw over the starting stud.\n\n\n An instant later we were plunging through the dark night.\nSix days after leaving Swamp City we reached Level Five, the last\n outpost of firm ground. Ahead lay the inner marsh, stretching as far as\n the eye could reach. Low islands projected at intervals from the thick\n water. Mold balls, two feet across, drifted down from the slate-gray\n sky like puffs of cotton.", "\"As most of you are familiar with our program, it will be unnecessary\n to give any advance explanation. I will only say that on this stage are\n nine visi sets, each tuned to one of the nine planets. At transmitting\n sets all over these planets listeners will appear and voice questions.\n These questions, my nine experts will endeavor to answer. For every\n question missed, the sender will receive a check for one thousand\nplanetoles\n.\n\n\n \"One thing more. As usual we have with us a guest star who will match\n her wits with the experts. May I present that renowned writer of\n science fiction, Annabella C. Flowers.\"\n\n\n From the left wing Grannie Annie appeared. She bowed and took her place\n on the dais.", "\"Okay, okay,\" I grinned. \"Look, we'll go into the grille. There's no\n one there at this hour.\"\n\n\n In the grille an equally astonished waiter served us—me a lime rickey\n and Grannie Annie her usual whisky sour—I waited until she had tossed\n the drink off at a gulp before I set off a chain of questions:\n\n\n \"What the devil are you doing on Venus? Don't you know women aren't\n allowed in the\nSpacemen's\n? What happened to the book you were\n writing?\"\n\n\n \"Hold it, Billy-boy.\" Laughingly she threw up both hands. \"Sure, I knew\n this place had some antiquated laws. Pure fiddle-faddle, that's what\n they are. Anyway, I've been thrown out of better places.\"", "\"That it was sent by our enemy, the same enemy that shot at us in the\n cafe in Swamp City. Exactly.\" Grannie Annie halted at the door of her\n tent and faced me with earnest eyes. \"Billy-boy, our every move is\n being watched. From now on it's the survival of the fittest.\"\nThe following day was our seventh in the swamp. The water here\n resembled a vast mosaic, striped and cross-striped with long winding\n ribbons of yellowish substance that floated a few inches below the\n surface. The mold balls coming into contact with the evonium water of\n the swamp had undergone a chemical change and evolved into a cohesive\n multi-celled marine life that lived and died within a space of hours.\n The Venusians paddled with extreme care. Had one of them dipped his\n hand into one of those yellow streaks, he would have been devoured in\n a matter of seconds.", "Grannie frowned in annoyance, but the prospector was adamant. He\n flipped a stud, twisted a dial and a moment later was leaning back in a\n chair, listening with avid interest.", "She hadn't changed. To her publishers and her readers she might be\n Annabella C. Flowers, author of a long list of science fiction novels.\n But to me she was still Grannie Annie, as old-fashioned as last year's\n hat, as modern as an atomic motor. She had probably written more drivel\n in the name of science fiction than anyone alive.\n\n\n But the public loved it. They ate up her stories, and they clamored for\n more. Her annual income totaled into six figures, and her publishers\n sat back and massaged their digits, watching their earnings mount.\n\n\n One thing you had to admit about her books. They may have been dime\n novels, but they weren't synthetic. If Annabella C. Flowers wrote a\n novel, and the locale was the desert of Mars, she packed her carpet bag\n and hopped a liner for Craterville. If she cooked up a feud between two\n expeditions on Callisto, she went to Callisto.", "Abruptly I stiffened. The familiar drone of the marsh was gone. In its\n place a ringing silence blanketed everything.\n\n\n And then out in the gloom a darker shadow appeared, moving in\n undulating sweeps toward the center of the camp. Fascinated, I watched\n it advance and retreat, saw two hyalescent eyes swim out of the murk.\n It charged, and with but a split second to act, I threw myself flat.\n There was a rush of mighty wings as the thing swept over me. Sharp\n talons raked my clothing. Again it came, and again I rolled swiftly,\n missing the thing by the narrowest of margins.\n\n\n From the tent opposite a gaunt figure clad in a familiar dress\n appeared. Grannie gave a single warning:\n\n\n \"Stand still!\"", "NINE GENIUSES\n\n THE QUESTION PROGRAM OF\n\n THE SYSTEM\n\n\n As we strode down the aisle a mangy-looking Venusian began to pound a\n tinpan piano in the pit. Grannie Annie pushed me into a seat in the\n front row.\n\n\n \"Sit here,\" she said. \"I'm sorry about all this rush, but I'm one of\n the players in this shindig. As soon as the show is over, we'll go\n somewhere and talk.\" She minced lightly down the aisle, climbed the\n stage steps and disappeared in the wings.\n\n\n \"That damned fossilized dynamo,\" I muttered. \"She'll be the death of me\n yet.\"", "At high noon by my Earth watch I sighted a low white structure on one\n of the distant islands. Moments later we made a landing at a rude\n jetty, and Grannie Annie was introducing me to Ezra Karn.\n\n\n He was not as old a man as I had expected, but he was ragged and\n unkempt with iron gray hair falling almost to his shoulders. He was\n dressed in\nvarpa\ncloth, the Venus equivalent of buckskin, and on his\n head was an enormous flop-brimmed hat.\n\n\n \"Glad to meet you,\" he said, shaking my hand. \"Any friend of Miss\n Flowers is a friend of mine.\" He ushered us down the catwalk into his\n hut.\n\n\n The place was a two room affair, small but comfortable. The latest\n type of visi set in one corner showed that Karn was not isolated from\n civilization entirely.", "Doctor Universe\nBy CARL JACOBI\nGrannie Annie, who wrote science fiction\n\n under the nom de plume of Annabella C. Flowers,\n\n had stumbled onto a murderous plot more\n\n hair-raising than any she had ever concocted.\n\n And the danger from the villain of the piece\n\n didn't worry her—I was the guy he was shooting at.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI was killing an hour in the billiard room of the\nSpacemen's Club\nin Swamp City when the Venusian bellboy came and tapped me on the\n shoulder.", "She was the most completely delightful crackpot I had ever known.\n\n\n \"What happened to\nGuns for Ganymede\n?\" I asked. \"That was the title of\n your last, wasn't it?\"\nGrannie spilled a few shreds of Martian tobacco onto a paper and deftly\n rolled herself a cigarette.\n\n\n \"It wasn't\nGuns\n, it was\nPistols\n; and it wasn't\nGanymede\n, it was\nPluto\n.\"\n\n\n I grinned. \"All complete, I'll bet, with threats against the universe\n and beautiful Earth heroines dragged in by the hair.\"\n\n\n \"What else is there in science fiction?\" she demanded. \"You can't have\n your hero fall in love with a bug-eyed monster.\"\n\n\n Up on the wall a clock chimed the hour. The old woman jerked to her\n feet.", "\"The archives tell us that one of the first acts of the overthrowing\n government was to cast out all Green Flames, two of which Vennox had\n ordered must be kept in each household. The effect on the people was\n immediate. Representative government, individual enterprise, freedom\n followed.\"\n\n\n Grannie Annie lit a cigarette and flipped the match to the floor.\n\n\n \"To go back to my first trip to Venus. As I said, I met Ezra Karn, an\n old prospector there in the marsh. Karn told me that on one of his\n travels into the Varsoom district he had come upon the wreckage of\n an old space ship. The hold of that space ship was packed with Green\n Flames!\"\n\n\n If Grannie expected me to show surprise at that, she was disappointed.\n I said, \"So what?\"", "Grannie gazed a long moment through binoculars. \"Billy-boy, take three\n Venusians and head across the knoll,\" she ordered. \"Ezra and I will\n circle in from the west. Fire a gun if you strike trouble.\"\n\n\n But we found no trouble. The scene before us lay steeped in silence.\n Moments later our two parties converged at the base of the great ship.\n\n\n A metal ladder extended from the envelope down the side of the vessel.\n Mid-way we could see a circular hatch-like door.\n\n\n \"Up we go, Billy-boy.\" Heat gun in readiness, Grannie Annie began to\n climb slowly.\n\n\n The silence remained absolute. We reached the door and pulled it open.\n There was no sign of life.\n\n\n \"Somebody's gone to a lot of trouble here,\" Ezra Karn observed." ], [ "The thing in the darkness turned like a cam on a rod and drove at us\n again. This time the old woman's heat gun clicked, and a tracery of\n purple flame shot outward. A horrible soul-chilling scream rent the\n air. A moment later something huge and heavy scrabbled across the\n ground and shot aloft.\nGrannie Annie fired with deliberate speed.\nI stood frozen as the diminuendo of its wild cries echoed back to me.\n\n\n \"In heaven's name, what was it?\"\n\n\n \"Hunter-bird,\" Grannie said calmly. \"A form of avian life found here\n in the swamp. Harmless in its wild state, but when captured, it can be\n trained to pursue a quarry until it kills. It has a single unit brain\n and follows with a relentless purpose.\"\n\n\n \"Then that would mean...?\"", "She said it quietly, but there was a glitter in her eyes and a harsh\n line about her usually smiling lips.\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\nFor a moment the old lady sat there in silence; then she leaned back,\n closed her eyes, and I knew there was a story coming.\n\n\n \"My last book,\nDeath In The Atom\n, hit the stands last January,\"\n she began. \"When it was finished I had planned to take a six months'\n vacation, but those fool publishers of mine insisted I do a sequel.\n Well, I'd used Mars and Pluto and Ganymede as settings for novels, so\n for this one I decided on Venus. I went to Venus City, and I spent six\n weeks in-country. I got some swell background material, and I met Ezra\n Karn....\"\n\n\n \"Who?\" I interrupted.", "Abruptly I stiffened. The familiar drone of the marsh was gone. In its\n place a ringing silence blanketed everything.\n\n\n And then out in the gloom a darker shadow appeared, moving in\n undulating sweeps toward the center of the camp. Fascinated, I watched\n it advance and retreat, saw two hyalescent eyes swim out of the murk.\n It charged, and with but a split second to act, I threw myself flat.\n There was a rush of mighty wings as the thing swept over me. Sharp\n talons raked my clothing. Again it came, and again I rolled swiftly,\n missing the thing by the narrowest of margins.\n\n\n From the tent opposite a gaunt figure clad in a familiar dress\n appeared. Grannie gave a single warning:\n\n\n \"Stand still!\"", "\"So everything, Billy-boy. Do you realize what such a thing would mean\n if it were true? Green Flames were supposedly destroyed on all planets\n after the Vennox regime crashed. If a quantity of the rock were in\n existence, and it fell into the wrong hands, there'd be trouble.\n\n\n \"Of course, I regarded Karn's story as a wild dream, but it made\n corking good story material. I wrote it into a novel, and a week after\n it was completed, the manuscript was stolen from my study back on\n Earth.\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" I said as she lapsed into silence. \"And now you've come to the\n conclusion that the details of your story were true and that someone is\n attempting to put your plot into action.\"\n\n\n Grannie nodded. \"Yes,\" she said. \"That's exactly what I think.\"", "Moments later an official hydrocar roared up and a dozen I.P. men\n rushed out and scattered the crowd. But a few stragglers lingered to\n shout derisive epithets.\n\n\n Grannie Annie came out from behind the box office then. She took my arm\n and led me around a corner and through a doorway under a sign that read\n THE JET. Inside was a deep room with booths along one wall. The place\n was all but deserted.\n\n\n In a booth well toward the rear the old lady surveyed me with sober\n eyes.\n\n\n \"Billy-boy, did you see the way that crowd acted?\"\n\n\n I nodded. \"As disgraceful an exhibition as I've ever seen. The I.P. men\n ought to clamp down.\"\n\n\n \"The I.P. men aren't strong enough.\"", "Sleep had never bothered me, yet that night I lay awake for hours\n tossing restlessly. The thousand sounds of the blue marsh droned\n steadily. And the news broadcast I had heard over the portable visi\n just before retiring still lingered in my mind. To a casual observer\n that broadcast would have meant little, a slight rebellion here, an\n isolated crime there. But viewed from the perspective Grannie had\n given me, everything dovetailed. The situation on Jupiter was swiftly\n coming to a head. Not only had the people on that planet demanded that\n representative government be abolished, but a forum was now being held\n to find a leader who might take complete dictatorial control.\n\n\n Outside a whisper-worm hissed softly. I got up and strode out of my\n tent. For some time I stood there, lost in thought. Could I believe\n Grannie's incredible story? Or was this another of her fantastic plots\n which she had skilfully blended into a novel?", "When the last question had been answered I joined the exit-moving\n crowd. It was outside under the street marquee that a strange incident\n occurred.\n\n\n A yellow-faced Kagor from the upper Martian desert country shuffled by,\n dragging his cumbersome third leg behind him. Kagors, of course, had an\n unpleasant history of persecution since the early colonization days of\n the Red Planet. But the thing that happened there was a throw back to\n an earlier era.\n\n\n Someone shouted, \"Yah, yellow-face! Down with all Kagors!\" As one\n man the crowd took up the cry and surged forward. The helpless Kagor\n was seized and flung to the pavement. A knife appeared from nowhere,\n snipped the Martian's single lock of hair. A booted foot bludgeoned\n into his mouth.", "\"And you can lay it all to the Green Flames. It seems incredible that a\n single shipload of the ore could effect such a wide ranged area, but in\n my opinion someone has found a means of making that quantity a thousand\n times more potent and is transmiting it\nen masse\n.\"\n\n\n If it had been anyone but Grannie Annie there before me, I would\n have called her a fool. And then all at once I got an odd feeling of\n approaching danger.\n\n\n \"Let's get out of here,\" I said, getting up.\nZinnng-whack!\n\"All right!\"\n\n\n On the mirror behind the bar a small circle with radiating cracks\n appeared. On the booth wall a scant inch above Grannie's head the\n fresco seemed to melt away suddenly.\n\n\n A heat ray!", "There she stood before a frantically gesticulating desk clerk, leaning\n on her faded green umbrella. A little wisp of a woman clad in a\n voluminous black dress with one of those doily-like caps on her head,\n tied by a ribbon under her chin. Her high-topped button shoes were\n planted firmly on the varpla carpet and her wrinkled face was set in\n calm defiance.\n\n\n I barged across the lounge and seized her hand. \"Grannie Annie! I\n haven't seen you in two years.\"\n\n\n \"Hi, Billy-boy,\" she greeted calmly. \"Will you please tell this\n fish-face to shut up.\"\n\n\n The desk clerk went white. \"Mithter Trenwith, if thith lady ith a\n friend of yourth, you'll have to take her away. It'th abtholutely\n againth the ruleth....\"", "We had traveled this far by\nganet\n, the tough little two headed pack\n animal of the Venus hinterland. Any form of plane or rocket would have\n had its motor instantly destroyed, of course, by the magnetic force\n belt that encircled the planet's equator. Now our drivers changed to\n boatmen, and we loaded our supplies into three clumsy\njagua\ncanoes.\n\n\n It was around the camp fire that night that Grannie took me into her\n confidence for the first time since we had left Swamp City.\n\n\n \"We're heading directly for Varsoom country,\" she said. \"If we find\n Ezra Karn so much the better. If we don't, we follow his directions to\n the lost space ship. Our job is to find that ore and destroy it. You\n see, I'm positive the Green Flames have never been removed from the\n ship.\"", "She was the most completely delightful crackpot I had ever known.\n\n\n \"What happened to\nGuns for Ganymede\n?\" I asked. \"That was the title of\n your last, wasn't it?\"\nGrannie spilled a few shreds of Martian tobacco onto a paper and deftly\n rolled herself a cigarette.\n\n\n \"It wasn't\nGuns\n, it was\nPistols\n; and it wasn't\nGanymede\n, it was\nPluto\n.\"\n\n\n I grinned. \"All complete, I'll bet, with threats against the universe\n and beautiful Earth heroines dragged in by the hair.\"\n\n\n \"What else is there in science fiction?\" she demanded. \"You can't have\n your hero fall in love with a bug-eyed monster.\"\n\n\n Up on the wall a clock chimed the hour. The old woman jerked to her\n feet.", "\"You'll never do it that way,\" Grannie said. \"Nothing short of an\n atomic blast will shatter that wall. It explains why there are no\n guards here. The mechanism is entirely self-operating. Let's see if the\n Green Flames are more accessible.\"\n\n\n In the lower hold disappointment again confronted us. Visible in\n the feeble shafts of daylight that filtered through cracks in the\n vessel's hull were tiers of rectangular ingots of green iridescent ore.\n Suspended by insulators from the ceiling over them was a thick metal\n plate.\n\n\n But between was a barrier. A wall of impenetrable stepto glass.\n\n\n Grannie stamped her foot. \"It's maddening,\" she said. \"Here we are at\n the crux of the whole matter, and we're powerless to make a single\n move.\"", "And so it went. Questions from Mars, from Earth, from Saturn flowed in\n the visi sets. Isolated miners on Jupiter, dancers in swank Plutonian\n cafes strove to stump the experts. With Doctor Universe offering\n bantering side play, the experts gave their answers. When they failed,\n or when the Truthicator flashed a red light, he announced the name of\n the winner.\n\n\n It grew a little tiresome after a while and I wondered why Grannie had\n brought me here. And then I began to notice things.\n\n\n The audience in the\nSatellite\nseemed to have lost much of its\n original fervor. They applauded as before but they did so only at the\n signal of Doctor Universe. The spell created by the man was complete.\n\n\n Pompous and erect, he strode back and forth across the stage like a\n general surveying his army. His black eyes gleamed, and his thin lips\n were turned in a smile of satisfaction.", "Grannie Annie leaped to her feet, grasped my arm and raced for the\n door. Outside a driverless hydrocar stood with idling motors. The old\n woman threw herself into the control seat, yanked me in after her and\n threw over the starting stud.\n\n\n An instant later we were plunging through the dark night.\nSix days after leaving Swamp City we reached Level Five, the last\n outpost of firm ground. Ahead lay the inner marsh, stretching as far as\n the eye could reach. Low islands projected at intervals from the thick\n water. Mold balls, two feet across, drifted down from the slate-gray\n sky like puffs of cotton.", "\"Okay, okay,\" I grinned. \"Look, we'll go into the grille. There's no\n one there at this hour.\"\n\n\n In the grille an equally astonished waiter served us—me a lime rickey\n and Grannie Annie her usual whisky sour—I waited until she had tossed\n the drink off at a gulp before I set off a chain of questions:\n\n\n \"What the devil are you doing on Venus? Don't you know women aren't\n allowed in the\nSpacemen's\n? What happened to the book you were\n writing?\"\n\n\n \"Hold it, Billy-boy.\" Laughingly she threw up both hands. \"Sure, I knew\n this place had some antiquated laws. Pure fiddle-faddle, that's what\n they are. Anyway, I've been thrown out of better places.\"", "\"That it was sent by our enemy, the same enemy that shot at us in the\n cafe in Swamp City. Exactly.\" Grannie Annie halted at the door of her\n tent and faced me with earnest eyes. \"Billy-boy, our every move is\n being watched. From now on it's the survival of the fittest.\"\nThe following day was our seventh in the swamp. The water here\n resembled a vast mosaic, striped and cross-striped with long winding\n ribbons of yellowish substance that floated a few inches below the\n surface. The mold balls coming into contact with the evonium water of\n the swamp had undergone a chemical change and evolved into a cohesive\n multi-celled marine life that lived and died within a space of hours.\n The Venusians paddled with extreme care. Had one of them dipped his\n hand into one of those yellow streaks, he would have been devoured in\n a matter of seconds.", "After that I lost track of time. Day after day of incessant rain ... of\n steaming swamp.... But at length we reached firm ground and began our\n advance on foot.\n\n\n It was Karn who first sighted the ship. Striding in the lead, he\n suddenly halted at the top of a hill and leveled his arm before him.\n There it lay, a huge cigar-shaped vessel of blackened\narelium\nsteel,\n half buried in the swamp soil.\n\n\n \"What's that thing on top?\" Karn demanded, puzzled.\n\n\n A rectangular metal envelope had been constructed over the stern\n quarters of the ship. Above this structure were three tall masts. And\n suspended between them was a network of copper wire studded with white\n insulators.", "\"Yes and no. Only man I ever heard of who escaped their country outside\n of myself was the explorer, Darthier, three years ago. I got away\n because I was alone, and they didn't notice me, and Darthier escaped\n because he made 'em laugh.\"\n\n\n \"Laugh?\" A scowl crossed Grannie's face.\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Karn said. \"The Varsoom have a strange nervous reaction\n that's manifested by laughing. But just what it is that makes them\n laugh, I don't know.\"\n\n\n Food supplies and fresh drinking water were replenished at the hut.\n Several mold guns were borrowed from the prospector's supply to arm the\n Venusians. And then as we were about to leave, Karn suddenly turned.\n\n\n \"The Doctor Universe program,\" he said. \"I ain't missed one in months.\n You gotta wait 'til I hear it.\"", "\"Beg pardon, thir,\" he said with his racial lisp, \"thereth thome one to\n thee you in the main lounge.\" His eyes rolled as he added, \"A lady!\"\n\n\n A woman here...! The\nSpacemen's\nwas a sanctuary, a rest club where\n in-coming pilots and crewmen could relax before leaving for another\n voyage. The rule that no females could pass its portals was strictly\n enforced.\n\n\n I followed the bellhop down the long corridor that led to the main\n lounge. At the threshold I jerked to a halt and stared incredulously.\n\n\n Grannie Annie!", "It was the same show I had witnessed back in Swamp City. Once again I\n heard questions filter in from the far outposts of the System. Once\n again I saw the commanding figure of the quiz master as he strode back\n and forth across the stage. And as I sat there, looking into the visi\n screen, a curious numbing drowsiness seemed to steal over me and lead\n my thoughts far away.\nHalf an hour later we headed into the unknown. The Venusian boatmen\n were ill-at-ease now and jabbered among themselves constantly. We\n camped that night on a miserable little island where insects swarmed\n about us in hordes. The next day an indefinable wave of weariness and\n despondency beset our entire party. I caught myself musing over the\n futility of the venture. Only the pleadings of Grannie Annie kept me\n from turning back. On the morrow I realized the truth in her warning,\n that all of us had been exposed to the insidious radiations." ] ]
train	52326	[ "What shocked Myles the most when he woke up on the beach?", "What was most often on Myles's mind during his time away?", "How did Doggo feel about their plan?", "Why did Yuri go back to Cupia?" ]	[ [ "Enemies arrived that he believed to be dead.", "He was on Venus instead of Mars.", "He realized Prince Yuri was alive.", "He knew he'd been dreaming." ], [ "Doggo ", "His friends on Earth", "Lilla", "Revenge" ], [ "Hesitant for it to happen so soon", "Reluctant at first but then confident", "Worried for the queen", "He trusted Myles, so he knew it would work" ], [ "He was in love with Lilla", "He wanted to rule both lands", "He was afraid of Myles", "He deserted New Formia" ] ]	[ 1, 3, 2, 2 ]	[ 1, 1, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "Suddenly, however, his ears were jarred by a familiar\n sound. At once his senses cleared, and he listened intently\n to the distant purring of a motor. Yes, there could be no\n mistake; an airplane was approaching. Now he could see\n it, a speck in the sky, far down the beach.\n\n\n Nearer and nearer it came.\n\n\n Myles sprang to his feet. To his intense surprise, he found\n that the effort threw him quite a distance into the air. Instantly\n the idea flashed through his mind: “I must be on\n Mars! Or some other strange planet.” This idea was vaguely\n reminiscent of something.", "During his stay on my farm, Cabot had built the matter-transmitting\n apparatus, with which he had shot himself off\n into space on that October night on which he had received\n the message from the skies: “S O S, Lilla.” A thunderstorm\n had been brewing all that evening, and just as Myles\n had placed himself between the coordinate axes of his machine\n and had gathered up the strings which ran from his\n control levers to within the apparatus, there had come a\n blinding flash. Lightning had struck his aerial.\n\n\n How long his unconsciousness lasted he knew not. He\n was some time in regaining his senses. But when he had\n finally and fully recovered, he found himself lying on a\n sandy beach beside a calm and placid lake beneath a silver\n sky.\n\n\n He fell to wondering, vaguely and pleasantly, where he\n was and how he had got here.", "But while he was trying to catch this vaguely elusive\n train of thought, his attention was diverted by the fact that,\n for some unaccountable reason, his belt buckle and most of\n the buttons which had held his clothes together were missing,\n so that his clothing came to pieces as he rose, and that\n he had to shed it rapidly in order to avoid impeding his\n movements. He wondered at the cause of this.\n\n10\n\n But his speculations were cut short by the alighting of the\n plane a hundred yards down the beach.\n\n\n What was his horror when out of it clambered, not men\n but ants! Ants, six-footed, and six feet high. Huge ants, four\n of them, running toward him over the glistening sands.\n\n\n Gone was all his languor, as he seized a piece of driftwood\n and prepared to defend himself.", "As he stood thus expectant, Myles realized that his present\n position and condition, the surrounding scenery, and the advance\n of the ant-men were exactly, item for item, like the\n opening events of his first arrival on the planet Poros. He\n even recognized one of the ant-men as old Doggo, who had\n befriended him on his previous visit.\n\n\n Could it be that all his adventures in Cupia had been\n naught but a dream; a recurring dream, in fact? Were his\n dear wife Lilla and his little son Kew merely figments of\n his imagination? Horrible thought!", "And then events began to differ from those of the past;\n for the three other Formians halted, and Doggo advanced\n alone. By the agitation of the beast’s antennae the earth\n man could see that it was talking to him. But Myles no\n longer possessed the wonderful electrical headset which he\n had contrived and built during his previous visit to that\n planet, so as to talk with Cupians and Formians, both of\n which races are earless and converse by means of radiations\n from their antennae.\n\n\n So he picked up two sticks from the beach, and held\n them projecting from his forehead; then threw them to the\n ground with a grimace of disgust and pointed to his ears.\n\n\n Doggo understood, and scratched with his paw in Cupian\n shorthand on the silver sands the message: “Myles Cabot,\n you are our prisoner.”\n\n\n “What, again?” scratched Myles, then made a sign of\n submission.\n\n11", "To which the messenger added: “And he offers to give us\n back our own old country, if we too will return across the\n boiling seas again.”\n\n\n “It is a lie!” Doggo shouted.\n\n\n “Yuri, usurper of the thrones of two continents. Bah!”\n shouted Emu.\n\n\n “Yuri, our rightful leader,” shouted Barth.\n\n\n “Give us a queen of our own race,” shouted Fum.\n\n\n “Release the prisoner,” shouted the Queen.\n\n\n And that is all that Myles learned of the conversation,\n for his interpreter at this juncture stopped writing and\n obeyed the queen. The earth-man was free!", "He gazed again at the scene below, and now noted one\n difference from the accustomed Porovian landscape, for nowhere\n ran the smooth concrete roads which bear the swift\n two-wheeled kerkools of the Cupians to all parts of their\n continent. What uninhabited portion of Cupia could this be,\n over which they were now passing?\n\n12\n\n Turning to Doggo, Myles extended his left palm, and\n made a motion as though writing on it with the thumb\n and forefinger of his right hand. But the ant-man waved\n a negative with one of his forepaws. It was evident that\n there were no writing materials aboard the ship. Myles\n would have to wait until they reached their landing place;\n for doubtless they would soon hover down in some city\n or town, though just which one he could not guess, as the\n country below was wholly unfamiliar.", "When Myles had somewhat recovered from his astonishment,\n he warmly congratulated his friend by patting him\n on the side of the head, as is the Porovian custom.\n\n\n “Doggo,” he wrote, “this ought to constitute you a person\n of some importance among the Formians.”\n\n\n “It\nought\nto,” the ant-man replied, “but as a matter of\n fact, it merely intensifies Yuri’s mistrust and hatred of me.\n Now that I am mother of the queen, he fears that I may\n turn against him and establish Formis in his place as the\n head of an empire of the Formians, by the Formians, and\n for the Formians exclusively.”\n\n\n “Why don’t you?” Myles wrote. It seemed to him to be\n a bully good idea, and incidentally a solution of his own\n difficulties.", "With one bound he gained the throne, where fighting\n was already in progress between the two factions. Barth\n and Doggo were rolling over and over on the floor in a\n death grapple, while the ant-queen had backed to the rear\n of the stage, closely guarded by Emu and Fum.\n\n\n Seizing one of the pikes which supported the scarlet\n canopy, Myles wrenched it loose and drove it into the thorax\n of Barth. In another instant the earth-man and Doggo stood\n beside the queen.\n\n\n Ant-men now came pouring into the chamber through all\n the entrances, taking sides as they entered and sized up the\n situation. If it had still been in vogue among the Formians\n to be known by numbers rather than names, and to have\n these identifying numbers painted on the backs of their\n abdomens followed by the numbers of those whom they\n had defeated in the duels so common among them, then\n many a Formian would have “got the number” of many\n another, that day.", "On a raised platform stood the ant queen, surmounted by\n a scarlet canopy, which set off the perfect proportions of\n her jet-black body. On each side of her stood six refined\n and intelligent ant-men, her councillors. One of the twelve\n was Doggo.\n\n\n Messenger ants hurried hither and thither.\n\n\n First the accusation was read, Myles being furnished\n with a written copy.\n\n\n The witnesses were then called. They were veterans who\n had served in the wars in which Cabot had twice freed\n Cupia from the domination of its Formian oppressors.\n They spoke with bitterness of the downfall of their beloved\n Formia. Their testimony was brief.\n\n\n Then the accused was asked if he wished to say anything\n in his own behalf. Myles rose, then shrugged his shoulders,\n sat down again, and wrote: “I fully realize the futility of\n making an argument through the antennae of another.”", "“We know not,” the Formian wrote in reply. “Six days\n ago he left us in his airship and flew westward. When he\n failed to return, we sent out scout planes to search for\n him, and we have been hunting ever since. When we\n sighted you on the beach this morning we thought that\n you might be our lost leader, and that is why we landed and\n approached you.”\n\n\n At about this point the conversation was interrupted by\n a worker ant who brought food: roast alta and green aphid\n milk. With what relish did the earth-man plunge into the\n feast, his first taste of Porovian delicacies in many months.\n\n\n During the meal conversation lagged, owing to the difficulty\n of writing and eating at the same time. But now\n Myles Cabot seized his pad and stylus and wrote:\n\n\n “Have you ever known me to fail in any undertaking\n on the planet Poros?”", "“Here we are, and here are you, in Yuriana, capitol of\n New Formia. But how is it that you, Myles Cabot, have\n arrived here on this continent in exactly the same manner\n and condition in which I discovered you in\nold\nFormia\n eight years ago?”\n\n\n When Myles reached the end of reading this narrative, he\n in turn took the pad and stylus and related how he had\n gone to the planet Minos (which we call the Earth) to learn\n the latest discoveries and inventions there, and how his\n calculations for his return to Poros had been upset by some\n static conditions just as he had been about to transmit\n himself back. Oh, if only he had landed by chance upon\n the same beach as on his first journey through the skies!\n\n\n Wisely he refrained from mentioning the “S O S” message\n from Lilla. But his recollection of her predicament\n spurred him to be anxious about her rescue.", "Then he passed the paper and stylus over to his old\n friend Doggo. They were alone together at last.\nThe ant-man’s reply consumed sheet after sheet of paper;\n but, owning to the rapidity of Porovian shorthand, did not\n take so very much more time than speaking would have\n required. As he completed each sheet he passed it over to\n Myles, who read as follows:\n\n\n “As to your princess and your son, I know not, for this\n is not Cupia. Do you remember how, when your victorious\n army and air navy swept to the southern extremity of what\n had been Formia, a few of our survivors rose in planes from\n the ruins of our last stronghold and braved the dangers\n of the steam clouds which overhang the boiling seas? Our\n leader was Prince Yuri, erstwhile contender for the throne\n of Cupia, splendid even in defeat.", "But Doggo wrote in horror, “It would be treason!” Then\n tore up all the correspondence. It is difficult to inculcate the\n thought of independence in the mind of one reared in an\n autocracy.\n\n\n The earth-man, however, persisted.\n\n\n “How many of the council can you count on, if the interests\n of Yuri should clash with those of Formis?”\n\n16\n\n “Only one—myself.”\n\n\n And again Doggo tore up the correspondence.\n\n\n Myles tactfully changed the subject.\n\n\n “Where is the arch-fiend now?” he asked.", "This time, as he tore up the correspondence, Doggo\n signified an affirmative. And thus there resulted further\n correspondence.\n\n17\n\n “Doggo,” Myles wrote, “can you get to the antenna of\n the queen?”\n\n\n The ant-man indicated that he could.\n\n\n “If she has inherited any of your character,” Myles continued,\n “she will assert herself, if given half a chance.”\nSo the Pitmanesque conversation continued. Long since had\n the pink light of Porovian evening faded from the western\n sky. The ceiling vapor-lamps were lit. The night showed velvet-black\n through the slit-like windows. And still the two old\n friends wrote on, Myles Standish Cabot, the Bostonian, and\n Doggo, No. 334-2-18, the only really humanlike ant-man\n whom Myles had ever known among the once dominant\n race of Poros.", "Finally a small settlement loomed ahead. It was of the\n familiar style of toy-building-block architecture affected by\n the ant-men, and, from its appearance, was very new. On its\n outskirts further building operations were actively in progress.\n Apparently a few survivors of the accursed race of Formians\n were consolidating their position and attempting to build\n up a new empire in some out-of-the-way portion of the continent.\n\n\n As the earth-man was turning these thoughts over in his\n mind the plane softly settled down upon one of the flat\n roofs, and its occupants disembarked. Three of the ants\n advanced menacingly toward Myles, but Doggo held them\n off. Then all of the party descended down one of the ramps\n to the lower levels of the building.", "Barth: “It is the radio. Know then, O Queen, and ye,\n members of the council, that when we fled across the boiling\n seas under the gallant leadership of Prince Yuri, the man\n with the heart of a Formian, he brought with him one of\n those powerful radio sets invented by the beast who is our\n prisoner here to-day.\n\n\n “Supporters of Yuri still remained among the Cupians,\n and he has been in constant communication with these ever\n since shortly after our arrival here. From them he learned\n of the return of Myles Cabot to the planet Minos.\n\n20\n\n “Then Yuri disappeared. Those of us who were closest\n to him suspected that he had gone back across the boiling\n seas to claim as his own the throne of Cupia. But we hesitated\n to announce this until we were sure, for we feared that\n some of our own people would regard his departure as\n desertion. Yet who can blame him for returning to his father-land\n and to the throne which is his by rights?”", "With a sweep of his paw, Doggo indicated that this was\n to be Cabot’s quarters. Then, with another wave, he\n pointed to the table, where lay a pad of paper and stylus,\n not a pencil-like stylus as employed by the Cupians, but\n rather one equipped with straps for attaching it to the claw\n of a Formian.\n\n\n Even so, it was better than nothing. The earth-man seized\n it eagerly, but before he could begin writing an ant entered\n bearing a Cupian toga, short-sleeved and bordered with\n Grecian wave designs in blue. Myles put on this garment,\n and then quickly filled a sheet with questions:\n\n\n “How is my princess and my son, the baby king? Whence\n come all you Formians, whose race I thought had been\n exterminated? What part of Cupia is this? What is this city?\n Where is Prince Yuri? And what do you intend to do with\n me\nthis\ntime?”", "“I will waive anything,” Myles replied, “counsel, immunity,\n extradition, anything in order to speed up my return\n to Cupia, where Lilla awaits in some dire extremity.”\n\n\n “All right,” Doggo wrote, and the conference was at an\n end. The morrow would decide the ascendancy of Myles\n Cabot or the Prince Yuri over the new continent.\nIV\n\n THE COUP D’ETAT\nThe next morning Myles Cabot was led under guard to the\n council chamber of the dread thirteen: Formis and her\n twelve advisers. The accused was placed in a wicker cage,\n from which he surveyed his surroundings as the proceedings\n opened.\n\n19", "“Mr. Farley?”\n\n\n “Speaking.”\n\n\n “This is Professor Kellogg, O. D. Kellogg,” the voice\n replied.\n\n7\n\n It was my friend of the Harvard math faculty, the man\n who had analyzed the measurements of the streamline projectile\n in which Myles Cabot had shot to earth the account\n of the first part of his adventures on Venus. Some further\n adventures Myles had told me in person during his stay\n on my farm.\n\n\n “Professor Hammond thinks that he is getting Mars on the\n air,” the voice continued.\n\n\n “Yes,” I replied. “I judged as much from what I read in\n this morning’s paper. But what do\nyou\nthink?”\n\n\n Kellogg’s reply gave my sluggish mind the second jolt\n which it had received that day." ], [ "During his stay on my farm, Cabot had built the matter-transmitting\n apparatus, with which he had shot himself off\n into space on that October night on which he had received\n the message from the skies: “S O S, Lilla.” A thunderstorm\n had been brewing all that evening, and just as Myles\n had placed himself between the coordinate axes of his machine\n and had gathered up the strings which ran from his\n control levers to within the apparatus, there had come a\n blinding flash. Lightning had struck his aerial.\n\n\n How long his unconsciousness lasted he knew not. He\n was some time in regaining his senses. But when he had\n finally and fully recovered, he found himself lying on a\n sandy beach beside a calm and placid lake beneath a silver\n sky.\n\n\n He fell to wondering, vaguely and pleasantly, where he\n was and how he had got here.", "Suddenly, however, his ears were jarred by a familiar\n sound. At once his senses cleared, and he listened intently\n to the distant purring of a motor. Yes, there could be no\n mistake; an airplane was approaching. Now he could see\n it, a speck in the sky, far down the beach.\n\n\n Nearer and nearer it came.\n\n\n Myles sprang to his feet. To his intense surprise, he found\n that the effort threw him quite a distance into the air. Instantly\n the idea flashed through his mind: “I must be on\n Mars! Or some other strange planet.” This idea was vaguely\n reminiscent of something.", "As he stood thus expectant, Myles realized that his present\n position and condition, the surrounding scenery, and the advance\n of the ant-men were exactly, item for item, like the\n opening events of his first arrival on the planet Poros. He\n even recognized one of the ant-men as old Doggo, who had\n befriended him on his previous visit.\n\n\n Could it be that all his adventures in Cupia had been\n naught but a dream; a recurring dream, in fact? Were his\n dear wife Lilla and his little son Kew merely figments of\n his imagination? Horrible thought!", "To which the messenger added: “And he offers to give us\n back our own old country, if we too will return across the\n boiling seas again.”\n\n\n “It is a lie!” Doggo shouted.\n\n\n “Yuri, usurper of the thrones of two continents. Bah!”\n shouted Emu.\n\n\n “Yuri, our rightful leader,” shouted Barth.\n\n\n “Give us a queen of our own race,” shouted Fum.\n\n\n “Release the prisoner,” shouted the Queen.\n\n\n And that is all that Myles learned of the conversation,\n for his interpreter at this juncture stopped writing and\n obeyed the queen. The earth-man was free!", "“Here we are, and here are you, in Yuriana, capitol of\n New Formia. But how is it that you, Myles Cabot, have\n arrived here on this continent in exactly the same manner\n and condition in which I discovered you in\nold\nFormia\n eight years ago?”\n\n\n When Myles reached the end of reading this narrative, he\n in turn took the pad and stylus and related how he had\n gone to the planet Minos (which we call the Earth) to learn\n the latest discoveries and inventions there, and how his\n calculations for his return to Poros had been upset by some\n static conditions just as he had been about to transmit\n himself back. Oh, if only he had landed by chance upon\n the same beach as on his first journey through the skies!\n\n\n Wisely he refrained from mentioning the “S O S” message\n from Lilla. But his recollection of her predicament\n spurred him to be anxious about her rescue.", "“We know not,” the Formian wrote in reply. “Six days\n ago he left us in his airship and flew westward. When he\n failed to return, we sent out scout planes to search for\n him, and we have been hunting ever since. When we\n sighted you on the beach this morning we thought that\n you might be our lost leader, and that is why we landed and\n approached you.”\n\n\n At about this point the conversation was interrupted by\n a worker ant who brought food: roast alta and green aphid\n milk. With what relish did the earth-man plunge into the\n feast, his first taste of Porovian delicacies in many months.\n\n\n During the meal conversation lagged, owing to the difficulty\n of writing and eating at the same time. But now\n Myles Cabot seized his pad and stylus and wrote:\n\n\n “Have you ever known me to fail in any undertaking\n on the planet Poros?”", "He gazed again at the scene below, and now noted one\n difference from the accustomed Porovian landscape, for nowhere\n ran the smooth concrete roads which bear the swift\n two-wheeled kerkools of the Cupians to all parts of their\n continent. What uninhabited portion of Cupia could this be,\n over which they were now passing?\n\n12\n\n Turning to Doggo, Myles extended his left palm, and\n made a motion as though writing on it with the thumb\n and forefinger of his right hand. But the ant-man waved\n a negative with one of his forepaws. It was evident that\n there were no writing materials aboard the ship. Myles\n would have to wait until they reached their landing place;\n for doubtless they would soon hover down in some city\n or town, though just which one he could not guess, as the\n country below was wholly unfamiliar.", "When Myles had somewhat recovered from his astonishment,\n he warmly congratulated his friend by patting him\n on the side of the head, as is the Porovian custom.\n\n\n “Doggo,” he wrote, “this ought to constitute you a person\n of some importance among the Formians.”\n\n\n “It\nought\nto,” the ant-man replied, “but as a matter of\n fact, it merely intensifies Yuri’s mistrust and hatred of me.\n Now that I am mother of the queen, he fears that I may\n turn against him and establish Formis in his place as the\n head of an empire of the Formians, by the Formians, and\n for the Formians exclusively.”\n\n\n “Why don’t you?” Myles wrote. It seemed to him to be\n a bully good idea, and incidentally a solution of his own\n difficulties.", "But Doggo wrote in horror, “It would be treason!” Then\n tore up all the correspondence. It is difficult to inculcate the\n thought of independence in the mind of one reared in an\n autocracy.\n\n\n The earth-man, however, persisted.\n\n\n “How many of the council can you count on, if the interests\n of Yuri should clash with those of Formis?”\n\n16\n\n “Only one—myself.”\n\n\n And again Doggo tore up the correspondence.\n\n\n Myles tactfully changed the subject.\n\n\n “Where is the arch-fiend now?” he asked.", "With one bound he gained the throne, where fighting\n was already in progress between the two factions. Barth\n and Doggo were rolling over and over on the floor in a\n death grapple, while the ant-queen had backed to the rear\n of the stage, closely guarded by Emu and Fum.\n\n\n Seizing one of the pikes which supported the scarlet\n canopy, Myles wrenched it loose and drove it into the thorax\n of Barth. In another instant the earth-man and Doggo stood\n beside the queen.\n\n\n Ant-men now came pouring into the chamber through all\n the entrances, taking sides as they entered and sized up the\n situation. If it had still been in vogue among the Formians\n to be known by numbers rather than names, and to have\n these identifying numbers painted on the backs of their\n abdomens followed by the numbers of those whom they\n had defeated in the duels so common among them, then\n many a Formian would have “got the number” of many\n another, that day.", "This time, as he tore up the correspondence, Doggo\n signified an affirmative. And thus there resulted further\n correspondence.\n\n17\n\n “Doggo,” Myles wrote, “can you get to the antenna of\n the queen?”\n\n\n The ant-man indicated that he could.\n\n\n “If she has inherited any of your character,” Myles continued,\n “she will assert herself, if given half a chance.”\nSo the Pitmanesque conversation continued. Long since had\n the pink light of Porovian evening faded from the western\n sky. The ceiling vapor-lamps were lit. The night showed velvet-black\n through the slit-like windows. And still the two old\n friends wrote on, Myles Standish Cabot, the Bostonian, and\n Doggo, No. 334-2-18, the only really humanlike ant-man\n whom Myles had ever known among the once dominant\n race of Poros.", "But while he was trying to catch this vaguely elusive\n train of thought, his attention was diverted by the fact that,\n for some unaccountable reason, his belt buckle and most of\n the buttons which had held his clothes together were missing,\n so that his clothing came to pieces as he rose, and that\n he had to shed it rapidly in order to avoid impeding his\n movements. He wondered at the cause of this.\n\n10\n\n But his speculations were cut short by the alighting of the\n plane a hundred yards down the beach.\n\n\n What was his horror when out of it clambered, not men\n but ants! Ants, six-footed, and six feet high. Huge ants, four\n of them, running toward him over the glistening sands.\n\n\n Gone was all his languor, as he seized a piece of driftwood\n and prepared to defend himself.", "Twelve months ago he would have been available, for\n he was then quietly visiting at my farm, after five earth-years\n spent on the planet Venus, where, by the aid of radio,\n he had led the Cupians to victory over their oppressors,\n a human-brained race of gigantic black ants. He had driven\n the last ant from the face of continental Poros, and had\n won and wed the Princess Lilla, who had borne him a son\n to occupy the throne of Cupia.\n\n\n While at my farm Cabot had rigged up a huge radio\n set and a matter-transmitting apparatus, with which he had\n (presumably) shot himself back to Poros on the night of the\n big October storm which had wrecked his installation.\n\n\n I showed the newspaper item to Mrs. Farley, and lamented\n on Cabot’s absence. Her response opened up an\n entirely new line of thought.", "Then he passed the paper and stylus over to his old\n friend Doggo. They were alone together at last.\nThe ant-man’s reply consumed sheet after sheet of paper;\n but, owning to the rapidity of Porovian shorthand, did not\n take so very much more time than speaking would have\n required. As he completed each sheet he passed it over to\n Myles, who read as follows:\n\n\n “As to your princess and your son, I know not, for this\n is not Cupia. Do you remember how, when your victorious\n army and air navy swept to the southern extremity of what\n had been Formia, a few of our survivors rose in planes from\n the ruins of our last stronghold and braved the dangers\n of the steam clouds which overhang the boiling seas? Our\n leader was Prince Yuri, erstwhile contender for the throne\n of Cupia, splendid even in defeat.", "And then events began to differ from those of the past;\n for the three other Formians halted, and Doggo advanced\n alone. By the agitation of the beast’s antennae the earth\n man could see that it was talking to him. But Myles no\n longer possessed the wonderful electrical headset which he\n had contrived and built during his previous visit to that\n planet, so as to talk with Cupians and Formians, both of\n which races are earless and converse by means of radiations\n from their antennae.\n\n\n So he picked up two sticks from the beach, and held\n them projecting from his forehead; then threw them to the\n ground with a grimace of disgust and pointed to his ears.\n\n\n Doggo understood, and scratched with his paw in Cupian\n shorthand on the silver sands the message: “Myles Cabot,\n you are our prisoner.”\n\n\n “What, again?” scratched Myles, then made a sign of\n submission.\n\n11", "With a sweep of his paw, Doggo indicated that this was\n to be Cabot’s quarters. Then, with another wave, he\n pointed to the table, where lay a pad of paper and stylus,\n not a pencil-like stylus as employed by the Cupians, but\n rather one equipped with straps for attaching it to the claw\n of a Formian.\n\n\n Even so, it was better than nothing. The earth-man seized\n it eagerly, but before he could begin writing an ant entered\n bearing a Cupian toga, short-sleeved and bordered with\n Grecian wave designs in blue. Myles put on this garment,\n and then quickly filled a sheet with questions:\n\n\n “How is my princess and my son, the baby king? Whence\n come all you Formians, whose race I thought had been\n exterminated? What part of Cupia is this? What is this city?\n Where is Prince Yuri? And what do you intend to do with\n me\nthis\ntime?”", "On a raised platform stood the ant queen, surmounted by\n a scarlet canopy, which set off the perfect proportions of\n her jet-black body. On each side of her stood six refined\n and intelligent ant-men, her councillors. One of the twelve\n was Doggo.\n\n\n Messenger ants hurried hither and thither.\n\n\n First the accusation was read, Myles being furnished\n with a written copy.\n\n\n The witnesses were then called. They were veterans who\n had served in the wars in which Cabot had twice freed\n Cupia from the domination of its Formian oppressors.\n They spoke with bitterness of the downfall of their beloved\n Formia. Their testimony was brief.\n\n\n Then the accused was asked if he wished to say anything\n in his own behalf. Myles rose, then shrugged his shoulders,\n sat down again, and wrote: “I fully realize the futility of\n making an argument through the antennae of another.”", "Finally a small settlement loomed ahead. It was of the\n familiar style of toy-building-block architecture affected by\n the ant-men, and, from its appearance, was very new. On its\n outskirts further building operations were actively in progress.\n Apparently a few survivors of the accursed race of Formians\n were consolidating their position and attempting to build\n up a new empire in some out-of-the-way portion of the continent.\n\n\n As the earth-man was turning these thoughts over in his\n mind the plane softly settled down upon one of the flat\n roofs, and its occupants disembarked. Three of the ants\n advanced menacingly toward Myles, but Doggo held them\n off. Then all of the party descended down one of the ramps\n to the lower levels of the building.", "“It was his brain that conceived our daring plan of\n escape. If there were other lands beyond the boiling seas,\n the lands which tradition taught were the origin of the\n Cupian race, then there we might prosper and raise up a\n new empire. At the worst we should merely meet death in\n another form, rather than at your hands. So we essayed.\n\n14\n\n “Your planes followed us, but turned back as we neared\n the area of terrific heat. Soon the vapor closed over us,\n blotting our enemies and our native land from view.”\n\n\n For page after page Doggo, the ant-man, related the\n harrowing details of that perilous flight across the boiling\n seas, ending with the words:", "Interplanetary communication was an established fact at\n last! And not with Mars after all these years of scientific\n speculations. But what meant more to me was that I was\n again in touch with my classmate Myles Standish Cabot,\n the radio man.\n\n\n The next day a party of prominent scientists, accompanied\n by a telegrapher and two stenographers, arrived at my\n farm.\n\n\n During the weeks that followed there was recorded\n Myles’s own account of the amazing adventures on the planet\n Venus (or Poros, as its own inhabitants call it,)\n which befell him upon his return there after his brief visit\n to the earth. I have edited those notes into the following\n coherent story.\nII" ], [ "But Doggo wrote in horror, “It would be treason!” Then\n tore up all the correspondence. It is difficult to inculcate the\n thought of independence in the mind of one reared in an\n autocracy.\n\n\n The earth-man, however, persisted.\n\n\n “How many of the council can you count on, if the interests\n of Yuri should clash with those of Formis?”\n\n16\n\n “Only one—myself.”\n\n\n And again Doggo tore up the correspondence.\n\n\n Myles tactfully changed the subject.\n\n\n “Where is the arch-fiend now?” he asked.", "“No,” the ant-man wrote in reply.\n\n\n “Have you ever known me to be untrue to a principle,\n a cause, or a friend?”\n\n\n “No,” Doggo replied.\n\n\n “Then,” Myles wrote, “let us make your daughter queen\n in fact as well as in name.”\n\n\n “It is treason,” Doggo wrote in reply, but this time he\n did not tear up the correspondence.\n\n\n “Treason?” Myles asked. If he had spoken the word, he\n would have spoken it with scorn and derision. “Treason?\n Is it treason to support your own queen? What has become\n of the national pride of the once great Formians? Look!\n I pledge myself to the cause of Formis, rightful Queen of\n Formia. Formis, daughter of Doggo! What say you?”", "To which the messenger added: “And he offers to give us\n back our own old country, if we too will return across the\n boiling seas again.”\n\n\n “It is a lie!” Doggo shouted.\n\n\n “Yuri, usurper of the thrones of two continents. Bah!”\n shouted Emu.\n\n\n “Yuri, our rightful leader,” shouted Barth.\n\n\n “Give us a queen of our own race,” shouted Fum.\n\n\n “Release the prisoner,” shouted the Queen.\n\n\n And that is all that Myles learned of the conversation,\n for his interpreter at this juncture stopped writing and\n obeyed the queen. The earth-man was free!", "This time, as he tore up the correspondence, Doggo\n signified an affirmative. And thus there resulted further\n correspondence.\n\n17\n\n “Doggo,” Myles wrote, “can you get to the antenna of\n the queen?”\n\n\n The ant-man indicated that he could.\n\n\n “If she has inherited any of your character,” Myles continued,\n “she will assert herself, if given half a chance.”\nSo the Pitmanesque conversation continued. Long since had\n the pink light of Porovian evening faded from the western\n sky. The ceiling vapor-lamps were lit. The night showed velvet-black\n through the slit-like windows. And still the two old\n friends wrote on, Myles Standish Cabot, the Bostonian, and\n Doggo, No. 334-2-18, the only really humanlike ant-man\n whom Myles had ever known among the once dominant\n race of Poros.", "He dreaded the paralyzing bite which Formians usually\n administer to their victims, and which he had twice experienced\n in the past; but, fortunately, it was not now\n forthcoming.\n\n\n The other three ants kept away from him as Doggo led\n him to the beached airplane, and soon they were scudding\n along beneath silver skies, northward as it later turned out.\n\n\n Far below them were silver-green fields and tangled\n tropical woods, interspersed with rivulets and little ponds.\nThis was Cupia, his Cupia. He was home once more,\n back again upon the planet which held all that was dear\n to him in two worlds.\n\n\n His heart glowed with the warmth of homecoming.\n What mattered it that he was now a prisoner, in the hands\n (or, rather, claws) of his old enemies, the Formians? He\n had been their prisoner before, and had escaped. Once more\n he could escape, and rescue the Princess Lilla.", "“It was his brain that conceived our daring plan of\n escape. If there were other lands beyond the boiling seas,\n the lands which tradition taught were the origin of the\n Cupian race, then there we might prosper and raise up a\n new empire. At the worst we should merely meet death in\n another form, rather than at your hands. So we essayed.\n\n14\n\n “Your planes followed us, but turned back as we neared\n the area of terrific heat. Soon the vapor closed over us,\n blotting our enemies and our native land from view.”\n\n\n For page after page Doggo, the ant-man, related the\n harrowing details of that perilous flight across the boiling\n seas, ending with the words:", "Finally a small settlement loomed ahead. It was of the\n familiar style of toy-building-block architecture affected by\n the ant-men, and, from its appearance, was very new. On its\n outskirts further building operations were actively in progress.\n Apparently a few survivors of the accursed race of Formians\n were consolidating their position and attempting to build\n up a new empire in some out-of-the-way portion of the continent.\n\n\n As the earth-man was turning these thoughts over in his\n mind the plane softly settled down upon one of the flat\n roofs, and its occupants disembarked. Three of the ants\n advanced menacingly toward Myles, but Doggo held them\n off. Then all of the party descended down one of the ramps\n to the lower levels of the building.", "And then events began to differ from those of the past;\n for the three other Formians halted, and Doggo advanced\n alone. By the agitation of the beast’s antennae the earth\n man could see that it was talking to him. But Myles no\n longer possessed the wonderful electrical headset which he\n had contrived and built during his previous visit to that\n planet, so as to talk with Cupians and Formians, both of\n which races are earless and converse by means of radiations\n from their antennae.\n\n\n So he picked up two sticks from the beach, and held\n them projecting from his forehead; then threw them to the\n ground with a grimace of disgust and pointed to his ears.\n\n\n Doggo understood, and scratched with his paw in Cupian\n shorthand on the silver sands the message: “Myles Cabot,\n you are our prisoner.”\n\n\n “What, again?” scratched Myles, then made a sign of\n submission.\n\n11", "Finally, as the dials indicated midnight, the two conspirators\n ceased their labors. All was arranged for the\ncoup d’ etat\n.\n\n\n They tore into shreds every scrap of used paper, leaving\n extant merely the ant-man’s concluding words: “Meanwhile\n you are my prisoner.”\n\n\n Doggo then rang a soundless bell, which was answered\n by a worker ant, whom he inaudibly directed to bring\n sufficient draperies to form a bed for the earth-man. These\n brought, the two friends patted each other a fond good\n night, and the tired earth-man lay down for the first sleep\n which he had had in over forty earth hours.", "Whereupon the queen and the council went into executive\n session. Their remarks were not intended for the eyes\n of the prisoner, but he soon observed that some kind of a\n dispute was on between Doggo, supported by two councillors\n named Emu and Fum on one side, and a councillor named\n Barth on the other.\n\n\n As this dispute reached its height, a messenger ant rushed\n in and held up one paw. Cabot’s interpreter, not deeming\n this a part of the executive session, obligingly translated the\n following into writing:\n\n\n The messenger: “Yuri lives and reigns over Cupia. It is his\n command that Cabot die.”", "When Myles had somewhat recovered from his astonishment,\n he warmly congratulated his friend by patting him\n on the side of the head, as is the Porovian custom.\n\n\n “Doggo,” he wrote, “this ought to constitute you a person\n of some importance among the Formians.”\n\n\n “It\nought\nto,” the ant-man replied, “but as a matter of\n fact, it merely intensifies Yuri’s mistrust and hatred of me.\n Now that I am mother of the queen, he fears that I may\n turn against him and establish Formis in his place as the\n head of an empire of the Formians, by the Formians, and\n for the Formians exclusively.”\n\n\n “Why don’t you?” Myles wrote. It seemed to him to be\n a bully good idea, and incidentally a solution of his own\n difficulties.", "With a sweep of his paw, Doggo indicated that this was\n to be Cabot’s quarters. Then, with another wave, he\n pointed to the table, where lay a pad of paper and stylus,\n not a pencil-like stylus as employed by the Cupians, but\n rather one equipped with straps for attaching it to the claw\n of a Formian.\n\n\n Even so, it was better than nothing. The earth-man seized\n it eagerly, but before he could begin writing an ant entered\n bearing a Cupian toga, short-sleeved and bordered with\n Grecian wave designs in blue. Myles put on this garment,\n and then quickly filled a sheet with questions:\n\n\n “How is my princess and my son, the baby king? Whence\n come all you Formians, whose race I thought had been\n exterminated? What part of Cupia is this? What is this city?\n Where is Prince Yuri? And what do you intend to do with\n me\nthis\ntime?”", "It hardly seemed possible! Night before last he had slept\n peacefully on a conventional feather-bed in a little New\n England farmhouse. Then had come the S O S message\n from the skies; and here he was now, millions of miles\n away through space retiring on matted silver felting on the\n concrete floor of a Porovian ant-house. Such are the mutations\n of fortune!\n\n\n With these thoughts the returned wanderer lapsed into\n a deep and dreamless sleep.\n\n\n When he awakened in the morning there was a guard\n posted at the door.\n\n18\n\n Doggo did not show up until nearly noon, when he\n rattled in, bristling with excitement.\n\n\n Seizing the pad he wrote: “A stormy session of the Council\n of Twelve! We are all agreed that you must be indicted\n for high crimes and misdemeanors. But the great question\n is as to just what we can charge you with.”", "On a raised platform stood the ant queen, surmounted by\n a scarlet canopy, which set off the perfect proportions of\n her jet-black body. On each side of her stood six refined\n and intelligent ant-men, her councillors. One of the twelve\n was Doggo.\n\n\n Messenger ants hurried hither and thither.\n\n\n First the accusation was read, Myles being furnished\n with a written copy.\n\n\n The witnesses were then called. They were veterans who\n had served in the wars in which Cabot had twice freed\n Cupia from the domination of its Formian oppressors.\n They spoke with bitterness of the downfall of their beloved\n Formia. Their testimony was brief.\n\n\n Then the accused was asked if he wished to say anything\n in his own behalf. Myles rose, then shrugged his shoulders,\n sat down again, and wrote: “I fully realize the futility of\n making an argument through the antennae of another.”", "Then he passed the paper and stylus over to his old\n friend Doggo. They were alone together at last.\nThe ant-man’s reply consumed sheet after sheet of paper;\n but, owning to the rapidity of Porovian shorthand, did not\n take so very much more time than speaking would have\n required. As he completed each sheet he passed it over to\n Myles, who read as follows:\n\n\n “As to your princess and your son, I know not, for this\n is not Cupia. Do you remember how, when your victorious\n army and air navy swept to the southern extremity of what\n had been Formia, a few of our survivors rose in planes from\n the ruins of our last stronghold and braved the dangers\n of the steam clouds which overhang the boiling seas? Our\n leader was Prince Yuri, erstwhile contender for the throne\n of Cupia, splendid even in defeat.", "With one bound he gained the throne, where fighting\n was already in progress between the two factions. Barth\n and Doggo were rolling over and over on the floor in a\n death grapple, while the ant-queen had backed to the rear\n of the stage, closely guarded by Emu and Fum.\n\n\n Seizing one of the pikes which supported the scarlet\n canopy, Myles wrenched it loose and drove it into the thorax\n of Barth. In another instant the earth-man and Doggo stood\n beside the queen.\n\n\n Ant-men now came pouring into the chamber through all\n the entrances, taking sides as they entered and sized up the\n situation. If it had still been in vogue among the Formians\n to be known by numbers rather than names, and to have\n these identifying numbers painted on the backs of their\n abdomens followed by the numbers of those whom they\n had defeated in the duels so common among them, then\n many a Formian would have “got the number” of many\n another, that day.", "He gazed again at the scene below, and now noted one\n difference from the accustomed Porovian landscape, for nowhere\n ran the smooth concrete roads which bear the swift\n two-wheeled kerkools of the Cupians to all parts of their\n continent. What uninhabited portion of Cupia could this be,\n over which they were now passing?\n\n12\n\n Turning to Doggo, Myles extended his left palm, and\n made a motion as though writing on it with the thumb\n and forefinger of his right hand. But the ant-man waved\n a negative with one of his forepaws. It was evident that\n there were no writing materials aboard the ship. Myles\n would have to wait until they reached their landing place;\n for doubtless they would soon hover down in some city\n or town, though just which one he could not guess, as the\n country below was wholly unfamiliar.", "His immediate problem was to learn what the ant-men\n planned for him; so the concluding words which he wrote\n upon the pad were: “And, now that you have me in your\n power, what shall you do with me?”\n\n\n “Old friend,” Doggo wrote in reply, “that depends entirely\n upon Yuri, our king, whose toga you now have on.”\nIII\n\n YURI OR FORMIS?\nThe earth-man grimaced, but then smiled. Perhaps, his\n succeeding to the toga of King Yuri might prove to be an\n omen.\n\n15\n\n “So Yuri is king of the ants?” he asked.\n\n\n “Yes,” his captor replied, “for Queen Formis did not survive\n the trip across the boiling seas.”", "As he stood thus expectant, Myles realized that his present\n position and condition, the surrounding scenery, and the advance\n of the ant-men were exactly, item for item, like the\n opening events of his first arrival on the planet Poros. He\n even recognized one of the ant-men as old Doggo, who had\n befriended him on his previous visit.\n\n\n Could it be that all his adventures in Cupia had been\n naught but a dream; a recurring dream, in fact? Were his\n dear wife Lilla and his little son Kew merely figments of\n his imagination? Horrible thought!", "Narrow slitlike window openings gave onto courtyards,\n where fountains played and masses of blue and yellow flowers\n bloomed, amid gray-branched lichens with red and purple\n twig-knobs. It was in just such a garden, through just\n such a window, that he had first looked upon the lovely\n blue-eyed, golden-haired Lilla, Crown Princess of Cupia.\n\n\n The earth-man sighed. Where was his beloved wife now?\n That she needed his help was certain. He must therefore\n get busy. So once again he made motions of writing on the\n palm of his left hand with the thumb and forefinger of his\n right; and this time the sign language produced results,\n for Doggo halted the procession and led Cabot into a room.\n\n13\n\n It was a plain bare room, devoid of any furniture except\n a small table, for ant-men have no use for chairs and\n couches. The sky outside was already beginning to pinken\n with the unseen sun." ], [ "Whereupon the queen and the council went into executive\n session. Their remarks were not intended for the eyes\n of the prisoner, but he soon observed that some kind of a\n dispute was on between Doggo, supported by two councillors\n named Emu and Fum on one side, and a councillor named\n Barth on the other.\n\n\n As this dispute reached its height, a messenger ant rushed\n in and held up one paw. Cabot’s interpreter, not deeming\n this a part of the executive session, obligingly translated the\n following into writing:\n\n\n The messenger: “Yuri lives and reigns over Cupia. It is his\n command that Cabot die.”", "To which the messenger added: “And he offers to give us\n back our own old country, if we too will return across the\n boiling seas again.”\n\n\n “It is a lie!” Doggo shouted.\n\n\n “Yuri, usurper of the thrones of two continents. Bah!”\n shouted Emu.\n\n\n “Yuri, our rightful leader,” shouted Barth.\n\n\n “Give us a queen of our own race,” shouted Fum.\n\n\n “Release the prisoner,” shouted the Queen.\n\n\n And that is all that Myles learned of the conversation,\n for his interpreter at this juncture stopped writing and\n obeyed the queen. The earth-man was free!", "Then he passed the paper and stylus over to his old\n friend Doggo. They were alone together at last.\nThe ant-man’s reply consumed sheet after sheet of paper;\n but, owning to the rapidity of Porovian shorthand, did not\n take so very much more time than speaking would have\n required. As he completed each sheet he passed it over to\n Myles, who read as follows:\n\n\n “As to your princess and your son, I know not, for this\n is not Cupia. Do you remember how, when your victorious\n army and air navy swept to the southern extremity of what\n had been Formia, a few of our survivors rose in planes from\n the ruins of our last stronghold and braved the dangers\n of the steam clouds which overhang the boiling seas? Our\n leader was Prince Yuri, erstwhile contender for the throne\n of Cupia, splendid even in defeat.", "Barth: “It is the radio. Know then, O Queen, and ye,\n members of the council, that when we fled across the boiling\n seas under the gallant leadership of Prince Yuri, the man\n with the heart of a Formian, he brought with him one of\n those powerful radio sets invented by the beast who is our\n prisoner here to-day.\n\n\n “Supporters of Yuri still remained among the Cupians,\n and he has been in constant communication with these ever\n since shortly after our arrival here. From them he learned\n of the return of Myles Cabot to the planet Minos.\n\n20\n\n “Then Yuri disappeared. Those of us who were closest\n to him suspected that he had gone back across the boiling\n seas to claim as his own the throne of Cupia. But we hesitated\n to announce this until we were sure, for we feared that\n some of our own people would regard his departure as\n desertion. Yet who can blame him for returning to his father-land\n and to the throne which is his by rights?”", "With a sweep of his paw, Doggo indicated that this was\n to be Cabot’s quarters. Then, with another wave, he\n pointed to the table, where lay a pad of paper and stylus,\n not a pencil-like stylus as employed by the Cupians, but\n rather one equipped with straps for attaching it to the claw\n of a Formian.\n\n\n Even so, it was better than nothing. The earth-man seized\n it eagerly, but before he could begin writing an ant entered\n bearing a Cupian toga, short-sleeved and bordered with\n Grecian wave designs in blue. Myles put on this garment,\n and then quickly filled a sheet with questions:\n\n\n “How is my princess and my son, the baby king? Whence\n come all you Formians, whose race I thought had been\n exterminated? What part of Cupia is this? What is this city?\n Where is Prince Yuri? And what do you intend to do with\n me\nthis\ntime?”", "“I will waive anything,” Myles replied, “counsel, immunity,\n extradition, anything in order to speed up my return\n to Cupia, where Lilla awaits in some dire extremity.”\n\n\n “All right,” Doggo wrote, and the conference was at an\n end. The morrow would decide the ascendancy of Myles\n Cabot or the Prince Yuri over the new continent.\nIV\n\n THE COUP D’ETAT\nThe next morning Myles Cabot was led under guard to the\n council chamber of the dread thirteen: Formis and her\n twelve advisers. The accused was placed in a wicker cage,\n from which he surveyed his surroundings as the proceedings\n opened.\n\n19", "But Doggo wrote in horror, “It would be treason!” Then\n tore up all the correspondence. It is difficult to inculcate the\n thought of independence in the mind of one reared in an\n autocracy.\n\n\n The earth-man, however, persisted.\n\n\n “How many of the council can you count on, if the interests\n of Yuri should clash with those of Formis?”\n\n16\n\n “Only one—myself.”\n\n\n And again Doggo tore up the correspondence.\n\n\n Myles tactfully changed the subject.\n\n\n “Where is the arch-fiend now?” he asked.", "Poor girl! How eager he was to reach her side, and save\n her from that peril, whatever it was, which had caused her\n to flash that “S O S” a hundred million miles across the\n solar system from Poros to the earth.\n\n\n He wondered what could have happened in Cupia since\n his departure, only a few sangths ago. How was it that\n the ant-men had survived their airplane journey across the\n boiling seas? What had led them to return? Or perhaps\n these ants were a group who had hidden somewhere and\n thus had escaped the general extermination of their race.\n In either event, how had they been able to reconquer\n Cupia? And where was their former leader, Yuri, the renegade\n Cupian prince?\n\n\n These and a hundred other similar questions flooded in\n upon the earth-man, as the Formian airship carried him, a\n captive, through the skies.", "TOO MUCH STATIC\nMyles Cabot had returned to the earth to study the\n latest developments of modern terrestrial science for the\n benefit of the Cupian nation. He was the regent of Cupia\n during the minority of his baby son, King Kew the\n Thirteenth. The loyal Prince Toron occupied the throne in his\n absence. The last of the ant-men and their ally, the renegade\n Cupian Prince Yuri, had presumably perished in an attempt\n to escape by flying through the steam-clouds which completely\n hem in continental Poros. What lay beyond the\n boiling seas no man knew.\n\n9", "“Here we are, and here are you, in Yuriana, capitol of\n New Formia. But how is it that you, Myles Cabot, have\n arrived here on this continent in exactly the same manner\n and condition in which I discovered you in\nold\nFormia\n eight years ago?”\n\n\n When Myles reached the end of reading this narrative, he\n in turn took the pad and stylus and related how he had\n gone to the planet Minos (which we call the Earth) to learn\n the latest discoveries and inventions there, and how his\n calculations for his return to Poros had been upset by some\n static conditions just as he had been about to transmit\n himself back. Oh, if only he had landed by chance upon\n the same beach as on his first journey through the skies!\n\n\n Wisely he refrained from mentioning the “S O S” message\n from Lilla. But his recollection of her predicament\n spurred him to be anxious about her rescue.", "As he stood thus expectant, Myles realized that his present\n position and condition, the surrounding scenery, and the advance\n of the ant-men were exactly, item for item, like the\n opening events of his first arrival on the planet Poros. He\n even recognized one of the ant-men as old Doggo, who had\n befriended him on his previous visit.\n\n\n Could it be that all his adventures in Cupia had been\n naught but a dream; a recurring dream, in fact? Were his\n dear wife Lilla and his little son Kew merely figments of\n his imagination? Horrible thought!", "He gazed again at the scene below, and now noted one\n difference from the accustomed Porovian landscape, for nowhere\n ran the smooth concrete roads which bear the swift\n two-wheeled kerkools of the Cupians to all parts of their\n continent. What uninhabited portion of Cupia could this be,\n over which they were now passing?\n\n12\n\n Turning to Doggo, Myles extended his left palm, and\n made a motion as though writing on it with the thumb\n and forefinger of his right hand. But the ant-man waved\n a negative with one of his forepaws. It was evident that\n there were no writing materials aboard the ship. Myles\n would have to wait until they reached their landing place;\n for doubtless they would soon hover down in some city\n or town, though just which one he could not guess, as the\n country below was wholly unfamiliar.", "He dreaded the paralyzing bite which Formians usually\n administer to their victims, and which he had twice experienced\n in the past; but, fortunately, it was not now\n forthcoming.\n\n\n The other three ants kept away from him as Doggo led\n him to the beached airplane, and soon they were scudding\n along beneath silver skies, northward as it later turned out.\n\n\n Far below them were silver-green fields and tangled\n tropical woods, interspersed with rivulets and little ponds.\nThis was Cupia, his Cupia. He was home once more,\n back again upon the planet which held all that was dear\n to him in two worlds.\n\n\n His heart glowed with the warmth of homecoming.\n What mattered it that he was now a prisoner, in the hands\n (or, rather, claws) of his old enemies, the Formians? He\n had been their prisoner before, and had escaped. Once more\n he could escape, and rescue the Princess Lilla.", "And then events began to differ from those of the past;\n for the three other Formians halted, and Doggo advanced\n alone. By the agitation of the beast’s antennae the earth\n man could see that it was talking to him. But Myles no\n longer possessed the wonderful electrical headset which he\n had contrived and built during his previous visit to that\n planet, so as to talk with Cupians and Formians, both of\n which races are earless and converse by means of radiations\n from their antennae.\n\n\n So he picked up two sticks from the beach, and held\n them projecting from his forehead; then threw them to the\n ground with a grimace of disgust and pointed to his ears.\n\n\n Doggo understood, and scratched with his paw in Cupian\n shorthand on the silver sands the message: “Myles Cabot,\n you are our prisoner.”\n\n\n “What, again?” scratched Myles, then made a sign of\n submission.\n\n11", "“It was his brain that conceived our daring plan of\n escape. If there were other lands beyond the boiling seas,\n the lands which tradition taught were the origin of the\n Cupian race, then there we might prosper and raise up a\n new empire. At the worst we should merely meet death in\n another form, rather than at your hands. So we essayed.\n\n14\n\n “Your planes followed us, but turned back as we neared\n the area of terrific heat. Soon the vapor closed over us,\n blotting our enemies and our native land from view.”\n\n\n For page after page Doggo, the ant-man, related the\n harrowing details of that perilous flight across the boiling\n seas, ending with the words:", "Twelve months ago he would have been available, for\n he was then quietly visiting at my farm, after five earth-years\n spent on the planet Venus, where, by the aid of radio,\n he had led the Cupians to victory over their oppressors,\n a human-brained race of gigantic black ants. He had driven\n the last ant from the face of continental Poros, and had\n won and wed the Princess Lilla, who had borne him a son\n to occupy the throne of Cupia.\n\n\n While at my farm Cabot had rigged up a huge radio\n set and a matter-transmitting apparatus, with which he had\n (presumably) shot himself back to Poros on the night of the\n big October storm which had wrecked his installation.\n\n\n I showed the newspaper item to Mrs. Farley, and lamented\n on Cabot’s absence. Her response opened up an\n entirely new line of thought.", "Narrow slitlike window openings gave onto courtyards,\n where fountains played and masses of blue and yellow flowers\n bloomed, amid gray-branched lichens with red and purple\n twig-knobs. It was in just such a garden, through just\n such a window, that he had first looked upon the lovely\n blue-eyed, golden-haired Lilla, Crown Princess of Cupia.\n\n\n The earth-man sighed. Where was his beloved wife now?\n That she needed his help was certain. He must therefore\n get busy. So once again he made motions of writing on the\n palm of his left hand with the thumb and forefinger of his\n right; and this time the sign language produced results,\n for Doggo halted the procession and led Cabot into a room.\n\n13\n\n It was a plain bare room, devoid of any furniture except\n a small table, for ant-men have no use for chairs and\n couches. The sky outside was already beginning to pinken\n with the unseen sun.", "When Myles had somewhat recovered from his astonishment,\n he warmly congratulated his friend by patting him\n on the side of the head, as is the Porovian custom.\n\n\n “Doggo,” he wrote, “this ought to constitute you a person\n of some importance among the Formians.”\n\n\n “It\nought\nto,” the ant-man replied, “but as a matter of\n fact, it merely intensifies Yuri’s mistrust and hatred of me.\n Now that I am mother of the queen, he fears that I may\n turn against him and establish Formis in his place as the\n head of an empire of the Formians, by the Formians, and\n for the Formians exclusively.”\n\n\n “Why don’t you?” Myles wrote. It seemed to him to be\n a bully good idea, and incidentally a solution of his own\n difficulties.", "On a raised platform stood the ant queen, surmounted by\n a scarlet canopy, which set off the perfect proportions of\n her jet-black body. On each side of her stood six refined\n and intelligent ant-men, her councillors. One of the twelve\n was Doggo.\n\n\n Messenger ants hurried hither and thither.\n\n\n First the accusation was read, Myles being furnished\n with a written copy.\n\n\n The witnesses were then called. They were veterans who\n had served in the wars in which Cabot had twice freed\n Cupia from the domination of its Formian oppressors.\n They spoke with bitterness of the downfall of their beloved\n Formia. Their testimony was brief.\n\n\n Then the accused was asked if he wished to say anything\n in his own behalf. Myles rose, then shrugged his shoulders,\n sat down again, and wrote: “I fully realize the futility of\n making an argument through the antennae of another.”", "“Sorry I can’t assist you,” the earth-man wrote. “How\n would it be if I were to slap your daughter’s face, or\n something? Or why not try me for general cussedness?”\n\n\n “That is just what we finally decided to do,” the ant-man\n wrote in reply. “We shall try you on general principles,\n and let the proper accusation develop from the evidence.\n\n\n “At some stage of the proceedings it will inevitably occur\n to some member of the council to suggest that you be\n charged with treason to Yuri, whereupon two members of\n the council, whom I have won over to the cause of my\n daughter, will raise the objection that Yuri is not our king.\n This will be the signal for the proclaiming of Queen Formis.\n If you will waive counsel the trial can take place to-morrow.”" ] ]
train	63527	[ "Why was Queazy given his said nickname?", "Why were Parker and Queazy voyaging on the trip looking for an asteroid?", "What would have likely happened had Parker and Queazy or the Saylor brothers never located the asteroid?", "Why was Mr. Burnside so determined to have such a large and specific asteroid delivered to his backyard?", "How long were Parker, Queazy and Starre floating around in space while unconcious?", "What gave Starre the right to claim the asteroid as her own when Parker and Queazy arrived?", "How was Queazy able to determine how long the trio were floating around in space before waking?", "What was the indication in the passage to show that Starre was aware of Parker's newfound love for her?", "What can be determined would happen after Parker and Queazy retrieved the asteroid?", "Had Starre not been able to rescue herself, Parker, and Queazy, what would have likely happened to them after the Saylor brothers attack?" ]	[ [ "Because his name was Quentin Zuyler", "Because no one could recall his real name. ", "Because he had been known for being whimsical", "Because he often became queasy while flying" ], [ "The Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co. was in difficult competition with Saylor & Saylor to get to it first. ", "The Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co. had to have it to prove their business was legitimate. ", "From the request of Andrew Burnside to purchase it", "From the request of Andrew Burnside to destroy it" ], [ "Starre would have been able to call off the wedding to Mac. ", "They would have received their payment anyways because of their long travel in space. ", "Mr. Burnside would have traveled to get the asteroid himself. ", "The wedding would have been held on a different asteroid that looked similar. " ], [ "He didn't actually want it, he just wanted the Saylor brothers and Parker and Queazy to be occupied. ", "He had previously had one that was similar and wanted another for reminiscing. ", "He wanted something more grand and valuable than anyone else.", "His granddaughter had requested one for her wedding. " ], [ "Three days ", "Three days", "One week", "Three weeks" ], [ "She had made a deal with the Interplanetary Commission.", "Her grandfather had purchased the asteroid for her. ", "By common law, asteroids up to a certain size belong to whoever happens to be on them.", "She had signed an interplanetary lease agreement. " ], [ "From the chronometer", "By how much fuel was left in their ship", "From how much oxygen was left in their suits", "By his declared level of hunger" ], [ "His decision to not deliver the asteroid to her grandfather for the wedding. ", "His protectiveness over her towards Queazy.", "His determination to help her stop the wedding to Mac. ", "His affection while teaching her about the mechanics of the hauler. " ], [ "They would retrieve it and sell it to Mr. Burnside for their large profit", "They would end up losing it while traveling back to Earth. ", "They would return it to space and Starre would continue to live on it. ", "They would return it to space and return empty handed" ], [ "They would have eventually orbited back to their ship", "They would have reached their ship for more oxygen . ", "They would have died from starvation or lack of oxygen.", "They would have been lost in space alone forever. " ] ]	[ 1, 3, 1, 4, 4, 3, 1, 4, 1, 3 ]	[ 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "He couldn't keep himself from taking in great gulps of air. Minutes,\n then hours passed. He was breathing abnormally, and there wasn't enough\n air in the first place. He pleaded continually for Queazy, hoping\n that somehow Queazy could help, when probably Queazy was in the same\n condition. He ripped out wild curses directed at the Saylor brothers.\n Murderers, both of them! Up until this time, he had merely thought of\n them as business rivals. If he ever got out of this—\n\n\n He groaned. He never would get out of it! After another hour, he was\n gasping weakly, and yellow spots danced in his eyes. He called Queazy's\n name once more, knowing that was the last time he would have strength\n to call it.\n\n\n And this time the headset spoke back!", "Bob Parker made a gurgling sound. A voice came again, washed with\n static, far away, burbling, but excited. Bob made a rattling sound in\n his throat. Then his eyes started to close, but he imagined that he saw\n a ship, shiny and small, driving toward him, growing in size against\n the backdrop of the Milky Way. He relapsed, a terrific buzzing in his\n ears.\n\n\n He did not lose consciousness. He heard voices, Queazy's and the\n girl's, whoever she was. Somebody grabbed hold of his foot. His\n \"aquarium\" was unbuckled and good air washed over his streaming face.\n The sudden rush of oxygen to his brain dizzied him. Then he was lying\n on a bunk, and gradually the world beyond his sick body focussed in his\n clearing eyes and he knew he was alive—and going to stay that way, for\n awhile anyway.\n\n\n \"Thanks, Queazy,\" he said huskily.", "Queazy was bending over him, his anxiety clearing away from his\n suddenly brightening face.\n\n\n \"Don't thank me,\" he whispered. \"We'd have both been goners if it\n hadn't been for her. The Saylor brothers left her paralyzed like\n us, and when she woke up she was on a slow orbit around her ship.\n She unstrapped her holster and threw it away from her and it gave\n her enough reaction to reach the ship. She got inside and used the\n direction-finder on the telaudio and located me first. The Saylors\n scattered us far and wide.\" Queazy's broad, normally good-humored face\n twisted blackly. \"The so and so's didn't care if we lived or died.\"", "It was Bob Parker's misfortune that he didn't carry a weapon. Each of\n these men carried one or more, plainly visible. But he was thinking of\n the girl's spasticizer—a paralyzing weapon. He took a hair-brained\n chance, jerked the spasticizer from the girl's holster and yelled at\n Queazy. Queazy got the idea, urged his immense body into motion. He\n hurled straight at Billy Saylor, lifted him straight off the asteroid\n and threw him away, into space. He yelled with triumph.", "There was no answer from Queazy. With sick eyes, Bob studied the\n oxygen indicator. There was only five pounds pressure. Five pounds!\n That meant he had been floating around out here—how long? Days at\n least—maybe weeks! It was evident that somebody had given him a dose\n of spastic rays, enough to screw up every muscle in his body to the\n snapping point, putting him in such a condition of suspended animation\n that his oxygen needs were small. He closed his eyes, trying to fight\n against panic. He was glad he couldn't see any part of his body. He was\n probably scrawny. And he was hungry!\n\n\n \"I'll starve,\" he thought. \"Or suffocate to death first!\"", "What had happened to Queazy he didn't know. He felt so horribly sick,\n he didn't care. Then—lights out.\nBob Parker came to, the emptiness of remote starlight in his face. He\n opened his eyes. He was slowly revolving on an axis. Sometimes the Sun\n swept across his line of vision. A cold hammering began at the base of\n his skull, a sensation similar to that of being buried alive. There was\n no asteroid, no girl, no Queazy. He was alone in the vastness of space.\n Alone in a space-suit.\n\n\n \"Queazy!\" he whispered. \"Queazy! I'm running out of air!\"", "\"Have it your way,\" Bob Parker sang, happily. He threw the ethergram\n to the winds and it fell gently to the deck-plates. While Queazy—so\n called because his full name was Quentin Zuyler—dropped the ship\n straight down to the smooth surface of the asteroid, and clamped it\n tight with magnetic grapples, Bob flung open the lazarette, brought\n out two space-suits. Moments later, they were outside the ship, with\n star-powdered infinity spread to all sides.", "\"No!\" she exclaimed. \"No. My grandfather didn't even know there was an\n asteroid like this. But I did, long before he ordered it from you—or\n from the Saylor brothers. You see—well, my granddad's about the\n stubbornest old hoot-owl in this universe! He's always had his way, and\n when people stand in his way, that's just a challenge to him. He's been\n badgering me for years to marry Mac, and so has Mac—\"\n\n\n \"Who's Mac?\" Queazy demanded.", "Bob swore under his breath. He went reeling across to a port, and was\n gratified to see his and Queazy's big interplanetary hauler floating\n only a few hundred feet away. He swung around, looked at Queazy.\n\n\n \"How long were we floating around out there?\"\n\n\n \"Three weeks, according to the chronometer. The Saylor boys gave us a\n stiff shot.\"", "The \"asteroid in your back yard\" idea had been Bob Parker's originally.\n Now it was a fad that was sweeping Earth, and Burnside wasn't the first\n rich man who had decided to hold a wedding on top of an asteroid.\n Unfortunately, other interplanetary moving companies had cashed in on\n that brainstorm, chiefly the firm of the Saylor brothers—which persons\n Bob Parker intended to punch in the nose some day. And would have\n before this if he hadn't been lanky and tall while they were giants.\n Now that he and Queazy had found the asteroid, they were desperate to\n get it to its destination, for fear that the Saylor brothers might get\n wind of what was going on, and try to beat them out of their profits.\n Which was not so far-fetched, because the firm of Saylor & Saylor made\n no pretense of being scrupulous.", "Bob saw the girl now, standing a little behind Queazy, looking down at\n him curiously, but unhappily. Her space-suit was off. She was wearing\n lightly striped blue slacks and blue silk blouse and she had a paper\n flower in her hair. Something in Bob's stomach caved in as his eyes\n widened on her.\n\n\n The girl said glumly, \"I guess you men won't much care for me when you\n find out who I am and what I've done. I'm Starre Lowenthal—Andrew S.\n Burnside's granddaughter!\"\nBob came slowly to his feet, and matched Queazy's slowly growing anger.\n\n\n \"Say that again?\" he snapped. \"This is some kind of dirty trick you and\n your grandfather cooked up?\"", "He said grimly, \"Don't worry. I don't intend to pull any rough stuff.\n I just want you to listen to reason. You've taken a whim to stay on\n an asteroid that doesn't mean anything to you one way or another. But\n to us—to me and Queazy here—it means our business. We got an order\n for this asteroid. Some screwball millionaire wants it for a backyard\n wedding see? We get five hundred and fifty thousand dollars for it!\n If we don't take this asteroid to Earth before June 2, we go back to\n Satterfield City and work the rest of our lives in the glass factories.\n Don't we, Queazy?\"\n\n\n Queazy said simply, \"That's right, miss. We're in a spot. I assure you\n we didn't expect to find someone living here.\"", "Starre was chortling with glee. Queazy whispered, \"Attaboy, Bob! This\n time we'll knock 'em out of the sky!\"\n\n\n The \"yo-yo\" came to rest and at the same moment a gong rang excitedly.\n Bob knew what that meant. The Saylor brothers were trying to establish\n communication.\n\n\n Queazy was across the room in two running strides. He threw in the\n telaudio and almost immediately, Wally Saylor's big body built up in\n the plate. Wally Saylor's face was quivering with wrath.\n\n\n \"What do you damned fools think you're trying to do?\" he roared.\n \"You've crushed in our stern section. You've sliced away half of our\n stern jets. Air is rushing out! You'll kill us!\"\n\n\n \"Now,\" Bob drawled, \"you're getting the idea.\"", "He jerked a badly crumpled ethergram from his pocket, smoothed it out,\n and thumbed his nose at the signature.\n\n\n \"Whee! Mr. Andrew S. Burnside, you owe us five hundred and fifty\n thousand dollars!\"\n\n\n Queazy straightened. A slow, likeable smile wreathed his tanned face.\n \"Better take it easy,\" he advised, \"until I land the ship and we use\n the atomic whirl spectroscope to determine the composition of the\n asteroid.\"", "\"A\nyo-yo\n!\" Bob Parker yelled the word and almost hit the ceiling, he\n got out of the chair so fast. \"Can you imagine it! A yo-yo!\"\n\n\n He disappeared from the room. \"Queazy!\" he shouted. \"\nQueazy, I've got\n it!\n\"\nIt was Queazy who got into his space-suit and did the welding job,\n fastening two huge supra-steel \"eyes\" onto the dumbbell-shaped ship's\n narrow midsection. Into these eyes cables which trailed back to\n two winches in the big ship's nose were inserted, welded fast, and\n reinforced.", "The girl holstered her spasticizer, but her completely inhospitable\n expression did not change. She put her hands on the bulging hips of her\n space-suit. \"Okay,\" she said. \"Now I understand the conditions. Now we\n both understand each other. G'bye again. I'm staying here and—\" she\n smiled sweetly \"—it may interest you to know that if I let you have\n the asteroid you'll save your business, but I'll meet a fate worse than\n death! So that's that.\"\n\n\n Bob recognized finality when he saw it. \"Come on, Queazy,\" he said\n fuming. \"Let this brat have her way. But if I ever run across her\n without a space-suit on I'm going to give her the licking of her life,\n right where it'll do the most good!\"\n\n\n He turned angrily, but Queazy grabbed his arm, his mouth falling open.\n He pointed off into space, beyond the girl.", "\"Cut the drive!\" he yelled at Queazy. \"I've got it, right on the nose.\n Queazy, my boy, can you imagine it? We're in the dough. Not only that,\n we're rich! Come here!\"\n\n\n Queazy discharged their tremendous inertia into the motive-tubes in\n such a manner that the big, powerful ship was moving at the same rate\n as the asteroid below—47.05 miles per second. He came slogging back\n excitedly, put his eyes to the eyepiece. He gasped, and his big body\n shook with joyful ejaculations.\n\n\n \"She checks down to the last dimension,\" Bob chortled, working with\n slide-rule and logarithm tables. \"Now all we have to do is find out if\n she's made of tungsten, iron, quartz crystals, and cinnabar! But there\n couldn't be two asteroids of that shape anywhere else in the Belt, so\n this has to be it!\"", "Bob Parker said, in astonishment, \"Hell! There's something screwy about\n this business. Look at that point—\"\n\n\n Neither he nor Queazy had the opportunity to observe the pointer any\n further. A cold, completely disagreeable feminine voice said,\n\n\n \"May I ask what you interlopers are doing on my asteroid?\"\n\n\n Bob started so badly that the spectroscope's settings were jarred and\n the lights in its interior died. Bob twisted his head around as far as\n he could inside the \"aquarium\"—the glass helmet, and found himself\n looking at a space-suited girl who was standing on the edge of the\n asteroid \"below.\"\n\n\n \"Ma'am,\" said Bob, blinking, \"did you say something?\"\n\n\n Queazy made a gulping sound and slowly straightened. He automatically\n reached up as if he would take off his hat and twist it in his hands.", "Bob looked at Queazy dismally. \"The old balance-wheel,\" he groaned at\n Starre. \"He's always pulling me up short when I go off half-cocked. All\n I know is, that maybe we'll get a good idea as we go along. In the\n meantime, Starre—ahem—none of us has eaten in three weeks...?\"\n\n\n Starre got the idea. She smiled dazzlingly and vanished toward the\n galley.\nBob Parker was in love with Starre Lowenthal. He knew that after five\n days out, as the ship hurled itself at breakneck speed toward Earth;\n probably that distracting emotion was the real reason he couldn't\n attach any significance to Starre's dumbbell-shaped ship, which trailed\n astern, attached by a long cable.\n\n\n Starre apparently knew he was in love with her, too, for on the fifth\n day Bob was teaching her the mechanics of operating the hauler, and she\n gently lifted his hand from a finger-switch.", "At the same time, the spasticizer Bob held was shot cleanly out of his\n hand by Wally Saylor. Bob roared, started toward Wally Saylor, knocked\n the smoking gun from his hand with a sweeping arm. Then something\n crushing seemed to hit him in the stomach, grabbing at his solar\n plexus. He doubled up, gurgling with agony. He fell over on his back,\n and his boots were wrenched loose from their magnetic grip. Vaguely,\n before the flickering points of light in his brain subsided to complete\n darkness, he heard the girl's scream of rage—then a scream of pain." ], [ "The \"asteroid in your back yard\" idea had been Bob Parker's originally.\n Now it was a fad that was sweeping Earth, and Burnside wasn't the first\n rich man who had decided to hold a wedding on top of an asteroid.\n Unfortunately, other interplanetary moving companies had cashed in on\n that brainstorm, chiefly the firm of the Saylor brothers—which persons\n Bob Parker intended to punch in the nose some day. And would have\n before this if he hadn't been lanky and tall while they were giants.\n Now that he and Queazy had found the asteroid, they were desperate to\n get it to its destination, for fear that the Saylor brothers might get\n wind of what was going on, and try to beat them out of their profits.\n Which was not so far-fetched, because the firm of Saylor & Saylor made\n no pretense of being scrupulous.", "It was Bob Parker's misfortune that he didn't carry a weapon. Each of\n these men carried one or more, plainly visible. But he was thinking of\n the girl's spasticizer—a paralyzing weapon. He took a hair-brained\n chance, jerked the spasticizer from the girl's holster and yelled at\n Queazy. Queazy got the idea, urged his immense body into motion. He\n hurled straight at Billy Saylor, lifted him straight off the asteroid\n and threw him away, into space. He yelled with triumph.", "What had happened to Queazy he didn't know. He felt so horribly sick,\n he didn't care. Then—lights out.\nBob Parker came to, the emptiness of remote starlight in his face. He\n opened his eyes. He was slowly revolving on an axis. Sometimes the Sun\n swept across his line of vision. A cold hammering began at the base of\n his skull, a sensation similar to that of being buried alive. There was\n no asteroid, no girl, no Queazy. He was alone in the vastness of space.\n Alone in a space-suit.\n\n\n \"Queazy!\" he whispered. \"Queazy! I'm running out of air!\"", "\"Have it your way,\" Bob Parker sang, happily. He threw the ethergram\n to the winds and it fell gently to the deck-plates. While Queazy—so\n called because his full name was Quentin Zuyler—dropped the ship\n straight down to the smooth surface of the asteroid, and clamped it\n tight with magnetic grapples, Bob flung open the lazarette, brought\n out two space-suits. Moments later, they were outside the ship, with\n star-powdered infinity spread to all sides.", "Bob Parker made a gurgling sound. A voice came again, washed with\n static, far away, burbling, but excited. Bob made a rattling sound in\n his throat. Then his eyes started to close, but he imagined that he saw\n a ship, shiny and small, driving toward him, growing in size against\n the backdrop of the Milky Way. He relapsed, a terrific buzzing in his\n ears.\n\n\n He did not lose consciousness. He heard voices, Queazy's and the\n girl's, whoever she was. Somebody grabbed hold of his foot. His\n \"aquarium\" was unbuckled and good air washed over his streaming face.\n The sudden rush of oxygen to his brain dizzied him. Then he was lying\n on a bunk, and gradually the world beyond his sick body focussed in his\n clearing eyes and he knew he was alive—and going to stay that way, for\n awhile anyway.\n\n\n \"Thanks, Queazy,\" he said huskily.", "\"Cut the drive!\" he yelled at Queazy. \"I've got it, right on the nose.\n Queazy, my boy, can you imagine it? We're in the dough. Not only that,\n we're rich! Come here!\"\n\n\n Queazy discharged their tremendous inertia into the motive-tubes in\n such a manner that the big, powerful ship was moving at the same rate\n as the asteroid below—47.05 miles per second. He came slogging back\n excitedly, put his eyes to the eyepiece. He gasped, and his big body\n shook with joyful ejaculations.\n\n\n \"She checks down to the last dimension,\" Bob chortled, working with\n slide-rule and logarithm tables. \"Now all we have to do is find out if\n she's made of tungsten, iron, quartz crystals, and cinnabar! But there\n couldn't be two asteroids of that shape anywhere else in the Belt, so\n this has to be it!\"", "Bob Parker said, in astonishment, \"Hell! There's something screwy about\n this business. Look at that point—\"\n\n\n Neither he nor Queazy had the opportunity to observe the pointer any\n further. A cold, completely disagreeable feminine voice said,\n\n\n \"May I ask what you interlopers are doing on my asteroid?\"\n\n\n Bob started so badly that the spectroscope's settings were jarred and\n the lights in its interior died. Bob twisted his head around as far as\n he could inside the \"aquarium\"—the glass helmet, and found himself\n looking at a space-suited girl who was standing on the edge of the\n asteroid \"below.\"\n\n\n \"Ma'am,\" said Bob, blinking, \"did you say something?\"\n\n\n Queazy made a gulping sound and slowly straightened. He automatically\n reached up as if he would take off his hat and twist it in his hands.", "The nose of the hauler was blunt, perfectly fitted for the job. Bob\n Parker practiced and experimented for three hours with this yo-yo of\n cosmic dimensions, while Starre and Queazy stood over him bursting into\n strange, delighted squeals of laughter whenever the yo-yo reached the\n end of its double cable and started rolling back up to the ship. Queazy\n snapped his fingers.\n\n\n \"It'll work!\" His gray eyes showed satisfaction. \"Now, if only the\n Saylor brothers are where we calculated!\"\n\n\n They weren't where Bob and Queazy had calculated, as they had\n discovered the next day. They had expected to pick up the asteroid\n on their mass-detectors a few hundred thousand miles outside of the\n Moon's orbit. But now they saw the giant ship attached like a leech to\n the still bigger asteroid—inside the Moon's orbit! A mere two hundred\n thousand miles from Earth!", "He said grimly, \"Don't worry. I don't intend to pull any rough stuff.\n I just want you to listen to reason. You've taken a whim to stay on\n an asteroid that doesn't mean anything to you one way or another. But\n to us—to me and Queazy here—it means our business. We got an order\n for this asteroid. Some screwball millionaire wants it for a backyard\n wedding see? We get five hundred and fifty thousand dollars for it!\n If we don't take this asteroid to Earth before June 2, we go back to\n Satterfield City and work the rest of our lives in the glass factories.\n Don't we, Queazy?\"\n\n\n Queazy said simply, \"That's right, miss. We're in a spot. I assure you\n we didn't expect to find someone living here.\"", "quartz crystals, and cinnabar. Must be in my back yard before 11:30\n A.M. my time, for important wedding June 2, else order is void. Will\n pay $5.00 per ton.\nBob Parker had received that ethergram three weeks ago. And if The\n Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co., hadn't been about to go on the\n rocks (chiefly due to the activities of Saylor & Saylor, a rival firm)\n neither Bob nor Queazy would have thought of sending an answering\n ethergram to Burnside stating that they would fill the order. It\n was, plainly, a hair-brained request. And yet, if by some chance\n there was such a rigidly specified asteroid, their financial worries\n would be over. That they had actually discovered the asteroid, using", "Bob looked at Queazy dismally. \"The old balance-wheel,\" he groaned at\n Starre. \"He's always pulling me up short when I go off half-cocked. All\n I know is, that maybe we'll get a good idea as we go along. In the\n meantime, Starre—ahem—none of us has eaten in three weeks...?\"\n\n\n Starre got the idea. She smiled dazzlingly and vanished toward the\n galley.\nBob Parker was in love with Starre Lowenthal. He knew that after five\n days out, as the ship hurled itself at breakneck speed toward Earth;\n probably that distracting emotion was the real reason he couldn't\n attach any significance to Starre's dumbbell-shaped ship, which trailed\n astern, attached by a long cable.\n\n\n Starre apparently knew he was in love with her, too, for on the fifth\n day Bob was teaching her the mechanics of operating the hauler, and she\n gently lifted his hand from a finger-switch.", "She turned and disappeared.\n\n\n Bob awoke from his trance, shouted desperately, \"Hey! Wait!\nYou!\n\"\n\n\n He and Queazy caught up with her on the side of the asteroid they\n hadn't yet examined. It was a rough plane, completing the rigid\n qualifications Burnside had set down.\n\n\n \"Wait a minute,\" Bob Parker begged nervously. \"I want to make some\n conversation, lady. I'm sure you don't understand the conditions—\"\n\n\n The girl turned and drew a gun from a holster. It was a spasticizer,\n and it was three times as big as her gloved hand.\n\n\n \"I understand conditions better than you do,\" she said. \"You want\n to move this asteroid from its orbit and haul it back to Earth.\n Unfortunately, this is my home, by common law. Come back in a month. I\n don't expect to be here then.\"", "\"What's that?\" he whispered.\n\n\n \"What's wha—\nOh!\n\"\n\n\n Bob Parker's stomach caved in. A few hundred feet away, floating\n gently toward the asteroid, came another ship—a ship a trifle bigger\n than their own. The girl turned, too. They heard her gasp. In another\n second, Bob was standing next to her. He turned the audio-switch to his\n headset off, and spoke to the girl by putting his helmet against hers.\n\n\n \"Listen to me, miss,\" he snapped earnestly, when she tried to draw\n away. \"Don't talk by radio. That ship belongs to the Saylor brothers!\n Oh, Lord, that this should happen! Somewhere along the line, we've been\n double-crossed. Those boys are after this asteroid too, and they won't\n hesitate to pull any rough stuff. We're in this together, understand?\n We got to back each other up.\"", "Queazy was bending over him, his anxiety clearing away from his\n suddenly brightening face.\n\n\n \"Don't thank me,\" he whispered. \"We'd have both been goners if it\n hadn't been for her. The Saylor brothers left her paralyzed like\n us, and when she woke up she was on a slow orbit around her ship.\n She unstrapped her holster and threw it away from her and it gave\n her enough reaction to reach the ship. She got inside and used the\n direction-finder on the telaudio and located me first. The Saylors\n scattered us far and wide.\" Queazy's broad, normally good-humored face\n twisted blackly. \"The so and so's didn't care if we lived or died.\"", "The girl holstered her spasticizer, but her completely inhospitable\n expression did not change. She put her hands on the bulging hips of her\n space-suit. \"Okay,\" she said. \"Now I understand the conditions. Now we\n both understand each other. G'bye again. I'm staying here and—\" she\n smiled sweetly \"—it may interest you to know that if I let you have\n the asteroid you'll save your business, but I'll meet a fate worse than\n death! So that's that.\"\n\n\n Bob recognized finality when he saw it. \"Come on, Queazy,\" he said\n fuming. \"Let this brat have her way. But if I ever run across her\n without a space-suit on I'm going to give her the licking of her life,\n right where it'll do the most good!\"\n\n\n He turned angrily, but Queazy grabbed his arm, his mouth falling open.\n He pointed off into space, beyond the girl.", "\"No!\" she exclaimed. \"No. My grandfather didn't even know there was an\n asteroid like this. But I did, long before he ordered it from you—or\n from the Saylor brothers. You see—well, my granddad's about the\n stubbornest old hoot-owl in this universe! He's always had his way, and\n when people stand in his way, that's just a challenge to him. He's been\n badgering me for years to marry Mac, and so has Mac—\"\n\n\n \"Who's Mac?\" Queazy demanded.", "COSMIC YO-YO\nBy ROSS ROCKLYNNE\n\"Want an asteroid in your backyard? We supply\n\n cheap. Trouble also handled without charge.\"\n\n Interplanetary Hauling Company. (ADVT.)\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Summer 1945.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nBob Parker, looking through the photo-amplifiers at the wedge-shaped\n asteroid, was plainly flabbergasted. Not in his wildest imaginings had\n he thought they would actually find what they were looking for.", "\"That's right,\" Bob said grimly. \"We're in business. For us, it's a\n matter of survival. If the by-product of delivering the asteroid is\n your marriage—sorry! But until we do get the asteroid back, we three\n can work as a team if you're willing. We'll fight the other problem out\n later. Okay?\"\n\n\n She smiled tremulously. \"Okay, I guess.\"\n\n\n Queazy looked from one to another of them. He waved his hand scornfully\n at Bob. \"You're plain nuts,\" he complained. \"How do you propose to go\n about convincing the Saylor brothers they ought to let us have the\n asteroid back? Remember, commercial ships aren't allowed to carry\n long-range weapons. And we couldn't ram the Saylor brothers' ship—not\n without damaging our own ship just as much. Go ahead and answer that.\"", "The \"yo-yo\" struck again, but Bob Parker maneuvered its speed in\n such a manner that it struck in the same place as before, but not as\n heavily, then rebounded and came spinning back with perfect, sparkling\n precision. And even before it snugged itself into its berth, it was\n apparent that the Saylor brothers had given up. Like a wounded terrier,\n their ship shook itself free of the asteroid, hung in black space for\n a second, then vanished with a flaming puff of released gravitons from\n its still-intact jets.\n\n\n The battle was won!", "The girl nodded dumbly. Suddenly she seemed to be frightened.\n \"It's—it's very important that this—this asteroid stay right where it\n is,\" she said huskily. \"What—what will they do?\"\nBob Parker didn't answer. The big ship had landed, and little blue\n sparks crackled between the hull and the asteroid as the magnetic\n clamps took hold. A few seconds later, the airlocks swung down, and\n five men let themselves down to the asteroid's surface and stood\n surveying the three who faced them.\n\n\n The two men in the lead stood with their hands on their hips; their\n darkish, twin faces were grinning broadly.\n\n\n \"A pleasure,\" drawled Wally Saylor, looking at the girl. \"What do you\n think of this situation Billy?\"\n\n\n \"It's obvious,\" drawled Billy Saylor, rocking back and forth on his\n heels, \"that Bob Parker and company have double-crossed us. We'll have\n to take steps.\"" ], [ "The \"asteroid in your back yard\" idea had been Bob Parker's originally.\n Now it was a fad that was sweeping Earth, and Burnside wasn't the first\n rich man who had decided to hold a wedding on top of an asteroid.\n Unfortunately, other interplanetary moving companies had cashed in on\n that brainstorm, chiefly the firm of the Saylor brothers—which persons\n Bob Parker intended to punch in the nose some day. And would have\n before this if he hadn't been lanky and tall while they were giants.\n Now that he and Queazy had found the asteroid, they were desperate to\n get it to its destination, for fear that the Saylor brothers might get\n wind of what was going on, and try to beat them out of their profits.\n Which was not so far-fetched, because the firm of Saylor & Saylor made\n no pretense of being scrupulous.", "It was Bob Parker's misfortune that he didn't carry a weapon. Each of\n these men carried one or more, plainly visible. But he was thinking of\n the girl's spasticizer—a paralyzing weapon. He took a hair-brained\n chance, jerked the spasticizer from the girl's holster and yelled at\n Queazy. Queazy got the idea, urged his immense body into motion. He\n hurled straight at Billy Saylor, lifted him straight off the asteroid\n and threw him away, into space. He yelled with triumph.", "Queazy was bending over him, his anxiety clearing away from his\n suddenly brightening face.\n\n\n \"Don't thank me,\" he whispered. \"We'd have both been goners if it\n hadn't been for her. The Saylor brothers left her paralyzed like\n us, and when she woke up she was on a slow orbit around her ship.\n She unstrapped her holster and threw it away from her and it gave\n her enough reaction to reach the ship. She got inside and used the\n direction-finder on the telaudio and located me first. The Saylors\n scattered us far and wide.\" Queazy's broad, normally good-humored face\n twisted blackly. \"The so and so's didn't care if we lived or died.\"", "\"No!\" she exclaimed. \"No. My grandfather didn't even know there was an\n asteroid like this. But I did, long before he ordered it from you—or\n from the Saylor brothers. You see—well, my granddad's about the\n stubbornest old hoot-owl in this universe! He's always had his way, and\n when people stand in his way, that's just a challenge to him. He's been\n badgering me for years to marry Mac, and so has Mac—\"\n\n\n \"Who's Mac?\" Queazy demanded.", "The nose of the hauler was blunt, perfectly fitted for the job. Bob\n Parker practiced and experimented for three hours with this yo-yo of\n cosmic dimensions, while Starre and Queazy stood over him bursting into\n strange, delighted squeals of laughter whenever the yo-yo reached the\n end of its double cable and started rolling back up to the ship. Queazy\n snapped his fingers.\n\n\n \"It'll work!\" His gray eyes showed satisfaction. \"Now, if only the\n Saylor brothers are where we calculated!\"\n\n\n They weren't where Bob and Queazy had calculated, as they had\n discovered the next day. They had expected to pick up the asteroid\n on their mass-detectors a few hundred thousand miles outside of the\n Moon's orbit. But now they saw the giant ship attached like a leech to\n the still bigger asteroid—inside the Moon's orbit! A mere two hundred\n thousand miles from Earth!", "\"What's that?\" he whispered.\n\n\n \"What's wha—\nOh!\n\"\n\n\n Bob Parker's stomach caved in. A few hundred feet away, floating\n gently toward the asteroid, came another ship—a ship a trifle bigger\n than their own. The girl turned, too. They heard her gasp. In another\n second, Bob was standing next to her. He turned the audio-switch to his\n headset off, and spoke to the girl by putting his helmet against hers.\n\n\n \"Listen to me, miss,\" he snapped earnestly, when she tried to draw\n away. \"Don't talk by radio. That ship belongs to the Saylor brothers!\n Oh, Lord, that this should happen! Somewhere along the line, we've been\n double-crossed. Those boys are after this asteroid too, and they won't\n hesitate to pull any rough stuff. We're in this together, understand?\n We got to back each other up.\"", "What had happened to Queazy he didn't know. He felt so horribly sick,\n he didn't care. Then—lights out.\nBob Parker came to, the emptiness of remote starlight in his face. He\n opened his eyes. He was slowly revolving on an axis. Sometimes the Sun\n swept across his line of vision. A cold hammering began at the base of\n his skull, a sensation similar to that of being buried alive. There was\n no asteroid, no girl, no Queazy. He was alone in the vastness of space.\n Alone in a space-suit.\n\n\n \"Queazy!\" he whispered. \"Queazy! I'm running out of air!\"", "All this had happened in such a short space of time that the Saylor\n brothers must have had only a bare realization of what was going on.\n But by the time the \"yo-yo\" was flung at them again, this time with\n better calculations, they managed to put the firmly held asteroid\n between them and the deadly missile. But it was clumsy evasion, for\n the asteroid was several times as massive as the ship which was towing\n it, and its inertia was great. And as soon as the little ship came\n spinning back to rest, Bob flung the hauler to a new vantage point and\n again the \"yo-yo\" snapped out.\n\n\n And this time—collision! Bob yelled as he saw the stern section of the\n Saylor brothers' ship crumple like tissue paper crushed between the\n hand. The dumbbell-shaped ship, smaller, and therefore stauncher due to\n the principle of the arch, wound up again, wobbling a little. It had\n received a mere dent in its starboard half.", "\"Cut the drive!\" he yelled at Queazy. \"I've got it, right on the nose.\n Queazy, my boy, can you imagine it? We're in the dough. Not only that,\n we're rich! Come here!\"\n\n\n Queazy discharged their tremendous inertia into the motive-tubes in\n such a manner that the big, powerful ship was moving at the same rate\n as the asteroid below—47.05 miles per second. He came slogging back\n excitedly, put his eyes to the eyepiece. He gasped, and his big body\n shook with joyful ejaculations.\n\n\n \"She checks down to the last dimension,\" Bob chortled, working with\n slide-rule and logarithm tables. \"Now all we have to do is find out if\n she's made of tungsten, iron, quartz crystals, and cinnabar! But there\n couldn't be two asteroids of that shape anywhere else in the Belt, so\n this has to be it!\"", "\"That's right,\" Bob said grimly. \"We're in business. For us, it's a\n matter of survival. If the by-product of delivering the asteroid is\n your marriage—sorry! But until we do get the asteroid back, we three\n can work as a team if you're willing. We'll fight the other problem out\n later. Okay?\"\n\n\n She smiled tremulously. \"Okay, I guess.\"\n\n\n Queazy looked from one to another of them. He waved his hand scornfully\n at Bob. \"You're plain nuts,\" he complained. \"How do you propose to go\n about convincing the Saylor brothers they ought to let us have the\n asteroid back? Remember, commercial ships aren't allowed to carry\n long-range weapons. And we couldn't ram the Saylor brothers' ship—not\n without damaging our own ship just as much. Go ahead and answer that.\"", "The \"yo-yo\" struck again, but Bob Parker maneuvered its speed in\n such a manner that it struck in the same place as before, but not as\n heavily, then rebounded and came spinning back with perfect, sparkling\n precision. And even before it snugged itself into its berth, it was\n apparent that the Saylor brothers had given up. Like a wounded terrier,\n their ship shook itself free of the asteroid, hung in black space for\n a second, then vanished with a flaming puff of released gravitons from\n its still-intact jets.\n\n\n The battle was won!", "\"Have it your way,\" Bob Parker sang, happily. He threw the ethergram\n to the winds and it fell gently to the deck-plates. While Queazy—so\n called because his full name was Quentin Zuyler—dropped the ship\n straight down to the smooth surface of the asteroid, and clamped it\n tight with magnetic grapples, Bob flung open the lazarette, brought\n out two space-suits. Moments later, they were outside the ship, with\n star-powdered infinity spread to all sides.", "quartz crystals, and cinnabar. Must be in my back yard before 11:30\n A.M. my time, for important wedding June 2, else order is void. Will\n pay $5.00 per ton.\nBob Parker had received that ethergram three weeks ago. And if The\n Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co., hadn't been about to go on the\n rocks (chiefly due to the activities of Saylor & Saylor, a rival firm)\n neither Bob nor Queazy would have thought of sending an answering\n ethergram to Burnside stating that they would fill the order. It\n was, plainly, a hair-brained request. And yet, if by some chance\n there was such a rigidly specified asteroid, their financial worries\n would be over. That they had actually discovered the asteroid, using", "He said grimly, \"Don't worry. I don't intend to pull any rough stuff.\n I just want you to listen to reason. You've taken a whim to stay on\n an asteroid that doesn't mean anything to you one way or another. But\n to us—to me and Queazy here—it means our business. We got an order\n for this asteroid. Some screwball millionaire wants it for a backyard\n wedding see? We get five hundred and fifty thousand dollars for it!\n If we don't take this asteroid to Earth before June 2, we go back to\n Satterfield City and work the rest of our lives in the glass factories.\n Don't we, Queazy?\"\n\n\n Queazy said simply, \"That's right, miss. We're in a spot. I assure you\n we didn't expect to find someone living here.\"", "Bob Parker made a gurgling sound. A voice came again, washed with\n static, far away, burbling, but excited. Bob made a rattling sound in\n his throat. Then his eyes started to close, but he imagined that he saw\n a ship, shiny and small, driving toward him, growing in size against\n the backdrop of the Milky Way. He relapsed, a terrific buzzing in his\n ears.\n\n\n He did not lose consciousness. He heard voices, Queazy's and the\n girl's, whoever she was. Somebody grabbed hold of his foot. His\n \"aquarium\" was unbuckled and good air washed over his streaming face.\n The sudden rush of oxygen to his brain dizzied him. Then he was lying\n on a bunk, and gradually the world beyond his sick body focussed in his\n clearing eyes and he knew he was alive—and going to stay that way, for\n awhile anyway.\n\n\n \"Thanks, Queazy,\" he said huskily.", "Bob Parker said, in astonishment, \"Hell! There's something screwy about\n this business. Look at that point—\"\n\n\n Neither he nor Queazy had the opportunity to observe the pointer any\n further. A cold, completely disagreeable feminine voice said,\n\n\n \"May I ask what you interlopers are doing on my asteroid?\"\n\n\n Bob started so badly that the spectroscope's settings were jarred and\n the lights in its interior died. Bob twisted his head around as far as\n he could inside the \"aquarium\"—the glass helmet, and found himself\n looking at a space-suited girl who was standing on the edge of the\n asteroid \"below.\"\n\n\n \"Ma'am,\" said Bob, blinking, \"did you say something?\"\n\n\n Queazy made a gulping sound and slowly straightened. He automatically\n reached up as if he would take off his hat and twist it in his hands.", "The three men behind the Saylor twins broke into rough, chuckling\n laughter.\n\n\n Bob Parker's gorge rose. \"Scram,\" he said coldly. \"We've got an\n ethergram direct from Andrew S. Burnside ordering this asteroid.\"\n\n\n \"So have we,\" Wally Saylor smiled—and his smile remained fixed,\n dangerous. He started moving forward, and the three men in back came\n abreast, forming a semi-circle which slowly closed in. Bob Parker gave\n back a step, as he saw their intentions.\n\n\n \"We got here first,\" he snapped harshly. \"Try any funny stuff and we'll\n report you to the Interplanetary Commission!\"", "The girl nodded dumbly. Suddenly she seemed to be frightened.\n \"It's—it's very important that this—this asteroid stay right where it\n is,\" she said huskily. \"What—what will they do?\"\nBob Parker didn't answer. The big ship had landed, and little blue\n sparks crackled between the hull and the asteroid as the magnetic\n clamps took hold. A few seconds later, the airlocks swung down, and\n five men let themselves down to the asteroid's surface and stood\n surveying the three who faced them.\n\n\n The two men in the lead stood with their hands on their hips; their\n darkish, twin faces were grinning broadly.\n\n\n \"A pleasure,\" drawled Wally Saylor, looking at the girl. \"What do you\n think of this situation Billy?\"\n\n\n \"It's obvious,\" drawled Billy Saylor, rocking back and forth on his\n heels, \"that Bob Parker and company have double-crossed us. We'll have\n to take steps.\"", "\"We have to work fast,\" Bob stammered, sweating. He got within\n naked-eye distance of the Saylor brothers' ship. Below, Earth was\n spread out, a huge crescent shape, part of the Eastern hemisphere\n vaguely visible through impeding clouds and atmosphere. The enemy ship\n was two miles distant, a black shadow occulting part of the brilliant\n sky. It was moving along a down-spiraling path toward Earth.\n\n\n Queazy's big hand gripped his shoulder. \"Go to it, Bob!\"\n\n\n Bob nodded grimly. He backed the hauler up about thirty miles, then\n sent it forward again, directly toward the Saylor brothers' ship at ten\n miles per second. And resting on the blunt nose of the ship was the\n \"yo-yo.\"", "The girl holstered her spasticizer, but her completely inhospitable\n expression did not change. She put her hands on the bulging hips of her\n space-suit. \"Okay,\" she said. \"Now I understand the conditions. Now we\n both understand each other. G'bye again. I'm staying here and—\" she\n smiled sweetly \"—it may interest you to know that if I let you have\n the asteroid you'll save your business, but I'll meet a fate worse than\n death! So that's that.\"\n\n\n Bob recognized finality when he saw it. \"Come on, Queazy,\" he said\n fuming. \"Let this brat have her way. But if I ever run across her\n without a space-suit on I'm going to give her the licking of her life,\n right where it'll do the most good!\"\n\n\n He turned angrily, but Queazy grabbed his arm, his mouth falling open.\n He pointed off into space, beyond the girl." ], [ "The \"asteroid in your back yard\" idea had been Bob Parker's originally.\n Now it was a fad that was sweeping Earth, and Burnside wasn't the first\n rich man who had decided to hold a wedding on top of an asteroid.\n Unfortunately, other interplanetary moving companies had cashed in on\n that brainstorm, chiefly the firm of the Saylor brothers—which persons\n Bob Parker intended to punch in the nose some day. And would have\n before this if he hadn't been lanky and tall while they were giants.\n Now that he and Queazy had found the asteroid, they were desperate to\n get it to its destination, for fear that the Saylor brothers might get\n wind of what was going on, and try to beat them out of their profits.\n Which was not so far-fetched, because the firm of Saylor & Saylor made\n no pretense of being scrupulous.", "In the ship, the ethergram from Andrew S. Burnside, of Philadelphia,\n one of the richest men in the world, still lay on the deck-plates. It\n was addressed to: Mr. Robert Parker, President Interplanetary Hauling &\n Moving Co., 777 Main Street, Satterfield City, Fontanaland, Mars. The\n ethergram read:\nReceived your advertising literature a week ago. Would like to state\n that yes I would like an asteroid in my back yard. Must meet following\n specifications: 506 feet length, long enough for wedding procession;\n 98 feet at base, tapering to 10 feet at apex; 9-12 feet thick; topside\n smooth-plane, underside rough-plane; composed of iron ore, tungsten,", "quartz crystals, and cinnabar. Must be in my back yard before 11:30\n A.M. my time, for important wedding June 2, else order is void. Will\n pay $5.00 per ton.\nBob Parker had received that ethergram three weeks ago. And if The\n Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co., hadn't been about to go on the\n rocks (chiefly due to the activities of Saylor & Saylor, a rival firm)\n neither Bob nor Queazy would have thought of sending an answering\n ethergram to Burnside stating that they would fill the order. It\n was, plainly, a hair-brained request. And yet, if by some chance\n there was such a rigidly specified asteroid, their financial worries\n would be over. That they had actually discovered the asteroid, using", "He said grimly, \"Don't worry. I don't intend to pull any rough stuff.\n I just want you to listen to reason. You've taken a whim to stay on\n an asteroid that doesn't mean anything to you one way or another. But\n to us—to me and Queazy here—it means our business. We got an order\n for this asteroid. Some screwball millionaire wants it for a backyard\n wedding see? We get five hundred and fifty thousand dollars for it!\n If we don't take this asteroid to Earth before June 2, we go back to\n Satterfield City and work the rest of our lives in the glass factories.\n Don't we, Queazy?\"\n\n\n Queazy said simply, \"That's right, miss. We're in a spot. I assure you\n we didn't expect to find someone living here.\"", "my grandfather I'd marry Mac if the wedding was in the back yard on top\n of an asteroid with those measurements and made of iron ore, tungsten,\n and so forth. He agreed so fast he scared me, and just to make sure\n that if somebody\ndid\nfind the asteroid in time they wouldn't be able\n to get it back to Earth, I came out here and decided to live here.\n Asteroids up to a certain size belong to whoever happens to be on them,\n by common law.... So I had everything figured out—except,\" she added\n bitterly, \"the Saylor brothers! I guess Granddad wanted to make sure\n the asteroid was delivered, so he gave the order to several companies.\"", "\"Cut the drive!\" he yelled at Queazy. \"I've got it, right on the nose.\n Queazy, my boy, can you imagine it? We're in the dough. Not only that,\n we're rich! Come here!\"\n\n\n Queazy discharged their tremendous inertia into the motive-tubes in\n such a manner that the big, powerful ship was moving at the same rate\n as the asteroid below—47.05 miles per second. He came slogging back\n excitedly, put his eyes to the eyepiece. He gasped, and his big body\n shook with joyful ejaculations.\n\n\n \"She checks down to the last dimension,\" Bob chortled, working with\n slide-rule and logarithm tables. \"Now all we have to do is find out if\n she's made of tungsten, iron, quartz crystals, and cinnabar! But there\n couldn't be two asteroids of that shape anywhere else in the Belt, so\n this has to be it!\"", "COSMIC YO-YO\nBy ROSS ROCKLYNNE\n\"Want an asteroid in your backyard? We supply\n\n cheap. Trouble also handled without charge.\"\n\n Interplanetary Hauling Company. (ADVT.)\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Summer 1945.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nBob Parker, looking through the photo-amplifiers at the wedge-shaped\n asteroid, was plainly flabbergasted. Not in his wildest imaginings had\n he thought they would actually find what they were looking for.", "He jerked a badly crumpled ethergram from his pocket, smoothed it out,\n and thumbed his nose at the signature.\n\n\n \"Whee! Mr. Andrew S. Burnside, you owe us five hundred and fifty\n thousand dollars!\"\n\n\n Queazy straightened. A slow, likeable smile wreathed his tanned face.\n \"Better take it easy,\" he advised, \"until I land the ship and we use\n the atomic whirl spectroscope to determine the composition of the\n asteroid.\"", "\"\nOuch!\n\" Bob groaned. Then he looked at Starre Lowenthal with\n determination. \"Miss, pardon me if I say that this deal you and your\n granddad cooked up is plain screwy! With us on the butt end. But I'm\n going to put this to you plainly. We can catch up with the Saylor\n brothers even if they are three weeks ahead of us. The Saylor ship and\n ours both travel on the HH drive—inertia-less. But the asteroid has\n plenty of inertia, and so they'll have to haul it down to Earth by a\n long, spiraling orbit. We can go direct and probably catch up with them\n a few hundred thousand miles this side of Earth. And we can have a\n fling at getting the asteroid back!\"\n\n\n Her eyes sparkled. \"You mean—\" she cried. Then her attractive face\n fell. \"Oh,\" she said. \"\nOh!\nAnd when you get it back, you'll land it.\"", "The nose of the hauler was blunt, perfectly fitted for the job. Bob\n Parker practiced and experimented for three hours with this yo-yo of\n cosmic dimensions, while Starre and Queazy stood over him bursting into\n strange, delighted squeals of laughter whenever the yo-yo reached the\n end of its double cable and started rolling back up to the ship. Queazy\n snapped his fingers.\n\n\n \"It'll work!\" His gray eyes showed satisfaction. \"Now, if only the\n Saylor brothers are where we calculated!\"\n\n\n They weren't where Bob and Queazy had calculated, as they had\n discovered the next day. They had expected to pick up the asteroid\n on their mass-detectors a few hundred thousand miles outside of the\n Moon's orbit. But now they saw the giant ship attached like a leech to\n the still bigger asteroid—inside the Moon's orbit! A mere two hundred\n thousand miles from Earth!", "The three men behind the Saylor twins broke into rough, chuckling\n laughter.\n\n\n Bob Parker's gorge rose. \"Scram,\" he said coldly. \"We've got an\n ethergram direct from Andrew S. Burnside ordering this asteroid.\"\n\n\n \"So have we,\" Wally Saylor smiled—and his smile remained fixed,\n dangerous. He started moving forward, and the three men in back came\n abreast, forming a semi-circle which slowly closed in. Bob Parker gave\n back a step, as he saw their intentions.\n\n\n \"We got here first,\" he snapped harshly. \"Try any funny stuff and we'll\n report you to the Interplanetary Commission!\"", "She turned and disappeared.\n\n\n Bob awoke from his trance, shouted desperately, \"Hey! Wait!\nYou!\n\"\n\n\n He and Queazy caught up with her on the side of the asteroid they\n hadn't yet examined. It was a rough plane, completing the rigid\n qualifications Burnside had set down.\n\n\n \"Wait a minute,\" Bob Parker begged nervously. \"I want to make some\n conversation, lady. I'm sure you don't understand the conditions—\"\n\n\n The girl turned and drew a gun from a holster. It was a spasticizer,\n and it was three times as big as her gloved hand.\n\n\n \"I understand conditions better than you do,\" she said. \"You want\n to move this asteroid from its orbit and haul it back to Earth.\n Unfortunately, this is my home, by common law. Come back in a month. I\n don't expect to be here then.\"", "Now they scuffed along the smooth-plane topside of the asteroid, the\n magnets in their shoes keeping them from stepping off into space. They\n came to the broad base of the asteroid-wedge, walked over the edge and\n \"down\" the twelve-foot thickness. Here they squatted, and Bob Parker\n happily clamped the atomic-whirl spectroscope to the rough surface.\n By the naked eye, they could see iron ore, quartz crystals, cinnabar,\n but he had the spectroscope and there was no reason why he shouldn't\n use it. He satisfied himself as to the exterior of the asteroid, and\n then sent the twin beams deep into its heart. The beams crossed, tore\n atoms from molecules, revolved them like an infinitely fine powder. The\n radiations from the sundered molecules traveled back up the beams to\n the atomic-whirl spectroscope. Bob watched a pointer which moved slowly\n up and up—past tungsten, past iridium, past gold—", "\"I'll inform the Interplanetary Commission!\" screamed Saylor.\n\n\n \"\nIf\nyou're alive,\" Bob snarled wrathfully. \"And you won't be unless\n you release the asteroid.\"\n\n\n \"I'll see you in Hades first!\"\n\n\n \"Hades,\" remarked Bob coldly, \"here you come!\"\n\n\n He snapped the hauler into its mile-a-second speed again, stopped it at\n zero. And the \"yo-yo\" went on its lone, destructive sortie.\n\n\n For a fraction of a second Wally Saylor exhibited the countenance of a\n doomed man. In the telaudio plate, he whirled, and diminished in size\n with a strangled yell.", "\"Have it your way,\" Bob Parker sang, happily. He threw the ethergram\n to the winds and it fell gently to the deck-plates. While Queazy—so\n called because his full name was Quentin Zuyler—dropped the ship\n straight down to the smooth surface of the asteroid, and clamped it\n tight with magnetic grapples, Bob flung open the lazarette, brought\n out two space-suits. Moments later, they were outside the ship, with\n star-powdered infinity spread to all sides.", "All this had happened in such a short space of time that the Saylor\n brothers must have had only a bare realization of what was going on.\n But by the time the \"yo-yo\" was flung at them again, this time with\n better calculations, they managed to put the firmly held asteroid\n between them and the deadly missile. But it was clumsy evasion, for\n the asteroid was several times as massive as the ship which was towing\n it, and its inertia was great. And as soon as the little ship came\n spinning back to rest, Bob flung the hauler to a new vantage point and\n again the \"yo-yo\" snapped out.\n\n\n And this time—collision! Bob yelled as he saw the stern section of the\n Saylor brothers' ship crumple like tissue paper crushed between the\n hand. The dumbbell-shaped ship, smaller, and therefore stauncher due to\n the principle of the arch, wound up again, wobbling a little. It had\n received a mere dent in its starboard half.", "\"And ruin your whole life,\" he ground out. Suddenly, he turned back to\n the control board, quartered the vision plate. He pointed savagely to\n the lower left quarter, which gave a rearward view of the dumbbell ship\n trailing astern.\n\n\n \"There's your ship, Starre.\" He jabbed his finger at it. \"I've got a\n feeling—and I can't put the thought into concrete words—that somehow\n the whole solution of the problem of grabbing the asteroid back lies\n there. But how?\nHow?\n\"\n\n\n Starre's blue eyes followed the long cable back to where it was\n attached around her ship's narrow midsection.\n\n\n She shook her head helplessly. \"It just looks like a big yo-yo to me.\"\n\n\n \"A yo-yo?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, a yo-yo. That's all.\" She was belligerent.", "\"That's right,\" Bob said grimly. \"We're in business. For us, it's a\n matter of survival. If the by-product of delivering the asteroid is\n your marriage—sorry! But until we do get the asteroid back, we three\n can work as a team if you're willing. We'll fight the other problem out\n later. Okay?\"\n\n\n She smiled tremulously. \"Okay, I guess.\"\n\n\n Queazy looked from one to another of them. He waved his hand scornfully\n at Bob. \"You're plain nuts,\" he complained. \"How do you propose to go\n about convincing the Saylor brothers they ought to let us have the\n asteroid back? Remember, commercial ships aren't allowed to carry\n long-range weapons. And we couldn't ram the Saylor brothers' ship—not\n without damaging our own ship just as much. Go ahead and answer that.\"", "\"No!\" she exclaimed. \"No. My grandfather didn't even know there was an\n asteroid like this. But I did, long before he ordered it from you—or\n from the Saylor brothers. You see—well, my granddad's about the\n stubbornest old hoot-owl in this universe! He's always had his way, and\n when people stand in his way, that's just a challenge to him. He's been\n badgering me for years to marry Mac, and so has Mac—\"\n\n\n \"Who's Mac?\" Queazy demanded.", "The girl holstered her spasticizer, but her completely inhospitable\n expression did not change. She put her hands on the bulging hips of her\n space-suit. \"Okay,\" she said. \"Now I understand the conditions. Now we\n both understand each other. G'bye again. I'm staying here and—\" she\n smiled sweetly \"—it may interest you to know that if I let you have\n the asteroid you'll save your business, but I'll meet a fate worse than\n death! So that's that.\"\n\n\n Bob recognized finality when he saw it. \"Come on, Queazy,\" he said\n fuming. \"Let this brat have her way. But if I ever run across her\n without a space-suit on I'm going to give her the licking of her life,\n right where it'll do the most good!\"\n\n\n He turned angrily, but Queazy grabbed his arm, his mouth falling open.\n He pointed off into space, beyond the girl." ], [ "Bob swore under his breath. He went reeling across to a port, and was\n gratified to see his and Queazy's big interplanetary hauler floating\n only a few hundred feet away. He swung around, looked at Queazy.\n\n\n \"How long were we floating around out there?\"\n\n\n \"Three weeks, according to the chronometer. The Saylor boys gave us a\n stiff shot.\"", "Bob Parker made a gurgling sound. A voice came again, washed with\n static, far away, burbling, but excited. Bob made a rattling sound in\n his throat. Then his eyes started to close, but he imagined that he saw\n a ship, shiny and small, driving toward him, growing in size against\n the backdrop of the Milky Way. He relapsed, a terrific buzzing in his\n ears.\n\n\n He did not lose consciousness. He heard voices, Queazy's and the\n girl's, whoever she was. Somebody grabbed hold of his foot. His\n \"aquarium\" was unbuckled and good air washed over his streaming face.\n The sudden rush of oxygen to his brain dizzied him. Then he was lying\n on a bunk, and gradually the world beyond his sick body focussed in his\n clearing eyes and he knew he was alive—and going to stay that way, for\n awhile anyway.\n\n\n \"Thanks, Queazy,\" he said huskily.", "What had happened to Queazy he didn't know. He felt so horribly sick,\n he didn't care. Then—lights out.\nBob Parker came to, the emptiness of remote starlight in his face. He\n opened his eyes. He was slowly revolving on an axis. Sometimes the Sun\n swept across his line of vision. A cold hammering began at the base of\n his skull, a sensation similar to that of being buried alive. There was\n no asteroid, no girl, no Queazy. He was alone in the vastness of space.\n Alone in a space-suit.\n\n\n \"Queazy!\" he whispered. \"Queazy! I'm running out of air!\"", "There was no answer from Queazy. With sick eyes, Bob studied the\n oxygen indicator. There was only five pounds pressure. Five pounds!\n That meant he had been floating around out here—how long? Days at\n least—maybe weeks! It was evident that somebody had given him a dose\n of spastic rays, enough to screw up every muscle in his body to the\n snapping point, putting him in such a condition of suspended animation\n that his oxygen needs were small. He closed his eyes, trying to fight\n against panic. He was glad he couldn't see any part of his body. He was\n probably scrawny. And he was hungry!\n\n\n \"I'll starve,\" he thought. \"Or suffocate to death first!\"", "Bob looked at Queazy dismally. \"The old balance-wheel,\" he groaned at\n Starre. \"He's always pulling me up short when I go off half-cocked. All\n I know is, that maybe we'll get a good idea as we go along. In the\n meantime, Starre—ahem—none of us has eaten in three weeks...?\"\n\n\n Starre got the idea. She smiled dazzlingly and vanished toward the\n galley.\nBob Parker was in love with Starre Lowenthal. He knew that after five\n days out, as the ship hurled itself at breakneck speed toward Earth;\n probably that distracting emotion was the real reason he couldn't\n attach any significance to Starre's dumbbell-shaped ship, which trailed\n astern, attached by a long cable.\n\n\n Starre apparently knew he was in love with her, too, for on the fifth\n day Bob was teaching her the mechanics of operating the hauler, and she\n gently lifted his hand from a finger-switch.", "\"A month!\" Parker burst the word out. He started to sweat, then his\n face became grim. He took two slow steps toward the girl. She blinked\n and lost her composure and unconsciously backed up two steps. About\n twenty steps away was her small dumbbell-shaped ship, so shiny and\n unscarred that it reflected starlight in highlights from its curved\n surface. A rich girl's ship, Bob Parker thought angrily. A month would\n be too late!", "Queazy was bending over him, his anxiety clearing away from his\n suddenly brightening face.\n\n\n \"Don't thank me,\" he whispered. \"We'd have both been goners if it\n hadn't been for her. The Saylor brothers left her paralyzed like\n us, and when she woke up she was on a slow orbit around her ship.\n She unstrapped her holster and threw it away from her and it gave\n her enough reaction to reach the ship. She got inside and used the\n direction-finder on the telaudio and located me first. The Saylors\n scattered us far and wide.\" Queazy's broad, normally good-humored face\n twisted blackly. \"The so and so's didn't care if we lived or died.\"", "It was Bob Parker's misfortune that he didn't carry a weapon. Each of\n these men carried one or more, plainly visible. But he was thinking of\n the girl's spasticizer—a paralyzing weapon. He took a hair-brained\n chance, jerked the spasticizer from the girl's holster and yelled at\n Queazy. Queazy got the idea, urged his immense body into motion. He\n hurled straight at Billy Saylor, lifted him straight off the asteroid\n and threw him away, into space. He yelled with triumph.", "\"Have it your way,\" Bob Parker sang, happily. He threw the ethergram\n to the winds and it fell gently to the deck-plates. While Queazy—so\n called because his full name was Quentin Zuyler—dropped the ship\n straight down to the smooth surface of the asteroid, and clamped it\n tight with magnetic grapples, Bob flung open the lazarette, brought\n out two space-suits. Moments later, they were outside the ship, with\n star-powdered infinity spread to all sides.", "Starre was chortling with glee. Queazy whispered, \"Attaboy, Bob! This\n time we'll knock 'em out of the sky!\"\n\n\n The \"yo-yo\" came to rest and at the same moment a gong rang excitedly.\n Bob knew what that meant. The Saylor brothers were trying to establish\n communication.\n\n\n Queazy was across the room in two running strides. He threw in the\n telaudio and almost immediately, Wally Saylor's big body built up in\n the plate. Wally Saylor's face was quivering with wrath.\n\n\n \"What do you damned fools think you're trying to do?\" he roared.\n \"You've crushed in our stern section. You've sliced away half of our\n stern jets. Air is rushing out! You'll kill us!\"\n\n\n \"Now,\" Bob drawled, \"you're getting the idea.\"", "The nose of the hauler was blunt, perfectly fitted for the job. Bob\n Parker practiced and experimented for three hours with this yo-yo of\n cosmic dimensions, while Starre and Queazy stood over him bursting into\n strange, delighted squeals of laughter whenever the yo-yo reached the\n end of its double cable and started rolling back up to the ship. Queazy\n snapped his fingers.\n\n\n \"It'll work!\" His gray eyes showed satisfaction. \"Now, if only the\n Saylor brothers are where we calculated!\"\n\n\n They weren't where Bob and Queazy had calculated, as they had\n discovered the next day. They had expected to pick up the asteroid\n on their mass-detectors a few hundred thousand miles outside of the\n Moon's orbit. But now they saw the giant ship attached like a leech to\n the still bigger asteroid—inside the Moon's orbit! A mere two hundred\n thousand miles from Earth!", "Bob Parker said, in astonishment, \"Hell! There's something screwy about\n this business. Look at that point—\"\n\n\n Neither he nor Queazy had the opportunity to observe the pointer any\n further. A cold, completely disagreeable feminine voice said,\n\n\n \"May I ask what you interlopers are doing on my asteroid?\"\n\n\n Bob started so badly that the spectroscope's settings were jarred and\n the lights in its interior died. Bob twisted his head around as far as\n he could inside the \"aquarium\"—the glass helmet, and found himself\n looking at a space-suited girl who was standing on the edge of the\n asteroid \"below.\"\n\n\n \"Ma'am,\" said Bob, blinking, \"did you say something?\"\n\n\n Queazy made a gulping sound and slowly straightened. He automatically\n reached up as if he would take off his hat and twist it in his hands.", "He couldn't keep himself from taking in great gulps of air. Minutes,\n then hours passed. He was breathing abnormally, and there wasn't enough\n air in the first place. He pleaded continually for Queazy, hoping\n that somehow Queazy could help, when probably Queazy was in the same\n condition. He ripped out wild curses directed at the Saylor brothers.\n Murderers, both of them! Up until this time, he had merely thought of\n them as business rivals. If he ever got out of this—\n\n\n He groaned. He never would get out of it! After another hour, he was\n gasping weakly, and yellow spots danced in his eyes. He called Queazy's\n name once more, knowing that was the last time he would have strength\n to call it.\n\n\n And this time the headset spoke back!", "She turned and disappeared.\n\n\n Bob awoke from his trance, shouted desperately, \"Hey! Wait!\nYou!\n\"\n\n\n He and Queazy caught up with her on the side of the asteroid they\n hadn't yet examined. It was a rough plane, completing the rigid\n qualifications Burnside had set down.\n\n\n \"Wait a minute,\" Bob Parker begged nervously. \"I want to make some\n conversation, lady. I'm sure you don't understand the conditions—\"\n\n\n The girl turned and drew a gun from a holster. It was a spasticizer,\n and it was three times as big as her gloved hand.\n\n\n \"I understand conditions better than you do,\" she said. \"You want\n to move this asteroid from its orbit and haul it back to Earth.\n Unfortunately, this is my home, by common law. Come back in a month. I\n don't expect to be here then.\"", "The \"yo-yo\" struck again, but Bob Parker maneuvered its speed in\n such a manner that it struck in the same place as before, but not as\n heavily, then rebounded and came spinning back with perfect, sparkling\n precision. And even before it snugged itself into its berth, it was\n apparent that the Saylor brothers had given up. Like a wounded terrier,\n their ship shook itself free of the asteroid, hung in black space for\n a second, then vanished with a flaming puff of released gravitons from\n its still-intact jets.\n\n\n The battle was won!", "\"What's that?\" he whispered.\n\n\n \"What's wha—\nOh!\n\"\n\n\n Bob Parker's stomach caved in. A few hundred feet away, floating\n gently toward the asteroid, came another ship—a ship a trifle bigger\n than their own. The girl turned, too. They heard her gasp. In another\n second, Bob was standing next to her. He turned the audio-switch to his\n headset off, and spoke to the girl by putting his helmet against hers.\n\n\n \"Listen to me, miss,\" he snapped earnestly, when she tried to draw\n away. \"Don't talk by radio. That ship belongs to the Saylor brothers!\n Oh, Lord, that this should happen! Somewhere along the line, we've been\n double-crossed. Those boys are after this asteroid too, and they won't\n hesitate to pull any rough stuff. We're in this together, understand?\n We got to back each other up.\"", "Bob saw the girl now, standing a little behind Queazy, looking down at\n him curiously, but unhappily. Her space-suit was off. She was wearing\n lightly striped blue slacks and blue silk blouse and she had a paper\n flower in her hair. Something in Bob's stomach caved in as his eyes\n widened on her.\n\n\n The girl said glumly, \"I guess you men won't much care for me when you\n find out who I am and what I've done. I'm Starre Lowenthal—Andrew S.\n Burnside's granddaughter!\"\nBob came slowly to his feet, and matched Queazy's slowly growing anger.\n\n\n \"Say that again?\" he snapped. \"This is some kind of dirty trick you and\n your grandfather cooked up?\"", "\"A\nyo-yo\n!\" Bob Parker yelled the word and almost hit the ceiling, he\n got out of the chair so fast. \"Can you imagine it! A yo-yo!\"\n\n\n He disappeared from the room. \"Queazy!\" he shouted. \"\nQueazy, I've got\n it!\n\"\nIt was Queazy who got into his space-suit and did the welding job,\n fastening two huge supra-steel \"eyes\" onto the dumbbell-shaped ship's\n narrow midsection. Into these eyes cables which trailed back to\n two winches in the big ship's nose were inserted, welded fast, and\n reinforced.", "The excited cry came from Starre. But Bob swore. The dumbbell ship\n reached the end of its cables, falling a bare twenty feet short of\n completing its mission. It didn't stop spinning, but came winding back\n up the cable, at the same terrific speed with which it had left.\nBob sweated, having only fractions of seconds in which to maneuver\n for the \"yo-yo\" could strike a fatal blow at the hauler too. It was\n ticklish work completely to nullify the \"yo-yo's\" speed. Bob used\n exactly the same method of catching the \"yo-yo\" on the blunt nose of\n the ship as a baseball player uses to catch a hard-driven ball in\n his glove—namely, by matching the ball's speed and direction almost\n exactly at the moment of impact. And now Bob's hours of practice paid\n dividends, for the \"yo-yo\" came to rest snugly, ready to be released\n again.", "\"And ruin your whole life,\" he ground out. Suddenly, he turned back to\n the control board, quartered the vision plate. He pointed savagely to\n the lower left quarter, which gave a rearward view of the dumbbell ship\n trailing astern.\n\n\n \"There's your ship, Starre.\" He jabbed his finger at it. \"I've got a\n feeling—and I can't put the thought into concrete words—that somehow\n the whole solution of the problem of grabbing the asteroid back lies\n there. But how?\nHow?\n\"\n\n\n Starre's blue eyes followed the long cable back to where it was\n attached around her ship's narrow midsection.\n\n\n She shook her head helplessly. \"It just looks like a big yo-yo to me.\"\n\n\n \"A yo-yo?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, a yo-yo. That's all.\" She was belligerent." ], [ "Bob Parker said, in astonishment, \"Hell! There's something screwy about\n this business. Look at that point—\"\n\n\n Neither he nor Queazy had the opportunity to observe the pointer any\n further. A cold, completely disagreeable feminine voice said,\n\n\n \"May I ask what you interlopers are doing on my asteroid?\"\n\n\n Bob started so badly that the spectroscope's settings were jarred and\n the lights in its interior died. Bob twisted his head around as far as\n he could inside the \"aquarium\"—the glass helmet, and found himself\n looking at a space-suited girl who was standing on the edge of the\n asteroid \"below.\"\n\n\n \"Ma'am,\" said Bob, blinking, \"did you say something?\"\n\n\n Queazy made a gulping sound and slowly straightened. He automatically\n reached up as if he would take off his hat and twist it in his hands.", "She turned and disappeared.\n\n\n Bob awoke from his trance, shouted desperately, \"Hey! Wait!\nYou!\n\"\n\n\n He and Queazy caught up with her on the side of the asteroid they\n hadn't yet examined. It was a rough plane, completing the rigid\n qualifications Burnside had set down.\n\n\n \"Wait a minute,\" Bob Parker begged nervously. \"I want to make some\n conversation, lady. I'm sure you don't understand the conditions—\"\n\n\n The girl turned and drew a gun from a holster. It was a spasticizer,\n and it was three times as big as her gloved hand.\n\n\n \"I understand conditions better than you do,\" she said. \"You want\n to move this asteroid from its orbit and haul it back to Earth.\n Unfortunately, this is my home, by common law. Come back in a month. I\n don't expect to be here then.\"", "The \"asteroid in your back yard\" idea had been Bob Parker's originally.\n Now it was a fad that was sweeping Earth, and Burnside wasn't the first\n rich man who had decided to hold a wedding on top of an asteroid.\n Unfortunately, other interplanetary moving companies had cashed in on\n that brainstorm, chiefly the firm of the Saylor brothers—which persons\n Bob Parker intended to punch in the nose some day. And would have\n before this if he hadn't been lanky and tall while they were giants.\n Now that he and Queazy had found the asteroid, they were desperate to\n get it to its destination, for fear that the Saylor brothers might get\n wind of what was going on, and try to beat them out of their profits.\n Which was not so far-fetched, because the firm of Saylor & Saylor made\n no pretense of being scrupulous.", "\"Have it your way,\" Bob Parker sang, happily. He threw the ethergram\n to the winds and it fell gently to the deck-plates. While Queazy—so\n called because his full name was Quentin Zuyler—dropped the ship\n straight down to the smooth surface of the asteroid, and clamped it\n tight with magnetic grapples, Bob flung open the lazarette, brought\n out two space-suits. Moments later, they were outside the ship, with\n star-powdered infinity spread to all sides.", "He said grimly, \"Don't worry. I don't intend to pull any rough stuff.\n I just want you to listen to reason. You've taken a whim to stay on\n an asteroid that doesn't mean anything to you one way or another. But\n to us—to me and Queazy here—it means our business. We got an order\n for this asteroid. Some screwball millionaire wants it for a backyard\n wedding see? We get five hundred and fifty thousand dollars for it!\n If we don't take this asteroid to Earth before June 2, we go back to\n Satterfield City and work the rest of our lives in the glass factories.\n Don't we, Queazy?\"\n\n\n Queazy said simply, \"That's right, miss. We're in a spot. I assure you\n we didn't expect to find someone living here.\"", "It was Bob Parker's misfortune that he didn't carry a weapon. Each of\n these men carried one or more, plainly visible. But he was thinking of\n the girl's spasticizer—a paralyzing weapon. He took a hair-brained\n chance, jerked the spasticizer from the girl's holster and yelled at\n Queazy. Queazy got the idea, urged his immense body into motion. He\n hurled straight at Billy Saylor, lifted him straight off the asteroid\n and threw him away, into space. He yelled with triumph.", "Bob looked at Queazy dismally. \"The old balance-wheel,\" he groaned at\n Starre. \"He's always pulling me up short when I go off half-cocked. All\n I know is, that maybe we'll get a good idea as we go along. In the\n meantime, Starre—ahem—none of us has eaten in three weeks...?\"\n\n\n Starre got the idea. She smiled dazzlingly and vanished toward the\n galley.\nBob Parker was in love with Starre Lowenthal. He knew that after five\n days out, as the ship hurled itself at breakneck speed toward Earth;\n probably that distracting emotion was the real reason he couldn't\n attach any significance to Starre's dumbbell-shaped ship, which trailed\n astern, attached by a long cable.\n\n\n Starre apparently knew he was in love with her, too, for on the fifth\n day Bob was teaching her the mechanics of operating the hauler, and she\n gently lifted his hand from a finger-switch.", "\"Cut the drive!\" he yelled at Queazy. \"I've got it, right on the nose.\n Queazy, my boy, can you imagine it? We're in the dough. Not only that,\n we're rich! Come here!\"\n\n\n Queazy discharged their tremendous inertia into the motive-tubes in\n such a manner that the big, powerful ship was moving at the same rate\n as the asteroid below—47.05 miles per second. He came slogging back\n excitedly, put his eyes to the eyepiece. He gasped, and his big body\n shook with joyful ejaculations.\n\n\n \"She checks down to the last dimension,\" Bob chortled, working with\n slide-rule and logarithm tables. \"Now all we have to do is find out if\n she's made of tungsten, iron, quartz crystals, and cinnabar! But there\n couldn't be two asteroids of that shape anywhere else in the Belt, so\n this has to be it!\"", "The girl holstered her spasticizer, but her completely inhospitable\n expression did not change. She put her hands on the bulging hips of her\n space-suit. \"Okay,\" she said. \"Now I understand the conditions. Now we\n both understand each other. G'bye again. I'm staying here and—\" she\n smiled sweetly \"—it may interest you to know that if I let you have\n the asteroid you'll save your business, but I'll meet a fate worse than\n death! So that's that.\"\n\n\n Bob recognized finality when he saw it. \"Come on, Queazy,\" he said\n fuming. \"Let this brat have her way. But if I ever run across her\n without a space-suit on I'm going to give her the licking of her life,\n right where it'll do the most good!\"\n\n\n He turned angrily, but Queazy grabbed his arm, his mouth falling open.\n He pointed off into space, beyond the girl.", "The nose of the hauler was blunt, perfectly fitted for the job. Bob\n Parker practiced and experimented for three hours with this yo-yo of\n cosmic dimensions, while Starre and Queazy stood over him bursting into\n strange, delighted squeals of laughter whenever the yo-yo reached the\n end of its double cable and started rolling back up to the ship. Queazy\n snapped his fingers.\n\n\n \"It'll work!\" His gray eyes showed satisfaction. \"Now, if only the\n Saylor brothers are where we calculated!\"\n\n\n They weren't where Bob and Queazy had calculated, as they had\n discovered the next day. They had expected to pick up the asteroid\n on their mass-detectors a few hundred thousand miles outside of the\n Moon's orbit. But now they saw the giant ship attached like a leech to\n the still bigger asteroid—inside the Moon's orbit! A mere two hundred\n thousand miles from Earth!", "The three men behind the Saylor twins broke into rough, chuckling\n laughter.\n\n\n Bob Parker's gorge rose. \"Scram,\" he said coldly. \"We've got an\n ethergram direct from Andrew S. Burnside ordering this asteroid.\"\n\n\n \"So have we,\" Wally Saylor smiled—and his smile remained fixed,\n dangerous. He started moving forward, and the three men in back came\n abreast, forming a semi-circle which slowly closed in. Bob Parker gave\n back a step, as he saw their intentions.\n\n\n \"We got here first,\" he snapped harshly. \"Try any funny stuff and we'll\n report you to the Interplanetary Commission!\"", "What had happened to Queazy he didn't know. He felt so horribly sick,\n he didn't care. Then—lights out.\nBob Parker came to, the emptiness of remote starlight in his face. He\n opened his eyes. He was slowly revolving on an axis. Sometimes the Sun\n swept across his line of vision. A cold hammering began at the base of\n his skull, a sensation similar to that of being buried alive. There was\n no asteroid, no girl, no Queazy. He was alone in the vastness of space.\n Alone in a space-suit.\n\n\n \"Queazy!\" he whispered. \"Queazy! I'm running out of air!\"", "Bob Parker made a gurgling sound. A voice came again, washed with\n static, far away, burbling, but excited. Bob made a rattling sound in\n his throat. Then his eyes started to close, but he imagined that he saw\n a ship, shiny and small, driving toward him, growing in size against\n the backdrop of the Milky Way. He relapsed, a terrific buzzing in his\n ears.\n\n\n He did not lose consciousness. He heard voices, Queazy's and the\n girl's, whoever she was. Somebody grabbed hold of his foot. His\n \"aquarium\" was unbuckled and good air washed over his streaming face.\n The sudden rush of oxygen to his brain dizzied him. Then he was lying\n on a bunk, and gradually the world beyond his sick body focussed in his\n clearing eyes and he knew he was alive—and going to stay that way, for\n awhile anyway.\n\n\n \"Thanks, Queazy,\" he said huskily.", "quartz crystals, and cinnabar. Must be in my back yard before 11:30\n A.M. my time, for important wedding June 2, else order is void. Will\n pay $5.00 per ton.\nBob Parker had received that ethergram three weeks ago. And if The\n Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co., hadn't been about to go on the\n rocks (chiefly due to the activities of Saylor & Saylor, a rival firm)\n neither Bob nor Queazy would have thought of sending an answering\n ethergram to Burnside stating that they would fill the order. It\n was, plainly, a hair-brained request. And yet, if by some chance\n there was such a rigidly specified asteroid, their financial worries\n would be over. That they had actually discovered the asteroid, using", "\"That's right,\" Bob said grimly. \"We're in business. For us, it's a\n matter of survival. If the by-product of delivering the asteroid is\n your marriage—sorry! But until we do get the asteroid back, we three\n can work as a team if you're willing. We'll fight the other problem out\n later. Okay?\"\n\n\n She smiled tremulously. \"Okay, I guess.\"\n\n\n Queazy looked from one to another of them. He waved his hand scornfully\n at Bob. \"You're plain nuts,\" he complained. \"How do you propose to go\n about convincing the Saylor brothers they ought to let us have the\n asteroid back? Remember, commercial ships aren't allowed to carry\n long-range weapons. And we couldn't ram the Saylor brothers' ship—not\n without damaging our own ship just as much. Go ahead and answer that.\"", "\"No!\" she exclaimed. \"No. My grandfather didn't even know there was an\n asteroid like this. But I did, long before he ordered it from you—or\n from the Saylor brothers. You see—well, my granddad's about the\n stubbornest old hoot-owl in this universe! He's always had his way, and\n when people stand in his way, that's just a challenge to him. He's been\n badgering me for years to marry Mac, and so has Mac—\"\n\n\n \"Who's Mac?\" Queazy demanded.", "\"What's that?\" he whispered.\n\n\n \"What's wha—\nOh!\n\"\n\n\n Bob Parker's stomach caved in. A few hundred feet away, floating\n gently toward the asteroid, came another ship—a ship a trifle bigger\n than their own. The girl turned, too. They heard her gasp. In another\n second, Bob was standing next to her. He turned the audio-switch to his\n headset off, and spoke to the girl by putting his helmet against hers.\n\n\n \"Listen to me, miss,\" he snapped earnestly, when she tried to draw\n away. \"Don't talk by radio. That ship belongs to the Saylor brothers!\n Oh, Lord, that this should happen! Somewhere along the line, we've been\n double-crossed. Those boys are after this asteroid too, and they won't\n hesitate to pull any rough stuff. We're in this together, understand?\n We got to back each other up.\"", "The girl nodded dumbly. Suddenly she seemed to be frightened.\n \"It's—it's very important that this—this asteroid stay right where it\n is,\" she said huskily. \"What—what will they do?\"\nBob Parker didn't answer. The big ship had landed, and little blue\n sparks crackled between the hull and the asteroid as the magnetic\n clamps took hold. A few seconds later, the airlocks swung down, and\n five men let themselves down to the asteroid's surface and stood\n surveying the three who faced them.\n\n\n The two men in the lead stood with their hands on their hips; their\n darkish, twin faces were grinning broadly.\n\n\n \"A pleasure,\" drawled Wally Saylor, looking at the girl. \"What do you\n think of this situation Billy?\"\n\n\n \"It's obvious,\" drawled Billy Saylor, rocking back and forth on his\n heels, \"that Bob Parker and company have double-crossed us. We'll have\n to take steps.\"", "Queazy was bending over him, his anxiety clearing away from his\n suddenly brightening face.\n\n\n \"Don't thank me,\" he whispered. \"We'd have both been goners if it\n hadn't been for her. The Saylor brothers left her paralyzed like\n us, and when she woke up she was on a slow orbit around her ship.\n She unstrapped her holster and threw it away from her and it gave\n her enough reaction to reach the ship. She got inside and used the\n direction-finder on the telaudio and located me first. The Saylors\n scattered us far and wide.\" Queazy's broad, normally good-humored face\n twisted blackly. \"The so and so's didn't care if we lived or died.\"", "\"\nOuch!\n\" Bob groaned. Then he looked at Starre Lowenthal with\n determination. \"Miss, pardon me if I say that this deal you and your\n granddad cooked up is plain screwy! With us on the butt end. But I'm\n going to put this to you plainly. We can catch up with the Saylor\n brothers even if they are three weeks ahead of us. The Saylor ship and\n ours both travel on the HH drive—inertia-less. But the asteroid has\n plenty of inertia, and so they'll have to haul it down to Earth by a\n long, spiraling orbit. We can go direct and probably catch up with them\n a few hundred thousand miles this side of Earth. And we can have a\n fling at getting the asteroid back!\"\n\n\n Her eyes sparkled. \"You mean—\" she cried. Then her attractive face\n fell. \"Oh,\" she said. \"\nOh!\nAnd when you get it back, you'll land it.\"" ], [ "Bob swore under his breath. He went reeling across to a port, and was\n gratified to see his and Queazy's big interplanetary hauler floating\n only a few hundred feet away. He swung around, looked at Queazy.\n\n\n \"How long were we floating around out there?\"\n\n\n \"Three weeks, according to the chronometer. The Saylor boys gave us a\n stiff shot.\"", "There was no answer from Queazy. With sick eyes, Bob studied the\n oxygen indicator. There was only five pounds pressure. Five pounds!\n That meant he had been floating around out here—how long? Days at\n least—maybe weeks! It was evident that somebody had given him a dose\n of spastic rays, enough to screw up every muscle in his body to the\n snapping point, putting him in such a condition of suspended animation\n that his oxygen needs were small. He closed his eyes, trying to fight\n against panic. He was glad he couldn't see any part of his body. He was\n probably scrawny. And he was hungry!\n\n\n \"I'll starve,\" he thought. \"Or suffocate to death first!\"", "Queazy was bending over him, his anxiety clearing away from his\n suddenly brightening face.\n\n\n \"Don't thank me,\" he whispered. \"We'd have both been goners if it\n hadn't been for her. The Saylor brothers left her paralyzed like\n us, and when she woke up she was on a slow orbit around her ship.\n She unstrapped her holster and threw it away from her and it gave\n her enough reaction to reach the ship. She got inside and used the\n direction-finder on the telaudio and located me first. The Saylors\n scattered us far and wide.\" Queazy's broad, normally good-humored face\n twisted blackly. \"The so and so's didn't care if we lived or died.\"", "Bob Parker made a gurgling sound. A voice came again, washed with\n static, far away, burbling, but excited. Bob made a rattling sound in\n his throat. Then his eyes started to close, but he imagined that he saw\n a ship, shiny and small, driving toward him, growing in size against\n the backdrop of the Milky Way. He relapsed, a terrific buzzing in his\n ears.\n\n\n He did not lose consciousness. He heard voices, Queazy's and the\n girl's, whoever she was. Somebody grabbed hold of his foot. His\n \"aquarium\" was unbuckled and good air washed over his streaming face.\n The sudden rush of oxygen to his brain dizzied him. Then he was lying\n on a bunk, and gradually the world beyond his sick body focussed in his\n clearing eyes and he knew he was alive—and going to stay that way, for\n awhile anyway.\n\n\n \"Thanks, Queazy,\" he said huskily.", "What had happened to Queazy he didn't know. He felt so horribly sick,\n he didn't care. Then—lights out.\nBob Parker came to, the emptiness of remote starlight in his face. He\n opened his eyes. He was slowly revolving on an axis. Sometimes the Sun\n swept across his line of vision. A cold hammering began at the base of\n his skull, a sensation similar to that of being buried alive. There was\n no asteroid, no girl, no Queazy. He was alone in the vastness of space.\n Alone in a space-suit.\n\n\n \"Queazy!\" he whispered. \"Queazy! I'm running out of air!\"", "He couldn't keep himself from taking in great gulps of air. Minutes,\n then hours passed. He was breathing abnormally, and there wasn't enough\n air in the first place. He pleaded continually for Queazy, hoping\n that somehow Queazy could help, when probably Queazy was in the same\n condition. He ripped out wild curses directed at the Saylor brothers.\n Murderers, both of them! Up until this time, he had merely thought of\n them as business rivals. If he ever got out of this—\n\n\n He groaned. He never would get out of it! After another hour, he was\n gasping weakly, and yellow spots danced in his eyes. He called Queazy's\n name once more, knowing that was the last time he would have strength\n to call it.\n\n\n And this time the headset spoke back!", "Bob looked at Queazy dismally. \"The old balance-wheel,\" he groaned at\n Starre. \"He's always pulling me up short when I go off half-cocked. All\n I know is, that maybe we'll get a good idea as we go along. In the\n meantime, Starre—ahem—none of us has eaten in three weeks...?\"\n\n\n Starre got the idea. She smiled dazzlingly and vanished toward the\n galley.\nBob Parker was in love with Starre Lowenthal. He knew that after five\n days out, as the ship hurled itself at breakneck speed toward Earth;\n probably that distracting emotion was the real reason he couldn't\n attach any significance to Starre's dumbbell-shaped ship, which trailed\n astern, attached by a long cable.\n\n\n Starre apparently knew he was in love with her, too, for on the fifth\n day Bob was teaching her the mechanics of operating the hauler, and she\n gently lifted his hand from a finger-switch.", "\"Cut the drive!\" he yelled at Queazy. \"I've got it, right on the nose.\n Queazy, my boy, can you imagine it? We're in the dough. Not only that,\n we're rich! Come here!\"\n\n\n Queazy discharged their tremendous inertia into the motive-tubes in\n such a manner that the big, powerful ship was moving at the same rate\n as the asteroid below—47.05 miles per second. He came slogging back\n excitedly, put his eyes to the eyepiece. He gasped, and his big body\n shook with joyful ejaculations.\n\n\n \"She checks down to the last dimension,\" Bob chortled, working with\n slide-rule and logarithm tables. \"Now all we have to do is find out if\n she's made of tungsten, iron, quartz crystals, and cinnabar! But there\n couldn't be two asteroids of that shape anywhere else in the Belt, so\n this has to be it!\"", "\"Have it your way,\" Bob Parker sang, happily. He threw the ethergram\n to the winds and it fell gently to the deck-plates. While Queazy—so\n called because his full name was Quentin Zuyler—dropped the ship\n straight down to the smooth surface of the asteroid, and clamped it\n tight with magnetic grapples, Bob flung open the lazarette, brought\n out two space-suits. Moments later, they were outside the ship, with\n star-powdered infinity spread to all sides.", "Starre was chortling with glee. Queazy whispered, \"Attaboy, Bob! This\n time we'll knock 'em out of the sky!\"\n\n\n The \"yo-yo\" came to rest and at the same moment a gong rang excitedly.\n Bob knew what that meant. The Saylor brothers were trying to establish\n communication.\n\n\n Queazy was across the room in two running strides. He threw in the\n telaudio and almost immediately, Wally Saylor's big body built up in\n the plate. Wally Saylor's face was quivering with wrath.\n\n\n \"What do you damned fools think you're trying to do?\" he roared.\n \"You've crushed in our stern section. You've sliced away half of our\n stern jets. Air is rushing out! You'll kill us!\"\n\n\n \"Now,\" Bob drawled, \"you're getting the idea.\"", "It was Bob Parker's misfortune that he didn't carry a weapon. Each of\n these men carried one or more, plainly visible. But he was thinking of\n the girl's spasticizer—a paralyzing weapon. He took a hair-brained\n chance, jerked the spasticizer from the girl's holster and yelled at\n Queazy. Queazy got the idea, urged his immense body into motion. He\n hurled straight at Billy Saylor, lifted him straight off the asteroid\n and threw him away, into space. He yelled with triumph.", "\"A month!\" Parker burst the word out. He started to sweat, then his\n face became grim. He took two slow steps toward the girl. She blinked\n and lost her composure and unconsciously backed up two steps. About\n twenty steps away was her small dumbbell-shaped ship, so shiny and\n unscarred that it reflected starlight in highlights from its curved\n surface. A rich girl's ship, Bob Parker thought angrily. A month would\n be too late!", "He jerked a badly crumpled ethergram from his pocket, smoothed it out,\n and thumbed his nose at the signature.\n\n\n \"Whee! Mr. Andrew S. Burnside, you owe us five hundred and fifty\n thousand dollars!\"\n\n\n Queazy straightened. A slow, likeable smile wreathed his tanned face.\n \"Better take it easy,\" he advised, \"until I land the ship and we use\n the atomic whirl spectroscope to determine the composition of the\n asteroid.\"", "He said grimly, \"Don't worry. I don't intend to pull any rough stuff.\n I just want you to listen to reason. You've taken a whim to stay on\n an asteroid that doesn't mean anything to you one way or another. But\n to us—to me and Queazy here—it means our business. We got an order\n for this asteroid. Some screwball millionaire wants it for a backyard\n wedding see? We get five hundred and fifty thousand dollars for it!\n If we don't take this asteroid to Earth before June 2, we go back to\n Satterfield City and work the rest of our lives in the glass factories.\n Don't we, Queazy?\"\n\n\n Queazy said simply, \"That's right, miss. We're in a spot. I assure you\n we didn't expect to find someone living here.\"", "Bob saw the girl now, standing a little behind Queazy, looking down at\n him curiously, but unhappily. Her space-suit was off. She was wearing\n lightly striped blue slacks and blue silk blouse and she had a paper\n flower in her hair. Something in Bob's stomach caved in as his eyes\n widened on her.\n\n\n The girl said glumly, \"I guess you men won't much care for me when you\n find out who I am and what I've done. I'm Starre Lowenthal—Andrew S.\n Burnside's granddaughter!\"\nBob came slowly to his feet, and matched Queazy's slowly growing anger.\n\n\n \"Say that again?\" he snapped. \"This is some kind of dirty trick you and\n your grandfather cooked up?\"", "Bob Parker said, in astonishment, \"Hell! There's something screwy about\n this business. Look at that point—\"\n\n\n Neither he nor Queazy had the opportunity to observe the pointer any\n further. A cold, completely disagreeable feminine voice said,\n\n\n \"May I ask what you interlopers are doing on my asteroid?\"\n\n\n Bob started so badly that the spectroscope's settings were jarred and\n the lights in its interior died. Bob twisted his head around as far as\n he could inside the \"aquarium\"—the glass helmet, and found himself\n looking at a space-suited girl who was standing on the edge of the\n asteroid \"below.\"\n\n\n \"Ma'am,\" said Bob, blinking, \"did you say something?\"\n\n\n Queazy made a gulping sound and slowly straightened. He automatically\n reached up as if he would take off his hat and twist it in his hands.", "The girl holstered her spasticizer, but her completely inhospitable\n expression did not change. She put her hands on the bulging hips of her\n space-suit. \"Okay,\" she said. \"Now I understand the conditions. Now we\n both understand each other. G'bye again. I'm staying here and—\" she\n smiled sweetly \"—it may interest you to know that if I let you have\n the asteroid you'll save your business, but I'll meet a fate worse than\n death! So that's that.\"\n\n\n Bob recognized finality when he saw it. \"Come on, Queazy,\" he said\n fuming. \"Let this brat have her way. But if I ever run across her\n without a space-suit on I'm going to give her the licking of her life,\n right where it'll do the most good!\"\n\n\n He turned angrily, but Queazy grabbed his arm, his mouth falling open.\n He pointed off into space, beyond the girl.", "The nose of the hauler was blunt, perfectly fitted for the job. Bob\n Parker practiced and experimented for three hours with this yo-yo of\n cosmic dimensions, while Starre and Queazy stood over him bursting into\n strange, delighted squeals of laughter whenever the yo-yo reached the\n end of its double cable and started rolling back up to the ship. Queazy\n snapped his fingers.\n\n\n \"It'll work!\" His gray eyes showed satisfaction. \"Now, if only the\n Saylor brothers are where we calculated!\"\n\n\n They weren't where Bob and Queazy had calculated, as they had\n discovered the next day. They had expected to pick up the asteroid\n on their mass-detectors a few hundred thousand miles outside of the\n Moon's orbit. But now they saw the giant ship attached like a leech to\n the still bigger asteroid—inside the Moon's orbit! A mere two hundred\n thousand miles from Earth!", "\"A\nyo-yo\n!\" Bob Parker yelled the word and almost hit the ceiling, he\n got out of the chair so fast. \"Can you imagine it! A yo-yo!\"\n\n\n He disappeared from the room. \"Queazy!\" he shouted. \"\nQueazy, I've got\n it!\n\"\nIt was Queazy who got into his space-suit and did the welding job,\n fastening two huge supra-steel \"eyes\" onto the dumbbell-shaped ship's\n narrow midsection. Into these eyes cables which trailed back to\n two winches in the big ship's nose were inserted, welded fast, and\n reinforced.", "\"No!\" she exclaimed. \"No. My grandfather didn't even know there was an\n asteroid like this. But I did, long before he ordered it from you—or\n from the Saylor brothers. You see—well, my granddad's about the\n stubbornest old hoot-owl in this universe! He's always had his way, and\n when people stand in his way, that's just a challenge to him. He's been\n badgering me for years to marry Mac, and so has Mac—\"\n\n\n \"Who's Mac?\" Queazy demanded." ], [ "Bob looked at Queazy dismally. \"The old balance-wheel,\" he groaned at\n Starre. \"He's always pulling me up short when I go off half-cocked. All\n I know is, that maybe we'll get a good idea as we go along. In the\n meantime, Starre—ahem—none of us has eaten in three weeks...?\"\n\n\n Starre got the idea. She smiled dazzlingly and vanished toward the\n galley.\nBob Parker was in love with Starre Lowenthal. He knew that after five\n days out, as the ship hurled itself at breakneck speed toward Earth;\n probably that distracting emotion was the real reason he couldn't\n attach any significance to Starre's dumbbell-shaped ship, which trailed\n astern, attached by a long cable.\n\n\n Starre apparently knew he was in love with her, too, for on the fifth\n day Bob was teaching her the mechanics of operating the hauler, and she\n gently lifted his hand from a finger-switch.", "\"A month!\" Parker burst the word out. He started to sweat, then his\n face became grim. He took two slow steps toward the girl. She blinked\n and lost her composure and unconsciously backed up two steps. About\n twenty steps away was her small dumbbell-shaped ship, so shiny and\n unscarred that it reflected starlight in highlights from its curved\n surface. A rich girl's ship, Bob Parker thought angrily. A month would\n be too late!", "He snapped his fingers. \"No acceleration effects. This type of ship,\n necessary in our business, can stop flat, back up, ease up, move in\n any direction, and the passengers wouldn't have any feeling of motion\n at—Oh, hell!\" Bob groaned, the serious glory of her eyes making him\n shake. He took her hand. \"Starre,\" he said desperately, \"I've got to\n tell you something—\"\n\n\n She jerked her hand away. \"No,\" she exclaimed in an almost frightened\n voice. \"You can't tell me. There's—there's Mac,\" she finished,\n faltering. \"The asteroid—\"\n\n\n \"You\nhave\nto marry him?\"\n\n\n Her eyes filled with tears. \"I have to live up to the bargain.\"", "Bob Parker made a gurgling sound. A voice came again, washed with\n static, far away, burbling, but excited. Bob made a rattling sound in\n his throat. Then his eyes started to close, but he imagined that he saw\n a ship, shiny and small, driving toward him, growing in size against\n the backdrop of the Milky Way. He relapsed, a terrific buzzing in his\n ears.\n\n\n He did not lose consciousness. He heard voices, Queazy's and the\n girl's, whoever she was. Somebody grabbed hold of his foot. His\n \"aquarium\" was unbuckled and good air washed over his streaming face.\n The sudden rush of oxygen to his brain dizzied him. Then he was lying\n on a bunk, and gradually the world beyond his sick body focussed in his\n clearing eyes and he knew he was alive—and going to stay that way, for\n awhile anyway.\n\n\n \"Thanks, Queazy,\" he said huskily.", "What had happened to Queazy he didn't know. He felt so horribly sick,\n he didn't care. Then—lights out.\nBob Parker came to, the emptiness of remote starlight in his face. He\n opened his eyes. He was slowly revolving on an axis. Sometimes the Sun\n swept across his line of vision. A cold hammering began at the base of\n his skull, a sensation similar to that of being buried alive. There was\n no asteroid, no girl, no Queazy. He was alone in the vastness of space.\n Alone in a space-suit.\n\n\n \"Queazy!\" he whispered. \"Queazy! I'm running out of air!\"", "Bob saw the girl now, standing a little behind Queazy, looking down at\n him curiously, but unhappily. Her space-suit was off. She was wearing\n lightly striped blue slacks and blue silk blouse and she had a paper\n flower in her hair. Something in Bob's stomach caved in as his eyes\n widened on her.\n\n\n The girl said glumly, \"I guess you men won't much care for me when you\n find out who I am and what I've done. I'm Starre Lowenthal—Andrew S.\n Burnside's granddaughter!\"\nBob came slowly to his feet, and matched Queazy's slowly growing anger.\n\n\n \"Say that again?\" he snapped. \"This is some kind of dirty trick you and\n your grandfather cooked up?\"", "The \"yo-yo\" struck again, but Bob Parker maneuvered its speed in\n such a manner that it struck in the same place as before, but not as\n heavily, then rebounded and came spinning back with perfect, sparkling\n precision. And even before it snugged itself into its berth, it was\n apparent that the Saylor brothers had given up. Like a wounded terrier,\n their ship shook itself free of the asteroid, hung in black space for\n a second, then vanished with a flaming puff of released gravitons from\n its still-intact jets.\n\n\n The battle was won!", "Bob Parker said, in astonishment, \"Hell! There's something screwy about\n this business. Look at that point—\"\n\n\n Neither he nor Queazy had the opportunity to observe the pointer any\n further. A cold, completely disagreeable feminine voice said,\n\n\n \"May I ask what you interlopers are doing on my asteroid?\"\n\n\n Bob started so badly that the spectroscope's settings were jarred and\n the lights in its interior died. Bob twisted his head around as far as\n he could inside the \"aquarium\"—the glass helmet, and found himself\n looking at a space-suited girl who was standing on the edge of the\n asteroid \"below.\"\n\n\n \"Ma'am,\" said Bob, blinking, \"did you say something?\"\n\n\n Queazy made a gulping sound and slowly straightened. He automatically\n reached up as if he would take off his hat and twist it in his hands.", "\"Have it your way,\" Bob Parker sang, happily. He threw the ethergram\n to the winds and it fell gently to the deck-plates. While Queazy—so\n called because his full name was Quentin Zuyler—dropped the ship\n straight down to the smooth surface of the asteroid, and clamped it\n tight with magnetic grapples, Bob flung open the lazarette, brought\n out two space-suits. Moments later, they were outside the ship, with\n star-powdered infinity spread to all sides.", "It was Bob Parker's misfortune that he didn't carry a weapon. Each of\n these men carried one or more, plainly visible. But he was thinking of\n the girl's spasticizer—a paralyzing weapon. He took a hair-brained\n chance, jerked the spasticizer from the girl's holster and yelled at\n Queazy. Queazy got the idea, urged his immense body into motion. He\n hurled straight at Billy Saylor, lifted him straight off the asteroid\n and threw him away, into space. He yelled with triumph.", "The excited cry came from Starre. But Bob swore. The dumbbell ship\n reached the end of its cables, falling a bare twenty feet short of\n completing its mission. It didn't stop spinning, but came winding back\n up the cable, at the same terrific speed with which it had left.\nBob sweated, having only fractions of seconds in which to maneuver\n for the \"yo-yo\" could strike a fatal blow at the hauler too. It was\n ticklish work completely to nullify the \"yo-yo's\" speed. Bob used\n exactly the same method of catching the \"yo-yo\" on the blunt nose of\n the ship as a baseball player uses to catch a hard-driven ball in\n his glove—namely, by matching the ball's speed and direction almost\n exactly at the moment of impact. And now Bob's hours of practice paid\n dividends, for the \"yo-yo\" came to rest snugly, ready to be released\n again.", "\"What's that?\" he whispered.\n\n\n \"What's wha—\nOh!\n\"\n\n\n Bob Parker's stomach caved in. A few hundred feet away, floating\n gently toward the asteroid, came another ship—a ship a trifle bigger\n than their own. The girl turned, too. They heard her gasp. In another\n second, Bob was standing next to her. He turned the audio-switch to his\n headset off, and spoke to the girl by putting his helmet against hers.\n\n\n \"Listen to me, miss,\" he snapped earnestly, when she tried to draw\n away. \"Don't talk by radio. That ship belongs to the Saylor brothers!\n Oh, Lord, that this should happen! Somewhere along the line, we've been\n double-crossed. Those boys are after this asteroid too, and they won't\n hesitate to pull any rough stuff. We're in this together, understand?\n We got to back each other up.\"", "Starre was chortling with glee. Queazy whispered, \"Attaboy, Bob! This\n time we'll knock 'em out of the sky!\"\n\n\n The \"yo-yo\" came to rest and at the same moment a gong rang excitedly.\n Bob knew what that meant. The Saylor brothers were trying to establish\n communication.\n\n\n Queazy was across the room in two running strides. He threw in the\n telaudio and almost immediately, Wally Saylor's big body built up in\n the plate. Wally Saylor's face was quivering with wrath.\n\n\n \"What do you damned fools think you're trying to do?\" he roared.\n \"You've crushed in our stern section. You've sliced away half of our\n stern jets. Air is rushing out! You'll kill us!\"\n\n\n \"Now,\" Bob drawled, \"you're getting the idea.\"", "\"And ruin your whole life,\" he ground out. Suddenly, he turned back to\n the control board, quartered the vision plate. He pointed savagely to\n the lower left quarter, which gave a rearward view of the dumbbell ship\n trailing astern.\n\n\n \"There's your ship, Starre.\" He jabbed his finger at it. \"I've got a\n feeling—and I can't put the thought into concrete words—that somehow\n the whole solution of the problem of grabbing the asteroid back lies\n there. But how?\nHow?\n\"\n\n\n Starre's blue eyes followed the long cable back to where it was\n attached around her ship's narrow midsection.\n\n\n She shook her head helplessly. \"It just looks like a big yo-yo to me.\"\n\n\n \"A yo-yo?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, a yo-yo. That's all.\" She was belligerent.", "The nose of the hauler was blunt, perfectly fitted for the job. Bob\n Parker practiced and experimented for three hours with this yo-yo of\n cosmic dimensions, while Starre and Queazy stood over him bursting into\n strange, delighted squeals of laughter whenever the yo-yo reached the\n end of its double cable and started rolling back up to the ship. Queazy\n snapped his fingers.\n\n\n \"It'll work!\" His gray eyes showed satisfaction. \"Now, if only the\n Saylor brothers are where we calculated!\"\n\n\n They weren't where Bob and Queazy had calculated, as they had\n discovered the next day. They had expected to pick up the asteroid\n on their mass-detectors a few hundred thousand miles outside of the\n Moon's orbit. But now they saw the giant ship attached like a leech to\n the still bigger asteroid—inside the Moon's orbit! A mere two hundred\n thousand miles from Earth!", "The \"asteroid in your back yard\" idea had been Bob Parker's originally.\n Now it was a fad that was sweeping Earth, and Burnside wasn't the first\n rich man who had decided to hold a wedding on top of an asteroid.\n Unfortunately, other interplanetary moving companies had cashed in on\n that brainstorm, chiefly the firm of the Saylor brothers—which persons\n Bob Parker intended to punch in the nose some day. And would have\n before this if he hadn't been lanky and tall while they were giants.\n Now that he and Queazy had found the asteroid, they were desperate to\n get it to its destination, for fear that the Saylor brothers might get\n wind of what was going on, and try to beat them out of their profits.\n Which was not so far-fetched, because the firm of Saylor & Saylor made\n no pretense of being scrupulous.", "The girl nodded dumbly. Suddenly she seemed to be frightened.\n \"It's—it's very important that this—this asteroid stay right where it\n is,\" she said huskily. \"What—what will they do?\"\nBob Parker didn't answer. The big ship had landed, and little blue\n sparks crackled between the hull and the asteroid as the magnetic\n clamps took hold. A few seconds later, the airlocks swung down, and\n five men let themselves down to the asteroid's surface and stood\n surveying the three who faced them.\n\n\n The two men in the lead stood with their hands on their hips; their\n darkish, twin faces were grinning broadly.\n\n\n \"A pleasure,\" drawled Wally Saylor, looking at the girl. \"What do you\n think of this situation Billy?\"\n\n\n \"It's obvious,\" drawled Billy Saylor, rocking back and forth on his\n heels, \"that Bob Parker and company have double-crossed us. We'll have\n to take steps.\"", "\"\nOuch!\n\" Bob groaned. Then he looked at Starre Lowenthal with\n determination. \"Miss, pardon me if I say that this deal you and your\n granddad cooked up is plain screwy! With us on the butt end. But I'm\n going to put this to you plainly. We can catch up with the Saylor\n brothers even if they are three weeks ahead of us. The Saylor ship and\n ours both travel on the HH drive—inertia-less. But the asteroid has\n plenty of inertia, and so they'll have to haul it down to Earth by a\n long, spiraling orbit. We can go direct and probably catch up with them\n a few hundred thousand miles this side of Earth. And we can have a\n fling at getting the asteroid back!\"\n\n\n Her eyes sparkled. \"You mean—\" she cried. Then her attractive face\n fell. \"Oh,\" she said. \"\nOh!\nAnd when you get it back, you'll land it.\"", "Queazy was bending over him, his anxiety clearing away from his\n suddenly brightening face.\n\n\n \"Don't thank me,\" he whispered. \"We'd have both been goners if it\n hadn't been for her. The Saylor brothers left her paralyzed like\n us, and when she woke up she was on a slow orbit around her ship.\n She unstrapped her holster and threw it away from her and it gave\n her enough reaction to reach the ship. She got inside and used the\n direction-finder on the telaudio and located me first. The Saylors\n scattered us far and wide.\" Queazy's broad, normally good-humored face\n twisted blackly. \"The so and so's didn't care if we lived or died.\"", "There was little doubt the Saylors' saw their approach. But,\n scornfully, they made no attempt to evade. There was no possible harm\n the oncoming ship could wreak. Or at least that was what they thought,\n for Bob brought the hauler's speed down to zero—and Starre Lowenthal's\n little ship, possessing its own inertia, kept on moving!\n\n\n It spun away from the hauler's blunt nose, paying out two rigid\n lengths of cable behind it as it unwound, hurled itself forward like a\n fantastic spinning cannon ball.\n\n\n \"It's going to hit!\"" ], [ "It was Bob Parker's misfortune that he didn't carry a weapon. Each of\n these men carried one or more, plainly visible. But he was thinking of\n the girl's spasticizer—a paralyzing weapon. He took a hair-brained\n chance, jerked the spasticizer from the girl's holster and yelled at\n Queazy. Queazy got the idea, urged his immense body into motion. He\n hurled straight at Billy Saylor, lifted him straight off the asteroid\n and threw him away, into space. He yelled with triumph.", "The \"asteroid in your back yard\" idea had been Bob Parker's originally.\n Now it was a fad that was sweeping Earth, and Burnside wasn't the first\n rich man who had decided to hold a wedding on top of an asteroid.\n Unfortunately, other interplanetary moving companies had cashed in on\n that brainstorm, chiefly the firm of the Saylor brothers—which persons\n Bob Parker intended to punch in the nose some day. And would have\n before this if he hadn't been lanky and tall while they were giants.\n Now that he and Queazy had found the asteroid, they were desperate to\n get it to its destination, for fear that the Saylor brothers might get\n wind of what was going on, and try to beat them out of their profits.\n Which was not so far-fetched, because the firm of Saylor & Saylor made\n no pretense of being scrupulous.", "What had happened to Queazy he didn't know. He felt so horribly sick,\n he didn't care. Then—lights out.\nBob Parker came to, the emptiness of remote starlight in his face. He\n opened his eyes. He was slowly revolving on an axis. Sometimes the Sun\n swept across his line of vision. A cold hammering began at the base of\n his skull, a sensation similar to that of being buried alive. There was\n no asteroid, no girl, no Queazy. He was alone in the vastness of space.\n Alone in a space-suit.\n\n\n \"Queazy!\" he whispered. \"Queazy! I'm running out of air!\"", "Bob Parker made a gurgling sound. A voice came again, washed with\n static, far away, burbling, but excited. Bob made a rattling sound in\n his throat. Then his eyes started to close, but he imagined that he saw\n a ship, shiny and small, driving toward him, growing in size against\n the backdrop of the Milky Way. He relapsed, a terrific buzzing in his\n ears.\n\n\n He did not lose consciousness. He heard voices, Queazy's and the\n girl's, whoever she was. Somebody grabbed hold of his foot. His\n \"aquarium\" was unbuckled and good air washed over his streaming face.\n The sudden rush of oxygen to his brain dizzied him. Then he was lying\n on a bunk, and gradually the world beyond his sick body focussed in his\n clearing eyes and he knew he was alive—and going to stay that way, for\n awhile anyway.\n\n\n \"Thanks, Queazy,\" he said huskily.", "The nose of the hauler was blunt, perfectly fitted for the job. Bob\n Parker practiced and experimented for three hours with this yo-yo of\n cosmic dimensions, while Starre and Queazy stood over him bursting into\n strange, delighted squeals of laughter whenever the yo-yo reached the\n end of its double cable and started rolling back up to the ship. Queazy\n snapped his fingers.\n\n\n \"It'll work!\" His gray eyes showed satisfaction. \"Now, if only the\n Saylor brothers are where we calculated!\"\n\n\n They weren't where Bob and Queazy had calculated, as they had\n discovered the next day. They had expected to pick up the asteroid\n on their mass-detectors a few hundred thousand miles outside of the\n Moon's orbit. But now they saw the giant ship attached like a leech to\n the still bigger asteroid—inside the Moon's orbit! A mere two hundred\n thousand miles from Earth!", "\"Have it your way,\" Bob Parker sang, happily. He threw the ethergram\n to the winds and it fell gently to the deck-plates. While Queazy—so\n called because his full name was Quentin Zuyler—dropped the ship\n straight down to the smooth surface of the asteroid, and clamped it\n tight with magnetic grapples, Bob flung open the lazarette, brought\n out two space-suits. Moments later, they were outside the ship, with\n star-powdered infinity spread to all sides.", "\"Cut the drive!\" he yelled at Queazy. \"I've got it, right on the nose.\n Queazy, my boy, can you imagine it? We're in the dough. Not only that,\n we're rich! Come here!\"\n\n\n Queazy discharged their tremendous inertia into the motive-tubes in\n such a manner that the big, powerful ship was moving at the same rate\n as the asteroid below—47.05 miles per second. He came slogging back\n excitedly, put his eyes to the eyepiece. He gasped, and his big body\n shook with joyful ejaculations.\n\n\n \"She checks down to the last dimension,\" Bob chortled, working with\n slide-rule and logarithm tables. \"Now all we have to do is find out if\n she's made of tungsten, iron, quartz crystals, and cinnabar! But there\n couldn't be two asteroids of that shape anywhere else in the Belt, so\n this has to be it!\"", "Bob Parker said, in astonishment, \"Hell! There's something screwy about\n this business. Look at that point—\"\n\n\n Neither he nor Queazy had the opportunity to observe the pointer any\n further. A cold, completely disagreeable feminine voice said,\n\n\n \"May I ask what you interlopers are doing on my asteroid?\"\n\n\n Bob started so badly that the spectroscope's settings were jarred and\n the lights in its interior died. Bob twisted his head around as far as\n he could inside the \"aquarium\"—the glass helmet, and found himself\n looking at a space-suited girl who was standing on the edge of the\n asteroid \"below.\"\n\n\n \"Ma'am,\" said Bob, blinking, \"did you say something?\"\n\n\n Queazy made a gulping sound and slowly straightened. He automatically\n reached up as if he would take off his hat and twist it in his hands.", "He said grimly, \"Don't worry. I don't intend to pull any rough stuff.\n I just want you to listen to reason. You've taken a whim to stay on\n an asteroid that doesn't mean anything to you one way or another. But\n to us—to me and Queazy here—it means our business. We got an order\n for this asteroid. Some screwball millionaire wants it for a backyard\n wedding see? We get five hundred and fifty thousand dollars for it!\n If we don't take this asteroid to Earth before June 2, we go back to\n Satterfield City and work the rest of our lives in the glass factories.\n Don't we, Queazy?\"\n\n\n Queazy said simply, \"That's right, miss. We're in a spot. I assure you\n we didn't expect to find someone living here.\"", "She turned and disappeared.\n\n\n Bob awoke from his trance, shouted desperately, \"Hey! Wait!\nYou!\n\"\n\n\n He and Queazy caught up with her on the side of the asteroid they\n hadn't yet examined. It was a rough plane, completing the rigid\n qualifications Burnside had set down.\n\n\n \"Wait a minute,\" Bob Parker begged nervously. \"I want to make some\n conversation, lady. I'm sure you don't understand the conditions—\"\n\n\n The girl turned and drew a gun from a holster. It was a spasticizer,\n and it was three times as big as her gloved hand.\n\n\n \"I understand conditions better than you do,\" she said. \"You want\n to move this asteroid from its orbit and haul it back to Earth.\n Unfortunately, this is my home, by common law. Come back in a month. I\n don't expect to be here then.\"", "\"That's right,\" Bob said grimly. \"We're in business. For us, it's a\n matter of survival. If the by-product of delivering the asteroid is\n your marriage—sorry! But until we do get the asteroid back, we three\n can work as a team if you're willing. We'll fight the other problem out\n later. Okay?\"\n\n\n She smiled tremulously. \"Okay, I guess.\"\n\n\n Queazy looked from one to another of them. He waved his hand scornfully\n at Bob. \"You're plain nuts,\" he complained. \"How do you propose to go\n about convincing the Saylor brothers they ought to let us have the\n asteroid back? Remember, commercial ships aren't allowed to carry\n long-range weapons. And we couldn't ram the Saylor brothers' ship—not\n without damaging our own ship just as much. Go ahead and answer that.\"", "The \"yo-yo\" struck again, but Bob Parker maneuvered its speed in\n such a manner that it struck in the same place as before, but not as\n heavily, then rebounded and came spinning back with perfect, sparkling\n precision. And even before it snugged itself into its berth, it was\n apparent that the Saylor brothers had given up. Like a wounded terrier,\n their ship shook itself free of the asteroid, hung in black space for\n a second, then vanished with a flaming puff of released gravitons from\n its still-intact jets.\n\n\n The battle was won!", "The girl holstered her spasticizer, but her completely inhospitable\n expression did not change. She put her hands on the bulging hips of her\n space-suit. \"Okay,\" she said. \"Now I understand the conditions. Now we\n both understand each other. G'bye again. I'm staying here and—\" she\n smiled sweetly \"—it may interest you to know that if I let you have\n the asteroid you'll save your business, but I'll meet a fate worse than\n death! So that's that.\"\n\n\n Bob recognized finality when he saw it. \"Come on, Queazy,\" he said\n fuming. \"Let this brat have her way. But if I ever run across her\n without a space-suit on I'm going to give her the licking of her life,\n right where it'll do the most good!\"\n\n\n He turned angrily, but Queazy grabbed his arm, his mouth falling open.\n He pointed off into space, beyond the girl.", "Queazy was bending over him, his anxiety clearing away from his\n suddenly brightening face.\n\n\n \"Don't thank me,\" he whispered. \"We'd have both been goners if it\n hadn't been for her. The Saylor brothers left her paralyzed like\n us, and when she woke up she was on a slow orbit around her ship.\n She unstrapped her holster and threw it away from her and it gave\n her enough reaction to reach the ship. She got inside and used the\n direction-finder on the telaudio and located me first. The Saylors\n scattered us far and wide.\" Queazy's broad, normally good-humored face\n twisted blackly. \"The so and so's didn't care if we lived or died.\"", "Bob looked at Queazy dismally. \"The old balance-wheel,\" he groaned at\n Starre. \"He's always pulling me up short when I go off half-cocked. All\n I know is, that maybe we'll get a good idea as we go along. In the\n meantime, Starre—ahem—none of us has eaten in three weeks...?\"\n\n\n Starre got the idea. She smiled dazzlingly and vanished toward the\n galley.\nBob Parker was in love with Starre Lowenthal. He knew that after five\n days out, as the ship hurled itself at breakneck speed toward Earth;\n probably that distracting emotion was the real reason he couldn't\n attach any significance to Starre's dumbbell-shaped ship, which trailed\n astern, attached by a long cable.\n\n\n Starre apparently knew he was in love with her, too, for on the fifth\n day Bob was teaching her the mechanics of operating the hauler, and she\n gently lifted his hand from a finger-switch.", "quartz crystals, and cinnabar. Must be in my back yard before 11:30\n A.M. my time, for important wedding June 2, else order is void. Will\n pay $5.00 per ton.\nBob Parker had received that ethergram three weeks ago. And if The\n Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co., hadn't been about to go on the\n rocks (chiefly due to the activities of Saylor & Saylor, a rival firm)\n neither Bob nor Queazy would have thought of sending an answering\n ethergram to Burnside stating that they would fill the order. It\n was, plainly, a hair-brained request. And yet, if by some chance\n there was such a rigidly specified asteroid, their financial worries\n would be over. That they had actually discovered the asteroid, using", "\"What's that?\" he whispered.\n\n\n \"What's wha—\nOh!\n\"\n\n\n Bob Parker's stomach caved in. A few hundred feet away, floating\n gently toward the asteroid, came another ship—a ship a trifle bigger\n than their own. The girl turned, too. They heard her gasp. In another\n second, Bob was standing next to her. He turned the audio-switch to his\n headset off, and spoke to the girl by putting his helmet against hers.\n\n\n \"Listen to me, miss,\" he snapped earnestly, when she tried to draw\n away. \"Don't talk by radio. That ship belongs to the Saylor brothers!\n Oh, Lord, that this should happen! Somewhere along the line, we've been\n double-crossed. Those boys are after this asteroid too, and they won't\n hesitate to pull any rough stuff. We're in this together, understand?\n We got to back each other up.\"", "The girl nodded dumbly. Suddenly she seemed to be frightened.\n \"It's—it's very important that this—this asteroid stay right where it\n is,\" she said huskily. \"What—what will they do?\"\nBob Parker didn't answer. The big ship had landed, and little blue\n sparks crackled between the hull and the asteroid as the magnetic\n clamps took hold. A few seconds later, the airlocks swung down, and\n five men let themselves down to the asteroid's surface and stood\n surveying the three who faced them.\n\n\n The two men in the lead stood with their hands on their hips; their\n darkish, twin faces were grinning broadly.\n\n\n \"A pleasure,\" drawled Wally Saylor, looking at the girl. \"What do you\n think of this situation Billy?\"\n\n\n \"It's obvious,\" drawled Billy Saylor, rocking back and forth on his\n heels, \"that Bob Parker and company have double-crossed us. We'll have\n to take steps.\"", "\"No!\" she exclaimed. \"No. My grandfather didn't even know there was an\n asteroid like this. But I did, long before he ordered it from you—or\n from the Saylor brothers. You see—well, my granddad's about the\n stubbornest old hoot-owl in this universe! He's always had his way, and\n when people stand in his way, that's just a challenge to him. He's been\n badgering me for years to marry Mac, and so has Mac—\"\n\n\n \"Who's Mac?\" Queazy demanded.", "\"A month!\" Parker burst the word out. He started to sweat, then his\n face became grim. He took two slow steps toward the girl. She blinked\n and lost her composure and unconsciously backed up two steps. About\n twenty steps away was her small dumbbell-shaped ship, so shiny and\n unscarred that it reflected starlight in highlights from its curved\n surface. A rich girl's ship, Bob Parker thought angrily. A month would\n be too late!" ], [ "Queazy was bending over him, his anxiety clearing away from his\n suddenly brightening face.\n\n\n \"Don't thank me,\" he whispered. \"We'd have both been goners if it\n hadn't been for her. The Saylor brothers left her paralyzed like\n us, and when she woke up she was on a slow orbit around her ship.\n She unstrapped her holster and threw it away from her and it gave\n her enough reaction to reach the ship. She got inside and used the\n direction-finder on the telaudio and located me first. The Saylors\n scattered us far and wide.\" Queazy's broad, normally good-humored face\n twisted blackly. \"The so and so's didn't care if we lived or died.\"", "It was Bob Parker's misfortune that he didn't carry a weapon. Each of\n these men carried one or more, plainly visible. But he was thinking of\n the girl's spasticizer—a paralyzing weapon. He took a hair-brained\n chance, jerked the spasticizer from the girl's holster and yelled at\n Queazy. Queazy got the idea, urged his immense body into motion. He\n hurled straight at Billy Saylor, lifted him straight off the asteroid\n and threw him away, into space. He yelled with triumph.", "Bob Parker made a gurgling sound. A voice came again, washed with\n static, far away, burbling, but excited. Bob made a rattling sound in\n his throat. Then his eyes started to close, but he imagined that he saw\n a ship, shiny and small, driving toward him, growing in size against\n the backdrop of the Milky Way. He relapsed, a terrific buzzing in his\n ears.\n\n\n He did not lose consciousness. He heard voices, Queazy's and the\n girl's, whoever she was. Somebody grabbed hold of his foot. His\n \"aquarium\" was unbuckled and good air washed over his streaming face.\n The sudden rush of oxygen to his brain dizzied him. Then he was lying\n on a bunk, and gradually the world beyond his sick body focussed in his\n clearing eyes and he knew he was alive—and going to stay that way, for\n awhile anyway.\n\n\n \"Thanks, Queazy,\" he said huskily.", "Starre was chortling with glee. Queazy whispered, \"Attaboy, Bob! This\n time we'll knock 'em out of the sky!\"\n\n\n The \"yo-yo\" came to rest and at the same moment a gong rang excitedly.\n Bob knew what that meant. The Saylor brothers were trying to establish\n communication.\n\n\n Queazy was across the room in two running strides. He threw in the\n telaudio and almost immediately, Wally Saylor's big body built up in\n the plate. Wally Saylor's face was quivering with wrath.\n\n\n \"What do you damned fools think you're trying to do?\" he roared.\n \"You've crushed in our stern section. You've sliced away half of our\n stern jets. Air is rushing out! You'll kill us!\"\n\n\n \"Now,\" Bob drawled, \"you're getting the idea.\"", "He couldn't keep himself from taking in great gulps of air. Minutes,\n then hours passed. He was breathing abnormally, and there wasn't enough\n air in the first place. He pleaded continually for Queazy, hoping\n that somehow Queazy could help, when probably Queazy was in the same\n condition. He ripped out wild curses directed at the Saylor brothers.\n Murderers, both of them! Up until this time, he had merely thought of\n them as business rivals. If he ever got out of this—\n\n\n He groaned. He never would get out of it! After another hour, he was\n gasping weakly, and yellow spots danced in his eyes. He called Queazy's\n name once more, knowing that was the last time he would have strength\n to call it.\n\n\n And this time the headset spoke back!", "What had happened to Queazy he didn't know. He felt so horribly sick,\n he didn't care. Then—lights out.\nBob Parker came to, the emptiness of remote starlight in his face. He\n opened his eyes. He was slowly revolving on an axis. Sometimes the Sun\n swept across his line of vision. A cold hammering began at the base of\n his skull, a sensation similar to that of being buried alive. There was\n no asteroid, no girl, no Queazy. He was alone in the vastness of space.\n Alone in a space-suit.\n\n\n \"Queazy!\" he whispered. \"Queazy! I'm running out of air!\"", "The \"yo-yo\" struck again, but Bob Parker maneuvered its speed in\n such a manner that it struck in the same place as before, but not as\n heavily, then rebounded and came spinning back with perfect, sparkling\n precision. And even before it snugged itself into its berth, it was\n apparent that the Saylor brothers had given up. Like a wounded terrier,\n their ship shook itself free of the asteroid, hung in black space for\n a second, then vanished with a flaming puff of released gravitons from\n its still-intact jets.\n\n\n The battle was won!", "Bob swore under his breath. He went reeling across to a port, and was\n gratified to see his and Queazy's big interplanetary hauler floating\n only a few hundred feet away. He swung around, looked at Queazy.\n\n\n \"How long were we floating around out there?\"\n\n\n \"Three weeks, according to the chronometer. The Saylor boys gave us a\n stiff shot.\"", "The \"asteroid in your back yard\" idea had been Bob Parker's originally.\n Now it was a fad that was sweeping Earth, and Burnside wasn't the first\n rich man who had decided to hold a wedding on top of an asteroid.\n Unfortunately, other interplanetary moving companies had cashed in on\n that brainstorm, chiefly the firm of the Saylor brothers—which persons\n Bob Parker intended to punch in the nose some day. And would have\n before this if he hadn't been lanky and tall while they were giants.\n Now that he and Queazy had found the asteroid, they were desperate to\n get it to its destination, for fear that the Saylor brothers might get\n wind of what was going on, and try to beat them out of their profits.\n Which was not so far-fetched, because the firm of Saylor & Saylor made\n no pretense of being scrupulous.", "\"That's right,\" Bob said grimly. \"We're in business. For us, it's a\n matter of survival. If the by-product of delivering the asteroid is\n your marriage—sorry! But until we do get the asteroid back, we three\n can work as a team if you're willing. We'll fight the other problem out\n later. Okay?\"\n\n\n She smiled tremulously. \"Okay, I guess.\"\n\n\n Queazy looked from one to another of them. He waved his hand scornfully\n at Bob. \"You're plain nuts,\" he complained. \"How do you propose to go\n about convincing the Saylor brothers they ought to let us have the\n asteroid back? Remember, commercial ships aren't allowed to carry\n long-range weapons. And we couldn't ram the Saylor brothers' ship—not\n without damaging our own ship just as much. Go ahead and answer that.\"", "Bob looked at Queazy dismally. \"The old balance-wheel,\" he groaned at\n Starre. \"He's always pulling me up short when I go off half-cocked. All\n I know is, that maybe we'll get a good idea as we go along. In the\n meantime, Starre—ahem—none of us has eaten in three weeks...?\"\n\n\n Starre got the idea. She smiled dazzlingly and vanished toward the\n galley.\nBob Parker was in love with Starre Lowenthal. He knew that after five\n days out, as the ship hurled itself at breakneck speed toward Earth;\n probably that distracting emotion was the real reason he couldn't\n attach any significance to Starre's dumbbell-shaped ship, which trailed\n astern, attached by a long cable.\n\n\n Starre apparently knew he was in love with her, too, for on the fifth\n day Bob was teaching her the mechanics of operating the hauler, and she\n gently lifted his hand from a finger-switch.", "All this had happened in such a short space of time that the Saylor\n brothers must have had only a bare realization of what was going on.\n But by the time the \"yo-yo\" was flung at them again, this time with\n better calculations, they managed to put the firmly held asteroid\n between them and the deadly missile. But it was clumsy evasion, for\n the asteroid was several times as massive as the ship which was towing\n it, and its inertia was great. And as soon as the little ship came\n spinning back to rest, Bob flung the hauler to a new vantage point and\n again the \"yo-yo\" snapped out.\n\n\n And this time—collision! Bob yelled as he saw the stern section of the\n Saylor brothers' ship crumple like tissue paper crushed between the\n hand. The dumbbell-shaped ship, smaller, and therefore stauncher due to\n the principle of the arch, wound up again, wobbling a little. It had\n received a mere dent in its starboard half.", "\"What's that?\" he whispered.\n\n\n \"What's wha—\nOh!\n\"\n\n\n Bob Parker's stomach caved in. A few hundred feet away, floating\n gently toward the asteroid, came another ship—a ship a trifle bigger\n than their own. The girl turned, too. They heard her gasp. In another\n second, Bob was standing next to her. He turned the audio-switch to his\n headset off, and spoke to the girl by putting his helmet against hers.\n\n\n \"Listen to me, miss,\" he snapped earnestly, when she tried to draw\n away. \"Don't talk by radio. That ship belongs to the Saylor brothers!\n Oh, Lord, that this should happen! Somewhere along the line, we've been\n double-crossed. Those boys are after this asteroid too, and they won't\n hesitate to pull any rough stuff. We're in this together, understand?\n We got to back each other up.\"", "\"A month!\" Parker burst the word out. He started to sweat, then his\n face became grim. He took two slow steps toward the girl. She blinked\n and lost her composure and unconsciously backed up two steps. About\n twenty steps away was her small dumbbell-shaped ship, so shiny and\n unscarred that it reflected starlight in highlights from its curved\n surface. A rich girl's ship, Bob Parker thought angrily. A month would\n be too late!", "There was little doubt the Saylors' saw their approach. But,\n scornfully, they made no attempt to evade. There was no possible harm\n the oncoming ship could wreak. Or at least that was what they thought,\n for Bob brought the hauler's speed down to zero—and Starre Lowenthal's\n little ship, possessing its own inertia, kept on moving!\n\n\n It spun away from the hauler's blunt nose, paying out two rigid\n lengths of cable behind it as it unwound, hurled itself forward like a\n fantastic spinning cannon ball.\n\n\n \"It's going to hit!\"", "\"Have it your way,\" Bob Parker sang, happily. He threw the ethergram\n to the winds and it fell gently to the deck-plates. While Queazy—so\n called because his full name was Quentin Zuyler—dropped the ship\n straight down to the smooth surface of the asteroid, and clamped it\n tight with magnetic grapples, Bob flung open the lazarette, brought\n out two space-suits. Moments later, they were outside the ship, with\n star-powdered infinity spread to all sides.", "Bob saw the girl now, standing a little behind Queazy, looking down at\n him curiously, but unhappily. Her space-suit was off. She was wearing\n lightly striped blue slacks and blue silk blouse and she had a paper\n flower in her hair. Something in Bob's stomach caved in as his eyes\n widened on her.\n\n\n The girl said glumly, \"I guess you men won't much care for me when you\n find out who I am and what I've done. I'm Starre Lowenthal—Andrew S.\n Burnside's granddaughter!\"\nBob came slowly to his feet, and matched Queazy's slowly growing anger.\n\n\n \"Say that again?\" he snapped. \"This is some kind of dirty trick you and\n your grandfather cooked up?\"", "\"No!\" she exclaimed. \"No. My grandfather didn't even know there was an\n asteroid like this. But I did, long before he ordered it from you—or\n from the Saylor brothers. You see—well, my granddad's about the\n stubbornest old hoot-owl in this universe! He's always had his way, and\n when people stand in his way, that's just a challenge to him. He's been\n badgering me for years to marry Mac, and so has Mac—\"\n\n\n \"Who's Mac?\" Queazy demanded.", "\"\nOuch!\n\" Bob groaned. Then he looked at Starre Lowenthal with\n determination. \"Miss, pardon me if I say that this deal you and your\n granddad cooked up is plain screwy! With us on the butt end. But I'm\n going to put this to you plainly. We can catch up with the Saylor\n brothers even if they are three weeks ahead of us. The Saylor ship and\n ours both travel on the HH drive—inertia-less. But the asteroid has\n plenty of inertia, and so they'll have to haul it down to Earth by a\n long, spiraling orbit. We can go direct and probably catch up with them\n a few hundred thousand miles this side of Earth. And we can have a\n fling at getting the asteroid back!\"\n\n\n Her eyes sparkled. \"You mean—\" she cried. Then her attractive face\n fell. \"Oh,\" she said. \"\nOh!\nAnd when you get it back, you'll land it.\"", "\"We have to work fast,\" Bob stammered, sweating. He got within\n naked-eye distance of the Saylor brothers' ship. Below, Earth was\n spread out, a huge crescent shape, part of the Eastern hemisphere\n vaguely visible through impeding clouds and atmosphere. The enemy ship\n was two miles distant, a black shadow occulting part of the brilliant\n sky. It was moving along a down-spiraling path toward Earth.\n\n\n Queazy's big hand gripped his shoulder. \"Go to it, Bob!\"\n\n\n Bob nodded grimly. He backed the hauler up about thirty miles, then\n sent it forward again, directly toward the Saylor brothers' ship at ten\n miles per second. And resting on the blunt nose of the ship was the\n \"yo-yo.\"" ] ]
train	63890	[ "What is the origin of the name Joe on Venus? \n", "Who is Joe? \n", "What is the first clue that hints at how Venusian culture has absorbed the name Joe? \n", "What is the significance of the mission Colonel Walsh gives Major Polk? \n", "Major Polk refers to his long hike through the jungle with guide Joe as being like. . . \n", "Which three things do Venusians love about Terrans?\n", "What is the relationship between Polk and Walsh? What is the central complication in their history together?\n", "Which “Joe” faces the brunt of Colonel Walsh’s racism? \n", "What is the name of the Captain in charge of briefing the Major when he arrives on Venus? \n" ]	[ [ "The Venusians use “Joe” as an idiom, referring to friends and family as Joe, even though that is not their given Venusian name. \n", "Terrans use the term “Joe” to refer to each other. The Venusians took the idiom literally and adopted it in earnest as the global name.", "There is a Venusian hero named Joe, prompting all Venusians to take the name.\n", "Venusians are required by Terrans to use the name as a sign of enslavement.\n" ], [ "The Major’s senior officer \n", "A Venusian who doesn’t like cigarettes \n", "The entire population of Venus \n", "A Venusian Trader \n" ], [ "The first Joe who Major Polk meets knows the Terran idiom, “stabbed in the back.” \n", "The first Joe who Major Polk meets knows the Terran idiom, “you’ve got the wrong number.”\n", "The first Joe who Major Polk meets knows the Terran idiom, “bite the bullet.” \n", "The first Joe who Major Polk meets knows the Terran idiom, “Joe,” as a way of causally referring to others. \n" ], [ "Walsh sends Polk on a fools errand in order to trick him into time away from Earth so that Walsh can botch the occupation on Mars once and for all. \n", "Walsh sends Major Polk on a fools errand so that he can trick Polk into the Venusian jungle and kill him, serving as revenge for the embarrassment Polk caused him years ago. \n", "Walsh sends Polk on a fools errands in order to trick him into a full time job on Venus.\n", "Walsh sends Polk on a fools errand in order to trick him into finding trader Joe, who is responsible for some of Walsh’s recent military problems.\n" ], [ "The time a friend took him on a journey through the city on his birthday.\n", "The time Walsh fell asleep on the job and almost destroyed the barracks.", "His time in boot camp.\n", "The relentless way in which Venusians constantly ask for more cigarettes.\n" ], [ "The name “Joe,” Terran cigarettes, and their fun jokes. \n", "The name “Joe,” Terran idioms, and Terran spaceships \n", "Terran idioms, Terran cigarettes, and the Terran interest in Venus. \n", "The name “Joe,” Terran spaceships, and Terran cigarettes. \n" ], [ "Colonel Walsh is Major Polk’s senior officer. Their relationship became contentious in boot camp, when Walsh reported Polk for falling asleep on the job. \n", "Colonel Walsh is Major Polk’s ex best friend. Their relationship became contentious during the Terran occupation of Mars, when Polk realized Walsh was prejudiced against Martian natives. \n", "Colonel Polk is Major Walsh’s ex best friend. Their relationship became contentious in boot camp, when Polk reported Walsh for falling asleep on the job.\n", "Colonel Walsh is Major Polk’s senior officer. Their relationship became contentious in boot camp, when Polk reported Walsh for falling asleep on the job. \n" ], [ "Bartender Joe \n", "Trader Joe \n", "Military Joe\n", "Jungle Guide Joe\n" ], [ "Bransten \n", "Trader Joe \n", "Walsh\n", "Bartender Joe \n" ] ]	[ 2, 3, 2, 2, 1, 1, 4, 4, 1 ]	[ 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "\"What's with all this Joe business? It may be a very original name but\n I think its popularity here is a little outstanding.\"\n\n\n Captain Bransten began to chuckle softly. I personally didn't think it\n was so funny. I tossed him my withering Superior Officer's gaze and\n waited for his explanation.\n\n\n \"I hadn't realized this was your first time on Venus,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Is there a local hero named Joe?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"No, no, nothing like that,\" he assured me. \"It's a simple culture, you\n know. Not nearly as developed as Mars.\"\n\n\n \"I can see that,\" I said bitingly.\n\n\n \"And the natives are only now becoming acquainted with Terran culture.\n Lots of enlisted men, you know.\"", "\"And this man is on Venus now?\" I asked for confirmation. I'd never\n been to Venus, being in Space II ever since I'd left the Moon run. It\n was just like Walsh to ship me off to a strange place.\n\n\n \"Yes, Major,\" he said. \"This man is on Venus.\"\n\n\n At the Academy he had called me Fred. That was before I'd reported\n him for sleeping on Boiler Watch. He'd goofed off on a pile of uranium\n that could've, and almost did, blow the barracks sky-high that night.\n He still thought it was my fault, as if I'd done the wrong thing by\n reporting him. And now, through the fouled-up machinery that exists in\n any military organization, he outranked me.\n\n\n \"And the man's name, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Joe.\" A tight smile played on his face.\n\n\n \"Joe what?\" I asked.", "Everybody was Joe. It was one beautiful, happy, joyous round of\n stinking, hot jungle. And I wasn't getting any nearer my man. Nor had\n I any idea how I was supposed to find him. I began to feel pretty low\n about the whole affair.\n\n\n Joe, on the other hand, enjoyed every moment of the trip. In each\n village he greeted the natives cheerfully, told them stories, swapped\n gossip and jokes. And when it was time to leave, he would say goodbye\n to all his friends and we would plunge into the twisted foliage again.\n\n\n His spirits were always high and he never failed to say the right thing\n that would give a momentary lift to my own depressed state of mind. He\n would talk for hours on end as we hacked our way through the jungle.\n\n\n \"I like Venus,\" he said once. \"I would never leave it.\"\n\n\n \"Have you ever been to Earth?\" I asked.", "A PLANET NAMED JOE\nBy S. A. LOMBINO\nThere were more Joes on Venus than you could shake\n \na ray-gun at. Perhaps there was method in Colonel\n \nWalsh's madness—murder-madness—when he ordered Major\n \nPolk to scan the planet for a guy named Joe.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories\n\n November 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the\n\n U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nColonel Walsh had a great sense of humor. I hated his guts ever since\n we went through the Academy together, but he had a great sense of humor.", "\"Just Joe.\"\n\n\n \"Just Joe?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Walsh said. \"A native, you know. They rarely go in for more than\n first names. But then, it should be simple to find a man with a name\n like Joe. Among the natives, I mean.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know, sir.\"\n\n\n \"A relatively simple assignment,\" Walsh said.\n\n\n \"Can you tell me anything else about this man? Physical appearance?\n Personal habits? Anything?\"\n\n\n Walsh seemed to consider this for a moment. \"Well, physically he's like\n any of the other Venusians, so I can't give you much help there. He\n does have a peculiar habit, though.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"\n\n\n \"He has an affinity for Terran cigarettes.\"", "\"Well,\" Bransten went on, \"that sort of thing mushrooms. The natives\n are a simple, almost childish people. It appealed to them—the Joe\n business, I mean. Now they're all Joe. They like it. That and the\n cigarettes.\"\n\n\n He cleared his throat and looked at me apologetically as if he were\n personally responsible for Venusian culture. In fact, he looked as if\n he were responsible for having put Venus in the heavens in the first\n place.\n\n\n \"Do you understand, Major? Just a case of extended idiom, that's all.\"\n\n\n Just a case of extended\nidiot\n, I thought. An idiot on a wild goose\n chase a hell of a long way from home.\n\n\n \"I understand perfectly,\" I snapped. \"Where are my quarters?\"", "Bransten asked a Venusian named Joe to show me my quarters, reminding\n me that chow was at thirteen hundred. As I was leaving, the first\n Venusian came back with the cigarettes Bransten had ordered.\n\n\n I could tell by the look on his face that he probably had half a carton\n stuffed into his pockets. I shrugged and went to change into a tropical\n tunic.\n\n\n I called Earth right after chow. The Captain assured me that this sort\n of thing was definitely against regulations, but he submitted when I\n twinkled my little gold leaf under his nose.\n\n\n Walsh's face appeared on the screen. He was smiling, looking like a fat\n pussy cat.\n\n\n \"What is it, Major?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"This man Joe,\" I said. \"Can you give me any more on him?\"", "Two: I could assume there really was a guy name Joe somewhere in that\n jungle, a Joe separate and apart from the other Joes on this planet, a\n trader Joe who knew the Martians well. I could always admit failure, of\n course, and return empty handed. Mission not accomplished. Or, I might\n really find a guy who was trader Joe.\n\n\n I made my decision quickly. I wanted to stay in the Service, and\n besides Walsh may have been on the level for the first time in his\n life. Maybe there was a Joe here who could help us on Mars. If there\n was I'd try to find him. It was still a hell of a trick though.\n\n\n I cursed Walsh again and pushed the buzzer near my bed.\n\n\n A tall Venusian stepped into the room.\n\n\n \"Joe?\" I asked, just to be sure.\n\n\n \"Who else, boss?\" he answered.", "Sending me off on a wild goose chase after a character named Joe may\n have been a gag. But it may have been something a little grimmer than a\n gag, and I made up my mind to be extremely careful from here on in.\n\n\n The guide arrived at fifteen hundred on the dot. He was tall,\n elongated, looked almost like all the other Venusians I'd seen so far.\n\n\n \"I understand you need a Grade A guide, sir,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Are you familiar with the jungle?\" I asked him.\n\n\n \"Born and raised there, sir. Know it like the back of my hand.\"\n\n\n \"Has Joe told you what the payment will be?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. A carton and a half of cigarettes.\"\n\n\n I thought about Joe deducting his commission and smiled.\n\n\n \"When can we leave?\"", "I walked over and asked, \"What are you serving, pal?\"\n\n\n \"Call me Joe,\" he answered.\n\n\n He caught me off balance. \"What?\"\n\n\n \"Joe,\" he said again.\n\n\n A faint glimmer of understanding began to penetrate my thick skull.\n \"You wouldn't happen to be Joe the trader? The guy who knows all about\n Mars, would you?\"\n\n\n \"I never left home,\" he said simply. \"What are you drinking?\"\n\n\n That rat! That dirty, filthy, stinking, unprincipled....\nBut then, it should be simple to find a man with a name like\nJoe.\nAmong the natives, I mean.\nSure. Oh sure. Real simple. Walsh was about the lowest, most\n contemptible....\n\n\n \"What are you drinking, pal?\" the Venusian asked again.", "\"I'm trying to locate someone,\" I said. \"I'll need a guide to take me\n into the jungle. Can you get me one?\"\n\n\n \"It'll cost you, boss,\" the Venusian said.\n\n\n \"How much?\"\n\n\n \"Two cartons of cigarettes at least.\"\n\n\n \"Who's the guide?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"How's the price sound?\"\n\n\n \"Fine, fine,\" I said impatiently. And the Captain had said they were\n almost a childish people!\n\n\n \"His name is Joe,\" the Venusian told me. \"Best damn guide on the\n planet. Take you anywhere you want to go, do anything you want to do.\n Courageous. Doesn't know the meaning of fear. I've known him to....\"", "Venus was hotter than I'd expected it to be. Much too hot for the tunic\n I was wearing. It smelled, too. A funny smell I couldn't place. Like\n a mixture of old shoe and after-shave. There were plants everywhere\n I looked. Big plants and small ones, some blooming with flowers I'd\n never seen before, and some as bare as cactus.\n\n\n I recognized a blue figure as one of the natives the pilot had told me\n about. He was tall, looking almost human except that everything about\n him was elongated. His features, his muscles, everything seemed to have\n been stretched like a rubber band. I kept expecting him to pop back to\n normal. Instead, he flashed a double row of brilliant teeth at me.\n\n\n I wondered if he spoke English. \"Hey, boy,\" I called.\n\n\n He ambled over with long-legged strides that closed the distance\n between us in seconds.\n\n\n \"Call me Joe,\" he said.", "\"We're out of cigarettes, Joe,\" the Captain said. \"Will you get us\n some, please?\"\n\n\n \"Sure thing,\" the Venusian answered. He smiled broadly and closed the\n door behind him.\nAnother Joe\n, I thought.\nAnother damned Joe.\n\"They steal them,\" Captain Bransten said abruptly.\n\n\n \"Steal what?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"Cigarettes. I sometimes think the cigarette is one of the few things\n they like about Terran culture.\"\n\n\n So Walsh had taken care of that angle too.\nHe does have a peculiar\n habit, though. He has an affinity for Terran cigarettes.\nCigarettes\n was the tip I should have given; not solars.\n\n\n \"All right,\" I said, \"suppose we start at the beginning.\"\n\n\n Captain Bransten opened his eyes wide. \"Sir?\" he asked.", "\"Oh,\" I said, my voice conveying my disappointment. I sighed and began\n wondering just how I should go about contacting the Joe I was looking\n for. My orders said I was to report to Captain Bransten immediately\n upon arrival. I figured the hell with Captain Bransten. I outranked him\n anyway, and there wasn't much he could do if I decided to stop for a\n drink first.\n\n\n \"Where's the Officer's Club?\" I asked the Venusian.\n\n\n \"Are you buying information or are you just curious?\"\n\n\n \"Can you take me there?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"Sure thing, Toots.\" He picked up my bags and started walking up a\n heavily overgrown path. We'd probably walked for about ten minutes when\n he dropped my bags and said, \"There it is.\"", "I began to get the idea. And I began to appreciate Walsh's doubtful\n ancestry more keenly.\n\n\n \"It's impossible to tell exactly where it all started, of course,\"\n Bransten was saying.\n\n\n I was beginning to get angry. Very angry. I was thinking of Walsh\n sitting back in a nice cozy foam chair back on Earth.\n\n\n \"Get to the point, Captain!\" I barked.\n\n\n \"Easy, sir,\" Bransten said, turning pale. I could see that the Captain\n wasn't used to entertaining Majors. \"The enlisted men. You know how\n they are. They'll ask a native to do something and they'll call him\n Joe. 'Hey, Joe, give me a hand with this.' Or 'Listen, Joe, how'd you\n like to earn some cigarettes?' Do you follow?\"\n\n\n \"I follow, all right,\" I said bitterly.", "\"No,\" Joe replied. \"I like Terrans too, you understand. They are good\n for Venus. And they are fun.\"\n\n\n \"Fun?\" I asked, thinking of a particular species of Terran: species\n Leonard Walsh.\n\n\n \"Yes, yes,\" he said wholeheartedly. \"They joke and they laugh and ...\n well, you know.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose so,\" I admitted.", "\"Mmmm,\" he said, \"yes, that's true. But this is a special job. It so\n happens this Venusian is the one man who can help us understand just\n what's happening on Mars.\"\n\n\n I tried to picture a Venusian understanding Mars and I didn't get very\n far.\n\n\n \"He's had many dealings with the natives there,\" Walsh explained. \"If\n anyone can tell us the reasons for the revolt, he can.\"\n\n\n If Walsh really wanted to know the reasons for the revolt, I could give\n them to him in one word: Walsh. I had to laugh at the way he called\n it \"revolt.\" It had been going on for six months now and we'd lost at\n least a thousand men from Space II. Revolt.", "\"It will involve finding one man, a Venusian native.\"\n\n\n I wanted to say, \"Then why the hell don't you send a green kid on\n the job? Why me?\" Instead, I nodded and watched him playing with his\n fingers.\n\n\n \"The man is a trader of sorts. Rather intelligent.\" He paused, then\n added, \"For a native, that is.\"\n\n\n I had never liked Walsh's attitude toward natives. I hadn't liked the\n way he'd treated the natives on Mars ever since he'd taken over there.\n Which brought to mind an important point.\n\n\n \"I always figured Venus was under the jurisdiction of Space III, sir. I\n thought our activities were confined to Mars.\"\n\n\n He folded his fingers like a deck of cards and dropped them on his desk\n as if he were waiting for me to cut.", "\"Skip it,\" I said. \"How do I get to the captain's shack?\"\n\n\n \"Follow your nose, pal. Can't miss it.\"\n\n\n I started to pick up my bag as another Venusian entered. He waved at\n the bartender.\n\n\n \"Hello, Joe,\" he said. \"How's it going?\"\n\n\n \"Not so hot, Joe,\" the bartender replied.\n\n\n I listened in fascination. Joe, Joe, Joe. So this was Walsh's idea of a\n great gag. Very funny. Very....\n\n\n \"You Major Polk, sweetheart?\" the Venusian who'd just come in asked.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I said, still thinking of Colonel Walsh.\n\n\n \"You better get your butt over to the captain's shack,\" he said. \"He's\n about ready to post you as overdue.\"", "Joe smiled secretly, and we pushed on. I began to find, more and more,\n that I had started to talk freely to Joe. In the beginning he had been\n just my guide. There had been the strained relationship of employer and\n employee. But as the days lengthened into weeks, the formal atmosphere\n began to crumble. I found myself telling him all about Earth, about\n the people there, about my decision to attend the Academy, the rigid\n tests, the grind, even the Moon run. Joe was a good listener, nodding\n sympathetically, finding experiences in his own life to parallel my own.\n\n\n And as our relationship progressed from a casual one to a definitely\n friendly one, Joe seemed more enthusiastic than ever to keep up our\n grinding pace to find what we were looking for." ], [ "Everybody was Joe. It was one beautiful, happy, joyous round of\n stinking, hot jungle. And I wasn't getting any nearer my man. Nor had\n I any idea how I was supposed to find him. I began to feel pretty low\n about the whole affair.\n\n\n Joe, on the other hand, enjoyed every moment of the trip. In each\n village he greeted the natives cheerfully, told them stories, swapped\n gossip and jokes. And when it was time to leave, he would say goodbye\n to all his friends and we would plunge into the twisted foliage again.\n\n\n His spirits were always high and he never failed to say the right thing\n that would give a momentary lift to my own depressed state of mind. He\n would talk for hours on end as we hacked our way through the jungle.\n\n\n \"I like Venus,\" he said once. \"I would never leave it.\"\n\n\n \"Have you ever been to Earth?\" I asked.", "Joe smiled secretly, and we pushed on. I began to find, more and more,\n that I had started to talk freely to Joe. In the beginning he had been\n just my guide. There had been the strained relationship of employer and\n employee. But as the days lengthened into weeks, the formal atmosphere\n began to crumble. I found myself telling him all about Earth, about\n the people there, about my decision to attend the Academy, the rigid\n tests, the grind, even the Moon run. Joe was a good listener, nodding\n sympathetically, finding experiences in his own life to parallel my own.\n\n\n And as our relationship progressed from a casual one to a definitely\n friendly one, Joe seemed more enthusiastic than ever to keep up our\n grinding pace to find what we were looking for.", "\"A man of my calibre,\" he said then, his face grim. \"Dealing with\n savages.\" He caught himself again and threw a hasty glance at Joe.\n The perplexed frown had grown heavier on Joe's face. He looked at the\n colonel in puzzlement.", "Joe was an excellent guide and a pleasant companion. He seemed to be\n enjoying a great romp, seemed to love the jungle and take a secret\n pleasure in the work he was doing. There were times when I couldn't\n see three feet ahead of me. He'd stand stock still for a few minutes,\n his head barely moving, his eyes darting from one plant to another.\n Then he'd say, \"This way,\" and take off into what looked like more\n impenetrable jungle invariably to find a little path leading directly\n to another village.\n\n\n Each village was the same. The natives would come running out of their\n huts, tall and blue, shouting, \"Cigarettes, Joe? Cigarettes?\" It took\n me a while to realize they were addressing me and not my guide.", "Sending me off on a wild goose chase after a character named Joe may\n have been a gag. But it may have been something a little grimmer than a\n gag, and I made up my mind to be extremely careful from here on in.\n\n\n The guide arrived at fifteen hundred on the dot. He was tall,\n elongated, looked almost like all the other Venusians I'd seen so far.\n\n\n \"I understand you need a Grade A guide, sir,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Are you familiar with the jungle?\" I asked him.\n\n\n \"Born and raised there, sir. Know it like the back of my hand.\"\n\n\n \"Has Joe told you what the payment will be?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. A carton and a half of cigarettes.\"\n\n\n I thought about Joe deducting his commission and smiled.\n\n\n \"When can we leave?\"", "Walsh grinned a little. \"Always the wit,\" he said drily. And then the\n smile faded from his lips and his eyes took on a hard lustre. \"I'm\n going to kill you, you know.\" He said it as if he were saying, \"I think\n it'll rain tomorrow.\"\n\n\n Joe almost clapped his hands together with glee. He was really enjoying\n this. Another of those funny Terran games.\n\n\n \"You gave me a powerful handicap to overcome,\" Walsh said. \"I suppose I\n should thank you, really.\"\n\n\n \"You're welcome,\" I said.\n\n\n \"It wasn't easy living down the disgrace you caused me.\"\n\n\n \"It was your own damn fault,\" I said. \"You knew what you were doing\n when you decided to cork off.\"\n\n\n Beside me, Joe chuckled a little, enjoying the game immensely.", "\"Right away, sir. We won't need much really. I've made a list of\n supplies and I can get them in less than an hour. I suggest you wear\n light clothing, boots, and a hat.\"\n\n\n \"Will I need a weapon?\"\n\n\n He looked at me, his eyes faintly amused. \"Why, what for, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Never mind,\" I said. \"What's your name, by the way?\"\n\n\n He lifted his eyebrows, and his eyes widened in his narrow face. He was\n definitely surprised.\n\n\n \"Joe,\" he said. \"Didn't you know?\"\nWhen we'd been out for a while I discovered why Joe had suggested the\n boots and the hat. The undergrowth was often sharp and jagged and it\n would have sliced my legs to ribbons were they not protected by the\n high boots. The hat kept the strong sun off my head.", "\"Just Joe.\"\n\n\n \"Just Joe?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Walsh said. \"A native, you know. They rarely go in for more than\n first names. But then, it should be simple to find a man with a name\n like Joe. Among the natives, I mean.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know, sir.\"\n\n\n \"A relatively simple assignment,\" Walsh said.\n\n\n \"Can you tell me anything else about this man? Physical appearance?\n Personal habits? Anything?\"\n\n\n Walsh seemed to consider this for a moment. \"Well, physically he's like\n any of the other Venusians, so I can't give you much help there. He\n does have a peculiar habit, though.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"\n\n\n \"He has an affinity for Terran cigarettes.\"", "\"And this man is on Venus now?\" I asked for confirmation. I'd never\n been to Venus, being in Space II ever since I'd left the Moon run. It\n was just like Walsh to ship me off to a strange place.\n\n\n \"Yes, Major,\" he said. \"This man is on Venus.\"\n\n\n At the Academy he had called me Fred. That was before I'd reported\n him for sleeping on Boiler Watch. He'd goofed off on a pile of uranium\n that could've, and almost did, blow the barracks sky-high that night.\n He still thought it was my fault, as if I'd done the wrong thing by\n reporting him. And now, through the fouled-up machinery that exists in\n any military organization, he outranked me.\n\n\n \"And the man's name, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Joe.\" A tight smile played on his face.\n\n\n \"Joe what?\" I asked.", "Two: I could assume there really was a guy name Joe somewhere in that\n jungle, a Joe separate and apart from the other Joes on this planet, a\n trader Joe who knew the Martians well. I could always admit failure, of\n course, and return empty handed. Mission not accomplished. Or, I might\n really find a guy who was trader Joe.\n\n\n I made my decision quickly. I wanted to stay in the Service, and\n besides Walsh may have been on the level for the first time in his\n life. Maybe there was a Joe here who could help us on Mars. If there\n was I'd try to find him. It was still a hell of a trick though.\n\n\n I cursed Walsh again and pushed the buzzer near my bed.\n\n\n A tall Venusian stepped into the room.\n\n\n \"Joe?\" I asked, just to be sure.\n\n\n \"Who else, boss?\" he answered.", "\"I'm trying to locate someone,\" I said. \"I'll need a guide to take me\n into the jungle. Can you get me one?\"\n\n\n \"It'll cost you, boss,\" the Venusian said.\n\n\n \"How much?\"\n\n\n \"Two cartons of cigarettes at least.\"\n\n\n \"Who's the guide?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"How's the price sound?\"\n\n\n \"Fine, fine,\" I said impatiently. And the Captain had said they were\n almost a childish people!\n\n\n \"His name is Joe,\" the Venusian told me. \"Best damn guide on the\n planet. Take you anywhere you want to go, do anything you want to do.\n Courageous. Doesn't know the meaning of fear. I've known him to....\"", "I turned rapidly. Joe nodded and kept grinning, a grin that told me he\n was getting a big kick out of all this. Like a kid playing a game.\n\n\n I faced Walsh again. \"Okay, what's it all about, pal?\"\n\n\n \"Colonel,\" Walsh corrected me. \"You mustn't forget to say Colonel,\nMajor\n.\" He emphasized my rank, and he said it with a sort of ruthless\n finality.\n\n\n I waited. I could see he was just busting to tell me how clever he'd\n been. Besides, there wasn't much I could do but wait. Not with Walsh\n pointing the stun gun at my middle.\n\n\n \"We've come a long way since the Academy, haven't we, Major?\"\n\n\n \"If you mean in miles,\" I said, looking around at the plants, \"we sure\n have.\"", "Once we stopped in a clearing to rest. Joe lounged on the matted\n greenery, his long body stretched out in front of him, the knife\n gleaming in his belt. I'd seen him slash his way through thick, tangled\n vines with that knife, his long, muscular arms powerfully slicing\n through them like strips of silk.\n\n\n \"How far are we from the Station?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"Three or four Earth weeks,\" he replied.\n\n\n I sighed wearily. \"Where do we go from here?\"\n\n\n \"There are more villages,\" he said.\n\n\n \"We'll never find him.\"\n\n\n \"Possibly,\" Joe mused, the smile creeping over his face again.\n\n\n \"A wild goose chase. A fool's errand.\"\n\n\n \"We'd better get started,\" Joe said simply.", "\"What...?\" I started.\n\n\n \"It's all right,\" Joe said, smiling.\n\n\n The ship looked vaguely familiar. I noticed the crest of Space II near\n the nose, and a lot of things became clear then. I also saw Walsh\n standing near one of the huts, a stun gun in his hand.\n\n\n \"Hello, Major,\" he called, almost cheerfully. The gun didn't look\n cheerful, though. It was pointed at my head.\n\n\n \"Fancy meeting you here, Colonel,\" I said, trying to match his\n joviality. Somehow it didn't quite come off.\n\n\n Joe was walking beside me, waving at the colonel, beaming all over with\n happiness.\n\n\n \"I see you found your man,\" Walsh said.", "I dropped my bags and stared at him. Maybe this\nwas\ngoing to be a\n simple assignment after all. \"I sure am glad to see you, Joe,\" I said.\n\n\n \"Same here, Toots,\" he answered.\n\n\n \"The guys back in Space II are searching high and low for you,\" I told\n him.\n\n\n \"You've got the wrong number,\" he said, and I was a little surprised at\n his use of Terran idiom.\n\n\n \"You are Joe, aren't you? Joe the trader?\"\n\n\n \"I'm Joe, all right,\" he said. \"Only thing I ever traded, though, was a\n pocketknife. Got a set of keys for it.\"", "A PLANET NAMED JOE\nBy S. A. LOMBINO\nThere were more Joes on Venus than you could shake\n \na ray-gun at. Perhaps there was method in Colonel\n \nWalsh's madness—murder-madness—when he ordered Major\n \nPolk to scan the planet for a guy named Joe.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories\n\n November 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the\n\n U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nColonel Walsh had a great sense of humor. I hated his guts ever since\n we went through the Academy together, but he had a great sense of humor.", "\"We're out of cigarettes, Joe,\" the Captain said. \"Will you get us\n some, please?\"\n\n\n \"Sure thing,\" the Venusian answered. He smiled broadly and closed the\n door behind him.\nAnother Joe\n, I thought.\nAnother damned Joe.\n\"They steal them,\" Captain Bransten said abruptly.\n\n\n \"Steal what?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"Cigarettes. I sometimes think the cigarette is one of the few things\n they like about Terran culture.\"\n\n\n So Walsh had taken care of that angle too.\nHe does have a peculiar\n habit, though. He has an affinity for Terran cigarettes.\nCigarettes\n was the tip I should have given; not solars.\n\n\n \"All right,\" I said, \"suppose we start at the beginning.\"\n\n\n Captain Bransten opened his eyes wide. \"Sir?\" he asked.", "I walked over and asked, \"What are you serving, pal?\"\n\n\n \"Call me Joe,\" he answered.\n\n\n He caught me off balance. \"What?\"\n\n\n \"Joe,\" he said again.\n\n\n A faint glimmer of understanding began to penetrate my thick skull.\n \"You wouldn't happen to be Joe the trader? The guy who knows all about\n Mars, would you?\"\n\n\n \"I never left home,\" he said simply. \"What are you drinking?\"\n\n\n That rat! That dirty, filthy, stinking, unprincipled....\nBut then, it should be simple to find a man with a name like\nJoe.\nAmong the natives, I mean.\nSure. Oh sure. Real simple. Walsh was about the lowest, most\n contemptible....\n\n\n \"What are you drinking, pal?\" the Venusian asked again.", "Bransten asked a Venusian named Joe to show me my quarters, reminding\n me that chow was at thirteen hundred. As I was leaving, the first\n Venusian came back with the cigarettes Bransten had ordered.\n\n\n I could tell by the look on his face that he probably had half a carton\n stuffed into his pockets. I shrugged and went to change into a tropical\n tunic.\n\n\n I called Earth right after chow. The Captain assured me that this sort\n of thing was definitely against regulations, but he submitted when I\n twinkled my little gold leaf under his nose.\n\n\n Walsh's face appeared on the screen. He was smiling, looking like a fat\n pussy cat.\n\n\n \"What is it, Major?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"This man Joe,\" I said. \"Can you give me any more on him?\"", "Beside me, a slight frown crossed Joe's face. Apparently he couldn't\n understand the seriousness of our voices. What had happened to the\n game, the fun?\n\n\n \"You brought the Mars business on yourself,\" I told Walsh. \"There was\n never any trouble before you took command.\"\n\n\n \"The natives,\" he practically shouted. \"They ... they....\"\n\n\n Joe caught his breath sharply, and I wondered what Walsh was going to\n say about the natives. Apparently he'd realized that Joe was a native.\n Or maybe Joe's knife had something to do with it.\n\n\n \"What about the natives?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" Walsh said. \"Nothing.\" He was silent for a while." ], [ "\"What's with all this Joe business? It may be a very original name but\n I think its popularity here is a little outstanding.\"\n\n\n Captain Bransten began to chuckle softly. I personally didn't think it\n was so funny. I tossed him my withering Superior Officer's gaze and\n waited for his explanation.\n\n\n \"I hadn't realized this was your first time on Venus,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Is there a local hero named Joe?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"No, no, nothing like that,\" he assured me. \"It's a simple culture, you\n know. Not nearly as developed as Mars.\"\n\n\n \"I can see that,\" I said bitingly.\n\n\n \"And the natives are only now becoming acquainted with Terran culture.\n Lots of enlisted men, you know.\"", "\"Just Joe.\"\n\n\n \"Just Joe?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Walsh said. \"A native, you know. They rarely go in for more than\n first names. But then, it should be simple to find a man with a name\n like Joe. Among the natives, I mean.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know, sir.\"\n\n\n \"A relatively simple assignment,\" Walsh said.\n\n\n \"Can you tell me anything else about this man? Physical appearance?\n Personal habits? Anything?\"\n\n\n Walsh seemed to consider this for a moment. \"Well, physically he's like\n any of the other Venusians, so I can't give you much help there. He\n does have a peculiar habit, though.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"\n\n\n \"He has an affinity for Terran cigarettes.\"", "Everybody was Joe. It was one beautiful, happy, joyous round of\n stinking, hot jungle. And I wasn't getting any nearer my man. Nor had\n I any idea how I was supposed to find him. I began to feel pretty low\n about the whole affair.\n\n\n Joe, on the other hand, enjoyed every moment of the trip. In each\n village he greeted the natives cheerfully, told them stories, swapped\n gossip and jokes. And when it was time to leave, he would say goodbye\n to all his friends and we would plunge into the twisted foliage again.\n\n\n His spirits were always high and he never failed to say the right thing\n that would give a momentary lift to my own depressed state of mind. He\n would talk for hours on end as we hacked our way through the jungle.\n\n\n \"I like Venus,\" he said once. \"I would never leave it.\"\n\n\n \"Have you ever been to Earth?\" I asked.", "\"Well,\" Bransten went on, \"that sort of thing mushrooms. The natives\n are a simple, almost childish people. It appealed to them—the Joe\n business, I mean. Now they're all Joe. They like it. That and the\n cigarettes.\"\n\n\n He cleared his throat and looked at me apologetically as if he were\n personally responsible for Venusian culture. In fact, he looked as if\n he were responsible for having put Venus in the heavens in the first\n place.\n\n\n \"Do you understand, Major? Just a case of extended idiom, that's all.\"\n\n\n Just a case of extended\nidiot\n, I thought. An idiot on a wild goose\n chase a hell of a long way from home.\n\n\n \"I understand perfectly,\" I snapped. \"Where are my quarters?\"", "\"And this man is on Venus now?\" I asked for confirmation. I'd never\n been to Venus, being in Space II ever since I'd left the Moon run. It\n was just like Walsh to ship me off to a strange place.\n\n\n \"Yes, Major,\" he said. \"This man is on Venus.\"\n\n\n At the Academy he had called me Fred. That was before I'd reported\n him for sleeping on Boiler Watch. He'd goofed off on a pile of uranium\n that could've, and almost did, blow the barracks sky-high that night.\n He still thought it was my fault, as if I'd done the wrong thing by\n reporting him. And now, through the fouled-up machinery that exists in\n any military organization, he outranked me.\n\n\n \"And the man's name, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Joe.\" A tight smile played on his face.\n\n\n \"Joe what?\" I asked.", "A PLANET NAMED JOE\nBy S. A. LOMBINO\nThere were more Joes on Venus than you could shake\n \na ray-gun at. Perhaps there was method in Colonel\n \nWalsh's madness—murder-madness—when he ordered Major\n \nPolk to scan the planet for a guy named Joe.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories\n\n November 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the\n\n U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nColonel Walsh had a great sense of humor. I hated his guts ever since\n we went through the Academy together, but he had a great sense of humor.", "Bransten asked a Venusian named Joe to show me my quarters, reminding\n me that chow was at thirteen hundred. As I was leaving, the first\n Venusian came back with the cigarettes Bransten had ordered.\n\n\n I could tell by the look on his face that he probably had half a carton\n stuffed into his pockets. I shrugged and went to change into a tropical\n tunic.\n\n\n I called Earth right after chow. The Captain assured me that this sort\n of thing was definitely against regulations, but he submitted when I\n twinkled my little gold leaf under his nose.\n\n\n Walsh's face appeared on the screen. He was smiling, looking like a fat\n pussy cat.\n\n\n \"What is it, Major?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"This man Joe,\" I said. \"Can you give me any more on him?\"", "Sending me off on a wild goose chase after a character named Joe may\n have been a gag. But it may have been something a little grimmer than a\n gag, and I made up my mind to be extremely careful from here on in.\n\n\n The guide arrived at fifteen hundred on the dot. He was tall,\n elongated, looked almost like all the other Venusians I'd seen so far.\n\n\n \"I understand you need a Grade A guide, sir,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Are you familiar with the jungle?\" I asked him.\n\n\n \"Born and raised there, sir. Know it like the back of my hand.\"\n\n\n \"Has Joe told you what the payment will be?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. A carton and a half of cigarettes.\"\n\n\n I thought about Joe deducting his commission and smiled.\n\n\n \"When can we leave?\"", "\"We're out of cigarettes, Joe,\" the Captain said. \"Will you get us\n some, please?\"\n\n\n \"Sure thing,\" the Venusian answered. He smiled broadly and closed the\n door behind him.\nAnother Joe\n, I thought.\nAnother damned Joe.\n\"They steal them,\" Captain Bransten said abruptly.\n\n\n \"Steal what?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"Cigarettes. I sometimes think the cigarette is one of the few things\n they like about Terran culture.\"\n\n\n So Walsh had taken care of that angle too.\nHe does have a peculiar\n habit, though. He has an affinity for Terran cigarettes.\nCigarettes\n was the tip I should have given; not solars.\n\n\n \"All right,\" I said, \"suppose we start at the beginning.\"\n\n\n Captain Bransten opened his eyes wide. \"Sir?\" he asked.", "I walked over and asked, \"What are you serving, pal?\"\n\n\n \"Call me Joe,\" he answered.\n\n\n He caught me off balance. \"What?\"\n\n\n \"Joe,\" he said again.\n\n\n A faint glimmer of understanding began to penetrate my thick skull.\n \"You wouldn't happen to be Joe the trader? The guy who knows all about\n Mars, would you?\"\n\n\n \"I never left home,\" he said simply. \"What are you drinking?\"\n\n\n That rat! That dirty, filthy, stinking, unprincipled....\nBut then, it should be simple to find a man with a name like\nJoe.\nAmong the natives, I mean.\nSure. Oh sure. Real simple. Walsh was about the lowest, most\n contemptible....\n\n\n \"What are you drinking, pal?\" the Venusian asked again.", "Two: I could assume there really was a guy name Joe somewhere in that\n jungle, a Joe separate and apart from the other Joes on this planet, a\n trader Joe who knew the Martians well. I could always admit failure, of\n course, and return empty handed. Mission not accomplished. Or, I might\n really find a guy who was trader Joe.\n\n\n I made my decision quickly. I wanted to stay in the Service, and\n besides Walsh may have been on the level for the first time in his\n life. Maybe there was a Joe here who could help us on Mars. If there\n was I'd try to find him. It was still a hell of a trick though.\n\n\n I cursed Walsh again and pushed the buzzer near my bed.\n\n\n A tall Venusian stepped into the room.\n\n\n \"Joe?\" I asked, just to be sure.\n\n\n \"Who else, boss?\" he answered.", "Venus was hotter than I'd expected it to be. Much too hot for the tunic\n I was wearing. It smelled, too. A funny smell I couldn't place. Like\n a mixture of old shoe and after-shave. There were plants everywhere\n I looked. Big plants and small ones, some blooming with flowers I'd\n never seen before, and some as bare as cactus.\n\n\n I recognized a blue figure as one of the natives the pilot had told me\n about. He was tall, looking almost human except that everything about\n him was elongated. His features, his muscles, everything seemed to have\n been stretched like a rubber band. I kept expecting him to pop back to\n normal. Instead, he flashed a double row of brilliant teeth at me.\n\n\n I wondered if he spoke English. \"Hey, boy,\" I called.\n\n\n He ambled over with long-legged strides that closed the distance\n between us in seconds.\n\n\n \"Call me Joe,\" he said.", "\"I'm trying to locate someone,\" I said. \"I'll need a guide to take me\n into the jungle. Can you get me one?\"\n\n\n \"It'll cost you, boss,\" the Venusian said.\n\n\n \"How much?\"\n\n\n \"Two cartons of cigarettes at least.\"\n\n\n \"Who's the guide?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"How's the price sound?\"\n\n\n \"Fine, fine,\" I said impatiently. And the Captain had said they were\n almost a childish people!\n\n\n \"His name is Joe,\" the Venusian told me. \"Best damn guide on the\n planet. Take you anywhere you want to go, do anything you want to do.\n Courageous. Doesn't know the meaning of fear. I've known him to....\"", "\"Oh,\" I said, my voice conveying my disappointment. I sighed and began\n wondering just how I should go about contacting the Joe I was looking\n for. My orders said I was to report to Captain Bransten immediately\n upon arrival. I figured the hell with Captain Bransten. I outranked him\n anyway, and there wasn't much he could do if I decided to stop for a\n drink first.\n\n\n \"Where's the Officer's Club?\" I asked the Venusian.\n\n\n \"Are you buying information or are you just curious?\"\n\n\n \"Can you take me there?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"Sure thing, Toots.\" He picked up my bags and started walking up a\n heavily overgrown path. We'd probably walked for about ten minutes when\n he dropped my bags and said, \"There it is.\"", "I began to get the idea. And I began to appreciate Walsh's doubtful\n ancestry more keenly.\n\n\n \"It's impossible to tell exactly where it all started, of course,\"\n Bransten was saying.\n\n\n I was beginning to get angry. Very angry. I was thinking of Walsh\n sitting back in a nice cozy foam chair back on Earth.\n\n\n \"Get to the point, Captain!\" I barked.\n\n\n \"Easy, sir,\" Bransten said, turning pale. I could see that the Captain\n wasn't used to entertaining Majors. \"The enlisted men. You know how\n they are. They'll ask a native to do something and they'll call him\n Joe. 'Hey, Joe, give me a hand with this.' Or 'Listen, Joe, how'd you\n like to earn some cigarettes?' Do you follow?\"\n\n\n \"I follow, all right,\" I said bitterly.", "\"No,\" Joe replied. \"I like Terrans too, you understand. They are good\n for Venus. And they are fun.\"\n\n\n \"Fun?\" I asked, thinking of a particular species of Terran: species\n Leonard Walsh.\n\n\n \"Yes, yes,\" he said wholeheartedly. \"They joke and they laugh and ...\n well, you know.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose so,\" I admitted.", "\"Skip it,\" I said. \"How do I get to the captain's shack?\"\n\n\n \"Follow your nose, pal. Can't miss it.\"\n\n\n I started to pick up my bag as another Venusian entered. He waved at\n the bartender.\n\n\n \"Hello, Joe,\" he said. \"How's it going?\"\n\n\n \"Not so hot, Joe,\" the bartender replied.\n\n\n I listened in fascination. Joe, Joe, Joe. So this was Walsh's idea of a\n great gag. Very funny. Very....\n\n\n \"You Major Polk, sweetheart?\" the Venusian who'd just come in asked.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I said, still thinking of Colonel Walsh.\n\n\n \"You better get your butt over to the captain's shack,\" he said. \"He's\n about ready to post you as overdue.\"", "\"Mmmm,\" he said, \"yes, that's true. But this is a special job. It so\n happens this Venusian is the one man who can help us understand just\n what's happening on Mars.\"\n\n\n I tried to picture a Venusian understanding Mars and I didn't get very\n far.\n\n\n \"He's had many dealings with the natives there,\" Walsh explained. \"If\n anyone can tell us the reasons for the revolt, he can.\"\n\n\n If Walsh really wanted to know the reasons for the revolt, I could give\n them to him in one word: Walsh. I had to laugh at the way he called\n it \"revolt.\" It had been going on for six months now and we'd lost at\n least a thousand men from Space II. Revolt.", "\"Sure,\" I said wearily. \"Will you take my bags, please?\"\n\n\n \"Roger,\" he answered. He picked up the bags and nodded at the bar.\n\n\n \"So long, Joe,\" he said to the bartender.\n\n\n \"See you, Joe,\" the bartender called back.\nCaptain Bransten was a mousey, unimpressive sort of man. He was wearing\n a tropical tunic, but he still resembled a wilted lily more than he did\n an officer.\n\n\n \"Have a seat, Major,\" he offered. He reached for a cigarette box on the\n desk and extended it to me. He coughed in embarrassment when he saw it\n was empty. Quickly, he pressed a button on his desk and the door popped\n open. A tall, blue Venusian stepped lithely into the room.\n\n\n \"Sir?\" the Venusian asked.", "I dropped my bags and stared at him. Maybe this\nwas\ngoing to be a\n simple assignment after all. \"I sure am glad to see you, Joe,\" I said.\n\n\n \"Same here, Toots,\" he answered.\n\n\n \"The guys back in Space II are searching high and low for you,\" I told\n him.\n\n\n \"You've got the wrong number,\" he said, and I was a little surprised at\n his use of Terran idiom.\n\n\n \"You are Joe, aren't you? Joe the trader?\"\n\n\n \"I'm Joe, all right,\" he said. \"Only thing I ever traded, though, was a\n pocketknife. Got a set of keys for it.\"" ], [ "Walsh's grin grew wider. \"Why, Major,\" he said, \"you're not having any\n difficulties, are you?\"\n\n\n \"None at all,\" I snapped back. \"I just thought I'd be able to find him\n a lot sooner if....\"\n\n\n \"Take your time, Major,\" Walsh beamed. \"There's no rush at all.\"\n\n\n \"I thought....\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you can do the job,\" Walsh cut in. \"I wouldn't have sent you\n otherwise.\"\n\n\n Hell, I was through kidding around. \"Look....\"\n\n\n \"He's somewhere in the jungle, you know,\" Walsh said.\n\n\n I wanted to ram my fist into the screen, right smack up against those\n big white teeth. Instead, I cut off the transmission and watched the\n surprised look on his face as his screen went blank millions of miles\n away.", "\"You didn't have to report me,\" Walsh said.\n\n\n \"No? Maybe I should have forgotten all about it? Maybe I should have\n nudged you and served you orange juice? So you could do it again\n sometime and maybe blow up the whole damn Academy!\"\n\n\n Walsh was silent for a long time. When he spoke his voice was barely\n audible. The heat was oppressive, as if it were concentrated on this\n little spot in the jungle, focusing all its penetration on a small,\n unimportant drama.\n\n\n I could hear Joe breathing beside me.\n\n\n \"I'm on my way out,\" Walsh rasped. \"Finished, do you understand?\"\n\n\n \"Good,\" I said. And I meant it.\n\n\n \"This Mars thing. A terrible fix. Terrible.\"", "For example, he could have chosen a Second Looie for the job on Venus.\n He might even have picked a Captain. But he liked me about as much as\n I liked him, and so he decided the job was just right for a Major. At\n least, that's what he told me.\n\n\n I stood at attention before his desk in the Patrol Station. We were\n somewhere in Area Two on Earth, takeoff point for any operations in\n Space II. The duty was fine, and I liked it a lot. Come to think of\n it, the most I ever did was inspect a few defective tubes every now and\n then. The rest was gravy, and Colonel Walsh wasn't going to let me get\n by with gravy.\n\n\n \"It will be a simple assignment, Major,\" he said to me, peering over\n his fingers. He held them up in front of him like a cathedral.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" I said.", "He blinked at the screen, trying to realize I'd deliberately hung up on\n him.\n\n\n \"Polk!\" he shouted, \"can you hear me?\"\n\n\n I smiled, saw the twisted hatred on his features, and then the screen\n on my end went blank, too.\nHe's somewhere in the jungle, you know.\nI thanked Captain Bransten for his hospitality and went back to my\n quarters.\n\n\n As I saw it, there were two courses for me to follow.\n\n\n One: I could say the hell with Walsh and Venus. That would mean hopping\n the next ship back to Earth.\n\n\n It would also mean disobeying the direct order of a superior officer.\n It might mean demotion, and it might mean getting bounced out of the\n Service altogether.", "I turned rapidly. Joe nodded and kept grinning, a grin that told me he\n was getting a big kick out of all this. Like a kid playing a game.\n\n\n I faced Walsh again. \"Okay, what's it all about, pal?\"\n\n\n \"Colonel,\" Walsh corrected me. \"You mustn't forget to say Colonel,\nMajor\n.\" He emphasized my rank, and he said it with a sort of ruthless\n finality.\n\n\n I waited. I could see he was just busting to tell me how clever he'd\n been. Besides, there wasn't much I could do but wait. Not with Walsh\n pointing the stun gun at my middle.\n\n\n \"We've come a long way since the Academy, haven't we, Major?\"\n\n\n \"If you mean in miles,\" I said, looking around at the plants, \"we sure\n have.\"", "\"Skip it,\" I said. \"How do I get to the captain's shack?\"\n\n\n \"Follow your nose, pal. Can't miss it.\"\n\n\n I started to pick up my bag as another Venusian entered. He waved at\n the bartender.\n\n\n \"Hello, Joe,\" he said. \"How's it going?\"\n\n\n \"Not so hot, Joe,\" the bartender replied.\n\n\n I listened in fascination. Joe, Joe, Joe. So this was Walsh's idea of a\n great gag. Very funny. Very....\n\n\n \"You Major Polk, sweetheart?\" the Venusian who'd just come in asked.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I said, still thinking of Colonel Walsh.\n\n\n \"You better get your butt over to the captain's shack,\" he said. \"He's\n about ready to post you as overdue.\"", "\"What...?\" I started.\n\n\n \"It's all right,\" Joe said, smiling.\n\n\n The ship looked vaguely familiar. I noticed the crest of Space II near\n the nose, and a lot of things became clear then. I also saw Walsh\n standing near one of the huts, a stun gun in his hand.\n\n\n \"Hello, Major,\" he called, almost cheerfully. The gun didn't look\n cheerful, though. It was pointed at my head.\n\n\n \"Fancy meeting you here, Colonel,\" I said, trying to match his\n joviality. Somehow it didn't quite come off.\n\n\n Joe was walking beside me, waving at the colonel, beaming all over with\n happiness.\n\n\n \"I see you found your man,\" Walsh said.", "The thought hadn't occurred to me before this, and I began to consider\n it seriously. Walsh was no good, rotten clear through. He was failing\n at the job of keeping Mars in hand, and he probably realized that a\n few more mistakes on his part would mean the end of his career with\n Space II. I chuckled as I thought of him isolated in some God-forsaken\n place like Space V or Space VII. This probably bothered him a lot, too.\n But what probably bothered him more was the fact that I was next in\n command. If he were transferred, I'd be in charge of Space II, and I\n could understand how much that would appeal to Walsh.\n\n\n I tried to figure the thing out sensibly, tried to weigh his good\n points against his bad. But it all came back to the same thing. A\n guy who would deliberately go to sleep on Boiler Watch with a ton of\n uranium ready to blast a barracks to smithereens if it wasn't watched,\n would deliberately do just about anything.", "I began to get the idea. And I began to appreciate Walsh's doubtful\n ancestry more keenly.\n\n\n \"It's impossible to tell exactly where it all started, of course,\"\n Bransten was saying.\n\n\n I was beginning to get angry. Very angry. I was thinking of Walsh\n sitting back in a nice cozy foam chair back on Earth.\n\n\n \"Get to the point, Captain!\" I barked.\n\n\n \"Easy, sir,\" Bransten said, turning pale. I could see that the Captain\n wasn't used to entertaining Majors. \"The enlisted men. You know how\n they are. They'll ask a native to do something and they'll call him\n Joe. 'Hey, Joe, give me a hand with this.' Or 'Listen, Joe, how'd you\n like to earn some cigarettes?' Do you follow?\"\n\n\n \"I follow, all right,\" I said bitterly.", "I sighed. \"Well, it's not very much to go on.\"\n\n\n \"You'll find him,\" Walsh said, grinning. \"I'm sure of it.\"\nThe trip to Venus came off without a hitch. I did a lot of thinking on\n that trip. I thought about Mars and the revolt there. And I thought\n about Colonel Leonard Walsh and how he was supposed to be quelling that\n revolt. Ever since Walsh had taken command, ever since he'd started\n pushing the natives around, there'd been trouble. It was almost as if\n the whole damned planet had blown up in our faces the moment he took\n over. Swell guy, Walsh.", "\"And this man is on Venus now?\" I asked for confirmation. I'd never\n been to Venus, being in Space II ever since I'd left the Moon run. It\n was just like Walsh to ship me off to a strange place.\n\n\n \"Yes, Major,\" he said. \"This man is on Venus.\"\n\n\n At the Academy he had called me Fred. That was before I'd reported\n him for sleeping on Boiler Watch. He'd goofed off on a pile of uranium\n that could've, and almost did, blow the barracks sky-high that night.\n He still thought it was my fault, as if I'd done the wrong thing by\n reporting him. And now, through the fouled-up machinery that exists in\n any military organization, he outranked me.\n\n\n \"And the man's name, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Joe.\" A tight smile played on his face.\n\n\n \"Joe what?\" I asked.", "A PLANET NAMED JOE\nBy S. A. LOMBINO\nThere were more Joes on Venus than you could shake\n \na ray-gun at. Perhaps there was method in Colonel\n \nWalsh's madness—murder-madness—when he ordered Major\n \nPolk to scan the planet for a guy named Joe.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories\n\n November 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the\n\n U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nColonel Walsh had a great sense of humor. I hated his guts ever since\n we went through the Academy together, but he had a great sense of humor.", "\"It will involve finding one man, a Venusian native.\"\n\n\n I wanted to say, \"Then why the hell don't you send a green kid on\n the job? Why me?\" Instead, I nodded and watched him playing with his\n fingers.\n\n\n \"The man is a trader of sorts. Rather intelligent.\" He paused, then\n added, \"For a native, that is.\"\n\n\n I had never liked Walsh's attitude toward natives. I hadn't liked the\n way he'd treated the natives on Mars ever since he'd taken over there.\n Which brought to mind an important point.\n\n\n \"I always figured Venus was under the jurisdiction of Space III, sir. I\n thought our activities were confined to Mars.\"\n\n\n He folded his fingers like a deck of cards and dropped them on his desk\n as if he were waiting for me to cut.", "Walsh grinned a little. \"Always the wit,\" he said drily. And then the\n smile faded from his lips and his eyes took on a hard lustre. \"I'm\n going to kill you, you know.\" He said it as if he were saying, \"I think\n it'll rain tomorrow.\"\n\n\n Joe almost clapped his hands together with glee. He was really enjoying\n this. Another of those funny Terran games.\n\n\n \"You gave me a powerful handicap to overcome,\" Walsh said. \"I suppose I\n should thank you, really.\"\n\n\n \"You're welcome,\" I said.\n\n\n \"It wasn't easy living down the disgrace you caused me.\"\n\n\n \"It was your own damn fault,\" I said. \"You knew what you were doing\n when you decided to cork off.\"\n\n\n Beside me, Joe chuckled a little, enjoying the game immensely.", "Beside me, a slight frown crossed Joe's face. Apparently he couldn't\n understand the seriousness of our voices. What had happened to the\n game, the fun?\n\n\n \"You brought the Mars business on yourself,\" I told Walsh. \"There was\n never any trouble before you took command.\"\n\n\n \"The natives,\" he practically shouted. \"They ... they....\"\n\n\n Joe caught his breath sharply, and I wondered what Walsh was going to\n say about the natives. Apparently he'd realized that Joe was a native.\n Or maybe Joe's knife had something to do with it.\n\n\n \"What about the natives?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" Walsh said. \"Nothing.\" He was silent for a while.", "\"Mmmm,\" he said, \"yes, that's true. But this is a special job. It so\n happens this Venusian is the one man who can help us understand just\n what's happening on Mars.\"\n\n\n I tried to picture a Venusian understanding Mars and I didn't get very\n far.\n\n\n \"He's had many dealings with the natives there,\" Walsh explained. \"If\n anyone can tell us the reasons for the revolt, he can.\"\n\n\n If Walsh really wanted to know the reasons for the revolt, I could give\n them to him in one word: Walsh. I had to laugh at the way he called\n it \"revolt.\" It had been going on for six months now and we'd lost at\n least a thousand men from Space II. Revolt.", "Bransten asked a Venusian named Joe to show me my quarters, reminding\n me that chow was at thirteen hundred. As I was leaving, the first\n Venusian came back with the cigarettes Bransten had ordered.\n\n\n I could tell by the look on his face that he probably had half a carton\n stuffed into his pockets. I shrugged and went to change into a tropical\n tunic.\n\n\n I called Earth right after chow. The Captain assured me that this sort\n of thing was definitely against regulations, but he submitted when I\n twinkled my little gold leaf under his nose.\n\n\n Walsh's face appeared on the screen. He was smiling, looking like a fat\n pussy cat.\n\n\n \"What is it, Major?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"This man Joe,\" I said. \"Can you give me any more on him?\"", "Two: I could assume there really was a guy name Joe somewhere in that\n jungle, a Joe separate and apart from the other Joes on this planet, a\n trader Joe who knew the Martians well. I could always admit failure, of\n course, and return empty handed. Mission not accomplished. Or, I might\n really find a guy who was trader Joe.\n\n\n I made my decision quickly. I wanted to stay in the Service, and\n besides Walsh may have been on the level for the first time in his\n life. Maybe there was a Joe here who could help us on Mars. If there\n was I'd try to find him. It was still a hell of a trick though.\n\n\n I cursed Walsh again and pushed the buzzer near my bed.\n\n\n A tall Venusian stepped into the room.\n\n\n \"Joe?\" I asked, just to be sure.\n\n\n \"Who else, boss?\" he answered.", "When he was gone I began figuring out a plan of action. Obviously, I'd\n just have to traipse through the jungle looking for a guy named Joe on\n a planet where everyone was named Joe. Everybody, at least, but the\n Captain, the small garrison attached to the Station, and me.\nI began wondering why Walsh had gone to so much trouble to get rid of\n me. The job, as I saw it, would take a hell of a long time. It seemed\n like a silly thing to do, just to get even with a guy for something\n that had happened years ago. He surely must have realized that I'd be\n back again, sooner or later. Maybe he had another little junket all set\n for me.\n\n\n Or maybe he didn't expect me to come back.", "\"Just Joe.\"\n\n\n \"Just Joe?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Walsh said. \"A native, you know. They rarely go in for more than\n first names. But then, it should be simple to find a man with a name\n like Joe. Among the natives, I mean.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know, sir.\"\n\n\n \"A relatively simple assignment,\" Walsh said.\n\n\n \"Can you tell me anything else about this man? Physical appearance?\n Personal habits? Anything?\"\n\n\n Walsh seemed to consider this for a moment. \"Well, physically he's like\n any of the other Venusians, so I can't give you much help there. He\n does have a peculiar habit, though.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"\n\n\n \"He has an affinity for Terran cigarettes.\"" ], [ "Joe was an excellent guide and a pleasant companion. He seemed to be\n enjoying a great romp, seemed to love the jungle and take a secret\n pleasure in the work he was doing. There were times when I couldn't\n see three feet ahead of me. He'd stand stock still for a few minutes,\n his head barely moving, his eyes darting from one plant to another.\n Then he'd say, \"This way,\" and take off into what looked like more\n impenetrable jungle invariably to find a little path leading directly\n to another village.\n\n\n Each village was the same. The natives would come running out of their\n huts, tall and blue, shouting, \"Cigarettes, Joe? Cigarettes?\" It took\n me a while to realize they were addressing me and not my guide.", "Everybody was Joe. It was one beautiful, happy, joyous round of\n stinking, hot jungle. And I wasn't getting any nearer my man. Nor had\n I any idea how I was supposed to find him. I began to feel pretty low\n about the whole affair.\n\n\n Joe, on the other hand, enjoyed every moment of the trip. In each\n village he greeted the natives cheerfully, told them stories, swapped\n gossip and jokes. And when it was time to leave, he would say goodbye\n to all his friends and we would plunge into the twisted foliage again.\n\n\n His spirits were always high and he never failed to say the right thing\n that would give a momentary lift to my own depressed state of mind. He\n would talk for hours on end as we hacked our way through the jungle.\n\n\n \"I like Venus,\" he said once. \"I would never leave it.\"\n\n\n \"Have you ever been to Earth?\" I asked.", "Sending me off on a wild goose chase after a character named Joe may\n have been a gag. But it may have been something a little grimmer than a\n gag, and I made up my mind to be extremely careful from here on in.\n\n\n The guide arrived at fifteen hundred on the dot. He was tall,\n elongated, looked almost like all the other Venusians I'd seen so far.\n\n\n \"I understand you need a Grade A guide, sir,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Are you familiar with the jungle?\" I asked him.\n\n\n \"Born and raised there, sir. Know it like the back of my hand.\"\n\n\n \"Has Joe told you what the payment will be?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. A carton and a half of cigarettes.\"\n\n\n I thought about Joe deducting his commission and smiled.\n\n\n \"When can we leave?\"", "\"I'm trying to locate someone,\" I said. \"I'll need a guide to take me\n into the jungle. Can you get me one?\"\n\n\n \"It'll cost you, boss,\" the Venusian said.\n\n\n \"How much?\"\n\n\n \"Two cartons of cigarettes at least.\"\n\n\n \"Who's the guide?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"How's the price sound?\"\n\n\n \"Fine, fine,\" I said impatiently. And the Captain had said they were\n almost a childish people!\n\n\n \"His name is Joe,\" the Venusian told me. \"Best damn guide on the\n planet. Take you anywhere you want to go, do anything you want to do.\n Courageous. Doesn't know the meaning of fear. I've known him to....\"", "Once we stopped in a clearing to rest. Joe lounged on the matted\n greenery, his long body stretched out in front of him, the knife\n gleaming in his belt. I'd seen him slash his way through thick, tangled\n vines with that knife, his long, muscular arms powerfully slicing\n through them like strips of silk.\n\n\n \"How far are we from the Station?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"Three or four Earth weeks,\" he replied.\n\n\n I sighed wearily. \"Where do we go from here?\"\n\n\n \"There are more villages,\" he said.\n\n\n \"We'll never find him.\"\n\n\n \"Possibly,\" Joe mused, the smile creeping over his face again.\n\n\n \"A wild goose chase. A fool's errand.\"\n\n\n \"We'd better get started,\" Joe said simply.", "\"Right away, sir. We won't need much really. I've made a list of\n supplies and I can get them in less than an hour. I suggest you wear\n light clothing, boots, and a hat.\"\n\n\n \"Will I need a weapon?\"\n\n\n He looked at me, his eyes faintly amused. \"Why, what for, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Never mind,\" I said. \"What's your name, by the way?\"\n\n\n He lifted his eyebrows, and his eyes widened in his narrow face. He was\n definitely surprised.\n\n\n \"Joe,\" he said. \"Didn't you know?\"\nWhen we'd been out for a while I discovered why Joe had suggested the\n boots and the hat. The undergrowth was often sharp and jagged and it\n would have sliced my legs to ribbons were they not protected by the\n high boots. The hat kept the strong sun off my head.", "Walsh's grin grew wider. \"Why, Major,\" he said, \"you're not having any\n difficulties, are you?\"\n\n\n \"None at all,\" I snapped back. \"I just thought I'd be able to find him\n a lot sooner if....\"\n\n\n \"Take your time, Major,\" Walsh beamed. \"There's no rush at all.\"\n\n\n \"I thought....\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you can do the job,\" Walsh cut in. \"I wouldn't have sent you\n otherwise.\"\n\n\n Hell, I was through kidding around. \"Look....\"\n\n\n \"He's somewhere in the jungle, you know,\" Walsh said.\n\n\n I wanted to ram my fist into the screen, right smack up against those\n big white teeth. Instead, I cut off the transmission and watched the\n surprised look on his face as his screen went blank millions of miles\n away.", "\"A man of my calibre,\" he said then, his face grim. \"Dealing with\n savages.\" He caught himself again and threw a hasty glance at Joe.\n The perplexed frown had grown heavier on Joe's face. He looked at the\n colonel in puzzlement.", "Joe smiled secretly, and we pushed on. I began to find, more and more,\n that I had started to talk freely to Joe. In the beginning he had been\n just my guide. There had been the strained relationship of employer and\n employee. But as the days lengthened into weeks, the formal atmosphere\n began to crumble. I found myself telling him all about Earth, about\n the people there, about my decision to attend the Academy, the rigid\n tests, the grind, even the Moon run. Joe was a good listener, nodding\n sympathetically, finding experiences in his own life to parallel my own.\n\n\n And as our relationship progressed from a casual one to a definitely\n friendly one, Joe seemed more enthusiastic than ever to keep up our\n grinding pace to find what we were looking for.", "When he was gone I began figuring out a plan of action. Obviously, I'd\n just have to traipse through the jungle looking for a guy named Joe on\n a planet where everyone was named Joe. Everybody, at least, but the\n Captain, the small garrison attached to the Station, and me.\nI began wondering why Walsh had gone to so much trouble to get rid of\n me. The job, as I saw it, would take a hell of a long time. It seemed\n like a silly thing to do, just to get even with a guy for something\n that had happened years ago. He surely must have realized that I'd be\n back again, sooner or later. Maybe he had another little junket all set\n for me.\n\n\n Or maybe he didn't expect me to come back.", "\"Skip it,\" I said. \"How do I get to the captain's shack?\"\n\n\n \"Follow your nose, pal. Can't miss it.\"\n\n\n I started to pick up my bag as another Venusian entered. He waved at\n the bartender.\n\n\n \"Hello, Joe,\" he said. \"How's it going?\"\n\n\n \"Not so hot, Joe,\" the bartender replied.\n\n\n I listened in fascination. Joe, Joe, Joe. So this was Walsh's idea of a\n great gag. Very funny. Very....\n\n\n \"You Major Polk, sweetheart?\" the Venusian who'd just come in asked.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I said, still thinking of Colonel Walsh.\n\n\n \"You better get your butt over to the captain's shack,\" he said. \"He's\n about ready to post you as overdue.\"", "I began to get the idea. And I began to appreciate Walsh's doubtful\n ancestry more keenly.\n\n\n \"It's impossible to tell exactly where it all started, of course,\"\n Bransten was saying.\n\n\n I was beginning to get angry. Very angry. I was thinking of Walsh\n sitting back in a nice cozy foam chair back on Earth.\n\n\n \"Get to the point, Captain!\" I barked.\n\n\n \"Easy, sir,\" Bransten said, turning pale. I could see that the Captain\n wasn't used to entertaining Majors. \"The enlisted men. You know how\n they are. They'll ask a native to do something and they'll call him\n Joe. 'Hey, Joe, give me a hand with this.' Or 'Listen, Joe, how'd you\n like to earn some cigarettes?' Do you follow?\"\n\n\n \"I follow, all right,\" I said bitterly.", "I turned rapidly. Joe nodded and kept grinning, a grin that told me he\n was getting a big kick out of all this. Like a kid playing a game.\n\n\n I faced Walsh again. \"Okay, what's it all about, pal?\"\n\n\n \"Colonel,\" Walsh corrected me. \"You mustn't forget to say Colonel,\nMajor\n.\" He emphasized my rank, and he said it with a sort of ruthless\n finality.\n\n\n I waited. I could see he was just busting to tell me how clever he'd\n been. Besides, there wasn't much I could do but wait. Not with Walsh\n pointing the stun gun at my middle.\n\n\n \"We've come a long way since the Academy, haven't we, Major?\"\n\n\n \"If you mean in miles,\" I said, looking around at the plants, \"we sure\n have.\"", "\"Well,\" Bransten went on, \"that sort of thing mushrooms. The natives\n are a simple, almost childish people. It appealed to them—the Joe\n business, I mean. Now they're all Joe. They like it. That and the\n cigarettes.\"\n\n\n He cleared his throat and looked at me apologetically as if he were\n personally responsible for Venusian culture. In fact, he looked as if\n he were responsible for having put Venus in the heavens in the first\n place.\n\n\n \"Do you understand, Major? Just a case of extended idiom, that's all.\"\n\n\n Just a case of extended\nidiot\n, I thought. An idiot on a wild goose\n chase a hell of a long way from home.\n\n\n \"I understand perfectly,\" I snapped. \"Where are my quarters?\"", "A PLANET NAMED JOE\nBy S. A. LOMBINO\nThere were more Joes on Venus than you could shake\n \na ray-gun at. Perhaps there was method in Colonel\n \nWalsh's madness—murder-madness—when he ordered Major\n \nPolk to scan the planet for a guy named Joe.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories\n\n November 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the\n\n U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nColonel Walsh had a great sense of humor. I hated his guts ever since\n we went through the Academy together, but he had a great sense of humor.", "I got to my feet and we started the march again. Joe was still fresh, a\n brilliant contrast to me, weary and dejected. Somehow, I had the same\n feeling I'd had a long time ago on my sixteenth birthday. One of my\n friends had taken me all over the city, finally dropping me off at my\n own house where the whole gang was gathered for a surprise party. Joe\n reminded me of that friend.\n\n\n \"There's a village ahead,\" he said, and the grin on his face was large\n now, his eyes shining.\nSomething was missing here. Natives. There were no natives rushing out\n to greet us. No cries of \"Cigarettes? Cigarettes?\" I caught up with Joe.\n\n\n \"What's the story?\" I whispered.\n\n\n He shrugged knowingly and continued walking.\n\n\n And then I saw the ship, nose pointing into space, catching the rays of\n the sun like a great silver bullet.", "Two: I could assume there really was a guy name Joe somewhere in that\n jungle, a Joe separate and apart from the other Joes on this planet, a\n trader Joe who knew the Martians well. I could always admit failure, of\n course, and return empty handed. Mission not accomplished. Or, I might\n really find a guy who was trader Joe.\n\n\n I made my decision quickly. I wanted to stay in the Service, and\n besides Walsh may have been on the level for the first time in his\n life. Maybe there was a Joe here who could help us on Mars. If there\n was I'd try to find him. It was still a hell of a trick though.\n\n\n I cursed Walsh again and pushed the buzzer near my bed.\n\n\n A tall Venusian stepped into the room.\n\n\n \"Joe?\" I asked, just to be sure.\n\n\n \"Who else, boss?\" he answered.", "He blinked at the screen, trying to realize I'd deliberately hung up on\n him.\n\n\n \"Polk!\" he shouted, \"can you hear me?\"\n\n\n I smiled, saw the twisted hatred on his features, and then the screen\n on my end went blank, too.\nHe's somewhere in the jungle, you know.\nI thanked Captain Bransten for his hospitality and went back to my\n quarters.\n\n\n As I saw it, there were two courses for me to follow.\n\n\n One: I could say the hell with Walsh and Venus. That would mean hopping\n the next ship back to Earth.\n\n\n It would also mean disobeying the direct order of a superior officer.\n It might mean demotion, and it might mean getting bounced out of the\n Service altogether.", "\"You didn't have to report me,\" Walsh said.\n\n\n \"No? Maybe I should have forgotten all about it? Maybe I should have\n nudged you and served you orange juice? So you could do it again\n sometime and maybe blow up the whole damn Academy!\"\n\n\n Walsh was silent for a long time. When he spoke his voice was barely\n audible. The heat was oppressive, as if it were concentrated on this\n little spot in the jungle, focusing all its penetration on a small,\n unimportant drama.\n\n\n I could hear Joe breathing beside me.\n\n\n \"I'm on my way out,\" Walsh rasped. \"Finished, do you understand?\"\n\n\n \"Good,\" I said. And I meant it.\n\n\n \"This Mars thing. A terrible fix. Terrible.\"", "\"What...?\" I started.\n\n\n \"It's all right,\" Joe said, smiling.\n\n\n The ship looked vaguely familiar. I noticed the crest of Space II near\n the nose, and a lot of things became clear then. I also saw Walsh\n standing near one of the huts, a stun gun in his hand.\n\n\n \"Hello, Major,\" he called, almost cheerfully. The gun didn't look\n cheerful, though. It was pointed at my head.\n\n\n \"Fancy meeting you here, Colonel,\" I said, trying to match his\n joviality. Somehow it didn't quite come off.\n\n\n Joe was walking beside me, waving at the colonel, beaming all over with\n happiness.\n\n\n \"I see you found your man,\" Walsh said." ], [ "\"No,\" Joe replied. \"I like Terrans too, you understand. They are good\n for Venus. And they are fun.\"\n\n\n \"Fun?\" I asked, thinking of a particular species of Terran: species\n Leonard Walsh.\n\n\n \"Yes, yes,\" he said wholeheartedly. \"They joke and they laugh and ...\n well, you know.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose so,\" I admitted.", "\"Mmmm,\" he said, \"yes, that's true. But this is a special job. It so\n happens this Venusian is the one man who can help us understand just\n what's happening on Mars.\"\n\n\n I tried to picture a Venusian understanding Mars and I didn't get very\n far.\n\n\n \"He's had many dealings with the natives there,\" Walsh explained. \"If\n anyone can tell us the reasons for the revolt, he can.\"\n\n\n If Walsh really wanted to know the reasons for the revolt, I could give\n them to him in one word: Walsh. I had to laugh at the way he called\n it \"revolt.\" It had been going on for six months now and we'd lost at\n least a thousand men from Space II. Revolt.", "\"It will involve finding one man, a Venusian native.\"\n\n\n I wanted to say, \"Then why the hell don't you send a green kid on\n the job? Why me?\" Instead, I nodded and watched him playing with his\n fingers.\n\n\n \"The man is a trader of sorts. Rather intelligent.\" He paused, then\n added, \"For a native, that is.\"\n\n\n I had never liked Walsh's attitude toward natives. I hadn't liked the\n way he'd treated the natives on Mars ever since he'd taken over there.\n Which brought to mind an important point.\n\n\n \"I always figured Venus was under the jurisdiction of Space III, sir. I\n thought our activities were confined to Mars.\"\n\n\n He folded his fingers like a deck of cards and dropped them on his desk\n as if he were waiting for me to cut.", "Venus was hotter than I'd expected it to be. Much too hot for the tunic\n I was wearing. It smelled, too. A funny smell I couldn't place. Like\n a mixture of old shoe and after-shave. There were plants everywhere\n I looked. Big plants and small ones, some blooming with flowers I'd\n never seen before, and some as bare as cactus.\n\n\n I recognized a blue figure as one of the natives the pilot had told me\n about. He was tall, looking almost human except that everything about\n him was elongated. His features, his muscles, everything seemed to have\n been stretched like a rubber band. I kept expecting him to pop back to\n normal. Instead, he flashed a double row of brilliant teeth at me.\n\n\n I wondered if he spoke English. \"Hey, boy,\" I called.\n\n\n He ambled over with long-legged strides that closed the distance\n between us in seconds.\n\n\n \"Call me Joe,\" he said.", "\"We're out of cigarettes, Joe,\" the Captain said. \"Will you get us\n some, please?\"\n\n\n \"Sure thing,\" the Venusian answered. He smiled broadly and closed the\n door behind him.\nAnother Joe\n, I thought.\nAnother damned Joe.\n\"They steal them,\" Captain Bransten said abruptly.\n\n\n \"Steal what?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"Cigarettes. I sometimes think the cigarette is one of the few things\n they like about Terran culture.\"\n\n\n So Walsh had taken care of that angle too.\nHe does have a peculiar\n habit, though. He has an affinity for Terran cigarettes.\nCigarettes\n was the tip I should have given; not solars.\n\n\n \"All right,\" I said, \"suppose we start at the beginning.\"\n\n\n Captain Bransten opened his eyes wide. \"Sir?\" he asked.", "Everybody was Joe. It was one beautiful, happy, joyous round of\n stinking, hot jungle. And I wasn't getting any nearer my man. Nor had\n I any idea how I was supposed to find him. I began to feel pretty low\n about the whole affair.\n\n\n Joe, on the other hand, enjoyed every moment of the trip. In each\n village he greeted the natives cheerfully, told them stories, swapped\n gossip and jokes. And when it was time to leave, he would say goodbye\n to all his friends and we would plunge into the twisted foliage again.\n\n\n His spirits were always high and he never failed to say the right thing\n that would give a momentary lift to my own depressed state of mind. He\n would talk for hours on end as we hacked our way through the jungle.\n\n\n \"I like Venus,\" he said once. \"I would never leave it.\"\n\n\n \"Have you ever been to Earth?\" I asked.", "\"Just Joe.\"\n\n\n \"Just Joe?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Walsh said. \"A native, you know. They rarely go in for more than\n first names. But then, it should be simple to find a man with a name\n like Joe. Among the natives, I mean.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know, sir.\"\n\n\n \"A relatively simple assignment,\" Walsh said.\n\n\n \"Can you tell me anything else about this man? Physical appearance?\n Personal habits? Anything?\"\n\n\n Walsh seemed to consider this for a moment. \"Well, physically he's like\n any of the other Venusians, so I can't give you much help there. He\n does have a peculiar habit, though.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"\n\n\n \"He has an affinity for Terran cigarettes.\"", "\"Well,\" Bransten went on, \"that sort of thing mushrooms. The natives\n are a simple, almost childish people. It appealed to them—the Joe\n business, I mean. Now they're all Joe. They like it. That and the\n cigarettes.\"\n\n\n He cleared his throat and looked at me apologetically as if he were\n personally responsible for Venusian culture. In fact, he looked as if\n he were responsible for having put Venus in the heavens in the first\n place.\n\n\n \"Do you understand, Major? Just a case of extended idiom, that's all.\"\n\n\n Just a case of extended\nidiot\n, I thought. An idiot on a wild goose\n chase a hell of a long way from home.\n\n\n \"I understand perfectly,\" I snapped. \"Where are my quarters?\"", "Bransten asked a Venusian named Joe to show me my quarters, reminding\n me that chow was at thirteen hundred. As I was leaving, the first\n Venusian came back with the cigarettes Bransten had ordered.\n\n\n I could tell by the look on his face that he probably had half a carton\n stuffed into his pockets. I shrugged and went to change into a tropical\n tunic.\n\n\n I called Earth right after chow. The Captain assured me that this sort\n of thing was definitely against regulations, but he submitted when I\n twinkled my little gold leaf under his nose.\n\n\n Walsh's face appeared on the screen. He was smiling, looking like a fat\n pussy cat.\n\n\n \"What is it, Major?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"This man Joe,\" I said. \"Can you give me any more on him?\"", "For example, he could have chosen a Second Looie for the job on Venus.\n He might even have picked a Captain. But he liked me about as much as\n I liked him, and so he decided the job was just right for a Major. At\n least, that's what he told me.\n\n\n I stood at attention before his desk in the Patrol Station. We were\n somewhere in Area Two on Earth, takeoff point for any operations in\n Space II. The duty was fine, and I liked it a lot. Come to think of\n it, the most I ever did was inspect a few defective tubes every now and\n then. The rest was gravy, and Colonel Walsh wasn't going to let me get\n by with gravy.\n\n\n \"It will be a simple assignment, Major,\" he said to me, peering over\n his fingers. He held them up in front of him like a cathedral.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" I said.", "\"What's with all this Joe business? It may be a very original name but\n I think its popularity here is a little outstanding.\"\n\n\n Captain Bransten began to chuckle softly. I personally didn't think it\n was so funny. I tossed him my withering Superior Officer's gaze and\n waited for his explanation.\n\n\n \"I hadn't realized this was your first time on Venus,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Is there a local hero named Joe?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"No, no, nothing like that,\" he assured me. \"It's a simple culture, you\n know. Not nearly as developed as Mars.\"\n\n\n \"I can see that,\" I said bitingly.\n\n\n \"And the natives are only now becoming acquainted with Terran culture.\n Lots of enlisted men, you know.\"", "\"Sure,\" I said wearily. \"Will you take my bags, please?\"\n\n\n \"Roger,\" he answered. He picked up the bags and nodded at the bar.\n\n\n \"So long, Joe,\" he said to the bartender.\n\n\n \"See you, Joe,\" the bartender called back.\nCaptain Bransten was a mousey, unimpressive sort of man. He was wearing\n a tropical tunic, but he still resembled a wilted lily more than he did\n an officer.\n\n\n \"Have a seat, Major,\" he offered. He reached for a cigarette box on the\n desk and extended it to me. He coughed in embarrassment when he saw it\n was empty. Quickly, he pressed a button on his desk and the door popped\n open. A tall, blue Venusian stepped lithely into the room.\n\n\n \"Sir?\" the Venusian asked.", "\"Skip it,\" I said. \"How do I get to the captain's shack?\"\n\n\n \"Follow your nose, pal. Can't miss it.\"\n\n\n I started to pick up my bag as another Venusian entered. He waved at\n the bartender.\n\n\n \"Hello, Joe,\" he said. \"How's it going?\"\n\n\n \"Not so hot, Joe,\" the bartender replied.\n\n\n I listened in fascination. Joe, Joe, Joe. So this was Walsh's idea of a\n great gag. Very funny. Very....\n\n\n \"You Major Polk, sweetheart?\" the Venusian who'd just come in asked.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I said, still thinking of Colonel Walsh.\n\n\n \"You better get your butt over to the captain's shack,\" he said. \"He's\n about ready to post you as overdue.\"", "\"I'm trying to locate someone,\" I said. \"I'll need a guide to take me\n into the jungle. Can you get me one?\"\n\n\n \"It'll cost you, boss,\" the Venusian said.\n\n\n \"How much?\"\n\n\n \"Two cartons of cigarettes at least.\"\n\n\n \"Who's the guide?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"How's the price sound?\"\n\n\n \"Fine, fine,\" I said impatiently. And the Captain had said they were\n almost a childish people!\n\n\n \"His name is Joe,\" the Venusian told me. \"Best damn guide on the\n planet. Take you anywhere you want to go, do anything you want to do.\n Courageous. Doesn't know the meaning of fear. I've known him to....\"", "Two: I could assume there really was a guy name Joe somewhere in that\n jungle, a Joe separate and apart from the other Joes on this planet, a\n trader Joe who knew the Martians well. I could always admit failure, of\n course, and return empty handed. Mission not accomplished. Or, I might\n really find a guy who was trader Joe.\n\n\n I made my decision quickly. I wanted to stay in the Service, and\n besides Walsh may have been on the level for the first time in his\n life. Maybe there was a Joe here who could help us on Mars. If there\n was I'd try to find him. It was still a hell of a trick though.\n\n\n I cursed Walsh again and pushed the buzzer near my bed.\n\n\n A tall Venusian stepped into the room.\n\n\n \"Joe?\" I asked, just to be sure.\n\n\n \"Who else, boss?\" he answered.", "Walsh grinned a little. \"Always the wit,\" he said drily. And then the\n smile faded from his lips and his eyes took on a hard lustre. \"I'm\n going to kill you, you know.\" He said it as if he were saying, \"I think\n it'll rain tomorrow.\"\n\n\n Joe almost clapped his hands together with glee. He was really enjoying\n this. Another of those funny Terran games.\n\n\n \"You gave me a powerful handicap to overcome,\" Walsh said. \"I suppose I\n should thank you, really.\"\n\n\n \"You're welcome,\" I said.\n\n\n \"It wasn't easy living down the disgrace you caused me.\"\n\n\n \"It was your own damn fault,\" I said. \"You knew what you were doing\n when you decided to cork off.\"\n\n\n Beside me, Joe chuckled a little, enjoying the game immensely.", "\"Oh,\" I said, my voice conveying my disappointment. I sighed and began\n wondering just how I should go about contacting the Joe I was looking\n for. My orders said I was to report to Captain Bransten immediately\n upon arrival. I figured the hell with Captain Bransten. I outranked him\n anyway, and there wasn't much he could do if I decided to stop for a\n drink first.\n\n\n \"Where's the Officer's Club?\" I asked the Venusian.\n\n\n \"Are you buying information or are you just curious?\"\n\n\n \"Can you take me there?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"Sure thing, Toots.\" He picked up my bags and started walking up a\n heavily overgrown path. We'd probably walked for about ten minutes when\n he dropped my bags and said, \"There it is.\"", "I sighed. \"Well, it's not very much to go on.\"\n\n\n \"You'll find him,\" Walsh said, grinning. \"I'm sure of it.\"\nThe trip to Venus came off without a hitch. I did a lot of thinking on\n that trip. I thought about Mars and the revolt there. And I thought\n about Colonel Leonard Walsh and how he was supposed to be quelling that\n revolt. Ever since Walsh had taken command, ever since he'd started\n pushing the natives around, there'd been trouble. It was almost as if\n the whole damned planet had blown up in our faces the moment he took\n over. Swell guy, Walsh.", "I walked over and asked, \"What are you serving, pal?\"\n\n\n \"Call me Joe,\" he answered.\n\n\n He caught me off balance. \"What?\"\n\n\n \"Joe,\" he said again.\n\n\n A faint glimmer of understanding began to penetrate my thick skull.\n \"You wouldn't happen to be Joe the trader? The guy who knows all about\n Mars, would you?\"\n\n\n \"I never left home,\" he said simply. \"What are you drinking?\"\n\n\n That rat! That dirty, filthy, stinking, unprincipled....\nBut then, it should be simple to find a man with a name like\nJoe.\nAmong the natives, I mean.\nSure. Oh sure. Real simple. Walsh was about the lowest, most\n contemptible....\n\n\n \"What are you drinking, pal?\" the Venusian asked again.", "Sending me off on a wild goose chase after a character named Joe may\n have been a gag. But it may have been something a little grimmer than a\n gag, and I made up my mind to be extremely careful from here on in.\n\n\n The guide arrived at fifteen hundred on the dot. He was tall,\n elongated, looked almost like all the other Venusians I'd seen so far.\n\n\n \"I understand you need a Grade A guide, sir,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Are you familiar with the jungle?\" I asked him.\n\n\n \"Born and raised there, sir. Know it like the back of my hand.\"\n\n\n \"Has Joe told you what the payment will be?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. A carton and a half of cigarettes.\"\n\n\n I thought about Joe deducting his commission and smiled.\n\n\n \"When can we leave?\"" ], [ "Walsh grinned a little. \"Always the wit,\" he said drily. And then the\n smile faded from his lips and his eyes took on a hard lustre. \"I'm\n going to kill you, you know.\" He said it as if he were saying, \"I think\n it'll rain tomorrow.\"\n\n\n Joe almost clapped his hands together with glee. He was really enjoying\n this. Another of those funny Terran games.\n\n\n \"You gave me a powerful handicap to overcome,\" Walsh said. \"I suppose I\n should thank you, really.\"\n\n\n \"You're welcome,\" I said.\n\n\n \"It wasn't easy living down the disgrace you caused me.\"\n\n\n \"It was your own damn fault,\" I said. \"You knew what you were doing\n when you decided to cork off.\"\n\n\n Beside me, Joe chuckled a little, enjoying the game immensely.", "\"You didn't have to report me,\" Walsh said.\n\n\n \"No? Maybe I should have forgotten all about it? Maybe I should have\n nudged you and served you orange juice? So you could do it again\n sometime and maybe blow up the whole damn Academy!\"\n\n\n Walsh was silent for a long time. When he spoke his voice was barely\n audible. The heat was oppressive, as if it were concentrated on this\n little spot in the jungle, focusing all its penetration on a small,\n unimportant drama.\n\n\n I could hear Joe breathing beside me.\n\n\n \"I'm on my way out,\" Walsh rasped. \"Finished, do you understand?\"\n\n\n \"Good,\" I said. And I meant it.\n\n\n \"This Mars thing. A terrible fix. Terrible.\"", "He blinked at the screen, trying to realize I'd deliberately hung up on\n him.\n\n\n \"Polk!\" he shouted, \"can you hear me?\"\n\n\n I smiled, saw the twisted hatred on his features, and then the screen\n on my end went blank, too.\nHe's somewhere in the jungle, you know.\nI thanked Captain Bransten for his hospitality and went back to my\n quarters.\n\n\n As I saw it, there were two courses for me to follow.\n\n\n One: I could say the hell with Walsh and Venus. That would mean hopping\n the next ship back to Earth.\n\n\n It would also mean disobeying the direct order of a superior officer.\n It might mean demotion, and it might mean getting bounced out of the\n Service altogether.", "I began to get the idea. And I began to appreciate Walsh's doubtful\n ancestry more keenly.\n\n\n \"It's impossible to tell exactly where it all started, of course,\"\n Bransten was saying.\n\n\n I was beginning to get angry. Very angry. I was thinking of Walsh\n sitting back in a nice cozy foam chair back on Earth.\n\n\n \"Get to the point, Captain!\" I barked.\n\n\n \"Easy, sir,\" Bransten said, turning pale. I could see that the Captain\n wasn't used to entertaining Majors. \"The enlisted men. You know how\n they are. They'll ask a native to do something and they'll call him\n Joe. 'Hey, Joe, give me a hand with this.' Or 'Listen, Joe, how'd you\n like to earn some cigarettes?' Do you follow?\"\n\n\n \"I follow, all right,\" I said bitterly.", "The thought hadn't occurred to me before this, and I began to consider\n it seriously. Walsh was no good, rotten clear through. He was failing\n at the job of keeping Mars in hand, and he probably realized that a\n few more mistakes on his part would mean the end of his career with\n Space II. I chuckled as I thought of him isolated in some God-forsaken\n place like Space V or Space VII. This probably bothered him a lot, too.\n But what probably bothered him more was the fact that I was next in\n command. If he were transferred, I'd be in charge of Space II, and I\n could understand how much that would appeal to Walsh.\n\n\n I tried to figure the thing out sensibly, tried to weigh his good\n points against his bad. But it all came back to the same thing. A\n guy who would deliberately go to sleep on Boiler Watch with a ton of\n uranium ready to blast a barracks to smithereens if it wasn't watched,\n would deliberately do just about anything.", "Walsh's grin grew wider. \"Why, Major,\" he said, \"you're not having any\n difficulties, are you?\"\n\n\n \"None at all,\" I snapped back. \"I just thought I'd be able to find him\n a lot sooner if....\"\n\n\n \"Take your time, Major,\" Walsh beamed. \"There's no rush at all.\"\n\n\n \"I thought....\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you can do the job,\" Walsh cut in. \"I wouldn't have sent you\n otherwise.\"\n\n\n Hell, I was through kidding around. \"Look....\"\n\n\n \"He's somewhere in the jungle, you know,\" Walsh said.\n\n\n I wanted to ram my fist into the screen, right smack up against those\n big white teeth. Instead, I cut off the transmission and watched the\n surprised look on his face as his screen went blank millions of miles\n away.", "Beside me, a slight frown crossed Joe's face. Apparently he couldn't\n understand the seriousness of our voices. What had happened to the\n game, the fun?\n\n\n \"You brought the Mars business on yourself,\" I told Walsh. \"There was\n never any trouble before you took command.\"\n\n\n \"The natives,\" he practically shouted. \"They ... they....\"\n\n\n Joe caught his breath sharply, and I wondered what Walsh was going to\n say about the natives. Apparently he'd realized that Joe was a native.\n Or maybe Joe's knife had something to do with it.\n\n\n \"What about the natives?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" Walsh said. \"Nothing.\" He was silent for a while.", "I turned rapidly. Joe nodded and kept grinning, a grin that told me he\n was getting a big kick out of all this. Like a kid playing a game.\n\n\n I faced Walsh again. \"Okay, what's it all about, pal?\"\n\n\n \"Colonel,\" Walsh corrected me. \"You mustn't forget to say Colonel,\nMajor\n.\" He emphasized my rank, and he said it with a sort of ruthless\n finality.\n\n\n I waited. I could see he was just busting to tell me how clever he'd\n been. Besides, there wasn't much I could do but wait. Not with Walsh\n pointing the stun gun at my middle.\n\n\n \"We've come a long way since the Academy, haven't we, Major?\"\n\n\n \"If you mean in miles,\" I said, looking around at the plants, \"we sure\n have.\"", "I sighed. \"Well, it's not very much to go on.\"\n\n\n \"You'll find him,\" Walsh said, grinning. \"I'm sure of it.\"\nThe trip to Venus came off without a hitch. I did a lot of thinking on\n that trip. I thought about Mars and the revolt there. And I thought\n about Colonel Leonard Walsh and how he was supposed to be quelling that\n revolt. Ever since Walsh had taken command, ever since he'd started\n pushing the natives around, there'd been trouble. It was almost as if\n the whole damned planet had blown up in our faces the moment he took\n over. Swell guy, Walsh.", "\"Skip it,\" I said. \"How do I get to the captain's shack?\"\n\n\n \"Follow your nose, pal. Can't miss it.\"\n\n\n I started to pick up my bag as another Venusian entered. He waved at\n the bartender.\n\n\n \"Hello, Joe,\" he said. \"How's it going?\"\n\n\n \"Not so hot, Joe,\" the bartender replied.\n\n\n I listened in fascination. Joe, Joe, Joe. So this was Walsh's idea of a\n great gag. Very funny. Very....\n\n\n \"You Major Polk, sweetheart?\" the Venusian who'd just come in asked.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I said, still thinking of Colonel Walsh.\n\n\n \"You better get your butt over to the captain's shack,\" he said. \"He's\n about ready to post you as overdue.\"", "\"And this man is on Venus now?\" I asked for confirmation. I'd never\n been to Venus, being in Space II ever since I'd left the Moon run. It\n was just like Walsh to ship me off to a strange place.\n\n\n \"Yes, Major,\" he said. \"This man is on Venus.\"\n\n\n At the Academy he had called me Fred. That was before I'd reported\n him for sleeping on Boiler Watch. He'd goofed off on a pile of uranium\n that could've, and almost did, blow the barracks sky-high that night.\n He still thought it was my fault, as if I'd done the wrong thing by\n reporting him. And now, through the fouled-up machinery that exists in\n any military organization, he outranked me.\n\n\n \"And the man's name, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Joe.\" A tight smile played on his face.\n\n\n \"Joe what?\" I asked.", "\"Mmmm,\" he said, \"yes, that's true. But this is a special job. It so\n happens this Venusian is the one man who can help us understand just\n what's happening on Mars.\"\n\n\n I tried to picture a Venusian understanding Mars and I didn't get very\n far.\n\n\n \"He's had many dealings with the natives there,\" Walsh explained. \"If\n anyone can tell us the reasons for the revolt, he can.\"\n\n\n If Walsh really wanted to know the reasons for the revolt, I could give\n them to him in one word: Walsh. I had to laugh at the way he called\n it \"revolt.\" It had been going on for six months now and we'd lost at\n least a thousand men from Space II. Revolt.", "\"What...?\" I started.\n\n\n \"It's all right,\" Joe said, smiling.\n\n\n The ship looked vaguely familiar. I noticed the crest of Space II near\n the nose, and a lot of things became clear then. I also saw Walsh\n standing near one of the huts, a stun gun in his hand.\n\n\n \"Hello, Major,\" he called, almost cheerfully. The gun didn't look\n cheerful, though. It was pointed at my head.\n\n\n \"Fancy meeting you here, Colonel,\" I said, trying to match his\n joviality. Somehow it didn't quite come off.\n\n\n Joe was walking beside me, waving at the colonel, beaming all over with\n happiness.\n\n\n \"I see you found your man,\" Walsh said.", "\"Just Joe.\"\n\n\n \"Just Joe?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Walsh said. \"A native, you know. They rarely go in for more than\n first names. But then, it should be simple to find a man with a name\n like Joe. Among the natives, I mean.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know, sir.\"\n\n\n \"A relatively simple assignment,\" Walsh said.\n\n\n \"Can you tell me anything else about this man? Physical appearance?\n Personal habits? Anything?\"\n\n\n Walsh seemed to consider this for a moment. \"Well, physically he's like\n any of the other Venusians, so I can't give you much help there. He\n does have a peculiar habit, though.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"\n\n\n \"He has an affinity for Terran cigarettes.\"", "\"It will involve finding one man, a Venusian native.\"\n\n\n I wanted to say, \"Then why the hell don't you send a green kid on\n the job? Why me?\" Instead, I nodded and watched him playing with his\n fingers.\n\n\n \"The man is a trader of sorts. Rather intelligent.\" He paused, then\n added, \"For a native, that is.\"\n\n\n I had never liked Walsh's attitude toward natives. I hadn't liked the\n way he'd treated the natives on Mars ever since he'd taken over there.\n Which brought to mind an important point.\n\n\n \"I always figured Venus was under the jurisdiction of Space III, sir. I\n thought our activities were confined to Mars.\"\n\n\n He folded his fingers like a deck of cards and dropped them on his desk\n as if he were waiting for me to cut.", "\"We're out of cigarettes, Joe,\" the Captain said. \"Will you get us\n some, please?\"\n\n\n \"Sure thing,\" the Venusian answered. He smiled broadly and closed the\n door behind him.\nAnother Joe\n, I thought.\nAnother damned Joe.\n\"They steal them,\" Captain Bransten said abruptly.\n\n\n \"Steal what?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"Cigarettes. I sometimes think the cigarette is one of the few things\n they like about Terran culture.\"\n\n\n So Walsh had taken care of that angle too.\nHe does have a peculiar\n habit, though. He has an affinity for Terran cigarettes.\nCigarettes\n was the tip I should have given; not solars.\n\n\n \"All right,\" I said, \"suppose we start at the beginning.\"\n\n\n Captain Bransten opened his eyes wide. \"Sir?\" he asked.", "A PLANET NAMED JOE\nBy S. A. LOMBINO\nThere were more Joes on Venus than you could shake\n \na ray-gun at. Perhaps there was method in Colonel\n \nWalsh's madness—murder-madness—when he ordered Major\n \nPolk to scan the planet for a guy named Joe.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories\n\n November 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the\n\n U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nColonel Walsh had a great sense of humor. I hated his guts ever since\n we went through the Academy together, but he had a great sense of humor.", "Two: I could assume there really was a guy name Joe somewhere in that\n jungle, a Joe separate and apart from the other Joes on this planet, a\n trader Joe who knew the Martians well. I could always admit failure, of\n course, and return empty handed. Mission not accomplished. Or, I might\n really find a guy who was trader Joe.\n\n\n I made my decision quickly. I wanted to stay in the Service, and\n besides Walsh may have been on the level for the first time in his\n life. Maybe there was a Joe here who could help us on Mars. If there\n was I'd try to find him. It was still a hell of a trick though.\n\n\n I cursed Walsh again and pushed the buzzer near my bed.\n\n\n A tall Venusian stepped into the room.\n\n\n \"Joe?\" I asked, just to be sure.\n\n\n \"Who else, boss?\" he answered.", "Bransten asked a Venusian named Joe to show me my quarters, reminding\n me that chow was at thirteen hundred. As I was leaving, the first\n Venusian came back with the cigarettes Bransten had ordered.\n\n\n I could tell by the look on his face that he probably had half a carton\n stuffed into his pockets. I shrugged and went to change into a tropical\n tunic.\n\n\n I called Earth right after chow. The Captain assured me that this sort\n of thing was definitely against regulations, but he submitted when I\n twinkled my little gold leaf under his nose.\n\n\n Walsh's face appeared on the screen. He was smiling, looking like a fat\n pussy cat.\n\n\n \"What is it, Major?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"This man Joe,\" I said. \"Can you give me any more on him?\"", "\"A man of my calibre,\" he said then, his face grim. \"Dealing with\n savages.\" He caught himself again and threw a hasty glance at Joe.\n The perplexed frown had grown heavier on Joe's face. He looked at the\n colonel in puzzlement." ], [ "I began to get the idea. And I began to appreciate Walsh's doubtful\n ancestry more keenly.\n\n\n \"It's impossible to tell exactly where it all started, of course,\"\n Bransten was saying.\n\n\n I was beginning to get angry. Very angry. I was thinking of Walsh\n sitting back in a nice cozy foam chair back on Earth.\n\n\n \"Get to the point, Captain!\" I barked.\n\n\n \"Easy, sir,\" Bransten said, turning pale. I could see that the Captain\n wasn't used to entertaining Majors. \"The enlisted men. You know how\n they are. They'll ask a native to do something and they'll call him\n Joe. 'Hey, Joe, give me a hand with this.' Or 'Listen, Joe, how'd you\n like to earn some cigarettes?' Do you follow?\"\n\n\n \"I follow, all right,\" I said bitterly.", "\"A man of my calibre,\" he said then, his face grim. \"Dealing with\n savages.\" He caught himself again and threw a hasty glance at Joe.\n The perplexed frown had grown heavier on Joe's face. He looked at the\n colonel in puzzlement.", "I turned rapidly. Joe nodded and kept grinning, a grin that told me he\n was getting a big kick out of all this. Like a kid playing a game.\n\n\n I faced Walsh again. \"Okay, what's it all about, pal?\"\n\n\n \"Colonel,\" Walsh corrected me. \"You mustn't forget to say Colonel,\nMajor\n.\" He emphasized my rank, and he said it with a sort of ruthless\n finality.\n\n\n I waited. I could see he was just busting to tell me how clever he'd\n been. Besides, there wasn't much I could do but wait. Not with Walsh\n pointing the stun gun at my middle.\n\n\n \"We've come a long way since the Academy, haven't we, Major?\"\n\n\n \"If you mean in miles,\" I said, looking around at the plants, \"we sure\n have.\"", "Walsh grinned a little. \"Always the wit,\" he said drily. And then the\n smile faded from his lips and his eyes took on a hard lustre. \"I'm\n going to kill you, you know.\" He said it as if he were saying, \"I think\n it'll rain tomorrow.\"\n\n\n Joe almost clapped his hands together with glee. He was really enjoying\n this. Another of those funny Terran games.\n\n\n \"You gave me a powerful handicap to overcome,\" Walsh said. \"I suppose I\n should thank you, really.\"\n\n\n \"You're welcome,\" I said.\n\n\n \"It wasn't easy living down the disgrace you caused me.\"\n\n\n \"It was your own damn fault,\" I said. \"You knew what you were doing\n when you decided to cork off.\"\n\n\n Beside me, Joe chuckled a little, enjoying the game immensely.", "\"You didn't have to report me,\" Walsh said.\n\n\n \"No? Maybe I should have forgotten all about it? Maybe I should have\n nudged you and served you orange juice? So you could do it again\n sometime and maybe blow up the whole damn Academy!\"\n\n\n Walsh was silent for a long time. When he spoke his voice was barely\n audible. The heat was oppressive, as if it were concentrated on this\n little spot in the jungle, focusing all its penetration on a small,\n unimportant drama.\n\n\n I could hear Joe breathing beside me.\n\n\n \"I'm on my way out,\" Walsh rasped. \"Finished, do you understand?\"\n\n\n \"Good,\" I said. And I meant it.\n\n\n \"This Mars thing. A terrible fix. Terrible.\"", "A PLANET NAMED JOE\nBy S. A. LOMBINO\nThere were more Joes on Venus than you could shake\n \na ray-gun at. Perhaps there was method in Colonel\n \nWalsh's madness—murder-madness—when he ordered Major\n \nPolk to scan the planet for a guy named Joe.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories\n\n November 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the\n\n U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nColonel Walsh had a great sense of humor. I hated his guts ever since\n we went through the Academy together, but he had a great sense of humor.", "\"And this man is on Venus now?\" I asked for confirmation. I'd never\n been to Venus, being in Space II ever since I'd left the Moon run. It\n was just like Walsh to ship me off to a strange place.\n\n\n \"Yes, Major,\" he said. \"This man is on Venus.\"\n\n\n At the Academy he had called me Fred. That was before I'd reported\n him for sleeping on Boiler Watch. He'd goofed off on a pile of uranium\n that could've, and almost did, blow the barracks sky-high that night.\n He still thought it was my fault, as if I'd done the wrong thing by\n reporting him. And now, through the fouled-up machinery that exists in\n any military organization, he outranked me.\n\n\n \"And the man's name, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Joe.\" A tight smile played on his face.\n\n\n \"Joe what?\" I asked.", "Beside me, a slight frown crossed Joe's face. Apparently he couldn't\n understand the seriousness of our voices. What had happened to the\n game, the fun?\n\n\n \"You brought the Mars business on yourself,\" I told Walsh. \"There was\n never any trouble before you took command.\"\n\n\n \"The natives,\" he practically shouted. \"They ... they....\"\n\n\n Joe caught his breath sharply, and I wondered what Walsh was going to\n say about the natives. Apparently he'd realized that Joe was a native.\n Or maybe Joe's knife had something to do with it.\n\n\n \"What about the natives?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" Walsh said. \"Nothing.\" He was silent for a while.", "\"What...?\" I started.\n\n\n \"It's all right,\" Joe said, smiling.\n\n\n The ship looked vaguely familiar. I noticed the crest of Space II near\n the nose, and a lot of things became clear then. I also saw Walsh\n standing near one of the huts, a stun gun in his hand.\n\n\n \"Hello, Major,\" he called, almost cheerfully. The gun didn't look\n cheerful, though. It was pointed at my head.\n\n\n \"Fancy meeting you here, Colonel,\" I said, trying to match his\n joviality. Somehow it didn't quite come off.\n\n\n Joe was walking beside me, waving at the colonel, beaming all over with\n happiness.\n\n\n \"I see you found your man,\" Walsh said.", "Walsh's grin grew wider. \"Why, Major,\" he said, \"you're not having any\n difficulties, are you?\"\n\n\n \"None at all,\" I snapped back. \"I just thought I'd be able to find him\n a lot sooner if....\"\n\n\n \"Take your time, Major,\" Walsh beamed. \"There's no rush at all.\"\n\n\n \"I thought....\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you can do the job,\" Walsh cut in. \"I wouldn't have sent you\n otherwise.\"\n\n\n Hell, I was through kidding around. \"Look....\"\n\n\n \"He's somewhere in the jungle, you know,\" Walsh said.\n\n\n I wanted to ram my fist into the screen, right smack up against those\n big white teeth. Instead, I cut off the transmission and watched the\n surprised look on his face as his screen went blank millions of miles\n away.", "Two: I could assume there really was a guy name Joe somewhere in that\n jungle, a Joe separate and apart from the other Joes on this planet, a\n trader Joe who knew the Martians well. I could always admit failure, of\n course, and return empty handed. Mission not accomplished. Or, I might\n really find a guy who was trader Joe.\n\n\n I made my decision quickly. I wanted to stay in the Service, and\n besides Walsh may have been on the level for the first time in his\n life. Maybe there was a Joe here who could help us on Mars. If there\n was I'd try to find him. It was still a hell of a trick though.\n\n\n I cursed Walsh again and pushed the buzzer near my bed.\n\n\n A tall Venusian stepped into the room.\n\n\n \"Joe?\" I asked, just to be sure.\n\n\n \"Who else, boss?\" he answered.", "Bransten asked a Venusian named Joe to show me my quarters, reminding\n me that chow was at thirteen hundred. As I was leaving, the first\n Venusian came back with the cigarettes Bransten had ordered.\n\n\n I could tell by the look on his face that he probably had half a carton\n stuffed into his pockets. I shrugged and went to change into a tropical\n tunic.\n\n\n I called Earth right after chow. The Captain assured me that this sort\n of thing was definitely against regulations, but he submitted when I\n twinkled my little gold leaf under his nose.\n\n\n Walsh's face appeared on the screen. He was smiling, looking like a fat\n pussy cat.\n\n\n \"What is it, Major?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"This man Joe,\" I said. \"Can you give me any more on him?\"", "Everybody was Joe. It was one beautiful, happy, joyous round of\n stinking, hot jungle. And I wasn't getting any nearer my man. Nor had\n I any idea how I was supposed to find him. I began to feel pretty low\n about the whole affair.\n\n\n Joe, on the other hand, enjoyed every moment of the trip. In each\n village he greeted the natives cheerfully, told them stories, swapped\n gossip and jokes. And when it was time to leave, he would say goodbye\n to all his friends and we would plunge into the twisted foliage again.\n\n\n His spirits were always high and he never failed to say the right thing\n that would give a momentary lift to my own depressed state of mind. He\n would talk for hours on end as we hacked our way through the jungle.\n\n\n \"I like Venus,\" he said once. \"I would never leave it.\"\n\n\n \"Have you ever been to Earth?\" I asked.", "\"Well,\" Bransten went on, \"that sort of thing mushrooms. The natives\n are a simple, almost childish people. It appealed to them—the Joe\n business, I mean. Now they're all Joe. They like it. That and the\n cigarettes.\"\n\n\n He cleared his throat and looked at me apologetically as if he were\n personally responsible for Venusian culture. In fact, he looked as if\n he were responsible for having put Venus in the heavens in the first\n place.\n\n\n \"Do you understand, Major? Just a case of extended idiom, that's all.\"\n\n\n Just a case of extended\nidiot\n, I thought. An idiot on a wild goose\n chase a hell of a long way from home.\n\n\n \"I understand perfectly,\" I snapped. \"Where are my quarters?\"", "\"Just Joe.\"\n\n\n \"Just Joe?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Walsh said. \"A native, you know. They rarely go in for more than\n first names. But then, it should be simple to find a man with a name\n like Joe. Among the natives, I mean.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know, sir.\"\n\n\n \"A relatively simple assignment,\" Walsh said.\n\n\n \"Can you tell me anything else about this man? Physical appearance?\n Personal habits? Anything?\"\n\n\n Walsh seemed to consider this for a moment. \"Well, physically he's like\n any of the other Venusians, so I can't give you much help there. He\n does have a peculiar habit, though.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"\n\n\n \"He has an affinity for Terran cigarettes.\"", "\"We're out of cigarettes, Joe,\" the Captain said. \"Will you get us\n some, please?\"\n\n\n \"Sure thing,\" the Venusian answered. He smiled broadly and closed the\n door behind him.\nAnother Joe\n, I thought.\nAnother damned Joe.\n\"They steal them,\" Captain Bransten said abruptly.\n\n\n \"Steal what?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"Cigarettes. I sometimes think the cigarette is one of the few things\n they like about Terran culture.\"\n\n\n So Walsh had taken care of that angle too.\nHe does have a peculiar\n habit, though. He has an affinity for Terran cigarettes.\nCigarettes\n was the tip I should have given; not solars.\n\n\n \"All right,\" I said, \"suppose we start at the beginning.\"\n\n\n Captain Bransten opened his eyes wide. \"Sir?\" he asked.", "Joe was an excellent guide and a pleasant companion. He seemed to be\n enjoying a great romp, seemed to love the jungle and take a secret\n pleasure in the work he was doing. There were times when I couldn't\n see three feet ahead of me. He'd stand stock still for a few minutes,\n his head barely moving, his eyes darting from one plant to another.\n Then he'd say, \"This way,\" and take off into what looked like more\n impenetrable jungle invariably to find a little path leading directly\n to another village.\n\n\n Each village was the same. The natives would come running out of their\n huts, tall and blue, shouting, \"Cigarettes, Joe? Cigarettes?\" It took\n me a while to realize they were addressing me and not my guide.", "When he was gone I began figuring out a plan of action. Obviously, I'd\n just have to traipse through the jungle looking for a guy named Joe on\n a planet where everyone was named Joe. Everybody, at least, but the\n Captain, the small garrison attached to the Station, and me.\nI began wondering why Walsh had gone to so much trouble to get rid of\n me. The job, as I saw it, would take a hell of a long time. It seemed\n like a silly thing to do, just to get even with a guy for something\n that had happened years ago. He surely must have realized that I'd be\n back again, sooner or later. Maybe he had another little junket all set\n for me.\n\n\n Or maybe he didn't expect me to come back.", "The thought hadn't occurred to me before this, and I began to consider\n it seriously. Walsh was no good, rotten clear through. He was failing\n at the job of keeping Mars in hand, and he probably realized that a\n few more mistakes on his part would mean the end of his career with\n Space II. I chuckled as I thought of him isolated in some God-forsaken\n place like Space V or Space VII. This probably bothered him a lot, too.\n But what probably bothered him more was the fact that I was next in\n command. If he were transferred, I'd be in charge of Space II, and I\n could understand how much that would appeal to Walsh.\n\n\n I tried to figure the thing out sensibly, tried to weigh his good\n points against his bad. But it all came back to the same thing. A\n guy who would deliberately go to sleep on Boiler Watch with a ton of\n uranium ready to blast a barracks to smithereens if it wasn't watched,\n would deliberately do just about anything.", "I sighed. \"Well, it's not very much to go on.\"\n\n\n \"You'll find him,\" Walsh said, grinning. \"I'm sure of it.\"\nThe trip to Venus came off without a hitch. I did a lot of thinking on\n that trip. I thought about Mars and the revolt there. And I thought\n about Colonel Leonard Walsh and how he was supposed to be quelling that\n revolt. Ever since Walsh had taken command, ever since he'd started\n pushing the natives around, there'd been trouble. It was almost as if\n the whole damned planet had blown up in our faces the moment he took\n over. Swell guy, Walsh." ], [ "For example, he could have chosen a Second Looie for the job on Venus.\n He might even have picked a Captain. But he liked me about as much as\n I liked him, and so he decided the job was just right for a Major. At\n least, that's what he told me.\n\n\n I stood at attention before his desk in the Patrol Station. We were\n somewhere in Area Two on Earth, takeoff point for any operations in\n Space II. The duty was fine, and I liked it a lot. Come to think of\n it, the most I ever did was inspect a few defective tubes every now and\n then. The rest was gravy, and Colonel Walsh wasn't going to let me get\n by with gravy.\n\n\n \"It will be a simple assignment, Major,\" he said to me, peering over\n his fingers. He held them up in front of him like a cathedral.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" I said.", "\"And this man is on Venus now?\" I asked for confirmation. I'd never\n been to Venus, being in Space II ever since I'd left the Moon run. It\n was just like Walsh to ship me off to a strange place.\n\n\n \"Yes, Major,\" he said. \"This man is on Venus.\"\n\n\n At the Academy he had called me Fred. That was before I'd reported\n him for sleeping on Boiler Watch. He'd goofed off on a pile of uranium\n that could've, and almost did, blow the barracks sky-high that night.\n He still thought it was my fault, as if I'd done the wrong thing by\n reporting him. And now, through the fouled-up machinery that exists in\n any military organization, he outranked me.\n\n\n \"And the man's name, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Joe.\" A tight smile played on his face.\n\n\n \"Joe what?\" I asked.", "\"Sure,\" I said wearily. \"Will you take my bags, please?\"\n\n\n \"Roger,\" he answered. He picked up the bags and nodded at the bar.\n\n\n \"So long, Joe,\" he said to the bartender.\n\n\n \"See you, Joe,\" the bartender called back.\nCaptain Bransten was a mousey, unimpressive sort of man. He was wearing\n a tropical tunic, but he still resembled a wilted lily more than he did\n an officer.\n\n\n \"Have a seat, Major,\" he offered. He reached for a cigarette box on the\n desk and extended it to me. He coughed in embarrassment when he saw it\n was empty. Quickly, he pressed a button on his desk and the door popped\n open. A tall, blue Venusian stepped lithely into the room.\n\n\n \"Sir?\" the Venusian asked.", "\"Skip it,\" I said. \"How do I get to the captain's shack?\"\n\n\n \"Follow your nose, pal. Can't miss it.\"\n\n\n I started to pick up my bag as another Venusian entered. He waved at\n the bartender.\n\n\n \"Hello, Joe,\" he said. \"How's it going?\"\n\n\n \"Not so hot, Joe,\" the bartender replied.\n\n\n I listened in fascination. Joe, Joe, Joe. So this was Walsh's idea of a\n great gag. Very funny. Very....\n\n\n \"You Major Polk, sweetheart?\" the Venusian who'd just come in asked.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I said, still thinking of Colonel Walsh.\n\n\n \"You better get your butt over to the captain's shack,\" he said. \"He's\n about ready to post you as overdue.\"", "Bransten asked a Venusian named Joe to show me my quarters, reminding\n me that chow was at thirteen hundred. As I was leaving, the first\n Venusian came back with the cigarettes Bransten had ordered.\n\n\n I could tell by the look on his face that he probably had half a carton\n stuffed into his pockets. I shrugged and went to change into a tropical\n tunic.\n\n\n I called Earth right after chow. The Captain assured me that this sort\n of thing was definitely against regulations, but he submitted when I\n twinkled my little gold leaf under his nose.\n\n\n Walsh's face appeared on the screen. He was smiling, looking like a fat\n pussy cat.\n\n\n \"What is it, Major?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"This man Joe,\" I said. \"Can you give me any more on him?\"", "\"Oh,\" I said, my voice conveying my disappointment. I sighed and began\n wondering just how I should go about contacting the Joe I was looking\n for. My orders said I was to report to Captain Bransten immediately\n upon arrival. I figured the hell with Captain Bransten. I outranked him\n anyway, and there wasn't much he could do if I decided to stop for a\n drink first.\n\n\n \"Where's the Officer's Club?\" I asked the Venusian.\n\n\n \"Are you buying information or are you just curious?\"\n\n\n \"Can you take me there?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"Sure thing, Toots.\" He picked up my bags and started walking up a\n heavily overgrown path. We'd probably walked for about ten minutes when\n he dropped my bags and said, \"There it is.\"", "\"Well,\" Bransten went on, \"that sort of thing mushrooms. The natives\n are a simple, almost childish people. It appealed to them—the Joe\n business, I mean. Now they're all Joe. They like it. That and the\n cigarettes.\"\n\n\n He cleared his throat and looked at me apologetically as if he were\n personally responsible for Venusian culture. In fact, he looked as if\n he were responsible for having put Venus in the heavens in the first\n place.\n\n\n \"Do you understand, Major? Just a case of extended idiom, that's all.\"\n\n\n Just a case of extended\nidiot\n, I thought. An idiot on a wild goose\n chase a hell of a long way from home.\n\n\n \"I understand perfectly,\" I snapped. \"Where are my quarters?\"", "\"It will involve finding one man, a Venusian native.\"\n\n\n I wanted to say, \"Then why the hell don't you send a green kid on\n the job? Why me?\" Instead, I nodded and watched him playing with his\n fingers.\n\n\n \"The man is a trader of sorts. Rather intelligent.\" He paused, then\n added, \"For a native, that is.\"\n\n\n I had never liked Walsh's attitude toward natives. I hadn't liked the\n way he'd treated the natives on Mars ever since he'd taken over there.\n Which brought to mind an important point.\n\n\n \"I always figured Venus was under the jurisdiction of Space III, sir. I\n thought our activities were confined to Mars.\"\n\n\n He folded his fingers like a deck of cards and dropped them on his desk\n as if he were waiting for me to cut.", "\"We're out of cigarettes, Joe,\" the Captain said. \"Will you get us\n some, please?\"\n\n\n \"Sure thing,\" the Venusian answered. He smiled broadly and closed the\n door behind him.\nAnother Joe\n, I thought.\nAnother damned Joe.\n\"They steal them,\" Captain Bransten said abruptly.\n\n\n \"Steal what?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"Cigarettes. I sometimes think the cigarette is one of the few things\n they like about Terran culture.\"\n\n\n So Walsh had taken care of that angle too.\nHe does have a peculiar\n habit, though. He has an affinity for Terran cigarettes.\nCigarettes\n was the tip I should have given; not solars.\n\n\n \"All right,\" I said, \"suppose we start at the beginning.\"\n\n\n Captain Bransten opened his eyes wide. \"Sir?\" he asked.", "\"What...?\" I started.\n\n\n \"It's all right,\" Joe said, smiling.\n\n\n The ship looked vaguely familiar. I noticed the crest of Space II near\n the nose, and a lot of things became clear then. I also saw Walsh\n standing near one of the huts, a stun gun in his hand.\n\n\n \"Hello, Major,\" he called, almost cheerfully. The gun didn't look\n cheerful, though. It was pointed at my head.\n\n\n \"Fancy meeting you here, Colonel,\" I said, trying to match his\n joviality. Somehow it didn't quite come off.\n\n\n Joe was walking beside me, waving at the colonel, beaming all over with\n happiness.\n\n\n \"I see you found your man,\" Walsh said.", "\"I'm trying to locate someone,\" I said. \"I'll need a guide to take me\n into the jungle. Can you get me one?\"\n\n\n \"It'll cost you, boss,\" the Venusian said.\n\n\n \"How much?\"\n\n\n \"Two cartons of cigarettes at least.\"\n\n\n \"Who's the guide?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"How's the price sound?\"\n\n\n \"Fine, fine,\" I said impatiently. And the Captain had said they were\n almost a childish people!\n\n\n \"His name is Joe,\" the Venusian told me. \"Best damn guide on the\n planet. Take you anywhere you want to go, do anything you want to do.\n Courageous. Doesn't know the meaning of fear. I've known him to....\"", "He blinked at the screen, trying to realize I'd deliberately hung up on\n him.\n\n\n \"Polk!\" he shouted, \"can you hear me?\"\n\n\n I smiled, saw the twisted hatred on his features, and then the screen\n on my end went blank, too.\nHe's somewhere in the jungle, you know.\nI thanked Captain Bransten for his hospitality and went back to my\n quarters.\n\n\n As I saw it, there were two courses for me to follow.\n\n\n One: I could say the hell with Walsh and Venus. That would mean hopping\n the next ship back to Earth.\n\n\n It would also mean disobeying the direct order of a superior officer.\n It might mean demotion, and it might mean getting bounced out of the\n Service altogether.", "Two: I could assume there really was a guy name Joe somewhere in that\n jungle, a Joe separate and apart from the other Joes on this planet, a\n trader Joe who knew the Martians well. I could always admit failure, of\n course, and return empty handed. Mission not accomplished. Or, I might\n really find a guy who was trader Joe.\n\n\n I made my decision quickly. I wanted to stay in the Service, and\n besides Walsh may have been on the level for the first time in his\n life. Maybe there was a Joe here who could help us on Mars. If there\n was I'd try to find him. It was still a hell of a trick though.\n\n\n I cursed Walsh again and pushed the buzzer near my bed.\n\n\n A tall Venusian stepped into the room.\n\n\n \"Joe?\" I asked, just to be sure.\n\n\n \"Who else, boss?\" he answered.", "\"Mmmm,\" he said, \"yes, that's true. But this is a special job. It so\n happens this Venusian is the one man who can help us understand just\n what's happening on Mars.\"\n\n\n I tried to picture a Venusian understanding Mars and I didn't get very\n far.\n\n\n \"He's had many dealings with the natives there,\" Walsh explained. \"If\n anyone can tell us the reasons for the revolt, he can.\"\n\n\n If Walsh really wanted to know the reasons for the revolt, I could give\n them to him in one word: Walsh. I had to laugh at the way he called\n it \"revolt.\" It had been going on for six months now and we'd lost at\n least a thousand men from Space II. Revolt.", "Sending me off on a wild goose chase after a character named Joe may\n have been a gag. But it may have been something a little grimmer than a\n gag, and I made up my mind to be extremely careful from here on in.\n\n\n The guide arrived at fifteen hundred on the dot. He was tall,\n elongated, looked almost like all the other Venusians I'd seen so far.\n\n\n \"I understand you need a Grade A guide, sir,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Are you familiar with the jungle?\" I asked him.\n\n\n \"Born and raised there, sir. Know it like the back of my hand.\"\n\n\n \"Has Joe told you what the payment will be?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. A carton and a half of cigarettes.\"\n\n\n I thought about Joe deducting his commission and smiled.\n\n\n \"When can we leave?\"", "\"What's with all this Joe business? It may be a very original name but\n I think its popularity here is a little outstanding.\"\n\n\n Captain Bransten began to chuckle softly. I personally didn't think it\n was so funny. I tossed him my withering Superior Officer's gaze and\n waited for his explanation.\n\n\n \"I hadn't realized this was your first time on Venus,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Is there a local hero named Joe?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"No, no, nothing like that,\" he assured me. \"It's a simple culture, you\n know. Not nearly as developed as Mars.\"\n\n\n \"I can see that,\" I said bitingly.\n\n\n \"And the natives are only now becoming acquainted with Terran culture.\n Lots of enlisted men, you know.\"", "Everybody was Joe. It was one beautiful, happy, joyous round of\n stinking, hot jungle. And I wasn't getting any nearer my man. Nor had\n I any idea how I was supposed to find him. I began to feel pretty low\n about the whole affair.\n\n\n Joe, on the other hand, enjoyed every moment of the trip. In each\n village he greeted the natives cheerfully, told them stories, swapped\n gossip and jokes. And when it was time to leave, he would say goodbye\n to all his friends and we would plunge into the twisted foliage again.\n\n\n His spirits were always high and he never failed to say the right thing\n that would give a momentary lift to my own depressed state of mind. He\n would talk for hours on end as we hacked our way through the jungle.\n\n\n \"I like Venus,\" he said once. \"I would never leave it.\"\n\n\n \"Have you ever been to Earth?\" I asked.", "Walsh's grin grew wider. \"Why, Major,\" he said, \"you're not having any\n difficulties, are you?\"\n\n\n \"None at all,\" I snapped back. \"I just thought I'd be able to find him\n a lot sooner if....\"\n\n\n \"Take your time, Major,\" Walsh beamed. \"There's no rush at all.\"\n\n\n \"I thought....\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you can do the job,\" Walsh cut in. \"I wouldn't have sent you\n otherwise.\"\n\n\n Hell, I was through kidding around. \"Look....\"\n\n\n \"He's somewhere in the jungle, you know,\" Walsh said.\n\n\n I wanted to ram my fist into the screen, right smack up against those\n big white teeth. Instead, I cut off the transmission and watched the\n surprised look on his face as his screen went blank millions of miles\n away.", "\"Skip it,\" I said, cutting the promotion short. \"Tell him to show up\n around fifteen hundred with a complete list of what we'll need.\"\n\n\n The Venusian started to leave.\n\n\n \"And Joe,\" I said, stopping him at the door, \"I hope you're not\n overlooking your commission on the deal.\"\n\n\n His face broke into a wide grin. \"No danger of that, boss,\" he said.", "\"Just Joe.\"\n\n\n \"Just Joe?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Walsh said. \"A native, you know. They rarely go in for more than\n first names. But then, it should be simple to find a man with a name\n like Joe. Among the natives, I mean.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know, sir.\"\n\n\n \"A relatively simple assignment,\" Walsh said.\n\n\n \"Can you tell me anything else about this man? Physical appearance?\n Personal habits? Anything?\"\n\n\n Walsh seemed to consider this for a moment. \"Well, physically he's like\n any of the other Venusians, so I can't give you much help there. He\n does have a peculiar habit, though.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"\n\n\n \"He has an affinity for Terran cigarettes.\"" ] ]
train	50103	[ "What is particularly strange about humans this world? ", "Why is communication so slow between colonies?", "Why is Earth so stunted in comparison to other colonies? ", "How is it this society can manage such slow communications?", "In simple terms, how does the anti-aging process work?", "What is the connection between bravery and death? ", "How does Giles change with the knowledge of his aging? ", "Why does Gile volunteer for the ship in the end?", "What could the moral of the story be?" ]	[ [ "They have achieved immortality, ", "They use telecommunications across planets to stay in contact. ", "They no longer have the same family values most people do. ", "People are living for far, far longer than they ever have before. " ], [ "There isn’t a lot of time out into the communications departments. ", "People don’t have the same relationships they used to, so they don’t bother to talk the same way. ", "Distance, along with technology differences. ", "People live so long now, they take their time communicating. " ], [ "They don’t have the right kind of technology. ", "They’re overpopulated and sending off their youngest people. ", "They don’t receive the same attention.", "No one is dying, so their priorities don’t lend themselves to progress. " ], [ "People live long enough now where they’ve adapted to the delay.", "Everything eventually gets to where it’s going, so they make do. ", "They work around it. They have the time to wait. ", "Science is progressing slowly as well, so they can’t rush it anyway. " ], [ "It makes your brain think it’s younger through memories, and treat the body’s growth that way. ", "It tricks the patient into believing they’re younger.", "It replaces key parts in your cells with young cells. ", "It halts growth all together by communicating with your brain. " ], [ "There is no correlation. It’s based on personality how brave someone is. ", "If one can’t be hurt, then people tend to be braver. ", "Bravery only seems to come to those who know they have limits. ", "Bravery only seems to come to those who are limitless. " ], [ "He resigns to his fate, because he doesn’t know what else to do. ", "He doesn’t. He goes right back to doing what he’d been doing out of habit. ", "He feels a new fondness for his son and family.", "He shows a much greater appreciation for every aspect of his life. " ], [ "He hasn’t accepted his mortality, and is trying to make up for it with an act of heroism. ", "He knows that no one else will volunteer, and feels responsible to do so. ", "He fears the end of his life, and wants to try to see his family before he passes. ", "He accepts his mortality, and is willing to spend his last years on the chance to see his family. " ], [ "People will make sacrifices like the one Giles made at the end for the greater good. ", "Mortality is crucial to enjoy life to the fullest. ", "Given the chance, humans will chase after immortality. ", "Fear of aging is normal, but aging is unavoidable. " ] ]	[ 4, 3, 4, 1, 1, 3, 3, 4, 2 ]	[ 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "when it was necessary because\n someone called across to him.\n Ordinarily, he was quick to support\n the idea of clubs in place\n of private families. A man here\n could choose his group and grow\n into them. Yet he wasn’t swallowed\n by them, as he might be by\n a family. Giles had been living\n here for nearly a century now and\n he’d never regretted it. But tonight\n his own group irritated him.\nHe puzzled over it, finding no\n real reason. Certainly they weren’t\n forcing themselves on him. He\n remembered once when he’d had\n a cold, before they finally licked\n that; Harry had been a complete\n nuisance, running around with", "Even that failed him, though.\n He’d developed one of the finest\n chess collections in the world, but\n tonight it held no interest. And\n when he drew out his tools and\n tried working on the delicate,\n lovely jade for the set he was\n carving his hands seemed to be\n all thumbs. None of the other interests\n he’d developed through\n the years helped to add to the\n richness of living now.\nHe gave it up and went to bed—to\n have the fragment of that\n song pop into his head. Now there\n was no escaping it. Something\n about the years—or was it days—dwindling\n down to something\n or other.", "such thing. A statement that\n lightning had never struck a\n house was no guarantee that it\n never would. It was an evasion\n meant to give such an impression.\nThe worry nagged at him all\n the way back. Word had already\n gone around the club that he’d\n had some kind of attack and\n there were endless questions that\n kept it on his mind. And even\n when it had been covered and\n recovered, he could still sense the\n glances of the others, as if he\n were Vincenti in one of the man’s\n more morose moods.\nHe found a single table in the\n dining room and picked his way\n through the meal, listening to\n the conversation about him only", "about his head and the earpieces\n were fitted. The drugs were shot\n painlessly into his arm and the\n light-pulser was adjusted to his\n brain-wave pattern.\nIt had been nothing like this his\n first time. Then it had required\n months of mental training, followed\n by crude mechanical and\n drug hypnosis for other months.\n Somewhere in every human brain\n lay the memory of what his cells\n had been like when he was young.\n Or perhaps it lay in the cells\n themselves, with the brain as only\n a linkage to it. They’d discovered\n that, and the fact that the mind\n could effect physical changes in\n the body. Even such things as", "drive working, there was no reason\n he should give up his work.\n The discovery that men could\n live practically forever had put\n an end to most family ties; sentiment\n wore thin in half a century—which\n wasn’t much time\n now, though it had once seemed\n long enough.\nStrange how the years seemed\n to get shorter as their number increased.\n There’d been a song\n once—something about the years\n dwindling down. He groped for\n the lines and couldn’t remember.\n Drat it! Now he’d probably lie\n awake most of the night again,\n trying to recall them.\nThe outside line buzzed musically,\n flashing Research’s number.", "his old answers. “We’re still ahead\n in medicine and we’ll get the\n other discoveries eventually, without\n interrupting the work of making\n the Earth fit for our longevity.\n We can wait. We’ll have to.”\nTHE YOUNGER man stared\n at him with the strange puzzled\n look Giles had seen too often\n lately. “Damn it, haven’t you read\n my report? We know the super-light\n drive works! That missile\n reached Sirius in less than ten\n days. We can have the secret of\n this antigravity in less than a\n year! We—”\n“Wait a minute.” Giles felt the\n thickness pushing back at his", "and there were hollows in his\n face and circles under his eyes.\n Even his hair had seemed thinner,\n though that, of course, was\n impossible.\n“Anything urgent on the Procyon\n shuttle?” he asked as she\n continue staring at him with worried\n eyes.\nSHE JERKED her gaze away\n guiltily and turned to the incoming\n basket. “Mostly drugs for\n experimenting. A personal letter\n for you, relayed from some place\n I never heard of. And one of the\n super-light missiles! They found\n it drifting half a light-year out\n and captured it. Jordan’s got a\n report on it and he’s going crazy.", "people still in the odd, wheelless\n vehicle on the alien planet.\nFOR A long moment, he stared\n at the picture without thinking,\n and then bent closer. Harry’s\n face hadn’t changed much. Giles\n had almost forgotten it, but there\n was still the same grin there. And\n his grandchildren had a touch\n of it, too. And of their grandfather’s\n nose, he thought. Funny,\n he’d never seen even pictures of\n his other grandchildren. Family\n ties melted away too fast for interstellar\n travel.\nYet there seemed to be no\n slackening of them in Harry’s\n case, and somehow it looked like\n a family, rather than a mere", "GILES TRIED to stop scaring\n himself and partially succeeded,\n until he reached the doctor’s\n office. Then it was no longer necessary\n to frighten himself. The\n wrongness was too strong, no matter\n how professional Cobb’s smile!\nHe didn’t hear the preliminary\n words. He watched the smile vanish\n as the stack of reports came\n out. There was no nurse here\n now. The machines were quiet—and\n all the doors were shut.\nGiles shook his head, interrupting\n the doctor’s technical jargon.\n Now that he knew there was reason\n for his fear, it seemed to\n vanish, leaving a coldness that\n numbed him.", "by an effort. “It’s a shock\n to me, too, Mr. Giles. But—well,\n to simplify it, no memory is perfect—even\n cellular memory. It\n loses a little each time. And the\n effect is cumulative. It’s like an\n asymptotic curve—the further it\n goes, the steeper the curve. And—well,\n you’ve passed too far.”\nHe faced away from Giles,\n dropping the reports into a\n drawer and locking it. “I wasn’t\n supposed to tell you, of course.\n It’s going to be tough enough\n when they’re ready to let people\n know. But you aren’t the first and\n you won’t be the last, if that’s any", "group. A very pleasant family in\n a very pleasant world.\nHe read Harry’s note again,\n with its praise for the planet and\n its invitation. He wondered if\n Dr. Vincenti had received an invitation\n like that, before he left.\n Or had he even been one of those\n to whom the same report had\n been delivered by some doctor?\n It didn’t matter, but it would explain\n things, at least.\nTwenty years to Centaurus,\n while the years dwindled down—\nThen abruptly the line finished\n itself. “The years dwindle down\n to a precious few....” he remembered.\n “A precious few.”\nThose dwindling years had", "“Thanks,” said Giles. “Ten\n o’clock is fine.”\nDubbins was still waiting, reading\n a paper whose headlined feature\n carried a glowing account of\n the discovery of the super-light\n missile and what it might mean.\n He took a quick look at Giles and\n pointed to it. “Great work, Mr.\n Giles. Maybe we’ll all get to see\n some of those other worlds yet.”\n Then he studied Giles more carefully.\n “Everything’s in good shape\n now, sir?”\n“The doctor says everything’s\n going to be fine,” Giles answered.\nIt was then he realized for the\n first time that Cobb had said no", "when he’d had a mansion and\n counted his wealth in possessions,\n instead of the treasures he could\n build inside himself for the future\n ahead. He was getting positively\n childish!\nYet he relished the feeling of\n having Dubbins drive his car.\n More than anything else, he’d\n loved being driven. Even after\n chauffeurs were a thing of the\n past, Harry had driven him\n around. Now he’d taken to walking,\n as so many others had, for\n even with modern safety measures\n so strict, there was always\n a small chance of some accident\n and nobody had any desire to\n spend the long future as a cripple.", "consolation. We’ve got a longer\n time scale than we used to have—but\n it’s in centuries, not in\n eons. For everybody, not just\n you.”\nIt was no consolation. Giles\n nodded mechanically. “I won’t\n talk, of course. How—how long?”\nCobb spread his hands unhappily.\n “Thirty years, maybe. But\n we can make them better. Geriatric\n knowledge is still on record.\n We can fix the heart and all the\n rest. You’ll be in good physical\n condition, better than your grandfather—”\n“And then....” Giles couldn’t\n pronounce the words. He’d grown\n old and he’d grow older. And", "various nostrums, giving him no\n peace. Constant questions about\n how he felt, constant little looks\n of worry—until he’d been ready\n to yell at the boy. In fact, he\n had.\nFunny, he couldn’t picture really\n losing his temper here. Families\n did odd things to a man.\nHE LISTENED to a few of\n the discussions after the dinner,\n but he’d heard them all before,\n except for one about the\n super-speed drive, and there he\n had no wish to talk until he could\n study the final report. He gave up\n at last and went to his own suite.\n What he needed was a good\n night’s sleep after a little relaxation.", "Could they really dwindle\n down? Suppose he couldn’t rejuvenate\n all the way? He knew\n that there were some people who\n didn’t respond as well as others.\n Sol Graves, for instance. He’d\n been fifty when he finally learned\n how to work with the doctors and\n they could only bring him back to\n about thirty, instead of the normal\n early twenties. Would that\n reduce the slice of eternity that\n rejuvenation meant? And what\n had happened to Sol?\nOr suppose it wasn’t rejuvenation,\n after all; suppose something\n had gone wrong with him\n permanently?\nHe fought that off, but he\n couldn’t escape the nagging", "somehow lost; the city beyond\n the window blurred as he\n studied it, and he swung the chair\n back so violently that his hand\n jerked painfully on the forelock\n he’d been twisting.\nThen he was staring unbelievingly\n at the single white hair that\n was twisted with the dark ones\n between his fingers.\nLike an automaton, he bent\n forward, his other hand groping\n for the mirror that should be in\n one of the drawers. The dull pain\n in his chest sharpened and his\n breath was hoarse in his throat,\n but he hardly noticed as he found\n the mirror and brought it up. His\n eyes focused reluctantly. There", "can send a message on the shuttle,\n begging for their secret in a\n couple of hundred years! While\n a hundred other worlds make a\n thousand major discoveries they\n don’t bother reporting! Can’t the\n Council see\nanything\n?”\nGiles had heard it all before.\n Earth was becoming a backwater\n world; no real progress had been\n made in two centuries; the young\n men were sent out as soon as\n their first fifty years of education\n were finished, and the older men\n were too conservative for really\n new thinking. There was a measure\n of truth in it, unfortunately.\n“They’ll slow up when their\n populations fill,” Giles repeated", "But if you don’t feel well—”\n“I’m all right!” he told her\n sharply. Then he steadied himself\n and managed to smile. “Thanks\n for the coffee, Amanda.”\nShe accepted dismissal reluctantly.\n When she was gone, he\n sat gazing at the report from Jordan\n at Research.\nFor eighty years now, they’d\n been sending out the little ships\n that vanished at greater than the\n speed of light, equipped with\n every conceivable device to make\n them return automatically after\n taking pictures of wherever they\n arrived. So far, none had ever returned\n or been located. This was\n the first hope they’d found that\n the century-long trips between", "stars in the ponderous shuttles\n might be ended and he should\n have been filled with excitement\n at Jordan’s hasty preliminary report.\nHe leafed through it. The little\n ship apparently had been picked\n up by accident when it almost\n collided with a Sirius-local ship.\n Scientists there had puzzled over\n it, reset it and sent it back. The\n two white rats on it had still been\n alive.\nGiles dropped the report wearily\n and picked up the personal\n message that had come on the\n shuttle. He fingered the microstrip\n inside while he drank another\n coffee, and finally pulled\n out the microviewer. There were" ], [ "can send a message on the shuttle,\n begging for their secret in a\n couple of hundred years! While\n a hundred other worlds make a\n thousand major discoveries they\n don’t bother reporting! Can’t the\n Council see\nanything\n?”\nGiles had heard it all before.\n Earth was becoming a backwater\n world; no real progress had been\n made in two centuries; the young\n men were sent out as soon as\n their first fifty years of education\n were finished, and the older men\n were too conservative for really\n new thinking. There was a measure\n of truth in it, unfortunately.\n“They’ll slow up when their\n populations fill,” Giles repeated", "stars in the ponderous shuttles\n might be ended and he should\n have been filled with excitement\n at Jordan’s hasty preliminary report.\nHe leafed through it. The little\n ship apparently had been picked\n up by accident when it almost\n collided with a Sirius-local ship.\n Scientists there had puzzled over\n it, reset it and sent it back. The\n two white rats on it had still been\n alive.\nGiles dropped the report wearily\n and picked up the personal\n message that had come on the\n shuttle. He fingered the microstrip\n inside while he drank another\n coffee, and finally pulled\n out the microviewer. There were", "three frames to the message, he\n saw with some surprise.\nHe didn’t need to see the signature\n on the first projection.\n Only his youngest son would have\n sent an elaborate tercentenary\n greeting verse—one that would\n arrive ninety years too late! Harry\n had been born just before Earth\n passed the drastic birth limitation\n act and his mother had\n spoiled him. He’d even tried to\n avoid the compulsory emigration\n draft and stay on with his mother.\n It had been the bitter quarrels\n over that which had finally\n broken Giles’ fifth marriage.\nOddly enough, the message in\n the next frame showed none of\n that. Harry had nothing but", "But if you don’t feel well—”\n“I’m all right!” he told her\n sharply. Then he steadied himself\n and managed to smile. “Thanks\n for the coffee, Amanda.”\nShe accepted dismissal reluctantly.\n When she was gone, he\n sat gazing at the report from Jordan\n at Research.\nFor eighty years now, they’d\n been sending out the little ships\n that vanished at greater than the\n speed of light, equipped with\n every conceivable device to make\n them return automatically after\n taking pictures of wherever they\n arrived. So far, none had ever returned\n or been located. This was\n the first hope they’d found that\n the century-long trips between", "praise for the solar system where\n he’d been sent. He barely mentioned\n being married on the way\n or his dozen children, but filled\n most of the frame with glowing\n description and a plea for his\n father to join him there!\nGILES SNORTED and turned\n to the third frame, which\n showed a group picture of the\n family in some sort of vehicle,\n against the background of an alien\n but attractive world.\nHe had no desire to spend\n ninety years cooped up with a\n bunch of callow young emigrants,\n even in one of the improved Exodus\n shuttles. And even if Exodus\n ever got the super-light", "I mean the big ship. We’ve had it\n drafted for building long enough;\n now we can finish it in three\n months. We know the drive works.\n We know it’s fast enough to reach\n Procyon in two weeks. We even\n know life can stand the trip. The\n rats were unharmed.”\nGiles shook his head at what\n the other was proposing, only\n partly believing it. “Rats don’t\n have minds that could show any\n real damage such as the loss of\n power to rejuvenate. We can’t put\n human pilots into a ship with our\n drive until we’ve tested it more\n thoroughly, Bill, even if they\n could correct for errors on arrival.", "Maybe if we put in stronger signaling\n transmitters....”\n“Yeah. Maybe in two centuries\n we’d have a through route charted\n to Sirius. And we still wouldn’t\n have proved it safe for human\n pilots. Mr. Giles, we’ve got to\n have the big ship. All we need is\none\nvolunteer!”\nIt occurred to Giles then that\n the man had been too fired with\n the idea to think. He leaned back,\n shaking his head again wearily.\n “All right, Bill. Find me one volunteer.\n Or how about you? Do\n you really want to risk losing the\n rest of your life rather than waiting\n a couple more centuries until", "projected picture from Harry, across\n the desk from the communicator.\n“Antigravity!” His voice was\n unbelieving as he turned his head\n to face the older man. “What\n world is that?”\nGiles forced his attention on\n the picture again and this time\n he noticed the vehicle shown. It\n was enough like an old model\n Earth conveyance to pass casual\n inspection, but it floated wheellessly\n above the ground. Faint\n blur lines indicated it had been\n moving when the picture was\n taken.\n“One of my sons—” Giles\n started to answer. “I could find\n the star’s designation....”\nJordan cursed harshly. “So we", "and there were hollows in his\n face and circles under his eyes.\n Even his hair had seemed thinner,\n though that, of course, was\n impossible.\n“Anything urgent on the Procyon\n shuttle?” he asked as she\n continue staring at him with worried\n eyes.\nSHE JERKED her gaze away\n guiltily and turned to the incoming\n basket. “Mostly drugs for\n experimenting. A personal letter\n for you, relayed from some place\n I never heard of. And one of the\n super-light missiles! They found\n it drifting half a light-year out\n and captured it. Jordan’s got a\n report on it and he’s going crazy.", "group. A very pleasant family in\n a very pleasant world.\nHe read Harry’s note again,\n with its praise for the planet and\n its invitation. He wondered if\n Dr. Vincenti had received an invitation\n like that, before he left.\n Or had he even been one of those\n to whom the same report had\n been delivered by some doctor?\n It didn’t matter, but it would explain\n things, at least.\nTwenty years to Centaurus,\n while the years dwindled down—\nThen abruptly the line finished\n itself. “The years dwindle down\n to a precious few....” he remembered.\n “A precious few.”\nThose dwindling years had", "his old answers. “We’re still ahead\n in medicine and we’ll get the\n other discoveries eventually, without\n interrupting the work of making\n the Earth fit for our longevity.\n We can wait. We’ll have to.”\nTHE YOUNGER man stared\n at him with the strange puzzled\n look Giles had seen too often\n lately. “Damn it, haven’t you read\n my report? We know the super-light\n drive works! That missile\n reached Sirius in less than ten\n days. We can have the secret of\n this antigravity in less than a\n year! We—”\n“Wait a minute.” Giles felt the\n thickness pushing back at his", "Dubbins shook his head. “Dr.\n Vincenti isn’t with us, sir. He\n left a year ago to visit a son in\n the Centauri system. There’s a\n Dr. Cobb whose reputation is\n very good, sir.”\nGiles puzzled over it doubtfully.\n Vincenti had been an oddly\n morose man the last few times\n he’d seen him, but that could\n hardly explain his taking a twenty-year\n shuttle trip for such a\n slim reason. It was no concern of\n his, though. “Dr. Cobb, then,” he\n said.\nGiles heard the other man’s\n voice on the study phone, too low\n for the words to be distinguishable.", "people still in the odd, wheelless\n vehicle on the alien planet.\nFOR A long moment, he stared\n at the picture without thinking,\n and then bent closer. Harry’s\n face hadn’t changed much. Giles\n had almost forgotten it, but there\n was still the same grin there. And\n his grandchildren had a touch\n of it, too. And of their grandfather’s\n nose, he thought. Funny,\n he’d never seen even pictures of\n his other grandchildren. Family\n ties melted away too fast for interstellar\n travel.\nYet there seemed to be no\n slackening of them in Harry’s\n case, and somehow it looked like\n a family, rather than a mere", "mind and tried to fight it off. He’d\n only skimmed the report, but this\n made no sense. “You mean you\n can calibrate your guiding devices\n accurately enough to get a\n missile where you want it and\n back?”\n“\nWhat?\n” Jordan’s voice rattled\n the speaker. “Of course not! It\n took two accidents to get the\n thing back to us—and with a\n half-light-year miss that delayed\n it about twenty years before the\n Procyon shuttle heard its signal.\n Pre-setting a course may take\n centuries, if we can ever master\n it. Even with Sirius expecting the\n missiles and ready to cooperate.", "we’ll find a way. With time\n enough, we’re bound to. And\n when we do, the ship will be\n ready.”\nThe engineer nodded miserably\n and clicked off. Giles turned\n from the blank screen to stare\n out of the windows, while his\n hand came up to twist at the lock\n of hair over his forehead. Eternity!\n They had to plan and build\n for it. They couldn’t risk that\n plan for short-term benefits. Usually\n it was too easy to realize that,\n and the sight of the solid, time-enduring\n buildings outside should\n have given him a sense of security.\nToday, though, nothing seemed\n to help. He felt choked, imprisoned,", "various nostrums, giving him no\n peace. Constant questions about\n how he felt, constant little looks\n of worry—until he’d been ready\n to yell at the boy. In fact, he\n had.\nFunny, he couldn’t picture really\n losing his temper here. Families\n did odd things to a man.\nHE LISTENED to a few of\n the discussions after the dinner,\n but he’d heard them all before,\n except for one about the\n super-speed drive, and there he\n had no wish to talk until he could\n study the final report. He gave up\n at last and went to his own suite.\n What he needed was a good\n night’s sleep after a little relaxation.", "we know it’s safe? If you do, I’ll\n order the big ship.”\nJordan opened his mouth and\n for a second Giles’ heart caught\n in a flux of emotions as the\n man’s offer hovered on his lips.\n Then the engineer shut his mouth\n slowly. The belligerence ran out\n of him.\nHe looked sick, for he had no\n answer.\nNO SANE man would risk a\n chance for near eternity\n against such a relatively short\n wait. Heroism had belonged to\n those who knew their days were\n numbered, anyhow.\n“Forget it, Bill,” Giles advised.\n “It may take longer, but eventually", "drive working, there was no reason\n he should give up his work.\n The discovery that men could\n live practically forever had put\n an end to most family ties; sentiment\n wore thin in half a century—which\n wasn’t much time\n now, though it had once seemed\n long enough.\nStrange how the years seemed\n to get shorter as their number increased.\n There’d been a song\n once—something about the years\n dwindling down. He groped for\n the lines and couldn’t remember.\n Drat it! Now he’d probably lie\n awake most of the night again,\n trying to recall them.\nThe outside line buzzed musically,\n flashing Research’s number.", "there’d be other grandchildren.\n With the ship, he’d have time\n enough to look them up. Plenty\n of time!\nThirty years was a long time,\n when he stopped to think of it.\n—LESTER DEL REY", "“Thanks,” said Giles. “Ten\n o’clock is fine.”\nDubbins was still waiting, reading\n a paper whose headlined feature\n carried a glowing account of\n the discovery of the super-light\n missile and what it might mean.\n He took a quick look at Giles and\n pointed to it. “Great work, Mr.\n Giles. Maybe we’ll all get to see\n some of those other worlds yet.”\n Then he studied Giles more carefully.\n “Everything’s in good shape\n now, sir?”\n“The doctor says everything’s\n going to be fine,” Giles answered.\nIt was then he realized for the\n first time that Cobb had said no" ], [ "can send a message on the shuttle,\n begging for their secret in a\n couple of hundred years! While\n a hundred other worlds make a\n thousand major discoveries they\n don’t bother reporting! Can’t the\n Council see\nanything\n?”\nGiles had heard it all before.\n Earth was becoming a backwater\n world; no real progress had been\n made in two centuries; the young\n men were sent out as soon as\n their first fifty years of education\n were finished, and the older men\n were too conservative for really\n new thinking. There was a measure\n of truth in it, unfortunately.\n“They’ll slow up when their\n populations fill,” Giles repeated", "his old answers. “We’re still ahead\n in medicine and we’ll get the\n other discoveries eventually, without\n interrupting the work of making\n the Earth fit for our longevity.\n We can wait. We’ll have to.”\nTHE YOUNGER man stared\n at him with the strange puzzled\n look Giles had seen too often\n lately. “Damn it, haven’t you read\n my report? We know the super-light\n drive works! That missile\n reached Sirius in less than ten\n days. We can have the secret of\n this antigravity in less than a\n year! We—”\n“Wait a minute.” Giles felt the\n thickness pushing back at his", "and there were hollows in his\n face and circles under his eyes.\n Even his hair had seemed thinner,\n though that, of course, was\n impossible.\n“Anything urgent on the Procyon\n shuttle?” he asked as she\n continue staring at him with worried\n eyes.\nSHE JERKED her gaze away\n guiltily and turned to the incoming\n basket. “Mostly drugs for\n experimenting. A personal letter\n for you, relayed from some place\n I never heard of. And one of the\n super-light missiles! They found\n it drifting half a light-year out\n and captured it. Jordan’s got a\n report on it and he’s going crazy.", "I mean the big ship. We’ve had it\n drafted for building long enough;\n now we can finish it in three\n months. We know the drive works.\n We know it’s fast enough to reach\n Procyon in two weeks. We even\n know life can stand the trip. The\n rats were unharmed.”\nGiles shook his head at what\n the other was proposing, only\n partly believing it. “Rats don’t\n have minds that could show any\n real damage such as the loss of\n power to rejuvenate. We can’t put\n human pilots into a ship with our\n drive until we’ve tested it more\n thoroughly, Bill, even if they\n could correct for errors on arrival.", "praise for the solar system where\n he’d been sent. He barely mentioned\n being married on the way\n or his dozen children, but filled\n most of the frame with glowing\n description and a plea for his\n father to join him there!\nGILES SNORTED and turned\n to the third frame, which\n showed a group picture of the\n family in some sort of vehicle,\n against the background of an alien\n but attractive world.\nHe had no desire to spend\n ninety years cooped up with a\n bunch of callow young emigrants,\n even in one of the improved Exodus\n shuttles. And even if Exodus\n ever got the super-light", "people still in the odd, wheelless\n vehicle on the alien planet.\nFOR A long moment, he stared\n at the picture without thinking,\n and then bent closer. Harry’s\n face hadn’t changed much. Giles\n had almost forgotten it, but there\n was still the same grin there. And\n his grandchildren had a touch\n of it, too. And of their grandfather’s\n nose, he thought. Funny,\n he’d never seen even pictures of\n his other grandchildren. Family\n ties melted away too fast for interstellar\n travel.\nYet there seemed to be no\n slackening of them in Harry’s\n case, and somehow it looked like\n a family, rather than a mere", "group. A very pleasant family in\n a very pleasant world.\nHe read Harry’s note again,\n with its praise for the planet and\n its invitation. He wondered if\n Dr. Vincenti had received an invitation\n like that, before he left.\n Or had he even been one of those\n to whom the same report had\n been delivered by some doctor?\n It didn’t matter, but it would explain\n things, at least.\nTwenty years to Centaurus,\n while the years dwindled down—\nThen abruptly the line finished\n itself. “The years dwindle down\n to a precious few....” he remembered.\n “A precious few.”\nThose dwindling years had", "projected picture from Harry, across\n the desk from the communicator.\n“Antigravity!” His voice was\n unbelieving as he turned his head\n to face the older man. “What\n world is that?”\nGiles forced his attention on\n the picture again and this time\n he noticed the vehicle shown. It\n was enough like an old model\n Earth conveyance to pass casual\n inspection, but it floated wheellessly\n above the ground. Faint\n blur lines indicated it had been\n moving when the picture was\n taken.\n“One of my sons—” Giles\n started to answer. “I could find\n the star’s designation....”\nJordan cursed harshly. “So we", "stars in the ponderous shuttles\n might be ended and he should\n have been filled with excitement\n at Jordan’s hasty preliminary report.\nHe leafed through it. The little\n ship apparently had been picked\n up by accident when it almost\n collided with a Sirius-local ship.\n Scientists there had puzzled over\n it, reset it and sent it back. The\n two white rats on it had still been\n alive.\nGiles dropped the report wearily\n and picked up the personal\n message that had come on the\n shuttle. He fingered the microstrip\n inside while he drank another\n coffee, and finally pulled\n out the microviewer. There were", "Dubbins shook his head. “Dr.\n Vincenti isn’t with us, sir. He\n left a year ago to visit a son in\n the Centauri system. There’s a\n Dr. Cobb whose reputation is\n very good, sir.”\nGiles puzzled over it doubtfully.\n Vincenti had been an oddly\n morose man the last few times\n he’d seen him, but that could\n hardly explain his taking a twenty-year\n shuttle trip for such a\n slim reason. It was no concern of\n his, though. “Dr. Cobb, then,” he\n said.\nGiles heard the other man’s\n voice on the study phone, too low\n for the words to be distinguishable.", "we’ll find a way. With time\n enough, we’re bound to. And\n when we do, the ship will be\n ready.”\nThe engineer nodded miserably\n and clicked off. Giles turned\n from the blank screen to stare\n out of the windows, while his\n hand came up to twist at the lock\n of hair over his forehead. Eternity!\n They had to plan and build\n for it. They couldn’t risk that\n plan for short-term benefits. Usually\n it was too easy to realize that,\n and the sight of the solid, time-enduring\n buildings outside should\n have given him a sense of security.\nToday, though, nothing seemed\n to help. He felt choked, imprisoned,", "Maybe if we put in stronger signaling\n transmitters....”\n“Yeah. Maybe in two centuries\n we’d have a through route charted\n to Sirius. And we still wouldn’t\n have proved it safe for human\n pilots. Mr. Giles, we’ve got to\n have the big ship. All we need is\none\nvolunteer!”\nIt occurred to Giles then that\n the man had been too fired with\n the idea to think. He leaned back,\n shaking his head again wearily.\n “All right, Bill. Find me one volunteer.\n Or how about you? Do\n you really want to risk losing the\n rest of your life rather than waiting\n a couple more centuries until", "But if you don’t feel well—”\n“I’m all right!” he told her\n sharply. Then he steadied himself\n and managed to smile. “Thanks\n for the coffee, Amanda.”\nShe accepted dismissal reluctantly.\n When she was gone, he\n sat gazing at the report from Jordan\n at Research.\nFor eighty years now, they’d\n been sending out the little ships\n that vanished at greater than the\n speed of light, equipped with\n every conceivable device to make\n them return automatically after\n taking pictures of wherever they\n arrived. So far, none had ever returned\n or been located. This was\n the first hope they’d found that\n the century-long trips between", "consolation. We’ve got a longer\n time scale than we used to have—but\n it’s in centuries, not in\n eons. For everybody, not just\n you.”\nIt was no consolation. Giles\n nodded mechanically. “I won’t\n talk, of course. How—how long?”\nCobb spread his hands unhappily.\n “Thirty years, maybe. But\n we can make them better. Geriatric\n knowledge is still on record.\n We can fix the heart and all the\n rest. You’ll be in good physical\n condition, better than your grandfather—”\n“And then....” Giles couldn’t\n pronounce the words. He’d grown\n old and he’d grow older. And", "“I’d rather know the whole\n truth,” he said. His voice sounded\n dead in his ears. “The worst first.\n The rejuvenation...?”\nCobb sighed and yet seemed relieved.\n “Failed.” He stopped, and\n his hands touched the reports on\n his desk. “Completely,” he added\n in a low, defeated tone.\n“But I thought that was impossible!”\n“So did I. I wouldn’t believe\n it even yet—but now I find it\n isn’t the first case. I spent the\n night at Medical Center going up\n the ranks until I found men who\n really know about it. And now I\n wish I hadn’t.” His voice ran\n down and he gathered himself together", "three frames to the message, he\n saw with some surprise.\nHe didn’t need to see the signature\n on the first projection.\n Only his youngest son would have\n sent an elaborate tercentenary\n greeting verse—one that would\n arrive ninety years too late! Harry\n had been born just before Earth\n passed the drastic birth limitation\n act and his mother had\n spoiled him. He’d even tried to\n avoid the compulsory emigration\n draft and stay on with his mother.\n It had been the bitter quarrels\n over that which had finally\n broken Giles’ fifth marriage.\nOddly enough, the message in\n the next frame showed none of\n that. Harry had nothing but", "various nostrums, giving him no\n peace. Constant questions about\n how he felt, constant little looks\n of worry—until he’d been ready\n to yell at the boy. In fact, he\n had.\nFunny, he couldn’t picture really\n losing his temper here. Families\n did odd things to a man.\nHE LISTENED to a few of\n the discussions after the dinner,\n but he’d heard them all before,\n except for one about the\n super-speed drive, and there he\n had no wish to talk until he could\n study the final report. He gave up\n at last and went to his own suite.\n What he needed was a good\n night’s sleep after a little relaxation.", "“Thanks,” said Giles. “Ten\n o’clock is fine.”\nDubbins was still waiting, reading\n a paper whose headlined feature\n carried a glowing account of\n the discovery of the super-light\n missile and what it might mean.\n He took a quick look at Giles and\n pointed to it. “Great work, Mr.\n Giles. Maybe we’ll all get to see\n some of those other worlds yet.”\n Then he studied Giles more carefully.\n “Everything’s in good shape\n now, sir?”\n“The doctor says everything’s\n going to be fine,” Giles answered.\nIt was then he realized for the\n first time that Cobb had said no", "mind and tried to fight it off. He’d\n only skimmed the report, but this\n made no sense. “You mean you\n can calibrate your guiding devices\n accurately enough to get a\n missile where you want it and\n back?”\n“\nWhat?\n” Jordan’s voice rattled\n the speaker. “Of course not! It\n took two accidents to get the\n thing back to us—and with a\n half-light-year miss that delayed\n it about twenty years before the\n Procyon shuttle heard its signal.\n Pre-setting a course may take\n centuries, if we can ever master\n it. Even with Sirius expecting the\n missiles and ready to cooperate.", "when it was necessary because\n someone called across to him.\n Ordinarily, he was quick to support\n the idea of clubs in place\n of private families. A man here\n could choose his group and grow\n into them. Yet he wasn’t swallowed\n by them, as he might be by\n a family. Giles had been living\n here for nearly a century now and\n he’d never regretted it. But tonight\n his own group irritated him.\nHe puzzled over it, finding no\n real reason. Certainly they weren’t\n forcing themselves on him. He\n remembered once when he’d had\n a cold, before they finally licked\n that; Harry had been a complete\n nuisance, running around with" ], [ "can send a message on the shuttle,\n begging for their secret in a\n couple of hundred years! While\n a hundred other worlds make a\n thousand major discoveries they\n don’t bother reporting! Can’t the\n Council see\nanything\n?”\nGiles had heard it all before.\n Earth was becoming a backwater\n world; no real progress had been\n made in two centuries; the young\n men were sent out as soon as\n their first fifty years of education\n were finished, and the older men\n were too conservative for really\n new thinking. There was a measure\n of truth in it, unfortunately.\n“They’ll slow up when their\n populations fill,” Giles repeated", "three frames to the message, he\n saw with some surprise.\nHe didn’t need to see the signature\n on the first projection.\n Only his youngest son would have\n sent an elaborate tercentenary\n greeting verse—one that would\n arrive ninety years too late! Harry\n had been born just before Earth\n passed the drastic birth limitation\n act and his mother had\n spoiled him. He’d even tried to\n avoid the compulsory emigration\n draft and stay on with his mother.\n It had been the bitter quarrels\n over that which had finally\n broken Giles’ fifth marriage.\nOddly enough, the message in\n the next frame showed none of\n that. Harry had nothing but", "stars in the ponderous shuttles\n might be ended and he should\n have been filled with excitement\n at Jordan’s hasty preliminary report.\nHe leafed through it. The little\n ship apparently had been picked\n up by accident when it almost\n collided with a Sirius-local ship.\n Scientists there had puzzled over\n it, reset it and sent it back. The\n two white rats on it had still been\n alive.\nGiles dropped the report wearily\n and picked up the personal\n message that had come on the\n shuttle. He fingered the microstrip\n inside while he drank another\n coffee, and finally pulled\n out the microviewer. There were", "and there were hollows in his\n face and circles under his eyes.\n Even his hair had seemed thinner,\n though that, of course, was\n impossible.\n“Anything urgent on the Procyon\n shuttle?” he asked as she\n continue staring at him with worried\n eyes.\nSHE JERKED her gaze away\n guiltily and turned to the incoming\n basket. “Mostly drugs for\n experimenting. A personal letter\n for you, relayed from some place\n I never heard of. And one of the\n super-light missiles! They found\n it drifting half a light-year out\n and captured it. Jordan’s got a\n report on it and he’s going crazy.", "But if you don’t feel well—”\n“I’m all right!” he told her\n sharply. Then he steadied himself\n and managed to smile. “Thanks\n for the coffee, Amanda.”\nShe accepted dismissal reluctantly.\n When she was gone, he\n sat gazing at the report from Jordan\n at Research.\nFor eighty years now, they’d\n been sending out the little ships\n that vanished at greater than the\n speed of light, equipped with\n every conceivable device to make\n them return automatically after\n taking pictures of wherever they\n arrived. So far, none had ever returned\n or been located. This was\n the first hope they’d found that\n the century-long trips between", "projected picture from Harry, across\n the desk from the communicator.\n“Antigravity!” His voice was\n unbelieving as he turned his head\n to face the older man. “What\n world is that?”\nGiles forced his attention on\n the picture again and this time\n he noticed the vehicle shown. It\n was enough like an old model\n Earth conveyance to pass casual\n inspection, but it floated wheellessly\n above the ground. Faint\n blur lines indicated it had been\n moving when the picture was\n taken.\n“One of my sons—” Giles\n started to answer. “I could find\n the star’s designation....”\nJordan cursed harshly. “So we", "drive working, there was no reason\n he should give up his work.\n The discovery that men could\n live practically forever had put\n an end to most family ties; sentiment\n wore thin in half a century—which\n wasn’t much time\n now, though it had once seemed\n long enough.\nStrange how the years seemed\n to get shorter as their number increased.\n There’d been a song\n once—something about the years\n dwindling down. He groped for\n the lines and couldn’t remember.\n Drat it! Now he’d probably lie\n awake most of the night again,\n trying to recall them.\nThe outside line buzzed musically,\n flashing Research’s number.", "his old answers. “We’re still ahead\n in medicine and we’ll get the\n other discoveries eventually, without\n interrupting the work of making\n the Earth fit for our longevity.\n We can wait. We’ll have to.”\nTHE YOUNGER man stared\n at him with the strange puzzled\n look Giles had seen too often\n lately. “Damn it, haven’t you read\n my report? We know the super-light\n drive works! That missile\n reached Sirius in less than ten\n days. We can have the secret of\n this antigravity in less than a\n year! We—”\n“Wait a minute.” Giles felt the\n thickness pushing back at his", "group. A very pleasant family in\n a very pleasant world.\nHe read Harry’s note again,\n with its praise for the planet and\n its invitation. He wondered if\n Dr. Vincenti had received an invitation\n like that, before he left.\n Or had he even been one of those\n to whom the same report had\n been delivered by some doctor?\n It didn’t matter, but it would explain\n things, at least.\nTwenty years to Centaurus,\n while the years dwindled down—\nThen abruptly the line finished\n itself. “The years dwindle down\n to a precious few....” he remembered.\n “A precious few.”\nThose dwindling years had", "when it was necessary because\n someone called across to him.\n Ordinarily, he was quick to support\n the idea of clubs in place\n of private families. A man here\n could choose his group and grow\n into them. Yet he wasn’t swallowed\n by them, as he might be by\n a family. Giles had been living\n here for nearly a century now and\n he’d never regretted it. But tonight\n his own group irritated him.\nHe puzzled over it, finding no\n real reason. Certainly they weren’t\n forcing themselves on him. He\n remembered once when he’d had\n a cold, before they finally licked\n that; Harry had been a complete\n nuisance, running around with", "people still in the odd, wheelless\n vehicle on the alien planet.\nFOR A long moment, he stared\n at the picture without thinking,\n and then bent closer. Harry’s\n face hadn’t changed much. Giles\n had almost forgotten it, but there\n was still the same grin there. And\n his grandchildren had a touch\n of it, too. And of their grandfather’s\n nose, he thought. Funny,\n he’d never seen even pictures of\n his other grandchildren. Family\n ties melted away too fast for interstellar\n travel.\nYet there seemed to be no\n slackening of them in Harry’s\n case, and somehow it looked like\n a family, rather than a mere", "various nostrums, giving him no\n peace. Constant questions about\n how he felt, constant little looks\n of worry—until he’d been ready\n to yell at the boy. In fact, he\n had.\nFunny, he couldn’t picture really\n losing his temper here. Families\n did odd things to a man.\nHE LISTENED to a few of\n the discussions after the dinner,\n but he’d heard them all before,\n except for one about the\n super-speed drive, and there he\n had no wish to talk until he could\n study the final report. He gave up\n at last and went to his own suite.\n What he needed was a good\n night’s sleep after a little relaxation.", "we’ll find a way. With time\n enough, we’re bound to. And\n when we do, the ship will be\n ready.”\nThe engineer nodded miserably\n and clicked off. Giles turned\n from the blank screen to stare\n out of the windows, while his\n hand came up to twist at the lock\n of hair over his forehead. Eternity!\n They had to plan and build\n for it. They couldn’t risk that\n plan for short-term benefits. Usually\n it was too easy to realize that,\n and the sight of the solid, time-enduring\n buildings outside should\n have given him a sense of security.\nToday, though, nothing seemed\n to help. He felt choked, imprisoned,", "mind and tried to fight it off. He’d\n only skimmed the report, but this\n made no sense. “You mean you\n can calibrate your guiding devices\n accurately enough to get a\n missile where you want it and\n back?”\n“\nWhat?\n” Jordan’s voice rattled\n the speaker. “Of course not! It\n took two accidents to get the\n thing back to us—and with a\n half-light-year miss that delayed\n it about twenty years before the\n Procyon shuttle heard its signal.\n Pre-setting a course may take\n centuries, if we can ever master\n it. Even with Sirius expecting the\n missiles and ready to cooperate.", "such thing. A statement that\n lightning had never struck a\n house was no guarantee that it\n never would. It was an evasion\n meant to give such an impression.\nThe worry nagged at him all\n the way back. Word had already\n gone around the club that he’d\n had some kind of attack and\n there were endless questions that\n kept it on his mind. And even\n when it had been covered and\n recovered, he could still sense the\n glances of the others, as if he\n were Vincenti in one of the man’s\n more morose moods.\nHe found a single table in the\n dining room and picked his way\n through the meal, listening to\n the conversation about him only", "I mean the big ship. We’ve had it\n drafted for building long enough;\n now we can finish it in three\n months. We know the drive works.\n We know it’s fast enough to reach\n Procyon in two weeks. We even\n know life can stand the trip. The\n rats were unharmed.”\nGiles shook his head at what\n the other was proposing, only\n partly believing it. “Rats don’t\n have minds that could show any\n real damage such as the loss of\n power to rejuvenate. We can’t put\n human pilots into a ship with our\n drive until we’ve tested it more\n thoroughly, Bill, even if they\n could correct for errors on arrival.", "we know it’s safe? If you do, I’ll\n order the big ship.”\nJordan opened his mouth and\n for a second Giles’ heart caught\n in a flux of emotions as the\n man’s offer hovered on his lips.\n Then the engineer shut his mouth\n slowly. The belligerence ran out\n of him.\nHe looked sick, for he had no\n answer.\nNO SANE man would risk a\n chance for near eternity\n against such a relatively short\n wait. Heroism had belonged to\n those who knew their days were\n numbered, anyhow.\n“Forget it, Bill,” Giles advised.\n “It may take longer, but eventually", "“Thanks,” said Giles. “Ten\n o’clock is fine.”\nDubbins was still waiting, reading\n a paper whose headlined feature\n carried a glowing account of\n the discovery of the super-light\n missile and what it might mean.\n He took a quick look at Giles and\n pointed to it. “Great work, Mr.\n Giles. Maybe we’ll all get to see\n some of those other worlds yet.”\n Then he studied Giles more carefully.\n “Everything’s in good shape\n now, sir?”\n“The doctor says everything’s\n going to be fine,” Giles answered.\nIt was then he realized for the\n first time that Cobb had said no", "Maybe if we put in stronger signaling\n transmitters....”\n“Yeah. Maybe in two centuries\n we’d have a through route charted\n to Sirius. And we still wouldn’t\n have proved it safe for human\n pilots. Mr. Giles, we’ve got to\n have the big ship. All we need is\none\nvolunteer!”\nIt occurred to Giles then that\n the man had been too fired with\n the idea to think. He leaned back,\n shaking his head again wearily.\n “All right, Bill. Find me one volunteer.\n Or how about you? Do\n you really want to risk losing the\n rest of your life rather than waiting\n a couple more centuries until", "consolation. We’ve got a longer\n time scale than we used to have—but\n it’s in centuries, not in\n eons. For everybody, not just\n you.”\nIt was no consolation. Giles\n nodded mechanically. “I won’t\n talk, of course. How—how long?”\nCobb spread his hands unhappily.\n “Thirty years, maybe. But\n we can make them better. Geriatric\n knowledge is still on record.\n We can fix the heart and all the\n rest. You’ll be in good physical\n condition, better than your grandfather—”\n“And then....” Giles couldn’t\n pronounce the words. He’d grown\n old and he’d grow older. And" ], [ "Giles remembered that Dubbins\n was waiting for him, but this\n was more important. It hadn’t\n been a joke about his growing old,\n after all. But now, in a few days,\n he’d be his old—no, of course\n not—his young self again!\nThey went down the hall to\n another office, where Giles waited\n outside while Cobb conferred\n with another doctor and technician,\n with much waving of charts.\n He resented every second of it.\n It was as if the almost forgotten\n specter of age stood beside him,\n counting the seconds. But at last\n they were through and he was led\n into the quiet rejuvenation room,\n where the clamps were adjusted", "Could they really dwindle\n down? Suppose he couldn’t rejuvenate\n all the way? He knew\n that there were some people who\n didn’t respond as well as others.\n Sol Graves, for instance. He’d\n been fifty when he finally learned\n how to work with the doctors and\n they could only bring him back to\n about thirty, instead of the normal\n early twenties. Would that\n reduce the slice of eternity that\n rejuvenation meant? And what\n had happened to Sol?\nOr suppose it wasn’t rejuvenation,\n after all; suppose something\n had gone wrong with him\n permanently?\nHe fought that off, but he\n couldn’t escape the nagging", "with an old-fashioned desk and\n chairs that almost concealed the\n cabinets of equipment beyond.\nHe listened as Giles stumbled\n out his story. Halfway through,\n the nurse took a blood sample\n with one of the little mosquito\n needles and the machinery behind\n the doctor began working on\n it.\n“Your friend told me about the\n gray hair, of course,” Cobb said.\n At Giles’ look, he smiled faintly.\n “Surely you didn’t think people\n could miss that in this day and\n age? Let’s see it.”\nHe inspected it and began\n making tests. Some were older\n than Giles could remember—knee", "“I’d rather know the whole\n truth,” he said. His voice sounded\n dead in his ears. “The worst first.\n The rejuvenation...?”\nCobb sighed and yet seemed relieved.\n “Failed.” He stopped, and\n his hands touched the reports on\n his desk. “Completely,” he added\n in a low, defeated tone.\n“But I thought that was impossible!”\n“So did I. I wouldn’t believe\n it even yet—but now I find it\n isn’t the first case. I spent the\n night at Medical Center going up\n the ranks until I found men who\n really know about it. And now I\n wish I hadn’t.” His voice ran\n down and he gathered himself together", "consolation. We’ve got a longer\n time scale than we used to have—but\n it’s in centuries, not in\n eons. For everybody, not just\n you.”\nIt was no consolation. Giles\n nodded mechanically. “I won’t\n talk, of course. How—how long?”\nCobb spread his hands unhappily.\n “Thirty years, maybe. But\n we can make them better. Geriatric\n knowledge is still on record.\n We can fix the heart and all the\n rest. You’ll be in good physical\n condition, better than your grandfather—”\n“And then....” Giles couldn’t\n pronounce the words. He’d grown\n old and he’d grow older. And", "Cobb considered it, hesitated as\n if making up his mind to be frank\n against his better judgment. “I\n can’t see any other explanation.\n You’ve got a slight case of angina—nothing\n serious, but quite definite—as\n well as other signs\n of aging. I’m afraid the treatment\n didn’t take fully. It might have\n been some unconscious block\n on your part, some infection not\n diagnosed at the time, or even a\n fault in the treatment. That’s\n pretty rare, but we can’t neglect\n the possibility.”\nHE STUDIED his charts again\n and then smiled. “So we’ll\n give you another treatment. Any\n reason you can’t begin immediately?”", "reflex, blood pressure, pulse\n and fluoroscope. Others involved\n complicated little gadgets that\n ran over his body, while meters\n bobbed and wiggled. The blood\n check came through and Cobb\n studied it, to go back and make\n further inspections of his own.\nAt last he nodded slowly.\n “Hyper-catabolism, of course. I\n thought it might be. How long\n since you had your last rejuvenation?\n And who gave it?”\n“About ten years ago,” Giles\n answered. He found his identity\n card and passed it over, while\n the doctor studied it. “My sixteenth.”\nIt wasn’t going right. He could", "by an effort. “It’s a shock\n to me, too, Mr. Giles. But—well,\n to simplify it, no memory is perfect—even\n cellular memory. It\n loses a little each time. And the\n effect is cumulative. It’s like an\n asymptotic curve—the further it\n goes, the steeper the curve. And—well,\n you’ve passed too far.”\nHe faced away from Giles,\n dropping the reports into a\n drawer and locking it. “I wasn’t\n supposed to tell you, of course.\n It’s going to be tough enough\n when they’re ready to let people\n know. But you aren’t the first and\n you won’t be the last, if that’s any", "after the treatment!\nBut with all the equipment, it\n wasn’t impossible for a mistake\n to happen. It had been no fault of\n his ... he was sure of that ... his\n mind was easy to reach ... he\n could relax so easily....\nHe came out of it without\n even a headache, while they were\n removing the probes, but the\n fatigue on the operator’s face told\n him it had been a long and difficult\n job. He stretched experimentally,\n with the eternal unconscious\n expectation that he would\n find himself suddenly young\n again. But that, of course, was ridiculous.\n It took days for the mind\n to work on all the cells and to\n repair the damage of time.", "feel it. Some of the panic symptoms\n were returning; the pulse in\n his neck was pounding and his\n breath was growing difficult.\n Sweat ran down his sides from\n his armpit and he wiped his palms\n against his coat.\n“Any particular emotional\n strain when you were treated—some\n major upset in your life?”\n Cobb asked.\nGiles thought as carefully as\n he could, but he remembered\n nothing like that. “You mean—it\n didn’t take? But I never had\n any trouble, Doctor. I was one of\n the first million cases, when a\n lot of people couldn’t rejuvenate\n at all, and I had no trouble even\n then.”", "about his head and the earpieces\n were fitted. The drugs were shot\n painlessly into his arm and the\n light-pulser was adjusted to his\n brain-wave pattern.\nIt had been nothing like this his\n first time. Then it had required\n months of mental training, followed\n by crude mechanical and\n drug hypnosis for other months.\n Somewhere in every human brain\n lay the memory of what his cells\n had been like when he was young.\n Or perhaps it lay in the cells\n themselves, with the brain as only\n a linkage to it. They’d discovered\n that, and the fact that the mind\n could effect physical changes in\n the body. Even such things as", "his old answers. “We’re still ahead\n in medicine and we’ll get the\n other discoveries eventually, without\n interrupting the work of making\n the Earth fit for our longevity.\n We can wait. We’ll have to.”\nTHE YOUNGER man stared\n at him with the strange puzzled\n look Giles had seen too often\n lately. “Damn it, haven’t you read\n my report? We know the super-light\n drive works! That missile\n reached Sirius in less than ten\n days. We can have the secret of\n this antigravity in less than a\n year! We—”\n“Wait a minute.” Giles felt the\n thickness pushing back at his", "“That bad, Arthur?” she asked.\n“Just a little tired,” he told\n her, refilling the cup. She’d made\n the coffee stronger than usual\n and it seemed to cut through\n some of the thickness in his head.\n “I guess I’m getting old, Amanda.”\nShe smiled dutifully at the\n time-worn joke, but he knew she\n wasn’t fooled. She’d cycled to\n middle age four times in her\n job and she probably knew him\n better than he knew himself—which\n wouldn’t be hard, he\n thought. He’d hardly recognized\n the stranger in the mirror as he\n tried to shave. His normal thinness\n had looked almost gaunt", "eventually he’d die!\nAn immortal man had suddenly\n found death hovering on his\n trail. The years had dwindled and\n gone, and only a few were left.\nHe stood up, holding out his\n hand. “Thank you, Doctor,” he\n said, and was surprised to find\n he meant it. The man had done\n all he could and had at least\n saved him the suspense of growing\n doubt and horrible eventual\n discovery.\nOUTSIDE ON the street, he\n looked up at the Sun and\n then at the buildings built to last\n for thousands of years. Their\n eternity was no longer a part of\n him.\nEven his car would outlast him.", "cancer could be willed out of existence—provided\n the brain\n could be reached far below the\n conscious level and forced to\n operate.\nThere had been impossible\n faith cures for millenia—cataracts\n removed from blinded eyes\n within minutes, even—but finding\n the mechanism in the brain\n that worked those miracles had\n taken an incredible amount of\n study and finding a means of\n bringing it under control had\n taken even longer.\nNow they did it with dozens of\n mechanical aids in addition to\n the hypnotic instructions—and\n did it usually in a single sitting,\n with the full transformation of\n the body taking less than a week", "drive working, there was no reason\n he should give up his work.\n The discovery that men could\n live practically forever had put\n an end to most family ties; sentiment\n wore thin in half a century—which\n wasn’t much time\n now, though it had once seemed\n long enough.\nStrange how the years seemed\n to get shorter as their number increased.\n There’d been a song\n once—something about the years\n dwindling down. He groped for\n the lines and couldn’t remember.\n Drat it! Now he’d probably lie\n awake most of the night again,\n trying to recall them.\nThe outside line buzzed musically,\n flashing Research’s number.", "doubts at the doctor’s words.\nHe got up once to stare at himself\n in the mirror. Ten hours had\n gone by and there should have\n been some signs of improvement.\n He couldn’t be sure, though,\n whether there were or not.\nHe looked no better the next\n morning when he finally dragged\n himself up from the little sleep\n he’d managed to get. The hollows\n were still there and the circles\n under his eyes. He searched for\n the gray in his hair, but the traitorous\n strands had been removed\n at the doctor’s office and he could\n find no new ones.\nHe looked into the dining room\n and then went by hastily. He", "somehow lost; the city beyond\n the window blurred as he\n studied it, and he swung the chair\n back so violently that his hand\n jerked painfully on the forelock\n he’d been twisting.\nThen he was staring unbelievingly\n at the single white hair that\n was twisted with the dark ones\n between his fingers.\nLike an automaton, he bent\n forward, his other hand groping\n for the mirror that should be in\n one of the drawers. The dull pain\n in his chest sharpened and his\n breath was hoarse in his throat,\n but he hardly noticed as he found\n the mirror and brought it up. His\n eyes focused reluctantly. There", "Amanda, so you can stop\n figuring ways to get me there.”\nShe smiled back suddenly, without\n feigning it. “Then you’re all\n right?”\n“As all right as I’ll ever be,”\n he told her. “They tell me I’m just\n growing old.”\nThis time her laugh was heartier.\n He caught himself before he\n could echo her mirth in a different\n voice and went inside where she\n had the coffee waiting for him.\nOddly, it still tasted good to\n him.\nThe projection was off, he saw,\n wondering whether he’d left it on\n or not. He snapped the switch and\n saw the screen light up, with the", "COBB LED him back to the\n first office, where he was given\n an injection of some kind and\n another sample of his blood was\n taken, while the earlier tests were\n repeated. But finally the doctor\n nodded.\n“That’s all for now, Mr. Giles.\n You might drop in tomorrow\n morning, after I’ve had a chance\n to complete my study of all this.\n We’ll know by then whether you’ll\n need more treatment. Ten o’clock\n okay?”\n“But I’ll be all right?”\nCobb smiled the automatic reassurance\n of his profession. “We\n haven’t lost a patient in two hundred\n years, to my knowledge.”" ], [ "He climbed into it, still partly\n numbed, and began driving mechanically,\n no longer wondering\n about the dangers that might possibly\n arise. Those wouldn’t matter\n much now. For a man who\n had thought of living almost forever,\n thirty years was too short\n a time to count.\nHe was passing near the club\n and started to slow. Then he\n went on without stopping. He\n wanted no chance to have them\n asking questions he couldn’t answer.\n It was none of their business.\n Dubbins had been kind—but\n now Giles wanted no kindness.\nThe street led to the office\n and he drove on. What else was\n there for him? There, at least, he", "such thing. A statement that\n lightning had never struck a\n house was no guarantee that it\n never would. It was an evasion\n meant to give such an impression.\nThe worry nagged at him all\n the way back. Word had already\n gone around the club that he’d\n had some kind of attack and\n there were endless questions that\n kept it on his mind. And even\n when it had been covered and\n recovered, he could still sense the\n glances of the others, as if he\n were Vincenti in one of the man’s\n more morose moods.\nHe found a single table in the\n dining room and picked his way\n through the meal, listening to\n the conversation about him only", "eventually he’d die!\nAn immortal man had suddenly\n found death hovering on his\n trail. The years had dwindled and\n gone, and only a few were left.\nHe stood up, holding out his\n hand. “Thank you, Doctor,” he\n said, and was surprised to find\n he meant it. The man had done\n all he could and had at least\n saved him the suspense of growing\n doubt and horrible eventual\n discovery.\nOUTSIDE ON the street, he\n looked up at the Sun and\n then at the buildings built to last\n for thousands of years. Their\n eternity was no longer a part of\n him.\nEven his car would outlast him.", "Even that failed him, though.\n He’d developed one of the finest\n chess collections in the world, but\n tonight it held no interest. And\n when he drew out his tools and\n tried working on the delicate,\n lovely jade for the set he was\n carving his hands seemed to be\n all thumbs. None of the other interests\n he’d developed through\n the years helped to add to the\n richness of living now.\nHe gave it up and went to bed—to\n have the fragment of that\n song pop into his head. Now there\n was no escaping it. Something\n about the years—or was it days—dwindling\n down to something\n or other.", "somehow lost; the city beyond\n the window blurred as he\n studied it, and he swung the chair\n back so violently that his hand\n jerked painfully on the forelock\n he’d been twisting.\nThen he was staring unbelievingly\n at the single white hair that\n was twisted with the dark ones\n between his fingers.\nLike an automaton, he bent\n forward, his other hand groping\n for the mirror that should be in\n one of the drawers. The dull pain\n in his chest sharpened and his\n breath was hoarse in his throat,\n but he hardly noticed as he found\n the mirror and brought it up. His\n eyes focused reluctantly. There", "GILES TRIED to stop scaring\n himself and partially succeeded,\n until he reached the doctor’s\n office. Then it was no longer necessary\n to frighten himself. The\n wrongness was too strong, no matter\n how professional Cobb’s smile!\nHe didn’t hear the preliminary\n words. He watched the smile vanish\n as the stack of reports came\n out. There was no nurse here\n now. The machines were quiet—and\n all the doors were shut.\nGiles shook his head, interrupting\n the doctor’s technical jargon.\n Now that he knew there was reason\n for his fear, it seemed to\n vanish, leaving a coldness that\n numbed him.", "drive working, there was no reason\n he should give up his work.\n The discovery that men could\n live practically forever had put\n an end to most family ties; sentiment\n wore thin in half a century—which\n wasn’t much time\n now, though it had once seemed\n long enough.\nStrange how the years seemed\n to get shorter as their number increased.\n There’d been a song\n once—something about the years\n dwindling down. He groped for\n the lines and couldn’t remember.\n Drat it! Now he’d probably lie\n awake most of the night again,\n trying to recall them.\nThe outside line buzzed musically,\n flashing Research’s number.", "been precious once. He unexpectedly\n recalled his own grandfather\n holding him on an old\n knee and slipping him candy\n that was forbidden. The years\n seemed precious to the old man\n then.\nAmanda’s voice came abruptly\n over the intercom. “Jordan wants\n to talk to you,” she said, and the\n irritation was sharp in her voice.\n “He won’t take no!”\nGiles shrugged and reached for\n the projector, to cut it off. Then,\n on impulse, he set it back to the\n picture, studying the group again\n as he switched on Jordan’s wire.\nBut he didn’t wait for the hot\n words about whatever was the\n trouble.", "when it was necessary because\n someone called across to him.\n Ordinarily, he was quick to support\n the idea of clubs in place\n of private families. A man here\n could choose his group and grow\n into them. Yet he wasn’t swallowed\n by them, as he might be by\n a family. Giles had been living\n here for nearly a century now and\n he’d never regretted it. But tonight\n his own group irritated him.\nHe puzzled over it, finding no\n real reason. Certainly they weren’t\n forcing themselves on him. He\n remembered once when he’d had\n a cold, before they finally licked\n that; Harry had been a complete\n nuisance, running around with", "Giles remembered that Dubbins\n was waiting for him, but this\n was more important. It hadn’t\n been a joke about his growing old,\n after all. But now, in a few days,\n he’d be his old—no, of course\n not—his young self again!\nThey went down the hall to\n another office, where Giles waited\n outside while Cobb conferred\n with another doctor and technician,\n with much waving of charts.\n He resented every second of it.\n It was as if the almost forgotten\n specter of age stood beside him,\n counting the seconds. But at last\n they were through and he was led\n into the quiet rejuvenation room,\n where the clamps were adjusted", "by an effort. “It’s a shock\n to me, too, Mr. Giles. But—well,\n to simplify it, no memory is perfect—even\n cellular memory. It\n loses a little each time. And the\n effect is cumulative. It’s like an\n asymptotic curve—the further it\n goes, the steeper the curve. And—well,\n you’ve passed too far.”\nHe faced away from Giles,\n dropping the reports into a\n drawer and locking it. “I wasn’t\n supposed to tell you, of course.\n It’s going to be tough enough\n when they’re ready to let people\n know. But you aren’t the first and\n you won’t be the last, if that’s any", "we know it’s safe? If you do, I’ll\n order the big ship.”\nJordan opened his mouth and\n for a second Giles’ heart caught\n in a flux of emotions as the\n man’s offer hovered on his lips.\n Then the engineer shut his mouth\n slowly. The belligerence ran out\n of him.\nHe looked sick, for he had no\n answer.\nNO SANE man would risk a\n chance for near eternity\n against such a relatively short\n wait. Heroism had belonged to\n those who knew their days were\n numbered, anyhow.\n“Forget it, Bill,” Giles advised.\n “It may take longer, but eventually", "“That bad, Arthur?” she asked.\n“Just a little tired,” he told\n her, refilling the cup. She’d made\n the coffee stronger than usual\n and it seemed to cut through\n some of the thickness in his head.\n “I guess I’m getting old, Amanda.”\nShe smiled dutifully at the\n time-worn joke, but he knew she\n wasn’t fooled. She’d cycled to\n middle age four times in her\n job and she probably knew him\n better than he knew himself—which\n wouldn’t be hard, he\n thought. He’d hardly recognized\n the stranger in the mirror as he\n tried to shave. His normal thinness\n had looked almost gaunt", "Amanda, so you can stop\n figuring ways to get me there.”\nShe smiled back suddenly, without\n feigning it. “Then you’re all\n right?”\n“As all right as I’ll ever be,”\n he told her. “They tell me I’m just\n growing old.”\nThis time her laugh was heartier.\n He caught himself before he\n could echo her mirth in a different\n voice and went inside where she\n had the coffee waiting for him.\nOddly, it still tasted good to\n him.\nThe projection was off, he saw,\n wondering whether he’d left it on\n or not. He snapped the switch and\n saw the screen light up, with the", "consolation. We’ve got a longer\n time scale than we used to have—but\n it’s in centuries, not in\n eons. For everybody, not just\n you.”\nIt was no consolation. Giles\n nodded mechanically. “I won’t\n talk, of course. How—how long?”\nCobb spread his hands unhappily.\n “Thirty years, maybe. But\n we can make them better. Geriatric\n knowledge is still on record.\n We can fix the heart and all the\n rest. You’ll be in good physical\n condition, better than your grandfather—”\n“And then....” Giles couldn’t\n pronounce the words. He’d grown\n old and he’d grow older. And", "Cobb considered it, hesitated as\n if making up his mind to be frank\n against his better judgment. “I\n can’t see any other explanation.\n You’ve got a slight case of angina—nothing\n serious, but quite definite—as\n well as other signs\n of aging. I’m afraid the treatment\n didn’t take fully. It might have\n been some unconscious block\n on your part, some infection not\n diagnosed at the time, or even a\n fault in the treatment. That’s\n pretty rare, but we can’t neglect\n the possibility.”\nHE STUDIED his charts again\n and then smiled. “So we’ll\n give you another treatment. Any\n reason you can’t begin immediately?”", "“I’d rather know the whole\n truth,” he said. His voice sounded\n dead in his ears. “The worst first.\n The rejuvenation...?”\nCobb sighed and yet seemed relieved.\n “Failed.” He stopped, and\n his hands touched the reports on\n his desk. “Completely,” he added\n in a low, defeated tone.\n“But I thought that was impossible!”\n“So did I. I wouldn’t believe\n it even yet—but now I find it\n isn’t the first case. I spent the\n night at Medical Center going up\n the ranks until I found men who\n really know about it. And now I\n wish I hadn’t.” His voice ran\n down and he gathered himself together", "Could they really dwindle\n down? Suppose he couldn’t rejuvenate\n all the way? He knew\n that there were some people who\n didn’t respond as well as others.\n Sol Graves, for instance. He’d\n been fifty when he finally learned\n how to work with the doctors and\n they could only bring him back to\n about thirty, instead of the normal\n early twenties. Would that\n reduce the slice of eternity that\n rejuvenation meant? And what\n had happened to Sol?\nOr suppose it wasn’t rejuvenation,\n after all; suppose something\n had gone wrong with him\n permanently?\nHe fought that off, but he\n couldn’t escape the nagging", "doubts at the doctor’s words.\nHe got up once to stare at himself\n in the mirror. Ten hours had\n gone by and there should have\n been some signs of improvement.\n He couldn’t be sure, though,\n whether there were or not.\nHe looked no better the next\n morning when he finally dragged\n himself up from the little sleep\n he’d managed to get. The hollows\n were still there and the circles\n under his eyes. He searched for\n the gray in his hair, but the traitorous\n strands had been removed\n at the doctor’s office and he could\n find no new ones.\nHe looked into the dining room\n and then went by hastily. He", "“Thanks,” said Giles. “Ten\n o’clock is fine.”\nDubbins was still waiting, reading\n a paper whose headlined feature\n carried a glowing account of\n the discovery of the super-light\n missile and what it might mean.\n He took a quick look at Giles and\n pointed to it. “Great work, Mr.\n Giles. Maybe we’ll all get to see\n some of those other worlds yet.”\n Then he studied Giles more carefully.\n “Everything’s in good shape\n now, sir?”\n“The doctor says everything’s\n going to be fine,” Giles answered.\nIt was then he realized for the\n first time that Cobb had said no" ], [ "Giles remembered that Dubbins\n was waiting for him, but this\n was more important. It hadn’t\n been a joke about his growing old,\n after all. But now, in a few days,\n he’d be his old—no, of course\n not—his young self again!\nThey went down the hall to\n another office, where Giles waited\n outside while Cobb conferred\n with another doctor and technician,\n with much waving of charts.\n He resented every second of it.\n It was as if the almost forgotten\n specter of age stood beside him,\n counting the seconds. But at last\n they were through and he was led\n into the quiet rejuvenation room,\n where the clamps were adjusted", "by an effort. “It’s a shock\n to me, too, Mr. Giles. But—well,\n to simplify it, no memory is perfect—even\n cellular memory. It\n loses a little each time. And the\n effect is cumulative. It’s like an\n asymptotic curve—the further it\n goes, the steeper the curve. And—well,\n you’ve passed too far.”\nHe faced away from Giles,\n dropping the reports into a\n drawer and locking it. “I wasn’t\n supposed to tell you, of course.\n It’s going to be tough enough\n when they’re ready to let people\n know. But you aren’t the first and\n you won’t be the last, if that’s any", "consolation. We’ve got a longer\n time scale than we used to have—but\n it’s in centuries, not in\n eons. For everybody, not just\n you.”\nIt was no consolation. Giles\n nodded mechanically. “I won’t\n talk, of course. How—how long?”\nCobb spread his hands unhappily.\n “Thirty years, maybe. But\n we can make them better. Geriatric\n knowledge is still on record.\n We can fix the heart and all the\n rest. You’ll be in good physical\n condition, better than your grandfather—”\n“And then....” Giles couldn’t\n pronounce the words. He’d grown\n old and he’d grow older. And", "with an old-fashioned desk and\n chairs that almost concealed the\n cabinets of equipment beyond.\nHe listened as Giles stumbled\n out his story. Halfway through,\n the nurse took a blood sample\n with one of the little mosquito\n needles and the machinery behind\n the doctor began working on\n it.\n“Your friend told me about the\n gray hair, of course,” Cobb said.\n At Giles’ look, he smiled faintly.\n “Surely you didn’t think people\n could miss that in this day and\n age? Let’s see it.”\nHe inspected it and began\n making tests. Some were older\n than Giles could remember—knee", "when it was necessary because\n someone called across to him.\n Ordinarily, he was quick to support\n the idea of clubs in place\n of private families. A man here\n could choose his group and grow\n into them. Yet he wasn’t swallowed\n by them, as he might be by\n a family. Giles had been living\n here for nearly a century now and\n he’d never regretted it. But tonight\n his own group irritated him.\nHe puzzled over it, finding no\n real reason. Certainly they weren’t\n forcing themselves on him. He\n remembered once when he’d had\n a cold, before they finally licked\n that; Harry had been a complete\n nuisance, running around with", "He climbed into it, still partly\n numbed, and began driving mechanically,\n no longer wondering\n about the dangers that might possibly\n arise. Those wouldn’t matter\n much now. For a man who\n had thought of living almost forever,\n thirty years was too short\n a time to count.\nHe was passing near the club\n and started to slow. Then he\n went on without stopping. He\n wanted no chance to have them\n asking questions he couldn’t answer.\n It was none of their business.\n Dubbins had been kind—but\n now Giles wanted no kindness.\nThe street led to the office\n and he drove on. What else was\n there for him? There, at least, he", "“I’ll wait for you, sir,” Dubbins\n offered as they stopped beside\n the low, massive medical building.\nIt was almost too much consideration.\n Giles nodded, got out\n and headed down the hall uncertainly.\n Just how bad did he\n look? Well, he’d soon find out.\nHe located the directory and\n finally found the right office, its\n reception room wall covered\n with all the degrees Dr. Cobb had\n picked up in some three hundred\n years of practice. Giles felt\n better, realizing it wouldn’t be\n one of the younger men.\nCOBB APPEARED himself,\n before the nurse could take\n over, and led Giles into a room", "been precious once. He unexpectedly\n recalled his own grandfather\n holding him on an old\n knee and slipping him candy\n that was forbidden. The years\n seemed precious to the old man\n then.\nAmanda’s voice came abruptly\n over the intercom. “Jordan wants\n to talk to you,” she said, and the\n irritation was sharp in her voice.\n “He won’t take no!”\nGiles shrugged and reached for\n the projector, to cut it off. Then,\n on impulse, he set it back to the\n picture, studying the group again\n as he switched on Jordan’s wire.\nBut he didn’t wait for the hot\n words about whatever was the\n trouble.", "GILES TRIED to stop scaring\n himself and partially succeeded,\n until he reached the doctor’s\n office. Then it was no longer necessary\n to frighten himself. The\n wrongness was too strong, no matter\n how professional Cobb’s smile!\nHe didn’t hear the preliminary\n words. He watched the smile vanish\n as the stack of reports came\n out. There was no nurse here\n now. The machines were quiet—and\n all the doors were shut.\nGiles shook his head, interrupting\n the doctor’s technical jargon.\n Now that he knew there was reason\n for his fear, it seemed to\n vanish, leaving a coldness that\n numbed him.", "Giles grunted in irritation. He\n wasn’t ready to face Jordan yet.\n But he shrugged and pressed the\n button.\nThe intense face that looked\n from the screen was frowning as\n Jordan’s eyes seemed to sweep\n around the room. He was still\n young—one of the few under\n a hundred who’d escaped deportation\n because of special ability—and\n patience was still foreign to\n him.\nThen the frown vanished as\n an expression of shock replaced\n it, and Giles felt a sinking sensation.\n If he looked\nthat\nbad—\nBut Jordan wasn’t looking at\n him; the man’s interest lay in the", "we’ll find a way. With time\n enough, we’re bound to. And\n when we do, the ship will be\n ready.”\nThe engineer nodded miserably\n and clicked off. Giles turned\n from the blank screen to stare\n out of the windows, while his\n hand came up to twist at the lock\n of hair over his forehead. Eternity!\n They had to plan and build\n for it. They couldn’t risk that\n plan for short-term benefits. Usually\n it was too easy to realize that,\n and the sight of the solid, time-enduring\n buildings outside should\n have given him a sense of security.\nToday, though, nothing seemed\n to help. He felt choked, imprisoned,", "reflex, blood pressure, pulse\n and fluoroscope. Others involved\n complicated little gadgets that\n ran over his body, while meters\n bobbed and wiggled. The blood\n check came through and Cobb\n studied it, to go back and make\n further inspections of his own.\nAt last he nodded slowly.\n “Hyper-catabolism, of course. I\n thought it might be. How long\n since you had your last rejuvenation?\n And who gave it?”\n“About ten years ago,” Giles\n answered. He found his identity\n card and passed it over, while\n the doctor studied it. “My sixteenth.”\nIt wasn’t going right. He could", "were other white strands in his\n dark hair.\nThe mirror crashed to the floor\n as he staggered out of the office.\nIt was only two blocks to Giles’\n residence club, but he had to\n stop twice to catch his breath\n and fight against the pain that\n clawed at his chest. When he\n reached the wood-paneled lobby,\n he was barely able to stand.\nDubbins was at his side almost\n at once, with a hand under\n his arm to guide him toward his\n suite.\n“Let me help you, sir,” Dubbins\n suggested, in the tones\n Giles hadn’t heard since the man\n had been his valet, back when", "it was still possible to find personal\n servants. Now he managed\n the club on a level of quasi-equality\n with the members. For the\n moment, though, he’d slipped\n back into the old ways.\nGILES FOUND himself lying\n on his couch, partially undressed,\n with the pillows just right\n and a long drink in his hand. The\n alcohol combined with the reaction\n from his panic to leave him\n almost himself again. After all,\n there was nothing to worry about;\n Earth’s doctors could cure anything.\n“I guess you’d better call Dr.\n Vincenti,” he decided. Vincenti\n was a member and would probably\n be the quickest to get.", "He finished the drink, feeling\n still better, and was sitting\n up when Dubbins came back.\n“Dr. Cobb wants you to come\n to his office at once, sir,” he said,\n dropping to his knee to help\n Giles with his shoes. “I’d be\n pleased to drive you there.”\nGiles frowned. He’d expected\n Cobb to come to him. Then he\n grimaced at his own thoughts.\n Dubbins’ manners must have carried\n him back into the past; doctors\n didn’t go in for home visits\n now—they preferred to see their\n patients in the laboratories that\n housed their offices. If this kept\n on, he’d be missing the old days", "“Thanks,” said Giles. “Ten\n o’clock is fine.”\nDubbins was still waiting, reading\n a paper whose headlined feature\n carried a glowing account of\n the discovery of the super-light\n missile and what it might mean.\n He took a quick look at Giles and\n pointed to it. “Great work, Mr.\n Giles. Maybe we’ll all get to see\n some of those other worlds yet.”\n Then he studied Giles more carefully.\n “Everything’s in good shape\n now, sir?”\n“The doctor says everything’s\n going to be fine,” Giles answered.\nIt was then he realized for the\n first time that Cobb had said no", "somehow lost; the city beyond\n the window blurred as he\n studied it, and he swung the chair\n back so violently that his hand\n jerked painfully on the forelock\n he’d been twisting.\nThen he was staring unbelievingly\n at the single white hair that\n was twisted with the dark ones\n between his fingers.\nLike an automaton, he bent\n forward, his other hand groping\n for the mirror that should be in\n one of the drawers. The dull pain\n in his chest sharpened and his\n breath was hoarse in his throat,\n but he hardly noticed as he found\n the mirror and brought it up. His\n eyes focused reluctantly. There", "“That bad, Arthur?” she asked.\n“Just a little tired,” he told\n her, refilling the cup. She’d made\n the coffee stronger than usual\n and it seemed to cut through\n some of the thickness in his head.\n “I guess I’m getting old, Amanda.”\nShe smiled dutifully at the\n time-worn joke, but he knew she\n wasn’t fooled. She’d cycled to\n middle age four times in her\n job and she probably knew him\n better than he knew himself—which\n wouldn’t be hard, he\n thought. He’d hardly recognized\n the stranger in the mirror as he\n tried to shave. His normal thinness\n had looked almost gaunt", "Could they really dwindle\n down? Suppose he couldn’t rejuvenate\n all the way? He knew\n that there were some people who\n didn’t respond as well as others.\n Sol Graves, for instance. He’d\n been fifty when he finally learned\n how to work with the doctors and\n they could only bring him back to\n about thirty, instead of the normal\n early twenties. Would that\n reduce the slice of eternity that\n rejuvenation meant? And what\n had happened to Sol?\nOr suppose it wasn’t rejuvenation,\n after all; suppose something\n had gone wrong with him\n permanently?\nHe fought that off, but he\n couldn’t escape the nagging", "Even that failed him, though.\n He’d developed one of the finest\n chess collections in the world, but\n tonight it held no interest. And\n when he drew out his tools and\n tried working on the delicate,\n lovely jade for the set he was\n carving his hands seemed to be\n all thumbs. None of the other interests\n he’d developed through\n the years helped to add to the\n richness of living now.\nHe gave it up and went to bed—to\n have the fragment of that\n song pop into his head. Now there\n was no escaping it. Something\n about the years—or was it days—dwindling\n down to something\n or other." ], [ "Maybe if we put in stronger signaling\n transmitters....”\n“Yeah. Maybe in two centuries\n we’d have a through route charted\n to Sirius. And we still wouldn’t\n have proved it safe for human\n pilots. Mr. Giles, we’ve got to\n have the big ship. All we need is\none\nvolunteer!”\nIt occurred to Giles then that\n the man had been too fired with\n the idea to think. He leaned back,\n shaking his head again wearily.\n “All right, Bill. Find me one volunteer.\n Or how about you? Do\n you really want to risk losing the\n rest of your life rather than waiting\n a couple more centuries until", "we know it’s safe? If you do, I’ll\n order the big ship.”\nJordan opened his mouth and\n for a second Giles’ heart caught\n in a flux of emotions as the\n man’s offer hovered on his lips.\n Then the engineer shut his mouth\n slowly. The belligerence ran out\n of him.\nHe looked sick, for he had no\n answer.\nNO SANE man would risk a\n chance for near eternity\n against such a relatively short\n wait. Heroism had belonged to\n those who knew their days were\n numbered, anyhow.\n“Forget it, Bill,” Giles advised.\n “It may take longer, but eventually", "“Bill,” he said, “start getting\n the big ship into production. I’ve\n found a volunteer.”\nHe’d been driven to it, he knew,\n as he watched the man’s amazed\n face snap from the screen. From\n the first suspicion of his trouble,\n something inside him had been\n forcing him to make this decision.\n And maybe it would do no good.\n Maybe the ship would fail. But\n thirty years was a number a man\n could risk.\nIf he made it, though....\nWell, he’d see those grandchildren\n of his this year—and\n Harry. Maybe he’d even tell\n Harry the truth, once they got\n done celebrating the reunion. And", "I mean the big ship. We’ve had it\n drafted for building long enough;\n now we can finish it in three\n months. We know the drive works.\n We know it’s fast enough to reach\n Procyon in two weeks. We even\n know life can stand the trip. The\n rats were unharmed.”\nGiles shook his head at what\n the other was proposing, only\n partly believing it. “Rats don’t\n have minds that could show any\n real damage such as the loss of\n power to rejuvenate. We can’t put\n human pilots into a ship with our\n drive until we’ve tested it more\n thoroughly, Bill, even if they\n could correct for errors on arrival.", "He climbed into it, still partly\n numbed, and began driving mechanically,\n no longer wondering\n about the dangers that might possibly\n arise. Those wouldn’t matter\n much now. For a man who\n had thought of living almost forever,\n thirty years was too short\n a time to count.\nHe was passing near the club\n and started to slow. Then he\n went on without stopping. He\n wanted no chance to have them\n asking questions he couldn’t answer.\n It was none of their business.\n Dubbins had been kind—but\n now Giles wanted no kindness.\nThe street led to the office\n and he drove on. What else was\n there for him? There, at least, he", "we’ll find a way. With time\n enough, we’re bound to. And\n when we do, the ship will be\n ready.”\nThe engineer nodded miserably\n and clicked off. Giles turned\n from the blank screen to stare\n out of the windows, while his\n hand came up to twist at the lock\n of hair over his forehead. Eternity!\n They had to plan and build\n for it. They couldn’t risk that\n plan for short-term benefits. Usually\n it was too easy to realize that,\n and the sight of the solid, time-enduring\n buildings outside should\n have given him a sense of security.\nToday, though, nothing seemed\n to help. He felt choked, imprisoned,", "“Thanks,” said Giles. “Ten\n o’clock is fine.”\nDubbins was still waiting, reading\n a paper whose headlined feature\n carried a glowing account of\n the discovery of the super-light\n missile and what it might mean.\n He took a quick look at Giles and\n pointed to it. “Great work, Mr.\n Giles. Maybe we’ll all get to see\n some of those other worlds yet.”\n Then he studied Giles more carefully.\n “Everything’s in good shape\n now, sir?”\n“The doctor says everything’s\n going to be fine,” Giles answered.\nIt was then he realized for the\n first time that Cobb had said no", "when it was necessary because\n someone called across to him.\n Ordinarily, he was quick to support\n the idea of clubs in place\n of private families. A man here\n could choose his group and grow\n into them. Yet he wasn’t swallowed\n by them, as he might be by\n a family. Giles had been living\n here for nearly a century now and\n he’d never regretted it. But tonight\n his own group irritated him.\nHe puzzled over it, finding no\n real reason. Certainly they weren’t\n forcing themselves on him. He\n remembered once when he’d had\n a cold, before they finally licked\n that; Harry had been a complete\n nuisance, running around with", "GILES TRIED to stop scaring\n himself and partially succeeded,\n until he reached the doctor’s\n office. Then it was no longer necessary\n to frighten himself. The\n wrongness was too strong, no matter\n how professional Cobb’s smile!\nHe didn’t hear the preliminary\n words. He watched the smile vanish\n as the stack of reports came\n out. There was no nurse here\n now. The machines were quiet—and\n all the doors were shut.\nGiles shook his head, interrupting\n the doctor’s technical jargon.\n Now that he knew there was reason\n for his fear, it seemed to\n vanish, leaving a coldness that\n numbed him.", "He finished the drink, feeling\n still better, and was sitting\n up when Dubbins came back.\n“Dr. Cobb wants you to come\n to his office at once, sir,” he said,\n dropping to his knee to help\n Giles with his shoes. “I’d be\n pleased to drive you there.”\nGiles frowned. He’d expected\n Cobb to come to him. Then he\n grimaced at his own thoughts.\n Dubbins’ manners must have carried\n him back into the past; doctors\n didn’t go in for home visits\n now—they preferred to see their\n patients in the laboratories that\n housed their offices. If this kept\n on, he’d be missing the old days", "Giles remembered that Dubbins\n was waiting for him, but this\n was more important. It hadn’t\n been a joke about his growing old,\n after all. But now, in a few days,\n he’d be his old—no, of course\n not—his young self again!\nThey went down the hall to\n another office, where Giles waited\n outside while Cobb conferred\n with another doctor and technician,\n with much waving of charts.\n He resented every second of it.\n It was as if the almost forgotten\n specter of age stood beside him,\n counting the seconds. But at last\n they were through and he was led\n into the quiet rejuvenation room,\n where the clamps were adjusted", "consolation. We’ve got a longer\n time scale than we used to have—but\n it’s in centuries, not in\n eons. For everybody, not just\n you.”\nIt was no consolation. Giles\n nodded mechanically. “I won’t\n talk, of course. How—how long?”\nCobb spread his hands unhappily.\n “Thirty years, maybe. But\n we can make them better. Geriatric\n knowledge is still on record.\n We can fix the heart and all the\n rest. You’ll be in good physical\n condition, better than your grandfather—”\n“And then....” Giles couldn’t\n pronounce the words. He’d grown\n old and he’d grow older. And", "praise for the solar system where\n he’d been sent. He barely mentioned\n being married on the way\n or his dozen children, but filled\n most of the frame with glowing\n description and a plea for his\n father to join him there!\nGILES SNORTED and turned\n to the third frame, which\n showed a group picture of the\n family in some sort of vehicle,\n against the background of an alien\n but attractive world.\nHe had no desire to spend\n ninety years cooped up with a\n bunch of callow young emigrants,\n even in one of the improved Exodus\n shuttles. And even if Exodus\n ever got the super-light", "been precious once. He unexpectedly\n recalled his own grandfather\n holding him on an old\n knee and slipping him candy\n that was forbidden. The years\n seemed precious to the old man\n then.\nAmanda’s voice came abruptly\n over the intercom. “Jordan wants\n to talk to you,” she said, and the\n irritation was sharp in her voice.\n “He won’t take no!”\nGiles shrugged and reached for\n the projector, to cut it off. Then,\n on impulse, he set it back to the\n picture, studying the group again\n as he switched on Jordan’s wire.\nBut he didn’t wait for the hot\n words about whatever was the\n trouble.", "various nostrums, giving him no\n peace. Constant questions about\n how he felt, constant little looks\n of worry—until he’d been ready\n to yell at the boy. In fact, he\n had.\nFunny, he couldn’t picture really\n losing his temper here. Families\n did odd things to a man.\nHE LISTENED to a few of\n the discussions after the dinner,\n but he’d heard them all before,\n except for one about the\n super-speed drive, and there he\n had no wish to talk until he could\n study the final report. He gave up\n at last and went to his own suite.\n What he needed was a good\n night’s sleep after a little relaxation.", "his old answers. “We’re still ahead\n in medicine and we’ll get the\n other discoveries eventually, without\n interrupting the work of making\n the Earth fit for our longevity.\n We can wait. We’ll have to.”\nTHE YOUNGER man stared\n at him with the strange puzzled\n look Giles had seen too often\n lately. “Damn it, haven’t you read\n my report? We know the super-light\n drive works! That missile\n reached Sirius in less than ten\n days. We can have the secret of\n this antigravity in less than a\n year! We—”\n“Wait a minute.” Giles felt the\n thickness pushing back at his", "group. A very pleasant family in\n a very pleasant world.\nHe read Harry’s note again,\n with its praise for the planet and\n its invitation. He wondered if\n Dr. Vincenti had received an invitation\n like that, before he left.\n Or had he even been one of those\n to whom the same report had\n been delivered by some doctor?\n It didn’t matter, but it would explain\n things, at least.\nTwenty years to Centaurus,\n while the years dwindled down—\nThen abruptly the line finished\n itself. “The years dwindle down\n to a precious few....” he remembered.\n “A precious few.”\nThose dwindling years had", "Dubbins shook his head. “Dr.\n Vincenti isn’t with us, sir. He\n left a year ago to visit a son in\n the Centauri system. There’s a\n Dr. Cobb whose reputation is\n very good, sir.”\nGiles puzzled over it doubtfully.\n Vincenti had been an oddly\n morose man the last few times\n he’d seen him, but that could\n hardly explain his taking a twenty-year\n shuttle trip for such a\n slim reason. It was no concern of\n his, though. “Dr. Cobb, then,” he\n said.\nGiles heard the other man’s\n voice on the study phone, too low\n for the words to be distinguishable.", "could still fill his time with work—work\n that might even be useful.\n In the future, men would\n need the super-light drive if they\n were to span much more of the\n Universe than now. And he could\n speed up the work in some ways\n still, even if he could never see\n its finish.\nIt would be cold comfort but it\n was something. And he might\n keep busy enough to forget sometimes\n that the years were gone\n for him.\nAutomatic habit carried him\n through the office again, to Amanda’s\n desk, where her worry was\n still riding her. He managed a\n grin and somehow the right words\n came to his lips. “I saw the doctor,", "COBB LED him back to the\n first office, where he was given\n an injection of some kind and\n another sample of his blood was\n taken, while the earlier tests were\n repeated. But finally the doctor\n nodded.\n“That’s all for now, Mr. Giles.\n You might drop in tomorrow\n morning, after I’ve had a chance\n to complete my study of all this.\n We’ll know by then whether you’ll\n need more treatment. Ten o’clock\n okay?”\n“But I’ll be all right?”\nCobb smiled the automatic reassurance\n of his profession. “We\n haven’t lost a patient in two hundred\n years, to my knowledge.”" ], [ "He climbed into it, still partly\n numbed, and began driving mechanically,\n no longer wondering\n about the dangers that might possibly\n arise. Those wouldn’t matter\n much now. For a man who\n had thought of living almost forever,\n thirty years was too short\n a time to count.\nHe was passing near the club\n and started to slow. Then he\n went on without stopping. He\n wanted no chance to have them\n asking questions he couldn’t answer.\n It was none of their business.\n Dubbins had been kind—but\n now Giles wanted no kindness.\nThe street led to the office\n and he drove on. What else was\n there for him? There, at least, he", "Even that failed him, though.\n He’d developed one of the finest\n chess collections in the world, but\n tonight it held no interest. And\n when he drew out his tools and\n tried working on the delicate,\n lovely jade for the set he was\n carving his hands seemed to be\n all thumbs. None of the other interests\n he’d developed through\n the years helped to add to the\n richness of living now.\nHe gave it up and went to bed—to\n have the fragment of that\n song pop into his head. Now there\n was no escaping it. Something\n about the years—or was it days—dwindling\n down to something\n or other.", "eventually he’d die!\nAn immortal man had suddenly\n found death hovering on his\n trail. The years had dwindled and\n gone, and only a few were left.\nHe stood up, holding out his\n hand. “Thank you, Doctor,” he\n said, and was surprised to find\n he meant it. The man had done\n all he could and had at least\n saved him the suspense of growing\n doubt and horrible eventual\n discovery.\nOUTSIDE ON the street, he\n looked up at the Sun and\n then at the buildings built to last\n for thousands of years. Their\n eternity was no longer a part of\n him.\nEven his car would outlast him.", "such thing. A statement that\n lightning had never struck a\n house was no guarantee that it\n never would. It was an evasion\n meant to give such an impression.\nThe worry nagged at him all\n the way back. Word had already\n gone around the club that he’d\n had some kind of attack and\n there were endless questions that\n kept it on his mind. And even\n when it had been covered and\n recovered, he could still sense the\n glances of the others, as if he\n were Vincenti in one of the man’s\n more morose moods.\nHe found a single table in the\n dining room and picked his way\n through the meal, listening to\n the conversation about him only", "could still fill his time with work—work\n that might even be useful.\n In the future, men would\n need the super-light drive if they\n were to span much more of the\n Universe than now. And he could\n speed up the work in some ways\n still, even if he could never see\n its finish.\nIt would be cold comfort but it\n was something. And he might\n keep busy enough to forget sometimes\n that the years were gone\n for him.\nAutomatic habit carried him\n through the office again, to Amanda’s\n desk, where her worry was\n still riding her. He managed a\n grin and somehow the right words\n came to his lips. “I saw the doctor,", "somehow lost; the city beyond\n the window blurred as he\n studied it, and he swung the chair\n back so violently that his hand\n jerked painfully on the forelock\n he’d been twisting.\nThen he was staring unbelievingly\n at the single white hair that\n was twisted with the dark ones\n between his fingers.\nLike an automaton, he bent\n forward, his other hand groping\n for the mirror that should be in\n one of the drawers. The dull pain\n in his chest sharpened and his\n breath was hoarse in his throat,\n but he hardly noticed as he found\n the mirror and brought it up. His\n eyes focused reluctantly. There", "Cobb considered it, hesitated as\n if making up his mind to be frank\n against his better judgment. “I\n can’t see any other explanation.\n You’ve got a slight case of angina—nothing\n serious, but quite definite—as\n well as other signs\n of aging. I’m afraid the treatment\n didn’t take fully. It might have\n been some unconscious block\n on your part, some infection not\n diagnosed at the time, or even a\n fault in the treatment. That’s\n pretty rare, but we can’t neglect\n the possibility.”\nHE STUDIED his charts again\n and then smiled. “So we’ll\n give you another treatment. Any\n reason you can’t begin immediately?”", "been precious once. He unexpectedly\n recalled his own grandfather\n holding him on an old\n knee and slipping him candy\n that was forbidden. The years\n seemed precious to the old man\n then.\nAmanda’s voice came abruptly\n over the intercom. “Jordan wants\n to talk to you,” she said, and the\n irritation was sharp in her voice.\n “He won’t take no!”\nGiles shrugged and reached for\n the projector, to cut it off. Then,\n on impulse, he set it back to the\n picture, studying the group again\n as he switched on Jordan’s wire.\nBut he didn’t wait for the hot\n words about whatever was the\n trouble.", "Could they really dwindle\n down? Suppose he couldn’t rejuvenate\n all the way? He knew\n that there were some people who\n didn’t respond as well as others.\n Sol Graves, for instance. He’d\n been fifty when he finally learned\n how to work with the doctors and\n they could only bring him back to\n about thirty, instead of the normal\n early twenties. Would that\n reduce the slice of eternity that\n rejuvenation meant? And what\n had happened to Sol?\nOr suppose it wasn’t rejuvenation,\n after all; suppose something\n had gone wrong with him\n permanently?\nHe fought that off, but he\n couldn’t escape the nagging", "Amanda, so you can stop\n figuring ways to get me there.”\nShe smiled back suddenly, without\n feigning it. “Then you’re all\n right?”\n“As all right as I’ll ever be,”\n he told her. “They tell me I’m just\n growing old.”\nThis time her laugh was heartier.\n He caught himself before he\n could echo her mirth in a different\n voice and went inside where she\n had the coffee waiting for him.\nOddly, it still tasted good to\n him.\nThe projection was off, he saw,\n wondering whether he’d left it on\n or not. He snapped the switch and\n saw the screen light up, with the", "with an old-fashioned desk and\n chairs that almost concealed the\n cabinets of equipment beyond.\nHe listened as Giles stumbled\n out his story. Halfway through,\n the nurse took a blood sample\n with one of the little mosquito\n needles and the machinery behind\n the doctor began working on\n it.\n“Your friend told me about the\n gray hair, of course,” Cobb said.\n At Giles’ look, he smiled faintly.\n “Surely you didn’t think people\n could miss that in this day and\n age? Let’s see it.”\nHe inspected it and began\n making tests. Some were older\n than Giles could remember—knee", "“That bad, Arthur?” she asked.\n“Just a little tired,” he told\n her, refilling the cup. She’d made\n the coffee stronger than usual\n and it seemed to cut through\n some of the thickness in his head.\n “I guess I’m getting old, Amanda.”\nShe smiled dutifully at the\n time-worn joke, but he knew she\n wasn’t fooled. She’d cycled to\n middle age four times in her\n job and she probably knew him\n better than he knew himself—which\n wouldn’t be hard, he\n thought. He’d hardly recognized\n the stranger in the mirror as he\n tried to shave. His normal thinness\n had looked almost gaunt", "drive working, there was no reason\n he should give up his work.\n The discovery that men could\n live practically forever had put\n an end to most family ties; sentiment\n wore thin in half a century—which\n wasn’t much time\n now, though it had once seemed\n long enough.\nStrange how the years seemed\n to get shorter as their number increased.\n There’d been a song\n once—something about the years\n dwindling down. He groped for\n the lines and couldn’t remember.\n Drat it! Now he’d probably lie\n awake most of the night again,\n trying to recall them.\nThe outside line buzzed musically,\n flashing Research’s number.", "when it was necessary because\n someone called across to him.\n Ordinarily, he was quick to support\n the idea of clubs in place\n of private families. A man here\n could choose his group and grow\n into them. Yet he wasn’t swallowed\n by them, as he might be by\n a family. Giles had been living\n here for nearly a century now and\n he’d never regretted it. But tonight\n his own group irritated him.\nHe puzzled over it, finding no\n real reason. Certainly they weren’t\n forcing themselves on him. He\n remembered once when he’d had\n a cold, before they finally licked\n that; Harry had been a complete\n nuisance, running around with", "when he’d had a mansion and\n counted his wealth in possessions,\n instead of the treasures he could\n build inside himself for the future\n ahead. He was getting positively\n childish!\nYet he relished the feeling of\n having Dubbins drive his car.\n More than anything else, he’d\n loved being driven. Even after\n chauffeurs were a thing of the\n past, Harry had driven him\n around. Now he’d taken to walking,\n as so many others had, for\n even with modern safety measures\n so strict, there was always\n a small chance of some accident\n and nobody had any desire to\n spend the long future as a cripple.", "consolation. We’ve got a longer\n time scale than we used to have—but\n it’s in centuries, not in\n eons. For everybody, not just\n you.”\nIt was no consolation. Giles\n nodded mechanically. “I won’t\n talk, of course. How—how long?”\nCobb spread his hands unhappily.\n “Thirty years, maybe. But\n we can make them better. Geriatric\n knowledge is still on record.\n We can fix the heart and all the\n rest. You’ll be in good physical\n condition, better than your grandfather—”\n“And then....” Giles couldn’t\n pronounce the words. He’d grown\n old and he’d grow older. And", "GILES TRIED to stop scaring\n himself and partially succeeded,\n until he reached the doctor’s\n office. Then it was no longer necessary\n to frighten himself. The\n wrongness was too strong, no matter\n how professional Cobb’s smile!\nHe didn’t hear the preliminary\n words. He watched the smile vanish\n as the stack of reports came\n out. There was no nurse here\n now. The machines were quiet—and\n all the doors were shut.\nGiles shook his head, interrupting\n the doctor’s technical jargon.\n Now that he knew there was reason\n for his fear, it seemed to\n vanish, leaving a coldness that\n numbed him.", "doubts at the doctor’s words.\nHe got up once to stare at himself\n in the mirror. Ten hours had\n gone by and there should have\n been some signs of improvement.\n He couldn’t be sure, though,\n whether there were or not.\nHe looked no better the next\n morning when he finally dragged\n himself up from the little sleep\n he’d managed to get. The hollows\n were still there and the circles\n under his eyes. He searched for\n the gray in his hair, but the traitorous\n strands had been removed\n at the doctor’s office and he could\n find no new ones.\nHe looked into the dining room\n and then went by hastily. He", "Giles remembered that Dubbins\n was waiting for him, but this\n was more important. It hadn’t\n been a joke about his growing old,\n after all. But now, in a few days,\n he’d be his old—no, of course\n not—his young self again!\nThey went down the hall to\n another office, where Giles waited\n outside while Cobb conferred\n with another doctor and technician,\n with much waving of charts.\n He resented every second of it.\n It was as if the almost forgotten\n specter of age stood beside him,\n counting the seconds. But at last\n they were through and he was led\n into the quiet rejuvenation room,\n where the clamps were adjusted", "“I’d rather know the whole\n truth,” he said. His voice sounded\n dead in his ears. “The worst first.\n The rejuvenation...?”\nCobb sighed and yet seemed relieved.\n “Failed.” He stopped, and\n his hands touched the reports on\n his desk. “Completely,” he added\n in a low, defeated tone.\n“But I thought that was impossible!”\n“So did I. I wouldn’t believe\n it even yet—but now I find it\n isn’t the first case. I spent the\n night at Medical Center going up\n the ranks until I found men who\n really know about it. And now I\n wish I hadn’t.” His voice ran\n down and he gathered himself together" ] ]
train	47841	[ "Why did Judy spent a week with her grandmother for a week during summer?", "Who did Judy give credit for warning the people in town that a flood was coming?", "Why would the trip Judy had taken with her grandparents to the fountain have likely felt longer than when she was traveling with Lois and Lorraine?", "Why did Judy start crying in the attic of her grandparents home?", "What did Judy fall asleep on the summer when she was fourteen?", "What was Judy's grandmother delivering on the day that they took their wagon ride?", "Of the three, who seems to keep holding secrets in more than the others?", "Why did Lorraine duck her head when another car passed by the group on their way to the fountain?", "Why did Lois decide to turn the car around?" ]	[ [ "So that her parents could take a vacation. ", "So that her grandmother would have an opportunity to spent time with her. ", "So that her father, a doctor, could travel out of the country for work. ", "So that she could solve mysteries that were filed away in her grandmother's attic. " ], [ "Her brother, Horace. ", "Her sister, Lois. ", "Herself, due to her mystery solving ability. ", "Her sister, Lorraine." ], [ "Lorraine was speeding through the roads to the fountain.", "Her grandparents were traveling by wagon. ", "She had napped in the car, causing the ride to feel shorter. ", "She had napped in the wagon, causing the ride to feel longer. " ], [ "She was trying to cry to get tears for the fountain of wishes. ", "She was lonely with no friends. ", "She was sad that her parents wouldn't let her come on their vacation. ", "She was afraid of the attic. " ], [ "A hammock", "A flying carpet", "A wagon", "A car " ], [ "Pies that she had baked. ", "Magic carpets", "Old magazines that she had collected for years.", "Hooked rugs" ], [ "Lois", "All three equally", "Judy ", "Lorraine" ], [ "She had recently forged checks and people were looking for her. ", "She was afraid someone would report that they were trespassing. ", "She feared that they were going to collide and she was covering her face from impact. ", "She knew who the new owner of the estate was and didn't want to be seen. " ], [ "There were two approaching dark-coated figures. ", "She didn't want her license plate visible from the road. ", "She was going to park facing out in case they had to make a quick exit. ", "She feared the other car they had almost swiped would return and call the police. " ] ]	[ 1, 1, 2, 2, 1, 4, 4, 4, 3 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "was a precious memory. Every summer Dr. Bolton\n and his wife relived it. And every summer Judy\n went to stay with her grandmother Smeed, who\n scolded and fussed and tried to pretend she wasn’t\n glad to have her.\n“You here again?” she had greeted her that summer,\n and Judy hadn’t noticed her old eyes twinkling\n behind her glasses. “What do you propose to do with\n yourself this time?”\n“Read,” Judy had told her. “Mom and Dad say\n you have a whole stack of old magazines—”\n“In the attic. Go up and look them over if you\n can stand the heat.”\nJudy went, not to look over the old magazines so\n much as to escape to a place where she could have a", "“Anyway,” Lorraine began, “you had a chance to\n see how beautiful everything was before—”\nAgain she broke off as if there were something\n she wanted to tell but didn’t quite dare.\n“Before what?” questioned Judy.\n“Oh, nothing. Forget I said anything about it. You\n were telling us how you woke up in the hammock,\n but you never did explain how you got back home,”\n Lorraine reminded her.\n“Didn’t I?” asked Judy. “I’d forgotten a lot of it,\n but it’s beginning to come back now. I do remember\n driving home along this road. You see, I thought my\n grandparents had left me in the garden for a surprise\n and would return for me. I told you I was all alone.", "think she would do?\n“You’ll have plenty to read,” her father had told\n her. “I bought you six new books in that mystery\n series you like. When they’re finished there are\n plenty of short stories around. Your grandmother\n never throws anything away. She has magazines she’s\n saved since your mother was a girl. If you ask for\n them she’ll let you have the whole stack. I know how\n you love to read.”\n“I do, Dad, but if the magazines are that old—”\nJudy had stopped. She had seen her father’s tired\n eyes and had realized that a busy doctor needed a\n vacation much more than a schoolgirl who had too\n little to do. He and Judy’s mother usually went to\n the beach hotel where they had honeymooned. It", "The trip was a short one. In twenty minutes they\n had covered the distance that had seemed such a\n long way to Judy when she was riding in her grandfather’s\n wagon.\n“I’ve been thinking about it,” she said, “and I’ve\n just about figured out how it happened. I didn’t\n think my grandparents knew the Brandts well enough\n to pay them a visit, though. We must have looked\n queer driving up to a beautiful estate in Grandpa’s\n old farm wagon. I do remember that Grandma had\n some hooked rugs to deliver. But that still doesn’t\n explain what happened afterwards. When I woke\n up in the hammock I was alone in the garden. Horse,\n wagon, grandparents—all had disappeared.”\n“How could they?” asked Lois.", "actually scared by the time I reached the old tower.\n There wasn’t time to explore it. Just then I heard\n the rumble of my grandfather’s wagon and knew he\n was driving off without me.”\n“He was!” Judy’s friends both chorused in surprise,\n and Lois asked, “Why would he do a thing like\n that?”\n“I think now it was just to tease me. He did stop\n and wait for me after a while,” Judy remembered.\n “The rugs were gone. Grandma must have delivered\n them, but I didn’t ask where. If she made them for\n Mrs. Brandt they may still be there.”\n“I wouldn’t depend on it,” Lorraine said as they\n turned up the narrow road to the Brandt estate.", "that it was Lorraine’s father, Richard Thornton\n Lee, who gave him his job with the\nFarringdon\n Daily Herald\n. He had turned in some interesting\n church news, convincing Mr. Lee that he had in him\n the makings of a good reporter. And so it was that\n he spent the summer Judy was remembering in Farringdon\n where the Farringdon-Petts had their turreted\n mansion, while she had to suffer the heat and\n loneliness of Dry Brook Hollow.\nHer thoughts were what had made it so hard, she\n confessed now as she reviewed everything that had\n happened. She just couldn’t help resenting the fact\n that her parents left her every summer while they\n went off on a vacation by themselves. What did they", "And now they’re both dead and I can’t ask them.\n They left me a lot of unsolved mysteries along with\n this house. Maybe I’ll find the answers to some of\n them when I finish sorting Grandma’s things. They’re\n stored in one end of the attic.”\n“Another haunted attic? How thrilling!” exclaimed\n Lois. “Why don’t you have another ghost party and\n show up the spooks?”\n“I didn’t say the attic was haunted.”\nJudy was almost sorry she had mentioned it. She\n wasn’t in the mood for digging up old mysteries,\n but Lois and Lorraine insisted. It all began, she finally\n told them, the summer before they met. Horace\n had just started working on the paper. Judy remembered", "“Maybe not, but we can pretend we think they do,\n can’t we?” Judy replied a little uncertainly.\nShe was beginning to suspect that Lorraine knew\n more about the Brandt estate than she was telling.\nLois kept on driving along the narrow, gravelly\n road. Soon there were more evergreens and a hedge\n of rhododendrons to be seen. They looked very\n green next to the leafless trees in the woods beyond.\n The sky was gray with white clouds being driven\n across it by the wind.\n“There’s the tower!” Lorraine exclaimed. “I can\n see it over to the left. It looks like something out of\n Grimm’s Fairy Tales, doesn’t it?”\n“It looks grim all right,” agreed Judy. “I wonder", "“Watch out!” Judy suddenly exclaimed. “There’s\n another car coming.”\nAs Lois swerved to avoid the oncoming car, Lorraine\n ducked her head. She kept herself hidden behind\n Judy until the car had passed. The man driving\n it was a stranger to Judy, but she would remember\n his hypnotic, dark eyes and swarthy complexion for a\n long time. The soft brown hat he was wearing covered\n most of his hair.\n“What’s the matter with you two?” asked Lois\n when the car had passed. “Aren’t you a little old for\n playing hide and seek?”\n“I wasn’t—playing. Let’s not go up there,” Lorraine\n begged. “I don’t think the Brandts live there\n any more.”", "“You,” Lois said, “and all the mysteries you’ve\n solved. Maybe you were mistaken about a thing or\n two before the flood, but what about the haunted\n house you moved into? You were the one who\n tracked down the ghosts in the attic and the cellar\n and goodness knows where all. You’ve been chasing\n ghosts ever since I met you, and not one of them did\n you fail to explain in some sensible, logical fashion.”\n“Before I met you,” Judy said, thinking back,\n “there were plenty of them I couldn’t explain. There\n was one I used to call the spirit of the fountain, but\n what she was or how she spoke to me is more than\n I know. If my grandparents knew, they weren’t telling.", "But, apparently, Lois did not understand it that way.\n If she did, she pretended not to.\n“Where?” she asked. “To the fountain? I’d love\n to, wouldn’t you, Judy?”\n“I certainly would,” Judy replied enthusiastically.\n “Do you recognize it, too?”\n“I think so,” Lois answered after studying a little\n more closely the picture they had found. “It looks\n like the fountain on the Brandt estate.”\n“The department store Brandts?” Judy questioned.\n “Then my grandparents must have driven old Fanny\n all the way to Farringdon.”\n“Not quite all the way,” Lorraine objected. “The\n Brandts own that stretch of woods just before you", "come into the city. You’ve passed it lots of times.”\n“Of course,” agreed Judy. She put the magazine\n back in its place under the eaves and turned eagerly\n to her friends. “I do remember a road turning off\n into the woods and going on uphill,” she told them.\n “I never thought it led to a house, though. There\n isn’t even a gate. Could that be the road my grandparents\n took?”\n“Why don’t we take it ourselves and find out?”\n Lois suggested.\nCHAPTER III\nA Strange Encounter\nLorraine was not too enthusiastic about the proposed\n trip to the Brandt estate. Finally she agreed to\n it under one condition. They were not to drive all", "“But what is there to cry about?”\n“You found plenty to cry about back at your\n grandmother’s house,” the mysterious voice had reminded\n her. “Weren’t you crying on my picture up\n there in the attic?”\n“Then you—you\nare\nthe fountain!” Judy remembered\n exclaiming. “But a fountain doesn’t speak. It\n doesn’t have a voice.”\n“Wish wisely,” the voice from the fountain had\n said in a mysterious whisper.\nCHAPTER II\nIf Wishes Came True\n“Did you?” Lois interrupted the story to ask excitedly.\n “Oh, Judy! Don’t keep us in suspense any\n longer. What did you wish?”", "used to tease her and call her carrot-top until one day\n she yelled back at him, “Carrot-tops are green and so\n are you!”\nPeter was to win Judy’s heart when he gave her a\n kitten and suggested the name Blackberry for him.\n The kitten was now a dignified family cat. But the\n summer Judy found the picture of a fountain and\n spilled tears on it she had no kitten. She had nothing,\n she confessed, not even a friend. It had helped to\n pretend the fountain in the picture was filled with\n all the tears lonely girls like herself had ever cried.\n“But that would make it enchanted!” she had suddenly\n exclaimed. “If I could find it I’d wish—”\nA step had sounded on the stairs. Judy remembered", "thoughtfully, “I’m sure that was one of their wishes.\n Another could have been to keep the good old days,\n as Grandma used to call them. That one came true\n in a way. They did manage to keep a little of the\n past when they kept all these old things. That’s what\n I meant about turning back the clock.”\n“If wishes came true I’d like to turn it back a little\n myself,” Lorraine began. “It would be nice if things\n were the way they used to be when I trusted\n Arthur—”\n“Don’t you trust him now?” Judy asked.\nAfterwards she was sorry for the interruption. Lois\n and Judy both questioned Lorraine, but that was all\n she would say. Judy wondered, as they searched", "of,” Judy urged her friends.\n“Maybe not, but I’m beginning to get the shivers,”\n confessed Lois as she followed Judy to the sewing\n room at the top of the last flight of stairs.\n“So am I,” Lorraine admitted. “I’m not superstitious\n about black cats, but they are creepy. Does\n Blackberry have to roll spools across the floor?”\n“Now he thinks he’s a kitten,” laughed Judy.\n Pausing at still another door that led to the darker\n part of the attic, she turned and said mysteriously,\n “Up here we can all turn back the clock. Does anybody\n care to explore the past?”\nThe exploration began enthusiastically with Judy\n relating still more of what she remembered about", "the fountain.\n“When I told Grandma about it she laughed and\n said I must have dreamed it. She said if wishes came\n true that easily she’d be living in a castle. But would\n she?” Judy wondered. “When I first remember this\n house she was still burning kerosene lamps like those\n you see on that high shelf by the window. I think\n she and Grandpa like the way they lived without\n any modern conveniences or anything.”\n“I think so, too,” Lois agreed, looking around the\n old attic with a shiver. “It is strange they both died\n the same winter, isn’t it?”\n“Maybe they wanted it that way. Maybe they\n wished neither of them would outlive the other. If\n they did wish in the fountain,” Judy went on more", "springs at me,” Judy explained.\n“You seem to think there’s danger in this expedition\n of ours, don’t you?” asked Lorraine.\n“I don’t know what to think. You’re the one who\n seems to know the answers, but you’re not telling.\n Hiding your face back there gave you away. You’ve\n seen that character who drove down this road and,\n for some reason, you were afraid he would see you.\n Why, Lorraine? Why didn’t you want to be recognized?”\nLorraine hesitated a moment and then replied\n evasively, “People don’t generally enter private\n estates without an invitation. That’s all.”\n“I’d better turn the car around,” Lois decided,", "the way to the house which, she said, was just over\n the hilltop. They were to park the car where no\n one would see it and follow the path to the fountain.\n“But suppose we can’t find the path?” asked Judy.\n“You’ll remember it, won’t you?”\nJudy thought she would, but she wasn’t too sure.\n She and Lois both argued that it would be better to\n inquire at the house. Lois knew Helen Brandt slightly.\n“She’d be glad to show us around. This way it\n looks as if we’re planning a crime,” Lois said as they\n started off in the blue car she was driving.\nIt was a neat little car, not too conspicuous, and\n easy to park in out-of-the-way places. Judy laughed", "“A hammock?” Lois questioned. “Are you sure it\n wasn’t a flying carpet?”\n“No, it was a hammock all right,” Judy assured\n her, laughing. “It was hung between two trees in a\n beautiful garden all enclosed in rose trellises thick\n with roses. Did I tell you it was June?”\n“All the year around?”\nAgain Lois laughed. But Lorraine said abruptly,\n “Let’s not talk about rose gardens in June. It’s a long\n way from June to December.”\n“Do you mean a garden changes? I know,” Judy\n said, “but I think this one would be beautiful at any\n time of the year. There were rhododendrons, too,\n and I don’t know how many different kinds of evergreens." ], [ "not me. He was the hero without even meaning to\n be. He was the one who rode through town and\n warned people that the flood was coming. I was off\n chasing a shadow.”\n“A vanishing shadow,” Lois said with a sigh.\n “What you did wasn’t easy, Judy.”\n“It didn’t need to be as hard as it was,” Judy confessed.\n “I know now that keeping that promise not\n to talk about the dam was a great big mistake and\n could have cost lives. I should have told Arthur.”\n“Please,” Lorraine said, a pained expression clouding\n her pretty face, “let’s not talk about him now.”\n“Very well,” Judy agreed. “What shall we talk\n about?”", "“You,” Lois said, “and all the mysteries you’ve\n solved. Maybe you were mistaken about a thing or\n two before the flood, but what about the haunted\n house you moved into? You were the one who\n tracked down the ghosts in the attic and the cellar\n and goodness knows where all. You’ve been chasing\n ghosts ever since I met you, and not one of them did\n you fail to explain in some sensible, logical fashion.”\n“Before I met you,” Judy said, thinking back,\n “there were plenty of them I couldn’t explain. There\n was one I used to call the spirit of the fountain, but\n what she was or how she spoke to me is more than\n I know. If my grandparents knew, they weren’t telling.", "“Patience,” Judy said with a smile. “I’m coming\n to that.”\nFirst, she told her friends, she had to think of a\n wise wish. There had been so much she wanted in\n those early days before the flood. Dora Scott had\n been her best friend in Roulsville, but she had moved\n away.\n“You see,” she explained, “I made the mistake of\n having just one best friend. There wasn’t anybody\n in Dry Brook Hollow. I remember thinking of how\n lonely I was and how I wished for a friend or a sister,\n and suddenly a tear splashed in the water. It made\n little ripples. I thought I had to wish quickly before\n they vanished, and so I began naming the things I", "“I did make trouble for you,” Lorraine remembered.\n “It was all because of my foolish jealousy.”\n“It was nothing compared to the trouble caused by\n the Roulsville flood,” declared Judy. “After that\n things started happening so fast that I completely\n forgot about the fountain. Honestly, Lois, I don’t\n believe I thought about it again until after we moved\n to Farringdon and I walked up to your door and\n saw the fountain on your lawn.”\n“The Farringdon-Pett puddle, I always called it,”\n Lois said with a giggle. “I’ve seen lots nicer fountains.”\n“You have?” asked Judy. “Then maybe you’ve\n seen the one I’ve been telling you about. I think the", "“Watch out!” Judy suddenly exclaimed. “There’s\n another car coming.”\nAs Lois swerved to avoid the oncoming car, Lorraine\n ducked her head. She kept herself hidden behind\n Judy until the car had passed. The man driving\n it was a stranger to Judy, but she would remember\n his hypnotic, dark eyes and swarthy complexion for a\n long time. The soft brown hat he was wearing covered\n most of his hair.\n“What’s the matter with you two?” asked Lois\n when the car had passed. “Aren’t you a little old for\n playing hide and seek?”\n“I wasn’t—playing. Let’s not go up there,” Lorraine\n begged. “I don’t think the Brandts live there\n any more.”", "actually scared by the time I reached the old tower.\n There wasn’t time to explore it. Just then I heard\n the rumble of my grandfather’s wagon and knew he\n was driving off without me.”\n“He was!” Judy’s friends both chorused in surprise,\n and Lois asked, “Why would he do a thing like\n that?”\n“I think now it was just to tease me. He did stop\n and wait for me after a while,” Judy remembered.\n “The rugs were gone. Grandma must have delivered\n them, but I didn’t ask where. If she made them for\n Mrs. Brandt they may still be there.”\n“I wouldn’t depend on it,” Lorraine said as they\n turned up the narrow road to the Brandt estate.", "“Anyway,” Lorraine began, “you had a chance to\n see how beautiful everything was before—”\nAgain she broke off as if there were something\n she wanted to tell but didn’t quite dare.\n“Before what?” questioned Judy.\n“Oh, nothing. Forget I said anything about it. You\n were telling us how you woke up in the hammock,\n but you never did explain how you got back home,”\n Lorraine reminded her.\n“Didn’t I?” asked Judy. “I’d forgotten a lot of it,\n but it’s beginning to come back now. I do remember\n driving home along this road. You see, I thought my\n grandparents had left me in the garden for a surprise\n and would return for me. I told you I was all alone.", "and said if they did find the fountain she thought\n she’d wish for one exactly like it.\n“Well, you know what your grandmother said\n about wishes, don’t you?” Lorraine asked. “If you\n let people know about them instead of muttering\n them to yourself most of them aren’t so impossible.”\n“Quite true,” Judy agreed. “I’ll let Peter know\n about this one. He’s my Santa Claus, and it will soon\n be Christmas. Maybe I should have worn the fur\n coat he gave me last year.”\n“Your reversible’s better in case it rains. It’s too\n warm for snow. We picked a perfect day for this\n trip,” Lois continued, guiding the car around curves\n as it climbed the steep hill beyond Dry Brook Hollow.", "“But what is there to cry about?”\n“You found plenty to cry about back at your\n grandmother’s house,” the mysterious voice had reminded\n her. “Weren’t you crying on my picture up\n there in the attic?”\n“Then you—you\nare\nthe fountain!” Judy remembered\n exclaiming. “But a fountain doesn’t speak. It\n doesn’t have a voice.”\n“Wish wisely,” the voice from the fountain had\n said in a mysterious whisper.\nCHAPTER II\nIf Wishes Came True\n“Did you?” Lois interrupted the story to ask excitedly.\n “Oh, Judy! Don’t keep us in suspense any\n longer. What did you wish?”", "Judy wiped it away she noticed that it had fallen\n on a picture of a fountain.\n“A fountain with tears for water. How strange!”\n she remembered saying aloud.\nJudy had never seen a real fountain. The thrill of\n walking up to the door of the palatial Farringdon-Pett\n mansion was still ahead of her. On the lawn a\n fountain still caught and held rainbows like those\n she was to see on her honeymoon at Niagara Falls.\n But all that was in the future. If anyone had told\n the freckled-faced, pigtailed girl that she would one\n day marry Peter Dobbs, she would have laughed in\n their faces.\n“That tease!”\nFor then she knew Peter only as an older boy who", "“Maybe not, but we can pretend we think they do,\n can’t we?” Judy replied a little uncertainly.\nShe was beginning to suspect that Lorraine knew\n more about the Brandt estate than she was telling.\nLois kept on driving along the narrow, gravelly\n road. Soon there were more evergreens and a hedge\n of rhododendrons to be seen. They looked very\n green next to the leafless trees in the woods beyond.\n The sky was gray with white clouds being driven\n across it by the wind.\n“There’s the tower!” Lorraine exclaimed. “I can\n see it over to the left. It looks like something out of\n Grimm’s Fairy Tales, doesn’t it?”\n“It looks grim all right,” agreed Judy. “I wonder", "But, apparently, Lois did not understand it that way.\n If she did, she pretended not to.\n“Where?” she asked. “To the fountain? I’d love\n to, wouldn’t you, Judy?”\n“I certainly would,” Judy replied enthusiastically.\n “Do you recognize it, too?”\n“I think so,” Lois answered after studying a little\n more closely the picture they had found. “It looks\n like the fountain on the Brandt estate.”\n“The department store Brandts?” Judy questioned.\n “Then my grandparents must have driven old Fanny\n all the way to Farringdon.”\n“Not quite all the way,” Lorraine objected. “The\n Brandts own that stretch of woods just before you", "the way to the house which, she said, was just over\n the hilltop. They were to park the car where no\n one would see it and follow the path to the fountain.\n“But suppose we can’t find the path?” asked Judy.\n“You’ll remember it, won’t you?”\nJudy thought she would, but she wasn’t too sure.\n She and Lois both argued that it would be better to\n inquire at the house. Lois knew Helen Brandt slightly.\n“She’d be glad to show us around. This way it\n looks as if we’re planning a crime,” Lois said as they\n started off in the blue car she was driving.\nIt was a neat little car, not too conspicuous, and\n easy to park in out-of-the-way places. Judy laughed", "“You’re right, Lorraine,” announced Judy, coming\n in to serve dessert to the two friends she had invited\n for lunch at Peter’s suggestion. “I do have\n problems, and there are plenty of mysteries I can’t\n solve.”\n“Name one,” charged Lois. “Just mention one\n single spooky thing you couldn’t explain, and I’ll\n believe you. I’ve seen you in action, Judy Bolton—”\n“Judy Dobbs, remember?”\n“Well, you were Judy Bolton when you solved\n all those mysteries. I met you when the whole\n valley below the big Roulsville dam was threatened\n by flood and you solved that—”\n“That,” declared Judy, “was my brother Horace,", "what it is.”\n“I suppose it’s nothing but an old water tower. It\n would be fun to explore it, though,” Lois said. “But\n if there are new people living here they’ll never give\n us permission.”\n“We might explore it without permission,” Judy\n suggested daringly. “Come on!” she urged her friends\n as Lois parked the car in a cleared place beside the\n road. “Who’s going to stop us? And who wants to\n explore a gloomy old tower, anyway? Let’s look for\n the fountain.”\n“Do you think we should?” Lorraine asked. “It\n won’t be enchanted. I told you—”\n“You told us very little,” Lois reminded her. “If\n you know anything about the people who live here", "“in case we have to leave in a hurry. I don’t expect\n we’ll encounter any tigers, but we may be accused\n of trespassing.”\n“I’m sure we will be,” announced Judy as two\n dark-coated figures strode down the road toward\n them. “You drove right by a\n NO TRESPASSING\n sign,\n and this isn’t a welcoming committee coming to\n meet us!”", "springs at me,” Judy explained.\n“You seem to think there’s danger in this expedition\n of ours, don’t you?” asked Lorraine.\n“I don’t know what to think. You’re the one who\n seems to know the answers, but you’re not telling.\n Hiding your face back there gave you away. You’ve\n seen that character who drove down this road and,\n for some reason, you were afraid he would see you.\n Why, Lorraine? Why didn’t you want to be recognized?”\nLorraine hesitated a moment and then replied\n evasively, “People don’t generally enter private\n estates without an invitation. That’s all.”\n“I’d better turn the car around,” Lois decided,", "wanted as fast as I could. I’m not sure they were\n wise wishes. They seem rather selfish to me, now. I\n wasn’t thinking of anybody but me, Judy Bolton,\n and what I wanted. It wasn’t until after I began to\n think of others that my wishes started to come true.”\n“But what were they?” Lois insisted.\nLorraine seemed unusually quiet and thoughtful.\n Judy did not notice the fear in her eyes as she replied\n airily, “Oh, didn’t I tell you? I wished for lots\n of friends and a sister, and I wished I could marry a\n G-man and solve a lot of mysteries and that’s as far\n as I got when the ripples vanished. I thought the\n spell was broken and so I didn’t wish for anything\n more.”", "now, I think you ought to let us know. Otherwise,\n I’m afraid we won’t be very welcome.”\n“I don’t think they’ll welcome us, anyway. I do\n know who they are,” Lorraine admitted. “You remember\n Roger Banning from school, don’t you?\n I’ve seen him around here. His family must have\n acquired sudden wealth, or else he’s just working on\n the estate.”\n“Then you’ve been here lately? Why didn’t you\n tell me?” asked Lois. “We always used to go places\n together.”\n“It wasn’t important,” Lorraine replied evasively.\n “I was just out for a drive.”\n“You plutocrats!” laughed Judy. “Each with a", "the fountain.\n“When I told Grandma about it she laughed and\n said I must have dreamed it. She said if wishes came\n true that easily she’d be living in a castle. But would\n she?” Judy wondered. “When I first remember this\n house she was still burning kerosene lamps like those\n you see on that high shelf by the window. I think\n she and Grandpa like the way they lived without\n any modern conveniences or anything.”\n“I think so, too,” Lois agreed, looking around the\n old attic with a shiver. “It is strange they both died\n the same winter, isn’t it?”\n“Maybe they wanted it that way. Maybe they\n wished neither of them would outlive the other. If\n they did wish in the fountain,” Judy went on more" ], [ "it distinctly. She had turned to see her grandmother\n and to hear her say in her usual abrupt fashion,\n “Enchanted fountain, indeed! If you let people\n know your wishes instead of muttering them to\n yourself, most of them aren’t so impossible.”\n“Were they?” asked Lois.\nShe and Lorraine had listened to this much of what\n Judy was telling them without interruption.\n“That’s the unsolved mystery,” Judy replied.\n “There weren’t any of them impossible.”\nAnd she went on to tell them how, the very next\n day, her grandparents had taken her to a fountain\n exactly like the one in the picture. It was in the center\n of a deep, circular pool with steps leading up to it.", "But, apparently, Lois did not understand it that way.\n If she did, she pretended not to.\n“Where?” she asked. “To the fountain? I’d love\n to, wouldn’t you, Judy?”\n“I certainly would,” Judy replied enthusiastically.\n “Do you recognize it, too?”\n“I think so,” Lois answered after studying a little\n more closely the picture they had found. “It looks\n like the fountain on the Brandt estate.”\n“The department store Brandts?” Judy questioned.\n “Then my grandparents must have driven old Fanny\n all the way to Farringdon.”\n“Not quite all the way,” Lorraine objected. “The\n Brandts own that stretch of woods just before you", "the fountain.\n“When I told Grandma about it she laughed and\n said I must have dreamed it. She said if wishes came\n true that easily she’d be living in a castle. But would\n she?” Judy wondered. “When I first remember this\n house she was still burning kerosene lamps like those\n you see on that high shelf by the window. I think\n she and Grandpa like the way they lived without\n any modern conveniences or anything.”\n“I think so, too,” Lois agreed, looking around the\n old attic with a shiver. “It is strange they both died\n the same winter, isn’t it?”\n“Maybe they wanted it that way. Maybe they\n wished neither of them would outlive the other. If\n they did wish in the fountain,” Judy went on more", "The trip was a short one. In twenty minutes they\n had covered the distance that had seemed such a\n long way to Judy when she was riding in her grandfather’s\n wagon.\n“I’ve been thinking about it,” she said, “and I’ve\n just about figured out how it happened. I didn’t\n think my grandparents knew the Brandts well enough\n to pay them a visit, though. We must have looked\n queer driving up to a beautiful estate in Grandpa’s\n old farm wagon. I do remember that Grandma had\n some hooked rugs to deliver. But that still doesn’t\n explain what happened afterwards. When I woke\n up in the hammock I was alone in the garden. Horse,\n wagon, grandparents—all had disappeared.”\n“How could they?” asked Lois.", "and said if they did find the fountain she thought\n she’d wish for one exactly like it.\n“Well, you know what your grandmother said\n about wishes, don’t you?” Lorraine asked. “If you\n let people know about them instead of muttering\n them to yourself most of them aren’t so impossible.”\n“Quite true,” Judy agreed. “I’ll let Peter know\n about this one. He’s my Santa Claus, and it will soon\n be Christmas. Maybe I should have worn the fur\n coat he gave me last year.”\n“Your reversible’s better in case it rains. It’s too\n warm for snow. We picked a perfect day for this\n trip,” Lois continued, guiding the car around curves\n as it climbed the steep hill beyond Dry Brook Hollow.", "“Honey and I always do,” she replied “but then\n it was different. I didn’t know I would marry Peter\n or that he would become a G-man, and he didn’t\n know he had a sister. It is strange, isn’t it? But the\n strangest thing of all was the fountain itself.”\n“Why?” asked Lorraine. “Do you still think it was\n enchanted?”\nLois laughed at this, but Judy was serious as she\n answered, “I was still little girl enough to think so\n at the time. I wandered around, growing very\n drowsy. Then I found a hammock and climbed into\n it. I must have gone to sleep, because I remember\n waking up and wondering if the voice in the fountain\n had been a dream.”", "“I did make trouble for you,” Lorraine remembered.\n “It was all because of my foolish jealousy.”\n“It was nothing compared to the trouble caused by\n the Roulsville flood,” declared Judy. “After that\n things started happening so fast that I completely\n forgot about the fountain. Honestly, Lois, I don’t\n believe I thought about it again until after we moved\n to Farringdon and I walked up to your door and\n saw the fountain on your lawn.”\n“The Farringdon-Pett puddle, I always called it,”\n Lois said with a giggle. “I’ve seen lots nicer fountains.”\n“You have?” asked Judy. “Then maybe you’ve\n seen the one I’ve been telling you about. I think the", "“Anyway,” Lorraine began, “you had a chance to\n see how beautiful everything was before—”\nAgain she broke off as if there were something\n she wanted to tell but didn’t quite dare.\n“Before what?” questioned Judy.\n“Oh, nothing. Forget I said anything about it. You\n were telling us how you woke up in the hammock,\n but you never did explain how you got back home,”\n Lorraine reminded her.\n“Didn’t I?” asked Judy. “I’d forgotten a lot of it,\n but it’s beginning to come back now. I do remember\n driving home along this road. You see, I thought my\n grandparents had left me in the garden for a surprise\n and would return for me. I told you I was all alone.", "“But what is there to cry about?”\n“You found plenty to cry about back at your\n grandmother’s house,” the mysterious voice had reminded\n her. “Weren’t you crying on my picture up\n there in the attic?”\n“Then you—you\nare\nthe fountain!” Judy remembered\n exclaiming. “But a fountain doesn’t speak. It\n doesn’t have a voice.”\n“Wish wisely,” the voice from the fountain had\n said in a mysterious whisper.\nCHAPTER II\nIf Wishes Came True\n“Did you?” Lois interrupted the story to ask excitedly.\n “Oh, Judy! Don’t keep us in suspense any\n longer. What did you wish?”", "I explored the garden all around the fountain.”\n“And then what happened?” Lorraine urged her.\n“Yes, yes. Go on,” entreated Lois. “I didn’t dream\n you’d kept anything that exciting a secret. Why didn’t\n you try to solve the mystery?”\n“I think I would have tried,” Judy admitted, “if\n I had been older or more experienced. I really should\n have investigated it more thoroughly and learned the\n secret of the fountain. But after the ripples went\n away it didn’t speak to me any more, and I didn’t\n really think it had heard my wishes. I was still wishing\n for a friend when I met you, Lois. It did seem\n impossible for us to be friends at first, didn’t it? Lorraine\n was your friend.”", "through the old magazines, what was wrong. Lorraine\n was of a jealous disposition. Was the green-eyed\n monster coming between her and her handsome husband,\n Arthur Farringdon-Pett? Until now they had\n seemed blissfully happy. But there was no happiness\n in Lorraine’s face as she gazed at a picture of one of\n the fountains and then said in a tight little voice, “It\n is. It’s the very same one.”\n“But that’s the picture I’ve been searching for!”\n Judy said eagerly. “Do you know where it is?”\n“I can’t be sure. But if it ever was enchanted, I’m\n sure it isn’t now. Let’s go,” Lorraine said suddenly\n to Lois. Judy knew she was suggesting a fast trip home.", "“You,” Lois said, “and all the mysteries you’ve\n solved. Maybe you were mistaken about a thing or\n two before the flood, but what about the haunted\n house you moved into? You were the one who\n tracked down the ghosts in the attic and the cellar\n and goodness knows where all. You’ve been chasing\n ghosts ever since I met you, and not one of them did\n you fail to explain in some sensible, logical fashion.”\n“Before I met you,” Judy said, thinking back,\n “there were plenty of them I couldn’t explain. There\n was one I used to call the spirit of the fountain, but\n what she was or how she spoke to me is more than\n I know. If my grandparents knew, they weren’t telling.", "actually scared by the time I reached the old tower.\n There wasn’t time to explore it. Just then I heard\n the rumble of my grandfather’s wagon and knew he\n was driving off without me.”\n“He was!” Judy’s friends both chorused in surprise,\n and Lois asked, “Why would he do a thing like\n that?”\n“I think now it was just to tease me. He did stop\n and wait for me after a while,” Judy remembered.\n “The rugs were gone. Grandma must have delivered\n them, but I didn’t ask where. If she made them for\n Mrs. Brandt they may still be there.”\n“I wouldn’t depend on it,” Lorraine said as they\n turned up the narrow road to the Brandt estate.", "“Maybe not, but we can pretend we think they do,\n can’t we?” Judy replied a little uncertainly.\nShe was beginning to suspect that Lorraine knew\n more about the Brandt estate than she was telling.\nLois kept on driving along the narrow, gravelly\n road. Soon there were more evergreens and a hedge\n of rhododendrons to be seen. They looked very\n green next to the leafless trees in the woods beyond.\n The sky was gray with white clouds being driven\n across it by the wind.\n“There’s the tower!” Lorraine exclaimed. “I can\n see it over to the left. It looks like something out of\n Grimm’s Fairy Tales, doesn’t it?”\n“It looks grim all right,” agreed Judy. “I wonder", "picture of it is still in the attic. Come on up and I’ll\n show you.”\nLois and Lorraine had finished their dessert while\n Judy was telling them the story of the fountain.\n Somehow, she wasn’t hungry for hers. She had\n tasted it too often while she was making it.\n“I’ll leave it for Blackberry,” she decided.\nLois watched in amusement as the cat lapped up\n the chocolate pudding after Judy had mixed it generously\n with cream.\n“Sometimes,” Judy said fondly, “Blackberry thinks\n he’s a person. He eats everything we eat, including\n lettuce. Do you mind if he comes with us, Lorraine?\n He wants to explore the attic, too.”", "“Watch out!” Judy suddenly exclaimed. “There’s\n another car coming.”\nAs Lois swerved to avoid the oncoming car, Lorraine\n ducked her head. She kept herself hidden behind\n Judy until the car had passed. The man driving\n it was a stranger to Judy, but she would remember\n his hypnotic, dark eyes and swarthy complexion for a\n long time. The soft brown hat he was wearing covered\n most of his hair.\n“What’s the matter with you two?” asked Lois\n when the car had passed. “Aren’t you a little old for\n playing hide and seek?”\n“I wasn’t—playing. Let’s not go up there,” Lorraine\n begged. “I don’t think the Brandts live there\n any more.”", "thoughtfully, “I’m sure that was one of their wishes.\n Another could have been to keep the good old days,\n as Grandma used to call them. That one came true\n in a way. They did manage to keep a little of the\n past when they kept all these old things. That’s what\n I meant about turning back the clock.”\n“If wishes came true I’d like to turn it back a little\n myself,” Lorraine began. “It would be nice if things\n were the way they used to be when I trusted\n Arthur—”\n“Don’t you trust him now?” Judy asked.\nAfterwards she was sorry for the interruption. Lois\n and Judy both questioned Lorraine, but that was all\n she would say. Judy wondered, as they searched", "the way to the house which, she said, was just over\n the hilltop. They were to park the car where no\n one would see it and follow the path to the fountain.\n“But suppose we can’t find the path?” asked Judy.\n“You’ll remember it, won’t you?”\nJudy thought she would, but she wasn’t too sure.\n She and Lois both argued that it would be better to\n inquire at the house. Lois knew Helen Brandt slightly.\n“She’d be glad to show us around. This way it\n looks as if we’re planning a crime,” Lois said as they\n started off in the blue car she was driving.\nIt was a neat little car, not too conspicuous, and\n easy to park in out-of-the-way places. Judy laughed", "And now they’re both dead and I can’t ask them.\n They left me a lot of unsolved mysteries along with\n this house. Maybe I’ll find the answers to some of\n them when I finish sorting Grandma’s things. They’re\n stored in one end of the attic.”\n“Another haunted attic? How thrilling!” exclaimed\n Lois. “Why don’t you have another ghost party and\n show up the spooks?”\n“I didn’t say the attic was haunted.”\nJudy was almost sorry she had mentioned it. She\n wasn’t in the mood for digging up old mysteries,\n but Lois and Lorraine insisted. It all began, she finally\n told them, the summer before they met. Horace\n had just started working on the paper. Judy remembered", "what it is.”\n“I suppose it’s nothing but an old water tower. It\n would be fun to explore it, though,” Lois said. “But\n if there are new people living here they’ll never give\n us permission.”\n“We might explore it without permission,” Judy\n suggested daringly. “Come on!” she urged her friends\n as Lois parked the car in a cleared place beside the\n road. “Who’s going to stop us? And who wants to\n explore a gloomy old tower, anyway? Let’s look for\n the fountain.”\n“Do you think we should?” Lorraine asked. “It\n won’t be enchanted. I told you—”\n“You told us very little,” Lois reminded her. “If\n you know anything about the people who live here" ], [ "And now they’re both dead and I can’t ask them.\n They left me a lot of unsolved mysteries along with\n this house. Maybe I’ll find the answers to some of\n them when I finish sorting Grandma’s things. They’re\n stored in one end of the attic.”\n“Another haunted attic? How thrilling!” exclaimed\n Lois. “Why don’t you have another ghost party and\n show up the spooks?”\n“I didn’t say the attic was haunted.”\nJudy was almost sorry she had mentioned it. She\n wasn’t in the mood for digging up old mysteries,\n but Lois and Lorraine insisted. It all began, she finally\n told them, the summer before they met. Horace\n had just started working on the paper. Judy remembered", "“He’ll remember he’s a cat fast enough if there\n are any mice up there,” Lois said with a giggle.\nLeaving the table, they all started upstairs with\n the cat bounding ahead of them. In modernizing her\n grandparents’ house to suit her own and Peter’s\n tastes, Judy had seen to it that the old stair door was\n removed. But there was still a door closing off the\n narrower stairs that led to the attic. Blackberry\n reached it first and yowled for Judy to open it.\n“He can read my mind. He always knows where\n I’m going,” Judy said as the door creaked open and\n the cat shot through it. A moment later a weird rolling\n noise came from the floor above.\n“Come on. There’s nothing up here to be afraid", "of,” Judy urged her friends.\n“Maybe not, but I’m beginning to get the shivers,”\n confessed Lois as she followed Judy to the sewing\n room at the top of the last flight of stairs.\n“So am I,” Lorraine admitted. “I’m not superstitious\n about black cats, but they are creepy. Does\n Blackberry have to roll spools across the floor?”\n“Now he thinks he’s a kitten,” laughed Judy.\n Pausing at still another door that led to the darker\n part of the attic, she turned and said mysteriously,\n “Up here we can all turn back the clock. Does anybody\n care to explore the past?”\nThe exploration began enthusiastically with Judy\n relating still more of what she remembered about", "was a precious memory. Every summer Dr. Bolton\n and his wife relived it. And every summer Judy\n went to stay with her grandmother Smeed, who\n scolded and fussed and tried to pretend she wasn’t\n glad to have her.\n“You here again?” she had greeted her that summer,\n and Judy hadn’t noticed her old eyes twinkling\n behind her glasses. “What do you propose to do with\n yourself this time?”\n“Read,” Judy had told her. “Mom and Dad say\n you have a whole stack of old magazines—”\n“In the attic. Go up and look them over if you\n can stand the heat.”\nJudy went, not to look over the old magazines so\n much as to escape to a place where she could have a", "“But what is there to cry about?”\n“You found plenty to cry about back at your\n grandmother’s house,” the mysterious voice had reminded\n her. “Weren’t you crying on my picture up\n there in the attic?”\n“Then you—you\nare\nthe fountain!” Judy remembered\n exclaiming. “But a fountain doesn’t speak. It\n doesn’t have a voice.”\n“Wish wisely,” the voice from the fountain had\n said in a mysterious whisper.\nCHAPTER II\nIf Wishes Came True\n“Did you?” Lois interrupted the story to ask excitedly.\n “Oh, Judy! Don’t keep us in suspense any\n longer. What did you wish?”", "“Anyway,” Lorraine began, “you had a chance to\n see how beautiful everything was before—”\nAgain she broke off as if there were something\n she wanted to tell but didn’t quite dare.\n“Before what?” questioned Judy.\n“Oh, nothing. Forget I said anything about it. You\n were telling us how you woke up in the hammock,\n but you never did explain how you got back home,”\n Lorraine reminded her.\n“Didn’t I?” asked Judy. “I’d forgotten a lot of it,\n but it’s beginning to come back now. I do remember\n driving home along this road. You see, I thought my\n grandparents had left me in the garden for a surprise\n and would return for me. I told you I was all alone.", "“You,” Lois said, “and all the mysteries you’ve\n solved. Maybe you were mistaken about a thing or\n two before the flood, but what about the haunted\n house you moved into? You were the one who\n tracked down the ghosts in the attic and the cellar\n and goodness knows where all. You’ve been chasing\n ghosts ever since I met you, and not one of them did\n you fail to explain in some sensible, logical fashion.”\n“Before I met you,” Judy said, thinking back,\n “there were plenty of them I couldn’t explain. There\n was one I used to call the spirit of the fountain, but\n what she was or how she spoke to me is more than\n I know. If my grandparents knew, they weren’t telling.", "“Watch out!” Judy suddenly exclaimed. “There’s\n another car coming.”\nAs Lois swerved to avoid the oncoming car, Lorraine\n ducked her head. She kept herself hidden behind\n Judy until the car had passed. The man driving\n it was a stranger to Judy, but she would remember\n his hypnotic, dark eyes and swarthy complexion for a\n long time. The soft brown hat he was wearing covered\n most of his hair.\n“What’s the matter with you two?” asked Lois\n when the car had passed. “Aren’t you a little old for\n playing hide and seek?”\n“I wasn’t—playing. Let’s not go up there,” Lorraine\n begged. “I don’t think the Brandts live there\n any more.”", "actually scared by the time I reached the old tower.\n There wasn’t time to explore it. Just then I heard\n the rumble of my grandfather’s wagon and knew he\n was driving off without me.”\n“He was!” Judy’s friends both chorused in surprise,\n and Lois asked, “Why would he do a thing like\n that?”\n“I think now it was just to tease me. He did stop\n and wait for me after a while,” Judy remembered.\n “The rugs were gone. Grandma must have delivered\n them, but I didn’t ask where. If she made them for\n Mrs. Brandt they may still be there.”\n“I wouldn’t depend on it,” Lorraine said as they\n turned up the narrow road to the Brandt estate.", "the fountain.\n“When I told Grandma about it she laughed and\n said I must have dreamed it. She said if wishes came\n true that easily she’d be living in a castle. But would\n she?” Judy wondered. “When I first remember this\n house she was still burning kerosene lamps like those\n you see on that high shelf by the window. I think\n she and Grandpa like the way they lived without\n any modern conveniences or anything.”\n“I think so, too,” Lois agreed, looking around the\n old attic with a shiver. “It is strange they both died\n the same winter, isn’t it?”\n“Maybe they wanted it that way. Maybe they\n wished neither of them would outlive the other. If\n they did wish in the fountain,” Judy went on more", "Judy wiped it away she noticed that it had fallen\n on a picture of a fountain.\n“A fountain with tears for water. How strange!”\n she remembered saying aloud.\nJudy had never seen a real fountain. The thrill of\n walking up to the door of the palatial Farringdon-Pett\n mansion was still ahead of her. On the lawn a\n fountain still caught and held rainbows like those\n she was to see on her honeymoon at Niagara Falls.\n But all that was in the future. If anyone had told\n the freckled-faced, pigtailed girl that she would one\n day marry Peter Dobbs, she would have laughed in\n their faces.\n“That tease!”\nFor then she knew Peter only as an older boy who", "picture of it is still in the attic. Come on up and I’ll\n show you.”\nLois and Lorraine had finished their dessert while\n Judy was telling them the story of the fountain.\n Somehow, she wasn’t hungry for hers. She had\n tasted it too often while she was making it.\n“I’ll leave it for Blackberry,” she decided.\nLois watched in amusement as the cat lapped up\n the chocolate pudding after Judy had mixed it generously\n with cream.\n“Sometimes,” Judy said fondly, “Blackberry thinks\n he’s a person. He eats everything we eat, including\n lettuce. Do you mind if he comes with us, Lorraine?\n He wants to explore the attic, too.”", "“Maybe not, but we can pretend we think they do,\n can’t we?” Judy replied a little uncertainly.\nShe was beginning to suspect that Lorraine knew\n more about the Brandt estate than she was telling.\nLois kept on driving along the narrow, gravelly\n road. Soon there were more evergreens and a hedge\n of rhododendrons to be seen. They looked very\n green next to the leafless trees in the woods beyond.\n The sky was gray with white clouds being driven\n across it by the wind.\n“There’s the tower!” Lorraine exclaimed. “I can\n see it over to the left. It looks like something out of\n Grimm’s Fairy Tales, doesn’t it?”\n“It looks grim all right,” agreed Judy. “I wonder", "thoughtfully, “I’m sure that was one of their wishes.\n Another could have been to keep the good old days,\n as Grandma used to call them. That one came true\n in a way. They did manage to keep a little of the\n past when they kept all these old things. That’s what\n I meant about turning back the clock.”\n“If wishes came true I’d like to turn it back a little\n myself,” Lorraine began. “It would be nice if things\n were the way they used to be when I trusted\n Arthur—”\n“Don’t you trust him now?” Judy asked.\nAfterwards she was sorry for the interruption. Lois\n and Judy both questioned Lorraine, but that was all\n she would say. Judy wondered, as they searched", "used to tease her and call her carrot-top until one day\n she yelled back at him, “Carrot-tops are green and so\n are you!”\nPeter was to win Judy’s heart when he gave her a\n kitten and suggested the name Blackberry for him.\n The kitten was now a dignified family cat. But the\n summer Judy found the picture of a fountain and\n spilled tears on it she had no kitten. She had nothing,\n she confessed, not even a friend. It had helped to\n pretend the fountain in the picture was filled with\n all the tears lonely girls like herself had ever cried.\n“But that would make it enchanted!” she had suddenly\n exclaimed. “If I could find it I’d wish—”\nA step had sounded on the stairs. Judy remembered", "The trip was a short one. In twenty minutes they\n had covered the distance that had seemed such a\n long way to Judy when she was riding in her grandfather’s\n wagon.\n“I’ve been thinking about it,” she said, “and I’ve\n just about figured out how it happened. I didn’t\n think my grandparents knew the Brandts well enough\n to pay them a visit, though. We must have looked\n queer driving up to a beautiful estate in Grandpa’s\n old farm wagon. I do remember that Grandma had\n some hooked rugs to deliver. But that still doesn’t\n explain what happened afterwards. When I woke\n up in the hammock I was alone in the garden. Horse,\n wagon, grandparents—all had disappeared.”\n“How could they?” asked Lois.", "good cry. It was the summer before her fifteenth\n birthday. In another year she would have outgrown\n her childish resentment of her parents’ vacation or\n be grown up enough to ask them to let her have a\n vacation of her own. In another year she would\n be summering among the beautiful Thousand Islands\n and solving a mystery to be known as the\nGhost\n Parade\n.\n“A whole parade of ghosts,” Lois would be telling\n her, “and you solved everything.”\nBut then she didn’t even know Lois. She had no\n idea so many thrilling adventures awaited her. There\n seemed to be nothing—nothing—and so the tears\n came and spilled over on one of the magazines. As", "Beside the steps were smaller fountains with the\n water spurting from the mouths of stone lions. Judy\n had stared at them a moment and then climbed the\n steps to the pool.\n“Am I dreaming?” she remembered saying aloud.\n “Is this beautiful fountain real?”\nA voice had answered, although she could see no\n one.\n“Make your wishes, Judy. Wish wisely. If you\n shed a tear in the fountain your wishes will surely\n come true.”\n“A tear?” Judy had asked. “How can I shed a\n tear when I’m happy? This is a wonderful place.”\n“Shed a tear in the fountain and your wishes will\n surely come true,” the voice had repeated.", "But, apparently, Lois did not understand it that way.\n If she did, she pretended not to.\n“Where?” she asked. “To the fountain? I’d love\n to, wouldn’t you, Judy?”\n“I certainly would,” Judy replied enthusiastically.\n “Do you recognize it, too?”\n“I think so,” Lois answered after studying a little\n more closely the picture they had found. “It looks\n like the fountain on the Brandt estate.”\n“The department store Brandts?” Judy questioned.\n “Then my grandparents must have driven old Fanny\n all the way to Farringdon.”\n“Not quite all the way,” Lorraine objected. “The\n Brandts own that stretch of woods just before you", "come into the city. You’ve passed it lots of times.”\n“Of course,” agreed Judy. She put the magazine\n back in its place under the eaves and turned eagerly\n to her friends. “I do remember a road turning off\n into the woods and going on uphill,” she told them.\n “I never thought it led to a house, though. There\n isn’t even a gate. Could that be the road my grandparents\n took?”\n“Why don’t we take it ourselves and find out?”\n Lois suggested.\nCHAPTER III\nA Strange Encounter\nLorraine was not too enthusiastic about the proposed\n trip to the Brandt estate. Finally she agreed to\n it under one condition. They were not to drive all" ], [ "was a precious memory. Every summer Dr. Bolton\n and his wife relived it. And every summer Judy\n went to stay with her grandmother Smeed, who\n scolded and fussed and tried to pretend she wasn’t\n glad to have her.\n“You here again?” she had greeted her that summer,\n and Judy hadn’t noticed her old eyes twinkling\n behind her glasses. “What do you propose to do with\n yourself this time?”\n“Read,” Judy had told her. “Mom and Dad say\n you have a whole stack of old magazines—”\n“In the attic. Go up and look them over if you\n can stand the heat.”\nJudy went, not to look over the old magazines so\n much as to escape to a place where she could have a", "“Anyway,” Lorraine began, “you had a chance to\n see how beautiful everything was before—”\nAgain she broke off as if there were something\n she wanted to tell but didn’t quite dare.\n“Before what?” questioned Judy.\n“Oh, nothing. Forget I said anything about it. You\n were telling us how you woke up in the hammock,\n but you never did explain how you got back home,”\n Lorraine reminded her.\n“Didn’t I?” asked Judy. “I’d forgotten a lot of it,\n but it’s beginning to come back now. I do remember\n driving home along this road. You see, I thought my\n grandparents had left me in the garden for a surprise\n and would return for me. I told you I was all alone.", "“A hammock?” Lois questioned. “Are you sure it\n wasn’t a flying carpet?”\n“No, it was a hammock all right,” Judy assured\n her, laughing. “It was hung between two trees in a\n beautiful garden all enclosed in rose trellises thick\n with roses. Did I tell you it was June?”\n“All the year around?”\nAgain Lois laughed. But Lorraine said abruptly,\n “Let’s not talk about rose gardens in June. It’s a long\n way from June to December.”\n“Do you mean a garden changes? I know,” Judy\n said, “but I think this one would be beautiful at any\n time of the year. There were rhododendrons, too,\n and I don’t know how many different kinds of evergreens.", "Judy wiped it away she noticed that it had fallen\n on a picture of a fountain.\n“A fountain with tears for water. How strange!”\n she remembered saying aloud.\nJudy had never seen a real fountain. The thrill of\n walking up to the door of the palatial Farringdon-Pett\n mansion was still ahead of her. On the lawn a\n fountain still caught and held rainbows like those\n she was to see on her honeymoon at Niagara Falls.\n But all that was in the future. If anyone had told\n the freckled-faced, pigtailed girl that she would one\n day marry Peter Dobbs, she would have laughed in\n their faces.\n“That tease!”\nFor then she knew Peter only as an older boy who", "good cry. It was the summer before her fifteenth\n birthday. In another year she would have outgrown\n her childish resentment of her parents’ vacation or\n be grown up enough to ask them to let her have a\n vacation of her own. In another year she would\n be summering among the beautiful Thousand Islands\n and solving a mystery to be known as the\nGhost\n Parade\n.\n“A whole parade of ghosts,” Lois would be telling\n her, “and you solved everything.”\nBut then she didn’t even know Lois. She had no\n idea so many thrilling adventures awaited her. There\n seemed to be nothing—nothing—and so the tears\n came and spilled over on one of the magazines. As", "used to tease her and call her carrot-top until one day\n she yelled back at him, “Carrot-tops are green and so\n are you!”\nPeter was to win Judy’s heart when he gave her a\n kitten and suggested the name Blackberry for him.\n The kitten was now a dignified family cat. But the\n summer Judy found the picture of a fountain and\n spilled tears on it she had no kitten. She had nothing,\n she confessed, not even a friend. It had helped to\n pretend the fountain in the picture was filled with\n all the tears lonely girls like herself had ever cried.\n“But that would make it enchanted!” she had suddenly\n exclaimed. “If I could find it I’d wish—”\nA step had sounded on the stairs. Judy remembered", "that it was Lorraine’s father, Richard Thornton\n Lee, who gave him his job with the\nFarringdon\n Daily Herald\n. He had turned in some interesting\n church news, convincing Mr. Lee that he had in him\n the makings of a good reporter. And so it was that\n he spent the summer Judy was remembering in Farringdon\n where the Farringdon-Petts had their turreted\n mansion, while she had to suffer the heat and\n loneliness of Dry Brook Hollow.\nHer thoughts were what had made it so hard, she\n confessed now as she reviewed everything that had\n happened. She just couldn’t help resenting the fact\n that her parents left her every summer while they\n went off on a vacation by themselves. What did they", "The trip was a short one. In twenty minutes they\n had covered the distance that had seemed such a\n long way to Judy when she was riding in her grandfather’s\n wagon.\n“I’ve been thinking about it,” she said, “and I’ve\n just about figured out how it happened. I didn’t\n think my grandparents knew the Brandts well enough\n to pay them a visit, though. We must have looked\n queer driving up to a beautiful estate in Grandpa’s\n old farm wagon. I do remember that Grandma had\n some hooked rugs to deliver. But that still doesn’t\n explain what happened afterwards. When I woke\n up in the hammock I was alone in the garden. Horse,\n wagon, grandparents—all had disappeared.”\n“How could they?” asked Lois.", "And now they’re both dead and I can’t ask them.\n They left me a lot of unsolved mysteries along with\n this house. Maybe I’ll find the answers to some of\n them when I finish sorting Grandma’s things. They’re\n stored in one end of the attic.”\n“Another haunted attic? How thrilling!” exclaimed\n Lois. “Why don’t you have another ghost party and\n show up the spooks?”\n“I didn’t say the attic was haunted.”\nJudy was almost sorry she had mentioned it. She\n wasn’t in the mood for digging up old mysteries,\n but Lois and Lorraine insisted. It all began, she finally\n told them, the summer before they met. Horace\n had just started working on the paper. Judy remembered", "think she would do?\n“You’ll have plenty to read,” her father had told\n her. “I bought you six new books in that mystery\n series you like. When they’re finished there are\n plenty of short stories around. Your grandmother\n never throws anything away. She has magazines she’s\n saved since your mother was a girl. If you ask for\n them she’ll let you have the whole stack. I know how\n you love to read.”\n“I do, Dad, but if the magazines are that old—”\nJudy had stopped. She had seen her father’s tired\n eyes and had realized that a busy doctor needed a\n vacation much more than a schoolgirl who had too\n little to do. He and Judy’s mother usually went to\n the beach hotel where they had honeymooned. It", "of,” Judy urged her friends.\n“Maybe not, but I’m beginning to get the shivers,”\n confessed Lois as she followed Judy to the sewing\n room at the top of the last flight of stairs.\n“So am I,” Lorraine admitted. “I’m not superstitious\n about black cats, but they are creepy. Does\n Blackberry have to roll spools across the floor?”\n“Now he thinks he’s a kitten,” laughed Judy.\n Pausing at still another door that led to the darker\n part of the attic, she turned and said mysteriously,\n “Up here we can all turn back the clock. Does anybody\n care to explore the past?”\nThe exploration began enthusiastically with Judy\n relating still more of what she remembered about", "“Honey and I always do,” she replied “but then\n it was different. I didn’t know I would marry Peter\n or that he would become a G-man, and he didn’t\n know he had a sister. It is strange, isn’t it? But the\n strangest thing of all was the fountain itself.”\n“Why?” asked Lorraine. “Do you still think it was\n enchanted?”\nLois laughed at this, but Judy was serious as she\n answered, “I was still little girl enough to think so\n at the time. I wandered around, growing very\n drowsy. Then I found a hammock and climbed into\n it. I must have gone to sleep, because I remember\n waking up and wondering if the voice in the fountain\n had been a dream.”", "actually scared by the time I reached the old tower.\n There wasn’t time to explore it. Just then I heard\n the rumble of my grandfather’s wagon and knew he\n was driving off without me.”\n“He was!” Judy’s friends both chorused in surprise,\n and Lois asked, “Why would he do a thing like\n that?”\n“I think now it was just to tease me. He did stop\n and wait for me after a while,” Judy remembered.\n “The rugs were gone. Grandma must have delivered\n them, but I didn’t ask where. If she made them for\n Mrs. Brandt they may still be there.”\n“I wouldn’t depend on it,” Lorraine said as they\n turned up the narrow road to the Brandt estate.", "“Watch out!” Judy suddenly exclaimed. “There’s\n another car coming.”\nAs Lois swerved to avoid the oncoming car, Lorraine\n ducked her head. She kept herself hidden behind\n Judy until the car had passed. The man driving\n it was a stranger to Judy, but she would remember\n his hypnotic, dark eyes and swarthy complexion for a\n long time. The soft brown hat he was wearing covered\n most of his hair.\n“What’s the matter with you two?” asked Lois\n when the car had passed. “Aren’t you a little old for\n playing hide and seek?”\n“I wasn’t—playing. Let’s not go up there,” Lorraine\n begged. “I don’t think the Brandts live there\n any more.”", "Beside the steps were smaller fountains with the\n water spurting from the mouths of stone lions. Judy\n had stared at them a moment and then climbed the\n steps to the pool.\n“Am I dreaming?” she remembered saying aloud.\n “Is this beautiful fountain real?”\nA voice had answered, although she could see no\n one.\n“Make your wishes, Judy. Wish wisely. If you\n shed a tear in the fountain your wishes will surely\n come true.”\n“A tear?” Judy had asked. “How can I shed a\n tear when I’m happy? This is a wonderful place.”\n“Shed a tear in the fountain and your wishes will\n surely come true,” the voice had repeated.", "“Maybe not, but we can pretend we think they do,\n can’t we?” Judy replied a little uncertainly.\nShe was beginning to suspect that Lorraine knew\n more about the Brandt estate than she was telling.\nLois kept on driving along the narrow, gravelly\n road. Soon there were more evergreens and a hedge\n of rhododendrons to be seen. They looked very\n green next to the leafless trees in the woods beyond.\n The sky was gray with white clouds being driven\n across it by the wind.\n“There’s the tower!” Lorraine exclaimed. “I can\n see it over to the left. It looks like something out of\n Grimm’s Fairy Tales, doesn’t it?”\n“It looks grim all right,” agreed Judy. “I wonder", "the fountain.\n“When I told Grandma about it she laughed and\n said I must have dreamed it. She said if wishes came\n true that easily she’d be living in a castle. But would\n she?” Judy wondered. “When I first remember this\n house she was still burning kerosene lamps like those\n you see on that high shelf by the window. I think\n she and Grandpa like the way they lived without\n any modern conveniences or anything.”\n“I think so, too,” Lois agreed, looking around the\n old attic with a shiver. “It is strange they both died\n the same winter, isn’t it?”\n“Maybe they wanted it that way. Maybe they\n wished neither of them would outlive the other. If\n they did wish in the fountain,” Judy went on more", "“He’ll remember he’s a cat fast enough if there\n are any mice up there,” Lois said with a giggle.\nLeaving the table, they all started upstairs with\n the cat bounding ahead of them. In modernizing her\n grandparents’ house to suit her own and Peter’s\n tastes, Judy had seen to it that the old stair door was\n removed. But there was still a door closing off the\n narrower stairs that led to the attic. Blackberry\n reached it first and yowled for Judy to open it.\n“He can read my mind. He always knows where\n I’m going,” Judy said as the door creaked open and\n the cat shot through it. A moment later a weird rolling\n noise came from the floor above.\n“Come on. There’s nothing up here to be afraid", "There wasn’t a house in sight.”\n“The Brandt house is just over the top of this next\n hill,” Lois put in.\n“I know. You told me that. Now I know why I\n couldn’t see it. All I could see was a windowless old\n tower and a path leading in that direction. Naturally,\n I followed it. There’s something about a path in\n the woods that always tempts me.”\n“We know that, Judy. Honey told us all about\n your latest mystery. You followed a trail or something.”\n“Well, this trail led out of the rose garden where\n the hammock was and then through an archway,”\n Judy continued. “All sorts of little cupids and gnomes\n peered out at me from unexpected places. I was", "“You,” Lois said, “and all the mysteries you’ve\n solved. Maybe you were mistaken about a thing or\n two before the flood, but what about the haunted\n house you moved into? You were the one who\n tracked down the ghosts in the attic and the cellar\n and goodness knows where all. You’ve been chasing\n ghosts ever since I met you, and not one of them did\n you fail to explain in some sensible, logical fashion.”\n“Before I met you,” Judy said, thinking back,\n “there were plenty of them I couldn’t explain. There\n was one I used to call the spirit of the fountain, but\n what she was or how she spoke to me is more than\n I know. If my grandparents knew, they weren’t telling." ], [ "The trip was a short one. In twenty minutes they\n had covered the distance that had seemed such a\n long way to Judy when she was riding in her grandfather’s\n wagon.\n“I’ve been thinking about it,” she said, “and I’ve\n just about figured out how it happened. I didn’t\n think my grandparents knew the Brandts well enough\n to pay them a visit, though. We must have looked\n queer driving up to a beautiful estate in Grandpa’s\n old farm wagon. I do remember that Grandma had\n some hooked rugs to deliver. But that still doesn’t\n explain what happened afterwards. When I woke\n up in the hammock I was alone in the garden. Horse,\n wagon, grandparents—all had disappeared.”\n“How could they?” asked Lois.", "actually scared by the time I reached the old tower.\n There wasn’t time to explore it. Just then I heard\n the rumble of my grandfather’s wagon and knew he\n was driving off without me.”\n“He was!” Judy’s friends both chorused in surprise,\n and Lois asked, “Why would he do a thing like\n that?”\n“I think now it was just to tease me. He did stop\n and wait for me after a while,” Judy remembered.\n “The rugs were gone. Grandma must have delivered\n them, but I didn’t ask where. If she made them for\n Mrs. Brandt they may still be there.”\n“I wouldn’t depend on it,” Lorraine said as they\n turned up the narrow road to the Brandt estate.", "“Anyway,” Lorraine began, “you had a chance to\n see how beautiful everything was before—”\nAgain she broke off as if there were something\n she wanted to tell but didn’t quite dare.\n“Before what?” questioned Judy.\n“Oh, nothing. Forget I said anything about it. You\n were telling us how you woke up in the hammock,\n but you never did explain how you got back home,”\n Lorraine reminded her.\n“Didn’t I?” asked Judy. “I’d forgotten a lot of it,\n but it’s beginning to come back now. I do remember\n driving home along this road. You see, I thought my\n grandparents had left me in the garden for a surprise\n and would return for me. I told you I was all alone.", "and said if they did find the fountain she thought\n she’d wish for one exactly like it.\n“Well, you know what your grandmother said\n about wishes, don’t you?” Lorraine asked. “If you\n let people know about them instead of muttering\n them to yourself most of them aren’t so impossible.”\n“Quite true,” Judy agreed. “I’ll let Peter know\n about this one. He’s my Santa Claus, and it will soon\n be Christmas. Maybe I should have worn the fur\n coat he gave me last year.”\n“Your reversible’s better in case it rains. It’s too\n warm for snow. We picked a perfect day for this\n trip,” Lois continued, guiding the car around curves\n as it climbed the steep hill beyond Dry Brook Hollow.", "“Maybe not, but we can pretend we think they do,\n can’t we?” Judy replied a little uncertainly.\nShe was beginning to suspect that Lorraine knew\n more about the Brandt estate than she was telling.\nLois kept on driving along the narrow, gravelly\n road. Soon there were more evergreens and a hedge\n of rhododendrons to be seen. They looked very\n green next to the leafless trees in the woods beyond.\n The sky was gray with white clouds being driven\n across it by the wind.\n“There’s the tower!” Lorraine exclaimed. “I can\n see it over to the left. It looks like something out of\n Grimm’s Fairy Tales, doesn’t it?”\n“It looks grim all right,” agreed Judy. “I wonder", "“Watch out!” Judy suddenly exclaimed. “There’s\n another car coming.”\nAs Lois swerved to avoid the oncoming car, Lorraine\n ducked her head. She kept herself hidden behind\n Judy until the car had passed. The man driving\n it was a stranger to Judy, but she would remember\n his hypnotic, dark eyes and swarthy complexion for a\n long time. The soft brown hat he was wearing covered\n most of his hair.\n“What’s the matter with you two?” asked Lois\n when the car had passed. “Aren’t you a little old for\n playing hide and seek?”\n“I wasn’t—playing. Let’s not go up there,” Lorraine\n begged. “I don’t think the Brandts live there\n any more.”", "was a precious memory. Every summer Dr. Bolton\n and his wife relived it. And every summer Judy\n went to stay with her grandmother Smeed, who\n scolded and fussed and tried to pretend she wasn’t\n glad to have her.\n“You here again?” she had greeted her that summer,\n and Judy hadn’t noticed her old eyes twinkling\n behind her glasses. “What do you propose to do with\n yourself this time?”\n“Read,” Judy had told her. “Mom and Dad say\n you have a whole stack of old magazines—”\n“In the attic. Go up and look them over if you\n can stand the heat.”\nJudy went, not to look over the old magazines so\n much as to escape to a place where she could have a", "But, apparently, Lois did not understand it that way.\n If she did, she pretended not to.\n“Where?” she asked. “To the fountain? I’d love\n to, wouldn’t you, Judy?”\n“I certainly would,” Judy replied enthusiastically.\n “Do you recognize it, too?”\n“I think so,” Lois answered after studying a little\n more closely the picture they had found. “It looks\n like the fountain on the Brandt estate.”\n“The department store Brandts?” Judy questioned.\n “Then my grandparents must have driven old Fanny\n all the way to Farringdon.”\n“Not quite all the way,” Lorraine objected. “The\n Brandts own that stretch of woods just before you", "And now they’re both dead and I can’t ask them.\n They left me a lot of unsolved mysteries along with\n this house. Maybe I’ll find the answers to some of\n them when I finish sorting Grandma’s things. They’re\n stored in one end of the attic.”\n“Another haunted attic? How thrilling!” exclaimed\n Lois. “Why don’t you have another ghost party and\n show up the spooks?”\n“I didn’t say the attic was haunted.”\nJudy was almost sorry she had mentioned it. She\n wasn’t in the mood for digging up old mysteries,\n but Lois and Lorraine insisted. It all began, she finally\n told them, the summer before they met. Horace\n had just started working on the paper. Judy remembered", "come into the city. You’ve passed it lots of times.”\n“Of course,” agreed Judy. She put the magazine\n back in its place under the eaves and turned eagerly\n to her friends. “I do remember a road turning off\n into the woods and going on uphill,” she told them.\n “I never thought it led to a house, though. There\n isn’t even a gate. Could that be the road my grandparents\n took?”\n“Why don’t we take it ourselves and find out?”\n Lois suggested.\nCHAPTER III\nA Strange Encounter\nLorraine was not too enthusiastic about the proposed\n trip to the Brandt estate. Finally she agreed to\n it under one condition. They were not to drive all", "thoughtfully, “I’m sure that was one of their wishes.\n Another could have been to keep the good old days,\n as Grandma used to call them. That one came true\n in a way. They did manage to keep a little of the\n past when they kept all these old things. That’s what\n I meant about turning back the clock.”\n“If wishes came true I’d like to turn it back a little\n myself,” Lorraine began. “It would be nice if things\n were the way they used to be when I trusted\n Arthur—”\n“Don’t you trust him now?” Judy asked.\nAfterwards she was sorry for the interruption. Lois\n and Judy both questioned Lorraine, but that was all\n she would say. Judy wondered, as they searched", "“A hammock?” Lois questioned. “Are you sure it\n wasn’t a flying carpet?”\n“No, it was a hammock all right,” Judy assured\n her, laughing. “It was hung between two trees in a\n beautiful garden all enclosed in rose trellises thick\n with roses. Did I tell you it was June?”\n“All the year around?”\nAgain Lois laughed. But Lorraine said abruptly,\n “Let’s not talk about rose gardens in June. It’s a long\n way from June to December.”\n“Do you mean a garden changes? I know,” Judy\n said, “but I think this one would be beautiful at any\n time of the year. There were rhododendrons, too,\n and I don’t know how many different kinds of evergreens.", "“But what is there to cry about?”\n“You found plenty to cry about back at your\n grandmother’s house,” the mysterious voice had reminded\n her. “Weren’t you crying on my picture up\n there in the attic?”\n“Then you—you\nare\nthe fountain!” Judy remembered\n exclaiming. “But a fountain doesn’t speak. It\n doesn’t have a voice.”\n“Wish wisely,” the voice from the fountain had\n said in a mysterious whisper.\nCHAPTER II\nIf Wishes Came True\n“Did you?” Lois interrupted the story to ask excitedly.\n “Oh, Judy! Don’t keep us in suspense any\n longer. What did you wish?”", "it distinctly. She had turned to see her grandmother\n and to hear her say in her usual abrupt fashion,\n “Enchanted fountain, indeed! If you let people\n know your wishes instead of muttering them to\n yourself, most of them aren’t so impossible.”\n“Were they?” asked Lois.\nShe and Lorraine had listened to this much of what\n Judy was telling them without interruption.\n“That’s the unsolved mystery,” Judy replied.\n “There weren’t any of them impossible.”\nAnd she went on to tell them how, the very next\n day, her grandparents had taken her to a fountain\n exactly like the one in the picture. It was in the center\n of a deep, circular pool with steps leading up to it.", "the fountain.\n“When I told Grandma about it she laughed and\n said I must have dreamed it. She said if wishes came\n true that easily she’d be living in a castle. But would\n she?” Judy wondered. “When I first remember this\n house she was still burning kerosene lamps like those\n you see on that high shelf by the window. I think\n she and Grandpa like the way they lived without\n any modern conveniences or anything.”\n“I think so, too,” Lois agreed, looking around the\n old attic with a shiver. “It is strange they both died\n the same winter, isn’t it?”\n“Maybe they wanted it that way. Maybe they\n wished neither of them would outlive the other. If\n they did wish in the fountain,” Judy went on more", "“in case we have to leave in a hurry. I don’t expect\n we’ll encounter any tigers, but we may be accused\n of trespassing.”\n“I’m sure we will be,” announced Judy as two\n dark-coated figures strode down the road toward\n them. “You drove right by a\n NO TRESPASSING\n sign,\n and this isn’t a welcoming committee coming to\n meet us!”", "“Patience,” Judy said with a smile. “I’m coming\n to that.”\nFirst, she told her friends, she had to think of a\n wise wish. There had been so much she wanted in\n those early days before the flood. Dora Scott had\n been her best friend in Roulsville, but she had moved\n away.\n“You see,” she explained, “I made the mistake of\n having just one best friend. There wasn’t anybody\n in Dry Brook Hollow. I remember thinking of how\n lonely I was and how I wished for a friend or a sister,\n and suddenly a tear splashed in the water. It made\n little ripples. I thought I had to wish quickly before\n they vanished, and so I began naming the things I", "think she would do?\n“You’ll have plenty to read,” her father had told\n her. “I bought you six new books in that mystery\n series you like. When they’re finished there are\n plenty of short stories around. Your grandmother\n never throws anything away. She has magazines she’s\n saved since your mother was a girl. If you ask for\n them she’ll let you have the whole stack. I know how\n you love to read.”\n“I do, Dad, but if the magazines are that old—”\nJudy had stopped. She had seen her father’s tired\n eyes and had realized that a busy doctor needed a\n vacation much more than a schoolgirl who had too\n little to do. He and Judy’s mother usually went to\n the beach hotel where they had honeymooned. It", "“You,” Lois said, “and all the mysteries you’ve\n solved. Maybe you were mistaken about a thing or\n two before the flood, but what about the haunted\n house you moved into? You were the one who\n tracked down the ghosts in the attic and the cellar\n and goodness knows where all. You’ve been chasing\n ghosts ever since I met you, and not one of them did\n you fail to explain in some sensible, logical fashion.”\n“Before I met you,” Judy said, thinking back,\n “there were plenty of them I couldn’t explain. There\n was one I used to call the spirit of the fountain, but\n what she was or how she spoke to me is more than\n I know. If my grandparents knew, they weren’t telling.", "“He’ll remember he’s a cat fast enough if there\n are any mice up there,” Lois said with a giggle.\nLeaving the table, they all started upstairs with\n the cat bounding ahead of them. In modernizing her\n grandparents’ house to suit her own and Peter’s\n tastes, Judy had seen to it that the old stair door was\n removed. But there was still a door closing off the\n narrower stairs that led to the attic. Blackberry\n reached it first and yowled for Judy to open it.\n“He can read my mind. He always knows where\n I’m going,” Judy said as the door creaked open and\n the cat shot through it. A moment later a weird rolling\n noise came from the floor above.\n“Come on. There’s nothing up here to be afraid" ], [ "thoughtfully, “I’m sure that was one of their wishes.\n Another could have been to keep the good old days,\n as Grandma used to call them. That one came true\n in a way. They did manage to keep a little of the\n past when they kept all these old things. That’s what\n I meant about turning back the clock.”\n“If wishes came true I’d like to turn it back a little\n myself,” Lorraine began. “It would be nice if things\n were the way they used to be when I trusted\n Arthur—”\n“Don’t you trust him now?” Judy asked.\nAfterwards she was sorry for the interruption. Lois\n and Judy both questioned Lorraine, but that was all\n she would say. Judy wondered, as they searched", "“Honey and I always do,” she replied “but then\n it was different. I didn’t know I would marry Peter\n or that he would become a G-man, and he didn’t\n know he had a sister. It is strange, isn’t it? But the\n strangest thing of all was the fountain itself.”\n“Why?” asked Lorraine. “Do you still think it was\n enchanted?”\nLois laughed at this, but Judy was serious as she\n answered, “I was still little girl enough to think so\n at the time. I wandered around, growing very\n drowsy. Then I found a hammock and climbed into\n it. I must have gone to sleep, because I remember\n waking up and wondering if the voice in the fountain\n had been a dream.”", "springs at me,” Judy explained.\n“You seem to think there’s danger in this expedition\n of ours, don’t you?” asked Lorraine.\n“I don’t know what to think. You’re the one who\n seems to know the answers, but you’re not telling.\n Hiding your face back there gave you away. You’ve\n seen that character who drove down this road and,\n for some reason, you were afraid he would see you.\n Why, Lorraine? Why didn’t you want to be recognized?”\nLorraine hesitated a moment and then replied\n evasively, “People don’t generally enter private\n estates without an invitation. That’s all.”\n“I’d better turn the car around,” Lois decided,", "“Watch out!” Judy suddenly exclaimed. “There’s\n another car coming.”\nAs Lois swerved to avoid the oncoming car, Lorraine\n ducked her head. She kept herself hidden behind\n Judy until the car had passed. The man driving\n it was a stranger to Judy, but she would remember\n his hypnotic, dark eyes and swarthy complexion for a\n long time. The soft brown hat he was wearing covered\n most of his hair.\n“What’s the matter with you two?” asked Lois\n when the car had passed. “Aren’t you a little old for\n playing hide and seek?”\n“I wasn’t—playing. Let’s not go up there,” Lorraine\n begged. “I don’t think the Brandts live there\n any more.”", "now, I think you ought to let us know. Otherwise,\n I’m afraid we won’t be very welcome.”\n“I don’t think they’ll welcome us, anyway. I do\n know who they are,” Lorraine admitted. “You remember\n Roger Banning from school, don’t you?\n I’ve seen him around here. His family must have\n acquired sudden wealth, or else he’s just working on\n the estate.”\n“Then you’ve been here lately? Why didn’t you\n tell me?” asked Lois. “We always used to go places\n together.”\n“It wasn’t important,” Lorraine replied evasively.\n “I was just out for a drive.”\n“You plutocrats!” laughed Judy. “Each with a", "“Maybe not, but we can pretend we think they do,\n can’t we?” Judy replied a little uncertainly.\nShe was beginning to suspect that Lorraine knew\n more about the Brandt estate than she was telling.\nLois kept on driving along the narrow, gravelly\n road. Soon there were more evergreens and a hedge\n of rhododendrons to be seen. They looked very\n green next to the leafless trees in the woods beyond.\n The sky was gray with white clouds being driven\n across it by the wind.\n“There’s the tower!” Lorraine exclaimed. “I can\n see it over to the left. It looks like something out of\n Grimm’s Fairy Tales, doesn’t it?”\n“It looks grim all right,” agreed Judy. “I wonder", "not me. He was the hero without even meaning to\n be. He was the one who rode through town and\n warned people that the flood was coming. I was off\n chasing a shadow.”\n“A vanishing shadow,” Lois said with a sigh.\n “What you did wasn’t easy, Judy.”\n“It didn’t need to be as hard as it was,” Judy confessed.\n “I know now that keeping that promise not\n to talk about the dam was a great big mistake and\n could have cost lives. I should have told Arthur.”\n“Please,” Lorraine said, a pained expression clouding\n her pretty face, “let’s not talk about him now.”\n“Very well,” Judy agreed. “What shall we talk\n about?”", "“Wasn’t there anything more you wanted?” Lois\n asked.\n“Of course,” replied Judy. “There were lots more\n things. I wanted to go places, of course, and keep\n pets, and have a nice home, and—”\n“And your wishes all came true!”\n“Every one of them,” Judy agreed, “even the one\n about the sister. You see, it wasn’t a baby sister I\n wanted. It was a sister near my own age. That\n seemed impossible at the time, but the future did\n hold a sister for me.”\n“It held one for me, too,” Lois said, squeezing\n Lorraine’s hand under the table. “Don’t you think\n sisters should tell each other their problems, Judy?”", "I explored the garden all around the fountain.”\n“And then what happened?” Lorraine urged her.\n“Yes, yes. Go on,” entreated Lois. “I didn’t dream\n you’d kept anything that exciting a secret. Why didn’t\n you try to solve the mystery?”\n“I think I would have tried,” Judy admitted, “if\n I had been older or more experienced. I really should\n have investigated it more thoroughly and learned the\n secret of the fountain. But after the ripples went\n away it didn’t speak to me any more, and I didn’t\n really think it had heard my wishes. I was still wishing\n for a friend when I met you, Lois. It did seem\n impossible for us to be friends at first, didn’t it? Lorraine\n was your friend.”", "of,” Judy urged her friends.\n“Maybe not, but I’m beginning to get the shivers,”\n confessed Lois as she followed Judy to the sewing\n room at the top of the last flight of stairs.\n“So am I,” Lorraine admitted. “I’m not superstitious\n about black cats, but they are creepy. Does\n Blackberry have to roll spools across the floor?”\n“Now he thinks he’s a kitten,” laughed Judy.\n Pausing at still another door that led to the darker\n part of the attic, she turned and said mysteriously,\n “Up here we can all turn back the clock. Does anybody\n care to explore the past?”\nThe exploration began enthusiastically with Judy\n relating still more of what she remembered about", "But, apparently, Lois did not understand it that way.\n If she did, she pretended not to.\n“Where?” she asked. “To the fountain? I’d love\n to, wouldn’t you, Judy?”\n“I certainly would,” Judy replied enthusiastically.\n “Do you recognize it, too?”\n“I think so,” Lois answered after studying a little\n more closely the picture they had found. “It looks\n like the fountain on the Brandt estate.”\n“The department store Brandts?” Judy questioned.\n “Then my grandparents must have driven old Fanny\n all the way to Farringdon.”\n“Not quite all the way,” Lorraine objected. “The\n Brandts own that stretch of woods just before you", "the way to the house which, she said, was just over\n the hilltop. They were to park the car where no\n one would see it and follow the path to the fountain.\n“But suppose we can’t find the path?” asked Judy.\n“You’ll remember it, won’t you?”\nJudy thought she would, but she wasn’t too sure.\n She and Lois both argued that it would be better to\n inquire at the house. Lois knew Helen Brandt slightly.\n“She’d be glad to show us around. This way it\n looks as if we’re planning a crime,” Lois said as they\n started off in the blue car she was driving.\nIt was a neat little car, not too conspicuous, and\n easy to park in out-of-the-way places. Judy laughed", "it distinctly. She had turned to see her grandmother\n and to hear her say in her usual abrupt fashion,\n “Enchanted fountain, indeed! If you let people\n know your wishes instead of muttering them to\n yourself, most of them aren’t so impossible.”\n“Were they?” asked Lois.\nShe and Lorraine had listened to this much of what\n Judy was telling them without interruption.\n“That’s the unsolved mystery,” Judy replied.\n “There weren’t any of them impossible.”\nAnd she went on to tell them how, the very next\n day, her grandparents had taken her to a fountain\n exactly like the one in the picture. It was in the center\n of a deep, circular pool with steps leading up to it.", "And now they’re both dead and I can’t ask them.\n They left me a lot of unsolved mysteries along with\n this house. Maybe I’ll find the answers to some of\n them when I finish sorting Grandma’s things. They’re\n stored in one end of the attic.”\n“Another haunted attic? How thrilling!” exclaimed\n Lois. “Why don’t you have another ghost party and\n show up the spooks?”\n“I didn’t say the attic was haunted.”\nJudy was almost sorry she had mentioned it. She\n wasn’t in the mood for digging up old mysteries,\n but Lois and Lorraine insisted. It all began, she finally\n told them, the summer before they met. Horace\n had just started working on the paper. Judy remembered", "through the old magazines, what was wrong. Lorraine\n was of a jealous disposition. Was the green-eyed\n monster coming between her and her handsome husband,\n Arthur Farringdon-Pett? Until now they had\n seemed blissfully happy. But there was no happiness\n in Lorraine’s face as she gazed at a picture of one of\n the fountains and then said in a tight little voice, “It\n is. It’s the very same one.”\n“But that’s the picture I’ve been searching for!”\n Judy said eagerly. “Do you know where it is?”\n“I can’t be sure. But if it ever was enchanted, I’m\n sure it isn’t now. Let’s go,” Lorraine said suddenly\n to Lois. Judy knew she was suggesting a fast trip home.", "and said if they did find the fountain she thought\n she’d wish for one exactly like it.\n“Well, you know what your grandmother said\n about wishes, don’t you?” Lorraine asked. “If you\n let people know about them instead of muttering\n them to yourself most of them aren’t so impossible.”\n“Quite true,” Judy agreed. “I’ll let Peter know\n about this one. He’s my Santa Claus, and it will soon\n be Christmas. Maybe I should have worn the fur\n coat he gave me last year.”\n“Your reversible’s better in case it rains. It’s too\n warm for snow. We picked a perfect day for this\n trip,” Lois continued, guiding the car around curves\n as it climbed the steep hill beyond Dry Brook Hollow.", "“Anyway,” Lorraine began, “you had a chance to\n see how beautiful everything was before—”\nAgain she broke off as if there were something\n she wanted to tell but didn’t quite dare.\n“Before what?” questioned Judy.\n“Oh, nothing. Forget I said anything about it. You\n were telling us how you woke up in the hammock,\n but you never did explain how you got back home,”\n Lorraine reminded her.\n“Didn’t I?” asked Judy. “I’d forgotten a lot of it,\n but it’s beginning to come back now. I do remember\n driving home along this road. You see, I thought my\n grandparents had left me in the garden for a surprise\n and would return for me. I told you I was all alone.", "“You,” Lois said, “and all the mysteries you’ve\n solved. Maybe you were mistaken about a thing or\n two before the flood, but what about the haunted\n house you moved into? You were the one who\n tracked down the ghosts in the attic and the cellar\n and goodness knows where all. You’ve been chasing\n ghosts ever since I met you, and not one of them did\n you fail to explain in some sensible, logical fashion.”\n“Before I met you,” Judy said, thinking back,\n “there were plenty of them I couldn’t explain. There\n was one I used to call the spirit of the fountain, but\n what she was or how she spoke to me is more than\n I know. If my grandparents knew, they weren’t telling.", "used to tease her and call her carrot-top until one day\n she yelled back at him, “Carrot-tops are green and so\n are you!”\nPeter was to win Judy’s heart when he gave her a\n kitten and suggested the name Blackberry for him.\n The kitten was now a dignified family cat. But the\n summer Judy found the picture of a fountain and\n spilled tears on it she had no kitten. She had nothing,\n she confessed, not even a friend. It had helped to\n pretend the fountain in the picture was filled with\n all the tears lonely girls like herself had ever cried.\n“But that would make it enchanted!” she had suddenly\n exclaimed. “If I could find it I’d wish—”\nA step had sounded on the stairs. Judy remembered", "“Patience,” Judy said with a smile. “I’m coming\n to that.”\nFirst, she told her friends, she had to think of a\n wise wish. There had been so much she wanted in\n those early days before the flood. Dora Scott had\n been her best friend in Roulsville, but she had moved\n away.\n“You see,” she explained, “I made the mistake of\n having just one best friend. There wasn’t anybody\n in Dry Brook Hollow. I remember thinking of how\n lonely I was and how I wished for a friend or a sister,\n and suddenly a tear splashed in the water. It made\n little ripples. I thought I had to wish quickly before\n they vanished, and so I began naming the things I" ], [ "“Watch out!” Judy suddenly exclaimed. “There’s\n another car coming.”\nAs Lois swerved to avoid the oncoming car, Lorraine\n ducked her head. She kept herself hidden behind\n Judy until the car had passed. The man driving\n it was a stranger to Judy, but she would remember\n his hypnotic, dark eyes and swarthy complexion for a\n long time. The soft brown hat he was wearing covered\n most of his hair.\n“What’s the matter with you two?” asked Lois\n when the car had passed. “Aren’t you a little old for\n playing hide and seek?”\n“I wasn’t—playing. Let’s not go up there,” Lorraine\n begged. “I don’t think the Brandts live there\n any more.”", "the way to the house which, she said, was just over\n the hilltop. They were to park the car where no\n one would see it and follow the path to the fountain.\n“But suppose we can’t find the path?” asked Judy.\n“You’ll remember it, won’t you?”\nJudy thought she would, but she wasn’t too sure.\n She and Lois both argued that it would be better to\n inquire at the house. Lois knew Helen Brandt slightly.\n“She’d be glad to show us around. This way it\n looks as if we’re planning a crime,” Lois said as they\n started off in the blue car she was driving.\nIt was a neat little car, not too conspicuous, and\n easy to park in out-of-the-way places. Judy laughed", "springs at me,” Judy explained.\n“You seem to think there’s danger in this expedition\n of ours, don’t you?” asked Lorraine.\n“I don’t know what to think. You’re the one who\n seems to know the answers, but you’re not telling.\n Hiding your face back there gave you away. You’ve\n seen that character who drove down this road and,\n for some reason, you were afraid he would see you.\n Why, Lorraine? Why didn’t you want to be recognized?”\nLorraine hesitated a moment and then replied\n evasively, “People don’t generally enter private\n estates without an invitation. That’s all.”\n“I’d better turn the car around,” Lois decided,", "But, apparently, Lois did not understand it that way.\n If she did, she pretended not to.\n“Where?” she asked. “To the fountain? I’d love\n to, wouldn’t you, Judy?”\n“I certainly would,” Judy replied enthusiastically.\n “Do you recognize it, too?”\n“I think so,” Lois answered after studying a little\n more closely the picture they had found. “It looks\n like the fountain on the Brandt estate.”\n“The department store Brandts?” Judy questioned.\n “Then my grandparents must have driven old Fanny\n all the way to Farringdon.”\n“Not quite all the way,” Lorraine objected. “The\n Brandts own that stretch of woods just before you", "“Honey and I always do,” she replied “but then\n it was different. I didn’t know I would marry Peter\n or that he would become a G-man, and he didn’t\n know he had a sister. It is strange, isn’t it? But the\n strangest thing of all was the fountain itself.”\n“Why?” asked Lorraine. “Do you still think it was\n enchanted?”\nLois laughed at this, but Judy was serious as she\n answered, “I was still little girl enough to think so\n at the time. I wandered around, growing very\n drowsy. Then I found a hammock and climbed into\n it. I must have gone to sleep, because I remember\n waking up and wondering if the voice in the fountain\n had been a dream.”", "and said if they did find the fountain she thought\n she’d wish for one exactly like it.\n“Well, you know what your grandmother said\n about wishes, don’t you?” Lorraine asked. “If you\n let people know about them instead of muttering\n them to yourself most of them aren’t so impossible.”\n“Quite true,” Judy agreed. “I’ll let Peter know\n about this one. He’s my Santa Claus, and it will soon\n be Christmas. Maybe I should have worn the fur\n coat he gave me last year.”\n“Your reversible’s better in case it rains. It’s too\n warm for snow. We picked a perfect day for this\n trip,” Lois continued, guiding the car around curves\n as it climbed the steep hill beyond Dry Brook Hollow.", "through the old magazines, what was wrong. Lorraine\n was of a jealous disposition. Was the green-eyed\n monster coming between her and her handsome husband,\n Arthur Farringdon-Pett? Until now they had\n seemed blissfully happy. But there was no happiness\n in Lorraine’s face as she gazed at a picture of one of\n the fountains and then said in a tight little voice, “It\n is. It’s the very same one.”\n“But that’s the picture I’ve been searching for!”\n Judy said eagerly. “Do you know where it is?”\n“I can’t be sure. But if it ever was enchanted, I’m\n sure it isn’t now. Let’s go,” Lorraine said suddenly\n to Lois. Judy knew she was suggesting a fast trip home.", "“I did make trouble for you,” Lorraine remembered.\n “It was all because of my foolish jealousy.”\n“It was nothing compared to the trouble caused by\n the Roulsville flood,” declared Judy. “After that\n things started happening so fast that I completely\n forgot about the fountain. Honestly, Lois, I don’t\n believe I thought about it again until after we moved\n to Farringdon and I walked up to your door and\n saw the fountain on your lawn.”\n“The Farringdon-Pett puddle, I always called it,”\n Lois said with a giggle. “I’ve seen lots nicer fountains.”\n“You have?” asked Judy. “Then maybe you’ve\n seen the one I’ve been telling you about. I think the", "it distinctly. She had turned to see her grandmother\n and to hear her say in her usual abrupt fashion,\n “Enchanted fountain, indeed! If you let people\n know your wishes instead of muttering them to\n yourself, most of them aren’t so impossible.”\n“Were they?” asked Lois.\nShe and Lorraine had listened to this much of what\n Judy was telling them without interruption.\n“That’s the unsolved mystery,” Judy replied.\n “There weren’t any of them impossible.”\nAnd she went on to tell them how, the very next\n day, her grandparents had taken her to a fountain\n exactly like the one in the picture. It was in the center\n of a deep, circular pool with steps leading up to it.", "“Anyway,” Lorraine began, “you had a chance to\n see how beautiful everything was before—”\nAgain she broke off as if there were something\n she wanted to tell but didn’t quite dare.\n“Before what?” questioned Judy.\n“Oh, nothing. Forget I said anything about it. You\n were telling us how you woke up in the hammock,\n but you never did explain how you got back home,”\n Lorraine reminded her.\n“Didn’t I?” asked Judy. “I’d forgotten a lot of it,\n but it’s beginning to come back now. I do remember\n driving home along this road. You see, I thought my\n grandparents had left me in the garden for a surprise\n and would return for me. I told you I was all alone.", "now, I think you ought to let us know. Otherwise,\n I’m afraid we won’t be very welcome.”\n“I don’t think they’ll welcome us, anyway. I do\n know who they are,” Lorraine admitted. “You remember\n Roger Banning from school, don’t you?\n I’ve seen him around here. His family must have\n acquired sudden wealth, or else he’s just working on\n the estate.”\n“Then you’ve been here lately? Why didn’t you\n tell me?” asked Lois. “We always used to go places\n together.”\n“It wasn’t important,” Lorraine replied evasively.\n “I was just out for a drive.”\n“You plutocrats!” laughed Judy. “Each with a", "“Maybe not, but we can pretend we think they do,\n can’t we?” Judy replied a little uncertainly.\nShe was beginning to suspect that Lorraine knew\n more about the Brandt estate than she was telling.\nLois kept on driving along the narrow, gravelly\n road. Soon there were more evergreens and a hedge\n of rhododendrons to be seen. They looked very\n green next to the leafless trees in the woods beyond.\n The sky was gray with white clouds being driven\n across it by the wind.\n“There’s the tower!” Lorraine exclaimed. “I can\n see it over to the left. It looks like something out of\n Grimm’s Fairy Tales, doesn’t it?”\n“It looks grim all right,” agreed Judy. “I wonder", "I explored the garden all around the fountain.”\n“And then what happened?” Lorraine urged her.\n“Yes, yes. Go on,” entreated Lois. “I didn’t dream\n you’d kept anything that exciting a secret. Why didn’t\n you try to solve the mystery?”\n“I think I would have tried,” Judy admitted, “if\n I had been older or more experienced. I really should\n have investigated it more thoroughly and learned the\n secret of the fountain. But after the ripples went\n away it didn’t speak to me any more, and I didn’t\n really think it had heard my wishes. I was still wishing\n for a friend when I met you, Lois. It did seem\n impossible for us to be friends at first, didn’t it? Lorraine\n was your friend.”", "his father’s desk and forged the names of a lot of important\n business people. I think he forged some legal\n documents, too. Anyway, he went to the Federal Penitentiary.\n It was all in the papers,” Lorraine told her.\nNow Judy did remember. It was something she\n would have preferred to forget. She liked to think\n she was a good judge of character, and she had taken\n Dick Hartwell for a quiet, refined boy who would\n never stoop to crime.\n“I don’t see what all this has to do with the fountain,”\n Lois said impatiently. “Are we going to look\n for it, or aren’t we?”\n“Of course we are. That’s what we came for. I\n just like to know what a tiger looks like before he", "The Haunted Fountain\nCHAPTER I\nAn Unsolved Mystery\n“Tell Judy about it,” begged Lois. “Please, Lorraine,\n it can’t be as bad as it appears. There isn’t\n anything that Judy can’t solve.”\nLorraine tilted her head disdainfully. “We’re sisters\n now. We’re both Farringdon-Petts and should be\n loyal to each other. But you always did take Judy’s\n part. She was the one who nearly spoiled our double\n wedding trying to solve a mystery. I don’t believe\n she’d understand—understand any better than I do.\n Everyone has problems, and I’m sure Judy is no\n exception.”", "the fountain.\n“When I told Grandma about it she laughed and\n said I must have dreamed it. She said if wishes came\n true that easily she’d be living in a castle. But would\n she?” Judy wondered. “When I first remember this\n house she was still burning kerosene lamps like those\n you see on that high shelf by the window. I think\n she and Grandpa like the way they lived without\n any modern conveniences or anything.”\n“I think so, too,” Lois agreed, looking around the\n old attic with a shiver. “It is strange they both died\n the same winter, isn’t it?”\n“Maybe they wanted it that way. Maybe they\n wished neither of them would outlive the other. If\n they did wish in the fountain,” Judy went on more", "what it is.”\n“I suppose it’s nothing but an old water tower. It\n would be fun to explore it, though,” Lois said. “But\n if there are new people living here they’ll never give\n us permission.”\n“We might explore it without permission,” Judy\n suggested daringly. “Come on!” she urged her friends\n as Lois parked the car in a cleared place beside the\n road. “Who’s going to stop us? And who wants to\n explore a gloomy old tower, anyway? Let’s look for\n the fountain.”\n“Do you think we should?” Lorraine asked. “It\n won’t be enchanted. I told you—”\n“You told us very little,” Lois reminded her. “If\n you know anything about the people who live here", "thoughtfully, “I’m sure that was one of their wishes.\n Another could have been to keep the good old days,\n as Grandma used to call them. That one came true\n in a way. They did manage to keep a little of the\n past when they kept all these old things. That’s what\n I meant about turning back the clock.”\n“If wishes came true I’d like to turn it back a little\n myself,” Lorraine began. “It would be nice if things\n were the way they used to be when I trusted\n Arthur—”\n“Don’t you trust him now?” Judy asked.\nAfterwards she was sorry for the interruption. Lois\n and Judy both questioned Lorraine, but that was all\n she would say. Judy wondered, as they searched", "Beside the steps were smaller fountains with the\n water spurting from the mouths of stone lions. Judy\n had stared at them a moment and then climbed the\n steps to the pool.\n“Am I dreaming?” she remembered saying aloud.\n “Is this beautiful fountain real?”\nA voice had answered, although she could see no\n one.\n“Make your wishes, Judy. Wish wisely. If you\n shed a tear in the fountain your wishes will surely\n come true.”\n“A tear?” Judy had asked. “How can I shed a\n tear when I’m happy? This is a wonderful place.”\n“Shed a tear in the fountain and your wishes will\n surely come true,” the voice had repeated.", "used to tease her and call her carrot-top until one day\n she yelled back at him, “Carrot-tops are green and so\n are you!”\nPeter was to win Judy’s heart when he gave her a\n kitten and suggested the name Blackberry for him.\n The kitten was now a dignified family cat. But the\n summer Judy found the picture of a fountain and\n spilled tears on it she had no kitten. She had nothing,\n she confessed, not even a friend. It had helped to\n pretend the fountain in the picture was filled with\n all the tears lonely girls like herself had ever cried.\n“But that would make it enchanted!” she had suddenly\n exclaimed. “If I could find it I’d wish—”\nA step had sounded on the stairs. Judy remembered" ], [ "springs at me,” Judy explained.\n“You seem to think there’s danger in this expedition\n of ours, don’t you?” asked Lorraine.\n“I don’t know what to think. You’re the one who\n seems to know the answers, but you’re not telling.\n Hiding your face back there gave you away. You’ve\n seen that character who drove down this road and,\n for some reason, you were afraid he would see you.\n Why, Lorraine? Why didn’t you want to be recognized?”\nLorraine hesitated a moment and then replied\n evasively, “People don’t generally enter private\n estates without an invitation. That’s all.”\n“I’d better turn the car around,” Lois decided,", "“Watch out!” Judy suddenly exclaimed. “There’s\n another car coming.”\nAs Lois swerved to avoid the oncoming car, Lorraine\n ducked her head. She kept herself hidden behind\n Judy until the car had passed. The man driving\n it was a stranger to Judy, but she would remember\n his hypnotic, dark eyes and swarthy complexion for a\n long time. The soft brown hat he was wearing covered\n most of his hair.\n“What’s the matter with you two?” asked Lois\n when the car had passed. “Aren’t you a little old for\n playing hide and seek?”\n“I wasn’t—playing. Let’s not go up there,” Lorraine\n begged. “I don’t think the Brandts live there\n any more.”", "the way to the house which, she said, was just over\n the hilltop. They were to park the car where no\n one would see it and follow the path to the fountain.\n“But suppose we can’t find the path?” asked Judy.\n“You’ll remember it, won’t you?”\nJudy thought she would, but she wasn’t too sure.\n She and Lois both argued that it would be better to\n inquire at the house. Lois knew Helen Brandt slightly.\n“She’d be glad to show us around. This way it\n looks as if we’re planning a crime,” Lois said as they\n started off in the blue car she was driving.\nIt was a neat little car, not too conspicuous, and\n easy to park in out-of-the-way places. Judy laughed", "But, apparently, Lois did not understand it that way.\n If she did, she pretended not to.\n“Where?” she asked. “To the fountain? I’d love\n to, wouldn’t you, Judy?”\n“I certainly would,” Judy replied enthusiastically.\n “Do you recognize it, too?”\n“I think so,” Lois answered after studying a little\n more closely the picture they had found. “It looks\n like the fountain on the Brandt estate.”\n“The department store Brandts?” Judy questioned.\n “Then my grandparents must have driven old Fanny\n all the way to Farringdon.”\n“Not quite all the way,” Lorraine objected. “The\n Brandts own that stretch of woods just before you", "and said if they did find the fountain she thought\n she’d wish for one exactly like it.\n“Well, you know what your grandmother said\n about wishes, don’t you?” Lorraine asked. “If you\n let people know about them instead of muttering\n them to yourself most of them aren’t so impossible.”\n“Quite true,” Judy agreed. “I’ll let Peter know\n about this one. He’s my Santa Claus, and it will soon\n be Christmas. Maybe I should have worn the fur\n coat he gave me last year.”\n“Your reversible’s better in case it rains. It’s too\n warm for snow. We picked a perfect day for this\n trip,” Lois continued, guiding the car around curves\n as it climbed the steep hill beyond Dry Brook Hollow.", "“He’ll remember he’s a cat fast enough if there\n are any mice up there,” Lois said with a giggle.\nLeaving the table, they all started upstairs with\n the cat bounding ahead of them. In modernizing her\n grandparents’ house to suit her own and Peter’s\n tastes, Judy had seen to it that the old stair door was\n removed. But there was still a door closing off the\n narrower stairs that led to the attic. Blackberry\n reached it first and yowled for Judy to open it.\n“He can read my mind. He always knows where\n I’m going,” Judy said as the door creaked open and\n the cat shot through it. A moment later a weird rolling\n noise came from the floor above.\n“Come on. There’s nothing up here to be afraid", "not me. He was the hero without even meaning to\n be. He was the one who rode through town and\n warned people that the flood was coming. I was off\n chasing a shadow.”\n“A vanishing shadow,” Lois said with a sigh.\n “What you did wasn’t easy, Judy.”\n“It didn’t need to be as hard as it was,” Judy confessed.\n “I know now that keeping that promise not\n to talk about the dam was a great big mistake and\n could have cost lives. I should have told Arthur.”\n“Please,” Lorraine said, a pained expression clouding\n her pretty face, “let’s not talk about him now.”\n“Very well,” Judy agreed. “What shall we talk\n about?”", "thoughtfully, “I’m sure that was one of their wishes.\n Another could have been to keep the good old days,\n as Grandma used to call them. That one came true\n in a way. They did manage to keep a little of the\n past when they kept all these old things. That’s what\n I meant about turning back the clock.”\n“If wishes came true I’d like to turn it back a little\n myself,” Lorraine began. “It would be nice if things\n were the way they used to be when I trusted\n Arthur—”\n“Don’t you trust him now?” Judy asked.\nAfterwards she was sorry for the interruption. Lois\n and Judy both questioned Lorraine, but that was all\n she would say. Judy wondered, as they searched", "“Honey and I always do,” she replied “but then\n it was different. I didn’t know I would marry Peter\n or that he would become a G-man, and he didn’t\n know he had a sister. It is strange, isn’t it? But the\n strangest thing of all was the fountain itself.”\n“Why?” asked Lorraine. “Do you still think it was\n enchanted?”\nLois laughed at this, but Judy was serious as she\n answered, “I was still little girl enough to think so\n at the time. I wandered around, growing very\n drowsy. Then I found a hammock and climbed into\n it. I must have gone to sleep, because I remember\n waking up and wondering if the voice in the fountain\n had been a dream.”", "car of your own. You’re not interested in Roger\n Banning, are you, Lois? I’m sure you can do better\n than that. I did know him slightly, but not from\n school. The boys and girls were separated and went\n to different high schools by the time we moved to\n Farringdon. I remember his pal, Dick Hartwell, a\n lot better. He was in our young people’s group at\n church.”\n“Sh!” Lois cautioned her. “Nice people no longer\n mention Dick Hartwell’s name. He’s doing time.”\n“For what?” asked Judy.\nLike Peter, her FBI husband, she preferred facts\n to gossip.\n“Forgery, I guess. He stole some checkbooks from", "“Anyway,” Lorraine began, “you had a chance to\n see how beautiful everything was before—”\nAgain she broke off as if there were something\n she wanted to tell but didn’t quite dare.\n“Before what?” questioned Judy.\n“Oh, nothing. Forget I said anything about it. You\n were telling us how you woke up in the hammock,\n but you never did explain how you got back home,”\n Lorraine reminded her.\n“Didn’t I?” asked Judy. “I’d forgotten a lot of it,\n but it’s beginning to come back now. I do remember\n driving home along this road. You see, I thought my\n grandparents had left me in the garden for a surprise\n and would return for me. I told you I was all alone.", "“Maybe not, but we can pretend we think they do,\n can’t we?” Judy replied a little uncertainly.\nShe was beginning to suspect that Lorraine knew\n more about the Brandt estate than she was telling.\nLois kept on driving along the narrow, gravelly\n road. Soon there were more evergreens and a hedge\n of rhododendrons to be seen. They looked very\n green next to the leafless trees in the woods beyond.\n The sky was gray with white clouds being driven\n across it by the wind.\n“There’s the tower!” Lorraine exclaimed. “I can\n see it over to the left. It looks like something out of\n Grimm’s Fairy Tales, doesn’t it?”\n“It looks grim all right,” agreed Judy. “I wonder", "“A hammock?” Lois questioned. “Are you sure it\n wasn’t a flying carpet?”\n“No, it was a hammock all right,” Judy assured\n her, laughing. “It was hung between two trees in a\n beautiful garden all enclosed in rose trellises thick\n with roses. Did I tell you it was June?”\n“All the year around?”\nAgain Lois laughed. But Lorraine said abruptly,\n “Let’s not talk about rose gardens in June. It’s a long\n way from June to December.”\n“Do you mean a garden changes? I know,” Judy\n said, “but I think this one would be beautiful at any\n time of the year. There were rhododendrons, too,\n and I don’t know how many different kinds of evergreens.", "of,” Judy urged her friends.\n“Maybe not, but I’m beginning to get the shivers,”\n confessed Lois as she followed Judy to the sewing\n room at the top of the last flight of stairs.\n“So am I,” Lorraine admitted. “I’m not superstitious\n about black cats, but they are creepy. Does\n Blackberry have to roll spools across the floor?”\n“Now he thinks he’s a kitten,” laughed Judy.\n Pausing at still another door that led to the darker\n part of the attic, she turned and said mysteriously,\n “Up here we can all turn back the clock. Does anybody\n care to explore the past?”\nThe exploration began enthusiastically with Judy\n relating still more of what she remembered about", "through the old magazines, what was wrong. Lorraine\n was of a jealous disposition. Was the green-eyed\n monster coming between her and her handsome husband,\n Arthur Farringdon-Pett? Until now they had\n seemed blissfully happy. But there was no happiness\n in Lorraine’s face as she gazed at a picture of one of\n the fountains and then said in a tight little voice, “It\n is. It’s the very same one.”\n“But that’s the picture I’ve been searching for!”\n Judy said eagerly. “Do you know where it is?”\n“I can’t be sure. But if it ever was enchanted, I’m\n sure it isn’t now. Let’s go,” Lorraine said suddenly\n to Lois. Judy knew she was suggesting a fast trip home.", "now, I think you ought to let us know. Otherwise,\n I’m afraid we won’t be very welcome.”\n“I don’t think they’ll welcome us, anyway. I do\n know who they are,” Lorraine admitted. “You remember\n Roger Banning from school, don’t you?\n I’ve seen him around here. His family must have\n acquired sudden wealth, or else he’s just working on\n the estate.”\n“Then you’ve been here lately? Why didn’t you\n tell me?” asked Lois. “We always used to go places\n together.”\n“It wasn’t important,” Lorraine replied evasively.\n “I was just out for a drive.”\n“You plutocrats!” laughed Judy. “Each with a", "it distinctly. She had turned to see her grandmother\n and to hear her say in her usual abrupt fashion,\n “Enchanted fountain, indeed! If you let people\n know your wishes instead of muttering them to\n yourself, most of them aren’t so impossible.”\n“Were they?” asked Lois.\nShe and Lorraine had listened to this much of what\n Judy was telling them without interruption.\n“That’s the unsolved mystery,” Judy replied.\n “There weren’t any of them impossible.”\nAnd she went on to tell them how, the very next\n day, her grandparents had taken her to a fountain\n exactly like the one in the picture. It was in the center\n of a deep, circular pool with steps leading up to it.", "come into the city. You’ve passed it lots of times.”\n“Of course,” agreed Judy. She put the magazine\n back in its place under the eaves and turned eagerly\n to her friends. “I do remember a road turning off\n into the woods and going on uphill,” she told them.\n “I never thought it led to a house, though. There\n isn’t even a gate. Could that be the road my grandparents\n took?”\n“Why don’t we take it ourselves and find out?”\n Lois suggested.\nCHAPTER III\nA Strange Encounter\nLorraine was not too enthusiastic about the proposed\n trip to the Brandt estate. Finally she agreed to\n it under one condition. They were not to drive all", "“I did make trouble for you,” Lorraine remembered.\n “It was all because of my foolish jealousy.”\n“It was nothing compared to the trouble caused by\n the Roulsville flood,” declared Judy. “After that\n things started happening so fast that I completely\n forgot about the fountain. Honestly, Lois, I don’t\n believe I thought about it again until after we moved\n to Farringdon and I walked up to your door and\n saw the fountain on your lawn.”\n“The Farringdon-Pett puddle, I always called it,”\n Lois said with a giggle. “I’ve seen lots nicer fountains.”\n“You have?” asked Judy. “Then maybe you’ve\n seen the one I’ve been telling you about. I think the", "“You,” Lois said, “and all the mysteries you’ve\n solved. Maybe you were mistaken about a thing or\n two before the flood, but what about the haunted\n house you moved into? You were the one who\n tracked down the ghosts in the attic and the cellar\n and goodness knows where all. You’ve been chasing\n ghosts ever since I met you, and not one of them did\n you fail to explain in some sensible, logical fashion.”\n“Before I met you,” Judy said, thinking back,\n “there were plenty of them I couldn’t explain. There\n was one I used to call the spirit of the fountain, but\n what she was or how she spoke to me is more than\n I know. If my grandparents knew, they weren’t telling." ] ]
train	50668	[ "How did Jery feel when he first encountered the security men?", "How did Baxter feel when he first met Jery?", "What does Jery do best?", "Why is the Brain so effective?", "Why were the Space Scouts sent on their mission?", "How did Jery act differently with Anders?", "How did Jery feel when going to Baxter's office the second time?", "What will happen next to Jery?" ]	[ [ "confused and nervous", "frustrated and annoyed", "guilty and sad", "nervous yet excited" ], [ "guilty and sympathetic", "confused and anxious", "frustrated and nervous", "nervous yet excited" ], [ "interplanetary security", "come up with the best ways to sell products", "work closely with women in advertising", "develop products for the advertisement company" ], [ "it explains the best answer to any problem", "it thinks like the most intelligent human", "it uses logic to make the best decisions", "it predicts the problem and the solution before it's asked" ], [ "to research the environment on Mars", "to symbolize peace and harmony amongst the nations", "to show that anyone can travel in outer space", "because the Brain told them to do so" ], [ "he was more helpful than usual", "he provided more detail in his answers", "he was better at observing and noticing things", "he was much more commanding than usual" ], [ "just as nervous and confused", "exhausted and worried", "excited to find out what happens next", "more comfortable and relaxed" ], [ "he will be well-known for finding the Space Scouts", "he will help to improve the Brain", "he will continue to help Baxter", "he will be able to go back to his normal life" ] ]	[ 1, 2, 2, 3, 2, 4, 4, 3 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "It was only a fraction of an instant between the time I saw them and\n the time they spoke to me, but in that miniscule interval I managed\n to retrace quite a bit of my lifetime up till that moment, seeking\n vainly for some reason why they'd be standing there, so terribly and\n inflexibly efficient looking. Mostly, I ran back over all the ads I'd\n created and/or okayed for Solar Sales, Inc. during my five years with\n the firm, trying to see just where I'd gone and shaken the security\n of the government. I couldn't find anything really incriminating,\n unless maybe it was that hair dye that unexpectedly turned bright green\n after six weeks in the hair, but that was the lab's fault, not mine.\n So I managed a weak smile toward the duo, and tried not to sweat too\n profusely.\n\n\n \"Jery Delvin?\" said the one on my left, a note of no-funny-business in\n his brusque baritone.", "She was staring after me, open-mouthed, as the door slid neatly shut\n behind us.\n\n\n \"\nW-Will\nI be back?\" I asked desperately, as we waited for the\n elevator. \"At all? Am I under arrest? What's up, anyhow?\"\n\n\n \"You will be informed,\" said the man again. I had to let it go at that.\n Security men were not hired for their loquaciousness. They had a car\n waiting at the curb downstairs, in the No Parking zone. The cop on the\n beat very politely opened the door for them when we got there. Those\n red-and-bronze uniforms carry an awful lot of weight. Not to mention\n the golden bulk of their holstered collapsers.\n\n\n There was nothing for me to do but sweat it out and to try and enjoy\n the ride, wherever we were going.\n\"\nYou\nare Jery Delvin?\"", "\"... Yes,\" I said, some terrified portion of my mind waiting\n masochistically for them to draw their collapsers and reduce me to a\n heap of hot protons.\n\n\n \"Come with us,\" said his companion. I stared at him, then glanced\n hopelessly at the jumble of things on my desk. \"Never mind that stuff,\"\n he added.\n\n\n I rose from my place, slipped my jacket from its hook, and started\n across the office toward the door, each of them falling into rigid step\n beside me. Marge, my secretary, stood wide-eyed as we passed through\n her office, heading for the hall exit.\n\n\n \"Mr. Delvin,\" she said, her voice a wispy croak. \"When will you be\n back? The Plasti-Flex man is waiting for your—\"\n\n\n I opened my mouth, but one of the security men cut in.\n\n\n \"You will be informed,\" he said to Marge.", "\"Anders?\" I said, approaching to within five feet of him before\n halting, to get the best psychological effect from my appearance.\n\n\n He turned, saw me, and hurriedly spat the butt out onto the cement\n floor. \"Yes, sir!\" he said loudly, throwing me a quivering salute. His\n eyes were a bit wild as they took me in.", "Yes, parting. I was on my own. After all, with a Security disc—the\n Amnesty, they called it—such as I possessed, and a collapser, I could\n go anywhere, do anything, commandeer anything I might need. All with\n no questions asked. Needless to say, I was feeling pretty chipper as I\n entered the hangar housing\nPhobos II\n. At the moment, I was the most\n influential human being in the known universe.\n\n\n The pilot, as per my videophoned request, was waiting there for me. I\n saw him as I stepped into the cool shadows of the building from the hot\n yellow sunlight outside. He was tall, much taller than I, but he seemed\n nervous as hell. At least he was pacing back and forth amid a litter\n of half-smoked cigarette butts beside the gleaming tailfins of the\n spaceship, and a fuming butt was puckered into place in his mouth.", "And well they might be. An Amnesty-bearer can suddenly decide a subject\n is not answering questions to his satisfaction and simply blast the\n annoying party to atoms. It makes for straight responses. Of course,\n I was dressing the part, in a way. I wore the Amnesty suspended by a\n thin golden chain from my neck, and for costume I wore a raven-black\n blouse and matching uniform trousers and boots. I must have looked\n quite sinister. I'm under six feet, but I'm angular and wiry. Thus,\n in ominous black, with an Amnesty on my breast and a collapser in\n my holster, I was a sight to strike even honest citizens into quick\n examinations of conscience. I felt a little silly, but the outfit was\n Baxter's idea.\n\n\n \"I understand you were aboard the\nPhobos II\nwhen the incident\n occurred?\" I said sternly, which was unusual for my wonted demeanor.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" he replied swiftly, at stiff attention.", "\"Jery Delvin,\" he read, musingly and dispassionately. \"Five foot eleven\n inches tall, brown hair, slate-gray eyes. Citizen. Honest, sober,\n civic-minded, slightly antisocial....\"\n\n\n He looked at me, questioningly.\n\n\n \"I'd rather not discuss that, sir, if you don't mind.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mind if I do mind?\"\n\n\n \"Oh ... Oh, well if you put it like that. It's girls, sir. They block\n my mind. Ruin my work.\"\n\n\n \"I don't get you.\"\n\n\n \"Well, in my job—See, I've got this gift. I'm a spotter.\"\n\n\n \"A what?\"\n\n\n \"A spotter. I can't be fooled. By advertising. Or mostly anything else.\n Except girls.\"", "The man who spoke seemed more than surprised; he seemed stunned. His\n voice held an incredulous squeak, a squeak which would have amazed his\n subordinates. It certainly amazed me. Because the speaker was Philip\n Baxter, Chief of Interplanetary Security, second only to the World\n President in power, and not even that in matters of security. I managed\n to nod.\n\n\n He shook his white-maned head, slowly. \"I don't believe it.\"\n\n\n \"But I am, sir,\" I insisted doggedly.\n\n\n Baxter pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes for a moment,\n then sighed, grinned wryly, and waggled an index finger at an empty\n plastic contour chair.\n\n\n \"I guess maybe you are at that, son. Sit down, sit down.\"", "Baxter smiled. \"No chance of that, Jery. We didn't leave it up to any\n committee or bureau or any other faction to do the picking. Hell, that\n would have put us right back where we'd been before. No, we left it up\n to the Brain. We'd find ourselves in a tight situation, and the Brain\n after being fed the data, would come up with either a solution, or a\n name.\"\n\n\n I stared at him. \"Then, when I was here before, I was here solely to\n receive the Amnesty, is that it?\"\n\n\n Baxter nodded. \"The Brain just picks the men. Then we tell the men the\n situation, hand over the Amnesty, and pray.\"\n\n\n I had a sudden thought. \"Say, what happens if two men are selected by\n the Brain? Who has authority over whom?\"", "And, snugly enholstered, I carried a collapser, the restricted weapon\n given only to Security Agents, so deadly was its molecule-disrupting\n beam. Baxter had spent a tremulous hour showing me how to use the\n weapon, and especially how to turn the beam off. I'd finally gotten the\n hang of it, though not before half his kidney-shaped desk had flashed\n into nothingness, along with a good-sized swath of carpeting and six\n inches of concrete floor.\n\n\n His parting injunction had been. \"Be careful, Delvin, huh?\"", "I started back for Interplanetary Security, and my second—and I hoped,\n last—interview with Chief Baxter. I had a slight inkling why the Brain\n had chosen me; because, in the affair of the missing Space Scouts, my\n infallible talent for spotting the True within the Apparent had come\n through nicely. I had found a very interesting clinker.\n4\n\"Strange,\" I remarked to Chief Baxter when I was seated once again in\n his office, opposite his newly replaced desk. \"I hardly acted like\n myself out at that airfield. I was brusque, highhanded, austere, almost\n malevolent with the pilot. And I'm ordinarily on the shy side, as a\n matter of fact.\"", "\"And,\" I said, beginning to be fascinated by his bewildered manner,\n \"what came out?\"\n\n\n He looked at me for a long moment, then picked up that brochure again,\n and said, without referring to it, \"Jery Delvin, five foot eleven\n inches tall—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but read me the part where it says why I was picked,\" I said, a\n little exasperated.\n\n\n Baxter eyed me balefully, then skimmed the brochure through the air in\n my direction. I caught it just short of the carpet.\n\n\n \"If you can find it, I'll read it!\" he said, almost snarling.\n\n\n I looked over the sheet, then turned it over and scanned the black\n opposite side. \"All it gives is my description, governmental status,\n and address!\"", "He stared, then frowned, and thought hard. \"Yes, sir,\" he said,\n after a minute. \"Even twice that, with no trouble, but—\" He caught\n himself short. It didn't pay to be too curious about the aims of an\n Amnesty-bearer.\n\n\n \"It's all right, Anders. You've been a tremendous help. Just one thing.\n When you left Mars, you took off from the night side, didn't you?\"\n\n\n \"Why, yes, I did, sir. But how did you—?\"\n\n\n \"No matter, Anders. That'll be all.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" He saluted sharply and started off.", "I ascended the retractable metal rungs that jutted from a point\n between the tailfins to the open airlock, twenty feet over ground\n level, and followed Anders inside the ship.\n\n\n I trailed Anders through the ship, from the pilot's compartment—a\n bewildering mass of dials, switches, signal lights and wire—through\n the galley into the troop section. It was a cramped cubicle housing a\n number of nylon-webbed foam rubber bunks. The bunks were empty, but I\n looked them over anyhow. I carefully tugged back the canvas covering\n that fitted envelope-fashion over a foam rubber pad, and ran my finger\n over the surface of the pad. It came away just slightly gritty.\n\n\n \"Uh-huh!\" I said, smiling. Anders just stared at me.\n\n\n I turned to the storage lockers. \"Let's see this junk they were\n suddenly deprived of.\"", "Jery Delvin had a most unusual talent. He could detect the flaws in\n any scheme almost on sight—even where they had eluded the best brains\n in the ad agency where he worked. So when the Chief of World Security\n told him that he had been selected as the answer to the Solar System's\n greatest mystery, Jery assumed that it was because of his mental\n agility.\n\n\n But when he got to Mars to find out why fifteen boys had vanished from\n a spaceship in mid-space, he found out that even his quick mind needed\n time to pierce the maze of out-of-this-world double-dealing. For Jery\n had become a walking bomb, and when he set himself off, it would be the\n end of the whole puzzle of THE SECRET MARTIANS—with Jery as the first\n to go!", "Baxter grimaced and shivered. \"Don't even think such a thing! Even\n your mentioning such a contingency gives me a small migraine. It'd be\n unprecedented in the history of the Brain or the Amnesty.\" He grinned,\n suddenly. \"Besides, it can't happen. There's only one of these—\" he\n tapped the medallion gently \"—in existence, Jery. So we couldn't have\n such a situation!\"\n\n\n I sank back into the contour chair, and glanced at my watch. Much too\n late to go back to work. I'd done a lot in one day, I reasoned. Well,\n the thing was out of my hands. Baxter had the information I'd come\n up with, and it had been coded and fed to the Brain. As soon as the\n solution came through, I could be on my way back to the world of hard\n and soft sell.", "I folded gingerly at knees and hips and slid back into the chair,\n pressing my perspiring palms against the sides of my pants to get rid\n of their uncomfortably slippery feel. \"Thank you, sir.\"\n\n\n There was a silence, during which I breathed uneasily, and a bit too\n loudly. Baxter seemed to be trying to say something.\n\n\n \"I suppose you're wondering why I've called—\" he started, then stopped\n short and flushed with embarrassment. I felt a sympathetic hot wave\n flooding my own features. A copy chief in an advertising company almost\n always reacts to an obvious cliche.\n\n\n Then, with something like a look of relief on his blunt face, he\n snatched up a brochure from his kidney-shaped desktop and his eyes\n raced over the lettering on its face.", "\"Uh-huh,\" Baxter grunted laconically. \"It amuses you, does it?\" The\n smile was still on his lips, but there was a grimness in the glitter of\n his narrowing eyes.\n\n\n \"Not really,\" I said hastily. \"It baffles me, to be frank.\"\n\n\n \"If you're sitting there in that hopeful stance awaiting some sort of\n explanation, you may as well relax,\" Baxter said shortly. \"I have none\n to make. IC had none to make. Damn it all to hell!\" He brought a meaty\n fist down on the desktop. \"No one has an explanation! All we know is\n that the Brain always picks the right man.\"\n\n\n I let this sink in, then asked, \"What made you ask for a man in\n the first place, sir? I've always understood that your own staff\n represented some of the finest minds—\"", "\"Chow time, sir. That's when you expect to have the little—to have\n the kids in your hair, sir. Everyone wants his rations first—You know\n how kids are, sir. So I went to the galley and was about to open up\n the ration packs, when I noticed how damned quiet it was aboard. And\n especially funny that no one was in the galley waiting for me to start\n passing the stuff out.\"\n\n\n \"So you searched,\" I said.\n\n\n Anders nodded sorrowfully. \"Not a trace of 'em, sir. Just some of their\n junk left in their storage lockers.\"\n\n\n I raised my eyebrows. \"Really? I'd be interested in seeing this junk,\n Anders.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, sir. Right this way, sir. Watch out for these rungs, they're\n slippery.\"", "\"It is dangerous, of course, but it's vitally necessary. You're young,\n Jery Delvin, and even the finest history course available these days\n is slanted in favor of World Government. So you have no idea how tough\n things were before the Amnesty came along. Ever hear of red tape?\"\n\n\n I shook my head. \"No, I don't believe so. Unless it had something to do\n with the former communist menace? They called themselves the Reds, I\n believe....\"" ], [ "I folded gingerly at knees and hips and slid back into the chair,\n pressing my perspiring palms against the sides of my pants to get rid\n of their uncomfortably slippery feel. \"Thank you, sir.\"\n\n\n There was a silence, during which I breathed uneasily, and a bit too\n loudly. Baxter seemed to be trying to say something.\n\n\n \"I suppose you're wondering why I've called—\" he started, then stopped\n short and flushed with embarrassment. I felt a sympathetic hot wave\n flooding my own features. A copy chief in an advertising company almost\n always reacts to an obvious cliche.\n\n\n Then, with something like a look of relief on his blunt face, he\n snatched up a brochure from his kidney-shaped desktop and his eyes\n raced over the lettering on its face.", "\"And,\" I said, beginning to be fascinated by his bewildered manner,\n \"what came out?\"\n\n\n He looked at me for a long moment, then picked up that brochure again,\n and said, without referring to it, \"Jery Delvin, five foot eleven\n inches tall—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but read me the part where it says why I was picked,\" I said, a\n little exasperated.\n\n\n Baxter eyed me balefully, then skimmed the brochure through the air in\n my direction. I caught it just short of the carpet.\n\n\n \"If you can find it, I'll read it!\" he said, almost snarling.\n\n\n I looked over the sheet, then turned it over and scanned the black\n opposite side. \"All it gives is my description, governmental status,\n and address!\"", "Baxter smiled. \"No chance of that, Jery. We didn't leave it up to any\n committee or bureau or any other faction to do the picking. Hell, that\n would have put us right back where we'd been before. No, we left it up\n to the Brain. We'd find ourselves in a tight situation, and the Brain\n after being fed the data, would come up with either a solution, or a\n name.\"\n\n\n I stared at him. \"Then, when I was here before, I was here solely to\n receive the Amnesty, is that it?\"\n\n\n Baxter nodded. \"The Brain just picks the men. Then we tell the men the\n situation, hand over the Amnesty, and pray.\"\n\n\n I had a sudden thought. \"Say, what happens if two men are selected by\n the Brain? Who has authority over whom?\"", "\"Anders?\" I said, approaching to within five feet of him before\n halting, to get the best psychological effect from my appearance.\n\n\n He turned, saw me, and hurriedly spat the butt out onto the cement\n floor. \"Yes, sir!\" he said loudly, throwing me a quivering salute. His\n eyes were a bit wild as they took me in.", "\"Uh-huh,\" Baxter grunted laconically. \"It amuses you, does it?\" The\n smile was still on his lips, but there was a grimness in the glitter of\n his narrowing eyes.\n\n\n \"Not really,\" I said hastily. \"It baffles me, to be frank.\"\n\n\n \"If you're sitting there in that hopeful stance awaiting some sort of\n explanation, you may as well relax,\" Baxter said shortly. \"I have none\n to make. IC had none to make. Damn it all to hell!\" He brought a meaty\n fist down on the desktop. \"No one has an explanation! All we know is\n that the Brain always picks the right man.\"\n\n\n I let this sink in, then asked, \"What made you ask for a man in\n the first place, sir? I've always understood that your own staff\n represented some of the finest minds—\"", "Baxter grimaced and shivered. \"Don't even think such a thing! Even\n your mentioning such a contingency gives me a small migraine. It'd be\n unprecedented in the history of the Brain or the Amnesty.\" He grinned,\n suddenly. \"Besides, it can't happen. There's only one of these—\" he\n tapped the medallion gently \"—in existence, Jery. So we couldn't have\n such a situation!\"\n\n\n I sank back into the contour chair, and glanced at my watch. Much too\n late to go back to work. I'd done a lot in one day, I reasoned. Well,\n the thing was out of my hands. Baxter had the information I'd come\n up with, and it had been coded and fed to the Brain. As soon as the\n solution came through, I could be on my way back to the world of hard\n and soft sell.", "\"Jery Delvin,\" he read, musingly and dispassionately. \"Five foot eleven\n inches tall, brown hair, slate-gray eyes. Citizen. Honest, sober,\n civic-minded, slightly antisocial....\"\n\n\n He looked at me, questioningly.\n\n\n \"I'd rather not discuss that, sir, if you don't mind.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mind if I do mind?\"\n\n\n \"Oh ... Oh, well if you put it like that. It's girls, sir. They block\n my mind. Ruin my work.\"\n\n\n \"I don't get you.\"\n\n\n \"Well, in my job—See, I've got this gift. I'm a spotter.\"\n\n\n \"A what?\"\n\n\n \"A spotter. I can't be fooled. By advertising. Or mostly anything else.\n Except girls.\"", "The man who spoke seemed more than surprised; he seemed stunned. His\n voice held an incredulous squeak, a squeak which would have amazed his\n subordinates. It certainly amazed me. Because the speaker was Philip\n Baxter, Chief of Interplanetary Security, second only to the World\n President in power, and not even that in matters of security. I managed\n to nod.\n\n\n He shook his white-maned head, slowly. \"I don't believe it.\"\n\n\n \"But I am, sir,\" I insisted doggedly.\n\n\n Baxter pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes for a moment,\n then sighed, grinned wryly, and waggled an index finger at an empty\n plastic contour chair.\n\n\n \"I guess maybe you are at that, son. Sit down, sit down.\"", "Baxter cupped his slightly jowled cheeks in his hands and propped his\n elbows on the desktop, suddenly slipping out of his high position to\n talk to me man-to-man. \"Look, son, an adding machine—which is a minor\n form of an electronic brain, and even works on the same principle—can\n tell you that two and two make four. But can it tell you why?\n\n\n \"Well, no, but—\"\n\n\n \"That, in a nutshell is our problem. We coded and fed to the Brain\n every shred of information at our disposal; the ages of the children,\n for instance, and all their physical attributes, and where they were\n last seen, and what they were wearing. Hell, everything! The machine\n took the factors, weighed them, popped them through its billions of\n relays and tubes, and out of the end of the answer slot popped a single\n sheet. The one you just saw. Your dossier.\"", "It was only a fraction of an instant between the time I saw them and\n the time they spoke to me, but in that miniscule interval I managed\n to retrace quite a bit of my lifetime up till that moment, seeking\n vainly for some reason why they'd be standing there, so terribly and\n inflexibly efficient looking. Mostly, I ran back over all the ads I'd\n created and/or okayed for Solar Sales, Inc. during my five years with\n the firm, trying to see just where I'd gone and shaken the security\n of the government. I couldn't find anything really incriminating,\n unless maybe it was that hair dye that unexpectedly turned bright green\n after six weeks in the hair, but that was the lab's fault, not mine.\n So I managed a weak smile toward the duo, and tried not to sweat too\n profusely.\n\n\n \"Jery Delvin?\" said the one on my left, a note of no-funny-business in\n his brusque baritone.", "I started back for Interplanetary Security, and my second—and I hoped,\n last—interview with Chief Baxter. I had a slight inkling why the Brain\n had chosen me; because, in the affair of the missing Space Scouts, my\n infallible talent for spotting the True within the Apparent had come\n through nicely. I had found a very interesting clinker.\n4\n\"Strange,\" I remarked to Chief Baxter when I was seated once again in\n his office, opposite his newly replaced desk. \"I hardly acted like\n myself out at that airfield. I was brusque, highhanded, austere, almost\n malevolent with the pilot. And I'm ordinarily on the shy side, as a\n matter of fact.\"", "\"Yes, sir. Even my secretary, Marge, whom I'd never in a million years\n think of looking at twice, except for business reasons, of course, has\n to stay out of my office when I'm working, or I can't function.\"\n\n\n \"You have my sympathy, son,\" Baxter said, not unkindly.\n\n\n \"Thank you, sir. It hasn't been easy.\"\n\n\n \"No, I don't imagine it has....\" Baxter was staring into some far-off\n distance. Then he remembered himself and blinked back to the present.\n \"Delvin,\" he said sharply. \"I'll come right to the point. This thing\n is.... You have been chosen for an extremely important mission.\"\n\n\n I couldn't have been more surprised had he announced my incipient\n maternity, but I was able to ask, \"Me? For Pete's sake, why, sir?\"", "She was staring after me, open-mouthed, as the door slid neatly shut\n behind us.\n\n\n \"\nW-Will\nI be back?\" I asked desperately, as we waited for the\n elevator. \"At all? Am I under arrest? What's up, anyhow?\"\n\n\n \"You will be informed,\" said the man again. I had to let it go at that.\n Security men were not hired for their loquaciousness. They had a car\n waiting at the curb downstairs, in the No Parking zone. The cop on the\n beat very politely opened the door for them when we got there. Those\n red-and-bronze uniforms carry an awful lot of weight. Not to mention\n the golden bulk of their holstered collapsers.\n\n\n There was nothing for me to do but sweat it out and to try and enjoy\n the ride, wherever we were going.\n\"\nYou\nare Jery Delvin?\"", "I sat back, feeling much better. \"That's right, sir.\"\n\n\n Then Baxter frowned again. \"But what's this about girls?\"\n\n\n \"They—they block my thinking, sir, that's all. Why, take that example\n I just mentioned. In plain writing, I caught the clinker in one-tenth\n of a second. Then they handed me a layout with a picture of a lawyer\n dictating notes to his secretary on it. Her legs were crossed. Nice\n legs. Gorgeous legs....\"\n\n\n \"How long that time, Delvin?\"\n\n\n \"Indefinite. Till they took the girl away, sir.\"\n\n\n Baxter cleared his throat loudly. \"I understand, at last. Hence your\n slight antisocial rating. You avoid women in order to keep your job.\"", "And well they might be. An Amnesty-bearer can suddenly decide a subject\n is not answering questions to his satisfaction and simply blast the\n annoying party to atoms. It makes for straight responses. Of course,\n I was dressing the part, in a way. I wore the Amnesty suspended by a\n thin golden chain from my neck, and for costume I wore a raven-black\n blouse and matching uniform trousers and boots. I must have looked\n quite sinister. I'm under six feet, but I'm angular and wiry. Thus,\n in ominous black, with an Amnesty on my breast and a collapser in\n my holster, I was a sight to strike even honest citizens into quick\n examinations of conscience. I felt a little silly, but the outfit was\n Baxter's idea.\n\n\n \"I understand you were aboard the\nPhobos II\nwhen the incident\n occurred?\" I said sternly, which was unusual for my wonted demeanor.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" he replied swiftly, at stiff attention.", "Baxter looked me square in the eye. \"Damned if I know!\"\n2\nI stared at him, nonplussed. He'd spoken with evidence of utmost\n candor, and the Chief of Interplanetary Security was not one to be\n accused of a friendly josh, but—\"You're kidding!\" I said. \"You must\n be. Otherwise, why was I sent for?\"\n\n\n \"Believe me, I wish I knew,\" he sighed. \"You were chosen, from all\n the inhabitants of this planet, and all the inhabitants of the Earth\n Colonies, by the Brain.\"\n\n\n \"You mean that International Cybernetics picked me for a mission?\n That's crazy, if you'll pardon me, sir.\"\n\n\n Baxter shrugged, and his genial smile was a bit tightly stretched.\n \"When the current emergency arose and all our usual methods failed, we\n had to submit the problem to the Brain.\"", "Baxter swore under his breath. Then he reached across the desktop and\n tossed me the Amnesty.", "\"No.\nMy\nmen are doing the work. Handpicked crews, day and night,\n have been sending those letters to the trusting mothers. It's been\n ghastly, Delvin. Hard on the men, terribly hard. Undotted\ni\n's,\n misuse of tenses, deliberate misspellings. They take it out of an\n adult, especially an adult with a mind keen enough to get him into\n Interplanetary Security. We've limited the shifts to four hours per man\n per day. Otherwise, they'd all be gibbering by now!\"\n\n\n \"And your men haven't found out anything?\" I marvelled.\n\n\n Baxter shook his head.\n\n\n \"And you finally had to resort to the Brain, and it gave you my name,\n but no reason for it?\"", "Yes, parting. I was on my own. After all, with a Security disc—the\n Amnesty, they called it—such as I possessed, and a collapser, I could\n go anywhere, do anything, commandeer anything I might need. All with\n no questions asked. Needless to say, I was feeling pretty chipper as I\n entered the hangar housing\nPhobos II\n. At the moment, I was the most\n influential human being in the known universe.\n\n\n The pilot, as per my videophoned request, was waiting there for me. I\n saw him as I stepped into the cool shadows of the building from the hot\n yellow sunlight outside. He was tall, much taller than I, but he seemed\n nervous as hell. At least he was pacing back and forth amid a litter\n of half-smoked cigarette butts beside the gleaming tailfins of the\n spaceship, and a fuming butt was puckered into place in his mouth.", "\"And you recall the recent government-sponsored trip they had? To Mars\n and back, with the broadly-smiling government picking up the enormous\n tab?\"\n\n\n I detected a tinge of cynicism in his tone, but said nothing.\n\n\n \"What a gesture!\" Baxter went on, hardly speaking directly to me at\n all. \"Inter-nation harmony! Good will! If these mere boys can get\n together and travel the voids of space, then so can everyone else! Why\n should there be tensions between the various nations comprising the\n World Government, when there's none between these fine lads, one from\n every civilized nation on Earth?\"\n\n\n \"You sound disillusioned, sir,\" I interjected.\n\n\n He stared at me as though I'd just fallen in from the ceiling or\n somewhere. \"Huh? Oh, yes, Delvin, isn't it? Sorry, I got carried away.\n Where was I?\"" ], [ "\"Jery Delvin,\" he read, musingly and dispassionately. \"Five foot eleven\n inches tall, brown hair, slate-gray eyes. Citizen. Honest, sober,\n civic-minded, slightly antisocial....\"\n\n\n He looked at me, questioningly.\n\n\n \"I'd rather not discuss that, sir, if you don't mind.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mind if I do mind?\"\n\n\n \"Oh ... Oh, well if you put it like that. It's girls, sir. They block\n my mind. Ruin my work.\"\n\n\n \"I don't get you.\"\n\n\n \"Well, in my job—See, I've got this gift. I'm a spotter.\"\n\n\n \"A what?\"\n\n\n \"A spotter. I can't be fooled. By advertising. Or mostly anything else.\n Except girls.\"", "She was staring after me, open-mouthed, as the door slid neatly shut\n behind us.\n\n\n \"\nW-Will\nI be back?\" I asked desperately, as we waited for the\n elevator. \"At all? Am I under arrest? What's up, anyhow?\"\n\n\n \"You will be informed,\" said the man again. I had to let it go at that.\n Security men were not hired for their loquaciousness. They had a car\n waiting at the curb downstairs, in the No Parking zone. The cop on the\n beat very politely opened the door for them when we got there. Those\n red-and-bronze uniforms carry an awful lot of weight. Not to mention\n the golden bulk of their holstered collapsers.\n\n\n There was nothing for me to do but sweat it out and to try and enjoy\n the ride, wherever we were going.\n\"\nYou\nare Jery Delvin?\"", "It was only a fraction of an instant between the time I saw them and\n the time they spoke to me, but in that miniscule interval I managed\n to retrace quite a bit of my lifetime up till that moment, seeking\n vainly for some reason why they'd be standing there, so terribly and\n inflexibly efficient looking. Mostly, I ran back over all the ads I'd\n created and/or okayed for Solar Sales, Inc. during my five years with\n the firm, trying to see just where I'd gone and shaken the security\n of the government. I couldn't find anything really incriminating,\n unless maybe it was that hair dye that unexpectedly turned bright green\n after six weeks in the hair, but that was the lab's fault, not mine.\n So I managed a weak smile toward the duo, and tried not to sweat too\n profusely.\n\n\n \"Jery Delvin?\" said the one on my left, a note of no-funny-business in\n his brusque baritone.", "Oddly enough, it worked out, and he now does nothing else. He says,\n \"I'd like to say I do this for fulfillment, or for cash, or because\n it's my destiny; however, the real reason (same as that expressed by\n Jean Kerr) is that this kind of stay-at-home self-employment lets me\n sleep late in the morning.\"\n1\nI was sitting at my desk, trying to decide how to tell the women of\n America that they were certain to be lovely in a Plasti-Flex brassiere\n without absolutely guaranteeing them anything, when the two security\n men came to get me. I didn't quite believe it at first, when I looked\n up and saw them, six-feet-plus of steel nerves and gimlet eyes, staring\n down at me, amidst my litter of sketches, crumpled copy sheets and\n deadline memos.", "\"Anders?\" I said, approaching to within five feet of him before\n halting, to get the best psychological effect from my appearance.\n\n\n He turned, saw me, and hurriedly spat the butt out onto the cement\n floor. \"Yes, sir!\" he said loudly, throwing me a quivering salute. His\n eyes were a bit wild as they took me in.", "Jery Delvin had a most unusual talent. He could detect the flaws in\n any scheme almost on sight—even where they had eluded the best brains\n in the ad agency where he worked. So when the Chief of World Security\n told him that he had been selected as the answer to the Solar System's\n greatest mystery, Jery assumed that it was because of his mental\n agility.\n\n\n But when he got to Mars to find out why fifteen boys had vanished from\n a spaceship in mid-space, he found out that even his quick mind needed\n time to pierce the maze of out-of-this-world double-dealing. For Jery\n had become a walking bomb, and when he set himself off, it would be the\n end of the whole puzzle of THE SECRET MARTIANS—with Jery as the first\n to go!", "Baxter smiled. \"No chance of that, Jery. We didn't leave it up to any\n committee or bureau or any other faction to do the picking. Hell, that\n would have put us right back where we'd been before. No, we left it up\n to the Brain. We'd find ourselves in a tight situation, and the Brain\n after being fed the data, would come up with either a solution, or a\n name.\"\n\n\n I stared at him. \"Then, when I was here before, I was here solely to\n receive the Amnesty, is that it?\"\n\n\n Baxter nodded. \"The Brain just picks the men. Then we tell the men the\n situation, hand over the Amnesty, and pray.\"\n\n\n I had a sudden thought. \"Say, what happens if two men are selected by\n the Brain? Who has authority over whom?\"", "\"And,\" I said, beginning to be fascinated by his bewildered manner,\n \"what came out?\"\n\n\n He looked at me for a long moment, then picked up that brochure again,\n and said, without referring to it, \"Jery Delvin, five foot eleven\n inches tall—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but read me the part where it says why I was picked,\" I said, a\n little exasperated.\n\n\n Baxter eyed me balefully, then skimmed the brochure through the air in\n my direction. I caught it just short of the carpet.\n\n\n \"If you can find it, I'll read it!\" he said, almost snarling.\n\n\n I looked over the sheet, then turned it over and scanned the black\n opposite side. \"All it gives is my description, governmental status,\n and address!\"", "Baxter grimaced and shivered. \"Don't even think such a thing! Even\n your mentioning such a contingency gives me a small migraine. It'd be\n unprecedented in the history of the Brain or the Amnesty.\" He grinned,\n suddenly. \"Besides, it can't happen. There's only one of these—\" he\n tapped the medallion gently \"—in existence, Jery. So we couldn't have\n such a situation!\"\n\n\n I sank back into the contour chair, and glanced at my watch. Much too\n late to go back to work. I'd done a lot in one day, I reasoned. Well,\n the thing was out of my hands. Baxter had the information I'd come\n up with, and it had been coded and fed to the Brain. As soon as the\n solution came through, I could be on my way back to the world of hard\n and soft sell.", "\"It is dangerous, of course, but it's vitally necessary. You're young,\n Jery Delvin, and even the finest history course available these days\n is slanted in favor of World Government. So you have no idea how tough\n things were before the Amnesty came along. Ever hear of red tape?\"\n\n\n I shook my head. \"No, I don't believe so. Unless it had something to do\n with the former communist menace? They called themselves the Reds, I\n believe....\"", "Baxter cupped his slightly jowled cheeks in his hands and propped his\n elbows on the desktop, suddenly slipping out of his high position to\n talk to me man-to-man. \"Look, son, an adding machine—which is a minor\n form of an electronic brain, and even works on the same principle—can\n tell you that two and two make four. But can it tell you why?\n\n\n \"Well, no, but—\"\n\n\n \"That, in a nutshell is our problem. We coded and fed to the Brain\n every shred of information at our disposal; the ages of the children,\n for instance, and all their physical attributes, and where they were\n last seen, and what they were wearing. Hell, everything! The machine\n took the factors, weighed them, popped them through its billions of\n relays and tubes, and out of the end of the answer slot popped a single\n sheet. The one you just saw. Your dossier.\"", "I folded gingerly at knees and hips and slid back into the chair,\n pressing my perspiring palms against the sides of my pants to get rid\n of their uncomfortably slippery feel. \"Thank you, sir.\"\n\n\n There was a silence, during which I breathed uneasily, and a bit too\n loudly. Baxter seemed to be trying to say something.\n\n\n \"I suppose you're wondering why I've called—\" he started, then stopped\n short and flushed with embarrassment. I felt a sympathetic hot wave\n flooding my own features. A copy chief in an advertising company almost\n always reacts to an obvious cliche.\n\n\n Then, with something like a look of relief on his blunt face, he\n snatched up a brochure from his kidney-shaped desktop and his eyes\n raced over the lettering on its face.", "And well they might be. An Amnesty-bearer can suddenly decide a subject\n is not answering questions to his satisfaction and simply blast the\n annoying party to atoms. It makes for straight responses. Of course,\n I was dressing the part, in a way. I wore the Amnesty suspended by a\n thin golden chain from my neck, and for costume I wore a raven-black\n blouse and matching uniform trousers and boots. I must have looked\n quite sinister. I'm under six feet, but I'm angular and wiry. Thus,\n in ominous black, with an Amnesty on my breast and a collapser in\n my holster, I was a sight to strike even honest citizens into quick\n examinations of conscience. I felt a little silly, but the outfit was\n Baxter's idea.\n\n\n \"I understand you were aboard the\nPhobos II\nwhen the incident\n occurred?\" I said sternly, which was unusual for my wonted demeanor.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" he replied swiftly, at stiff attention.", "\"Uh-huh,\" Baxter grunted laconically. \"It amuses you, does it?\" The\n smile was still on his lips, but there was a grimness in the glitter of\n his narrowing eyes.\n\n\n \"Not really,\" I said hastily. \"It baffles me, to be frank.\"\n\n\n \"If you're sitting there in that hopeful stance awaiting some sort of\n explanation, you may as well relax,\" Baxter said shortly. \"I have none\n to make. IC had none to make. Damn it all to hell!\" He brought a meaty\n fist down on the desktop. \"No one has an explanation! All we know is\n that the Brain always picks the right man.\"\n\n\n I let this sink in, then asked, \"What made you ask for a man in\n the first place, sir? I've always understood that your own staff\n represented some of the finest minds—\"", "\"Chow time, sir. That's when you expect to have the little—to have\n the kids in your hair, sir. Everyone wants his rations first—You know\n how kids are, sir. So I went to the galley and was about to open up\n the ration packs, when I noticed how damned quiet it was aboard. And\n especially funny that no one was in the galley waiting for me to start\n passing the stuff out.\"\n\n\n \"So you searched,\" I said.\n\n\n Anders nodded sorrowfully. \"Not a trace of 'em, sir. Just some of their\n junk left in their storage lockers.\"\n\n\n I raised my eyebrows. \"Really? I'd be interested in seeing this junk,\n Anders.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, sir. Right this way, sir. Watch out for these rungs, they're\n slippery.\"", "I sat back, feeling much better. \"That's right, sir.\"\n\n\n Then Baxter frowned again. \"But what's this about girls?\"\n\n\n \"They—they block my thinking, sir, that's all. Why, take that example\n I just mentioned. In plain writing, I caught the clinker in one-tenth\n of a second. Then they handed me a layout with a picture of a lawyer\n dictating notes to his secretary on it. Her legs were crossed. Nice\n legs. Gorgeous legs....\"\n\n\n \"How long that time, Delvin?\"\n\n\n \"Indefinite. Till they took the girl away, sir.\"\n\n\n Baxter cleared his throat loudly. \"I understand, at last. Hence your\n slight antisocial rating. You avoid women in order to keep your job.\"", "\"I'm still not sure that I—\"\n\n\n \"It's like this. I designate ratios, by the minute. They hand me a new\n ad, and I read it by a stopwatch. Then, as soon as I spot the clinker,\n they stop the watch. If I get it in five seconds, it passes. But if I\n spot it in less, they throw it out and start over again. Or is that\n clear? No, I guess you're still confused, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Just a bit,\" Baxter said.\n\n\n I took a deep breath and tried again.\n\n\n \"Maybe an example would be better. Uh, you know the one about 'Three\n out of five New York lawyers use Hamilton Bond Paper for note-taking'?\"\n\n\n \"I've heard that, yes.\"", "\"Well, the clinker—that's the sneaky part of the ad, sir, or what we\n call weasel-wording—the clinker in that one is that while it seems to\n imply sixty percent of New York lawyers, it actually means precisely\n what it says: Three out of five. For that particular product, we had\n to question seventy-nine lawyers before we could come up with three who\n liked Hamilton Bond, see? Then we took the names of the three, and the\n names of two of the seventy-six men remaining, and kept them on file.\"\n\n\n \"On file?\" Baxter frowned. \"What for?\"\n\n\n \"In case the Federal Trade Council got on our necks. We could prove\n that three out of five lawyers used the product. Three out of those\n five. See?\"\n\n\n \"Ah,\" said Baxter, grinning. \"I begin to. And your job is to test these\n ads, before they reach the public. What fools you for five seconds will\n fool the average consumer indefinitely.\"", "I started back for Interplanetary Security, and my second—and I hoped,\n last—interview with Chief Baxter. I had a slight inkling why the Brain\n had chosen me; because, in the affair of the missing Space Scouts, my\n infallible talent for spotting the True within the Apparent had come\n through nicely. I had found a very interesting clinker.\n4\n\"Strange,\" I remarked to Chief Baxter when I was seated once again in\n his office, opposite his newly replaced desk. \"I hardly acted like\n myself out at that airfield. I was brusque, highhanded, austere, almost\n malevolent with the pilot. And I'm ordinarily on the shy side, as a\n matter of fact.\"", "Jack Sharkey decided to be a writer nineteen years ago, in the Fourth\n Grade, when he realized all at once that \"someone wrote all those\n stories in the textbooks.\" While everyone else looked forward variously\n to becoming firemen, cowboys, and trapeze artists, Jack was devouring\n every book he could get his hands on, figuring that \"if I put enough\n literature into my head, some of it might overflow and come out.\"\n\n\n After sixteen years of education, Jack found himself teaching high\n school English in Chicago, a worthwhile career, but \"not what one would\n call zesty.\" After a two-year Army hitch, and a year in advertising\n \"sublimating my urge to write things for cash,\" Jack moved to New York,\n determined to make a career of full-time fiction-writing." ], [ "\"Uh-huh,\" Baxter grunted laconically. \"It amuses you, does it?\" The\n smile was still on his lips, but there was a grimness in the glitter of\n his narrowing eyes.\n\n\n \"Not really,\" I said hastily. \"It baffles me, to be frank.\"\n\n\n \"If you're sitting there in that hopeful stance awaiting some sort of\n explanation, you may as well relax,\" Baxter said shortly. \"I have none\n to make. IC had none to make. Damn it all to hell!\" He brought a meaty\n fist down on the desktop. \"No one has an explanation! All we know is\n that the Brain always picks the right man.\"\n\n\n I let this sink in, then asked, \"What made you ask for a man in\n the first place, sir? I've always understood that your own staff\n represented some of the finest minds—\"", "\"No.\nMy\nmen are doing the work. Handpicked crews, day and night,\n have been sending those letters to the trusting mothers. It's been\n ghastly, Delvin. Hard on the men, terribly hard. Undotted\ni\n's,\n misuse of tenses, deliberate misspellings. They take it out of an\n adult, especially an adult with a mind keen enough to get him into\n Interplanetary Security. We've limited the shifts to four hours per man\n per day. Otherwise, they'd all be gibbering by now!\"\n\n\n \"And your men haven't found out anything?\" I marvelled.\n\n\n Baxter shook his head.\n\n\n \"And you finally had to resort to the Brain, and it gave you my name,\n but no reason for it?\"", "\"It's the Amnesty that does it,\" he said, gesturing toward the disc. It\n lay on his desk, now, along with the collapser. I felt, with the new\n information I'd garnered, that my work was done, and that the new data\n fed into the Brain would produce some other results, not involving me.\n\n\n I looked at the Amnesty, then nodded. \"Kind of gets you, after awhile.\n To know that you are the most influential person in creation is to\n automatically act the part. A shame, in a way.\"\n\n\n \"The hell it is!\" Baxter snapped. \"Good grief, man, why'd you think the\n Amnesty was created in the first place?\"\n\n\n I sat up straight and scratched the back of my head. \"Now you mention\n it, I really don't know. It seems a pretty dangerous thing to have\n about, the way people jump when they see it.\"", "Baxter cupped his slightly jowled cheeks in his hands and propped his\n elbows on the desktop, suddenly slipping out of his high position to\n talk to me man-to-man. \"Look, son, an adding machine—which is a minor\n form of an electronic brain, and even works on the same principle—can\n tell you that two and two make four. But can it tell you why?\n\n\n \"Well, no, but—\"\n\n\n \"That, in a nutshell is our problem. We coded and fed to the Brain\n every shred of information at our disposal; the ages of the children,\n for instance, and all their physical attributes, and where they were\n last seen, and what they were wearing. Hell, everything! The machine\n took the factors, weighed them, popped them through its billions of\n relays and tubes, and out of the end of the answer slot popped a single\n sheet. The one you just saw. Your dossier.\"", "I started back for Interplanetary Security, and my second—and I hoped,\n last—interview with Chief Baxter. I had a slight inkling why the Brain\n had chosen me; because, in the affair of the missing Space Scouts, my\n infallible talent for spotting the True within the Apparent had come\n through nicely. I had found a very interesting clinker.\n4\n\"Strange,\" I remarked to Chief Baxter when I was seated once again in\n his office, opposite his newly replaced desk. \"I hardly acted like\n myself out at that airfield. I was brusque, highhanded, austere, almost\n malevolent with the pilot. And I'm ordinarily on the shy side, as a\n matter of fact.\"", "Baxter looked me square in the eye. \"Damned if I know!\"\n2\nI stared at him, nonplussed. He'd spoken with evidence of utmost\n candor, and the Chief of Interplanetary Security was not one to be\n accused of a friendly josh, but—\"You're kidding!\" I said. \"You must\n be. Otherwise, why was I sent for?\"\n\n\n \"Believe me, I wish I knew,\" he sighed. \"You were chosen, from all\n the inhabitants of this planet, and all the inhabitants of the Earth\n Colonies, by the Brain.\"\n\n\n \"You mean that International Cybernetics picked me for a mission?\n That's crazy, if you'll pardon me, sir.\"\n\n\n Baxter shrugged, and his genial smile was a bit tightly stretched.\n \"When the current emergency arose and all our usual methods failed, we\n had to submit the problem to the Brain.\"", "Baxter smiled. \"No chance of that, Jery. We didn't leave it up to any\n committee or bureau or any other faction to do the picking. Hell, that\n would have put us right back where we'd been before. No, we left it up\n to the Brain. We'd find ourselves in a tight situation, and the Brain\n after being fed the data, would come up with either a solution, or a\n name.\"\n\n\n I stared at him. \"Then, when I was here before, I was here solely to\n receive the Amnesty, is that it?\"\n\n\n Baxter nodded. \"The Brain just picks the men. Then we tell the men the\n situation, hand over the Amnesty, and pray.\"\n\n\n I had a sudden thought. \"Say, what happens if two men are selected by\n the Brain? Who has authority over whom?\"", "Baxter grimaced and shivered. \"Don't even think such a thing! Even\n your mentioning such a contingency gives me a small migraine. It'd be\n unprecedented in the history of the Brain or the Amnesty.\" He grinned,\n suddenly. \"Besides, it can't happen. There's only one of these—\" he\n tapped the medallion gently \"—in existence, Jery. So we couldn't have\n such a situation!\"\n\n\n I sank back into the contour chair, and glanced at my watch. Much too\n late to go back to work. I'd done a lot in one day, I reasoned. Well,\n the thing was out of my hands. Baxter had the information I'd come\n up with, and it had been coded and fed to the Brain. As soon as the\n solution came through, I could be on my way back to the world of hard\n and soft sell.", "\"You understand,\" said Baxter suddenly, \"that you're to say nothing\n whatever about the disappearance of the Space Scouts until this office\n makes the news public? You know what would happen if this thing should\n leak!\"\n\n\n The intercom on Baxter's desk suddenly buzzed, and a bright red light\n flashed on. \"Ah!\" he said, thumbing a knob. \"Here we go, at last!\"\n\n\n As he exerted pressure on the knob, a thin slit in the side of the\n intercom began feeding out a long sheet of paper; the new answer from\n the Brain. It reached a certain length, then was automatically sheared\n off within the intercom, and the sheet fell gently to the desktop.\n Baxter picked it up and swiftly scanned its surface. A look of dismay\n overrode his erstwhile genial features.\n\n\n I had a horrible suspicion. \"Not again?\" I said softly.", "And well they might be. An Amnesty-bearer can suddenly decide a subject\n is not answering questions to his satisfaction and simply blast the\n annoying party to atoms. It makes for straight responses. Of course,\n I was dressing the part, in a way. I wore the Amnesty suspended by a\n thin golden chain from my neck, and for costume I wore a raven-black\n blouse and matching uniform trousers and boots. I must have looked\n quite sinister. I'm under six feet, but I'm angular and wiry. Thus,\n in ominous black, with an Amnesty on my breast and a collapser in\n my holster, I was a sight to strike even honest citizens into quick\n examinations of conscience. I felt a little silly, but the outfit was\n Baxter's idea.\n\n\n \"I understand you were aboard the\nPhobos II\nwhen the incident\n occurred?\" I said sternly, which was unusual for my wonted demeanor.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" he replied swiftly, at stiff attention.", "\"Jery Delvin,\" he read, musingly and dispassionately. \"Five foot eleven\n inches tall, brown hair, slate-gray eyes. Citizen. Honest, sober,\n civic-minded, slightly antisocial....\"\n\n\n He looked at me, questioningly.\n\n\n \"I'd rather not discuss that, sir, if you don't mind.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mind if I do mind?\"\n\n\n \"Oh ... Oh, well if you put it like that. It's girls, sir. They block\n my mind. Ruin my work.\"\n\n\n \"I don't get you.\"\n\n\n \"Well, in my job—See, I've got this gift. I'm a spotter.\"\n\n\n \"A what?\"\n\n\n \"A spotter. I can't be fooled. By advertising. Or mostly anything else.\n Except girls.\"", "I sat back, feeling much better. \"That's right, sir.\"\n\n\n Then Baxter frowned again. \"But what's this about girls?\"\n\n\n \"They—they block my thinking, sir, that's all. Why, take that example\n I just mentioned. In plain writing, I caught the clinker in one-tenth\n of a second. Then they handed me a layout with a picture of a lawyer\n dictating notes to his secretary on it. Her legs were crossed. Nice\n legs. Gorgeous legs....\"\n\n\n \"How long that time, Delvin?\"\n\n\n \"Indefinite. Till they took the girl away, sir.\"\n\n\n Baxter cleared his throat loudly. \"I understand, at last. Hence your\n slight antisocial rating. You avoid women in order to keep your job.\"", "\"I'm still not sure that I—\"\n\n\n \"It's like this. I designate ratios, by the minute. They hand me a new\n ad, and I read it by a stopwatch. Then, as soon as I spot the clinker,\n they stop the watch. If I get it in five seconds, it passes. But if I\n spot it in less, they throw it out and start over again. Or is that\n clear? No, I guess you're still confused, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Just a bit,\" Baxter said.\n\n\n I took a deep breath and tried again.\n\n\n \"Maybe an example would be better. Uh, you know the one about 'Three\n out of five New York lawyers use Hamilton Bond Paper for note-taking'?\"\n\n\n \"I've heard that, yes.\"", "\"Anders?\" I said, approaching to within five feet of him before\n halting, to get the best psychological effect from my appearance.\n\n\n He turned, saw me, and hurriedly spat the butt out onto the cement\n floor. \"Yes, sir!\" he said loudly, throwing me a quivering salute. His\n eyes were a bit wild as they took me in.", "\"And,\" I said, beginning to be fascinated by his bewildered manner,\n \"what came out?\"\n\n\n He looked at me for a long moment, then picked up that brochure again,\n and said, without referring to it, \"Jery Delvin, five foot eleven\n inches tall—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but read me the part where it says why I was picked,\" I said, a\n little exasperated.\n\n\n Baxter eyed me balefully, then skimmed the brochure through the air in\n my direction. I caught it just short of the carpet.\n\n\n \"If you can find it, I'll read it!\" he said, almost snarling.\n\n\n I looked over the sheet, then turned it over and scanned the black\n opposite side. \"All it gives is my description, governmental status,\n and address!\"", "Oddly enough, it worked out, and he now does nothing else. He says,\n \"I'd like to say I do this for fulfillment, or for cash, or because\n it's my destiny; however, the real reason (same as that expressed by\n Jean Kerr) is that this kind of stay-at-home self-employment lets me\n sleep late in the morning.\"\n1\nI was sitting at my desk, trying to decide how to tell the women of\n America that they were certain to be lovely in a Plasti-Flex brassiere\n without absolutely guaranteeing them anything, when the two security\n men came to get me. I didn't quite believe it at first, when I looked\n up and saw them, six-feet-plus of steel nerves and gimlet eyes, staring\n down at me, amidst my litter of sketches, crumpled copy sheets and\n deadline memos.", "\"... Yes,\" I said, some terrified portion of my mind waiting\n masochistically for them to draw their collapsers and reduce me to a\n heap of hot protons.\n\n\n \"Come with us,\" said his companion. I stared at him, then glanced\n hopelessly at the jumble of things on my desk. \"Never mind that stuff,\"\n he added.\n\n\n I rose from my place, slipped my jacket from its hook, and started\n across the office toward the door, each of them falling into rigid step\n beside me. Marge, my secretary, stood wide-eyed as we passed through\n her office, heading for the hall exit.\n\n\n \"Mr. Delvin,\" she said, her voice a wispy croak. \"When will you be\n back? The Plasti-Flex man is waiting for your—\"\n\n\n I opened my mouth, but one of the security men cut in.\n\n\n \"You will be informed,\" he said to Marge.", "\"Yes, sir. Even my secretary, Marge, whom I'd never in a million years\n think of looking at twice, except for business reasons, of course, has\n to stay out of my office when I'm working, or I can't function.\"\n\n\n \"You have my sympathy, son,\" Baxter said, not unkindly.\n\n\n \"Thank you, sir. It hasn't been easy.\"\n\n\n \"No, I don't imagine it has....\" Baxter was staring into some far-off\n distance. Then he remembered himself and blinked back to the present.\n \"Delvin,\" he said sharply. \"I'll come right to the point. This thing\n is.... You have been chosen for an extremely important mission.\"\n\n\n I couldn't have been more surprised had he announced my incipient\n maternity, but I was able to ask, \"Me? For Pete's sake, why, sir?\"", "\"Well, the clinker—that's the sneaky part of the ad, sir, or what we\n call weasel-wording—the clinker in that one is that while it seems to\n imply sixty percent of New York lawyers, it actually means precisely\n what it says: Three out of five. For that particular product, we had\n to question seventy-nine lawyers before we could come up with three who\n liked Hamilton Bond, see? Then we took the names of the three, and the\n names of two of the seventy-six men remaining, and kept them on file.\"\n\n\n \"On file?\" Baxter frowned. \"What for?\"\n\n\n \"In case the Federal Trade Council got on our necks. We could prove\n that three out of five lawyers used the product. Three out of those\n five. See?\"\n\n\n \"Ah,\" said Baxter, grinning. \"I begin to. And your job is to test these\n ads, before they reach the public. What fools you for five seconds will\n fool the average consumer indefinitely.\"", "I folded gingerly at knees and hips and slid back into the chair,\n pressing my perspiring palms against the sides of my pants to get rid\n of their uncomfortably slippery feel. \"Thank you, sir.\"\n\n\n There was a silence, during which I breathed uneasily, and a bit too\n loudly. Baxter seemed to be trying to say something.\n\n\n \"I suppose you're wondering why I've called—\" he started, then stopped\n short and flushed with embarrassment. I felt a sympathetic hot wave\n flooding my own features. A copy chief in an advertising company almost\n always reacts to an obvious cliche.\n\n\n Then, with something like a look of relief on his blunt face, he\n snatched up a brochure from his kidney-shaped desktop and his eyes\n raced over the lettering on its face." ], [ "\"Hold it, son. Perhaps I didn't make myself clear. We asked for no man.\n We asked for a solution to an important problem. And your name was what\n we got. You, son, are the solution.\"\n\n\n Chief of Security or not, I was getting a little burned up at his\n highhanded treatment of my emotions. \"How nice!\" I said icily. \"Now if\n I only knew the problem!\"\n\n\n Baxter blinked, then lost some of his scowl. \"Yes, of course;\" Baxter\n murmured, lighting up a cigar. He blew a plume of blue smoke toward the\n ceiling, then continued. \"You've heard, of course, of the Space Scouts?\"\n\n\n I nodded. \"Like the old-time Boy Scouts, only with rocket-names for\n their various troops in place of the old animal names.\"", "I thought a second, then nodded. \"They've been having such a good time\n that the government extended their trip by—Why are you shaking your\n head that way, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Because it's not true, Delvin,\" he said. His voice was suddenly old\n and tired, and very much in keeping with his snowy hair. \"You see, the\n Space Scouts have vanished.\"\n\n\n I came up in the chair, ramrod-straight. \"Their mothers—they've been\n getting letters and—\"\n\n\n \"Forgeries, Fakes. Counterfeits.\"\n\n\n \"You mean whoever took the Scouts is falsifying—\"", "\"You were telling about how this gesture, the WG sending these kids\n off for an extraterrestrial romp, will cement relations between those\n nations who have remained hostile despite the unification of all\n governments on Earth. Personally, I think it was a pretty good idea,\n myself. Everybody likes kids. Take this jam we were trying to push.\n Pomegranate Nectar, it was called. Well, sir, it just wouldn't sell,\n and then we got this red-headed kid with freckles like confetti all\n over his slightly bucktoothed face, and we—Sir?\"\n\n\n I'd paused, because he was staring at me like a man on the brink of\n apoplexy. I swallowed, and tried to look relaxed.\n\n\n After a moment, he found his voice. \"To go on, Delvin. Do you recall\n what happened to the Space Scouts last week?\"", "\"You understand,\" said Baxter suddenly, \"that you're to say nothing\n whatever about the disappearance of the Space Scouts until this office\n makes the news public? You know what would happen if this thing should\n leak!\"\n\n\n The intercom on Baxter's desk suddenly buzzed, and a bright red light\n flashed on. \"Ah!\" he said, thumbing a knob. \"Here we go, at last!\"\n\n\n As he exerted pressure on the knob, a thin slit in the side of the\n intercom began feeding out a long sheet of paper; the new answer from\n the Brain. It reached a certain length, then was automatically sheared\n off within the intercom, and the sheet fell gently to the desktop.\n Baxter picked it up and swiftly scanned its surface. A look of dismay\n overrode his erstwhile genial features.\n\n\n I had a horrible suspicion. \"Not again?\" I said softly.", "\"Then I'm to be sent to Mars?\" I said, nervously.\n\n\n \"That's just it,\" Baxter sighed. \"We don't even know that! We're like a\n savage who finds a pistol: used correctly, it's a mean little weapon;\n pointed the wrong way, it's a quick suicide. So, you are our weapon.\n Now, the question is: Which way do we point you?\"\n\n\n \"You got me!\" I shrugged hopelessly.\n\n\n \"However, since we have nothing else to go on but the locale from which\n the children vanished, my suggestion would be to send you there.\"\n\n\n \"Mars, you mean,\" I said.\n\n\n \"No, to the spaceship\nPhobos II\n. The one they were returning to Earth\n in when they disappeared.\"\n\n\n \"They disappeared from a spaceship? While in space?\"\n\n\n Baxter nodded.", "Baxter looked me square in the eye. \"Damned if I know!\"\n2\nI stared at him, nonplussed. He'd spoken with evidence of utmost\n candor, and the Chief of Interplanetary Security was not one to be\n accused of a friendly josh, but—\"You're kidding!\" I said. \"You must\n be. Otherwise, why was I sent for?\"\n\n\n \"Believe me, I wish I knew,\" he sighed. \"You were chosen, from all\n the inhabitants of this planet, and all the inhabitants of the Earth\n Colonies, by the Brain.\"\n\n\n \"You mean that International Cybernetics picked me for a mission?\n That's crazy, if you'll pardon me, sir.\"\n\n\n Baxter shrugged, and his genial smile was a bit tightly stretched.\n \"When the current emergency arose and all our usual methods failed, we\n had to submit the problem to the Brain.\"", "\"Chow time, sir. That's when you expect to have the little—to have\n the kids in your hair, sir. Everyone wants his rations first—You know\n how kids are, sir. So I went to the galley and was about to open up\n the ration packs, when I noticed how damned quiet it was aboard. And\n especially funny that no one was in the galley waiting for me to start\n passing the stuff out.\"\n\n\n \"So you searched,\" I said.\n\n\n Anders nodded sorrowfully. \"Not a trace of 'em, sir. Just some of their\n junk left in their storage lockers.\"\n\n\n I raised my eyebrows. \"Really? I'd be interested in seeing this junk,\n Anders.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, sir. Right this way, sir. Watch out for these rungs, they're\n slippery.\"", "I started back for Interplanetary Security, and my second—and I hoped,\n last—interview with Chief Baxter. I had a slight inkling why the Brain\n had chosen me; because, in the affair of the missing Space Scouts, my\n infallible talent for spotting the True within the Apparent had come\n through nicely. I had found a very interesting clinker.\n4\n\"Strange,\" I remarked to Chief Baxter when I was seated once again in\n his office, opposite his newly replaced desk. \"I hardly acted like\n myself out at that airfield. I was brusque, highhanded, austere, almost\n malevolent with the pilot. And I'm ordinarily on the shy side, as a\n matter of fact.\"", "Jery Delvin had a most unusual talent. He could detect the flaws in\n any scheme almost on sight—even where they had eluded the best brains\n in the ad agency where he worked. So when the Chief of World Security\n told him that he had been selected as the answer to the Solar System's\n greatest mystery, Jery assumed that it was because of his mental\n agility.\n\n\n But when he got to Mars to find out why fifteen boys had vanished from\n a spaceship in mid-space, he found out that even his quick mind needed\n time to pierce the maze of out-of-this-world double-dealing. For Jery\n had become a walking bomb, and when he set himself off, it would be the\n end of the whole puzzle of THE SECRET MARTIANS—with Jery as the first\n to go!", "\"I don't really have any details,\" I said, and waited for him to take\n his cue. As an afterthought, to help him talk, I added, \"At ease, by\n the way, Anders.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, sir,\" he said, not actually loosening much in his rigid\n position, but his face looking happier. \"See, I was supposed to pilot\n the kids back here from Mars when their trip was done, and—\" He gave\n a helpless shrug. \"I dunno, sir. I got 'em all aboard, made sure they\n were secure in the takeoff racks, and then I set my coordinates for\n Earth and took off. Just a run-of-the-mill takeoff, sir.\"\n\n\n \"And when did you notice they were missing?\" I asked, looking at the\n metallic bulk of the ship and wondering what alien force could snatch\n fifteen fair-sized young boys through its impervious hull without\n leaving a trace.", "I ascended the retractable metal rungs that jutted from a point\n between the tailfins to the open airlock, twenty feet over ground\n level, and followed Anders inside the ship.\n\n\n I trailed Anders through the ship, from the pilot's compartment—a\n bewildering mass of dials, switches, signal lights and wire—through\n the galley into the troop section. It was a cramped cubicle housing a\n number of nylon-webbed foam rubber bunks. The bunks were empty, but I\n looked them over anyhow. I carefully tugged back the canvas covering\n that fitted envelope-fashion over a foam rubber pad, and ran my finger\n over the surface of the pad. It came away just slightly gritty.\n\n\n \"Uh-huh!\" I said, smiling. Anders just stared at me.\n\n\n I turned to the storage lockers. \"Let's see this junk they were\n suddenly deprived of.\"", "The man who spoke seemed more than surprised; he seemed stunned. His\n voice held an incredulous squeak, a squeak which would have amazed his\n subordinates. It certainly amazed me. Because the speaker was Philip\n Baxter, Chief of Interplanetary Security, second only to the World\n President in power, and not even that in matters of security. I managed\n to nod.\n\n\n He shook his white-maned head, slowly. \"I don't believe it.\"\n\n\n \"But I am, sir,\" I insisted doggedly.\n\n\n Baxter pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes for a moment,\n then sighed, grinned wryly, and waggled an index finger at an empty\n plastic contour chair.\n\n\n \"I guess maybe you are at that, son. Sit down, sit down.\"", "\"No.\nMy\nmen are doing the work. Handpicked crews, day and night,\n have been sending those letters to the trusting mothers. It's been\n ghastly, Delvin. Hard on the men, terribly hard. Undotted\ni\n's,\n misuse of tenses, deliberate misspellings. They take it out of an\n adult, especially an adult with a mind keen enough to get him into\n Interplanetary Security. We've limited the shifts to four hours per man\n per day. Otherwise, they'd all be gibbering by now!\"\n\n\n \"And your men haven't found out anything?\" I marvelled.\n\n\n Baxter shook his head.\n\n\n \"And you finally had to resort to the Brain, and it gave you my name,\n but no reason for it?\"", "\"And you recall the recent government-sponsored trip they had? To Mars\n and back, with the broadly-smiling government picking up the enormous\n tab?\"\n\n\n I detected a tinge of cynicism in his tone, but said nothing.\n\n\n \"What a gesture!\" Baxter went on, hardly speaking directly to me at\n all. \"Inter-nation harmony! Good will! If these mere boys can get\n together and travel the voids of space, then so can everyone else! Why\n should there be tensions between the various nations comprising the\n World Government, when there's none between these fine lads, one from\n every civilized nation on Earth?\"\n\n\n \"You sound disillusioned, sir,\" I interjected.\n\n\n He stared at me as though I'd just fallen in from the ceiling or\n somewhere. \"Huh? Oh, yes, Delvin, isn't it? Sorry, I got carried away.\n Where was I?\"", "He stared, then frowned, and thought hard. \"Yes, sir,\" he said,\n after a minute. \"Even twice that, with no trouble, but—\" He caught\n himself short. It didn't pay to be too curious about the aims of an\n Amnesty-bearer.\n\n\n \"It's all right, Anders. You've been a tremendous help. Just one thing.\n When you left Mars, you took off from the night side, didn't you?\"\n\n\n \"Why, yes, I did, sir. But how did you—?\"\n\n\n \"No matter, Anders. That'll be all.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" He saluted sharply and started off.", "\"Yes, sir. Even my secretary, Marge, whom I'd never in a million years\n think of looking at twice, except for business reasons, of course, has\n to stay out of my office when I'm working, or I can't function.\"\n\n\n \"You have my sympathy, son,\" Baxter said, not unkindly.\n\n\n \"Thank you, sir. It hasn't been easy.\"\n\n\n \"No, I don't imagine it has....\" Baxter was staring into some far-off\n distance. Then he remembered himself and blinked back to the present.\n \"Delvin,\" he said sharply. \"I'll come right to the point. This thing\n is.... You have been chosen for an extremely important mission.\"\n\n\n I couldn't have been more surprised had he announced my incipient\n maternity, but I was able to ask, \"Me? For Pete's sake, why, sir?\"", "Anders, after a puzzled frown, obediently threw open the doors of\n the riveted tiers of metal boxes along the rear wall; the wall next\n to the firing chambers, which I had no particular desire to visit. I\n glanced inside at the articles therein, and noted with interest their\n similarity.\n\n\n \"Now, then,\" I resumed, \"the thrust of this rocket to get from Mars to\n Earth is calculated with regard to the mass on board, is that correct?\"\n He nodded. \"Good, that clears up an important point. I'd also like to\n know if this rocket has a dehumidifying system to keep the cast-off\n moisture from the passengers out of the air?\"\n\n\n \"Well, sure, sir!\" said Anders. \"Otherwise, we'd all be swimming in our\n own sweat after a ten-hour trip across space!\"\n\n\n \"Have you checked the storage tanks?\" I asked. \"Or is the cast-off\n perspiration simply jetted into space?\"", "\"But that's impossible,\" I said, shaking my head against this\n disconcerting thought.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Baxter. \"That's what bothers me.\"\n3\nPhobos II\n, for obvious reasons, was berthed in a Top Security\n spaceport. Even so, they'd shuttled it into a hangar, safe from the\n eyes of even their own men, and as a final touch had hidden the ship's\n nameplate beneath magnetic repair-plates.\n\n\n I had a metal disk—bronze and red, the Security colors—insigniaed\n by Baxter and counterembossed with the President's special device, a\n small globe surmounted by clasping hands. It gave me authority to do\n anything. With such an identification disc, I could go to Times Square\n and start machine gunning the passers-by, and not one of New York's\n finest would raise a hand to stop me.", "Yes, parting. I was on my own. After all, with a Security disc—the\n Amnesty, they called it—such as I possessed, and a collapser, I could\n go anywhere, do anything, commandeer anything I might need. All with\n no questions asked. Needless to say, I was feeling pretty chipper as I\n entered the hangar housing\nPhobos II\n. At the moment, I was the most\n influential human being in the known universe.\n\n\n The pilot, as per my videophoned request, was waiting there for me. I\n saw him as I stepped into the cool shadows of the building from the hot\n yellow sunlight outside. He was tall, much taller than I, but he seemed\n nervous as hell. At least he was pacing back and forth amid a litter\n of half-smoked cigarette butts beside the gleaming tailfins of the\n spaceship, and a fuming butt was puckered into place in his mouth.", "\"And,\" I said, beginning to be fascinated by his bewildered manner,\n \"what came out?\"\n\n\n He looked at me for a long moment, then picked up that brochure again,\n and said, without referring to it, \"Jery Delvin, five foot eleven\n inches tall—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but read me the part where it says why I was picked,\" I said, a\n little exasperated.\n\n\n Baxter eyed me balefully, then skimmed the brochure through the air in\n my direction. I caught it just short of the carpet.\n\n\n \"If you can find it, I'll read it!\" he said, almost snarling.\n\n\n I looked over the sheet, then turned it over and scanned the black\n opposite side. \"All it gives is my description, governmental status,\n and address!\"" ], [ "\"Anders?\" I said, approaching to within five feet of him before\n halting, to get the best psychological effect from my appearance.\n\n\n He turned, saw me, and hurriedly spat the butt out onto the cement\n floor. \"Yes, sir!\" he said loudly, throwing me a quivering salute. His\n eyes were a bit wild as they took me in.", "He stared, then frowned, and thought hard. \"Yes, sir,\" he said,\n after a minute. \"Even twice that, with no trouble, but—\" He caught\n himself short. It didn't pay to be too curious about the aims of an\n Amnesty-bearer.\n\n\n \"It's all right, Anders. You've been a tremendous help. Just one thing.\n When you left Mars, you took off from the night side, didn't you?\"\n\n\n \"Why, yes, I did, sir. But how did you—?\"\n\n\n \"No matter, Anders. That'll be all.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" He saluted sharply and started off.", "\"Chow time, sir. That's when you expect to have the little—to have\n the kids in your hair, sir. Everyone wants his rations first—You know\n how kids are, sir. So I went to the galley and was about to open up\n the ration packs, when I noticed how damned quiet it was aboard. And\n especially funny that no one was in the galley waiting for me to start\n passing the stuff out.\"\n\n\n \"So you searched,\" I said.\n\n\n Anders nodded sorrowfully. \"Not a trace of 'em, sir. Just some of their\n junk left in their storage lockers.\"\n\n\n I raised my eyebrows. \"Really? I'd be interested in seeing this junk,\n Anders.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, sir. Right this way, sir. Watch out for these rungs, they're\n slippery.\"", "I ascended the retractable metal rungs that jutted from a point\n between the tailfins to the open airlock, twenty feet over ground\n level, and followed Anders inside the ship.\n\n\n I trailed Anders through the ship, from the pilot's compartment—a\n bewildering mass of dials, switches, signal lights and wire—through\n the galley into the troop section. It was a cramped cubicle housing a\n number of nylon-webbed foam rubber bunks. The bunks were empty, but I\n looked them over anyhow. I carefully tugged back the canvas covering\n that fitted envelope-fashion over a foam rubber pad, and ran my finger\n over the surface of the pad. It came away just slightly gritty.\n\n\n \"Uh-huh!\" I said, smiling. Anders just stared at me.\n\n\n I turned to the storage lockers. \"Let's see this junk they were\n suddenly deprived of.\"", "It was only a fraction of an instant between the time I saw them and\n the time they spoke to me, but in that miniscule interval I managed\n to retrace quite a bit of my lifetime up till that moment, seeking\n vainly for some reason why they'd be standing there, so terribly and\n inflexibly efficient looking. Mostly, I ran back over all the ads I'd\n created and/or okayed for Solar Sales, Inc. during my five years with\n the firm, trying to see just where I'd gone and shaken the security\n of the government. I couldn't find anything really incriminating,\n unless maybe it was that hair dye that unexpectedly turned bright green\n after six weeks in the hair, but that was the lab's fault, not mine.\n So I managed a weak smile toward the duo, and tried not to sweat too\n profusely.\n\n\n \"Jery Delvin?\" said the one on my left, a note of no-funny-business in\n his brusque baritone.", "\"Jery Delvin,\" he read, musingly and dispassionately. \"Five foot eleven\n inches tall, brown hair, slate-gray eyes. Citizen. Honest, sober,\n civic-minded, slightly antisocial....\"\n\n\n He looked at me, questioningly.\n\n\n \"I'd rather not discuss that, sir, if you don't mind.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mind if I do mind?\"\n\n\n \"Oh ... Oh, well if you put it like that. It's girls, sir. They block\n my mind. Ruin my work.\"\n\n\n \"I don't get you.\"\n\n\n \"Well, in my job—See, I've got this gift. I'm a spotter.\"\n\n\n \"A what?\"\n\n\n \"A spotter. I can't be fooled. By advertising. Or mostly anything else.\n Except girls.\"", "And well they might be. An Amnesty-bearer can suddenly decide a subject\n is not answering questions to his satisfaction and simply blast the\n annoying party to atoms. It makes for straight responses. Of course,\n I was dressing the part, in a way. I wore the Amnesty suspended by a\n thin golden chain from my neck, and for costume I wore a raven-black\n blouse and matching uniform trousers and boots. I must have looked\n quite sinister. I'm under six feet, but I'm angular and wiry. Thus,\n in ominous black, with an Amnesty on my breast and a collapser in\n my holster, I was a sight to strike even honest citizens into quick\n examinations of conscience. I felt a little silly, but the outfit was\n Baxter's idea.\n\n\n \"I understand you were aboard the\nPhobos II\nwhen the incident\n occurred?\" I said sternly, which was unusual for my wonted demeanor.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" he replied swiftly, at stiff attention.", "Baxter smiled. \"No chance of that, Jery. We didn't leave it up to any\n committee or bureau or any other faction to do the picking. Hell, that\n would have put us right back where we'd been before. No, we left it up\n to the Brain. We'd find ourselves in a tight situation, and the Brain\n after being fed the data, would come up with either a solution, or a\n name.\"\n\n\n I stared at him. \"Then, when I was here before, I was here solely to\n receive the Amnesty, is that it?\"\n\n\n Baxter nodded. \"The Brain just picks the men. Then we tell the men the\n situation, hand over the Amnesty, and pray.\"\n\n\n I had a sudden thought. \"Say, what happens if two men are selected by\n the Brain? Who has authority over whom?\"", "\"And,\" I said, beginning to be fascinated by his bewildered manner,\n \"what came out?\"\n\n\n He looked at me for a long moment, then picked up that brochure again,\n and said, without referring to it, \"Jery Delvin, five foot eleven\n inches tall—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but read me the part where it says why I was picked,\" I said, a\n little exasperated.\n\n\n Baxter eyed me balefully, then skimmed the brochure through the air in\n my direction. I caught it just short of the carpet.\n\n\n \"If you can find it, I'll read it!\" he said, almost snarling.\n\n\n I looked over the sheet, then turned it over and scanned the black\n opposite side. \"All it gives is my description, governmental status,\n and address!\"", "Anders, after a puzzled frown, obediently threw open the doors of\n the riveted tiers of metal boxes along the rear wall; the wall next\n to the firing chambers, which I had no particular desire to visit. I\n glanced inside at the articles therein, and noted with interest their\n similarity.\n\n\n \"Now, then,\" I resumed, \"the thrust of this rocket to get from Mars to\n Earth is calculated with regard to the mass on board, is that correct?\"\n He nodded. \"Good, that clears up an important point. I'd also like to\n know if this rocket has a dehumidifying system to keep the cast-off\n moisture from the passengers out of the air?\"\n\n\n \"Well, sure, sir!\" said Anders. \"Otherwise, we'd all be swimming in our\n own sweat after a ten-hour trip across space!\"\n\n\n \"Have you checked the storage tanks?\" I asked. \"Or is the cast-off\n perspiration simply jetted into space?\"", "She was staring after me, open-mouthed, as the door slid neatly shut\n behind us.\n\n\n \"\nW-Will\nI be back?\" I asked desperately, as we waited for the\n elevator. \"At all? Am I under arrest? What's up, anyhow?\"\n\n\n \"You will be informed,\" said the man again. I had to let it go at that.\n Security men were not hired for their loquaciousness. They had a car\n waiting at the curb downstairs, in the No Parking zone. The cop on the\n beat very politely opened the door for them when we got there. Those\n red-and-bronze uniforms carry an awful lot of weight. Not to mention\n the golden bulk of their holstered collapsers.\n\n\n There was nothing for me to do but sweat it out and to try and enjoy\n the ride, wherever we were going.\n\"\nYou\nare Jery Delvin?\"", "Baxter grimaced and shivered. \"Don't even think such a thing! Even\n your mentioning such a contingency gives me a small migraine. It'd be\n unprecedented in the history of the Brain or the Amnesty.\" He grinned,\n suddenly. \"Besides, it can't happen. There's only one of these—\" he\n tapped the medallion gently \"—in existence, Jery. So we couldn't have\n such a situation!\"\n\n\n I sank back into the contour chair, and glanced at my watch. Much too\n late to go back to work. I'd done a lot in one day, I reasoned. Well,\n the thing was out of my hands. Baxter had the information I'd come\n up with, and it had been coded and fed to the Brain. As soon as the\n solution came through, I could be on my way back to the world of hard\n and soft sell.", "I started back for Interplanetary Security, and my second—and I hoped,\n last—interview with Chief Baxter. I had a slight inkling why the Brain\n had chosen me; because, in the affair of the missing Space Scouts, my\n infallible talent for spotting the True within the Apparent had come\n through nicely. I had found a very interesting clinker.\n4\n\"Strange,\" I remarked to Chief Baxter when I was seated once again in\n his office, opposite his newly replaced desk. \"I hardly acted like\n myself out at that airfield. I was brusque, highhanded, austere, almost\n malevolent with the pilot. And I'm ordinarily on the shy side, as a\n matter of fact.\"", "I folded gingerly at knees and hips and slid back into the chair,\n pressing my perspiring palms against the sides of my pants to get rid\n of their uncomfortably slippery feel. \"Thank you, sir.\"\n\n\n There was a silence, during which I breathed uneasily, and a bit too\n loudly. Baxter seemed to be trying to say something.\n\n\n \"I suppose you're wondering why I've called—\" he started, then stopped\n short and flushed with embarrassment. I felt a sympathetic hot wave\n flooding my own features. A copy chief in an advertising company almost\n always reacts to an obvious cliche.\n\n\n Then, with something like a look of relief on his blunt face, he\n snatched up a brochure from his kidney-shaped desktop and his eyes\n raced over the lettering on its face.", "Baxter cupped his slightly jowled cheeks in his hands and propped his\n elbows on the desktop, suddenly slipping out of his high position to\n talk to me man-to-man. \"Look, son, an adding machine—which is a minor\n form of an electronic brain, and even works on the same principle—can\n tell you that two and two make four. But can it tell you why?\n\n\n \"Well, no, but—\"\n\n\n \"That, in a nutshell is our problem. We coded and fed to the Brain\n every shred of information at our disposal; the ages of the children,\n for instance, and all their physical attributes, and where they were\n last seen, and what they were wearing. Hell, everything! The machine\n took the factors, weighed them, popped them through its billions of\n relays and tubes, and out of the end of the answer slot popped a single\n sheet. The one you just saw. Your dossier.\"", "\"It is dangerous, of course, but it's vitally necessary. You're young,\n Jery Delvin, and even the finest history course available these days\n is slanted in favor of World Government. So you have no idea how tough\n things were before the Amnesty came along. Ever hear of red tape?\"\n\n\n I shook my head. \"No, I don't believe so. Unless it had something to do\n with the former communist menace? They called themselves the Reds, I\n believe....\"", "\"... Yes,\" I said, some terrified portion of my mind waiting\n masochistically for them to draw their collapsers and reduce me to a\n heap of hot protons.\n\n\n \"Come with us,\" said his companion. I stared at him, then glanced\n hopelessly at the jumble of things on my desk. \"Never mind that stuff,\"\n he added.\n\n\n I rose from my place, slipped my jacket from its hook, and started\n across the office toward the door, each of them falling into rigid step\n beside me. Marge, my secretary, stood wide-eyed as we passed through\n her office, heading for the hall exit.\n\n\n \"Mr. Delvin,\" she said, her voice a wispy croak. \"When will you be\n back? The Plasti-Flex man is waiting for your—\"\n\n\n I opened my mouth, but one of the security men cut in.\n\n\n \"You will be informed,\" he said to Marge.", "Jery Delvin had a most unusual talent. He could detect the flaws in\n any scheme almost on sight—even where they had eluded the best brains\n in the ad agency where he worked. So when the Chief of World Security\n told him that he had been selected as the answer to the Solar System's\n greatest mystery, Jery assumed that it was because of his mental\n agility.\n\n\n But when he got to Mars to find out why fifteen boys had vanished from\n a spaceship in mid-space, he found out that even his quick mind needed\n time to pierce the maze of out-of-this-world double-dealing. For Jery\n had become a walking bomb, and when he set himself off, it would be the\n end of the whole puzzle of THE SECRET MARTIANS—with Jery as the first\n to go!", "Yes, parting. I was on my own. After all, with a Security disc—the\n Amnesty, they called it—such as I possessed, and a collapser, I could\n go anywhere, do anything, commandeer anything I might need. All with\n no questions asked. Needless to say, I was feeling pretty chipper as I\n entered the hangar housing\nPhobos II\n. At the moment, I was the most\n influential human being in the known universe.\n\n\n The pilot, as per my videophoned request, was waiting there for me. I\n saw him as I stepped into the cool shadows of the building from the hot\n yellow sunlight outside. He was tall, much taller than I, but he seemed\n nervous as hell. At least he was pacing back and forth amid a litter\n of half-smoked cigarette butts beside the gleaming tailfins of the\n spaceship, and a fuming butt was puckered into place in his mouth.", "\"I don't really have any details,\" I said, and waited for him to take\n his cue. As an afterthought, to help him talk, I added, \"At ease, by\n the way, Anders.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, sir,\" he said, not actually loosening much in his rigid\n position, but his face looking happier. \"See, I was supposed to pilot\n the kids back here from Mars when their trip was done, and—\" He gave\n a helpless shrug. \"I dunno, sir. I got 'em all aboard, made sure they\n were secure in the takeoff racks, and then I set my coordinates for\n Earth and took off. Just a run-of-the-mill takeoff, sir.\"\n\n\n \"And when did you notice they were missing?\" I asked, looking at the\n metallic bulk of the ship and wondering what alien force could snatch\n fifteen fair-sized young boys through its impervious hull without\n leaving a trace." ], [ "I folded gingerly at knees and hips and slid back into the chair,\n pressing my perspiring palms against the sides of my pants to get rid\n of their uncomfortably slippery feel. \"Thank you, sir.\"\n\n\n There was a silence, during which I breathed uneasily, and a bit too\n loudly. Baxter seemed to be trying to say something.\n\n\n \"I suppose you're wondering why I've called—\" he started, then stopped\n short and flushed with embarrassment. I felt a sympathetic hot wave\n flooding my own features. A copy chief in an advertising company almost\n always reacts to an obvious cliche.\n\n\n Then, with something like a look of relief on his blunt face, he\n snatched up a brochure from his kidney-shaped desktop and his eyes\n raced over the lettering on its face.", "Baxter grimaced and shivered. \"Don't even think such a thing! Even\n your mentioning such a contingency gives me a small migraine. It'd be\n unprecedented in the history of the Brain or the Amnesty.\" He grinned,\n suddenly. \"Besides, it can't happen. There's only one of these—\" he\n tapped the medallion gently \"—in existence, Jery. So we couldn't have\n such a situation!\"\n\n\n I sank back into the contour chair, and glanced at my watch. Much too\n late to go back to work. I'd done a lot in one day, I reasoned. Well,\n the thing was out of my hands. Baxter had the information I'd come\n up with, and it had been coded and fed to the Brain. As soon as the\n solution came through, I could be on my way back to the world of hard\n and soft sell.", "It was only a fraction of an instant between the time I saw them and\n the time they spoke to me, but in that miniscule interval I managed\n to retrace quite a bit of my lifetime up till that moment, seeking\n vainly for some reason why they'd be standing there, so terribly and\n inflexibly efficient looking. Mostly, I ran back over all the ads I'd\n created and/or okayed for Solar Sales, Inc. during my five years with\n the firm, trying to see just where I'd gone and shaken the security\n of the government. I couldn't find anything really incriminating,\n unless maybe it was that hair dye that unexpectedly turned bright green\n after six weeks in the hair, but that was the lab's fault, not mine.\n So I managed a weak smile toward the duo, and tried not to sweat too\n profusely.\n\n\n \"Jery Delvin?\" said the one on my left, a note of no-funny-business in\n his brusque baritone.", "Baxter smiled. \"No chance of that, Jery. We didn't leave it up to any\n committee or bureau or any other faction to do the picking. Hell, that\n would have put us right back where we'd been before. No, we left it up\n to the Brain. We'd find ourselves in a tight situation, and the Brain\n after being fed the data, would come up with either a solution, or a\n name.\"\n\n\n I stared at him. \"Then, when I was here before, I was here solely to\n receive the Amnesty, is that it?\"\n\n\n Baxter nodded. \"The Brain just picks the men. Then we tell the men the\n situation, hand over the Amnesty, and pray.\"\n\n\n I had a sudden thought. \"Say, what happens if two men are selected by\n the Brain? Who has authority over whom?\"", "She was staring after me, open-mouthed, as the door slid neatly shut\n behind us.\n\n\n \"\nW-Will\nI be back?\" I asked desperately, as we waited for the\n elevator. \"At all? Am I under arrest? What's up, anyhow?\"\n\n\n \"You will be informed,\" said the man again. I had to let it go at that.\n Security men were not hired for their loquaciousness. They had a car\n waiting at the curb downstairs, in the No Parking zone. The cop on the\n beat very politely opened the door for them when we got there. Those\n red-and-bronze uniforms carry an awful lot of weight. Not to mention\n the golden bulk of their holstered collapsers.\n\n\n There was nothing for me to do but sweat it out and to try and enjoy\n the ride, wherever we were going.\n\"\nYou\nare Jery Delvin?\"", "\"... Yes,\" I said, some terrified portion of my mind waiting\n masochistically for them to draw their collapsers and reduce me to a\n heap of hot protons.\n\n\n \"Come with us,\" said his companion. I stared at him, then glanced\n hopelessly at the jumble of things on my desk. \"Never mind that stuff,\"\n he added.\n\n\n I rose from my place, slipped my jacket from its hook, and started\n across the office toward the door, each of them falling into rigid step\n beside me. Marge, my secretary, stood wide-eyed as we passed through\n her office, heading for the hall exit.\n\n\n \"Mr. Delvin,\" she said, her voice a wispy croak. \"When will you be\n back? The Plasti-Flex man is waiting for your—\"\n\n\n I opened my mouth, but one of the security men cut in.\n\n\n \"You will be informed,\" he said to Marge.", "And well they might be. An Amnesty-bearer can suddenly decide a subject\n is not answering questions to his satisfaction and simply blast the\n annoying party to atoms. It makes for straight responses. Of course,\n I was dressing the part, in a way. I wore the Amnesty suspended by a\n thin golden chain from my neck, and for costume I wore a raven-black\n blouse and matching uniform trousers and boots. I must have looked\n quite sinister. I'm under six feet, but I'm angular and wiry. Thus,\n in ominous black, with an Amnesty on my breast and a collapser in\n my holster, I was a sight to strike even honest citizens into quick\n examinations of conscience. I felt a little silly, but the outfit was\n Baxter's idea.\n\n\n \"I understand you were aboard the\nPhobos II\nwhen the incident\n occurred?\" I said sternly, which was unusual for my wonted demeanor.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" he replied swiftly, at stiff attention.", "Baxter cupped his slightly jowled cheeks in his hands and propped his\n elbows on the desktop, suddenly slipping out of his high position to\n talk to me man-to-man. \"Look, son, an adding machine—which is a minor\n form of an electronic brain, and even works on the same principle—can\n tell you that two and two make four. But can it tell you why?\n\n\n \"Well, no, but—\"\n\n\n \"That, in a nutshell is our problem. We coded and fed to the Brain\n every shred of information at our disposal; the ages of the children,\n for instance, and all their physical attributes, and where they were\n last seen, and what they were wearing. Hell, everything! The machine\n took the factors, weighed them, popped them through its billions of\n relays and tubes, and out of the end of the answer slot popped a single\n sheet. The one you just saw. Your dossier.\"", "The man who spoke seemed more than surprised; he seemed stunned. His\n voice held an incredulous squeak, a squeak which would have amazed his\n subordinates. It certainly amazed me. Because the speaker was Philip\n Baxter, Chief of Interplanetary Security, second only to the World\n President in power, and not even that in matters of security. I managed\n to nod.\n\n\n He shook his white-maned head, slowly. \"I don't believe it.\"\n\n\n \"But I am, sir,\" I insisted doggedly.\n\n\n Baxter pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes for a moment,\n then sighed, grinned wryly, and waggled an index finger at an empty\n plastic contour chair.\n\n\n \"I guess maybe you are at that, son. Sit down, sit down.\"", "I started back for Interplanetary Security, and my second—and I hoped,\n last—interview with Chief Baxter. I had a slight inkling why the Brain\n had chosen me; because, in the affair of the missing Space Scouts, my\n infallible talent for spotting the True within the Apparent had come\n through nicely. I had found a very interesting clinker.\n4\n\"Strange,\" I remarked to Chief Baxter when I was seated once again in\n his office, opposite his newly replaced desk. \"I hardly acted like\n myself out at that airfield. I was brusque, highhanded, austere, almost\n malevolent with the pilot. And I'm ordinarily on the shy side, as a\n matter of fact.\"", "\"Anders?\" I said, approaching to within five feet of him before\n halting, to get the best psychological effect from my appearance.\n\n\n He turned, saw me, and hurriedly spat the butt out onto the cement\n floor. \"Yes, sir!\" he said loudly, throwing me a quivering salute. His\n eyes were a bit wild as they took me in.", "\"You understand,\" said Baxter suddenly, \"that you're to say nothing\n whatever about the disappearance of the Space Scouts until this office\n makes the news public? You know what would happen if this thing should\n leak!\"\n\n\n The intercom on Baxter's desk suddenly buzzed, and a bright red light\n flashed on. \"Ah!\" he said, thumbing a knob. \"Here we go, at last!\"\n\n\n As he exerted pressure on the knob, a thin slit in the side of the\n intercom began feeding out a long sheet of paper; the new answer from\n the Brain. It reached a certain length, then was automatically sheared\n off within the intercom, and the sheet fell gently to the desktop.\n Baxter picked it up and swiftly scanned its surface. A look of dismay\n overrode his erstwhile genial features.\n\n\n I had a horrible suspicion. \"Not again?\" I said softly.", "Baxter swore under his breath. Then he reached across the desktop and\n tossed me the Amnesty.", "\"And,\" I said, beginning to be fascinated by his bewildered manner,\n \"what came out?\"\n\n\n He looked at me for a long moment, then picked up that brochure again,\n and said, without referring to it, \"Jery Delvin, five foot eleven\n inches tall—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but read me the part where it says why I was picked,\" I said, a\n little exasperated.\n\n\n Baxter eyed me balefully, then skimmed the brochure through the air in\n my direction. I caught it just short of the carpet.\n\n\n \"If you can find it, I'll read it!\" he said, almost snarling.\n\n\n I looked over the sheet, then turned it over and scanned the black\n opposite side. \"All it gives is my description, governmental status,\n and address!\"", "\"Yes, sir. Even my secretary, Marge, whom I'd never in a million years\n think of looking at twice, except for business reasons, of course, has\n to stay out of my office when I'm working, or I can't function.\"\n\n\n \"You have my sympathy, son,\" Baxter said, not unkindly.\n\n\n \"Thank you, sir. It hasn't been easy.\"\n\n\n \"No, I don't imagine it has....\" Baxter was staring into some far-off\n distance. Then he remembered himself and blinked back to the present.\n \"Delvin,\" he said sharply. \"I'll come right to the point. This thing\n is.... You have been chosen for an extremely important mission.\"\n\n\n I couldn't have been more surprised had he announced my incipient\n maternity, but I was able to ask, \"Me? For Pete's sake, why, sir?\"", "\"Uh-huh,\" Baxter grunted laconically. \"It amuses you, does it?\" The\n smile was still on his lips, but there was a grimness in the glitter of\n his narrowing eyes.\n\n\n \"Not really,\" I said hastily. \"It baffles me, to be frank.\"\n\n\n \"If you're sitting there in that hopeful stance awaiting some sort of\n explanation, you may as well relax,\" Baxter said shortly. \"I have none\n to make. IC had none to make. Damn it all to hell!\" He brought a meaty\n fist down on the desktop. \"No one has an explanation! All we know is\n that the Brain always picks the right man.\"\n\n\n I let this sink in, then asked, \"What made you ask for a man in\n the first place, sir? I've always understood that your own staff\n represented some of the finest minds—\"", "I sat back, feeling much better. \"That's right, sir.\"\n\n\n Then Baxter frowned again. \"But what's this about girls?\"\n\n\n \"They—they block my thinking, sir, that's all. Why, take that example\n I just mentioned. In plain writing, I caught the clinker in one-tenth\n of a second. Then they handed me a layout with a picture of a lawyer\n dictating notes to his secretary on it. Her legs were crossed. Nice\n legs. Gorgeous legs....\"\n\n\n \"How long that time, Delvin?\"\n\n\n \"Indefinite. Till they took the girl away, sir.\"\n\n\n Baxter cleared his throat loudly. \"I understand, at last. Hence your\n slight antisocial rating. You avoid women in order to keep your job.\"", "Yes, parting. I was on my own. After all, with a Security disc—the\n Amnesty, they called it—such as I possessed, and a collapser, I could\n go anywhere, do anything, commandeer anything I might need. All with\n no questions asked. Needless to say, I was feeling pretty chipper as I\n entered the hangar housing\nPhobos II\n. At the moment, I was the most\n influential human being in the known universe.\n\n\n The pilot, as per my videophoned request, was waiting there for me. I\n saw him as I stepped into the cool shadows of the building from the hot\n yellow sunlight outside. He was tall, much taller than I, but he seemed\n nervous as hell. At least he was pacing back and forth amid a litter\n of half-smoked cigarette butts beside the gleaming tailfins of the\n spaceship, and a fuming butt was puckered into place in his mouth.", "He stared, then frowned, and thought hard. \"Yes, sir,\" he said,\n after a minute. \"Even twice that, with no trouble, but—\" He caught\n himself short. It didn't pay to be too curious about the aims of an\n Amnesty-bearer.\n\n\n \"It's all right, Anders. You've been a tremendous help. Just one thing.\n When you left Mars, you took off from the night side, didn't you?\"\n\n\n \"Why, yes, I did, sir. But how did you—?\"\n\n\n \"No matter, Anders. That'll be all.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" He saluted sharply and started off.", "And, snugly enholstered, I carried a collapser, the restricted weapon\n given only to Security Agents, so deadly was its molecule-disrupting\n beam. Baxter had spent a tremulous hour showing me how to use the\n weapon, and especially how to turn the beam off. I'd finally gotten the\n hang of it, though not before half his kidney-shaped desk had flashed\n into nothingness, along with a good-sized swath of carpeting and six\n inches of concrete floor.\n\n\n His parting injunction had been. \"Be careful, Delvin, huh?\"" ], [ "Baxter grimaced and shivered. \"Don't even think such a thing! Even\n your mentioning such a contingency gives me a small migraine. It'd be\n unprecedented in the history of the Brain or the Amnesty.\" He grinned,\n suddenly. \"Besides, it can't happen. There's only one of these—\" he\n tapped the medallion gently \"—in existence, Jery. So we couldn't have\n such a situation!\"\n\n\n I sank back into the contour chair, and glanced at my watch. Much too\n late to go back to work. I'd done a lot in one day, I reasoned. Well,\n the thing was out of my hands. Baxter had the information I'd come\n up with, and it had been coded and fed to the Brain. As soon as the\n solution came through, I could be on my way back to the world of hard\n and soft sell.", "She was staring after me, open-mouthed, as the door slid neatly shut\n behind us.\n\n\n \"\nW-Will\nI be back?\" I asked desperately, as we waited for the\n elevator. \"At all? Am I under arrest? What's up, anyhow?\"\n\n\n \"You will be informed,\" said the man again. I had to let it go at that.\n Security men were not hired for their loquaciousness. They had a car\n waiting at the curb downstairs, in the No Parking zone. The cop on the\n beat very politely opened the door for them when we got there. Those\n red-and-bronze uniforms carry an awful lot of weight. Not to mention\n the golden bulk of their holstered collapsers.\n\n\n There was nothing for me to do but sweat it out and to try and enjoy\n the ride, wherever we were going.\n\"\nYou\nare Jery Delvin?\"", "\"Jery Delvin,\" he read, musingly and dispassionately. \"Five foot eleven\n inches tall, brown hair, slate-gray eyes. Citizen. Honest, sober,\n civic-minded, slightly antisocial....\"\n\n\n He looked at me, questioningly.\n\n\n \"I'd rather not discuss that, sir, if you don't mind.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mind if I do mind?\"\n\n\n \"Oh ... Oh, well if you put it like that. It's girls, sir. They block\n my mind. Ruin my work.\"\n\n\n \"I don't get you.\"\n\n\n \"Well, in my job—See, I've got this gift. I'm a spotter.\"\n\n\n \"A what?\"\n\n\n \"A spotter. I can't be fooled. By advertising. Or mostly anything else.\n Except girls.\"", "It was only a fraction of an instant between the time I saw them and\n the time they spoke to me, but in that miniscule interval I managed\n to retrace quite a bit of my lifetime up till that moment, seeking\n vainly for some reason why they'd be standing there, so terribly and\n inflexibly efficient looking. Mostly, I ran back over all the ads I'd\n created and/or okayed for Solar Sales, Inc. during my five years with\n the firm, trying to see just where I'd gone and shaken the security\n of the government. I couldn't find anything really incriminating,\n unless maybe it was that hair dye that unexpectedly turned bright green\n after six weeks in the hair, but that was the lab's fault, not mine.\n So I managed a weak smile toward the duo, and tried not to sweat too\n profusely.\n\n\n \"Jery Delvin?\" said the one on my left, a note of no-funny-business in\n his brusque baritone.", "Baxter smiled. \"No chance of that, Jery. We didn't leave it up to any\n committee or bureau or any other faction to do the picking. Hell, that\n would have put us right back where we'd been before. No, we left it up\n to the Brain. We'd find ourselves in a tight situation, and the Brain\n after being fed the data, would come up with either a solution, or a\n name.\"\n\n\n I stared at him. \"Then, when I was here before, I was here solely to\n receive the Amnesty, is that it?\"\n\n\n Baxter nodded. \"The Brain just picks the men. Then we tell the men the\n situation, hand over the Amnesty, and pray.\"\n\n\n I had a sudden thought. \"Say, what happens if two men are selected by\n the Brain? Who has authority over whom?\"", "\"... Yes,\" I said, some terrified portion of my mind waiting\n masochistically for them to draw their collapsers and reduce me to a\n heap of hot protons.\n\n\n \"Come with us,\" said his companion. I stared at him, then glanced\n hopelessly at the jumble of things on my desk. \"Never mind that stuff,\"\n he added.\n\n\n I rose from my place, slipped my jacket from its hook, and started\n across the office toward the door, each of them falling into rigid step\n beside me. Marge, my secretary, stood wide-eyed as we passed through\n her office, heading for the hall exit.\n\n\n \"Mr. Delvin,\" she said, her voice a wispy croak. \"When will you be\n back? The Plasti-Flex man is waiting for your—\"\n\n\n I opened my mouth, but one of the security men cut in.\n\n\n \"You will be informed,\" he said to Marge.", "And well they might be. An Amnesty-bearer can suddenly decide a subject\n is not answering questions to his satisfaction and simply blast the\n annoying party to atoms. It makes for straight responses. Of course,\n I was dressing the part, in a way. I wore the Amnesty suspended by a\n thin golden chain from my neck, and for costume I wore a raven-black\n blouse and matching uniform trousers and boots. I must have looked\n quite sinister. I'm under six feet, but I'm angular and wiry. Thus,\n in ominous black, with an Amnesty on my breast and a collapser in\n my holster, I was a sight to strike even honest citizens into quick\n examinations of conscience. I felt a little silly, but the outfit was\n Baxter's idea.\n\n\n \"I understand you were aboard the\nPhobos II\nwhen the incident\n occurred?\" I said sternly, which was unusual for my wonted demeanor.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" he replied swiftly, at stiff attention.", "\"And,\" I said, beginning to be fascinated by his bewildered manner,\n \"what came out?\"\n\n\n He looked at me for a long moment, then picked up that brochure again,\n and said, without referring to it, \"Jery Delvin, five foot eleven\n inches tall—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but read me the part where it says why I was picked,\" I said, a\n little exasperated.\n\n\n Baxter eyed me balefully, then skimmed the brochure through the air in\n my direction. I caught it just short of the carpet.\n\n\n \"If you can find it, I'll read it!\" he said, almost snarling.\n\n\n I looked over the sheet, then turned it over and scanned the black\n opposite side. \"All it gives is my description, governmental status,\n and address!\"", "\"It is dangerous, of course, but it's vitally necessary. You're young,\n Jery Delvin, and even the finest history course available these days\n is slanted in favor of World Government. So you have no idea how tough\n things were before the Amnesty came along. Ever hear of red tape?\"\n\n\n I shook my head. \"No, I don't believe so. Unless it had something to do\n with the former communist menace? They called themselves the Reds, I\n believe....\"", "\"Chow time, sir. That's when you expect to have the little—to have\n the kids in your hair, sir. Everyone wants his rations first—You know\n how kids are, sir. So I went to the galley and was about to open up\n the ration packs, when I noticed how damned quiet it was aboard. And\n especially funny that no one was in the galley waiting for me to start\n passing the stuff out.\"\n\n\n \"So you searched,\" I said.\n\n\n Anders nodded sorrowfully. \"Not a trace of 'em, sir. Just some of their\n junk left in their storage lockers.\"\n\n\n I raised my eyebrows. \"Really? I'd be interested in seeing this junk,\n Anders.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, sir. Right this way, sir. Watch out for these rungs, they're\n slippery.\"", "\"Anders?\" I said, approaching to within five feet of him before\n halting, to get the best psychological effect from my appearance.\n\n\n He turned, saw me, and hurriedly spat the butt out onto the cement\n floor. \"Yes, sir!\" he said loudly, throwing me a quivering salute. His\n eyes were a bit wild as they took me in.", "Baxter cupped his slightly jowled cheeks in his hands and propped his\n elbows on the desktop, suddenly slipping out of his high position to\n talk to me man-to-man. \"Look, son, an adding machine—which is a minor\n form of an electronic brain, and even works on the same principle—can\n tell you that two and two make four. But can it tell you why?\n\n\n \"Well, no, but—\"\n\n\n \"That, in a nutshell is our problem. We coded and fed to the Brain\n every shred of information at our disposal; the ages of the children,\n for instance, and all their physical attributes, and where they were\n last seen, and what they were wearing. Hell, everything! The machine\n took the factors, weighed them, popped them through its billions of\n relays and tubes, and out of the end of the answer slot popped a single\n sheet. The one you just saw. Your dossier.\"", "He stared, then frowned, and thought hard. \"Yes, sir,\" he said,\n after a minute. \"Even twice that, with no trouble, but—\" He caught\n himself short. It didn't pay to be too curious about the aims of an\n Amnesty-bearer.\n\n\n \"It's all right, Anders. You've been a tremendous help. Just one thing.\n When you left Mars, you took off from the night side, didn't you?\"\n\n\n \"Why, yes, I did, sir. But how did you—?\"\n\n\n \"No matter, Anders. That'll be all.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" He saluted sharply and started off.", "\"It's the Amnesty that does it,\" he said, gesturing toward the disc. It\n lay on his desk, now, along with the collapser. I felt, with the new\n information I'd garnered, that my work was done, and that the new data\n fed into the Brain would produce some other results, not involving me.\n\n\n I looked at the Amnesty, then nodded. \"Kind of gets you, after awhile.\n To know that you are the most influential person in creation is to\n automatically act the part. A shame, in a way.\"\n\n\n \"The hell it is!\" Baxter snapped. \"Good grief, man, why'd you think the\n Amnesty was created in the first place?\"\n\n\n I sat up straight and scratched the back of my head. \"Now you mention\n it, I really don't know. It seems a pretty dangerous thing to have\n about, the way people jump when they see it.\"", "He waved me silent. \"No connection at all, son. No, red tape was, well,\n involvement. Forms to be signed, certain factors to be considered,\n protocol to be dealt with, government agencies to be checked with,\n classifications, bureaus, sub-bureaus, congressional committees. It\n was impossible, Jery, my boy, to get anything done whatsoever without\n consulting someone else. And the time lag and paperwork involved made\n accurate and swift action impossible, sometimes. What we needed, of\n course, was a person who could simply have all authority, in order to\n save the sometimes disastrous delays. So we came up with the Amnesty.\"\n\n\n \"But the danger. If you should pick the wrong man—\"", "Jery Delvin had a most unusual talent. He could detect the flaws in\n any scheme almost on sight—even where they had eluded the best brains\n in the ad agency where he worked. So when the Chief of World Security\n told him that he had been selected as the answer to the Solar System's\n greatest mystery, Jery assumed that it was because of his mental\n agility.\n\n\n But when he got to Mars to find out why fifteen boys had vanished from\n a spaceship in mid-space, he found out that even his quick mind needed\n time to pierce the maze of out-of-this-world double-dealing. For Jery\n had become a walking bomb, and when he set himself off, it would be the\n end of the whole puzzle of THE SECRET MARTIANS—with Jery as the first\n to go!", "I folded gingerly at knees and hips and slid back into the chair,\n pressing my perspiring palms against the sides of my pants to get rid\n of their uncomfortably slippery feel. \"Thank you, sir.\"\n\n\n There was a silence, during which I breathed uneasily, and a bit too\n loudly. Baxter seemed to be trying to say something.\n\n\n \"I suppose you're wondering why I've called—\" he started, then stopped\n short and flushed with embarrassment. I felt a sympathetic hot wave\n flooding my own features. A copy chief in an advertising company almost\n always reacts to an obvious cliche.\n\n\n Then, with something like a look of relief on his blunt face, he\n snatched up a brochure from his kidney-shaped desktop and his eyes\n raced over the lettering on its face.", "\"You understand,\" said Baxter suddenly, \"that you're to say nothing\n whatever about the disappearance of the Space Scouts until this office\n makes the news public? You know what would happen if this thing should\n leak!\"\n\n\n The intercom on Baxter's desk suddenly buzzed, and a bright red light\n flashed on. \"Ah!\" he said, thumbing a knob. \"Here we go, at last!\"\n\n\n As he exerted pressure on the knob, a thin slit in the side of the\n intercom began feeding out a long sheet of paper; the new answer from\n the Brain. It reached a certain length, then was automatically sheared\n off within the intercom, and the sheet fell gently to the desktop.\n Baxter picked it up and swiftly scanned its surface. A look of dismay\n overrode his erstwhile genial features.\n\n\n I had a horrible suspicion. \"Not again?\" I said softly.", "Yes, parting. I was on my own. After all, with a Security disc—the\n Amnesty, they called it—such as I possessed, and a collapser, I could\n go anywhere, do anything, commandeer anything I might need. All with\n no questions asked. Needless to say, I was feeling pretty chipper as I\n entered the hangar housing\nPhobos II\n. At the moment, I was the most\n influential human being in the known universe.\n\n\n The pilot, as per my videophoned request, was waiting there for me. I\n saw him as I stepped into the cool shadows of the building from the hot\n yellow sunlight outside. He was tall, much taller than I, but he seemed\n nervous as hell. At least he was pacing back and forth amid a litter\n of half-smoked cigarette butts beside the gleaming tailfins of the\n spaceship, and a fuming butt was puckered into place in his mouth.", "\"You were telling about how this gesture, the WG sending these kids\n off for an extraterrestrial romp, will cement relations between those\n nations who have remained hostile despite the unification of all\n governments on Earth. Personally, I think it was a pretty good idea,\n myself. Everybody likes kids. Take this jam we were trying to push.\n Pomegranate Nectar, it was called. Well, sir, it just wouldn't sell,\n and then we got this red-headed kid with freckles like confetti all\n over his slightly bucktoothed face, and we—Sir?\"\n\n\n I'd paused, because he was staring at me like a man on the brink of\n apoplexy. I swallowed, and tried to look relaxed.\n\n\n After a moment, he found his voice. \"To go on, Delvin. Do you recall\n what happened to the Space Scouts last week?\"" ] ]
train	20026	[ "What doesn't the author believe about Bauer?", "What is a similarity between Forbes and Bauer?", "What doesn't the author believe about John McCain?", "How does the author seem to feel about the upcoming presidential race?", "Who does the author think will win?" ]	[ [ "Forbes is Bauer's current competition", "Bauer is able to spin results in his favor", "he is pro-choice and a moderate conservative", "he is an underdog because of his inexperience" ], [ "they are considered underdogs in the race", "the media attention they're receiving", "their political beliefs", "their upbringing" ], [ "he was trying to send a message about Ames being unimportant", "he had a lot of courage and cunning to skip over Ames", "he's the only experienced political candidate in the running", "McCain could afford to miss Ames because of his support in other states" ], [ "surprised by the atypical political happenings", "excited to see how the contestants \"battle\"", "confident that it will be a close race between the four", "convinced that he already knows how the race will end" ], [ "Dole - she had feminism and and a new set of voters behind her", "Forbes - he's the best conservative and has the most money", "Bush - he's only discussed as the competition, implying that nothing more needs to be said", "McCain - he's so good, he didn't need to participate at Ames" ] ]	[ 3, 3, 3, 2, 3 ]	[ 1, 0, 1, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "1. Buchanan will defect. Since Buchanan's combativeness and loyal base make him hard to write off as a candidate, his rivals have persuaded the media at least to write him off as a Republican by inferring that his low score at Ames will prompt him to transfer to the Reform Party. The more Buchanan fends off comparisons to Bauer by emphasizing his protectionism, the more he plays into this scenario. \n\n \n\n 2. Populism. With Buchanan out of the way, Bauer will go after Forbes. When asked on television about Forbes' claim to represent the right. Bauer cited Forbes' wealth and called himself \"the son of a maintenance man.\" On This Week , George Stephanopoulos agreed that Bauer \"is becoming the populist in the race,\" noting that Bauer's supporters \"love the fact that he was the son of a janitor.\"", "2. Social conservative quarterfinal. This was Bauer's big spin win. Like Dole, he won a crucial \"contest-within-the-contest.\" His scant margin over Pat Buchanan--8.9 percent to 7.3 percent--became a huge factor in the post-poll analysis. Pundits concluded that Bauer \"did what he had to do ... beat Pat Buchanan,\" and therefore \"can legitimately say he is the candidate of the Christian right,\" establishing himself as \"one of the winners,\" the \"three or four\" candidates who \"got their tickets punched\" to stay in the race. Talk show hosts reminded Buchanan that he had lost to Bauer and asked whether Buchanan was finished.", "3. Conservative semifinal. Having scored well ahead of Bauer and Buchanan, Forbes anointed himself \"the conservative in a two-man race\" against Bush. Bauer disagreed, and the media took his side. \"Forbes, Bauer Battle for Right,\" the Post proclaimed, concluding that because Forbes failed to break away, \"he and Bauer are likely to continue a long and tough fight for the leadership of the conservative wing.\"", "So here's how the race shapes up. Bauer will frame it as a populist showdown, chiefly between himself and Forbes. Forbes will frame it as a fight between the establishment, led by Bush, and conservatives, led by himself. Dole will exploit feminism as well as feminine stereotypes, pitching herself as the candidate of change, civility, and moral renewal. And McCain will fortify his war chest while his rivals battle and bleed. Ames has organized the contestants. Let the games begin.", "4. Underdog. Bauer couldn't claim to be more strapped than Dole, so he claimed underdog status on the basis of low name recognition, inexperience, and working-class heritage. \"I am running against some big bios ... the son of a former president, the son of a tycoon, and the wife of a senator,\" Bauer argued on Late Edition . \"I have never run for president or office before. And yet here we come in fourth place.\" Newsweek 's David Brooks wrote that Bauer \"overcame his own financial disadvantages\" and joined Dole as the two surviving \"Have-Not candidates.\" \n\n \n\n Playbook", "1. Top four. Like Dole, Bauer needed to crack the top tier and seal off the pack. Since sports analogies tend to cut off the top tier at three rather than four (e.g., \"bronze medal,\" \"win, place, and show\"), Bauer changed metaphors, telling reporters that he had reached \"the first rung of candidates\" and that lower finishers might soon perish. On Meet the Press , he called himself the \"breakout candidate.\" While some pundits lumped Bauer with the winners, others offered him the next best position--\"leading the rest of the pack\"--or at least distinguished him from the \"losers.\"", "3. Conservatism. If Bauer wins the social conservative quarterfinal and the conservative semifinal, he gets to run as the \"Reagan\" candidate against \"Bush-Gore\" moderation on abortion, Hollywood, China, and other hot-button issues. This bracket-by-bracket tournament strategy reduces Bauer's obstacles from three candidates to two. He can target Forbes, knowing that if he prevails, either Bush or Dole will have vanquished the other in the moderate semifinal. Indeed, Dole's success at Ames arguably helps Bauer by giving Bush a semifinal contest. \n\n John McCain \n\n \n\n Playback", "1. Real votes. The vote-buying complaint only gets McCain a bye on the straw poll. To get another bye on February's Iowa caucuses, he'll rely on two other moral arguments. First, he'll claim that caucuses aren't \"real votes.\" \"We'll have real votes in New Hampshire,\" McCain argued on Fox News Sunday . \"That's where real people are motivated to vote.\" On Face the Nation , he suggested that he would focus on \"the genuine balloting process, which takes place in New Hampshire and then South Carolina.\"", "1. Ames meant nothing to him. Despite having skipped the straw poll, McCain was invited onto Face the Nation and Fox News Sunday to discuss it. \"If you're going to be taken seriously,\" Brit Hume asked him, \"don't you have to face up to the fact, when all the other candidates decide that an event is worth attending ... that maybe you've got to play too?\" In reply, McCain repeatedly called Ames \"meaningless.\" His chutzpah bowled over the pundits. Stephanopoulos called McCain's no-show \"a pretty smart move\" and portrayed the 83 votes he won in the straw poll--putting him in last place among active Republican candidates--as evidence of his strength.", "4. Vote-buying. To undermine the straw poll's authority as an arbiter of his candidacy, McCain called it a \"fund-raiser,\" \"a sham and a joke\" in which campaigns spent \"millions\" to \"buy\" votes. \"My campaign theme is to try to reform the system that is now awash with money and the influence of special interests,\" he argued on Fox News Sunday . Brit Hume's retort--\"that this whole process isn't quite pure enough for you\"--played right into McCain's hands. McCain doesn't need to persuade the media that his reasons for skipping Ames were morally sound. He just needs to persuade them that his reasons were moral rather than political. \n\n \n\n Playbook", "3. Gender. This is the more obvious criterion that distinguishes Dole. She hardly needs to mention it--the media bring it up anyway--but she invokes it subtly, alluding (as she did on two Sunday talk shows) to \"women who drive their daughters halfway across the state to shake my hand, a woman they dare to believe in.\" Newspapers hail Dole's female followers as evidence \"that she can attract new voters to the GOP.\" \n\n Gary Bauer \n\n \n\n Playback", "1. Top three. Dole needed to get within striking distance of Bush and to seal off the rest of the pack behind her. On Meet the Press , Face the Nation , and Late Edition , she boasted that she had cracked \"the top three.\" Pundits bought the three-winners line, treating Ames as a horse race (\"win, place, and show\") and noting that \"no one's ever won the Republican nomination without finishing in the top three\" at Ames. Newspapers, cramped for space, confined their headlines to Bush, Forbes, and Dole. Though Dole's 14 percent was closer to Bauer's 9 than to Forbes' 21, she earned a \"solid third\" and a place among the leaders by crossing the \"double-digit\" threshold. As Fox News' Carl Cameron put it: \"The other seven candidates could not crack double digits.\"", "2. Ames meant death for others. Noting that McCain had bypassed the event, Quayle explained on Face the Nation that he, too, \"almost took a pass on this. It wasn't until George Bush said he was going to participate that then I said, 'OK, we've got to do it,' out of respect to the Iowa Republican Party.\" The result, Quayle pleaded, was that he lost to candidates who had been in Iowa \"years and months.\" McCain, explaining his decision to stay out, espoused a less sentimental philosophy: \"You always want to fight on ground that is most favorable to you.\" For this, the media executed Quayle and spared McCain. \"Quayle and Lamar Alexander might be gone, but I think McCain is still in,\" concluded NPR's Mara Liasson. Ames was Vietnam in reverse: McCain ducked the fight, and Quayle took the beating.", "3. Viability. \"Once the dust has settled from the straw poll,\" McCain regally announced, \"I will review the new political landscape\" and begin \"engaging the other Republican candidates.\" Why does McCain get a bye? Because he has convinced the media that he has enough money and support in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and other states to skip Iowa and catch fire later. Newsweek , the New York Times , the Los Angeles Times , and several TV pundits agreed that McCain remains formidable, wasn't hurt by Ames, and may well end up as the principal alternative to Bush.", "2. Ethanol. Many pundits, fancying themselves shrewd, suggest that McCain's true reason for skipping Iowa is that he has \"taken a position on ethanol subsidies that's unpalatable to voters in Iowa.\" On This Week , Stephanopoulos suggested that McCain might \"have to do something dramatic,\" such as \"make a stand and say, 'We're not going to compete in Iowa. We think these ethanol subsidies are an abomination.' \" This is McCain's greatest triumph: He has conned the media into disbelieving his political calculations and accusing him instead of principle. \"I've taken a lot of unpopular positions,\" he conceded on Fox News Sunday .", "2. Race for third. Since Bush and Forbes were expected to finish first and second, many pundits concluded, as Lisa Myers put it on Meet the Press , that \"the real race here was for third. Elizabeth Dole won that.\" The Boston Globe called Dole \"the winner of this contest-within-the-contest.\" Dole touted her \"victory\" on every talk show and cited the Myers and Globe quotes in a press release. At a news conference, an aide introduced Dole as the straw poll's \"real winner.\" \n\n \n\n 3. Underdog. In every TV interview, Dole claimed to have been \"outspent by millions of dollars.\" Her spokesman told reporters that \"on a dollar-per-vote basis, Elizabeth Dole trounced George Bush and Steve Forbes.\" Reporters love an underdog. \"From a strict cost-benefit standpoint, the big winner may be Elizabeth Dole,\" concluded Time .", "3. Experience. The longer McCain stays out of the race without damaging his credibility, the more the field narrows to his advantage. Alexander and Rep. John Kasich, R-Ohio, are already gone. Quayle and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, won't be far behind. If the field dwindles to Bush, Forbes, and Bauer, McCain can sell himself as the only experienced officeholder running against Bush. But Dole's third-place finish at Ames, coupled with her victory in the post-Ames spin contest, complicates this plan.", "Republican Shakeout \n\n This weekend's straw poll in Ames, Iowa, kicked off the 2000 presidential race and sorted out the Republican field. Everyone agrees that George W. Bush is the front-runner, that Steve Forbes is in second place, and that Dan Quayle, who finished back in the pack with Lamar Alexander, will soon join Alexander on the sidelines. But Ames failed to resolve the fate of the candidates who came in third and fourth--Elizabeth Dole and Gary Bauer--and the one who skipped Ames, John McCain. For these three, the post-game spin contest is crucial. Here's a playback of their takes on the straw poll results and a look ahead at their playbook of messages for the remainder of the race. \n\n Elizabeth Dole \n\n \n\n Playback", "1. Race for second. Forbes wants to fast-forward the GOP tournament to a finals bracket: Bush vs. Forbes. To prevent this, Dole needs to create a semifinal playoff--Forbes vs. Dole--to determine who gets to play Bush. Despite Forbes' huge financial advantage, \"we finished close to second,\" Dole told reporters Saturday night. \"This is going to become a two-person race.\" The press agreed. \"Forbes had growing hopes ... that he might upset Bush or finish a close second,\" recalled the Post . Instead, \"he finished closer to Dole than to Bush.\" \n\n \n\n 2. Experience. Having narrowed the field to three, Dole needs to focus the contest on criteria that favor her. The first of these is political experience, of which Bush has little and Forbes has almost none. On every talk show, Dole vowed \"to demonstrate that the candidate with the most experience is more qualified than the candidates with the most money. ... We're talking about president of the United States.\"", "4. Comeback kid. Dismissive coverage of Dole before the straw poll played to her advantage, as everyone marveled at her \"surprisingly\" strong third. \"Dole Revived,\" the Washington Post 's front page proclaimed. On This Week , George Will conceded, \"There had been a lot of very skeptical stories about whether her people would show up. She, therefore, I think, is the biggest winner.\" \n\n \n\n Playbook" ], [ "3. Conservative semifinal. Having scored well ahead of Bauer and Buchanan, Forbes anointed himself \"the conservative in a two-man race\" against Bush. Bauer disagreed, and the media took his side. \"Forbes, Bauer Battle for Right,\" the Post proclaimed, concluding that because Forbes failed to break away, \"he and Bauer are likely to continue a long and tough fight for the leadership of the conservative wing.\"", "1. Buchanan will defect. Since Buchanan's combativeness and loyal base make him hard to write off as a candidate, his rivals have persuaded the media at least to write him off as a Republican by inferring that his low score at Ames will prompt him to transfer to the Reform Party. The more Buchanan fends off comparisons to Bauer by emphasizing his protectionism, the more he plays into this scenario. \n\n \n\n 2. Populism. With Buchanan out of the way, Bauer will go after Forbes. When asked on television about Forbes' claim to represent the right. Bauer cited Forbes' wealth and called himself \"the son of a maintenance man.\" On This Week , George Stephanopoulos agreed that Bauer \"is becoming the populist in the race,\" noting that Bauer's supporters \"love the fact that he was the son of a janitor.\"", "So here's how the race shapes up. Bauer will frame it as a populist showdown, chiefly between himself and Forbes. Forbes will frame it as a fight between the establishment, led by Bush, and conservatives, led by himself. Dole will exploit feminism as well as feminine stereotypes, pitching herself as the candidate of change, civility, and moral renewal. And McCain will fortify his war chest while his rivals battle and bleed. Ames has organized the contestants. Let the games begin.", "4. Underdog. Bauer couldn't claim to be more strapped than Dole, so he claimed underdog status on the basis of low name recognition, inexperience, and working-class heritage. \"I am running against some big bios ... the son of a former president, the son of a tycoon, and the wife of a senator,\" Bauer argued on Late Edition . \"I have never run for president or office before. And yet here we come in fourth place.\" Newsweek 's David Brooks wrote that Bauer \"overcame his own financial disadvantages\" and joined Dole as the two surviving \"Have-Not candidates.\" \n\n \n\n Playbook", "1. Top four. Like Dole, Bauer needed to crack the top tier and seal off the pack. Since sports analogies tend to cut off the top tier at three rather than four (e.g., \"bronze medal,\" \"win, place, and show\"), Bauer changed metaphors, telling reporters that he had reached \"the first rung of candidates\" and that lower finishers might soon perish. On Meet the Press , he called himself the \"breakout candidate.\" While some pundits lumped Bauer with the winners, others offered him the next best position--\"leading the rest of the pack\"--or at least distinguished him from the \"losers.\"", "2. Social conservative quarterfinal. This was Bauer's big spin win. Like Dole, he won a crucial \"contest-within-the-contest.\" His scant margin over Pat Buchanan--8.9 percent to 7.3 percent--became a huge factor in the post-poll analysis. Pundits concluded that Bauer \"did what he had to do ... beat Pat Buchanan,\" and therefore \"can legitimately say he is the candidate of the Christian right,\" establishing himself as \"one of the winners,\" the \"three or four\" candidates who \"got their tickets punched\" to stay in the race. Talk show hosts reminded Buchanan that he had lost to Bauer and asked whether Buchanan was finished.", "1. Race for second. Forbes wants to fast-forward the GOP tournament to a finals bracket: Bush vs. Forbes. To prevent this, Dole needs to create a semifinal playoff--Forbes vs. Dole--to determine who gets to play Bush. Despite Forbes' huge financial advantage, \"we finished close to second,\" Dole told reporters Saturday night. \"This is going to become a two-person race.\" The press agreed. \"Forbes had growing hopes ... that he might upset Bush or finish a close second,\" recalled the Post . Instead, \"he finished closer to Dole than to Bush.\" \n\n \n\n 2. Experience. Having narrowed the field to three, Dole needs to focus the contest on criteria that favor her. The first of these is political experience, of which Bush has little and Forbes has almost none. On every talk show, Dole vowed \"to demonstrate that the candidate with the most experience is more qualified than the candidates with the most money. ... We're talking about president of the United States.\"", "3. Conservatism. If Bauer wins the social conservative quarterfinal and the conservative semifinal, he gets to run as the \"Reagan\" candidate against \"Bush-Gore\" moderation on abortion, Hollywood, China, and other hot-button issues. This bracket-by-bracket tournament strategy reduces Bauer's obstacles from three candidates to two. He can target Forbes, knowing that if he prevails, either Bush or Dole will have vanquished the other in the moderate semifinal. Indeed, Dole's success at Ames arguably helps Bauer by giving Bush a semifinal contest. \n\n John McCain \n\n \n\n Playback", "2. Race for third. Since Bush and Forbes were expected to finish first and second, many pundits concluded, as Lisa Myers put it on Meet the Press , that \"the real race here was for third. Elizabeth Dole won that.\" The Boston Globe called Dole \"the winner of this contest-within-the-contest.\" Dole touted her \"victory\" on every talk show and cited the Myers and Globe quotes in a press release. At a news conference, an aide introduced Dole as the straw poll's \"real winner.\" \n\n \n\n 3. Underdog. In every TV interview, Dole claimed to have been \"outspent by millions of dollars.\" Her spokesman told reporters that \"on a dollar-per-vote basis, Elizabeth Dole trounced George Bush and Steve Forbes.\" Reporters love an underdog. \"From a strict cost-benefit standpoint, the big winner may be Elizabeth Dole,\" concluded Time .", "3. Gender. This is the more obvious criterion that distinguishes Dole. She hardly needs to mention it--the media bring it up anyway--but she invokes it subtly, alluding (as she did on two Sunday talk shows) to \"women who drive their daughters halfway across the state to shake my hand, a woman they dare to believe in.\" Newspapers hail Dole's female followers as evidence \"that she can attract new voters to the GOP.\" \n\n Gary Bauer \n\n \n\n Playback", "1. Top three. Dole needed to get within striking distance of Bush and to seal off the rest of the pack behind her. On Meet the Press , Face the Nation , and Late Edition , she boasted that she had cracked \"the top three.\" Pundits bought the three-winners line, treating Ames as a horse race (\"win, place, and show\") and noting that \"no one's ever won the Republican nomination without finishing in the top three\" at Ames. Newspapers, cramped for space, confined their headlines to Bush, Forbes, and Dole. Though Dole's 14 percent was closer to Bauer's 9 than to Forbes' 21, she earned a \"solid third\" and a place among the leaders by crossing the \"double-digit\" threshold. As Fox News' Carl Cameron put it: \"The other seven candidates could not crack double digits.\"", "3. Experience. The longer McCain stays out of the race without damaging his credibility, the more the field narrows to his advantage. Alexander and Rep. John Kasich, R-Ohio, are already gone. Quayle and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, won't be far behind. If the field dwindles to Bush, Forbes, and Bauer, McCain can sell himself as the only experienced officeholder running against Bush. But Dole's third-place finish at Ames, coupled with her victory in the post-Ames spin contest, complicates this plan.", "Republican Shakeout \n\n This weekend's straw poll in Ames, Iowa, kicked off the 2000 presidential race and sorted out the Republican field. Everyone agrees that George W. Bush is the front-runner, that Steve Forbes is in second place, and that Dan Quayle, who finished back in the pack with Lamar Alexander, will soon join Alexander on the sidelines. But Ames failed to resolve the fate of the candidates who came in third and fourth--Elizabeth Dole and Gary Bauer--and the one who skipped Ames, John McCain. For these three, the post-game spin contest is crucial. Here's a playback of their takes on the straw poll results and a look ahead at their playbook of messages for the remainder of the race. \n\n Elizabeth Dole \n\n \n\n Playback", "2. Ames meant death for others. Noting that McCain had bypassed the event, Quayle explained on Face the Nation that he, too, \"almost took a pass on this. It wasn't until George Bush said he was going to participate that then I said, 'OK, we've got to do it,' out of respect to the Iowa Republican Party.\" The result, Quayle pleaded, was that he lost to candidates who had been in Iowa \"years and months.\" McCain, explaining his decision to stay out, espoused a less sentimental philosophy: \"You always want to fight on ground that is most favorable to you.\" For this, the media executed Quayle and spared McCain. \"Quayle and Lamar Alexander might be gone, but I think McCain is still in,\" concluded NPR's Mara Liasson. Ames was Vietnam in reverse: McCain ducked the fight, and Quayle took the beating.", "3. Viability. \"Once the dust has settled from the straw poll,\" McCain regally announced, \"I will review the new political landscape\" and begin \"engaging the other Republican candidates.\" Why does McCain get a bye? Because he has convinced the media that he has enough money and support in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and other states to skip Iowa and catch fire later. Newsweek , the New York Times , the Los Angeles Times , and several TV pundits agreed that McCain remains formidable, wasn't hurt by Ames, and may well end up as the principal alternative to Bush.", "1. Real votes. The vote-buying complaint only gets McCain a bye on the straw poll. To get another bye on February's Iowa caucuses, he'll rely on two other moral arguments. First, he'll claim that caucuses aren't \"real votes.\" \"We'll have real votes in New Hampshire,\" McCain argued on Fox News Sunday . \"That's where real people are motivated to vote.\" On Face the Nation , he suggested that he would focus on \"the genuine balloting process, which takes place in New Hampshire and then South Carolina.\"", "1. Ames meant nothing to him. Despite having skipped the straw poll, McCain was invited onto Face the Nation and Fox News Sunday to discuss it. \"If you're going to be taken seriously,\" Brit Hume asked him, \"don't you have to face up to the fact, when all the other candidates decide that an event is worth attending ... that maybe you've got to play too?\" In reply, McCain repeatedly called Ames \"meaningless.\" His chutzpah bowled over the pundits. Stephanopoulos called McCain's no-show \"a pretty smart move\" and portrayed the 83 votes he won in the straw poll--putting him in last place among active Republican candidates--as evidence of his strength.", "4. Vote-buying. To undermine the straw poll's authority as an arbiter of his candidacy, McCain called it a \"fund-raiser,\" \"a sham and a joke\" in which campaigns spent \"millions\" to \"buy\" votes. \"My campaign theme is to try to reform the system that is now awash with money and the influence of special interests,\" he argued on Fox News Sunday . Brit Hume's retort--\"that this whole process isn't quite pure enough for you\"--played right into McCain's hands. McCain doesn't need to persuade the media that his reasons for skipping Ames were morally sound. He just needs to persuade them that his reasons were moral rather than political. \n\n \n\n Playbook", "2. Ethanol. Many pundits, fancying themselves shrewd, suggest that McCain's true reason for skipping Iowa is that he has \"taken a position on ethanol subsidies that's unpalatable to voters in Iowa.\" On This Week , Stephanopoulos suggested that McCain might \"have to do something dramatic,\" such as \"make a stand and say, 'We're not going to compete in Iowa. We think these ethanol subsidies are an abomination.' \" This is McCain's greatest triumph: He has conned the media into disbelieving his political calculations and accusing him instead of principle. \"I've taken a lot of unpopular positions,\" he conceded on Fox News Sunday .", "4. Comeback kid. Dismissive coverage of Dole before the straw poll played to her advantage, as everyone marveled at her \"surprisingly\" strong third. \"Dole Revived,\" the Washington Post 's front page proclaimed. On This Week , George Will conceded, \"There had been a lot of very skeptical stories about whether her people would show up. She, therefore, I think, is the biggest winner.\" \n\n \n\n Playbook" ], [ "1. Real votes. The vote-buying complaint only gets McCain a bye on the straw poll. To get another bye on February's Iowa caucuses, he'll rely on two other moral arguments. First, he'll claim that caucuses aren't \"real votes.\" \"We'll have real votes in New Hampshire,\" McCain argued on Fox News Sunday . \"That's where real people are motivated to vote.\" On Face the Nation , he suggested that he would focus on \"the genuine balloting process, which takes place in New Hampshire and then South Carolina.\"", "1. Ames meant nothing to him. Despite having skipped the straw poll, McCain was invited onto Face the Nation and Fox News Sunday to discuss it. \"If you're going to be taken seriously,\" Brit Hume asked him, \"don't you have to face up to the fact, when all the other candidates decide that an event is worth attending ... that maybe you've got to play too?\" In reply, McCain repeatedly called Ames \"meaningless.\" His chutzpah bowled over the pundits. Stephanopoulos called McCain's no-show \"a pretty smart move\" and portrayed the 83 votes he won in the straw poll--putting him in last place among active Republican candidates--as evidence of his strength.", "4. Vote-buying. To undermine the straw poll's authority as an arbiter of his candidacy, McCain called it a \"fund-raiser,\" \"a sham and a joke\" in which campaigns spent \"millions\" to \"buy\" votes. \"My campaign theme is to try to reform the system that is now awash with money and the influence of special interests,\" he argued on Fox News Sunday . Brit Hume's retort--\"that this whole process isn't quite pure enough for you\"--played right into McCain's hands. McCain doesn't need to persuade the media that his reasons for skipping Ames were morally sound. He just needs to persuade them that his reasons were moral rather than political. \n\n \n\n Playbook", "2. Ethanol. Many pundits, fancying themselves shrewd, suggest that McCain's true reason for skipping Iowa is that he has \"taken a position on ethanol subsidies that's unpalatable to voters in Iowa.\" On This Week , Stephanopoulos suggested that McCain might \"have to do something dramatic,\" such as \"make a stand and say, 'We're not going to compete in Iowa. We think these ethanol subsidies are an abomination.' \" This is McCain's greatest triumph: He has conned the media into disbelieving his political calculations and accusing him instead of principle. \"I've taken a lot of unpopular positions,\" he conceded on Fox News Sunday .", "2. Ames meant death for others. Noting that McCain had bypassed the event, Quayle explained on Face the Nation that he, too, \"almost took a pass on this. It wasn't until George Bush said he was going to participate that then I said, 'OK, we've got to do it,' out of respect to the Iowa Republican Party.\" The result, Quayle pleaded, was that he lost to candidates who had been in Iowa \"years and months.\" McCain, explaining his decision to stay out, espoused a less sentimental philosophy: \"You always want to fight on ground that is most favorable to you.\" For this, the media executed Quayle and spared McCain. \"Quayle and Lamar Alexander might be gone, but I think McCain is still in,\" concluded NPR's Mara Liasson. Ames was Vietnam in reverse: McCain ducked the fight, and Quayle took the beating.", "3. Viability. \"Once the dust has settled from the straw poll,\" McCain regally announced, \"I will review the new political landscape\" and begin \"engaging the other Republican candidates.\" Why does McCain get a bye? Because he has convinced the media that he has enough money and support in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and other states to skip Iowa and catch fire later. Newsweek , the New York Times , the Los Angeles Times , and several TV pundits agreed that McCain remains formidable, wasn't hurt by Ames, and may well end up as the principal alternative to Bush.", "3. Experience. The longer McCain stays out of the race without damaging his credibility, the more the field narrows to his advantage. Alexander and Rep. John Kasich, R-Ohio, are already gone. Quayle and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, won't be far behind. If the field dwindles to Bush, Forbes, and Bauer, McCain can sell himself as the only experienced officeholder running against Bush. But Dole's third-place finish at Ames, coupled with her victory in the post-Ames spin contest, complicates this plan.", "So here's how the race shapes up. Bauer will frame it as a populist showdown, chiefly between himself and Forbes. Forbes will frame it as a fight between the establishment, led by Bush, and conservatives, led by himself. Dole will exploit feminism as well as feminine stereotypes, pitching herself as the candidate of change, civility, and moral renewal. And McCain will fortify his war chest while his rivals battle and bleed. Ames has organized the contestants. Let the games begin.", "3. Conservatism. If Bauer wins the social conservative quarterfinal and the conservative semifinal, he gets to run as the \"Reagan\" candidate against \"Bush-Gore\" moderation on abortion, Hollywood, China, and other hot-button issues. This bracket-by-bracket tournament strategy reduces Bauer's obstacles from three candidates to two. He can target Forbes, knowing that if he prevails, either Bush or Dole will have vanquished the other in the moderate semifinal. Indeed, Dole's success at Ames arguably helps Bauer by giving Bush a semifinal contest. \n\n John McCain \n\n \n\n Playback", "Republican Shakeout \n\n This weekend's straw poll in Ames, Iowa, kicked off the 2000 presidential race and sorted out the Republican field. Everyone agrees that George W. Bush is the front-runner, that Steve Forbes is in second place, and that Dan Quayle, who finished back in the pack with Lamar Alexander, will soon join Alexander on the sidelines. But Ames failed to resolve the fate of the candidates who came in third and fourth--Elizabeth Dole and Gary Bauer--and the one who skipped Ames, John McCain. For these three, the post-game spin contest is crucial. Here's a playback of their takes on the straw poll results and a look ahead at their playbook of messages for the remainder of the race. \n\n Elizabeth Dole \n\n \n\n Playback", "2. Race for third. Since Bush and Forbes were expected to finish first and second, many pundits concluded, as Lisa Myers put it on Meet the Press , that \"the real race here was for third. Elizabeth Dole won that.\" The Boston Globe called Dole \"the winner of this contest-within-the-contest.\" Dole touted her \"victory\" on every talk show and cited the Myers and Globe quotes in a press release. At a news conference, an aide introduced Dole as the straw poll's \"real winner.\" \n\n \n\n 3. Underdog. In every TV interview, Dole claimed to have been \"outspent by millions of dollars.\" Her spokesman told reporters that \"on a dollar-per-vote basis, Elizabeth Dole trounced George Bush and Steve Forbes.\" Reporters love an underdog. \"From a strict cost-benefit standpoint, the big winner may be Elizabeth Dole,\" concluded Time .", "1. Buchanan will defect. Since Buchanan's combativeness and loyal base make him hard to write off as a candidate, his rivals have persuaded the media at least to write him off as a Republican by inferring that his low score at Ames will prompt him to transfer to the Reform Party. The more Buchanan fends off comparisons to Bauer by emphasizing his protectionism, the more he plays into this scenario. \n\n \n\n 2. Populism. With Buchanan out of the way, Bauer will go after Forbes. When asked on television about Forbes' claim to represent the right. Bauer cited Forbes' wealth and called himself \"the son of a maintenance man.\" On This Week , George Stephanopoulos agreed that Bauer \"is becoming the populist in the race,\" noting that Bauer's supporters \"love the fact that he was the son of a janitor.\"", "4. Underdog. Bauer couldn't claim to be more strapped than Dole, so he claimed underdog status on the basis of low name recognition, inexperience, and working-class heritage. \"I am running against some big bios ... the son of a former president, the son of a tycoon, and the wife of a senator,\" Bauer argued on Late Edition . \"I have never run for president or office before. And yet here we come in fourth place.\" Newsweek 's David Brooks wrote that Bauer \"overcame his own financial disadvantages\" and joined Dole as the two surviving \"Have-Not candidates.\" \n\n \n\n Playbook", "1. Race for second. Forbes wants to fast-forward the GOP tournament to a finals bracket: Bush vs. Forbes. To prevent this, Dole needs to create a semifinal playoff--Forbes vs. Dole--to determine who gets to play Bush. Despite Forbes' huge financial advantage, \"we finished close to second,\" Dole told reporters Saturday night. \"This is going to become a two-person race.\" The press agreed. \"Forbes had growing hopes ... that he might upset Bush or finish a close second,\" recalled the Post . Instead, \"he finished closer to Dole than to Bush.\" \n\n \n\n 2. Experience. Having narrowed the field to three, Dole needs to focus the contest on criteria that favor her. The first of these is political experience, of which Bush has little and Forbes has almost none. On every talk show, Dole vowed \"to demonstrate that the candidate with the most experience is more qualified than the candidates with the most money. ... We're talking about president of the United States.\"", "4. Comeback kid. Dismissive coverage of Dole before the straw poll played to her advantage, as everyone marveled at her \"surprisingly\" strong third. \"Dole Revived,\" the Washington Post 's front page proclaimed. On This Week , George Will conceded, \"There had been a lot of very skeptical stories about whether her people would show up. She, therefore, I think, is the biggest winner.\" \n\n \n\n Playbook", "3. Conservative semifinal. Having scored well ahead of Bauer and Buchanan, Forbes anointed himself \"the conservative in a two-man race\" against Bush. Bauer disagreed, and the media took his side. \"Forbes, Bauer Battle for Right,\" the Post proclaimed, concluding that because Forbes failed to break away, \"he and Bauer are likely to continue a long and tough fight for the leadership of the conservative wing.\"", "1. Top three. Dole needed to get within striking distance of Bush and to seal off the rest of the pack behind her. On Meet the Press , Face the Nation , and Late Edition , she boasted that she had cracked \"the top three.\" Pundits bought the three-winners line, treating Ames as a horse race (\"win, place, and show\") and noting that \"no one's ever won the Republican nomination without finishing in the top three\" at Ames. Newspapers, cramped for space, confined their headlines to Bush, Forbes, and Dole. Though Dole's 14 percent was closer to Bauer's 9 than to Forbes' 21, she earned a \"solid third\" and a place among the leaders by crossing the \"double-digit\" threshold. As Fox News' Carl Cameron put it: \"The other seven candidates could not crack double digits.\"", "3. Gender. This is the more obvious criterion that distinguishes Dole. She hardly needs to mention it--the media bring it up anyway--but she invokes it subtly, alluding (as she did on two Sunday talk shows) to \"women who drive their daughters halfway across the state to shake my hand, a woman they dare to believe in.\" Newspapers hail Dole's female followers as evidence \"that she can attract new voters to the GOP.\" \n\n Gary Bauer \n\n \n\n Playback", "1. Top four. Like Dole, Bauer needed to crack the top tier and seal off the pack. Since sports analogies tend to cut off the top tier at three rather than four (e.g., \"bronze medal,\" \"win, place, and show\"), Bauer changed metaphors, telling reporters that he had reached \"the first rung of candidates\" and that lower finishers might soon perish. On Meet the Press , he called himself the \"breakout candidate.\" While some pundits lumped Bauer with the winners, others offered him the next best position--\"leading the rest of the pack\"--or at least distinguished him from the \"losers.\"", "2. Social conservative quarterfinal. This was Bauer's big spin win. Like Dole, he won a crucial \"contest-within-the-contest.\" His scant margin over Pat Buchanan--8.9 percent to 7.3 percent--became a huge factor in the post-poll analysis. Pundits concluded that Bauer \"did what he had to do ... beat Pat Buchanan,\" and therefore \"can legitimately say he is the candidate of the Christian right,\" establishing himself as \"one of the winners,\" the \"three or four\" candidates who \"got their tickets punched\" to stay in the race. Talk show hosts reminded Buchanan that he had lost to Bauer and asked whether Buchanan was finished." ], [ "So here's how the race shapes up. Bauer will frame it as a populist showdown, chiefly between himself and Forbes. Forbes will frame it as a fight between the establishment, led by Bush, and conservatives, led by himself. Dole will exploit feminism as well as feminine stereotypes, pitching herself as the candidate of change, civility, and moral renewal. And McCain will fortify his war chest while his rivals battle and bleed. Ames has organized the contestants. Let the games begin.", "1. Race for second. Forbes wants to fast-forward the GOP tournament to a finals bracket: Bush vs. Forbes. To prevent this, Dole needs to create a semifinal playoff--Forbes vs. Dole--to determine who gets to play Bush. Despite Forbes' huge financial advantage, \"we finished close to second,\" Dole told reporters Saturday night. \"This is going to become a two-person race.\" The press agreed. \"Forbes had growing hopes ... that he might upset Bush or finish a close second,\" recalled the Post . Instead, \"he finished closer to Dole than to Bush.\" \n\n \n\n 2. Experience. Having narrowed the field to three, Dole needs to focus the contest on criteria that favor her. The first of these is political experience, of which Bush has little and Forbes has almost none. On every talk show, Dole vowed \"to demonstrate that the candidate with the most experience is more qualified than the candidates with the most money. ... We're talking about president of the United States.\"", "1. Buchanan will defect. Since Buchanan's combativeness and loyal base make him hard to write off as a candidate, his rivals have persuaded the media at least to write him off as a Republican by inferring that his low score at Ames will prompt him to transfer to the Reform Party. The more Buchanan fends off comparisons to Bauer by emphasizing his protectionism, the more he plays into this scenario. \n\n \n\n 2. Populism. With Buchanan out of the way, Bauer will go after Forbes. When asked on television about Forbes' claim to represent the right. Bauer cited Forbes' wealth and called himself \"the son of a maintenance man.\" On This Week , George Stephanopoulos agreed that Bauer \"is becoming the populist in the race,\" noting that Bauer's supporters \"love the fact that he was the son of a janitor.\"", "2. Race for third. Since Bush and Forbes were expected to finish first and second, many pundits concluded, as Lisa Myers put it on Meet the Press , that \"the real race here was for third. Elizabeth Dole won that.\" The Boston Globe called Dole \"the winner of this contest-within-the-contest.\" Dole touted her \"victory\" on every talk show and cited the Myers and Globe quotes in a press release. At a news conference, an aide introduced Dole as the straw poll's \"real winner.\" \n\n \n\n 3. Underdog. In every TV interview, Dole claimed to have been \"outspent by millions of dollars.\" Her spokesman told reporters that \"on a dollar-per-vote basis, Elizabeth Dole trounced George Bush and Steve Forbes.\" Reporters love an underdog. \"From a strict cost-benefit standpoint, the big winner may be Elizabeth Dole,\" concluded Time .", "3. Viability. \"Once the dust has settled from the straw poll,\" McCain regally announced, \"I will review the new political landscape\" and begin \"engaging the other Republican candidates.\" Why does McCain get a bye? Because he has convinced the media that he has enough money and support in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and other states to skip Iowa and catch fire later. Newsweek , the New York Times , the Los Angeles Times , and several TV pundits agreed that McCain remains formidable, wasn't hurt by Ames, and may well end up as the principal alternative to Bush.", "4. Vote-buying. To undermine the straw poll's authority as an arbiter of his candidacy, McCain called it a \"fund-raiser,\" \"a sham and a joke\" in which campaigns spent \"millions\" to \"buy\" votes. \"My campaign theme is to try to reform the system that is now awash with money and the influence of special interests,\" he argued on Fox News Sunday . Brit Hume's retort--\"that this whole process isn't quite pure enough for you\"--played right into McCain's hands. McCain doesn't need to persuade the media that his reasons for skipping Ames were morally sound. He just needs to persuade them that his reasons were moral rather than political. \n\n \n\n Playbook", "1. Real votes. The vote-buying complaint only gets McCain a bye on the straw poll. To get another bye on February's Iowa caucuses, he'll rely on two other moral arguments. First, he'll claim that caucuses aren't \"real votes.\" \"We'll have real votes in New Hampshire,\" McCain argued on Fox News Sunday . \"That's where real people are motivated to vote.\" On Face the Nation , he suggested that he would focus on \"the genuine balloting process, which takes place in New Hampshire and then South Carolina.\"", "3. Conservative semifinal. Having scored well ahead of Bauer and Buchanan, Forbes anointed himself \"the conservative in a two-man race\" against Bush. Bauer disagreed, and the media took his side. \"Forbes, Bauer Battle for Right,\" the Post proclaimed, concluding that because Forbes failed to break away, \"he and Bauer are likely to continue a long and tough fight for the leadership of the conservative wing.\"", "Republican Shakeout \n\n This weekend's straw poll in Ames, Iowa, kicked off the 2000 presidential race and sorted out the Republican field. Everyone agrees that George W. Bush is the front-runner, that Steve Forbes is in second place, and that Dan Quayle, who finished back in the pack with Lamar Alexander, will soon join Alexander on the sidelines. But Ames failed to resolve the fate of the candidates who came in third and fourth--Elizabeth Dole and Gary Bauer--and the one who skipped Ames, John McCain. For these three, the post-game spin contest is crucial. Here's a playback of their takes on the straw poll results and a look ahead at their playbook of messages for the remainder of the race. \n\n Elizabeth Dole \n\n \n\n Playback", "2. Ames meant death for others. Noting that McCain had bypassed the event, Quayle explained on Face the Nation that he, too, \"almost took a pass on this. It wasn't until George Bush said he was going to participate that then I said, 'OK, we've got to do it,' out of respect to the Iowa Republican Party.\" The result, Quayle pleaded, was that he lost to candidates who had been in Iowa \"years and months.\" McCain, explaining his decision to stay out, espoused a less sentimental philosophy: \"You always want to fight on ground that is most favorable to you.\" For this, the media executed Quayle and spared McCain. \"Quayle and Lamar Alexander might be gone, but I think McCain is still in,\" concluded NPR's Mara Liasson. Ames was Vietnam in reverse: McCain ducked the fight, and Quayle took the beating.", "1. Ames meant nothing to him. Despite having skipped the straw poll, McCain was invited onto Face the Nation and Fox News Sunday to discuss it. \"If you're going to be taken seriously,\" Brit Hume asked him, \"don't you have to face up to the fact, when all the other candidates decide that an event is worth attending ... that maybe you've got to play too?\" In reply, McCain repeatedly called Ames \"meaningless.\" His chutzpah bowled over the pundits. Stephanopoulos called McCain's no-show \"a pretty smart move\" and portrayed the 83 votes he won in the straw poll--putting him in last place among active Republican candidates--as evidence of his strength.", "3. Experience. The longer McCain stays out of the race without damaging his credibility, the more the field narrows to his advantage. Alexander and Rep. John Kasich, R-Ohio, are already gone. Quayle and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, won't be far behind. If the field dwindles to Bush, Forbes, and Bauer, McCain can sell himself as the only experienced officeholder running against Bush. But Dole's third-place finish at Ames, coupled with her victory in the post-Ames spin contest, complicates this plan.", "1. Top four. Like Dole, Bauer needed to crack the top tier and seal off the pack. Since sports analogies tend to cut off the top tier at three rather than four (e.g., \"bronze medal,\" \"win, place, and show\"), Bauer changed metaphors, telling reporters that he had reached \"the first rung of candidates\" and that lower finishers might soon perish. On Meet the Press , he called himself the \"breakout candidate.\" While some pundits lumped Bauer with the winners, others offered him the next best position--\"leading the rest of the pack\"--or at least distinguished him from the \"losers.\"", "4. Comeback kid. Dismissive coverage of Dole before the straw poll played to her advantage, as everyone marveled at her \"surprisingly\" strong third. \"Dole Revived,\" the Washington Post 's front page proclaimed. On This Week , George Will conceded, \"There had been a lot of very skeptical stories about whether her people would show up. She, therefore, I think, is the biggest winner.\" \n\n \n\n Playbook", "3. Conservatism. If Bauer wins the social conservative quarterfinal and the conservative semifinal, he gets to run as the \"Reagan\" candidate against \"Bush-Gore\" moderation on abortion, Hollywood, China, and other hot-button issues. This bracket-by-bracket tournament strategy reduces Bauer's obstacles from three candidates to two. He can target Forbes, knowing that if he prevails, either Bush or Dole will have vanquished the other in the moderate semifinal. Indeed, Dole's success at Ames arguably helps Bauer by giving Bush a semifinal contest. \n\n John McCain \n\n \n\n Playback", "2. Ethanol. Many pundits, fancying themselves shrewd, suggest that McCain's true reason for skipping Iowa is that he has \"taken a position on ethanol subsidies that's unpalatable to voters in Iowa.\" On This Week , Stephanopoulos suggested that McCain might \"have to do something dramatic,\" such as \"make a stand and say, 'We're not going to compete in Iowa. We think these ethanol subsidies are an abomination.' \" This is McCain's greatest triumph: He has conned the media into disbelieving his political calculations and accusing him instead of principle. \"I've taken a lot of unpopular positions,\" he conceded on Fox News Sunday .", "4. Underdog. Bauer couldn't claim to be more strapped than Dole, so he claimed underdog status on the basis of low name recognition, inexperience, and working-class heritage. \"I am running against some big bios ... the son of a former president, the son of a tycoon, and the wife of a senator,\" Bauer argued on Late Edition . \"I have never run for president or office before. And yet here we come in fourth place.\" Newsweek 's David Brooks wrote that Bauer \"overcame his own financial disadvantages\" and joined Dole as the two surviving \"Have-Not candidates.\" \n\n \n\n Playbook", "1. Top three. Dole needed to get within striking distance of Bush and to seal off the rest of the pack behind her. On Meet the Press , Face the Nation , and Late Edition , she boasted that she had cracked \"the top three.\" Pundits bought the three-winners line, treating Ames as a horse race (\"win, place, and show\") and noting that \"no one's ever won the Republican nomination without finishing in the top three\" at Ames. Newspapers, cramped for space, confined their headlines to Bush, Forbes, and Dole. Though Dole's 14 percent was closer to Bauer's 9 than to Forbes' 21, she earned a \"solid third\" and a place among the leaders by crossing the \"double-digit\" threshold. As Fox News' Carl Cameron put it: \"The other seven candidates could not crack double digits.\"", "3. Gender. This is the more obvious criterion that distinguishes Dole. She hardly needs to mention it--the media bring it up anyway--but she invokes it subtly, alluding (as she did on two Sunday talk shows) to \"women who drive their daughters halfway across the state to shake my hand, a woman they dare to believe in.\" Newspapers hail Dole's female followers as evidence \"that she can attract new voters to the GOP.\" \n\n Gary Bauer \n\n \n\n Playback", "2. Social conservative quarterfinal. This was Bauer's big spin win. Like Dole, he won a crucial \"contest-within-the-contest.\" His scant margin over Pat Buchanan--8.9 percent to 7.3 percent--became a huge factor in the post-poll analysis. Pundits concluded that Bauer \"did what he had to do ... beat Pat Buchanan,\" and therefore \"can legitimately say he is the candidate of the Christian right,\" establishing himself as \"one of the winners,\" the \"three or four\" candidates who \"got their tickets punched\" to stay in the race. Talk show hosts reminded Buchanan that he had lost to Bauer and asked whether Buchanan was finished." ], [ "So here's how the race shapes up. Bauer will frame it as a populist showdown, chiefly between himself and Forbes. Forbes will frame it as a fight between the establishment, led by Bush, and conservatives, led by himself. Dole will exploit feminism as well as feminine stereotypes, pitching herself as the candidate of change, civility, and moral renewal. And McCain will fortify his war chest while his rivals battle and bleed. Ames has organized the contestants. Let the games begin.", "1. Buchanan will defect. Since Buchanan's combativeness and loyal base make him hard to write off as a candidate, his rivals have persuaded the media at least to write him off as a Republican by inferring that his low score at Ames will prompt him to transfer to the Reform Party. The more Buchanan fends off comparisons to Bauer by emphasizing his protectionism, the more he plays into this scenario. \n\n \n\n 2. Populism. With Buchanan out of the way, Bauer will go after Forbes. When asked on television about Forbes' claim to represent the right. Bauer cited Forbes' wealth and called himself \"the son of a maintenance man.\" On This Week , George Stephanopoulos agreed that Bauer \"is becoming the populist in the race,\" noting that Bauer's supporters \"love the fact that he was the son of a janitor.\"", "2. Race for third. Since Bush and Forbes were expected to finish first and second, many pundits concluded, as Lisa Myers put it on Meet the Press , that \"the real race here was for third. Elizabeth Dole won that.\" The Boston Globe called Dole \"the winner of this contest-within-the-contest.\" Dole touted her \"victory\" on every talk show and cited the Myers and Globe quotes in a press release. At a news conference, an aide introduced Dole as the straw poll's \"real winner.\" \n\n \n\n 3. Underdog. In every TV interview, Dole claimed to have been \"outspent by millions of dollars.\" Her spokesman told reporters that \"on a dollar-per-vote basis, Elizabeth Dole trounced George Bush and Steve Forbes.\" Reporters love an underdog. \"From a strict cost-benefit standpoint, the big winner may be Elizabeth Dole,\" concluded Time .", "3. Conservatism. If Bauer wins the social conservative quarterfinal and the conservative semifinal, he gets to run as the \"Reagan\" candidate against \"Bush-Gore\" moderation on abortion, Hollywood, China, and other hot-button issues. This bracket-by-bracket tournament strategy reduces Bauer's obstacles from three candidates to two. He can target Forbes, knowing that if he prevails, either Bush or Dole will have vanquished the other in the moderate semifinal. Indeed, Dole's success at Ames arguably helps Bauer by giving Bush a semifinal contest. \n\n John McCain \n\n \n\n Playback", "1. Race for second. Forbes wants to fast-forward the GOP tournament to a finals bracket: Bush vs. Forbes. To prevent this, Dole needs to create a semifinal playoff--Forbes vs. Dole--to determine who gets to play Bush. Despite Forbes' huge financial advantage, \"we finished close to second,\" Dole told reporters Saturday night. \"This is going to become a two-person race.\" The press agreed. \"Forbes had growing hopes ... that he might upset Bush or finish a close second,\" recalled the Post . Instead, \"he finished closer to Dole than to Bush.\" \n\n \n\n 2. Experience. Having narrowed the field to three, Dole needs to focus the contest on criteria that favor her. The first of these is political experience, of which Bush has little and Forbes has almost none. On every talk show, Dole vowed \"to demonstrate that the candidate with the most experience is more qualified than the candidates with the most money. ... We're talking about president of the United States.\"", "3. Conservative semifinal. Having scored well ahead of Bauer and Buchanan, Forbes anointed himself \"the conservative in a two-man race\" against Bush. Bauer disagreed, and the media took his side. \"Forbes, Bauer Battle for Right,\" the Post proclaimed, concluding that because Forbes failed to break away, \"he and Bauer are likely to continue a long and tough fight for the leadership of the conservative wing.\"", "3. Viability. \"Once the dust has settled from the straw poll,\" McCain regally announced, \"I will review the new political landscape\" and begin \"engaging the other Republican candidates.\" Why does McCain get a bye? Because he has convinced the media that he has enough money and support in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and other states to skip Iowa and catch fire later. Newsweek , the New York Times , the Los Angeles Times , and several TV pundits agreed that McCain remains formidable, wasn't hurt by Ames, and may well end up as the principal alternative to Bush.", "2. Ames meant death for others. Noting that McCain had bypassed the event, Quayle explained on Face the Nation that he, too, \"almost took a pass on this. It wasn't until George Bush said he was going to participate that then I said, 'OK, we've got to do it,' out of respect to the Iowa Republican Party.\" The result, Quayle pleaded, was that he lost to candidates who had been in Iowa \"years and months.\" McCain, explaining his decision to stay out, espoused a less sentimental philosophy: \"You always want to fight on ground that is most favorable to you.\" For this, the media executed Quayle and spared McCain. \"Quayle and Lamar Alexander might be gone, but I think McCain is still in,\" concluded NPR's Mara Liasson. Ames was Vietnam in reverse: McCain ducked the fight, and Quayle took the beating.", "1. Top four. Like Dole, Bauer needed to crack the top tier and seal off the pack. Since sports analogies tend to cut off the top tier at three rather than four (e.g., \"bronze medal,\" \"win, place, and show\"), Bauer changed metaphors, telling reporters that he had reached \"the first rung of candidates\" and that lower finishers might soon perish. On Meet the Press , he called himself the \"breakout candidate.\" While some pundits lumped Bauer with the winners, others offered him the next best position--\"leading the rest of the pack\"--or at least distinguished him from the \"losers.\"", "2. Social conservative quarterfinal. This was Bauer's big spin win. Like Dole, he won a crucial \"contest-within-the-contest.\" His scant margin over Pat Buchanan--8.9 percent to 7.3 percent--became a huge factor in the post-poll analysis. Pundits concluded that Bauer \"did what he had to do ... beat Pat Buchanan,\" and therefore \"can legitimately say he is the candidate of the Christian right,\" establishing himself as \"one of the winners,\" the \"three or four\" candidates who \"got their tickets punched\" to stay in the race. Talk show hosts reminded Buchanan that he had lost to Bauer and asked whether Buchanan was finished.", "4. Comeback kid. Dismissive coverage of Dole before the straw poll played to her advantage, as everyone marveled at her \"surprisingly\" strong third. \"Dole Revived,\" the Washington Post 's front page proclaimed. On This Week , George Will conceded, \"There had been a lot of very skeptical stories about whether her people would show up. She, therefore, I think, is the biggest winner.\" \n\n \n\n Playbook", "1. Real votes. The vote-buying complaint only gets McCain a bye on the straw poll. To get another bye on February's Iowa caucuses, he'll rely on two other moral arguments. First, he'll claim that caucuses aren't \"real votes.\" \"We'll have real votes in New Hampshire,\" McCain argued on Fox News Sunday . \"That's where real people are motivated to vote.\" On Face the Nation , he suggested that he would focus on \"the genuine balloting process, which takes place in New Hampshire and then South Carolina.\"", "3. Experience. The longer McCain stays out of the race without damaging his credibility, the more the field narrows to his advantage. Alexander and Rep. John Kasich, R-Ohio, are already gone. Quayle and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, won't be far behind. If the field dwindles to Bush, Forbes, and Bauer, McCain can sell himself as the only experienced officeholder running against Bush. But Dole's third-place finish at Ames, coupled with her victory in the post-Ames spin contest, complicates this plan.", "4. Underdog. Bauer couldn't claim to be more strapped than Dole, so he claimed underdog status on the basis of low name recognition, inexperience, and working-class heritage. \"I am running against some big bios ... the son of a former president, the son of a tycoon, and the wife of a senator,\" Bauer argued on Late Edition . \"I have never run for president or office before. And yet here we come in fourth place.\" Newsweek 's David Brooks wrote that Bauer \"overcame his own financial disadvantages\" and joined Dole as the two surviving \"Have-Not candidates.\" \n\n \n\n Playbook", "Republican Shakeout \n\n This weekend's straw poll in Ames, Iowa, kicked off the 2000 presidential race and sorted out the Republican field. Everyone agrees that George W. Bush is the front-runner, that Steve Forbes is in second place, and that Dan Quayle, who finished back in the pack with Lamar Alexander, will soon join Alexander on the sidelines. But Ames failed to resolve the fate of the candidates who came in third and fourth--Elizabeth Dole and Gary Bauer--and the one who skipped Ames, John McCain. For these three, the post-game spin contest is crucial. Here's a playback of their takes on the straw poll results and a look ahead at their playbook of messages for the remainder of the race. \n\n Elizabeth Dole \n\n \n\n Playback", "1. Ames meant nothing to him. Despite having skipped the straw poll, McCain was invited onto Face the Nation and Fox News Sunday to discuss it. \"If you're going to be taken seriously,\" Brit Hume asked him, \"don't you have to face up to the fact, when all the other candidates decide that an event is worth attending ... that maybe you've got to play too?\" In reply, McCain repeatedly called Ames \"meaningless.\" His chutzpah bowled over the pundits. Stephanopoulos called McCain's no-show \"a pretty smart move\" and portrayed the 83 votes he won in the straw poll--putting him in last place among active Republican candidates--as evidence of his strength.", "1. Top three. Dole needed to get within striking distance of Bush and to seal off the rest of the pack behind her. On Meet the Press , Face the Nation , and Late Edition , she boasted that she had cracked \"the top three.\" Pundits bought the three-winners line, treating Ames as a horse race (\"win, place, and show\") and noting that \"no one's ever won the Republican nomination without finishing in the top three\" at Ames. Newspapers, cramped for space, confined their headlines to Bush, Forbes, and Dole. Though Dole's 14 percent was closer to Bauer's 9 than to Forbes' 21, she earned a \"solid third\" and a place among the leaders by crossing the \"double-digit\" threshold. As Fox News' Carl Cameron put it: \"The other seven candidates could not crack double digits.\"", "4. Vote-buying. To undermine the straw poll's authority as an arbiter of his candidacy, McCain called it a \"fund-raiser,\" \"a sham and a joke\" in which campaigns spent \"millions\" to \"buy\" votes. \"My campaign theme is to try to reform the system that is now awash with money and the influence of special interests,\" he argued on Fox News Sunday . Brit Hume's retort--\"that this whole process isn't quite pure enough for you\"--played right into McCain's hands. McCain doesn't need to persuade the media that his reasons for skipping Ames were morally sound. He just needs to persuade them that his reasons were moral rather than political. \n\n \n\n Playbook", "2. Ethanol. Many pundits, fancying themselves shrewd, suggest that McCain's true reason for skipping Iowa is that he has \"taken a position on ethanol subsidies that's unpalatable to voters in Iowa.\" On This Week , Stephanopoulos suggested that McCain might \"have to do something dramatic,\" such as \"make a stand and say, 'We're not going to compete in Iowa. We think these ethanol subsidies are an abomination.' \" This is McCain's greatest triumph: He has conned the media into disbelieving his political calculations and accusing him instead of principle. \"I've taken a lot of unpopular positions,\" he conceded on Fox News Sunday .", "3. Gender. This is the more obvious criterion that distinguishes Dole. She hardly needs to mention it--the media bring it up anyway--but she invokes it subtly, alluding (as she did on two Sunday talk shows) to \"women who drive their daughters halfway across the state to shake my hand, a woman they dare to believe in.\" Newspapers hail Dole's female followers as evidence \"that she can attract new voters to the GOP.\" \n\n Gary Bauer \n\n \n\n Playback" ] ]
train	20072	[ "To which director does the film reviewer offer the most praise?", "In reviewing \"Princess Mononoke,\" which of Miyazaki's techniques does the reviewer appreciate the least?", "According to the reviewer, Miyazaki believes that technological and industrial advancement has had a/an ______ effect on the force of nature:", "According to the reviewer, what is one of the greatest moments of the film \"Princess Mononoke\"?", "According to the reviewer, what is one of the disappointing aspects of the film \"Princess Mononoke\"?", "According to the reviewer, how would Miyazaki feel about youth viewing \"Princess Mononoke\"?", "In reviewing \"Music of the Heart,\" the reviewer believes that the director's greatest flaw is:", "The reviewer shares the following similar criticism of Princess Mononoke and Roberta Guaspari:", "The film reviewer is generally _____ the actors in \"Princess Mononoke,\" and ______ the actors in \"The Limey,\" respectively:", "What does the film reviewer respect the most about the director of \"The Limey\"?" ]	[ [ "Sam Raimi", "Steven Soderbergh", "Wes Craven", "Hayao Miyazaki" ], [ "His awareness of his audience", "His digitally dazzling cinematography", "His attention to detail", "His sublime proportionality " ], [ "Cannabilistic", "Befuddling", "Lethal", "Solipsistic" ], [ "The moment when Princess Mononoke sets off to kill the leader of Irontown", "The moment when Princess Mononoke rescues the Ashitaka ", "The moment when Ashitaka unlodges the iron ball from his body", "The moment when the kodamas make a brief appearance" ], [ "Industry ultimately triumphs over nature", "Princess Mononoke is too fixated on Ashitaka", "The director Miyazaki gets too lost in unimportant details", "The actors' overfamiliar voices distract from the seriousness of the plot" ], [ "Zealous", "Apprehensive", "Supportive", "Ambivalent" ], [ "Not focusing enough on the violin music", "Trying too hard to appeal to the film industry's elite", "Ignoring the perspectives of the children in the film", "Mischaracterizing Roberta Guaspari" ], [ "They are unoriginal and sexist caricatures of stereotypical female archetypes", "They are not developed to the fullest extent they could be, and the audience loses interest in their storyline", "They lose their appeal when the director reduces their rough edges", "They should have been cast as the protagonists of their respective stories, instead of secondary characters" ], [ "irritated by // impressed by", "skeptical of // convinced by", "bored of // enraptured by", "critical of // overpraising of" ], [ "His use of flashback and dialogue", "His simultaneous implication and omission of violence", "His ability to pack a lot of action into a short film", "His ability to evolve as a filmmaker" ] ]	[ 4, 2, 3, 1, 4, 3, 4, 3, 1, 4 ]	[ 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "Soderbergh is one of those rare filmmakers who learn on the job. Working within a tight genre structure, he's discovering hundreds of ways of editing a given scene that can give it the richness of a novel. Is he totally successful? No; he misses now and then, which is why the technique sticks out. But what a fantastic effort. See it and weep for what's missing in most other movies.", "Some, including the critic at Time , have questioned Soderbergh's sanity. (But of course--Soderbergh flouts time!) I see a method to his madness. Less grandiosely than Harmony Korine in Julien Donkey-Boy , Soderbergh pores over every scene in search of its essential dramatic gesture. He's saying: This --not all that other stuff--is what's important. He telegraphs the ending--you know the Limey will somehow be at the root of his daughter's death--but it's still an emotional wow. The climax justifies the technique. It says the point of this odyssey isn't revenge but regret--for irredeemably blown chances and a tragic waste of love.", "But then, \"soft\" is not a word you can apply to Princess Mononoke , however pantheistic its worldview. The film, which is rated PG-13, is full of splattery carnage. If Miyazaki in long shot is contemplative, in close-up he's ferocious. He's both inside and outside the action: He knows when to rock your world and when to induce a state of sorrowful detachment. According to the New York Times , Toy Story animators screened reels of his work when their imaginations flagged, and writers for Star Trek named an alien species after one of his features. Watching Princess Mononoke --which has been dubbed to Disney/Miramax specifications by American and English stars but retains its two-hour-plus length, its gory beheadings, and its grim, near-apocalyptic finale--you can understand their worship. It isn't that Miyazaki's work is technically so dazzling in this age of digitized miracles; it's that everything is sublimely in proportion.", "But the picture's glory is its layered and intricate syntax. The dialogue moves ahead--there are great gobs of exposition--but the images continually double back: to Stamp and Lesley Ann Warren, as his daughter's acting teacher, simply gazing at each other; or to Stamp sitting on a plane, remembering his daughter as a girl on the beach, the lens of his home movie camera creating an eerily bright--almost supernatural--spot that dances over her face. The film's most violent act happens well off screen. (You hear the distant \"pop-pop-pop-pop-pop\" of the hero's gun.) The rest is only half-glimpsed, fantasized, or saturated by memory--or is the present the memory? Is all of The Limey a temporal hiccup?", "actors in the classroom scenes, but the film has a reticence common to most biopics and a mushy, TV-movie humanism that blands out its texture. OK, I was a puddle after some scenes, like the one where Guaspari pushes", "Directors of violent genre pieces like Craven (who got this mainstream gig in return for doing the Scream sequels) or Carl Franklin or Sam Raimi sometimes want so badly to belong to Establishment", "In outline, The Limey is a lean little B-movie revenge melodrama about a felonious Brit (Terence Stamp) who's newly sprung from prison and flies to Southern California to get to the bottom of his beautiful daughter's death: \"My name's Wilson ... Who dunnit?\" The film, directed by Steven Soderbergh, would be worth seeing just for Stamp's performance, at once rock-hard and goofily blinkered, and for Peter Fonda's wittily self-parodic turn as the suspected killer, a music producer who coasts on '60s counterculture easiness while his lackeys do the dirty work. (\"Oh, man,\" he says, the fear finally seeping through the ether. \"This is getting all too close to me.\")", "a voice that the animators deserve. \"Bring the strange-ah to me late-ah,\" she commands in sexy Martian Queen cadences that will stir the loins of Flash Gordon fans everywhere. \"I would like to thank him puh-sonally.\"", "The overfamiliar voices nudge Princess Mononoke closer to its American counterparts--but not by a lot. There's always something wondrously strange. The \"kodamas\" are little tree spirits on doughboy bodies. They cock their trapezoidal dice heads and emit a series of clicks; then their heads pop back with a conclusive rattle. Something about them seems just right; I could watch them for hours. (Miyazaki limits their appearances to seconds--he doesn't wear out their mystery the way that, say, George Lucas would.) And no Hollywood animated feature would end with such a powerful vision of apocalypse, as the land is bestridden by a colossus dropping a thick, caustic, tarlike gel that recalls the post-Hiroshima \"black rain.\" Can you take the kids? I think so. As Miyazaki said at a New York Film Festival press conference, \"Children understand intuitively that the world they have been born into is not a blessed world.\" Princess Mononoke , at least, can tell them why.", "\"A special smile ... a certain touch ...\" So begins the elevator-music theme song of Music of the Heart ... \"I never had a lot that I loved so much.\" The credits had just started and I was already looking for a barf bag. Did Miramax and director Wes Craven have to work so hard to schlockify the story of Roberta Guaspari (played here by Meryl Streep), whose violin courses in East Harlem elementary schools have become a beacon for such programs nationwide? A fabled taskmaster (her story was told in the 1996 documentary Small Wonders ), Guaspari used music as a way to teach self-discipline--along with the healthy self-respect that follows in its wake. When the New York school board cut the funding for her program, she proved a marvel of self-promotion, attracting features in all the major dailies and ending up along with her best students at Carnegie Hall for a benefit \"Fiddlefest\"--along with Itzhak Perlman, Isaac Stern, and other legendary \"fiddlers.\"", "Machines in the Garden \n\n In the animated ecological epic Princess Mononoke , the camera travels over landscapes with a clear, steady gaze, like a Zen hang glider. The images have none of the comin'-at-ya pop-surrealism of American cartoons, many of which have characters that spring out of the frame like jack-in-the-boxes. The Japanese director, Hayao Miyazaki, who spent three years on Princess Mononoke and is reported to have done 70 percent of its paintings himself, seems to work from the outside in: to begin with the curve of the earth, then the mossy hills, the watercolor foliage, the nubby stones, the whorls on the wood, the meticulous carvings on a teacup. He captures the texture of light and the currents of air. You could almost settle down in this landscape. A view of nature that some would call \"tree-hugging\" doesn't feel softheaded when the trees are rendered in such brilliant and robust detail.", "Hollywood--to go to the Academy Awards--that they neuter themselves. Bending over backward to show how sensitive they can be, they forget that violence--even if it's just emotional violence--belongs in \"ordinary\" dramas, too. Craven does good work with the young", "The movie has a scope that makes Hollywood's homiletic, follow-your-dream fables look even more solipsistic. Miyazaki is after nothing less than the moment in our history (the film is set in the 14 th and 15 th centuries) when the power shifted from a \"natural\" world to one shaped by human technology. It's the beginning of what Bill McKibben called \"the end of nature\"--that is, when nature became no longer an autonomous, self-regulating force but one touched (and, in Miyazaki's view, poisoned) by human industry.", "Lady Eboshi--is one of the movie's high points. It's Miyazaki's use of sound--and silence--that takes your breath away: the determined tap of the wolf princess's shoes as she scuttles over the fortress's rooftops; the silence of Eboshi", "Streep has said that she spent so much of the time on the set learning the violin (she doesn't play any instruments) that she didn't bring the full force of her acting technique to bear on Roberta. Maybe that's why the performance seems so natural. Let her always learn an instrument on the set! Still, she doesn't make much sense of Guaspari. The script, by Pamela Gray ( A Walk on the Moon ), has her students complain of her nastiness and perfectionism, but Streep--who has made herself look dumpy, thick-waisted, and bedraggled--is so busy telegraphing her vulnerability that all we get is dippy niceness. Instead of a monument to an individual's iron will, Music of the Heart becomes the story of a woman so helpless that she arouses the kindness of strangers.", "The hero, Ashitaka, a warrior from the isolationist Emishi clan, is forced in the first scene to kill a marauding boar--a god turned into a demon (covered in roiling, corrosive worms) by an iron ball lodged in its body. Infected, destined to be consumed by--and to die of--rage, Ashitaka leaves his village in search of the iron ball's source. He discovers a fortress-cum-arms-manufacturing plant called Irontown, presided over by one of the most complex villains in modern film: the regal Lady Eboshi. On one hand, she's a benevolent industrialist who presides over a warmly matriarchal society; on the other, she wants to destroy the forest, harness its resources, and exterminate its animal deities--chiefly the Spirit of the Forest, a magnificent deer god whose touch brings instant life or death, and who transforms at dusk into the towering Night Walker.", "sounds silly (she doesn't have the breath control), and the fey-hick tones of Billy Bob Thornton are too recognizable as the Akim Tamiroff-like mercenary, Jigo. But Minnie Driver--coming off a triumphantly dizzy Jane in Tarzan --once again provides", "and her army as they stare at this tiny yet formidable tomboy against the black sky. Their battle is so furious that the blades streak and lose definition--it's almost subliminal.", "a student to get her to improve her posture and discovers that the girl is wearing a leg brace. But how much more emotional the Carnegie Hall climax would have been if instead of suddenly seeing these East Harlem kids on", "voice--I'd be interested to hear the original Japanese actress.) Billy Crudup is just as Disneyfied (Miramaxed?), but that doesn't hurt as much because Ashitaka is conceived from the start as a rather bland ingÃ©nu. Gillian Anderson's growling Moro" ], [ "But then, \"soft\" is not a word you can apply to Princess Mononoke , however pantheistic its worldview. The film, which is rated PG-13, is full of splattery carnage. If Miyazaki in long shot is contemplative, in close-up he's ferocious. He's both inside and outside the action: He knows when to rock your world and when to induce a state of sorrowful detachment. According to the New York Times , Toy Story animators screened reels of his work when their imaginations flagged, and writers for Star Trek named an alien species after one of his features. Watching Princess Mononoke --which has been dubbed to Disney/Miramax specifications by American and English stars but retains its two-hour-plus length, its gory beheadings, and its grim, near-apocalyptic finale--you can understand their worship. It isn't that Miyazaki's work is technically so dazzling in this age of digitized miracles; it's that everything is sublimely in proportion.", "Machines in the Garden \n\n In the animated ecological epic Princess Mononoke , the camera travels over landscapes with a clear, steady gaze, like a Zen hang glider. The images have none of the comin'-at-ya pop-surrealism of American cartoons, many of which have characters that spring out of the frame like jack-in-the-boxes. The Japanese director, Hayao Miyazaki, who spent three years on Princess Mononoke and is reported to have done 70 percent of its paintings himself, seems to work from the outside in: to begin with the curve of the earth, then the mossy hills, the watercolor foliage, the nubby stones, the whorls on the wood, the meticulous carvings on a teacup. He captures the texture of light and the currents of air. You could almost settle down in this landscape. A view of nature that some would call \"tree-hugging\" doesn't feel softheaded when the trees are rendered in such brilliant and robust detail.", "Lady Eboshi--is one of the movie's high points. It's Miyazaki's use of sound--and silence--that takes your breath away: the determined tap of the wolf princess's shoes as she scuttles over the fortress's rooftops; the silence of Eboshi", "The overfamiliar voices nudge Princess Mononoke closer to its American counterparts--but not by a lot. There's always something wondrously strange. The \"kodamas\" are little tree spirits on doughboy bodies. They cock their trapezoidal dice heads and emit a series of clicks; then their heads pop back with a conclusive rattle. Something about them seems just right; I could watch them for hours. (Miyazaki limits their appearances to seconds--he doesn't wear out their mystery the way that, say, George Lucas would.) And no Hollywood animated feature would end with such a powerful vision of apocalypse, as the land is bestridden by a colossus dropping a thick, caustic, tarlike gel that recalls the post-Hiroshima \"black rain.\" Can you take the kids? I think so. As Miyazaki said at a New York Film Festival press conference, \"Children understand intuitively that the world they have been born into is not a blessed world.\" Princess Mononoke , at least, can tell them why.", "P rincess Mononoke builds to a full-scale war between humans and the animal kingdom--which does not, by the way, consist of your father's cartoon critters. In fact, the boars and apes have", "It's a shame that the wolf princess warms up to Ashitaka and spends the rest of the film either saving him or being saved by him. She loses that punk-bitch allure. The voice", "The movie has a scope that makes Hollywood's homiletic, follow-your-dream fables look even more solipsistic. Miyazaki is after nothing less than the moment in our history (the film is set in the 14 th and 15 th centuries) when the power shifted from a \"natural\" world to one shaped by human technology. It's the beginning of what Bill McKibben called \"the end of nature\"--that is, when nature became no longer an autonomous, self-regulating force but one touched (and, in Miyazaki's view, poisoned) by human industry.", "little patience with Ashitaka's call for nature and mankind to live together in harmony; they'd like to eat him. The wolf god, Moro, is slightly more sympathetic, but that's because her adopted \"daughter,\" San (a k a Princess Mononoke),", "The hero, Ashitaka, a warrior from the isolationist Emishi clan, is forced in the first scene to kill a marauding boar--a god turned into a demon (covered in roiling, corrosive worms) by an iron ball lodged in its body. Infected, destined to be consumed by--and to die of--rage, Ashitaka leaves his village in search of the iron ball's source. He discovers a fortress-cum-arms-manufacturing plant called Irontown, presided over by one of the most complex villains in modern film: the regal Lady Eboshi. On one hand, she's a benevolent industrialist who presides over a warmly matriarchal society; on the other, she wants to destroy the forest, harness its resources, and exterminate its animal deities--chiefly the Spirit of the Forest, a magnificent deer god whose touch brings instant life or death, and who transforms at dusk into the towering Night Walker.", "voice--I'd be interested to hear the original Japanese actress.) Billy Crudup is just as Disneyfied (Miramaxed?), but that doesn't hurt as much because Ashitaka is conceived from the start as a rather bland ingÃ©nu. Gillian Anderson's growling Moro", "is human. San is first seen sucking a wound of her huge wolf mother, then, as the gore drips from her mouth, training her dark eyes on Ashitaka with feral hatred. Her second appearance--a lone attack on Irontown to assassinate", "Soderbergh is one of those rare filmmakers who learn on the job. Working within a tight genre structure, he's discovering hundreds of ways of editing a given scene that can give it the richness of a novel. Is he totally successful? No; he misses now and then, which is why the technique sticks out. But what a fantastic effort. See it and weep for what's missing in most other movies.", "But the picture's glory is its layered and intricate syntax. The dialogue moves ahead--there are great gobs of exposition--but the images continually double back: to Stamp and Lesley Ann Warren, as his daughter's acting teacher, simply gazing at each other; or to Stamp sitting on a plane, remembering his daughter as a girl on the beach, the lens of his home movie camera creating an eerily bright--almost supernatural--spot that dances over her face. The film's most violent act happens well off screen. (You hear the distant \"pop-pop-pop-pop-pop\" of the hero's gun.) The rest is only half-glimpsed, fantasized, or saturated by memory--or is the present the memory? Is all of The Limey a temporal hiccup?", "Some, including the critic at Time , have questioned Soderbergh's sanity. (But of course--Soderbergh flouts time!) I see a method to his madness. Less grandiosely than Harmony Korine in Julien Donkey-Boy , Soderbergh pores over every scene in search of its essential dramatic gesture. He's saying: This --not all that other stuff--is what's important. He telegraphs the ending--you know the Limey will somehow be at the root of his daughter's death--but it's still an emotional wow. The climax justifies the technique. It says the point of this odyssey isn't revenge but regret--for irredeemably blown chances and a tragic waste of love.", "sounds silly (she doesn't have the breath control), and the fey-hick tones of Billy Bob Thornton are too recognizable as the Akim Tamiroff-like mercenary, Jigo. But Minnie Driver--coming off a triumphantly dizzy Jane in Tarzan --once again provides", "of Claire Danes doesn't help. When Danes says, \"I'd do anything to get you humans out of my forest,\" she sounds like a Valley Girl peeved over lack of parking spaces at the mall. (San needs a more ragged", "Streep has said that she spent so much of the time on the set learning the violin (she doesn't play any instruments) that she didn't bring the full force of her acting technique to bear on Roberta. Maybe that's why the performance seems so natural. Let her always learn an instrument on the set! Still, she doesn't make much sense of Guaspari. The script, by Pamela Gray ( A Walk on the Moon ), has her students complain of her nastiness and perfectionism, but Streep--who has made herself look dumpy, thick-waisted, and bedraggled--is so busy telegraphing her vulnerability that all we get is dippy niceness. Instead of a monument to an individual's iron will, Music of the Heart becomes the story of a woman so helpless that she arouses the kindness of strangers.", "and her army as they stare at this tiny yet formidable tomboy against the black sky. Their battle is so furious that the blades streak and lose definition--it's almost subliminal.", "\"A special smile ... a certain touch ...\" So begins the elevator-music theme song of Music of the Heart ... \"I never had a lot that I loved so much.\" The credits had just started and I was already looking for a barf bag. Did Miramax and director Wes Craven have to work so hard to schlockify the story of Roberta Guaspari (played here by Meryl Streep), whose violin courses in East Harlem elementary schools have become a beacon for such programs nationwide? A fabled taskmaster (her story was told in the 1996 documentary Small Wonders ), Guaspari used music as a way to teach self-discipline--along with the healthy self-respect that follows in its wake. When the New York school board cut the funding for her program, she proved a marvel of self-promotion, attracting features in all the major dailies and ending up along with her best students at Carnegie Hall for a benefit \"Fiddlefest\"--along with Itzhak Perlman, Isaac Stern, and other legendary \"fiddlers.\"", "a voice that the animators deserve. \"Bring the strange-ah to me late-ah,\" she commands in sexy Martian Queen cadences that will stir the loins of Flash Gordon fans everywhere. \"I would like to thank him puh-sonally.\"" ], [ "The movie has a scope that makes Hollywood's homiletic, follow-your-dream fables look even more solipsistic. Miyazaki is after nothing less than the moment in our history (the film is set in the 14 th and 15 th centuries) when the power shifted from a \"natural\" world to one shaped by human technology. It's the beginning of what Bill McKibben called \"the end of nature\"--that is, when nature became no longer an autonomous, self-regulating force but one touched (and, in Miyazaki's view, poisoned) by human industry.", "Machines in the Garden \n\n In the animated ecological epic Princess Mononoke , the camera travels over landscapes with a clear, steady gaze, like a Zen hang glider. The images have none of the comin'-at-ya pop-surrealism of American cartoons, many of which have characters that spring out of the frame like jack-in-the-boxes. The Japanese director, Hayao Miyazaki, who spent three years on Princess Mononoke and is reported to have done 70 percent of its paintings himself, seems to work from the outside in: to begin with the curve of the earth, then the mossy hills, the watercolor foliage, the nubby stones, the whorls on the wood, the meticulous carvings on a teacup. He captures the texture of light and the currents of air. You could almost settle down in this landscape. A view of nature that some would call \"tree-hugging\" doesn't feel softheaded when the trees are rendered in such brilliant and robust detail.", "But then, \"soft\" is not a word you can apply to Princess Mononoke , however pantheistic its worldview. The film, which is rated PG-13, is full of splattery carnage. If Miyazaki in long shot is contemplative, in close-up he's ferocious. He's both inside and outside the action: He knows when to rock your world and when to induce a state of sorrowful detachment. According to the New York Times , Toy Story animators screened reels of his work when their imaginations flagged, and writers for Star Trek named an alien species after one of his features. Watching Princess Mononoke --which has been dubbed to Disney/Miramax specifications by American and English stars but retains its two-hour-plus length, its gory beheadings, and its grim, near-apocalyptic finale--you can understand their worship. It isn't that Miyazaki's work is technically so dazzling in this age of digitized miracles; it's that everything is sublimely in proportion.", "The hero, Ashitaka, a warrior from the isolationist Emishi clan, is forced in the first scene to kill a marauding boar--a god turned into a demon (covered in roiling, corrosive worms) by an iron ball lodged in its body. Infected, destined to be consumed by--and to die of--rage, Ashitaka leaves his village in search of the iron ball's source. He discovers a fortress-cum-arms-manufacturing plant called Irontown, presided over by one of the most complex villains in modern film: the regal Lady Eboshi. On one hand, she's a benevolent industrialist who presides over a warmly matriarchal society; on the other, she wants to destroy the forest, harness its resources, and exterminate its animal deities--chiefly the Spirit of the Forest, a magnificent deer god whose touch brings instant life or death, and who transforms at dusk into the towering Night Walker.", "Lady Eboshi--is one of the movie's high points. It's Miyazaki's use of sound--and silence--that takes your breath away: the determined tap of the wolf princess's shoes as she scuttles over the fortress's rooftops; the silence of Eboshi", "The overfamiliar voices nudge Princess Mononoke closer to its American counterparts--but not by a lot. There's always something wondrously strange. The \"kodamas\" are little tree spirits on doughboy bodies. They cock their trapezoidal dice heads and emit a series of clicks; then their heads pop back with a conclusive rattle. Something about them seems just right; I could watch them for hours. (Miyazaki limits their appearances to seconds--he doesn't wear out their mystery the way that, say, George Lucas would.) And no Hollywood animated feature would end with such a powerful vision of apocalypse, as the land is bestridden by a colossus dropping a thick, caustic, tarlike gel that recalls the post-Hiroshima \"black rain.\" Can you take the kids? I think so. As Miyazaki said at a New York Film Festival press conference, \"Children understand intuitively that the world they have been born into is not a blessed world.\" Princess Mononoke , at least, can tell them why.", "little patience with Ashitaka's call for nature and mankind to live together in harmony; they'd like to eat him. The wolf god, Moro, is slightly more sympathetic, but that's because her adopted \"daughter,\" San (a k a Princess Mononoke),", "P rincess Mononoke builds to a full-scale war between humans and the animal kingdom--which does not, by the way, consist of your father's cartoon critters. In fact, the boars and apes have", "and her army as they stare at this tiny yet formidable tomboy against the black sky. Their battle is so furious that the blades streak and lose definition--it's almost subliminal.", "Some, including the critic at Time , have questioned Soderbergh's sanity. (But of course--Soderbergh flouts time!) I see a method to his madness. Less grandiosely than Harmony Korine in Julien Donkey-Boy , Soderbergh pores over every scene in search of its essential dramatic gesture. He's saying: This --not all that other stuff--is what's important. He telegraphs the ending--you know the Limey will somehow be at the root of his daughter's death--but it's still an emotional wow. The climax justifies the technique. It says the point of this odyssey isn't revenge but regret--for irredeemably blown chances and a tragic waste of love.", "is human. San is first seen sucking a wound of her huge wolf mother, then, as the gore drips from her mouth, training her dark eyes on Ashitaka with feral hatred. Her second appearance--a lone attack on Irontown to assassinate", "voice--I'd be interested to hear the original Japanese actress.) Billy Crudup is just as Disneyfied (Miramaxed?), but that doesn't hurt as much because Ashitaka is conceived from the start as a rather bland ingÃ©nu. Gillian Anderson's growling Moro", "Streep has said that she spent so much of the time on the set learning the violin (she doesn't play any instruments) that she didn't bring the full force of her acting technique to bear on Roberta. Maybe that's why the performance seems so natural. Let her always learn an instrument on the set! Still, she doesn't make much sense of Guaspari. The script, by Pamela Gray ( A Walk on the Moon ), has her students complain of her nastiness and perfectionism, but Streep--who has made herself look dumpy, thick-waisted, and bedraggled--is so busy telegraphing her vulnerability that all we get is dippy niceness. Instead of a monument to an individual's iron will, Music of the Heart becomes the story of a woman so helpless that she arouses the kindness of strangers.", "It's a shame that the wolf princess warms up to Ashitaka and spends the rest of the film either saving him or being saved by him. She loses that punk-bitch allure. The voice", "Soderbergh is one of those rare filmmakers who learn on the job. Working within a tight genre structure, he's discovering hundreds of ways of editing a given scene that can give it the richness of a novel. Is he totally successful? No; he misses now and then, which is why the technique sticks out. But what a fantastic effort. See it and weep for what's missing in most other movies.", "But the picture's glory is its layered and intricate syntax. The dialogue moves ahead--there are great gobs of exposition--but the images continually double back: to Stamp and Lesley Ann Warren, as his daughter's acting teacher, simply gazing at each other; or to Stamp sitting on a plane, remembering his daughter as a girl on the beach, the lens of his home movie camera creating an eerily bright--almost supernatural--spot that dances over her face. The film's most violent act happens well off screen. (You hear the distant \"pop-pop-pop-pop-pop\" of the hero's gun.) The rest is only half-glimpsed, fantasized, or saturated by memory--or is the present the memory? Is all of The Limey a temporal hiccup?", "\"A special smile ... a certain touch ...\" So begins the elevator-music theme song of Music of the Heart ... \"I never had a lot that I loved so much.\" The credits had just started and I was already looking for a barf bag. Did Miramax and director Wes Craven have to work so hard to schlockify the story of Roberta Guaspari (played here by Meryl Streep), whose violin courses in East Harlem elementary schools have become a beacon for such programs nationwide? A fabled taskmaster (her story was told in the 1996 documentary Small Wonders ), Guaspari used music as a way to teach self-discipline--along with the healthy self-respect that follows in its wake. When the New York school board cut the funding for her program, she proved a marvel of self-promotion, attracting features in all the major dailies and ending up along with her best students at Carnegie Hall for a benefit \"Fiddlefest\"--along with Itzhak Perlman, Isaac Stern, and other legendary \"fiddlers.\"", "a voice that the animators deserve. \"Bring the strange-ah to me late-ah,\" she commands in sexy Martian Queen cadences that will stir the loins of Flash Gordon fans everywhere. \"I would like to thank him puh-sonally.\"", "sounds silly (she doesn't have the breath control), and the fey-hick tones of Billy Bob Thornton are too recognizable as the Akim Tamiroff-like mercenary, Jigo. But Minnie Driver--coming off a triumphantly dizzy Jane in Tarzan --once again provides", "In outline, The Limey is a lean little B-movie revenge melodrama about a felonious Brit (Terence Stamp) who's newly sprung from prison and flies to Southern California to get to the bottom of his beautiful daughter's death: \"My name's Wilson ... Who dunnit?\" The film, directed by Steven Soderbergh, would be worth seeing just for Stamp's performance, at once rock-hard and goofily blinkered, and for Peter Fonda's wittily self-parodic turn as the suspected killer, a music producer who coasts on '60s counterculture easiness while his lackeys do the dirty work. (\"Oh, man,\" he says, the fear finally seeping through the ether. \"This is getting all too close to me.\")" ], [ "Lady Eboshi--is one of the movie's high points. It's Miyazaki's use of sound--and silence--that takes your breath away: the determined tap of the wolf princess's shoes as she scuttles over the fortress's rooftops; the silence of Eboshi", "But then, \"soft\" is not a word you can apply to Princess Mononoke , however pantheistic its worldview. The film, which is rated PG-13, is full of splattery carnage. If Miyazaki in long shot is contemplative, in close-up he's ferocious. He's both inside and outside the action: He knows when to rock your world and when to induce a state of sorrowful detachment. According to the New York Times , Toy Story animators screened reels of his work when their imaginations flagged, and writers for Star Trek named an alien species after one of his features. Watching Princess Mononoke --which has been dubbed to Disney/Miramax specifications by American and English stars but retains its two-hour-plus length, its gory beheadings, and its grim, near-apocalyptic finale--you can understand their worship. It isn't that Miyazaki's work is technically so dazzling in this age of digitized miracles; it's that everything is sublimely in proportion.", "The hero, Ashitaka, a warrior from the isolationist Emishi clan, is forced in the first scene to kill a marauding boar--a god turned into a demon (covered in roiling, corrosive worms) by an iron ball lodged in its body. Infected, destined to be consumed by--and to die of--rage, Ashitaka leaves his village in search of the iron ball's source. He discovers a fortress-cum-arms-manufacturing plant called Irontown, presided over by one of the most complex villains in modern film: the regal Lady Eboshi. On one hand, she's a benevolent industrialist who presides over a warmly matriarchal society; on the other, she wants to destroy the forest, harness its resources, and exterminate its animal deities--chiefly the Spirit of the Forest, a magnificent deer god whose touch brings instant life or death, and who transforms at dusk into the towering Night Walker.", "Machines in the Garden \n\n In the animated ecological epic Princess Mononoke , the camera travels over landscapes with a clear, steady gaze, like a Zen hang glider. The images have none of the comin'-at-ya pop-surrealism of American cartoons, many of which have characters that spring out of the frame like jack-in-the-boxes. The Japanese director, Hayao Miyazaki, who spent three years on Princess Mononoke and is reported to have done 70 percent of its paintings himself, seems to work from the outside in: to begin with the curve of the earth, then the mossy hills, the watercolor foliage, the nubby stones, the whorls on the wood, the meticulous carvings on a teacup. He captures the texture of light and the currents of air. You could almost settle down in this landscape. A view of nature that some would call \"tree-hugging\" doesn't feel softheaded when the trees are rendered in such brilliant and robust detail.", "The overfamiliar voices nudge Princess Mononoke closer to its American counterparts--but not by a lot. There's always something wondrously strange. The \"kodamas\" are little tree spirits on doughboy bodies. They cock their trapezoidal dice heads and emit a series of clicks; then their heads pop back with a conclusive rattle. Something about them seems just right; I could watch them for hours. (Miyazaki limits their appearances to seconds--he doesn't wear out their mystery the way that, say, George Lucas would.) And no Hollywood animated feature would end with such a powerful vision of apocalypse, as the land is bestridden by a colossus dropping a thick, caustic, tarlike gel that recalls the post-Hiroshima \"black rain.\" Can you take the kids? I think so. As Miyazaki said at a New York Film Festival press conference, \"Children understand intuitively that the world they have been born into is not a blessed world.\" Princess Mononoke , at least, can tell them why.", "The movie has a scope that makes Hollywood's homiletic, follow-your-dream fables look even more solipsistic. Miyazaki is after nothing less than the moment in our history (the film is set in the 14 th and 15 th centuries) when the power shifted from a \"natural\" world to one shaped by human technology. It's the beginning of what Bill McKibben called \"the end of nature\"--that is, when nature became no longer an autonomous, self-regulating force but one touched (and, in Miyazaki's view, poisoned) by human industry.", "P rincess Mononoke builds to a full-scale war between humans and the animal kingdom--which does not, by the way, consist of your father's cartoon critters. In fact, the boars and apes have", "It's a shame that the wolf princess warms up to Ashitaka and spends the rest of the film either saving him or being saved by him. She loses that punk-bitch allure. The voice", "little patience with Ashitaka's call for nature and mankind to live together in harmony; they'd like to eat him. The wolf god, Moro, is slightly more sympathetic, but that's because her adopted \"daughter,\" San (a k a Princess Mononoke),", "is human. San is first seen sucking a wound of her huge wolf mother, then, as the gore drips from her mouth, training her dark eyes on Ashitaka with feral hatred. Her second appearance--a lone attack on Irontown to assassinate", "voice--I'd be interested to hear the original Japanese actress.) Billy Crudup is just as Disneyfied (Miramaxed?), but that doesn't hurt as much because Ashitaka is conceived from the start as a rather bland ingÃ©nu. Gillian Anderson's growling Moro", "But the picture's glory is its layered and intricate syntax. The dialogue moves ahead--there are great gobs of exposition--but the images continually double back: to Stamp and Lesley Ann Warren, as his daughter's acting teacher, simply gazing at each other; or to Stamp sitting on a plane, remembering his daughter as a girl on the beach, the lens of his home movie camera creating an eerily bright--almost supernatural--spot that dances over her face. The film's most violent act happens well off screen. (You hear the distant \"pop-pop-pop-pop-pop\" of the hero's gun.) The rest is only half-glimpsed, fantasized, or saturated by memory--or is the present the memory? Is all of The Limey a temporal hiccup?", "Some, including the critic at Time , have questioned Soderbergh's sanity. (But of course--Soderbergh flouts time!) I see a method to his madness. Less grandiosely than Harmony Korine in Julien Donkey-Boy , Soderbergh pores over every scene in search of its essential dramatic gesture. He's saying: This --not all that other stuff--is what's important. He telegraphs the ending--you know the Limey will somehow be at the root of his daughter's death--but it's still an emotional wow. The climax justifies the technique. It says the point of this odyssey isn't revenge but regret--for irredeemably blown chances and a tragic waste of love.", "and her army as they stare at this tiny yet formidable tomboy against the black sky. Their battle is so furious that the blades streak and lose definition--it's almost subliminal.", "a voice that the animators deserve. \"Bring the strange-ah to me late-ah,\" she commands in sexy Martian Queen cadences that will stir the loins of Flash Gordon fans everywhere. \"I would like to thank him puh-sonally.\"", "Soderbergh is one of those rare filmmakers who learn on the job. Working within a tight genre structure, he's discovering hundreds of ways of editing a given scene that can give it the richness of a novel. Is he totally successful? No; he misses now and then, which is why the technique sticks out. But what a fantastic effort. See it and weep for what's missing in most other movies.", "In outline, The Limey is a lean little B-movie revenge melodrama about a felonious Brit (Terence Stamp) who's newly sprung from prison and flies to Southern California to get to the bottom of his beautiful daughter's death: \"My name's Wilson ... Who dunnit?\" The film, directed by Steven Soderbergh, would be worth seeing just for Stamp's performance, at once rock-hard and goofily blinkered, and for Peter Fonda's wittily self-parodic turn as the suspected killer, a music producer who coasts on '60s counterculture easiness while his lackeys do the dirty work. (\"Oh, man,\" he says, the fear finally seeping through the ether. \"This is getting all too close to me.\")", "\"A special smile ... a certain touch ...\" So begins the elevator-music theme song of Music of the Heart ... \"I never had a lot that I loved so much.\" The credits had just started and I was already looking for a barf bag. Did Miramax and director Wes Craven have to work so hard to schlockify the story of Roberta Guaspari (played here by Meryl Streep), whose violin courses in East Harlem elementary schools have become a beacon for such programs nationwide? A fabled taskmaster (her story was told in the 1996 documentary Small Wonders ), Guaspari used music as a way to teach self-discipline--along with the healthy self-respect that follows in its wake. When the New York school board cut the funding for her program, she proved a marvel of self-promotion, attracting features in all the major dailies and ending up along with her best students at Carnegie Hall for a benefit \"Fiddlefest\"--along with Itzhak Perlman, Isaac Stern, and other legendary \"fiddlers.\"", "sounds silly (she doesn't have the breath control), and the fey-hick tones of Billy Bob Thornton are too recognizable as the Akim Tamiroff-like mercenary, Jigo. But Minnie Driver--coming off a triumphantly dizzy Jane in Tarzan --once again provides", "actors in the classroom scenes, but the film has a reticence common to most biopics and a mushy, TV-movie humanism that blands out its texture. OK, I was a puddle after some scenes, like the one where Guaspari pushes" ], [ "But then, \"soft\" is not a word you can apply to Princess Mononoke , however pantheistic its worldview. The film, which is rated PG-13, is full of splattery carnage. If Miyazaki in long shot is contemplative, in close-up he's ferocious. He's both inside and outside the action: He knows when to rock your world and when to induce a state of sorrowful detachment. According to the New York Times , Toy Story animators screened reels of his work when their imaginations flagged, and writers for Star Trek named an alien species after one of his features. Watching Princess Mononoke --which has been dubbed to Disney/Miramax specifications by American and English stars but retains its two-hour-plus length, its gory beheadings, and its grim, near-apocalyptic finale--you can understand their worship. It isn't that Miyazaki's work is technically so dazzling in this age of digitized miracles; it's that everything is sublimely in proportion.", "Machines in the Garden \n\n In the animated ecological epic Princess Mononoke , the camera travels over landscapes with a clear, steady gaze, like a Zen hang glider. The images have none of the comin'-at-ya pop-surrealism of American cartoons, many of which have characters that spring out of the frame like jack-in-the-boxes. The Japanese director, Hayao Miyazaki, who spent three years on Princess Mononoke and is reported to have done 70 percent of its paintings himself, seems to work from the outside in: to begin with the curve of the earth, then the mossy hills, the watercolor foliage, the nubby stones, the whorls on the wood, the meticulous carvings on a teacup. He captures the texture of light and the currents of air. You could almost settle down in this landscape. A view of nature that some would call \"tree-hugging\" doesn't feel softheaded when the trees are rendered in such brilliant and robust detail.", "The overfamiliar voices nudge Princess Mononoke closer to its American counterparts--but not by a lot. There's always something wondrously strange. The \"kodamas\" are little tree spirits on doughboy bodies. They cock their trapezoidal dice heads and emit a series of clicks; then their heads pop back with a conclusive rattle. Something about them seems just right; I could watch them for hours. (Miyazaki limits their appearances to seconds--he doesn't wear out their mystery the way that, say, George Lucas would.) And no Hollywood animated feature would end with such a powerful vision of apocalypse, as the land is bestridden by a colossus dropping a thick, caustic, tarlike gel that recalls the post-Hiroshima \"black rain.\" Can you take the kids? I think so. As Miyazaki said at a New York Film Festival press conference, \"Children understand intuitively that the world they have been born into is not a blessed world.\" Princess Mononoke , at least, can tell them why.", "It's a shame that the wolf princess warms up to Ashitaka and spends the rest of the film either saving him or being saved by him. She loses that punk-bitch allure. The voice", "Lady Eboshi--is one of the movie's high points. It's Miyazaki's use of sound--and silence--that takes your breath away: the determined tap of the wolf princess's shoes as she scuttles over the fortress's rooftops; the silence of Eboshi", "P rincess Mononoke builds to a full-scale war between humans and the animal kingdom--which does not, by the way, consist of your father's cartoon critters. In fact, the boars and apes have", "The hero, Ashitaka, a warrior from the isolationist Emishi clan, is forced in the first scene to kill a marauding boar--a god turned into a demon (covered in roiling, corrosive worms) by an iron ball lodged in its body. Infected, destined to be consumed by--and to die of--rage, Ashitaka leaves his village in search of the iron ball's source. He discovers a fortress-cum-arms-manufacturing plant called Irontown, presided over by one of the most complex villains in modern film: the regal Lady Eboshi. On one hand, she's a benevolent industrialist who presides over a warmly matriarchal society; on the other, she wants to destroy the forest, harness its resources, and exterminate its animal deities--chiefly the Spirit of the Forest, a magnificent deer god whose touch brings instant life or death, and who transforms at dusk into the towering Night Walker.", "voice--I'd be interested to hear the original Japanese actress.) Billy Crudup is just as Disneyfied (Miramaxed?), but that doesn't hurt as much because Ashitaka is conceived from the start as a rather bland ingÃ©nu. Gillian Anderson's growling Moro", "little patience with Ashitaka's call for nature and mankind to live together in harmony; they'd like to eat him. The wolf god, Moro, is slightly more sympathetic, but that's because her adopted \"daughter,\" San (a k a Princess Mononoke),", "The movie has a scope that makes Hollywood's homiletic, follow-your-dream fables look even more solipsistic. Miyazaki is after nothing less than the moment in our history (the film is set in the 14 th and 15 th centuries) when the power shifted from a \"natural\" world to one shaped by human technology. It's the beginning of what Bill McKibben called \"the end of nature\"--that is, when nature became no longer an autonomous, self-regulating force but one touched (and, in Miyazaki's view, poisoned) by human industry.", "is human. San is first seen sucking a wound of her huge wolf mother, then, as the gore drips from her mouth, training her dark eyes on Ashitaka with feral hatred. Her second appearance--a lone attack on Irontown to assassinate", "\"A special smile ... a certain touch ...\" So begins the elevator-music theme song of Music of the Heart ... \"I never had a lot that I loved so much.\" The credits had just started and I was already looking for a barf bag. Did Miramax and director Wes Craven have to work so hard to schlockify the story of Roberta Guaspari (played here by Meryl Streep), whose violin courses in East Harlem elementary schools have become a beacon for such programs nationwide? A fabled taskmaster (her story was told in the 1996 documentary Small Wonders ), Guaspari used music as a way to teach self-discipline--along with the healthy self-respect that follows in its wake. When the New York school board cut the funding for her program, she proved a marvel of self-promotion, attracting features in all the major dailies and ending up along with her best students at Carnegie Hall for a benefit \"Fiddlefest\"--along with Itzhak Perlman, Isaac Stern, and other legendary \"fiddlers.\"", "But the picture's glory is its layered and intricate syntax. The dialogue moves ahead--there are great gobs of exposition--but the images continually double back: to Stamp and Lesley Ann Warren, as his daughter's acting teacher, simply gazing at each other; or to Stamp sitting on a plane, remembering his daughter as a girl on the beach, the lens of his home movie camera creating an eerily bright--almost supernatural--spot that dances over her face. The film's most violent act happens well off screen. (You hear the distant \"pop-pop-pop-pop-pop\" of the hero's gun.) The rest is only half-glimpsed, fantasized, or saturated by memory--or is the present the memory? Is all of The Limey a temporal hiccup?", "Streep has said that she spent so much of the time on the set learning the violin (she doesn't play any instruments) that she didn't bring the full force of her acting technique to bear on Roberta. Maybe that's why the performance seems so natural. Let her always learn an instrument on the set! Still, she doesn't make much sense of Guaspari. The script, by Pamela Gray ( A Walk on the Moon ), has her students complain of her nastiness and perfectionism, but Streep--who has made herself look dumpy, thick-waisted, and bedraggled--is so busy telegraphing her vulnerability that all we get is dippy niceness. Instead of a monument to an individual's iron will, Music of the Heart becomes the story of a woman so helpless that she arouses the kindness of strangers.", "of Claire Danes doesn't help. When Danes says, \"I'd do anything to get you humans out of my forest,\" she sounds like a Valley Girl peeved over lack of parking spaces at the mall. (San needs a more ragged", "Some, including the critic at Time , have questioned Soderbergh's sanity. (But of course--Soderbergh flouts time!) I see a method to his madness. Less grandiosely than Harmony Korine in Julien Donkey-Boy , Soderbergh pores over every scene in search of its essential dramatic gesture. He's saying: This --not all that other stuff--is what's important. He telegraphs the ending--you know the Limey will somehow be at the root of his daughter's death--but it's still an emotional wow. The climax justifies the technique. It says the point of this odyssey isn't revenge but regret--for irredeemably blown chances and a tragic waste of love.", "sounds silly (she doesn't have the breath control), and the fey-hick tones of Billy Bob Thornton are too recognizable as the Akim Tamiroff-like mercenary, Jigo. But Minnie Driver--coming off a triumphantly dizzy Jane in Tarzan --once again provides", "Soderbergh is one of those rare filmmakers who learn on the job. Working within a tight genre structure, he's discovering hundreds of ways of editing a given scene that can give it the richness of a novel. Is he totally successful? No; he misses now and then, which is why the technique sticks out. But what a fantastic effort. See it and weep for what's missing in most other movies.", "actors in the classroom scenes, but the film has a reticence common to most biopics and a mushy, TV-movie humanism that blands out its texture. OK, I was a puddle after some scenes, like the one where Guaspari pushes", "a voice that the animators deserve. \"Bring the strange-ah to me late-ah,\" she commands in sexy Martian Queen cadences that will stir the loins of Flash Gordon fans everywhere. \"I would like to thank him puh-sonally.\"" ], [ "But then, \"soft\" is not a word you can apply to Princess Mononoke , however pantheistic its worldview. The film, which is rated PG-13, is full of splattery carnage. If Miyazaki in long shot is contemplative, in close-up he's ferocious. He's both inside and outside the action: He knows when to rock your world and when to induce a state of sorrowful detachment. According to the New York Times , Toy Story animators screened reels of his work when their imaginations flagged, and writers for Star Trek named an alien species after one of his features. Watching Princess Mononoke --which has been dubbed to Disney/Miramax specifications by American and English stars but retains its two-hour-plus length, its gory beheadings, and its grim, near-apocalyptic finale--you can understand their worship. It isn't that Miyazaki's work is technically so dazzling in this age of digitized miracles; it's that everything is sublimely in proportion.", "The overfamiliar voices nudge Princess Mononoke closer to its American counterparts--but not by a lot. There's always something wondrously strange. The \"kodamas\" are little tree spirits on doughboy bodies. They cock their trapezoidal dice heads and emit a series of clicks; then their heads pop back with a conclusive rattle. Something about them seems just right; I could watch them for hours. (Miyazaki limits their appearances to seconds--he doesn't wear out their mystery the way that, say, George Lucas would.) And no Hollywood animated feature would end with such a powerful vision of apocalypse, as the land is bestridden by a colossus dropping a thick, caustic, tarlike gel that recalls the post-Hiroshima \"black rain.\" Can you take the kids? I think so. As Miyazaki said at a New York Film Festival press conference, \"Children understand intuitively that the world they have been born into is not a blessed world.\" Princess Mononoke , at least, can tell them why.", "Machines in the Garden \n\n In the animated ecological epic Princess Mononoke , the camera travels over landscapes with a clear, steady gaze, like a Zen hang glider. The images have none of the comin'-at-ya pop-surrealism of American cartoons, many of which have characters that spring out of the frame like jack-in-the-boxes. The Japanese director, Hayao Miyazaki, who spent three years on Princess Mononoke and is reported to have done 70 percent of its paintings himself, seems to work from the outside in: to begin with the curve of the earth, then the mossy hills, the watercolor foliage, the nubby stones, the whorls on the wood, the meticulous carvings on a teacup. He captures the texture of light and the currents of air. You could almost settle down in this landscape. A view of nature that some would call \"tree-hugging\" doesn't feel softheaded when the trees are rendered in such brilliant and robust detail.", "The movie has a scope that makes Hollywood's homiletic, follow-your-dream fables look even more solipsistic. Miyazaki is after nothing less than the moment in our history (the film is set in the 14 th and 15 th centuries) when the power shifted from a \"natural\" world to one shaped by human technology. It's the beginning of what Bill McKibben called \"the end of nature\"--that is, when nature became no longer an autonomous, self-regulating force but one touched (and, in Miyazaki's view, poisoned) by human industry.", "The hero, Ashitaka, a warrior from the isolationist Emishi clan, is forced in the first scene to kill a marauding boar--a god turned into a demon (covered in roiling, corrosive worms) by an iron ball lodged in its body. Infected, destined to be consumed by--and to die of--rage, Ashitaka leaves his village in search of the iron ball's source. He discovers a fortress-cum-arms-manufacturing plant called Irontown, presided over by one of the most complex villains in modern film: the regal Lady Eboshi. On one hand, she's a benevolent industrialist who presides over a warmly matriarchal society; on the other, she wants to destroy the forest, harness its resources, and exterminate its animal deities--chiefly the Spirit of the Forest, a magnificent deer god whose touch brings instant life or death, and who transforms at dusk into the towering Night Walker.", "little patience with Ashitaka's call for nature and mankind to live together in harmony; they'd like to eat him. The wolf god, Moro, is slightly more sympathetic, but that's because her adopted \"daughter,\" San (a k a Princess Mononoke),", "Lady Eboshi--is one of the movie's high points. It's Miyazaki's use of sound--and silence--that takes your breath away: the determined tap of the wolf princess's shoes as she scuttles over the fortress's rooftops; the silence of Eboshi", "P rincess Mononoke builds to a full-scale war between humans and the animal kingdom--which does not, by the way, consist of your father's cartoon critters. In fact, the boars and apes have", "It's a shame that the wolf princess warms up to Ashitaka and spends the rest of the film either saving him or being saved by him. She loses that punk-bitch allure. The voice", "voice--I'd be interested to hear the original Japanese actress.) Billy Crudup is just as Disneyfied (Miramaxed?), but that doesn't hurt as much because Ashitaka is conceived from the start as a rather bland ingÃ©nu. Gillian Anderson's growling Moro", "is human. San is first seen sucking a wound of her huge wolf mother, then, as the gore drips from her mouth, training her dark eyes on Ashitaka with feral hatred. Her second appearance--a lone attack on Irontown to assassinate", "Hollywood--to go to the Academy Awards--that they neuter themselves. Bending over backward to show how sensitive they can be, they forget that violence--even if it's just emotional violence--belongs in \"ordinary\" dramas, too. Craven does good work with the young", "and her army as they stare at this tiny yet formidable tomboy against the black sky. Their battle is so furious that the blades streak and lose definition--it's almost subliminal.", "\"A special smile ... a certain touch ...\" So begins the elevator-music theme song of Music of the Heart ... \"I never had a lot that I loved so much.\" The credits had just started and I was already looking for a barf bag. Did Miramax and director Wes Craven have to work so hard to schlockify the story of Roberta Guaspari (played here by Meryl Streep), whose violin courses in East Harlem elementary schools have become a beacon for such programs nationwide? A fabled taskmaster (her story was told in the 1996 documentary Small Wonders ), Guaspari used music as a way to teach self-discipline--along with the healthy self-respect that follows in its wake. When the New York school board cut the funding for her program, she proved a marvel of self-promotion, attracting features in all the major dailies and ending up along with her best students at Carnegie Hall for a benefit \"Fiddlefest\"--along with Itzhak Perlman, Isaac Stern, and other legendary \"fiddlers.\"", "Some, including the critic at Time , have questioned Soderbergh's sanity. (But of course--Soderbergh flouts time!) I see a method to his madness. Less grandiosely than Harmony Korine in Julien Donkey-Boy , Soderbergh pores over every scene in search of its essential dramatic gesture. He's saying: This --not all that other stuff--is what's important. He telegraphs the ending--you know the Limey will somehow be at the root of his daughter's death--but it's still an emotional wow. The climax justifies the technique. It says the point of this odyssey isn't revenge but regret--for irredeemably blown chances and a tragic waste of love.", "But the picture's glory is its layered and intricate syntax. The dialogue moves ahead--there are great gobs of exposition--but the images continually double back: to Stamp and Lesley Ann Warren, as his daughter's acting teacher, simply gazing at each other; or to Stamp sitting on a plane, remembering his daughter as a girl on the beach, the lens of his home movie camera creating an eerily bright--almost supernatural--spot that dances over her face. The film's most violent act happens well off screen. (You hear the distant \"pop-pop-pop-pop-pop\" of the hero's gun.) The rest is only half-glimpsed, fantasized, or saturated by memory--or is the present the memory? Is all of The Limey a temporal hiccup?", "a voice that the animators deserve. \"Bring the strange-ah to me late-ah,\" she commands in sexy Martian Queen cadences that will stir the loins of Flash Gordon fans everywhere. \"I would like to thank him puh-sonally.\"", "In outline, The Limey is a lean little B-movie revenge melodrama about a felonious Brit (Terence Stamp) who's newly sprung from prison and flies to Southern California to get to the bottom of his beautiful daughter's death: \"My name's Wilson ... Who dunnit?\" The film, directed by Steven Soderbergh, would be worth seeing just for Stamp's performance, at once rock-hard and goofily blinkered, and for Peter Fonda's wittily self-parodic turn as the suspected killer, a music producer who coasts on '60s counterculture easiness while his lackeys do the dirty work. (\"Oh, man,\" he says, the fear finally seeping through the ether. \"This is getting all too close to me.\")", "Streep has said that she spent so much of the time on the set learning the violin (she doesn't play any instruments) that she didn't bring the full force of her acting technique to bear on Roberta. Maybe that's why the performance seems so natural. Let her always learn an instrument on the set! Still, she doesn't make much sense of Guaspari. The script, by Pamela Gray ( A Walk on the Moon ), has her students complain of her nastiness and perfectionism, but Streep--who has made herself look dumpy, thick-waisted, and bedraggled--is so busy telegraphing her vulnerability that all we get is dippy niceness. Instead of a monument to an individual's iron will, Music of the Heart becomes the story of a woman so helpless that she arouses the kindness of strangers.", "Directors of violent genre pieces like Craven (who got this mainstream gig in return for doing the Scream sequels) or Carl Franklin or Sam Raimi sometimes want so badly to belong to Establishment" ], [ "\"A special smile ... a certain touch ...\" So begins the elevator-music theme song of Music of the Heart ... \"I never had a lot that I loved so much.\" The credits had just started and I was already looking for a barf bag. Did Miramax and director Wes Craven have to work so hard to schlockify the story of Roberta Guaspari (played here by Meryl Streep), whose violin courses in East Harlem elementary schools have become a beacon for such programs nationwide? A fabled taskmaster (her story was told in the 1996 documentary Small Wonders ), Guaspari used music as a way to teach self-discipline--along with the healthy self-respect that follows in its wake. When the New York school board cut the funding for her program, she proved a marvel of self-promotion, attracting features in all the major dailies and ending up along with her best students at Carnegie Hall for a benefit \"Fiddlefest\"--along with Itzhak Perlman, Isaac Stern, and other legendary \"fiddlers.\"", "Streep has said that she spent so much of the time on the set learning the violin (she doesn't play any instruments) that she didn't bring the full force of her acting technique to bear on Roberta. Maybe that's why the performance seems so natural. Let her always learn an instrument on the set! Still, she doesn't make much sense of Guaspari. The script, by Pamela Gray ( A Walk on the Moon ), has her students complain of her nastiness and perfectionism, but Streep--who has made herself look dumpy, thick-waisted, and bedraggled--is so busy telegraphing her vulnerability that all we get is dippy niceness. Instead of a monument to an individual's iron will, Music of the Heart becomes the story of a woman so helpless that she arouses the kindness of strangers.", "stage with Perlman, Stern, Joshua Bell, etc., we'd seen them rehearsing first and struggling to keep up. There's too much music of the heart and not enough music of the callused fingers.", "actors in the classroom scenes, but the film has a reticence common to most biopics and a mushy, TV-movie humanism that blands out its texture. OK, I was a puddle after some scenes, like the one where Guaspari pushes", "Some, including the critic at Time , have questioned Soderbergh's sanity. (But of course--Soderbergh flouts time!) I see a method to his madness. Less grandiosely than Harmony Korine in Julien Donkey-Boy , Soderbergh pores over every scene in search of its essential dramatic gesture. He's saying: This --not all that other stuff--is what's important. He telegraphs the ending--you know the Limey will somehow be at the root of his daughter's death--but it's still an emotional wow. The climax justifies the technique. It says the point of this odyssey isn't revenge but regret--for irredeemably blown chances and a tragic waste of love.", "But the picture's glory is its layered and intricate syntax. The dialogue moves ahead--there are great gobs of exposition--but the images continually double back: to Stamp and Lesley Ann Warren, as his daughter's acting teacher, simply gazing at each other; or to Stamp sitting on a plane, remembering his daughter as a girl on the beach, the lens of his home movie camera creating an eerily bright--almost supernatural--spot that dances over her face. The film's most violent act happens well off screen. (You hear the distant \"pop-pop-pop-pop-pop\" of the hero's gun.) The rest is only half-glimpsed, fantasized, or saturated by memory--or is the present the memory? Is all of The Limey a temporal hiccup?", "Soderbergh is one of those rare filmmakers who learn on the job. Working within a tight genre structure, he's discovering hundreds of ways of editing a given scene that can give it the richness of a novel. Is he totally successful? No; he misses now and then, which is why the technique sticks out. But what a fantastic effort. See it and weep for what's missing in most other movies.", "In outline, The Limey is a lean little B-movie revenge melodrama about a felonious Brit (Terence Stamp) who's newly sprung from prison and flies to Southern California to get to the bottom of his beautiful daughter's death: \"My name's Wilson ... Who dunnit?\" The film, directed by Steven Soderbergh, would be worth seeing just for Stamp's performance, at once rock-hard and goofily blinkered, and for Peter Fonda's wittily self-parodic turn as the suspected killer, a music producer who coasts on '60s counterculture easiness while his lackeys do the dirty work. (\"Oh, man,\" he says, the fear finally seeping through the ether. \"This is getting all too close to me.\")", "Directors of violent genre pieces like Craven (who got this mainstream gig in return for doing the Scream sequels) or Carl Franklin or Sam Raimi sometimes want so badly to belong to Establishment", "But then, \"soft\" is not a word you can apply to Princess Mononoke , however pantheistic its worldview. The film, which is rated PG-13, is full of splattery carnage. If Miyazaki in long shot is contemplative, in close-up he's ferocious. He's both inside and outside the action: He knows when to rock your world and when to induce a state of sorrowful detachment. According to the New York Times , Toy Story animators screened reels of his work when their imaginations flagged, and writers for Star Trek named an alien species after one of his features. Watching Princess Mononoke --which has been dubbed to Disney/Miramax specifications by American and English stars but retains its two-hour-plus length, its gory beheadings, and its grim, near-apocalyptic finale--you can understand their worship. It isn't that Miyazaki's work is technically so dazzling in this age of digitized miracles; it's that everything is sublimely in proportion.", "a student to get her to improve her posture and discovers that the girl is wearing a leg brace. But how much more emotional the Carnegie Hall climax would have been if instead of suddenly seeing these East Harlem kids on", "Hollywood--to go to the Academy Awards--that they neuter themselves. Bending over backward to show how sensitive they can be, they forget that violence--even if it's just emotional violence--belongs in \"ordinary\" dramas, too. Craven does good work with the young", "Lady Eboshi--is one of the movie's high points. It's Miyazaki's use of sound--and silence--that takes your breath away: the determined tap of the wolf princess's shoes as she scuttles over the fortress's rooftops; the silence of Eboshi", "Machines in the Garden \n\n In the animated ecological epic Princess Mononoke , the camera travels over landscapes with a clear, steady gaze, like a Zen hang glider. The images have none of the comin'-at-ya pop-surrealism of American cartoons, many of which have characters that spring out of the frame like jack-in-the-boxes. The Japanese director, Hayao Miyazaki, who spent three years on Princess Mononoke and is reported to have done 70 percent of its paintings himself, seems to work from the outside in: to begin with the curve of the earth, then the mossy hills, the watercolor foliage, the nubby stones, the whorls on the wood, the meticulous carvings on a teacup. He captures the texture of light and the currents of air. You could almost settle down in this landscape. A view of nature that some would call \"tree-hugging\" doesn't feel softheaded when the trees are rendered in such brilliant and robust detail.", "of Claire Danes doesn't help. When Danes says, \"I'd do anything to get you humans out of my forest,\" she sounds like a Valley Girl peeved over lack of parking spaces at the mall. (San needs a more ragged", "The movie has a scope that makes Hollywood's homiletic, follow-your-dream fables look even more solipsistic. Miyazaki is after nothing less than the moment in our history (the film is set in the 14 th and 15 th centuries) when the power shifted from a \"natural\" world to one shaped by human technology. It's the beginning of what Bill McKibben called \"the end of nature\"--that is, when nature became no longer an autonomous, self-regulating force but one touched (and, in Miyazaki's view, poisoned) by human industry.", "It's a shame that the wolf princess warms up to Ashitaka and spends the rest of the film either saving him or being saved by him. She loses that punk-bitch allure. The voice", "a voice that the animators deserve. \"Bring the strange-ah to me late-ah,\" she commands in sexy Martian Queen cadences that will stir the loins of Flash Gordon fans everywhere. \"I would like to thank him puh-sonally.\"", "sounds silly (she doesn't have the breath control), and the fey-hick tones of Billy Bob Thornton are too recognizable as the Akim Tamiroff-like mercenary, Jigo. But Minnie Driver--coming off a triumphantly dizzy Jane in Tarzan --once again provides", "The overfamiliar voices nudge Princess Mononoke closer to its American counterparts--but not by a lot. There's always something wondrously strange. The \"kodamas\" are little tree spirits on doughboy bodies. They cock their trapezoidal dice heads and emit a series of clicks; then their heads pop back with a conclusive rattle. Something about them seems just right; I could watch them for hours. (Miyazaki limits their appearances to seconds--he doesn't wear out their mystery the way that, say, George Lucas would.) And no Hollywood animated feature would end with such a powerful vision of apocalypse, as the land is bestridden by a colossus dropping a thick, caustic, tarlike gel that recalls the post-Hiroshima \"black rain.\" Can you take the kids? I think so. As Miyazaki said at a New York Film Festival press conference, \"Children understand intuitively that the world they have been born into is not a blessed world.\" Princess Mononoke , at least, can tell them why." ], [ "But then, \"soft\" is not a word you can apply to Princess Mononoke , however pantheistic its worldview. The film, which is rated PG-13, is full of splattery carnage. If Miyazaki in long shot is contemplative, in close-up he's ferocious. He's both inside and outside the action: He knows when to rock your world and when to induce a state of sorrowful detachment. According to the New York Times , Toy Story animators screened reels of his work when their imaginations flagged, and writers for Star Trek named an alien species after one of his features. Watching Princess Mononoke --which has been dubbed to Disney/Miramax specifications by American and English stars but retains its two-hour-plus length, its gory beheadings, and its grim, near-apocalyptic finale--you can understand their worship. It isn't that Miyazaki's work is technically so dazzling in this age of digitized miracles; it's that everything is sublimely in proportion.", "Streep has said that she spent so much of the time on the set learning the violin (she doesn't play any instruments) that she didn't bring the full force of her acting technique to bear on Roberta. Maybe that's why the performance seems so natural. Let her always learn an instrument on the set! Still, she doesn't make much sense of Guaspari. The script, by Pamela Gray ( A Walk on the Moon ), has her students complain of her nastiness and perfectionism, but Streep--who has made herself look dumpy, thick-waisted, and bedraggled--is so busy telegraphing her vulnerability that all we get is dippy niceness. Instead of a monument to an individual's iron will, Music of the Heart becomes the story of a woman so helpless that she arouses the kindness of strangers.", "Machines in the Garden \n\n In the animated ecological epic Princess Mononoke , the camera travels over landscapes with a clear, steady gaze, like a Zen hang glider. The images have none of the comin'-at-ya pop-surrealism of American cartoons, many of which have characters that spring out of the frame like jack-in-the-boxes. The Japanese director, Hayao Miyazaki, who spent three years on Princess Mononoke and is reported to have done 70 percent of its paintings himself, seems to work from the outside in: to begin with the curve of the earth, then the mossy hills, the watercolor foliage, the nubby stones, the whorls on the wood, the meticulous carvings on a teacup. He captures the texture of light and the currents of air. You could almost settle down in this landscape. A view of nature that some would call \"tree-hugging\" doesn't feel softheaded when the trees are rendered in such brilliant and robust detail.", "The overfamiliar voices nudge Princess Mononoke closer to its American counterparts--but not by a lot. There's always something wondrously strange. The \"kodamas\" are little tree spirits on doughboy bodies. They cock their trapezoidal dice heads and emit a series of clicks; then their heads pop back with a conclusive rattle. Something about them seems just right; I could watch them for hours. (Miyazaki limits their appearances to seconds--he doesn't wear out their mystery the way that, say, George Lucas would.) And no Hollywood animated feature would end with such a powerful vision of apocalypse, as the land is bestridden by a colossus dropping a thick, caustic, tarlike gel that recalls the post-Hiroshima \"black rain.\" Can you take the kids? I think so. As Miyazaki said at a New York Film Festival press conference, \"Children understand intuitively that the world they have been born into is not a blessed world.\" Princess Mononoke , at least, can tell them why.", "\"A special smile ... a certain touch ...\" So begins the elevator-music theme song of Music of the Heart ... \"I never had a lot that I loved so much.\" The credits had just started and I was already looking for a barf bag. Did Miramax and director Wes Craven have to work so hard to schlockify the story of Roberta Guaspari (played here by Meryl Streep), whose violin courses in East Harlem elementary schools have become a beacon for such programs nationwide? A fabled taskmaster (her story was told in the 1996 documentary Small Wonders ), Guaspari used music as a way to teach self-discipline--along with the healthy self-respect that follows in its wake. When the New York school board cut the funding for her program, she proved a marvel of self-promotion, attracting features in all the major dailies and ending up along with her best students at Carnegie Hall for a benefit \"Fiddlefest\"--along with Itzhak Perlman, Isaac Stern, and other legendary \"fiddlers.\"", "little patience with Ashitaka's call for nature and mankind to live together in harmony; they'd like to eat him. The wolf god, Moro, is slightly more sympathetic, but that's because her adopted \"daughter,\" San (a k a Princess Mononoke),", "Lady Eboshi--is one of the movie's high points. It's Miyazaki's use of sound--and silence--that takes your breath away: the determined tap of the wolf princess's shoes as she scuttles over the fortress's rooftops; the silence of Eboshi", "The hero, Ashitaka, a warrior from the isolationist Emishi clan, is forced in the first scene to kill a marauding boar--a god turned into a demon (covered in roiling, corrosive worms) by an iron ball lodged in its body. Infected, destined to be consumed by--and to die of--rage, Ashitaka leaves his village in search of the iron ball's source. He discovers a fortress-cum-arms-manufacturing plant called Irontown, presided over by one of the most complex villains in modern film: the regal Lady Eboshi. On one hand, she's a benevolent industrialist who presides over a warmly matriarchal society; on the other, she wants to destroy the forest, harness its resources, and exterminate its animal deities--chiefly the Spirit of the Forest, a magnificent deer god whose touch brings instant life or death, and who transforms at dusk into the towering Night Walker.", "It's a shame that the wolf princess warms up to Ashitaka and spends the rest of the film either saving him or being saved by him. She loses that punk-bitch allure. The voice", "P rincess Mononoke builds to a full-scale war between humans and the animal kingdom--which does not, by the way, consist of your father's cartoon critters. In fact, the boars and apes have", "actors in the classroom scenes, but the film has a reticence common to most biopics and a mushy, TV-movie humanism that blands out its texture. OK, I was a puddle after some scenes, like the one where Guaspari pushes", "voice--I'd be interested to hear the original Japanese actress.) Billy Crudup is just as Disneyfied (Miramaxed?), but that doesn't hurt as much because Ashitaka is conceived from the start as a rather bland ingÃ©nu. Gillian Anderson's growling Moro", "The movie has a scope that makes Hollywood's homiletic, follow-your-dream fables look even more solipsistic. Miyazaki is after nothing less than the moment in our history (the film is set in the 14 th and 15 th centuries) when the power shifted from a \"natural\" world to one shaped by human technology. It's the beginning of what Bill McKibben called \"the end of nature\"--that is, when nature became no longer an autonomous, self-regulating force but one touched (and, in Miyazaki's view, poisoned) by human industry.", "is human. San is first seen sucking a wound of her huge wolf mother, then, as the gore drips from her mouth, training her dark eyes on Ashitaka with feral hatred. Her second appearance--a lone attack on Irontown to assassinate", "and her army as they stare at this tiny yet formidable tomboy against the black sky. Their battle is so furious that the blades streak and lose definition--it's almost subliminal.", "But the picture's glory is its layered and intricate syntax. The dialogue moves ahead--there are great gobs of exposition--but the images continually double back: to Stamp and Lesley Ann Warren, as his daughter's acting teacher, simply gazing at each other; or to Stamp sitting on a plane, remembering his daughter as a girl on the beach, the lens of his home movie camera creating an eerily bright--almost supernatural--spot that dances over her face. The film's most violent act happens well off screen. (You hear the distant \"pop-pop-pop-pop-pop\" of the hero's gun.) The rest is only half-glimpsed, fantasized, or saturated by memory--or is the present the memory? Is all of The Limey a temporal hiccup?", "of Claire Danes doesn't help. When Danes says, \"I'd do anything to get you humans out of my forest,\" she sounds like a Valley Girl peeved over lack of parking spaces at the mall. (San needs a more ragged", "sounds silly (she doesn't have the breath control), and the fey-hick tones of Billy Bob Thornton are too recognizable as the Akim Tamiroff-like mercenary, Jigo. But Minnie Driver--coming off a triumphantly dizzy Jane in Tarzan --once again provides", "Some, including the critic at Time , have questioned Soderbergh's sanity. (But of course--Soderbergh flouts time!) I see a method to his madness. Less grandiosely than Harmony Korine in Julien Donkey-Boy , Soderbergh pores over every scene in search of its essential dramatic gesture. He's saying: This --not all that other stuff--is what's important. He telegraphs the ending--you know the Limey will somehow be at the root of his daughter's death--but it's still an emotional wow. The climax justifies the technique. It says the point of this odyssey isn't revenge but regret--for irredeemably blown chances and a tragic waste of love.", "stage with Perlman, Stern, Joshua Bell, etc., we'd seen them rehearsing first and struggling to keep up. There's too much music of the heart and not enough music of the callused fingers." ], [ "In outline, The Limey is a lean little B-movie revenge melodrama about a felonious Brit (Terence Stamp) who's newly sprung from prison and flies to Southern California to get to the bottom of his beautiful daughter's death: \"My name's Wilson ... Who dunnit?\" The film, directed by Steven Soderbergh, would be worth seeing just for Stamp's performance, at once rock-hard and goofily blinkered, and for Peter Fonda's wittily self-parodic turn as the suspected killer, a music producer who coasts on '60s counterculture easiness while his lackeys do the dirty work. (\"Oh, man,\" he says, the fear finally seeping through the ether. \"This is getting all too close to me.\")", "But then, \"soft\" is not a word you can apply to Princess Mononoke , however pantheistic its worldview. The film, which is rated PG-13, is full of splattery carnage. If Miyazaki in long shot is contemplative, in close-up he's ferocious. He's both inside and outside the action: He knows when to rock your world and when to induce a state of sorrowful detachment. According to the New York Times , Toy Story animators screened reels of his work when their imaginations flagged, and writers for Star Trek named an alien species after one of his features. Watching Princess Mononoke --which has been dubbed to Disney/Miramax specifications by American and English stars but retains its two-hour-plus length, its gory beheadings, and its grim, near-apocalyptic finale--you can understand their worship. It isn't that Miyazaki's work is technically so dazzling in this age of digitized miracles; it's that everything is sublimely in proportion.", "But the picture's glory is its layered and intricate syntax. The dialogue moves ahead--there are great gobs of exposition--but the images continually double back: to Stamp and Lesley Ann Warren, as his daughter's acting teacher, simply gazing at each other; or to Stamp sitting on a plane, remembering his daughter as a girl on the beach, the lens of his home movie camera creating an eerily bright--almost supernatural--spot that dances over her face. The film's most violent act happens well off screen. (You hear the distant \"pop-pop-pop-pop-pop\" of the hero's gun.) The rest is only half-glimpsed, fantasized, or saturated by memory--or is the present the memory? Is all of The Limey a temporal hiccup?", "Some, including the critic at Time , have questioned Soderbergh's sanity. (But of course--Soderbergh flouts time!) I see a method to his madness. Less grandiosely than Harmony Korine in Julien Donkey-Boy , Soderbergh pores over every scene in search of its essential dramatic gesture. He's saying: This --not all that other stuff--is what's important. He telegraphs the ending--you know the Limey will somehow be at the root of his daughter's death--but it's still an emotional wow. The climax justifies the technique. It says the point of this odyssey isn't revenge but regret--for irredeemably blown chances and a tragic waste of love.", "The overfamiliar voices nudge Princess Mononoke closer to its American counterparts--but not by a lot. There's always something wondrously strange. The \"kodamas\" are little tree spirits on doughboy bodies. They cock their trapezoidal dice heads and emit a series of clicks; then their heads pop back with a conclusive rattle. Something about them seems just right; I could watch them for hours. (Miyazaki limits their appearances to seconds--he doesn't wear out their mystery the way that, say, George Lucas would.) And no Hollywood animated feature would end with such a powerful vision of apocalypse, as the land is bestridden by a colossus dropping a thick, caustic, tarlike gel that recalls the post-Hiroshima \"black rain.\" Can you take the kids? I think so. As Miyazaki said at a New York Film Festival press conference, \"Children understand intuitively that the world they have been born into is not a blessed world.\" Princess Mononoke , at least, can tell them why.", "Machines in the Garden \n\n In the animated ecological epic Princess Mononoke , the camera travels over landscapes with a clear, steady gaze, like a Zen hang glider. The images have none of the comin'-at-ya pop-surrealism of American cartoons, many of which have characters that spring out of the frame like jack-in-the-boxes. The Japanese director, Hayao Miyazaki, who spent three years on Princess Mononoke and is reported to have done 70 percent of its paintings himself, seems to work from the outside in: to begin with the curve of the earth, then the mossy hills, the watercolor foliage, the nubby stones, the whorls on the wood, the meticulous carvings on a teacup. He captures the texture of light and the currents of air. You could almost settle down in this landscape. A view of nature that some would call \"tree-hugging\" doesn't feel softheaded when the trees are rendered in such brilliant and robust detail.", "voice--I'd be interested to hear the original Japanese actress.) Billy Crudup is just as Disneyfied (Miramaxed?), but that doesn't hurt as much because Ashitaka is conceived from the start as a rather bland ingÃ©nu. Gillian Anderson's growling Moro", "The hero, Ashitaka, a warrior from the isolationist Emishi clan, is forced in the first scene to kill a marauding boar--a god turned into a demon (covered in roiling, corrosive worms) by an iron ball lodged in its body. Infected, destined to be consumed by--and to die of--rage, Ashitaka leaves his village in search of the iron ball's source. He discovers a fortress-cum-arms-manufacturing plant called Irontown, presided over by one of the most complex villains in modern film: the regal Lady Eboshi. On one hand, she's a benevolent industrialist who presides over a warmly matriarchal society; on the other, she wants to destroy the forest, harness its resources, and exterminate its animal deities--chiefly the Spirit of the Forest, a magnificent deer god whose touch brings instant life or death, and who transforms at dusk into the towering Night Walker.", "Lady Eboshi--is one of the movie's high points. It's Miyazaki's use of sound--and silence--that takes your breath away: the determined tap of the wolf princess's shoes as she scuttles over the fortress's rooftops; the silence of Eboshi", "sounds silly (she doesn't have the breath control), and the fey-hick tones of Billy Bob Thornton are too recognizable as the Akim Tamiroff-like mercenary, Jigo. But Minnie Driver--coming off a triumphantly dizzy Jane in Tarzan --once again provides", "little patience with Ashitaka's call for nature and mankind to live together in harmony; they'd like to eat him. The wolf god, Moro, is slightly more sympathetic, but that's because her adopted \"daughter,\" San (a k a Princess Mononoke),", "P rincess Mononoke builds to a full-scale war between humans and the animal kingdom--which does not, by the way, consist of your father's cartoon critters. In fact, the boars and apes have", "actors in the classroom scenes, but the film has a reticence common to most biopics and a mushy, TV-movie humanism that blands out its texture. OK, I was a puddle after some scenes, like the one where Guaspari pushes", "The movie has a scope that makes Hollywood's homiletic, follow-your-dream fables look even more solipsistic. Miyazaki is after nothing less than the moment in our history (the film is set in the 14 th and 15 th centuries) when the power shifted from a \"natural\" world to one shaped by human technology. It's the beginning of what Bill McKibben called \"the end of nature\"--that is, when nature became no longer an autonomous, self-regulating force but one touched (and, in Miyazaki's view, poisoned) by human industry.", "is human. San is first seen sucking a wound of her huge wolf mother, then, as the gore drips from her mouth, training her dark eyes on Ashitaka with feral hatred. Her second appearance--a lone attack on Irontown to assassinate", "It's a shame that the wolf princess warms up to Ashitaka and spends the rest of the film either saving him or being saved by him. She loses that punk-bitch allure. The voice", "Soderbergh is one of those rare filmmakers who learn on the job. Working within a tight genre structure, he's discovering hundreds of ways of editing a given scene that can give it the richness of a novel. Is he totally successful? No; he misses now and then, which is why the technique sticks out. But what a fantastic effort. See it and weep for what's missing in most other movies.", "a voice that the animators deserve. \"Bring the strange-ah to me late-ah,\" she commands in sexy Martian Queen cadences that will stir the loins of Flash Gordon fans everywhere. \"I would like to thank him puh-sonally.\"", "Hollywood--to go to the Academy Awards--that they neuter themselves. Bending over backward to show how sensitive they can be, they forget that violence--even if it's just emotional violence--belongs in \"ordinary\" dramas, too. Craven does good work with the young", "Streep has said that she spent so much of the time on the set learning the violin (she doesn't play any instruments) that she didn't bring the full force of her acting technique to bear on Roberta. Maybe that's why the performance seems so natural. Let her always learn an instrument on the set! Still, she doesn't make much sense of Guaspari. The script, by Pamela Gray ( A Walk on the Moon ), has her students complain of her nastiness and perfectionism, but Streep--who has made herself look dumpy, thick-waisted, and bedraggled--is so busy telegraphing her vulnerability that all we get is dippy niceness. Instead of a monument to an individual's iron will, Music of the Heart becomes the story of a woman so helpless that she arouses the kindness of strangers." ], [ "In outline, The Limey is a lean little B-movie revenge melodrama about a felonious Brit (Terence Stamp) who's newly sprung from prison and flies to Southern California to get to the bottom of his beautiful daughter's death: \"My name's Wilson ... Who dunnit?\" The film, directed by Steven Soderbergh, would be worth seeing just for Stamp's performance, at once rock-hard and goofily blinkered, and for Peter Fonda's wittily self-parodic turn as the suspected killer, a music producer who coasts on '60s counterculture easiness while his lackeys do the dirty work. (\"Oh, man,\" he says, the fear finally seeping through the ether. \"This is getting all too close to me.\")", "Some, including the critic at Time , have questioned Soderbergh's sanity. (But of course--Soderbergh flouts time!) I see a method to his madness. Less grandiosely than Harmony Korine in Julien Donkey-Boy , Soderbergh pores over every scene in search of its essential dramatic gesture. He's saying: This --not all that other stuff--is what's important. He telegraphs the ending--you know the Limey will somehow be at the root of his daughter's death--but it's still an emotional wow. The climax justifies the technique. It says the point of this odyssey isn't revenge but regret--for irredeemably blown chances and a tragic waste of love.", "But the picture's glory is its layered and intricate syntax. The dialogue moves ahead--there are great gobs of exposition--but the images continually double back: to Stamp and Lesley Ann Warren, as his daughter's acting teacher, simply gazing at each other; or to Stamp sitting on a plane, remembering his daughter as a girl on the beach, the lens of his home movie camera creating an eerily bright--almost supernatural--spot that dances over her face. The film's most violent act happens well off screen. (You hear the distant \"pop-pop-pop-pop-pop\" of the hero's gun.) The rest is only half-glimpsed, fantasized, or saturated by memory--or is the present the memory? Is all of The Limey a temporal hiccup?", "Soderbergh is one of those rare filmmakers who learn on the job. Working within a tight genre structure, he's discovering hundreds of ways of editing a given scene that can give it the richness of a novel. Is he totally successful? No; he misses now and then, which is why the technique sticks out. But what a fantastic effort. See it and weep for what's missing in most other movies.", "But then, \"soft\" is not a word you can apply to Princess Mononoke , however pantheistic its worldview. The film, which is rated PG-13, is full of splattery carnage. If Miyazaki in long shot is contemplative, in close-up he's ferocious. He's both inside and outside the action: He knows when to rock your world and when to induce a state of sorrowful detachment. According to the New York Times , Toy Story animators screened reels of his work when their imaginations flagged, and writers for Star Trek named an alien species after one of his features. Watching Princess Mononoke --which has been dubbed to Disney/Miramax specifications by American and English stars but retains its two-hour-plus length, its gory beheadings, and its grim, near-apocalyptic finale--you can understand their worship. It isn't that Miyazaki's work is technically so dazzling in this age of digitized miracles; it's that everything is sublimely in proportion.", "Directors of violent genre pieces like Craven (who got this mainstream gig in return for doing the Scream sequels) or Carl Franklin or Sam Raimi sometimes want so badly to belong to Establishment", "Hollywood--to go to the Academy Awards--that they neuter themselves. Bending over backward to show how sensitive they can be, they forget that violence--even if it's just emotional violence--belongs in \"ordinary\" dramas, too. Craven does good work with the young", "actors in the classroom scenes, but the film has a reticence common to most biopics and a mushy, TV-movie humanism that blands out its texture. OK, I was a puddle after some scenes, like the one where Guaspari pushes", "\"A special smile ... a certain touch ...\" So begins the elevator-music theme song of Music of the Heart ... \"I never had a lot that I loved so much.\" The credits had just started and I was already looking for a barf bag. Did Miramax and director Wes Craven have to work so hard to schlockify the story of Roberta Guaspari (played here by Meryl Streep), whose violin courses in East Harlem elementary schools have become a beacon for such programs nationwide? A fabled taskmaster (her story was told in the 1996 documentary Small Wonders ), Guaspari used music as a way to teach self-discipline--along with the healthy self-respect that follows in its wake. When the New York school board cut the funding for her program, she proved a marvel of self-promotion, attracting features in all the major dailies and ending up along with her best students at Carnegie Hall for a benefit \"Fiddlefest\"--along with Itzhak Perlman, Isaac Stern, and other legendary \"fiddlers.\"", "Machines in the Garden \n\n In the animated ecological epic Princess Mononoke , the camera travels over landscapes with a clear, steady gaze, like a Zen hang glider. The images have none of the comin'-at-ya pop-surrealism of American cartoons, many of which have characters that spring out of the frame like jack-in-the-boxes. The Japanese director, Hayao Miyazaki, who spent three years on Princess Mononoke and is reported to have done 70 percent of its paintings himself, seems to work from the outside in: to begin with the curve of the earth, then the mossy hills, the watercolor foliage, the nubby stones, the whorls on the wood, the meticulous carvings on a teacup. He captures the texture of light and the currents of air. You could almost settle down in this landscape. A view of nature that some would call \"tree-hugging\" doesn't feel softheaded when the trees are rendered in such brilliant and robust detail.", "sounds silly (she doesn't have the breath control), and the fey-hick tones of Billy Bob Thornton are too recognizable as the Akim Tamiroff-like mercenary, Jigo. But Minnie Driver--coming off a triumphantly dizzy Jane in Tarzan --once again provides", "a voice that the animators deserve. \"Bring the strange-ah to me late-ah,\" she commands in sexy Martian Queen cadences that will stir the loins of Flash Gordon fans everywhere. \"I would like to thank him puh-sonally.\"", "The movie has a scope that makes Hollywood's homiletic, follow-your-dream fables look even more solipsistic. Miyazaki is after nothing less than the moment in our history (the film is set in the 14 th and 15 th centuries) when the power shifted from a \"natural\" world to one shaped by human technology. It's the beginning of what Bill McKibben called \"the end of nature\"--that is, when nature became no longer an autonomous, self-regulating force but one touched (and, in Miyazaki's view, poisoned) by human industry.", "The overfamiliar voices nudge Princess Mononoke closer to its American counterparts--but not by a lot. There's always something wondrously strange. The \"kodamas\" are little tree spirits on doughboy bodies. They cock their trapezoidal dice heads and emit a series of clicks; then their heads pop back with a conclusive rattle. Something about them seems just right; I could watch them for hours. (Miyazaki limits their appearances to seconds--he doesn't wear out their mystery the way that, say, George Lucas would.) And no Hollywood animated feature would end with such a powerful vision of apocalypse, as the land is bestridden by a colossus dropping a thick, caustic, tarlike gel that recalls the post-Hiroshima \"black rain.\" Can you take the kids? I think so. As Miyazaki said at a New York Film Festival press conference, \"Children understand intuitively that the world they have been born into is not a blessed world.\" Princess Mononoke , at least, can tell them why.", "Streep has said that she spent so much of the time on the set learning the violin (she doesn't play any instruments) that she didn't bring the full force of her acting technique to bear on Roberta. Maybe that's why the performance seems so natural. Let her always learn an instrument on the set! Still, she doesn't make much sense of Guaspari. The script, by Pamela Gray ( A Walk on the Moon ), has her students complain of her nastiness and perfectionism, but Streep--who has made herself look dumpy, thick-waisted, and bedraggled--is so busy telegraphing her vulnerability that all we get is dippy niceness. Instead of a monument to an individual's iron will, Music of the Heart becomes the story of a woman so helpless that she arouses the kindness of strangers.", "Lady Eboshi--is one of the movie's high points. It's Miyazaki's use of sound--and silence--that takes your breath away: the determined tap of the wolf princess's shoes as she scuttles over the fortress's rooftops; the silence of Eboshi", "The hero, Ashitaka, a warrior from the isolationist Emishi clan, is forced in the first scene to kill a marauding boar--a god turned into a demon (covered in roiling, corrosive worms) by an iron ball lodged in its body. Infected, destined to be consumed by--and to die of--rage, Ashitaka leaves his village in search of the iron ball's source. He discovers a fortress-cum-arms-manufacturing plant called Irontown, presided over by one of the most complex villains in modern film: the regal Lady Eboshi. On one hand, she's a benevolent industrialist who presides over a warmly matriarchal society; on the other, she wants to destroy the forest, harness its resources, and exterminate its animal deities--chiefly the Spirit of the Forest, a magnificent deer god whose touch brings instant life or death, and who transforms at dusk into the towering Night Walker.", "and her army as they stare at this tiny yet formidable tomboy against the black sky. Their battle is so furious that the blades streak and lose definition--it's almost subliminal.", "It's a shame that the wolf princess warms up to Ashitaka and spends the rest of the film either saving him or being saved by him. She loses that punk-bitch allure. The voice", "voice--I'd be interested to hear the original Japanese actress.) Billy Crudup is just as Disneyfied (Miramaxed?), but that doesn't hurt as much because Ashitaka is conceived from the start as a rather bland ingÃ©nu. Gillian Anderson's growling Moro" ] ]
train	24278	[ "Why does the UN want to arrest Umluana?", "Why don't Harry's parents want him to join the UN?", "Why did Rashid join the UN?", "How does Read feel about Rashid?", "Why wasn't Read wearing his green beret when arrested Umluana?", "Why can't they transmit Umluana as planned?", "Why are the Belderkans shooting if they might hit Umlauna?", "Why would the psychologists be surprised to see Read blow up the tank?" ]	[ [ "Umluana conspired to attack Belderkan.", "Umluana conspired to attack another nation.", "Umluana has violated the Nuclear Disarmament Treaty.", "Umluana is the head of a gang called The Golden Spacemen." ], [ "Harry's parents think he is too lazy to succeed in the UN.", "Harry's parents want him to go to trade school.", "Harry's parents feel that joining the UN means he is turning his back on America.", "Harry's parents don't want him to be a soldier." ], [ "Rashid joined the UN to get away from a gang called The Golden Spacemen.", "Rashid joined the UN because he wants world peace at any cost.", "Rashid joined the UN after he was fired from Cambridge.", "Rashid joined the UN because he wanted to go to war." ], [ "Read thinks Rashid is a very special man.", "Read thinks Sergeant Rashid is the ideal UN soldier. Rashid is completely devoted to world peace at any cost.", "Read thinks Rashid is weak because Rashid wants to help the wounded.", "Read thinks Rashid is crazy for using Molotov cocktails." ], [ "His beret was knocked off his head in the scuffle.", "Read doesn't really like wearing hats.", "Read was in plain clothes. They were undercover.", "Read forgot that he placed it in his pocket earlier." ], [ "The controls at the Geneva receiving station have been destroyed.", "The controls at the Miaka station have been destroyed.", "The controls at the UN receiving station have been destroyed.", "The controls at the Belderkan Preserve have been destroyed." ], [ "The Belderkans don't like Umlauna. He tried to invade their country.", "The Belderkans want Umlauna dead. That's why Read and Rashid are rescuing him.", "If they shoot Umlauna, he'll be a martyr for their cause. That is okay.", "The Belderkans don't realize that Umlauna is with Read and Rashid. " ], [ "Read's psych tests said he only cared about himself.", "Read's psych tests said he would likely fall apart under pressure.", "Read's psych tests said he was only driven by pride.", "Read's psych tests said he was a coward." ] ]	[ 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 4, 3, 3 ]	[ 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "But the radio assault and the arms buildup continued. Early in\n 1982, South Africa claimed the Belderkan Army exceeded the size\n agreed to in the Disarmament Treaty. The European countries and\n some African nations joined in the accusation. China called the\n uproar a vicious slur on a new African nation. The United States\n and Russia, trying not to get entangled, asked for more\n investigation by the UN.\n\n\n But the evidence was clear. Umluana was defying world law. If he\n got away with it, some larger and more dangerous nation might\n follow his precedent. And the arms race would begin again.\n\n\n The Inspector General decided. They would enter Belderkan, arrest\n Umluana and try him by due process before the World Court. If the\n plan succeeded, mankind would be a long step farther from nuclear\n war.", "Umluana took control of Belderkan in 1979. The tiny, former Dutch\n colony, had been a tottering democracy for ten years. The very\n day he took control the new dictator and his African party began\n to build up the Belderkan Army. For years he had preached a new\n Africa, united, free of white masters, the home of a vigorous and\n perfect Negro society. His critics called him a hypocritical\n racist, an opportunist using the desires of the African people to\n build himself an empire.\n\n\n He began a propaganda war against neighboring South Africa,\n promising the liberation of that strife-torn land. Most Negro\n leaders, having just won representation in the South African\n Parliament, told him to liberate his own country. They believed\n they could use their first small voice in the government to win\n true freedom for their people.", "\"I don't know your language,\" Rashid said.\n\n\n \"Then I'll speak English.\" Umluana was a small man with wrinkled\n brow, glasses and a mustache. His skin was a shade lighter than\n Read's. \"The Inspector General doesn't have the power to arrest a\n head of state—especially the Premier of Belderkan. Now, if\n you'll excuse me, I must return to my party.\"\n\n\n In the other room people laughed and talked. Glasses clinked in\n the late afternoon. Read knew two armed men stood just outside\n the door. \"If you leave, Premier, I'll have to shoot you.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think so,\" Umluana said. \"No, if you kill me, all Africa\n will rise against the world. You don't want me dead. You want me\n in court.\"\n\n\n Read clicked off the safety.", "Read didn't know much about the complicated political reasons for\n the arrest. He liked the Corp and he liked being in the Corp. He\n went where they sent him and did what they told him to do.\nThe car skimmed above the tree-tops. The driver and his two\n passengers scanned the sky.\n\n\n A plane would have been a faster way to get out of the country.\n But then they would have spent hours flying over Africa, with\n Belderkan fighters in hot pursuit, other nations joining the\n chase and the world uproar gaining volume. By transmitter, if all\n went well, they could have Umluana in Geneva in an hour.\n\n\n They were racing toward Miaka, a branch transmitter station. From\n Miaka they would transmit to the Belderkan Preserve, a famous\n tourist attraction whose station could transmit to any point on\n the globe. Even now a dozen inspectors were taking over the Game\n Preserve station and manning its controls.", "\"I liked Rangoon,\" he even told a friend. \"I even liked Korea.\n But I think I liked the Pole job best. You sit around playing\n cards and shooting the bull and then there's a plane crash or\n something and you go out and win a medal. That's great for me.\n I'm lazy and I like excitement.\"\nOne power implied in the UN Charter no Secretary General or\n Inspector General had ever tried to use. The power to arrest any\n head of state whose country violated international law. Could the\n World Court try and imprison a politician who had conspired to\n attack another nation?\n\n\n For years Africa had been called \"The South America of the Old\n World.\" Revolution followed revolution. Colonies became\n democracies. Democracies became dictatorships or dissolved in\n civil war. Men planted bases on the moon and in four years,\n 1978-82, ringed the world with matter transmitters; but the black\n population of Africa still struggled toward political equality.", "They knelt on the cramped floor. Rashid put on his gas mask and\n Read copied him. Umluana breathed like a furnace, still\n unconscious from the injection Rashid had given him.\nI can't do anything\n, Read thought.\nThey're too far away to\n shoot back. All we can do is run.\nThe sky was clear and blue. The jungle was a noisy bazaar of\n color. In the distance guns crashed. He listened to shells\n whistle by and the whipcrack of machine-gun bullets. The car\n roller-coastered up and down. Every time a shell passed, he\n crawled in waves down his own back.\n\n\n Another explosion, this time very loud.\n\n\n Rashid raised his eyes above the seat and looked out the rear\n window. \"Two left. Keep down, Read.\"\n\n\n \"Can't we go down?\" Read said.\n\n\n \"They'll get to Miaka before us.\"", "\"The copter will be here in half an hour. We'll put Umluana on,\n then try to save ourselves. Once he's gone, I think we ought to\n surrender.\"\n\n\n \"How do you think they'll treat us?\"\n\n\n \"That we'll have to see.\"\n\n\n An occasional bullet cracked and whined through the misty room.\n Near him a man gasped frantically for air. On the sunny field a\n wounded man screamed for help.\n\n\n \"There's a garage downstairs,\" Rashid said. \"In case the copter\n doesn't get here on time, I've got a man filling wine bottles\n with gasoline.\"\n\n\n \"We'll stop them, Sarge. Don't worry.\"\nRashid ran off. Read stared across the green land and listened to\n the pound of his heart. What were the Belderkans planning? A mass\n frontal attack? To sneak in over the top of the hill?", "They had made no plans to take over Miaka. They planned to get\n there before it could be defended.\n\n\n \"There's no military base near Miaka,\" Rashid said. \"We might get\n there before the Belderkans.\"\n\n\n \"Here comes our escort,\" Read said.\n\n\n A big car rose from the jungle. This one had a recoilless rifle\n mounted on the roof. The driver and the gunner waved and fell in\n behind them.\n\n\n \"One thing,\" Read said, \"I don't think they'll shoot at us while\nhe's\nin the car.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be certain, corporal. All these strong-arm movements are\n alike. I'll bet Umluana's lieutenants are hoping he'll become a\n dead legend. Then they can become live conquerors.\"", "\"Corporal Read is very young,\" Rashid said, \"but he's a crack\n shot. That's why I brought him with me. I think he\nlikes\nto\n shoot, too.\"\n\n\n Umluana turned back to Rashid a second too soon. He saw the\n sergeant's upraised hand before it collided with his neck.\n\n\n \"Help!\nKidnap.\n\"\n\n\n Rashid judo chopped him and swung the inert body over his\n shoulders. Read pulled a flat grenade from his vest pocket. He\n dropped it and yellow psycho gas hissed from the valve.\n\n\n \"Let's be off,\" Rashid said.\n\n\n The door lock snapped as they went out the window. Two men with\n rifles plunged into the gas; sighing, they fell to the floor in a\n catatonic trance.", "Transcriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from Analog, January 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nTHE\n\n GREEN\n\n BERET\nBy TOM PURDOM\nIt's not so much the decisions a man does make that mark\n him as a Man—but the ones he refrains from making. Like the\n decision \"I've had enough!\"\nIllustrated by Schoenherr\nRead locked the door and drew his pistol. Sergeant Rashid handed\n Premier Umluana the warrant.\n\n\n \"We're from the UN Inspector Corps,\" Sergeant Rashid said. \"I'm\n very sorry, but we have to arrest you and bring you in for trial\n by the World Court.\"\n\n\n If Umluana noticed Read's gun, he didn't show it. He read the\n warrant carefully. When he finished, he said something in Dutch.", "The machine gun kicked and chattered on his shoulder. He picked a\n target and squeezed off a burst. Tensely, he hunted for another\n mask. Three grenades arced through the air and yellow gas spread\n across the battlefield. The attackers ran through it. A few yards\n beyond the gas, some of them turned and ran for their own lines.\n In a moment only half a dozen masked men still advanced. The\n inspectors fired a long, noisy volley. When they stopped only\n four attackers remained on their feet. And they were running for\n cover.\n\n\n The attackers had come straight up a road that led from the Game\n Preserve to the station. They had not expected any resistance.\n The UN men had already taken over the station, chased out the\n passengers and technicians and taken up defense positions; they\n had met the Belderkans with a dozen grenades and sent them\n scurrying for cover. The fight so far had been vicious but\n disorganized. But the Belderkans had a few hundred men and knew\n they had wrecked the transmitter controls.", "For two years Read had served under Sergeant Rashid. To him, the\n sergeant was everything a UN inspector should be. Rashid's\n devotion to peace had no limits.\n\n\n Read's psych tests said pride alone drove him on. That was good\n enough for the UN; they only rejected men whose loyalties might\n conflict with their duties. But an assault on the tank required\n something more than a hunger for self-respect.\n\n\n Read had seen the inspector who covered their getaway. He had\n watched their escort charge three-to-one odds. He had seen\n another inspector stay behind at Miaka Station. And here, in this\n building, lay battered men and dead men.\n\n\n All UN inspectors. All part of his life.\n\n\n And he was part of their life. Their blood, their sacrifice, and\n pain, had become a part of him.\n\n\n \"I'll take a cocktail, Sarge.\"", "The copter landed ten minutes later. Umluana left in a shower of\n bullets. A Russian private, the ranking man alive in the station,\n surrendered the survivors to the Belderkans.\nHis mother hung the Global Medal above the television set.\n\n\n \"He must have been brave,\" she said. \"We had a fine son.\"\n\n\n \"He was our only son,\" her husband said. \"What did he volunteer\n for? Couldn't somebody else have done it?\"\n\n\n His wife started to cry. Awkwardly, he embraced her. He wondered\n what his son had wanted that he couldn't get at home.\nTHE END", "\"Is he all right?\" the driver asked.\n\n\n \"I don't think I hurt him.\" Rashid took a syrette from his vest\n pocket. \"Well, Read, it looks like we're in for a fight. In a few\n minutes Miaka Station will know we're coming. And God knows what\n will happen at the Game Preserve.\"\n\n\n Read wanted to jump out of the car. He could die any minute. But\n he had set his life on a well-oiled track and he couldn't get off\n until they reached Geneva.\n\n\n \"They don't know who's coming,\" he said. \"They don't make them\n tough enough to stop this boy.\"\n\n\n Staring straight ahead, he didn't see the sergeant smile.\nTwo types of recruits are accepted by the UN Inspector Corps:\n those with a fanatic loyalty to the ideals of peace and world\n order, and those who are loyal to nothing but themselves. Read\n was the second type.", "Bullets had completely shattered the wall in front of him. He\n stared through the murk, across the broken glass. He was Corporal\n Harry Read, UN Inspector Corps—a very special man. If he didn't\n do a good job here, he wasn't the man he claimed to be. This\n might be the only real test he would ever face.\nHe heard a shout in rapid French. He turned to his right. Men in\n red loincloths ran zigzagging toward the station. They carried\n light automatic rifles. Half of them wore gas masks.\n\n\n \"Shoot the masks,\" he yelled. \"Aim for the masks.\"", "\"I don't want that,\" Read said.\n\n\n \"What do you mean, you don't want that?\"\n\n\n \"You could join the American Army,\" his mother said. \"That's as\n good as a trade school. If you have to be a soldier.\"\n\n\n \"I want to be a UN man. I've already enlisted. I'm in! What do\n you care what I do?\"\n\n\n The UN Inspector Corps had been founded to enforce the Nuclear\n Disarmament Treaty of 1966. Through the years it had acquired\n other jobs. UN men no longer went unarmed. Trained to use small\n arms and gas weapons, they guarded certain borders, bodyguarded\n diplomats and UN officials, even put down riots that threatened\n international peace. As the UN evolved into a strong world\n government, the UN Inspector Corps steadily acquired new powers.\n\n\n Read went through six months training on Madagascar.", "Directly in front of him, his head shattered by a bullet, a dead\n inspector lay behind an overturned couch.\n\n\n Read had seen dozens of training films taken during actual\n battles or after atomic attacks. He had laughed when other\n recruits complained. \"That's the way this world is. You people\n with the weak stomachs better get used to it.\"\n\n\n Now he slid against the rear wall of the transmitter booth.\n\n\n A wounded inspector crawled across the floor to the booth. Read\n couldn't see his wound, only the pain scratched on his face and\n the blood he deposited on the floor.\n\n\n \"Did you get Umluana?\" he asked Sergeant Rashid.\n\n\n \"He's in the booth. What's going on?\" Rashid's Middle East Oxford\n seemed more clipped than ever.", "\"I can't move, Sarge.\"\n\n\n \"Read, you've got to. I think you're the only—\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n Guns clattered. Bullets cracked.\n\n\n \"Sergeant Rashid! Answer me.\"\n\n\n He heard nothing but the lonely passage of the bullets in the\n mist.\n\n\n \"I'm a UN man,\" he mumbled. \"You people up there know what a UN\n man is? You know what happens when you meet one?\"\n\n\n When he reached the tank, he had another bullet in his right arm.\n But they didn't know he was coming and when you get within ten\n feet of a tank, the men inside can't see you.\n\n\n He just had to stand up and drop the bottle down the gun barrel.\n That was all—with a broken hip and a wounded right arm.", "There were three technicians in the station and no passengers.\n All three panicked when the psycho gas enveloped them. They ran\n howling for the jungle.\n\n\n Through the window of his mask, Read saw their pursuers land in\n the clearing. Machine-gun bullets raked the building. They got\n Umluana in the booth and hit the floor. Read took aim and opened\n fire on the largest car.\n\n\n \"Now, I can shoot back,\" he said. \"Now we'll see what they do.\"\n\n\n \"Are you ready, Rashid?\" yelled the driver.\n\n\n \"Man, get us out of here!\"\n\n\n The booth door shut. When it opened, they were at the Game\n Preserve.\n\n\n The station jutted from the side of a hill. A glass-walled\n waiting room surrounded the bank of transmitter booths. Read\n looked out the door and saw his first battlefield.", "A little car skimmed across the lawn. Bearing the Scourge of\n Africa, Rashid struggled toward it. Read walked backward,\n covering their retreat.\n\n\n The car stopped, whirling blades holding it a few inches off the\n lawn. They climbed in.\n\n\n \"How did it go?\" The driver and another inspector occupied the\n front seat.\n\n\n \"They'll be after us in half a minute.\"\n\n\n The other inspector carried a light machine gun and a box of\n grenades. \"I better cover,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Rashid said.\n\n\n The inspector slid out of the car and ran to a clump of bushes.\n The driver pushed in the accelerator. As they swerved toward the\n south, Read saw a dozen armed men run out of the house. A grenade\n arced from the bushes and the pursuers recoiled from the cloud\n that rose before them." ], [ "\"A man ought to be a man,\" he once told a girl. \"He ought to do a\n man's work. Did you ever notice how our fathers look, how they\n sleep so much? I don't want to be like that. I want to be\n something proud.\"\n\n\n He joined the UN Inspector Corps at eighteen, in 1978. The\n international cops wore green berets, high buttonless boots, bush\n jackets. They were very special men.\n\n\n For the first time in his life, his father said something about\n his ambitions.\n\n\n \"Don't you like America, Harry? Do you\nwant\nto be without a\n country? This is the best country in the world. All my life I've\n made a good living. Haven't you had everything you ever wanted?\n I've been a king compared to people overseas. Why, you stay here\n and go to trade school and in two years you'll be living just\n like me.\"", "\"I don't want that,\" Read said.\n\n\n \"What do you mean, you don't want that?\"\n\n\n \"You could join the American Army,\" his mother said. \"That's as\n good as a trade school. If you have to be a soldier.\"\n\n\n \"I want to be a UN man. I've already enlisted. I'm in! What do\n you care what I do?\"\n\n\n The UN Inspector Corps had been founded to enforce the Nuclear\n Disarmament Treaty of 1966. Through the years it had acquired\n other jobs. UN men no longer went unarmed. Trained to use small\n arms and gas weapons, they guarded certain borders, bodyguarded\n diplomats and UN officials, even put down riots that threatened\n international peace. As the UN evolved into a strong world\n government, the UN Inspector Corps steadily acquired new powers.\n\n\n Read went through six months training on Madagascar.", "\"Is he all right?\" the driver asked.\n\n\n \"I don't think I hurt him.\" Rashid took a syrette from his vest\n pocket. \"Well, Read, it looks like we're in for a fight. In a few\n minutes Miaka Station will know we're coming. And God knows what\n will happen at the Game Preserve.\"\n\n\n Read wanted to jump out of the car. He could die any minute. But\n he had set his life on a well-oiled track and he couldn't get off\n until they reached Geneva.\n\n\n \"They don't know who's coming,\" he said. \"They don't make them\n tough enough to stop this boy.\"\n\n\n Staring straight ahead, he didn't see the sergeant smile.\nTwo types of recruits are accepted by the UN Inspector Corps:\n those with a fanatic loyalty to the ideals of peace and world\n order, and those who are loyal to nothing but themselves. Read\n was the second type.", "Bullets had completely shattered the wall in front of him. He\n stared through the murk, across the broken glass. He was Corporal\n Harry Read, UN Inspector Corps—a very special man. If he didn't\n do a good job here, he wasn't the man he claimed to be. This\n might be the only real test he would ever face.\nHe heard a shout in rapid French. He turned to his right. Men in\n red loincloths ran zigzagging toward the station. They carried\n light automatic rifles. Half of them wore gas masks.\n\n\n \"Shoot the masks,\" he yelled. \"Aim for the masks.\"", "\"I liked Rangoon,\" he even told a friend. \"I even liked Korea.\n But I think I liked the Pole job best. You sit around playing\n cards and shooting the bull and then there's a plane crash or\n something and you go out and win a medal. That's great for me.\n I'm lazy and I like excitement.\"\nOne power implied in the UN Charter no Secretary General or\n Inspector General had ever tried to use. The power to arrest any\n head of state whose country violated international law. Could the\n World Court try and imprison a politician who had conspired to\n attack another nation?\n\n\n For years Africa had been called \"The South America of the Old\n World.\" Revolution followed revolution. Colonies became\n democracies. Democracies became dictatorships or dissolved in\n civil war. Men planted bases on the moon and in four years,\n 1978-82, ringed the world with matter transmitters; but the black\n population of Africa still struggled toward political equality.", "For two years Read had served under Sergeant Rashid. To him, the\n sergeant was everything a UN inspector should be. Rashid's\n devotion to peace had no limits.\n\n\n Read's psych tests said pride alone drove him on. That was good\n enough for the UN; they only rejected men whose loyalties might\n conflict with their duties. But an assault on the tank required\n something more than a hunger for self-respect.\n\n\n Read had seen the inspector who covered their getaway. He had\n watched their escort charge three-to-one odds. He had seen\n another inspector stay behind at Miaka Station. And here, in this\n building, lay battered men and dead men.\n\n\n All UN inspectors. All part of his life.\n\n\n And he was part of their life. Their blood, their sacrifice, and\n pain, had become a part of him.\n\n\n \"I'll take a cocktail, Sarge.\"", "But the radio assault and the arms buildup continued. Early in\n 1982, South Africa claimed the Belderkan Army exceeded the size\n agreed to in the Disarmament Treaty. The European countries and\n some African nations joined in the accusation. China called the\n uproar a vicious slur on a new African nation. The United States\n and Russia, trying not to get entangled, asked for more\n investigation by the UN.\n\n\n But the evidence was clear. Umluana was defying world law. If he\n got away with it, some larger and more dangerous nation might\n follow his precedent. And the arms race would begin again.\n\n\n The Inspector General decided. They would enter Belderkan, arrest\n Umluana and try him by due process before the World Court. If the\n plan succeeded, mankind would be a long step farther from nuclear\n war.", "Read didn't know much about the complicated political reasons for\n the arrest. He liked the Corp and he liked being in the Corp. He\n went where they sent him and did what they told him to do.\nThe car skimmed above the tree-tops. The driver and his two\n passengers scanned the sky.\n\n\n A plane would have been a faster way to get out of the country.\n But then they would have spent hours flying over Africa, with\n Belderkan fighters in hot pursuit, other nations joining the\n chase and the world uproar gaining volume. By transmitter, if all\n went well, they could have Umluana in Geneva in an hour.\n\n\n They were racing toward Miaka, a branch transmitter station. From\n Miaka they would transmit to the Belderkan Preserve, a famous\n tourist attraction whose station could transmit to any point on\n the globe. Even now a dozen inspectors were taking over the Game\n Preserve station and manning its controls.", "Twice he nearly got expelled for picking fights with smaller men.\n Rather than resign, he accepted punishment which assigned him to\n weeks of dull, filthy extra labor. He hated the restrictions and\n the iron fence of regulations. He hated boredom, loneliness and\n isolation.\n\n\n And yet he responded with enthusiasm. They had given him a job. A\n job many people considered important.\n\n\n He took his turn guarding the still disputed borders of Korea. He\n served on the rescue teams that patrol the busy Polar routes. He\n mounted guard at the 1980 World's Fair in Rangoon.", "The copter landed ten minutes later. Umluana left in a shower of\n bullets. A Russian private, the ranking man alive in the station,\n surrendered the survivors to the Belderkans.\nHis mother hung the Global Medal above the television set.\n\n\n \"He must have been brave,\" she said. \"We had a fine son.\"\n\n\n \"He was our only son,\" her husband said. \"What did he volunteer\n for? Couldn't somebody else have done it?\"\n\n\n His wife started to cry. Awkwardly, he embraced her. He wondered\n what his son had wanted that he couldn't get at home.\nTHE END", "A tall, lanky Negro he had spent his school days in one of the\n drab suburbs that ring every prosperous American city. It was the\n home of factory workers, clerks, semiskilled technicians, all who\n do the drudge work of civilization and know they will never do\n more. The adults spent their days with television, alcohol and\n drugs; the young spent their days with gangs, sex, television and\n alcohol. What else was there? Those who could have told him\n neither studied nor taught at his schools. What he saw on the\n concrete fields between the tall apartment houses marked the\n limits of life's possibilities.\n\n\n He had belonged to a gang called The Golden Spacemen. \"Nobody\n fools with me,\" he bragged. \"When Harry Read's out, there's a\n tiger running loose.\" No one knew how many times he nearly ran\n from other clubs, how carefully he picked the safest spot on the\n battle line.", "He didn't think, anymore than a rabbit thinks when it lies hiding\n from the fox or a panther thinks when it crouches on a branch\n above the trail. His skin tightened and relaxed on his body.\n\n\n \"Listen,\" said a German.\n\n\n Far down the hill he heard the deep-throated rumble of a big\n motor.\n\n\n \"Armor,\" the German said.\n\n\n The earth shook. The tank rounded the bend. Read watched the\n squat, angular monster until its stubby gun pointed at the\n station. It stopped less than two hundred yards away.\n\n\n A loud-speaker blared.\n\n\n ATTENTION UN SOLDIERS.\n\n ATTENTION UN SOLDIERS.\n\n YOU MAY THINK US SAVAGES\n\n BUT WE HAVE MODERN WEAPONS.", "The machine gun kicked and chattered on his shoulder. He picked a\n target and squeezed off a burst. Tensely, he hunted for another\n mask. Three grenades arced through the air and yellow gas spread\n across the battlefield. The attackers ran through it. A few yards\n beyond the gas, some of them turned and ran for their own lines.\n In a moment only half a dozen masked men still advanced. The\n inspectors fired a long, noisy volley. When they stopped only\n four attackers remained on their feet. And they were running for\n cover.\n\n\n The attackers had come straight up a road that led from the Game\n Preserve to the station. They had not expected any resistance.\n The UN men had already taken over the station, chased out the\n passengers and technicians and taken up defense positions; they\n had met the Belderkans with a dozen grenades and sent them\n scurrying for cover. The fight so far had been vicious but\n disorganized. But the Belderkans had a few hundred men and knew\n they had wrecked the transmitter controls.", "\"I can't move, Sarge.\"\n\n\n \"Read, you've got to. I think you're the only—\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n Guns clattered. Bullets cracked.\n\n\n \"Sergeant Rashid! Answer me.\"\n\n\n He heard nothing but the lonely passage of the bullets in the\n mist.\n\n\n \"I'm a UN man,\" he mumbled. \"You people up there know what a UN\n man is? You know what happens when you meet one?\"\n\n\n When he reached the tank, he had another bullet in his right arm.\n But they didn't know he was coming and when you get within ten\n feet of a tank, the men inside can't see you.\n\n\n He just had to stand up and drop the bottle down the gun barrel.\n That was all—with a broken hip and a wounded right arm.", "\"I don't know your language,\" Rashid said.\n\n\n \"Then I'll speak English.\" Umluana was a small man with wrinkled\n brow, glasses and a mustache. His skin was a shade lighter than\n Read's. \"The Inspector General doesn't have the power to arrest a\n head of state—especially the Premier of Belderkan. Now, if\n you'll excuse me, I must return to my party.\"\n\n\n In the other room people laughed and talked. Glasses clinked in\n the late afternoon. Read knew two armed men stood just outside\n the door. \"If you leave, Premier, I'll have to shoot you.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think so,\" Umluana said. \"No, if you kill me, all Africa\n will rise against the world. You don't want me dead. You want me\n in court.\"\n\n\n Read clicked off the safety.", "Directly in front of him, his head shattered by a bullet, a dead\n inspector lay behind an overturned couch.\n\n\n Read had seen dozens of training films taken during actual\n battles or after atomic attacks. He had laughed when other\n recruits complained. \"That's the way this world is. You people\n with the weak stomachs better get used to it.\"\n\n\n Now he slid against the rear wall of the transmitter booth.\n\n\n A wounded inspector crawled across the floor to the booth. Read\n couldn't see his wound, only the pain scratched on his face and\n the blood he deposited on the floor.\n\n\n \"Did you get Umluana?\" he asked Sergeant Rashid.\n\n\n \"He's in the booth. What's going on?\" Rashid's Middle East Oxford\n seemed more clipped than ever.", "A few feet away, sprawled behind a barricade of tables, lay a man\n in advanced shock. His deadly white skin shone like ivory. They\n wouldn't even look like that. One nuclear shell from that gun and\n they'd be vaporized. Or perhaps the tank had sonic projectors;\n then the skin would peel off their bones. Or they might be\n burned, or cut up by shrapnel, or gassed with some new mist their\n masks couldn't filter.\n\n\n Read shut his eyes. All around him he heard heavy breathing,\n mumbled comments, curses. Clothes rustled as men moved restlessly.\n\n\n But already the voice of Sergeant Rashid resounded in the murky\n room.\n\n\n \"We've got to knock that thing out before the copter comes.\n Otherwise, he can't land. I have six Molotov cocktails here. Who\n wants to go hunting with me?\"", "Umluana took control of Belderkan in 1979. The tiny, former Dutch\n colony, had been a tottering democracy for ten years. The very\n day he took control the new dictator and his African party began\n to build up the Belderkan Army. For years he had preached a new\n Africa, united, free of white masters, the home of a vigorous and\n perfect Negro society. His critics called him a hypocritical\n racist, an opportunist using the desires of the African people to\n build himself an empire.\n\n\n He began a propaganda war against neighboring South Africa,\n promising the liberation of that strife-torn land. Most Negro\n leaders, having just won representation in the South African\n Parliament, told him to liberate his own country. They believed\n they could use their first small voice in the government to win\n true freedom for their people.", "They had made no plans to take over Miaka. They planned to get\n there before it could be defended.\n\n\n \"There's no military base near Miaka,\" Rashid said. \"We might get\n there before the Belderkans.\"\n\n\n \"Here comes our escort,\" Read said.\n\n\n A big car rose from the jungle. This one had a recoilless rifle\n mounted on the roof. The driver and the gunner waved and fell in\n behind them.\n\n\n \"One thing,\" Read said, \"I don't think they'll shoot at us while\nhe's\nin the car.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be certain, corporal. All these strong-arm movements are\n alike. I'll bet Umluana's lieutenants are hoping he'll become a\n dead legend. Then they can become live conquerors.\"", "He knew they would see him when he stood up but he didn't think\n about that. He didn't think about Sergeant Rashid, about the\n complicated politics of Africa, about crowded market streets. He\n had to kill the tank. That was all he thought about. He had\n decided something in the world was more important than himself,\n but he didn't know it or realize the psychologists would be\n surprised to see him do this. He had made many decisions in the\n last few minutes. He had ceased to think about them or anything\n else.\n\n\n With his cigarette lighter, he lit the rag stuffed in the end of\n the bottle.\n\n\n Biting his tongue, he pulled himself up the front of the tank.\n His long arm stretched for the muzzle of the gun. He tossed the\n bottle down the dark throat.\n\n\n As he fell, the machine-gun bullets hit him in the chest, then in\n the neck. He didn't feel them. He had fainted the moment he felt\n the bottle leave his hand." ], [ "\"Is he all right?\" the driver asked.\n\n\n \"I don't think I hurt him.\" Rashid took a syrette from his vest\n pocket. \"Well, Read, it looks like we're in for a fight. In a few\n minutes Miaka Station will know we're coming. And God knows what\n will happen at the Game Preserve.\"\n\n\n Read wanted to jump out of the car. He could die any minute. But\n he had set his life on a well-oiled track and he couldn't get off\n until they reached Geneva.\n\n\n \"They don't know who's coming,\" he said. \"They don't make them\n tough enough to stop this boy.\"\n\n\n Staring straight ahead, he didn't see the sergeant smile.\nTwo types of recruits are accepted by the UN Inspector Corps:\n those with a fanatic loyalty to the ideals of peace and world\n order, and those who are loyal to nothing but themselves. Read\n was the second type.", "For two years Read had served under Sergeant Rashid. To him, the\n sergeant was everything a UN inspector should be. Rashid's\n devotion to peace had no limits.\n\n\n Read's psych tests said pride alone drove him on. That was good\n enough for the UN; they only rejected men whose loyalties might\n conflict with their duties. But an assault on the tank required\n something more than a hunger for self-respect.\n\n\n Read had seen the inspector who covered their getaway. He had\n watched their escort charge three-to-one odds. He had seen\n another inspector stay behind at Miaka Station. And here, in this\n building, lay battered men and dead men.\n\n\n All UN inspectors. All part of his life.\n\n\n And he was part of their life. Their blood, their sacrifice, and\n pain, had become a part of him.\n\n\n \"I'll take a cocktail, Sarge.\"", "\"A man ought to be a man,\" he once told a girl. \"He ought to do a\n man's work. Did you ever notice how our fathers look, how they\n sleep so much? I don't want to be like that. I want to be\n something proud.\"\n\n\n He joined the UN Inspector Corps at eighteen, in 1978. The\n international cops wore green berets, high buttonless boots, bush\n jackets. They were very special men.\n\n\n For the first time in his life, his father said something about\n his ambitions.\n\n\n \"Don't you like America, Harry? Do you\nwant\nto be without a\n country? This is the best country in the world. All my life I've\n made a good living. Haven't you had everything you ever wanted?\n I've been a king compared to people overseas. Why, you stay here\n and go to trade school and in two years you'll be living just\n like me.\"", "They knelt on the cramped floor. Rashid put on his gas mask and\n Read copied him. Umluana breathed like a furnace, still\n unconscious from the injection Rashid had given him.\nI can't do anything\n, Read thought.\nThey're too far away to\n shoot back. All we can do is run.\nThe sky was clear and blue. The jungle was a noisy bazaar of\n color. In the distance guns crashed. He listened to shells\n whistle by and the whipcrack of machine-gun bullets. The car\n roller-coastered up and down. Every time a shell passed, he\n crawled in waves down his own back.\n\n\n Another explosion, this time very loud.\n\n\n Rashid raised his eyes above the seat and looked out the rear\n window. \"Two left. Keep down, Read.\"\n\n\n \"Can't we go down?\" Read said.\n\n\n \"They'll get to Miaka before us.\"", "\"I can't move, Sarge.\"\n\n\n \"Read, you've got to. I think you're the only—\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n Guns clattered. Bullets cracked.\n\n\n \"Sergeant Rashid! Answer me.\"\n\n\n He heard nothing but the lonely passage of the bullets in the\n mist.\n\n\n \"I'm a UN man,\" he mumbled. \"You people up there know what a UN\n man is? You know what happens when you meet one?\"\n\n\n When he reached the tank, he had another bullet in his right arm.\n But they didn't know he was coming and when you get within ten\n feet of a tank, the men inside can't see you.\n\n\n He just had to stand up and drop the bottle down the gun barrel.\n That was all—with a broken hip and a wounded right arm.", "\"They hit us with two companies of troops a few minutes ago. I\n think half our men are wounded.\"\n\n\n \"Can we get out of here?\"\n\n\n \"They machine-gunned the controls.\"\n\n\n Rashid swore. \"You heard him, Read! Get out there and help those\n men.\"\n\n\n He heard the screams of the wounded, the crack of rifles and\n machine guns, all the terrifying noise of war. But since his\n eighteenth year he had done everything his superiors told him to\n do.\n\n\n He started crawling toward an easy-chair that looked like good\n cover. A bullet cracked above his head, so close he felt the\n shock wave. He got up, ran panicky, crouched, and dove behind the\n chair.", "Sergeant Rashid came from Cairo. He had degrees in science and\n history from Cambridge but only the Corp gave him work that\n satisfied his conscience. He hated war. It was that simple.\n\n\n Read looked back. He saw three spots of sunlight about two\n hundred feet up and a good mile behind.\n\n\n \"Here they come, Sarge.\"\n\n\n Rashid turned his head. He waved frantically. The two men in the\n other car waved back.\n\n\n \"Shall I duck under the trees?\" the driver asked.\n\n\n \"Not yet. Not until we have to.\"\n\n\n Read fingered the machine gun he had picked up when he got in the\n car. He had never been shot at. Twice he had faced an unarmed\n mob, but a few shots had sent them running.", "\"I don't know your language,\" Rashid said.\n\n\n \"Then I'll speak English.\" Umluana was a small man with wrinkled\n brow, glasses and a mustache. His skin was a shade lighter than\n Read's. \"The Inspector General doesn't have the power to arrest a\n head of state—especially the Premier of Belderkan. Now, if\n you'll excuse me, I must return to my party.\"\n\n\n In the other room people laughed and talked. Glasses clinked in\n the late afternoon. Read knew two armed men stood just outside\n the door. \"If you leave, Premier, I'll have to shoot you.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think so,\" Umluana said. \"No, if you kill me, all Africa\n will rise against the world. You don't want me dead. You want me\n in court.\"\n\n\n Read clicked off the safety.", "\"I liked Rangoon,\" he even told a friend. \"I even liked Korea.\n But I think I liked the Pole job best. You sit around playing\n cards and shooting the bull and then there's a plane crash or\n something and you go out and win a medal. That's great for me.\n I'm lazy and I like excitement.\"\nOne power implied in the UN Charter no Secretary General or\n Inspector General had ever tried to use. The power to arrest any\n head of state whose country violated international law. Could the\n World Court try and imprison a politician who had conspired to\n attack another nation?\n\n\n For years Africa had been called \"The South America of the Old\n World.\" Revolution followed revolution. Colonies became\n democracies. Democracies became dictatorships or dissolved in\n civil war. Men planted bases on the moon and in four years,\n 1978-82, ringed the world with matter transmitters; but the black\n population of Africa still struggled toward political equality.", "\"I don't want that,\" Read said.\n\n\n \"What do you mean, you don't want that?\"\n\n\n \"You could join the American Army,\" his mother said. \"That's as\n good as a trade school. If you have to be a soldier.\"\n\n\n \"I want to be a UN man. I've already enlisted. I'm in! What do\n you care what I do?\"\n\n\n The UN Inspector Corps had been founded to enforce the Nuclear\n Disarmament Treaty of 1966. Through the years it had acquired\n other jobs. UN men no longer went unarmed. Trained to use small\n arms and gas weapons, they guarded certain borders, bodyguarded\n diplomats and UN officials, even put down riots that threatened\n international peace. As the UN evolved into a strong world\n government, the UN Inspector Corps steadily acquired new powers.\n\n\n Read went through six months training on Madagascar.", "\"Corporal Read is very young,\" Rashid said, \"but he's a crack\n shot. That's why I brought him with me. I think he\nlikes\nto\n shoot, too.\"\n\n\n Umluana turned back to Rashid a second too soon. He saw the\n sergeant's upraised hand before it collided with his neck.\n\n\n \"Help!\nKidnap.\n\"\n\n\n Rashid judo chopped him and swung the inert body over his\n shoulders. Read pulled a flat grenade from his vest pocket. He\n dropped it and yellow psycho gas hissed from the valve.\n\n\n \"Let's be off,\" Rashid said.\n\n\n The door lock snapped as they went out the window. Two men with\n rifles plunged into the gas; sighing, they fell to the floor in a\n catatonic trance.", "Twice he nearly got expelled for picking fights with smaller men.\n Rather than resign, he accepted punishment which assigned him to\n weeks of dull, filthy extra labor. He hated the restrictions and\n the iron fence of regulations. He hated boredom, loneliness and\n isolation.\n\n\n And yet he responded with enthusiasm. They had given him a job. A\n job many people considered important.\n\n\n He took his turn guarding the still disputed borders of Korea. He\n served on the rescue teams that patrol the busy Polar routes. He\n mounted guard at the 1980 World's Fair in Rangoon.", "He knew they would see him when he stood up but he didn't think\n about that. He didn't think about Sergeant Rashid, about the\n complicated politics of Africa, about crowded market streets. He\n had to kill the tank. That was all he thought about. He had\n decided something in the world was more important than himself,\n but he didn't know it or realize the psychologists would be\n surprised to see him do this. He had made many decisions in the\n last few minutes. He had ceased to think about them or anything\n else.\n\n\n With his cigarette lighter, he lit the rag stuffed in the end of\n the bottle.\n\n\n Biting his tongue, he pulled himself up the front of the tank.\n His long arm stretched for the muzzle of the gun. He tossed the\n bottle down the dark throat.\n\n\n As he fell, the machine-gun bullets hit him in the chest, then in\n the neck. He didn't feel them. He had fainted the moment he felt\n the bottle leave his hand.", "They had made no plans to take over Miaka. They planned to get\n there before it could be defended.\n\n\n \"There's no military base near Miaka,\" Rashid said. \"We might get\n there before the Belderkans.\"\n\n\n \"Here comes our escort,\" Read said.\n\n\n A big car rose from the jungle. This one had a recoilless rifle\n mounted on the roof. The driver and the gunner waved and fell in\n behind them.\n\n\n \"One thing,\" Read said, \"I don't think they'll shoot at us while\nhe's\nin the car.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be certain, corporal. All these strong-arm movements are\n alike. I'll bet Umluana's lieutenants are hoping he'll become a\n dead legend. Then they can become live conquerors.\"", "He shut his eyes when he heard another loud explosion.\n\n\n Sergeant Rashid looked out the window again. He swore bitterly in\n English and Egyptian. Read raised his head. The two cars behind\n them weren't fighting each other. A long way back the tree-tops\n burned.\n\n\n \"How much farther?\" Rashid said. The masks muffled their voices.\n\n\n \"There it is now. Shall I take us right in?\"\n\n\n \"I think you'd better.\"\nThe station was a glass diamond in a small clearing. The driver\n slowed down, then crashed through the glass walls and hovered by\n the transmitter booth.\n\n\n Rashid opened the door and threw out two grenades. Read jumped\n out and the two of them struggled toward the booth with Umluana.\n The driver, pistol in hand, ran for the control panel.", "Read didn't know much about the complicated political reasons for\n the arrest. He liked the Corp and he liked being in the Corp. He\n went where they sent him and did what they told him to do.\nThe car skimmed above the tree-tops. The driver and his two\n passengers scanned the sky.\n\n\n A plane would have been a faster way to get out of the country.\n But then they would have spent hours flying over Africa, with\n Belderkan fighters in hot pursuit, other nations joining the\n chase and the world uproar gaining volume. By transmitter, if all\n went well, they could have Umluana in Geneva in an hour.\n\n\n They were racing toward Miaka, a branch transmitter station. From\n Miaka they would transmit to the Belderkan Preserve, a famous\n tourist attraction whose station could transmit to any point on\n the globe. Even now a dozen inspectors were taking over the Game\n Preserve station and manning its controls.", "A little car skimmed across the lawn. Bearing the Scourge of\n Africa, Rashid struggled toward it. Read walked backward,\n covering their retreat.\n\n\n The car stopped, whirling blades holding it a few inches off the\n lawn. They climbed in.\n\n\n \"How did it go?\" The driver and another inspector occupied the\n front seat.\n\n\n \"They'll be after us in half a minute.\"\n\n\n The other inspector carried a light machine gun and a box of\n grenades. \"I better cover,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Rashid said.\n\n\n The inspector slid out of the car and ran to a clump of bushes.\n The driver pushed in the accelerator. As they swerved toward the\n south, Read saw a dozen armed men run out of the house. A grenade\n arced from the bushes and the pursuers recoiled from the cloud\n that rose before them.", "Bullets had completely shattered the wall in front of him. He\n stared through the murk, across the broken glass. He was Corporal\n Harry Read, UN Inspector Corps—a very special man. If he didn't\n do a good job here, he wasn't the man he claimed to be. This\n might be the only real test he would ever face.\nHe heard a shout in rapid French. He turned to his right. Men in\n red loincloths ran zigzagging toward the station. They carried\n light automatic rifles. Half of them wore gas masks.\n\n\n \"Shoot the masks,\" he yelled. \"Aim for the masks.\"", "Directly in front of him, his head shattered by a bullet, a dead\n inspector lay behind an overturned couch.\n\n\n Read had seen dozens of training films taken during actual\n battles or after atomic attacks. He had laughed when other\n recruits complained. \"That's the way this world is. You people\n with the weak stomachs better get used to it.\"\n\n\n Now he slid against the rear wall of the transmitter booth.\n\n\n A wounded inspector crawled across the floor to the booth. Read\n couldn't see his wound, only the pain scratched on his face and\n the blood he deposited on the floor.\n\n\n \"Did you get Umluana?\" he asked Sergeant Rashid.\n\n\n \"He's in the booth. What's going on?\" Rashid's Middle East Oxford\n seemed more clipped than ever.", "Birds flew screaming from their nests. Monkeys screeched and\n threw things at the noisy, speeding cars. A little cloud of birds\n surrounded each vehicle.\n\n\n The escort car made a sharp turn and charged their pursuers. The\n big rifle fired twice. Read saw the Belderkan cars scatter.\n Suddenly machine-gun bullets cracked and whined beside him.\n\n\n \"Evade,\" Rashid said. \"Don't go down.\"\n\n\n Without losing any forward speed, the driver took them straight\n up. Read's stomach bounced.\n\n\n A shell exploded above them. The car rocked. He raised his eyes\n and saw a long crack in the roof.\n\n\n \"Hit the floor,\" Rashid said." ], [ "Sergeant Rashid came from Cairo. He had degrees in science and\n history from Cambridge but only the Corp gave him work that\n satisfied his conscience. He hated war. It was that simple.\n\n\n Read looked back. He saw three spots of sunlight about two\n hundred feet up and a good mile behind.\n\n\n \"Here they come, Sarge.\"\n\n\n Rashid turned his head. He waved frantically. The two men in the\n other car waved back.\n\n\n \"Shall I duck under the trees?\" the driver asked.\n\n\n \"Not yet. Not until we have to.\"\n\n\n Read fingered the machine gun he had picked up when he got in the\n car. He had never been shot at. Twice he had faced an unarmed\n mob, but a few shots had sent them running.", "\"Corporal Read is very young,\" Rashid said, \"but he's a crack\n shot. That's why I brought him with me. I think he\nlikes\nto\n shoot, too.\"\n\n\n Umluana turned back to Rashid a second too soon. He saw the\n sergeant's upraised hand before it collided with his neck.\n\n\n \"Help!\nKidnap.\n\"\n\n\n Rashid judo chopped him and swung the inert body over his\n shoulders. Read pulled a flat grenade from his vest pocket. He\n dropped it and yellow psycho gas hissed from the valve.\n\n\n \"Let's be off,\" Rashid said.\n\n\n The door lock snapped as they went out the window. Two men with\n rifles plunged into the gas; sighing, they fell to the floor in a\n catatonic trance.", "For two years Read had served under Sergeant Rashid. To him, the\n sergeant was everything a UN inspector should be. Rashid's\n devotion to peace had no limits.\n\n\n Read's psych tests said pride alone drove him on. That was good\n enough for the UN; they only rejected men whose loyalties might\n conflict with their duties. But an assault on the tank required\n something more than a hunger for self-respect.\n\n\n Read had seen the inspector who covered their getaway. He had\n watched their escort charge three-to-one odds. He had seen\n another inspector stay behind at Miaka Station. And here, in this\n building, lay battered men and dead men.\n\n\n All UN inspectors. All part of his life.\n\n\n And he was part of their life. Their blood, their sacrifice, and\n pain, had become a part of him.\n\n\n \"I'll take a cocktail, Sarge.\"", "They knelt on the cramped floor. Rashid put on his gas mask and\n Read copied him. Umluana breathed like a furnace, still\n unconscious from the injection Rashid had given him.\nI can't do anything\n, Read thought.\nThey're too far away to\n shoot back. All we can do is run.\nThe sky was clear and blue. The jungle was a noisy bazaar of\n color. In the distance guns crashed. He listened to shells\n whistle by and the whipcrack of machine-gun bullets. The car\n roller-coastered up and down. Every time a shell passed, he\n crawled in waves down his own back.\n\n\n Another explosion, this time very loud.\n\n\n Rashid raised his eyes above the seat and looked out the rear\n window. \"Two left. Keep down, Read.\"\n\n\n \"Can't we go down?\" Read said.\n\n\n \"They'll get to Miaka before us.\"", "Directly in front of him, his head shattered by a bullet, a dead\n inspector lay behind an overturned couch.\n\n\n Read had seen dozens of training films taken during actual\n battles or after atomic attacks. He had laughed when other\n recruits complained. \"That's the way this world is. You people\n with the weak stomachs better get used to it.\"\n\n\n Now he slid against the rear wall of the transmitter booth.\n\n\n A wounded inspector crawled across the floor to the booth. Read\n couldn't see his wound, only the pain scratched on his face and\n the blood he deposited on the floor.\n\n\n \"Did you get Umluana?\" he asked Sergeant Rashid.\n\n\n \"He's in the booth. What's going on?\" Rashid's Middle East Oxford\n seemed more clipped than ever.", "\"They hit us with two companies of troops a few minutes ago. I\n think half our men are wounded.\"\n\n\n \"Can we get out of here?\"\n\n\n \"They machine-gunned the controls.\"\n\n\n Rashid swore. \"You heard him, Read! Get out there and help those\n men.\"\n\n\n He heard the screams of the wounded, the crack of rifles and\n machine guns, all the terrifying noise of war. But since his\n eighteenth year he had done everything his superiors told him to\n do.\n\n\n He started crawling toward an easy-chair that looked like good\n cover. A bullet cracked above his head, so close he felt the\n shock wave. He got up, ran panicky, crouched, and dove behind the\n chair.", "\"Is that Read?\"\n\n\n \"Who else did you expect?\"\n\n\n \"Nobody. Anybody else?\"\n\n\n \"I'll go,\" the Frenchman said. \"Three should be enough. Give us a\n good smoke screen.\"\nRashid snapped orders. He put the German inspector in charge of\n Umluana. Read, the Frenchman and himself, he stationed at\n thirty-foot intervals along the floor.\n\n\n \"Remember,\" Rashid said. \"We have to knock out that gun.\"\n\n\n Read had given away his machine gun. He held a gas-filled bottle\n in each hand. His automatic nestled in its shoulder holster.\n\n\n Rashid whistled.\n\n\n Dozens of smoke grenades tumbled through the air. Thick mist\n engulfed the tank. Read stood up and ran forward. He crouched but\n didn't zigzag. Speed counted most here.", "\"Is he all right?\" the driver asked.\n\n\n \"I don't think I hurt him.\" Rashid took a syrette from his vest\n pocket. \"Well, Read, it looks like we're in for a fight. In a few\n minutes Miaka Station will know we're coming. And God knows what\n will happen at the Game Preserve.\"\n\n\n Read wanted to jump out of the car. He could die any minute. But\n he had set his life on a well-oiled track and he couldn't get off\n until they reached Geneva.\n\n\n \"They don't know who's coming,\" he said. \"They don't make them\n tough enough to stop this boy.\"\n\n\n Staring straight ahead, he didn't see the sergeant smile.\nTwo types of recruits are accepted by the UN Inspector Corps:\n those with a fanatic loyalty to the ideals of peace and world\n order, and those who are loyal to nothing but themselves. Read\n was the second type.", "He shut his eyes when he heard another loud explosion.\n\n\n Sergeant Rashid looked out the window again. He swore bitterly in\n English and Egyptian. Read raised his head. The two cars behind\n them weren't fighting each other. A long way back the tree-tops\n burned.\n\n\n \"How much farther?\" Rashid said. The masks muffled their voices.\n\n\n \"There it is now. Shall I take us right in?\"\n\n\n \"I think you'd better.\"\nThe station was a glass diamond in a small clearing. The driver\n slowed down, then crashed through the glass walls and hovered by\n the transmitter booth.\n\n\n Rashid opened the door and threw out two grenades. Read jumped\n out and the two of them struggled toward the booth with Umluana.\n The driver, pistol in hand, ran for the control panel.", "A little car skimmed across the lawn. Bearing the Scourge of\n Africa, Rashid struggled toward it. Read walked backward,\n covering their retreat.\n\n\n The car stopped, whirling blades holding it a few inches off the\n lawn. They climbed in.\n\n\n \"How did it go?\" The driver and another inspector occupied the\n front seat.\n\n\n \"They'll be after us in half a minute.\"\n\n\n The other inspector carried a light machine gun and a box of\n grenades. \"I better cover,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Rashid said.\n\n\n The inspector slid out of the car and ran to a clump of bushes.\n The driver pushed in the accelerator. As they swerved toward the\n south, Read saw a dozen armed men run out of the house. A grenade\n arced from the bushes and the pursuers recoiled from the cloud\n that rose before them.", "\"I don't know your language,\" Rashid said.\n\n\n \"Then I'll speak English.\" Umluana was a small man with wrinkled\n brow, glasses and a mustache. His skin was a shade lighter than\n Read's. \"The Inspector General doesn't have the power to arrest a\n head of state—especially the Premier of Belderkan. Now, if\n you'll excuse me, I must return to my party.\"\n\n\n In the other room people laughed and talked. Glasses clinked in\n the late afternoon. Read knew two armed men stood just outside\n the door. \"If you leave, Premier, I'll have to shoot you.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think so,\" Umluana said. \"No, if you kill me, all Africa\n will rise against the world. You don't want me dead. You want me\n in court.\"\n\n\n Read clicked off the safety.", "Birds flew screaming from their nests. Monkeys screeched and\n threw things at the noisy, speeding cars. A little cloud of birds\n surrounded each vehicle.\n\n\n The escort car made a sharp turn and charged their pursuers. The\n big rifle fired twice. Read saw the Belderkan cars scatter.\n Suddenly machine-gun bullets cracked and whined beside him.\n\n\n \"Evade,\" Rashid said. \"Don't go down.\"\n\n\n Without losing any forward speed, the driver took them straight\n up. Read's stomach bounced.\n\n\n A shell exploded above them. The car rocked. He raised his eyes\n and saw a long crack in the roof.\n\n\n \"Hit the floor,\" Rashid said.", "A few feet away, sprawled behind a barricade of tables, lay a man\n in advanced shock. His deadly white skin shone like ivory. They\n wouldn't even look like that. One nuclear shell from that gun and\n they'd be vaporized. Or perhaps the tank had sonic projectors;\n then the skin would peel off their bones. Or they might be\n burned, or cut up by shrapnel, or gassed with some new mist their\n masks couldn't filter.\n\n\n Read shut his eyes. All around him he heard heavy breathing,\n mumbled comments, curses. Clothes rustled as men moved restlessly.\n\n\n But already the voice of Sergeant Rashid resounded in the murky\n room.\n\n\n \"We've got to knock that thing out before the copter comes.\n Otherwise, he can't land. I have six Molotov cocktails here. Who\n wants to go hunting with me?\"", "They had made no plans to take over Miaka. They planned to get\n there before it could be defended.\n\n\n \"There's no military base near Miaka,\" Rashid said. \"We might get\n there before the Belderkans.\"\n\n\n \"Here comes our escort,\" Read said.\n\n\n A big car rose from the jungle. This one had a recoilless rifle\n mounted on the roof. The driver and the gunner waved and fell in\n behind them.\n\n\n \"One thing,\" Read said, \"I don't think they'll shoot at us while\nhe's\nin the car.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be certain, corporal. All these strong-arm movements are\n alike. I'll bet Umluana's lieutenants are hoping he'll become a\n dead legend. Then they can become live conquerors.\"", "\"The copter will be here in half an hour. We'll put Umluana on,\n then try to save ourselves. Once he's gone, I think we ought to\n surrender.\"\n\n\n \"How do you think they'll treat us?\"\n\n\n \"That we'll have to see.\"\n\n\n An occasional bullet cracked and whined through the misty room.\n Near him a man gasped frantically for air. On the sunny field a\n wounded man screamed for help.\n\n\n \"There's a garage downstairs,\" Rashid said. \"In case the copter\n doesn't get here on time, I've got a man filling wine bottles\n with gasoline.\"\n\n\n \"We'll stop them, Sarge. Don't worry.\"\nRashid ran off. Read stared across the green land and listened to\n the pound of his heart. What were the Belderkans planning? A mass\n frontal attack? To sneak in over the top of the hill?", "He knew they would see him when he stood up but he didn't think\n about that. He didn't think about Sergeant Rashid, about the\n complicated politics of Africa, about crowded market streets. He\n had to kill the tank. That was all he thought about. He had\n decided something in the world was more important than himself,\n but he didn't know it or realize the psychologists would be\n surprised to see him do this. He had made many decisions in the\n last few minutes. He had ceased to think about them or anything\n else.\n\n\n With his cigarette lighter, he lit the rag stuffed in the end of\n the bottle.\n\n\n Biting his tongue, he pulled himself up the front of the tank.\n His long arm stretched for the muzzle of the gun. He tossed the\n bottle down the dark throat.\n\n\n As he fell, the machine-gun bullets hit him in the chest, then in\n the neck. He didn't feel them. He had fainted the moment he felt\n the bottle leave his hand.", "Read didn't know much about the complicated political reasons for\n the arrest. He liked the Corp and he liked being in the Corp. He\n went where they sent him and did what they told him to do.\nThe car skimmed above the tree-tops. The driver and his two\n passengers scanned the sky.\n\n\n A plane would have been a faster way to get out of the country.\n But then they would have spent hours flying over Africa, with\n Belderkan fighters in hot pursuit, other nations joining the\n chase and the world uproar gaining volume. By transmitter, if all\n went well, they could have Umluana in Geneva in an hour.\n\n\n They were racing toward Miaka, a branch transmitter station. From\n Miaka they would transmit to the Belderkan Preserve, a famous\n tourist attraction whose station could transmit to any point on\n the globe. Even now a dozen inspectors were taking over the Game\n Preserve station and manning its controls.", "An inspector cracked the valve on a smoke grenade. A white fog\n spread through the building. They could see anyone who tried to\n rush them but the besiegers couldn't pick out targets.\n\n\n Above the noise, he heard Rashid.\n\n\n \"I'm calling South Africa Station for a copter. It's the only way\n out of here. Until it comes, we've got to hold them back.\"\n\n\n Read thought of the green beret he had stuffed in his pocket that\n morning. He stuck it on his head and cocked it. He didn't need\n plain clothes anymore and he wanted to wear at least a part of\n his uniform.", "He didn't think, anymore than a rabbit thinks when it lies hiding\n from the fox or a panther thinks when it crouches on a branch\n above the trail. His skin tightened and relaxed on his body.\n\n\n \"Listen,\" said a German.\n\n\n Far down the hill he heard the deep-throated rumble of a big\n motor.\n\n\n \"Armor,\" the German said.\n\n\n The earth shook. The tank rounded the bend. Read watched the\n squat, angular monster until its stubby gun pointed at the\n station. It stopped less than two hundred yards away.\n\n\n A loud-speaker blared.\n\n\n ATTENTION UN SOLDIERS.\n\n ATTENTION UN SOLDIERS.\n\n YOU MAY THINK US SAVAGES\n\n BUT WE HAVE MODERN WEAPONS.", "\"I can't move, Sarge.\"\n\n\n \"Read, you've got to. I think you're the only—\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n Guns clattered. Bullets cracked.\n\n\n \"Sergeant Rashid! Answer me.\"\n\n\n He heard nothing but the lonely passage of the bullets in the\n mist.\n\n\n \"I'm a UN man,\" he mumbled. \"You people up there know what a UN\n man is? You know what happens when you meet one?\"\n\n\n When he reached the tank, he had another bullet in his right arm.\n But they didn't know he was coming and when you get within ten\n feet of a tank, the men inside can't see you.\n\n\n He just had to stand up and drop the bottle down the gun barrel.\n That was all—with a broken hip and a wounded right arm." ], [ "Transcriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from Analog, January 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nTHE\n\n GREEN\n\n BERET\nBy TOM PURDOM\nIt's not so much the decisions a man does make that mark\n him as a Man—but the ones he refrains from making. Like the\n decision \"I've had enough!\"\nIllustrated by Schoenherr\nRead locked the door and drew his pistol. Sergeant Rashid handed\n Premier Umluana the warrant.\n\n\n \"We're from the UN Inspector Corps,\" Sergeant Rashid said. \"I'm\n very sorry, but we have to arrest you and bring you in for trial\n by the World Court.\"\n\n\n If Umluana noticed Read's gun, he didn't show it. He read the\n warrant carefully. When he finished, he said something in Dutch.", "\"Corporal Read is very young,\" Rashid said, \"but he's a crack\n shot. That's why I brought him with me. I think he\nlikes\nto\n shoot, too.\"\n\n\n Umluana turned back to Rashid a second too soon. He saw the\n sergeant's upraised hand before it collided with his neck.\n\n\n \"Help!\nKidnap.\n\"\n\n\n Rashid judo chopped him and swung the inert body over his\n shoulders. Read pulled a flat grenade from his vest pocket. He\n dropped it and yellow psycho gas hissed from the valve.\n\n\n \"Let's be off,\" Rashid said.\n\n\n The door lock snapped as they went out the window. Two men with\n rifles plunged into the gas; sighing, they fell to the floor in a\n catatonic trance.", "They knelt on the cramped floor. Rashid put on his gas mask and\n Read copied him. Umluana breathed like a furnace, still\n unconscious from the injection Rashid had given him.\nI can't do anything\n, Read thought.\nThey're too far away to\n shoot back. All we can do is run.\nThe sky was clear and blue. The jungle was a noisy bazaar of\n color. In the distance guns crashed. He listened to shells\n whistle by and the whipcrack of machine-gun bullets. The car\n roller-coastered up and down. Every time a shell passed, he\n crawled in waves down his own back.\n\n\n Another explosion, this time very loud.\n\n\n Rashid raised his eyes above the seat and looked out the rear\n window. \"Two left. Keep down, Read.\"\n\n\n \"Can't we go down?\" Read said.\n\n\n \"They'll get to Miaka before us.\"", "\"Is that Read?\"\n\n\n \"Who else did you expect?\"\n\n\n \"Nobody. Anybody else?\"\n\n\n \"I'll go,\" the Frenchman said. \"Three should be enough. Give us a\n good smoke screen.\"\nRashid snapped orders. He put the German inspector in charge of\n Umluana. Read, the Frenchman and himself, he stationed at\n thirty-foot intervals along the floor.\n\n\n \"Remember,\" Rashid said. \"We have to knock out that gun.\"\n\n\n Read had given away his machine gun. He held a gas-filled bottle\n in each hand. His automatic nestled in its shoulder holster.\n\n\n Rashid whistled.\n\n\n Dozens of smoke grenades tumbled through the air. Thick mist\n engulfed the tank. Read stood up and ran forward. He crouched but\n didn't zigzag. Speed counted most here.", "\"The copter will be here in half an hour. We'll put Umluana on,\n then try to save ourselves. Once he's gone, I think we ought to\n surrender.\"\n\n\n \"How do you think they'll treat us?\"\n\n\n \"That we'll have to see.\"\n\n\n An occasional bullet cracked and whined through the misty room.\n Near him a man gasped frantically for air. On the sunny field a\n wounded man screamed for help.\n\n\n \"There's a garage downstairs,\" Rashid said. \"In case the copter\n doesn't get here on time, I've got a man filling wine bottles\n with gasoline.\"\n\n\n \"We'll stop them, Sarge. Don't worry.\"\nRashid ran off. Read stared across the green land and listened to\n the pound of his heart. What were the Belderkans planning? A mass\n frontal attack? To sneak in over the top of the hill?", "Read didn't know much about the complicated political reasons for\n the arrest. He liked the Corp and he liked being in the Corp. He\n went where they sent him and did what they told him to do.\nThe car skimmed above the tree-tops. The driver and his two\n passengers scanned the sky.\n\n\n A plane would have been a faster way to get out of the country.\n But then they would have spent hours flying over Africa, with\n Belderkan fighters in hot pursuit, other nations joining the\n chase and the world uproar gaining volume. By transmitter, if all\n went well, they could have Umluana in Geneva in an hour.\n\n\n They were racing toward Miaka, a branch transmitter station. From\n Miaka they would transmit to the Belderkan Preserve, a famous\n tourist attraction whose station could transmit to any point on\n the globe. Even now a dozen inspectors were taking over the Game\n Preserve station and manning its controls.", "An inspector cracked the valve on a smoke grenade. A white fog\n spread through the building. They could see anyone who tried to\n rush them but the besiegers couldn't pick out targets.\n\n\n Above the noise, he heard Rashid.\n\n\n \"I'm calling South Africa Station for a copter. It's the only way\n out of here. Until it comes, we've got to hold them back.\"\n\n\n Read thought of the green beret he had stuffed in his pocket that\n morning. He stuck it on his head and cocked it. He didn't need\n plain clothes anymore and he wanted to wear at least a part of\n his uniform.", "\"I don't know your language,\" Rashid said.\n\n\n \"Then I'll speak English.\" Umluana was a small man with wrinkled\n brow, glasses and a mustache. His skin was a shade lighter than\n Read's. \"The Inspector General doesn't have the power to arrest a\n head of state—especially the Premier of Belderkan. Now, if\n you'll excuse me, I must return to my party.\"\n\n\n In the other room people laughed and talked. Glasses clinked in\n the late afternoon. Read knew two armed men stood just outside\n the door. \"If you leave, Premier, I'll have to shoot you.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think so,\" Umluana said. \"No, if you kill me, all Africa\n will rise against the world. You don't want me dead. You want me\n in court.\"\n\n\n Read clicked off the safety.", "They had made no plans to take over Miaka. They planned to get\n there before it could be defended.\n\n\n \"There's no military base near Miaka,\" Rashid said. \"We might get\n there before the Belderkans.\"\n\n\n \"Here comes our escort,\" Read said.\n\n\n A big car rose from the jungle. This one had a recoilless rifle\n mounted on the roof. The driver and the gunner waved and fell in\n behind them.\n\n\n \"One thing,\" Read said, \"I don't think they'll shoot at us while\nhe's\nin the car.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be certain, corporal. All these strong-arm movements are\n alike. I'll bet Umluana's lieutenants are hoping he'll become a\n dead legend. Then they can become live conquerors.\"", "Directly in front of him, his head shattered by a bullet, a dead\n inspector lay behind an overturned couch.\n\n\n Read had seen dozens of training films taken during actual\n battles or after atomic attacks. He had laughed when other\n recruits complained. \"That's the way this world is. You people\n with the weak stomachs better get used to it.\"\n\n\n Now he slid against the rear wall of the transmitter booth.\n\n\n A wounded inspector crawled across the floor to the booth. Read\n couldn't see his wound, only the pain scratched on his face and\n the blood he deposited on the floor.\n\n\n \"Did you get Umluana?\" he asked Sergeant Rashid.\n\n\n \"He's in the booth. What's going on?\" Rashid's Middle East Oxford\n seemed more clipped than ever.", "He shut his eyes when he heard another loud explosion.\n\n\n Sergeant Rashid looked out the window again. He swore bitterly in\n English and Egyptian. Read raised his head. The two cars behind\n them weren't fighting each other. A long way back the tree-tops\n burned.\n\n\n \"How much farther?\" Rashid said. The masks muffled their voices.\n\n\n \"There it is now. Shall I take us right in?\"\n\n\n \"I think you'd better.\"\nThe station was a glass diamond in a small clearing. The driver\n slowed down, then crashed through the glass walls and hovered by\n the transmitter booth.\n\n\n Rashid opened the door and threw out two grenades. Read jumped\n out and the two of them struggled toward the booth with Umluana.\n The driver, pistol in hand, ran for the control panel.", "He didn't think, anymore than a rabbit thinks when it lies hiding\n from the fox or a panther thinks when it crouches on a branch\n above the trail. His skin tightened and relaxed on his body.\n\n\n \"Listen,\" said a German.\n\n\n Far down the hill he heard the deep-throated rumble of a big\n motor.\n\n\n \"Armor,\" the German said.\n\n\n The earth shook. The tank rounded the bend. Read watched the\n squat, angular monster until its stubby gun pointed at the\n station. It stopped less than two hundred yards away.\n\n\n A loud-speaker blared.\n\n\n ATTENTION UN SOLDIERS.\n\n ATTENTION UN SOLDIERS.\n\n YOU MAY THINK US SAVAGES\n\n BUT WE HAVE MODERN WEAPONS.", "A little car skimmed across the lawn. Bearing the Scourge of\n Africa, Rashid struggled toward it. Read walked backward,\n covering their retreat.\n\n\n The car stopped, whirling blades holding it a few inches off the\n lawn. They climbed in.\n\n\n \"How did it go?\" The driver and another inspector occupied the\n front seat.\n\n\n \"They'll be after us in half a minute.\"\n\n\n The other inspector carried a light machine gun and a box of\n grenades. \"I better cover,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Rashid said.\n\n\n The inspector slid out of the car and ran to a clump of bushes.\n The driver pushed in the accelerator. As they swerved toward the\n south, Read saw a dozen armed men run out of the house. A grenade\n arced from the bushes and the pursuers recoiled from the cloud\n that rose before them.", "There were three technicians in the station and no passengers.\n All three panicked when the psycho gas enveloped them. They ran\n howling for the jungle.\n\n\n Through the window of his mask, Read saw their pursuers land in\n the clearing. Machine-gun bullets raked the building. They got\n Umluana in the booth and hit the floor. Read took aim and opened\n fire on the largest car.\n\n\n \"Now, I can shoot back,\" he said. \"Now we'll see what they do.\"\n\n\n \"Are you ready, Rashid?\" yelled the driver.\n\n\n \"Man, get us out of here!\"\n\n\n The booth door shut. When it opened, they were at the Game\n Preserve.\n\n\n The station jutted from the side of a hill. A glass-walled\n waiting room surrounded the bank of transmitter booths. Read\n looked out the door and saw his first battlefield.", "The first direct attack had been repulsed. They could attack many\n more times and continue to spray the building with bullets. They\n could also try to go around the hill and attack the station from\n above; if they did, the inspectors had a good view of the hill\n and should see them going up.\n\n\n The inspectors had taken up good defensive positions. In spite of\n their losses, they still had enough firepower to cover the area\n surrounding the station.\n\n\n Read surveyed his sector of fire. About two hundred yards to his\n left, he saw the top of a small ditch. Using the ditch for cover,\n the Belderkans could sneak to the top of the hill.\n\n\n Gas grenades are only three inches long. They hold cubic yards of\n gas under high pressure. Read unclipped a telescoping rod from\n his vest pocket. He opened it and a pair of sights flipped up. A\n thin track ran down one side.", "Sergeant Rashid came from Cairo. He had degrees in science and\n history from Cambridge but only the Corp gave him work that\n satisfied his conscience. He hated war. It was that simple.\n\n\n Read looked back. He saw three spots of sunlight about two\n hundred feet up and a good mile behind.\n\n\n \"Here they come, Sarge.\"\n\n\n Rashid turned his head. He waved frantically. The two men in the\n other car waved back.\n\n\n \"Shall I duck under the trees?\" the driver asked.\n\n\n \"Not yet. Not until we have to.\"\n\n\n Read fingered the machine gun he had picked up when he got in the\n car. He had never been shot at. Twice he had faced an unarmed\n mob, but a few shots had sent them running.", "\"Is he all right?\" the driver asked.\n\n\n \"I don't think I hurt him.\" Rashid took a syrette from his vest\n pocket. \"Well, Read, it looks like we're in for a fight. In a few\n minutes Miaka Station will know we're coming. And God knows what\n will happen at the Game Preserve.\"\n\n\n Read wanted to jump out of the car. He could die any minute. But\n he had set his life on a well-oiled track and he couldn't get off\n until they reached Geneva.\n\n\n \"They don't know who's coming,\" he said. \"They don't make them\n tough enough to stop this boy.\"\n\n\n Staring straight ahead, he didn't see the sergeant smile.\nTwo types of recruits are accepted by the UN Inspector Corps:\n those with a fanatic loyalty to the ideals of peace and world\n order, and those who are loyal to nothing but themselves. Read\n was the second type.", "But the radio assault and the arms buildup continued. Early in\n 1982, South Africa claimed the Belderkan Army exceeded the size\n agreed to in the Disarmament Treaty. The European countries and\n some African nations joined in the accusation. China called the\n uproar a vicious slur on a new African nation. The United States\n and Russia, trying not to get entangled, asked for more\n investigation by the UN.\n\n\n But the evidence was clear. Umluana was defying world law. If he\n got away with it, some larger and more dangerous nation might\n follow his precedent. And the arms race would begin again.\n\n\n The Inspector General decided. They would enter Belderkan, arrest\n Umluana and try him by due process before the World Court. If the\n plan succeeded, mankind would be a long step farther from nuclear\n war.", "For two years Read had served under Sergeant Rashid. To him, the\n sergeant was everything a UN inspector should be. Rashid's\n devotion to peace had no limits.\n\n\n Read's psych tests said pride alone drove him on. That was good\n enough for the UN; they only rejected men whose loyalties might\n conflict with their duties. But an assault on the tank required\n something more than a hunger for self-respect.\n\n\n Read had seen the inspector who covered their getaway. He had\n watched their escort charge three-to-one odds. He had seen\n another inspector stay behind at Miaka Station. And here, in this\n building, lay battered men and dead men.\n\n\n All UN inspectors. All part of his life.\n\n\n And he was part of their life. Their blood, their sacrifice, and\n pain, had become a part of him.\n\n\n \"I'll take a cocktail, Sarge.\"", "A few feet away, sprawled behind a barricade of tables, lay a man\n in advanced shock. His deadly white skin shone like ivory. They\n wouldn't even look like that. One nuclear shell from that gun and\n they'd be vaporized. Or perhaps the tank had sonic projectors;\n then the skin would peel off their bones. Or they might be\n burned, or cut up by shrapnel, or gassed with some new mist their\n masks couldn't filter.\n\n\n Read shut his eyes. All around him he heard heavy breathing,\n mumbled comments, curses. Clothes rustled as men moved restlessly.\n\n\n But already the voice of Sergeant Rashid resounded in the murky\n room.\n\n\n \"We've got to knock that thing out before the copter comes.\n Otherwise, he can't land. I have six Molotov cocktails here. Who\n wants to go hunting with me?\"" ], [ "Read didn't know much about the complicated political reasons for\n the arrest. He liked the Corp and he liked being in the Corp. He\n went where they sent him and did what they told him to do.\nThe car skimmed above the tree-tops. The driver and his two\n passengers scanned the sky.\n\n\n A plane would have been a faster way to get out of the country.\n But then they would have spent hours flying over Africa, with\n Belderkan fighters in hot pursuit, other nations joining the\n chase and the world uproar gaining volume. By transmitter, if all\n went well, they could have Umluana in Geneva in an hour.\n\n\n They were racing toward Miaka, a branch transmitter station. From\n Miaka they would transmit to the Belderkan Preserve, a famous\n tourist attraction whose station could transmit to any point on\n the globe. Even now a dozen inspectors were taking over the Game\n Preserve station and manning its controls.", "But the radio assault and the arms buildup continued. Early in\n 1982, South Africa claimed the Belderkan Army exceeded the size\n agreed to in the Disarmament Treaty. The European countries and\n some African nations joined in the accusation. China called the\n uproar a vicious slur on a new African nation. The United States\n and Russia, trying not to get entangled, asked for more\n investigation by the UN.\n\n\n But the evidence was clear. Umluana was defying world law. If he\n got away with it, some larger and more dangerous nation might\n follow his precedent. And the arms race would begin again.\n\n\n The Inspector General decided. They would enter Belderkan, arrest\n Umluana and try him by due process before the World Court. If the\n plan succeeded, mankind would be a long step farther from nuclear\n war.", "They had made no plans to take over Miaka. They planned to get\n there before it could be defended.\n\n\n \"There's no military base near Miaka,\" Rashid said. \"We might get\n there before the Belderkans.\"\n\n\n \"Here comes our escort,\" Read said.\n\n\n A big car rose from the jungle. This one had a recoilless rifle\n mounted on the roof. The driver and the gunner waved and fell in\n behind them.\n\n\n \"One thing,\" Read said, \"I don't think they'll shoot at us while\nhe's\nin the car.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be certain, corporal. All these strong-arm movements are\n alike. I'll bet Umluana's lieutenants are hoping he'll become a\n dead legend. Then they can become live conquerors.\"", "\"The copter will be here in half an hour. We'll put Umluana on,\n then try to save ourselves. Once he's gone, I think we ought to\n surrender.\"\n\n\n \"How do you think they'll treat us?\"\n\n\n \"That we'll have to see.\"\n\n\n An occasional bullet cracked and whined through the misty room.\n Near him a man gasped frantically for air. On the sunny field a\n wounded man screamed for help.\n\n\n \"There's a garage downstairs,\" Rashid said. \"In case the copter\n doesn't get here on time, I've got a man filling wine bottles\n with gasoline.\"\n\n\n \"We'll stop them, Sarge. Don't worry.\"\nRashid ran off. Read stared across the green land and listened to\n the pound of his heart. What were the Belderkans planning? A mass\n frontal attack? To sneak in over the top of the hill?", "Umluana took control of Belderkan in 1979. The tiny, former Dutch\n colony, had been a tottering democracy for ten years. The very\n day he took control the new dictator and his African party began\n to build up the Belderkan Army. For years he had preached a new\n Africa, united, free of white masters, the home of a vigorous and\n perfect Negro society. His critics called him a hypocritical\n racist, an opportunist using the desires of the African people to\n build himself an empire.\n\n\n He began a propaganda war against neighboring South Africa,\n promising the liberation of that strife-torn land. Most Negro\n leaders, having just won representation in the South African\n Parliament, told him to liberate his own country. They believed\n they could use their first small voice in the government to win\n true freedom for their people.", "There were three technicians in the station and no passengers.\n All three panicked when the psycho gas enveloped them. They ran\n howling for the jungle.\n\n\n Through the window of his mask, Read saw their pursuers land in\n the clearing. Machine-gun bullets raked the building. They got\n Umluana in the booth and hit the floor. Read took aim and opened\n fire on the largest car.\n\n\n \"Now, I can shoot back,\" he said. \"Now we'll see what they do.\"\n\n\n \"Are you ready, Rashid?\" yelled the driver.\n\n\n \"Man, get us out of here!\"\n\n\n The booth door shut. When it opened, they were at the Game\n Preserve.\n\n\n The station jutted from the side of a hill. A glass-walled\n waiting room surrounded the bank of transmitter booths. Read\n looked out the door and saw his first battlefield.", "Directly in front of him, his head shattered by a bullet, a dead\n inspector lay behind an overturned couch.\n\n\n Read had seen dozens of training films taken during actual\n battles or after atomic attacks. He had laughed when other\n recruits complained. \"That's the way this world is. You people\n with the weak stomachs better get used to it.\"\n\n\n Now he slid against the rear wall of the transmitter booth.\n\n\n A wounded inspector crawled across the floor to the booth. Read\n couldn't see his wound, only the pain scratched on his face and\n the blood he deposited on the floor.\n\n\n \"Did you get Umluana?\" he asked Sergeant Rashid.\n\n\n \"He's in the booth. What's going on?\" Rashid's Middle East Oxford\n seemed more clipped than ever.", "The machine gun kicked and chattered on his shoulder. He picked a\n target and squeezed off a burst. Tensely, he hunted for another\n mask. Three grenades arced through the air and yellow gas spread\n across the battlefield. The attackers ran through it. A few yards\n beyond the gas, some of them turned and ran for their own lines.\n In a moment only half a dozen masked men still advanced. The\n inspectors fired a long, noisy volley. When they stopped only\n four attackers remained on their feet. And they were running for\n cover.\n\n\n The attackers had come straight up a road that led from the Game\n Preserve to the station. They had not expected any resistance.\n The UN men had already taken over the station, chased out the\n passengers and technicians and taken up defense positions; they\n had met the Belderkans with a dozen grenades and sent them\n scurrying for cover. The fight so far had been vicious but\n disorganized. But the Belderkans had a few hundred men and knew\n they had wrecked the transmitter controls.", "They knelt on the cramped floor. Rashid put on his gas mask and\n Read copied him. Umluana breathed like a furnace, still\n unconscious from the injection Rashid had given him.\nI can't do anything\n, Read thought.\nThey're too far away to\n shoot back. All we can do is run.\nThe sky was clear and blue. The jungle was a noisy bazaar of\n color. In the distance guns crashed. He listened to shells\n whistle by and the whipcrack of machine-gun bullets. The car\n roller-coastered up and down. Every time a shell passed, he\n crawled in waves down his own back.\n\n\n Another explosion, this time very loud.\n\n\n Rashid raised his eyes above the seat and looked out the rear\n window. \"Two left. Keep down, Read.\"\n\n\n \"Can't we go down?\" Read said.\n\n\n \"They'll get to Miaka before us.\"", "He shut his eyes when he heard another loud explosion.\n\n\n Sergeant Rashid looked out the window again. He swore bitterly in\n English and Egyptian. Read raised his head. The two cars behind\n them weren't fighting each other. A long way back the tree-tops\n burned.\n\n\n \"How much farther?\" Rashid said. The masks muffled their voices.\n\n\n \"There it is now. Shall I take us right in?\"\n\n\n \"I think you'd better.\"\nThe station was a glass diamond in a small clearing. The driver\n slowed down, then crashed through the glass walls and hovered by\n the transmitter booth.\n\n\n Rashid opened the door and threw out two grenades. Read jumped\n out and the two of them struggled toward the booth with Umluana.\n The driver, pistol in hand, ran for the control panel.", "WE HAVE ATOMIC WARHEADS,\n\n ALL GASES, ROCKETS\n\n AND FLAME THROWERS. IF\n\n YOU DO NOT SURRENDER\n\n OUR PREMIER, WE WILL DESTROY YOU.\n\n\n\n \"They know we don't have any big weapons,\" Read said. \"They know\n we have only gas grenades and small arms.\"\n\n\n He looked nervously from side to side. They couldn't bring the\n copter in with that thing squatting out there.", "The copter landed ten minutes later. Umluana left in a shower of\n bullets. A Russian private, the ranking man alive in the station,\n surrendered the survivors to the Belderkans.\nHis mother hung the Global Medal above the television set.\n\n\n \"He must have been brave,\" she said. \"We had a fine son.\"\n\n\n \"He was our only son,\" her husband said. \"What did he volunteer\n for? Couldn't somebody else have done it?\"\n\n\n His wife started to cry. Awkwardly, he embraced her. He wondered\n what his son had wanted that he couldn't get at home.\nTHE END", "\"I don't know your language,\" Rashid said.\n\n\n \"Then I'll speak English.\" Umluana was a small man with wrinkled\n brow, glasses and a mustache. His skin was a shade lighter than\n Read's. \"The Inspector General doesn't have the power to arrest a\n head of state—especially the Premier of Belderkan. Now, if\n you'll excuse me, I must return to my party.\"\n\n\n In the other room people laughed and talked. Glasses clinked in\n the late afternoon. Read knew two armed men stood just outside\n the door. \"If you leave, Premier, I'll have to shoot you.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think so,\" Umluana said. \"No, if you kill me, all Africa\n will rise against the world. You don't want me dead. You want me\n in court.\"\n\n\n Read clicked off the safety.", "\"Corporal Read is very young,\" Rashid said, \"but he's a crack\n shot. That's why I brought him with me. I think he\nlikes\nto\n shoot, too.\"\n\n\n Umluana turned back to Rashid a second too soon. He saw the\n sergeant's upraised hand before it collided with his neck.\n\n\n \"Help!\nKidnap.\n\"\n\n\n Rashid judo chopped him and swung the inert body over his\n shoulders. Read pulled a flat grenade from his vest pocket. He\n dropped it and yellow psycho gas hissed from the valve.\n\n\n \"Let's be off,\" Rashid said.\n\n\n The door lock snapped as they went out the window. Two men with\n rifles plunged into the gas; sighing, they fell to the floor in a\n catatonic trance.", "A few feet away, sprawled behind a barricade of tables, lay a man\n in advanced shock. His deadly white skin shone like ivory. They\n wouldn't even look like that. One nuclear shell from that gun and\n they'd be vaporized. Or perhaps the tank had sonic projectors;\n then the skin would peel off their bones. Or they might be\n burned, or cut up by shrapnel, or gassed with some new mist their\n masks couldn't filter.\n\n\n Read shut his eyes. All around him he heard heavy breathing,\n mumbled comments, curses. Clothes rustled as men moved restlessly.\n\n\n But already the voice of Sergeant Rashid resounded in the murky\n room.\n\n\n \"We've got to knock that thing out before the copter comes.\n Otherwise, he can't land. I have six Molotov cocktails here. Who\n wants to go hunting with me?\"", "The first direct attack had been repulsed. They could attack many\n more times and continue to spray the building with bullets. They\n could also try to go around the hill and attack the station from\n above; if they did, the inspectors had a good view of the hill\n and should see them going up.\n\n\n The inspectors had taken up good defensive positions. In spite of\n their losses, they still had enough firepower to cover the area\n surrounding the station.\n\n\n Read surveyed his sector of fire. About two hundred yards to his\n left, he saw the top of a small ditch. Using the ditch for cover,\n the Belderkans could sneak to the top of the hill.\n\n\n Gas grenades are only three inches long. They hold cubic yards of\n gas under high pressure. Read unclipped a telescoping rod from\n his vest pocket. He opened it and a pair of sights flipped up. A\n thin track ran down one side.", "\"Is that Read?\"\n\n\n \"Who else did you expect?\"\n\n\n \"Nobody. Anybody else?\"\n\n\n \"I'll go,\" the Frenchman said. \"Three should be enough. Give us a\n good smoke screen.\"\nRashid snapped orders. He put the German inspector in charge of\n Umluana. Read, the Frenchman and himself, he stationed at\n thirty-foot intervals along the floor.\n\n\n \"Remember,\" Rashid said. \"We have to knock out that gun.\"\n\n\n Read had given away his machine gun. He held a gas-filled bottle\n in each hand. His automatic nestled in its shoulder holster.\n\n\n Rashid whistled.\n\n\n Dozens of smoke grenades tumbled through the air. Thick mist\n engulfed the tank. Read stood up and ran forward. He crouched but\n didn't zigzag. Speed counted most here.", "\"I liked Rangoon,\" he even told a friend. \"I even liked Korea.\n But I think I liked the Pole job best. You sit around playing\n cards and shooting the bull and then there's a plane crash or\n something and you go out and win a medal. That's great for me.\n I'm lazy and I like excitement.\"\nOne power implied in the UN Charter no Secretary General or\n Inspector General had ever tried to use. The power to arrest any\n head of state whose country violated international law. Could the\n World Court try and imprison a politician who had conspired to\n attack another nation?\n\n\n For years Africa had been called \"The South America of the Old\n World.\" Revolution followed revolution. Colonies became\n democracies. Democracies became dictatorships or dissolved in\n civil war. Men planted bases on the moon and in four years,\n 1978-82, ringed the world with matter transmitters; but the black\n population of Africa still struggled toward political equality.", "He didn't think, anymore than a rabbit thinks when it lies hiding\n from the fox or a panther thinks when it crouches on a branch\n above the trail. His skin tightened and relaxed on his body.\n\n\n \"Listen,\" said a German.\n\n\n Far down the hill he heard the deep-throated rumble of a big\n motor.\n\n\n \"Armor,\" the German said.\n\n\n The earth shook. The tank rounded the bend. Read watched the\n squat, angular monster until its stubby gun pointed at the\n station. It stopped less than two hundred yards away.\n\n\n A loud-speaker blared.\n\n\n ATTENTION UN SOLDIERS.\n\n ATTENTION UN SOLDIERS.\n\n YOU MAY THINK US SAVAGES\n\n BUT WE HAVE MODERN WEAPONS.", "\"They hit us with two companies of troops a few minutes ago. I\n think half our men are wounded.\"\n\n\n \"Can we get out of here?\"\n\n\n \"They machine-gunned the controls.\"\n\n\n Rashid swore. \"You heard him, Read! Get out there and help those\n men.\"\n\n\n He heard the screams of the wounded, the crack of rifles and\n machine guns, all the terrifying noise of war. But since his\n eighteenth year he had done everything his superiors told him to\n do.\n\n\n He started crawling toward an easy-chair that looked like good\n cover. A bullet cracked above his head, so close he felt the\n shock wave. He got up, ran panicky, crouched, and dove behind the\n chair." ], [ "They had made no plans to take over Miaka. They planned to get\n there before it could be defended.\n\n\n \"There's no military base near Miaka,\" Rashid said. \"We might get\n there before the Belderkans.\"\n\n\n \"Here comes our escort,\" Read said.\n\n\n A big car rose from the jungle. This one had a recoilless rifle\n mounted on the roof. The driver and the gunner waved and fell in\n behind them.\n\n\n \"One thing,\" Read said, \"I don't think they'll shoot at us while\nhe's\nin the car.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be certain, corporal. All these strong-arm movements are\n alike. I'll bet Umluana's lieutenants are hoping he'll become a\n dead legend. Then they can become live conquerors.\"", "Umluana took control of Belderkan in 1979. The tiny, former Dutch\n colony, had been a tottering democracy for ten years. The very\n day he took control the new dictator and his African party began\n to build up the Belderkan Army. For years he had preached a new\n Africa, united, free of white masters, the home of a vigorous and\n perfect Negro society. His critics called him a hypocritical\n racist, an opportunist using the desires of the African people to\n build himself an empire.\n\n\n He began a propaganda war against neighboring South Africa,\n promising the liberation of that strife-torn land. Most Negro\n leaders, having just won representation in the South African\n Parliament, told him to liberate his own country. They believed\n they could use their first small voice in the government to win\n true freedom for their people.", "\"I don't know your language,\" Rashid said.\n\n\n \"Then I'll speak English.\" Umluana was a small man with wrinkled\n brow, glasses and a mustache. His skin was a shade lighter than\n Read's. \"The Inspector General doesn't have the power to arrest a\n head of state—especially the Premier of Belderkan. Now, if\n you'll excuse me, I must return to my party.\"\n\n\n In the other room people laughed and talked. Glasses clinked in\n the late afternoon. Read knew two armed men stood just outside\n the door. \"If you leave, Premier, I'll have to shoot you.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think so,\" Umluana said. \"No, if you kill me, all Africa\n will rise against the world. You don't want me dead. You want me\n in court.\"\n\n\n Read clicked off the safety.", "\"The copter will be here in half an hour. We'll put Umluana on,\n then try to save ourselves. Once he's gone, I think we ought to\n surrender.\"\n\n\n \"How do you think they'll treat us?\"\n\n\n \"That we'll have to see.\"\n\n\n An occasional bullet cracked and whined through the misty room.\n Near him a man gasped frantically for air. On the sunny field a\n wounded man screamed for help.\n\n\n \"There's a garage downstairs,\" Rashid said. \"In case the copter\n doesn't get here on time, I've got a man filling wine bottles\n with gasoline.\"\n\n\n \"We'll stop them, Sarge. Don't worry.\"\nRashid ran off. Read stared across the green land and listened to\n the pound of his heart. What were the Belderkans planning? A mass\n frontal attack? To sneak in over the top of the hill?", "But the radio assault and the arms buildup continued. Early in\n 1982, South Africa claimed the Belderkan Army exceeded the size\n agreed to in the Disarmament Treaty. The European countries and\n some African nations joined in the accusation. China called the\n uproar a vicious slur on a new African nation. The United States\n and Russia, trying not to get entangled, asked for more\n investigation by the UN.\n\n\n But the evidence was clear. Umluana was defying world law. If he\n got away with it, some larger and more dangerous nation might\n follow his precedent. And the arms race would begin again.\n\n\n The Inspector General decided. They would enter Belderkan, arrest\n Umluana and try him by due process before the World Court. If the\n plan succeeded, mankind would be a long step farther from nuclear\n war.", "Gunfire shook the hill. The Belderkans couldn't see them but they\n knew what was going on and they fired systematically into the\n smoke.\n\n\n Bullets ploughed the ground beside him. He raised his head and\n found the dim silhouette of the tank. He tried not to think about\n bullets ploughing through his flesh.\n\n\n A bullet slammed into his hip. He fell on his back, screaming.\n \"Sarge.\nSarge.\n\"\n\n\n \"I'm hit, too,\" Rashid said. \"Don't stop if you can move.\"\nListen to him. What's he got, a sprained ankle?\nBut he didn't feel any pain. He closed his eyes and threw himself\n onto his stomach. And nearly fainted from pain. He screamed and\n quivered. The pain stopped. He stretched out his hands, gripping\n the wine bottles, and inched forward. Pain stabbed him from\n stomach to knee.", "The machine gun kicked and chattered on his shoulder. He picked a\n target and squeezed off a burst. Tensely, he hunted for another\n mask. Three grenades arced through the air and yellow gas spread\n across the battlefield. The attackers ran through it. A few yards\n beyond the gas, some of them turned and ran for their own lines.\n In a moment only half a dozen masked men still advanced. The\n inspectors fired a long, noisy volley. When they stopped only\n four attackers remained on their feet. And they were running for\n cover.\n\n\n The attackers had come straight up a road that led from the Game\n Preserve to the station. They had not expected any resistance.\n The UN men had already taken over the station, chased out the\n passengers and technicians and taken up defense positions; they\n had met the Belderkans with a dozen grenades and sent them\n scurrying for cover. The fight so far had been vicious but\n disorganized. But the Belderkans had a few hundred men and knew\n they had wrecked the transmitter controls.", "The copter landed ten minutes later. Umluana left in a shower of\n bullets. A Russian private, the ranking man alive in the station,\n surrendered the survivors to the Belderkans.\nHis mother hung the Global Medal above the television set.\n\n\n \"He must have been brave,\" she said. \"We had a fine son.\"\n\n\n \"He was our only son,\" her husband said. \"What did he volunteer\n for? Couldn't somebody else have done it?\"\n\n\n His wife started to cry. Awkwardly, he embraced her. He wondered\n what his son had wanted that he couldn't get at home.\nTHE END", "Read didn't know much about the complicated political reasons for\n the arrest. He liked the Corp and he liked being in the Corp. He\n went where they sent him and did what they told him to do.\nThe car skimmed above the tree-tops. The driver and his two\n passengers scanned the sky.\n\n\n A plane would have been a faster way to get out of the country.\n But then they would have spent hours flying over Africa, with\n Belderkan fighters in hot pursuit, other nations joining the\n chase and the world uproar gaining volume. By transmitter, if all\n went well, they could have Umluana in Geneva in an hour.\n\n\n They were racing toward Miaka, a branch transmitter station. From\n Miaka they would transmit to the Belderkan Preserve, a famous\n tourist attraction whose station could transmit to any point on\n the globe. Even now a dozen inspectors were taking over the Game\n Preserve station and manning its controls.", "Birds flew screaming from their nests. Monkeys screeched and\n threw things at the noisy, speeding cars. A little cloud of birds\n surrounded each vehicle.\n\n\n The escort car made a sharp turn and charged their pursuers. The\n big rifle fired twice. Read saw the Belderkan cars scatter.\n Suddenly machine-gun bullets cracked and whined beside him.\n\n\n \"Evade,\" Rashid said. \"Don't go down.\"\n\n\n Without losing any forward speed, the driver took them straight\n up. Read's stomach bounced.\n\n\n A shell exploded above them. The car rocked. He raised his eyes\n and saw a long crack in the roof.\n\n\n \"Hit the floor,\" Rashid said.", "The first direct attack had been repulsed. They could attack many\n more times and continue to spray the building with bullets. They\n could also try to go around the hill and attack the station from\n above; if they did, the inspectors had a good view of the hill\n and should see them going up.\n\n\n The inspectors had taken up good defensive positions. In spite of\n their losses, they still had enough firepower to cover the area\n surrounding the station.\n\n\n Read surveyed his sector of fire. About two hundred yards to his\n left, he saw the top of a small ditch. Using the ditch for cover,\n the Belderkans could sneak to the top of the hill.\n\n\n Gas grenades are only three inches long. They hold cubic yards of\n gas under high pressure. Read unclipped a telescoping rod from\n his vest pocket. He opened it and a pair of sights flipped up. A\n thin track ran down one side.", "They knelt on the cramped floor. Rashid put on his gas mask and\n Read copied him. Umluana breathed like a furnace, still\n unconscious from the injection Rashid had given him.\nI can't do anything\n, Read thought.\nThey're too far away to\n shoot back. All we can do is run.\nThe sky was clear and blue. The jungle was a noisy bazaar of\n color. In the distance guns crashed. He listened to shells\n whistle by and the whipcrack of machine-gun bullets. The car\n roller-coastered up and down. Every time a shell passed, he\n crawled in waves down his own back.\n\n\n Another explosion, this time very loud.\n\n\n Rashid raised his eyes above the seat and looked out the rear\n window. \"Two left. Keep down, Read.\"\n\n\n \"Can't we go down?\" Read said.\n\n\n \"They'll get to Miaka before us.\"", "Transcriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from Analog, January 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nTHE\n\n GREEN\n\n BERET\nBy TOM PURDOM\nIt's not so much the decisions a man does make that mark\n him as a Man—but the ones he refrains from making. Like the\n decision \"I've had enough!\"\nIllustrated by Schoenherr\nRead locked the door and drew his pistol. Sergeant Rashid handed\n Premier Umluana the warrant.\n\n\n \"We're from the UN Inspector Corps,\" Sergeant Rashid said. \"I'm\n very sorry, but we have to arrest you and bring you in for trial\n by the World Court.\"\n\n\n If Umluana noticed Read's gun, he didn't show it. He read the\n warrant carefully. When he finished, he said something in Dutch.", "\"Corporal Read is very young,\" Rashid said, \"but he's a crack\n shot. That's why I brought him with me. I think he\nlikes\nto\n shoot, too.\"\n\n\n Umluana turned back to Rashid a second too soon. He saw the\n sergeant's upraised hand before it collided with his neck.\n\n\n \"Help!\nKidnap.\n\"\n\n\n Rashid judo chopped him and swung the inert body over his\n shoulders. Read pulled a flat grenade from his vest pocket. He\n dropped it and yellow psycho gas hissed from the valve.\n\n\n \"Let's be off,\" Rashid said.\n\n\n The door lock snapped as they went out the window. Two men with\n rifles plunged into the gas; sighing, they fell to the floor in a\n catatonic trance.", "A few feet away, sprawled behind a barricade of tables, lay a man\n in advanced shock. His deadly white skin shone like ivory. They\n wouldn't even look like that. One nuclear shell from that gun and\n they'd be vaporized. Or perhaps the tank had sonic projectors;\n then the skin would peel off their bones. Or they might be\n burned, or cut up by shrapnel, or gassed with some new mist their\n masks couldn't filter.\n\n\n Read shut his eyes. All around him he heard heavy breathing,\n mumbled comments, curses. Clothes rustled as men moved restlessly.\n\n\n But already the voice of Sergeant Rashid resounded in the murky\n room.\n\n\n \"We've got to knock that thing out before the copter comes.\n Otherwise, he can't land. I have six Molotov cocktails here. Who\n wants to go hunting with me?\"", "He didn't think, anymore than a rabbit thinks when it lies hiding\n from the fox or a panther thinks when it crouches on a branch\n above the trail. His skin tightened and relaxed on his body.\n\n\n \"Listen,\" said a German.\n\n\n Far down the hill he heard the deep-throated rumble of a big\n motor.\n\n\n \"Armor,\" the German said.\n\n\n The earth shook. The tank rounded the bend. Read watched the\n squat, angular monster until its stubby gun pointed at the\n station. It stopped less than two hundred yards away.\n\n\n A loud-speaker blared.\n\n\n ATTENTION UN SOLDIERS.\n\n ATTENTION UN SOLDIERS.\n\n YOU MAY THINK US SAVAGES\n\n BUT WE HAVE MODERN WEAPONS.", "He shut his eyes when he heard another loud explosion.\n\n\n Sergeant Rashid looked out the window again. He swore bitterly in\n English and Egyptian. Read raised his head. The two cars behind\n them weren't fighting each other. A long way back the tree-tops\n burned.\n\n\n \"How much farther?\" Rashid said. The masks muffled their voices.\n\n\n \"There it is now. Shall I take us right in?\"\n\n\n \"I think you'd better.\"\nThe station was a glass diamond in a small clearing. The driver\n slowed down, then crashed through the glass walls and hovered by\n the transmitter booth.\n\n\n Rashid opened the door and threw out two grenades. Read jumped\n out and the two of them struggled toward the booth with Umluana.\n The driver, pistol in hand, ran for the control panel.", "Directly in front of him, his head shattered by a bullet, a dead\n inspector lay behind an overturned couch.\n\n\n Read had seen dozens of training films taken during actual\n battles or after atomic attacks. He had laughed when other\n recruits complained. \"That's the way this world is. You people\n with the weak stomachs better get used to it.\"\n\n\n Now he slid against the rear wall of the transmitter booth.\n\n\n A wounded inspector crawled across the floor to the booth. Read\n couldn't see his wound, only the pain scratched on his face and\n the blood he deposited on the floor.\n\n\n \"Did you get Umluana?\" he asked Sergeant Rashid.\n\n\n \"He's in the booth. What's going on?\" Rashid's Middle East Oxford\n seemed more clipped than ever.", "\"Is that Read?\"\n\n\n \"Who else did you expect?\"\n\n\n \"Nobody. Anybody else?\"\n\n\n \"I'll go,\" the Frenchman said. \"Three should be enough. Give us a\n good smoke screen.\"\nRashid snapped orders. He put the German inspector in charge of\n Umluana. Read, the Frenchman and himself, he stationed at\n thirty-foot intervals along the floor.\n\n\n \"Remember,\" Rashid said. \"We have to knock out that gun.\"\n\n\n Read had given away his machine gun. He held a gas-filled bottle\n in each hand. His automatic nestled in its shoulder holster.\n\n\n Rashid whistled.\n\n\n Dozens of smoke grenades tumbled through the air. Thick mist\n engulfed the tank. Read stood up and ran forward. He crouched but\n didn't zigzag. Speed counted most here.", "There were three technicians in the station and no passengers.\n All three panicked when the psycho gas enveloped them. They ran\n howling for the jungle.\n\n\n Through the window of his mask, Read saw their pursuers land in\n the clearing. Machine-gun bullets raked the building. They got\n Umluana in the booth and hit the floor. Read took aim and opened\n fire on the largest car.\n\n\n \"Now, I can shoot back,\" he said. \"Now we'll see what they do.\"\n\n\n \"Are you ready, Rashid?\" yelled the driver.\n\n\n \"Man, get us out of here!\"\n\n\n The booth door shut. When it opened, they were at the Game\n Preserve.\n\n\n The station jutted from the side of a hill. A glass-walled\n waiting room surrounded the bank of transmitter booths. Read\n looked out the door and saw his first battlefield." ], [ "He knew they would see him when he stood up but he didn't think\n about that. He didn't think about Sergeant Rashid, about the\n complicated politics of Africa, about crowded market streets. He\n had to kill the tank. That was all he thought about. He had\n decided something in the world was more important than himself,\n but he didn't know it or realize the psychologists would be\n surprised to see him do this. He had made many decisions in the\n last few minutes. He had ceased to think about them or anything\n else.\n\n\n With his cigarette lighter, he lit the rag stuffed in the end of\n the bottle.\n\n\n Biting his tongue, he pulled himself up the front of the tank.\n His long arm stretched for the muzzle of the gun. He tossed the\n bottle down the dark throat.\n\n\n As he fell, the machine-gun bullets hit him in the chest, then in\n the neck. He didn't feel them. He had fainted the moment he felt\n the bottle leave his hand.", "\"Is that Read?\"\n\n\n \"Who else did you expect?\"\n\n\n \"Nobody. Anybody else?\"\n\n\n \"I'll go,\" the Frenchman said. \"Three should be enough. Give us a\n good smoke screen.\"\nRashid snapped orders. He put the German inspector in charge of\n Umluana. Read, the Frenchman and himself, he stationed at\n thirty-foot intervals along the floor.\n\n\n \"Remember,\" Rashid said. \"We have to knock out that gun.\"\n\n\n Read had given away his machine gun. He held a gas-filled bottle\n in each hand. His automatic nestled in its shoulder holster.\n\n\n Rashid whistled.\n\n\n Dozens of smoke grenades tumbled through the air. Thick mist\n engulfed the tank. Read stood up and ran forward. He crouched but\n didn't zigzag. Speed counted most here.", "There were three technicians in the station and no passengers.\n All three panicked when the psycho gas enveloped them. They ran\n howling for the jungle.\n\n\n Through the window of his mask, Read saw their pursuers land in\n the clearing. Machine-gun bullets raked the building. They got\n Umluana in the booth and hit the floor. Read took aim and opened\n fire on the largest car.\n\n\n \"Now, I can shoot back,\" he said. \"Now we'll see what they do.\"\n\n\n \"Are you ready, Rashid?\" yelled the driver.\n\n\n \"Man, get us out of here!\"\n\n\n The booth door shut. When it opened, they were at the Game\n Preserve.\n\n\n The station jutted from the side of a hill. A glass-walled\n waiting room surrounded the bank of transmitter booths. Read\n looked out the door and saw his first battlefield.", "A few feet away, sprawled behind a barricade of tables, lay a man\n in advanced shock. His deadly white skin shone like ivory. They\n wouldn't even look like that. One nuclear shell from that gun and\n they'd be vaporized. Or perhaps the tank had sonic projectors;\n then the skin would peel off their bones. Or they might be\n burned, or cut up by shrapnel, or gassed with some new mist their\n masks couldn't filter.\n\n\n Read shut his eyes. All around him he heard heavy breathing,\n mumbled comments, curses. Clothes rustled as men moved restlessly.\n\n\n But already the voice of Sergeant Rashid resounded in the murky\n room.\n\n\n \"We've got to knock that thing out before the copter comes.\n Otherwise, he can't land. I have six Molotov cocktails here. Who\n wants to go hunting with me?\"", "\"Corporal Read is very young,\" Rashid said, \"but he's a crack\n shot. That's why I brought him with me. I think he\nlikes\nto\n shoot, too.\"\n\n\n Umluana turned back to Rashid a second too soon. He saw the\n sergeant's upraised hand before it collided with his neck.\n\n\n \"Help!\nKidnap.\n\"\n\n\n Rashid judo chopped him and swung the inert body over his\n shoulders. Read pulled a flat grenade from his vest pocket. He\n dropped it and yellow psycho gas hissed from the valve.\n\n\n \"Let's be off,\" Rashid said.\n\n\n The door lock snapped as they went out the window. Two men with\n rifles plunged into the gas; sighing, they fell to the floor in a\n catatonic trance.", "The first direct attack had been repulsed. They could attack many\n more times and continue to spray the building with bullets. They\n could also try to go around the hill and attack the station from\n above; if they did, the inspectors had a good view of the hill\n and should see them going up.\n\n\n The inspectors had taken up good defensive positions. In spite of\n their losses, they still had enough firepower to cover the area\n surrounding the station.\n\n\n Read surveyed his sector of fire. About two hundred yards to his\n left, he saw the top of a small ditch. Using the ditch for cover,\n the Belderkans could sneak to the top of the hill.\n\n\n Gas grenades are only three inches long. They hold cubic yards of\n gas under high pressure. Read unclipped a telescoping rod from\n his vest pocket. He opened it and a pair of sights flipped up. A\n thin track ran down one side.", "For two years Read had served under Sergeant Rashid. To him, the\n sergeant was everything a UN inspector should be. Rashid's\n devotion to peace had no limits.\n\n\n Read's psych tests said pride alone drove him on. That was good\n enough for the UN; they only rejected men whose loyalties might\n conflict with their duties. But an assault on the tank required\n something more than a hunger for self-respect.\n\n\n Read had seen the inspector who covered their getaway. He had\n watched their escort charge three-to-one odds. He had seen\n another inspector stay behind at Miaka Station. And here, in this\n building, lay battered men and dead men.\n\n\n All UN inspectors. All part of his life.\n\n\n And he was part of their life. Their blood, their sacrifice, and\n pain, had become a part of him.\n\n\n \"I'll take a cocktail, Sarge.\"", "Directly in front of him, his head shattered by a bullet, a dead\n inspector lay behind an overturned couch.\n\n\n Read had seen dozens of training films taken during actual\n battles or after atomic attacks. He had laughed when other\n recruits complained. \"That's the way this world is. You people\n with the weak stomachs better get used to it.\"\n\n\n Now he slid against the rear wall of the transmitter booth.\n\n\n A wounded inspector crawled across the floor to the booth. Read\n couldn't see his wound, only the pain scratched on his face and\n the blood he deposited on the floor.\n\n\n \"Did you get Umluana?\" he asked Sergeant Rashid.\n\n\n \"He's in the booth. What's going on?\" Rashid's Middle East Oxford\n seemed more clipped than ever.", "He didn't think, anymore than a rabbit thinks when it lies hiding\n from the fox or a panther thinks when it crouches on a branch\n above the trail. His skin tightened and relaxed on his body.\n\n\n \"Listen,\" said a German.\n\n\n Far down the hill he heard the deep-throated rumble of a big\n motor.\n\n\n \"Armor,\" the German said.\n\n\n The earth shook. The tank rounded the bend. Read watched the\n squat, angular monster until its stubby gun pointed at the\n station. It stopped less than two hundred yards away.\n\n\n A loud-speaker blared.\n\n\n ATTENTION UN SOLDIERS.\n\n ATTENTION UN SOLDIERS.\n\n YOU MAY THINK US SAVAGES\n\n BUT WE HAVE MODERN WEAPONS.", "He shut his eyes when he heard another loud explosion.\n\n\n Sergeant Rashid looked out the window again. He swore bitterly in\n English and Egyptian. Read raised his head. The two cars behind\n them weren't fighting each other. A long way back the tree-tops\n burned.\n\n\n \"How much farther?\" Rashid said. The masks muffled their voices.\n\n\n \"There it is now. Shall I take us right in?\"\n\n\n \"I think you'd better.\"\nThe station was a glass diamond in a small clearing. The driver\n slowed down, then crashed through the glass walls and hovered by\n the transmitter booth.\n\n\n Rashid opened the door and threw out two grenades. Read jumped\n out and the two of them struggled toward the booth with Umluana.\n The driver, pistol in hand, ran for the control panel.", "\"I can't move, Sarge.\"\n\n\n \"Read, you've got to. I think you're the only—\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n Guns clattered. Bullets cracked.\n\n\n \"Sergeant Rashid! Answer me.\"\n\n\n He heard nothing but the lonely passage of the bullets in the\n mist.\n\n\n \"I'm a UN man,\" he mumbled. \"You people up there know what a UN\n man is? You know what happens when you meet one?\"\n\n\n When he reached the tank, he had another bullet in his right arm.\n But they didn't know he was coming and when you get within ten\n feet of a tank, the men inside can't see you.\n\n\n He just had to stand up and drop the bottle down the gun barrel.\n That was all—with a broken hip and a wounded right arm.", "Sergeant Rashid came from Cairo. He had degrees in science and\n history from Cambridge but only the Corp gave him work that\n satisfied his conscience. He hated war. It was that simple.\n\n\n Read looked back. He saw three spots of sunlight about two\n hundred feet up and a good mile behind.\n\n\n \"Here they come, Sarge.\"\n\n\n Rashid turned his head. He waved frantically. The two men in the\n other car waved back.\n\n\n \"Shall I duck under the trees?\" the driver asked.\n\n\n \"Not yet. Not until we have to.\"\n\n\n Read fingered the machine gun he had picked up when he got in the\n car. He had never been shot at. Twice he had faced an unarmed\n mob, but a few shots had sent them running.", "They knelt on the cramped floor. Rashid put on his gas mask and\n Read copied him. Umluana breathed like a furnace, still\n unconscious from the injection Rashid had given him.\nI can't do anything\n, Read thought.\nThey're too far away to\n shoot back. All we can do is run.\nThe sky was clear and blue. The jungle was a noisy bazaar of\n color. In the distance guns crashed. He listened to shells\n whistle by and the whipcrack of machine-gun bullets. The car\n roller-coastered up and down. Every time a shell passed, he\n crawled in waves down his own back.\n\n\n Another explosion, this time very loud.\n\n\n Rashid raised his eyes above the seat and looked out the rear\n window. \"Two left. Keep down, Read.\"\n\n\n \"Can't we go down?\" Read said.\n\n\n \"They'll get to Miaka before us.\"", "The machine gun kicked and chattered on his shoulder. He picked a\n target and squeezed off a burst. Tensely, he hunted for another\n mask. Three grenades arced through the air and yellow gas spread\n across the battlefield. The attackers ran through it. A few yards\n beyond the gas, some of them turned and ran for their own lines.\n In a moment only half a dozen masked men still advanced. The\n inspectors fired a long, noisy volley. When they stopped only\n four attackers remained on their feet. And they were running for\n cover.\n\n\n The attackers had come straight up a road that led from the Game\n Preserve to the station. They had not expected any resistance.\n The UN men had already taken over the station, chased out the\n passengers and technicians and taken up defense positions; they\n had met the Belderkans with a dozen grenades and sent them\n scurrying for cover. The fight so far had been vicious but\n disorganized. But the Belderkans had a few hundred men and knew\n they had wrecked the transmitter controls.", "WE HAVE ATOMIC WARHEADS,\n\n ALL GASES, ROCKETS\n\n AND FLAME THROWERS. IF\n\n YOU DO NOT SURRENDER\n\n OUR PREMIER, WE WILL DESTROY YOU.\n\n\n\n \"They know we don't have any big weapons,\" Read said. \"They know\n we have only gas grenades and small arms.\"\n\n\n He looked nervously from side to side. They couldn't bring the\n copter in with that thing squatting out there.", "\"Is he all right?\" the driver asked.\n\n\n \"I don't think I hurt him.\" Rashid took a syrette from his vest\n pocket. \"Well, Read, it looks like we're in for a fight. In a few\n minutes Miaka Station will know we're coming. And God knows what\n will happen at the Game Preserve.\"\n\n\n Read wanted to jump out of the car. He could die any minute. But\n he had set his life on a well-oiled track and he couldn't get off\n until they reached Geneva.\n\n\n \"They don't know who's coming,\" he said. \"They don't make them\n tough enough to stop this boy.\"\n\n\n Staring straight ahead, he didn't see the sergeant smile.\nTwo types of recruits are accepted by the UN Inspector Corps:\n those with a fanatic loyalty to the ideals of peace and world\n order, and those who are loyal to nothing but themselves. Read\n was the second type.", "\"The copter will be here in half an hour. We'll put Umluana on,\n then try to save ourselves. Once he's gone, I think we ought to\n surrender.\"\n\n\n \"How do you think they'll treat us?\"\n\n\n \"That we'll have to see.\"\n\n\n An occasional bullet cracked and whined through the misty room.\n Near him a man gasped frantically for air. On the sunny field a\n wounded man screamed for help.\n\n\n \"There's a garage downstairs,\" Rashid said. \"In case the copter\n doesn't get here on time, I've got a man filling wine bottles\n with gasoline.\"\n\n\n \"We'll stop them, Sarge. Don't worry.\"\nRashid ran off. Read stared across the green land and listened to\n the pound of his heart. What were the Belderkans planning? A mass\n frontal attack? To sneak in over the top of the hill?", "An inspector cracked the valve on a smoke grenade. A white fog\n spread through the building. They could see anyone who tried to\n rush them but the besiegers couldn't pick out targets.\n\n\n Above the noise, he heard Rashid.\n\n\n \"I'm calling South Africa Station for a copter. It's the only way\n out of here. Until it comes, we've got to hold them back.\"\n\n\n Read thought of the green beret he had stuffed in his pocket that\n morning. He stuck it on his head and cocked it. He didn't need\n plain clothes anymore and he wanted to wear at least a part of\n his uniform.", "Birds flew screaming from their nests. Monkeys screeched and\n threw things at the noisy, speeding cars. A little cloud of birds\n surrounded each vehicle.\n\n\n The escort car made a sharp turn and charged their pursuers. The\n big rifle fired twice. Read saw the Belderkan cars scatter.\n Suddenly machine-gun bullets cracked and whined beside him.\n\n\n \"Evade,\" Rashid said. \"Don't go down.\"\n\n\n Without losing any forward speed, the driver took them straight\n up. Read's stomach bounced.\n\n\n A shell exploded above them. The car rocked. He raised his eyes\n and saw a long crack in the roof.\n\n\n \"Hit the floor,\" Rashid said.", "Read didn't know much about the complicated political reasons for\n the arrest. He liked the Corp and he liked being in the Corp. He\n went where they sent him and did what they told him to do.\nThe car skimmed above the tree-tops. The driver and his two\n passengers scanned the sky.\n\n\n A plane would have been a faster way to get out of the country.\n But then they would have spent hours flying over Africa, with\n Belderkan fighters in hot pursuit, other nations joining the\n chase and the world uproar gaining volume. By transmitter, if all\n went well, they could have Umluana in Geneva in an hour.\n\n\n They were racing toward Miaka, a branch transmitter station. From\n Miaka they would transmit to the Belderkan Preserve, a famous\n tourist attraction whose station could transmit to any point on\n the globe. Even now a dozen inspectors were taking over the Game\n Preserve station and manning its controls." ] ]
train	32836	[ "Which best describes the relationship between Neena and Var?", "Who is the Watcher?", "How does the Watcher feel about Neena and Var's arrival?", "Why does Groz not want to go into the mountain? ", "What does Var think of The Watcher? ", "Which of these is not a lasting effect of the Ryzgas?", "Why does the story take place somewhere cold?", "How does The Watcher communicate with others?", "What is the significance of the title of the story?", "What is special about light in this story?" ]	[ [ "They are marrying out of familial responsibility more than love but are still happy to be together", "They have roughly equal footing in their dedication to one another", "Neena gets to make all of the decision in return for going with Var to stay with his people", "Var has convinced Neena to go with him after he won her in battle" ], [ "Someone who has been granted the honor of watching over the mountain region", "A man who was exiled from society because of violent tendencies", "An old man who has retracted from society", "An alien in charge of protecting the planet" ], [ "He is thankful to have company to pass his wisdom to", "He is a little disappointed to not have time to himself", "He is suspicious of any people who would enter where he lives", "He is thankful to have any interaction with other humans" ], [ "He does not want to get separated from his team", "He is scared of the wildlife that might try to attack", "He is nervous about the technology left behind", "He knows it will be hard to see the people he is chasing" ], [ "He respects him even though he is surprising", "He will trust him in any decision even if he does not like him personally", "He thinks all of his ideas are ridiculous", "He thinks his reputation is overblown but he thinks he is nice" ], [ "Climate change on the planet", "An increase in technological advancements", "Use of limited resources", "General fear between groups of people" ], [ "The history of the area is such that warmth and resources have been taken from the land", "A volcano has blocked light from the region making everything cold", "The mountains are the only place Var and Neena can hide", "It isn't actually cold, because of the lava" ], [ "Mostly through transference of heat and light", "A mix of many methods of communication", "Primarily with his mind", "By talking as the rest of the people do" ], [ "It references the old technology that is disturbed", "It is an image of the chase that Var and Neena are running from", "It hints to the great power of the Watcher", "It points to Var and Neena disrupting an area that is usually quiet" ], [ "It is traded like a commodity", "It is the only way the adventurers nowhere to go", "It can be manipulated by the people", "It is liquid-like in its composition" ] ]	[ 2, 1, 1, 3, 1, 2, 1, 3, 1, 3 ]	[ 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Neena shivered, even though the surrounding cold could not reach her.\n The ice-wind blew from the glacier, but Var's love was round her as a\n warming cloak, a cloak that glowed softly golden in the deepening\n twilight, even as her love was about him.\n\n\n Var said, \"The Watcher's cave should be three miles beyond this pass.\"\n He stood rigid, trying to catch an echo of the Watcher's thoughts, but\n there was nothing. Perhaps the old man was resting. From the other\n direction, the long way that they two had come, it was not difficult to\n sense the thought of Groz. That thought was powerful, and heavy with\n vengeance.\n\n\n \"Hurry,\" said Neena. \"They're closer than they were an hour ago.\"", "She was beautiful and defiant, facing the red sunset and the black\n mountain. Var sensed her fear, and the love that had conquered it. He\n felt a wave of tenderness and bitterness. For him she had come to this.\n For the flame that had sprung between them at the Truce of New Grass,\n she had challenged the feud of their peoples and had left her home, to\n follow him. Now, if her father and his kinsmen overtook them, it would\n be death for Var, and for Neena living shame. Which of the two was worse\n was no longer a simple problem to Var, who had grown much older in the\n last days.", "Var felt Neena beside him, and drew her close. As she sobbed her relief,\n he continued to look down absently at the dead man. When at last he\n raised his head, he saw that the drama's end had had a further audience.\n In the outer doorway, backed by his clansmen, stood Groz, gazing first\n in stupefaction at the fallen Ryzga, then with something like awe at\n Var.\n\n\n Var eyed him for a long moment; then he smiled, and asked, \"Well, Groz?\n Is our feud finished, or does your ambition for a worthy son-in-law go\n beyond the conqueror of the Ryzgas?\"", "\"You have an alternative,\" said the Watcher crisply. The two took their\n eyes from the black mountain and gazed at him in sudden hope, but his\n face was unsmiling. \"It is this. You, Var, can flee up the canyon to the\n north, by a way I will show you, disguising your thoughts and masking\n your presence as well as you are able, while the girl goes in the other\n direction, southward, without seeking to conceal herself. Your pursuers\n will be deceived and follow her, and by the time they catch her it will\n be too late for them to overtake Var.\"\n\n\n That possibility had not occurred to them at all. Var and Neena looked\n at one another. Then by common consent they blended their minds into\n one.", "Var strove to cry out that there was no time, that Groz was near and\n that sleep was for infants and the aged, but his intention sank and\n drowned under wave upon wave of unconquerable languor. The bright cave\n swam and dissolved; his eyelids closed.\nVar woke. Daylight glimmered through the ice of the cave mouth. He had\n been unconscious, helpless, for hours! At the thought of that, panic\n gripped him. He had not slept since childhood, and he had forgotten how\n it was.\n\n\n He came to his feet in one quick movement, realizing in that action that\n sleep had refreshed his mind and body—realizing also that a footstep\n had wakened him. Across the cave he faced a young man who watched him\n coolly with dark piercing eyes that were familiar though he did not know\n the face.\n\n\n Neena sat up and stifled a cry of fright. Var growled, \"Who are you?\n Where's the Watcher?\"", "Var nodded somberly, thinking that an old recluse would in any case be\n able to do little for them against Groz and his violent kinsfolk.\n\n\n \"And what will you do now?\"\n\n\n Var grinned mirthlessly. \"We haven't much choice, since they're\n overtaking us. I have only one idea left: we can go where Groz may fear\n to follow us.\"\n\n\n \"To the mountain, you mean.\"\n\n\n \"And into it, if need be.\"\n\n\n The Watcher was broodingly silent; his eyes shifted to Neena, where she\n nestled by Var's side. He asked, \"And you—are you willing to follow\n your lover in this?\"", "Neena returned his gaze without flinching; then she looked sidelong at\n Var, and her lips curled with a proud and tender mockery. \"Follow? Why,\n I will lead, if his courage should fail him.\"\nThe old man said, \"It is no part of my duty to dissuade you from this\n thing. You are free persons. But I must be sure that you know what you\n are doing. That is the second part of the law the First Watcher made: to\n guard lest the unwary and the ignorant should bring harm on themselves\n and on all men.\"\n\n\n \"We know the stories,\" Var said brusquely. \"In the hollow heart of their\n mountain the Ryzgas sleep, as they chose to do when their world\n crumbled. But if they are wakened, the mountain will tremble, and the\n Ryzgas will come forth.\"\n\n\n \"Do you believe that?\"\n\n\n \"As one believes stories.\"", "Var had guessed right. When Neena in her terror had flung a dream\n monster into the Ryzga's way—a mere child's bogey out of a fairy\n tale—the Ryzga had not recognized it as such, but had taken it for a\n real being. Var laughed aloud, and with great care, as one communicates\n with an infant, he projected his thoughts into the other's mind. \"There\n will be no new beginning for you in\nour\nworld, Ryzga! In two thousand\n years, we've learned some new things. Now at last I understand why you\n built so many machines, such complicated arrangements of matter and\n energy to do simple tasks—it was because you knew no other way.\"", "\"Wait,\" he commanded. While she waited he spun a dream, attaching it to\n the crags that loomed over the pass, and to the frozen ground underfoot.\n It was black night, as it would really be when Groz and his henchmen\n reached this place; lurid fire spewed from the Ryzga mountain, and\n strange lights dipped above it; and for good measure there was an\n avalanche in the dream, and hideous beasts rushed snapping and ravening\n from the crevices of the rock.\n\n\n \"Oh!\" cried Neena in involuntary alarm.\n\n\n Var sighed, shaking his head. \"It won't hold them for long, but it's the\n best I can do now. Come on.\"", "Together they plunged into the curtain of darkness.\nAt Var's thought command Neena froze instantly. \"Feel that!\" he\n muttered, and she, listening, sensed it too: the infinitesimal trickle\n of currents behind what appeared to be a blank tunnel wall, a rising\n potential that seemed to whisper\nReady ... ready....\nThe sun-globe floated behind them, casting light before them down the\n featureless tunnel that sloped always toward the mountain's heart. Var\n summoned it, and it drifted ahead, a dozen feet, a little more—\n\n\n Between wall and wall a blinding spindle of flame sprang into being,\n pulsed briefly with radiant energy that pained the eyes, and went out.\n The immaterial globe of light danced on before them.", "The stunned paralysis fell apart in fury. Flame towered over the\n citadel. The hordes ran and shrieked again toward the central inferno,\n and the city burned and burned....\nVar blinked dazedly in the shadowless glow of the ice-cave. His arm\n tightened about Neena till she gasped. He was momentarily uncertain that\n he and she were real and here, such had been the force of the dream, a\n vision of such scope and reality as Var had never seen—no, lived\n through—before. With deep respect now he gazed upon the bent old man\n who was the Mountain Watcher.", "The Watcher eyed them speculatively. \"Before all,\" he said finally,\n \"this is a world where you are free to risk wakening the old tyrants, if\n in your own judgment your great need renders the chance worth taking.\"\n\n\n Neena pressed her face against Var's shoulder, hiding her eyes. In her\n mind as it groped for his there was a confusion of horror and pity. Var\n looked grimly at the Watcher, and would have spoken; but the Watcher\n seemed suddenly a very long way off, and Var could no longer feel his\n own limbs, his face was a numb mask. Dully he heard the old man say,\n \"You are tired. Best sleep until morning.\"", "The two stood shivering together.\n\n\n The morning wind stirred, freshening, the fog lifted a little, and they\n heard a great voice crying, \"There they are!\"\n\n\n Var and Neena turned. Far out in the sea of fog, on a dream bridge that\n they could not see, stood Groz. He shook the staff he carried. It was\n too far to discern the rage that must contort his features, but the\n thought he hurled at them was a soundless bellow: \"Young fools! I've\n caught you now!\"\n\n\n Behind Groz the figures of his followers loomed up as striding shadows.\n Neena's hand tightened on Var's. Var sent a thought of defiance: \"Go\n back! Or you'll drive us to enter the mountain!\"", "Hot food and drink were before them almost at once. The Watcher regarded\n them with compassion as their eyes brightened and some of the shadow of\n weariness lifted from them. \"You have stolen your enemy's daughter, no\n doubt, young man? Such things happened when I was young.\"\n\n\n Warming to the old man now, Var sketched his and Neena's history\n briefly. \"We should have been safe among my people by now. And before\n very long, I'm sure, I would have performed some deed which Groz would\n recognize as a worthy exploit, and would thus have healed the feud\n between our families. But our flight was found out too soon. They cut us\n off and forced us into the mountains, and now they are only a few hours\n behind us.\"\n\n\n \"A pity, indeed. I would like to help you—but, you understand, I am the\n Mountain Watcher. I must be above feuds and families.\"", "There was a clang of metal like a signal. Halfway up the wall opposite,\n above a narrow ramp that descended between the instrument panels, a\n massive doorway swung wide, and in its opening a figure stood.\n\n\n Var and Neena huddled frozenly, half expecting each instant to be their\n last. And the Ryzga too stood motionless, looking down at them.\nHe was a man of middle height and stocky build, clad in a garment of\n changing colors, of fabric delicate as dream-stuff. In his right hand,\n with the care one uses with a weapon, he grasped a gleaming metal tube;\n his other hand rested as for support against the frame of the doorway.\n That, and his movements when he came slowly down the ramp toward them,\n conveyed a queer suggestion of weariness or weakness, as if he were yet\n not wholly roused from his two millenia of slumber. But the Ryzga's\n manner and his mind radiated a consciousness of power, a pride and\n assurance of self that smote them like a numbing blow.", "Var was staring in fascination at the Ryzga's face. It was a face formed\n by the custom of unquestioned command; yet it was lined by a deeply\n ingrained weariness, the signs of premature age—denied, overridden by\n the driving will they had sensed a moment earlier. It was a sick man's\n face.\n\n\n The Ryzga's final thought clicked into place:\nDecision!\nHe turned\n toward the switchboard behind him, reaching with practised certainty for\n one spot upon it.\n\n\n Neena screamed.\n\n\n Between the Ryzga and the control panel a nightmare shape reared up\n seven feet tall, flapping black amorphous limbs and flashing red eyes\n and white fangs. The Ryzga recoiled, and the weapon in his hand came up.\n There was an instantaneous glare like heat lightning, and the monster\n crumpled in on itself, twitched briefly and vanished.", "\"You are ready to go,\" said the Watcher. He spoke aloud, and his voice\n was cracked and harsh. Var opened his eyes in surprise, and saw that the\n Watcher had become again the hoary ancient of last night.\n\n\n Var felt a twinge of unfamiliar emotion; only by its echo in Neena's\n mind did he recognize it as a sense of guilt. He said stiffly, \"You\n don't blame us?\"\n\n\n \"You have taken life in your own hands,\" rasped the Watcher. \"Who does\n that needs no blessing and feels no curse. Go!\"\nThey groped through the fog above blank abysses that hid the snarling\n river, crept hand in hand, sharing their strength, across unstable dream\n bridges from crag to crag. Groz and his pack, in their numbers, would\n cross the gorge more surely and swiftly. When Var and Neena set foot at\n last on the cindery slope of the great volcanic cone, they sensed that\n the pursuit already halved their lead.", "Groz seemed to hesitate. Then he swung his staff up like a weapon, and\n for the two on the mountainside the world turned upside down, the\n mountain's black shoulder hung inverted above them and the dizzy gulf of\n sky was beneath. Var fought for footing with his balance gone, feeling\n Neena reel against him until, summoning all his strength, he broke the\n grip of the illusion and the world seemed to right itself. The mist\n billowed again and Groz was out of sight, but they could hear him\n exhorting his men to haste.\n\n\n Neena's face was deadly pale and her lips trembled, but her urgent\n whisper said, \"Come on!\"", "But in that moment a light of inspiration had flashed upon Var, and it\n remained. As the Ryzga stretched out his hand again, Var acted. The\n Ryzga froze, teetering off balance and almost falling, as a numbing grip\n closed down on all his motor nerves.\n\n\n Holding that grip, Var strode across the floor and looked straight into\n the Ryzga's frantic eyes. They glared back at him with such hatred and\n such evil that for an instant he almost faltered. But the Ryzga's\n efforts, as he strove to free himself from the neural hold, were as\n misdirected and unavailing as those of a child who has not learned to\n wrestle with the mind.", "The other flashed white teeth in a smile. \"I'm the Watcher,\" he\n answered. \"Often I become a youth at morning, and relax into age as the\n day passes. A foolish amusement, no doubt, but amusements are few here.\"\n\n\n \"You made us fall asleep. Groz will be on us—\"\n\n\n \"Groz and his people could not detect your thoughts as you slept. They\n were all night chasing elusive dreams on the high ridges, miles away.\"\n\n\n Var passed a hand across bewildered eyes. Neena said softly, \"Thank you,\n Watcher.\"\n\n\n \"Don't thank me. I take no sides in your valley feuds. But now you are\n rested, your minds are clear. Do you still mean to go on to the Ryzga\n mountain?\"\n\n\n Not looking at the Watcher, Var muttered unsteadily, \"We have no\n alternative.\"" ], [ "The Watcher peered at them in turn. \"Welcome,\" he said in a cracked\n voice. He did not speak again; the rest of his conversation was in\n thought only. \"Welcome indeed. I am too much alone here.\"\n\n\n \"You were asleep!\" said Var. Shock made his thought accusing, though he\n had not meant to be.\n\n\n The old man grinned toothlessly. \"Never fear. Asleep or awake, I watch.\n Come in! You're letting in the wind.\"", "The other flashed white teeth in a smile. \"I'm the Watcher,\" he\n answered. \"Often I become a youth at morning, and relax into age as the\n day passes. A foolish amusement, no doubt, but amusements are few here.\"\n\n\n \"You made us fall asleep. Groz will be on us—\"\n\n\n \"Groz and his people could not detect your thoughts as you slept. They\n were all night chasing elusive dreams on the high ridges, miles away.\"\n\n\n Var passed a hand across bewildered eyes. Neena said softly, \"Thank you,\n Watcher.\"\n\n\n \"Don't thank me. I take no sides in your valley feuds. But now you are\n rested, your minds are clear. Do you still mean to go on to the Ryzga\n mountain?\"\n\n\n Not looking at the Watcher, Var muttered unsteadily, \"We have no\n alternative.\"", "\"It is true,\" said the Watcher heavily. \"In my youth I penetrated\n farther into the mountain than anyone before, farther even than did the\n First Watcher. I did not see the sleepers, nor will any man until they\n come again, but I met their sentries, the sentinel machines that guard\n them now as they have for two thousand years. When I had gone that far,\n the mountain began to shake, the force that is in the Earth rumbled\n below, and I returned in time.\" Now for the first time Var sensed the\n power in the old man's look, the power of four hundred years' wisdom.\n Var stared down at his hands.", "The Watcher eyed them speculatively. \"Before all,\" he said finally,\n \"this is a world where you are free to risk wakening the old tyrants, if\n in your own judgment your great need renders the chance worth taking.\"\n\n\n Neena pressed her face against Var's shoulder, hiding her eyes. In her\n mind as it groped for his there was a confusion of horror and pity. Var\n looked grimly at the Watcher, and would have spoken; but the Watcher\n seemed suddenly a very long way off, and Var could no longer feel his\n own limbs, his face was a numb mask. Dully he heard the old man say,\n \"You are tired. Best sleep until morning.\"", "\"You have an alternative,\" said the Watcher crisply. The two took their\n eyes from the black mountain and gazed at him in sudden hope, but his\n face was unsmiling. \"It is this. You, Var, can flee up the canyon to the\n north, by a way I will show you, disguising your thoughts and masking\n your presence as well as you are able, while the girl goes in the other\n direction, southward, without seeking to conceal herself. Your pursuers\n will be deceived and follow her, and by the time they catch her it will\n be too late for them to overtake Var.\"\n\n\n That possibility had not occurred to them at all. Var and Neena looked\n at one another. Then by common consent they blended their minds into\n one.", "Var strove to cry out that there was no time, that Groz was near and\n that sleep was for infants and the aged, but his intention sank and\n drowned under wave upon wave of unconquerable languor. The bright cave\n swam and dissolved; his eyelids closed.\nVar woke. Daylight glimmered through the ice of the cave mouth. He had\n been unconscious, helpless, for hours! At the thought of that, panic\n gripped him. He had not slept since childhood, and he had forgotten how\n it was.\n\n\n He came to his feet in one quick movement, realizing in that action that\n sleep had refreshed his mind and body—realizing also that a footstep\n had wakened him. Across the cave he faced a young man who watched him\n coolly with dark piercing eyes that were familiar though he did not know\n the face.\n\n\n Neena sat up and stifled a cry of fright. Var growled, \"Who are you?\n Where's the Watcher?\"", "\"You are ready to go,\" said the Watcher. He spoke aloud, and his voice\n was cracked and harsh. Var opened his eyes in surprise, and saw that the\n Watcher had become again the hoary ancient of last night.\n\n\n Var felt a twinge of unfamiliar emotion; only by its echo in Neena's\n mind did he recognize it as a sense of guilt. He said stiffly, \"You\n don't blame us?\"\n\n\n \"You have taken life in your own hands,\" rasped the Watcher. \"Who does\n that needs no blessing and feels no curse. Go!\"\nThey groped through the fog above blank abysses that hid the snarling\n river, crept hand in hand, sharing their strength, across unstable dream\n bridges from crag to crag. Groz and his pack, in their numbers, would\n cross the gorge more surely and swiftly. When Var and Neena set foot at\n last on the cindery slope of the great volcanic cone, they sensed that\n the pursuit already halved their lead.", "Hot food and drink were before them almost at once. The Watcher regarded\n them with compassion as their eyes brightened and some of the shadow of\n weariness lifted from them. \"You have stolen your enemy's daughter, no\n doubt, young man? Such things happened when I was young.\"\n\n\n Warming to the old man now, Var sketched his and Neena's history\n briefly. \"We should have been safe among my people by now. And before\n very long, I'm sure, I would have performed some deed which Groz would\n recognize as a worthy exploit, and would thus have healed the feud\n between our families. But our flight was found out too soon. They cut us\n off and forced us into the mountains, and now they are only a few hours\n behind us.\"\n\n\n \"A pity, indeed. I would like to help you—but, you understand, I am the\n Mountain Watcher. I must be above feuds and families.\"", "The two young people stared for a long minute, intrigued and fearful.\n Both had heard of this place, and the ancient who lived there to keep\n watch on the Ryzga mountain, as a part of the oldest legends of their\n childhood; but neither had been here before.\n\n\n But this was no time for shyness. Var eyed the ice-curtain closely to\n make sure that it was real, not dream-stuff; then he struck it boldly\n with his fist. It shattered and fell in a rain of splinters, sparkling\n in the light that poured from within.\nThey felt the Watcher rouse, heard his footsteps, and finally saw him—a\n shrunken old man, white-haired, with a lined beardless face. The sight\n of him, more marred by age than anyone they had ever seen before, was\n disappointing. They had expected something more—an ancient giant, a\n tower of wisdom and strength. The Watcher was four hundred years old;\n beside him even Groz, who had always seemed so ancient, was like a boy.", "They thought, in the warm intimacy of unreserved understanding: \"\nIt\n would work: I-you would make the sacrifice of shame and mockery—yet\n these can be borne—that I-you might be saved from death—which is alone\n irreparable.... But to become\nI\nand\nyou\nagain—that cannot be\n borne.\n\"\n\n\n They said in unison, \"No. Not that.\"\n\n\n The Watcher's face did not change. He said gravely, \"Very well. I will\n give you what knowledge I have that may help you when you enter the\n Ryzga mountain.\"\n\n\n Quickly, he impressed on them what he had learned of the structure of\n the mountain and of its guardian machines. Var closed his eyes, a little\n dizzied by the rapid flood of detail.", "There was no path. Now they were descending the steeper face of the\n sierra, and the way led over bottomless crevasses, sheer drops and sheer\n ascents, sheets of traitorous glare ice. Place after place had to be\n crossed on the air, and both grew weary with the effort such crossings\n cost. They hoarded their strength, helping one another; one alone might\n never have won through.\n\n\n It was starry night already when they saw the light from the Watcher's\n cave. The light shone watery and dim from beneath the hoary back of the\n glacier, and as they came nearer they saw why: the cave entrance was\n sealed by a sheet of ice, a frozen waterfall that fell motionless from\n the rocks above. They heard no sound.", "Inside the cave it was warm as summer. Var saw with some surprise that\n all the walls were sheathed in ice—warm to the touch, bound fast\n against melting by the Watcher's will. Light blazed in reflections from\n the ice walls, till there was no shadow in the place. Behind them began\n a tinkling of falling water, thawed from the glacial ridges above to\n descend sheet-wise over the cave mouth, freezing as it fell into\n lengthening icicles. The old man gazed at his work for a moment, then\n turned questioningly to the young pair.\n\n\n \"We need a little rest out of the cold,\" said Var. \"And food, if you can\n spare it. We're pursued.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes. You shall have what I can give you. Make yourselves\n comfortable, and in one minute.... Pursued, eh? A pity. I see the world\n is as bad as it was when I was last in it.\"", "\"The Ryzgas also were men,\" said the Watcher. \"But they were such a race\n as the world has not seen before or since. There were tyrannies before\n the Ryzgas, there was lust for power, and atrocious cruelty; but such\n tyranny, power, and cruelty as theirs, had never been known. They ruled\n the Earth for four generations, and the Earth was too little for them.\n They laid the world waste, stripped it of metals and fuels and bored to\n its heart for energy, poisoned its seas and its air with the fume of\n their works, wrung its peoples dry for their labor ... and in each of\n those four generations they launched a ship of space. They were great\n and evil as no other people has been, because they wanted the stars.", "Var nodded somberly, thinking that an old recluse would in any case be\n able to do little for them against Groz and his violent kinsfolk.\n\n\n \"And what will you do now?\"\n\n\n Var grinned mirthlessly. \"We haven't much choice, since they're\n overtaking us. I have only one idea left: we can go where Groz may fear\n to follow us.\"\n\n\n \"To the mountain, you mean.\"\n\n\n \"And into it, if need be.\"\n\n\n The Watcher was broodingly silent; his eyes shifted to Neena, where she\n nestled by Var's side. He asked, \"And you—are you willing to follow\n your lover in this?\"", "Neena shivered, even though the surrounding cold could not reach her.\n The ice-wind blew from the glacier, but Var's love was round her as a\n warming cloak, a cloak that glowed softly golden in the deepening\n twilight, even as her love was about him.\n\n\n Var said, \"The Watcher's cave should be three miles beyond this pass.\"\n He stood rigid, trying to catch an echo of the Watcher's thoughts, but\n there was nothing. Perhaps the old man was resting. From the other\n direction, the long way that they two had come, it was not difficult to\n sense the thought of Groz. That thought was powerful, and heavy with\n vengeance.\n\n\n \"Hurry,\" said Neena. \"They're closer than they were an hour ago.\"", "Neena returned his gaze without flinching; then she looked sidelong at\n Var, and her lips curled with a proud and tender mockery. \"Follow? Why,\n I will lead, if his courage should fail him.\"\nThe old man said, \"It is no part of my duty to dissuade you from this\n thing. You are free persons. But I must be sure that you know what you\n are doing. That is the second part of the law the First Watcher made: to\n guard lest the unwary and the ignorant should bring harm on themselves\n and on all men.\"\n\n\n \"We know the stories,\" Var said brusquely. \"In the hollow heart of their\n mountain the Ryzgas sleep, as they chose to do when their world\n crumbled. But if they are wakened, the mountain will tremble, and the\n Ryzgas will come forth.\"\n\n\n \"Do you believe that?\"\n\n\n \"As one believes stories.\"", "The stunned paralysis fell apart in fury. Flame towered over the\n citadel. The hordes ran and shrieked again toward the central inferno,\n and the city burned and burned....\nVar blinked dazedly in the shadowless glow of the ice-cave. His arm\n tightened about Neena till she gasped. He was momentarily uncertain that\n he and she were real and here, such had been the force of the dream, a\n vision of such scope and reality as Var had never seen—no, lived\n through—before. With deep respect now he gazed upon the bent old man\n who was the Mountain Watcher.", "\"Forward, before the charge builds up again!\" said Var. A few feet\n further on, they stumbled over a pile of charred bones. Someone else had\n made it only this far. It was farther than the Watcher had gone into\n these uncharted regions, and only the utmost alertness of mind and sense\n had saved them from death in traps like this. But as yet the way was not\n blocked....\n\n\n Then they felt the mountain begin to tremble. A very faint and remote\n vibration at first, then an increasingly potent shuddering of the floor\n under their feet and the walls around them. Somewhere far below immense\n energies were stirring for the first time in centuries. The power that\n was in the Earth was rising; great wheels commenced to turn, the\n mechanical servitors of the Ryzgas woke one by one and began to make\n ready, while their masters yet slept, for the moment of rebirth that\n might be near at hand.", "It poised motionless. For an instant the burning city lay mute; then the\n millions found voice. Some roared ferocious threats and curses; others\n cried desolately—\nwait!\nThen the whole city, the dark tumuli of its buildings and its leaping\n fires and tormented faces, and the black sky over it, seemed to twist\n and swim, like a scene under water when a great fish sweeps past, and\n the ship was gone.", "The two stood shivering together.\n\n\n The morning wind stirred, freshening, the fog lifted a little, and they\n heard a great voice crying, \"There they are!\"\n\n\n Var and Neena turned. Far out in the sea of fog, on a dream bridge that\n they could not see, stood Groz. He shook the staff he carried. It was\n too far to discern the rage that must contort his features, but the\n thought he hurled at them was a soundless bellow: \"Young fools! I've\n caught you now!\"\n\n\n Behind Groz the figures of his followers loomed up as striding shadows.\n Neena's hand tightened on Var's. Var sent a thought of defiance: \"Go\n back! Or you'll drive us to enter the mountain!\"" ], [ "The Watcher eyed them speculatively. \"Before all,\" he said finally,\n \"this is a world where you are free to risk wakening the old tyrants, if\n in your own judgment your great need renders the chance worth taking.\"\n\n\n Neena pressed her face against Var's shoulder, hiding her eyes. In her\n mind as it groped for his there was a confusion of horror and pity. Var\n looked grimly at the Watcher, and would have spoken; but the Watcher\n seemed suddenly a very long way off, and Var could no longer feel his\n own limbs, his face was a numb mask. Dully he heard the old man say,\n \"You are tired. Best sleep until morning.\"", "Var nodded somberly, thinking that an old recluse would in any case be\n able to do little for them against Groz and his violent kinsfolk.\n\n\n \"And what will you do now?\"\n\n\n Var grinned mirthlessly. \"We haven't much choice, since they're\n overtaking us. I have only one idea left: we can go where Groz may fear\n to follow us.\"\n\n\n \"To the mountain, you mean.\"\n\n\n \"And into it, if need be.\"\n\n\n The Watcher was broodingly silent; his eyes shifted to Neena, where she\n nestled by Var's side. He asked, \"And you—are you willing to follow\n your lover in this?\"", "\"You have an alternative,\" said the Watcher crisply. The two took their\n eyes from the black mountain and gazed at him in sudden hope, but his\n face was unsmiling. \"It is this. You, Var, can flee up the canyon to the\n north, by a way I will show you, disguising your thoughts and masking\n your presence as well as you are able, while the girl goes in the other\n direction, southward, without seeking to conceal herself. Your pursuers\n will be deceived and follow her, and by the time they catch her it will\n be too late for them to overtake Var.\"\n\n\n That possibility had not occurred to them at all. Var and Neena looked\n at one another. Then by common consent they blended their minds into\n one.", "Neena shivered, even though the surrounding cold could not reach her.\n The ice-wind blew from the glacier, but Var's love was round her as a\n warming cloak, a cloak that glowed softly golden in the deepening\n twilight, even as her love was about him.\n\n\n Var said, \"The Watcher's cave should be three miles beyond this pass.\"\n He stood rigid, trying to catch an echo of the Watcher's thoughts, but\n there was nothing. Perhaps the old man was resting. From the other\n direction, the long way that they two had come, it was not difficult to\n sense the thought of Groz. That thought was powerful, and heavy with\n vengeance.\n\n\n \"Hurry,\" said Neena. \"They're closer than they were an hour ago.\"", "Var strove to cry out that there was no time, that Groz was near and\n that sleep was for infants and the aged, but his intention sank and\n drowned under wave upon wave of unconquerable languor. The bright cave\n swam and dissolved; his eyelids closed.\nVar woke. Daylight glimmered through the ice of the cave mouth. He had\n been unconscious, helpless, for hours! At the thought of that, panic\n gripped him. He had not slept since childhood, and he had forgotten how\n it was.\n\n\n He came to his feet in one quick movement, realizing in that action that\n sleep had refreshed his mind and body—realizing also that a footstep\n had wakened him. Across the cave he faced a young man who watched him\n coolly with dark piercing eyes that were familiar though he did not know\n the face.\n\n\n Neena sat up and stifled a cry of fright. Var growled, \"Who are you?\n Where's the Watcher?\"", "\"You are ready to go,\" said the Watcher. He spoke aloud, and his voice\n was cracked and harsh. Var opened his eyes in surprise, and saw that the\n Watcher had become again the hoary ancient of last night.\n\n\n Var felt a twinge of unfamiliar emotion; only by its echo in Neena's\n mind did he recognize it as a sense of guilt. He said stiffly, \"You\n don't blame us?\"\n\n\n \"You have taken life in your own hands,\" rasped the Watcher. \"Who does\n that needs no blessing and feels no curse. Go!\"\nThey groped through the fog above blank abysses that hid the snarling\n river, crept hand in hand, sharing their strength, across unstable dream\n bridges from crag to crag. Groz and his pack, in their numbers, would\n cross the gorge more surely and swiftly. When Var and Neena set foot at\n last on the cindery slope of the great volcanic cone, they sensed that\n the pursuit already halved their lead.", "The other flashed white teeth in a smile. \"I'm the Watcher,\" he\n answered. \"Often I become a youth at morning, and relax into age as the\n day passes. A foolish amusement, no doubt, but amusements are few here.\"\n\n\n \"You made us fall asleep. Groz will be on us—\"\n\n\n \"Groz and his people could not detect your thoughts as you slept. They\n were all night chasing elusive dreams on the high ridges, miles away.\"\n\n\n Var passed a hand across bewildered eyes. Neena said softly, \"Thank you,\n Watcher.\"\n\n\n \"Don't thank me. I take no sides in your valley feuds. But now you are\n rested, your minds are clear. Do you still mean to go on to the Ryzga\n mountain?\"\n\n\n Not looking at the Watcher, Var muttered unsteadily, \"We have no\n alternative.\"", "Hot food and drink were before them almost at once. The Watcher regarded\n them with compassion as their eyes brightened and some of the shadow of\n weariness lifted from them. \"You have stolen your enemy's daughter, no\n doubt, young man? Such things happened when I was young.\"\n\n\n Warming to the old man now, Var sketched his and Neena's history\n briefly. \"We should have been safe among my people by now. And before\n very long, I'm sure, I would have performed some deed which Groz would\n recognize as a worthy exploit, and would thus have healed the feud\n between our families. But our flight was found out too soon. They cut us\n off and forced us into the mountains, and now they are only a few hours\n behind us.\"\n\n\n \"A pity, indeed. I would like to help you—but, you understand, I am the\n Mountain Watcher. I must be above feuds and families.\"", "The Watcher peered at them in turn. \"Welcome,\" he said in a cracked\n voice. He did not speak again; the rest of his conversation was in\n thought only. \"Welcome indeed. I am too much alone here.\"\n\n\n \"You were asleep!\" said Var. Shock made his thought accusing, though he\n had not meant to be.\n\n\n The old man grinned toothlessly. \"Never fear. Asleep or awake, I watch.\n Come in! You're letting in the wind.\"", "The stunned paralysis fell apart in fury. Flame towered over the\n citadel. The hordes ran and shrieked again toward the central inferno,\n and the city burned and burned....\nVar blinked dazedly in the shadowless glow of the ice-cave. His arm\n tightened about Neena till she gasped. He was momentarily uncertain that\n he and she were real and here, such had been the force of the dream, a\n vision of such scope and reality as Var had never seen—no, lived\n through—before. With deep respect now he gazed upon the bent old man\n who was the Mountain Watcher.", "Neena returned his gaze without flinching; then she looked sidelong at\n Var, and her lips curled with a proud and tender mockery. \"Follow? Why,\n I will lead, if his courage should fail him.\"\nThe old man said, \"It is no part of my duty to dissuade you from this\n thing. You are free persons. But I must be sure that you know what you\n are doing. That is the second part of the law the First Watcher made: to\n guard lest the unwary and the ignorant should bring harm on themselves\n and on all men.\"\n\n\n \"We know the stories,\" Var said brusquely. \"In the hollow heart of their\n mountain the Ryzgas sleep, as they chose to do when their world\n crumbled. But if they are wakened, the mountain will tremble, and the\n Ryzgas will come forth.\"\n\n\n \"Do you believe that?\"\n\n\n \"As one believes stories.\"", "\"It is true,\" said the Watcher heavily. \"In my youth I penetrated\n farther into the mountain than anyone before, farther even than did the\n First Watcher. I did not see the sleepers, nor will any man until they\n come again, but I met their sentries, the sentinel machines that guard\n them now as they have for two thousand years. When I had gone that far,\n the mountain began to shake, the force that is in the Earth rumbled\n below, and I returned in time.\" Now for the first time Var sensed the\n power in the old man's look, the power of four hundred years' wisdom.\n Var stared down at his hands.", "Var felt Neena beside him, and drew her close. As she sobbed her relief,\n he continued to look down absently at the dead man. When at last he\n raised his head, he saw that the drama's end had had a further audience.\n In the outer doorway, backed by his clansmen, stood Groz, gazing first\n in stupefaction at the fallen Ryzga, then with something like awe at\n Var.\n\n\n Var eyed him for a long moment; then he smiled, and asked, \"Well, Groz?\n Is our feud finished, or does your ambition for a worthy son-in-law go\n beyond the conqueror of the Ryzgas?\"", "\"Wait,\" he commanded. While she waited he spun a dream, attaching it to\n the crags that loomed over the pass, and to the frozen ground underfoot.\n It was black night, as it would really be when Groz and his henchmen\n reached this place; lurid fire spewed from the Ryzga mountain, and\n strange lights dipped above it; and for good measure there was an\n avalanche in the dream, and hideous beasts rushed snapping and ravening\n from the crevices of the rock.\n\n\n \"Oh!\" cried Neena in involuntary alarm.\n\n\n Var sighed, shaking his head. \"It won't hold them for long, but it's the\n best I can do now. Come on.\"", "They thought, in the warm intimacy of unreserved understanding: \"\nIt\n would work: I-you would make the sacrifice of shame and mockery—yet\n these can be borne—that I-you might be saved from death—which is alone\n irreparable.... But to become\nI\nand\nyou\nagain—that cannot be\n borne.\n\"\n\n\n They said in unison, \"No. Not that.\"\n\n\n The Watcher's face did not change. He said gravely, \"Very well. I will\n give you what knowledge I have that may help you when you enter the\n Ryzga mountain.\"\n\n\n Quickly, he impressed on them what he had learned of the structure of\n the mountain and of its guardian machines. Var closed his eyes, a little\n dizzied by the rapid flood of detail.", "Var was staring in fascination at the Ryzga's face. It was a face formed\n by the custom of unquestioned command; yet it was lined by a deeply\n ingrained weariness, the signs of premature age—denied, overridden by\n the driving will they had sensed a moment earlier. It was a sick man's\n face.\n\n\n The Ryzga's final thought clicked into place:\nDecision!\nHe turned\n toward the switchboard behind him, reaching with practised certainty for\n one spot upon it.\n\n\n Neena screamed.\n\n\n Between the Ryzga and the control panel a nightmare shape reared up\n seven feet tall, flapping black amorphous limbs and flashing red eyes\n and white fangs. The Ryzga recoiled, and the weapon in his hand came up.\n There was an instantaneous glare like heat lightning, and the monster\n crumpled in on itself, twitched briefly and vanished.", "Var had guessed right. When Neena in her terror had flung a dream\n monster into the Ryzga's way—a mere child's bogey out of a fairy\n tale—the Ryzga had not recognized it as such, but had taken it for a\n real being. Var laughed aloud, and with great care, as one communicates\n with an infant, he projected his thoughts into the other's mind. \"There\n will be no new beginning for you in\nour\nworld, Ryzga! In two thousand\n years, we've learned some new things. Now at last I understand why you\n built so many machines, such complicated arrangements of matter and\n energy to do simple tasks—it was because you knew no other way.\"", "She was beautiful and defiant, facing the red sunset and the black\n mountain. Var sensed her fear, and the love that had conquered it. He\n felt a wave of tenderness and bitterness. For him she had come to this.\n For the flame that had sprung between them at the Truce of New Grass,\n she had challenged the feud of their peoples and had left her home, to\n follow him. Now, if her father and his kinsmen overtook them, it would\n be death for Var, and for Neena living shame. Which of the two was worse\n was no longer a simple problem to Var, who had grown much older in the\n last days.", "There was a clang of metal like a signal. Halfway up the wall opposite,\n above a narrow ramp that descended between the instrument panels, a\n massive doorway swung wide, and in its opening a figure stood.\n\n\n Var and Neena huddled frozenly, half expecting each instant to be their\n last. And the Ryzga too stood motionless, looking down at them.\nHe was a man of middle height and stocky build, clad in a garment of\n changing colors, of fabric delicate as dream-stuff. In his right hand,\n with the care one uses with a weapon, he grasped a gleaming metal tube;\n his other hand rested as for support against the frame of the doorway.\n That, and his movements when he came slowly down the ramp toward them,\n conveyed a queer suggestion of weariness or weakness, as if he were yet\n not wholly roused from his two millenia of slumber. But the Ryzga's\n manner and his mind radiated a consciousness of power, a pride and\n assurance of self that smote them like a numbing blow.", "The two stood shivering together.\n\n\n The morning wind stirred, freshening, the fog lifted a little, and they\n heard a great voice crying, \"There they are!\"\n\n\n Var and Neena turned. Far out in the sea of fog, on a dream bridge that\n they could not see, stood Groz. He shook the staff he carried. It was\n too far to discern the rage that must contort his features, but the\n thought he hurled at them was a soundless bellow: \"Young fools! I've\n caught you now!\"\n\n\n Behind Groz the figures of his followers loomed up as striding shadows.\n Neena's hand tightened on Var's. Var sent a thought of defiance: \"Go\n back! Or you'll drive us to enter the mountain!\"" ], [ "Var nodded somberly, thinking that an old recluse would in any case be\n able to do little for them against Groz and his violent kinsfolk.\n\n\n \"And what will you do now?\"\n\n\n Var grinned mirthlessly. \"We haven't much choice, since they're\n overtaking us. I have only one idea left: we can go where Groz may fear\n to follow us.\"\n\n\n \"To the mountain, you mean.\"\n\n\n \"And into it, if need be.\"\n\n\n The Watcher was broodingly silent; his eyes shifted to Neena, where she\n nestled by Var's side. He asked, \"And you—are you willing to follow\n your lover in this?\"", "The two stood shivering together.\n\n\n The morning wind stirred, freshening, the fog lifted a little, and they\n heard a great voice crying, \"There they are!\"\n\n\n Var and Neena turned. Far out in the sea of fog, on a dream bridge that\n they could not see, stood Groz. He shook the staff he carried. It was\n too far to discern the rage that must contort his features, but the\n thought he hurled at them was a soundless bellow: \"Young fools! I've\n caught you now!\"\n\n\n Behind Groz the figures of his followers loomed up as striding shadows.\n Neena's hand tightened on Var's. Var sent a thought of defiance: \"Go\n back! Or you'll drive us to enter the mountain!\"", "From behind, up the tunnel, came a clear involuntary thought of dismay,\n then a directed thought, echoing and ghostly in the confinement of the\n dark burrow:\n\n\n \"\nStop!\n—before you go too far!\"\n\n\n Var faced that way and thought coldly: \"Only if you return and let us go\n free.\"\n\n\n In the black reaches of the shaft his will groped for and locked with\n that of Groz, like the grip of two strong wrestlers. In that grip each\n knew with finality that the other's stubbornness matched his own—that\n neither would yield, though the mountain above them and the world\n outside should crumble to ruin around them.\n\n\n \"Follow us, then!\"", "Groz seemed to hesitate. Then he swung his staff up like a weapon, and\n for the two on the mountainside the world turned upside down, the\n mountain's black shoulder hung inverted above them and the dizzy gulf of\n sky was beneath. Var fought for footing with his balance gone, feeling\n Neena reel against him until, summoning all his strength, he broke the\n grip of the illusion and the world seemed to right itself. The mist\n billowed again and Groz was out of sight, but they could hear him\n exhorting his men to haste.\n\n\n Neena's face was deadly pale and her lips trembled, but her urgent\n whisper said, \"Come on!\"", "\"Wait,\" he commanded. While she waited he spun a dream, attaching it to\n the crags that loomed over the pass, and to the frozen ground underfoot.\n It was black night, as it would really be when Groz and his henchmen\n reached this place; lurid fire spewed from the Ryzga mountain, and\n strange lights dipped above it; and for good measure there was an\n avalanche in the dream, and hideous beasts rushed snapping and ravening\n from the crevices of the rock.\n\n\n \"Oh!\" cried Neena in involuntary alarm.\n\n\n Var sighed, shaking his head. \"It won't hold them for long, but it's the\n best I can do now. Come on.\"", "The other flashed white teeth in a smile. \"I'm the Watcher,\" he\n answered. \"Often I become a youth at morning, and relax into age as the\n day passes. A foolish amusement, no doubt, but amusements are few here.\"\n\n\n \"You made us fall asleep. Groz will be on us—\"\n\n\n \"Groz and his people could not detect your thoughts as you slept. They\n were all night chasing elusive dreams on the high ridges, miles away.\"\n\n\n Var passed a hand across bewildered eyes. Neena said softly, \"Thank you,\n Watcher.\"\n\n\n \"Don't thank me. I take no sides in your valley feuds. But now you are\n rested, your minds are clear. Do you still mean to go on to the Ryzga\n mountain?\"\n\n\n Not looking at the Watcher, Var muttered unsteadily, \"We have no\n alternative.\"", "They thought, in the warm intimacy of unreserved understanding: \"\nIt\n would work: I-you would make the sacrifice of shame and mockery—yet\n these can be borne—that I-you might be saved from death—which is alone\n irreparable.... But to become\nI\nand\nyou\nagain—that cannot be\n borne.\n\"\n\n\n They said in unison, \"No. Not that.\"\n\n\n The Watcher's face did not change. He said gravely, \"Very well. I will\n give you what knowledge I have that may help you when you enter the\n Ryzga mountain.\"\n\n\n Quickly, he impressed on them what he had learned of the structure of\n the mountain and of its guardian machines. Var closed his eyes, a little\n dizzied by the rapid flood of detail.", "The two young people stared for a long minute, intrigued and fearful.\n Both had heard of this place, and the ancient who lived there to keep\n watch on the Ryzga mountain, as a part of the oldest legends of their\n childhood; but neither had been here before.\n\n\n But this was no time for shyness. Var eyed the ice-curtain closely to\n make sure that it was real, not dream-stuff; then he struck it boldly\n with his fist. It shattered and fell in a rain of splinters, sparkling\n in the light that poured from within.\nThey felt the Watcher rouse, heard his footsteps, and finally saw him—a\n shrunken old man, white-haired, with a lined beardless face. The sight\n of him, more marred by age than anyone they had ever seen before, was\n disappointing. They had expected something more—an ancient giant, a\n tower of wisdom and strength. The Watcher was four hundred years old;\n beside him even Groz, who had always seemed so ancient, was like a boy.", "Hot food and drink were before them almost at once. The Watcher regarded\n them with compassion as their eyes brightened and some of the shadow of\n weariness lifted from them. \"You have stolen your enemy's daughter, no\n doubt, young man? Such things happened when I was young.\"\n\n\n Warming to the old man now, Var sketched his and Neena's history\n briefly. \"We should have been safe among my people by now. And before\n very long, I'm sure, I would have performed some deed which Groz would\n recognize as a worthy exploit, and would thus have healed the feud\n between our families. But our flight was found out too soon. They cut us\n off and forced us into the mountains, and now they are only a few hours\n behind us.\"\n\n\n \"A pity, indeed. I would like to help you—but, you understand, I am the\n Mountain Watcher. I must be above feuds and families.\"", "Var strove to cry out that there was no time, that Groz was near and\n that sleep was for infants and the aged, but his intention sank and\n drowned under wave upon wave of unconquerable languor. The bright cave\n swam and dissolved; his eyelids closed.\nVar woke. Daylight glimmered through the ice of the cave mouth. He had\n been unconscious, helpless, for hours! At the thought of that, panic\n gripped him. He had not slept since childhood, and he had forgotten how\n it was.\n\n\n He came to his feet in one quick movement, realizing in that action that\n sleep had refreshed his mind and body—realizing also that a footstep\n had wakened him. Across the cave he faced a young man who watched him\n coolly with dark piercing eyes that were familiar though he did not know\n the face.\n\n\n Neena sat up and stifled a cry of fright. Var growled, \"Who are you?\n Where's the Watcher?\"", "There was a liquid tinkling as the ice-curtain collapsed; the fresh\n breeze of morning swept into the cave. The youth beckoned to them, and\n they followed him outside.\n\n\n The glacial slope on which the cavern opened faced toward the mountain.\n It rose black and forbidding in the dawn as it had by sunset. To right\n and left of it, the grand cliffs, ocher and red, were lit splendidly by\n the morning sun, but the mountain of the Ryzgas drank in the light and\n gave nothing back.\n\n\n Below their feet the slope fell away into an opaque sea of fog, filling\n a mile-wide gorge. There was a sound of turbulent water, of a river\n dashed from rock to rock in its struggle toward the plain, but the\n curling fog hid everything.", "They stood high on the side of the Ryzga mountain, and gazed at the\n doorway. It was an opaque yet penetrable well of darkness, opening into\n the face of a lava cliff, closed only by an intangible curtain—so\n little had the Ryzgas feared those who might assail them in their sleep.\n\n\n Var sent his thoughts probing beyond the curtain, listened intently,\n head thrown back, to their echoes that returned. The tunnel beyond\n slanted steeply downward. Var's hands moved, molding a radiant globe\n from the feeble sunshine that straggled through the fog-bank. With an\n abrupt motion he hurled it. The sun-globe vanished, as if the darkness\n had drunk it up, but though sight did not serve they both sensed that it\n had passed through to light up the depths beyond. For within the\n mountain something snapped suddenly alert—something alive yet not\n living, seeing yet blind. They felt light-sensitive cells tingle in\n response, felt electric currents sting along buried, long-idle\n circuits....", "\"It is true,\" said the Watcher heavily. \"In my youth I penetrated\n farther into the mountain than anyone before, farther even than did the\n First Watcher. I did not see the sleepers, nor will any man until they\n come again, but I met their sentries, the sentinel machines that guard\n them now as they have for two thousand years. When I had gone that far,\n the mountain began to shake, the force that is in the Earth rumbled\n below, and I returned in time.\" Now for the first time Var sensed the\n power in the old man's look, the power of four hundred years' wisdom.\n Var stared down at his hands.", "Neena returned his gaze without flinching; then she looked sidelong at\n Var, and her lips curled with a proud and tender mockery. \"Follow? Why,\n I will lead, if his courage should fail him.\"\nThe old man said, \"It is no part of my duty to dissuade you from this\n thing. You are free persons. But I must be sure that you know what you\n are doing. That is the second part of the law the First Watcher made: to\n guard lest the unwary and the ignorant should bring harm on themselves\n and on all men.\"\n\n\n \"We know the stories,\" Var said brusquely. \"In the hollow heart of their\n mountain the Ryzgas sleep, as they chose to do when their world\n crumbled. But if they are wakened, the mountain will tremble, and the\n Ryzgas will come forth.\"\n\n\n \"Do you believe that?\"\n\n\n \"As one believes stories.\"", "There was no path. Now they were descending the steeper face of the\n sierra, and the way led over bottomless crevasses, sheer drops and sheer\n ascents, sheets of traitorous glare ice. Place after place had to be\n crossed on the air, and both grew weary with the effort such crossings\n cost. They hoarded their strength, helping one another; one alone might\n never have won through.\n\n\n It was starry night already when they saw the light from the Watcher's\n cave. The light shone watery and dim from beneath the hoary back of the\n glacier, and as they came nearer they saw why: the cave entrance was\n sealed by a sheet of ice, a frozen waterfall that fell motionless from\n the rocks above. They heard no sound.", "Neena shivered, even though the surrounding cold could not reach her.\n The ice-wind blew from the glacier, but Var's love was round her as a\n warming cloak, a cloak that glowed softly golden in the deepening\n twilight, even as her love was about him.\n\n\n Var said, \"The Watcher's cave should be three miles beyond this pass.\"\n He stood rigid, trying to catch an echo of the Watcher's thoughts, but\n there was nothing. Perhaps the old man was resting. From the other\n direction, the long way that they two had come, it was not difficult to\n sense the thought of Groz. That thought was powerful, and heavy with\n vengeance.\n\n\n \"Hurry,\" said Neena. \"They're closer than they were an hour ago.\"", "They plunged deeper into the mountain. And the shaking of the mountain\n increased with every step, its vibrations became sound, and its sound\n was like that of the terrible city which they had seen in the dream.\n Through the slow-rolling thunder of the hidden machines seemed to echo\n the death-cries of a billion slaves, the despair of all flesh and blood\n before their monstrous and inhuman power.\n\n\n Without warning, lights went on. Blinking in their glare, Var and Neena\n saw that fifty paces before them the way opened out into a great rounded\n room that was likewise ablaze with light. Cautiously they crept forward\n to the threshold of that chamber at the mountain's heart.", "\"You are ready to go,\" said the Watcher. He spoke aloud, and his voice\n was cracked and harsh. Var opened his eyes in surprise, and saw that the\n Watcher had become again the hoary ancient of last night.\n\n\n Var felt a twinge of unfamiliar emotion; only by its echo in Neena's\n mind did he recognize it as a sense of guilt. He said stiffly, \"You\n don't blame us?\"\n\n\n \"You have taken life in your own hands,\" rasped the Watcher. \"Who does\n that needs no blessing and feels no curse. Go!\"\nThey groped through the fog above blank abysses that hid the snarling\n river, crept hand in hand, sharing their strength, across unstable dream\n bridges from crag to crag. Groz and his pack, in their numbers, would\n cross the gorge more surely and swiftly. When Var and Neena set foot at\n last on the cindery slope of the great volcanic cone, they sensed that\n the pursuit already halved their lead.", "Inside the cave it was warm as summer. Var saw with some surprise that\n all the walls were sheathed in ice—warm to the touch, bound fast\n against melting by the Watcher's will. Light blazed in reflections from\n the ice walls, till there was no shadow in the place. Behind them began\n a tinkling of falling water, thawed from the glacial ridges above to\n descend sheet-wise over the cave mouth, freezing as it fell into\n lengthening icicles. The old man gazed at his work for a moment, then\n turned questioningly to the young pair.\n\n\n \"We need a little rest out of the cold,\" said Var. \"And food, if you can\n spare it. We're pursued.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes. You shall have what I can give you. Make yourselves\n comfortable, and in one minute.... Pursued, eh? A pity. I see the world\n is as bad as it was when I was last in it.\"", "\"Some of the Ryzgas took flight to the stars, and some perished on\n Earth. But there was a group of them who believed that their time to\n rule would come again. These raised a black mountain from the Earth's\n heart, and in hollows within it cast themselves into deathless sleep,\n their deathless and lifeless sentinels round them, to wait till someone\n dare arouse them, or until their chosen time—no one knows surely.\n\n\n \"I have told you the story you know, and have shown you a glimpse of the\n old time, because I must make sure that you do not approach the mountain\n in ignorance. Our world is unwise and sometimes evil, full of arrogance,\n folly, and passion that are in the nature of man. Yet it is a happy\n world, compared to that the Ryzgas made and will make again.\"" ], [ "The Watcher peered at them in turn. \"Welcome,\" he said in a cracked\n voice. He did not speak again; the rest of his conversation was in\n thought only. \"Welcome indeed. I am too much alone here.\"\n\n\n \"You were asleep!\" said Var. Shock made his thought accusing, though he\n had not meant to be.\n\n\n The old man grinned toothlessly. \"Never fear. Asleep or awake, I watch.\n Come in! You're letting in the wind.\"", "The other flashed white teeth in a smile. \"I'm the Watcher,\" he\n answered. \"Often I become a youth at morning, and relax into age as the\n day passes. A foolish amusement, no doubt, but amusements are few here.\"\n\n\n \"You made us fall asleep. Groz will be on us—\"\n\n\n \"Groz and his people could not detect your thoughts as you slept. They\n were all night chasing elusive dreams on the high ridges, miles away.\"\n\n\n Var passed a hand across bewildered eyes. Neena said softly, \"Thank you,\n Watcher.\"\n\n\n \"Don't thank me. I take no sides in your valley feuds. But now you are\n rested, your minds are clear. Do you still mean to go on to the Ryzga\n mountain?\"\n\n\n Not looking at the Watcher, Var muttered unsteadily, \"We have no\n alternative.\"", "The Watcher eyed them speculatively. \"Before all,\" he said finally,\n \"this is a world where you are free to risk wakening the old tyrants, if\n in your own judgment your great need renders the chance worth taking.\"\n\n\n Neena pressed her face against Var's shoulder, hiding her eyes. In her\n mind as it groped for his there was a confusion of horror and pity. Var\n looked grimly at the Watcher, and would have spoken; but the Watcher\n seemed suddenly a very long way off, and Var could no longer feel his\n own limbs, his face was a numb mask. Dully he heard the old man say,\n \"You are tired. Best sleep until morning.\"", "Var strove to cry out that there was no time, that Groz was near and\n that sleep was for infants and the aged, but his intention sank and\n drowned under wave upon wave of unconquerable languor. The bright cave\n swam and dissolved; his eyelids closed.\nVar woke. Daylight glimmered through the ice of the cave mouth. He had\n been unconscious, helpless, for hours! At the thought of that, panic\n gripped him. He had not slept since childhood, and he had forgotten how\n it was.\n\n\n He came to his feet in one quick movement, realizing in that action that\n sleep had refreshed his mind and body—realizing also that a footstep\n had wakened him. Across the cave he faced a young man who watched him\n coolly with dark piercing eyes that were familiar though he did not know\n the face.\n\n\n Neena sat up and stifled a cry of fright. Var growled, \"Who are you?\n Where's the Watcher?\"", "\"It is true,\" said the Watcher heavily. \"In my youth I penetrated\n farther into the mountain than anyone before, farther even than did the\n First Watcher. I did not see the sleepers, nor will any man until they\n come again, but I met their sentries, the sentinel machines that guard\n them now as they have for two thousand years. When I had gone that far,\n the mountain began to shake, the force that is in the Earth rumbled\n below, and I returned in time.\" Now for the first time Var sensed the\n power in the old man's look, the power of four hundred years' wisdom.\n Var stared down at his hands.", "Var nodded somberly, thinking that an old recluse would in any case be\n able to do little for them against Groz and his violent kinsfolk.\n\n\n \"And what will you do now?\"\n\n\n Var grinned mirthlessly. \"We haven't much choice, since they're\n overtaking us. I have only one idea left: we can go where Groz may fear\n to follow us.\"\n\n\n \"To the mountain, you mean.\"\n\n\n \"And into it, if need be.\"\n\n\n The Watcher was broodingly silent; his eyes shifted to Neena, where she\n nestled by Var's side. He asked, \"And you—are you willing to follow\n your lover in this?\"", "\"You have an alternative,\" said the Watcher crisply. The two took their\n eyes from the black mountain and gazed at him in sudden hope, but his\n face was unsmiling. \"It is this. You, Var, can flee up the canyon to the\n north, by a way I will show you, disguising your thoughts and masking\n your presence as well as you are able, while the girl goes in the other\n direction, southward, without seeking to conceal herself. Your pursuers\n will be deceived and follow her, and by the time they catch her it will\n be too late for them to overtake Var.\"\n\n\n That possibility had not occurred to them at all. Var and Neena looked\n at one another. Then by common consent they blended their minds into\n one.", "Hot food and drink were before them almost at once. The Watcher regarded\n them with compassion as their eyes brightened and some of the shadow of\n weariness lifted from them. \"You have stolen your enemy's daughter, no\n doubt, young man? Such things happened when I was young.\"\n\n\n Warming to the old man now, Var sketched his and Neena's history\n briefly. \"We should have been safe among my people by now. And before\n very long, I'm sure, I would have performed some deed which Groz would\n recognize as a worthy exploit, and would thus have healed the feud\n between our families. But our flight was found out too soon. They cut us\n off and forced us into the mountains, and now they are only a few hours\n behind us.\"\n\n\n \"A pity, indeed. I would like to help you—but, you understand, I am the\n Mountain Watcher. I must be above feuds and families.\"", "Inside the cave it was warm as summer. Var saw with some surprise that\n all the walls were sheathed in ice—warm to the touch, bound fast\n against melting by the Watcher's will. Light blazed in reflections from\n the ice walls, till there was no shadow in the place. Behind them began\n a tinkling of falling water, thawed from the glacial ridges above to\n descend sheet-wise over the cave mouth, freezing as it fell into\n lengthening icicles. The old man gazed at his work for a moment, then\n turned questioningly to the young pair.\n\n\n \"We need a little rest out of the cold,\" said Var. \"And food, if you can\n spare it. We're pursued.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes. You shall have what I can give you. Make yourselves\n comfortable, and in one minute.... Pursued, eh? A pity. I see the world\n is as bad as it was when I was last in it.\"", "\"You are ready to go,\" said the Watcher. He spoke aloud, and his voice\n was cracked and harsh. Var opened his eyes in surprise, and saw that the\n Watcher had become again the hoary ancient of last night.\n\n\n Var felt a twinge of unfamiliar emotion; only by its echo in Neena's\n mind did he recognize it as a sense of guilt. He said stiffly, \"You\n don't blame us?\"\n\n\n \"You have taken life in your own hands,\" rasped the Watcher. \"Who does\n that needs no blessing and feels no curse. Go!\"\nThey groped through the fog above blank abysses that hid the snarling\n river, crept hand in hand, sharing their strength, across unstable dream\n bridges from crag to crag. Groz and his pack, in their numbers, would\n cross the gorge more surely and swiftly. When Var and Neena set foot at\n last on the cindery slope of the great volcanic cone, they sensed that\n the pursuit already halved their lead.", "Neena shivered, even though the surrounding cold could not reach her.\n The ice-wind blew from the glacier, but Var's love was round her as a\n warming cloak, a cloak that glowed softly golden in the deepening\n twilight, even as her love was about him.\n\n\n Var said, \"The Watcher's cave should be three miles beyond this pass.\"\n He stood rigid, trying to catch an echo of the Watcher's thoughts, but\n there was nothing. Perhaps the old man was resting. From the other\n direction, the long way that they two had come, it was not difficult to\n sense the thought of Groz. That thought was powerful, and heavy with\n vengeance.\n\n\n \"Hurry,\" said Neena. \"They're closer than they were an hour ago.\"", "The stunned paralysis fell apart in fury. Flame towered over the\n citadel. The hordes ran and shrieked again toward the central inferno,\n and the city burned and burned....\nVar blinked dazedly in the shadowless glow of the ice-cave. His arm\n tightened about Neena till she gasped. He was momentarily uncertain that\n he and she were real and here, such had been the force of the dream, a\n vision of such scope and reality as Var had never seen—no, lived\n through—before. With deep respect now he gazed upon the bent old man\n who was the Mountain Watcher.", "Var had guessed right. When Neena in her terror had flung a dream\n monster into the Ryzga's way—a mere child's bogey out of a fairy\n tale—the Ryzga had not recognized it as such, but had taken it for a\n real being. Var laughed aloud, and with great care, as one communicates\n with an infant, he projected his thoughts into the other's mind. \"There\n will be no new beginning for you in\nour\nworld, Ryzga! In two thousand\n years, we've learned some new things. Now at last I understand why you\n built so many machines, such complicated arrangements of matter and\n energy to do simple tasks—it was because you knew no other way.\"", "Neena returned his gaze without flinching; then she looked sidelong at\n Var, and her lips curled with a proud and tender mockery. \"Follow? Why,\n I will lead, if his courage should fail him.\"\nThe old man said, \"It is no part of my duty to dissuade you from this\n thing. You are free persons. But I must be sure that you know what you\n are doing. That is the second part of the law the First Watcher made: to\n guard lest the unwary and the ignorant should bring harm on themselves\n and on all men.\"\n\n\n \"We know the stories,\" Var said brusquely. \"In the hollow heart of their\n mountain the Ryzgas sleep, as they chose to do when their world\n crumbled. But if they are wakened, the mountain will tremble, and the\n Ryzgas will come forth.\"\n\n\n \"Do you believe that?\"\n\n\n \"As one believes stories.\"", "They thought, in the warm intimacy of unreserved understanding: \"\nIt\n would work: I-you would make the sacrifice of shame and mockery—yet\n these can be borne—that I-you might be saved from death—which is alone\n irreparable.... But to become\nI\nand\nyou\nagain—that cannot be\n borne.\n\"\n\n\n They said in unison, \"No. Not that.\"\n\n\n The Watcher's face did not change. He said gravely, \"Very well. I will\n give you what knowledge I have that may help you when you enter the\n Ryzga mountain.\"\n\n\n Quickly, he impressed on them what he had learned of the structure of\n the mountain and of its guardian machines. Var closed his eyes, a little\n dizzied by the rapid flood of detail.", "The two young people stared for a long minute, intrigued and fearful.\n Both had heard of this place, and the ancient who lived there to keep\n watch on the Ryzga mountain, as a part of the oldest legends of their\n childhood; but neither had been here before.\n\n\n But this was no time for shyness. Var eyed the ice-curtain closely to\n make sure that it was real, not dream-stuff; then he struck it boldly\n with his fist. It shattered and fell in a rain of splinters, sparkling\n in the light that poured from within.\nThey felt the Watcher rouse, heard his footsteps, and finally saw him—a\n shrunken old man, white-haired, with a lined beardless face. The sight\n of him, more marred by age than anyone they had ever seen before, was\n disappointing. They had expected something more—an ancient giant, a\n tower of wisdom and strength. The Watcher was four hundred years old;\n beside him even Groz, who had always seemed so ancient, was like a boy.", "With a new shock, Var realized that the Ryzga's thoughts were quite\n open. They had a terse, disconnected quality that was strange and\n unsettling, and in part they were couched in alien and unintelligible\n symbols. But there was no block. Apparently the Ryzga felt no need to\n close his mind in the presence of inferior creatures....\n\n\n He paused with his back to the central control panel, and studied the\n interlopers with the dispassionate gaze of a scientist examining a new,\n but not novel, species of insect. His thoughts seemed to click, like\n metal parts of a mechanism falling into places prepared for them. The\n image occurred oddly to Var, to whom such a comparison would ordinarily\n have been totally strange.", "The two stood shivering together.\n\n\n The morning wind stirred, freshening, the fog lifted a little, and they\n heard a great voice crying, \"There they are!\"\n\n\n Var and Neena turned. Far out in the sea of fog, on a dream bridge that\n they could not see, stood Groz. He shook the staff he carried. It was\n too far to discern the rage that must contort his features, but the\n thought he hurled at them was a soundless bellow: \"Young fools! I've\n caught you now!\"\n\n\n Behind Groz the figures of his followers loomed up as striding shadows.\n Neena's hand tightened on Var's. Var sent a thought of defiance: \"Go\n back! Or you'll drive us to enter the mountain!\"", "Var was staring in fascination at the Ryzga's face. It was a face formed\n by the custom of unquestioned command; yet it was lined by a deeply\n ingrained weariness, the signs of premature age—denied, overridden by\n the driving will they had sensed a moment earlier. It was a sick man's\n face.\n\n\n The Ryzga's final thought clicked into place:\nDecision!\nHe turned\n toward the switchboard behind him, reaching with practised certainty for\n one spot upon it.\n\n\n Neena screamed.\n\n\n Between the Ryzga and the control panel a nightmare shape reared up\n seven feet tall, flapping black amorphous limbs and flashing red eyes\n and white fangs. The Ryzga recoiled, and the weapon in his hand came up.\n There was an instantaneous glare like heat lightning, and the monster\n crumpled in on itself, twitched briefly and vanished.", "\"Forward, before the charge builds up again!\" said Var. A few feet\n further on, they stumbled over a pile of charred bones. Someone else had\n made it only this far. It was farther than the Watcher had gone into\n these uncharted regions, and only the utmost alertness of mind and sense\n had saved them from death in traps like this. But as yet the way was not\n blocked....\n\n\n Then they felt the mountain begin to tremble. A very faint and remote\n vibration at first, then an increasingly potent shuddering of the floor\n under their feet and the walls around them. Somewhere far below immense\n energies were stirring for the first time in centuries. The power that\n was in the Earth was rising; great wheels commenced to turn, the\n mechanical servitors of the Ryzgas woke one by one and began to make\n ready, while their masters yet slept, for the moment of rebirth that\n might be near at hand." ], [ "Behind the hate-filled eyes the cold brain tried to reason still.\n \"Barbarians...? Our party was wrong after all. After us the machine\n civilization could never rise again, because it was a fire that consumed\n its fuel. After us\nman\ncould not survive on the Earth, because the\n conditions that made him great were gone. The survivors must be\n something else—capacities undeveloped by our science—after us the end\n of man, the beginning.... But those of us who chose to die were right.\"\n\n\n The tide of hate and sick desire rose up to drown all coherence. The\n Ryzga made a savage, wholly futile effort to lift the weapon in his\n paralyzed hand. Then his eyes rolled upward, and abruptly he went limp\n and fell in a heap, like a mechanical doll whose motive power has\n failed.", "\"Because of them we must build with dreams instead of iron, and our only\n fire is that of the Sun, and even now, two thousand years later, the\n Earth is still slowly recovering from the pangs and poison of that age.\n If you turn up the sod in the plain where the wild herds graze, you will\n find numberless fragments of rusted or corroded metal, bits of glass and\n strange plastic substances, debris of artifacts still showing the marks\n of their shaping—the scattered wreckage of the things they made. And\n we—we too are a remnant, the descendants of the few out of all humanity\n that survived when the Ryzgas' world went down in flame and thunder.", "They thought, in the warm intimacy of unreserved understanding: \"\nIt\n would work: I-you would make the sacrifice of shame and mockery—yet\n these can be borne—that I-you might be saved from death—which is alone\n irreparable.... But to become\nI\nand\nyou\nagain—that cannot be\n borne.\n\"\n\n\n They said in unison, \"No. Not that.\"\n\n\n The Watcher's face did not change. He said gravely, \"Very well. I will\n give you what knowledge I have that may help you when you enter the\n Ryzga mountain.\"\n\n\n Quickly, he impressed on them what he had learned of the structure of\n the mountain and of its guardian machines. Var closed his eyes, a little\n dizzied by the rapid flood of detail.", "\"Wait,\" he commanded. While she waited he spun a dream, attaching it to\n the crags that loomed over the pass, and to the frozen ground underfoot.\n It was black night, as it would really be when Groz and his henchmen\n reached this place; lurid fire spewed from the Ryzga mountain, and\n strange lights dipped above it; and for good measure there was an\n avalanche in the dream, and hideous beasts rushed snapping and ravening\n from the crevices of the rock.\n\n\n \"Oh!\" cried Neena in involuntary alarm.\n\n\n Var sighed, shaking his head. \"It won't hold them for long, but it's the\n best I can do now. Come on.\"", "But in that moment a light of inspiration had flashed upon Var, and it\n remained. As the Ryzga stretched out his hand again, Var acted. The\n Ryzga froze, teetering off balance and almost falling, as a numbing grip\n closed down on all his motor nerves.\n\n\n Holding that grip, Var strode across the floor and looked straight into\n the Ryzga's frantic eyes. They glared back at him with such hatred and\n such evil that for an instant he almost faltered. But the Ryzga's\n efforts, as he strove to free himself from the neural hold, were as\n misdirected and unavailing as those of a child who has not learned to\n wrestle with the mind.", "Var was staring in fascination at the Ryzga's face. It was a face formed\n by the custom of unquestioned command; yet it was lined by a deeply\n ingrained weariness, the signs of premature age—denied, overridden by\n the driving will they had sensed a moment earlier. It was a sick man's\n face.\n\n\n The Ryzga's final thought clicked into place:\nDecision!\nHe turned\n toward the switchboard behind him, reaching with practised certainty for\n one spot upon it.\n\n\n Neena screamed.\n\n\n Between the Ryzga and the control panel a nightmare shape reared up\n seven feet tall, flapping black amorphous limbs and flashing red eyes\n and white fangs. The Ryzga recoiled, and the weapon in his hand came up.\n There was an instantaneous glare like heat lightning, and the monster\n crumpled in on itself, twitched briefly and vanished.", "The two young people stared for a long minute, intrigued and fearful.\n Both had heard of this place, and the ancient who lived there to keep\n watch on the Ryzga mountain, as a part of the oldest legends of their\n childhood; but neither had been here before.\n\n\n But this was no time for shyness. Var eyed the ice-curtain closely to\n make sure that it was real, not dream-stuff; then he struck it boldly\n with his fist. It shattered and fell in a rain of splinters, sparkling\n in the light that poured from within.\nThey felt the Watcher rouse, heard his footsteps, and finally saw him—a\n shrunken old man, white-haired, with a lined beardless face. The sight\n of him, more marred by age than anyone they had ever seen before, was\n disappointing. They had expected something more—an ancient giant, a\n tower of wisdom and strength. The Watcher was four hundred years old;\n beside him even Groz, who had always seemed so ancient, was like a boy.", "Var had guessed right. When Neena in her terror had flung a dream\n monster into the Ryzga's way—a mere child's bogey out of a fairy\n tale—the Ryzga had not recognized it as such, but had taken it for a\n real being. Var laughed aloud, and with great care, as one communicates\n with an infant, he projected his thoughts into the other's mind. \"There\n will be no new beginning for you in\nour\nworld, Ryzga! In two thousand\n years, we've learned some new things. Now at last I understand why you\n built so many machines, such complicated arrangements of matter and\n energy to do simple tasks—it was because you knew no other way.\"", "The other flashed white teeth in a smile. \"I'm the Watcher,\" he\n answered. \"Often I become a youth at morning, and relax into age as the\n day passes. A foolish amusement, no doubt, but amusements are few here.\"\n\n\n \"You made us fall asleep. Groz will be on us—\"\n\n\n \"Groz and his people could not detect your thoughts as you slept. They\n were all night chasing elusive dreams on the high ridges, miles away.\"\n\n\n Var passed a hand across bewildered eyes. Neena said softly, \"Thank you,\n Watcher.\"\n\n\n \"Don't thank me. I take no sides in your valley feuds. But now you are\n rested, your minds are clear. Do you still mean to go on to the Ryzga\n mountain?\"\n\n\n Not looking at the Watcher, Var muttered unsteadily, \"We have no\n alternative.\"", "Var felt Neena beside him, and drew her close. As she sobbed her relief,\n he continued to look down absently at the dead man. When at last he\n raised his head, he saw that the drama's end had had a further audience.\n In the outer doorway, backed by his clansmen, stood Groz, gazing first\n in stupefaction at the fallen Ryzga, then with something like awe at\n Var.\n\n\n Var eyed him for a long moment; then he smiled, and asked, \"Well, Groz?\n Is our feud finished, or does your ambition for a worthy son-in-law go\n beyond the conqueror of the Ryzgas?\"", "\"In the last generation of their power the Ryzgas knew by their science\n that the race of man would endure them no longer. They made ready their\n weapons, they mined the cities and the factories for destruction, making\n sure that their works and their knowledge would perish with them.\n Meanwhile they redoubled the yoke and the punishments, hastening the\n completion of the last of the starships.\n\n\n \"From the memories that the old Watchers have left here, and from the\n memories of dead men that still echo in the air, I have gathered a\n picture of that world's end. I will show it to you....\"\nVar and Neena stared, unstirring, with wide vacant eyes, while the old\n man wove a dream around them, and the bright ice-cave faded from their\n vision, and they saw—", "\"Culture: late barbarism. Handwork of high quality—good. Physically\n excellent stock....\" There was a complicated and incomprehensible\n schemata of numbers and abstract forms. \"The time: two thousand\n years—more progress might have been expected, if any survivors at all\n initially postulated; but this will do. The pessimists were mistaken. We\n can begin again.\" Then, startlingly super-imposed on the cool\n progression of logical thought, came a wave of raw emotion, devastating\n in its force. It was a lustful image of a world once more obedient,\n crawling, laboring to do the Ryzgas' will—\ntoward the stars, the\n stars!\nThe icy calculation resumed: \"Immobilize these and the ones\n indicated in the passage above. Then wake the rest....\"", "There was a clang of metal like a signal. Halfway up the wall opposite,\n above a narrow ramp that descended between the instrument panels, a\n massive doorway swung wide, and in its opening a figure stood.\n\n\n Var and Neena huddled frozenly, half expecting each instant to be their\n last. And the Ryzga too stood motionless, looking down at them.\nHe was a man of middle height and stocky build, clad in a garment of\n changing colors, of fabric delicate as dream-stuff. In his right hand,\n with the care one uses with a weapon, he grasped a gleaming metal tube;\n his other hand rested as for support against the frame of the doorway.\n That, and his movements when he came slowly down the ramp toward them,\n conveyed a queer suggestion of weariness or weakness, as if he were yet\n not wholly roused from his two millenia of slumber. But the Ryzga's\n manner and his mind radiated a consciousness of power, a pride and\n assurance of self that smote them like a numbing blow.", "\"Some of the Ryzgas took flight to the stars, and some perished on\n Earth. But there was a group of them who believed that their time to\n rule would come again. These raised a black mountain from the Earth's\n heart, and in hollows within it cast themselves into deathless sleep,\n their deathless and lifeless sentinels round them, to wait till someone\n dare arouse them, or until their chosen time—no one knows surely.\n\n\n \"I have told you the story you know, and have shown you a glimpse of the\n old time, because I must make sure that you do not approach the mountain\n in ignorance. Our world is unwise and sometimes evil, full of arrogance,\n folly, and passion that are in the nature of man. Yet it is a happy\n world, compared to that the Ryzgas made and will make again.\"", "Neena returned his gaze without flinching; then she looked sidelong at\n Var, and her lips curled with a proud and tender mockery. \"Follow? Why,\n I will lead, if his courage should fail him.\"\nThe old man said, \"It is no part of my duty to dissuade you from this\n thing. You are free persons. But I must be sure that you know what you\n are doing. That is the second part of the law the First Watcher made: to\n guard lest the unwary and the ignorant should bring harm on themselves\n and on all men.\"\n\n\n \"We know the stories,\" Var said brusquely. \"In the hollow heart of their\n mountain the Ryzgas sleep, as they chose to do when their world\n crumbled. But if they are wakened, the mountain will tremble, and the\n Ryzgas will come forth.\"\n\n\n \"Do you believe that?\"\n\n\n \"As one believes stories.\"", "They stood high on the side of the Ryzga mountain, and gazed at the\n doorway. It was an opaque yet penetrable well of darkness, opening into\n the face of a lava cliff, closed only by an intangible curtain—so\n little had the Ryzgas feared those who might assail them in their sleep.\n\n\n Var sent his thoughts probing beyond the curtain, listened intently,\n head thrown back, to their echoes that returned. The tunnel beyond\n slanted steeply downward. Var's hands moved, molding a radiant globe\n from the feeble sunshine that straggled through the fog-bank. With an\n abrupt motion he hurled it. The sun-globe vanished, as if the darkness\n had drunk it up, but though sight did not serve they both sensed that it\n had passed through to light up the depths beyond. For within the\n mountain something snapped suddenly alert—something alive yet not\n living, seeing yet blind. They felt light-sensitive cells tingle in\n response, felt electric currents sting along buried, long-idle\n circuits....", "With a new shock, Var realized that the Ryzga's thoughts were quite\n open. They had a terse, disconnected quality that was strange and\n unsettling, and in part they were couched in alien and unintelligible\n symbols. But there was no block. Apparently the Ryzga felt no need to\n close his mind in the presence of inferior creatures....\n\n\n He paused with his back to the central control panel, and studied the\n interlopers with the dispassionate gaze of a scientist examining a new,\n but not novel, species of insect. His thoughts seemed to click, like\n metal parts of a mechanism falling into places prepared for them. The\n image occurred oddly to Var, to whom such a comparison would ordinarily\n have been totally strange.", "\"The Ryzgas also were men,\" said the Watcher. \"But they were such a race\n as the world has not seen before or since. There were tyrannies before\n the Ryzgas, there was lust for power, and atrocious cruelty; but such\n tyranny, power, and cruelty as theirs, had never been known. They ruled\n the Earth for four generations, and the Earth was too little for them.\n They laid the world waste, stripped it of metals and fuels and bored to\n its heart for energy, poisoned its seas and its air with the fume of\n their works, wrung its peoples dry for their labor ... and in each of\n those four generations they launched a ship of space. They were great\n and evil as no other people has been, because they wanted the stars.", "It poised motionless. For an instant the burning city lay mute; then the\n millions found voice. Some roared ferocious threats and curses; others\n cried desolately—\nwait!\nThen the whole city, the dark tumuli of its buildings and its leaping\n fires and tormented faces, and the black sky over it, seemed to twist\n and swim, like a scene under water when a great fish sweeps past, and\n the ship was gone.", "Black starless night, a sky of rolling smoke above the greatest city\n that was ever built. Only the angry light of fires relieved the city's\n darkness—that, and the blue-white lightning flashes that silhouetted\n the naked skeletons of buildings and were followed by thunder and a\n shaking of the earth.\n\n\n Along lightless streets, half choked with rubble and with the dead,\n poured a mad, hating horde. The recurrent flashes lit scarred faces,\n naked bodies blackened and maimed from the hell of the workshops where\n the Ryzgas' might had been forged, eyes that stared white and half\n sightless from the glare of the furnaces, gnarled hands that now at long\n last clutched the weapons of the last rebellion—a rebellion without\n hope of new life on a world gutted and smoldering from the fulfilment of\n the Ryzgas' dream, without slogans other than a cry for blood." ], [ "There was no path. Now they were descending the steeper face of the\n sierra, and the way led over bottomless crevasses, sheer drops and sheer\n ascents, sheets of traitorous glare ice. Place after place had to be\n crossed on the air, and both grew weary with the effort such crossings\n cost. They hoarded their strength, helping one another; one alone might\n never have won through.\n\n\n It was starry night already when they saw the light from the Watcher's\n cave. The light shone watery and dim from beneath the hoary back of the\n glacier, and as they came nearer they saw why: the cave entrance was\n sealed by a sheet of ice, a frozen waterfall that fell motionless from\n the rocks above. They heard no sound.", "Neena shivered, even though the surrounding cold could not reach her.\n The ice-wind blew from the glacier, but Var's love was round her as a\n warming cloak, a cloak that glowed softly golden in the deepening\n twilight, even as her love was about him.\n\n\n Var said, \"The Watcher's cave should be three miles beyond this pass.\"\n He stood rigid, trying to catch an echo of the Watcher's thoughts, but\n there was nothing. Perhaps the old man was resting. From the other\n direction, the long way that they two had come, it was not difficult to\n sense the thought of Groz. That thought was powerful, and heavy with\n vengeance.\n\n\n \"Hurry,\" said Neena. \"They're closer than they were an hour ago.\"", "Inside the cave it was warm as summer. Var saw with some surprise that\n all the walls were sheathed in ice—warm to the touch, bound fast\n against melting by the Watcher's will. Light blazed in reflections from\n the ice walls, till there was no shadow in the place. Behind them began\n a tinkling of falling water, thawed from the glacial ridges above to\n descend sheet-wise over the cave mouth, freezing as it fell into\n lengthening icicles. The old man gazed at his work for a moment, then\n turned questioningly to the young pair.\n\n\n \"We need a little rest out of the cold,\" said Var. \"And food, if you can\n spare it. We're pursued.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes. You shall have what I can give you. Make yourselves\n comfortable, and in one minute.... Pursued, eh? A pity. I see the world\n is as bad as it was when I was last in it.\"", "\"Wait,\" he commanded. While she waited he spun a dream, attaching it to\n the crags that loomed over the pass, and to the frozen ground underfoot.\n It was black night, as it would really be when Groz and his henchmen\n reached this place; lurid fire spewed from the Ryzga mountain, and\n strange lights dipped above it; and for good measure there was an\n avalanche in the dream, and hideous beasts rushed snapping and ravening\n from the crevices of the rock.\n\n\n \"Oh!\" cried Neena in involuntary alarm.\n\n\n Var sighed, shaking his head. \"It won't hold them for long, but it's the\n best I can do now. Come on.\"", "The two young people stared for a long minute, intrigued and fearful.\n Both had heard of this place, and the ancient who lived there to keep\n watch on the Ryzga mountain, as a part of the oldest legends of their\n childhood; but neither had been here before.\n\n\n But this was no time for shyness. Var eyed the ice-curtain closely to\n make sure that it was real, not dream-stuff; then he struck it boldly\n with his fist. It shattered and fell in a rain of splinters, sparkling\n in the light that poured from within.\nThey felt the Watcher rouse, heard his footsteps, and finally saw him—a\n shrunken old man, white-haired, with a lined beardless face. The sight\n of him, more marred by age than anyone they had ever seen before, was\n disappointing. They had expected something more—an ancient giant, a\n tower of wisdom and strength. The Watcher was four hundred years old;\n beside him even Groz, who had always seemed so ancient, was like a boy.", "The two stood shivering together.\n\n\n The morning wind stirred, freshening, the fog lifted a little, and they\n heard a great voice crying, \"There they are!\"\n\n\n Var and Neena turned. Far out in the sea of fog, on a dream bridge that\n they could not see, stood Groz. He shook the staff he carried. It was\n too far to discern the rage that must contort his features, but the\n thought he hurled at them was a soundless bellow: \"Young fools! I've\n caught you now!\"\n\n\n Behind Groz the figures of his followers loomed up as striding shadows.\n Neena's hand tightened on Var's. Var sent a thought of defiance: \"Go\n back! Or you'll drive us to enter the mountain!\"", "There was a liquid tinkling as the ice-curtain collapsed; the fresh\n breeze of morning swept into the cave. The youth beckoned to them, and\n they followed him outside.\n\n\n The glacial slope on which the cavern opened faced toward the mountain.\n It rose black and forbidding in the dawn as it had by sunset. To right\n and left of it, the grand cliffs, ocher and red, were lit splendidly by\n the morning sun, but the mountain of the Ryzgas drank in the light and\n gave nothing back.\n\n\n Below their feet the slope fell away into an opaque sea of fog, filling\n a mile-wide gorge. There was a sound of turbulent water, of a river\n dashed from rock to rock in its struggle toward the plain, but the\n curling fog hid everything.", "The stunned paralysis fell apart in fury. Flame towered over the\n citadel. The hordes ran and shrieked again toward the central inferno,\n and the city burned and burned....\nVar blinked dazedly in the shadowless glow of the ice-cave. His arm\n tightened about Neena till she gasped. He was momentarily uncertain that\n he and she were real and here, such had been the force of the dream, a\n vision of such scope and reality as Var had never seen—no, lived\n through—before. With deep respect now he gazed upon the bent old man\n who was the Mountain Watcher.", "Hot food and drink were before them almost at once. The Watcher regarded\n them with compassion as their eyes brightened and some of the shadow of\n weariness lifted from them. \"You have stolen your enemy's daughter, no\n doubt, young man? Such things happened when I was young.\"\n\n\n Warming to the old man now, Var sketched his and Neena's history\n briefly. \"We should have been safe among my people by now. And before\n very long, I'm sure, I would have performed some deed which Groz would\n recognize as a worthy exploit, and would thus have healed the feud\n between our families. But our flight was found out too soon. They cut us\n off and forced us into the mountains, and now they are only a few hours\n behind us.\"\n\n\n \"A pity, indeed. I would like to help you—but, you understand, I am the\n Mountain Watcher. I must be above feuds and families.\"", "Var nodded somberly, thinking that an old recluse would in any case be\n able to do little for them against Groz and his violent kinsfolk.\n\n\n \"And what will you do now?\"\n\n\n Var grinned mirthlessly. \"We haven't much choice, since they're\n overtaking us. I have only one idea left: we can go where Groz may fear\n to follow us.\"\n\n\n \"To the mountain, you mean.\"\n\n\n \"And into it, if need be.\"\n\n\n The Watcher was broodingly silent; his eyes shifted to Neena, where she\n nestled by Var's side. He asked, \"And you—are you willing to follow\n your lover in this?\"", "\"Some of the Ryzgas took flight to the stars, and some perished on\n Earth. But there was a group of them who believed that their time to\n rule would come again. These raised a black mountain from the Earth's\n heart, and in hollows within it cast themselves into deathless sleep,\n their deathless and lifeless sentinels round them, to wait till someone\n dare arouse them, or until their chosen time—no one knows surely.\n\n\n \"I have told you the story you know, and have shown you a glimpse of the\n old time, because I must make sure that you do not approach the mountain\n in ignorance. Our world is unwise and sometimes evil, full of arrogance,\n folly, and passion that are in the nature of man. Yet it is a happy\n world, compared to that the Ryzgas made and will make again.\"", "Groz seemed to hesitate. Then he swung his staff up like a weapon, and\n for the two on the mountainside the world turned upside down, the\n mountain's black shoulder hung inverted above them and the dizzy gulf of\n sky was beneath. Var fought for footing with his balance gone, feeling\n Neena reel against him until, summoning all his strength, he broke the\n grip of the illusion and the world seemed to right itself. The mist\n billowed again and Groz was out of sight, but they could hear him\n exhorting his men to haste.\n\n\n Neena's face was deadly pale and her lips trembled, but her urgent\n whisper said, \"Come on!\"", "Behind the hate-filled eyes the cold brain tried to reason still.\n \"Barbarians...? Our party was wrong after all. After us the machine\n civilization could never rise again, because it was a fire that consumed\n its fuel. After us\nman\ncould not survive on the Earth, because the\n conditions that made him great were gone. The survivors must be\n something else—capacities undeveloped by our science—after us the end\n of man, the beginning.... But those of us who chose to die were right.\"\n\n\n The tide of hate and sick desire rose up to drown all coherence. The\n Ryzga made a savage, wholly futile effort to lift the weapon in his\n paralyzed hand. Then his eyes rolled upward, and abruptly he went limp\n and fell in a heap, like a mechanical doll whose motive power has\n failed.", "Var strove to cry out that there was no time, that Groz was near and\n that sleep was for infants and the aged, but his intention sank and\n drowned under wave upon wave of unconquerable languor. The bright cave\n swam and dissolved; his eyelids closed.\nVar woke. Daylight glimmered through the ice of the cave mouth. He had\n been unconscious, helpless, for hours! At the thought of that, panic\n gripped him. He had not slept since childhood, and he had forgotten how\n it was.\n\n\n He came to his feet in one quick movement, realizing in that action that\n sleep had refreshed his mind and body—realizing also that a footstep\n had wakened him. Across the cave he faced a young man who watched him\n coolly with dark piercing eyes that were familiar though he did not know\n the face.\n\n\n Neena sat up and stifled a cry of fright. Var growled, \"Who are you?\n Where's the Watcher?\"", "The other flashed white teeth in a smile. \"I'm the Watcher,\" he\n answered. \"Often I become a youth at morning, and relax into age as the\n day passes. A foolish amusement, no doubt, but amusements are few here.\"\n\n\n \"You made us fall asleep. Groz will be on us—\"\n\n\n \"Groz and his people could not detect your thoughts as you slept. They\n were all night chasing elusive dreams on the high ridges, miles away.\"\n\n\n Var passed a hand across bewildered eyes. Neena said softly, \"Thank you,\n Watcher.\"\n\n\n \"Don't thank me. I take no sides in your valley feuds. But now you are\n rested, your minds are clear. Do you still mean to go on to the Ryzga\n mountain?\"\n\n\n Not looking at the Watcher, Var muttered unsteadily, \"We have no\n alternative.\"", "\"Because of them we must build with dreams instead of iron, and our only\n fire is that of the Sun, and even now, two thousand years later, the\n Earth is still slowly recovering from the pangs and poison of that age.\n If you turn up the sod in the plain where the wild herds graze, you will\n find numberless fragments of rusted or corroded metal, bits of glass and\n strange plastic substances, debris of artifacts still showing the marks\n of their shaping—the scattered wreckage of the things they made. And\n we—we too are a remnant, the descendants of the few out of all humanity\n that survived when the Ryzgas' world went down in flame and thunder.", "It poised motionless. For an instant the burning city lay mute; then the\n millions found voice. Some roared ferocious threats and curses; others\n cried desolately—\nwait!\nThen the whole city, the dark tumuli of its buildings and its leaping\n fires and tormented faces, and the black sky over it, seemed to twist\n and swim, like a scene under water when a great fish sweeps past, and\n the ship was gone.", "The Watcher peered at them in turn. \"Welcome,\" he said in a cracked\n voice. He did not speak again; the rest of his conversation was in\n thought only. \"Welcome indeed. I am too much alone here.\"\n\n\n \"You were asleep!\" said Var. Shock made his thought accusing, though he\n had not meant to be.\n\n\n The old man grinned toothlessly. \"Never fear. Asleep or awake, I watch.\n Come in! You're letting in the wind.\"", "\"In the last generation of their power the Ryzgas knew by their science\n that the race of man would endure them no longer. They made ready their\n weapons, they mined the cities and the factories for destruction, making\n sure that their works and their knowledge would perish with them.\n Meanwhile they redoubled the yoke and the punishments, hastening the\n completion of the last of the starships.\n\n\n \"From the memories that the old Watchers have left here, and from the\n memories of dead men that still echo in the air, I have gathered a\n picture of that world's end. I will show it to you....\"\nVar and Neena stared, unstirring, with wide vacant eyes, while the old\n man wove a dream around them, and the bright ice-cave faded from their\n vision, and they saw—", "\"You are ready to go,\" said the Watcher. He spoke aloud, and his voice\n was cracked and harsh. Var opened his eyes in surprise, and saw that the\n Watcher had become again the hoary ancient of last night.\n\n\n Var felt a twinge of unfamiliar emotion; only by its echo in Neena's\n mind did he recognize it as a sense of guilt. He said stiffly, \"You\n don't blame us?\"\n\n\n \"You have taken life in your own hands,\" rasped the Watcher. \"Who does\n that needs no blessing and feels no curse. Go!\"\nThey groped through the fog above blank abysses that hid the snarling\n river, crept hand in hand, sharing their strength, across unstable dream\n bridges from crag to crag. Groz and his pack, in their numbers, would\n cross the gorge more surely and swiftly. When Var and Neena set foot at\n last on the cindery slope of the great volcanic cone, they sensed that\n the pursuit already halved their lead." ], [ "The Watcher peered at them in turn. \"Welcome,\" he said in a cracked\n voice. He did not speak again; the rest of his conversation was in\n thought only. \"Welcome indeed. I am too much alone here.\"\n\n\n \"You were asleep!\" said Var. Shock made his thought accusing, though he\n had not meant to be.\n\n\n The old man grinned toothlessly. \"Never fear. Asleep or awake, I watch.\n Come in! You're letting in the wind.\"", "The other flashed white teeth in a smile. \"I'm the Watcher,\" he\n answered. \"Often I become a youth at morning, and relax into age as the\n day passes. A foolish amusement, no doubt, but amusements are few here.\"\n\n\n \"You made us fall asleep. Groz will be on us—\"\n\n\n \"Groz and his people could not detect your thoughts as you slept. They\n were all night chasing elusive dreams on the high ridges, miles away.\"\n\n\n Var passed a hand across bewildered eyes. Neena said softly, \"Thank you,\n Watcher.\"\n\n\n \"Don't thank me. I take no sides in your valley feuds. But now you are\n rested, your minds are clear. Do you still mean to go on to the Ryzga\n mountain?\"\n\n\n Not looking at the Watcher, Var muttered unsteadily, \"We have no\n alternative.\"", "\"It is true,\" said the Watcher heavily. \"In my youth I penetrated\n farther into the mountain than anyone before, farther even than did the\n First Watcher. I did not see the sleepers, nor will any man until they\n come again, but I met their sentries, the sentinel machines that guard\n them now as they have for two thousand years. When I had gone that far,\n the mountain began to shake, the force that is in the Earth rumbled\n below, and I returned in time.\" Now for the first time Var sensed the\n power in the old man's look, the power of four hundred years' wisdom.\n Var stared down at his hands.", "The Watcher eyed them speculatively. \"Before all,\" he said finally,\n \"this is a world where you are free to risk wakening the old tyrants, if\n in your own judgment your great need renders the chance worth taking.\"\n\n\n Neena pressed her face against Var's shoulder, hiding her eyes. In her\n mind as it groped for his there was a confusion of horror and pity. Var\n looked grimly at the Watcher, and would have spoken; but the Watcher\n seemed suddenly a very long way off, and Var could no longer feel his\n own limbs, his face was a numb mask. Dully he heard the old man say,\n \"You are tired. Best sleep until morning.\"", "\"You have an alternative,\" said the Watcher crisply. The two took their\n eyes from the black mountain and gazed at him in sudden hope, but his\n face was unsmiling. \"It is this. You, Var, can flee up the canyon to the\n north, by a way I will show you, disguising your thoughts and masking\n your presence as well as you are able, while the girl goes in the other\n direction, southward, without seeking to conceal herself. Your pursuers\n will be deceived and follow her, and by the time they catch her it will\n be too late for them to overtake Var.\"\n\n\n That possibility had not occurred to them at all. Var and Neena looked\n at one another. Then by common consent they blended their minds into\n one.", "Var strove to cry out that there was no time, that Groz was near and\n that sleep was for infants and the aged, but his intention sank and\n drowned under wave upon wave of unconquerable languor. The bright cave\n swam and dissolved; his eyelids closed.\nVar woke. Daylight glimmered through the ice of the cave mouth. He had\n been unconscious, helpless, for hours! At the thought of that, panic\n gripped him. He had not slept since childhood, and he had forgotten how\n it was.\n\n\n He came to his feet in one quick movement, realizing in that action that\n sleep had refreshed his mind and body—realizing also that a footstep\n had wakened him. Across the cave he faced a young man who watched him\n coolly with dark piercing eyes that were familiar though he did not know\n the face.\n\n\n Neena sat up and stifled a cry of fright. Var growled, \"Who are you?\n Where's the Watcher?\"", "They thought, in the warm intimacy of unreserved understanding: \"\nIt\n would work: I-you would make the sacrifice of shame and mockery—yet\n these can be borne—that I-you might be saved from death—which is alone\n irreparable.... But to become\nI\nand\nyou\nagain—that cannot be\n borne.\n\"\n\n\n They said in unison, \"No. Not that.\"\n\n\n The Watcher's face did not change. He said gravely, \"Very well. I will\n give you what knowledge I have that may help you when you enter the\n Ryzga mountain.\"\n\n\n Quickly, he impressed on them what he had learned of the structure of\n the mountain and of its guardian machines. Var closed his eyes, a little\n dizzied by the rapid flood of detail.", "There was no path. Now they were descending the steeper face of the\n sierra, and the way led over bottomless crevasses, sheer drops and sheer\n ascents, sheets of traitorous glare ice. Place after place had to be\n crossed on the air, and both grew weary with the effort such crossings\n cost. They hoarded their strength, helping one another; one alone might\n never have won through.\n\n\n It was starry night already when they saw the light from the Watcher's\n cave. The light shone watery and dim from beneath the hoary back of the\n glacier, and as they came nearer they saw why: the cave entrance was\n sealed by a sheet of ice, a frozen waterfall that fell motionless from\n the rocks above. They heard no sound.", "The two young people stared for a long minute, intrigued and fearful.\n Both had heard of this place, and the ancient who lived there to keep\n watch on the Ryzga mountain, as a part of the oldest legends of their\n childhood; but neither had been here before.\n\n\n But this was no time for shyness. Var eyed the ice-curtain closely to\n make sure that it was real, not dream-stuff; then he struck it boldly\n with his fist. It shattered and fell in a rain of splinters, sparkling\n in the light that poured from within.\nThey felt the Watcher rouse, heard his footsteps, and finally saw him—a\n shrunken old man, white-haired, with a lined beardless face. The sight\n of him, more marred by age than anyone they had ever seen before, was\n disappointing. They had expected something more—an ancient giant, a\n tower of wisdom and strength. The Watcher was four hundred years old;\n beside him even Groz, who had always seemed so ancient, was like a boy.", "\"You are ready to go,\" said the Watcher. He spoke aloud, and his voice\n was cracked and harsh. Var opened his eyes in surprise, and saw that the\n Watcher had become again the hoary ancient of last night.\n\n\n Var felt a twinge of unfamiliar emotion; only by its echo in Neena's\n mind did he recognize it as a sense of guilt. He said stiffly, \"You\n don't blame us?\"\n\n\n \"You have taken life in your own hands,\" rasped the Watcher. \"Who does\n that needs no blessing and feels no curse. Go!\"\nThey groped through the fog above blank abysses that hid the snarling\n river, crept hand in hand, sharing their strength, across unstable dream\n bridges from crag to crag. Groz and his pack, in their numbers, would\n cross the gorge more surely and swiftly. When Var and Neena set foot at\n last on the cindery slope of the great volcanic cone, they sensed that\n the pursuit already halved their lead.", "With a new shock, Var realized that the Ryzga's thoughts were quite\n open. They had a terse, disconnected quality that was strange and\n unsettling, and in part they were couched in alien and unintelligible\n symbols. But there was no block. Apparently the Ryzga felt no need to\n close his mind in the presence of inferior creatures....\n\n\n He paused with his back to the central control panel, and studied the\n interlopers with the dispassionate gaze of a scientist examining a new,\n but not novel, species of insect. His thoughts seemed to click, like\n metal parts of a mechanism falling into places prepared for them. The\n image occurred oddly to Var, to whom such a comparison would ordinarily\n have been totally strange.", "Hot food and drink were before them almost at once. The Watcher regarded\n them with compassion as their eyes brightened and some of the shadow of\n weariness lifted from them. \"You have stolen your enemy's daughter, no\n doubt, young man? Such things happened when I was young.\"\n\n\n Warming to the old man now, Var sketched his and Neena's history\n briefly. \"We should have been safe among my people by now. And before\n very long, I'm sure, I would have performed some deed which Groz would\n recognize as a worthy exploit, and would thus have healed the feud\n between our families. But our flight was found out too soon. They cut us\n off and forced us into the mountains, and now they are only a few hours\n behind us.\"\n\n\n \"A pity, indeed. I would like to help you—but, you understand, I am the\n Mountain Watcher. I must be above feuds and families.\"", "Neena shivered, even though the surrounding cold could not reach her.\n The ice-wind blew from the glacier, but Var's love was round her as a\n warming cloak, a cloak that glowed softly golden in the deepening\n twilight, even as her love was about him.\n\n\n Var said, \"The Watcher's cave should be three miles beyond this pass.\"\n He stood rigid, trying to catch an echo of the Watcher's thoughts, but\n there was nothing. Perhaps the old man was resting. From the other\n direction, the long way that they two had come, it was not difficult to\n sense the thought of Groz. That thought was powerful, and heavy with\n vengeance.\n\n\n \"Hurry,\" said Neena. \"They're closer than they were an hour ago.\"", "\"The Ryzgas also were men,\" said the Watcher. \"But they were such a race\n as the world has not seen before or since. There were tyrannies before\n the Ryzgas, there was lust for power, and atrocious cruelty; but such\n tyranny, power, and cruelty as theirs, had never been known. They ruled\n the Earth for four generations, and the Earth was too little for them.\n They laid the world waste, stripped it of metals and fuels and bored to\n its heart for energy, poisoned its seas and its air with the fume of\n their works, wrung its peoples dry for their labor ... and in each of\n those four generations they launched a ship of space. They were great\n and evil as no other people has been, because they wanted the stars.", "Inside the cave it was warm as summer. Var saw with some surprise that\n all the walls were sheathed in ice—warm to the touch, bound fast\n against melting by the Watcher's will. Light blazed in reflections from\n the ice walls, till there was no shadow in the place. Behind them began\n a tinkling of falling water, thawed from the glacial ridges above to\n descend sheet-wise over the cave mouth, freezing as it fell into\n lengthening icicles. The old man gazed at his work for a moment, then\n turned questioningly to the young pair.\n\n\n \"We need a little rest out of the cold,\" said Var. \"And food, if you can\n spare it. We're pursued.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes. You shall have what I can give you. Make yourselves\n comfortable, and in one minute.... Pursued, eh? A pity. I see the world\n is as bad as it was when I was last in it.\"", "They stood high on the side of the Ryzga mountain, and gazed at the\n doorway. It was an opaque yet penetrable well of darkness, opening into\n the face of a lava cliff, closed only by an intangible curtain—so\n little had the Ryzgas feared those who might assail them in their sleep.\n\n\n Var sent his thoughts probing beyond the curtain, listened intently,\n head thrown back, to their echoes that returned. The tunnel beyond\n slanted steeply downward. Var's hands moved, molding a radiant globe\n from the feeble sunshine that straggled through the fog-bank. With an\n abrupt motion he hurled it. The sun-globe vanished, as if the darkness\n had drunk it up, but though sight did not serve they both sensed that it\n had passed through to light up the depths beyond. For within the\n mountain something snapped suddenly alert—something alive yet not\n living, seeing yet blind. They felt light-sensitive cells tingle in\n response, felt electric currents sting along buried, long-idle\n circuits....", "Var nodded somberly, thinking that an old recluse would in any case be\n able to do little for them against Groz and his violent kinsfolk.\n\n\n \"And what will you do now?\"\n\n\n Var grinned mirthlessly. \"We haven't much choice, since they're\n overtaking us. I have only one idea left: we can go where Groz may fear\n to follow us.\"\n\n\n \"To the mountain, you mean.\"\n\n\n \"And into it, if need be.\"\n\n\n The Watcher was broodingly silent; his eyes shifted to Neena, where she\n nestled by Var's side. He asked, \"And you—are you willing to follow\n your lover in this?\"", "\"Forward, before the charge builds up again!\" said Var. A few feet\n further on, they stumbled over a pile of charred bones. Someone else had\n made it only this far. It was farther than the Watcher had gone into\n these uncharted regions, and only the utmost alertness of mind and sense\n had saved them from death in traps like this. But as yet the way was not\n blocked....\n\n\n Then they felt the mountain begin to tremble. A very faint and remote\n vibration at first, then an increasingly potent shuddering of the floor\n under their feet and the walls around them. Somewhere far below immense\n energies were stirring for the first time in centuries. The power that\n was in the Earth was rising; great wheels commenced to turn, the\n mechanical servitors of the Ryzgas woke one by one and began to make\n ready, while their masters yet slept, for the moment of rebirth that\n might be near at hand.", "Var had guessed right. When Neena in her terror had flung a dream\n monster into the Ryzga's way—a mere child's bogey out of a fairy\n tale—the Ryzga had not recognized it as such, but had taken it for a\n real being. Var laughed aloud, and with great care, as one communicates\n with an infant, he projected his thoughts into the other's mind. \"There\n will be no new beginning for you in\nour\nworld, Ryzga! In two thousand\n years, we've learned some new things. Now at last I understand why you\n built so many machines, such complicated arrangements of matter and\n energy to do simple tasks—it was because you knew no other way.\"", "There was a clang of metal like a signal. Halfway up the wall opposite,\n above a narrow ramp that descended between the instrument panels, a\n massive doorway swung wide, and in its opening a figure stood.\n\n\n Var and Neena huddled frozenly, half expecting each instant to be their\n last. And the Ryzga too stood motionless, looking down at them.\nHe was a man of middle height and stocky build, clad in a garment of\n changing colors, of fabric delicate as dream-stuff. In his right hand,\n with the care one uses with a weapon, he grasped a gleaming metal tube;\n his other hand rested as for support against the frame of the doorway.\n That, and his movements when he came slowly down the ramp toward them,\n conveyed a queer suggestion of weariness or weakness, as if he were yet\n not wholly roused from his two millenia of slumber. But the Ryzga's\n manner and his mind radiated a consciousness of power, a pride and\n assurance of self that smote them like a numbing blow." ], [ "Behind the hate-filled eyes the cold brain tried to reason still.\n \"Barbarians...? Our party was wrong after all. After us the machine\n civilization could never rise again, because it was a fire that consumed\n its fuel. After us\nman\ncould not survive on the Earth, because the\n conditions that made him great were gone. The survivors must be\n something else—capacities undeveloped by our science—after us the end\n of man, the beginning.... But those of us who chose to die were right.\"\n\n\n The tide of hate and sick desire rose up to drown all coherence. The\n Ryzga made a savage, wholly futile effort to lift the weapon in his\n paralyzed hand. Then his eyes rolled upward, and abruptly he went limp\n and fell in a heap, like a mechanical doll whose motive power has\n failed.", "It poised motionless. For an instant the burning city lay mute; then the\n millions found voice. Some roared ferocious threats and curses; others\n cried desolately—\nwait!\nThen the whole city, the dark tumuli of its buildings and its leaping\n fires and tormented faces, and the black sky over it, seemed to twist\n and swim, like a scene under water when a great fish sweeps past, and\n the ship was gone.", "There was no path. Now they were descending the steeper face of the\n sierra, and the way led over bottomless crevasses, sheer drops and sheer\n ascents, sheets of traitorous glare ice. Place after place had to be\n crossed on the air, and both grew weary with the effort such crossings\n cost. They hoarded their strength, helping one another; one alone might\n never have won through.\n\n\n It was starry night already when they saw the light from the Watcher's\n cave. The light shone watery and dim from beneath the hoary back of the\n glacier, and as they came nearer they saw why: the cave entrance was\n sealed by a sheet of ice, a frozen waterfall that fell motionless from\n the rocks above. They heard no sound.", "They thought, in the warm intimacy of unreserved understanding: \"\nIt\n would work: I-you would make the sacrifice of shame and mockery—yet\n these can be borne—that I-you might be saved from death—which is alone\n irreparable.... But to become\nI\nand\nyou\nagain—that cannot be\n borne.\n\"\n\n\n They said in unison, \"No. Not that.\"\n\n\n The Watcher's face did not change. He said gravely, \"Very well. I will\n give you what knowledge I have that may help you when you enter the\n Ryzga mountain.\"\n\n\n Quickly, he impressed on them what he had learned of the structure of\n the mountain and of its guardian machines. Var closed his eyes, a little\n dizzied by the rapid flood of detail.", "There was a clang of metal like a signal. Halfway up the wall opposite,\n above a narrow ramp that descended between the instrument panels, a\n massive doorway swung wide, and in its opening a figure stood.\n\n\n Var and Neena huddled frozenly, half expecting each instant to be their\n last. And the Ryzga too stood motionless, looking down at them.\nHe was a man of middle height and stocky build, clad in a garment of\n changing colors, of fabric delicate as dream-stuff. In his right hand,\n with the care one uses with a weapon, he grasped a gleaming metal tube;\n his other hand rested as for support against the frame of the doorway.\n That, and his movements when he came slowly down the ramp toward them,\n conveyed a queer suggestion of weariness or weakness, as if he were yet\n not wholly roused from his two millenia of slumber. But the Ryzga's\n manner and his mind radiated a consciousness of power, a pride and\n assurance of self that smote them like a numbing blow.", "\"Wait,\" he commanded. While she waited he spun a dream, attaching it to\n the crags that loomed over the pass, and to the frozen ground underfoot.\n It was black night, as it would really be when Groz and his henchmen\n reached this place; lurid fire spewed from the Ryzga mountain, and\n strange lights dipped above it; and for good measure there was an\n avalanche in the dream, and hideous beasts rushed snapping and ravening\n from the crevices of the rock.\n\n\n \"Oh!\" cried Neena in involuntary alarm.\n\n\n Var sighed, shaking his head. \"It won't hold them for long, but it's the\n best I can do now. Come on.\"", "The Watcher peered at them in turn. \"Welcome,\" he said in a cracked\n voice. He did not speak again; the rest of his conversation was in\n thought only. \"Welcome indeed. I am too much alone here.\"\n\n\n \"You were asleep!\" said Var. Shock made his thought accusing, though he\n had not meant to be.\n\n\n The old man grinned toothlessly. \"Never fear. Asleep or awake, I watch.\n Come in! You're letting in the wind.\"", "Var was staring in fascination at the Ryzga's face. It was a face formed\n by the custom of unquestioned command; yet it was lined by a deeply\n ingrained weariness, the signs of premature age—denied, overridden by\n the driving will they had sensed a moment earlier. It was a sick man's\n face.\n\n\n The Ryzga's final thought clicked into place:\nDecision!\nHe turned\n toward the switchboard behind him, reaching with practised certainty for\n one spot upon it.\n\n\n Neena screamed.\n\n\n Between the Ryzga and the control panel a nightmare shape reared up\n seven feet tall, flapping black amorphous limbs and flashing red eyes\n and white fangs. The Ryzga recoiled, and the weapon in his hand came up.\n There was an instantaneous glare like heat lightning, and the monster\n crumpled in on itself, twitched briefly and vanished.", "Before them death waited around the citadel where the masters still\n fought. All round, from the lowest and most poisonous levels of the\n shattered city, the slaves swarmed up in their millions. And the\n lightning blazed, and the city howled and screamed and burned.\n\n\n Then, unbelievably, the thunder fell silent, and the silence swept\n outward like a wave, from ruined street to street. The mouths that had\n shouted their wrath were speechless, and the rage-blinded eyes were\n lifted in sudden awe. From the center, over the citadel, an immense\n white globe soared upward, rising swiftly without sound.\n\n\n They had never seen its like, but they knew. It was the last starship,\n and it was leaving.", "The Watcher eyed them speculatively. \"Before all,\" he said finally,\n \"this is a world where you are free to risk wakening the old tyrants, if\n in your own judgment your great need renders the chance worth taking.\"\n\n\n Neena pressed her face against Var's shoulder, hiding her eyes. In her\n mind as it groped for his there was a confusion of horror and pity. Var\n looked grimly at the Watcher, and would have spoken; but the Watcher\n seemed suddenly a very long way off, and Var could no longer feel his\n own limbs, his face was a numb mask. Dully he heard the old man say,\n \"You are tired. Best sleep until morning.\"", "The two stood shivering together.\n\n\n The morning wind stirred, freshening, the fog lifted a little, and they\n heard a great voice crying, \"There they are!\"\n\n\n Var and Neena turned. Far out in the sea of fog, on a dream bridge that\n they could not see, stood Groz. He shook the staff he carried. It was\n too far to discern the rage that must contort his features, but the\n thought he hurled at them was a soundless bellow: \"Young fools! I've\n caught you now!\"\n\n\n Behind Groz the figures of his followers loomed up as striding shadows.\n Neena's hand tightened on Var's. Var sent a thought of defiance: \"Go\n back! Or you'll drive us to enter the mountain!\"", "\"You are ready to go,\" said the Watcher. He spoke aloud, and his voice\n was cracked and harsh. Var opened his eyes in surprise, and saw that the\n Watcher had become again the hoary ancient of last night.\n\n\n Var felt a twinge of unfamiliar emotion; only by its echo in Neena's\n mind did he recognize it as a sense of guilt. He said stiffly, \"You\n don't blame us?\"\n\n\n \"You have taken life in your own hands,\" rasped the Watcher. \"Who does\n that needs no blessing and feels no curse. Go!\"\nThey groped through the fog above blank abysses that hid the snarling\n river, crept hand in hand, sharing their strength, across unstable dream\n bridges from crag to crag. Groz and his pack, in their numbers, would\n cross the gorge more surely and swiftly. When Var and Neena set foot at\n last on the cindery slope of the great volcanic cone, they sensed that\n the pursuit already halved their lead.", "She was beautiful and defiant, facing the red sunset and the black\n mountain. Var sensed her fear, and the love that had conquered it. He\n felt a wave of tenderness and bitterness. For him she had come to this.\n For the flame that had sprung between them at the Truce of New Grass,\n she had challenged the feud of their peoples and had left her home, to\n follow him. Now, if her father and his kinsmen overtook them, it would\n be death for Var, and for Neena living shame. Which of the two was worse\n was no longer a simple problem to Var, who had grown much older in the\n last days.", "Neena returned his gaze without flinching; then she looked sidelong at\n Var, and her lips curled with a proud and tender mockery. \"Follow? Why,\n I will lead, if his courage should fail him.\"\nThe old man said, \"It is no part of my duty to dissuade you from this\n thing. You are free persons. But I must be sure that you know what you\n are doing. That is the second part of the law the First Watcher made: to\n guard lest the unwary and the ignorant should bring harm on themselves\n and on all men.\"\n\n\n \"We know the stories,\" Var said brusquely. \"In the hollow heart of their\n mountain the Ryzgas sleep, as they chose to do when their world\n crumbled. But if they are wakened, the mountain will tremble, and the\n Ryzgas will come forth.\"\n\n\n \"Do you believe that?\"\n\n\n \"As one believes stories.\"", "Var felt Neena beside him, and drew her close. As she sobbed her relief,\n he continued to look down absently at the dead man. When at last he\n raised his head, he saw that the drama's end had had a further audience.\n In the outer doorway, backed by his clansmen, stood Groz, gazing first\n in stupefaction at the fallen Ryzga, then with something like awe at\n Var.\n\n\n Var eyed him for a long moment; then he smiled, and asked, \"Well, Groz?\n Is our feud finished, or does your ambition for a worthy son-in-law go\n beyond the conqueror of the Ryzgas?\"", "Its roof was vaulted; its circular walls were lined with panels studded\n with gleaming control buttons, levers, colored lights. As they watched\n light flicked on and off in changing patterns, registering the\n progressive changes in the vast complex of mechanisms for which this\n must be the central control station. Behind those boards circuits opened\n and closed in bewildering confusion; the two invaders felt the rapid\n shifting of magnetic fields, the fury of electrons boiling in vacuum....\n\n\n For long moments they forgot the pursuit, forgot everything in wonder at\n this place whose remotest like they had never seen in the simplicity of\n their machineless culture. In all the brilliant space there was no life.\n They looked at one another, the same thought coming to both at once:\n perhaps, after two thousand years, the masters were dead after all, and\n only the machines remained? As if irresistibly drawn, they stepped over\n the threshold.", "Inside the cave it was warm as summer. Var saw with some surprise that\n all the walls were sheathed in ice—warm to the touch, bound fast\n against melting by the Watcher's will. Light blazed in reflections from\n the ice walls, till there was no shadow in the place. Behind them began\n a tinkling of falling water, thawed from the glacial ridges above to\n descend sheet-wise over the cave mouth, freezing as it fell into\n lengthening icicles. The old man gazed at his work for a moment, then\n turned questioningly to the young pair.\n\n\n \"We need a little rest out of the cold,\" said Var. \"And food, if you can\n spare it. We're pursued.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes. You shall have what I can give you. Make yourselves\n comfortable, and in one minute.... Pursued, eh? A pity. I see the world\n is as bad as it was when I was last in it.\"", "The two young people stared for a long minute, intrigued and fearful.\n Both had heard of this place, and the ancient who lived there to keep\n watch on the Ryzga mountain, as a part of the oldest legends of their\n childhood; but neither had been here before.\n\n\n But this was no time for shyness. Var eyed the ice-curtain closely to\n make sure that it was real, not dream-stuff; then he struck it boldly\n with his fist. It shattered and fell in a rain of splinters, sparkling\n in the light that poured from within.\nThey felt the Watcher rouse, heard his footsteps, and finally saw him—a\n shrunken old man, white-haired, with a lined beardless face. The sight\n of him, more marred by age than anyone they had ever seen before, was\n disappointing. They had expected something more—an ancient giant, a\n tower of wisdom and strength. The Watcher was four hundred years old;\n beside him even Groz, who had always seemed so ancient, was like a boy.", "They plunged deeper into the mountain. And the shaking of the mountain\n increased with every step, its vibrations became sound, and its sound\n was like that of the terrible city which they had seen in the dream.\n Through the slow-rolling thunder of the hidden machines seemed to echo\n the death-cries of a billion slaves, the despair of all flesh and blood\n before their monstrous and inhuman power.\n\n\n Without warning, lights went on. Blinking in their glare, Var and Neena\n saw that fifty paces before them the way opened out into a great rounded\n room that was likewise ablaze with light. Cautiously they crept forward\n to the threshold of that chamber at the mountain's heart.", "The other flashed white teeth in a smile. \"I'm the Watcher,\" he\n answered. \"Often I become a youth at morning, and relax into age as the\n day passes. A foolish amusement, no doubt, but amusements are few here.\"\n\n\n \"You made us fall asleep. Groz will be on us—\"\n\n\n \"Groz and his people could not detect your thoughts as you slept. They\n were all night chasing elusive dreams on the high ridges, miles away.\"\n\n\n Var passed a hand across bewildered eyes. Neena said softly, \"Thank you,\n Watcher.\"\n\n\n \"Don't thank me. I take no sides in your valley feuds. But now you are\n rested, your minds are clear. Do you still mean to go on to the Ryzga\n mountain?\"\n\n\n Not looking at the Watcher, Var muttered unsteadily, \"We have no\n alternative.\"" ], [ "They stood high on the side of the Ryzga mountain, and gazed at the\n doorway. It was an opaque yet penetrable well of darkness, opening into\n the face of a lava cliff, closed only by an intangible curtain—so\n little had the Ryzgas feared those who might assail them in their sleep.\n\n\n Var sent his thoughts probing beyond the curtain, listened intently,\n head thrown back, to their echoes that returned. The tunnel beyond\n slanted steeply downward. Var's hands moved, molding a radiant globe\n from the feeble sunshine that straggled through the fog-bank. With an\n abrupt motion he hurled it. The sun-globe vanished, as if the darkness\n had drunk it up, but though sight did not serve they both sensed that it\n had passed through to light up the depths beyond. For within the\n mountain something snapped suddenly alert—something alive yet not\n living, seeing yet blind. They felt light-sensitive cells tingle in\n response, felt electric currents sting along buried, long-idle\n circuits....", "There was no path. Now they were descending the steeper face of the\n sierra, and the way led over bottomless crevasses, sheer drops and sheer\n ascents, sheets of traitorous glare ice. Place after place had to be\n crossed on the air, and both grew weary with the effort such crossings\n cost. They hoarded their strength, helping one another; one alone might\n never have won through.\n\n\n It was starry night already when they saw the light from the Watcher's\n cave. The light shone watery and dim from beneath the hoary back of the\n glacier, and as they came nearer they saw why: the cave entrance was\n sealed by a sheet of ice, a frozen waterfall that fell motionless from\n the rocks above. They heard no sound.", "Together they plunged into the curtain of darkness.\nAt Var's thought command Neena froze instantly. \"Feel that!\" he\n muttered, and she, listening, sensed it too: the infinitesimal trickle\n of currents behind what appeared to be a blank tunnel wall, a rising\n potential that seemed to whisper\nReady ... ready....\nThe sun-globe floated behind them, casting light before them down the\n featureless tunnel that sloped always toward the mountain's heart. Var\n summoned it, and it drifted ahead, a dozen feet, a little more—\n\n\n Between wall and wall a blinding spindle of flame sprang into being,\n pulsed briefly with radiant energy that pained the eyes, and went out.\n The immaterial globe of light danced on before them.", "They plunged deeper into the mountain. And the shaking of the mountain\n increased with every step, its vibrations became sound, and its sound\n was like that of the terrible city which they had seen in the dream.\n Through the slow-rolling thunder of the hidden machines seemed to echo\n the death-cries of a billion slaves, the despair of all flesh and blood\n before their monstrous and inhuman power.\n\n\n Without warning, lights went on. Blinking in their glare, Var and Neena\n saw that fifty paces before them the way opened out into a great rounded\n room that was likewise ablaze with light. Cautiously they crept forward\n to the threshold of that chamber at the mountain's heart.", "Its roof was vaulted; its circular walls were lined with panels studded\n with gleaming control buttons, levers, colored lights. As they watched\n light flicked on and off in changing patterns, registering the\n progressive changes in the vast complex of mechanisms for which this\n must be the central control station. Behind those boards circuits opened\n and closed in bewildering confusion; the two invaders felt the rapid\n shifting of magnetic fields, the fury of electrons boiling in vacuum....\n\n\n For long moments they forgot the pursuit, forgot everything in wonder at\n this place whose remotest like they had never seen in the simplicity of\n their machineless culture. In all the brilliant space there was no life.\n They looked at one another, the same thought coming to both at once:\n perhaps, after two thousand years, the masters were dead after all, and\n only the machines remained? As if irresistibly drawn, they stepped over\n the threshold.", "Inside the cave it was warm as summer. Var saw with some surprise that\n all the walls were sheathed in ice—warm to the touch, bound fast\n against melting by the Watcher's will. Light blazed in reflections from\n the ice walls, till there was no shadow in the place. Behind them began\n a tinkling of falling water, thawed from the glacial ridges above to\n descend sheet-wise over the cave mouth, freezing as it fell into\n lengthening icicles. The old man gazed at his work for a moment, then\n turned questioningly to the young pair.\n\n\n \"We need a little rest out of the cold,\" said Var. \"And food, if you can\n spare it. We're pursued.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes. You shall have what I can give you. Make yourselves\n comfortable, and in one minute.... Pursued, eh? A pity. I see the world\n is as bad as it was when I was last in it.\"", "It poised motionless. For an instant the burning city lay mute; then the\n millions found voice. Some roared ferocious threats and curses; others\n cried desolately—\nwait!\nThen the whole city, the dark tumuli of its buildings and its leaping\n fires and tormented faces, and the black sky over it, seemed to twist\n and swim, like a scene under water when a great fish sweeps past, and\n the ship was gone.", "\"Wait,\" he commanded. While she waited he spun a dream, attaching it to\n the crags that loomed over the pass, and to the frozen ground underfoot.\n It was black night, as it would really be when Groz and his henchmen\n reached this place; lurid fire spewed from the Ryzga mountain, and\n strange lights dipped above it; and for good measure there was an\n avalanche in the dream, and hideous beasts rushed snapping and ravening\n from the crevices of the rock.\n\n\n \"Oh!\" cried Neena in involuntary alarm.\n\n\n Var sighed, shaking his head. \"It won't hold them for long, but it's the\n best I can do now. Come on.\"", "The two young people stared for a long minute, intrigued and fearful.\n Both had heard of this place, and the ancient who lived there to keep\n watch on the Ryzga mountain, as a part of the oldest legends of their\n childhood; but neither had been here before.\n\n\n But this was no time for shyness. Var eyed the ice-curtain closely to\n make sure that it was real, not dream-stuff; then he struck it boldly\n with his fist. It shattered and fell in a rain of splinters, sparkling\n in the light that poured from within.\nThey felt the Watcher rouse, heard his footsteps, and finally saw him—a\n shrunken old man, white-haired, with a lined beardless face. The sight\n of him, more marred by age than anyone they had ever seen before, was\n disappointing. They had expected something more—an ancient giant, a\n tower of wisdom and strength. The Watcher was four hundred years old;\n beside him even Groz, who had always seemed so ancient, was like a boy.", "Black starless night, a sky of rolling smoke above the greatest city\n that was ever built. Only the angry light of fires relieved the city's\n darkness—that, and the blue-white lightning flashes that silhouetted\n the naked skeletons of buildings and were followed by thunder and a\n shaking of the earth.\n\n\n Along lightless streets, half choked with rubble and with the dead,\n poured a mad, hating horde. The recurrent flashes lit scarred faces,\n naked bodies blackened and maimed from the hell of the workshops where\n the Ryzgas' might had been forged, eyes that stared white and half\n sightless from the glare of the furnaces, gnarled hands that now at long\n last clutched the weapons of the last rebellion—a rebellion without\n hope of new life on a world gutted and smoldering from the fulfilment of\n the Ryzgas' dream, without slogans other than a cry for blood.", "There was a liquid tinkling as the ice-curtain collapsed; the fresh\n breeze of morning swept into the cave. The youth beckoned to them, and\n they followed him outside.\n\n\n The glacial slope on which the cavern opened faced toward the mountain.\n It rose black and forbidding in the dawn as it had by sunset. To right\n and left of it, the grand cliffs, ocher and red, were lit splendidly by\n the morning sun, but the mountain of the Ryzgas drank in the light and\n gave nothing back.\n\n\n Below their feet the slope fell away into an opaque sea of fog, filling\n a mile-wide gorge. There was a sound of turbulent water, of a river\n dashed from rock to rock in its struggle toward the plain, but the\n curling fog hid everything.", "Var was staring in fascination at the Ryzga's face. It was a face formed\n by the custom of unquestioned command; yet it was lined by a deeply\n ingrained weariness, the signs of premature age—denied, overridden by\n the driving will they had sensed a moment earlier. It was a sick man's\n face.\n\n\n The Ryzga's final thought clicked into place:\nDecision!\nHe turned\n toward the switchboard behind him, reaching with practised certainty for\n one spot upon it.\n\n\n Neena screamed.\n\n\n Between the Ryzga and the control panel a nightmare shape reared up\n seven feet tall, flapping black amorphous limbs and flashing red eyes\n and white fangs. The Ryzga recoiled, and the weapon in his hand came up.\n There was an instantaneous glare like heat lightning, and the monster\n crumpled in on itself, twitched briefly and vanished.", "Before them death waited around the citadel where the masters still\n fought. All round, from the lowest and most poisonous levels of the\n shattered city, the slaves swarmed up in their millions. And the\n lightning blazed, and the city howled and screamed and burned.\n\n\n Then, unbelievably, the thunder fell silent, and the silence swept\n outward like a wave, from ruined street to street. The mouths that had\n shouted their wrath were speechless, and the rage-blinded eyes were\n lifted in sudden awe. From the center, over the citadel, an immense\n white globe soared upward, rising swiftly without sound.\n\n\n They had never seen its like, but they knew. It was the last starship,\n and it was leaving.", "But in that moment a light of inspiration had flashed upon Var, and it\n remained. As the Ryzga stretched out his hand again, Var acted. The\n Ryzga froze, teetering off balance and almost falling, as a numbing grip\n closed down on all his motor nerves.\n\n\n Holding that grip, Var strode across the floor and looked straight into\n the Ryzga's frantic eyes. They glared back at him with such hatred and\n such evil that for an instant he almost faltered. But the Ryzga's\n efforts, as he strove to free himself from the neural hold, were as\n misdirected and unavailing as those of a child who has not learned to\n wrestle with the mind.", "There was a clang of metal like a signal. Halfway up the wall opposite,\n above a narrow ramp that descended between the instrument panels, a\n massive doorway swung wide, and in its opening a figure stood.\n\n\n Var and Neena huddled frozenly, half expecting each instant to be their\n last. And the Ryzga too stood motionless, looking down at them.\nHe was a man of middle height and stocky build, clad in a garment of\n changing colors, of fabric delicate as dream-stuff. In his right hand,\n with the care one uses with a weapon, he grasped a gleaming metal tube;\n his other hand rested as for support against the frame of the doorway.\n That, and his movements when he came slowly down the ramp toward them,\n conveyed a queer suggestion of weariness or weakness, as if he were yet\n not wholly roused from his two millenia of slumber. But the Ryzga's\n manner and his mind radiated a consciousness of power, a pride and\n assurance of self that smote them like a numbing blow.", "The Watcher peered at them in turn. \"Welcome,\" he said in a cracked\n voice. He did not speak again; the rest of his conversation was in\n thought only. \"Welcome indeed. I am too much alone here.\"\n\n\n \"You were asleep!\" said Var. Shock made his thought accusing, though he\n had not meant to be.\n\n\n The old man grinned toothlessly. \"Never fear. Asleep or awake, I watch.\n Come in! You're letting in the wind.\"", "Neena shivered, even though the surrounding cold could not reach her.\n The ice-wind blew from the glacier, but Var's love was round her as a\n warming cloak, a cloak that glowed softly golden in the deepening\n twilight, even as her love was about him.\n\n\n Var said, \"The Watcher's cave should be three miles beyond this pass.\"\n He stood rigid, trying to catch an echo of the Watcher's thoughts, but\n there was nothing. Perhaps the old man was resting. From the other\n direction, the long way that they two had come, it was not difficult to\n sense the thought of Groz. That thought was powerful, and heavy with\n vengeance.\n\n\n \"Hurry,\" said Neena. \"They're closer than they were an hour ago.\"", "Var strove to cry out that there was no time, that Groz was near and\n that sleep was for infants and the aged, but his intention sank and\n drowned under wave upon wave of unconquerable languor. The bright cave\n swam and dissolved; his eyelids closed.\nVar woke. Daylight glimmered through the ice of the cave mouth. He had\n been unconscious, helpless, for hours! At the thought of that, panic\n gripped him. He had not slept since childhood, and he had forgotten how\n it was.\n\n\n He came to his feet in one quick movement, realizing in that action that\n sleep had refreshed his mind and body—realizing also that a footstep\n had wakened him. Across the cave he faced a young man who watched him\n coolly with dark piercing eyes that were familiar though he did not know\n the face.\n\n\n Neena sat up and stifled a cry of fright. Var growled, \"Who are you?\n Where's the Watcher?\"", "Var had guessed right. When Neena in her terror had flung a dream\n monster into the Ryzga's way—a mere child's bogey out of a fairy\n tale—the Ryzga had not recognized it as such, but had taken it for a\n real being. Var laughed aloud, and with great care, as one communicates\n with an infant, he projected his thoughts into the other's mind. \"There\n will be no new beginning for you in\nour\nworld, Ryzga! In two thousand\n years, we've learned some new things. Now at last I understand why you\n built so many machines, such complicated arrangements of matter and\n energy to do simple tasks—it was because you knew no other way.\"", "The stunned paralysis fell apart in fury. Flame towered over the\n citadel. The hordes ran and shrieked again toward the central inferno,\n and the city burned and burned....\nVar blinked dazedly in the shadowless glow of the ice-cave. His arm\n tightened about Neena till she gasped. He was momentarily uncertain that\n he and she were real and here, such had been the force of the dream, a\n vision of such scope and reality as Var had never seen—no, lived\n through—before. With deep respect now he gazed upon the bent old man\n who was the Mountain Watcher." ] ]
train	99921	[ "How does the photographer capture their subjects in a certain way?", "How does the photographer feel about dark rooms?", "How does the photographer contribute to free culture?", "How does the photographer feel about Larry Lessing?", "How does the photographer imagine photos with a CC license will be used?", "When does Creative Commons get complicated?" ]	[ [ "They photograph subjects who are feeling very nervous. It makes the images more lively.", "They photograph subjects who are unaware the photographer is in the room. It's the only way to get truly natural-looking photos.", "They continually shoot photos while conversing with their subjects. This distracts the subjects from the camera and results in a subject looking very natural.", "They photograph people when they are in high-pressure situations. The subjects look super focused in the photos." ], [ "Darkrooms don't make sense anymore with today's technology.", "They are a darkroom geek.", "Darkrooms are not all that exciting.", "Doing the wet work in the darkroom will always produce a superior picture." ], [ "They share their photos through Creative Commons.", "They are a board member of Creative Commons.", "They share their personal image through Creative Commons.", "They are the CEO of Creative Commons." ], [ "Larry is a great guy. They are a huge fan.", "Larry is a disarming guy. ", "Larry is a frustrating guy.", "Larry is a nervous guy." ], [ "On billboards", "In memes", "In textbooks and mainstream media articles.", "In TV commercials" ], [ "Advertisement", "Human images", "Derivative creative works", "Original creative works" ] ]	[ 3, 1, 4, 1, 3, 2 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "someone’s soul from his or her image. There are a lot of things that\n make this hard. A lot of people are uncomfortable in front of a camera,\n or might make expressions that aren’t very natural for them. And if the\n person is nervous, it’s very difficult to try to see what it is that\n you’re trying to capture.\nA lot of what I’m doing is, I just start shooting photos. After half an\n hour of having their picture taken, people start to ignore you. Or I’ll\n take pictures when I’m talking to people about what they’re doing, so\n after a while they get distracted by the conversation and forget about\n the camera. That’s something that I’m not perfect at, but I’m getting\n better.\nI think good photographers are also able to disarm people through", "Just another free soul\nIn his foreword to the book, Lessig writes that you understand your subjects “by learning to see them in a certain way.” What is that certain way?\nI think I’m trying to get a mental image of a person, certain\n expressions, or what I think that person is about. I’m trying to capture\n what I think they look like, which is many times a minority of their\n typical expressions, or their typical stance. So, if I’m taking pictures\n of Larry [Lessig], I want to have his signature hand gestures, and not\n just random ones.\nI think I’m trying to capture pictures of people that help others see\n what they’re about. Some photographers will make someone look the way\n the photographer wants them to look, and not the way they appear, so\n they’ll pick the one picture out of 100 where the guy looks more", "egotistical than he really is. Some photographers are almost medical,\n and are going after a perfect portrait. I’m somewhere in between.\nIt’s amazing how many people will upload snapshots of people where the\n pictures don’t look like them at all. To me, uploading a picture that is\n not an easily recognizable picture of that person defeats the point,\n which I’m working toward, to try to express who they are. On the other\n hand, professional photographers usually have a subject whom they don’t\n know personally, so they end up having to try to capture an image that\n they’ve created based on who they think the person is or how they want\n that person to appear. You know how sculptors often say that they’re\n just freeing an image from a block? What I’m trying to do is free", "conversation, but still, it’s difficult to have a disarming conversation\n with somebody you don’t know, or to make them laugh. Many times people\n make a face for me that they wouldn’t make for a professional\n photographer.\nFor instance, a board meeting picture, like the one with Eric Saltzman:\n that was during a very tense discussion. I’ve found that people are at\n their most animated at these kinds of meetings, and look the most alive\n when they are under a lot of pressure, and super- focused. But usually\n if an outsider is in the room, they won’t get into that. I mean, it\n would be difficult for a cameraman to be in a room where a board is\n having a heated debate.\nBut those are the things that I’m trying to capture, because most people", "of these people don’t have any free photos of themselves on the web, so\n while they are “notable” on Wikipedia, their images aren’t free of the\n copyright of the photographer, or the institution who hired the\n photographer to take the picture. Often, even the subject of the article\n can’t make an image available to the Wikimedia/Wikipedia community.\nThis means that a lot of people who have a Net presence have a legally\n encumbered Net presence. People who are invited to conferences get asked\n all the time, “By the way, do you have a photo that we can use?” But\n they don’t. By making these pictures available under a Creative Commons\n license, now they do. This is solving the issue of legal freedom.\nThe third part of the pun is that, since I’m asking for a model release", "photography books and photographs and are probably providing an\n increasing revenue stream for professional photographers. I think most\n amateurs, including myself, are paying homage to the professionals and\n not trying to “compete” with them.\nDespite the existence of social software, what is still important about meeting people face-to-face?\nFor me, the right way to use a lot of the new social software is by\n making it easier to spend more physical time with the people you like\n best. Dopplr is a great example. When\n I visit a city, I will see all of the people who are in the city at the\n same time. When I went to London awhile ago, there were 47 people I knew\n in London, and a huge percentage of those people don’t live there. I\n would bet that more than half of the photos in this book are pictures of", "from the subjects, I’m asking everyone to be much more open and giving\n about their image than most people typically are. I’m giving, you’re\n giving, we’re all giving to participate and to try to create this\n wonderful work, and allow others to create derivative works.\nOf course people can abuse that, just like they can abuse anything. But\n I want people to see the value in sharing over the fear in sharing. The\n fact is, it’s much more likely that somebody is going to use these\n pictures for something positive, rather than for something negative. The\n benefits greatly outweigh the risks. I think we spend way too much of\n our lives worrying about the risks, at the cost of a lot of the\n benefits.\nThis is a celebration of all of the people who are willing to give. In a", "friends, and they’re not in their hometown.\nThat’s the really interesting thing that is happening right now: it’s\n really increasing your ability to spend quality time with, actually, a\n smaller number of people. It allows you to actively filter. Your\n meetings don’t have to be random. If I look at the list of people in\n this book, although there are some obvious people missing whom I didn’t\n see last year, probably met more of my friends last year, my real\n friends, than I’ve met in any other year. I know my travels were crazy,\n but I think that the online world has allowed me to do that.\nWhat’s great about photography is that it captures the moment that I was\n sharing with that person. It’s not just a connection on a social network\n online, which is really pretty binary. I can look at all these photos", "don’t get to see that. At the Creative Commons board meeting, Larry\n asked me to put the camera away after awhile [laughs] because it was\n distracting. We were having a very heated discussion and I was taking\n all of these pictures. But he credited me later because afterward those\n pictures turned out the best.\nIn your mind, what is a ‘Freesoul’ ?\nA freesoul is somewhat of a pun. On the one hand it means you are free,\n liberated. You, as a human spirit, are open. And then, it also has the\n meaning that you are unencumbered legally, that you are free, as in\n ‘free software.’\nThere’s a paradox: with many people’s Wikipedia\n articles to which I’ve contributed, when it comes to the picture, many", "another thing, though, about this book: the number of\n professional-quality amateurs has increased significantly due to the\n importance of digital in both professional and high-end amateur\n photography I hate to say it, a lot of people love the darkroom, but it\n really feels like the death of the darkroom with this year.\nWith new 22 megapixel cameras coming in under $10,000, and Lightroom\n and some of this software at a couple hundred dollars, it doesn’t really\n make sense, except for particularly fussy artists, to do wet-work\n anymore. If you’re a commercial photographer or a high-end amateur, you\n can do anything you used to do in the darkroom. I think it has really\n lowered the bar. I don’t know how that affects the industry directly,\n but for me, it bridged a huge gap.", "and remember exactly what we were doing, what we were eating, what we\n were drinking, what we were talking about, and to me that’s a much more\n rich experience.\nIt’s the combination of social software and photography. For me, reality\n is “the present” plus what you remember from the past. I think this\n project is really sharing memories with people. Blog posts contribute as\n well, but to me photography is a really good way of doing that. When I\n look at the expressions, I remember the moment and get a sense of\n presence.\nI think the main problem for me is the environmental impact of flying\n around. Just as I never believed that we would have a paperless office,\n being able to connect with people through social software mostly\n increases your travel, it doesn’t decrease it. It is great because you", "way, giving up your image and allowing anyone to use it: it’s the\n ultimate gift. In one way it’s kind of vain. [laughs] But in another\n way it’s wonderful. A Wikipedia article on some person but with no\n picture is sad.\nBesides Wikipedia, how do you imagine these photos being used?\nThey can be used in textbooks and in mainstream media articles about the\n person. Now they can get a picture that represents the person, at least\n from my perspective. That said, I shouldn’t be the only person doing\n this. More people should do the same, and make the photographs available\n freely. For one, I feel that “free” CC licensed photos have a much\n higher chance of not disappearing. But I don’t know exactly how these\n photos are going to be used, so in a sense I’m curious. For example,", "balance between business and the non-business elements of the movement\n is essential. My job is to keep that focus and maintain that balance.\n Also, CC needs to run smoothly as an organization and there is a lot of\n operational work that we all need to do. My photography is a way for me\n to participate in a small measure on the creative side of the Free\n Culture movement, and helps me see things from that perspective as well.\nHowever, I believe in emergent democracy and the importance of trying to\n celebrate the community more than the heroes. Of course, I’m a huge fan\n of Larry’s and I have great respect for the leaders of our movement. But\n more than anything, I’m thankful for and respectful of all of the\n participants who aren’t so well known and who are essential to moving\n everything forward.", "kicking myself because it was terrible. But then the Leica M8 came out,\n and I bought one at the beginning of 2007. The M8 really got me to where\n I could use my old gear, and it had enough megapixels to be as good as\n some film.\nAnother way of saying it was that there was a gear breakthrough at the\n beginning of last year. Okay, that’s pretty materialistic! So there was\n a technology breakthrough, let’s call it that, that allowed me to switch\n completely away from film, and I think this happened to a lot of\n photographers. It caused an explosion of content and an increase in the\n quality of content on sites like Flickr. It has\n allowed amateurs to create a business model with professionals.\n Interestingly, I think these new high-end amateurs are buying more", "recently I received the Harvard Berkman Center pamphlet. It was a report\n of what they’re doing, and they also had a bunch of my pictures in\n there. They all had attribution, and it made me feel really good. There\n were pictures of different Berkman Center members that I had taken in\n various places all over the world. I think that the subject is probably\n happy with this, and I’m happy, and the Berkman Center’s happy because\n they’re not all pictures of people sitting at desks in the Berkman\n Center. There’s one more important thing: Creative Commons is great for\n original creative works or derivative creative works, but when it\n involves human images, it gets very complicated. We all know the Virgin\n Mobile case, where Virgin used CC licensed images in an advertisement\n without getting permission from the models, and got in trouble. What", "I used to be darkroom geek. I loved my darkroom, and even when I didn’t\n have my darkroom anymore, I still was shooting 6x6 Hasselblad 120 film\n and processing it in a special lab, and then digitizing it. For me, that\n film was it. You could never get as good as medium-format film or\n large-format film\nAt the time, the digital Hasselblad backs were too expensive, and were\n still not as good as 8x10 film. So there was this whole period where the\n darkroom was not all that exciting, but the digital wasn’t perfect. I\n went through a limbo period. I had invested so much in my Hasselblad\n system, and my Leica M6 set. I had bought the Leica R8, but I was", "science and technology to promote sharing in research. And as of now, we\n have the license ported to at least 44 jurisdictions, and the number of\n countries with projects continues to grow. In many ways, the movement\n outside of the United States has become much bigger than the movement in\n the United States. Although the United States is still slightly farther\n ahead in terms of commercialization, the size of the whole free culture\n movement outside of the United States is huge now. The CC China Photo\n exhibit was just amazing. There were some great\n images, and a lot of the photographers were professionals. This is\n beyond what anybody has done in the US. A lot of the progress that we’re\n making is international.\nWhat are your personal realizations or experiences?\nWell, we’re all getting old, if you look at these pictures. But there’s", "get to meet all these people. But it is bad for the environment, and bad\n for our jet lag.\nHow would you characterize your contributions to free culture?\nI think it’s mostly incremental. I think there is very little we\n actually do all by ourselves, and I hate saying, “I did this” or “I did\n that.” I think that in most cases, focusing on individual contributions\n or achievements undervalues the importance of everyone else involved.\nHaving said that, I think my main contribution is probably in supporting\n Creative Commons as a fan, board member, chairman of the board and now\n CEO. I think CC has a significant role, and helping to keep it on track\n and growing is probably the single most important role that I have in\n Free Culture.\nSpecifically, I think that trying to keep an international focus and a", "Personally, I don’t think it’s ultimately meaningful to talk about one\n individual’s personal contribution to any movement. The real meaning is\n in the whole movement. I’m just one participant. Just another free soul.", "released their album, Ghost, under a Creative Commons license. The list\n goes on. Many people are asking: can you make money and share? The\n answer is, yes. CC is becoming an important part of the business\n discussion.\nBut one thing that happens when a movement like CC becomes a business\n thing, is that a lot of the pioneers fade into the background, and it\n becomes a part of industry. This happened to the Internet. And so while\n you still have the core people who still remember and hold the torch for\n the philosophical side, the Internet has become much more of a business.\n Now, when you go to many Internet conferences, it’s mostly salesmen in\n attendance.\nI believe that the success of the Internet has two parts. The first part\n is the market- driven business side, which has made the Internet" ], [ "another thing, though, about this book: the number of\n professional-quality amateurs has increased significantly due to the\n importance of digital in both professional and high-end amateur\n photography I hate to say it, a lot of people love the darkroom, but it\n really feels like the death of the darkroom with this year.\nWith new 22 megapixel cameras coming in under $10,000, and Lightroom\n and some of this software at a couple hundred dollars, it doesn’t really\n make sense, except for particularly fussy artists, to do wet-work\n anymore. If you’re a commercial photographer or a high-end amateur, you\n can do anything you used to do in the darkroom. I think it has really\n lowered the bar. I don’t know how that affects the industry directly,\n but for me, it bridged a huge gap.", "someone’s soul from his or her image. There are a lot of things that\n make this hard. A lot of people are uncomfortable in front of a camera,\n or might make expressions that aren’t very natural for them. And if the\n person is nervous, it’s very difficult to try to see what it is that\n you’re trying to capture.\nA lot of what I’m doing is, I just start shooting photos. After half an\n hour of having their picture taken, people start to ignore you. Or I’ll\n take pictures when I’m talking to people about what they’re doing, so\n after a while they get distracted by the conversation and forget about\n the camera. That’s something that I’m not perfect at, but I’m getting\n better.\nI think good photographers are also able to disarm people through", "I used to be darkroom geek. I loved my darkroom, and even when I didn’t\n have my darkroom anymore, I still was shooting 6x6 Hasselblad 120 film\n and processing it in a special lab, and then digitizing it. For me, that\n film was it. You could never get as good as medium-format film or\n large-format film\nAt the time, the digital Hasselblad backs were too expensive, and were\n still not as good as 8x10 film. So there was this whole period where the\n darkroom was not all that exciting, but the digital wasn’t perfect. I\n went through a limbo period. I had invested so much in my Hasselblad\n system, and my Leica M6 set. I had bought the Leica R8, but I was", "conversation, but still, it’s difficult to have a disarming conversation\n with somebody you don’t know, or to make them laugh. Many times people\n make a face for me that they wouldn’t make for a professional\n photographer.\nFor instance, a board meeting picture, like the one with Eric Saltzman:\n that was during a very tense discussion. I’ve found that people are at\n their most animated at these kinds of meetings, and look the most alive\n when they are under a lot of pressure, and super- focused. But usually\n if an outsider is in the room, they won’t get into that. I mean, it\n would be difficult for a cameraman to be in a room where a board is\n having a heated debate.\nBut those are the things that I’m trying to capture, because most people", "Just another free soul\nIn his foreword to the book, Lessig writes that you understand your subjects “by learning to see them in a certain way.” What is that certain way?\nI think I’m trying to get a mental image of a person, certain\n expressions, or what I think that person is about. I’m trying to capture\n what I think they look like, which is many times a minority of their\n typical expressions, or their typical stance. So, if I’m taking pictures\n of Larry [Lessig], I want to have his signature hand gestures, and not\n just random ones.\nI think I’m trying to capture pictures of people that help others see\n what they’re about. Some photographers will make someone look the way\n the photographer wants them to look, and not the way they appear, so\n they’ll pick the one picture out of 100 where the guy looks more", "egotistical than he really is. Some photographers are almost medical,\n and are going after a perfect portrait. I’m somewhere in between.\nIt’s amazing how many people will upload snapshots of people where the\n pictures don’t look like them at all. To me, uploading a picture that is\n not an easily recognizable picture of that person defeats the point,\n which I’m working toward, to try to express who they are. On the other\n hand, professional photographers usually have a subject whom they don’t\n know personally, so they end up having to try to capture an image that\n they’ve created based on who they think the person is or how they want\n that person to appear. You know how sculptors often say that they’re\n just freeing an image from a block? What I’m trying to do is free", "photography books and photographs and are probably providing an\n increasing revenue stream for professional photographers. I think most\n amateurs, including myself, are paying homage to the professionals and\n not trying to “compete” with them.\nDespite the existence of social software, what is still important about meeting people face-to-face?\nFor me, the right way to use a lot of the new social software is by\n making it easier to spend more physical time with the people you like\n best. Dopplr is a great example. When\n I visit a city, I will see all of the people who are in the city at the\n same time. When I went to London awhile ago, there were 47 people I knew\n in London, and a huge percentage of those people don’t live there. I\n would bet that more than half of the photos in this book are pictures of", "don’t get to see that. At the Creative Commons board meeting, Larry\n asked me to put the camera away after awhile [laughs] because it was\n distracting. We were having a very heated discussion and I was taking\n all of these pictures. But he credited me later because afterward those\n pictures turned out the best.\nIn your mind, what is a ‘Freesoul’ ?\nA freesoul is somewhat of a pun. On the one hand it means you are free,\n liberated. You, as a human spirit, are open. And then, it also has the\n meaning that you are unencumbered legally, that you are free, as in\n ‘free software.’\nThere’s a paradox: with many people’s Wikipedia\n articles to which I’ve contributed, when it comes to the picture, many", "and remember exactly what we were doing, what we were eating, what we\n were drinking, what we were talking about, and to me that’s a much more\n rich experience.\nIt’s the combination of social software and photography. For me, reality\n is “the present” plus what you remember from the past. I think this\n project is really sharing memories with people. Blog posts contribute as\n well, but to me photography is a really good way of doing that. When I\n look at the expressions, I remember the moment and get a sense of\n presence.\nI think the main problem for me is the environmental impact of flying\n around. Just as I never believed that we would have a paperless office,\n being able to connect with people through social software mostly\n increases your travel, it doesn’t decrease it. It is great because you", "kicking myself because it was terrible. But then the Leica M8 came out,\n and I bought one at the beginning of 2007. The M8 really got me to where\n I could use my old gear, and it had enough megapixels to be as good as\n some film.\nAnother way of saying it was that there was a gear breakthrough at the\n beginning of last year. Okay, that’s pretty materialistic! So there was\n a technology breakthrough, let’s call it that, that allowed me to switch\n completely away from film, and I think this happened to a lot of\n photographers. It caused an explosion of content and an increase in the\n quality of content on sites like Flickr. It has\n allowed amateurs to create a business model with professionals.\n Interestingly, I think these new high-end amateurs are buying more", "balance between business and the non-business elements of the movement\n is essential. My job is to keep that focus and maintain that balance.\n Also, CC needs to run smoothly as an organization and there is a lot of\n operational work that we all need to do. My photography is a way for me\n to participate in a small measure on the creative side of the Free\n Culture movement, and helps me see things from that perspective as well.\nHowever, I believe in emergent democracy and the importance of trying to\n celebrate the community more than the heroes. Of course, I’m a huge fan\n of Larry’s and I have great respect for the leaders of our movement. But\n more than anything, I’m thankful for and respectful of all of the\n participants who aren’t so well known and who are essential to moving\n everything forward.", "of these people don’t have any free photos of themselves on the web, so\n while they are “notable” on Wikipedia, their images aren’t free of the\n copyright of the photographer, or the institution who hired the\n photographer to take the picture. Often, even the subject of the article\n can’t make an image available to the Wikimedia/Wikipedia community.\nThis means that a lot of people who have a Net presence have a legally\n encumbered Net presence. People who are invited to conferences get asked\n all the time, “By the way, do you have a photo that we can use?” But\n they don’t. By making these pictures available under a Creative Commons\n license, now they do. This is solving the issue of legal freedom.\nThe third part of the pun is that, since I’m asking for a model release", "friends, and they’re not in their hometown.\nThat’s the really interesting thing that is happening right now: it’s\n really increasing your ability to spend quality time with, actually, a\n smaller number of people. It allows you to actively filter. Your\n meetings don’t have to be random. If I look at the list of people in\n this book, although there are some obvious people missing whom I didn’t\n see last year, probably met more of my friends last year, my real\n friends, than I’ve met in any other year. I know my travels were crazy,\n but I think that the online world has allowed me to do that.\nWhat’s great about photography is that it captures the moment that I was\n sharing with that person. It’s not just a connection on a social network\n online, which is really pretty binary. I can look at all these photos", "from the subjects, I’m asking everyone to be much more open and giving\n about their image than most people typically are. I’m giving, you’re\n giving, we’re all giving to participate and to try to create this\n wonderful work, and allow others to create derivative works.\nOf course people can abuse that, just like they can abuse anything. But\n I want people to see the value in sharing over the fear in sharing. The\n fact is, it’s much more likely that somebody is going to use these\n pictures for something positive, rather than for something negative. The\n benefits greatly outweigh the risks. I think we spend way too much of\n our lives worrying about the risks, at the cost of a lot of the\n benefits.\nThis is a celebration of all of the people who are willing to give. In a", "way, giving up your image and allowing anyone to use it: it’s the\n ultimate gift. In one way it’s kind of vain. [laughs] But in another\n way it’s wonderful. A Wikipedia article on some person but with no\n picture is sad.\nBesides Wikipedia, how do you imagine these photos being used?\nThey can be used in textbooks and in mainstream media articles about the\n person. Now they can get a picture that represents the person, at least\n from my perspective. That said, I shouldn’t be the only person doing\n this. More people should do the same, and make the photographs available\n freely. For one, I feel that “free” CC licensed photos have a much\n higher chance of not disappearing. But I don’t know exactly how these\n photos are going to be used, so in a sense I’m curious. For example,", "recently I received the Harvard Berkman Center pamphlet. It was a report\n of what they’re doing, and they also had a bunch of my pictures in\n there. They all had attribution, and it made me feel really good. There\n were pictures of different Berkman Center members that I had taken in\n various places all over the world. I think that the subject is probably\n happy with this, and I’m happy, and the Berkman Center’s happy because\n they’re not all pictures of people sitting at desks in the Berkman\n Center. There’s one more important thing: Creative Commons is great for\n original creative works or derivative creative works, but when it\n involves human images, it gets very complicated. We all know the Virgin\n Mobile case, where Virgin used CC licensed images in an advertisement\n without getting permission from the models, and got in trouble. What", "science and technology to promote sharing in research. And as of now, we\n have the license ported to at least 44 jurisdictions, and the number of\n countries with projects continues to grow. In many ways, the movement\n outside of the United States has become much bigger than the movement in\n the United States. Although the United States is still slightly farther\n ahead in terms of commercialization, the size of the whole free culture\n movement outside of the United States is huge now. The CC China Photo\n exhibit was just amazing. There were some great\n images, and a lot of the photographers were professionals. This is\n beyond what anybody has done in the US. A lot of the progress that we’re\n making is international.\nWhat are your personal realizations or experiences?\nWell, we’re all getting old, if you look at these pictures. But there’s", "Personally, I don’t think it’s ultimately meaningful to talk about one\n individual’s personal contribution to any movement. The real meaning is\n in the whole movement. I’m just one participant. Just another free soul.", "get to meet all these people. But it is bad for the environment, and bad\n for our jet lag.\nHow would you characterize your contributions to free culture?\nI think it’s mostly incremental. I think there is very little we\n actually do all by ourselves, and I hate saying, “I did this” or “I did\n that.” I think that in most cases, focusing on individual contributions\n or achievements undervalues the importance of everyone else involved.\nHaving said that, I think my main contribution is probably in supporting\n Creative Commons as a fan, board member, chairman of the board and now\n CEO. I think CC has a significant role, and helping to keep it on track\n and growing is probably the single most important role that I have in\n Free Culture.\nSpecifically, I think that trying to keep an international focus and a", "released their album, Ghost, under a Creative Commons license. The list\n goes on. Many people are asking: can you make money and share? The\n answer is, yes. CC is becoming an important part of the business\n discussion.\nBut one thing that happens when a movement like CC becomes a business\n thing, is that a lot of the pioneers fade into the background, and it\n becomes a part of industry. This happened to the Internet. And so while\n you still have the core people who still remember and hold the torch for\n the philosophical side, the Internet has become much more of a business.\n Now, when you go to many Internet conferences, it’s mostly salesmen in\n attendance.\nI believe that the success of the Internet has two parts. The first part\n is the market- driven business side, which has made the Internet" ], [ "of these people don’t have any free photos of themselves on the web, so\n while they are “notable” on Wikipedia, their images aren’t free of the\n copyright of the photographer, or the institution who hired the\n photographer to take the picture. Often, even the subject of the article\n can’t make an image available to the Wikimedia/Wikipedia community.\nThis means that a lot of people who have a Net presence have a legally\n encumbered Net presence. People who are invited to conferences get asked\n all the time, “By the way, do you have a photo that we can use?” But\n they don’t. By making these pictures available under a Creative Commons\n license, now they do. This is solving the issue of legal freedom.\nThe third part of the pun is that, since I’m asking for a model release", "don’t get to see that. At the Creative Commons board meeting, Larry\n asked me to put the camera away after awhile [laughs] because it was\n distracting. We were having a very heated discussion and I was taking\n all of these pictures. But he credited me later because afterward those\n pictures turned out the best.\nIn your mind, what is a ‘Freesoul’ ?\nA freesoul is somewhat of a pun. On the one hand it means you are free,\n liberated. You, as a human spirit, are open. And then, it also has the\n meaning that you are unencumbered legally, that you are free, as in\n ‘free software.’\nThere’s a paradox: with many people’s Wikipedia\n articles to which I’ve contributed, when it comes to the picture, many", "balance between business and the non-business elements of the movement\n is essential. My job is to keep that focus and maintain that balance.\n Also, CC needs to run smoothly as an organization and there is a lot of\n operational work that we all need to do. My photography is a way for me\n to participate in a small measure on the creative side of the Free\n Culture movement, and helps me see things from that perspective as well.\nHowever, I believe in emergent democracy and the importance of trying to\n celebrate the community more than the heroes. Of course, I’m a huge fan\n of Larry’s and I have great respect for the leaders of our movement. But\n more than anything, I’m thankful for and respectful of all of the\n participants who aren’t so well known and who are essential to moving\n everything forward.", "get to meet all these people. But it is bad for the environment, and bad\n for our jet lag.\nHow would you characterize your contributions to free culture?\nI think it’s mostly incremental. I think there is very little we\n actually do all by ourselves, and I hate saying, “I did this” or “I did\n that.” I think that in most cases, focusing on individual contributions\n or achievements undervalues the importance of everyone else involved.\nHaving said that, I think my main contribution is probably in supporting\n Creative Commons as a fan, board member, chairman of the board and now\n CEO. I think CC has a significant role, and helping to keep it on track\n and growing is probably the single most important role that I have in\n Free Culture.\nSpecifically, I think that trying to keep an international focus and a", "way, giving up your image and allowing anyone to use it: it’s the\n ultimate gift. In one way it’s kind of vain. [laughs] But in another\n way it’s wonderful. A Wikipedia article on some person but with no\n picture is sad.\nBesides Wikipedia, how do you imagine these photos being used?\nThey can be used in textbooks and in mainstream media articles about the\n person. Now they can get a picture that represents the person, at least\n from my perspective. That said, I shouldn’t be the only person doing\n this. More people should do the same, and make the photographs available\n freely. For one, I feel that “free” CC licensed photos have a much\n higher chance of not disappearing. But I don’t know exactly how these\n photos are going to be used, so in a sense I’m curious. For example,", "from the subjects, I’m asking everyone to be much more open and giving\n about their image than most people typically are. I’m giving, you’re\n giving, we’re all giving to participate and to try to create this\n wonderful work, and allow others to create derivative works.\nOf course people can abuse that, just like they can abuse anything. But\n I want people to see the value in sharing over the fear in sharing. The\n fact is, it’s much more likely that somebody is going to use these\n pictures for something positive, rather than for something negative. The\n benefits greatly outweigh the risks. I think we spend way too much of\n our lives worrying about the risks, at the cost of a lot of the\n benefits.\nThis is a celebration of all of the people who are willing to give. In a", "science and technology to promote sharing in research. And as of now, we\n have the license ported to at least 44 jurisdictions, and the number of\n countries with projects continues to grow. In many ways, the movement\n outside of the United States has become much bigger than the movement in\n the United States. Although the United States is still slightly farther\n ahead in terms of commercialization, the size of the whole free culture\n movement outside of the United States is huge now. The CC China Photo\n exhibit was just amazing. There were some great\n images, and a lot of the photographers were professionals. This is\n beyond what anybody has done in the US. A lot of the progress that we’re\n making is international.\nWhat are your personal realizations or experiences?\nWell, we’re all getting old, if you look at these pictures. But there’s", "Just another free soul\nIn his foreword to the book, Lessig writes that you understand your subjects “by learning to see them in a certain way.” What is that certain way?\nI think I’m trying to get a mental image of a person, certain\n expressions, or what I think that person is about. I’m trying to capture\n what I think they look like, which is many times a minority of their\n typical expressions, or their typical stance. So, if I’m taking pictures\n of Larry [Lessig], I want to have his signature hand gestures, and not\n just random ones.\nI think I’m trying to capture pictures of people that help others see\n what they’re about. Some photographers will make someone look the way\n the photographer wants them to look, and not the way they appear, so\n they’ll pick the one picture out of 100 where the guy looks more", "photography books and photographs and are probably providing an\n increasing revenue stream for professional photographers. I think most\n amateurs, including myself, are paying homage to the professionals and\n not trying to “compete” with them.\nDespite the existence of social software, what is still important about meeting people face-to-face?\nFor me, the right way to use a lot of the new social software is by\n making it easier to spend more physical time with the people you like\n best. Dopplr is a great example. When\n I visit a city, I will see all of the people who are in the city at the\n same time. When I went to London awhile ago, there were 47 people I knew\n in London, and a huge percentage of those people don’t live there. I\n would bet that more than half of the photos in this book are pictures of", "egotistical than he really is. Some photographers are almost medical,\n and are going after a perfect portrait. I’m somewhere in between.\nIt’s amazing how many people will upload snapshots of people where the\n pictures don’t look like them at all. To me, uploading a picture that is\n not an easily recognizable picture of that person defeats the point,\n which I’m working toward, to try to express who they are. On the other\n hand, professional photographers usually have a subject whom they don’t\n know personally, so they end up having to try to capture an image that\n they’ve created based on who they think the person is or how they want\n that person to appear. You know how sculptors often say that they’re\n just freeing an image from a block? What I’m trying to do is free", "released their album, Ghost, under a Creative Commons license. The list\n goes on. Many people are asking: can you make money and share? The\n answer is, yes. CC is becoming an important part of the business\n discussion.\nBut one thing that happens when a movement like CC becomes a business\n thing, is that a lot of the pioneers fade into the background, and it\n becomes a part of industry. This happened to the Internet. And so while\n you still have the core people who still remember and hold the torch for\n the philosophical side, the Internet has become much more of a business.\n Now, when you go to many Internet conferences, it’s mostly salesmen in\n attendance.\nI believe that the success of the Internet has two parts. The first part\n is the market- driven business side, which has made the Internet", "recently I received the Harvard Berkman Center pamphlet. It was a report\n of what they’re doing, and they also had a bunch of my pictures in\n there. They all had attribution, and it made me feel really good. There\n were pictures of different Berkman Center members that I had taken in\n various places all over the world. I think that the subject is probably\n happy with this, and I’m happy, and the Berkman Center’s happy because\n they’re not all pictures of people sitting at desks in the Berkman\n Center. There’s one more important thing: Creative Commons is great for\n original creative works or derivative creative works, but when it\n involves human images, it gets very complicated. We all know the Virgin\n Mobile case, where Virgin used CC licensed images in an advertisement\n without getting permission from the models, and got in trouble. What", "Personally, I don’t think it’s ultimately meaningful to talk about one\n individual’s personal contribution to any movement. The real meaning is\n in the whole movement. I’m just one participant. Just another free soul.", "someone’s soul from his or her image. There are a lot of things that\n make this hard. A lot of people are uncomfortable in front of a camera,\n or might make expressions that aren’t very natural for them. And if the\n person is nervous, it’s very difficult to try to see what it is that\n you’re trying to capture.\nA lot of what I’m doing is, I just start shooting photos. After half an\n hour of having their picture taken, people start to ignore you. Or I’ll\n take pictures when I’m talking to people about what they’re doing, so\n after a while they get distracted by the conversation and forget about\n the camera. That’s something that I’m not perfect at, but I’m getting\n better.\nI think good photographers are also able to disarm people through", "and remember exactly what we were doing, what we were eating, what we\n were drinking, what we were talking about, and to me that’s a much more\n rich experience.\nIt’s the combination of social software and photography. For me, reality\n is “the present” plus what you remember from the past. I think this\n project is really sharing memories with people. Blog posts contribute as\n well, but to me photography is a really good way of doing that. When I\n look at the expressions, I remember the moment and get a sense of\n presence.\nI think the main problem for me is the environmental impact of flying\n around. Just as I never believed that we would have a paperless office,\n being able to connect with people through social software mostly\n increases your travel, it doesn’t decrease it. It is great because you", "affordable and ubiquitous. The second part is the strong movement of\n participants who fight to keep the Internet open and try to prevent the\n business side from corrupting the fundamental elements that make the\n Internet great. The Net Neutrality or Open Network discussion going on\n right now is a good example of the importance of continuing to balance\n these principles with business interests.\nSimilarly, I think that business interests can help make Creative\n Commons ubiquitous and more easily accessible to everyone. However, I\n think it’s important to remember to keep pushing to make content more\n “free” and not allow businesses to use Creative Commons in exploitive or\n destructive ways.\nIn addition to the business side, Creative Commons is being used by\n educators to create open courseware around the world and in the area of", "conversation, but still, it’s difficult to have a disarming conversation\n with somebody you don’t know, or to make them laugh. Many times people\n make a face for me that they wouldn’t make for a professional\n photographer.\nFor instance, a board meeting picture, like the one with Eric Saltzman:\n that was during a very tense discussion. I’ve found that people are at\n their most animated at these kinds of meetings, and look the most alive\n when they are under a lot of pressure, and super- focused. But usually\n if an outsider is in the room, they won’t get into that. I mean, it\n would be difficult for a cameraman to be in a room where a board is\n having a heated debate.\nBut those are the things that I’m trying to capture, because most people", "we’re trying to do here is to expand beyond just copyright, to make it\n more thorough from a legal perspective. It’s also an important\n educational point, so people understand that, in addition to the\n Creative Commons licenses, we need people to provide other rights in\n cases where the law requires such rights to be cleared before reuse.\nWhat have you learned about the people in these networks, just in the past year?\nThat’s a good question. I think that at least Creative Commons has\n become much more mainstream. Creative Commons has moved from a fringy\n academic discussion to a boardroom discussion. Yahoo announced that it\n will be using Creative Commons for all of their basic infrastructure,\n and integrating it all. Google has CC search in their advanced search.\nMicrosoft is working with CC as well and have a plug-in. Nine Inch Nails", "friends, and they’re not in their hometown.\nThat’s the really interesting thing that is happening right now: it’s\n really increasing your ability to spend quality time with, actually, a\n smaller number of people. It allows you to actively filter. Your\n meetings don’t have to be random. If I look at the list of people in\n this book, although there are some obvious people missing whom I didn’t\n see last year, probably met more of my friends last year, my real\n friends, than I’ve met in any other year. I know my travels were crazy,\n but I think that the online world has allowed me to do that.\nWhat’s great about photography is that it captures the moment that I was\n sharing with that person. It’s not just a connection on a social network\n online, which is really pretty binary. I can look at all these photos", "another thing, though, about this book: the number of\n professional-quality amateurs has increased significantly due to the\n importance of digital in both professional and high-end amateur\n photography I hate to say it, a lot of people love the darkroom, but it\n really feels like the death of the darkroom with this year.\nWith new 22 megapixel cameras coming in under $10,000, and Lightroom\n and some of this software at a couple hundred dollars, it doesn’t really\n make sense, except for particularly fussy artists, to do wet-work\n anymore. If you’re a commercial photographer or a high-end amateur, you\n can do anything you used to do in the darkroom. I think it has really\n lowered the bar. I don’t know how that affects the industry directly,\n but for me, it bridged a huge gap." ], [ "Just another free soul\nIn his foreword to the book, Lessig writes that you understand your subjects “by learning to see them in a certain way.” What is that certain way?\nI think I’m trying to get a mental image of a person, certain\n expressions, or what I think that person is about. I’m trying to capture\n what I think they look like, which is many times a minority of their\n typical expressions, or their typical stance. So, if I’m taking pictures\n of Larry [Lessig], I want to have his signature hand gestures, and not\n just random ones.\nI think I’m trying to capture pictures of people that help others see\n what they’re about. Some photographers will make someone look the way\n the photographer wants them to look, and not the way they appear, so\n they’ll pick the one picture out of 100 where the guy looks more", "someone’s soul from his or her image. There are a lot of things that\n make this hard. A lot of people are uncomfortable in front of a camera,\n or might make expressions that aren’t very natural for them. And if the\n person is nervous, it’s very difficult to try to see what it is that\n you’re trying to capture.\nA lot of what I’m doing is, I just start shooting photos. After half an\n hour of having their picture taken, people start to ignore you. Or I’ll\n take pictures when I’m talking to people about what they’re doing, so\n after a while they get distracted by the conversation and forget about\n the camera. That’s something that I’m not perfect at, but I’m getting\n better.\nI think good photographers are also able to disarm people through", "conversation, but still, it’s difficult to have a disarming conversation\n with somebody you don’t know, or to make them laugh. Many times people\n make a face for me that they wouldn’t make for a professional\n photographer.\nFor instance, a board meeting picture, like the one with Eric Saltzman:\n that was during a very tense discussion. I’ve found that people are at\n their most animated at these kinds of meetings, and look the most alive\n when they are under a lot of pressure, and super- focused. But usually\n if an outsider is in the room, they won’t get into that. I mean, it\n would be difficult for a cameraman to be in a room where a board is\n having a heated debate.\nBut those are the things that I’m trying to capture, because most people", "egotistical than he really is. Some photographers are almost medical,\n and are going after a perfect portrait. I’m somewhere in between.\nIt’s amazing how many people will upload snapshots of people where the\n pictures don’t look like them at all. To me, uploading a picture that is\n not an easily recognizable picture of that person defeats the point,\n which I’m working toward, to try to express who they are. On the other\n hand, professional photographers usually have a subject whom they don’t\n know personally, so they end up having to try to capture an image that\n they’ve created based on who they think the person is or how they want\n that person to appear. You know how sculptors often say that they’re\n just freeing an image from a block? What I’m trying to do is free", "don’t get to see that. At the Creative Commons board meeting, Larry\n asked me to put the camera away after awhile [laughs] because it was\n distracting. We were having a very heated discussion and I was taking\n all of these pictures. But he credited me later because afterward those\n pictures turned out the best.\nIn your mind, what is a ‘Freesoul’ ?\nA freesoul is somewhat of a pun. On the one hand it means you are free,\n liberated. You, as a human spirit, are open. And then, it also has the\n meaning that you are unencumbered legally, that you are free, as in\n ‘free software.’\nThere’s a paradox: with many people’s Wikipedia\n articles to which I’ve contributed, when it comes to the picture, many", "balance between business and the non-business elements of the movement\n is essential. My job is to keep that focus and maintain that balance.\n Also, CC needs to run smoothly as an organization and there is a lot of\n operational work that we all need to do. My photography is a way for me\n to participate in a small measure on the creative side of the Free\n Culture movement, and helps me see things from that perspective as well.\nHowever, I believe in emergent democracy and the importance of trying to\n celebrate the community more than the heroes. Of course, I’m a huge fan\n of Larry’s and I have great respect for the leaders of our movement. But\n more than anything, I’m thankful for and respectful of all of the\n participants who aren’t so well known and who are essential to moving\n everything forward.", "another thing, though, about this book: the number of\n professional-quality amateurs has increased significantly due to the\n importance of digital in both professional and high-end amateur\n photography I hate to say it, a lot of people love the darkroom, but it\n really feels like the death of the darkroom with this year.\nWith new 22 megapixel cameras coming in under $10,000, and Lightroom\n and some of this software at a couple hundred dollars, it doesn’t really\n make sense, except for particularly fussy artists, to do wet-work\n anymore. If you’re a commercial photographer or a high-end amateur, you\n can do anything you used to do in the darkroom. I think it has really\n lowered the bar. I don’t know how that affects the industry directly,\n but for me, it bridged a huge gap.", "of these people don’t have any free photos of themselves on the web, so\n while they are “notable” on Wikipedia, their images aren’t free of the\n copyright of the photographer, or the institution who hired the\n photographer to take the picture. Often, even the subject of the article\n can’t make an image available to the Wikimedia/Wikipedia community.\nThis means that a lot of people who have a Net presence have a legally\n encumbered Net presence. People who are invited to conferences get asked\n all the time, “By the way, do you have a photo that we can use?” But\n they don’t. By making these pictures available under a Creative Commons\n license, now they do. This is solving the issue of legal freedom.\nThe third part of the pun is that, since I’m asking for a model release", "photography books and photographs and are probably providing an\n increasing revenue stream for professional photographers. I think most\n amateurs, including myself, are paying homage to the professionals and\n not trying to “compete” with them.\nDespite the existence of social software, what is still important about meeting people face-to-face?\nFor me, the right way to use a lot of the new social software is by\n making it easier to spend more physical time with the people you like\n best. Dopplr is a great example. When\n I visit a city, I will see all of the people who are in the city at the\n same time. When I went to London awhile ago, there were 47 people I knew\n in London, and a huge percentage of those people don’t live there. I\n would bet that more than half of the photos in this book are pictures of", "way, giving up your image and allowing anyone to use it: it’s the\n ultimate gift. In one way it’s kind of vain. [laughs] But in another\n way it’s wonderful. A Wikipedia article on some person but with no\n picture is sad.\nBesides Wikipedia, how do you imagine these photos being used?\nThey can be used in textbooks and in mainstream media articles about the\n person. Now they can get a picture that represents the person, at least\n from my perspective. That said, I shouldn’t be the only person doing\n this. More people should do the same, and make the photographs available\n freely. For one, I feel that “free” CC licensed photos have a much\n higher chance of not disappearing. But I don’t know exactly how these\n photos are going to be used, so in a sense I’m curious. For example,", "friends, and they’re not in their hometown.\nThat’s the really interesting thing that is happening right now: it’s\n really increasing your ability to spend quality time with, actually, a\n smaller number of people. It allows you to actively filter. Your\n meetings don’t have to be random. If I look at the list of people in\n this book, although there are some obvious people missing whom I didn’t\n see last year, probably met more of my friends last year, my real\n friends, than I’ve met in any other year. I know my travels were crazy,\n but I think that the online world has allowed me to do that.\nWhat’s great about photography is that it captures the moment that I was\n sharing with that person. It’s not just a connection on a social network\n online, which is really pretty binary. I can look at all these photos", "from the subjects, I’m asking everyone to be much more open and giving\n about their image than most people typically are. I’m giving, you’re\n giving, we’re all giving to participate and to try to create this\n wonderful work, and allow others to create derivative works.\nOf course people can abuse that, just like they can abuse anything. But\n I want people to see the value in sharing over the fear in sharing. The\n fact is, it’s much more likely that somebody is going to use these\n pictures for something positive, rather than for something negative. The\n benefits greatly outweigh the risks. I think we spend way too much of\n our lives worrying about the risks, at the cost of a lot of the\n benefits.\nThis is a celebration of all of the people who are willing to give. In a", "and remember exactly what we were doing, what we were eating, what we\n were drinking, what we were talking about, and to me that’s a much more\n rich experience.\nIt’s the combination of social software and photography. For me, reality\n is “the present” plus what you remember from the past. I think this\n project is really sharing memories with people. Blog posts contribute as\n well, but to me photography is a really good way of doing that. When I\n look at the expressions, I remember the moment and get a sense of\n presence.\nI think the main problem for me is the environmental impact of flying\n around. Just as I never believed that we would have a paperless office,\n being able to connect with people through social software mostly\n increases your travel, it doesn’t decrease it. It is great because you", "kicking myself because it was terrible. But then the Leica M8 came out,\n and I bought one at the beginning of 2007. The M8 really got me to where\n I could use my old gear, and it had enough megapixels to be as good as\n some film.\nAnother way of saying it was that there was a gear breakthrough at the\n beginning of last year. Okay, that’s pretty materialistic! So there was\n a technology breakthrough, let’s call it that, that allowed me to switch\n completely away from film, and I think this happened to a lot of\n photographers. It caused an explosion of content and an increase in the\n quality of content on sites like Flickr. It has\n allowed amateurs to create a business model with professionals.\n Interestingly, I think these new high-end amateurs are buying more", "science and technology to promote sharing in research. And as of now, we\n have the license ported to at least 44 jurisdictions, and the number of\n countries with projects continues to grow. In many ways, the movement\n outside of the United States has become much bigger than the movement in\n the United States. Although the United States is still slightly farther\n ahead in terms of commercialization, the size of the whole free culture\n movement outside of the United States is huge now. The CC China Photo\n exhibit was just amazing. There were some great\n images, and a lot of the photographers were professionals. This is\n beyond what anybody has done in the US. A lot of the progress that we’re\n making is international.\nWhat are your personal realizations or experiences?\nWell, we’re all getting old, if you look at these pictures. But there’s", "recently I received the Harvard Berkman Center pamphlet. It was a report\n of what they’re doing, and they also had a bunch of my pictures in\n there. They all had attribution, and it made me feel really good. There\n were pictures of different Berkman Center members that I had taken in\n various places all over the world. I think that the subject is probably\n happy with this, and I’m happy, and the Berkman Center’s happy because\n they’re not all pictures of people sitting at desks in the Berkman\n Center. There’s one more important thing: Creative Commons is great for\n original creative works or derivative creative works, but when it\n involves human images, it gets very complicated. We all know the Virgin\n Mobile case, where Virgin used CC licensed images in an advertisement\n without getting permission from the models, and got in trouble. What", "I used to be darkroom geek. I loved my darkroom, and even when I didn’t\n have my darkroom anymore, I still was shooting 6x6 Hasselblad 120 film\n and processing it in a special lab, and then digitizing it. For me, that\n film was it. You could never get as good as medium-format film or\n large-format film\nAt the time, the digital Hasselblad backs were too expensive, and were\n still not as good as 8x10 film. So there was this whole period where the\n darkroom was not all that exciting, but the digital wasn’t perfect. I\n went through a limbo period. I had invested so much in my Hasselblad\n system, and my Leica M6 set. I had bought the Leica R8, but I was", "Personally, I don’t think it’s ultimately meaningful to talk about one\n individual’s personal contribution to any movement. The real meaning is\n in the whole movement. I’m just one participant. Just another free soul.", "get to meet all these people. But it is bad for the environment, and bad\n for our jet lag.\nHow would you characterize your contributions to free culture?\nI think it’s mostly incremental. I think there is very little we\n actually do all by ourselves, and I hate saying, “I did this” or “I did\n that.” I think that in most cases, focusing on individual contributions\n or achievements undervalues the importance of everyone else involved.\nHaving said that, I think my main contribution is probably in supporting\n Creative Commons as a fan, board member, chairman of the board and now\n CEO. I think CC has a significant role, and helping to keep it on track\n and growing is probably the single most important role that I have in\n Free Culture.\nSpecifically, I think that trying to keep an international focus and a", "released their album, Ghost, under a Creative Commons license. The list\n goes on. Many people are asking: can you make money and share? The\n answer is, yes. CC is becoming an important part of the business\n discussion.\nBut one thing that happens when a movement like CC becomes a business\n thing, is that a lot of the pioneers fade into the background, and it\n becomes a part of industry. This happened to the Internet. And so while\n you still have the core people who still remember and hold the torch for\n the philosophical side, the Internet has become much more of a business.\n Now, when you go to many Internet conferences, it’s mostly salesmen in\n attendance.\nI believe that the success of the Internet has two parts. The first part\n is the market- driven business side, which has made the Internet" ], [ "way, giving up your image and allowing anyone to use it: it’s the\n ultimate gift. In one way it’s kind of vain. [laughs] But in another\n way it’s wonderful. A Wikipedia article on some person but with no\n picture is sad.\nBesides Wikipedia, how do you imagine these photos being used?\nThey can be used in textbooks and in mainstream media articles about the\n person. Now they can get a picture that represents the person, at least\n from my perspective. That said, I shouldn’t be the only person doing\n this. More people should do the same, and make the photographs available\n freely. For one, I feel that “free” CC licensed photos have a much\n higher chance of not disappearing. But I don’t know exactly how these\n photos are going to be used, so in a sense I’m curious. For example,", "of these people don’t have any free photos of themselves on the web, so\n while they are “notable” on Wikipedia, their images aren’t free of the\n copyright of the photographer, or the institution who hired the\n photographer to take the picture. Often, even the subject of the article\n can’t make an image available to the Wikimedia/Wikipedia community.\nThis means that a lot of people who have a Net presence have a legally\n encumbered Net presence. People who are invited to conferences get asked\n all the time, “By the way, do you have a photo that we can use?” But\n they don’t. By making these pictures available under a Creative Commons\n license, now they do. This is solving the issue of legal freedom.\nThe third part of the pun is that, since I’m asking for a model release", "recently I received the Harvard Berkman Center pamphlet. It was a report\n of what they’re doing, and they also had a bunch of my pictures in\n there. They all had attribution, and it made me feel really good. There\n were pictures of different Berkman Center members that I had taken in\n various places all over the world. I think that the subject is probably\n happy with this, and I’m happy, and the Berkman Center’s happy because\n they’re not all pictures of people sitting at desks in the Berkman\n Center. There’s one more important thing: Creative Commons is great for\n original creative works or derivative creative works, but when it\n involves human images, it gets very complicated. We all know the Virgin\n Mobile case, where Virgin used CC licensed images in an advertisement\n without getting permission from the models, and got in trouble. What", "from the subjects, I’m asking everyone to be much more open and giving\n about their image than most people typically are. I’m giving, you’re\n giving, we’re all giving to participate and to try to create this\n wonderful work, and allow others to create derivative works.\nOf course people can abuse that, just like they can abuse anything. But\n I want people to see the value in sharing over the fear in sharing. The\n fact is, it’s much more likely that somebody is going to use these\n pictures for something positive, rather than for something negative. The\n benefits greatly outweigh the risks. I think we spend way too much of\n our lives worrying about the risks, at the cost of a lot of the\n benefits.\nThis is a celebration of all of the people who are willing to give. In a", "don’t get to see that. At the Creative Commons board meeting, Larry\n asked me to put the camera away after awhile [laughs] because it was\n distracting. We were having a very heated discussion and I was taking\n all of these pictures. But he credited me later because afterward those\n pictures turned out the best.\nIn your mind, what is a ‘Freesoul’ ?\nA freesoul is somewhat of a pun. On the one hand it means you are free,\n liberated. You, as a human spirit, are open. And then, it also has the\n meaning that you are unencumbered legally, that you are free, as in\n ‘free software.’\nThere’s a paradox: with many people’s Wikipedia\n articles to which I’ve contributed, when it comes to the picture, many", "science and technology to promote sharing in research. And as of now, we\n have the license ported to at least 44 jurisdictions, and the number of\n countries with projects continues to grow. In many ways, the movement\n outside of the United States has become much bigger than the movement in\n the United States. Although the United States is still slightly farther\n ahead in terms of commercialization, the size of the whole free culture\n movement outside of the United States is huge now. The CC China Photo\n exhibit was just amazing. There were some great\n images, and a lot of the photographers were professionals. This is\n beyond what anybody has done in the US. A lot of the progress that we’re\n making is international.\nWhat are your personal realizations or experiences?\nWell, we’re all getting old, if you look at these pictures. But there’s", "balance between business and the non-business elements of the movement\n is essential. My job is to keep that focus and maintain that balance.\n Also, CC needs to run smoothly as an organization and there is a lot of\n operational work that we all need to do. My photography is a way for me\n to participate in a small measure on the creative side of the Free\n Culture movement, and helps me see things from that perspective as well.\nHowever, I believe in emergent democracy and the importance of trying to\n celebrate the community more than the heroes. Of course, I’m a huge fan\n of Larry’s and I have great respect for the leaders of our movement. But\n more than anything, I’m thankful for and respectful of all of the\n participants who aren’t so well known and who are essential to moving\n everything forward.", "released their album, Ghost, under a Creative Commons license. The list\n goes on. Many people are asking: can you make money and share? The\n answer is, yes. CC is becoming an important part of the business\n discussion.\nBut one thing that happens when a movement like CC becomes a business\n thing, is that a lot of the pioneers fade into the background, and it\n becomes a part of industry. This happened to the Internet. And so while\n you still have the core people who still remember and hold the torch for\n the philosophical side, the Internet has become much more of a business.\n Now, when you go to many Internet conferences, it’s mostly salesmen in\n attendance.\nI believe that the success of the Internet has two parts. The first part\n is the market- driven business side, which has made the Internet", "Just another free soul\nIn his foreword to the book, Lessig writes that you understand your subjects “by learning to see them in a certain way.” What is that certain way?\nI think I’m trying to get a mental image of a person, certain\n expressions, or what I think that person is about. I’m trying to capture\n what I think they look like, which is many times a minority of their\n typical expressions, or their typical stance. So, if I’m taking pictures\n of Larry [Lessig], I want to have his signature hand gestures, and not\n just random ones.\nI think I’m trying to capture pictures of people that help others see\n what they’re about. Some photographers will make someone look the way\n the photographer wants them to look, and not the way they appear, so\n they’ll pick the one picture out of 100 where the guy looks more", "affordable and ubiquitous. The second part is the strong movement of\n participants who fight to keep the Internet open and try to prevent the\n business side from corrupting the fundamental elements that make the\n Internet great. The Net Neutrality or Open Network discussion going on\n right now is a good example of the importance of continuing to balance\n these principles with business interests.\nSimilarly, I think that business interests can help make Creative\n Commons ubiquitous and more easily accessible to everyone. However, I\n think it’s important to remember to keep pushing to make content more\n “free” and not allow businesses to use Creative Commons in exploitive or\n destructive ways.\nIn addition to the business side, Creative Commons is being used by\n educators to create open courseware around the world and in the area of", "we’re trying to do here is to expand beyond just copyright, to make it\n more thorough from a legal perspective. It’s also an important\n educational point, so people understand that, in addition to the\n Creative Commons licenses, we need people to provide other rights in\n cases where the law requires such rights to be cleared before reuse.\nWhat have you learned about the people in these networks, just in the past year?\nThat’s a good question. I think that at least Creative Commons has\n become much more mainstream. Creative Commons has moved from a fringy\n academic discussion to a boardroom discussion. Yahoo announced that it\n will be using Creative Commons for all of their basic infrastructure,\n and integrating it all. Google has CC search in their advanced search.\nMicrosoft is working with CC as well and have a plug-in. Nine Inch Nails", "photography books and photographs and are probably providing an\n increasing revenue stream for professional photographers. I think most\n amateurs, including myself, are paying homage to the professionals and\n not trying to “compete” with them.\nDespite the existence of social software, what is still important about meeting people face-to-face?\nFor me, the right way to use a lot of the new social software is by\n making it easier to spend more physical time with the people you like\n best. Dopplr is a great example. When\n I visit a city, I will see all of the people who are in the city at the\n same time. When I went to London awhile ago, there were 47 people I knew\n in London, and a huge percentage of those people don’t live there. I\n would bet that more than half of the photos in this book are pictures of", "egotistical than he really is. Some photographers are almost medical,\n and are going after a perfect portrait. I’m somewhere in between.\nIt’s amazing how many people will upload snapshots of people where the\n pictures don’t look like them at all. To me, uploading a picture that is\n not an easily recognizable picture of that person defeats the point,\n which I’m working toward, to try to express who they are. On the other\n hand, professional photographers usually have a subject whom they don’t\n know personally, so they end up having to try to capture an image that\n they’ve created based on who they think the person is or how they want\n that person to appear. You know how sculptors often say that they’re\n just freeing an image from a block? What I’m trying to do is free", "get to meet all these people. But it is bad for the environment, and bad\n for our jet lag.\nHow would you characterize your contributions to free culture?\nI think it’s mostly incremental. I think there is very little we\n actually do all by ourselves, and I hate saying, “I did this” or “I did\n that.” I think that in most cases, focusing on individual contributions\n or achievements undervalues the importance of everyone else involved.\nHaving said that, I think my main contribution is probably in supporting\n Creative Commons as a fan, board member, chairman of the board and now\n CEO. I think CC has a significant role, and helping to keep it on track\n and growing is probably the single most important role that I have in\n Free Culture.\nSpecifically, I think that trying to keep an international focus and a", "someone’s soul from his or her image. There are a lot of things that\n make this hard. A lot of people are uncomfortable in front of a camera,\n or might make expressions that aren’t very natural for them. And if the\n person is nervous, it’s very difficult to try to see what it is that\n you’re trying to capture.\nA lot of what I’m doing is, I just start shooting photos. After half an\n hour of having their picture taken, people start to ignore you. Or I’ll\n take pictures when I’m talking to people about what they’re doing, so\n after a while they get distracted by the conversation and forget about\n the camera. That’s something that I’m not perfect at, but I’m getting\n better.\nI think good photographers are also able to disarm people through", "and remember exactly what we were doing, what we were eating, what we\n were drinking, what we were talking about, and to me that’s a much more\n rich experience.\nIt’s the combination of social software and photography. For me, reality\n is “the present” plus what you remember from the past. I think this\n project is really sharing memories with people. Blog posts contribute as\n well, but to me photography is a really good way of doing that. When I\n look at the expressions, I remember the moment and get a sense of\n presence.\nI think the main problem for me is the environmental impact of flying\n around. Just as I never believed that we would have a paperless office,\n being able to connect with people through social software mostly\n increases your travel, it doesn’t decrease it. It is great because you", "conversation, but still, it’s difficult to have a disarming conversation\n with somebody you don’t know, or to make them laugh. Many times people\n make a face for me that they wouldn’t make for a professional\n photographer.\nFor instance, a board meeting picture, like the one with Eric Saltzman:\n that was during a very tense discussion. I’ve found that people are at\n their most animated at these kinds of meetings, and look the most alive\n when they are under a lot of pressure, and super- focused. But usually\n if an outsider is in the room, they won’t get into that. I mean, it\n would be difficult for a cameraman to be in a room where a board is\n having a heated debate.\nBut those are the things that I’m trying to capture, because most people", "another thing, though, about this book: the number of\n professional-quality amateurs has increased significantly due to the\n importance of digital in both professional and high-end amateur\n photography I hate to say it, a lot of people love the darkroom, but it\n really feels like the death of the darkroom with this year.\nWith new 22 megapixel cameras coming in under $10,000, and Lightroom\n and some of this software at a couple hundred dollars, it doesn’t really\n make sense, except for particularly fussy artists, to do wet-work\n anymore. If you’re a commercial photographer or a high-end amateur, you\n can do anything you used to do in the darkroom. I think it has really\n lowered the bar. I don’t know how that affects the industry directly,\n but for me, it bridged a huge gap.", "kicking myself because it was terrible. But then the Leica M8 came out,\n and I bought one at the beginning of 2007. The M8 really got me to where\n I could use my old gear, and it had enough megapixels to be as good as\n some film.\nAnother way of saying it was that there was a gear breakthrough at the\n beginning of last year. Okay, that’s pretty materialistic! So there was\n a technology breakthrough, let’s call it that, that allowed me to switch\n completely away from film, and I think this happened to a lot of\n photographers. It caused an explosion of content and an increase in the\n quality of content on sites like Flickr. It has\n allowed amateurs to create a business model with professionals.\n Interestingly, I think these new high-end amateurs are buying more", "friends, and they’re not in their hometown.\nThat’s the really interesting thing that is happening right now: it’s\n really increasing your ability to spend quality time with, actually, a\n smaller number of people. It allows you to actively filter. Your\n meetings don’t have to be random. If I look at the list of people in\n this book, although there are some obvious people missing whom I didn’t\n see last year, probably met more of my friends last year, my real\n friends, than I’ve met in any other year. I know my travels were crazy,\n but I think that the online world has allowed me to do that.\nWhat’s great about photography is that it captures the moment that I was\n sharing with that person. It’s not just a connection on a social network\n online, which is really pretty binary. I can look at all these photos" ], [ "recently I received the Harvard Berkman Center pamphlet. It was a report\n of what they’re doing, and they also had a bunch of my pictures in\n there. They all had attribution, and it made me feel really good. There\n were pictures of different Berkman Center members that I had taken in\n various places all over the world. I think that the subject is probably\n happy with this, and I’m happy, and the Berkman Center’s happy because\n they’re not all pictures of people sitting at desks in the Berkman\n Center. There’s one more important thing: Creative Commons is great for\n original creative works or derivative creative works, but when it\n involves human images, it gets very complicated. We all know the Virgin\n Mobile case, where Virgin used CC licensed images in an advertisement\n without getting permission from the models, and got in trouble. What", "released their album, Ghost, under a Creative Commons license. The list\n goes on. Many people are asking: can you make money and share? The\n answer is, yes. CC is becoming an important part of the business\n discussion.\nBut one thing that happens when a movement like CC becomes a business\n thing, is that a lot of the pioneers fade into the background, and it\n becomes a part of industry. This happened to the Internet. And so while\n you still have the core people who still remember and hold the torch for\n the philosophical side, the Internet has become much more of a business.\n Now, when you go to many Internet conferences, it’s mostly salesmen in\n attendance.\nI believe that the success of the Internet has two parts. The first part\n is the market- driven business side, which has made the Internet", "affordable and ubiquitous. The second part is the strong movement of\n participants who fight to keep the Internet open and try to prevent the\n business side from corrupting the fundamental elements that make the\n Internet great. The Net Neutrality or Open Network discussion going on\n right now is a good example of the importance of continuing to balance\n these principles with business interests.\nSimilarly, I think that business interests can help make Creative\n Commons ubiquitous and more easily accessible to everyone. However, I\n think it’s important to remember to keep pushing to make content more\n “free” and not allow businesses to use Creative Commons in exploitive or\n destructive ways.\nIn addition to the business side, Creative Commons is being used by\n educators to create open courseware around the world and in the area of", "we’re trying to do here is to expand beyond just copyright, to make it\n more thorough from a legal perspective. It’s also an important\n educational point, so people understand that, in addition to the\n Creative Commons licenses, we need people to provide other rights in\n cases where the law requires such rights to be cleared before reuse.\nWhat have you learned about the people in these networks, just in the past year?\nThat’s a good question. I think that at least Creative Commons has\n become much more mainstream. Creative Commons has moved from a fringy\n academic discussion to a boardroom discussion. Yahoo announced that it\n will be using Creative Commons for all of their basic infrastructure,\n and integrating it all. Google has CC search in their advanced search.\nMicrosoft is working with CC as well and have a plug-in. Nine Inch Nails", "don’t get to see that. At the Creative Commons board meeting, Larry\n asked me to put the camera away after awhile [laughs] because it was\n distracting. We were having a very heated discussion and I was taking\n all of these pictures. But he credited me later because afterward those\n pictures turned out the best.\nIn your mind, what is a ‘Freesoul’ ?\nA freesoul is somewhat of a pun. On the one hand it means you are free,\n liberated. You, as a human spirit, are open. And then, it also has the\n meaning that you are unencumbered legally, that you are free, as in\n ‘free software.’\nThere’s a paradox: with many people’s Wikipedia\n articles to which I’ve contributed, when it comes to the picture, many", "science and technology to promote sharing in research. And as of now, we\n have the license ported to at least 44 jurisdictions, and the number of\n countries with projects continues to grow. In many ways, the movement\n outside of the United States has become much bigger than the movement in\n the United States. Although the United States is still slightly farther\n ahead in terms of commercialization, the size of the whole free culture\n movement outside of the United States is huge now. The CC China Photo\n exhibit was just amazing. There were some great\n images, and a lot of the photographers were professionals. This is\n beyond what anybody has done in the US. A lot of the progress that we’re\n making is international.\nWhat are your personal realizations or experiences?\nWell, we’re all getting old, if you look at these pictures. But there’s", "of these people don’t have any free photos of themselves on the web, so\n while they are “notable” on Wikipedia, their images aren’t free of the\n copyright of the photographer, or the institution who hired the\n photographer to take the picture. Often, even the subject of the article\n can’t make an image available to the Wikimedia/Wikipedia community.\nThis means that a lot of people who have a Net presence have a legally\n encumbered Net presence. People who are invited to conferences get asked\n all the time, “By the way, do you have a photo that we can use?” But\n they don’t. By making these pictures available under a Creative Commons\n license, now they do. This is solving the issue of legal freedom.\nThe third part of the pun is that, since I’m asking for a model release", "get to meet all these people. But it is bad for the environment, and bad\n for our jet lag.\nHow would you characterize your contributions to free culture?\nI think it’s mostly incremental. I think there is very little we\n actually do all by ourselves, and I hate saying, “I did this” or “I did\n that.” I think that in most cases, focusing on individual contributions\n or achievements undervalues the importance of everyone else involved.\nHaving said that, I think my main contribution is probably in supporting\n Creative Commons as a fan, board member, chairman of the board and now\n CEO. I think CC has a significant role, and helping to keep it on track\n and growing is probably the single most important role that I have in\n Free Culture.\nSpecifically, I think that trying to keep an international focus and a", "way, giving up your image and allowing anyone to use it: it’s the\n ultimate gift. In one way it’s kind of vain. [laughs] But in another\n way it’s wonderful. A Wikipedia article on some person but with no\n picture is sad.\nBesides Wikipedia, how do you imagine these photos being used?\nThey can be used in textbooks and in mainstream media articles about the\n person. Now they can get a picture that represents the person, at least\n from my perspective. That said, I shouldn’t be the only person doing\n this. More people should do the same, and make the photographs available\n freely. For one, I feel that “free” CC licensed photos have a much\n higher chance of not disappearing. But I don’t know exactly how these\n photos are going to be used, so in a sense I’m curious. For example,", "balance between business and the non-business elements of the movement\n is essential. My job is to keep that focus and maintain that balance.\n Also, CC needs to run smoothly as an organization and there is a lot of\n operational work that we all need to do. My photography is a way for me\n to participate in a small measure on the creative side of the Free\n Culture movement, and helps me see things from that perspective as well.\nHowever, I believe in emergent democracy and the importance of trying to\n celebrate the community more than the heroes. Of course, I’m a huge fan\n of Larry’s and I have great respect for the leaders of our movement. But\n more than anything, I’m thankful for and respectful of all of the\n participants who aren’t so well known and who are essential to moving\n everything forward.", "from the subjects, I’m asking everyone to be much more open and giving\n about their image than most people typically are. I’m giving, you’re\n giving, we’re all giving to participate and to try to create this\n wonderful work, and allow others to create derivative works.\nOf course people can abuse that, just like they can abuse anything. But\n I want people to see the value in sharing over the fear in sharing. The\n fact is, it’s much more likely that somebody is going to use these\n pictures for something positive, rather than for something negative. The\n benefits greatly outweigh the risks. I think we spend way too much of\n our lives worrying about the risks, at the cost of a lot of the\n benefits.\nThis is a celebration of all of the people who are willing to give. In a", "Just another free soul\nIn his foreword to the book, Lessig writes that you understand your subjects “by learning to see them in a certain way.” What is that certain way?\nI think I’m trying to get a mental image of a person, certain\n expressions, or what I think that person is about. I’m trying to capture\n what I think they look like, which is many times a minority of their\n typical expressions, or their typical stance. So, if I’m taking pictures\n of Larry [Lessig], I want to have his signature hand gestures, and not\n just random ones.\nI think I’m trying to capture pictures of people that help others see\n what they’re about. Some photographers will make someone look the way\n the photographer wants them to look, and not the way they appear, so\n they’ll pick the one picture out of 100 where the guy looks more", "photography books and photographs and are probably providing an\n increasing revenue stream for professional photographers. I think most\n amateurs, including myself, are paying homage to the professionals and\n not trying to “compete” with them.\nDespite the existence of social software, what is still important about meeting people face-to-face?\nFor me, the right way to use a lot of the new social software is by\n making it easier to spend more physical time with the people you like\n best. Dopplr is a great example. When\n I visit a city, I will see all of the people who are in the city at the\n same time. When I went to London awhile ago, there were 47 people I knew\n in London, and a huge percentage of those people don’t live there. I\n would bet that more than half of the photos in this book are pictures of", "another thing, though, about this book: the number of\n professional-quality amateurs has increased significantly due to the\n importance of digital in both professional and high-end amateur\n photography I hate to say it, a lot of people love the darkroom, but it\n really feels like the death of the darkroom with this year.\nWith new 22 megapixel cameras coming in under $10,000, and Lightroom\n and some of this software at a couple hundred dollars, it doesn’t really\n make sense, except for particularly fussy artists, to do wet-work\n anymore. If you’re a commercial photographer or a high-end amateur, you\n can do anything you used to do in the darkroom. I think it has really\n lowered the bar. I don’t know how that affects the industry directly,\n but for me, it bridged a huge gap.", "egotistical than he really is. Some photographers are almost medical,\n and are going after a perfect portrait. I’m somewhere in between.\nIt’s amazing how many people will upload snapshots of people where the\n pictures don’t look like them at all. To me, uploading a picture that is\n not an easily recognizable picture of that person defeats the point,\n which I’m working toward, to try to express who they are. On the other\n hand, professional photographers usually have a subject whom they don’t\n know personally, so they end up having to try to capture an image that\n they’ve created based on who they think the person is or how they want\n that person to appear. You know how sculptors often say that they’re\n just freeing an image from a block? What I’m trying to do is free", "kicking myself because it was terrible. But then the Leica M8 came out,\n and I bought one at the beginning of 2007. The M8 really got me to where\n I could use my old gear, and it had enough megapixels to be as good as\n some film.\nAnother way of saying it was that there was a gear breakthrough at the\n beginning of last year. Okay, that’s pretty materialistic! So there was\n a technology breakthrough, let’s call it that, that allowed me to switch\n completely away from film, and I think this happened to a lot of\n photographers. It caused an explosion of content and an increase in the\n quality of content on sites like Flickr. It has\n allowed amateurs to create a business model with professionals.\n Interestingly, I think these new high-end amateurs are buying more", "someone’s soul from his or her image. There are a lot of things that\n make this hard. A lot of people are uncomfortable in front of a camera,\n or might make expressions that aren’t very natural for them. And if the\n person is nervous, it’s very difficult to try to see what it is that\n you’re trying to capture.\nA lot of what I’m doing is, I just start shooting photos. After half an\n hour of having their picture taken, people start to ignore you. Or I’ll\n take pictures when I’m talking to people about what they’re doing, so\n after a while they get distracted by the conversation and forget about\n the camera. That’s something that I’m not perfect at, but I’m getting\n better.\nI think good photographers are also able to disarm people through", "and remember exactly what we were doing, what we were eating, what we\n were drinking, what we were talking about, and to me that’s a much more\n rich experience.\nIt’s the combination of social software and photography. For me, reality\n is “the present” plus what you remember from the past. I think this\n project is really sharing memories with people. Blog posts contribute as\n well, but to me photography is a really good way of doing that. When I\n look at the expressions, I remember the moment and get a sense of\n presence.\nI think the main problem for me is the environmental impact of flying\n around. Just as I never believed that we would have a paperless office,\n being able to connect with people through social software mostly\n increases your travel, it doesn’t decrease it. It is great because you", "conversation, but still, it’s difficult to have a disarming conversation\n with somebody you don’t know, or to make them laugh. Many times people\n make a face for me that they wouldn’t make for a professional\n photographer.\nFor instance, a board meeting picture, like the one with Eric Saltzman:\n that was during a very tense discussion. I’ve found that people are at\n their most animated at these kinds of meetings, and look the most alive\n when they are under a lot of pressure, and super- focused. But usually\n if an outsider is in the room, they won’t get into that. I mean, it\n would be difficult for a cameraman to be in a room where a board is\n having a heated debate.\nBut those are the things that I’m trying to capture, because most people", "friends, and they’re not in their hometown.\nThat’s the really interesting thing that is happening right now: it’s\n really increasing your ability to spend quality time with, actually, a\n smaller number of people. It allows you to actively filter. Your\n meetings don’t have to be random. If I look at the list of people in\n this book, although there are some obvious people missing whom I didn’t\n see last year, probably met more of my friends last year, my real\n friends, than I’ve met in any other year. I know my travels were crazy,\n but I think that the online world has allowed me to do that.\nWhat’s great about photography is that it captures the moment that I was\n sharing with that person. It’s not just a connection on a social network\n online, which is really pretty binary. I can look at all these photos" ] ]
train	23791	[ "What makes the far side of the moon intolerable?", "What motivates Pop Young to live on the far side of the moon?", "Which item would most likely be shared by Sattell and Pop?", "What is the relationship between Sattell and Pop Young?", "What do the colony inhabitants share?", "What effect does Sattell's proximity have on Pop?", "Which of the following describes Pop's attitude toward Sattell?", "Which term best describes Pop's attitude toward his lunar occupation?", "Which term best describes Sattell's attitude toward Pop?", "How does Sattell hope to get rid of Pop?" ]	[ [ "extreme temperatures", "loud noises from the mines", "social isolation", "vicious predators" ], [ "He is being compensated for a wrongful death suit that occurred back on Earth", "He is close to Sattell's location, which enhances his memories of his wife and children", "If he left his post, there would be no one to monitor the mines in the Big Crack", "If he returned to Earth, he would be arrested for the murder of his family" ], [ "hatchet", "pencil", "lighter", "screwdriver" ], [ "Sattell uses methods to help Pop recover his memories", "Sattell is trying to escape Pop, who believes he killed his family", "Sattell was Pop's neighbor back on Earth", "Sattell is Pop's son and the only witness who saw Pop murder his wife and other children" ], [ "traumatic brain injuries", "criminal backgrounds", "fear of open spaces", "aversion to sunlight" ], [ "It brings Pop's memory of the murder of his family into clarity", "It motivates him to plot his revenge against his family's murderer", "It amplifies the pain of his Pop's head injury", "It restores Pop's memories of his wife and children" ], [ "obsessive", "delirious", "ambivalent", "vengeful" ], [ "methodical", "unselfish", "passionate", "resentful" ], [ "condescending", "frenetic", "aggrieved", "repugnant" ], [ "Luring him down into the Big Crack and killing him", "Hiring an assassin from a neighboring planet", "Blowing up the shack near the edge of the Big Crack", "Escaping on board a secondhand lunar tour vessel" ] ]	[ 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 4, 1, 1, 3, 4 ]	[ 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "But it wasn't fun, even underground.\n In the Moon's slight gravity,\n a man is really adjusted to existence\n when he has a well-developed case\n of agoraphobia. With such an aid, a\n man can get into a tiny, coffinlike\n cubbyhole, and feel solidity above\n and below and around him, and\n happily tell himself that it feels delicious.\n Sometimes it does.\n\n\n But Sattell couldn't comfort himself\n so easily. He knew about Pop,\n up on the surface. He'd shipped out,\n whimpering, to the Moon to get far\n away from Pop, and Pop was just\n about a mile overhead and there was\n no way to get around him. It was\n difficult to get away from the mine,\n anyhow. It doesn't take too long for\n the low gravity to tear a man's\n nerves to shreds. He has to develop\n kinks in his head to survive. And\n those kinks—", "Sattell had no such device for adjusting\n to the lunar state of things.\n Living on the Moon was bad enough\n anyhow, then, but living one mile\n underground from Pop Young was\n much worse. Sattell clearly remembered\n the crime Pop Young hadn't\n yet recalled. He considered that Pop\n had made no overt attempt to revenge\n himself because he planned\n some retaliation so horrible and lingering\n that it was worth waiting for.\n He came to hate Pop with an insane\n ferocity. And fear. In his mind the\n need to escape became an obsession\n on top of the other psychotic states\n normal to a Moon-colonist.", "Otherwise, he was wholly matter-of-fact—certainly\n so for the far side\n of the Moon. He was a rather fussy\n housekeeper. The shack above the\n Big Crack's rim was as tidy as any\n lighthouse or fur-trapper's cabin. He\n tended his air-apparatus with a fine\n precision. It was perfectly simple. In\n the shadow of the shack he had an\n unfailing source of extreme low\n temperature. Air from the shack\n flowed into a shadow-chilled pipe.\n Moisture condensed out of it here,\n and CO\n 2\n froze solidly out of it there,", "hours before sunset. Then there\n was night, and for three hundred\n and thirty-six consecutive hours there\n were only stars overhead and the\n sky was a hole so terrible that a man\n who looked up into it—what with\n the nagging sensation of one-sixth\n gravity—tended to lose all confidence\n in the stability of things. Most men\n immediately found it hysterically necessary\n to seize hold of something\n solid to keep from falling upward.\n But nothing felt solid. Everything\n fell, too. Wherefore most men tended\n to scream.", "The shack stood a hundred feet\n from the Big Crack's edge. It looked\n like a dust-heap thirty feet high, and\n it was. The outside was surface\n moondust, piled over a tiny dome to\n be insulation against the cold of\n night and shadow and the furnace\n heat of day. Pop lived in it all alone,\n and in his spare time he worked\n industriously at recovering some\n missing portions of his life that Sattell\n had managed to take away from\n him.\n\n\n He thought often of Sattell, down\n in the colony underground. There\n were galleries and tunnels and living-quarters\n down there. There were\n air-tight bulkheads for safety, and a\n hydroponic garden to keep the air\n fresh, and all sorts of things to make\n life possible for men under if not\n on the Moon.", "The Crack, of course, was that\n gaping rocky fault which stretches\n nine hundred miles, jaggedly, over\n the side of the Moon that Earth\n never sees. There is one stretch where\n it is a yawning gulf a full half-mile\n wide and unguessably deep. Where\n Pop Young's shack stood it was only\n a hundred yards, but the colony was\n a full mile down, in one wall. There\n is nothing like it on Earth, of course.\n When it was first found, scientists\n descended into it to examine the exposed\n rock-strata and learn the history\n of the Moon before its craters\n were made. But they found more\n than history. They found the reason\n for the colony and the rocket landing\n field and the shack.\n\n\n The reason for Pop was something\n else.", "The sun rose, and baked the\n abomination of desolation which was\n the moonscape. Pop Young meticulously\n touched up the glittering\n triangles which were landing guides\n for the Lunar City ships. They glittered\n from the thinnest conceivable\n layer of magnesium marking-powder.\n He checked over the moondozer.\n He tended the air apparatus. He did\n everything that his job and survival\n required. Ungrudgingly.", "Then he made more sketches. The\n images to be drawn came back more\n clearly when he thought of Sattell,\n so by keeping Sattell in mind he recovered\n the memory of a chair that\n had been in his forgotten home.\n Then he drew his wife sitting in it,\n reading. It felt very good to see her\n again. And he speculated about\n whether Sattell ever thought of millions\n of dollars' worth of new-mined\n diamonds knocking about unguarded\n in the shack, and he suddenly recollected\n clearly the way one of his\n children had looked while playing\n with her doll. He made a quick\n sketch to keep from forgetting that.\n\n\n There was no purpose in the\n sketching, save that he'd lost all his\n young manhood through a senseless\n crime. He wanted his youth back. He\n was recovering it bit by bit. The\n occupation made it absurdly easy to\n live on the surface of the far side of\n the Moon, whether anybody else\n could do it or not.", "\"And get it straight! You try\n any tricks and we take off! We\n swing over your shack! The rocket-blast\n smashes it! We burn you\n down! Then we swing over the cable\n down to the mine and the rocket-flame\n melts it! You die and everybody\n in the mine besides! No tricks!\n We didn't come here for nothing!\"\n\n\n He twitched all over. Then he\n struck cruelly again at Pop Young's\n face. He seemed filled with fury, at\n least partly hysterical. It was the tension\n that space-travel—then, at its\n beginning—produced. It was meaningless\n savagery due to terror. But,\n of course, Pop was helpless to resent\n it. There were no weapons on the\n Moon and the mention of Sattell's\n name showed the uselessness of bluff.\n He'd pictured the complete set-up\n by the edge of the Big Crack. Pop\n could do nothing.", "The shack and the job he filled\n were located in the medieval notion\n of the physical appearance of hell.\n By day the environment was heat and\n torment. By night—lunar night, of\n course, and lunar day—it was frigidity\n and horror. Once in two weeks\n Earth-time a rocketship came around\n the horizon from Lunar City with\n stores for the colony deep underground.\n Pop received the stores and\n took care of them. He handed over\n the product of the mine, to be forwarded\n to Earth. The rocket went\n away again. Come nightfall Pop\n lowered the supplies down the long\n cable into the Big Crack to the colony\n far down inside, and freshened up\n the landing field marks with magnesium\n marking-powder if a rocket-blast\n had blurred them. That was\n fundamentally all he had to do. But\n without him the mine down in the\n Crack would have had to shut\n down.", "He began to explore the area outside\n the shack for possible material\n no one would think of sending from\n Earth. He collected stones of various\n sorts, but when warmed up in the\n shack they were useless. He found\n no strictly lunar material which\n would serve for modeling or carving\n portraits in the ground. He found\n minerals which could be pulverized\n and used as pigments, but nothing\n suitable for this new adventure in\n the recovery of lost youth. He even\n considered blasting, to aid his search.\n He could. Down in the mine, blasting\n was done by soaking carbon black—from\n CO\n 2\n —in liquid oxygen, and then\n firing it with a spark. It exploded\n splendidly. And its fumes were\n merely more CO\n 2\n which an air-apparatus\n handled easily.", "Sometimes, in the shack on the far\n side of the Moon, Pop Young had\n odd fancies about Sattell. There was\n the mine, for example. In each two\n Earth-weeks of working, the mine-colony\n nearly filled up a three-gallon\n cannister with greasy-seeming white\n crystals shaped like two pyramids\n base to base. The filled cannister\n would weigh a hundred pounds on\n Earth. Here it weighed eighteen. But\n on Earth its contents would be computed\n in carats, and a hundred\n pounds was worth millions. Yet here\n on the Moon Pop kept a waiting cannister\n on a shelf in his tiny dome,", "All of which happened back on\n Earth and a long time ago. It seemed\n to Pop that the sight of Sattell had\n brought back some vague and cloudy\n memories. They were not sharp,\n though, and he hunted up Sattell\n again to find out if he was right.\n And Sattell went into panic when\n he returned.\n\n\n Nowadays, by the Big Crack, Pop\n wasn't so insistent on seeing Sattell,\n but he was deeply concerned with\n the recovery of the memories that\n Sattell helped bring back. Pop was\n a highly conscientious man. He took\n good care of his job. There was a\n warning-bell in the shack, and when\n a rocketship from Lunar City got\n above the horizon and could send a\n tight beam, the gong clanged loudly,\n and Pop got into a vacuum-suit\n and went out the air lock. He usually\n reached the moondozer about the\n time the ship began to brake for\n landing, and he watched it come in.", "Pop reflected hungrily that it was\n something else to be made permanent\n and inspected from time to time.\n But he wanted more than a drawing\n of this! He wanted to make the memory\n permanent and to extend it—\n\n\n If it had not been for his vacuum\n suit and the cannister he carried, Pop\n would have rubbed his hands.\nTall, jagged crater-walls rose\n from the lunar plain. Monstrous, extended\n inky shadows stretched\n enormous distances, utterly black.\n The sun, like a glowing octopod,\n floated low at the edge of things and\n seemed to hate all creation.\n\n\n Pop reached the rocket. He\n climbed the welded ladder-rungs to\n the air lock. He closed the door. Air\n whined. His suit sagged against his\n body. He took off his helmet.\n\n\n When the red-headed man opened\n the inner door, the hand-weapon\n shook and trembled. Pop said\n calmly:", "He saw the silver needle in the\n sky fighting momentum above a line\n of jagged crater-walls. It slowed, and\n slowed, and curved down as it drew\n nearer. The pilot killed all forward\n motion just above the field and came\n steadily and smoothly down to land\n between the silvery triangles that\n marked the landing place.\n\n\n Instantly the rockets cut off,\n drums of fuel and air and food came\n out of the cargo-hatch and Pop swept\n forward with the dozer. It was a\n miniature tractor with a gigantic\n scoop in front. He pushed a great\n mound of talc-fine dust before him\n to cover up the cargo. It was necessary.\n With freight costing what it\n did, fuel and air and food came\n frozen solid, in containers barely\n thicker than foil. While they stayed\n at space-shadow temperature, the foil\n would hold anything. And a cover of\n insulating moondust with vacuum\n between the grains kept even air\n frozen solid, though in sunlight.", "It was just barely past lunar sunrise\n on the far side of the Moon.\n Incredibly long and utterly black\n shadows stretched across the plain,\n and half the rocketship was dazzling\n white and half was blacker than\n blackness itself. The sun still hung\n low indeed in the black, star-speckled\n sky. Pop waded through moondust,\n raising a trail of slowly settling\n powder. He knew only that the ship\n didn't come from Lunar City, but\n from Earth. He couldn't imagine\n why. He did not even wildly connect\n it with what—say—Sattell might\n have written with desperate plausibility\n about greasy-seeming white\n crystals out of the mine, knocking\n about Pop Young's shack in cannisters\n containing a hundred Earth-pounds\n weight of richness.\nPop reached the rocketship. He\n approached the big tail-fins. On one\n of them there were welded ladder-rungs\n going up to the opened air-lock\n door.", "There were just two passenger\n tours. The first was fully booked.\n But the passengers who paid so highly,\n expected to be pleasantly thrilled\n and shielded from all reasons for\n alarm. And they couldn't be. Something\n happens when a self-centered\n and complacent individual unsuspectingly\n looks out of a spaceship\n port and sees the cosmos unshielded\n by mists or clouds or other aids to\n blindness against reality. It is shattering.", "SCRIMSHAW\nThe old man\n just wanted to get back his\n memory—and the methods he used were\n gently hellish, from the viewpoint of the\n others....\nBY MURRAY LEINSTER\nIllustrated by Freas\n\n\n Pop Young was the one known\n man who could stand life on the\n surface of the Moon's far side, and,\n therefore, he occupied the shack on\n the Big Crack's edge, above the\n mining colony there. Some people\n said that no normal man could do\n it, and mentioned the scar of a\n ghastly head-wound to explain his\n ability. One man partly guessed the\n secret, but only partly. His name was\n Sattell and he had reason not to\n talk. Pop Young alone knew the\n whole truth, and he kept his mouth\n shut, too. It wasn't anybody else's\n business.", "The first men to leave the colony\n had to be knocked cold and shipped\n out unconscious. They'd been underground—and\n in low gravity—long\n enough to be utterly unable to face\n the idea of open spaces. Even now\n there were some who had to be carried,\n but there were some tougher\n ones who were able to walk to the\n rocketship if Pop put a tarpaulin\n over their heads so they didn't have\n to see the sky. In any case Pop was\n essential, either for carrying or\n guidance.\nSattell got the shakes when he\n thought of Pop, and Pop rather\n probably knew it. Of course, by the\n time he took the job tending the\n shack, he was pretty certain about\n Sattell. The facts spoke for themselves.", "A millionaire cut his throat when\n he saw Earth dwindled to a mere\n blue-green ball in vastness. He could\n not endure his own smallness in the\n face of immensity. Not one passenger\n disembarked even for Lunar\n City. Most of them cowered in their\n chairs, hiding their eyes. They were\n the simple cases of hysteria. But the\n richest girl on Earth, who'd had five\n husbands and believed that nothing\n could move her—she went into\n catatonic withdrawal and neither\n saw nor heard nor moved. Two other\n passengers sobbed in improvised\n strait jackets. The first shipload\n started home. Fast." ], [ "The Crack, of course, was that\n gaping rocky fault which stretches\n nine hundred miles, jaggedly, over\n the side of the Moon that Earth\n never sees. There is one stretch where\n it is a yawning gulf a full half-mile\n wide and unguessably deep. Where\n Pop Young's shack stood it was only\n a hundred yards, but the colony was\n a full mile down, in one wall. There\n is nothing like it on Earth, of course.\n When it was first found, scientists\n descended into it to examine the exposed\n rock-strata and learn the history\n of the Moon before its craters\n were made. But they found more\n than history. They found the reason\n for the colony and the rocket landing\n field and the shack.\n\n\n The reason for Pop was something\n else.", "Sattell had no such device for adjusting\n to the lunar state of things.\n Living on the Moon was bad enough\n anyhow, then, but living one mile\n underground from Pop Young was\n much worse. Sattell clearly remembered\n the crime Pop Young hadn't\n yet recalled. He considered that Pop\n had made no overt attempt to revenge\n himself because he planned\n some retaliation so horrible and lingering\n that it was worth waiting for.\n He came to hate Pop with an insane\n ferocity. And fear. In his mind the\n need to escape became an obsession\n on top of the other psychotic states\n normal to a Moon-colonist.", "But not Pop. He'd come to the\n Moon in the first place because Sattell\n was here. Near Sattell, he found\n memories of times when he was a\n young man with a young wife who\n loved him extravagantly. Then pictures\n of his children came out of\n emptiness and grew sharp and clear.\n He found that he loved them very\n dearly. And when he was near Sattell\n he literally recovered them—in\n the sense that he came to know new\n things about them and had new\n memories of them every day. He\n hadn't yet remembered the crime\n which lost them to him. Until he\n did—and the fact possessed a certain\n grisly humor—Pop didn't even hate\n Sattell. He simply wanted to be near\n him because it enabled him to recover\n new and vivid parts of his\n youth that had been lost.", "Sometimes, in the shack on the far\n side of the Moon, Pop Young had\n odd fancies about Sattell. There was\n the mine, for example. In each two\n Earth-weeks of working, the mine-colony\n nearly filled up a three-gallon\n cannister with greasy-seeming white\n crystals shaped like two pyramids\n base to base. The filled cannister\n would weigh a hundred pounds on\n Earth. Here it weighed eighteen. But\n on Earth its contents would be computed\n in carats, and a hundred\n pounds was worth millions. Yet here\n on the Moon Pop kept a waiting cannister\n on a shelf in his tiny dome,", "It was just barely past lunar sunrise\n on the far side of the Moon.\n Incredibly long and utterly black\n shadows stretched across the plain,\n and half the rocketship was dazzling\n white and half was blacker than\n blackness itself. The sun still hung\n low indeed in the black, star-speckled\n sky. Pop waded through moondust,\n raising a trail of slowly settling\n powder. He knew only that the ship\n didn't come from Lunar City, but\n from Earth. He couldn't imagine\n why. He did not even wildly connect\n it with what—say—Sattell might\n have written with desperate plausibility\n about greasy-seeming white\n crystals out of the mine, knocking\n about Pop Young's shack in cannisters\n containing a hundred Earth-pounds\n weight of richness.\nPop reached the rocketship. He\n approached the big tail-fins. On one\n of them there were welded ladder-rungs\n going up to the opened air-lock\n door.", "The shack stood a hundred feet\n from the Big Crack's edge. It looked\n like a dust-heap thirty feet high, and\n it was. The outside was surface\n moondust, piled over a tiny dome to\n be insulation against the cold of\n night and shadow and the furnace\n heat of day. Pop lived in it all alone,\n and in his spare time he worked\n industriously at recovering some\n missing portions of his life that Sattell\n had managed to take away from\n him.\n\n\n He thought often of Sattell, down\n in the colony underground. There\n were galleries and tunnels and living-quarters\n down there. There were\n air-tight bulkheads for safety, and a\n hydroponic garden to keep the air\n fresh, and all sorts of things to make\n life possible for men under if not\n on the Moon.", "But he was helpless. He couldn't\n leave. There was Pop. He couldn't\n kill Pop. He had no chance—and he\n was afraid. The one absurd, irrelevant\n thing he could do was write\n letters back to Earth. He did that.\n He wrote with the desperate, impassioned,\n frantic blend of persuasion\n and information and genius-like invention\n of a prisoner in a high-security\n prison, trying to induce someone\n to help him escape.\n\n\n He had friends, of a sort, but for\n a long time his letters produced\n nothing. The Moon swung in vast\n circles about the Earth, and the Earth\n swung sedately about the Sun. The\n other planets danced their saraband.\n The rest of humanity went about its\n own affairs with fascinated attention.\n But then an event occurred which\n bore directly upon Pop Young and\n Sattell and Pop Young's missing\n years.", "The sun rose, and baked the\n abomination of desolation which was\n the moonscape. Pop Young meticulously\n touched up the glittering\n triangles which were landing guides\n for the Lunar City ships. They glittered\n from the thinnest conceivable\n layer of magnesium marking-powder.\n He checked over the moondozer.\n He tended the air apparatus. He did\n everything that his job and survival\n required. Ungrudgingly.", "\"And get it straight! You try\n any tricks and we take off! We\n swing over your shack! The rocket-blast\n smashes it! We burn you\n down! Then we swing over the cable\n down to the mine and the rocket-flame\n melts it! You die and everybody\n in the mine besides! No tricks!\n We didn't come here for nothing!\"\n\n\n He twitched all over. Then he\n struck cruelly again at Pop Young's\n face. He seemed filled with fury, at\n least partly hysterical. It was the tension\n that space-travel—then, at its\n beginning—produced. It was meaningless\n savagery due to terror. But,\n of course, Pop was helpless to resent\n it. There were no weapons on the\n Moon and the mention of Sattell's\n name showed the uselessness of bluff.\n He'd pictured the complete set-up\n by the edge of the Big Crack. Pop\n could do nothing.", "All of which happened back on\n Earth and a long time ago. It seemed\n to Pop that the sight of Sattell had\n brought back some vague and cloudy\n memories. They were not sharp,\n though, and he hunted up Sattell\n again to find out if he was right.\n And Sattell went into panic when\n he returned.\n\n\n Nowadays, by the Big Crack, Pop\n wasn't so insistent on seeing Sattell,\n but he was deeply concerned with\n the recovery of the memories that\n Sattell helped bring back. Pop was\n a highly conscientious man. He took\n good care of his job. There was a\n warning-bell in the shack, and when\n a rocketship from Lunar City got\n above the horizon and could send a\n tight beam, the gong clanged loudly,\n and Pop got into a vacuum-suit\n and went out the air lock. He usually\n reached the moondozer about the\n time the ship began to brake for\n landing, and he watched it come in.", "SCRIMSHAW\nThe old man\n just wanted to get back his\n memory—and the methods he used were\n gently hellish, from the viewpoint of the\n others....\nBY MURRAY LEINSTER\nIllustrated by Freas\n\n\n Pop Young was the one known\n man who could stand life on the\n surface of the Moon's far side, and,\n therefore, he occupied the shack on\n the Big Crack's edge, above the\n mining colony there. Some people\n said that no normal man could do\n it, and mentioned the scar of a\n ghastly head-wound to explain his\n ability. One man partly guessed the\n secret, but only partly. His name was\n Sattell and he had reason not to\n talk. Pop Young alone knew the\n whole truth, and he kept his mouth\n shut, too. It wasn't anybody else's\n business.", "But it wasn't fun, even underground.\n In the Moon's slight gravity,\n a man is really adjusted to existence\n when he has a well-developed case\n of agoraphobia. With such an aid, a\n man can get into a tiny, coffinlike\n cubbyhole, and feel solidity above\n and below and around him, and\n happily tell himself that it feels delicious.\n Sometimes it does.\n\n\n But Sattell couldn't comfort himself\n so easily. He knew about Pop,\n up on the surface. He'd shipped out,\n whimpering, to the Moon to get far\n away from Pop, and Pop was just\n about a mile overhead and there was\n no way to get around him. It was\n difficult to get away from the mine,\n anyhow. It doesn't take too long for\n the low gravity to tear a man's\n nerves to shreds. He has to develop\n kinks in his head to survive. And\n those kinks—", "The red-headed man hit him\n again. He was nerve-racked, and,\n therefore, he wanted to hurt.\n\n\n \"Move!\" he rasped. \"I want the\n diamonds you've got for the ship\n from Lunar City! Bring 'em!\" Pop\n licked blood from his lips and the\n man with the weapon raged at him.\n \"Then phone down to the mine!\n Tell Sattell I'm here and he can\n come on up! Tell him to bring any\n more diamonds they've dug up since\n the stuff you've got!\"\n\n\n He leaned forward. His face was\n only inches from Pop Young's. It\n was seamed and hard-bitten and\n nerve-racked. But any man would be\n quivering if he wasn't used to space\n or the feel of one-sixth gravity on\n the Moon. He panted:", "Pop heard of the quaint commercial\n enterprise through the micro-tapes\n put off at the shack for the men\n down in the mine. Sattell probably\n learned of it the same way. Pop didn't\n even think of it again. It seemed\n to have nothing to do with him. But\n Sattell undoubtedly dealt with it\n fully in his desperate writings back\n to Earth.\nPop matter-of-factly tended the\n shack and the landing field and the\n stores for the Big Crack mine. Between-times\n he made more drawings\n in pursuit of his own private objective.\n Quite accidentally, he developed\n a certain talent professional artists\n might have approved. But he was not", "The shack and the job he filled\n were located in the medieval notion\n of the physical appearance of hell.\n By day the environment was heat and\n torment. By night—lunar night, of\n course, and lunar day—it was frigidity\n and horror. Once in two weeks\n Earth-time a rocketship came around\n the horizon from Lunar City with\n stores for the colony deep underground.\n Pop received the stores and\n took care of them. He handed over\n the product of the mine, to be forwarded\n to Earth. The rocket went\n away again. Come nightfall Pop\n lowered the supplies down the long\n cable into the Big Crack to the colony\n far down inside, and freshened up\n the landing field marks with magnesium\n marking-powder if a rocket-blast\n had blurred them. That was\n fundamentally all he had to do. But\n without him the mine down in the\n Crack would have had to shut\n down.", "Pop reflected hungrily that it was\n something else to be made permanent\n and inspected from time to time.\n But he wanted more than a drawing\n of this! He wanted to make the memory\n permanent and to extend it—\n\n\n If it had not been for his vacuum\n suit and the cannister he carried, Pop\n would have rubbed his hands.\nTall, jagged crater-walls rose\n from the lunar plain. Monstrous, extended\n inky shadows stretched\n enormous distances, utterly black.\n The sun, like a glowing octopod,\n floated low at the edge of things and\n seemed to hate all creation.\n\n\n Pop reached the rocket. He\n climbed the welded ladder-rungs to\n the air lock. He closed the door. Air\n whined. His suit sagged against his\n body. He took off his helmet.\n\n\n When the red-headed man opened\n the inner door, the hand-weapon\n shook and trembled. Pop said\n calmly:", "The first men to leave the colony\n had to be knocked cold and shipped\n out unconscious. They'd been underground—and\n in low gravity—long\n enough to be utterly unable to face\n the idea of open spaces. Even now\n there were some who had to be carried,\n but there were some tougher\n ones who were able to walk to the\n rocketship if Pop put a tarpaulin\n over their heads so they didn't have\n to see the sky. In any case Pop was\n essential, either for carrying or\n guidance.\nSattell got the shakes when he\n thought of Pop, and Pop rather\n probably knew it. Of course, by the\n time he took the job tending the\n shack, he was pretty certain about\n Sattell. The facts spoke for themselves.", "There was the most luridly bright\n of all possible flashes. There was no\n sound, of course. But something\n flamed very brightly, and the ground\n thumped under Pop Young's vacuum\n boots. He turned.\n\n\n The rocketship was still in the act\n of flying apart. It had been a splendid\n explosion. Of course cotton sheeting\n in liquid oxygen is not quite as\n good an explosive as carbon-black,\n which they used down in the mine.\n Even with magnesium powder to\n start the flame when a bare light-filament\n ignited it, the cannister-bomb\n hadn't equaled—say—T.N.T.\n But the ship had fuel on board for\n the trip back to Earth. And it blew,\n too. It would be minutes before all\n the fragments of the ship returned\n to the Moon's surface. On the Moon,\n things fall slowly.", "Then he made more sketches. The\n images to be drawn came back more\n clearly when he thought of Sattell,\n so by keeping Sattell in mind he recovered\n the memory of a chair that\n had been in his forgotten home.\n Then he drew his wife sitting in it,\n reading. It felt very good to see her\n again. And he speculated about\n whether Sattell ever thought of millions\n of dollars' worth of new-mined\n diamonds knocking about unguarded\n in the shack, and he suddenly recollected\n clearly the way one of his\n children had looked while playing\n with her doll. He made a quick\n sketch to keep from forgetting that.\n\n\n There was no purpose in the\n sketching, save that he'd lost all his\n young manhood through a senseless\n crime. He wanted his youth back. He\n was recovering it bit by bit. The\n occupation made it absurdly easy to\n live on the surface of the far side of\n the Moon, whether anybody else\n could do it or not.", "He saw the silver needle in the\n sky fighting momentum above a line\n of jagged crater-walls. It slowed, and\n slowed, and curved down as it drew\n nearer. The pilot killed all forward\n motion just above the field and came\n steadily and smoothly down to land\n between the silvery triangles that\n marked the landing place.\n\n\n Instantly the rockets cut off,\n drums of fuel and air and food came\n out of the cargo-hatch and Pop swept\n forward with the dozer. It was a\n miniature tractor with a gigantic\n scoop in front. He pushed a great\n mound of talc-fine dust before him\n to cover up the cargo. It was necessary.\n With freight costing what it\n did, fuel and air and food came\n frozen solid, in containers barely\n thicker than foil. While they stayed\n at space-shadow temperature, the foil\n would hold anything. And a cover of\n insulating moondust with vacuum\n between the grains kept even air\n frozen solid, though in sunlight." ], [ "But not Pop. He'd come to the\n Moon in the first place because Sattell\n was here. Near Sattell, he found\n memories of times when he was a\n young man with a young wife who\n loved him extravagantly. Then pictures\n of his children came out of\n emptiness and grew sharp and clear.\n He found that he loved them very\n dearly. And when he was near Sattell\n he literally recovered them—in\n the sense that he came to know new\n things about them and had new\n memories of them every day. He\n hadn't yet remembered the crime\n which lost them to him. Until he\n did—and the fact possessed a certain\n grisly humor—Pop didn't even hate\n Sattell. He simply wanted to be near\n him because it enabled him to recover\n new and vivid parts of his\n youth that had been lost.", "Pop had come back to consciousness\n in a hospital with a great\n wound in his head and no memory\n of anything that had happened before\n that moment. It was not that his\n identity was in question. When he\n was stronger, the doctors told him\n who he was, and as gently as possible\n what had happened to his wife\n and children. They'd been murdered\n after he was seemingly killed defending\n them. But he didn't remember\n a thing. Not then. It was\n something of a blessing.\n\n\n But when he was physically recovered\n he set about trying to pick\n up the threads of the life he could\n no longer remember. He met Sattell\n quite by accident. Sattell looked familiar.\n Pop eagerly tried to ask him\n questions. And Sattell turned gray\n and frantically denied that he'd ever\n seen Pop before.", "At such times Pop hardly thought\n of Sattell. He knew he had plenty\n of time for that. He'd started to follow\n Sattell knowing what had happened\n to his wife and children, but\n it was hearsay only. He had no memory\n of them at all. But Sattell stirred\n the lost memories. At first Pop followed\n absorbedly from city to city,\n to recover the years that had been\n wiped out by an axe-blow. He did\n recover a good deal. When Sattell\n fled to another continent, Pop followed\n because he had some distinct\n memories of his wife—and the way\n he'd felt about her—and some fugitive\n mental images of his children.\n When Sattell frenziedly tried to deny\n knowledge of the murder in Tangier,\n Pop had come to remember both his\n children and some of the happiness\n of his married life.", "Pop heard of the quaint commercial\n enterprise through the micro-tapes\n put off at the shack for the men\n down in the mine. Sattell probably\n learned of it the same way. Pop didn't\n even think of it again. It seemed\n to have nothing to do with him. But\n Sattell undoubtedly dealt with it\n fully in his desperate writings back\n to Earth.\nPop matter-of-factly tended the\n shack and the landing field and the\n stores for the Big Crack mine. Between-times\n he made more drawings\n in pursuit of his own private objective.\n Quite accidentally, he developed\n a certain talent professional artists\n might have approved. But he was not", "Sattell had no such device for adjusting\n to the lunar state of things.\n Living on the Moon was bad enough\n anyhow, then, but living one mile\n underground from Pop Young was\n much worse. Sattell clearly remembered\n the crime Pop Young hadn't\n yet recalled. He considered that Pop\n had made no overt attempt to revenge\n himself because he planned\n some retaliation so horrible and lingering\n that it was worth waiting for.\n He came to hate Pop with an insane\n ferocity. And fear. In his mind the\n need to escape became an obsession\n on top of the other psychotic states\n normal to a Moon-colonist.", "All of which happened back on\n Earth and a long time ago. It seemed\n to Pop that the sight of Sattell had\n brought back some vague and cloudy\n memories. They were not sharp,\n though, and he hunted up Sattell\n again to find out if he was right.\n And Sattell went into panic when\n he returned.\n\n\n Nowadays, by the Big Crack, Pop\n wasn't so insistent on seeing Sattell,\n but he was deeply concerned with\n the recovery of the memories that\n Sattell helped bring back. Pop was\n a highly conscientious man. He took\n good care of his job. There was a\n warning-bell in the shack, and when\n a rocketship from Lunar City got\n above the horizon and could send a\n tight beam, the gong clanged loudly,\n and Pop got into a vacuum-suit\n and went out the air lock. He usually\n reached the moondozer about the\n time the ship began to brake for\n landing, and he watched it come in.", "\"I'd guess,\" said Pop painstakingly,\n \"that Sattell figured it out. He's\n probably got some sort of gun to\n keep you from holding him down\n there. But he won't know his friends\n are here—not right this minute he\n won't.\"\n\n\n A shaking voice asked questions\n from the vision-phone.\n\n\n \"No,\" said Pop, \"they'll do it anyhow.\n If we were able to tell about\n 'em, they'd be chased. But if I'm\n dead and the shacks smashed and\n the cable burnt through, they'll be\n back on Earth long before a new\n cable's been got and let down to you.\n So they'll do all they can no matter\n what I do.\" He added, \"I wouldn't\n tell Sattell a thing about it, if I were\n you. It'll save trouble. Just let him\n keep on waiting for this to happen.\n It'll save you trouble.\"", "The red-headed man checked\n himself, panting. He drew back and\n slammed the inner lock-door. There\n was the sound of pumping.\n\n\n Pop put his helmet back on and\n sealed it. The outer door opened.\n Outrushing air tugged at Pop. After\n a second or two he went out and\n climbed down the welded-on ladder-bars\n to the ground.\n\n\n He headed back toward his shack.\n Somehow, the mention of Sattell had\n made his mind work better. It always\n did. He began painstakingly to\n put things together. The red-headed\n man knew the routine here in every\n detail. He knew Sattell. That part\n was simple. Sattell had planned this\n multi-million-dollar coup, as a man\n in prison might plan his break. The\n stripped interior of the ship identified\n it.", "Even when Sattell—whimpering—signed\n up for Lunar City, Pop tracked\n him. By that time he was quite\n sure that Sattell was the man who'd\n killed his family. If so, Sattell had\n profited by less than two days' pay\n for wiping out everything that Pop\n possessed. But Pop wanted it back.\n He couldn't prove Sattell's guilt.\n There was no evidence. In any case,\n he didn't really want Sattell to die.\n If he did, there'd be no way to recover\n more lost memories.", "Sometimes, in the shack on the far\n side of the Moon, Pop Young had\n odd fancies about Sattell. There was\n the mine, for example. In each two\n Earth-weeks of working, the mine-colony\n nearly filled up a three-gallon\n cannister with greasy-seeming white\n crystals shaped like two pyramids\n base to base. The filled cannister\n would weigh a hundred pounds on\n Earth. Here it weighed eighteen. But\n on Earth its contents would be computed\n in carats, and a hundred\n pounds was worth millions. Yet here\n on the Moon Pop kept a waiting cannister\n on a shelf in his tiny dome,", "The first men to leave the colony\n had to be knocked cold and shipped\n out unconscious. They'd been underground—and\n in low gravity—long\n enough to be utterly unable to face\n the idea of open spaces. Even now\n there were some who had to be carried,\n but there were some tougher\n ones who were able to walk to the\n rocketship if Pop put a tarpaulin\n over their heads so they didn't have\n to see the sky. In any case Pop was\n essential, either for carrying or\n guidance.\nSattell got the shakes when he\n thought of Pop, and Pop rather\n probably knew it. Of course, by the\n time he took the job tending the\n shack, he was pretty certain about\n Sattell. The facts spoke for themselves.", "Somebody back on Earth promoted\n a luxury passenger-line of spaceships\n to ply between Earth and\n Moon. It looked like a perfect set-up.\n Three spacecraft capable of the journey\n came into being with attendant\n reams of publicity. They promised a\n thrill and a new distinction for the\n rich. Guided tours to Lunar! The\n most expensive and most thrilling\n trip in history! One hundred thousand\n dollars for a twelve-day cruise\n through space, with views of the\n Moon's far side and trips through\n Lunar City and a landing in Aristarchus,\n plus sound-tapes of the journey\n and fame hitherto reserved for\n honest explorers!\n\n\n It didn't seem to have anything\n to do with Pop or with Sattell. But\n it did.", "Pop didn't wait. He searched\n hopefully. Once a mass of steel plating\n fell only yards from him, but it\n did not interrupt his search.\n\n\n When he went into the shack, he\n grinned to himself. The call-light of\n the vision-phone flickered wildly.\n When he took off his helmet the bell\n clanged incessantly. He answered. A\n shaking voice from the mining-colony\n panted:\n\n\n \"We felt a shock! What happened?\n What do we do?\"\n\n\n \"Don't do a thing,\" advised Pop.\n \"It's all right. I blew up the ship and\n everything's all right. I wouldn't\n even mention it to Sattell if I were\n you.\"", "behind the air-apparatus. It rattled\n if he shook it, and it was worth no\n more than so many pebbles. But\n sometimes Pop wondered if Sattell\n ever thought of the value of the\n mine's production. If he would kill\n a woman and two children and think\n he'd killed a man for no more than\n a hundred dollars, what enormity\n would he commit for a three-gallon\n quantity of uncut diamonds?\nBut he did not dwell on such\n speculation. The sun rose very, very\n slowly in what by convention was\n called the east. It took nearly two\n hours to urge its disk above the\n horizon, and it burned terribly in\n emptiness for fourteen times twenty-four", "But it wasn't fun, even underground.\n In the Moon's slight gravity,\n a man is really adjusted to existence\n when he has a well-developed case\n of agoraphobia. With such an aid, a\n man can get into a tiny, coffinlike\n cubbyhole, and feel solidity above\n and below and around him, and\n happily tell himself that it feels delicious.\n Sometimes it does.\n\n\n But Sattell couldn't comfort himself\n so easily. He knew about Pop,\n up on the surface. He'd shipped out,\n whimpering, to the Moon to get far\n away from Pop, and Pop was just\n about a mile overhead and there was\n no way to get around him. It was\n difficult to get away from the mine,\n anyhow. It doesn't take too long for\n the low gravity to tear a man's\n nerves to shreds. He has to develop\n kinks in his head to survive. And\n those kinks—", "The shack stood a hundred feet\n from the Big Crack's edge. It looked\n like a dust-heap thirty feet high, and\n it was. The outside was surface\n moondust, piled over a tiny dome to\n be insulation against the cold of\n night and shadow and the furnace\n heat of day. Pop lived in it all alone,\n and in his spare time he worked\n industriously at recovering some\n missing portions of his life that Sattell\n had managed to take away from\n him.\n\n\n He thought often of Sattell, down\n in the colony underground. There\n were galleries and tunnels and living-quarters\n down there. There were\n air-tight bulkheads for safety, and a\n hydroponic garden to keep the air\n fresh, and all sorts of things to make\n life possible for men under if not\n on the Moon.", "\"And get it straight! You try\n any tricks and we take off! We\n swing over your shack! The rocket-blast\n smashes it! We burn you\n down! Then we swing over the cable\n down to the mine and the rocket-flame\n melts it! You die and everybody\n in the mine besides! No tricks!\n We didn't come here for nothing!\"\n\n\n He twitched all over. Then he\n struck cruelly again at Pop Young's\n face. He seemed filled with fury, at\n least partly hysterical. It was the tension\n that space-travel—then, at its\n beginning—produced. It was meaningless\n savagery due to terror. But,\n of course, Pop was helpless to resent\n it. There were no weapons on the\n Moon and the mention of Sattell's\n name showed the uselessness of bluff.\n He'd pictured the complete set-up\n by the edge of the Big Crack. Pop\n could do nothing.", "It was one of the unsuccessful\n luxury-liners sold for scrap. Or perhaps\n it was stolen for the journey\n here. Sattell's associates had had to\n steal or somehow get the fuel, and\n somehow find a pilot. But there were\n diamonds worth at least five million\n dollars waiting for them, and the\n whole job might not have called for\n more than two men—with Sattell as\n a third. According to the economics\n of crime, it was feasible. Anyhow it\n was being done.\n\n\n Pop reached the dust-heap which\n was his shack and went in the air\n lock. Inside, he went to the vision-phone\n and called the mine-colony\n down in the Crack. He gave the\n message he'd been told to pass on.\n Sattell to come up, with what diamonds\n had been dug since the\n regular cannister was sent up for the\n Lunar City ship that would be due\n presently. Otherwise the ship on the\n landing strip would destroy shack\n and Pop and the colony together.", "But he was helpless. He couldn't\n leave. There was Pop. He couldn't\n kill Pop. He had no chance—and he\n was afraid. The one absurd, irrelevant\n thing he could do was write\n letters back to Earth. He did that.\n He wrote with the desperate, impassioned,\n frantic blend of persuasion\n and information and genius-like invention\n of a prisoner in a high-security\n prison, trying to induce someone\n to help him escape.\n\n\n He had friends, of a sort, but for\n a long time his letters produced\n nothing. The Moon swung in vast\n circles about the Earth, and the Earth\n swung sedately about the Sun. The\n other planets danced their saraband.\n The rest of humanity went about its\n own affairs with fascinated attention.\n But then an event occurred which\n bore directly upon Pop Young and\n Sattell and Pop Young's missing\n years.", "He grinned happily down at a section\n of plastic stair-rail he'd found\n not too far from where the ship exploded.\n When the man down in the\n mine cut off, Pop got out of his\n vacuum suit in a hurry. He placed\n the plastic zestfully on the table\n where he'd been restricted to drawing\n pictures of his wife and children\n in order to recover memories of\n them.\n\n\n He began to plan, gloatingly, the\n thing he would carve out of a four-inch\n section of the plastic. When it\n was carved, he'd paint it. While he\n worked, he'd think of Sattell, because\n that was the way to get back the\n missing portions of his life—the\n parts Sattell had managed to get\n away from him. He'd get back more\n than ever, now!" ], [ "But not Pop. He'd come to the\n Moon in the first place because Sattell\n was here. Near Sattell, he found\n memories of times when he was a\n young man with a young wife who\n loved him extravagantly. Then pictures\n of his children came out of\n emptiness and grew sharp and clear.\n He found that he loved them very\n dearly. And when he was near Sattell\n he literally recovered them—in\n the sense that he came to know new\n things about them and had new\n memories of them every day. He\n hadn't yet remembered the crime\n which lost them to him. Until he\n did—and the fact possessed a certain\n grisly humor—Pop didn't even hate\n Sattell. He simply wanted to be near\n him because it enabled him to recover\n new and vivid parts of his\n youth that had been lost.", "Sattell had no such device for adjusting\n to the lunar state of things.\n Living on the Moon was bad enough\n anyhow, then, but living one mile\n underground from Pop Young was\n much worse. Sattell clearly remembered\n the crime Pop Young hadn't\n yet recalled. He considered that Pop\n had made no overt attempt to revenge\n himself because he planned\n some retaliation so horrible and lingering\n that it was worth waiting for.\n He came to hate Pop with an insane\n ferocity. And fear. In his mind the\n need to escape became an obsession\n on top of the other psychotic states\n normal to a Moon-colonist.", "Pop had come back to consciousness\n in a hospital with a great\n wound in his head and no memory\n of anything that had happened before\n that moment. It was not that his\n identity was in question. When he\n was stronger, the doctors told him\n who he was, and as gently as possible\n what had happened to his wife\n and children. They'd been murdered\n after he was seemingly killed defending\n them. But he didn't remember\n a thing. Not then. It was\n something of a blessing.\n\n\n But when he was physically recovered\n he set about trying to pick\n up the threads of the life he could\n no longer remember. He met Sattell\n quite by accident. Sattell looked familiar.\n Pop eagerly tried to ask him\n questions. And Sattell turned gray\n and frantically denied that he'd ever\n seen Pop before.", "But he was helpless. He couldn't\n leave. There was Pop. He couldn't\n kill Pop. He had no chance—and he\n was afraid. The one absurd, irrelevant\n thing he could do was write\n letters back to Earth. He did that.\n He wrote with the desperate, impassioned,\n frantic blend of persuasion\n and information and genius-like invention\n of a prisoner in a high-security\n prison, trying to induce someone\n to help him escape.\n\n\n He had friends, of a sort, but for\n a long time his letters produced\n nothing. The Moon swung in vast\n circles about the Earth, and the Earth\n swung sedately about the Sun. The\n other planets danced their saraband.\n The rest of humanity went about its\n own affairs with fascinated attention.\n But then an event occurred which\n bore directly upon Pop Young and\n Sattell and Pop Young's missing\n years.", "\"And get it straight! You try\n any tricks and we take off! We\n swing over your shack! The rocket-blast\n smashes it! We burn you\n down! Then we swing over the cable\n down to the mine and the rocket-flame\n melts it! You die and everybody\n in the mine besides! No tricks!\n We didn't come here for nothing!\"\n\n\n He twitched all over. Then he\n struck cruelly again at Pop Young's\n face. He seemed filled with fury, at\n least partly hysterical. It was the tension\n that space-travel—then, at its\n beginning—produced. It was meaningless\n savagery due to terror. But,\n of course, Pop was helpless to resent\n it. There were no weapons on the\n Moon and the mention of Sattell's\n name showed the uselessness of bluff.\n He'd pictured the complete set-up\n by the edge of the Big Crack. Pop\n could do nothing.", "At such times Pop hardly thought\n of Sattell. He knew he had plenty\n of time for that. He'd started to follow\n Sattell knowing what had happened\n to his wife and children, but\n it was hearsay only. He had no memory\n of them at all. But Sattell stirred\n the lost memories. At first Pop followed\n absorbedly from city to city,\n to recover the years that had been\n wiped out by an axe-blow. He did\n recover a good deal. When Sattell\n fled to another continent, Pop followed\n because he had some distinct\n memories of his wife—and the way\n he'd felt about her—and some fugitive\n mental images of his children.\n When Sattell frenziedly tried to deny\n knowledge of the murder in Tangier,\n Pop had come to remember both his\n children and some of the happiness\n of his married life.", "\"I'd guess,\" said Pop painstakingly,\n \"that Sattell figured it out. He's\n probably got some sort of gun to\n keep you from holding him down\n there. But he won't know his friends\n are here—not right this minute he\n won't.\"\n\n\n A shaking voice asked questions\n from the vision-phone.\n\n\n \"No,\" said Pop, \"they'll do it anyhow.\n If we were able to tell about\n 'em, they'd be chased. But if I'm\n dead and the shacks smashed and\n the cable burnt through, they'll be\n back on Earth long before a new\n cable's been got and let down to you.\n So they'll do all they can no matter\n what I do.\" He added, \"I wouldn't\n tell Sattell a thing about it, if I were\n you. It'll save trouble. Just let him\n keep on waiting for this to happen.\n It'll save you trouble.\"", "Sometimes, in the shack on the far\n side of the Moon, Pop Young had\n odd fancies about Sattell. There was\n the mine, for example. In each two\n Earth-weeks of working, the mine-colony\n nearly filled up a three-gallon\n cannister with greasy-seeming white\n crystals shaped like two pyramids\n base to base. The filled cannister\n would weigh a hundred pounds on\n Earth. Here it weighed eighteen. But\n on Earth its contents would be computed\n in carats, and a hundred\n pounds was worth millions. Yet here\n on the Moon Pop kept a waiting cannister\n on a shelf in his tiny dome,", "Somebody back on Earth promoted\n a luxury passenger-line of spaceships\n to ply between Earth and\n Moon. It looked like a perfect set-up.\n Three spacecraft capable of the journey\n came into being with attendant\n reams of publicity. They promised a\n thrill and a new distinction for the\n rich. Guided tours to Lunar! The\n most expensive and most thrilling\n trip in history! One hundred thousand\n dollars for a twelve-day cruise\n through space, with views of the\n Moon's far side and trips through\n Lunar City and a landing in Aristarchus,\n plus sound-tapes of the journey\n and fame hitherto reserved for\n honest explorers!\n\n\n It didn't seem to have anything\n to do with Pop or with Sattell. But\n it did.", "All of which happened back on\n Earth and a long time ago. It seemed\n to Pop that the sight of Sattell had\n brought back some vague and cloudy\n memories. They were not sharp,\n though, and he hunted up Sattell\n again to find out if he was right.\n And Sattell went into panic when\n he returned.\n\n\n Nowadays, by the Big Crack, Pop\n wasn't so insistent on seeing Sattell,\n but he was deeply concerned with\n the recovery of the memories that\n Sattell helped bring back. Pop was\n a highly conscientious man. He took\n good care of his job. There was a\n warning-bell in the shack, and when\n a rocketship from Lunar City got\n above the horizon and could send a\n tight beam, the gong clanged loudly,\n and Pop got into a vacuum-suit\n and went out the air lock. He usually\n reached the moondozer about the\n time the ship began to brake for\n landing, and he watched it come in.", "Pop heard of the quaint commercial\n enterprise through the micro-tapes\n put off at the shack for the men\n down in the mine. Sattell probably\n learned of it the same way. Pop didn't\n even think of it again. It seemed\n to have nothing to do with him. But\n Sattell undoubtedly dealt with it\n fully in his desperate writings back\n to Earth.\nPop matter-of-factly tended the\n shack and the landing field and the\n stores for the Big Crack mine. Between-times\n he made more drawings\n in pursuit of his own private objective.\n Quite accidentally, he developed\n a certain talent professional artists\n might have approved. But he was not", "Even when Sattell—whimpering—signed\n up for Lunar City, Pop tracked\n him. By that time he was quite\n sure that Sattell was the man who'd\n killed his family. If so, Sattell had\n profited by less than two days' pay\n for wiping out everything that Pop\n possessed. But Pop wanted it back.\n He couldn't prove Sattell's guilt.\n There was no evidence. In any case,\n he didn't really want Sattell to die.\n If he did, there'd be no way to recover\n more lost memories.", "The red-headed man hit him\n again. He was nerve-racked, and,\n therefore, he wanted to hurt.\n\n\n \"Move!\" he rasped. \"I want the\n diamonds you've got for the ship\n from Lunar City! Bring 'em!\" Pop\n licked blood from his lips and the\n man with the weapon raged at him.\n \"Then phone down to the mine!\n Tell Sattell I'm here and he can\n come on up! Tell him to bring any\n more diamonds they've dug up since\n the stuff you've got!\"\n\n\n He leaned forward. His face was\n only inches from Pop Young's. It\n was seamed and hard-bitten and\n nerve-racked. But any man would be\n quivering if he wasn't used to space\n or the feel of one-sixth gravity on\n the Moon. He panted:", "The first men to leave the colony\n had to be knocked cold and shipped\n out unconscious. They'd been underground—and\n in low gravity—long\n enough to be utterly unable to face\n the idea of open spaces. Even now\n there were some who had to be carried,\n but there were some tougher\n ones who were able to walk to the\n rocketship if Pop put a tarpaulin\n over their heads so they didn't have\n to see the sky. In any case Pop was\n essential, either for carrying or\n guidance.\nSattell got the shakes when he\n thought of Pop, and Pop rather\n probably knew it. Of course, by the\n time he took the job tending the\n shack, he was pretty certain about\n Sattell. The facts spoke for themselves.", "The red-headed man checked\n himself, panting. He drew back and\n slammed the inner lock-door. There\n was the sound of pumping.\n\n\n Pop put his helmet back on and\n sealed it. The outer door opened.\n Outrushing air tugged at Pop. After\n a second or two he went out and\n climbed down the welded-on ladder-bars\n to the ground.\n\n\n He headed back toward his shack.\n Somehow, the mention of Sattell had\n made his mind work better. It always\n did. He began painstakingly to\n put things together. The red-headed\n man knew the routine here in every\n detail. He knew Sattell. That part\n was simple. Sattell had planned this\n multi-million-dollar coup, as a man\n in prison might plan his break. The\n stripped interior of the ship identified\n it.", "behind the air-apparatus. It rattled\n if he shook it, and it was worth no\n more than so many pebbles. But\n sometimes Pop wondered if Sattell\n ever thought of the value of the\n mine's production. If he would kill\n a woman and two children and think\n he'd killed a man for no more than\n a hundred dollars, what enormity\n would he commit for a three-gallon\n quantity of uncut diamonds?\nBut he did not dwell on such\n speculation. The sun rose very, very\n slowly in what by convention was\n called the east. It took nearly two\n hours to urge its disk above the\n horizon, and it burned terribly in\n emptiness for fourteen times twenty-four", "The shack stood a hundred feet\n from the Big Crack's edge. It looked\n like a dust-heap thirty feet high, and\n it was. The outside was surface\n moondust, piled over a tiny dome to\n be insulation against the cold of\n night and shadow and the furnace\n heat of day. Pop lived in it all alone,\n and in his spare time he worked\n industriously at recovering some\n missing portions of his life that Sattell\n had managed to take away from\n him.\n\n\n He thought often of Sattell, down\n in the colony underground. There\n were galleries and tunnels and living-quarters\n down there. There were\n air-tight bulkheads for safety, and a\n hydroponic garden to keep the air\n fresh, and all sorts of things to make\n life possible for men under if not\n on the Moon.", "It was just barely past lunar sunrise\n on the far side of the Moon.\n Incredibly long and utterly black\n shadows stretched across the plain,\n and half the rocketship was dazzling\n white and half was blacker than\n blackness itself. The sun still hung\n low indeed in the black, star-speckled\n sky. Pop waded through moondust,\n raising a trail of slowly settling\n powder. He knew only that the ship\n didn't come from Lunar City, but\n from Earth. He couldn't imagine\n why. He did not even wildly connect\n it with what—say—Sattell might\n have written with desperate plausibility\n about greasy-seeming white\n crystals out of the mine, knocking\n about Pop Young's shack in cannisters\n containing a hundred Earth-pounds\n weight of richness.\nPop reached the rocketship. He\n approached the big tail-fins. On one\n of them there were welded ladder-rungs\n going up to the opened air-lock\n door.", "The Crack, of course, was that\n gaping rocky fault which stretches\n nine hundred miles, jaggedly, over\n the side of the Moon that Earth\n never sees. There is one stretch where\n it is a yawning gulf a full half-mile\n wide and unguessably deep. Where\n Pop Young's shack stood it was only\n a hundred yards, but the colony was\n a full mile down, in one wall. There\n is nothing like it on Earth, of course.\n When it was first found, scientists\n descended into it to examine the exposed\n rock-strata and learn the history\n of the Moon before its craters\n were made. But they found more\n than history. They found the reason\n for the colony and the rocket landing\n field and the shack.\n\n\n The reason for Pop was something\n else.", "It was one of the unsuccessful\n luxury-liners sold for scrap. Or perhaps\n it was stolen for the journey\n here. Sattell's associates had had to\n steal or somehow get the fuel, and\n somehow find a pilot. But there were\n diamonds worth at least five million\n dollars waiting for them, and the\n whole job might not have called for\n more than two men—with Sattell as\n a third. According to the economics\n of crime, it was feasible. Anyhow it\n was being done.\n\n\n Pop reached the dust-heap which\n was his shack and went in the air\n lock. Inside, he went to the vision-phone\n and called the mine-colony\n down in the Crack. He gave the\n message he'd been told to pass on.\n Sattell to come up, with what diamonds\n had been dug since the\n regular cannister was sent up for the\n Lunar City ship that would be due\n presently. Otherwise the ship on the\n landing strip would destroy shack\n and Pop and the colony together." ], [ "The first men to leave the colony\n had to be knocked cold and shipped\n out unconscious. They'd been underground—and\n in low gravity—long\n enough to be utterly unable to face\n the idea of open spaces. Even now\n there were some who had to be carried,\n but there were some tougher\n ones who were able to walk to the\n rocketship if Pop put a tarpaulin\n over their heads so they didn't have\n to see the sky. In any case Pop was\n essential, either for carrying or\n guidance.\nSattell got the shakes when he\n thought of Pop, and Pop rather\n probably knew it. Of course, by the\n time he took the job tending the\n shack, he was pretty certain about\n Sattell. The facts spoke for themselves.", "The shack and the job he filled\n were located in the medieval notion\n of the physical appearance of hell.\n By day the environment was heat and\n torment. By night—lunar night, of\n course, and lunar day—it was frigidity\n and horror. Once in two weeks\n Earth-time a rocketship came around\n the horizon from Lunar City with\n stores for the colony deep underground.\n Pop received the stores and\n took care of them. He handed over\n the product of the mine, to be forwarded\n to Earth. The rocket went\n away again. Come nightfall Pop\n lowered the supplies down the long\n cable into the Big Crack to the colony\n far down inside, and freshened up\n the landing field marks with magnesium\n marking-powder if a rocket-blast\n had blurred them. That was\n fundamentally all he had to do. But\n without him the mine down in the\n Crack would have had to shut\n down.", "The Crack, of course, was that\n gaping rocky fault which stretches\n nine hundred miles, jaggedly, over\n the side of the Moon that Earth\n never sees. There is one stretch where\n it is a yawning gulf a full half-mile\n wide and unguessably deep. Where\n Pop Young's shack stood it was only\n a hundred yards, but the colony was\n a full mile down, in one wall. There\n is nothing like it on Earth, of course.\n When it was first found, scientists\n descended into it to examine the exposed\n rock-strata and learn the history\n of the Moon before its craters\n were made. But they found more\n than history. They found the reason\n for the colony and the rocket landing\n field and the shack.\n\n\n The reason for Pop was something\n else.", "The shack stood a hundred feet\n from the Big Crack's edge. It looked\n like a dust-heap thirty feet high, and\n it was. The outside was surface\n moondust, piled over a tiny dome to\n be insulation against the cold of\n night and shadow and the furnace\n heat of day. Pop lived in it all alone,\n and in his spare time he worked\n industriously at recovering some\n missing portions of his life that Sattell\n had managed to take away from\n him.\n\n\n He thought often of Sattell, down\n in the colony underground. There\n were galleries and tunnels and living-quarters\n down there. There were\n air-tight bulkheads for safety, and a\n hydroponic garden to keep the air\n fresh, and all sorts of things to make\n life possible for men under if not\n on the Moon.", "Sometimes, in the shack on the far\n side of the Moon, Pop Young had\n odd fancies about Sattell. There was\n the mine, for example. In each two\n Earth-weeks of working, the mine-colony\n nearly filled up a three-gallon\n cannister with greasy-seeming white\n crystals shaped like two pyramids\n base to base. The filled cannister\n would weigh a hundred pounds on\n Earth. Here it weighed eighteen. But\n on Earth its contents would be computed\n in carats, and a hundred\n pounds was worth millions. Yet here\n on the Moon Pop kept a waiting cannister\n on a shelf in his tiny dome,", "All of which happened back on\n Earth and a long time ago. It seemed\n to Pop that the sight of Sattell had\n brought back some vague and cloudy\n memories. They were not sharp,\n though, and he hunted up Sattell\n again to find out if he was right.\n And Sattell went into panic when\n he returned.\n\n\n Nowadays, by the Big Crack, Pop\n wasn't so insistent on seeing Sattell,\n but he was deeply concerned with\n the recovery of the memories that\n Sattell helped bring back. Pop was\n a highly conscientious man. He took\n good care of his job. There was a\n warning-bell in the shack, and when\n a rocketship from Lunar City got\n above the horizon and could send a\n tight beam, the gong clanged loudly,\n and Pop got into a vacuum-suit\n and went out the air lock. He usually\n reached the moondozer about the\n time the ship began to brake for\n landing, and he watched it come in.", "But it wasn't fun, even underground.\n In the Moon's slight gravity,\n a man is really adjusted to existence\n when he has a well-developed case\n of agoraphobia. With such an aid, a\n man can get into a tiny, coffinlike\n cubbyhole, and feel solidity above\n and below and around him, and\n happily tell himself that it feels delicious.\n Sometimes it does.\n\n\n But Sattell couldn't comfort himself\n so easily. He knew about Pop,\n up on the surface. He'd shipped out,\n whimpering, to the Moon to get far\n away from Pop, and Pop was just\n about a mile overhead and there was\n no way to get around him. It was\n difficult to get away from the mine,\n anyhow. It doesn't take too long for\n the low gravity to tear a man's\n nerves to shreds. He has to develop\n kinks in his head to survive. And\n those kinks—", "The sun rose, and baked the\n abomination of desolation which was\n the moonscape. Pop Young meticulously\n touched up the glittering\n triangles which were landing guides\n for the Lunar City ships. They glittered\n from the thinnest conceivable\n layer of magnesium marking-powder.\n He checked over the moondozer.\n He tended the air apparatus. He did\n everything that his job and survival\n required. Ungrudgingly.", "Outside the shack, jagged stony\n pinnacles reared in the starlight, and\n craters complained of the bombardment\n from space that had made them.\n But, outside, nothing ever happened.\n Inside, it was quite different.\n\n\n Working on his memories, one\n day Pop made a little sketch. It\n helped a great deal. He grew deeply\n interested. Writing-material was\n scarce, but he spent most of the time\n between two particular rocket-landings\n getting down on paper exactly\n how a child had looked while sleeping,\n some fifteen years before. He\n remembered with astonishment that\n the child had really looked exactly\n like that! Later he began a sketch of\n his partly-remembered wife. In time—he\n had plenty—it became a really\n truthful likeness.", "But not Pop. He'd come to the\n Moon in the first place because Sattell\n was here. Near Sattell, he found\n memories of times when he was a\n young man with a young wife who\n loved him extravagantly. Then pictures\n of his children came out of\n emptiness and grew sharp and clear.\n He found that he loved them very\n dearly. And when he was near Sattell\n he literally recovered them—in\n the sense that he came to know new\n things about them and had new\n memories of them every day. He\n hadn't yet remembered the crime\n which lost them to him. Until he\n did—and the fact possessed a certain\n grisly humor—Pop didn't even hate\n Sattell. He simply wanted to be near\n him because it enabled him to recover\n new and vivid parts of his\n youth that had been lost.", "hours before sunset. Then there\n was night, and for three hundred\n and thirty-six consecutive hours there\n were only stars overhead and the\n sky was a hole so terrible that a man\n who looked up into it—what with\n the nagging sensation of one-sixth\n gravity—tended to lose all confidence\n in the stability of things. Most men\n immediately found it hysterically necessary\n to seize hold of something\n solid to keep from falling upward.\n But nothing felt solid. Everything\n fell, too. Wherefore most men tended\n to scream.", "Pop heard of the quaint commercial\n enterprise through the micro-tapes\n put off at the shack for the men\n down in the mine. Sattell probably\n learned of it the same way. Pop didn't\n even think of it again. It seemed\n to have nothing to do with him. But\n Sattell undoubtedly dealt with it\n fully in his desperate writings back\n to Earth.\nPop matter-of-factly tended the\n shack and the landing field and the\n stores for the Big Crack mine. Between-times\n he made more drawings\n in pursuit of his own private objective.\n Quite accidentally, he developed\n a certain talent professional artists\n might have approved. But he was not", "Pop didn't wait. He searched\n hopefully. Once a mass of steel plating\n fell only yards from him, but it\n did not interrupt his search.\n\n\n When he went into the shack, he\n grinned to himself. The call-light of\n the vision-phone flickered wildly.\n When he took off his helmet the bell\n clanged incessantly. He answered. A\n shaking voice from the mining-colony\n panted:\n\n\n \"We felt a shock! What happened?\n What do we do?\"\n\n\n \"Don't do a thing,\" advised Pop.\n \"It's all right. I blew up the ship and\n everything's all right. I wouldn't\n even mention it to Sattell if I were\n you.\"", "There were just two passenger\n tours. The first was fully booked.\n But the passengers who paid so highly,\n expected to be pleasantly thrilled\n and shielded from all reasons for\n alarm. And they couldn't be. Something\n happens when a self-centered\n and complacent individual unsuspectingly\n looks out of a spaceship\n port and sees the cosmos unshielded\n by mists or clouds or other aids to\n blindness against reality. It is shattering.", "Sattell had no such device for adjusting\n to the lunar state of things.\n Living on the Moon was bad enough\n anyhow, then, but living one mile\n underground from Pop Young was\n much worse. Sattell clearly remembered\n the crime Pop Young hadn't\n yet recalled. He considered that Pop\n had made no overt attempt to revenge\n himself because he planned\n some retaliation so horrible and lingering\n that it was worth waiting for.\n He came to hate Pop with an insane\n ferocity. And fear. In his mind the\n need to escape became an obsession\n on top of the other psychotic states\n normal to a Moon-colonist.", "Another shaky question.\n\n\n \"Me?\" asked Pop. \"Oh, I'm going\n to raise what hell I can. There's\n some stuff in that ship I want.\"\n\n\n He switched off the phone. He\n went over to his air apparatus. He\n took down the cannister of diamonds\n which were worth five millions or\n more back on Earth. He found a\n bucket. He dumped the diamonds\n casually into it. They floated downward\n with great deliberation and\n surged from side to side like a liquid\n when they stopped. One-sixth gravity.\n\n\n Pop regarded his drawings meditatively.\n A sketch of his wife as he\n now remembered her. It was very\n good to remember. A drawing of his\n two children, playing together. He\n looked forward to remembering\n much more about them. He grinned.\n\n\n \"That stair-rail,\" he said in deep\n satisfaction. \"That'll do it!\"", "\"I'd guess,\" said Pop painstakingly,\n \"that Sattell figured it out. He's\n probably got some sort of gun to\n keep you from holding him down\n there. But he won't know his friends\n are here—not right this minute he\n won't.\"\n\n\n A shaking voice asked questions\n from the vision-phone.\n\n\n \"No,\" said Pop, \"they'll do it anyhow.\n If we were able to tell about\n 'em, they'd be chased. But if I'm\n dead and the shacks smashed and\n the cable burnt through, they'll be\n back on Earth long before a new\n cable's been got and let down to you.\n So they'll do all they can no matter\n what I do.\" He added, \"I wouldn't\n tell Sattell a thing about it, if I were\n you. It'll save trouble. Just let him\n keep on waiting for this to happen.\n It'll save you trouble.\"", "At such times Pop hardly thought\n of Sattell. He knew he had plenty\n of time for that. He'd started to follow\n Sattell knowing what had happened\n to his wife and children, but\n it was hearsay only. He had no memory\n of them at all. But Sattell stirred\n the lost memories. At first Pop followed\n absorbedly from city to city,\n to recover the years that had been\n wiped out by an axe-blow. He did\n recover a good deal. When Sattell\n fled to another continent, Pop followed\n because he had some distinct\n memories of his wife—and the way\n he'd felt about her—and some fugitive\n mental images of his children.\n When Sattell frenziedly tried to deny\n knowledge of the murder in Tangier,\n Pop had come to remember both his\n children and some of the happiness\n of his married life.", "All the inside of the shack was\n foggy when he finished. Then he\n pushed the cannister-top down. He\n breathed a sigh of relief when it was\n in place. He'd arranged for it to\n break a frozen-brittle switch as it\n descended. When it came off, the\n switch would light the lamp with its\n bare filament. There was powdered\n magnesium in contact with it and\n liquid oxygen all about.\n\n\n He went out of the shack by the\n air lock. On the way, thinking about\n Sattell, he suddenly recovered a completely\n new memory. On their first\n wedding anniversary, so long ago,\n he and his wife had gone out to\n dinner to celebrate. He remembered\n how she looked: the almost-smug\n joy they shared that they would be\n together for always, with one complete\n year for proof.", "Pop reflected hungrily that it was\n something else to be made permanent\n and inspected from time to time.\n But he wanted more than a drawing\n of this! He wanted to make the memory\n permanent and to extend it—\n\n\n If it had not been for his vacuum\n suit and the cannister he carried, Pop\n would have rubbed his hands.\nTall, jagged crater-walls rose\n from the lunar plain. Monstrous, extended\n inky shadows stretched\n enormous distances, utterly black.\n The sun, like a glowing octopod,\n floated low at the edge of things and\n seemed to hate all creation.\n\n\n Pop reached the rocket. He\n climbed the welded ladder-rungs to\n the air lock. He closed the door. Air\n whined. His suit sagged against his\n body. He took off his helmet.\n\n\n When the red-headed man opened\n the inner door, the hand-weapon\n shook and trembled. Pop said\n calmly:" ], [ "But not Pop. He'd come to the\n Moon in the first place because Sattell\n was here. Near Sattell, he found\n memories of times when he was a\n young man with a young wife who\n loved him extravagantly. Then pictures\n of his children came out of\n emptiness and grew sharp and clear.\n He found that he loved them very\n dearly. And when he was near Sattell\n he literally recovered them—in\n the sense that he came to know new\n things about them and had new\n memories of them every day. He\n hadn't yet remembered the crime\n which lost them to him. Until he\n did—and the fact possessed a certain\n grisly humor—Pop didn't even hate\n Sattell. He simply wanted to be near\n him because it enabled him to recover\n new and vivid parts of his\n youth that had been lost.", "Sattell had no such device for adjusting\n to the lunar state of things.\n Living on the Moon was bad enough\n anyhow, then, but living one mile\n underground from Pop Young was\n much worse. Sattell clearly remembered\n the crime Pop Young hadn't\n yet recalled. He considered that Pop\n had made no overt attempt to revenge\n himself because he planned\n some retaliation so horrible and lingering\n that it was worth waiting for.\n He came to hate Pop with an insane\n ferocity. And fear. In his mind the\n need to escape became an obsession\n on top of the other psychotic states\n normal to a Moon-colonist.", "At such times Pop hardly thought\n of Sattell. He knew he had plenty\n of time for that. He'd started to follow\n Sattell knowing what had happened\n to his wife and children, but\n it was hearsay only. He had no memory\n of them at all. But Sattell stirred\n the lost memories. At first Pop followed\n absorbedly from city to city,\n to recover the years that had been\n wiped out by an axe-blow. He did\n recover a good deal. When Sattell\n fled to another continent, Pop followed\n because he had some distinct\n memories of his wife—and the way\n he'd felt about her—and some fugitive\n mental images of his children.\n When Sattell frenziedly tried to deny\n knowledge of the murder in Tangier,\n Pop had come to remember both his\n children and some of the happiness\n of his married life.", "Pop had come back to consciousness\n in a hospital with a great\n wound in his head and no memory\n of anything that had happened before\n that moment. It was not that his\n identity was in question. When he\n was stronger, the doctors told him\n who he was, and as gently as possible\n what had happened to his wife\n and children. They'd been murdered\n after he was seemingly killed defending\n them. But he didn't remember\n a thing. Not then. It was\n something of a blessing.\n\n\n But when he was physically recovered\n he set about trying to pick\n up the threads of the life he could\n no longer remember. He met Sattell\n quite by accident. Sattell looked familiar.\n Pop eagerly tried to ask him\n questions. And Sattell turned gray\n and frantically denied that he'd ever\n seen Pop before.", "All of which happened back on\n Earth and a long time ago. It seemed\n to Pop that the sight of Sattell had\n brought back some vague and cloudy\n memories. They were not sharp,\n though, and he hunted up Sattell\n again to find out if he was right.\n And Sattell went into panic when\n he returned.\n\n\n Nowadays, by the Big Crack, Pop\n wasn't so insistent on seeing Sattell,\n but he was deeply concerned with\n the recovery of the memories that\n Sattell helped bring back. Pop was\n a highly conscientious man. He took\n good care of his job. There was a\n warning-bell in the shack, and when\n a rocketship from Lunar City got\n above the horizon and could send a\n tight beam, the gong clanged loudly,\n and Pop got into a vacuum-suit\n and went out the air lock. He usually\n reached the moondozer about the\n time the ship began to brake for\n landing, and he watched it come in.", "Even when Sattell—whimpering—signed\n up for Lunar City, Pop tracked\n him. By that time he was quite\n sure that Sattell was the man who'd\n killed his family. If so, Sattell had\n profited by less than two days' pay\n for wiping out everything that Pop\n possessed. But Pop wanted it back.\n He couldn't prove Sattell's guilt.\n There was no evidence. In any case,\n he didn't really want Sattell to die.\n If he did, there'd be no way to recover\n more lost memories.", "\"I'd guess,\" said Pop painstakingly,\n \"that Sattell figured it out. He's\n probably got some sort of gun to\n keep you from holding him down\n there. But he won't know his friends\n are here—not right this minute he\n won't.\"\n\n\n A shaking voice asked questions\n from the vision-phone.\n\n\n \"No,\" said Pop, \"they'll do it anyhow.\n If we were able to tell about\n 'em, they'd be chased. But if I'm\n dead and the shacks smashed and\n the cable burnt through, they'll be\n back on Earth long before a new\n cable's been got and let down to you.\n So they'll do all they can no matter\n what I do.\" He added, \"I wouldn't\n tell Sattell a thing about it, if I were\n you. It'll save trouble. Just let him\n keep on waiting for this to happen.\n It'll save you trouble.\"", "The first men to leave the colony\n had to be knocked cold and shipped\n out unconscious. They'd been underground—and\n in low gravity—long\n enough to be utterly unable to face\n the idea of open spaces. Even now\n there were some who had to be carried,\n but there were some tougher\n ones who were able to walk to the\n rocketship if Pop put a tarpaulin\n over their heads so they didn't have\n to see the sky. In any case Pop was\n essential, either for carrying or\n guidance.\nSattell got the shakes when he\n thought of Pop, and Pop rather\n probably knew it. Of course, by the\n time he took the job tending the\n shack, he was pretty certain about\n Sattell. The facts spoke for themselves.", "Pop heard of the quaint commercial\n enterprise through the micro-tapes\n put off at the shack for the men\n down in the mine. Sattell probably\n learned of it the same way. Pop didn't\n even think of it again. It seemed\n to have nothing to do with him. But\n Sattell undoubtedly dealt with it\n fully in his desperate writings back\n to Earth.\nPop matter-of-factly tended the\n shack and the landing field and the\n stores for the Big Crack mine. Between-times\n he made more drawings\n in pursuit of his own private objective.\n Quite accidentally, he developed\n a certain talent professional artists\n might have approved. But he was not", "But it wasn't fun, even underground.\n In the Moon's slight gravity,\n a man is really adjusted to existence\n when he has a well-developed case\n of agoraphobia. With such an aid, a\n man can get into a tiny, coffinlike\n cubbyhole, and feel solidity above\n and below and around him, and\n happily tell himself that it feels delicious.\n Sometimes it does.\n\n\n But Sattell couldn't comfort himself\n so easily. He knew about Pop,\n up on the surface. He'd shipped out,\n whimpering, to the Moon to get far\n away from Pop, and Pop was just\n about a mile overhead and there was\n no way to get around him. It was\n difficult to get away from the mine,\n anyhow. It doesn't take too long for\n the low gravity to tear a man's\n nerves to shreds. He has to develop\n kinks in his head to survive. And\n those kinks—", "\"And get it straight! You try\n any tricks and we take off! We\n swing over your shack! The rocket-blast\n smashes it! We burn you\n down! Then we swing over the cable\n down to the mine and the rocket-flame\n melts it! You die and everybody\n in the mine besides! No tricks!\n We didn't come here for nothing!\"\n\n\n He twitched all over. Then he\n struck cruelly again at Pop Young's\n face. He seemed filled with fury, at\n least partly hysterical. It was the tension\n that space-travel—then, at its\n beginning—produced. It was meaningless\n savagery due to terror. But,\n of course, Pop was helpless to resent\n it. There were no weapons on the\n Moon and the mention of Sattell's\n name showed the uselessness of bluff.\n He'd pictured the complete set-up\n by the edge of the Big Crack. Pop\n could do nothing.", "But he was helpless. He couldn't\n leave. There was Pop. He couldn't\n kill Pop. He had no chance—and he\n was afraid. The one absurd, irrelevant\n thing he could do was write\n letters back to Earth. He did that.\n He wrote with the desperate, impassioned,\n frantic blend of persuasion\n and information and genius-like invention\n of a prisoner in a high-security\n prison, trying to induce someone\n to help him escape.\n\n\n He had friends, of a sort, but for\n a long time his letters produced\n nothing. The Moon swung in vast\n circles about the Earth, and the Earth\n swung sedately about the Sun. The\n other planets danced their saraband.\n The rest of humanity went about its\n own affairs with fascinated attention.\n But then an event occurred which\n bore directly upon Pop Young and\n Sattell and Pop Young's missing\n years.", "Sometimes, in the shack on the far\n side of the Moon, Pop Young had\n odd fancies about Sattell. There was\n the mine, for example. In each two\n Earth-weeks of working, the mine-colony\n nearly filled up a three-gallon\n cannister with greasy-seeming white\n crystals shaped like two pyramids\n base to base. The filled cannister\n would weigh a hundred pounds on\n Earth. Here it weighed eighteen. But\n on Earth its contents would be computed\n in carats, and a hundred\n pounds was worth millions. Yet here\n on the Moon Pop kept a waiting cannister\n on a shelf in his tiny dome,", "The shack stood a hundred feet\n from the Big Crack's edge. It looked\n like a dust-heap thirty feet high, and\n it was. The outside was surface\n moondust, piled over a tiny dome to\n be insulation against the cold of\n night and shadow and the furnace\n heat of day. Pop lived in it all alone,\n and in his spare time he worked\n industriously at recovering some\n missing portions of his life that Sattell\n had managed to take away from\n him.\n\n\n He thought often of Sattell, down\n in the colony underground. There\n were galleries and tunnels and living-quarters\n down there. There were\n air-tight bulkheads for safety, and a\n hydroponic garden to keep the air\n fresh, and all sorts of things to make\n life possible for men under if not\n on the Moon.", "behind the air-apparatus. It rattled\n if he shook it, and it was worth no\n more than so many pebbles. But\n sometimes Pop wondered if Sattell\n ever thought of the value of the\n mine's production. If he would kill\n a woman and two children and think\n he'd killed a man for no more than\n a hundred dollars, what enormity\n would he commit for a three-gallon\n quantity of uncut diamonds?\nBut he did not dwell on such\n speculation. The sun rose very, very\n slowly in what by convention was\n called the east. It took nearly two\n hours to urge its disk above the\n horizon, and it burned terribly in\n emptiness for fourteen times twenty-four", "The red-headed man checked\n himself, panting. He drew back and\n slammed the inner lock-door. There\n was the sound of pumping.\n\n\n Pop put his helmet back on and\n sealed it. The outer door opened.\n Outrushing air tugged at Pop. After\n a second or two he went out and\n climbed down the welded-on ladder-bars\n to the ground.\n\n\n He headed back toward his shack.\n Somehow, the mention of Sattell had\n made his mind work better. It always\n did. He began painstakingly to\n put things together. The red-headed\n man knew the routine here in every\n detail. He knew Sattell. That part\n was simple. Sattell had planned this\n multi-million-dollar coup, as a man\n in prison might plan his break. The\n stripped interior of the ship identified\n it.", "Pop didn't wait. He searched\n hopefully. Once a mass of steel plating\n fell only yards from him, but it\n did not interrupt his search.\n\n\n When he went into the shack, he\n grinned to himself. The call-light of\n the vision-phone flickered wildly.\n When he took off his helmet the bell\n clanged incessantly. He answered. A\n shaking voice from the mining-colony\n panted:\n\n\n \"We felt a shock! What happened?\n What do we do?\"\n\n\n \"Don't do a thing,\" advised Pop.\n \"It's all right. I blew up the ship and\n everything's all right. I wouldn't\n even mention it to Sattell if I were\n you.\"", "Somebody back on Earth promoted\n a luxury passenger-line of spaceships\n to ply between Earth and\n Moon. It looked like a perfect set-up.\n Three spacecraft capable of the journey\n came into being with attendant\n reams of publicity. They promised a\n thrill and a new distinction for the\n rich. Guided tours to Lunar! The\n most expensive and most thrilling\n trip in history! One hundred thousand\n dollars for a twelve-day cruise\n through space, with views of the\n Moon's far side and trips through\n Lunar City and a landing in Aristarchus,\n plus sound-tapes of the journey\n and fame hitherto reserved for\n honest explorers!\n\n\n It didn't seem to have anything\n to do with Pop or with Sattell. But\n it did.", "The red-headed man hit him\n again. He was nerve-racked, and,\n therefore, he wanted to hurt.\n\n\n \"Move!\" he rasped. \"I want the\n diamonds you've got for the ship\n from Lunar City! Bring 'em!\" Pop\n licked blood from his lips and the\n man with the weapon raged at him.\n \"Then phone down to the mine!\n Tell Sattell I'm here and he can\n come on up! Tell him to bring any\n more diamonds they've dug up since\n the stuff you've got!\"\n\n\n He leaned forward. His face was\n only inches from Pop Young's. It\n was seamed and hard-bitten and\n nerve-racked. But any man would be\n quivering if he wasn't used to space\n or the feel of one-sixth gravity on\n the Moon. He panted:", "\"Now I've got to go handle the\n hoist, if Sattell's coming up from\n the mine. If I don't do it, he don't\n come up.\"\n\n\n The red-headed man snarled. But\n his eyes were on the cannister whose\n contents should weigh a hundred\n pounds on Earth.\n\n\n \"Any tricks,\" he rasped, \"and you\n know what happens!\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Pop.\n\n\n He stolidly put his helmet back\n on. But his eyes went past the red-headed\n man to the stair that wound\n down, inside the ship, from some\n compartment above. The stair-rail was\n pure, clear, water-white plastic, not\n less than three inches thick. There\n was a lot of it!\n\n\n The inner door closed. Pop opened\n the outer. Air rushed out. He\n climbed painstakingly down to the\n ground. He started back toward the\n shack." ], [ "But not Pop. He'd come to the\n Moon in the first place because Sattell\n was here. Near Sattell, he found\n memories of times when he was a\n young man with a young wife who\n loved him extravagantly. Then pictures\n of his children came out of\n emptiness and grew sharp and clear.\n He found that he loved them very\n dearly. And when he was near Sattell\n he literally recovered them—in\n the sense that he came to know new\n things about them and had new\n memories of them every day. He\n hadn't yet remembered the crime\n which lost them to him. Until he\n did—and the fact possessed a certain\n grisly humor—Pop didn't even hate\n Sattell. He simply wanted to be near\n him because it enabled him to recover\n new and vivid parts of his\n youth that had been lost.", "At such times Pop hardly thought\n of Sattell. He knew he had plenty\n of time for that. He'd started to follow\n Sattell knowing what had happened\n to his wife and children, but\n it was hearsay only. He had no memory\n of them at all. But Sattell stirred\n the lost memories. At first Pop followed\n absorbedly from city to city,\n to recover the years that had been\n wiped out by an axe-blow. He did\n recover a good deal. When Sattell\n fled to another continent, Pop followed\n because he had some distinct\n memories of his wife—and the way\n he'd felt about her—and some fugitive\n mental images of his children.\n When Sattell frenziedly tried to deny\n knowledge of the murder in Tangier,\n Pop had come to remember both his\n children and some of the happiness\n of his married life.", "Sattell had no such device for adjusting\n to the lunar state of things.\n Living on the Moon was bad enough\n anyhow, then, but living one mile\n underground from Pop Young was\n much worse. Sattell clearly remembered\n the crime Pop Young hadn't\n yet recalled. He considered that Pop\n had made no overt attempt to revenge\n himself because he planned\n some retaliation so horrible and lingering\n that it was worth waiting for.\n He came to hate Pop with an insane\n ferocity. And fear. In his mind the\n need to escape became an obsession\n on top of the other psychotic states\n normal to a Moon-colonist.", "Pop had come back to consciousness\n in a hospital with a great\n wound in his head and no memory\n of anything that had happened before\n that moment. It was not that his\n identity was in question. When he\n was stronger, the doctors told him\n who he was, and as gently as possible\n what had happened to his wife\n and children. They'd been murdered\n after he was seemingly killed defending\n them. But he didn't remember\n a thing. Not then. It was\n something of a blessing.\n\n\n But when he was physically recovered\n he set about trying to pick\n up the threads of the life he could\n no longer remember. He met Sattell\n quite by accident. Sattell looked familiar.\n Pop eagerly tried to ask him\n questions. And Sattell turned gray\n and frantically denied that he'd ever\n seen Pop before.", "\"I'd guess,\" said Pop painstakingly,\n \"that Sattell figured it out. He's\n probably got some sort of gun to\n keep you from holding him down\n there. But he won't know his friends\n are here—not right this minute he\n won't.\"\n\n\n A shaking voice asked questions\n from the vision-phone.\n\n\n \"No,\" said Pop, \"they'll do it anyhow.\n If we were able to tell about\n 'em, they'd be chased. But if I'm\n dead and the shacks smashed and\n the cable burnt through, they'll be\n back on Earth long before a new\n cable's been got and let down to you.\n So they'll do all they can no matter\n what I do.\" He added, \"I wouldn't\n tell Sattell a thing about it, if I were\n you. It'll save trouble. Just let him\n keep on waiting for this to happen.\n It'll save you trouble.\"", "Pop heard of the quaint commercial\n enterprise through the micro-tapes\n put off at the shack for the men\n down in the mine. Sattell probably\n learned of it the same way. Pop didn't\n even think of it again. It seemed\n to have nothing to do with him. But\n Sattell undoubtedly dealt with it\n fully in his desperate writings back\n to Earth.\nPop matter-of-factly tended the\n shack and the landing field and the\n stores for the Big Crack mine. Between-times\n he made more drawings\n in pursuit of his own private objective.\n Quite accidentally, he developed\n a certain talent professional artists\n might have approved. But he was not", "Even when Sattell—whimpering—signed\n up for Lunar City, Pop tracked\n him. By that time he was quite\n sure that Sattell was the man who'd\n killed his family. If so, Sattell had\n profited by less than two days' pay\n for wiping out everything that Pop\n possessed. But Pop wanted it back.\n He couldn't prove Sattell's guilt.\n There was no evidence. In any case,\n he didn't really want Sattell to die.\n If he did, there'd be no way to recover\n more lost memories.", "\"And get it straight! You try\n any tricks and we take off! We\n swing over your shack! The rocket-blast\n smashes it! We burn you\n down! Then we swing over the cable\n down to the mine and the rocket-flame\n melts it! You die and everybody\n in the mine besides! No tricks!\n We didn't come here for nothing!\"\n\n\n He twitched all over. Then he\n struck cruelly again at Pop Young's\n face. He seemed filled with fury, at\n least partly hysterical. It was the tension\n that space-travel—then, at its\n beginning—produced. It was meaningless\n savagery due to terror. But,\n of course, Pop was helpless to resent\n it. There were no weapons on the\n Moon and the mention of Sattell's\n name showed the uselessness of bluff.\n He'd pictured the complete set-up\n by the edge of the Big Crack. Pop\n could do nothing.", "All of which happened back on\n Earth and a long time ago. It seemed\n to Pop that the sight of Sattell had\n brought back some vague and cloudy\n memories. They were not sharp,\n though, and he hunted up Sattell\n again to find out if he was right.\n And Sattell went into panic when\n he returned.\n\n\n Nowadays, by the Big Crack, Pop\n wasn't so insistent on seeing Sattell,\n but he was deeply concerned with\n the recovery of the memories that\n Sattell helped bring back. Pop was\n a highly conscientious man. He took\n good care of his job. There was a\n warning-bell in the shack, and when\n a rocketship from Lunar City got\n above the horizon and could send a\n tight beam, the gong clanged loudly,\n and Pop got into a vacuum-suit\n and went out the air lock. He usually\n reached the moondozer about the\n time the ship began to brake for\n landing, and he watched it come in.", "The red-headed man checked\n himself, panting. He drew back and\n slammed the inner lock-door. There\n was the sound of pumping.\n\n\n Pop put his helmet back on and\n sealed it. The outer door opened.\n Outrushing air tugged at Pop. After\n a second or two he went out and\n climbed down the welded-on ladder-bars\n to the ground.\n\n\n He headed back toward his shack.\n Somehow, the mention of Sattell had\n made his mind work better. It always\n did. He began painstakingly to\n put things together. The red-headed\n man knew the routine here in every\n detail. He knew Sattell. That part\n was simple. Sattell had planned this\n multi-million-dollar coup, as a man\n in prison might plan his break. The\n stripped interior of the ship identified\n it.", "The first men to leave the colony\n had to be knocked cold and shipped\n out unconscious. They'd been underground—and\n in low gravity—long\n enough to be utterly unable to face\n the idea of open spaces. Even now\n there were some who had to be carried,\n but there were some tougher\n ones who were able to walk to the\n rocketship if Pop put a tarpaulin\n over their heads so they didn't have\n to see the sky. In any case Pop was\n essential, either for carrying or\n guidance.\nSattell got the shakes when he\n thought of Pop, and Pop rather\n probably knew it. Of course, by the\n time he took the job tending the\n shack, he was pretty certain about\n Sattell. The facts spoke for themselves.", "behind the air-apparatus. It rattled\n if he shook it, and it was worth no\n more than so many pebbles. But\n sometimes Pop wondered if Sattell\n ever thought of the value of the\n mine's production. If he would kill\n a woman and two children and think\n he'd killed a man for no more than\n a hundred dollars, what enormity\n would he commit for a three-gallon\n quantity of uncut diamonds?\nBut he did not dwell on such\n speculation. The sun rose very, very\n slowly in what by convention was\n called the east. It took nearly two\n hours to urge its disk above the\n horizon, and it burned terribly in\n emptiness for fourteen times twenty-four", "Somebody back on Earth promoted\n a luxury passenger-line of spaceships\n to ply between Earth and\n Moon. It looked like a perfect set-up.\n Three spacecraft capable of the journey\n came into being with attendant\n reams of publicity. They promised a\n thrill and a new distinction for the\n rich. Guided tours to Lunar! The\n most expensive and most thrilling\n trip in history! One hundred thousand\n dollars for a twelve-day cruise\n through space, with views of the\n Moon's far side and trips through\n Lunar City and a landing in Aristarchus,\n plus sound-tapes of the journey\n and fame hitherto reserved for\n honest explorers!\n\n\n It didn't seem to have anything\n to do with Pop or with Sattell. But\n it did.", "Pop didn't wait. He searched\n hopefully. Once a mass of steel plating\n fell only yards from him, but it\n did not interrupt his search.\n\n\n When he went into the shack, he\n grinned to himself. The call-light of\n the vision-phone flickered wildly.\n When he took off his helmet the bell\n clanged incessantly. He answered. A\n shaking voice from the mining-colony\n panted:\n\n\n \"We felt a shock! What happened?\n What do we do?\"\n\n\n \"Don't do a thing,\" advised Pop.\n \"It's all right. I blew up the ship and\n everything's all right. I wouldn't\n even mention it to Sattell if I were\n you.\"", "But he was helpless. He couldn't\n leave. There was Pop. He couldn't\n kill Pop. He had no chance—and he\n was afraid. The one absurd, irrelevant\n thing he could do was write\n letters back to Earth. He did that.\n He wrote with the desperate, impassioned,\n frantic blend of persuasion\n and information and genius-like invention\n of a prisoner in a high-security\n prison, trying to induce someone\n to help him escape.\n\n\n He had friends, of a sort, but for\n a long time his letters produced\n nothing. The Moon swung in vast\n circles about the Earth, and the Earth\n swung sedately about the Sun. The\n other planets danced their saraband.\n The rest of humanity went about its\n own affairs with fascinated attention.\n But then an event occurred which\n bore directly upon Pop Young and\n Sattell and Pop Young's missing\n years.", "The shack stood a hundred feet\n from the Big Crack's edge. It looked\n like a dust-heap thirty feet high, and\n it was. The outside was surface\n moondust, piled over a tiny dome to\n be insulation against the cold of\n night and shadow and the furnace\n heat of day. Pop lived in it all alone,\n and in his spare time he worked\n industriously at recovering some\n missing portions of his life that Sattell\n had managed to take away from\n him.\n\n\n He thought often of Sattell, down\n in the colony underground. There\n were galleries and tunnels and living-quarters\n down there. There were\n air-tight bulkheads for safety, and a\n hydroponic garden to keep the air\n fresh, and all sorts of things to make\n life possible for men under if not\n on the Moon.", "But it wasn't fun, even underground.\n In the Moon's slight gravity,\n a man is really adjusted to existence\n when he has a well-developed case\n of agoraphobia. With such an aid, a\n man can get into a tiny, coffinlike\n cubbyhole, and feel solidity above\n and below and around him, and\n happily tell himself that it feels delicious.\n Sometimes it does.\n\n\n But Sattell couldn't comfort himself\n so easily. He knew about Pop,\n up on the surface. He'd shipped out,\n whimpering, to the Moon to get far\n away from Pop, and Pop was just\n about a mile overhead and there was\n no way to get around him. It was\n difficult to get away from the mine,\n anyhow. It doesn't take too long for\n the low gravity to tear a man's\n nerves to shreds. He has to develop\n kinks in his head to survive. And\n those kinks—", "He grinned happily down at a section\n of plastic stair-rail he'd found\n not too far from where the ship exploded.\n When the man down in the\n mine cut off, Pop got out of his\n vacuum suit in a hurry. He placed\n the plastic zestfully on the table\n where he'd been restricted to drawing\n pictures of his wife and children\n in order to recover memories of\n them.\n\n\n He began to plan, gloatingly, the\n thing he would carve out of a four-inch\n section of the plastic. When it\n was carved, he'd paint it. While he\n worked, he'd think of Sattell, because\n that was the way to get back the\n missing portions of his life—the\n parts Sattell had managed to get\n away from him. He'd get back more\n than ever, now!", "Sometimes, in the shack on the far\n side of the Moon, Pop Young had\n odd fancies about Sattell. There was\n the mine, for example. In each two\n Earth-weeks of working, the mine-colony\n nearly filled up a three-gallon\n cannister with greasy-seeming white\n crystals shaped like two pyramids\n base to base. The filled cannister\n would weigh a hundred pounds on\n Earth. Here it weighed eighteen. But\n on Earth its contents would be computed\n in carats, and a hundred\n pounds was worth millions. Yet here\n on the Moon Pop kept a waiting cannister\n on a shelf in his tiny dome,", "\"Now I've got to go handle the\n hoist, if Sattell's coming up from\n the mine. If I don't do it, he don't\n come up.\"\n\n\n The red-headed man snarled. But\n his eyes were on the cannister whose\n contents should weigh a hundred\n pounds on Earth.\n\n\n \"Any tricks,\" he rasped, \"and you\n know what happens!\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Pop.\n\n\n He stolidly put his helmet back\n on. But his eyes went past the red-headed\n man to the stair that wound\n down, inside the ship, from some\n compartment above. The stair-rail was\n pure, clear, water-white plastic, not\n less than three inches thick. There\n was a lot of it!\n\n\n The inner door closed. Pop opened\n the outer. Air rushed out. He\n climbed painstakingly down to the\n ground. He started back toward the\n shack." ], [ "The sun rose, and baked the\n abomination of desolation which was\n the moonscape. Pop Young meticulously\n touched up the glittering\n triangles which were landing guides\n for the Lunar City ships. They glittered\n from the thinnest conceivable\n layer of magnesium marking-powder.\n He checked over the moondozer.\n He tended the air apparatus. He did\n everything that his job and survival\n required. Ungrudgingly.", "All of which happened back on\n Earth and a long time ago. It seemed\n to Pop that the sight of Sattell had\n brought back some vague and cloudy\n memories. They were not sharp,\n though, and he hunted up Sattell\n again to find out if he was right.\n And Sattell went into panic when\n he returned.\n\n\n Nowadays, by the Big Crack, Pop\n wasn't so insistent on seeing Sattell,\n but he was deeply concerned with\n the recovery of the memories that\n Sattell helped bring back. Pop was\n a highly conscientious man. He took\n good care of his job. There was a\n warning-bell in the shack, and when\n a rocketship from Lunar City got\n above the horizon and could send a\n tight beam, the gong clanged loudly,\n and Pop got into a vacuum-suit\n and went out the air lock. He usually\n reached the moondozer about the\n time the ship began to brake for\n landing, and he watched it come in.", "Pop reflected hungrily that it was\n something else to be made permanent\n and inspected from time to time.\n But he wanted more than a drawing\n of this! He wanted to make the memory\n permanent and to extend it—\n\n\n If it had not been for his vacuum\n suit and the cannister he carried, Pop\n would have rubbed his hands.\nTall, jagged crater-walls rose\n from the lunar plain. Monstrous, extended\n inky shadows stretched\n enormous distances, utterly black.\n The sun, like a glowing octopod,\n floated low at the edge of things and\n seemed to hate all creation.\n\n\n Pop reached the rocket. He\n climbed the welded ladder-rungs to\n the air lock. He closed the door. Air\n whined. His suit sagged against his\n body. He took off his helmet.\n\n\n When the red-headed man opened\n the inner door, the hand-weapon\n shook and trembled. Pop said\n calmly:", "Pop heard of the quaint commercial\n enterprise through the micro-tapes\n put off at the shack for the men\n down in the mine. Sattell probably\n learned of it the same way. Pop didn't\n even think of it again. It seemed\n to have nothing to do with him. But\n Sattell undoubtedly dealt with it\n fully in his desperate writings back\n to Earth.\nPop matter-of-factly tended the\n shack and the landing field and the\n stores for the Big Crack mine. Between-times\n he made more drawings\n in pursuit of his own private objective.\n Quite accidentally, he developed\n a certain talent professional artists\n might have approved. But he was not", "But not Pop. He'd come to the\n Moon in the first place because Sattell\n was here. Near Sattell, he found\n memories of times when he was a\n young man with a young wife who\n loved him extravagantly. Then pictures\n of his children came out of\n emptiness and grew sharp and clear.\n He found that he loved them very\n dearly. And when he was near Sattell\n he literally recovered them—in\n the sense that he came to know new\n things about them and had new\n memories of them every day. He\n hadn't yet remembered the crime\n which lost them to him. Until he\n did—and the fact possessed a certain\n grisly humor—Pop didn't even hate\n Sattell. He simply wanted to be near\n him because it enabled him to recover\n new and vivid parts of his\n youth that had been lost.", "It was just barely past lunar sunrise\n on the far side of the Moon.\n Incredibly long and utterly black\n shadows stretched across the plain,\n and half the rocketship was dazzling\n white and half was blacker than\n blackness itself. The sun still hung\n low indeed in the black, star-speckled\n sky. Pop waded through moondust,\n raising a trail of slowly settling\n powder. He knew only that the ship\n didn't come from Lunar City, but\n from Earth. He couldn't imagine\n why. He did not even wildly connect\n it with what—say—Sattell might\n have written with desperate plausibility\n about greasy-seeming white\n crystals out of the mine, knocking\n about Pop Young's shack in cannisters\n containing a hundred Earth-pounds\n weight of richness.\nPop reached the rocketship. He\n approached the big tail-fins. On one\n of them there were welded ladder-rungs\n going up to the opened air-lock\n door.", "The shack and the job he filled\n were located in the medieval notion\n of the physical appearance of hell.\n By day the environment was heat and\n torment. By night—lunar night, of\n course, and lunar day—it was frigidity\n and horror. Once in two weeks\n Earth-time a rocketship came around\n the horizon from Lunar City with\n stores for the colony deep underground.\n Pop received the stores and\n took care of them. He handed over\n the product of the mine, to be forwarded\n to Earth. The rocket went\n away again. Come nightfall Pop\n lowered the supplies down the long\n cable into the Big Crack to the colony\n far down inside, and freshened up\n the landing field marks with magnesium\n marking-powder if a rocket-blast\n had blurred them. That was\n fundamentally all he had to do. But\n without him the mine down in the\n Crack would have had to shut\n down.", "The Crack, of course, was that\n gaping rocky fault which stretches\n nine hundred miles, jaggedly, over\n the side of the Moon that Earth\n never sees. There is one stretch where\n it is a yawning gulf a full half-mile\n wide and unguessably deep. Where\n Pop Young's shack stood it was only\n a hundred yards, but the colony was\n a full mile down, in one wall. There\n is nothing like it on Earth, of course.\n When it was first found, scientists\n descended into it to examine the exposed\n rock-strata and learn the history\n of the Moon before its craters\n were made. But they found more\n than history. They found the reason\n for the colony and the rocket landing\n field and the shack.\n\n\n The reason for Pop was something\n else.", "Somebody back on Earth promoted\n a luxury passenger-line of spaceships\n to ply between Earth and\n Moon. It looked like a perfect set-up.\n Three spacecraft capable of the journey\n came into being with attendant\n reams of publicity. They promised a\n thrill and a new distinction for the\n rich. Guided tours to Lunar! The\n most expensive and most thrilling\n trip in history! One hundred thousand\n dollars for a twelve-day cruise\n through space, with views of the\n Moon's far side and trips through\n Lunar City and a landing in Aristarchus,\n plus sound-tapes of the journey\n and fame hitherto reserved for\n honest explorers!\n\n\n It didn't seem to have anything\n to do with Pop or with Sattell. But\n it did.", "He saw the silver needle in the\n sky fighting momentum above a line\n of jagged crater-walls. It slowed, and\n slowed, and curved down as it drew\n nearer. The pilot killed all forward\n motion just above the field and came\n steadily and smoothly down to land\n between the silvery triangles that\n marked the landing place.\n\n\n Instantly the rockets cut off,\n drums of fuel and air and food came\n out of the cargo-hatch and Pop swept\n forward with the dozer. It was a\n miniature tractor with a gigantic\n scoop in front. He pushed a great\n mound of talc-fine dust before him\n to cover up the cargo. It was necessary.\n With freight costing what it\n did, fuel and air and food came\n frozen solid, in containers barely\n thicker than foil. While they stayed\n at space-shadow temperature, the foil\n would hold anything. And a cover of\n insulating moondust with vacuum\n between the grains kept even air\n frozen solid, though in sunlight.", "Pop made his way toward it in\n the skittering, skating gait one uses\n in one-sixth gravity. When he was\n within half a mile, an air-lock door\n opened in the ship's side. But nothing\n came out of the lock. No space-suited\n figure. No cargo came drifting\n down with the singular deliberation\n of falling objects on the Moon.", "Sattell had no such device for adjusting\n to the lunar state of things.\n Living on the Moon was bad enough\n anyhow, then, but living one mile\n underground from Pop Young was\n much worse. Sattell clearly remembered\n the crime Pop Young hadn't\n yet recalled. He considered that Pop\n had made no overt attempt to revenge\n himself because he planned\n some retaliation so horrible and lingering\n that it was worth waiting for.\n He came to hate Pop with an insane\n ferocity. And fear. In his mind the\n need to escape became an obsession\n on top of the other psychotic states\n normal to a Moon-colonist.", "But it wasn't fun, even underground.\n In the Moon's slight gravity,\n a man is really adjusted to existence\n when he has a well-developed case\n of agoraphobia. With such an aid, a\n man can get into a tiny, coffinlike\n cubbyhole, and feel solidity above\n and below and around him, and\n happily tell himself that it feels delicious.\n Sometimes it does.\n\n\n But Sattell couldn't comfort himself\n so easily. He knew about Pop,\n up on the surface. He'd shipped out,\n whimpering, to the Moon to get far\n away from Pop, and Pop was just\n about a mile overhead and there was\n no way to get around him. It was\n difficult to get away from the mine,\n anyhow. It doesn't take too long for\n the low gravity to tear a man's\n nerves to shreds. He has to develop\n kinks in his head to survive. And\n those kinks—", "The first men to leave the colony\n had to be knocked cold and shipped\n out unconscious. They'd been underground—and\n in low gravity—long\n enough to be utterly unable to face\n the idea of open spaces. Even now\n there were some who had to be carried,\n but there were some tougher\n ones who were able to walk to the\n rocketship if Pop put a tarpaulin\n over their heads so they didn't have\n to see the sky. In any case Pop was\n essential, either for carrying or\n guidance.\nSattell got the shakes when he\n thought of Pop, and Pop rather\n probably knew it. Of course, by the\n time he took the job tending the\n shack, he was pretty certain about\n Sattell. The facts spoke for themselves.", "Sometimes, in the shack on the far\n side of the Moon, Pop Young had\n odd fancies about Sattell. There was\n the mine, for example. In each two\n Earth-weeks of working, the mine-colony\n nearly filled up a three-gallon\n cannister with greasy-seeming white\n crystals shaped like two pyramids\n base to base. The filled cannister\n would weigh a hundred pounds on\n Earth. Here it weighed eighteen. But\n on Earth its contents would be computed\n in carats, and a hundred\n pounds was worth millions. Yet here\n on the Moon Pop kept a waiting cannister\n on a shelf in his tiny dome,", "But he was helpless. He couldn't\n leave. There was Pop. He couldn't\n kill Pop. He had no chance—and he\n was afraid. The one absurd, irrelevant\n thing he could do was write\n letters back to Earth. He did that.\n He wrote with the desperate, impassioned,\n frantic blend of persuasion\n and information and genius-like invention\n of a prisoner in a high-security\n prison, trying to induce someone\n to help him escape.\n\n\n He had friends, of a sort, but for\n a long time his letters produced\n nothing. The Moon swung in vast\n circles about the Earth, and the Earth\n swung sedately about the Sun. The\n other planets danced their saraband.\n The rest of humanity went about its\n own affairs with fascinated attention.\n But then an event occurred which\n bore directly upon Pop Young and\n Sattell and Pop Young's missing\n years.", "Even when Sattell—whimpering—signed\n up for Lunar City, Pop tracked\n him. By that time he was quite\n sure that Sattell was the man who'd\n killed his family. If so, Sattell had\n profited by less than two days' pay\n for wiping out everything that Pop\n possessed. But Pop wanted it back.\n He couldn't prove Sattell's guilt.\n There was no evidence. In any case,\n he didn't really want Sattell to die.\n If he did, there'd be no way to recover\n more lost memories.", "\"And get it straight! You try\n any tricks and we take off! We\n swing over your shack! The rocket-blast\n smashes it! We burn you\n down! Then we swing over the cable\n down to the mine and the rocket-flame\n melts it! You die and everybody\n in the mine besides! No tricks!\n We didn't come here for nothing!\"\n\n\n He twitched all over. Then he\n struck cruelly again at Pop Young's\n face. He seemed filled with fury, at\n least partly hysterical. It was the tension\n that space-travel—then, at its\n beginning—produced. It was meaningless\n savagery due to terror. But,\n of course, Pop was helpless to resent\n it. There were no weapons on the\n Moon and the mention of Sattell's\n name showed the uselessness of bluff.\n He'd pictured the complete set-up\n by the edge of the Big Crack. Pop\n could do nothing.", "Another shaky question.\n\n\n \"Me?\" asked Pop. \"Oh, I'm going\n to raise what hell I can. There's\n some stuff in that ship I want.\"\n\n\n He switched off the phone. He\n went over to his air apparatus. He\n took down the cannister of diamonds\n which were worth five millions or\n more back on Earth. He found a\n bucket. He dumped the diamonds\n casually into it. They floated downward\n with great deliberation and\n surged from side to side like a liquid\n when they stopped. One-sixth gravity.\n\n\n Pop regarded his drawings meditatively.\n A sketch of his wife as he\n now remembered her. It was very\n good to remember. A drawing of his\n two children, playing together. He\n looked forward to remembering\n much more about them. He grinned.\n\n\n \"That stair-rail,\" he said in deep\n satisfaction. \"That'll do it!\"", "The shack stood a hundred feet\n from the Big Crack's edge. It looked\n like a dust-heap thirty feet high, and\n it was. The outside was surface\n moondust, piled over a tiny dome to\n be insulation against the cold of\n night and shadow and the furnace\n heat of day. Pop lived in it all alone,\n and in his spare time he worked\n industriously at recovering some\n missing portions of his life that Sattell\n had managed to take away from\n him.\n\n\n He thought often of Sattell, down\n in the colony underground. There\n were galleries and tunnels and living-quarters\n down there. There were\n air-tight bulkheads for safety, and a\n hydroponic garden to keep the air\n fresh, and all sorts of things to make\n life possible for men under if not\n on the Moon." ], [ "But not Pop. He'd come to the\n Moon in the first place because Sattell\n was here. Near Sattell, he found\n memories of times when he was a\n young man with a young wife who\n loved him extravagantly. Then pictures\n of his children came out of\n emptiness and grew sharp and clear.\n He found that he loved them very\n dearly. And when he was near Sattell\n he literally recovered them—in\n the sense that he came to know new\n things about them and had new\n memories of them every day. He\n hadn't yet remembered the crime\n which lost them to him. Until he\n did—and the fact possessed a certain\n grisly humor—Pop didn't even hate\n Sattell. He simply wanted to be near\n him because it enabled him to recover\n new and vivid parts of his\n youth that had been lost.", "At such times Pop hardly thought\n of Sattell. He knew he had plenty\n of time for that. He'd started to follow\n Sattell knowing what had happened\n to his wife and children, but\n it was hearsay only. He had no memory\n of them at all. But Sattell stirred\n the lost memories. At first Pop followed\n absorbedly from city to city,\n to recover the years that had been\n wiped out by an axe-blow. He did\n recover a good deal. When Sattell\n fled to another continent, Pop followed\n because he had some distinct\n memories of his wife—and the way\n he'd felt about her—and some fugitive\n mental images of his children.\n When Sattell frenziedly tried to deny\n knowledge of the murder in Tangier,\n Pop had come to remember both his\n children and some of the happiness\n of his married life.", "Sattell had no such device for adjusting\n to the lunar state of things.\n Living on the Moon was bad enough\n anyhow, then, but living one mile\n underground from Pop Young was\n much worse. Sattell clearly remembered\n the crime Pop Young hadn't\n yet recalled. He considered that Pop\n had made no overt attempt to revenge\n himself because he planned\n some retaliation so horrible and lingering\n that it was worth waiting for.\n He came to hate Pop with an insane\n ferocity. And fear. In his mind the\n need to escape became an obsession\n on top of the other psychotic states\n normal to a Moon-colonist.", "Pop had come back to consciousness\n in a hospital with a great\n wound in his head and no memory\n of anything that had happened before\n that moment. It was not that his\n identity was in question. When he\n was stronger, the doctors told him\n who he was, and as gently as possible\n what had happened to his wife\n and children. They'd been murdered\n after he was seemingly killed defending\n them. But he didn't remember\n a thing. Not then. It was\n something of a blessing.\n\n\n But when he was physically recovered\n he set about trying to pick\n up the threads of the life he could\n no longer remember. He met Sattell\n quite by accident. Sattell looked familiar.\n Pop eagerly tried to ask him\n questions. And Sattell turned gray\n and frantically denied that he'd ever\n seen Pop before.", "Pop heard of the quaint commercial\n enterprise through the micro-tapes\n put off at the shack for the men\n down in the mine. Sattell probably\n learned of it the same way. Pop didn't\n even think of it again. It seemed\n to have nothing to do with him. But\n Sattell undoubtedly dealt with it\n fully in his desperate writings back\n to Earth.\nPop matter-of-factly tended the\n shack and the landing field and the\n stores for the Big Crack mine. Between-times\n he made more drawings\n in pursuit of his own private objective.\n Quite accidentally, he developed\n a certain talent professional artists\n might have approved. But he was not", "The first men to leave the colony\n had to be knocked cold and shipped\n out unconscious. They'd been underground—and\n in low gravity—long\n enough to be utterly unable to face\n the idea of open spaces. Even now\n there were some who had to be carried,\n but there were some tougher\n ones who were able to walk to the\n rocketship if Pop put a tarpaulin\n over their heads so they didn't have\n to see the sky. In any case Pop was\n essential, either for carrying or\n guidance.\nSattell got the shakes when he\n thought of Pop, and Pop rather\n probably knew it. Of course, by the\n time he took the job tending the\n shack, he was pretty certain about\n Sattell. The facts spoke for themselves.", "\"I'd guess,\" said Pop painstakingly,\n \"that Sattell figured it out. He's\n probably got some sort of gun to\n keep you from holding him down\n there. But he won't know his friends\n are here—not right this minute he\n won't.\"\n\n\n A shaking voice asked questions\n from the vision-phone.\n\n\n \"No,\" said Pop, \"they'll do it anyhow.\n If we were able to tell about\n 'em, they'd be chased. But if I'm\n dead and the shacks smashed and\n the cable burnt through, they'll be\n back on Earth long before a new\n cable's been got and let down to you.\n So they'll do all they can no matter\n what I do.\" He added, \"I wouldn't\n tell Sattell a thing about it, if I were\n you. It'll save trouble. Just let him\n keep on waiting for this to happen.\n It'll save you trouble.\"", "Even when Sattell—whimpering—signed\n up for Lunar City, Pop tracked\n him. By that time he was quite\n sure that Sattell was the man who'd\n killed his family. If so, Sattell had\n profited by less than two days' pay\n for wiping out everything that Pop\n possessed. But Pop wanted it back.\n He couldn't prove Sattell's guilt.\n There was no evidence. In any case,\n he didn't really want Sattell to die.\n If he did, there'd be no way to recover\n more lost memories.", "All of which happened back on\n Earth and a long time ago. It seemed\n to Pop that the sight of Sattell had\n brought back some vague and cloudy\n memories. They were not sharp,\n though, and he hunted up Sattell\n again to find out if he was right.\n And Sattell went into panic when\n he returned.\n\n\n Nowadays, by the Big Crack, Pop\n wasn't so insistent on seeing Sattell,\n but he was deeply concerned with\n the recovery of the memories that\n Sattell helped bring back. Pop was\n a highly conscientious man. He took\n good care of his job. There was a\n warning-bell in the shack, and when\n a rocketship from Lunar City got\n above the horizon and could send a\n tight beam, the gong clanged loudly,\n and Pop got into a vacuum-suit\n and went out the air lock. He usually\n reached the moondozer about the\n time the ship began to brake for\n landing, and he watched it come in.", "But he was helpless. He couldn't\n leave. There was Pop. He couldn't\n kill Pop. He had no chance—and he\n was afraid. The one absurd, irrelevant\n thing he could do was write\n letters back to Earth. He did that.\n He wrote with the desperate, impassioned,\n frantic blend of persuasion\n and information and genius-like invention\n of a prisoner in a high-security\n prison, trying to induce someone\n to help him escape.\n\n\n He had friends, of a sort, but for\n a long time his letters produced\n nothing. The Moon swung in vast\n circles about the Earth, and the Earth\n swung sedately about the Sun. The\n other planets danced their saraband.\n The rest of humanity went about its\n own affairs with fascinated attention.\n But then an event occurred which\n bore directly upon Pop Young and\n Sattell and Pop Young's missing\n years.", "Sometimes, in the shack on the far\n side of the Moon, Pop Young had\n odd fancies about Sattell. There was\n the mine, for example. In each two\n Earth-weeks of working, the mine-colony\n nearly filled up a three-gallon\n cannister with greasy-seeming white\n crystals shaped like two pyramids\n base to base. The filled cannister\n would weigh a hundred pounds on\n Earth. Here it weighed eighteen. But\n on Earth its contents would be computed\n in carats, and a hundred\n pounds was worth millions. Yet here\n on the Moon Pop kept a waiting cannister\n on a shelf in his tiny dome,", "But it wasn't fun, even underground.\n In the Moon's slight gravity,\n a man is really adjusted to existence\n when he has a well-developed case\n of agoraphobia. With such an aid, a\n man can get into a tiny, coffinlike\n cubbyhole, and feel solidity above\n and below and around him, and\n happily tell himself that it feels delicious.\n Sometimes it does.\n\n\n But Sattell couldn't comfort himself\n so easily. He knew about Pop,\n up on the surface. He'd shipped out,\n whimpering, to the Moon to get far\n away from Pop, and Pop was just\n about a mile overhead and there was\n no way to get around him. It was\n difficult to get away from the mine,\n anyhow. It doesn't take too long for\n the low gravity to tear a man's\n nerves to shreds. He has to develop\n kinks in his head to survive. And\n those kinks—", "\"And get it straight! You try\n any tricks and we take off! We\n swing over your shack! The rocket-blast\n smashes it! We burn you\n down! Then we swing over the cable\n down to the mine and the rocket-flame\n melts it! You die and everybody\n in the mine besides! No tricks!\n We didn't come here for nothing!\"\n\n\n He twitched all over. Then he\n struck cruelly again at Pop Young's\n face. He seemed filled with fury, at\n least partly hysterical. It was the tension\n that space-travel—then, at its\n beginning—produced. It was meaningless\n savagery due to terror. But,\n of course, Pop was helpless to resent\n it. There were no weapons on the\n Moon and the mention of Sattell's\n name showed the uselessness of bluff.\n He'd pictured the complete set-up\n by the edge of the Big Crack. Pop\n could do nothing.", "behind the air-apparatus. It rattled\n if he shook it, and it was worth no\n more than so many pebbles. But\n sometimes Pop wondered if Sattell\n ever thought of the value of the\n mine's production. If he would kill\n a woman and two children and think\n he'd killed a man for no more than\n a hundred dollars, what enormity\n would he commit for a three-gallon\n quantity of uncut diamonds?\nBut he did not dwell on such\n speculation. The sun rose very, very\n slowly in what by convention was\n called the east. It took nearly two\n hours to urge its disk above the\n horizon, and it burned terribly in\n emptiness for fourteen times twenty-four", "The red-headed man checked\n himself, panting. He drew back and\n slammed the inner lock-door. There\n was the sound of pumping.\n\n\n Pop put his helmet back on and\n sealed it. The outer door opened.\n Outrushing air tugged at Pop. After\n a second or two he went out and\n climbed down the welded-on ladder-bars\n to the ground.\n\n\n He headed back toward his shack.\n Somehow, the mention of Sattell had\n made his mind work better. It always\n did. He began painstakingly to\n put things together. The red-headed\n man knew the routine here in every\n detail. He knew Sattell. That part\n was simple. Sattell had planned this\n multi-million-dollar coup, as a man\n in prison might plan his break. The\n stripped interior of the ship identified\n it.", "Pop didn't wait. He searched\n hopefully. Once a mass of steel plating\n fell only yards from him, but it\n did not interrupt his search.\n\n\n When he went into the shack, he\n grinned to himself. The call-light of\n the vision-phone flickered wildly.\n When he took off his helmet the bell\n clanged incessantly. He answered. A\n shaking voice from the mining-colony\n panted:\n\n\n \"We felt a shock! What happened?\n What do we do?\"\n\n\n \"Don't do a thing,\" advised Pop.\n \"It's all right. I blew up the ship and\n everything's all right. I wouldn't\n even mention it to Sattell if I were\n you.\"", "The shack stood a hundred feet\n from the Big Crack's edge. It looked\n like a dust-heap thirty feet high, and\n it was. The outside was surface\n moondust, piled over a tiny dome to\n be insulation against the cold of\n night and shadow and the furnace\n heat of day. Pop lived in it all alone,\n and in his spare time he worked\n industriously at recovering some\n missing portions of his life that Sattell\n had managed to take away from\n him.\n\n\n He thought often of Sattell, down\n in the colony underground. There\n were galleries and tunnels and living-quarters\n down there. There were\n air-tight bulkheads for safety, and a\n hydroponic garden to keep the air\n fresh, and all sorts of things to make\n life possible for men under if not\n on the Moon.", "Somebody back on Earth promoted\n a luxury passenger-line of spaceships\n to ply between Earth and\n Moon. It looked like a perfect set-up.\n Three spacecraft capable of the journey\n came into being with attendant\n reams of publicity. They promised a\n thrill and a new distinction for the\n rich. Guided tours to Lunar! The\n most expensive and most thrilling\n trip in history! One hundred thousand\n dollars for a twelve-day cruise\n through space, with views of the\n Moon's far side and trips through\n Lunar City and a landing in Aristarchus,\n plus sound-tapes of the journey\n and fame hitherto reserved for\n honest explorers!\n\n\n It didn't seem to have anything\n to do with Pop or with Sattell. But\n it did.", "He grinned happily down at a section\n of plastic stair-rail he'd found\n not too far from where the ship exploded.\n When the man down in the\n mine cut off, Pop got out of his\n vacuum suit in a hurry. He placed\n the plastic zestfully on the table\n where he'd been restricted to drawing\n pictures of his wife and children\n in order to recover memories of\n them.\n\n\n He began to plan, gloatingly, the\n thing he would carve out of a four-inch\n section of the plastic. When it\n was carved, he'd paint it. While he\n worked, he'd think of Sattell, because\n that was the way to get back the\n missing portions of his life—the\n parts Sattell had managed to get\n away from him. He'd get back more\n than ever, now!", "Pop reflected hungrily that it was\n something else to be made permanent\n and inspected from time to time.\n But he wanted more than a drawing\n of this! He wanted to make the memory\n permanent and to extend it—\n\n\n If it had not been for his vacuum\n suit and the cannister he carried, Pop\n would have rubbed his hands.\nTall, jagged crater-walls rose\n from the lunar plain. Monstrous, extended\n inky shadows stretched\n enormous distances, utterly black.\n The sun, like a glowing octopod,\n floated low at the edge of things and\n seemed to hate all creation.\n\n\n Pop reached the rocket. He\n climbed the welded ladder-rungs to\n the air lock. He closed the door. Air\n whined. His suit sagged against his\n body. He took off his helmet.\n\n\n When the red-headed man opened\n the inner door, the hand-weapon\n shook and trembled. Pop said\n calmly:" ], [ "Sattell had no such device for adjusting\n to the lunar state of things.\n Living on the Moon was bad enough\n anyhow, then, but living one mile\n underground from Pop Young was\n much worse. Sattell clearly remembered\n the crime Pop Young hadn't\n yet recalled. He considered that Pop\n had made no overt attempt to revenge\n himself because he planned\n some retaliation so horrible and lingering\n that it was worth waiting for.\n He came to hate Pop with an insane\n ferocity. And fear. In his mind the\n need to escape became an obsession\n on top of the other psychotic states\n normal to a Moon-colonist.", "But not Pop. He'd come to the\n Moon in the first place because Sattell\n was here. Near Sattell, he found\n memories of times when he was a\n young man with a young wife who\n loved him extravagantly. Then pictures\n of his children came out of\n emptiness and grew sharp and clear.\n He found that he loved them very\n dearly. And when he was near Sattell\n he literally recovered them—in\n the sense that he came to know new\n things about them and had new\n memories of them every day. He\n hadn't yet remembered the crime\n which lost them to him. Until he\n did—and the fact possessed a certain\n grisly humor—Pop didn't even hate\n Sattell. He simply wanted to be near\n him because it enabled him to recover\n new and vivid parts of his\n youth that had been lost.", "\"I'd guess,\" said Pop painstakingly,\n \"that Sattell figured it out. He's\n probably got some sort of gun to\n keep you from holding him down\n there. But he won't know his friends\n are here—not right this minute he\n won't.\"\n\n\n A shaking voice asked questions\n from the vision-phone.\n\n\n \"No,\" said Pop, \"they'll do it anyhow.\n If we were able to tell about\n 'em, they'd be chased. But if I'm\n dead and the shacks smashed and\n the cable burnt through, they'll be\n back on Earth long before a new\n cable's been got and let down to you.\n So they'll do all they can no matter\n what I do.\" He added, \"I wouldn't\n tell Sattell a thing about it, if I were\n you. It'll save trouble. Just let him\n keep on waiting for this to happen.\n It'll save you trouble.\"", "At such times Pop hardly thought\n of Sattell. He knew he had plenty\n of time for that. He'd started to follow\n Sattell knowing what had happened\n to his wife and children, but\n it was hearsay only. He had no memory\n of them at all. But Sattell stirred\n the lost memories. At first Pop followed\n absorbedly from city to city,\n to recover the years that had been\n wiped out by an axe-blow. He did\n recover a good deal. When Sattell\n fled to another continent, Pop followed\n because he had some distinct\n memories of his wife—and the way\n he'd felt about her—and some fugitive\n mental images of his children.\n When Sattell frenziedly tried to deny\n knowledge of the murder in Tangier,\n Pop had come to remember both his\n children and some of the happiness\n of his married life.", "Pop had come back to consciousness\n in a hospital with a great\n wound in his head and no memory\n of anything that had happened before\n that moment. It was not that his\n identity was in question. When he\n was stronger, the doctors told him\n who he was, and as gently as possible\n what had happened to his wife\n and children. They'd been murdered\n after he was seemingly killed defending\n them. But he didn't remember\n a thing. Not then. It was\n something of a blessing.\n\n\n But when he was physically recovered\n he set about trying to pick\n up the threads of the life he could\n no longer remember. He met Sattell\n quite by accident. Sattell looked familiar.\n Pop eagerly tried to ask him\n questions. And Sattell turned gray\n and frantically denied that he'd ever\n seen Pop before.", "Even when Sattell—whimpering—signed\n up for Lunar City, Pop tracked\n him. By that time he was quite\n sure that Sattell was the man who'd\n killed his family. If so, Sattell had\n profited by less than two days' pay\n for wiping out everything that Pop\n possessed. But Pop wanted it back.\n He couldn't prove Sattell's guilt.\n There was no evidence. In any case,\n he didn't really want Sattell to die.\n If he did, there'd be no way to recover\n more lost memories.", "\"And get it straight! You try\n any tricks and we take off! We\n swing over your shack! The rocket-blast\n smashes it! We burn you\n down! Then we swing over the cable\n down to the mine and the rocket-flame\n melts it! You die and everybody\n in the mine besides! No tricks!\n We didn't come here for nothing!\"\n\n\n He twitched all over. Then he\n struck cruelly again at Pop Young's\n face. He seemed filled with fury, at\n least partly hysterical. It was the tension\n that space-travel—then, at its\n beginning—produced. It was meaningless\n savagery due to terror. But,\n of course, Pop was helpless to resent\n it. There were no weapons on the\n Moon and the mention of Sattell's\n name showed the uselessness of bluff.\n He'd pictured the complete set-up\n by the edge of the Big Crack. Pop\n could do nothing.", "But he was helpless. He couldn't\n leave. There was Pop. He couldn't\n kill Pop. He had no chance—and he\n was afraid. The one absurd, irrelevant\n thing he could do was write\n letters back to Earth. He did that.\n He wrote with the desperate, impassioned,\n frantic blend of persuasion\n and information and genius-like invention\n of a prisoner in a high-security\n prison, trying to induce someone\n to help him escape.\n\n\n He had friends, of a sort, but for\n a long time his letters produced\n nothing. The Moon swung in vast\n circles about the Earth, and the Earth\n swung sedately about the Sun. The\n other planets danced their saraband.\n The rest of humanity went about its\n own affairs with fascinated attention.\n But then an event occurred which\n bore directly upon Pop Young and\n Sattell and Pop Young's missing\n years.", "The first men to leave the colony\n had to be knocked cold and shipped\n out unconscious. They'd been underground—and\n in low gravity—long\n enough to be utterly unable to face\n the idea of open spaces. Even now\n there were some who had to be carried,\n but there were some tougher\n ones who were able to walk to the\n rocketship if Pop put a tarpaulin\n over their heads so they didn't have\n to see the sky. In any case Pop was\n essential, either for carrying or\n guidance.\nSattell got the shakes when he\n thought of Pop, and Pop rather\n probably knew it. Of course, by the\n time he took the job tending the\n shack, he was pretty certain about\n Sattell. The facts spoke for themselves.", "But it wasn't fun, even underground.\n In the Moon's slight gravity,\n a man is really adjusted to existence\n when he has a well-developed case\n of agoraphobia. With such an aid, a\n man can get into a tiny, coffinlike\n cubbyhole, and feel solidity above\n and below and around him, and\n happily tell himself that it feels delicious.\n Sometimes it does.\n\n\n But Sattell couldn't comfort himself\n so easily. He knew about Pop,\n up on the surface. He'd shipped out,\n whimpering, to the Moon to get far\n away from Pop, and Pop was just\n about a mile overhead and there was\n no way to get around him. It was\n difficult to get away from the mine,\n anyhow. It doesn't take too long for\n the low gravity to tear a man's\n nerves to shreds. He has to develop\n kinks in his head to survive. And\n those kinks—", "Pop heard of the quaint commercial\n enterprise through the micro-tapes\n put off at the shack for the men\n down in the mine. Sattell probably\n learned of it the same way. Pop didn't\n even think of it again. It seemed\n to have nothing to do with him. But\n Sattell undoubtedly dealt with it\n fully in his desperate writings back\n to Earth.\nPop matter-of-factly tended the\n shack and the landing field and the\n stores for the Big Crack mine. Between-times\n he made more drawings\n in pursuit of his own private objective.\n Quite accidentally, he developed\n a certain talent professional artists\n might have approved. But he was not", "The red-headed man checked\n himself, panting. He drew back and\n slammed the inner lock-door. There\n was the sound of pumping.\n\n\n Pop put his helmet back on and\n sealed it. The outer door opened.\n Outrushing air tugged at Pop. After\n a second or two he went out and\n climbed down the welded-on ladder-bars\n to the ground.\n\n\n He headed back toward his shack.\n Somehow, the mention of Sattell had\n made his mind work better. It always\n did. He began painstakingly to\n put things together. The red-headed\n man knew the routine here in every\n detail. He knew Sattell. That part\n was simple. Sattell had planned this\n multi-million-dollar coup, as a man\n in prison might plan his break. The\n stripped interior of the ship identified\n it.", "All of which happened back on\n Earth and a long time ago. It seemed\n to Pop that the sight of Sattell had\n brought back some vague and cloudy\n memories. They were not sharp,\n though, and he hunted up Sattell\n again to find out if he was right.\n And Sattell went into panic when\n he returned.\n\n\n Nowadays, by the Big Crack, Pop\n wasn't so insistent on seeing Sattell,\n but he was deeply concerned with\n the recovery of the memories that\n Sattell helped bring back. Pop was\n a highly conscientious man. He took\n good care of his job. There was a\n warning-bell in the shack, and when\n a rocketship from Lunar City got\n above the horizon and could send a\n tight beam, the gong clanged loudly,\n and Pop got into a vacuum-suit\n and went out the air lock. He usually\n reached the moondozer about the\n time the ship began to brake for\n landing, and he watched it come in.", "behind the air-apparatus. It rattled\n if he shook it, and it was worth no\n more than so many pebbles. But\n sometimes Pop wondered if Sattell\n ever thought of the value of the\n mine's production. If he would kill\n a woman and two children and think\n he'd killed a man for no more than\n a hundred dollars, what enormity\n would he commit for a three-gallon\n quantity of uncut diamonds?\nBut he did not dwell on such\n speculation. The sun rose very, very\n slowly in what by convention was\n called the east. It took nearly two\n hours to urge its disk above the\n horizon, and it burned terribly in\n emptiness for fourteen times twenty-four", "Sometimes, in the shack on the far\n side of the Moon, Pop Young had\n odd fancies about Sattell. There was\n the mine, for example. In each two\n Earth-weeks of working, the mine-colony\n nearly filled up a three-gallon\n cannister with greasy-seeming white\n crystals shaped like two pyramids\n base to base. The filled cannister\n would weigh a hundred pounds on\n Earth. Here it weighed eighteen. But\n on Earth its contents would be computed\n in carats, and a hundred\n pounds was worth millions. Yet here\n on the Moon Pop kept a waiting cannister\n on a shelf in his tiny dome,", "\"Now I've got to go handle the\n hoist, if Sattell's coming up from\n the mine. If I don't do it, he don't\n come up.\"\n\n\n The red-headed man snarled. But\n his eyes were on the cannister whose\n contents should weigh a hundred\n pounds on Earth.\n\n\n \"Any tricks,\" he rasped, \"and you\n know what happens!\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Pop.\n\n\n He stolidly put his helmet back\n on. But his eyes went past the red-headed\n man to the stair that wound\n down, inside the ship, from some\n compartment above. The stair-rail was\n pure, clear, water-white plastic, not\n less than three inches thick. There\n was a lot of it!\n\n\n The inner door closed. Pop opened\n the outer. Air rushed out. He\n climbed painstakingly down to the\n ground. He started back toward the\n shack.", "Pop didn't wait. He searched\n hopefully. Once a mass of steel plating\n fell only yards from him, but it\n did not interrupt his search.\n\n\n When he went into the shack, he\n grinned to himself. The call-light of\n the vision-phone flickered wildly.\n When he took off his helmet the bell\n clanged incessantly. He answered. A\n shaking voice from the mining-colony\n panted:\n\n\n \"We felt a shock! What happened?\n What do we do?\"\n\n\n \"Don't do a thing,\" advised Pop.\n \"It's all right. I blew up the ship and\n everything's all right. I wouldn't\n even mention it to Sattell if I were\n you.\"", "Somebody back on Earth promoted\n a luxury passenger-line of spaceships\n to ply between Earth and\n Moon. It looked like a perfect set-up.\n Three spacecraft capable of the journey\n came into being with attendant\n reams of publicity. They promised a\n thrill and a new distinction for the\n rich. Guided tours to Lunar! The\n most expensive and most thrilling\n trip in history! One hundred thousand\n dollars for a twelve-day cruise\n through space, with views of the\n Moon's far side and trips through\n Lunar City and a landing in Aristarchus,\n plus sound-tapes of the journey\n and fame hitherto reserved for\n honest explorers!\n\n\n It didn't seem to have anything\n to do with Pop or with Sattell. But\n it did.", "It was one of the unsuccessful\n luxury-liners sold for scrap. Or perhaps\n it was stolen for the journey\n here. Sattell's associates had had to\n steal or somehow get the fuel, and\n somehow find a pilot. But there were\n diamonds worth at least five million\n dollars waiting for them, and the\n whole job might not have called for\n more than two men—with Sattell as\n a third. According to the economics\n of crime, it was feasible. Anyhow it\n was being done.\n\n\n Pop reached the dust-heap which\n was his shack and went in the air\n lock. Inside, he went to the vision-phone\n and called the mine-colony\n down in the Crack. He gave the\n message he'd been told to pass on.\n Sattell to come up, with what diamonds\n had been dug since the\n regular cannister was sent up for the\n Lunar City ship that would be due\n presently. Otherwise the ship on the\n landing strip would destroy shack\n and Pop and the colony together.", "The shack stood a hundred feet\n from the Big Crack's edge. It looked\n like a dust-heap thirty feet high, and\n it was. The outside was surface\n moondust, piled over a tiny dome to\n be insulation against the cold of\n night and shadow and the furnace\n heat of day. Pop lived in it all alone,\n and in his spare time he worked\n industriously at recovering some\n missing portions of his life that Sattell\n had managed to take away from\n him.\n\n\n He thought often of Sattell, down\n in the colony underground. There\n were galleries and tunnels and living-quarters\n down there. There were\n air-tight bulkheads for safety, and a\n hydroponic garden to keep the air\n fresh, and all sorts of things to make\n life possible for men under if not\n on the Moon." ] ]
valid	62314	[ "What is the relationship like between Yasak and Koroby?", "What did Koroby think of the vehicle she took to her wedding?", "What time period in human history does the author liken the Venusian planet to?", "What likely happened to Koroby after the story ended?", "How did Yasak feel towards Robert upon their meeting?", "How does Robert communicate with the Venusians?", "What statement best describes Robert?", "Why does Koroby feel motivated to start the fire?", "Under what circumstances does Yasak first reunite with Koroby during the story?", "How did Robert feel about becoming stranded on Venus?" ]	[ [ "They are set to meet for the first time on the date of their marriage", "Yasak is faithfully devoted to Koroby’s needs", "Koroby is faithfully devoted to Yasak, but falls in love with Robert", "Koroby has always loved Yasak, but Yasak treats her poorly" ], [ "It was carved by craftspeople and painted delicately", "It was old and musty", "It smelled beautifully of flower garlands", "It was delightful for her to finally ride in a space ship to her wedding" ], [ "The dawn of the Space Age", "A fairytale of the Stone Age", "A society on the edge of an industrial revolution", "A magical Iron Age" ], [ "She likely married Yasak", "She likely died from her wounds in the fire", "She likely hurried to complete her space ship to explore Terra", "Yasak was so fed up with her at that point he likely banished her" ], [ "Shocked by his appearance", "A friendly camaraderie", "Threatened by his presence", "Angry he had carried Koroby" ], [ "Both the Venusians and his people from Terra speak the same language", "He carries a translation device ", "He communicates telepathically", "He learns thoughts and language through mind reading" ], [ "He is revered as a god by all the Venusians in Stone City", "He is a Venusian that travelled to outer space and returned home completely changed", "He is an artificially intelligent machine that overtook planet Terra from humans", "He is a bionic human that had become immortal" ], [ "She starts the fire by accident while fleeing Stone City", "She starts the fire to protect Robert from being pursued", "She has had her heart broken and is fueled by rage", "She does not wish to marry Yasak, so must create a diversion" ], [ "He went looking for her when she was late to their wedding", "Some of the wedding procession alerted him to her distress", "He intercepted the wedding procession in a grassy field", "He was investigating the source of the green flame when he saw her" ], [ "He was unmoved by the situation", "He was eager to explore Venus while he fixed his ship", "He was anxious to fix his ship and return to Terra", "He felt lucky to have survived the crash" ] ]	[ 2, 2, 4, 1, 3, 4, 3, 3, 2, 1 ]	[ 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Koroby reached the City wall, panted through the gate into a shrieking\n crowd. Someone grasped her roughly—she was too breathless to do more\n than gasp for air—and shook her violently. \"You fool, you utter\n fool! What did you think you were doing?\" Others clamored around her,\n reaching for her. Then she heard Yasak's voice. Face stern, he pushed\n through the crowd, pressed her to him. \"Let her alone—Let her alone, I\n say!\"", "\"You will stay with me while you are in the City, of course,\" Yasak\n said, as they walked. He eyed this handsome stranger speculatively, and\n then turned to shout an necessary order. \"You, there, keep in line!\" He\n glanced at Robert furtively to see if this had impressed him at all.\nIt was day. Koroby sat up in bed and scanned her surroundings. She was\n in Yasak's house. The bed was very soft, the coverlets of the finest\n weave. The furniture was elegantly carved and painted; there were even\n paintings on the walls.\n\n\n A woman came to the bed. She was stocky and wore drab grey: the blue\n circles tattooed on her cheeks proclaimed her a slave. \"How do you\n feel?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Fairly well. How long have I been ill?\" Koroby asked, sweetly weak.\n\n\n \"You haven't been ill. They brought you in last night.\"", "\"Oh,\" Koroby said disappointedly, and sat upright. \"I feel as if I'd\n been lying here for weeks. Where's Yasak? Where's the strange man in\n armor?\"\n\n\n \"Yasak's out somewhere. The stranger man is in the room at the end of\n the hall.\"\n\n\n \"Fetch me something to wear—that's good enough,\" the girl accepted the\n mantle offered by the slave. \"Quick, some water—I must wash.\"\n\n\n In a few minutes she was lightly running down the hall; she knocked on\n the door of Robert's room. \"May I come in?\"\n\n\n He did not answer. She waited a little and went in. He was seated on\n one of the carved chairs, fussing over some scraps of metal on the\n table. He did not look up.", "They watched the conflagration, Yasak and Koroby, from a higher part of\n the wall than where the others were gathered. They could glimpse Robert\n now and then. He was running, trying to outrace the flames. Then they\n swept around him, circling him—his arms flailed frantically.\nThe fire had passed over the horizon. The air was blue with smoke,\n difficult to breathe, and ashes were drifting lightly down like\n dove-colored snow. Yasak, watery eyed, a cloth pressed to his nose, was\n walking with several others over the smoking earth and still warm ashes\n up to his knees. In one hand he held a stick. He stopped and pointed.\n \"He fell about here,\" he said, and began to probe the ashes with the\n stick.\n\n\n He struck something. \"Here he is!\" he cried. The others hurried to the\n spot and scooped ashes away, dog-fashion, until Robert's remains were\n laid clear. There were exclamations of amazement and perplexity from\n the people.", "But Koroby, with supreme confidence, walked toward the stranger, her\n lovely body graceful as a cat's, her face radiant. The man did not hear\n her. She halted behind him, waited silent, expectant, excited—but he\n did not turn. The green fire sputtered upward. At last the girl stepped\n to the man's side and gently touched him again. He turned, and her\n heart faltered: she swayed with bliss.\n\n\n He was probably a god. Not even handsome Yasak looked like this. Here\n was a face so finely-chiseled, so perfectly proportioned, that it was\n almost frightening, unhuman, mechanical. It was unlined and without\n expression, somehow unreal. Mysterious, compelling.", "His face swung up to hers. \"But—there's no path that way—\"\n\n\n \"I don't care,\" she said. \"Take me there.\" Her order had reached the\n others' ears, and they slowed their pace.\n\n\n \"Lady—believe me—it's impossible. There's nothing but matted jungle\n in that direction—we'd have to hack our way as we go along. And who\n knows how far away that light is? Besides, you're on your way to be\n married.\"\n\n\n \"Take me to that light!\" she persisted.\n\n\n They set the litter down. \"We can't do that,\" one man said to another.\n\n\n Koroby stepped out to the path, straightened up, her eyes on the glow.\n \"You'd better,\" she said ominously. \"Otherwise, I'll make a complaint\n to Yasak—\"", "Koroby stared defiantly at the laughing faces of her bridesmaids. She\n shrugged hopelessly. \"I don't care,\" she said slowly. \"It will be nice\n to have Yasak for a husband—yes. And perhaps I do love him. I don't\n know.\" She tightened her lips as she reflected on it.\n\n\n She left them, moving gracefully to the door. Venus-girls were\n generally of truly elfin proportions, so delicately slim that they\n seemed incapable of the slightest exertion. But Koroby's body\n was—compared to her friends'—voluptuous.\n\n\n She rested against the door-frame, watching the red of the afterglow\n deepen to purple. \"I want romance,\" she said, so softly that the girls\n had to strain forward to hear her. \"I wish that there were other worlds\n than this—and that someone would drop out of the skies and claim\n me ... and take me away from here, away from all this—this monotony!\"", "Grumbling, they bent to the conveyance's poles, and Koroby lithely\n slipped to the cushions. They turned off the path, plodded through the\n deep grass toward the light. The litter lurched violently as their\n feet caught in the tangled grass, and clouds of fine dust arose from\n the disturbed blades.\nBy the time they reached the source of the light, they were quite\n demoralized. The musicians had not accompanied them, preferring to\n carry the message to Yasak in the Stone City that his prospective\n bride had gone off on a mad journey. The bearers were powdered grey\n with dust, striped with blood where the dry grass-stems had cut them.\n They were exhausted and panting. Koroby was walking beside them, for\n they had abandoned the litter finally. Her blue drapery was ripped and\n rumpled; her carefully-arranged braids had fallen loose; dust on her\n face had hid its youthful color, aging her.", "There was a rap at the doorway; they turned. One of the litter-bearers\n loomed darker than the gloomy sky. \"Are you ready?\" he asked.\n\n\n Koroby twirled before the mirror, criticizing her appearance. \"Yes,\n ready,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Ready!\" the girls cried. Then there was a little silence.\n\n\n \"Shall we go now?\" Koroby asked, and the litter-carrier nodded. Koroby\n kissed the girls, one after another. \"Here, Shonka—you can have this\n bracelet you've always liked. And this is for you, Lolla. And here,\n Trossa—and you, Shia. Goodbye, darlings, goodbye—come and see me\n whenever you can!\"\n\n\n \"Goodbye, Koroby!\"", "Koroby huddled on a chair, sobbing. Then she dried her eyes on the\n backs of her hands. She went to the narrow slits that served as windows\n and unfastened the translucent shutter of one. Down in the City street,\n Robert was walking away. Her eyes hardened, and her fingers spread\n into ugly claws. Without bothering to pull the shutter in place she\n hurried out of the room, ran eagerly down the hall. She stopped at\n the armor-rack at the main hall on her way outside, and snatched up a\nsiatcha\n—a firestone. Then she slipped outside and down the street.\nThe City's wall was not far behind. Robert was visible in the distance,\n striding toward his sky-ship, a widening cloud of dust rising behind\n him like the spreading wake of a boat. Koroby stood on tip-toe, waving\n and calling after him, \"Robert! Robert! Come back!\" but he did not seem\n to hear.", "\"Robert—I'm mad about you! I've dreamed of your coming—all my life!\n Don't be so cruel—so cold to me! You mock me, say that I'm nothing,\n that I'm not worthy of you—\"\n\n\n She stepped back from him, clenching her hands. \"Oh, I hate you—hate\n you! You don't care the least bit about me—and I've shamed myself in\n front of you—I, supposed to be Yasak's wife by now!\" She began to\n cry, hid her face in suddenly lax fingers. She looked up fiercely. \"I\n could kill you!\" Robert stood immobile, no trace of feeling marring the\n perfection of his face. \"I could kill you, and I will kill you!\" she\n sprang at him.\n\n\n \"You'll hurt yourself,\" he admonished kindly, and after she had\n pummeled his chest, bruising her fingers on his armor, she turned away.", "Koroby fingered the flowers around her throat, her eyes rapt on the\n passing trees. Her lips moved in the barest murmur: \"If only—!\"\n and again, \"Oh, if only—!\" But the music trickled on, and nothing\n happened; the litter seemed to float along—none of the bearers even\n stumbled.\n\n\n They came to a cleared space of waist-high grass. It was like a canyon\n steeply walled by cliffs of verdure. The litter jerked as it glided\n along, and Koroby heard one of the bearers exclaim gruffly, \"Listen!\"\n Then the litter resumed its dream-like floating on the backs of the men.\n\n\n \"What was it?\" another bearer asked.\n\n\n \"Thought I heard something,\" the other replied. \"Shrill and high—like\n something screaming—\"\n\n\n Koroby peered out. \"A\ngnau\n?\" she asked.", "He was walking along, head erect, apparently quite at ease, while the\n litter bearers and Koroby could barely drag themselves with him. The\n girl's garment was a tattered ruin. Her skin was gritty with dust, and\n she was bleeding from many scratches. She tripped over tangled roots\n and exclaimed in pain. Then the man took one of the strange implements\n from his belt, pressed a knob on it, and light appeared as if by magic!\n He handed the stick to Koroby, but she was afraid to touch it. This was\n a strange light that gave no heat, nor flickered in the breeze. Finally\n she accepted it from him, but carried it gingerly at arm's length.\n\n\n She refused to believe that he had no name, and so he named himself.\n \"Call me Robert. It is an ancient name on Terra.\"\n\n\n \"Robert,\" she said, and, \"Robert.\"", "\"Thank you for carrying me, Robert.\" He did not reply. \"Robert—I\n dreamed of you last night. I dreamed you built another round house and\n that we both flew away in it. Yasak had to stay behind, and he was\n furious. Robert! Aren't you listening?\"\n\n\n \"I hear you.\"\n\n\n \"Don't you think it was an exciting dream?\" He shook his head. \"But\n why? Robert\"—she laid longing hands on his shoulders—\"can't you see\n that I'm in love with you?\" He shrugged. \"I believe you don't know what\n love is!\"\n\n\n \"I had a faint idea of it when I looked into your mind,\" he said. \"I'm\n afraid I haven't any use for it. Where I come from there is no love,\n and there shouldn't be here, either. It's a waste of time.\"", "He was very tall, and his shoulders were very wide. Oh, but he looked\n like a man, and stood like one—even though his hands were folded\n behind his back and he was probably dejected. A man in a house from the\n sky—\n\n\n Koroby hastily grasped a corner of her gown, moistened it with saliva,\n and scrubbed her face. She rearranged her hair, and stepped forward.\n\n\n \"Don't go there—it's magic—he'll cast a spell—!\" one of the bearers\n whispered urgently, reaching after her, but Koroby pushed him away. The\n litter-carriers watched the girl go, unconsciously huddling together\n as if feeling the need for combined strength. They withdrew into the\n jungle's shadows, and waited there anxiously, ready at any moment to\n run away.", "Her lips tightened and her eyes narrowed. \"And I?\"\n\n\n His voice sounded almost surprised. \"What about you?\"\n\n\n \"You see nothing about me worthy of your respect? Are you infinitely\n superior to me—\nme\n?\"\n\n\n He looked her up and down. \"Of course!\"\n\n\n Her eyes jerked wide open and she took a deep breath. \"And just who do\n you think you are? A god?\"\n\n\n He shook his head. \"No. Just better informed, for one thing. And—\"\n\n\n Koroby cut him short. \"What's your name?\"\n\n\n \"I have none.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, you have none?\"", "But at last she could go no farther. She had forced herself along\n because she wanted to impress this indifferent man that she was not as\n inferior as he might think—but now she could not go on. With a little\n cry almost of relief, she sank to the ground and lay semi-conscious, so\n weary that the very pain of it seemed on the point of pleasure.\n\n\n Robert dipped down, scooped her up, and carried her.\n\n\n Lights glimmered ahead; shouts reached them. It was a searching party,\n Yasak in it. The litter-carriers who could still speak blurted out what\n had happened. \"A green light—loud sounds—fire—this man there—\" and\n then dropped into sleep.\n\n\n \"Someone carry these men,\" Yasak ordered. To Robert he said, \"We're not\n very far from the path to the City now. Shall I carry the girl?\"\n\n\n \"It makes no difference,\" Robert said.", "\"This way,\" the litter-carrier announced, touching the girl's arm. They\n stumbled over the rutted clearing toward the twinkling sparks that were\n the lights of the other litter-bearers, colored sparks as befitted\n a wedding-conveyance. The winking lights were enclosed in shells of\n colored glass for another reason—the danger of their firing the papery\n jungle verdure.\nIt was not a new litter, built especially for the occasion—Yasak was\n too practical a man to sanction any kind of waste. It was the same\n old litter that Koroby had been watching come and go ever since she\n was a little girl, a canopied framework of gaudily-painted carvings.\n She had wondered, watching it pass, whether its cushioned floor was\n soft, and now, as she stepped into the litter, she patted the padding\n experimentally. Yes, it was soft .... And fragrant, too—a shade too\n fragrant. It smelled stale, hinting of other occupants, other brides\n being borne to other weddings....", "\"Goodbye! Goodbye!\" They crowded around her, embracing, babbling\n farewells, shreds of advice. Trossa began to cry. Finally Koroby broke\n away from them, went to the door. She took a last look at the interior\n of the little hut, dim in the lamplight—at the hard bed of laced\ngnau\n-hide strips, the crude but beautifully-carved charts and chests.\n Then she turned and stepped out into the night.", "The expedition emerged from the jungle on a sandy stretch of barren\n land. A thousand feet away a gigantic metal object lay on the sand,\n crumpled as though it had dropped from a great distance. It had been\n globular before the crash, and was pierced with holes like windows.\n What could it possibly be? A house? But whoever heard of a metal house?\n Why, who could forge such a thing! Yasak's house in the City had iron\n doors, and they were considered one of the most wonderful things of the\n age. It would take a giant to make such a ponderous thing as this.\n\n\n A house, fallen from the sky? The green lights poured out of its\n crumpled part, and a strange bubbling and hissing filled the air.\n\n\n Koroby stopped short, clasping her hands and involuntarily uttering a\n squeal of joyful excitement, for between her and the blaze, his eyes on\n the destruction, stood a man....." ], [ "Grumbling, they bent to the conveyance's poles, and Koroby lithely\n slipped to the cushions. They turned off the path, plodded through the\n deep grass toward the light. The litter lurched violently as their\n feet caught in the tangled grass, and clouds of fine dust arose from\n the disturbed blades.\nBy the time they reached the source of the light, they were quite\n demoralized. The musicians had not accompanied them, preferring to\n carry the message to Yasak in the Stone City that his prospective\n bride had gone off on a mad journey. The bearers were powdered grey\n with dust, striped with blood where the dry grass-stems had cut them.\n They were exhausted and panting. Koroby was walking beside them, for\n they had abandoned the litter finally. Her blue drapery was ripped and\n rumpled; her carefully-arranged braids had fallen loose; dust on her\n face had hid its youthful color, aging her.", "There was a rap at the doorway; they turned. One of the litter-bearers\n loomed darker than the gloomy sky. \"Are you ready?\" he asked.\n\n\n Koroby twirled before the mirror, criticizing her appearance. \"Yes,\n ready,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Ready!\" the girls cried. Then there was a little silence.\n\n\n \"Shall we go now?\" Koroby asked, and the litter-carrier nodded. Koroby\n kissed the girls, one after another. \"Here, Shonka—you can have this\n bracelet you've always liked. And this is for you, Lolla. And here,\n Trossa—and you, Shia. Goodbye, darlings, goodbye—come and see me\n whenever you can!\"\n\n\n \"Goodbye, Koroby!\"", "\"This way,\" the litter-carrier announced, touching the girl's arm. They\n stumbled over the rutted clearing toward the twinkling sparks that were\n the lights of the other litter-bearers, colored sparks as befitted\n a wedding-conveyance. The winking lights were enclosed in shells of\n colored glass for another reason—the danger of their firing the papery\n jungle verdure.\nIt was not a new litter, built especially for the occasion—Yasak was\n too practical a man to sanction any kind of waste. It was the same\n old litter that Koroby had been watching come and go ever since she\n was a little girl, a canopied framework of gaudily-painted carvings.\n She had wondered, watching it pass, whether its cushioned floor was\n soft, and now, as she stepped into the litter, she patted the padding\n experimentally. Yes, it was soft .... And fragrant, too—a shade too\n fragrant. It smelled stale, hinting of other occupants, other brides\n being borne to other weddings....", "Koroby stared defiantly at the laughing faces of her bridesmaids. She\n shrugged hopelessly. \"I don't care,\" she said slowly. \"It will be nice\n to have Yasak for a husband—yes. And perhaps I do love him. I don't\n know.\" She tightened her lips as she reflected on it.\n\n\n She left them, moving gracefully to the door. Venus-girls were\n generally of truly elfin proportions, so delicately slim that they\n seemed incapable of the slightest exertion. But Koroby's body\n was—compared to her friends'—voluptuous.\n\n\n She rested against the door-frame, watching the red of the afterglow\n deepen to purple. \"I want romance,\" she said, so softly that the girls\n had to strain forward to hear her. \"I wish that there were other worlds\n than this—and that someone would drop out of the skies and claim\n me ... and take me away from here, away from all this—this monotony!\"", "Koroby fingered the flowers around her throat, her eyes rapt on the\n passing trees. Her lips moved in the barest murmur: \"If only—!\"\n and again, \"Oh, if only—!\" But the music trickled on, and nothing\n happened; the litter seemed to float along—none of the bearers even\n stumbled.\n\n\n They came to a cleared space of waist-high grass. It was like a canyon\n steeply walled by cliffs of verdure. The litter jerked as it glided\n along, and Koroby heard one of the bearers exclaim gruffly, \"Listen!\"\n Then the litter resumed its dream-like floating on the backs of the men.\n\n\n \"What was it?\" another bearer asked.\n\n\n \"Thought I heard something,\" the other replied. \"Shrill and high—like\n something screaming—\"\n\n\n Koroby peered out. \"A\ngnau\n?\" she asked.", "\"I don't know,\" the bearer volunteered.\n\n\n Koroby lifted a hand. \"Stop the litter,\" she said.\nThe conveyance halted. Koroby leaning out, the men peering around them,\n they listened. One of the bearers shouted at the musicians; the music\n ceased. There was nothing to be heard except the whisper of the breeze\n in the grass.\n\n\n Then the girl heard it—a shrill, distant whine, dying away, then\n growing louder—and louder—it seemed to be approaching—from the sky—\n\n\n All the faces were lifted up now, worriedly. The whine grew\n louder—Koroby's hands clenched nervously on the wreaths at her throat—\n\n\n Then, far ahead, a series of bright flashes, like the lightning of the\n dust-storms, but brilliantly green. A silence, then staccatto reports,\n certainly not thunder—unlike any sound that Koroby had ever heard.", "Koroby huddled on a chair, sobbing. Then she dried her eyes on the\n backs of her hands. She went to the narrow slits that served as windows\n and unfastened the translucent shutter of one. Down in the City street,\n Robert was walking away. Her eyes hardened, and her fingers spread\n into ugly claws. Without bothering to pull the shutter in place she\n hurried out of the room, ran eagerly down the hall. She stopped at\n the armor-rack at the main hall on her way outside, and snatched up a\nsiatcha\n—a firestone. Then she slipped outside and down the street.\nThe City's wall was not far behind. Robert was visible in the distance,\n striding toward his sky-ship, a widening cloud of dust rising behind\n him like the spreading wake of a boat. Koroby stood on tip-toe, waving\n and calling after him, \"Robert! Robert! Come back!\" but he did not seem\n to hear.", "His face swung up to hers. \"But—there's no path that way—\"\n\n\n \"I don't care,\" she said. \"Take me there.\" Her order had reached the\n others' ears, and they slowed their pace.\n\n\n \"Lady—believe me—it's impossible. There's nothing but matted jungle\n in that direction—we'd have to hack our way as we go along. And who\n knows how far away that light is? Besides, you're on your way to be\n married.\"\n\n\n \"Take me to that light!\" she persisted.\n\n\n They set the litter down. \"We can't do that,\" one man said to another.\n\n\n Koroby stepped out to the path, straightened up, her eyes on the glow.\n \"You'd better,\" she said ominously. \"Otherwise, I'll make a complaint\n to Yasak—\"", "\"Oh,\" Koroby said disappointedly, and sat upright. \"I feel as if I'd\n been lying here for weeks. Where's Yasak? Where's the strange man in\n armor?\"\n\n\n \"Yasak's out somewhere. The stranger man is in the room at the end of\n the hall.\"\n\n\n \"Fetch me something to wear—that's good enough,\" the girl accepted the\n mantle offered by the slave. \"Quick, some water—I must wash.\"\n\n\n In a few minutes she was lightly running down the hall; she knocked on\n the door of Robert's room. \"May I come in?\"\n\n\n He did not answer. She waited a little and went in. He was seated on\n one of the carved chairs, fussing over some scraps of metal on the\n table. He did not look up.", "\"Goodbye! Goodbye!\" They crowded around her, embracing, babbling\n farewells, shreds of advice. Trossa began to cry. Finally Koroby broke\n away from them, went to the door. She took a last look at the interior\n of the little hut, dim in the lamplight—at the hard bed of laced\ngnau\n-hide strips, the crude but beautifully-carved charts and chests.\n Then she turned and stepped out into the night.", "Garlands of flowers occupied a good deal of space in it. Settled among\n them, she felt like a bird in a strange nest. She leaned back among\n them; they rustled dryly. Too bad—it had been such a dry year—\n\n\n \"You're comfortable?\" the litter bearer asked. Koroby nodded, and the\n litter was lifted, was carried along the path.\n\n\n The procession filed into the jungle, into a tunnel of arched branches,\n of elephant-eared leaves. Above the monotonous music came the hiss of\n the torches, the occasional startled cry of a wakened bird. The glow of\n the flames, in the dusty air, hung around the party, sharply defined,\n like a cloak of light. At times a breeze would shake the ceiling of\n foliage, producing the sound of rolling surf.", "But Koroby, with supreme confidence, walked toward the stranger, her\n lovely body graceful as a cat's, her face radiant. The man did not hear\n her. She halted behind him, waited silent, expectant, excited—but he\n did not turn. The green fire sputtered upward. At last the girl stepped\n to the man's side and gently touched him again. He turned, and her\n heart faltered: she swayed with bliss.\n\n\n He was probably a god. Not even handsome Yasak looked like this. Here\n was a face so finely-chiseled, so perfectly proportioned, that it was\n almost frightening, unhuman, mechanical. It was unlined and without\n expression, somehow unreal. Mysterious, compelling.", "He was walking along, head erect, apparently quite at ease, while the\n litter bearers and Koroby could barely drag themselves with him. The\n girl's garment was a tattered ruin. Her skin was gritty with dust, and\n she was bleeding from many scratches. She tripped over tangled roots\n and exclaimed in pain. Then the man took one of the strange implements\n from his belt, pressed a knob on it, and light appeared as if by magic!\n He handed the stick to Koroby, but she was afraid to touch it. This was\n a strange light that gave no heat, nor flickered in the breeze. Finally\n she accepted it from him, but carried it gingerly at arm's length.\n\n\n She refused to believe that he had no name, and so he named himself.\n \"Call me Robert. It is an ancient name on Terra.\"\n\n\n \"Robert,\" she said, and, \"Robert.\"", "He was clothed very peculiarly. A wonderfully-made metallic garment\n enclosed his whole body—legs and all, unlike the Venus-men's tunics.\n Even his feet were covered. Perhaps it was armor—though the Venus-men\n usually wore only breastplate and greaves. And a helmet hid all of\n the man's head except his face. Around his waist was a belt with many\n incomprehensible objects dangling from it. If he was so well armored,\n why was he not carrying a sword—a dagger at least! Of what use were\n those things on his belt—for instance, that notched L-shaped thing? It\n would not even make a decent club!\n\n\n The stranger did not speak, merely gazed deeply into Koroby's eyes. And\n she, returning the gaze, wondered if he was peering into her very soul.\n The words of a folk-ballad came to her:", "She watched him a little longer. Then she deliberately stooped and drew\n the firestone out of its sheath. She touched it to a blade of the tall\n grass. A little orange flame licked up, slowly quested along the blade,\n down to the ground and up another stem. It slipped over to another\n stem, and another, growing larger, hotter—Koroby stepped back from the\n writhing fire, her hand protectively over her face.\n\n\n The flames crackled at first—like the crumpling of thin paper. Then,\n as they widened and began climbing hand over hand up an invisible\n ladder, they roared. Koroby was running back toward the City now, away\n from the heat. The fire spread in a long line over the prairie. Above\n its roar came shouts from the City. The flames rose in a monstrous\n twisting pillar, brighter than even the dust-palled sky, lighting the\n buildings and the prairie. The heat was dreadful.", "Koroby reached the City wall, panted through the gate into a shrieking\n crowd. Someone grasped her roughly—she was too breathless to do more\n than gasp for air—and shook her violently. \"You fool, you utter\n fool! What did you think you were doing?\" Others clamored around her,\n reaching for her. Then she heard Yasak's voice. Face stern, he pushed\n through the crowd, pressed her to him. \"Let her alone—Let her alone, I\n say!\"", "She turned back to her friends, went to them, one of her hands, patting\n the head of the kneeling one. She eyed herself in the mirror.\n\n\n \"Well—heigh-ho! There don't seem to be any other worlds, and nobody is\n going to steal me away from Yasak, so I might as well get on with my\n preparations. The men with the litter will be here soon to carry me to\n the Stone City.\"\n\n\n She ran slim hands down her sides, smoothing the blue sarong; she\n fondled her dark braids. \"Trossa, how about some flowers at my ears—or\n do you think that it would look a little too much—?\" Her eyes sought\n the mirror, and her lips parted in an irreprehensible smile. She\n trilled softly to herself, \"Yes, I am beautiful tonight—the loveliest\n woman Yasak will ever see!\" And then, regretfully, sullenly, \"But oh,\n if only\nHe\nwould come ... the man of my dreams!\"", "He was very tall, and his shoulders were very wide. Oh, but he looked\n like a man, and stood like one—even though his hands were folded\n behind his back and he was probably dejected. A man in a house from the\n sky—\n\n\n Koroby hastily grasped a corner of her gown, moistened it with saliva,\n and scrubbed her face. She rearranged her hair, and stepped forward.\n\n\n \"Don't go there—it's magic—he'll cast a spell—!\" one of the bearers\n whispered urgently, reaching after her, but Koroby pushed him away. The\n litter-carriers watched the girl go, unconsciously huddling together\n as if feeling the need for combined strength. They withdrew into the\n jungle's shadows, and waited there anxiously, ready at any moment to\n run away.", "He seemed just a trifle bored. \"We gave up names long ago on my world.\n We are concerned with more weighty things than our own selves. But I\n have a personal problem now,\" he said, making a peculiar sound that\n was not quite a sigh. \"Here I am stranded on Venus, my ship utterly\n wrecked, and I'm due at the Reisezek Convention in two weeks. You\"—he\n gripped Koroby's shoulder, and his strength made her wince—\"tell me,\n where is the nearest city? I must communicate with my people at once.\"\n\n\n She pointed. \"The Stone City's that way.\"\n\n\n \"Good,\" he said. \"Let's go there.\"", "There was a babble of voices as the musicians crowded together, asking\n what had it been, and where—just exactly—could one suppose it had\n happened, that thunder—was it going to storm!\n\n\n They waited, but nothing further happened—there were no more stabs of\n green light nor detonations. The bearers stooped to lift the litter's\n poles to their shoulders. \"Shall we go on?\" one of them asked Koroby.\n\n\n She waved a hand. \"Yes, go on.\"\nThe litter resumed its gentle swaying, but the music did not start\n again. Then, from the direction of the light-flashes, a glow appeared,\n shining steadily, green as the flashes had been. Noticing it, Koroby\n frowned. Then the path bent, and the glow swung to one side.\n\n\n Suddenly Koroby reached out, tapped the shoulder of the closet bearer.\n \"Go toward the light.\"" ], [ "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nIt was twilight on Venus—the rusty red that the eyes notice when\n their closed lids are raised to light. Against the glow, fantastically\n twisted trees spread claws of spiky leaves, and a group of clay huts\n thrust up sharp edges of shadow, like the abandoned toy blocks of a\n gigantic child. There was no sign of clear sky and stars—the heavens\n were roofed by a perpetual ceiling of dust-clouds.\n\n\n A light glimmered in one of the huts. Feminine voices rippled across\n the clearing and into the jungle. There was laughter, then someone's\n faint and wistful sigh. One of the voices mourned, in the twittering\n Venusian speech, \"How I envy you, Koroby! I wish I were being married\n tonight, like you!\"", "He was looking at the wrecked globe of metal. \"So there are people on\n Venus!\" he said slowly.\n\n\n Koroby watched him, forgot her fear, and went eagerly to him, took his\n arm. \"Who are you?\" she asked. \"Tell me your name!\"\n\n\n He turned his mask of a face to her. \"My name? I have none,\" he said.\n\n\n \"No name? But who are you? Where are you from? And what is that?\" She\n pointed at the metal globe.\n\n\n \"The vehicle by which I came here from a land beyond the sky,\" he said.\n She had no concept of stars or space, and he could not fully explain.\n \"From a world known as Terra.\"\n\n\n She was silent a moment, stunned. So there was another world! Then she\n asked, \"Is it far? Have you come to take me there?\"", "He seemed just a trifle bored. \"We gave up names long ago on my world.\n We are concerned with more weighty things than our own selves. But I\n have a personal problem now,\" he said, making a peculiar sound that\n was not quite a sigh. \"Here I am stranded on Venus, my ship utterly\n wrecked, and I'm due at the Reisezek Convention in two weeks. You\"—he\n gripped Koroby's shoulder, and his strength made her wince—\"tell me,\n where is the nearest city? I must communicate with my people at once.\"\n\n\n She pointed. \"The Stone City's that way.\"\n\n\n \"Good,\" he said. \"Let's go there.\"", "Koroby stared defiantly at the laughing faces of her bridesmaids. She\n shrugged hopelessly. \"I don't care,\" she said slowly. \"It will be nice\n to have Yasak for a husband—yes. And perhaps I do love him. I don't\n know.\" She tightened her lips as she reflected on it.\n\n\n She left them, moving gracefully to the door. Venus-girls were\n generally of truly elfin proportions, so delicately slim that they\n seemed incapable of the slightest exertion. But Koroby's body\n was—compared to her friends'—voluptuous.\n\n\n She rested against the door-frame, watching the red of the afterglow\n deepen to purple. \"I want romance,\" she said, so softly that the girls\n had to strain forward to hear her. \"I wish that there were other worlds\n than this—and that someone would drop out of the skies and claim\n me ... and take me away from here, away from all this—this monotony!\"", "He was clothed very peculiarly. A wonderfully-made metallic garment\n enclosed his whole body—legs and all, unlike the Venus-men's tunics.\n Even his feet were covered. Perhaps it was armor—though the Venus-men\n usually wore only breastplate and greaves. And a helmet hid all of\n the man's head except his face. Around his waist was a belt with many\n incomprehensible objects dangling from it. If he was so well armored,\n why was he not carrying a sword—a dagger at least! Of what use were\n those things on his belt—for instance, that notched L-shaped thing? It\n would not even make a decent club!\n\n\n The stranger did not speak, merely gazed deeply into Koroby's eyes. And\n she, returning the gaze, wondered if he was peering into her very soul.\n The words of a folk-ballad came to her:", "Here the similarity between her dream and actual experience ended.\n What was he thinking as he eyed her for a long moment? She had no way\n of guessing. He said, \"No, I am not going to take you back there.\" Her\n month gaped in surprise, and he continued, \"As for the distance to\n Terra—it is incredibly far away.\"\n\n\n The glare was beginning to die, the green flames' hissing fading to a\n whisper. They watched the melting globe sag on the sand. Then Koroby\n said, \"But if it is so far away, how could you speak my language? There\n are some tribes beyond the jungle whose language is unlike ours—\"\n\n\n \"I read your mind,\" he explained indifferently. \"I have a remarkable\n memory.\"\n\n\n \"Remarkable indeed!\" she mocked. \"No one here could do that.\"\n\n\n \"But my race is infinitely superior to yours,\" he said blandly. \"You\n little people—ah—\" He gestured airily.", "The expedition emerged from the jungle on a sandy stretch of barren\n land. A thousand feet away a gigantic metal object lay on the sand,\n crumpled as though it had dropped from a great distance. It had been\n globular before the crash, and was pierced with holes like windows.\n What could it possibly be? A house? But whoever heard of a metal house?\n Why, who could forge such a thing! Yasak's house in the City had iron\n doors, and they were considered one of the most wonderful things of the\n age. It would take a giant to make such a ponderous thing as this.\n\n\n A house, fallen from the sky? The green lights poured out of its\n crumpled part, and a strange bubbling and hissing filled the air.\n\n\n Koroby stopped short, clasping her hands and involuntarily uttering a\n squeal of joyful excitement, for between her and the blaze, his eyes on\n the destruction, stood a man.....", "He was walking along, head erect, apparently quite at ease, while the\n litter bearers and Koroby could barely drag themselves with him. The\n girl's garment was a tattered ruin. Her skin was gritty with dust, and\n she was bleeding from many scratches. She tripped over tangled roots\n and exclaimed in pain. Then the man took one of the strange implements\n from his belt, pressed a knob on it, and light appeared as if by magic!\n He handed the stick to Koroby, but she was afraid to touch it. This was\n a strange light that gave no heat, nor flickered in the breeze. Finally\n she accepted it from him, but carried it gingerly at arm's length.\n\n\n She refused to believe that he had no name, and so he named himself.\n \"Call me Robert. It is an ancient name on Terra.\"\n\n\n \"Robert,\" she said, and, \"Robert.\"", "\"Thank you for carrying me, Robert.\" He did not reply. \"Robert—I\n dreamed of you last night. I dreamed you built another round house and\n that we both flew away in it. Yasak had to stay behind, and he was\n furious. Robert! Aren't you listening?\"\n\n\n \"I hear you.\"\n\n\n \"Don't you think it was an exciting dream?\" He shook his head. \"But\n why? Robert\"—she laid longing hands on his shoulders—\"can't you see\n that I'm in love with you?\" He shrugged. \"I believe you don't know what\n love is!\"\n\n\n \"I had a faint idea of it when I looked into your mind,\" he said. \"I'm\n afraid I haven't any use for it. Where I come from there is no love,\n and there shouldn't be here, either. It's a waste of time.\"", "\"I don't know,\" the bearer volunteered.\n\n\n Koroby lifted a hand. \"Stop the litter,\" she said.\nThe conveyance halted. Koroby leaning out, the men peering around them,\n they listened. One of the bearers shouted at the musicians; the music\n ceased. There was nothing to be heard except the whisper of the breeze\n in the grass.\n\n\n Then the girl heard it—a shrill, distant whine, dying away, then\n growing louder—and louder—it seemed to be approaching—from the sky—\n\n\n All the faces were lifted up now, worriedly. The whine grew\n louder—Koroby's hands clenched nervously on the wreaths at her throat—\n\n\n Then, far ahead, a series of bright flashes, like the lightning of the\n dust-storms, but brilliantly green. A silence, then staccatto reports,\n certainly not thunder—unlike any sound that Koroby had ever heard.", "She turned back to her friends, went to them, one of her hands, patting\n the head of the kneeling one. She eyed herself in the mirror.\n\n\n \"Well—heigh-ho! There don't seem to be any other worlds, and nobody is\n going to steal me away from Yasak, so I might as well get on with my\n preparations. The men with the litter will be here soon to carry me to\n the Stone City.\"\n\n\n She ran slim hands down her sides, smoothing the blue sarong; she\n fondled her dark braids. \"Trossa, how about some flowers at my ears—or\n do you think that it would look a little too much—?\" Her eyes sought\n the mirror, and her lips parted in an irreprehensible smile. She\n trilled softly to herself, \"Yes, I am beautiful tonight—the loveliest\n woman Yasak will ever see!\" And then, regretfully, sullenly, \"But oh,\n if only\nHe\nwould come ... the man of my dreams!\"", "It was a metal skeleton, and the fragments of complicated machinery,\n caked with soot.\n\n\n \"He wasn't human at all!\" Yasak marvelled. \"He was some kind of a toy\n made to look like a man—that's why he wore armor, and his face never\n changed expression—\"\n\n\n \"Magic!\" someone cried, and backed away.\n\n\n \"Magic!\" the others repeated, and edged back ... and that was the\n end of one of those robots which had been fashioned as servants for\n Terrestial men, made in Man's likeness to appease Man's vanity, then\n conquered him.", "They took another glance at the metal globe and the green fire, which\n by now had died to a fitful glimmer. Then the stranger and the girl\n started toward the jungle, where the litter-bearers awaited them.\nAs the party was struggling through the prairie's tall grass, the man\n said to Koroby, \"I realize from the pictures in your mind that there\n is no means in your city of communicating directly with my people. But\n it seems that there are materials which I can utilize in building a\n signal—\"", "There was a rap at the doorway; they turned. One of the litter-bearers\n loomed darker than the gloomy sky. \"Are you ready?\" he asked.\n\n\n Koroby twirled before the mirror, criticizing her appearance. \"Yes,\n ready,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Ready!\" the girls cried. Then there was a little silence.\n\n\n \"Shall we go now?\" Koroby asked, and the litter-carrier nodded. Koroby\n kissed the girls, one after another. \"Here, Shonka—you can have this\n bracelet you've always liked. And this is for you, Lolla. And here,\n Trossa—and you, Shia. Goodbye, darlings, goodbye—come and see me\n whenever you can!\"\n\n\n \"Goodbye, Koroby!\"", "But Koroby, with supreme confidence, walked toward the stranger, her\n lovely body graceful as a cat's, her face radiant. The man did not hear\n her. She halted behind him, waited silent, expectant, excited—but he\n did not turn. The green fire sputtered upward. At last the girl stepped\n to the man's side and gently touched him again. He turned, and her\n heart faltered: she swayed with bliss.\n\n\n He was probably a god. Not even handsome Yasak looked like this. Here\n was a face so finely-chiseled, so perfectly proportioned, that it was\n almost frightening, unhuman, mechanical. It was unlined and without\n expression, somehow unreal. Mysterious, compelling.", "\"This way,\" the litter-carrier announced, touching the girl's arm. They\n stumbled over the rutted clearing toward the twinkling sparks that were\n the lights of the other litter-bearers, colored sparks as befitted\n a wedding-conveyance. The winking lights were enclosed in shells of\n colored glass for another reason—the danger of their firing the papery\n jungle verdure.\nIt was not a new litter, built especially for the occasion—Yasak was\n too practical a man to sanction any kind of waste. It was the same\n old litter that Koroby had been watching come and go ever since she\n was a little girl, a canopied framework of gaudily-painted carvings.\n She had wondered, watching it pass, whether its cushioned floor was\n soft, and now, as she stepped into the litter, she patted the padding\n experimentally. Yes, it was soft .... And fragrant, too—a shade too\n fragrant. It smelled stale, hinting of other occupants, other brides\n being borne to other weddings....", "Koroby fingered the flowers around her throat, her eyes rapt on the\n passing trees. Her lips moved in the barest murmur: \"If only—!\"\n and again, \"Oh, if only—!\" But the music trickled on, and nothing\n happened; the litter seemed to float along—none of the bearers even\n stumbled.\n\n\n They came to a cleared space of waist-high grass. It was like a canyon\n steeply walled by cliffs of verdure. The litter jerked as it glided\n along, and Koroby heard one of the bearers exclaim gruffly, \"Listen!\"\n Then the litter resumed its dream-like floating on the backs of the men.\n\n\n \"What was it?\" another bearer asked.\n\n\n \"Thought I heard something,\" the other replied. \"Shrill and high—like\n something screaming—\"\n\n\n Koroby peered out. \"A\ngnau\n?\" she asked.", "Koroby huddled on a chair, sobbing. Then she dried her eyes on the\n backs of her hands. She went to the narrow slits that served as windows\n and unfastened the translucent shutter of one. Down in the City street,\n Robert was walking away. Her eyes hardened, and her fingers spread\n into ugly claws. Without bothering to pull the shutter in place she\n hurried out of the room, ran eagerly down the hall. She stopped at\n the armor-rack at the main hall on her way outside, and snatched up a\nsiatcha\n—a firestone. Then she slipped outside and down the street.\nThe City's wall was not far behind. Robert was visible in the distance,\n striding toward his sky-ship, a widening cloud of dust rising behind\n him like the spreading wake of a boat. Koroby stood on tip-toe, waving\n and calling after him, \"Robert! Robert! Come back!\" but he did not seem\n to hear.", "He was very tall, and his shoulders were very wide. Oh, but he looked\n like a man, and stood like one—even though his hands were folded\n behind his back and he was probably dejected. A man in a house from the\n sky—\n\n\n Koroby hastily grasped a corner of her gown, moistened it with saliva,\n and scrubbed her face. She rearranged her hair, and stepped forward.\n\n\n \"Don't go there—it's magic—he'll cast a spell—!\" one of the bearers\n whispered urgently, reaching after her, but Koroby pushed him away. The\n litter-carriers watched the girl go, unconsciously huddling together\n as if feeling the need for combined strength. They withdrew into the\n jungle's shadows, and waited there anxiously, ready at any moment to\n run away.", "But at last she could go no farther. She had forced herself along\n because she wanted to impress this indifferent man that she was not as\n inferior as he might think—but now she could not go on. With a little\n cry almost of relief, she sank to the ground and lay semi-conscious, so\n weary that the very pain of it seemed on the point of pleasure.\n\n\n Robert dipped down, scooped her up, and carried her.\n\n\n Lights glimmered ahead; shouts reached them. It was a searching party,\n Yasak in it. The litter-carriers who could still speak blurted out what\n had happened. \"A green light—loud sounds—fire—this man there—\" and\n then dropped into sleep.\n\n\n \"Someone carry these men,\" Yasak ordered. To Robert he said, \"We're not\n very far from the path to the City now. Shall I carry the girl?\"\n\n\n \"It makes no difference,\" Robert said." ], [ "There was a rap at the doorway; they turned. One of the litter-bearers\n loomed darker than the gloomy sky. \"Are you ready?\" he asked.\n\n\n Koroby twirled before the mirror, criticizing her appearance. \"Yes,\n ready,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Ready!\" the girls cried. Then there was a little silence.\n\n\n \"Shall we go now?\" Koroby asked, and the litter-carrier nodded. Koroby\n kissed the girls, one after another. \"Here, Shonka—you can have this\n bracelet you've always liked. And this is for you, Lolla. And here,\n Trossa—and you, Shia. Goodbye, darlings, goodbye—come and see me\n whenever you can!\"\n\n\n \"Goodbye, Koroby!\"", "They watched the conflagration, Yasak and Koroby, from a higher part of\n the wall than where the others were gathered. They could glimpse Robert\n now and then. He was running, trying to outrace the flames. Then they\n swept around him, circling him—his arms flailed frantically.\nThe fire had passed over the horizon. The air was blue with smoke,\n difficult to breathe, and ashes were drifting lightly down like\n dove-colored snow. Yasak, watery eyed, a cloth pressed to his nose, was\n walking with several others over the smoking earth and still warm ashes\n up to his knees. In one hand he held a stick. He stopped and pointed.\n \"He fell about here,\" he said, and began to probe the ashes with the\n stick.\n\n\n He struck something. \"Here he is!\" he cried. The others hurried to the\n spot and scooped ashes away, dog-fashion, until Robert's remains were\n laid clear. There were exclamations of amazement and perplexity from\n the people.", "Koroby huddled on a chair, sobbing. Then she dried her eyes on the\n backs of her hands. She went to the narrow slits that served as windows\n and unfastened the translucent shutter of one. Down in the City street,\n Robert was walking away. Her eyes hardened, and her fingers spread\n into ugly claws. Without bothering to pull the shutter in place she\n hurried out of the room, ran eagerly down the hall. She stopped at\n the armor-rack at the main hall on her way outside, and snatched up a\nsiatcha\n—a firestone. Then she slipped outside and down the street.\nThe City's wall was not far behind. Robert was visible in the distance,\n striding toward his sky-ship, a widening cloud of dust rising behind\n him like the spreading wake of a boat. Koroby stood on tip-toe, waving\n and calling after him, \"Robert! Robert! Come back!\" but he did not seem\n to hear.", "\"Oh,\" Koroby said disappointedly, and sat upright. \"I feel as if I'd\n been lying here for weeks. Where's Yasak? Where's the strange man in\n armor?\"\n\n\n \"Yasak's out somewhere. The stranger man is in the room at the end of\n the hall.\"\n\n\n \"Fetch me something to wear—that's good enough,\" the girl accepted the\n mantle offered by the slave. \"Quick, some water—I must wash.\"\n\n\n In a few minutes she was lightly running down the hall; she knocked on\n the door of Robert's room. \"May I come in?\"\n\n\n He did not answer. She waited a little and went in. He was seated on\n one of the carved chairs, fussing over some scraps of metal on the\n table. He did not look up.", "Koroby fingered the flowers around her throat, her eyes rapt on the\n passing trees. Her lips moved in the barest murmur: \"If only—!\"\n and again, \"Oh, if only—!\" But the music trickled on, and nothing\n happened; the litter seemed to float along—none of the bearers even\n stumbled.\n\n\n They came to a cleared space of waist-high grass. It was like a canyon\n steeply walled by cliffs of verdure. The litter jerked as it glided\n along, and Koroby heard one of the bearers exclaim gruffly, \"Listen!\"\n Then the litter resumed its dream-like floating on the backs of the men.\n\n\n \"What was it?\" another bearer asked.\n\n\n \"Thought I heard something,\" the other replied. \"Shrill and high—like\n something screaming—\"\n\n\n Koroby peered out. \"A\ngnau\n?\" she asked.", "\"Goodbye! Goodbye!\" They crowded around her, embracing, babbling\n farewells, shreds of advice. Trossa began to cry. Finally Koroby broke\n away from them, went to the door. She took a last look at the interior\n of the little hut, dim in the lamplight—at the hard bed of laced\ngnau\n-hide strips, the crude but beautifully-carved charts and chests.\n Then she turned and stepped out into the night.", "Koroby reached the City wall, panted through the gate into a shrieking\n crowd. Someone grasped her roughly—she was too breathless to do more\n than gasp for air—and shook her violently. \"You fool, you utter\n fool! What did you think you were doing?\" Others clamored around her,\n reaching for her. Then she heard Yasak's voice. Face stern, he pushed\n through the crowd, pressed her to him. \"Let her alone—Let her alone, I\n say!\"", "She watched him a little longer. Then she deliberately stooped and drew\n the firestone out of its sheath. She touched it to a blade of the tall\n grass. A little orange flame licked up, slowly quested along the blade,\n down to the ground and up another stem. It slipped over to another\n stem, and another, growing larger, hotter—Koroby stepped back from the\n writhing fire, her hand protectively over her face.\n\n\n The flames crackled at first—like the crumpling of thin paper. Then,\n as they widened and began climbing hand over hand up an invisible\n ladder, they roared. Koroby was running back toward the City now, away\n from the heat. The fire spread in a long line over the prairie. Above\n its roar came shouts from the City. The flames rose in a monstrous\n twisting pillar, brighter than even the dust-palled sky, lighting the\n buildings and the prairie. The heat was dreadful.", "Grumbling, they bent to the conveyance's poles, and Koroby lithely\n slipped to the cushions. They turned off the path, plodded through the\n deep grass toward the light. The litter lurched violently as their\n feet caught in the tangled grass, and clouds of fine dust arose from\n the disturbed blades.\nBy the time they reached the source of the light, they were quite\n demoralized. The musicians had not accompanied them, preferring to\n carry the message to Yasak in the Stone City that his prospective\n bride had gone off on a mad journey. The bearers were powdered grey\n with dust, striped with blood where the dry grass-stems had cut them.\n They were exhausted and panting. Koroby was walking beside them, for\n they had abandoned the litter finally. Her blue drapery was ripped and\n rumpled; her carefully-arranged braids had fallen loose; dust on her\n face had hid its youthful color, aging her.", "But Koroby, with supreme confidence, walked toward the stranger, her\n lovely body graceful as a cat's, her face radiant. The man did not hear\n her. She halted behind him, waited silent, expectant, excited—but he\n did not turn. The green fire sputtered upward. At last the girl stepped\n to the man's side and gently touched him again. He turned, and her\n heart faltered: she swayed with bliss.\n\n\n He was probably a god. Not even handsome Yasak looked like this. Here\n was a face so finely-chiseled, so perfectly proportioned, that it was\n almost frightening, unhuman, mechanical. It was unlined and without\n expression, somehow unreal. Mysterious, compelling.", "His face swung up to hers. \"But—there's no path that way—\"\n\n\n \"I don't care,\" she said. \"Take me there.\" Her order had reached the\n others' ears, and they slowed their pace.\n\n\n \"Lady—believe me—it's impossible. There's nothing but matted jungle\n in that direction—we'd have to hack our way as we go along. And who\n knows how far away that light is? Besides, you're on your way to be\n married.\"\n\n\n \"Take me to that light!\" she persisted.\n\n\n They set the litter down. \"We can't do that,\" one man said to another.\n\n\n Koroby stepped out to the path, straightened up, her eyes on the glow.\n \"You'd better,\" she said ominously. \"Otherwise, I'll make a complaint\n to Yasak—\"", "He was walking along, head erect, apparently quite at ease, while the\n litter bearers and Koroby could barely drag themselves with him. The\n girl's garment was a tattered ruin. Her skin was gritty with dust, and\n she was bleeding from many scratches. She tripped over tangled roots\n and exclaimed in pain. Then the man took one of the strange implements\n from his belt, pressed a knob on it, and light appeared as if by magic!\n He handed the stick to Koroby, but she was afraid to touch it. This was\n a strange light that gave no heat, nor flickered in the breeze. Finally\n she accepted it from him, but carried it gingerly at arm's length.\n\n\n She refused to believe that he had no name, and so he named himself.\n \"Call me Robert. It is an ancient name on Terra.\"\n\n\n \"Robert,\" she said, and, \"Robert.\"", "\"You will stay with me while you are in the City, of course,\" Yasak\n said, as they walked. He eyed this handsome stranger speculatively, and\n then turned to shout an necessary order. \"You, there, keep in line!\" He\n glanced at Robert furtively to see if this had impressed him at all.\nIt was day. Koroby sat up in bed and scanned her surroundings. She was\n in Yasak's house. The bed was very soft, the coverlets of the finest\n weave. The furniture was elegantly carved and painted; there were even\n paintings on the walls.\n\n\n A woman came to the bed. She was stocky and wore drab grey: the blue\n circles tattooed on her cheeks proclaimed her a slave. \"How do you\n feel?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Fairly well. How long have I been ill?\" Koroby asked, sweetly weak.\n\n\n \"You haven't been ill. They brought you in last night.\"", "He seemed just a trifle bored. \"We gave up names long ago on my world.\n We are concerned with more weighty things than our own selves. But I\n have a personal problem now,\" he said, making a peculiar sound that\n was not quite a sigh. \"Here I am stranded on Venus, my ship utterly\n wrecked, and I'm due at the Reisezek Convention in two weeks. You\"—he\n gripped Koroby's shoulder, and his strength made her wince—\"tell me,\n where is the nearest city? I must communicate with my people at once.\"\n\n\n She pointed. \"The Stone City's that way.\"\n\n\n \"Good,\" he said. \"Let's go there.\"", "Koroby stared defiantly at the laughing faces of her bridesmaids. She\n shrugged hopelessly. \"I don't care,\" she said slowly. \"It will be nice\n to have Yasak for a husband—yes. And perhaps I do love him. I don't\n know.\" She tightened her lips as she reflected on it.\n\n\n She left them, moving gracefully to the door. Venus-girls were\n generally of truly elfin proportions, so delicately slim that they\n seemed incapable of the slightest exertion. But Koroby's body\n was—compared to her friends'—voluptuous.\n\n\n She rested against the door-frame, watching the red of the afterglow\n deepen to purple. \"I want romance,\" she said, so softly that the girls\n had to strain forward to hear her. \"I wish that there were other worlds\n than this—and that someone would drop out of the skies and claim\n me ... and take me away from here, away from all this—this monotony!\"", "They took another glance at the metal globe and the green fire, which\n by now had died to a fitful glimmer. Then the stranger and the girl\n started toward the jungle, where the litter-bearers awaited them.\nAs the party was struggling through the prairie's tall grass, the man\n said to Koroby, \"I realize from the pictures in your mind that there\n is no means in your city of communicating directly with my people. But\n it seems that there are materials which I can utilize in building a\n signal—\"", "There was a babble of voices as the musicians crowded together, asking\n what had it been, and where—just exactly—could one suppose it had\n happened, that thunder—was it going to storm!\n\n\n They waited, but nothing further happened—there were no more stabs of\n green light nor detonations. The bearers stooped to lift the litter's\n poles to their shoulders. \"Shall we go on?\" one of them asked Koroby.\n\n\n She waved a hand. \"Yes, go on.\"\nThe litter resumed its gentle swaying, but the music did not start\n again. Then, from the direction of the light-flashes, a glow appeared,\n shining steadily, green as the flashes had been. Noticing it, Koroby\n frowned. Then the path bent, and the glow swung to one side.\n\n\n Suddenly Koroby reached out, tapped the shoulder of the closet bearer.\n \"Go toward the light.\"", "\"I don't know,\" the bearer volunteered.\n\n\n Koroby lifted a hand. \"Stop the litter,\" she said.\nThe conveyance halted. Koroby leaning out, the men peering around them,\n they listened. One of the bearers shouted at the musicians; the music\n ceased. There was nothing to be heard except the whisper of the breeze\n in the grass.\n\n\n Then the girl heard it—a shrill, distant whine, dying away, then\n growing louder—and louder—it seemed to be approaching—from the sky—\n\n\n All the faces were lifted up now, worriedly. The whine grew\n louder—Koroby's hands clenched nervously on the wreaths at her throat—\n\n\n Then, far ahead, a series of bright flashes, like the lightning of the\n dust-storms, but brilliantly green. A silence, then staccatto reports,\n certainly not thunder—unlike any sound that Koroby had ever heard.", "He was very tall, and his shoulders were very wide. Oh, but he looked\n like a man, and stood like one—even though his hands were folded\n behind his back and he was probably dejected. A man in a house from the\n sky—\n\n\n Koroby hastily grasped a corner of her gown, moistened it with saliva,\n and scrubbed her face. She rearranged her hair, and stepped forward.\n\n\n \"Don't go there—it's magic—he'll cast a spell—!\" one of the bearers\n whispered urgently, reaching after her, but Koroby pushed him away. The\n litter-carriers watched the girl go, unconsciously huddling together\n as if feeling the need for combined strength. They withdrew into the\n jungle's shadows, and waited there anxiously, ready at any moment to\n run away.", "Here the similarity between her dream and actual experience ended.\n What was he thinking as he eyed her for a long moment? She had no way\n of guessing. He said, \"No, I am not going to take you back there.\" Her\n month gaped in surprise, and he continued, \"As for the distance to\n Terra—it is incredibly far away.\"\n\n\n The glare was beginning to die, the green flames' hissing fading to a\n whisper. They watched the melting globe sag on the sand. Then Koroby\n said, \"But if it is so far away, how could you speak my language? There\n are some tribes beyond the jungle whose language is unlike ours—\"\n\n\n \"I read your mind,\" he explained indifferently. \"I have a remarkable\n memory.\"\n\n\n \"Remarkable indeed!\" she mocked. \"No one here could do that.\"\n\n\n \"But my race is infinitely superior to yours,\" he said blandly. \"You\n little people—ah—\" He gestured airily." ], [ "\"Oh,\" Koroby said disappointedly, and sat upright. \"I feel as if I'd\n been lying here for weeks. Where's Yasak? Where's the strange man in\n armor?\"\n\n\n \"Yasak's out somewhere. The stranger man is in the room at the end of\n the hall.\"\n\n\n \"Fetch me something to wear—that's good enough,\" the girl accepted the\n mantle offered by the slave. \"Quick, some water—I must wash.\"\n\n\n In a few minutes she was lightly running down the hall; she knocked on\n the door of Robert's room. \"May I come in?\"\n\n\n He did not answer. She waited a little and went in. He was seated on\n one of the carved chairs, fussing over some scraps of metal on the\n table. He did not look up.", "\"Robert—I'm mad about you! I've dreamed of your coming—all my life!\n Don't be so cruel—so cold to me! You mock me, say that I'm nothing,\n that I'm not worthy of you—\"\n\n\n She stepped back from him, clenching her hands. \"Oh, I hate you—hate\n you! You don't care the least bit about me—and I've shamed myself in\n front of you—I, supposed to be Yasak's wife by now!\" She began to\n cry, hid her face in suddenly lax fingers. She looked up fiercely. \"I\n could kill you!\" Robert stood immobile, no trace of feeling marring the\n perfection of his face. \"I could kill you, and I will kill you!\" she\n sprang at him.\n\n\n \"You'll hurt yourself,\" he admonished kindly, and after she had\n pummeled his chest, bruising her fingers on his armor, she turned away.", "\"You will stay with me while you are in the City, of course,\" Yasak\n said, as they walked. He eyed this handsome stranger speculatively, and\n then turned to shout an necessary order. \"You, there, keep in line!\" He\n glanced at Robert furtively to see if this had impressed him at all.\nIt was day. Koroby sat up in bed and scanned her surroundings. She was\n in Yasak's house. The bed was very soft, the coverlets of the finest\n weave. The furniture was elegantly carved and painted; there were even\n paintings on the walls.\n\n\n A woman came to the bed. She was stocky and wore drab grey: the blue\n circles tattooed on her cheeks proclaimed her a slave. \"How do you\n feel?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Fairly well. How long have I been ill?\" Koroby asked, sweetly weak.\n\n\n \"You haven't been ill. They brought you in last night.\"", "They watched the conflagration, Yasak and Koroby, from a higher part of\n the wall than where the others were gathered. They could glimpse Robert\n now and then. He was running, trying to outrace the flames. Then they\n swept around him, circling him—his arms flailed frantically.\nThe fire had passed over the horizon. The air was blue with smoke,\n difficult to breathe, and ashes were drifting lightly down like\n dove-colored snow. Yasak, watery eyed, a cloth pressed to his nose, was\n walking with several others over the smoking earth and still warm ashes\n up to his knees. In one hand he held a stick. He stopped and pointed.\n \"He fell about here,\" he said, and began to probe the ashes with the\n stick.\n\n\n He struck something. \"Here he is!\" he cried. The others hurried to the\n spot and scooped ashes away, dog-fashion, until Robert's remains were\n laid clear. There were exclamations of amazement and perplexity from\n the people.", "Koroby reached the City wall, panted through the gate into a shrieking\n crowd. Someone grasped her roughly—she was too breathless to do more\n than gasp for air—and shook her violently. \"You fool, you utter\n fool! What did you think you were doing?\" Others clamored around her,\n reaching for her. Then she heard Yasak's voice. Face stern, he pushed\n through the crowd, pressed her to him. \"Let her alone—Let her alone, I\n say!\"", "But at last she could go no farther. She had forced herself along\n because she wanted to impress this indifferent man that she was not as\n inferior as he might think—but now she could not go on. With a little\n cry almost of relief, she sank to the ground and lay semi-conscious, so\n weary that the very pain of it seemed on the point of pleasure.\n\n\n Robert dipped down, scooped her up, and carried her.\n\n\n Lights glimmered ahead; shouts reached them. It was a searching party,\n Yasak in it. The litter-carriers who could still speak blurted out what\n had happened. \"A green light—loud sounds—fire—this man there—\" and\n then dropped into sleep.\n\n\n \"Someone carry these men,\" Yasak ordered. To Robert he said, \"We're not\n very far from the path to the City now. Shall I carry the girl?\"\n\n\n \"It makes no difference,\" Robert said.", "\"Thank you for carrying me, Robert.\" He did not reply. \"Robert—I\n dreamed of you last night. I dreamed you built another round house and\n that we both flew away in it. Yasak had to stay behind, and he was\n furious. Robert! Aren't you listening?\"\n\n\n \"I hear you.\"\n\n\n \"Don't you think it was an exciting dream?\" He shook his head. \"But\n why? Robert\"—she laid longing hands on his shoulders—\"can't you see\n that I'm in love with you?\" He shrugged. \"I believe you don't know what\n love is!\"\n\n\n \"I had a faint idea of it when I looked into your mind,\" he said. \"I'm\n afraid I haven't any use for it. Where I come from there is no love,\n and there shouldn't be here, either. It's a waste of time.\"", "But Koroby, with supreme confidence, walked toward the stranger, her\n lovely body graceful as a cat's, her face radiant. The man did not hear\n her. She halted behind him, waited silent, expectant, excited—but he\n did not turn. The green fire sputtered upward. At last the girl stepped\n to the man's side and gently touched him again. He turned, and her\n heart faltered: she swayed with bliss.\n\n\n He was probably a god. Not even handsome Yasak looked like this. Here\n was a face so finely-chiseled, so perfectly proportioned, that it was\n almost frightening, unhuman, mechanical. It was unlined and without\n expression, somehow unreal. Mysterious, compelling.", "His face swung up to hers. \"But—there's no path that way—\"\n\n\n \"I don't care,\" she said. \"Take me there.\" Her order had reached the\n others' ears, and they slowed their pace.\n\n\n \"Lady—believe me—it's impossible. There's nothing but matted jungle\n in that direction—we'd have to hack our way as we go along. And who\n knows how far away that light is? Besides, you're on your way to be\n married.\"\n\n\n \"Take me to that light!\" she persisted.\n\n\n They set the litter down. \"We can't do that,\" one man said to another.\n\n\n Koroby stepped out to the path, straightened up, her eyes on the glow.\n \"You'd better,\" she said ominously. \"Otherwise, I'll make a complaint\n to Yasak—\"", "He was walking along, head erect, apparently quite at ease, while the\n litter bearers and Koroby could barely drag themselves with him. The\n girl's garment was a tattered ruin. Her skin was gritty with dust, and\n she was bleeding from many scratches. She tripped over tangled roots\n and exclaimed in pain. Then the man took one of the strange implements\n from his belt, pressed a knob on it, and light appeared as if by magic!\n He handed the stick to Koroby, but she was afraid to touch it. This was\n a strange light that gave no heat, nor flickered in the breeze. Finally\n she accepted it from him, but carried it gingerly at arm's length.\n\n\n She refused to believe that he had no name, and so he named himself.\n \"Call me Robert. It is an ancient name on Terra.\"\n\n\n \"Robert,\" she said, and, \"Robert.\"", "The expedition emerged from the jungle on a sandy stretch of barren\n land. A thousand feet away a gigantic metal object lay on the sand,\n crumpled as though it had dropped from a great distance. It had been\n globular before the crash, and was pierced with holes like windows.\n What could it possibly be? A house? But whoever heard of a metal house?\n Why, who could forge such a thing! Yasak's house in the City had iron\n doors, and they were considered one of the most wonderful things of the\n age. It would take a giant to make such a ponderous thing as this.\n\n\n A house, fallen from the sky? The green lights poured out of its\n crumpled part, and a strange bubbling and hissing filled the air.\n\n\n Koroby stopped short, clasping her hands and involuntarily uttering a\n squeal of joyful excitement, for between her and the blaze, his eyes on\n the destruction, stood a man.....", "She turned back to her friends, went to them, one of her hands, patting\n the head of the kneeling one. She eyed herself in the mirror.\n\n\n \"Well—heigh-ho! There don't seem to be any other worlds, and nobody is\n going to steal me away from Yasak, so I might as well get on with my\n preparations. The men with the litter will be here soon to carry me to\n the Stone City.\"\n\n\n She ran slim hands down her sides, smoothing the blue sarong; she\n fondled her dark braids. \"Trossa, how about some flowers at my ears—or\n do you think that it would look a little too much—?\" Her eyes sought\n the mirror, and her lips parted in an irreprehensible smile. She\n trilled softly to herself, \"Yes, I am beautiful tonight—the loveliest\n woman Yasak will ever see!\" And then, regretfully, sullenly, \"But oh,\n if only\nHe\nwould come ... the man of my dreams!\"", "Grumbling, they bent to the conveyance's poles, and Koroby lithely\n slipped to the cushions. They turned off the path, plodded through the\n deep grass toward the light. The litter lurched violently as their\n feet caught in the tangled grass, and clouds of fine dust arose from\n the disturbed blades.\nBy the time they reached the source of the light, they were quite\n demoralized. The musicians had not accompanied them, preferring to\n carry the message to Yasak in the Stone City that his prospective\n bride had gone off on a mad journey. The bearers were powdered grey\n with dust, striped with blood where the dry grass-stems had cut them.\n They were exhausted and panting. Koroby was walking beside them, for\n they had abandoned the litter finally. Her blue drapery was ripped and\n rumpled; her carefully-arranged braids had fallen loose; dust on her\n face had hid its youthful color, aging her.", "Koroby huddled on a chair, sobbing. Then she dried her eyes on the\n backs of her hands. She went to the narrow slits that served as windows\n and unfastened the translucent shutter of one. Down in the City street,\n Robert was walking away. Her eyes hardened, and her fingers spread\n into ugly claws. Without bothering to pull the shutter in place she\n hurried out of the room, ran eagerly down the hall. She stopped at\n the armor-rack at the main hall on her way outside, and snatched up a\nsiatcha\n—a firestone. Then she slipped outside and down the street.\nThe City's wall was not far behind. Robert was visible in the distance,\n striding toward his sky-ship, a widening cloud of dust rising behind\n him like the spreading wake of a boat. Koroby stood on tip-toe, waving\n and calling after him, \"Robert! Robert! Come back!\" but he did not seem\n to hear.", "\"And now if you're through playing your incomprehensible little scene,\"\n Robert said, \"I hope you will excuse me. I regret that I have no\n emotions—I was never allowed them. But it is an esthetic regret.... I\n must go back to my wrecked ship now and arrange the signals there.\" He\n did not wait for her leave, but strode out of the room.", "Koroby stared defiantly at the laughing faces of her bridesmaids. She\n shrugged hopelessly. \"I don't care,\" she said slowly. \"It will be nice\n to have Yasak for a husband—yes. And perhaps I do love him. I don't\n know.\" She tightened her lips as she reflected on it.\n\n\n She left them, moving gracefully to the door. Venus-girls were\n generally of truly elfin proportions, so delicately slim that they\n seemed incapable of the slightest exertion. But Koroby's body\n was—compared to her friends'—voluptuous.\n\n\n She rested against the door-frame, watching the red of the afterglow\n deepen to purple. \"I want romance,\" she said, so softly that the girls\n had to strain forward to hear her. \"I wish that there were other worlds\n than this—and that someone would drop out of the skies and claim\n me ... and take me away from here, away from all this—this monotony!\"", "He was very tall, and his shoulders were very wide. Oh, but he looked\n like a man, and stood like one—even though his hands were folded\n behind his back and he was probably dejected. A man in a house from the\n sky—\n\n\n Koroby hastily grasped a corner of her gown, moistened it with saliva,\n and scrubbed her face. She rearranged her hair, and stepped forward.\n\n\n \"Don't go there—it's magic—he'll cast a spell—!\" one of the bearers\n whispered urgently, reaching after her, but Koroby pushed him away. The\n litter-carriers watched the girl go, unconsciously huddling together\n as if feeling the need for combined strength. They withdrew into the\n jungle's shadows, and waited there anxiously, ready at any moment to\n run away.", "He was clothed very peculiarly. A wonderfully-made metallic garment\n enclosed his whole body—legs and all, unlike the Venus-men's tunics.\n Even his feet were covered. Perhaps it was armor—though the Venus-men\n usually wore only breastplate and greaves. And a helmet hid all of\n the man's head except his face. Around his waist was a belt with many\n incomprehensible objects dangling from it. If he was so well armored,\n why was he not carrying a sword—a dagger at least! Of what use were\n those things on his belt—for instance, that notched L-shaped thing? It\n would not even make a decent club!\n\n\n The stranger did not speak, merely gazed deeply into Koroby's eyes. And\n she, returning the gaze, wondered if he was peering into her very soul.\n The words of a folk-ballad came to her:", "It was a metal skeleton, and the fragments of complicated machinery,\n caked with soot.\n\n\n \"He wasn't human at all!\" Yasak marvelled. \"He was some kind of a toy\n made to look like a man—that's why he wore armor, and his face never\n changed expression—\"\n\n\n \"Magic!\" someone cried, and backed away.\n\n\n \"Magic!\" the others repeated, and edged back ... and that was the\n end of one of those robots which had been fashioned as servants for\n Terrestial men, made in Man's likeness to appease Man's vanity, then\n conquered him.", "\"This way,\" the litter-carrier announced, touching the girl's arm. They\n stumbled over the rutted clearing toward the twinkling sparks that were\n the lights of the other litter-bearers, colored sparks as befitted\n a wedding-conveyance. The winking lights were enclosed in shells of\n colored glass for another reason—the danger of their firing the papery\n jungle verdure.\nIt was not a new litter, built especially for the occasion—Yasak was\n too practical a man to sanction any kind of waste. It was the same\n old litter that Koroby had been watching come and go ever since she\n was a little girl, a canopied framework of gaudily-painted carvings.\n She had wondered, watching it pass, whether its cushioned floor was\n soft, and now, as she stepped into the litter, she patted the padding\n experimentally. Yes, it was soft .... And fragrant, too—a shade too\n fragrant. It smelled stale, hinting of other occupants, other brides\n being borne to other weddings...." ], [ "He was looking at the wrecked globe of metal. \"So there are people on\n Venus!\" he said slowly.\n\n\n Koroby watched him, forgot her fear, and went eagerly to him, took his\n arm. \"Who are you?\" she asked. \"Tell me your name!\"\n\n\n He turned his mask of a face to her. \"My name? I have none,\" he said.\n\n\n \"No name? But who are you? Where are you from? And what is that?\" She\n pointed at the metal globe.\n\n\n \"The vehicle by which I came here from a land beyond the sky,\" he said.\n She had no concept of stars or space, and he could not fully explain.\n \"From a world known as Terra.\"\n\n\n She was silent a moment, stunned. So there was another world! Then she\n asked, \"Is it far? Have you come to take me there?\"", "They took another glance at the metal globe and the green fire, which\n by now had died to a fitful glimmer. Then the stranger and the girl\n started toward the jungle, where the litter-bearers awaited them.\nAs the party was struggling through the prairie's tall grass, the man\n said to Koroby, \"I realize from the pictures in your mind that there\n is no means in your city of communicating directly with my people. But\n it seems that there are materials which I can utilize in building a\n signal—\"", "Here the similarity between her dream and actual experience ended.\n What was he thinking as he eyed her for a long moment? She had no way\n of guessing. He said, \"No, I am not going to take you back there.\" Her\n month gaped in surprise, and he continued, \"As for the distance to\n Terra—it is incredibly far away.\"\n\n\n The glare was beginning to die, the green flames' hissing fading to a\n whisper. They watched the melting globe sag on the sand. Then Koroby\n said, \"But if it is so far away, how could you speak my language? There\n are some tribes beyond the jungle whose language is unlike ours—\"\n\n\n \"I read your mind,\" he explained indifferently. \"I have a remarkable\n memory.\"\n\n\n \"Remarkable indeed!\" she mocked. \"No one here could do that.\"\n\n\n \"But my race is infinitely superior to yours,\" he said blandly. \"You\n little people—ah—\" He gestured airily.", "He was walking along, head erect, apparently quite at ease, while the\n litter bearers and Koroby could barely drag themselves with him. The\n girl's garment was a tattered ruin. Her skin was gritty with dust, and\n she was bleeding from many scratches. She tripped over tangled roots\n and exclaimed in pain. Then the man took one of the strange implements\n from his belt, pressed a knob on it, and light appeared as if by magic!\n He handed the stick to Koroby, but she was afraid to touch it. This was\n a strange light that gave no heat, nor flickered in the breeze. Finally\n she accepted it from him, but carried it gingerly at arm's length.\n\n\n She refused to believe that he had no name, and so he named himself.\n \"Call me Robert. It is an ancient name on Terra.\"\n\n\n \"Robert,\" she said, and, \"Robert.\"", "He seemed just a trifle bored. \"We gave up names long ago on my world.\n We are concerned with more weighty things than our own selves. But I\n have a personal problem now,\" he said, making a peculiar sound that\n was not quite a sigh. \"Here I am stranded on Venus, my ship utterly\n wrecked, and I'm due at the Reisezek Convention in two weeks. You\"—he\n gripped Koroby's shoulder, and his strength made her wince—\"tell me,\n where is the nearest city? I must communicate with my people at once.\"\n\n\n She pointed. \"The Stone City's that way.\"\n\n\n \"Good,\" he said. \"Let's go there.\"", "He was clothed very peculiarly. A wonderfully-made metallic garment\n enclosed his whole body—legs and all, unlike the Venus-men's tunics.\n Even his feet were covered. Perhaps it was armor—though the Venus-men\n usually wore only breastplate and greaves. And a helmet hid all of\n the man's head except his face. Around his waist was a belt with many\n incomprehensible objects dangling from it. If he was so well armored,\n why was he not carrying a sword—a dagger at least! Of what use were\n those things on his belt—for instance, that notched L-shaped thing? It\n would not even make a decent club!\n\n\n The stranger did not speak, merely gazed deeply into Koroby's eyes. And\n she, returning the gaze, wondered if he was peering into her very soul.\n The words of a folk-ballad came to her:", "\"—He'll smile and touch my cheek,\nAnd maybe more;\nAnd though we'll neither speak,\nWe'll know the score—\"\nSuddenly he put his hands to her cheeks and bent close to her, his eyes\n peering into hers as though he were searching for something he had lost\n in them. She spoke her thought: \"What are you doing? You seem to be\n reading my mind!\"\n\n\n Without removing hands, he nodded. \"Reading—mind.\" He stared long\n into her eyes. His dispassionate, too-perfect face began to frighten\n her. She slipped back from him, her hand clutching her throat.\n\n\n He straightened up and spoke—haltingly at first, then with growing\n assurance. \"Don't be afraid. I mean you no harm.\" She trembled. It was\n such a wonderful voice—it was as she had always dreamed it! But she\n had never really believed in the dream....", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nIt was twilight on Venus—the rusty red that the eyes notice when\n their closed lids are raised to light. Against the glow, fantastically\n twisted trees spread claws of spiky leaves, and a group of clay huts\n thrust up sharp edges of shadow, like the abandoned toy blocks of a\n gigantic child. There was no sign of clear sky and stars—the heavens\n were roofed by a perpetual ceiling of dust-clouds.\n\n\n A light glimmered in one of the huts. Feminine voices rippled across\n the clearing and into the jungle. There was laughter, then someone's\n faint and wistful sigh. One of the voices mourned, in the twittering\n Venusian speech, \"How I envy you, Koroby! I wish I were being married\n tonight, like you!\"", "\"Thank you for carrying me, Robert.\" He did not reply. \"Robert—I\n dreamed of you last night. I dreamed you built another round house and\n that we both flew away in it. Yasak had to stay behind, and he was\n furious. Robert! Aren't you listening?\"\n\n\n \"I hear you.\"\n\n\n \"Don't you think it was an exciting dream?\" He shook his head. \"But\n why? Robert\"—she laid longing hands on his shoulders—\"can't you see\n that I'm in love with you?\" He shrugged. \"I believe you don't know what\n love is!\"\n\n\n \"I had a faint idea of it when I looked into your mind,\" he said. \"I'm\n afraid I haven't any use for it. Where I come from there is no love,\n and there shouldn't be here, either. It's a waste of time.\"", "\"Oh,\" Koroby said disappointedly, and sat upright. \"I feel as if I'd\n been lying here for weeks. Where's Yasak? Where's the strange man in\n armor?\"\n\n\n \"Yasak's out somewhere. The stranger man is in the room at the end of\n the hall.\"\n\n\n \"Fetch me something to wear—that's good enough,\" the girl accepted the\n mantle offered by the slave. \"Quick, some water—I must wash.\"\n\n\n In a few minutes she was lightly running down the hall; she knocked on\n the door of Robert's room. \"May I come in?\"\n\n\n He did not answer. She waited a little and went in. He was seated on\n one of the carved chairs, fussing over some scraps of metal on the\n table. He did not look up.", "Koroby stared defiantly at the laughing faces of her bridesmaids. She\n shrugged hopelessly. \"I don't care,\" she said slowly. \"It will be nice\n to have Yasak for a husband—yes. And perhaps I do love him. I don't\n know.\" She tightened her lips as she reflected on it.\n\n\n She left them, moving gracefully to the door. Venus-girls were\n generally of truly elfin proportions, so delicately slim that they\n seemed incapable of the slightest exertion. But Koroby's body\n was—compared to her friends'—voluptuous.\n\n\n She rested against the door-frame, watching the red of the afterglow\n deepen to purple. \"I want romance,\" she said, so softly that the girls\n had to strain forward to hear her. \"I wish that there were other worlds\n than this—and that someone would drop out of the skies and claim\n me ... and take me away from here, away from all this—this monotony!\"", "Koroby huddled on a chair, sobbing. Then she dried her eyes on the\n backs of her hands. She went to the narrow slits that served as windows\n and unfastened the translucent shutter of one. Down in the City street,\n Robert was walking away. Her eyes hardened, and her fingers spread\n into ugly claws. Without bothering to pull the shutter in place she\n hurried out of the room, ran eagerly down the hall. She stopped at\n the armor-rack at the main hall on her way outside, and snatched up a\nsiatcha\n—a firestone. Then she slipped outside and down the street.\nThe City's wall was not far behind. Robert was visible in the distance,\n striding toward his sky-ship, a widening cloud of dust rising behind\n him like the spreading wake of a boat. Koroby stood on tip-toe, waving\n and calling after him, \"Robert! Robert! Come back!\" but he did not seem\n to hear.", "The expedition emerged from the jungle on a sandy stretch of barren\n land. A thousand feet away a gigantic metal object lay on the sand,\n crumpled as though it had dropped from a great distance. It had been\n globular before the crash, and was pierced with holes like windows.\n What could it possibly be? A house? But whoever heard of a metal house?\n Why, who could forge such a thing! Yasak's house in the City had iron\n doors, and they were considered one of the most wonderful things of the\n age. It would take a giant to make such a ponderous thing as this.\n\n\n A house, fallen from the sky? The green lights poured out of its\n crumpled part, and a strange bubbling and hissing filled the air.\n\n\n Koroby stopped short, clasping her hands and involuntarily uttering a\n squeal of joyful excitement, for between her and the blaze, his eyes on\n the destruction, stood a man.....", "\"And now if you're through playing your incomprehensible little scene,\"\n Robert said, \"I hope you will excuse me. I regret that I have no\n emotions—I was never allowed them. But it is an esthetic regret.... I\n must go back to my wrecked ship now and arrange the signals there.\" He\n did not wait for her leave, but strode out of the room.", "They watched the conflagration, Yasak and Koroby, from a higher part of\n the wall than where the others were gathered. They could glimpse Robert\n now and then. He was running, trying to outrace the flames. Then they\n swept around him, circling him—his arms flailed frantically.\nThe fire had passed over the horizon. The air was blue with smoke,\n difficult to breathe, and ashes were drifting lightly down like\n dove-colored snow. Yasak, watery eyed, a cloth pressed to his nose, was\n walking with several others over the smoking earth and still warm ashes\n up to his knees. In one hand he held a stick. He stopped and pointed.\n \"He fell about here,\" he said, and began to probe the ashes with the\n stick.\n\n\n He struck something. \"Here he is!\" he cried. The others hurried to the\n spot and scooped ashes away, dog-fashion, until Robert's remains were\n laid clear. There were exclamations of amazement and perplexity from\n the people.", "But at last she could go no farther. She had forced herself along\n because she wanted to impress this indifferent man that she was not as\n inferior as he might think—but now she could not go on. With a little\n cry almost of relief, she sank to the ground and lay semi-conscious, so\n weary that the very pain of it seemed on the point of pleasure.\n\n\n Robert dipped down, scooped her up, and carried her.\n\n\n Lights glimmered ahead; shouts reached them. It was a searching party,\n Yasak in it. The litter-carriers who could still speak blurted out what\n had happened. \"A green light—loud sounds—fire—this man there—\" and\n then dropped into sleep.\n\n\n \"Someone carry these men,\" Yasak ordered. To Robert he said, \"We're not\n very far from the path to the City now. Shall I carry the girl?\"\n\n\n \"It makes no difference,\" Robert said.", "But Koroby, with supreme confidence, walked toward the stranger, her\n lovely body graceful as a cat's, her face radiant. The man did not hear\n her. She halted behind him, waited silent, expectant, excited—but he\n did not turn. The green fire sputtered upward. At last the girl stepped\n to the man's side and gently touched him again. He turned, and her\n heart faltered: she swayed with bliss.\n\n\n He was probably a god. Not even handsome Yasak looked like this. Here\n was a face so finely-chiseled, so perfectly proportioned, that it was\n almost frightening, unhuman, mechanical. It was unlined and without\n expression, somehow unreal. Mysterious, compelling.", "\"I don't know,\" the bearer volunteered.\n\n\n Koroby lifted a hand. \"Stop the litter,\" she said.\nThe conveyance halted. Koroby leaning out, the men peering around them,\n they listened. One of the bearers shouted at the musicians; the music\n ceased. There was nothing to be heard except the whisper of the breeze\n in the grass.\n\n\n Then the girl heard it—a shrill, distant whine, dying away, then\n growing louder—and louder—it seemed to be approaching—from the sky—\n\n\n All the faces were lifted up now, worriedly. The whine grew\n louder—Koroby's hands clenched nervously on the wreaths at her throat—\n\n\n Then, far ahead, a series of bright flashes, like the lightning of the\n dust-storms, but brilliantly green. A silence, then staccatto reports,\n certainly not thunder—unlike any sound that Koroby had ever heard.", "It was a metal skeleton, and the fragments of complicated machinery,\n caked with soot.\n\n\n \"He wasn't human at all!\" Yasak marvelled. \"He was some kind of a toy\n made to look like a man—that's why he wore armor, and his face never\n changed expression—\"\n\n\n \"Magic!\" someone cried, and backed away.\n\n\n \"Magic!\" the others repeated, and edged back ... and that was the\n end of one of those robots which had been fashioned as servants for\n Terrestial men, made in Man's likeness to appease Man's vanity, then\n conquered him.", "\"You will stay with me while you are in the City, of course,\" Yasak\n said, as they walked. He eyed this handsome stranger speculatively, and\n then turned to shout an necessary order. \"You, there, keep in line!\" He\n glanced at Robert furtively to see if this had impressed him at all.\nIt was day. Koroby sat up in bed and scanned her surroundings. She was\n in Yasak's house. The bed was very soft, the coverlets of the finest\n weave. The furniture was elegantly carved and painted; there were even\n paintings on the walls.\n\n\n A woman came to the bed. She was stocky and wore drab grey: the blue\n circles tattooed on her cheeks proclaimed her a slave. \"How do you\n feel?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Fairly well. How long have I been ill?\" Koroby asked, sweetly weak.\n\n\n \"You haven't been ill. They brought you in last night.\"" ], [ "They watched the conflagration, Yasak and Koroby, from a higher part of\n the wall than where the others were gathered. They could glimpse Robert\n now and then. He was running, trying to outrace the flames. Then they\n swept around him, circling him—his arms flailed frantically.\nThe fire had passed over the horizon. The air was blue with smoke,\n difficult to breathe, and ashes were drifting lightly down like\n dove-colored snow. Yasak, watery eyed, a cloth pressed to his nose, was\n walking with several others over the smoking earth and still warm ashes\n up to his knees. In one hand he held a stick. He stopped and pointed.\n \"He fell about here,\" he said, and began to probe the ashes with the\n stick.\n\n\n He struck something. \"Here he is!\" he cried. The others hurried to the\n spot and scooped ashes away, dog-fashion, until Robert's remains were\n laid clear. There were exclamations of amazement and perplexity from\n the people.", "\"Thank you for carrying me, Robert.\" He did not reply. \"Robert—I\n dreamed of you last night. I dreamed you built another round house and\n that we both flew away in it. Yasak had to stay behind, and he was\n furious. Robert! Aren't you listening?\"\n\n\n \"I hear you.\"\n\n\n \"Don't you think it was an exciting dream?\" He shook his head. \"But\n why? Robert\"—she laid longing hands on his shoulders—\"can't you see\n that I'm in love with you?\" He shrugged. \"I believe you don't know what\n love is!\"\n\n\n \"I had a faint idea of it when I looked into your mind,\" he said. \"I'm\n afraid I haven't any use for it. Where I come from there is no love,\n and there shouldn't be here, either. It's a waste of time.\"", "\"And now if you're through playing your incomprehensible little scene,\"\n Robert said, \"I hope you will excuse me. I regret that I have no\n emotions—I was never allowed them. But it is an esthetic regret.... I\n must go back to my wrecked ship now and arrange the signals there.\" He\n did not wait for her leave, but strode out of the room.", "He was walking along, head erect, apparently quite at ease, while the\n litter bearers and Koroby could barely drag themselves with him. The\n girl's garment was a tattered ruin. Her skin was gritty with dust, and\n she was bleeding from many scratches. She tripped over tangled roots\n and exclaimed in pain. Then the man took one of the strange implements\n from his belt, pressed a knob on it, and light appeared as if by magic!\n He handed the stick to Koroby, but she was afraid to touch it. This was\n a strange light that gave no heat, nor flickered in the breeze. Finally\n she accepted it from him, but carried it gingerly at arm's length.\n\n\n She refused to believe that he had no name, and so he named himself.\n \"Call me Robert. It is an ancient name on Terra.\"\n\n\n \"Robert,\" she said, and, \"Robert.\"", "\"Robert—I'm mad about you! I've dreamed of your coming—all my life!\n Don't be so cruel—so cold to me! You mock me, say that I'm nothing,\n that I'm not worthy of you—\"\n\n\n She stepped back from him, clenching her hands. \"Oh, I hate you—hate\n you! You don't care the least bit about me—and I've shamed myself in\n front of you—I, supposed to be Yasak's wife by now!\" She began to\n cry, hid her face in suddenly lax fingers. She looked up fiercely. \"I\n could kill you!\" Robert stood immobile, no trace of feeling marring the\n perfection of his face. \"I could kill you, and I will kill you!\" she\n sprang at him.\n\n\n \"You'll hurt yourself,\" he admonished kindly, and after she had\n pummeled his chest, bruising her fingers on his armor, she turned away.", "Koroby huddled on a chair, sobbing. Then she dried her eyes on the\n backs of her hands. She went to the narrow slits that served as windows\n and unfastened the translucent shutter of one. Down in the City street,\n Robert was walking away. Her eyes hardened, and her fingers spread\n into ugly claws. Without bothering to pull the shutter in place she\n hurried out of the room, ran eagerly down the hall. She stopped at\n the armor-rack at the main hall on her way outside, and snatched up a\nsiatcha\n—a firestone. Then she slipped outside and down the street.\nThe City's wall was not far behind. Robert was visible in the distance,\n striding toward his sky-ship, a widening cloud of dust rising behind\n him like the spreading wake of a boat. Koroby stood on tip-toe, waving\n and calling after him, \"Robert! Robert! Come back!\" but he did not seem\n to hear.", "\"Oh,\" Koroby said disappointedly, and sat upright. \"I feel as if I'd\n been lying here for weeks. Where's Yasak? Where's the strange man in\n armor?\"\n\n\n \"Yasak's out somewhere. The stranger man is in the room at the end of\n the hall.\"\n\n\n \"Fetch me something to wear—that's good enough,\" the girl accepted the\n mantle offered by the slave. \"Quick, some water—I must wash.\"\n\n\n In a few minutes she was lightly running down the hall; she knocked on\n the door of Robert's room. \"May I come in?\"\n\n\n He did not answer. She waited a little and went in. He was seated on\n one of the carved chairs, fussing over some scraps of metal on the\n table. He did not look up.", "But at last she could go no farther. She had forced herself along\n because she wanted to impress this indifferent man that she was not as\n inferior as he might think—but now she could not go on. With a little\n cry almost of relief, she sank to the ground and lay semi-conscious, so\n weary that the very pain of it seemed on the point of pleasure.\n\n\n Robert dipped down, scooped her up, and carried her.\n\n\n Lights glimmered ahead; shouts reached them. It was a searching party,\n Yasak in it. The litter-carriers who could still speak blurted out what\n had happened. \"A green light—loud sounds—fire—this man there—\" and\n then dropped into sleep.\n\n\n \"Someone carry these men,\" Yasak ordered. To Robert he said, \"We're not\n very far from the path to the City now. Shall I carry the girl?\"\n\n\n \"It makes no difference,\" Robert said.", "\"You will stay with me while you are in the City, of course,\" Yasak\n said, as they walked. He eyed this handsome stranger speculatively, and\n then turned to shout an necessary order. \"You, there, keep in line!\" He\n glanced at Robert furtively to see if this had impressed him at all.\nIt was day. Koroby sat up in bed and scanned her surroundings. She was\n in Yasak's house. The bed was very soft, the coverlets of the finest\n weave. The furniture was elegantly carved and painted; there were even\n paintings on the walls.\n\n\n A woman came to the bed. She was stocky and wore drab grey: the blue\n circles tattooed on her cheeks proclaimed her a slave. \"How do you\n feel?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Fairly well. How long have I been ill?\" Koroby asked, sweetly weak.\n\n\n \"You haven't been ill. They brought you in last night.\"", "He was clothed very peculiarly. A wonderfully-made metallic garment\n enclosed his whole body—legs and all, unlike the Venus-men's tunics.\n Even his feet were covered. Perhaps it was armor—though the Venus-men\n usually wore only breastplate and greaves. And a helmet hid all of\n the man's head except his face. Around his waist was a belt with many\n incomprehensible objects dangling from it. If he was so well armored,\n why was he not carrying a sword—a dagger at least! Of what use were\n those things on his belt—for instance, that notched L-shaped thing? It\n would not even make a decent club!\n\n\n The stranger did not speak, merely gazed deeply into Koroby's eyes. And\n she, returning the gaze, wondered if he was peering into her very soul.\n The words of a folk-ballad came to her:", "But Koroby, with supreme confidence, walked toward the stranger, her\n lovely body graceful as a cat's, her face radiant. The man did not hear\n her. She halted behind him, waited silent, expectant, excited—but he\n did not turn. The green fire sputtered upward. At last the girl stepped\n to the man's side and gently touched him again. He turned, and her\n heart faltered: she swayed with bliss.\n\n\n He was probably a god. Not even handsome Yasak looked like this. Here\n was a face so finely-chiseled, so perfectly proportioned, that it was\n almost frightening, unhuman, mechanical. It was unlined and without\n expression, somehow unreal. Mysterious, compelling.", "There was a rap at the doorway; they turned. One of the litter-bearers\n loomed darker than the gloomy sky. \"Are you ready?\" he asked.\n\n\n Koroby twirled before the mirror, criticizing her appearance. \"Yes,\n ready,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Ready!\" the girls cried. Then there was a little silence.\n\n\n \"Shall we go now?\" Koroby asked, and the litter-carrier nodded. Koroby\n kissed the girls, one after another. \"Here, Shonka—you can have this\n bracelet you've always liked. And this is for you, Lolla. And here,\n Trossa—and you, Shia. Goodbye, darlings, goodbye—come and see me\n whenever you can!\"\n\n\n \"Goodbye, Koroby!\"", "\"—He'll smile and touch my cheek,\nAnd maybe more;\nAnd though we'll neither speak,\nWe'll know the score—\"\nSuddenly he put his hands to her cheeks and bent close to her, his eyes\n peering into hers as though he were searching for something he had lost\n in them. She spoke her thought: \"What are you doing? You seem to be\n reading my mind!\"\n\n\n Without removing hands, he nodded. \"Reading—mind.\" He stared long\n into her eyes. His dispassionate, too-perfect face began to frighten\n her. She slipped back from him, her hand clutching her throat.\n\n\n He straightened up and spoke—haltingly at first, then with growing\n assurance. \"Don't be afraid. I mean you no harm.\" She trembled. It was\n such a wonderful voice—it was as she had always dreamed it! But she\n had never really believed in the dream....", "The men eyed each other, mentally shrugging. \"Well—\" one yielded.\n\n\n The girl whirled impatiently on the others. \"Hurry!\" she cried. \"If you\n won't take me, I'll go by myself. I must get to that fire, whatever it\n is!\" She put a hand to her heart. \"I must! I must!\" Then she faced the\n green glare again, smiling to herself.\n\n\n \"You can't do that!\" a carrier cried.\n\n\n \"Well, then, you take me,\" she said over her shoulder.", "She turned back to her friends, went to them, one of her hands, patting\n the head of the kneeling one. She eyed herself in the mirror.\n\n\n \"Well—heigh-ho! There don't seem to be any other worlds, and nobody is\n going to steal me away from Yasak, so I might as well get on with my\n preparations. The men with the litter will be here soon to carry me to\n the Stone City.\"\n\n\n She ran slim hands down her sides, smoothing the blue sarong; she\n fondled her dark braids. \"Trossa, how about some flowers at my ears—or\n do you think that it would look a little too much—?\" Her eyes sought\n the mirror, and her lips parted in an irreprehensible smile. She\n trilled softly to herself, \"Yes, I am beautiful tonight—the loveliest\n woman Yasak will ever see!\" And then, regretfully, sullenly, \"But oh,\n if only\nHe\nwould come ... the man of my dreams!\"", "It was a metal skeleton, and the fragments of complicated machinery,\n caked with soot.\n\n\n \"He wasn't human at all!\" Yasak marvelled. \"He was some kind of a toy\n made to look like a man—that's why he wore armor, and his face never\n changed expression—\"\n\n\n \"Magic!\" someone cried, and backed away.\n\n\n \"Magic!\" the others repeated, and edged back ... and that was the\n end of one of those robots which had been fashioned as servants for\n Terrestial men, made in Man's likeness to appease Man's vanity, then\n conquered him.", "Here the similarity between her dream and actual experience ended.\n What was he thinking as he eyed her for a long moment? She had no way\n of guessing. He said, \"No, I am not going to take you back there.\" Her\n month gaped in surprise, and he continued, \"As for the distance to\n Terra—it is incredibly far away.\"\n\n\n The glare was beginning to die, the green flames' hissing fading to a\n whisper. They watched the melting globe sag on the sand. Then Koroby\n said, \"But if it is so far away, how could you speak my language? There\n are some tribes beyond the jungle whose language is unlike ours—\"\n\n\n \"I read your mind,\" he explained indifferently. \"I have a remarkable\n memory.\"\n\n\n \"Remarkable indeed!\" she mocked. \"No one here could do that.\"\n\n\n \"But my race is infinitely superior to yours,\" he said blandly. \"You\n little people—ah—\" He gestured airily.", "Koroby fingered the flowers around her throat, her eyes rapt on the\n passing trees. Her lips moved in the barest murmur: \"If only—!\"\n and again, \"Oh, if only—!\" But the music trickled on, and nothing\n happened; the litter seemed to float along—none of the bearers even\n stumbled.\n\n\n They came to a cleared space of waist-high grass. It was like a canyon\n steeply walled by cliffs of verdure. The litter jerked as it glided\n along, and Koroby heard one of the bearers exclaim gruffly, \"Listen!\"\n Then the litter resumed its dream-like floating on the backs of the men.\n\n\n \"What was it?\" another bearer asked.\n\n\n \"Thought I heard something,\" the other replied. \"Shrill and high—like\n something screaming—\"\n\n\n Koroby peered out. \"A\ngnau\n?\" she asked.", "He was very tall, and his shoulders were very wide. Oh, but he looked\n like a man, and stood like one—even though his hands were folded\n behind his back and he was probably dejected. A man in a house from the\n sky—\n\n\n Koroby hastily grasped a corner of her gown, moistened it with saliva,\n and scrubbed her face. She rearranged her hair, and stepped forward.\n\n\n \"Don't go there—it's magic—he'll cast a spell—!\" one of the bearers\n whispered urgently, reaching after her, but Koroby pushed him away. The\n litter-carriers watched the girl go, unconsciously huddling together\n as if feeling the need for combined strength. They withdrew into the\n jungle's shadows, and waited there anxiously, ready at any moment to\n run away.", "Grumbling, they bent to the conveyance's poles, and Koroby lithely\n slipped to the cushions. They turned off the path, plodded through the\n deep grass toward the light. The litter lurched violently as their\n feet caught in the tangled grass, and clouds of fine dust arose from\n the disturbed blades.\nBy the time they reached the source of the light, they were quite\n demoralized. The musicians had not accompanied them, preferring to\n carry the message to Yasak in the Stone City that his prospective\n bride had gone off on a mad journey. The bearers were powdered grey\n with dust, striped with blood where the dry grass-stems had cut them.\n They were exhausted and panting. Koroby was walking beside them, for\n they had abandoned the litter finally. Her blue drapery was ripped and\n rumpled; her carefully-arranged braids had fallen loose; dust on her\n face had hid its youthful color, aging her." ], [ "She watched him a little longer. Then she deliberately stooped and drew\n the firestone out of its sheath. She touched it to a blade of the tall\n grass. A little orange flame licked up, slowly quested along the blade,\n down to the ground and up another stem. It slipped over to another\n stem, and another, growing larger, hotter—Koroby stepped back from the\n writhing fire, her hand protectively over her face.\n\n\n The flames crackled at first—like the crumpling of thin paper. Then,\n as they widened and began climbing hand over hand up an invisible\n ladder, they roared. Koroby was running back toward the City now, away\n from the heat. The fire spread in a long line over the prairie. Above\n its roar came shouts from the City. The flames rose in a monstrous\n twisting pillar, brighter than even the dust-palled sky, lighting the\n buildings and the prairie. The heat was dreadful.", "They watched the conflagration, Yasak and Koroby, from a higher part of\n the wall than where the others were gathered. They could glimpse Robert\n now and then. He was running, trying to outrace the flames. Then they\n swept around him, circling him—his arms flailed frantically.\nThe fire had passed over the horizon. The air was blue with smoke,\n difficult to breathe, and ashes were drifting lightly down like\n dove-colored snow. Yasak, watery eyed, a cloth pressed to his nose, was\n walking with several others over the smoking earth and still warm ashes\n up to his knees. In one hand he held a stick. He stopped and pointed.\n \"He fell about here,\" he said, and began to probe the ashes with the\n stick.\n\n\n He struck something. \"Here he is!\" he cried. The others hurried to the\n spot and scooped ashes away, dog-fashion, until Robert's remains were\n laid clear. There were exclamations of amazement and perplexity from\n the people.", "Koroby huddled on a chair, sobbing. Then she dried her eyes on the\n backs of her hands. She went to the narrow slits that served as windows\n and unfastened the translucent shutter of one. Down in the City street,\n Robert was walking away. Her eyes hardened, and her fingers spread\n into ugly claws. Without bothering to pull the shutter in place she\n hurried out of the room, ran eagerly down the hall. She stopped at\n the armor-rack at the main hall on her way outside, and snatched up a\nsiatcha\n—a firestone. Then she slipped outside and down the street.\nThe City's wall was not far behind. Robert was visible in the distance,\n striding toward his sky-ship, a widening cloud of dust rising behind\n him like the spreading wake of a boat. Koroby stood on tip-toe, waving\n and calling after him, \"Robert! Robert! Come back!\" but he did not seem\n to hear.", "But Koroby, with supreme confidence, walked toward the stranger, her\n lovely body graceful as a cat's, her face radiant. The man did not hear\n her. She halted behind him, waited silent, expectant, excited—but he\n did not turn. The green fire sputtered upward. At last the girl stepped\n to the man's side and gently touched him again. He turned, and her\n heart faltered: she swayed with bliss.\n\n\n He was probably a god. Not even handsome Yasak looked like this. Here\n was a face so finely-chiseled, so perfectly proportioned, that it was\n almost frightening, unhuman, mechanical. It was unlined and without\n expression, somehow unreal. Mysterious, compelling.", "\"Oh,\" Koroby said disappointedly, and sat upright. \"I feel as if I'd\n been lying here for weeks. Where's Yasak? Where's the strange man in\n armor?\"\n\n\n \"Yasak's out somewhere. The stranger man is in the room at the end of\n the hall.\"\n\n\n \"Fetch me something to wear—that's good enough,\" the girl accepted the\n mantle offered by the slave. \"Quick, some water—I must wash.\"\n\n\n In a few minutes she was lightly running down the hall; she knocked on\n the door of Robert's room. \"May I come in?\"\n\n\n He did not answer. She waited a little and went in. He was seated on\n one of the carved chairs, fussing over some scraps of metal on the\n table. He did not look up.", "There was a rap at the doorway; they turned. One of the litter-bearers\n loomed darker than the gloomy sky. \"Are you ready?\" he asked.\n\n\n Koroby twirled before the mirror, criticizing her appearance. \"Yes,\n ready,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Ready!\" the girls cried. Then there was a little silence.\n\n\n \"Shall we go now?\" Koroby asked, and the litter-carrier nodded. Koroby\n kissed the girls, one after another. \"Here, Shonka—you can have this\n bracelet you've always liked. And this is for you, Lolla. And here,\n Trossa—and you, Shia. Goodbye, darlings, goodbye—come and see me\n whenever you can!\"\n\n\n \"Goodbye, Koroby!\"", "Koroby reached the City wall, panted through the gate into a shrieking\n crowd. Someone grasped her roughly—she was too breathless to do more\n than gasp for air—and shook her violently. \"You fool, you utter\n fool! What did you think you were doing?\" Others clamored around her,\n reaching for her. Then she heard Yasak's voice. Face stern, he pushed\n through the crowd, pressed her to him. \"Let her alone—Let her alone, I\n say!\"", "His face swung up to hers. \"But—there's no path that way—\"\n\n\n \"I don't care,\" she said. \"Take me there.\" Her order had reached the\n others' ears, and they slowed their pace.\n\n\n \"Lady—believe me—it's impossible. There's nothing but matted jungle\n in that direction—we'd have to hack our way as we go along. And who\n knows how far away that light is? Besides, you're on your way to be\n married.\"\n\n\n \"Take me to that light!\" she persisted.\n\n\n They set the litter down. \"We can't do that,\" one man said to another.\n\n\n Koroby stepped out to the path, straightened up, her eyes on the glow.\n \"You'd better,\" she said ominously. \"Otherwise, I'll make a complaint\n to Yasak—\"", "Grumbling, they bent to the conveyance's poles, and Koroby lithely\n slipped to the cushions. They turned off the path, plodded through the\n deep grass toward the light. The litter lurched violently as their\n feet caught in the tangled grass, and clouds of fine dust arose from\n the disturbed blades.\nBy the time they reached the source of the light, they were quite\n demoralized. The musicians had not accompanied them, preferring to\n carry the message to Yasak in the Stone City that his prospective\n bride had gone off on a mad journey. The bearers were powdered grey\n with dust, striped with blood where the dry grass-stems had cut them.\n They were exhausted and panting. Koroby was walking beside them, for\n they had abandoned the litter finally. Her blue drapery was ripped and\n rumpled; her carefully-arranged braids had fallen loose; dust on her\n face had hid its youthful color, aging her.", "He was walking along, head erect, apparently quite at ease, while the\n litter bearers and Koroby could barely drag themselves with him. The\n girl's garment was a tattered ruin. Her skin was gritty with dust, and\n she was bleeding from many scratches. She tripped over tangled roots\n and exclaimed in pain. Then the man took one of the strange implements\n from his belt, pressed a knob on it, and light appeared as if by magic!\n He handed the stick to Koroby, but she was afraid to touch it. This was\n a strange light that gave no heat, nor flickered in the breeze. Finally\n she accepted it from him, but carried it gingerly at arm's length.\n\n\n She refused to believe that he had no name, and so he named himself.\n \"Call me Robert. It is an ancient name on Terra.\"\n\n\n \"Robert,\" she said, and, \"Robert.\"", "They took another glance at the metal globe and the green fire, which\n by now had died to a fitful glimmer. Then the stranger and the girl\n started toward the jungle, where the litter-bearers awaited them.\nAs the party was struggling through the prairie's tall grass, the man\n said to Koroby, \"I realize from the pictures in your mind that there\n is no means in your city of communicating directly with my people. But\n it seems that there are materials which I can utilize in building a\n signal—\"", "The men eyed each other, mentally shrugging. \"Well—\" one yielded.\n\n\n The girl whirled impatiently on the others. \"Hurry!\" she cried. \"If you\n won't take me, I'll go by myself. I must get to that fire, whatever it\n is!\" She put a hand to her heart. \"I must! I must!\" Then she faced the\n green glare again, smiling to herself.\n\n\n \"You can't do that!\" a carrier cried.\n\n\n \"Well, then, you take me,\" she said over her shoulder.", "Koroby fingered the flowers around her throat, her eyes rapt on the\n passing trees. Her lips moved in the barest murmur: \"If only—!\"\n and again, \"Oh, if only—!\" But the music trickled on, and nothing\n happened; the litter seemed to float along—none of the bearers even\n stumbled.\n\n\n They came to a cleared space of waist-high grass. It was like a canyon\n steeply walled by cliffs of verdure. The litter jerked as it glided\n along, and Koroby heard one of the bearers exclaim gruffly, \"Listen!\"\n Then the litter resumed its dream-like floating on the backs of the men.\n\n\n \"What was it?\" another bearer asked.\n\n\n \"Thought I heard something,\" the other replied. \"Shrill and high—like\n something screaming—\"\n\n\n Koroby peered out. \"A\ngnau\n?\" she asked.", "\"Goodbye! Goodbye!\" They crowded around her, embracing, babbling\n farewells, shreds of advice. Trossa began to cry. Finally Koroby broke\n away from them, went to the door. She took a last look at the interior\n of the little hut, dim in the lamplight—at the hard bed of laced\ngnau\n-hide strips, the crude but beautifully-carved charts and chests.\n Then she turned and stepped out into the night.", "There was a babble of voices as the musicians crowded together, asking\n what had it been, and where—just exactly—could one suppose it had\n happened, that thunder—was it going to storm!\n\n\n They waited, but nothing further happened—there were no more stabs of\n green light nor detonations. The bearers stooped to lift the litter's\n poles to their shoulders. \"Shall we go on?\" one of them asked Koroby.\n\n\n She waved a hand. \"Yes, go on.\"\nThe litter resumed its gentle swaying, but the music did not start\n again. Then, from the direction of the light-flashes, a glow appeared,\n shining steadily, green as the flashes had been. Noticing it, Koroby\n frowned. Then the path bent, and the glow swung to one side.\n\n\n Suddenly Koroby reached out, tapped the shoulder of the closet bearer.\n \"Go toward the light.\"", "Koroby stared defiantly at the laughing faces of her bridesmaids. She\n shrugged hopelessly. \"I don't care,\" she said slowly. \"It will be nice\n to have Yasak for a husband—yes. And perhaps I do love him. I don't\n know.\" She tightened her lips as she reflected on it.\n\n\n She left them, moving gracefully to the door. Venus-girls were\n generally of truly elfin proportions, so delicately slim that they\n seemed incapable of the slightest exertion. But Koroby's body\n was—compared to her friends'—voluptuous.\n\n\n She rested against the door-frame, watching the red of the afterglow\n deepen to purple. \"I want romance,\" she said, so softly that the girls\n had to strain forward to hear her. \"I wish that there were other worlds\n than this—and that someone would drop out of the skies and claim\n me ... and take me away from here, away from all this—this monotony!\"", "He was very tall, and his shoulders were very wide. Oh, but he looked\n like a man, and stood like one—even though his hands were folded\n behind his back and he was probably dejected. A man in a house from the\n sky—\n\n\n Koroby hastily grasped a corner of her gown, moistened it with saliva,\n and scrubbed her face. She rearranged her hair, and stepped forward.\n\n\n \"Don't go there—it's magic—he'll cast a spell—!\" one of the bearers\n whispered urgently, reaching after her, but Koroby pushed him away. The\n litter-carriers watched the girl go, unconsciously huddling together\n as if feeling the need for combined strength. They withdrew into the\n jungle's shadows, and waited there anxiously, ready at any moment to\n run away.", "\"You will stay with me while you are in the City, of course,\" Yasak\n said, as they walked. He eyed this handsome stranger speculatively, and\n then turned to shout an necessary order. \"You, there, keep in line!\" He\n glanced at Robert furtively to see if this had impressed him at all.\nIt was day. Koroby sat up in bed and scanned her surroundings. She was\n in Yasak's house. The bed was very soft, the coverlets of the finest\n weave. The furniture was elegantly carved and painted; there were even\n paintings on the walls.\n\n\n A woman came to the bed. She was stocky and wore drab grey: the blue\n circles tattooed on her cheeks proclaimed her a slave. \"How do you\n feel?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Fairly well. How long have I been ill?\" Koroby asked, sweetly weak.\n\n\n \"You haven't been ill. They brought you in last night.\"", "Here the similarity between her dream and actual experience ended.\n What was he thinking as he eyed her for a long moment? She had no way\n of guessing. He said, \"No, I am not going to take you back there.\" Her\n month gaped in surprise, and he continued, \"As for the distance to\n Terra—it is incredibly far away.\"\n\n\n The glare was beginning to die, the green flames' hissing fading to a\n whisper. They watched the melting globe sag on the sand. Then Koroby\n said, \"But if it is so far away, how could you speak my language? There\n are some tribes beyond the jungle whose language is unlike ours—\"\n\n\n \"I read your mind,\" he explained indifferently. \"I have a remarkable\n memory.\"\n\n\n \"Remarkable indeed!\" she mocked. \"No one here could do that.\"\n\n\n \"But my race is infinitely superior to yours,\" he said blandly. \"You\n little people—ah—\" He gestured airily.", "He seemed just a trifle bored. \"We gave up names long ago on my world.\n We are concerned with more weighty things than our own selves. But I\n have a personal problem now,\" he said, making a peculiar sound that\n was not quite a sigh. \"Here I am stranded on Venus, my ship utterly\n wrecked, and I'm due at the Reisezek Convention in two weeks. You\"—he\n gripped Koroby's shoulder, and his strength made her wince—\"tell me,\n where is the nearest city? I must communicate with my people at once.\"\n\n\n She pointed. \"The Stone City's that way.\"\n\n\n \"Good,\" he said. \"Let's go there.\"" ], [ "Koroby reached the City wall, panted through the gate into a shrieking\n crowd. Someone grasped her roughly—she was too breathless to do more\n than gasp for air—and shook her violently. \"You fool, you utter\n fool! What did you think you were doing?\" Others clamored around her,\n reaching for her. Then she heard Yasak's voice. Face stern, he pushed\n through the crowd, pressed her to him. \"Let her alone—Let her alone, I\n say!\"", "\"Oh,\" Koroby said disappointedly, and sat upright. \"I feel as if I'd\n been lying here for weeks. Where's Yasak? Where's the strange man in\n armor?\"\n\n\n \"Yasak's out somewhere. The stranger man is in the room at the end of\n the hall.\"\n\n\n \"Fetch me something to wear—that's good enough,\" the girl accepted the\n mantle offered by the slave. \"Quick, some water—I must wash.\"\n\n\n In a few minutes she was lightly running down the hall; she knocked on\n the door of Robert's room. \"May I come in?\"\n\n\n He did not answer. She waited a little and went in. He was seated on\n one of the carved chairs, fussing over some scraps of metal on the\n table. He did not look up.", "\"You will stay with me while you are in the City, of course,\" Yasak\n said, as they walked. He eyed this handsome stranger speculatively, and\n then turned to shout an necessary order. \"You, there, keep in line!\" He\n glanced at Robert furtively to see if this had impressed him at all.\nIt was day. Koroby sat up in bed and scanned her surroundings. She was\n in Yasak's house. The bed was very soft, the coverlets of the finest\n weave. The furniture was elegantly carved and painted; there were even\n paintings on the walls.\n\n\n A woman came to the bed. She was stocky and wore drab grey: the blue\n circles tattooed on her cheeks proclaimed her a slave. \"How do you\n feel?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Fairly well. How long have I been ill?\" Koroby asked, sweetly weak.\n\n\n \"You haven't been ill. They brought you in last night.\"", "They watched the conflagration, Yasak and Koroby, from a higher part of\n the wall than where the others were gathered. They could glimpse Robert\n now and then. He was running, trying to outrace the flames. Then they\n swept around him, circling him—his arms flailed frantically.\nThe fire had passed over the horizon. The air was blue with smoke,\n difficult to breathe, and ashes were drifting lightly down like\n dove-colored snow. Yasak, watery eyed, a cloth pressed to his nose, was\n walking with several others over the smoking earth and still warm ashes\n up to his knees. In one hand he held a stick. He stopped and pointed.\n \"He fell about here,\" he said, and began to probe the ashes with the\n stick.\n\n\n He struck something. \"Here he is!\" he cried. The others hurried to the\n spot and scooped ashes away, dog-fashion, until Robert's remains were\n laid clear. There were exclamations of amazement and perplexity from\n the people.", "His face swung up to hers. \"But—there's no path that way—\"\n\n\n \"I don't care,\" she said. \"Take me there.\" Her order had reached the\n others' ears, and they slowed their pace.\n\n\n \"Lady—believe me—it's impossible. There's nothing but matted jungle\n in that direction—we'd have to hack our way as we go along. And who\n knows how far away that light is? Besides, you're on your way to be\n married.\"\n\n\n \"Take me to that light!\" she persisted.\n\n\n They set the litter down. \"We can't do that,\" one man said to another.\n\n\n Koroby stepped out to the path, straightened up, her eyes on the glow.\n \"You'd better,\" she said ominously. \"Otherwise, I'll make a complaint\n to Yasak—\"", "Grumbling, they bent to the conveyance's poles, and Koroby lithely\n slipped to the cushions. They turned off the path, plodded through the\n deep grass toward the light. The litter lurched violently as their\n feet caught in the tangled grass, and clouds of fine dust arose from\n the disturbed blades.\nBy the time they reached the source of the light, they were quite\n demoralized. The musicians had not accompanied them, preferring to\n carry the message to Yasak in the Stone City that his prospective\n bride had gone off on a mad journey. The bearers were powdered grey\n with dust, striped with blood where the dry grass-stems had cut them.\n They were exhausted and panting. Koroby was walking beside them, for\n they had abandoned the litter finally. Her blue drapery was ripped and\n rumpled; her carefully-arranged braids had fallen loose; dust on her\n face had hid its youthful color, aging her.", "But Koroby, with supreme confidence, walked toward the stranger, her\n lovely body graceful as a cat's, her face radiant. The man did not hear\n her. She halted behind him, waited silent, expectant, excited—but he\n did not turn. The green fire sputtered upward. At last the girl stepped\n to the man's side and gently touched him again. He turned, and her\n heart faltered: she swayed with bliss.\n\n\n He was probably a god. Not even handsome Yasak looked like this. Here\n was a face so finely-chiseled, so perfectly proportioned, that it was\n almost frightening, unhuman, mechanical. It was unlined and without\n expression, somehow unreal. Mysterious, compelling.", "There was a rap at the doorway; they turned. One of the litter-bearers\n loomed darker than the gloomy sky. \"Are you ready?\" he asked.\n\n\n Koroby twirled before the mirror, criticizing her appearance. \"Yes,\n ready,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Ready!\" the girls cried. Then there was a little silence.\n\n\n \"Shall we go now?\" Koroby asked, and the litter-carrier nodded. Koroby\n kissed the girls, one after another. \"Here, Shonka—you can have this\n bracelet you've always liked. And this is for you, Lolla. And here,\n Trossa—and you, Shia. Goodbye, darlings, goodbye—come and see me\n whenever you can!\"\n\n\n \"Goodbye, Koroby!\"", "Koroby stared defiantly at the laughing faces of her bridesmaids. She\n shrugged hopelessly. \"I don't care,\" she said slowly. \"It will be nice\n to have Yasak for a husband—yes. And perhaps I do love him. I don't\n know.\" She tightened her lips as she reflected on it.\n\n\n She left them, moving gracefully to the door. Venus-girls were\n generally of truly elfin proportions, so delicately slim that they\n seemed incapable of the slightest exertion. But Koroby's body\n was—compared to her friends'—voluptuous.\n\n\n She rested against the door-frame, watching the red of the afterglow\n deepen to purple. \"I want romance,\" she said, so softly that the girls\n had to strain forward to hear her. \"I wish that there were other worlds\n than this—and that someone would drop out of the skies and claim\n me ... and take me away from here, away from all this—this monotony!\"", "Koroby huddled on a chair, sobbing. Then she dried her eyes on the\n backs of her hands. She went to the narrow slits that served as windows\n and unfastened the translucent shutter of one. Down in the City street,\n Robert was walking away. Her eyes hardened, and her fingers spread\n into ugly claws. Without bothering to pull the shutter in place she\n hurried out of the room, ran eagerly down the hall. She stopped at\n the armor-rack at the main hall on her way outside, and snatched up a\nsiatcha\n—a firestone. Then she slipped outside and down the street.\nThe City's wall was not far behind. Robert was visible in the distance,\n striding toward his sky-ship, a widening cloud of dust rising behind\n him like the spreading wake of a boat. Koroby stood on tip-toe, waving\n and calling after him, \"Robert! Robert! Come back!\" but he did not seem\n to hear.", "\"Robert—I'm mad about you! I've dreamed of your coming—all my life!\n Don't be so cruel—so cold to me! You mock me, say that I'm nothing,\n that I'm not worthy of you—\"\n\n\n She stepped back from him, clenching her hands. \"Oh, I hate you—hate\n you! You don't care the least bit about me—and I've shamed myself in\n front of you—I, supposed to be Yasak's wife by now!\" She began to\n cry, hid her face in suddenly lax fingers. She looked up fiercely. \"I\n could kill you!\" Robert stood immobile, no trace of feeling marring the\n perfection of his face. \"I could kill you, and I will kill you!\" she\n sprang at him.\n\n\n \"You'll hurt yourself,\" he admonished kindly, and after she had\n pummeled his chest, bruising her fingers on his armor, she turned away.", "But at last she could go no farther. She had forced herself along\n because she wanted to impress this indifferent man that she was not as\n inferior as he might think—but now she could not go on. With a little\n cry almost of relief, she sank to the ground and lay semi-conscious, so\n weary that the very pain of it seemed on the point of pleasure.\n\n\n Robert dipped down, scooped her up, and carried her.\n\n\n Lights glimmered ahead; shouts reached them. It was a searching party,\n Yasak in it. The litter-carriers who could still speak blurted out what\n had happened. \"A green light—loud sounds—fire—this man there—\" and\n then dropped into sleep.\n\n\n \"Someone carry these men,\" Yasak ordered. To Robert he said, \"We're not\n very far from the path to the City now. Shall I carry the girl?\"\n\n\n \"It makes no difference,\" Robert said.", "He was walking along, head erect, apparently quite at ease, while the\n litter bearers and Koroby could barely drag themselves with him. The\n girl's garment was a tattered ruin. Her skin was gritty with dust, and\n she was bleeding from many scratches. She tripped over tangled roots\n and exclaimed in pain. Then the man took one of the strange implements\n from his belt, pressed a knob on it, and light appeared as if by magic!\n He handed the stick to Koroby, but she was afraid to touch it. This was\n a strange light that gave no heat, nor flickered in the breeze. Finally\n she accepted it from him, but carried it gingerly at arm's length.\n\n\n She refused to believe that he had no name, and so he named himself.\n \"Call me Robert. It is an ancient name on Terra.\"\n\n\n \"Robert,\" she said, and, \"Robert.\"", "The expedition emerged from the jungle on a sandy stretch of barren\n land. A thousand feet away a gigantic metal object lay on the sand,\n crumpled as though it had dropped from a great distance. It had been\n globular before the crash, and was pierced with holes like windows.\n What could it possibly be? A house? But whoever heard of a metal house?\n Why, who could forge such a thing! Yasak's house in the City had iron\n doors, and they were considered one of the most wonderful things of the\n age. It would take a giant to make such a ponderous thing as this.\n\n\n A house, fallen from the sky? The green lights poured out of its\n crumpled part, and a strange bubbling and hissing filled the air.\n\n\n Koroby stopped short, clasping her hands and involuntarily uttering a\n squeal of joyful excitement, for between her and the blaze, his eyes on\n the destruction, stood a man.....", "\"Goodbye! Goodbye!\" They crowded around her, embracing, babbling\n farewells, shreds of advice. Trossa began to cry. Finally Koroby broke\n away from them, went to the door. She took a last look at the interior\n of the little hut, dim in the lamplight—at the hard bed of laced\ngnau\n-hide strips, the crude but beautifully-carved charts and chests.\n Then she turned and stepped out into the night.", "Koroby fingered the flowers around her throat, her eyes rapt on the\n passing trees. Her lips moved in the barest murmur: \"If only—!\"\n and again, \"Oh, if only—!\" But the music trickled on, and nothing\n happened; the litter seemed to float along—none of the bearers even\n stumbled.\n\n\n They came to a cleared space of waist-high grass. It was like a canyon\n steeply walled by cliffs of verdure. The litter jerked as it glided\n along, and Koroby heard one of the bearers exclaim gruffly, \"Listen!\"\n Then the litter resumed its dream-like floating on the backs of the men.\n\n\n \"What was it?\" another bearer asked.\n\n\n \"Thought I heard something,\" the other replied. \"Shrill and high—like\n something screaming—\"\n\n\n Koroby peered out. \"A\ngnau\n?\" she asked.", "He was very tall, and his shoulders were very wide. Oh, but he looked\n like a man, and stood like one—even though his hands were folded\n behind his back and he was probably dejected. A man in a house from the\n sky—\n\n\n Koroby hastily grasped a corner of her gown, moistened it with saliva,\n and scrubbed her face. She rearranged her hair, and stepped forward.\n\n\n \"Don't go there—it's magic—he'll cast a spell—!\" one of the bearers\n whispered urgently, reaching after her, but Koroby pushed him away. The\n litter-carriers watched the girl go, unconsciously huddling together\n as if feeling the need for combined strength. They withdrew into the\n jungle's shadows, and waited there anxiously, ready at any moment to\n run away.", "\"This way,\" the litter-carrier announced, touching the girl's arm. They\n stumbled over the rutted clearing toward the twinkling sparks that were\n the lights of the other litter-bearers, colored sparks as befitted\n a wedding-conveyance. The winking lights were enclosed in shells of\n colored glass for another reason—the danger of their firing the papery\n jungle verdure.\nIt was not a new litter, built especially for the occasion—Yasak was\n too practical a man to sanction any kind of waste. It was the same\n old litter that Koroby had been watching come and go ever since she\n was a little girl, a canopied framework of gaudily-painted carvings.\n She had wondered, watching it pass, whether its cushioned floor was\n soft, and now, as she stepped into the litter, she patted the padding\n experimentally. Yes, it was soft .... And fragrant, too—a shade too\n fragrant. It smelled stale, hinting of other occupants, other brides\n being borne to other weddings....", "She turned back to her friends, went to them, one of her hands, patting\n the head of the kneeling one. She eyed herself in the mirror.\n\n\n \"Well—heigh-ho! There don't seem to be any other worlds, and nobody is\n going to steal me away from Yasak, so I might as well get on with my\n preparations. The men with the litter will be here soon to carry me to\n the Stone City.\"\n\n\n She ran slim hands down her sides, smoothing the blue sarong; she\n fondled her dark braids. \"Trossa, how about some flowers at my ears—or\n do you think that it would look a little too much—?\" Her eyes sought\n the mirror, and her lips parted in an irreprehensible smile. She\n trilled softly to herself, \"Yes, I am beautiful tonight—the loveliest\n woman Yasak will ever see!\" And then, regretfully, sullenly, \"But oh,\n if only\nHe\nwould come ... the man of my dreams!\"", "There was a babble of voices as the musicians crowded together, asking\n what had it been, and where—just exactly—could one suppose it had\n happened, that thunder—was it going to storm!\n\n\n They waited, but nothing further happened—there were no more stabs of\n green light nor detonations. The bearers stooped to lift the litter's\n poles to their shoulders. \"Shall we go on?\" one of them asked Koroby.\n\n\n She waved a hand. \"Yes, go on.\"\nThe litter resumed its gentle swaying, but the music did not start\n again. Then, from the direction of the light-flashes, a glow appeared,\n shining steadily, green as the flashes had been. Noticing it, Koroby\n frowned. Then the path bent, and the glow swung to one side.\n\n\n Suddenly Koroby reached out, tapped the shoulder of the closet bearer.\n \"Go toward the light.\"" ], [ "He was looking at the wrecked globe of metal. \"So there are people on\n Venus!\" he said slowly.\n\n\n Koroby watched him, forgot her fear, and went eagerly to him, took his\n arm. \"Who are you?\" she asked. \"Tell me your name!\"\n\n\n He turned his mask of a face to her. \"My name? I have none,\" he said.\n\n\n \"No name? But who are you? Where are you from? And what is that?\" She\n pointed at the metal globe.\n\n\n \"The vehicle by which I came here from a land beyond the sky,\" he said.\n She had no concept of stars or space, and he could not fully explain.\n \"From a world known as Terra.\"\n\n\n She was silent a moment, stunned. So there was another world! Then she\n asked, \"Is it far? Have you come to take me there?\"", "He seemed just a trifle bored. \"We gave up names long ago on my world.\n We are concerned with more weighty things than our own selves. But I\n have a personal problem now,\" he said, making a peculiar sound that\n was not quite a sigh. \"Here I am stranded on Venus, my ship utterly\n wrecked, and I'm due at the Reisezek Convention in two weeks. You\"—he\n gripped Koroby's shoulder, and his strength made her wince—\"tell me,\n where is the nearest city? I must communicate with my people at once.\"\n\n\n She pointed. \"The Stone City's that way.\"\n\n\n \"Good,\" he said. \"Let's go there.\"", "\"Thank you for carrying me, Robert.\" He did not reply. \"Robert—I\n dreamed of you last night. I dreamed you built another round house and\n that we both flew away in it. Yasak had to stay behind, and he was\n furious. Robert! Aren't you listening?\"\n\n\n \"I hear you.\"\n\n\n \"Don't you think it was an exciting dream?\" He shook his head. \"But\n why? Robert\"—she laid longing hands on his shoulders—\"can't you see\n that I'm in love with you?\" He shrugged. \"I believe you don't know what\n love is!\"\n\n\n \"I had a faint idea of it when I looked into your mind,\" he said. \"I'm\n afraid I haven't any use for it. Where I come from there is no love,\n and there shouldn't be here, either. It's a waste of time.\"", "He was walking along, head erect, apparently quite at ease, while the\n litter bearers and Koroby could barely drag themselves with him. The\n girl's garment was a tattered ruin. Her skin was gritty with dust, and\n she was bleeding from many scratches. She tripped over tangled roots\n and exclaimed in pain. Then the man took one of the strange implements\n from his belt, pressed a knob on it, and light appeared as if by magic!\n He handed the stick to Koroby, but she was afraid to touch it. This was\n a strange light that gave no heat, nor flickered in the breeze. Finally\n she accepted it from him, but carried it gingerly at arm's length.\n\n\n She refused to believe that he had no name, and so he named himself.\n \"Call me Robert. It is an ancient name on Terra.\"\n\n\n \"Robert,\" she said, and, \"Robert.\"", "\"And now if you're through playing your incomprehensible little scene,\"\n Robert said, \"I hope you will excuse me. I regret that I have no\n emotions—I was never allowed them. But it is an esthetic regret.... I\n must go back to my wrecked ship now and arrange the signals there.\" He\n did not wait for her leave, but strode out of the room.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nIt was twilight on Venus—the rusty red that the eyes notice when\n their closed lids are raised to light. Against the glow, fantastically\n twisted trees spread claws of spiky leaves, and a group of clay huts\n thrust up sharp edges of shadow, like the abandoned toy blocks of a\n gigantic child. There was no sign of clear sky and stars—the heavens\n were roofed by a perpetual ceiling of dust-clouds.\n\n\n A light glimmered in one of the huts. Feminine voices rippled across\n the clearing and into the jungle. There was laughter, then someone's\n faint and wistful sigh. One of the voices mourned, in the twittering\n Venusian speech, \"How I envy you, Koroby! I wish I were being married\n tonight, like you!\"", "Koroby stared defiantly at the laughing faces of her bridesmaids. She\n shrugged hopelessly. \"I don't care,\" she said slowly. \"It will be nice\n to have Yasak for a husband—yes. And perhaps I do love him. I don't\n know.\" She tightened her lips as she reflected on it.\n\n\n She left them, moving gracefully to the door. Venus-girls were\n generally of truly elfin proportions, so delicately slim that they\n seemed incapable of the slightest exertion. But Koroby's body\n was—compared to her friends'—voluptuous.\n\n\n She rested against the door-frame, watching the red of the afterglow\n deepen to purple. \"I want romance,\" she said, so softly that the girls\n had to strain forward to hear her. \"I wish that there were other worlds\n than this—and that someone would drop out of the skies and claim\n me ... and take me away from here, away from all this—this monotony!\"", "He was clothed very peculiarly. A wonderfully-made metallic garment\n enclosed his whole body—legs and all, unlike the Venus-men's tunics.\n Even his feet were covered. Perhaps it was armor—though the Venus-men\n usually wore only breastplate and greaves. And a helmet hid all of\n the man's head except his face. Around his waist was a belt with many\n incomprehensible objects dangling from it. If he was so well armored,\n why was he not carrying a sword—a dagger at least! Of what use were\n those things on his belt—for instance, that notched L-shaped thing? It\n would not even make a decent club!\n\n\n The stranger did not speak, merely gazed deeply into Koroby's eyes. And\n she, returning the gaze, wondered if he was peering into her very soul.\n The words of a folk-ballad came to her:", "But at last she could go no farther. She had forced herself along\n because she wanted to impress this indifferent man that she was not as\n inferior as he might think—but now she could not go on. With a little\n cry almost of relief, she sank to the ground and lay semi-conscious, so\n weary that the very pain of it seemed on the point of pleasure.\n\n\n Robert dipped down, scooped her up, and carried her.\n\n\n Lights glimmered ahead; shouts reached them. It was a searching party,\n Yasak in it. The litter-carriers who could still speak blurted out what\n had happened. \"A green light—loud sounds—fire—this man there—\" and\n then dropped into sleep.\n\n\n \"Someone carry these men,\" Yasak ordered. To Robert he said, \"We're not\n very far from the path to the City now. Shall I carry the girl?\"\n\n\n \"It makes no difference,\" Robert said.", "Koroby huddled on a chair, sobbing. Then she dried her eyes on the\n backs of her hands. She went to the narrow slits that served as windows\n and unfastened the translucent shutter of one. Down in the City street,\n Robert was walking away. Her eyes hardened, and her fingers spread\n into ugly claws. Without bothering to pull the shutter in place she\n hurried out of the room, ran eagerly down the hall. She stopped at\n the armor-rack at the main hall on her way outside, and snatched up a\nsiatcha\n—a firestone. Then she slipped outside and down the street.\nThe City's wall was not far behind. Robert was visible in the distance,\n striding toward his sky-ship, a widening cloud of dust rising behind\n him like the spreading wake of a boat. Koroby stood on tip-toe, waving\n and calling after him, \"Robert! Robert! Come back!\" but he did not seem\n to hear.", "\"Oh,\" Koroby said disappointedly, and sat upright. \"I feel as if I'd\n been lying here for weeks. Where's Yasak? Where's the strange man in\n armor?\"\n\n\n \"Yasak's out somewhere. The stranger man is in the room at the end of\n the hall.\"\n\n\n \"Fetch me something to wear—that's good enough,\" the girl accepted the\n mantle offered by the slave. \"Quick, some water—I must wash.\"\n\n\n In a few minutes she was lightly running down the hall; she knocked on\n the door of Robert's room. \"May I come in?\"\n\n\n He did not answer. She waited a little and went in. He was seated on\n one of the carved chairs, fussing over some scraps of metal on the\n table. He did not look up.", "Here the similarity between her dream and actual experience ended.\n What was he thinking as he eyed her for a long moment? She had no way\n of guessing. He said, \"No, I am not going to take you back there.\" Her\n month gaped in surprise, and he continued, \"As for the distance to\n Terra—it is incredibly far away.\"\n\n\n The glare was beginning to die, the green flames' hissing fading to a\n whisper. They watched the melting globe sag on the sand. Then Koroby\n said, \"But if it is so far away, how could you speak my language? There\n are some tribes beyond the jungle whose language is unlike ours—\"\n\n\n \"I read your mind,\" he explained indifferently. \"I have a remarkable\n memory.\"\n\n\n \"Remarkable indeed!\" she mocked. \"No one here could do that.\"\n\n\n \"But my race is infinitely superior to yours,\" he said blandly. \"You\n little people—ah—\" He gestured airily.", "The expedition emerged from the jungle on a sandy stretch of barren\n land. A thousand feet away a gigantic metal object lay on the sand,\n crumpled as though it had dropped from a great distance. It had been\n globular before the crash, and was pierced with holes like windows.\n What could it possibly be? A house? But whoever heard of a metal house?\n Why, who could forge such a thing! Yasak's house in the City had iron\n doors, and they were considered one of the most wonderful things of the\n age. It would take a giant to make such a ponderous thing as this.\n\n\n A house, fallen from the sky? The green lights poured out of its\n crumpled part, and a strange bubbling and hissing filled the air.\n\n\n Koroby stopped short, clasping her hands and involuntarily uttering a\n squeal of joyful excitement, for between her and the blaze, his eyes on\n the destruction, stood a man.....", "They watched the conflagration, Yasak and Koroby, from a higher part of\n the wall than where the others were gathered. They could glimpse Robert\n now and then. He was running, trying to outrace the flames. Then they\n swept around him, circling him—his arms flailed frantically.\nThe fire had passed over the horizon. The air was blue with smoke,\n difficult to breathe, and ashes were drifting lightly down like\n dove-colored snow. Yasak, watery eyed, a cloth pressed to his nose, was\n walking with several others over the smoking earth and still warm ashes\n up to his knees. In one hand he held a stick. He stopped and pointed.\n \"He fell about here,\" he said, and began to probe the ashes with the\n stick.\n\n\n He struck something. \"Here he is!\" he cried. The others hurried to the\n spot and scooped ashes away, dog-fashion, until Robert's remains were\n laid clear. There were exclamations of amazement and perplexity from\n the people.", "They took another glance at the metal globe and the green fire, which\n by now had died to a fitful glimmer. Then the stranger and the girl\n started toward the jungle, where the litter-bearers awaited them.\nAs the party was struggling through the prairie's tall grass, the man\n said to Koroby, \"I realize from the pictures in your mind that there\n is no means in your city of communicating directly with my people. But\n it seems that there are materials which I can utilize in building a\n signal—\"", "\"Robert—I'm mad about you! I've dreamed of your coming—all my life!\n Don't be so cruel—so cold to me! You mock me, say that I'm nothing,\n that I'm not worthy of you—\"\n\n\n She stepped back from him, clenching her hands. \"Oh, I hate you—hate\n you! You don't care the least bit about me—and I've shamed myself in\n front of you—I, supposed to be Yasak's wife by now!\" She began to\n cry, hid her face in suddenly lax fingers. She looked up fiercely. \"I\n could kill you!\" Robert stood immobile, no trace of feeling marring the\n perfection of his face. \"I could kill you, and I will kill you!\" she\n sprang at him.\n\n\n \"You'll hurt yourself,\" he admonished kindly, and after she had\n pummeled his chest, bruising her fingers on his armor, she turned away.", "It was a metal skeleton, and the fragments of complicated machinery,\n caked with soot.\n\n\n \"He wasn't human at all!\" Yasak marvelled. \"He was some kind of a toy\n made to look like a man—that's why he wore armor, and his face never\n changed expression—\"\n\n\n \"Magic!\" someone cried, and backed away.\n\n\n \"Magic!\" the others repeated, and edged back ... and that was the\n end of one of those robots which had been fashioned as servants for\n Terrestial men, made in Man's likeness to appease Man's vanity, then\n conquered him.", "But Koroby, with supreme confidence, walked toward the stranger, her\n lovely body graceful as a cat's, her face radiant. The man did not hear\n her. She halted behind him, waited silent, expectant, excited—but he\n did not turn. The green fire sputtered upward. At last the girl stepped\n to the man's side and gently touched him again. He turned, and her\n heart faltered: she swayed with bliss.\n\n\n He was probably a god. Not even handsome Yasak looked like this. Here\n was a face so finely-chiseled, so perfectly proportioned, that it was\n almost frightening, unhuman, mechanical. It was unlined and without\n expression, somehow unreal. Mysterious, compelling.", "The men eyed each other, mentally shrugging. \"Well—\" one yielded.\n\n\n The girl whirled impatiently on the others. \"Hurry!\" she cried. \"If you\n won't take me, I'll go by myself. I must get to that fire, whatever it\n is!\" She put a hand to her heart. \"I must! I must!\" Then she faced the\n green glare again, smiling to herself.\n\n\n \"You can't do that!\" a carrier cried.\n\n\n \"Well, then, you take me,\" she said over her shoulder.", "STRANGER FROM SPACE\nBy HANNES BOK\nShe prayed that a God would come from the skies\n\n and carry her away to bright adventures. But\n\n when he came in a metal globe, she knew only\n\n disappointment—for his godliness was oddly strange!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories March 1943.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that" ] ]
valid	61434	[ "What was Qorn before the next to last time he estivated?", "What happens to the qornt at estivating time?", "Which reaction to the ultimatum was not suggested to Nitworth?", "How did Magnan feel about his reconnaissance assignment?", "Who found Retief and Magnan in the trees?", "Who would make the least warlike Qornt?", "Why had the humans not been able to see the Qornt village from the air?", "Why did Zubb want the men to go visit the Qornt?" ]	[ [ "a verpp", "a rheuk", "a boog", "a qornt" ], [ "It is unknown", "They die", "Nothing", "They moult" ], [ "Delayed withdrawal", "Guerilla warfare", "Quick withdrawal", "Insisting on more time" ], [ "He was scared and tried every opportunity to get out of it", "He was afraid he would do something rash", "He was afraid of failing his responsibility", "He felt heroic" ], [ "Two wild animals", "Two Verpp", "Two Qornt", "Three Qornt" ], [ "A passive Verpp", "A calm Verpp", "An angry Verpp", "A happy Verpp" ], [ "It was underground", "It was too small", "It was camouflaged ", "It had an invisibility cloak" ], [ "He wanted to report their crimes against him", "He thought they would be ignored", "He wanted the men to be honored guests", "He wanted them to negotiate a surrender" ] ]	[ 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 3, 1 ]	[ 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "\"I've lost the thread,\" Magnan said. \"Who are the new Qornt?\"\n\n\n \"After estivating, the Verpp moult, and then they're Qornt, of course.\n The Gwil become Boog, the Boog become Rheuk, the Rheuk metamorphosize\n into Verpp—\"\n\n\n \"You mean Slun and Zubb—the mild-natured naturalists—will become\n warmongers like Qorn?\"\n\n\n \"Very likely. 'The milder the Verpp, the wilder the Qorn,' as the old\n saying goes.\"\n\n\n \"What do Qornt turn into?\" Retief asked.\n\n\n \"Hmmmm. That's a good question. So far, none have survived Qornthood.\"\n\n\n \"Have you thought of forsaking your warlike ways?\" Magnan asked. \"What\n about taking up sheepherding and regular church attendance?\"", "\"I have a suggestion,\" Magnan said. \"Why not turn the reins of\n government over to the Verpp? They seem a level-headed group.\"\n\n\n \"What good would that do? Qornt are Qornt. It seems there's always one\n among us who's a slave to instinct—and, naturally, we have to follow\n him.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Because that's the way it's done.\"\n\n\n \"Why not do it another way?\" Magnan offered. \"Now, I'd like to suggest\n community singing—\"\n\n\n \"If we gave up fighting, we might live too long. Then what would\n happen?\"\n\n\n \"Live too long?\" Magnan looked puzzled.\n\n\n \"When estivating time comes there'd be no burrows for us. Anyway, with\n the new Qornt stepping on our heels—\"", "Qorn turned as Retief came up, blinking three-inch eyes. Zubb stepped\n forward, gibbered, waving his arms excitedly. Qorn pushed back his\n chair—a low, heavily padded stool—and stared unwinking at Retief,\n moving his head to bring first one great round eye, then the other, to\n bear. There were small blue veins in the immense fleshy beak. The bushy\n hair, springing out in a giant halo around the grayish, porous-skinned\n face, was wiry, stiff, moss-green, with tufts of chartreuse fuzz\n surrounding what appeared to be tympanic membranes. The tall head-dress\n of scarlet silk and purple feathers was slightly askew, and a loop of\n pink pearls had slipped down above one eye.\n\n\n Zubb finished his speech and fell silent, breathing hard.\n\n\n Qorn looked Retief over in silence, then belched.", "\"Stay back!\" Qorn hooted. \"Stand over there where I can keep an eye on\n you.\"\n\n\n \"Your Excellency, I'm empowered—\"\n\n\n \"Not here, you're not!\" Qorn trumpeted. \"Want peace, do you? Well, I\n don't want peace! I've had a surfeit of peace these last two centuries!\n I want action! Loot! Adventure! Glory!\" He turned to look down the\n table. \"How about it, fellows? It's war to the knife, eh?\"\nThere was a momentary silence from all sides.\n\n\n \"I guess so,\" grunted a giant Qornt in iridescent blue with\n flame-colored plumes.\n\n\n Qorn's eyes bulged. He half rose. \"We've been all over this,\" he\n bassooned. He clamped bony fingers on the hilt of a light rapier. \"I\n thought I'd made my point!\"", "\"Oh, sure, Qorn.\"\n\n\n \"You bet.\"\n\n\n \"I'm convinced.\"\n\n\n Qorn rumbled and resumed his seat. \"All for one and one for all, that's\n us.\"\n\n\n \"And you're the one, eh, Qorn?\" Retief commented.\n\n\n Magnan cleared his throat. \"I sense that some of you gentlemen are not\n convinced of the wisdom of this move,\" he piped, looking along the\n table at the silks, jewels, beaks, feather-decked crests and staring\n eyes.\n\n\n \"Silence!\" Qorn hooted. \"No use your talking to my loyal lieutenants\n anyway,\" he added. \"They do whatever I convince them they ought to do.\"\n\n\n \"But I'm sure that on more mature consideration—\"", "Qorn struck suddenly, a long arm flashing down in a vicious cut at\n Retief, who leaned aside, caught one lean shank below the knee. Qorn\n bent to haul Retief from his leg—and staggered back as a haymaker took\n him just below the beak. A screech went up from the crowd as Retief\n leaped clear.\n\n\n Qorn hissed and charged. Retief whirled aside, then struck the alien's\n off-leg in a flying tackle. Qorn leaned, arms windmilling, crashed to\n the floor. Retief whirled, dived for the left arm, whipped it behind\n the narrow back, seized Qorn's neck in a stranglehold and threw his\n weight backward. Qorn fell on his back, his legs squatted out at an\n awkward angle. He squawked and beat his free arm on the floor, reaching\n in vain for Retief.\n\n\n Zubb stepped forward, pistols ready. Magnan stepped before him.", "\"I'll peck away at him at knee level. When he bends over to swat me,\n I'll get a crack at him.\"\n\n\n Across the cleared floor, Qorn shook off his helpers with a snort.\n\n\n \"Enough! Let me at the upstart!\"\n\n\n Retief moved out to meet him, watching the upraised backward-jointed\n arms. Qorn stalked forward, long lean legs bent, long horny feet\n clacking against the polished floor. The other aliens—both servitors\n and bejeweled Qornt—formed a wide circle, all eyes unwaveringly on the\n combatants.", "\"I can lick any Qornt in the house.\" Qorn said. \"That's why I'm Qorn.\"\n He belched again.\n\n\n A servant came up staggering under a weight of chain, dropped it with a\n crash at Magnan's feet. Zubb aimed the guns while the servant wrapped\n three loops around Magnan's wrists, snapped a lock in place.\n\n\n \"You next!\" The guns pointed at Retief's chest. He held out his arms.\n Four loops of silvery-gray chain in half-inch links dropped around\n them. The servant cinched them up tight, squeezed a lock through the\n ends and closed it.\n\n\n \"Now,\" Qorn said, lolling back in his chair, glass in hand. \"There's a\n bit of sport to be had here, lads. What shall we do with them?\"\n\n\n \"Let them go,\" the blue and flame Qornt said glumly.", "There was a sound of crackling foliage. Twenty feet ahead, a leafy\n branch swung aside. An eight-foot biped stepped into view, long, thin,\n green-clad legs with back-bending knees moving in quick, bird-like\n steps. A pair of immense black-lensed goggles covered staring eyes set\n among bushy green hair above a great bone-white beak. The crest bobbed\n as the creature cocked its head, listening.\n\n\n Magnan gulped audibly. The Qornt froze, head tilted, beak aimed\n directly at the spot where the Terrestrials stood in the deep shade of\n a giant trunk.\n\n\n \"I'll go for help,\" Magnan squeaked. He whirled and took three leaps\n into the brush.", "Qorn rolled an eye at Retief and another at Magnan. \"Take these two,\"\n he hooted. \"I'll wager they came here to negotiate a surrender!\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Magnan started.\n\n\n \"Hold it, Mr. Magnan,\" Retief said. \"I'll tell him.\"\n\n\n \"What's your proposal?\" Qorn whistled, taking a gulp from his goblet.\n \"A fifty-fifty split? Monetary reparations? Alternate territory? I can\n assure you, it's useless. We Qornt\nlike\nto fight.\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid you've gotten the wrong impression, your Excellency,\"\n Retief said blandly. \"We didn't come to negotiate. We came to deliver\n an Ultimatum.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Qorn trumpeted. Behind Retief, Magnan spluttered.", "Lesser trolls—beaked, bush-haired, great-eyed—trotted briskly,\n bird-kneed, bearing steaming platters, stood in groups of\n three strumming slender bottle-shaped lutes, or pranced an\n intricate-patterned dance, unnoticed in the shrill uproar as each of\n the magnificently draped, belted, feathered and jeweled Qornt carried\n on a shouted conversation with an equally noisy fellow.\n\n\n \"A most interesting display of barbaric splendor,\" Magnan breathed.\n \"Now we'd better be getting back.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, a moment,\" Zubb said. \"Observe the Qornt—the tallest of the\n feasters—he with the head-dress of crimson, purple, silver and pink.\"\n\n\n \"Twelve feet if he's an inch,\" Magnan estimated. \"And now we really\n must hurry along—\"", "MIGHTIEST QORN\nBY KEITH LAUMER\nSly, brave and truculent, the Qornt\n\n held all humans in contempt—except one!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI\n\n\n Ambassador Nitworth glowered across his mirror-polished, nine-foot\n platinum desk at his assembled staff.\n\n\n \"Gentlemen, are any of you familiar with a race known as the Qornt?\"\n\n\n There was a moment of profound silence. Nitworth leaned forward,\n looking solemn.", "\"Qorn, you seem to be the fire-brand here,\" Retief said. \"I think the\n rest of the boys would listen to reason—\"\n\n\n \"Over my dead body!\"\n\n\n \"My idea exactly,\" Retief said. \"You claim you can lick any man in\n the house. Unwind yourself from your ribbons and step out here on the\n floor, and we'll see how good you are at backing up your conversation.\"\nMagnan hovered at Retief's side. \"Twelve feet tall,\" he moaned. \"And\n did you notice the size of those hands?\"\n\n\n Retief watched as Qorn's aides helped him out of his formal trappings.\n \"I wouldn't worry too much, Mr. Magnan. This is a light-Gee world. I\n doubt if old Qorn would weigh up at more than two-fifty standard pounds\n here.\"\n\n\n \"But that phenomenal reach—\"", "\"That would be the invasion of Smorbrod,\" Magnan said. \"And unless we\n hurry, Retief, we're likely to be caught there with the last of the\n evacuees!\"\n\n\n \"How many Qornt would you say there are at Tarroon?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, a very large number. Perhaps fifteen or twenty.\"\n\n\n \"Fifteen or twenty what?\" Magnan looked perplexed.\n\n\n \"Fifteen or twenty Qornt.\"\n\n\n \"You mean that there are only fifteen or twenty individual Qornt in\n all?\"\n\n\n Another whistle. \"Not at all. I was referring to the local Qornt only.\n There are more at the other Centers, of course.\"\n\n\n \"And the Qornt are responsible for the ultimatum—unilaterally?\"", "Retief had thrown a turn of violet silk around Qorn's left wrist, bound\n it to the alien's neck. Another wisp of stuff floated from Qorn's\n shoulder. Retief, still holding Qorn in an awkward sprawl, wrapped\n it around one outflung leg, trussed ankle and thigh together. Qorn\n flopped, hooting. At each movement, the constricting loop around his\n neck, jerked his head back, the green crest tossing wildly.\n\n\n \"If I were you, I'd relax,\" Retief said, rising and releasing his grip.\n Qorn got a leg under him; Retief kicked it. Qorn's chin hit the floor\n with a hollow clack. He wilted, an ungainly tangle of over-long limbs\n and gay silks.\n\n\n Retief turned to the watching crowd. \"Next?\" he called.", "\"See here, we have no interest in investigating this barrow,\" Magnan\n announced. \"We wish you to take us direct to Tarroon to interview your\n military leaders regarding the ultimatum!\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes, of course. Qornt Hall lies here inside the village.\"\n\n\n \"This is Tarroon?\"\n\n\n \"A modest civic center, sir, but there are those who love it.\"\n\n\n \"No wonder we didn't observe their works from the air,\" Magnan\n muttered. \"Camouflaged.\" He moved hesitantly through the opening.\n\n\n The party moved along a wide, deserted tunnel which sloped down\n steeply, then leveled off and branched. Zubb took the center branch,\n ducking slightly under the nine-foot ceiling lit at intervals with what\n appeared to be primitive incandescent panels.", "Qorn slammed his fist down on the table. \"I don't care what they are!\"\n he honked. \"Evacuate, hell! I can field eighty-five combat-ready ships!\"\n\n\n \"And we can englobe every one of them with a thousand Peace Enforcers\n with a hundred megatons/second firepower each.\"\n\n\n \"Retief.\" Magnan tugged at his sleeve. \"Don't forget their superdrive.\"\n\n\n \"That's all right. They don't have one.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"We'll take you on!\" Qorn French-horned. \"We're the Qorn! We glory in\n battle! We live in fame or go down in—\"\n\n\n \"Hogwash,\" the flame-and-blue Qorn cut in. \"If it wasn't for you, Qorn,\n we could sit around and feast and brag and enjoy life without having to\n prove anything.\"", "\"Great heavens, Retief!\" Magnan exclaimed in a whisper. \"It sounds as\n though these brutes employ a battle armada as simpler souls might a set\n of toy sailboats!\"\n\n\n Retief stepped past Magnan and Zubb to study the feasting hall. \"I can\n see that their votes would carry all the necessary weight.\"\n\n\n \"And now an interview with the Qorn himself,\" Zubb shrilled. \"If you'll\n kindly step along, gentlemen....\"\n\n\n \"That won't be necessary,\" Magnan said hastily, \"I've decided to refer\n the matter to committee.\"\n\n\n \"After having come so far,\" Zubb said, \"it would be a pity to miss\n having a cosy chat.\"\n\n\n There was a pause.", "\"Kindly return to your chair,\" Nitworth said coldly. \"A number of\n chores remain to be assigned. I think you, Magnan, need a little field\n experience. I want you to get over to Roolit I and take a look at these\n Qornt personally.\"\n\n\n Magnan's mouth opened and closed soundlessly.\n\n\n \"Not afraid of a few Qornt, are you, Magnan?\"\n\n\n \"Afraid? Good lord, no, ha ha. It's just that I'm afraid I may lose my\n head and do something rash if I go.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense! A diplomat is immune to heroic impulses. Take Retief along.\n No dawdling, now! I want you on the way in two hours. Notify the\n transport pool at once. Now get going!\"\n\n\n Magnan nodded unhappily and went into the hall.", "\"Few signs of an advanced technology here,\" Magnan whispered. \"These\n creatures must devote all their talents to warlike enterprise.\"\n\n\n Ahead, Zubb slowed. A distant susurration was audible, a sustained\n high-pitched screeching. \"Softly, now. We approach Qornt Hall. They\n can be an irascible lot when disturbed at their feasting.\"\n\n\n \"When will the feast be over?\" Magnan called hoarsely.\n\n\n \"In another few weeks, I should imagine, if, as you say, they've\n scheduled an invasion for next month.\"\n\n\n \"Look here, Zubb.\" Magnan shook a finger at the tall alien. \"How is it\n that these Qornt are allowed to embark on piratical ventures of this\n sort without reference to the wishes of the majority?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, the majority of the Qornt favor the move, I imagine.\"" ], [ "\"I've lost the thread,\" Magnan said. \"Who are the new Qornt?\"\n\n\n \"After estivating, the Verpp moult, and then they're Qornt, of course.\n The Gwil become Boog, the Boog become Rheuk, the Rheuk metamorphosize\n into Verpp—\"\n\n\n \"You mean Slun and Zubb—the mild-natured naturalists—will become\n warmongers like Qorn?\"\n\n\n \"Very likely. 'The milder the Verpp, the wilder the Qorn,' as the old\n saying goes.\"\n\n\n \"What do Qornt turn into?\" Retief asked.\n\n\n \"Hmmmm. That's a good question. So far, none have survived Qornthood.\"\n\n\n \"Have you thought of forsaking your warlike ways?\" Magnan asked. \"What\n about taking up sheepherding and regular church attendance?\"", "\"I have a suggestion,\" Magnan said. \"Why not turn the reins of\n government over to the Verpp? They seem a level-headed group.\"\n\n\n \"What good would that do? Qornt are Qornt. It seems there's always one\n among us who's a slave to instinct—and, naturally, we have to follow\n him.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Because that's the way it's done.\"\n\n\n \"Why not do it another way?\" Magnan offered. \"Now, I'd like to suggest\n community singing—\"\n\n\n \"If we gave up fighting, we might live too long. Then what would\n happen?\"\n\n\n \"Live too long?\" Magnan looked puzzled.\n\n\n \"When estivating time comes there'd be no burrows for us. Anyway, with\n the new Qornt stepping on our heels—\"", "There was a sound of crackling foliage. Twenty feet ahead, a leafy\n branch swung aside. An eight-foot biped stepped into view, long, thin,\n green-clad legs with back-bending knees moving in quick, bird-like\n steps. A pair of immense black-lensed goggles covered staring eyes set\n among bushy green hair above a great bone-white beak. The crest bobbed\n as the creature cocked its head, listening.\n\n\n Magnan gulped audibly. The Qornt froze, head tilted, beak aimed\n directly at the spot where the Terrestrials stood in the deep shade of\n a giant trunk.\n\n\n \"I'll go for help,\" Magnan squeaked. He whirled and took three leaps\n into the brush.", "Lesser trolls—beaked, bush-haired, great-eyed—trotted briskly,\n bird-kneed, bearing steaming platters, stood in groups of\n three strumming slender bottle-shaped lutes, or pranced an\n intricate-patterned dance, unnoticed in the shrill uproar as each of\n the magnificently draped, belted, feathered and jeweled Qornt carried\n on a shouted conversation with an equally noisy fellow.\n\n\n \"A most interesting display of barbaric splendor,\" Magnan breathed.\n \"Now we'd better be getting back.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, a moment,\" Zubb said. \"Observe the Qornt—the tallest of the\n feasters—he with the head-dress of crimson, purple, silver and pink.\"\n\n\n \"Twelve feet if he's an inch,\" Magnan estimated. \"And now we really\n must hurry along—\"", "\"That would be the invasion of Smorbrod,\" Magnan said. \"And unless we\n hurry, Retief, we're likely to be caught there with the last of the\n evacuees!\"\n\n\n \"How many Qornt would you say there are at Tarroon?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, a very large number. Perhaps fifteen or twenty.\"\n\n\n \"Fifteen or twenty what?\" Magnan looked perplexed.\n\n\n \"Fifteen or twenty Qornt.\"\n\n\n \"You mean that there are only fifteen or twenty individual Qornt in\n all?\"\n\n\n Another whistle. \"Not at all. I was referring to the local Qornt only.\n There are more at the other Centers, of course.\"\n\n\n \"And the Qornt are responsible for the ultimatum—unilaterally?\"", "\"Suppose we went down to Tarroon,\" Retief asked. \"What kind of\n reception would we get?\"\n\n\n \"That depends. I wouldn't recommend interfering with the Gwil or the\n Rheuk; it's their nest-mending time, you know. The Boog will be busy\n mating—such a tedious business—and of course the Qornt are tied up\n with their ceremonial feasting. I'm afraid no one will take any notice\n of you.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mean to say,\" Magnan demanded, \"that these ferocious Qornt, who\n have issued an ultimatum to the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne—who\n openly avow their occupied world—would ignore Terrestrials in their\n midst?\"\n\n\n \"If at all possible.\"\n\n\n Retief got to his feet.", "The smaller of the two captive Qornt ran long, slender fingers over\n a bony shin, from which he had turned back the tight-fitting green\n trousers.\n\n\n \"It's not broken,\" he whistled nasally in passable Terrestrial, eyeing\n Magnan through the heavy goggles, now badly cracked. \"Small thanks to\n you.\"\n\n\n Magnan smiled loftily. \"I daresay you'll think twice before interfering\n with peaceable diplomats in future.\"\n\n\n \"Diplomats? Surely you jest.\"\n\n\n \"Never mind us,\" Retief said. \"It's you fellows we'd like to talk\n about. How many of you are there?\"\n\n\n \"Only Zubb and myself.\"\n\n\n \"I mean altogether. How many Qornt?\"\n\n\n The alien whistled shrilly.", "\"See here, we have no interest in investigating this barrow,\" Magnan\n announced. \"We wish you to take us direct to Tarroon to interview your\n military leaders regarding the ultimatum!\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes, of course. Qornt Hall lies here inside the village.\"\n\n\n \"This is Tarroon?\"\n\n\n \"A modest civic center, sir, but there are those who love it.\"\n\n\n \"No wonder we didn't observe their works from the air,\" Magnan\n muttered. \"Camouflaged.\" He moved hesitantly through the opening.\n\n\n The party moved along a wide, deserted tunnel which sloped down\n steeply, then leveled off and branched. Zubb took the center branch,\n ducking slightly under the nine-foot ceiling lit at intervals with what\n appeared to be primitive incandescent panels.", "MIGHTIEST QORN\nBY KEITH LAUMER\nSly, brave and truculent, the Qornt\n\n held all humans in contempt—except one!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI\n\n\n Ambassador Nitworth glowered across his mirror-polished, nine-foot\n platinum desk at his assembled staff.\n\n\n \"Gentlemen, are any of you familiar with a race known as the Qornt?\"\n\n\n There was a moment of profound silence. Nitworth leaned forward,\n looking solemn.", "Qorn turned as Retief came up, blinking three-inch eyes. Zubb stepped\n forward, gibbered, waving his arms excitedly. Qorn pushed back his\n chair—a low, heavily padded stool—and stared unwinking at Retief,\n moving his head to bring first one great round eye, then the other, to\n bear. There were small blue veins in the immense fleshy beak. The bushy\n hair, springing out in a giant halo around the grayish, porous-skinned\n face, was wiry, stiff, moss-green, with tufts of chartreuse fuzz\n surrounding what appeared to be tympanic membranes. The tall head-dress\n of scarlet silk and purple feathers was slightly askew, and a loop of\n pink pearls had slipped down above one eye.\n\n\n Zubb finished his speech and fell silent, breathing hard.\n\n\n Qorn looked Retief over in silence, then belched.", "\"I can lick any Qornt in the house.\" Qorn said. \"That's why I'm Qorn.\"\n He belched again.\n\n\n A servant came up staggering under a weight of chain, dropped it with a\n crash at Magnan's feet. Zubb aimed the guns while the servant wrapped\n three loops around Magnan's wrists, snapped a lock in place.\n\n\n \"You next!\" The guns pointed at Retief's chest. He held out his arms.\n Four loops of silvery-gray chain in half-inch links dropped around\n them. The servant cinched them up tight, squeezed a lock through the\n ends and closed it.\n\n\n \"Now,\" Qorn said, lolling back in his chair, glass in hand. \"There's a\n bit of sport to be had here, lads. What shall we do with them?\"\n\n\n \"Let them go,\" the blue and flame Qornt said glumly.", "\"I'll peck away at him at knee level. When he bends over to swat me,\n I'll get a crack at him.\"\n\n\n Across the cleared floor, Qorn shook off his helpers with a snort.\n\n\n \"Enough! Let me at the upstart!\"\n\n\n Retief moved out to meet him, watching the upraised backward-jointed\n arms. Qorn stalked forward, long lean legs bent, long horny feet\n clacking against the polished floor. The other aliens—both servitors\n and bejeweled Qornt—formed a wide circle, all eyes unwaveringly on the\n combatants.", "\"Few signs of an advanced technology here,\" Magnan whispered. \"These\n creatures must devote all their talents to warlike enterprise.\"\n\n\n Ahead, Zubb slowed. A distant susurration was audible, a sustained\n high-pitched screeching. \"Softly, now. We approach Qornt Hall. They\n can be an irascible lot when disturbed at their feasting.\"\n\n\n \"When will the feast be over?\" Magnan called hoarsely.\n\n\n \"In another few weeks, I should imagine, if, as you say, they've\n scheduled an invasion for next month.\"\n\n\n \"Look here, Zubb.\" Magnan shook a finger at the tall alien. \"How is it\n that these Qornt are allowed to embark on piratical ventures of this\n sort without reference to the wishes of the majority?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, the majority of the Qornt favor the move, I imagine.\"", "\"Retief, we're engaged in a serious mission. This is not a time to\n think of sightseeing.\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to take a good look at what we're giving away.\"\n\n\n \"See here, Retief! One might almost receive the impression that you're\n questioning Corps policy!\"\n\n\n \"One might, at that. The Qornt have made their play, but I think it\n might be valuable to take a look at their cards before we fold. If I'm\n not back at the boat in an hour, lift without me.\"\n\n\n \"You expect me to make my way back alone?\"\n\n\n \"It's directly down-slope—\" Retief broke off, listening. Magnan\n clutched at his arm.", "\"Kindly return to your chair,\" Nitworth said coldly. \"A number of\n chores remain to be assigned. I think you, Magnan, need a little field\n experience. I want you to get over to Roolit I and take a look at these\n Qornt personally.\"\n\n\n Magnan's mouth opened and closed soundlessly.\n\n\n \"Not afraid of a few Qornt, are you, Magnan?\"\n\n\n \"Afraid? Good lord, no, ha ha. It's just that I'm afraid I may lose my\n head and do something rash if I go.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense! A diplomat is immune to heroic impulses. Take Retief along.\n No dawdling, now! I want you on the way in two hours. Notify the\n transport pool at once. Now get going!\"\n\n\n Magnan nodded unhappily and went into the hall.", "\"Stay back!\" Qorn hooted. \"Stand over there where I can keep an eye on\n you.\"\n\n\n \"Your Excellency, I'm empowered—\"\n\n\n \"Not here, you're not!\" Qorn trumpeted. \"Want peace, do you? Well, I\n don't want peace! I've had a surfeit of peace these last two centuries!\n I want action! Loot! Adventure! Glory!\" He turned to look down the\n table. \"How about it, fellows? It's war to the knife, eh?\"\nThere was a momentary silence from all sides.\n\n\n \"I guess so,\" grunted a giant Qornt in iridescent blue with\n flame-colored plumes.\n\n\n Qorn's eyes bulged. He half rose. \"We've been all over this,\" he\n bassooned. He clamped bony fingers on the hilt of a light rapier. \"I\n thought I'd made my point!\"", "The blue and flame Qornt stepped forward. \"Maybe this would be a good\n time to elect a new leader,\" he said. \"Now, my qualifications—\"\n\n\n \"Sit down,\" Retief said loudly. He stepped to the head of the table,\n seated himself in Qorn's vacated chair. \"A couple of you finish\n trussing Qorn up for me.\"\n\n\n \"But we must select a leader!\"\n\n\n \"That won't be necessary, boys. I'm your new leader.\"\n\"As I see it,\" Retief said, dribbling cigar ashes into an empty wine\n glass, \"you Qornt like to be warriors, but you don't particularly like\n to fight.\"\n\n\n \"We don't mind a little fighting—within reason. And, of course, as\n Qornt, we're expected to die in battle. But what I say is, why rush\n things?\"", "\"Don't mistake me. We Qornt like a military life. It's great sport to\n sit around roaring fires and drink and tell lies and then go dashing\n off to enjoy a brisk affray and some leisurely looting afterward. But\n we prefer a nice numerical advantage. Not this business of tackling you\n Terrestrials over on Guzzum—that was a mad notion. We had no idea what\n your strength was.\"\n\n\n \"But now that's all off, of course,\" Magnan chirped. \"Now that we've\n had diplomatic relations and all—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, by no means. The fleet lifts in thirty days. After all, we're\n Qornt; we have to satisfy our drive to action.\"\n\n\n \"But Mr. Retief is your leader now. He won't let you!\"", "A second great green-clad figure rose up to block his way. He spun,\n darted to the left. The first Qornt pounced, grappled Magnan to its\n narrow chest. Magnan yelled, threshing and kicking, broke free,\n turned—and collided with the eight-foot alien, coming in fast from the\n right. All three went down in a tangle of limbs.\n\n\n Retief jumped forward, hauled Magnan free, thrust him aside and\n stopped, right fist cocked. The two Qornt lay groaning feebly.\n\n\n \"Nice piece of work, Mr. Magnan,\" Retief said. \"You nailed both of\n them.\"\n\"Those undoubtedly are the most bloodthirsty, aggressive, merciless\n countenances it has ever been my misfortune to encounter,\" Magnan said.\n \"It hardly seems fair. Eight feet tall\nand\nfaces like that!\"", "\"Oh, not at all—except perhaps to a Terrestrial. The Qornt are\n sturdily built rascals, all over ten feet in height. And, of course,\n they do nothing but quarrel. A drone caste, actually.\"\n\n\n \"A caste? You mean they're biologically the same as you?\"\n\n\n \"Not at all! A Verpp wouldn't think of fertilizing a Qornt.\"\n\n\n \"I mean to say, you are of the same basic stock—descended from a\n common ancestor, perhaps.\"\n\n\n \"We are all Pud's creatures.\"\n\n\n \"What are the differences between you, then?\"\n\n\n \"Why, the Qornt are argumentive, boastful, lacking in appreciation\n for the finer things of life. One dreads to contemplate descending to\ntheir\nlevel.\"" ], [ "His Supreme Excellency The Qorn, Regent of Qornt, Over-Lord of the\n Galactic Destiny, Greets the Terrestrials and, with reference to the\n presence in mandated territory of Terrestrial squatters, has the honor\n to advise that he will require the use of his outer world on the\n thirtieth day. Then will the Qornt come with steel and fire. Receive,\n Terrestrials, renewed assurances of my awareness of your existence,\n and let Those who dare gird for the contest.\n\n\n \"Frankly, I wouldn't call it conciliatory,\" Magnan said.\n\n\n Nitworth tapped the paper with a finger.\n\n\n \"We have been served, gentlemen, with nothing less than an Ultimatum!\"\n\n\n \"Well, we'll soon straighten these fellows out—\" the Military Attache\n began.", "\"Early tomorrow,\" Magnan said. \"Or maybe later today.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I see you're of a mind with me,\" Nitworth nodded. \"Our plan of\n action is clear, but it remains to be implemented. We have a population\n of over fifteen million individuals to relocate.\" He eyed the\n Political Officer. \"I want five proposals for resettlement on my desk\n by oh-eight-hundred hours tomorrow.\" Nitworth rapped out instructions.\n Harried-looking staff members arose and hurried from the room. Magnan\n eased toward the door.\n\n\n \"Where are you going, Magnan?\" Nitworth snapped.\n\n\n \"Since you're so busy, I thought I'd just slip back down to Com Inq. It\n was a most interesting orientation lecture, Mr. Ambassador. Be sure to\n let us know how it works out.\"", "\"Kindly return to your chair,\" Nitworth said coldly. \"A number of\n chores remain to be assigned. I think you, Magnan, need a little field\n experience. I want you to get over to Roolit I and take a look at these\n Qornt personally.\"\n\n\n Magnan's mouth opened and closed soundlessly.\n\n\n \"Not afraid of a few Qornt, are you, Magnan?\"\n\n\n \"Afraid? Good lord, no, ha ha. It's just that I'm afraid I may lose my\n head and do something rash if I go.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense! A diplomat is immune to heroic impulses. Take Retief along.\n No dawdling, now! I want you on the way in two hours. Notify the\n transport pool at once. Now get going!\"\n\n\n Magnan nodded unhappily and went into the hall.", "Qorn rolled an eye at Retief and another at Magnan. \"Take these two,\"\n he hooted. \"I'll wager they came here to negotiate a surrender!\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Magnan started.\n\n\n \"Hold it, Mr. Magnan,\" Retief said. \"I'll tell him.\"\n\n\n \"What's your proposal?\" Qorn whistled, taking a gulp from his goblet.\n \"A fifty-fifty split? Monetary reparations? Alternate territory? I can\n assure you, it's useless. We Qornt\nlike\nto fight.\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid you've gotten the wrong impression, your Excellency,\"\n Retief said blandly. \"We didn't come to negotiate. We came to deliver\n an Ultimatum.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Qorn trumpeted. Behind Retief, Magnan spluttered.", "\"Suppose we went down to Tarroon,\" Retief asked. \"What kind of\n reception would we get?\"\n\n\n \"That depends. I wouldn't recommend interfering with the Gwil or the\n Rheuk; it's their nest-mending time, you know. The Boog will be busy\n mating—such a tedious business—and of course the Qornt are tied up\n with their ceremonial feasting. I'm afraid no one will take any notice\n of you.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mean to say,\" Magnan demanded, \"that these ferocious Qornt, who\n have issued an ultimatum to the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne—who\n openly avow their occupied world—would ignore Terrestrials in their\n midst?\"\n\n\n \"If at all possible.\"\n\n\n Retief got to his feet.", "\"I'll have my boys start in to crack this thing,\" the Chief of the\n Confidential Terrestrial Source Section spoke up. \"I'll fit out a\n couple of volunteers with plastic beaks—\"\n\n\n \"No cloak and dagger work, gentlemen! Long range policy will be\n worked out by Deep-Think teams back at the Department. Our role will\n be a holding action. Now I want suggestions for a comprehensive,\n well rounded and decisive course for meeting this threat. Any\n recommendation?\"\n\n\n The Political Officer placed his fingertips together. \"What about a\n stiff Note demanding an extra week's time?\"\n\n\n \"No! No begging,\" the Economic Officer objected. \"I'd say a calm,\n dignified, aggressive withdrawal—as soon as possible.\"\n\n\n \"We don't want to give them the idea we spook easily,\" the Military\n Attache said. \"Let's delay the withdrawal—say, until tomorrow.\"", "\"That would be the invasion of Smorbrod,\" Magnan said. \"And unless we\n hurry, Retief, we're likely to be caught there with the last of the\n evacuees!\"\n\n\n \"How many Qornt would you say there are at Tarroon?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, a very large number. Perhaps fifteen or twenty.\"\n\n\n \"Fifteen or twenty what?\" Magnan looked perplexed.\n\n\n \"Fifteen or twenty Qornt.\"\n\n\n \"You mean that there are only fifteen or twenty individual Qornt in\n all?\"\n\n\n Another whistle. \"Not at all. I was referring to the local Qornt only.\n There are more at the other Centers, of course.\"\n\n\n \"And the Qornt are responsible for the ultimatum—unilaterally?\"", "\"See here, we have no interest in investigating this barrow,\" Magnan\n announced. \"We wish you to take us direct to Tarroon to interview your\n military leaders regarding the ultimatum!\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes, of course. Qornt Hall lies here inside the village.\"\n\n\n \"This is Tarroon?\"\n\n\n \"A modest civic center, sir, but there are those who love it.\"\n\n\n \"No wonder we didn't observe their works from the air,\" Magnan\n muttered. \"Camouflaged.\" He moved hesitantly through the opening.\n\n\n The party moved along a wide, deserted tunnel which sloped down\n steeply, then leveled off and branched. Zubb took the center branch,\n ducking slightly under the nine-foot ceiling lit at intervals with what\n appeared to be primitive incandescent panels.", "\"Oh, Retief,\" Nitworth said. Retief turned.\n\n\n \"Try to restrain Mr. Magnan from any impulsive moves—in any\n direction.\"\nII\n\n\n Retief and Magnan topped a ridge and looked down across a slope\n of towering tree-shrubs and glossy violet-stemmed palms set among\n flamboyant blossoms of yellow and red, reaching down to a strip of\n white beach with the blue sea beyond.\n\n\n \"A delightful vista,\" Magnan said, mopping at his face. \"A pity we\n couldn't locate the Qornt. We'll go back now and report—\"\n\n\n \"I'm pretty sure the settlement is off to the right,\" Retief said. \"Why\n don't you head back for the boat, while I ease over and see what I can\n observe.\"", "\"Great heavens, Retief!\" Magnan exclaimed in a whisper. \"It sounds as\n though these brutes employ a battle armada as simpler souls might a set\n of toy sailboats!\"\n\n\n Retief stepped past Magnan and Zubb to study the feasting hall. \"I can\n see that their votes would carry all the necessary weight.\"\n\n\n \"And now an interview with the Qorn himself,\" Zubb shrilled. \"If you'll\n kindly step along, gentlemen....\"\n\n\n \"That won't be necessary,\" Magnan said hastily, \"I've decided to refer\n the matter to committee.\"\n\n\n \"After having come so far,\" Zubb said, \"it would be a pity to miss\n having a cosy chat.\"\n\n\n There was a pause.", "\"I have a suggestion,\" Magnan said. \"Why not turn the reins of\n government over to the Verpp? They seem a level-headed group.\"\n\n\n \"What good would that do? Qornt are Qornt. It seems there's always one\n among us who's a slave to instinct—and, naturally, we have to follow\n him.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Because that's the way it's done.\"\n\n\n \"Why not do it another way?\" Magnan offered. \"Now, I'd like to suggest\n community singing—\"\n\n\n \"If we gave up fighting, we might live too long. Then what would\n happen?\"\n\n\n \"Live too long?\" Magnan looked puzzled.\n\n\n \"When estivating time comes there'd be no burrows for us. Anyway, with\n the new Qornt stepping on our heels—\"", "\"There happens to be more to this piece of truculence than appears on\n the surface,\" the Ambassador cut in. He paused, waiting for interested\n frowns to settle into place.\n\n\n \"Note, gentlemen, that these invaders have appeared on terrestrial\n controlled soil—and without so much as a flicker from the instruments\n of the Navigational Monitor Service!\"\n\n\n The Military Attache blinked. \"That's absurd,\" he said flatly. Nitworth\n slapped the table.\n\n\n \"We're up against something new, gentlemen! I've considered every\n hypothesis from cloaks of invisibility to time travel! The fact is—the\n Qornt fleets are indetectible!\"\nThe Military Attache pulled at his lower lip. \"In that case, we can't\n try conclusions with these fellows until we have an indetectible drive\n of our own. I recommend a crash project. In the meantime—\"", "\"You can do better than that,\" Qorn hooted. \"Now here's a suggestion:\n we carve them up a little—lop off the external labiae and pinnae,\n say—and ship them back.\"\n\n\n \"Good lord! Retief, he's talking about cutting off our ears and sending\n us home mutilated! What a barbaric proposal!\"\n\n\n \"It wouldn't be the first time a Terrestrial diplomat got a trimming,\"\n Retief commented.\n\n\n \"It should have the effect of stimulating the Terries to put up a\n reasonable scrap,\" Qorn said judiciously. \"I have a feeling that\n they're thinking of giving up without a struggle.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I doubt that,\" the blue-and-flame Qornt said. \"Why should they?\"", "\"Retief, we're engaged in a serious mission. This is not a time to\n think of sightseeing.\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to take a good look at what we're giving away.\"\n\n\n \"See here, Retief! One might almost receive the impression that you're\n questioning Corps policy!\"\n\n\n \"One might, at that. The Qornt have made their play, but I think it\n might be valuable to take a look at their cards before we fold. If I'm\n not back at the boat in an hour, lift without me.\"\n\n\n \"You expect me to make my way back alone?\"\n\n\n \"It's directly down-slope—\" Retief broke off, listening. Magnan\n clutched at his arm.", "\"Need I remind you, sir,\" he said icily, \"that this is an official\n diplomatic function? I can brook no interference from disinterested\n parties.\"\n\n\n Zubb hesitated. Magnan held out a hand. \"I must ask you to hand me your\n weapons, Zubb.\"\n\n\n \"Look here,\" Zubb began.\n\n\n \"I\nmay\nlose my temper,\" Magnan hinted. Zubb lowered the guns, passed\n them to Magnan. He thrust them into his belt with a sour smile, turned\n back to watch the encounter.", "\"They were a warlike race known in this sector back in Concordiat\n times, perhaps two hundred years ago. They vanished as suddenly as\n they had appeared. There was no record of where they went.\" He paused\n for effect.\n\n\n \"They have now reappeared—occupying the inner planet of this system!\"\n\n\n \"But, sir,\" Second Secretary Magnan offered. \"That's uninhabited\n Terrestrial territory....\"\n\n\n \"Indeed, Mr. Magnan?\" Nitworth smiled icily. \"It appears the Qornt do\n not share that opinion.\" He plucked a heavy parchment from a folder\n before him, harrumphed and read aloud:", "\"Not bad,\" Retief said admiringly. \"Maybe we could get up a match\n between you and Ambassador Sternwheeler. You've got the volume on him,\n but he's got timbre.\"\n\n\n \"So,\" Qorn hooted in a resonant tenor. \"You come from Guzzum, eh? Or\n Smorbrod, as I think you call it. What is it you're after? More time?\n A compromise? Negotiations? Peace?\" He slammed a bony hand against the\n table. \"The answer is\nno\n!\"\n\n\n Zubb twittered. Qorn cocked an eye, motioned to a servant. \"Chain that\n one.\" He indicated Magnan. His eyes went to Retief. \"This one's bigger;\n you'd best chain him, too.\"\n\n\n \"Why, your Excellency—\" Magnan started, stepping forward.", "\"Don't mistake me. We Qornt like a military life. It's great sport to\n sit around roaring fires and drink and tell lies and then go dashing\n off to enjoy a brisk affray and some leisurely looting afterward. But\n we prefer a nice numerical advantage. Not this business of tackling you\n Terrestrials over on Guzzum—that was a mad notion. We had no idea what\n your strength was.\"\n\n\n \"But now that's all off, of course,\" Magnan chirped. \"Now that we've\n had diplomatic relations and all—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, by no means. The fleet lifts in thirty days. After all, we're\n Qornt; we have to satisfy our drive to action.\"\n\n\n \"But Mr. Retief is your leader now. He won't let you!\"", "\"Stay back!\" Qorn hooted. \"Stand over there where I can keep an eye on\n you.\"\n\n\n \"Your Excellency, I'm empowered—\"\n\n\n \"Not here, you're not!\" Qorn trumpeted. \"Want peace, do you? Well, I\n don't want peace! I've had a surfeit of peace these last two centuries!\n I want action! Loot! Adventure! Glory!\" He turned to look down the\n table. \"How about it, fellows? It's war to the knife, eh?\"\nThere was a momentary silence from all sides.\n\n\n \"I guess so,\" grunted a giant Qornt in iridescent blue with\n flame-colored plumes.\n\n\n Qorn's eyes bulged. He half rose. \"We've been all over this,\" he\n bassooned. He clamped bony fingers on the hilt of a light rapier. \"I\n thought I'd made my point!\"", "\"Oh, sure, Qorn.\"\n\n\n \"You bet.\"\n\n\n \"I'm convinced.\"\n\n\n Qorn rumbled and resumed his seat. \"All for one and one for all, that's\n us.\"\n\n\n \"And you're the one, eh, Qorn?\" Retief commented.\n\n\n Magnan cleared his throat. \"I sense that some of you gentlemen are not\n convinced of the wisdom of this move,\" he piped, looking along the\n table at the silks, jewels, beaks, feather-decked crests and staring\n eyes.\n\n\n \"Silence!\" Qorn hooted. \"No use your talking to my loyal lieutenants\n anyway,\" he added. \"They do whatever I convince them they ought to do.\"\n\n\n \"But I'm sure that on more mature consideration—\"" ], [ "\"Kindly return to your chair,\" Nitworth said coldly. \"A number of\n chores remain to be assigned. I think you, Magnan, need a little field\n experience. I want you to get over to Roolit I and take a look at these\n Qornt personally.\"\n\n\n Magnan's mouth opened and closed soundlessly.\n\n\n \"Not afraid of a few Qornt, are you, Magnan?\"\n\n\n \"Afraid? Good lord, no, ha ha. It's just that I'm afraid I may lose my\n head and do something rash if I go.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense! A diplomat is immune to heroic impulses. Take Retief along.\n No dawdling, now! I want you on the way in two hours. Notify the\n transport pool at once. Now get going!\"\n\n\n Magnan nodded unhappily and went into the hall.", "\"Early tomorrow,\" Magnan said. \"Or maybe later today.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I see you're of a mind with me,\" Nitworth nodded. \"Our plan of\n action is clear, but it remains to be implemented. We have a population\n of over fifteen million individuals to relocate.\" He eyed the\n Political Officer. \"I want five proposals for resettlement on my desk\n by oh-eight-hundred hours tomorrow.\" Nitworth rapped out instructions.\n Harried-looking staff members arose and hurried from the room. Magnan\n eased toward the door.\n\n\n \"Where are you going, Magnan?\" Nitworth snapped.\n\n\n \"Since you're so busy, I thought I'd just slip back down to Com Inq. It\n was a most interesting orientation lecture, Mr. Ambassador. Be sure to\n let us know how it works out.\"", "\"See here, we have no interest in investigating this barrow,\" Magnan\n announced. \"We wish you to take us direct to Tarroon to interview your\n military leaders regarding the ultimatum!\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes, of course. Qornt Hall lies here inside the village.\"\n\n\n \"This is Tarroon?\"\n\n\n \"A modest civic center, sir, but there are those who love it.\"\n\n\n \"No wonder we didn't observe their works from the air,\" Magnan\n muttered. \"Camouflaged.\" He moved hesitantly through the opening.\n\n\n The party moved along a wide, deserted tunnel which sloped down\n steeply, then leveled off and branched. Zubb took the center branch,\n ducking slightly under the nine-foot ceiling lit at intervals with what\n appeared to be primitive incandescent panels.", "\"I think our course is clear, Mr. Magnan. It's up to us to go down and\n attract a little attention.\"\nIII\n\n\n \"I'm not at all sure we're going about this in the right way,\" Magnan\n puffed, trotting at Retief's side. \"These fellows Zubb and Slun—Oh,\n they seem affable enough, but how can we be sure we're not being led\n into a trap?\"\n\n\n \"We can't.\"\n\n\n Magnan stopped short. \"Let's go back.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Retief said. \"Of course there may be an ambush—\"\n\n\n Magnan moved off. \"Let's keep going.\"\n\n\n The party emerged from the undergrowth at the edge of a great\n brush-grown mound. Slun took the lead, rounded the flank of the\n hillock, halted at a rectangular opening cut into the slope.", "\"Retief, we're engaged in a serious mission. This is not a time to\n think of sightseeing.\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to take a good look at what we're giving away.\"\n\n\n \"See here, Retief! One might almost receive the impression that you're\n questioning Corps policy!\"\n\n\n \"One might, at that. The Qornt have made their play, but I think it\n might be valuable to take a look at their cards before we fold. If I'm\n not back at the boat in an hour, lift without me.\"\n\n\n \"You expect me to make my way back alone?\"\n\n\n \"It's directly down-slope—\" Retief broke off, listening. Magnan\n clutched at his arm.", "\"Need I remind you, sir,\" he said icily, \"that this is an official\n diplomatic function? I can brook no interference from disinterested\n parties.\"\n\n\n Zubb hesitated. Magnan held out a hand. \"I must ask you to hand me your\n weapons, Zubb.\"\n\n\n \"Look here,\" Zubb began.\n\n\n \"I\nmay\nlose my temper,\" Magnan hinted. Zubb lowered the guns, passed\n them to Magnan. He thrust them into his belt with a sour smile, turned\n back to watch the encounter.", "There was a sound of crackling foliage. Twenty feet ahead, a leafy\n branch swung aside. An eight-foot biped stepped into view, long, thin,\n green-clad legs with back-bending knees moving in quick, bird-like\n steps. A pair of immense black-lensed goggles covered staring eyes set\n among bushy green hair above a great bone-white beak. The crest bobbed\n as the creature cocked its head, listening.\n\n\n Magnan gulped audibly. The Qornt froze, head tilted, beak aimed\n directly at the spot where the Terrestrials stood in the deep shade of\n a giant trunk.\n\n\n \"I'll go for help,\" Magnan squeaked. He whirled and took three leaps\n into the brush.", "\"Oh, Retief,\" Nitworth said. Retief turned.\n\n\n \"Try to restrain Mr. Magnan from any impulsive moves—in any\n direction.\"\nII\n\n\n Retief and Magnan topped a ridge and looked down across a slope\n of towering tree-shrubs and glossy violet-stemmed palms set among\n flamboyant blossoms of yellow and red, reaching down to a strip of\n white beach with the blue sea beyond.\n\n\n \"A delightful vista,\" Magnan said, mopping at his face. \"A pity we\n couldn't locate the Qornt. We'll go back now and report—\"\n\n\n \"I'm pretty sure the settlement is off to the right,\" Retief said. \"Why\n don't you head back for the boat, while I ease over and see what I can\n observe.\"", "\"Great heavens, Retief!\" Magnan exclaimed in a whisper. \"It sounds as\n though these brutes employ a battle armada as simpler souls might a set\n of toy sailboats!\"\n\n\n Retief stepped past Magnan and Zubb to study the feasting hall. \"I can\n see that their votes would carry all the necessary weight.\"\n\n\n \"And now an interview with the Qorn himself,\" Zubb shrilled. \"If you'll\n kindly step along, gentlemen....\"\n\n\n \"That won't be necessary,\" Magnan said hastily, \"I've decided to refer\n the matter to committee.\"\n\n\n \"After having come so far,\" Zubb said, \"it would be a pity to miss\n having a cosy chat.\"\n\n\n There was a pause.", "\"Suppose we went down to Tarroon,\" Retief asked. \"What kind of\n reception would we get?\"\n\n\n \"That depends. I wouldn't recommend interfering with the Gwil or the\n Rheuk; it's their nest-mending time, you know. The Boog will be busy\n mating—such a tedious business—and of course the Qornt are tied up\n with their ceremonial feasting. I'm afraid no one will take any notice\n of you.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mean to say,\" Magnan demanded, \"that these ferocious Qornt, who\n have issued an ultimatum to the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne—who\n openly avow their occupied world—would ignore Terrestrials in their\n midst?\"\n\n\n \"If at all possible.\"\n\n\n Retief got to his feet.", "\"You can find your way easily enough from here,\" he said. \"You'll\n excuse us, I hope—\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense, Slun!\" Zubb pushed forward. \"I'll escort our guests to Qornt\n Hall.\" He twittered briefly to his fellow Verpp. Slun twittered back.\n\n\n \"I don't like it, Retief,\" Magnan whispered. \"Those fellows are\n plotting mischief.\"\n\n\n \"Threaten them with violence, Mr Magnan. They're scared of you.\"\n\n\n \"That's true. And the drubbing they received was well-deserved. I'm a\n patient man, but there are occasions—\"\n\n\n \"Come along, please,\" Zubb called. \"Another ten minutes' walk—\"", "His Supreme Excellency The Qorn, Regent of Qornt, Over-Lord of the\n Galactic Destiny, Greets the Terrestrials and, with reference to the\n presence in mandated territory of Terrestrial squatters, has the honor\n to advise that he will require the use of his outer world on the\n thirtieth day. Then will the Qornt come with steel and fire. Receive,\n Terrestrials, renewed assurances of my awareness of your existence,\n and let Those who dare gird for the contest.\n\n\n \"Frankly, I wouldn't call it conciliatory,\" Magnan said.\n\n\n Nitworth tapped the paper with a finger.\n\n\n \"We have been served, gentlemen, with nothing less than an Ultimatum!\"\n\n\n \"Well, we'll soon straighten these fellows out—\" the Military Attache\n began.", "\"Oh, sure, Qorn.\"\n\n\n \"You bet.\"\n\n\n \"I'm convinced.\"\n\n\n Qorn rumbled and resumed his seat. \"All for one and one for all, that's\n us.\"\n\n\n \"And you're the one, eh, Qorn?\" Retief commented.\n\n\n Magnan cleared his throat. \"I sense that some of you gentlemen are not\n convinced of the wisdom of this move,\" he piped, looking along the\n table at the silks, jewels, beaks, feather-decked crests and staring\n eyes.\n\n\n \"Silence!\" Qorn hooted. \"No use your talking to my loyal lieutenants\n anyway,\" he added. \"They do whatever I convince them they ought to do.\"\n\n\n \"But I'm sure that on more mature consideration—\"", "\"Here, no signalling!\" Magnan snapped, looking around.\n\n\n \"That was merely an expression of amusement.\"\n\n\n \"You find the situation amusing? I assure you, sir, you are in perilous\n straits at the moment. I\nmay\nfly into another rage, you know.\"\n\n\n \"Please, restrain yourself. I was merely somewhat astonished—\" a small\n whistle escaped—\"at being taken for a Qornt.\"\n\n\n \"Aren't you a Qornt?\"\n\n\n \"I? Great snail trails, no!\" More stifled whistles of amusement escaped\n the beaked face. \"Both Zubb and I are Verpp. Naturalists, as it\n happens.\"\n\n\n \"You certainly\nlook\nlike Qornt.\"", "\"Don't mistake me. We Qornt like a military life. It's great sport to\n sit around roaring fires and drink and tell lies and then go dashing\n off to enjoy a brisk affray and some leisurely looting afterward. But\n we prefer a nice numerical advantage. Not this business of tackling you\n Terrestrials over on Guzzum—that was a mad notion. We had no idea what\n your strength was.\"\n\n\n \"But now that's all off, of course,\" Magnan chirped. \"Now that we've\n had diplomatic relations and all—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, by no means. The fleet lifts in thirty days. After all, we're\n Qornt; we have to satisfy our drive to action.\"\n\n\n \"But Mr. Retief is your leader now. He won't let you!\"", "Qorn rolled an eye at Retief and another at Magnan. \"Take these two,\"\n he hooted. \"I'll wager they came here to negotiate a surrender!\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Magnan started.\n\n\n \"Hold it, Mr. Magnan,\" Retief said. \"I'll tell him.\"\n\n\n \"What's your proposal?\" Qorn whistled, taking a gulp from his goblet.\n \"A fifty-fifty split? Monetary reparations? Alternate territory? I can\n assure you, it's useless. We Qornt\nlike\nto fight.\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid you've gotten the wrong impression, your Excellency,\"\n Retief said blandly. \"We didn't come to negotiate. We came to deliver\n an Ultimatum.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Qorn trumpeted. Behind Retief, Magnan spluttered.", "\"I have a suggestion,\" Magnan said. \"Why not turn the reins of\n government over to the Verpp? They seem a level-headed group.\"\n\n\n \"What good would that do? Qornt are Qornt. It seems there's always one\n among us who's a slave to instinct—and, naturally, we have to follow\n him.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Because that's the way it's done.\"\n\n\n \"Why not do it another way?\" Magnan offered. \"Now, I'd like to suggest\n community singing—\"\n\n\n \"If we gave up fighting, we might live too long. Then what would\n happen?\"\n\n\n \"Live too long?\" Magnan looked puzzled.\n\n\n \"When estivating time comes there'd be no burrows for us. Anyway, with\n the new Qornt stepping on our heels—\"", "\"Few signs of an advanced technology here,\" Magnan whispered. \"These\n creatures must devote all their talents to warlike enterprise.\"\n\n\n Ahead, Zubb slowed. A distant susurration was audible, a sustained\n high-pitched screeching. \"Softly, now. We approach Qornt Hall. They\n can be an irascible lot when disturbed at their feasting.\"\n\n\n \"When will the feast be over?\" Magnan called hoarsely.\n\n\n \"In another few weeks, I should imagine, if, as you say, they've\n scheduled an invasion for next month.\"\n\n\n \"Look here, Zubb.\" Magnan shook a finger at the tall alien. \"How is it\n that these Qornt are allowed to embark on piratical ventures of this\n sort without reference to the wishes of the majority?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, the majority of the Qornt favor the move, I imagine.\"", "Lesser trolls—beaked, bush-haired, great-eyed—trotted briskly,\n bird-kneed, bearing steaming platters, stood in groups of\n three strumming slender bottle-shaped lutes, or pranced an\n intricate-patterned dance, unnoticed in the shrill uproar as each of\n the magnificently draped, belted, feathered and jeweled Qornt carried\n on a shouted conversation with an equally noisy fellow.\n\n\n \"A most interesting display of barbaric splendor,\" Magnan breathed.\n \"Now we'd better be getting back.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, a moment,\" Zubb said. \"Observe the Qornt—the tallest of the\n feasters—he with the head-dress of crimson, purple, silver and pink.\"\n\n\n \"Twelve feet if he's an inch,\" Magnan estimated. \"And now we really\n must hurry along—\"", "\"That one is chief among these rowdies. I'm sure you'll want a word\n with him. He controls not only the Tarroonian vessels but those from\n the other Centers as well.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of vessels? Warships?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. What other kind would the Qornt bother with?\"\n\n\n \"I don't suppose,\" Magnan said casually, \"that you'd know the type,\n tonnage, armament and manning of these vessels? And how many units\n comprise the fleet? And where they're based at present?\"\n\n\n \"They're fully automated twenty-thousand-ton all-purpose dreadnaughts.\n They mount a variety of weapons. The Qornt are fond of that sort of\n thing. Each of the Qornt has his own, of course. They're virtually\n identical, except for the personal touches each individual has given\n his ship.\"" ], [ "\"I think our course is clear, Mr. Magnan. It's up to us to go down and\n attract a little attention.\"\nIII\n\n\n \"I'm not at all sure we're going about this in the right way,\" Magnan\n puffed, trotting at Retief's side. \"These fellows Zubb and Slun—Oh,\n they seem affable enough, but how can we be sure we're not being led\n into a trap?\"\n\n\n \"We can't.\"\n\n\n Magnan stopped short. \"Let's go back.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Retief said. \"Of course there may be an ambush—\"\n\n\n Magnan moved off. \"Let's keep going.\"\n\n\n The party emerged from the undergrowth at the edge of a great\n brush-grown mound. Slun took the lead, rounded the flank of the\n hillock, halted at a rectangular opening cut into the slope.", "\"Oh, Retief,\" Nitworth said. Retief turned.\n\n\n \"Try to restrain Mr. Magnan from any impulsive moves—in any\n direction.\"\nII\n\n\n Retief and Magnan topped a ridge and looked down across a slope\n of towering tree-shrubs and glossy violet-stemmed palms set among\n flamboyant blossoms of yellow and red, reaching down to a strip of\n white beach with the blue sea beyond.\n\n\n \"A delightful vista,\" Magnan said, mopping at his face. \"A pity we\n couldn't locate the Qornt. We'll go back now and report—\"\n\n\n \"I'm pretty sure the settlement is off to the right,\" Retief said. \"Why\n don't you head back for the boat, while I ease over and see what I can\n observe.\"", "\"Retief, we're engaged in a serious mission. This is not a time to\n think of sightseeing.\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to take a good look at what we're giving away.\"\n\n\n \"See here, Retief! One might almost receive the impression that you're\n questioning Corps policy!\"\n\n\n \"One might, at that. The Qornt have made their play, but I think it\n might be valuable to take a look at their cards before we fold. If I'm\n not back at the boat in an hour, lift without me.\"\n\n\n \"You expect me to make my way back alone?\"\n\n\n \"It's directly down-slope—\" Retief broke off, listening. Magnan\n clutched at his arm.", "\"Kindly return to your chair,\" Nitworth said coldly. \"A number of\n chores remain to be assigned. I think you, Magnan, need a little field\n experience. I want you to get over to Roolit I and take a look at these\n Qornt personally.\"\n\n\n Magnan's mouth opened and closed soundlessly.\n\n\n \"Not afraid of a few Qornt, are you, Magnan?\"\n\n\n \"Afraid? Good lord, no, ha ha. It's just that I'm afraid I may lose my\n head and do something rash if I go.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense! A diplomat is immune to heroic impulses. Take Retief along.\n No dawdling, now! I want you on the way in two hours. Notify the\n transport pool at once. Now get going!\"\n\n\n Magnan nodded unhappily and went into the hall.", "There was a sound of crackling foliage. Twenty feet ahead, a leafy\n branch swung aside. An eight-foot biped stepped into view, long, thin,\n green-clad legs with back-bending knees moving in quick, bird-like\n steps. A pair of immense black-lensed goggles covered staring eyes set\n among bushy green hair above a great bone-white beak. The crest bobbed\n as the creature cocked its head, listening.\n\n\n Magnan gulped audibly. The Qornt froze, head tilted, beak aimed\n directly at the spot where the Terrestrials stood in the deep shade of\n a giant trunk.\n\n\n \"I'll go for help,\" Magnan squeaked. He whirled and took three leaps\n into the brush.", "Qorn rolled an eye at Retief and another at Magnan. \"Take these two,\"\n he hooted. \"I'll wager they came here to negotiate a surrender!\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Magnan started.\n\n\n \"Hold it, Mr. Magnan,\" Retief said. \"I'll tell him.\"\n\n\n \"What's your proposal?\" Qorn whistled, taking a gulp from his goblet.\n \"A fifty-fifty split? Monetary reparations? Alternate territory? I can\n assure you, it's useless. We Qornt\nlike\nto fight.\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid you've gotten the wrong impression, your Excellency,\"\n Retief said blandly. \"We didn't come to negotiate. We came to deliver\n an Ultimatum.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Qorn trumpeted. Behind Retief, Magnan spluttered.", "A second great green-clad figure rose up to block his way. He spun,\n darted to the left. The first Qornt pounced, grappled Magnan to its\n narrow chest. Magnan yelled, threshing and kicking, broke free,\n turned—and collided with the eight-foot alien, coming in fast from the\n right. All three went down in a tangle of limbs.\n\n\n Retief jumped forward, hauled Magnan free, thrust him aside and\n stopped, right fist cocked. The two Qornt lay groaning feebly.\n\n\n \"Nice piece of work, Mr. Magnan,\" Retief said. \"You nailed both of\n them.\"\n\"Those undoubtedly are the most bloodthirsty, aggressive, merciless\n countenances it has ever been my misfortune to encounter,\" Magnan said.\n \"It hardly seems fair. Eight feet tall\nand\nfaces like that!\"", "\"You can find your way easily enough from here,\" he said. \"You'll\n excuse us, I hope—\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense, Slun!\" Zubb pushed forward. \"I'll escort our guests to Qornt\n Hall.\" He twittered briefly to his fellow Verpp. Slun twittered back.\n\n\n \"I don't like it, Retief,\" Magnan whispered. \"Those fellows are\n plotting mischief.\"\n\n\n \"Threaten them with violence, Mr Magnan. They're scared of you.\"\n\n\n \"That's true. And the drubbing they received was well-deserved. I'm a\n patient man, but there are occasions—\"\n\n\n \"Come along, please,\" Zubb called. \"Another ten minutes' walk—\"", "\"Great heavens, Retief!\" Magnan exclaimed in a whisper. \"It sounds as\n though these brutes employ a battle armada as simpler souls might a set\n of toy sailboats!\"\n\n\n Retief stepped past Magnan and Zubb to study the feasting hall. \"I can\n see that their votes would carry all the necessary weight.\"\n\n\n \"And now an interview with the Qorn himself,\" Zubb shrilled. \"If you'll\n kindly step along, gentlemen....\"\n\n\n \"That won't be necessary,\" Magnan said hastily, \"I've decided to refer\n the matter to committee.\"\n\n\n \"After having come so far,\" Zubb said, \"it would be a pity to miss\n having a cosy chat.\"\n\n\n There was a pause.", "\"Suppose we went down to Tarroon,\" Retief asked. \"What kind of\n reception would we get?\"\n\n\n \"That depends. I wouldn't recommend interfering with the Gwil or the\n Rheuk; it's their nest-mending time, you know. The Boog will be busy\n mating—such a tedious business—and of course the Qornt are tied up\n with their ceremonial feasting. I'm afraid no one will take any notice\n of you.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mean to say,\" Magnan demanded, \"that these ferocious Qornt, who\n have issued an ultimatum to the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne—who\n openly avow their occupied world—would ignore Terrestrials in their\n midst?\"\n\n\n \"If at all possible.\"\n\n\n Retief got to his feet.", "\"Come softly, now.\" Zubb beckoned, moving toward a bend in the\n yellow-lit corridor. Retief and Magnan moved forward.\nThe corridor debouched through a high double door into a vast oval\n chamber, high-domed, gloomy, paneled in dark wood and hung with\n tattered banners, scarred halberds, pikes, rusted longswords, crossed\n spears over patinaed hauberks, pitted radiation armor, corroded power\n rifles, the immense mummified heads of horned and fanged animals. Great\n guttering torches in wall brackets and in stands along the length\n of the long table shed a smoky light that reflected from the mirror\n polish of the red granite floor, gleamed on polished silver bowls and\n paper-thin glass, shone jewel-red and gold through dark bottles—and\n cast long flickering shadows behind the fifteen trolls at the board.", "\"Don't mistake me. We Qornt like a military life. It's great sport to\n sit around roaring fires and drink and tell lies and then go dashing\n off to enjoy a brisk affray and some leisurely looting afterward. But\n we prefer a nice numerical advantage. Not this business of tackling you\n Terrestrials over on Guzzum—that was a mad notion. We had no idea what\n your strength was.\"\n\n\n \"But now that's all off, of course,\" Magnan chirped. \"Now that we've\n had diplomatic relations and all—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, by no means. The fleet lifts in thirty days. After all, we're\n Qornt; we have to satisfy our drive to action.\"\n\n\n \"But Mr. Retief is your leader now. He won't let you!\"", "\"Qorn, you seem to be the fire-brand here,\" Retief said. \"I think the\n rest of the boys would listen to reason—\"\n\n\n \"Over my dead body!\"\n\n\n \"My idea exactly,\" Retief said. \"You claim you can lick any man in\n the house. Unwind yourself from your ribbons and step out here on the\n floor, and we'll see how good you are at backing up your conversation.\"\nMagnan hovered at Retief's side. \"Twelve feet tall,\" he moaned. \"And\n did you notice the size of those hands?\"\n\n\n Retief watched as Qorn's aides helped him out of his formal trappings.\n \"I wouldn't worry too much, Mr. Magnan. This is a light-Gee world. I\n doubt if old Qorn would weigh up at more than two-fifty standard pounds\n here.\"\n\n\n \"But that phenomenal reach—\"", "\"I can lick any Qornt in the house.\" Qorn said. \"That's why I'm Qorn.\"\n He belched again.\n\n\n A servant came up staggering under a weight of chain, dropped it with a\n crash at Magnan's feet. Zubb aimed the guns while the servant wrapped\n three loops around Magnan's wrists, snapped a lock in place.\n\n\n \"You next!\" The guns pointed at Retief's chest. He held out his arms.\n Four loops of silvery-gray chain in half-inch links dropped around\n them. The servant cinched them up tight, squeezed a lock through the\n ends and closed it.\n\n\n \"Now,\" Qorn said, lolling back in his chair, glass in hand. \"There's a\n bit of sport to be had here, lads. What shall we do with them?\"\n\n\n \"Let them go,\" the blue and flame Qornt said glumly.", "Qorn turned as Retief came up, blinking three-inch eyes. Zubb stepped\n forward, gibbered, waving his arms excitedly. Qorn pushed back his\n chair—a low, heavily padded stool—and stared unwinking at Retief,\n moving his head to bring first one great round eye, then the other, to\n bear. There were small blue veins in the immense fleshy beak. The bushy\n hair, springing out in a giant halo around the grayish, porous-skinned\n face, was wiry, stiff, moss-green, with tufts of chartreuse fuzz\n surrounding what appeared to be tympanic membranes. The tall head-dress\n of scarlet silk and purple feathers was slightly askew, and a loop of\n pink pearls had slipped down above one eye.\n\n\n Zubb finished his speech and fell silent, breathing hard.\n\n\n Qorn looked Retief over in silence, then belched.", "\"Ah ... Retief,\" Magnan said. \"Zubb has just presented a most\n compelling argument....\"\nRetief turned. Zubb stood gripping an ornately decorated power pistol\n in one bony hand, a slim needler in the other. Both were pointed at\n Magnan's chest.\n\n\n \"I suspected you had hidden qualities, Zubb,\" Retief commented.\n\n\n \"See here, Zubb! We're diplomats!\" Magnan started.\n\n\n \"Careful, Mr. Magnan; you may goad him to a frenzy.\"\n\n\n \"By no means,\" Zubb whistled. \"I much prefer to observe the frenzy\n of the Qornt when presented with the news that two peaceful Verpp\n have been assaulted and kidnapped by bullying interlopers. If there's\n anything that annoys the Qornt, it's Qornt-like behavior in others. Now\n step along, please.\"", "\"I suppose so; it sounds like them. A truculent group, you know. And\n interplanetary relations\nare\nrather a hobby of theirs.\"\n\n\n Zubb moaned and stirred. He sat up slowly, rubbing his head. He spoke\n to his companion in a shrill alien clatter of consonants.\n\n\n \"What did he say?\"\n\n\n \"Poor Zubb. He blames me for his bruises, since it was my idea to\n gather you as specimens.\"\n\n\n \"You should have known better than to tackle that fierce-looking\n creature,\" Zubb said, pointing his beak at Magnan.\n\n\n \"How does it happen that you speak Terrestrial?\" Retief asked.\n\n\n \"Oh, one picks up all sorts of dialects.\"\n\n\n \"It's quite charming, really,\" Magnan said. \"Such a quaint, archaic\n accent.\"", "Qorn struck suddenly, a long arm flashing down in a vicious cut at\n Retief, who leaned aside, caught one lean shank below the knee. Qorn\n bent to haul Retief from his leg—and staggered back as a haymaker took\n him just below the beak. A screech went up from the crowd as Retief\n leaped clear.\n\n\n Qorn hissed and charged. Retief whirled aside, then struck the alien's\n off-leg in a flying tackle. Qorn leaned, arms windmilling, crashed to\n the floor. Retief whirled, dived for the left arm, whipped it behind\n the narrow back, seized Qorn's neck in a stranglehold and threw his\n weight backward. Qorn fell on his back, his legs squatted out at an\n awkward angle. He squawked and beat his free arm on the floor, reaching\n in vain for Retief.\n\n\n Zubb stepped forward, pistols ready. Magnan stepped before him.", "\"Oh, sure, Qorn.\"\n\n\n \"You bet.\"\n\n\n \"I'm convinced.\"\n\n\n Qorn rumbled and resumed his seat. \"All for one and one for all, that's\n us.\"\n\n\n \"And you're the one, eh, Qorn?\" Retief commented.\n\n\n Magnan cleared his throat. \"I sense that some of you gentlemen are not\n convinced of the wisdom of this move,\" he piped, looking along the\n table at the silks, jewels, beaks, feather-decked crests and staring\n eyes.\n\n\n \"Silence!\" Qorn hooted. \"No use your talking to my loyal lieutenants\n anyway,\" he added. \"They do whatever I convince them they ought to do.\"\n\n\n \"But I'm sure that on more mature consideration—\"", "\"Not bad,\" Retief said admiringly. \"Maybe we could get up a match\n between you and Ambassador Sternwheeler. You've got the volume on him,\n but he's got timbre.\"\n\n\n \"So,\" Qorn hooted in a resonant tenor. \"You come from Guzzum, eh? Or\n Smorbrod, as I think you call it. What is it you're after? More time?\n A compromise? Negotiations? Peace?\" He slammed a bony hand against the\n table. \"The answer is\nno\n!\"\n\n\n Zubb twittered. Qorn cocked an eye, motioned to a servant. \"Chain that\n one.\" He indicated Magnan. His eyes went to Retief. \"This one's bigger;\n you'd best chain him, too.\"\n\n\n \"Why, your Excellency—\" Magnan started, stepping forward." ], [ "\"Stay back!\" Qorn hooted. \"Stand over there where I can keep an eye on\n you.\"\n\n\n \"Your Excellency, I'm empowered—\"\n\n\n \"Not here, you're not!\" Qorn trumpeted. \"Want peace, do you? Well, I\n don't want peace! I've had a surfeit of peace these last two centuries!\n I want action! Loot! Adventure! Glory!\" He turned to look down the\n table. \"How about it, fellows? It's war to the knife, eh?\"\nThere was a momentary silence from all sides.\n\n\n \"I guess so,\" grunted a giant Qornt in iridescent blue with\n flame-colored plumes.\n\n\n Qorn's eyes bulged. He half rose. \"We've been all over this,\" he\n bassooned. He clamped bony fingers on the hilt of a light rapier. \"I\n thought I'd made my point!\"", "\"I've lost the thread,\" Magnan said. \"Who are the new Qornt?\"\n\n\n \"After estivating, the Verpp moult, and then they're Qornt, of course.\n The Gwil become Boog, the Boog become Rheuk, the Rheuk metamorphosize\n into Verpp—\"\n\n\n \"You mean Slun and Zubb—the mild-natured naturalists—will become\n warmongers like Qorn?\"\n\n\n \"Very likely. 'The milder the Verpp, the wilder the Qorn,' as the old\n saying goes.\"\n\n\n \"What do Qornt turn into?\" Retief asked.\n\n\n \"Hmmmm. That's a good question. So far, none have survived Qornthood.\"\n\n\n \"Have you thought of forsaking your warlike ways?\" Magnan asked. \"What\n about taking up sheepherding and regular church attendance?\"", "The blue and flame Qornt stepped forward. \"Maybe this would be a good\n time to elect a new leader,\" he said. \"Now, my qualifications—\"\n\n\n \"Sit down,\" Retief said loudly. He stepped to the head of the table,\n seated himself in Qorn's vacated chair. \"A couple of you finish\n trussing Qorn up for me.\"\n\n\n \"But we must select a leader!\"\n\n\n \"That won't be necessary, boys. I'm your new leader.\"\n\"As I see it,\" Retief said, dribbling cigar ashes into an empty wine\n glass, \"you Qornt like to be warriors, but you don't particularly like\n to fight.\"\n\n\n \"We don't mind a little fighting—within reason. And, of course, as\n Qornt, we're expected to die in battle. But what I say is, why rush\n things?\"", "MIGHTIEST QORN\nBY KEITH LAUMER\nSly, brave and truculent, the Qornt\n\n held all humans in contempt—except one!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI\n\n\n Ambassador Nitworth glowered across his mirror-polished, nine-foot\n platinum desk at his assembled staff.\n\n\n \"Gentlemen, are any of you familiar with a race known as the Qornt?\"\n\n\n There was a moment of profound silence. Nitworth leaned forward,\n looking solemn.", "\"That one is chief among these rowdies. I'm sure you'll want a word\n with him. He controls not only the Tarroonian vessels but those from\n the other Centers as well.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of vessels? Warships?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. What other kind would the Qornt bother with?\"\n\n\n \"I don't suppose,\" Magnan said casually, \"that you'd know the type,\n tonnage, armament and manning of these vessels? And how many units\n comprise the fleet? And where they're based at present?\"\n\n\n \"They're fully automated twenty-thousand-ton all-purpose dreadnaughts.\n They mount a variety of weapons. The Qornt are fond of that sort of\n thing. Each of the Qornt has his own, of course. They're virtually\n identical, except for the personal touches each individual has given\n his ship.\"", "\"Few signs of an advanced technology here,\" Magnan whispered. \"These\n creatures must devote all their talents to warlike enterprise.\"\n\n\n Ahead, Zubb slowed. A distant susurration was audible, a sustained\n high-pitched screeching. \"Softly, now. We approach Qornt Hall. They\n can be an irascible lot when disturbed at their feasting.\"\n\n\n \"When will the feast be over?\" Magnan called hoarsely.\n\n\n \"In another few weeks, I should imagine, if, as you say, they've\n scheduled an invasion for next month.\"\n\n\n \"Look here, Zubb.\" Magnan shook a finger at the tall alien. \"How is it\n that these Qornt are allowed to embark on piratical ventures of this\n sort without reference to the wishes of the majority?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, the majority of the Qornt favor the move, I imagine.\"", "\"I have a suggestion,\" Magnan said. \"Why not turn the reins of\n government over to the Verpp? They seem a level-headed group.\"\n\n\n \"What good would that do? Qornt are Qornt. It seems there's always one\n among us who's a slave to instinct—and, naturally, we have to follow\n him.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Because that's the way it's done.\"\n\n\n \"Why not do it another way?\" Magnan offered. \"Now, I'd like to suggest\n community singing—\"\n\n\n \"If we gave up fighting, we might live too long. Then what would\n happen?\"\n\n\n \"Live too long?\" Magnan looked puzzled.\n\n\n \"When estivating time comes there'd be no burrows for us. Anyway, with\n the new Qornt stepping on our heels—\"", "\"That would be the invasion of Smorbrod,\" Magnan said. \"And unless we\n hurry, Retief, we're likely to be caught there with the last of the\n evacuees!\"\n\n\n \"How many Qornt would you say there are at Tarroon?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, a very large number. Perhaps fifteen or twenty.\"\n\n\n \"Fifteen or twenty what?\" Magnan looked perplexed.\n\n\n \"Fifteen or twenty Qornt.\"\n\n\n \"You mean that there are only fifteen or twenty individual Qornt in\n all?\"\n\n\n Another whistle. \"Not at all. I was referring to the local Qornt only.\n There are more at the other Centers, of course.\"\n\n\n \"And the Qornt are responsible for the ultimatum—unilaterally?\"", "Lesser trolls—beaked, bush-haired, great-eyed—trotted briskly,\n bird-kneed, bearing steaming platters, stood in groups of\n three strumming slender bottle-shaped lutes, or pranced an\n intricate-patterned dance, unnoticed in the shrill uproar as each of\n the magnificently draped, belted, feathered and jeweled Qornt carried\n on a shouted conversation with an equally noisy fellow.\n\n\n \"A most interesting display of barbaric splendor,\" Magnan breathed.\n \"Now we'd better be getting back.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, a moment,\" Zubb said. \"Observe the Qornt—the tallest of the\n feasters—he with the head-dress of crimson, purple, silver and pink.\"\n\n\n \"Twelve feet if he's an inch,\" Magnan estimated. \"And now we really\n must hurry along—\"", "\"Don't mistake me. We Qornt like a military life. It's great sport to\n sit around roaring fires and drink and tell lies and then go dashing\n off to enjoy a brisk affray and some leisurely looting afterward. But\n we prefer a nice numerical advantage. Not this business of tackling you\n Terrestrials over on Guzzum—that was a mad notion. We had no idea what\n your strength was.\"\n\n\n \"But now that's all off, of course,\" Magnan chirped. \"Now that we've\n had diplomatic relations and all—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, by no means. The fleet lifts in thirty days. After all, we're\n Qornt; we have to satisfy our drive to action.\"\n\n\n \"But Mr. Retief is your leader now. He won't let you!\"", "\"They were a warlike race known in this sector back in Concordiat\n times, perhaps two hundred years ago. They vanished as suddenly as\n they had appeared. There was no record of where they went.\" He paused\n for effect.\n\n\n \"They have now reappeared—occupying the inner planet of this system!\"\n\n\n \"But, sir,\" Second Secretary Magnan offered. \"That's uninhabited\n Terrestrial territory....\"\n\n\n \"Indeed, Mr. Magnan?\" Nitworth smiled icily. \"It appears the Qornt do\n not share that opinion.\" He plucked a heavy parchment from a folder\n before him, harrumphed and read aloud:", "The smaller of the two captive Qornt ran long, slender fingers over\n a bony shin, from which he had turned back the tight-fitting green\n trousers.\n\n\n \"It's not broken,\" he whistled nasally in passable Terrestrial, eyeing\n Magnan through the heavy goggles, now badly cracked. \"Small thanks to\n you.\"\n\n\n Magnan smiled loftily. \"I daresay you'll think twice before interfering\n with peaceable diplomats in future.\"\n\n\n \"Diplomats? Surely you jest.\"\n\n\n \"Never mind us,\" Retief said. \"It's you fellows we'd like to talk\n about. How many of you are there?\"\n\n\n \"Only Zubb and myself.\"\n\n\n \"I mean altogether. How many Qornt?\"\n\n\n The alien whistled shrilly.", "A second great green-clad figure rose up to block his way. He spun,\n darted to the left. The first Qornt pounced, grappled Magnan to its\n narrow chest. Magnan yelled, threshing and kicking, broke free,\n turned—and collided with the eight-foot alien, coming in fast from the\n right. All three went down in a tangle of limbs.\n\n\n Retief jumped forward, hauled Magnan free, thrust him aside and\n stopped, right fist cocked. The two Qornt lay groaning feebly.\n\n\n \"Nice piece of work, Mr. Magnan,\" Retief said. \"You nailed both of\n them.\"\n\"Those undoubtedly are the most bloodthirsty, aggressive, merciless\n countenances it has ever been my misfortune to encounter,\" Magnan said.\n \"It hardly seems fair. Eight feet tall\nand\nfaces like that!\"", "\"Qorn, you seem to be the fire-brand here,\" Retief said. \"I think the\n rest of the boys would listen to reason—\"\n\n\n \"Over my dead body!\"\n\n\n \"My idea exactly,\" Retief said. \"You claim you can lick any man in\n the house. Unwind yourself from your ribbons and step out here on the\n floor, and we'll see how good you are at backing up your conversation.\"\nMagnan hovered at Retief's side. \"Twelve feet tall,\" he moaned. \"And\n did you notice the size of those hands?\"\n\n\n Retief watched as Qorn's aides helped him out of his formal trappings.\n \"I wouldn't worry too much, Mr. Magnan. This is a light-Gee world. I\n doubt if old Qorn would weigh up at more than two-fifty standard pounds\n here.\"\n\n\n \"But that phenomenal reach—\"", "\"I'll peck away at him at knee level. When he bends over to swat me,\n I'll get a crack at him.\"\n\n\n Across the cleared floor, Qorn shook off his helpers with a snort.\n\n\n \"Enough! Let me at the upstart!\"\n\n\n Retief moved out to meet him, watching the upraised backward-jointed\n arms. Qorn stalked forward, long lean legs bent, long horny feet\n clacking against the polished floor. The other aliens—both servitors\n and bejeweled Qornt—formed a wide circle, all eyes unwaveringly on the\n combatants.", "\"Suppose we went down to Tarroon,\" Retief asked. \"What kind of\n reception would we get?\"\n\n\n \"That depends. I wouldn't recommend interfering with the Gwil or the\n Rheuk; it's their nest-mending time, you know. The Boog will be busy\n mating—such a tedious business—and of course the Qornt are tied up\n with their ceremonial feasting. I'm afraid no one will take any notice\n of you.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mean to say,\" Magnan demanded, \"that these ferocious Qornt, who\n have issued an ultimatum to the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne—who\n openly avow their occupied world—would ignore Terrestrials in their\n midst?\"\n\n\n \"If at all possible.\"\n\n\n Retief got to his feet.", "\"I can lick any Qornt in the house.\" Qorn said. \"That's why I'm Qorn.\"\n He belched again.\n\n\n A servant came up staggering under a weight of chain, dropped it with a\n crash at Magnan's feet. Zubb aimed the guns while the servant wrapped\n three loops around Magnan's wrists, snapped a lock in place.\n\n\n \"You next!\" The guns pointed at Retief's chest. He held out his arms.\n Four loops of silvery-gray chain in half-inch links dropped around\n them. The servant cinched them up tight, squeezed a lock through the\n ends and closed it.\n\n\n \"Now,\" Qorn said, lolling back in his chair, glass in hand. \"There's a\n bit of sport to be had here, lads. What shall we do with them?\"\n\n\n \"Let them go,\" the blue and flame Qornt said glumly.", "Qorn rolled an eye at Retief and another at Magnan. \"Take these two,\"\n he hooted. \"I'll wager they came here to negotiate a surrender!\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Magnan started.\n\n\n \"Hold it, Mr. Magnan,\" Retief said. \"I'll tell him.\"\n\n\n \"What's your proposal?\" Qorn whistled, taking a gulp from his goblet.\n \"A fifty-fifty split? Monetary reparations? Alternate territory? I can\n assure you, it's useless. We Qornt\nlike\nto fight.\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid you've gotten the wrong impression, your Excellency,\"\n Retief said blandly. \"We didn't come to negotiate. We came to deliver\n an Ultimatum.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Qorn trumpeted. Behind Retief, Magnan spluttered.", "\"Oh, not at all—except perhaps to a Terrestrial. The Qornt are\n sturdily built rascals, all over ten feet in height. And, of course,\n they do nothing but quarrel. A drone caste, actually.\"\n\n\n \"A caste? You mean they're biologically the same as you?\"\n\n\n \"Not at all! A Verpp wouldn't think of fertilizing a Qornt.\"\n\n\n \"I mean to say, you are of the same basic stock—descended from a\n common ancestor, perhaps.\"\n\n\n \"We are all Pud's creatures.\"\n\n\n \"What are the differences between you, then?\"\n\n\n \"Why, the Qornt are argumentive, boastful, lacking in appreciation\n for the finer things of life. One dreads to contemplate descending to\ntheir\nlevel.\"", "His Supreme Excellency The Qorn, Regent of Qornt, Over-Lord of the\n Galactic Destiny, Greets the Terrestrials and, with reference to the\n presence in mandated territory of Terrestrial squatters, has the honor\n to advise that he will require the use of his outer world on the\n thirtieth day. Then will the Qornt come with steel and fire. Receive,\n Terrestrials, renewed assurances of my awareness of your existence,\n and let Those who dare gird for the contest.\n\n\n \"Frankly, I wouldn't call it conciliatory,\" Magnan said.\n\n\n Nitworth tapped the paper with a finger.\n\n\n \"We have been served, gentlemen, with nothing less than an Ultimatum!\"\n\n\n \"Well, we'll soon straighten these fellows out—\" the Military Attache\n began." ], [ "\"See here, we have no interest in investigating this barrow,\" Magnan\n announced. \"We wish you to take us direct to Tarroon to interview your\n military leaders regarding the ultimatum!\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes, of course. Qornt Hall lies here inside the village.\"\n\n\n \"This is Tarroon?\"\n\n\n \"A modest civic center, sir, but there are those who love it.\"\n\n\n \"No wonder we didn't observe their works from the air,\" Magnan\n muttered. \"Camouflaged.\" He moved hesitantly through the opening.\n\n\n The party moved along a wide, deserted tunnel which sloped down\n steeply, then leveled off and branched. Zubb took the center branch,\n ducking slightly under the nine-foot ceiling lit at intervals with what\n appeared to be primitive incandescent panels.", "There was a sound of crackling foliage. Twenty feet ahead, a leafy\n branch swung aside. An eight-foot biped stepped into view, long, thin,\n green-clad legs with back-bending knees moving in quick, bird-like\n steps. A pair of immense black-lensed goggles covered staring eyes set\n among bushy green hair above a great bone-white beak. The crest bobbed\n as the creature cocked its head, listening.\n\n\n Magnan gulped audibly. The Qornt froze, head tilted, beak aimed\n directly at the spot where the Terrestrials stood in the deep shade of\n a giant trunk.\n\n\n \"I'll go for help,\" Magnan squeaked. He whirled and took three leaps\n into the brush.", "\"Retief, we're engaged in a serious mission. This is not a time to\n think of sightseeing.\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to take a good look at what we're giving away.\"\n\n\n \"See here, Retief! One might almost receive the impression that you're\n questioning Corps policy!\"\n\n\n \"One might, at that. The Qornt have made their play, but I think it\n might be valuable to take a look at their cards before we fold. If I'm\n not back at the boat in an hour, lift without me.\"\n\n\n \"You expect me to make my way back alone?\"\n\n\n \"It's directly down-slope—\" Retief broke off, listening. Magnan\n clutched at his arm.", "\"Suppose we went down to Tarroon,\" Retief asked. \"What kind of\n reception would we get?\"\n\n\n \"That depends. I wouldn't recommend interfering with the Gwil or the\n Rheuk; it's their nest-mending time, you know. The Boog will be busy\n mating—such a tedious business—and of course the Qornt are tied up\n with their ceremonial feasting. I'm afraid no one will take any notice\n of you.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mean to say,\" Magnan demanded, \"that these ferocious Qornt, who\n have issued an ultimatum to the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne—who\n openly avow their occupied world—would ignore Terrestrials in their\n midst?\"\n\n\n \"If at all possible.\"\n\n\n Retief got to his feet.", "\"Few signs of an advanced technology here,\" Magnan whispered. \"These\n creatures must devote all their talents to warlike enterprise.\"\n\n\n Ahead, Zubb slowed. A distant susurration was audible, a sustained\n high-pitched screeching. \"Softly, now. We approach Qornt Hall. They\n can be an irascible lot when disturbed at their feasting.\"\n\n\n \"When will the feast be over?\" Magnan called hoarsely.\n\n\n \"In another few weeks, I should imagine, if, as you say, they've\n scheduled an invasion for next month.\"\n\n\n \"Look here, Zubb.\" Magnan shook a finger at the tall alien. \"How is it\n that these Qornt are allowed to embark on piratical ventures of this\n sort without reference to the wishes of the majority?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, the majority of the Qornt favor the move, I imagine.\"", "\"That would be the invasion of Smorbrod,\" Magnan said. \"And unless we\n hurry, Retief, we're likely to be caught there with the last of the\n evacuees!\"\n\n\n \"How many Qornt would you say there are at Tarroon?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, a very large number. Perhaps fifteen or twenty.\"\n\n\n \"Fifteen or twenty what?\" Magnan looked perplexed.\n\n\n \"Fifteen or twenty Qornt.\"\n\n\n \"You mean that there are only fifteen or twenty individual Qornt in\n all?\"\n\n\n Another whistle. \"Not at all. I was referring to the local Qornt only.\n There are more at the other Centers, of course.\"\n\n\n \"And the Qornt are responsible for the ultimatum—unilaterally?\"", "Lesser trolls—beaked, bush-haired, great-eyed—trotted briskly,\n bird-kneed, bearing steaming platters, stood in groups of\n three strumming slender bottle-shaped lutes, or pranced an\n intricate-patterned dance, unnoticed in the shrill uproar as each of\n the magnificently draped, belted, feathered and jeweled Qornt carried\n on a shouted conversation with an equally noisy fellow.\n\n\n \"A most interesting display of barbaric splendor,\" Magnan breathed.\n \"Now we'd better be getting back.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, a moment,\" Zubb said. \"Observe the Qornt—the tallest of the\n feasters—he with the head-dress of crimson, purple, silver and pink.\"\n\n\n \"Twelve feet if he's an inch,\" Magnan estimated. \"And now we really\n must hurry along—\"", "MIGHTIEST QORN\nBY KEITH LAUMER\nSly, brave and truculent, the Qornt\n\n held all humans in contempt—except one!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI\n\n\n Ambassador Nitworth glowered across his mirror-polished, nine-foot\n platinum desk at his assembled staff.\n\n\n \"Gentlemen, are any of you familiar with a race known as the Qornt?\"\n\n\n There was a moment of profound silence. Nitworth leaned forward,\n looking solemn.", "\"Oh, Retief,\" Nitworth said. Retief turned.\n\n\n \"Try to restrain Mr. Magnan from any impulsive moves—in any\n direction.\"\nII\n\n\n Retief and Magnan topped a ridge and looked down across a slope\n of towering tree-shrubs and glossy violet-stemmed palms set among\n flamboyant blossoms of yellow and red, reaching down to a strip of\n white beach with the blue sea beyond.\n\n\n \"A delightful vista,\" Magnan said, mopping at his face. \"A pity we\n couldn't locate the Qornt. We'll go back now and report—\"\n\n\n \"I'm pretty sure the settlement is off to the right,\" Retief said. \"Why\n don't you head back for the boat, while I ease over and see what I can\n observe.\"", "\"They were a warlike race known in this sector back in Concordiat\n times, perhaps two hundred years ago. They vanished as suddenly as\n they had appeared. There was no record of where they went.\" He paused\n for effect.\n\n\n \"They have now reappeared—occupying the inner planet of this system!\"\n\n\n \"But, sir,\" Second Secretary Magnan offered. \"That's uninhabited\n Terrestrial territory....\"\n\n\n \"Indeed, Mr. Magnan?\" Nitworth smiled icily. \"It appears the Qornt do\n not share that opinion.\" He plucked a heavy parchment from a folder\n before him, harrumphed and read aloud:", "\"Here, no signalling!\" Magnan snapped, looking around.\n\n\n \"That was merely an expression of amusement.\"\n\n\n \"You find the situation amusing? I assure you, sir, you are in perilous\n straits at the moment. I\nmay\nfly into another rage, you know.\"\n\n\n \"Please, restrain yourself. I was merely somewhat astonished—\" a small\n whistle escaped—\"at being taken for a Qornt.\"\n\n\n \"Aren't you a Qornt?\"\n\n\n \"I? Great snail trails, no!\" More stifled whistles of amusement escaped\n the beaked face. \"Both Zubb and I are Verpp. Naturalists, as it\n happens.\"\n\n\n \"You certainly\nlook\nlike Qornt.\"", "\"There happens to be more to this piece of truculence than appears on\n the surface,\" the Ambassador cut in. He paused, waiting for interested\n frowns to settle into place.\n\n\n \"Note, gentlemen, that these invaders have appeared on terrestrial\n controlled soil—and without so much as a flicker from the instruments\n of the Navigational Monitor Service!\"\n\n\n The Military Attache blinked. \"That's absurd,\" he said flatly. Nitworth\n slapped the table.\n\n\n \"We're up against something new, gentlemen! I've considered every\n hypothesis from cloaks of invisibility to time travel! The fact is—the\n Qornt fleets are indetectible!\"\nThe Military Attache pulled at his lower lip. \"In that case, we can't\n try conclusions with these fellows until we have an indetectible drive\n of our own. I recommend a crash project. In the meantime—\"", "The smaller of the two captive Qornt ran long, slender fingers over\n a bony shin, from which he had turned back the tight-fitting green\n trousers.\n\n\n \"It's not broken,\" he whistled nasally in passable Terrestrial, eyeing\n Magnan through the heavy goggles, now badly cracked. \"Small thanks to\n you.\"\n\n\n Magnan smiled loftily. \"I daresay you'll think twice before interfering\n with peaceable diplomats in future.\"\n\n\n \"Diplomats? Surely you jest.\"\n\n\n \"Never mind us,\" Retief said. \"It's you fellows we'd like to talk\n about. How many of you are there?\"\n\n\n \"Only Zubb and myself.\"\n\n\n \"I mean altogether. How many Qornt?\"\n\n\n The alien whistled shrilly.", "Qorn turned as Retief came up, blinking three-inch eyes. Zubb stepped\n forward, gibbered, waving his arms excitedly. Qorn pushed back his\n chair—a low, heavily padded stool—and stared unwinking at Retief,\n moving his head to bring first one great round eye, then the other, to\n bear. There were small blue veins in the immense fleshy beak. The bushy\n hair, springing out in a giant halo around the grayish, porous-skinned\n face, was wiry, stiff, moss-green, with tufts of chartreuse fuzz\n surrounding what appeared to be tympanic membranes. The tall head-dress\n of scarlet silk and purple feathers was slightly askew, and a loop of\n pink pearls had slipped down above one eye.\n\n\n Zubb finished his speech and fell silent, breathing hard.\n\n\n Qorn looked Retief over in silence, then belched.", "\"I have a suggestion,\" Magnan said. \"Why not turn the reins of\n government over to the Verpp? They seem a level-headed group.\"\n\n\n \"What good would that do? Qornt are Qornt. It seems there's always one\n among us who's a slave to instinct—and, naturally, we have to follow\n him.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Because that's the way it's done.\"\n\n\n \"Why not do it another way?\" Magnan offered. \"Now, I'd like to suggest\n community singing—\"\n\n\n \"If we gave up fighting, we might live too long. Then what would\n happen?\"\n\n\n \"Live too long?\" Magnan looked puzzled.\n\n\n \"When estivating time comes there'd be no burrows for us. Anyway, with\n the new Qornt stepping on our heels—\"", "\"Don't mistake me. We Qornt like a military life. It's great sport to\n sit around roaring fires and drink and tell lies and then go dashing\n off to enjoy a brisk affray and some leisurely looting afterward. But\n we prefer a nice numerical advantage. Not this business of tackling you\n Terrestrials over on Guzzum—that was a mad notion. We had no idea what\n your strength was.\"\n\n\n \"But now that's all off, of course,\" Magnan chirped. \"Now that we've\n had diplomatic relations and all—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, by no means. The fleet lifts in thirty days. After all, we're\n Qornt; we have to satisfy our drive to action.\"\n\n\n \"But Mr. Retief is your leader now. He won't let you!\"", "\"Stay back!\" Qorn hooted. \"Stand over there where I can keep an eye on\n you.\"\n\n\n \"Your Excellency, I'm empowered—\"\n\n\n \"Not here, you're not!\" Qorn trumpeted. \"Want peace, do you? Well, I\n don't want peace! I've had a surfeit of peace these last two centuries!\n I want action! Loot! Adventure! Glory!\" He turned to look down the\n table. \"How about it, fellows? It's war to the knife, eh?\"\nThere was a momentary silence from all sides.\n\n\n \"I guess so,\" grunted a giant Qornt in iridescent blue with\n flame-colored plumes.\n\n\n Qorn's eyes bulged. He half rose. \"We've been all over this,\" he\n bassooned. He clamped bony fingers on the hilt of a light rapier. \"I\n thought I'd made my point!\"", "\"You can find your way easily enough from here,\" he said. \"You'll\n excuse us, I hope—\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense, Slun!\" Zubb pushed forward. \"I'll escort our guests to Qornt\n Hall.\" He twittered briefly to his fellow Verpp. Slun twittered back.\n\n\n \"I don't like it, Retief,\" Magnan whispered. \"Those fellows are\n plotting mischief.\"\n\n\n \"Threaten them with violence, Mr Magnan. They're scared of you.\"\n\n\n \"That's true. And the drubbing they received was well-deserved. I'm a\n patient man, but there are occasions—\"\n\n\n \"Come along, please,\" Zubb called. \"Another ten minutes' walk—\"", "A second great green-clad figure rose up to block his way. He spun,\n darted to the left. The first Qornt pounced, grappled Magnan to its\n narrow chest. Magnan yelled, threshing and kicking, broke free,\n turned—and collided with the eight-foot alien, coming in fast from the\n right. All three went down in a tangle of limbs.\n\n\n Retief jumped forward, hauled Magnan free, thrust him aside and\n stopped, right fist cocked. The two Qornt lay groaning feebly.\n\n\n \"Nice piece of work, Mr. Magnan,\" Retief said. \"You nailed both of\n them.\"\n\"Those undoubtedly are the most bloodthirsty, aggressive, merciless\n countenances it has ever been my misfortune to encounter,\" Magnan said.\n \"It hardly seems fair. Eight feet tall\nand\nfaces like that!\"", "\"Do you know anything about a Note passed to the Terrestrial Ambassador\n at Smorbrod?\" Retief asked.\nThe beak twitched. \"Smorbrod? I know of no place called Smorbrod.\"\n\n\n \"The outer planet of this system.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes. We call it Guzzum. I had heard that some sort of creatures\n had established a settlement there, but I confess I pay little note to\n such matters.\"\n\n\n \"We're wasting time, Retief,\" Magnan said. \"We must truss these chaps\n up, hurry back to the boat and make our escape. You heard what they\n said.\"\n\n\n \"Are there any Qornt down there at the harbor, where the boats are?\"\n Retief asked.\n\n\n \"At Tarroon, you mean? Oh, yes. Planning some adventure.\"" ], [ "\"See here, we have no interest in investigating this barrow,\" Magnan\n announced. \"We wish you to take us direct to Tarroon to interview your\n military leaders regarding the ultimatum!\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes, of course. Qornt Hall lies here inside the village.\"\n\n\n \"This is Tarroon?\"\n\n\n \"A modest civic center, sir, but there are those who love it.\"\n\n\n \"No wonder we didn't observe their works from the air,\" Magnan\n muttered. \"Camouflaged.\" He moved hesitantly through the opening.\n\n\n The party moved along a wide, deserted tunnel which sloped down\n steeply, then leveled off and branched. Zubb took the center branch,\n ducking slightly under the nine-foot ceiling lit at intervals with what\n appeared to be primitive incandescent panels.", "\"You can find your way easily enough from here,\" he said. \"You'll\n excuse us, I hope—\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense, Slun!\" Zubb pushed forward. \"I'll escort our guests to Qornt\n Hall.\" He twittered briefly to his fellow Verpp. Slun twittered back.\n\n\n \"I don't like it, Retief,\" Magnan whispered. \"Those fellows are\n plotting mischief.\"\n\n\n \"Threaten them with violence, Mr Magnan. They're scared of you.\"\n\n\n \"That's true. And the drubbing they received was well-deserved. I'm a\n patient man, but there are occasions—\"\n\n\n \"Come along, please,\" Zubb called. \"Another ten minutes' walk—\"", "Lesser trolls—beaked, bush-haired, great-eyed—trotted briskly,\n bird-kneed, bearing steaming platters, stood in groups of\n three strumming slender bottle-shaped lutes, or pranced an\n intricate-patterned dance, unnoticed in the shrill uproar as each of\n the magnificently draped, belted, feathered and jeweled Qornt carried\n on a shouted conversation with an equally noisy fellow.\n\n\n \"A most interesting display of barbaric splendor,\" Magnan breathed.\n \"Now we'd better be getting back.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, a moment,\" Zubb said. \"Observe the Qornt—the tallest of the\n feasters—he with the head-dress of crimson, purple, silver and pink.\"\n\n\n \"Twelve feet if he's an inch,\" Magnan estimated. \"And now we really\n must hurry along—\"", "\"Few signs of an advanced technology here,\" Magnan whispered. \"These\n creatures must devote all their talents to warlike enterprise.\"\n\n\n Ahead, Zubb slowed. A distant susurration was audible, a sustained\n high-pitched screeching. \"Softly, now. We approach Qornt Hall. They\n can be an irascible lot when disturbed at their feasting.\"\n\n\n \"When will the feast be over?\" Magnan called hoarsely.\n\n\n \"In another few weeks, I should imagine, if, as you say, they've\n scheduled an invasion for next month.\"\n\n\n \"Look here, Zubb.\" Magnan shook a finger at the tall alien. \"How is it\n that these Qornt are allowed to embark on piratical ventures of this\n sort without reference to the wishes of the majority?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, the majority of the Qornt favor the move, I imagine.\"", "Qorn turned as Retief came up, blinking three-inch eyes. Zubb stepped\n forward, gibbered, waving his arms excitedly. Qorn pushed back his\n chair—a low, heavily padded stool—and stared unwinking at Retief,\n moving his head to bring first one great round eye, then the other, to\n bear. There were small blue veins in the immense fleshy beak. The bushy\n hair, springing out in a giant halo around the grayish, porous-skinned\n face, was wiry, stiff, moss-green, with tufts of chartreuse fuzz\n surrounding what appeared to be tympanic membranes. The tall head-dress\n of scarlet silk and purple feathers was slightly askew, and a loop of\n pink pearls had slipped down above one eye.\n\n\n Zubb finished his speech and fell silent, breathing hard.\n\n\n Qorn looked Retief over in silence, then belched.", "\"I can lick any Qornt in the house.\" Qorn said. \"That's why I'm Qorn.\"\n He belched again.\n\n\n A servant came up staggering under a weight of chain, dropped it with a\n crash at Magnan's feet. Zubb aimed the guns while the servant wrapped\n three loops around Magnan's wrists, snapped a lock in place.\n\n\n \"You next!\" The guns pointed at Retief's chest. He held out his arms.\n Four loops of silvery-gray chain in half-inch links dropped around\n them. The servant cinched them up tight, squeezed a lock through the\n ends and closed it.\n\n\n \"Now,\" Qorn said, lolling back in his chair, glass in hand. \"There's a\n bit of sport to be had here, lads. What shall we do with them?\"\n\n\n \"Let them go,\" the blue and flame Qornt said glumly.", "\"Great heavens, Retief!\" Magnan exclaimed in a whisper. \"It sounds as\n though these brutes employ a battle armada as simpler souls might a set\n of toy sailboats!\"\n\n\n Retief stepped past Magnan and Zubb to study the feasting hall. \"I can\n see that their votes would carry all the necessary weight.\"\n\n\n \"And now an interview with the Qorn himself,\" Zubb shrilled. \"If you'll\n kindly step along, gentlemen....\"\n\n\n \"That won't be necessary,\" Magnan said hastily, \"I've decided to refer\n the matter to committee.\"\n\n\n \"After having come so far,\" Zubb said, \"it would be a pity to miss\n having a cosy chat.\"\n\n\n There was a pause.", "\"I have a suggestion,\" Magnan said. \"Why not turn the reins of\n government over to the Verpp? They seem a level-headed group.\"\n\n\n \"What good would that do? Qornt are Qornt. It seems there's always one\n among us who's a slave to instinct—and, naturally, we have to follow\n him.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Because that's the way it's done.\"\n\n\n \"Why not do it another way?\" Magnan offered. \"Now, I'd like to suggest\n community singing—\"\n\n\n \"If we gave up fighting, we might live too long. Then what would\n happen?\"\n\n\n \"Live too long?\" Magnan looked puzzled.\n\n\n \"When estivating time comes there'd be no burrows for us. Anyway, with\n the new Qornt stepping on our heels—\"", "\"Stay back!\" Qorn hooted. \"Stand over there where I can keep an eye on\n you.\"\n\n\n \"Your Excellency, I'm empowered—\"\n\n\n \"Not here, you're not!\" Qorn trumpeted. \"Want peace, do you? Well, I\n don't want peace! I've had a surfeit of peace these last two centuries!\n I want action! Loot! Adventure! Glory!\" He turned to look down the\n table. \"How about it, fellows? It's war to the knife, eh?\"\nThere was a momentary silence from all sides.\n\n\n \"I guess so,\" grunted a giant Qornt in iridescent blue with\n flame-colored plumes.\n\n\n Qorn's eyes bulged. He half rose. \"We've been all over this,\" he\n bassooned. He clamped bony fingers on the hilt of a light rapier. \"I\n thought I'd made my point!\"", "\"Retief, we're engaged in a serious mission. This is not a time to\n think of sightseeing.\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to take a good look at what we're giving away.\"\n\n\n \"See here, Retief! One might almost receive the impression that you're\n questioning Corps policy!\"\n\n\n \"One might, at that. The Qornt have made their play, but I think it\n might be valuable to take a look at their cards before we fold. If I'm\n not back at the boat in an hour, lift without me.\"\n\n\n \"You expect me to make my way back alone?\"\n\n\n \"It's directly down-slope—\" Retief broke off, listening. Magnan\n clutched at his arm.", "\"Kindly return to your chair,\" Nitworth said coldly. \"A number of\n chores remain to be assigned. I think you, Magnan, need a little field\n experience. I want you to get over to Roolit I and take a look at these\n Qornt personally.\"\n\n\n Magnan's mouth opened and closed soundlessly.\n\n\n \"Not afraid of a few Qornt, are you, Magnan?\"\n\n\n \"Afraid? Good lord, no, ha ha. It's just that I'm afraid I may lose my\n head and do something rash if I go.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense! A diplomat is immune to heroic impulses. Take Retief along.\n No dawdling, now! I want you on the way in two hours. Notify the\n transport pool at once. Now get going!\"\n\n\n Magnan nodded unhappily and went into the hall.", "\"Suppose we went down to Tarroon,\" Retief asked. \"What kind of\n reception would we get?\"\n\n\n \"That depends. I wouldn't recommend interfering with the Gwil or the\n Rheuk; it's their nest-mending time, you know. The Boog will be busy\n mating—such a tedious business—and of course the Qornt are tied up\n with their ceremonial feasting. I'm afraid no one will take any notice\n of you.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mean to say,\" Magnan demanded, \"that these ferocious Qornt, who\n have issued an ultimatum to the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne—who\n openly avow their occupied world—would ignore Terrestrials in their\n midst?\"\n\n\n \"If at all possible.\"\n\n\n Retief got to his feet.", "\"That would be the invasion of Smorbrod,\" Magnan said. \"And unless we\n hurry, Retief, we're likely to be caught there with the last of the\n evacuees!\"\n\n\n \"How many Qornt would you say there are at Tarroon?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, a very large number. Perhaps fifteen or twenty.\"\n\n\n \"Fifteen or twenty what?\" Magnan looked perplexed.\n\n\n \"Fifteen or twenty Qornt.\"\n\n\n \"You mean that there are only fifteen or twenty individual Qornt in\n all?\"\n\n\n Another whistle. \"Not at all. I was referring to the local Qornt only.\n There are more at the other Centers, of course.\"\n\n\n \"And the Qornt are responsible for the ultimatum—unilaterally?\"", "\"Here, no signalling!\" Magnan snapped, looking around.\n\n\n \"That was merely an expression of amusement.\"\n\n\n \"You find the situation amusing? I assure you, sir, you are in perilous\n straits at the moment. I\nmay\nfly into another rage, you know.\"\n\n\n \"Please, restrain yourself. I was merely somewhat astonished—\" a small\n whistle escaped—\"at being taken for a Qornt.\"\n\n\n \"Aren't you a Qornt?\"\n\n\n \"I? Great snail trails, no!\" More stifled whistles of amusement escaped\n the beaked face. \"Both Zubb and I are Verpp. Naturalists, as it\n happens.\"\n\n\n \"You certainly\nlook\nlike Qornt.\"", "\"Oh, sure, Qorn.\"\n\n\n \"You bet.\"\n\n\n \"I'm convinced.\"\n\n\n Qorn rumbled and resumed his seat. \"All for one and one for all, that's\n us.\"\n\n\n \"And you're the one, eh, Qorn?\" Retief commented.\n\n\n Magnan cleared his throat. \"I sense that some of you gentlemen are not\n convinced of the wisdom of this move,\" he piped, looking along the\n table at the silks, jewels, beaks, feather-decked crests and staring\n eyes.\n\n\n \"Silence!\" Qorn hooted. \"No use your talking to my loyal lieutenants\n anyway,\" he added. \"They do whatever I convince them they ought to do.\"\n\n\n \"But I'm sure that on more mature consideration—\"", "\"I think our course is clear, Mr. Magnan. It's up to us to go down and\n attract a little attention.\"\nIII\n\n\n \"I'm not at all sure we're going about this in the right way,\" Magnan\n puffed, trotting at Retief's side. \"These fellows Zubb and Slun—Oh,\n they seem affable enough, but how can we be sure we're not being led\n into a trap?\"\n\n\n \"We can't.\"\n\n\n Magnan stopped short. \"Let's go back.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Retief said. \"Of course there may be an ambush—\"\n\n\n Magnan moved off. \"Let's keep going.\"\n\n\n The party emerged from the undergrowth at the edge of a great\n brush-grown mound. Slun took the lead, rounded the flank of the\n hillock, halted at a rectangular opening cut into the slope.", "\"Don't mistake me. We Qornt like a military life. It's great sport to\n sit around roaring fires and drink and tell lies and then go dashing\n off to enjoy a brisk affray and some leisurely looting afterward. But\n we prefer a nice numerical advantage. Not this business of tackling you\n Terrestrials over on Guzzum—that was a mad notion. We had no idea what\n your strength was.\"\n\n\n \"But now that's all off, of course,\" Magnan chirped. \"Now that we've\n had diplomatic relations and all—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, by no means. The fleet lifts in thirty days. After all, we're\n Qornt; we have to satisfy our drive to action.\"\n\n\n \"But Mr. Retief is your leader now. He won't let you!\"", "Qorn rolled an eye at Retief and another at Magnan. \"Take these two,\"\n he hooted. \"I'll wager they came here to negotiate a surrender!\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Magnan started.\n\n\n \"Hold it, Mr. Magnan,\" Retief said. \"I'll tell him.\"\n\n\n \"What's your proposal?\" Qorn whistled, taking a gulp from his goblet.\n \"A fifty-fifty split? Monetary reparations? Alternate territory? I can\n assure you, it's useless. We Qornt\nlike\nto fight.\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid you've gotten the wrong impression, your Excellency,\"\n Retief said blandly. \"We didn't come to negotiate. We came to deliver\n an Ultimatum.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Qorn trumpeted. Behind Retief, Magnan spluttered.", "The smaller of the two captive Qornt ran long, slender fingers over\n a bony shin, from which he had turned back the tight-fitting green\n trousers.\n\n\n \"It's not broken,\" he whistled nasally in passable Terrestrial, eyeing\n Magnan through the heavy goggles, now badly cracked. \"Small thanks to\n you.\"\n\n\n Magnan smiled loftily. \"I daresay you'll think twice before interfering\n with peaceable diplomats in future.\"\n\n\n \"Diplomats? Surely you jest.\"\n\n\n \"Never mind us,\" Retief said. \"It's you fellows we'd like to talk\n about. How many of you are there?\"\n\n\n \"Only Zubb and myself.\"\n\n\n \"I mean altogether. How many Qornt?\"\n\n\n The alien whistled shrilly.", "\"I've lost the thread,\" Magnan said. \"Who are the new Qornt?\"\n\n\n \"After estivating, the Verpp moult, and then they're Qornt, of course.\n The Gwil become Boog, the Boog become Rheuk, the Rheuk metamorphosize\n into Verpp—\"\n\n\n \"You mean Slun and Zubb—the mild-natured naturalists—will become\n warmongers like Qorn?\"\n\n\n \"Very likely. 'The milder the Verpp, the wilder the Qorn,' as the old\n saying goes.\"\n\n\n \"What do Qornt turn into?\" Retief asked.\n\n\n \"Hmmmm. That's a good question. So far, none have survived Qornthood.\"\n\n\n \"Have you thought of forsaking your warlike ways?\" Magnan asked. \"What\n about taking up sheepherding and regular church attendance?\"" ] ]
valid	32665	[ "Of the following options, which best summarizes this story?", "Of the following options, which traits best describe Arthur Farrell?", "Of the following options, which technology is not used in the story?", "Did the characters accomplish their goal?", "What is the narrative purpose of having Arthur try to explore Arz while Stryker slept?", "Based on the reading, of the three main characters who should you want to go on an expedition with the least, and why?", "If you were to be one of the three types of creatures on the island, who would you most likely want to be?", "Who would most likely enjoy this story, of the following options?", "Of the following options, what is a potential moral of this story?", "What was the narrative purpose of having Stryker take the sleeping pill?" ]	[ [ "Men study a planet to see where they should colonize and learn the natural resources potential of the planet.", "Men study the interspecies interactions on a planet to learn whether they're allowed to colonize the planet.", "Men study the interspecies interactions on a planet to make sense of them to learn whether the planet is safe to inhabit.", "Men study a planet to see where they should colonize and learn more about the strange customs of the fishermen." ], [ "witty and considerate", "smart and reckless", "stubborn and talkative", "calculated and cautious" ], [ "Radio-like communication", "A chemical that prevents a person from moving", "Ships that can submerge to examine deep waters", "Tablets used to enhance rest" ], [ "No. The characters had many questions, some of which were resolved, but a few important ones were left unanswered.", "No. The characters learned something they didn't want to know and it caused them to want to defy orders.", "Yes. They learned what they wanted to learn and made good choices based on what they learned.", "Yes. Not only did they learn what they needed to, but they had fun interactions with the species on the planet which improved their understanding." ], [ "It was to increase the reader's curiosity because Arthur didn't know what the inside of the island looked like.", "It was to help the reader learn answers to the questions they had.", "It was to allow Arthur to communicate with the fishermen and learn more about their customs.", "It was to build suspense because Arthur was put in harm's way." ], [ "Gibson. He's so independent that he's not one for teamwork and it teamwork makes adventures more fun.", "Farrell. He's a useful crew member, but he doesn't think things through to a dangerous degree.", "Stryker. He's the captain and he knows a lot, but he's fairly rude to his subordinates. ", "Gibson. He's a know it all; though he may be right often, it's a frustrating personality trait to deal with." ], [ "The squids.", "None of them; the passage shows that all of them have bad lives.", "The fishermen.", "The winged lizards." ], [ "A science fiction fan who really likes descriptions of space travel.", "A mystery fan who likes to read things with surprise reveals.", "A science fiction fan who really likes interspecies communication.", "A fantasy fan because winged lizards are a major element of Arz." ], [ "Exploration of the unknown can lead to many surprises.", "Discovery is fun and can be done without inherently endangering one's wellbeing.", "Communication with other species and cultures is a delicate process that needs to be done with care.", "Learning is a process that takes time and can be best done independently." ], [ "Farrell regularly wakes him by walking around on the ship, and Stryker wanted a good night of sleep.", "Farrell would've tried to ask him questions about the fishermen in the morning had Stryker been awake.", "Taking the pill prevented Stryker from helping Farrell.", "Taking the pill prevented Stryker from helping Marco." ] ]	[ 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 2, 1, 2, 1, 3 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "He broke off, seeing for the first time the octopods that ringed the\n outcrop just under the surface of the water, waiting with barbed\n tentacles spread and yellow eyes studying him glassily. He heard the\n unmistakable flapping of wings behind and above him then, and thought\n with shock-born lucidity:\nI wanted a backstage look at this show, and\n now I'm one of the cast\n.\n\n\n The scouter roared in from the west across the thorn forest, flashing so\n close above his head that he felt the wind of its passage. Almost\n instantly he heard the shrilling blast of its emergency bow jets as\n Gibson met the lizard swarm head on.\n\n\n Gibson's voice came tinnily from the audicom. \"Scattered them for the\n moment, Arthur—blinded the whole crew with the exhaust, I think. Stand\n fast, now. I'm going to pick you up.\"", "Stryker shielded his eyes with his hands against the glare of sun on\n water. \"You know I can't do that, Arthur. These Arzians may turn out to\n be Fifth Order beings or higher, and under Terran Regulations our\n tampering with what may be a basic culture-pattern would amount to armed\n invasion. We'll have to crack that cackle-and-grunt language of theirs\n and learn something of their mores before we can interfere.\"\n\n\n Farrell turned an irritable stare on the incurious group of Arzians\n gathering, nets and fishing spears in hand, at the edge of the\n sheltering bramble forest.\n\n\n \"What stumps me is their motivation,\" he said. \"Why do the fools go out\n to that islet every night, when they must know damned well what will\n happen next morning?\"", "\"Behold a familiar pattern shaping up,\" Stryker said. He laughed\n suddenly, a great irrepressible bellow of sound. \"Arz is a squid's\n world, Arthur, don't you see? And like most civilized peoples, they're\n sportsmen. The flying-lizards are the game they hunt, and they raise the\n pink fishers for—\"\n\n\n Farrell swore in astonishment. \"Then those poor devils are put out there\n deliberately, like worms on a hook—angling in reverse! No wonder I\n couldn't spot their motivation!\"\n\n\n Gibson got up and sealed the port, shutting out the soft morning breeze.\n \"Colonization being out of the question, we may as well move on before\n the octopods get curious enough about us to make trouble. Do you feel up\n to the acceleration, Arthur?\"", "Gibson followed, stretching his powerfully-muscled body like a wrestler\n to throw off the effects of sleep. Gibson was linguist-ethnologist of\n the crew, a blocky man in his early thirties with thick black hair and\n heavy brows that shaded a square, humorless face.\n\n\n \"Any sign of the squids yet?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"They won't show up until the dragons come,\" Farrell said. He adjusted\n the light filter of the magnoscanner and scowled at Stryker. \"Lee, I\n wish you'd let me break up the show this time with a dis-beam. This\n butchery gets on my nerves.\"", "He stepped out through the open lock and paced restlessly up and down on\n the springy turf, feeling the ocean breeze soft on his face. Three days\n of dull routine logwork had built up a need for physical action that\n chafed his temper; he was intrigued and at the same time annoyed by the\n enigmatic relation that linked the Arzian fishers to the dragons and\n squids, and his desire to understand that relation was aggravated by the\n knowledge that Arz could be a perfect world for Terran colonization.\n That is, he thought wryly, if Terran colonists could stomach the weird\n custom pursued by its natives of committing suicide in pairs.", "He went over again the improbable drama of the past three mornings, and\n found it not too unnatural until he came to the motivation and the means\n of transportation that placed the Arzians in pairs on the islet, when\n his whole fabric of speculation fell into a tangled snarl of\n inconsistencies. He gave it up finally; how could any Earthman\n rationalize the outlandish compulsions that actuated so alien a race?\n\n\n He went inside again, and the sound of Stryker's muffled snoring fanned\n his restlessness. He made his decision abruptly, laying aside the\n magnoscanner for a hand-flash and a pocket-sized audicom unit which he\n clipped to the belt of his shorts.", "He gathered himself for another shout, and recalled with a chill of\n horror the tablet Stryker had mixed into his nightcap the night before.\n Worn out by his work, Stryker had made certain that he would not be\n easily disturbed.\n\n\n The flattened sun-disk on the water brightened and grew rounder. Above\n its reflected glare he caught a flicker of movement, a restless\n suggestion of flapping wings.\nHe tried again. \"Stryker, help me! I'm on the islet!\"\n\n\n The audicom crackled. The voice that answered was not Stryker's, but\n Gibson's.\n\n\n \"Farrell! What the devil are you doing on that butcher's block?\"\n\n\n Farrell fought down an insane desire to laugh. \"Never mind that—get\n here fast, Gib! The flying-lizards—\"", "The scouter settled on the outcrop beside Farrell, so close that the hot\n wash of its exhaust gases scorched his bare legs. Gibson put out thick\n brown arms and hauled him inside like a straw man, ignoring the native.\n The scouter darted for shore with Farrell lying across Gibson's knees in\n the cockpit, his head hanging half overside.\n\n\n Farrell had a last dizzy glimpse of the islet against the rush of green\n water below, and felt his shaky laugh of relief stick in his throat. Two\n of the octopods were swimming strongly for shore, holding the rigid\n Arzian native carefully above water between them.\n\n\n \"Gib,\" Farrell croaked. \"Gib, can you risk a look back? I think I've\n gone mad.\"\n\n\n The scouter swerved briefly as Gibson looked back. \"You're all right,\n Arthur. Just hang on tight. I'll explain everything when we get you safe\n in the\nMarco\n.\"", "He worked deeper into the underbrush and found other sleeping couples,\n but nothing else. There were no humming insects, no twittering\n night-birds or scurrying rodents. He had worked his way close to the\n center of the island without further discovery and was on the point of\n turning back, disgusted, when something bulky and powerful seized him\n from behind.", "A sharp sting burned his shoulder, wasp-like, and a sudden overwhelming\n lassitude swept him into a darkness deeper than the Arzian night. His\n last conscious thought was not of his own danger, but of Stryker—asleep\n and unprotected behind the\nMarco's\nopen port....\nHe was standing erect when he woke, his back to the open sea and a\n prismatic glimmer of early-dawn rainbow shining on the water before him.\n For a moment he was totally disoriented; then from the corner of an eye\n he caught the pinkish blur of an Arzian fisher standing beside him, and\n cried out hoarsely in sudden panic when he tried to turn his head and\n could not.\n\n\n He was on the coral outcropping offshore, and except for the involuntary\n muscles of balance and respiration his body was paralyzed.", "The first red glow of sunrise blurred the reflected rainbow at his feet,\n but for some seconds his shuttling mind was too busy to consider the\n danger of predicament.\nWhatever brought me here anesthetized me first\n,\n he thought.\nThat sting in my shoulder was like a hypo needle.\nPanic seized him again when he remembered the green flying-lizards; more\n seconds passed before he gained control of himself, sweating with the\n effort. He had to get help. If he could switch on the audicom at his\n belt and call Stryker....\n\n\n He bent every ounce of his will toward raising his right hand, and\n failed.\n\n\n His arm was like a limb of lead, its inertia too great to budge. He\n relaxed the effort with a groan, sweating again when he saw a fiery\n half-disk of sun on the water, edges blurred and distorted by tiny\n surface ripples.", "He did not choose a weapon because he saw no need for one. The torch\n would show him how the natives reached the outcrop, and if he should\n need help the audicom would summon Stryker. Investigating without\n Stryker's sanction was, strictly speaking, a breach of Terran\n Regulations, but—\n\n\n \"Damn Terran Regulations,\" he muttered. \"I've got to\nknow\n.\"\n\n\n Farrell snapped on the torch at the edge of the thorn forest and entered\n briskly, eager for action now that he had begun. Just inside the edge of\n the bramble he came upon a pair of Arzians curled up together on the\n mossy ground, sleeping soundly, their triangular faces wholly blank and\n unrevealing.", "Farrell waved a hand and took up his magnoscanner. It was dark outside\n already, the close, soft night of a moonless tropical world whose moist\n atmosphere absorbed even starlight. He dragged a chair to the open port\n and packed his pipe, settling himself comfortably while Stryker mixed a\n nightcap before turning in.\n\n\n Later he remembered that Stryker dissolved a tablet in his glass, but at\n the moment it meant nothing. In a matter of minutes the older man's\n snoring drifted to him, a sound faintly irritating against the velvety\n hush outside.\n\n\n Farrell lit his pipe and turned to the inconsistencies he had uncovered.\n The Arzians did not swim, and without boats....\n\n\n It occurred to him then that there had been two of the pink fishers on\n the islet each morning, and the coincidence made him sit up suddenly,\n startled. Why two? Why not three or four, or only one?", "Sunrise brought him alert with a jerk, frowning at sight of two pinkish,\n bipedal Arzian fishermen posted on the tiny coral islet a quarter-mile\n offshore, their blank triangular faces turned stolidly toward the beach.\n\n\n \"They're at it again,\" Farrell called, and dropped to the mossy turf\n outside. \"Roll out on the double! I'm going to magnofilm this!\"\n\n\n Stryker and Gibson came out of their sleeping cubicles reluctantly,\n belting on the loose shorts which all three wore in the balmy Arzian\n climate. Stryker blinked and yawned as he let himself through the port,\n his fringe of white hair tousled and his naked paunch sweating. He\n looked, Farrell thought for the thousandth time, more like a retired\n cook than like the veteran commander of a Terran Colonies expedition.", "Stryker threw up his hands. \"I've a mountain of data to collate, and\n Arthur is off duty after standing watch last night. Help yourself, but\n you won't find anything.\"\nThe scouter was a speeding dot on the horizon when Farrell crawled into\n his sleeping cubicle a short time later, leaving Stryker to mutter over\n his litter of notes. Sleep did not come to him at once; a vague sense of\n something overlooked prodded irritatingly at the back of his\n consciousness, but it was not until drowsiness had finally overtaken him\n that the discrepancy assumed definite form.\n\n\n He recalled then that on the first day of the\nMarco's\nplanetfall one\n of the pink fishers had fallen from a casting ledge into the water, and\n had all but drowned before his fellows pulled him out with extended\n spear-shafts. Which meant that the fishers could not swim, else some\n would surely have gone in after him.", "Out of the morning rainbow dropped a swarm of winged lizards, twenty\n feet in length and a glistening chlorophyll green in the early light.\n They stooped like hawks upon the islet offshore, burying the two Arzian\n fishers instantly under their snapping, threshing bodies. Then around\n the outcrop the sea boiled whitely, churned to foam by a sudden\n uprushing of black, octopoid shapes.\n\n\n \"The squids,\" Stryker grunted. \"Right on schedule. Two seconds too late,\n as usual, to stop the slaughter.\"\n\n\n A barrage of barbed tentacles lashed out of the foam and drove into the\n melee of winged lizards. The lizards took the air at once, leaving\n behind three of their number who disappeared under the surface like\n harpooned seals. No trace remained of the two Arzian natives.", "Gibson answered him with an older problem, his square face puzzled. \"For\n that matter, what became of the city I saw when we came in through the\n stratosphere? It must be a tremendous thing, yet we've searched the\n entire globe in the scouter and found nothing but water and a scattering\n of little islands like this one, all covered with bramble. It wasn't a\n city these pink fishers could have built, either. The architecture was\n beyond them by a million years.\"\nStryker and Farrell traded baffled looks. The city had become something\n of a fixation with Gibson, and his dogged insistence—coupled with an\n irritating habit of being right—had worn their patience thin.\n\n\n \"There never was a city here, Gib,\" Stryker said. \"You dozed off while\n we were making planetfall, that's all.\"\n\n\n Gibson stiffened resentfully, but Farrell's voice cut his protest short.\n \"Get set! Here they come!\"", "\"He's scouring the daylight side now,\" Stryker said. \"Arthur, I'm going\n to ground Gib tomorrow, much as I dislike giving him a direct order.\n He's got that phantom city on the brain, and he lacks the imagination to\n understand how dangerous to our assignment an obsession of that sort can\n be.\"\n\n\n Farrell shrugged. \"I'd agree with you offhand if it weren't for Gib's\n bullheaded habit of being right. I hope he finds it soon, if it's here.\n I'll probably be standing his watch until he's satisfied.\"\n\n\n Stryker looked relieved. \"Would you mind taking it tonight? I'm\n completely bushed after today's logging.\"", "Farrell and Stryker looked at each other, grinning. Farrell said: \"You\n don't think I want to stick here and be used for bait again, do you?\"\n\n\n He and Stryker were still grinning over it when Gibson, unamused,\n blasted the\nMarco Four\nfree of Arz.", "Farrell forced himself to relax, more relieved than alarmed by the\n painful pricking of returning sensation. \"I might have known it, damn\n you,\" he said. \"You found your lost city, didn't you?\"\n\n\n Gibson sounded a little disgusted, as if he were still angry with\n himself over some private stupidity. \"I'd have found it sooner if I'd\n had any brains. It was under water, of course.\"\nIn the\nMarco Four\n, Gibson routed Stryker out of his cubicle and mixed\n drinks around, leaving Farrell comfortably relaxed in the padded control\n chair. The paralysis was still wearing off slowly, easing Farrell's fear\n of being permanently disabled." ], [ "of drowsy, pastoral peace. Navigator Arthur Farrell—it was his turn to\n stand watch—was sitting at an open-side port with a magnoscanner ready;\n but in spite of his vigilance he had not exposed a film when the\n inevitable pre-dawn rainbow began to shimmer over the eastern ocean.", "\"He's scouring the daylight side now,\" Stryker said. \"Arthur, I'm going\n to ground Gib tomorrow, much as I dislike giving him a direct order.\n He's got that phantom city on the brain, and he lacks the imagination to\n understand how dangerous to our assignment an obsession of that sort can\n be.\"\n\n\n Farrell shrugged. \"I'd agree with you offhand if it weren't for Gib's\n bullheaded habit of being right. I hope he finds it soon, if it's here.\n I'll probably be standing his watch until he's satisfied.\"\n\n\n Stryker looked relieved. \"Would you mind taking it tonight? I'm\n completely bushed after today's logging.\"", "The scouter settled on the outcrop beside Farrell, so close that the hot\n wash of its exhaust gases scorched his bare legs. Gibson put out thick\n brown arms and hauled him inside like a straw man, ignoring the native.\n The scouter darted for shore with Farrell lying across Gibson's knees in\n the cockpit, his head hanging half overside.\n\n\n Farrell had a last dizzy glimpse of the islet against the rush of green\n water below, and felt his shaky laugh of relief stick in his throat. Two\n of the octopods were swimming strongly for shore, holding the rigid\n Arzian native carefully above water between them.\n\n\n \"Gib,\" Farrell croaked. \"Gib, can you risk a look back? I think I've\n gone mad.\"\n\n\n The scouter swerved briefly as Gibson looked back. \"You're all right,\n Arthur. Just hang on tight. I'll explain everything when we get you safe\n in the\nMarco\n.\"", "Sunrise brought him alert with a jerk, frowning at sight of two pinkish,\n bipedal Arzian fishermen posted on the tiny coral islet a quarter-mile\n offshore, their blank triangular faces turned stolidly toward the beach.\n\n\n \"They're at it again,\" Farrell called, and dropped to the mossy turf\n outside. \"Roll out on the double! I'm going to magnofilm this!\"\n\n\n Stryker and Gibson came out of their sleeping cubicles reluctantly,\n belting on the loose shorts which all three wore in the balmy Arzian\n climate. Stryker blinked and yawned as he let himself through the port,\n his fringe of white hair tousled and his naked paunch sweating. He\n looked, Farrell thought for the thousandth time, more like a retired\n cook than like the veteran commander of a Terran Colonies expedition.", "Gibson followed, stretching his powerfully-muscled body like a wrestler\n to throw off the effects of sleep. Gibson was linguist-ethnologist of\n the crew, a blocky man in his early thirties with thick black hair and\n heavy brows that shaded a square, humorless face.\n\n\n \"Any sign of the squids yet?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"They won't show up until the dragons come,\" Farrell said. He adjusted\n the light filter of the magnoscanner and scowled at Stryker. \"Lee, I\n wish you'd let me break up the show this time with a dis-beam. This\n butchery gets on my nerves.\"", "Stryker shielded his eyes with his hands against the glare of sun on\n water. \"You know I can't do that, Arthur. These Arzians may turn out to\n be Fifth Order beings or higher, and under Terran Regulations our\n tampering with what may be a basic culture-pattern would amount to armed\n invasion. We'll have to crack that cackle-and-grunt language of theirs\n and learn something of their mores before we can interfere.\"\n\n\n Farrell turned an irritable stare on the incurious group of Arzians\n gathering, nets and fishing spears in hand, at the edge of the\n sheltering bramble forest.\n\n\n \"What stumps me is their motivation,\" he said. \"Why do the fools go out\n to that islet every night, when they must know damned well what will\n happen next morning?\"", "\"Behold a familiar pattern shaping up,\" Stryker said. He laughed\n suddenly, a great irrepressible bellow of sound. \"Arz is a squid's\n world, Arthur, don't you see? And like most civilized peoples, they're\n sportsmen. The flying-lizards are the game they hunt, and they raise the\n pink fishers for—\"\n\n\n Farrell swore in astonishment. \"Then those poor devils are put out there\n deliberately, like worms on a hook—angling in reverse! No wonder I\n couldn't spot their motivation!\"\n\n\n Gibson got up and sealed the port, shutting out the soft morning breeze.\n \"Colonization being out of the question, we may as well move on before\n the octopods get curious enough about us to make trouble. Do you feel up\n to the acceleration, Arthur?\"", "He did not choose a weapon because he saw no need for one. The torch\n would show him how the natives reached the outcrop, and if he should\n need help the audicom would summon Stryker. Investigating without\n Stryker's sanction was, strictly speaking, a breach of Terran\n Regulations, but—\n\n\n \"Damn Terran Regulations,\" he muttered. \"I've got to\nknow\n.\"\n\n\n Farrell snapped on the torch at the edge of the thorn forest and entered\n briskly, eager for action now that he had begun. Just inside the edge of\n the bramble he came upon a pair of Arzians curled up together on the\n mossy ground, sleeping soundly, their triangular faces wholly blank and\n unrevealing.", "Farrell and Stryker looked at each other, grinning. Farrell said: \"You\n don't think I want to stick here and be used for bait again, do you?\"\n\n\n He and Stryker were still grinning over it when Gibson, unamused,\n blasted the\nMarco Four\nfree of Arz.", "He stepped out through the open lock and paced restlessly up and down on\n the springy turf, feeling the ocean breeze soft on his face. Three days\n of dull routine logwork had built up a need for physical action that\n chafed his temper; he was intrigued and at the same time annoyed by the\n enigmatic relation that linked the Arzian fishers to the dragons and\n squids, and his desire to understand that relation was aggravated by the\n knowledge that Arz could be a perfect world for Terran colonization.\n That is, he thought wryly, if Terran colonists could stomach the weird\n custom pursued by its natives of committing suicide in pairs.", "Farrell waved a hand and took up his magnoscanner. It was dark outside\n already, the close, soft night of a moonless tropical world whose moist\n atmosphere absorbed even starlight. He dragged a chair to the open port\n and packed his pipe, settling himself comfortably while Stryker mixed a\n nightcap before turning in.\n\n\n Later he remembered that Stryker dissolved a tablet in his glass, but at\n the moment it meant nothing. In a matter of minutes the older man's\n snoring drifted to him, a sound faintly irritating against the velvety\n hush outside.\n\n\n Farrell lit his pipe and turned to the inconsistencies he had uncovered.\n The Arzians did not swim, and without boats....\n\n\n It occurred to him then that there had been two of the pink fishers on\n the islet each morning, and the coincidence made him sit up suddenly,\n startled. Why two? Why not three or four, or only one?", "And the Marco's crew had explored Arz exhaustively without finding any\n slightest trace of boats or of boat landings. The train of association\n completed itself with automatic logic, almost rousing Farrell out of his\n doze.\n\n\n \"I'll be damned,\" he muttered. \"No boats, and they don't swim.\nThen how\n the devil do they get out to that islet?\n\"\n\n\n He fell asleep with the paradox unresolved.\nStryker was still humped over his records when Farrell came out of his\n cubicle and broke a packaged meal from the food locker. The visicom over\n the control board hummed softly, its screen blank on open channel.\n\n\n \"Gibson found his lost city yet?\" Farrell asked, and grinned when\n Stryker snorted.", "Farrell forced himself to relax, more relieved than alarmed by the\n painful pricking of returning sensation. \"I might have known it, damn\n you,\" he said. \"You found your lost city, didn't you?\"\n\n\n Gibson sounded a little disgusted, as if he were still angry with\n himself over some private stupidity. \"I'd have found it sooner if I'd\n had any brains. It was under water, of course.\"\nIn the\nMarco Four\n, Gibson routed Stryker out of his cubicle and mixed\n drinks around, leaving Farrell comfortably relaxed in the padded control\n chair. The paralysis was still wearing off slowly, easing Farrell's fear\n of being permanently disabled.", "Stryker threw up his hands. \"I've a mountain of data to collate, and\n Arthur is off duty after standing watch last night. Help yourself, but\n you won't find anything.\"\nThe scouter was a speeding dot on the horizon when Farrell crawled into\n his sleeping cubicle a short time later, leaving Stryker to mutter over\n his litter of notes. Sleep did not come to him at once; a vague sense of\n something overlooked prodded irritatingly at the back of his\n consciousness, but it was not until drowsiness had finally overtaken him\n that the discrepancy assumed definite form.\n\n\n He recalled then that on the first day of the\nMarco's\nplanetfall one\n of the pink fishers had fallen from a casting ledge into the water, and\n had all but drowned before his fellows pulled him out with extended\n spear-shafts. Which meant that the fishers could not swim, else some\n would surely have gone in after him.", "He gathered himself for another shout, and recalled with a chill of\n horror the tablet Stryker had mixed into his nightcap the night before.\n Worn out by his work, Stryker had made certain that he would not be\n easily disturbed.\n\n\n The flattened sun-disk on the water brightened and grew rounder. Above\n its reflected glare he caught a flicker of movement, a restless\n suggestion of flapping wings.\nHe tried again. \"Stryker, help me! I'm on the islet!\"\n\n\n The audicom crackled. The voice that answered was not Stryker's, but\n Gibson's.\n\n\n \"Farrell! What the devil are you doing on that butcher's block?\"\n\n\n Farrell fought down an insane desire to laugh. \"Never mind that—get\n here fast, Gib! The flying-lizards—\"", "He broke off, seeing for the first time the octopods that ringed the\n outcrop just under the surface of the water, waiting with barbed\n tentacles spread and yellow eyes studying him glassily. He heard the\n unmistakable flapping of wings behind and above him then, and thought\n with shock-born lucidity:\nI wanted a backstage look at this show, and\n now I'm one of the cast\n.\n\n\n The scouter roared in from the west across the thorn forest, flashing so\n close above his head that he felt the wind of its passage. Almost\n instantly he heard the shrilling blast of its emergency bow jets as\n Gibson met the lizard swarm head on.\n\n\n Gibson's voice came tinnily from the audicom. \"Scattered them for the\n moment, Arthur—blinded the whole crew with the exhaust, I think. Stand\n fast, now. I'm going to pick you up.\"", "He went over again the improbable drama of the past three mornings, and\n found it not too unnatural until he came to the motivation and the means\n of transportation that placed the Arzians in pairs on the islet, when\n his whole fabric of speculation fell into a tangled snarl of\n inconsistencies. He gave it up finally; how could any Earthman\n rationalize the outlandish compulsions that actuated so alien a race?\n\n\n He went inside again, and the sound of Stryker's muffled snoring fanned\n his restlessness. He made his decision abruptly, laying aside the\n magnoscanner for a hand-flash and a pocket-sized audicom unit which he\n clipped to the belt of his shorts.", "Gibson answered him with an older problem, his square face puzzled. \"For\n that matter, what became of the city I saw when we came in through the\n stratosphere? It must be a tremendous thing, yet we've searched the\n entire globe in the scouter and found nothing but water and a scattering\n of little islands like this one, all covered with bramble. It wasn't a\n city these pink fishers could have built, either. The architecture was\n beyond them by a million years.\"\nStryker and Farrell traded baffled looks. The city had become something\n of a fixation with Gibson, and his dogged insistence—coupled with an\n irritating habit of being right—had worn their patience thin.\n\n\n \"There never was a city here, Gib,\" Stryker said. \"You dozed off while\n we were making planetfall, that's all.\"\n\n\n Gibson stiffened resentfully, but Farrell's voice cut his protest short.\n \"Get set! Here they come!\"", "The Anglers of Arz\nBy Roger Dee\nIllustrated by BOB MARTIN\n[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science\n Fiction January 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence\n that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThere were two pinkish, bipedal fishermen on the tiny\n islet.\nIn order to make Izaak Walton's sport complete, there must\n be an angler, a fish, and some bait. All three existed on Arz but there\n was a question as to which was which.\nThe third night of the\nMarco Four's\nlandfall on the moonless Altarian\n planet was a repetition of the two before it, a nine-hour intermission", "\"A neat example of dog eat dog,\" Farrell said, snapping off the\n magnoscanner. \"Do any of those beauties look like city-builders, Gib?\"\n\n\n Chattering pink natives straggled past from the shelter of the thorn\n forest, ignoring the Earthmen, and lined the casting ledges along the\n beach to begin their day's fishing.\n\n\n \"Nothing we've seen yet could have built that city,\" Gibson said\n stubbornly. \"But it's here somewhere, and I'm going to find it. Will\n either of you be using the scouter today?\"" ], [ "He broke off, seeing for the first time the octopods that ringed the\n outcrop just under the surface of the water, waiting with barbed\n tentacles spread and yellow eyes studying him glassily. He heard the\n unmistakable flapping of wings behind and above him then, and thought\n with shock-born lucidity:\nI wanted a backstage look at this show, and\n now I'm one of the cast\n.\n\n\n The scouter roared in from the west across the thorn forest, flashing so\n close above his head that he felt the wind of its passage. Almost\n instantly he heard the shrilling blast of its emergency bow jets as\n Gibson met the lizard swarm head on.\n\n\n Gibson's voice came tinnily from the audicom. \"Scattered them for the\n moment, Arthur—blinded the whole crew with the exhaust, I think. Stand\n fast, now. I'm going to pick you up.\"", "Stryker threw up his hands. \"I've a mountain of data to collate, and\n Arthur is off duty after standing watch last night. Help yourself, but\n you won't find anything.\"\nThe scouter was a speeding dot on the horizon when Farrell crawled into\n his sleeping cubicle a short time later, leaving Stryker to mutter over\n his litter of notes. Sleep did not come to him at once; a vague sense of\n something overlooked prodded irritatingly at the back of his\n consciousness, but it was not until drowsiness had finally overtaken him\n that the discrepancy assumed definite form.\n\n\n He recalled then that on the first day of the\nMarco's\nplanetfall one\n of the pink fishers had fallen from a casting ledge into the water, and\n had all but drowned before his fellows pulled him out with extended\n spear-shafts. Which meant that the fishers could not swim, else some\n would surely have gone in after him.", "Gibson followed, stretching his powerfully-muscled body like a wrestler\n to throw off the effects of sleep. Gibson was linguist-ethnologist of\n the crew, a blocky man in his early thirties with thick black hair and\n heavy brows that shaded a square, humorless face.\n\n\n \"Any sign of the squids yet?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"They won't show up until the dragons come,\" Farrell said. He adjusted\n the light filter of the magnoscanner and scowled at Stryker. \"Lee, I\n wish you'd let me break up the show this time with a dis-beam. This\n butchery gets on my nerves.\"", "He went over again the improbable drama of the past three mornings, and\n found it not too unnatural until he came to the motivation and the means\n of transportation that placed the Arzians in pairs on the islet, when\n his whole fabric of speculation fell into a tangled snarl of\n inconsistencies. He gave it up finally; how could any Earthman\n rationalize the outlandish compulsions that actuated so alien a race?\n\n\n He went inside again, and the sound of Stryker's muffled snoring fanned\n his restlessness. He made his decision abruptly, laying aside the\n magnoscanner for a hand-flash and a pocket-sized audicom unit which he\n clipped to the belt of his shorts.", "He did not choose a weapon because he saw no need for one. The torch\n would show him how the natives reached the outcrop, and if he should\n need help the audicom would summon Stryker. Investigating without\n Stryker's sanction was, strictly speaking, a breach of Terran\n Regulations, but—\n\n\n \"Damn Terran Regulations,\" he muttered. \"I've got to\nknow\n.\"\n\n\n Farrell snapped on the torch at the edge of the thorn forest and entered\n briskly, eager for action now that he had begun. Just inside the edge of\n the bramble he came upon a pair of Arzians curled up together on the\n mossy ground, sleeping soundly, their triangular faces wholly blank and\n unrevealing.", "And the Marco's crew had explored Arz exhaustively without finding any\n slightest trace of boats or of boat landings. The train of association\n completed itself with automatic logic, almost rousing Farrell out of his\n doze.\n\n\n \"I'll be damned,\" he muttered. \"No boats, and they don't swim.\nThen how\n the devil do they get out to that islet?\n\"\n\n\n He fell asleep with the paradox unresolved.\nStryker was still humped over his records when Farrell came out of his\n cubicle and broke a packaged meal from the food locker. The visicom over\n the control board hummed softly, its screen blank on open channel.\n\n\n \"Gibson found his lost city yet?\" Farrell asked, and grinned when\n Stryker snorted.", "On shore he could see the\nMarco Four\nresting between thorn forest and\n beach, its silvered sides glistening with dew. The port was still open,\n and the empty carrier rack in the bow told him that Gibson had not yet\n returned with the scouter.\n\n\n He grew aware then that sensation was returning to him slowly, that the\n cold surface of the audicom unit at his hip—unfelt before—was pressing\n against the inner curve of his elbow. He bent his will again toward\n motion; this time the arm tensed a little, enough to send hope flaring\n through him. If he could put pressure enough against the stud....\n\n\n The tiny click of its engaging sent him faint with relief.\n\n\n \"Stryker!\" he yelled. \"Lee, roll out—\nStryker\n!\"\n\n\n The audicom hummed gently, without answer.", "The scouter settled on the outcrop beside Farrell, so close that the hot\n wash of its exhaust gases scorched his bare legs. Gibson put out thick\n brown arms and hauled him inside like a straw man, ignoring the native.\n The scouter darted for shore with Farrell lying across Gibson's knees in\n the cockpit, his head hanging half overside.\n\n\n Farrell had a last dizzy glimpse of the islet against the rush of green\n water below, and felt his shaky laugh of relief stick in his throat. Two\n of the octopods were swimming strongly for shore, holding the rigid\n Arzian native carefully above water between them.\n\n\n \"Gib,\" Farrell croaked. \"Gib, can you risk a look back? I think I've\n gone mad.\"\n\n\n The scouter swerved briefly as Gibson looked back. \"You're all right,\n Arthur. Just hang on tight. I'll explain everything when we get you safe\n in the\nMarco\n.\"", "Gibson answered him with an older problem, his square face puzzled. \"For\n that matter, what became of the city I saw when we came in through the\n stratosphere? It must be a tremendous thing, yet we've searched the\n entire globe in the scouter and found nothing but water and a scattering\n of little islands like this one, all covered with bramble. It wasn't a\n city these pink fishers could have built, either. The architecture was\n beyond them by a million years.\"\nStryker and Farrell traded baffled looks. The city had become something\n of a fixation with Gibson, and his dogged insistence—coupled with an\n irritating habit of being right—had worn their patience thin.\n\n\n \"There never was a city here, Gib,\" Stryker said. \"You dozed off while\n we were making planetfall, that's all.\"\n\n\n Gibson stiffened resentfully, but Farrell's voice cut his protest short.\n \"Get set! Here they come!\"", "Farrell waved a hand and took up his magnoscanner. It was dark outside\n already, the close, soft night of a moonless tropical world whose moist\n atmosphere absorbed even starlight. He dragged a chair to the open port\n and packed his pipe, settling himself comfortably while Stryker mixed a\n nightcap before turning in.\n\n\n Later he remembered that Stryker dissolved a tablet in his glass, but at\n the moment it meant nothing. In a matter of minutes the older man's\n snoring drifted to him, a sound faintly irritating against the velvety\n hush outside.\n\n\n Farrell lit his pipe and turned to the inconsistencies he had uncovered.\n The Arzians did not swim, and without boats....\n\n\n It occurred to him then that there had been two of the pink fishers on\n the islet each morning, and the coincidence made him sit up suddenly,\n startled. Why two? Why not three or four, or only one?", "\"Behold a familiar pattern shaping up,\" Stryker said. He laughed\n suddenly, a great irrepressible bellow of sound. \"Arz is a squid's\n world, Arthur, don't you see? And like most civilized peoples, they're\n sportsmen. The flying-lizards are the game they hunt, and they raise the\n pink fishers for—\"\n\n\n Farrell swore in astonishment. \"Then those poor devils are put out there\n deliberately, like worms on a hook—angling in reverse! No wonder I\n couldn't spot their motivation!\"\n\n\n Gibson got up and sealed the port, shutting out the soft morning breeze.\n \"Colonization being out of the question, we may as well move on before\n the octopods get curious enough about us to make trouble. Do you feel up\n to the acceleration, Arthur?\"", "Sunrise brought him alert with a jerk, frowning at sight of two pinkish,\n bipedal Arzian fishermen posted on the tiny coral islet a quarter-mile\n offshore, their blank triangular faces turned stolidly toward the beach.\n\n\n \"They're at it again,\" Farrell called, and dropped to the mossy turf\n outside. \"Roll out on the double! I'm going to magnofilm this!\"\n\n\n Stryker and Gibson came out of their sleeping cubicles reluctantly,\n belting on the loose shorts which all three wore in the balmy Arzian\n climate. Stryker blinked and yawned as he let himself through the port,\n his fringe of white hair tousled and his naked paunch sweating. He\n looked, Farrell thought for the thousandth time, more like a retired\n cook than like the veteran commander of a Terran Colonies expedition.", "The first red glow of sunrise blurred the reflected rainbow at his feet,\n but for some seconds his shuttling mind was too busy to consider the\n danger of predicament.\nWhatever brought me here anesthetized me first\n,\n he thought.\nThat sting in my shoulder was like a hypo needle.\nPanic seized him again when he remembered the green flying-lizards; more\n seconds passed before he gained control of himself, sweating with the\n effort. He had to get help. If he could switch on the audicom at his\n belt and call Stryker....\n\n\n He bent every ounce of his will toward raising his right hand, and\n failed.\n\n\n His arm was like a limb of lead, its inertia too great to budge. He\n relaxed the effort with a groan, sweating again when he saw a fiery\n half-disk of sun on the water, edges blurred and distorted by tiny\n surface ripples.", "Stryker shielded his eyes with his hands against the glare of sun on\n water. \"You know I can't do that, Arthur. These Arzians may turn out to\n be Fifth Order beings or higher, and under Terran Regulations our\n tampering with what may be a basic culture-pattern would amount to armed\n invasion. We'll have to crack that cackle-and-grunt language of theirs\n and learn something of their mores before we can interfere.\"\n\n\n Farrell turned an irritable stare on the incurious group of Arzians\n gathering, nets and fishing spears in hand, at the edge of the\n sheltering bramble forest.\n\n\n \"What stumps me is their motivation,\" he said. \"Why do the fools go out\n to that islet every night, when they must know damned well what will\n happen next morning?\"", "of drowsy, pastoral peace. Navigator Arthur Farrell—it was his turn to\n stand watch—was sitting at an open-side port with a magnoscanner ready;\n but in spite of his vigilance he had not exposed a film when the\n inevitable pre-dawn rainbow began to shimmer over the eastern ocean.", "He gathered himself for another shout, and recalled with a chill of\n horror the tablet Stryker had mixed into his nightcap the night before.\n Worn out by his work, Stryker had made certain that he would not be\n easily disturbed.\n\n\n The flattened sun-disk on the water brightened and grew rounder. Above\n its reflected glare he caught a flicker of movement, a restless\n suggestion of flapping wings.\nHe tried again. \"Stryker, help me! I'm on the islet!\"\n\n\n The audicom crackled. The voice that answered was not Stryker's, but\n Gibson's.\n\n\n \"Farrell! What the devil are you doing on that butcher's block?\"\n\n\n Farrell fought down an insane desire to laugh. \"Never mind that—get\n here fast, Gib! The flying-lizards—\"", "\"A neat example of dog eat dog,\" Farrell said, snapping off the\n magnoscanner. \"Do any of those beauties look like city-builders, Gib?\"\n\n\n Chattering pink natives straggled past from the shelter of the thorn\n forest, ignoring the Earthmen, and lined the casting ledges along the\n beach to begin their day's fishing.\n\n\n \"Nothing we've seen yet could have built that city,\" Gibson said\n stubbornly. \"But it's here somewhere, and I'm going to find it. Will\n either of you be using the scouter today?\"", "Farrell forced himself to relax, more relieved than alarmed by the\n painful pricking of returning sensation. \"I might have known it, damn\n you,\" he said. \"You found your lost city, didn't you?\"\n\n\n Gibson sounded a little disgusted, as if he were still angry with\n himself over some private stupidity. \"I'd have found it sooner if I'd\n had any brains. It was under water, of course.\"\nIn the\nMarco Four\n, Gibson routed Stryker out of his cubicle and mixed\n drinks around, leaving Farrell comfortably relaxed in the padded control\n chair. The paralysis was still wearing off slowly, easing Farrell's fear\n of being permanently disabled.", "Out of the morning rainbow dropped a swarm of winged lizards, twenty\n feet in length and a glistening chlorophyll green in the early light.\n They stooped like hawks upon the islet offshore, burying the two Arzian\n fishers instantly under their snapping, threshing bodies. Then around\n the outcrop the sea boiled whitely, churned to foam by a sudden\n uprushing of black, octopoid shapes.\n\n\n \"The squids,\" Stryker grunted. \"Right on schedule. Two seconds too late,\n as usual, to stop the slaughter.\"\n\n\n A barrage of barbed tentacles lashed out of the foam and drove into the\n melee of winged lizards. The lizards took the air at once, leaving\n behind three of their number who disappeared under the surface like\n harpooned seals. No trace remained of the two Arzian natives.", "A sharp sting burned his shoulder, wasp-like, and a sudden overwhelming\n lassitude swept him into a darkness deeper than the Arzian night. His\n last conscious thought was not of his own danger, but of Stryker—asleep\n and unprotected behind the\nMarco's\nopen port....\nHe was standing erect when he woke, his back to the open sea and a\n prismatic glimmer of early-dawn rainbow shining on the water before him.\n For a moment he was totally disoriented; then from the corner of an eye\n he caught the pinkish blur of an Arzian fisher standing beside him, and\n cried out hoarsely in sudden panic when he tried to turn his head and\n could not.\n\n\n He was on the coral outcropping offshore, and except for the involuntary\n muscles of balance and respiration his body was paralyzed." ], [ "He went over again the improbable drama of the past three mornings, and\n found it not too unnatural until he came to the motivation and the means\n of transportation that placed the Arzians in pairs on the islet, when\n his whole fabric of speculation fell into a tangled snarl of\n inconsistencies. He gave it up finally; how could any Earthman\n rationalize the outlandish compulsions that actuated so alien a race?\n\n\n He went inside again, and the sound of Stryker's muffled snoring fanned\n his restlessness. He made his decision abruptly, laying aside the\n magnoscanner for a hand-flash and a pocket-sized audicom unit which he\n clipped to the belt of his shorts.", "Farrell and Stryker looked at each other, grinning. Farrell said: \"You\n don't think I want to stick here and be used for bait again, do you?\"\n\n\n He and Stryker were still grinning over it when Gibson, unamused,\n blasted the\nMarco Four\nfree of Arz.", "He stepped out through the open lock and paced restlessly up and down on\n the springy turf, feeling the ocean breeze soft on his face. Three days\n of dull routine logwork had built up a need for physical action that\n chafed his temper; he was intrigued and at the same time annoyed by the\n enigmatic relation that linked the Arzian fishers to the dragons and\n squids, and his desire to understand that relation was aggravated by the\n knowledge that Arz could be a perfect world for Terran colonization.\n That is, he thought wryly, if Terran colonists could stomach the weird\n custom pursued by its natives of committing suicide in pairs.", "And the Marco's crew had explored Arz exhaustively without finding any\n slightest trace of boats or of boat landings. The train of association\n completed itself with automatic logic, almost rousing Farrell out of his\n doze.\n\n\n \"I'll be damned,\" he muttered. \"No boats, and they don't swim.\nThen how\n the devil do they get out to that islet?\n\"\n\n\n He fell asleep with the paradox unresolved.\nStryker was still humped over his records when Farrell came out of his\n cubicle and broke a packaged meal from the food locker. The visicom over\n the control board hummed softly, its screen blank on open channel.\n\n\n \"Gibson found his lost city yet?\" Farrell asked, and grinned when\n Stryker snorted.", "\"Behold a familiar pattern shaping up,\" Stryker said. He laughed\n suddenly, a great irrepressible bellow of sound. \"Arz is a squid's\n world, Arthur, don't you see? And like most civilized peoples, they're\n sportsmen. The flying-lizards are the game they hunt, and they raise the\n pink fishers for—\"\n\n\n Farrell swore in astonishment. \"Then those poor devils are put out there\n deliberately, like worms on a hook—angling in reverse! No wonder I\n couldn't spot their motivation!\"\n\n\n Gibson got up and sealed the port, shutting out the soft morning breeze.\n \"Colonization being out of the question, we may as well move on before\n the octopods get curious enough about us to make trouble. Do you feel up\n to the acceleration, Arthur?\"", "Stryker threw up his hands. \"I've a mountain of data to collate, and\n Arthur is off duty after standing watch last night. Help yourself, but\n you won't find anything.\"\nThe scouter was a speeding dot on the horizon when Farrell crawled into\n his sleeping cubicle a short time later, leaving Stryker to mutter over\n his litter of notes. Sleep did not come to him at once; a vague sense of\n something overlooked prodded irritatingly at the back of his\n consciousness, but it was not until drowsiness had finally overtaken him\n that the discrepancy assumed definite form.\n\n\n He recalled then that on the first day of the\nMarco's\nplanetfall one\n of the pink fishers had fallen from a casting ledge into the water, and\n had all but drowned before his fellows pulled him out with extended\n spear-shafts. Which meant that the fishers could not swim, else some\n would surely have gone in after him.", "The scouter settled on the outcrop beside Farrell, so close that the hot\n wash of its exhaust gases scorched his bare legs. Gibson put out thick\n brown arms and hauled him inside like a straw man, ignoring the native.\n The scouter darted for shore with Farrell lying across Gibson's knees in\n the cockpit, his head hanging half overside.\n\n\n Farrell had a last dizzy glimpse of the islet against the rush of green\n water below, and felt his shaky laugh of relief stick in his throat. Two\n of the octopods were swimming strongly for shore, holding the rigid\n Arzian native carefully above water between them.\n\n\n \"Gib,\" Farrell croaked. \"Gib, can you risk a look back? I think I've\n gone mad.\"\n\n\n The scouter swerved briefly as Gibson looked back. \"You're all right,\n Arthur. Just hang on tight. I'll explain everything when we get you safe\n in the\nMarco\n.\"", "He broke off, seeing for the first time the octopods that ringed the\n outcrop just under the surface of the water, waiting with barbed\n tentacles spread and yellow eyes studying him glassily. He heard the\n unmistakable flapping of wings behind and above him then, and thought\n with shock-born lucidity:\nI wanted a backstage look at this show, and\n now I'm one of the cast\n.\n\n\n The scouter roared in from the west across the thorn forest, flashing so\n close above his head that he felt the wind of its passage. Almost\n instantly he heard the shrilling blast of its emergency bow jets as\n Gibson met the lizard swarm head on.\n\n\n Gibson's voice came tinnily from the audicom. \"Scattered them for the\n moment, Arthur—blinded the whole crew with the exhaust, I think. Stand\n fast, now. I'm going to pick you up.\"", "Stryker shielded his eyes with his hands against the glare of sun on\n water. \"You know I can't do that, Arthur. These Arzians may turn out to\n be Fifth Order beings or higher, and under Terran Regulations our\n tampering with what may be a basic culture-pattern would amount to armed\n invasion. We'll have to crack that cackle-and-grunt language of theirs\n and learn something of their mores before we can interfere.\"\n\n\n Farrell turned an irritable stare on the incurious group of Arzians\n gathering, nets and fishing spears in hand, at the edge of the\n sheltering bramble forest.\n\n\n \"What stumps me is their motivation,\" he said. \"Why do the fools go out\n to that islet every night, when they must know damned well what will\n happen next morning?\"", "He gathered himself for another shout, and recalled with a chill of\n horror the tablet Stryker had mixed into his nightcap the night before.\n Worn out by his work, Stryker had made certain that he would not be\n easily disturbed.\n\n\n The flattened sun-disk on the water brightened and grew rounder. Above\n its reflected glare he caught a flicker of movement, a restless\n suggestion of flapping wings.\nHe tried again. \"Stryker, help me! I'm on the islet!\"\n\n\n The audicom crackled. The voice that answered was not Stryker's, but\n Gibson's.\n\n\n \"Farrell! What the devil are you doing on that butcher's block?\"\n\n\n Farrell fought down an insane desire to laugh. \"Never mind that—get\n here fast, Gib! The flying-lizards—\"", "He worked deeper into the underbrush and found other sleeping couples,\n but nothing else. There were no humming insects, no twittering\n night-birds or scurrying rodents. He had worked his way close to the\n center of the island without further discovery and was on the point of\n turning back, disgusted, when something bulky and powerful seized him\n from behind.", "Gibson answered him with an older problem, his square face puzzled. \"For\n that matter, what became of the city I saw when we came in through the\n stratosphere? It must be a tremendous thing, yet we've searched the\n entire globe in the scouter and found nothing but water and a scattering\n of little islands like this one, all covered with bramble. It wasn't a\n city these pink fishers could have built, either. The architecture was\n beyond them by a million years.\"\nStryker and Farrell traded baffled looks. The city had become something\n of a fixation with Gibson, and his dogged insistence—coupled with an\n irritating habit of being right—had worn their patience thin.\n\n\n \"There never was a city here, Gib,\" Stryker said. \"You dozed off while\n we were making planetfall, that's all.\"\n\n\n Gibson stiffened resentfully, but Farrell's voice cut his protest short.\n \"Get set! Here they come!\"", "He did not choose a weapon because he saw no need for one. The torch\n would show him how the natives reached the outcrop, and if he should\n need help the audicom would summon Stryker. Investigating without\n Stryker's sanction was, strictly speaking, a breach of Terran\n Regulations, but—\n\n\n \"Damn Terran Regulations,\" he muttered. \"I've got to\nknow\n.\"\n\n\n Farrell snapped on the torch at the edge of the thorn forest and entered\n briskly, eager for action now that he had begun. Just inside the edge of\n the bramble he came upon a pair of Arzians curled up together on the\n mossy ground, sleeping soundly, their triangular faces wholly blank and\n unrevealing.", "A sharp sting burned his shoulder, wasp-like, and a sudden overwhelming\n lassitude swept him into a darkness deeper than the Arzian night. His\n last conscious thought was not of his own danger, but of Stryker—asleep\n and unprotected behind the\nMarco's\nopen port....\nHe was standing erect when he woke, his back to the open sea and a\n prismatic glimmer of early-dawn rainbow shining on the water before him.\n For a moment he was totally disoriented; then from the corner of an eye\n he caught the pinkish blur of an Arzian fisher standing beside him, and\n cried out hoarsely in sudden panic when he tried to turn his head and\n could not.\n\n\n He was on the coral outcropping offshore, and except for the involuntary\n muscles of balance and respiration his body was paralyzed.", "Sunrise brought him alert with a jerk, frowning at sight of two pinkish,\n bipedal Arzian fishermen posted on the tiny coral islet a quarter-mile\n offshore, their blank triangular faces turned stolidly toward the beach.\n\n\n \"They're at it again,\" Farrell called, and dropped to the mossy turf\n outside. \"Roll out on the double! I'm going to magnofilm this!\"\n\n\n Stryker and Gibson came out of their sleeping cubicles reluctantly,\n belting on the loose shorts which all three wore in the balmy Arzian\n climate. Stryker blinked and yawned as he let himself through the port,\n his fringe of white hair tousled and his naked paunch sweating. He\n looked, Farrell thought for the thousandth time, more like a retired\n cook than like the veteran commander of a Terran Colonies expedition.", "\"He's scouring the daylight side now,\" Stryker said. \"Arthur, I'm going\n to ground Gib tomorrow, much as I dislike giving him a direct order.\n He's got that phantom city on the brain, and he lacks the imagination to\n understand how dangerous to our assignment an obsession of that sort can\n be.\"\n\n\n Farrell shrugged. \"I'd agree with you offhand if it weren't for Gib's\n bullheaded habit of being right. I hope he finds it soon, if it's here.\n I'll probably be standing his watch until he's satisfied.\"\n\n\n Stryker looked relieved. \"Would you mind taking it tonight? I'm\n completely bushed after today's logging.\"", "Farrell waved a hand and took up his magnoscanner. It was dark outside\n already, the close, soft night of a moonless tropical world whose moist\n atmosphere absorbed even starlight. He dragged a chair to the open port\n and packed his pipe, settling himself comfortably while Stryker mixed a\n nightcap before turning in.\n\n\n Later he remembered that Stryker dissolved a tablet in his glass, but at\n the moment it meant nothing. In a matter of minutes the older man's\n snoring drifted to him, a sound faintly irritating against the velvety\n hush outside.\n\n\n Farrell lit his pipe and turned to the inconsistencies he had uncovered.\n The Arzians did not swim, and without boats....\n\n\n It occurred to him then that there had been two of the pink fishers on\n the islet each morning, and the coincidence made him sit up suddenly,\n startled. Why two? Why not three or four, or only one?", "Gibson followed, stretching his powerfully-muscled body like a wrestler\n to throw off the effects of sleep. Gibson was linguist-ethnologist of\n the crew, a blocky man in his early thirties with thick black hair and\n heavy brows that shaded a square, humorless face.\n\n\n \"Any sign of the squids yet?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"They won't show up until the dragons come,\" Farrell said. He adjusted\n the light filter of the magnoscanner and scowled at Stryker. \"Lee, I\n wish you'd let me break up the show this time with a dis-beam. This\n butchery gets on my nerves.\"", "On shore he could see the\nMarco Four\nresting between thorn forest and\n beach, its silvered sides glistening with dew. The port was still open,\n and the empty carrier rack in the bow told him that Gibson had not yet\n returned with the scouter.\n\n\n He grew aware then that sensation was returning to him slowly, that the\n cold surface of the audicom unit at his hip—unfelt before—was pressing\n against the inner curve of his elbow. He bent his will again toward\n motion; this time the arm tensed a little, enough to send hope flaring\n through him. If he could put pressure enough against the stud....\n\n\n The tiny click of its engaging sent him faint with relief.\n\n\n \"Stryker!\" he yelled. \"Lee, roll out—\nStryker\n!\"\n\n\n The audicom hummed gently, without answer.", "Farrell forced himself to relax, more relieved than alarmed by the\n painful pricking of returning sensation. \"I might have known it, damn\n you,\" he said. \"You found your lost city, didn't you?\"\n\n\n Gibson sounded a little disgusted, as if he were still angry with\n himself over some private stupidity. \"I'd have found it sooner if I'd\n had any brains. It was under water, of course.\"\nIn the\nMarco Four\n, Gibson routed Stryker out of his cubicle and mixed\n drinks around, leaving Farrell comfortably relaxed in the padded control\n chair. The paralysis was still wearing off slowly, easing Farrell's fear\n of being permanently disabled." ], [ "He went over again the improbable drama of the past three mornings, and\n found it not too unnatural until he came to the motivation and the means\n of transportation that placed the Arzians in pairs on the islet, when\n his whole fabric of speculation fell into a tangled snarl of\n inconsistencies. He gave it up finally; how could any Earthman\n rationalize the outlandish compulsions that actuated so alien a race?\n\n\n He went inside again, and the sound of Stryker's muffled snoring fanned\n his restlessness. He made his decision abruptly, laying aside the\n magnoscanner for a hand-flash and a pocket-sized audicom unit which he\n clipped to the belt of his shorts.", "A sharp sting burned his shoulder, wasp-like, and a sudden overwhelming\n lassitude swept him into a darkness deeper than the Arzian night. His\n last conscious thought was not of his own danger, but of Stryker—asleep\n and unprotected behind the\nMarco's\nopen port....\nHe was standing erect when he woke, his back to the open sea and a\n prismatic glimmer of early-dawn rainbow shining on the water before him.\n For a moment he was totally disoriented; then from the corner of an eye\n he caught the pinkish blur of an Arzian fisher standing beside him, and\n cried out hoarsely in sudden panic when he tried to turn his head and\n could not.\n\n\n He was on the coral outcropping offshore, and except for the involuntary\n muscles of balance and respiration his body was paralyzed.", "\"He's scouring the daylight side now,\" Stryker said. \"Arthur, I'm going\n to ground Gib tomorrow, much as I dislike giving him a direct order.\n He's got that phantom city on the brain, and he lacks the imagination to\n understand how dangerous to our assignment an obsession of that sort can\n be.\"\n\n\n Farrell shrugged. \"I'd agree with you offhand if it weren't for Gib's\n bullheaded habit of being right. I hope he finds it soon, if it's here.\n I'll probably be standing his watch until he's satisfied.\"\n\n\n Stryker looked relieved. \"Would you mind taking it tonight? I'm\n completely bushed after today's logging.\"", "He did not choose a weapon because he saw no need for one. The torch\n would show him how the natives reached the outcrop, and if he should\n need help the audicom would summon Stryker. Investigating without\n Stryker's sanction was, strictly speaking, a breach of Terran\n Regulations, but—\n\n\n \"Damn Terran Regulations,\" he muttered. \"I've got to\nknow\n.\"\n\n\n Farrell snapped on the torch at the edge of the thorn forest and entered\n briskly, eager for action now that he had begun. Just inside the edge of\n the bramble he came upon a pair of Arzians curled up together on the\n mossy ground, sleeping soundly, their triangular faces wholly blank and\n unrevealing.", "He stepped out through the open lock and paced restlessly up and down on\n the springy turf, feeling the ocean breeze soft on his face. Three days\n of dull routine logwork had built up a need for physical action that\n chafed his temper; he was intrigued and at the same time annoyed by the\n enigmatic relation that linked the Arzian fishers to the dragons and\n squids, and his desire to understand that relation was aggravated by the\n knowledge that Arz could be a perfect world for Terran colonization.\n That is, he thought wryly, if Terran colonists could stomach the weird\n custom pursued by its natives of committing suicide in pairs.", "And the Marco's crew had explored Arz exhaustively without finding any\n slightest trace of boats or of boat landings. The train of association\n completed itself with automatic logic, almost rousing Farrell out of his\n doze.\n\n\n \"I'll be damned,\" he muttered. \"No boats, and they don't swim.\nThen how\n the devil do they get out to that islet?\n\"\n\n\n He fell asleep with the paradox unresolved.\nStryker was still humped over his records when Farrell came out of his\n cubicle and broke a packaged meal from the food locker. The visicom over\n the control board hummed softly, its screen blank on open channel.\n\n\n \"Gibson found his lost city yet?\" Farrell asked, and grinned when\n Stryker snorted.", "Stryker shielded his eyes with his hands against the glare of sun on\n water. \"You know I can't do that, Arthur. These Arzians may turn out to\n be Fifth Order beings or higher, and under Terran Regulations our\n tampering with what may be a basic culture-pattern would amount to armed\n invasion. We'll have to crack that cackle-and-grunt language of theirs\n and learn something of their mores before we can interfere.\"\n\n\n Farrell turned an irritable stare on the incurious group of Arzians\n gathering, nets and fishing spears in hand, at the edge of the\n sheltering bramble forest.\n\n\n \"What stumps me is their motivation,\" he said. \"Why do the fools go out\n to that islet every night, when they must know damned well what will\n happen next morning?\"", "Sunrise brought him alert with a jerk, frowning at sight of two pinkish,\n bipedal Arzian fishermen posted on the tiny coral islet a quarter-mile\n offshore, their blank triangular faces turned stolidly toward the beach.\n\n\n \"They're at it again,\" Farrell called, and dropped to the mossy turf\n outside. \"Roll out on the double! I'm going to magnofilm this!\"\n\n\n Stryker and Gibson came out of their sleeping cubicles reluctantly,\n belting on the loose shorts which all three wore in the balmy Arzian\n climate. Stryker blinked and yawned as he let himself through the port,\n his fringe of white hair tousled and his naked paunch sweating. He\n looked, Farrell thought for the thousandth time, more like a retired\n cook than like the veteran commander of a Terran Colonies expedition.", "of drowsy, pastoral peace. Navigator Arthur Farrell—it was his turn to\n stand watch—was sitting at an open-side port with a magnoscanner ready;\n but in spite of his vigilance he had not exposed a film when the\n inevitable pre-dawn rainbow began to shimmer over the eastern ocean.", "The first red glow of sunrise blurred the reflected rainbow at his feet,\n but for some seconds his shuttling mind was too busy to consider the\n danger of predicament.\nWhatever brought me here anesthetized me first\n,\n he thought.\nThat sting in my shoulder was like a hypo needle.\nPanic seized him again when he remembered the green flying-lizards; more\n seconds passed before he gained control of himself, sweating with the\n effort. He had to get help. If he could switch on the audicom at his\n belt and call Stryker....\n\n\n He bent every ounce of his will toward raising his right hand, and\n failed.\n\n\n His arm was like a limb of lead, its inertia too great to budge. He\n relaxed the effort with a groan, sweating again when he saw a fiery\n half-disk of sun on the water, edges blurred and distorted by tiny\n surface ripples.", "Stryker threw up his hands. \"I've a mountain of data to collate, and\n Arthur is off duty after standing watch last night. Help yourself, but\n you won't find anything.\"\nThe scouter was a speeding dot on the horizon when Farrell crawled into\n his sleeping cubicle a short time later, leaving Stryker to mutter over\n his litter of notes. Sleep did not come to him at once; a vague sense of\n something overlooked prodded irritatingly at the back of his\n consciousness, but it was not until drowsiness had finally overtaken him\n that the discrepancy assumed definite form.\n\n\n He recalled then that on the first day of the\nMarco's\nplanetfall one\n of the pink fishers had fallen from a casting ledge into the water, and\n had all but drowned before his fellows pulled him out with extended\n spear-shafts. Which meant that the fishers could not swim, else some\n would surely have gone in after him.", "\"Behold a familiar pattern shaping up,\" Stryker said. He laughed\n suddenly, a great irrepressible bellow of sound. \"Arz is a squid's\n world, Arthur, don't you see? And like most civilized peoples, they're\n sportsmen. The flying-lizards are the game they hunt, and they raise the\n pink fishers for—\"\n\n\n Farrell swore in astonishment. \"Then those poor devils are put out there\n deliberately, like worms on a hook—angling in reverse! No wonder I\n couldn't spot their motivation!\"\n\n\n Gibson got up and sealed the port, shutting out the soft morning breeze.\n \"Colonization being out of the question, we may as well move on before\n the octopods get curious enough about us to make trouble. Do you feel up\n to the acceleration, Arthur?\"", "The scouter settled on the outcrop beside Farrell, so close that the hot\n wash of its exhaust gases scorched his bare legs. Gibson put out thick\n brown arms and hauled him inside like a straw man, ignoring the native.\n The scouter darted for shore with Farrell lying across Gibson's knees in\n the cockpit, his head hanging half overside.\n\n\n Farrell had a last dizzy glimpse of the islet against the rush of green\n water below, and felt his shaky laugh of relief stick in his throat. Two\n of the octopods were swimming strongly for shore, holding the rigid\n Arzian native carefully above water between them.\n\n\n \"Gib,\" Farrell croaked. \"Gib, can you risk a look back? I think I've\n gone mad.\"\n\n\n The scouter swerved briefly as Gibson looked back. \"You're all right,\n Arthur. Just hang on tight. I'll explain everything when we get you safe\n in the\nMarco\n.\"", "On shore he could see the\nMarco Four\nresting between thorn forest and\n beach, its silvered sides glistening with dew. The port was still open,\n and the empty carrier rack in the bow told him that Gibson had not yet\n returned with the scouter.\n\n\n He grew aware then that sensation was returning to him slowly, that the\n cold surface of the audicom unit at his hip—unfelt before—was pressing\n against the inner curve of his elbow. He bent his will again toward\n motion; this time the arm tensed a little, enough to send hope flaring\n through him. If he could put pressure enough against the stud....\n\n\n The tiny click of its engaging sent him faint with relief.\n\n\n \"Stryker!\" he yelled. \"Lee, roll out—\nStryker\n!\"\n\n\n The audicom hummed gently, without answer.", "Farrell and Stryker looked at each other, grinning. Farrell said: \"You\n don't think I want to stick here and be used for bait again, do you?\"\n\n\n He and Stryker were still grinning over it when Gibson, unamused,\n blasted the\nMarco Four\nfree of Arz.", "Farrell waved a hand and took up his magnoscanner. It was dark outside\n already, the close, soft night of a moonless tropical world whose moist\n atmosphere absorbed even starlight. He dragged a chair to the open port\n and packed his pipe, settling himself comfortably while Stryker mixed a\n nightcap before turning in.\n\n\n Later he remembered that Stryker dissolved a tablet in his glass, but at\n the moment it meant nothing. In a matter of minutes the older man's\n snoring drifted to him, a sound faintly irritating against the velvety\n hush outside.\n\n\n Farrell lit his pipe and turned to the inconsistencies he had uncovered.\n The Arzians did not swim, and without boats....\n\n\n It occurred to him then that there had been two of the pink fishers on\n the islet each morning, and the coincidence made him sit up suddenly,\n startled. Why two? Why not three or four, or only one?", "Gibson followed, stretching his powerfully-muscled body like a wrestler\n to throw off the effects of sleep. Gibson was linguist-ethnologist of\n the crew, a blocky man in his early thirties with thick black hair and\n heavy brows that shaded a square, humorless face.\n\n\n \"Any sign of the squids yet?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"They won't show up until the dragons come,\" Farrell said. He adjusted\n the light filter of the magnoscanner and scowled at Stryker. \"Lee, I\n wish you'd let me break up the show this time with a dis-beam. This\n butchery gets on my nerves.\"", "He gathered himself for another shout, and recalled with a chill of\n horror the tablet Stryker had mixed into his nightcap the night before.\n Worn out by his work, Stryker had made certain that he would not be\n easily disturbed.\n\n\n The flattened sun-disk on the water brightened and grew rounder. Above\n its reflected glare he caught a flicker of movement, a restless\n suggestion of flapping wings.\nHe tried again. \"Stryker, help me! I'm on the islet!\"\n\n\n The audicom crackled. The voice that answered was not Stryker's, but\n Gibson's.\n\n\n \"Farrell! What the devil are you doing on that butcher's block?\"\n\n\n Farrell fought down an insane desire to laugh. \"Never mind that—get\n here fast, Gib! The flying-lizards—\"", "He broke off, seeing for the first time the octopods that ringed the\n outcrop just under the surface of the water, waiting with barbed\n tentacles spread and yellow eyes studying him glassily. He heard the\n unmistakable flapping of wings behind and above him then, and thought\n with shock-born lucidity:\nI wanted a backstage look at this show, and\n now I'm one of the cast\n.\n\n\n The scouter roared in from the west across the thorn forest, flashing so\n close above his head that he felt the wind of its passage. Almost\n instantly he heard the shrilling blast of its emergency bow jets as\n Gibson met the lizard swarm head on.\n\n\n Gibson's voice came tinnily from the audicom. \"Scattered them for the\n moment, Arthur—blinded the whole crew with the exhaust, I think. Stand\n fast, now. I'm going to pick you up.\"", "Farrell forced himself to relax, more relieved than alarmed by the\n painful pricking of returning sensation. \"I might have known it, damn\n you,\" he said. \"You found your lost city, didn't you?\"\n\n\n Gibson sounded a little disgusted, as if he were still angry with\n himself over some private stupidity. \"I'd have found it sooner if I'd\n had any brains. It was under water, of course.\"\nIn the\nMarco Four\n, Gibson routed Stryker out of his cubicle and mixed\n drinks around, leaving Farrell comfortably relaxed in the padded control\n chair. The paralysis was still wearing off slowly, easing Farrell's fear\n of being permanently disabled." ], [ "Gibson followed, stretching his powerfully-muscled body like a wrestler\n to throw off the effects of sleep. Gibson was linguist-ethnologist of\n the crew, a blocky man in his early thirties with thick black hair and\n heavy brows that shaded a square, humorless face.\n\n\n \"Any sign of the squids yet?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"They won't show up until the dragons come,\" Farrell said. He adjusted\n the light filter of the magnoscanner and scowled at Stryker. \"Lee, I\n wish you'd let me break up the show this time with a dis-beam. This\n butchery gets on my nerves.\"", "He stepped out through the open lock and paced restlessly up and down on\n the springy turf, feeling the ocean breeze soft on his face. Three days\n of dull routine logwork had built up a need for physical action that\n chafed his temper; he was intrigued and at the same time annoyed by the\n enigmatic relation that linked the Arzian fishers to the dragons and\n squids, and his desire to understand that relation was aggravated by the\n knowledge that Arz could be a perfect world for Terran colonization.\n That is, he thought wryly, if Terran colonists could stomach the weird\n custom pursued by its natives of committing suicide in pairs.", "He went over again the improbable drama of the past three mornings, and\n found it not too unnatural until he came to the motivation and the means\n of transportation that placed the Arzians in pairs on the islet, when\n his whole fabric of speculation fell into a tangled snarl of\n inconsistencies. He gave it up finally; how could any Earthman\n rationalize the outlandish compulsions that actuated so alien a race?\n\n\n He went inside again, and the sound of Stryker's muffled snoring fanned\n his restlessness. He made his decision abruptly, laying aside the\n magnoscanner for a hand-flash and a pocket-sized audicom unit which he\n clipped to the belt of his shorts.", "Sunrise brought him alert with a jerk, frowning at sight of two pinkish,\n bipedal Arzian fishermen posted on the tiny coral islet a quarter-mile\n offshore, their blank triangular faces turned stolidly toward the beach.\n\n\n \"They're at it again,\" Farrell called, and dropped to the mossy turf\n outside. \"Roll out on the double! I'm going to magnofilm this!\"\n\n\n Stryker and Gibson came out of their sleeping cubicles reluctantly,\n belting on the loose shorts which all three wore in the balmy Arzian\n climate. Stryker blinked and yawned as he let himself through the port,\n his fringe of white hair tousled and his naked paunch sweating. He\n looked, Farrell thought for the thousandth time, more like a retired\n cook than like the veteran commander of a Terran Colonies expedition.", "Farrell and Stryker looked at each other, grinning. Farrell said: \"You\n don't think I want to stick here and be used for bait again, do you?\"\n\n\n He and Stryker were still grinning over it when Gibson, unamused,\n blasted the\nMarco Four\nfree of Arz.", "He did not choose a weapon because he saw no need for one. The torch\n would show him how the natives reached the outcrop, and if he should\n need help the audicom would summon Stryker. Investigating without\n Stryker's sanction was, strictly speaking, a breach of Terran\n Regulations, but—\n\n\n \"Damn Terran Regulations,\" he muttered. \"I've got to\nknow\n.\"\n\n\n Farrell snapped on the torch at the edge of the thorn forest and entered\n briskly, eager for action now that he had begun. Just inside the edge of\n the bramble he came upon a pair of Arzians curled up together on the\n mossy ground, sleeping soundly, their triangular faces wholly blank and\n unrevealing.", "He broke off, seeing for the first time the octopods that ringed the\n outcrop just under the surface of the water, waiting with barbed\n tentacles spread and yellow eyes studying him glassily. He heard the\n unmistakable flapping of wings behind and above him then, and thought\n with shock-born lucidity:\nI wanted a backstage look at this show, and\n now I'm one of the cast\n.\n\n\n The scouter roared in from the west across the thorn forest, flashing so\n close above his head that he felt the wind of its passage. Almost\n instantly he heard the shrilling blast of its emergency bow jets as\n Gibson met the lizard swarm head on.\n\n\n Gibson's voice came tinnily from the audicom. \"Scattered them for the\n moment, Arthur—blinded the whole crew with the exhaust, I think. Stand\n fast, now. I'm going to pick you up.\"", "And the Marco's crew had explored Arz exhaustively without finding any\n slightest trace of boats or of boat landings. The train of association\n completed itself with automatic logic, almost rousing Farrell out of his\n doze.\n\n\n \"I'll be damned,\" he muttered. \"No boats, and they don't swim.\nThen how\n the devil do they get out to that islet?\n\"\n\n\n He fell asleep with the paradox unresolved.\nStryker was still humped over his records when Farrell came out of his\n cubicle and broke a packaged meal from the food locker. The visicom over\n the control board hummed softly, its screen blank on open channel.\n\n\n \"Gibson found his lost city yet?\" Farrell asked, and grinned when\n Stryker snorted.", "\"Behold a familiar pattern shaping up,\" Stryker said. He laughed\n suddenly, a great irrepressible bellow of sound. \"Arz is a squid's\n world, Arthur, don't you see? And like most civilized peoples, they're\n sportsmen. The flying-lizards are the game they hunt, and they raise the\n pink fishers for—\"\n\n\n Farrell swore in astonishment. \"Then those poor devils are put out there\n deliberately, like worms on a hook—angling in reverse! No wonder I\n couldn't spot their motivation!\"\n\n\n Gibson got up and sealed the port, shutting out the soft morning breeze.\n \"Colonization being out of the question, we may as well move on before\n the octopods get curious enough about us to make trouble. Do you feel up\n to the acceleration, Arthur?\"", "The scouter settled on the outcrop beside Farrell, so close that the hot\n wash of its exhaust gases scorched his bare legs. Gibson put out thick\n brown arms and hauled him inside like a straw man, ignoring the native.\n The scouter darted for shore with Farrell lying across Gibson's knees in\n the cockpit, his head hanging half overside.\n\n\n Farrell had a last dizzy glimpse of the islet against the rush of green\n water below, and felt his shaky laugh of relief stick in his throat. Two\n of the octopods were swimming strongly for shore, holding the rigid\n Arzian native carefully above water between them.\n\n\n \"Gib,\" Farrell croaked. \"Gib, can you risk a look back? I think I've\n gone mad.\"\n\n\n The scouter swerved briefly as Gibson looked back. \"You're all right,\n Arthur. Just hang on tight. I'll explain everything when we get you safe\n in the\nMarco\n.\"", "\"He's scouring the daylight side now,\" Stryker said. \"Arthur, I'm going\n to ground Gib tomorrow, much as I dislike giving him a direct order.\n He's got that phantom city on the brain, and he lacks the imagination to\n understand how dangerous to our assignment an obsession of that sort can\n be.\"\n\n\n Farrell shrugged. \"I'd agree with you offhand if it weren't for Gib's\n bullheaded habit of being right. I hope he finds it soon, if it's here.\n I'll probably be standing his watch until he's satisfied.\"\n\n\n Stryker looked relieved. \"Would you mind taking it tonight? I'm\n completely bushed after today's logging.\"", "Stryker shielded his eyes with his hands against the glare of sun on\n water. \"You know I can't do that, Arthur. These Arzians may turn out to\n be Fifth Order beings or higher, and under Terran Regulations our\n tampering with what may be a basic culture-pattern would amount to armed\n invasion. We'll have to crack that cackle-and-grunt language of theirs\n and learn something of their mores before we can interfere.\"\n\n\n Farrell turned an irritable stare on the incurious group of Arzians\n gathering, nets and fishing spears in hand, at the edge of the\n sheltering bramble forest.\n\n\n \"What stumps me is their motivation,\" he said. \"Why do the fools go out\n to that islet every night, when they must know damned well what will\n happen next morning?\"", "Stryker threw up his hands. \"I've a mountain of data to collate, and\n Arthur is off duty after standing watch last night. Help yourself, but\n you won't find anything.\"\nThe scouter was a speeding dot on the horizon when Farrell crawled into\n his sleeping cubicle a short time later, leaving Stryker to mutter over\n his litter of notes. Sleep did not come to him at once; a vague sense of\n something overlooked prodded irritatingly at the back of his\n consciousness, but it was not until drowsiness had finally overtaken him\n that the discrepancy assumed definite form.\n\n\n He recalled then that on the first day of the\nMarco's\nplanetfall one\n of the pink fishers had fallen from a casting ledge into the water, and\n had all but drowned before his fellows pulled him out with extended\n spear-shafts. Which meant that the fishers could not swim, else some\n would surely have gone in after him.", "He gathered himself for another shout, and recalled with a chill of\n horror the tablet Stryker had mixed into his nightcap the night before.\n Worn out by his work, Stryker had made certain that he would not be\n easily disturbed.\n\n\n The flattened sun-disk on the water brightened and grew rounder. Above\n its reflected glare he caught a flicker of movement, a restless\n suggestion of flapping wings.\nHe tried again. \"Stryker, help me! I'm on the islet!\"\n\n\n The audicom crackled. The voice that answered was not Stryker's, but\n Gibson's.\n\n\n \"Farrell! What the devil are you doing on that butcher's block?\"\n\n\n Farrell fought down an insane desire to laugh. \"Never mind that—get\n here fast, Gib! The flying-lizards—\"", "Gibson answered him with an older problem, his square face puzzled. \"For\n that matter, what became of the city I saw when we came in through the\n stratosphere? It must be a tremendous thing, yet we've searched the\n entire globe in the scouter and found nothing but water and a scattering\n of little islands like this one, all covered with bramble. It wasn't a\n city these pink fishers could have built, either. The architecture was\n beyond them by a million years.\"\nStryker and Farrell traded baffled looks. The city had become something\n of a fixation with Gibson, and his dogged insistence—coupled with an\n irritating habit of being right—had worn their patience thin.\n\n\n \"There never was a city here, Gib,\" Stryker said. \"You dozed off while\n we were making planetfall, that's all.\"\n\n\n Gibson stiffened resentfully, but Farrell's voice cut his protest short.\n \"Get set! Here they come!\"", "He worked deeper into the underbrush and found other sleeping couples,\n but nothing else. There were no humming insects, no twittering\n night-birds or scurrying rodents. He had worked his way close to the\n center of the island without further discovery and was on the point of\n turning back, disgusted, when something bulky and powerful seized him\n from behind.", "Farrell waved a hand and took up his magnoscanner. It was dark outside\n already, the close, soft night of a moonless tropical world whose moist\n atmosphere absorbed even starlight. He dragged a chair to the open port\n and packed his pipe, settling himself comfortably while Stryker mixed a\n nightcap before turning in.\n\n\n Later he remembered that Stryker dissolved a tablet in his glass, but at\n the moment it meant nothing. In a matter of minutes the older man's\n snoring drifted to him, a sound faintly irritating against the velvety\n hush outside.\n\n\n Farrell lit his pipe and turned to the inconsistencies he had uncovered.\n The Arzians did not swim, and without boats....\n\n\n It occurred to him then that there had been two of the pink fishers on\n the islet each morning, and the coincidence made him sit up suddenly,\n startled. Why two? Why not three or four, or only one?", "of drowsy, pastoral peace. Navigator Arthur Farrell—it was his turn to\n stand watch—was sitting at an open-side port with a magnoscanner ready;\n but in spite of his vigilance he had not exposed a film when the\n inevitable pre-dawn rainbow began to shimmer over the eastern ocean.", "\"A neat example of dog eat dog,\" Farrell said, snapping off the\n magnoscanner. \"Do any of those beauties look like city-builders, Gib?\"\n\n\n Chattering pink natives straggled past from the shelter of the thorn\n forest, ignoring the Earthmen, and lined the casting ledges along the\n beach to begin their day's fishing.\n\n\n \"Nothing we've seen yet could have built that city,\" Gibson said\n stubbornly. \"But it's here somewhere, and I'm going to find it. Will\n either of you be using the scouter today?\"", "The first red glow of sunrise blurred the reflected rainbow at his feet,\n but for some seconds his shuttling mind was too busy to consider the\n danger of predicament.\nWhatever brought me here anesthetized me first\n,\n he thought.\nThat sting in my shoulder was like a hypo needle.\nPanic seized him again when he remembered the green flying-lizards; more\n seconds passed before he gained control of himself, sweating with the\n effort. He had to get help. If he could switch on the audicom at his\n belt and call Stryker....\n\n\n He bent every ounce of his will toward raising his right hand, and\n failed.\n\n\n His arm was like a limb of lead, its inertia too great to budge. He\n relaxed the effort with a groan, sweating again when he saw a fiery\n half-disk of sun on the water, edges blurred and distorted by tiny\n surface ripples." ], [ "He worked deeper into the underbrush and found other sleeping couples,\n but nothing else. There were no humming insects, no twittering\n night-birds or scurrying rodents. He had worked his way close to the\n center of the island without further discovery and was on the point of\n turning back, disgusted, when something bulky and powerful seized him\n from behind.", "He gathered himself for another shout, and recalled with a chill of\n horror the tablet Stryker had mixed into his nightcap the night before.\n Worn out by his work, Stryker had made certain that he would not be\n easily disturbed.\n\n\n The flattened sun-disk on the water brightened and grew rounder. Above\n its reflected glare he caught a flicker of movement, a restless\n suggestion of flapping wings.\nHe tried again. \"Stryker, help me! I'm on the islet!\"\n\n\n The audicom crackled. The voice that answered was not Stryker's, but\n Gibson's.\n\n\n \"Farrell! What the devil are you doing on that butcher's block?\"\n\n\n Farrell fought down an insane desire to laugh. \"Never mind that—get\n here fast, Gib! The flying-lizards—\"", "Gibson followed, stretching his powerfully-muscled body like a wrestler\n to throw off the effects of sleep. Gibson was linguist-ethnologist of\n the crew, a blocky man in his early thirties with thick black hair and\n heavy brows that shaded a square, humorless face.\n\n\n \"Any sign of the squids yet?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"They won't show up until the dragons come,\" Farrell said. He adjusted\n the light filter of the magnoscanner and scowled at Stryker. \"Lee, I\n wish you'd let me break up the show this time with a dis-beam. This\n butchery gets on my nerves.\"", "He stepped out through the open lock and paced restlessly up and down on\n the springy turf, feeling the ocean breeze soft on his face. Three days\n of dull routine logwork had built up a need for physical action that\n chafed his temper; he was intrigued and at the same time annoyed by the\n enigmatic relation that linked the Arzian fishers to the dragons and\n squids, and his desire to understand that relation was aggravated by the\n knowledge that Arz could be a perfect world for Terran colonization.\n That is, he thought wryly, if Terran colonists could stomach the weird\n custom pursued by its natives of committing suicide in pairs.", "Stryker shielded his eyes with his hands against the glare of sun on\n water. \"You know I can't do that, Arthur. These Arzians may turn out to\n be Fifth Order beings or higher, and under Terran Regulations our\n tampering with what may be a basic culture-pattern would amount to armed\n invasion. We'll have to crack that cackle-and-grunt language of theirs\n and learn something of their mores before we can interfere.\"\n\n\n Farrell turned an irritable stare on the incurious group of Arzians\n gathering, nets and fishing spears in hand, at the edge of the\n sheltering bramble forest.\n\n\n \"What stumps me is their motivation,\" he said. \"Why do the fools go out\n to that islet every night, when they must know damned well what will\n happen next morning?\"", "\"Behold a familiar pattern shaping up,\" Stryker said. He laughed\n suddenly, a great irrepressible bellow of sound. \"Arz is a squid's\n world, Arthur, don't you see? And like most civilized peoples, they're\n sportsmen. The flying-lizards are the game they hunt, and they raise the\n pink fishers for—\"\n\n\n Farrell swore in astonishment. \"Then those poor devils are put out there\n deliberately, like worms on a hook—angling in reverse! No wonder I\n couldn't spot their motivation!\"\n\n\n Gibson got up and sealed the port, shutting out the soft morning breeze.\n \"Colonization being out of the question, we may as well move on before\n the octopods get curious enough about us to make trouble. Do you feel up\n to the acceleration, Arthur?\"", "He broke off, seeing for the first time the octopods that ringed the\n outcrop just under the surface of the water, waiting with barbed\n tentacles spread and yellow eyes studying him glassily. He heard the\n unmistakable flapping of wings behind and above him then, and thought\n with shock-born lucidity:\nI wanted a backstage look at this show, and\n now I'm one of the cast\n.\n\n\n The scouter roared in from the west across the thorn forest, flashing so\n close above his head that he felt the wind of its passage. Almost\n instantly he heard the shrilling blast of its emergency bow jets as\n Gibson met the lizard swarm head on.\n\n\n Gibson's voice came tinnily from the audicom. \"Scattered them for the\n moment, Arthur—blinded the whole crew with the exhaust, I think. Stand\n fast, now. I'm going to pick you up.\"", "Farrell waved a hand and took up his magnoscanner. It was dark outside\n already, the close, soft night of a moonless tropical world whose moist\n atmosphere absorbed even starlight. He dragged a chair to the open port\n and packed his pipe, settling himself comfortably while Stryker mixed a\n nightcap before turning in.\n\n\n Later he remembered that Stryker dissolved a tablet in his glass, but at\n the moment it meant nothing. In a matter of minutes the older man's\n snoring drifted to him, a sound faintly irritating against the velvety\n hush outside.\n\n\n Farrell lit his pipe and turned to the inconsistencies he had uncovered.\n The Arzians did not swim, and without boats....\n\n\n It occurred to him then that there had been two of the pink fishers on\n the islet each morning, and the coincidence made him sit up suddenly,\n startled. Why two? Why not three or four, or only one?", "The scouter settled on the outcrop beside Farrell, so close that the hot\n wash of its exhaust gases scorched his bare legs. Gibson put out thick\n brown arms and hauled him inside like a straw man, ignoring the native.\n The scouter darted for shore with Farrell lying across Gibson's knees in\n the cockpit, his head hanging half overside.\n\n\n Farrell had a last dizzy glimpse of the islet against the rush of green\n water below, and felt his shaky laugh of relief stick in his throat. Two\n of the octopods were swimming strongly for shore, holding the rigid\n Arzian native carefully above water between them.\n\n\n \"Gib,\" Farrell croaked. \"Gib, can you risk a look back? I think I've\n gone mad.\"\n\n\n The scouter swerved briefly as Gibson looked back. \"You're all right,\n Arthur. Just hang on tight. I'll explain everything when we get you safe\n in the\nMarco\n.\"", "Out of the morning rainbow dropped a swarm of winged lizards, twenty\n feet in length and a glistening chlorophyll green in the early light.\n They stooped like hawks upon the islet offshore, burying the two Arzian\n fishers instantly under their snapping, threshing bodies. Then around\n the outcrop the sea boiled whitely, churned to foam by a sudden\n uprushing of black, octopoid shapes.\n\n\n \"The squids,\" Stryker grunted. \"Right on schedule. Two seconds too late,\n as usual, to stop the slaughter.\"\n\n\n A barrage of barbed tentacles lashed out of the foam and drove into the\n melee of winged lizards. The lizards took the air at once, leaving\n behind three of their number who disappeared under the surface like\n harpooned seals. No trace remained of the two Arzian natives.", "\"A neat example of dog eat dog,\" Farrell said, snapping off the\n magnoscanner. \"Do any of those beauties look like city-builders, Gib?\"\n\n\n Chattering pink natives straggled past from the shelter of the thorn\n forest, ignoring the Earthmen, and lined the casting ledges along the\n beach to begin their day's fishing.\n\n\n \"Nothing we've seen yet could have built that city,\" Gibson said\n stubbornly. \"But it's here somewhere, and I'm going to find it. Will\n either of you be using the scouter today?\"", "Stryker threw up his hands. \"I've a mountain of data to collate, and\n Arthur is off duty after standing watch last night. Help yourself, but\n you won't find anything.\"\nThe scouter was a speeding dot on the horizon when Farrell crawled into\n his sleeping cubicle a short time later, leaving Stryker to mutter over\n his litter of notes. Sleep did not come to him at once; a vague sense of\n something overlooked prodded irritatingly at the back of his\n consciousness, but it was not until drowsiness had finally overtaken him\n that the discrepancy assumed definite form.\n\n\n He recalled then that on the first day of the\nMarco's\nplanetfall one\n of the pink fishers had fallen from a casting ledge into the water, and\n had all but drowned before his fellows pulled him out with extended\n spear-shafts. Which meant that the fishers could not swim, else some\n would surely have gone in after him.", "Sunrise brought him alert with a jerk, frowning at sight of two pinkish,\n bipedal Arzian fishermen posted on the tiny coral islet a quarter-mile\n offshore, their blank triangular faces turned stolidly toward the beach.\n\n\n \"They're at it again,\" Farrell called, and dropped to the mossy turf\n outside. \"Roll out on the double! I'm going to magnofilm this!\"\n\n\n Stryker and Gibson came out of their sleeping cubicles reluctantly,\n belting on the loose shorts which all three wore in the balmy Arzian\n climate. Stryker blinked and yawned as he let himself through the port,\n his fringe of white hair tousled and his naked paunch sweating. He\n looked, Farrell thought for the thousandth time, more like a retired\n cook than like the veteran commander of a Terran Colonies expedition.", "He went over again the improbable drama of the past three mornings, and\n found it not too unnatural until he came to the motivation and the means\n of transportation that placed the Arzians in pairs on the islet, when\n his whole fabric of speculation fell into a tangled snarl of\n inconsistencies. He gave it up finally; how could any Earthman\n rationalize the outlandish compulsions that actuated so alien a race?\n\n\n He went inside again, and the sound of Stryker's muffled snoring fanned\n his restlessness. He made his decision abruptly, laying aside the\n magnoscanner for a hand-flash and a pocket-sized audicom unit which he\n clipped to the belt of his shorts.", "Gibson answered him with an older problem, his square face puzzled. \"For\n that matter, what became of the city I saw when we came in through the\n stratosphere? It must be a tremendous thing, yet we've searched the\n entire globe in the scouter and found nothing but water and a scattering\n of little islands like this one, all covered with bramble. It wasn't a\n city these pink fishers could have built, either. The architecture was\n beyond them by a million years.\"\nStryker and Farrell traded baffled looks. The city had become something\n of a fixation with Gibson, and his dogged insistence—coupled with an\n irritating habit of being right—had worn their patience thin.\n\n\n \"There never was a city here, Gib,\" Stryker said. \"You dozed off while\n we were making planetfall, that's all.\"\n\n\n Gibson stiffened resentfully, but Farrell's voice cut his protest short.\n \"Get set! Here they come!\"", "\"Are cattle, or less,\" Gibson finished. \"The octopods are the dominant\n race, and they're so far above Fifth Order that we're completely out of\n bounds here. Under Terran Regulations we can't colonize Arz. It would be\n armed invasion.\"\n\n\n \"Invasion of a squid world?\" Farrell protested, baffled. \"Why should\n surface colonization conflict with an undersea culture, Gib? Why\n couldn't we share the planet?\"\n\n\n \"Because the octopods own the islands too, and keep them policed,\"\n Gibson said patiently. \"They even own the pink fishers. It was one of\n the squid-people, making a dry-land canvass of his preserve here to pick\n a couple of victims for this morning's show, that carried you off last\n night.\"", "He did not choose a weapon because he saw no need for one. The torch\n would show him how the natives reached the outcrop, and if he should\n need help the audicom would summon Stryker. Investigating without\n Stryker's sanction was, strictly speaking, a breach of Terran\n Regulations, but—\n\n\n \"Damn Terran Regulations,\" he muttered. \"I've got to\nknow\n.\"\n\n\n Farrell snapped on the torch at the edge of the thorn forest and entered\n briskly, eager for action now that he had begun. Just inside the edge of\n the bramble he came upon a pair of Arzians curled up together on the\n mossy ground, sleeping soundly, their triangular faces wholly blank and\n unrevealing.", "And the Marco's crew had explored Arz exhaustively without finding any\n slightest trace of boats or of boat landings. The train of association\n completed itself with automatic logic, almost rousing Farrell out of his\n doze.\n\n\n \"I'll be damned,\" he muttered. \"No boats, and they don't swim.\nThen how\n the devil do they get out to that islet?\n\"\n\n\n He fell asleep with the paradox unresolved.\nStryker was still humped over his records when Farrell came out of his\n cubicle and broke a packaged meal from the food locker. The visicom over\n the control board hummed softly, its screen blank on open channel.\n\n\n \"Gibson found his lost city yet?\" Farrell asked, and grinned when\n Stryker snorted.", "The Anglers of Arz\nBy Roger Dee\nIllustrated by BOB MARTIN\n[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science\n Fiction January 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence\n that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThere were two pinkish, bipedal fishermen on the tiny\n islet.\nIn order to make Izaak Walton's sport complete, there must\n be an angler, a fish, and some bait. All three existed on Arz but there\n was a question as to which was which.\nThe third night of the\nMarco Four's\nlandfall on the moonless Altarian\n planet was a repetition of the two before it, a nine-hour intermission", "\"We never saw the city from the scouter because we didn't go high\n enough,\" Gibson said. \"I realized that finally, remembering how they\n used high-altitude blimps during the First Wars to spot submarines, and\n when I took the scouter up far enough there it was, at the ocean\n bottom—a city to compare with anything men ever built.\"\n\n\n Stryker stared. \"A marine city? What use would sea-creatures have for\n buildings?\"\n\n\n \"None,\" Gibson said. \"I think the city must have been built ages ago—by\n men or by a manlike race, judging from the architecture—and was\n submerged later by a sinking of land masses that killed off the original\n builders and left Arz nothing but an oversized archipelago. The squids\n took over then, and from all appearances they've developed a culture of\n their own.\"\n\n\n \"I don't see it,\" Stryker complained, shaking his head. \"The pink\n fishers—\"" ], [ "Stryker shielded his eyes with his hands against the glare of sun on\n water. \"You know I can't do that, Arthur. These Arzians may turn out to\n be Fifth Order beings or higher, and under Terran Regulations our\n tampering with what may be a basic culture-pattern would amount to armed\n invasion. We'll have to crack that cackle-and-grunt language of theirs\n and learn something of their mores before we can interfere.\"\n\n\n Farrell turned an irritable stare on the incurious group of Arzians\n gathering, nets and fishing spears in hand, at the edge of the\n sheltering bramble forest.\n\n\n \"What stumps me is their motivation,\" he said. \"Why do the fools go out\n to that islet every night, when they must know damned well what will\n happen next morning?\"", "\"Behold a familiar pattern shaping up,\" Stryker said. He laughed\n suddenly, a great irrepressible bellow of sound. \"Arz is a squid's\n world, Arthur, don't you see? And like most civilized peoples, they're\n sportsmen. The flying-lizards are the game they hunt, and they raise the\n pink fishers for—\"\n\n\n Farrell swore in astonishment. \"Then those poor devils are put out there\n deliberately, like worms on a hook—angling in reverse! No wonder I\n couldn't spot their motivation!\"\n\n\n Gibson got up and sealed the port, shutting out the soft morning breeze.\n \"Colonization being out of the question, we may as well move on before\n the octopods get curious enough about us to make trouble. Do you feel up\n to the acceleration, Arthur?\"", "Gibson followed, stretching his powerfully-muscled body like a wrestler\n to throw off the effects of sleep. Gibson was linguist-ethnologist of\n the crew, a blocky man in his early thirties with thick black hair and\n heavy brows that shaded a square, humorless face.\n\n\n \"Any sign of the squids yet?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"They won't show up until the dragons come,\" Farrell said. He adjusted\n the light filter of the magnoscanner and scowled at Stryker. \"Lee, I\n wish you'd let me break up the show this time with a dis-beam. This\n butchery gets on my nerves.\"", "He broke off, seeing for the first time the octopods that ringed the\n outcrop just under the surface of the water, waiting with barbed\n tentacles spread and yellow eyes studying him glassily. He heard the\n unmistakable flapping of wings behind and above him then, and thought\n with shock-born lucidity:\nI wanted a backstage look at this show, and\n now I'm one of the cast\n.\n\n\n The scouter roared in from the west across the thorn forest, flashing so\n close above his head that he felt the wind of its passage. Almost\n instantly he heard the shrilling blast of its emergency bow jets as\n Gibson met the lizard swarm head on.\n\n\n Gibson's voice came tinnily from the audicom. \"Scattered them for the\n moment, Arthur—blinded the whole crew with the exhaust, I think. Stand\n fast, now. I'm going to pick you up.\"", "\"He's scouring the daylight side now,\" Stryker said. \"Arthur, I'm going\n to ground Gib tomorrow, much as I dislike giving him a direct order.\n He's got that phantom city on the brain, and he lacks the imagination to\n understand how dangerous to our assignment an obsession of that sort can\n be.\"\n\n\n Farrell shrugged. \"I'd agree with you offhand if it weren't for Gib's\n bullheaded habit of being right. I hope he finds it soon, if it's here.\n I'll probably be standing his watch until he's satisfied.\"\n\n\n Stryker looked relieved. \"Would you mind taking it tonight? I'm\n completely bushed after today's logging.\"", "Farrell waved a hand and took up his magnoscanner. It was dark outside\n already, the close, soft night of a moonless tropical world whose moist\n atmosphere absorbed even starlight. He dragged a chair to the open port\n and packed his pipe, settling himself comfortably while Stryker mixed a\n nightcap before turning in.\n\n\n Later he remembered that Stryker dissolved a tablet in his glass, but at\n the moment it meant nothing. In a matter of minutes the older man's\n snoring drifted to him, a sound faintly irritating against the velvety\n hush outside.\n\n\n Farrell lit his pipe and turned to the inconsistencies he had uncovered.\n The Arzians did not swim, and without boats....\n\n\n It occurred to him then that there had been two of the pink fishers on\n the islet each morning, and the coincidence made him sit up suddenly,\n startled. Why two? Why not three or four, or only one?", "He stepped out through the open lock and paced restlessly up and down on\n the springy turf, feeling the ocean breeze soft on his face. Three days\n of dull routine logwork had built up a need for physical action that\n chafed his temper; he was intrigued and at the same time annoyed by the\n enigmatic relation that linked the Arzian fishers to the dragons and\n squids, and his desire to understand that relation was aggravated by the\n knowledge that Arz could be a perfect world for Terran colonization.\n That is, he thought wryly, if Terran colonists could stomach the weird\n custom pursued by its natives of committing suicide in pairs.", "Sunrise brought him alert with a jerk, frowning at sight of two pinkish,\n bipedal Arzian fishermen posted on the tiny coral islet a quarter-mile\n offshore, their blank triangular faces turned stolidly toward the beach.\n\n\n \"They're at it again,\" Farrell called, and dropped to the mossy turf\n outside. \"Roll out on the double! I'm going to magnofilm this!\"\n\n\n Stryker and Gibson came out of their sleeping cubicles reluctantly,\n belting on the loose shorts which all three wore in the balmy Arzian\n climate. Stryker blinked and yawned as he let himself through the port,\n his fringe of white hair tousled and his naked paunch sweating. He\n looked, Farrell thought for the thousandth time, more like a retired\n cook than like the veteran commander of a Terran Colonies expedition.", "Farrell and Stryker looked at each other, grinning. Farrell said: \"You\n don't think I want to stick here and be used for bait again, do you?\"\n\n\n He and Stryker were still grinning over it when Gibson, unamused,\n blasted the\nMarco Four\nfree of Arz.", "Stryker threw up his hands. \"I've a mountain of data to collate, and\n Arthur is off duty after standing watch last night. Help yourself, but\n you won't find anything.\"\nThe scouter was a speeding dot on the horizon when Farrell crawled into\n his sleeping cubicle a short time later, leaving Stryker to mutter over\n his litter of notes. Sleep did not come to him at once; a vague sense of\n something overlooked prodded irritatingly at the back of his\n consciousness, but it was not until drowsiness had finally overtaken him\n that the discrepancy assumed definite form.\n\n\n He recalled then that on the first day of the\nMarco's\nplanetfall one\n of the pink fishers had fallen from a casting ledge into the water, and\n had all but drowned before his fellows pulled him out with extended\n spear-shafts. Which meant that the fishers could not swim, else some\n would surely have gone in after him.", "He gathered himself for another shout, and recalled with a chill of\n horror the tablet Stryker had mixed into his nightcap the night before.\n Worn out by his work, Stryker had made certain that he would not be\n easily disturbed.\n\n\n The flattened sun-disk on the water brightened and grew rounder. Above\n its reflected glare he caught a flicker of movement, a restless\n suggestion of flapping wings.\nHe tried again. \"Stryker, help me! I'm on the islet!\"\n\n\n The audicom crackled. The voice that answered was not Stryker's, but\n Gibson's.\n\n\n \"Farrell! What the devil are you doing on that butcher's block?\"\n\n\n Farrell fought down an insane desire to laugh. \"Never mind that—get\n here fast, Gib! The flying-lizards—\"", "Gibson answered him with an older problem, his square face puzzled. \"For\n that matter, what became of the city I saw when we came in through the\n stratosphere? It must be a tremendous thing, yet we've searched the\n entire globe in the scouter and found nothing but water and a scattering\n of little islands like this one, all covered with bramble. It wasn't a\n city these pink fishers could have built, either. The architecture was\n beyond them by a million years.\"\nStryker and Farrell traded baffled looks. The city had become something\n of a fixation with Gibson, and his dogged insistence—coupled with an\n irritating habit of being right—had worn their patience thin.\n\n\n \"There never was a city here, Gib,\" Stryker said. \"You dozed off while\n we were making planetfall, that's all.\"\n\n\n Gibson stiffened resentfully, but Farrell's voice cut his protest short.\n \"Get set! Here they come!\"", "The Anglers of Arz\nBy Roger Dee\nIllustrated by BOB MARTIN\n[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science\n Fiction January 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence\n that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThere were two pinkish, bipedal fishermen on the tiny\n islet.\nIn order to make Izaak Walton's sport complete, there must\n be an angler, a fish, and some bait. All three existed on Arz but there\n was a question as to which was which.\nThe third night of the\nMarco Four's\nlandfall on the moonless Altarian\n planet was a repetition of the two before it, a nine-hour intermission", "He worked deeper into the underbrush and found other sleeping couples,\n but nothing else. There were no humming insects, no twittering\n night-birds or scurrying rodents. He had worked his way close to the\n center of the island without further discovery and was on the point of\n turning back, disgusted, when something bulky and powerful seized him\n from behind.", "He did not choose a weapon because he saw no need for one. The torch\n would show him how the natives reached the outcrop, and if he should\n need help the audicom would summon Stryker. Investigating without\n Stryker's sanction was, strictly speaking, a breach of Terran\n Regulations, but—\n\n\n \"Damn Terran Regulations,\" he muttered. \"I've got to\nknow\n.\"\n\n\n Farrell snapped on the torch at the edge of the thorn forest and entered\n briskly, eager for action now that he had begun. Just inside the edge of\n the bramble he came upon a pair of Arzians curled up together on the\n mossy ground, sleeping soundly, their triangular faces wholly blank and\n unrevealing.", "He went over again the improbable drama of the past three mornings, and\n found it not too unnatural until he came to the motivation and the means\n of transportation that placed the Arzians in pairs on the islet, when\n his whole fabric of speculation fell into a tangled snarl of\n inconsistencies. He gave it up finally; how could any Earthman\n rationalize the outlandish compulsions that actuated so alien a race?\n\n\n He went inside again, and the sound of Stryker's muffled snoring fanned\n his restlessness. He made his decision abruptly, laying aside the\n magnoscanner for a hand-flash and a pocket-sized audicom unit which he\n clipped to the belt of his shorts.", "\"A neat example of dog eat dog,\" Farrell said, snapping off the\n magnoscanner. \"Do any of those beauties look like city-builders, Gib?\"\n\n\n Chattering pink natives straggled past from the shelter of the thorn\n forest, ignoring the Earthmen, and lined the casting ledges along the\n beach to begin their day's fishing.\n\n\n \"Nothing we've seen yet could have built that city,\" Gibson said\n stubbornly. \"But it's here somewhere, and I'm going to find it. Will\n either of you be using the scouter today?\"", "The scouter settled on the outcrop beside Farrell, so close that the hot\n wash of its exhaust gases scorched his bare legs. Gibson put out thick\n brown arms and hauled him inside like a straw man, ignoring the native.\n The scouter darted for shore with Farrell lying across Gibson's knees in\n the cockpit, his head hanging half overside.\n\n\n Farrell had a last dizzy glimpse of the islet against the rush of green\n water below, and felt his shaky laugh of relief stick in his throat. Two\n of the octopods were swimming strongly for shore, holding the rigid\n Arzian native carefully above water between them.\n\n\n \"Gib,\" Farrell croaked. \"Gib, can you risk a look back? I think I've\n gone mad.\"\n\n\n The scouter swerved briefly as Gibson looked back. \"You're all right,\n Arthur. Just hang on tight. I'll explain everything when we get you safe\n in the\nMarco\n.\"", "Out of the morning rainbow dropped a swarm of winged lizards, twenty\n feet in length and a glistening chlorophyll green in the early light.\n They stooped like hawks upon the islet offshore, burying the two Arzian\n fishers instantly under their snapping, threshing bodies. Then around\n the outcrop the sea boiled whitely, churned to foam by a sudden\n uprushing of black, octopoid shapes.\n\n\n \"The squids,\" Stryker grunted. \"Right on schedule. Two seconds too late,\n as usual, to stop the slaughter.\"\n\n\n A barrage of barbed tentacles lashed out of the foam and drove into the\n melee of winged lizards. The lizards took the air at once, leaving\n behind three of their number who disappeared under the surface like\n harpooned seals. No trace remained of the two Arzian natives.", "The first red glow of sunrise blurred the reflected rainbow at his feet,\n but for some seconds his shuttling mind was too busy to consider the\n danger of predicament.\nWhatever brought me here anesthetized me first\n,\n he thought.\nThat sting in my shoulder was like a hypo needle.\nPanic seized him again when he remembered the green flying-lizards; more\n seconds passed before he gained control of himself, sweating with the\n effort. He had to get help. If he could switch on the audicom at his\n belt and call Stryker....\n\n\n He bent every ounce of his will toward raising his right hand, and\n failed.\n\n\n His arm was like a limb of lead, its inertia too great to budge. He\n relaxed the effort with a groan, sweating again when he saw a fiery\n half-disk of sun on the water, edges blurred and distorted by tiny\n surface ripples." ], [ "\"Behold a familiar pattern shaping up,\" Stryker said. He laughed\n suddenly, a great irrepressible bellow of sound. \"Arz is a squid's\n world, Arthur, don't you see? And like most civilized peoples, they're\n sportsmen. The flying-lizards are the game they hunt, and they raise the\n pink fishers for—\"\n\n\n Farrell swore in astonishment. \"Then those poor devils are put out there\n deliberately, like worms on a hook—angling in reverse! No wonder I\n couldn't spot their motivation!\"\n\n\n Gibson got up and sealed the port, shutting out the soft morning breeze.\n \"Colonization being out of the question, we may as well move on before\n the octopods get curious enough about us to make trouble. Do you feel up\n to the acceleration, Arthur?\"", "Stryker shielded his eyes with his hands against the glare of sun on\n water. \"You know I can't do that, Arthur. These Arzians may turn out to\n be Fifth Order beings or higher, and under Terran Regulations our\n tampering with what may be a basic culture-pattern would amount to armed\n invasion. We'll have to crack that cackle-and-grunt language of theirs\n and learn something of their mores before we can interfere.\"\n\n\n Farrell turned an irritable stare on the incurious group of Arzians\n gathering, nets and fishing spears in hand, at the edge of the\n sheltering bramble forest.\n\n\n \"What stumps me is their motivation,\" he said. \"Why do the fools go out\n to that islet every night, when they must know damned well what will\n happen next morning?\"", "He broke off, seeing for the first time the octopods that ringed the\n outcrop just under the surface of the water, waiting with barbed\n tentacles spread and yellow eyes studying him glassily. He heard the\n unmistakable flapping of wings behind and above him then, and thought\n with shock-born lucidity:\nI wanted a backstage look at this show, and\n now I'm one of the cast\n.\n\n\n The scouter roared in from the west across the thorn forest, flashing so\n close above his head that he felt the wind of its passage. Almost\n instantly he heard the shrilling blast of its emergency bow jets as\n Gibson met the lizard swarm head on.\n\n\n Gibson's voice came tinnily from the audicom. \"Scattered them for the\n moment, Arthur—blinded the whole crew with the exhaust, I think. Stand\n fast, now. I'm going to pick you up.\"", "Stryker threw up his hands. \"I've a mountain of data to collate, and\n Arthur is off duty after standing watch last night. Help yourself, but\n you won't find anything.\"\nThe scouter was a speeding dot on the horizon when Farrell crawled into\n his sleeping cubicle a short time later, leaving Stryker to mutter over\n his litter of notes. Sleep did not come to him at once; a vague sense of\n something overlooked prodded irritatingly at the back of his\n consciousness, but it was not until drowsiness had finally overtaken him\n that the discrepancy assumed definite form.\n\n\n He recalled then that on the first day of the\nMarco's\nplanetfall one\n of the pink fishers had fallen from a casting ledge into the water, and\n had all but drowned before his fellows pulled him out with extended\n spear-shafts. Which meant that the fishers could not swim, else some\n would surely have gone in after him.", "Gibson followed, stretching his powerfully-muscled body like a wrestler\n to throw off the effects of sleep. Gibson was linguist-ethnologist of\n the crew, a blocky man in his early thirties with thick black hair and\n heavy brows that shaded a square, humorless face.\n\n\n \"Any sign of the squids yet?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"They won't show up until the dragons come,\" Farrell said. He adjusted\n the light filter of the magnoscanner and scowled at Stryker. \"Lee, I\n wish you'd let me break up the show this time with a dis-beam. This\n butchery gets on my nerves.\"", "The scouter settled on the outcrop beside Farrell, so close that the hot\n wash of its exhaust gases scorched his bare legs. Gibson put out thick\n brown arms and hauled him inside like a straw man, ignoring the native.\n The scouter darted for shore with Farrell lying across Gibson's knees in\n the cockpit, his head hanging half overside.\n\n\n Farrell had a last dizzy glimpse of the islet against the rush of green\n water below, and felt his shaky laugh of relief stick in his throat. Two\n of the octopods were swimming strongly for shore, holding the rigid\n Arzian native carefully above water between them.\n\n\n \"Gib,\" Farrell croaked. \"Gib, can you risk a look back? I think I've\n gone mad.\"\n\n\n The scouter swerved briefly as Gibson looked back. \"You're all right,\n Arthur. Just hang on tight. I'll explain everything when we get you safe\n in the\nMarco\n.\"", "He went over again the improbable drama of the past three mornings, and\n found it not too unnatural until he came to the motivation and the means\n of transportation that placed the Arzians in pairs on the islet, when\n his whole fabric of speculation fell into a tangled snarl of\n inconsistencies. He gave it up finally; how could any Earthman\n rationalize the outlandish compulsions that actuated so alien a race?\n\n\n He went inside again, and the sound of Stryker's muffled snoring fanned\n his restlessness. He made his decision abruptly, laying aside the\n magnoscanner for a hand-flash and a pocket-sized audicom unit which he\n clipped to the belt of his shorts.", "The first red glow of sunrise blurred the reflected rainbow at his feet,\n but for some seconds his shuttling mind was too busy to consider the\n danger of predicament.\nWhatever brought me here anesthetized me first\n,\n he thought.\nThat sting in my shoulder was like a hypo needle.\nPanic seized him again when he remembered the green flying-lizards; more\n seconds passed before he gained control of himself, sweating with the\n effort. He had to get help. If he could switch on the audicom at his\n belt and call Stryker....\n\n\n He bent every ounce of his will toward raising his right hand, and\n failed.\n\n\n His arm was like a limb of lead, its inertia too great to budge. He\n relaxed the effort with a groan, sweating again when he saw a fiery\n half-disk of sun on the water, edges blurred and distorted by tiny\n surface ripples.", "\"He's scouring the daylight side now,\" Stryker said. \"Arthur, I'm going\n to ground Gib tomorrow, much as I dislike giving him a direct order.\n He's got that phantom city on the brain, and he lacks the imagination to\n understand how dangerous to our assignment an obsession of that sort can\n be.\"\n\n\n Farrell shrugged. \"I'd agree with you offhand if it weren't for Gib's\n bullheaded habit of being right. I hope he finds it soon, if it's here.\n I'll probably be standing his watch until he's satisfied.\"\n\n\n Stryker looked relieved. \"Would you mind taking it tonight? I'm\n completely bushed after today's logging.\"", "Farrell waved a hand and took up his magnoscanner. It was dark outside\n already, the close, soft night of a moonless tropical world whose moist\n atmosphere absorbed even starlight. He dragged a chair to the open port\n and packed his pipe, settling himself comfortably while Stryker mixed a\n nightcap before turning in.\n\n\n Later he remembered that Stryker dissolved a tablet in his glass, but at\n the moment it meant nothing. In a matter of minutes the older man's\n snoring drifted to him, a sound faintly irritating against the velvety\n hush outside.\n\n\n Farrell lit his pipe and turned to the inconsistencies he had uncovered.\n The Arzians did not swim, and without boats....\n\n\n It occurred to him then that there had been two of the pink fishers on\n the islet each morning, and the coincidence made him sit up suddenly,\n startled. Why two? Why not three or four, or only one?", "He gathered himself for another shout, and recalled with a chill of\n horror the tablet Stryker had mixed into his nightcap the night before.\n Worn out by his work, Stryker had made certain that he would not be\n easily disturbed.\n\n\n The flattened sun-disk on the water brightened and grew rounder. Above\n its reflected glare he caught a flicker of movement, a restless\n suggestion of flapping wings.\nHe tried again. \"Stryker, help me! I'm on the islet!\"\n\n\n The audicom crackled. The voice that answered was not Stryker's, but\n Gibson's.\n\n\n \"Farrell! What the devil are you doing on that butcher's block?\"\n\n\n Farrell fought down an insane desire to laugh. \"Never mind that—get\n here fast, Gib! The flying-lizards—\"", "A sharp sting burned his shoulder, wasp-like, and a sudden overwhelming\n lassitude swept him into a darkness deeper than the Arzian night. His\n last conscious thought was not of his own danger, but of Stryker—asleep\n and unprotected behind the\nMarco's\nopen port....\nHe was standing erect when he woke, his back to the open sea and a\n prismatic glimmer of early-dawn rainbow shining on the water before him.\n For a moment he was totally disoriented; then from the corner of an eye\n he caught the pinkish blur of an Arzian fisher standing beside him, and\n cried out hoarsely in sudden panic when he tried to turn his head and\n could not.\n\n\n He was on the coral outcropping offshore, and except for the involuntary\n muscles of balance and respiration his body was paralyzed.", "Farrell and Stryker looked at each other, grinning. Farrell said: \"You\n don't think I want to stick here and be used for bait again, do you?\"\n\n\n He and Stryker were still grinning over it when Gibson, unamused,\n blasted the\nMarco Four\nfree of Arz.", "He did not choose a weapon because he saw no need for one. The torch\n would show him how the natives reached the outcrop, and if he should\n need help the audicom would summon Stryker. Investigating without\n Stryker's sanction was, strictly speaking, a breach of Terran\n Regulations, but—\n\n\n \"Damn Terran Regulations,\" he muttered. \"I've got to\nknow\n.\"\n\n\n Farrell snapped on the torch at the edge of the thorn forest and entered\n briskly, eager for action now that he had begun. Just inside the edge of\n the bramble he came upon a pair of Arzians curled up together on the\n mossy ground, sleeping soundly, their triangular faces wholly blank and\n unrevealing.", "He stepped out through the open lock and paced restlessly up and down on\n the springy turf, feeling the ocean breeze soft on his face. Three days\n of dull routine logwork had built up a need for physical action that\n chafed his temper; he was intrigued and at the same time annoyed by the\n enigmatic relation that linked the Arzian fishers to the dragons and\n squids, and his desire to understand that relation was aggravated by the\n knowledge that Arz could be a perfect world for Terran colonization.\n That is, he thought wryly, if Terran colonists could stomach the weird\n custom pursued by its natives of committing suicide in pairs.", "Gibson answered him with an older problem, his square face puzzled. \"For\n that matter, what became of the city I saw when we came in through the\n stratosphere? It must be a tremendous thing, yet we've searched the\n entire globe in the scouter and found nothing but water and a scattering\n of little islands like this one, all covered with bramble. It wasn't a\n city these pink fishers could have built, either. The architecture was\n beyond them by a million years.\"\nStryker and Farrell traded baffled looks. The city had become something\n of a fixation with Gibson, and his dogged insistence—coupled with an\n irritating habit of being right—had worn their patience thin.\n\n\n \"There never was a city here, Gib,\" Stryker said. \"You dozed off while\n we were making planetfall, that's all.\"\n\n\n Gibson stiffened resentfully, but Farrell's voice cut his protest short.\n \"Get set! Here they come!\"", "And the Marco's crew had explored Arz exhaustively without finding any\n slightest trace of boats or of boat landings. The train of association\n completed itself with automatic logic, almost rousing Farrell out of his\n doze.\n\n\n \"I'll be damned,\" he muttered. \"No boats, and they don't swim.\nThen how\n the devil do they get out to that islet?\n\"\n\n\n He fell asleep with the paradox unresolved.\nStryker was still humped over his records when Farrell came out of his\n cubicle and broke a packaged meal from the food locker. The visicom over\n the control board hummed softly, its screen blank on open channel.\n\n\n \"Gibson found his lost city yet?\" Farrell asked, and grinned when\n Stryker snorted.", "\"A neat example of dog eat dog,\" Farrell said, snapping off the\n magnoscanner. \"Do any of those beauties look like city-builders, Gib?\"\n\n\n Chattering pink natives straggled past from the shelter of the thorn\n forest, ignoring the Earthmen, and lined the casting ledges along the\n beach to begin their day's fishing.\n\n\n \"Nothing we've seen yet could have built that city,\" Gibson said\n stubbornly. \"But it's here somewhere, and I'm going to find it. Will\n either of you be using the scouter today?\"", "Out of the morning rainbow dropped a swarm of winged lizards, twenty\n feet in length and a glistening chlorophyll green in the early light.\n They stooped like hawks upon the islet offshore, burying the two Arzian\n fishers instantly under their snapping, threshing bodies. Then around\n the outcrop the sea boiled whitely, churned to foam by a sudden\n uprushing of black, octopoid shapes.\n\n\n \"The squids,\" Stryker grunted. \"Right on schedule. Two seconds too late,\n as usual, to stop the slaughter.\"\n\n\n A barrage of barbed tentacles lashed out of the foam and drove into the\n melee of winged lizards. The lizards took the air at once, leaving\n behind three of their number who disappeared under the surface like\n harpooned seals. No trace remained of the two Arzian natives.", "Farrell forced himself to relax, more relieved than alarmed by the\n painful pricking of returning sensation. \"I might have known it, damn\n you,\" he said. \"You found your lost city, didn't you?\"\n\n\n Gibson sounded a little disgusted, as if he were still angry with\n himself over some private stupidity. \"I'd have found it sooner if I'd\n had any brains. It was under water, of course.\"\nIn the\nMarco Four\n, Gibson routed Stryker out of his cubicle and mixed\n drinks around, leaving Farrell comfortably relaxed in the padded control\n chair. The paralysis was still wearing off slowly, easing Farrell's fear\n of being permanently disabled." ], [ "A sharp sting burned his shoulder, wasp-like, and a sudden overwhelming\n lassitude swept him into a darkness deeper than the Arzian night. His\n last conscious thought was not of his own danger, but of Stryker—asleep\n and unprotected behind the\nMarco's\nopen port....\nHe was standing erect when he woke, his back to the open sea and a\n prismatic glimmer of early-dawn rainbow shining on the water before him.\n For a moment he was totally disoriented; then from the corner of an eye\n he caught the pinkish blur of an Arzian fisher standing beside him, and\n cried out hoarsely in sudden panic when he tried to turn his head and\n could not.\n\n\n He was on the coral outcropping offshore, and except for the involuntary\n muscles of balance and respiration his body was paralyzed.", "He went over again the improbable drama of the past three mornings, and\n found it not too unnatural until he came to the motivation and the means\n of transportation that placed the Arzians in pairs on the islet, when\n his whole fabric of speculation fell into a tangled snarl of\n inconsistencies. He gave it up finally; how could any Earthman\n rationalize the outlandish compulsions that actuated so alien a race?\n\n\n He went inside again, and the sound of Stryker's muffled snoring fanned\n his restlessness. He made his decision abruptly, laying aside the\n magnoscanner for a hand-flash and a pocket-sized audicom unit which he\n clipped to the belt of his shorts.", "The first red glow of sunrise blurred the reflected rainbow at his feet,\n but for some seconds his shuttling mind was too busy to consider the\n danger of predicament.\nWhatever brought me here anesthetized me first\n,\n he thought.\nThat sting in my shoulder was like a hypo needle.\nPanic seized him again when he remembered the green flying-lizards; more\n seconds passed before he gained control of himself, sweating with the\n effort. He had to get help. If he could switch on the audicom at his\n belt and call Stryker....\n\n\n He bent every ounce of his will toward raising his right hand, and\n failed.\n\n\n His arm was like a limb of lead, its inertia too great to budge. He\n relaxed the effort with a groan, sweating again when he saw a fiery\n half-disk of sun on the water, edges blurred and distorted by tiny\n surface ripples.", "\"He's scouring the daylight side now,\" Stryker said. \"Arthur, I'm going\n to ground Gib tomorrow, much as I dislike giving him a direct order.\n He's got that phantom city on the brain, and he lacks the imagination to\n understand how dangerous to our assignment an obsession of that sort can\n be.\"\n\n\n Farrell shrugged. \"I'd agree with you offhand if it weren't for Gib's\n bullheaded habit of being right. I hope he finds it soon, if it's here.\n I'll probably be standing his watch until he's satisfied.\"\n\n\n Stryker looked relieved. \"Would you mind taking it tonight? I'm\n completely bushed after today's logging.\"", "Gibson followed, stretching his powerfully-muscled body like a wrestler\n to throw off the effects of sleep. Gibson was linguist-ethnologist of\n the crew, a blocky man in his early thirties with thick black hair and\n heavy brows that shaded a square, humorless face.\n\n\n \"Any sign of the squids yet?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"They won't show up until the dragons come,\" Farrell said. He adjusted\n the light filter of the magnoscanner and scowled at Stryker. \"Lee, I\n wish you'd let me break up the show this time with a dis-beam. This\n butchery gets on my nerves.\"", "He did not choose a weapon because he saw no need for one. The torch\n would show him how the natives reached the outcrop, and if he should\n need help the audicom would summon Stryker. Investigating without\n Stryker's sanction was, strictly speaking, a breach of Terran\n Regulations, but—\n\n\n \"Damn Terran Regulations,\" he muttered. \"I've got to\nknow\n.\"\n\n\n Farrell snapped on the torch at the edge of the thorn forest and entered\n briskly, eager for action now that he had begun. Just inside the edge of\n the bramble he came upon a pair of Arzians curled up together on the\n mossy ground, sleeping soundly, their triangular faces wholly blank and\n unrevealing.", "He gathered himself for another shout, and recalled with a chill of\n horror the tablet Stryker had mixed into his nightcap the night before.\n Worn out by his work, Stryker had made certain that he would not be\n easily disturbed.\n\n\n The flattened sun-disk on the water brightened and grew rounder. Above\n its reflected glare he caught a flicker of movement, a restless\n suggestion of flapping wings.\nHe tried again. \"Stryker, help me! I'm on the islet!\"\n\n\n The audicom crackled. The voice that answered was not Stryker's, but\n Gibson's.\n\n\n \"Farrell! What the devil are you doing on that butcher's block?\"\n\n\n Farrell fought down an insane desire to laugh. \"Never mind that—get\n here fast, Gib! The flying-lizards—\"", "Stryker threw up his hands. \"I've a mountain of data to collate, and\n Arthur is off duty after standing watch last night. Help yourself, but\n you won't find anything.\"\nThe scouter was a speeding dot on the horizon when Farrell crawled into\n his sleeping cubicle a short time later, leaving Stryker to mutter over\n his litter of notes. Sleep did not come to him at once; a vague sense of\n something overlooked prodded irritatingly at the back of his\n consciousness, but it was not until drowsiness had finally overtaken him\n that the discrepancy assumed definite form.\n\n\n He recalled then that on the first day of the\nMarco's\nplanetfall one\n of the pink fishers had fallen from a casting ledge into the water, and\n had all but drowned before his fellows pulled him out with extended\n spear-shafts. Which meant that the fishers could not swim, else some\n would surely have gone in after him.", "Farrell forced himself to relax, more relieved than alarmed by the\n painful pricking of returning sensation. \"I might have known it, damn\n you,\" he said. \"You found your lost city, didn't you?\"\n\n\n Gibson sounded a little disgusted, as if he were still angry with\n himself over some private stupidity. \"I'd have found it sooner if I'd\n had any brains. It was under water, of course.\"\nIn the\nMarco Four\n, Gibson routed Stryker out of his cubicle and mixed\n drinks around, leaving Farrell comfortably relaxed in the padded control\n chair. The paralysis was still wearing off slowly, easing Farrell's fear\n of being permanently disabled.", "Sunrise brought him alert with a jerk, frowning at sight of two pinkish,\n bipedal Arzian fishermen posted on the tiny coral islet a quarter-mile\n offshore, their blank triangular faces turned stolidly toward the beach.\n\n\n \"They're at it again,\" Farrell called, and dropped to the mossy turf\n outside. \"Roll out on the double! I'm going to magnofilm this!\"\n\n\n Stryker and Gibson came out of their sleeping cubicles reluctantly,\n belting on the loose shorts which all three wore in the balmy Arzian\n climate. Stryker blinked and yawned as he let himself through the port,\n his fringe of white hair tousled and his naked paunch sweating. He\n looked, Farrell thought for the thousandth time, more like a retired\n cook than like the veteran commander of a Terran Colonies expedition.", "And the Marco's crew had explored Arz exhaustively without finding any\n slightest trace of boats or of boat landings. The train of association\n completed itself with automatic logic, almost rousing Farrell out of his\n doze.\n\n\n \"I'll be damned,\" he muttered. \"No boats, and they don't swim.\nThen how\n the devil do they get out to that islet?\n\"\n\n\n He fell asleep with the paradox unresolved.\nStryker was still humped over his records when Farrell came out of his\n cubicle and broke a packaged meal from the food locker. The visicom over\n the control board hummed softly, its screen blank on open channel.\n\n\n \"Gibson found his lost city yet?\" Farrell asked, and grinned when\n Stryker snorted.", "Stryker shielded his eyes with his hands against the glare of sun on\n water. \"You know I can't do that, Arthur. These Arzians may turn out to\n be Fifth Order beings or higher, and under Terran Regulations our\n tampering with what may be a basic culture-pattern would amount to armed\n invasion. We'll have to crack that cackle-and-grunt language of theirs\n and learn something of their mores before we can interfere.\"\n\n\n Farrell turned an irritable stare on the incurious group of Arzians\n gathering, nets and fishing spears in hand, at the edge of the\n sheltering bramble forest.\n\n\n \"What stumps me is their motivation,\" he said. \"Why do the fools go out\n to that islet every night, when they must know damned well what will\n happen next morning?\"", "On shore he could see the\nMarco Four\nresting between thorn forest and\n beach, its silvered sides glistening with dew. The port was still open,\n and the empty carrier rack in the bow told him that Gibson had not yet\n returned with the scouter.\n\n\n He grew aware then that sensation was returning to him slowly, that the\n cold surface of the audicom unit at his hip—unfelt before—was pressing\n against the inner curve of his elbow. He bent his will again toward\n motion; this time the arm tensed a little, enough to send hope flaring\n through him. If he could put pressure enough against the stud....\n\n\n The tiny click of its engaging sent him faint with relief.\n\n\n \"Stryker!\" he yelled. \"Lee, roll out—\nStryker\n!\"\n\n\n The audicom hummed gently, without answer.", "Farrell and Stryker looked at each other, grinning. Farrell said: \"You\n don't think I want to stick here and be used for bait again, do you?\"\n\n\n He and Stryker were still grinning over it when Gibson, unamused,\n blasted the\nMarco Four\nfree of Arz.", "Farrell waved a hand and took up his magnoscanner. It was dark outside\n already, the close, soft night of a moonless tropical world whose moist\n atmosphere absorbed even starlight. He dragged a chair to the open port\n and packed his pipe, settling himself comfortably while Stryker mixed a\n nightcap before turning in.\n\n\n Later he remembered that Stryker dissolved a tablet in his glass, but at\n the moment it meant nothing. In a matter of minutes the older man's\n snoring drifted to him, a sound faintly irritating against the velvety\n hush outside.\n\n\n Farrell lit his pipe and turned to the inconsistencies he had uncovered.\n The Arzians did not swim, and without boats....\n\n\n It occurred to him then that there had been two of the pink fishers on\n the islet each morning, and the coincidence made him sit up suddenly,\n startled. Why two? Why not three or four, or only one?", "Gibson answered him with an older problem, his square face puzzled. \"For\n that matter, what became of the city I saw when we came in through the\n stratosphere? It must be a tremendous thing, yet we've searched the\n entire globe in the scouter and found nothing but water and a scattering\n of little islands like this one, all covered with bramble. It wasn't a\n city these pink fishers could have built, either. The architecture was\n beyond them by a million years.\"\nStryker and Farrell traded baffled looks. The city had become something\n of a fixation with Gibson, and his dogged insistence—coupled with an\n irritating habit of being right—had worn their patience thin.\n\n\n \"There never was a city here, Gib,\" Stryker said. \"You dozed off while\n we were making planetfall, that's all.\"\n\n\n Gibson stiffened resentfully, but Farrell's voice cut his protest short.\n \"Get set! Here they come!\"", "\"Behold a familiar pattern shaping up,\" Stryker said. He laughed\n suddenly, a great irrepressible bellow of sound. \"Arz is a squid's\n world, Arthur, don't you see? And like most civilized peoples, they're\n sportsmen. The flying-lizards are the game they hunt, and they raise the\n pink fishers for—\"\n\n\n Farrell swore in astonishment. \"Then those poor devils are put out there\n deliberately, like worms on a hook—angling in reverse! No wonder I\n couldn't spot their motivation!\"\n\n\n Gibson got up and sealed the port, shutting out the soft morning breeze.\n \"Colonization being out of the question, we may as well move on before\n the octopods get curious enough about us to make trouble. Do you feel up\n to the acceleration, Arthur?\"", "He worked deeper into the underbrush and found other sleeping couples,\n but nothing else. There were no humming insects, no twittering\n night-birds or scurrying rodents. He had worked his way close to the\n center of the island without further discovery and was on the point of\n turning back, disgusted, when something bulky and powerful seized him\n from behind.", "He stepped out through the open lock and paced restlessly up and down on\n the springy turf, feeling the ocean breeze soft on his face. Three days\n of dull routine logwork had built up a need for physical action that\n chafed his temper; he was intrigued and at the same time annoyed by the\n enigmatic relation that linked the Arzian fishers to the dragons and\n squids, and his desire to understand that relation was aggravated by the\n knowledge that Arz could be a perfect world for Terran colonization.\n That is, he thought wryly, if Terran colonists could stomach the weird\n custom pursued by its natives of committing suicide in pairs.", "The scouter settled on the outcrop beside Farrell, so close that the hot\n wash of its exhaust gases scorched his bare legs. Gibson put out thick\n brown arms and hauled him inside like a straw man, ignoring the native.\n The scouter darted for shore with Farrell lying across Gibson's knees in\n the cockpit, his head hanging half overside.\n\n\n Farrell had a last dizzy glimpse of the islet against the rush of green\n water below, and felt his shaky laugh of relief stick in his throat. Two\n of the octopods were swimming strongly for shore, holding the rigid\n Arzian native carefully above water between them.\n\n\n \"Gib,\" Farrell croaked. \"Gib, can you risk a look back? I think I've\n gone mad.\"\n\n\n The scouter swerved briefly as Gibson looked back. \"You're all right,\n Arthur. Just hang on tight. I'll explain everything when we get you safe\n in the\nMarco\n.\"" ] ]
valid	51267	[ "Who put Granthan's leg in a walking brace?", "Why did they not want to let Granthan go back to Earth?", "How did Granthan know how to reach out to the Gool?", "What was not true about the aliens?", "Why did Granthan get in the lifeboat?", "Why was it difficult for Granthan to get people to help him travel after he left the capsule?", "Describe Granthan's journey after leaving the capsule.", "Why did Granthan change from coveralls to a suit?", "What endangered Granthan on his way from the capsule to the beach?" ]	[ [ "The med people", "He did it himself", "A colonel", "The first aid cabinet" ], [ "He needed to stay out and fight the war", "He was injured very badly", "They were afraid he was being controlled by someone", "He was the only survivor of the disaster" ], [ "There was an open channel", "He was a psychodynamicist", "He copied what they had done to him", "He was a soldier" ], [ "They ate iron", "They were large", "Their mouths were above their brains", "They lived all throughout the galaxy" ], [ "To get away from the fire", "To tend to his injuries", "Because he was the only survivor", "To go back to Earth to cause damage" ], [ "The authorities had circulated his picture", "He could no longer control their minds", "He was injured", "He did not understand people" ], [ "Boat, then car, then train, then walking, then car, then cab", "Boat, then car, then train, then car, then walking, then car, then cab", "Boat, then car, then train, then walking, then cab", "Boat, then train, then walking, then car, then cab" ], [ "He had to walk through a swamp", "His coveralls were tattered", "He was in New Orleans", "He was trying to avoid detection" ], [ "Missiles", "Guns", "His injuries", "Starvation" ] ]	[ 4, 3, 3, 4, 4, 1, 1, 4, 1 ]	[ 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "There was a first-aid cabinet across the compartment from me. I\n tried my right leg, felt broken bone-ends grate with a sensation\n that transcended pain. I heaved with the other leg, scrabbled with\n the charred arm. The crawl to the cabinet dwarfed Hillary's trek\n up Everest, but I reached it after a couple of years, and found the\n microswitch on the floor that activated the thing, and then I was\n fading out again....\nI came out of it clear-headed but weak. My right leg was numb, but\n reasonably comfortable, clamped tight in a walking brace. I put up\n a hand and felt a shaved skull, with sutures. It must have been a\n fracture. The left arm—well, it was still there, wrapped to the", "shoulder and held out stiffly by a power truss that would keep the scar\n tissue from pulling up and crippling me. The steady pressure as the\n truss contracted wasn't anything to do a sense-tape on for replaying at\n leisure moments, but at least the cabinet hadn't amputated. I wasn't\n complaining.", "I tried to reason with him. I reminded him how I had readied myself\n for the trip with sessions on the encephaloscope, setting up the\n cross-networks of conditioned defensive responses, the shunt circuits\n to the decoy pseudo-personality, leaving my volitional ego free. I\n talked about subliminal hypnotics and the resilience quotient of the\n ego-complex.\n\n\n I might have saved my breath.\n\n\n \"I don't understand that psychodynamics jargon, Granthan,\" he snapped.\n \"It smacks of mysticism. But I understand what the Gool have done to\n you well enough. I'm sorry.\"\n\n\n I leaned back and chewed the inside of my lip and thought unkind\n thoughts about Colonel Ausar Kayle. Then I settled down to solve the\n problem at hand.", "I gritted my teeth, pulled myself into the car, crawled to a dark\n corner behind a crate and slumped down. I tried to evoke a personality\n fraction to set as a guard, a part of my mind to stay awake and warn\n me of danger. It was too much trouble. I relaxed and let it all slide\n down into darkness.\nThe car swayed, click-clack, click-clack. I opened my eyes, saw yellow\n sunlight in a bar across the litter on the floor. The power truss\n creaked, pulling at my arm. My broken leg was throbbing its indignation\n at the treatment it had received—walking brace and all—and the burned\n arm was yelling aloud for more of that nice dope that had been keeping\n it from realizing how bad it was. All things considered, I felt like a\n badly embalmed mummy—except that I was hungry. I had been a fool not\n to fill my pockets when I left the escape capsule in the shallows off\n Key Largo, but things had been happening too fast.", "I pressed the release on the power truss, gingerly unclamped it, then\n rigged a sling from a strip of shirt tail. I tied the arm to my side as\n inconspicuously as possible. I didn't disturb the bandages.\n\n\n I needed new clothes—or at least different ones—and something to\n cover my shaved skull. I couldn't stay hidden forever. The yard cop had\n recognized me at a glance.\n\n\n I lay back, waiting for the train to slow for a town. I wasn't unduly\n worried—at the moment. The watchman probably hadn't convinced anyone\n he'd actually seen me. Maybe he hadn't been too sure himself.\n\n\n The click-clack slowed and the train shuddered to a stop. I crept to\n the door, peered through the crack. There were sunny fields, a few low\n buildings in the distance, the corner of a platform. I closed my eyes\n and let my awareness stretch out.", "I wasn't, of course. I was still the same Peter Granthan,\n psychodynamicist, who had started out with Dayan's fleet six weeks\n earlier. The thoughts I was having weren't brilliant, but they were\n mine, all mine....\n\n\n But how could I be sure of that?\n\n\n Maybe there was something in Kayle's suspicion. If the Gool were as\n skillful as we thought, they would have left no overt indications of\n their tampering—not at a conscious level.\n\n\n But this was where psychodynamics training came in. I had been reacting\n like any scared casualty, aching to get home and lick his wounds. But I\n wasn't just any casualty. I had been trained in the subtleties of the\n mind—and I had been prepared for just such an attack.", "\"This is war, Granthan. War against a vicious enemy who strike without\n warning and without mercy. You were sent out to investigate the\n possibility of—what's that term you use?—hyper-cortical invasion. You\n know better than most the risk I'd be running if you were allowed to\n pass the patrol line.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Granthan. I can't let you land on Earth. I can't accept\n the risk.\"\n\n\n \"What do I do now?\" I stormed. \"Go into orbit and eat pills and hope\n you think of something? I need a doctor!\"", "\"Mr. Granthan, I am General Titus. On behalf of your country, and\n in the name of the President—who has been apprised of this tragic\n situation—it is my privilege to inform you that you will be awarded\n the Congressional Medal of Honor—posthumously—for your heroic effort.\n Although you failed, and have in fact been forced, against your will,\n to carry out the schemes of the inhuman enemy, this in no way detracts\n from your gallant attempt. Mr. Granthan, I salute you.\"\n\n\n The general's arm went up in a rigid gesture.\n\n\n \"Stow that, you pompous idiot!\" I barked. \"I'm no spy!\"\n\n\n Kayle was back, blanking out the startled face of the general.\n\n\n \"Goodbye, Granthan. Try to understand....\"", "I drank the water first, ate a sandwich, then lit a cigarette and lay\n back. So far so good. The crates in the car were marked \"U. S. Naval\n Aerospace Station, Bayou Le Cochon\". With any luck I'd reach New\n Orleans in another twelve hours. The first step of my plan included a\n raid on the Delta National Labs; but that was tomorrow. That could\n wait.\nIt was a little before dawn when I crawled out of the car at a siding\n in the swampy country a few miles out of New Orleans. I wasn't feeling\n good, but I had a stake in staying on my feet. I still had a few miles\n in me. I had my supplies—a few candy bars and some cigarettes—stuffed\n in the pockets of the tattered issue coverall. Otherwise, I was\n unencumbered. Unless you wanted to count the walking brace on my right\n leg and the sling binding my arm.", "\"We have you pinpointed,\" Kayle cut in. \"It's no use fighting it,\n Granthan.\"\nI felt cold sweat pop out on my forehead. \"You've got to listen,\n Kayle,\" I shouted. \"I suppose you've got missiles on the way already.\n Call them back! I have information that can win the war—\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Granthan,\" Kayle said. \"It's too late—even if I could\n take the chance you were right.\"\n\n\n A different face appeared on the screen.", "I would have to risk calling Kayle now—but by voluntarily giving my\n position away, I should convince him I was still on our side—and I was\n badly in need of a pick-up. I flipped the sending key.\n\n\n \"This is Z four-oh-two,\" I said. \"I have an urgent report for Colonel\n Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence.\"\n\n\n Kayle's face appeared. \"Don't fight it, Granthan,\" he croaked. \"You\n penetrated the planetary defenses—God knows how. I—\"\n\n\n \"Later,\" I snapped. \"How about calling off your dogs now? And send\n somebody out here to pick me up, before I add sea-sickness to my other\n complaints.\"", "I picked my way across mushy ground to a pot-holed black-top road,\n started limping toward a few car lights visible half a mile away. It\n was already hot. The swamp air was like warmed-over subway fumes.\n Through the drugs, I could feel my pulse throbbing in my various\n wounds. I reached out and touched the driver's mind; he was thinking\n about shrimps, a fish-hook wound on his left thumb and a girl with\n black hair. \"Want a lift?\" he called.\n\n\n I thanked him and got in. He gave me a glance and I pinched off his\n budding twinge of curiosity. It was almost an effort now not to follow\n his thoughts. It was as though my mind, having learned the trick of\n communications with others, instinctively reached out toward them.", "I opened my eyes and took a look around. I was on the floor next to\n an unpadded acceleration couch—the kind the Terrestrial Space Arm\n installs in seldom-used lifeboats. There were three more couches, but\n no one in them. I tried to sit up. It wasn't easy but, by applying a\n lot more will-power than should be required of a sick man, I made it.\n I took a look at my left arm. Baked. The hand was only medium rare,\n but the forearm was black, with deep red showing at the bottom of the\n cracks where the crisped upper layers had burst....", "END AS A HERO\nBy KEITH LAUMER\n\n\n Illustrated by SCHELLING\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction June 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nGranthan's mission was the most vital of the war.\n\n It would mean instant victory—but for whom?\nI\n\n\n In the dream I was swimming in a river of white fire and the dream went\n on and on. And then I was awake—and the fire was still there, fiercely\n burning at me.\n\n\n I tried to move to get away from the flames, and then the real pain\n hit me. I tried to go back to sleep and the relative comfort of the\n river of fire, but it was no go. For better or worse, I was alive and\n conscious.", "As far as I knew, I was the first recorded survivor of contact with the\n Gool—if I survived.\n\n\n I was still a long way from home, and I hadn't yet checked on the\n condition of the lifeboat. I glanced toward the entry port. It was\n dogged shut. I could see black marks where my burned hand had been at\n work.\n\n\n I fumbled my way into a couch and tried to think. In my condition—with\n a broken leg and third-degree burns, plus a fractured skull—I\n shouldn't have been able to fall out of bed, much less make the trip\n from\nBelshazzar's\nCCC to the boat; and how had I managed to dog that\n port shut? In an emergency a man was capable of great exertions. But\n running on a broken femur, handling heavy levers with charred fingers\n and thinking with a cracked head were overdoing it. Still, I was\n here—and it was time to get a call through to TSA headquarters.", "I had barely made it to the fishing boat, whose owner I had coerced\n into rendezvousing with me before shells started dropping around us. If\n the gunners on the cruiser ten miles away had had any luck, they would\n have finished me—and the hapless fisherman—right then. We rode out a\n couple of near misses, before I put the cruiser's gunnery crew off the\n air.\n\n\n At a fishing camp on the beach, I found a car—with driver. He dropped\n me at the railyard, and drove off under the impression he was in town\n for groceries. He'd never believe he'd seen me.\n\n\n Now I'd had my sleep. I had to start getting ready for the next act of\n the farce.", "He jumped out, opened my door, helped me out with a hand under my good\n elbow. \"I'll get your change, sir,\" he said, reaching for his hip.\n\n\n \"Keep it.\"\n\n\n \"Thank YOU.\" He hesitated. \"Maybe I oughta stick around. You know.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be all right.\"\n\n\n \"I hope so,\" he said. \"A man like you—you and me—\" he winked. \"After\n all, we ain't both wearing berets fer nothing.\"\n\n\n \"True,\" I said. \"Consider your tip doubled. Now drive away into the\n sunrise and forget you ever saw me.\"", "\"\nAlmost it eluded me then, Effulgent Lord. Link with this lowly one!\n\"\n\n\n \"\nImpossible! Do you forget all my teachings? Cling, though you expend\n the last filament of your life-force!\n\"\n\n\n Free from all distraction, at a level where comprehension and retention\n are instantaneous and total, my monitoring basic personality fraction\n followed the skillful Gool mind as it engraved its commands deep in\n my subconscious. Then the touch withdrew, erasing the scars of its\n passage, to leave me unaware of its tampering—at a conscious level.\n\n\n Watching the Gool mind, I learned.\n\n\n The insinuating probe—a concept regarding which psychodynamicists had\n theorized—was no more than a pattern in emptiness....\n\n\n But a pattern which I could duplicate, now that I had seen what had\n been done to me.", "\"—\nlousy job. What's the use? Little witch in the lunch room ... up in\n the hills, squirrel hunting, bottle of whiskey....\n\"\n\n\n I settled into control gently, trying not to alarm the man. I saw\n through his eyes the dusty box car, the rust on the tracks, the\n listless weeds growing among cinders, and the weathered boards of\n the platform. I turned him, and saw the dingy glass of the telegraph\n window, a sagging screen door with a chipped enameled cola sign.\n\n\n I walked the man to the door, and through it. Behind a linoleum-topped\n counter, a coarse-skinned teen-age girl with heavy breasts and wet\n patches under her arms looked up without interest as the door banged.", "Gravel scrunched nearby. The beam of a flashlight lanced out, slipped\n along the weathered car, caught me. There was a startled exclamation.\n I ducked back, closed my eyes, felt out for his mind. There was a\n confused murmur of thought, a random intrusion of impressions from the\n city all around. It was hard, too hard. I had to sleep—\n\n\n I heard the snick of a revolver being cocked, and dropped flat as a\n gout of flame stabbed toward me, the imperative Bam! echoing between\n the cars. I caught the clear thought:\n\n\n \"God-awful looking, shaved head, arm stuck out; him all right—\"\n\n\n I reached out to his mind and struck at random. The light fell, went\n out, and I heard the unconscious body slam to the ground like a poled\n steer.\n\n\n It was easy—if I could only stay awake." ], [ "\"This is war, Granthan. War against a vicious enemy who strike without\n warning and without mercy. You were sent out to investigate the\n possibility of—what's that term you use?—hyper-cortical invasion. You\n know better than most the risk I'd be running if you were allowed to\n pass the patrol line.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Granthan. I can't let you land on Earth. I can't accept\n the risk.\"\n\n\n \"What do I do now?\" I stormed. \"Go into orbit and eat pills and hope\n you think of something? I need a doctor!\"", "I would have to risk calling Kayle now—but by voluntarily giving my\n position away, I should convince him I was still on our side—and I was\n badly in need of a pick-up. I flipped the sending key.\n\n\n \"This is Z four-oh-two,\" I said. \"I have an urgent report for Colonel\n Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence.\"\n\n\n Kayle's face appeared. \"Don't fight it, Granthan,\" he croaked. \"You\n penetrated the planetary defenses—God knows how. I—\"\n\n\n \"Later,\" I snapped. \"How about calling off your dogs now? And send\n somebody out here to pick me up, before I add sea-sickness to my other\n complaints.\"", "\"We have you pinpointed,\" Kayle cut in. \"It's no use fighting it,\n Granthan.\"\nI felt cold sweat pop out on my forehead. \"You've got to listen,\n Kayle,\" I shouted. \"I suppose you've got missiles on the way already.\n Call them back! I have information that can win the war—\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Granthan,\" Kayle said. \"It's too late—even if I could\n take the chance you were right.\"\n\n\n A different face appeared on the screen.", "I tried to reason with him. I reminded him how I had readied myself\n for the trip with sessions on the encephaloscope, setting up the\n cross-networks of conditioned defensive responses, the shunt circuits\n to the decoy pseudo-personality, leaving my volitional ego free. I\n talked about subliminal hypnotics and the resilience quotient of the\n ego-complex.\n\n\n I might have saved my breath.\n\n\n \"I don't understand that psychodynamics jargon, Granthan,\" he snapped.\n \"It smacks of mysticism. But I understand what the Gool have done to\n you well enough. I'm sorry.\"\n\n\n I leaned back and chewed the inside of my lip and thought unkind\n thoughts about Colonel Ausar Kayle. Then I settled down to solve the\n problem at hand.", "Presently Kayle replied. \"Yes,\" he said. \"You'll have to enter a\n parking orbit. Perhaps there will be developments soon which will make\n it possible to ... ah ... restudy the situation.\" He didn't meet my\n eye. I knew what he was thinking. He'd spare me the mental anguish of\n knowing what was coming. I couldn't really blame him; he was doing\n what he thought was the right thing. And I'd have to go along and\n pretend—right up until the warheads struck—that I didn't know I'd\n been condemned to death.\nII\n\n\n I tried to gather my wits and think my way through the situation. I\n was alone and injured, aboard a lifeboat that would be the focus of a\n converging flight of missiles as soon as I approached within battery\n range of Earth. I had gotten clear of the Gool, but I wouldn't survive\n my next meeting with my own kind. They couldn't take the chance that I\n was acting under Gool orders.", "\"Mr. Granthan, I am General Titus. On behalf of your country, and\n in the name of the President—who has been apprised of this tragic\n situation—it is my privilege to inform you that you will be awarded\n the Congressional Medal of Honor—posthumously—for your heroic effort.\n Although you failed, and have in fact been forced, against your will,\n to carry out the schemes of the inhuman enemy, this in no way detracts\n from your gallant attempt. Mr. Granthan, I salute you.\"\n\n\n The general's arm went up in a rigid gesture.\n\n\n \"Stow that, you pompous idiot!\" I barked. \"I'm no spy!\"\n\n\n Kayle was back, blanking out the startled face of the general.\n\n\n \"Goodbye, Granthan. Try to understand....\"", "But not if I could help it.\n\n\n The Gool had evolved a plan—but they'd had a stroke of bad luck.\n\n\n In the past, they had managed to control a man here and there, among\n the fleets, far from home, but only at a superficial level. Enough,\n perhaps, to wreck a ship, but not the complete control needed to send a\n man back to Earth under Gool compulsion, to carry out complex sabotage.\n\n\n Then they had found me, alone, a sole survivor, free from the clutter\n of the other mind-fields. It had been their misfortune to pick a\n psychodynamicist. Instead of gaining a patient slave, they had opened\n the fortress door to an unseen spy. Now that I was there, I would see\n what I could steal.", "I wasn't, of course. I was still the same Peter Granthan,\n psychodynamicist, who had started out with Dayan's fleet six weeks\n earlier. The thoughts I was having weren't brilliant, but they were\n mine, all mine....\n\n\n But how could I be sure of that?\n\n\n Maybe there was something in Kayle's suspicion. If the Gool were as\n skillful as we thought, they would have left no overt indications of\n their tampering—not at a conscious level.\n\n\n But this was where psychodynamics training came in. I had been reacting\n like any scared casualty, aching to get home and lick his wounds. But I\n wasn't just any casualty. I had been trained in the subtleties of the\n mind—and I had been prepared for just such an attack.", "I flipped the switch and gave the emergency call-letters Col. Ausar\n Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence had assigned to me a few weeks before.\n It was almost five minutes before the \"acknowledge\" came through from\n the Ganymede relay station, another ten minutes before Kayle's face\n swam into view. Even through the blur of the screen I could see the\n haggard look.\n\n\n \"Granthan!\" he burst out. \"Where are the others? What happened out\n there?\" I turned him down to a mutter.\n\n\n \"Hold on,\" I said. \"I'll tell you. Recorders going?\" I didn't wait for\n an answer—not with a fifteen-minute transmission lag. I plowed on:\n\n\n \"\nBelshazzar\nwas sabotaged. So was\nGilgamesh\n—I think. I got out. I\n lost a little skin, but the aid cabinet has the case in hand. Tell the\n Med people the drinks are on me.\"", "\"Z four-oh-two, countermand DEW Line clearance! Repeat, clearance\n countermanded! Emergency course change to standard hyperbolic code\n ninety-eight. Do not attempt re-entry. Repeat: do not attempt re-entry!\"\n\n\n It hadn't taken Kayle long to see that I'd gotten past the outer line\n of defense. A few more minutes' grace would have helped. I'd play it\n dumb, and hope for a little luck.\n\n\n \"Planetary, Z four-oh-two here. Say, I'm afraid I missed part of that,\n fellows. I'm a little banged up—I guess I switched frequencies on you.\n What was that after 'pick up channel forty-three'...?\"\n\n\n \"Four-oh-two, sheer off there! You're not cleared for re-entry!\"", "END AS A HERO\nBy KEITH LAUMER\n\n\n Illustrated by SCHELLING\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction June 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nGranthan's mission was the most vital of the war.\n\n It would mean instant victory—but for whom?\nI\n\n\n In the dream I was swimming in a river of white fire and the dream went\n on and on. And then I was awake—and the fire was still there, fiercely\n burning at me.\n\n\n I tried to move to get away from the flames, and then the real pain\n hit me. I tried to go back to sleep and the relative comfort of the\n river of fire, but it was no go. For better or worse, I was alive and\n conscious.", "I closed my eyes, reached out—as the Gool mind had reached out to\n me—and felt the touch of a Signals Officer's mind, forty thousand\n miles distant, aboard the patrol vessel. There was a brief flurry of\n struggle; then I dictated my instructions. The Signals Officer punched\n keys, spoke into his microphone:\n\n\n \"As you were, Z four-oh-two. Continue on present course. At Oh-nineteen\n seconds, pick up planetary for re-entry and let-down.\"\n\n\n I blanked out the man's recollection of what had happened, caught his\n belated puzzlement as I broke contact. But I was clear of the DEW line\n now, rapidly approaching atmosphere.\n\n\n \"Z four-oh-two,\" the speaker crackled. \"This is planetary control. I am\n picking you up on channel forty-three, for re-entry and let-down.\"\n\n\n There was a long pause. Then:", "I finished talking and flopped back, waiting for Kayle's reply. On the\n screen, his flickering image gazed back impatiently, looking as hostile\n as a swing-shift ward nurse. It would be half an hour before I would\n get his reaction to my report. I dozed off—and awoke with a start.\n Kayle was talking.\n\n\n \"—your report. I won't mince words. They're wondering at your role in\n the disaster. How does it happen that you alone survived?\"\n\n\n \"How the hell do I know?\" I yelled—or croaked. But Kayle's voice was\n droning on:\n\n\n \"... you Psychodynamics people have been telling me the Gool may\n have some kind of long-range telehypnotic ability that might make it\n possible for them to subvert a loyal man without his knowledge. You've\n told me yourself that you blacked out during the attack—and came to on\n the lifeboat, with no recollection of how you got there.", "discovered, worlds where food was free for the taking. Not sulphur\n alone, but potassium, calcium, iron and all the metals—riches\n beyond belief in endless profusion. No longer would the Gool tribe\n cluster—those who remained of a once-great race—at a single feeding\n trough. They would spread out across a galaxy—and beyond.", "As far as I knew, I was the first recorded survivor of contact with the\n Gool—if I survived.\n\n\n I was still a long way from home, and I hadn't yet checked on the\n condition of the lifeboat. I glanced toward the entry port. It was\n dogged shut. I could see black marks where my burned hand had been at\n work.\n\n\n I fumbled my way into a couch and tried to think. In my condition—with\n a broken leg and third-degree burns, plus a fractured skull—I\n shouldn't have been able to fall out of bed, much less make the trip\n from\nBelshazzar's\nCCC to the boat; and how had I managed to dog that\n port shut? In an emergency a man was capable of great exertions. But\n running on a broken femur, handling heavy levers with charred fingers\n and thinking with a cracked head were overdoing it. Still, I was\n here—and it was time to get a call through to TSA headquarters.", "A timeless time passed. I wandered among patterns of white light and\n white sound, plumbed the deepest recesses of hidden Gool thoughts,\n fared along strange ways examining the shapes and colors of the\n concepts of an alien mind.\n\n\n I paused at last, scanning a multi-ordinal structure of pattern within\n pattern; the diagrammed circuits of a strange machine.\n\n\n I followed through its logic-sequence; and, like a bomb-burst, its\n meaning exploded in my mind.\n\n\n From the vile nest deep under the dark surface of the Gool world in\n its lonely trans-Plutonian orbit, I had plucked the ultimate secret of\n their kind.", "A part of my mind watched as the memory unreeled. I listened to the\n voices—yet not voices, merely the shape of concepts, indescribably\n intricate. I saw how the decoy pseudo-personality which I had\n concretized for the purpose in a hundred training sessions had fought\n against the intruding stimuli—then yielded under the relentless thrust\n of the alien probe. I watched as the Gool operator took over the motor\n centers, caused me to crawl through the choking smoke of the devastated\n control compartment toward the escape hatch. Fire leaped up, blocking\n the way. I went on, felt ghostly flames whipping at me—and then the\n hatch was open and I pulled myself through, forcing the broken leg.\n My blackened hand fumbled at the locking wheel. Then the blast as\n the lifeboat leaped clear of the disintegrating dreadnought—and the\n world-ending impact as I fell.\n\n\n At a level far below the conscious, the embattled pseudo-personality\n lashed out again—fighting the invader.", "Matter across space.\n\"You've got to listen to me, Kayle,\" I shouted. \"I know you think I'm\n a Gool robot. But what I have is too big to let you blow it up without\n a fight. Matter transmission! You know what that can mean to us. The\n concept is too complex to try to describe in words. You'll have to take\n my word for it. I can build it, though, using standard components, plus\n an infinite-area antenna and a moebius-wound coil—and a few other\n things....\"\n\n\n I harangued Kayle for a while, and then sweated out his answer. I was\n getting close now. If he couldn't see the beauty of my proposal, my\n screens would start to register the radiation of warheads any time now.\n\n\n Kayle came back—and his answer boiled down to \"no.\"", "I dropped the contact, found another, who leaped to the panel,\n detonated the remainder of the flight of six missiles. Then I withdrew.\n I would have a few minutes' stay of execution now.\n\n\n I was ten miles from shore. The capsule had its own power plant. I\n started it up, switched on the external viewer. I saw dark sea, the\n glint of star-light on the choppy surface, in the distance a glow on\n the horizon that would be Key West. I plugged the course into the\n pilot, then leaned back and felt outward with my mind for the next\n attacker.\nIV\n\n\n It was dark in the trainyard. I moved along the tracks in a stumbling\n walk. Just a few more minutes, I was telling myself.\nA few more\n minutes and you can lie down ... rest....\nThe shadowed bulk of a box car loomed up, its open door a blacker\n square. I leaned against the sill, breathing hard, then reached inside\n for a grip with my good hand.", "I flipped the switch, sat gripping the couch, my stomach rising with\n each heave of the floating escape capsule. I had perhaps five minutes.\n The missiles would be from Canaveral.\n\n\n I closed my eyes, forced myself to relax, reached out....\n\n\n I sensed the distant shore, the hot buzz of human minds at work in the\n cities. I followed the coastline, found the Missile Base, flicked\n through the cluster of minds.\n\n\n \"—\nmissile on course; do right, baby. That's it, right in the slot.\n\"\n\n\n I fingered my way through the man's mind and found the control centers.\n He turned stiffly from the plotting board, tottered to a panel to slam\n his hand against the destruct button.\n\n\n Men fell on him, dragged him back. \"—\nfool, why did you blow it?\n\"" ], [ "I tried to reason with him. I reminded him how I had readied myself\n for the trip with sessions on the encephaloscope, setting up the\n cross-networks of conditioned defensive responses, the shunt circuits\n to the decoy pseudo-personality, leaving my volitional ego free. I\n talked about subliminal hypnotics and the resilience quotient of the\n ego-complex.\n\n\n I might have saved my breath.\n\n\n \"I don't understand that psychodynamics jargon, Granthan,\" he snapped.\n \"It smacks of mysticism. But I understand what the Gool have done to\n you well enough. I'm sorry.\"\n\n\n I leaned back and chewed the inside of my lip and thought unkind\n thoughts about Colonel Ausar Kayle. Then I settled down to solve the\n problem at hand.", "Hesitantly, I felt for the immaterial fabric of the continuum, warping\n and manipulating it, copying the Gool probe. Like planes of paper-thin\n crystal, the polyfinite aspects of reality shifted into focus, aligning\n themselves.\n\n\n Abruptly, a channel lay open. As easily as I would stretch out my hand\n to pluck a moth from a night-flower, I reached across the unimaginable\n void—and sensed a pit blacker than the bottom floor of hell, and a\n glistening dark shape.\n\n\n There was a soundless shriek. \"\nEffulgence! It reached out—touched\n me!\n\"\nUsing the technique I had grasped from the Gool itself, I struck,\n stifling the outcry, invaded the fetid blackness and grappled the\n obscene gelatinous immensity of the Gool spy as it spasmed in a frenzy\n of xenophobia—a ton of liver writhing at the bottom of a dark well.", "I wasn't, of course. I was still the same Peter Granthan,\n psychodynamicist, who had started out with Dayan's fleet six weeks\n earlier. The thoughts I was having weren't brilliant, but they were\n mine, all mine....\n\n\n But how could I be sure of that?\n\n\n Maybe there was something in Kayle's suspicion. If the Gool were as\n skillful as we thought, they would have left no overt indications of\n their tampering—not at a conscious level.\n\n\n But this was where psychodynamics training came in. I had been reacting\n like any scared casualty, aching to get home and lick his wounds. But I\n wasn't just any casualty. I had been trained in the subtleties of the\n mind—and I had been prepared for just such an attack.", "\"\nAlmost it eluded me then, Effulgent Lord. Link with this lowly one!\n\"\n\n\n \"\nImpossible! Do you forget all my teachings? Cling, though you expend\n the last filament of your life-force!\n\"\n\n\n Free from all distraction, at a level where comprehension and retention\n are instantaneous and total, my monitoring basic personality fraction\n followed the skillful Gool mind as it engraved its commands deep in\n my subconscious. Then the touch withdrew, erasing the scars of its\n passage, to leave me unaware of its tampering—at a conscious level.\n\n\n Watching the Gool mind, I learned.\n\n\n The insinuating probe—a concept regarding which psychodynamicists had\n theorized—was no more than a pattern in emptiness....\n\n\n But a pattern which I could duplicate, now that I had seen what had\n been done to me.", "And found it.\n\n\n As the eye instantaneously detects a flicker of motion amid an infinity\n of static detail, so my inner eye perceived the subtle traces of the\n probing Gool mind, like a whispered touch deftly rearranging my buried\n motivations.\n\n\n I focused selectively, tuned to the recorded gestalt.\n\n\n \"\nIt is a contact, Effulgent One!\n\"\n\n\n \"\nSoftly, now! Nurture the spark well. It but trembles at the\n threshold....\n\"\n\n\n \"\nIt is elusive, Master! It wriggles like a gorm-worm in the eating\n trough!\n\"", "A timeless time passed. I wandered among patterns of white light and\n white sound, plumbed the deepest recesses of hidden Gool thoughts,\n fared along strange ways examining the shapes and colors of the\n concepts of an alien mind.\n\n\n I paused at last, scanning a multi-ordinal structure of pattern within\n pattern; the diagrammed circuits of a strange machine.\n\n\n I followed through its logic-sequence; and, like a bomb-burst, its\n meaning exploded in my mind.\n\n\n From the vile nest deep under the dark surface of the Gool world in\n its lonely trans-Plutonian orbit, I had plucked the ultimate secret of\n their kind.", "But not if I could help it.\n\n\n The Gool had evolved a plan—but they'd had a stroke of bad luck.\n\n\n In the past, they had managed to control a man here and there, among\n the fleets, far from home, but only at a superficial level. Enough,\n perhaps, to wreck a ship, but not the complete control needed to send a\n man back to Earth under Gool compulsion, to carry out complex sabotage.\n\n\n Then they had found me, alone, a sole survivor, free from the clutter\n of the other mind-fields. It had been their misfortune to pick a\n psychodynamicist. Instead of gaining a patient slave, they had opened\n the fortress door to an unseen spy. Now that I was there, I would see\n what I could steal.", "As far as I knew, I was the first recorded survivor of contact with the\n Gool—if I survived.\n\n\n I was still a long way from home, and I hadn't yet checked on the\n condition of the lifeboat. I glanced toward the entry port. It was\n dogged shut. I could see black marks where my burned hand had been at\n work.\n\n\n I fumbled my way into a couch and tried to think. In my condition—with\n a broken leg and third-degree burns, plus a fractured skull—I\n shouldn't have been able to fall out of bed, much less make the trip\n from\nBelshazzar's\nCCC to the boat; and how had I managed to dog that\n port shut? In an emergency a man was capable of great exertions. But\n running on a broken femur, handling heavy levers with charred fingers\n and thinking with a cracked head were overdoing it. Still, I was\n here—and it was time to get a call through to TSA headquarters.", "I clamped down control. The Gool mind folded in on itself, gibbering.\n Not pausing to rest, I followed up, probed along my channel of contact,\n tracing patterns, scanning the flaccid Gool mind....", "I would have to risk calling Kayle now—but by voluntarily giving my\n position away, I should convince him I was still on our side—and I was\n badly in need of a pick-up. I flipped the sending key.\n\n\n \"This is Z four-oh-two,\" I said. \"I have an urgent report for Colonel\n Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence.\"\n\n\n Kayle's face appeared. \"Don't fight it, Granthan,\" he croaked. \"You\n penetrated the planetary defenses—God knows how. I—\"\n\n\n \"Later,\" I snapped. \"How about calling off your dogs now? And send\n somebody out here to pick me up, before I add sea-sickness to my other\n complaints.\"", "discovered, worlds where food was free for the taking. Not sulphur\n alone, but potassium, calcium, iron and all the metals—riches\n beyond belief in endless profusion. No longer would the Gool tribe\n cluster—those who remained of a once-great race—at a single feeding\n trough. They would spread out across a galaxy—and beyond.", "\"We have you pinpointed,\" Kayle cut in. \"It's no use fighting it,\n Granthan.\"\nI felt cold sweat pop out on my forehead. \"You've got to listen,\n Kayle,\" I shouted. \"I suppose you've got missiles on the way already.\n Call them back! I have information that can win the war—\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Granthan,\" Kayle said. \"It's too late—even if I could\n take the chance you were right.\"\n\n\n A different face appeared on the screen.", "I closed my eyes, reached out—as the Gool mind had reached out to\n me—and felt the touch of a Signals Officer's mind, forty thousand\n miles distant, aboard the patrol vessel. There was a brief flurry of\n struggle; then I dictated my instructions. The Signals Officer punched\n keys, spoke into his microphone:\n\n\n \"As you were, Z four-oh-two. Continue on present course. At Oh-nineteen\n seconds, pick up planetary for re-entry and let-down.\"\n\n\n I blanked out the man's recollection of what had happened, caught his\n belated puzzlement as I broke contact. But I was clear of the DEW line\n now, rapidly approaching atmosphere.\n\n\n \"Z four-oh-two,\" the speaker crackled. \"This is planetary control. I am\n picking you up on channel forty-three, for re-entry and let-down.\"\n\n\n There was a long pause. Then:", "\"Mr. Granthan, I am General Titus. On behalf of your country, and\n in the name of the President—who has been apprised of this tragic\n situation—it is my privilege to inform you that you will be awarded\n the Congressional Medal of Honor—posthumously—for your heroic effort.\n Although you failed, and have in fact been forced, against your will,\n to carry out the schemes of the inhuman enemy, this in no way detracts\n from your gallant attempt. Mr. Granthan, I salute you.\"\n\n\n The general's arm went up in a rigid gesture.\n\n\n \"Stow that, you pompous idiot!\" I barked. \"I'm no spy!\"\n\n\n Kayle was back, blanking out the startled face of the general.\n\n\n \"Goodbye, Granthan. Try to understand....\"", "\"This is war, Granthan. War against a vicious enemy who strike without\n warning and without mercy. You were sent out to investigate the\n possibility of—what's that term you use?—hyper-cortical invasion. You\n know better than most the risk I'd be running if you were allowed to\n pass the patrol line.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Granthan. I can't let you land on Earth. I can't accept\n the risk.\"\n\n\n \"What do I do now?\" I stormed. \"Go into orbit and eat pills and hope\n you think of something? I need a doctor!\"", "I finished talking and flopped back, waiting for Kayle's reply. On the\n screen, his flickering image gazed back impatiently, looking as hostile\n as a swing-shift ward nurse. It would be half an hour before I would\n get his reaction to my report. I dozed off—and awoke with a start.\n Kayle was talking.\n\n\n \"—your report. I won't mince words. They're wondering at your role in\n the disaster. How does it happen that you alone survived?\"\n\n\n \"How the hell do I know?\" I yelled—or croaked. But Kayle's voice was\n droning on:\n\n\n \"... you Psychodynamics people have been telling me the Gool may\n have some kind of long-range telehypnotic ability that might make it\n possible for them to subvert a loyal man without his knowledge. You've\n told me yourself that you blacked out during the attack—and came to on\n the lifeboat, with no recollection of how you got there.", "I saw a world of yellow seas lapping at endless shores of mud. There\n was a fuming pit, where liquid sulphur bubbled up from some inner\n source, filling an immense natural basin. The Gool clustered at its\n rim, feeding, each monstrous shape heaving against its neighbors for a\n more favorable position.\nI probed farther, saw the great cables of living nervous tissue that\n linked each eating organ with the brain-mass far underground. I traced\n the passages through which tendrils ran out to immense caverns where\n smaller creatures labored over strange devices. These, my host's memory\n told me, were the young of the Gool. Here they built the fleets that\n would transport the spawn to the new worlds the Prime Overlord had", "A part of my mind watched as the memory unreeled. I listened to the\n voices—yet not voices, merely the shape of concepts, indescribably\n intricate. I saw how the decoy pseudo-personality which I had\n concretized for the purpose in a hundred training sessions had fought\n against the intruding stimuli—then yielded under the relentless thrust\n of the alien probe. I watched as the Gool operator took over the motor\n centers, caused me to crawl through the choking smoke of the devastated\n control compartment toward the escape hatch. Fire leaped up, blocking\n the way. I went on, felt ghostly flames whipping at me—and then the\n hatch was open and I pulled myself through, forcing the broken leg.\n My blackened hand fumbled at the locking wheel. Then the blast as\n the lifeboat leaped clear of the disintegrating dreadnought—and the\n world-ending impact as I fell.\n\n\n At a level far below the conscious, the embattled pseudo-personality\n lashed out again—fighting the invader.", "Presently Kayle replied. \"Yes,\" he said. \"You'll have to enter a\n parking orbit. Perhaps there will be developments soon which will make\n it possible to ... ah ... restudy the situation.\" He didn't meet my\n eye. I knew what he was thinking. He'd spare me the mental anguish of\n knowing what was coming. I couldn't really blame him; he was doing\n what he thought was the right thing. And I'd have to go along and\n pretend—right up until the warheads struck—that I didn't know I'd\n been condemned to death.\nII\n\n\n I tried to gather my wits and think my way through the situation. I\n was alone and injured, aboard a lifeboat that would be the focus of a\n converging flight of missiles as soon as I approached within battery\n range of Earth. I had gotten clear of the Gool, but I wouldn't survive\n my next meeting with my own kind. They couldn't take the chance that I\n was acting under Gool orders.", "END AS A HERO\nBy KEITH LAUMER\n\n\n Illustrated by SCHELLING\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction June 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nGranthan's mission was the most vital of the war.\n\n It would mean instant victory—but for whom?\nI\n\n\n In the dream I was swimming in a river of white fire and the dream went\n on and on. And then I was awake—and the fire was still there, fiercely\n burning at me.\n\n\n I tried to move to get away from the flames, and then the real pain\n hit me. I tried to go back to sleep and the relative comfort of the\n river of fire, but it was no go. For better or worse, I was alive and\n conscious." ], [ "Now was the time to make use of that training. It had given me one\n resource. I could unlock the memories of my subconscious—and see again\n what had happened.\n\n\n I lay back, cleared my mind of extraneous thoughts, and concentrated on\n the trigger word that would key an auto-hypnotic sequence....\n\n\n Sense impressions faded. I was alone in the nebulous emptiness of a\n first-level trance. I keyed a second word, slipped below the misty\n surface into a dreamworld of vague phantasmagoric figures milling in\n their limbo of sub-conceptualization. I penetrated deeper, broke\n through into the vividly hallucinatory third level, where images of\n mirror-bright immediacy clamored for attention. And deeper....\nThe immense orderly confusion of the basic memory level lay before\n me. Abstracted from it, aloof and observant, the monitoring\n personality-fraction scanned the pattern, searching the polydimensional\n continuum for evidence of an alien intrusion.", "I wasn't, of course. I was still the same Peter Granthan,\n psychodynamicist, who had started out with Dayan's fleet six weeks\n earlier. The thoughts I was having weren't brilliant, but they were\n mine, all mine....\n\n\n But how could I be sure of that?\n\n\n Maybe there was something in Kayle's suspicion. If the Gool were as\n skillful as we thought, they would have left no overt indications of\n their tampering—not at a conscious level.\n\n\n But this was where psychodynamics training came in. I had been reacting\n like any scared casualty, aching to get home and lick his wounds. But I\n wasn't just any casualty. I had been trained in the subtleties of the\n mind—and I had been prepared for just such an attack.", "A timeless time passed. I wandered among patterns of white light and\n white sound, plumbed the deepest recesses of hidden Gool thoughts,\n fared along strange ways examining the shapes and colors of the\n concepts of an alien mind.\n\n\n I paused at last, scanning a multi-ordinal structure of pattern within\n pattern; the diagrammed circuits of a strange machine.\n\n\n I followed through its logic-sequence; and, like a bomb-burst, its\n meaning exploded in my mind.\n\n\n From the vile nest deep under the dark surface of the Gool world in\n its lonely trans-Plutonian orbit, I had plucked the ultimate secret of\n their kind.", "But not if I could help it.\n\n\n The Gool had evolved a plan—but they'd had a stroke of bad luck.\n\n\n In the past, they had managed to control a man here and there, among\n the fleets, far from home, but only at a superficial level. Enough,\n perhaps, to wreck a ship, but not the complete control needed to send a\n man back to Earth under Gool compulsion, to carry out complex sabotage.\n\n\n Then they had found me, alone, a sole survivor, free from the clutter\n of the other mind-fields. It had been their misfortune to pick a\n psychodynamicist. Instead of gaining a patient slave, they had opened\n the fortress door to an unseen spy. Now that I was there, I would see\n what I could steal.", "I tried to reason with him. I reminded him how I had readied myself\n for the trip with sessions on the encephaloscope, setting up the\n cross-networks of conditioned defensive responses, the shunt circuits\n to the decoy pseudo-personality, leaving my volitional ego free. I\n talked about subliminal hypnotics and the resilience quotient of the\n ego-complex.\n\n\n I might have saved my breath.\n\n\n \"I don't understand that psychodynamics jargon, Granthan,\" he snapped.\n \"It smacks of mysticism. But I understand what the Gool have done to\n you well enough. I'm sorry.\"\n\n\n I leaned back and chewed the inside of my lip and thought unkind\n thoughts about Colonel Ausar Kayle. Then I settled down to solve the\n problem at hand.", "A part of my mind watched as the memory unreeled. I listened to the\n voices—yet not voices, merely the shape of concepts, indescribably\n intricate. I saw how the decoy pseudo-personality which I had\n concretized for the purpose in a hundred training sessions had fought\n against the intruding stimuli—then yielded under the relentless thrust\n of the alien probe. I watched as the Gool operator took over the motor\n centers, caused me to crawl through the choking smoke of the devastated\n control compartment toward the escape hatch. Fire leaped up, blocking\n the way. I went on, felt ghostly flames whipping at me—and then the\n hatch was open and I pulled myself through, forcing the broken leg.\n My blackened hand fumbled at the locking wheel. Then the blast as\n the lifeboat leaped clear of the disintegrating dreadnought—and the\n world-ending impact as I fell.\n\n\n At a level far below the conscious, the embattled pseudo-personality\n lashed out again—fighting the invader.", "I finished talking and flopped back, waiting for Kayle's reply. On the\n screen, his flickering image gazed back impatiently, looking as hostile\n as a swing-shift ward nurse. It would be half an hour before I would\n get his reaction to my report. I dozed off—and awoke with a start.\n Kayle was talking.\n\n\n \"—your report. I won't mince words. They're wondering at your role in\n the disaster. How does it happen that you alone survived?\"\n\n\n \"How the hell do I know?\" I yelled—or croaked. But Kayle's voice was\n droning on:\n\n\n \"... you Psychodynamics people have been telling me the Gool may\n have some kind of long-range telehypnotic ability that might make it\n possible for them to subvert a loyal man without his knowledge. You've\n told me yourself that you blacked out during the attack—and came to on\n the lifeboat, with no recollection of how you got there.", "discovered, worlds where food was free for the taking. Not sulphur\n alone, but potassium, calcium, iron and all the metals—riches\n beyond belief in endless profusion. No longer would the Gool tribe\n cluster—those who remained of a once-great race—at a single feeding\n trough. They would spread out across a galaxy—and beyond.", "Presently Kayle replied. \"Yes,\" he said. \"You'll have to enter a\n parking orbit. Perhaps there will be developments soon which will make\n it possible to ... ah ... restudy the situation.\" He didn't meet my\n eye. I knew what he was thinking. He'd spare me the mental anguish of\n knowing what was coming. I couldn't really blame him; he was doing\n what he thought was the right thing. And I'd have to go along and\n pretend—right up until the warheads struck—that I didn't know I'd\n been condemned to death.\nII\n\n\n I tried to gather my wits and think my way through the situation. I\n was alone and injured, aboard a lifeboat that would be the focus of a\n converging flight of missiles as soon as I approached within battery\n range of Earth. I had gotten clear of the Gool, but I wouldn't survive\n my next meeting with my own kind. They couldn't take the chance that I\n was acting under Gool orders.", "I saw a world of yellow seas lapping at endless shores of mud. There\n was a fuming pit, where liquid sulphur bubbled up from some inner\n source, filling an immense natural basin. The Gool clustered at its\n rim, feeding, each monstrous shape heaving against its neighbors for a\n more favorable position.\nI probed farther, saw the great cables of living nervous tissue that\n linked each eating organ with the brain-mass far underground. I traced\n the passages through which tendrils ran out to immense caverns where\n smaller creatures labored over strange devices. These, my host's memory\n told me, were the young of the Gool. Here they built the fleets that\n would transport the spawn to the new worlds the Prime Overlord had", "I would have to risk calling Kayle now—but by voluntarily giving my\n position away, I should convince him I was still on our side—and I was\n badly in need of a pick-up. I flipped the sending key.\n\n\n \"This is Z four-oh-two,\" I said. \"I have an urgent report for Colonel\n Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence.\"\n\n\n Kayle's face appeared. \"Don't fight it, Granthan,\" he croaked. \"You\n penetrated the planetary defenses—God knows how. I—\"\n\n\n \"Later,\" I snapped. \"How about calling off your dogs now? And send\n somebody out here to pick me up, before I add sea-sickness to my other\n complaints.\"", "I closed my eyes, reached out—as the Gool mind had reached out to\n me—and felt the touch of a Signals Officer's mind, forty thousand\n miles distant, aboard the patrol vessel. There was a brief flurry of\n struggle; then I dictated my instructions. The Signals Officer punched\n keys, spoke into his microphone:\n\n\n \"As you were, Z four-oh-two. Continue on present course. At Oh-nineteen\n seconds, pick up planetary for re-entry and let-down.\"\n\n\n I blanked out the man's recollection of what had happened, caught his\n belated puzzlement as I broke contact. But I was clear of the DEW line\n now, rapidly approaching atmosphere.\n\n\n \"Z four-oh-two,\" the speaker crackled. \"This is planetary control. I am\n picking you up on channel forty-three, for re-entry and let-down.\"\n\n\n There was a long pause. Then:", "As far as I knew, I was the first recorded survivor of contact with the\n Gool—if I survived.\n\n\n I was still a long way from home, and I hadn't yet checked on the\n condition of the lifeboat. I glanced toward the entry port. It was\n dogged shut. I could see black marks where my burned hand had been at\n work.\n\n\n I fumbled my way into a couch and tried to think. In my condition—with\n a broken leg and third-degree burns, plus a fractured skull—I\n shouldn't have been able to fall out of bed, much less make the trip\n from\nBelshazzar's\nCCC to the boat; and how had I managed to dog that\n port shut? In an emergency a man was capable of great exertions. But\n running on a broken femur, handling heavy levers with charred fingers\n and thinking with a cracked head were overdoing it. Still, I was\n here—and it was time to get a call through to TSA headquarters.", "\"This is war, Granthan. War against a vicious enemy who strike without\n warning and without mercy. You were sent out to investigate the\n possibility of—what's that term you use?—hyper-cortical invasion. You\n know better than most the risk I'd be running if you were allowed to\n pass the patrol line.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Granthan. I can't let you land on Earth. I can't accept\n the risk.\"\n\n\n \"What do I do now?\" I stormed. \"Go into orbit and eat pills and hope\n you think of something? I need a doctor!\"", "Hesitantly, I felt for the immaterial fabric of the continuum, warping\n and manipulating it, copying the Gool probe. Like planes of paper-thin\n crystal, the polyfinite aspects of reality shifted into focus, aligning\n themselves.\n\n\n Abruptly, a channel lay open. As easily as I would stretch out my hand\n to pluck a moth from a night-flower, I reached across the unimaginable\n void—and sensed a pit blacker than the bottom floor of hell, and a\n glistening dark shape.\n\n\n There was a soundless shriek. \"\nEffulgence! It reached out—touched\n me!\n\"\nUsing the technique I had grasped from the Gool itself, I struck,\n stifling the outcry, invaded the fetid blackness and grappled the\n obscene gelatinous immensity of the Gool spy as it spasmed in a frenzy\n of xenophobia—a ton of liver writhing at the bottom of a dark well.", "And found it.\n\n\n As the eye instantaneously detects a flicker of motion amid an infinity\n of static detail, so my inner eye perceived the subtle traces of the\n probing Gool mind, like a whispered touch deftly rearranging my buried\n motivations.\n\n\n I focused selectively, tuned to the recorded gestalt.\n\n\n \"\nIt is a contact, Effulgent One!\n\"\n\n\n \"\nSoftly, now! Nurture the spark well. It but trembles at the\n threshold....\n\"\n\n\n \"\nIt is elusive, Master! It wriggles like a gorm-worm in the eating\n trough!\n\"", "\"Hey, you birds are mixed up,\" I protested. \"I'm cleared all the way. I\n checked in with DEW—\"\n\n\n It was time to disappear. I blanked off all transmission, hit the\n controls, following my evasive pattern. And again I reached out—\n\n\n A radar man at a site in the Pacific, fifteen thousand miles away, rose\n from his chair, crossed the darkened room and threw a switch. The radar\n screens blanked off....\n\n\n For an hour I rode the long orbit down, fending off attack after\n attack. Then I was clear, skimming the surface of the ocean a few miles\n southeast of Key West. The boat hit hard. I felt the floor rise up,\n over, buffeting me against the restraining harness.\n\n\n I hauled at the release lever, felt a long moment of giddy\n disorientation as the escape capsule separated from the sinking\n lifeboat deep under the surface. Then my escape capsule was bobbing on\n the water.", "\"We have you pinpointed,\" Kayle cut in. \"It's no use fighting it,\n Granthan.\"\nI felt cold sweat pop out on my forehead. \"You've got to listen,\n Kayle,\" I shouted. \"I suppose you've got missiles on the way already.\n Call them back! I have information that can win the war—\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Granthan,\" Kayle said. \"It's too late—even if I could\n take the chance you were right.\"\n\n\n A different face appeared on the screen.", "I dropped the contact, found another, who leaped to the panel,\n detonated the remainder of the flight of six missiles. Then I withdrew.\n I would have a few minutes' stay of execution now.\n\n\n I was ten miles from shore. The capsule had its own power plant. I\n started it up, switched on the external viewer. I saw dark sea, the\n glint of star-light on the choppy surface, in the distance a glow on\n the horizon that would be Key West. I plugged the course into the\n pilot, then leaned back and felt outward with my mind for the next\n attacker.\nIV\n\n\n It was dark in the trainyard. I moved along the tracks in a stumbling\n walk. Just a few more minutes, I was telling myself.\nA few more\n minutes and you can lie down ... rest....\nThe shadowed bulk of a box car loomed up, its open door a blacker\n square. I leaned against the sill, breathing hard, then reached inside\n for a grip with my good hand.", "\"Z four-oh-two, countermand DEW Line clearance! Repeat, clearance\n countermanded! Emergency course change to standard hyperbolic code\n ninety-eight. Do not attempt re-entry. Repeat: do not attempt re-entry!\"\n\n\n It hadn't taken Kayle long to see that I'd gotten past the outer line\n of defense. A few more minutes' grace would have helped. I'd play it\n dumb, and hope for a little luck.\n\n\n \"Planetary, Z four-oh-two here. Say, I'm afraid I missed part of that,\n fellows. I'm a little banged up—I guess I switched frequencies on you.\n What was that after 'pick up channel forty-three'...?\"\n\n\n \"Four-oh-two, sheer off there! You're not cleared for re-entry!\"" ], [ "I would have to risk calling Kayle now—but by voluntarily giving my\n position away, I should convince him I was still on our side—and I was\n badly in need of a pick-up. I flipped the sending key.\n\n\n \"This is Z four-oh-two,\" I said. \"I have an urgent report for Colonel\n Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence.\"\n\n\n Kayle's face appeared. \"Don't fight it, Granthan,\" he croaked. \"You\n penetrated the planetary defenses—God knows how. I—\"\n\n\n \"Later,\" I snapped. \"How about calling off your dogs now? And send\n somebody out here to pick me up, before I add sea-sickness to my other\n complaints.\"", "Presently Kayle replied. \"Yes,\" he said. \"You'll have to enter a\n parking orbit. Perhaps there will be developments soon which will make\n it possible to ... ah ... restudy the situation.\" He didn't meet my\n eye. I knew what he was thinking. He'd spare me the mental anguish of\n knowing what was coming. I couldn't really blame him; he was doing\n what he thought was the right thing. And I'd have to go along and\n pretend—right up until the warheads struck—that I didn't know I'd\n been condemned to death.\nII\n\n\n I tried to gather my wits and think my way through the situation. I\n was alone and injured, aboard a lifeboat that would be the focus of a\n converging flight of missiles as soon as I approached within battery\n range of Earth. I had gotten clear of the Gool, but I wouldn't survive\n my next meeting with my own kind. They couldn't take the chance that I\n was acting under Gool orders.", "\"Mr. Granthan, I am General Titus. On behalf of your country, and\n in the name of the President—who has been apprised of this tragic\n situation—it is my privilege to inform you that you will be awarded\n the Congressional Medal of Honor—posthumously—for your heroic effort.\n Although you failed, and have in fact been forced, against your will,\n to carry out the schemes of the inhuman enemy, this in no way detracts\n from your gallant attempt. Mr. Granthan, I salute you.\"\n\n\n The general's arm went up in a rigid gesture.\n\n\n \"Stow that, you pompous idiot!\" I barked. \"I'm no spy!\"\n\n\n Kayle was back, blanking out the startled face of the general.\n\n\n \"Goodbye, Granthan. Try to understand....\"", "\"We have you pinpointed,\" Kayle cut in. \"It's no use fighting it,\n Granthan.\"\nI felt cold sweat pop out on my forehead. \"You've got to listen,\n Kayle,\" I shouted. \"I suppose you've got missiles on the way already.\n Call them back! I have information that can win the war—\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Granthan,\" Kayle said. \"It's too late—even if I could\n take the chance you were right.\"\n\n\n A different face appeared on the screen.", "I finished talking and flopped back, waiting for Kayle's reply. On the\n screen, his flickering image gazed back impatiently, looking as hostile\n as a swing-shift ward nurse. It would be half an hour before I would\n get his reaction to my report. I dozed off—and awoke with a start.\n Kayle was talking.\n\n\n \"—your report. I won't mince words. They're wondering at your role in\n the disaster. How does it happen that you alone survived?\"\n\n\n \"How the hell do I know?\" I yelled—or croaked. But Kayle's voice was\n droning on:\n\n\n \"... you Psychodynamics people have been telling me the Gool may\n have some kind of long-range telehypnotic ability that might make it\n possible for them to subvert a loyal man without his knowledge. You've\n told me yourself that you blacked out during the attack—and came to on\n the lifeboat, with no recollection of how you got there.", "I tried to reason with him. I reminded him how I had readied myself\n for the trip with sessions on the encephaloscope, setting up the\n cross-networks of conditioned defensive responses, the shunt circuits\n to the decoy pseudo-personality, leaving my volitional ego free. I\n talked about subliminal hypnotics and the resilience quotient of the\n ego-complex.\n\n\n I might have saved my breath.\n\n\n \"I don't understand that psychodynamics jargon, Granthan,\" he snapped.\n \"It smacks of mysticism. But I understand what the Gool have done to\n you well enough. I'm sorry.\"\n\n\n I leaned back and chewed the inside of my lip and thought unkind\n thoughts about Colonel Ausar Kayle. Then I settled down to solve the\n problem at hand.", "\"This is war, Granthan. War against a vicious enemy who strike without\n warning and without mercy. You were sent out to investigate the\n possibility of—what's that term you use?—hyper-cortical invasion. You\n know better than most the risk I'd be running if you were allowed to\n pass the patrol line.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Granthan. I can't let you land on Earth. I can't accept\n the risk.\"\n\n\n \"What do I do now?\" I stormed. \"Go into orbit and eat pills and hope\n you think of something? I need a doctor!\"", "I gritted my teeth, pulled myself into the car, crawled to a dark\n corner behind a crate and slumped down. I tried to evoke a personality\n fraction to set as a guard, a part of my mind to stay awake and warn\n me of danger. It was too much trouble. I relaxed and let it all slide\n down into darkness.\nThe car swayed, click-clack, click-clack. I opened my eyes, saw yellow\n sunlight in a bar across the litter on the floor. The power truss\n creaked, pulling at my arm. My broken leg was throbbing its indignation\n at the treatment it had received—walking brace and all—and the burned\n arm was yelling aloud for more of that nice dope that had been keeping\n it from realizing how bad it was. All things considered, I felt like a\n badly embalmed mummy—except that I was hungry. I had been a fool not\n to fill my pockets when I left the escape capsule in the shallows off\n Key Largo, but things had been happening too fast.", "END AS A HERO\nBy KEITH LAUMER\n\n\n Illustrated by SCHELLING\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction June 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nGranthan's mission was the most vital of the war.\n\n It would mean instant victory—but for whom?\nI\n\n\n In the dream I was swimming in a river of white fire and the dream went\n on and on. And then I was awake—and the fire was still there, fiercely\n burning at me.\n\n\n I tried to move to get away from the flames, and then the real pain\n hit me. I tried to go back to sleep and the relative comfort of the\n river of fire, but it was no go. For better or worse, I was alive and\n conscious.", "I wasn't, of course. I was still the same Peter Granthan,\n psychodynamicist, who had started out with Dayan's fleet six weeks\n earlier. The thoughts I was having weren't brilliant, but they were\n mine, all mine....\n\n\n But how could I be sure of that?\n\n\n Maybe there was something in Kayle's suspicion. If the Gool were as\n skillful as we thought, they would have left no overt indications of\n their tampering—not at a conscious level.\n\n\n But this was where psychodynamics training came in. I had been reacting\n like any scared casualty, aching to get home and lick his wounds. But I\n wasn't just any casualty. I had been trained in the subtleties of the\n mind—and I had been prepared for just such an attack.", "I opened my eyes and took a look around. I was on the floor next to\n an unpadded acceleration couch—the kind the Terrestrial Space Arm\n installs in seldom-used lifeboats. There were three more couches, but\n no one in them. I tried to sit up. It wasn't easy but, by applying a\n lot more will-power than should be required of a sick man, I made it.\n I took a look at my left arm. Baked. The hand was only medium rare,\n but the forearm was black, with deep red showing at the bottom of the\n cracks where the crisped upper layers had burst....", "I flipped the switch and gave the emergency call-letters Col. Ausar\n Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence had assigned to me a few weeks before.\n It was almost five minutes before the \"acknowledge\" came through from\n the Ganymede relay station, another ten minutes before Kayle's face\n swam into view. Even through the blur of the screen I could see the\n haggard look.\n\n\n \"Granthan!\" he burst out. \"Where are the others? What happened out\n there?\" I turned him down to a mutter.\n\n\n \"Hold on,\" I said. \"I'll tell you. Recorders going?\" I didn't wait for\n an answer—not with a fifteen-minute transmission lag. I plowed on:\n\n\n \"\nBelshazzar\nwas sabotaged. So was\nGilgamesh\n—I think. I got out. I\n lost a little skin, but the aid cabinet has the case in hand. Tell the\n Med people the drinks are on me.\"", "\"Hey, you birds are mixed up,\" I protested. \"I'm cleared all the way. I\n checked in with DEW—\"\n\n\n It was time to disappear. I blanked off all transmission, hit the\n controls, following my evasive pattern. And again I reached out—\n\n\n A radar man at a site in the Pacific, fifteen thousand miles away, rose\n from his chair, crossed the darkened room and threw a switch. The radar\n screens blanked off....\n\n\n For an hour I rode the long orbit down, fending off attack after\n attack. Then I was clear, skimming the surface of the ocean a few miles\n southeast of Key West. The boat hit hard. I felt the floor rise up,\n over, buffeting me against the restraining harness.\n\n\n I hauled at the release lever, felt a long moment of giddy\n disorientation as the escape capsule separated from the sinking\n lifeboat deep under the surface. Then my escape capsule was bobbing on\n the water.", "As far as I knew, I was the first recorded survivor of contact with the\n Gool—if I survived.\n\n\n I was still a long way from home, and I hadn't yet checked on the\n condition of the lifeboat. I glanced toward the entry port. It was\n dogged shut. I could see black marks where my burned hand had been at\n work.\n\n\n I fumbled my way into a couch and tried to think. In my condition—with\n a broken leg and third-degree burns, plus a fractured skull—I\n shouldn't have been able to fall out of bed, much less make the trip\n from\nBelshazzar's\nCCC to the boat; and how had I managed to dog that\n port shut? In an emergency a man was capable of great exertions. But\n running on a broken femur, handling heavy levers with charred fingers\n and thinking with a cracked head were overdoing it. Still, I was\n here—and it was time to get a call through to TSA headquarters.", "A part of my mind watched as the memory unreeled. I listened to the\n voices—yet not voices, merely the shape of concepts, indescribably\n intricate. I saw how the decoy pseudo-personality which I had\n concretized for the purpose in a hundred training sessions had fought\n against the intruding stimuli—then yielded under the relentless thrust\n of the alien probe. I watched as the Gool operator took over the motor\n centers, caused me to crawl through the choking smoke of the devastated\n control compartment toward the escape hatch. Fire leaped up, blocking\n the way. I went on, felt ghostly flames whipping at me—and then the\n hatch was open and I pulled myself through, forcing the broken leg.\n My blackened hand fumbled at the locking wheel. Then the blast as\n the lifeboat leaped clear of the disintegrating dreadnought—and the\n world-ending impact as I fell.\n\n\n At a level far below the conscious, the embattled pseudo-personality\n lashed out again—fighting the invader.", "I had barely made it to the fishing boat, whose owner I had coerced\n into rendezvousing with me before shells started dropping around us. If\n the gunners on the cruiser ten miles away had had any luck, they would\n have finished me—and the hapless fisherman—right then. We rode out a\n couple of near misses, before I put the cruiser's gunnery crew off the\n air.\n\n\n At a fishing camp on the beach, I found a car—with driver. He dropped\n me at the railyard, and drove off under the impression he was in town\n for groceries. He'd never believe he'd seen me.\n\n\n Now I'd had my sleep. I had to start getting ready for the next act of\n the farce.", "I dropped the contact, found another, who leaped to the panel,\n detonated the remainder of the flight of six missiles. Then I withdrew.\n I would have a few minutes' stay of execution now.\n\n\n I was ten miles from shore. The capsule had its own power plant. I\n started it up, switched on the external viewer. I saw dark sea, the\n glint of star-light on the choppy surface, in the distance a glow on\n the horizon that would be Key West. I plugged the course into the\n pilot, then leaned back and felt outward with my mind for the next\n attacker.\nIV\n\n\n It was dark in the trainyard. I moved along the tracks in a stumbling\n walk. Just a few more minutes, I was telling myself.\nA few more\n minutes and you can lie down ... rest....\nThe shadowed bulk of a box car loomed up, its open door a blacker\n square. I leaned against the sill, breathing hard, then reached inside\n for a grip with my good hand.", "There was a first-aid cabinet across the compartment from me. I\n tried my right leg, felt broken bone-ends grate with a sensation\n that transcended pain. I heaved with the other leg, scrabbled with\n the charred arm. The crawl to the cabinet dwarfed Hillary's trek\n up Everest, but I reached it after a couple of years, and found the\n microswitch on the floor that activated the thing, and then I was\n fading out again....\nI came out of it clear-headed but weak. My right leg was numb, but\n reasonably comfortable, clamped tight in a walking brace. I put up\n a hand and felt a shaved skull, with sutures. It must have been a\n fracture. The left arm—well, it was still there, wrapped to the", "He jumped out, opened my door, helped me out with a hand under my good\n elbow. \"I'll get your change, sir,\" he said, reaching for his hip.\n\n\n \"Keep it.\"\n\n\n \"Thank YOU.\" He hesitated. \"Maybe I oughta stick around. You know.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be all right.\"\n\n\n \"I hope so,\" he said. \"A man like you—you and me—\" he winked. \"After\n all, we ain't both wearing berets fer nothing.\"\n\n\n \"True,\" I said. \"Consider your tip doubled. Now drive away into the\n sunrise and forget you ever saw me.\"", "My host took two dog-eared bills from his shirt pocket, dropped them\n on the counter and waited while the girl filled a glass. He picked it\n up and started out.\n\n\n \"Hey! Where you goin' with my glass?\"\n\n\n The trainman crossed the platform, headed for the boxcar. He slid the\n loose door back a few inches against the slack latch, pushed the bag\n inside, placed the glass of water beside it, then pulled off his grimy\n railroader's cap and pushed it through the opening. He turned. The girl\n watched from the platform. A rattle passed down the line and the train\n started up with a lurch. The man walked back toward the girl. I heard\n him say: \"Friend o' mine in there—just passin' through.\"" ], [ "I would have to risk calling Kayle now—but by voluntarily giving my\n position away, I should convince him I was still on our side—and I was\n badly in need of a pick-up. I flipped the sending key.\n\n\n \"This is Z four-oh-two,\" I said. \"I have an urgent report for Colonel\n Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence.\"\n\n\n Kayle's face appeared. \"Don't fight it, Granthan,\" he croaked. \"You\n penetrated the planetary defenses—God knows how. I—\"\n\n\n \"Later,\" I snapped. \"How about calling off your dogs now? And send\n somebody out here to pick me up, before I add sea-sickness to my other\n complaints.\"", "I tried to reason with him. I reminded him how I had readied myself\n for the trip with sessions on the encephaloscope, setting up the\n cross-networks of conditioned defensive responses, the shunt circuits\n to the decoy pseudo-personality, leaving my volitional ego free. I\n talked about subliminal hypnotics and the resilience quotient of the\n ego-complex.\n\n\n I might have saved my breath.\n\n\n \"I don't understand that psychodynamics jargon, Granthan,\" he snapped.\n \"It smacks of mysticism. But I understand what the Gool have done to\n you well enough. I'm sorry.\"\n\n\n I leaned back and chewed the inside of my lip and thought unkind\n thoughts about Colonel Ausar Kayle. Then I settled down to solve the\n problem at hand.", "\"This is war, Granthan. War against a vicious enemy who strike without\n warning and without mercy. You were sent out to investigate the\n possibility of—what's that term you use?—hyper-cortical invasion. You\n know better than most the risk I'd be running if you were allowed to\n pass the patrol line.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Granthan. I can't let you land on Earth. I can't accept\n the risk.\"\n\n\n \"What do I do now?\" I stormed. \"Go into orbit and eat pills and hope\n you think of something? I need a doctor!\"", "I flipped the switch and gave the emergency call-letters Col. Ausar\n Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence had assigned to me a few weeks before.\n It was almost five minutes before the \"acknowledge\" came through from\n the Ganymede relay station, another ten minutes before Kayle's face\n swam into view. Even through the blur of the screen I could see the\n haggard look.\n\n\n \"Granthan!\" he burst out. \"Where are the others? What happened out\n there?\" I turned him down to a mutter.\n\n\n \"Hold on,\" I said. \"I'll tell you. Recorders going?\" I didn't wait for\n an answer—not with a fifteen-minute transmission lag. I plowed on:\n\n\n \"\nBelshazzar\nwas sabotaged. So was\nGilgamesh\n—I think. I got out. I\n lost a little skin, but the aid cabinet has the case in hand. Tell the\n Med people the drinks are on me.\"", "I gritted my teeth, pulled myself into the car, crawled to a dark\n corner behind a crate and slumped down. I tried to evoke a personality\n fraction to set as a guard, a part of my mind to stay awake and warn\n me of danger. It was too much trouble. I relaxed and let it all slide\n down into darkness.\nThe car swayed, click-clack, click-clack. I opened my eyes, saw yellow\n sunlight in a bar across the litter on the floor. The power truss\n creaked, pulling at my arm. My broken leg was throbbing its indignation\n at the treatment it had received—walking brace and all—and the burned\n arm was yelling aloud for more of that nice dope that had been keeping\n it from realizing how bad it was. All things considered, I felt like a\n badly embalmed mummy—except that I was hungry. I had been a fool not\n to fill my pockets when I left the escape capsule in the shallows off\n Key Largo, but things had been happening too fast.", "I dropped the contact, found another, who leaped to the panel,\n detonated the remainder of the flight of six missiles. Then I withdrew.\n I would have a few minutes' stay of execution now.\n\n\n I was ten miles from shore. The capsule had its own power plant. I\n started it up, switched on the external viewer. I saw dark sea, the\n glint of star-light on the choppy surface, in the distance a glow on\n the horizon that would be Key West. I plugged the course into the\n pilot, then leaned back and felt outward with my mind for the next\n attacker.\nIV\n\n\n It was dark in the trainyard. I moved along the tracks in a stumbling\n walk. Just a few more minutes, I was telling myself.\nA few more\n minutes and you can lie down ... rest....\nThe shadowed bulk of a box car loomed up, its open door a blacker\n square. I leaned against the sill, breathing hard, then reached inside\n for a grip with my good hand.", "Presently Kayle replied. \"Yes,\" he said. \"You'll have to enter a\n parking orbit. Perhaps there will be developments soon which will make\n it possible to ... ah ... restudy the situation.\" He didn't meet my\n eye. I knew what he was thinking. He'd spare me the mental anguish of\n knowing what was coming. I couldn't really blame him; he was doing\n what he thought was the right thing. And I'd have to go along and\n pretend—right up until the warheads struck—that I didn't know I'd\n been condemned to death.\nII\n\n\n I tried to gather my wits and think my way through the situation. I\n was alone and injured, aboard a lifeboat that would be the focus of a\n converging flight of missiles as soon as I approached within battery\n range of Earth. I had gotten clear of the Gool, but I wouldn't survive\n my next meeting with my own kind. They couldn't take the chance that I\n was acting under Gool orders.", "I wasn't, of course. I was still the same Peter Granthan,\n psychodynamicist, who had started out with Dayan's fleet six weeks\n earlier. The thoughts I was having weren't brilliant, but they were\n mine, all mine....\n\n\n But how could I be sure of that?\n\n\n Maybe there was something in Kayle's suspicion. If the Gool were as\n skillful as we thought, they would have left no overt indications of\n their tampering—not at a conscious level.\n\n\n But this was where psychodynamics training came in. I had been reacting\n like any scared casualty, aching to get home and lick his wounds. But I\n wasn't just any casualty. I had been trained in the subtleties of the\n mind—and I had been prepared for just such an attack.", "\"Mr. Granthan, I am General Titus. On behalf of your country, and\n in the name of the President—who has been apprised of this tragic\n situation—it is my privilege to inform you that you will be awarded\n the Congressional Medal of Honor—posthumously—for your heroic effort.\n Although you failed, and have in fact been forced, against your will,\n to carry out the schemes of the inhuman enemy, this in no way detracts\n from your gallant attempt. Mr. Granthan, I salute you.\"\n\n\n The general's arm went up in a rigid gesture.\n\n\n \"Stow that, you pompous idiot!\" I barked. \"I'm no spy!\"\n\n\n Kayle was back, blanking out the startled face of the general.\n\n\n \"Goodbye, Granthan. Try to understand....\"", "\"We have you pinpointed,\" Kayle cut in. \"It's no use fighting it,\n Granthan.\"\nI felt cold sweat pop out on my forehead. \"You've got to listen,\n Kayle,\" I shouted. \"I suppose you've got missiles on the way already.\n Call them back! I have information that can win the war—\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Granthan,\" Kayle said. \"It's too late—even if I could\n take the chance you were right.\"\n\n\n A different face appeared on the screen.", "I opened my eyes and took a look around. I was on the floor next to\n an unpadded acceleration couch—the kind the Terrestrial Space Arm\n installs in seldom-used lifeboats. There were three more couches, but\n no one in them. I tried to sit up. It wasn't easy but, by applying a\n lot more will-power than should be required of a sick man, I made it.\n I took a look at my left arm. Baked. The hand was only medium rare,\n but the forearm was black, with deep red showing at the bottom of the\n cracks where the crisped upper layers had burst....", "As far as I knew, I was the first recorded survivor of contact with the\n Gool—if I survived.\n\n\n I was still a long way from home, and I hadn't yet checked on the\n condition of the lifeboat. I glanced toward the entry port. It was\n dogged shut. I could see black marks where my burned hand had been at\n work.\n\n\n I fumbled my way into a couch and tried to think. In my condition—with\n a broken leg and third-degree burns, plus a fractured skull—I\n shouldn't have been able to fall out of bed, much less make the trip\n from\nBelshazzar's\nCCC to the boat; and how had I managed to dog that\n port shut? In an emergency a man was capable of great exertions. But\n running on a broken femur, handling heavy levers with charred fingers\n and thinking with a cracked head were overdoing it. Still, I was\n here—and it was time to get a call through to TSA headquarters.", "But not if I could help it.\n\n\n The Gool had evolved a plan—but they'd had a stroke of bad luck.\n\n\n In the past, they had managed to control a man here and there, among\n the fleets, far from home, but only at a superficial level. Enough,\n perhaps, to wreck a ship, but not the complete control needed to send a\n man back to Earth under Gool compulsion, to carry out complex sabotage.\n\n\n Then they had found me, alone, a sole survivor, free from the clutter\n of the other mind-fields. It had been their misfortune to pick a\n psychodynamicist. Instead of gaining a patient slave, they had opened\n the fortress door to an unseen spy. Now that I was there, I would see\n what I could steal.", "I finished talking and flopped back, waiting for Kayle's reply. On the\n screen, his flickering image gazed back impatiently, looking as hostile\n as a swing-shift ward nurse. It would be half an hour before I would\n get his reaction to my report. I dozed off—and awoke with a start.\n Kayle was talking.\n\n\n \"—your report. I won't mince words. They're wondering at your role in\n the disaster. How does it happen that you alone survived?\"\n\n\n \"How the hell do I know?\" I yelled—or croaked. But Kayle's voice was\n droning on:\n\n\n \"... you Psychodynamics people have been telling me the Gool may\n have some kind of long-range telehypnotic ability that might make it\n possible for them to subvert a loyal man without his knowledge. You've\n told me yourself that you blacked out during the attack—and came to on\n the lifeboat, with no recollection of how you got there.", "Gravel scrunched nearby. The beam of a flashlight lanced out, slipped\n along the weathered car, caught me. There was a startled exclamation.\n I ducked back, closed my eyes, felt out for his mind. There was a\n confused murmur of thought, a random intrusion of impressions from the\n city all around. It was hard, too hard. I had to sleep—\n\n\n I heard the snick of a revolver being cocked, and dropped flat as a\n gout of flame stabbed toward me, the imperative Bam! echoing between\n the cars. I caught the clear thought:\n\n\n \"God-awful looking, shaved head, arm stuck out; him all right—\"\n\n\n I reached out to his mind and struck at random. The light fell, went\n out, and I heard the unconscious body slam to the ground like a poled\n steer.\n\n\n It was easy—if I could only stay awake.", "There was a first-aid cabinet across the compartment from me. I\n tried my right leg, felt broken bone-ends grate with a sensation\n that transcended pain. I heaved with the other leg, scrabbled with\n the charred arm. The crawl to the cabinet dwarfed Hillary's trek\n up Everest, but I reached it after a couple of years, and found the\n microswitch on the floor that activated the thing, and then I was\n fading out again....\nI came out of it clear-headed but weak. My right leg was numb, but\n reasonably comfortable, clamped tight in a walking brace. I put up\n a hand and felt a shaved skull, with sutures. It must have been a\n fracture. The left arm—well, it was still there, wrapped to the", "I picked my way across mushy ground to a pot-holed black-top road,\n started limping toward a few car lights visible half a mile away. It\n was already hot. The swamp air was like warmed-over subway fumes.\n Through the drugs, I could feel my pulse throbbing in my various\n wounds. I reached out and touched the driver's mind; he was thinking\n about shrimps, a fish-hook wound on his left thumb and a girl with\n black hair. \"Want a lift?\" he called.\n\n\n I thanked him and got in. He gave me a glance and I pinched off his\n budding twinge of curiosity. It was almost an effort now not to follow\n his thoughts. It was as though my mind, having learned the trick of\n communications with others, instinctively reached out toward them.", "END AS A HERO\nBy KEITH LAUMER\n\n\n Illustrated by SCHELLING\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction June 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nGranthan's mission was the most vital of the war.\n\n It would mean instant victory—but for whom?\nI\n\n\n In the dream I was swimming in a river of white fire and the dream went\n on and on. And then I was awake—and the fire was still there, fiercely\n burning at me.\n\n\n I tried to move to get away from the flames, and then the real pain\n hit me. I tried to go back to sleep and the relative comfort of the\n river of fire, but it was no go. For better or worse, I was alive and\n conscious.", "discovered, worlds where food was free for the taking. Not sulphur\n alone, but potassium, calcium, iron and all the metals—riches\n beyond belief in endless profusion. No longer would the Gool tribe\n cluster—those who remained of a once-great race—at a single feeding\n trough. They would spread out across a galaxy—and beyond.", "I pressed the release on the power truss, gingerly unclamped it, then\n rigged a sling from a strip of shirt tail. I tied the arm to my side as\n inconspicuously as possible. I didn't disturb the bandages.\n\n\n I needed new clothes—or at least different ones—and something to\n cover my shaved skull. I couldn't stay hidden forever. The yard cop had\n recognized me at a glance.\n\n\n I lay back, waiting for the train to slow for a town. I wasn't unduly\n worried—at the moment. The watchman probably hadn't convinced anyone\n he'd actually seen me. Maybe he hadn't been too sure himself.\n\n\n The click-clack slowed and the train shuddered to a stop. I crept to\n the door, peered through the crack. There were sunny fields, a few low\n buildings in the distance, the corner of a platform. I closed my eyes\n and let my awareness stretch out." ], [ "I would have to risk calling Kayle now—but by voluntarily giving my\n position away, I should convince him I was still on our side—and I was\n badly in need of a pick-up. I flipped the sending key.\n\n\n \"This is Z four-oh-two,\" I said. \"I have an urgent report for Colonel\n Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence.\"\n\n\n Kayle's face appeared. \"Don't fight it, Granthan,\" he croaked. \"You\n penetrated the planetary defenses—God knows how. I—\"\n\n\n \"Later,\" I snapped. \"How about calling off your dogs now? And send\n somebody out here to pick me up, before I add sea-sickness to my other\n complaints.\"", "\"This is war, Granthan. War against a vicious enemy who strike without\n warning and without mercy. You were sent out to investigate the\n possibility of—what's that term you use?—hyper-cortical invasion. You\n know better than most the risk I'd be running if you were allowed to\n pass the patrol line.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Granthan. I can't let you land on Earth. I can't accept\n the risk.\"\n\n\n \"What do I do now?\" I stormed. \"Go into orbit and eat pills and hope\n you think of something? I need a doctor!\"", "I dropped the contact, found another, who leaped to the panel,\n detonated the remainder of the flight of six missiles. Then I withdrew.\n I would have a few minutes' stay of execution now.\n\n\n I was ten miles from shore. The capsule had its own power plant. I\n started it up, switched on the external viewer. I saw dark sea, the\n glint of star-light on the choppy surface, in the distance a glow on\n the horizon that would be Key West. I plugged the course into the\n pilot, then leaned back and felt outward with my mind for the next\n attacker.\nIV\n\n\n It was dark in the trainyard. I moved along the tracks in a stumbling\n walk. Just a few more minutes, I was telling myself.\nA few more\n minutes and you can lie down ... rest....\nThe shadowed bulk of a box car loomed up, its open door a blacker\n square. I leaned against the sill, breathing hard, then reached inside\n for a grip with my good hand.", "I tried to reason with him. I reminded him how I had readied myself\n for the trip with sessions on the encephaloscope, setting up the\n cross-networks of conditioned defensive responses, the shunt circuits\n to the decoy pseudo-personality, leaving my volitional ego free. I\n talked about subliminal hypnotics and the resilience quotient of the\n ego-complex.\n\n\n I might have saved my breath.\n\n\n \"I don't understand that psychodynamics jargon, Granthan,\" he snapped.\n \"It smacks of mysticism. But I understand what the Gool have done to\n you well enough. I'm sorry.\"\n\n\n I leaned back and chewed the inside of my lip and thought unkind\n thoughts about Colonel Ausar Kayle. Then I settled down to solve the\n problem at hand.", "I gritted my teeth, pulled myself into the car, crawled to a dark\n corner behind a crate and slumped down. I tried to evoke a personality\n fraction to set as a guard, a part of my mind to stay awake and warn\n me of danger. It was too much trouble. I relaxed and let it all slide\n down into darkness.\nThe car swayed, click-clack, click-clack. I opened my eyes, saw yellow\n sunlight in a bar across the litter on the floor. The power truss\n creaked, pulling at my arm. My broken leg was throbbing its indignation\n at the treatment it had received—walking brace and all—and the burned\n arm was yelling aloud for more of that nice dope that had been keeping\n it from realizing how bad it was. All things considered, I felt like a\n badly embalmed mummy—except that I was hungry. I had been a fool not\n to fill my pockets when I left the escape capsule in the shallows off\n Key Largo, but things had been happening too fast.", "I flipped the switch and gave the emergency call-letters Col. Ausar\n Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence had assigned to me a few weeks before.\n It was almost five minutes before the \"acknowledge\" came through from\n the Ganymede relay station, another ten minutes before Kayle's face\n swam into view. Even through the blur of the screen I could see the\n haggard look.\n\n\n \"Granthan!\" he burst out. \"Where are the others? What happened out\n there?\" I turned him down to a mutter.\n\n\n \"Hold on,\" I said. \"I'll tell you. Recorders going?\" I didn't wait for\n an answer—not with a fifteen-minute transmission lag. I plowed on:\n\n\n \"\nBelshazzar\nwas sabotaged. So was\nGilgamesh\n—I think. I got out. I\n lost a little skin, but the aid cabinet has the case in hand. Tell the\n Med people the drinks are on me.\"", "I opened my eyes and took a look around. I was on the floor next to\n an unpadded acceleration couch—the kind the Terrestrial Space Arm\n installs in seldom-used lifeboats. There were three more couches, but\n no one in them. I tried to sit up. It wasn't easy but, by applying a\n lot more will-power than should be required of a sick man, I made it.\n I took a look at my left arm. Baked. The hand was only medium rare,\n but the forearm was black, with deep red showing at the bottom of the\n cracks where the crisped upper layers had burst....", "I wasn't, of course. I was still the same Peter Granthan,\n psychodynamicist, who had started out with Dayan's fleet six weeks\n earlier. The thoughts I was having weren't brilliant, but they were\n mine, all mine....\n\n\n But how could I be sure of that?\n\n\n Maybe there was something in Kayle's suspicion. If the Gool were as\n skillful as we thought, they would have left no overt indications of\n their tampering—not at a conscious level.\n\n\n But this was where psychodynamics training came in. I had been reacting\n like any scared casualty, aching to get home and lick his wounds. But I\n wasn't just any casualty. I had been trained in the subtleties of the\n mind—and I had been prepared for just such an attack.", "As far as I knew, I was the first recorded survivor of contact with the\n Gool—if I survived.\n\n\n I was still a long way from home, and I hadn't yet checked on the\n condition of the lifeboat. I glanced toward the entry port. It was\n dogged shut. I could see black marks where my burned hand had been at\n work.\n\n\n I fumbled my way into a couch and tried to think. In my condition—with\n a broken leg and third-degree burns, plus a fractured skull—I\n shouldn't have been able to fall out of bed, much less make the trip\n from\nBelshazzar's\nCCC to the boat; and how had I managed to dog that\n port shut? In an emergency a man was capable of great exertions. But\n running on a broken femur, handling heavy levers with charred fingers\n and thinking with a cracked head were overdoing it. Still, I was\n here—and it was time to get a call through to TSA headquarters.", "END AS A HERO\nBy KEITH LAUMER\n\n\n Illustrated by SCHELLING\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction June 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nGranthan's mission was the most vital of the war.\n\n It would mean instant victory—but for whom?\nI\n\n\n In the dream I was swimming in a river of white fire and the dream went\n on and on. And then I was awake—and the fire was still there, fiercely\n burning at me.\n\n\n I tried to move to get away from the flames, and then the real pain\n hit me. I tried to go back to sleep and the relative comfort of the\n river of fire, but it was no go. For better or worse, I was alive and\n conscious.", "I closed my eyes, reached out—as the Gool mind had reached out to\n me—and felt the touch of a Signals Officer's mind, forty thousand\n miles distant, aboard the patrol vessel. There was a brief flurry of\n struggle; then I dictated my instructions. The Signals Officer punched\n keys, spoke into his microphone:\n\n\n \"As you were, Z four-oh-two. Continue on present course. At Oh-nineteen\n seconds, pick up planetary for re-entry and let-down.\"\n\n\n I blanked out the man's recollection of what had happened, caught his\n belated puzzlement as I broke contact. But I was clear of the DEW line\n now, rapidly approaching atmosphere.\n\n\n \"Z four-oh-two,\" the speaker crackled. \"This is planetary control. I am\n picking you up on channel forty-three, for re-entry and let-down.\"\n\n\n There was a long pause. Then:", "A part of my mind watched as the memory unreeled. I listened to the\n voices—yet not voices, merely the shape of concepts, indescribably\n intricate. I saw how the decoy pseudo-personality which I had\n concretized for the purpose in a hundred training sessions had fought\n against the intruding stimuli—then yielded under the relentless thrust\n of the alien probe. I watched as the Gool operator took over the motor\n centers, caused me to crawl through the choking smoke of the devastated\n control compartment toward the escape hatch. Fire leaped up, blocking\n the way. I went on, felt ghostly flames whipping at me—and then the\n hatch was open and I pulled myself through, forcing the broken leg.\n My blackened hand fumbled at the locking wheel. Then the blast as\n the lifeboat leaped clear of the disintegrating dreadnought—and the\n world-ending impact as I fell.\n\n\n At a level far below the conscious, the embattled pseudo-personality\n lashed out again—fighting the invader.", "Presently Kayle replied. \"Yes,\" he said. \"You'll have to enter a\n parking orbit. Perhaps there will be developments soon which will make\n it possible to ... ah ... restudy the situation.\" He didn't meet my\n eye. I knew what he was thinking. He'd spare me the mental anguish of\n knowing what was coming. I couldn't really blame him; he was doing\n what he thought was the right thing. And I'd have to go along and\n pretend—right up until the warheads struck—that I didn't know I'd\n been condemned to death.\nII\n\n\n I tried to gather my wits and think my way through the situation. I\n was alone and injured, aboard a lifeboat that would be the focus of a\n converging flight of missiles as soon as I approached within battery\n range of Earth. I had gotten clear of the Gool, but I wouldn't survive\n my next meeting with my own kind. They couldn't take the chance that I\n was acting under Gool orders.", "I pressed the release on the power truss, gingerly unclamped it, then\n rigged a sling from a strip of shirt tail. I tied the arm to my side as\n inconspicuously as possible. I didn't disturb the bandages.\n\n\n I needed new clothes—or at least different ones—and something to\n cover my shaved skull. I couldn't stay hidden forever. The yard cop had\n recognized me at a glance.\n\n\n I lay back, waiting for the train to slow for a town. I wasn't unduly\n worried—at the moment. The watchman probably hadn't convinced anyone\n he'd actually seen me. Maybe he hadn't been too sure himself.\n\n\n The click-clack slowed and the train shuddered to a stop. I crept to\n the door, peered through the crack. There were sunny fields, a few low\n buildings in the distance, the corner of a platform. I closed my eyes\n and let my awareness stretch out.", "There was a first-aid cabinet across the compartment from me. I\n tried my right leg, felt broken bone-ends grate with a sensation\n that transcended pain. I heaved with the other leg, scrabbled with\n the charred arm. The crawl to the cabinet dwarfed Hillary's trek\n up Everest, but I reached it after a couple of years, and found the\n microswitch on the floor that activated the thing, and then I was\n fading out again....\nI came out of it clear-headed but weak. My right leg was numb, but\n reasonably comfortable, clamped tight in a walking brace. I put up\n a hand and felt a shaved skull, with sutures. It must have been a\n fracture. The left arm—well, it was still there, wrapped to the", "\"Hey, you birds are mixed up,\" I protested. \"I'm cleared all the way. I\n checked in with DEW—\"\n\n\n It was time to disappear. I blanked off all transmission, hit the\n controls, following my evasive pattern. And again I reached out—\n\n\n A radar man at a site in the Pacific, fifteen thousand miles away, rose\n from his chair, crossed the darkened room and threw a switch. The radar\n screens blanked off....\n\n\n For an hour I rode the long orbit down, fending off attack after\n attack. Then I was clear, skimming the surface of the ocean a few miles\n southeast of Key West. The boat hit hard. I felt the floor rise up,\n over, buffeting me against the restraining harness.\n\n\n I hauled at the release lever, felt a long moment of giddy\n disorientation as the escape capsule separated from the sinking\n lifeboat deep under the surface. Then my escape capsule was bobbing on\n the water.", "\"We have you pinpointed,\" Kayle cut in. \"It's no use fighting it,\n Granthan.\"\nI felt cold sweat pop out on my forehead. \"You've got to listen,\n Kayle,\" I shouted. \"I suppose you've got missiles on the way already.\n Call them back! I have information that can win the war—\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Granthan,\" Kayle said. \"It's too late—even if I could\n take the chance you were right.\"\n\n\n A different face appeared on the screen.", "\"Mr. Granthan, I am General Titus. On behalf of your country, and\n in the name of the President—who has been apprised of this tragic\n situation—it is my privilege to inform you that you will be awarded\n the Congressional Medal of Honor—posthumously—for your heroic effort.\n Although you failed, and have in fact been forced, against your will,\n to carry out the schemes of the inhuman enemy, this in no way detracts\n from your gallant attempt. Mr. Granthan, I salute you.\"\n\n\n The general's arm went up in a rigid gesture.\n\n\n \"Stow that, you pompous idiot!\" I barked. \"I'm no spy!\"\n\n\n Kayle was back, blanking out the startled face of the general.\n\n\n \"Goodbye, Granthan. Try to understand....\"", "\"Z four-oh-two, countermand DEW Line clearance! Repeat, clearance\n countermanded! Emergency course change to standard hyperbolic code\n ninety-eight. Do not attempt re-entry. Repeat: do not attempt re-entry!\"\n\n\n It hadn't taken Kayle long to see that I'd gotten past the outer line\n of defense. A few more minutes' grace would have helped. I'd play it\n dumb, and hope for a little luck.\n\n\n \"Planetary, Z four-oh-two here. Say, I'm afraid I missed part of that,\n fellows. I'm a little banged up—I guess I switched frequencies on you.\n What was that after 'pick up channel forty-three'...?\"\n\n\n \"Four-oh-two, sheer off there! You're not cleared for re-entry!\"", "A timeless time passed. I wandered among patterns of white light and\n white sound, plumbed the deepest recesses of hidden Gool thoughts,\n fared along strange ways examining the shapes and colors of the\n concepts of an alien mind.\n\n\n I paused at last, scanning a multi-ordinal structure of pattern within\n pattern; the diagrammed circuits of a strange machine.\n\n\n I followed through its logic-sequence; and, like a bomb-burst, its\n meaning exploded in my mind.\n\n\n From the vile nest deep under the dark surface of the Gool world in\n its lonely trans-Plutonian orbit, I had plucked the ultimate secret of\n their kind." ], [ "An hour later he dropped me on a street corner in a shabby marketing\n district of the city and drove off. I hoped he made out all right with\n the dark-haired girl. I spotted a used-clothing store and headed for it.\n\n\n Twenty minutes later I was back on the sidewalk, dressed in a\n pinkish-gray suit that had been cut a long time ago by a Latin\n tailor—maybe to settle a grudge. The shirt that went with it was\n an unsuccessful violet. The black string tie lent a dubious air of\n distinction. I'd swapped the railroader's cap for a tarnished beret.\n The man who had supplied the outfit was still asleep. I figured\n I'd done him a favor by taking it. I couldn't hope to pass for a\n fisherman—I wasn't the type. Maybe I'd get by as a coffee-house\n derelict.", "\"Mr. Granthan, I am General Titus. On behalf of your country, and\n in the name of the President—who has been apprised of this tragic\n situation—it is my privilege to inform you that you will be awarded\n the Congressional Medal of Honor—posthumously—for your heroic effort.\n Although you failed, and have in fact been forced, against your will,\n to carry out the schemes of the inhuman enemy, this in no way detracts\n from your gallant attempt. Mr. Granthan, I salute you.\"\n\n\n The general's arm went up in a rigid gesture.\n\n\n \"Stow that, you pompous idiot!\" I barked. \"I'm no spy!\"\n\n\n Kayle was back, blanking out the startled face of the general.\n\n\n \"Goodbye, Granthan. Try to understand....\"", "I tried to reason with him. I reminded him how I had readied myself\n for the trip with sessions on the encephaloscope, setting up the\n cross-networks of conditioned defensive responses, the shunt circuits\n to the decoy pseudo-personality, leaving my volitional ego free. I\n talked about subliminal hypnotics and the resilience quotient of the\n ego-complex.\n\n\n I might have saved my breath.\n\n\n \"I don't understand that psychodynamics jargon, Granthan,\" he snapped.\n \"It smacks of mysticism. But I understand what the Gool have done to\n you well enough. I'm sorry.\"\n\n\n I leaned back and chewed the inside of my lip and thought unkind\n thoughts about Colonel Ausar Kayle. Then I settled down to solve the\n problem at hand.", "I wasn't, of course. I was still the same Peter Granthan,\n psychodynamicist, who had started out with Dayan's fleet six weeks\n earlier. The thoughts I was having weren't brilliant, but they were\n mine, all mine....\n\n\n But how could I be sure of that?\n\n\n Maybe there was something in Kayle's suspicion. If the Gool were as\n skillful as we thought, they would have left no overt indications of\n their tampering—not at a conscious level.\n\n\n But this was where psychodynamics training came in. I had been reacting\n like any scared casualty, aching to get home and lick his wounds. But I\n wasn't just any casualty. I had been trained in the subtleties of the\n mind—and I had been prepared for just such an attack.", "\"We have you pinpointed,\" Kayle cut in. \"It's no use fighting it,\n Granthan.\"\nI felt cold sweat pop out on my forehead. \"You've got to listen,\n Kayle,\" I shouted. \"I suppose you've got missiles on the way already.\n Call them back! I have information that can win the war—\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Granthan,\" Kayle said. \"It's too late—even if I could\n take the chance you were right.\"\n\n\n A different face appeared on the screen.", "He jumped out, opened my door, helped me out with a hand under my good\n elbow. \"I'll get your change, sir,\" he said, reaching for his hip.\n\n\n \"Keep it.\"\n\n\n \"Thank YOU.\" He hesitated. \"Maybe I oughta stick around. You know.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be all right.\"\n\n\n \"I hope so,\" he said. \"A man like you—you and me—\" he winked. \"After\n all, we ain't both wearing berets fer nothing.\"\n\n\n \"True,\" I said. \"Consider your tip doubled. Now drive away into the\n sunrise and forget you ever saw me.\"", "I would have to risk calling Kayle now—but by voluntarily giving my\n position away, I should convince him I was still on our side—and I was\n badly in need of a pick-up. I flipped the sending key.\n\n\n \"This is Z four-oh-two,\" I said. \"I have an urgent report for Colonel\n Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence.\"\n\n\n Kayle's face appeared. \"Don't fight it, Granthan,\" he croaked. \"You\n penetrated the planetary defenses—God knows how. I—\"\n\n\n \"Later,\" I snapped. \"How about calling off your dogs now? And send\n somebody out here to pick me up, before I add sea-sickness to my other\n complaints.\"", "\"This is war, Granthan. War against a vicious enemy who strike without\n warning and without mercy. You were sent out to investigate the\n possibility of—what's that term you use?—hyper-cortical invasion. You\n know better than most the risk I'd be running if you were allowed to\n pass the patrol line.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Granthan. I can't let you land on Earth. I can't accept\n the risk.\"\n\n\n \"What do I do now?\" I stormed. \"Go into orbit and eat pills and hope\n you think of something? I need a doctor!\"", "I dropped the contact, found another, who leaped to the panel,\n detonated the remainder of the flight of six missiles. Then I withdrew.\n I would have a few minutes' stay of execution now.\n\n\n I was ten miles from shore. The capsule had its own power plant. I\n started it up, switched on the external viewer. I saw dark sea, the\n glint of star-light on the choppy surface, in the distance a glow on\n the horizon that would be Key West. I plugged the course into the\n pilot, then leaned back and felt outward with my mind for the next\n attacker.\nIV\n\n\n It was dark in the trainyard. I moved along the tracks in a stumbling\n walk. Just a few more minutes, I was telling myself.\nA few more\n minutes and you can lie down ... rest....\nThe shadowed bulk of a box car loomed up, its open door a blacker\n square. I leaned against the sill, breathing hard, then reached inside\n for a grip with my good hand.", "I flipped the switch and gave the emergency call-letters Col. Ausar\n Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence had assigned to me a few weeks before.\n It was almost five minutes before the \"acknowledge\" came through from\n the Ganymede relay station, another ten minutes before Kayle's face\n swam into view. Even through the blur of the screen I could see the\n haggard look.\n\n\n \"Granthan!\" he burst out. \"Where are the others? What happened out\n there?\" I turned him down to a mutter.\n\n\n \"Hold on,\" I said. \"I'll tell you. Recorders going?\" I didn't wait for\n an answer—not with a fifteen-minute transmission lag. I plowed on:\n\n\n \"\nBelshazzar\nwas sabotaged. So was\nGilgamesh\n—I think. I got out. I\n lost a little skin, but the aid cabinet has the case in hand. Tell the\n Med people the drinks are on me.\"", "END AS A HERO\nBy KEITH LAUMER\n\n\n Illustrated by SCHELLING\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction June 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nGranthan's mission was the most vital of the war.\n\n It would mean instant victory—but for whom?\nI\n\n\n In the dream I was swimming in a river of white fire and the dream went\n on and on. And then I was awake—and the fire was still there, fiercely\n burning at me.\n\n\n I tried to move to get away from the flames, and then the real pain\n hit me. I tried to go back to sleep and the relative comfort of the\n river of fire, but it was no go. For better or worse, I was alive and\n conscious.", "I pressed the release on the power truss, gingerly unclamped it, then\n rigged a sling from a strip of shirt tail. I tied the arm to my side as\n inconspicuously as possible. I didn't disturb the bandages.\n\n\n I needed new clothes—or at least different ones—and something to\n cover my shaved skull. I couldn't stay hidden forever. The yard cop had\n recognized me at a glance.\n\n\n I lay back, waiting for the train to slow for a town. I wasn't unduly\n worried—at the moment. The watchman probably hadn't convinced anyone\n he'd actually seen me. Maybe he hadn't been too sure himself.\n\n\n The click-clack slowed and the train shuddered to a stop. I crept to\n the door, peered through the crack. There were sunny fields, a few low\n buildings in the distance, the corner of a platform. I closed my eyes\n and let my awareness stretch out.", "My host went on to the counter, gestured toward the waxed-paper-wrapped\n sandwiches under a glass cover. \"I'll take 'em all. And candy bars, and\n cigarettes. And give me a big glass of water.\"\n\n\n \"Better git out there and look after yer train,\" the girl said\n carelessly. \"When'd you git so all-fired hungry all of a sudden?\"\n\n\n \"Put it in a bag. Quick.\"\n\n\n \"Look who's getting bossy—\"\n\n\n My host rounded the counter, picked up a used paper bag, began stuffing\n food in it. The girl stared at him, then pushed him back. \"You git back\n around that counter!\"\n\n\n She filled the bag, took a pencil from behind her ear.\n\n\n \"That'll be one eighty-five. Cash.\"", "I gritted my teeth, pulled myself into the car, crawled to a dark\n corner behind a crate and slumped down. I tried to evoke a personality\n fraction to set as a guard, a part of my mind to stay awake and warn\n me of danger. It was too much trouble. I relaxed and let it all slide\n down into darkness.\nThe car swayed, click-clack, click-clack. I opened my eyes, saw yellow\n sunlight in a bar across the litter on the floor. The power truss\n creaked, pulling at my arm. My broken leg was throbbing its indignation\n at the treatment it had received—walking brace and all—and the burned\n arm was yelling aloud for more of that nice dope that had been keeping\n it from realizing how bad it was. All things considered, I felt like a\n badly embalmed mummy—except that I was hungry. I had been a fool not\n to fill my pockets when I left the escape capsule in the shallows off\n Key Largo, but things had been happening too fast.", "I had barely made it to the fishing boat, whose owner I had coerced\n into rendezvousing with me before shells started dropping around us. If\n the gunners on the cruiser ten miles away had had any luck, they would\n have finished me—and the hapless fisherman—right then. We rode out a\n couple of near misses, before I put the cruiser's gunnery crew off the\n air.\n\n\n At a fishing camp on the beach, I found a car—with driver. He dropped\n me at the railyard, and drove off under the impression he was in town\n for groceries. He'd never believe he'd seen me.\n\n\n Now I'd had my sleep. I had to start getting ready for the next act of\n the farce.", "Gravel scrunched nearby. The beam of a flashlight lanced out, slipped\n along the weathered car, caught me. There was a startled exclamation.\n I ducked back, closed my eyes, felt out for his mind. There was a\n confused murmur of thought, a random intrusion of impressions from the\n city all around. It was hard, too hard. I had to sleep—\n\n\n I heard the snick of a revolver being cocked, and dropped flat as a\n gout of flame stabbed toward me, the imperative Bam! echoing between\n the cars. I caught the clear thought:\n\n\n \"God-awful looking, shaved head, arm stuck out; him all right—\"\n\n\n I reached out to his mind and struck at random. The light fell, went\n out, and I heard the unconscious body slam to the ground like a poled\n steer.\n\n\n It was easy—if I could only stay awake.", "\"—\nlousy job. What's the use? Little witch in the lunch room ... up in\n the hills, squirrel hunting, bottle of whiskey....\n\"\n\n\n I settled into control gently, trying not to alarm the man. I saw\n through his eyes the dusty box car, the rust on the tracks, the\n listless weeds growing among cinders, and the weathered boards of\n the platform. I turned him, and saw the dingy glass of the telegraph\n window, a sagging screen door with a chipped enameled cola sign.\n\n\n I walked the man to the door, and through it. Behind a linoleum-topped\n counter, a coarse-skinned teen-age girl with heavy breasts and wet\n patches under her arms looked up without interest as the door banged.", "I walked past fly-covered fish stalls, racks of faded garments, grimy\n vegetables in bins, enough paint-flaked wrought iron to cage a herd of\n brontosauri, and fetched up at a cab stand. I picked a fat driver with\n a wart.\n\n\n \"How much to the Delta National Laboratories?\"\n\n\n He rolled an eye toward me, shifted his toothpick.\n\n\n \"What ya wanna go out there for? Nothing out there.\"\n\n\n \"I'm a tourist,\" I said. \"They told me before I left home not to miss\n it.\"\n\n\n He grunted, reached back and opened the door. I got in. He flipped his\n flag down, started up with a clash of gears and pulled out without\n looking.\n\n\n \"How far is it?\" I asked him.\n\n\n \"It ain't far. Mile, mile and a quarter.\"", "I drank the water first, ate a sandwich, then lit a cigarette and lay\n back. So far so good. The crates in the car were marked \"U. S. Naval\n Aerospace Station, Bayou Le Cochon\". With any luck I'd reach New\n Orleans in another twelve hours. The first step of my plan included a\n raid on the Delta National Labs; but that was tomorrow. That could\n wait.\nIt was a little before dawn when I crawled out of the car at a siding\n in the swampy country a few miles out of New Orleans. I wasn't feeling\n good, but I had a stake in staying on my feet. I still had a few miles\n in me. I had my supplies—a few candy bars and some cigarettes—stuffed\n in the pockets of the tattered issue coverall. Otherwise, I was\n unencumbered. Unless you wanted to count the walking brace on my right\n leg and the sling binding my arm.", "\"Pretty big place, I guess.\"\n\n\n He didn't answer.\n\n\n We went through a warehousing district, swung left along the\n waterfront, bumped over railroad tracks, and pulled up at a nine-foot\n cyclone fence with a locked gate.\n\n\n \"A buck ten,\" my driver said.\n\n\n I looked out at the fence, a barren field, a distant group of low\n buildings. \"What's this?\"\n\n\n \"This is the place you ast for. That'll be a buck ten, mister.\"\n\n\n I touched his mind, planted a couple of false impressions and withdrew.\n He blinked, then started up, drove around the field, pulled up at an\n open gate with a blue-uniformed guard. He looked back at me.\n\n\n \"You want I should drive in, sir?\"\n\n\n \"I'll get out here.\"" ], [ "I would have to risk calling Kayle now—but by voluntarily giving my\n position away, I should convince him I was still on our side—and I was\n badly in need of a pick-up. I flipped the sending key.\n\n\n \"This is Z four-oh-two,\" I said. \"I have an urgent report for Colonel\n Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence.\"\n\n\n Kayle's face appeared. \"Don't fight it, Granthan,\" he croaked. \"You\n penetrated the planetary defenses—God knows how. I—\"\n\n\n \"Later,\" I snapped. \"How about calling off your dogs now? And send\n somebody out here to pick me up, before I add sea-sickness to my other\n complaints.\"", "\"This is war, Granthan. War against a vicious enemy who strike without\n warning and without mercy. You were sent out to investigate the\n possibility of—what's that term you use?—hyper-cortical invasion. You\n know better than most the risk I'd be running if you were allowed to\n pass the patrol line.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Granthan. I can't let you land on Earth. I can't accept\n the risk.\"\n\n\n \"What do I do now?\" I stormed. \"Go into orbit and eat pills and hope\n you think of something? I need a doctor!\"", "I tried to reason with him. I reminded him how I had readied myself\n for the trip with sessions on the encephaloscope, setting up the\n cross-networks of conditioned defensive responses, the shunt circuits\n to the decoy pseudo-personality, leaving my volitional ego free. I\n talked about subliminal hypnotics and the resilience quotient of the\n ego-complex.\n\n\n I might have saved my breath.\n\n\n \"I don't understand that psychodynamics jargon, Granthan,\" he snapped.\n \"It smacks of mysticism. But I understand what the Gool have done to\n you well enough. I'm sorry.\"\n\n\n I leaned back and chewed the inside of my lip and thought unkind\n thoughts about Colonel Ausar Kayle. Then I settled down to solve the\n problem at hand.", "I dropped the contact, found another, who leaped to the panel,\n detonated the remainder of the flight of six missiles. Then I withdrew.\n I would have a few minutes' stay of execution now.\n\n\n I was ten miles from shore. The capsule had its own power plant. I\n started it up, switched on the external viewer. I saw dark sea, the\n glint of star-light on the choppy surface, in the distance a glow on\n the horizon that would be Key West. I plugged the course into the\n pilot, then leaned back and felt outward with my mind for the next\n attacker.\nIV\n\n\n It was dark in the trainyard. I moved along the tracks in a stumbling\n walk. Just a few more minutes, I was telling myself.\nA few more\n minutes and you can lie down ... rest....\nThe shadowed bulk of a box car loomed up, its open door a blacker\n square. I leaned against the sill, breathing hard, then reached inside\n for a grip with my good hand.", "END AS A HERO\nBy KEITH LAUMER\n\n\n Illustrated by SCHELLING\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction June 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nGranthan's mission was the most vital of the war.\n\n It would mean instant victory—but for whom?\nI\n\n\n In the dream I was swimming in a river of white fire and the dream went\n on and on. And then I was awake—and the fire was still there, fiercely\n burning at me.\n\n\n I tried to move to get away from the flames, and then the real pain\n hit me. I tried to go back to sleep and the relative comfort of the\n river of fire, but it was no go. For better or worse, I was alive and\n conscious.", "I gritted my teeth, pulled myself into the car, crawled to a dark\n corner behind a crate and slumped down. I tried to evoke a personality\n fraction to set as a guard, a part of my mind to stay awake and warn\n me of danger. It was too much trouble. I relaxed and let it all slide\n down into darkness.\nThe car swayed, click-clack, click-clack. I opened my eyes, saw yellow\n sunlight in a bar across the litter on the floor. The power truss\n creaked, pulling at my arm. My broken leg was throbbing its indignation\n at the treatment it had received—walking brace and all—and the burned\n arm was yelling aloud for more of that nice dope that had been keeping\n it from realizing how bad it was. All things considered, I felt like a\n badly embalmed mummy—except that I was hungry. I had been a fool not\n to fill my pockets when I left the escape capsule in the shallows off\n Key Largo, but things had been happening too fast.", "\"Hey, you birds are mixed up,\" I protested. \"I'm cleared all the way. I\n checked in with DEW—\"\n\n\n It was time to disappear. I blanked off all transmission, hit the\n controls, following my evasive pattern. And again I reached out—\n\n\n A radar man at a site in the Pacific, fifteen thousand miles away, rose\n from his chair, crossed the darkened room and threw a switch. The radar\n screens blanked off....\n\n\n For an hour I rode the long orbit down, fending off attack after\n attack. Then I was clear, skimming the surface of the ocean a few miles\n southeast of Key West. The boat hit hard. I felt the floor rise up,\n over, buffeting me against the restraining harness.\n\n\n I hauled at the release lever, felt a long moment of giddy\n disorientation as the escape capsule separated from the sinking\n lifeboat deep under the surface. Then my escape capsule was bobbing on\n the water.", "\"We have you pinpointed,\" Kayle cut in. \"It's no use fighting it,\n Granthan.\"\nI felt cold sweat pop out on my forehead. \"You've got to listen,\n Kayle,\" I shouted. \"I suppose you've got missiles on the way already.\n Call them back! I have information that can win the war—\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Granthan,\" Kayle said. \"It's too late—even if I could\n take the chance you were right.\"\n\n\n A different face appeared on the screen.", "I wasn't, of course. I was still the same Peter Granthan,\n psychodynamicist, who had started out with Dayan's fleet six weeks\n earlier. The thoughts I was having weren't brilliant, but they were\n mine, all mine....\n\n\n But how could I be sure of that?\n\n\n Maybe there was something in Kayle's suspicion. If the Gool were as\n skillful as we thought, they would have left no overt indications of\n their tampering—not at a conscious level.\n\n\n But this was where psychodynamics training came in. I had been reacting\n like any scared casualty, aching to get home and lick his wounds. But I\n wasn't just any casualty. I had been trained in the subtleties of the\n mind—and I had been prepared for just such an attack.", "I flipped the switch and gave the emergency call-letters Col. Ausar\n Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence had assigned to me a few weeks before.\n It was almost five minutes before the \"acknowledge\" came through from\n the Ganymede relay station, another ten minutes before Kayle's face\n swam into view. Even through the blur of the screen I could see the\n haggard look.\n\n\n \"Granthan!\" he burst out. \"Where are the others? What happened out\n there?\" I turned him down to a mutter.\n\n\n \"Hold on,\" I said. \"I'll tell you. Recorders going?\" I didn't wait for\n an answer—not with a fifteen-minute transmission lag. I plowed on:\n\n\n \"\nBelshazzar\nwas sabotaged. So was\nGilgamesh\n—I think. I got out. I\n lost a little skin, but the aid cabinet has the case in hand. Tell the\n Med people the drinks are on me.\"", "Presently Kayle replied. \"Yes,\" he said. \"You'll have to enter a\n parking orbit. Perhaps there will be developments soon which will make\n it possible to ... ah ... restudy the situation.\" He didn't meet my\n eye. I knew what he was thinking. He'd spare me the mental anguish of\n knowing what was coming. I couldn't really blame him; he was doing\n what he thought was the right thing. And I'd have to go along and\n pretend—right up until the warheads struck—that I didn't know I'd\n been condemned to death.\nII\n\n\n I tried to gather my wits and think my way through the situation. I\n was alone and injured, aboard a lifeboat that would be the focus of a\n converging flight of missiles as soon as I approached within battery\n range of Earth. I had gotten clear of the Gool, but I wouldn't survive\n my next meeting with my own kind. They couldn't take the chance that I\n was acting under Gool orders.", "I flipped the switch, sat gripping the couch, my stomach rising with\n each heave of the floating escape capsule. I had perhaps five minutes.\n The missiles would be from Canaveral.\n\n\n I closed my eyes, forced myself to relax, reached out....\n\n\n I sensed the distant shore, the hot buzz of human minds at work in the\n cities. I followed the coastline, found the Missile Base, flicked\n through the cluster of minds.\n\n\n \"—\nmissile on course; do right, baby. That's it, right in the slot.\n\"\n\n\n I fingered my way through the man's mind and found the control centers.\n He turned stiffly from the plotting board, tottered to a panel to slam\n his hand against the destruct button.\n\n\n Men fell on him, dragged him back. \"—\nfool, why did you blow it?\n\"", "\"Mr. Granthan, I am General Titus. On behalf of your country, and\n in the name of the President—who has been apprised of this tragic\n situation—it is my privilege to inform you that you will be awarded\n the Congressional Medal of Honor—posthumously—for your heroic effort.\n Although you failed, and have in fact been forced, against your will,\n to carry out the schemes of the inhuman enemy, this in no way detracts\n from your gallant attempt. Mr. Granthan, I salute you.\"\n\n\n The general's arm went up in a rigid gesture.\n\n\n \"Stow that, you pompous idiot!\" I barked. \"I'm no spy!\"\n\n\n Kayle was back, blanking out the startled face of the general.\n\n\n \"Goodbye, Granthan. Try to understand....\"", "I opened my eyes and took a look around. I was on the floor next to\n an unpadded acceleration couch—the kind the Terrestrial Space Arm\n installs in seldom-used lifeboats. There were three more couches, but\n no one in them. I tried to sit up. It wasn't easy but, by applying a\n lot more will-power than should be required of a sick man, I made it.\n I took a look at my left arm. Baked. The hand was only medium rare,\n but the forearm was black, with deep red showing at the bottom of the\n cracks where the crisped upper layers had burst....", "As far as I knew, I was the first recorded survivor of contact with the\n Gool—if I survived.\n\n\n I was still a long way from home, and I hadn't yet checked on the\n condition of the lifeboat. I glanced toward the entry port. It was\n dogged shut. I could see black marks where my burned hand had been at\n work.\n\n\n I fumbled my way into a couch and tried to think. In my condition—with\n a broken leg and third-degree burns, plus a fractured skull—I\n shouldn't have been able to fall out of bed, much less make the trip\n from\nBelshazzar's\nCCC to the boat; and how had I managed to dog that\n port shut? In an emergency a man was capable of great exertions. But\n running on a broken femur, handling heavy levers with charred fingers\n and thinking with a cracked head were overdoing it. Still, I was\n here—and it was time to get a call through to TSA headquarters.", "I finished talking and flopped back, waiting for Kayle's reply. On the\n screen, his flickering image gazed back impatiently, looking as hostile\n as a swing-shift ward nurse. It would be half an hour before I would\n get his reaction to my report. I dozed off—and awoke with a start.\n Kayle was talking.\n\n\n \"—your report. I won't mince words. They're wondering at your role in\n the disaster. How does it happen that you alone survived?\"\n\n\n \"How the hell do I know?\" I yelled—or croaked. But Kayle's voice was\n droning on:\n\n\n \"... you Psychodynamics people have been telling me the Gool may\n have some kind of long-range telehypnotic ability that might make it\n possible for them to subvert a loyal man without his knowledge. You've\n told me yourself that you blacked out during the attack—and came to on\n the lifeboat, with no recollection of how you got there.", "I had barely made it to the fishing boat, whose owner I had coerced\n into rendezvousing with me before shells started dropping around us. If\n the gunners on the cruiser ten miles away had had any luck, they would\n have finished me—and the hapless fisherman—right then. We rode out a\n couple of near misses, before I put the cruiser's gunnery crew off the\n air.\n\n\n At a fishing camp on the beach, I found a car—with driver. He dropped\n me at the railyard, and drove off under the impression he was in town\n for groceries. He'd never believe he'd seen me.\n\n\n Now I'd had my sleep. I had to start getting ready for the next act of\n the farce.", "But not if I could help it.\n\n\n The Gool had evolved a plan—but they'd had a stroke of bad luck.\n\n\n In the past, they had managed to control a man here and there, among\n the fleets, far from home, but only at a superficial level. Enough,\n perhaps, to wreck a ship, but not the complete control needed to send a\n man back to Earth under Gool compulsion, to carry out complex sabotage.\n\n\n Then they had found me, alone, a sole survivor, free from the clutter\n of the other mind-fields. It had been their misfortune to pick a\n psychodynamicist. Instead of gaining a patient slave, they had opened\n the fortress door to an unseen spy. Now that I was there, I would see\n what I could steal.", "A part of my mind watched as the memory unreeled. I listened to the\n voices—yet not voices, merely the shape of concepts, indescribably\n intricate. I saw how the decoy pseudo-personality which I had\n concretized for the purpose in a hundred training sessions had fought\n against the intruding stimuli—then yielded under the relentless thrust\n of the alien probe. I watched as the Gool operator took over the motor\n centers, caused me to crawl through the choking smoke of the devastated\n control compartment toward the escape hatch. Fire leaped up, blocking\n the way. I went on, felt ghostly flames whipping at me—and then the\n hatch was open and I pulled myself through, forcing the broken leg.\n My blackened hand fumbled at the locking wheel. Then the blast as\n the lifeboat leaped clear of the disintegrating dreadnought—and the\n world-ending impact as I fell.\n\n\n At a level far below the conscious, the embattled pseudo-personality\n lashed out again—fighting the invader.", "\"Z four-oh-two, countermand DEW Line clearance! Repeat, clearance\n countermanded! Emergency course change to standard hyperbolic code\n ninety-eight. Do not attempt re-entry. Repeat: do not attempt re-entry!\"\n\n\n It hadn't taken Kayle long to see that I'd gotten past the outer line\n of defense. A few more minutes' grace would have helped. I'd play it\n dumb, and hope for a little luck.\n\n\n \"Planetary, Z four-oh-two here. Say, I'm afraid I missed part of that,\n fellows. I'm a little banged up—I guess I switched frequencies on you.\n What was that after 'pick up channel forty-three'...?\"\n\n\n \"Four-oh-two, sheer off there! You're not cleared for re-entry!\"" ] ]
valid	51650	[ "How is Mars faring in relation to Earth?", "How does Peter feel towards Gus through the story?", "How much time passes over the course of the story?", "What is the relationship like between Gus and Peri?", "What are some of the current industries on Mars?", "How does Mars appear to be governed?", "How did Mars become colonized in the story?", "What is Peter’s backstory?" ]	[ [ "Behind the times", "Earth is striving to make a treaty with Mars", "About the same socioeconomic climate as Earth", "Advanced compared to the systems of Earth" ], [ "He feels like a student to Gus", "Skeptical, appreciative, friendly", "He feels he has an advantage", "Conspiratorial, he cons Gus with a friendly act" ], [ "Several months", "A week", "Less than a day", "Three days" ], [ "They are colleagues working as spies in the government", "Peri is Gus’ boss", "They are conspiring con artists", "They are old friends owing each other favors" ], [ "Artifacts, Distilled spirits, Media", "Tourism, Collectibles, Distilled spirits", "Mining, Media, Artifacts", "Postage stamps, Mining, Tourism" ], [ "Mars has a dictatorship", "Mars and Earth are one in the same as far as the government is concerned", "Mars is currently trying to form a government", "A separate entity doing trade with Earth" ], [ "Martians originated from another solar system and colonized Mars", "Martians are uncertain of their own origin because their artifacts were destroyed", "Martians evolved separately on Mars", "Immigration from Earth" ], [ "Undercover recruiter posing as a college professor", "College professor on a personal mission to improve Mars’ economy by looking for business opportunities", "A con man pretending to recruit on Earth, but using special skills to win money at Earth’s casinos", "A high official on Mars sent to Earth to gain information" ] ]	[ 1, 2, 3, 3, 1, 4, 4, 2 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "\"Trouble with it is, I hear Mars is not so comfortable,\" said Doran. \"I\n mean, do not get me wrong, I don't want to insult you or anything, but\n people come back saying you have given the planet just barely enough\n air to keep a man alive. And there are no cities, just little towns and\n villages and ranches out in the bush. I mean you are being pioneers and\n making a new nation and all that, but people paying half a megabuck for\n their ticket expect some comfort and, uh, you know.\"\n\n\n \"I do know,\" said Matheny. \"But we're poor—a handful of people trying\n to make a world of dust and sand and scrub thorn into fields and woods\n and seas. We can't do it without substantial help from Earth, equipment\n and supplies—which can only be paid for in Earth dollars—and we can't\n export enough to Earth to earn those dollars.\"", "A hell of a good bloke. He knew some very funny stories, too, and\n he laughed at Matheny's, though they were probably too rustic for a\n big-city taste like his.\n\n\n \"What I really want,\" said Matheny, \"what I really want—I mean what\n Mars really needs, get me?—is a confidence man.\"\n\n\n \"A what?\"\n\n\n \"The best and slickest one on Earth, to operate a world-size con game\n for us and make us some real money.\"\n\n\n \"Con man? Oh. A slipstring.\"\n\n\n \"A con by any other name,\" said Matheny, pouring down an akvavit.\nDoran squinted through cigarette smoke. \"You are interesting me\n strangely, my friend. Say on.\"", "He had been standing at the table for some time before the rest of the\n congregation really noticed him. Then it was with awe. The first few\n passes he had made were unsuccessful. Earth gravity threw him off.\n But when he got the rhythm of it, he tossed a row of sevens. It was a\n customary form of challenge on Mars. Here, though, they simply pushed\n chips toward him. He missed a throw, as anyone would at home: simple\n courtesy. The next time around, he threw for a seven just to get the\n feel. He got a seven. The dice had not been substituted on him.\n\n\n \"I say!\" he exclaimed. He looked up into eyes and eyes, all around the\n green table. \"I'm sorry. I guess I don't know your rules.\"\n\n\n \"You did all right, brother,\" said a middle-aged lady with an obviously\n surgical bodice.", "\"And then the Red Ankh Society. You must have seen or heard their ads.\n 'What mysterious knowledge did the Old Martians possess? What was\n the secret wisdom of the Ancient Aliens? Now the incredibly powerful\n semantics of the Red Ankh (not a religious organization) is available\n to a select few—' That's our largest dollar-earning enterprise.\"\n\n\n He would have liked to say it was his suggestion originally, but it\n would have been too presumptuous. He was talking to an Earthman, who\n had heard everything already.\n\n\n Doran whistled.\n\n\n \"That's about all, so far,\" confessed Matheny. \"Perhaps a con is our\n only hope. I've been wondering, maybe we could organize a Martian\n bucket shop, handling Martian securities, but—well, I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"I think—\" Doran removed the helmet and stood up.", "\"The only beer on Mars comes forty million miles, with interplanetary\n freight charges tacked on,\" said Matheny. \"Heineken's!\"\n\n\n Doran shrugged, dialed the dispenser and fed it coins.\n\n\n \"This is a real interesting talk, Pete,\" he said. \"You are being very\n frank with me. I like a man that is frank.\"\n\n\n Matheny shrugged. \"I haven't told you anything that isn't known to\n every economist.\"\nOf course I haven't. I've not so much as mentioned the Red Ankh, for\n instance. But, in principle, I have told him the truth, told him of our\n need; for even the secret operations do not yield us enough.\nThe beer arrived. Matheny engulfed himself in it. Doran sipped at a\n whiskey sour and unobtrusively set another full bottle in front of the\n Martian.", "\"Of course,\" said Matheny bitterly. \"We offer the most liberal\n concessions in the Solar System. Any little mining company or transport\n firm or—or anybody—who wanted to come and actually invest a few\n dollars in Mars—why, we'd probably give him the President's daughter\n as security. No, the Minister of Ecology has a better-looking one.\n But who's interested? We haven't a thing that Earth hasn't got more\n of. We're only the descendants of a few scientists, a few political\n malcontents, oddballs who happen to prefer elbow room and a bill of\n liberties to the incorporated state—what could General Nucleonics\n hope to get from Mars?\"\n\n\n \"I see. Well, what are you having to drink?\"\n\n\n \"Beer,\" said Matheny without hesitation.\n\n\n \"Huh? Look, pal, this is on me.\"", "acreage than his eyes reached, was impressive and all that, but—he\n used to stroll out in the rock garden behind his cottage and smoke a\n pipe in company with Orion. On summer evenings, that is, when the\n temperature wasn't too far below zero.\nWhy did they tap me for this job?\nhe asked himself in a surge of\n homesickness.\nWhat the hell is the Martian Embassy here for?\nHe, Peter Matheny, was no more than a peaceful professor of\n sociodynamics at Devil's Kettle University. Of course, he had advised\n his government before now—in fact, the Red Ankh Society had been his\n idea—but still he was at ease only with his books and his chess and\n his mineral collection, a faculty poker party on Tenthday night and an", "Matheny shuddered. \"Good Lord, no!\"\n\n\n \"Huh? But they make thyle right on Mars, don't they?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. And it all goes to Earth and sells at 2000 dollars a fifth. But\n you don't think we'd\ndrink\nit, do you? I mean—well, I imagine it\n doesn't absolutely\nruin\nvermouth. But we don't see those Earthside\n commercials about how sophisticated people like it so much.\"\n\"Well, I'll be a socialist creeper!\" Doran's face split in a grin. \"You\n know, all my life I've hated the stuff and never dared admit it!\" He\n raised a hand. \"Don't worry, I won't blabbo. But I am wondering, if you\n control the thyle industry and sell all those relics at fancy prices,\n why do you call yourselves poor?\"", "Doran's thin sharp face grinned. \"You break that date, Peri. Put it off\n or something. I got this Martian for you, see?\"\n\n\n \"So? Since when has all Mars had as much spending money as one big-time\n marijuana rancher? Not to mention the heir ap—\"\n\n\n \"Sure, sure. But how much are those boys going to spend on any girl,\n even a high-level type like you? Listen, I need you just for tonight,\n see? This Martian is strictly from gone. He is here on official\n business, but he is a yokel and I do mean hayseed. Like he asked me\n what the Christmas decorations in all the stores were! And here is the\n solar nexus of it, Peri, kid.\"", "The frightful thing about the Earthman was the way he seemed to\n exist only in organized masses. A gypsy snake oil peddler, plodding\n his syrtosaur wagon across Martian sands, just didn't have a prayer\n against, say, the Grant, Harding & Adams Public Relations Agency.\nMatheny puffed smoke and looked around. His feet ached from the weight\n on them. Where could a man sit down? It was hard to make out any\n individual sign through all that flimmering neon. His eye fell on one\n that was distinguished by relative austerity.\nTHE CHURCH OF CHOICE\nEnter, Play, Pray\nThat would do. He took an upward slideramp through several hundred feet\n of altitude, stepped past an aurora curtain, and found himself in a\n marble lobby next to an inspirational newsstand.\n\n\n \"Ah, brother, welcome,\" said a red-haired usherette in demure black\n leotards. \"The peace that passeth all understanding be with you. The\n restaurant is right up those stairs.\"", "\"Well, you see, maybe a man like that is just what Mars does need. And\n maybe I have got a few contacts.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Matheny gaped out of the bathroom.\n\n\n Doran cupped his hands around a fresh cigarette, not looking at him.\n \"I am not that man,\" he said frankly. \"But in my line I get a lot of\n contacts, and not all of them go topside. See what I mean? Like if,\n say, you wanted somebody terminated and could pay for it, I could not\n do it. I would not want to know anything about it. But I could tell you\n a phone number.\"\n\n\n He shrugged and gave the Martian a sidelong glance. \"Sure, you may not\n be interested. But if you are, well, Pete, I was not born yesterday. I\n got tolerance. Like the book says, if you want to get ahead, you have\n got to think positively.\"", "\"Is five hundred thousand flat,\" said Peri. \"Too bad I just got an\n awful headache and can't see Mr. Sastro tonight. Where you at, Gus?\"\nThe gravity was not as hard to take as Peter Matheny had expected.\n Three generations on Mars might lengthen the legs and expand the chest\n a trifle, but the genes had come from Earth and the organism readjusts.\n What set him gasping was the air. It weighed like a ton of wool and had\n apparently sopped up half the Atlantic Ocean. Ears trained to listen\n through the Martian atmosphere shuddered from the racket conducted by\n Earth's. The passport official seemed to bellow at him.\n\n\n \"Pardon me for asking this. The United Protectorates welcome all\n visitors to Earth and I assure you, sir, an ordinary five-year visa\n provokes no questions. But since you came on an official courier boat\n of your planet, Mr. Matheny, regulations force me to ask your business.\"\n\n\n \"Well—recruiting.\"", "\"I shall never reveal to any person unauthorized by yourself whatever\n you may tell me under security, now or at any other time,\" he\n recited. Then, cheerfully: \"And that formula, Pete, happens to be the\n honest-to-zebra truth.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\" Matheny stared, embarrassed, at the carpet. \"I'm sorry\n to—to—I mean of course I trust you, but—\"\n\n\n \"Forget it. I take a hundred security oaths a year, in my line of work.\n Maybe I can help you. I like you, Pete, damn if I don't. And, sure,\n I might stand to get an agent's cut, if I arrange—Go ahead, boy, go\n ahead.\" Doran crossed his legs and leaned back.\n\n\n \"Oh, it's simple enough,\" said Matheny. \"It's only that we already are\n operating con games.\"\n\n\n \"On Mars, you mean?\"", "\"I don't want to—I mean if you're busy tonight, Mr. Doran—\"\n\n\n \"Nah. I am not doing one thing in particular. Besides, I have never met\n a Martian. I am very interested.\"\n\n\n \"There aren't many of us on Earth,\" agreed Matheny. \"Just a small\n embassy staff and an occasional like me.\"\n\n\n \"I should think you would do a lot of traveling here. The old mother\n planet and so on.\"\n\n\n \"We can't afford it,\" said Matheny. \"What with gravitation and\n distance, such voyages are much too expensive for us to make them for\n pleasure. Not to mention our dollar shortage.\" As they entered the\n shaft, he added wistfully: \"You Earth people have that kind of money,\n at least in your more prosperous brackets. Why don't you send a few\n tourists to us?\"", "Matheny hesitated. If only he hadn't taken that last shot! It made him\n want to say yes, immediately, without reservations. And therefore maybe\n he became overcautious.\n\n\n They had instructed him on Mars to take chances if he must.\n\n\n \"I could tell you a thing or two that might give you a better idea,\" he\n said slowly. \"But it would have to be under security.\"\n\n\n \"Okay by me. Room service can send us up an oath box right now.\"\n\n\n \"What? But—but—\" Matheny hung onto himself and tried to believe that\n he had landed on Earth less than six hours ago.\n\n\n In the end, he did call room service and the machine was trundled in.\n Doran swallowed the pill and donned the conditioner helmet without an\n instant's hesitation.", "occasional trip to Swindletown—\nMy God\n, thought Matheny,\nhere I am, one solitary outlander in the\n greatest commercial empire the human race has ever seen, and I'm\n supposed to find my planet a con man!\nHe began walking, disconsolately, at random. His lizardskin shirt and\n black culottes drew glances, but derisive ones: their cut was forty\n years out of date. He should find himself a hotel, he thought drearily,\n but he wasn't tired; the spaceport would pneumo his baggage to him\n whenever he did check in. The few Martians who had been to Earth had\n gone into ecstasies over the automation which put any service you could\n name on a twenty-four-hour basis. But it would be a long time before", "\"You're from Mars, aren't you?\" he asked in the friendliest tone\n Matheny had yet heard.\n\n\n \"Yes. Yes, I am. M-my name's Peter Matheny. I, I—\" He stuck out his\n hand to shake and chips rolled over the floor. \"Damn! Oh, excuse me, I\n forgot this was a church. Never mind the chips. No, please. I just want\n to g-g-get the hell out of here.\"\n\n\n \"Good idea. How about a drink? I know a bar downshaft.\"\n\n\n Matheny sighed. \"A drink is what I need the very most.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Doran. Gus Doran. Call me Gus.\"\n\n\n They walked back to the deaconette's booth and Matheny cashed what\n remained of his winnings.", "Mars had such machines. If ever.", "\"That is a sexy type of furniture, all right,\" agreed Doran. He lowered\n himself into another chair, cocked his feet on the 3-D and waved a\n cigarette. \"Which speaking of, what say we get some girls? It is not\n too late to catch them at home. A date here will usually start around\n 2100 hours earliest.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"You know. Dames. Like a certain blonde warhead with twin radar and\n swivel mounting, and she just loves exotics. Such as you.\"\n\n\n \"Me?\" Matheny heard his voice climb to a schoolboy squeak. \"Me?\n Exotic? Why, I'm just a little college professor. I g-g-g, that is—\"\n His tongue got stuck on his palate. He pulled it loose and moistened\n uncertain lips.\n\n\n \"You are from Mars. Okay? So you fought bushcats barehanded in an\n abandoned canal.\"", "\"How about postage stamps?\" inquired Doran. \"Philately is a big\n business, I have heard.\"\n\n\n \"It was our mainstay,\" admitted Matheny, \"but it's been overworked.\n Martian stamps are a drug on the market. What we'd like to operate is a\n sweepstakes, but the anti-gambling laws on Earth forbid that.\"\nDoran whistled. \"I got to give your people credit for enterprise,\n anyway!\" He fingered his mustache. \"Uh, pardon me, but have you tried\n to, well, attract capital from Earth?\"" ], [ "\"You're from Mars, aren't you?\" he asked in the friendliest tone\n Matheny had yet heard.\n\n\n \"Yes. Yes, I am. M-my name's Peter Matheny. I, I—\" He stuck out his\n hand to shake and chips rolled over the floor. \"Damn! Oh, excuse me, I\n forgot this was a church. Never mind the chips. No, please. I just want\n to g-g-get the hell out of here.\"\n\n\n \"Good idea. How about a drink? I know a bar downshaft.\"\n\n\n Matheny sighed. \"A drink is what I need the very most.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Doran. Gus Doran. Call me Gus.\"\n\n\n They walked back to the deaconette's booth and Matheny cashed what\n remained of his winnings.", "\"No.\" Matheny realized his head was a bit smoky. The walls of the booth\n seemed odd, somehow. They were just leatheroid walls, but they had an\n odd quality.\n\n\n \"No, sorry, Gus,\" he said. \"I spoke too much.\"\n\n\n \"Okay. Forget it. I do not like a man that pries. But look, let's bomb\n out of here, how about it? Go have a little fun.\"\n\n\n \"By all means.\" Matheny disposed of his last beer. \"I could use some\n gaiety.\"\n\n\n \"You have come to the right town then. But let us get you a hotel room\n first and some more up-to-date clothes.\"\n\n\n \"\nAllez\n,\" said Matheny. \"If I don't mean\nallons\n, or maybe\nalors\n.\"", "\"I shall never reveal to any person unauthorized by yourself whatever\n you may tell me under security, now or at any other time,\" he\n recited. Then, cheerfully: \"And that formula, Pete, happens to be the\n honest-to-zebra truth.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\" Matheny stared, embarrassed, at the carpet. \"I'm sorry\n to—to—I mean of course I trust you, but—\"\n\n\n \"Forget it. I take a hundred security oaths a year, in my line of work.\n Maybe I can help you. I like you, Pete, damn if I don't. And, sure,\n I might stand to get an agent's cut, if I arrange—Go ahead, boy, go\n ahead.\" Doran crossed his legs and leaned back.\n\n\n \"Oh, it's simple enough,\" said Matheny. \"It's only that we already are\n operating con games.\"\n\n\n \"On Mars, you mean?\"", "\"Yes?\" Matheny faced around, shivering with his own tension.\n\n\n \"I may be able to find the man you want,\" said Doran. \"I just may. It\n will take a few days and might get a little expensive.\"\n\n\n \"You mean.... Mr. Doran—Gus—you could actually—\"\n\n\n \"I cannot promise anything yet except that I will try. Now you finish\n dressing. I will be down in the bar. And I will call up this girl I\n know. We deserve a celebration!\"", "\"What's a bushcat? And we don't have canals. The evaporation rate—\"\n\n\n \"Look, Pete,\" said Doran patiently. \"She don't have to know that, does\n she?\"\n\n\n \"Well—well, no. I guess not No.\"\n\n\n \"Let's order you some clothes on the pneumo,\" said Doran. \"I recommend\n you buy from Schwartzherz. Everybody knows he is expensive.\"\nWhile Matheny jittered about, shaving and showering and struggling with\n his new raiment, Doran kept him supplied with akvavit and beer.\n\n\n \"You said one thing, Pete,\" Doran remarked. \"About needing a\n slipstring. A con man, you would call it.\"\n\n\n \"Forget that. Please. I spoke out of turn.\"", "She undulated to the phone and pressed its Accept. \"Hello-o, there,\"\n she said automatically. \"So sorry to keep you waiting. I was just\n taking a bath and—Oh. It's you.\"\n\n\n Gus Doran's prawnlike eyes popped at her. \"Holy Success,\" he whispered\n in awe. \"You sure the wires can carry that much voltage?\"\n\"Well, hurry up with whatever it is,\" snapped Peri. \"I got a date\n tonight.\"\n\n\n \"I'll say you do! With a Martian!\"\nPeri narrowed her silver-blue gaze and looked icily at him. \"You must\n have heard wrong, Gus. He's the heir apparent of Indonesia, Inc.,\n that's who, and if you called up to ask for a piece of him, you can\n just blank right out again. I saw him first!\"", "\"Well, you see, maybe a man like that is just what Mars does need. And\n maybe I have got a few contacts.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Matheny gaped out of the bathroom.\n\n\n Doran cupped his hands around a fresh cigarette, not looking at him.\n \"I am not that man,\" he said frankly. \"But in my line I get a lot of\n contacts, and not all of them go topside. See what I mean? Like if,\n say, you wanted somebody terminated and could pay for it, I could not\n do it. I would not want to know anything about it. But I could tell you\n a phone number.\"\n\n\n He shrugged and gave the Martian a sidelong glance. \"Sure, you may not\n be interested. But if you are, well, Pete, I was not born yesterday. I\n got tolerance. Like the book says, if you want to get ahead, you have\n got to think positively.\"", "\"I could offer a certain amount of, uh, lagniappe,\" said Matheny. \"That\n is, well, I can draw up to a hundred megabucks myself for, uh, expenses\n and, well ... let me buy you a drink!\"\n\n\n Doran's black eyes frogged at him. \"You might at that,\" said the\n Earthman very softly. \"Yes, you might at that.\"\n\n\n Matheny found himself warming. Gus Doran was an authentic bobber. A\n hell of a swell chap. He explained modestly that he was a free-lance\n business consultant and it was barely possible that he could arrange\n some contacts....\n\n\n \"No, no, no commission, all done in the interest of interplanetary\n friendship ... well, anyhow, let's not talk business now. If you have\n got to stick to beer, Pete, make it a chaser to akvavit. What is\n akvavit? Well, I will just take and show you.\"", "\"Is five hundred thousand flat,\" said Peri. \"Too bad I just got an\n awful headache and can't see Mr. Sastro tonight. Where you at, Gus?\"\nThe gravity was not as hard to take as Peter Matheny had expected.\n Three generations on Mars might lengthen the legs and expand the chest\n a trifle, but the genes had come from Earth and the organism readjusts.\n What set him gasping was the air. It weighed like a ton of wool and had\n apparently sopped up half the Atlantic Ocean. Ears trained to listen\n through the Martian atmosphere shuddered from the racket conducted by\n Earth's. The passport official seemed to bellow at him.\n\n\n \"Pardon me for asking this. The United Protectorates welcome all\n visitors to Earth and I assure you, sir, an ordinary five-year visa\n provokes no questions. But since you came on an official courier boat\n of your planet, Mr. Matheny, regulations force me to ask your business.\"\n\n\n \"Well—recruiting.\"", "A hell of a good bloke. He knew some very funny stories, too, and\n he laughed at Matheny's, though they were probably too rustic for a\n big-city taste like his.\n\n\n \"What I really want,\" said Matheny, \"what I really want—I mean what\n Mars really needs, get me?—is a confidence man.\"\n\n\n \"A what?\"\n\n\n \"The best and slickest one on Earth, to operate a world-size con game\n for us and make us some real money.\"\n\n\n \"Con man? Oh. A slipstring.\"\n\n\n \"A con by any other name,\" said Matheny, pouring down an akvavit.\nDoran squinted through cigarette smoke. \"You are interesting me\n strangely, my friend. Say on.\"", "\"Ahhh!\" said Matheny. \"Bless you, my friend.\"\n\n\n \"A pleasure.\"\n\n\n \"But now you must let me buy you one.\"\n\n\n \"That is not necessary. After all,\" said Doran with great tact, \"with\n the situation as you have been describing—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, we're not\nthat\npoor! My expense allowance assumes I will\n entertain quite a bit.\"\n\n\n Doran's brows lifted a few minutes of arc. \"You're here on business,\n then?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I told you we haven't any tourists. I was sent to hire a business\n manager for the Martian export trade.\"", "acreage than his eyes reached, was impressive and all that, but—he\n used to stroll out in the rock garden behind his cottage and smoke a\n pipe in company with Orion. On summer evenings, that is, when the\n temperature wasn't too far below zero.\nWhy did they tap me for this job?\nhe asked himself in a surge of\n homesickness.\nWhat the hell is the Martian Embassy here for?\nHe, Peter Matheny, was no more than a peaceful professor of\n sociodynamics at Devil's Kettle University. Of course, he had advised\n his government before now—in fact, the Red Ankh Society had been his\n idea—but still he was at ease only with his books and his chess and\n his mineral collection, a faculty poker party on Tenthday night and an", "The drop down to cab-ramp level and the short ride afterward sobered\n him; the room rate at the Jupiter-Astoria sobered him still more.\nOh, well\n, he thought,\nif I succeed in this job, no one at home will\n quibble.\nAnd the chamber to which he and Doran were shown was spectacular\n enough, with a pneumo direct to the bar and a full-wall transparency to\n show the vertical incandescence of the towers.\n\n\n \"Whoof!\" Matheny sat down. The chair slithered sensuously about his\n contours. He jumped. \"What the dusty hell—Oh.\" He tried to grin, but\n his face burned. \"I see.\"", "\"I—I'm not hungry,\" stammered Matheny. \"I just wanted to sit in—\"\n\n\n \"To your left, sir.\"\n\n\n The Martian crossed the lobby. His pipe went out in the breeze from an\n animated angel. Organ music sighed through an open doorway. The series\n of rooms beyond was dim, Gothic, interminable.\n\n\n \"Get your chips right here, sir,\" said the girl in the booth.\n\n\n \"Hm?\" said Matheny.\n\n\n She explained. He bought a few hundred-dollar tokens, dropped a\n fifty-buck coin down a slot marked CONTRIBUTIONS, and sipped the\n martini he got back while he strolled around studying the games.\n He stopped, frowned. Bingo? No, he didn't want to bother learning\n something new. He decided that the roulette wheels were either honest\n or too deep for him. He'd have to relax with a crap game instead.", "occasional trip to Swindletown—\nMy God\n, thought Matheny,\nhere I am, one solitary outlander in the\n greatest commercial empire the human race has ever seen, and I'm\n supposed to find my planet a con man!\nHe began walking, disconsolately, at random. His lizardskin shirt and\n black culottes drew glances, but derisive ones: their cut was forty\n years out of date. He should find himself a hotel, he thought drearily,\n but he wasn't tired; the spaceport would pneumo his baggage to him\n whenever he did check in. The few Martians who had been to Earth had\n gone into ecstasies over the automation which put any service you could\n name on a twenty-four-hour basis. But it would be a long time before", "\"What's wrong with your own people? I mean, Pete, it is not your fault\n there are so many rackets—uh, taxes—and middlemen and agencies and et\n cetera. That is just the way Earth is set up these days.\"\nMatheny's finger stabbed in the general direction of Doran's pajama\n top. \"Exactly. And who set it up that way? Earthmen. We Martians are\n babes in the desert. What chance do we have to earn dollars on the\n scale we need them, in competition with corporations which could buy\n and sell our whole planet before breakfast? Why, we couldn't afford\n three seconds of commercial time on a Lullaby Pillow 'cast. What we\n need, what we have to hire, is an executive who knows Earth, who's an\n Earthman himself. Let him tell us what will appeal to your people, and\n how to dodge the tax bite and—and—well, you see how it goes, that\n sort of, uh, thing.\"", "Matheny hesitated. If only he hadn't taken that last shot! It made him\n want to say yes, immediately, without reservations. And therefore maybe\n he became overcautious.\n\n\n They had instructed him on Mars to take chances if he must.\n\n\n \"I could tell you a thing or two that might give you a better idea,\" he\n said slowly. \"But it would have to be under security.\"\n\n\n \"Okay by me. Room service can send us up an oath box right now.\"\n\n\n \"What? But—but—\" Matheny hung onto himself and tried to believe that\n he had landed on Earth less than six hours ago.\n\n\n In the end, he did call room service and the machine was trundled in.\n Doran swallowed the pill and donned the conditioner helmet without an\n instant's hesitation.", "Doran leaned forward as if to climb out of the screen. \"He has got a\n hundred million dollars expense money, and they are not going to audit\n his accounts at home. One hundred million good green certificates,\n legal tender anywhere in the United Protectorates. And he has about\n as much backbone as a piece of steak alga. Kid, if I did not happen to\n have experience otherwise with a small nephew, I would say this will be\n like taking candy from a baby.\"\n\n\n Peri's peaches-and-cream countenance began to resemble peaches and\n cream left overnight on Pluto. \"Badger?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Sure. You and Sam Wendt handle the routine. I will take the go-between\n angle, so he will think of me as still his friend, because I have other\n plans for him too. But if we can't shake a million out of him for this\n one night's work, there is something akilter. And your share of a\n million is three hundred thirty-three—\"", "By that time, they were entering the Paul Bunyan Knotty Pine Bar &\n Grill, on the 73rd Level. Matheny's jaw clanked down.\n\n\n \"Whassa matter?\" asked Doran. \"Ain't you ever seen a ecdysiastic\n technician before?\"\n\n\n \"Uh, yes, but—well, not in a 3-D image under ten magnifications.\"\n\n\n Matheny followed Doran past a sign announcing that this show was for\n purely artistic purposes, into a booth. There a soundproof curtain\n reduced the noise level enough so they could talk in normal voices.\n\n\n \"What'll you have?\" asked Doran. \"It's on me.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I couldn't let you. I mean—\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense. Welcome to Earth! Care for a thyle and vermouth?\"", "\"Remember Junie O'Brien? The little golden-haired girl on Mars, a\n mathematical prodigy, but dying of an incurable disease? She collected\n Earth coins.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, that. Sure, I remember—Hey! You didn't!\"\n\n\n \"Yes. We made about a billion dollars on that one.\"\n\n\n \"I will be double damned. You know, Pete, I sent her a hundred-buck\n piece myself. Say, how is Junie O'Brien?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, fine. Under a different name, she's now our finance minister.\"\n Matheny stared out the wall, his hands twisting nervously behind his\n back. \"There were no lies involved. She really does have a fatal\n disease. So do you and I. Every day we grow older.\"\n\n\n \"Uh!\" exclaimed Doran." ], [ "\"No.\" Matheny realized his head was a bit smoky. The walls of the booth\n seemed odd, somehow. They were just leatheroid walls, but they had an\n odd quality.\n\n\n \"No, sorry, Gus,\" he said. \"I spoke too much.\"\n\n\n \"Okay. Forget it. I do not like a man that pries. But look, let's bomb\n out of here, how about it? Go have a little fun.\"\n\n\n \"By all means.\" Matheny disposed of his last beer. \"I could use some\n gaiety.\"\n\n\n \"You have come to the right town then. But let us get you a hotel room\n first and some more up-to-date clothes.\"\n\n\n \"\nAllez\n,\" said Matheny. \"If I don't mean\nallons\n, or maybe\nalors\n.\"", "\"Remember Junie O'Brien? The little golden-haired girl on Mars, a\n mathematical prodigy, but dying of an incurable disease? She collected\n Earth coins.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, that. Sure, I remember—Hey! You didn't!\"\n\n\n \"Yes. We made about a billion dollars on that one.\"\n\n\n \"I will be double damned. You know, Pete, I sent her a hundred-buck\n piece myself. Say, how is Junie O'Brien?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, fine. Under a different name, she's now our finance minister.\"\n Matheny stared out the wall, his hands twisting nervously behind his\n back. \"There were no lies involved. She really does have a fatal\n disease. So do you and I. Every day we grow older.\"\n\n\n \"Uh!\" exclaimed Doran.", "By that time, they were entering the Paul Bunyan Knotty Pine Bar &\n Grill, on the 73rd Level. Matheny's jaw clanked down.\n\n\n \"Whassa matter?\" asked Doran. \"Ain't you ever seen a ecdysiastic\n technician before?\"\n\n\n \"Uh, yes, but—well, not in a 3-D image under ten magnifications.\"\n\n\n Matheny followed Doran past a sign announcing that this show was for\n purely artistic purposes, into a booth. There a soundproof curtain\n reduced the noise level enough so they could talk in normal voices.\n\n\n \"What'll you have?\" asked Doran. \"It's on me.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I couldn't let you. I mean—\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense. Welcome to Earth! Care for a thyle and vermouth?\"", "\"I—I'm not hungry,\" stammered Matheny. \"I just wanted to sit in—\"\n\n\n \"To your left, sir.\"\n\n\n The Martian crossed the lobby. His pipe went out in the breeze from an\n animated angel. Organ music sighed through an open doorway. The series\n of rooms beyond was dim, Gothic, interminable.\n\n\n \"Get your chips right here, sir,\" said the girl in the booth.\n\n\n \"Hm?\" said Matheny.\n\n\n She explained. He bought a few hundred-dollar tokens, dropped a\n fifty-buck coin down a slot marked CONTRIBUTIONS, and sipped the\n martini he got back while he strolled around studying the games.\n He stopped, frowned. Bingo? No, he didn't want to bother learning\n something new. He decided that the roulette wheels were either honest\n or too deep for him. He'd have to relax with a crap game instead.", "\"I shall never reveal to any person unauthorized by yourself whatever\n you may tell me under security, now or at any other time,\" he\n recited. Then, cheerfully: \"And that formula, Pete, happens to be the\n honest-to-zebra truth.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\" Matheny stared, embarrassed, at the carpet. \"I'm sorry\n to—to—I mean of course I trust you, but—\"\n\n\n \"Forget it. I take a hundred security oaths a year, in my line of work.\n Maybe I can help you. I like you, Pete, damn if I don't. And, sure,\n I might stand to get an agent's cut, if I arrange—Go ahead, boy, go\n ahead.\" Doran crossed his legs and leaned back.\n\n\n \"Oh, it's simple enough,\" said Matheny. \"It's only that we already are\n operating con games.\"\n\n\n \"On Mars, you mean?\"", "\"Yes?\" Matheny faced around, shivering with his own tension.\n\n\n \"I may be able to find the man you want,\" said Doran. \"I just may. It\n will take a few days and might get a little expensive.\"\n\n\n \"You mean.... Mr. Doran—Gus—you could actually—\"\n\n\n \"I cannot promise anything yet except that I will try. Now you finish\n dressing. I will be down in the bar. And I will call up this girl I\n know. We deserve a celebration!\"", "\"That is a sexy type of furniture, all right,\" agreed Doran. He lowered\n himself into another chair, cocked his feet on the 3-D and waved a\n cigarette. \"Which speaking of, what say we get some girls? It is not\n too late to catch them at home. A date here will usually start around\n 2100 hours earliest.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"You know. Dames. Like a certain blonde warhead with twin radar and\n swivel mounting, and she just loves exotics. Such as you.\"\n\n\n \"Me?\" Matheny heard his voice climb to a schoolboy squeak. \"Me?\n Exotic? Why, I'm just a little college professor. I g-g-g, that is—\"\n His tongue got stuck on his palate. He pulled it loose and moistened\n uncertain lips.\n\n\n \"You are from Mars. Okay? So you fought bushcats barehanded in an\n abandoned canal.\"", "The drop down to cab-ramp level and the short ride afterward sobered\n him; the room rate at the Jupiter-Astoria sobered him still more.\nOh, well\n, he thought,\nif I succeed in this job, no one at home will\n quibble.\nAnd the chamber to which he and Doran were shown was spectacular\n enough, with a pneumo direct to the bar and a full-wall transparency to\n show the vertical incandescence of the towers.\n\n\n \"Whoof!\" Matheny sat down. The chair slithered sensuously about his\n contours. He jumped. \"What the dusty hell—Oh.\" He tried to grin, but\n his face burned. \"I see.\"", "Matheny hesitated. If only he hadn't taken that last shot! It made him\n want to say yes, immediately, without reservations. And therefore maybe\n he became overcautious.\n\n\n They had instructed him on Mars to take chances if he must.\n\n\n \"I could tell you a thing or two that might give you a better idea,\" he\n said slowly. \"But it would have to be under security.\"\n\n\n \"Okay by me. Room service can send us up an oath box right now.\"\n\n\n \"What? But—but—\" Matheny hung onto himself and tried to believe that\n he had landed on Earth less than six hours ago.\n\n\n In the end, he did call room service and the machine was trundled in.\n Doran swallowed the pill and donned the conditioner helmet without an\n instant's hesitation.", "Doran leaned forward as if to climb out of the screen. \"He has got a\n hundred million dollars expense money, and they are not going to audit\n his accounts at home. One hundred million good green certificates,\n legal tender anywhere in the United Protectorates. And he has about\n as much backbone as a piece of steak alga. Kid, if I did not happen to\n have experience otherwise with a small nephew, I would say this will be\n like taking candy from a baby.\"\n\n\n Peri's peaches-and-cream countenance began to resemble peaches and\n cream left overnight on Pluto. \"Badger?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Sure. You and Sam Wendt handle the routine. I will take the go-between\n angle, so he will think of me as still his friend, because I have other\n plans for him too. But if we can't shake a million out of him for this\n one night's work, there is something akilter. And your share of a\n million is three hundred thirty-three—\"", "He had been standing at the table for some time before the rest of the\n congregation really noticed him. Then it was with awe. The first few\n passes he had made were unsuccessful. Earth gravity threw him off.\n But when he got the rhythm of it, he tossed a row of sevens. It was a\n customary form of challenge on Mars. Here, though, they simply pushed\n chips toward him. He missed a throw, as anyone would at home: simple\n courtesy. The next time around, he threw for a seven just to get the\n feel. He got a seven. The dice had not been substituted on him.\n\n\n \"I say!\" he exclaimed. He looked up into eyes and eyes, all around the\n green table. \"I'm sorry. I guess I don't know your rules.\"\n\n\n \"You did all right, brother,\" said a middle-aged lady with an obviously\n surgical bodice.", "occasional trip to Swindletown—\nMy God\n, thought Matheny,\nhere I am, one solitary outlander in the\n greatest commercial empire the human race has ever seen, and I'm\n supposed to find my planet a con man!\nHe began walking, disconsolately, at random. His lizardskin shirt and\n black culottes drew glances, but derisive ones: their cut was forty\n years out of date. He should find himself a hotel, he thought drearily,\n but he wasn't tired; the spaceport would pneumo his baggage to him\n whenever he did check in. The few Martians who had been to Earth had\n gone into ecstasies over the automation which put any service you could\n name on a twenty-four-hour basis. But it would be a long time before", "He backed out of the office.\nA dropshaft deposited him on a walkway. The crowd, a rainbow of men in\n pajamas and robes, women in Neo-Sino dresses and goldleaf hats, swept\n him against the rail. For a moment, squashed to the wire, he stared a\n hundred feet down at the river of automobiles.\nPhobos!\nhe thought\n wildly.\nIf the barrier gives, I'll be sliced in two by a dorsal fin\n before I hit the pavement!\nThe August twilight wrapped him in heat and stickiness. He could see\n neither stars nor even moon through the city's blaze. The forest of\n multi-colored towers, cataracting half a mile skyward across more", "\"What's a bushcat? And we don't have canals. The evaporation rate—\"\n\n\n \"Look, Pete,\" said Doran patiently. \"She don't have to know that, does\n she?\"\n\n\n \"Well—well, no. I guess not No.\"\n\n\n \"Let's order you some clothes on the pneumo,\" said Doran. \"I recommend\n you buy from Schwartzherz. Everybody knows he is expensive.\"\nWhile Matheny jittered about, shaving and showering and struggling with\n his new raiment, Doran kept him supplied with akvavit and beer.\n\n\n \"You said one thing, Pete,\" Doran remarked. \"About needing a\n slipstring. A con man, you would call it.\"\n\n\n \"Forget that. Please. I spoke out of turn.\"", "She undulated to the phone and pressed its Accept. \"Hello-o, there,\"\n she said automatically. \"So sorry to keep you waiting. I was just\n taking a bath and—Oh. It's you.\"\n\n\n Gus Doran's prawnlike eyes popped at her. \"Holy Success,\" he whispered\n in awe. \"You sure the wires can carry that much voltage?\"\n\"Well, hurry up with whatever it is,\" snapped Peri. \"I got a date\n tonight.\"\n\n\n \"I'll say you do! With a Martian!\"\nPeri narrowed her silver-blue gaze and looked icily at him. \"You must\n have heard wrong, Gus. He's the heir apparent of Indonesia, Inc.,\n that's who, and if you called up to ask for a piece of him, you can\n just blank right out again. I saw him first!\"", "\"I always wanted to,\" said Doran. \"I would like to see the what they\n call City of Time, and so on. As a matter of fact, I have given my\n girl one of those Old Martian rings last Ike's Birthday and she was\n just gazoo about it. A jewel dug out of the City of Time, like,\n made a million years ago by a, uh, extinct race ... I tell you, she\nappreciated\nme for it!\" He winked and nudged.\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said Matheny.\nHe felt a certain guilt. Doran was too pleasant a little man to\n deserve—\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Matheny said ritually, \"I agree with all the archeologists\n it's a crime to sell such scientifically priceless artifacts, but what\n can we do? We must live, and the tourist trade is almost nonexistent.\"", "\"But—I mean—when do we start actually\nplaying\n? What happened to the\n cocked dice?\"\nThe lady drew herself up and jutted an indignant brow at him. \"Sir!\n This is a church!\"\n\n\n \"Oh—I see—excuse me, I, I, I—\" Matheny backed out of the crowd,\n shuddering. He looked around for some place to hide his burning ears.\n\n\n \"You forgot your chips, pal,\" said a voice.\n\n\n \"Oh. Thanks. Thanks ever so much. I, I, that is—\" Matheny cursed\n his knotting tongue.\nDamn it, just because they're so much more\n sophisticated than I, do I have to talk like a leaky boiler?\nThe helpful Earthman was not tall. He was dark and chisel-faced and\n sleekly pomaded, dapper in blue pajamas with a red zigzag, a sleighbell\n cloak and curly-toed slippers.", "acreage than his eyes reached, was impressive and all that, but—he\n used to stroll out in the rock garden behind his cottage and smoke a\n pipe in company with Orion. On summer evenings, that is, when the\n temperature wasn't too far below zero.\nWhy did they tap me for this job?\nhe asked himself in a surge of\n homesickness.\nWhat the hell is the Martian Embassy here for?\nHe, Peter Matheny, was no more than a peaceful professor of\n sociodynamics at Devil's Kettle University. Of course, he had advised\n his government before now—in fact, the Red Ankh Society had been his\n idea—but still he was at ease only with his books and his chess and\n his mineral collection, a faculty poker party on Tenthday night and an", "\"Ahhh!\" said Matheny. \"Bless you, my friend.\"\n\n\n \"A pleasure.\"\n\n\n \"But now you must let me buy you one.\"\n\n\n \"That is not necessary. After all,\" said Doran with great tact, \"with\n the situation as you have been describing—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, we're not\nthat\npoor! My expense allowance assumes I will\n entertain quite a bit.\"\n\n\n Doran's brows lifted a few minutes of arc. \"You're here on business,\n then?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I told you we haven't any tourists. I was sent to hire a business\n manager for the Martian export trade.\"", "\"You're from Mars, aren't you?\" he asked in the friendliest tone\n Matheny had yet heard.\n\n\n \"Yes. Yes, I am. M-my name's Peter Matheny. I, I—\" He stuck out his\n hand to shake and chips rolled over the floor. \"Damn! Oh, excuse me, I\n forgot this was a church. Never mind the chips. No, please. I just want\n to g-g-get the hell out of here.\"\n\n\n \"Good idea. How about a drink? I know a bar downshaft.\"\n\n\n Matheny sighed. \"A drink is what I need the very most.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Doran. Gus Doran. Call me Gus.\"\n\n\n They walked back to the deaconette's booth and Matheny cashed what\n remained of his winnings." ], [ "She undulated to the phone and pressed its Accept. \"Hello-o, there,\"\n she said automatically. \"So sorry to keep you waiting. I was just\n taking a bath and—Oh. It's you.\"\n\n\n Gus Doran's prawnlike eyes popped at her. \"Holy Success,\" he whispered\n in awe. \"You sure the wires can carry that much voltage?\"\n\"Well, hurry up with whatever it is,\" snapped Peri. \"I got a date\n tonight.\"\n\n\n \"I'll say you do! With a Martian!\"\nPeri narrowed her silver-blue gaze and looked icily at him. \"You must\n have heard wrong, Gus. He's the heir apparent of Indonesia, Inc.,\n that's who, and if you called up to ask for a piece of him, you can\n just blank right out again. I saw him first!\"", "Doran's thin sharp face grinned. \"You break that date, Peri. Put it off\n or something. I got this Martian for you, see?\"\n\n\n \"So? Since when has all Mars had as much spending money as one big-time\n marijuana rancher? Not to mention the heir ap—\"\n\n\n \"Sure, sure. But how much are those boys going to spend on any girl,\n even a high-level type like you? Listen, I need you just for tonight,\n see? This Martian is strictly from gone. He is here on official\n business, but he is a yokel and I do mean hayseed. Like he asked me\n what the Christmas decorations in all the stores were! And here is the\n solar nexus of it, Peri, kid.\"", "\"You're from Mars, aren't you?\" he asked in the friendliest tone\n Matheny had yet heard.\n\n\n \"Yes. Yes, I am. M-my name's Peter Matheny. I, I—\" He stuck out his\n hand to shake and chips rolled over the floor. \"Damn! Oh, excuse me, I\n forgot this was a church. Never mind the chips. No, please. I just want\n to g-g-get the hell out of here.\"\n\n\n \"Good idea. How about a drink? I know a bar downshaft.\"\n\n\n Matheny sighed. \"A drink is what I need the very most.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Doran. Gus Doran. Call me Gus.\"\n\n\n They walked back to the deaconette's booth and Matheny cashed what\n remained of his winnings.", "\"No.\" Matheny realized his head was a bit smoky. The walls of the booth\n seemed odd, somehow. They were just leatheroid walls, but they had an\n odd quality.\n\n\n \"No, sorry, Gus,\" he said. \"I spoke too much.\"\n\n\n \"Okay. Forget it. I do not like a man that pries. But look, let's bomb\n out of here, how about it? Go have a little fun.\"\n\n\n \"By all means.\" Matheny disposed of his last beer. \"I could use some\n gaiety.\"\n\n\n \"You have come to the right town then. But let us get you a hotel room\n first and some more up-to-date clothes.\"\n\n\n \"\nAllez\n,\" said Matheny. \"If I don't mean\nallons\n, or maybe\nalors\n.\"", "\"Is five hundred thousand flat,\" said Peri. \"Too bad I just got an\n awful headache and can't see Mr. Sastro tonight. Where you at, Gus?\"\nThe gravity was not as hard to take as Peter Matheny had expected.\n Three generations on Mars might lengthen the legs and expand the chest\n a trifle, but the genes had come from Earth and the organism readjusts.\n What set him gasping was the air. It weighed like a ton of wool and had\n apparently sopped up half the Atlantic Ocean. Ears trained to listen\n through the Martian atmosphere shuddered from the racket conducted by\n Earth's. The passport official seemed to bellow at him.\n\n\n \"Pardon me for asking this. The United Protectorates welcome all\n visitors to Earth and I assure you, sir, an ordinary five-year visa\n provokes no questions. But since you came on an official courier boat\n of your planet, Mr. Matheny, regulations force me to ask your business.\"\n\n\n \"Well—recruiting.\"", "\"Yes?\" Matheny faced around, shivering with his own tension.\n\n\n \"I may be able to find the man you want,\" said Doran. \"I just may. It\n will take a few days and might get a little expensive.\"\n\n\n \"You mean.... Mr. Doran—Gus—you could actually—\"\n\n\n \"I cannot promise anything yet except that I will try. Now you finish\n dressing. I will be down in the bar. And I will call up this girl I\n know. We deserve a celebration!\"", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nA hayseed Martian among big-planet slickers ... of course\n \nhe would get into trouble. But that was nothing compared\n \nto the trouble he would be in if he did not get into trouble!\nThe visiphone chimed when Peri had just gotten into her dinner gown.\n She peeled it off again and slipped on a casual bathrobe: a wisp of\n translucence which had set the president of Antarctic Enterprise—or\n had it been the chairman of the board?—back several thousand dollars.\n Then she pulled a lock of lion-colored hair down over one eye, checked\n with a mirror, rumpled it a tiny bit more and wrapped the robe loosely\n on top and tight around the hips.\n\n\n After all, some of the men who knew her private number were important.", "Doran leaned forward as if to climb out of the screen. \"He has got a\n hundred million dollars expense money, and they are not going to audit\n his accounts at home. One hundred million good green certificates,\n legal tender anywhere in the United Protectorates. And he has about\n as much backbone as a piece of steak alga. Kid, if I did not happen to\n have experience otherwise with a small nephew, I would say this will be\n like taking candy from a baby.\"\n\n\n Peri's peaches-and-cream countenance began to resemble peaches and\n cream left overnight on Pluto. \"Badger?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Sure. You and Sam Wendt handle the routine. I will take the go-between\n angle, so he will think of me as still his friend, because I have other\n plans for him too. But if we can't shake a million out of him for this\n one night's work, there is something akilter. And your share of a\n million is three hundred thirty-three—\"", "\"That is a sexy type of furniture, all right,\" agreed Doran. He lowered\n himself into another chair, cocked his feet on the 3-D and waved a\n cigarette. \"Which speaking of, what say we get some girls? It is not\n too late to catch them at home. A date here will usually start around\n 2100 hours earliest.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"You know. Dames. Like a certain blonde warhead with twin radar and\n swivel mounting, and she just loves exotics. Such as you.\"\n\n\n \"Me?\" Matheny heard his voice climb to a schoolboy squeak. \"Me?\n Exotic? Why, I'm just a little college professor. I g-g-g, that is—\"\n His tongue got stuck on his palate. He pulled it loose and moistened\n uncertain lips.\n\n\n \"You are from Mars. Okay? So you fought bushcats barehanded in an\n abandoned canal.\"", "\"Ahhh!\" said Matheny. \"Bless you, my friend.\"\n\n\n \"A pleasure.\"\n\n\n \"But now you must let me buy you one.\"\n\n\n \"That is not necessary. After all,\" said Doran with great tact, \"with\n the situation as you have been describing—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, we're not\nthat\npoor! My expense allowance assumes I will\n entertain quite a bit.\"\n\n\n Doran's brows lifted a few minutes of arc. \"You're here on business,\n then?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I told you we haven't any tourists. I was sent to hire a business\n manager for the Martian export trade.\"", "\"I shall never reveal to any person unauthorized by yourself whatever\n you may tell me under security, now or at any other time,\" he\n recited. Then, cheerfully: \"And that formula, Pete, happens to be the\n honest-to-zebra truth.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\" Matheny stared, embarrassed, at the carpet. \"I'm sorry\n to—to—I mean of course I trust you, but—\"\n\n\n \"Forget it. I take a hundred security oaths a year, in my line of work.\n Maybe I can help you. I like you, Pete, damn if I don't. And, sure,\n I might stand to get an agent's cut, if I arrange—Go ahead, boy, go\n ahead.\" Doran crossed his legs and leaned back.\n\n\n \"Oh, it's simple enough,\" said Matheny. \"It's only that we already are\n operating con games.\"\n\n\n \"On Mars, you mean?\"", "\"I could offer a certain amount of, uh, lagniappe,\" said Matheny. \"That\n is, well, I can draw up to a hundred megabucks myself for, uh, expenses\n and, well ... let me buy you a drink!\"\n\n\n Doran's black eyes frogged at him. \"You might at that,\" said the\n Earthman very softly. \"Yes, you might at that.\"\n\n\n Matheny found himself warming. Gus Doran was an authentic bobber. A\n hell of a swell chap. He explained modestly that he was a free-lance\n business consultant and it was barely possible that he could arrange\n some contacts....\n\n\n \"No, no, no commission, all done in the interest of interplanetary\n friendship ... well, anyhow, let's not talk business now. If you have\n got to stick to beer, Pete, make it a chaser to akvavit. What is\n akvavit? Well, I will just take and show you.\"", "By that time, they were entering the Paul Bunyan Knotty Pine Bar &\n Grill, on the 73rd Level. Matheny's jaw clanked down.\n\n\n \"Whassa matter?\" asked Doran. \"Ain't you ever seen a ecdysiastic\n technician before?\"\n\n\n \"Uh, yes, but—well, not in a 3-D image under ten magnifications.\"\n\n\n Matheny followed Doran past a sign announcing that this show was for\n purely artistic purposes, into a booth. There a soundproof curtain\n reduced the noise level enough so they could talk in normal voices.\n\n\n \"What'll you have?\" asked Doran. \"It's on me.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I couldn't let you. I mean—\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense. Welcome to Earth! Care for a thyle and vermouth?\"", "\"What's a bushcat? And we don't have canals. The evaporation rate—\"\n\n\n \"Look, Pete,\" said Doran patiently. \"She don't have to know that, does\n she?\"\n\n\n \"Well—well, no. I guess not No.\"\n\n\n \"Let's order you some clothes on the pneumo,\" said Doran. \"I recommend\n you buy from Schwartzherz. Everybody knows he is expensive.\"\nWhile Matheny jittered about, shaving and showering and struggling with\n his new raiment, Doran kept him supplied with akvavit and beer.\n\n\n \"You said one thing, Pete,\" Doran remarked. \"About needing a\n slipstring. A con man, you would call it.\"\n\n\n \"Forget that. Please. I spoke out of turn.\"", "\"I—I'm not hungry,\" stammered Matheny. \"I just wanted to sit in—\"\n\n\n \"To your left, sir.\"\n\n\n The Martian crossed the lobby. His pipe went out in the breeze from an\n animated angel. Organ music sighed through an open doorway. The series\n of rooms beyond was dim, Gothic, interminable.\n\n\n \"Get your chips right here, sir,\" said the girl in the booth.\n\n\n \"Hm?\" said Matheny.\n\n\n She explained. He bought a few hundred-dollar tokens, dropped a\n fifty-buck coin down a slot marked CONTRIBUTIONS, and sipped the\n martini he got back while he strolled around studying the games.\n He stopped, frowned. Bingo? No, he didn't want to bother learning\n something new. He decided that the roulette wheels were either honest\n or too deep for him. He'd have to relax with a crap game instead.", "\"Well, you see, maybe a man like that is just what Mars does need. And\n maybe I have got a few contacts.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Matheny gaped out of the bathroom.\n\n\n Doran cupped his hands around a fresh cigarette, not looking at him.\n \"I am not that man,\" he said frankly. \"But in my line I get a lot of\n contacts, and not all of them go topside. See what I mean? Like if,\n say, you wanted somebody terminated and could pay for it, I could not\n do it. I would not want to know anything about it. But I could tell you\n a phone number.\"\n\n\n He shrugged and gave the Martian a sidelong glance. \"Sure, you may not\n be interested. But if you are, well, Pete, I was not born yesterday. I\n got tolerance. Like the book says, if you want to get ahead, you have\n got to think positively.\"", "A hell of a good bloke. He knew some very funny stories, too, and\n he laughed at Matheny's, though they were probably too rustic for a\n big-city taste like his.\n\n\n \"What I really want,\" said Matheny, \"what I really want—I mean what\n Mars really needs, get me?—is a confidence man.\"\n\n\n \"A what?\"\n\n\n \"The best and slickest one on Earth, to operate a world-size con game\n for us and make us some real money.\"\n\n\n \"Con man? Oh. A slipstring.\"\n\n\n \"A con by any other name,\" said Matheny, pouring down an akvavit.\nDoran squinted through cigarette smoke. \"You are interesting me\n strangely, my friend. Say on.\"", "\"But—I mean—when do we start actually\nplaying\n? What happened to the\n cocked dice?\"\nThe lady drew herself up and jutted an indignant brow at him. \"Sir!\n This is a church!\"\n\n\n \"Oh—I see—excuse me, I, I, I—\" Matheny backed out of the crowd,\n shuddering. He looked around for some place to hide his burning ears.\n\n\n \"You forgot your chips, pal,\" said a voice.\n\n\n \"Oh. Thanks. Thanks ever so much. I, I, that is—\" Matheny cursed\n his knotting tongue.\nDamn it, just because they're so much more\n sophisticated than I, do I have to talk like a leaky boiler?\nThe helpful Earthman was not tall. He was dark and chisel-faced and\n sleekly pomaded, dapper in blue pajamas with a red zigzag, a sleighbell\n cloak and curly-toed slippers.", "The drop down to cab-ramp level and the short ride afterward sobered\n him; the room rate at the Jupiter-Astoria sobered him still more.\nOh, well\n, he thought,\nif I succeed in this job, no one at home will\n quibble.\nAnd the chamber to which he and Doran were shown was spectacular\n enough, with a pneumo direct to the bar and a full-wall transparency to\n show the vertical incandescence of the towers.\n\n\n \"Whoof!\" Matheny sat down. The chair slithered sensuously about his\n contours. He jumped. \"What the dusty hell—Oh.\" He tried to grin, but\n his face burned. \"I see.\"", "\"I always wanted to,\" said Doran. \"I would like to see the what they\n call City of Time, and so on. As a matter of fact, I have given my\n girl one of those Old Martian rings last Ike's Birthday and she was\n just gazoo about it. A jewel dug out of the City of Time, like,\n made a million years ago by a, uh, extinct race ... I tell you, she\nappreciated\nme for it!\" He winked and nudged.\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said Matheny.\nHe felt a certain guilt. Doran was too pleasant a little man to\n deserve—\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Matheny said ritually, \"I agree with all the archeologists\n it's a crime to sell such scientifically priceless artifacts, but what\n can we do? We must live, and the tourist trade is almost nonexistent.\"" ], [ "\"Well, we do sell a lot of color slides, postcards, baggage labels and\n so on to people who like to act cosmopolitan, and I understand our\n travel posters are quite popular as wall decoration. But all that has\n to be printed on Earth, and the printer and distributor keep most of\n the money. We've sold some books and show tapes, of course, but only\n one has been really successful—\nI Was a Slave Girl on Mars\n.\n\n\n \"Our most prominent novelist was co-opted to ghostwrite that one.\n Again, though, local income taxes took most of the money; authors\n never have been protected the way a businessman is. We do make a high\n percentage of profit on those little certificates you see around—you\n know, the title deeds to one square inch of Mars—but expressed\n absolutely, in dollars, it doesn't amount to much when we start\n shopping for bulldozers and thermonuclear power plants.\"", "\"Trouble with it is, I hear Mars is not so comfortable,\" said Doran. \"I\n mean, do not get me wrong, I don't want to insult you or anything, but\n people come back saying you have given the planet just barely enough\n air to keep a man alive. And there are no cities, just little towns and\n villages and ranches out in the bush. I mean you are being pioneers and\n making a new nation and all that, but people paying half a megabuck for\n their ticket expect some comfort and, uh, you know.\"\n\n\n \"I do know,\" said Matheny. \"But we're poor—a handful of people trying\n to make a world of dust and sand and scrub thorn into fields and woods\n and seas. We can't do it without substantial help from Earth, equipment\n and supplies—which can only be paid for in Earth dollars—and we can't\n export enough to Earth to earn those dollars.\"", "Matheny shuddered. \"Good Lord, no!\"\n\n\n \"Huh? But they make thyle right on Mars, don't they?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. And it all goes to Earth and sells at 2000 dollars a fifth. But\n you don't think we'd\ndrink\nit, do you? I mean—well, I imagine it\n doesn't absolutely\nruin\nvermouth. But we don't see those Earthside\n commercials about how sophisticated people like it so much.\"\n\"Well, I'll be a socialist creeper!\" Doran's face split in a grin. \"You\n know, all my life I've hated the stuff and never dared admit it!\" He\n raised a hand. \"Don't worry, I won't blabbo. But I am wondering, if you\n control the thyle industry and sell all those relics at fancy prices,\n why do you call yourselves poor?\"", "\"Of course,\" said Matheny bitterly. \"We offer the most liberal\n concessions in the Solar System. Any little mining company or transport\n firm or—or anybody—who wanted to come and actually invest a few\n dollars in Mars—why, we'd probably give him the President's daughter\n as security. No, the Minister of Ecology has a better-looking one.\n But who's interested? We haven't a thing that Earth hasn't got more\n of. We're only the descendants of a few scientists, a few political\n malcontents, oddballs who happen to prefer elbow room and a bill of\n liberties to the incorporated state—what could General Nucleonics\n hope to get from Mars?\"\n\n\n \"I see. Well, what are you having to drink?\"\n\n\n \"Beer,\" said Matheny without hesitation.\n\n\n \"Huh? Look, pal, this is on me.\"", "\"The only beer on Mars comes forty million miles, with interplanetary\n freight charges tacked on,\" said Matheny. \"Heineken's!\"\n\n\n Doran shrugged, dialed the dispenser and fed it coins.\n\n\n \"This is a real interesting talk, Pete,\" he said. \"You are being very\n frank with me. I like a man that is frank.\"\n\n\n Matheny shrugged. \"I haven't told you anything that isn't known to\n every economist.\"\nOf course I haven't. I've not so much as mentioned the Red Ankh, for\n instance. But, in principle, I have told him the truth, told him of our\n need; for even the secret operations do not yield us enough.\nThe beer arrived. Matheny engulfed himself in it. Doran sipped at a\n whiskey sour and unobtrusively set another full bottle in front of the\n Martian.", "\"Because we are,\" said Matheny. \"By the time the shipping costs have\n been paid on a bottle, and the Earth wholesaler and jobber and sales\n engineer and so on, down to the retailer, have taken their percentage,\n and the advertising agency has been paid, and about fifty separate\n Earth taxes—there's very little profit going back to the distillery\n on Mars. The same principle is what's strangling us on everything. Old\n Martian artifacts aren't really rare, for instance, but freight charges\n and the middlemen here put them out of the mass market.\"\n\n\n \"Have you not got some other business?\"", "\"And then the Red Ankh Society. You must have seen or heard their ads.\n 'What mysterious knowledge did the Old Martians possess? What was\n the secret wisdom of the Ancient Aliens? Now the incredibly powerful\n semantics of the Red Ankh (not a religious organization) is available\n to a select few—' That's our largest dollar-earning enterprise.\"\n\n\n He would have liked to say it was his suggestion originally, but it\n would have been too presumptuous. He was talking to an Earthman, who\n had heard everything already.\n\n\n Doran whistled.\n\n\n \"That's about all, so far,\" confessed Matheny. \"Perhaps a con is our\n only hope. I've been wondering, maybe we could organize a Martian\n bucket shop, handling Martian securities, but—well, I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"I think—\" Doran removed the helmet and stood up.", "\"How about postage stamps?\" inquired Doran. \"Philately is a big\n business, I have heard.\"\n\n\n \"It was our mainstay,\" admitted Matheny, \"but it's been overworked.\n Martian stamps are a drug on the market. What we'd like to operate is a\n sweepstakes, but the anti-gambling laws on Earth forbid that.\"\nDoran whistled. \"I got to give your people credit for enterprise,\n anyway!\" He fingered his mustache. \"Uh, pardon me, but have you tried\n to, well, attract capital from Earth?\"", "Mars had such machines. If ever.", "\"Well, you see, maybe a man like that is just what Mars does need. And\n maybe I have got a few contacts.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Matheny gaped out of the bathroom.\n\n\n Doran cupped his hands around a fresh cigarette, not looking at him.\n \"I am not that man,\" he said frankly. \"But in my line I get a lot of\n contacts, and not all of them go topside. See what I mean? Like if,\n say, you wanted somebody terminated and could pay for it, I could not\n do it. I would not want to know anything about it. But I could tell you\n a phone number.\"\n\n\n He shrugged and gave the Martian a sidelong glance. \"Sure, you may not\n be interested. But if you are, well, Pete, I was not born yesterday. I\n got tolerance. Like the book says, if you want to get ahead, you have\n got to think positively.\"", "\"Ahhh!\" said Matheny. \"Bless you, my friend.\"\n\n\n \"A pleasure.\"\n\n\n \"But now you must let me buy you one.\"\n\n\n \"That is not necessary. After all,\" said Doran with great tact, \"with\n the situation as you have been describing—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, we're not\nthat\npoor! My expense allowance assumes I will\n entertain quite a bit.\"\n\n\n Doran's brows lifted a few minutes of arc. \"You're here on business,\n then?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I told you we haven't any tourists. I was sent to hire a business\n manager for the Martian export trade.\"", "\"I always wanted to,\" said Doran. \"I would like to see the what they\n call City of Time, and so on. As a matter of fact, I have given my\n girl one of those Old Martian rings last Ike's Birthday and she was\n just gazoo about it. A jewel dug out of the City of Time, like,\n made a million years ago by a, uh, extinct race ... I tell you, she\nappreciated\nme for it!\" He winked and nudged.\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said Matheny.\nHe felt a certain guilt. Doran was too pleasant a little man to\n deserve—\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Matheny said ritually, \"I agree with all the archeologists\n it's a crime to sell such scientifically priceless artifacts, but what\n can we do? We must live, and the tourist trade is almost nonexistent.\"", "\"I shall never reveal to any person unauthorized by yourself whatever\n you may tell me under security, now or at any other time,\" he\n recited. Then, cheerfully: \"And that formula, Pete, happens to be the\n honest-to-zebra truth.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\" Matheny stared, embarrassed, at the carpet. \"I'm sorry\n to—to—I mean of course I trust you, but—\"\n\n\n \"Forget it. I take a hundred security oaths a year, in my line of work.\n Maybe I can help you. I like you, Pete, damn if I don't. And, sure,\n I might stand to get an agent's cut, if I arrange—Go ahead, boy, go\n ahead.\" Doran crossed his legs and leaned back.\n\n\n \"Oh, it's simple enough,\" said Matheny. \"It's only that we already are\n operating con games.\"\n\n\n \"On Mars, you mean?\"", "Doran's thin sharp face grinned. \"You break that date, Peri. Put it off\n or something. I got this Martian for you, see?\"\n\n\n \"So? Since when has all Mars had as much spending money as one big-time\n marijuana rancher? Not to mention the heir ap—\"\n\n\n \"Sure, sure. But how much are those boys going to spend on any girl,\n even a high-level type like you? Listen, I need you just for tonight,\n see? This Martian is strictly from gone. He is here on official\n business, but he is a yokel and I do mean hayseed. Like he asked me\n what the Christmas decorations in all the stores were! And here is the\n solar nexus of it, Peri, kid.\"", "\"Yes. There never were any Old Martians. We erected the ruins fifty\n years ago for the Billingsworth Expedition to find. We've been\n manufacturing relics ever since.\"\n\n\n \"\nHuh?\nWell, why, but—\"\n\n\n \"In this case, it helps to be at the far end of an interplanetary\n haul,\" said Matheny. \"Not many Terrestrial archeologists get to Mars\n and they depend on our people to—Well, anyhow—\"\n\n\n \"I will be clopped! Good for you!\"\nDoran blew up in laughter. \"That is one thing I would never spill, even\n without security. I told you about my girl friend, didn't I?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, and that calls to mind the Little Girl,\" said Matheny\n apologetically. \"She was another official project.\"\n\n\n \"Who?\"", "occasional trip to Swindletown—\nMy God\n, thought Matheny,\nhere I am, one solitary outlander in the\n greatest commercial empire the human race has ever seen, and I'm\n supposed to find my planet a con man!\nHe began walking, disconsolately, at random. His lizardskin shirt and\n black culottes drew glances, but derisive ones: their cut was forty\n years out of date. He should find himself a hotel, he thought drearily,\n but he wasn't tired; the spaceport would pneumo his baggage to him\n whenever he did check in. The few Martians who had been to Earth had\n gone into ecstasies over the automation which put any service you could\n name on a twenty-four-hour basis. But it would be a long time before", "\"That is a sexy type of furniture, all right,\" agreed Doran. He lowered\n himself into another chair, cocked his feet on the 3-D and waved a\n cigarette. \"Which speaking of, what say we get some girls? It is not\n too late to catch them at home. A date here will usually start around\n 2100 hours earliest.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"You know. Dames. Like a certain blonde warhead with twin radar and\n swivel mounting, and she just loves exotics. Such as you.\"\n\n\n \"Me?\" Matheny heard his voice climb to a schoolboy squeak. \"Me?\n Exotic? Why, I'm just a little college professor. I g-g-g, that is—\"\n His tongue got stuck on his palate. He pulled it loose and moistened\n uncertain lips.\n\n\n \"You are from Mars. Okay? So you fought bushcats barehanded in an\n abandoned canal.\"", "He had been standing at the table for some time before the rest of the\n congregation really noticed him. Then it was with awe. The first few\n passes he had made were unsuccessful. Earth gravity threw him off.\n But when he got the rhythm of it, he tossed a row of sevens. It was a\n customary form of challenge on Mars. Here, though, they simply pushed\n chips toward him. He missed a throw, as anyone would at home: simple\n courtesy. The next time around, he threw for a seven just to get the\n feel. He got a seven. The dice had not been substituted on him.\n\n\n \"I say!\" he exclaimed. He looked up into eyes and eyes, all around the\n green table. \"I'm sorry. I guess I don't know your rules.\"\n\n\n \"You did all right, brother,\" said a middle-aged lady with an obviously\n surgical bodice.", "A hell of a good bloke. He knew some very funny stories, too, and\n he laughed at Matheny's, though they were probably too rustic for a\n big-city taste like his.\n\n\n \"What I really want,\" said Matheny, \"what I really want—I mean what\n Mars really needs, get me?—is a confidence man.\"\n\n\n \"A what?\"\n\n\n \"The best and slickest one on Earth, to operate a world-size con game\n for us and make us some real money.\"\n\n\n \"Con man? Oh. A slipstring.\"\n\n\n \"A con by any other name,\" said Matheny, pouring down an akvavit.\nDoran squinted through cigarette smoke. \"You are interesting me\n strangely, my friend. Say on.\"", "\"Is five hundred thousand flat,\" said Peri. \"Too bad I just got an\n awful headache and can't see Mr. Sastro tonight. Where you at, Gus?\"\nThe gravity was not as hard to take as Peter Matheny had expected.\n Three generations on Mars might lengthen the legs and expand the chest\n a trifle, but the genes had come from Earth and the organism readjusts.\n What set him gasping was the air. It weighed like a ton of wool and had\n apparently sopped up half the Atlantic Ocean. Ears trained to listen\n through the Martian atmosphere shuddered from the racket conducted by\n Earth's. The passport official seemed to bellow at him.\n\n\n \"Pardon me for asking this. The United Protectorates welcome all\n visitors to Earth and I assure you, sir, an ordinary five-year visa\n provokes no questions. But since you came on an official courier boat\n of your planet, Mr. Matheny, regulations force me to ask your business.\"\n\n\n \"Well—recruiting.\"" ], [ "\"Trouble with it is, I hear Mars is not so comfortable,\" said Doran. \"I\n mean, do not get me wrong, I don't want to insult you or anything, but\n people come back saying you have given the planet just barely enough\n air to keep a man alive. And there are no cities, just little towns and\n villages and ranches out in the bush. I mean you are being pioneers and\n making a new nation and all that, but people paying half a megabuck for\n their ticket expect some comfort and, uh, you know.\"\n\n\n \"I do know,\" said Matheny. \"But we're poor—a handful of people trying\n to make a world of dust and sand and scrub thorn into fields and woods\n and seas. We can't do it without substantial help from Earth, equipment\n and supplies—which can only be paid for in Earth dollars—and we can't\n export enough to Earth to earn those dollars.\"", "A hell of a good bloke. He knew some very funny stories, too, and\n he laughed at Matheny's, though they were probably too rustic for a\n big-city taste like his.\n\n\n \"What I really want,\" said Matheny, \"what I really want—I mean what\n Mars really needs, get me?—is a confidence man.\"\n\n\n \"A what?\"\n\n\n \"The best and slickest one on Earth, to operate a world-size con game\n for us and make us some real money.\"\n\n\n \"Con man? Oh. A slipstring.\"\n\n\n \"A con by any other name,\" said Matheny, pouring down an akvavit.\nDoran squinted through cigarette smoke. \"You are interesting me\n strangely, my friend. Say on.\"", "Matheny shuddered. \"Good Lord, no!\"\n\n\n \"Huh? But they make thyle right on Mars, don't they?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. And it all goes to Earth and sells at 2000 dollars a fifth. But\n you don't think we'd\ndrink\nit, do you? I mean—well, I imagine it\n doesn't absolutely\nruin\nvermouth. But we don't see those Earthside\n commercials about how sophisticated people like it so much.\"\n\"Well, I'll be a socialist creeper!\" Doran's face split in a grin. \"You\n know, all my life I've hated the stuff and never dared admit it!\" He\n raised a hand. \"Don't worry, I won't blabbo. But I am wondering, if you\n control the thyle industry and sell all those relics at fancy prices,\n why do you call yourselves poor?\"", "\"Of course,\" said Matheny bitterly. \"We offer the most liberal\n concessions in the Solar System. Any little mining company or transport\n firm or—or anybody—who wanted to come and actually invest a few\n dollars in Mars—why, we'd probably give him the President's daughter\n as security. No, the Minister of Ecology has a better-looking one.\n But who's interested? We haven't a thing that Earth hasn't got more\n of. We're only the descendants of a few scientists, a few political\n malcontents, oddballs who happen to prefer elbow room and a bill of\n liberties to the incorporated state—what could General Nucleonics\n hope to get from Mars?\"\n\n\n \"I see. Well, what are you having to drink?\"\n\n\n \"Beer,\" said Matheny without hesitation.\n\n\n \"Huh? Look, pal, this is on me.\"", "The city roared at him.\n\n\n He fumbled after his pipe.\nOf course\n, he told himself,\nthat's why\n the Embassy can't act. I may find it advisable to go outside the law.\n Please, sir, where can I contact the underworld?\nHe wished gambling were legal on Earth. The Constitution of the Martian\n Republic forbade sumptuary and moral legislation; quite apart from the\n rambunctious individualism which that document formulated, the article\n was a practical necessity. Life was bleak enough on the deserts,\n without being denied the pleasure of trying to bottom-deal some friend\n who was happily trying to mark the cards. Matheny would have found a\n few spins of roulette soothing: it was always an intellectual challenge\n to work out the system by which the management operated a wheel. But\n more, he would have been among people he understood.", "The frightful thing about the Earthman was the way he seemed to\n exist only in organized masses. A gypsy snake oil peddler, plodding\n his syrtosaur wagon across Martian sands, just didn't have a prayer\n against, say, the Grant, Harding & Adams Public Relations Agency.\nMatheny puffed smoke and looked around. His feet ached from the weight\n on them. Where could a man sit down? It was hard to make out any\n individual sign through all that flimmering neon. His eye fell on one\n that was distinguished by relative austerity.\nTHE CHURCH OF CHOICE\nEnter, Play, Pray\nThat would do. He took an upward slideramp through several hundred feet\n of altitude, stepped past an aurora curtain, and found himself in a\n marble lobby next to an inspirational newsstand.\n\n\n \"Ah, brother, welcome,\" said a red-haired usherette in demure black\n leotards. \"The peace that passeth all understanding be with you. The\n restaurant is right up those stairs.\"", "He had been standing at the table for some time before the rest of the\n congregation really noticed him. Then it was with awe. The first few\n passes he had made were unsuccessful. Earth gravity threw him off.\n But when he got the rhythm of it, he tossed a row of sevens. It was a\n customary form of challenge on Mars. Here, though, they simply pushed\n chips toward him. He missed a throw, as anyone would at home: simple\n courtesy. The next time around, he threw for a seven just to get the\n feel. He got a seven. The dice had not been substituted on him.\n\n\n \"I say!\" he exclaimed. He looked up into eyes and eyes, all around the\n green table. \"I'm sorry. I guess I don't know your rules.\"\n\n\n \"You did all right, brother,\" said a middle-aged lady with an obviously\n surgical bodice.", "\"The only beer on Mars comes forty million miles, with interplanetary\n freight charges tacked on,\" said Matheny. \"Heineken's!\"\n\n\n Doran shrugged, dialed the dispenser and fed it coins.\n\n\n \"This is a real interesting talk, Pete,\" he said. \"You are being very\n frank with me. I like a man that is frank.\"\n\n\n Matheny shrugged. \"I haven't told you anything that isn't known to\n every economist.\"\nOf course I haven't. I've not so much as mentioned the Red Ankh, for\n instance. But, in principle, I have told him the truth, told him of our\n need; for even the secret operations do not yield us enough.\nThe beer arrived. Matheny engulfed himself in it. Doran sipped at a\n whiskey sour and unobtrusively set another full bottle in front of the\n Martian.", "acreage than his eyes reached, was impressive and all that, but—he\n used to stroll out in the rock garden behind his cottage and smoke a\n pipe in company with Orion. On summer evenings, that is, when the\n temperature wasn't too far below zero.\nWhy did they tap me for this job?\nhe asked himself in a surge of\n homesickness.\nWhat the hell is the Martian Embassy here for?\nHe, Peter Matheny, was no more than a peaceful professor of\n sociodynamics at Devil's Kettle University. Of course, he had advised\n his government before now—in fact, the Red Ankh Society had been his\n idea—but still he was at ease only with his books and his chess and\n his mineral collection, a faculty poker party on Tenthday night and an", "Mars had such machines. If ever.", "\"Well, you see, maybe a man like that is just what Mars does need. And\n maybe I have got a few contacts.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Matheny gaped out of the bathroom.\n\n\n Doran cupped his hands around a fresh cigarette, not looking at him.\n \"I am not that man,\" he said frankly. \"But in my line I get a lot of\n contacts, and not all of them go topside. See what I mean? Like if,\n say, you wanted somebody terminated and could pay for it, I could not\n do it. I would not want to know anything about it. But I could tell you\n a phone number.\"\n\n\n He shrugged and gave the Martian a sidelong glance. \"Sure, you may not\n be interested. But if you are, well, Pete, I was not born yesterday. I\n got tolerance. Like the book says, if you want to get ahead, you have\n got to think positively.\"", "\"I shall never reveal to any person unauthorized by yourself whatever\n you may tell me under security, now or at any other time,\" he\n recited. Then, cheerfully: \"And that formula, Pete, happens to be the\n honest-to-zebra truth.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\" Matheny stared, embarrassed, at the carpet. \"I'm sorry\n to—to—I mean of course I trust you, but—\"\n\n\n \"Forget it. I take a hundred security oaths a year, in my line of work.\n Maybe I can help you. I like you, Pete, damn if I don't. And, sure,\n I might stand to get an agent's cut, if I arrange—Go ahead, boy, go\n ahead.\" Doran crossed his legs and leaned back.\n\n\n \"Oh, it's simple enough,\" said Matheny. \"It's only that we already are\n operating con games.\"\n\n\n \"On Mars, you mean?\"", "\"Well, we do sell a lot of color slides, postcards, baggage labels and\n so on to people who like to act cosmopolitan, and I understand our\n travel posters are quite popular as wall decoration. But all that has\n to be printed on Earth, and the printer and distributor keep most of\n the money. We've sold some books and show tapes, of course, but only\n one has been really successful—\nI Was a Slave Girl on Mars\n.\n\n\n \"Our most prominent novelist was co-opted to ghostwrite that one.\n Again, though, local income taxes took most of the money; authors\n never have been protected the way a businessman is. We do make a high\n percentage of profit on those little certificates you see around—you\n know, the title deeds to one square inch of Mars—but expressed\n absolutely, in dollars, it doesn't amount to much when we start\n shopping for bulldozers and thermonuclear power plants.\"", "\"Ahhh!\" said Matheny. \"Bless you, my friend.\"\n\n\n \"A pleasure.\"\n\n\n \"But now you must let me buy you one.\"\n\n\n \"That is not necessary. After all,\" said Doran with great tact, \"with\n the situation as you have been describing—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, we're not\nthat\npoor! My expense allowance assumes I will\n entertain quite a bit.\"\n\n\n Doran's brows lifted a few minutes of arc. \"You're here on business,\n then?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I told you we haven't any tourists. I was sent to hire a business\n manager for the Martian export trade.\"", "\"You're from Mars, aren't you?\" he asked in the friendliest tone\n Matheny had yet heard.\n\n\n \"Yes. Yes, I am. M-my name's Peter Matheny. I, I—\" He stuck out his\n hand to shake and chips rolled over the floor. \"Damn! Oh, excuse me, I\n forgot this was a church. Never mind the chips. No, please. I just want\n to g-g-get the hell out of here.\"\n\n\n \"Good idea. How about a drink? I know a bar downshaft.\"\n\n\n Matheny sighed. \"A drink is what I need the very most.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Doran. Gus Doran. Call me Gus.\"\n\n\n They walked back to the deaconette's booth and Matheny cashed what\n remained of his winnings.", "Doran's thin sharp face grinned. \"You break that date, Peri. Put it off\n or something. I got this Martian for you, see?\"\n\n\n \"So? Since when has all Mars had as much spending money as one big-time\n marijuana rancher? Not to mention the heir ap—\"\n\n\n \"Sure, sure. But how much are those boys going to spend on any girl,\n even a high-level type like you? Listen, I need you just for tonight,\n see? This Martian is strictly from gone. He is here on official\n business, but he is a yokel and I do mean hayseed. Like he asked me\n what the Christmas decorations in all the stores were! And here is the\n solar nexus of it, Peri, kid.\"", "Matheny hesitated. If only he hadn't taken that last shot! It made him\n want to say yes, immediately, without reservations. And therefore maybe\n he became overcautious.\n\n\n They had instructed him on Mars to take chances if he must.\n\n\n \"I could tell you a thing or two that might give you a better idea,\" he\n said slowly. \"But it would have to be under security.\"\n\n\n \"Okay by me. Room service can send us up an oath box right now.\"\n\n\n \"What? But—but—\" Matheny hung onto himself and tried to believe that\n he had landed on Earth less than six hours ago.\n\n\n In the end, he did call room service and the machine was trundled in.\n Doran swallowed the pill and donned the conditioner helmet without an\n instant's hesitation.", "\"That is a sexy type of furniture, all right,\" agreed Doran. He lowered\n himself into another chair, cocked his feet on the 3-D and waved a\n cigarette. \"Which speaking of, what say we get some girls? It is not\n too late to catch them at home. A date here will usually start around\n 2100 hours earliest.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"You know. Dames. Like a certain blonde warhead with twin radar and\n swivel mounting, and she just loves exotics. Such as you.\"\n\n\n \"Me?\" Matheny heard his voice climb to a schoolboy squeak. \"Me?\n Exotic? Why, I'm just a little college professor. I g-g-g, that is—\"\n His tongue got stuck on his palate. He pulled it loose and moistened\n uncertain lips.\n\n\n \"You are from Mars. Okay? So you fought bushcats barehanded in an\n abandoned canal.\"", "\"And then the Red Ankh Society. You must have seen or heard their ads.\n 'What mysterious knowledge did the Old Martians possess? What was\n the secret wisdom of the Ancient Aliens? Now the incredibly powerful\n semantics of the Red Ankh (not a religious organization) is available\n to a select few—' That's our largest dollar-earning enterprise.\"\n\n\n He would have liked to say it was his suggestion originally, but it\n would have been too presumptuous. He was talking to an Earthman, who\n had heard everything already.\n\n\n Doran whistled.\n\n\n \"That's about all, so far,\" confessed Matheny. \"Perhaps a con is our\n only hope. I've been wondering, maybe we could organize a Martian\n bucket shop, handling Martian securities, but—well, I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"I think—\" Doran removed the helmet and stood up.", "\"I always wanted to,\" said Doran. \"I would like to see the what they\n call City of Time, and so on. As a matter of fact, I have given my\n girl one of those Old Martian rings last Ike's Birthday and she was\n just gazoo about it. A jewel dug out of the City of Time, like,\n made a million years ago by a, uh, extinct race ... I tell you, she\nappreciated\nme for it!\" He winked and nudged.\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said Matheny.\nHe felt a certain guilt. Doran was too pleasant a little man to\n deserve—\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Matheny said ritually, \"I agree with all the archeologists\n it's a crime to sell such scientifically priceless artifacts, but what\n can we do? We must live, and the tourist trade is almost nonexistent.\"" ], [ "\"Trouble with it is, I hear Mars is not so comfortable,\" said Doran. \"I\n mean, do not get me wrong, I don't want to insult you or anything, but\n people come back saying you have given the planet just barely enough\n air to keep a man alive. And there are no cities, just little towns and\n villages and ranches out in the bush. I mean you are being pioneers and\n making a new nation and all that, but people paying half a megabuck for\n their ticket expect some comfort and, uh, you know.\"\n\n\n \"I do know,\" said Matheny. \"But we're poor—a handful of people trying\n to make a world of dust and sand and scrub thorn into fields and woods\n and seas. We can't do it without substantial help from Earth, equipment\n and supplies—which can only be paid for in Earth dollars—and we can't\n export enough to Earth to earn those dollars.\"", "\"Of course,\" said Matheny bitterly. \"We offer the most liberal\n concessions in the Solar System. Any little mining company or transport\n firm or—or anybody—who wanted to come and actually invest a few\n dollars in Mars—why, we'd probably give him the President's daughter\n as security. No, the Minister of Ecology has a better-looking one.\n But who's interested? We haven't a thing that Earth hasn't got more\n of. We're only the descendants of a few scientists, a few political\n malcontents, oddballs who happen to prefer elbow room and a bill of\n liberties to the incorporated state—what could General Nucleonics\n hope to get from Mars?\"\n\n\n \"I see. Well, what are you having to drink?\"\n\n\n \"Beer,\" said Matheny without hesitation.\n\n\n \"Huh? Look, pal, this is on me.\"", "Mars had such machines. If ever.", "\"Well, we do sell a lot of color slides, postcards, baggage labels and\n so on to people who like to act cosmopolitan, and I understand our\n travel posters are quite popular as wall decoration. But all that has\n to be printed on Earth, and the printer and distributor keep most of\n the money. We've sold some books and show tapes, of course, but only\n one has been really successful—\nI Was a Slave Girl on Mars\n.\n\n\n \"Our most prominent novelist was co-opted to ghostwrite that one.\n Again, though, local income taxes took most of the money; authors\n never have been protected the way a businessman is. We do make a high\n percentage of profit on those little certificates you see around—you\n know, the title deeds to one square inch of Mars—but expressed\n absolutely, in dollars, it doesn't amount to much when we start\n shopping for bulldozers and thermonuclear power plants.\"", "Matheny shuddered. \"Good Lord, no!\"\n\n\n \"Huh? But they make thyle right on Mars, don't they?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. And it all goes to Earth and sells at 2000 dollars a fifth. But\n you don't think we'd\ndrink\nit, do you? I mean—well, I imagine it\n doesn't absolutely\nruin\nvermouth. But we don't see those Earthside\n commercials about how sophisticated people like it so much.\"\n\"Well, I'll be a socialist creeper!\" Doran's face split in a grin. \"You\n know, all my life I've hated the stuff and never dared admit it!\" He\n raised a hand. \"Don't worry, I won't blabbo. But I am wondering, if you\n control the thyle industry and sell all those relics at fancy prices,\n why do you call yourselves poor?\"", "A hell of a good bloke. He knew some very funny stories, too, and\n he laughed at Matheny's, though they were probably too rustic for a\n big-city taste like his.\n\n\n \"What I really want,\" said Matheny, \"what I really want—I mean what\n Mars really needs, get me?—is a confidence man.\"\n\n\n \"A what?\"\n\n\n \"The best and slickest one on Earth, to operate a world-size con game\n for us and make us some real money.\"\n\n\n \"Con man? Oh. A slipstring.\"\n\n\n \"A con by any other name,\" said Matheny, pouring down an akvavit.\nDoran squinted through cigarette smoke. \"You are interesting me\n strangely, my friend. Say on.\"", "\"The only beer on Mars comes forty million miles, with interplanetary\n freight charges tacked on,\" said Matheny. \"Heineken's!\"\n\n\n Doran shrugged, dialed the dispenser and fed it coins.\n\n\n \"This is a real interesting talk, Pete,\" he said. \"You are being very\n frank with me. I like a man that is frank.\"\n\n\n Matheny shrugged. \"I haven't told you anything that isn't known to\n every economist.\"\nOf course I haven't. I've not so much as mentioned the Red Ankh, for\n instance. But, in principle, I have told him the truth, told him of our\n need; for even the secret operations do not yield us enough.\nThe beer arrived. Matheny engulfed himself in it. Doran sipped at a\n whiskey sour and unobtrusively set another full bottle in front of the\n Martian.", "\"And then the Red Ankh Society. You must have seen or heard their ads.\n 'What mysterious knowledge did the Old Martians possess? What was\n the secret wisdom of the Ancient Aliens? Now the incredibly powerful\n semantics of the Red Ankh (not a religious organization) is available\n to a select few—' That's our largest dollar-earning enterprise.\"\n\n\n He would have liked to say it was his suggestion originally, but it\n would have been too presumptuous. He was talking to an Earthman, who\n had heard everything already.\n\n\n Doran whistled.\n\n\n \"That's about all, so far,\" confessed Matheny. \"Perhaps a con is our\n only hope. I've been wondering, maybe we could organize a Martian\n bucket shop, handling Martian securities, but—well, I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"I think—\" Doran removed the helmet and stood up.", "He had been standing at the table for some time before the rest of the\n congregation really noticed him. Then it was with awe. The first few\n passes he had made were unsuccessful. Earth gravity threw him off.\n But when he got the rhythm of it, he tossed a row of sevens. It was a\n customary form of challenge on Mars. Here, though, they simply pushed\n chips toward him. He missed a throw, as anyone would at home: simple\n courtesy. The next time around, he threw for a seven just to get the\n feel. He got a seven. The dice had not been substituted on him.\n\n\n \"I say!\" he exclaimed. He looked up into eyes and eyes, all around the\n green table. \"I'm sorry. I guess I don't know your rules.\"\n\n\n \"You did all right, brother,\" said a middle-aged lady with an obviously\n surgical bodice.", "\"Yes. There never were any Old Martians. We erected the ruins fifty\n years ago for the Billingsworth Expedition to find. We've been\n manufacturing relics ever since.\"\n\n\n \"\nHuh?\nWell, why, but—\"\n\n\n \"In this case, it helps to be at the far end of an interplanetary\n haul,\" said Matheny. \"Not many Terrestrial archeologists get to Mars\n and they depend on our people to—Well, anyhow—\"\n\n\n \"I will be clopped! Good for you!\"\nDoran blew up in laughter. \"That is one thing I would never spill, even\n without security. I told you about my girl friend, didn't I?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, and that calls to mind the Little Girl,\" said Matheny\n apologetically. \"She was another official project.\"\n\n\n \"Who?\"", "Matheny hesitated. If only he hadn't taken that last shot! It made him\n want to say yes, immediately, without reservations. And therefore maybe\n he became overcautious.\n\n\n They had instructed him on Mars to take chances if he must.\n\n\n \"I could tell you a thing or two that might give you a better idea,\" he\n said slowly. \"But it would have to be under security.\"\n\n\n \"Okay by me. Room service can send us up an oath box right now.\"\n\n\n \"What? But—but—\" Matheny hung onto himself and tried to believe that\n he had landed on Earth less than six hours ago.\n\n\n In the end, he did call room service and the machine was trundled in.\n Doran swallowed the pill and donned the conditioner helmet without an\n instant's hesitation.", "\"How about postage stamps?\" inquired Doran. \"Philately is a big\n business, I have heard.\"\n\n\n \"It was our mainstay,\" admitted Matheny, \"but it's been overworked.\n Martian stamps are a drug on the market. What we'd like to operate is a\n sweepstakes, but the anti-gambling laws on Earth forbid that.\"\nDoran whistled. \"I got to give your people credit for enterprise,\n anyway!\" He fingered his mustache. \"Uh, pardon me, but have you tried\n to, well, attract capital from Earth?\"", "\"Well, you see, maybe a man like that is just what Mars does need. And\n maybe I have got a few contacts.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Matheny gaped out of the bathroom.\n\n\n Doran cupped his hands around a fresh cigarette, not looking at him.\n \"I am not that man,\" he said frankly. \"But in my line I get a lot of\n contacts, and not all of them go topside. See what I mean? Like if,\n say, you wanted somebody terminated and could pay for it, I could not\n do it. I would not want to know anything about it. But I could tell you\n a phone number.\"\n\n\n He shrugged and gave the Martian a sidelong glance. \"Sure, you may not\n be interested. But if you are, well, Pete, I was not born yesterday. I\n got tolerance. Like the book says, if you want to get ahead, you have\n got to think positively.\"", "acreage than his eyes reached, was impressive and all that, but—he\n used to stroll out in the rock garden behind his cottage and smoke a\n pipe in company with Orion. On summer evenings, that is, when the\n temperature wasn't too far below zero.\nWhy did they tap me for this job?\nhe asked himself in a surge of\n homesickness.\nWhat the hell is the Martian Embassy here for?\nHe, Peter Matheny, was no more than a peaceful professor of\n sociodynamics at Devil's Kettle University. Of course, he had advised\n his government before now—in fact, the Red Ankh Society had been his\n idea—but still he was at ease only with his books and his chess and\n his mineral collection, a faculty poker party on Tenthday night and an", "\"That is a sexy type of furniture, all right,\" agreed Doran. He lowered\n himself into another chair, cocked his feet on the 3-D and waved a\n cigarette. \"Which speaking of, what say we get some girls? It is not\n too late to catch them at home. A date here will usually start around\n 2100 hours earliest.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"You know. Dames. Like a certain blonde warhead with twin radar and\n swivel mounting, and she just loves exotics. Such as you.\"\n\n\n \"Me?\" Matheny heard his voice climb to a schoolboy squeak. \"Me?\n Exotic? Why, I'm just a little college professor. I g-g-g, that is—\"\n His tongue got stuck on his palate. He pulled it loose and moistened\n uncertain lips.\n\n\n \"You are from Mars. Okay? So you fought bushcats barehanded in an\n abandoned canal.\"", "\"Is five hundred thousand flat,\" said Peri. \"Too bad I just got an\n awful headache and can't see Mr. Sastro tonight. Where you at, Gus?\"\nThe gravity was not as hard to take as Peter Matheny had expected.\n Three generations on Mars might lengthen the legs and expand the chest\n a trifle, but the genes had come from Earth and the organism readjusts.\n What set him gasping was the air. It weighed like a ton of wool and had\n apparently sopped up half the Atlantic Ocean. Ears trained to listen\n through the Martian atmosphere shuddered from the racket conducted by\n Earth's. The passport official seemed to bellow at him.\n\n\n \"Pardon me for asking this. The United Protectorates welcome all\n visitors to Earth and I assure you, sir, an ordinary five-year visa\n provokes no questions. But since you came on an official courier boat\n of your planet, Mr. Matheny, regulations force me to ask your business.\"\n\n\n \"Well—recruiting.\"", "\"I shall never reveal to any person unauthorized by yourself whatever\n you may tell me under security, now or at any other time,\" he\n recited. Then, cheerfully: \"And that formula, Pete, happens to be the\n honest-to-zebra truth.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\" Matheny stared, embarrassed, at the carpet. \"I'm sorry\n to—to—I mean of course I trust you, but—\"\n\n\n \"Forget it. I take a hundred security oaths a year, in my line of work.\n Maybe I can help you. I like you, Pete, damn if I don't. And, sure,\n I might stand to get an agent's cut, if I arrange—Go ahead, boy, go\n ahead.\" Doran crossed his legs and leaned back.\n\n\n \"Oh, it's simple enough,\" said Matheny. \"It's only that we already are\n operating con games.\"\n\n\n \"On Mars, you mean?\"", "Matheny felt his eloquence running down and grabbed for the second\n bottle of beer.\n\n\n \"But where do I start?\" he asked plaintively, for his loneliness smote\n him anew. \"I'm just a college professor at home. How would I even get\n to see—\"\n\n\n \"It might be arranged,\" said Doran in a thoughtful tone. \"It just\n might. How much could you pay this fellow?\"\n\n\n \"A hundred megabucks a year, if he'll sign a five-year contract. That's\n Earth years, mind you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry to tell you this, Pete,\" said Doran, \"but while that is not\n bad money, it is not what a high-powered sales scientist gets in Newer\n York. Plus his retirement benefits, which he would lose if he quit\n where he is now at. And I am sure he would not want to settle on Mars\n permanently.\"", "\"You're from Mars, aren't you?\" he asked in the friendliest tone\n Matheny had yet heard.\n\n\n \"Yes. Yes, I am. M-my name's Peter Matheny. I, I—\" He stuck out his\n hand to shake and chips rolled over the floor. \"Damn! Oh, excuse me, I\n forgot this was a church. Never mind the chips. No, please. I just want\n to g-g-get the hell out of here.\"\n\n\n \"Good idea. How about a drink? I know a bar downshaft.\"\n\n\n Matheny sighed. \"A drink is what I need the very most.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Doran. Gus Doran. Call me Gus.\"\n\n\n They walked back to the deaconette's booth and Matheny cashed what\n remained of his winnings.", "\"Ahhh!\" said Matheny. \"Bless you, my friend.\"\n\n\n \"A pleasure.\"\n\n\n \"But now you must let me buy you one.\"\n\n\n \"That is not necessary. After all,\" said Doran with great tact, \"with\n the situation as you have been describing—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, we're not\nthat\npoor! My expense allowance assumes I will\n entertain quite a bit.\"\n\n\n Doran's brows lifted a few minutes of arc. \"You're here on business,\n then?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I told you we haven't any tourists. I was sent to hire a business\n manager for the Martian export trade.\"" ], [ "acreage than his eyes reached, was impressive and all that, but—he\n used to stroll out in the rock garden behind his cottage and smoke a\n pipe in company with Orion. On summer evenings, that is, when the\n temperature wasn't too far below zero.\nWhy did they tap me for this job?\nhe asked himself in a surge of\n homesickness.\nWhat the hell is the Martian Embassy here for?\nHe, Peter Matheny, was no more than a peaceful professor of\n sociodynamics at Devil's Kettle University. Of course, he had advised\n his government before now—in fact, the Red Ankh Society had been his\n idea—but still he was at ease only with his books and his chess and\n his mineral collection, a faculty poker party on Tenthday night and an", "\"I shall never reveal to any person unauthorized by yourself whatever\n you may tell me under security, now or at any other time,\" he\n recited. Then, cheerfully: \"And that formula, Pete, happens to be the\n honest-to-zebra truth.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\" Matheny stared, embarrassed, at the carpet. \"I'm sorry\n to—to—I mean of course I trust you, but—\"\n\n\n \"Forget it. I take a hundred security oaths a year, in my line of work.\n Maybe I can help you. I like you, Pete, damn if I don't. And, sure,\n I might stand to get an agent's cut, if I arrange—Go ahead, boy, go\n ahead.\" Doran crossed his legs and leaned back.\n\n\n \"Oh, it's simple enough,\" said Matheny. \"It's only that we already are\n operating con games.\"\n\n\n \"On Mars, you mean?\"", "\"What's a bushcat? And we don't have canals. The evaporation rate—\"\n\n\n \"Look, Pete,\" said Doran patiently. \"She don't have to know that, does\n she?\"\n\n\n \"Well—well, no. I guess not No.\"\n\n\n \"Let's order you some clothes on the pneumo,\" said Doran. \"I recommend\n you buy from Schwartzherz. Everybody knows he is expensive.\"\nWhile Matheny jittered about, shaving and showering and struggling with\n his new raiment, Doran kept him supplied with akvavit and beer.\n\n\n \"You said one thing, Pete,\" Doran remarked. \"About needing a\n slipstring. A con man, you would call it.\"\n\n\n \"Forget that. Please. I spoke out of turn.\"", "\"You're from Mars, aren't you?\" he asked in the friendliest tone\n Matheny had yet heard.\n\n\n \"Yes. Yes, I am. M-my name's Peter Matheny. I, I—\" He stuck out his\n hand to shake and chips rolled over the floor. \"Damn! Oh, excuse me, I\n forgot this was a church. Never mind the chips. No, please. I just want\n to g-g-get the hell out of here.\"\n\n\n \"Good idea. How about a drink? I know a bar downshaft.\"\n\n\n Matheny sighed. \"A drink is what I need the very most.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Doran. Gus Doran. Call me Gus.\"\n\n\n They walked back to the deaconette's booth and Matheny cashed what\n remained of his winnings.", "\"No.\" Matheny realized his head was a bit smoky. The walls of the booth\n seemed odd, somehow. They were just leatheroid walls, but they had an\n odd quality.\n\n\n \"No, sorry, Gus,\" he said. \"I spoke too much.\"\n\n\n \"Okay. Forget it. I do not like a man that pries. But look, let's bomb\n out of here, how about it? Go have a little fun.\"\n\n\n \"By all means.\" Matheny disposed of his last beer. \"I could use some\n gaiety.\"\n\n\n \"You have come to the right town then. But let us get you a hotel room\n first and some more up-to-date clothes.\"\n\n\n \"\nAllez\n,\" said Matheny. \"If I don't mean\nallons\n, or maybe\nalors\n.\"", "\"What's wrong with your own people? I mean, Pete, it is not your fault\n there are so many rackets—uh, taxes—and middlemen and agencies and et\n cetera. That is just the way Earth is set up these days.\"\nMatheny's finger stabbed in the general direction of Doran's pajama\n top. \"Exactly. And who set it up that way? Earthmen. We Martians are\n babes in the desert. What chance do we have to earn dollars on the\n scale we need them, in competition with corporations which could buy\n and sell our whole planet before breakfast? Why, we couldn't afford\n three seconds of commercial time on a Lullaby Pillow 'cast. What we\n need, what we have to hire, is an executive who knows Earth, who's an\n Earthman himself. Let him tell us what will appeal to your people, and\n how to dodge the tax bite and—and—well, you see how it goes, that\n sort of, uh, thing.\"", "He backed out of the office.\nA dropshaft deposited him on a walkway. The crowd, a rainbow of men in\n pajamas and robes, women in Neo-Sino dresses and goldleaf hats, swept\n him against the rail. For a moment, squashed to the wire, he stared a\n hundred feet down at the river of automobiles.\nPhobos!\nhe thought\n wildly.\nIf the barrier gives, I'll be sliced in two by a dorsal fin\n before I hit the pavement!\nThe August twilight wrapped him in heat and stickiness. He could see\n neither stars nor even moon through the city's blaze. The forest of\n multi-colored towers, cataracting half a mile skyward across more", "\"Is five hundred thousand flat,\" said Peri. \"Too bad I just got an\n awful headache and can't see Mr. Sastro tonight. Where you at, Gus?\"\nThe gravity was not as hard to take as Peter Matheny had expected.\n Three generations on Mars might lengthen the legs and expand the chest\n a trifle, but the genes had come from Earth and the organism readjusts.\n What set him gasping was the air. It weighed like a ton of wool and had\n apparently sopped up half the Atlantic Ocean. Ears trained to listen\n through the Martian atmosphere shuddered from the racket conducted by\n Earth's. The passport official seemed to bellow at him.\n\n\n \"Pardon me for asking this. The United Protectorates welcome all\n visitors to Earth and I assure you, sir, an ordinary five-year visa\n provokes no questions. But since you came on an official courier boat\n of your planet, Mr. Matheny, regulations force me to ask your business.\"\n\n\n \"Well—recruiting.\"", "\"Well, good luck.\" The official's tone was skeptical. He stamped the\n passport and handed it back. \"There, now, you are free to travel\n anywhere in the Protectorates. But I would advise you to leave the\n capital and get into the sticks—um, I mean the provinces. I am sure\n there must be tolerably competent sales executives in Russia or\n Congolese Belgium or such regions. Frankly, sir, I do not believe you\n can attract anyone out of Newer York.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" said Matheny, \"but, you see, I—we need—that is.... Oh,\n well. Thanks. Good-by.\"", "\"Remember Junie O'Brien? The little golden-haired girl on Mars, a\n mathematical prodigy, but dying of an incurable disease? She collected\n Earth coins.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, that. Sure, I remember—Hey! You didn't!\"\n\n\n \"Yes. We made about a billion dollars on that one.\"\n\n\n \"I will be double damned. You know, Pete, I sent her a hundred-buck\n piece myself. Say, how is Junie O'Brien?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, fine. Under a different name, she's now our finance minister.\"\n Matheny stared out the wall, his hands twisting nervously behind his\n back. \"There were no lies involved. She really does have a fatal\n disease. So do you and I. Every day we grow older.\"\n\n\n \"Uh!\" exclaimed Doran.", "\"Well, you see, maybe a man like that is just what Mars does need. And\n maybe I have got a few contacts.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Matheny gaped out of the bathroom.\n\n\n Doran cupped his hands around a fresh cigarette, not looking at him.\n \"I am not that man,\" he said frankly. \"But in my line I get a lot of\n contacts, and not all of them go topside. See what I mean? Like if,\n say, you wanted somebody terminated and could pay for it, I could not\n do it. I would not want to know anything about it. But I could tell you\n a phone number.\"\n\n\n He shrugged and gave the Martian a sidelong glance. \"Sure, you may not\n be interested. But if you are, well, Pete, I was not born yesterday. I\n got tolerance. Like the book says, if you want to get ahead, you have\n got to think positively.\"", "Doran leaned forward as if to climb out of the screen. \"He has got a\n hundred million dollars expense money, and they are not going to audit\n his accounts at home. One hundred million good green certificates,\n legal tender anywhere in the United Protectorates. And he has about\n as much backbone as a piece of steak alga. Kid, if I did not happen to\n have experience otherwise with a small nephew, I would say this will be\n like taking candy from a baby.\"\n\n\n Peri's peaches-and-cream countenance began to resemble peaches and\n cream left overnight on Pluto. \"Badger?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Sure. You and Sam Wendt handle the routine. I will take the go-between\n angle, so he will think of me as still his friend, because I have other\n plans for him too. But if we can't shake a million out of him for this\n one night's work, there is something akilter. And your share of a\n million is three hundred thirty-three—\"", "\"That is a sexy type of furniture, all right,\" agreed Doran. He lowered\n himself into another chair, cocked his feet on the 3-D and waved a\n cigarette. \"Which speaking of, what say we get some girls? It is not\n too late to catch them at home. A date here will usually start around\n 2100 hours earliest.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"You know. Dames. Like a certain blonde warhead with twin radar and\n swivel mounting, and she just loves exotics. Such as you.\"\n\n\n \"Me?\" Matheny heard his voice climb to a schoolboy squeak. \"Me?\n Exotic? Why, I'm just a little college professor. I g-g-g, that is—\"\n His tongue got stuck on his palate. He pulled it loose and moistened\n uncertain lips.\n\n\n \"You are from Mars. Okay? So you fought bushcats barehanded in an\n abandoned canal.\"", "A hell of a good bloke. He knew some very funny stories, too, and\n he laughed at Matheny's, though they were probably too rustic for a\n big-city taste like his.\n\n\n \"What I really want,\" said Matheny, \"what I really want—I mean what\n Mars really needs, get me?—is a confidence man.\"\n\n\n \"A what?\"\n\n\n \"The best and slickest one on Earth, to operate a world-size con game\n for us and make us some real money.\"\n\n\n \"Con man? Oh. A slipstring.\"\n\n\n \"A con by any other name,\" said Matheny, pouring down an akvavit.\nDoran squinted through cigarette smoke. \"You are interesting me\n strangely, my friend. Say on.\"", "\"I could offer a certain amount of, uh, lagniappe,\" said Matheny. \"That\n is, well, I can draw up to a hundred megabucks myself for, uh, expenses\n and, well ... let me buy you a drink!\"\n\n\n Doran's black eyes frogged at him. \"You might at that,\" said the\n Earthman very softly. \"Yes, you might at that.\"\n\n\n Matheny found himself warming. Gus Doran was an authentic bobber. A\n hell of a swell chap. He explained modestly that he was a free-lance\n business consultant and it was barely possible that he could arrange\n some contacts....\n\n\n \"No, no, no commission, all done in the interest of interplanetary\n friendship ... well, anyhow, let's not talk business now. If you have\n got to stick to beer, Pete, make it a chaser to akvavit. What is\n akvavit? Well, I will just take and show you.\"", "\"I—I'm not hungry,\" stammered Matheny. \"I just wanted to sit in—\"\n\n\n \"To your left, sir.\"\n\n\n The Martian crossed the lobby. His pipe went out in the breeze from an\n animated angel. Organ music sighed through an open doorway. The series\n of rooms beyond was dim, Gothic, interminable.\n\n\n \"Get your chips right here, sir,\" said the girl in the booth.\n\n\n \"Hm?\" said Matheny.\n\n\n She explained. He bought a few hundred-dollar tokens, dropped a\n fifty-buck coin down a slot marked CONTRIBUTIONS, and sipped the\n martini he got back while he strolled around studying the games.\n He stopped, frowned. Bingo? No, he didn't want to bother learning\n something new. He decided that the roulette wheels were either honest\n or too deep for him. He'd have to relax with a crap game instead.", "She undulated to the phone and pressed its Accept. \"Hello-o, there,\"\n she said automatically. \"So sorry to keep you waiting. I was just\n taking a bath and—Oh. It's you.\"\n\n\n Gus Doran's prawnlike eyes popped at her. \"Holy Success,\" he whispered\n in awe. \"You sure the wires can carry that much voltage?\"\n\"Well, hurry up with whatever it is,\" snapped Peri. \"I got a date\n tonight.\"\n\n\n \"I'll say you do! With a Martian!\"\nPeri narrowed her silver-blue gaze and looked icily at him. \"You must\n have heard wrong, Gus. He's the heir apparent of Indonesia, Inc.,\n that's who, and if you called up to ask for a piece of him, you can\n just blank right out again. I saw him first!\"", "\"But—I mean—when do we start actually\nplaying\n? What happened to the\n cocked dice?\"\nThe lady drew herself up and jutted an indignant brow at him. \"Sir!\n This is a church!\"\n\n\n \"Oh—I see—excuse me, I, I, I—\" Matheny backed out of the crowd,\n shuddering. He looked around for some place to hide his burning ears.\n\n\n \"You forgot your chips, pal,\" said a voice.\n\n\n \"Oh. Thanks. Thanks ever so much. I, I, that is—\" Matheny cursed\n his knotting tongue.\nDamn it, just because they're so much more\n sophisticated than I, do I have to talk like a leaky boiler?\nThe helpful Earthman was not tall. He was dark and chisel-faced and\n sleekly pomaded, dapper in blue pajamas with a red zigzag, a sleighbell\n cloak and curly-toed slippers.", "occasional trip to Swindletown—\nMy God\n, thought Matheny,\nhere I am, one solitary outlander in the\n greatest commercial empire the human race has ever seen, and I'm\n supposed to find my planet a con man!\nHe began walking, disconsolately, at random. His lizardskin shirt and\n black culottes drew glances, but derisive ones: their cut was forty\n years out of date. He should find himself a hotel, he thought drearily,\n but he wasn't tired; the spaceport would pneumo his baggage to him\n whenever he did check in. The few Martians who had been to Earth had\n gone into ecstasies over the automation which put any service you could\n name on a twenty-four-hour basis. But it would be a long time before", "The frightful thing about the Earthman was the way he seemed to\n exist only in organized masses. A gypsy snake oil peddler, plodding\n his syrtosaur wagon across Martian sands, just didn't have a prayer\n against, say, the Grant, Harding & Adams Public Relations Agency.\nMatheny puffed smoke and looked around. His feet ached from the weight\n on them. Where could a man sit down? It was hard to make out any\n individual sign through all that flimmering neon. His eye fell on one\n that was distinguished by relative austerity.\nTHE CHURCH OF CHOICE\nEnter, Play, Pray\nThat would do. He took an upward slideramp through several hundred feet\n of altitude, stepped past an aurora curtain, and found himself in a\n marble lobby next to an inspirational newsstand.\n\n\n \"Ah, brother, welcome,\" said a red-haired usherette in demure black\n leotards. \"The peace that passeth all understanding be with you. The\n restaurant is right up those stairs.\"" ] ]
valid	20056	[ "How is the author connected with Nash?", "How was Nash’s family involved in the story?", "What were some of the themes in Nash’s later years?", "How was Nash viewed by his colleagues over time?", "What were some of the reported events that the author brings up to justify Nash’s undoing?", "What were some of Nash’s working habits?", "What is the significance of the fixed point to the story?", "What was an early achievement of the main character the author focuses on?", "How many major mathematical problems does Nash solve that are mentioned in the article?", "What does the author hypothesize is connected in human genetics?" ]	[ [ "They were a student of Nash and witnessed his undoing", "They too are involved with both mathematics and asylums", "They were classmates of Nash", "They are writing a biography about Nash" ], [ "His two sons and previous wife were talked about", "His father was a large influence on his life", "His mother’s influence was discussed at length", "His parents and wife were discussed" ], [ "He settled into family life", "He oscillated between asylums and prison", "He saw patterns in letters and numbers", "He spent his years apologizing to those he had wronged" ], [ "He lost respect for a period of time, but somewhat regained it with an honor later in life", "His exploits of madness were never public, so his colleagues always treated him the same", "He was initially respected, but then they came to reject him and he died in an asylum", "His colleagues accepted his quirks and treated him as an equal" ], [ "Nudity, creating fake passports, communications with extraterrestrials", "Sending bombs, nudity, lewd public conduct", "Lewd public conduct, nudity, violence, communications with extraterrestrials", "Communicating with extraterrestrials, creating fake passports, violence" ], [ "Involving colleagues in round tables to brainstorm", "Yelling in his office", "It is never outlined", "Going on long retreats" ], [ "It was Nash’s claim to fame", "It is an analogy for his father", "It was the turning point of Nash’s behavior", "It turned out to be proved false and drove Nash mad" ], [ "Being invited to serve in the European Union as a mathematician", "Becoming a dean at Princeton", "Teaching at MIT", "Applying an old mathematical concept in a new and exciting way" ], [ "Zero", "Three", "Five", "Seven" ], [ "Storytelling and madness", "Madness and math abilities", "Madness and math abilities, eye color and IQ", "Political activism and math abilities" ] ]	[ 2, 1, 1, 1, 3, 3, 1, 4, 2, 2 ]	[ 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "As a boy growing up in the hills of West Virginia, Nash enjoyed torturing animals and building homemade bombs with two other unpopular youngsters, one of whom was accidentally killed by a blast. (Given Nash's childhood keenness for explosives and his later penchant for sending odd packages to prominent strangers through the mail, it's a wonder the FBI never got on to him as a Unabomber suspect.) He made his way to Carnegie Tech, where he was a classmate of Andy Warhol's, and thence to Princeton--the world capital of mathematics at the time--at the age of 20.", "That about marked the end of Nash's career as a mathematical genius. The next year, he was expelled from Rand as a security risk after local police caught him engaging in a lewd act in a public men's room near Muscle Beach. At MIT, where he had been given a teaching job, he hardly bothered with undergraduates and humiliated graduate students by solving their thesis problems. He carried on affairs with several men and a mistress, who bore him a son he refused to lift a finger to support. His cruel streak extended to the woman he married, a beautiful physics student named Alicia who was awed by this \"genius with a penis.\" Once, at a math department picnic, he threw her to the ground and put his foot on her throat.", "The eeriest thing I discovered while reading this superb book was that Nash and I came within a couple of years of crossing paths in a Virginia mental hospital. I was actually working there, but psychiatric aides pick up so many mannerisms of the patients that it's hard to tell the difference after a while. A few years after that I found myself in a mathematics Ph.D. program. You'll be glad to know that I'm in remission.", "Indeed, he has evolved into a \"very fine person,\" according to his ex-wife--humbled by years of psychotic helplessness, buoyed up by the intellectual world's highest accolade. The Nobel has a terrible effect on the productivity of many recipients, paralyzing them with greatness. For Nash it was pure therapy. Then, too, there is the need to take care of his son by Alicia, who--pleiotropically?--inherited both his mathematical promise and his madness. (His older son, the one born out of wedlock, got neither.) The Nobel money bought a new boiler for the little bungalow across from the Princeton train station inhabited by this shaky menage. (When Vanity Fair published an excerpt of A Beautiful Mind , Nash probably became the only person ever featured in that magazine to live in a house clad in \"insulbrick.\")", "Such ebullitions of insanity continued for three decades, becoming more rococo. Nash went to Europe to form a world government, attempting repeatedly to renounce his U.S. citizenship. He did stints in tony asylums, hanging out with Robert Lowell, and in dismal state institutions, where he was subjected daily to insulin-induced comas. He believed himself to be a Palestinian refugee called C.O.R.P.S.E.; a great Japanese shogun, C1423; Esau; the prince of peace; l'homme d'Or ; a mouse. As Nasar observes, his delusions were weirdly inconsistent. He felt himself simultaneously to be the epicenter of the universe--\"I am the left foot of God on earth\"--and an abject, persecuted petitioner.", "In sheer appearance, this cold and aloof Southerner stood out from his fellow math prodigies. A \"beautiful dark-haired young man,\" \"handsome as a god,\" he was 6 feet 1 inch tall, with broad shoulders, a heavily muscled chest (which he liked to show off with see-through Dacron shirts), a tapered waist, and \"rather limp and beautiful hands\" accentuated by long fingernails. Within two years of entering Princeton, Nash had framed and proved the most important proposition in the theory of games. \n\n Mathematically, this was no big deal. Game theory was a somewhat fashionable pursuit for mathematicians in those postwar days, when it looked as if it might do for military science and economics what Newton's calculus had done for physics. But they were bored with it by the early 1950s. Economists, after a few decades of hesitation, picked it up in the '80s and made it a cornerstone of their discipline.", "Nash's breakthrough in game theory got him recruited by the Rand Corp., which was then a secretive military think tank in Santa Monica (its name is an acronym for \"research and development\"). However, the achievement did not greatly impress his fellow mathematicians. To do that, Nash, on a wager, disposed of a deep problem that had baffled the profession since the 19 th century: He showed that any Riemannian manifold possessing a special kind of \"smoothness\" can be embedded in Euclidean space. Manifolds, one must understand, are fairly wild and exotic beasts in mathematics. A famous example is the Klein bottle, a kind of higher-dimensional Moebius strip whose inside is somehow the same as its outside. Euclidean space, by contrast, is orderly and bourgeois. To demonstrate that \"impossible\" manifolds could be coaxed into living in Euclidean space is counterintuitive and pretty exciting. Nash did this by constructing a bizarre set of inequalities that left his fellow mathematicians thoroughly befuddled.", "All the while, Nash was showing an intense interest in the state of Israel--often a sign of incipient insanity, at least in a non-Jew. Geniuses slipping into madness also tend to disrobe in public (I learned this from a volume on chess prodigies, who have a proclivity for disrobing on public buses). Nash showed up for an MIT New Year's Eve party clad only in a diaper. And then, of course, there was the New York Times , that old mainstay of psychotic delusion--Nash thought aliens were sending him encrypted messages through its pages (come to think of it, that could explain the Times ' odd prose).", "Then, in the '90s, inexplicably, the voices in Nash's head began to quiet down. (Nasar gives an interesting account of just how rare such remissions are among those diagnosed with schizophrenia.) At the same time, the Nobel committee in Stockholm was deciding it was about time to award the prize in economics for game theory. Dare they make a known madman into a laureate? What might he say to King Gustav at the ceremony? Nasar shows her mettle as a reporter here by penetrating the veil of secrecy surrounding the Nobel and revealing the back-stage machinations for and against Nash's candidacy. He did fine at the ceremony, by the way.", "When the big breakdown came, it was properly mathematical. Fearing his powers might be waning as he approached 30, Nash decided he would solve the most important unresolved problem in mathematics: the Riemann Zeta conjecture. This bold guess about the solutions to a certain complex-valued infinite series (made by the incomparable Bernhard Riemann in 1859) would, if true, have far-reaching implications for the structure of the most basic of entities, the natural numbers. Before an eager audience of hundreds of mathematicians at Columbia University in 1959, Nash presented his results: a farrago of mathematical lunacy. \"Nash's talk wasn't good or bad,\" said one mathematician present. \"It was horrible.\" Some weeks before, Nash had declined a University of Chicago offer of an endowed chair on the grounds that he was scheduled to become the emperor of Antarctica.", "Could there be a similar pleiotropy between madness and mathematics? Reading this absolutely fascinating biography by Sylvia Nasar, an economics writer for the New York Times , I began to wonder. Its subject, John Nash, is a mathematical genius who went crazy at the age of 30 and then, after several decades of flamboyant lunacy, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for something he had discovered as a graduate student. (He is now about to turn 70.) Nash is among the latest in a long and distinguished line of mathematicians--stretching back to that morbid paranoiac, Isaac Newton--who have been certifiably insane during parts of their lives.", "Just in the last 100 years or so, most of the heroic figures in the foundations of mathematics have landed in mental asylums or have died by their own hand. The greatest of them, Kurt Gödel, starved himself to death in the belief that his colleagues were putting poison in his food. Of the two pioneers of game theory--the field in which Nash garnered his Nobel--one, Ernst Zermelo, was hospitalized for psychosis. The other, John Von Neumann, may not have been clinically insane, but he did serve as the real-life model for the title character in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove .", "He returned to the Princeton area in the 1970s, where he was taken care of by the long-suffering Alicia, now his ex-wife (she supported him partly through computer programming, partly on welfare). He haunted the campus, where students began to call him \"the Phantom.\" They would come to class in the morning to find runic messages he had written on the blackboard at night: \"Mao Tse-Tung's Bar Mitzvah was 13 years, 13 months, and 13 days after Brezhnev's circumcision.\"", "So maybe there is an accidental, pleiotropic connection between madness and mathematics. Or maybe it isn't so accidental. Mathematicians are, after all, people who fancy that they commune with perfect Platonic objects--abstract spaces, infinite numbers, zeta functions--that are invisible to normal humans. They spend their days piecing together complicated, scrupulously logical tales about these hallucinatory entities, which they believe are vastly more important than anything in the actual world. Is this not a kind of a folie à n (where n equals the number of pure mathematicians worldwide)? \n\n ABeautiful Mind reveals quite a lot about the psychic continuum leading from mathematical genius to madness. It is also a very peculiar redemption story: how three decades of raging schizophrenia, capped by an unexpected Nobel Prize, can transmute a cruel shit into a frail but decent human being.", "necessarily exist at least one thing in that domain that will remain unchanged--the \"fixed point.\" Nash found a way of applying this to the domain of all game strategies so that the guaranteed fixed point was the equilibrium for the game--clever,", "other. Each player has several strategy options to choose from. What Nash showed was that in every such game there is what has become known as a \"Nash equilibrium\": a set of strategies, one for each player, such that no player", "can improve his situation by switching to a different strategy. His proof was elegant but slight. A game is guaranteed to have a Nash equilibrium, it turns out, for the same reason that in a cup of coffee that is being stirred,", "but the earlier topological theorem did all the work. Still, for an economics theorem, that counts as profound. Economists have been known to win Nobel Prizes for rediscovering theorems in elementary calculus.", "Agame is just a conflict situation with a bunch of participants, or \"players.\" The players could be poker pals, oligopolists competing to corner a market, or nuclear powers trying to dominate each", "at least one coffee molecule must remain absolutely still. Both are direct consequences of a \"fixed-point theorem\" in the branch of mathematics known as topology. This theorem says that for any continuous rearrangement of a domain of things, there will" ], [ "That about marked the end of Nash's career as a mathematical genius. The next year, he was expelled from Rand as a security risk after local police caught him engaging in a lewd act in a public men's room near Muscle Beach. At MIT, where he had been given a teaching job, he hardly bothered with undergraduates and humiliated graduate students by solving their thesis problems. He carried on affairs with several men and a mistress, who bore him a son he refused to lift a finger to support. His cruel streak extended to the woman he married, a beautiful physics student named Alicia who was awed by this \"genius with a penis.\" Once, at a math department picnic, he threw her to the ground and put his foot on her throat.", "As a boy growing up in the hills of West Virginia, Nash enjoyed torturing animals and building homemade bombs with two other unpopular youngsters, one of whom was accidentally killed by a blast. (Given Nash's childhood keenness for explosives and his later penchant for sending odd packages to prominent strangers through the mail, it's a wonder the FBI never got on to him as a Unabomber suspect.) He made his way to Carnegie Tech, where he was a classmate of Andy Warhol's, and thence to Princeton--the world capital of mathematics at the time--at the age of 20.", "Indeed, he has evolved into a \"very fine person,\" according to his ex-wife--humbled by years of psychotic helplessness, buoyed up by the intellectual world's highest accolade. The Nobel has a terrible effect on the productivity of many recipients, paralyzing them with greatness. For Nash it was pure therapy. Then, too, there is the need to take care of his son by Alicia, who--pleiotropically?--inherited both his mathematical promise and his madness. (His older son, the one born out of wedlock, got neither.) The Nobel money bought a new boiler for the little bungalow across from the Princeton train station inhabited by this shaky menage. (When Vanity Fair published an excerpt of A Beautiful Mind , Nash probably became the only person ever featured in that magazine to live in a house clad in \"insulbrick.\")", "Then, in the '90s, inexplicably, the voices in Nash's head began to quiet down. (Nasar gives an interesting account of just how rare such remissions are among those diagnosed with schizophrenia.) At the same time, the Nobel committee in Stockholm was deciding it was about time to award the prize in economics for game theory. Dare they make a known madman into a laureate? What might he say to King Gustav at the ceremony? Nasar shows her mettle as a reporter here by penetrating the veil of secrecy surrounding the Nobel and revealing the back-stage machinations for and against Nash's candidacy. He did fine at the ceremony, by the way.", "In sheer appearance, this cold and aloof Southerner stood out from his fellow math prodigies. A \"beautiful dark-haired young man,\" \"handsome as a god,\" he was 6 feet 1 inch tall, with broad shoulders, a heavily muscled chest (which he liked to show off with see-through Dacron shirts), a tapered waist, and \"rather limp and beautiful hands\" accentuated by long fingernails. Within two years of entering Princeton, Nash had framed and proved the most important proposition in the theory of games. \n\n Mathematically, this was no big deal. Game theory was a somewhat fashionable pursuit for mathematicians in those postwar days, when it looked as if it might do for military science and economics what Newton's calculus had done for physics. But they were bored with it by the early 1950s. Economists, after a few decades of hesitation, picked it up in the '80s and made it a cornerstone of their discipline.", "Such ebullitions of insanity continued for three decades, becoming more rococo. Nash went to Europe to form a world government, attempting repeatedly to renounce his U.S. citizenship. He did stints in tony asylums, hanging out with Robert Lowell, and in dismal state institutions, where he was subjected daily to insulin-induced comas. He believed himself to be a Palestinian refugee called C.O.R.P.S.E.; a great Japanese shogun, C1423; Esau; the prince of peace; l'homme d'Or ; a mouse. As Nasar observes, his delusions were weirdly inconsistent. He felt himself simultaneously to be the epicenter of the universe--\"I am the left foot of God on earth\"--and an abject, persecuted petitioner.", "Nash's breakthrough in game theory got him recruited by the Rand Corp., which was then a secretive military think tank in Santa Monica (its name is an acronym for \"research and development\"). However, the achievement did not greatly impress his fellow mathematicians. To do that, Nash, on a wager, disposed of a deep problem that had baffled the profession since the 19 th century: He showed that any Riemannian manifold possessing a special kind of \"smoothness\" can be embedded in Euclidean space. Manifolds, one must understand, are fairly wild and exotic beasts in mathematics. A famous example is the Klein bottle, a kind of higher-dimensional Moebius strip whose inside is somehow the same as its outside. Euclidean space, by contrast, is orderly and bourgeois. To demonstrate that \"impossible\" manifolds could be coaxed into living in Euclidean space is counterintuitive and pretty exciting. Nash did this by constructing a bizarre set of inequalities that left his fellow mathematicians thoroughly befuddled.", "When the big breakdown came, it was properly mathematical. Fearing his powers might be waning as he approached 30, Nash decided he would solve the most important unresolved problem in mathematics: the Riemann Zeta conjecture. This bold guess about the solutions to a certain complex-valued infinite series (made by the incomparable Bernhard Riemann in 1859) would, if true, have far-reaching implications for the structure of the most basic of entities, the natural numbers. Before an eager audience of hundreds of mathematicians at Columbia University in 1959, Nash presented his results: a farrago of mathematical lunacy. \"Nash's talk wasn't good or bad,\" said one mathematician present. \"It was horrible.\" Some weeks before, Nash had declined a University of Chicago offer of an endowed chair on the grounds that he was scheduled to become the emperor of Antarctica.", "The eeriest thing I discovered while reading this superb book was that Nash and I came within a couple of years of crossing paths in a Virginia mental hospital. I was actually working there, but psychiatric aides pick up so many mannerisms of the patients that it's hard to tell the difference after a while. A few years after that I found myself in a mathematics Ph.D. program. You'll be glad to know that I'm in remission.", "All the while, Nash was showing an intense interest in the state of Israel--often a sign of incipient insanity, at least in a non-Jew. Geniuses slipping into madness also tend to disrobe in public (I learned this from a volume on chess prodigies, who have a proclivity for disrobing on public buses). Nash showed up for an MIT New Year's Eve party clad only in a diaper. And then, of course, there was the New York Times , that old mainstay of psychotic delusion--Nash thought aliens were sending him encrypted messages through its pages (come to think of it, that could explain the Times ' odd prose).", "He returned to the Princeton area in the 1970s, where he was taken care of by the long-suffering Alicia, now his ex-wife (she supported him partly through computer programming, partly on welfare). He haunted the campus, where students began to call him \"the Phantom.\" They would come to class in the morning to find runic messages he had written on the blackboard at night: \"Mao Tse-Tung's Bar Mitzvah was 13 years, 13 months, and 13 days after Brezhnev's circumcision.\"", "Just in the last 100 years or so, most of the heroic figures in the foundations of mathematics have landed in mental asylums or have died by their own hand. The greatest of them, Kurt Gödel, starved himself to death in the belief that his colleagues were putting poison in his food. Of the two pioneers of game theory--the field in which Nash garnered his Nobel--one, Ernst Zermelo, was hospitalized for psychosis. The other, John Von Neumann, may not have been clinically insane, but he did serve as the real-life model for the title character in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove .", "Could there be a similar pleiotropy between madness and mathematics? Reading this absolutely fascinating biography by Sylvia Nasar, an economics writer for the New York Times , I began to wonder. Its subject, John Nash, is a mathematical genius who went crazy at the age of 30 and then, after several decades of flamboyant lunacy, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for something he had discovered as a graduate student. (He is now about to turn 70.) Nash is among the latest in a long and distinguished line of mathematicians--stretching back to that morbid paranoiac, Isaac Newton--who have been certifiably insane during parts of their lives.", "necessarily exist at least one thing in that domain that will remain unchanged--the \"fixed point.\" Nash found a way of applying this to the domain of all game strategies so that the guaranteed fixed point was the equilibrium for the game--clever,", "So maybe there is an accidental, pleiotropic connection between madness and mathematics. Or maybe it isn't so accidental. Mathematicians are, after all, people who fancy that they commune with perfect Platonic objects--abstract spaces, infinite numbers, zeta functions--that are invisible to normal humans. They spend their days piecing together complicated, scrupulously logical tales about these hallucinatory entities, which they believe are vastly more important than anything in the actual world. Is this not a kind of a folie à n (where n equals the number of pure mathematicians worldwide)? \n\n ABeautiful Mind reveals quite a lot about the psychic continuum leading from mathematical genius to madness. It is also a very peculiar redemption story: how three decades of raging schizophrenia, capped by an unexpected Nobel Prize, can transmute a cruel shit into a frail but decent human being.", "other. Each player has several strategy options to choose from. What Nash showed was that in every such game there is what has become known as a \"Nash equilibrium\": a set of strategies, one for each player, such that no player", "can improve his situation by switching to a different strategy. His proof was elegant but slight. A game is guaranteed to have a Nash equilibrium, it turns out, for the same reason that in a cup of coffee that is being stirred,", "Agame is just a conflict situation with a bunch of participants, or \"players.\" The players could be poker pals, oligopolists competing to corner a market, or nuclear powers trying to dominate each", "but the earlier topological theorem did all the work. Still, for an economics theorem, that counts as profound. Economists have been known to win Nobel Prizes for rediscovering theorems in elementary calculus.", "at least one coffee molecule must remain absolutely still. Both are direct consequences of a \"fixed-point theorem\" in the branch of mathematics known as topology. This theorem says that for any continuous rearrangement of a domain of things, there will" ], [ "That about marked the end of Nash's career as a mathematical genius. The next year, he was expelled from Rand as a security risk after local police caught him engaging in a lewd act in a public men's room near Muscle Beach. At MIT, where he had been given a teaching job, he hardly bothered with undergraduates and humiliated graduate students by solving their thesis problems. He carried on affairs with several men and a mistress, who bore him a son he refused to lift a finger to support. His cruel streak extended to the woman he married, a beautiful physics student named Alicia who was awed by this \"genius with a penis.\" Once, at a math department picnic, he threw her to the ground and put his foot on her throat.", "Such ebullitions of insanity continued for three decades, becoming more rococo. Nash went to Europe to form a world government, attempting repeatedly to renounce his U.S. citizenship. He did stints in tony asylums, hanging out with Robert Lowell, and in dismal state institutions, where he was subjected daily to insulin-induced comas. He believed himself to be a Palestinian refugee called C.O.R.P.S.E.; a great Japanese shogun, C1423; Esau; the prince of peace; l'homme d'Or ; a mouse. As Nasar observes, his delusions were weirdly inconsistent. He felt himself simultaneously to be the epicenter of the universe--\"I am the left foot of God on earth\"--and an abject, persecuted petitioner.", "As a boy growing up in the hills of West Virginia, Nash enjoyed torturing animals and building homemade bombs with two other unpopular youngsters, one of whom was accidentally killed by a blast. (Given Nash's childhood keenness for explosives and his later penchant for sending odd packages to prominent strangers through the mail, it's a wonder the FBI never got on to him as a Unabomber suspect.) He made his way to Carnegie Tech, where he was a classmate of Andy Warhol's, and thence to Princeton--the world capital of mathematics at the time--at the age of 20.", "When the big breakdown came, it was properly mathematical. Fearing his powers might be waning as he approached 30, Nash decided he would solve the most important unresolved problem in mathematics: the Riemann Zeta conjecture. This bold guess about the solutions to a certain complex-valued infinite series (made by the incomparable Bernhard Riemann in 1859) would, if true, have far-reaching implications for the structure of the most basic of entities, the natural numbers. Before an eager audience of hundreds of mathematicians at Columbia University in 1959, Nash presented his results: a farrago of mathematical lunacy. \"Nash's talk wasn't good or bad,\" said one mathematician present. \"It was horrible.\" Some weeks before, Nash had declined a University of Chicago offer of an endowed chair on the grounds that he was scheduled to become the emperor of Antarctica.", "All the while, Nash was showing an intense interest in the state of Israel--often a sign of incipient insanity, at least in a non-Jew. Geniuses slipping into madness also tend to disrobe in public (I learned this from a volume on chess prodigies, who have a proclivity for disrobing on public buses). Nash showed up for an MIT New Year's Eve party clad only in a diaper. And then, of course, there was the New York Times , that old mainstay of psychotic delusion--Nash thought aliens were sending him encrypted messages through its pages (come to think of it, that could explain the Times ' odd prose).", "In sheer appearance, this cold and aloof Southerner stood out from his fellow math prodigies. A \"beautiful dark-haired young man,\" \"handsome as a god,\" he was 6 feet 1 inch tall, with broad shoulders, a heavily muscled chest (which he liked to show off with see-through Dacron shirts), a tapered waist, and \"rather limp and beautiful hands\" accentuated by long fingernails. Within two years of entering Princeton, Nash had framed and proved the most important proposition in the theory of games. \n\n Mathematically, this was no big deal. Game theory was a somewhat fashionable pursuit for mathematicians in those postwar days, when it looked as if it might do for military science and economics what Newton's calculus had done for physics. But they were bored with it by the early 1950s. Economists, after a few decades of hesitation, picked it up in the '80s and made it a cornerstone of their discipline.", "Then, in the '90s, inexplicably, the voices in Nash's head began to quiet down. (Nasar gives an interesting account of just how rare such remissions are among those diagnosed with schizophrenia.) At the same time, the Nobel committee in Stockholm was deciding it was about time to award the prize in economics for game theory. Dare they make a known madman into a laureate? What might he say to King Gustav at the ceremony? Nasar shows her mettle as a reporter here by penetrating the veil of secrecy surrounding the Nobel and revealing the back-stage machinations for and against Nash's candidacy. He did fine at the ceremony, by the way.", "Indeed, he has evolved into a \"very fine person,\" according to his ex-wife--humbled by years of psychotic helplessness, buoyed up by the intellectual world's highest accolade. The Nobel has a terrible effect on the productivity of many recipients, paralyzing them with greatness. For Nash it was pure therapy. Then, too, there is the need to take care of his son by Alicia, who--pleiotropically?--inherited both his mathematical promise and his madness. (His older son, the one born out of wedlock, got neither.) The Nobel money bought a new boiler for the little bungalow across from the Princeton train station inhabited by this shaky menage. (When Vanity Fair published an excerpt of A Beautiful Mind , Nash probably became the only person ever featured in that magazine to live in a house clad in \"insulbrick.\")", "He returned to the Princeton area in the 1970s, where he was taken care of by the long-suffering Alicia, now his ex-wife (she supported him partly through computer programming, partly on welfare). He haunted the campus, where students began to call him \"the Phantom.\" They would come to class in the morning to find runic messages he had written on the blackboard at night: \"Mao Tse-Tung's Bar Mitzvah was 13 years, 13 months, and 13 days after Brezhnev's circumcision.\"", "The eeriest thing I discovered while reading this superb book was that Nash and I came within a couple of years of crossing paths in a Virginia mental hospital. I was actually working there, but psychiatric aides pick up so many mannerisms of the patients that it's hard to tell the difference after a while. A few years after that I found myself in a mathematics Ph.D. program. You'll be glad to know that I'm in remission.", "Nash's breakthrough in game theory got him recruited by the Rand Corp., which was then a secretive military think tank in Santa Monica (its name is an acronym for \"research and development\"). However, the achievement did not greatly impress his fellow mathematicians. To do that, Nash, on a wager, disposed of a deep problem that had baffled the profession since the 19 th century: He showed that any Riemannian manifold possessing a special kind of \"smoothness\" can be embedded in Euclidean space. Manifolds, one must understand, are fairly wild and exotic beasts in mathematics. A famous example is the Klein bottle, a kind of higher-dimensional Moebius strip whose inside is somehow the same as its outside. Euclidean space, by contrast, is orderly and bourgeois. To demonstrate that \"impossible\" manifolds could be coaxed into living in Euclidean space is counterintuitive and pretty exciting. Nash did this by constructing a bizarre set of inequalities that left his fellow mathematicians thoroughly befuddled.", "Just in the last 100 years or so, most of the heroic figures in the foundations of mathematics have landed in mental asylums or have died by their own hand. The greatest of them, Kurt Gödel, starved himself to death in the belief that his colleagues were putting poison in his food. Of the two pioneers of game theory--the field in which Nash garnered his Nobel--one, Ernst Zermelo, was hospitalized for psychosis. The other, John Von Neumann, may not have been clinically insane, but he did serve as the real-life model for the title character in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove .", "Could there be a similar pleiotropy between madness and mathematics? Reading this absolutely fascinating biography by Sylvia Nasar, an economics writer for the New York Times , I began to wonder. Its subject, John Nash, is a mathematical genius who went crazy at the age of 30 and then, after several decades of flamboyant lunacy, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for something he had discovered as a graduate student. (He is now about to turn 70.) Nash is among the latest in a long and distinguished line of mathematicians--stretching back to that morbid paranoiac, Isaac Newton--who have been certifiably insane during parts of their lives.", "necessarily exist at least one thing in that domain that will remain unchanged--the \"fixed point.\" Nash found a way of applying this to the domain of all game strategies so that the guaranteed fixed point was the equilibrium for the game--clever,", "other. Each player has several strategy options to choose from. What Nash showed was that in every such game there is what has become known as a \"Nash equilibrium\": a set of strategies, one for each player, such that no player", "So maybe there is an accidental, pleiotropic connection between madness and mathematics. Or maybe it isn't so accidental. Mathematicians are, after all, people who fancy that they commune with perfect Platonic objects--abstract spaces, infinite numbers, zeta functions--that are invisible to normal humans. They spend their days piecing together complicated, scrupulously logical tales about these hallucinatory entities, which they believe are vastly more important than anything in the actual world. Is this not a kind of a folie à n (where n equals the number of pure mathematicians worldwide)? \n\n ABeautiful Mind reveals quite a lot about the psychic continuum leading from mathematical genius to madness. It is also a very peculiar redemption story: how three decades of raging schizophrenia, capped by an unexpected Nobel Prize, can transmute a cruel shit into a frail but decent human being.", "can improve his situation by switching to a different strategy. His proof was elegant but slight. A game is guaranteed to have a Nash equilibrium, it turns out, for the same reason that in a cup of coffee that is being stirred,", "but the earlier topological theorem did all the work. Still, for an economics theorem, that counts as profound. Economists have been known to win Nobel Prizes for rediscovering theorems in elementary calculus.", "Agame is just a conflict situation with a bunch of participants, or \"players.\" The players could be poker pals, oligopolists competing to corner a market, or nuclear powers trying to dominate each", "at least one coffee molecule must remain absolutely still. Both are direct consequences of a \"fixed-point theorem\" in the branch of mathematics known as topology. This theorem says that for any continuous rearrangement of a domain of things, there will" ], [ "That about marked the end of Nash's career as a mathematical genius. The next year, he was expelled from Rand as a security risk after local police caught him engaging in a lewd act in a public men's room near Muscle Beach. At MIT, where he had been given a teaching job, he hardly bothered with undergraduates and humiliated graduate students by solving their thesis problems. He carried on affairs with several men and a mistress, who bore him a son he refused to lift a finger to support. His cruel streak extended to the woman he married, a beautiful physics student named Alicia who was awed by this \"genius with a penis.\" Once, at a math department picnic, he threw her to the ground and put his foot on her throat.", "As a boy growing up in the hills of West Virginia, Nash enjoyed torturing animals and building homemade bombs with two other unpopular youngsters, one of whom was accidentally killed by a blast. (Given Nash's childhood keenness for explosives and his later penchant for sending odd packages to prominent strangers through the mail, it's a wonder the FBI never got on to him as a Unabomber suspect.) He made his way to Carnegie Tech, where he was a classmate of Andy Warhol's, and thence to Princeton--the world capital of mathematics at the time--at the age of 20.", "In sheer appearance, this cold and aloof Southerner stood out from his fellow math prodigies. A \"beautiful dark-haired young man,\" \"handsome as a god,\" he was 6 feet 1 inch tall, with broad shoulders, a heavily muscled chest (which he liked to show off with see-through Dacron shirts), a tapered waist, and \"rather limp and beautiful hands\" accentuated by long fingernails. Within two years of entering Princeton, Nash had framed and proved the most important proposition in the theory of games. \n\n Mathematically, this was no big deal. Game theory was a somewhat fashionable pursuit for mathematicians in those postwar days, when it looked as if it might do for military science and economics what Newton's calculus had done for physics. But they were bored with it by the early 1950s. Economists, after a few decades of hesitation, picked it up in the '80s and made it a cornerstone of their discipline.", "When the big breakdown came, it was properly mathematical. Fearing his powers might be waning as he approached 30, Nash decided he would solve the most important unresolved problem in mathematics: the Riemann Zeta conjecture. This bold guess about the solutions to a certain complex-valued infinite series (made by the incomparable Bernhard Riemann in 1859) would, if true, have far-reaching implications for the structure of the most basic of entities, the natural numbers. Before an eager audience of hundreds of mathematicians at Columbia University in 1959, Nash presented his results: a farrago of mathematical lunacy. \"Nash's talk wasn't good or bad,\" said one mathematician present. \"It was horrible.\" Some weeks before, Nash had declined a University of Chicago offer of an endowed chair on the grounds that he was scheduled to become the emperor of Antarctica.", "All the while, Nash was showing an intense interest in the state of Israel--often a sign of incipient insanity, at least in a non-Jew. Geniuses slipping into madness also tend to disrobe in public (I learned this from a volume on chess prodigies, who have a proclivity for disrobing on public buses). Nash showed up for an MIT New Year's Eve party clad only in a diaper. And then, of course, there was the New York Times , that old mainstay of psychotic delusion--Nash thought aliens were sending him encrypted messages through its pages (come to think of it, that could explain the Times ' odd prose).", "Just in the last 100 years or so, most of the heroic figures in the foundations of mathematics have landed in mental asylums or have died by their own hand. The greatest of them, Kurt Gödel, starved himself to death in the belief that his colleagues were putting poison in his food. Of the two pioneers of game theory--the field in which Nash garnered his Nobel--one, Ernst Zermelo, was hospitalized for psychosis. The other, John Von Neumann, may not have been clinically insane, but he did serve as the real-life model for the title character in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove .", "Then, in the '90s, inexplicably, the voices in Nash's head began to quiet down. (Nasar gives an interesting account of just how rare such remissions are among those diagnosed with schizophrenia.) At the same time, the Nobel committee in Stockholm was deciding it was about time to award the prize in economics for game theory. Dare they make a known madman into a laureate? What might he say to King Gustav at the ceremony? Nasar shows her mettle as a reporter here by penetrating the veil of secrecy surrounding the Nobel and revealing the back-stage machinations for and against Nash's candidacy. He did fine at the ceremony, by the way.", "Such ebullitions of insanity continued for three decades, becoming more rococo. Nash went to Europe to form a world government, attempting repeatedly to renounce his U.S. citizenship. He did stints in tony asylums, hanging out with Robert Lowell, and in dismal state institutions, where he was subjected daily to insulin-induced comas. He believed himself to be a Palestinian refugee called C.O.R.P.S.E.; a great Japanese shogun, C1423; Esau; the prince of peace; l'homme d'Or ; a mouse. As Nasar observes, his delusions were weirdly inconsistent. He felt himself simultaneously to be the epicenter of the universe--\"I am the left foot of God on earth\"--and an abject, persecuted petitioner.", "Nash's breakthrough in game theory got him recruited by the Rand Corp., which was then a secretive military think tank in Santa Monica (its name is an acronym for \"research and development\"). However, the achievement did not greatly impress his fellow mathematicians. To do that, Nash, on a wager, disposed of a deep problem that had baffled the profession since the 19 th century: He showed that any Riemannian manifold possessing a special kind of \"smoothness\" can be embedded in Euclidean space. Manifolds, one must understand, are fairly wild and exotic beasts in mathematics. A famous example is the Klein bottle, a kind of higher-dimensional Moebius strip whose inside is somehow the same as its outside. Euclidean space, by contrast, is orderly and bourgeois. To demonstrate that \"impossible\" manifolds could be coaxed into living in Euclidean space is counterintuitive and pretty exciting. Nash did this by constructing a bizarre set of inequalities that left his fellow mathematicians thoroughly befuddled.", "The eeriest thing I discovered while reading this superb book was that Nash and I came within a couple of years of crossing paths in a Virginia mental hospital. I was actually working there, but psychiatric aides pick up so many mannerisms of the patients that it's hard to tell the difference after a while. A few years after that I found myself in a mathematics Ph.D. program. You'll be glad to know that I'm in remission.", "Indeed, he has evolved into a \"very fine person,\" according to his ex-wife--humbled by years of psychotic helplessness, buoyed up by the intellectual world's highest accolade. The Nobel has a terrible effect on the productivity of many recipients, paralyzing them with greatness. For Nash it was pure therapy. Then, too, there is the need to take care of his son by Alicia, who--pleiotropically?--inherited both his mathematical promise and his madness. (His older son, the one born out of wedlock, got neither.) The Nobel money bought a new boiler for the little bungalow across from the Princeton train station inhabited by this shaky menage. (When Vanity Fair published an excerpt of A Beautiful Mind , Nash probably became the only person ever featured in that magazine to live in a house clad in \"insulbrick.\")", "Could there be a similar pleiotropy between madness and mathematics? Reading this absolutely fascinating biography by Sylvia Nasar, an economics writer for the New York Times , I began to wonder. Its subject, John Nash, is a mathematical genius who went crazy at the age of 30 and then, after several decades of flamboyant lunacy, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for something he had discovered as a graduate student. (He is now about to turn 70.) Nash is among the latest in a long and distinguished line of mathematicians--stretching back to that morbid paranoiac, Isaac Newton--who have been certifiably insane during parts of their lives.", "He returned to the Princeton area in the 1970s, where he was taken care of by the long-suffering Alicia, now his ex-wife (she supported him partly through computer programming, partly on welfare). He haunted the campus, where students began to call him \"the Phantom.\" They would come to class in the morning to find runic messages he had written on the blackboard at night: \"Mao Tse-Tung's Bar Mitzvah was 13 years, 13 months, and 13 days after Brezhnev's circumcision.\"", "necessarily exist at least one thing in that domain that will remain unchanged--the \"fixed point.\" Nash found a way of applying this to the domain of all game strategies so that the guaranteed fixed point was the equilibrium for the game--clever,", "other. Each player has several strategy options to choose from. What Nash showed was that in every such game there is what has become known as a \"Nash equilibrium\": a set of strategies, one for each player, such that no player", "So maybe there is an accidental, pleiotropic connection between madness and mathematics. Or maybe it isn't so accidental. Mathematicians are, after all, people who fancy that they commune with perfect Platonic objects--abstract spaces, infinite numbers, zeta functions--that are invisible to normal humans. They spend their days piecing together complicated, scrupulously logical tales about these hallucinatory entities, which they believe are vastly more important than anything in the actual world. Is this not a kind of a folie à n (where n equals the number of pure mathematicians worldwide)? \n\n ABeautiful Mind reveals quite a lot about the psychic continuum leading from mathematical genius to madness. It is also a very peculiar redemption story: how three decades of raging schizophrenia, capped by an unexpected Nobel Prize, can transmute a cruel shit into a frail but decent human being.", "can improve his situation by switching to a different strategy. His proof was elegant but slight. A game is guaranteed to have a Nash equilibrium, it turns out, for the same reason that in a cup of coffee that is being stirred,", "but the earlier topological theorem did all the work. Still, for an economics theorem, that counts as profound. Economists have been known to win Nobel Prizes for rediscovering theorems in elementary calculus.", "Agame is just a conflict situation with a bunch of participants, or \"players.\" The players could be poker pals, oligopolists competing to corner a market, or nuclear powers trying to dominate each", "Folie ࠎ \n\n People with high IQs tend to be nearsighted. This is not because they read a lot or stare at computer screens too much. That common-sense hypothesis has been discredited by research. Rather, it is a matter of genetics. The same genes that tend to elevate IQ also tend to affect the shape of the eyeball in a way that leads to myopia. This relationship--known in genetics as \"pleiotropy\"--seems to be completely accidental, a quirk of evolution." ], [ "That about marked the end of Nash's career as a mathematical genius. The next year, he was expelled from Rand as a security risk after local police caught him engaging in a lewd act in a public men's room near Muscle Beach. At MIT, where he had been given a teaching job, he hardly bothered with undergraduates and humiliated graduate students by solving their thesis problems. He carried on affairs with several men and a mistress, who bore him a son he refused to lift a finger to support. His cruel streak extended to the woman he married, a beautiful physics student named Alicia who was awed by this \"genius with a penis.\" Once, at a math department picnic, he threw her to the ground and put his foot on her throat.", "As a boy growing up in the hills of West Virginia, Nash enjoyed torturing animals and building homemade bombs with two other unpopular youngsters, one of whom was accidentally killed by a blast. (Given Nash's childhood keenness for explosives and his later penchant for sending odd packages to prominent strangers through the mail, it's a wonder the FBI never got on to him as a Unabomber suspect.) He made his way to Carnegie Tech, where he was a classmate of Andy Warhol's, and thence to Princeton--the world capital of mathematics at the time--at the age of 20.", "When the big breakdown came, it was properly mathematical. Fearing his powers might be waning as he approached 30, Nash decided he would solve the most important unresolved problem in mathematics: the Riemann Zeta conjecture. This bold guess about the solutions to a certain complex-valued infinite series (made by the incomparable Bernhard Riemann in 1859) would, if true, have far-reaching implications for the structure of the most basic of entities, the natural numbers. Before an eager audience of hundreds of mathematicians at Columbia University in 1959, Nash presented his results: a farrago of mathematical lunacy. \"Nash's talk wasn't good or bad,\" said one mathematician present. \"It was horrible.\" Some weeks before, Nash had declined a University of Chicago offer of an endowed chair on the grounds that he was scheduled to become the emperor of Antarctica.", "Then, in the '90s, inexplicably, the voices in Nash's head began to quiet down. (Nasar gives an interesting account of just how rare such remissions are among those diagnosed with schizophrenia.) At the same time, the Nobel committee in Stockholm was deciding it was about time to award the prize in economics for game theory. Dare they make a known madman into a laureate? What might he say to King Gustav at the ceremony? Nasar shows her mettle as a reporter here by penetrating the veil of secrecy surrounding the Nobel and revealing the back-stage machinations for and against Nash's candidacy. He did fine at the ceremony, by the way.", "All the while, Nash was showing an intense interest in the state of Israel--often a sign of incipient insanity, at least in a non-Jew. Geniuses slipping into madness also tend to disrobe in public (I learned this from a volume on chess prodigies, who have a proclivity for disrobing on public buses). Nash showed up for an MIT New Year's Eve party clad only in a diaper. And then, of course, there was the New York Times , that old mainstay of psychotic delusion--Nash thought aliens were sending him encrypted messages through its pages (come to think of it, that could explain the Times ' odd prose).", "Such ebullitions of insanity continued for three decades, becoming more rococo. Nash went to Europe to form a world government, attempting repeatedly to renounce his U.S. citizenship. He did stints in tony asylums, hanging out with Robert Lowell, and in dismal state institutions, where he was subjected daily to insulin-induced comas. He believed himself to be a Palestinian refugee called C.O.R.P.S.E.; a great Japanese shogun, C1423; Esau; the prince of peace; l'homme d'Or ; a mouse. As Nasar observes, his delusions were weirdly inconsistent. He felt himself simultaneously to be the epicenter of the universe--\"I am the left foot of God on earth\"--and an abject, persecuted petitioner.", "Indeed, he has evolved into a \"very fine person,\" according to his ex-wife--humbled by years of psychotic helplessness, buoyed up by the intellectual world's highest accolade. The Nobel has a terrible effect on the productivity of many recipients, paralyzing them with greatness. For Nash it was pure therapy. Then, too, there is the need to take care of his son by Alicia, who--pleiotropically?--inherited both his mathematical promise and his madness. (His older son, the one born out of wedlock, got neither.) The Nobel money bought a new boiler for the little bungalow across from the Princeton train station inhabited by this shaky menage. (When Vanity Fair published an excerpt of A Beautiful Mind , Nash probably became the only person ever featured in that magazine to live in a house clad in \"insulbrick.\")", "The eeriest thing I discovered while reading this superb book was that Nash and I came within a couple of years of crossing paths in a Virginia mental hospital. I was actually working there, but psychiatric aides pick up so many mannerisms of the patients that it's hard to tell the difference after a while. A few years after that I found myself in a mathematics Ph.D. program. You'll be glad to know that I'm in remission.", "In sheer appearance, this cold and aloof Southerner stood out from his fellow math prodigies. A \"beautiful dark-haired young man,\" \"handsome as a god,\" he was 6 feet 1 inch tall, with broad shoulders, a heavily muscled chest (which he liked to show off with see-through Dacron shirts), a tapered waist, and \"rather limp and beautiful hands\" accentuated by long fingernails. Within two years of entering Princeton, Nash had framed and proved the most important proposition in the theory of games. \n\n Mathematically, this was no big deal. Game theory was a somewhat fashionable pursuit for mathematicians in those postwar days, when it looked as if it might do for military science and economics what Newton's calculus had done for physics. But they were bored with it by the early 1950s. Economists, after a few decades of hesitation, picked it up in the '80s and made it a cornerstone of their discipline.", "Nash's breakthrough in game theory got him recruited by the Rand Corp., which was then a secretive military think tank in Santa Monica (its name is an acronym for \"research and development\"). However, the achievement did not greatly impress his fellow mathematicians. To do that, Nash, on a wager, disposed of a deep problem that had baffled the profession since the 19 th century: He showed that any Riemannian manifold possessing a special kind of \"smoothness\" can be embedded in Euclidean space. Manifolds, one must understand, are fairly wild and exotic beasts in mathematics. A famous example is the Klein bottle, a kind of higher-dimensional Moebius strip whose inside is somehow the same as its outside. Euclidean space, by contrast, is orderly and bourgeois. To demonstrate that \"impossible\" manifolds could be coaxed into living in Euclidean space is counterintuitive and pretty exciting. Nash did this by constructing a bizarre set of inequalities that left his fellow mathematicians thoroughly befuddled.", "He returned to the Princeton area in the 1970s, where he was taken care of by the long-suffering Alicia, now his ex-wife (she supported him partly through computer programming, partly on welfare). He haunted the campus, where students began to call him \"the Phantom.\" They would come to class in the morning to find runic messages he had written on the blackboard at night: \"Mao Tse-Tung's Bar Mitzvah was 13 years, 13 months, and 13 days after Brezhnev's circumcision.\"", "Just in the last 100 years or so, most of the heroic figures in the foundations of mathematics have landed in mental asylums or have died by their own hand. The greatest of them, Kurt Gödel, starved himself to death in the belief that his colleagues were putting poison in his food. Of the two pioneers of game theory--the field in which Nash garnered his Nobel--one, Ernst Zermelo, was hospitalized for psychosis. The other, John Von Neumann, may not have been clinically insane, but he did serve as the real-life model for the title character in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove .", "Could there be a similar pleiotropy between madness and mathematics? Reading this absolutely fascinating biography by Sylvia Nasar, an economics writer for the New York Times , I began to wonder. Its subject, John Nash, is a mathematical genius who went crazy at the age of 30 and then, after several decades of flamboyant lunacy, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for something he had discovered as a graduate student. (He is now about to turn 70.) Nash is among the latest in a long and distinguished line of mathematicians--stretching back to that morbid paranoiac, Isaac Newton--who have been certifiably insane during parts of their lives.", "So maybe there is an accidental, pleiotropic connection between madness and mathematics. Or maybe it isn't so accidental. Mathematicians are, after all, people who fancy that they commune with perfect Platonic objects--abstract spaces, infinite numbers, zeta functions--that are invisible to normal humans. They spend their days piecing together complicated, scrupulously logical tales about these hallucinatory entities, which they believe are vastly more important than anything in the actual world. Is this not a kind of a folie à n (where n equals the number of pure mathematicians worldwide)? \n\n ABeautiful Mind reveals quite a lot about the psychic continuum leading from mathematical genius to madness. It is also a very peculiar redemption story: how three decades of raging schizophrenia, capped by an unexpected Nobel Prize, can transmute a cruel shit into a frail but decent human being.", "necessarily exist at least one thing in that domain that will remain unchanged--the \"fixed point.\" Nash found a way of applying this to the domain of all game strategies so that the guaranteed fixed point was the equilibrium for the game--clever,", "can improve his situation by switching to a different strategy. His proof was elegant but slight. A game is guaranteed to have a Nash equilibrium, it turns out, for the same reason that in a cup of coffee that is being stirred,", "other. Each player has several strategy options to choose from. What Nash showed was that in every such game there is what has become known as a \"Nash equilibrium\": a set of strategies, one for each player, such that no player", "but the earlier topological theorem did all the work. Still, for an economics theorem, that counts as profound. Economists have been known to win Nobel Prizes for rediscovering theorems in elementary calculus.", "at least one coffee molecule must remain absolutely still. Both are direct consequences of a \"fixed-point theorem\" in the branch of mathematics known as topology. This theorem says that for any continuous rearrangement of a domain of things, there will", "Agame is just a conflict situation with a bunch of participants, or \"players.\" The players could be poker pals, oligopolists competing to corner a market, or nuclear powers trying to dominate each" ], [ "As a boy growing up in the hills of West Virginia, Nash enjoyed torturing animals and building homemade bombs with two other unpopular youngsters, one of whom was accidentally killed by a blast. (Given Nash's childhood keenness for explosives and his later penchant for sending odd packages to prominent strangers through the mail, it's a wonder the FBI never got on to him as a Unabomber suspect.) He made his way to Carnegie Tech, where he was a classmate of Andy Warhol's, and thence to Princeton--the world capital of mathematics at the time--at the age of 20.", "That about marked the end of Nash's career as a mathematical genius. The next year, he was expelled from Rand as a security risk after local police caught him engaging in a lewd act in a public men's room near Muscle Beach. At MIT, where he had been given a teaching job, he hardly bothered with undergraduates and humiliated graduate students by solving their thesis problems. He carried on affairs with several men and a mistress, who bore him a son he refused to lift a finger to support. His cruel streak extended to the woman he married, a beautiful physics student named Alicia who was awed by this \"genius with a penis.\" Once, at a math department picnic, he threw her to the ground and put his foot on her throat.", "Indeed, he has evolved into a \"very fine person,\" according to his ex-wife--humbled by years of psychotic helplessness, buoyed up by the intellectual world's highest accolade. The Nobel has a terrible effect on the productivity of many recipients, paralyzing them with greatness. For Nash it was pure therapy. Then, too, there is the need to take care of his son by Alicia, who--pleiotropically?--inherited both his mathematical promise and his madness. (His older son, the one born out of wedlock, got neither.) The Nobel money bought a new boiler for the little bungalow across from the Princeton train station inhabited by this shaky menage. (When Vanity Fair published an excerpt of A Beautiful Mind , Nash probably became the only person ever featured in that magazine to live in a house clad in \"insulbrick.\")", "Such ebullitions of insanity continued for three decades, becoming more rococo. Nash went to Europe to form a world government, attempting repeatedly to renounce his U.S. citizenship. He did stints in tony asylums, hanging out with Robert Lowell, and in dismal state institutions, where he was subjected daily to insulin-induced comas. He believed himself to be a Palestinian refugee called C.O.R.P.S.E.; a great Japanese shogun, C1423; Esau; the prince of peace; l'homme d'Or ; a mouse. As Nasar observes, his delusions were weirdly inconsistent. He felt himself simultaneously to be the epicenter of the universe--\"I am the left foot of God on earth\"--and an abject, persecuted petitioner.", "The eeriest thing I discovered while reading this superb book was that Nash and I came within a couple of years of crossing paths in a Virginia mental hospital. I was actually working there, but psychiatric aides pick up so many mannerisms of the patients that it's hard to tell the difference after a while. A few years after that I found myself in a mathematics Ph.D. program. You'll be glad to know that I'm in remission.", "All the while, Nash was showing an intense interest in the state of Israel--often a sign of incipient insanity, at least in a non-Jew. Geniuses slipping into madness also tend to disrobe in public (I learned this from a volume on chess prodigies, who have a proclivity for disrobing on public buses). Nash showed up for an MIT New Year's Eve party clad only in a diaper. And then, of course, there was the New York Times , that old mainstay of psychotic delusion--Nash thought aliens were sending him encrypted messages through its pages (come to think of it, that could explain the Times ' odd prose).", "In sheer appearance, this cold and aloof Southerner stood out from his fellow math prodigies. A \"beautiful dark-haired young man,\" \"handsome as a god,\" he was 6 feet 1 inch tall, with broad shoulders, a heavily muscled chest (which he liked to show off with see-through Dacron shirts), a tapered waist, and \"rather limp and beautiful hands\" accentuated by long fingernails. Within two years of entering Princeton, Nash had framed and proved the most important proposition in the theory of games. \n\n Mathematically, this was no big deal. Game theory was a somewhat fashionable pursuit for mathematicians in those postwar days, when it looked as if it might do for military science and economics what Newton's calculus had done for physics. But they were bored with it by the early 1950s. Economists, after a few decades of hesitation, picked it up in the '80s and made it a cornerstone of their discipline.", "When the big breakdown came, it was properly mathematical. Fearing his powers might be waning as he approached 30, Nash decided he would solve the most important unresolved problem in mathematics: the Riemann Zeta conjecture. This bold guess about the solutions to a certain complex-valued infinite series (made by the incomparable Bernhard Riemann in 1859) would, if true, have far-reaching implications for the structure of the most basic of entities, the natural numbers. Before an eager audience of hundreds of mathematicians at Columbia University in 1959, Nash presented his results: a farrago of mathematical lunacy. \"Nash's talk wasn't good or bad,\" said one mathematician present. \"It was horrible.\" Some weeks before, Nash had declined a University of Chicago offer of an endowed chair on the grounds that he was scheduled to become the emperor of Antarctica.", "Then, in the '90s, inexplicably, the voices in Nash's head began to quiet down. (Nasar gives an interesting account of just how rare such remissions are among those diagnosed with schizophrenia.) At the same time, the Nobel committee in Stockholm was deciding it was about time to award the prize in economics for game theory. Dare they make a known madman into a laureate? What might he say to King Gustav at the ceremony? Nasar shows her mettle as a reporter here by penetrating the veil of secrecy surrounding the Nobel and revealing the back-stage machinations for and against Nash's candidacy. He did fine at the ceremony, by the way.", "Nash's breakthrough in game theory got him recruited by the Rand Corp., which was then a secretive military think tank in Santa Monica (its name is an acronym for \"research and development\"). However, the achievement did not greatly impress his fellow mathematicians. To do that, Nash, on a wager, disposed of a deep problem that had baffled the profession since the 19 th century: He showed that any Riemannian manifold possessing a special kind of \"smoothness\" can be embedded in Euclidean space. Manifolds, one must understand, are fairly wild and exotic beasts in mathematics. A famous example is the Klein bottle, a kind of higher-dimensional Moebius strip whose inside is somehow the same as its outside. Euclidean space, by contrast, is orderly and bourgeois. To demonstrate that \"impossible\" manifolds could be coaxed into living in Euclidean space is counterintuitive and pretty exciting. Nash did this by constructing a bizarre set of inequalities that left his fellow mathematicians thoroughly befuddled.", "Just in the last 100 years or so, most of the heroic figures in the foundations of mathematics have landed in mental asylums or have died by their own hand. The greatest of them, Kurt Gödel, starved himself to death in the belief that his colleagues were putting poison in his food. Of the two pioneers of game theory--the field in which Nash garnered his Nobel--one, Ernst Zermelo, was hospitalized for psychosis. The other, John Von Neumann, may not have been clinically insane, but he did serve as the real-life model for the title character in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove .", "He returned to the Princeton area in the 1970s, where he was taken care of by the long-suffering Alicia, now his ex-wife (she supported him partly through computer programming, partly on welfare). He haunted the campus, where students began to call him \"the Phantom.\" They would come to class in the morning to find runic messages he had written on the blackboard at night: \"Mao Tse-Tung's Bar Mitzvah was 13 years, 13 months, and 13 days after Brezhnev's circumcision.\"", "Could there be a similar pleiotropy between madness and mathematics? Reading this absolutely fascinating biography by Sylvia Nasar, an economics writer for the New York Times , I began to wonder. Its subject, John Nash, is a mathematical genius who went crazy at the age of 30 and then, after several decades of flamboyant lunacy, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for something he had discovered as a graduate student. (He is now about to turn 70.) Nash is among the latest in a long and distinguished line of mathematicians--stretching back to that morbid paranoiac, Isaac Newton--who have been certifiably insane during parts of their lives.", "necessarily exist at least one thing in that domain that will remain unchanged--the \"fixed point.\" Nash found a way of applying this to the domain of all game strategies so that the guaranteed fixed point was the equilibrium for the game--clever,", "other. Each player has several strategy options to choose from. What Nash showed was that in every such game there is what has become known as a \"Nash equilibrium\": a set of strategies, one for each player, such that no player", "So maybe there is an accidental, pleiotropic connection between madness and mathematics. Or maybe it isn't so accidental. Mathematicians are, after all, people who fancy that they commune with perfect Platonic objects--abstract spaces, infinite numbers, zeta functions--that are invisible to normal humans. They spend their days piecing together complicated, scrupulously logical tales about these hallucinatory entities, which they believe are vastly more important than anything in the actual world. Is this not a kind of a folie à n (where n equals the number of pure mathematicians worldwide)? \n\n ABeautiful Mind reveals quite a lot about the psychic continuum leading from mathematical genius to madness. It is also a very peculiar redemption story: how three decades of raging schizophrenia, capped by an unexpected Nobel Prize, can transmute a cruel shit into a frail but decent human being.", "can improve his situation by switching to a different strategy. His proof was elegant but slight. A game is guaranteed to have a Nash equilibrium, it turns out, for the same reason that in a cup of coffee that is being stirred,", "but the earlier topological theorem did all the work. Still, for an economics theorem, that counts as profound. Economists have been known to win Nobel Prizes for rediscovering theorems in elementary calculus.", "at least one coffee molecule must remain absolutely still. Both are direct consequences of a \"fixed-point theorem\" in the branch of mathematics known as topology. This theorem says that for any continuous rearrangement of a domain of things, there will", "Folie ࠎ \n\n People with high IQs tend to be nearsighted. This is not because they read a lot or stare at computer screens too much. That common-sense hypothesis has been discredited by research. Rather, it is a matter of genetics. The same genes that tend to elevate IQ also tend to affect the shape of the eyeball in a way that leads to myopia. This relationship--known in genetics as \"pleiotropy\"--seems to be completely accidental, a quirk of evolution." ], [ "necessarily exist at least one thing in that domain that will remain unchanged--the \"fixed point.\" Nash found a way of applying this to the domain of all game strategies so that the guaranteed fixed point was the equilibrium for the game--clever,", "at least one coffee molecule must remain absolutely still. Both are direct consequences of a \"fixed-point theorem\" in the branch of mathematics known as topology. This theorem says that for any continuous rearrangement of a domain of things, there will", "He returned to the Princeton area in the 1970s, where he was taken care of by the long-suffering Alicia, now his ex-wife (she supported him partly through computer programming, partly on welfare). He haunted the campus, where students began to call him \"the Phantom.\" They would come to class in the morning to find runic messages he had written on the blackboard at night: \"Mao Tse-Tung's Bar Mitzvah was 13 years, 13 months, and 13 days after Brezhnev's circumcision.\"", "Indeed, he has evolved into a \"very fine person,\" according to his ex-wife--humbled by years of psychotic helplessness, buoyed up by the intellectual world's highest accolade. The Nobel has a terrible effect on the productivity of many recipients, paralyzing them with greatness. For Nash it was pure therapy. Then, too, there is the need to take care of his son by Alicia, who--pleiotropically?--inherited both his mathematical promise and his madness. (His older son, the one born out of wedlock, got neither.) The Nobel money bought a new boiler for the little bungalow across from the Princeton train station inhabited by this shaky menage. (When Vanity Fair published an excerpt of A Beautiful Mind , Nash probably became the only person ever featured in that magazine to live in a house clad in \"insulbrick.\")", "That about marked the end of Nash's career as a mathematical genius. The next year, he was expelled from Rand as a security risk after local police caught him engaging in a lewd act in a public men's room near Muscle Beach. At MIT, where he had been given a teaching job, he hardly bothered with undergraduates and humiliated graduate students by solving their thesis problems. He carried on affairs with several men and a mistress, who bore him a son he refused to lift a finger to support. His cruel streak extended to the woman he married, a beautiful physics student named Alicia who was awed by this \"genius with a penis.\" Once, at a math department picnic, he threw her to the ground and put his foot on her throat.", "When the big breakdown came, it was properly mathematical. Fearing his powers might be waning as he approached 30, Nash decided he would solve the most important unresolved problem in mathematics: the Riemann Zeta conjecture. This bold guess about the solutions to a certain complex-valued infinite series (made by the incomparable Bernhard Riemann in 1859) would, if true, have far-reaching implications for the structure of the most basic of entities, the natural numbers. Before an eager audience of hundreds of mathematicians at Columbia University in 1959, Nash presented his results: a farrago of mathematical lunacy. \"Nash's talk wasn't good or bad,\" said one mathematician present. \"It was horrible.\" Some weeks before, Nash had declined a University of Chicago offer of an endowed chair on the grounds that he was scheduled to become the emperor of Antarctica.", "The eeriest thing I discovered while reading this superb book was that Nash and I came within a couple of years of crossing paths in a Virginia mental hospital. I was actually working there, but psychiatric aides pick up so many mannerisms of the patients that it's hard to tell the difference after a while. A few years after that I found myself in a mathematics Ph.D. program. You'll be glad to know that I'm in remission.", "In sheer appearance, this cold and aloof Southerner stood out from his fellow math prodigies. A \"beautiful dark-haired young man,\" \"handsome as a god,\" he was 6 feet 1 inch tall, with broad shoulders, a heavily muscled chest (which he liked to show off with see-through Dacron shirts), a tapered waist, and \"rather limp and beautiful hands\" accentuated by long fingernails. Within two years of entering Princeton, Nash had framed and proved the most important proposition in the theory of games. \n\n Mathematically, this was no big deal. Game theory was a somewhat fashionable pursuit for mathematicians in those postwar days, when it looked as if it might do for military science and economics what Newton's calculus had done for physics. But they were bored with it by the early 1950s. Economists, after a few decades of hesitation, picked it up in the '80s and made it a cornerstone of their discipline.", "So maybe there is an accidental, pleiotropic connection between madness and mathematics. Or maybe it isn't so accidental. Mathematicians are, after all, people who fancy that they commune with perfect Platonic objects--abstract spaces, infinite numbers, zeta functions--that are invisible to normal humans. They spend their days piecing together complicated, scrupulously logical tales about these hallucinatory entities, which they believe are vastly more important than anything in the actual world. Is this not a kind of a folie à n (where n equals the number of pure mathematicians worldwide)? \n\n ABeautiful Mind reveals quite a lot about the psychic continuum leading from mathematical genius to madness. It is also a very peculiar redemption story: how three decades of raging schizophrenia, capped by an unexpected Nobel Prize, can transmute a cruel shit into a frail but decent human being.", "Nash's breakthrough in game theory got him recruited by the Rand Corp., which was then a secretive military think tank in Santa Monica (its name is an acronym for \"research and development\"). However, the achievement did not greatly impress his fellow mathematicians. To do that, Nash, on a wager, disposed of a deep problem that had baffled the profession since the 19 th century: He showed that any Riemannian manifold possessing a special kind of \"smoothness\" can be embedded in Euclidean space. Manifolds, one must understand, are fairly wild and exotic beasts in mathematics. A famous example is the Klein bottle, a kind of higher-dimensional Moebius strip whose inside is somehow the same as its outside. Euclidean space, by contrast, is orderly and bourgeois. To demonstrate that \"impossible\" manifolds could be coaxed into living in Euclidean space is counterintuitive and pretty exciting. Nash did this by constructing a bizarre set of inequalities that left his fellow mathematicians thoroughly befuddled.", "Such ebullitions of insanity continued for three decades, becoming more rococo. Nash went to Europe to form a world government, attempting repeatedly to renounce his U.S. citizenship. He did stints in tony asylums, hanging out with Robert Lowell, and in dismal state institutions, where he was subjected daily to insulin-induced comas. He believed himself to be a Palestinian refugee called C.O.R.P.S.E.; a great Japanese shogun, C1423; Esau; the prince of peace; l'homme d'Or ; a mouse. As Nasar observes, his delusions were weirdly inconsistent. He felt himself simultaneously to be the epicenter of the universe--\"I am the left foot of God on earth\"--and an abject, persecuted petitioner.", "As a boy growing up in the hills of West Virginia, Nash enjoyed torturing animals and building homemade bombs with two other unpopular youngsters, one of whom was accidentally killed by a blast. (Given Nash's childhood keenness for explosives and his later penchant for sending odd packages to prominent strangers through the mail, it's a wonder the FBI never got on to him as a Unabomber suspect.) He made his way to Carnegie Tech, where he was a classmate of Andy Warhol's, and thence to Princeton--the world capital of mathematics at the time--at the age of 20.", "Just in the last 100 years or so, most of the heroic figures in the foundations of mathematics have landed in mental asylums or have died by their own hand. The greatest of them, Kurt Gödel, starved himself to death in the belief that his colleagues were putting poison in his food. Of the two pioneers of game theory--the field in which Nash garnered his Nobel--one, Ernst Zermelo, was hospitalized for psychosis. The other, John Von Neumann, may not have been clinically insane, but he did serve as the real-life model for the title character in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove .", "All the while, Nash was showing an intense interest in the state of Israel--often a sign of incipient insanity, at least in a non-Jew. Geniuses slipping into madness also tend to disrobe in public (I learned this from a volume on chess prodigies, who have a proclivity for disrobing on public buses). Nash showed up for an MIT New Year's Eve party clad only in a diaper. And then, of course, there was the New York Times , that old mainstay of psychotic delusion--Nash thought aliens were sending him encrypted messages through its pages (come to think of it, that could explain the Times ' odd prose).", "Then, in the '90s, inexplicably, the voices in Nash's head began to quiet down. (Nasar gives an interesting account of just how rare such remissions are among those diagnosed with schizophrenia.) At the same time, the Nobel committee in Stockholm was deciding it was about time to award the prize in economics for game theory. Dare they make a known madman into a laureate? What might he say to King Gustav at the ceremony? Nasar shows her mettle as a reporter here by penetrating the veil of secrecy surrounding the Nobel and revealing the back-stage machinations for and against Nash's candidacy. He did fine at the ceremony, by the way.", "can improve his situation by switching to a different strategy. His proof was elegant but slight. A game is guaranteed to have a Nash equilibrium, it turns out, for the same reason that in a cup of coffee that is being stirred,", "Could there be a similar pleiotropy between madness and mathematics? Reading this absolutely fascinating biography by Sylvia Nasar, an economics writer for the New York Times , I began to wonder. Its subject, John Nash, is a mathematical genius who went crazy at the age of 30 and then, after several decades of flamboyant lunacy, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for something he had discovered as a graduate student. (He is now about to turn 70.) Nash is among the latest in a long and distinguished line of mathematicians--stretching back to that morbid paranoiac, Isaac Newton--who have been certifiably insane during parts of their lives.", "other. Each player has several strategy options to choose from. What Nash showed was that in every such game there is what has become known as a \"Nash equilibrium\": a set of strategies, one for each player, such that no player", "but the earlier topological theorem did all the work. Still, for an economics theorem, that counts as profound. Economists have been known to win Nobel Prizes for rediscovering theorems in elementary calculus.", "Folie ࠎ \n\n People with high IQs tend to be nearsighted. This is not because they read a lot or stare at computer screens too much. That common-sense hypothesis has been discredited by research. Rather, it is a matter of genetics. The same genes that tend to elevate IQ also tend to affect the shape of the eyeball in a way that leads to myopia. This relationship--known in genetics as \"pleiotropy\"--seems to be completely accidental, a quirk of evolution." ], [ "As a boy growing up in the hills of West Virginia, Nash enjoyed torturing animals and building homemade bombs with two other unpopular youngsters, one of whom was accidentally killed by a blast. (Given Nash's childhood keenness for explosives and his later penchant for sending odd packages to prominent strangers through the mail, it's a wonder the FBI never got on to him as a Unabomber suspect.) He made his way to Carnegie Tech, where he was a classmate of Andy Warhol's, and thence to Princeton--the world capital of mathematics at the time--at the age of 20.", "That about marked the end of Nash's career as a mathematical genius. The next year, he was expelled from Rand as a security risk after local police caught him engaging in a lewd act in a public men's room near Muscle Beach. At MIT, where he had been given a teaching job, he hardly bothered with undergraduates and humiliated graduate students by solving their thesis problems. He carried on affairs with several men and a mistress, who bore him a son he refused to lift a finger to support. His cruel streak extended to the woman he married, a beautiful physics student named Alicia who was awed by this \"genius with a penis.\" Once, at a math department picnic, he threw her to the ground and put his foot on her throat.", "Indeed, he has evolved into a \"very fine person,\" according to his ex-wife--humbled by years of psychotic helplessness, buoyed up by the intellectual world's highest accolade. The Nobel has a terrible effect on the productivity of many recipients, paralyzing them with greatness. For Nash it was pure therapy. Then, too, there is the need to take care of his son by Alicia, who--pleiotropically?--inherited both his mathematical promise and his madness. (His older son, the one born out of wedlock, got neither.) The Nobel money bought a new boiler for the little bungalow across from the Princeton train station inhabited by this shaky menage. (When Vanity Fair published an excerpt of A Beautiful Mind , Nash probably became the only person ever featured in that magazine to live in a house clad in \"insulbrick.\")", "In sheer appearance, this cold and aloof Southerner stood out from his fellow math prodigies. A \"beautiful dark-haired young man,\" \"handsome as a god,\" he was 6 feet 1 inch tall, with broad shoulders, a heavily muscled chest (which he liked to show off with see-through Dacron shirts), a tapered waist, and \"rather limp and beautiful hands\" accentuated by long fingernails. Within two years of entering Princeton, Nash had framed and proved the most important proposition in the theory of games. \n\n Mathematically, this was no big deal. Game theory was a somewhat fashionable pursuit for mathematicians in those postwar days, when it looked as if it might do for military science and economics what Newton's calculus had done for physics. But they were bored with it by the early 1950s. Economists, after a few decades of hesitation, picked it up in the '80s and made it a cornerstone of their discipline.", "He returned to the Princeton area in the 1970s, where he was taken care of by the long-suffering Alicia, now his ex-wife (she supported him partly through computer programming, partly on welfare). He haunted the campus, where students began to call him \"the Phantom.\" They would come to class in the morning to find runic messages he had written on the blackboard at night: \"Mao Tse-Tung's Bar Mitzvah was 13 years, 13 months, and 13 days after Brezhnev's circumcision.\"", "The eeriest thing I discovered while reading this superb book was that Nash and I came within a couple of years of crossing paths in a Virginia mental hospital. I was actually working there, but psychiatric aides pick up so many mannerisms of the patients that it's hard to tell the difference after a while. A few years after that I found myself in a mathematics Ph.D. program. You'll be glad to know that I'm in remission.", "When the big breakdown came, it was properly mathematical. Fearing his powers might be waning as he approached 30, Nash decided he would solve the most important unresolved problem in mathematics: the Riemann Zeta conjecture. This bold guess about the solutions to a certain complex-valued infinite series (made by the incomparable Bernhard Riemann in 1859) would, if true, have far-reaching implications for the structure of the most basic of entities, the natural numbers. Before an eager audience of hundreds of mathematicians at Columbia University in 1959, Nash presented his results: a farrago of mathematical lunacy. \"Nash's talk wasn't good or bad,\" said one mathematician present. \"It was horrible.\" Some weeks before, Nash had declined a University of Chicago offer of an endowed chair on the grounds that he was scheduled to become the emperor of Antarctica.", "Nash's breakthrough in game theory got him recruited by the Rand Corp., which was then a secretive military think tank in Santa Monica (its name is an acronym for \"research and development\"). However, the achievement did not greatly impress his fellow mathematicians. To do that, Nash, on a wager, disposed of a deep problem that had baffled the profession since the 19 th century: He showed that any Riemannian manifold possessing a special kind of \"smoothness\" can be embedded in Euclidean space. Manifolds, one must understand, are fairly wild and exotic beasts in mathematics. A famous example is the Klein bottle, a kind of higher-dimensional Moebius strip whose inside is somehow the same as its outside. Euclidean space, by contrast, is orderly and bourgeois. To demonstrate that \"impossible\" manifolds could be coaxed into living in Euclidean space is counterintuitive and pretty exciting. Nash did this by constructing a bizarre set of inequalities that left his fellow mathematicians thoroughly befuddled.", "All the while, Nash was showing an intense interest in the state of Israel--often a sign of incipient insanity, at least in a non-Jew. Geniuses slipping into madness also tend to disrobe in public (I learned this from a volume on chess prodigies, who have a proclivity for disrobing on public buses). Nash showed up for an MIT New Year's Eve party clad only in a diaper. And then, of course, there was the New York Times , that old mainstay of psychotic delusion--Nash thought aliens were sending him encrypted messages through its pages (come to think of it, that could explain the Times ' odd prose).", "Then, in the '90s, inexplicably, the voices in Nash's head began to quiet down. (Nasar gives an interesting account of just how rare such remissions are among those diagnosed with schizophrenia.) At the same time, the Nobel committee in Stockholm was deciding it was about time to award the prize in economics for game theory. Dare they make a known madman into a laureate? What might he say to King Gustav at the ceremony? Nasar shows her mettle as a reporter here by penetrating the veil of secrecy surrounding the Nobel and revealing the back-stage machinations for and against Nash's candidacy. He did fine at the ceremony, by the way.", "Just in the last 100 years or so, most of the heroic figures in the foundations of mathematics have landed in mental asylums or have died by their own hand. The greatest of them, Kurt Gödel, starved himself to death in the belief that his colleagues were putting poison in his food. Of the two pioneers of game theory--the field in which Nash garnered his Nobel--one, Ernst Zermelo, was hospitalized for psychosis. The other, John Von Neumann, may not have been clinically insane, but he did serve as the real-life model for the title character in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove .", "Could there be a similar pleiotropy between madness and mathematics? Reading this absolutely fascinating biography by Sylvia Nasar, an economics writer for the New York Times , I began to wonder. Its subject, John Nash, is a mathematical genius who went crazy at the age of 30 and then, after several decades of flamboyant lunacy, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for something he had discovered as a graduate student. (He is now about to turn 70.) Nash is among the latest in a long and distinguished line of mathematicians--stretching back to that morbid paranoiac, Isaac Newton--who have been certifiably insane during parts of their lives.", "Such ebullitions of insanity continued for three decades, becoming more rococo. Nash went to Europe to form a world government, attempting repeatedly to renounce his U.S. citizenship. He did stints in tony asylums, hanging out with Robert Lowell, and in dismal state institutions, where he was subjected daily to insulin-induced comas. He believed himself to be a Palestinian refugee called C.O.R.P.S.E.; a great Japanese shogun, C1423; Esau; the prince of peace; l'homme d'Or ; a mouse. As Nasar observes, his delusions were weirdly inconsistent. He felt himself simultaneously to be the epicenter of the universe--\"I am the left foot of God on earth\"--and an abject, persecuted petitioner.", "So maybe there is an accidental, pleiotropic connection between madness and mathematics. Or maybe it isn't so accidental. Mathematicians are, after all, people who fancy that they commune with perfect Platonic objects--abstract spaces, infinite numbers, zeta functions--that are invisible to normal humans. They spend their days piecing together complicated, scrupulously logical tales about these hallucinatory entities, which they believe are vastly more important than anything in the actual world. Is this not a kind of a folie à n (where n equals the number of pure mathematicians worldwide)? \n\n ABeautiful Mind reveals quite a lot about the psychic continuum leading from mathematical genius to madness. It is also a very peculiar redemption story: how three decades of raging schizophrenia, capped by an unexpected Nobel Prize, can transmute a cruel shit into a frail but decent human being.", "but the earlier topological theorem did all the work. Still, for an economics theorem, that counts as profound. Economists have been known to win Nobel Prizes for rediscovering theorems in elementary calculus.", "necessarily exist at least one thing in that domain that will remain unchanged--the \"fixed point.\" Nash found a way of applying this to the domain of all game strategies so that the guaranteed fixed point was the equilibrium for the game--clever,", "Folie ࠎ \n\n People with high IQs tend to be nearsighted. This is not because they read a lot or stare at computer screens too much. That common-sense hypothesis has been discredited by research. Rather, it is a matter of genetics. The same genes that tend to elevate IQ also tend to affect the shape of the eyeball in a way that leads to myopia. This relationship--known in genetics as \"pleiotropy\"--seems to be completely accidental, a quirk of evolution.", "can improve his situation by switching to a different strategy. His proof was elegant but slight. A game is guaranteed to have a Nash equilibrium, it turns out, for the same reason that in a cup of coffee that is being stirred,", "other. Each player has several strategy options to choose from. What Nash showed was that in every such game there is what has become known as a \"Nash equilibrium\": a set of strategies, one for each player, such that no player", "at least one coffee molecule must remain absolutely still. Both are direct consequences of a \"fixed-point theorem\" in the branch of mathematics known as topology. This theorem says that for any continuous rearrangement of a domain of things, there will" ], [ "In sheer appearance, this cold and aloof Southerner stood out from his fellow math prodigies. A \"beautiful dark-haired young man,\" \"handsome as a god,\" he was 6 feet 1 inch tall, with broad shoulders, a heavily muscled chest (which he liked to show off with see-through Dacron shirts), a tapered waist, and \"rather limp and beautiful hands\" accentuated by long fingernails. Within two years of entering Princeton, Nash had framed and proved the most important proposition in the theory of games. \n\n Mathematically, this was no big deal. Game theory was a somewhat fashionable pursuit for mathematicians in those postwar days, when it looked as if it might do for military science and economics what Newton's calculus had done for physics. But they were bored with it by the early 1950s. Economists, after a few decades of hesitation, picked it up in the '80s and made it a cornerstone of their discipline.", "Nash's breakthrough in game theory got him recruited by the Rand Corp., which was then a secretive military think tank in Santa Monica (its name is an acronym for \"research and development\"). However, the achievement did not greatly impress his fellow mathematicians. To do that, Nash, on a wager, disposed of a deep problem that had baffled the profession since the 19 th century: He showed that any Riemannian manifold possessing a special kind of \"smoothness\" can be embedded in Euclidean space. Manifolds, one must understand, are fairly wild and exotic beasts in mathematics. A famous example is the Klein bottle, a kind of higher-dimensional Moebius strip whose inside is somehow the same as its outside. Euclidean space, by contrast, is orderly and bourgeois. To demonstrate that \"impossible\" manifolds could be coaxed into living in Euclidean space is counterintuitive and pretty exciting. Nash did this by constructing a bizarre set of inequalities that left his fellow mathematicians thoroughly befuddled.", "When the big breakdown came, it was properly mathematical. Fearing his powers might be waning as he approached 30, Nash decided he would solve the most important unresolved problem in mathematics: the Riemann Zeta conjecture. This bold guess about the solutions to a certain complex-valued infinite series (made by the incomparable Bernhard Riemann in 1859) would, if true, have far-reaching implications for the structure of the most basic of entities, the natural numbers. Before an eager audience of hundreds of mathematicians at Columbia University in 1959, Nash presented his results: a farrago of mathematical lunacy. \"Nash's talk wasn't good or bad,\" said one mathematician present. \"It was horrible.\" Some weeks before, Nash had declined a University of Chicago offer of an endowed chair on the grounds that he was scheduled to become the emperor of Antarctica.", "Just in the last 100 years or so, most of the heroic figures in the foundations of mathematics have landed in mental asylums or have died by their own hand. The greatest of them, Kurt Gödel, starved himself to death in the belief that his colleagues were putting poison in his food. Of the two pioneers of game theory--the field in which Nash garnered his Nobel--one, Ernst Zermelo, was hospitalized for psychosis. The other, John Von Neumann, may not have been clinically insane, but he did serve as the real-life model for the title character in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove .", "necessarily exist at least one thing in that domain that will remain unchanged--the \"fixed point.\" Nash found a way of applying this to the domain of all game strategies so that the guaranteed fixed point was the equilibrium for the game--clever,", "That about marked the end of Nash's career as a mathematical genius. The next year, he was expelled from Rand as a security risk after local police caught him engaging in a lewd act in a public men's room near Muscle Beach. At MIT, where he had been given a teaching job, he hardly bothered with undergraduates and humiliated graduate students by solving their thesis problems. He carried on affairs with several men and a mistress, who bore him a son he refused to lift a finger to support. His cruel streak extended to the woman he married, a beautiful physics student named Alicia who was awed by this \"genius with a penis.\" Once, at a math department picnic, he threw her to the ground and put his foot on her throat.", "other. Each player has several strategy options to choose from. What Nash showed was that in every such game there is what has become known as a \"Nash equilibrium\": a set of strategies, one for each player, such that no player", "Then, in the '90s, inexplicably, the voices in Nash's head began to quiet down. (Nasar gives an interesting account of just how rare such remissions are among those diagnosed with schizophrenia.) At the same time, the Nobel committee in Stockholm was deciding it was about time to award the prize in economics for game theory. Dare they make a known madman into a laureate? What might he say to King Gustav at the ceremony? Nasar shows her mettle as a reporter here by penetrating the veil of secrecy surrounding the Nobel and revealing the back-stage machinations for and against Nash's candidacy. He did fine at the ceremony, by the way.", "As a boy growing up in the hills of West Virginia, Nash enjoyed torturing animals and building homemade bombs with two other unpopular youngsters, one of whom was accidentally killed by a blast. (Given Nash's childhood keenness for explosives and his later penchant for sending odd packages to prominent strangers through the mail, it's a wonder the FBI never got on to him as a Unabomber suspect.) He made his way to Carnegie Tech, where he was a classmate of Andy Warhol's, and thence to Princeton--the world capital of mathematics at the time--at the age of 20.", "Could there be a similar pleiotropy between madness and mathematics? Reading this absolutely fascinating biography by Sylvia Nasar, an economics writer for the New York Times , I began to wonder. Its subject, John Nash, is a mathematical genius who went crazy at the age of 30 and then, after several decades of flamboyant lunacy, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for something he had discovered as a graduate student. (He is now about to turn 70.) Nash is among the latest in a long and distinguished line of mathematicians--stretching back to that morbid paranoiac, Isaac Newton--who have been certifiably insane during parts of their lives.", "Indeed, he has evolved into a \"very fine person,\" according to his ex-wife--humbled by years of psychotic helplessness, buoyed up by the intellectual world's highest accolade. The Nobel has a terrible effect on the productivity of many recipients, paralyzing them with greatness. For Nash it was pure therapy. Then, too, there is the need to take care of his son by Alicia, who--pleiotropically?--inherited both his mathematical promise and his madness. (His older son, the one born out of wedlock, got neither.) The Nobel money bought a new boiler for the little bungalow across from the Princeton train station inhabited by this shaky menage. (When Vanity Fair published an excerpt of A Beautiful Mind , Nash probably became the only person ever featured in that magazine to live in a house clad in \"insulbrick.\")", "can improve his situation by switching to a different strategy. His proof was elegant but slight. A game is guaranteed to have a Nash equilibrium, it turns out, for the same reason that in a cup of coffee that is being stirred,", "All the while, Nash was showing an intense interest in the state of Israel--often a sign of incipient insanity, at least in a non-Jew. Geniuses slipping into madness also tend to disrobe in public (I learned this from a volume on chess prodigies, who have a proclivity for disrobing on public buses). Nash showed up for an MIT New Year's Eve party clad only in a diaper. And then, of course, there was the New York Times , that old mainstay of psychotic delusion--Nash thought aliens were sending him encrypted messages through its pages (come to think of it, that could explain the Times ' odd prose).", "The eeriest thing I discovered while reading this superb book was that Nash and I came within a couple of years of crossing paths in a Virginia mental hospital. I was actually working there, but psychiatric aides pick up so many mannerisms of the patients that it's hard to tell the difference after a while. A few years after that I found myself in a mathematics Ph.D. program. You'll be glad to know that I'm in remission.", "So maybe there is an accidental, pleiotropic connection between madness and mathematics. Or maybe it isn't so accidental. Mathematicians are, after all, people who fancy that they commune with perfect Platonic objects--abstract spaces, infinite numbers, zeta functions--that are invisible to normal humans. They spend their days piecing together complicated, scrupulously logical tales about these hallucinatory entities, which they believe are vastly more important than anything in the actual world. Is this not a kind of a folie à n (where n equals the number of pure mathematicians worldwide)? \n\n ABeautiful Mind reveals quite a lot about the psychic continuum leading from mathematical genius to madness. It is also a very peculiar redemption story: how three decades of raging schizophrenia, capped by an unexpected Nobel Prize, can transmute a cruel shit into a frail but decent human being.", "but the earlier topological theorem did all the work. Still, for an economics theorem, that counts as profound. Economists have been known to win Nobel Prizes for rediscovering theorems in elementary calculus.", "Such ebullitions of insanity continued for three decades, becoming more rococo. Nash went to Europe to form a world government, attempting repeatedly to renounce his U.S. citizenship. He did stints in tony asylums, hanging out with Robert Lowell, and in dismal state institutions, where he was subjected daily to insulin-induced comas. He believed himself to be a Palestinian refugee called C.O.R.P.S.E.; a great Japanese shogun, C1423; Esau; the prince of peace; l'homme d'Or ; a mouse. As Nasar observes, his delusions were weirdly inconsistent. He felt himself simultaneously to be the epicenter of the universe--\"I am the left foot of God on earth\"--and an abject, persecuted petitioner.", "He returned to the Princeton area in the 1970s, where he was taken care of by the long-suffering Alicia, now his ex-wife (she supported him partly through computer programming, partly on welfare). He haunted the campus, where students began to call him \"the Phantom.\" They would come to class in the morning to find runic messages he had written on the blackboard at night: \"Mao Tse-Tung's Bar Mitzvah was 13 years, 13 months, and 13 days after Brezhnev's circumcision.\"", "Agame is just a conflict situation with a bunch of participants, or \"players.\" The players could be poker pals, oligopolists competing to corner a market, or nuclear powers trying to dominate each", "at least one coffee molecule must remain absolutely still. Both are direct consequences of a \"fixed-point theorem\" in the branch of mathematics known as topology. This theorem says that for any continuous rearrangement of a domain of things, there will" ], [ "Folie ࠎ \n\n People with high IQs tend to be nearsighted. This is not because they read a lot or stare at computer screens too much. That common-sense hypothesis has been discredited by research. Rather, it is a matter of genetics. The same genes that tend to elevate IQ also tend to affect the shape of the eyeball in a way that leads to myopia. This relationship--known in genetics as \"pleiotropy\"--seems to be completely accidental, a quirk of evolution.", "Could there be a similar pleiotropy between madness and mathematics? Reading this absolutely fascinating biography by Sylvia Nasar, an economics writer for the New York Times , I began to wonder. Its subject, John Nash, is a mathematical genius who went crazy at the age of 30 and then, after several decades of flamboyant lunacy, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for something he had discovered as a graduate student. (He is now about to turn 70.) Nash is among the latest in a long and distinguished line of mathematicians--stretching back to that morbid paranoiac, Isaac Newton--who have been certifiably insane during parts of their lives.", "So maybe there is an accidental, pleiotropic connection between madness and mathematics. Or maybe it isn't so accidental. Mathematicians are, after all, people who fancy that they commune with perfect Platonic objects--abstract spaces, infinite numbers, zeta functions--that are invisible to normal humans. They spend their days piecing together complicated, scrupulously logical tales about these hallucinatory entities, which they believe are vastly more important than anything in the actual world. Is this not a kind of a folie à n (where n equals the number of pure mathematicians worldwide)? \n\n ABeautiful Mind reveals quite a lot about the psychic continuum leading from mathematical genius to madness. It is also a very peculiar redemption story: how three decades of raging schizophrenia, capped by an unexpected Nobel Prize, can transmute a cruel shit into a frail but decent human being.", "The eeriest thing I discovered while reading this superb book was that Nash and I came within a couple of years of crossing paths in a Virginia mental hospital. I was actually working there, but psychiatric aides pick up so many mannerisms of the patients that it's hard to tell the difference after a while. A few years after that I found myself in a mathematics Ph.D. program. You'll be glad to know that I'm in remission.", "All the while, Nash was showing an intense interest in the state of Israel--often a sign of incipient insanity, at least in a non-Jew. Geniuses slipping into madness also tend to disrobe in public (I learned this from a volume on chess prodigies, who have a proclivity for disrobing on public buses). Nash showed up for an MIT New Year's Eve party clad only in a diaper. And then, of course, there was the New York Times , that old mainstay of psychotic delusion--Nash thought aliens were sending him encrypted messages through its pages (come to think of it, that could explain the Times ' odd prose).", "That about marked the end of Nash's career as a mathematical genius. The next year, he was expelled from Rand as a security risk after local police caught him engaging in a lewd act in a public men's room near Muscle Beach. At MIT, where he had been given a teaching job, he hardly bothered with undergraduates and humiliated graduate students by solving their thesis problems. He carried on affairs with several men and a mistress, who bore him a son he refused to lift a finger to support. His cruel streak extended to the woman he married, a beautiful physics student named Alicia who was awed by this \"genius with a penis.\" Once, at a math department picnic, he threw her to the ground and put his foot on her throat.", "Indeed, he has evolved into a \"very fine person,\" according to his ex-wife--humbled by years of psychotic helplessness, buoyed up by the intellectual world's highest accolade. The Nobel has a terrible effect on the productivity of many recipients, paralyzing them with greatness. For Nash it was pure therapy. Then, too, there is the need to take care of his son by Alicia, who--pleiotropically?--inherited both his mathematical promise and his madness. (His older son, the one born out of wedlock, got neither.) The Nobel money bought a new boiler for the little bungalow across from the Princeton train station inhabited by this shaky menage. (When Vanity Fair published an excerpt of A Beautiful Mind , Nash probably became the only person ever featured in that magazine to live in a house clad in \"insulbrick.\")", "In sheer appearance, this cold and aloof Southerner stood out from his fellow math prodigies. A \"beautiful dark-haired young man,\" \"handsome as a god,\" he was 6 feet 1 inch tall, with broad shoulders, a heavily muscled chest (which he liked to show off with see-through Dacron shirts), a tapered waist, and \"rather limp and beautiful hands\" accentuated by long fingernails. Within two years of entering Princeton, Nash had framed and proved the most important proposition in the theory of games. \n\n Mathematically, this was no big deal. Game theory was a somewhat fashionable pursuit for mathematicians in those postwar days, when it looked as if it might do for military science and economics what Newton's calculus had done for physics. But they were bored with it by the early 1950s. Economists, after a few decades of hesitation, picked it up in the '80s and made it a cornerstone of their discipline.", "Just in the last 100 years or so, most of the heroic figures in the foundations of mathematics have landed in mental asylums or have died by their own hand. The greatest of them, Kurt Gödel, starved himself to death in the belief that his colleagues were putting poison in his food. Of the two pioneers of game theory--the field in which Nash garnered his Nobel--one, Ernst Zermelo, was hospitalized for psychosis. The other, John Von Neumann, may not have been clinically insane, but he did serve as the real-life model for the title character in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove .", "He returned to the Princeton area in the 1970s, where he was taken care of by the long-suffering Alicia, now his ex-wife (she supported him partly through computer programming, partly on welfare). He haunted the campus, where students began to call him \"the Phantom.\" They would come to class in the morning to find runic messages he had written on the blackboard at night: \"Mao Tse-Tung's Bar Mitzvah was 13 years, 13 months, and 13 days after Brezhnev's circumcision.\"", "When the big breakdown came, it was properly mathematical. Fearing his powers might be waning as he approached 30, Nash decided he would solve the most important unresolved problem in mathematics: the Riemann Zeta conjecture. This bold guess about the solutions to a certain complex-valued infinite series (made by the incomparable Bernhard Riemann in 1859) would, if true, have far-reaching implications for the structure of the most basic of entities, the natural numbers. Before an eager audience of hundreds of mathematicians at Columbia University in 1959, Nash presented his results: a farrago of mathematical lunacy. \"Nash's talk wasn't good or bad,\" said one mathematician present. \"It was horrible.\" Some weeks before, Nash had declined a University of Chicago offer of an endowed chair on the grounds that he was scheduled to become the emperor of Antarctica.", "Such ebullitions of insanity continued for three decades, becoming more rococo. Nash went to Europe to form a world government, attempting repeatedly to renounce his U.S. citizenship. He did stints in tony asylums, hanging out with Robert Lowell, and in dismal state institutions, where he was subjected daily to insulin-induced comas. He believed himself to be a Palestinian refugee called C.O.R.P.S.E.; a great Japanese shogun, C1423; Esau; the prince of peace; l'homme d'Or ; a mouse. As Nasar observes, his delusions were weirdly inconsistent. He felt himself simultaneously to be the epicenter of the universe--\"I am the left foot of God on earth\"--and an abject, persecuted petitioner.", "at least one coffee molecule must remain absolutely still. Both are direct consequences of a \"fixed-point theorem\" in the branch of mathematics known as topology. This theorem says that for any continuous rearrangement of a domain of things, there will", "Then, in the '90s, inexplicably, the voices in Nash's head began to quiet down. (Nasar gives an interesting account of just how rare such remissions are among those diagnosed with schizophrenia.) At the same time, the Nobel committee in Stockholm was deciding it was about time to award the prize in economics for game theory. Dare they make a known madman into a laureate? What might he say to King Gustav at the ceremony? Nasar shows her mettle as a reporter here by penetrating the veil of secrecy surrounding the Nobel and revealing the back-stage machinations for and against Nash's candidacy. He did fine at the ceremony, by the way.", "Nash's breakthrough in game theory got him recruited by the Rand Corp., which was then a secretive military think tank in Santa Monica (its name is an acronym for \"research and development\"). However, the achievement did not greatly impress his fellow mathematicians. To do that, Nash, on a wager, disposed of a deep problem that had baffled the profession since the 19 th century: He showed that any Riemannian manifold possessing a special kind of \"smoothness\" can be embedded in Euclidean space. Manifolds, one must understand, are fairly wild and exotic beasts in mathematics. A famous example is the Klein bottle, a kind of higher-dimensional Moebius strip whose inside is somehow the same as its outside. Euclidean space, by contrast, is orderly and bourgeois. To demonstrate that \"impossible\" manifolds could be coaxed into living in Euclidean space is counterintuitive and pretty exciting. Nash did this by constructing a bizarre set of inequalities that left his fellow mathematicians thoroughly befuddled.", "As a boy growing up in the hills of West Virginia, Nash enjoyed torturing animals and building homemade bombs with two other unpopular youngsters, one of whom was accidentally killed by a blast. (Given Nash's childhood keenness for explosives and his later penchant for sending odd packages to prominent strangers through the mail, it's a wonder the FBI never got on to him as a Unabomber suspect.) He made his way to Carnegie Tech, where he was a classmate of Andy Warhol's, and thence to Princeton--the world capital of mathematics at the time--at the age of 20.", "necessarily exist at least one thing in that domain that will remain unchanged--the \"fixed point.\" Nash found a way of applying this to the domain of all game strategies so that the guaranteed fixed point was the equilibrium for the game--clever,", "but the earlier topological theorem did all the work. Still, for an economics theorem, that counts as profound. Economists have been known to win Nobel Prizes for rediscovering theorems in elementary calculus.", "Agame is just a conflict situation with a bunch of participants, or \"players.\" The players could be poker pals, oligopolists competing to corner a market, or nuclear powers trying to dominate each", "can improve his situation by switching to a different strategy. His proof was elegant but slight. A game is guaranteed to have a Nash equilibrium, it turns out, for the same reason that in a cup of coffee that is being stirred," ] ]
valid	22073	[ "Why was it urgent to repair the old Beacon?", "What is the most time-consuming part of traveling using hyperspace?", "Why did the natives build a pyramid around the reactor?", "What was the purpose of the pool of water on top of the pyramid", "When the narrator mentions \"the eye,\" what is he describing?", "How did the narrator learn the local language?", "What was the natives' solution to keeping the holy waters from stopping again?", "Why was the narrator able to take off his camouflage suit in front of the priests?" ]	[ [ "It was causing disruptions in hyperspace travel", "It had been 2000 years since the last routine matinence", "It was keeping the Proxima Cetauri planets safe", "To appease the local Earthlings" ], [ "Flying through regular space ", "Locating enough beacons", "Filling out paperwork", "Preparing the ship for the jump" ], [ "They saw it as a religious site", "The reactor was built after the pyramid was built", "They wanted to harness its' power", "To protect it from extra terrestrials" ], [ "To cool the reactor hidden within the pyramid", "To provide a source of drinking water for the natives", "To collect solar energy and create power", "To serve as a religious bathing site for the natives" ], [ "The agency always watching him", "His bionic machine eye", "The telescope of his ship", "A drone-like camera" ], [ "He left a recorder in a busy area and fed it to a computer ", "He spent time in the society under a disguise", "He studied it during his journey through space", "He asked a local boy to teach him" ], [ "To call the repairmen for help if it happens again", "To sacrifice priests to appease the Gods", "To blind anyone who enters the holy space", "To weld the gate shut and never allow anyone to enter the holy space" ], [ "He was going to be leaving soon ", "He had incapacitated them beforehand ", "They were blinded in order to enter the reactor", "They understood that he was an extra terrestrial" ] ]	[ 1, 1, 1, 1, 4, 1, 3, 3 ]	[ 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "“Mark III,” the Old Man repeated, practically chortling.\n “I never heard of it either until Records dug up the specs. They\n found them buried in the back of their oldest warehouse. This was the\n earliest type of beacon ever built—by Earth, no less. Considering\n its location on one of the Proxima Centauri planets, it might very well\n be the first beacon.”\nI looked\n at the blueprints he handed me and felt my eyes glaze with\n horror. “It’s a monstrosity! It looks more like a distillery\n than a beacon—must be at least a few hundred meters high.\n I’m a repairman, not an archeologist. This pile of junk is over\n 2000 years old. Just forget about it and build a new one.”\n\n\n The Old Man leaned over his desk, breathing into my face. “It\n would take a year to install a new beacon—besides being too\n expensive—and this relic is on one of the main routes. We have\n ships making fifteen-light-year detours now.”", "A crumbling and cracked stone stairway brought us up to a solid metal\n doorway labeled in archaic script\n MARK III BEACON—AUTHORIZED\n PERSONNEL ONLY\n . The trusting builders counted on the sign to do the\n whole job, for there wasn’t a trace of a lock on the door. One\n lizard merely turned the handle and we were inside the beacon.\n\n\n I unzipped the front of my camouflage suit and pulled out the\n blueprints. With the faithful priests stumbling after me, I located the\n control room and turned on the lights. There was a residue of charge in\n the emergency batteries, just enough to give a dim light. The meters and\n indicators looked to be in good shape; if anything, unexpectedly bright\n from constant polishing.", "I wasn’t going to play with the fuel problem at all. It would be\n far easier to install a new power plant. I had one in the ship that was\n about a tenth the size of the ancient bucket of bolts and produced at\n least four times the power. Before I sent for it, I checked over the\n rest of the beacon. In 2000 years, there should be\n some\n sign of wear.\n\n\n The old boys had built well, I’ll give them credit for that.\n Ninety per cent of the machinery had no moving parts and had suffered no\n wear whatever. Other parts they had beefed up, figuring they would wear,\n but slowly. The water-feed pipe from the roof, for example. The pipe\n walls were at least three meters thick—and the pipe opening itself\n no bigger than my head. There were some things I could do, though, and I\n made a list of parts.", "I dived the eye lower. The pyramid was a crude-looking thing of\n undressed stone, without carvings or decorations. There was a shimmer of\n light from the top and I took a closer look at it. On the peak of the\n pyramid was a hollow basin filled with water. When I saw that, something\n clicked in my mind.\nLocking\n the eye in a circular course, I dug through the Mark III\n plans—and there it was. The beacon had a precipitating field and a\n basin on top of it for water; this was used to cool the reactor that\n powered the monstrosity. If the water was still there, the beacon was\n still there—inside the pyramid. The natives, who, of course,\n weren’t even mentioned by the idiots who constructed the thing,\n had built a nice heavy, thick stone pyramid around the beacon.", "The parts, the new power plant and a few other odds and ends were chuted\n into a neat pile on the ship. I checked all the parts by screen before\n they were loaded in a metal crate. In the darkest hour before dawn, the\n heavy-duty eye dropped the crate outside the temple and darted away\n without being seen.\n\n\n I watched the priests through the pryeye while they tried to open it.\n When they had given up, I boomed orders at them through a speaker in the\n crate. They spent most of the day sweating the heavy box up through the\n narrow temple stairs and I enjoyed a good sleep. It was resting inside\n the beacon door when I woke up.\nThe\n repairs didn’t take long, though there was plenty of groaning\n from the blind lizards when they heard me ripping the wall open to get\n at the power leads. I even hooked a gadget to the water pipe so their\n Holy Waters would have the usual refreshing radioactivity when they\n started flowing again. The moment this was all finished, I did the job\n they were waiting for.", "He leaned back, wiped his hands on his handkerchief and gave me Lecture\n Forty-four on Company Duty and My Troubles.\n\n\n “This department is officially called Maintenance and Repair, when\n it really should be called trouble-shooting. Hyperspace beacons are made\n to last forever—or damn close to it. When one of them breaks down,\n it is\n never\n an accident, and repairing the thing is never a matter of\n just plugging in a new part.”\n\n\n He was telling\n me\n —the guy who did the job while he sat back on his\n fat paycheck in an air-conditioned office.\n\n\n He rambled on. “How I wish that were all it took! I would have a\n fleet of parts ships and junior mechanics to install them. But its not\n like that at all. I have a fleet of expensive ships that are equipped to\n do almost anything—manned by a bunch of irresponsibles like\n you\n .”", "I had got turned around after the eye-burning and my flying beast hooked\n onto me backward. I had meant to sail out bravely, blind eyes facing\n into the sunset; instead, I faced the crowd as I soared away, so I made\n the most of a bad situation and threw them a snappy military salute.\n Then I was out in the fresh air and away.\n\n\n When I lifted the plate and poked holes in the seared plastic, I could\n see the pyramid growing smaller behind me, water gushing out of the base\n and a happy crowd of reptiles sporting in its radioactive rush. I\n counted off on my talons to see if I had forgotten anything.\n\n\n One: The beacon was repaired.\n\n\n Two: The door was sealed, so there should be no more sabotage,\n accidental or deliberate.", "The time went fast. I rebuilt my camera for about the twentieth time and\n just about finished a correspondence course in nucleonics. Most\n repairmen take these courses. Besides their always coming in handy, the\n company grades your pay by the number of specialties you can handle. All\n this, with some oil painting and free-fall workouts in the gym, passed\n the time. I was asleep when the alarm went off that announced planetary\n distance.\n\n\n Planet two, where the beacon was situated according to the old charts,\n was a mushy-looking, wet kind of globe. I tried to make sense out of\n the ancient directions and finally located the right area. Staying\n outside the atmosphere, I sent a flying eye down to look things over. In\n this business, you learn early when and where to risk your own skin. The\n eye would be good enough for the preliminary survey.", "Three: The priests should be satisfied. The water was running again, my\n eyes had been duly burned out, and they were back in business. Which\n added up to—\n\n\n Four: The fact that they would probably let another repairman in, under\n the same conditions, if the beacon conked out again. At least I had done\n nothing, like butchering a few of them, that would make them\n antagonistic toward future ancestral messengers.\n\n\n I stripped off my tattered lizard suit back in the ship, very glad that\n it would be some other repairman who’d get the job.\n—\nHarry Harrison\nTranscriber’s Note\n\n\n This etext was produced from\n Galaxy\n February 1958. Extensive research\n did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication\n was renewed.", "The old boys had enough brains to choose a traceable site for the\n beacon, equidistant on a line between two of the most prominent mountain\n peaks. I located the peaks easily enough and started the eye out from\n the first peak and kept it on a course directly toward the second. There\n was a nose and tail radar in the eye and I fed their signals into a\n scope as an amplitude curve. When the two peaks coincided, I spun the\n eye controls and dived the thing down.\n\n\n I cut out the radar and cut in the nose orthicon and sat back to watch\n the beacon appear on the screen.\n\n\n The image blinked, focused—and a great damn pyramid swam into\n view. I cursed and wheeled the eye in circles, scanning the surrounding\n country. It was flat, marshy bottom land without a bump. The only thing\n in a ten-mile circle was this pyramid—and that definitely\n wasn’t my beacon.\n\n\n Or wasn’t it?", "Normally, a repairman stays away from native cultures. They are poison.\n Anthropologists may not mind being dissected for their science, but a\n repairman wants to make no sacrifices of any kind for his job. For this\n reason, most beacons are built on uninhabited planets. If a beacon\n has\n to go on a planet with a culture, it is usually built in some\n inaccessible place.\n\n\n Why this beacon had been built within reach of the local claws, I had\n yet to find out. But that would come in time. The first thing to do was\n make contact. To make contact, you have to know the local language.\n\n\n And, for\n that\n , I had long before worked out a system that was\n fool-proof.", "“Here is some money from paradise, because you have been a good\n boy.” Not really from paradise—I had lifted it from the\n treasury the night before. “Come back tomorrow and we will talk\n some more,” I called after the fleeing figure. I was pleased to\n notice that he took the cash before taking off.\n\n\n After that, Grandpa in paradise had many heart-to-heart talks with\n Grandson, who found the heavenly loot more than he could resist. Grandpa\n had been out of touch with things since his death and Goat-boy happily\n filled him in.\n\n\n I learned all I needed to know of the history, past and recent, and it\n wasn’t nice.\n\n\n In addition to the pyramid being around the beacon, there was a nice\n little religious war going on around the pyramid.", "To understand the importance of the beacons, you have to understand\n hyperspace. Not that many people do, but it is easy enough to understand\n that in this\n non\n -space the regular rules don’t apply. Speed and\n measurements are a matter of relationship, not constant facts like the\n fixed universe.\n\n\n The first ships to enter hyperspace had no place to go—and no way\n to even tell if they had moved. The beacons solved that problem and\n opened the entire universe. They are built on planets and generate\n tremendous amounts of power. This power is turned into radiation that is\n punched through into hyperspace. Every beacon has a code signal as part\n of its radiation and represents a measurable point in hyperspace.\n Triangulation and quadrature of the beacons works for\n navigation—only it follows its own rules. The rules are complex\n and variable, but they are still rules that a navigator can follow.", "A city was built around the temple and, through the centuries, the\n pyramid was put up around the beacon. A special branch of the priesthood\n served the temple. All went well until one of the priests violated the\n temple and destroyed the holy waters. There had been revolt, strife,\n murder and destruction since then. But still the holy waters would not\n flow. Now armed mobs fought around the temple each day and a new band of\n priests guarded the sacred fount.\n\n\n And I had to walk into the middle of that mess and repair the thing.\n\n\n It would have been easy enough if we were allowed a little mayhem. I\n could have had a lizard fry, fixed the beacon and taken off. Only\n “native life-forms” were quite well protected. There were\n spy cells on my ship, all of which I hadn’t found, that would\n cheerfully rat on me when I got back.", "The Repairman\nBy Harry Harrison\nIllustrated by Kramer\nBeing an interstellar trouble shooter wouldn’t be so bad …\n if I could shoot the trouble!\n\n\n The\n Old Man had that look of intense glee on his face that meant someone\n was in for a very rough time. Since we were alone, it took no great feat\n of intelligence to figure it would be me. I talked first, bold attack\n being the best defense and so forth.\n\n\n “I quit. Don’t bother telling me what dirty job you have\n cooked up, because I have already quit and you do not want to reveal\n company secrets to me.”\n\n\n The grin was even wider now and he actually chortled as he thumbed a\n button on his console. A thick legal document slid out of the delivery\n slot onto his desk.\n\n\n “This is your contract,” he said. “It tells how and\n when you will work. A steel-and-vanadium-bound contract that you\n couldn’t crack with a molecular disruptor.”", "For a hyperspace jump, you need at least four beacons for an accurate\n fix. For long jumps, navigators use as many as seven or eight. So every\n beacon is important and every one has to keep operating. That is where I\n and the other trouble-shooters came in.\n\n\n We travel in well-stocked ships that carry a little bit of everything;\n only one man to a ship because that is all it takes to operate the\n overly efficient repair machinery. Due to the very nature of our job, we\n spend most of our time just rocketing through normal space. After all,\n when a beacon breaks down, how do you find it?\n\n\n Not through hyperspace. All you can do is approach as close as you can\n by using other beacons, then finish the trip in normal space. This can\n take months, and often does.", "“According to this document, you can’t quit. Ever. Therefore\n I have a little job I know you’ll enjoy. Repair job. The Centauri\n beacon has shut down. It’s a Mark III beacon.…”\n\n\n “\n What\n kind of beacon?” I asked him. I have repaired\n hyperspace beacons from one arm of the Galaxy to the other and was sure\n I had worked on every type or model made. But I had never heard of this\n kind.", "I nodded moodily at his pointing finger.\n\n\n “How I wish I could fire you all! Combination space-jockeys,\n mechanics, engineers, soldiers, con-men and anything else it takes to do\n the repairs. I have to browbeat, bribe, blackmail and bulldoze you thugs\n into doing a simple job. If you think you’re fed up, just think\n how I feel. But the ships must go through! The beacons must\n operate!”\n\n\n I recognized this deathless line as the curtain speech and crawled to my\n feet. He threw the Mark III file at me and went back to scratching in\n his papers. Just as I reached the door, he looked up and impaled me on\n his finger again.\n\n\n “And don’t get any fancy ideas about jumping your contract.\n We can attach that bank account of yours on Algol II long before you\n could draw the money out.”", "“Undoubtedly you know of the rule,” he said. “Because\n the old priests did pry and peer, it was ruled henceforth that only the\n blind could enter the Holy of Holies.” I’d swear he was\n smiling, if thirty teeth peeking out of what looked like a crack in an\n old suitcase can be called smiling.\n\n\n He was also signaling to him an underpriest who carried a brazier of\n charcoal complete with red-hot irons. All I could do was stand and watch\n as he stirred up the coals, pulled out the ruddiest iron and turned\n toward me. He was just drawing a bead on my right eyeball when my brain\n got back in gear.", "I threw the switch that started the water flowing again.\n\n\n There were a few minutes while the water began to gurgle down through\n the dry pipe. Then a roar came from outside the pyramid that must have\n shaken its stone walls. Shaking my hands once over my head, I went down\n for the eye-burning ceremony.\n\n\n The blind lizards were waiting for me by the door and looked even\n unhappier than usual. When I tried the door, I found out why—it\n was bolted and barred from the other side.\n\n\n “It has been decided,” a lizard said, “that you shall\n remain here forever and tend the Holy Waters. We will stay with you and\n serve your every need.”\n\n\n A delightful prospect, eternity spent in a locked beacon with three\n blind lizards. In spite of their hospitality, I couldn’t accept." ], [ "For a hyperspace jump, you need at least four beacons for an accurate\n fix. For long jumps, navigators use as many as seven or eight. So every\n beacon is important and every one has to keep operating. That is where I\n and the other trouble-shooters came in.\n\n\n We travel in well-stocked ships that carry a little bit of everything;\n only one man to a ship because that is all it takes to operate the\n overly efficient repair machinery. Due to the very nature of our job, we\n spend most of our time just rocketing through normal space. After all,\n when a beacon breaks down, how do you find it?\n\n\n Not through hyperspace. All you can do is approach as close as you can\n by using other beacons, then finish the trip in normal space. This can\n take months, and often does.", "I would much rather take a chance of breaking through near some star\n than spend time just barreling through normal space, but apparently Tech\n knows this, too. They had a safety factor built into the computer so you\n couldn’t end up inside a star no matter how hard you tried.\n I’m sure there was no humaneness in this decision. They just\n didn’t want to lose the ship.\nIt\n was a twenty-hour jump, ship’s time, and I came through in the\n middle of nowhere. The robot analyzer chuckled to itself and scanned all\n the stars, comparing them to the spectra of Proxima Centauri. It finally\n rang a bell and blinked a light. I peeped through the eyepiece.\n\n\n A fast reading with the photocell gave me the apparent magnitude and a\n comparison with its absolute magnitude showed its distance. Not as bad\n as I had thought—a six-week run, give or take a few days. After\n feeding a course tape into the robot pilot, I strapped into the\n acceleration tank and went to sleep.", "To understand the importance of the beacons, you have to understand\n hyperspace. Not that many people do, but it is easy enough to understand\n that in this\n non\n -space the regular rules don’t apply. Speed and\n measurements are a matter of relationship, not constant facts like the\n fixed universe.\n\n\n The first ships to enter hyperspace had no place to go—and no way\n to even tell if they had moved. The beacons solved that problem and\n opened the entire universe. They are built on planets and generate\n tremendous amounts of power. This power is turned into radiation that is\n punched through into hyperspace. Every beacon has a code signal as part\n of its radiation and represents a measurable point in hyperspace.\n Triangulation and quadrature of the beacons works for\n navigation—only it follows its own rules. The rules are complex\n and variable, but they are still rules that a navigator can follow.", "He leaned back, wiped his hands on his handkerchief and gave me Lecture\n Forty-four on Company Duty and My Troubles.\n\n\n “This department is officially called Maintenance and Repair, when\n it really should be called trouble-shooting. Hyperspace beacons are made\n to last forever—or damn close to it. When one of them breaks down,\n it is\n never\n an accident, and repairing the thing is never a matter of\n just plugging in a new part.”\n\n\n He was telling\n me\n —the guy who did the job while he sat back on his\n fat paycheck in an air-conditioned office.\n\n\n He rambled on. “How I wish that were all it took! I would have a\n fleet of parts ships and junior mechanics to install them. But its not\n like that at all. I have a fleet of expensive ships that are equipped to\n do almost anything—manned by a bunch of irresponsibles like\n you\n .”", "The time went fast. I rebuilt my camera for about the twentieth time and\n just about finished a correspondence course in nucleonics. Most\n repairmen take these courses. Besides their always coming in handy, the\n company grades your pay by the number of specialties you can handle. All\n this, with some oil painting and free-fall workouts in the gym, passed\n the time. I was asleep when the alarm went off that announced planetary\n distance.\n\n\n Planet two, where the beacon was situated according to the old charts,\n was a mushy-looking, wet kind of globe. I tried to make sense out of\n the ancient directions and finally located the right area. Staying\n outside the atmosphere, I sent a flying eye down to look things over. In\n this business, you learn early when and where to risk your own skin. The\n eye would be good enough for the preliminary survey.", "I smiled, a little weakly, I’m afraid, as if I had never meant to\n keep that account a secret. His spies were getting more efficient every\n day. Walking down the hall, I tried to figure a way to transfer the\n money without his catching on—and knew at the same time he was\n figuring a way to outfigure me.\n\n\n It was all very depressing, so I stopped for a drink, then went on to\n the spaceport.\nBy\n the time the ship was serviced, I had a course charted. The nearest\n beacon to the broken-down Proxima Centauri Beacon was on one of the\n planets of Beta Circinus and I headed there first, a short trip of only\n about nine days in hyperspace.", "This job didn’t turn out to be quite that bad. I zeroed on the\n Beta Circinus beacon and ran a complicated eight-point problem through\n the navigator, using every beacon I could get an accurate fix on. The\n computer gave me a course with an estimated point-of-arrival as well as\n a built-in safety factor I never could eliminate from the machine.", "I wasn’t going to play with the fuel problem at all. It would be\n far easier to install a new power plant. I had one in the ship that was\n about a tenth the size of the ancient bucket of bolts and produced at\n least four times the power. Before I sent for it, I checked over the\n rest of the beacon. In 2000 years, there should be\n some\n sign of wear.\n\n\n The old boys had built well, I’ll give them credit for that.\n Ninety per cent of the machinery had no moving parts and had suffered no\n wear whatever. Other parts they had beefed up, figuring they would wear,\n but slowly. The water-feed pipe from the roof, for example. The pipe\n walls were at least three meters thick—and the pipe opening itself\n no bigger than my head. There were some things I could do, though, and I\n made a list of parts.", "“Mark III,” the Old Man repeated, practically chortling.\n “I never heard of it either until Records dug up the specs. They\n found them buried in the back of their oldest warehouse. This was the\n earliest type of beacon ever built—by Earth, no less. Considering\n its location on one of the Proxima Centauri planets, it might very well\n be the first beacon.”\nI looked\n at the blueprints he handed me and felt my eyes glaze with\n horror. “It’s a monstrosity! It looks more like a distillery\n than a beacon—must be at least a few hundred meters high.\n I’m a repairman, not an archeologist. This pile of junk is over\n 2000 years old. Just forget about it and build a new one.”\n\n\n The Old Man leaned over his desk, breathing into my face. “It\n would take a year to install a new beacon—besides being too\n expensive—and this relic is on one of the main routes. We have\n ships making fifteen-light-year detours now.”", "I nodded moodily at his pointing finger.\n\n\n “How I wish I could fire you all! Combination space-jockeys,\n mechanics, engineers, soldiers, con-men and anything else it takes to do\n the repairs. I have to browbeat, bribe, blackmail and bulldoze you thugs\n into doing a simple job. If you think you’re fed up, just think\n how I feel. But the ships must go through! The beacons must\n operate!”\n\n\n I recognized this deathless line as the curtain speech and crawled to my\n feet. He threw the Mark III file at me and went back to scratching in\n his papers. Just as I reached the door, he looked up and impaled me on\n his finger again.\n\n\n “And don’t get any fancy ideas about jumping your contract.\n We can attach that bank account of yours on Algol II long before you\n could draw the money out.”", "I took another look at the screen and realized that I had locked the eye\n into a circular orbit about twenty feet above the pyramid. The summit of\n the stone pile was now covered with lizards of some type, apparently the\n local life-form. They had what looked like throwing sticks and arbalasts\n and were trying to shoot down the eye, a cloud of arrows and rocks\n flying in every direction.\n\n\n I pulled the eye straight up and away and threw in the control circuit\n that would return it automatically to the ship.\n\n\n Then I went to the galley for a long, strong drink. My beacon was not\n only locked inside a mountain of handmade stone, but I had managed to\n irritate the things who had built the pyramid. A great beginning for a\n job and one clearly designed to drive a stronger man than me to the\n bottle.", "“According to this document, you can’t quit. Ever. Therefore\n I have a little job I know you’ll enjoy. Repair job. The Centauri\n beacon has shut down. It’s a Mark III beacon.…”\n\n\n “\n What\n kind of beacon?” I asked him. I have repaired\n hyperspace beacons from one arm of the Galaxy to the other and was sure\n I had worked on every type or model made. But I had never heard of this\n kind.", "Normally, a repairman stays away from native cultures. They are poison.\n Anthropologists may not mind being dissected for their science, but a\n repairman wants to make no sacrifices of any kind for his job. For this\n reason, most beacons are built on uninhabited planets. If a beacon\n has\n to go on a planet with a culture, it is usually built in some\n inaccessible place.\n\n\n Why this beacon had been built within reach of the local claws, I had\n yet to find out. But that would come in time. The first thing to do was\n make contact. To make contact, you have to know the local language.\n\n\n And, for\n that\n , I had long before worked out a system that was\n fool-proof.", "When the head was done, I peeled it off and attached it to an attractive\n suit of green plastic, complete with tail. I was really glad they had\n tails. The lizards didn’t wear clothes and I wanted to take along\n a lot of electronic equipment. I built the tail over a metal frame that\n anchored around my waist. Then I filled the frame with all the equipment\n I would need and began to wire the suit.\n\n\n When it was done, I tried it on in front of a full-length mirror. It was\n horrible but effective. The tail dragged me down in the rear and gave me\n a duck-waddle, but that only helped the resemblance.\n\n\n That night I took the ship down into the hills nearest the pyramid, an\n out-of-the-way dry spot where the amphibious natives would never go. A\n little before dawn, the eye hooked onto my shoulders and we sailed\n straight up. We hovered above the temple at about 2,000 meters, until it\n was light, then dropped straight down.", "A city was built around the temple and, through the centuries, the\n pyramid was put up around the beacon. A special branch of the priesthood\n served the temple. All went well until one of the priests violated the\n temple and destroyed the holy waters. There had been revolt, strife,\n murder and destruction since then. But still the holy waters would not\n flow. Now armed mobs fought around the temple each day and a new band of\n priests guarded the sacred fount.\n\n\n And I had to walk into the middle of that mess and repair the thing.\n\n\n It would have been easy enough if we were allowed a little mayhem. I\n could have had a lizard fry, fixed the beacon and taken off. Only\n “native life-forms” were quite well protected. There were\n spy cells on my ship, all of which I hadn’t found, that would\n cheerfully rat on me when I got back.", "A crumbling and cracked stone stairway brought us up to a solid metal\n doorway labeled in archaic script\n MARK III BEACON—AUTHORIZED\n PERSONNEL ONLY\n . The trusting builders counted on the sign to do the\n whole job, for there wasn’t a trace of a lock on the door. One\n lizard merely turned the handle and we were inside the beacon.\n\n\n I unzipped the front of my camouflage suit and pulled out the\n blueprints. With the faithful priests stumbling after me, I located the\n control room and turned on the lights. There was a residue of charge in\n the emergency batteries, just enough to give a dim light. The meters and\n indicators looked to be in good shape; if anything, unexpectedly bright\n from constant polishing.", "Diplomacy was called for. I sighed and dragged out the plastiflesh\n equipment.\nWorking\n from 3D snaps of Grandson, I modeled a passable reptile head\n over my own features. It was a little short in the jaw, me not having\n one of their toothy mandibles, but that was all right. I didn’t\n have to look\n exactly\n like them, just something close, to soothe the\n native mind. It’s logical. If I were an ignorant aborigine of\n Earth and I ran into a Spican, who looks like a two-foot gob of dried\n shellac, I would immediately leave the scene. However, if the Spican was\n wearing a suit of plastiflesh that looked remotely humanoid, I would at\n least stay and talk to him. This was what I was aiming to do with the\n Centaurians.", "The Repairman\nBy Harry Harrison\nIllustrated by Kramer\nBeing an interstellar trouble shooter wouldn’t be so bad …\n if I could shoot the trouble!\n\n\n The\n Old Man had that look of intense glee on his face that meant someone\n was in for a very rough time. Since we were alone, it took no great feat\n of intelligence to figure it would be me. I talked first, bold attack\n being the best defense and so forth.\n\n\n “I quit. Don’t bother telling me what dirty job you have\n cooked up, because I have already quit and you do not want to reveal\n company secrets to me.”\n\n\n The grin was even wider now and he actually chortled as he thumbed a\n button on his console. A thick legal document slid out of the delivery\n slot onto his desk.\n\n\n “This is your contract,” he said. “It tells how and\n when you will work. A steel-and-vanadium-bound contract that you\n couldn’t crack with a molecular disruptor.”", "I had got turned around after the eye-burning and my flying beast hooked\n onto me backward. I had meant to sail out bravely, blind eyes facing\n into the sunset; instead, I faced the crowd as I soared away, so I made\n the most of a bad situation and threw them a snappy military salute.\n Then I was out in the fresh air and away.\n\n\n When I lifted the plate and poked holes in the seared plastic, I could\n see the pyramid growing smaller behind me, water gushing out of the base\n and a happy crowd of reptiles sporting in its radioactive rush. I\n counted off on my talons to see if I had forgotten anything.\n\n\n One: The beacon was repaired.\n\n\n Two: The door was sealed, so there should be no more sabotage,\n accidental or deliberate.", "When you get enough reference phrases like this in the memory bank, the\n MT brain takes over and starts filling in the missing pieces. As soon as\n the MT could give a running translation of any conversation it heard, I\n figured it was time to make a contact.\nI found\n him easily enough. He was the Centaurian version of a\n goat-boy—he herded a particularly loathsome form of local life in\n the swamps outside the town. I had one of the working eyes dig a cave in\n an outcropping of rock and wait for him.\n\n\n When he passed next day, I whispered into the mike: “Welcome, O\n Goat-boy Grandson! This is your grandfather’s spirit speaking from\n paradise.” This fitted in with what I could make out of the local\n religion.\n\n\n Goat-boy stopped as if he’d been shot. Before he could move, I\n pushed a switch and a handful of the local currency, wampum-type shells,\n rolled out of the cave and landed at his feet." ], [ "I dived the eye lower. The pyramid was a crude-looking thing of\n undressed stone, without carvings or decorations. There was a shimmer of\n light from the top and I took a closer look at it. On the peak of the\n pyramid was a hollow basin filled with water. When I saw that, something\n clicked in my mind.\nLocking\n the eye in a circular course, I dug through the Mark III\n plans—and there it was. The beacon had a precipitating field and a\n basin on top of it for water; this was used to cool the reactor that\n powered the monstrosity. If the water was still there, the beacon was\n still there—inside the pyramid. The natives, who, of course,\n weren’t even mentioned by the idiots who constructed the thing,\n had built a nice heavy, thick stone pyramid around the beacon.", "A city was built around the temple and, through the centuries, the\n pyramid was put up around the beacon. A special branch of the priesthood\n served the temple. All went well until one of the priests violated the\n temple and destroyed the holy waters. There had been revolt, strife,\n murder and destruction since then. But still the holy waters would not\n flow. Now armed mobs fought around the temple each day and a new band of\n priests guarded the sacred fount.\n\n\n And I had to walk into the middle of that mess and repair the thing.\n\n\n It would have been easy enough if we were allowed a little mayhem. I\n could have had a lizard fry, fixed the beacon and taken off. Only\n “native life-forms” were quite well protected. There were\n spy cells on my ship, all of which I hadn’t found, that would\n cheerfully rat on me when I got back.", "The old boys had enough brains to choose a traceable site for the\n beacon, equidistant on a line between two of the most prominent mountain\n peaks. I located the peaks easily enough and started the eye out from\n the first peak and kept it on a course directly toward the second. There\n was a nose and tail radar in the eye and I fed their signals into a\n scope as an amplitude curve. When the two peaks coincided, I spun the\n eye controls and dived the thing down.\n\n\n I cut out the radar and cut in the nose orthicon and sat back to watch\n the beacon appear on the screen.\n\n\n The image blinked, focused—and a great damn pyramid swam into\n view. I cursed and wheeled the eye in circles, scanning the surrounding\n country. It was flat, marshy bottom land without a bump. The only thing\n in a ten-mile circle was this pyramid—and that definitely\n wasn’t my beacon.\n\n\n Or wasn’t it?", "I had got turned around after the eye-burning and my flying beast hooked\n onto me backward. I had meant to sail out bravely, blind eyes facing\n into the sunset; instead, I faced the crowd as I soared away, so I made\n the most of a bad situation and threw them a snappy military salute.\n Then I was out in the fresh air and away.\n\n\n When I lifted the plate and poked holes in the seared plastic, I could\n see the pyramid growing smaller behind me, water gushing out of the base\n and a happy crowd of reptiles sporting in its radioactive rush. I\n counted off on my talons to see if I had forgotten anything.\n\n\n One: The beacon was repaired.\n\n\n Two: The door was sealed, so there should be no more sabotage,\n accidental or deliberate.", "When the head was done, I peeled it off and attached it to an attractive\n suit of green plastic, complete with tail. I was really glad they had\n tails. The lizards didn’t wear clothes and I wanted to take along\n a lot of electronic equipment. I built the tail over a metal frame that\n anchored around my waist. Then I filled the frame with all the equipment\n I would need and began to wire the suit.\n\n\n When it was done, I tried it on in front of a full-length mirror. It was\n horrible but effective. The tail dragged me down in the rear and gave me\n a duck-waddle, but that only helped the resemblance.\n\n\n That night I took the ship down into the hills nearest the pyramid, an\n out-of-the-way dry spot where the amphibious natives would never go. A\n little before dawn, the eye hooked onto my shoulders and we sailed\n straight up. We hovered above the temple at about 2,000 meters, until it\n was light, then dropped straight down.", "It all began with the land bridge. Apparently the local lizards had been\n living in the swamps when the beacon was built, but the builders\n didn’t think much of them. They were a low type and confined to a\n distant continent. The idea that the race would develop and might reach\n this\n continent never occurred to the beacon mechanics. Which is, of\n course, what happened.\n\n\n A little geological turnover, a swampy land bridge formed in the right\n spot, and the lizards began to wander up beacon valley. And found\n religion. A shiny metal temple out of which poured a constant stream of\n magic water—the reactor-cooling water pumped down from the\n atmosphere condenser on the roof. The radioactivity in the water\n didn’t hurt the natives. It caused mutations that bred true.", "I took another look at the screen and realized that I had locked the eye\n into a circular orbit about twenty feet above the pyramid. The summit of\n the stone pile was now covered with lizards of some type, apparently the\n local life-form. They had what looked like throwing sticks and arbalasts\n and were trying to shoot down the eye, a cloud of arrows and rocks\n flying in every direction.\n\n\n I pulled the eye straight up and away and threw in the control circuit\n that would return it automatically to the ship.\n\n\n Then I went to the galley for a long, strong drink. My beacon was not\n only locked inside a mountain of handmade stone, but I had managed to\n irritate the things who had built the pyramid. A great beginning for a\n job and one clearly designed to drive a stronger man than me to the\n bottle.", "“Here is some money from paradise, because you have been a good\n boy.” Not really from paradise—I had lifted it from the\n treasury the night before. “Come back tomorrow and we will talk\n some more,” I called after the fleeing figure. I was pleased to\n notice that he took the cash before taking off.\n\n\n After that, Grandpa in paradise had many heart-to-heart talks with\n Grandson, who found the heavenly loot more than he could resist. Grandpa\n had been out of touch with things since his death and Goat-boy happily\n filled him in.\n\n\n I learned all I needed to know of the history, past and recent, and it\n wasn’t nice.\n\n\n In addition to the pyramid being around the beacon, there was a nice\n little religious war going on around the pyramid.", "The First Lizard knew I was talking sense then and immediately called a\n meeting of the shamans. It, of course, took place in the public bathtub\n and I had to join them there. We jawed and gurgled for about an hour and\n settled all the major points.\n\n\n I found out that they were new priests; the previous ones had all been\n boiled for letting the Holy Waters cease. They found out I was there\n only to help them restore the flow of the waters. They bought this,\n tentatively, and we all heaved out of the tub and trickled muddy paths\n across the floor. There was a bolted and guarded door that led into the\n pyramid proper. While it was being opened, the First Lizard turned to\n me.", "I checked the readings carefully and found just what I had suspected.\n One of the eager lizards had managed to open a circuit box and had\n polished the switches inside. While doing this, he had thrown one of the\n switches and that had caused the trouble.\nRather\n , that had\n started\n the trouble. It wasn’t going to be ended\n by just reversing the water-valve switch. This valve was supposed to be\n used only for repairs, after the pile was damped. When the water was cut\n off with the pile in operation, it had started to overheat and the\n automatic safeties had dumped the charge down the pit.\n\n\n I could start the water again easily enough, but there was no fuel left\n in the reactor.", "The parts, the new power plant and a few other odds and ends were chuted\n into a neat pile on the ship. I checked all the parts by screen before\n they were loaded in a metal crate. In the darkest hour before dawn, the\n heavy-duty eye dropped the crate outside the temple and darted away\n without being seen.\n\n\n I watched the priests through the pryeye while they tried to open it.\n When they had given up, I boomed orders at them through a speaker in the\n crate. They spent most of the day sweating the heavy box up through the\n narrow temple stairs and I enjoyed a good sleep. It was resting inside\n the beacon door when I woke up.\nThe\n repairs didn’t take long, though there was plenty of groaning\n from the blind lizards when they heard me ripping the wall open to get\n at the power leads. I even hooked a gadget to the water pipe so their\n Holy Waters would have the usual refreshing radioactivity when they\n started flowing again. The moment this was all finished, I did the job\n they were waiting for.", "It must have been a grand sight. The eye was camouflaged to look like a\n flying lizard, sort of a cardboard pterodactyl, and the slowly flapping\n wings obviously had nothing to do with our flight. But it was impressive\n enough for the natives. The first one that spotted me screamed and\n dropped over on his back. The others came running. They milled and\n mobbed and piled on top of one another, and by that time I had landed in\n the plaza fronting the temple. The priesthood arrived.\n\n\n I folded my arms in a regal stance. “Greetings, O noble servers of\n the Great God,” I said. Of course I didn’t say it out loud,\n just whispered loud enough for the throat mike to catch. This was\n radioed back to the MT and the translation shot back to a speaker in my\n jaws.\n\n\n The natives chomped and rattled and the translation rolled out almost\n instantly. I had the volume turned up and the whole square echoed.", "I had a pryeye of my own construction. It looked like a piece of rock\n about a foot long. Once on the ground, it would never be noticed, though\n it was a little disconcerting to see it float by. I located a lizard\n town about a thousand kilometers from the pyramid and dropped the eye.\n It swished down and landed at night in the bank of the local mud wallow.\n This was a favorite spot that drew a good crowd during the day. In the\n morning, when the first wallowers arrived, I flipped on the recorder.", "I threw the switch that started the water flowing again.\n\n\n There were a few minutes while the water began to gurgle down through\n the dry pipe. Then a roar came from outside the pyramid that must have\n shaken its stone walls. Shaking my hands once over my head, I went down\n for the eye-burning ceremony.\n\n\n The blind lizards were waiting for me by the door and looked even\n unhappier than usual. When I tried the door, I found out why—it\n was bolted and barred from the other side.\n\n\n “It has been decided,” a lizard said, “that you shall\n remain here forever and tend the Holy Waters. We will stay with you and\n serve your every need.”\n\n\n A delightful prospect, eternity spent in a locked beacon with three\n blind lizards. In spite of their hospitality, I couldn’t accept.", "Normally, a repairman stays away from native cultures. They are poison.\n Anthropologists may not mind being dissected for their science, but a\n repairman wants to make no sacrifices of any kind for his job. For this\n reason, most beacons are built on uninhabited planets. If a beacon\n has\n to go on a planet with a culture, it is usually built in some\n inaccessible place.\n\n\n Why this beacon had been built within reach of the local claws, I had\n yet to find out. But that would come in time. The first thing to do was\n make contact. To make contact, you have to know the local language.\n\n\n And, for\n that\n , I had long before worked out a system that was\n fool-proof.", "Before they could think up a good answer, I was inside.\nThe\n temple was a small one built against the base of the pyramid. I\n hoped I wasn’t breaking too many taboos by going in. I\n wasn’t stopped, so it looked all right. The temple was a single\n room with a murky-looking pool at one end. Sloshing in the pool was an\n ancient reptile who clearly was one of the leaders. I waddled toward him\n and he gave me a cold and fishy eye, then growled something.\n\n\n The MT whispered into my ear, “Just what in the name of the\n thirteenth sin are you and what are you doing here?”\n\n\n I drew up my scaly figure in a noble gesture and pointed toward the\n ceiling. “I come from your ancestors to help you. I am here to\n restore the Holy Waters.”", "A crumbling and cracked stone stairway brought us up to a solid metal\n doorway labeled in archaic script\n MARK III BEACON—AUTHORIZED\n PERSONNEL ONLY\n . The trusting builders counted on the sign to do the\n whole job, for there wasn’t a trace of a lock on the door. One\n lizard merely turned the handle and we were inside the beacon.\n\n\n I unzipped the front of my camouflage suit and pulled out the\n blueprints. With the faithful priests stumbling after me, I located the\n control room and turned on the lights. There was a residue of charge in\n the emergency batteries, just enough to give a dim light. The meters and\n indicators looked to be in good shape; if anything, unexpectedly bright\n from constant polishing.", "“What—you dare interfere with the messenger of your\n ancestors!” I had the speaker on full volume and the vibration\n almost shook my head off.\n\n\n The lizards cringed and I set my Solar for a narrow beam and ran it\n around the door jamb. There was a great crunching and banging from the\n junk piled against it, and then the door swung free. I threw it open.\n Before they could protest, I had pushed the priests out through it.\n\n\n The rest of their clan showed up at the foot of the stairs and made a\n great ruckus while I finished welding the door shut. Running through the\n crowd, I faced up to the First Lizard in his tub. He sank slowly beneath\n the surface.", "Some of the more credulous natives prostrated themselves and others fled\n screaming. One doubtful type raised a spear, but no one else tried that\n after the pterodactyl-eye picked him up and dropped him in the swamp.\n The priests were a hard-headed lot and weren’t buying any lizards\n in a poke; they just stood and muttered. I had to take the offensive\n again.\n\n\n “Begone, O faithful steed,” I said to the eye, and pressed\n the control in my palm at the same time.\n\n\n It took off straight up a bit faster than I wanted; little pieces of\n wind-torn plastic rained down. While the crowd was ogling this ascent, I\n walked through the temple doors.\n\n\n “I would talk with you, O noble priests,” I said.", "This raised a buzz of conversation behind me, but got no rise out of the\n chief. He sank slowly into the water until only his eyes were showing. I\n could almost hear the wheels turning behind that moss-covered forehead.\n Then he lunged up and pointed a dripping finger at me.\n\n\n “You are a liar! You are no ancestor of ours! We\n will—”\n\n\n “Stop!” I thundered before he got so far in that he\n couldn’t back out. “I said your ancestors sent me as\n emissary—I am not one of your ancestors. Do not try to harm me or\n the wrath of those who have Passed On will turn against you.”\n\n\n When I said this, I turned to jab a claw at the other priests, using the\n motion to cover my flicking a coin grenade toward them. It blew a nice\n hole in the floor with a great show of noise and smoke." ], [ "I dived the eye lower. The pyramid was a crude-looking thing of\n undressed stone, without carvings or decorations. There was a shimmer of\n light from the top and I took a closer look at it. On the peak of the\n pyramid was a hollow basin filled with water. When I saw that, something\n clicked in my mind.\nLocking\n the eye in a circular course, I dug through the Mark III\n plans—and there it was. The beacon had a precipitating field and a\n basin on top of it for water; this was used to cool the reactor that\n powered the monstrosity. If the water was still there, the beacon was\n still there—inside the pyramid. The natives, who, of course,\n weren’t even mentioned by the idiots who constructed the thing,\n had built a nice heavy, thick stone pyramid around the beacon.", "The First Lizard knew I was talking sense then and immediately called a\n meeting of the shamans. It, of course, took place in the public bathtub\n and I had to join them there. We jawed and gurgled for about an hour and\n settled all the major points.\n\n\n I found out that they were new priests; the previous ones had all been\n boiled for letting the Holy Waters cease. They found out I was there\n only to help them restore the flow of the waters. They bought this,\n tentatively, and we all heaved out of the tub and trickled muddy paths\n across the floor. There was a bolted and guarded door that led into the\n pyramid proper. While it was being opened, the First Lizard turned to\n me.", "Before they could think up a good answer, I was inside.\nThe\n temple was a small one built against the base of the pyramid. I\n hoped I wasn’t breaking too many taboos by going in. I\n wasn’t stopped, so it looked all right. The temple was a single\n room with a murky-looking pool at one end. Sloshing in the pool was an\n ancient reptile who clearly was one of the leaders. I waddled toward him\n and he gave me a cold and fishy eye, then growled something.\n\n\n The MT whispered into my ear, “Just what in the name of the\n thirteenth sin are you and what are you doing here?”\n\n\n I drew up my scaly figure in a noble gesture and pointed toward the\n ceiling. “I come from your ancestors to help you. I am here to\n restore the Holy Waters.”", "I threw the switch that started the water flowing again.\n\n\n There were a few minutes while the water began to gurgle down through\n the dry pipe. Then a roar came from outside the pyramid that must have\n shaken its stone walls. Shaking my hands once over my head, I went down\n for the eye-burning ceremony.\n\n\n The blind lizards were waiting for me by the door and looked even\n unhappier than usual. When I tried the door, I found out why—it\n was bolted and barred from the other side.\n\n\n “It has been decided,” a lizard said, “that you shall\n remain here forever and tend the Holy Waters. We will stay with you and\n serve your every need.”\n\n\n A delightful prospect, eternity spent in a locked beacon with three\n blind lizards. In spite of their hospitality, I couldn’t accept.", "I had got turned around after the eye-burning and my flying beast hooked\n onto me backward. I had meant to sail out bravely, blind eyes facing\n into the sunset; instead, I faced the crowd as I soared away, so I made\n the most of a bad situation and threw them a snappy military salute.\n Then I was out in the fresh air and away.\n\n\n When I lifted the plate and poked holes in the seared plastic, I could\n see the pyramid growing smaller behind me, water gushing out of the base\n and a happy crowd of reptiles sporting in its radioactive rush. I\n counted off on my talons to see if I had forgotten anything.\n\n\n One: The beacon was repaired.\n\n\n Two: The door was sealed, so there should be no more sabotage,\n accidental or deliberate.", "“Here is some money from paradise, because you have been a good\n boy.” Not really from paradise—I had lifted it from the\n treasury the night before. “Come back tomorrow and we will talk\n some more,” I called after the fleeing figure. I was pleased to\n notice that he took the cash before taking off.\n\n\n After that, Grandpa in paradise had many heart-to-heart talks with\n Grandson, who found the heavenly loot more than he could resist. Grandpa\n had been out of touch with things since his death and Goat-boy happily\n filled him in.\n\n\n I learned all I needed to know of the history, past and recent, and it\n wasn’t nice.\n\n\n In addition to the pyramid being around the beacon, there was a nice\n little religious war going on around the pyramid.", "When the head was done, I peeled it off and attached it to an attractive\n suit of green plastic, complete with tail. I was really glad they had\n tails. The lizards didn’t wear clothes and I wanted to take along\n a lot of electronic equipment. I built the tail over a metal frame that\n anchored around my waist. Then I filled the frame with all the equipment\n I would need and began to wire the suit.\n\n\n When it was done, I tried it on in front of a full-length mirror. It was\n horrible but effective. The tail dragged me down in the rear and gave me\n a duck-waddle, but that only helped the resemblance.\n\n\n That night I took the ship down into the hills nearest the pyramid, an\n out-of-the-way dry spot where the amphibious natives would never go. A\n little before dawn, the eye hooked onto my shoulders and we sailed\n straight up. We hovered above the temple at about 2,000 meters, until it\n was light, then dropped straight down.", "The old boys had enough brains to choose a traceable site for the\n beacon, equidistant on a line between two of the most prominent mountain\n peaks. I located the peaks easily enough and started the eye out from\n the first peak and kept it on a course directly toward the second. There\n was a nose and tail radar in the eye and I fed their signals into a\n scope as an amplitude curve. When the two peaks coincided, I spun the\n eye controls and dived the thing down.\n\n\n I cut out the radar and cut in the nose orthicon and sat back to watch\n the beacon appear on the screen.\n\n\n The image blinked, focused—and a great damn pyramid swam into\n view. I cursed and wheeled the eye in circles, scanning the surrounding\n country. It was flat, marshy bottom land without a bump. The only thing\n in a ten-mile circle was this pyramid—and that definitely\n wasn’t my beacon.\n\n\n Or wasn’t it?", "“What lack of courtesy!” I shouted. He made little bubbles\n in the water. “The ancestors are annoyed and have decided to\n forbid entrance to the Inner Temple forever; though, out of kindness,\n they will let the waters flow. Now I must return—on with the\n ceremony!”\n\n\n The torture-master was too frightened to move, so I grabbed out his hot\n iron. A touch on the side of my face dropped a steel plate over my eyes,\n under the plastiskin. Then I jammed the iron hard into my phony\n eye-sockets and the plastic gave off an authentic odor.\n\n\n A cry went up from the crowd as I dropped the iron and staggered in\n blind circles. I must admit it went off pretty well.\nBefore\n they could get any more bright ideas, I threw the switch and my\n plastic pterodactyl sailed in through the door. I couldn’t see it,\n of course, but I knew it had arrived when the grapples in the claws\n latched onto the steel plates on my shoulders.", "I had a pryeye of my own construction. It looked like a piece of rock\n about a foot long. Once on the ground, it would never be noticed, though\n it was a little disconcerting to see it float by. I located a lizard\n town about a thousand kilometers from the pyramid and dropped the eye.\n It swished down and landed at night in the bank of the local mud wallow.\n This was a favorite spot that drew a good crowd during the day. In the\n morning, when the first wallowers arrived, I flipped on the recorder.", "I took another look at the screen and realized that I had locked the eye\n into a circular orbit about twenty feet above the pyramid. The summit of\n the stone pile was now covered with lizards of some type, apparently the\n local life-form. They had what looked like throwing sticks and arbalasts\n and were trying to shoot down the eye, a cloud of arrows and rocks\n flying in every direction.\n\n\n I pulled the eye straight up and away and threw in the control circuit\n that would return it automatically to the ship.\n\n\n Then I went to the galley for a long, strong drink. My beacon was not\n only locked inside a mountain of handmade stone, but I had managed to\n irritate the things who had built the pyramid. A great beginning for a\n job and one clearly designed to drive a stronger man than me to the\n bottle.", "A city was built around the temple and, through the centuries, the\n pyramid was put up around the beacon. A special branch of the priesthood\n served the temple. All went well until one of the priests violated the\n temple and destroyed the holy waters. There had been revolt, strife,\n murder and destruction since then. But still the holy waters would not\n flow. Now armed mobs fought around the temple each day and a new band of\n priests guarded the sacred fount.\n\n\n And I had to walk into the middle of that mess and repair the thing.\n\n\n It would have been easy enough if we were allowed a little mayhem. I\n could have had a lizard fry, fixed the beacon and taken off. Only\n “native life-forms” were quite well protected. There were\n spy cells on my ship, all of which I hadn’t found, that would\n cheerfully rat on me when I got back.", "This raised a buzz of conversation behind me, but got no rise out of the\n chief. He sank slowly into the water until only his eyes were showing. I\n could almost hear the wheels turning behind that moss-covered forehead.\n Then he lunged up and pointed a dripping finger at me.\n\n\n “You are a liar! You are no ancestor of ours! We\n will—”\n\n\n “Stop!” I thundered before he got so far in that he\n couldn’t back out. “I said your ancestors sent me as\n emissary—I am not one of your ancestors. Do not try to harm me or\n the wrath of those who have Passed On will turn against you.”\n\n\n When I said this, I turned to jab a claw at the other priests, using the\n motion to cover my flicking a coin grenade toward them. It blew a nice\n hole in the floor with a great show of noise and smoke.", "“Of course,” I said, “blinding is only right. But in\n my case you will have to blind me before I\n leave\n the Holy of Holies, not\n now. I need my eyes to see and mend the Fount of Holy Waters. Once the\n waters flow again, I will laugh as I hurl myself on the burning\n iron.”\nHe\n took a good thirty seconds to think it over and had to agree with me.\n The local torturer sniffled a bit and threw a little more charcoal on\n the fire. The gate crashed open and I stalked through; then it banged to\n behind me and I was alone in the dark.\n\n\n But not for long—there was a shuffling nearby and I took a chance\n and turned on my flash. Three priests were groping toward me, their\n eye-sockets red pits of burned flesh. They knew what I wanted and led\n the way without a word.", "“Undoubtedly you know of the rule,” he said. “Because\n the old priests did pry and peer, it was ruled henceforth that only the\n blind could enter the Holy of Holies.” I’d swear he was\n smiling, if thirty teeth peeking out of what looked like a crack in an\n old suitcase can be called smiling.\n\n\n He was also signaling to him an underpriest who carried a brazier of\n charcoal complete with red-hot irons. All I could do was stand and watch\n as he stirred up the coals, pulled out the ruddiest iron and turned\n toward me. He was just drawing a bead on my right eyeball when my brain\n got back in gear.", "Some of the more credulous natives prostrated themselves and others fled\n screaming. One doubtful type raised a spear, but no one else tried that\n after the pterodactyl-eye picked him up and dropped him in the swamp.\n The priests were a hard-headed lot and weren’t buying any lizards\n in a poke; they just stood and muttered. I had to take the offensive\n again.\n\n\n “Begone, O faithful steed,” I said to the eye, and pressed\n the control in my palm at the same time.\n\n\n It took off straight up a bit faster than I wanted; little pieces of\n wind-torn plastic rained down. While the crowd was ogling this ascent, I\n walked through the temple doors.\n\n\n “I would talk with you, O noble priests,” I said.", "“What—you dare interfere with the messenger of your\n ancestors!” I had the speaker on full volume and the vibration\n almost shook my head off.\n\n\n The lizards cringed and I set my Solar for a narrow beam and ran it\n around the door jamb. There was a great crunching and banging from the\n junk piled against it, and then the door swung free. I threw it open.\n Before they could protest, I had pushed the priests out through it.\n\n\n The rest of their clan showed up at the foot of the stairs and made a\n great ruckus while I finished welding the door shut. Running through the\n crowd, I faced up to the First Lizard in his tub. He sank slowly beneath\n the surface.", "It must have been a grand sight. The eye was camouflaged to look like a\n flying lizard, sort of a cardboard pterodactyl, and the slowly flapping\n wings obviously had nothing to do with our flight. But it was impressive\n enough for the natives. The first one that spotted me screamed and\n dropped over on his back. The others came running. They milled and\n mobbed and piled on top of one another, and by that time I had landed in\n the plaza fronting the temple. The priesthood arrived.\n\n\n I folded my arms in a regal stance. “Greetings, O noble servers of\n the Great God,” I said. Of course I didn’t say it out loud,\n just whispered loud enough for the throat mike to catch. This was\n radioed back to the MT and the translation shot back to a speaker in my\n jaws.\n\n\n The natives chomped and rattled and the translation rolled out almost\n instantly. I had the volume turned up and the whole square echoed.", "The parts, the new power plant and a few other odds and ends were chuted\n into a neat pile on the ship. I checked all the parts by screen before\n they were loaded in a metal crate. In the darkest hour before dawn, the\n heavy-duty eye dropped the crate outside the temple and darted away\n without being seen.\n\n\n I watched the priests through the pryeye while they tried to open it.\n When they had given up, I boomed orders at them through a speaker in the\n crate. They spent most of the day sweating the heavy box up through the\n narrow temple stairs and I enjoyed a good sleep. It was resting inside\n the beacon door when I woke up.\nThe\n repairs didn’t take long, though there was plenty of groaning\n from the blind lizards when they heard me ripping the wall open to get\n at the power leads. I even hooked a gadget to the water pipe so their\n Holy Waters would have the usual refreshing radioactivity when they\n started flowing again. The moment this was all finished, I did the job\n they were waiting for.", "It all began with the land bridge. Apparently the local lizards had been\n living in the swamps when the beacon was built, but the builders\n didn’t think much of them. They were a low type and confined to a\n distant continent. The idea that the race would develop and might reach\n this\n continent never occurred to the beacon mechanics. Which is, of\n course, what happened.\n\n\n A little geological turnover, a swampy land bridge formed in the right\n spot, and the lizards began to wander up beacon valley. And found\n religion. A shiny metal temple out of which poured a constant stream of\n magic water—the reactor-cooling water pumped down from the\n atmosphere condenser on the roof. The radioactivity in the water\n didn’t hurt the natives. It caused mutations that bred true." ], [ "“Undoubtedly you know of the rule,” he said. “Because\n the old priests did pry and peer, it was ruled henceforth that only the\n blind could enter the Holy of Holies.” I’d swear he was\n smiling, if thirty teeth peeking out of what looked like a crack in an\n old suitcase can be called smiling.\n\n\n He was also signaling to him an underpriest who carried a brazier of\n charcoal complete with red-hot irons. All I could do was stand and watch\n as he stirred up the coals, pulled out the ruddiest iron and turned\n toward me. He was just drawing a bead on my right eyeball when my brain\n got back in gear.", "I had a pryeye of my own construction. It looked like a piece of rock\n about a foot long. Once on the ground, it would never be noticed, though\n it was a little disconcerting to see it float by. I located a lizard\n town about a thousand kilometers from the pyramid and dropped the eye.\n It swished down and landed at night in the bank of the local mud wallow.\n This was a favorite spot that drew a good crowd during the day. In the\n morning, when the first wallowers arrived, I flipped on the recorder.", "I dived the eye lower. The pyramid was a crude-looking thing of\n undressed stone, without carvings or decorations. There was a shimmer of\n light from the top and I took a closer look at it. On the peak of the\n pyramid was a hollow basin filled with water. When I saw that, something\n clicked in my mind.\nLocking\n the eye in a circular course, I dug through the Mark III\n plans—and there it was. The beacon had a precipitating field and a\n basin on top of it for water; this was used to cool the reactor that\n powered the monstrosity. If the water was still there, the beacon was\n still there—inside the pyramid. The natives, who, of course,\n weren’t even mentioned by the idiots who constructed the thing,\n had built a nice heavy, thick stone pyramid around the beacon.", "I had got turned around after the eye-burning and my flying beast hooked\n onto me backward. I had meant to sail out bravely, blind eyes facing\n into the sunset; instead, I faced the crowd as I soared away, so I made\n the most of a bad situation and threw them a snappy military salute.\n Then I was out in the fresh air and away.\n\n\n When I lifted the plate and poked holes in the seared plastic, I could\n see the pyramid growing smaller behind me, water gushing out of the base\n and a happy crowd of reptiles sporting in its radioactive rush. I\n counted off on my talons to see if I had forgotten anything.\n\n\n One: The beacon was repaired.\n\n\n Two: The door was sealed, so there should be no more sabotage,\n accidental or deliberate.", "The old boys had enough brains to choose a traceable site for the\n beacon, equidistant on a line between two of the most prominent mountain\n peaks. I located the peaks easily enough and started the eye out from\n the first peak and kept it on a course directly toward the second. There\n was a nose and tail radar in the eye and I fed their signals into a\n scope as an amplitude curve. When the two peaks coincided, I spun the\n eye controls and dived the thing down.\n\n\n I cut out the radar and cut in the nose orthicon and sat back to watch\n the beacon appear on the screen.\n\n\n The image blinked, focused—and a great damn pyramid swam into\n view. I cursed and wheeled the eye in circles, scanning the surrounding\n country. It was flat, marshy bottom land without a bump. The only thing\n in a ten-mile circle was this pyramid—and that definitely\n wasn’t my beacon.\n\n\n Or wasn’t it?", "“Of course,” I said, “blinding is only right. But in\n my case you will have to blind me before I\n leave\n the Holy of Holies, not\n now. I need my eyes to see and mend the Fount of Holy Waters. Once the\n waters flow again, I will laugh as I hurl myself on the burning\n iron.”\nHe\n took a good thirty seconds to think it over and had to agree with me.\n The local torturer sniffled a bit and threw a little more charcoal on\n the fire. The gate crashed open and I stalked through; then it banged to\n behind me and I was alone in the dark.\n\n\n But not for long—there was a shuffling nearby and I took a chance\n and turned on my flash. Three priests were groping toward me, their\n eye-sockets red pits of burned flesh. They knew what I wanted and led\n the way without a word.", "Some of the more credulous natives prostrated themselves and others fled\n screaming. One doubtful type raised a spear, but no one else tried that\n after the pterodactyl-eye picked him up and dropped him in the swamp.\n The priests were a hard-headed lot and weren’t buying any lizards\n in a poke; they just stood and muttered. I had to take the offensive\n again.\n\n\n “Begone, O faithful steed,” I said to the eye, and pressed\n the control in my palm at the same time.\n\n\n It took off straight up a bit faster than I wanted; little pieces of\n wind-torn plastic rained down. While the crowd was ogling this ascent, I\n walked through the temple doors.\n\n\n “I would talk with you, O noble priests,” I said.", "“What lack of courtesy!” I shouted. He made little bubbles\n in the water. “The ancestors are annoyed and have decided to\n forbid entrance to the Inner Temple forever; though, out of kindness,\n they will let the waters flow. Now I must return—on with the\n ceremony!”\n\n\n The torture-master was too frightened to move, so I grabbed out his hot\n iron. A touch on the side of my face dropped a steel plate over my eyes,\n under the plastiskin. Then I jammed the iron hard into my phony\n eye-sockets and the plastic gave off an authentic odor.\n\n\n A cry went up from the crowd as I dropped the iron and staggered in\n blind circles. I must admit it went off pretty well.\nBefore\n they could get any more bright ideas, I threw the switch and my\n plastic pterodactyl sailed in through the door. I couldn’t see it,\n of course, but I knew it had arrived when the grapples in the claws\n latched onto the steel plates on my shoulders.", "I took another look at the screen and realized that I had locked the eye\n into a circular orbit about twenty feet above the pyramid. The summit of\n the stone pile was now covered with lizards of some type, apparently the\n local life-form. They had what looked like throwing sticks and arbalasts\n and were trying to shoot down the eye, a cloud of arrows and rocks\n flying in every direction.\n\n\n I pulled the eye straight up and away and threw in the control circuit\n that would return it automatically to the ship.\n\n\n Then I went to the galley for a long, strong drink. My beacon was not\n only locked inside a mountain of handmade stone, but I had managed to\n irritate the things who had built the pyramid. A great beginning for a\n job and one clearly designed to drive a stronger man than me to the\n bottle.", "The time went fast. I rebuilt my camera for about the twentieth time and\n just about finished a correspondence course in nucleonics. Most\n repairmen take these courses. Besides their always coming in handy, the\n company grades your pay by the number of specialties you can handle. All\n this, with some oil painting and free-fall workouts in the gym, passed\n the time. I was asleep when the alarm went off that announced planetary\n distance.\n\n\n Planet two, where the beacon was situated according to the old charts,\n was a mushy-looking, wet kind of globe. I tried to make sense out of\n the ancient directions and finally located the right area. Staying\n outside the atmosphere, I sent a flying eye down to look things over. In\n this business, you learn early when and where to risk your own skin. The\n eye would be good enough for the preliminary survey.", "I threw the switch that started the water flowing again.\n\n\n There were a few minutes while the water began to gurgle down through\n the dry pipe. Then a roar came from outside the pyramid that must have\n shaken its stone walls. Shaking my hands once over my head, I went down\n for the eye-burning ceremony.\n\n\n The blind lizards were waiting for me by the door and looked even\n unhappier than usual. When I tried the door, I found out why—it\n was bolted and barred from the other side.\n\n\n “It has been decided,” a lizard said, “that you shall\n remain here forever and tend the Holy Waters. We will stay with you and\n serve your every need.”\n\n\n A delightful prospect, eternity spent in a locked beacon with three\n blind lizards. In spite of their hospitality, I couldn’t accept.", "It must have been a grand sight. The eye was camouflaged to look like a\n flying lizard, sort of a cardboard pterodactyl, and the slowly flapping\n wings obviously had nothing to do with our flight. But it was impressive\n enough for the natives. The first one that spotted me screamed and\n dropped over on his back. The others came running. They milled and\n mobbed and piled on top of one another, and by that time I had landed in\n the plaza fronting the temple. The priesthood arrived.\n\n\n I folded my arms in a regal stance. “Greetings, O noble servers of\n the Great God,” I said. Of course I didn’t say it out loud,\n just whispered loud enough for the throat mike to catch. This was\n radioed back to the MT and the translation shot back to a speaker in my\n jaws.\n\n\n The natives chomped and rattled and the translation rolled out almost\n instantly. I had the volume turned up and the whole square echoed.", "The parts, the new power plant and a few other odds and ends were chuted\n into a neat pile on the ship. I checked all the parts by screen before\n they were loaded in a metal crate. In the darkest hour before dawn, the\n heavy-duty eye dropped the crate outside the temple and darted away\n without being seen.\n\n\n I watched the priests through the pryeye while they tried to open it.\n When they had given up, I boomed orders at them through a speaker in the\n crate. They spent most of the day sweating the heavy box up through the\n narrow temple stairs and I enjoyed a good sleep. It was resting inside\n the beacon door when I woke up.\nThe\n repairs didn’t take long, though there was plenty of groaning\n from the blind lizards when they heard me ripping the wall open to get\n at the power leads. I even hooked a gadget to the water pipe so their\n Holy Waters would have the usual refreshing radioactivity when they\n started flowing again. The moment this was all finished, I did the job\n they were waiting for.", "The First Lizard knew I was talking sense then and immediately called a\n meeting of the shamans. It, of course, took place in the public bathtub\n and I had to join them there. We jawed and gurgled for about an hour and\n settled all the major points.\n\n\n I found out that they were new priests; the previous ones had all been\n boiled for letting the Holy Waters cease. They found out I was there\n only to help them restore the flow of the waters. They bought this,\n tentatively, and we all heaved out of the tub and trickled muddy paths\n across the floor. There was a bolted and guarded door that led into the\n pyramid proper. While it was being opened, the First Lizard turned to\n me.", "When the head was done, I peeled it off and attached it to an attractive\n suit of green plastic, complete with tail. I was really glad they had\n tails. The lizards didn’t wear clothes and I wanted to take along\n a lot of electronic equipment. I built the tail over a metal frame that\n anchored around my waist. Then I filled the frame with all the equipment\n I would need and began to wire the suit.\n\n\n When it was done, I tried it on in front of a full-length mirror. It was\n horrible but effective. The tail dragged me down in the rear and gave me\n a duck-waddle, but that only helped the resemblance.\n\n\n That night I took the ship down into the hills nearest the pyramid, an\n out-of-the-way dry spot where the amphibious natives would never go. A\n little before dawn, the eye hooked onto my shoulders and we sailed\n straight up. We hovered above the temple at about 2,000 meters, until it\n was light, then dropped straight down.", "A crumbling and cracked stone stairway brought us up to a solid metal\n doorway labeled in archaic script\n MARK III BEACON—AUTHORIZED\n PERSONNEL ONLY\n . The trusting builders counted on the sign to do the\n whole job, for there wasn’t a trace of a lock on the door. One\n lizard merely turned the handle and we were inside the beacon.\n\n\n I unzipped the front of my camouflage suit and pulled out the\n blueprints. With the faithful priests stumbling after me, I located the\n control room and turned on the lights. There was a residue of charge in\n the emergency batteries, just enough to give a dim light. The meters and\n indicators looked to be in good shape; if anything, unexpectedly bright\n from constant polishing.", "This raised a buzz of conversation behind me, but got no rise out of the\n chief. He sank slowly into the water until only his eyes were showing. I\n could almost hear the wheels turning behind that moss-covered forehead.\n Then he lunged up and pointed a dripping finger at me.\n\n\n “You are a liar! You are no ancestor of ours! We\n will—”\n\n\n “Stop!” I thundered before he got so far in that he\n couldn’t back out. “I said your ancestors sent me as\n emissary—I am not one of your ancestors. Do not try to harm me or\n the wrath of those who have Passed On will turn against you.”\n\n\n When I said this, I turned to jab a claw at the other priests, using the\n motion to cover my flicking a coin grenade toward them. It blew a nice\n hole in the floor with a great show of noise and smoke.", "When you get enough reference phrases like this in the memory bank, the\n MT brain takes over and starts filling in the missing pieces. As soon as\n the MT could give a running translation of any conversation it heard, I\n figured it was time to make a contact.\nI found\n him easily enough. He was the Centaurian version of a\n goat-boy—he herded a particularly loathsome form of local life in\n the swamps outside the town. I had one of the working eyes dig a cave in\n an outcropping of rock and wait for him.\n\n\n When he passed next day, I whispered into the mike: “Welcome, O\n Goat-boy Grandson! This is your grandfather’s spirit speaking from\n paradise.” This fitted in with what I could make out of the local\n religion.\n\n\n Goat-boy stopped as if he’d been shot. Before he could move, I\n pushed a switch and a handful of the local currency, wampum-type shells,\n rolled out of the cave and landed at his feet.", "“Here is some money from paradise, because you have been a good\n boy.” Not really from paradise—I had lifted it from the\n treasury the night before. “Come back tomorrow and we will talk\n some more,” I called after the fleeing figure. I was pleased to\n notice that he took the cash before taking off.\n\n\n After that, Grandpa in paradise had many heart-to-heart talks with\n Grandson, who found the heavenly loot more than he could resist. Grandpa\n had been out of touch with things since his death and Goat-boy happily\n filled him in.\n\n\n I learned all I needed to know of the history, past and recent, and it\n wasn’t nice.\n\n\n In addition to the pyramid being around the beacon, there was a nice\n little religious war going on around the pyramid.", "I nodded moodily at his pointing finger.\n\n\n “How I wish I could fire you all! Combination space-jockeys,\n mechanics, engineers, soldiers, con-men and anything else it takes to do\n the repairs. I have to browbeat, bribe, blackmail and bulldoze you thugs\n into doing a simple job. If you think you’re fed up, just think\n how I feel. But the ships must go through! The beacons must\n operate!”\n\n\n I recognized this deathless line as the curtain speech and crawled to my\n feet. He threw the Mark III file at me and went back to scratching in\n his papers. Just as I reached the door, he looked up and impaled me on\n his finger again.\n\n\n “And don’t get any fancy ideas about jumping your contract.\n We can attach that bank account of yours on Algol II long before you\n could draw the money out.”" ], [ "After about five of the local days, I had a sea of native conversation\n in the memory bank of the machine translator and had tagged a few\n expressions. This is fairly easy to do when you have a machine memory to\n work with. One of the lizards gargled at another one and the second one\n turned around. I tagged this expression with the phrase, “Hey,\n George!” and waited my chance to use it. Later the same day, I\n caught one of them alone and shouted “Hey, George!” at him.\n It gurgled out through the speaker in the local tongue and he turned\n around.", "When you get enough reference phrases like this in the memory bank, the\n MT brain takes over and starts filling in the missing pieces. As soon as\n the MT could give a running translation of any conversation it heard, I\n figured it was time to make a contact.\nI found\n him easily enough. He was the Centaurian version of a\n goat-boy—he herded a particularly loathsome form of local life in\n the swamps outside the town. I had one of the working eyes dig a cave in\n an outcropping of rock and wait for him.\n\n\n When he passed next day, I whispered into the mike: “Welcome, O\n Goat-boy Grandson! This is your grandfather’s spirit speaking from\n paradise.” This fitted in with what I could make out of the local\n religion.\n\n\n Goat-boy stopped as if he’d been shot. Before he could move, I\n pushed a switch and a handful of the local currency, wampum-type shells,\n rolled out of the cave and landed at his feet.", "Normally, a repairman stays away from native cultures. They are poison.\n Anthropologists may not mind being dissected for their science, but a\n repairman wants to make no sacrifices of any kind for his job. For this\n reason, most beacons are built on uninhabited planets. If a beacon\n has\n to go on a planet with a culture, it is usually built in some\n inaccessible place.\n\n\n Why this beacon had been built within reach of the local claws, I had\n yet to find out. But that would come in time. The first thing to do was\n make contact. To make contact, you have to know the local language.\n\n\n And, for\n that\n , I had long before worked out a system that was\n fool-proof.", "It must have been a grand sight. The eye was camouflaged to look like a\n flying lizard, sort of a cardboard pterodactyl, and the slowly flapping\n wings obviously had nothing to do with our flight. But it was impressive\n enough for the natives. The first one that spotted me screamed and\n dropped over on his back. The others came running. They milled and\n mobbed and piled on top of one another, and by that time I had landed in\n the plaza fronting the temple. The priesthood arrived.\n\n\n I folded my arms in a regal stance. “Greetings, O noble servers of\n the Great God,” I said. Of course I didn’t say it out loud,\n just whispered loud enough for the throat mike to catch. This was\n radioed back to the MT and the translation shot back to a speaker in my\n jaws.\n\n\n The natives chomped and rattled and the translation rolled out almost\n instantly. I had the volume turned up and the whole square echoed.", "The First Lizard knew I was talking sense then and immediately called a\n meeting of the shamans. It, of course, took place in the public bathtub\n and I had to join them there. We jawed and gurgled for about an hour and\n settled all the major points.\n\n\n I found out that they were new priests; the previous ones had all been\n boiled for letting the Holy Waters cease. They found out I was there\n only to help them restore the flow of the waters. They bought this,\n tentatively, and we all heaved out of the tub and trickled muddy paths\n across the floor. There was a bolted and guarded door that led into the\n pyramid proper. While it was being opened, the First Lizard turned to\n me.", "The time went fast. I rebuilt my camera for about the twentieth time and\n just about finished a correspondence course in nucleonics. Most\n repairmen take these courses. Besides their always coming in handy, the\n company grades your pay by the number of specialties you can handle. All\n this, with some oil painting and free-fall workouts in the gym, passed\n the time. I was asleep when the alarm went off that announced planetary\n distance.\n\n\n Planet two, where the beacon was situated according to the old charts,\n was a mushy-looking, wet kind of globe. I tried to make sense out of\n the ancient directions and finally located the right area. Staying\n outside the atmosphere, I sent a flying eye down to look things over. In\n this business, you learn early when and where to risk your own skin. The\n eye would be good enough for the preliminary survey.", "Some of the more credulous natives prostrated themselves and others fled\n screaming. One doubtful type raised a spear, but no one else tried that\n after the pterodactyl-eye picked him up and dropped him in the swamp.\n The priests were a hard-headed lot and weren’t buying any lizards\n in a poke; they just stood and muttered. I had to take the offensive\n again.\n\n\n “Begone, O faithful steed,” I said to the eye, and pressed\n the control in my palm at the same time.\n\n\n It took off straight up a bit faster than I wanted; little pieces of\n wind-torn plastic rained down. While the crowd was ogling this ascent, I\n walked through the temple doors.\n\n\n “I would talk with you, O noble priests,” I said.", "“What lack of courtesy!” I shouted. He made little bubbles\n in the water. “The ancestors are annoyed and have decided to\n forbid entrance to the Inner Temple forever; though, out of kindness,\n they will let the waters flow. Now I must return—on with the\n ceremony!”\n\n\n The torture-master was too frightened to move, so I grabbed out his hot\n iron. A touch on the side of my face dropped a steel plate over my eyes,\n under the plastiskin. Then I jammed the iron hard into my phony\n eye-sockets and the plastic gave off an authentic odor.\n\n\n A cry went up from the crowd as I dropped the iron and staggered in\n blind circles. I must admit it went off pretty well.\nBefore\n they could get any more bright ideas, I threw the switch and my\n plastic pterodactyl sailed in through the door. I couldn’t see it,\n of course, but I knew it had arrived when the grapples in the claws\n latched onto the steel plates on my shoulders.", "I had got turned around after the eye-burning and my flying beast hooked\n onto me backward. I had meant to sail out bravely, blind eyes facing\n into the sunset; instead, I faced the crowd as I soared away, so I made\n the most of a bad situation and threw them a snappy military salute.\n Then I was out in the fresh air and away.\n\n\n When I lifted the plate and poked holes in the seared plastic, I could\n see the pyramid growing smaller behind me, water gushing out of the base\n and a happy crowd of reptiles sporting in its radioactive rush. I\n counted off on my talons to see if I had forgotten anything.\n\n\n One: The beacon was repaired.\n\n\n Two: The door was sealed, so there should be no more sabotage,\n accidental or deliberate.", "When the head was done, I peeled it off and attached it to an attractive\n suit of green plastic, complete with tail. I was really glad they had\n tails. The lizards didn’t wear clothes and I wanted to take along\n a lot of electronic equipment. I built the tail over a metal frame that\n anchored around my waist. Then I filled the frame with all the equipment\n I would need and began to wire the suit.\n\n\n When it was done, I tried it on in front of a full-length mirror. It was\n horrible but effective. The tail dragged me down in the rear and gave me\n a duck-waddle, but that only helped the resemblance.\n\n\n That night I took the ship down into the hills nearest the pyramid, an\n out-of-the-way dry spot where the amphibious natives would never go. A\n little before dawn, the eye hooked onto my shoulders and we sailed\n straight up. We hovered above the temple at about 2,000 meters, until it\n was light, then dropped straight down.", "A city was built around the temple and, through the centuries, the\n pyramid was put up around the beacon. A special branch of the priesthood\n served the temple. All went well until one of the priests violated the\n temple and destroyed the holy waters. There had been revolt, strife,\n murder and destruction since then. But still the holy waters would not\n flow. Now armed mobs fought around the temple each day and a new band of\n priests guarded the sacred fount.\n\n\n And I had to walk into the middle of that mess and repair the thing.\n\n\n It would have been easy enough if we were allowed a little mayhem. I\n could have had a lizard fry, fixed the beacon and taken off. Only\n “native life-forms” were quite well protected. There were\n spy cells on my ship, all of which I hadn’t found, that would\n cheerfully rat on me when I got back.", "This raised a buzz of conversation behind me, but got no rise out of the\n chief. He sank slowly into the water until only his eyes were showing. I\n could almost hear the wheels turning behind that moss-covered forehead.\n Then he lunged up and pointed a dripping finger at me.\n\n\n “You are a liar! You are no ancestor of ours! We\n will—”\n\n\n “Stop!” I thundered before he got so far in that he\n couldn’t back out. “I said your ancestors sent me as\n emissary—I am not one of your ancestors. Do not try to harm me or\n the wrath of those who have Passed On will turn against you.”\n\n\n When I said this, I turned to jab a claw at the other priests, using the\n motion to cover my flicking a coin grenade toward them. It blew a nice\n hole in the floor with a great show of noise and smoke.", "I had a pryeye of my own construction. It looked like a piece of rock\n about a foot long. Once on the ground, it would never be noticed, though\n it was a little disconcerting to see it float by. I located a lizard\n town about a thousand kilometers from the pyramid and dropped the eye.\n It swished down and landed at night in the bank of the local mud wallow.\n This was a favorite spot that drew a good crowd during the day. In the\n morning, when the first wallowers arrived, I flipped on the recorder.", "The parts, the new power plant and a few other odds and ends were chuted\n into a neat pile on the ship. I checked all the parts by screen before\n they were loaded in a metal crate. In the darkest hour before dawn, the\n heavy-duty eye dropped the crate outside the temple and darted away\n without being seen.\n\n\n I watched the priests through the pryeye while they tried to open it.\n When they had given up, I boomed orders at them through a speaker in the\n crate. They spent most of the day sweating the heavy box up through the\n narrow temple stairs and I enjoyed a good sleep. It was resting inside\n the beacon door when I woke up.\nThe\n repairs didn’t take long, though there was plenty of groaning\n from the blind lizards when they heard me ripping the wall open to get\n at the power leads. I even hooked a gadget to the water pipe so their\n Holy Waters would have the usual refreshing radioactivity when they\n started flowing again. The moment this was all finished, I did the job\n they were waiting for.", "It all began with the land bridge. Apparently the local lizards had been\n living in the swamps when the beacon was built, but the builders\n didn’t think much of them. They were a low type and confined to a\n distant continent. The idea that the race would develop and might reach\n this\n continent never occurred to the beacon mechanics. Which is, of\n course, what happened.\n\n\n A little geological turnover, a swampy land bridge formed in the right\n spot, and the lizards began to wander up beacon valley. And found\n religion. A shiny metal temple out of which poured a constant stream of\n magic water—the reactor-cooling water pumped down from the\n atmosphere condenser on the roof. The radioactivity in the water\n didn’t hurt the natives. It caused mutations that bred true.", "Before they could think up a good answer, I was inside.\nThe\n temple was a small one built against the base of the pyramid. I\n hoped I wasn’t breaking too many taboos by going in. I\n wasn’t stopped, so it looked all right. The temple was a single\n room with a murky-looking pool at one end. Sloshing in the pool was an\n ancient reptile who clearly was one of the leaders. I waddled toward him\n and he gave me a cold and fishy eye, then growled something.\n\n\n The MT whispered into my ear, “Just what in the name of the\n thirteenth sin are you and what are you doing here?”\n\n\n I drew up my scaly figure in a noble gesture and pointed toward the\n ceiling. “I come from your ancestors to help you. I am here to\n restore the Holy Waters.”", "“Here is some money from paradise, because you have been a good\n boy.” Not really from paradise—I had lifted it from the\n treasury the night before. “Come back tomorrow and we will talk\n some more,” I called after the fleeing figure. I was pleased to\n notice that he took the cash before taking off.\n\n\n After that, Grandpa in paradise had many heart-to-heart talks with\n Grandson, who found the heavenly loot more than he could resist. Grandpa\n had been out of touch with things since his death and Goat-boy happily\n filled him in.\n\n\n I learned all I needed to know of the history, past and recent, and it\n wasn’t nice.\n\n\n In addition to the pyramid being around the beacon, there was a nice\n little religious war going on around the pyramid.", "Diplomacy was called for. I sighed and dragged out the plastiflesh\n equipment.\nWorking\n from 3D snaps of Grandson, I modeled a passable reptile head\n over my own features. It was a little short in the jaw, me not having\n one of their toothy mandibles, but that was all right. I didn’t\n have to look\n exactly\n like them, just something close, to soothe the\n native mind. It’s logical. If I were an ignorant aborigine of\n Earth and I ran into a Spican, who looks like a two-foot gob of dried\n shellac, I would immediately leave the scene. However, if the Spican was\n wearing a suit of plastiflesh that looked remotely humanoid, I would at\n least stay and talk to him. This was what I was aiming to do with the\n Centaurians.", "“Of course,” I said, “blinding is only right. But in\n my case you will have to blind me before I\n leave\n the Holy of Holies, not\n now. I need my eyes to see and mend the Fount of Holy Waters. Once the\n waters flow again, I will laugh as I hurl myself on the burning\n iron.”\nHe\n took a good thirty seconds to think it over and had to agree with me.\n The local torturer sniffled a bit and threw a little more charcoal on\n the fire. The gate crashed open and I stalked through; then it banged to\n behind me and I was alone in the dark.\n\n\n But not for long—there was a shuffling nearby and I took a chance\n and turned on my flash. Three priests were groping toward me, their\n eye-sockets red pits of burned flesh. They knew what I wanted and led\n the way without a word.", "I nodded moodily at his pointing finger.\n\n\n “How I wish I could fire you all! Combination space-jockeys,\n mechanics, engineers, soldiers, con-men and anything else it takes to do\n the repairs. I have to browbeat, bribe, blackmail and bulldoze you thugs\n into doing a simple job. If you think you’re fed up, just think\n how I feel. But the ships must go through! The beacons must\n operate!”\n\n\n I recognized this deathless line as the curtain speech and crawled to my\n feet. He threw the Mark III file at me and went back to scratching in\n his papers. Just as I reached the door, he looked up and impaled me on\n his finger again.\n\n\n “And don’t get any fancy ideas about jumping your contract.\n We can attach that bank account of yours on Algol II long before you\n could draw the money out.”" ], [ "The First Lizard knew I was talking sense then and immediately called a\n meeting of the shamans. It, of course, took place in the public bathtub\n and I had to join them there. We jawed and gurgled for about an hour and\n settled all the major points.\n\n\n I found out that they were new priests; the previous ones had all been\n boiled for letting the Holy Waters cease. They found out I was there\n only to help them restore the flow of the waters. They bought this,\n tentatively, and we all heaved out of the tub and trickled muddy paths\n across the floor. There was a bolted and guarded door that led into the\n pyramid proper. While it was being opened, the First Lizard turned to\n me.", "Before they could think up a good answer, I was inside.\nThe\n temple was a small one built against the base of the pyramid. I\n hoped I wasn’t breaking too many taboos by going in. I\n wasn’t stopped, so it looked all right. The temple was a single\n room with a murky-looking pool at one end. Sloshing in the pool was an\n ancient reptile who clearly was one of the leaders. I waddled toward him\n and he gave me a cold and fishy eye, then growled something.\n\n\n The MT whispered into my ear, “Just what in the name of the\n thirteenth sin are you and what are you doing here?”\n\n\n I drew up my scaly figure in a noble gesture and pointed toward the\n ceiling. “I come from your ancestors to help you. I am here to\n restore the Holy Waters.”", "I threw the switch that started the water flowing again.\n\n\n There were a few minutes while the water began to gurgle down through\n the dry pipe. Then a roar came from outside the pyramid that must have\n shaken its stone walls. Shaking my hands once over my head, I went down\n for the eye-burning ceremony.\n\n\n The blind lizards were waiting for me by the door and looked even\n unhappier than usual. When I tried the door, I found out why—it\n was bolted and barred from the other side.\n\n\n “It has been decided,” a lizard said, “that you shall\n remain here forever and tend the Holy Waters. We will stay with you and\n serve your every need.”\n\n\n A delightful prospect, eternity spent in a locked beacon with three\n blind lizards. In spite of their hospitality, I couldn’t accept.", "A city was built around the temple and, through the centuries, the\n pyramid was put up around the beacon. A special branch of the priesthood\n served the temple. All went well until one of the priests violated the\n temple and destroyed the holy waters. There had been revolt, strife,\n murder and destruction since then. But still the holy waters would not\n flow. Now armed mobs fought around the temple each day and a new band of\n priests guarded the sacred fount.\n\n\n And I had to walk into the middle of that mess and repair the thing.\n\n\n It would have been easy enough if we were allowed a little mayhem. I\n could have had a lizard fry, fixed the beacon and taken off. Only\n “native life-forms” were quite well protected. There were\n spy cells on my ship, all of which I hadn’t found, that would\n cheerfully rat on me when I got back.", "I dived the eye lower. The pyramid was a crude-looking thing of\n undressed stone, without carvings or decorations. There was a shimmer of\n light from the top and I took a closer look at it. On the peak of the\n pyramid was a hollow basin filled with water. When I saw that, something\n clicked in my mind.\nLocking\n the eye in a circular course, I dug through the Mark III\n plans—and there it was. The beacon had a precipitating field and a\n basin on top of it for water; this was used to cool the reactor that\n powered the monstrosity. If the water was still there, the beacon was\n still there—inside the pyramid. The natives, who, of course,\n weren’t even mentioned by the idiots who constructed the thing,\n had built a nice heavy, thick stone pyramid around the beacon.", "This raised a buzz of conversation behind me, but got no rise out of the\n chief. He sank slowly into the water until only his eyes were showing. I\n could almost hear the wheels turning behind that moss-covered forehead.\n Then he lunged up and pointed a dripping finger at me.\n\n\n “You are a liar! You are no ancestor of ours! We\n will—”\n\n\n “Stop!” I thundered before he got so far in that he\n couldn’t back out. “I said your ancestors sent me as\n emissary—I am not one of your ancestors. Do not try to harm me or\n the wrath of those who have Passed On will turn against you.”\n\n\n When I said this, I turned to jab a claw at the other priests, using the\n motion to cover my flicking a coin grenade toward them. It blew a nice\n hole in the floor with a great show of noise and smoke.", "“Of course,” I said, “blinding is only right. But in\n my case you will have to blind me before I\n leave\n the Holy of Holies, not\n now. I need my eyes to see and mend the Fount of Holy Waters. Once the\n waters flow again, I will laugh as I hurl myself on the burning\n iron.”\nHe\n took a good thirty seconds to think it over and had to agree with me.\n The local torturer sniffled a bit and threw a little more charcoal on\n the fire. The gate crashed open and I stalked through; then it banged to\n behind me and I was alone in the dark.\n\n\n But not for long—there was a shuffling nearby and I took a chance\n and turned on my flash. Three priests were groping toward me, their\n eye-sockets red pits of burned flesh. They knew what I wanted and led\n the way without a word.", "The parts, the new power plant and a few other odds and ends were chuted\n into a neat pile on the ship. I checked all the parts by screen before\n they were loaded in a metal crate. In the darkest hour before dawn, the\n heavy-duty eye dropped the crate outside the temple and darted away\n without being seen.\n\n\n I watched the priests through the pryeye while they tried to open it.\n When they had given up, I boomed orders at them through a speaker in the\n crate. They spent most of the day sweating the heavy box up through the\n narrow temple stairs and I enjoyed a good sleep. It was resting inside\n the beacon door when I woke up.\nThe\n repairs didn’t take long, though there was plenty of groaning\n from the blind lizards when they heard me ripping the wall open to get\n at the power leads. I even hooked a gadget to the water pipe so their\n Holy Waters would have the usual refreshing radioactivity when they\n started flowing again. The moment this was all finished, I did the job\n they were waiting for.", "“Undoubtedly you know of the rule,” he said. “Because\n the old priests did pry and peer, it was ruled henceforth that only the\n blind could enter the Holy of Holies.” I’d swear he was\n smiling, if thirty teeth peeking out of what looked like a crack in an\n old suitcase can be called smiling.\n\n\n He was also signaling to him an underpriest who carried a brazier of\n charcoal complete with red-hot irons. All I could do was stand and watch\n as he stirred up the coals, pulled out the ruddiest iron and turned\n toward me. He was just drawing a bead on my right eyeball when my brain\n got back in gear.", "I checked the readings carefully and found just what I had suspected.\n One of the eager lizards had managed to open a circuit box and had\n polished the switches inside. While doing this, he had thrown one of the\n switches and that had caused the trouble.\nRather\n , that had\n started\n the trouble. It wasn’t going to be ended\n by just reversing the water-valve switch. This valve was supposed to be\n used only for repairs, after the pile was damped. When the water was cut\n off with the pile in operation, it had started to overheat and the\n automatic safeties had dumped the charge down the pit.\n\n\n I could start the water again easily enough, but there was no fuel left\n in the reactor.", "It all began with the land bridge. Apparently the local lizards had been\n living in the swamps when the beacon was built, but the builders\n didn’t think much of them. They were a low type and confined to a\n distant continent. The idea that the race would develop and might reach\n this\n continent never occurred to the beacon mechanics. Which is, of\n course, what happened.\n\n\n A little geological turnover, a swampy land bridge formed in the right\n spot, and the lizards began to wander up beacon valley. And found\n religion. A shiny metal temple out of which poured a constant stream of\n magic water—the reactor-cooling water pumped down from the\n atmosphere condenser on the roof. The radioactivity in the water\n didn’t hurt the natives. It caused mutations that bred true.", "“What—you dare interfere with the messenger of your\n ancestors!” I had the speaker on full volume and the vibration\n almost shook my head off.\n\n\n The lizards cringed and I set my Solar for a narrow beam and ran it\n around the door jamb. There was a great crunching and banging from the\n junk piled against it, and then the door swung free. I threw it open.\n Before they could protest, I had pushed the priests out through it.\n\n\n The rest of their clan showed up at the foot of the stairs and made a\n great ruckus while I finished welding the door shut. Running through the\n crowd, I faced up to the First Lizard in his tub. He sank slowly beneath\n the surface.", "“What lack of courtesy!” I shouted. He made little bubbles\n in the water. “The ancestors are annoyed and have decided to\n forbid entrance to the Inner Temple forever; though, out of kindness,\n they will let the waters flow. Now I must return—on with the\n ceremony!”\n\n\n The torture-master was too frightened to move, so I grabbed out his hot\n iron. A touch on the side of my face dropped a steel plate over my eyes,\n under the plastiskin. Then I jammed the iron hard into my phony\n eye-sockets and the plastic gave off an authentic odor.\n\n\n A cry went up from the crowd as I dropped the iron and staggered in\n blind circles. I must admit it went off pretty well.\nBefore\n they could get any more bright ideas, I threw the switch and my\n plastic pterodactyl sailed in through the door. I couldn’t see it,\n of course, but I knew it had arrived when the grapples in the claws\n latched onto the steel plates on my shoulders.", "I had got turned around after the eye-burning and my flying beast hooked\n onto me backward. I had meant to sail out bravely, blind eyes facing\n into the sunset; instead, I faced the crowd as I soared away, so I made\n the most of a bad situation and threw them a snappy military salute.\n Then I was out in the fresh air and away.\n\n\n When I lifted the plate and poked holes in the seared plastic, I could\n see the pyramid growing smaller behind me, water gushing out of the base\n and a happy crowd of reptiles sporting in its radioactive rush. I\n counted off on my talons to see if I had forgotten anything.\n\n\n One: The beacon was repaired.\n\n\n Two: The door was sealed, so there should be no more sabotage,\n accidental or deliberate.", "Three: The priests should be satisfied. The water was running again, my\n eyes had been duly burned out, and they were back in business. Which\n added up to—\n\n\n Four: The fact that they would probably let another repairman in, under\n the same conditions, if the beacon conked out again. At least I had done\n nothing, like butchering a few of them, that would make them\n antagonistic toward future ancestral messengers.\n\n\n I stripped off my tattered lizard suit back in the ship, very glad that\n it would be some other repairman who’d get the job.\n—\nHarry Harrison\nTranscriber’s Note\n\n\n This etext was produced from\n Galaxy\n February 1958. Extensive research\n did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication\n was renewed.", "Some of the more credulous natives prostrated themselves and others fled\n screaming. One doubtful type raised a spear, but no one else tried that\n after the pterodactyl-eye picked him up and dropped him in the swamp.\n The priests were a hard-headed lot and weren’t buying any lizards\n in a poke; they just stood and muttered. I had to take the offensive\n again.\n\n\n “Begone, O faithful steed,” I said to the eye, and pressed\n the control in my palm at the same time.\n\n\n It took off straight up a bit faster than I wanted; little pieces of\n wind-torn plastic rained down. While the crowd was ogling this ascent, I\n walked through the temple doors.\n\n\n “I would talk with you, O noble priests,” I said.", "It must have been a grand sight. The eye was camouflaged to look like a\n flying lizard, sort of a cardboard pterodactyl, and the slowly flapping\n wings obviously had nothing to do with our flight. But it was impressive\n enough for the natives. The first one that spotted me screamed and\n dropped over on his back. The others came running. They milled and\n mobbed and piled on top of one another, and by that time I had landed in\n the plaza fronting the temple. The priesthood arrived.\n\n\n I folded my arms in a regal stance. “Greetings, O noble servers of\n the Great God,” I said. Of course I didn’t say it out loud,\n just whispered loud enough for the throat mike to catch. This was\n radioed back to the MT and the translation shot back to a speaker in my\n jaws.\n\n\n The natives chomped and rattled and the translation rolled out almost\n instantly. I had the volume turned up and the whole square echoed.", "“Here is some money from paradise, because you have been a good\n boy.” Not really from paradise—I had lifted it from the\n treasury the night before. “Come back tomorrow and we will talk\n some more,” I called after the fleeing figure. I was pleased to\n notice that he took the cash before taking off.\n\n\n After that, Grandpa in paradise had many heart-to-heart talks with\n Grandson, who found the heavenly loot more than he could resist. Grandpa\n had been out of touch with things since his death and Goat-boy happily\n filled him in.\n\n\n I learned all I needed to know of the history, past and recent, and it\n wasn’t nice.\n\n\n In addition to the pyramid being around the beacon, there was a nice\n little religious war going on around the pyramid.", "When the head was done, I peeled it off and attached it to an attractive\n suit of green plastic, complete with tail. I was really glad they had\n tails. The lizards didn’t wear clothes and I wanted to take along\n a lot of electronic equipment. I built the tail over a metal frame that\n anchored around my waist. Then I filled the frame with all the equipment\n I would need and began to wire the suit.\n\n\n When it was done, I tried it on in front of a full-length mirror. It was\n horrible but effective. The tail dragged me down in the rear and gave me\n a duck-waddle, but that only helped the resemblance.\n\n\n That night I took the ship down into the hills nearest the pyramid, an\n out-of-the-way dry spot where the amphibious natives would never go. A\n little before dawn, the eye hooked onto my shoulders and we sailed\n straight up. We hovered above the temple at about 2,000 meters, until it\n was light, then dropped straight down.", "I had a pryeye of my own construction. It looked like a piece of rock\n about a foot long. Once on the ground, it would never be noticed, though\n it was a little disconcerting to see it float by. I located a lizard\n town about a thousand kilometers from the pyramid and dropped the eye.\n It swished down and landed at night in the bank of the local mud wallow.\n This was a favorite spot that drew a good crowd during the day. In the\n morning, when the first wallowers arrived, I flipped on the recorder." ], [ "“Undoubtedly you know of the rule,” he said. “Because\n the old priests did pry and peer, it was ruled henceforth that only the\n blind could enter the Holy of Holies.” I’d swear he was\n smiling, if thirty teeth peeking out of what looked like a crack in an\n old suitcase can be called smiling.\n\n\n He was also signaling to him an underpriest who carried a brazier of\n charcoal complete with red-hot irons. All I could do was stand and watch\n as he stirred up the coals, pulled out the ruddiest iron and turned\n toward me. He was just drawing a bead on my right eyeball when my brain\n got back in gear.", "The First Lizard knew I was talking sense then and immediately called a\n meeting of the shamans. It, of course, took place in the public bathtub\n and I had to join them there. We jawed and gurgled for about an hour and\n settled all the major points.\n\n\n I found out that they were new priests; the previous ones had all been\n boiled for letting the Holy Waters cease. They found out I was there\n only to help them restore the flow of the waters. They bought this,\n tentatively, and we all heaved out of the tub and trickled muddy paths\n across the floor. There was a bolted and guarded door that led into the\n pyramid proper. While it was being opened, the First Lizard turned to\n me.", "“Of course,” I said, “blinding is only right. But in\n my case you will have to blind me before I\n leave\n the Holy of Holies, not\n now. I need my eyes to see and mend the Fount of Holy Waters. Once the\n waters flow again, I will laugh as I hurl myself on the burning\n iron.”\nHe\n took a good thirty seconds to think it over and had to agree with me.\n The local torturer sniffled a bit and threw a little more charcoal on\n the fire. The gate crashed open and I stalked through; then it banged to\n behind me and I was alone in the dark.\n\n\n But not for long—there was a shuffling nearby and I took a chance\n and turned on my flash. Three priests were groping toward me, their\n eye-sockets red pits of burned flesh. They knew what I wanted and led\n the way without a word.", "This raised a buzz of conversation behind me, but got no rise out of the\n chief. He sank slowly into the water until only his eyes were showing. I\n could almost hear the wheels turning behind that moss-covered forehead.\n Then he lunged up and pointed a dripping finger at me.\n\n\n “You are a liar! You are no ancestor of ours! We\n will—”\n\n\n “Stop!” I thundered before he got so far in that he\n couldn’t back out. “I said your ancestors sent me as\n emissary—I am not one of your ancestors. Do not try to harm me or\n the wrath of those who have Passed On will turn against you.”\n\n\n When I said this, I turned to jab a claw at the other priests, using the\n motion to cover my flicking a coin grenade toward them. It blew a nice\n hole in the floor with a great show of noise and smoke.", "Some of the more credulous natives prostrated themselves and others fled\n screaming. One doubtful type raised a spear, but no one else tried that\n after the pterodactyl-eye picked him up and dropped him in the swamp.\n The priests were a hard-headed lot and weren’t buying any lizards\n in a poke; they just stood and muttered. I had to take the offensive\n again.\n\n\n “Begone, O faithful steed,” I said to the eye, and pressed\n the control in my palm at the same time.\n\n\n It took off straight up a bit faster than I wanted; little pieces of\n wind-torn plastic rained down. While the crowd was ogling this ascent, I\n walked through the temple doors.\n\n\n “I would talk with you, O noble priests,” I said.", "“What lack of courtesy!” I shouted. He made little bubbles\n in the water. “The ancestors are annoyed and have decided to\n forbid entrance to the Inner Temple forever; though, out of kindness,\n they will let the waters flow. Now I must return—on with the\n ceremony!”\n\n\n The torture-master was too frightened to move, so I grabbed out his hot\n iron. A touch on the side of my face dropped a steel plate over my eyes,\n under the plastiskin. Then I jammed the iron hard into my phony\n eye-sockets and the plastic gave off an authentic odor.\n\n\n A cry went up from the crowd as I dropped the iron and staggered in\n blind circles. I must admit it went off pretty well.\nBefore\n they could get any more bright ideas, I threw the switch and my\n plastic pterodactyl sailed in through the door. I couldn’t see it,\n of course, but I knew it had arrived when the grapples in the claws\n latched onto the steel plates on my shoulders.", "The parts, the new power plant and a few other odds and ends were chuted\n into a neat pile on the ship. I checked all the parts by screen before\n they were loaded in a metal crate. In the darkest hour before dawn, the\n heavy-duty eye dropped the crate outside the temple and darted away\n without being seen.\n\n\n I watched the priests through the pryeye while they tried to open it.\n When they had given up, I boomed orders at them through a speaker in the\n crate. They spent most of the day sweating the heavy box up through the\n narrow temple stairs and I enjoyed a good sleep. It was resting inside\n the beacon door when I woke up.\nThe\n repairs didn’t take long, though there was plenty of groaning\n from the blind lizards when they heard me ripping the wall open to get\n at the power leads. I even hooked a gadget to the water pipe so their\n Holy Waters would have the usual refreshing radioactivity when they\n started flowing again. The moment this was all finished, I did the job\n they were waiting for.", "When the head was done, I peeled it off and attached it to an attractive\n suit of green plastic, complete with tail. I was really glad they had\n tails. The lizards didn’t wear clothes and I wanted to take along\n a lot of electronic equipment. I built the tail over a metal frame that\n anchored around my waist. Then I filled the frame with all the equipment\n I would need and began to wire the suit.\n\n\n When it was done, I tried it on in front of a full-length mirror. It was\n horrible but effective. The tail dragged me down in the rear and gave me\n a duck-waddle, but that only helped the resemblance.\n\n\n That night I took the ship down into the hills nearest the pyramid, an\n out-of-the-way dry spot where the amphibious natives would never go. A\n little before dawn, the eye hooked onto my shoulders and we sailed\n straight up. We hovered above the temple at about 2,000 meters, until it\n was light, then dropped straight down.", "I had got turned around after the eye-burning and my flying beast hooked\n onto me backward. I had meant to sail out bravely, blind eyes facing\n into the sunset; instead, I faced the crowd as I soared away, so I made\n the most of a bad situation and threw them a snappy military salute.\n Then I was out in the fresh air and away.\n\n\n When I lifted the plate and poked holes in the seared plastic, I could\n see the pyramid growing smaller behind me, water gushing out of the base\n and a happy crowd of reptiles sporting in its radioactive rush. I\n counted off on my talons to see if I had forgotten anything.\n\n\n One: The beacon was repaired.\n\n\n Two: The door was sealed, so there should be no more sabotage,\n accidental or deliberate.", "It must have been a grand sight. The eye was camouflaged to look like a\n flying lizard, sort of a cardboard pterodactyl, and the slowly flapping\n wings obviously had nothing to do with our flight. But it was impressive\n enough for the natives. The first one that spotted me screamed and\n dropped over on his back. The others came running. They milled and\n mobbed and piled on top of one another, and by that time I had landed in\n the plaza fronting the temple. The priesthood arrived.\n\n\n I folded my arms in a regal stance. “Greetings, O noble servers of\n the Great God,” I said. Of course I didn’t say it out loud,\n just whispered loud enough for the throat mike to catch. This was\n radioed back to the MT and the translation shot back to a speaker in my\n jaws.\n\n\n The natives chomped and rattled and the translation rolled out almost\n instantly. I had the volume turned up and the whole square echoed.", "“What—you dare interfere with the messenger of your\n ancestors!” I had the speaker on full volume and the vibration\n almost shook my head off.\n\n\n The lizards cringed and I set my Solar for a narrow beam and ran it\n around the door jamb. There was a great crunching and banging from the\n junk piled against it, and then the door swung free. I threw it open.\n Before they could protest, I had pushed the priests out through it.\n\n\n The rest of their clan showed up at the foot of the stairs and made a\n great ruckus while I finished welding the door shut. Running through the\n crowd, I faced up to the First Lizard in his tub. He sank slowly beneath\n the surface.", "“Here is some money from paradise, because you have been a good\n boy.” Not really from paradise—I had lifted it from the\n treasury the night before. “Come back tomorrow and we will talk\n some more,” I called after the fleeing figure. I was pleased to\n notice that he took the cash before taking off.\n\n\n After that, Grandpa in paradise had many heart-to-heart talks with\n Grandson, who found the heavenly loot more than he could resist. Grandpa\n had been out of touch with things since his death and Goat-boy happily\n filled him in.\n\n\n I learned all I needed to know of the history, past and recent, and it\n wasn’t nice.\n\n\n In addition to the pyramid being around the beacon, there was a nice\n little religious war going on around the pyramid.", "Three: The priests should be satisfied. The water was running again, my\n eyes had been duly burned out, and they were back in business. Which\n added up to—\n\n\n Four: The fact that they would probably let another repairman in, under\n the same conditions, if the beacon conked out again. At least I had done\n nothing, like butchering a few of them, that would make them\n antagonistic toward future ancestral messengers.\n\n\n I stripped off my tattered lizard suit back in the ship, very glad that\n it would be some other repairman who’d get the job.\n—\nHarry Harrison\nTranscriber’s Note\n\n\n This etext was produced from\n Galaxy\n February 1958. Extensive research\n did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication\n was renewed.", "A crumbling and cracked stone stairway brought us up to a solid metal\n doorway labeled in archaic script\n MARK III BEACON—AUTHORIZED\n PERSONNEL ONLY\n . The trusting builders counted on the sign to do the\n whole job, for there wasn’t a trace of a lock on the door. One\n lizard merely turned the handle and we were inside the beacon.\n\n\n I unzipped the front of my camouflage suit and pulled out the\n blueprints. With the faithful priests stumbling after me, I located the\n control room and turned on the lights. There was a residue of charge in\n the emergency batteries, just enough to give a dim light. The meters and\n indicators looked to be in good shape; if anything, unexpectedly bright\n from constant polishing.", "Before they could think up a good answer, I was inside.\nThe\n temple was a small one built against the base of the pyramid. I\n hoped I wasn’t breaking too many taboos by going in. I\n wasn’t stopped, so it looked all right. The temple was a single\n room with a murky-looking pool at one end. Sloshing in the pool was an\n ancient reptile who clearly was one of the leaders. I waddled toward him\n and he gave me a cold and fishy eye, then growled something.\n\n\n The MT whispered into my ear, “Just what in the name of the\n thirteenth sin are you and what are you doing here?”\n\n\n I drew up my scaly figure in a noble gesture and pointed toward the\n ceiling. “I come from your ancestors to help you. I am here to\n restore the Holy Waters.”", "A city was built around the temple and, through the centuries, the\n pyramid was put up around the beacon. A special branch of the priesthood\n served the temple. All went well until one of the priests violated the\n temple and destroyed the holy waters. There had been revolt, strife,\n murder and destruction since then. But still the holy waters would not\n flow. Now armed mobs fought around the temple each day and a new band of\n priests guarded the sacred fount.\n\n\n And I had to walk into the middle of that mess and repair the thing.\n\n\n It would have been easy enough if we were allowed a little mayhem. I\n could have had a lizard fry, fixed the beacon and taken off. Only\n “native life-forms” were quite well protected. There were\n spy cells on my ship, all of which I hadn’t found, that would\n cheerfully rat on me when I got back.", "I threw the switch that started the water flowing again.\n\n\n There were a few minutes while the water began to gurgle down through\n the dry pipe. Then a roar came from outside the pyramid that must have\n shaken its stone walls. Shaking my hands once over my head, I went down\n for the eye-burning ceremony.\n\n\n The blind lizards were waiting for me by the door and looked even\n unhappier than usual. When I tried the door, I found out why—it\n was bolted and barred from the other side.\n\n\n “It has been decided,” a lizard said, “that you shall\n remain here forever and tend the Holy Waters. We will stay with you and\n serve your every need.”\n\n\n A delightful prospect, eternity spent in a locked beacon with three\n blind lizards. In spite of their hospitality, I couldn’t accept.", "I dived the eye lower. The pyramid was a crude-looking thing of\n undressed stone, without carvings or decorations. There was a shimmer of\n light from the top and I took a closer look at it. On the peak of the\n pyramid was a hollow basin filled with water. When I saw that, something\n clicked in my mind.\nLocking\n the eye in a circular course, I dug through the Mark III\n plans—and there it was. The beacon had a precipitating field and a\n basin on top of it for water; this was used to cool the reactor that\n powered the monstrosity. If the water was still there, the beacon was\n still there—inside the pyramid. The natives, who, of course,\n weren’t even mentioned by the idiots who constructed the thing,\n had built a nice heavy, thick stone pyramid around the beacon.", "The old boys had enough brains to choose a traceable site for the\n beacon, equidistant on a line between two of the most prominent mountain\n peaks. I located the peaks easily enough and started the eye out from\n the first peak and kept it on a course directly toward the second. There\n was a nose and tail radar in the eye and I fed their signals into a\n scope as an amplitude curve. When the two peaks coincided, I spun the\n eye controls and dived the thing down.\n\n\n I cut out the radar and cut in the nose orthicon and sat back to watch\n the beacon appear on the screen.\n\n\n The image blinked, focused—and a great damn pyramid swam into\n view. I cursed and wheeled the eye in circles, scanning the surrounding\n country. It was flat, marshy bottom land without a bump. The only thing\n in a ten-mile circle was this pyramid—and that definitely\n wasn’t my beacon.\n\n\n Or wasn’t it?", "The time went fast. I rebuilt my camera for about the twentieth time and\n just about finished a correspondence course in nucleonics. Most\n repairmen take these courses. Besides their always coming in handy, the\n company grades your pay by the number of specialties you can handle. All\n this, with some oil painting and free-fall workouts in the gym, passed\n the time. I was asleep when the alarm went off that announced planetary\n distance.\n\n\n Planet two, where the beacon was situated according to the old charts,\n was a mushy-looking, wet kind of globe. I tried to make sense out of\n the ancient directions and finally located the right area. Staying\n outside the atmosphere, I sent a flying eye down to look things over. In\n this business, you learn early when and where to risk your own skin. The\n eye would be good enough for the preliminary survey." ] ]
valid	22346	[ "Who did Kinton want to land on Tepokt?", "Which of the following are most true about how the Tepoktans regard Kinton?", "How did Kinton survive his crash onto Tepokt?", "Why does Kinton struggle with his choice about Al Birken's fate?", "How do the first two lines connect with the rest of the story?", "What do the Tepoktan scientists want to do with Kinton after he dies?", "How can the quoted Tepoktan proverb apply to the story?", "Why are the Tepoktans so interested in space travel?", "What would have most likely happened if Kinton had let Birken take the spaceship?" ]	[ [ "A woman", "Anyone", "A man", "Birken" ], [ "They are afraid of him.", "They treat him like one of their own.", "They treat him with respect.", "They treat him like an alien." ], [ "He is a great pilot.", "He had an extra strong spaceship.", "He followed a specific path.", "He got lucky." ], [ "He is lonely without another human around.", "He does not struggle with him choice.", "He thinks Al could possibly help him get off the Tepokt.", "He likes Al." ], [ "Birken feels the bitterness of respect and justice.", "The lines do not connect to the rest of the story.", "Kinton feels the bitterness of respect and justice.", "No more Terrans land on Tepokt." ], [ "They want to bury him.", "We do not know what they want to do.", "They want to honor him with a grand funeral.", "They want to dissect his body." ], [ "It does not apply to the story.", "It only applies to the Dome of Eyes.", "It can apply to Kinton's fame and loneliness.", "It can apply to Birken's choices." ], [ "They do not know anything about the stars.", "They want to leave their planet.", "They are interested in what they cannot do.", "They are not interested in space travel." ], [ "Klaft would have shot it down with a rocket.", "Birken would have decided to stay with Kinton.", "Birken would have escaped.", "Birken would have crashed into the Dome of Eyes." ] ]	[ 1, 3, 4, 1, 3, 4, 3, 3, 4 ]	[ 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Kinton smiled at his aide's\n earnest concern. Then he turned\n to look out the window as he recalled\n the shadow that underlay\n such remonstrances. He estimated\n that he was about forty-eight\n now, as nearly as he could tell\n from the somewhat longer revolutions\n of Tepokt. The time\n would come when he would age\n and die. Whose wishes would\n then prevail?", "Kinton growled a Tepoktan expression\n the meaning of which\n he had deduced after hearing it\n used by the dam workers.\n\n\n He whirled to run toward the\n helicopter. Hardly had he taken\n two steps, however, when he saw\n startled changes in the carefully\n blank looks of his escort. The\n constable half raised his heavy\n weapon, and Klaft sprang forward\n with a hissing cry.\n\n\n By the time Kinton's aging\n muscles obeyed his impulse to\n sidestep, the spear had already\n hurtled past. It had missed him\n by an error of over six feet.\n\n\n [113]\n He felt his face flushing with\n sudden anger. Birken was running\n as best he could toward the\n spaceship, and had covered nearly\n half the distance.\n\n\n Kinton ran at the Tepoktans,\n brushing aside the concerned\n Klaft. He snatched the heavy\n weapon from the surprised constable.", "Kinton turned away from the\n window as he caught the glint\n of Tepokt's sun upon the hull of\n the spaceship they had also built\n for him. Perhaps ... would it\n be fair to encourage the newcomer\n to attempt the barrier?", "\"We must get into the air\n immediately,\" he told Klaft.\n \"Perhaps we may see him before\n he reaches—\"\n\n\n He broke off at the word\n \"spaceship\" but he noticed a reserved\n expression on Klaft's\n pointed face. His aide had probably\n reached a conclusion similar\n to his own.\n\n\n They climbed back into the\n cabin and Klaft gave brisk orders\n to the lean young pilot. A\n moment later, Kinton saw the\n ground outside drop away.\n\n\n Only upon turning around did\n he realize that two armed Tepoktans\n had materialized in time to\n follow Klaft inside.", "The aide reached Kinton and\n bent to hiss and cluck into the\n latter's ear in what he presumably\n considered an undertone.\n The Terran laboriously spelled\n out the message inscribed on the\n limp, satiny paper held before his\n eyes. Then he rose and took one\n step toward the waiting group.\n\n\n \"I regret I shall have to conclude\n this discussion,\" he announced.\n \"I am informed that\n another ship from space has\n reached the surface of Tepokt.\n My presence is requested in case\n the crew are of my own planet.\"\n\n\n [104]\n Klaft excitedly skipped down\n to lead the way up the aisle, but\n Kinton hesitated. Those in the\n audience were scholars or officials\n to whom attendance at one\n of Kinton's limited number of\n personal lectures was awarded as\n an honor.", "He turned and raised it to his\n chest. Because of the shortness\n of Tepoktan arms, the launcher\n was constructed so that the butt\n rested against the chest with the\n sighting loops before the eyes.\n The little rocket tubes were\n above head height, to prevent the\n handler's catching the blast.\n\n\n The circles of the sights\n weaved and danced about the\n running figure. Kinton realized\n to his surprise that the effort of\n seizing the weapon had him panting.\n Or was it the fright at having\n a spear thrown at him? He\n decided that Birken had not come\n close enough for that, and wondered\n if he was afraid of his\n own impending action.\n\n\n It wasn't fair, he complained\n to himself. The poor slob only\n had a spear, and a man couldn't\n blame him for wanting to get\n back to his own sort. He was\n limping ... hurt ... how could\n they expect him to realize—?", "For the next three weeks, Kinton\n flew back and forth from his\n own town nearly every day. He\n felt that he should not neglect\n the few meetings which were the\n only way he could repay the Tepoktans\n for all they did for him.\n On the other hand, the chance\n to see and talk with one of his\n own kind drew him like a magnet\n to the hospital.\n\n\n The doctors operated upon\n Birken's leg, inserting a metal\n rod inside the bone by a method\n they had known before Kinton\n described it. The new arrival expected\n to be able to walk, with\n care, almost any day; although\n the pin would have to be removed\n after the bone had healed. Meanwhile,\n Birken seemed eager to\n learn all Kinton could tell him\n about the planet, Tepokt.\n\n\n About himself, he was remarkably\n reticent. Kinton worried\n about this.", "Kinton observed, however,\n that his aide also stared upward\n for a long moment. The Tepoktans\n loved speculating about the\n unsolvable. They had even founded\n clubs to argue whether two\n satellites had been destroyed or\n only one.\n\n\n Half a dozen officials hastened\n up to escort the party to the\n vehicle awaiting Kinton. Klaft\n succeeded in quieting the lesser\n members of the delegation so\n that Kinton was able to learn a\n few facts about the new arrival.\n The crash had been several hundred\n miles away, but someone\n had thought of the hospital in\n this city which was known to\n have a doctor rating as an expert\n in human physiology. The survivor—only\n one occupant of the\n wreck, alive or dead, had\n been discovered—had accordingly\n been flown here.", "Why was it one like him who\n got through? he asked himself\n in silent anguish. After ten\n years. The Tepoktans had been\n thinking well of Terrans, but\n now—\n\n\n He did not worry about his\n own position. That was well\n enough established, whether or\n not he could again hold up his\n head before the purple-scaled\n people who had been so generous\n to him.\n\n\n Even if they had been aroused\n to a rage by the killing, Kinton\n told himself, he would not have\n been concerned about himself. He\n had reached a fairly ripe age for\n a spaceman. In fact, he had already\n [110]\n enjoyed a decade of borrowed\n time.\n\n\n But they were more civilized\n than that wanton murderer, he\n realized.\n\n\n He straightened up, forcing\n back his early-morning weariness.", "For ten years, Kinton had\n failed to work up any strong desire\n to try it. The Tepoktans\n called the ever-shifting lights\n the Dome of Eyes, after a myth\n in which each tiny satellite\n bright enough to be visible was\n supposed to watch over a single\n individual on the surface. Like\n their brothers on Terra, the native\n astronomers could trace\n their science back to a form of\n astrology; and Kinton often told\n them jokingly that he felt no\n urge to risk a physical encounter\n with his own personal Eye.\nThe helicopter started to descend,\n and Kinton remembered\n that the city named in his message\n was only about twenty miles\n from his home. The brief twilight\n of Tepokt was passing by\n the time he set foot on the landing\n field, and he paused to look\n up.", "One was a constable but the\n other he recognized for an officer\n of some rank. Both wore slung\n across their chests weapons resembling\n long-barreled pistols\n with large, oddly indented butts\n to fit Tepoktan claws. The constable,\n in addition, carried a\n contraption with a quadruple\n tube for launching tiny rockets\n no thicker than Kinton's thumb.\n These, he knew, were loaded\n with an explosive worthy of respect\n on any planet he had heard\n of.\n\n\n To protect him, he wondered.\n Or to get Birken?\n\n\n The pilot headed the craft\n back toward Kinton's town in\n the brightening sky of early day.\n Long before the buildings of\n Kinton's institute came into\n view, they received a radio message\n about Birken.", "They would hardly learn anything\n from him directly that was\n not available in recordings made\n over the course of years. The\n Tepoktan scientists, historians,\n and philosophers had respectfully\n but eagerly gathered every\n crumb of information Kinton\n knowingly had to offer—and\n some he thought he had forgotten.\n Still ... he sensed the disappointment\n at his announcement.\n\n\n \"I shall arrange for you to\n await my return here in town,\"\n Kinton said, and there were murmurs\n of pleasure.\n\n\n Later, aboard the jet helicopter\n that was basically like\n those Kinton remembered using\n on Terra twenty light years\n away, he shook his head at\n Klaft's respectful protest.\n\n\n \"But George! It was enough\n that they were present when you\n received the news. They can talk\n about that the rest of their lives!\n You must not waste your\n strength on these people who\n come out of curiosity.\"", "\"Get on with it, Klaft!\n Please!\"\n\n\n \"In the night, then, Albirken\n left the chamber in which he lay.\n He can walk some now, you\n know, because of Dr. Chuxolkhee's\n metal pin. He—he stole a\n ground car and is gone.\"\n\n\n \"He did?\" Kinton had an\n empty feeling in the pit of his\n stomach. \"Is it known where he\n went? I mean ... he has been\n curious to see some of Tepokt.\n Perhaps—\"\n\n\n He stopped, his own words\n braying in his ears. Klaft was\n clicking two claws together, a\n sign of emphatic disagreement.\n\n\n \"Albirken,\" he said, \"was soon\n followed by three police constables\n in another vehicle. They\n found him heading in the direction\n of our town.\"", "Maybe he was wrong, he\n thought. Maybe he shouldn't\n stand in the way of their biologists\n and surgeons. But he'd\n rather be buried, even if that\n left them with only what he\n could tell them about the human\n body.\nTo help himself forget the\n rather preoccupied manner in\n which some of the Tepoktan scientists\n occasionally eyed him, he\n peered down at the big dam of\n the hydro-electric project being\n completed to Kinton's design.\n Power from this would soon\n light the town built to house the\n staff of scientists, students, and\n workers assigned to the institute\n organized about the person\n of Kinton.\n\n\n Now, there was an example of\n their willingness to repay him\n for whatever help he had been,\n he reflected. They hadn't needed\n that for themselves.", "He could tell that they were\n pleased by his admiration, and\n wondered yet again why any\n little show of approval by him\n was so eagerly received. Even\n though he was the first stellar\n visitor in their recorded history,\n Kinton remained conscious of the\n fact that in many fields he was\n unable to offer the Tepoktans any\n new ideas. In one or two ways,\n he believed, no Terran could\n teach their experts anything.\n\n\n \"Then will you tell us, George,\n more about the problems of your\n first space explorers?\" came another\n question.\nBefore Kinton had formed his\n answer, the golden curtains at\n the rear of the austerely simple\n chamber parted. Klaft, the Tepoktan\n serving the current year\n as Kinton's chief aide, hurried\n toward the dais. The twenty-odd\n members of the group fell silent\n on their polished stone benches,\n turning their pointed visages to\n follow Klaft's progress.", "\"Wait! Don't you think they\n tried sending unmanned rockets\n up? Every one was struck and\n exploded.\"\n\n\n Birken showed no more change\n of expression than if the other\n had commented on the weather.\n\n\n Kinton had stepped forward\n six or eight paces, irritated despite\n his anxiety at the way Birken\n persisted in drifting before\n him.\n\n\n Kinton couldn't just grab him—bad\n leg or not, he could probably\n break the older man in two.\n\n\n He glanced back at the Tepoktans\n beside the helicopter, Klaft,\n the pilot, the officer, the constable\n with the rocket weapon.\n\n\n They stood quietly, looking\n back at him.\n\n\n The call for help that had risen\n to his lips died there.", "\"I think we should not expect\n too much of this Terran,\" he\n warned Klaft uneasily. \"You,\n too, have citizens who do not always\n obey, your laws, who sometimes\n ... that is—\"\n\n\n \"Who are born to die under\n the axe, as we say,\" interrupted\n Klaft, as if to ease the concern\n plain on Kinton's face. \"In other\n words, criminals. You suspect\n this Albirken is such a one,\n George?\"\n\n\n \"It is not impossible,\" admitted\n Kinton unhappily. \"He will\n tell me little about himself. It\n may be that he was caught in\n Tepokt's gravity while fleeing\n from justice.\"", "\"The police will stay until cars\n from town arrive. They are coming\n now,\" said his aide.\nKinton stared at his hands,\n wondering at the fact that they\n were not shaking. He felt dejected,\n empty, not like a man who\n had just been at a high pitch of\n excitement.\n\n\n \"Why did you not let him go,\n George?\"\n\n\n \"What? Why ... why ... he\n would have destroyed the ship\n you worked so hard to build.\n There is no safe path through\n the Dome of Eyes.\"\n\n\n \"No predictable path,\" Klaft\n corrected. \"But what then? We\n would have built you another\n ship, George, for it was you who\n showed us how.\"\n\n\n Kinton flexed his fingers\n slowly.", "\"Why did he say he was traveling\n that way?\" asked Kinton,\n thinking to himself of the spaceship!\n Was the man crazy?\n\n\n \"He did not say,\" answered\n Klaft expressionlessly. \"Taking\n them by surprise, he killed two\n of the constables and injured\n the third before fleeing with one\n of their spears.\"\n\n\n \"\nWhat?\n\"\n\n\n Kinton felt his eyes bulging\n with dismay.\n\n\n \"Yes, for they carried only the\n short spears of their authority,\n not expecting to need fire weapons.\"\nKinton looked from him to the\n messenger, noticing for the first\n time that the latter was an under-officer\n of police. He shook his\n head distractedly. It appeared\n that his suspicions concerning\n Birken had been only too accurate.", "\"I\nshouldn't\nhave told him\n about the ship!\" Kinton muttered,\n gnawing the knuckle of\n his left thumb. \"He's on the run,\n all right. Probably scared the\n colonial authorities will trail him\n right down through the Dome of\n Eyes. Wonder what he did?\"\n\n\n He caught himself and looked\n around to see if he had been overheard.\n Klaft and the police officers\n peered from their respective\n windows, in calculated withdrawal.\n Kinton, disturbed, tried\n to remember whether he had\n spoken in Terran or Tepoktan.\n\n\n Would Birken listen if he tried\n reasoning, he asked himself.\n Maybe if he showed the man how\n they had proved the unpredictability\n of openings through the\n shifting Dome of Eyes—" ], [ "Kinton growled a Tepoktan expression\n the meaning of which\n he had deduced after hearing it\n used by the dam workers.\n\n\n He whirled to run toward the\n helicopter. Hardly had he taken\n two steps, however, when he saw\n startled changes in the carefully\n blank looks of his escort. The\n constable half raised his heavy\n weapon, and Klaft sprang forward\n with a hissing cry.\n\n\n By the time Kinton's aging\n muscles obeyed his impulse to\n sidestep, the spear had already\n hurtled past. It had missed him\n by an error of over six feet.\n\n\n [113]\n He felt his face flushing with\n sudden anger. Birken was running\n as best he could toward the\n spaceship, and had covered nearly\n half the distance.\n\n\n Kinton ran at the Tepoktans,\n brushing aside the concerned\n Klaft. He snatched the heavy\n weapon from the surprised constable.", "He could tell that they were\n pleased by his admiration, and\n wondered yet again why any\n little show of approval by him\n was so eagerly received. Even\n though he was the first stellar\n visitor in their recorded history,\n Kinton remained conscious of the\n fact that in many fields he was\n unable to offer the Tepoktans any\n new ideas. In one or two ways,\n he believed, no Terran could\n teach their experts anything.\n\n\n \"Then will you tell us, George,\n more about the problems of your\n first space explorers?\" came another\n question.\nBefore Kinton had formed his\n answer, the golden curtains at\n the rear of the austerely simple\n chamber parted. Klaft, the Tepoktan\n serving the current year\n as Kinton's chief aide, hurried\n toward the dais. The twenty-odd\n members of the group fell silent\n on their polished stone benches,\n turning their pointed visages to\n follow Klaft's progress.", "Kinton observed, however,\n that his aide also stared upward\n for a long moment. The Tepoktans\n loved speculating about the\n unsolvable. They had even founded\n clubs to argue whether two\n satellites had been destroyed or\n only one.\n\n\n Half a dozen officials hastened\n up to escort the party to the\n vehicle awaiting Kinton. Klaft\n succeeded in quieting the lesser\n members of the delegation so\n that Kinton was able to learn a\n few facts about the new arrival.\n The crash had been several hundred\n miles away, but someone\n had thought of the hospital in\n this city which was known to\n have a doctor rating as an expert\n in human physiology. The survivor—only\n one occupant of the\n wreck, alive or dead, had\n been discovered—had accordingly\n been flown here.", "Why was it one like him who\n got through? he asked himself\n in silent anguish. After ten\n years. The Tepoktans had been\n thinking well of Terrans, but\n now—\n\n\n He did not worry about his\n own position. That was well\n enough established, whether or\n not he could again hold up his\n head before the purple-scaled\n people who had been so generous\n to him.\n\n\n Even if they had been aroused\n to a rage by the killing, Kinton\n told himself, he would not have\n been concerned about himself. He\n had reached a fairly ripe age for\n a spaceman. In fact, he had already\n [110]\n enjoyed a decade of borrowed\n time.\n\n\n But they were more civilized\n than that wanton murderer, he\n realized.\n\n\n He straightened up, forcing\n back his early-morning weariness.", "Maybe he was wrong, he\n thought. Maybe he shouldn't\n stand in the way of their biologists\n and surgeons. But he'd\n rather be buried, even if that\n left them with only what he\n could tell them about the human\n body.\nTo help himself forget the\n rather preoccupied manner in\n which some of the Tepoktan scientists\n occasionally eyed him, he\n peered down at the big dam of\n the hydro-electric project being\n completed to Kinton's design.\n Power from this would soon\n light the town built to house the\n staff of scientists, students, and\n workers assigned to the institute\n organized about the person\n of Kinton.\n\n\n Now, there was an example of\n their willingness to repay him\n for whatever help he had been,\n he reflected. They hadn't needed\n that for themselves.", "Kinton smiled at his aide's\n earnest concern. Then he turned\n to look out the window as he recalled\n the shadow that underlay\n such remonstrances. He estimated\n that he was about forty-eight\n now, as nearly as he could tell\n from the somewhat longer revolutions\n of Tepokt. The time\n would come when he would age\n and die. Whose wishes would\n then prevail?", "For the next three weeks, Kinton\n flew back and forth from his\n own town nearly every day. He\n felt that he should not neglect\n the few meetings which were the\n only way he could repay the Tepoktans\n for all they did for him.\n On the other hand, the chance\n to see and talk with one of his\n own kind drew him like a magnet\n to the hospital.\n\n\n The doctors operated upon\n Birken's leg, inserting a metal\n rod inside the bone by a method\n they had known before Kinton\n described it. The new arrival expected\n to be able to walk, with\n care, almost any day; although\n the pin would have to be removed\n after the bone had healed. Meanwhile,\n Birken seemed eager to\n learn all Kinton could tell him\n about the planet, Tepokt.\n\n\n About himself, he was remarkably\n reticent. Kinton worried\n about this.", "They would hardly learn anything\n from him directly that was\n not available in recordings made\n over the course of years. The\n Tepoktan scientists, historians,\n and philosophers had respectfully\n but eagerly gathered every\n crumb of information Kinton\n knowingly had to offer—and\n some he thought he had forgotten.\n Still ... he sensed the disappointment\n at his announcement.\n\n\n \"I shall arrange for you to\n await my return here in town,\"\n Kinton said, and there were murmurs\n of pleasure.\n\n\n Later, aboard the jet helicopter\n that was basically like\n those Kinton remembered using\n on Terra twenty light years\n away, he shook his head at\n Klaft's respectful protest.\n\n\n \"But George! It was enough\n that they were present when you\n received the news. They can talk\n about that the rest of their lives!\n You must not waste your\n strength on these people who\n come out of curiosity.\"", "Kinton turned away from the\n window as he caught the glint\n of Tepokt's sun upon the hull of\n the spaceship they had also built\n for him. Perhaps ... would it\n be fair to encourage the newcomer\n to attempt the barrier?", "In some ways, compared to\n [105]\n those of Terra, the industries of\n Tepokt were underdeveloped. In\n the first place, the population\n was smaller and had different\n standards of luxury. In the second,\n a certain lack of drive resulted\n from the inability to\n break out into interplanetary\n space. Kinton had been inexplicably\n lucky to have reached the\n surface even in a battered hulk.\n The shell of meteorites was at\n least a hundred miles thick and\n constantly shifting.\n\n\n \"We do not know if they have\n always been meteorites,\" the\n Tepoktans had told Kinton, \"or\n whether part of them come from\n a destroyed satellite; but our observers\n have proved mathematically\n that no direct path through\n them may be predicted more than\n a very short while in advance.\"", "\"We must get into the air\n immediately,\" he told Klaft.\n \"Perhaps we may see him before\n he reaches—\"\n\n\n He broke off at the word\n \"spaceship\" but he noticed a reserved\n expression on Klaft's\n pointed face. His aide had probably\n reached a conclusion similar\n to his own.\n\n\n They climbed back into the\n cabin and Klaft gave brisk orders\n to the lean young pilot. A\n moment later, Kinton saw the\n ground outside drop away.\n\n\n Only upon turning around did\n he realize that two armed Tepoktans\n had materialized in time to\n follow Klaft inside.", "The aide reached Kinton and\n bent to hiss and cluck into the\n latter's ear in what he presumably\n considered an undertone.\n The Terran laboriously spelled\n out the message inscribed on the\n limp, satiny paper held before his\n eyes. Then he rose and took one\n step toward the waiting group.\n\n\n \"I regret I shall have to conclude\n this discussion,\" he announced.\n \"I am informed that\n another ship from space has\n reached the surface of Tepokt.\n My presence is requested in case\n the crew are of my own planet.\"\n\n\n [104]\n Klaft excitedly skipped down\n to lead the way up the aisle, but\n Kinton hesitated. Those in the\n audience were scholars or officials\n to whom attendance at one\n of Kinton's limited number of\n personal lectures was awarded as\n an honor.", "He leaned back and scanned\n the faces of his interviewers,\n faces that would have been oddly\n humanoid were it not for the\n elongated snouts and pointed,\n sharp-toothed jaws. The average\n Tepoktan was slightly under\n Kinton's height of five-feet-ten,\n with a long, supple trunk. Under\n the robes their scholars affected,\n the shortness of their two bowed\n legs was not obvious; but the\n sight of the short, thick arms\n carried high before their chests\n still left Kinton with a feeling\n of misproportion.\n\n\n He should be used to it after\n ten years, he thought, but even\n the reds or purples of the scales\n or the big teeth seemed more\n natural.\n\n\n \"I sympathize with your curiosity,\"\n he added. \"It is a marvel\n that your scientists have\n managed to measure the distances\n of so many stars.\"", "One was a constable but the\n other he recognized for an officer\n of some rank. Both wore slung\n across their chests weapons resembling\n long-barreled pistols\n with large, oddly indented butts\n to fit Tepoktan claws. The constable,\n in addition, carried a\n contraption with a quadruple\n tube for launching tiny rockets\n no thicker than Kinton's thumb.\n These, he knew, were loaded\n with an explosive worthy of respect\n on any planet he had heard\n of.\n\n\n To protect him, he wondered.\n Or to get Birken?\n\n\n The pilot headed the craft\n back toward Kinton's town in\n the brightening sky of early day.\n Long before the buildings of\n Kinton's institute came into\n view, they received a radio message\n about Birken.", "He turned and raised it to his\n chest. Because of the shortness\n of Tepoktan arms, the launcher\n was constructed so that the butt\n rested against the chest with the\n sighting loops before the eyes.\n The little rocket tubes were\n above head height, to prevent the\n handler's catching the blast.\n\n\n The circles of the sights\n weaved and danced about the\n running figure. Kinton realized\n to his surprise that the effort of\n seizing the weapon had him panting.\n Or was it the fright at having\n a spear thrown at him? He\n decided that Birken had not come\n close enough for that, and wondered\n if he was afraid of his\n own impending action.\n\n\n It wasn't fair, he complained\n to himself. The poor slob only\n had a spear, and a man couldn't\n blame him for wanting to get\n back to his own sort. He was\n limping ... hurt ... how could\n they expect him to realize—?", "\"I think we should not expect\n too much of this Terran,\" he\n warned Klaft uneasily. \"You,\n too, have citizens who do not always\n obey, your laws, who sometimes\n ... that is—\"\n\n\n \"Who are born to die under\n the axe, as we say,\" interrupted\n Klaft, as if to ease the concern\n plain on Kinton's face. \"In other\n words, criminals. You suspect\n this Albirken is such a one,\n George?\"\n\n\n \"It is not impossible,\" admitted\n Kinton unhappily. \"He will\n tell me little about himself. It\n may be that he was caught in\n Tepokt's gravity while fleeing\n from justice.\"", "For ten years, Kinton had\n failed to work up any strong desire\n to try it. The Tepoktans\n called the ever-shifting lights\n the Dome of Eyes, after a myth\n in which each tiny satellite\n bright enough to be visible was\n supposed to watch over a single\n individual on the surface. Like\n their brothers on Terra, the native\n astronomers could trace\n their science back to a form of\n astrology; and Kinton often told\n them jokingly that he felt no\n urge to risk a physical encounter\n with his own personal Eye.\nThe helicopter started to descend,\n and Kinton remembered\n that the city named in his message\n was only about twenty miles\n from his home. The brief twilight\n of Tepokt was passing by\n the time he set foot on the landing\n field, and he paused to look\n up.", "\"Get on with it, Klaft!\n Please!\"\n\n\n \"In the night, then, Albirken\n left the chamber in which he lay.\n He can walk some now, you\n know, because of Dr. Chuxolkhee's\n metal pin. He—he stole a\n ground car and is gone.\"\n\n\n \"He did?\" Kinton had an\n empty feeling in the pit of his\n stomach. \"Is it known where he\n went? I mean ... he has been\n curious to see some of Tepokt.\n Perhaps—\"\n\n\n He stopped, his own words\n braying in his ears. Klaft was\n clicking two claws together, a\n sign of emphatic disagreement.\n\n\n \"Albirken,\" he said, \"was soon\n followed by three police constables\n in another vehicle. They\n found him heading in the direction\n of our town.\"", "Questions like this had been\n put to him often during the ten\n years since his rocket had\n hurtled through the meteorite\n belt and down to the surface of\n Tepokt, leaving him the only survivor.\n Barred off as they were\n from venturing into space, the\n highly civilized Tepoktans constantly\n displayed the curiosity of\n dreamers in matters related to\n the universe. Because of the veil\n of meteorites and satellite fragments\n whirling about their\n planet, their astronomers had acquired\n torturous skills but only\n scraps of real knowledge.\n\n\n \"As I believe I mentioned in\n some of my recorded lectures,\"\n Kinton answered in their language,\n [103]\n \"the number is actually\n as vast as it seems to those of\n you peering through the Dome\n of Eyes. The scientists of my\n race have not yet encountered\n any beings capable of estimating\n the total.\"", "Kinton realized guiltily that\n the man should be resting. He\n [108]\n had lost track of the moments\n he had wasted in talk while the\n others with him stood attentively\n about.\n\n\n He questioned the doctor briefly\n and relayed the information\n that Birken's leg was broken but\n that the other injuries were not\n serious.\n\n\n \"They'll fix you up,\" he assured\n the spaceman. \"They're\n quite good at it, even if the sight\n of one does make you think a\n little of an iguana. Rest up, now;\n and I'll come back again when\n you're feeling better.\"" ], [ "Kinton observed, however,\n that his aide also stared upward\n for a long moment. The Tepoktans\n loved speculating about the\n unsolvable. They had even founded\n clubs to argue whether two\n satellites had been destroyed or\n only one.\n\n\n Half a dozen officials hastened\n up to escort the party to the\n vehicle awaiting Kinton. Klaft\n succeeded in quieting the lesser\n members of the delegation so\n that Kinton was able to learn a\n few facts about the new arrival.\n The crash had been several hundred\n miles away, but someone\n had thought of the hospital in\n this city which was known to\n have a doctor rating as an expert\n in human physiology. The survivor—only\n one occupant of the\n wreck, alive or dead, had\n been discovered—had accordingly\n been flown here.", "Kinton growled a Tepoktan expression\n the meaning of which\n he had deduced after hearing it\n used by the dam workers.\n\n\n He whirled to run toward the\n helicopter. Hardly had he taken\n two steps, however, when he saw\n startled changes in the carefully\n blank looks of his escort. The\n constable half raised his heavy\n weapon, and Klaft sprang forward\n with a hissing cry.\n\n\n By the time Kinton's aging\n muscles obeyed his impulse to\n sidestep, the spear had already\n hurtled past. It had missed him\n by an error of over six feet.\n\n\n [113]\n He felt his face flushing with\n sudden anger. Birken was running\n as best he could toward the\n spaceship, and had covered nearly\n half the distance.\n\n\n Kinton ran at the Tepoktans,\n brushing aside the concerned\n Klaft. He snatched the heavy\n weapon from the surprised constable.", "Kinton turned away from the\n window as he caught the glint\n of Tepokt's sun upon the hull of\n the spaceship they had also built\n for him. Perhaps ... would it\n be fair to encourage the newcomer\n to attempt the barrier?", "For the next three weeks, Kinton\n flew back and forth from his\n own town nearly every day. He\n felt that he should not neglect\n the few meetings which were the\n only way he could repay the Tepoktans\n for all they did for him.\n On the other hand, the chance\n to see and talk with one of his\n own kind drew him like a magnet\n to the hospital.\n\n\n The doctors operated upon\n Birken's leg, inserting a metal\n rod inside the bone by a method\n they had known before Kinton\n described it. The new arrival expected\n to be able to walk, with\n care, almost any day; although\n the pin would have to be removed\n after the bone had healed. Meanwhile,\n Birken seemed eager to\n learn all Kinton could tell him\n about the planet, Tepokt.\n\n\n About himself, he was remarkably\n reticent. Kinton worried\n about this.", "\"We must get into the air\n immediately,\" he told Klaft.\n \"Perhaps we may see him before\n he reaches—\"\n\n\n He broke off at the word\n \"spaceship\" but he noticed a reserved\n expression on Klaft's\n pointed face. His aide had probably\n reached a conclusion similar\n to his own.\n\n\n They climbed back into the\n cabin and Klaft gave brisk orders\n to the lean young pilot. A\n moment later, Kinton saw the\n ground outside drop away.\n\n\n Only upon turning around did\n he realize that two armed Tepoktans\n had materialized in time to\n follow Klaft inside.", "Kinton smiled at his aide's\n earnest concern. Then he turned\n to look out the window as he recalled\n the shadow that underlay\n such remonstrances. He estimated\n that he was about forty-eight\n now, as nearly as he could tell\n from the somewhat longer revolutions\n of Tepokt. The time\n would come when he would age\n and die. Whose wishes would\n then prevail?", "Kinton realized guiltily that\n the man should be resting. He\n [108]\n had lost track of the moments\n he had wasted in talk while the\n others with him stood attentively\n about.\n\n\n He questioned the doctor briefly\n and relayed the information\n that Birken's leg was broken but\n that the other injuries were not\n serious.\n\n\n \"They'll fix you up,\" he assured\n the spaceman. \"They're\n quite good at it, even if the sight\n of one does make you think a\n little of an iguana. Rest up, now;\n and I'll come back again when\n you're feeling better.\"", "In some ways, compared to\n [105]\n those of Terra, the industries of\n Tepokt were underdeveloped. In\n the first place, the population\n was smaller and had different\n standards of luxury. In the second,\n a certain lack of drive resulted\n from the inability to\n break out into interplanetary\n space. Kinton had been inexplicably\n lucky to have reached the\n surface even in a battered hulk.\n The shell of meteorites was at\n least a hundred miles thick and\n constantly shifting.\n\n\n \"We do not know if they have\n always been meteorites,\" the\n Tepoktans had told Kinton, \"or\n whether part of them come from\n a destroyed satellite; but our observers\n have proved mathematically\n that no direct path through\n them may be predicted more than\n a very short while in advance.\"", "He turned and raised it to his\n chest. Because of the shortness\n of Tepoktan arms, the launcher\n was constructed so that the butt\n rested against the chest with the\n sighting loops before the eyes.\n The little rocket tubes were\n above head height, to prevent the\n handler's catching the blast.\n\n\n The circles of the sights\n weaved and danced about the\n running figure. Kinton realized\n to his surprise that the effort of\n seizing the weapon had him panting.\n Or was it the fright at having\n a spear thrown at him? He\n decided that Birken had not come\n close enough for that, and wondered\n if he was afraid of his\n own impending action.\n\n\n It wasn't fair, he complained\n to himself. The poor slob only\n had a spear, and a man couldn't\n blame him for wanting to get\n back to his own sort. He was\n limping ... hurt ... how could\n they expect him to realize—?", "Why was it one like him who\n got through? he asked himself\n in silent anguish. After ten\n years. The Tepoktans had been\n thinking well of Terrans, but\n now—\n\n\n He did not worry about his\n own position. That was well\n enough established, whether or\n not he could again hold up his\n head before the purple-scaled\n people who had been so generous\n to him.\n\n\n Even if they had been aroused\n to a rage by the killing, Kinton\n told himself, he would not have\n been concerned about himself. He\n had reached a fairly ripe age for\n a spaceman. In fact, he had already\n [110]\n enjoyed a decade of borrowed\n time.\n\n\n But they were more civilized\n than that wanton murderer, he\n realized.\n\n\n He straightened up, forcing\n back his early-morning weariness.", "\"Thrown across the controls\n after his belt broke loose?\" Kinton\n guessed.\n\n\n \"I bow to your wisdom,\n George,\" said the plump Tepoktan\n doctor who appeared to be\n in charge.\n\n\n Kinton could not remember\n him, but everyone on the planet\n addressed the Terran by the\n sound they fondly thought to be\n his first name.\n\n\n \"This is Doctor Chuxolkhee,\"\n murmured Klaft.\n\n\n Kinton made the accepted gesture\n of greeting with one hand\n and said, \"You seem to have\n treated him very expertly.\"\n\n\n Chuxolkhee ruffled the scales\n around his neck with pleasure.\n\n\n [107]\n \"I have studied Terran physiology,\"\n he admitted complacently.\n \"From your records and\n drawings, of course, George, for\n I have not yet had the good fortune\n to visit you.\"", "They would hardly learn anything\n from him directly that was\n not available in recordings made\n over the course of years. The\n Tepoktan scientists, historians,\n and philosophers had respectfully\n but eagerly gathered every\n crumb of information Kinton\n knowingly had to offer—and\n some he thought he had forgotten.\n Still ... he sensed the disappointment\n at his announcement.\n\n\n \"I shall arrange for you to\n await my return here in town,\"\n Kinton said, and there were murmurs\n of pleasure.\n\n\n Later, aboard the jet helicopter\n that was basically like\n those Kinton remembered using\n on Terra twenty light years\n away, he shook his head at\n Klaft's respectful protest.\n\n\n \"But George! It was enough\n that they were present when you\n received the news. They can talk\n about that the rest of their lives!\n You must not waste your\n strength on these people who\n come out of curiosity.\"", "Maybe he was wrong, he\n thought. Maybe he shouldn't\n stand in the way of their biologists\n and surgeons. But he'd\n rather be buried, even if that\n left them with only what he\n could tell them about the human\n body.\nTo help himself forget the\n rather preoccupied manner in\n which some of the Tepoktan scientists\n occasionally eyed him, he\n peered down at the big dam of\n the hydro-electric project being\n completed to Kinton's design.\n Power from this would soon\n light the town built to house the\n staff of scientists, students, and\n workers assigned to the institute\n organized about the person\n of Kinton.\n\n\n Now, there was an example of\n their willingness to repay him\n for whatever help he had been,\n he reflected. They hadn't needed\n that for themselves.", "\"Get on with it, Klaft!\n Please!\"\n\n\n \"In the night, then, Albirken\n left the chamber in which he lay.\n He can walk some now, you\n know, because of Dr. Chuxolkhee's\n metal pin. He—he stole a\n ground car and is gone.\"\n\n\n \"He did?\" Kinton had an\n empty feeling in the pit of his\n stomach. \"Is it known where he\n went? I mean ... he has been\n curious to see some of Tepokt.\n Perhaps—\"\n\n\n He stopped, his own words\n braying in his ears. Klaft was\n clicking two claws together, a\n sign of emphatic disagreement.\n\n\n \"Albirken,\" he said, \"was soon\n followed by three police constables\n in another vehicle. They\n found him heading in the direction\n of our town.\"", "One was a constable but the\n other he recognized for an officer\n of some rank. Both wore slung\n across their chests weapons resembling\n long-barreled pistols\n with large, oddly indented butts\n to fit Tepoktan claws. The constable,\n in addition, carried a\n contraption with a quadruple\n tube for launching tiny rockets\n no thicker than Kinton's thumb.\n These, he knew, were loaded\n with an explosive worthy of respect\n on any planet he had heard\n of.\n\n\n To protect him, he wondered.\n Or to get Birken?\n\n\n The pilot headed the craft\n back toward Kinton's town in\n the brightening sky of early day.\n Long before the buildings of\n Kinton's institute came into\n view, they received a radio message\n about Birken.", "For ten years, Kinton had\n failed to work up any strong desire\n to try it. The Tepoktans\n called the ever-shifting lights\n the Dome of Eyes, after a myth\n in which each tiny satellite\n bright enough to be visible was\n supposed to watch over a single\n individual on the surface. Like\n their brothers on Terra, the native\n astronomers could trace\n their science back to a form of\n astrology; and Kinton often told\n them jokingly that he felt no\n urge to risk a physical encounter\n with his own personal Eye.\nThe helicopter started to descend,\n and Kinton remembered\n that the city named in his message\n was only about twenty miles\n from his home. The brief twilight\n of Tepokt was passing by\n the time he set foot on the landing\n field, and he paused to look\n up.", "The aide reached Kinton and\n bent to hiss and cluck into the\n latter's ear in what he presumably\n considered an undertone.\n The Terran laboriously spelled\n out the message inscribed on the\n limp, satiny paper held before his\n eyes. Then he rose and took one\n step toward the waiting group.\n\n\n \"I regret I shall have to conclude\n this discussion,\" he announced.\n \"I am informed that\n another ship from space has\n reached the surface of Tepokt.\n My presence is requested in case\n the crew are of my own planet.\"\n\n\n [104]\n Klaft excitedly skipped down\n to lead the way up the aisle, but\n Kinton hesitated. Those in the\n audience were scholars or officials\n to whom attendance at one\n of Kinton's limited number of\n personal lectures was awarded as\n an honor.", "\"Wait! Don't you think they\n tried sending unmanned rockets\n up? Every one was struck and\n exploded.\"\n\n\n Birken showed no more change\n of expression than if the other\n had commented on the weather.\n\n\n Kinton had stepped forward\n six or eight paces, irritated despite\n his anxiety at the way Birken\n persisted in drifting before\n him.\n\n\n Kinton couldn't just grab him—bad\n leg or not, he could probably\n break the older man in two.\n\n\n He glanced back at the Tepoktans\n beside the helicopter, Klaft,\n the pilot, the officer, the constable\n with the rocket weapon.\n\n\n They stood quietly, looking\n back at him.\n\n\n The call for help that had risen\n to his lips died there.", "\"He is dead,\" said Klaft when\n the constable straightened up\n with a curt wave.\n\n\n \"Will ... will you have someone\n see to him, please?\" Kinton\n requested, turning toward the\n helicopter.\n\n\n \"Yes, George,\" said Klaft.\n \"George...?\"\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"It would be very instructive—that\n is, I believe Dr. Chuxolkhee\n would like to—\"\n\n\n \"All right!\" yielded Kinton,\n surprised at the harshness of his\n own voice. \"Just tell him not to\n bring around any sketches of the\n various organs for a few\n months!\"\n\n\n He climbed into the helicopter\n and slumped into his seat. Presently,\n he was aware of Klaft edging\n into the seat across the aisle.\n He looked up.", "\"The police will stay until cars\n from town arrive. They are coming\n now,\" said his aide.\nKinton stared at his hands,\n wondering at the fact that they\n were not shaking. He felt dejected,\n empty, not like a man who\n had just been at a high pitch of\n excitement.\n\n\n \"Why did you not let him go,\n George?\"\n\n\n \"What? Why ... why ... he\n would have destroyed the ship\n you worked so hard to build.\n There is no safe path through\n the Dome of Eyes.\"\n\n\n \"No predictable path,\" Klaft\n corrected. \"But what then? We\n would have built you another\n ship, George, for it was you who\n showed us how.\"\n\n\n Kinton flexed his fingers\n slowly." ], [ "Kinton settled back in the seat\n especially padded to fit the contours\n of his Terran body, and\n [111]\n stared silently at the partition\n behind the pilot.\n\n\n In other words, he thought, he\n was responsible for Birken, who\n was a Terran, one of his own\n kind. Maybe they really didn't\n want to risk hurting his feelings,\n but that was only part of it.\n They were leaving it up to him\n to handle what they considered\n his private affair.\n\n\n He wondered what to do. He\n had no actual faith in the idea\n that Birken was delirious, or acting\n under any influence but that\n of a criminally self-centered nature.", "To himself, he wished he had\n not told Birken about the spaceship.\n He didn't think the man\n exactly believed his explanation\n of why there was no use taking\n off in it.\nYet he continued to spend as\n much time as he could visiting\n the other man. Then, as his helicopter\n landed at the city airport\n one gray dawn, the news reached\n him.\n\n\n \"The other Terran has gone,\"\n Klaft reported, turning from the\n breathless messenger as Kinton\n followed him from the machine.\n\n\n [109]\n \"Gone? Where did they take\n him?\"\n\n\n Klaft looked uneasy, embarrassed.\n Kinton repeated his question,\n wondering about the group\n of armed police on hand.\n\n\n \"In the night,\" Klaft hissed\n and clucked, \"when none would\n think to watch him, they tell me\n ... and quite rightly, I think—\"", "For the next three weeks, Kinton\n flew back and forth from his\n own town nearly every day. He\n felt that he should not neglect\n the few meetings which were the\n only way he could repay the Tepoktans\n for all they did for him.\n On the other hand, the chance\n to see and talk with one of his\n own kind drew him like a magnet\n to the hospital.\n\n\n The doctors operated upon\n Birken's leg, inserting a metal\n rod inside the bone by a method\n they had known before Kinton\n described it. The new arrival expected\n to be able to walk, with\n care, almost any day; although\n the pin would have to be removed\n after the bone had healed. Meanwhile,\n Birken seemed eager to\n learn all Kinton could tell him\n about the planet, Tepokt.\n\n\n About himself, he was remarkably\n reticent. Kinton worried\n about this.", "\"Why did he say he was traveling\n that way?\" asked Kinton,\n thinking to himself of the spaceship!\n Was the man crazy?\n\n\n \"He did not say,\" answered\n Klaft expressionlessly. \"Taking\n them by surprise, he killed two\n of the constables and injured\n the third before fleeing with one\n of their spears.\"\n\n\n \"\nWhat?\n\"\n\n\n Kinton felt his eyes bulging\n with dismay.\n\n\n \"Yes, for they carried only the\n short spears of their authority,\n not expecting to need fire weapons.\"\nKinton looked from him to the\n messenger, noticing for the first\n time that the latter was an under-officer\n of police. He shook his\n head distractedly. It appeared\n that his suspicions concerning\n Birken had been only too accurate.", "Kinton realized guiltily that\n the man should be resting. He\n [108]\n had lost track of the moments\n he had wasted in talk while the\n others with him stood attentively\n about.\n\n\n He questioned the doctor briefly\n and relayed the information\n that Birken's leg was broken but\n that the other injuries were not\n serious.\n\n\n \"They'll fix you up,\" he assured\n the spaceman. \"They're\n quite good at it, even if the sight\n of one does make you think a\n little of an iguana. Rest up, now;\n and I'll come back again when\n you're feeling better.\"", "\"I\nshouldn't\nhave told him\n about the ship!\" Kinton muttered,\n gnawing the knuckle of\n his left thumb. \"He's on the run,\n all right. Probably scared the\n colonial authorities will trail him\n right down through the Dome of\n Eyes. Wonder what he did?\"\n\n\n He caught himself and looked\n around to see if he had been overheard.\n Klaft and the police officers\n peered from their respective\n windows, in calculated withdrawal.\n Kinton, disturbed, tried\n to remember whether he had\n spoken in Terran or Tepoktan.\n\n\n Would Birken listen if he tried\n reasoning, he asked himself.\n Maybe if he showed the man how\n they had proved the unpredictability\n of openings through the\n shifting Dome of Eyes—", "Kinton smiled at his aide's\n earnest concern. Then he turned\n to look out the window as he recalled\n the shadow that underlay\n such remonstrances. He estimated\n that he was about forty-eight\n now, as nearly as he could tell\n from the somewhat longer revolutions\n of Tepokt. The time\n would come when he would age\n and die. Whose wishes would\n then prevail?", "\"Wait! Don't you think they\n tried sending unmanned rockets\n up? Every one was struck and\n exploded.\"\n\n\n Birken showed no more change\n of expression than if the other\n had commented on the weather.\n\n\n Kinton had stepped forward\n six or eight paces, irritated despite\n his anxiety at the way Birken\n persisted in drifting before\n him.\n\n\n Kinton couldn't just grab him—bad\n leg or not, he could probably\n break the older man in two.\n\n\n He glanced back at the Tepoktans\n beside the helicopter, Klaft,\n the pilot, the officer, the constable\n with the rocket weapon.\n\n\n They stood quietly, looking\n back at him.\n\n\n The call for help that had risen\n to his lips died there.", "\"I think we should not expect\n too much of this Terran,\" he\n warned Klaft uneasily. \"You,\n too, have citizens who do not always\n obey, your laws, who sometimes\n ... that is—\"\n\n\n \"Who are born to die under\n the axe, as we say,\" interrupted\n Klaft, as if to ease the concern\n plain on Kinton's face. \"In other\n words, criminals. You suspect\n this Albirken is such a one,\n George?\"\n\n\n \"It is not impossible,\" admitted\n Kinton unhappily. \"He will\n tell me little about himself. It\n may be that he was caught in\n Tepokt's gravity while fleeing\n from justice.\"", "\"Get on with it, Klaft!\n Please!\"\n\n\n \"In the night, then, Albirken\n left the chamber in which he lay.\n He can walk some now, you\n know, because of Dr. Chuxolkhee's\n metal pin. He—he stole a\n ground car and is gone.\"\n\n\n \"He did?\" Kinton had an\n empty feeling in the pit of his\n stomach. \"Is it known where he\n went? I mean ... he has been\n curious to see some of Tepokt.\n Perhaps—\"\n\n\n He stopped, his own words\n braying in his ears. Klaft was\n clicking two claws together, a\n sign of emphatic disagreement.\n\n\n \"Albirken,\" he said, \"was soon\n followed by three police constables\n in another vehicle. They\n found him heading in the direction\n of our town.\"", "He turned and raised it to his\n chest. Because of the shortness\n of Tepoktan arms, the launcher\n was constructed so that the butt\n rested against the chest with the\n sighting loops before the eyes.\n The little rocket tubes were\n above head height, to prevent the\n handler's catching the blast.\n\n\n The circles of the sights\n weaved and danced about the\n running figure. Kinton realized\n to his surprise that the effort of\n seizing the weapon had him panting.\n Or was it the fright at having\n a spear thrown at him? He\n decided that Birken had not come\n close enough for that, and wondered\n if he was afraid of his\n own impending action.\n\n\n It wasn't fair, he complained\n to himself. The poor slob only\n had a spear, and a man couldn't\n blame him for wanting to get\n back to his own sort. He was\n limping ... hurt ... how could\n they expect him to realize—?", "\"The police will stay until cars\n from town arrive. They are coming\n now,\" said his aide.\nKinton stared at his hands,\n wondering at the fact that they\n were not shaking. He felt dejected,\n empty, not like a man who\n had just been at a high pitch of\n excitement.\n\n\n \"Why did you not let him go,\n George?\"\n\n\n \"What? Why ... why ... he\n would have destroyed the ship\n you worked so hard to build.\n There is no safe path through\n the Dome of Eyes.\"\n\n\n \"No predictable path,\" Klaft\n corrected. \"But what then? We\n would have built you another\n ship, George, for it was you who\n showed us how.\"\n\n\n Kinton flexed his fingers\n slowly.", "\"He was just no good. You\n know the murder he did here;\n we can only guess what he did\n among my own ... among Terrans.\n Should he have a chance to\n go back and commit more\n crimes?\"\n\n\n \"I understand, George, the\n logic of it,\" said Klaft. \"I meant\n ... it is not my place to say this\n ... but you seem unhappy.\"\n\n\n \"Possibly,\" grunted Kinton\n wrily.\n\n\n \"We, too, have criminals,\" said\n the aide, as gently as was possible\n in his clicking language.\n \"We do not think it necessary\n to grieve for the pain they bring\n upon themselves.\"\n\n\n \"No, I suppose not,\" sighed\n Kinton. \"I ... it's just—\"\n\n\n He looked up at the pointed\n visage, at the strange eyes regarding\n him sympathetically\n from beneath the sloping, purple-scaled\n forehead.", "The pilot landed about a hundred\n yards from the spaceship.\n By the time his passengers had\n alighted, however, Birken had\n drawn level with them, about\n fifty feet away.\n\n\n \"Birken!\" shouted Kinton.\n \"Where do you think you're going?\"\n\n\n Seeing that no one ran after\n him, Birken slowed his pace, but\n kept walking toward the ship.\n [112]\n He watched them over his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Sorry, Kinton,\" he shouted\n with no noticeable tone of regret.\n \"I figure I better travel on for\n my health.\"\n\n\n \"It's not so damn healthy up\n there!\" called Kinton. \"I told\n you how there's no clear path—\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, yeah, you told me. That\n don't mean I gotta believe it.\"", "Then, abruptly, his lips tightened\n to a thin line. The sights\n steadied on Birken as the latter\n approached the foot of the ladder\n leading to the entrance port\n of the spaceship.\n\n\n Kinton pressed the firing stud.\n\n\n Across the hundred-yard space\n streaked four flaring little projectiles.\n Kinton, without exactly\n seeing each, was aware of the\n general lines of flight diverging\n gradually to bracket the figure\n of Birken.", "One was a constable but the\n other he recognized for an officer\n of some rank. Both wore slung\n across their chests weapons resembling\n long-barreled pistols\n with large, oddly indented butts\n to fit Tepoktan claws. The constable,\n in addition, carried a\n contraption with a quadruple\n tube for launching tiny rockets\n no thicker than Kinton's thumb.\n These, he knew, were loaded\n with an explosive worthy of respect\n on any planet he had heard\n of.\n\n\n To protect him, he wondered.\n Or to get Birken?\n\n\n The pilot headed the craft\n back toward Kinton's town in\n the brightening sky of early day.\n Long before the buildings of\n Kinton's institute came into\n view, they received a radio message\n about Birken.", "\"He is dead,\" said Klaft when\n the constable straightened up\n with a curt wave.\n\n\n \"Will ... will you have someone\n see to him, please?\" Kinton\n requested, turning toward the\n helicopter.\n\n\n \"Yes, George,\" said Klaft.\n \"George...?\"\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"It would be very instructive—that\n is, I believe Dr. Chuxolkhee\n would like to—\"\n\n\n \"All right!\" yielded Kinton,\n surprised at the harshness of his\n own voice. \"Just tell him not to\n bring around any sketches of the\n various organs for a few\n months!\"\n\n\n He climbed into the helicopter\n and slumped into his seat. Presently,\n he was aware of Klaft edging\n into the seat across the aisle.\n He looked up.", "Maybe he was wrong, he\n thought. Maybe he shouldn't\n stand in the way of their biologists\n and surgeons. But he'd\n rather be buried, even if that\n left them with only what he\n could tell them about the human\n body.\nTo help himself forget the\n rather preoccupied manner in\n which some of the Tepoktan scientists\n occasionally eyed him, he\n peered down at the big dam of\n the hydro-electric project being\n completed to Kinton's design.\n Power from this would soon\n light the town built to house the\n staff of scientists, students, and\n workers assigned to the institute\n organized about the person\n of Kinton.\n\n\n Now, there was an example of\n their willingness to repay him\n for whatever help he had been,\n he reflected. They hadn't needed\n that for themselves.", "\"Not\ntheir\nparty,\" he muttered.\n He turned again to Birken,\n who still retreated toward the\n ship. \"But he'll only get himself\n killed\nand\ndestroy the ship! Or\n if some miracle gets him\n through, that's worse! He's\n nothing to turn loose on a civilized\n colony again.\"\nA twinge of shame tugged\n down the corners of his mouth\n as he realized that keeping Birken\n here would also expose a\n highly cultured people to an unscrupulous\n criminal who had already\n committed murder the very\n first time he had been crossed.\n\n\n \"Birken!\" he shouted. \"For\n the last time! Do you want me\n to send them to drag you back\n here?\"\n\n\n Birken stopped at that. He regarded\n the motionless Tepoktans\n with a derisive sneer.\n\n\n \"They don't look too eager to\n me,\" he taunted.", "Why was it one like him who\n got through? he asked himself\n in silent anguish. After ten\n years. The Tepoktans had been\n thinking well of Terrans, but\n now—\n\n\n He did not worry about his\n own position. That was well\n enough established, whether or\n not he could again hold up his\n head before the purple-scaled\n people who had been so generous\n to him.\n\n\n Even if they had been aroused\n to a rage by the killing, Kinton\n told himself, he would not have\n been concerned about himself. He\n had reached a fairly ripe age for\n a spaceman. In fact, he had already\n [110]\n enjoyed a decade of borrowed\n time.\n\n\n But they were more civilized\n than that wanton murderer, he\n realized.\n\n\n He straightened up, forcing\n back his early-morning weariness." ], [ "Then, abruptly, his lips tightened\n to a thin line. The sights\n steadied on Birken as the latter\n approached the foot of the ladder\n leading to the entrance port\n of the spaceship.\n\n\n Kinton pressed the firing stud.\n\n\n Across the hundred-yard space\n streaked four flaring little projectiles.\n Kinton, without exactly\n seeing each, was aware of the\n general lines of flight diverging\n gradually to bracket the figure\n of Birken.", "\"He is dead,\" said Klaft when\n the constable straightened up\n with a curt wave.\n\n\n \"Will ... will you have someone\n see to him, please?\" Kinton\n requested, turning toward the\n helicopter.\n\n\n \"Yes, George,\" said Klaft.\n \"George...?\"\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"It would be very instructive—that\n is, I believe Dr. Chuxolkhee\n would like to—\"\n\n\n \"All right!\" yielded Kinton,\n surprised at the harshness of his\n own voice. \"Just tell him not to\n bring around any sketches of the\n various organs for a few\n months!\"\n\n\n He climbed into the helicopter\n and slumped into his seat. Presently,\n he was aware of Klaft edging\n into the seat across the aisle.\n He looked up.", "Kinton observed, however,\n that his aide also stared upward\n for a long moment. The Tepoktans\n loved speculating about the\n unsolvable. They had even founded\n clubs to argue whether two\n satellites had been destroyed or\n only one.\n\n\n Half a dozen officials hastened\n up to escort the party to the\n vehicle awaiting Kinton. Klaft\n succeeded in quieting the lesser\n members of the delegation so\n that Kinton was able to learn a\n few facts about the new arrival.\n The crash had been several hundred\n miles away, but someone\n had thought of the hospital in\n this city which was known to\n have a doctor rating as an expert\n in human physiology. The survivor—only\n one occupant of the\n wreck, alive or dead, had\n been discovered—had accordingly\n been flown here.", "\"Get on with it, Klaft!\n Please!\"\n\n\n \"In the night, then, Albirken\n left the chamber in which he lay.\n He can walk some now, you\n know, because of Dr. Chuxolkhee's\n metal pin. He—he stole a\n ground car and is gone.\"\n\n\n \"He did?\" Kinton had an\n empty feeling in the pit of his\n stomach. \"Is it known where he\n went? I mean ... he has been\n curious to see some of Tepokt.\n Perhaps—\"\n\n\n He stopped, his own words\n braying in his ears. Klaft was\n clicking two claws together, a\n sign of emphatic disagreement.\n\n\n \"Albirken,\" he said, \"was soon\n followed by three police constables\n in another vehicle. They\n found him heading in the direction\n of our town.\"", "One struck the ground beside\n the man just as he set one foot\n on the bottom rung of the ladder,\n and skittered away past one fin\n of the ship before exploding.\n Two others burst against the\n hull, scattering metal fragments,\n and another puffed on the upright\n of the ladder just above\n Birken's head.\nThe spaceman was blown back\n from the ladder. He balanced on\n his heels for a moment with outstretched\n fingers reaching toward\n the grips from which they\n had been torn. Then he crumpled\n into a limp huddle on the yellowing\n turf.\n\n\n Kinton sighed.\n\n\n The constable took the weapon\n from him, reloaded deftly, and\n proffered it again. When the\n Terran did not reach for it, the\n officer held out a clawed hand to\n receive it. He gestured silently,\n and the constable trotted across\n [114]\n the intervening ground to bend\n over Birken.", "\"He has been seen on the road\n passing the dam,\" Klaft reported\n soberly after having been called\n to the pilot's compartment. \"He\n stopped to demand fuel from\n some maintenance workers, but\n they had been warned and fled.\"\n\n\n \"Couldn't they have seized\n him?\" demanded Kinton, his tone\n sharp with the worry he endeavored\n to control. \"He has that\n spear, I suppose; but he is only\n one and injured.\"\n\n\n Klaft hesitated.\n\n\n \"Well, couldn't they?\"\n\n\n The aide looked away, out one\n of the windows at some sun-dyed\n clouds ranging from pink\n to orange. He grimaced and\n clicked his showy teeth uncomfortably.\n\n\n \"Perhaps they thought you\n might be offended, George,\" he\n answered at last.", "The brighter stars visible from\n this part of the planet twinkled\n back at him, and he knew that\n each was being scrutinized by\n some amateur or professional\n astronomer. Before an hour had\n elapsed, most of them would be\n obscured by the tiny moonlets,\n some of which could already be\n seen. These could easily be mistaken\n for stars or the other five\n planets of the system, but in a\n short while the tinier ones in\n groups would cause a celestial\n haze resembling a miniature\n Milky Way.\n\n\n Klaft, who had descended first,\n leaving the pilot to bring up the\n rear, noticed Kinton's pause.\n\n\n \"Glory glitters till it is known\n for a curse,\" he remarked, quoting\n a Tepoktan proverb often applied\n [106]\n by the disgruntled scientists\n to the Dome of Eyes.", "Kinton realized guiltily that\n the man should be resting. He\n [108]\n had lost track of the moments\n he had wasted in talk while the\n others with him stood attentively\n about.\n\n\n He questioned the doctor briefly\n and relayed the information\n that Birken's leg was broken but\n that the other injuries were not\n serious.\n\n\n \"They'll fix you up,\" he assured\n the spaceman. \"They're\n quite good at it, even if the sight\n of one does make you think a\n little of an iguana. Rest up, now;\n and I'll come back again when\n you're feeling better.\"", "For ten years, Kinton had\n failed to work up any strong desire\n to try it. The Tepoktans\n called the ever-shifting lights\n the Dome of Eyes, after a myth\n in which each tiny satellite\n bright enough to be visible was\n supposed to watch over a single\n individual on the surface. Like\n their brothers on Terra, the native\n astronomers could trace\n their science back to a form of\n astrology; and Kinton often told\n them jokingly that he felt no\n urge to risk a physical encounter\n with his own personal Eye.\nThe helicopter started to descend,\n and Kinton remembered\n that the city named in his message\n was only about twenty miles\n from his home. The brief twilight\n of Tepokt was passing by\n the time he set foot on the landing\n field, and he paused to look\n up.", "\"Why did he say he was traveling\n that way?\" asked Kinton,\n thinking to himself of the spaceship!\n Was the man crazy?\n\n\n \"He did not say,\" answered\n Klaft expressionlessly. \"Taking\n them by surprise, he killed two\n of the constables and injured\n the third before fleeing with one\n of their spears.\"\n\n\n \"\nWhat?\n\"\n\n\n Kinton felt his eyes bulging\n with dismay.\n\n\n \"Yes, for they carried only the\n short spears of their authority,\n not expecting to need fire weapons.\"\nKinton looked from him to the\n messenger, noticing for the first\n time that the latter was an under-officer\n of police. He shook his\n head distractedly. It appeared\n that his suspicions concerning\n Birken had been only too accurate.", "\"The police will stay until cars\n from town arrive. They are coming\n now,\" said his aide.\nKinton stared at his hands,\n wondering at the fact that they\n were not shaking. He felt dejected,\n empty, not like a man who\n had just been at a high pitch of\n excitement.\n\n\n \"Why did you not let him go,\n George?\"\n\n\n \"What? Why ... why ... he\n would have destroyed the ship\n you worked so hard to build.\n There is no safe path through\n the Dome of Eyes.\"\n\n\n \"No predictable path,\" Klaft\n corrected. \"But what then? We\n would have built you another\n ship, George, for it was you who\n showed us how.\"\n\n\n Kinton flexed his fingers\n slowly.", "With a clanging of bells, the\n little convoy of ground cars\n drew up in front of the hospital.\n A way was made through the\n chittering crowd around the\n entrance. Within a few minutes,\n Kinton found himself looking\n down at a pallet upon which lay\n another Terran.\n\n\n A man! he thought, then\n curled a lip wrily at the sudden,\n unexpected pang of disappointment.\n Well, he hadn't realized\n until then what he was really\n hoping for!\nThe spaceman had been\n cleaned up and bandaged by the\n native medicos. Kinton saw that\n his left thigh was probably\n broken. Other dressings suggested\n cracked ribs and lacerations\n on the head and shoulders. The\n man was dark-haired but pale of\n skin, with a jutting chin and a\n nose that had been flattened in\n some earlier mishap. The flaring\n set of his ears somehow emphasized\n an overall leanness. Even in\n sleep, his mouth was thin and\n hard.", "Kinton smiled at his aide's\n earnest concern. Then he turned\n to look out the window as he recalled\n the shadow that underlay\n such remonstrances. He estimated\n that he was about forty-eight\n now, as nearly as he could tell\n from the somewhat longer revolutions\n of Tepokt. The time\n would come when he would age\n and die. Whose wishes would\n then prevail?", "An exclamation from the constable\n drew his attention. He\n rose, and room was made for him\n at the opposite window.\nIn the distance, beyond the\n town landing field they were now\n approaching, Kinton saw a halted\n ground car. Across the plain\n which was colored a yellowish\n tan by a short, grass-like growth,\n a lone figure plodded toward the\n upthrust bulk of the spaceship\n that had never flown.\n\n\n \"Never mind landing at the\n town!\" snapped Kinton. \"Go directly\n out to the ship!\"\n\n\n Klaft relayed the command to\n the pilot. The helicopter swept\n in a descending curve across the\n plain toward the gleaming hull.\n\n\n As they passed the man below,\n Birken looked up. He continued\n to limp along at a brisk\n pace with the aid of what looked\n like a short spear.\n\n\n \"Go down!\" Kinton ordered.", "The pilot landed about a hundred\n yards from the spaceship.\n By the time his passengers had\n alighted, however, Birken had\n drawn level with them, about\n fifty feet away.\n\n\n \"Birken!\" shouted Kinton.\n \"Where do you think you're going?\"\n\n\n Seeing that no one ran after\n him, Birken slowed his pace, but\n kept walking toward the ship.\n [112]\n He watched them over his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Sorry, Kinton,\" he shouted\n with no noticeable tone of regret.\n \"I figure I better travel on for\n my health.\"\n\n\n \"It's not so damn healthy up\n there!\" called Kinton. \"I told\n you how there's no clear path—\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, yeah, you told me. That\n don't mean I gotta believe it.\"", "To himself, he wished he had\n not told Birken about the spaceship.\n He didn't think the man\n exactly believed his explanation\n of why there was no use taking\n off in it.\nYet he continued to spend as\n much time as he could visiting\n the other man. Then, as his helicopter\n landed at the city airport\n one gray dawn, the news reached\n him.\n\n\n \"The other Terran has gone,\"\n Klaft reported, turning from the\n breathless messenger as Kinton\n followed him from the machine.\n\n\n [109]\n \"Gone? Where did they take\n him?\"\n\n\n Klaft looked uneasy, embarrassed.\n Kinton repeated his question,\n wondering about the group\n of armed police on hand.\n\n\n \"In the night,\" Klaft hissed\n and clucked, \"when none would\n think to watch him, they tell me\n ... and quite rightly, I think—\"", "He turned and raised it to his\n chest. Because of the shortness\n of Tepoktan arms, the launcher\n was constructed so that the butt\n rested against the chest with the\n sighting loops before the eyes.\n The little rocket tubes were\n above head height, to prevent the\n handler's catching the blast.\n\n\n The circles of the sights\n weaved and danced about the\n running figure. Kinton realized\n to his surprise that the effort of\n seizing the weapon had him panting.\n Or was it the fright at having\n a spear thrown at him? He\n decided that Birken had not come\n close enough for that, and wondered\n if he was afraid of his\n own impending action.\n\n\n It wasn't fair, he complained\n to himself. The poor slob only\n had a spear, and a man couldn't\n blame him for wanting to get\n back to his own sort. He was\n limping ... hurt ... how could\n they expect him to realize—?", "Maybe he was wrong, he\n thought. Maybe he shouldn't\n stand in the way of their biologists\n and surgeons. But he'd\n rather be buried, even if that\n left them with only what he\n could tell them about the human\n body.\nTo help himself forget the\n rather preoccupied manner in\n which some of the Tepoktan scientists\n occasionally eyed him, he\n peered down at the big dam of\n the hydro-electric project being\n completed to Kinton's design.\n Power from this would soon\n light the town built to house the\n staff of scientists, students, and\n workers assigned to the institute\n organized about the person\n of Kinton.\n\n\n Now, there was an example of\n their willingness to repay him\n for whatever help he had been,\n he reflected. They hadn't needed\n that for themselves.", "\"I\nshouldn't\nhave told him\n about the ship!\" Kinton muttered,\n gnawing the knuckle of\n his left thumb. \"He's on the run,\n all right. Probably scared the\n colonial authorities will trail him\n right down through the Dome of\n Eyes. Wonder what he did?\"\n\n\n He caught himself and looked\n around to see if he had been overheard.\n Klaft and the police officers\n peered from their respective\n windows, in calculated withdrawal.\n Kinton, disturbed, tried\n to remember whether he had\n spoken in Terran or Tepoktan.\n\n\n Would Birken listen if he tried\n reasoning, he asked himself.\n Maybe if he showed the man how\n they had proved the unpredictability\n of openings through the\n shifting Dome of Eyes—", "Why was it one like him who\n got through? he asked himself\n in silent anguish. After ten\n years. The Tepoktans had been\n thinking well of Terrans, but\n now—\n\n\n He did not worry about his\n own position. That was well\n enough established, whether or\n not he could again hold up his\n head before the purple-scaled\n people who had been so generous\n to him.\n\n\n Even if they had been aroused\n to a rage by the killing, Kinton\n told himself, he would not have\n been concerned about himself. He\n had reached a fairly ripe age for\n a spaceman. In fact, he had already\n [110]\n enjoyed a decade of borrowed\n time.\n\n\n But they were more civilized\n than that wanton murderer, he\n realized.\n\n\n He straightened up, forcing\n back his early-morning weariness." ], [ "Maybe he was wrong, he\n thought. Maybe he shouldn't\n stand in the way of their biologists\n and surgeons. But he'd\n rather be buried, even if that\n left them with only what he\n could tell them about the human\n body.\nTo help himself forget the\n rather preoccupied manner in\n which some of the Tepoktan scientists\n occasionally eyed him, he\n peered down at the big dam of\n the hydro-electric project being\n completed to Kinton's design.\n Power from this would soon\n light the town built to house the\n staff of scientists, students, and\n workers assigned to the institute\n organized about the person\n of Kinton.\n\n\n Now, there was an example of\n their willingness to repay him\n for whatever help he had been,\n he reflected. They hadn't needed\n that for themselves.", "Kinton smiled at his aide's\n earnest concern. Then he turned\n to look out the window as he recalled\n the shadow that underlay\n such remonstrances. He estimated\n that he was about forty-eight\n now, as nearly as he could tell\n from the somewhat longer revolutions\n of Tepokt. The time\n would come when he would age\n and die. Whose wishes would\n then prevail?", "Kinton observed, however,\n that his aide also stared upward\n for a long moment. The Tepoktans\n loved speculating about the\n unsolvable. They had even founded\n clubs to argue whether two\n satellites had been destroyed or\n only one.\n\n\n Half a dozen officials hastened\n up to escort the party to the\n vehicle awaiting Kinton. Klaft\n succeeded in quieting the lesser\n members of the delegation so\n that Kinton was able to learn a\n few facts about the new arrival.\n The crash had been several hundred\n miles away, but someone\n had thought of the hospital in\n this city which was known to\n have a doctor rating as an expert\n in human physiology. The survivor—only\n one occupant of the\n wreck, alive or dead, had\n been discovered—had accordingly\n been flown here.", "They would hardly learn anything\n from him directly that was\n not available in recordings made\n over the course of years. The\n Tepoktan scientists, historians,\n and philosophers had respectfully\n but eagerly gathered every\n crumb of information Kinton\n knowingly had to offer—and\n some he thought he had forgotten.\n Still ... he sensed the disappointment\n at his announcement.\n\n\n \"I shall arrange for you to\n await my return here in town,\"\n Kinton said, and there were murmurs\n of pleasure.\n\n\n Later, aboard the jet helicopter\n that was basically like\n those Kinton remembered using\n on Terra twenty light years\n away, he shook his head at\n Klaft's respectful protest.\n\n\n \"But George! It was enough\n that they were present when you\n received the news. They can talk\n about that the rest of their lives!\n You must not waste your\n strength on these people who\n come out of curiosity.\"", "For the next three weeks, Kinton\n flew back and forth from his\n own town nearly every day. He\n felt that he should not neglect\n the few meetings which were the\n only way he could repay the Tepoktans\n for all they did for him.\n On the other hand, the chance\n to see and talk with one of his\n own kind drew him like a magnet\n to the hospital.\n\n\n The doctors operated upon\n Birken's leg, inserting a metal\n rod inside the bone by a method\n they had known before Kinton\n described it. The new arrival expected\n to be able to walk, with\n care, almost any day; although\n the pin would have to be removed\n after the bone had healed. Meanwhile,\n Birken seemed eager to\n learn all Kinton could tell him\n about the planet, Tepokt.\n\n\n About himself, he was remarkably\n reticent. Kinton worried\n about this.", "Why was it one like him who\n got through? he asked himself\n in silent anguish. After ten\n years. The Tepoktans had been\n thinking well of Terrans, but\n now—\n\n\n He did not worry about his\n own position. That was well\n enough established, whether or\n not he could again hold up his\n head before the purple-scaled\n people who had been so generous\n to him.\n\n\n Even if they had been aroused\n to a rage by the killing, Kinton\n told himself, he would not have\n been concerned about himself. He\n had reached a fairly ripe age for\n a spaceman. In fact, he had already\n [110]\n enjoyed a decade of borrowed\n time.\n\n\n But they were more civilized\n than that wanton murderer, he\n realized.\n\n\n He straightened up, forcing\n back his early-morning weariness.", "\"He is dead,\" said Klaft when\n the constable straightened up\n with a curt wave.\n\n\n \"Will ... will you have someone\n see to him, please?\" Kinton\n requested, turning toward the\n helicopter.\n\n\n \"Yes, George,\" said Klaft.\n \"George...?\"\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"It would be very instructive—that\n is, I believe Dr. Chuxolkhee\n would like to—\"\n\n\n \"All right!\" yielded Kinton,\n surprised at the harshness of his\n own voice. \"Just tell him not to\n bring around any sketches of the\n various organs for a few\n months!\"\n\n\n He climbed into the helicopter\n and slumped into his seat. Presently,\n he was aware of Klaft edging\n into the seat across the aisle.\n He looked up.", "Kinton turned away from the\n window as he caught the glint\n of Tepokt's sun upon the hull of\n the spaceship they had also built\n for him. Perhaps ... would it\n be fair to encourage the newcomer\n to attempt the barrier?", "Kinton growled a Tepoktan expression\n the meaning of which\n he had deduced after hearing it\n used by the dam workers.\n\n\n He whirled to run toward the\n helicopter. Hardly had he taken\n two steps, however, when he saw\n startled changes in the carefully\n blank looks of his escort. The\n constable half raised his heavy\n weapon, and Klaft sprang forward\n with a hissing cry.\n\n\n By the time Kinton's aging\n muscles obeyed his impulse to\n sidestep, the spear had already\n hurtled past. It had missed him\n by an error of over six feet.\n\n\n [113]\n He felt his face flushing with\n sudden anger. Birken was running\n as best he could toward the\n spaceship, and had covered nearly\n half the distance.\n\n\n Kinton ran at the Tepoktans,\n brushing aside the concerned\n Klaft. He snatched the heavy\n weapon from the surprised constable.", "\"Thrown across the controls\n after his belt broke loose?\" Kinton\n guessed.\n\n\n \"I bow to your wisdom,\n George,\" said the plump Tepoktan\n doctor who appeared to be\n in charge.\n\n\n Kinton could not remember\n him, but everyone on the planet\n addressed the Terran by the\n sound they fondly thought to be\n his first name.\n\n\n \"This is Doctor Chuxolkhee,\"\n murmured Klaft.\n\n\n Kinton made the accepted gesture\n of greeting with one hand\n and said, \"You seem to have\n treated him very expertly.\"\n\n\n Chuxolkhee ruffled the scales\n around his neck with pleasure.\n\n\n [107]\n \"I have studied Terran physiology,\"\n he admitted complacently.\n \"From your records and\n drawings, of course, George, for\n I have not yet had the good fortune\n to visit you.\"", "\"We must get into the air\n immediately,\" he told Klaft.\n \"Perhaps we may see him before\n he reaches—\"\n\n\n He broke off at the word\n \"spaceship\" but he noticed a reserved\n expression on Klaft's\n pointed face. His aide had probably\n reached a conclusion similar\n to his own.\n\n\n They climbed back into the\n cabin and Klaft gave brisk orders\n to the lean young pilot. A\n moment later, Kinton saw the\n ground outside drop away.\n\n\n Only upon turning around did\n he realize that two armed Tepoktans\n had materialized in time to\n follow Klaft inside.", "The aide reached Kinton and\n bent to hiss and cluck into the\n latter's ear in what he presumably\n considered an undertone.\n The Terran laboriously spelled\n out the message inscribed on the\n limp, satiny paper held before his\n eyes. Then he rose and took one\n step toward the waiting group.\n\n\n \"I regret I shall have to conclude\n this discussion,\" he announced.\n \"I am informed that\n another ship from space has\n reached the surface of Tepokt.\n My presence is requested in case\n the crew are of my own planet.\"\n\n\n [104]\n Klaft excitedly skipped down\n to lead the way up the aisle, but\n Kinton hesitated. Those in the\n audience were scholars or officials\n to whom attendance at one\n of Kinton's limited number of\n personal lectures was awarded as\n an honor.", "Kinton realized guiltily that\n the man should be resting. He\n [108]\n had lost track of the moments\n he had wasted in talk while the\n others with him stood attentively\n about.\n\n\n He questioned the doctor briefly\n and relayed the information\n that Birken's leg was broken but\n that the other injuries were not\n serious.\n\n\n \"They'll fix you up,\" he assured\n the spaceman. \"They're\n quite good at it, even if the sight\n of one does make you think a\n little of an iguana. Rest up, now;\n and I'll come back again when\n you're feeling better.\"", "He could tell that they were\n pleased by his admiration, and\n wondered yet again why any\n little show of approval by him\n was so eagerly received. Even\n though he was the first stellar\n visitor in their recorded history,\n Kinton remained conscious of the\n fact that in many fields he was\n unable to offer the Tepoktans any\n new ideas. In one or two ways,\n he believed, no Terran could\n teach their experts anything.\n\n\n \"Then will you tell us, George,\n more about the problems of your\n first space explorers?\" came another\n question.\nBefore Kinton had formed his\n answer, the golden curtains at\n the rear of the austerely simple\n chamber parted. Klaft, the Tepoktan\n serving the current year\n as Kinton's chief aide, hurried\n toward the dais. The twenty-odd\n members of the group fell silent\n on their polished stone benches,\n turning their pointed visages to\n follow Klaft's progress.", "\"He was just no good. You\n know the murder he did here;\n we can only guess what he did\n among my own ... among Terrans.\n Should he have a chance to\n go back and commit more\n crimes?\"\n\n\n \"I understand, George, the\n logic of it,\" said Klaft. \"I meant\n ... it is not my place to say this\n ... but you seem unhappy.\"\n\n\n \"Possibly,\" grunted Kinton\n wrily.\n\n\n \"We, too, have criminals,\" said\n the aide, as gently as was possible\n in his clicking language.\n \"We do not think it necessary\n to grieve for the pain they bring\n upon themselves.\"\n\n\n \"No, I suppose not,\" sighed\n Kinton. \"I ... it's just—\"\n\n\n He looked up at the pointed\n visage, at the strange eyes regarding\n him sympathetically\n from beneath the sloping, purple-scaled\n forehead.", "He leaned back and scanned\n the faces of his interviewers,\n faces that would have been oddly\n humanoid were it not for the\n elongated snouts and pointed,\n sharp-toothed jaws. The average\n Tepoktan was slightly under\n Kinton's height of five-feet-ten,\n with a long, supple trunk. Under\n the robes their scholars affected,\n the shortness of their two bowed\n legs was not obvious; but the\n sight of the short, thick arms\n carried high before their chests\n still left Kinton with a feeling\n of misproportion.\n\n\n He should be used to it after\n ten years, he thought, but even\n the reds or purples of the scales\n or the big teeth seemed more\n natural.\n\n\n \"I sympathize with your curiosity,\"\n he added. \"It is a marvel\n that your scientists have\n managed to measure the distances\n of so many stars.\"", "\"Get on with it, Klaft!\n Please!\"\n\n\n \"In the night, then, Albirken\n left the chamber in which he lay.\n He can walk some now, you\n know, because of Dr. Chuxolkhee's\n metal pin. He—he stole a\n ground car and is gone.\"\n\n\n \"He did?\" Kinton had an\n empty feeling in the pit of his\n stomach. \"Is it known where he\n went? I mean ... he has been\n curious to see some of Tepokt.\n Perhaps—\"\n\n\n He stopped, his own words\n braying in his ears. Klaft was\n clicking two claws together, a\n sign of emphatic disagreement.\n\n\n \"Albirken,\" he said, \"was soon\n followed by three police constables\n in another vehicle. They\n found him heading in the direction\n of our town.\"", "He turned and raised it to his\n chest. Because of the shortness\n of Tepoktan arms, the launcher\n was constructed so that the butt\n rested against the chest with the\n sighting loops before the eyes.\n The little rocket tubes were\n above head height, to prevent the\n handler's catching the blast.\n\n\n The circles of the sights\n weaved and danced about the\n running figure. Kinton realized\n to his surprise that the effort of\n seizing the weapon had him panting.\n Or was it the fright at having\n a spear thrown at him? He\n decided that Birken had not come\n close enough for that, and wondered\n if he was afraid of his\n own impending action.\n\n\n It wasn't fair, he complained\n to himself. The poor slob only\n had a spear, and a man couldn't\n blame him for wanting to get\n back to his own sort. He was\n limping ... hurt ... how could\n they expect him to realize—?", "\"I think we should not expect\n too much of this Terran,\" he\n warned Klaft uneasily. \"You,\n too, have citizens who do not always\n obey, your laws, who sometimes\n ... that is—\"\n\n\n \"Who are born to die under\n the axe, as we say,\" interrupted\n Klaft, as if to ease the concern\n plain on Kinton's face. \"In other\n words, criminals. You suspect\n this Albirken is such a one,\n George?\"\n\n\n \"It is not impossible,\" admitted\n Kinton unhappily. \"He will\n tell me little about himself. It\n may be that he was caught in\n Tepokt's gravity while fleeing\n from justice.\"", "For ten years, Kinton had\n failed to work up any strong desire\n to try it. The Tepoktans\n called the ever-shifting lights\n the Dome of Eyes, after a myth\n in which each tiny satellite\n bright enough to be visible was\n supposed to watch over a single\n individual on the surface. Like\n their brothers on Terra, the native\n astronomers could trace\n their science back to a form of\n astrology; and Kinton often told\n them jokingly that he felt no\n urge to risk a physical encounter\n with his own personal Eye.\nThe helicopter started to descend,\n and Kinton remembered\n that the city named in his message\n was only about twenty miles\n from his home. The brief twilight\n of Tepokt was passing by\n the time he set foot on the landing\n field, and he paused to look\n up." ], [ "Kinton growled a Tepoktan expression\n the meaning of which\n he had deduced after hearing it\n used by the dam workers.\n\n\n He whirled to run toward the\n helicopter. Hardly had he taken\n two steps, however, when he saw\n startled changes in the carefully\n blank looks of his escort. The\n constable half raised his heavy\n weapon, and Klaft sprang forward\n with a hissing cry.\n\n\n By the time Kinton's aging\n muscles obeyed his impulse to\n sidestep, the spear had already\n hurtled past. It had missed him\n by an error of over six feet.\n\n\n [113]\n He felt his face flushing with\n sudden anger. Birken was running\n as best he could toward the\n spaceship, and had covered nearly\n half the distance.\n\n\n Kinton ran at the Tepoktans,\n brushing aside the concerned\n Klaft. He snatched the heavy\n weapon from the surprised constable.", "Kinton smiled at his aide's\n earnest concern. Then he turned\n to look out the window as he recalled\n the shadow that underlay\n such remonstrances. He estimated\n that he was about forty-eight\n now, as nearly as he could tell\n from the somewhat longer revolutions\n of Tepokt. The time\n would come when he would age\n and die. Whose wishes would\n then prevail?", "Why was it one like him who\n got through? he asked himself\n in silent anguish. After ten\n years. The Tepoktans had been\n thinking well of Terrans, but\n now—\n\n\n He did not worry about his\n own position. That was well\n enough established, whether or\n not he could again hold up his\n head before the purple-scaled\n people who had been so generous\n to him.\n\n\n Even if they had been aroused\n to a rage by the killing, Kinton\n told himself, he would not have\n been concerned about himself. He\n had reached a fairly ripe age for\n a spaceman. In fact, he had already\n [110]\n enjoyed a decade of borrowed\n time.\n\n\n But they were more civilized\n than that wanton murderer, he\n realized.\n\n\n He straightened up, forcing\n back his early-morning weariness.", "He turned and raised it to his\n chest. Because of the shortness\n of Tepoktan arms, the launcher\n was constructed so that the butt\n rested against the chest with the\n sighting loops before the eyes.\n The little rocket tubes were\n above head height, to prevent the\n handler's catching the blast.\n\n\n The circles of the sights\n weaved and danced about the\n running figure. Kinton realized\n to his surprise that the effort of\n seizing the weapon had him panting.\n Or was it the fright at having\n a spear thrown at him? He\n decided that Birken had not come\n close enough for that, and wondered\n if he was afraid of his\n own impending action.\n\n\n It wasn't fair, he complained\n to himself. The poor slob only\n had a spear, and a man couldn't\n blame him for wanting to get\n back to his own sort. He was\n limping ... hurt ... how could\n they expect him to realize—?", "Maybe he was wrong, he\n thought. Maybe he shouldn't\n stand in the way of their biologists\n and surgeons. But he'd\n rather be buried, even if that\n left them with only what he\n could tell them about the human\n body.\nTo help himself forget the\n rather preoccupied manner in\n which some of the Tepoktan scientists\n occasionally eyed him, he\n peered down at the big dam of\n the hydro-electric project being\n completed to Kinton's design.\n Power from this would soon\n light the town built to house the\n staff of scientists, students, and\n workers assigned to the institute\n organized about the person\n of Kinton.\n\n\n Now, there was an example of\n their willingness to repay him\n for whatever help he had been,\n he reflected. They hadn't needed\n that for themselves.", "Kinton observed, however,\n that his aide also stared upward\n for a long moment. The Tepoktans\n loved speculating about the\n unsolvable. They had even founded\n clubs to argue whether two\n satellites had been destroyed or\n only one.\n\n\n Half a dozen officials hastened\n up to escort the party to the\n vehicle awaiting Kinton. Klaft\n succeeded in quieting the lesser\n members of the delegation so\n that Kinton was able to learn a\n few facts about the new arrival.\n The crash had been several hundred\n miles away, but someone\n had thought of the hospital in\n this city which was known to\n have a doctor rating as an expert\n in human physiology. The survivor—only\n one occupant of the\n wreck, alive or dead, had\n been discovered—had accordingly\n been flown here.", "For ten years, Kinton had\n failed to work up any strong desire\n to try it. The Tepoktans\n called the ever-shifting lights\n the Dome of Eyes, after a myth\n in which each tiny satellite\n bright enough to be visible was\n supposed to watch over a single\n individual on the surface. Like\n their brothers on Terra, the native\n astronomers could trace\n their science back to a form of\n astrology; and Kinton often told\n them jokingly that he felt no\n urge to risk a physical encounter\n with his own personal Eye.\nThe helicopter started to descend,\n and Kinton remembered\n that the city named in his message\n was only about twenty miles\n from his home. The brief twilight\n of Tepokt was passing by\n the time he set foot on the landing\n field, and he paused to look\n up.", "They would hardly learn anything\n from him directly that was\n not available in recordings made\n over the course of years. The\n Tepoktan scientists, historians,\n and philosophers had respectfully\n but eagerly gathered every\n crumb of information Kinton\n knowingly had to offer—and\n some he thought he had forgotten.\n Still ... he sensed the disappointment\n at his announcement.\n\n\n \"I shall arrange for you to\n await my return here in town,\"\n Kinton said, and there were murmurs\n of pleasure.\n\n\n Later, aboard the jet helicopter\n that was basically like\n those Kinton remembered using\n on Terra twenty light years\n away, he shook his head at\n Klaft's respectful protest.\n\n\n \"But George! It was enough\n that they were present when you\n received the news. They can talk\n about that the rest of their lives!\n You must not waste your\n strength on these people who\n come out of curiosity.\"", "The brighter stars visible from\n this part of the planet twinkled\n back at him, and he knew that\n each was being scrutinized by\n some amateur or professional\n astronomer. Before an hour had\n elapsed, most of them would be\n obscured by the tiny moonlets,\n some of which could already be\n seen. These could easily be mistaken\n for stars or the other five\n planets of the system, but in a\n short while the tinier ones in\n groups would cause a celestial\n haze resembling a miniature\n Milky Way.\n\n\n Klaft, who had descended first,\n leaving the pilot to bring up the\n rear, noticed Kinton's pause.\n\n\n \"Glory glitters till it is known\n for a curse,\" he remarked, quoting\n a Tepoktan proverb often applied\n [106]\n by the disgruntled scientists\n to the Dome of Eyes.", "He could tell that they were\n pleased by his admiration, and\n wondered yet again why any\n little show of approval by him\n was so eagerly received. Even\n though he was the first stellar\n visitor in their recorded history,\n Kinton remained conscious of the\n fact that in many fields he was\n unable to offer the Tepoktans any\n new ideas. In one or two ways,\n he believed, no Terran could\n teach their experts anything.\n\n\n \"Then will you tell us, George,\n more about the problems of your\n first space explorers?\" came another\n question.\nBefore Kinton had formed his\n answer, the golden curtains at\n the rear of the austerely simple\n chamber parted. Klaft, the Tepoktan\n serving the current year\n as Kinton's chief aide, hurried\n toward the dais. The twenty-odd\n members of the group fell silent\n on their polished stone benches,\n turning their pointed visages to\n follow Klaft's progress.", "In some ways, compared to\n [105]\n those of Terra, the industries of\n Tepokt were underdeveloped. In\n the first place, the population\n was smaller and had different\n standards of luxury. In the second,\n a certain lack of drive resulted\n from the inability to\n break out into interplanetary\n space. Kinton had been inexplicably\n lucky to have reached the\n surface even in a battered hulk.\n The shell of meteorites was at\n least a hundred miles thick and\n constantly shifting.\n\n\n \"We do not know if they have\n always been meteorites,\" the\n Tepoktans had told Kinton, \"or\n whether part of them come from\n a destroyed satellite; but our observers\n have proved mathematically\n that no direct path through\n them may be predicted more than\n a very short while in advance.\"", "He leaned back and scanned\n the faces of his interviewers,\n faces that would have been oddly\n humanoid were it not for the\n elongated snouts and pointed,\n sharp-toothed jaws. The average\n Tepoktan was slightly under\n Kinton's height of five-feet-ten,\n with a long, supple trunk. Under\n the robes their scholars affected,\n the shortness of their two bowed\n legs was not obvious; but the\n sight of the short, thick arms\n carried high before their chests\n still left Kinton with a feeling\n of misproportion.\n\n\n He should be used to it after\n ten years, he thought, but even\n the reds or purples of the scales\n or the big teeth seemed more\n natural.\n\n\n \"I sympathize with your curiosity,\"\n he added. \"It is a marvel\n that your scientists have\n managed to measure the distances\n of so many stars.\"", "\"Get on with it, Klaft!\n Please!\"\n\n\n \"In the night, then, Albirken\n left the chamber in which he lay.\n He can walk some now, you\n know, because of Dr. Chuxolkhee's\n metal pin. He—he stole a\n ground car and is gone.\"\n\n\n \"He did?\" Kinton had an\n empty feeling in the pit of his\n stomach. \"Is it known where he\n went? I mean ... he has been\n curious to see some of Tepokt.\n Perhaps—\"\n\n\n He stopped, his own words\n braying in his ears. Klaft was\n clicking two claws together, a\n sign of emphatic disagreement.\n\n\n \"Albirken,\" he said, \"was soon\n followed by three police constables\n in another vehicle. They\n found him heading in the direction\n of our town.\"", "\"We must get into the air\n immediately,\" he told Klaft.\n \"Perhaps we may see him before\n he reaches—\"\n\n\n He broke off at the word\n \"spaceship\" but he noticed a reserved\n expression on Klaft's\n pointed face. His aide had probably\n reached a conclusion similar\n to his own.\n\n\n They climbed back into the\n cabin and Klaft gave brisk orders\n to the lean young pilot. A\n moment later, Kinton saw the\n ground outside drop away.\n\n\n Only upon turning around did\n he realize that two armed Tepoktans\n had materialized in time to\n follow Klaft inside.", "\"I\nshouldn't\nhave told him\n about the ship!\" Kinton muttered,\n gnawing the knuckle of\n his left thumb. \"He's on the run,\n all right. Probably scared the\n colonial authorities will trail him\n right down through the Dome of\n Eyes. Wonder what he did?\"\n\n\n He caught himself and looked\n around to see if he had been overheard.\n Klaft and the police officers\n peered from their respective\n windows, in calculated withdrawal.\n Kinton, disturbed, tried\n to remember whether he had\n spoken in Terran or Tepoktan.\n\n\n Would Birken listen if he tried\n reasoning, he asked himself.\n Maybe if he showed the man how\n they had proved the unpredictability\n of openings through the\n shifting Dome of Eyes—", "\"I think we should not expect\n too much of this Terran,\" he\n warned Klaft uneasily. \"You,\n too, have citizens who do not always\n obey, your laws, who sometimes\n ... that is—\"\n\n\n \"Who are born to die under\n the axe, as we say,\" interrupted\n Klaft, as if to ease the concern\n plain on Kinton's face. \"In other\n words, criminals. You suspect\n this Albirken is such a one,\n George?\"\n\n\n \"It is not impossible,\" admitted\n Kinton unhappily. \"He will\n tell me little about himself. It\n may be that he was caught in\n Tepokt's gravity while fleeing\n from justice.\"", "For the next three weeks, Kinton\n flew back and forth from his\n own town nearly every day. He\n felt that he should not neglect\n the few meetings which were the\n only way he could repay the Tepoktans\n for all they did for him.\n On the other hand, the chance\n to see and talk with one of his\n own kind drew him like a magnet\n to the hospital.\n\n\n The doctors operated upon\n Birken's leg, inserting a metal\n rod inside the bone by a method\n they had known before Kinton\n described it. The new arrival expected\n to be able to walk, with\n care, almost any day; although\n the pin would have to be removed\n after the bone had healed. Meanwhile,\n Birken seemed eager to\n learn all Kinton could tell him\n about the planet, Tepokt.\n\n\n About himself, he was remarkably\n reticent. Kinton worried\n about this.", "Kinton turned away from the\n window as he caught the glint\n of Tepokt's sun upon the hull of\n the spaceship they had also built\n for him. Perhaps ... would it\n be fair to encourage the newcomer\n to attempt the barrier?", "The aide reached Kinton and\n bent to hiss and cluck into the\n latter's ear in what he presumably\n considered an undertone.\n The Terran laboriously spelled\n out the message inscribed on the\n limp, satiny paper held before his\n eyes. Then he rose and took one\n step toward the waiting group.\n\n\n \"I regret I shall have to conclude\n this discussion,\" he announced.\n \"I am informed that\n another ship from space has\n reached the surface of Tepokt.\n My presence is requested in case\n the crew are of my own planet.\"\n\n\n [104]\n Klaft excitedly skipped down\n to lead the way up the aisle, but\n Kinton hesitated. Those in the\n audience were scholars or officials\n to whom attendance at one\n of Kinton's limited number of\n personal lectures was awarded as\n an honor.", "\"Wait! Don't you think they\n tried sending unmanned rockets\n up? Every one was struck and\n exploded.\"\n\n\n Birken showed no more change\n of expression than if the other\n had commented on the weather.\n\n\n Kinton had stepped forward\n six or eight paces, irritated despite\n his anxiety at the way Birken\n persisted in drifting before\n him.\n\n\n Kinton couldn't just grab him—bad\n leg or not, he could probably\n break the older man in two.\n\n\n He glanced back at the Tepoktans\n beside the helicopter, Klaft,\n the pilot, the officer, the constable\n with the rocket weapon.\n\n\n They stood quietly, looking\n back at him.\n\n\n The call for help that had risen\n to his lips died there." ], [ "He could tell that they were\n pleased by his admiration, and\n wondered yet again why any\n little show of approval by him\n was so eagerly received. Even\n though he was the first stellar\n visitor in their recorded history,\n Kinton remained conscious of the\n fact that in many fields he was\n unable to offer the Tepoktans any\n new ideas. In one or two ways,\n he believed, no Terran could\n teach their experts anything.\n\n\n \"Then will you tell us, George,\n more about the problems of your\n first space explorers?\" came another\n question.\nBefore Kinton had formed his\n answer, the golden curtains at\n the rear of the austerely simple\n chamber parted. Klaft, the Tepoktan\n serving the current year\n as Kinton's chief aide, hurried\n toward the dais. The twenty-odd\n members of the group fell silent\n on their polished stone benches,\n turning their pointed visages to\n follow Klaft's progress.", "In some ways, compared to\n [105]\n those of Terra, the industries of\n Tepokt were underdeveloped. In\n the first place, the population\n was smaller and had different\n standards of luxury. In the second,\n a certain lack of drive resulted\n from the inability to\n break out into interplanetary\n space. Kinton had been inexplicably\n lucky to have reached the\n surface even in a battered hulk.\n The shell of meteorites was at\n least a hundred miles thick and\n constantly shifting.\n\n\n \"We do not know if they have\n always been meteorites,\" the\n Tepoktans had told Kinton, \"or\n whether part of them come from\n a destroyed satellite; but our observers\n have proved mathematically\n that no direct path through\n them may be predicted more than\n a very short while in advance.\"", "Kinton turned away from the\n window as he caught the glint\n of Tepokt's sun upon the hull of\n the spaceship they had also built\n for him. Perhaps ... would it\n be fair to encourage the newcomer\n to attempt the barrier?", "Questions like this had been\n put to him often during the ten\n years since his rocket had\n hurtled through the meteorite\n belt and down to the surface of\n Tepokt, leaving him the only survivor.\n Barred off as they were\n from venturing into space, the\n highly civilized Tepoktans constantly\n displayed the curiosity of\n dreamers in matters related to\n the universe. Because of the veil\n of meteorites and satellite fragments\n whirling about their\n planet, their astronomers had acquired\n torturous skills but only\n scraps of real knowledge.\n\n\n \"As I believe I mentioned in\n some of my recorded lectures,\"\n Kinton answered in their language,\n [103]\n \"the number is actually\n as vast as it seems to those of\n you peering through the Dome\n of Eyes. The scientists of my\n race have not yet encountered\n any beings capable of estimating\n the total.\"", "For ten years, Kinton had\n failed to work up any strong desire\n to try it. The Tepoktans\n called the ever-shifting lights\n the Dome of Eyes, after a myth\n in which each tiny satellite\n bright enough to be visible was\n supposed to watch over a single\n individual on the surface. Like\n their brothers on Terra, the native\n astronomers could trace\n their science back to a form of\n astrology; and Kinton often told\n them jokingly that he felt no\n urge to risk a physical encounter\n with his own personal Eye.\nThe helicopter started to descend,\n and Kinton remembered\n that the city named in his message\n was only about twenty miles\n from his home. The brief twilight\n of Tepokt was passing by\n the time he set foot on the landing\n field, and he paused to look\n up.", "\"We must get into the air\n immediately,\" he told Klaft.\n \"Perhaps we may see him before\n he reaches—\"\n\n\n He broke off at the word\n \"spaceship\" but he noticed a reserved\n expression on Klaft's\n pointed face. His aide had probably\n reached a conclusion similar\n to his own.\n\n\n They climbed back into the\n cabin and Klaft gave brisk orders\n to the lean young pilot. A\n moment later, Kinton saw the\n ground outside drop away.\n\n\n Only upon turning around did\n he realize that two armed Tepoktans\n had materialized in time to\n follow Klaft inside.", "Kinton observed, however,\n that his aide also stared upward\n for a long moment. The Tepoktans\n loved speculating about the\n unsolvable. They had even founded\n clubs to argue whether two\n satellites had been destroyed or\n only one.\n\n\n Half a dozen officials hastened\n up to escort the party to the\n vehicle awaiting Kinton. Klaft\n succeeded in quieting the lesser\n members of the delegation so\n that Kinton was able to learn a\n few facts about the new arrival.\n The crash had been several hundred\n miles away, but someone\n had thought of the hospital in\n this city which was known to\n have a doctor rating as an expert\n in human physiology. The survivor—only\n one occupant of the\n wreck, alive or dead, had\n been discovered—had accordingly\n been flown here.", "He leaned back and scanned\n the faces of his interviewers,\n faces that would have been oddly\n humanoid were it not for the\n elongated snouts and pointed,\n sharp-toothed jaws. The average\n Tepoktan was slightly under\n Kinton's height of five-feet-ten,\n with a long, supple trunk. Under\n the robes their scholars affected,\n the shortness of their two bowed\n legs was not obvious; but the\n sight of the short, thick arms\n carried high before their chests\n still left Kinton with a feeling\n of misproportion.\n\n\n He should be used to it after\n ten years, he thought, but even\n the reds or purples of the scales\n or the big teeth seemed more\n natural.\n\n\n \"I sympathize with your curiosity,\"\n he added. \"It is a marvel\n that your scientists have\n managed to measure the distances\n of so many stars.\"", "Why was it one like him who\n got through? he asked himself\n in silent anguish. After ten\n years. The Tepoktans had been\n thinking well of Terrans, but\n now—\n\n\n He did not worry about his\n own position. That was well\n enough established, whether or\n not he could again hold up his\n head before the purple-scaled\n people who had been so generous\n to him.\n\n\n Even if they had been aroused\n to a rage by the killing, Kinton\n told himself, he would not have\n been concerned about himself. He\n had reached a fairly ripe age for\n a spaceman. In fact, he had already\n [110]\n enjoyed a decade of borrowed\n time.\n\n\n But they were more civilized\n than that wanton murderer, he\n realized.\n\n\n He straightened up, forcing\n back his early-morning weariness.", "Kinton growled a Tepoktan expression\n the meaning of which\n he had deduced after hearing it\n used by the dam workers.\n\n\n He whirled to run toward the\n helicopter. Hardly had he taken\n two steps, however, when he saw\n startled changes in the carefully\n blank looks of his escort. The\n constable half raised his heavy\n weapon, and Klaft sprang forward\n with a hissing cry.\n\n\n By the time Kinton's aging\n muscles obeyed his impulse to\n sidestep, the spear had already\n hurtled past. It had missed him\n by an error of over six feet.\n\n\n [113]\n He felt his face flushing with\n sudden anger. Birken was running\n as best he could toward the\n spaceship, and had covered nearly\n half the distance.\n\n\n Kinton ran at the Tepoktans,\n brushing aside the concerned\n Klaft. He snatched the heavy\n weapon from the surprised constable.", "They would hardly learn anything\n from him directly that was\n not available in recordings made\n over the course of years. The\n Tepoktan scientists, historians,\n and philosophers had respectfully\n but eagerly gathered every\n crumb of information Kinton\n knowingly had to offer—and\n some he thought he had forgotten.\n Still ... he sensed the disappointment\n at his announcement.\n\n\n \"I shall arrange for you to\n await my return here in town,\"\n Kinton said, and there were murmurs\n of pleasure.\n\n\n Later, aboard the jet helicopter\n that was basically like\n those Kinton remembered using\n on Terra twenty light years\n away, he shook his head at\n Klaft's respectful protest.\n\n\n \"But George! It was enough\n that they were present when you\n received the news. They can talk\n about that the rest of their lives!\n You must not waste your\n strength on these people who\n come out of curiosity.\"", "The aide reached Kinton and\n bent to hiss and cluck into the\n latter's ear in what he presumably\n considered an undertone.\n The Terran laboriously spelled\n out the message inscribed on the\n limp, satiny paper held before his\n eyes. Then he rose and took one\n step toward the waiting group.\n\n\n \"I regret I shall have to conclude\n this discussion,\" he announced.\n \"I am informed that\n another ship from space has\n reached the surface of Tepokt.\n My presence is requested in case\n the crew are of my own planet.\"\n\n\n [104]\n Klaft excitedly skipped down\n to lead the way up the aisle, but\n Kinton hesitated. Those in the\n audience were scholars or officials\n to whom attendance at one\n of Kinton's limited number of\n personal lectures was awarded as\n an honor.", "The brighter stars visible from\n this part of the planet twinkled\n back at him, and he knew that\n each was being scrutinized by\n some amateur or professional\n astronomer. Before an hour had\n elapsed, most of them would be\n obscured by the tiny moonlets,\n some of which could already be\n seen. These could easily be mistaken\n for stars or the other five\n planets of the system, but in a\n short while the tinier ones in\n groups would cause a celestial\n haze resembling a miniature\n Milky Way.\n\n\n Klaft, who had descended first,\n leaving the pilot to bring up the\n rear, noticed Kinton's pause.\n\n\n \"Glory glitters till it is known\n for a curse,\" he remarked, quoting\n a Tepoktan proverb often applied\n [106]\n by the disgruntled scientists\n to the Dome of Eyes.", "\"Wait! Don't you think they\n tried sending unmanned rockets\n up? Every one was struck and\n exploded.\"\n\n\n Birken showed no more change\n of expression than if the other\n had commented on the weather.\n\n\n Kinton had stepped forward\n six or eight paces, irritated despite\n his anxiety at the way Birken\n persisted in drifting before\n him.\n\n\n Kinton couldn't just grab him—bad\n leg or not, he could probably\n break the older man in two.\n\n\n He glanced back at the Tepoktans\n beside the helicopter, Klaft,\n the pilot, the officer, the constable\n with the rocket weapon.\n\n\n They stood quietly, looking\n back at him.\n\n\n The call for help that had risen\n to his lips died there.", "For the next three weeks, Kinton\n flew back and forth from his\n own town nearly every day. He\n felt that he should not neglect\n the few meetings which were the\n only way he could repay the Tepoktans\n for all they did for him.\n On the other hand, the chance\n to see and talk with one of his\n own kind drew him like a magnet\n to the hospital.\n\n\n The doctors operated upon\n Birken's leg, inserting a metal\n rod inside the bone by a method\n they had known before Kinton\n described it. The new arrival expected\n to be able to walk, with\n care, almost any day; although\n the pin would have to be removed\n after the bone had healed. Meanwhile,\n Birken seemed eager to\n learn all Kinton could tell him\n about the planet, Tepokt.\n\n\n About himself, he was remarkably\n reticent. Kinton worried\n about this.", "\"Not\ntheir\nparty,\" he muttered.\n He turned again to Birken,\n who still retreated toward the\n ship. \"But he'll only get himself\n killed\nand\ndestroy the ship! Or\n if some miracle gets him\n through, that's worse! He's\n nothing to turn loose on a civilized\n colony again.\"\nA twinge of shame tugged\n down the corners of his mouth\n as he realized that keeping Birken\n here would also expose a\n highly cultured people to an unscrupulous\n criminal who had already\n committed murder the very\n first time he had been crossed.\n\n\n \"Birken!\" he shouted. \"For\n the last time! Do you want me\n to send them to drag you back\n here?\"\n\n\n Birken stopped at that. He regarded\n the motionless Tepoktans\n with a derisive sneer.\n\n\n \"They don't look too eager to\n me,\" he taunted.", "\"I think we should not expect\n too much of this Terran,\" he\n warned Klaft uneasily. \"You,\n too, have citizens who do not always\n obey, your laws, who sometimes\n ... that is—\"\n\n\n \"Who are born to die under\n the axe, as we say,\" interrupted\n Klaft, as if to ease the concern\n plain on Kinton's face. \"In other\n words, criminals. You suspect\n this Albirken is such a one,\n George?\"\n\n\n \"It is not impossible,\" admitted\n Kinton unhappily. \"He will\n tell me little about himself. It\n may be that he was caught in\n Tepokt's gravity while fleeing\n from justice.\"", "Kinton smiled at his aide's\n earnest concern. Then he turned\n to look out the window as he recalled\n the shadow that underlay\n such remonstrances. He estimated\n that he was about forty-eight\n now, as nearly as he could tell\n from the somewhat longer revolutions\n of Tepokt. The time\n would come when he would age\n and die. Whose wishes would\n then prevail?", "One was a constable but the\n other he recognized for an officer\n of some rank. Both wore slung\n across their chests weapons resembling\n long-barreled pistols\n with large, oddly indented butts\n to fit Tepoktan claws. The constable,\n in addition, carried a\n contraption with a quadruple\n tube for launching tiny rockets\n no thicker than Kinton's thumb.\n These, he knew, were loaded\n with an explosive worthy of respect\n on any planet he had heard\n of.\n\n\n To protect him, he wondered.\n Or to get Birken?\n\n\n The pilot headed the craft\n back toward Kinton's town in\n the brightening sky of early day.\n Long before the buildings of\n Kinton's institute came into\n view, they received a radio message\n about Birken.", "Maybe he was wrong, he\n thought. Maybe he shouldn't\n stand in the way of their biologists\n and surgeons. But he'd\n rather be buried, even if that\n left them with only what he\n could tell them about the human\n body.\nTo help himself forget the\n rather preoccupied manner in\n which some of the Tepoktan scientists\n occasionally eyed him, he\n peered down at the big dam of\n the hydro-electric project being\n completed to Kinton's design.\n Power from this would soon\n light the town built to house the\n staff of scientists, students, and\n workers assigned to the institute\n organized about the person\n of Kinton.\n\n\n Now, there was an example of\n their willingness to repay him\n for whatever help he had been,\n he reflected. They hadn't needed\n that for themselves." ], [ "To himself, he wished he had\n not told Birken about the spaceship.\n He didn't think the man\n exactly believed his explanation\n of why there was no use taking\n off in it.\nYet he continued to spend as\n much time as he could visiting\n the other man. Then, as his helicopter\n landed at the city airport\n one gray dawn, the news reached\n him.\n\n\n \"The other Terran has gone,\"\n Klaft reported, turning from the\n breathless messenger as Kinton\n followed him from the machine.\n\n\n [109]\n \"Gone? Where did they take\n him?\"\n\n\n Klaft looked uneasy, embarrassed.\n Kinton repeated his question,\n wondering about the group\n of armed police on hand.\n\n\n \"In the night,\" Klaft hissed\n and clucked, \"when none would\n think to watch him, they tell me\n ... and quite rightly, I think—\"", "Kinton settled back in the seat\n especially padded to fit the contours\n of his Terran body, and\n [111]\n stared silently at the partition\n behind the pilot.\n\n\n In other words, he thought, he\n was responsible for Birken, who\n was a Terran, one of his own\n kind. Maybe they really didn't\n want to risk hurting his feelings,\n but that was only part of it.\n They were leaving it up to him\n to handle what they considered\n his private affair.\n\n\n He wondered what to do. He\n had no actual faith in the idea\n that Birken was delirious, or acting\n under any influence but that\n of a criminally self-centered nature.", "\"Why did he say he was traveling\n that way?\" asked Kinton,\n thinking to himself of the spaceship!\n Was the man crazy?\n\n\n \"He did not say,\" answered\n Klaft expressionlessly. \"Taking\n them by surprise, he killed two\n of the constables and injured\n the third before fleeing with one\n of their spears.\"\n\n\n \"\nWhat?\n\"\n\n\n Kinton felt his eyes bulging\n with dismay.\n\n\n \"Yes, for they carried only the\n short spears of their authority,\n not expecting to need fire weapons.\"\nKinton looked from him to the\n messenger, noticing for the first\n time that the latter was an under-officer\n of police. He shook his\n head distractedly. It appeared\n that his suspicions concerning\n Birken had been only too accurate.", "The pilot landed about a hundred\n yards from the spaceship.\n By the time his passengers had\n alighted, however, Birken had\n drawn level with them, about\n fifty feet away.\n\n\n \"Birken!\" shouted Kinton.\n \"Where do you think you're going?\"\n\n\n Seeing that no one ran after\n him, Birken slowed his pace, but\n kept walking toward the ship.\n [112]\n He watched them over his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Sorry, Kinton,\" he shouted\n with no noticeable tone of regret.\n \"I figure I better travel on for\n my health.\"\n\n\n \"It's not so damn healthy up\n there!\" called Kinton. \"I told\n you how there's no clear path—\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, yeah, you told me. That\n don't mean I gotta believe it.\"", "\"I\nshouldn't\nhave told him\n about the ship!\" Kinton muttered,\n gnawing the knuckle of\n his left thumb. \"He's on the run,\n all right. Probably scared the\n colonial authorities will trail him\n right down through the Dome of\n Eyes. Wonder what he did?\"\n\n\n He caught himself and looked\n around to see if he had been overheard.\n Klaft and the police officers\n peered from their respective\n windows, in calculated withdrawal.\n Kinton, disturbed, tried\n to remember whether he had\n spoken in Terran or Tepoktan.\n\n\n Would Birken listen if he tried\n reasoning, he asked himself.\n Maybe if he showed the man how\n they had proved the unpredictability\n of openings through the\n shifting Dome of Eyes—", "\"Wait! Don't you think they\n tried sending unmanned rockets\n up? Every one was struck and\n exploded.\"\n\n\n Birken showed no more change\n of expression than if the other\n had commented on the weather.\n\n\n Kinton had stepped forward\n six or eight paces, irritated despite\n his anxiety at the way Birken\n persisted in drifting before\n him.\n\n\n Kinton couldn't just grab him—bad\n leg or not, he could probably\n break the older man in two.\n\n\n He glanced back at the Tepoktans\n beside the helicopter, Klaft,\n the pilot, the officer, the constable\n with the rocket weapon.\n\n\n They stood quietly, looking\n back at him.\n\n\n The call for help that had risen\n to his lips died there.", "Then, abruptly, his lips tightened\n to a thin line. The sights\n steadied on Birken as the latter\n approached the foot of the ladder\n leading to the entrance port\n of the spaceship.\n\n\n Kinton pressed the firing stud.\n\n\n Across the hundred-yard space\n streaked four flaring little projectiles.\n Kinton, without exactly\n seeing each, was aware of the\n general lines of flight diverging\n gradually to bracket the figure\n of Birken.", "Kinton realized guiltily that\n the man should be resting. He\n [108]\n had lost track of the moments\n he had wasted in talk while the\n others with him stood attentively\n about.\n\n\n He questioned the doctor briefly\n and relayed the information\n that Birken's leg was broken but\n that the other injuries were not\n serious.\n\n\n \"They'll fix you up,\" he assured\n the spaceman. \"They're\n quite good at it, even if the sight\n of one does make you think a\n little of an iguana. Rest up, now;\n and I'll come back again when\n you're feeling better.\"", "\"We must get into the air\n immediately,\" he told Klaft.\n \"Perhaps we may see him before\n he reaches—\"\n\n\n He broke off at the word\n \"spaceship\" but he noticed a reserved\n expression on Klaft's\n pointed face. His aide had probably\n reached a conclusion similar\n to his own.\n\n\n They climbed back into the\n cabin and Klaft gave brisk orders\n to the lean young pilot. A\n moment later, Kinton saw the\n ground outside drop away.\n\n\n Only upon turning around did\n he realize that two armed Tepoktans\n had materialized in time to\n follow Klaft inside.", "\"Not\ntheir\nparty,\" he muttered.\n He turned again to Birken,\n who still retreated toward the\n ship. \"But he'll only get himself\n killed\nand\ndestroy the ship! Or\n if some miracle gets him\n through, that's worse! He's\n nothing to turn loose on a civilized\n colony again.\"\nA twinge of shame tugged\n down the corners of his mouth\n as he realized that keeping Birken\n here would also expose a\n highly cultured people to an unscrupulous\n criminal who had already\n committed murder the very\n first time he had been crossed.\n\n\n \"Birken!\" he shouted. \"For\n the last time! Do you want me\n to send them to drag you back\n here?\"\n\n\n Birken stopped at that. He regarded\n the motionless Tepoktans\n with a derisive sneer.\n\n\n \"They don't look too eager to\n me,\" he taunted.", "\"The police will stay until cars\n from town arrive. They are coming\n now,\" said his aide.\nKinton stared at his hands,\n wondering at the fact that they\n were not shaking. He felt dejected,\n empty, not like a man who\n had just been at a high pitch of\n excitement.\n\n\n \"Why did you not let him go,\n George?\"\n\n\n \"What? Why ... why ... he\n would have destroyed the ship\n you worked so hard to build.\n There is no safe path through\n the Dome of Eyes.\"\n\n\n \"No predictable path,\" Klaft\n corrected. \"But what then? We\n would have built you another\n ship, George, for it was you who\n showed us how.\"\n\n\n Kinton flexed his fingers\n slowly.", "Kinton growled a Tepoktan expression\n the meaning of which\n he had deduced after hearing it\n used by the dam workers.\n\n\n He whirled to run toward the\n helicopter. Hardly had he taken\n two steps, however, when he saw\n startled changes in the carefully\n blank looks of his escort. The\n constable half raised his heavy\n weapon, and Klaft sprang forward\n with a hissing cry.\n\n\n By the time Kinton's aging\n muscles obeyed his impulse to\n sidestep, the spear had already\n hurtled past. It had missed him\n by an error of over six feet.\n\n\n [113]\n He felt his face flushing with\n sudden anger. Birken was running\n as best he could toward the\n spaceship, and had covered nearly\n half the distance.\n\n\n Kinton ran at the Tepoktans,\n brushing aside the concerned\n Klaft. He snatched the heavy\n weapon from the surprised constable.", "One struck the ground beside\n the man just as he set one foot\n on the bottom rung of the ladder,\n and skittered away past one fin\n of the ship before exploding.\n Two others burst against the\n hull, scattering metal fragments,\n and another puffed on the upright\n of the ladder just above\n Birken's head.\nThe spaceman was blown back\n from the ladder. He balanced on\n his heels for a moment with outstretched\n fingers reaching toward\n the grips from which they\n had been torn. Then he crumpled\n into a limp huddle on the yellowing\n turf.\n\n\n Kinton sighed.\n\n\n The constable took the weapon\n from him, reloaded deftly, and\n proffered it again. When the\n Terran did not reach for it, the\n officer held out a clawed hand to\n receive it. He gestured silently,\n and the constable trotted across\n [114]\n the intervening ground to bend\n over Birken.", "Kinton turned away from the\n window as he caught the glint\n of Tepokt's sun upon the hull of\n the spaceship they had also built\n for him. Perhaps ... would it\n be fair to encourage the newcomer\n to attempt the barrier?", "\"My name is George Kinton.\n I don't blame you if I'm hard to\n understand. You see, I've been\n here ten years without ever having\n another Terran to speak to.\"\n\n\n The spaceman considered that\n for a few breaths, then seemed\n to relax.\n\n\n \"Al Birken,\" he introduced\n himself laconically. \"Ten years?\"\n\n\n \"A little over,\" confirmed Kinton.\n \"It's extremely unusual that\n anything gets through to the\n surface, let alone a spaceship.\n What happened to you?\"\nBirken's stare was suspicious.\n\n\n \"Then you ain't heard about\n the new colonies? Naw—you\n musta come here when all the\n planets were open.\"\n\n\n \"We had a small settlement on\n the second planet,\" Kinton told\n him. \"You mean there are new\n Terran colonies?\"", "For the next three weeks, Kinton\n flew back and forth from his\n own town nearly every day. He\n felt that he should not neglect\n the few meetings which were the\n only way he could repay the Tepoktans\n for all they did for him.\n On the other hand, the chance\n to see and talk with one of his\n own kind drew him like a magnet\n to the hospital.\n\n\n The doctors operated upon\n Birken's leg, inserting a metal\n rod inside the bone by a method\n they had known before Kinton\n described it. The new arrival expected\n to be able to walk, with\n care, almost any day; although\n the pin would have to be removed\n after the bone had healed. Meanwhile,\n Birken seemed eager to\n learn all Kinton could tell him\n about the planet, Tepokt.\n\n\n About himself, he was remarkably\n reticent. Kinton worried\n about this.", "An exclamation from the constable\n drew his attention. He\n rose, and room was made for him\n at the opposite window.\nIn the distance, beyond the\n town landing field they were now\n approaching, Kinton saw a halted\n ground car. Across the plain\n which was colored a yellowish\n tan by a short, grass-like growth,\n a lone figure plodded toward the\n upthrust bulk of the spaceship\n that had never flown.\n\n\n \"Never mind landing at the\n town!\" snapped Kinton. \"Go directly\n out to the ship!\"\n\n\n Klaft relayed the command to\n the pilot. The helicopter swept\n in a descending curve across the\n plain toward the gleaming hull.\n\n\n As they passed the man below,\n Birken looked up. He continued\n to limp along at a brisk\n pace with the aid of what looked\n like a short spear.\n\n\n \"Go down!\" Kinton ordered.", "\"Yeah. Jet-hoppers spreadin'\n all over the other five. None of\n the land-hungry poops figured a\n way to set down here, though, or\n they'd be creepin' around this\n planet too.\"\n\n\n \"How did you happen to do\n it? Run out of fuel?\"\n\n\n The other eyed him for a few\n seconds before dropping his\n gaze. Kinton was struck with\n sudden doubt. The outposts of\n civilization were followed by less\n desirable developments as a general\n rule—prisons, for instance.\n He resolved to be wary of the\n visitor.\n\n\n \"Ya might say I was explorin',\"\n Birken replied at last.\n \"That's why I come alone.\n Didn't want nobody else hurt if\n I didn't make it. Say, how bad\n am I banged up?\"", "One was a constable but the\n other he recognized for an officer\n of some rank. Both wore slung\n across their chests weapons resembling\n long-barreled pistols\n with large, oddly indented butts\n to fit Tepoktan claws. The constable,\n in addition, carried a\n contraption with a quadruple\n tube for launching tiny rockets\n no thicker than Kinton's thumb.\n These, he knew, were loaded\n with an explosive worthy of respect\n on any planet he had heard\n of.\n\n\n To protect him, he wondered.\n Or to get Birken?\n\n\n The pilot headed the craft\n back toward Kinton's town in\n the brightening sky of early day.\n Long before the buildings of\n Kinton's institute came into\n view, they received a radio message\n about Birken.", "Why was it one like him who\n got through? he asked himself\n in silent anguish. After ten\n years. The Tepoktans had been\n thinking well of Terrans, but\n now—\n\n\n He did not worry about his\n own position. That was well\n enough established, whether or\n not he could again hold up his\n head before the purple-scaled\n people who had been so generous\n to him.\n\n\n Even if they had been aroused\n to a rage by the killing, Kinton\n told himself, he would not have\n been concerned about himself. He\n had reached a fairly ripe age for\n a spaceman. In fact, he had already\n [110]\n enjoyed a decade of borrowed\n time.\n\n\n But they were more civilized\n than that wanton murderer, he\n realized.\n\n\n He straightened up, forcing\n back his early-morning weariness." ] ]
valid	99927	[ "Why is it difficult to appeal to academic writers about OA policies? ", "Why are funding agencies and universities concerned with OA policy?", "Why are there no gold OA mandates?", "Which of the OA mandates gives the author the most control over their work? ", "What is the main difference between funding groups and academic institutions when it comes to OA?", "In which situations does truly unconditional OA policy apply?", "Why are green gratis mandates spreading faster than green libre mandates ", "How does the author suggest that the transition will be made to more liberal OA policies? " ]	[ [ "They are hard to capture the attention of ", "All of the other answers are correct", "They work too hard to be concerned with publishing intricacies ", "They are not a homogenous group " ], [ "They are seeking to limit the power that private publishers have ", "They want to ensure researchers are able to work in the most effective way possible ", "They want to influence the content of the authors’ works ", "They are looking to maximize their profits " ], [ "They would not be effective as they would deter authors from submitting to journals with Gold OA mandates ", "OA mandates have not become popular in the academic field yet ", "They are illegal and no publishers would risk breaking the law ", "They are not needed as most authors only submit work to one journal " ], [ "Libre green mandates ", "Loophole mandates", "Deposit mandates", "Rights-retention mandates " ], [ "Funding groups allow waivers for the authors to not release their work ", "Funding groups only allow Gold OA policies ", "Academic institutions only allow Gold policies ", "Funding groups do not allow waivers for the authors to not release their work " ], [ "When publishing work in a journal ", "When working for a university ", "There are no situations where unconditional OA applies ", "When working in the field of Physics" ], [ "Gold mandates are more popular than libre green mandates ", "University resistance to libre green mandates ", "Author resistance to libre green mandates ", "Publisher resistance to libre green mandates " ], [ "By researchers demanding more OA to further their work ", "By more academic and funding institutions adoptions OA policies", "By education faculty about the benefits of OA policies ", "By more publishers willingly adopting OA policies" ] ]	[ 2, 2, 1, 4, 4, 3, 4, 2 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "Open Access: Policies\n4.1 OA Policies at Funding Agencies and Universities\nAuthors control the volume and growth of OA. They decide whether to submit their work to OA journals (gold OA), whether to deposit their work in OA repositories (green OA), and how to use their copyrights. But scholarly authors are still largely unfamiliar with their OA options. It’s pointless to appeal to them as a bloc because they don’t act as a bloc. It’s not hard to persuade or even excite them once we catch their attention, but because they are so anarchical, overworked, and preoccupied, it’s hard to catch their attention.", "That’s the main reason why no university policies require OA without qualification. There are a few more. First, as Harvard’s Stuart Shieber frequently argues, even the strongest university policies can’t make tenured faculty comply.\n \n Second, as I’ve frequently argued, successful policies are implemented through expectations, education, incentives, and assistance, not coercion. Third, even the strongest policies—even the no-loophole, no-deference, no-waiver policies at the Wellcome Trust and NIH—make OA a condition on a voluntary contract. No policy anywhere pretends to impose an unconditional OA requirement, and it’s hard to imagine how any policy could even try. (“You must make your work OA even if you don’t work for us or use our funds”?)", "Fortunately, funding agencies and universities are discovering their own interests in fostering OA. These nonprofit institutions make it their mission to advance research and to make that research as useful and widely available as possible. Their money frees researchers to do their work and avoid the need to tie their income to the popularity of their ideas. Above all, these institutions are in an unparalleled position to influence author decisions.\nToday, more than fifty funding agencies and more than one hundred universities have adopted strong OA policies. Each one depends on the primacy of author decisions.\nOne kind of policy, better than nothing, requests or encourages OA. A stronger kind of policy requires OA or makes it the default for new work. These stronger policies are usually called OA\nmandates\nand I’ll use that term for lack of a better one (but see section 4.2 on how it’s misleading).\nRequest or encouragement policies", "There are two reasons why these strong funder policies don’t infringe faculty freedom to submit work to their journals of their choice. First, researchers needn’t seek funds from these funders. When they choose to do so, then they agree to the OA provisions, just as they agree to the other terms and conditions of the grant. The OA “mandate” is a condition on a voluntary contract, not an unconditional requirement. It’s a reasonable condition as well, since public funders, like the NIH, disburse public money in the public interest, and private funders, like the Wellcome Trust, disburse charitable money for charitable purposes. To my knowledge, no researchers have refused to apply for Wellcome or NIH funds because of the OA condition, even when they plan to publish in OA-averse journals. The OA condition benefits authors and has not been a deal-breaker.", "Finally, the fact that faculty vote unanimously for strong OA policies is a good reason to keep looking for a better word than “mandate.” At least it’s a good reason to look past the colloquial implications of the term to the policies themselves and the players who drafted and adopted them. Since 2008, most OA “mandates” at universities have been self-imposed by faculty.\n4.3 Digression on the Historical Timing of OA Policies\nSome kinds of strong OA policy that are politically unattainable or unwise today may become attainable and wise in the future. Here are three examples.", "Fortunately, this is well understood. There are no gold OA mandates anywhere; all OA mandates are green. Unfortunately, however, many people mistakenly believe that all OA is gold OA and therefore mistake proposed green OA mandates for proposed gold OA mandates and raise objections that would only apply to gold OA mandates. But as more academics understand the green/gold distinction, and understand that well-written green OA mandates are compatible with academic freedom, more institutions are adopting green OA mandates, almost always at the initiative of faculty themselves.\nAt universities, there are roughly three approaches to green OA mandates:\nLoophole mandates\nThese require green OA except when the author’s publisher doesn’t allow it.\nDeposit mandates", "Finally, a common misunderstanding deliberately promulgated by some publishers is that OA must be “mandated” because faculty don’t want it. This position gets understandable but regrettable mileage from the word “mandate.” It also overlooks decisive counter-evidence that we’ve had in hand since 2004. Alma Swan’s empirical studies of researcher attitudes show that an overwhelming majority of researchers would “willingly” comply with a mandatory OA policy from their funder or employer.\nThe most recent evidence of faculty willingness is the stunning series of strong OA policies adopted by unanimous faculty votes. (When is the last time you heard of a unanimous faculty vote for anything, let alone anything of importance?) As recently as 2007, speculation that we’d soon see more than two dozen unanimous faculty votes for OA policies would have been dismissed as wishful thinking. But now that the evidence lies before us, what looks like wishful thinking is the publishing lobby’s idea that OA must be mandated because faculty don’t want it.", "Today, a gold OA mandate would limit faculty freedom to submit work to the journals of their choice. But that’s because today only about 25 percent of peer-reviewed journals are OA. As this percentage grows, then a gold OA mandate’s encroachment on academic freedom shrinks. At some point even the most zealous defenders of faculty freedom may decide that the encroachment is negligible. In principle the encroachment could be zero, though of course when the encroachment is zero, and gold OA mandates are harmless, then gold OA mandates would also be unnecessary.", "These merely ask faculty to make their work OA, or recommend OA for their new work. Sometimes they’re called resolutions or pledges rather than policies.\nEncouragement policies can target green and gold OA equally. By contrast, mandates only make sense for green OA, at least today when OA journals constitute only about one-quarter of peer-reviewed journals. A gold OA mandate would put most peer-reviewed journals off-limits and seriously limit faculty freedom to submit their work to the journals of their choice. This problem doesn’t arise for green OA mandates.", "We could say that rights-retention policies require OA except when authors opt out, or that they simply shift the default to OA. Those are two ways of saying the same thing because, either way, faculty remain free to decide for or against OA for each of their publications. Preserving this freedom and making it conspicuous help muster faculty support, indeed, unanimous faculty votes. Because shifting the default is enough to change behavior on a large scale, waiver options don’t significantly reduce the volume of OA. At Harvard the waiver rate is less than 5 percent, and at MIT it’s less than 2 percent.\nLoophole policies and rights-retention policies both offer opt-outs. But loophole policies give the opt-out to publishers and rights-retention policies give it to authors. The difference is significant because many more authors than publishers want OA for research articles.", "policy as a condition of publication. Policies triggering rejections hurt authors, and policies driving up waiver rates don’t do much to help OA. However, publisher resistance might diminish as the ratio of OA publishers to toll-access publishers tilts toward", "Today, faculty voting for a rights-retention OA mandate want a waiver option, and when the option is available their votes tend to be overwhelming or unanimous. But there are several circumstances that might make it attractive for faculty to abolish waiver options or make waivers harder to obtain. One is a shift in faculty perspective that makes access to research more urgent than indulging publishers who erect access barriers. Another is a significant rise in publisher acceptance of green OA, which gives virtually all authors—rather than just most—blanket permission for green OA. In the first case, faculty might “vote with their submissions” and steer clear of publishers who don’t allow author-initiated green OA. In the second case, faculty would virtually never encounter such publishers. In the first case, they’d seldom want waivers, and the second they’d seldom need waivers.", "I use “mandate” with reluctance because it can frighten some of the people I’m trying to persuade and can give rise to misunderstandings about the policies behind the label. When we have time and space for longer phrases, we can talk about “putting an OA condition” on research grants, in the case of NIH-style policies, or “shifting the default to OA” for faculty research, in the case of Harvard-style policies. These longer expressions are more accurate and less frightening. However, sometimes we need a shorthand term, and we need a term that draws an appropriately sharp contrast with policies that merely request or encourage OA.", "OA, as spontaneous author submissions shift toward OA journals, or as the number of institutions with libre green mandates makes resistance more costly than accommodation for publishers. When OA policies are toothless, few in number, or concentrated in small institutions,", "Green OA mandates don’t assure OA to the entire research output of a university or funding agency, for the same reason that they don’t require OA without qualification. But implementing them provides OA to a much larger percentage of the research output than was already headed toward OA journals or OA repositories, and does so while leaving authors free to submit their work to the journals of their choice.\nI’ve only tried to give a rough taxonomy of OA policies and their supporting arguments. For detailed recommendations on OA policy provisions, and specific arguments for them, see my 2009 analysis of policy options for funding agencies and universities.\nI’ve also focused here on OA policies for peer-reviewed research articles. Many universities have adopted OA mandates for theses and dissertations, and many funder OA policies also cover datasets. A growing number of universities supplement OA mandates for articles with a sensible and effective policy to assure compliance: When faculty come up for promotion or tenure, the review committee will only consider journal articles on deposit in the institutional repository.", "Many institutions adopt loophole policies because they believe a blanket exemption for dissenting publishers is the only way to avoid copyright problems. But that is not true. Deposit policies don’t make works OA until publishers allow OA, and rights-retention policies close the loophole and obtain permission directly from authors at a time when authors are the copyright holders.\nOA policies from funding agencies are very much like OA policies from universities. They can encourage green and gold OA, or they can require green OA. If they require green OA, they can do so in one of the three ways above. If there’s a difference, it’s that when funders adopt a rights-retention mandate, they typically don’t offer waiver options. On the contrary, the Wellcome Trust and NIH require their grantees to make their work OA through a certain OA repository on a certain timetable and to retain the right to authorize that OA. If a given publisher will not allow grantees to comply with their prior funding agreement, then grantees must look for another publisher.", "4.2 Digression on the Word “Mandate”\nThe strongest OA policies use words like “must” or “shall” and require or seem to require OA. They’re commonly called OA “mandates.” But all three varieties of university “mandate” above show why the term is misleading. Loophole mandates don’t require OA without qualification: when publishers dissent, articles are either not deposited in the repository or not made OA. Deposit mandates don’t require OA without qualification: when publishers dissent, articles are deposited in a repository but are not made OA. Rights-retention mandates with waiver options don’t require OA without qualification: authors may obtain waivers and sometimes do. I haven’t seen a university OA “mandate” anywhere without at least one of these three kinds of flexibility.", "As researchers become more familiar with OA, as more institutions adopt OA policies, as more new literature is covered by strong OA policies, as more toll-access journals convert to OA, as more toll-access journals accommodate OA mandates without converting, and even as more OA journals shift from gratis to libre, institutions will be able strengthen their OA policies without increasing publisher-controlled rejection rates or author-controlled waiver rates. They should watch the shifting balance of power and seize opportunities to strengthen their policies.", "The moments of opportunity will not be obvious. They will not be highlighted by objective evidence alone and will call for some self-fulfilling leadership. Institutional policy-makers will have to assess not only the climate created by existing policies, and existing levels of support, but also the likely effects of their own actions. Every strong, new policy increases the likelihood of publisher accommodation, and when enough universities and funders have policies, all publishers will have to accommodate them. In that sense, every strong new policy creates some of the conditions of its own success. Every institution adopting a new policy brings about OA for the research it controls and makes the way easier for other institutions behind it. Like many other policy issues, this is one on which it is easier to follow than to lead, and we already have a growing number of leaders. A critical mass is growing and every policy is an implicit invitation to other institutions to gain strength through common purpose and help accelerate publisher adaptation.", "then they must accommodate publishers in order to avoid triggering rejections and hurting authors. But as policies grow in number, scope, and strength, the situation could flip over, and publishers will have to accommodate OA policies in order to avoid hurting" ], [ "Fortunately, funding agencies and universities are discovering their own interests in fostering OA. These nonprofit institutions make it their mission to advance research and to make that research as useful and widely available as possible. Their money frees researchers to do their work and avoid the need to tie their income to the popularity of their ideas. Above all, these institutions are in an unparalleled position to influence author decisions.\nToday, more than fifty funding agencies and more than one hundred universities have adopted strong OA policies. Each one depends on the primacy of author decisions.\nOne kind of policy, better than nothing, requests or encourages OA. A stronger kind of policy requires OA or makes it the default for new work. These stronger policies are usually called OA\nmandates\nand I’ll use that term for lack of a better one (but see section 4.2 on how it’s misleading).\nRequest or encouragement policies", "Open Access: Policies\n4.1 OA Policies at Funding Agencies and Universities\nAuthors control the volume and growth of OA. They decide whether to submit their work to OA journals (gold OA), whether to deposit their work in OA repositories (green OA), and how to use their copyrights. But scholarly authors are still largely unfamiliar with their OA options. It’s pointless to appeal to them as a bloc because they don’t act as a bloc. It’s not hard to persuade or even excite them once we catch their attention, but because they are so anarchical, overworked, and preoccupied, it’s hard to catch their attention.", "There are two reasons why these strong funder policies don’t infringe faculty freedom to submit work to their journals of their choice. First, researchers needn’t seek funds from these funders. When they choose to do so, then they agree to the OA provisions, just as they agree to the other terms and conditions of the grant. The OA “mandate” is a condition on a voluntary contract, not an unconditional requirement. It’s a reasonable condition as well, since public funders, like the NIH, disburse public money in the public interest, and private funders, like the Wellcome Trust, disburse charitable money for charitable purposes. To my knowledge, no researchers have refused to apply for Wellcome or NIH funds because of the OA condition, even when they plan to publish in OA-averse journals. The OA condition benefits authors and has not been a deal-breaker.", "permission. At the Wellcome Trust and NIH, which pioneered this approach for funding agencies, when grantees publish articles based on their funded research they must retain the nonexclusive right to authorize OA through a repository. At Harvard, which pioneered this", "Green OA mandates don’t assure OA to the entire research output of a university or funding agency, for the same reason that they don’t require OA without qualification. But implementing them provides OA to a much larger percentage of the research output than was already headed toward OA journals or OA repositories, and does so while leaving authors free to submit their work to the journals of their choice.\nI’ve only tried to give a rough taxonomy of OA policies and their supporting arguments. For detailed recommendations on OA policy provisions, and specific arguments for them, see my 2009 analysis of policy options for funding agencies and universities.\nI’ve also focused here on OA policies for peer-reviewed research articles. Many universities have adopted OA mandates for theses and dissertations, and many funder OA policies also cover datasets. A growing number of universities supplement OA mandates for articles with a sensible and effective policy to assure compliance: When faculty come up for promotion or tenure, the review committee will only consider journal articles on deposit in the institutional repository.", "Many institutions adopt loophole policies because they believe a blanket exemption for dissenting publishers is the only way to avoid copyright problems. But that is not true. Deposit policies don’t make works OA until publishers allow OA, and rights-retention policies close the loophole and obtain permission directly from authors at a time when authors are the copyright holders.\nOA policies from funding agencies are very much like OA policies from universities. They can encourage green and gold OA, or they can require green OA. If they require green OA, they can do so in one of the three ways above. If there’s a difference, it’s that when funders adopt a rights-retention mandate, they typically don’t offer waiver options. On the contrary, the Wellcome Trust and NIH require their grantees to make their work OA through a certain OA repository on a certain timetable and to retain the right to authorize that OA. If a given publisher will not allow grantees to comply with their prior funding agreement, then grantees must look for another publisher.", "Second, virtually all publishers accommodate these policies. For example, no surveyed publishers anywhere refuse to publish work by NIH-funded authors on account of the agency’s OA mandate. Hence, in practice grantees may still submit work to the journals of their choice, even without a waiver option to accommodate holdout publishers.", "That’s the main reason why no university policies require OA without qualification. There are a few more. First, as Harvard’s Stuart Shieber frequently argues, even the strongest university policies can’t make tenured faculty comply.\n \n Second, as I’ve frequently argued, successful policies are implemented through expectations, education, incentives, and assistance, not coercion. Third, even the strongest policies—even the no-loophole, no-deference, no-waiver policies at the Wellcome Trust and NIH—make OA a condition on a voluntary contract. No policy anywhere pretends to impose an unconditional OA requirement, and it’s hard to imagine how any policy could even try. (“You must make your work OA even if you don’t work for us or use our funds”?)", "Fortunately, this is well understood. There are no gold OA mandates anywhere; all OA mandates are green. Unfortunately, however, many people mistakenly believe that all OA is gold OA and therefore mistake proposed green OA mandates for proposed gold OA mandates and raise objections that would only apply to gold OA mandates. But as more academics understand the green/gold distinction, and understand that well-written green OA mandates are compatible with academic freedom, more institutions are adopting green OA mandates, almost always at the initiative of faculty themselves.\nAt universities, there are roughly three approaches to green OA mandates:\nLoophole mandates\nThese require green OA except when the author’s publisher doesn’t allow it.\nDeposit mandates", "These merely ask faculty to make their work OA, or recommend OA for their new work. Sometimes they’re called resolutions or pledges rather than policies.\nEncouragement policies can target green and gold OA equally. By contrast, mandates only make sense for green OA, at least today when OA journals constitute only about one-quarter of peer-reviewed journals. A gold OA mandate would put most peer-reviewed journals off-limits and seriously limit faculty freedom to submit their work to the journals of their choice. This problem doesn’t arise for green OA mandates.", "As researchers become more familiar with OA, as more institutions adopt OA policies, as more new literature is covered by strong OA policies, as more toll-access journals convert to OA, as more toll-access journals accommodate OA mandates without converting, and even as more OA journals shift from gratis to libre, institutions will be able strengthen their OA policies without increasing publisher-controlled rejection rates or author-controlled waiver rates. They should watch the shifting balance of power and seize opportunities to strengthen their policies.", "Finally, the fact that faculty vote unanimously for strong OA policies is a good reason to keep looking for a better word than “mandate.” At least it’s a good reason to look past the colloquial implications of the term to the policies themselves and the players who drafted and adopted them. Since 2008, most OA “mandates” at universities have been self-imposed by faculty.\n4.3 Digression on the Historical Timing of OA Policies\nSome kinds of strong OA policy that are politically unattainable or unwise today may become attainable and wise in the future. Here are three examples.", "Finally, a common misunderstanding deliberately promulgated by some publishers is that OA must be “mandated” because faculty don’t want it. This position gets understandable but regrettable mileage from the word “mandate.” It also overlooks decisive counter-evidence that we’ve had in hand since 2004. Alma Swan’s empirical studies of researcher attitudes show that an overwhelming majority of researchers would “willingly” comply with a mandatory OA policy from their funder or employer.\nThe most recent evidence of faculty willingness is the stunning series of strong OA policies adopted by unanimous faculty votes. (When is the last time you heard of a unanimous faculty vote for anything, let alone anything of importance?) As recently as 2007, speculation that we’d soon see more than two dozen unanimous faculty votes for OA policies would have been dismissed as wishful thinking. But now that the evidence lies before us, what looks like wishful thinking is the publishing lobby’s idea that OA must be mandated because faculty don’t want it.", "We should never forget that most toll-access journals already allow green OA and that a growing number of high-quality, high-prestige peer-reviewed journal are gold OA. From one point of view, we don’t need OA mandates when authors already plan to publish in one of those journals. But sometimes toll-access journals change their positions on green OA. Sometimes authors don’t get around to making their work green OA even when their journals allow it. And sometimes authors don’t publish in one of those journals. The final rationale for green OA mandates, then, is for institutions to bring about OA for their entire research output, regardless of how publishers might alter their policies, regardless of author inertia, and regardless of the journals in which faculty or grantees choose to publish.", "policy as a condition of publication. Policies triggering rejections hurt authors, and policies driving up waiver rates don’t do much to help OA. However, publisher resistance might diminish as the ratio of OA publishers to toll-access publishers tilts toward", "We could say that rights-retention policies require OA except when authors opt out, or that they simply shift the default to OA. Those are two ways of saying the same thing because, either way, faculty remain free to decide for or against OA for each of their publications. Preserving this freedom and making it conspicuous help muster faculty support, indeed, unanimous faculty votes. Because shifting the default is enough to change behavior on a large scale, waiver options don’t significantly reduce the volume of OA. At Harvard the waiver rate is less than 5 percent, and at MIT it’s less than 2 percent.\nLoophole policies and rights-retention policies both offer opt-outs. But loophole policies give the opt-out to publishers and rights-retention policies give it to authors. The difference is significant because many more authors than publishers want OA for research articles.", "Today, a gold OA mandate would limit faculty freedom to submit work to the journals of their choice. But that’s because today only about 25 percent of peer-reviewed journals are OA. As this percentage grows, then a gold OA mandate’s encroachment on academic freedom shrinks. At some point even the most zealous defenders of faculty freedom may decide that the encroachment is negligible. In principle the encroachment could be zero, though of course when the encroachment is zero, and gold OA mandates are harmless, then gold OA mandates would also be unnecessary.", "OA, as spontaneous author submissions shift toward OA journals, or as the number of institutions with libre green mandates makes resistance more costly than accommodation for publishers. When OA policies are toothless, few in number, or concentrated in small institutions,", "Many OA policies are crossbreeds rather than pure types, but all the policies I’ve seen are variations on these four themes.\nFirst note that none of the three “mandates” absolutely requires OA. Loophole mandates allow some work to escape through the loophole. Deposit mandates allow some deposited work to remain dark (non-OA), by following publisher preferences. Rights-retention mandates with waiver options allow some work to remain dark, by following author preferences.\nLoophole and deposit policies defer to publishers for permissions, while rights-retention policies obtain permission from authors before they transfer rights to publishers. For loophole and deposit policies, permission is contingent, because some publishers are willing and some are not. For rights-retention policies, permission is assured, at least initially or by default, although authors may opt out for any publication.", "It’s understandable that green gratis mandates are spreading faster than green libre mandates, that green mandates in general are spreading faster than gold mandates, and that rights-retention policies with waiver options are spreading faster than rights-retention policies without waivers. However, there is modest growth on one of these fronts: green libre mandates.\nThe case against these three kinds of OA policy is time-sensitive, not permanent. It’s circumstantial, and circumstances are changing. But the strategy for institutions wanting to remove access barriers to research is unchanging: they should adopt the strongest policies they can today and watch for the moment when they could strengthen them." ], [ "Fortunately, this is well understood. There are no gold OA mandates anywhere; all OA mandates are green. Unfortunately, however, many people mistakenly believe that all OA is gold OA and therefore mistake proposed green OA mandates for proposed gold OA mandates and raise objections that would only apply to gold OA mandates. But as more academics understand the green/gold distinction, and understand that well-written green OA mandates are compatible with academic freedom, more institutions are adopting green OA mandates, almost always at the initiative of faculty themselves.\nAt universities, there are roughly three approaches to green OA mandates:\nLoophole mandates\nThese require green OA except when the author’s publisher doesn’t allow it.\nDeposit mandates", "These merely ask faculty to make their work OA, or recommend OA for their new work. Sometimes they’re called resolutions or pledges rather than policies.\nEncouragement policies can target green and gold OA equally. By contrast, mandates only make sense for green OA, at least today when OA journals constitute only about one-quarter of peer-reviewed journals. A gold OA mandate would put most peer-reviewed journals off-limits and seriously limit faculty freedom to submit their work to the journals of their choice. This problem doesn’t arise for green OA mandates.", "Today, a gold OA mandate would limit faculty freedom to submit work to the journals of their choice. But that’s because today only about 25 percent of peer-reviewed journals are OA. As this percentage grows, then a gold OA mandate’s encroachment on academic freedom shrinks. At some point even the most zealous defenders of faculty freedom may decide that the encroachment is negligible. In principle the encroachment could be zero, though of course when the encroachment is zero, and gold OA mandates are harmless, then gold OA mandates would also be unnecessary.", "We should never forget that most toll-access journals already allow green OA and that a growing number of high-quality, high-prestige peer-reviewed journal are gold OA. From one point of view, we don’t need OA mandates when authors already plan to publish in one of those journals. But sometimes toll-access journals change their positions on green OA. Sometimes authors don’t get around to making their work green OA even when their journals allow it. And sometimes authors don’t publish in one of those journals. The final rationale for green OA mandates, then, is for institutions to bring about OA for their entire research output, regardless of how publishers might alter their policies, regardless of author inertia, and regardless of the journals in which faculty or grantees choose to publish.", "There are two reasons why these strong funder policies don’t infringe faculty freedom to submit work to their journals of their choice. First, researchers needn’t seek funds from these funders. When they choose to do so, then they agree to the OA provisions, just as they agree to the other terms and conditions of the grant. The OA “mandate” is a condition on a voluntary contract, not an unconditional requirement. It’s a reasonable condition as well, since public funders, like the NIH, disburse public money in the public interest, and private funders, like the Wellcome Trust, disburse charitable money for charitable purposes. To my knowledge, no researchers have refused to apply for Wellcome or NIH funds because of the OA condition, even when they plan to publish in OA-averse journals. The OA condition benefits authors and has not been a deal-breaker.", "Green OA mandates don’t assure OA to the entire research output of a university or funding agency, for the same reason that they don’t require OA without qualification. But implementing them provides OA to a much larger percentage of the research output than was already headed toward OA journals or OA repositories, and does so while leaving authors free to submit their work to the journals of their choice.\nI’ve only tried to give a rough taxonomy of OA policies and their supporting arguments. For detailed recommendations on OA policy provisions, and specific arguments for them, see my 2009 analysis of policy options for funding agencies and universities.\nI’ve also focused here on OA policies for peer-reviewed research articles. Many universities have adopted OA mandates for theses and dissertations, and many funder OA policies also cover datasets. A growing number of universities supplement OA mandates for articles with a sensible and effective policy to assure compliance: When faculty come up for promotion or tenure, the review committee will only consider journal articles on deposit in the institutional repository.", "Fortunately, funding agencies and universities are discovering their own interests in fostering OA. These nonprofit institutions make it their mission to advance research and to make that research as useful and widely available as possible. Their money frees researchers to do their work and avoid the need to tie their income to the popularity of their ideas. Above all, these institutions are in an unparalleled position to influence author decisions.\nToday, more than fifty funding agencies and more than one hundred universities have adopted strong OA policies. Each one depends on the primacy of author decisions.\nOne kind of policy, better than nothing, requests or encourages OA. A stronger kind of policy requires OA or makes it the default for new work. These stronger policies are usually called OA\nmandates\nand I’ll use that term for lack of a better one (but see section 4.2 on how it’s misleading).\nRequest or encouragement policies", "It’s understandable that green gratis mandates are spreading faster than green libre mandates, that green mandates in general are spreading faster than gold mandates, and that rights-retention policies with waiver options are spreading faster than rights-retention policies without waivers. However, there is modest growth on one of these fronts: green libre mandates.\nThe case against these three kinds of OA policy is time-sensitive, not permanent. It’s circumstantial, and circumstances are changing. But the strategy for institutions wanting to remove access barriers to research is unchanging: they should adopt the strongest policies they can today and watch for the moment when they could strengthen them.", "Open Access: Policies\n4.1 OA Policies at Funding Agencies and Universities\nAuthors control the volume and growth of OA. They decide whether to submit their work to OA journals (gold OA), whether to deposit their work in OA repositories (green OA), and how to use their copyrights. But scholarly authors are still largely unfamiliar with their OA options. It’s pointless to appeal to them as a bloc because they don’t act as a bloc. It’s not hard to persuade or even excite them once we catch their attention, but because they are so anarchical, overworked, and preoccupied, it’s hard to catch their attention.", "OA, as spontaneous author submissions shift toward OA journals, or as the number of institutions with libre green mandates makes resistance more costly than accommodation for publishers. When OA policies are toothless, few in number, or concentrated in small institutions,", "Many OA policies are crossbreeds rather than pure types, but all the policies I’ve seen are variations on these four themes.\nFirst note that none of the three “mandates” absolutely requires OA. Loophole mandates allow some work to escape through the loophole. Deposit mandates allow some deposited work to remain dark (non-OA), by following publisher preferences. Rights-retention mandates with waiver options allow some work to remain dark, by following author preferences.\nLoophole and deposit policies defer to publishers for permissions, while rights-retention policies obtain permission from authors before they transfer rights to publishers. For loophole and deposit policies, permission is contingent, because some publishers are willing and some are not. For rights-retention policies, permission is assured, at least initially or by default, although authors may opt out for any publication.", "Many institutions adopt loophole policies because they believe a blanket exemption for dissenting publishers is the only way to avoid copyright problems. But that is not true. Deposit policies don’t make works OA until publishers allow OA, and rights-retention policies close the loophole and obtain permission directly from authors at a time when authors are the copyright holders.\nOA policies from funding agencies are very much like OA policies from universities. They can encourage green and gold OA, or they can require green OA. If they require green OA, they can do so in one of the three ways above. If there’s a difference, it’s that when funders adopt a rights-retention mandate, they typically don’t offer waiver options. On the contrary, the Wellcome Trust and NIH require their grantees to make their work OA through a certain OA repository on a certain timetable and to retain the right to authorize that OA. If a given publisher will not allow grantees to comply with their prior funding agreement, then grantees must look for another publisher.", "Finally, the fact that faculty vote unanimously for strong OA policies is a good reason to keep looking for a better word than “mandate.” At least it’s a good reason to look past the colloquial implications of the term to the policies themselves and the players who drafted and adopted them. Since 2008, most OA “mandates” at universities have been self-imposed by faculty.\n4.3 Digression on the Historical Timing of OA Policies\nSome kinds of strong OA policy that are politically unattainable or unwise today may become attainable and wise in the future. Here are three examples.", "That’s the main reason why no university policies require OA without qualification. There are a few more. First, as Harvard’s Stuart Shieber frequently argues, even the strongest university policies can’t make tenured faculty comply.\n \n Second, as I’ve frequently argued, successful policies are implemented through expectations, education, incentives, and assistance, not coercion. Third, even the strongest policies—even the no-loophole, no-deference, no-waiver policies at the Wellcome Trust and NIH—make OA a condition on a voluntary contract. No policy anywhere pretends to impose an unconditional OA requirement, and it’s hard to imagine how any policy could even try. (“You must make your work OA even if you don’t work for us or use our funds”?)", "4.2 Digression on the Word “Mandate”\nThe strongest OA policies use words like “must” or “shall” and require or seem to require OA. They’re commonly called OA “mandates.” But all three varieties of university “mandate” above show why the term is misleading. Loophole mandates don’t require OA without qualification: when publishers dissent, articles are either not deposited in the repository or not made OA. Deposit mandates don’t require OA without qualification: when publishers dissent, articles are deposited in a repository but are not made OA. Rights-retention mandates with waiver options don’t require OA without qualification: authors may obtain waivers and sometimes do. I haven’t seen a university OA “mandate” anywhere without at least one of these three kinds of flexibility.", "Second, virtually all publishers accommodate these policies. For example, no surveyed publishers anywhere refuse to publish work by NIH-funded authors on account of the agency’s OA mandate. Hence, in practice grantees may still submit work to the journals of their choice, even without a waiver option to accommodate holdout publishers.", "Finally, a common misunderstanding deliberately promulgated by some publishers is that OA must be “mandated” because faculty don’t want it. This position gets understandable but regrettable mileage from the word “mandate.” It also overlooks decisive counter-evidence that we’ve had in hand since 2004. Alma Swan’s empirical studies of researcher attitudes show that an overwhelming majority of researchers would “willingly” comply with a mandatory OA policy from their funder or employer.\nThe most recent evidence of faculty willingness is the stunning series of strong OA policies adopted by unanimous faculty votes. (When is the last time you heard of a unanimous faculty vote for anything, let alone anything of importance?) As recently as 2007, speculation that we’d soon see more than two dozen unanimous faculty votes for OA policies would have been dismissed as wishful thinking. But now that the evidence lies before us, what looks like wishful thinking is the publishing lobby’s idea that OA must be mandated because faculty don’t want it.", "As researchers become more familiar with OA, as more institutions adopt OA policies, as more new literature is covered by strong OA policies, as more toll-access journals convert to OA, as more toll-access journals accommodate OA mandates without converting, and even as more OA journals shift from gratis to libre, institutions will be able strengthen their OA policies without increasing publisher-controlled rejection rates or author-controlled waiver rates. They should watch the shifting balance of power and seize opportunities to strengthen their policies.", "Today, faculty voting for a rights-retention OA mandate want a waiver option, and when the option is available their votes tend to be overwhelming or unanimous. But there are several circumstances that might make it attractive for faculty to abolish waiver options or make waivers harder to obtain. One is a shift in faculty perspective that makes access to research more urgent than indulging publishers who erect access barriers. Another is a significant rise in publisher acceptance of green OA, which gives virtually all authors—rather than just most—blanket permission for green OA. In the first case, faculty might “vote with their submissions” and steer clear of publishers who don’t allow author-initiated green OA. In the second case, faculty would virtually never encounter such publishers. In the first case, they’d seldom want waivers, and the second they’d seldom need waivers.", "These require deposit in an OA repository as soon as the article is accepted for publication, but they separate the timing of deposit from the timing of OA. If the author’s publisher doesn’t allow OA, then these policies keep the deposited article dark or non-OA. If the publisher allows OA, immediately or after some embargo, then the deposit becomes OA as soon as the permission kicks in. Because most publishers allow OA on some timetable, this method will provide OA to most new work in due time.\nDeposit mandates generally depend on publisher permission for OA, just like loophole mandates. The difference is that they require deposit even when they can’t obtain permission for OA.\nRights-retention mandates" ], [ "4.2 Digression on the Word “Mandate”\nThe strongest OA policies use words like “must” or “shall” and require or seem to require OA. They’re commonly called OA “mandates.” But all three varieties of university “mandate” above show why the term is misleading. Loophole mandates don’t require OA without qualification: when publishers dissent, articles are either not deposited in the repository or not made OA. Deposit mandates don’t require OA without qualification: when publishers dissent, articles are deposited in a repository but are not made OA. Rights-retention mandates with waiver options don’t require OA without qualification: authors may obtain waivers and sometimes do. I haven’t seen a university OA “mandate” anywhere without at least one of these three kinds of flexibility.", "Many OA policies are crossbreeds rather than pure types, but all the policies I’ve seen are variations on these four themes.\nFirst note that none of the three “mandates” absolutely requires OA. Loophole mandates allow some work to escape through the loophole. Deposit mandates allow some deposited work to remain dark (non-OA), by following publisher preferences. Rights-retention mandates with waiver options allow some work to remain dark, by following author preferences.\nLoophole and deposit policies defer to publishers for permissions, while rights-retention policies obtain permission from authors before they transfer rights to publishers. For loophole and deposit policies, permission is contingent, because some publishers are willing and some are not. For rights-retention policies, permission is assured, at least initially or by default, although authors may opt out for any publication.", "Unfortunately, we don’t have a good vocabulary for policies that use mandatory language while deferring to third-person dissents or offering first-person opt-outs. Nor do we have a good vocabulary for policies that use mandatory language and replace enforcement with compliance-building through expectations, education, incentives, and assistance. The word “mandate” is not a very good fit for policies like this, but neither is any other English word.\nBy contrast, we do have a good word for policies that use mandatory language for those who agree to be bound. We call them “contracts.” While “contract” is short, accurate, and unfrightening, it puts the accent on the author’s consent to be bound. That’s often illuminating, but just as often we want to put the accent on the content’s destiny to become OA. For that purpose, “mandate” has become the term of art, for better or worse.", "Fortunately, this is well understood. There are no gold OA mandates anywhere; all OA mandates are green. Unfortunately, however, many people mistakenly believe that all OA is gold OA and therefore mistake proposed green OA mandates for proposed gold OA mandates and raise objections that would only apply to gold OA mandates. But as more academics understand the green/gold distinction, and understand that well-written green OA mandates are compatible with academic freedom, more institutions are adopting green OA mandates, almost always at the initiative of faculty themselves.\nAt universities, there are roughly three approaches to green OA mandates:\nLoophole mandates\nThese require green OA except when the author’s publisher doesn’t allow it.\nDeposit mandates", "Fortunately, funding agencies and universities are discovering their own interests in fostering OA. These nonprofit institutions make it their mission to advance research and to make that research as useful and widely available as possible. Their money frees researchers to do their work and avoid the need to tie their income to the popularity of their ideas. Above all, these institutions are in an unparalleled position to influence author decisions.\nToday, more than fifty funding agencies and more than one hundred universities have adopted strong OA policies. Each one depends on the primacy of author decisions.\nOne kind of policy, better than nothing, requests or encourages OA. A stronger kind of policy requires OA or makes it the default for new work. These stronger policies are usually called OA\nmandates\nand I’ll use that term for lack of a better one (but see section 4.2 on how it’s misleading).\nRequest or encouragement policies", "We could say that rights-retention policies require OA except when authors opt out, or that they simply shift the default to OA. Those are two ways of saying the same thing because, either way, faculty remain free to decide for or against OA for each of their publications. Preserving this freedom and making it conspicuous help muster faculty support, indeed, unanimous faculty votes. Because shifting the default is enough to change behavior on a large scale, waiver options don’t significantly reduce the volume of OA. At Harvard the waiver rate is less than 5 percent, and at MIT it’s less than 2 percent.\nLoophole policies and rights-retention policies both offer opt-outs. But loophole policies give the opt-out to publishers and rights-retention policies give it to authors. The difference is significant because many more authors than publishers want OA for research articles.", "Many institutions adopt loophole policies because they believe a blanket exemption for dissenting publishers is the only way to avoid copyright problems. But that is not true. Deposit policies don’t make works OA until publishers allow OA, and rights-retention policies close the loophole and obtain permission directly from authors at a time when authors are the copyright holders.\nOA policies from funding agencies are very much like OA policies from universities. They can encourage green and gold OA, or they can require green OA. If they require green OA, they can do so in one of the three ways above. If there’s a difference, it’s that when funders adopt a rights-retention mandate, they typically don’t offer waiver options. On the contrary, the Wellcome Trust and NIH require their grantees to make their work OA through a certain OA repository on a certain timetable and to retain the right to authorize that OA. If a given publisher will not allow grantees to comply with their prior funding agreement, then grantees must look for another publisher.", "Finally, the fact that faculty vote unanimously for strong OA policies is a good reason to keep looking for a better word than “mandate.” At least it’s a good reason to look past the colloquial implications of the term to the policies themselves and the players who drafted and adopted them. Since 2008, most OA “mandates” at universities have been self-imposed by faculty.\n4.3 Digression on the Historical Timing of OA Policies\nSome kinds of strong OA policy that are politically unattainable or unwise today may become attainable and wise in the future. Here are three examples.", "Open Access: Policies\n4.1 OA Policies at Funding Agencies and Universities\nAuthors control the volume and growth of OA. They decide whether to submit their work to OA journals (gold OA), whether to deposit their work in OA repositories (green OA), and how to use their copyrights. But scholarly authors are still largely unfamiliar with their OA options. It’s pointless to appeal to them as a bloc because they don’t act as a bloc. It’s not hard to persuade or even excite them once we catch their attention, but because they are so anarchical, overworked, and preoccupied, it’s hard to catch their attention.", "There are two reasons why these strong funder policies don’t infringe faculty freedom to submit work to their journals of their choice. First, researchers needn’t seek funds from these funders. When they choose to do so, then they agree to the OA provisions, just as they agree to the other terms and conditions of the grant. The OA “mandate” is a condition on a voluntary contract, not an unconditional requirement. It’s a reasonable condition as well, since public funders, like the NIH, disburse public money in the public interest, and private funders, like the Wellcome Trust, disburse charitable money for charitable purposes. To my knowledge, no researchers have refused to apply for Wellcome or NIH funds because of the OA condition, even when they plan to publish in OA-averse journals. The OA condition benefits authors and has not been a deal-breaker.", "As researchers become more familiar with OA, as more institutions adopt OA policies, as more new literature is covered by strong OA policies, as more toll-access journals convert to OA, as more toll-access journals accommodate OA mandates without converting, and even as more OA journals shift from gratis to libre, institutions will be able strengthen their OA policies without increasing publisher-controlled rejection rates or author-controlled waiver rates. They should watch the shifting balance of power and seize opportunities to strengthen their policies.", "I use “mandate” with reluctance because it can frighten some of the people I’m trying to persuade and can give rise to misunderstandings about the policies behind the label. When we have time and space for longer phrases, we can talk about “putting an OA condition” on research grants, in the case of NIH-style policies, or “shifting the default to OA” for faculty research, in the case of Harvard-style policies. These longer expressions are more accurate and less frightening. However, sometimes we need a shorthand term, and we need a term that draws an appropriately sharp contrast with policies that merely request or encourage OA.", "Today, a libre green mandate (say, one giving users the right to copy and redistribute, not just access for reading) would face serious publisher resistance. Even if the policy included rights retention and didn’t depend on publishers for permissions, publisher", "Green OA mandates don’t assure OA to the entire research output of a university or funding agency, for the same reason that they don’t require OA without qualification. But implementing them provides OA to a much larger percentage of the research output than was already headed toward OA journals or OA repositories, and does so while leaving authors free to submit their work to the journals of their choice.\nI’ve only tried to give a rough taxonomy of OA policies and their supporting arguments. For detailed recommendations on OA policy provisions, and specific arguments for them, see my 2009 analysis of policy options for funding agencies and universities.\nI’ve also focused here on OA policies for peer-reviewed research articles. Many universities have adopted OA mandates for theses and dissertations, and many funder OA policies also cover datasets. A growing number of universities supplement OA mandates for articles with a sensible and effective policy to assure compliance: When faculty come up for promotion or tenure, the review committee will only consider journal articles on deposit in the institutional repository.", "These require deposit in an OA repository as soon as the article is accepted for publication, but they separate the timing of deposit from the timing of OA. If the author’s publisher doesn’t allow OA, then these policies keep the deposited article dark or non-OA. If the publisher allows OA, immediately or after some embargo, then the deposit becomes OA as soon as the permission kicks in. Because most publishers allow OA on some timetable, this method will provide OA to most new work in due time.\nDeposit mandates generally depend on publisher permission for OA, just like loophole mandates. The difference is that they require deposit even when they can’t obtain permission for OA.\nRights-retention mandates", "It’s understandable that green gratis mandates are spreading faster than green libre mandates, that green mandates in general are spreading faster than gold mandates, and that rights-retention policies with waiver options are spreading faster than rights-retention policies without waivers. However, there is modest growth on one of these fronts: green libre mandates.\nThe case against these three kinds of OA policy is time-sensitive, not permanent. It’s circumstantial, and circumstances are changing. But the strategy for institutions wanting to remove access barriers to research is unchanging: they should adopt the strongest policies they can today and watch for the moment when they could strengthen them.", "permission. At the Wellcome Trust and NIH, which pioneered this approach for funding agencies, when grantees publish articles based on their funded research they must retain the nonexclusive right to authorize OA through a repository. At Harvard, which pioneered this", "Today, a gold OA mandate would limit faculty freedom to submit work to the journals of their choice. But that’s because today only about 25 percent of peer-reviewed journals are OA. As this percentage grows, then a gold OA mandate’s encroachment on academic freedom shrinks. At some point even the most zealous defenders of faculty freedom may decide that the encroachment is negligible. In principle the encroachment could be zero, though of course when the encroachment is zero, and gold OA mandates are harmless, then gold OA mandates would also be unnecessary.", "resistance would still matter because publishers possess—and ought to possess—the right to refuse to publish any work for any reason. They could refuse to publish authors bound by a libre green policy, or they could insist on a waiver from the", "These merely ask faculty to make their work OA, or recommend OA for their new work. Sometimes they’re called resolutions or pledges rather than policies.\nEncouragement policies can target green and gold OA equally. By contrast, mandates only make sense for green OA, at least today when OA journals constitute only about one-quarter of peer-reviewed journals. A gold OA mandate would put most peer-reviewed journals off-limits and seriously limit faculty freedom to submit their work to the journals of their choice. This problem doesn’t arise for green OA mandates." ], [ "Fortunately, funding agencies and universities are discovering their own interests in fostering OA. These nonprofit institutions make it their mission to advance research and to make that research as useful and widely available as possible. Their money frees researchers to do their work and avoid the need to tie their income to the popularity of their ideas. Above all, these institutions are in an unparalleled position to influence author decisions.\nToday, more than fifty funding agencies and more than one hundred universities have adopted strong OA policies. Each one depends on the primacy of author decisions.\nOne kind of policy, better than nothing, requests or encourages OA. A stronger kind of policy requires OA or makes it the default for new work. These stronger policies are usually called OA\nmandates\nand I’ll use that term for lack of a better one (but see section 4.2 on how it’s misleading).\nRequest or encouragement policies", "There are two reasons why these strong funder policies don’t infringe faculty freedom to submit work to their journals of their choice. First, researchers needn’t seek funds from these funders. When they choose to do so, then they agree to the OA provisions, just as they agree to the other terms and conditions of the grant. The OA “mandate” is a condition on a voluntary contract, not an unconditional requirement. It’s a reasonable condition as well, since public funders, like the NIH, disburse public money in the public interest, and private funders, like the Wellcome Trust, disburse charitable money for charitable purposes. To my knowledge, no researchers have refused to apply for Wellcome or NIH funds because of the OA condition, even when they plan to publish in OA-averse journals. The OA condition benefits authors and has not been a deal-breaker.", "permission. At the Wellcome Trust and NIH, which pioneered this approach for funding agencies, when grantees publish articles based on their funded research they must retain the nonexclusive right to authorize OA through a repository. At Harvard, which pioneered this", "Fortunately, this is well understood. There are no gold OA mandates anywhere; all OA mandates are green. Unfortunately, however, many people mistakenly believe that all OA is gold OA and therefore mistake proposed green OA mandates for proposed gold OA mandates and raise objections that would only apply to gold OA mandates. But as more academics understand the green/gold distinction, and understand that well-written green OA mandates are compatible with academic freedom, more institutions are adopting green OA mandates, almost always at the initiative of faculty themselves.\nAt universities, there are roughly three approaches to green OA mandates:\nLoophole mandates\nThese require green OA except when the author’s publisher doesn’t allow it.\nDeposit mandates", "Many institutions adopt loophole policies because they believe a blanket exemption for dissenting publishers is the only way to avoid copyright problems. But that is not true. Deposit policies don’t make works OA until publishers allow OA, and rights-retention policies close the loophole and obtain permission directly from authors at a time when authors are the copyright holders.\nOA policies from funding agencies are very much like OA policies from universities. They can encourage green and gold OA, or they can require green OA. If they require green OA, they can do so in one of the three ways above. If there’s a difference, it’s that when funders adopt a rights-retention mandate, they typically don’t offer waiver options. On the contrary, the Wellcome Trust and NIH require their grantees to make their work OA through a certain OA repository on a certain timetable and to retain the right to authorize that OA. If a given publisher will not allow grantees to comply with their prior funding agreement, then grantees must look for another publisher.", "Open Access: Policies\n4.1 OA Policies at Funding Agencies and Universities\nAuthors control the volume and growth of OA. They decide whether to submit their work to OA journals (gold OA), whether to deposit their work in OA repositories (green OA), and how to use their copyrights. But scholarly authors are still largely unfamiliar with their OA options. It’s pointless to appeal to them as a bloc because they don’t act as a bloc. It’s not hard to persuade or even excite them once we catch their attention, but because they are so anarchical, overworked, and preoccupied, it’s hard to catch their attention.", "Green OA mandates don’t assure OA to the entire research output of a university or funding agency, for the same reason that they don’t require OA without qualification. But implementing them provides OA to a much larger percentage of the research output than was already headed toward OA journals or OA repositories, and does so while leaving authors free to submit their work to the journals of their choice.\nI’ve only tried to give a rough taxonomy of OA policies and their supporting arguments. For detailed recommendations on OA policy provisions, and specific arguments for them, see my 2009 analysis of policy options for funding agencies and universities.\nI’ve also focused here on OA policies for peer-reviewed research articles. Many universities have adopted OA mandates for theses and dissertations, and many funder OA policies also cover datasets. A growing number of universities supplement OA mandates for articles with a sensible and effective policy to assure compliance: When faculty come up for promotion or tenure, the review committee will only consider journal articles on deposit in the institutional repository.", "These merely ask faculty to make their work OA, or recommend OA for their new work. Sometimes they’re called resolutions or pledges rather than policies.\nEncouragement policies can target green and gold OA equally. By contrast, mandates only make sense for green OA, at least today when OA journals constitute only about one-quarter of peer-reviewed journals. A gold OA mandate would put most peer-reviewed journals off-limits and seriously limit faculty freedom to submit their work to the journals of their choice. This problem doesn’t arise for green OA mandates.", "OA, as spontaneous author submissions shift toward OA journals, or as the number of institutions with libre green mandates makes resistance more costly than accommodation for publishers. When OA policies are toothless, few in number, or concentrated in small institutions,", "Many OA policies are crossbreeds rather than pure types, but all the policies I’ve seen are variations on these four themes.\nFirst note that none of the three “mandates” absolutely requires OA. Loophole mandates allow some work to escape through the loophole. Deposit mandates allow some deposited work to remain dark (non-OA), by following publisher preferences. Rights-retention mandates with waiver options allow some work to remain dark, by following author preferences.\nLoophole and deposit policies defer to publishers for permissions, while rights-retention policies obtain permission from authors before they transfer rights to publishers. For loophole and deposit policies, permission is contingent, because some publishers are willing and some are not. For rights-retention policies, permission is assured, at least initially or by default, although authors may opt out for any publication.", "Finally, the fact that faculty vote unanimously for strong OA policies is a good reason to keep looking for a better word than “mandate.” At least it’s a good reason to look past the colloquial implications of the term to the policies themselves and the players who drafted and adopted them. Since 2008, most OA “mandates” at universities have been self-imposed by faculty.\n4.3 Digression on the Historical Timing of OA Policies\nSome kinds of strong OA policy that are politically unattainable or unwise today may become attainable and wise in the future. Here are three examples.", "Second, virtually all publishers accommodate these policies. For example, no surveyed publishers anywhere refuse to publish work by NIH-funded authors on account of the agency’s OA mandate. Hence, in practice grantees may still submit work to the journals of their choice, even without a waiver option to accommodate holdout publishers.", "Today, a gold OA mandate would limit faculty freedom to submit work to the journals of their choice. But that’s because today only about 25 percent of peer-reviewed journals are OA. As this percentage grows, then a gold OA mandate’s encroachment on academic freedom shrinks. At some point even the most zealous defenders of faculty freedom may decide that the encroachment is negligible. In principle the encroachment could be zero, though of course when the encroachment is zero, and gold OA mandates are harmless, then gold OA mandates would also be unnecessary.", "As researchers become more familiar with OA, as more institutions adopt OA policies, as more new literature is covered by strong OA policies, as more toll-access journals convert to OA, as more toll-access journals accommodate OA mandates without converting, and even as more OA journals shift from gratis to libre, institutions will be able strengthen their OA policies without increasing publisher-controlled rejection rates or author-controlled waiver rates. They should watch the shifting balance of power and seize opportunities to strengthen their policies.", "That’s the main reason why no university policies require OA without qualification. There are a few more. First, as Harvard’s Stuart Shieber frequently argues, even the strongest university policies can’t make tenured faculty comply.\n \n Second, as I’ve frequently argued, successful policies are implemented through expectations, education, incentives, and assistance, not coercion. Third, even the strongest policies—even the no-loophole, no-deference, no-waiver policies at the Wellcome Trust and NIH—make OA a condition on a voluntary contract. No policy anywhere pretends to impose an unconditional OA requirement, and it’s hard to imagine how any policy could even try. (“You must make your work OA even if you don’t work for us or use our funds”?)", "I use “mandate” with reluctance because it can frighten some of the people I’m trying to persuade and can give rise to misunderstandings about the policies behind the label. When we have time and space for longer phrases, we can talk about “putting an OA condition” on research grants, in the case of NIH-style policies, or “shifting the default to OA” for faculty research, in the case of Harvard-style policies. These longer expressions are more accurate and less frightening. However, sometimes we need a shorthand term, and we need a term that draws an appropriately sharp contrast with policies that merely request or encourage OA.", "Finally, a common misunderstanding deliberately promulgated by some publishers is that OA must be “mandated” because faculty don’t want it. This position gets understandable but regrettable mileage from the word “mandate.” It also overlooks decisive counter-evidence that we’ve had in hand since 2004. Alma Swan’s empirical studies of researcher attitudes show that an overwhelming majority of researchers would “willingly” comply with a mandatory OA policy from their funder or employer.\nThe most recent evidence of faculty willingness is the stunning series of strong OA policies adopted by unanimous faculty votes. (When is the last time you heard of a unanimous faculty vote for anything, let alone anything of importance?) As recently as 2007, speculation that we’d soon see more than two dozen unanimous faculty votes for OA policies would have been dismissed as wishful thinking. But now that the evidence lies before us, what looks like wishful thinking is the publishing lobby’s idea that OA must be mandated because faculty don’t want it.", "It’s understandable that green gratis mandates are spreading faster than green libre mandates, that green mandates in general are spreading faster than gold mandates, and that rights-retention policies with waiver options are spreading faster than rights-retention policies without waivers. However, there is modest growth on one of these fronts: green libre mandates.\nThe case against these three kinds of OA policy is time-sensitive, not permanent. It’s circumstantial, and circumstances are changing. But the strategy for institutions wanting to remove access barriers to research is unchanging: they should adopt the strongest policies they can today and watch for the moment when they could strengthen them.", "We could say that rights-retention policies require OA except when authors opt out, or that they simply shift the default to OA. Those are two ways of saying the same thing because, either way, faculty remain free to decide for or against OA for each of their publications. Preserving this freedom and making it conspicuous help muster faculty support, indeed, unanimous faculty votes. Because shifting the default is enough to change behavior on a large scale, waiver options don’t significantly reduce the volume of OA. At Harvard the waiver rate is less than 5 percent, and at MIT it’s less than 2 percent.\nLoophole policies and rights-retention policies both offer opt-outs. But loophole policies give the opt-out to publishers and rights-retention policies give it to authors. The difference is significant because many more authors than publishers want OA for research articles.", "These require deposit in an OA repository as soon as the article is accepted for publication, but they separate the timing of deposit from the timing of OA. If the author’s publisher doesn’t allow OA, then these policies keep the deposited article dark or non-OA. If the publisher allows OA, immediately or after some embargo, then the deposit becomes OA as soon as the permission kicks in. Because most publishers allow OA on some timetable, this method will provide OA to most new work in due time.\nDeposit mandates generally depend on publisher permission for OA, just like loophole mandates. The difference is that they require deposit even when they can’t obtain permission for OA.\nRights-retention mandates" ], [ "That’s the main reason why no university policies require OA without qualification. There are a few more. First, as Harvard’s Stuart Shieber frequently argues, even the strongest university policies can’t make tenured faculty comply.\n \n Second, as I’ve frequently argued, successful policies are implemented through expectations, education, incentives, and assistance, not coercion. Third, even the strongest policies—even the no-loophole, no-deference, no-waiver policies at the Wellcome Trust and NIH—make OA a condition on a voluntary contract. No policy anywhere pretends to impose an unconditional OA requirement, and it’s hard to imagine how any policy could even try. (“You must make your work OA even if you don’t work for us or use our funds”?)", "There are two reasons why these strong funder policies don’t infringe faculty freedom to submit work to their journals of their choice. First, researchers needn’t seek funds from these funders. When they choose to do so, then they agree to the OA provisions, just as they agree to the other terms and conditions of the grant. The OA “mandate” is a condition on a voluntary contract, not an unconditional requirement. It’s a reasonable condition as well, since public funders, like the NIH, disburse public money in the public interest, and private funders, like the Wellcome Trust, disburse charitable money for charitable purposes. To my knowledge, no researchers have refused to apply for Wellcome or NIH funds because of the OA condition, even when they plan to publish in OA-averse journals. The OA condition benefits authors and has not been a deal-breaker.", "Many OA policies are crossbreeds rather than pure types, but all the policies I’ve seen are variations on these four themes.\nFirst note that none of the three “mandates” absolutely requires OA. Loophole mandates allow some work to escape through the loophole. Deposit mandates allow some deposited work to remain dark (non-OA), by following publisher preferences. Rights-retention mandates with waiver options allow some work to remain dark, by following author preferences.\nLoophole and deposit policies defer to publishers for permissions, while rights-retention policies obtain permission from authors before they transfer rights to publishers. For loophole and deposit policies, permission is contingent, because some publishers are willing and some are not. For rights-retention policies, permission is assured, at least initially or by default, although authors may opt out for any publication.", "Green OA mandates don’t assure OA to the entire research output of a university or funding agency, for the same reason that they don’t require OA without qualification. But implementing them provides OA to a much larger percentage of the research output than was already headed toward OA journals or OA repositories, and does so while leaving authors free to submit their work to the journals of their choice.\nI’ve only tried to give a rough taxonomy of OA policies and their supporting arguments. For detailed recommendations on OA policy provisions, and specific arguments for them, see my 2009 analysis of policy options for funding agencies and universities.\nI’ve also focused here on OA policies for peer-reviewed research articles. Many universities have adopted OA mandates for theses and dissertations, and many funder OA policies also cover datasets. A growing number of universities supplement OA mandates for articles with a sensible and effective policy to assure compliance: When faculty come up for promotion or tenure, the review committee will only consider journal articles on deposit in the institutional repository.", "Many institutions adopt loophole policies because they believe a blanket exemption for dissenting publishers is the only way to avoid copyright problems. But that is not true. Deposit policies don’t make works OA until publishers allow OA, and rights-retention policies close the loophole and obtain permission directly from authors at a time when authors are the copyright holders.\nOA policies from funding agencies are very much like OA policies from universities. They can encourage green and gold OA, or they can require green OA. If they require green OA, they can do so in one of the three ways above. If there’s a difference, it’s that when funders adopt a rights-retention mandate, they typically don’t offer waiver options. On the contrary, the Wellcome Trust and NIH require their grantees to make their work OA through a certain OA repository on a certain timetable and to retain the right to authorize that OA. If a given publisher will not allow grantees to comply with their prior funding agreement, then grantees must look for another publisher.", "As researchers become more familiar with OA, as more institutions adopt OA policies, as more new literature is covered by strong OA policies, as more toll-access journals convert to OA, as more toll-access journals accommodate OA mandates without converting, and even as more OA journals shift from gratis to libre, institutions will be able strengthen their OA policies without increasing publisher-controlled rejection rates or author-controlled waiver rates. They should watch the shifting balance of power and seize opportunities to strengthen their policies.", "4.2 Digression on the Word “Mandate”\nThe strongest OA policies use words like “must” or “shall” and require or seem to require OA. They’re commonly called OA “mandates.” But all three varieties of university “mandate” above show why the term is misleading. Loophole mandates don’t require OA without qualification: when publishers dissent, articles are either not deposited in the repository or not made OA. Deposit mandates don’t require OA without qualification: when publishers dissent, articles are deposited in a repository but are not made OA. Rights-retention mandates with waiver options don’t require OA without qualification: authors may obtain waivers and sometimes do. I haven’t seen a university OA “mandate” anywhere without at least one of these three kinds of flexibility.", "It’s understandable that green gratis mandates are spreading faster than green libre mandates, that green mandates in general are spreading faster than gold mandates, and that rights-retention policies with waiver options are spreading faster than rights-retention policies without waivers. However, there is modest growth on one of these fronts: green libre mandates.\nThe case against these three kinds of OA policy is time-sensitive, not permanent. It’s circumstantial, and circumstances are changing. But the strategy for institutions wanting to remove access barriers to research is unchanging: they should adopt the strongest policies they can today and watch for the moment when they could strengthen them.", "Fortunately, this is well understood. There are no gold OA mandates anywhere; all OA mandates are green. Unfortunately, however, many people mistakenly believe that all OA is gold OA and therefore mistake proposed green OA mandates for proposed gold OA mandates and raise objections that would only apply to gold OA mandates. But as more academics understand the green/gold distinction, and understand that well-written green OA mandates are compatible with academic freedom, more institutions are adopting green OA mandates, almost always at the initiative of faculty themselves.\nAt universities, there are roughly three approaches to green OA mandates:\nLoophole mandates\nThese require green OA except when the author’s publisher doesn’t allow it.\nDeposit mandates", "Finally, the fact that faculty vote unanimously for strong OA policies is a good reason to keep looking for a better word than “mandate.” At least it’s a good reason to look past the colloquial implications of the term to the policies themselves and the players who drafted and adopted them. Since 2008, most OA “mandates” at universities have been self-imposed by faculty.\n4.3 Digression on the Historical Timing of OA Policies\nSome kinds of strong OA policy that are politically unattainable or unwise today may become attainable and wise in the future. Here are three examples.", "Second, virtually all publishers accommodate these policies. For example, no surveyed publishers anywhere refuse to publish work by NIH-funded authors on account of the agency’s OA mandate. Hence, in practice grantees may still submit work to the journals of their choice, even without a waiver option to accommodate holdout publishers.", "Fortunately, funding agencies and universities are discovering their own interests in fostering OA. These nonprofit institutions make it their mission to advance research and to make that research as useful and widely available as possible. Their money frees researchers to do their work and avoid the need to tie their income to the popularity of their ideas. Above all, these institutions are in an unparalleled position to influence author decisions.\nToday, more than fifty funding agencies and more than one hundred universities have adopted strong OA policies. Each one depends on the primacy of author decisions.\nOne kind of policy, better than nothing, requests or encourages OA. A stronger kind of policy requires OA or makes it the default for new work. These stronger policies are usually called OA\nmandates\nand I’ll use that term for lack of a better one (but see section 4.2 on how it’s misleading).\nRequest or encouragement policies", "We could say that rights-retention policies require OA except when authors opt out, or that they simply shift the default to OA. Those are two ways of saying the same thing because, either way, faculty remain free to decide for or against OA for each of their publications. Preserving this freedom and making it conspicuous help muster faculty support, indeed, unanimous faculty votes. Because shifting the default is enough to change behavior on a large scale, waiver options don’t significantly reduce the volume of OA. At Harvard the waiver rate is less than 5 percent, and at MIT it’s less than 2 percent.\nLoophole policies and rights-retention policies both offer opt-outs. But loophole policies give the opt-out to publishers and rights-retention policies give it to authors. The difference is significant because many more authors than publishers want OA for research articles.", "These merely ask faculty to make their work OA, or recommend OA for their new work. Sometimes they’re called resolutions or pledges rather than policies.\nEncouragement policies can target green and gold OA equally. By contrast, mandates only make sense for green OA, at least today when OA journals constitute only about one-quarter of peer-reviewed journals. A gold OA mandate would put most peer-reviewed journals off-limits and seriously limit faculty freedom to submit their work to the journals of their choice. This problem doesn’t arise for green OA mandates.", "permission. At the Wellcome Trust and NIH, which pioneered this approach for funding agencies, when grantees publish articles based on their funded research they must retain the nonexclusive right to authorize OA through a repository. At Harvard, which pioneered this", "policy as a condition of publication. Policies triggering rejections hurt authors, and policies driving up waiver rates don’t do much to help OA. However, publisher resistance might diminish as the ratio of OA publishers to toll-access publishers tilts toward", "Open Access: Policies\n4.1 OA Policies at Funding Agencies and Universities\nAuthors control the volume and growth of OA. They decide whether to submit their work to OA journals (gold OA), whether to deposit their work in OA repositories (green OA), and how to use their copyrights. But scholarly authors are still largely unfamiliar with their OA options. It’s pointless to appeal to them as a bloc because they don’t act as a bloc. It’s not hard to persuade or even excite them once we catch their attention, but because they are so anarchical, overworked, and preoccupied, it’s hard to catch their attention.", "These require deposit in an OA repository as soon as the article is accepted for publication, just like deposit mandates. But they add a method to secure permission for making the deposit OA. There’s more than one way to secure that", "We should never forget that most toll-access journals already allow green OA and that a growing number of high-quality, high-prestige peer-reviewed journal are gold OA. From one point of view, we don’t need OA mandates when authors already plan to publish in one of those journals. But sometimes toll-access journals change their positions on green OA. Sometimes authors don’t get around to making their work green OA even when their journals allow it. And sometimes authors don’t publish in one of those journals. The final rationale for green OA mandates, then, is for institutions to bring about OA for their entire research output, regardless of how publishers might alter their policies, regardless of author inertia, and regardless of the journals in which faculty or grantees choose to publish.", "When loophole policies can’t provide OA, covered works needn’t make it to the repository even as dark deposits. When deposit and rights-retention policies can’t provide OA, at least they require dark deposit for the texts, and OA for the metadata (information about author, title, date, and so on). Releasing the metadata makes even a dark deposit visible to readers and search engines. Moreover, many repositories support an email-request button for works on dark deposit. The button enables a reader to submit a one-click request for a full-text email copy and enables the author to grant or deny the request with a one-click response." ], [ "It’s understandable that green gratis mandates are spreading faster than green libre mandates, that green mandates in general are spreading faster than gold mandates, and that rights-retention policies with waiver options are spreading faster than rights-retention policies without waivers. However, there is modest growth on one of these fronts: green libre mandates.\nThe case against these three kinds of OA policy is time-sensitive, not permanent. It’s circumstantial, and circumstances are changing. But the strategy for institutions wanting to remove access barriers to research is unchanging: they should adopt the strongest policies they can today and watch for the moment when they could strengthen them.", "Today, a libre green mandate (say, one giving users the right to copy and redistribute, not just access for reading) would face serious publisher resistance. Even if the policy included rights retention and didn’t depend on publishers for permissions, publisher", "Unfortunately, we don’t have a good vocabulary for policies that use mandatory language while deferring to third-person dissents or offering first-person opt-outs. Nor do we have a good vocabulary for policies that use mandatory language and replace enforcement with compliance-building through expectations, education, incentives, and assistance. The word “mandate” is not a very good fit for policies like this, but neither is any other English word.\nBy contrast, we do have a good word for policies that use mandatory language for those who agree to be bound. We call them “contracts.” While “contract” is short, accurate, and unfrightening, it puts the accent on the author’s consent to be bound. That’s often illuminating, but just as often we want to put the accent on the content’s destiny to become OA. For that purpose, “mandate” has become the term of art, for better or worse.", "I use “mandate” with reluctance because it can frighten some of the people I’m trying to persuade and can give rise to misunderstandings about the policies behind the label. When we have time and space for longer phrases, we can talk about “putting an OA condition” on research grants, in the case of NIH-style policies, or “shifting the default to OA” for faculty research, in the case of Harvard-style policies. These longer expressions are more accurate and less frightening. However, sometimes we need a shorthand term, and we need a term that draws an appropriately sharp contrast with policies that merely request or encourage OA.", "Green OA mandates don’t assure OA to the entire research output of a university or funding agency, for the same reason that they don’t require OA without qualification. But implementing them provides OA to a much larger percentage of the research output than was already headed toward OA journals or OA repositories, and does so while leaving authors free to submit their work to the journals of their choice.\nI’ve only tried to give a rough taxonomy of OA policies and their supporting arguments. For detailed recommendations on OA policy provisions, and specific arguments for them, see my 2009 analysis of policy options for funding agencies and universities.\nI’ve also focused here on OA policies for peer-reviewed research articles. Many universities have adopted OA mandates for theses and dissertations, and many funder OA policies also cover datasets. A growing number of universities supplement OA mandates for articles with a sensible and effective policy to assure compliance: When faculty come up for promotion or tenure, the review committee will only consider journal articles on deposit in the institutional repository.", "Fortunately, this is well understood. There are no gold OA mandates anywhere; all OA mandates are green. Unfortunately, however, many people mistakenly believe that all OA is gold OA and therefore mistake proposed green OA mandates for proposed gold OA mandates and raise objections that would only apply to gold OA mandates. But as more academics understand the green/gold distinction, and understand that well-written green OA mandates are compatible with academic freedom, more institutions are adopting green OA mandates, almost always at the initiative of faculty themselves.\nAt universities, there are roughly three approaches to green OA mandates:\nLoophole mandates\nThese require green OA except when the author’s publisher doesn’t allow it.\nDeposit mandates", "As researchers become more familiar with OA, as more institutions adopt OA policies, as more new literature is covered by strong OA policies, as more toll-access journals convert to OA, as more toll-access journals accommodate OA mandates without converting, and even as more OA journals shift from gratis to libre, institutions will be able strengthen their OA policies without increasing publisher-controlled rejection rates or author-controlled waiver rates. They should watch the shifting balance of power and seize opportunities to strengthen their policies.", "resistance would still matter because publishers possess—and ought to possess—the right to refuse to publish any work for any reason. They could refuse to publish authors bound by a libre green policy, or they could insist on a waiver from the", "These merely ask faculty to make their work OA, or recommend OA for their new work. Sometimes they’re called resolutions or pledges rather than policies.\nEncouragement policies can target green and gold OA equally. By contrast, mandates only make sense for green OA, at least today when OA journals constitute only about one-quarter of peer-reviewed journals. A gold OA mandate would put most peer-reviewed journals off-limits and seriously limit faculty freedom to submit their work to the journals of their choice. This problem doesn’t arise for green OA mandates.", "Fortunately, funding agencies and universities are discovering their own interests in fostering OA. These nonprofit institutions make it their mission to advance research and to make that research as useful and widely available as possible. Their money frees researchers to do their work and avoid the need to tie their income to the popularity of their ideas. Above all, these institutions are in an unparalleled position to influence author decisions.\nToday, more than fifty funding agencies and more than one hundred universities have adopted strong OA policies. Each one depends on the primacy of author decisions.\nOne kind of policy, better than nothing, requests or encourages OA. A stronger kind of policy requires OA or makes it the default for new work. These stronger policies are usually called OA\nmandates\nand I’ll use that term for lack of a better one (but see section 4.2 on how it’s misleading).\nRequest or encouragement policies", "We should never forget that most toll-access journals already allow green OA and that a growing number of high-quality, high-prestige peer-reviewed journal are gold OA. From one point of view, we don’t need OA mandates when authors already plan to publish in one of those journals. But sometimes toll-access journals change their positions on green OA. Sometimes authors don’t get around to making their work green OA even when their journals allow it. And sometimes authors don’t publish in one of those journals. The final rationale for green OA mandates, then, is for institutions to bring about OA for their entire research output, regardless of how publishers might alter their policies, regardless of author inertia, and regardless of the journals in which faculty or grantees choose to publish.", "OA, as spontaneous author submissions shift toward OA journals, or as the number of institutions with libre green mandates makes resistance more costly than accommodation for publishers. When OA policies are toothless, few in number, or concentrated in small institutions,", "Finally, the fact that faculty vote unanimously for strong OA policies is a good reason to keep looking for a better word than “mandate.” At least it’s a good reason to look past the colloquial implications of the term to the policies themselves and the players who drafted and adopted them. Since 2008, most OA “mandates” at universities have been self-imposed by faculty.\n4.3 Digression on the Historical Timing of OA Policies\nSome kinds of strong OA policy that are politically unattainable or unwise today may become attainable and wise in the future. Here are three examples.", "If anyone objects that a policy containing mandatory language and a waiver option isn’t really a “mandate,” I won’t disagree. On the contrary, I applaud them for recognizing a nuance which too many others overlook. (It’s depressing how many PhDs can read a policy with mandatory language and a waiver option, notice the mandatory language, overlook the waiver option, and then cite the lack of flexibility as an objection.) But denying that a policy is a mandate can create its own kinds of misunderstanding. In the United States, citizens called for jury duty must appear, even if many can claim exemptions and go home again. We can say that jury duty with exemptions isn’t really a “duty,” provided we don’t conclude that it’s merely a request and encouragement.", "Many OA policies are crossbreeds rather than pure types, but all the policies I’ve seen are variations on these four themes.\nFirst note that none of the three “mandates” absolutely requires OA. Loophole mandates allow some work to escape through the loophole. Deposit mandates allow some deposited work to remain dark (non-OA), by following publisher preferences. Rights-retention mandates with waiver options allow some work to remain dark, by following author preferences.\nLoophole and deposit policies defer to publishers for permissions, while rights-retention policies obtain permission from authors before they transfer rights to publishers. For loophole and deposit policies, permission is contingent, because some publishers are willing and some are not. For rights-retention policies, permission is assured, at least initially or by default, although authors may opt out for any publication.", "4.2 Digression on the Word “Mandate”\nThe strongest OA policies use words like “must” or “shall” and require or seem to require OA. They’re commonly called OA “mandates.” But all three varieties of university “mandate” above show why the term is misleading. Loophole mandates don’t require OA without qualification: when publishers dissent, articles are either not deposited in the repository or not made OA. Deposit mandates don’t require OA without qualification: when publishers dissent, articles are deposited in a repository but are not made OA. Rights-retention mandates with waiver options don’t require OA without qualification: authors may obtain waivers and sometimes do. I haven’t seen a university OA “mandate” anywhere without at least one of these three kinds of flexibility.", "There are two reasons why these strong funder policies don’t infringe faculty freedom to submit work to their journals of their choice. First, researchers needn’t seek funds from these funders. When they choose to do so, then they agree to the OA provisions, just as they agree to the other terms and conditions of the grant. The OA “mandate” is a condition on a voluntary contract, not an unconditional requirement. It’s a reasonable condition as well, since public funders, like the NIH, disburse public money in the public interest, and private funders, like the Wellcome Trust, disburse charitable money for charitable purposes. To my knowledge, no researchers have refused to apply for Wellcome or NIH funds because of the OA condition, even when they plan to publish in OA-averse journals. The OA condition benefits authors and has not been a deal-breaker.", "Finally, a common misunderstanding deliberately promulgated by some publishers is that OA must be “mandated” because faculty don’t want it. This position gets understandable but regrettable mileage from the word “mandate.” It also overlooks decisive counter-evidence that we’ve had in hand since 2004. Alma Swan’s empirical studies of researcher attitudes show that an overwhelming majority of researchers would “willingly” comply with a mandatory OA policy from their funder or employer.\nThe most recent evidence of faculty willingness is the stunning series of strong OA policies adopted by unanimous faculty votes. (When is the last time you heard of a unanimous faculty vote for anything, let alone anything of importance?) As recently as 2007, speculation that we’d soon see more than two dozen unanimous faculty votes for OA policies would have been dismissed as wishful thinking. But now that the evidence lies before us, what looks like wishful thinking is the publishing lobby’s idea that OA must be mandated because faculty don’t want it.", "Many institutions adopt loophole policies because they believe a blanket exemption for dissenting publishers is the only way to avoid copyright problems. But that is not true. Deposit policies don’t make works OA until publishers allow OA, and rights-retention policies close the loophole and obtain permission directly from authors at a time when authors are the copyright holders.\nOA policies from funding agencies are very much like OA policies from universities. They can encourage green and gold OA, or they can require green OA. If they require green OA, they can do so in one of the three ways above. If there’s a difference, it’s that when funders adopt a rights-retention mandate, they typically don’t offer waiver options. On the contrary, the Wellcome Trust and NIH require their grantees to make their work OA through a certain OA repository on a certain timetable and to retain the right to authorize that OA. If a given publisher will not allow grantees to comply with their prior funding agreement, then grantees must look for another publisher.", "These require deposit in an OA repository as soon as the article is accepted for publication, but they separate the timing of deposit from the timing of OA. If the author’s publisher doesn’t allow OA, then these policies keep the deposited article dark or non-OA. If the publisher allows OA, immediately or after some embargo, then the deposit becomes OA as soon as the permission kicks in. Because most publishers allow OA on some timetable, this method will provide OA to most new work in due time.\nDeposit mandates generally depend on publisher permission for OA, just like loophole mandates. The difference is that they require deposit even when they can’t obtain permission for OA.\nRights-retention mandates" ], [ "OA, as spontaneous author submissions shift toward OA journals, or as the number of institutions with libre green mandates makes resistance more costly than accommodation for publishers. When OA policies are toothless, few in number, or concentrated in small institutions,", "As researchers become more familiar with OA, as more institutions adopt OA policies, as more new literature is covered by strong OA policies, as more toll-access journals convert to OA, as more toll-access journals accommodate OA mandates without converting, and even as more OA journals shift from gratis to libre, institutions will be able strengthen their OA policies without increasing publisher-controlled rejection rates or author-controlled waiver rates. They should watch the shifting balance of power and seize opportunities to strengthen their policies.", "Fortunately, funding agencies and universities are discovering their own interests in fostering OA. These nonprofit institutions make it their mission to advance research and to make that research as useful and widely available as possible. Their money frees researchers to do their work and avoid the need to tie their income to the popularity of their ideas. Above all, these institutions are in an unparalleled position to influence author decisions.\nToday, more than fifty funding agencies and more than one hundred universities have adopted strong OA policies. Each one depends on the primacy of author decisions.\nOne kind of policy, better than nothing, requests or encourages OA. A stronger kind of policy requires OA or makes it the default for new work. These stronger policies are usually called OA\nmandates\nand I’ll use that term for lack of a better one (but see section 4.2 on how it’s misleading).\nRequest or encouragement policies", "The moments of opportunity will not be obvious. They will not be highlighted by objective evidence alone and will call for some self-fulfilling leadership. Institutional policy-makers will have to assess not only the climate created by existing policies, and existing levels of support, but also the likely effects of their own actions. Every strong, new policy increases the likelihood of publisher accommodation, and when enough universities and funders have policies, all publishers will have to accommodate them. In that sense, every strong new policy creates some of the conditions of its own success. Every institution adopting a new policy brings about OA for the research it controls and makes the way easier for other institutions behind it. Like many other policy issues, this is one on which it is easier to follow than to lead, and we already have a growing number of leaders. A critical mass is growing and every policy is an implicit invitation to other institutions to gain strength through common purpose and help accelerate publisher adaptation.", "Open Access: Policies\n4.1 OA Policies at Funding Agencies and Universities\nAuthors control the volume and growth of OA. They decide whether to submit their work to OA journals (gold OA), whether to deposit their work in OA repositories (green OA), and how to use their copyrights. But scholarly authors are still largely unfamiliar with their OA options. It’s pointless to appeal to them as a bloc because they don’t act as a bloc. It’s not hard to persuade or even excite them once we catch their attention, but because they are so anarchical, overworked, and preoccupied, it’s hard to catch their attention.", "It’s understandable that green gratis mandates are spreading faster than green libre mandates, that green mandates in general are spreading faster than gold mandates, and that rights-retention policies with waiver options are spreading faster than rights-retention policies without waivers. However, there is modest growth on one of these fronts: green libre mandates.\nThe case against these three kinds of OA policy is time-sensitive, not permanent. It’s circumstantial, and circumstances are changing. But the strategy for institutions wanting to remove access barriers to research is unchanging: they should adopt the strongest policies they can today and watch for the moment when they could strengthen them.", "then they must accommodate publishers in order to avoid triggering rejections and hurting authors. But as policies grow in number, scope, and strength, the situation could flip over, and publishers will have to accommodate OA policies in order to avoid hurting", "Fortunately, this is well understood. There are no gold OA mandates anywhere; all OA mandates are green. Unfortunately, however, many people mistakenly believe that all OA is gold OA and therefore mistake proposed green OA mandates for proposed gold OA mandates and raise objections that would only apply to gold OA mandates. But as more academics understand the green/gold distinction, and understand that well-written green OA mandates are compatible with academic freedom, more institutions are adopting green OA mandates, almost always at the initiative of faculty themselves.\nAt universities, there are roughly three approaches to green OA mandates:\nLoophole mandates\nThese require green OA except when the author’s publisher doesn’t allow it.\nDeposit mandates", "We could say that rights-retention policies require OA except when authors opt out, or that they simply shift the default to OA. Those are two ways of saying the same thing because, either way, faculty remain free to decide for or against OA for each of their publications. Preserving this freedom and making it conspicuous help muster faculty support, indeed, unanimous faculty votes. Because shifting the default is enough to change behavior on a large scale, waiver options don’t significantly reduce the volume of OA. At Harvard the waiver rate is less than 5 percent, and at MIT it’s less than 2 percent.\nLoophole policies and rights-retention policies both offer opt-outs. But loophole policies give the opt-out to publishers and rights-retention policies give it to authors. The difference is significant because many more authors than publishers want OA for research articles.", "Many institutions adopt loophole policies because they believe a blanket exemption for dissenting publishers is the only way to avoid copyright problems. But that is not true. Deposit policies don’t make works OA until publishers allow OA, and rights-retention policies close the loophole and obtain permission directly from authors at a time when authors are the copyright holders.\nOA policies from funding agencies are very much like OA policies from universities. They can encourage green and gold OA, or they can require green OA. If they require green OA, they can do so in one of the three ways above. If there’s a difference, it’s that when funders adopt a rights-retention mandate, they typically don’t offer waiver options. On the contrary, the Wellcome Trust and NIH require their grantees to make their work OA through a certain OA repository on a certain timetable and to retain the right to authorize that OA. If a given publisher will not allow grantees to comply with their prior funding agreement, then grantees must look for another publisher.", "policy as a condition of publication. Policies triggering rejections hurt authors, and policies driving up waiver rates don’t do much to help OA. However, publisher resistance might diminish as the ratio of OA publishers to toll-access publishers tilts toward", "Finally, the fact that faculty vote unanimously for strong OA policies is a good reason to keep looking for a better word than “mandate.” At least it’s a good reason to look past the colloquial implications of the term to the policies themselves and the players who drafted and adopted them. Since 2008, most OA “mandates” at universities have been self-imposed by faculty.\n4.3 Digression on the Historical Timing of OA Policies\nSome kinds of strong OA policy that are politically unattainable or unwise today may become attainable and wise in the future. Here are three examples.", "Today, a libre green mandate (say, one giving users the right to copy and redistribute, not just access for reading) would face serious publisher resistance. Even if the policy included rights retention and didn’t depend on publishers for permissions, publisher", "These merely ask faculty to make their work OA, or recommend OA for their new work. Sometimes they’re called resolutions or pledges rather than policies.\nEncouragement policies can target green and gold OA equally. By contrast, mandates only make sense for green OA, at least today when OA journals constitute only about one-quarter of peer-reviewed journals. A gold OA mandate would put most peer-reviewed journals off-limits and seriously limit faculty freedom to submit their work to the journals of their choice. This problem doesn’t arise for green OA mandates.", "permission. At the Wellcome Trust and NIH, which pioneered this approach for funding agencies, when grantees publish articles based on their funded research they must retain the nonexclusive right to authorize OA through a repository. At Harvard, which pioneered this", "Today, faculty voting for a rights-retention OA mandate want a waiver option, and when the option is available their votes tend to be overwhelming or unanimous. But there are several circumstances that might make it attractive for faculty to abolish waiver options or make waivers harder to obtain. One is a shift in faculty perspective that makes access to research more urgent than indulging publishers who erect access barriers. Another is a significant rise in publisher acceptance of green OA, which gives virtually all authors—rather than just most—blanket permission for green OA. In the first case, faculty might “vote with their submissions” and steer clear of publishers who don’t allow author-initiated green OA. In the second case, faculty would virtually never encounter such publishers. In the first case, they’d seldom want waivers, and the second they’d seldom need waivers.", "Today, a gold OA mandate would limit faculty freedom to submit work to the journals of their choice. But that’s because today only about 25 percent of peer-reviewed journals are OA. As this percentage grows, then a gold OA mandate’s encroachment on academic freedom shrinks. At some point even the most zealous defenders of faculty freedom may decide that the encroachment is negligible. In principle the encroachment could be zero, though of course when the encroachment is zero, and gold OA mandates are harmless, then gold OA mandates would also be unnecessary.", "Finally, a common misunderstanding deliberately promulgated by some publishers is that OA must be “mandated” because faculty don’t want it. This position gets understandable but regrettable mileage from the word “mandate.” It also overlooks decisive counter-evidence that we’ve had in hand since 2004. Alma Swan’s empirical studies of researcher attitudes show that an overwhelming majority of researchers would “willingly” comply with a mandatory OA policy from their funder or employer.\nThe most recent evidence of faculty willingness is the stunning series of strong OA policies adopted by unanimous faculty votes. (When is the last time you heard of a unanimous faculty vote for anything, let alone anything of importance?) As recently as 2007, speculation that we’d soon see more than two dozen unanimous faculty votes for OA policies would have been dismissed as wishful thinking. But now that the evidence lies before us, what looks like wishful thinking is the publishing lobby’s idea that OA must be mandated because faculty don’t want it.", "Many OA policies are crossbreeds rather than pure types, but all the policies I’ve seen are variations on these four themes.\nFirst note that none of the three “mandates” absolutely requires OA. Loophole mandates allow some work to escape through the loophole. Deposit mandates allow some deposited work to remain dark (non-OA), by following publisher preferences. Rights-retention mandates with waiver options allow some work to remain dark, by following author preferences.\nLoophole and deposit policies defer to publishers for permissions, while rights-retention policies obtain permission from authors before they transfer rights to publishers. For loophole and deposit policies, permission is contingent, because some publishers are willing and some are not. For rights-retention policies, permission is assured, at least initially or by default, although authors may opt out for any publication.", "These require deposit in an OA repository as soon as the article is accepted for publication, just like deposit mandates. But they add a method to secure permission for making the deposit OA. There’s more than one way to secure that" ] ]
test	62260	[ "Why is Isobar a good name for the main character in the story?", "What is the relevance of \"green cheese\" in this story?", "What is the meaning of \"O.Q.?\"", "Why does Isobar's complexion change color the second time he answers the phone?", "Why doesn't Isobar have a healthy, tanned look?", "Why did Isobar want to stay in Sparks' office after he delivered the weather report to Sparks?", "Why is Isobar prohibited from playing his \"doodlesack\" in the Moon's habitat dome?", "What native fauna has been discovered on the Moon?", "How does Isobar get oxygen when he fools the door sentry and goes outside the habitat dome?", "What does the author of the story think of bagpipe music?" ]	[ [ "Because the main character spends a lot of time in a nightclub called the Isobar.", "Because the main character is an introvert - he tends to isolate himself - and he was a lawyer before coming to the Moon.", "Because the main character is a meteorologist, and isobars, or lines of equal atmospheric pressure on a map, are related to meterology.", "Because the main character only knows hot to play one song, and he plays the same bars over and over again," ], [ "In the habitat dome on the Moon, food for the colony is stored in the crawl space below the office and living level. Green cheese keeps a long time, but has a strong smell which is affecting Isobar Jones' work.", "The story takes place on the Moon, which is often referred to in popular culture as being made of green cheese.", "There is a piece of moldy cheese under the paper on which Isobar Jones wrote the report.", "Isobar Jones has only green cheese in his refrigerator, not having shopped for awhile, and with only green cheese to eat, he is not able to concentrate." ], [ "It is the story author's way of making \"OK\" seem more futuristic, and means the same thing.", "It stands for \"Operational Qualification,\" and using the abbreviation is common among the Moon's governmen administrative personnel.", "It means \"On Queue,\" and refers to the fact that in the Moon colony, people have to wait in line for everything.", "It stands for \"Office Quote,\" and a speaker uses it to indicate that everyone on the meteorology team tends to use the phrase that follows \"O.Q.\" so often that it is a cliche." ], [ "The second call was from a young lady who has nothing to do with his report, so he is embarrassed by his brusque approach when he realizes it.", "Tnhe second call is from Isobar's boss's boss, and he knows he is in real trouble over his late report.", "The second call is from hisi banker, Miss Sally, wanting to knwo when he plans to make his next loan payment.", "The second one is a prank call from a local \"lady of the night\" that his teammates paid for." ], [ "The material that the Moon station is made of blocks the type of light that allows tanning, and Isobar has been there for half a year.", "Isobar is very careful not to get burned by the strong sunlight on the Moon's light side, and wears sunblock that filters out ultraviolet waves.", "Isobar is just recovering from an illness, which is why his meteorological report is so late.", "Isobar is homesick for Earth and a bit depressed, so he allowed a beard to grow and cover his face. He recently shaved it off, and his skin had become quite pale underneath." ], [ "The Terran weather service broadcaster was a good friend of Isobar's and Isobar wanted to chat with him for awhile.", "Because Isobar miised his home so much that he wanted a chance to see normal outdoor scenery such as one can see anywhere on his home planet.", "Isobar was very bored and anything was better than returning to his \"cloistered cell\" after delivering the report to Sparks.", "Because Isobar wanted a good look at a girl he was sweet on who worked in the weather office back on the home planet." ], [ "Loud sounds attract Grannies to the perimeter of the habitat dome.", "Because playing wind instruments on the Moon causes the player to use more than their allotted share of the dome's air supply.", "Because its noises are picked up and carried to all parts of the dome by the dome's ventilation system.", "Because the dome commander dislikes Isobar and is trying to make his service unpleasant enoug that he will quit and leave." ], [ "The lush vegetation outside the dome supports insects and even a few small animals similar to the trilobites found in Earth's fossil record.", "The moon dome is nestled in the middle a very pretty, green valley, full of so many plants and flowers that that they have not all been catalogued yet.", "The only life on the Moon, except for what was brought there from Earth, is a few extremely hardy species of bacteria, which have been found to thrive around the outside of the foundations of the habitat dome.", "A species of creatures that are not very smart, but are very dangerous to humans, and whose outer covering somewhat resembles grayish rock." ], [ "He wears the newest generation of oxygen generators, which takes up no more space than a face shield to protect the eyes and skin from the sun. ", "He just breathes normally. The moon has an atmosphere with sufficient oxygen.", "He wears a standard-issue moon pressure suit with high-capacity air tanks, good for 24 hours.", "He drags a lightweight hose that connects to a port on the outside of the dome. No need for oxygen tanks, as he does not intend to go very far from the dome." ], [ "He loves it and thinks it is undervalued by most people.", "He is indifferent to bagpipe music, but realizes that some people may find it enjoyable.", "He hates it so much that he re-imagines it as a weapon.", "He obviously knows nothing at all about bagpipe music, and the way he describes it in the story shows that." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "\"Excuse me, my boy,\" interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,\n \"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something\n deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call:\nweltschmertz\n. There is no accurate translation in English. It means\n 'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'—something like that but\n intensified a thousandfold.\n\n\n \"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame\n of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which\n they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts\n of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery....\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" demanded Sparks anxiously, \"Isobar ain't got all his\n buttons?\"", "Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are\nyou\ndoing out here, Isobar?\n And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n\n\n \"Oh—the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten\n his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten\n his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow\n throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just\n happened to—Oh!\nthe pipes!\n\"", "\"It is,\" promised Isobar. \"It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally.\n Fine sunshiny weather. You can go.\"\n\n\n \"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar.\"\n\n\n \"Don't mention it, ma'am,\" said Isobar, and returned to his work.", "It\nwas all\n, so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking\n to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to\n his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which,\n six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed:\nCond. of\n Obs.\nHe noted the proper figures under the headings\nSun Spots\n:\nMax\n Freq.\n—\nMin. Freq.\n; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red\n ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work\n sheet.\n\n\n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer,\n frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and\n began writing.\n\n\n \"\nWeather forecast for Terra\n,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching\n sounds.\n\n\n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered\n without looking.", "\"\nStop talking!\n\" roared Roberts. \"Stop talking, guy, and start\n blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last\n hope.\nBlow!\n\"\n\n\n \"And quick!\" appended Brown. \"For here they come!\"\nIsobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.\nHe meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more,\n a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing\n down upon the tree.\n\n\n \"\nHaa-a-roong!\n\" blew Isobar Jones.\nIV", "South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the\n meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his\n job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw\n himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain\n rendered possible.\nIf home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones—known better as \"Isobar\"\n to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna—was a long, long\n way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for\n six tedious Earth months, beneath the\nimpervite\nhemisphere of Lunar\n III—that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station,\n teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.", "\"O.Q.,\" he said wearily. \"O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple\n o' minutes. Keep your pants on!\"\n\n\n \"I—er—I beg your pardon, Isobar?\" queried a mild voice.\n\n\n Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He\n blinked nervously.\n\n\n \"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!\" he gulped. \"\nYou\n, Miss Sally! Golly—'scuse me!\n I didn't realize—\"\n\n\n The Dome Commander's niece giggled.\n\n\n \"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather\n in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki,\n but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice.\"", "It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n \"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n\n\n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n\n\n \"O.Q. But just bring\nit\n. Nothing else.\"\n\n\n Isobar bridled.\n\n\n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of\n yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n\n\n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I\n guess I can play it if I want to—\"", "\"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely,\nno\n! I have no time\n for such nonsense. You know the orders—obey them! And now, gentlemen,\n good afternoon!\"\n\n\n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish—hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play\n your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the\n awful screeching wails—\"\n\n\n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect\n fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from\n his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked\n startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent\n profanity.", "\"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that\n gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\nCommander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing\n yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n\n\n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think—\"\n\n\n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"'\nIn order that work or rest\n periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered\n that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must\n be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander\n,' That\n means you, Jones!\"\n\n\n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to\n play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good\n music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me—\"", "Followed then what, under somewhat different circumstances, should have\n been a piper's dream. For Isobar had an audience which would not—and\n in two cases\ndared\nnot—allow him to stop playing. And to this\n audience he played over and over again his entire repertoire. Marches,\n flings, dances—the stirring\nRhoderik Dhu\nand the lilting\nLassies\n O'Skye\n, the mournful\nCoghiegh nha Shie\nwhose keening is like the\n sound of a sobbing nation.\nThe Cock o' the North\n, he played, and\nMironton\n...\nWee Flow'r o'\n Dee\nand\nMacArthur's March\n...\nLa Cucuracha\nand—", "\"Oh, dagnab it!\" fumed Isobar Jones. \"Oh, tarnation and dingbust!\n Oh—\nfiddlesticks\n!\"\nII\n\n\n \"And so,\" chuckled Riley, \"he left, bubbling like a kettle on a red-hot\n oven. But, boy! was he ever mad! Just about ready to bust, he was.\"\n\n\n Some minutes had passed since Isobar had left; Riley was talking to Dr.\n Loesch, head of the Dome's Physics Research Division. The older man\n nodded commiseratingly.\n\n\n \"It is funny, yes,\" he agreed, \"but at the same time it is not\n altogether amusing. I feel sorry for him. He is a very unhappy man, our\n poor Isobar.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I know,\" said Riley, \"but, hell, we all get a little bit\n homesick now and then. He ought to learn to—\"", "\"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's—well, it's\n the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and\n trees.\"\n\n\n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n\n\n \"We've got\nthem\nright here on Luna. Go look out the tower window,\n Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest,\n greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All\n that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside—and we ain't allowed to go out\n in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to—\"\n\n\n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n\n\n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander\n Eagan. He squirmed.", "\"Outside!\" Eagan stared at him incredulously. \"Are you mad? How about\n the Grannies?\"\n\n\n Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life\n found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an\n abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar\n exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was\n an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low\n intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and\n implacable foe.", "\"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying—\"\n\n\n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir!\n It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of\n absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to\n go, for example—\"\n\n\n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n\n\n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones!\n Where are\nyou\ngoing?\"\n\n\n \"Why—why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n\n\n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n\n\n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a\n while—\"\n\n\n \"I thought that, too. And with\nwhat\n, pray, Jones?\"", "\"Never mind that,\" snapped Isobar, \"now!\" Placid by nature, he could\n move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their\n peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action\n against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons\n were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary\n way of staving off disaster. \"Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you\n go! Give him a lift, Brown—There! That's the stuff!\"", "TROUBLE ON TYCHO\nBy NELSON S. BOND\nIsobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of\n\n the Moon Station's existence. But there came\n\n the day when his comrades found that the worth\n\n of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories March 1943.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe audiophone buzzed thrice—one long, followed by two shorts—and\n Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n\n\n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n\n\n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander\n appeared.", "\"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!\" thought Isobar, \"Locked up\n in an airtight Dome like—like a goldfish in a glass bowl!\" Sunlight?\n Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not\n burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a\n toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented,\n reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.\n\n\n Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he\n signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine\n existence.\n\n\n \"A pain!\" declared Isobar Jones. \"That's what it is; a pain in the\n stummick. Not even allowed to—Yeah?\"", "\"I will,\" promised Isobar, \"don't worry.\"\nWilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely\n out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped\n through, and closed it behind him.\n\n\n A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated\n temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but\n fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with\n joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at\n last! After six long and dreary months!\n\n\n Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes\n that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the\n lunar valley....", "On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle\n adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But\n today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture\n out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have\n to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of\n the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.\n\n\n Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding\n an aura of propriety.\n\n\n \"Very well, Wilkins,\" he said. \"I'll take over now. You may go to the\n meeting.\"\n\n\n Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.\n\n\n \"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?\"\n\n\n Isobar's eyebrows arched.\n\n\n \"You mean you haven't been notified?\"" ], [ "\"Report ready, Jones?\"\n\n\n \"Almost,\" acknowledged Isobar gloomily. \"It prob'ly ain't right,\n though. How anybody can be expected to get\nanything\nright on this\n dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese—\"\n\n\n \"Send it up,\" interrupted Colonel Eagan, \"as soon as you can. Sparks is\n making Terra contact now. That is all.\"\n\n\n \"That ain't all!\" declared Isobar indignantly. \"How about my bag—?\"", "\"\nStop talking!\n\" roared Roberts. \"Stop talking, guy, and start\n blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last\n hope.\nBlow!\n\"\n\n\n \"And quick!\" appended Brown. \"For here they come!\"\nIsobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.\nHe meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more,\n a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing\n down upon the tree.\n\n\n \"\nHaa-a-roong!\n\" blew Isobar Jones.\nIV", "He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered.\n Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally\n turned to him in sheer exasperation.\n\n\n \"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your\n britches?\"\n\n\n Isobar said, \"H-huh? Oh, you mean—Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe\n you wouldn't mind if I—well—er—\"\n\n\n \"I get it!\" Sparks grinned. \"Want to play peekaboo while the contact's\n open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!\"\n\n\n He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of\n incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before\n him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating\n with painstaking clarity:", "It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n \"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n\n\n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n\n\n \"O.Q. But just bring\nit\n. Nothing else.\"\n\n\n Isobar bridled.\n\n\n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of\n yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n\n\n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I\n guess I can play it if I want to—\"", "\"Don't be a dope,\" said Sparks, \"you dope! I wasn't talking to you.\n I'm entertaining a visitor, a refugee from a cuckoo clock. Look, do me\n a favor, chum? Can you twist your mike around so it's pointing out a\n window?\"\n\n\n \"What? Why—why, yes, but—\"\n\n\n \"Without buts,\" said Sparks grumpily. \"Yours not to reason why; yours\n but to do or don't. Will you do it?\"\n\n\n \"Well, sure. But I don't understand—\" The silver platter which had\n mirrored the radioman's face clouded as the Earth operator twirled the\n inconoscope. Walls and desks of an ordinary broadcasting office spun\n briefly into view; then the plate reflected a glimpse of an Earthly\n landscape. Soft blue sky warmed by an atmosphere-shielded sun ... green\n trees firmly rooted in still-greener grass ... flowers ... birds ...\n people....", "\"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's—well, it's\n the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and\n trees.\"\n\n\n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n\n\n \"We've got\nthem\nright here on Luna. Go look out the tower window,\n Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest,\n greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All\n that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside—and we ain't allowed to go out\n in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to—\"\n\n\n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n\n\n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander\n Eagan. He squirmed.", "And—even he could not have foreseen the astounding results of\n his piping! What happened next was as astonishing as it was\n incomprehensible. For as the pipes, filled now and primed to burst into\n whatever substitute for melody they were prodded into, wailed into\n action—the Grannies' rush came to an abrupt halt!\n\n\n As one, they stopped cold in their tracks and turned dull, colorless,\n questioning eyes upward into the tree whence came this weird and\n vibrant droning!\n\n\n So stunned with surprise was Isobar that his grip on the pipes relaxed,\n his lips almost slipped from the reed. But Brown's delighted bellow\n lifted his paralysis.\n\n\n \"Sacred rings of Saturn-look! They\nlike\nit! Keep playing, Jonesy!\n Play, boy, like you never played before!\"", "Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are\nyou\ndoing out here, Isobar?\n And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n\n\n \"Oh—the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten\n his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten\n his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow\n throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just\n happened to—Oh!\nthe pipes!\n\"", "\"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in\nmy\ncubby! I've got sensitive\n eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling\n quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah? What?\"\n\n\n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown—\"\n\n\n \"What about 'em?\"\n\n\n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n\n\n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n\n\n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe—if they should meet any Grannies. Well,\n scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n\n\n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his\n cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.", "How long he wandered thus, carefree and utterly content, he could not\n afterward say. It seemed like minutes; it must have been longer. He\n only knew that the grass was green beneath his feet, the trees were a\n lacy network through which warm sunlight filtered benevolently, the\n chirrupings of small insects and the rustling whisper of the breezes\n formed a tiny symphony of happiness through which he moved as one\n charmed.\n\n\n It did not occur to him that he had wandered too far from the Dome's\n entrance until, strolling through an enchanting flower-decked glade, he\n was startled to hear—off to his right—the sharp, explosive bark of a\n Haemholtz ray pistol.", "\"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass\n of despair. He may try\nanything\nto retrieve his lost happiness, rid\n his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying\n hunger—By the way, where is he now?\"\n\n\n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will\n find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n\n\n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n \"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n\n\n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he\n was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive\n culprit.", "\"That goes for me, too, Jonesy,\" added Brown from an upper bough.\n \"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long\n as it lasts, but—\" He stared down upon the gathering knot of\n Grannies unhappily—\"it's not going to last long with that bunch of\n superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they\n come!\"\n\n\n For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic\n consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged\n headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like\n the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted\n beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about\n them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged\n forest monarch shuddered in agony.", "\"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right\n opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over\n there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of\n order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome—but\n the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short\n while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!\n\n\n \"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders.\n They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe\n they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can\n make him look out here—\"", "\"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely,\nno\n! I have no time\n for such nonsense. You know the orders—obey them! And now, gentlemen,\n good afternoon!\"\n\n\n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish—hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play\n your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the\n awful screeching wails—\"\n\n\n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect\n fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from\n his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked\n startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent\n profanity.", "\"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and\n get out of here! Watch the Grannies—they'll be after us the minute\n Isobar stops playing!\"\n\n\n Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar\n voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's\n fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:\n\n\n \"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres—\nthose Grannies are\n stone dead\n!\"", "But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again,\n excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing\n position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over\n his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath\n expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive,\n fearsome, \"\nKaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong!\n\"\n\n\n Roberts moaned.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n\n\n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n\n\n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense\n of hearing. That's been proven—\"\n\n\n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.", "Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever\n yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science\n was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of\n Graniteback physiology—but it was known, from bitter experience, that\n the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something\n harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be\n penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame,\n by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered\n atomo-needle dispenser.\n\n\n All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:\n\n\n \"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome,\" he said, \"for\n a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back\n inside—\"", "\"Earth answering Luna. Earth answering Luna's call. Can you hear me,\n Luna? Can you hear—?\"\n\n\n \"I can not only hear you,\" snorted Riley, \"I can see you and smell you,\n as well. Stop hamming it, stupid! You're lousing up the earth!\"\n\n\n The now-visible face of the Earth radioman drew into a grimace of\n displeasure.\n\n\n \"Oh, it's\nyou\n? Funny man, eh? Funny man Riley?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Riley agreeably. \"I'm a scream. Four-alarm Riley,\n the cosmic comedian—didn't you know? Flick on your dictacoder,\n oyster-puss; here's the weather report.\" He read it. \"'\nWeather\n forecast for Terra, week of May 15-21\n—'\"", "\"Excuse me, my boy,\" interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,\n \"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something\n deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call:\nweltschmertz\n. There is no accurate translation in English. It means\n 'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'—something like that but\n intensified a thousandfold.\n\n\n \"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame\n of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which\n they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts\n of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery....\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" demanded Sparks anxiously, \"Isobar ain't got all his\n buttons?\"", "And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood\n pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the\n chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the\n blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,\n\n\n \"Keep playing!\" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. \"Just a few\n minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his\n turret window five minutes ago!\"\n\n\n And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of\n those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he\n knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another\n sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank,\n sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.\n\n\n He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of\n encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below." ], [ "\"O.Q.,\" he said wearily. \"O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple\n o' minutes. Keep your pants on!\"\n\n\n \"I—er—I beg your pardon, Isobar?\" queried a mild voice.\n\n\n Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He\n blinked nervously.\n\n\n \"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!\" he gulped. \"\nYou\n, Miss Sally! Golly—'scuse me!\n I didn't realize—\"\n\n\n The Dome Commander's niece giggled.\n\n\n \"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather\n in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki,\n but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice.\"", "It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n \"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n\n\n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n\n\n \"O.Q. But just bring\nit\n. Nothing else.\"\n\n\n Isobar bridled.\n\n\n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of\n yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n\n\n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I\n guess I can play it if I want to—\"", "\"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\nRiley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report,\n entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and\n dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n\n\n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n\n\n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded\n Riley's shoulder.\n\n\n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked\n startled.\n\n\n \"How's that? I didn't say a word—\"", "He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered.\n Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally\n turned to him in sheer exasperation.\n\n\n \"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your\n britches?\"\n\n\n Isobar said, \"H-huh? Oh, you mean—Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe\n you wouldn't mind if I—well—er—\"\n\n\n \"I get it!\" Sparks grinned. \"Want to play peekaboo while the contact's\n open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!\"\n\n\n He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of\n incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before\n him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating\n with painstaking clarity:", "\"That goes for me, too, Jonesy,\" added Brown from an upper bough.\n \"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long\n as it lasts, but—\" He stared down upon the gathering knot of\n Grannies unhappily—\"it's not going to last long with that bunch of\n superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they\n come!\"\n\n\n For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic\n consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged\n headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like\n the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted\n beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about\n them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged\n forest monarch shuddered in agony.", "\"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that\n gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\nCommander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing\n yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n\n\n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think—\"\n\n\n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"'\nIn order that work or rest\n periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered\n that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must\n be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander\n,' That\n means you, Jones!\"\n\n\n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to\n play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good\n music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me—\"", "\"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely,\nno\n! I have no time\n for such nonsense. You know the orders—obey them! And now, gentlemen,\n good afternoon!\"\n\n\n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish—hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play\n your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the\n awful screeching wails—\"\n\n\n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect\n fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from\n his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked\n startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent\n profanity.", "\"Enough?\" asked Sparks.\n\n\n Isobar Jones awakened from his trance, eyes dulling. Reluctantly he\n nodded. Riley stared at him strangely, almost gently. To the other\n radioman, \"O.Q., pal,\" he said. \"Cut!\"\n\n\n \"Cut!\" agreed the other. The plate blanked out.\n\n\n \"Thanks, Sparks,\" said Isobar.\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" shrugged Riley \"\nHe twisted\nthe mike; not me. But—how come\n you always want to take a squint at Earth when the circuit's open,\n Jonesy? Homesick?\"\n\n\n \"Sort of,\" admitted Isobar guiltily.\n\n\n \"Well, hell, aren't we all? But we can't leave here for another six\n months at least. Not till our tricks are up. I should think it'd only\n make you feel worse to see Earth.\"", "But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again,\n excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing\n position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over\n his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath\n expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive,\n fearsome, \"\nKaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong!\n\"\n\n\n Roberts moaned.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n\n\n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n\n\n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense\n of hearing. That's been proven—\"\n\n\n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.", "Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are\nyou\ndoing out here, Isobar?\n And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n\n\n \"Oh—the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten\n his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten\n his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow\n throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just\n happened to—Oh!\nthe pipes!\n\"", "\"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and\n get out of here! Watch the Grannies—they'll be after us the minute\n Isobar stops playing!\"\n\n\n Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar\n voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's\n fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:\n\n\n \"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres—\nthose Grannies are\n stone dead\n!\"", "\"Notified of\nwhat\n?\"\n\n\n \"Why, the general council of all Patrolmen! Weren't you told that I\n would take your place here while you reported to G.H.Q.?\"\n\n\n \"I ain't,\" puzzled Wilkins, \"heard nothing about it. Maybe I ought to\n call the office, maybe?\"\n\n\n And he moved the wall-audio. But Isobar said swiftly. \"That—er—won't\n be necessary, Wilkins. My orders were plain enough. Now, you just run\n along. I'll watch this entrance for you.\"\n\n\n \"We-e-ell,\" said Wilkins, \"if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a\n sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back\n sudden-like.\"", "\"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying—\"\n\n\n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir!\n It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of\n absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to\n go, for example—\"\n\n\n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n\n\n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones!\n Where are\nyou\ngoing?\"\n\n\n \"Why—why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n\n\n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n\n\n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a\n while—\"\n\n\n \"I thought that, too. And with\nwhat\n, pray, Jones?\"", "\"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right\n opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over\n there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of\n order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome—but\n the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short\n while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!\n\n\n \"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders.\n They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe\n they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can\n make him look out here—\"", "\"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in\nmy\ncubby! I've got sensitive\n eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling\n quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah? What?\"\n\n\n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown—\"\n\n\n \"What about 'em?\"\n\n\n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n\n\n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n\n\n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe—if they should meet any Grannies. Well,\n scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n\n\n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his\n cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.", "\"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass\n of despair. He may try\nanything\nto retrieve his lost happiness, rid\n his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying\n hunger—By the way, where is he now?\"\n\n\n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will\n find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n\n\n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n \"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n\n\n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he\n was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive\n culprit.", "On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle\n adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But\n today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture\n out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have\n to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of\n the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.\n\n\n Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding\n an aura of propriety.\n\n\n \"Very well, Wilkins,\" he said. \"I'll take over now. You may go to the\n meeting.\"\n\n\n Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.\n\n\n \"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?\"\n\n\n Isobar's eyebrows arched.\n\n\n \"You mean you haven't been notified?\"", "It\nwas all\n, so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking\n to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to\n his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which,\n six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed:\nCond. of\n Obs.\nHe noted the proper figures under the headings\nSun Spots\n:\nMax\n Freq.\n—\nMin. Freq.\n; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red\n ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work\n sheet.\n\n\n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer,\n frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and\n began writing.\n\n\n \"\nWeather forecast for Terra\n,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching\n sounds.\n\n\n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered\n without looking.", "\"Earth answering Luna. Earth answering Luna's call. Can you hear me,\n Luna? Can you hear—?\"\n\n\n \"I can not only hear you,\" snorted Riley, \"I can see you and smell you,\n as well. Stop hamming it, stupid! You're lousing up the earth!\"\n\n\n The now-visible face of the Earth radioman drew into a grimace of\n displeasure.\n\n\n \"Oh, it's\nyou\n? Funny man, eh? Funny man Riley?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Riley agreeably. \"I'm a scream. Four-alarm Riley,\n the cosmic comedian—didn't you know? Flick on your dictacoder,\n oyster-puss; here's the weather report.\" He read it. \"'\nWeather\n forecast for Terra, week of May 15-21\n—'\"", "\"Outside!\" Eagan stared at him incredulously. \"Are you mad? How about\n the Grannies?\"\n\n\n Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life\n found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an\n abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar\n exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was\n an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low\n intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and\n implacable foe." ], [ "\"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass\n of despair. He may try\nanything\nto retrieve his lost happiness, rid\n his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying\n hunger—By the way, where is he now?\"\n\n\n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will\n find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n\n\n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n \"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n\n\n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he\n was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive\n culprit.", "It\nwas all\n, so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking\n to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to\n his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which,\n six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed:\nCond. of\n Obs.\nHe noted the proper figures under the headings\nSun Spots\n:\nMax\n Freq.\n—\nMin. Freq.\n; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red\n ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work\n sheet.\n\n\n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer,\n frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and\n began writing.\n\n\n \"\nWeather forecast for Terra\n,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching\n sounds.\n\n\n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered\n without looking.", "Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are\nyou\ndoing out here, Isobar?\n And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n\n\n \"Oh—the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten\n his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten\n his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow\n throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just\n happened to—Oh!\nthe pipes!\n\"", "He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered.\n Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally\n turned to him in sheer exasperation.\n\n\n \"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your\n britches?\"\n\n\n Isobar said, \"H-huh? Oh, you mean—Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe\n you wouldn't mind if I—well—er—\"\n\n\n \"I get it!\" Sparks grinned. \"Want to play peekaboo while the contact's\n open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!\"\n\n\n He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of\n incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before\n him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating\n with painstaking clarity:", "But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again,\n excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing\n position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over\n his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath\n expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive,\n fearsome, \"\nKaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong!\n\"\n\n\n Roberts moaned.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n\n\n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n\n\n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense\n of hearing. That's been proven—\"\n\n\n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.", "\"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\nRiley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report,\n entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and\n dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n\n\n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n\n\n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded\n Riley's shoulder.\n\n\n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked\n startled.\n\n\n \"How's that? I didn't say a word—\"", "TROUBLE ON TYCHO\nBy NELSON S. BOND\nIsobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of\n\n the Moon Station's existence. But there came\n\n the day when his comrades found that the worth\n\n of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories March 1943.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe audiophone buzzed thrice—one long, followed by two shorts—and\n Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n\n\n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n\n\n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander\n appeared.", "\"\nStop talking!\n\" roared Roberts. \"Stop talking, guy, and start\n blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last\n hope.\nBlow!\n\"\n\n\n \"And quick!\" appended Brown. \"For here they come!\"\nIsobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.\nHe meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more,\n a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing\n down upon the tree.\n\n\n \"\nHaa-a-roong!\n\" blew Isobar Jones.\nIV", "\"Notified of\nwhat\n?\"\n\n\n \"Why, the general council of all Patrolmen! Weren't you told that I\n would take your place here while you reported to G.H.Q.?\"\n\n\n \"I ain't,\" puzzled Wilkins, \"heard nothing about it. Maybe I ought to\n call the office, maybe?\"\n\n\n And he moved the wall-audio. But Isobar said swiftly. \"That—er—won't\n be necessary, Wilkins. My orders were plain enough. Now, you just run\n along. I'll watch this entrance for you.\"\n\n\n \"We-e-ell,\" said Wilkins, \"if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a\n sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back\n sudden-like.\"", "It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n \"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n\n\n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n\n\n \"O.Q. But just bring\nit\n. Nothing else.\"\n\n\n Isobar bridled.\n\n\n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of\n yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n\n\n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I\n guess I can play it if I want to—\"", "\"Excuse me, my boy,\" interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,\n \"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something\n deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call:\nweltschmertz\n. There is no accurate translation in English. It means\n 'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'—something like that but\n intensified a thousandfold.\n\n\n \"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame\n of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which\n they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts\n of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery....\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" demanded Sparks anxiously, \"Isobar ain't got all his\n buttons?\"", "He whirled, staring about him wildly, and discovered that though his\n meandering had kept him near the Dome, he had unconsciously followed\n its hemispherical perimeter to a point nearly two miles from the\n Gateway. By the placement of ports and windows, Isobar was able to\n judge his location perfectly; he was opposite that portion of the\n structure which housed Sparks' radio turret.\n\n\n And the shooting? That could only be—\n\n\n He did not have to name its reason, even to himself. For at that\n moment, there came racing around the curve of the Dome a pair of\n figures, Patrolmen clad in fatigue drab. Roberts and Brown. Roberts was\n staggering, one foot dragged awkwardly as he ran; Brown's left arm,\n bloodstained from shoulder to elbow, hung limply at his side, but in\n his good right fist he held a spitting Haemholtz with which he tried to\n cover his comrade's sluggish retreat.", "\"It is,\" promised Isobar. \"It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally.\n Fine sunshiny weather. You can go.\"\n\n\n \"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar.\"\n\n\n \"Don't mention it, ma'am,\" said Isobar, and returned to his work.", "\"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely,\nno\n! I have no time\n for such nonsense. You know the orders—obey them! And now, gentlemen,\n good afternoon!\"\n\n\n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish—hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play\n your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the\n awful screeching wails—\"\n\n\n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect\n fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from\n his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked\n startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent\n profanity.", "Followed then what, under somewhat different circumstances, should have\n been a piper's dream. For Isobar had an audience which would not—and\n in two cases\ndared\nnot—allow him to stop playing. And to this\n audience he played over and over again his entire repertoire. Marches,\n flings, dances—the stirring\nRhoderik Dhu\nand the lilting\nLassies\n O'Skye\n, the mournful\nCoghiegh nha Shie\nwhose keening is like the\n sound of a sobbing nation.\nThe Cock o' the North\n, he played, and\nMironton\n...\nWee Flow'r o'\n Dee\nand\nMacArthur's March\n...\nLa Cucuracha\nand—", "\"Never mind that,\" snapped Isobar, \"now!\" Placid by nature, he could\n move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their\n peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action\n against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons\n were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary\n way of staving off disaster. \"Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you\n go! Give him a lift, Brown—There! That's the stuff!\"", "\"O.Q.,\" he said wearily. \"O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple\n o' minutes. Keep your pants on!\"\n\n\n \"I—er—I beg your pardon, Isobar?\" queried a mild voice.\n\n\n Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He\n blinked nervously.\n\n\n \"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!\" he gulped. \"\nYou\n, Miss Sally! Golly—'scuse me!\n I didn't realize—\"\n\n\n The Dome Commander's niece giggled.\n\n\n \"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather\n in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki,\n but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice.\"", "And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood\n pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the\n chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the\n blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,\n\n\n \"Keep playing!\" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. \"Just a few\n minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his\n turret window five minutes ago!\"\n\n\n And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of\n those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he\n knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another\n sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank,\n sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.\n\n\n He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of\n encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.", "Desperately they clung to their perches. Though the great tree bent, it\n did not break. But when it stopped trembling, it was canted drunkenly\n to one side, and the erstwhile solid earth about its base was broken\n and cracked—revealing fleshy tentacles uprooted from ancient moorings!\nBrown stared at this evidence of the Grannies' power with\n terror-fascinated eyes. His voice was none too firm.\n\n\n \"Lord! Piledrivers! A couple more like that—\"\n\n\n Isobar nodded. He knew what falling into the clutch of the Grannies\n meant. He had once seen the grisly aftermath of a Graniteback feast.\n Even now their adversaries had drawn back for a second attack. A sudden\n idea struck him. A straw of hope at which he grasped feverishly.\n\n\n \"You telecast a message to the Dome? Help should be on the way by now.\n If we can just hold out—\"", "On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle\n adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But\n today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture\n out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have\n to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of\n the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.\n\n\n Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding\n an aura of propriety.\n\n\n \"Very well, Wilkins,\" he said. \"I'll take over now. You may go to the\n meeting.\"\n\n\n Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.\n\n\n \"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?\"\n\n\n Isobar's eyebrows arched.\n\n\n \"You mean you haven't been notified?\"" ], [ "Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are\nyou\ndoing out here, Isobar?\n And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n\n\n \"Oh—the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten\n his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten\n his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow\n throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just\n happened to—Oh!\nthe pipes!\n\"", "\"It is,\" promised Isobar. \"It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally.\n Fine sunshiny weather. You can go.\"\n\n\n \"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar.\"\n\n\n \"Don't mention it, ma'am,\" said Isobar, and returned to his work.", "\"Excuse me, my boy,\" interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,\n \"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something\n deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call:\nweltschmertz\n. There is no accurate translation in English. It means\n 'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'—something like that but\n intensified a thousandfold.\n\n\n \"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame\n of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which\n they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts\n of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery....\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" demanded Sparks anxiously, \"Isobar ain't got all his\n buttons?\"", "\"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass\n of despair. He may try\nanything\nto retrieve his lost happiness, rid\n his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying\n hunger—By the way, where is he now?\"\n\n\n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will\n find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n\n\n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n \"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n\n\n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he\n was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive\n culprit.", "\"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!\" thought Isobar, \"Locked up\n in an airtight Dome like—like a goldfish in a glass bowl!\" Sunlight?\n Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not\n burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a\n toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented,\n reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.\n\n\n Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he\n signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine\n existence.\n\n\n \"A pain!\" declared Isobar Jones. \"That's what it is; a pain in the\n stummick. Not even allowed to—Yeah?\"", "It\nwas all\n, so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking\n to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to\n his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which,\n six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed:\nCond. of\n Obs.\nHe noted the proper figures under the headings\nSun Spots\n:\nMax\n Freq.\n—\nMin. Freq.\n; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red\n ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work\n sheet.\n\n\n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer,\n frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and\n began writing.\n\n\n \"\nWeather forecast for Terra\n,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching\n sounds.\n\n\n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered\n without looking.", "\"I will,\" promised Isobar, \"don't worry.\"\nWilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely\n out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped\n through, and closed it behind him.\n\n\n A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated\n temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but\n fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with\n joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at\n last! After six long and dreary months!\n\n\n Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes\n that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the\n lunar valley....", "\"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely,\nno\n! I have no time\n for such nonsense. You know the orders—obey them! And now, gentlemen,\n good afternoon!\"\n\n\n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish—hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play\n your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the\n awful screeching wails—\"\n\n\n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect\n fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from\n his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked\n startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent\n profanity.", "South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the\n meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his\n job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw\n himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain\n rendered possible.\nIf home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones—known better as \"Isobar\"\n to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna—was a long, long\n way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for\n six tedious Earth months, beneath the\nimpervite\nhemisphere of Lunar\n III—that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station,\n teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.", "\"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's—well, it's\n the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and\n trees.\"\n\n\n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n\n\n \"We've got\nthem\nright here on Luna. Go look out the tower window,\n Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest,\n greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All\n that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside—and we ain't allowed to go out\n in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to—\"\n\n\n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n\n\n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander\n Eagan. He squirmed.", "But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again,\n excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing\n position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over\n his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath\n expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive,\n fearsome, \"\nKaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong!\n\"\n\n\n Roberts moaned.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n\n\n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n\n\n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense\n of hearing. That's been proven—\"\n\n\n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.", "\"O.Q.,\" he said wearily. \"O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple\n o' minutes. Keep your pants on!\"\n\n\n \"I—er—I beg your pardon, Isobar?\" queried a mild voice.\n\n\n Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He\n blinked nervously.\n\n\n \"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!\" he gulped. \"\nYou\n, Miss Sally! Golly—'scuse me!\n I didn't realize—\"\n\n\n The Dome Commander's niece giggled.\n\n\n \"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather\n in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki,\n but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice.\"", "\"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that\n gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\nCommander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing\n yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n\n\n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think—\"\n\n\n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"'\nIn order that work or rest\n periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered\n that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must\n be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander\n,' That\n means you, Jones!\"\n\n\n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to\n play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good\n music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me—\"", "Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever\n yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science\n was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of\n Graniteback physiology—but it was known, from bitter experience, that\n the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something\n harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be\n penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame,\n by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered\n atomo-needle dispenser.\n\n\n All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:\n\n\n \"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome,\" he said, \"for\n a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back\n inside—\"", "\"Oh, dagnab it!\" fumed Isobar Jones. \"Oh, tarnation and dingbust!\n Oh—\nfiddlesticks\n!\"\nII\n\n\n \"And so,\" chuckled Riley, \"he left, bubbling like a kettle on a red-hot\n oven. But, boy! was he ever mad! Just about ready to bust, he was.\"\n\n\n Some minutes had passed since Isobar had left; Riley was talking to Dr.\n Loesch, head of the Dome's Physics Research Division. The older man\n nodded commiseratingly.\n\n\n \"It is funny, yes,\" he agreed, \"but at the same time it is not\n altogether amusing. I feel sorry for him. He is a very unhappy man, our\n poor Isobar.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I know,\" said Riley, \"but, hell, we all get a little bit\n homesick now and then. He ought to learn to—\"", "\"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in\nmy\ncubby! I've got sensitive\n eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling\n quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah? What?\"\n\n\n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown—\"\n\n\n \"What about 'em?\"\n\n\n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n\n\n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n\n\n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe—if they should meet any Grannies. Well,\n scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n\n\n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his\n cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.", "\"Never mind that,\" snapped Isobar, \"now!\" Placid by nature, he could\n move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their\n peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action\n against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons\n were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary\n way of staving off disaster. \"Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you\n go! Give him a lift, Brown—There! That's the stuff!\"", "\"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying—\"\n\n\n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir!\n It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of\n absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to\n go, for example—\"\n\n\n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n\n\n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones!\n Where are\nyou\ngoing?\"\n\n\n \"Why—why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n\n\n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n\n\n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a\n while—\"\n\n\n \"I thought that, too. And with\nwhat\n, pray, Jones?\"", "\"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\nRiley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report,\n entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and\n dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n\n\n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n\n\n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded\n Riley's shoulder.\n\n\n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked\n startled.\n\n\n \"How's that? I didn't say a word—\"", "It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n \"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n\n\n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n\n\n \"O.Q. But just bring\nit\n. Nothing else.\"\n\n\n Isobar bridled.\n\n\n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of\n yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n\n\n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I\n guess I can play it if I want to—\"" ], [ "He didn't leave Sparks' turret after the sheets were delivered.\n Instead, he hung around, fidgeting so obtrusively that Riley finally\n turned to him in sheer exasperation.\n\n\n \"Sweet snakes of Saturn, Jonesy, what's the trouble? Bugs in your\n britches?\"\n\n\n Isobar said, \"H-huh? Oh, you mean—Oh, thanks, no! I just thought mebbe\n you wouldn't mind if I—well—er—\"\n\n\n \"I get it!\" Sparks grinned. \"Want to play peekaboo while the contact's\n open, eh? Well, O.Q. Watch the birdie!\"\n\n\n He twisted dials, adjusted verniers, fingered a host of\n incomprehensible keys. Current hummed and howled. Then a plate before\n him cleared, and the voice of the Earth operator came in, enunciating\n with painstaking clarity:", "\"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\nRiley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report,\n entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and\n dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n\n\n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n\n\n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded\n Riley's shoulder.\n\n\n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked\n startled.\n\n\n \"How's that? I didn't say a word—\"", "\"It is,\" promised Isobar. \"It'll be swell all weekend, Miss Sally.\n Fine sunshiny weather. You can go.\"\n\n\n \"That's wonderful. Thanks so much, Isobar.\"\n\n\n \"Don't mention it, ma'am,\" said Isobar, and returned to his work.", "It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n \"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n\n\n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n\n\n \"O.Q. But just bring\nit\n. Nothing else.\"\n\n\n Isobar bridled.\n\n\n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of\n yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n\n\n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I\n guess I can play it if I want to—\"", "\"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in\nmy\ncubby! I've got sensitive\n eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling\n quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah? What?\"\n\n\n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown—\"\n\n\n \"What about 'em?\"\n\n\n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n\n\n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n\n\n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe—if they should meet any Grannies. Well,\n scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n\n\n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his\n cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.", "It\nwas all\n, so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking\n to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to\n his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which,\n six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed:\nCond. of\n Obs.\nHe noted the proper figures under the headings\nSun Spots\n:\nMax\n Freq.\n—\nMin. Freq.\n; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red\n ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work\n sheet.\n\n\n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer,\n frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and\n began writing.\n\n\n \"\nWeather forecast for Terra\n,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching\n sounds.\n\n\n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered\n without looking.", "Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are\nyou\ndoing out here, Isobar?\n And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n\n\n \"Oh—the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten\n his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten\n his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow\n throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just\n happened to—Oh!\nthe pipes!\n\"", "\"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying—\"\n\n\n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir!\n It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of\n absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to\n go, for example—\"\n\n\n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n\n\n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones!\n Where are\nyou\ngoing?\"\n\n\n \"Why—why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n\n\n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n\n\n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a\n while—\"\n\n\n \"I thought that, too. And with\nwhat\n, pray, Jones?\"", "\"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass\n of despair. He may try\nanything\nto retrieve his lost happiness, rid\n his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying\n hunger—By the way, where is he now?\"\n\n\n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will\n find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n\n\n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n \"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n\n\n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he\n was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive\n culprit.", "He whirled, staring about him wildly, and discovered that though his\n meandering had kept him near the Dome, he had unconsciously followed\n its hemispherical perimeter to a point nearly two miles from the\n Gateway. By the placement of ports and windows, Isobar was able to\n judge his location perfectly; he was opposite that portion of the\n structure which housed Sparks' radio turret.\n\n\n And the shooting? That could only be—\n\n\n He did not have to name its reason, even to himself. For at that\n moment, there came racing around the curve of the Dome a pair of\n figures, Patrolmen clad in fatigue drab. Roberts and Brown. Roberts was\n staggering, one foot dragged awkwardly as he ran; Brown's left arm,\n bloodstained from shoulder to elbow, hung limply at his side, but in\n his good right fist he held a spitting Haemholtz with which he tried to\n cover his comrade's sluggish retreat.", "\"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely,\nno\n! I have no time\n for such nonsense. You know the orders—obey them! And now, gentlemen,\n good afternoon!\"\n\n\n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish—hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play\n your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the\n awful screeching wails—\"\n\n\n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect\n fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from\n his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked\n startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent\n profanity.", "South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the\n meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his\n job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw\n himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain\n rendered possible.\nIf home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones—known better as \"Isobar\"\n to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna—was a long, long\n way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for\n six tedious Earth months, beneath the\nimpervite\nhemisphere of Lunar\n III—that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station,\n teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.", "\"Never mind that,\" snapped Isobar, \"now!\" Placid by nature, he could\n move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their\n peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action\n against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons\n were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary\n way of staving off disaster. \"Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you\n go! Give him a lift, Brown—There! That's the stuff!\"", "\"Notified of\nwhat\n?\"\n\n\n \"Why, the general council of all Patrolmen! Weren't you told that I\n would take your place here while you reported to G.H.Q.?\"\n\n\n \"I ain't,\" puzzled Wilkins, \"heard nothing about it. Maybe I ought to\n call the office, maybe?\"\n\n\n And he moved the wall-audio. But Isobar said swiftly. \"That—er—won't\n be necessary, Wilkins. My orders were plain enough. Now, you just run\n along. I'll watch this entrance for you.\"\n\n\n \"We-e-ell,\" said Wilkins, \"if you say so. Orders is orders. But keep a\n sharp eye out, Mister Jones, in case Roberts and Brown should come back\n sudden-like.\"", "\"Excuse me, my boy,\" interrupted the aged physicist, his voice gentle,\n \"it is not mere homesickness that troubles our friend. It is something\n deeper, much more vital and serious. It is what my people call:\nweltschmertz\n. There is no accurate translation in English. It means\n 'world sickness,' or better, 'world weariness'—something like that but\n intensified a thousandfold.\n\n\n \"It is a deeply-rooted mental condition, sometimes a dangerous frame\n of mind. Under its grip, men do wild things. Hating the world on which\n they find themselves, they rebel in curious ways. Suicide ... mad acts\n of valor ... deeds of cunning or knavery....\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" demanded Sparks anxiously, \"Isobar ain't got all his\n buttons?\"", "On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle\n adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But\n today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture\n out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have\n to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of\n the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.\n\n\n Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding\n an aura of propriety.\n\n\n \"Very well, Wilkins,\" he said. \"I'll take over now. You may go to the\n meeting.\"\n\n\n Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.\n\n\n \"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?\"\n\n\n Isobar's eyebrows arched.\n\n\n \"You mean you haven't been notified?\"", "\"Enough?\" asked Sparks.\n\n\n Isobar Jones awakened from his trance, eyes dulling. Reluctantly he\n nodded. Riley stared at him strangely, almost gently. To the other\n radioman, \"O.Q., pal,\" he said. \"Cut!\"\n\n\n \"Cut!\" agreed the other. The plate blanked out.\n\n\n \"Thanks, Sparks,\" said Isobar.\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" shrugged Riley \"\nHe twisted\nthe mike; not me. But—how come\n you always want to take a squint at Earth when the circuit's open,\n Jonesy? Homesick?\"\n\n\n \"Sort of,\" admitted Isobar guiltily.\n\n\n \"Well, hell, aren't we all? But we can't leave here for another six\n months at least. Not till our tricks are up. I should think it'd only\n make you feel worse to see Earth.\"", "\"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that\n gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\nCommander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing\n yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n\n\n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think—\"\n\n\n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"'\nIn order that work or rest\n periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered\n that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must\n be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander\n,' That\n means you, Jones!\"\n\n\n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to\n play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good\n music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me—\"", "\"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's—well, it's\n the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and\n trees.\"\n\n\n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n\n\n \"We've got\nthem\nright here on Luna. Go look out the tower window,\n Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest,\n greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All\n that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside—and we ain't allowed to go out\n in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to—\"\n\n\n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n\n\n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander\n Eagan. He squirmed.", "\"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and\n get out of here! Watch the Grannies—they'll be after us the minute\n Isobar stops playing!\"\n\n\n Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar\n voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's\n fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:\n\n\n \"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres—\nthose Grannies are\n stone dead\n!\"" ], [ "\"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that\n gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\nCommander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing\n yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n\n\n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think—\"\n\n\n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"'\nIn order that work or rest\n periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered\n that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must\n be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander\n,' That\n means you, Jones!\"\n\n\n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to\n play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good\n music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me—\"", "\"But the Dome,\" pointed out Commander Eagan, \"has an air-conditioning\n system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of\n your—er—so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire\n structure.\"\n\n\n He suddenly seemed to gain stature.\n\n\n \"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire\n organization for your own—er—amusement.\"\n\n\n \"But—\" said Isobar.\n\n\n \"No!\"\n\n\n Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already.\n If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last\n amusement which lightened his moments of freedom—\n\n\n \"Look, Commander!\" he pleaded, \"I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother\n nobody. I'll go Outside and play it—\"", "It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n \"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n\n\n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n\n\n \"O.Q. But just bring\nit\n. Nothing else.\"\n\n\n Isobar bridled.\n\n\n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of\n yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n\n\n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I\n guess I can play it if I want to—\"", "\"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's—well, it's\n the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and\n trees.\"\n\n\n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n\n\n \"We've got\nthem\nright here on Luna. Go look out the tower window,\n Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest,\n greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All\n that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside—and we ain't allowed to go out\n in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to—\"\n\n\n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n\n\n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander\n Eagan. He squirmed.", "\"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely,\nno\n! I have no time\n for such nonsense. You know the orders—obey them! And now, gentlemen,\n good afternoon!\"\n\n\n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish—hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play\n your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the\n awful screeching wails—\"\n\n\n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect\n fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from\n his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked\n startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent\n profanity.", "Returning to his private cubicle after his conversation with Dome\n Commander Eagan, he had stalked straightway to the cabinet wherein was\n encased his precious set of bagpipes. These he had taken from their\n pegs, gazed upon defiantly, and fondled with almost parental affection.\n\n\n \"So I can't play you, huh?\" he muttered darkly. \"It disturbs the peace\n o' the dingfounded, dumblasted Dome staff, does it? Well, we'll\nsee\nabout that!\"\n\n\n And tucking the bag under his arm, he had cautiously slipped from the\n room, down little-used corridors, and now he stood before the huge\nimpervite\ngates which were the entrance to the Dome and the doorway\n to Outside.", "\"I will,\" promised Isobar, \"don't worry.\"\nWilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely\n out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped\n through, and closed it behind him.\n\n\n A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated\n temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but\n fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with\n joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at\n last! After six long and dreary months!\n\n\n Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes\n that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the\n lunar valley....", "Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are\nyou\ndoing out here, Isobar?\n And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n\n\n \"Oh—the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten\n his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten\n his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow\n throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just\n happened to—Oh!\nthe pipes!\n\"", "\"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!\" thought Isobar, \"Locked up\n in an airtight Dome like—like a goldfish in a glass bowl!\" Sunlight?\n Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not\n burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a\n toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented,\n reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.\n\n\n Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he\n signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine\n existence.\n\n\n \"A pain!\" declared Isobar Jones. \"That's what it is; a pain in the\n stummick. Not even allowed to—Yeah?\"", "TROUBLE ON TYCHO\nBy NELSON S. BOND\nIsobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of\n\n the Moon Station's existence. But there came\n\n the day when his comrades found that the worth\n\n of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories March 1943.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe audiophone buzzed thrice—one long, followed by two shorts—and\n Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n\n\n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n\n\n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander\n appeared.", "\"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in\nmy\ncubby! I've got sensitive\n eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling\n quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah? What?\"\n\n\n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown—\"\n\n\n \"What about 'em?\"\n\n\n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n\n\n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n\n\n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe—if they should meet any Grannies. Well,\n scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n\n\n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his\n cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.", "\"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\nRiley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report,\n entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and\n dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n\n\n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n\n\n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded\n Riley's shoulder.\n\n\n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked\n startled.\n\n\n \"How's that? I didn't say a word—\"", "And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood\n pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the\n chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the\n blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,\n\n\n \"Keep playing!\" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. \"Just a few\n minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his\n turret window five minutes ago!\"\n\n\n And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of\n those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he\n knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another\n sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank,\n sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.\n\n\n He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of\n encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.", "\"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying—\"\n\n\n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir!\n It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of\n absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to\n go, for example—\"\n\n\n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n\n\n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones!\n Where are\nyou\ngoing?\"\n\n\n \"Why—why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n\n\n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n\n\n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a\n while—\"\n\n\n \"I thought that, too. And with\nwhat\n, pray, Jones?\"", "It\nwas all\n, so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking\n to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, \"Nuts!\" and returned to\n his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word \"Clear\" which,\n six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed:\nCond. of\n Obs.\nHe noted the proper figures under the headings\nSun Spots\n:\nMax\n Freq.\n—\nMin. Freq.\n; then he sketched careful curves in blue and red\n ink upon the Mercator projection of Earth which was his daily work\n sheet.\n\n\n This done, he drew a clean sheet of paper out of his desk drawer,\n frowned thoughtfully at the tabulated results of his observations, and\n began writing.\n\n\n \"\nWeather forecast for Terra\n,\" he wrote, his pen making scratching\n sounds.\n\n\n The audiophone rasped again. Isobar jabbed the stud and answered\n without looking.", "Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever\n yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science\n was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of\n Graniteback physiology—but it was known, from bitter experience, that\n the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something\n harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be\n penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame,\n by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered\n atomo-needle dispenser.\n\n\n All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:\n\n\n \"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome,\" he said, \"for\n a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back\n inside—\"", "But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again,\n excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing\n position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over\n his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath\n expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive,\n fearsome, \"\nKaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong!\n\"\n\n\n Roberts moaned.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n\n\n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n\n\n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense\n of hearing. That's been proven—\"\n\n\n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.", "South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the\n meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his\n job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw\n himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain\n rendered possible.\nIf home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones—known better as \"Isobar\"\n to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna—was a long, long\n way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for\n six tedious Earth months, beneath the\nimpervite\nhemisphere of Lunar\n III—that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station,\n teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.", "\"Oh, dagnab it!\" fumed Isobar Jones. \"Oh, tarnation and dingbust!\n Oh—\nfiddlesticks\n!\"\nII\n\n\n \"And so,\" chuckled Riley, \"he left, bubbling like a kettle on a red-hot\n oven. But, boy! was he ever mad! Just about ready to bust, he was.\"\n\n\n Some minutes had passed since Isobar had left; Riley was talking to Dr.\n Loesch, head of the Dome's Physics Research Division. The older man\n nodded commiseratingly.\n\n\n \"It is funny, yes,\" he agreed, \"but at the same time it is not\n altogether amusing. I feel sorry for him. He is a very unhappy man, our\n poor Isobar.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I know,\" said Riley, \"but, hell, we all get a little bit\n homesick now and then. He ought to learn to—\"", "\"Don't be a dope,\" said Sparks, \"you dope! I wasn't talking to you.\n I'm entertaining a visitor, a refugee from a cuckoo clock. Look, do me\n a favor, chum? Can you twist your mike around so it's pointing out a\n window?\"\n\n\n \"What? Why—why, yes, but—\"\n\n\n \"Without buts,\" said Sparks grumpily. \"Yours not to reason why; yours\n but to do or don't. Will you do it?\"\n\n\n \"Well, sure. But I don't understand—\" The silver platter which had\n mirrored the radioman's face clouded as the Earth operator twirled the\n inconoscope. Walls and desks of an ordinary broadcasting office spun\n briefly into view; then the plate reflected a glimpse of an Earthly\n landscape. Soft blue sky warmed by an atmosphere-shielded sun ... green\n trees firmly rooted in still-greener grass ... flowers ... birds ...\n people...." ], [ "\"Outside!\" Eagan stared at him incredulously. \"Are you mad? How about\n the Grannies?\"\n\n\n Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life\n found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an\n abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar\n exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was\n an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low\n intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and\n implacable foe.", "\"Earth answering Luna. Earth answering Luna's call. Can you hear me,\n Luna? Can you hear—?\"\n\n\n \"I can not only hear you,\" snorted Riley, \"I can see you and smell you,\n as well. Stop hamming it, stupid! You're lousing up the earth!\"\n\n\n The now-visible face of the Earth radioman drew into a grimace of\n displeasure.\n\n\n \"Oh, it's\nyou\n? Funny man, eh? Funny man Riley?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Riley agreeably. \"I'm a scream. Four-alarm Riley,\n the cosmic comedian—didn't you know? Flick on your dictacoder,\n oyster-puss; here's the weather report.\" He read it. \"'\nWeather\n forecast for Terra, week of May 15-21\n—'\"", "But Roberts shook his head.\n\n\n \"We sent a message, Jonesy, but I don't think it got through. I've just\n been looking at my portable. It seems to be busted. Happened when they\n first attacked us, I guess. I tripped and fell on it.\"\n\n\n Isobar's last hope flickered out.\n\n\n \"Then I—I guess it won't be long now,\" he mourned. \"If we could have\n only got a message through, they would have sent out an armored car to\n pick us up. But as it is—\"\n\n\n Brown's shrug displayed a bravado he did not feel.\n\n\n \"Well, that's the way it goes. We knew what we were risking when we\n volunteered to come Outside. This damn moon! It'll never be worth\n a plugged credit until men find some way to fight those murderous\n stones-on-legs!\"", "\"Hold on!\" roared Roberts. His warning came just in time. Once more,\n the three tree-sitters shook like dried peas in a pod as their leafy\n refuge trembled before the locomotive onslaught of the lunar beasts.\n This time the already-exposed roots strained and lifted, several\n snapped; when the Grannies again withdrew, complacently unaware that\n the \"lethal ray\" of Brown's Haemholtz was wasting itself upon their\n adamant hides in futile fury, the tree was bent at a precarious angle.\n\n\n Brown sobbed, not with fear but with impotent anger, and in a gesture\n of enraged desperation, hurled his now-empty weapon at the retreating\n Grannies.\n\n\n \"No good! Not a damn bit of good! Oh, if there was only some way of\n fighting those filthy things—\"", "\"But the Dome,\" pointed out Commander Eagan, \"has an air-conditioning\n system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of\n your—er—so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire\n structure.\"\n\n\n He suddenly seemed to gain stature.\n\n\n \"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire\n organization for your own—er—amusement.\"\n\n\n \"But—\" said Isobar.\n\n\n \"No!\"\n\n\n Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already.\n If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last\n amusement which lightened his moments of freedom—\n\n\n \"Look, Commander!\" he pleaded, \"I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother\n nobody. I'll go Outside and play it—\"", "\"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's—well, it's\n the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and\n trees.\"\n\n\n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n\n\n \"We've got\nthem\nright here on Luna. Go look out the tower window,\n Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest,\n greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All\n that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside—and we ain't allowed to go out\n in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to—\"\n\n\n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n\n\n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander\n Eagan. He squirmed.", "\"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\nRiley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report,\n entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and\n dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n\n\n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n\n\n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded\n Riley's shoulder.\n\n\n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked\n startled.\n\n\n \"How's that? I didn't say a word—\"", "\"I will,\" promised Isobar, \"don't worry.\"\nWilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely\n out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped\n through, and closed it behind him.\n\n\n A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated\n temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but\n fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with\n joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at\n last! After six long and dreary months!\n\n\n Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes\n that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the\n lunar valley....", "\"Report ready, Jones?\"\n\n\n \"Almost,\" acknowledged Isobar gloomily. \"It prob'ly ain't right,\n though. How anybody can be expected to get\nanything\nright on this\n dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese—\"\n\n\n \"Send it up,\" interrupted Colonel Eagan, \"as soon as you can. Sparks is\n making Terra contact now. That is all.\"\n\n\n \"That ain't all!\" declared Isobar indignantly. \"How about my bag—?\"", "\"Don't be a dope,\" said Sparks, \"you dope! I wasn't talking to you.\n I'm entertaining a visitor, a refugee from a cuckoo clock. Look, do me\n a favor, chum? Can you twist your mike around so it's pointing out a\n window?\"\n\n\n \"What? Why—why, yes, but—\"\n\n\n \"Without buts,\" said Sparks grumpily. \"Yours not to reason why; yours\n but to do or don't. Will you do it?\"\n\n\n \"Well, sure. But I don't understand—\" The silver platter which had\n mirrored the radioman's face clouded as the Earth operator twirled the\n inconoscope. Walls and desks of an ordinary broadcasting office spun\n briefly into view; then the plate reflected a glimpse of an Earthly\n landscape. Soft blue sky warmed by an atmosphere-shielded sun ... green\n trees firmly rooted in still-greener grass ... flowers ... birds ...\n people....", "South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the\n meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his\n job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw\n himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain\n rendered possible.\nIf home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones—known better as \"Isobar\"\n to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna—was a long, long\n way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for\n six tedious Earth months, beneath the\nimpervite\nhemisphere of Lunar\n III—that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station,\n teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.", "And behind these two, grim, grey, gaunt figures that moved with\n astonishing speed despite their massive bulk, came three ... six ... a\n dozen of those lunarites whom all men feared. The Grannies!\nIII\n\n\n Simultaneously with his recognition of the pair, Joe Roberts saw him. A\n gasp of relief escaped the wounded man.\n\n\n \"Jones! Thank the Lord! Then you picked up our cry for help? Quick,\n man—where is it? Theres not a moment to waste!\"\n\n\n \"W-where,\" faltered Isobar feebly, \"is\nwhat\n?\"\n\n\n \"The tank, of course! Didn't you hear our telecast? We can't possibly\n make it back to the gate without an armored car. My foot's broken,\n and—\" Roberts stopped suddenly, an abrupt horror in his eyes. \"You\n don't have one! You're here\nalone\n! Then you didn't pick up our call?\n But, why—?\"", "But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again,\n excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing\n position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over\n his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath\n expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive,\n fearsome, \"\nKaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong!\n\"\n\n\n Roberts moaned.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n\n\n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n\n\n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense\n of hearing. That's been proven—\"\n\n\n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.", "\"That goes for me, too, Jonesy,\" added Brown from an upper bough.\n \"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long\n as it lasts, but—\" He stared down upon the gathering knot of\n Grannies unhappily—\"it's not going to last long with that bunch of\n superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they\n come!\"\n\n\n For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic\n consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged\n headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like\n the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted\n beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about\n them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged\n forest monarch shuddered in agony.", "How long he wandered thus, carefree and utterly content, he could not\n afterward say. It seemed like minutes; it must have been longer. He\n only knew that the grass was green beneath his feet, the trees were a\n lacy network through which warm sunlight filtered benevolently, the\n chirrupings of small insects and the rustling whisper of the breezes\n formed a tiny symphony of happiness through which he moved as one\n charmed.\n\n\n It did not occur to him that he had wandered too far from the Dome's\n entrance until, strolling through an enchanting flower-decked glade, he\n was startled to hear—off to his right—the sharp, explosive bark of a\n Haemholtz ray pistol.", "TROUBLE ON TYCHO\nBy NELSON S. BOND\nIsobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of\n\n the Moon Station's existence. But there came\n\n the day when his comrades found that the worth\n\n of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories March 1943.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe audiophone buzzed thrice—one long, followed by two shorts—and\n Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n\n\n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n\n\n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander\n appeared.", "\"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in\nmy\ncubby! I've got sensitive\n eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling\n quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah? What?\"\n\n\n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown—\"\n\n\n \"What about 'em?\"\n\n\n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n\n\n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n\n\n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe—if they should meet any Grannies. Well,\n scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n\n\n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his\n cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.", "Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever\n yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science\n was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of\n Graniteback physiology—but it was known, from bitter experience, that\n the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something\n harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be\n penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame,\n by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered\n atomo-needle dispenser.\n\n\n All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:\n\n\n \"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome,\" he said, \"for\n a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back\n inside—\"", "And—even he could not have foreseen the astounding results of\n his piping! What happened next was as astonishing as it was\n incomprehensible. For as the pipes, filled now and primed to burst into\n whatever substitute for melody they were prodded into, wailed into\n action—the Grannies' rush came to an abrupt halt!\n\n\n As one, they stopped cold in their tracks and turned dull, colorless,\n questioning eyes upward into the tree whence came this weird and\n vibrant droning!\n\n\n So stunned with surprise was Isobar that his grip on the pipes relaxed,\n his lips almost slipped from the reed. But Brown's delighted bellow\n lifted his paralysis.\n\n\n \"Sacred rings of Saturn-look! They\nlike\nit! Keep playing, Jonesy!\n Play, boy, like you never played before!\"", "And Roberts roared, above the skirling of the\npiobaireachd\ninto\n which Isobar had instinctively swung, \"Music hath charms to soothe the\n savage beast! Then we were wrong. They\ncan\nhear, after all! See that?\n They're lying down to listen—like so many lambs! Keep playing, Isobar!\n For once in my life I'm glad to hear that lovely, wonderful music!\"\n\n\n Isobar needed no urging. He, too, had noted how the Grannies' attack\n had stopped, how every last one of the gaunt grey beasts had suddenly,\n quietly, almost happily, dropped to its haunches at the base of the\n tree." ], [ "\"I will,\" promised Isobar, \"don't worry.\"\nWilkins moved away. Isobar waited until the Patrolman was completely\n out of sight. Then swiftly he pulled open the massive gate, slipped\n through, and closed it behind him.\n\n\n A flood of warmth, exhilarating after the constantly regulated\n temperature of the Dome, descended upon him. Fresh air, thin, but\n fragrant with the scent of growing things, made his pulses stir with\n joyous abandon. He was Outside! He was Outside, in good sunlight, at\n last! After six long and dreary months!\n\n\n Raptly, blissfully, all thought of caution tossed to the gentle breezes\n that ruffled his sparse hair, Isobar Jones stepped forward into the\n lunar valley....", "\"Six solid months! Six sad, dreary months!\" thought Isobar, \"Locked up\n in an airtight Dome like—like a goldfish in a glass bowl!\" Sunlight?\n Oh, sure! But filtered through ultraviolet wave-traps so it could not\n burn, it left the skin pale and lustreless and clammy as the belly of a\n toad. Fresh air? Pooh! Nothing but that everlasting sickening, scented,\n reoxygenated stuff gushing from atmo-conditioning units.\n\n\n Excitement? Adventure? The romance he had been led to expect when he\n signed on for frontier service? Bah! Only a weary, monotonous, routine\n existence.\n\n\n \"A pain!\" declared Isobar Jones. \"That's what it is; a pain in the\n stummick. Not even allowed to—Yeah?\"", "\"Ask him,\" whispered Isobar eagerly. \"Sparks, don't forget to ask him!\"\nRiley motioned for silence, but nodded. He finished the weather report,\n entered the Dome Commander's log upon the Home Office records, and\n dictated a short entry from the Luna Biological Commission. Then:\n\n\n \"That is all,\" he concluded.\n\n\n \"O.Q.,\" verified the other radioman. Isobar writhed anxiously, prodded\n Riley's shoulder.\n\n\n \"Ask him, Sparks! Go on ask him!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, cut jets, will you?\" snapped Sparks. The Terra operator looked\n startled.\n\n\n \"How's that? I didn't say a word—\"", "\"It ain't Earth I'm homesick for,\" explained Isobar. \"It's—well, it's\n the things that go with it. I mean things like grass and flowers and\n trees.\"\n\n\n Sparks grinned; a mirthless, lopsided grin.\n\n\n \"We've got\nthem\nright here on Luna. Go look out the tower window,\n Jonesy. The Dome's nestled smack in the middle of the prettiest,\n greenest little valley you ever saw.\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" complained Isobar. \"And that's what makes it even worse. All\n that pretty, soft, green stuff Outside—and we ain't allowed to go out\n in it. Sometimes I get so mad I'd like to—\"\n\n\n \"To,\" interrupted a crisp voice, \"what?\"\n\n\n Isobar spun, flushing; his eyes dropped before those of Dome Commander\n Eagan. He squirmed.", "\"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in\nmy\ncubby! I've got sensitive\n eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling\n quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah? What?\"\n\n\n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown—\"\n\n\n \"What about 'em?\"\n\n\n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n\n\n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n\n\n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe—if they should meet any Grannies. Well,\n scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n\n\n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his\n cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome.", "\"But the Dome,\" pointed out Commander Eagan, \"has an air-conditioning\n system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of\n your—er—so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire\n structure.\"\n\n\n He suddenly seemed to gain stature.\n\n\n \"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire\n organization for your own—er—amusement.\"\n\n\n \"But—\" said Isobar.\n\n\n \"No!\"\n\n\n Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already.\n If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last\n amusement which lightened his moments of freedom—\n\n\n \"Look, Commander!\" he pleaded, \"I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother\n nobody. I'll go Outside and play it—\"", "\"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right\n opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over\n there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of\n order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome—but\n the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short\n while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!\n\n\n \"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders.\n They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe\n they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can\n make him look out here—\"", "\"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that\n gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\nCommander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing\n yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n\n\n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think—\"\n\n\n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"'\nIn order that work or rest\n periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered\n that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must\n be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander\n,' That\n means you, Jones!\"\n\n\n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to\n play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good\n music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me—\"", "On all save those occasions when a spacecraft landed in the cradle\n adjacent the gateway, these portals were doubly locked and barred. But\n today they had been unbolted that the two maintenance men might venture\n out. And since it was quite possible that Brown and Roberts might have\n to get inside in a hurry, their bolts remained drawn. Sole guardian of\n the entrance was a very bored Junior Patrolman.\n\n\n Up to this worthy strode Isobar Jones, confident and assured, exuding\n an aura of propriety.\n\n\n \"Very well, Wilkins,\" he said. \"I'll take over now. You may go to the\n meeting.\"\n\n\n Wilkins looked at him bewilderedly.\n\n\n \"Huh? Whuzzat, Mr. Jones?\"\n\n\n Isobar's eyebrows arched.\n\n\n \"You mean you haven't been notified?\"", "\"N-nothing, sir. I was only saying—\"\n\n\n \"I heard you, Jones. And please let me hear no more of such talk, sir!\n It is strictly forbidden for anyone to go Outside except in cases of\n absolute necessity. Such labor as caused Patrolmen Brown and Roberts to\n go, for example—\"\n\n\n \"Any word from them yet, sir?\" asked Sparks eagerly.\n\n\n \"Not yet. But we're expecting them to return at any minute now. Jones!\n Where are\nyou\ngoing?\"\n\n\n \"Why—why, just back to my quarters, sir.\"\n\n\n \"That's what I thought. And what did you plan to do there?\"\n\n\n Isobar said stubbornly, \"Well, I sort of figured I'd amuse myself for a\n while—\"\n\n\n \"I thought that, too. And with\nwhat\n, pray, Jones?\"", "\"O.Q.,\" he said wearily. \"O.Q. I told you it would be ready in a couple\n o' minutes. Keep your pants on!\"\n\n\n \"I—er—I beg your pardon, Isobar?\" queried a mild voice.\n\n\n Isobar started. His sallow cheeks achieved a sickly salmon hue. He\n blinked nervously.\n\n\n \"Oh, jumpin' jimminy!\" he gulped. \"\nYou\n, Miss Sally! Golly—'scuse me!\n I didn't realize—\"\n\n\n The Dome Commander's niece giggled.\n\n\n \"That's all right, Isobar. I just called to ask you about the weather\n in Oceania Sector 4B next week. I've got a swimming date at Waikiki,\n but I won't make the shuttle unless the weather's going to be nice.\"", "Worse yet, they were an enemy almost indestructible! No man had ever\n yet brought to Earth laboratories the carcass of a Grannie; science\n was completely baffled in its endeavors to explain the composition of\n Graniteback physiology—but it was known, from bitter experience, that\n the carapace or exoskeleton of the Grannies was formed of something\n harder than steel, diamond, or battleplate! This flesh could be\n penetrated by no weapon known to man; neither by steel nor flame,\n by electronic nor ionic wave, nor by the lethal, newly discovered\n atomo-needle dispenser.\n\n\n All this Isobar knew about the Grannies. Yet:\n\n\n \"They ain't been any Grannies seen around the Dome,\" he said, \"for\n a 'coon's age. Anyhow, if I seen any comin', I could run right back\n inside—\"", "It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n \"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n\n\n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n\n\n \"O.Q. But just bring\nit\n. Nothing else.\"\n\n\n Isobar bridled.\n\n\n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of\n yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n\n\n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I\n guess I can play it if I want to—\"", "\"Never mind that,\" snapped Isobar, \"now!\" Placid by nature, he could\n move when urgency drove. His quick mind saw the immediateness of their\n peril. Unarmed, he could not help the Patrolmen fight a delaying action\n against their foes, nor could he hasten their retreat. Anyway, weapons\n were useless, and time was of the essence. There was but one temporary\n way of staving off disaster. \"Over here ... this tree! Quick! Up you\n go! Give him a lift, Brown—There! That's the stuff!\"", "And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood\n pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the\n chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the\n blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,\n\n\n \"Keep playing!\" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. \"Just a few\n minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his\n turret window five minutes ago!\"\n\n\n And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of\n those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he\n knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another\n sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank,\n sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.\n\n\n He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of\n encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.", "He whirled, staring about him wildly, and discovered that though his\n meandering had kept him near the Dome, he had unconsciously followed\n its hemispherical perimeter to a point nearly two miles from the\n Gateway. By the placement of ports and windows, Isobar was able to\n judge his location perfectly; he was opposite that portion of the\n structure which housed Sparks' radio turret.\n\n\n And the shooting? That could only be—\n\n\n He did not have to name its reason, even to himself. For at that\n moment, there came racing around the curve of the Dome a pair of\n figures, Patrolmen clad in fatigue drab. Roberts and Brown. Roberts was\n staggering, one foot dragged awkwardly as he ran; Brown's left arm,\n bloodstained from shoulder to elbow, hung limply at his side, but in\n his good right fist he held a spitting Haemholtz with which he tried to\n cover his comrade's sluggish retreat.", "\"Outside!\" Eagan stared at him incredulously. \"Are you mad? How about\n the Grannies?\"\n\n\n Isobar knew all about the Grannies. The only mobile form of life\n found by space-questing man on Earth's satellite, their name was an\n abbreviation of the descriptive one applied to them by the first Lunar\n exployers: Granitebacks. This was no exaggeration; if anything, it was\n an understatement. For the Grannies, though possessed of certain low\n intelligence, had quickly proven themselves a deadly, unyielding and\n implacable foe.", "Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are\nyou\ndoing out here, Isobar?\n And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n\n\n \"Oh—the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten\n his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten\n his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow\n throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just\n happened to—Oh!\nthe pipes!\n\"", "South America. Africa. Asia. Pan-Europa. Swiftly he outlined the\n meteorological prospects for each sector. He enjoyed this part of his\n job. As he wrote forecasts for each area, in his mind's eye he saw\n himself enjoying such pastimes as each geographical division's terrain\n rendered possible.\nIf home is where the heart is, Horatio Jones—known better as \"Isobar\"\n to his associates at the Experimental Dome on Luna—was a long, long\n way from home. His lean, gangling frame was immured, and had been for\n six tedious Earth months, beneath the\nimpervite\nhemisphere of Lunar\n III—that frontier outpost which served as a rocket refueling station,\n teleradio transmission point and meteorological base.", "TROUBLE ON TYCHO\nBy NELSON S. BOND\nIsobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of\n\n the Moon Station's existence. But there came\n\n the day when his comrades found that the worth\n\n of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories March 1943.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe audiophone buzzed thrice—one long, followed by two shorts—and\n Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n\n\n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n\n\n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander\n appeared." ], [ "But Isobar Jones had a one-track mind. \"The pipes!\" he cried again,\n excitedly. \"That's the answer!\" And he drew the instrument into playing\n position, bag cuddled beneath one arm-pit, drones stiffly erect over\n his shoulder, blow-pipe at his lips. His cheeks puffed, his breath\n expelled. The giant lung swelled, the chaunter emitted its distinctive,\n fearsome, \"\nKaa-aa-o-o-o-oro-oong!\n\"\n\n\n Roberts moaned.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord! A guy can't even die in peace!\"\n\n\n And Brown stared at him hopelessly.\n\n\n \"It's no use, Isobar. You trying to scare them off? They have no sense\n of hearing. That's been proven—\"\n\n\n Isobar took his lips from the reed to explain.", "Roberts said, \"That's right. But what are\nyou\ndoing out here, Isobar?\n And why, for Pete's sake, the bagpipes?\"\n\n\n \"Oh—the pipes?\" Isobar flushed painfully. He had almost forgotten\n his original reason for adventuring Outside, had quite forgotten\n his instrument, and was now rather amazed to discover that somehow\n throughout all the excitement he had held onto it. \"Why, I just\n happened to—Oh!\nthe pipes!\n\"", "Returning to his private cubicle after his conversation with Dome\n Commander Eagan, he had stalked straightway to the cabinet wherein was\n encased his precious set of bagpipes. These he had taken from their\n pegs, gazed upon defiantly, and fondled with almost parental affection.\n\n\n \"So I can't play you, huh?\" he muttered darkly. \"It disturbs the peace\n o' the dingfounded, dumblasted Dome staff, does it? Well, we'll\nsee\nabout that!\"\n\n\n And tucking the bag under his arm, he had cautiously slipped from the\n room, down little-used corridors, and now he stood before the huge\nimpervite\ngates which were the entrance to the Dome and the doorway\n to Outside.", "And Roberts roared, above the skirling of the\npiobaireachd\ninto\n which Isobar had instinctively swung, \"Music hath charms to soothe the\n savage beast! Then we were wrong. They\ncan\nhear, after all! See that?\n They're lying down to listen—like so many lambs! Keep playing, Isobar!\n For once in my life I'm glad to hear that lovely, wonderful music!\"\n\n\n Isobar needed no urging. He, too, had noted how the Grannies' attack\n had stopped, how every last one of the gaunt grey beasts had suddenly,\n quietly, almost happily, dropped to its haunches at the base of the\n tree.", "Followed then what, under somewhat different circumstances, should have\n been a piper's dream. For Isobar had an audience which would not—and\n in two cases\ndared\nnot—allow him to stop playing. And to this\n audience he played over and over again his entire repertoire. Marches,\n flings, dances—the stirring\nRhoderik Dhu\nand the lilting\nLassies\n O'Skye\n, the mournful\nCoghiegh nha Shie\nwhose keening is like the\n sound of a sobbing nation.\nThe Cock o' the North\n, he played, and\nMironton\n...\nWee Flow'r o'\n Dee\nand\nMacArthur's March\n...\nLa Cucuracha\nand—", "\"With the only dratted thing,\" said Isobar, suddenly petulant, \"that\n gives me any fun around this dagnabbed place! With my bagpipe.\"\nCommander Eagan said, \"You'd better find some new way of amusing\n yourself, Jones. Have you read General Order 17?\"\n\n\n Isobar said, \"I seen it. But if you think—\"\n\n\n \"It says,\" stated Eagan deliberately, \"'\nIn order that work or rest\n periods of the Dome's staff may not be disturbed, it is hereby ordered\n that the playing or practicing of all or any musical instruments must\n be discontinued immediately. By order of the Dome Commander\n,' That\n means you, Jones!\"\n\n\n \"But, dingbust it!\" keened Isobar, \"it don't disturb nobody for me to\n play my bagpipes! I know these lunks around here don't appreciate good\n music, so I always go in my office and lock the door after me—\"", "There was no doubt about it; the Grannies\nliked\nthis music. Eyes\n raptly fixed, unblinking, unwavering, they froze into postures of\n gentle beatitude. One stirred once, dangerously, as for a moment Isobar\n paused to catch his breath, but Isobar hastily lipped the blow-pipe\n with redoubled eagerness, and the Granny relapsed into quietude.", "And—even he could not have foreseen the astounding results of\n his piping! What happened next was as astonishing as it was\n incomprehensible. For as the pipes, filled now and primed to burst into\n whatever substitute for melody they were prodded into, wailed into\n action—the Grannies' rush came to an abrupt halt!\n\n\n As one, they stopped cold in their tracks and turned dull, colorless,\n questioning eyes upward into the tree whence came this weird and\n vibrant droning!\n\n\n So stunned with surprise was Isobar that his grip on the pipes relaxed,\n his lips almost slipped from the reed. But Brown's delighted bellow\n lifted his paralysis.\n\n\n \"Sacred rings of Saturn-look! They\nlike\nit! Keep playing, Jonesy!\n Play, boy, like you never played before!\"", "It was Sparks, audioing from the Dome's transmission turret. He said,\n \"Hyah, Jonesy! How comes with the report?\"\n\n\n \"Done,\" said Isobar. \"I was just gettin' the sheets together for you.\"\n\n\n \"O.Q. But just bring\nit\n. Nothing else.\"\n\n\n Isobar bridled.\n\n\n \"I don't know what you're talkin' about.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no? Well, I'm talking about that squawk-filled doodlesack of\n yours, sonny boy. Don't bring that bag-full of noise up here with you.\"\n\n\n Isobar said defiantly, \"It ain't a doodlesack. It's a bagpipe. And I\n guess I can play it if I want to—\"", "And his lungs were parched, his lips dry as swabs of cotton. Blood\n pounded through his temples, throbbing in time to the drone of the\n chaunter, and a dark mist gathered before his eyes. He tore the\n blow-pipe from his lips, gasped,\n\n\n \"Keep playing!\" came the dim, distant howl of Johnny Brown. \"Just a few\n minutes longer, Jonesy! Relief is on the way. Sparks saw us from his\n turret window five minutes ago!\"\n\n\n And Isobar played on. How, or what, he did not know. The memory of\n those next few minutes was never afterward clear in his mind. All he\n knew was that above the skirling drone of his pipes there came another\n sound, the metallic clanking of a man-made machine ... an armored tank,\n sent from the Dome to rescue the beleaguered trio.\n\n\n He was conscious, then, of a friendly voice shouting words of\n encouragement, of Joe Roberts calling a warning to those below.", "\"It's not that. I'm trying to rouse the boys in the Dome. We're right\n opposite the atmosphere-conditioning-unit. See that grilled duct over\n there? That's an inhalation-vent. The portable transmitter's out of\n order, and our voices ain't strong enough to carry into the Dome—but\n the sound of these pipes is! And Commander Eagan told me just a short\n while ago that the sound of the pipes carries all over the building!\n\n\n \"If they hear this, they'll get mad because I'm disobeyin' orders.\n They'll start lookin' for me. If they can't find me inside, maybe\n they'll look Outside. See that window? That's Sparks' turret. If we can\n make him look out here—\"", "\"Careful, boys! Drive the tank right up beneath us so we can hop in and\n get out of here! Watch the Grannies—they'll be after us the minute\n Isobar stops playing!\"\n\n\n Then the answer from below. The fantastic answer in Sparks' familiar\n voice. The answer that caused the bagpipes to slip from Isobar's\n fingers as Isobar Jones passed out in a dead faint:\n\n\n \"After you? Those Grannies? Hell's howling acres—\nthose Grannies are\n stone dead\n!\"", "\"But the Dome,\" pointed out Commander Eagan, \"has an air-conditioning\n system which can't be shut off. The ungodly moans of\n your—er—so-called musical instrument can be heard through the entire\n structure.\"\n\n\n He suddenly seemed to gain stature.\n\n\n \"No, Jones, this order is final! You cannot disrupt our entire\n organization for your own—er—amusement.\"\n\n\n \"But—\" said Isobar.\n\n\n \"No!\"\n\n\n Isobar wriggled desperately. Life on Luna was sorry enough already.\n If now they took from him the last remaining solace he had, the last\n amusement which lightened his moments of freedom—\n\n\n \"Look, Commander!\" he pleaded, \"I tell you what I'll do. I won't bother\n nobody. I'll go Outside and play it—\"", "\"\nStop talking!\n\" roared Roberts. \"Stop talking, guy, and start\n blowing! I think you've got something there. Anyhow, it's our last\n hope.\nBlow!\n\"\n\n\n \"And quick!\" appended Brown. \"For here they come!\"\nIsobar played, blew with all his might, while the Grannies raged below.\nHe meant the Grannies. Again they were huddling for attack, once more,\n a solid phalanx of indestructible, granite flesh, they were smashing\n down upon the tree.\n\n\n \"\nHaa-a-roong!\n\" blew Isobar Jones.\nIV", "\"No!\" said Commander Eagan flatly. \"Absolutely,\nno\n! I have no time\n for such nonsense. You know the orders—obey them! And now, gentlemen,\n good afternoon!\"\n\n\n He left. Sparks turned to Isobar, grinning.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said, \"one man's fish—hey, Jonesy? Too bad you can't play\n your doodlesack any more, but frankly, I'm just as glad. Of all the\n awful screeching wails—\"\n\n\n But Isobar Jones, generally mild and gentle, was now in a perfect\n fury. His pale eyes blazed, he stomped his foot on the floor, and from\n his lips poured a stream of such angry invective that Riley looked\n startled. Words that, to Isobar, were the utter dregs of violent\n profanity.", "How long he wandered thus, carefree and utterly content, he could not\n afterward say. It seemed like minutes; it must have been longer. He\n only knew that the grass was green beneath his feet, the trees were a\n lacy network through which warm sunlight filtered benevolently, the\n chirrupings of small insects and the rustling whisper of the breezes\n formed a tiny symphony of happiness through which he moved as one\n charmed.\n\n\n It did not occur to him that he had wandered too far from the Dome's\n entrance until, strolling through an enchanting flower-decked glade, he\n was startled to hear—off to his right—the sharp, explosive bark of a\n Haemholtz ray pistol.", "\"Not that exactly. He is perfectly sane. But he is in a dark morass\n of despair. He may try\nanything\nto retrieve his lost happiness, rid\n his soul of its dark oppression. His world-sickness is like a crying\n hunger—By the way, where is he now?\"\n\n\n \"Below, I guess. In his quarters.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, good! Perhaps he is sleeping. Let us hope so. In slumber he will\n find peace and forgetfulness.\"\n\n\n But Dr. Loesch would have been far less sanguine had some power the\n \"giftie gi'en\" him of watching Isobar Jones at that moment.\n\n\n Isobar was not asleep. Far from it. Wide awake and very much astir, he\n was acting in a singularly sinister role: that of a slinking, furtive\n culprit.", "\"That goes for me, too, Jonesy,\" added Brown from an upper bough.\n \"But I'm afraid you just delayed matters. This tree's O.Q. as long\n as it lasts, but—\" He stared down upon the gathering knot of\n Grannies unhappily—\"it's not going to last long with that bunch of\n superdreadnaughts working out on it! Hold tight, fellows! Here they\n come!\"\n\n\n For the Grannies, who had huddled for a moment as if in telepathic\n consultation, now joined forces, turned, and as one body charged\n headlong toward the tree. The unified force of their attack was like\n the shattering impact of a battering ram. Bark rasped and gritted\n beneath the besieged men's hands, dry leaves and twigs pelted about\n them in a tiny rain, tormented fibrous sinews groaned as the aged\n forest monarch shuddered in agony.", "TROUBLE ON TYCHO\nBy NELSON S. BOND\nIsobar and his squeeze-pipes were the bane of\n\n the Moon Station's existence. But there came\n\n the day when his comrades found that the worth\n\n of a man lies sometimes in his nuisance value.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories March 1943.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe audiophone buzzed thrice—one long, followed by two shorts—and\n Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc.\n\n\n \"Hummm?\" he said absent-mindedly.\n\n\n The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander\n appeared.", "\"Not,\" said Sparks emphatically, \"in\nmy\ncubby! I've got sensitive\n eardrums. Well, stir your stumps! I've got to get the report rolling\n quick today. Big doings up here.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah? What?\"\n\n\n \"Well, it's Roberts and Brown—\"\n\n\n \"What about 'em?\"\n\n\n \"They've gone Outside to make foundation repairs.\"\n\n\n \"Lucky stiffs!\" commented Isobar ruefully.\n\n\n \"Lucky, no. Stiffs, maybe—if they should meet any Grannies. Well,\n scoot along. I'm on the ether in four point sixteen minutes.\"\n\n\n \"Be right up,\" promised Isobar, and, sheets in hand, he ambled from his\n cloistered cell toward the central section of the Dome." ] ]
test	61459	[ "According to Mr. Retief, what is the most common goal in life?", "What was the GFE?", "Why does Mr. Retief smoke cigars?", "How did Retief so effectively control Jake's actions?", "Who composed the warning letter to Sternwheeler?", "Why did Retief claim to punch Jake in the face?", "According to Jake, why did the working-class drive out the managerial class?", "How did the managerial representatives rid themselves of General Sozier?" ]	[ [ "To ride the coattails of someone else's hard work.", "To get out of meetings as quickly as possible.", "To have a government controlled by blue-collar workers.", "To have a large balance of money stored in neutral banks." ], [ "Glavian Free Electorate.", "Goodies For Everybody.", "Glorious Fun Eternally.", "Glave For Everyone." ], [ "Sternwheeler dislikes how they smell, so the meetings don't last as long.", "He loves the taste and the thick smoke clouds they create.", "He enjoys lighting them with a permatch.", "They give him more confidence and make him feel more important during conference sessions." ], [ "He made Jake believe he was a powerful diplomat.", "By punching him in the jaw.", "He mirrored Jake's societal perceptions through ticky wordplay and manipulation.", "He took the power cylinder from Jake's rifle." ], [ "Trundy and Little Moe.", "Jake, Horny, and Pud.", "General Sozier.", "The Peace Enforcers." ], [ "So that he could escape being his prisoner.", "So that Jake would have a reason to report to his superiors for failing in his duties.", "So that he could steal his weapon.", "So that he could easily enter the pumping station and meet Corasol." ], [ "They were fed poorly.", "They were tired of working for the managerial class's profit.", "They were bitter about the education they were being provided.", "They were tired of the regimentation and class structure." ], [ "They sent Retief as a mole.", "They manipulated Jake to do their bidding.", "That shot at him with machine gun turret fixed to station's rooftop.", "They blasted his car with water from the pumping station." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "\"Oh ... Mr. Retief,\" a strained voice called. Retief looked up. A tall\n thin youth in the black-trimmed gray of a Third Secretary flapped a\n sheet of paper from the edge of the circle surrounding the game. \"The\n Ambassador's compliments, sir, and will you join him and the staff in\n the conference room at once?\"\n\n\n Retief rose and dusted his knees. \"That's all for now, boys,\" he said.\n \"I'll take the rest of your money later.\" He followed the junior\n diplomat from the ward room, along the bare corridors of the crew\n level, past the glare panel reading NOTICE—FIRST CLASS ONLY BEYOND\n THIS POINT, through the chandeliered and draped ballroom and along a\n stretch of soundless carpet to a heavy door bearing a placard with the\n legend CONFERENCE IN SESSION.\n\n\n \"Ambassador Sternwheeler seemed quite upset, Mr. Retief,\" the messenger\n said.", "Retief walked over to the cart, tossed his valise aboard, climbed\n into the driver's seat and headed for the operations building. Beyond\n the port, hills rose, white buildings gleaming against the deep green\n slopes. Near the ridge, a vehicle moved ant-like along a winding road,\n a dust trail rising behind it. Faintly a distant shot sounded.\n\n\n Papers littered the ground before the Operations Building. Retief\n pushed open the tall glass door, stood listening. Slanting sunlight\n reflected from a wide polished floor, at the far side of which\n illuminated lettering over empty counters read IMMIGRATION, HEALTH\n and CUSTOMS. He crossed to the desk, put the valise down, then leaned\n across the counter. A worried face under an oversized white cap looked\n up at him.\n\n\n \"You can come out now,\" Retief said. \"They've gone.\"", "Retief braked. \"In that case, I'm afraid our association is at an end,\n Jake.\"\n\n\n \"You mean ... you're getting out here?\"\n\n\n \"No, you are.\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Now wait a minute, Mister! The corporal said I was to stay with\n you.\"\n\n\n Retief accelerated. \"That's settled, then. Which way?\"\nIV\n\n\n Retief pulled the car to a halt two hundred yards from the periphery\n of a loose crowd of brown-uniformed men who stood in groups scattered\n across a broad plaza, overflowing into a stretch of manicured lawn\n before the bare, functional facade of sub-station number Nine. In the\n midst of the besieging mob, Sozier's red face and bald head bobbed as\n he harangued a cluster of green-uniformed men from his place in the\n rear of a long open car.", "\"The corporal will feel all the better for an invigorating swim in\n his mobile pool,\" Retief commented. \"By the way, Jake, I have to be\n going now. It wouldn't be fair to send you back to your boss without\n something to back up your story that you were outnumbered, so—\"\n\n\n Retief's left fist shot out to connect solidly with Jake's jaw. Jake\n dropped the gun and sat down hard. Retief turned and headed for the\n pumping station. The hose had shut down now. A few men were standing,\n eyeing the building anxiously. Others watched his progress across the\n square. As Retief passed, he caught scattered comments:\n\n\n \"—seen that bird before.\"\n\n\n \"—where he's headed.\"\n\n\n \"—feller Sozier was talking to....\"\n\n\n \"Hey, you!\"", "\"Come on, Jake. You've got a nervous habit of playing with the firing\n stud. We don't want any accidents.\"\n\n\n \"How do you get it out? They only give me this thing yesterday.\"\n\n\n Retief pocketed the cylinder. \"You sit in back. I'll drive.\" He wheeled\n the car off along a broad avenue crowded with vehicles and lined with\n flowering palms, behind which stately white buildings reared up into\n the pale sky.\n\n\n \"Nice looking city, Jake,\" Retief said conversationally. \"What's the\n population?\"\n\n\n \"I dunno. I only been here a year.\"\n\n\n \"What about Horny and Pud? Are they natives?\"\n\n\n \"Whatta ya mean, natives? They're just as civilized as me.\"\n\n\n \"My boner, Jake. Known Sozier long?\"", "\"General Sozier, damn you! and plaster your big mouth shut!\" He\n gestured to one of the uniformed men standing by.\n\n\n \"You! Get Trundy and Little Moe up here—pronto!\" He swiveled back to\n Retief. \"You're in luck. I'm too busy right now to bother with you.\n You get back over to the port and leave the same way you came—and tell\n your blood-sucking friends the easy pickings are over as far as Glave's\n concerned. You won't lounge around here living high and throwing big\n parties and cooking up your dirty deals to get fat on at the expense of\n the working man.\"\n\n\n Retief dribbled ash on Sozier's desk and glanced at the green uniform\n front bulging between silver buttons.\n\n\n \"Who paid for your potbelly, Sozier?\" he inquired carelessly.", "\"This guy asks too many questions,\" the man with the gun said. \"Let's\n let Sozier answer 'em.\"\n\n\n \"Who's he?\"\n\n\n \"He's the Military Governor of the City.\"\n\n\n \"Now we're getting somewhere,\" Retief said. \"Lead the way, Jake—and\n don't forget my bag.\"\nSozier was a small man with thin hair oiled across a shiny scalp,\n prominent ears and eyes like coal chips set in rolls of fat. He\n glowered at Retief from behind a polished desk occupying the center of\n a spacious office.\n\n\n \"I warned you off,\" he snapped. \"You came anyway.\" He leaned forward\n and slammed a fist down on the desk. \"You're used to throwing your\n weight around, but you won't throw it around here! There'll be no spies\n pussyfooting around Glave!\"\n\n\n \"Looking for what, Mr. Sozier?\"", "The man rose, dusting himself off. He looked over Retief's shoulder.\n \"Who's gone?\"\n\n\n \"Whoever it was that scared you.\"\n\n\n \"Whatta ya mean? I was looking for my pencil.\"\n\n\n \"Here it is.\" Retief plucked a worn stub from the pocket of the soiled\n shirt sagging under the weight of braided shoulderboards. \"You can sign\n me in as a Diplomatic Representative. A break for you—no formalities\n necessary. Where can I catch a cab for the city?\"\n\n\n The man eyed Retief's bag. \"What's in that?\"\n\n\n \"Personal belongings under duty-free entry.\"\n\n\n \"Guns?\"\n\n\n \"No, thanks, just a cab.\"\n\n\n \"You got no gun?\" The man raised his voice.", "Retief strolled over to the gray-haired man, now scribbling before a\n bank of meters. He glanced at the clipboard.\nPower off at sunset. Tell Corasol\nwas scrawled in block letters\n across the record sheet. Retief nodded, rejoined his guard.\n\n\n \"All right, Jake. Let's have a look at the communications center.\"\n\n\n Back in the car, headed west, Retief studied the blank windows of\n office buildings, the milling throngs in beer bars, shooting galleries,\n tattoo parlors, billiard halls, pinball arcades, bordellos and\n half-credit casinos.\n\n\n \"Everybody seems to be having fun,\" he remarked.\n\n\n Jake stared out the window.\n\n\n \"Yeah.\"\n\n\n \"Too bad you're on duty, Jake. You could be out there joining in.\"", "\"What are you doing here!\" he burst out. \"I told Jake—where is that—\"\n\n\n \"Jake didn't like the questions I was asking,\" Retief said, \"so he\n marched me up here to report to you.\"\n\n\n \"Jake, you damn fool!\" Sozier roared. \"I got a good mind—\"\n\"I disagree, Sozier,\" Retief cut in. \"I think you're a complete\n imbecile. Sitting out here in the open yelling at the top of your\n lungs, for example. Corasol and his party might get annoyed and spray\n that fancy car you've swiped with something a lot more painful than\n words.\"\n\n\n \"Eh?\" Sozier's head whipped around to stare at the building.\n\n\n \"Isn't that a gun I see sticking out?\"\n\n\n Sozier dropped. \"Where?\"", "Retief was on the grass now. Ahead, the blank wall loomed up. He walked\n on briskly.\n\n\n \"Stop that jasper!\" a shout rang out. There was a sharp whine and a\n black spot appeared on the wall ahead. Near it, a small personnel door\n abruptly swung inward. Retief sprinted, plunged through the opening\n as a second shot seared the paint on the doorframe. The door clanged\n behind him. Retief glanced over the half dozen men confronting him.\n\n\n \"I'm Retief, CDT, acting Charge,\" he said. \"Which of you gentlemen is\n Manager-General Corasol?\"", "\"Lead the way, Jake.\"\n\n\n \"Look, Mister, the corporal only wanted me to show you the outside.\"\n\n\n \"Anything to hide, Jake?\"\n\n\n Jake shook his head angrily and stamped past Retief. \"When I joined up\n with Sozier, I didn't figger I'd be getting in this kind of mess.\"\n\n\n \"I know, Jake. It's tough. Sometimes it seems like a fellow works\n harder after he's thrown out the parasites than he did before.\"\n\n\n A cautious guard let Retief and Jake inside, followed them along\n bright-lit aisles among consoles, cables, batteries of instruments.\n Armed men in careless uniforms lounged, watching. Here and there a\n silent technician worked quietly.\n\n\n Retief paused by one, an elderly man in a neat white coverall, with a\n purple spot under one eye.", "Jake looked at Retief uncertainly, fingering his empty rifle.\n\n\n Retief put his hands up. \"I guess you got me, Jake,\" he said. \"Careful\n of that gun, now.\"", "\"What are you proposing, Mr. Retief?\"\n\n\n \"That we proceed to make planetfall as scheduled, greet our welcoming\n committee with wide diplomatic smiles, hint at largesse in the offing\n and settle down to observe the lie of the land.\"\n\n\n \"Just what I was about to suggest,\" Magnan said.\n\n\n \"That might be dangerous,\" Sternwheeler said.\n\n\n \"That's why I didn't suggest it,\" Magnan said.\n\n\n \"Still it's essential that we learn more of the situation than can be\n gleaned from official broadcasts,\" Sternwheeler mused. \"Now, while I\n can't justify risking the entire Mission, it might be advisable to\n dispatch a delegation to sound out the new regime.\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to volunteer,\" Magnan said, rising.\n\n\n \"Of course, the delegates may be murdered—\"", "\"He usually is, Pete.\" Retief took a cigar from his breast pocket. \"Got\n a light?\"\n\n\n The Third Secretary produced a permatch. \"I don't know why you smoke\n those things instead of dope sticks, Mr. Retief,\" he said. \"The\n Ambassador hates the smell.\"\n\n\n Retief nodded. \"I only smoke this kind at conferences. It makes for\n shorter sessions.\" He stepped into the room. Ambassador Sternwheeler\n eyed him down the length of the conference table.\n\n\n \"Ah, Mr. Retief honors us with his presence. Do be seated, Retief.\" He\n fingered a yellow Departmental despatch. Retief took a chair, puffing\n out a dense cloud of smoke.", "\"What's it all about, Jake?\" Retief enquired. \"Since the parasites have\n all left peacefully, I'm having a hard time figuring out who'd be holed\n up in the pumping station—and why. Maybe they haven't gotten the word\n that it's all going to be fun and games from now on.\"\n\n\n \"If the corporal sees you over here—\"\n\n\n \"Ah, the good corporal. Glad you mentioned him, Jake. He's the man to\n see.\" Retief stepped out of the car and started through the crowd. A\n heavy lorry loaded with an immense tank with the letter H blazoned on\n its side trundled into the square from a side street, moved up to a\n position before the building. A smaller car pulled alongside Sozier's\n limousine. The driver stepped down, handed something to Sozier. A\n moment later, Sozier's amplified voice boomed across the crowd.", "Jake glanced at Sozier, gulped, aimed the rifle at Retief and nodded\n toward the car. As Retief moved off, a murmur swept across the crowd.\n Retief glanced back. A turret on the station roof was rotating slowly.\n A shout rose; men surged away from the building, scuffling for way;\n Sozier yelled. His car started up, moved forward, horns blaring. As\n Retief watched, a white stream arced up from the turret, catching the\n sun as it spanned the lawn, plunged down to strike the massed men in a\n splatter of spray. It searched across the mob, came to rest on Sozier's\n car. Uniformed men scrambled for safety as the terrified driver gunned\n the heavy vehicle. The hose followed the car, dropping a solid stream\n of water on Sozier, kicking and flailing in the back seat. As the car\n passed from view, down a side street, water was overflowing the sides.", "\"The most popular aspiration I know of is to live high off someone\n else's effort,\" Retief said. \"I don't know of anyone outside the Corps\n who's managed it.\"\n\"Gentlemen!\" Sternwheeler bellowed. \"I'm awaiting your constructive\n suggestions—not an exchange of political views. We'll arrive off\n Glave in less than six hours. I should like before that time to have\n developed some notion regarding to whom I shall expect to offer my\n credentials!\"\n\n\n There was a discreet tap at the door; it opened and the young Third\n Secretary poked his head in.\n\n\n \"Mr. Ambassador, I have a reply to your message—just received from\n Glave. It's signed by the Steward of the GFE, and I thought you'd want\n to see it at once....\"\n\n\n \"Yes, of course; let me have it.\"\n\n\n \"What's the GFE?\" someone asked.", "\"Jake! You stick close to this bird. Take him to the main power plant,\n the water works and the dispatch center. Ride him around town and show\n him we're doing okay without a bunch of leeches bossing us. Then dump\n him at the port—and see that he leaves.\"\n\n\n \"I'll plan my own itinerary, thanks. I can't promise I'll be finished\n in four hours—but I'll keep you advised.\"\n\n\n \"I warned you—\"\n\n\n \"I heard you. Five times. And I only warned you once. You're getting\n ahead of me.\" Retief rose, motioned to the hulking guard. \"Come on,\n Jake. We've got a lot of ground to cover before we come back for our\n dinner.\"\nIII\n\n\n At the curb, Retief held out his hand. \"Give me the power cylinder out\n of your rifle, Jake.\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\"", "\"My mistake. Just a foreign particle on my contact lenses.\" Retief\n leaned on the car. \"On the other hand, Sozier, most murderers are\n sneaky about it. I think making a public announcement is a nice gesture\n on your part. The Monitors won't have any trouble deciding who to hang\n when they come in to straighten out this mess.\"\n\n\n Sozier scrambled back onto his seat. \"Monitors?\" he snarled. \"I\n don't think so. I don't think you'll be around to do any blabbering\n to anybody.\" He raised his voice. \"Jake! March this spy over to the\n sidelines. If he tries anything, shoot him!\" He gave Retief a baleful\n grin. \"I'll lay the body out nice and ship it back to your cronies.\n Accidents will happen, you know. It'll be a week or two before they get\n around to following up—and by then I'll have this little problem under\n control.\"" ], [ "\"The most popular aspiration I know of is to live high off someone\n else's effort,\" Retief said. \"I don't know of anyone outside the Corps\n who's managed it.\"\n\"Gentlemen!\" Sternwheeler bellowed. \"I'm awaiting your constructive\n suggestions—not an exchange of political views. We'll arrive off\n Glave in less than six hours. I should like before that time to have\n developed some notion regarding to whom I shall expect to offer my\n credentials!\"\n\n\n There was a discreet tap at the door; it opened and the young Third\n Secretary poked his head in.\n\n\n \"Mr. Ambassador, I have a reply to your message—just received from\n Glave. It's signed by the Steward of the GFE, and I thought you'd want\n to see it at once....\"\n\n\n \"Yes, of course; let me have it.\"\n\n\n \"What's the GFE?\" someone asked.", "\"It's the revolutionary group,\" the messenger said, passing the message\n over.\n\n\n \"GFE? GFE? What do the letters SIGNIFY?\"\n\n\n \"Glorious Fun Eternally,\" Retief suggested. \"Or possibly Goodies For\n Everybody.\"\n\n\n \"I believe that's 'Glavian Free Electorate',\" the Third Secretary said.\n\n\n Sternwheeler stared at the paper, lips pursed. His face grew pink. He\n slammed the paper on the table.\n\n\n \"Well, gentlemen! It appears our worst fears have been realized!\n This is nothing less than a warning! A threat! We're advised to\n divert course and bypass Glave entirely. It seems the GFE wants no\n interference from meddling foreign exploiters, as they put it!\"", "\"General Sozier, damn you! and plaster your big mouth shut!\" He\n gestured to one of the uniformed men standing by.\n\n\n \"You! Get Trundy and Little Moe up here—pronto!\" He swiveled back to\n Retief. \"You're in luck. I'm too busy right now to bother with you.\n You get back over to the port and leave the same way you came—and tell\n your blood-sucking friends the easy pickings are over as far as Glave's\n concerned. You won't lounge around here living high and throwing big\n parties and cooking up your dirty deals to get fat on at the expense of\n the working man.\"\n\n\n Retief dribbled ash on Sozier's desk and glanced at the green uniform\n front bulging between silver buttons.\n\n\n \"Who paid for your potbelly, Sozier?\" he inquired carelessly.", "\"I suppose that would cover scientists, professional men, executives,\n technicians of all sorts, engineers, teachers—all that crowd.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, them are the ones.\"\n\n\n \"And once you got them out of the way, the regular fellows would have a\n chance. Chaps that don't spend all their time taking baths and reading\n books and using big words; good Joes that don't mind picking their\n noses in public.\"\n\n\n \"We got as much right as anybody—\"\n\n\n \"Jake, who's Corasol?\"\n\n\n \"He's—I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"I thought I overheard his name somewhere.\"\n\n\n \"Uh, here's the communication center,\" Jake cut in.\n\n\n Retief swung into a parking lot under a high blank facade. He set the\n brake and stepped out.", "THE GOVERNOR OF GLAVE\nBY KEITH LAUMER\nThe revolution was over and peace\n\n restored—naturally Retief expected the worst!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, November 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI\n\n\n Retief turned back the gold-encrusted scarlet cuff of the mess jacket\n of a First Secretary and Consul, gathered in the three eight-sided\n black dice, shook them by his right ear and sent them rattling across\n the floor to rebound from the bulk-head.\n\n\n \"Thirteen's the point,\" the Power Section Chief called. \"Ten he makes\n it!\"", "Jake nodded. \"Yeah, it was them schools done it. All the time trying\n to make a feller do some kind of class. Big shots. Know it all. Gonna\n make us sit around and view tapes. Figgered they was better than us.\"\n\n\n \"And Sozier's idea was you'd take over, and you wouldn't have to be\n bothered.\"\n\n\n \"Aw, it wasn't Sozier's idea. He ain't the big leader.\"\n\n\n \"Where does the big leader keep himself?\"\n\n\n \"I dunno. I guess he's pretty busy right now.\" Jake snickered. \"Some of\n them guys call themselves colonels turned out not to know nothing about\n how to shoot off the guns.\"\n\n\n \"Shooting, eh? I thought it was a sort of peaceful revolution. The\n managerial class were booted out, and that was that.\"", "\"Yes, yes, there is the possibility that the issue is yet in doubt.\n Of course we'll have to exercise caution in making our approach. It\n wouldn't do to make overtures to the wrong side.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I think we need have no fear on that score,\" the Chief of the\n Political Section spoke up. \"I know these entrenched cliques. Once\n challenged by an aroused populace, they scuttle for safety—with large\n balances safely tucked away in neutral banks.\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to go on record,\" Magnan piped, \"as registering my deep\n gratification at this fulfillment of popular aspirations—\"", "\"—but unfortunately, I'm under treatment at the moment.\" Magnan sat\n down.\n\n\n \"—which will place us in an excellent position, propaganda-wise.\n\n\n \"What a pity I can't go,\" the Military Attache said. \"But my place is\n with my troops.\"\n\n\n \"The only troops you've got are the Assistant Attache and your\n secretary,\" Magnan pointed out.\n\n\n \"Say, I'd like to be down there in the thick of things,\" the Political\n Officer said. He assumed a grave expression. \"But of course I'll be\n needed here, to interpret results.\"\n\n\n \"I appreciate your attitude, gentlemen,\" Sternwheeler said, studying\n the ceiling. \"But I'm afraid I must limit the privilege of volunteering\n for this hazardous duty to those officers of more robust physique,\n under forty years of age—\"\n\n\n \"Tsk. I'm forty-one,\" Magnan said.", "\"As I have been explaining to the remainder of my staff for the past\n quarter-hour,\" Sternwheeler rumbled, \"I've been the recipient of\n important intelligence.\" He blinked at Retief expectantly. Retief\n raised his eyebrows in polite inquiry.\n\n\n \"It seems,\" Sternwheeler went on, \"that there has been a change in\n regime on Glave. A week ago, the government which invited the dispatch\n of this mission—and to which we're accredited—was overthrown.\n The former ruling class has fled into exile. A popular workers' and\n peasants' junta has taken over.\"", "\"You in there, Corasol! This is General Sozier, and I'm warning you to\n come out now or you and your smart friends are in for a big surprise.\n You think I won't blast you out because I don't want to wreck the\n planet. You see the tank aboard the lorry that just pulled up? It's\n full of gas—and I got plenty of hoses out here to pump it inside with.\n I'll put men on the roof and squirt it in the ventilators.\"\n\n\n Sozier's voice echoed and died. The militiamen eyed the station.\n Nothing happened.\n\n\n \"I know you can hear me, damn you!\" Sozier squalled. \"You'd better get\n the doors open and get out here fast!\"\n\n\n Retief stepped to Sozier's side. \"Say, Corporal, I didn't know you went\n in for practical jokes.\"\n\n\n Sozier jerked around to gape at Retief.", "\"Call me General!\"\n\n\n \"Mind if I sit down?\" Retief pulled out a chair, seated himself and\n took out a cigar. \"Curiously enough,\" he said, lighting up, \"the Corps\n has no intention of making any embarrassing investigations. We deal\n with the existing government, no questions asked.\" His eyes held the\n other's. \"Unless, of course, there are evidences of atrocities or other\n illegal measures.\"\n\n\n The coal-chip eyes narrowed. \"I don't have to make explanations to you\n or anybody else.\"\n\n\n \"Except, presumably, the Glavian Free Electorate,\" Retief said blandly.\n \"But tell me, General—who's actually running the show?\"\n\n\n A speaker on the desk buzzed. \"Hey, Corporal Sozier! Wes's got them two\n hellions cornered. They're holed up in the Birthday Cake—\"", "\"Glave was one of the old Contract Worlds,\" Retief said. \"What's become\n of the Planetary Manager General and the technical staff? And how do\n the peasants and workers plan to operate the atmospheric purification\n system, the Weather Control station, the tide regulation complexes?\"\n\n\n \"I'm more concerned at present with the status of the Mission! Will we\n be welcomed by these peasants or peppered with buckshot?\"\n\n\n \"You say that this is a popular junta, and that the former leaders have\n fled into exile,\" Retief said. \"May I ask the source?\"\n\n\n \"The despatch cites a 'reliable Glavian source'.\"\n\n\n \"That's officialese for something cribbed from a broadcast news\n tape. Presumably the Glavian news services are in the hands of the\n revolution. In that case—\"", "\"Mr. Ambassador,\" Counsellor Magnan broke in, rising. \"I'd like to be\n the first—\" he glanced around the table—\"or one of the first, anyway,\n to welcome the new government of Glave into the family of planetary\n ruling bodies—\"\n\"Sit down, Magnan!\" Sternwheeler snapped. \"Of course the Corps always\n recognizes\nde facto\nsovereignty. The problem is merely one of\n acquainting ourselves with the policies of this new group—a sort of\n blue-collar coalition, it seems. In what position that leaves this\n Embassy I don't yet know.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose this means we'll spend the next month in a parking orbit,\"\n Counsellor Magnan sighed.\n\n\n \"Unfortunately,\" Sternwheeler went on, \"the entire affair has\n apparently been carried off without recourse to violence, leaving the\n Corps no excuse to move in—that is, it appears our assistance in\n restoring order will not be required.\"", "\"What we need is more guys to pull duty, not tourists. Anyway,\nI'm\nChief Engineer here. Nobody comes in here 'less I like their looks.\"\n Retief moved forward, stood looking down at the redhead. The little\n man hesitated, then waved him past. \"Lucky for you I like your looks.\"\n Inside, Retief surveyed the long room, the giant converter units, the\n massive busbars. Armed men—some in uniform, some in work clothes\n or loud sport shirts—stood here and there. Other men read meters,\n adjusted controls or inspected dials.\n\n\n \"You've got more guards than workers,\" Retief said. \"Expecting trouble?\"\n\n\n The redhead bit the corner from a plug of spearmint. He glanced around\n the plant. \"Things is quiet now; but you never know.\"\n\n\n \"Rather old-fashioned equipment isn't it? When was it installed?\"", "Retief walked over to the cart, tossed his valise aboard, climbed\n into the driver's seat and headed for the operations building. Beyond\n the port, hills rose, white buildings gleaming against the deep green\n slopes. Near the ridge, a vehicle moved ant-like along a winding road,\n a dust trail rising behind it. Faintly a distant shot sounded.\n\n\n Papers littered the ground before the Operations Building. Retief\n pushed open the tall glass door, stood listening. Slanting sunlight\n reflected from a wide polished floor, at the far side of which\n illuminated lettering over empty counters read IMMIGRATION, HEALTH\n and CUSTOMS. He crossed to the desk, put the valise down, then leaned\n across the counter. A worried face under an oversized white cap looked\n up at him.\n\n\n \"You can come out now,\" Retief said. \"They've gone.\"", "\"This guy asks too many questions,\" the man with the gun said. \"Let's\n let Sozier answer 'em.\"\n\n\n \"Who's he?\"\n\n\n \"He's the Military Governor of the City.\"\n\n\n \"Now we're getting somewhere,\" Retief said. \"Lead the way, Jake—and\n don't forget my bag.\"\nSozier was a small man with thin hair oiled across a shiny scalp,\n prominent ears and eyes like coal chips set in rolls of fat. He\n glowered at Retief from behind a polished desk occupying the center of\n a spacious office.\n\n\n \"I warned you off,\" he snapped. \"You came anyway.\" He leaned forward\n and slammed a fist down on the desk. \"You're used to throwing your\n weight around, but you won't throw it around here! There'll be no spies\n pussyfooting around Glave!\"\n\n\n \"Looking for what, Mr. Sozier?\"", "\"Oh ... Mr. Retief,\" a strained voice called. Retief looked up. A tall\n thin youth in the black-trimmed gray of a Third Secretary flapped a\n sheet of paper from the edge of the circle surrounding the game. \"The\n Ambassador's compliments, sir, and will you join him and the staff in\n the conference room at once?\"\n\n\n Retief rose and dusted his knees. \"That's all for now, boys,\" he said.\n \"I'll take the rest of your money later.\" He followed the junior\n diplomat from the ward room, along the bare corridors of the crew\n level, past the glare panel reading NOTICE—FIRST CLASS ONLY BEYOND\n THIS POINT, through the chandeliered and draped ballroom and along a\n stretch of soundless carpet to a heavy door bearing a placard with the\n legend CONFERENCE IN SESSION.\n\n\n \"Ambassador Sternwheeler seemed quite upset, Mr. Retief,\" the messenger\n said.", "Retief sighed. \"The trouble with taking over your boss's job is\n discovering its drawbacks. It's disillusioning, I know, Sozier, but—\"\n\n\n \"All right! Take your tour! You'll find everything running as smooth as\n silk! Utilities, police, transport, environmental control—\"\n\n\n \"What about Space Control? Glave Tower seems to be off the air.\"\n\n\n \"I shut it down. We don't need anything and we don't want anything from\n the outside.\"\n\n\n \"Where's the new Premier keeping himself? Does he share your passion\n for privacy?\"\n\n\n The general got to his feet. \"I'm letting you take your look, Mr.\n Big Nose. I'm giving you four hours. Then out! And the next meddling\n bureaucrat that tries to cut atmosphere on Glave without a clearance\n gets burned!\"\n\n\n \"I'll need a car.\"", "Retief strolled over to the gray-haired man, now scribbling before a\n bank of meters. He glanced at the clipboard.\nPower off at sunset. Tell Corasol\nwas scrawled in block letters\n across the record sheet. Retief nodded, rejoined his guard.\n\n\n \"All right, Jake. Let's have a look at the communications center.\"\n\n\n Back in the car, headed west, Retief studied the blank windows of\n office buildings, the milling throngs in beer bars, shooting galleries,\n tattoo parlors, billiard halls, pinball arcades, bordellos and\n half-credit casinos.\n\n\n \"Everybody seems to be having fun,\" he remarked.\n\n\n Jake stared out the window.\n\n\n \"Yeah.\"\n\n\n \"Too bad you're on duty, Jake. You could be out there joining in.\"", "Retief braked. \"In that case, I'm afraid our association is at an end,\n Jake.\"\n\n\n \"You mean ... you're getting out here?\"\n\n\n \"No, you are.\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Now wait a minute, Mister! The corporal said I was to stay with\n you.\"\n\n\n Retief accelerated. \"That's settled, then. Which way?\"\nIV\n\n\n Retief pulled the car to a halt two hundred yards from the periphery\n of a loose crowd of brown-uniformed men who stood in groups scattered\n across a broad plaza, overflowing into a stretch of manicured lawn\n before the bare, functional facade of sub-station number Nine. In the\n midst of the besieging mob, Sozier's red face and bald head bobbed as\n he harangued a cluster of green-uniformed men from his place in the\n rear of a long open car." ], [ "\"He usually is, Pete.\" Retief took a cigar from his breast pocket. \"Got\n a light?\"\n\n\n The Third Secretary produced a permatch. \"I don't know why you smoke\n those things instead of dope sticks, Mr. Retief,\" he said. \"The\n Ambassador hates the smell.\"\n\n\n Retief nodded. \"I only smoke this kind at conferences. It makes for\n shorter sessions.\" He stepped into the room. Ambassador Sternwheeler\n eyed him down the length of the conference table.\n\n\n \"Ah, Mr. Retief honors us with his presence. Do be seated, Retief.\" He\n fingered a yellow Departmental despatch. Retief took a chair, puffing\n out a dense cloud of smoke.", "Retief walked over to the cart, tossed his valise aboard, climbed\n into the driver's seat and headed for the operations building. Beyond\n the port, hills rose, white buildings gleaming against the deep green\n slopes. Near the ridge, a vehicle moved ant-like along a winding road,\n a dust trail rising behind it. Faintly a distant shot sounded.\n\n\n Papers littered the ground before the Operations Building. Retief\n pushed open the tall glass door, stood listening. Slanting sunlight\n reflected from a wide polished floor, at the far side of which\n illuminated lettering over empty counters read IMMIGRATION, HEALTH\n and CUSTOMS. He crossed to the desk, put the valise down, then leaned\n across the counter. A worried face under an oversized white cap looked\n up at him.\n\n\n \"You can come out now,\" Retief said. \"They've gone.\"", "\"General Sozier, damn you! and plaster your big mouth shut!\" He\n gestured to one of the uniformed men standing by.\n\n\n \"You! Get Trundy and Little Moe up here—pronto!\" He swiveled back to\n Retief. \"You're in luck. I'm too busy right now to bother with you.\n You get back over to the port and leave the same way you came—and tell\n your blood-sucking friends the easy pickings are over as far as Glave's\n concerned. You won't lounge around here living high and throwing big\n parties and cooking up your dirty deals to get fat on at the expense of\n the working man.\"\n\n\n Retief dribbled ash on Sozier's desk and glanced at the green uniform\n front bulging between silver buttons.\n\n\n \"Who paid for your potbelly, Sozier?\" he inquired carelessly.", "The man rose, dusting himself off. He looked over Retief's shoulder.\n \"Who's gone?\"\n\n\n \"Whoever it was that scared you.\"\n\n\n \"Whatta ya mean? I was looking for my pencil.\"\n\n\n \"Here it is.\" Retief plucked a worn stub from the pocket of the soiled\n shirt sagging under the weight of braided shoulderboards. \"You can sign\n me in as a Diplomatic Representative. A break for you—no formalities\n necessary. Where can I catch a cab for the city?\"\n\n\n The man eyed Retief's bag. \"What's in that?\"\n\n\n \"Personal belongings under duty-free entry.\"\n\n\n \"Guns?\"\n\n\n \"No, thanks, just a cab.\"\n\n\n \"You got no gun?\" The man raised his voice.", "\"Come on, Jake. You've got a nervous habit of playing with the firing\n stud. We don't want any accidents.\"\n\n\n \"How do you get it out? They only give me this thing yesterday.\"\n\n\n Retief pocketed the cylinder. \"You sit in back. I'll drive.\" He wheeled\n the car off along a broad avenue crowded with vehicles and lined with\n flowering palms, behind which stately white buildings reared up into\n the pale sky.\n\n\n \"Nice looking city, Jake,\" Retief said conversationally. \"What's the\n population?\"\n\n\n \"I dunno. I only been here a year.\"\n\n\n \"What about Horny and Pud? Are they natives?\"\n\n\n \"Whatta ya mean, natives? They're just as civilized as me.\"\n\n\n \"My boner, Jake. Known Sozier long?\"", "Retief braked. \"In that case, I'm afraid our association is at an end,\n Jake.\"\n\n\n \"You mean ... you're getting out here?\"\n\n\n \"No, you are.\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Now wait a minute, Mister! The corporal said I was to stay with\n you.\"\n\n\n Retief accelerated. \"That's settled, then. Which way?\"\nIV\n\n\n Retief pulled the car to a halt two hundred yards from the periphery\n of a loose crowd of brown-uniformed men who stood in groups scattered\n across a broad plaza, overflowing into a stretch of manicured lawn\n before the bare, functional facade of sub-station number Nine. In the\n midst of the besieging mob, Sozier's red face and bald head bobbed as\n he harangued a cluster of green-uniformed men from his place in the\n rear of a long open car.", "\"Oh ... Mr. Retief,\" a strained voice called. Retief looked up. A tall\n thin youth in the black-trimmed gray of a Third Secretary flapped a\n sheet of paper from the edge of the circle surrounding the game. \"The\n Ambassador's compliments, sir, and will you join him and the staff in\n the conference room at once?\"\n\n\n Retief rose and dusted his knees. \"That's all for now, boys,\" he said.\n \"I'll take the rest of your money later.\" He followed the junior\n diplomat from the ward room, along the bare corridors of the crew\n level, past the glare panel reading NOTICE—FIRST CLASS ONLY BEYOND\n THIS POINT, through the chandeliered and draped ballroom and along a\n stretch of soundless carpet to a heavy door bearing a placard with the\n legend CONFERENCE IN SESSION.\n\n\n \"Ambassador Sternwheeler seemed quite upset, Mr. Retief,\" the messenger\n said.", "\"This guy asks too many questions,\" the man with the gun said. \"Let's\n let Sozier answer 'em.\"\n\n\n \"Who's he?\"\n\n\n \"He's the Military Governor of the City.\"\n\n\n \"Now we're getting somewhere,\" Retief said. \"Lead the way, Jake—and\n don't forget my bag.\"\nSozier was a small man with thin hair oiled across a shiny scalp,\n prominent ears and eyes like coal chips set in rolls of fat. He\n glowered at Retief from behind a polished desk occupying the center of\n a spacious office.\n\n\n \"I warned you off,\" he snapped. \"You came anyway.\" He leaned forward\n and slammed a fist down on the desk. \"You're used to throwing your\n weight around, but you won't throw it around here! There'll be no spies\n pussyfooting around Glave!\"\n\n\n \"Looking for what, Mr. Sozier?\"", "Jake glanced at Sozier, gulped, aimed the rifle at Retief and nodded\n toward the car. As Retief moved off, a murmur swept across the crowd.\n Retief glanced back. A turret on the station roof was rotating slowly.\n A shout rose; men surged away from the building, scuffling for way;\n Sozier yelled. His car started up, moved forward, horns blaring. As\n Retief watched, a white stream arced up from the turret, catching the\n sun as it spanned the lawn, plunged down to strike the massed men in a\n splatter of spray. It searched across the mob, came to rest on Sozier's\n car. Uniformed men scrambled for safety as the terrified driver gunned\n the heavy vehicle. The hose followed the car, dropping a solid stream\n of water on Sozier, kicking and flailing in the back seat. As the car\n passed from view, down a side street, water was overflowing the sides.", "\"The corporal will feel all the better for an invigorating swim in\n his mobile pool,\" Retief commented. \"By the way, Jake, I have to be\n going now. It wouldn't be fair to send you back to your boss without\n something to back up your story that you were outnumbered, so—\"\n\n\n Retief's left fist shot out to connect solidly with Jake's jaw. Jake\n dropped the gun and sat down hard. Retief turned and headed for the\n pumping station. The hose had shut down now. A few men were standing,\n eyeing the building anxiously. Others watched his progress across the\n square. As Retief passed, he caught scattered comments:\n\n\n \"—seen that bird before.\"\n\n\n \"—where he's headed.\"\n\n\n \"—feller Sozier was talking to....\"\n\n\n \"Hey, you!\"", "\"The corporal's a busy man, Jake. We won't worry him by telling him\n about it.\"\n\n\n Jake followed Retief up the walk. The broad double doors were locked.\n \"Let's try the back.\"\n\n\n The narrow door set in the high blank wall opened as Retief approached.\n A gun barrel poked out, followed by a small man with bushy red hair. He\n looked Retief over.\n\n\n \"Who's this party, Jake?\" he barked.\n\n\n \"Sozier said show him the plant,\" Jake said.", "Jake looked at Retief uncertainly, fingering his empty rifle.\n\n\n Retief put his hands up. \"I guess you got me, Jake,\" he said. \"Careful\n of that gun, now.\"", "\"You in there, Corasol! This is General Sozier, and I'm warning you to\n come out now or you and your smart friends are in for a big surprise.\n You think I won't blast you out because I don't want to wreck the\n planet. You see the tank aboard the lorry that just pulled up? It's\n full of gas—and I got plenty of hoses out here to pump it inside with.\n I'll put men on the roof and squirt it in the ventilators.\"\n\n\n Sozier's voice echoed and died. The militiamen eyed the station.\n Nothing happened.\n\n\n \"I know you can hear me, damn you!\" Sozier squalled. \"You'd better get\n the doors open and get out here fast!\"\n\n\n Retief stepped to Sozier's side. \"Say, Corporal, I didn't know you went\n in for practical jokes.\"\n\n\n Sozier jerked around to gape at Retief.", "\"Lead the way, Jake.\"\n\n\n \"Look, Mister, the corporal only wanted me to show you the outside.\"\n\n\n \"Anything to hide, Jake?\"\n\n\n Jake shook his head angrily and stamped past Retief. \"When I joined up\n with Sozier, I didn't figger I'd be getting in this kind of mess.\"\n\n\n \"I know, Jake. It's tough. Sometimes it seems like a fellow works\n harder after he's thrown out the parasites than he did before.\"\n\n\n A cautious guard let Retief and Jake inside, followed them along\n bright-lit aisles among consoles, cables, batteries of instruments.\n Armed men in careless uniforms lounged, watching. Here and there a\n silent technician worked quietly.\n\n\n Retief paused by one, an elderly man in a neat white coverall, with a\n purple spot under one eye.", "\"What's it all about, Jake?\" Retief enquired. \"Since the parasites have\n all left peacefully, I'm having a hard time figuring out who'd be holed\n up in the pumping station—and why. Maybe they haven't gotten the word\n that it's all going to be fun and games from now on.\"\n\n\n \"If the corporal sees you over here—\"\n\n\n \"Ah, the good corporal. Glad you mentioned him, Jake. He's the man to\n see.\" Retief stepped out of the car and started through the crowd. A\n heavy lorry loaded with an immense tank with the letter H blazoned on\n its side trundled into the square from a side street, moved up to a\n position before the building. A smaller car pulled alongside Sozier's\n limousine. The driver stepped down, handed something to Sozier. A\n moment later, Sozier's amplified voice boomed across the crowd.", "\"What are you doing here!\" he burst out. \"I told Jake—where is that—\"\n\n\n \"Jake didn't like the questions I was asking,\" Retief said, \"so he\n marched me up here to report to you.\"\n\n\n \"Jake, you damn fool!\" Sozier roared. \"I got a good mind—\"\n\"I disagree, Sozier,\" Retief cut in. \"I think you're a complete\n imbecile. Sitting out here in the open yelling at the top of your\n lungs, for example. Corasol and his party might get annoyed and spray\n that fancy car you've swiped with something a lot more painful than\n words.\"\n\n\n \"Eh?\" Sozier's head whipped around to stare at the building.\n\n\n \"Isn't that a gun I see sticking out?\"\n\n\n Sozier dropped. \"Where?\"", "\"Call me General!\"\n\n\n \"Mind if I sit down?\" Retief pulled out a chair, seated himself and\n took out a cigar. \"Curiously enough,\" he said, lighting up, \"the Corps\n has no intention of making any embarrassing investigations. We deal\n with the existing government, no questions asked.\" His eyes held the\n other's. \"Unless, of course, there are evidences of atrocities or other\n illegal measures.\"\n\n\n The coal-chip eyes narrowed. \"I don't have to make explanations to you\n or anybody else.\"\n\n\n \"Except, presumably, the Glavian Free Electorate,\" Retief said blandly.\n \"But tell me, General—who's actually running the show?\"\n\n\n A speaker on the desk buzzed. \"Hey, Corporal Sozier! Wes's got them two\n hellions cornered. They're holed up in the Birthday Cake—\"", "Retief was on the grass now. Ahead, the blank wall loomed up. He walked\n on briskly.\n\n\n \"Stop that jasper!\" a shout rang out. There was a sharp whine and a\n black spot appeared on the wall ahead. Near it, a small personnel door\n abruptly swung inward. Retief sprinted, plunged through the opening\n as a second shot seared the paint on the doorframe. The door clanged\n behind him. Retief glanced over the half dozen men confronting him.\n\n\n \"I'm Retief, CDT, acting Charge,\" he said. \"Which of you gentlemen is\n Manager-General Corasol?\"", "\"Jake! You stick close to this bird. Take him to the main power plant,\n the water works and the dispatch center. Ride him around town and show\n him we're doing okay without a bunch of leeches bossing us. Then dump\n him at the port—and see that he leaves.\"\n\n\n \"I'll plan my own itinerary, thanks. I can't promise I'll be finished\n in four hours—but I'll keep you advised.\"\n\n\n \"I warned you—\"\n\n\n \"I heard you. Five times. And I only warned you once. You're getting\n ahead of me.\" Retief rose, motioned to the hulking guard. \"Come on,\n Jake. We've got a lot of ground to cover before we come back for our\n dinner.\"\nIII\n\n\n At the curb, Retief held out his hand. \"Give me the power cylinder out\n of your rifle, Jake.\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\"", "\"That's enough smart talk.\" The biggest of the three newcomers moved\n up to Retief. \"You stuck your nose in at the wrong time. We just had a\n change of management around here.\"\n\n\n \"I heard about it,\" Retief said. \"Who do I complain to?\"\n\n\n \"Complain? What about?\"\n\n\n \"The port's a mess,\" Retief barked. \"Nobody on duty to receive official\n visitors! No passenger service facilities! Why, do you know I had to\n carry my own bag—\"\n\n\n \"All right, all right, that's outside my department. You better see the\n boss.\"\n\n\n \"The boss? I thought you got rid of the bosses.\"\n\n\n \"We did, but now we got new ones.\"\n\n\n \"They any better than the old ones?\"" ], [ "Jake looked at Retief uncertainly, fingering his empty rifle.\n\n\n Retief put his hands up. \"I guess you got me, Jake,\" he said. \"Careful\n of that gun, now.\"", "\"The corporal will feel all the better for an invigorating swim in\n his mobile pool,\" Retief commented. \"By the way, Jake, I have to be\n going now. It wouldn't be fair to send you back to your boss without\n something to back up your story that you were outnumbered, so—\"\n\n\n Retief's left fist shot out to connect solidly with Jake's jaw. Jake\n dropped the gun and sat down hard. Retief turned and headed for the\n pumping station. The hose had shut down now. A few men were standing,\n eyeing the building anxiously. Others watched his progress across the\n square. As Retief passed, he caught scattered comments:\n\n\n \"—seen that bird before.\"\n\n\n \"—where he's headed.\"\n\n\n \"—feller Sozier was talking to....\"\n\n\n \"Hey, you!\"", "\"Jake! You stick close to this bird. Take him to the main power plant,\n the water works and the dispatch center. Ride him around town and show\n him we're doing okay without a bunch of leeches bossing us. Then dump\n him at the port—and see that he leaves.\"\n\n\n \"I'll plan my own itinerary, thanks. I can't promise I'll be finished\n in four hours—but I'll keep you advised.\"\n\n\n \"I warned you—\"\n\n\n \"I heard you. Five times. And I only warned you once. You're getting\n ahead of me.\" Retief rose, motioned to the hulking guard. \"Come on,\n Jake. We've got a lot of ground to cover before we come back for our\n dinner.\"\nIII\n\n\n At the curb, Retief held out his hand. \"Give me the power cylinder out\n of your rifle, Jake.\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\"", "Retief braked. \"In that case, I'm afraid our association is at an end,\n Jake.\"\n\n\n \"You mean ... you're getting out here?\"\n\n\n \"No, you are.\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Now wait a minute, Mister! The corporal said I was to stay with\n you.\"\n\n\n Retief accelerated. \"That's settled, then. Which way?\"\nIV\n\n\n Retief pulled the car to a halt two hundred yards from the periphery\n of a loose crowd of brown-uniformed men who stood in groups scattered\n across a broad plaza, overflowing into a stretch of manicured lawn\n before the bare, functional facade of sub-station number Nine. In the\n midst of the besieging mob, Sozier's red face and bald head bobbed as\n he harangued a cluster of green-uniformed men from his place in the\n rear of a long open car.", "\"Lead the way, Jake.\"\n\n\n \"Look, Mister, the corporal only wanted me to show you the outside.\"\n\n\n \"Anything to hide, Jake?\"\n\n\n Jake shook his head angrily and stamped past Retief. \"When I joined up\n with Sozier, I didn't figger I'd be getting in this kind of mess.\"\n\n\n \"I know, Jake. It's tough. Sometimes it seems like a fellow works\n harder after he's thrown out the parasites than he did before.\"\n\n\n A cautious guard let Retief and Jake inside, followed them along\n bright-lit aisles among consoles, cables, batteries of instruments.\n Armed men in careless uniforms lounged, watching. Here and there a\n silent technician worked quietly.\n\n\n Retief paused by one, an elderly man in a neat white coverall, with a\n purple spot under one eye.", "\"What are you doing here!\" he burst out. \"I told Jake—where is that—\"\n\n\n \"Jake didn't like the questions I was asking,\" Retief said, \"so he\n marched me up here to report to you.\"\n\n\n \"Jake, you damn fool!\" Sozier roared. \"I got a good mind—\"\n\"I disagree, Sozier,\" Retief cut in. \"I think you're a complete\n imbecile. Sitting out here in the open yelling at the top of your\n lungs, for example. Corasol and his party might get annoyed and spray\n that fancy car you've swiped with something a lot more painful than\n words.\"\n\n\n \"Eh?\" Sozier's head whipped around to stare at the building.\n\n\n \"Isn't that a gun I see sticking out?\"\n\n\n Sozier dropped. \"Where?\"", "\"The corporal's a busy man, Jake. We won't worry him by telling him\n about it.\"\n\n\n Jake followed Retief up the walk. The broad double doors were locked.\n \"Let's try the back.\"\n\n\n The narrow door set in the high blank wall opened as Retief approached.\n A gun barrel poked out, followed by a small man with bushy red hair. He\n looked Retief over.\n\n\n \"Who's this party, Jake?\" he barked.\n\n\n \"Sozier said show him the plant,\" Jake said.", "\"I must admit I'm surprised, Jake,\" Retief said. \"Everything seems\n orderly. No signs of riots or panic. Power, water, communications\n normal—just as the general said. Remarkable, isn't it, considering\n that the entire managerial class has packed up and left?\"\n\n\n \"You wanta see the Power Plant?\" Retief could see perspiration beaded\n on the man's forehead under the uniform cap.\n\n\n \"Sure. Which way?\" With Jake directing, Retief ascended to the ridge\n top, cruised past the blank white facade of the station.\n\n\n \"Quiet, isn't it?\" Retief pulled the car in to the curb. \"Let's go\n inside.\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Corporal Sozier didn't say nothing—\"\n\n\n \"You're right, Jake. That leaves it to our discretion.\"\n\n\n \"He won't like it.\"", "Jake glanced at Sozier, gulped, aimed the rifle at Retief and nodded\n toward the car. As Retief moved off, a murmur swept across the crowd.\n Retief glanced back. A turret on the station roof was rotating slowly.\n A shout rose; men surged away from the building, scuffling for way;\n Sozier yelled. His car started up, moved forward, horns blaring. As\n Retief watched, a white stream arced up from the turret, catching the\n sun as it spanned the lawn, plunged down to strike the massed men in a\n splatter of spray. It searched across the mob, came to rest on Sozier's\n car. Uniformed men scrambled for safety as the terrified driver gunned\n the heavy vehicle. The hose followed the car, dropping a solid stream\n of water on Sozier, kicking and flailing in the back seat. As the car\n passed from view, down a side street, water was overflowing the sides.", "\"Come on, Jake. You've got a nervous habit of playing with the firing\n stud. We don't want any accidents.\"\n\n\n \"How do you get it out? They only give me this thing yesterday.\"\n\n\n Retief pocketed the cylinder. \"You sit in back. I'll drive.\" He wheeled\n the car off along a broad avenue crowded with vehicles and lined with\n flowering palms, behind which stately white buildings reared up into\n the pale sky.\n\n\n \"Nice looking city, Jake,\" Retief said conversationally. \"What's the\n population?\"\n\n\n \"I dunno. I only been here a year.\"\n\n\n \"What about Horny and Pud? Are they natives?\"\n\n\n \"Whatta ya mean, natives? They're just as civilized as me.\"\n\n\n \"My boner, Jake. Known Sozier long?\"", "\"What's it all about, Jake?\" Retief enquired. \"Since the parasites have\n all left peacefully, I'm having a hard time figuring out who'd be holed\n up in the pumping station—and why. Maybe they haven't gotten the word\n that it's all going to be fun and games from now on.\"\n\n\n \"If the corporal sees you over here—\"\n\n\n \"Ah, the good corporal. Glad you mentioned him, Jake. He's the man to\n see.\" Retief stepped out of the car and started through the crowd. A\n heavy lorry loaded with an immense tank with the letter H blazoned on\n its side trundled into the square from a side street, moved up to a\n position before the building. A smaller car pulled alongside Sozier's\n limousine. The driver stepped down, handed something to Sozier. A\n moment later, Sozier's amplified voice boomed across the crowd.", "\"Quite a bruise you've got there,\" Retief commented heartily. \"Power\n failure at sunset,\" he added softly. The technician hesitated, nodded\n and moved on.\n\n\n Back in the car, Retief gave Jake directions. At the end of three\n hours, he had seen twelve smooth-running, heavily guarded installations.\n\n\n \"So far, so good, Jake,\" he said. \"Next stop, Sub-station Number Nine.\"\n In the mirror, Jake's face stiffened. \"Hey, you can't go down there—\"\n\n\n \"Something going on there, Jake?\"\n\n\n \"That's where—I mean, no. I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"I don't want to miss anything, Jake. Which way?\"\n\n\n \"I ain't going down there,\" Jake said sullenly.", "Retief strolled over to the gray-haired man, now scribbling before a\n bank of meters. He glanced at the clipboard.\nPower off at sunset. Tell Corasol\nwas scrawled in block letters\n across the record sheet. Retief nodded, rejoined his guard.\n\n\n \"All right, Jake. Let's have a look at the communications center.\"\n\n\n Back in the car, headed west, Retief studied the blank windows of\n office buildings, the milling throngs in beer bars, shooting galleries,\n tattoo parlors, billiard halls, pinball arcades, bordellos and\n half-credit casinos.\n\n\n \"Everybody seems to be having fun,\" he remarked.\n\n\n Jake stared out the window.\n\n\n \"Yeah.\"\n\n\n \"Too bad you're on duty, Jake. You could be out there joining in.\"", "\"My mistake. Just a foreign particle on my contact lenses.\" Retief\n leaned on the car. \"On the other hand, Sozier, most murderers are\n sneaky about it. I think making a public announcement is a nice gesture\n on your part. The Monitors won't have any trouble deciding who to hang\n when they come in to straighten out this mess.\"\n\n\n Sozier scrambled back onto his seat. \"Monitors?\" he snarled. \"I\n don't think so. I don't think you'll be around to do any blabbering\n to anybody.\" He raised his voice. \"Jake! March this spy over to the\n sidelines. If he tries anything, shoot him!\" He gave Retief a baleful\n grin. \"I'll lay the body out nice and ship it back to your cronies.\n Accidents will happen, you know. It'll be a week or two before they get\n around to following up—and by then I'll have this little problem under\n control.\"", "\"This guy asks too many questions,\" the man with the gun said. \"Let's\n let Sozier answer 'em.\"\n\n\n \"Who's he?\"\n\n\n \"He's the Military Governor of the City.\"\n\n\n \"Now we're getting somewhere,\" Retief said. \"Lead the way, Jake—and\n don't forget my bag.\"\nSozier was a small man with thin hair oiled across a shiny scalp,\n prominent ears and eyes like coal chips set in rolls of fat. He\n glowered at Retief from behind a polished desk occupying the center of\n a spacious office.\n\n\n \"I warned you off,\" he snapped. \"You came anyway.\" He leaned forward\n and slammed a fist down on the desk. \"You're used to throwing your\n weight around, but you won't throw it around here! There'll be no spies\n pussyfooting around Glave!\"\n\n\n \"Looking for what, Mr. Sozier?\"", "\"Sure. He useta come around to the club.\"\n\n\n \"I take it he was in the army under the old regime?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah—but he didn't like the way they run it. Nothing but band playing\n and fancy marching. There wasn't nobody to fight.\"\n\n\n \"Just between us, Jake—where did the former Planetary Manager General\n go?\" Retief watched Jake's heavy face in the mirror. Jake jumped,\n clamped his mouth shut.\n\n\n \"I don't know nothing.\"\n\n\n Half an hour later, after a tour of the commercial center, Retief\n headed towards the city's outskirts. The avenue curved, leading up\n along the flank of a low hill.", "Retief walked over to the cart, tossed his valise aboard, climbed\n into the driver's seat and headed for the operations building. Beyond\n the port, hills rose, white buildings gleaming against the deep green\n slopes. Near the ridge, a vehicle moved ant-like along a winding road,\n a dust trail rising behind it. Faintly a distant shot sounded.\n\n\n Papers littered the ground before the Operations Building. Retief\n pushed open the tall glass door, stood listening. Slanting sunlight\n reflected from a wide polished floor, at the far side of which\n illuminated lettering over empty counters read IMMIGRATION, HEALTH\n and CUSTOMS. He crossed to the desk, put the valise down, then leaned\n across the counter. A worried face under an oversized white cap looked\n up at him.\n\n\n \"You can come out now,\" Retief said. \"They've gone.\"", "\"General Sozier, damn you! and plaster your big mouth shut!\" He\n gestured to one of the uniformed men standing by.\n\n\n \"You! Get Trundy and Little Moe up here—pronto!\" He swiveled back to\n Retief. \"You're in luck. I'm too busy right now to bother with you.\n You get back over to the port and leave the same way you came—and tell\n your blood-sucking friends the easy pickings are over as far as Glave's\n concerned. You won't lounge around here living high and throwing big\n parties and cooking up your dirty deals to get fat on at the expense of\n the working man.\"\n\n\n Retief dribbled ash on Sozier's desk and glanced at the green uniform\n front bulging between silver buttons.\n\n\n \"Who paid for your potbelly, Sozier?\" he inquired carelessly.", "\"Looky here, Mister, I'll give the orders. We don't need anybody\n telling us how to run our business.\"\n\n\n \"I'm telling you to shift that blaster before I take it away from you\n and wrap it around your neck,\" Retief said conversationally. The cop\n stepped back uncertainly, lowering the gun.\n\n\n \"Jake! Horny! Pud! come on out!\"\n\n\n Three more brown uniforms emerged from concealment.\n\n\n \"Who are you fellows hiding from, the top sergeant?\" Retief glanced\n over the ill-fitting uniforms, the unshaved faces, the scuffed boots.\n \"Tell you what. When he shows up, I'll engage him in conversation. You\n beat it back to the barracks and grab a quick bath—\"", "Retief was on the grass now. Ahead, the blank wall loomed up. He walked\n on briskly.\n\n\n \"Stop that jasper!\" a shout rang out. There was a sharp whine and a\n black spot appeared on the wall ahead. Near it, a small personnel door\n abruptly swung inward. Retief sprinted, plunged through the opening\n as a second shot seared the paint on the doorframe. The door clanged\n behind him. Retief glanced over the half dozen men confronting him.\n\n\n \"I'm Retief, CDT, acting Charge,\" he said. \"Which of you gentlemen is\n Manager-General Corasol?\"" ], [ "\"It's the revolutionary group,\" the messenger said, passing the message\n over.\n\n\n \"GFE? GFE? What do the letters SIGNIFY?\"\n\n\n \"Glorious Fun Eternally,\" Retief suggested. \"Or possibly Goodies For\n Everybody.\"\n\n\n \"I believe that's 'Glavian Free Electorate',\" the Third Secretary said.\n\n\n Sternwheeler stared at the paper, lips pursed. His face grew pink. He\n slammed the paper on the table.\n\n\n \"Well, gentlemen! It appears our worst fears have been realized!\n This is nothing less than a warning! A threat! We're advised to\n divert course and bypass Glave entirely. It seems the GFE wants no\n interference from meddling foreign exploiters, as they put it!\"", "\"As I have been explaining to the remainder of my staff for the past\n quarter-hour,\" Sternwheeler rumbled, \"I've been the recipient of\n important intelligence.\" He blinked at Retief expectantly. Retief\n raised his eyebrows in polite inquiry.\n\n\n \"It seems,\" Sternwheeler went on, \"that there has been a change in\n regime on Glave. A week ago, the government which invited the dispatch\n of this mission—and to which we're accredited—was overthrown.\n The former ruling class has fled into exile. A popular workers' and\n peasants' junta has taken over.\"", "\"—but unfortunately, I'm under treatment at the moment.\" Magnan sat\n down.\n\n\n \"—which will place us in an excellent position, propaganda-wise.\n\n\n \"What a pity I can't go,\" the Military Attache said. \"But my place is\n with my troops.\"\n\n\n \"The only troops you've got are the Assistant Attache and your\n secretary,\" Magnan pointed out.\n\n\n \"Say, I'd like to be down there in the thick of things,\" the Political\n Officer said. He assumed a grave expression. \"But of course I'll be\n needed here, to interpret results.\"\n\n\n \"I appreciate your attitude, gentlemen,\" Sternwheeler said, studying\n the ceiling. \"But I'm afraid I must limit the privilege of volunteering\n for this hazardous duty to those officers of more robust physique,\n under forty years of age—\"\n\n\n \"Tsk. I'm forty-one,\" Magnan said.", "\"What are you proposing, Mr. Retief?\"\n\n\n \"That we proceed to make planetfall as scheduled, greet our welcoming\n committee with wide diplomatic smiles, hint at largesse in the offing\n and settle down to observe the lie of the land.\"\n\n\n \"Just what I was about to suggest,\" Magnan said.\n\n\n \"That might be dangerous,\" Sternwheeler said.\n\n\n \"That's why I didn't suggest it,\" Magnan said.\n\n\n \"Still it's essential that we learn more of the situation than can be\n gleaned from official broadcasts,\" Sternwheeler mused. \"Now, while I\n can't justify risking the entire Mission, it might be advisable to\n dispatch a delegation to sound out the new regime.\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to volunteer,\" Magnan said, rising.\n\n\n \"Of course, the delegates may be murdered—\"", "\"Oh ... Mr. Retief,\" a strained voice called. Retief looked up. A tall\n thin youth in the black-trimmed gray of a Third Secretary flapped a\n sheet of paper from the edge of the circle surrounding the game. \"The\n Ambassador's compliments, sir, and will you join him and the staff in\n the conference room at once?\"\n\n\n Retief rose and dusted his knees. \"That's all for now, boys,\" he said.\n \"I'll take the rest of your money later.\" He followed the junior\n diplomat from the ward room, along the bare corridors of the crew\n level, past the glare panel reading NOTICE—FIRST CLASS ONLY BEYOND\n THIS POINT, through the chandeliered and draped ballroom and along a\n stretch of soundless carpet to a heavy door bearing a placard with the\n legend CONFERENCE IN SESSION.\n\n\n \"Ambassador Sternwheeler seemed quite upset, Mr. Retief,\" the messenger\n said.", "Magnan rose. \"If you'll excuse me Mr. Ambassador, I want to get off a\n message to Sector HQ to hold my old job for me—\"\n\n\n \"Sit down, you idiot!\" Sternwheeler roared. \"If you think I'm\n consenting to have my career blighted—my first Ambassadorial post\n whisked out from under me—the Corps made a fool of—\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to take a look at that message,\" Retief said. It was passed\n along to him. He read it.\n\n\n \"I don't believe this applies to us, Mr. Ambassador.\"\n\"What are you talking about? It's addressed to me by name!\"\n\n\n \"It merely states that 'meddling foreign exploiters' are unwelcome.\n Meddling foreigners we are, but we don't qualify as exploiters unless\n we show a profit—and this appears to be shaping up as a particularly\n profitless venture.\"", "\"The most popular aspiration I know of is to live high off someone\n else's effort,\" Retief said. \"I don't know of anyone outside the Corps\n who's managed it.\"\n\"Gentlemen!\" Sternwheeler bellowed. \"I'm awaiting your constructive\n suggestions—not an exchange of political views. We'll arrive off\n Glave in less than six hours. I should like before that time to have\n developed some notion regarding to whom I shall expect to offer my\n credentials!\"\n\n\n There was a discreet tap at the door; it opened and the young Third\n Secretary poked his head in.\n\n\n \"Mr. Ambassador, I have a reply to your message—just received from\n Glave. It's signed by the Steward of the GFE, and I thought you'd want\n to see it at once....\"\n\n\n \"Yes, of course; let me have it.\"\n\n\n \"What's the GFE?\" someone asked.", "\"He usually is, Pete.\" Retief took a cigar from his breast pocket. \"Got\n a light?\"\n\n\n The Third Secretary produced a permatch. \"I don't know why you smoke\n those things instead of dope sticks, Mr. Retief,\" he said. \"The\n Ambassador hates the smell.\"\n\n\n Retief nodded. \"I only smoke this kind at conferences. It makes for\n shorter sessions.\" He stepped into the room. Ambassador Sternwheeler\n eyed him down the length of the conference table.\n\n\n \"Ah, Mr. Retief honors us with his presence. Do be seated, Retief.\" He\n fingered a yellow Departmental despatch. Retief took a chair, puffing\n out a dense cloud of smoke.", "\"You in there, Corasol! This is General Sozier, and I'm warning you to\n come out now or you and your smart friends are in for a big surprise.\n You think I won't blast you out because I don't want to wreck the\n planet. You see the tank aboard the lorry that just pulled up? It's\n full of gas—and I got plenty of hoses out here to pump it inside with.\n I'll put men on the roof and squirt it in the ventilators.\"\n\n\n Sozier's voice echoed and died. The militiamen eyed the station.\n Nothing happened.\n\n\n \"I know you can hear me, damn you!\" Sozier squalled. \"You'd better get\n the doors open and get out here fast!\"\n\n\n Retief stepped to Sozier's side. \"Say, Corporal, I didn't know you went\n in for practical jokes.\"\n\n\n Sozier jerked around to gape at Retief.", "\"—and with a reputation for adaptability.\" His glance moved along the\n table.\n\n\n \"Do you mind if I run along now, Mr. Ambassador?\" Retief said. \"It's\n time for my insulin shot.\"\n\n\n Sternwheeler's mouth dropped open.\n\n\n \"Just kidding,\" Retief said. \"I'll go. But I have one request, Mr.\n Ambassador: no further communication with the ground until I give the\n all-clear.\"\nII\n\n\n Retief grounded the lighter, in-cycled the lock and stepped out. The\n hot yellow Glavian sun beat down on a broad expanse of concrete, an\n abandoned service cart and a row of tall ships casting black shadows\n toward the silent control tower. A wisp of smoke curled up from the\n shed area at the rim of the field. There was no other sign of life.", "\"What are you doing here!\" he burst out. \"I told Jake—where is that—\"\n\n\n \"Jake didn't like the questions I was asking,\" Retief said, \"so he\n marched me up here to report to you.\"\n\n\n \"Jake, you damn fool!\" Sozier roared. \"I got a good mind—\"\n\"I disagree, Sozier,\" Retief cut in. \"I think you're a complete\n imbecile. Sitting out here in the open yelling at the top of your\n lungs, for example. Corasol and his party might get annoyed and spray\n that fancy car you've swiped with something a lot more painful than\n words.\"\n\n\n \"Eh?\" Sozier's head whipped around to stare at the building.\n\n\n \"Isn't that a gun I see sticking out?\"\n\n\n Sozier dropped. \"Where?\"", "\"General Sozier, damn you! and plaster your big mouth shut!\" He\n gestured to one of the uniformed men standing by.\n\n\n \"You! Get Trundy and Little Moe up here—pronto!\" He swiveled back to\n Retief. \"You're in luck. I'm too busy right now to bother with you.\n You get back over to the port and leave the same way you came—and tell\n your blood-sucking friends the easy pickings are over as far as Glave's\n concerned. You won't lounge around here living high and throwing big\n parties and cooking up your dirty deals to get fat on at the expense of\n the working man.\"\n\n\n Retief dribbled ash on Sozier's desk and glanced at the green uniform\n front bulging between silver buttons.\n\n\n \"Who paid for your potbelly, Sozier?\" he inquired carelessly.", "\"That's enough smart talk.\" The biggest of the three newcomers moved\n up to Retief. \"You stuck your nose in at the wrong time. We just had a\n change of management around here.\"\n\n\n \"I heard about it,\" Retief said. \"Who do I complain to?\"\n\n\n \"Complain? What about?\"\n\n\n \"The port's a mess,\" Retief barked. \"Nobody on duty to receive official\n visitors! No passenger service facilities! Why, do you know I had to\n carry my own bag—\"\n\n\n \"All right, all right, that's outside my department. You better see the\n boss.\"\n\n\n \"The boss? I thought you got rid of the bosses.\"\n\n\n \"We did, but now we got new ones.\"\n\n\n \"They any better than the old ones?\"", "\"Mr. Ambassador,\" Counsellor Magnan broke in, rising. \"I'd like to be\n the first—\" he glanced around the table—\"or one of the first, anyway,\n to welcome the new government of Glave into the family of planetary\n ruling bodies—\"\n\"Sit down, Magnan!\" Sternwheeler snapped. \"Of course the Corps always\n recognizes\nde facto\nsovereignty. The problem is merely one of\n acquainting ourselves with the policies of this new group—a sort of\n blue-collar coalition, it seems. In what position that leaves this\n Embassy I don't yet know.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose this means we'll spend the next month in a parking orbit,\"\n Counsellor Magnan sighed.\n\n\n \"Unfortunately,\" Sternwheeler went on, \"the entire affair has\n apparently been carried off without recourse to violence, leaving the\n Corps no excuse to move in—that is, it appears our assistance in\n restoring order will not be required.\"", "\"What's it all about, Jake?\" Retief enquired. \"Since the parasites have\n all left peacefully, I'm having a hard time figuring out who'd be holed\n up in the pumping station—and why. Maybe they haven't gotten the word\n that it's all going to be fun and games from now on.\"\n\n\n \"If the corporal sees you over here—\"\n\n\n \"Ah, the good corporal. Glad you mentioned him, Jake. He's the man to\n see.\" Retief stepped out of the car and started through the crowd. A\n heavy lorry loaded with an immense tank with the letter H blazoned on\n its side trundled into the square from a side street, moved up to a\n position before the building. A smaller car pulled alongside Sozier's\n limousine. The driver stepped down, handed something to Sozier. A\n moment later, Sozier's amplified voice boomed across the crowd.", "Retief walked over to the cart, tossed his valise aboard, climbed\n into the driver's seat and headed for the operations building. Beyond\n the port, hills rose, white buildings gleaming against the deep green\n slopes. Near the ridge, a vehicle moved ant-like along a winding road,\n a dust trail rising behind it. Faintly a distant shot sounded.\n\n\n Papers littered the ground before the Operations Building. Retief\n pushed open the tall glass door, stood listening. Slanting sunlight\n reflected from a wide polished floor, at the far side of which\n illuminated lettering over empty counters read IMMIGRATION, HEALTH\n and CUSTOMS. He crossed to the desk, put the valise down, then leaned\n across the counter. A worried face under an oversized white cap looked\n up at him.\n\n\n \"You can come out now,\" Retief said. \"They've gone.\"", "\"I suppose that would cover scientists, professional men, executives,\n technicians of all sorts, engineers, teachers—all that crowd.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, them are the ones.\"\n\n\n \"And once you got them out of the way, the regular fellows would have a\n chance. Chaps that don't spend all their time taking baths and reading\n books and using big words; good Joes that don't mind picking their\n noses in public.\"\n\n\n \"We got as much right as anybody—\"\n\n\n \"Jake, who's Corasol?\"\n\n\n \"He's—I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"I thought I overheard his name somewhere.\"\n\n\n \"Uh, here's the communication center,\" Jake cut in.\n\n\n Retief swung into a parking lot under a high blank facade. He set the\n brake and stepped out.", "\"The corporal's a busy man, Jake. We won't worry him by telling him\n about it.\"\n\n\n Jake followed Retief up the walk. The broad double doors were locked.\n \"Let's try the back.\"\n\n\n The narrow door set in the high blank wall opened as Retief approached.\n A gun barrel poked out, followed by a small man with bushy red hair. He\n looked Retief over.\n\n\n \"Who's this party, Jake?\" he barked.\n\n\n \"Sozier said show him the plant,\" Jake said.", "Jake glanced at Sozier, gulped, aimed the rifle at Retief and nodded\n toward the car. As Retief moved off, a murmur swept across the crowd.\n Retief glanced back. A turret on the station roof was rotating slowly.\n A shout rose; men surged away from the building, scuffling for way;\n Sozier yelled. His car started up, moved forward, horns blaring. As\n Retief watched, a white stream arced up from the turret, catching the\n sun as it spanned the lawn, plunged down to strike the massed men in a\n splatter of spray. It searched across the mob, came to rest on Sozier's\n car. Uniformed men scrambled for safety as the terrified driver gunned\n the heavy vehicle. The hose followed the car, dropping a solid stream\n of water on Sozier, kicking and flailing in the back seat. As the car\n passed from view, down a side street, water was overflowing the sides.", "\"This guy asks too many questions,\" the man with the gun said. \"Let's\n let Sozier answer 'em.\"\n\n\n \"Who's he?\"\n\n\n \"He's the Military Governor of the City.\"\n\n\n \"Now we're getting somewhere,\" Retief said. \"Lead the way, Jake—and\n don't forget my bag.\"\nSozier was a small man with thin hair oiled across a shiny scalp,\n prominent ears and eyes like coal chips set in rolls of fat. He\n glowered at Retief from behind a polished desk occupying the center of\n a spacious office.\n\n\n \"I warned you off,\" he snapped. \"You came anyway.\" He leaned forward\n and slammed a fist down on the desk. \"You're used to throwing your\n weight around, but you won't throw it around here! There'll be no spies\n pussyfooting around Glave!\"\n\n\n \"Looking for what, Mr. Sozier?\"" ], [ "Jake looked at Retief uncertainly, fingering his empty rifle.\n\n\n Retief put his hands up. \"I guess you got me, Jake,\" he said. \"Careful\n of that gun, now.\"", "\"The corporal will feel all the better for an invigorating swim in\n his mobile pool,\" Retief commented. \"By the way, Jake, I have to be\n going now. It wouldn't be fair to send you back to your boss without\n something to back up your story that you were outnumbered, so—\"\n\n\n Retief's left fist shot out to connect solidly with Jake's jaw. Jake\n dropped the gun and sat down hard. Retief turned and headed for the\n pumping station. The hose had shut down now. A few men were standing,\n eyeing the building anxiously. Others watched his progress across the\n square. As Retief passed, he caught scattered comments:\n\n\n \"—seen that bird before.\"\n\n\n \"—where he's headed.\"\n\n\n \"—feller Sozier was talking to....\"\n\n\n \"Hey, you!\"", "\"What are you doing here!\" he burst out. \"I told Jake—where is that—\"\n\n\n \"Jake didn't like the questions I was asking,\" Retief said, \"so he\n marched me up here to report to you.\"\n\n\n \"Jake, you damn fool!\" Sozier roared. \"I got a good mind—\"\n\"I disagree, Sozier,\" Retief cut in. \"I think you're a complete\n imbecile. Sitting out here in the open yelling at the top of your\n lungs, for example. Corasol and his party might get annoyed and spray\n that fancy car you've swiped with something a lot more painful than\n words.\"\n\n\n \"Eh?\" Sozier's head whipped around to stare at the building.\n\n\n \"Isn't that a gun I see sticking out?\"\n\n\n Sozier dropped. \"Where?\"", "Retief braked. \"In that case, I'm afraid our association is at an end,\n Jake.\"\n\n\n \"You mean ... you're getting out here?\"\n\n\n \"No, you are.\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Now wait a minute, Mister! The corporal said I was to stay with\n you.\"\n\n\n Retief accelerated. \"That's settled, then. Which way?\"\nIV\n\n\n Retief pulled the car to a halt two hundred yards from the periphery\n of a loose crowd of brown-uniformed men who stood in groups scattered\n across a broad plaza, overflowing into a stretch of manicured lawn\n before the bare, functional facade of sub-station number Nine. In the\n midst of the besieging mob, Sozier's red face and bald head bobbed as\n he harangued a cluster of green-uniformed men from his place in the\n rear of a long open car.", "\"The corporal's a busy man, Jake. We won't worry him by telling him\n about it.\"\n\n\n Jake followed Retief up the walk. The broad double doors were locked.\n \"Let's try the back.\"\n\n\n The narrow door set in the high blank wall opened as Retief approached.\n A gun barrel poked out, followed by a small man with bushy red hair. He\n looked Retief over.\n\n\n \"Who's this party, Jake?\" he barked.\n\n\n \"Sozier said show him the plant,\" Jake said.", "\"Come on, Jake. You've got a nervous habit of playing with the firing\n stud. We don't want any accidents.\"\n\n\n \"How do you get it out? They only give me this thing yesterday.\"\n\n\n Retief pocketed the cylinder. \"You sit in back. I'll drive.\" He wheeled\n the car off along a broad avenue crowded with vehicles and lined with\n flowering palms, behind which stately white buildings reared up into\n the pale sky.\n\n\n \"Nice looking city, Jake,\" Retief said conversationally. \"What's the\n population?\"\n\n\n \"I dunno. I only been here a year.\"\n\n\n \"What about Horny and Pud? Are they natives?\"\n\n\n \"Whatta ya mean, natives? They're just as civilized as me.\"\n\n\n \"My boner, Jake. Known Sozier long?\"", "\"Lead the way, Jake.\"\n\n\n \"Look, Mister, the corporal only wanted me to show you the outside.\"\n\n\n \"Anything to hide, Jake?\"\n\n\n Jake shook his head angrily and stamped past Retief. \"When I joined up\n with Sozier, I didn't figger I'd be getting in this kind of mess.\"\n\n\n \"I know, Jake. It's tough. Sometimes it seems like a fellow works\n harder after he's thrown out the parasites than he did before.\"\n\n\n A cautious guard let Retief and Jake inside, followed them along\n bright-lit aisles among consoles, cables, batteries of instruments.\n Armed men in careless uniforms lounged, watching. Here and there a\n silent technician worked quietly.\n\n\n Retief paused by one, an elderly man in a neat white coverall, with a\n purple spot under one eye.", "\"What's it all about, Jake?\" Retief enquired. \"Since the parasites have\n all left peacefully, I'm having a hard time figuring out who'd be holed\n up in the pumping station—and why. Maybe they haven't gotten the word\n that it's all going to be fun and games from now on.\"\n\n\n \"If the corporal sees you over here—\"\n\n\n \"Ah, the good corporal. Glad you mentioned him, Jake. He's the man to\n see.\" Retief stepped out of the car and started through the crowd. A\n heavy lorry loaded with an immense tank with the letter H blazoned on\n its side trundled into the square from a side street, moved up to a\n position before the building. A smaller car pulled alongside Sozier's\n limousine. The driver stepped down, handed something to Sozier. A\n moment later, Sozier's amplified voice boomed across the crowd.", "Jake glanced at Sozier, gulped, aimed the rifle at Retief and nodded\n toward the car. As Retief moved off, a murmur swept across the crowd.\n Retief glanced back. A turret on the station roof was rotating slowly.\n A shout rose; men surged away from the building, scuffling for way;\n Sozier yelled. His car started up, moved forward, horns blaring. As\n Retief watched, a white stream arced up from the turret, catching the\n sun as it spanned the lawn, plunged down to strike the massed men in a\n splatter of spray. It searched across the mob, came to rest on Sozier's\n car. Uniformed men scrambled for safety as the terrified driver gunned\n the heavy vehicle. The hose followed the car, dropping a solid stream\n of water on Sozier, kicking and flailing in the back seat. As the car\n passed from view, down a side street, water was overflowing the sides.", "\"Jake! You stick close to this bird. Take him to the main power plant,\n the water works and the dispatch center. Ride him around town and show\n him we're doing okay without a bunch of leeches bossing us. Then dump\n him at the port—and see that he leaves.\"\n\n\n \"I'll plan my own itinerary, thanks. I can't promise I'll be finished\n in four hours—but I'll keep you advised.\"\n\n\n \"I warned you—\"\n\n\n \"I heard you. Five times. And I only warned you once. You're getting\n ahead of me.\" Retief rose, motioned to the hulking guard. \"Come on,\n Jake. We've got a lot of ground to cover before we come back for our\n dinner.\"\nIII\n\n\n At the curb, Retief held out his hand. \"Give me the power cylinder out\n of your rifle, Jake.\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\"", "\"Sure. He useta come around to the club.\"\n\n\n \"I take it he was in the army under the old regime?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah—but he didn't like the way they run it. Nothing but band playing\n and fancy marching. There wasn't nobody to fight.\"\n\n\n \"Just between us, Jake—where did the former Planetary Manager General\n go?\" Retief watched Jake's heavy face in the mirror. Jake jumped,\n clamped his mouth shut.\n\n\n \"I don't know nothing.\"\n\n\n Half an hour later, after a tour of the commercial center, Retief\n headed towards the city's outskirts. The avenue curved, leading up\n along the flank of a low hill.", "\"My mistake. Just a foreign particle on my contact lenses.\" Retief\n leaned on the car. \"On the other hand, Sozier, most murderers are\n sneaky about it. I think making a public announcement is a nice gesture\n on your part. The Monitors won't have any trouble deciding who to hang\n when they come in to straighten out this mess.\"\n\n\n Sozier scrambled back onto his seat. \"Monitors?\" he snarled. \"I\n don't think so. I don't think you'll be around to do any blabbering\n to anybody.\" He raised his voice. \"Jake! March this spy over to the\n sidelines. If he tries anything, shoot him!\" He gave Retief a baleful\n grin. \"I'll lay the body out nice and ship it back to your cronies.\n Accidents will happen, you know. It'll be a week or two before they get\n around to following up—and by then I'll have this little problem under\n control.\"", "\"I must admit I'm surprised, Jake,\" Retief said. \"Everything seems\n orderly. No signs of riots or panic. Power, water, communications\n normal—just as the general said. Remarkable, isn't it, considering\n that the entire managerial class has packed up and left?\"\n\n\n \"You wanta see the Power Plant?\" Retief could see perspiration beaded\n on the man's forehead under the uniform cap.\n\n\n \"Sure. Which way?\" With Jake directing, Retief ascended to the ridge\n top, cruised past the blank white facade of the station.\n\n\n \"Quiet, isn't it?\" Retief pulled the car in to the curb. \"Let's go\n inside.\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Corporal Sozier didn't say nothing—\"\n\n\n \"You're right, Jake. That leaves it to our discretion.\"\n\n\n \"He won't like it.\"", "\"Quite a bruise you've got there,\" Retief commented heartily. \"Power\n failure at sunset,\" he added softly. The technician hesitated, nodded\n and moved on.\n\n\n Back in the car, Retief gave Jake directions. At the end of three\n hours, he had seen twelve smooth-running, heavily guarded installations.\n\n\n \"So far, so good, Jake,\" he said. \"Next stop, Sub-station Number Nine.\"\n In the mirror, Jake's face stiffened. \"Hey, you can't go down there—\"\n\n\n \"Something going on there, Jake?\"\n\n\n \"That's where—I mean, no. I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"I don't want to miss anything, Jake. Which way?\"\n\n\n \"I ain't going down there,\" Jake said sullenly.", "\"This guy asks too many questions,\" the man with the gun said. \"Let's\n let Sozier answer 'em.\"\n\n\n \"Who's he?\"\n\n\n \"He's the Military Governor of the City.\"\n\n\n \"Now we're getting somewhere,\" Retief said. \"Lead the way, Jake—and\n don't forget my bag.\"\nSozier was a small man with thin hair oiled across a shiny scalp,\n prominent ears and eyes like coal chips set in rolls of fat. He\n glowered at Retief from behind a polished desk occupying the center of\n a spacious office.\n\n\n \"I warned you off,\" he snapped. \"You came anyway.\" He leaned forward\n and slammed a fist down on the desk. \"You're used to throwing your\n weight around, but you won't throw it around here! There'll be no spies\n pussyfooting around Glave!\"\n\n\n \"Looking for what, Mr. Sozier?\"", "\"Looky here, Mister, I'll give the orders. We don't need anybody\n telling us how to run our business.\"\n\n\n \"I'm telling you to shift that blaster before I take it away from you\n and wrap it around your neck,\" Retief said conversationally. The cop\n stepped back uncertainly, lowering the gun.\n\n\n \"Jake! Horny! Pud! come on out!\"\n\n\n Three more brown uniforms emerged from concealment.\n\n\n \"Who are you fellows hiding from, the top sergeant?\" Retief glanced\n over the ill-fitting uniforms, the unshaved faces, the scuffed boots.\n \"Tell you what. When he shows up, I'll engage him in conversation. You\n beat it back to the barracks and grab a quick bath—\"", "\"General Sozier, damn you! and plaster your big mouth shut!\" He\n gestured to one of the uniformed men standing by.\n\n\n \"You! Get Trundy and Little Moe up here—pronto!\" He swiveled back to\n Retief. \"You're in luck. I'm too busy right now to bother with you.\n You get back over to the port and leave the same way you came—and tell\n your blood-sucking friends the easy pickings are over as far as Glave's\n concerned. You won't lounge around here living high and throwing big\n parties and cooking up your dirty deals to get fat on at the expense of\n the working man.\"\n\n\n Retief dribbled ash on Sozier's desk and glanced at the green uniform\n front bulging between silver buttons.\n\n\n \"Who paid for your potbelly, Sozier?\" he inquired carelessly.", "\"You in there, Corasol! This is General Sozier, and I'm warning you to\n come out now or you and your smart friends are in for a big surprise.\n You think I won't blast you out because I don't want to wreck the\n planet. You see the tank aboard the lorry that just pulled up? It's\n full of gas—and I got plenty of hoses out here to pump it inside with.\n I'll put men on the roof and squirt it in the ventilators.\"\n\n\n Sozier's voice echoed and died. The militiamen eyed the station.\n Nothing happened.\n\n\n \"I know you can hear me, damn you!\" Sozier squalled. \"You'd better get\n the doors open and get out here fast!\"\n\n\n Retief stepped to Sozier's side. \"Say, Corporal, I didn't know you went\n in for practical jokes.\"\n\n\n Sozier jerked around to gape at Retief.", "Retief was on the grass now. Ahead, the blank wall loomed up. He walked\n on briskly.\n\n\n \"Stop that jasper!\" a shout rang out. There was a sharp whine and a\n black spot appeared on the wall ahead. Near it, a small personnel door\n abruptly swung inward. Retief sprinted, plunged through the opening\n as a second shot seared the paint on the doorframe. The door clanged\n behind him. Retief glanced over the half dozen men confronting him.\n\n\n \"I'm Retief, CDT, acting Charge,\" he said. \"Which of you gentlemen is\n Manager-General Corasol?\"", "Retief strolled over to the gray-haired man, now scribbling before a\n bank of meters. He glanced at the clipboard.\nPower off at sunset. Tell Corasol\nwas scrawled in block letters\n across the record sheet. Retief nodded, rejoined his guard.\n\n\n \"All right, Jake. Let's have a look at the communications center.\"\n\n\n Back in the car, headed west, Retief studied the blank windows of\n office buildings, the milling throngs in beer bars, shooting galleries,\n tattoo parlors, billiard halls, pinball arcades, bordellos and\n half-credit casinos.\n\n\n \"Everybody seems to be having fun,\" he remarked.\n\n\n Jake stared out the window.\n\n\n \"Yeah.\"\n\n\n \"Too bad you're on duty, Jake. You could be out there joining in.\"" ], [ "Jake nodded. \"Yeah, it was them schools done it. All the time trying\n to make a feller do some kind of class. Big shots. Know it all. Gonna\n make us sit around and view tapes. Figgered they was better than us.\"\n\n\n \"And Sozier's idea was you'd take over, and you wouldn't have to be\n bothered.\"\n\n\n \"Aw, it wasn't Sozier's idea. He ain't the big leader.\"\n\n\n \"Where does the big leader keep himself?\"\n\n\n \"I dunno. I guess he's pretty busy right now.\" Jake snickered. \"Some of\n them guys call themselves colonels turned out not to know nothing about\n how to shoot off the guns.\"\n\n\n \"Shooting, eh? I thought it was a sort of peaceful revolution. The\n managerial class were booted out, and that was that.\"", "\"I must admit I'm surprised, Jake,\" Retief said. \"Everything seems\n orderly. No signs of riots or panic. Power, water, communications\n normal—just as the general said. Remarkable, isn't it, considering\n that the entire managerial class has packed up and left?\"\n\n\n \"You wanta see the Power Plant?\" Retief could see perspiration beaded\n on the man's forehead under the uniform cap.\n\n\n \"Sure. Which way?\" With Jake directing, Retief ascended to the ridge\n top, cruised past the blank white facade of the station.\n\n\n \"Quiet, isn't it?\" Retief pulled the car in to the curb. \"Let's go\n inside.\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Corporal Sozier didn't say nothing—\"\n\n\n \"You're right, Jake. That leaves it to our discretion.\"\n\n\n \"He won't like it.\"", "\"I suppose that would cover scientists, professional men, executives,\n technicians of all sorts, engineers, teachers—all that crowd.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, them are the ones.\"\n\n\n \"And once you got them out of the way, the regular fellows would have a\n chance. Chaps that don't spend all their time taking baths and reading\n books and using big words; good Joes that don't mind picking their\n noses in public.\"\n\n\n \"We got as much right as anybody—\"\n\n\n \"Jake, who's Corasol?\"\n\n\n \"He's—I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"I thought I overheard his name somewhere.\"\n\n\n \"Uh, here's the communication center,\" Jake cut in.\n\n\n Retief swung into a parking lot under a high blank facade. He set the\n brake and stepped out.", "\"I don't know nothing,\" Jake snapped. \"How come you keep trying to get\n me to say stuff I ain't supposed to talk about? You want to get me in\n trouble?\"\n\"Oh, you're already in trouble, Jake. But if you stick with me, I'll\n try to get you out of it. Where exactly did the refugees head for? How\n did they leave? Must have been a lot of them; I'd say in a city of this\n size alone, they'd run into the thousands.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, it depends on your definition of a big shot. Who's included\n in that category, Jake?\"\n\n\n \"You know, the slick-talking ones; the fancy dressers; the guys that\n walk around and tell other guys what to do. We do all the work and they\n get all the big pay.\"", "\"Sure. He useta come around to the club.\"\n\n\n \"I take it he was in the army under the old regime?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah—but he didn't like the way they run it. Nothing but band playing\n and fancy marching. There wasn't nobody to fight.\"\n\n\n \"Just between us, Jake—where did the former Planetary Manager General\n go?\" Retief watched Jake's heavy face in the mirror. Jake jumped,\n clamped his mouth shut.\n\n\n \"I don't know nothing.\"\n\n\n Half an hour later, after a tour of the commercial center, Retief\n headed towards the city's outskirts. The avenue curved, leading up\n along the flank of a low hill.", "\"Soon as the corporal gets things organized, I'm opening me up a place\n to show dirty tri-di's. I'll get my share.\"\n\n\n \"Meanwhile, let the rest of 'em have their fun, eh Jake?\"\n\n\n \"Look, Mister, I been thinking. Maybe you better gimme back that\n kick-stick you taken outa my gun....\"\n\n\n \"Sorry, Jake; no can do. Tell me, what was the real cause of the\n revolution? Not enough to eat? Too much regimentation?\"\n\n\n \"Naw, we always got plenty to eat. There wasn't none of that\n regimentation up till I joined up in the corporal's army.\"\n\n\n \"Rigid class structure, maybe? Educational discrimination?\"", "\"What's it all about, Jake?\" Retief enquired. \"Since the parasites have\n all left peacefully, I'm having a hard time figuring out who'd be holed\n up in the pumping station—and why. Maybe they haven't gotten the word\n that it's all going to be fun and games from now on.\"\n\n\n \"If the corporal sees you over here—\"\n\n\n \"Ah, the good corporal. Glad you mentioned him, Jake. He's the man to\n see.\" Retief stepped out of the car and started through the crowd. A\n heavy lorry loaded with an immense tank with the letter H blazoned on\n its side trundled into the square from a side street, moved up to a\n position before the building. A smaller car pulled alongside Sozier's\n limousine. The driver stepped down, handed something to Sozier. A\n moment later, Sozier's amplified voice boomed across the crowd.", "\"Come on, Jake. You've got a nervous habit of playing with the firing\n stud. We don't want any accidents.\"\n\n\n \"How do you get it out? They only give me this thing yesterday.\"\n\n\n Retief pocketed the cylinder. \"You sit in back. I'll drive.\" He wheeled\n the car off along a broad avenue crowded with vehicles and lined with\n flowering palms, behind which stately white buildings reared up into\n the pale sky.\n\n\n \"Nice looking city, Jake,\" Retief said conversationally. \"What's the\n population?\"\n\n\n \"I dunno. I only been here a year.\"\n\n\n \"What about Horny and Pud? Are they natives?\"\n\n\n \"Whatta ya mean, natives? They're just as civilized as me.\"\n\n\n \"My boner, Jake. Known Sozier long?\"", "Jake glanced at Sozier, gulped, aimed the rifle at Retief and nodded\n toward the car. As Retief moved off, a murmur swept across the crowd.\n Retief glanced back. A turret on the station roof was rotating slowly.\n A shout rose; men surged away from the building, scuffling for way;\n Sozier yelled. His car started up, moved forward, horns blaring. As\n Retief watched, a white stream arced up from the turret, catching the\n sun as it spanned the lawn, plunged down to strike the massed men in a\n splatter of spray. It searched across the mob, came to rest on Sozier's\n car. Uniformed men scrambled for safety as the terrified driver gunned\n the heavy vehicle. The hose followed the car, dropping a solid stream\n of water on Sozier, kicking and flailing in the back seat. As the car\n passed from view, down a side street, water was overflowing the sides.", "Retief braked. \"In that case, I'm afraid our association is at an end,\n Jake.\"\n\n\n \"You mean ... you're getting out here?\"\n\n\n \"No, you are.\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Now wait a minute, Mister! The corporal said I was to stay with\n you.\"\n\n\n Retief accelerated. \"That's settled, then. Which way?\"\nIV\n\n\n Retief pulled the car to a halt two hundred yards from the periphery\n of a loose crowd of brown-uniformed men who stood in groups scattered\n across a broad plaza, overflowing into a stretch of manicured lawn\n before the bare, functional facade of sub-station number Nine. In the\n midst of the besieging mob, Sozier's red face and bald head bobbed as\n he harangued a cluster of green-uniformed men from his place in the\n rear of a long open car.", "\"Lead the way, Jake.\"\n\n\n \"Look, Mister, the corporal only wanted me to show you the outside.\"\n\n\n \"Anything to hide, Jake?\"\n\n\n Jake shook his head angrily and stamped past Retief. \"When I joined up\n with Sozier, I didn't figger I'd be getting in this kind of mess.\"\n\n\n \"I know, Jake. It's tough. Sometimes it seems like a fellow works\n harder after he's thrown out the parasites than he did before.\"\n\n\n A cautious guard let Retief and Jake inside, followed them along\n bright-lit aisles among consoles, cables, batteries of instruments.\n Armed men in careless uniforms lounged, watching. Here and there a\n silent technician worked quietly.\n\n\n Retief paused by one, an elderly man in a neat white coverall, with a\n purple spot under one eye.", "\"The corporal will feel all the better for an invigorating swim in\n his mobile pool,\" Retief commented. \"By the way, Jake, I have to be\n going now. It wouldn't be fair to send you back to your boss without\n something to back up your story that you were outnumbered, so—\"\n\n\n Retief's left fist shot out to connect solidly with Jake's jaw. Jake\n dropped the gun and sat down hard. Retief turned and headed for the\n pumping station. The hose had shut down now. A few men were standing,\n eyeing the building anxiously. Others watched his progress across the\n square. As Retief passed, he caught scattered comments:\n\n\n \"—seen that bird before.\"\n\n\n \"—where he's headed.\"\n\n\n \"—feller Sozier was talking to....\"\n\n\n \"Hey, you!\"", "\"What are you doing here!\" he burst out. \"I told Jake—where is that—\"\n\n\n \"Jake didn't like the questions I was asking,\" Retief said, \"so he\n marched me up here to report to you.\"\n\n\n \"Jake, you damn fool!\" Sozier roared. \"I got a good mind—\"\n\"I disagree, Sozier,\" Retief cut in. \"I think you're a complete\n imbecile. Sitting out here in the open yelling at the top of your\n lungs, for example. Corasol and his party might get annoyed and spray\n that fancy car you've swiped with something a lot more painful than\n words.\"\n\n\n \"Eh?\" Sozier's head whipped around to stare at the building.\n\n\n \"Isn't that a gun I see sticking out?\"\n\n\n Sozier dropped. \"Where?\"", "\"The corporal's a busy man, Jake. We won't worry him by telling him\n about it.\"\n\n\n Jake followed Retief up the walk. The broad double doors were locked.\n \"Let's try the back.\"\n\n\n The narrow door set in the high blank wall opened as Retief approached.\n A gun barrel poked out, followed by a small man with bushy red hair. He\n looked Retief over.\n\n\n \"Who's this party, Jake?\" he barked.\n\n\n \"Sozier said show him the plant,\" Jake said.", "\"As I have been explaining to the remainder of my staff for the past\n quarter-hour,\" Sternwheeler rumbled, \"I've been the recipient of\n important intelligence.\" He blinked at Retief expectantly. Retief\n raised his eyebrows in polite inquiry.\n\n\n \"It seems,\" Sternwheeler went on, \"that there has been a change in\n regime on Glave. A week ago, the government which invited the dispatch\n of this mission—and to which we're accredited—was overthrown.\n The former ruling class has fled into exile. A popular workers' and\n peasants' junta has taken over.\"", "\"Jake! You stick close to this bird. Take him to the main power plant,\n the water works and the dispatch center. Ride him around town and show\n him we're doing okay without a bunch of leeches bossing us. Then dump\n him at the port—and see that he leaves.\"\n\n\n \"I'll plan my own itinerary, thanks. I can't promise I'll be finished\n in four hours—but I'll keep you advised.\"\n\n\n \"I warned you—\"\n\n\n \"I heard you. Five times. And I only warned you once. You're getting\n ahead of me.\" Retief rose, motioned to the hulking guard. \"Come on,\n Jake. We've got a lot of ground to cover before we come back for our\n dinner.\"\nIII\n\n\n At the curb, Retief held out his hand. \"Give me the power cylinder out\n of your rifle, Jake.\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\"", "Jake looked at Retief uncertainly, fingering his empty rifle.\n\n\n Retief put his hands up. \"I guess you got me, Jake,\" he said. \"Careful\n of that gun, now.\"", "\"That's enough smart talk.\" The biggest of the three newcomers moved\n up to Retief. \"You stuck your nose in at the wrong time. We just had a\n change of management around here.\"\n\n\n \"I heard about it,\" Retief said. \"Who do I complain to?\"\n\n\n \"Complain? What about?\"\n\n\n \"The port's a mess,\" Retief barked. \"Nobody on duty to receive official\n visitors! No passenger service facilities! Why, do you know I had to\n carry my own bag—\"\n\n\n \"All right, all right, that's outside my department. You better see the\n boss.\"\n\n\n \"The boss? I thought you got rid of the bosses.\"\n\n\n \"We did, but now we got new ones.\"\n\n\n \"They any better than the old ones?\"", "\"General Sozier, damn you! and plaster your big mouth shut!\" He\n gestured to one of the uniformed men standing by.\n\n\n \"You! Get Trundy and Little Moe up here—pronto!\" He swiveled back to\n Retief. \"You're in luck. I'm too busy right now to bother with you.\n You get back over to the port and leave the same way you came—and tell\n your blood-sucking friends the easy pickings are over as far as Glave's\n concerned. You won't lounge around here living high and throwing big\n parties and cooking up your dirty deals to get fat on at the expense of\n the working man.\"\n\n\n Retief dribbled ash on Sozier's desk and glanced at the green uniform\n front bulging between silver buttons.\n\n\n \"Who paid for your potbelly, Sozier?\" he inquired carelessly.", "\"Quite a bruise you've got there,\" Retief commented heartily. \"Power\n failure at sunset,\" he added softly. The technician hesitated, nodded\n and moved on.\n\n\n Back in the car, Retief gave Jake directions. At the end of three\n hours, he had seen twelve smooth-running, heavily guarded installations.\n\n\n \"So far, so good, Jake,\" he said. \"Next stop, Sub-station Number Nine.\"\n In the mirror, Jake's face stiffened. \"Hey, you can't go down there—\"\n\n\n \"Something going on there, Jake?\"\n\n\n \"That's where—I mean, no. I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"I don't want to miss anything, Jake. Which way?\"\n\n\n \"I ain't going down there,\" Jake said sullenly." ], [ "\"General Sozier, damn you! and plaster your big mouth shut!\" He\n gestured to one of the uniformed men standing by.\n\n\n \"You! Get Trundy and Little Moe up here—pronto!\" He swiveled back to\n Retief. \"You're in luck. I'm too busy right now to bother with you.\n You get back over to the port and leave the same way you came—and tell\n your blood-sucking friends the easy pickings are over as far as Glave's\n concerned. You won't lounge around here living high and throwing big\n parties and cooking up your dirty deals to get fat on at the expense of\n the working man.\"\n\n\n Retief dribbled ash on Sozier's desk and glanced at the green uniform\n front bulging between silver buttons.\n\n\n \"Who paid for your potbelly, Sozier?\" he inquired carelessly.", "Jake nodded. \"Yeah, it was them schools done it. All the time trying\n to make a feller do some kind of class. Big shots. Know it all. Gonna\n make us sit around and view tapes. Figgered they was better than us.\"\n\n\n \"And Sozier's idea was you'd take over, and you wouldn't have to be\n bothered.\"\n\n\n \"Aw, it wasn't Sozier's idea. He ain't the big leader.\"\n\n\n \"Where does the big leader keep himself?\"\n\n\n \"I dunno. I guess he's pretty busy right now.\" Jake snickered. \"Some of\n them guys call themselves colonels turned out not to know nothing about\n how to shoot off the guns.\"\n\n\n \"Shooting, eh? I thought it was a sort of peaceful revolution. The\n managerial class were booted out, and that was that.\"", "\"I must admit I'm surprised, Jake,\" Retief said. \"Everything seems\n orderly. No signs of riots or panic. Power, water, communications\n normal—just as the general said. Remarkable, isn't it, considering\n that the entire managerial class has packed up and left?\"\n\n\n \"You wanta see the Power Plant?\" Retief could see perspiration beaded\n on the man's forehead under the uniform cap.\n\n\n \"Sure. Which way?\" With Jake directing, Retief ascended to the ridge\n top, cruised past the blank white facade of the station.\n\n\n \"Quiet, isn't it?\" Retief pulled the car in to the curb. \"Let's go\n inside.\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Corporal Sozier didn't say nothing—\"\n\n\n \"You're right, Jake. That leaves it to our discretion.\"\n\n\n \"He won't like it.\"", "\"You in there, Corasol! This is General Sozier, and I'm warning you to\n come out now or you and your smart friends are in for a big surprise.\n You think I won't blast you out because I don't want to wreck the\n planet. You see the tank aboard the lorry that just pulled up? It's\n full of gas—and I got plenty of hoses out here to pump it inside with.\n I'll put men on the roof and squirt it in the ventilators.\"\n\n\n Sozier's voice echoed and died. The militiamen eyed the station.\n Nothing happened.\n\n\n \"I know you can hear me, damn you!\" Sozier squalled. \"You'd better get\n the doors open and get out here fast!\"\n\n\n Retief stepped to Sozier's side. \"Say, Corporal, I didn't know you went\n in for practical jokes.\"\n\n\n Sozier jerked around to gape at Retief.", "Retief braked. \"In that case, I'm afraid our association is at an end,\n Jake.\"\n\n\n \"You mean ... you're getting out here?\"\n\n\n \"No, you are.\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Now wait a minute, Mister! The corporal said I was to stay with\n you.\"\n\n\n Retief accelerated. \"That's settled, then. Which way?\"\nIV\n\n\n Retief pulled the car to a halt two hundred yards from the periphery\n of a loose crowd of brown-uniformed men who stood in groups scattered\n across a broad plaza, overflowing into a stretch of manicured lawn\n before the bare, functional facade of sub-station number Nine. In the\n midst of the besieging mob, Sozier's red face and bald head bobbed as\n he harangued a cluster of green-uniformed men from his place in the\n rear of a long open car.", "Retief sighed. \"The trouble with taking over your boss's job is\n discovering its drawbacks. It's disillusioning, I know, Sozier, but—\"\n\n\n \"All right! Take your tour! You'll find everything running as smooth as\n silk! Utilities, police, transport, environmental control—\"\n\n\n \"What about Space Control? Glave Tower seems to be off the air.\"\n\n\n \"I shut it down. We don't need anything and we don't want anything from\n the outside.\"\n\n\n \"Where's the new Premier keeping himself? Does he share your passion\n for privacy?\"\n\n\n The general got to his feet. \"I'm letting you take your look, Mr.\n Big Nose. I'm giving you four hours. Then out! And the next meddling\n bureaucrat that tries to cut atmosphere on Glave without a clearance\n gets burned!\"\n\n\n \"I'll need a car.\"", "\"What are you doing here!\" he burst out. \"I told Jake—where is that—\"\n\n\n \"Jake didn't like the questions I was asking,\" Retief said, \"so he\n marched me up here to report to you.\"\n\n\n \"Jake, you damn fool!\" Sozier roared. \"I got a good mind—\"\n\"I disagree, Sozier,\" Retief cut in. \"I think you're a complete\n imbecile. Sitting out here in the open yelling at the top of your\n lungs, for example. Corasol and his party might get annoyed and spray\n that fancy car you've swiped with something a lot more painful than\n words.\"\n\n\n \"Eh?\" Sozier's head whipped around to stare at the building.\n\n\n \"Isn't that a gun I see sticking out?\"\n\n\n Sozier dropped. \"Where?\"", "\"—but unfortunately, I'm under treatment at the moment.\" Magnan sat\n down.\n\n\n \"—which will place us in an excellent position, propaganda-wise.\n\n\n \"What a pity I can't go,\" the Military Attache said. \"But my place is\n with my troops.\"\n\n\n \"The only troops you've got are the Assistant Attache and your\n secretary,\" Magnan pointed out.\n\n\n \"Say, I'd like to be down there in the thick of things,\" the Political\n Officer said. He assumed a grave expression. \"But of course I'll be\n needed here, to interpret results.\"\n\n\n \"I appreciate your attitude, gentlemen,\" Sternwheeler said, studying\n the ceiling. \"But I'm afraid I must limit the privilege of volunteering\n for this hazardous duty to those officers of more robust physique,\n under forty years of age—\"\n\n\n \"Tsk. I'm forty-one,\" Magnan said.", "\"Sure. He useta come around to the club.\"\n\n\n \"I take it he was in the army under the old regime?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah—but he didn't like the way they run it. Nothing but band playing\n and fancy marching. There wasn't nobody to fight.\"\n\n\n \"Just between us, Jake—where did the former Planetary Manager General\n go?\" Retief watched Jake's heavy face in the mirror. Jake jumped,\n clamped his mouth shut.\n\n\n \"I don't know nothing.\"\n\n\n Half an hour later, after a tour of the commercial center, Retief\n headed towards the city's outskirts. The avenue curved, leading up\n along the flank of a low hill.", "\"The corporal's a busy man, Jake. We won't worry him by telling him\n about it.\"\n\n\n Jake followed Retief up the walk. The broad double doors were locked.\n \"Let's try the back.\"\n\n\n The narrow door set in the high blank wall opened as Retief approached.\n A gun barrel poked out, followed by a small man with bushy red hair. He\n looked Retief over.\n\n\n \"Who's this party, Jake?\" he barked.\n\n\n \"Sozier said show him the plant,\" Jake said.", "Jake glanced at Sozier, gulped, aimed the rifle at Retief and nodded\n toward the car. As Retief moved off, a murmur swept across the crowd.\n Retief glanced back. A turret on the station roof was rotating slowly.\n A shout rose; men surged away from the building, scuffling for way;\n Sozier yelled. His car started up, moved forward, horns blaring. As\n Retief watched, a white stream arced up from the turret, catching the\n sun as it spanned the lawn, plunged down to strike the massed men in a\n splatter of spray. It searched across the mob, came to rest on Sozier's\n car. Uniformed men scrambled for safety as the terrified driver gunned\n the heavy vehicle. The hose followed the car, dropping a solid stream\n of water on Sozier, kicking and flailing in the back seat. As the car\n passed from view, down a side street, water was overflowing the sides.", "\"I suppose that would cover scientists, professional men, executives,\n technicians of all sorts, engineers, teachers—all that crowd.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, them are the ones.\"\n\n\n \"And once you got them out of the way, the regular fellows would have a\n chance. Chaps that don't spend all their time taking baths and reading\n books and using big words; good Joes that don't mind picking their\n noses in public.\"\n\n\n \"We got as much right as anybody—\"\n\n\n \"Jake, who's Corasol?\"\n\n\n \"He's—I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"I thought I overheard his name somewhere.\"\n\n\n \"Uh, here's the communication center,\" Jake cut in.\n\n\n Retief swung into a parking lot under a high blank facade. He set the\n brake and stepped out.", "Sozier's eyes narrowed to slits. \"I could have you shot!\"\n\n\n \"Stop playing games with me, Sozier,\" Retief rapped. \"There's a\n squadron of Peace Enforcers standing by just in case any apprentice\n statesmen forget the niceties of diplomatic usage. I suggest you start\n showing a little intelligence about now, or even Horny and Pud are\n likely to notice.\"\nSozier's fingers squeaked on the arms of his chair. He swallowed.\n\n\n \"You might start by assigning me an escort for a conducted tour of\n the capital,\" Retief went on. \"I want to be in a position to confirm\n that order has been re-established, and that normal services have been\n restored. Otherwise it may be necessary to send in a Monitor Unit to\n straighten things out.\"\n\n\n \"You know you can't meddle with the internal affairs of a sovereign\n world!\"", "\"What's it all about, Jake?\" Retief enquired. \"Since the parasites have\n all left peacefully, I'm having a hard time figuring out who'd be holed\n up in the pumping station—and why. Maybe they haven't gotten the word\n that it's all going to be fun and games from now on.\"\n\n\n \"If the corporal sees you over here—\"\n\n\n \"Ah, the good corporal. Glad you mentioned him, Jake. He's the man to\n see.\" Retief stepped out of the car and started through the crowd. A\n heavy lorry loaded with an immense tank with the letter H blazoned on\n its side trundled into the square from a side street, moved up to a\n position before the building. A smaller car pulled alongside Sozier's\n limousine. The driver stepped down, handed something to Sozier. A\n moment later, Sozier's amplified voice boomed across the crowd.", "\"Lead the way, Jake.\"\n\n\n \"Look, Mister, the corporal only wanted me to show you the outside.\"\n\n\n \"Anything to hide, Jake?\"\n\n\n Jake shook his head angrily and stamped past Retief. \"When I joined up\n with Sozier, I didn't figger I'd be getting in this kind of mess.\"\n\n\n \"I know, Jake. It's tough. Sometimes it seems like a fellow works\n harder after he's thrown out the parasites than he did before.\"\n\n\n A cautious guard let Retief and Jake inside, followed them along\n bright-lit aisles among consoles, cables, batteries of instruments.\n Armed men in careless uniforms lounged, watching. Here and there a\n silent technician worked quietly.\n\n\n Retief paused by one, an elderly man in a neat white coverall, with a\n purple spot under one eye.", "\"Call me General!\"\n\n\n \"Mind if I sit down?\" Retief pulled out a chair, seated himself and\n took out a cigar. \"Curiously enough,\" he said, lighting up, \"the Corps\n has no intention of making any embarrassing investigations. We deal\n with the existing government, no questions asked.\" His eyes held the\n other's. \"Unless, of course, there are evidences of atrocities or other\n illegal measures.\"\n\n\n The coal-chip eyes narrowed. \"I don't have to make explanations to you\n or anybody else.\"\n\n\n \"Except, presumably, the Glavian Free Electorate,\" Retief said blandly.\n \"But tell me, General—who's actually running the show?\"\n\n\n A speaker on the desk buzzed. \"Hey, Corporal Sozier! Wes's got them two\n hellions cornered. They're holed up in the Birthday Cake—\"", "\"Yes, yes, there is the possibility that the issue is yet in doubt.\n Of course we'll have to exercise caution in making our approach. It\n wouldn't do to make overtures to the wrong side.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I think we need have no fear on that score,\" the Chief of the\n Political Section spoke up. \"I know these entrenched cliques. Once\n challenged by an aroused populace, they scuttle for safety—with large\n balances safely tucked away in neutral banks.\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to go on record,\" Magnan piped, \"as registering my deep\n gratification at this fulfillment of popular aspirations—\"", "\"The corporal will feel all the better for an invigorating swim in\n his mobile pool,\" Retief commented. \"By the way, Jake, I have to be\n going now. It wouldn't be fair to send you back to your boss without\n something to back up your story that you were outnumbered, so—\"\n\n\n Retief's left fist shot out to connect solidly with Jake's jaw. Jake\n dropped the gun and sat down hard. Retief turned and headed for the\n pumping station. The hose had shut down now. A few men were standing,\n eyeing the building anxiously. Others watched his progress across the\n square. As Retief passed, he caught scattered comments:\n\n\n \"—seen that bird before.\"\n\n\n \"—where he's headed.\"\n\n\n \"—feller Sozier was talking to....\"\n\n\n \"Hey, you!\"", "Retief walked over to the cart, tossed his valise aboard, climbed\n into the driver's seat and headed for the operations building. Beyond\n the port, hills rose, white buildings gleaming against the deep green\n slopes. Near the ridge, a vehicle moved ant-like along a winding road,\n a dust trail rising behind it. Faintly a distant shot sounded.\n\n\n Papers littered the ground before the Operations Building. Retief\n pushed open the tall glass door, stood listening. Slanting sunlight\n reflected from a wide polished floor, at the far side of which\n illuminated lettering over empty counters read IMMIGRATION, HEALTH\n and CUSTOMS. He crossed to the desk, put the valise down, then leaned\n across the counter. A worried face under an oversized white cap looked\n up at him.\n\n\n \"You can come out now,\" Retief said. \"They've gone.\"", "\"This guy asks too many questions,\" the man with the gun said. \"Let's\n let Sozier answer 'em.\"\n\n\n \"Who's he?\"\n\n\n \"He's the Military Governor of the City.\"\n\n\n \"Now we're getting somewhere,\" Retief said. \"Lead the way, Jake—and\n don't forget my bag.\"\nSozier was a small man with thin hair oiled across a shiny scalp,\n prominent ears and eyes like coal chips set in rolls of fat. He\n glowered at Retief from behind a polished desk occupying the center of\n a spacious office.\n\n\n \"I warned you off,\" he snapped. \"You came anyway.\" He leaned forward\n and slammed a fist down on the desk. \"You're used to throwing your\n weight around, but you won't throw it around here! There'll be no spies\n pussyfooting around Glave!\"\n\n\n \"Looking for what, Mr. Sozier?\"" ] ]
test	62244	[ "What does Willard say a man cannot live without?", "What does Dobbin see in his death that foreshadows Willard's fate?", "What does Willard tend to do in order to pass the time?", "What is the first thing that Willard believes he sees coming towards the Marry Lou?", "What is Willard's son's plan in regards to his father's memory?", "In the night, when he dreamt of home, what was most distinctive to Willard?", "What are Willard's thoughts on the accuracy of the Ghost Ship phenomenon?", "What is one thing that Willard did out of habit each day?", "At the conclusion of the story, Willard realizes" ]	[ [ "Family.", "Friends.", "Fortune.", "Earth." ], [ "The Ghost Ship carries Dobbin's body into space, and it will carry Willard's into space soon, as well.", "The Ghost Ship takes Dobbin home, just as it will see Willard back to Earth.", "The Ghost Ship is an illusion that Dobbin sees when he dies, and Willard sees the same illusion at the time of his death.", "The Ghost Ship comes for him as he dies as it will Willard." ], [ "He stares out into space.", "He communicates with others through the radio.", "He talks to himself to keep from going insane.", "He spends all of his time writing letters to his wife and son." ], [ "An old-timey rocket ship.", "His son's ship that has come to rescue him.", "The Ghost Ship.", "A meteor. " ], [ "He plans to build a ship and name it Mary Lou II.", "He plans to build a ship to go on an expedition to locate his father.", "He plans to build a ship and name it after his father.", "He is too young to have any memory of his father, so he plans to upload memories from a new machine named in his father's honor." ], [ "The voices of the city, fields, and places he had worked.", "The sound of the snow that crunched under his feet as he treads upon the Earth.", "His wife's voice.", "The face of his son." ], [ "It was real, and it was there to take him to Earth.", "It was just in his imagination.", "Too many others had seen and spoken of a Ghost Ship for it not to be real.", "He had gone insane and made the entire idea of a Ghost Ship up." ], [ "Check the radio to see if there was a broadcast from Earth.", "Talk to Dobbin.", "Look for the Ghost Ship.", "Made his bed." ], [ "Dobbin did not die. He hid from Willard because he was afraid that Willard would kill him.", "He is returning to Earth.", "He is now on the Ghost Ship.", "His son's expedition saved him from his fate to float aimlessly for eternity." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "\"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt.\n No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be\n anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no\n man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of\n the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the\n stars.\n\n\n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like\n Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from\n now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in\n space and bring them home again.\n\n\n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted\n him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the\n stars.", "Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague\n fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting\n and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n\n\n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no\n longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing.\n Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\nWillard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not\n because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been\n ingrained in him through the years.", "And so it was that each night—for Willard did not give up the\n Earth-habit of keeping time—Willard dreamed of the days he had known\n on Earth.\n\n\n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and\n feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his\n feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew.\n How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and\n friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would\n never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers\n and scientists.\n\n\n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the\n shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd\n that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a\n man who is alone.", "A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the\n captain's eyes.\n\n\n \"I want to walk on Earth just once—then I can die.\"\n\n\n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n\n\n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n\n\n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged\n at him.\n\n\n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a\n statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n\n\n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him,\nhe knew\n.", "\"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man\n would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping\n us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and\n we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed\n helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n\n\n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His\n face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n\n\n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once\n more!\"", "\"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n \"Of course, you looked through the log book of the\nMary Lou\n.\"\n\n\n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very\n old man.\n\n\n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly,\n measuring each word. \"Years in space—all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n\n\n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the\n thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me\n and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have\n died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of\n vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be\n now!\"", "When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be\n then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes\n he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control\n board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in\n the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great\n loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever\n known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair\n and hopeless pain.\n\n\n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was\n sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars.\n A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered!\n Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted,\n it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He\n watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion.\n And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!", "Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the\n heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he\n first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would\n die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any\n man could.\n\n\n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a\n tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n\n\n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n\n\n \"Saw what?\"\n\n\n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n\n\n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is\n it?\"\n\n\n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded\n space.", "Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost\n track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose\n could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there\n reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became\n meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About\n three years must have passed since his last record in the log book\n of the\nMary Lou\n. At that time, he remembered, he suffered another\n great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a\n full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with\n joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy\n was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly\n disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a\n distant star\nthrough\nthe space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon\n him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.", "\"The Ghost Ship!\"\n\n\n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in\n whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales.\n But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of\n Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up\n in this time of delirium.\n\n\n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n\n\n \"It's come—for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward\n Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His\n mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one\n with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.", "For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body\n of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was\n necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had\n ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the\n useless motors of the\nMary Lou\n.\nThe weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the\n ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged\n it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care\n and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept.\n The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious\n food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.", "\"\nArden, Rocketport\n—Thirteen years ago the Space Ship\nMary Lou\nunder John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the\n exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been\n seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is\n planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called\nMary Lou II\n, in memory of his father.\"\n\n\n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the\n cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only\n things both dear and precious to him.\n\n\n Willard, master and lone survivor of the\nMary Lou\n, knew this well for\n he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the\n anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be\n done.", "The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the\nMary Lou\n.\n In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically\n glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago.\n He realized suddenly that everything about the\nMary Lou\nwas hateful to\n him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty\n years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n\n\n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n\n\n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away\n and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was\n tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving\n the\nMary Lou\nbehind him forever.\n\n\n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor\n say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.", "Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He\n pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He\n yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his\n entire body.\n\n\n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his\n mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year\n and perhaps not the next—for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian\n expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home\n base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at\n the end of the trail.\n\n\n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those\n years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n\n\n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood\n up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of\n his ship, but he would manage.", "He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was\n not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A\n moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost\n Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand\n as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n\n\n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller,\n fainter and fainter.\n\n\n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket\n recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded\n loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\nSeven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard\n would never see there was published a small item:", "\"Matter is relative,\" he said, \"the existent under one condition is\n non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All\n things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass\n and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened\n to the\nMary Lou\n. Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years\n ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel\n the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became\n more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any\n Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real—to ourselves. But to\n some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen\n years—to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.\n\n\n \"Then this ship,\" Willard said, stunned, \"you and I and everything on\n it...\"", "The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship!\n Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was\n impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales\n told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.\n\n\n \"There is no ship there. There is no ship there,\" Willard told himself\n over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now\n motionless a few hundred miles away.\n\n\n Deep within him a faint voice cried, \"\nIt's come—for me!\n\" but Willard\n stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it.\n There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there\n had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas—ships doomed to roam\n forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true\n for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?", "GALACTIC GHOST\nBy WALTER KUBILIUS\nThe Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger\n\n of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions.\n\n He had seen the phantom—and lived.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Winter 1942.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's\n lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his\n fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the\nMary\n Lou\nwere now black as meteor dust.\n\n\n \"We'll never see Earth again,\" he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at\n the cover.", "\"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n\n\n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in\n bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\nHe woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the\n passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so\n much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the\n point of gibbering insanity.\n\n\n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he\n never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to\n remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to\n also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the\n value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental\n shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.", "For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt\n assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no\n phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight\n shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid\n and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the\n Ghost Ship in his youth.\nFor another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin,\n had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n\n\n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n\n\n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE\n SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n\n\n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent\n the answering message." ], [ "Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the\n heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he\n first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would\n die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any\n man could.\n\n\n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a\n tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n\n\n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n\n\n \"Saw what?\"\n\n\n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n\n\n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is\n it?\"\n\n\n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded\n space.", "\"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt.\n No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be\n anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no\n man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of\n the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the\n stars.\n\n\n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like\n Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from\n now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in\n space and bring them home again.\n\n\n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted\n him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the\n stars.", "\"The Ghost Ship!\"\n\n\n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in\n whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales.\n But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of\n Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up\n in this time of delirium.\n\n\n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n\n\n \"It's come—for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward\n Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His\n mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one\n with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.", "When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be\n then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes\n he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control\n board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in\n the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great\n loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever\n known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair\n and hopeless pain.\n\n\n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was\n sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars.\n A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered!\n Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted,\n it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He\n watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion.\n And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!", "GALACTIC GHOST\nBy WALTER KUBILIUS\nThe Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger\n\n of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions.\n\n He had seen the phantom—and lived.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Winter 1942.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's\n lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his\n fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the\nMary\n Lou\nwere now black as meteor dust.\n\n\n \"We'll never see Earth again,\" he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at\n the cover.", "The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship!\n Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was\n impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales\n told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.\n\n\n \"There is no ship there. There is no ship there,\" Willard told himself\n over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now\n motionless a few hundred miles away.\n\n\n Deep within him a faint voice cried, \"\nIt's come—for me!\n\" but Willard\n stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it.\n There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there\n had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas—ships doomed to roam\n forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true\n for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?", "A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the\n captain's eyes.\n\n\n \"I want to walk on Earth just once—then I can die.\"\n\n\n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n\n\n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n\n\n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged\n at him.\n\n\n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a\n statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n\n\n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him,\nhe knew\n.", "\"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man\n would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping\n us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and\n we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed\n helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n\n\n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His\n face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n\n\n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once\n more!\"", "And so it was that each night—for Willard did not give up the\n Earth-habit of keeping time—Willard dreamed of the days he had known\n on Earth.\n\n\n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and\n feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his\n feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew.\n How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and\n friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would\n never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers\n and scientists.\n\n\n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the\n shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd\n that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a\n man who is alone.", "Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague\n fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting\n and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n\n\n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no\n longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing.\n Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\nWillard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not\n because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been\n ingrained in him through the years.", "For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body\n of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was\n necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had\n ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the\n useless motors of the\nMary Lou\n.\nThe weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the\n ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged\n it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care\n and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept.\n The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious\n food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.", "The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the\nMary Lou\n.\n In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically\n glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago.\n He realized suddenly that everything about the\nMary Lou\nwas hateful to\n him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty\n years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n\n\n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n\n\n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away\n and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was\n tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving\n the\nMary Lou\nbehind him forever.\n\n\n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor\n say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.", "For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt\n assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no\n phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight\n shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid\n and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the\n Ghost Ship in his youth.\nFor another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin,\n had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n\n\n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n\n\n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE\n SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n\n\n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent\n the answering message.", "Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He\n pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He\n yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his\n entire body.\n\n\n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his\n mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year\n and perhaps not the next—for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian\n expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home\n base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at\n the end of the trail.\n\n\n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those\n years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n\n\n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood\n up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of\n his ship, but he would manage.", "\"... are doomed,\" the Captain said. \"We cannot go to Earth for the\n simple reason that we would go\nthrough\nit!\"\n\n\n The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth\n again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he\n walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of\n birds. Never. Never. Never....\n\n\n \"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"", "He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was\n not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A\n moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost\n Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand\n as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n\n\n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller,\n fainter and fainter.\n\n\n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket\n recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded\n loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\nSeven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard\n would never see there was published a small item:", "Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished\n instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few\n minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes\n would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass\n of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a\n moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth\n investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the\n last flashing seconds of life.\n\n\n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted\n its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but,\n instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused\n his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it\n would reach the\nMary Lou\n.", "\"\nArden, Rocketport\n—Thirteen years ago the Space Ship\nMary Lou\nunder John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the\n exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been\n seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is\n planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called\nMary Lou II\n, in memory of his father.\"\n\n\n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the\n cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only\n things both dear and precious to him.\n\n\n Willard, master and lone survivor of the\nMary Lou\n, knew this well for\n he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the\n anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be\n done.", "\"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n \"Of course, you looked through the log book of the\nMary Lou\n.\"\n\n\n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very\n old man.\n\n\n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly,\n measuring each word. \"Years in space—all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n\n\n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the\n thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me\n and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have\n died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of\n vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be\n now!\"", "Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost\n track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose\n could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there\n reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became\n meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About\n three years must have passed since his last record in the log book\n of the\nMary Lou\n. At that time, he remembered, he suffered another\n great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a\n full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with\n joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy\n was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly\n disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a\n distant star\nthrough\nthe space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon\n him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him." ], [ "Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague\n fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting\n and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n\n\n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no\n longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing.\n Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\nWillard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not\n because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been\n ingrained in him through the years.", "And so it was that each night—for Willard did not give up the\n Earth-habit of keeping time—Willard dreamed of the days he had known\n on Earth.\n\n\n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and\n feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his\n feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew.\n How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and\n friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would\n never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers\n and scientists.\n\n\n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the\n shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd\n that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a\n man who is alone.", "Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost\n track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose\n could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there\n reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became\n meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About\n three years must have passed since his last record in the log book\n of the\nMary Lou\n. At that time, he remembered, he suffered another\n great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a\n full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with\n joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy\n was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly\n disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a\n distant star\nthrough\nthe space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon\n him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.", "When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be\n then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes\n he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control\n board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in\n the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great\n loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever\n known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair\n and hopeless pain.\n\n\n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was\n sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars.\n A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered!\n Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted,\n it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He\n watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion.\n And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!", "For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body\n of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was\n necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had\n ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the\n useless motors of the\nMary Lou\n.\nThe weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the\n ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged\n it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care\n and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept.\n The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious\n food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.", "A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the\n captain's eyes.\n\n\n \"I want to walk on Earth just once—then I can die.\"\n\n\n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n\n\n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n\n\n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged\n at him.\n\n\n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a\n statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n\n\n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him,\nhe knew\n.", "\"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt.\n No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be\n anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no\n man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of\n the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the\n stars.\n\n\n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like\n Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from\n now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in\n space and bring them home again.\n\n\n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted\n him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the\n stars.", "\"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n \"Of course, you looked through the log book of the\nMary Lou\n.\"\n\n\n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very\n old man.\n\n\n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly,\n measuring each word. \"Years in space—all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n\n\n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the\n thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me\n and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have\n died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of\n vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be\n now!\"", "\"\nArden, Rocketport\n—Thirteen years ago the Space Ship\nMary Lou\nunder John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the\n exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been\n seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is\n planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called\nMary Lou II\n, in memory of his father.\"\n\n\n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the\n cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only\n things both dear and precious to him.\n\n\n Willard, master and lone survivor of the\nMary Lou\n, knew this well for\n he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the\n anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be\n done.", "He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was\n not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A\n moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost\n Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand\n as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n\n\n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller,\n fainter and fainter.\n\n\n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket\n recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded\n loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\nSeven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard\n would never see there was published a small item:", "Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished\n instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few\n minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes\n would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass\n of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a\n moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth\n investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the\n last flashing seconds of life.\n\n\n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted\n its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but,\n instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused\n his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it\n would reach the\nMary Lou\n.", "The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the\nMary Lou\n.\n In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically\n glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago.\n He realized suddenly that everything about the\nMary Lou\nwas hateful to\n him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty\n years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n\n\n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n\n\n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away\n and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was\n tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving\n the\nMary Lou\nbehind him forever.\n\n\n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor\n say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.", "\"The Ghost Ship!\"\n\n\n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in\n whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales.\n But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of\n Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up\n in this time of delirium.\n\n\n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n\n\n \"It's come—for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward\n Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His\n mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one\n with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.", "During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing\n it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his\n friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans'\n sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges.\n And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and\n confused.\n\n\n Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no\n longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But\n there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they\n refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual\n running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions,\n they mumbled and drifted away.", "\"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man\n would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping\n us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and\n we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed\n helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n\n\n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His\n face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n\n\n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once\n more!\"", "Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the\n heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he\n first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would\n die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any\n man could.\n\n\n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a\n tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n\n\n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n\n\n \"Saw what?\"\n\n\n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n\n\n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is\n it?\"\n\n\n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded\n space.", "Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He\n pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He\n yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his\n entire body.\n\n\n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his\n mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year\n and perhaps not the next—for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian\n expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home\n base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at\n the end of the trail.\n\n\n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those\n years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n\n\n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood\n up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of\n his ship, but he would manage.", "\"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n\n\n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in\n bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\nHe woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the\n passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so\n much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the\n point of gibbering insanity.\n\n\n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he\n never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to\n remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to\n also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the\n value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental\n shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.", "And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy\n ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage.\n Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.", "\"Matter is relative,\" he said, \"the existent under one condition is\n non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All\n things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass\n and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened\n to the\nMary Lou\n. Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years\n ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel\n the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became\n more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any\n Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real—to ourselves. But to\n some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen\n years—to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.\n\n\n \"Then this ship,\" Willard said, stunned, \"you and I and everything on\n it...\"" ], [ "Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished\n instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few\n minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes\n would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass\n of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a\n moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth\n investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the\n last flashing seconds of life.\n\n\n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted\n its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but,\n instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused\n his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it\n would reach the\nMary Lou\n.", "For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt\n assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no\n phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight\n shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid\n and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the\n Ghost Ship in his youth.\nFor another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin,\n had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n\n\n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n\n\n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE\n SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n\n\n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent\n the answering message.", "The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the\nMary Lou\n.\n In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically\n glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago.\n He realized suddenly that everything about the\nMary Lou\nwas hateful to\n him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty\n years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n\n\n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n\n\n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away\n and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was\n tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving\n the\nMary Lou\nbehind him forever.\n\n\n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor\n say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.", "Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague\n fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting\n and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n\n\n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no\n longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing.\n Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\nWillard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not\n because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been\n ingrained in him through the years.", "GALACTIC GHOST\nBy WALTER KUBILIUS\nThe Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger\n\n of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions.\n\n He had seen the phantom—and lived.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Winter 1942.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's\n lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his\n fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the\nMary\n Lou\nwere now black as meteor dust.\n\n\n \"We'll never see Earth again,\" he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at\n the cover.", "Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the\n heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he\n first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would\n die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any\n man could.\n\n\n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a\n tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n\n\n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n\n\n \"Saw what?\"\n\n\n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n\n\n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is\n it?\"\n\n\n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded\n space.", "\"The Ghost Ship!\"\n\n\n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in\n whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales.\n But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of\n Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up\n in this time of delirium.\n\n\n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n\n\n \"It's come—for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward\n Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His\n mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one\n with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.", "The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship!\n Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was\n impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales\n told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.\n\n\n \"There is no ship there. There is no ship there,\" Willard told himself\n over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now\n motionless a few hundred miles away.\n\n\n Deep within him a faint voice cried, \"\nIt's come—for me!\n\" but Willard\n stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it.\n There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there\n had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas—ships doomed to roam\n forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true\n for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?", "When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be\n then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes\n he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control\n board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in\n the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great\n loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever\n known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair\n and hopeless pain.\n\n\n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was\n sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars.\n A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered!\n Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted,\n it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He\n watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion.\n And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!", "Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost\n track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose\n could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there\n reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became\n meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About\n three years must have passed since his last record in the log book\n of the\nMary Lou\n. At that time, he remembered, he suffered another\n great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a\n full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with\n joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy\n was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly\n disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a\n distant star\nthrough\nthe space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon\n him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.", "\"SPACE SHIP MARY LOU REPLYING. RECEIVED MESSAGE. THANK GOD!\"\n\n\n He broke off, unable to continue. His heart was ready to burst within\n him and the tears of joy were already welling in his eyes. He listened\n to the happiest message he had ever heard:\n\n\n \"NOTICE THAT SPACE SHIP MARY LOU IS DISABLED AND NOT SPACE WORTHY. YOU\n ARE INVITED TO COME ABOARD. HAVE YOU SPACE SUIT AND—ARE YOU ABLE TO\n COME?\"\n\n\n Willard, already sobbing with joy, could send only two words.\n\n\n \"YES! COMING!\"", "For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body\n of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was\n necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had\n ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the\n useless motors of the\nMary Lou\n.\nThe weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the\n ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged\n it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care\n and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept.\n The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious\n food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.", "He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was\n not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A\n moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost\n Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand\n as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n\n\n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller,\n fainter and fainter.\n\n\n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket\n recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded\n loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\nSeven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard\n would never see there was published a small item:", "Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing\n his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars,\n though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something\n about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It\n resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty\n years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though\n half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a\n rocket ship.\n\n\n But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of\n any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed.\n But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the\n presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.\n\n\n Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years\n in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint\n ghost-like rocket ships?", "And so it was that each night—for Willard did not give up the\n Earth-habit of keeping time—Willard dreamed of the days he had known\n on Earth.\n\n\n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and\n feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his\n feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew.\n How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and\n friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would\n never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers\n and scientists.\n\n\n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the\n shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd\n that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a\n man who is alone.", "\"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n \"Of course, you looked through the log book of the\nMary Lou\n.\"\n\n\n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very\n old man.\n\n\n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly,\n measuring each word. \"Years in space—all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n\n\n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the\n thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me\n and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have\n died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of\n vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be\n now!\"", "\"Matter is relative,\" he said, \"the existent under one condition is\n non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All\n things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass\n and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened\n to the\nMary Lou\n. Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years\n ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel\n the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became\n more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any\n Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real—to ourselves. But to\n some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen\n years—to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.\n\n\n \"Then this ship,\" Willard said, stunned, \"you and I and everything on\n it...\"", "And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one\n night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth\n swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the\n years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the\nMary Lou\n. His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had\n once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years\n of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.\nHe awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought\n that perhaps he might still be in the\nMary Lou\n. The warm, smiling face\n of a man quickly reassured him.\n\n\n \"I'll call the captain,\" the space man said. \"He said to let him know\n when you came to.\"", "A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the\n captain's eyes.\n\n\n \"I want to walk on Earth just once—then I can die.\"\n\n\n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n\n\n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n\n\n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged\n at him.\n\n\n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a\n statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n\n\n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him,\nhe knew\n.", "\"\nArden, Rocketport\n—Thirteen years ago the Space Ship\nMary Lou\nunder John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the\n exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been\n seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is\n planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called\nMary Lou II\n, in memory of his father.\"\n\n\n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the\n cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only\n things both dear and precious to him.\n\n\n Willard, master and lone survivor of the\nMary Lou\n, knew this well for\n he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the\n anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be\n done." ], [ "A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the\n captain's eyes.\n\n\n \"I want to walk on Earth just once—then I can die.\"\n\n\n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n\n\n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n\n\n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged\n at him.\n\n\n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a\n statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n\n\n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him,\nhe knew\n.", "Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague\n fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting\n and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n\n\n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no\n longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing.\n Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\nWillard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not\n because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been\n ingrained in him through the years.", "\"\nArden, Rocketport\n—Thirteen years ago the Space Ship\nMary Lou\nunder John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the\n exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been\n seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is\n planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called\nMary Lou II\n, in memory of his father.\"\n\n\n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the\n cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only\n things both dear and precious to him.\n\n\n Willard, master and lone survivor of the\nMary Lou\n, knew this well for\n he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the\n anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be\n done.", "And so it was that each night—for Willard did not give up the\n Earth-habit of keeping time—Willard dreamed of the days he had known\n on Earth.\n\n\n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and\n feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his\n feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew.\n How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and\n friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would\n never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers\n and scientists.\n\n\n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the\n shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd\n that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a\n man who is alone.", "For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body\n of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was\n necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had\n ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the\n useless motors of the\nMary Lou\n.\nThe weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the\n ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged\n it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care\n and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept.\n The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious\n food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.", "When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be\n then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes\n he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control\n board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in\n the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great\n loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever\n known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair\n and hopeless pain.\n\n\n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was\n sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars.\n A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered!\n Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted,\n it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He\n watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion.\n And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!", "\"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man\n would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping\n us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and\n we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed\n helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n\n\n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His\n face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n\n\n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once\n more!\"", "The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the\nMary Lou\n.\n In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically\n glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago.\n He realized suddenly that everything about the\nMary Lou\nwas hateful to\n him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty\n years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n\n\n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n\n\n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away\n and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was\n tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving\n the\nMary Lou\nbehind him forever.\n\n\n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor\n say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.", "\"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt.\n No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be\n anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no\n man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of\n the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the\n stars.\n\n\n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like\n Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from\n now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in\n space and bring them home again.\n\n\n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted\n him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the\n stars.", "\"The Ghost Ship!\"\n\n\n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in\n whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales.\n But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of\n Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up\n in this time of delirium.\n\n\n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n\n\n \"It's come—for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward\n Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His\n mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one\n with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.", "Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost\n track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose\n could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there\n reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became\n meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About\n three years must have passed since his last record in the log book\n of the\nMary Lou\n. At that time, he remembered, he suffered another\n great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a\n full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with\n joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy\n was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly\n disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a\n distant star\nthrough\nthe space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon\n him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.", "He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was\n not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A\n moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost\n Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand\n as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n\n\n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller,\n fainter and fainter.\n\n\n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket\n recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded\n loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\nSeven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard\n would never see there was published a small item:", "\"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n \"Of course, you looked through the log book of the\nMary Lou\n.\"\n\n\n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very\n old man.\n\n\n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly,\n measuring each word. \"Years in space—all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n\n\n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the\n thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me\n and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have\n died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of\n vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be\n now!\"", "Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He\n pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He\n yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his\n entire body.\n\n\n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his\n mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year\n and perhaps not the next—for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian\n expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home\n base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at\n the end of the trail.\n\n\n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those\n years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n\n\n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood\n up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of\n his ship, but he would manage.", "Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished\n instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few\n minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes\n would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass\n of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a\n moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth\n investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the\n last flashing seconds of life.\n\n\n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted\n its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but,\n instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused\n his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it\n would reach the\nMary Lou\n.", "\"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n\n\n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in\n bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\nHe woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the\n passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so\n much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the\n point of gibbering insanity.\n\n\n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he\n never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to\n remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to\n also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the\n value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental\n shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.", "For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt\n assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no\n phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight\n shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid\n and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the\n Ghost Ship in his youth.\nFor another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin,\n had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n\n\n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n\n\n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE\n SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n\n\n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent\n the answering message.", "Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the\n heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he\n first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would\n die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any\n man could.\n\n\n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a\n tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n\n\n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n\n\n \"Saw what?\"\n\n\n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n\n\n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is\n it?\"\n\n\n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded\n space.", "During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing\n it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his\n friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans'\n sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges.\n And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and\n confused.\n\n\n Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no\n longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But\n there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they\n refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual\n running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions,\n they mumbled and drifted away.", "GALACTIC GHOST\nBy WALTER KUBILIUS\nThe Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger\n\n of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions.\n\n He had seen the phantom—and lived.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Winter 1942.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's\n lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his\n fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the\nMary\n Lou\nwere now black as meteor dust.\n\n\n \"We'll never see Earth again,\" he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at\n the cover." ], [ "And so it was that each night—for Willard did not give up the\n Earth-habit of keeping time—Willard dreamed of the days he had known\n on Earth.\n\n\n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and\n feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his\n feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew.\n How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and\n friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would\n never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers\n and scientists.\n\n\n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the\n shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd\n that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a\n man who is alone.", "Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague\n fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting\n and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n\n\n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no\n longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing.\n Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\nWillard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not\n because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been\n ingrained in him through the years.", "A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the\n captain's eyes.\n\n\n \"I want to walk on Earth just once—then I can die.\"\n\n\n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n\n\n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n\n\n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged\n at him.\n\n\n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a\n statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n\n\n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him,\nhe knew\n.", "\"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt.\n No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be\n anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no\n man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of\n the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the\n stars.\n\n\n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like\n Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from\n now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in\n space and bring them home again.\n\n\n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted\n him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the\n stars.", "Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He\n pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He\n yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his\n entire body.\n\n\n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his\n mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year\n and perhaps not the next—for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian\n expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home\n base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at\n the end of the trail.\n\n\n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those\n years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n\n\n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood\n up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of\n his ship, but he would manage.", "When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be\n then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes\n he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control\n board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in\n the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great\n loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever\n known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair\n and hopeless pain.\n\n\n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was\n sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars.\n A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered!\n Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted,\n it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He\n watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion.\n And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!", "Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost\n track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose\n could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there\n reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became\n meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About\n three years must have passed since his last record in the log book\n of the\nMary Lou\n. At that time, he remembered, he suffered another\n great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a\n full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with\n joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy\n was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly\n disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a\n distant star\nthrough\nthe space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon\n him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.", "\"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n \"Of course, you looked through the log book of the\nMary Lou\n.\"\n\n\n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very\n old man.\n\n\n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly,\n measuring each word. \"Years in space—all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n\n\n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the\n thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me\n and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have\n died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of\n vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be\n now!\"", "The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the\nMary Lou\n.\n In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically\n glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago.\n He realized suddenly that everything about the\nMary Lou\nwas hateful to\n him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty\n years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n\n\n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n\n\n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away\n and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was\n tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving\n the\nMary Lou\nbehind him forever.\n\n\n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor\n say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.", "\"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man\n would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping\n us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and\n we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed\n helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n\n\n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His\n face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n\n\n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once\n more!\"", "He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was\n not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A\n moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost\n Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand\n as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n\n\n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller,\n fainter and fainter.\n\n\n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket\n recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded\n loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\nSeven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard\n would never see there was published a small item:", "For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt\n assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no\n phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight\n shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid\n and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the\n Ghost Ship in his youth.\nFor another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin,\n had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n\n\n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n\n\n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE\n SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n\n\n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent\n the answering message.", "\"The Ghost Ship!\"\n\n\n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in\n whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales.\n But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of\n Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up\n in this time of delirium.\n\n\n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n\n\n \"It's come—for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward\n Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His\n mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one\n with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.", "Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the\n heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he\n first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would\n die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any\n man could.\n\n\n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a\n tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n\n\n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n\n\n \"Saw what?\"\n\n\n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n\n\n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is\n it?\"\n\n\n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded\n space.", "\"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n\n\n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in\n bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\nHe woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the\n passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so\n much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the\n point of gibbering insanity.\n\n\n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he\n never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to\n remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to\n also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the\n value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental\n shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.", "And then in his third week on the rescue ship, he went to sleep one\n night while peering from the port hole at the blue ball of Earth\n swimming in the blackness of space. He slept and he dreamed of the\n years he had spent by himself in the drifting, lifeless hulk of the\nMary Lou\n. His dreams were vivid, peopled with men and women he had\n once known, and were horrible with the fantasies of terror that years\n of solitary brooding had implanted deep in his mind.\nHe awoke with a start and a cry of alarm ran through him as he thought\n that perhaps he might still be in the\nMary Lou\n. The warm, smiling face\n of a man quickly reassured him.\n\n\n \"I'll call the captain,\" the space man said. \"He said to let him know\n when you came to.\"", "During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing\n it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his\n friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans'\n sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges.\n And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and\n confused.\n\n\n Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no\n longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But\n there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they\n refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual\n running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions,\n they mumbled and drifted away.", "\"\nArden, Rocketport\n—Thirteen years ago the Space Ship\nMary Lou\nunder John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the\n exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been\n seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is\n planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called\nMary Lou II\n, in memory of his father.\"\n\n\n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the\n cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only\n things both dear and precious to him.\n\n\n Willard, master and lone survivor of the\nMary Lou\n, knew this well for\n he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the\n anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be\n done.", "Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished\n instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few\n minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes\n would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass\n of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a\n moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth\n investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the\n last flashing seconds of life.\n\n\n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted\n its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but,\n instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused\n his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it\n would reach the\nMary Lou\n.", "For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body\n of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was\n necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had\n ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the\n useless motors of the\nMary Lou\n.\nThe weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the\n ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged\n it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care\n and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept.\n The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious\n food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed." ], [ "\"The Ghost Ship!\"\n\n\n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in\n whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales.\n But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of\n Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up\n in this time of delirium.\n\n\n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n\n\n \"It's come—for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward\n Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His\n mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one\n with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.", "Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague\n fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting\n and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n\n\n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no\n longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing.\n Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\nWillard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not\n because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been\n ingrained in him through the years.", "The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship!\n Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was\n impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales\n told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.\n\n\n \"There is no ship there. There is no ship there,\" Willard told himself\n over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now\n motionless a few hundred miles away.\n\n\n Deep within him a faint voice cried, \"\nIt's come—for me!\n\" but Willard\n stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it.\n There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there\n had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas—ships doomed to roam\n forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true\n for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?", "For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt\n assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no\n phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight\n shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid\n and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the\n Ghost Ship in his youth.\nFor another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin,\n had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n\n\n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n\n\n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE\n SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n\n\n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent\n the answering message.", "He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was\n not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A\n moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost\n Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand\n as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n\n\n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller,\n fainter and fainter.\n\n\n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket\n recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded\n loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\nSeven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard\n would never see there was published a small item:", "Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost\n track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose\n could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there\n reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became\n meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About\n three years must have passed since his last record in the log book\n of the\nMary Lou\n. At that time, he remembered, he suffered another\n great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a\n full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with\n joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy\n was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly\n disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a\n distant star\nthrough\nthe space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon\n him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.", "Clearer? Perhaps not. Perhaps they become more clouded. How could he,\n for example, explain the phenomena of the Ghost Ship? Was it really\n only a product of his imagination? What of all the others who had\n seen it? Was it possible for many different men under many different\n situations to have the same exact illusion? Reason denied that. But\n perhaps space itself denies reason.\n\n\n Grimly he retraced the legend of the Ghost Ship. A chance phrase here\n and a story there put together all that he knew:\n\n\n Doomed for all eternity to wander in the empty star-lanes, the Ghost\n Ship haunts the Solar System that gave it birth. And this is its\n tragedy, for it is the home of spacemen who can never go home again.\n When your last measure of fuel is burnt and your ship becomes a\n lifeless hulk—the Ghost will come—for you!", "And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy\n ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage.\n Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.", "When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be\n then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes\n he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control\n board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in\n the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great\n loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever\n known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair\n and hopeless pain.\n\n\n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was\n sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars.\n A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered!\n Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted,\n it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He\n watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion.\n And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!", "GALACTIC GHOST\nBy WALTER KUBILIUS\nThe Flying Dutchman of space was a harbinger\n\n of death. But Willard wasn't superstitions.\n\n He had seen the phantom—and lived.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Winter 1942.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's\n lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his\n fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the\nMary\n Lou\nwere now black as meteor dust.\n\n\n \"We'll never see Earth again,\" he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at\n the cover.", "A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the\n captain's eyes.\n\n\n \"I want to walk on Earth just once—then I can die.\"\n\n\n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n\n\n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n\n\n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged\n at him.\n\n\n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a\n statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n\n\n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him,\nhe knew\n.", "Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished\n instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few\n minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes\n would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass\n of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a\n moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth\n investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the\n last flashing seconds of life.\n\n\n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted\n its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but,\n instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused\n his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it\n would reach the\nMary Lou\n.", "Again he looked out the port. Unquestionably the faint mass was nearing\n his ship. It was round in shape and almost invisible. The stars,\n though dimmed, could still be seen through it. There was something\n about its form that reminded him of an old-fashioned rocket ship. It\n resembled one of those that had done pioneer service in the lanes forty\n years ago or more. Resembled one? It was one! Unquestionably, though\n half-invisible and like a piece of glass immersed in water, it was a\n rocket ship.\n\n\n But the instruments on the control board could not lie. The presence of\n any material body within a hundred thousand miles would be revealed.\n But the needle on the gauge did not quiver. Nothing indicated the\n presence of a ship. But the evidence of his eyes was incontestable.\n\n\n Or was it? Doubt gripped him. Did the loneliness of all these years\n in space twist his mind till he was imagining the appearance of faint\n ghost-like rocket ships?", "Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the\n heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he\n first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would\n die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any\n man could.\n\n\n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a\n tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n\n\n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n\n\n \"Saw what?\"\n\n\n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n\n\n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is\n it?\"\n\n\n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded\n space.", "\"... are doomed,\" the Captain said. \"We cannot go to Earth for the\n simple reason that we would go\nthrough\nit!\"\n\n\n The vision of Earth and green trees faded. He would never see Earth\n again. He would never feel the crunch of ground under feet as he\n walked. Never would listen to the voices of friends and the songs of\n birds. Never. Never. Never....\n\n\n \"Then this is the Ghost Ship and we are the Ghosts!\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"", "\"Matter is relative,\" he said, \"the existent under one condition is\n non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All\n things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass\n and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened\n to the\nMary Lou\n. Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years\n ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel\n the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became\n more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any\n Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real—to ourselves. But to\n some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen\n years—to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.\n\n\n \"Then this ship,\" Willard said, stunned, \"you and I and everything on\n it...\"", "\"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n \"Of course, you looked through the log book of the\nMary Lou\n.\"\n\n\n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very\n old man.\n\n\n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly,\n measuring each word. \"Years in space—all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n\n\n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the\n thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me\n and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have\n died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of\n vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be\n now!\"", "And so it was that each night—for Willard did not give up the\n Earth-habit of keeping time—Willard dreamed of the days he had known\n on Earth.\n\n\n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and\n feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his\n feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew.\n How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and\n friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would\n never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers\n and scientists.\n\n\n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the\n shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd\n that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a\n man who is alone.", "\"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt.\n No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be\n anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no\n man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of\n the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the\n stars.\n\n\n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like\n Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from\n now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in\n space and bring them home again.\n\n\n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted\n him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the\n stars.", "\"\nArden, Rocketport\n—Thirteen years ago the Space Ship\nMary Lou\nunder John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the\n exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been\n seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is\n planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called\nMary Lou II\n, in memory of his father.\"\n\n\n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the\n cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only\n things both dear and precious to him.\n\n\n Willard, master and lone survivor of the\nMary Lou\n, knew this well for\n he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the\n anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be\n done." ], [ "Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague\n fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting\n and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n\n\n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no\n longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing.\n Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\nWillard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not\n because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been\n ingrained in him through the years.", "And so it was that each night—for Willard did not give up the\n Earth-habit of keeping time—Willard dreamed of the days he had known\n on Earth.\n\n\n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and\n feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his\n feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew.\n How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and\n friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would\n never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers\n and scientists.\n\n\n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the\n shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd\n that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a\n man who is alone.", "When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be\n then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes\n he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control\n board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in\n the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great\n loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever\n known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair\n and hopeless pain.\n\n\n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was\n sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars.\n A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered!\n Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted,\n it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He\n watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion.\n And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!", "For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body\n of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was\n necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had\n ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the\n useless motors of the\nMary Lou\n.\nThe weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the\n ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged\n it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care\n and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept.\n The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious\n food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.", "Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost\n track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose\n could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there\n reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became\n meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About\n three years must have passed since his last record in the log book\n of the\nMary Lou\n. At that time, he remembered, he suffered another\n great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a\n full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with\n joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy\n was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly\n disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a\n distant star\nthrough\nthe space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon\n him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.", "A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the\n captain's eyes.\n\n\n \"I want to walk on Earth just once—then I can die.\"\n\n\n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n\n\n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n\n\n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged\n at him.\n\n\n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a\n statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n\n\n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him,\nhe knew\n.", "The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the\nMary Lou\n.\n In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically\n glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago.\n He realized suddenly that everything about the\nMary Lou\nwas hateful to\n him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty\n years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n\n\n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n\n\n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away\n and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was\n tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving\n the\nMary Lou\nbehind him forever.\n\n\n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor\n say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.", "He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was\n not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A\n moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost\n Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand\n as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n\n\n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller,\n fainter and fainter.\n\n\n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket\n recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded\n loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\nSeven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard\n would never see there was published a small item:", "\"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt.\n No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be\n anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no\n man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of\n the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the\n stars.\n\n\n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like\n Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from\n now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in\n space and bring them home again.\n\n\n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted\n him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the\n stars.", "Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He\n pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He\n yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his\n entire body.\n\n\n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his\n mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year\n and perhaps not the next—for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian\n expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home\n base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at\n the end of the trail.\n\n\n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those\n years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n\n\n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood\n up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of\n his ship, but he would manage.", "\"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n \"Of course, you looked through the log book of the\nMary Lou\n.\"\n\n\n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very\n old man.\n\n\n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly,\n measuring each word. \"Years in space—all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n\n\n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the\n thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me\n and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have\n died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of\n vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be\n now!\"", "\"The Ghost Ship!\"\n\n\n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in\n whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales.\n But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of\n Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up\n in this time of delirium.\n\n\n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n\n\n \"It's come—for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward\n Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His\n mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one\n with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.", "\"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man\n would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping\n us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and\n we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed\n helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n\n\n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His\n face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n\n\n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once\n more!\"", "\"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n\n\n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in\n bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\nHe woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the\n passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so\n much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the\n point of gibbering insanity.\n\n\n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he\n never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to\n remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to\n also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the\n value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental\n shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.", "And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy\n ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage.\n Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.", "Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished\n instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few\n minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes\n would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass\n of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a\n moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth\n investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the\n last flashing seconds of life.\n\n\n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted\n its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but,\n instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused\n his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it\n would reach the\nMary Lou\n.", "For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt\n assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no\n phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight\n shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid\n and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the\n Ghost Ship in his youth.\nFor another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin,\n had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n\n\n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n\n\n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE\n SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n\n\n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent\n the answering message.", "\"\nArden, Rocketport\n—Thirteen years ago the Space Ship\nMary Lou\nunder John Willard and Larry Dobbin left the Rocket Port for the\n exploration of an alleged planetoid beyond Pluto. The ship has not been\n seen or heard from since. J. Willard, II, son of the lost explorer, is\n planning the manufacture of a super-size exploration ship to be called\nMary Lou II\n, in memory of his father.\"\n\n\n Memories die hard. A man who is alone in space with nothing but the\n cold friendship of star-light looks back upon memories as the only\n things both dear and precious to him.\n\n\n Willard, master and lone survivor of the\nMary Lou\n, knew this well for\n he had tried to rip the memories of Earth out of his heart to ease the\n anguish of solitude within him. But it was a thing that could not be\n done.", "Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the\n heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he\n first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would\n die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any\n man could.\n\n\n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a\n tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n\n\n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n\n\n \"Saw what?\"\n\n\n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n\n\n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is\n it?\"\n\n\n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded\n space.", "During those passing days, he savored each new impression, comparing\n it with what he remembered from that age-long past when he and his\n friends had walked on Earth's great plains and ridden on the oceans'\n sleek ships or flown with the wings of birds over the mountain ranges.\n And each impression was doubly enjoyable, for his memory was hazy and\n confused.\n\n\n Gradually, though, his mind cleared; he remembered the past, and he no\n longer was afraid of the men who visited him from time to time. But\n there was a strangeness about the men that he could not fathom; they\n refused to talk about anything, any subject, other than the actual\n running of the great ship. Always, when he asked his eager questions,\n they mumbled and drifted away." ], [ "Since then Willard did not look out the window of his craft. A vague\n fear troubled him that perhaps the Ghost Ship might be here, waiting\n and watching, and that he would go mad if he saw it.\n\n\n How many years passed he could not tell. But this he knew. He was no\n longer a young man. Perhaps fifteen years has disappeared into nothing.\n Perhaps twenty. He did not know and he did not care.\nWillard awoke from a deep sleep and prepared his bed. He did it, not\n because it was necessary, but because it was a habit that had long been\n ingrained in him through the years.", "The years of waiting were over. At last he was free of the\nMary Lou\n.\n In a dream like trance, he dressed in his space suit, pathetically\n glad that he had already checked every detail of it a short time ago.\n He realized suddenly that everything about the\nMary Lou\nwas hateful to\n him. It was here that his best friend died, and it was here that twenty\n years of his life were wasted completely in solitude and despair.\n\n\n He took one last look and stepped into the air-lock.\n\n\n The Earth-ship, he did not see its name, was only a hundred yards away\n and a man was already at the air-lock waiting to help him. A rope was\n tossed to him. He reached for it and made his way to the ship, leaving\n the\nMary Lou\nbehind him forever.\n\n\n Suddenly the world dropped away from him. Willard could neither see nor\n say anything. His heart was choked with emotion.", "A note of sadness, matched only by that of Willard's, entered the\n captain's eyes.\n\n\n \"I want to walk on Earth just once—then I can die.\"\n\n\n Willard stopped. A happy dreamy smile touched his lips.\n\n\n \"When will we go to Earth?\" he asked.\n\n\n The Captain did not answer. Willard waited and a strange memory tugged\n at him.\n\n\n \"You don't know,\" the Captain said. It was not a question or a\n statement. The Captain found it hard to say it. His lips moved slowly.\n\n\n Willard stepped back and before the Captain told him,\nhe knew\n.", "When this was done, Willard immediately regretted it. For it would be\n then that the days and the weeks would roll by endlessly. Sometimes\n he thought he would go mad when, sitting at the useless control\n board, which was his habit, he would stare for hours and hours in\n the direction of the Sun where he knew the Earth would be. A great\n loneliness would then seize upon him and an agony that no man had ever\n known would tear at his heart. He would then turn away, full of despair\n and hopeless pain.\n\n\n Two years after Dobbin's death a strange thing happened. Willard was\n sitting at his accustomed place facing the unmoving vista of the stars.\n A chance glance at Orion's belt froze him still. A star had flickered!\n Distinctly, as if a light veil had been placed over it and then lifted,\n it dimmed and turned bright again. What strange phenomena was this? He\n watched and then another star faded momentarily in the exact fashion.\n And then a third! And a fourth! And a fifth!", "\"Four years!\" Willard echoed faintly. He knew how his space mate felt.\n No man can spend four years away from his home planet, and fail to be\n anguished. A man could live without friends, without fortune, but no\n man could live without Earth. He was like Anteus, for only the feel of\n the solid ground under his feet could give him courage to go among the\n stars.\n\n\n Willard also knew what he dared not admit to himself. He, too, like\n Dobbin, would never see Earth again. Perhaps, some thousand years from\n now, some lonely wanderers would find their battered hulk of a ship in\n space and bring them home again.\n\n\n Dobbin motioned to him and, in answer to a last request, Willard lifted\n him so he faced the port window for a final look at the panorama of the\n stars.", "\"Nonsense!\" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man\n would not see through the lie. \"We've got the sun's gravity helping\n us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and\n we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine....\" His voice trailed\n helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use.\n\n\n The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His\n face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob.\n\n\n \"To see Earth again!\" he said weakly. \"To walk on solid ground once\n more!\"", "And so it was that each night—for Willard did not give up the\n Earth-habit of keeping time—Willard dreamed of the days he had known\n on Earth.\n\n\n In his mind's eye, he saw himself walking the streets of Arden and\n feeling the crunch of snow or the soft slap of rainwater under his\n feet. He heard again, in his mind, the voices of friends he knew.\n How beautiful and perfect was each voice! How filled with warmth and\n friendship! There was the voice of his beautiful wife whom he would\n never see again. There were the gruff and deep voices of his co-workers\n and scientists.\n\n\n Above all there were the voices of the cities, and the fields and the\n shops where he had worked. All these had their individual voices. Odd\n that he had never realized it before, but things become clearer to a\n man who is alone.", "Willard could only nod in weak and grateful acceptance. It was true! He\n pressed his head back against the bed's pillows. How soft! How warm! He\n yawned and stretched his arms as a thrill of happiness shot through his\n entire body.\n\n\n He would see Earth again! That single thought ran over and over in his\n mind without stopping. He would see Earth again! Perhaps not this year\n and perhaps not the next—for the ship might be on some extra-Plutonian\n expedition. But even if it would take years before it returned to home\n base Willard knew that those years would fly quickly if Earth was at\n the end of the trail.\n\n\n Though he had aged, he still had many years before him. And those\n years, he vowed, would be spent on Earth and nowhere else.\n\n\n The captain, a pleasant old fellow, came into the room as Willard stood\n up and tried to walk. The gravity here was a bit different from that of\n his ship, but he would manage.", "He looked again at the strange ship. It was motionless. At least it was\n not nearing him. Willard could see nothing but its vague outline. A\n moment later he could discern a faint motion. It was turning! The Ghost\n Ship was turning back! Unconsciously Willard reached out with his hand\n as if to hold it back, for when it was gone he would be alone again.\n\n\n But the Ghost Ship went on. Its outline became smaller and smaller,\n fainter and fainter.\n\n\n Trembling, Willard turned away from the window as he saw the rocket\n recede and vanish into the emptiness of space. Once more the dreaded\n loneliness of the stars descended upon him.\nSeven years passed and back on Earth in a small newspaper that Willard\n would never see there was published a small item:", "\"The Ghost Ship!\"\n\n\n Something clicked in Willard's memory. He had heard it spoken of in\n whispers by drunken space men and professional tellers of fairy tales.\n But he had never put any stock in them. In some forgotten corner of\n Dobbin's mind the legend of the Ghost Ship must have lain, to come up\n in this time of delirium.\n\n\n \"There's nothing there,\" he said firmly.\n\n\n \"It's come—for me!\" Dobbin cried. He turned his head slowly toward\n Willard, tried to say something and then fell back upon the pillow. His\n mouth was open and his eyes stared unseeing ahead. Dobbin was now one\n with the vanished pioneers of yesterday. Willard was alone.", "\"How do you feel, Space Man Willard?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you know me?\" Willard looked at him in surprise, and then smiled,\n \"Of course, you looked through the log book of the\nMary Lou\n.\"\n\n\n The captain nodded and Willard noticed with surprise that he was a very\n old man.\n\n\n \"You don't know how much I suffered there,\" Willard said slowly,\n measuring each word. \"Years in space—all alone! It's a horrible thing!\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\" the old captain said.\n\n\n \"Many times I thought I would go completely mad. It was only the\n thought and hope that some day, somehow, an Earth-ship would find me\n and help me get back to Earth. If it was not for that, I would have\n died. I could think of nothing but of Earth, of blue green water, of\n vast open spaces and the good brown earth. How beautiful it must be\n now!\"", "Dobbin's eyes, dimming and half closed, took in the vast play of the\n heavens and in his mind he relived the days when in a frail craft he\n first crossed interstellar space. But for Earth-loneliness Dobbin would\n die a happy man, knowing that he had lived as much and as deeply as any\n man could.\n\n\n Silently the two men watched. Dobbin's eyes opened suddenly and a\n tremor seized his body. He turned painfully and looked at Willard.\n\n\n \"I saw it!\" his voice cracked, trembling.\n\n\n \"Saw what?\"\n\n\n \"It's true! It's true! It comes whenever a space man dies! It's there!\"\n\n\n \"In heaven's name, Dobbin,\" Willard demanded, \"What do you see? What is\n it?\"\n\n\n Dobbin lifted his dark bony arm and pointed out into star-studded\n space.", "For two days, reckoned in Earth time, Willard kept vigil over the body\n of his friend and space mate. When the time was up he did what was\n necessary and nothing remained of Harry Dobbin, the best friend he had\n ever had. The atoms of his body were now pure energy stored away in the\n useless motors of the\nMary Lou\n.\nThe weeks that followed were like a blur in Willard's mind. Though the\n ship was utterly incapable of motion, the chance meteor that damaged\n it had spared the convertors and assimilators. Through constant care\n and attention the frail balance that meant life or death could be kept.\n The substance of waste and refuse was torn down and rebuilt as precious\n food and air. It was even possible to create more than was needed.", "Willard's heart gave a leap and the lethargy of two years vanished\n instantly. Here, at last, was something to do. It might be only a few\n minutes before he would understand what it was, but those few minutes\n would help while away the maddening long hours. Perhaps it was a mass\n of fine meteorites or a pocket of gas that did not disperse, or even a\n moving warp of space-light. Whatever it was, it was a phenomena worth\n investigating and Willard seized upon it as a dying man seizes upon the\n last flashing seconds of life.\n\n\n Willard traced its course by the flickering stars and gradually plotted\n its semi-circular course. It was not from the solar system but,\n instead, headed toward it. A rapid check-up on his calculations caused\n his heart to beat in ever quickening excitement. Whatever it was, it\n would reach the\nMary Lou\n.", "\"It's all right,\" a kindly voice assured him, \"You're safe now.\"\n\n\n He had the sensation of being carried by several men and then placed in\n bed. The quiet of deep sleep descended upon him.\nHe woke many times in the following days, but the privations of the\n passing years had drained his strength and his mind, had made him so\n much of a hermit that the presence of other men frightened him to the\n point of gibbering insanity.\n\n\n He knew that the food and drink were drugged, for after eating he\n never remembered seeing the men enter the room to care for him and to\n remove the dirty dishes. But there was enough sanity in his mind to\n also realize that, without the gradual reawakening of his senses to the\n value of human companionship, he might not be able to stand the mental\n shock of moving about among his people back on Earth.", "Another year of loneliness passed. And still another. Willard lost\n track of the days. It was difficult to keep time for to what purpose\n could time be kept. Here in space there was no time, nor was there\n reason for clocks and records. Days and months and years became\n meaningless words for things that once may have had meaning. About\n three years must have passed since his last record in the log book\n of the\nMary Lou\n. At that time, he remembered, he suffered another\n great disappointment. On the port side there suddenly appeared a\n full-sized rocket ship. For many minutes Willard was half-mad with\n joy thinking that a passing ship was ready to rescue him. But the joy\n was short-lived, for the rocket ship abruptly turned away and slowly\n disappeared. As Willard watched it go away he saw the light of a\n distant star\nthrough\nthe space ship. A heart-breaking agony fell upon\n him. It was not a ship from Earth. It was the Ghost Ship, mocking him.", "For a moment the reason in his mind tottered on a balance. Doubt\n assailed him. Was this the Ghost Ship come to torment him again? But no\n phantom this! It was a life and blood rocket ship from Earth! Starlight\n shone on it and not through it! Its lines, window, vents were all solid\n and had none of the ghost-like quality he remembered seeing in the\n Ghost Ship in his youth.\nFor another split second he thought that perhaps he, too, like Dobbin,\n had gone mad and that the ship would vanish just as it approached him.\n\n\n The tapping of the space-telegrapher reassured him.\n\n\n \"CALLING SPACE SHIP MARY LOU,\" the message rapped out, \"CALLING SPACE\n SHIP MARY LOU.\"\n\n\n With trembling fingers that he could scarcely control, old Willard sent\n the answering message.", "\"Matter is relative,\" he said, \"the existent under one condition is\n non-existent under another. The real here is the non-real there. All\n things that wander alone in space are gradually drained of their mass\n and energy until nothing is left but mere shells. That is what happened\n to the\nMary Lou\n. Your ship was real when we passed by twenty years\n ago. It is now like ours, a vague outline in space. We cannot feel\n the change ourselves, for change is relative. That is why we became\n more and more solid to you, as you became more and more faint to any\n Earth-ship that might have passed. We are real—to ourselves. But to\n some ship from Earth which has not been in space for more than fifteen\n years—to that ship, to all intents and purposes, we do not exist.\n\n\n \"Then this ship,\" Willard said, stunned, \"you and I and everything on\n it...\"", "And this is all there was to the legend. Merely a tale of some fairy\n ship told to amuse and to while away the days of a star-voyage.\n Bitterly, Willard dismissed it from his mind.", "The thought shot through his mind like a thunder bolt. Ghost Ship!\n Was this the thing that Dobbin had seen before he died? But that was\n impossible. Ghost Ships existed nowhere but in legends and tall tales\n told by men drunk with the liquors of Mars.\n\n\n \"There is no ship there. There is no ship there,\" Willard told himself\n over and over again as he looked at the vague outline of the ship, now\n motionless a few hundred miles away.\n\n\n Deep within him a faint voice cried, \"\nIt's come—for me!\n\" but Willard\n stilled it. This was no fantasy. There was a scientific reason for it.\n There must be! Or should there be? Throughout all Earth history there\n had been Ghost Ships sailing the Seven Seas—ships doomed to roam\n forever because their crew broke some unbreakable law. If this was true\n for the ships of the seas, why not for the ships of empty space?" ] ]
test	50441	[ "Which trait best describe Prior?", "What traits best describe Roy Walton?", "Which traits best describe FiztMaugham?", "What is the relationship like between Fred and Roy?", "What was Prior's motivation in the passage?", "Why might someone not want to read this passage?", "What is the tone of this passage?", "Who would most enjoy reading this article?", "What would happen if Roy hadn't left his door unlocked?", "What world-building element is crucial to the setup of this story?" ]	[ [ "Bold and rude", "Caring and respectful", "Stubborn and humorous", "Desperate and disrespectful" ], [ "Suave and handsome", "Respectable and pragmatic", "Bold and stupid", "Empathetic and shortsighted" ], [ "Strong and humorless", "Practical and leader-like", "Bold and generous", "Strong and handsome" ], [ "They used to be friends but now they don't like each other", "They're brothers but they have a strained relationship", "They're friends and they care about each other", "They're brothers and they care about each other" ], [ "To save his brother", "To stop the examiner's system", "To stop the Popeek system", "To save his son" ], [ "Violence to children is a major topic", "Death is a major topic", "There is gore", "There is nudity" ], [ "Calm", "Humorous", "Chaotic", "Intense" ], [ "Someone who enjoys reading about rebellions", "Someone who enjoys sci-fi world-building", "Someone who enjoys reading about rebellions in intergalactic settings", "Someone who enjoys learning about Dystopian worlds" ], [ "He probably wouldn't have interacted with Prior solely because he was very busy that day", "He probably would've still met Prior anyway because the two are friends", "He probably would've still met Prior anyway because Prior's one of his favorite poets", "He probably wouldn't have interacted with Prior" ], [ "That the Earth is overpopulated", "That lots of citizens are contracting diseases that have to be stopped", "That the galaxy is overpopulated", "That lots of citizens are rebelling and the government has to control them" ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "\"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr.\n Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do\n the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n\n\n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly\n at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton\n feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his\n upper left desk drawer.\n\n\n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n \"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n\n\n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and\n slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the\n chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three\n basilisks.", "\"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said,\n without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a\n terribly busy man.\"\n\n\n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's\n desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the\n psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have\n had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little\n diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a\n man. \"I hadn't expected to find—I mean that you—\"\n\n\n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping\n for?\"\n\n\n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.", "\"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n\n\n \"Are you sure you—\"\n\n\n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked\n away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for\n protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here\n and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's\n simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world\n who'd take this job. Now\nget out\n!\"\n\n\n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed\n and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly\n unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations\n prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit\n that to the guards.\n\n\n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"", "Prior's words haunted him.\nI was tubercular ... where would my poems\n be now?\nThe big humble man was one of the great poets. Keats had been\n tubercular too.\nWhat good are poets?\nhe asked himself savagely.\n\n\n The reply came swiftly:\nWhat good is anything, then?\nKeats,\n Shakespeare, Eliot, Yeats, Donne, Pound, Matthews ... and Prior. How\n much duller life would be without them, Walton thought, picturing\n his bookshelf—his one bookshelf, in his crowded little cubicle of a\n one-room home.\n\n\n Sweat poured down his back as he groped toward his decision.\n\n\n The step he was considering would disqualify him from his job if he\n admitted it, though he wouldn't do that. Under the Equalization Law, it\n would be a criminal act.\n\n\n But just one baby wouldn't matter. Just one.", "\"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n \"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n\n\n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton\n stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he\n can have ten minutes with me at—oh, say, 1300.\"\n\n\n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer\n office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you\n immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n\n\n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in\n the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just\n been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"", "Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge\n of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this\n ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to\nsee\none of those people and try to convince him of the need—\n\n\n The door burst open.\n\n\n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and\n paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him\n came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security.\n They carried drawn needlers.\n\n\n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly\n deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"", "Frowning, he tried to remember the Prior boy's name. Ah ... Philip,\n wasn't it? He punched out a request for the card on Philip Prior.", "Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do\nsomething\nwhen I go home at\n night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No\n more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite\n remarkable.\"\n\n\n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n\n\n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles.\n Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize.\n Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr.\n Prior—and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is.\n Take Yeats, for instance—\"\n\n\n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior\n back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand,\n anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n\n\n \"Mr. Walton....\"", "Walton had set up the schedule himself: the gas chamber delivered\n Happysleep each day at 1100 and 1500. He had about half an hour to save\n Philip Prior.\n\n\n He peered covertly over his shoulder; no one was in sight. He slipped\n the baby's card into his breast pocket.\n\n\n That done, he typed out a requisition for explanation of the\n gene-sorting code the clinic used. Symbols began pouring forth,\n and Walton puzzledly correlated them with the line of gibberish on\n Phillip Prior's record card. Finally he found the one he wanted:\n3f2,\n tubercular-prone\n.", "\"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a\n little, I think.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n\n\n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid\n you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n\n\n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director\n to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed\nFourteen\n; there was\n a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed\ntwenty\n, covering\n the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his\n destination.\n\n\n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to\n see you this morning?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Walton said.", "Prior's baby.\n\n\n With nervous fingers he switched on the annunciator and said, \"If there\n are any calls for me, take the message. I'll be out of my office for\n the next half-hour.\"\nII\nHe stepped out of the office, glancing around furtively. The outer\n office was busy: half a dozen girls were answering calls, opening\n letters, coordinating activities. Walton slipped quickly past them into\n the hallway.\n\n\n There was a knot of fear in his stomach as he turned toward the\n lift tube. Six weeks of pressure, six weeks of tension since Popeek\n was organized and old man FitzMaugham had tapped him for the\n second-in-command post ... and now, a rebellion. The sparing of a\n single child was a small rebellion, true, but he knew he was striking\n as effectively at the base of Popeek this way as if he had brought\n about repeal of the entire Equalization Law.", "The Prior boy was safe. And in the eyes of the law—the Equalization\n Law—Roy Walton was now a criminal. He was every bit as much a criminal\n as the man who tried to hide his dying father from the investigators,\n or the anxious parents who attempted to bribe an examining doctor.\n\n\n He felt curiously dirty. And, now that he had betrayed FitzMaugham and\n the Cause, now that it was done, he had little idea why he had done\n it, why he had jeopardized the Popeek program, his position—his life,\n even—for the sake of one potentially tubercular baby.\n\n\n Well, the thing was done.\n\n\n No. Not quite. Later, when things had quieted down, he would have to\n finish the job by transferring all the men in the clinic to distant\n places and by obliterating the computer's memories of this morning's\n activities.", "\"You thought euthanasia was a fine thing for\nother\npeople. So did\n everyone else,\" Walton said. \"That's how the act was passed.\" Tenderly\n he said, \"I can't do it. I can't spare your son. Our doctors give a\n baby every chance to live.\"\n\n\n \"\nI\nwas tubercular. They cured me. What if they had practiced\n euthanasia a generation ago? Where would my poems be now?\"\n\n\n It was an unanswerable question; Walton tried to ignore it.\n \"Tuberculosis is an extremely rare disease, Mr. Prior. We can wipe\n it out completely if we strike at those with TB-susceptible genetic\n traits.\"\n\n\n \"Meaning you'll kill any children I have?\" Prior asked.", "\"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"My son Philip ... he's two weeks old now....\"\n\n\n Walton understood. \"No, Prior. Please don't ask.\" Walton's skin felt\n cold; his hands, tightly clenched, were clammy.\n\n\n \"He was committed to Happysleep this morning—potentially tubercular.\n The boy's perfectly sound, Mr. Walton. Couldn't you—\"\n\n\n Walton rose. \"\nNo\n,\" he said, half-commanding, half-pleading. \"Don't\n ask me to do it. I can't make any exceptions, not even for you. You're\n an intelligent man; you understand our program.\"\n\n\n \"I voted for Popeek. I know all about Weeding the Garden and the\n Euthanasia Plan. But I hadn't expected—\"", "The three security men caught up and swarmed all over Prior. One of\n them turned apologetically to Walton. \"We're terribly sorry about this,\n sir. He just broke away and ran. We can't understand how he got in\n here, but he did.\"\n\n\n \"Ah—yes. So I noticed,\" Walton remarked drily. \"See if he's planning\n to assassinate anybody, will you?\"\n\n\n \"Administrator Walton!\" Prior protested. \"I'm a man of peace! How can\n you accuse me of—\"\n\n\n One of the security men hit him. Walton stiffened and resisted the urge\n to reprimand the man. He was only doing his job, after all.\n\n\n \"Search him,\" Walton said.\n\n\n They gave Prior an efficient going-over. \"He's clean, Mr. Walton.\n Should we take him to security, or downstairs to health?\"", "Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child,\n and after that I'll keep within the law.\n\n\n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The\n clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n\n\n \"Roy.\"\n\n\n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise.\n He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood\n there.\n\n\n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n\n\n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly,\n his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy.\n Something the matter?\"\n\n\n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been\n a lot of work lately.\"", "A moment's pause followed, while the millions of tiny cryotronic\n circuits raced with information pulses, searching the Donnerson\n tubes for Philip Prior's record. Then, a brief squeaking sound and a\n yellow-brown card dropped out of the slot:\n3216847AB1\nPRIOR, Philip Hugh. Born 31 May 2232, New York General Hospital, New\n York. First son of Prior, Lyle Martin and Prior, Ava Leonard. Wgt. at\n birth 5lb. 3oz.\nAn elaborate description of the boy in great detail followed, ending\n with blood type, agglutinating characteristic, and gene-pattern,\n codified. Walton skipped impatiently through that and came to the", "\"No guessing games, Falbrough. Speak up.\"\n\n\n \"I—well, sir, I ran checks on the seven babies they sent me this\n morning. And guess—I mean—well, one of them shouldn't have been sent\n to me!\"\n\n\n \"No!\"\n\n\n \"It's the truth, sir. A cute little baby indeed. I've got his card\n right here. The boy's name is Philip Prior, and his gene-pattern is\n fine.\"\n\n\n \"Any recommendation for euthanasia on the card?\" Walton asked.\n\n\n \"No, sir.\"", "\"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n\n\n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n\n\n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was\n on his mind?\"\n\n\n Walton hesitated. \"He—he wanted his son spared from Happysleep.\n Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one\n exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, sir.\"", "As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek\n worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham\n had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at\n the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving\n mankind from itself.\n\n\n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength,\n Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad\n you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning,\n though. Mind if I join you?\"\n\n\n \"I'm—not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n\n\n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n\n\n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried,\n drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"" ], [ "Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He\n nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass\n cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\nIdiot!\nhe thought.\nFool!\nHe had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed\n to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew—the old man could see\n through Walton with ease—and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his\n father-substitute.\n\n\n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time,\n but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for\n Fred....\n\n\n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been\n particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now\n almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their\n parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had\n been sent to the public crèche.", "For it was\nhis\njob to tell parents their children were unfit to live;\nhe\nhad to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote\n areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens,\n denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a\n decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies,\n become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from its own folly.\n In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH?\nCAST OF CHARACTERS\nROY WALTON\nHe had to adopt the motto—\nthe ends justify the means\n.\nFITZMAUGHAM", "\"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could\n do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his\n protégé to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n\n\n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him\n for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n\n\n \"No—no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly,\n Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in\n the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and\n Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n\n\n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump,\n squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"", "\"Can I help—oh, it's you, Mr. Walton,\" a white-smocked technician\n said. Popeek employed a small army of technicians, each one faceless\n and without personality, but always ready to serve. \"Is there anything\n I can do?\"\n\n\n \"I'm simply running a routine checkup. Mind if I use the machine?\"\n\n\n \"Not at all, sir. Go right ahead.\"\n\n\n Walton grinned lightly and stepped forward. The technician practically\n backed out of his presence.\nNo doubt I must radiate charisma\n, he thought. Within the building he\n wore a sort of luminous halo, by virtue of being Director FitzMaugham's\n protégé and second-in-command. Outside, in the colder reality of the\n crowded metropolis, he kept his identity and Popeek rank quietly to\n himself.", "\"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system,\n would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of\n this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton\n doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble—oh, no!\"\n\n\n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n\n\n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now,\n shall we?\"\n\n\n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though\n the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen\n cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some\n work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n\n\n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n\n\n The screen went dead.", "As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek\n worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham\n had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at\n the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving\n mankind from itself.\n\n\n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength,\n Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad\n you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning,\n though. Mind if I join you?\"\n\n\n \"I'm—not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n\n\n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n\n\n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried,\n drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"", "\"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n\n\n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n\n\n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was\n on his mind?\"\n\n\n Walton hesitated. \"He—he wanted his son spared from Happysleep.\n Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one\n exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, sir.\"", "Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child,\n and after that I'll keep within the law.\n\n\n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The\n clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n\n\n \"Roy.\"\n\n\n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise.\n He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood\n there.\n\n\n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n\n\n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly,\n his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy.\n Something the matter?\"\n\n\n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been\n a lot of work lately.\"", "Even on the screen, Fred's neck and shoulders gave an impression of\n tremendous solidity and force. Walton waited for his brother's image to\n take shape, and when the time lag was over he said, \"Well, Fred? What\n goes?\"\n\n\n His brother's eyes flickered sleepily. \"They tell me you were down here\n a little while ago, Roy. How come I didn't rate a visit?\"\n\n\n \"I wasn't in your section. It was official business, anyway. I didn't\n have time.\"\n\n\n Walton fixed his eyes sharply on the caduceus emblem gleaming on Fred's\n lapel, and refused to look anywhere else.\n\n\n Fred said slowly, \"You had time to tinker with our computer, though.\"\n\n\n \"Official business!\"", "The annunciator chimed again. \"Your brother is on the wire, sir.\"\n\n\n Walton trembled imperceptibly as he said, \"Put him on.\" Somehow, Fred\n never called unless he could say or do something unpleasant. And\n Walton was very much afraid that his brother meant no good by this\n call. No good at all.\nIII\nRoy Walton watched his brother's head and shoulders take form out of\n the swirl of colors on the screen. Fred Walton was more compact, built\n closer to the ground than his rangy brother; he was a squat five-seven,\n next to Roy's lean six-two. Fred had always threatened to \"get even\"\n with his older brother as soon as they were the same size, but to\n Fred's great dismay he had never managed to catch up with Roy in height.", "Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do\nsomething\nwhen I go home at\n night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No\n more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite\n remarkable.\"\n\n\n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n\n\n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles.\n Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize.\n Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr.\n Prior—and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is.\n Take Yeats, for instance—\"\n\n\n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior\n back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand,\n anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n\n\n \"Mr. Walton....\"", "Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great\n anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet.\n Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that\n there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us\n in half an hour.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Don't say a word about this to\nanyone\n, not even the men in the\n examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents,\n apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for\n any future cases of this sort.\"\n\n\n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n\n\n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep\n breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.", "\"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n\n\n \"Are you sure you—\"\n\n\n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked\n away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for\n protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here\n and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's\n simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world\n who'd take this job. Now\nget out\n!\"\n\n\n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed\n and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly\n unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations\n prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit\n that to the guards.\n\n\n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"", "By the 23rd century Earth's population had reached seven billion.\n Mankind was in danger of perishing for lack of elbow room—unless\n prompt measures were taken. Roy Walton had the power to enforce those\n measures. But though his job was in the service of humanity, he soon\n found himself the most hated man in the world.", "\"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr.\n Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do\n the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n\n\n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly\n at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton\n feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his\n upper left desk drawer.\n\n\n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n \"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n\n\n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and\n slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the\n chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three\n basilisks.", "\"Really, Roy?\" His brother's tone was venomous. \"I happened to\n be using the computer shortly after you this morning. I was\n curious—unpardonably so, dear brother. I requested a transcript of\n your conversation with the machine.\"\n\n\n Sparks seemed to flow from the screen. Walton sat back, feeling numb.\n He managed to pull his sagging mouth back into a stiff hard line and\n say, \"That's a criminal offense, Fred. Any use I make of a Popeek\n computer outlet is confidential.\"\n\n\n \"Criminal offence? Maybe so ... but that makes two of us, then. Eh,\n Roy?\"\n\n\n \"How much do you know?\"", "Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge\n of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this\n ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to\nsee\none of those people and try to convince him of the need—\n\n\n The door burst open.\n\n\n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and\n paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him\n came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security.\n They carried drawn needlers.\n\n\n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly\n deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"", "Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a\n towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He\n remembered what FitzMaugham had said:\nOnce we make even one exception,\n the whole framework crumbles.\nWell, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little\n doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he\n had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n\n\n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling\n you, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Put him on.\"\n\n\n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had\n given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n\n\n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n\n\n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll\n never guess what just happened—\"", "Walton had set up the schedule himself: the gas chamber delivered\n Happysleep each day at 1100 and 1500. He had about half an hour to save\n Philip Prior.\n\n\n He peered covertly over his shoulder; no one was in sight. He slipped\n the baby's card into his breast pocket.\n\n\n That done, he typed out a requisition for explanation of the\n gene-sorting code the clinic used. Symbols began pouring forth,\n and Walton puzzledly correlated them with the line of gibberish on\n Phillip Prior's record card. Finally he found the one he wanted:\n3f2,\n tubercular-prone\n.", "\"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a\n little, I think.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n\n\n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid\n you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n\n\n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director\n to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed\nFourteen\n; there was\n a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed\ntwenty\n, covering\n the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his\n destination.\n\n\n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to\n see you this morning?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Walton said." ], [ "As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek\n worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham\n had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at\n the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving\n mankind from itself.\n\n\n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength,\n Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad\n you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning,\n though. Mind if I join you?\"\n\n\n \"I'm—not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n\n\n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n\n\n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried,\n drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"", "For it was\nhis\njob to tell parents their children were unfit to live;\nhe\nhad to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote\n areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens,\n denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a\n decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies,\n become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from its own folly.\n In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH?\nCAST OF CHARACTERS\nROY WALTON\nHe had to adopt the motto—\nthe ends justify the means\n.\nFITZMAUGHAM", "\"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n\n\n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n\n\n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was\n on his mind?\"\n\n\n Walton hesitated. \"He—he wanted his son spared from Happysleep.\n Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one\n exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, sir.\"", "Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He\n nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass\n cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\nIdiot!\nhe thought.\nFool!\nHe had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed\n to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew—the old man could see\n through Walton with ease—and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his\n father-substitute.\n\n\n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time,\n but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for\n Fred....\n\n\n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been\n particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now\n almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their\n parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had\n been sent to the public crèche.", "\"Can I help—oh, it's you, Mr. Walton,\" a white-smocked technician\n said. Popeek employed a small army of technicians, each one faceless\n and without personality, but always ready to serve. \"Is there anything\n I can do?\"\n\n\n \"I'm simply running a routine checkup. Mind if I use the machine?\"\n\n\n \"Not at all, sir. Go right ahead.\"\n\n\n Walton grinned lightly and stepped forward. The technician practically\n backed out of his presence.\nNo doubt I must radiate charisma\n, he thought. Within the building he\n wore a sort of luminous halo, by virtue of being Director FitzMaugham's\n protégé and second-in-command. Outside, in the colder reality of the\n crowded metropolis, he kept his identity and Popeek rank quietly to\n himself.", "\"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a\n little, I think.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n\n\n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid\n you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n\n\n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director\n to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed\nFourteen\n; there was\n a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed\ntwenty\n, covering\n the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his\n destination.\n\n\n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to\n see you this morning?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Walton said.", "\"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system,\n would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of\n this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton\n doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble—oh, no!\"\n\n\n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n\n\n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now,\n shall we?\"\n\n\n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though\n the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen\n cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some\n work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n\n\n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n\n\n The screen went dead.", "Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child,\n and after that I'll keep within the law.\n\n\n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The\n clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n\n\n \"Roy.\"\n\n\n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise.\n He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood\n there.\n\n\n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n\n\n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly,\n his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy.\n Something the matter?\"\n\n\n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been\n a lot of work lately.\"", "His desk was piled high with reports, and more kept arriving via\n pneumochute every minute. The job of assistant administrator was\n a thankless one, he thought; as much responsibility as Director\n FitzMaugham, and half the pay.\n\n\n He lifted a report from one eyebrow-high stack, smoothed the crinkly\n paper carefully, and read it.", "He shut his eyes, dug his thumbs into them until bright flares of light\n shot across his eyeballs, and refused to let himself be bothered by\n the multiple problems involved in dumping several hundred thousand\n Belgians into Patagonia. He forced himself to cling to one of Director\n FitzMaugham's oft-repeated maxims,\nIf you want to stay sane, think of\n these people as pawns in a chess game—not as human beings.\nWalton sighed. This was the biggest chess problem in the history of\n humanity, and the way it looked now, all the solutions led to checkmate\n in a century or less. They could keep equalizing population only so\n long, shifting like loggers riding logs in a rushing river, before\n trouble came.\n\n\n There was another matter to be attended to now. He picked up the\n voicewrite again. \"Memo from the assistant administrator, re\n establishment of new policy on reports from local agents: hire a staff\n of three clever girls to make a précis of each report, eliminating\n irrelevant data.\"", "Walton stepped out of the tube and returned FitzMaugham's smile as the\n door closed again. Bitter thoughts assailed him as soon as he was alone.\nSome fine criminal you are. You've given the show away already! And\n damn that smooth paternal smile. FitzMaugham knows! He must know!\nWalton wavered, then abruptly made his decision. He sucked in a deep\n breath and walked briskly toward the big room where the euthanasia\n files were kept.\nThe room was large, as rooms went nowadays—thirty by twenty, with deck\n upon deck of Donnerson micro-memory-tubes racked along one wall and a\n bank of microfilm records along the other. In six weeks of life Popeek\n had piled up an impressive collection of data.\n\n\n While he stood there, the computer chattered, lights flashed. New facts\n poured into the memory banks. It probably went on day and night.", "Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a\n towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He\n remembered what FitzMaugham had said:\nOnce we make even one exception,\n the whole framework crumbles.\nWell, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little\n doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he\n had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n\n\n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling\n you, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Put him on.\"\n\n\n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had\n given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n\n\n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n\n\n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll\n never guess what just happened—\"", "After that it had been separate paths for the brothers. For Roy, an\n education in the law, a short spell as Senator FitzMaugham's private\n secretary, followed last month by his sudden elevation to assistant\n administrator of the newly-created Popeek Bureau. For Fred, medicine,\n unsuccessful private practice, finally a job in the Happysleep section\n of Popeek, thanks to Roy.", "Since taking the job, he had managed to redecorate his own office—on\n the twenty-eighth floor, immediately below Director FitzMaugham's—but\n that had created only one minor oasis in the esthetically repugnant\n building. It couldn't be helped, though; Popeek was unpopular, though\n necessary; and, like the public hangman of some centuries earlier, the\n Bureau did not rate attractive quarters.\n\n\n So Walton had removed some of the iridescent chrome scalloping that\n trimmed the walls, replaced the sash windows with opaquers, and changed\n the massive ceiling fixture to more subtle electroluminescents. But the\n mark of the last century was stamped irrevocably on both building and\n office.\n\n\n Which was as it should be, Walton had finally realized. It was the last\n century's foolishness that had made Popeek necessary, after all.", "\"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr.\n Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do\n the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n\n\n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly\n at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton\n feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his\n upper left desk drawer.\n\n\n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n \"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n\n\n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and\n slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the\n chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three\n basilisks.", "\"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said,\n without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a\n terribly busy man.\"\n\n\n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's\n desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the\n psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have\n had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little\n diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a\n man. \"I hadn't expected to find—I mean that you—\"\n\n\n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping\n for?\"\n\n\n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.", "Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great\n anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet.\n Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that\n there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us\n in half an hour.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Don't say a word about this to\nanyone\n, not even the men in the\n examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents,\n apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for\n any future cases of this sort.\"\n\n\n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n\n\n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep\n breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.", "Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do\nsomething\nwhen I go home at\n night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No\n more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite\n remarkable.\"\n\n\n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n\n\n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles.\n Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize.\n Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr.\n Prior—and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is.\n Take Yeats, for instance—\"\n\n\n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior\n back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand,\n anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n\n\n \"Mr. Walton....\"", "\"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n\n\n \"Are you sure you—\"\n\n\n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked\n away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for\n protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here\n and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's\n simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world\n who'd take this job. Now\nget out\n!\"\n\n\n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed\n and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly\n unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations\n prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit\n that to the guards.\n\n\n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"", "The annunciator chimed again. \"Your brother is on the wire, sir.\"\n\n\n Walton trembled imperceptibly as he said, \"Put him on.\" Somehow, Fred\n never called unless he could say or do something unpleasant. And\n Walton was very much afraid that his brother meant no good by this\n call. No good at all.\nIII\nRoy Walton watched his brother's head and shoulders take form out of\n the swirl of colors on the screen. Fred Walton was more compact, built\n closer to the ground than his rangy brother; he was a squat five-seven,\n next to Roy's lean six-two. Fred had always threatened to \"get even\"\n with his older brother as soon as they were the same size, but to\n Fred's great dismay he had never managed to catch up with Roy in height." ], [ "After that it had been separate paths for the brothers. For Roy, an\n education in the law, a short spell as Senator FitzMaugham's private\n secretary, followed last month by his sudden elevation to assistant\n administrator of the newly-created Popeek Bureau. For Fred, medicine,\n unsuccessful private practice, finally a job in the Happysleep section\n of Popeek, thanks to Roy.", "Even on the screen, Fred's neck and shoulders gave an impression of\n tremendous solidity and force. Walton waited for his brother's image to\n take shape, and when the time lag was over he said, \"Well, Fred? What\n goes?\"\n\n\n His brother's eyes flickered sleepily. \"They tell me you were down here\n a little while ago, Roy. How come I didn't rate a visit?\"\n\n\n \"I wasn't in your section. It was official business, anyway. I didn't\n have time.\"\n\n\n Walton fixed his eyes sharply on the caduceus emblem gleaming on Fred's\n lapel, and refused to look anywhere else.\n\n\n Fred said slowly, \"You had time to tinker with our computer, though.\"\n\n\n \"Official business!\"", "\"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system,\n would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of\n this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton\n doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble—oh, no!\"\n\n\n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n\n\n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now,\n shall we?\"\n\n\n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though\n the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen\n cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some\n work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n\n\n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n\n\n The screen went dead.", "Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He\n nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass\n cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\nIdiot!\nhe thought.\nFool!\nHe had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed\n to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew—the old man could see\n through Walton with ease—and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his\n father-substitute.\n\n\n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time,\n but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for\n Fred....\n\n\n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been\n particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now\n almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their\n parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had\n been sent to the public crèche.", "The annunciator chimed again. \"Your brother is on the wire, sir.\"\n\n\n Walton trembled imperceptibly as he said, \"Put him on.\" Somehow, Fred\n never called unless he could say or do something unpleasant. And\n Walton was very much afraid that his brother meant no good by this\n call. No good at all.\nIII\nRoy Walton watched his brother's head and shoulders take form out of\n the swirl of colors on the screen. Fred Walton was more compact, built\n closer to the ground than his rangy brother; he was a squat five-seven,\n next to Roy's lean six-two. Fred had always threatened to \"get even\"\n with his older brother as soon as they were the same size, but to\n Fred's great dismay he had never managed to catch up with Roy in height.", "\"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could\n do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his\n protégé to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n\n\n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him\n for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n\n\n \"No—no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly,\n Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in\n the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and\n Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n\n\n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump,\n squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"", "\"Really, Roy?\" His brother's tone was venomous. \"I happened to\n be using the computer shortly after you this morning. I was\n curious—unpardonably so, dear brother. I requested a transcript of\n your conversation with the machine.\"\n\n\n Sparks seemed to flow from the screen. Walton sat back, feeling numb.\n He managed to pull his sagging mouth back into a stiff hard line and\n say, \"That's a criminal offense, Fred. Any use I make of a Popeek\n computer outlet is confidential.\"\n\n\n \"Criminal offence? Maybe so ... but that makes two of us, then. Eh,\n Roy?\"\n\n\n \"How much do you know?\"", "As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek\n worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham\n had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at\n the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving\n mankind from itself.\n\n\n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength,\n Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad\n you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning,\n though. Mind if I join you?\"\n\n\n \"I'm—not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n\n\n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n\n\n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried,\n drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"", "Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child,\n and after that I'll keep within the law.\n\n\n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The\n clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n\n\n \"Roy.\"\n\n\n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise.\n He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood\n there.\n\n\n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n\n\n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly,\n his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy.\n Something the matter?\"\n\n\n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been\n a lot of work lately.\"", "\"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n\n\n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n\n\n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was\n on his mind?\"\n\n\n Walton hesitated. \"He—he wanted his son spared from Happysleep.\n Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one\n exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, sir.\"", "\"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a\n little, I think.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n\n\n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid\n you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n\n\n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director\n to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed\nFourteen\n; there was\n a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed\ntwenty\n, covering\n the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his\n destination.\n\n\n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to\n see you this morning?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Walton said.", "Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a\n towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He\n remembered what FitzMaugham had said:\nOnce we make even one exception,\n the whole framework crumbles.\nWell, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little\n doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he\n had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n\n\n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling\n you, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Put him on.\"\n\n\n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had\n given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n\n\n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n\n\n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll\n never guess what just happened—\"", "The lift tube halted and rocked on its suspension. The door slid back,\n revealing a neat, gleaming sign:\nFLOOR 20\nEuthanasia Clinic and Files\nWalton had forgotten the accursed sign. He began to wish he had avoided\n traveling down with the director. He felt that his purpose must seem\n nakedly obvious now.\n\n\n The old man's eyes were twinkling amusedly. \"I guess you get off here,\"\n he said. \"I hope you catch up with your work soon, Roy. You really\n should take some time off for relaxation each day.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try, sir.\"", "The Prior boy was safe. And in the eyes of the law—the Equalization\n Law—Roy Walton was now a criminal. He was every bit as much a criminal\n as the man who tried to hide his dying father from the investigators,\n or the anxious parents who attempted to bribe an examining doctor.\n\n\n He felt curiously dirty. And, now that he had betrayed FitzMaugham and\n the Cause, now that it was done, he had little idea why he had done\n it, why he had jeopardized the Popeek program, his position—his life,\n even—for the sake of one potentially tubercular baby.\n\n\n Well, the thing was done.\n\n\n No. Not quite. Later, when things had quieted down, he would have to\n finish the job by transferring all the men in the clinic to distant\n places and by obliterating the computer's memories of this morning's\n activities.", "\"Can I help—oh, it's you, Mr. Walton,\" a white-smocked technician\n said. Popeek employed a small army of technicians, each one faceless\n and without personality, but always ready to serve. \"Is there anything\n I can do?\"\n\n\n \"I'm simply running a routine checkup. Mind if I use the machine?\"\n\n\n \"Not at all, sir. Go right ahead.\"\n\n\n Walton grinned lightly and stepped forward. The technician practically\n backed out of his presence.\nNo doubt I must radiate charisma\n, he thought. Within the building he\n wore a sort of luminous halo, by virtue of being Director FitzMaugham's\n protégé and second-in-command. Outside, in the colder reality of the\n crowded metropolis, he kept his identity and Popeek rank quietly to\n himself.", "\"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n\n\n \"Are you sure you—\"\n\n\n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked\n away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for\n protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here\n and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's\n simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world\n who'd take this job. Now\nget out\n!\"\n\n\n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed\n and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly\n unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations\n prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit\n that to the guards.\n\n\n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"", "Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great\n anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet.\n Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that\n there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us\n in half an hour.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Don't say a word about this to\nanyone\n, not even the men in the\n examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents,\n apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for\n any future cases of this sort.\"\n\n\n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n\n\n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep\n breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.", "For it was\nhis\njob to tell parents their children were unfit to live;\nhe\nhad to uproot people from their homes and send them to remote\n areas of the world. Now, threatened by mobs of outraged citizens,\n denounced and blackened by the press, Roy Walton had to make a\n decision: resign his post, or use his power to destroy his enemies,\n become a dictator in the hopes of saving humanity from its own folly.\n In other words, should he become the MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH?\nCAST OF CHARACTERS\nROY WALTON\nHe had to adopt the motto—\nthe ends justify the means\n.\nFITZMAUGHAM", "His reward for devoted service was—an assassin's bullet.\nFRED WALTON\nHis ambition was to fill his brother's shoes—but he underestimated\n their size.\nLEE PERCY\nHis specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills.\nPRIOR\nWith the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son?\nDR. LAMARRE\nHe died for discovering the secret of immortality.\nContents\nI\nThe offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known\n as Popeek, were located on the twentieth through twenty-ninth floors\n of the Cullen Building, a hundred-story monstrosity typical of\n twenty-second-century neo-Victorian at its overdecorated worst. Roy", "\"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr.\n Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do\n the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n\n\n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly\n at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton\n feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his\n upper left desk drawer.\n\n\n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n \"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n\n\n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and\n slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the\n chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three\n basilisks." ], [ "\"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said,\n without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a\n terribly busy man.\"\n\n\n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's\n desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the\n psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have\n had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little\n diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a\n man. \"I hadn't expected to find—I mean that you—\"\n\n\n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping\n for?\"\n\n\n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.", "\"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr.\n Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do\n the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n\n\n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly\n at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton\n feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his\n upper left desk drawer.\n\n\n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n \"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n\n\n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and\n slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the\n chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three\n basilisks.", "\"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n\n\n \"Are you sure you—\"\n\n\n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked\n away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for\n protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here\n and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's\n simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world\n who'd take this job. Now\nget out\n!\"\n\n\n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed\n and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly\n unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations\n prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit\n that to the guards.\n\n\n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"", "Prior's words haunted him.\nI was tubercular ... where would my poems\n be now?\nThe big humble man was one of the great poets. Keats had been\n tubercular too.\nWhat good are poets?\nhe asked himself savagely.\n\n\n The reply came swiftly:\nWhat good is anything, then?\nKeats,\n Shakespeare, Eliot, Yeats, Donne, Pound, Matthews ... and Prior. How\n much duller life would be without them, Walton thought, picturing\n his bookshelf—his one bookshelf, in his crowded little cubicle of a\n one-room home.\n\n\n Sweat poured down his back as he groped toward his decision.\n\n\n The step he was considering would disqualify him from his job if he\n admitted it, though he wouldn't do that. Under the Equalization Law, it\n would be a criminal act.\n\n\n But just one baby wouldn't matter. Just one.", "Frowning, he tried to remember the Prior boy's name. Ah ... Philip,\n wasn't it? He punched out a request for the card on Philip Prior.", "The Prior boy was safe. And in the eyes of the law—the Equalization\n Law—Roy Walton was now a criminal. He was every bit as much a criminal\n as the man who tried to hide his dying father from the investigators,\n or the anxious parents who attempted to bribe an examining doctor.\n\n\n He felt curiously dirty. And, now that he had betrayed FitzMaugham and\n the Cause, now that it was done, he had little idea why he had done\n it, why he had jeopardized the Popeek program, his position—his life,\n even—for the sake of one potentially tubercular baby.\n\n\n Well, the thing was done.\n\n\n No. Not quite. Later, when things had quieted down, he would have to\n finish the job by transferring all the men in the clinic to distant\n places and by obliterating the computer's memories of this morning's\n activities.", "\"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a\n little, I think.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n\n\n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid\n you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n\n\n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director\n to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed\nFourteen\n; there was\n a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed\ntwenty\n, covering\n the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his\n destination.\n\n\n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to\n see you this morning?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Walton said.", "\"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n \"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n\n\n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton\n stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he\n can have ten minutes with me at—oh, say, 1300.\"\n\n\n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer\n office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you\n immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n\n\n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in\n the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just\n been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"", "Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do\nsomething\nwhen I go home at\n night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No\n more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite\n remarkable.\"\n\n\n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n\n\n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles.\n Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize.\n Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr.\n Prior—and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is.\n Take Yeats, for instance—\"\n\n\n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior\n back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand,\n anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n\n\n \"Mr. Walton....\"", "Walton had set up the schedule himself: the gas chamber delivered\n Happysleep each day at 1100 and 1500. He had about half an hour to save\n Philip Prior.\n\n\n He peered covertly over his shoulder; no one was in sight. He slipped\n the baby's card into his breast pocket.\n\n\n That done, he typed out a requisition for explanation of the\n gene-sorting code the clinic used. Symbols began pouring forth,\n and Walton puzzledly correlated them with the line of gibberish on\n Phillip Prior's record card. Finally he found the one he wanted:\n3f2,\n tubercular-prone\n.", "Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child,\n and after that I'll keep within the law.\n\n\n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The\n clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n\n\n \"Roy.\"\n\n\n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise.\n He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood\n there.\n\n\n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n\n\n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly,\n his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy.\n Something the matter?\"\n\n\n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been\n a lot of work lately.\"", "Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge\n of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this\n ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to\nsee\none of those people and try to convince him of the need—\n\n\n The door burst open.\n\n\n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and\n paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him\n came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security.\n They carried drawn needlers.\n\n\n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly\n deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"", "\"You thought euthanasia was a fine thing for\nother\npeople. So did\n everyone else,\" Walton said. \"That's how the act was passed.\" Tenderly\n he said, \"I can't do it. I can't spare your son. Our doctors give a\n baby every chance to live.\"\n\n\n \"\nI\nwas tubercular. They cured me. What if they had practiced\n euthanasia a generation ago? Where would my poems be now?\"\n\n\n It was an unanswerable question; Walton tried to ignore it.\n \"Tuberculosis is an extremely rare disease, Mr. Prior. We can wipe\n it out completely if we strike at those with TB-susceptible genetic\n traits.\"\n\n\n \"Meaning you'll kill any children I have?\" Prior asked.", "The three security men caught up and swarmed all over Prior. One of\n them turned apologetically to Walton. \"We're terribly sorry about this,\n sir. He just broke away and ran. We can't understand how he got in\n here, but he did.\"\n\n\n \"Ah—yes. So I noticed,\" Walton remarked drily. \"See if he's planning\n to assassinate anybody, will you?\"\n\n\n \"Administrator Walton!\" Prior protested. \"I'm a man of peace! How can\n you accuse me of—\"\n\n\n One of the security men hit him. Walton stiffened and resisted the urge\n to reprimand the man. He was only doing his job, after all.\n\n\n \"Search him,\" Walton said.\n\n\n They gave Prior an efficient going-over. \"He's clean, Mr. Walton.\n Should we take him to security, or downstairs to health?\"", "Prior's baby.\n\n\n With nervous fingers he switched on the annunciator and said, \"If there\n are any calls for me, take the message. I'll be out of my office for\n the next half-hour.\"\nII\nHe stepped out of the office, glancing around furtively. The outer\n office was busy: half a dozen girls were answering calls, opening\n letters, coordinating activities. Walton slipped quickly past them into\n the hallway.\n\n\n There was a knot of fear in his stomach as he turned toward the\n lift tube. Six weeks of pressure, six weeks of tension since Popeek\n was organized and old man FitzMaugham had tapped him for the\n second-in-command post ... and now, a rebellion. The sparing of a\n single child was a small rebellion, true, but he knew he was striking\n as effectively at the base of Popeek this way as if he had brought\n about repeal of the entire Equalization Law.", "\"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"My son Philip ... he's two weeks old now....\"\n\n\n Walton understood. \"No, Prior. Please don't ask.\" Walton's skin felt\n cold; his hands, tightly clenched, were clammy.\n\n\n \"He was committed to Happysleep this morning—potentially tubercular.\n The boy's perfectly sound, Mr. Walton. Couldn't you—\"\n\n\n Walton rose. \"\nNo\n,\" he said, half-commanding, half-pleading. \"Don't\n ask me to do it. I can't make any exceptions, not even for you. You're\n an intelligent man; you understand our program.\"\n\n\n \"I voted for Popeek. I know all about Weeding the Garden and the\n Euthanasia Plan. But I hadn't expected—\"", "\"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n\n\n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n\n\n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was\n on his mind?\"\n\n\n Walton hesitated. \"He—he wanted his son spared from Happysleep.\n Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one\n exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, sir.\"", "As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek\n worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham\n had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at\n the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving\n mankind from itself.\n\n\n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength,\n Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad\n you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning,\n though. Mind if I join you?\"\n\n\n \"I'm—not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n\n\n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n\n\n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried,\n drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"", "Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a\n towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He\n remembered what FitzMaugham had said:\nOnce we make even one exception,\n the whole framework crumbles.\nWell, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little\n doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he\n had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n\n\n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling\n you, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Put him on.\"\n\n\n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had\n given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n\n\n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n\n\n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll\n never guess what just happened—\"", "Since taking the job, he had managed to redecorate his own office—on\n the twenty-eighth floor, immediately below Director FitzMaugham's—but\n that had created only one minor oasis in the esthetically repugnant\n building. It couldn't be helped, though; Popeek was unpopular, though\n necessary; and, like the public hangman of some centuries earlier, the\n Bureau did not rate attractive quarters.\n\n\n So Walton had removed some of the iridescent chrome scalloping that\n trimmed the walls, replaced the sash windows with opaquers, and changed\n the massive ceiling fixture to more subtle electroluminescents. But the\n mark of the last century was stamped irrevocably on both building and\n office.\n\n\n Which was as it should be, Walton had finally realized. It was the last\n century's foolishness that had made Popeek necessary, after all." ], [ "\"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr.\n Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do\n the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n\n\n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly\n at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton\n feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his\n upper left desk drawer.\n\n\n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n \"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n\n\n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and\n slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the\n chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three\n basilisks.", "\"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n\n\n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n\n\n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was\n on his mind?\"\n\n\n Walton hesitated. \"He—he wanted his son spared from Happysleep.\n Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one\n exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, sir.\"", "Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do\nsomething\nwhen I go home at\n night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No\n more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite\n remarkable.\"\n\n\n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n\n\n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles.\n Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize.\n Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr.\n Prior—and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is.\n Take Yeats, for instance—\"\n\n\n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior\n back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand,\n anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n\n\n \"Mr. Walton....\"", "As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek\n worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham\n had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at\n the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving\n mankind from itself.\n\n\n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength,\n Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad\n you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning,\n though. Mind if I join you?\"\n\n\n \"I'm—not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n\n\n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n\n\n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried,\n drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"", "\"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system,\n would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of\n this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton\n doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble—oh, no!\"\n\n\n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n\n\n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now,\n shall we?\"\n\n\n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though\n the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen\n cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some\n work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n\n\n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n\n\n The screen went dead.", "\"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n \"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n\n\n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton\n stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he\n can have ten minutes with me at—oh, say, 1300.\"\n\n\n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer\n office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you\n immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n\n\n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in\n the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just\n been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"", "Prior's words haunted him.\nI was tubercular ... where would my poems\n be now?\nThe big humble man was one of the great poets. Keats had been\n tubercular too.\nWhat good are poets?\nhe asked himself savagely.\n\n\n The reply came swiftly:\nWhat good is anything, then?\nKeats,\n Shakespeare, Eliot, Yeats, Donne, Pound, Matthews ... and Prior. How\n much duller life would be without them, Walton thought, picturing\n his bookshelf—his one bookshelf, in his crowded little cubicle of a\n one-room home.\n\n\n Sweat poured down his back as he groped toward his decision.\n\n\n The step he was considering would disqualify him from his job if he\n admitted it, though he wouldn't do that. Under the Equalization Law, it\n would be a criminal act.\n\n\n But just one baby wouldn't matter. Just one.", "He shut his eyes, dug his thumbs into them until bright flares of light\n shot across his eyeballs, and refused to let himself be bothered by\n the multiple problems involved in dumping several hundred thousand\n Belgians into Patagonia. He forced himself to cling to one of Director\n FitzMaugham's oft-repeated maxims,\nIf you want to stay sane, think of\n these people as pawns in a chess game—not as human beings.\nWalton sighed. This was the biggest chess problem in the history of\n humanity, and the way it looked now, all the solutions led to checkmate\n in a century or less. They could keep equalizing population only so\n long, shifting like loggers riding logs in a rushing river, before\n trouble came.\n\n\n There was another matter to be attended to now. He picked up the\n voicewrite again. \"Memo from the assistant administrator, re\n establishment of new policy on reports from local agents: hire a staff\n of three clever girls to make a précis of each report, eliminating\n irrelevant data.\"", "\"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said,\n without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a\n terribly busy man.\"\n\n\n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's\n desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the\n psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have\n had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little\n diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a\n man. \"I hadn't expected to find—I mean that you—\"\n\n\n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping\n for?\"\n\n\n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.", "Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a\n towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He\n remembered what FitzMaugham had said:\nOnce we make even one exception,\n the whole framework crumbles.\nWell, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little\n doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he\n had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n\n\n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling\n you, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Put him on.\"\n\n\n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had\n given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n\n\n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n\n\n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll\n never guess what just happened—\"", "\"You thought euthanasia was a fine thing for\nother\npeople. So did\n everyone else,\" Walton said. \"That's how the act was passed.\" Tenderly\n he said, \"I can't do it. I can't spare your son. Our doctors give a\n baby every chance to live.\"\n\n\n \"\nI\nwas tubercular. They cured me. What if they had practiced\n euthanasia a generation ago? Where would my poems be now?\"\n\n\n It was an unanswerable question; Walton tried to ignore it.\n \"Tuberculosis is an extremely rare disease, Mr. Prior. We can wipe\n it out completely if we strike at those with TB-susceptible genetic\n traits.\"\n\n\n \"Meaning you'll kill any children I have?\" Prior asked.", "Walton had set up the schedule himself: the gas chamber delivered\n Happysleep each day at 1100 and 1500. He had about half an hour to save\n Philip Prior.\n\n\n He peered covertly over his shoulder; no one was in sight. He slipped\n the baby's card into his breast pocket.\n\n\n That done, he typed out a requisition for explanation of the\n gene-sorting code the clinic used. Symbols began pouring forth,\n and Walton puzzledly correlated them with the line of gibberish on\n Phillip Prior's record card. Finally he found the one he wanted:\n3f2,\n tubercular-prone\n.", "Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great\n anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet.\n Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that\n there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us\n in half an hour.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Don't say a word about this to\nanyone\n, not even the men in the\n examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents,\n apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for\n any future cases of this sort.\"\n\n\n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n\n\n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep\n breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.", "\"Seven so far. They're scheduled for the 1100 chamber. Three tuberc,\n two blind, one congenital syph.\"\n\n\n \"That only makes six,\" Walton said.\n\n\n \"Oh, and a spastic,\" the doctor said. \"Biggest haul we've had yet.\n Seven in one morning.\"\n\n\n \"Have any trouble with the parents?\"\n\n\n \"What do you think?\" the doctor asked. \"But some of them seemed to\n understand. One of the tuberculars nearly raised the roof, though.\"\n\n\n Walton shuddered. \"You remember his name?\" he asked, with feigned calm.\n\n\n Silence for a moment. \"No. Darned if I can think of it. I can look it\n up for you if you like.\"\n\n\n \"Don't bother,\" Walton said hurriedly.", "\"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could\n do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his\n protégé to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n\n\n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him\n for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n\n\n \"No—no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly,\n Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in\n the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and\n Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n\n\n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump,\n squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"", "Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He\n nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass\n cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\nIdiot!\nhe thought.\nFool!\nHe had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed\n to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew—the old man could see\n through Walton with ease—and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his\n father-substitute.\n\n\n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time,\n but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for\n Fred....\n\n\n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been\n particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now\n almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their\n parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had\n been sent to the public crèche.", "\"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"My son Philip ... he's two weeks old now....\"\n\n\n Walton understood. \"No, Prior. Please don't ask.\" Walton's skin felt\n cold; his hands, tightly clenched, were clammy.\n\n\n \"He was committed to Happysleep this morning—potentially tubercular.\n The boy's perfectly sound, Mr. Walton. Couldn't you—\"\n\n\n Walton rose. \"\nNo\n,\" he said, half-commanding, half-pleading. \"Don't\n ask me to do it. I can't make any exceptions, not even for you. You're\n an intelligent man; you understand our program.\"\n\n\n \"I voted for Popeek. I know all about Weeding the Garden and the\n Euthanasia Plan. But I hadn't expected—\"", "\"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n\n\n \"Are you sure you—\"\n\n\n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked\n away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for\n protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here\n and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's\n simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world\n who'd take this job. Now\nget out\n!\"\n\n\n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed\n and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly\n unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations\n prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit\n that to the guards.\n\n\n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"", "His desk was piled high with reports, and more kept arriving via\n pneumochute every minute. The job of assistant administrator was\n a thankless one, he thought; as much responsibility as Director\n FitzMaugham, and half the pay.\n\n\n He lifted a report from one eyebrow-high stack, smoothed the crinkly\n paper carefully, and read it.", "Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge\n of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this\n ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to\nsee\none of those people and try to convince him of the need—\n\n\n The door burst open.\n\n\n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and\n paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him\n came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security.\n They carried drawn needlers.\n\n\n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly\n deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"" ], [ "Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a\n towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He\n remembered what FitzMaugham had said:\nOnce we make even one exception,\n the whole framework crumbles.\nWell, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little\n doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he\n had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n\n\n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling\n you, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Put him on.\"\n\n\n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had\n given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n\n\n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n\n\n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll\n never guess what just happened—\"", "\"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said,\n without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a\n terribly busy man.\"\n\n\n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's\n desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the\n psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have\n had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little\n diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a\n man. \"I hadn't expected to find—I mean that you—\"\n\n\n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping\n for?\"\n\n\n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.", "\"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr.\n Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do\n the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n\n\n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly\n at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton\n feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his\n upper left desk drawer.\n\n\n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n \"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n\n\n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and\n slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the\n chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three\n basilisks.", "\"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n\n\n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n\n\n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was\n on his mind?\"\n\n\n Walton hesitated. \"He—he wanted his son spared from Happysleep.\n Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one\n exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, sir.\"", "Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great\n anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet.\n Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that\n there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us\n in half an hour.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Don't say a word about this to\nanyone\n, not even the men in the\n examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents,\n apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for\n any future cases of this sort.\"\n\n\n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n\n\n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep\n breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.", "As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek\n worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham\n had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at\n the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving\n mankind from itself.\n\n\n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength,\n Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad\n you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning,\n though. Mind if I join you?\"\n\n\n \"I'm—not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n\n\n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n\n\n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried,\n drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"", "He shut his eyes, dug his thumbs into them until bright flares of light\n shot across his eyeballs, and refused to let himself be bothered by\n the multiple problems involved in dumping several hundred thousand\n Belgians into Patagonia. He forced himself to cling to one of Director\n FitzMaugham's oft-repeated maxims,\nIf you want to stay sane, think of\n these people as pawns in a chess game—not as human beings.\nWalton sighed. This was the biggest chess problem in the history of\n humanity, and the way it looked now, all the solutions led to checkmate\n in a century or less. They could keep equalizing population only so\n long, shifting like loggers riding logs in a rushing river, before\n trouble came.\n\n\n There was another matter to be attended to now. He picked up the\n voicewrite again. \"Memo from the assistant administrator, re\n establishment of new policy on reports from local agents: hire a staff\n of three clever girls to make a précis of each report, eliminating\n irrelevant data.\"", "\"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n \"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n\n\n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton\n stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he\n can have ten minutes with me at—oh, say, 1300.\"\n\n\n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer\n office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you\n immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n\n\n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in\n the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just\n been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"", "\"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could\n do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his\n protégé to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n\n\n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him\n for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n\n\n \"No—no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly,\n Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in\n the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and\n Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n\n\n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump,\n squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"", "\"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n\n\n \"Are you sure you—\"\n\n\n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked\n away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for\n protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here\n and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's\n simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world\n who'd take this job. Now\nget out\n!\"\n\n\n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed\n and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly\n unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations\n prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit\n that to the guards.\n\n\n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"", "Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do\nsomething\nwhen I go home at\n night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No\n more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite\n remarkable.\"\n\n\n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n\n\n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles.\n Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize.\n Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr.\n Prior—and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is.\n Take Yeats, for instance—\"\n\n\n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior\n back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand,\n anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n\n\n \"Mr. Walton....\"", "The lift tube halted and rocked on its suspension. The door slid back,\n revealing a neat, gleaming sign:\nFLOOR 20\nEuthanasia Clinic and Files\nWalton had forgotten the accursed sign. He began to wish he had avoided\n traveling down with the director. He felt that his purpose must seem\n nakedly obvious now.\n\n\n The old man's eyes were twinkling amusedly. \"I guess you get off here,\"\n he said. \"I hope you catch up with your work soon, Roy. You really\n should take some time off for relaxation each day.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try, sir.\"", "Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge\n of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this\n ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to\nsee\none of those people and try to convince him of the need—\n\n\n The door burst open.\n\n\n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and\n paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him\n came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security.\n They carried drawn needlers.\n\n\n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly\n deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"", "\"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a\n little, I think.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n\n\n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid\n you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n\n\n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director\n to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed\nFourteen\n; there was\n a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed\ntwenty\n, covering\n the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his\n destination.\n\n\n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to\n see you this morning?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Walton said.", "\"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system,\n would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of\n this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton\n doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble—oh, no!\"\n\n\n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n\n\n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now,\n shall we?\"\n\n\n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though\n the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen\n cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some\n work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n\n\n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n\n\n The screen went dead.", "Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He\n nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass\n cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\nIdiot!\nhe thought.\nFool!\nHe had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed\n to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew—the old man could see\n through Walton with ease—and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his\n father-substitute.\n\n\n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time,\n but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for\n Fred....\n\n\n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been\n particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now\n almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their\n parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had\n been sent to the public crèche.", "His desk was piled high with reports, and more kept arriving via\n pneumochute every minute. The job of assistant administrator was\n a thankless one, he thought; as much responsibility as Director\n FitzMaugham, and half the pay.\n\n\n He lifted a report from one eyebrow-high stack, smoothed the crinkly\n paper carefully, and read it.", "\"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"My son Philip ... he's two weeks old now....\"\n\n\n Walton understood. \"No, Prior. Please don't ask.\" Walton's skin felt\n cold; his hands, tightly clenched, were clammy.\n\n\n \"He was committed to Happysleep this morning—potentially tubercular.\n The boy's perfectly sound, Mr. Walton. Couldn't you—\"\n\n\n Walton rose. \"\nNo\n,\" he said, half-commanding, half-pleading. \"Don't\n ask me to do it. I can't make any exceptions, not even for you. You're\n an intelligent man; you understand our program.\"\n\n\n \"I voted for Popeek. I know all about Weeding the Garden and the\n Euthanasia Plan. But I hadn't expected—\"", "Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child,\n and after that I'll keep within the law.\n\n\n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The\n clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n\n\n \"Roy.\"\n\n\n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise.\n He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood\n there.\n\n\n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n\n\n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly,\n his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy.\n Something the matter?\"\n\n\n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been\n a lot of work lately.\"", "\"\nMistake?\nBut how—\"\n\n\n \"Never mind that, Falbrough. There was quite a tragic slip-up at one\n of the European centers yesterday. We may all hang for it if news gets\n out.\"\nHow glibly I reel this stuff off\n, Walton thought in amazement.\n\n\n Falbrough looked grave. \"I see, sir. Of course. We'll double-check\n everything from now on.\"\n\n\n \"Good. Begin with the 1100 batch.\"\n\n\n Walton couldn't bear to remain down in the clinic any longer. He left\n via a side exit, and signaled for a lift tube." ], [ "Grinning, Walton said, \"I have to do\nsomething\nwhen I go home at\n night. I don't really read Popeek reports twenty-four hours a day. No\n more than twenty; that's my rule. I thought your last book was quite\n remarkable.\"\n\n\n \"The critics didn't,\" Prior said diffidently.\n\n\n \"Critics! What do they know?\" Walton demanded. \"They swing in cycles.\n Ten years ago it was form and technique, and you got the Melling Prize.\n Now it's message, political content that counts. That's not poetry, Mr.\n Prior—and there are still a few of us who recognize what poetry is.\n Take Yeats, for instance—\"\n\n\n Walton was ready to launch into a discussion of every poet from Prior\n back to Surrey and Wyatt; anything to keep from the job at hand,\n anything to keep his mind from Popeek. But Prior interrupted him.\n\n\n \"Mr. Walton....\"", "His desk was piled high with reports, and more kept arriving via\n pneumochute every minute. The job of assistant administrator was\n a thankless one, he thought; as much responsibility as Director\n FitzMaugham, and half the pay.\n\n\n He lifted a report from one eyebrow-high stack, smoothed the crinkly\n paper carefully, and read it.", "\"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said,\n without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a\n terribly busy man.\"\n\n\n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's\n desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the\n psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have\n had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little\n diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a\n man. \"I hadn't expected to find—I mean that you—\"\n\n\n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping\n for?\"\n\n\n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.", "He shut his eyes, dug his thumbs into them until bright flares of light\n shot across his eyeballs, and refused to let himself be bothered by\n the multiple problems involved in dumping several hundred thousand\n Belgians into Patagonia. He forced himself to cling to one of Director\n FitzMaugham's oft-repeated maxims,\nIf you want to stay sane, think of\n these people as pawns in a chess game—not as human beings.\nWalton sighed. This was the biggest chess problem in the history of\n humanity, and the way it looked now, all the solutions led to checkmate\n in a century or less. They could keep equalizing population only so\n long, shifting like loggers riding logs in a rushing river, before\n trouble came.\n\n\n There was another matter to be attended to now. He picked up the\n voicewrite again. \"Memo from the assistant administrator, re\n establishment of new policy on reports from local agents: hire a staff\n of three clever girls to make a précis of each report, eliminating\n irrelevant data.\"", "\"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr.\n Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do\n the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n\n\n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly\n at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton\n feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his\n upper left desk drawer.\n\n\n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n \"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n\n\n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and\n slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the\n chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three\n basilisks.", "\"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n \"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n\n\n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton\n stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he\n can have ten minutes with me at—oh, say, 1300.\"\n\n\n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer\n office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you\n immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n\n\n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in\n the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just\n been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"", "\"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could\n do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his\n protégé to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n\n\n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him\n for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n\n\n \"No—no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly,\n Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in\n the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and\n Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n\n\n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump,\n squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"", "As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek\n worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham\n had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at\n the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving\n mankind from itself.\n\n\n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength,\n Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad\n you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning,\n though. Mind if I join you?\"\n\n\n \"I'm—not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n\n\n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n\n\n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried,\n drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"", "Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a\n towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He\n remembered what FitzMaugham had said:\nOnce we make even one exception,\n the whole framework crumbles.\nWell, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little\n doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he\n had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n\n\n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling\n you, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Put him on.\"\n\n\n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had\n given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n\n\n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n\n\n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll\n never guess what just happened—\"", "\"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system,\n would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of\n this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton\n doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble—oh, no!\"\n\n\n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n\n\n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now,\n shall we?\"\n\n\n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though\n the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen\n cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some\n work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n\n\n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n\n\n The screen went dead.", "\"Can I help—oh, it's you, Mr. Walton,\" a white-smocked technician\n said. Popeek employed a small army of technicians, each one faceless\n and without personality, but always ready to serve. \"Is there anything\n I can do?\"\n\n\n \"I'm simply running a routine checkup. Mind if I use the machine?\"\n\n\n \"Not at all, sir. Go right ahead.\"\n\n\n Walton grinned lightly and stepped forward. The technician practically\n backed out of his presence.\nNo doubt I must radiate charisma\n, he thought. Within the building he\n wore a sort of luminous halo, by virtue of being Director FitzMaugham's\n protégé and second-in-command. Outside, in the colder reality of the\n crowded metropolis, he kept his identity and Popeek rank quietly to\n himself.", "Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge\n of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this\n ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to\nsee\none of those people and try to convince him of the need—\n\n\n The door burst open.\n\n\n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and\n paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him\n came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security.\n They carried drawn needlers.\n\n\n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly\n deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"", "Walton had set up the schedule himself: the gas chamber delivered\n Happysleep each day at 1100 and 1500. He had about half an hour to save\n Philip Prior.\n\n\n He peered covertly over his shoulder; no one was in sight. He slipped\n the baby's card into his breast pocket.\n\n\n That done, he typed out a requisition for explanation of the\n gene-sorting code the clinic used. Symbols began pouring forth,\n and Walton puzzledly correlated them with the line of gibberish on\n Phillip Prior's record card. Finally he found the one he wanted:\n3f2,\n tubercular-prone\n.", "\"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n\n\n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n\n\n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was\n on his mind?\"\n\n\n Walton hesitated. \"He—he wanted his son spared from Happysleep.\n Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one\n exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, sir.\"", "\"I see.\" The deep, warm eyes bored into his. \"You ought to slow down a\n little, I think.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. As soon as the work eases up a little.\"\n\n\n FitzMaugham chuckled. \"In another century or two, you mean. I'm afraid\n you'll never learn how to relax, my boy.\"\n\n\n The lift tube arrived. Walton stepped to one side, allowed the Director\n to enter, and got in himself. FitzMaugham pushed\nFourteen\n; there was\n a coffee shop down there. Hesitantly, Walton pushed\ntwenty\n, covering\n the panel with his arm so the old man would be unable to see his\n destination.\n\n\n As the tube began to descend, FitzMaugham said, \"Did Mr. Prior come to\n see you this morning?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Walton said.", "Prior's words haunted him.\nI was tubercular ... where would my poems\n be now?\nThe big humble man was one of the great poets. Keats had been\n tubercular too.\nWhat good are poets?\nhe asked himself savagely.\n\n\n The reply came swiftly:\nWhat good is anything, then?\nKeats,\n Shakespeare, Eliot, Yeats, Donne, Pound, Matthews ... and Prior. How\n much duller life would be without them, Walton thought, picturing\n his bookshelf—his one bookshelf, in his crowded little cubicle of a\n one-room home.\n\n\n Sweat poured down his back as he groped toward his decision.\n\n\n The step he was considering would disqualify him from his job if he\n admitted it, though he wouldn't do that. Under the Equalization Law, it\n would be a criminal act.\n\n\n But just one baby wouldn't matter. Just one.", "The lift tube halted and rocked on its suspension. The door slid back,\n revealing a neat, gleaming sign:\nFLOOR 20\nEuthanasia Clinic and Files\nWalton had forgotten the accursed sign. He began to wish he had avoided\n traveling down with the director. He felt that his purpose must seem\n nakedly obvious now.\n\n\n The old man's eyes were twinkling amusedly. \"I guess you get off here,\"\n he said. \"I hope you catch up with your work soon, Roy. You really\n should take some time off for relaxation each day.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try, sir.\"", "\"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n\n\n \"Are you sure you—\"\n\n\n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked\n away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for\n protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here\n and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's\n simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world\n who'd take this job. Now\nget out\n!\"\n\n\n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed\n and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly\n unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations\n prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit\n that to the guards.\n\n\n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"", "His reward for devoted service was—an assassin's bullet.\nFRED WALTON\nHis ambition was to fill his brother's shoes—but he underestimated\n their size.\nLEE PERCY\nHis specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills.\nPRIOR\nWith the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son?\nDR. LAMARRE\nHe died for discovering the secret of immortality.\nContents\nI\nThe offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known\n as Popeek, were located on the twentieth through twenty-ninth floors\n of the Cullen Building, a hundred-story monstrosity typical of\n twenty-second-century neo-Victorian at its overdecorated worst. Roy", "Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great\n anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet.\n Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that\n there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us\n in half an hour.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Don't say a word about this to\nanyone\n, not even the men in the\n examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents,\n apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for\n any future cases of this sort.\"\n\n\n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n\n\n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep\n breath and stared bleakly at the far wall." ], [ "\"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n\n\n \"Are you sure you—\"\n\n\n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked\n away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for\n protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here\n and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's\n simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world\n who'd take this job. Now\nget out\n!\"\n\n\n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed\n and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly\n unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations\n prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit\n that to the guards.\n\n\n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"", "Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a\n towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He\n remembered what FitzMaugham had said:\nOnce we make even one exception,\n the whole framework crumbles.\nWell, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little\n doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he\n had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n\n\n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling\n you, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Put him on.\"\n\n\n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had\n given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n\n\n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n\n\n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll\n never guess what just happened—\"", "Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He\n nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass\n cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\nIdiot!\nhe thought.\nFool!\nHe had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed\n to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew—the old man could see\n through Walton with ease—and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his\n father-substitute.\n\n\n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time,\n but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for\n Fred....\n\n\n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been\n particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now\n almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their\n parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had\n been sent to the public crèche.", "Well, just one lapse, he promised himself. I'll spare Prior's child,\n and after that I'll keep within the law.\n\n\n He jabbed the lift tube indicator and the tube rose in its shaft. The\n clinic was on the twentieth floor.\n\n\n \"Roy.\"\n\n\n At the sound of the quiet voice behind him, Walton jumped in surprise.\n He steadied himself, forcing himself to turn slowly. The director stood\n there.\n\n\n \"Good morning, Mr. FitzMaugham.\"\n\n\n The old man was smiling serenely, his unlined face warm and friendly,\n his mop of white hair bright and full. \"You look preoccupied, boy.\n Something the matter?\"\n\n\n Walton shook his head quickly. \"Just a little tired, sir. There's been\n a lot of work lately.\"", "\"You wouldn't want me to recite it over a public communications system,\n would you? Your friend FitzMaugham might be listening to every word of\n this, and I have too much fraternal feeling for that. Ole Doc Walton\n doesn't want to get his bigwig big brother in trouble—oh, no!\"\n\n\n \"Thanks for small blessings,\" Roy said acidly.\n\n\n \"You got me this job. You can take it away. Let's call it even for now,\n shall we?\"\n\n\n \"Anything you like,\" Walton said. He was drenched in sweat, though\n the ingenious executive filter in the sending apparatus of the screen\n cloaked that fact and presented him as neat and fresh. \"I have some\n work to do now.\" His voice was barely audible.\n\n\n \"I won't keep you any longer, then,\" Fred said.\n\n\n The screen went dead.", "\"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr.\n Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do\n the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n\n\n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly\n at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton\n feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his\n upper left desk drawer.\n\n\n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n \"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n\n\n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and\n slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the\n chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three\n basilisks.", "As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek\n worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham\n had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at\n the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving\n mankind from itself.\n\n\n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength,\n Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad\n you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning,\n though. Mind if I join you?\"\n\n\n \"I'm—not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n\n\n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n\n\n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried,\n drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"", "The Prior boy was safe. And in the eyes of the law—the Equalization\n Law—Roy Walton was now a criminal. He was every bit as much a criminal\n as the man who tried to hide his dying father from the investigators,\n or the anxious parents who attempted to bribe an examining doctor.\n\n\n He felt curiously dirty. And, now that he had betrayed FitzMaugham and\n the Cause, now that it was done, he had little idea why he had done\n it, why he had jeopardized the Popeek program, his position—his life,\n even—for the sake of one potentially tubercular baby.\n\n\n Well, the thing was done.\n\n\n No. Not quite. Later, when things had quieted down, he would have to\n finish the job by transferring all the men in the clinic to distant\n places and by obliterating the computer's memories of this morning's\n activities.", "After that it had been separate paths for the brothers. For Roy, an\n education in the law, a short spell as Senator FitzMaugham's private\n secretary, followed last month by his sudden elevation to assistant\n administrator of the newly-created Popeek Bureau. For Fred, medicine,\n unsuccessful private practice, finally a job in the Happysleep section\n of Popeek, thanks to Roy.", "\"Really, Roy?\" His brother's tone was venomous. \"I happened to\n be using the computer shortly after you this morning. I was\n curious—unpardonably so, dear brother. I requested a transcript of\n your conversation with the machine.\"\n\n\n Sparks seemed to flow from the screen. Walton sat back, feeling numb.\n He managed to pull his sagging mouth back into a stiff hard line and\n say, \"That's a criminal offense, Fred. Any use I make of a Popeek\n computer outlet is confidential.\"\n\n\n \"Criminal offence? Maybe so ... but that makes two of us, then. Eh,\n Roy?\"\n\n\n \"How much do you know?\"", "\"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n\n\n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n\n\n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was\n on his mind?\"\n\n\n Walton hesitated. \"He—he wanted his son spared from Happysleep.\n Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one\n exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, sir.\"", "The lift tube halted and rocked on its suspension. The door slid back,\n revealing a neat, gleaming sign:\nFLOOR 20\nEuthanasia Clinic and Files\nWalton had forgotten the accursed sign. He began to wish he had avoided\n traveling down with the director. He felt that his purpose must seem\n nakedly obvious now.\n\n\n The old man's eyes were twinkling amusedly. \"I guess you get off here,\"\n he said. \"I hope you catch up with your work soon, Roy. You really\n should take some time off for relaxation each day.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try, sir.\"", "\"Umm. Yes.\" Walton didn't like that, but there was nothing he could\n do about it. He'd have to rely on the old man's abiding faith in his\n protégé to pull him out of any possible stickiness that arose.\n\n\n \"Seen my brother around?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Fred? He's working in room seven, running analyses. Want me to get him\n for you, Mr. Walton?\"\n\n\n \"No—no, don't bother him, thanks. I'll find him later.\" Inwardly,\n Walton felt relieved. Fred Walton, his younger brother, was a doctor in\n the employ of Popeek. Little love was lost between the brothers, and\n Roy did not care to have Fred know he was down there.\n\n\n Strolling casually through the clinic, he peered at a few plump,\n squalling babies, and said, \"Find many sour ones today?\"", "\"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n \"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n\n\n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton\n stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he\n can have ten minutes with me at—oh, say, 1300.\"\n\n\n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer\n office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you\n immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n\n\n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in\n the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just\n been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"", "\"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"My son Philip ... he's two weeks old now....\"\n\n\n Walton understood. \"No, Prior. Please don't ask.\" Walton's skin felt\n cold; his hands, tightly clenched, were clammy.\n\n\n \"He was committed to Happysleep this morning—potentially tubercular.\n The boy's perfectly sound, Mr. Walton. Couldn't you—\"\n\n\n Walton rose. \"\nNo\n,\" he said, half-commanding, half-pleading. \"Don't\n ask me to do it. I can't make any exceptions, not even for you. You're\n an intelligent man; you understand our program.\"\n\n\n \"I voted for Popeek. I know all about Weeding the Garden and the\n Euthanasia Plan. But I hadn't expected—\"", "The three security men caught up and swarmed all over Prior. One of\n them turned apologetically to Walton. \"We're terribly sorry about this,\n sir. He just broke away and ran. We can't understand how he got in\n here, but he did.\"\n\n\n \"Ah—yes. So I noticed,\" Walton remarked drily. \"See if he's planning\n to assassinate anybody, will you?\"\n\n\n \"Administrator Walton!\" Prior protested. \"I'm a man of peace! How can\n you accuse me of—\"\n\n\n One of the security men hit him. Walton stiffened and resisted the urge\n to reprimand the man. He was only doing his job, after all.\n\n\n \"Search him,\" Walton said.\n\n\n They gave Prior an efficient going-over. \"He's clean, Mr. Walton.\n Should we take him to security, or downstairs to health?\"", "Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great\n anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet.\n Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that\n there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us\n in half an hour.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Don't say a word about this to\nanyone\n, not even the men in the\n examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents,\n apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for\n any future cases of this sort.\"\n\n\n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n\n\n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep\n breath and stared bleakly at the far wall.", "Even on the screen, Fred's neck and shoulders gave an impression of\n tremendous solidity and force. Walton waited for his brother's image to\n take shape, and when the time lag was over he said, \"Well, Fred? What\n goes?\"\n\n\n His brother's eyes flickered sleepily. \"They tell me you were down here\n a little while ago, Roy. How come I didn't rate a visit?\"\n\n\n \"I wasn't in your section. It was official business, anyway. I didn't\n have time.\"\n\n\n Walton fixed his eyes sharply on the caduceus emblem gleaming on Fred's\n lapel, and refused to look anywhere else.\n\n\n Fred said slowly, \"You had time to tinker with our computer, though.\"\n\n\n \"Official business!\"", "The annunciator chimed again. \"Your brother is on the wire, sir.\"\n\n\n Walton trembled imperceptibly as he said, \"Put him on.\" Somehow, Fred\n never called unless he could say or do something unpleasant. And\n Walton was very much afraid that his brother meant no good by this\n call. No good at all.\nIII\nRoy Walton watched his brother's head and shoulders take form out of\n the swirl of colors on the screen. Fred Walton was more compact, built\n closer to the ground than his rangy brother; he was a squat five-seven,\n next to Roy's lean six-two. Fred had always threatened to \"get even\"\n with his older brother as soon as they were the same size, but to\n Fred's great dismay he had never managed to catch up with Roy in height.", "Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge\n of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this\n ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to\nsee\none of those people and try to convince him of the need—\n\n\n The door burst open.\n\n\n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and\n paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him\n came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security.\n They carried drawn needlers.\n\n\n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly\n deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"" ], [ "He shut his eyes, dug his thumbs into them until bright flares of light\n shot across his eyeballs, and refused to let himself be bothered by\n the multiple problems involved in dumping several hundred thousand\n Belgians into Patagonia. He forced himself to cling to one of Director\n FitzMaugham's oft-repeated maxims,\nIf you want to stay sane, think of\n these people as pawns in a chess game—not as human beings.\nWalton sighed. This was the biggest chess problem in the history of\n humanity, and the way it looked now, all the solutions led to checkmate\n in a century or less. They could keep equalizing population only so\n long, shifting like loggers riding logs in a rushing river, before\n trouble came.\n\n\n There was another matter to be attended to now. He picked up the\n voicewrite again. \"Memo from the assistant administrator, re\n establishment of new policy on reports from local agents: hire a staff\n of three clever girls to make a précis of each report, eliminating\n irrelevant data.\"", "Walton killed the contact at his end, got up, walked to the window. He\n nudged the opaquer control and the frosty white haze over the glass\n cleared away, revealing the fantastic beehive of the city outside.\nIdiot!\nhe thought.\nFool!\nHe had risked everything to save one baby, one child probably doomed\n to an early death anyway. And FitzMaugham knew—the old man could see\n through Walton with ease—and Fred knew, too. His brother, and his\n father-substitute.\n\n\n FitzMaugham might well choose to conceal Roy's defection this time,\n but would surely place less trust in him in the future. And as for\n Fred....\n\n\n There was no telling what Fred might do. They had never been\n particularly close as brothers; they had lived with their parents (now\n almost totally forgotten) until Roy was nine and Fred seven. Their\n parents had gone down off Maracaibo in a jet crash; Roy and Fred had\n been sent to the public crèche.", "His reward for devoted service was—an assassin's bullet.\nFRED WALTON\nHis ambition was to fill his brother's shoes—but he underestimated\n their size.\nLEE PERCY\nHis specialty was sugarcoating bitter pills.\nPRIOR\nWith the pen as his only weapon, could he save his son?\nDR. LAMARRE\nHe died for discovering the secret of immortality.\nContents\nI\nThe offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization, vulgarly known\n as Popeek, were located on the twentieth through twenty-ninth floors\n of the Cullen Building, a hundred-story monstrosity typical of\n twenty-second-century neo-Victorian at its overdecorated worst. Roy", "\"Those who inherit your condition,\" Walton said gently. \"Go home, Mr.\n Prior. Burn me in effigy. Write a poem about me. But don't ask me to do\n the impossible. I can't catch any falling stars for you.\"\n\n\n Prior rose. He was immense, a hulking tragic figure staring broodingly\n at Walton. For the first time since the poet's abrupt entry, Walton\n feared violence. His fingers groped for the needle gun he kept in his\n upper left desk drawer.\n\n\n But Prior had no violence in him. \"I'll leave you,\" he said somberly.\n \"I'm sorry, sir. Deeply sorry. For both of us.\"\n\n\n Walton pressed the doorlock to let him out, then locked it again and\n slipped heavily into his chair. Three more reports slid out of the\n chute and landed on his desk. He stared at them as if they were three\n basilisks.", "Minutes later he was back in his office, behind the security of a\n towering stack of work. His pulse was racing; his throat was dry. He\n remembered what FitzMaugham had said:\nOnce we make even one exception,\n the whole framework crumbles.\nWell, the framework had begun crumbling, then. And there was little\n doubt in Walton's mind that FitzMaugham knew or would soon know what he\n had done. He would have to cover his traces, somehow.\n\n\n The annunciator chimed and said, \"Dr. Falbrough of Happysleep calling\n you, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Put him on.\"\n\n\n The screen lit and Falbrough's face appeared; its normal blandness had\n given way to wild-eyed tenseness.\n\n\n \"What is it, Doctor?\"\n\n\n \"It's a good thing you issued that order when you did, sir! You'll\n never guess what just happened—\"", "As he said it, he knew how foolish it sounded. If anyone in Popeek\n worked harder than he did, it was the elderly director. FitzMaugham\n had striven for equalization legislature for fifty years, and now, at\n the age of eighty, he put in a sixteen-hour day at the task of saving\n mankind from itself.\n\n\n The director smiled. \"You never did learn how to budget your strength,\n Roy. You'll be a worn-out wreck before you're half my age. I'm glad\n you're adopting my habit of taking a coffee break in the morning,\n though. Mind if I join you?\"\n\n\n \"I'm—not taking a break, sir. I have some work to do downstairs.\"\n\n\n \"Oh? Can't you take care of it by phone?\"\n\n\n \"No, Mr. FitzMaugham.\" Walton felt as though he'd already been tried,\n drawn, and quartered. \"It requires personal attention.\"", "In the six weeks of Popeek's existence, three thousand babies had been\n ticketed for Happysleep, and three thousand sets of degenerate genes\n had been wiped from the race. Ten thousand subnormal males had been\n sterilized. Eight thousand dying oldsters had reached their graves\n ahead of time.\n\n\n It was a tough-minded program. But why transmit palsy to unborn\n generations? Why let an adult idiot litter the world with subnormal\n progeny? Why force a man hopelessly cancerous to linger on in pain,\n consuming precious food?\n\n\n Unpleasant? Sure. But the world had voted for it. Until Lang and his\n team succeeded in terraforming Venus, or until the faster-than-light\n outfit opened the stars to mankind, something had to be done about\n Earth's overpopulation. There were seven billion now and the figure was\n still growing.", "Since taking the job, he had managed to redecorate his own office—on\n the twenty-eighth floor, immediately below Director FitzMaugham's—but\n that had created only one minor oasis in the esthetically repugnant\n building. It couldn't be helped, though; Popeek was unpopular, though\n necessary; and, like the public hangman of some centuries earlier, the\n Bureau did not rate attractive quarters.\n\n\n So Walton had removed some of the iridescent chrome scalloping that\n trimmed the walls, replaced the sash windows with opaquers, and changed\n the massive ceiling fixture to more subtle electroluminescents. But the\n mark of the last century was stamped irrevocably on both building and\n office.\n\n\n Which was as it should be, Walton had finally realized. It was the last\n century's foolishness that had made Popeek necessary, after all.", "\"He's the poet, isn't he? The one you say is so good?\"\n\n\n \"That's right, sir,\" Walton said tightly.\n\n\n \"He came to see me first, but I had him referred down to you. What was\n on his mind?\"\n\n\n Walton hesitated. \"He—he wanted his son spared from Happysleep.\n Naturally, I had to turn him down.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" FitzMaugham agreed solemnly. \"Once we make even one\n exception, the whole framework crumbles.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, sir.\"", "Walton found his fingers trembling; he clamped them tight to the edge\n of his desk to steady himself. It was all right sitting up here in this\n ugly building and initialing commitment papers, but actually to\nsee\none of those people and try to convince him of the need—\n\n\n The door burst open.\n\n\n A tall, dark-haired man in an open jacket came rushing through and\n paused dramatically just over the threshold. Immediately behind him\n came three unsmiling men in the gray silk-sheen uniforms of security.\n They carried drawn needlers.\n\n\n \"Are you Administrator Walton?\" the big man asked, in an astonishingly\n deep, rich voice. \"I have to see you. I'm Lyle Prior.\"", "Prior's baby.\n\n\n With nervous fingers he switched on the annunciator and said, \"If there\n are any calls for me, take the message. I'll be out of my office for\n the next half-hour.\"\nII\nHe stepped out of the office, glancing around furtively. The outer\n office was busy: half a dozen girls were answering calls, opening\n letters, coordinating activities. Walton slipped quickly past them into\n the hallway.\n\n\n There was a knot of fear in his stomach as he turned toward the\n lift tube. Six weeks of pressure, six weeks of tension since Popeek\n was organized and old man FitzMaugham had tapped him for the\n second-in-command post ... and now, a rebellion. The sparing of a\n single child was a small rebellion, true, but he knew he was striking\n as effectively at the base of Popeek this way as if he had brought\n about repeal of the entire Equalization Law.", "\"I have to thank you for granting me this audience,\" Prior said,\n without a hint of sarcasm in his booming voice. \"I realize you're a\n terribly busy man.\"\n\n\n \"I am.\" Another three inches of paper had deposited itself on Walton's\n desk since Prior had entered. \"You're very lucky to have hit the\n psychological moment for your entrance. At any other time I'd have\n had you brigged for a month, but just now I'm in need of a little\n diversion. Besides, I very much admire your work, Mr. Prior.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you.\" Again that humility, startling in so big and commanding a\n man. \"I hadn't expected to find—I mean that you—\"\n\n\n \"That a bureaucrat should admire poetry? Is that what you're groping\n for?\"\n\n\n Prior reddened. \"Yes,\" he admitted.", "\"Can I help—oh, it's you, Mr. Walton,\" a white-smocked technician\n said. Popeek employed a small army of technicians, each one faceless\n and without personality, but always ready to serve. \"Is there anything\n I can do?\"\n\n\n \"I'm simply running a routine checkup. Mind if I use the machine?\"\n\n\n \"Not at all, sir. Go right ahead.\"\n\n\n Walton grinned lightly and stepped forward. The technician practically\n backed out of his presence.\nNo doubt I must radiate charisma\n, he thought. Within the building he\n wore a sort of luminous halo, by virtue of being Director FitzMaugham's\n protégé and second-in-command. Outside, in the colder reality of the\n crowded metropolis, he kept his identity and Popeek rank quietly to\n himself.", "He moved on, down the winding corridor that led to the execution\n chamber. Falbrough, the executioner, was studying a list of names at\n his desk when Walton appeared.\n\n\n Falbrough didn't look like the sort of man who would enjoy his work. He\n was short and plump, with a high-domed bald head and glittering contact\n lenses in his weak blue eyes. \"Morning, Mr. Walton.\"\n\n\n \"Good morning, Doctor Falbrough. You'll be operating soon, won't you?\"\n\n\n \"Eleven hundred, as usual.\"\n\n\n \"Good. There's a new regulation in effect from now on,\" Walton said.\n \"To keep public opinion on our side.\"\n\n\n \"Sir?\"\n\n\n \"Henceforth, until further notice, you're to check each baby that\n comes to you against the main file, just to make sure there's been no\n mistake. Got that?\"", "It was a basic step, one that should have been taken long ago. Now,\n with three feet of reports stacked on his desk, it was mandatory. One\n of the troubles with Popeek was its newness; it had been established so\n suddenly that most of its procedures were still in the formative stage.\n\n\n He took another report from the heap. This one was the data sheet of\n the Zurich Euthanasia Center, and he gave it a cursory scanning. During\n the past week, eleven substandard children and twenty-three substandard\n adults had been sent on to Happysleep.\n\n\n That was the grimmest form of population equalization. Walton initialed\n the report, earmarked it for files, and dumped it in the pneumochute.\n\n\n The annunciator chimed.\n\n\n \"I'm busy,\" Walton said immediately.", "\"There's a Mr. Prior to see you,\" the annunciator's calm voice said.\n \"He insists it's an emergency.\"\n\n\n \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see anyone for at least three hours.\" Walton\n stared gloomily at the growing pile of paper on his desk. \"Tell him he\n can have ten minutes with me at—oh, say, 1300.\"\n\n\n Walton heard an angry male voice muttering something in the outer\n office, and then the annunciator said, \"He insists he must see you\n immediately in reference to a Happysleep commitment.\"\n\n\n \"Commitments are irrevocable,\" Walton said heavily. The last thing in\n the world he wanted was to see a man whose child or parent had just\n been committed. \"Tell Mr. Prior I can't see him at all.\"", "\"Neither. Leave him here with me.\"\n\n\n \"Are you sure you—\"\n\n\n \"Get out of here,\" Walton snapped. As the three security men slinked\n away, he added, \"And figure out some more efficient system for\n protecting me. Some day an assassin is going to sneak through here\n and get me. Not that I give a damn about myself, you understand; it's\n simply that I'm indispensable. There isn't another lunatic in the world\n who'd take this job. Now\nget out\n!\"\n\n\n They wasted no time in leaving. Walton waited until the door closed\n and jammed down hard on the lockstud. His tirade, he knew, was wholly\n unjustified; if he had remembered to lock his door as regulations\n prescribed, Prior would never have broken in. But he couldn't admit\n that to the guards.\n\n\n \"Take a seat, Mr. Prior.\"", "The three security men caught up and swarmed all over Prior. One of\n them turned apologetically to Walton. \"We're terribly sorry about this,\n sir. He just broke away and ran. We can't understand how he got in\n here, but he did.\"\n\n\n \"Ah—yes. So I noticed,\" Walton remarked drily. \"See if he's planning\n to assassinate anybody, will you?\"\n\n\n \"Administrator Walton!\" Prior protested. \"I'm a man of peace! How can\n you accuse me of—\"\n\n\n One of the security men hit him. Walton stiffened and resisted the urge\n to reprimand the man. He was only doing his job, after all.\n\n\n \"Search him,\" Walton said.\n\n\n They gave Prior an efficient going-over. \"He's clean, Mr. Walton.\n Should we take him to security, or downstairs to health?\"", "\"\nMistake?\nBut how—\"\n\n\n \"Never mind that, Falbrough. There was quite a tragic slip-up at one\n of the European centers yesterday. We may all hang for it if news gets\n out.\"\nHow glibly I reel this stuff off\n, Walton thought in amazement.\n\n\n Falbrough looked grave. \"I see, sir. Of course. We'll double-check\n everything from now on.\"\n\n\n \"Good. Begin with the 1100 batch.\"\n\n\n Walton couldn't bear to remain down in the clinic any longer. He left\n via a side exit, and signaled for a lift tube.", "Walton chewed at a ragged cuticle for a moment, counterfeiting great\n anxiety. \"Falbrough, we're going to have to keep this very quiet.\n Someone slipped up in the examining room, and if word gets out that\n there's been as much as one mistake, we'll have a mob swarming over us\n in half an hour.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\" Falbrough looked terribly grave. \"What should I do, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Don't say a word about this to\nanyone\n, not even the men in the\n examining room. Fill out a certificate for the boy, find his parents,\n apologize and return him to them. And make sure you keep checking for\n any future cases of this sort.\"\n\n\n \"Certainly, sir. Is that all?\"\n\n\n \"It is,\" Walton said crisply, and broke the contact. He took a deep\n breath and stared bleakly at the far wall." ] ]
test	50868	[ "Why was Terrence unbothered by Bruce's story about the Venusian aborigines? ", "How did the crew of the Mars V die?", "Why did Marsha forget she loved Bruce?", "Who was Pietro?", "Why did Helene, Pietro, Marlene, and Bruce each survive on Mars while the rest of their crew died?", "How did Terrence manage to survive on the mountain to 600,000 feet and beyond?", "What was Bruce's profession?", "Why did Bruce, Marsha, and Doran discover no life on Mars initially?" ]	[ [ "Stromberg had diagnosed Bruce with schizophrenia, and therefore his story was not reliable.", "The Venusian aborigines were a threat to the Earth's existence.", "Years of social conditioning to embrace violent conquests had desensitized him to their plight.", "Bruce was psychotic and lived mostly in his own imagination." ], [ "They succumbed to the Martian power of suggestion, which made them obsessed with conquering an infinitely tall mountain. ", "Some of the crew developed altitude sickness; this drove them mad, and they began killing each other.", "They were murdered by Bruce in a psychotic episode.", "They froze to death on the high peaks of the mountain." ], [ "She had loved him in her youth, and they were much older now.", "The Martians cast a spell over the crew that made them forget their past.", "She had been slowly brainwashed over the years by the mission of the Conqueror Corps.", "Stromberg had hypnotized her." ], [ "A figment of Bruce's imagination.", "The sole survivor of Mars IV.", "The sole survivor of Mars III.", "A Martian that visited Bruce in his dreams." ], [ "They did not fall prey to the desire to climb and conquer the mountain.", "They shared the same psychic powers that the Martians had.", "They each voluntarily stayed in their shelters and took notes while the rest of the crew ascended the mountain.", "They offered each other support through their dreams." ], [ "His passion for conquest overruled any physical or emotional turmoil he was feeling.", "He killed Anhauser and took his weapon.", "Stromberg had demonstrated powerful psychological techniques for maintaining one's strength.", "He didn't. It was an illusion impressed upon his mind by the Martians." ], [ "He was a member of the inquisition, cast out after murdering Doran.", "He took mission notes for the crew of the Mars V.", "He was a member of the Conqueror Corps, tasked with overtaking planets.", "He was a poet." ], [ "All life had been destroyed by previous missions of the Conqueror Corps.", "There was no life there to discover.", "They had been too afraid to scale the mountain.", "The Martians had safely hidden their civilization through hypnotic mind powers." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "\"I know,\" Bruce agreed indifferently. \"I was drafted for this trip. I\n told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part\n of it.\"\n\n\n \"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you\n backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil\n does Venus—?\"\n\n\n Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high\n forehead. \"Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to\n the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly\n educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people.\"\n\n\n \"I haven't heard it,\" Terrence admitted. \"What injustice?\"", "Terrence nodded. \"You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the\n most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of\n elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the\n real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you\n think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws\n of the whole Solar System?\"\n\n\n \"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me,\" Bruce said. \"I can say\n what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do\n that regardless....\"", "\"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out\n there?\" Bruce laughed without much humor.\n\n\n Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again\n to his belly. \"You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in\n the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted\n enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior.\n This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too\n much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing\n fellow crew-members!\"\n\n\n \"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus,\"\n Bruce said.\n\n\n \"Now we get another lecture!\" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.\n \"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never\n have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can\n find. You don't belong here.\"", "Bruce said, \"I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice\n any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the\n crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One\n of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were\n aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this\n village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings\n there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand\n inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet\n us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The\n village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed.\"\n\n\n Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning\n to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the\n cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.\n\n\n \"No,\" Bruce said. \"I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking\n about.\"", "Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher.\n Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. \"Think of it! What\n a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says,\n it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but\n that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can\n see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be—\"\n\n\n Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he\n was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long\n time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking\n the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more\n real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.", "He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm\n city. He didn't look back.\n\n\n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet\n I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago.\n Are—are the climbers still climbing—somewhere, Helene?\"\n\n\n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the\n Martians have the answer to that.\"\n\n\n They entered the city.", "He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he\n wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late.\n They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n\n\n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly\n of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene\n shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in\n his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he\n had been when he woke from them.\n\n\n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know\n you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him.\n Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n\n\n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n\n\n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we\n get back.\"", "\"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\nBruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of\n the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them\n disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like\n convicts.\n\n\n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much\n if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative\n prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so\n pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as\n long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n\n\n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were\n climbing.\n\n\n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and\n that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for—to\n accept a challenge like this!\"", "A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions.\n Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for\n centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism,\n individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question\n of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first.\n So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job\n there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared.\n This was the fifth attempt—\nTerrence said, \"why did you shoot Doran?\"\n\n\n \"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and\n when he shot the—\" Bruce hesitated.\n\n\n \"What? When he shot what?\"\n\n\n Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to\n sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.", "\"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke\n me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we\n were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got\n here.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n\n\n Someone laughed.\n\n\n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People\n talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some\n kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n\n\n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n\n\n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of\n some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n\n\n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"", "He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded\n hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied\n together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond\n them were those from\nMars V\n, too freshly dead to have decayed\n much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and\n Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed\n to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched\n out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n\n\n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds,\n red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve\n miles from the ship—horizontally.\n\n\n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the\n fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace\n beside the canal.", "The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound\n of his own voice.\n\n\n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n\n\n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\"\n Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into\n any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our\n destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and\n we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're\n going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the\n top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a\n thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this\n world—the top of\neverything\n. The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"", "Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into\n Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger\n in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly\n at Bruce.\n\n\n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n\n\n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n\n\n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n\n\n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n \"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you\n think I'd be running to?\"\n\n\n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n\n\n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care\n of that, doesn't it?\"", "And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice\n that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other\n four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any\n of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb—\"\n\n\n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food\n concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He\n had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to\n take care of the time.", "Terrence shifted his position. \"However, we've voted to grant you\n a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from\n you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left\n food-concentrates to last a long time.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of service?\"\n\n\n \"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the\n mountain.\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Bruce said. \"You aren't certain you're coming back, then?\"\n\n\n \"We might not,\" Terrence admitted calmly. \"Something's happened to the\n others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of\n us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they\n come in.\"", "It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but\n Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real\n any more; certainly not as real as the dreams.\nThe problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to\n worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence\n was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His\n dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had\n left it, and it was the same—allowing even for the time difference\n necessitated by his periods of sleep.\n\n\n He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names:\n Pietro, Marlene, Helene.\n\n\n Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to\n him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could\n also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense.\n Consistently, they made sense.", "\"Not afraid,\" Bruce objected. \"I don't see any need to climb it. Coming\n to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew\n of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a\n precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why?\n Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them?\n Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful\n climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up\n there.\n\n\n \"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why\n should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The\n challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend\n going before something bigger than you are stops you—it doesn't\n interest me.\"\n\n\n \"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!\" Terrence said, sitting up\n straight and rigid.", "\"Yes,\" Bruce said. \"There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but\n they'll never get the chance—the chance we seem to have here, to live\n decently....\"\n\n\n \"You're beginning to see now which was the dream,\" she said and\n smiled. \"But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their\n chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far.\n Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming\n here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It\n won't take so long.\"\n\n\n She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene\n walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back\n and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and\n drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.", "Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or\n other—Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all—and turned into\n crazy yells that faded out and never came back.\n\n\n Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe\n they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He\n knew they would never come back down.\n\n\n He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration\n break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an\n instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film\n negatives.\n\n\n He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was\n out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet\n sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there\n was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the\n softly flowing canal water.", "\"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak\n personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He\nimagined\nhe saw\n something.\" He glanced at Marsha. \"Did\nyou\nsee anything?\"\n\n\n She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. \"Nothing at all. There wasn't\n anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there\n is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything\n else. A shadow maybe—\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Terrence interrupted. \"Now, Bruce, you know the law\n regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. Execution.\"\n\n\n \"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth.\"\n\n\n \"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain.\"" ], [ "He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded\n hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied\n together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond\n them were those from\nMars V\n, too freshly dead to have decayed\n much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and\n Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed\n to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched\n out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n\n\n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds,\n red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve\n miles from the ship—horizontally.\n\n\n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the\n fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace\n beside the canal.", "They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher\n than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The\n entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills\n by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one\n incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it\n had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at\n Earth—or a warning one.\nWith Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship,\nMars V\n, seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in\n front of them for the inquest.\n\n\n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs\n stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence.\n His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the\n Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there\n was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.", "\"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\nBruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of\n the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them\n disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like\n convicts.\n\n\n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much\n if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative\n prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so\n pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as\n long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n\n\n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were\n climbing.\n\n\n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and\n that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for—to\n accept a challenge like this!\"", "\"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out\n there?\" Bruce laughed without much humor.\n\n\n Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again\n to his belly. \"You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in\n the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted\n enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior.\n This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too\n much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing\n fellow crew-members!\"\n\n\n \"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus,\"\n Bruce said.\n\n\n \"Now we get another lecture!\" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.\n \"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never\n have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can\n find. You don't belong here.\"", "\"The Martians tested us,\" she explained. \"They're masters of the mind.\n I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill\n a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned\n the horror we're capable of from the first ship—the Conquerors,\n the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on\n into space, killing, destroying for no other reason than their own\n sickness. Being masters of the mind, the Martians are also capable\n of hypnosis—no, that's not really the word, only the closest our\n language comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it\n seems real to one human or a million or a billion; there's no limit to\n the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those\n ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to\n see and feel—but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain,\n was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was the\n suggestion of the Martians.\"", "Terrence shifted his position. \"However, we've voted to grant you\n a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from\n you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left\n food-concentrates to last a long time.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of service?\"\n\n\n \"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the\n mountain.\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Bruce said. \"You aren't certain you're coming back, then?\"\n\n\n \"We might not,\" Terrence admitted calmly. \"Something's happened to the\n others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of\n us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they\n come in.\"", "\"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak\n personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He\nimagined\nhe saw\n something.\" He glanced at Marsha. \"Did\nyou\nsee anything?\"\n\n\n She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. \"Nothing at all. There wasn't\n anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there\n is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything\n else. A shadow maybe—\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Terrence interrupted. \"Now, Bruce, you know the law\n regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. Execution.\"\n\n\n \"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth.\"\n\n\n \"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain.\"", "\"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there,\" Jacobs said. He pulled the\n revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. \"We got to get some\n sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning.\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain.\"\n\n\n Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the\n gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain\n didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars\n eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never\n got back to Earth—all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow,\n like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.", "Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into\n Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger\n in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly\n at Bruce.\n\n\n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n\n\n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n\n\n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n\n\n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n \"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you\n think I'd be running to?\"\n\n\n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n\n\n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care\n of that, doesn't it?\"", "A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions.\n Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for\n centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism,\n individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question\n of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first.\n So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job\n there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared.\n This was the fifth attempt—\nTerrence said, \"why did you shoot Doran?\"\n\n\n \"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and\n when he shot the—\" Bruce hesitated.\n\n\n \"What? When he shot what?\"\n\n\n Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to\n sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.", "The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green\n valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing\n their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there\n were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them\n that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know.\n\n\n '\n... dreams, in their vivid coloring of life, as in that fleeting,\n shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the\n delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love—and all our\n own!—than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known....\n'\n\n\n So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the\n dreams.\n\n\n And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would\n look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing\n but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky.", "She waved her arm slowly to describe a peak. \"The Martians made the\n mountain real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by\n instruments ... even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But\n you'll see how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the\n mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no\n Conqueror will ever see.\"\nThey walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When\n they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there ... the remains,\n actually, of what had once been bodies. He felt too sickened to go on\n walking.\n\n\n \"It may seem cruel now,\" she said, \"but the Martians realized that\n there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it,\n either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is\n given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the\n Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had\n to.\"", "\"Not afraid,\" Bruce objected. \"I don't see any need to climb it. Coming\n to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew\n of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a\n precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why?\n Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them?\n Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful\n climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up\n there.\n\n\n \"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why\n should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The\n challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend\n going before something bigger than you are stops you—it doesn't\n interest me.\"\n\n\n \"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!\" Terrence said, sitting up\n straight and rigid.", "He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm\n city. He didn't look back.\n\n\n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet\n I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago.\n Are—are the climbers still climbing—somewhere, Helene?\"\n\n\n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the\n Martians have the answer to that.\"\n\n\n They entered the city.", "He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he\n wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late.\n They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n\n\n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly\n of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene\n shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in\n his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he\n had been when he woke from them.\n\n\n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know\n you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him.\n Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n\n\n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n\n\n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we\n get back.\"", "Bruce said, \"I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice\n any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the\n crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One\n of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were\n aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this\n village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings\n there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand\n inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet\n us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The\n village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed.\"\n\n\n Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning\n to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the\n cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.\n\n\n \"No,\" Bruce said. \"I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking\n about.\"", "And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice\n that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other\n four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any\n of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb—\"\n\n\n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food\n concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He\n had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to\n take care of the time.", "\"'\nIs all that we see or seem\n,'\" he whispered, half to himself, \"'\nbut\n a dream within a dream?\n'\"\n\n\n She laughed softly. \"Poe was ahead of his time,\" she said. \"You still\n don't get it, do you? You don't know what's been happening?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe I don't.\"\n\n\n She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. \"Poor guys. I\n can't feel much hatred toward them now. The Martians give you a lot of\n understanding of the human mind—after they've accepted you, and after\n you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers—we can see\n now—it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child\n of chance.\"", "The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound\n of his own voice.\n\n\n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n\n\n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\"\n Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into\n any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our\n destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and\n we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're\n going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the\n top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a\n thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this\n world—the top of\neverything\n. The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"", "\"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke\n me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we\n were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got\n here.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n\n\n Someone laughed.\n\n\n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People\n talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some\n kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n\n\n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n\n\n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of\n some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n\n\n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"" ], [ "He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that\n other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so\n much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of\n Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently\n flowing water of the cool, green canal.\n\n\n \"You loved her?\"\n\n\n \"Once,\" Bruce said. \"She might have been sane. They got her when she\n was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd\n been older when they got her.\"\n\n\n He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the\n leaves floating down it.\n\n\n \"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never\n seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\n in the feathery green of the year....'\"", "\"Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember\n how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I\n never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't\n matter....\"", "\"Bruce—Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure\n to be five hundred thousand feet! It\nis\nimpossible. We keep climbing\n and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is\n going up and up—\"\n\n\n And some time later: \"Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the\n matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps\n laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it.\n Women don't have real guts.\"\n\n\n Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled\n softly at the door.\n\n\n \"Marsha,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Bruce—\"\n\n\n She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.", "He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper.\n \"Bruce, hello down there.\" Her voice was all mixed up with fear and\n hysteria and mockery. \"Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish\n I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that?\n I really love you, after all. After all....\"\nHer voice drifted away, came back to him. \"We're climbing the highest\n mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and\n warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What\n are you doing—reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was\n that, Bruce—that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last\n night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?\"\nHe stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the\n mike. He got through to her.", "He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he\n wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late.\n They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n\n\n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly\n of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene\n shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in\n his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he\n had been when he woke from them.\n\n\n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know\n you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him.\n Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n\n\n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n\n\n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we\n get back.\"", "He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded\n hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied\n together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond\n them were those from\nMars V\n, too freshly dead to have decayed\n much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and\n Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed\n to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched\n out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n\n\n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds,\n red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve\n miles from the ship—horizontally.\n\n\n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the\n fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace\n beside the canal.", "The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound\n of his own voice.\n\n\n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n\n\n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\"\n Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into\n any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our\n destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and\n we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're\n going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the\n top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a\n thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this\n world—the top of\neverything\n. The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"", "\"I know,\" Bruce said. \"Anyway, I got off the track. As I was saying,\n I woke up from this dream and Marsha and Doran were there. Doran was\n shaking me. But I didn't seem to have gotten entirely awake; either\n that or some part of the dream was real, because I looked out the\n window—something was out there, looking at me. It was late, and at\n first I thought it might be a shadow. But it wasn't. It was misty,\n almost translucent, but I think it was something alive. I had a feeling\n it was intelligent, maybe very intelligent. I could feel something in\n my mind. A kind of beauty and softness and warmth. I kept looking—\"", "Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into\n Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger\n in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly\n at Bruce.\n\n\n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n\n\n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n\n\n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n\n\n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n \"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you\n think I'd be running to?\"\n\n\n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n\n\n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care\n of that, doesn't it?\"", "He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row\n of spaceships—not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd\n relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships\n instead of four.\n\n\n There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building,\n and the other buildings. He looked up.\n\n\n There was no mountain.\nFor one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and\n he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now,\n and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it\n again.\n\n\n \"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through\n that thick poetic head of yours!\"\n\n\n \"Get what?\" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he\n wasn't quite sure yet.\n\n\n \"Smoke?\" she said.", "He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put the\n lighter back into her pocket.\n\n\n \"It's real nice here,\" she said. \"Isn't it?\"\n\n\n \"I guess it's about perfect.\"\n\n\n \"It'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever\n again, you know.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't\nknow\nthat, but I didn't\nthink\nwe ever would again.\"\n\n\n \"We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe\n it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was\n not? That barren icy world without life, or this?", "\"Hello, hello, darling,\" he whispered. \"Marsha, can you hear me?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes. You down there, all warm and cozy, reading poetry, darling.\n Where you can see both ways instead of just up and down, up and down.\"\n\n\n He tried to imagine where she was now as he spoke to her, how she\n looked. He thought of Earth and how it had been there, years ago, with\n Marsha. Things had seemed so different then. There was something of\n that hope in his voice now as he spoke to her, yet not directly to her,\n as he looked out the window at the naked frigid sky and the barren\n rocks.\n\n\"'... and there is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain,\nBut down, my dear;\nAnd the springs that flow on the floor of the valley\nWill never seem fresh or clear\nFor thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\nIn the feathery green of the year....'\"", "He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm\n city. He didn't look back.\n\n\n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet\n I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago.\n Are—are the climbers still climbing—somewhere, Helene?\"\n\n\n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the\n Martians have the answer to that.\"\n\n\n They entered the city.", "\"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\nBruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of\n the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them\n disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like\n convicts.\n\n\n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much\n if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative\n prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so\n pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as\n long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n\n\n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were\n climbing.\n\n\n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and\n that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for—to\n accept a challenge like this!\"", "They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher\n than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The\n entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills\n by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one\n incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it\n had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at\n Earth—or a warning one.\nWith Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship,\nMars V\n, seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in\n front of them for the inquest.\n\n\n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs\n stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence.\n His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the\n Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there\n was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.", "\"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak\n personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He\nimagined\nhe saw\n something.\" He glanced at Marsha. \"Did\nyou\nsee anything?\"\n\n\n She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. \"Nothing at all. There wasn't\n anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there\n is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything\n else. A shadow maybe—\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Terrence interrupted. \"Now, Bruce, you know the law\n regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. Execution.\"\n\n\n \"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth.\"\n\n\n \"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain.\"", "\"Yes,\" Bruce said. \"There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but\n they'll never get the chance—the chance we seem to have here, to live\n decently....\"\n\n\n \"You're beginning to see now which was the dream,\" she said and\n smiled. \"But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their\n chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far.\n Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming\n here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It\n won't take so long.\"\n\n\n She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene\n walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back\n and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and\n drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.", "\"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke\n me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we\n were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got\n here.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n\n\n Someone laughed.\n\n\n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People\n talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some\n kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n\n\n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n\n\n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of\n some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n\n\n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"", "She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the\n mountain had been, or still was—he didn't know.\n\n\n A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red,\n naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding\n green.\n\n\n She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure\n on his arm stopped him.\n\n\n \"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the\n third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb\n the mountain—\" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the\n pressure of her fingers on his arm. \"I'm very glad you came on the\n fifth,\" she whispered. \"Are you glad now?\"\n\n\n \"I'm very glad,\" he said.", "He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They\n had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The\n psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't\n want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human\n vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was\n kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted\n to open the mouth for in the first place." ], [ "She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the\n mountain had been, or still was—he didn't know.\n\n\n A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red,\n naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding\n green.\n\n\n She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure\n on his arm stopped him.\n\n\n \"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the\n third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb\n the mountain—\" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the\n pressure of her fingers on his arm. \"I'm very glad you came on the\n fifth,\" she whispered. \"Are you glad now?\"\n\n\n \"I'm very glad,\" he said.", "\"Yes,\" Bruce said. \"There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but\n they'll never get the chance—the chance we seem to have here, to live\n decently....\"\n\n\n \"You're beginning to see now which was the dream,\" she said and\n smiled. \"But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their\n chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far.\n Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming\n here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It\n won't take so long.\"\n\n\n She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene\n walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back\n and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and\n drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.", "It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but\n Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real\n any more; certainly not as real as the dreams.\nThe problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to\n worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence\n was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His\n dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had\n left it, and it was the same—allowing even for the time difference\n necessitated by his periods of sleep.\n\n\n He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names:\n Pietro, Marlene, Helene.\n\n\n Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to\n him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could\n also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense.\n Consistently, they made sense.", "He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded\n hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied\n together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond\n them were those from\nMars V\n, too freshly dead to have decayed\n much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and\n Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed\n to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched\n out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n\n\n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds,\n red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve\n miles from the ship—horizontally.\n\n\n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the\n fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace\n beside the canal.", "He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm\n city. He didn't look back.\n\n\n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet\n I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago.\n Are—are the climbers still climbing—somewhere, Helene?\"\n\n\n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the\n Martians have the answer to that.\"\n\n\n They entered the city.", "He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that\n other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so\n much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of\n Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently\n flowing water of the cool, green canal.\n\n\n \"You loved her?\"\n\n\n \"Once,\" Bruce said. \"She might have been sane. They got her when she\n was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd\n been older when they got her.\"\n\n\n He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the\n leaves floating down it.\n\n\n \"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never\n seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\n in the feathery green of the year....'\"", "\"That's what I figured.\" Terrence turned to the psychologist, a small\n wiry man who sat there constantly fingering his ear. \"Stromberg, what\n do you think of this gobbledegook? We know he's crazy. But what hit\n him? You said his record was good up until a year ago.\"", "He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row\n of spaceships—not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd\n relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships\n instead of four.\n\n\n There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building,\n and the other buildings. He looked up.\n\n\n There was no mountain.\nFor one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and\n he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now,\n and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it\n again.\n\n\n \"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through\n that thick poetic head of yours!\"\n\n\n \"Get what?\" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he\n wasn't quite sure yet.\n\n\n \"Smoke?\" she said.", "Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into\n Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger\n in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly\n at Bruce.\n\n\n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n\n\n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n\n\n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n\n\n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n \"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you\n think I'd be running to?\"\n\n\n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n\n\n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care\n of that, doesn't it?\"", "His throat was getting tight. He had difficulty talking. \"Doran asked\n me what I was looking at, and I told him. He laughed. But he looked.\n Then I realized that maybe I wasn't still dreaming. Doran saw it, too,\n or thought he did. He kept looking and finally he jumped and grabbed up\n his rifle and ran outside. I yelled at him. I kept on yelling and ran\n after him. 'It's intelligent, whatever it is!' I kept saying. 'How do\n you know it means any harm?' But I heard Doran's rifle go off before I\n could get to him. And whatever it was we saw, I didn't see it any more.\n Neither did Doran. Maybe he killed it. I don't know. He had to kill it.\n That's the way you think.\"\n\n\n \"What? Explain that remark.\"", "He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They\n had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The\n psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't\n want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human\n vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was\n kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted\n to open the mouth for in the first place.", "From sixty thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"I had to shoot Anhauser\n a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most\n dependable men. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether\n we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on\n climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused\n to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled.\n So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent caliber turning\n anti-democratic like that! This mountain will be a great tester for\n us in the future. We'll test everybody, find out quickly who the\n weaklings are.\"", "\"'\nIs all that we see or seem\n,'\" he whispered, half to himself, \"'\nbut\n a dream within a dream?\n'\"\n\n\n She laughed softly. \"Poe was ahead of his time,\" she said. \"You still\n don't get it, do you? You don't know what's been happening?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe I don't.\"\n\n\n She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. \"Poor guys. I\n can't feel much hatred toward them now. The Martians give you a lot of\n understanding of the human mind—after they've accepted you, and after\n you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers—we can see\n now—it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child\n of chance.\"", "\"Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember\n how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I\n never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't\n matter....\"", "Stromberg's voice was monotonous, like a voice off of a tape.\n \"Schizophrenia with mingled delusions of persecution. The schizophrenia\n is caused by inner conflict—indecision between the older values and\n our present ones which he hasn't been able to accept. A complete case\n history would tell why he can't accept our present attitudes. I would\n say that he has an incipient fear of personal inadequacy, which is why\n he fears our desire for conquest. He's rationalized, built up a defense\n which he's structured with his idealism, foundationed with Old Era\n values. Retreat into the past, an escape from his own present feelings\n of inadequacy. Also, he escapes into these dream fantasies.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Terrence said. \"But how does that account for Doran's action?\n Doran must have seen something—\"", "He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put the\n lighter back into her pocket.\n\n\n \"It's real nice here,\" she said. \"Isn't it?\"\n\n\n \"I guess it's about perfect.\"\n\n\n \"It'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever\n again, you know.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't\nknow\nthat, but I didn't\nthink\nwe ever would again.\"\n\n\n \"We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe\n it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was\n not? That barren icy world without life, or this?", "And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice\n that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other\n four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any\n of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb—\"\n\n\n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food\n concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He\n had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to\n take care of the time.", "\"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke\n me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we\n were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got\n here.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n\n\n Someone laughed.\n\n\n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People\n talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some\n kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n\n\n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n\n\n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of\n some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n\n\n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"", "\"The Martians tested us,\" she explained. \"They're masters of the mind.\n I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill\n a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned\n the horror we're capable of from the first ship—the Conquerors,\n the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on\n into space, killing, destroying for no other reason than their own\n sickness. Being masters of the mind, the Martians are also capable\n of hypnosis—no, that's not really the word, only the closest our\n language comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it\n seems real to one human or a million or a billion; there's no limit to\n the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those\n ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to\n see and feel—but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain,\n was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was the\n suggestion of the Martians.\"", "\"I know,\" Bruce agreed indifferently. \"I was drafted for this trip. I\n told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part\n of it.\"\n\n\n \"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you\n backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil\n does Venus—?\"\n\n\n Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high\n forehead. \"Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to\n the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly\n educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people.\"\n\n\n \"I haven't heard it,\" Terrence admitted. \"What injustice?\"" ], [ "He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded\n hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied\n together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond\n them were those from\nMars V\n, too freshly dead to have decayed\n much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and\n Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed\n to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched\n out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n\n\n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds,\n red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve\n miles from the ship—horizontally.\n\n\n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the\n fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace\n beside the canal.", "He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm\n city. He didn't look back.\n\n\n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet\n I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago.\n Are—are the climbers still climbing—somewhere, Helene?\"\n\n\n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the\n Martians have the answer to that.\"\n\n\n They entered the city.", "Terrence shifted his position. \"However, we've voted to grant you\n a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from\n you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left\n food-concentrates to last a long time.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of service?\"\n\n\n \"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the\n mountain.\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Bruce said. \"You aren't certain you're coming back, then?\"\n\n\n \"We might not,\" Terrence admitted calmly. \"Something's happened to the\n others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of\n us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they\n come in.\"", "\"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\nBruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of\n the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them\n disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like\n convicts.\n\n\n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much\n if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative\n prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so\n pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as\n long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n\n\n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were\n climbing.\n\n\n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and\n that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for—to\n accept a challenge like this!\"", "Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into\n Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger\n in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly\n at Bruce.\n\n\n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n\n\n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n\n\n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n\n\n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n \"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you\n think I'd be running to?\"\n\n\n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n\n\n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care\n of that, doesn't it?\"", "\"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out\n there?\" Bruce laughed without much humor.\n\n\n Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again\n to his belly. \"You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in\n the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted\n enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior.\n This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too\n much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing\n fellow crew-members!\"\n\n\n \"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus,\"\n Bruce said.\n\n\n \"Now we get another lecture!\" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.\n \"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never\n have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can\n find. You don't belong here.\"", "They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher\n than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The\n entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills\n by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one\n incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it\n had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at\n Earth—or a warning one.\nWith Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship,\nMars V\n, seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in\n front of them for the inquest.\n\n\n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs\n stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence.\n His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the\n Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there\n was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.", "\"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there,\" Jacobs said. He pulled the\n revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. \"We got to get some\n sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning.\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain.\"\n\n\n Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the\n gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain\n didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars\n eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never\n got back to Earth—all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow,\n like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.", "\"Not afraid,\" Bruce objected. \"I don't see any need to climb it. Coming\n to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew\n of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a\n precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why?\n Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them?\n Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful\n climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up\n there.\n\n\n \"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why\n should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The\n challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend\n going before something bigger than you are stops you—it doesn't\n interest me.\"\n\n\n \"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!\" Terrence said, sitting up\n straight and rigid.", "\"Yes,\" Bruce said. \"There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but\n they'll never get the chance—the chance we seem to have here, to live\n decently....\"\n\n\n \"You're beginning to see now which was the dream,\" she said and\n smiled. \"But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their\n chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far.\n Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming\n here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It\n won't take so long.\"\n\n\n She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene\n walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back\n and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and\n drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.", "Terrence nodded. \"You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the\n most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of\n elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the\n real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you\n think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws\n of the whole Solar System?\"\n\n\n \"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me,\" Bruce said. \"I can say\n what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do\n that regardless....\"", "\"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak\n personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He\nimagined\nhe saw\n something.\" He glanced at Marsha. \"Did\nyou\nsee anything?\"\n\n\n She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. \"Nothing at all. There wasn't\n anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there\n is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything\n else. A shadow maybe—\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Terrence interrupted. \"Now, Bruce, you know the law\n regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. Execution.\"\n\n\n \"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth.\"\n\n\n \"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain.\"", "The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound\n of his own voice.\n\n\n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n\n\n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\"\n Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into\n any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our\n destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and\n we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're\n going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the\n top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a\n thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this\n world—the top of\neverything\n. The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"", "He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he\n wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late.\n They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n\n\n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly\n of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene\n shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in\n his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he\n had been when he woke from them.\n\n\n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know\n you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him.\n Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n\n\n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n\n\n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we\n get back.\"", "And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice\n that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other\n four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any\n of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb—\"\n\n\n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food\n concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He\n had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to\n take care of the time.", "\"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke\n me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we\n were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got\n here.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n\n\n Someone laughed.\n\n\n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People\n talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some\n kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n\n\n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n\n\n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of\n some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n\n\n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"", "At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"We've put on oxygen\n masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness\n and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I\n can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just\n to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this!\n What a feeling of power, Bruce!\"\n\n\n From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We gauged this mountain\n at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't\n seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on\n going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our\n computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this\n high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so\n smooth.\"", "\"Bruce—Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure\n to be five hundred thousand feet! It\nis\nimpossible. We keep climbing\n and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is\n going up and up—\"\n\n\n And some time later: \"Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the\n matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps\n laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it.\n Women don't have real guts.\"\n\n\n Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled\n softly at the door.\n\n\n \"Marsha,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Bruce—\"\n\n\n She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.", "\"I know,\" Bruce agreed indifferently. \"I was drafted for this trip. I\n told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part\n of it.\"\n\n\n \"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you\n backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil\n does Venus—?\"\n\n\n Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high\n forehead. \"Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to\n the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly\n educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people.\"\n\n\n \"I haven't heard it,\" Terrence admitted. \"What injustice?\"", "He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that\n other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so\n much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of\n Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently\n flowing water of the cool, green canal.\n\n\n \"You loved her?\"\n\n\n \"Once,\" Bruce said. \"She might have been sane. They got her when she\n was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd\n been older when they got her.\"\n\n\n He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the\n leaves floating down it.\n\n\n \"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never\n seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\n in the feathery green of the year....'\"" ], [ "At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"We've put on oxygen\n masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness\n and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I\n can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just\n to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this!\n What a feeling of power, Bruce!\"\n\n\n From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We gauged this mountain\n at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't\n seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on\n going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our\n computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this\n high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so\n smooth.\"", "From sixty thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"I had to shoot Anhauser\n a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most\n dependable men. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether\n we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on\n climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused\n to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled.\n So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent caliber turning\n anti-democratic like that! This mountain will be a great tester for\n us in the future. We'll test everybody, find out quickly who the\n weaklings are.\"", "And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice\n that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other\n four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any\n of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb—\"\n\n\n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food\n concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He\n had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to\n take care of the time.", "\"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\nBruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of\n the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them\n disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like\n convicts.\n\n\n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much\n if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative\n prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so\n pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as\n long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n\n\n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were\n climbing.\n\n\n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and\n that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for—to\n accept a challenge like this!\"", "Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher.\n Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. \"Think of it! What\n a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says,\n it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but\n that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can\n see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be—\"\n\n\n Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he\n was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long\n time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking\n the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more\n real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.", "Terrence shifted his position. \"However, we've voted to grant you\n a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from\n you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left\n food-concentrates to last a long time.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of service?\"\n\n\n \"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the\n mountain.\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Bruce said. \"You aren't certain you're coming back, then?\"\n\n\n \"We might not,\" Terrence admitted calmly. \"Something's happened to the\n others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of\n us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they\n come in.\"", "\"Bruce—Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure\n to be five hundred thousand feet! It\nis\nimpossible. We keep climbing\n and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is\n going up and up—\"\n\n\n And some time later: \"Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the\n matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps\n laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it.\n Women don't have real guts.\"\n\n\n Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled\n softly at the door.\n\n\n \"Marsha,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Bruce—\"\n\n\n She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.", "\"Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had a feeling\n there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out.\n You're still interested?\"\n\n\n Terrence nodded and glanced to either side.\n\n\n \"We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever,\" Bruce\n pointed out. \"Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some\n fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me\n from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place—\"\n\n\n \"The mountain,\" Terrence said. \"You've been afraid even to talk about\n scaling it.\"", "The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound\n of his own voice.\n\n\n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n\n\n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\"\n Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into\n any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our\n destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and\n we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're\n going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the\n top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a\n thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this\n world—the top of\neverything\n. The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"", "He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded\n hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied\n together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond\n them were those from\nMars V\n, too freshly dead to have decayed\n much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and\n Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed\n to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched\n out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n\n\n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds,\n red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve\n miles from the ship—horizontally.\n\n\n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the\n fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace\n beside the canal.", "\"Not afraid,\" Bruce objected. \"I don't see any need to climb it. Coming\n to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew\n of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a\n precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why?\n Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them?\n Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful\n climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up\n there.\n\n\n \"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why\n should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The\n challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend\n going before something bigger than you are stops you—it doesn't\n interest me.\"\n\n\n \"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!\" Terrence said, sitting up\n straight and rigid.", "They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher\n than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The\n entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills\n by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one\n incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it\n had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at\n Earth—or a warning one.\nWith Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship,\nMars V\n, seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in\n front of them for the inquest.\n\n\n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs\n stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence.\n His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the\n Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there\n was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.", "Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or\n other—Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all—and turned into\n crazy yells that faded out and never came back.\n\n\n Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe\n they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He\n knew they would never come back down.\n\n\n He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration\n break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an\n instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film\n negatives.\n\n\n He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was\n out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet\n sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there\n was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the\n softly flowing canal water.", "Terrence nodded. \"You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the\n most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of\n elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the\n real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you\n think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws\n of the whole Solar System?\"\n\n\n \"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me,\" Bruce said. \"I can say\n what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do\n that regardless....\"", "\"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there,\" Jacobs said. He pulled the\n revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. \"We got to get some\n sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning.\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain.\"\n\n\n Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the\n gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain\n didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars\n eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never\n got back to Earth—all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow,\n like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.", "He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he\n wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late.\n They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n\n\n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly\n of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene\n shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in\n his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he\n had been when he woke from them.\n\n\n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know\n you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him.\n Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n\n\n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n\n\n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we\n get back.\"", "She waved her arm slowly to describe a peak. \"The Martians made the\n mountain real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by\n instruments ... even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But\n you'll see how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the\n mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no\n Conqueror will ever see.\"\nThey walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When\n they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there ... the remains,\n actually, of what had once been bodies. He felt too sickened to go on\n walking.\n\n\n \"It may seem cruel now,\" she said, \"but the Martians realized that\n there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it,\n either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is\n given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the\n Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had\n to.\"", "He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row\n of spaceships—not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd\n relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships\n instead of four.\n\n\n There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building,\n and the other buildings. He looked up.\n\n\n There was no mountain.\nFor one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and\n he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now,\n and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it\n again.\n\n\n \"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through\n that thick poetic head of yours!\"\n\n\n \"Get what?\" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he\n wasn't quite sure yet.\n\n\n \"Smoke?\" she said.", "She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the\n mountain had been, or still was—he didn't know.\n\n\n A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red,\n naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding\n green.\n\n\n She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure\n on his arm stopped him.\n\n\n \"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the\n third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb\n the mountain—\" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the\n pressure of her fingers on his arm. \"I'm very glad you came on the\n fifth,\" she whispered. \"Are you glad now?\"\n\n\n \"I'm very glad,\" he said.", "He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper.\n \"Bruce, hello down there.\" Her voice was all mixed up with fear and\n hysteria and mockery. \"Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish\n I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that?\n I really love you, after all. After all....\"\nHer voice drifted away, came back to him. \"We're climbing the highest\n mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and\n warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What\n are you doing—reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was\n that, Bruce—that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last\n night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?\"\nHe stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the\n mike. He got through to her." ], [ "Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into\n Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger\n in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly\n at Bruce.\n\n\n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n\n\n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n\n\n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n\n\n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n \"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you\n think I'd be running to?\"\n\n\n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n\n\n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care\n of that, doesn't it?\"", "He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm\n city. He didn't look back.\n\n\n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet\n I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago.\n Are—are the climbers still climbing—somewhere, Helene?\"\n\n\n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the\n Martians have the answer to that.\"\n\n\n They entered the city.", "Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher.\n Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. \"Think of it! What\n a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says,\n it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but\n that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can\n see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be—\"\n\n\n Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he\n was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long\n time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking\n the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more\n real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.", "He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he\n wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late.\n They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n\n\n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly\n of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene\n shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in\n his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he\n had been when he woke from them.\n\n\n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know\n you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him.\n Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n\n\n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n\n\n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we\n get back.\"", "And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice\n that seemed slightly strained: \"No sign of any of the crew of the other\n four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any\n of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb—\"\n\n\n Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food\n concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He\n had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to\n take care of the time.", "He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that\n other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so\n much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of\n Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently\n flowing water of the cool, green canal.\n\n\n \"You loved her?\"\n\n\n \"Once,\" Bruce said. \"She might have been sane. They got her when she\n was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd\n been older when they got her.\"\n\n\n He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the\n leaves floating down it.\n\n\n \"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never\n seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water\n in the feathery green of the year....'\"", "He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row\n of spaceships—not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd\n relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships\n instead of four.\n\n\n There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building,\n and the other buildings. He looked up.\n\n\n There was no mountain.\nFor one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and\n he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now,\n and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it\n again.\n\n\n \"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through\n that thick poetic head of yours!\"\n\n\n \"Get what?\" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he\n wasn't quite sure yet.\n\n\n \"Smoke?\" she said.", "\"I know,\" Bruce agreed indifferently. \"I was drafted for this trip. I\n told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part\n of it.\"\n\n\n \"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you\n backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil\n does Venus—?\"\n\n\n Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high\n forehead. \"Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to\n the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly\n educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people.\"\n\n\n \"I haven't heard it,\" Terrence admitted. \"What injustice?\"", "\"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\nBruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of\n the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them\n disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like\n convicts.\n\n\n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much\n if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative\n prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so\n pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as\n long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n\n\n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were\n climbing.\n\n\n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and\n that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for—to\n accept a challenge like this!\"", "\"Bruce—Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure\n to be five hundred thousand feet! It\nis\nimpossible. We keep climbing\n and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is\n going up and up—\"\n\n\n And some time later: \"Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the\n matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps\n laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it.\n Women don't have real guts.\"\n\n\n Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled\n softly at the door.\n\n\n \"Marsha,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Bruce—\"\n\n\n She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.", "He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper.\n \"Bruce, hello down there.\" Her voice was all mixed up with fear and\n hysteria and mockery. \"Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish\n I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that?\n I really love you, after all. After all....\"\nHer voice drifted away, came back to him. \"We're climbing the highest\n mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and\n warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What\n are you doing—reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was\n that, Bruce—that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last\n night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?\"\nHe stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the\n mike. He got through to her.", "The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound\n of his own voice.\n\n\n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n\n\n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\"\n Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into\n any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our\n destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and\n we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're\n going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the\n top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a\n thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this\n world—the top of\neverything\n. The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"", "He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded\n hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied\n together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond\n them were those from\nMars V\n, too freshly dead to have decayed\n much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and\n Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed\n to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched\n out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n\n\n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds,\n red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve\n miles from the ship—horizontally.\n\n\n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the\n fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace\n beside the canal.", "Terrence nodded. \"You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the\n most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of\n elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the\n real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you\n think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws\n of the whole Solar System?\"\n\n\n \"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me,\" Bruce said. \"I can say\n what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do\n that regardless....\"", "\"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out\n there?\" Bruce laughed without much humor.\n\n\n Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again\n to his belly. \"You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in\n the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted\n enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior.\n This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too\n much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing\n fellow crew-members!\"\n\n\n \"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus,\"\n Bruce said.\n\n\n \"Now we get another lecture!\" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.\n \"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never\n have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can\n find. You don't belong here.\"", "They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher\n than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The\n entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills\n by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one\n incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it\n had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at\n Earth—or a warning one.\nWith Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship,\nMars V\n, seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in\n front of them for the inquest.\n\n\n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs\n stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence.\n His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the\n Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there\n was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.", "\"Yes,\" Bruce said. \"There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but\n they'll never get the chance—the chance we seem to have here, to live\n decently....\"\n\n\n \"You're beginning to see now which was the dream,\" she said and\n smiled. \"But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their\n chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far.\n Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming\n here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It\n won't take so long.\"\n\n\n She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene\n walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back\n and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and\n drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.", "\"That's the philosophy of conquest—don't take any chances with\n aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill\n everything. Doran acted without thinking at all. Conditioned to kill\n everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun\n away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe\n that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and\n that I had to kill him, so I did.\"\n\n\n \"Is that all, Bruce?\"\n\n\n \"That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would\n if I had the chance.\"", "Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or\n other—Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all—and turned into\n crazy yells that faded out and never came back.\n\n\n Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe\n they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He\n knew they would never come back down.\n\n\n He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration\n break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an\n instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film\n negatives.\n\n\n He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was\n out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet\n sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there\n was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the\n softly flowing canal water.", "Bruce said, \"I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice\n any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the\n crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One\n of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were\n aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this\n village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings\n there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand\n inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet\n us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The\n village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed.\"\n\n\n Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning\n to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the\n cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.\n\n\n \"No,\" Bruce said. \"I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking\n about.\"" ], [ "\"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak\n personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He\nimagined\nhe saw\n something.\" He glanced at Marsha. \"Did\nyou\nsee anything?\"\n\n\n She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. \"Nothing at all. There wasn't\n anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there\n is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything\n else. A shadow maybe—\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Terrence interrupted. \"Now, Bruce, you know the law\n regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. Execution.\"\n\n\n \"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth.\"\n\n\n \"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain.\"", "\"I'll do that,\" Bruce said. \"It should be interesting.\"\nBruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of\n the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them\n disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like\n convicts.\n\n\n He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much\n if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative\n prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so\n pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as\n long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.\n\n\n At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were\n climbing.\n\n\n At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We're still climbing, and\n that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for—to\n accept a challenge like this!\"", "He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he\n wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late.\n They had gotten her young and it was too late.\n\n\n Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly\n of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene\n shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in\n his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he\n had been when he woke from them.\n\n\n \"This is a mere formality,\" Terrence finally said, \"since we all know\n you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him.\n Whatever you say goes on the record, of course.\"\n\n\n \"For whom?\" Bruce asked.\n\n\n \"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we\n get back.\"", "At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, \"We've put on oxygen\n masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness\n and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I\n can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just\n to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this!\n What a feeling of power, Bruce!\"\n\n\n From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, \"We gauged this mountain\n at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't\n seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on\n going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our\n computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this\n high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so\n smooth.\"", "The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound\n of his own voice.\n\n\n \"Marsha, are you still there?\"\n\n\n \"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?\"\n Terrence demanded. \"Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into\n any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our\n destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and\n we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're\n going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the\n top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a\n thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this\n world—the top of\neverything\n. The top of the\n UNIVERSE\n !\"", "\"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke\n me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we\n were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got\n here.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of dreams?\"\n\n\n Someone laughed.\n\n\n \"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there,\" Bruce said. \"People\n talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some\n kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all.\"\n\n\n Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.\n\n\n \"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of\n some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth.\"\n\n\n Terrence grinned. \"Ghosts, Bruce?\"", "They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher\n than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The\n entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills\n by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one\n incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it\n had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at\n Earth—or a warning one.\nWith Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship,\nMars V\n, seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in\n front of them for the inquest.\n\n\n In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs\n stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence.\n His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the\n Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there\n was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.", "A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions.\n Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for\n centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism,\n individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question\n of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first.\n So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job\n there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared.\n This was the fifth attempt—\nTerrence said, \"why did you shoot Doran?\"\n\n\n \"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and\n when he shot the—\" Bruce hesitated.\n\n\n \"What? When he shot what?\"\n\n\n Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to\n sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.", "Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into\n Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger\n in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly\n at Bruce.\n\n\n \"Come on in, boys, and get warm,\" Bruce invited.\n\n\n \"Hey, poet, you're still here!\" Anhauser said, looking astonished.\n\n\n \"We thought you'd be running off somewhere,\" Jacobs said.\n\n\n Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it.\n \"Where?\" he asked. \"Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you\n think I'd be running to?\"\n\n\n \"Any place just so it was away from here and us,\" Anhauser said.\n\n\n \"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care\n of that, doesn't it?\"", "Bruce said, \"I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice\n any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the\n crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One\n of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were\n aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this\n village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings\n there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand\n inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet\n us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The\n village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed.\"\n\n\n Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning\n to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the\n cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.\n\n\n \"No,\" Bruce said. \"I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking\n about.\"", "The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green\n valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing\n their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there\n were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them\n that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know.\n\n\n '\n... dreams, in their vivid coloring of life, as in that fleeting,\n shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the\n delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love—and all our\n own!—than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known....\n'\n\n\n So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the\n dreams.\n\n\n And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would\n look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing\n but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky.", "He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded\n hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied\n together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond\n them were those from\nMars V\n, too freshly dead to have decayed\n much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and\n Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed\n to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched\n out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.\n\n\n The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds,\n red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve\n miles from the ship—horizontally.\n\n\n Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the\n fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace\n beside the canal.", "\"Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had a feeling\n there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out.\n You're still interested?\"\n\n\n Terrence nodded and glanced to either side.\n\n\n \"We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever,\" Bruce\n pointed out. \"Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some\n fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me\n from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place—\"\n\n\n \"The mountain,\" Terrence said. \"You've been afraid even to talk about\n scaling it.\"", "\"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there,\" Jacobs said. He pulled the\n revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. \"We got to get some\n sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning.\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" Bruce said. \"I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain.\"\n\n\n Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the\n gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain\n didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars\n eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never\n got back to Earth—all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow,\n like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.", "\"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out\n there?\" Bruce laughed without much humor.\n\n\n Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again\n to his belly. \"You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in\n the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted\n enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior.\n This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too\n much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing\n fellow crew-members!\"\n\n\n \"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus,\"\n Bruce said.\n\n\n \"Now we get another lecture!\" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward.\n \"You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never\n have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can\n find. You don't belong here.\"", "\"Not afraid,\" Bruce objected. \"I don't see any need to climb it. Coming\n to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew\n of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a\n precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why?\n Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them?\n Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful\n climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up\n there.\n\n\n \"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why\n should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The\n challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend\n going before something bigger than you are stops you—it doesn't\n interest me.\"\n\n\n \"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!\" Terrence said, sitting up\n straight and rigid.", "Terrence shifted his position. \"However, we've voted to grant you\n a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from\n you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left\n food-concentrates to last a long time.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of service?\"\n\n\n \"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the\n mountain.\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Bruce said. \"You aren't certain you're coming back, then?\"\n\n\n \"We might not,\" Terrence admitted calmly. \"Something's happened to the\n others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of\n us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they\n come in.\"", "\"That's the philosophy of conquest—don't take any chances with\n aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill\n everything. Doran acted without thinking at all. Conditioned to kill\n everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun\n away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe\n that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and\n that I had to kill him, so I did.\"\n\n\n \"Is that all, Bruce?\"\n\n\n \"That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would\n if I had the chance.\"", "He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm\n city. He didn't look back.\n\n\n \"They've all been dead quite a while,\" Bruce said wonderingly. \"Yet\n I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago.\n Are—are the climbers still climbing—somewhere, Helene?\"\n\n\n \"Who knows?\" Helene answered softly. \"Maybe. I doubt if even the\n Martians have the answer to that.\"\n\n\n They entered the city.", "\"I know,\" Bruce agreed indifferently. \"I was drafted for this trip. I\n told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part\n of it.\"\n\n\n \"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you\n backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil\n does Venus—?\"\n\n\n Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high\n forehead. \"Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to\n the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly\n educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people.\"\n\n\n \"I haven't heard it,\" Terrence admitted. \"What injustice?\"" ] ]
test	20050	[ "Why does the public largely not know about the benefits of moderate alcohol consumption?", "What is the recommended alcohol intake for healthy consumption?", "Why might the public be surprised about the findings of the study by the New England Journal of Medicine?", "What does the author say is the result of ignoring the New England Journal of Medicine study?", "What was the result of the Competitive Enterprise Institute survey?", "What was the net result of the New England Journal of Medicine study?", "Why did Michael Thun hedge on the large statistic regarding prolonged life related to moderate alcohol consumption?", "What gives credence to the most recent study by the New England Journal of Medicine?" ]	[ [ "They do, but they believe the recommendation only applies to drinking red wine.", "A combination of ignorance and limitations on marketing efforts from alcohol companies and public health officials.", "There are no such benefits; if there were, alcohol companies would pursue marketing such benefits more strongly.", "The information is based on a twenty-year-old study." ], [ "One glass of red wine per day for women and two for men.", "One to two drinks per day for men and women.", "One to two glasses of red wine for men and women.", "One drink per day for women and two for men." ], [ "The study indicates that consuming larger amounts of alcohol leads to increases in alcoholism, high blood pressure, obesity, stroke, suicide, and accidents.", "It finds that drinking red wine offers no more health benefits than drinking beer or liquor.", "The study finds that people can safely operate a motor vehicle if they have had less than two drinks.", "It reveals that moderate drinkers tend to live longer than people who do not drink at all." ], [ "It could lead to an increase in deaths from heart disease. ", "It might perpetuate the idea that avoiding the subject or being uninformed about it is the best policy.", "It would result in a loss of business for the alcohol companies. ", "It would give people the impression that drinking too much is just as beneficial as drinking a little." ], [ "42% of respondents said that they did not believe there were any health benefits associated with consuming a light amount of alcohol.", "58% of respondents indicated they believed moderate consumption of alcohol could lead to greater health benefits.", "A majority of the percentage that responded that they believed consuming alcohol had the potential to reduce the risk of heart disease also believed the benefits were only linked to wine.", "42% of respondents said that they believed any potential health benefits came from consuming red wine." ], [ "People over forty were less likely to die at a younger age if they had moderate alcohol intake than people who drank nothing.", "People over 30 were 20% less likely than nondrinkers to die prematurely if they drank more than two drinks per day.", "People over thirty years old were less likely to die at a younger age if they had moderate alcohol intake than people who drank nothing.", "People over 40 who had less than two drinks per day were 20% less likely to die prematurely compared to nondrinkers." ], [ "The world of epidemiology considered the 20% reduction a small percentage.", "He indicated that the 20% mortality reduction was not significant enough to warrant public broadcasting.", "The statistic was challenged in a later study by British health authorities in their \"Sensible Drinking\" guidelines.", "He said the various problems related to alcohol in society create a situation where such positive messaging is not typically well-received." ], [ "It was sponsored by the American Heart Association.", "The same study found an association between smoking and lung cancer.", "Decades of corroborating studies conducted in the US and around the world.", "The fact that they conducted their tests primarily on men over forty years old." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "But there are a lot of people like my father out there: uninformed or vaguely informed or not thinking about it. In 1995, a free market advocacy group called the Competitive Enterprise Institute commissioned a survey asking people whether they believed \"that scientific evidence exists showing that moderate consumption of alcohol, approximately one or two drinks per day, may reduce the risk of heart disease for many people.\" Only 42 percent of those who responded said they did, and a majority of those believed, wrongly, that the potential benefits come only from wine. \n\n The evidence on alcohol and health is now more than 20 years old--so why the confusion? Two groups have a stake in getting the word out, but one of them, the alcohol industry, is effectively forbidden to do so. Every bottle of alcohol carries a government warning label, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has never permitted ads or labels to carry any health claims, even mild ones. (For more on rejected health claims, click here.)", "Given that the government restricts health claims even for innocuous foods such as orange juice and eggs, it's reasonable to decide that booze merchants are the wrong people to entrust with public education about drinking. That leaves only one other constituency for getting the word out: the public health community. Its approach, however, might charitably be called cautious--or, less charitably, embarrassed mumbling. \n\n For example, the authors of the aforementioned New England Journal study characterized their finding of a 20 percent mortality reduction as \"slight.\" The accompanying editorial called it \"small.\" I phoned Michael J. Thun, one of the study's authors and an epidemiologist with the American Cancer Society, and asked him whether a 20 percent mortality reduction is indeed small in the world of epidemiology. \"It's a sizable benefit in terms of prolonged survival,\" he said. Why not say so? \"Messages about alcohol don't come out the way you say them when they're broadcast,\" he replied. \"There's been a very long history in society of problems with alcohol.\"", "One of those lives might, just as an example, belong to my father. He is 69, has mild hypertension (controlled with medication) and, but for the rare social occasion, doesn't drink. He has read some news reports suggesting moderate alcohol use may yield benefits, but his doctor has never mentioned such benefits, and my father has never given a thought to changing his drinking habits. And, in the standard view of public health officialdom, that is as it should be: People should not be encouraged to drink, even in moderation, and alcohol should not be linked with better health. \n\n The trouble is that moderate drinking is linked with better health. We don't know exactly why; some evidence suggests alcohol--of whatever sort, by the way, not just red wine--stimulates \"good\" (HDL, for high density lipoprotein) cholesterol and may help prevent blood clotting. But we do know the effects: On average, if you're over about 40, a drink a day will reduce your chances of heart trouble.", "The British health authorities, in their 1995 guidelines (\"Sensible Drinking\"), say that people who drink very little or not at all and are in an age group at high risk for heart disease should \"consider the possibility that light drinking might benefit their health.\" But American authorities balk even at such a modest suggestion. \n\n And so the U.S. official nutritional guidelines say just this about potential benefits: \"Current evidence suggests that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk for coronary heart disease in some individuals.\" They then go on to recite a litany of risks (for the text, click here). Similarly, the American Heart Association's official recommendation advises, \"If you drink, do so in moderation.\" It goes on to say heart disease is lower in moderate drinkers but then warns of other dangers and cautions against \"guidelines to the general public\" that encourage drinking (for the full text, click here). See for yourself, but I think the message most people would get from both sources is \"Drinking isn't all bad, but eschew it anyway.\"", "Iasked Ronald Krauss--a doctor who, as the immediate past chairman of the American Heart Association's nutrition committee, helped write that statement--whether it was aggressive enough. \"We don't have much leeway around that 'one or two drinks a day,' \" he said, and what isn't known is whether encouraging moderate drinking will also encourage excessive drinking. \n\n The public health people understandably dread creating more drunks, more broken marriages, more crime, more car wrecks. \"When somebody calls you up saying, 'You're putting out a message to people to drink, and my daughter just got killed last night because of some drunk,' that's the other side of the equation,\" Thun says. \"There are substantial numbers of people out there who are looking for justification to drink more than they should.\"", "Areal worry. But there are lives, again, on both sides of the equation. The question, then, is what would happen if the public health folks ran a campaign saying, for example, \"Just One Drink\" or \"Drink a Little--Not a Lot.\" Would people's drinking habits improve, or would we create a nation of drunks--or what? The answer is: Nobody knows. What is surprising, given the public health community's usual eagerness to save lives, is that no one is trying to find out. It is simply assumed that too many people will do the wrong thing.", "\"Besides the association between smoking and lung cancer, I think this is the most consistent association I've seen in the literature,\" says Eric Rimm, a Harvard epidemiologist. Research has shown heart benefits consistently since the 1970s with, Rimm guesses, 70 or 80 studies of 30 to 35 countries by now. Not surprisingly, he has a drink on most days. \n\n Alcohol also causes harm, of course. It can increase chances of breast cancer, cirrhosis, accidents, and so on. Heart disease, however, is an enormous cause of death; improve those odds, and the net effect is significantly to the good. Last December, the New England Journal of Medicine reported the results of the biggest and probably best mortality study yet conducted, one that followed almost half a million people over nine years. It found that, after netting out all causes of death, moderate drinkers over 30 were 20 percent less likely than nondrinkers to die prematurely.", "\"People have a very hard time with complicated messages,\" says Thun. No doubt some people do. But is it really so hard to understand that a glass a day may help save your life if you're of middle age or beyond, but that more than that is dangerous? Presumably an avoidable heart attack is equally tragic whether the cause is too much alcohol or too little. To continue today's policy of muttering and changing the subject verges perilously on saying not just that too much alcohol is bad for you but that ignorance is good for you. \n\n \n\n ENDNOTES \n\n \n\n Note 1 \n\n By law, the label on alcoholic beverages reads:", "Temperance Kills \n\n First, to prevent any misunderstanding, the warning: Alcohol, when abused, is vicious, dangerous stuff. Each year about 100,000 Americans die alcohol-related deaths. No one should drink and drive or drink to excess. Some people--teen-agers, people on contraindicated medications, pregnant women, and those who have trouble controlling their consumption--should avoid alcohol, period. And all that you know already. \n\n Here is what you may not know--or may know only fuzzily. For most people of middle age and beyond, one drink a day helps prevent heart disease and makes you less likely to die prematurely. After one or (for men) two drinks, bad effects swamp the good--dosage is everything! But on average the positive cardiovascular effect of moderate drinking is not small, and it is not in dispute. Epidemiologists figure that if all Americans became teetotalers tomorrow, about 80,000 more people might die each year of heart disease. So there are lives on both sides of the equation.", "According to documents obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute in its lawsuit to have the current policy overturned, the statements that the bureau has barred include the following: \"Several medical authorities say that a glass or two of wine enjoyed daily is not only a pleasant experience but can be beneficial to an adult's health.\" \"Having reviewed modern research on the benefits of modest wine consumption, we believe that our wine, when enjoyed with wholesome food, will promote health and enhance the pleasure of life.\" \n\n Currently the wine industry is pushing--so far without success--for approval of wine labels that read \"To learn the health effects of moderate wine consumption, send for the federal government's Dietary Guidelines for Americans\"--followed by the Agriculture Department's address and Web site. \n\n Back \n\n \n\n Note 3 \n\n Excerpts from the U.S. government's current (1995) dietary guidelines (click here for the full text) include the following:", "Current evidence suggests that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk for coronary heart disease in some individuals. However, higher levels of alcohol intake raise the risk for high blood pressure, stroke, heart disease, certain cancers, accidents, violence, suicides, birth defects, and overall mortality (deaths). Too much alcohol may cause cirrhosis of the liver, inflammation of the pancreas, and damage to the brain and heart. Heavy drinkers also are at risk of malnutrition because alcohol contains calories that may substitute for those in more nutritious foods. \n\n If you drink alcoholic beverages, do so in moderation, with meals, and when consumption does not put you or others at risk. \n\n Moderation is defined as no more than one drink per day for women and no more than two drinks per day for men. Count as a drink-- \n\n --12 ounces of regular beer (150 calories) \n\n --5 ounces of wine (100 calories)", "GOVERNMENT WARNING: (1) According to the Surgeon General, women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth defects. (2) Consumption of alcoholic beverages impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery, and may cause health problems. \n\n Back \n\n \n\n Note 2 \n\n The law forbids \"curative and therapeutic claims\" in alcohol marketing \"if such statement is untrue in any particular or tends to create a misleading impression.\" In practice, the BATF interprets this to mean that any health claim must be fully balanced and says it \"considers it extremely unlikely that such a balanced claim would fit on a normal alcoholic beverage label.\" The only health statement the bureau has said it will accept is a four page government report, complete with 34 footnotes. (You can read that report by clicking here.)", "Back \n\n If you missed your government warning, click here. And here, again, is additional information on the BATF's onerous restrictions on health claims, the U.S. government's current dietary guidelines dealing with alcohol, and the American Heart Association's recommendation on alcohol.", "--1.5 ounces of 80-proof distilled spirits (100 calories) \n\n Back \n\n \n\n Note 4 \n\n Here is the American Heart Association's recommendation on alcohol: \n\n If you drink, do so in moderation. The incidence of heart disease in those who consume moderate amounts of alcohol (an average of one to two drinks per day for men and one drink per day for women) is lower than in nondrinkers. However, with increased intake of alcohol, there are increased public health dangers, such as alcoholism, high blood pressure, obesity, stroke, suicide, and accidents. In light of these and other risks, the AHA believes it is not advisable to issue guidelines to the general public that may lead some to increase their intake of alcohol or start drinking if they do not already do so. It is best to consult with your doctor for advice on consuming alcohol in moderation (no more than 2 drinks per day)." ], [ "Current evidence suggests that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk for coronary heart disease in some individuals. However, higher levels of alcohol intake raise the risk for high blood pressure, stroke, heart disease, certain cancers, accidents, violence, suicides, birth defects, and overall mortality (deaths). Too much alcohol may cause cirrhosis of the liver, inflammation of the pancreas, and damage to the brain and heart. Heavy drinkers also are at risk of malnutrition because alcohol contains calories that may substitute for those in more nutritious foods. \n\n If you drink alcoholic beverages, do so in moderation, with meals, and when consumption does not put you or others at risk. \n\n Moderation is defined as no more than one drink per day for women and no more than two drinks per day for men. Count as a drink-- \n\n --12 ounces of regular beer (150 calories) \n\n --5 ounces of wine (100 calories)", "\"People have a very hard time with complicated messages,\" says Thun. No doubt some people do. But is it really so hard to understand that a glass a day may help save your life if you're of middle age or beyond, but that more than that is dangerous? Presumably an avoidable heart attack is equally tragic whether the cause is too much alcohol or too little. To continue today's policy of muttering and changing the subject verges perilously on saying not just that too much alcohol is bad for you but that ignorance is good for you. \n\n \n\n ENDNOTES \n\n \n\n Note 1 \n\n By law, the label on alcoholic beverages reads:", "\"Besides the association between smoking and lung cancer, I think this is the most consistent association I've seen in the literature,\" says Eric Rimm, a Harvard epidemiologist. Research has shown heart benefits consistently since the 1970s with, Rimm guesses, 70 or 80 studies of 30 to 35 countries by now. Not surprisingly, he has a drink on most days. \n\n Alcohol also causes harm, of course. It can increase chances of breast cancer, cirrhosis, accidents, and so on. Heart disease, however, is an enormous cause of death; improve those odds, and the net effect is significantly to the good. Last December, the New England Journal of Medicine reported the results of the biggest and probably best mortality study yet conducted, one that followed almost half a million people over nine years. It found that, after netting out all causes of death, moderate drinkers over 30 were 20 percent less likely than nondrinkers to die prematurely.", "The British health authorities, in their 1995 guidelines (\"Sensible Drinking\"), say that people who drink very little or not at all and are in an age group at high risk for heart disease should \"consider the possibility that light drinking might benefit their health.\" But American authorities balk even at such a modest suggestion. \n\n And so the U.S. official nutritional guidelines say just this about potential benefits: \"Current evidence suggests that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk for coronary heart disease in some individuals.\" They then go on to recite a litany of risks (for the text, click here). Similarly, the American Heart Association's official recommendation advises, \"If you drink, do so in moderation.\" It goes on to say heart disease is lower in moderate drinkers but then warns of other dangers and cautions against \"guidelines to the general public\" that encourage drinking (for the full text, click here). See for yourself, but I think the message most people would get from both sources is \"Drinking isn't all bad, but eschew it anyway.\"", "Iasked Ronald Krauss--a doctor who, as the immediate past chairman of the American Heart Association's nutrition committee, helped write that statement--whether it was aggressive enough. \"We don't have much leeway around that 'one or two drinks a day,' \" he said, and what isn't known is whether encouraging moderate drinking will also encourage excessive drinking. \n\n The public health people understandably dread creating more drunks, more broken marriages, more crime, more car wrecks. \"When somebody calls you up saying, 'You're putting out a message to people to drink, and my daughter just got killed last night because of some drunk,' that's the other side of the equation,\" Thun says. \"There are substantial numbers of people out there who are looking for justification to drink more than they should.\"", "But there are a lot of people like my father out there: uninformed or vaguely informed or not thinking about it. In 1995, a free market advocacy group called the Competitive Enterprise Institute commissioned a survey asking people whether they believed \"that scientific evidence exists showing that moderate consumption of alcohol, approximately one or two drinks per day, may reduce the risk of heart disease for many people.\" Only 42 percent of those who responded said they did, and a majority of those believed, wrongly, that the potential benefits come only from wine. \n\n The evidence on alcohol and health is now more than 20 years old--so why the confusion? Two groups have a stake in getting the word out, but one of them, the alcohol industry, is effectively forbidden to do so. Every bottle of alcohol carries a government warning label, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has never permitted ads or labels to carry any health claims, even mild ones. (For more on rejected health claims, click here.)", "One of those lives might, just as an example, belong to my father. He is 69, has mild hypertension (controlled with medication) and, but for the rare social occasion, doesn't drink. He has read some news reports suggesting moderate alcohol use may yield benefits, but his doctor has never mentioned such benefits, and my father has never given a thought to changing his drinking habits. And, in the standard view of public health officialdom, that is as it should be: People should not be encouraged to drink, even in moderation, and alcohol should not be linked with better health. \n\n The trouble is that moderate drinking is linked with better health. We don't know exactly why; some evidence suggests alcohol--of whatever sort, by the way, not just red wine--stimulates \"good\" (HDL, for high density lipoprotein) cholesterol and may help prevent blood clotting. But we do know the effects: On average, if you're over about 40, a drink a day will reduce your chances of heart trouble.", "--1.5 ounces of 80-proof distilled spirits (100 calories) \n\n Back \n\n \n\n Note 4 \n\n Here is the American Heart Association's recommendation on alcohol: \n\n If you drink, do so in moderation. The incidence of heart disease in those who consume moderate amounts of alcohol (an average of one to two drinks per day for men and one drink per day for women) is lower than in nondrinkers. However, with increased intake of alcohol, there are increased public health dangers, such as alcoholism, high blood pressure, obesity, stroke, suicide, and accidents. In light of these and other risks, the AHA believes it is not advisable to issue guidelines to the general public that may lead some to increase their intake of alcohol or start drinking if they do not already do so. It is best to consult with your doctor for advice on consuming alcohol in moderation (no more than 2 drinks per day).", "GOVERNMENT WARNING: (1) According to the Surgeon General, women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth defects. (2) Consumption of alcoholic beverages impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery, and may cause health problems. \n\n Back \n\n \n\n Note 2 \n\n The law forbids \"curative and therapeutic claims\" in alcohol marketing \"if such statement is untrue in any particular or tends to create a misleading impression.\" In practice, the BATF interprets this to mean that any health claim must be fully balanced and says it \"considers it extremely unlikely that such a balanced claim would fit on a normal alcoholic beverage label.\" The only health statement the bureau has said it will accept is a four page government report, complete with 34 footnotes. (You can read that report by clicking here.)", "Temperance Kills \n\n First, to prevent any misunderstanding, the warning: Alcohol, when abused, is vicious, dangerous stuff. Each year about 100,000 Americans die alcohol-related deaths. No one should drink and drive or drink to excess. Some people--teen-agers, people on contraindicated medications, pregnant women, and those who have trouble controlling their consumption--should avoid alcohol, period. And all that you know already. \n\n Here is what you may not know--or may know only fuzzily. For most people of middle age and beyond, one drink a day helps prevent heart disease and makes you less likely to die prematurely. After one or (for men) two drinks, bad effects swamp the good--dosage is everything! But on average the positive cardiovascular effect of moderate drinking is not small, and it is not in dispute. Epidemiologists figure that if all Americans became teetotalers tomorrow, about 80,000 more people might die each year of heart disease. So there are lives on both sides of the equation.", "Areal worry. But there are lives, again, on both sides of the equation. The question, then, is what would happen if the public health folks ran a campaign saying, for example, \"Just One Drink\" or \"Drink a Little--Not a Lot.\" Would people's drinking habits improve, or would we create a nation of drunks--or what? The answer is: Nobody knows. What is surprising, given the public health community's usual eagerness to save lives, is that no one is trying to find out. It is simply assumed that too many people will do the wrong thing.", "Given that the government restricts health claims even for innocuous foods such as orange juice and eggs, it's reasonable to decide that booze merchants are the wrong people to entrust with public education about drinking. That leaves only one other constituency for getting the word out: the public health community. Its approach, however, might charitably be called cautious--or, less charitably, embarrassed mumbling. \n\n For example, the authors of the aforementioned New England Journal study characterized their finding of a 20 percent mortality reduction as \"slight.\" The accompanying editorial called it \"small.\" I phoned Michael J. Thun, one of the study's authors and an epidemiologist with the American Cancer Society, and asked him whether a 20 percent mortality reduction is indeed small in the world of epidemiology. \"It's a sizable benefit in terms of prolonged survival,\" he said. Why not say so? \"Messages about alcohol don't come out the way you say them when they're broadcast,\" he replied. \"There's been a very long history in society of problems with alcohol.\"", "According to documents obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute in its lawsuit to have the current policy overturned, the statements that the bureau has barred include the following: \"Several medical authorities say that a glass or two of wine enjoyed daily is not only a pleasant experience but can be beneficial to an adult's health.\" \"Having reviewed modern research on the benefits of modest wine consumption, we believe that our wine, when enjoyed with wholesome food, will promote health and enhance the pleasure of life.\" \n\n Currently the wine industry is pushing--so far without success--for approval of wine labels that read \"To learn the health effects of moderate wine consumption, send for the federal government's Dietary Guidelines for Americans\"--followed by the Agriculture Department's address and Web site. \n\n Back \n\n \n\n Note 3 \n\n Excerpts from the U.S. government's current (1995) dietary guidelines (click here for the full text) include the following:", "Back \n\n If you missed your government warning, click here. And here, again, is additional information on the BATF's onerous restrictions on health claims, the U.S. government's current dietary guidelines dealing with alcohol, and the American Heart Association's recommendation on alcohol." ], [ "Given that the government restricts health claims even for innocuous foods such as orange juice and eggs, it's reasonable to decide that booze merchants are the wrong people to entrust with public education about drinking. That leaves only one other constituency for getting the word out: the public health community. Its approach, however, might charitably be called cautious--or, less charitably, embarrassed mumbling. \n\n For example, the authors of the aforementioned New England Journal study characterized their finding of a 20 percent mortality reduction as \"slight.\" The accompanying editorial called it \"small.\" I phoned Michael J. Thun, one of the study's authors and an epidemiologist with the American Cancer Society, and asked him whether a 20 percent mortality reduction is indeed small in the world of epidemiology. \"It's a sizable benefit in terms of prolonged survival,\" he said. Why not say so? \"Messages about alcohol don't come out the way you say them when they're broadcast,\" he replied. \"There's been a very long history in society of problems with alcohol.\"", "One of those lives might, just as an example, belong to my father. He is 69, has mild hypertension (controlled with medication) and, but for the rare social occasion, doesn't drink. He has read some news reports suggesting moderate alcohol use may yield benefits, but his doctor has never mentioned such benefits, and my father has never given a thought to changing his drinking habits. And, in the standard view of public health officialdom, that is as it should be: People should not be encouraged to drink, even in moderation, and alcohol should not be linked with better health. \n\n The trouble is that moderate drinking is linked with better health. We don't know exactly why; some evidence suggests alcohol--of whatever sort, by the way, not just red wine--stimulates \"good\" (HDL, for high density lipoprotein) cholesterol and may help prevent blood clotting. But we do know the effects: On average, if you're over about 40, a drink a day will reduce your chances of heart trouble.", "\"Besides the association between smoking and lung cancer, I think this is the most consistent association I've seen in the literature,\" says Eric Rimm, a Harvard epidemiologist. Research has shown heart benefits consistently since the 1970s with, Rimm guesses, 70 or 80 studies of 30 to 35 countries by now. Not surprisingly, he has a drink on most days. \n\n Alcohol also causes harm, of course. It can increase chances of breast cancer, cirrhosis, accidents, and so on. Heart disease, however, is an enormous cause of death; improve those odds, and the net effect is significantly to the good. Last December, the New England Journal of Medicine reported the results of the biggest and probably best mortality study yet conducted, one that followed almost half a million people over nine years. It found that, after netting out all causes of death, moderate drinkers over 30 were 20 percent less likely than nondrinkers to die prematurely.", "Areal worry. But there are lives, again, on both sides of the equation. The question, then, is what would happen if the public health folks ran a campaign saying, for example, \"Just One Drink\" or \"Drink a Little--Not a Lot.\" Would people's drinking habits improve, or would we create a nation of drunks--or what? The answer is: Nobody knows. What is surprising, given the public health community's usual eagerness to save lives, is that no one is trying to find out. It is simply assumed that too many people will do the wrong thing.", "Iasked Ronald Krauss--a doctor who, as the immediate past chairman of the American Heart Association's nutrition committee, helped write that statement--whether it was aggressive enough. \"We don't have much leeway around that 'one or two drinks a day,' \" he said, and what isn't known is whether encouraging moderate drinking will also encourage excessive drinking. \n\n The public health people understandably dread creating more drunks, more broken marriages, more crime, more car wrecks. \"When somebody calls you up saying, 'You're putting out a message to people to drink, and my daughter just got killed last night because of some drunk,' that's the other side of the equation,\" Thun says. \"There are substantial numbers of people out there who are looking for justification to drink more than they should.\"", "But there are a lot of people like my father out there: uninformed or vaguely informed or not thinking about it. In 1995, a free market advocacy group called the Competitive Enterprise Institute commissioned a survey asking people whether they believed \"that scientific evidence exists showing that moderate consumption of alcohol, approximately one or two drinks per day, may reduce the risk of heart disease for many people.\" Only 42 percent of those who responded said they did, and a majority of those believed, wrongly, that the potential benefits come only from wine. \n\n The evidence on alcohol and health is now more than 20 years old--so why the confusion? Two groups have a stake in getting the word out, but one of them, the alcohol industry, is effectively forbidden to do so. Every bottle of alcohol carries a government warning label, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has never permitted ads or labels to carry any health claims, even mild ones. (For more on rejected health claims, click here.)", "\"People have a very hard time with complicated messages,\" says Thun. No doubt some people do. But is it really so hard to understand that a glass a day may help save your life if you're of middle age or beyond, but that more than that is dangerous? Presumably an avoidable heart attack is equally tragic whether the cause is too much alcohol or too little. To continue today's policy of muttering and changing the subject verges perilously on saying not just that too much alcohol is bad for you but that ignorance is good for you. \n\n \n\n ENDNOTES \n\n \n\n Note 1 \n\n By law, the label on alcoholic beverages reads:", "The British health authorities, in their 1995 guidelines (\"Sensible Drinking\"), say that people who drink very little or not at all and are in an age group at high risk for heart disease should \"consider the possibility that light drinking might benefit their health.\" But American authorities balk even at such a modest suggestion. \n\n And so the U.S. official nutritional guidelines say just this about potential benefits: \"Current evidence suggests that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk for coronary heart disease in some individuals.\" They then go on to recite a litany of risks (for the text, click here). Similarly, the American Heart Association's official recommendation advises, \"If you drink, do so in moderation.\" It goes on to say heart disease is lower in moderate drinkers but then warns of other dangers and cautions against \"guidelines to the general public\" that encourage drinking (for the full text, click here). See for yourself, but I think the message most people would get from both sources is \"Drinking isn't all bad, but eschew it anyway.\"", "Temperance Kills \n\n First, to prevent any misunderstanding, the warning: Alcohol, when abused, is vicious, dangerous stuff. Each year about 100,000 Americans die alcohol-related deaths. No one should drink and drive or drink to excess. Some people--teen-agers, people on contraindicated medications, pregnant women, and those who have trouble controlling their consumption--should avoid alcohol, period. And all that you know already. \n\n Here is what you may not know--or may know only fuzzily. For most people of middle age and beyond, one drink a day helps prevent heart disease and makes you less likely to die prematurely. After one or (for men) two drinks, bad effects swamp the good--dosage is everything! But on average the positive cardiovascular effect of moderate drinking is not small, and it is not in dispute. Epidemiologists figure that if all Americans became teetotalers tomorrow, about 80,000 more people might die each year of heart disease. So there are lives on both sides of the equation.", "According to documents obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute in its lawsuit to have the current policy overturned, the statements that the bureau has barred include the following: \"Several medical authorities say that a glass or two of wine enjoyed daily is not only a pleasant experience but can be beneficial to an adult's health.\" \"Having reviewed modern research on the benefits of modest wine consumption, we believe that our wine, when enjoyed with wholesome food, will promote health and enhance the pleasure of life.\" \n\n Currently the wine industry is pushing--so far without success--for approval of wine labels that read \"To learn the health effects of moderate wine consumption, send for the federal government's Dietary Guidelines for Americans\"--followed by the Agriculture Department's address and Web site. \n\n Back \n\n \n\n Note 3 \n\n Excerpts from the U.S. government's current (1995) dietary guidelines (click here for the full text) include the following:", "Current evidence suggests that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk for coronary heart disease in some individuals. However, higher levels of alcohol intake raise the risk for high blood pressure, stroke, heart disease, certain cancers, accidents, violence, suicides, birth defects, and overall mortality (deaths). Too much alcohol may cause cirrhosis of the liver, inflammation of the pancreas, and damage to the brain and heart. Heavy drinkers also are at risk of malnutrition because alcohol contains calories that may substitute for those in more nutritious foods. \n\n If you drink alcoholic beverages, do so in moderation, with meals, and when consumption does not put you or others at risk. \n\n Moderation is defined as no more than one drink per day for women and no more than two drinks per day for men. Count as a drink-- \n\n --12 ounces of regular beer (150 calories) \n\n --5 ounces of wine (100 calories)", "Back \n\n If you missed your government warning, click here. And here, again, is additional information on the BATF's onerous restrictions on health claims, the U.S. government's current dietary guidelines dealing with alcohol, and the American Heart Association's recommendation on alcohol.", "GOVERNMENT WARNING: (1) According to the Surgeon General, women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth defects. (2) Consumption of alcoholic beverages impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery, and may cause health problems. \n\n Back \n\n \n\n Note 2 \n\n The law forbids \"curative and therapeutic claims\" in alcohol marketing \"if such statement is untrue in any particular or tends to create a misleading impression.\" In practice, the BATF interprets this to mean that any health claim must be fully balanced and says it \"considers it extremely unlikely that such a balanced claim would fit on a normal alcoholic beverage label.\" The only health statement the bureau has said it will accept is a four page government report, complete with 34 footnotes. (You can read that report by clicking here.)", "--1.5 ounces of 80-proof distilled spirits (100 calories) \n\n Back \n\n \n\n Note 4 \n\n Here is the American Heart Association's recommendation on alcohol: \n\n If you drink, do so in moderation. The incidence of heart disease in those who consume moderate amounts of alcohol (an average of one to two drinks per day for men and one drink per day for women) is lower than in nondrinkers. However, with increased intake of alcohol, there are increased public health dangers, such as alcoholism, high blood pressure, obesity, stroke, suicide, and accidents. In light of these and other risks, the AHA believes it is not advisable to issue guidelines to the general public that may lead some to increase their intake of alcohol or start drinking if they do not already do so. It is best to consult with your doctor for advice on consuming alcohol in moderation (no more than 2 drinks per day)." ], [ "Given that the government restricts health claims even for innocuous foods such as orange juice and eggs, it's reasonable to decide that booze merchants are the wrong people to entrust with public education about drinking. That leaves only one other constituency for getting the word out: the public health community. Its approach, however, might charitably be called cautious--or, less charitably, embarrassed mumbling. \n\n For example, the authors of the aforementioned New England Journal study characterized their finding of a 20 percent mortality reduction as \"slight.\" The accompanying editorial called it \"small.\" I phoned Michael J. Thun, one of the study's authors and an epidemiologist with the American Cancer Society, and asked him whether a 20 percent mortality reduction is indeed small in the world of epidemiology. \"It's a sizable benefit in terms of prolonged survival,\" he said. Why not say so? \"Messages about alcohol don't come out the way you say them when they're broadcast,\" he replied. \"There's been a very long history in society of problems with alcohol.\"", "One of those lives might, just as an example, belong to my father. He is 69, has mild hypertension (controlled with medication) and, but for the rare social occasion, doesn't drink. He has read some news reports suggesting moderate alcohol use may yield benefits, but his doctor has never mentioned such benefits, and my father has never given a thought to changing his drinking habits. And, in the standard view of public health officialdom, that is as it should be: People should not be encouraged to drink, even in moderation, and alcohol should not be linked with better health. \n\n The trouble is that moderate drinking is linked with better health. We don't know exactly why; some evidence suggests alcohol--of whatever sort, by the way, not just red wine--stimulates \"good\" (HDL, for high density lipoprotein) cholesterol and may help prevent blood clotting. But we do know the effects: On average, if you're over about 40, a drink a day will reduce your chances of heart trouble.", "\"Besides the association between smoking and lung cancer, I think this is the most consistent association I've seen in the literature,\" says Eric Rimm, a Harvard epidemiologist. Research has shown heart benefits consistently since the 1970s with, Rimm guesses, 70 or 80 studies of 30 to 35 countries by now. Not surprisingly, he has a drink on most days. \n\n Alcohol also causes harm, of course. It can increase chances of breast cancer, cirrhosis, accidents, and so on. Heart disease, however, is an enormous cause of death; improve those odds, and the net effect is significantly to the good. Last December, the New England Journal of Medicine reported the results of the biggest and probably best mortality study yet conducted, one that followed almost half a million people over nine years. It found that, after netting out all causes of death, moderate drinkers over 30 were 20 percent less likely than nondrinkers to die prematurely.", "Iasked Ronald Krauss--a doctor who, as the immediate past chairman of the American Heart Association's nutrition committee, helped write that statement--whether it was aggressive enough. \"We don't have much leeway around that 'one or two drinks a day,' \" he said, and what isn't known is whether encouraging moderate drinking will also encourage excessive drinking. \n\n The public health people understandably dread creating more drunks, more broken marriages, more crime, more car wrecks. \"When somebody calls you up saying, 'You're putting out a message to people to drink, and my daughter just got killed last night because of some drunk,' that's the other side of the equation,\" Thun says. \"There are substantial numbers of people out there who are looking for justification to drink more than they should.\"", "But there are a lot of people like my father out there: uninformed or vaguely informed or not thinking about it. In 1995, a free market advocacy group called the Competitive Enterprise Institute commissioned a survey asking people whether they believed \"that scientific evidence exists showing that moderate consumption of alcohol, approximately one or two drinks per day, may reduce the risk of heart disease for many people.\" Only 42 percent of those who responded said they did, and a majority of those believed, wrongly, that the potential benefits come only from wine. \n\n The evidence on alcohol and health is now more than 20 years old--so why the confusion? Two groups have a stake in getting the word out, but one of them, the alcohol industry, is effectively forbidden to do so. Every bottle of alcohol carries a government warning label, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has never permitted ads or labels to carry any health claims, even mild ones. (For more on rejected health claims, click here.)", "Areal worry. But there are lives, again, on both sides of the equation. The question, then, is what would happen if the public health folks ran a campaign saying, for example, \"Just One Drink\" or \"Drink a Little--Not a Lot.\" Would people's drinking habits improve, or would we create a nation of drunks--or what? The answer is: Nobody knows. What is surprising, given the public health community's usual eagerness to save lives, is that no one is trying to find out. It is simply assumed that too many people will do the wrong thing.", "\"People have a very hard time with complicated messages,\" says Thun. No doubt some people do. But is it really so hard to understand that a glass a day may help save your life if you're of middle age or beyond, but that more than that is dangerous? Presumably an avoidable heart attack is equally tragic whether the cause is too much alcohol or too little. To continue today's policy of muttering and changing the subject verges perilously on saying not just that too much alcohol is bad for you but that ignorance is good for you. \n\n \n\n ENDNOTES \n\n \n\n Note 1 \n\n By law, the label on alcoholic beverages reads:", "Temperance Kills \n\n First, to prevent any misunderstanding, the warning: Alcohol, when abused, is vicious, dangerous stuff. Each year about 100,000 Americans die alcohol-related deaths. No one should drink and drive or drink to excess. Some people--teen-agers, people on contraindicated medications, pregnant women, and those who have trouble controlling their consumption--should avoid alcohol, period. And all that you know already. \n\n Here is what you may not know--or may know only fuzzily. For most people of middle age and beyond, one drink a day helps prevent heart disease and makes you less likely to die prematurely. After one or (for men) two drinks, bad effects swamp the good--dosage is everything! But on average the positive cardiovascular effect of moderate drinking is not small, and it is not in dispute. Epidemiologists figure that if all Americans became teetotalers tomorrow, about 80,000 more people might die each year of heart disease. So there are lives on both sides of the equation.", "The British health authorities, in their 1995 guidelines (\"Sensible Drinking\"), say that people who drink very little or not at all and are in an age group at high risk for heart disease should \"consider the possibility that light drinking might benefit their health.\" But American authorities balk even at such a modest suggestion. \n\n And so the U.S. official nutritional guidelines say just this about potential benefits: \"Current evidence suggests that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk for coronary heart disease in some individuals.\" They then go on to recite a litany of risks (for the text, click here). Similarly, the American Heart Association's official recommendation advises, \"If you drink, do so in moderation.\" It goes on to say heart disease is lower in moderate drinkers but then warns of other dangers and cautions against \"guidelines to the general public\" that encourage drinking (for the full text, click here). See for yourself, but I think the message most people would get from both sources is \"Drinking isn't all bad, but eschew it anyway.\"", "According to documents obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute in its lawsuit to have the current policy overturned, the statements that the bureau has barred include the following: \"Several medical authorities say that a glass or two of wine enjoyed daily is not only a pleasant experience but can be beneficial to an adult's health.\" \"Having reviewed modern research on the benefits of modest wine consumption, we believe that our wine, when enjoyed with wholesome food, will promote health and enhance the pleasure of life.\" \n\n Currently the wine industry is pushing--so far without success--for approval of wine labels that read \"To learn the health effects of moderate wine consumption, send for the federal government's Dietary Guidelines for Americans\"--followed by the Agriculture Department's address and Web site. \n\n Back \n\n \n\n Note 3 \n\n Excerpts from the U.S. government's current (1995) dietary guidelines (click here for the full text) include the following:", "Back \n\n If you missed your government warning, click here. And here, again, is additional information on the BATF's onerous restrictions on health claims, the U.S. government's current dietary guidelines dealing with alcohol, and the American Heart Association's recommendation on alcohol.", "GOVERNMENT WARNING: (1) According to the Surgeon General, women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth defects. (2) Consumption of alcoholic beverages impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery, and may cause health problems. \n\n Back \n\n \n\n Note 2 \n\n The law forbids \"curative and therapeutic claims\" in alcohol marketing \"if such statement is untrue in any particular or tends to create a misleading impression.\" In practice, the BATF interprets this to mean that any health claim must be fully balanced and says it \"considers it extremely unlikely that such a balanced claim would fit on a normal alcoholic beverage label.\" The only health statement the bureau has said it will accept is a four page government report, complete with 34 footnotes. (You can read that report by clicking here.)", "Current evidence suggests that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk for coronary heart disease in some individuals. However, higher levels of alcohol intake raise the risk for high blood pressure, stroke, heart disease, certain cancers, accidents, violence, suicides, birth defects, and overall mortality (deaths). Too much alcohol may cause cirrhosis of the liver, inflammation of the pancreas, and damage to the brain and heart. Heavy drinkers also are at risk of malnutrition because alcohol contains calories that may substitute for those in more nutritious foods. \n\n If you drink alcoholic beverages, do so in moderation, with meals, and when consumption does not put you or others at risk. \n\n Moderation is defined as no more than one drink per day for women and no more than two drinks per day for men. Count as a drink-- \n\n --12 ounces of regular beer (150 calories) \n\n --5 ounces of wine (100 calories)", "--1.5 ounces of 80-proof distilled spirits (100 calories) \n\n Back \n\n \n\n Note 4 \n\n Here is the American Heart Association's recommendation on alcohol: \n\n If you drink, do so in moderation. The incidence of heart disease in those who consume moderate amounts of alcohol (an average of one to two drinks per day for men and one drink per day for women) is lower than in nondrinkers. However, with increased intake of alcohol, there are increased public health dangers, such as alcoholism, high blood pressure, obesity, stroke, suicide, and accidents. In light of these and other risks, the AHA believes it is not advisable to issue guidelines to the general public that may lead some to increase their intake of alcohol or start drinking if they do not already do so. It is best to consult with your doctor for advice on consuming alcohol in moderation (no more than 2 drinks per day)." ], [ "But there are a lot of people like my father out there: uninformed or vaguely informed or not thinking about it. In 1995, a free market advocacy group called the Competitive Enterprise Institute commissioned a survey asking people whether they believed \"that scientific evidence exists showing that moderate consumption of alcohol, approximately one or two drinks per day, may reduce the risk of heart disease for many people.\" Only 42 percent of those who responded said they did, and a majority of those believed, wrongly, that the potential benefits come only from wine. \n\n The evidence on alcohol and health is now more than 20 years old--so why the confusion? Two groups have a stake in getting the word out, but one of them, the alcohol industry, is effectively forbidden to do so. Every bottle of alcohol carries a government warning label, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has never permitted ads or labels to carry any health claims, even mild ones. (For more on rejected health claims, click here.)", "According to documents obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute in its lawsuit to have the current policy overturned, the statements that the bureau has barred include the following: \"Several medical authorities say that a glass or two of wine enjoyed daily is not only a pleasant experience but can be beneficial to an adult's health.\" \"Having reviewed modern research on the benefits of modest wine consumption, we believe that our wine, when enjoyed with wholesome food, will promote health and enhance the pleasure of life.\" \n\n Currently the wine industry is pushing--so far without success--for approval of wine labels that read \"To learn the health effects of moderate wine consumption, send for the federal government's Dietary Guidelines for Americans\"--followed by the Agriculture Department's address and Web site. \n\n Back \n\n \n\n Note 3 \n\n Excerpts from the U.S. government's current (1995) dietary guidelines (click here for the full text) include the following:", "Given that the government restricts health claims even for innocuous foods such as orange juice and eggs, it's reasonable to decide that booze merchants are the wrong people to entrust with public education about drinking. That leaves only one other constituency for getting the word out: the public health community. Its approach, however, might charitably be called cautious--or, less charitably, embarrassed mumbling. \n\n For example, the authors of the aforementioned New England Journal study characterized their finding of a 20 percent mortality reduction as \"slight.\" The accompanying editorial called it \"small.\" I phoned Michael J. Thun, one of the study's authors and an epidemiologist with the American Cancer Society, and asked him whether a 20 percent mortality reduction is indeed small in the world of epidemiology. \"It's a sizable benefit in terms of prolonged survival,\" he said. Why not say so? \"Messages about alcohol don't come out the way you say them when they're broadcast,\" he replied. \"There's been a very long history in society of problems with alcohol.\"", "Areal worry. But there are lives, again, on both sides of the equation. The question, then, is what would happen if the public health folks ran a campaign saying, for example, \"Just One Drink\" or \"Drink a Little--Not a Lot.\" Would people's drinking habits improve, or would we create a nation of drunks--or what? The answer is: Nobody knows. What is surprising, given the public health community's usual eagerness to save lives, is that no one is trying to find out. It is simply assumed that too many people will do the wrong thing.", "Iasked Ronald Krauss--a doctor who, as the immediate past chairman of the American Heart Association's nutrition committee, helped write that statement--whether it was aggressive enough. \"We don't have much leeway around that 'one or two drinks a day,' \" he said, and what isn't known is whether encouraging moderate drinking will also encourage excessive drinking. \n\n The public health people understandably dread creating more drunks, more broken marriages, more crime, more car wrecks. \"When somebody calls you up saying, 'You're putting out a message to people to drink, and my daughter just got killed last night because of some drunk,' that's the other side of the equation,\" Thun says. \"There are substantial numbers of people out there who are looking for justification to drink more than they should.\"", "One of those lives might, just as an example, belong to my father. He is 69, has mild hypertension (controlled with medication) and, but for the rare social occasion, doesn't drink. He has read some news reports suggesting moderate alcohol use may yield benefits, but his doctor has never mentioned such benefits, and my father has never given a thought to changing his drinking habits. And, in the standard view of public health officialdom, that is as it should be: People should not be encouraged to drink, even in moderation, and alcohol should not be linked with better health. \n\n The trouble is that moderate drinking is linked with better health. We don't know exactly why; some evidence suggests alcohol--of whatever sort, by the way, not just red wine--stimulates \"good\" (HDL, for high density lipoprotein) cholesterol and may help prevent blood clotting. But we do know the effects: On average, if you're over about 40, a drink a day will reduce your chances of heart trouble.", "\"Besides the association between smoking and lung cancer, I think this is the most consistent association I've seen in the literature,\" says Eric Rimm, a Harvard epidemiologist. Research has shown heart benefits consistently since the 1970s with, Rimm guesses, 70 or 80 studies of 30 to 35 countries by now. Not surprisingly, he has a drink on most days. \n\n Alcohol also causes harm, of course. It can increase chances of breast cancer, cirrhosis, accidents, and so on. Heart disease, however, is an enormous cause of death; improve those odds, and the net effect is significantly to the good. Last December, the New England Journal of Medicine reported the results of the biggest and probably best mortality study yet conducted, one that followed almost half a million people over nine years. It found that, after netting out all causes of death, moderate drinkers over 30 were 20 percent less likely than nondrinkers to die prematurely.", "\"People have a very hard time with complicated messages,\" says Thun. No doubt some people do. But is it really so hard to understand that a glass a day may help save your life if you're of middle age or beyond, but that more than that is dangerous? Presumably an avoidable heart attack is equally tragic whether the cause is too much alcohol or too little. To continue today's policy of muttering and changing the subject verges perilously on saying not just that too much alcohol is bad for you but that ignorance is good for you. \n\n \n\n ENDNOTES \n\n \n\n Note 1 \n\n By law, the label on alcoholic beverages reads:", "Back \n\n If you missed your government warning, click here. And here, again, is additional information on the BATF's onerous restrictions on health claims, the U.S. government's current dietary guidelines dealing with alcohol, and the American Heart Association's recommendation on alcohol.", "GOVERNMENT WARNING: (1) According to the Surgeon General, women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth defects. (2) Consumption of alcoholic beverages impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery, and may cause health problems. \n\n Back \n\n \n\n Note 2 \n\n The law forbids \"curative and therapeutic claims\" in alcohol marketing \"if such statement is untrue in any particular or tends to create a misleading impression.\" In practice, the BATF interprets this to mean that any health claim must be fully balanced and says it \"considers it extremely unlikely that such a balanced claim would fit on a normal alcoholic beverage label.\" The only health statement the bureau has said it will accept is a four page government report, complete with 34 footnotes. (You can read that report by clicking here.)", "The British health authorities, in their 1995 guidelines (\"Sensible Drinking\"), say that people who drink very little or not at all and are in an age group at high risk for heart disease should \"consider the possibility that light drinking might benefit their health.\" But American authorities balk even at such a modest suggestion. \n\n And so the U.S. official nutritional guidelines say just this about potential benefits: \"Current evidence suggests that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk for coronary heart disease in some individuals.\" They then go on to recite a litany of risks (for the text, click here). Similarly, the American Heart Association's official recommendation advises, \"If you drink, do so in moderation.\" It goes on to say heart disease is lower in moderate drinkers but then warns of other dangers and cautions against \"guidelines to the general public\" that encourage drinking (for the full text, click here). See for yourself, but I think the message most people would get from both sources is \"Drinking isn't all bad, but eschew it anyway.\"", "Temperance Kills \n\n First, to prevent any misunderstanding, the warning: Alcohol, when abused, is vicious, dangerous stuff. Each year about 100,000 Americans die alcohol-related deaths. No one should drink and drive or drink to excess. Some people--teen-agers, people on contraindicated medications, pregnant women, and those who have trouble controlling their consumption--should avoid alcohol, period. And all that you know already. \n\n Here is what you may not know--or may know only fuzzily. For most people of middle age and beyond, one drink a day helps prevent heart disease and makes you less likely to die prematurely. After one or (for men) two drinks, bad effects swamp the good--dosage is everything! But on average the positive cardiovascular effect of moderate drinking is not small, and it is not in dispute. Epidemiologists figure that if all Americans became teetotalers tomorrow, about 80,000 more people might die each year of heart disease. So there are lives on both sides of the equation.", "Current evidence suggests that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk for coronary heart disease in some individuals. However, higher levels of alcohol intake raise the risk for high blood pressure, stroke, heart disease, certain cancers, accidents, violence, suicides, birth defects, and overall mortality (deaths). Too much alcohol may cause cirrhosis of the liver, inflammation of the pancreas, and damage to the brain and heart. Heavy drinkers also are at risk of malnutrition because alcohol contains calories that may substitute for those in more nutritious foods. \n\n If you drink alcoholic beverages, do so in moderation, with meals, and when consumption does not put you or others at risk. \n\n Moderation is defined as no more than one drink per day for women and no more than two drinks per day for men. Count as a drink-- \n\n --12 ounces of regular beer (150 calories) \n\n --5 ounces of wine (100 calories)", "--1.5 ounces of 80-proof distilled spirits (100 calories) \n\n Back \n\n \n\n Note 4 \n\n Here is the American Heart Association's recommendation on alcohol: \n\n If you drink, do so in moderation. The incidence of heart disease in those who consume moderate amounts of alcohol (an average of one to two drinks per day for men and one drink per day for women) is lower than in nondrinkers. However, with increased intake of alcohol, there are increased public health dangers, such as alcoholism, high blood pressure, obesity, stroke, suicide, and accidents. In light of these and other risks, the AHA believes it is not advisable to issue guidelines to the general public that may lead some to increase their intake of alcohol or start drinking if they do not already do so. It is best to consult with your doctor for advice on consuming alcohol in moderation (no more than 2 drinks per day)." ], [ "\"Besides the association between smoking and lung cancer, I think this is the most consistent association I've seen in the literature,\" says Eric Rimm, a Harvard epidemiologist. Research has shown heart benefits consistently since the 1970s with, Rimm guesses, 70 or 80 studies of 30 to 35 countries by now. Not surprisingly, he has a drink on most days. \n\n Alcohol also causes harm, of course. It can increase chances of breast cancer, cirrhosis, accidents, and so on. Heart disease, however, is an enormous cause of death; improve those odds, and the net effect is significantly to the good. Last December, the New England Journal of Medicine reported the results of the biggest and probably best mortality study yet conducted, one that followed almost half a million people over nine years. It found that, after netting out all causes of death, moderate drinkers over 30 were 20 percent less likely than nondrinkers to die prematurely.", "Given that the government restricts health claims even for innocuous foods such as orange juice and eggs, it's reasonable to decide that booze merchants are the wrong people to entrust with public education about drinking. That leaves only one other constituency for getting the word out: the public health community. Its approach, however, might charitably be called cautious--or, less charitably, embarrassed mumbling. \n\n For example, the authors of the aforementioned New England Journal study characterized their finding of a 20 percent mortality reduction as \"slight.\" The accompanying editorial called it \"small.\" I phoned Michael J. Thun, one of the study's authors and an epidemiologist with the American Cancer Society, and asked him whether a 20 percent mortality reduction is indeed small in the world of epidemiology. \"It's a sizable benefit in terms of prolonged survival,\" he said. Why not say so? \"Messages about alcohol don't come out the way you say them when they're broadcast,\" he replied. \"There's been a very long history in society of problems with alcohol.\"", "One of those lives might, just as an example, belong to my father. He is 69, has mild hypertension (controlled with medication) and, but for the rare social occasion, doesn't drink. He has read some news reports suggesting moderate alcohol use may yield benefits, but his doctor has never mentioned such benefits, and my father has never given a thought to changing his drinking habits. And, in the standard view of public health officialdom, that is as it should be: People should not be encouraged to drink, even in moderation, and alcohol should not be linked with better health. \n\n The trouble is that moderate drinking is linked with better health. We don't know exactly why; some evidence suggests alcohol--of whatever sort, by the way, not just red wine--stimulates \"good\" (HDL, for high density lipoprotein) cholesterol and may help prevent blood clotting. But we do know the effects: On average, if you're over about 40, a drink a day will reduce your chances of heart trouble.", "Iasked Ronald Krauss--a doctor who, as the immediate past chairman of the American Heart Association's nutrition committee, helped write that statement--whether it was aggressive enough. \"We don't have much leeway around that 'one or two drinks a day,' \" he said, and what isn't known is whether encouraging moderate drinking will also encourage excessive drinking. \n\n The public health people understandably dread creating more drunks, more broken marriages, more crime, more car wrecks. \"When somebody calls you up saying, 'You're putting out a message to people to drink, and my daughter just got killed last night because of some drunk,' that's the other side of the equation,\" Thun says. \"There are substantial numbers of people out there who are looking for justification to drink more than they should.\"", "But there are a lot of people like my father out there: uninformed or vaguely informed or not thinking about it. In 1995, a free market advocacy group called the Competitive Enterprise Institute commissioned a survey asking people whether they believed \"that scientific evidence exists showing that moderate consumption of alcohol, approximately one or two drinks per day, may reduce the risk of heart disease for many people.\" Only 42 percent of those who responded said they did, and a majority of those believed, wrongly, that the potential benefits come only from wine. \n\n The evidence on alcohol and health is now more than 20 years old--so why the confusion? Two groups have a stake in getting the word out, but one of them, the alcohol industry, is effectively forbidden to do so. Every bottle of alcohol carries a government warning label, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has never permitted ads or labels to carry any health claims, even mild ones. (For more on rejected health claims, click here.)", "\"People have a very hard time with complicated messages,\" says Thun. No doubt some people do. But is it really so hard to understand that a glass a day may help save your life if you're of middle age or beyond, but that more than that is dangerous? Presumably an avoidable heart attack is equally tragic whether the cause is too much alcohol or too little. To continue today's policy of muttering and changing the subject verges perilously on saying not just that too much alcohol is bad for you but that ignorance is good for you. \n\n \n\n ENDNOTES \n\n \n\n Note 1 \n\n By law, the label on alcoholic beverages reads:", "Areal worry. But there are lives, again, on both sides of the equation. The question, then, is what would happen if the public health folks ran a campaign saying, for example, \"Just One Drink\" or \"Drink a Little--Not a Lot.\" Would people's drinking habits improve, or would we create a nation of drunks--or what? The answer is: Nobody knows. What is surprising, given the public health community's usual eagerness to save lives, is that no one is trying to find out. It is simply assumed that too many people will do the wrong thing.", "Temperance Kills \n\n First, to prevent any misunderstanding, the warning: Alcohol, when abused, is vicious, dangerous stuff. Each year about 100,000 Americans die alcohol-related deaths. No one should drink and drive or drink to excess. Some people--teen-agers, people on contraindicated medications, pregnant women, and those who have trouble controlling their consumption--should avoid alcohol, period. And all that you know already. \n\n Here is what you may not know--or may know only fuzzily. For most people of middle age and beyond, one drink a day helps prevent heart disease and makes you less likely to die prematurely. After one or (for men) two drinks, bad effects swamp the good--dosage is everything! But on average the positive cardiovascular effect of moderate drinking is not small, and it is not in dispute. Epidemiologists figure that if all Americans became teetotalers tomorrow, about 80,000 more people might die each year of heart disease. So there are lives on both sides of the equation.", "The British health authorities, in their 1995 guidelines (\"Sensible Drinking\"), say that people who drink very little or not at all and are in an age group at high risk for heart disease should \"consider the possibility that light drinking might benefit their health.\" But American authorities balk even at such a modest suggestion. \n\n And so the U.S. official nutritional guidelines say just this about potential benefits: \"Current evidence suggests that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk for coronary heart disease in some individuals.\" They then go on to recite a litany of risks (for the text, click here). Similarly, the American Heart Association's official recommendation advises, \"If you drink, do so in moderation.\" It goes on to say heart disease is lower in moderate drinkers but then warns of other dangers and cautions against \"guidelines to the general public\" that encourage drinking (for the full text, click here). See for yourself, but I think the message most people would get from both sources is \"Drinking isn't all bad, but eschew it anyway.\"", "According to documents obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute in its lawsuit to have the current policy overturned, the statements that the bureau has barred include the following: \"Several medical authorities say that a glass or two of wine enjoyed daily is not only a pleasant experience but can be beneficial to an adult's health.\" \"Having reviewed modern research on the benefits of modest wine consumption, we believe that our wine, when enjoyed with wholesome food, will promote health and enhance the pleasure of life.\" \n\n Currently the wine industry is pushing--so far without success--for approval of wine labels that read \"To learn the health effects of moderate wine consumption, send for the federal government's Dietary Guidelines for Americans\"--followed by the Agriculture Department's address and Web site. \n\n Back \n\n \n\n Note 3 \n\n Excerpts from the U.S. government's current (1995) dietary guidelines (click here for the full text) include the following:", "Current evidence suggests that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk for coronary heart disease in some individuals. However, higher levels of alcohol intake raise the risk for high blood pressure, stroke, heart disease, certain cancers, accidents, violence, suicides, birth defects, and overall mortality (deaths). Too much alcohol may cause cirrhosis of the liver, inflammation of the pancreas, and damage to the brain and heart. Heavy drinkers also are at risk of malnutrition because alcohol contains calories that may substitute for those in more nutritious foods. \n\n If you drink alcoholic beverages, do so in moderation, with meals, and when consumption does not put you or others at risk. \n\n Moderation is defined as no more than one drink per day for women and no more than two drinks per day for men. Count as a drink-- \n\n --12 ounces of regular beer (150 calories) \n\n --5 ounces of wine (100 calories)", "GOVERNMENT WARNING: (1) According to the Surgeon General, women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth defects. (2) Consumption of alcoholic beverages impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery, and may cause health problems. \n\n Back \n\n \n\n Note 2 \n\n The law forbids \"curative and therapeutic claims\" in alcohol marketing \"if such statement is untrue in any particular or tends to create a misleading impression.\" In practice, the BATF interprets this to mean that any health claim must be fully balanced and says it \"considers it extremely unlikely that such a balanced claim would fit on a normal alcoholic beverage label.\" The only health statement the bureau has said it will accept is a four page government report, complete with 34 footnotes. (You can read that report by clicking here.)", "Back \n\n If you missed your government warning, click here. And here, again, is additional information on the BATF's onerous restrictions on health claims, the U.S. government's current dietary guidelines dealing with alcohol, and the American Heart Association's recommendation on alcohol.", "--1.5 ounces of 80-proof distilled spirits (100 calories) \n\n Back \n\n \n\n Note 4 \n\n Here is the American Heart Association's recommendation on alcohol: \n\n If you drink, do so in moderation. The incidence of heart disease in those who consume moderate amounts of alcohol (an average of one to two drinks per day for men and one drink per day for women) is lower than in nondrinkers. However, with increased intake of alcohol, there are increased public health dangers, such as alcoholism, high blood pressure, obesity, stroke, suicide, and accidents. In light of these and other risks, the AHA believes it is not advisable to issue guidelines to the general public that may lead some to increase their intake of alcohol or start drinking if they do not already do so. It is best to consult with your doctor for advice on consuming alcohol in moderation (no more than 2 drinks per day)." ], [ "Given that the government restricts health claims even for innocuous foods such as orange juice and eggs, it's reasonable to decide that booze merchants are the wrong people to entrust with public education about drinking. That leaves only one other constituency for getting the word out: the public health community. Its approach, however, might charitably be called cautious--or, less charitably, embarrassed mumbling. \n\n For example, the authors of the aforementioned New England Journal study characterized their finding of a 20 percent mortality reduction as \"slight.\" The accompanying editorial called it \"small.\" I phoned Michael J. Thun, one of the study's authors and an epidemiologist with the American Cancer Society, and asked him whether a 20 percent mortality reduction is indeed small in the world of epidemiology. \"It's a sizable benefit in terms of prolonged survival,\" he said. Why not say so? \"Messages about alcohol don't come out the way you say them when they're broadcast,\" he replied. \"There's been a very long history in society of problems with alcohol.\"", "One of those lives might, just as an example, belong to my father. He is 69, has mild hypertension (controlled with medication) and, but for the rare social occasion, doesn't drink. He has read some news reports suggesting moderate alcohol use may yield benefits, but his doctor has never mentioned such benefits, and my father has never given a thought to changing his drinking habits. And, in the standard view of public health officialdom, that is as it should be: People should not be encouraged to drink, even in moderation, and alcohol should not be linked with better health. \n\n The trouble is that moderate drinking is linked with better health. We don't know exactly why; some evidence suggests alcohol--of whatever sort, by the way, not just red wine--stimulates \"good\" (HDL, for high density lipoprotein) cholesterol and may help prevent blood clotting. But we do know the effects: On average, if you're over about 40, a drink a day will reduce your chances of heart trouble.", "Iasked Ronald Krauss--a doctor who, as the immediate past chairman of the American Heart Association's nutrition committee, helped write that statement--whether it was aggressive enough. \"We don't have much leeway around that 'one or two drinks a day,' \" he said, and what isn't known is whether encouraging moderate drinking will also encourage excessive drinking. \n\n The public health people understandably dread creating more drunks, more broken marriages, more crime, more car wrecks. \"When somebody calls you up saying, 'You're putting out a message to people to drink, and my daughter just got killed last night because of some drunk,' that's the other side of the equation,\" Thun says. \"There are substantial numbers of people out there who are looking for justification to drink more than they should.\"", "\"Besides the association between smoking and lung cancer, I think this is the most consistent association I've seen in the literature,\" says Eric Rimm, a Harvard epidemiologist. Research has shown heart benefits consistently since the 1970s with, Rimm guesses, 70 or 80 studies of 30 to 35 countries by now. Not surprisingly, he has a drink on most days. \n\n Alcohol also causes harm, of course. It can increase chances of breast cancer, cirrhosis, accidents, and so on. Heart disease, however, is an enormous cause of death; improve those odds, and the net effect is significantly to the good. Last December, the New England Journal of Medicine reported the results of the biggest and probably best mortality study yet conducted, one that followed almost half a million people over nine years. It found that, after netting out all causes of death, moderate drinkers over 30 were 20 percent less likely than nondrinkers to die prematurely.", "\"People have a very hard time with complicated messages,\" says Thun. No doubt some people do. But is it really so hard to understand that a glass a day may help save your life if you're of middle age or beyond, but that more than that is dangerous? Presumably an avoidable heart attack is equally tragic whether the cause is too much alcohol or too little. To continue today's policy of muttering and changing the subject verges perilously on saying not just that too much alcohol is bad for you but that ignorance is good for you. \n\n \n\n ENDNOTES \n\n \n\n Note 1 \n\n By law, the label on alcoholic beverages reads:", "But there are a lot of people like my father out there: uninformed or vaguely informed or not thinking about it. In 1995, a free market advocacy group called the Competitive Enterprise Institute commissioned a survey asking people whether they believed \"that scientific evidence exists showing that moderate consumption of alcohol, approximately one or two drinks per day, may reduce the risk of heart disease for many people.\" Only 42 percent of those who responded said they did, and a majority of those believed, wrongly, that the potential benefits come only from wine. \n\n The evidence on alcohol and health is now more than 20 years old--so why the confusion? Two groups have a stake in getting the word out, but one of them, the alcohol industry, is effectively forbidden to do so. Every bottle of alcohol carries a government warning label, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has never permitted ads or labels to carry any health claims, even mild ones. (For more on rejected health claims, click here.)", "Temperance Kills \n\n First, to prevent any misunderstanding, the warning: Alcohol, when abused, is vicious, dangerous stuff. Each year about 100,000 Americans die alcohol-related deaths. No one should drink and drive or drink to excess. Some people--teen-agers, people on contraindicated medications, pregnant women, and those who have trouble controlling their consumption--should avoid alcohol, period. And all that you know already. \n\n Here is what you may not know--or may know only fuzzily. For most people of middle age and beyond, one drink a day helps prevent heart disease and makes you less likely to die prematurely. After one or (for men) two drinks, bad effects swamp the good--dosage is everything! But on average the positive cardiovascular effect of moderate drinking is not small, and it is not in dispute. Epidemiologists figure that if all Americans became teetotalers tomorrow, about 80,000 more people might die each year of heart disease. So there are lives on both sides of the equation.", "The British health authorities, in their 1995 guidelines (\"Sensible Drinking\"), say that people who drink very little or not at all and are in an age group at high risk for heart disease should \"consider the possibility that light drinking might benefit their health.\" But American authorities balk even at such a modest suggestion. \n\n And so the U.S. official nutritional guidelines say just this about potential benefits: \"Current evidence suggests that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk for coronary heart disease in some individuals.\" They then go on to recite a litany of risks (for the text, click here). Similarly, the American Heart Association's official recommendation advises, \"If you drink, do so in moderation.\" It goes on to say heart disease is lower in moderate drinkers but then warns of other dangers and cautions against \"guidelines to the general public\" that encourage drinking (for the full text, click here). See for yourself, but I think the message most people would get from both sources is \"Drinking isn't all bad, but eschew it anyway.\"", "Areal worry. But there are lives, again, on both sides of the equation. The question, then, is what would happen if the public health folks ran a campaign saying, for example, \"Just One Drink\" or \"Drink a Little--Not a Lot.\" Would people's drinking habits improve, or would we create a nation of drunks--or what? The answer is: Nobody knows. What is surprising, given the public health community's usual eagerness to save lives, is that no one is trying to find out. It is simply assumed that too many people will do the wrong thing.", "Current evidence suggests that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk for coronary heart disease in some individuals. However, higher levels of alcohol intake raise the risk for high blood pressure, stroke, heart disease, certain cancers, accidents, violence, suicides, birth defects, and overall mortality (deaths). Too much alcohol may cause cirrhosis of the liver, inflammation of the pancreas, and damage to the brain and heart. Heavy drinkers also are at risk of malnutrition because alcohol contains calories that may substitute for those in more nutritious foods. \n\n If you drink alcoholic beverages, do so in moderation, with meals, and when consumption does not put you or others at risk. \n\n Moderation is defined as no more than one drink per day for women and no more than two drinks per day for men. Count as a drink-- \n\n --12 ounces of regular beer (150 calories) \n\n --5 ounces of wine (100 calories)", "According to documents obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute in its lawsuit to have the current policy overturned, the statements that the bureau has barred include the following: \"Several medical authorities say that a glass or two of wine enjoyed daily is not only a pleasant experience but can be beneficial to an adult's health.\" \"Having reviewed modern research on the benefits of modest wine consumption, we believe that our wine, when enjoyed with wholesome food, will promote health and enhance the pleasure of life.\" \n\n Currently the wine industry is pushing--so far without success--for approval of wine labels that read \"To learn the health effects of moderate wine consumption, send for the federal government's Dietary Guidelines for Americans\"--followed by the Agriculture Department's address and Web site. \n\n Back \n\n \n\n Note 3 \n\n Excerpts from the U.S. government's current (1995) dietary guidelines (click here for the full text) include the following:", "GOVERNMENT WARNING: (1) According to the Surgeon General, women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth defects. (2) Consumption of alcoholic beverages impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery, and may cause health problems. \n\n Back \n\n \n\n Note 2 \n\n The law forbids \"curative and therapeutic claims\" in alcohol marketing \"if such statement is untrue in any particular or tends to create a misleading impression.\" In practice, the BATF interprets this to mean that any health claim must be fully balanced and says it \"considers it extremely unlikely that such a balanced claim would fit on a normal alcoholic beverage label.\" The only health statement the bureau has said it will accept is a four page government report, complete with 34 footnotes. (You can read that report by clicking here.)", "Back \n\n If you missed your government warning, click here. And here, again, is additional information on the BATF's onerous restrictions on health claims, the U.S. government's current dietary guidelines dealing with alcohol, and the American Heart Association's recommendation on alcohol.", "--1.5 ounces of 80-proof distilled spirits (100 calories) \n\n Back \n\n \n\n Note 4 \n\n Here is the American Heart Association's recommendation on alcohol: \n\n If you drink, do so in moderation. The incidence of heart disease in those who consume moderate amounts of alcohol (an average of one to two drinks per day for men and one drink per day for women) is lower than in nondrinkers. However, with increased intake of alcohol, there are increased public health dangers, such as alcoholism, high blood pressure, obesity, stroke, suicide, and accidents. In light of these and other risks, the AHA believes it is not advisable to issue guidelines to the general public that may lead some to increase their intake of alcohol or start drinking if they do not already do so. It is best to consult with your doctor for advice on consuming alcohol in moderation (no more than 2 drinks per day)." ], [ "\"Besides the association between smoking and lung cancer, I think this is the most consistent association I've seen in the literature,\" says Eric Rimm, a Harvard epidemiologist. Research has shown heart benefits consistently since the 1970s with, Rimm guesses, 70 or 80 studies of 30 to 35 countries by now. Not surprisingly, he has a drink on most days. \n\n Alcohol also causes harm, of course. It can increase chances of breast cancer, cirrhosis, accidents, and so on. Heart disease, however, is an enormous cause of death; improve those odds, and the net effect is significantly to the good. Last December, the New England Journal of Medicine reported the results of the biggest and probably best mortality study yet conducted, one that followed almost half a million people over nine years. It found that, after netting out all causes of death, moderate drinkers over 30 were 20 percent less likely than nondrinkers to die prematurely.", "Given that the government restricts health claims even for innocuous foods such as orange juice and eggs, it's reasonable to decide that booze merchants are the wrong people to entrust with public education about drinking. That leaves only one other constituency for getting the word out: the public health community. Its approach, however, might charitably be called cautious--or, less charitably, embarrassed mumbling. \n\n For example, the authors of the aforementioned New England Journal study characterized their finding of a 20 percent mortality reduction as \"slight.\" The accompanying editorial called it \"small.\" I phoned Michael J. Thun, one of the study's authors and an epidemiologist with the American Cancer Society, and asked him whether a 20 percent mortality reduction is indeed small in the world of epidemiology. \"It's a sizable benefit in terms of prolonged survival,\" he said. Why not say so? \"Messages about alcohol don't come out the way you say them when they're broadcast,\" he replied. \"There's been a very long history in society of problems with alcohol.\"", "Iasked Ronald Krauss--a doctor who, as the immediate past chairman of the American Heart Association's nutrition committee, helped write that statement--whether it was aggressive enough. \"We don't have much leeway around that 'one or two drinks a day,' \" he said, and what isn't known is whether encouraging moderate drinking will also encourage excessive drinking. \n\n The public health people understandably dread creating more drunks, more broken marriages, more crime, more car wrecks. \"When somebody calls you up saying, 'You're putting out a message to people to drink, and my daughter just got killed last night because of some drunk,' that's the other side of the equation,\" Thun says. \"There are substantial numbers of people out there who are looking for justification to drink more than they should.\"", "One of those lives might, just as an example, belong to my father. He is 69, has mild hypertension (controlled with medication) and, but for the rare social occasion, doesn't drink. He has read some news reports suggesting moderate alcohol use may yield benefits, but his doctor has never mentioned such benefits, and my father has never given a thought to changing his drinking habits. And, in the standard view of public health officialdom, that is as it should be: People should not be encouraged to drink, even in moderation, and alcohol should not be linked with better health. \n\n The trouble is that moderate drinking is linked with better health. We don't know exactly why; some evidence suggests alcohol--of whatever sort, by the way, not just red wine--stimulates \"good\" (HDL, for high density lipoprotein) cholesterol and may help prevent blood clotting. But we do know the effects: On average, if you're over about 40, a drink a day will reduce your chances of heart trouble.", "But there are a lot of people like my father out there: uninformed or vaguely informed or not thinking about it. In 1995, a free market advocacy group called the Competitive Enterprise Institute commissioned a survey asking people whether they believed \"that scientific evidence exists showing that moderate consumption of alcohol, approximately one or two drinks per day, may reduce the risk of heart disease for many people.\" Only 42 percent of those who responded said they did, and a majority of those believed, wrongly, that the potential benefits come only from wine. \n\n The evidence on alcohol and health is now more than 20 years old--so why the confusion? Two groups have a stake in getting the word out, but one of them, the alcohol industry, is effectively forbidden to do so. Every bottle of alcohol carries a government warning label, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has never permitted ads or labels to carry any health claims, even mild ones. (For more on rejected health claims, click here.)", "Temperance Kills \n\n First, to prevent any misunderstanding, the warning: Alcohol, when abused, is vicious, dangerous stuff. Each year about 100,000 Americans die alcohol-related deaths. No one should drink and drive or drink to excess. Some people--teen-agers, people on contraindicated medications, pregnant women, and those who have trouble controlling their consumption--should avoid alcohol, period. And all that you know already. \n\n Here is what you may not know--or may know only fuzzily. For most people of middle age and beyond, one drink a day helps prevent heart disease and makes you less likely to die prematurely. After one or (for men) two drinks, bad effects swamp the good--dosage is everything! But on average the positive cardiovascular effect of moderate drinking is not small, and it is not in dispute. Epidemiologists figure that if all Americans became teetotalers tomorrow, about 80,000 more people might die each year of heart disease. So there are lives on both sides of the equation.", "\"People have a very hard time with complicated messages,\" says Thun. No doubt some people do. But is it really so hard to understand that a glass a day may help save your life if you're of middle age or beyond, but that more than that is dangerous? Presumably an avoidable heart attack is equally tragic whether the cause is too much alcohol or too little. To continue today's policy of muttering and changing the subject verges perilously on saying not just that too much alcohol is bad for you but that ignorance is good for you. \n\n \n\n ENDNOTES \n\n \n\n Note 1 \n\n By law, the label on alcoholic beverages reads:", "The British health authorities, in their 1995 guidelines (\"Sensible Drinking\"), say that people who drink very little or not at all and are in an age group at high risk for heart disease should \"consider the possibility that light drinking might benefit their health.\" But American authorities balk even at such a modest suggestion. \n\n And so the U.S. official nutritional guidelines say just this about potential benefits: \"Current evidence suggests that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk for coronary heart disease in some individuals.\" They then go on to recite a litany of risks (for the text, click here). Similarly, the American Heart Association's official recommendation advises, \"If you drink, do so in moderation.\" It goes on to say heart disease is lower in moderate drinkers but then warns of other dangers and cautions against \"guidelines to the general public\" that encourage drinking (for the full text, click here). See for yourself, but I think the message most people would get from both sources is \"Drinking isn't all bad, but eschew it anyway.\"", "Areal worry. But there are lives, again, on both sides of the equation. The question, then, is what would happen if the public health folks ran a campaign saying, for example, \"Just One Drink\" or \"Drink a Little--Not a Lot.\" Would people's drinking habits improve, or would we create a nation of drunks--or what? The answer is: Nobody knows. What is surprising, given the public health community's usual eagerness to save lives, is that no one is trying to find out. It is simply assumed that too many people will do the wrong thing.", "According to documents obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute in its lawsuit to have the current policy overturned, the statements that the bureau has barred include the following: \"Several medical authorities say that a glass or two of wine enjoyed daily is not only a pleasant experience but can be beneficial to an adult's health.\" \"Having reviewed modern research on the benefits of modest wine consumption, we believe that our wine, when enjoyed with wholesome food, will promote health and enhance the pleasure of life.\" \n\n Currently the wine industry is pushing--so far without success--for approval of wine labels that read \"To learn the health effects of moderate wine consumption, send for the federal government's Dietary Guidelines for Americans\"--followed by the Agriculture Department's address and Web site. \n\n Back \n\n \n\n Note 3 \n\n Excerpts from the U.S. government's current (1995) dietary guidelines (click here for the full text) include the following:", "Current evidence suggests that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk for coronary heart disease in some individuals. However, higher levels of alcohol intake raise the risk for high blood pressure, stroke, heart disease, certain cancers, accidents, violence, suicides, birth defects, and overall mortality (deaths). Too much alcohol may cause cirrhosis of the liver, inflammation of the pancreas, and damage to the brain and heart. Heavy drinkers also are at risk of malnutrition because alcohol contains calories that may substitute for those in more nutritious foods. \n\n If you drink alcoholic beverages, do so in moderation, with meals, and when consumption does not put you or others at risk. \n\n Moderation is defined as no more than one drink per day for women and no more than two drinks per day for men. Count as a drink-- \n\n --12 ounces of regular beer (150 calories) \n\n --5 ounces of wine (100 calories)", "GOVERNMENT WARNING: (1) According to the Surgeon General, women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth defects. (2) Consumption of alcoholic beverages impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery, and may cause health problems. \n\n Back \n\n \n\n Note 2 \n\n The law forbids \"curative and therapeutic claims\" in alcohol marketing \"if such statement is untrue in any particular or tends to create a misleading impression.\" In practice, the BATF interprets this to mean that any health claim must be fully balanced and says it \"considers it extremely unlikely that such a balanced claim would fit on a normal alcoholic beverage label.\" The only health statement the bureau has said it will accept is a four page government report, complete with 34 footnotes. (You can read that report by clicking here.)", "Back \n\n If you missed your government warning, click here. And here, again, is additional information on the BATF's onerous restrictions on health claims, the U.S. government's current dietary guidelines dealing with alcohol, and the American Heart Association's recommendation on alcohol.", "--1.5 ounces of 80-proof distilled spirits (100 calories) \n\n Back \n\n \n\n Note 4 \n\n Here is the American Heart Association's recommendation on alcohol: \n\n If you drink, do so in moderation. The incidence of heart disease in those who consume moderate amounts of alcohol (an average of one to two drinks per day for men and one drink per day for women) is lower than in nondrinkers. However, with increased intake of alcohol, there are increased public health dangers, such as alcoholism, high blood pressure, obesity, stroke, suicide, and accidents. In light of these and other risks, the AHA believes it is not advisable to issue guidelines to the general public that may lead some to increase their intake of alcohol or start drinking if they do not already do so. It is best to consult with your doctor for advice on consuming alcohol in moderation (no more than 2 drinks per day)." ] ]
test	50802	[ "What is Michaelson's profession?", "Why does the webfooted Alpha Centaurean accost Michaelson?", "How does Michaelson react to the native's demand that he leave?", "What kind of terrain surrounds the city?", "What special characteristics does the book the native throws at Michaelson have?", "How does Michaelson travel back and forth to the dead city?", "What would Michaelson like to do in this old city?", "Where does Maota find Michaelson the last time they meet?", "Where did Maota and Michaelson end up at the end of the story?" ]	[ [ "He is a retired engineer pursuing his antiques hobby.", "He is an astronaut.", "He is an Earthgod.", "He is an archaeologist." ], [ "He is trying to warn Michaelson about hidden dangers in the city.", "He is a beggar who makes his living from guilting tourists to the old city to give him money.", "He is the ticket taker for visitors to the old city, and Michaelson just walked in without buying a ticket.", "He indicates that Michaelson is violating a sacred space by being there." ], [ "Michaelson realizes he needs to wrap it up quickly and minimize his intrusion into this city of the ancient spirits.", "He is dismissive of the old man's concerns, and ignores the demand.", "Michaelson offers to pay the old native extra to stay in the city unmolested for an extra day.", "As a man who has studied other cultures, Michaelson is understanding and patient with the view that the city is sacred ground, but that knowledge is at war with his desire to study what he finds there." ], [ "A lot can change in half a million years. It used to be a desert, but now it is covered by a very thin sheet of ice.", "The climate is arrid and the terrain is mostly flat, but the city's water works still provide moisture to serve formal gardens around important buildings.", "The city itself is dry and sandy, but immediately outside it, the vegetation ramps up to the density of a jungle quite quickly.", "The characteristics described are those of a desert, with wind-blown sand and little to no vegetation." ], [ "Michaelson can feel his fingers burning when he touches the pages, like a warning from angry gods.", "When he followed the printed text with his finger, it transferred the words into his head, telepathically.", "When Michaelson touches the text on the page, it causes a holoprojector in the book's spine to start showing the story of the book.", "The book tells the history of the entire galaxy, and helps Michaelson understand the significance of the old city." ], [ "He paid a pilot to let him parachute in. The pilot will return for him when called by radio.", "He has a short range glider with sand skis that he set down just on the other side of a nearby hill.", "He has an implanted transportation device that teleports him wherever he wants.", "He parked a Land Rover (the Alpha Centaurus II equivalent) just outside the city and walked in." ], [ "He wants to excavate the city and remove all the artifacts to a museum in the capitol city of Alpha Centaurus II.", "He wants to do his archaeological research very quietly, disturbing the place as little as possible, so that he can publish academic papers about the place before professors who are his competitors.", "He would like to turn it into a historical exhibition and tourist attraction.", "He wants to build an amusement theme park. The super-tall buildings with the bridges hanging between him gave him some ideas for some exciting rides." ], [ "Michaelson had not moved since the encounter when Maota threw the book at him, because Michaelson was engrossed in reading the poetry.", "Michaelson found an opulently furnished bedroom on one of the top floors o the tall building. True, the bedclothes had disintegrated, but it looked safe and solid, so he stayed there.", "In the street at the edge of the city, where Michaelson collapsed after fleeing the tall building with the warm clock that freaked him out.", "Michaelson used his teleportation device to take him home to spend the night safe in his own bed." ], [ "Maota is trapped in an alternate dimension, but can travel anywhere. Michaelson succeeded in returning to his body on Alpha Centaurus II after visiting this alternate dimension.", "When Maota touched the magic clock, his mind went into another dimension and his body stayed behind. When Michaelson touched it, nothing happened at all.", "Maota believed that touching the clock would transport him to a new plane of existence, but in fact, he just died. Michaelson studied the culture and arrived at the same conclusion and made the same mistake.", "After Maota pressed the clock and appeared to die, Michaelson decided to try it too. They both ended up in the spirit world, so now Michaelson understands what Maota meant about the spirits in the city." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped\n behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of\n existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun\n him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an\n archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n\n\n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to\n pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers,\n hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n\n\n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking\n sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth,\n over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw\n impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n\n\n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand—neither knew whose finger or\n hand—touched the firing stud.", "Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins\n happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact,\n marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to\n catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled\n over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation\n of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog,\n under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun.\n Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\nThe native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving\n his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where\n you are trespassing!\"", "Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand\n against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed\n through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for\n a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle\n softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but\n his desire to hear the book was strong.\nOld Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the\n syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been\n a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley,\n Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n\n\n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in\n sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.", "Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he\n relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n\n\n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill\n you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer\n than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like\n a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n\n\n \"What rooms?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were\n bedrooms.\"\n\n\n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was\n sixty or seventy years old, at least.", "Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around.\n The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is\n this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing\n a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above\n the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his\n fright—thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n\n\n Maota pointed to it.\n\n\n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid\n his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\nMichaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight,\n then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he\n forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you\nare\ncomplex. Why not stop all this\n mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"", "Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the\n old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life\n force—he didn't stop to define it—in his body. Why was his dead body\n different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread\n stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n\n\n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried.\n I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication\n with you. No one can go back.\"\n\n\n Michaelson decided he try.\n\"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n\n\n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and\n gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and\n gave his most violent command.", "Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide,\n hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond\n a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of\n the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him\n that.\n\n\n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity.\n He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed\n floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items,\n making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched\n by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest\n detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books\n still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without\n tools.\n\n\n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.", "\"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers,\n these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how\n gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n\n\n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n\n\n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want\n to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no\n slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is,\n for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n\n\n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly\n in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.", "But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that\n the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense\n more complete than death.\n\n\n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came\n to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building\n with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination.\n Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n\n\n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all\n evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He\n had to know if the machine would work for him.\n\n\n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows\n over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old\n man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but\n determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the\n button.\n\n\n The high-pitched whine started.", "The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages\n rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while\n Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient\n street.\nWhen he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in\n the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old\n Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed\n a more practical place now.\n\n\n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short\n hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new\n determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool\n wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command,\n across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he\n remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked\n blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.", "\"You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be\n educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some\n sort. What is it? What does it measure?\"\n\n\n \"I insist that you go.\" The webfoot held something in his hand.\n\n\n \"No.\" Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the\n native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been.\n\"You are sensitive,\" the native said in his ear. \"It takes a sensitive\n god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old\n streets.\"\n\n\n \"Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing\n I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian\n tombs—none can hold a candle to this.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Earthgod....\"", "The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought\n a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind\n sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the\n sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n\n\n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over\n the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted\n at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the\n writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the\n writing.\n\n\n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n\n\n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.", "\"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n\n\n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred\n hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking\n half-heartedly again for the book.\n\n\n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human.\n Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n\n\n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's\n face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we\n could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We\n have finished, you and I.\"\n\n\n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n\n\n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"", "Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes;\n nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only\n like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left\n or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n\n\n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no\n direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n\n\n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking\n through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n\n\n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win\n after all.\"\n\n\n \"Neither did you.\"\n\n\n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be\n anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"", "He touched it again, curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No\n mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He\n stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling.\n Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason.\n He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled\n through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street\n until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for\n air, feeling the pain throb in his head.\n\n\n Common sense said that he should go home, that nothing worthwhile could\n be accomplished at night, that he was tired, that he was weak from loss\n of blood and fright and running. But when Michaelson was on the trail\n of important discoveries he had no common sense.\n\n\n He sat down in the darkness, meaning to rest a moment.\nWhen he awoke dawn was red against thin clouds in the east.", "\"I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the\n streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now\n I will do so.\"\n\n\n Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A high-pitched\n whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it\n then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly.\n\n\n The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay\n still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more\n carefully. No question about it.\n\n\n The old man was dead.\nFeeling depressed and alone, Michaelson found a desert knoll outside\n the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and\n gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's\n body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the\n knoll.\n\n\n Here he buried him.", "Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in\n the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair,\n familiar to Michaelson.\n\n\n Michaelson asked, \"Did you sleep well?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry to hear that.\"\n\n\n \"How do you feel?\"\n\n\n \"Fine, but my head aches a little.\"\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" Maota said.\n\n\n \"For what?\"\n\n\n \"For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you.\"\n\n\n Michaelson relaxed somewhat. \"What kind of man are you? First you try\n to break my skull, then you apologize.\"\n\n\n \"I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright.\"", "\"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was,\n said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n\n\n \"The spirits may return.\"\n\n\n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his\n trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say,\n some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n\n\n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n\n\n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons,\n and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n\n\n \"Leave!\"\n\n\n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in\n anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly\n serious.", "\"Wait!\"\n\n\n \"Now what?\"\n\n\n \"At least read some of the book to me before I die, then.\"\n\n\n The gun wavered. \"I am not an unreasonable man,\" the webfoot said.\n\n\n Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book.\n\n\n \"No, stay where you are. Throw it.\"\n\n\n \"This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items\n around.\"\n\n\n \"It won't break. Throw it.\"", "When he could talk again, Maota said, \"I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've\n disgraced myself.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be sorry.\" Michaelson helped him to his feet. \"We fight for some\n reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either.\"\n\n\n \"Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night\n when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take\n them we lose forever.\"\n\n\n \"I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never\n heard of negotiation?\"\n\n\n \"You are a god,\" Maota said. \"One does not negotiate with gods. One\n either loves them, or kills them.\"\n\n\n \"That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?\"" ], [ "He chuckled to himself, wondering with amusement what a webfooted man\n was doing in an old dead city so far from his people. Some facts were\n known about the people of Alpha Centaurus II. They were not actually\n natives, he recalled. They were a colony from the fifth planet of\n the system. They were a curious people. Some were highly intelligent,\n though uneducated.\n\n\n He decided to ignore the man for the moment. He was far down the\n ancient street, a mere speck against the sand. There would be plenty of\n time to wonder about him.", "Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide,\n hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond\n a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of\n the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him\n that.\n\n\n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity.\n He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed\n floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items,\n making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched\n by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest\n detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books\n still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without\n tools.\n\n\n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.", "Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped\n behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of\n existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun\n him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an\n archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n\n\n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to\n pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers,\n hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n\n\n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking\n sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth,\n over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw\n impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n\n\n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand—neither knew whose finger or\n hand—touched the firing stud.", "Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand\n against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed\n through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for\n a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle\n softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but\n his desire to hear the book was strong.\nOld Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the\n syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been\n a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley,\n Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n\n\n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in\n sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.", "The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages\n rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while\n Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient\n street.\nWhen he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in\n the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old\n Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed\n a more practical place now.\n\n\n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short\n hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new\n determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool\n wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command,\n across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he\n remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked\n blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.", "\"Wait!\"\n\n\n \"Now what?\"\n\n\n \"At least read some of the book to me before I die, then.\"\n\n\n The gun wavered. \"I am not an unreasonable man,\" the webfoot said.\n\n\n Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book.\n\n\n \"No, stay where you are. Throw it.\"\n\n\n \"This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items\n around.\"\n\n\n \"It won't break. Throw it.\"", "\"You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be\n educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some\n sort. What is it? What does it measure?\"\n\n\n \"I insist that you go.\" The webfoot held something in his hand.\n\n\n \"No.\" Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the\n native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been.\n\"You are sensitive,\" the native said in his ear. \"It takes a sensitive\n god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old\n streets.\"\n\n\n \"Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing\n I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian\n tombs—none can hold a candle to this.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Earthgod....\"", "Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he\n relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n\n\n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill\n you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer\n than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like\n a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n\n\n \"What rooms?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were\n bedrooms.\"\n\n\n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was\n sixty or seventy years old, at least.", "Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in\n the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair,\n familiar to Michaelson.\n\n\n Michaelson asked, \"Did you sleep well?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry to hear that.\"\n\n\n \"How do you feel?\"\n\n\n \"Fine, but my head aches a little.\"\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" Maota said.\n\n\n \"For what?\"\n\n\n \"For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you.\"\n\n\n Michaelson relaxed somewhat. \"What kind of man are you? First you try\n to break my skull, then you apologize.\"\n\n\n \"I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright.\"", "A CITY NEAR CENTAURUS\nBy BILL DOEDE\n\n\n Illustrated by WEST\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine October 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe city was sacred, but not to its gods.\n \nMichaelson was a god—but far from sacred!\nCrouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his\n burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native.\n\n\n At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the\n Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he\n saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed.", "\"Look,\" he said. \"No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know\n that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half\n covered with sand and dirt.\"\n\n\n He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The\n sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He\n glanced backward. The webfoot was following.\n\n\n \"Mr. Earthgod!\" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped.\n \"You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy\n the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of\n change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now,\n or be killed.\"\nHe turned and walked off, not looking back.", "\"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers,\n these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how\n gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n\n\n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n\n\n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want\n to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no\n slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is,\n for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n\n\n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly\n in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.", "The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought\n a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind\n sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the\n sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n\n\n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over\n the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted\n at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the\n writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the\n writing.\n\n\n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n\n\n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.", "Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins\n happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact,\n marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to\n catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled\n over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation\n of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog,\n under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun.\n Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\nThe native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving\n his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where\n you are trespassing!\"", "\"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n\n\n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred\n hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking\n half-heartedly again for the book.\n\n\n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human.\n Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n\n\n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's\n face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we\n could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We\n have finished, you and I.\"\n\n\n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n\n\n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"", "Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around.\n The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is\n this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing\n a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above\n the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his\n fright—thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n\n\n Maota pointed to it.\n\n\n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid\n his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\nMichaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight,\n then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he\n forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you\nare\ncomplex. Why not stop all this\n mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"", "The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short,\n even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up\n and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet\n dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n\n\n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said,\n chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it\n beautiful?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n\n\n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a\n child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n\n\n \"You must go.\"\n\n\n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n\n\n \"I am keeper of the city.\"", "Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand\n and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile,\n brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent.\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Michaelson repeated.\n\n\n \"Why not what?\" Maota dragged his eyes back.\n\n\n \"Negotiate.\"\n\n\n \"No.\" Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not\n twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far\n away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes.\n\n\n \"All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just\n disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that.\"\n\n\n Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer\n toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun.", "He stood there alone feeling the age of the place. Even the smell\n of age was in the air. Silver moonlight from the two moons filtered\n through clear air down upon the ruins. The city lay now in darkness,\n dead and still, waiting for morning so it could lie dead and still in\n the sun.\n\n\n There was no hurry to be going home, although he was alone, although\n this was Alpha Centaurus II with many unknowns, many dangers ...\n although home was a very great distance away. There was no one back\n there to worry about him.\n\n\n His wife had died many years ago back on Earth. No children. His\n friends in the settlement would not look for him for another day at\n least. Anyway, the tiny cylinder, buried in flesh behind his ear, a\n thing of mystery and immense power, could take him home instantly,\n without effort save a flicker of thought.\n\n\n \"You did not leave, as I asked you.\"", "When he could talk again, Maota said, \"I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've\n disgraced myself.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be sorry.\" Michaelson helped him to his feet. \"We fight for some\n reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either.\"\n\n\n \"Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night\n when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take\n them we lose forever.\"\n\n\n \"I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never\n heard of negotiation?\"\n\n\n \"You are a god,\" Maota said. \"One does not negotiate with gods. One\n either loves them, or kills them.\"\n\n\n \"That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?\"" ], [ "Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he\n relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n\n\n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill\n you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer\n than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like\n a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n\n\n \"What rooms?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were\n bedrooms.\"\n\n\n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was\n sixty or seventy years old, at least.", "Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins\n happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact,\n marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to\n catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled\n over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation\n of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog,\n under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun.\n Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\nThe native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving\n his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where\n you are trespassing!\"", "Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped\n behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of\n existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun\n him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an\n archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n\n\n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to\n pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers,\n hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n\n\n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking\n sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth,\n over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw\n impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n\n\n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand—neither knew whose finger or\n hand—touched the firing stud.", "\"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was,\n said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n\n\n \"The spirits may return.\"\n\n\n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his\n trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say,\n some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n\n\n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n\n\n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons,\n and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n\n\n \"Leave!\"\n\n\n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in\n anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly\n serious.", "\"You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be\n educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some\n sort. What is it? What does it measure?\"\n\n\n \"I insist that you go.\" The webfoot held something in his hand.\n\n\n \"No.\" Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the\n native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been.\n\"You are sensitive,\" the native said in his ear. \"It takes a sensitive\n god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old\n streets.\"\n\n\n \"Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing\n I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian\n tombs—none can hold a candle to this.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Earthgod....\"", "\"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers,\n these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how\n gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n\n\n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n\n\n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want\n to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no\n slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is,\n for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n\n\n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly\n in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.", "The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short,\n even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up\n and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet\n dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n\n\n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said,\n chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it\n beautiful?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n\n\n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a\n child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n\n\n \"You must go.\"\n\n\n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n\n\n \"I am keeper of the city.\"", "Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand\n against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed\n through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for\n a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle\n softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but\n his desire to hear the book was strong.\nOld Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the\n syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been\n a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley,\n Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n\n\n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in\n sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.", "Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around.\n The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is\n this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing\n a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above\n the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his\n fright—thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n\n\n Maota pointed to it.\n\n\n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid\n his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\nMichaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight,\n then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he\n forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you\nare\ncomplex. Why not stop all this\n mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"", "But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that\n the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense\n more complete than death.\n\n\n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came\n to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building\n with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination.\n Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n\n\n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all\n evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He\n had to know if the machine would work for him.\n\n\n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows\n over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old\n man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but\n determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the\n button.\n\n\n The high-pitched whine started.", "\"You will leave now.\"\n\n\n \"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They\n must be preserved. Future generations will thank us.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mean,\" the old man asked, aghast, \"that you want others to come\n here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who\n lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged\n and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their\n foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!\"\n\n\n \"No.\" Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.\n\n\n Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his\n body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his\n heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.", "Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide,\n hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond\n a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of\n the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him\n that.\n\n\n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity.\n He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed\n floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items,\n making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched\n by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest\n detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books\n still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without\n tools.\n\n\n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.", "The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages\n rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while\n Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient\n street.\nWhen he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in\n the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old\n Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed\n a more practical place now.\n\n\n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short\n hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new\n determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool\n wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command,\n across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he\n remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked\n blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.", "Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the\n old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life\n force—he didn't stop to define it—in his body. Why was his dead body\n different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread\n stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n\n\n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried.\n I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication\n with you. No one can go back.\"\n\n\n Michaelson decided he try.\n\"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n\n\n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and\n gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and\n gave his most violent command.", "\"Look,\" he said. \"No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know\n that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half\n covered with sand and dirt.\"\n\n\n He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The\n sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He\n glanced backward. The webfoot was following.\n\n\n \"Mr. Earthgod!\" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped.\n \"You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy\n the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of\n change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now,\n or be killed.\"\nHe turned and walked off, not looking back.", "Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand\n and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile,\n brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent.\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Michaelson repeated.\n\n\n \"Why not what?\" Maota dragged his eyes back.\n\n\n \"Negotiate.\"\n\n\n \"No.\" Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not\n twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far\n away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes.\n\n\n \"All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just\n disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that.\"\n\n\n Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer\n toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun.", "The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought\n a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind\n sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the\n sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n\n\n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over\n the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted\n at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the\n writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the\n writing.\n\n\n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n\n\n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.", "\"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n\n\n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred\n hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking\n half-heartedly again for the book.\n\n\n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human.\n Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n\n\n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's\n face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we\n could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We\n have finished, you and I.\"\n\n\n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n\n\n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"", "\"Wait!\"\n\n\n \"Now what?\"\n\n\n \"At least read some of the book to me before I die, then.\"\n\n\n The gun wavered. \"I am not an unreasonable man,\" the webfoot said.\n\n\n Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book.\n\n\n \"No, stay where you are. Throw it.\"\n\n\n \"This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items\n around.\"\n\n\n \"It won't break. Throw it.\"", "When he could talk again, Maota said, \"I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've\n disgraced myself.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be sorry.\" Michaelson helped him to his feet. \"We fight for some\n reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either.\"\n\n\n \"Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night\n when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take\n them we lose forever.\"\n\n\n \"I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never\n heard of negotiation?\"\n\n\n \"You are a god,\" Maota said. \"One does not negotiate with gods. One\n either loves them, or kills them.\"\n\n\n \"That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?\"" ], [ "He gazed out from his position at the complex variety of buildings\n before him. Some were small, obviously homes. Others were huge\n with tall, frail spires standing against the pale blue sky. Square\n buildings, ellipsoid, spheroid. Beautiful, dream-stuff bridges\n connected tall, conical towers, bridges that still swung in the wind\n after half a million years. Late afternoon sunlight shone against ebony\n surfaces. The sands of many centuries had blown down the wide streets\n and filled the doorways. Desert plants grew from roofs of smaller\n buildings.", "\"Where are you going?\"\n\n\n \"Away. Far away.\" Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant.\n\n\n \"Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the\n city?\"\n\n\n \"There are many directions. You would not understand.\"\n\n\n \"East. West. North. South. Up. Down.\"\n\n\n \"No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see.\"\n\n\n Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of\n the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed\n against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading\n to a particular building.\n\n\n Michaelson said, \"This is where you live?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"", "He had heard a voice. He looked around at the old buildings, down the\n length of the ancient street. Something strange about the voice. Not\n Maota. Not his tones. Not his words. Satisfied that no one was near, he\n stooped and picked up the book again.\n\n\n \"Good God!\" he said aloud. It was the book talking. His fingers had\n touched the writing again. It was not a voice, exactly, but a stirring\n in his mind, like a strange language heard for the first time.\n\n\n A talking book. What other surprises were in the city? Tall,\n fragile buildings laughing at time and weather. A clock measuring\n God-knows-what. If such wonders remained, what about those already\n destroyed? One could only guess at the machines, the gadgets, the\n artistry already decayed and blown away to mix forever with the sand.", "A CITY NEAR CENTAURUS\nBy BILL DOEDE\n\n\n Illustrated by WEST\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine October 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe city was sacred, but not to its gods.\n \nMichaelson was a god—but far from sacred!\nCrouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his\n burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native.\n\n\n At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the\n Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he\n saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed.", "\"You will leave now.\"\n\n\n \"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They\n must be preserved. Future generations will thank us.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mean,\" the old man asked, aghast, \"that you want others to come\n here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who\n lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged\n and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their\n foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!\"\n\n\n \"No.\" Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.\n\n\n Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his\n body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his\n heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.", "\"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was,\n said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n\n\n \"The spirits may return.\"\n\n\n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his\n trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say,\n some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n\n\n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n\n\n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons,\n and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n\n\n \"Leave!\"\n\n\n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in\n anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly\n serious.", "He touched it again, curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No\n mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He\n stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling.\n Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason.\n He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled\n through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street\n until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for\n air, feeling the pain throb in his head.\n\n\n Common sense said that he should go home, that nothing worthwhile could\n be accomplished at night, that he was tired, that he was weak from loss\n of blood and fright and running. But when Michaelson was on the trail\n of important discoveries he had no common sense.\n\n\n He sat down in the darkness, meaning to rest a moment.\nWhen he awoke dawn was red against thin clouds in the east.", "\"Look,\" he said. \"No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know\n that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half\n covered with sand and dirt.\"\n\n\n He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The\n sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He\n glanced backward. The webfoot was following.\n\n\n \"Mr. Earthgod!\" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped.\n \"You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy\n the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of\n change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now,\n or be killed.\"\nHe turned and walked off, not looking back.", "\"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers,\n these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how\n gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n\n\n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n\n\n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want\n to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no\n slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is,\n for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n\n\n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly\n in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.", "The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short,\n even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up\n and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet\n dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n\n\n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said,\n chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it\n beautiful?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n\n\n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a\n child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n\n\n \"You must go.\"\n\n\n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n\n\n \"I am keeper of the city.\"", "Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins\n happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact,\n marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to\n catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled\n over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation\n of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog,\n under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun.\n Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\nThe native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving\n his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where\n you are trespassing!\"", "Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide,\n hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond\n a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of\n the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him\n that.\n\n\n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity.\n He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed\n floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items,\n making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched\n by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest\n detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books\n still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without\n tools.\n\n\n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.", "Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes;\n nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only\n like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left\n or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n\n\n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no\n direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n\n\n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking\n through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n\n\n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win\n after all.\"\n\n\n \"Neither did you.\"\n\n\n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be\n anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"", "There was a hollow, whooshing sound. Both stopped still, realizing the\n total destruction they might have caused.\n\n\n \"It only hit the ground,\" Michaelson said.\n\n\n A black, charred hole, two feet in diameter and—they could not see how\n deep—stared at them.\n\n\n Maota let go and sprawled in the sand. \"The book!\" he cried. \"The book\n is gone!\"\n\n\n \"No! We probably covered it with sand while we fought.\"\nBoth men began scooping sand in their cupped hands, digging frantically\n for the book. Saliva dripped from Maota's mouth, but he didn't know or\n care.\n\n\n Finally they stopped, exhausted. They had covered a substantial area\n around the hole. They had covered the complete area where they had been.\n\n\n \"We killed it,\" the old man moaned.", "He started off toward the tall building he had examined upon discovery\n of the city. His left eyelid began to twitch and he laid his forefinger\n against the eye, pressing until it stopped. Then he stooped and entered\n the building. He laid the book down and tried to take the \"clock\"\n off the wall. It was dark in the building and his fingers felt along\n the wall, looking for it. Then he touched it. His fingers moved over\n its smooth surface. Then suddenly he jerked his hand back with an\n exclamation of amazement. Fear ran up his spine.\nThe clock was warm.\nHe felt like running, like flicking back to the settlement where there\n were people and familiar voices, for here was a thing that should not\n be. Half a million years—and here was warmth!", "\"I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the\n streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now\n I will do so.\"\n\n\n Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A high-pitched\n whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it\n then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly.\n\n\n The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay\n still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more\n carefully. No question about it.\n\n\n The old man was dead.\nFeeling depressed and alone, Michaelson found a desert knoll outside\n the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and\n gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's\n body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the\n knoll.\n\n\n Here he buried him.", "The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought\n a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind\n sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the\n sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n\n\n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over\n the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted\n at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the\n writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the\n writing.\n\n\n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n\n\n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.", "He stood there alone feeling the age of the place. Even the smell\n of age was in the air. Silver moonlight from the two moons filtered\n through clear air down upon the ruins. The city lay now in darkness,\n dead and still, waiting for morning so it could lie dead and still in\n the sun.\n\n\n There was no hurry to be going home, although he was alone, although\n this was Alpha Centaurus II with many unknowns, many dangers ...\n although home was a very great distance away. There was no one back\n there to worry about him.\n\n\n His wife had died many years ago back on Earth. No children. His\n friends in the settlement would not look for him for another day at\n least. Anyway, the tiny cylinder, buried in flesh behind his ear, a\n thing of mystery and immense power, could take him home instantly,\n without effort save a flicker of thought.\n\n\n \"You did not leave, as I asked you.\"", "The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages\n rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while\n Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient\n street.\nWhen he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in\n the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old\n Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed\n a more practical place now.\n\n\n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short\n hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new\n determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool\n wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command,\n across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he\n remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked\n blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.", "\"It was just a book. Not alive, you know.\"\n\n\n \"How do you know?\" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. \"It\n talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I\n used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it.\"\n\n\n \"There are other books. We'll get another.\"\n\n\n Maota shook his head. \"There are no more.\"\n\n\n \"But I've seen them. Down there in the square building.\"\n\n\n \"Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with\n songs.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry.\"\n\n\n \"\nYou\nkilled it!\" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying\n forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too\n weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage." ], [ "Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins\n happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact,\n marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to\n catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled\n over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation\n of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog,\n under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun.\n Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\nThe native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving\n his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where\n you are trespassing!\"", "Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand\n against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed\n through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for\n a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle\n softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but\n his desire to hear the book was strong.\nOld Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the\n syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been\n a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley,\n Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n\n\n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in\n sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.", "Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he\n relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n\n\n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill\n you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer\n than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like\n a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n\n\n \"What rooms?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were\n bedrooms.\"\n\n\n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was\n sixty or seventy years old, at least.", "\"You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be\n educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some\n sort. What is it? What does it measure?\"\n\n\n \"I insist that you go.\" The webfoot held something in his hand.\n\n\n \"No.\" Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the\n native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been.\n\"You are sensitive,\" the native said in his ear. \"It takes a sensitive\n god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old\n streets.\"\n\n\n \"Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing\n I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian\n tombs—none can hold a candle to this.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Earthgod....\"", "\"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers,\n these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how\n gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n\n\n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n\n\n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want\n to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no\n slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is,\n for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n\n\n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly\n in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.", "The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages\n rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while\n Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient\n street.\nWhen he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in\n the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old\n Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed\n a more practical place now.\n\n\n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short\n hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new\n determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool\n wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command,\n across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he\n remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked\n blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.", "He thought about that for a moment, eyeing the weapon.\n\n\n It looked in good working order. Slim and shiny and innocent, it looked\n like a glorified African blowgun. But he was not deceived by its\n appearance. It was a deadly weapon.\n\"Well,\" he said, \"before you kill me, tell me about the book.\" He held\n it up for Maota to see.\n\n\n \"What about the book?\"\n\n\n \"What kind of book is it?\"\n\n\n \"What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what\nkind\nof book? You have seen it. It\n is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it\n talks.\"\n\n\n \"No, no. I mean, what's in it?\"\n\n\n \"Poetry.\"", "But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that\n the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense\n more complete than death.\n\n\n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came\n to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building\n with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination.\n Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n\n\n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all\n evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He\n had to know if the machine would work for him.\n\n\n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows\n over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old\n man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but\n determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the\n button.\n\n\n The high-pitched whine started.", "\"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was,\n said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n\n\n \"The spirits may return.\"\n\n\n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his\n trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say,\n some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n\n\n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n\n\n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons,\n and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n\n\n \"Leave!\"\n\n\n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in\n anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly\n serious.", "Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around.\n The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is\n this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing\n a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above\n the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his\n fright—thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n\n\n Maota pointed to it.\n\n\n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid\n his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\nMichaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight,\n then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he\n forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you\nare\ncomplex. Why not stop all this\n mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"", "The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought\n a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind\n sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the\n sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n\n\n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over\n the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted\n at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the\n writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the\n writing.\n\n\n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n\n\n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.", "Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide,\n hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond\n a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of\n the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him\n that.\n\n\n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity.\n He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed\n floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items,\n making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched\n by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest\n detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books\n still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without\n tools.\n\n\n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.", "\"Wait!\"\n\n\n \"Now what?\"\n\n\n \"At least read some of the book to me before I die, then.\"\n\n\n The gun wavered. \"I am not an unreasonable man,\" the webfoot said.\n\n\n Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book.\n\n\n \"No, stay where you are. Throw it.\"\n\n\n \"This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items\n around.\"\n\n\n \"It won't break. Throw it.\"", "Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped\n behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of\n existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun\n him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an\n archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n\n\n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to\n pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers,\n hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n\n\n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking\n sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth,\n over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw\n impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n\n\n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand—neither knew whose finger or\n hand—touched the firing stud.", "\"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n\n\n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred\n hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking\n half-heartedly again for the book.\n\n\n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human.\n Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n\n\n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's\n face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we\n could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We\n have finished, you and I.\"\n\n\n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n\n\n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"", "The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short,\n even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up\n and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet\n dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n\n\n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said,\n chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it\n beautiful?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n\n\n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a\n child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n\n\n \"You must go.\"\n\n\n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n\n\n \"I am keeper of the city.\"", "\"It was just a book. Not alive, you know.\"\n\n\n \"How do you know?\" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. \"It\n talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I\n used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it.\"\n\n\n \"There are other books. We'll get another.\"\n\n\n Maota shook his head. \"There are no more.\"\n\n\n \"But I've seen them. Down there in the square building.\"\n\n\n \"Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with\n songs.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry.\"\n\n\n \"\nYou\nkilled it!\" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying\n forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too\n weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage.", "Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the\n old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life\n force—he didn't stop to define it—in his body. Why was his dead body\n different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread\n stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n\n\n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried.\n I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication\n with you. No one can go back.\"\n\n\n Michaelson decided he try.\n\"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n\n\n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and\n gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and\n gave his most violent command.", "A CITY NEAR CENTAURUS\nBy BILL DOEDE\n\n\n Illustrated by WEST\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine October 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe city was sacred, but not to its gods.\n \nMichaelson was a god—but far from sacred!\nCrouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his\n burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native.\n\n\n At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the\n Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he\n saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed.", "He had heard a voice. He looked around at the old buildings, down the\n length of the ancient street. Something strange about the voice. Not\n Maota. Not his tones. Not his words. Satisfied that no one was near, he\n stooped and picked up the book again.\n\n\n \"Good God!\" he said aloud. It was the book talking. His fingers had\n touched the writing again. It was not a voice, exactly, but a stirring\n in his mind, like a strange language heard for the first time.\n\n\n A talking book. What other surprises were in the city? Tall,\n fragile buildings laughing at time and weather. A clock measuring\n God-knows-what. If such wonders remained, what about those already\n destroyed? One could only guess at the machines, the gadgets, the\n artistry already decayed and blown away to mix forever with the sand." ], [ "Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the\n old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life\n force—he didn't stop to define it—in his body. Why was his dead body\n different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread\n stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n\n\n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried.\n I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication\n with you. No one can go back.\"\n\n\n Michaelson decided he try.\n\"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n\n\n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and\n gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and\n gave his most violent command.", "But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that\n the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense\n more complete than death.\n\n\n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came\n to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building\n with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination.\n Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n\n\n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all\n evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He\n had to know if the machine would work for him.\n\n\n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows\n over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old\n man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but\n determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the\n button.\n\n\n The high-pitched whine started.", "Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped\n behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of\n existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun\n him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an\n archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n\n\n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to\n pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers,\n hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n\n\n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking\n sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth,\n over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw\n impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n\n\n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand—neither knew whose finger or\n hand—touched the firing stud.", "Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes;\n nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only\n like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left\n or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n\n\n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no\n direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n\n\n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking\n through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n\n\n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win\n after all.\"\n\n\n \"Neither did you.\"\n\n\n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be\n anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"", "\"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was,\n said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n\n\n \"The spirits may return.\"\n\n\n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his\n trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say,\n some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n\n\n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n\n\n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons,\n and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n\n\n \"Leave!\"\n\n\n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in\n anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly\n serious.", "The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages\n rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while\n Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient\n street.\nWhen he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in\n the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old\n Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed\n a more practical place now.\n\n\n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short\n hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new\n determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool\n wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command,\n across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he\n remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked\n blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.", "\"I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the\n streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now\n I will do so.\"\n\n\n Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A high-pitched\n whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it\n then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly.\n\n\n The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay\n still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more\n carefully. No question about it.\n\n\n The old man was dead.\nFeeling depressed and alone, Michaelson found a desert knoll outside\n the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and\n gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's\n body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the\n knoll.\n\n\n Here he buried him.", "\"Where are you going?\"\n\n\n \"Away. Far away.\" Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant.\n\n\n \"Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the\n city?\"\n\n\n \"There are many directions. You would not understand.\"\n\n\n \"East. West. North. South. Up. Down.\"\n\n\n \"No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see.\"\n\n\n Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of\n the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed\n against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading\n to a particular building.\n\n\n Michaelson said, \"This is where you live?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"", "Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide,\n hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond\n a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of\n the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him\n that.\n\n\n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity.\n He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed\n floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items,\n making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched\n by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest\n detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books\n still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without\n tools.\n\n\n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.", "\"Look,\" he said. \"No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know\n that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half\n covered with sand and dirt.\"\n\n\n He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The\n sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He\n glanced backward. The webfoot was following.\n\n\n \"Mr. Earthgod!\" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped.\n \"You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy\n the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of\n change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now,\n or be killed.\"\nHe turned and walked off, not looking back.", "Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins\n happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact,\n marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to\n catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled\n over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation\n of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog,\n under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun.\n Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\nThe native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving\n his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where\n you are trespassing!\"", "\"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers,\n these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how\n gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n\n\n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n\n\n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want\n to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no\n slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is,\n for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n\n\n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly\n in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.", "He touched it again, curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No\n mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He\n stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling.\n Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason.\n He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled\n through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street\n until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for\n air, feeling the pain throb in his head.\n\n\n Common sense said that he should go home, that nothing worthwhile could\n be accomplished at night, that he was tired, that he was weak from loss\n of blood and fright and running. But when Michaelson was on the trail\n of important discoveries he had no common sense.\n\n\n He sat down in the darkness, meaning to rest a moment.\nWhen he awoke dawn was red against thin clouds in the east.", "The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought\n a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind\n sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the\n sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up.\n\n\n It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over\n the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted\n at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the\n writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the\n writing.\n\n\n Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands.\n\n\n \"God in heaven!\" he exclaimed.", "A CITY NEAR CENTAURUS\nBy BILL DOEDE\n\n\n Illustrated by WEST\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine October 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe city was sacred, but not to its gods.\n \nMichaelson was a god—but far from sacred!\nCrouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his\n burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native.\n\n\n At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the\n Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he\n saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed.", "\"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n\n\n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred\n hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking\n half-heartedly again for the book.\n\n\n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human.\n Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n\n\n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's\n face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we\n could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We\n have finished, you and I.\"\n\n\n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n\n\n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"", "\"You will leave now.\"\n\n\n \"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They\n must be preserved. Future generations will thank us.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mean,\" the old man asked, aghast, \"that you want others to come\n here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who\n lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged\n and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their\n foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!\"\n\n\n \"No.\" Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.\n\n\n Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his\n body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his\n heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.", "Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he\n relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n\n\n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill\n you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer\n than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like\n a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n\n\n \"What rooms?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were\n bedrooms.\"\n\n\n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was\n sixty or seventy years old, at least.", "The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short,\n even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up\n and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet\n dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n\n\n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said,\n chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it\n beautiful?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n\n\n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a\n child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n\n\n \"You must go.\"\n\n\n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n\n\n \"I am keeper of the city.\"", "Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around.\n The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is\n this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing\n a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above\n the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his\n fright—thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n\n\n Maota pointed to it.\n\n\n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid\n his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\nMichaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight,\n then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he\n forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you\nare\ncomplex. Why not stop all this\n mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"" ], [ "Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped\n behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of\n existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun\n him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an\n archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n\n\n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to\n pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers,\n hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n\n\n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking\n sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth,\n over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw\n impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n\n\n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand—neither knew whose finger or\n hand—touched the firing stud.", "\"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers,\n these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how\n gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n\n\n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n\n\n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want\n to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no\n slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is,\n for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n\n\n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly\n in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.", "Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide,\n hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond\n a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of\n the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him\n that.\n\n\n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity.\n He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed\n floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items,\n making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched\n by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest\n detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books\n still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without\n tools.\n\n\n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.", "\"You?\" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was,\n said, \"What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?\"\n\n\n \"The spirits may return.\"\n\n\n Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his\n trousers. He pointed. \"See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say,\n some alloy impervious to rust and wear.\"\n\n\n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n\n\n \"Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons,\n and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it.\"\n\n\n \"Leave!\"\n\n\n The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in\n anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly\n serious.", "Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins\n happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact,\n marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to\n catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled\n over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation\n of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog,\n under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun.\n Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\nThe native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving\n his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where\n you are trespassing!\"", "\"You will leave now.\"\n\n\n \"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They\n must be preserved. Future generations will thank us.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mean,\" the old man asked, aghast, \"that you want others to come\n here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who\n lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged\n and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their\n foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!\"\n\n\n \"No.\" Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.\n\n\n Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his\n body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his\n heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.", "\"Where are you going?\"\n\n\n \"Away. Far away.\" Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant.\n\n\n \"Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the\n city?\"\n\n\n \"There are many directions. You would not understand.\"\n\n\n \"East. West. North. South. Up. Down.\"\n\n\n \"No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see.\"\n\n\n Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of\n the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed\n against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading\n to a particular building.\n\n\n Michaelson said, \"This is where you live?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"", "The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages\n rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while\n Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient\n street.\nWhen he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in\n the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old\n Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed\n a more practical place now.\n\n\n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short\n hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new\n determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool\n wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command,\n across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he\n remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked\n blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.", "\"I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the\n streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now\n I will do so.\"\n\n\n Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A high-pitched\n whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it\n then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly.\n\n\n The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay\n still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more\n carefully. No question about it.\n\n\n The old man was dead.\nFeeling depressed and alone, Michaelson found a desert knoll outside\n the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and\n gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's\n body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the\n knoll.\n\n\n Here he buried him.", "Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand\n against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed\n through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for\n a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle\n softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but\n his desire to hear the book was strong.\nOld Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the\n syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been\n a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley,\n Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n\n\n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in\n sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.", "Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he\n relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n\n\n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill\n you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer\n than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like\n a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n\n\n \"What rooms?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were\n bedrooms.\"\n\n\n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was\n sixty or seventy years old, at least.", "\"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n\n\n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred\n hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking\n half-heartedly again for the book.\n\n\n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human.\n Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n\n\n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's\n face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we\n could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We\n have finished, you and I.\"\n\n\n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n\n\n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"", "\"You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be\n educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some\n sort. What is it? What does it measure?\"\n\n\n \"I insist that you go.\" The webfoot held something in his hand.\n\n\n \"No.\" Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the\n native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been.\n\"You are sensitive,\" the native said in his ear. \"It takes a sensitive\n god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old\n streets.\"\n\n\n \"Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing\n I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian\n tombs—none can hold a candle to this.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Earthgod....\"", "But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that\n the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense\n more complete than death.\n\n\n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came\n to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building\n with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination.\n Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n\n\n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all\n evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He\n had to know if the machine would work for him.\n\n\n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows\n over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old\n man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but\n determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the\n button.\n\n\n The high-pitched whine started.", "Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around.\n The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is\n this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing\n a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above\n the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his\n fright—thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n\n\n Maota pointed to it.\n\n\n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid\n his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\nMichaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight,\n then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he\n forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you\nare\ncomplex. Why not stop all this\n mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"", "Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the\n old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life\n force—he didn't stop to define it—in his body. Why was his dead body\n different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread\n stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n\n\n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried.\n I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication\n with you. No one can go back.\"\n\n\n Michaelson decided he try.\n\"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n\n\n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and\n gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and\n gave his most violent command.", "\"Look,\" he said. \"No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know\n that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half\n covered with sand and dirt.\"\n\n\n He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The\n sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He\n glanced backward. The webfoot was following.\n\n\n \"Mr. Earthgod!\" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped.\n \"You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy\n the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of\n change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now,\n or be killed.\"\nHe turned and walked off, not looking back.", "The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short,\n even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up\n and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet\n dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man.\n\n\n \"You never told us about this old dead city,\" Michaelson said,\n chidingly. \"Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it\n beautiful?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, beautiful. You will leave now.\"\n\n\n \"Leave?\" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a\n child. \"I just got here a few hours ago.\"\n\n\n \"You must go.\"\n\n\n \"Why? Who are you?\"\n\n\n \"I am keeper of the city.\"", "A CITY NEAR CENTAURUS\nBy BILL DOEDE\n\n\n Illustrated by WEST\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine October 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe city was sacred, but not to its gods.\n \nMichaelson was a god—but far from sacred!\nCrouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his\n burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native.\n\n\n At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the\n Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he\n saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed.", "Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes;\n nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only\n like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left\n or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n\n\n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no\n direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n\n\n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking\n through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n\n\n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win\n after all.\"\n\n\n \"Neither did you.\"\n\n\n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be\n anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"" ], [ "Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around.\n The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is\n this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing\n a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above\n the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his\n fright—thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n\n\n Maota pointed to it.\n\n\n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid\n his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\nMichaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight,\n then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he\n forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you\nare\ncomplex. Why not stop all this\n mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"", "When he could talk again, Maota said, \"I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've\n disgraced myself.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be sorry.\" Michaelson helped him to his feet. \"We fight for some\n reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either.\"\n\n\n \"Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night\n when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take\n them we lose forever.\"\n\n\n \"I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never\n heard of negotiation?\"\n\n\n \"You are a god,\" Maota said. \"One does not negotiate with gods. One\n either loves them, or kills them.\"\n\n\n \"That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?\"", "Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped\n behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of\n existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun\n him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an\n archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n\n\n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to\n pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers,\n hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n\n\n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking\n sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth,\n over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw\n impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n\n\n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand—neither knew whose finger or\n hand—touched the firing stud.", "Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes;\n nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only\n like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left\n or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n\n\n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no\n direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n\n\n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking\n through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n\n\n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win\n after all.\"\n\n\n \"Neither did you.\"\n\n\n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be\n anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"", "\"Where are you going?\"\n\n\n \"Away. Far away.\" Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant.\n\n\n \"Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the\n city?\"\n\n\n \"There are many directions. You would not understand.\"\n\n\n \"East. West. North. South. Up. Down.\"\n\n\n \"No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see.\"\n\n\n Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of\n the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed\n against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading\n to a particular building.\n\n\n Michaelson said, \"This is where you live?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"", "Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand\n and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile,\n brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent.\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Michaelson repeated.\n\n\n \"Why not what?\" Maota dragged his eyes back.\n\n\n \"Negotiate.\"\n\n\n \"No.\" Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not\n twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far\n away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes.\n\n\n \"All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just\n disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that.\"\n\n\n Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer\n toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun.", "Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in\n the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair,\n familiar to Michaelson.\n\n\n Michaelson asked, \"Did you sleep well?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry to hear that.\"\n\n\n \"How do you feel?\"\n\n\n \"Fine, but my head aches a little.\"\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" Maota said.\n\n\n \"For what?\"\n\n\n \"For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you.\"\n\n\n Michaelson relaxed somewhat. \"What kind of man are you? First you try\n to break my skull, then you apologize.\"\n\n\n \"I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright.\"", "Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand\n against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed\n through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for\n a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle\n softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but\n his desire to hear the book was strong.\nOld Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the\n syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been\n a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley,\n Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n\n\n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in\n sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.", "\"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers,\n these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how\n gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n\n\n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n\n\n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want\n to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no\n slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is,\n for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n\n\n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly\n in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.", "The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages\n rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while\n Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient\n street.\nWhen he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in\n the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old\n Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed\n a more practical place now.\n\n\n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short\n hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new\n determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool\n wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command,\n across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he\n remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked\n blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.", "But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that\n the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense\n more complete than death.\n\n\n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came\n to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building\n with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination.\n Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n\n\n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all\n evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He\n had to know if the machine would work for him.\n\n\n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows\n over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old\n man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but\n determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the\n button.\n\n\n The high-pitched whine started.", "Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the\n old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life\n force—he didn't stop to define it—in his body. Why was his dead body\n different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread\n stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n\n\n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried.\n I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication\n with you. No one can go back.\"\n\n\n Michaelson decided he try.\n\"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n\n\n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and\n gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and\n gave his most violent command.", "There was a hollow, whooshing sound. Both stopped still, realizing the\n total destruction they might have caused.\n\n\n \"It only hit the ground,\" Michaelson said.\n\n\n A black, charred hole, two feet in diameter and—they could not see how\n deep—stared at them.\n\n\n Maota let go and sprawled in the sand. \"The book!\" he cried. \"The book\n is gone!\"\n\n\n \"No! We probably covered it with sand while we fought.\"\nBoth men began scooping sand in their cupped hands, digging frantically\n for the book. Saliva dripped from Maota's mouth, but he didn't know or\n care.\n\n\n Finally they stopped, exhausted. They had covered a substantial area\n around the hole. They had covered the complete area where they had been.\n\n\n \"We killed it,\" the old man moaned.", "\"Of course.\" Maota smiled a toothless, superior smile. \"What do you\n suppose happened to this race?\"\n\n\n \"You tell me.\"\n\n\n \"They took the unknown direction. The books speak of it. I don't know\n how the instrument works, but one thing is certain. The race did not\n die out, as a species becomes extinct.\"\n\n\n Michaelson was amused, but interested. \"Something like a fourth\n dimension?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. I only know that with this instrument there is no death.\n I have read the books that speak of this race, this wonderful people\n who conquered all disease, who explored all the mysteries of science,\n who devised this machine to cheat death. See this button here on the\n face of the instrument? Press the button, and....\"\n\n\n \"And what?\"", "Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide,\n hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond\n a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of\n the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him\n that.\n\n\n Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity.\n He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed\n floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items,\n making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched\n by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest\n detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books\n still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without\n tools.\n\n\n Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street.", "\"Don't call me that. I'm not a god, and you know it.\"\n\n\n The old man shrugged. \"It is not an item worthy of dispute. Those names\n you mention, are they the names of gods?\"\n\n\n He chuckled. \"In a way, yes. What is your name?\"\n\n\n \"Maota.\"\n\n\n \"You must help me, Maota. These things must be preserved. We'll build\n a museum, right here in the street. No, over there on the hill just\n outside the city. We'll collect all the old writings and perhaps we may\n decipher them. Think of it, Maota! To read pages written so long ago\n and think their thoughts. We'll put everything under glass. Build and\n evacuate chambers to stop the decay. Catalogue, itemize....\"\n\n\n Michaelson was warming up to his subject, but Maota shook his head like\n a waving palm frond and stamped his feet.", "He thought about that for a moment, eyeing the weapon.\n\n\n It looked in good working order. Slim and shiny and innocent, it looked\n like a glorified African blowgun. But he was not deceived by its\n appearance. It was a deadly weapon.\n\"Well,\" he said, \"before you kill me, tell me about the book.\" He held\n it up for Maota to see.\n\n\n \"What about the book?\"\n\n\n \"What kind of book is it?\"\n\n\n \"What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what\nkind\nof book? You have seen it. It\n is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it\n talks.\"\n\n\n \"No, no. I mean, what's in it?\"\n\n\n \"Poetry.\"", "\"It was just a book. Not alive, you know.\"\n\n\n \"How do you know?\" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. \"It\n talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I\n used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it.\"\n\n\n \"There are other books. We'll get another.\"\n\n\n Maota shook his head. \"There are no more.\"\n\n\n \"But I've seen them. Down there in the square building.\"\n\n\n \"Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with\n songs.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry.\"\n\n\n \"\nYou\nkilled it!\" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying\n forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too\n weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage.", "Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he\n relaxed. He said, \"You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that.\"\n\n\n \"You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill\n you, but if I must....\" He made a clucking sound deep in the throat.\n \"The spirits are angry.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer\n than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like\n a clock but I'm certain it had some other function.\"\n\n\n \"What rooms?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were\n bedrooms.\"\n\n\n \"I do not know.\" The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was\n sixty or seventy years old, at least.", "Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins\n happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact,\n marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to\n catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled\n over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation\n of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog,\n under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun.\n Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs.\nThe native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving\n his arms madly. \"Mr. Earthgod,\" he cried. \"It is sacred ground where\n you are trespassing!\"" ], [ "Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped\n behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of\n existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun\n him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an\n archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man.\n\n\n He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to\n pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers,\n hung on and was pulled to his feet.\n\n\n They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking\n sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth,\n over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw\n impersonal shadows down where they fought.\n\n\n Then quite suddenly a finger or hand—neither knew whose finger or\n hand—touched the firing stud.", "Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around.\n The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is\n this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing\n a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above\n the bed a \"clock\" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his\n fright—thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be.\n\n\n Maota pointed to it.\n\n\n \"You asked about this machine,\" he said. \"Now I will tell you.\" He laid\n his hand against it. \"Here is power to follow another direction.\"\nMichaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight,\n then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he\n forced a short laugh. \"Maota, you\nare\ncomplex. Why not stop all this\n mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I.\"", "When he could talk again, Maota said, \"I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've\n disgraced myself.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be sorry.\" Michaelson helped him to his feet. \"We fight for some\n reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either.\"\n\n\n \"Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night\n when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take\n them we lose forever.\"\n\n\n \"I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never\n heard of negotiation?\"\n\n\n \"You are a god,\" Maota said. \"One does not negotiate with gods. One\n either loves them, or kills them.\"\n\n\n \"That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?\"", "Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand\n and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile,\n brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent.\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Michaelson repeated.\n\n\n \"Why not what?\" Maota dragged his eyes back.\n\n\n \"Negotiate.\"\n\n\n \"No.\" Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not\n twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far\n away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes.\n\n\n \"All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just\n disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that.\"\n\n\n Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer\n toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun.", "Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes;\n nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only\n like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left\n or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere.\n\n\n \"Look!\" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no\n direction. \"Think of the city and you will see it.\"\n\n\n Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking\n through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body.\n\n\n Maota's chuckle again. \"The city will remain as it is. You did not win\n after all.\"\n\n\n \"Neither did you.\"\n\n\n \"But this existence has compensations,\" Maota said. \"You can be\n anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth.\"", "\"See?\" he said. \"The spirits read. They must have been great readers,\n these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how\n gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk.\"\n\n\n Michaelson laughed. \"You certainly have an imagination.\"\n\n\n \"What difference does it make?\" Maota cried, suddenly angry. \"You want\n to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no\n slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is,\n for spirits whose existence I cannot prove.\"\n\n\n The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly\n in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved.", "\"Where are you going?\"\n\n\n \"Away. Far away.\" Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant.\n\n\n \"Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the\n city?\"\n\n\n \"There are many directions. You would not understand.\"\n\n\n \"East. West. North. South. Up. Down.\"\n\n\n \"No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see.\"\n\n\n Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of\n the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed\n against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading\n to a particular building.\n\n\n Michaelson said, \"This is where you live?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"", "Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand\n against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed\n through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for\n a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle\n softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but\n his desire to hear the book was strong.\nOld Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the\n syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been\n a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley,\n Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations.\n\n\n The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in\n sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages.", "But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that\n the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense\n more complete than death.\n\n\n In the days that followed he gave much thought to the \"clock.\" He came\n to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building\n with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination.\n Then he searched the books for information about the instrument.\n\n\n Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all\n evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He\n had to know if the machine would work for him.\n\n\n And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows\n over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old\n man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but\n determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the\n button.\n\n\n The high-pitched whine started.", "Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in\n the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair,\n familiar to Michaelson.\n\n\n Michaelson asked, \"Did you sleep well?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry to hear that.\"\n\n\n \"How do you feel?\"\n\n\n \"Fine, but my head aches a little.\"\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" Maota said.\n\n\n \"For what?\"\n\n\n \"For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you.\"\n\n\n Michaelson relaxed somewhat. \"What kind of man are you? First you try\n to break my skull, then you apologize.\"\n\n\n \"I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright.\"", "\"Of course.\" Maota smiled a toothless, superior smile. \"What do you\n suppose happened to this race?\"\n\n\n \"You tell me.\"\n\n\n \"They took the unknown direction. The books speak of it. I don't know\n how the instrument works, but one thing is certain. The race did not\n die out, as a species becomes extinct.\"\n\n\n Michaelson was amused, but interested. \"Something like a fourth\n dimension?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. I only know that with this instrument there is no death.\n I have read the books that speak of this race, this wonderful people\n who conquered all disease, who explored all the mysteries of science,\n who devised this machine to cheat death. See this button here on the\n face of the instrument? Press the button, and....\"\n\n\n \"And what?\"", "There was a hollow, whooshing sound. Both stopped still, realizing the\n total destruction they might have caused.\n\n\n \"It only hit the ground,\" Michaelson said.\n\n\n A black, charred hole, two feet in diameter and—they could not see how\n deep—stared at them.\n\n\n Maota let go and sprawled in the sand. \"The book!\" he cried. \"The book\n is gone!\"\n\n\n \"No! We probably covered it with sand while we fought.\"\nBoth men began scooping sand in their cupped hands, digging frantically\n for the book. Saliva dripped from Maota's mouth, but he didn't know or\n care.\n\n\n Finally they stopped, exhausted. They had covered a substantial area\n around the hole. They had covered the complete area where they had been.\n\n\n \"We killed it,\" the old man moaned.", "The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages\n rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while\n Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient\n street.\nWhen he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in\n the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old\n Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed\n a more practical place now.\n\n\n The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short\n hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new\n determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool\n wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command,\n across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he\n remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked\n blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back.", "Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the\n old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life\n force—he didn't stop to define it—in his body. Why was his dead body\n different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread\n stretching from the reality of his body to his present state?\n\n\n \"I don't like your thoughts,\" Maota said. \"No one can go back. I tried.\n I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication\n with you. No one can go back.\"\n\n\n Michaelson decided he try.\n\"No!\" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger.\n\n\n Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and\n gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and\n gave his most violent command.", "\"Don't call me that. I'm not a god, and you know it.\"\n\n\n The old man shrugged. \"It is not an item worthy of dispute. Those names\n you mention, are they the names of gods?\"\n\n\n He chuckled. \"In a way, yes. What is your name?\"\n\n\n \"Maota.\"\n\n\n \"You must help me, Maota. These things must be preserved. We'll build\n a museum, right here in the street. No, over there on the hill just\n outside the city. We'll collect all the old writings and perhaps we may\n decipher them. Think of it, Maota! To read pages written so long ago\n and think their thoughts. We'll put everything under glass. Build and\n evacuate chambers to stop the decay. Catalogue, itemize....\"\n\n\n Michaelson was warming up to his subject, but Maota shook his head like\n a waving palm frond and stamped his feet.", "\"It was just a book. Not alive, you know.\"\n\n\n \"How do you know?\" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. \"It\n talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I\n used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it.\"\n\n\n \"There are other books. We'll get another.\"\n\n\n Maota shook his head. \"There are no more.\"\n\n\n \"But I've seen them. Down there in the square building.\"\n\n\n \"Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with\n songs.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry.\"\n\n\n \"\nYou\nkilled it!\" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying\n forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too\n weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage.", "\"You will leave now.\"\n\n\n \"Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They\n must be preserved. Future generations will thank us.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mean,\" the old man asked, aghast, \"that you want others to come\n here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who\n lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged\n and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their\n foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!\"\n\n\n \"No.\" Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar.\n\n\n Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his\n body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his\n heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city.", "He thought about that for a moment, eyeing the weapon.\n\n\n It looked in good working order. Slim and shiny and innocent, it looked\n like a glorified African blowgun. But he was not deceived by its\n appearance. It was a deadly weapon.\n\"Well,\" he said, \"before you kill me, tell me about the book.\" He held\n it up for Maota to see.\n\n\n \"What about the book?\"\n\n\n \"What kind of book is it?\"\n\n\n \"What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what\nkind\nof book? You have seen it. It\n is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it\n talks.\"\n\n\n \"No, no. I mean, what's in it?\"\n\n\n \"Poetry.\"", "\"Wait!\"\n\n\n \"Now what?\"\n\n\n \"At least read some of the book to me before I die, then.\"\n\n\n The gun wavered. \"I am not an unreasonable man,\" the webfoot said.\n\n\n Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book.\n\n\n \"No, stay where you are. Throw it.\"\n\n\n \"This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items\n around.\"\n\n\n \"It won't break. Throw it.\"", "\"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Each machine is tailored for each person.\"\n\n\n The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred\n hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking\n half-heartedly again for the book.\n\n\n \"Look,\" Michaelson said. \"I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human.\n Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?\"\n\n\n He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's\n face. Finally he shook his head sadly. \"When we first met I hoped we\n could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We\n have finished, you and I.\"\n\n\n He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly.\n\n\n Michaelson caught up to him. \"Are you leaving the city?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"" ] ]
test	51534	[ "How can the reader initially tell that the narrator feels a sort of discontent towards the others he works with? ", "Why does his boss feel that the narrator has come to work at what is probably the most important place on Earth?", "Both the narrator and his boss express displeasure when it comes to what sort of people?", "Why is the narrator disappointed when he finds out what his work assignment is to be?", "Why does the narrator resent Len Ellsom?", "For the narrator's project, who is their test subject?", "Why does the narrator feel people in his field of science should be the \"rock stars\" of the science world and receive all the recognition and praise that is heaped on to those in neurosciences?", "The narrator compares people's expectations for him to", "What does Len credit for being the start of his drinking problem?", "Why does the narrator say Len should be proud?" ]	[ [ "He does not like the fact that they are only in the position they are in because their rich families paid their way in.", "He does not seem to approve of the way they dress or how they appear to be lazy.", "He doesn't appreciate the way that they speak to him?", "He speaks of their inferior intelligence." ], [ "They are in charge of training the most important scientists in the world.", "They are doing groundbreaking work in many scientific areas.", "They are the last place where free thought is allowed in America.", "They are charged with developing a cure for a plague that has started to kill off the human race." ], [ "Religious people who rely on God rather than science.", "Athletic people who do not have to be able to think in order to achieve advancement, just rely on their athletic ability.", "Creatives like artists and actors.", "Freethinkers like poets." ], [ "He wanted to work alone, but he was assigned a crew to assist him.", "He wanted to work directly under his supervisor.", "He wanted to be in charge of the weapon-making program.", "He wanted to work on the mysterious MS project." ], [ "Len is rich, and he is not afraid to remind the narrator that he is poor.", "He doesn't. They have been friends since college.", "Len took his place on the football team in college.", "Len took the narrator's girl, and now he has the job the narrator wanted." ], [ "A chimp named Ollie.", "A double amputee from the Army.", "An alien that they have captured and are holding to experiment on.", "Captives from the opposing side during the last great war." ], [ "Neuroscientists have it easier because not that many people are in need of brain surgery as they do artificial limbs, making the narrator's field much more in demand.", "Honestly, he doesn't care. He just doesn't like neuroscientists because Len works in that field, and he hates him.", "Neuroscientists are not as talented.", "Neuroscientists only have to worry about getting one component to work in order to be successful. People in the narrator's field have to focus on multiple things, and if they all don't work in unison, then the project doesn't work. That makes them twice as successful when it does." ], [ "slaves because they have to work for little money and no recognition.", "God because of what they expect them to be able to achieve.", "a bunch of losers who cannot get anything right.", "The neuroscientists who were able to get a robot to beat the world's chess champion." ], [ "Taking the narrator's girl.", "When he lost his parents.", "The day a robot he helped to create beat the world's chess champion.", "Knowing that the country was going to war again soon." ], [ "The success they had with the robot brain was a direct reflection of his own brain.", "He helped to contribute to creating a safer world.", "He got the girl of his dreams when he took the narrator's girlfriend.", "He has the job he always wanted." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "\"Definitely,\" I said. \"I'd be the last one in the world to say a word\n against Len, but he was always a little peculiar. Very gay one moment\n and very sour the next, and inclined to poke fun at things other people\n take seriously. He used to write poetry.\"\n\n\n \"I'm very glad to know that,\" the boss said. \"Confirms my own feeling\n about him.\"\n\n\n So the boss has some doubts about Len.\nOctober 27, 1959\nUnpleasant evening with Len. It all started after dinner when he showed\n up in my room, wagged his finger at me and said, \"Ollie, you've been\n avoiding me. That hurts. Thought we were pals, thick and thin and till\n debt and death do us part.\"\n\n\n I saw immediately that he was drunk—he always gets his words mixed\n up when he's drunk—and I tried to placate him by explaining that it\n wasn't anything like that; I'd been busy.", "Now, I've heard talk like that before, and I don't like it. I don't\n like it at all. It so happens that I feel very strongly on the subject.\n I think a scientist should like what he's doing and not want to take\n refuge in Nature from the Laws of Nature (which is downright illogical,\n anyhow). I, for one, enjoy cutting logs precisely\nbecause\n, when my\n saw rasps across a knot, I know that the innermost secret of that\n knot, as of all matter in the Universe, is E=MC\n 2\n . It's my job to\nknow\nit, and it's very satisfying to\nknow\nthat I know it and that\n the general run of people don't. I was about to put this thought into\n words, but before I could open my mouth, somebody behind us spoke up.", "\"Lushing it up,\" he said. \"Getting stinking from drinking.\" He still\n likes to use the most flamboyant slang; I consider it an infantile form\n of protest against what he regards as the \"genteel\" manner of academic\n people. \"I got sort of restless this morning, so I ducked out and beat\n it into New York and looked up my friend Steve Lundy in the Village.\n Spent the afternoon liquidating our joint assets. Liquidating our\n assets in the joints.\"\n\n\n What, I wanted to know, was he feeling restless about?\n\n\n \"Restless for going on three years now.\" His face grew solemn, as\n though he were thinking it over very carefully. \"I'll amend that\n statement. Hell with the Aesopian language. I've been a plain lush for\n going on three years. Ever since—\"\n\n\n If it was something personal—I suggested.", "\"Look here, Parks,\" the boss said. He seemed a little peeved.\n \"Cybernetics is teamwork, and the first rule of any team is that not\n everybody can be quarterback. Each man has a specific job on our team,\n one thing he's best suited for, and what\nyou're\nbest suited for,\n obviously, is the Pro lab. We've followed your work closely these last\n few years, and we were quite impressed by the way you handled those\n photo-electric-cell insects. You pulled off a brilliant engineering\n stunt, you know, when you induced nervous breakdown in your robot\n moths and bedbugs, and proved that the oscillations they developed\n corresponded to those which the human animal develops in intention\n tremor and Parkinson's disease. A keen bit of cybernetic thinking,\n that.\nVery\nkeen.\"\n\n\n It was just luck, I told him modestly.", "Guess I was a little previous in packing my soup-and-fish. Soon as I\n was shown to my room in the bachelor dorms, I dug it out and hung it\n way back in the closet, out of sight. When in Rome, etc. Later that day\n I discovered they carry dungarees in the Co-op; luckily, they had the\n pre-faded kind.\nOctober 6, 1959\nMet the boss this morning—hardly out of his thirties, crew-cut,\n wearing a flannel hunting shirt and dirty saddleshoes. I was glad I'd\n thought to change into my dungarees before the interview.\n\n\n \"Parks,\" he said, \"you can count yourself a very fortunate young man.\n You've come to the most important address in America, not excluding the\n Pentagon. In the world, probably. To get you oriented, suppose I sketch\n in some of the background of the place.\"", "\"If we're pals,\" he said, \"come on and have a beer with me.\"\n\n\n There was no shaking him off, so I followed him down to his car and we\n drove to this sleazy little bar in the Negro part of town. As soon as\n we sat down in a booth, Len borrowed all the nickels I had, put them\n in the jukebox and pressed the levers for a lot of old Louie Armstrong\n records.\n\n\n \"Sorry, kid,\" he said. \"I know how you hate this real jazzy stuff, but\n can't have a reunion without music, and there isn't a polka or cowboy\n ballad or hillbilly stomp in the box. They lack the folksy touch on\n this side of the tracks.\" Len has always been very snobbish about my\n interest in folk music.\n\n\n I asked him what he'd been doing during the day.", "\"Oh?\" I said. \"Does that mean you're in MS?\" It wasn't an easy idea to\n accept, but I think I was pretty successful in keeping my tone casual.\n\n\n \"Ollie, my boy,\" he said in an exaggerated stage whisper, putting his\n finger to his lips, \"in the beginning was the word and the word was\n mum. Leave us avoid the subject of brains in this\nkeen\nplace. We\n all have a job to do on the team.\" I suppose that was meant to be a\n humorous imitation of the boss; Len always did fancy himself quite a\n clown.\n\n\n We were separated during the sawing, but he caught up with me on the\n way back and said, \"Let's get together soon and have a talk, Ollie.\n It's been a long time.\"", "I didn't care for his cynical attitude at all, but he had a point. Len\n Ellsom just has to build a fancy adding machine to get his picture in\n the papers.\nI\nhave to be God!\nOctober 22, 1959\nDon't know what to make of Kujack. His attitude is peculiar. Of course,\n he's very co-operative, lies back on the fitting table and doesn't\n even wince when we snap on the pros, and he does his best to carry out\n instructions. Still, there's something funny about the way he looks at\n me. There's a kind of malicious expression in his eyes. At times, come\n to think of it, he reminds me of Len.", "\"Don't get me wrong, Doc,\" he said, much too innocently. \"It's just\n that I've been thinking. Maybe you'd have more luck if you thought of\n me as a bedbug.\"\n\n\n \"Where did you get that idea?\"\n\n\n \"From Doc Ellsom. I was having some beers with him the other night.\n He's got a very high opinion of you, says you build the best bedbugs in\n the business.\"\n\n\n I find it hard to believe that Len Ellsom would say anything really\n nice about me. Must be his guilt about Marilyn that makes him talk that\n way. I don't like his hanging around Kujack.\nOctober 25, 1959\nThe boss came along on our woodcutting expedition this morning and\n volunteered to work the other end of my two-handled saw. He asked how\n things were coming in the Pro lab.", "\"Sure thing,\" he said. \"You're going to take charge of a very important\n lab. The Pro lab.\" I guess he saw my puzzled look. \"Pro—that's short\n for prosthetics, artificial limbs. You know, it's really a scandal.\n With our present level of technology, we should have artificial limbs\n which in many ways are even better than the originals, but actually\n we're still making do with modifications of the same primitive, clumsy\n pegs and hooks they were using a thousand years ago. I'm counting on\n you to get things hopping in that department. It's a real challenge.\"\n\n\n I said it sure was a challenge, and of course I'd do my level best to\n meet it. Still, I couldn't help feeling a bit disappointed. Around\n cybernetics circles, I hinted, you heard a lot of talk about the\n hush-hush MS work that was going on at IFACS and it sounded so exciting\n that, well, a fellow sort of hoped he might get into\nthat\nend of\n things.", "I was relieved to see him taking it so well because I know how anxious\n he is to get results from the Pro lab. Since Pro is one of the few\n things going on at IFACS that can be talked about, he's impatient for\n us to come up with something he can release to the press. As the public\n relations officer explained it to me at dinner the other night, people\n get worried when they know there's something like IFACS going, but\n don't get any real information about it, so the boss, naturally, wants\n to relieve the public's curiosity with a good, reassuring story about\n our work.\n\n\n I knew I was taking an awful chance spilling the whole K-N thing to him\n the way I did, but I had to lay the groundwork for a little plan I've\n just begun to work on.\n\n\n \"By the way, sir,\" I said, \"I ran into Len Ellsom the other day. I\n didn't know he was here.\"", "Take this afternoon, for instance. I've just worked out an entirely\n different kind of leg based on a whole new arrangement of solenoids to\n duplicate the muscle systems, and I decided to give it a try. When I\n was slipping the model into place, I looked up and caught Kujack's eye\n for a moment. He seemed to be laughing at something, although his face\n was expressionless.\n\n\n \"All right,\" I said. \"Let's make a test. I understand you used to be\n quite a football player. Well, just think of how you used to kick a\n football and try to do it now.\"\n\n\n He really seemed to be trying; the effort made him sweat. All that\n happened, though, was that the big toe wriggled a little and the knee\n buckled. Dud Number Twenty-five. I was sore, of course, especially when\n I noticed that Kujack was more amused than ever.\n\n\n \"You seem to think something's pretty funny,\" I said.", "But our job calls for even more. The pro mustn't only\nequal\nthe\n real thing, it must be\nsuperior\n! That means creating a synthetic\n neuro-muscular system that actually\nimproves\non the nerves and\n muscles Nature created in the original!\n\n\n When our twenty-fourth experimental model turned out to be a dud last\n week—it just hung from Kujack's stump, quivering like one of my robot\n bedbugs, as though it had a bad case of intention tremor—Goldweiser\n said something that made an impression on me.\n\"They don't want much from us,\" he said sarcastically. \"They just want\n us to be God.\"", "He wants to talk about Marilyn, I suppose. Naturally. He has a guilty\n conscience. I'll have to make it quite clear to him that the whole\n episode is a matter of complete indifference to me. Marilyn is a closed\n book in my life; he must understand that. But can you beat that? He's\n right in the middle of MS! That lad certainly gets around. It's the\n usual Ellsom charm, I suppose.\n\n\n The usual Ellsom technique for irritating people, too. He's still\n trying to get my goat; he knows how much I've always hated to be called\n Ollie. Must watch Goldweiser. Thought he laughed pretty heartily at\n Len's wisecracks.\nOctober 18, 1959\nThings are shaping up in the Pro lab. Here's how I get the picture.", "\"The night is young,\" he said, \"and you're so dutiful. Where was I? Oh\n yes, Bell. At first our electronic pawn-pusher wasn't so hot—it could\n beat the pants off a lousy player, but an expert just made it look\n silly. But we kept improving it, see, building more and more electronic\n anticipation and gambit-plotting powers into it, and finally, one great\n day in '55, we thought we had all the kinks ironed out and were ready\n for the big test. By this time, of course, Washington had stepped in\n and taken over the whole project.\n\n\n \"Well, we got hold of Fortunescu, the world's champion chess player,\n sat him down and turned the robot loose on him. For four hours straight\n we followed the match, with a delegation of big brass from Washington,\n and for four hours straight the machine trounced Fortunescu every game.\n That was when I began to get scared. I went out that night and got\n really loaded.\"", "Damn! Everybody knows MS is the thing to get into. It gives you real\n standing in the field if it gets around that you're an MS man. I had my\n heart set on getting into MS.\nOctober 6, 1959\nIt never rains, etc.: now it turns out that Len Ellsom's here, and\nhe's\nin MS! Found out about it in a funny way. Two mornings a week,\n it seems, the staff members get into their skiing and hunting clothes\n and tramp into the woods to cut logs for their fireplaces. Well, this\n morning I went with them, and as we were walking along the trail\n Goldweiser, my assistant, told me the idea behind these expeditions.", "What had he been so scared about? It seemed to me he should have felt\n happy.\n\n\n \"Listen, Ollie,\" he said, \"for Christ's sake, stop talking like a Boy\n Scout for once in your life.\"\n\n\n If he was going to insult me—\n\n\n \"No insult intended. Just listen. I'm a terrible chess player. Any\n five-year-old could chatemeck—checkmate—me with his brains tied\n behind his back. But this machine which I built, helped build, is the\n champion chess player of the world. In other words, my brain has given\n birth to a brain which can do things my brain could never do. Don't you\n find that terrifying?\"\n\n\n \"Not at all,\" I said. \"\nYou\nmade the machine, didn't you? Therefore,\n no matter what it does, it's only an extension of you. You should feel\n proud to have devised a powerful new tool.\"", "\"Nonsense,\" the boss insisted. \"You're first and foremost a talented\n neuro man, and that's exactly what we need in the Pro department.\n There, you see, the problem is primarily one of duplicating a nervous\n mechanism in the metal, of bridging the gap between the neuronic and\n electronic. So buckle down, and if you hear any more gossip about MS,\n forget it fast—it's not a proper subject of conversation for you. The\n loyalty oath you signed is very specific about the trouble you can get\n into with loose talk. Remember that.\"\n\n\n I said I certainly would, and thanks a whole lot for the advice.", "I'm no Eniac, but I can occasionally put two and two together myself.\n If the boss's remarks mean anything, they mean that an electronic brain\n capable of playing games has been developed, and that it's led to\n something important militarily. Of course! I could kick myself for not\n having guessed it before.\n\n\n Brains-and-games—that's what MS is all about, obviously. It had to\n happen: out of the mathematical analysis of chess came a robot chess\n player, and out of the chess player came some kind of mechanical brain\n that's useful in military strategy.\nThat's\nwhat Len Ellsom's in the\n middle of.\n\n\n \"Really brilliant mind,\" the boss said after we'd sawed for a while.\n \"Keen. But he's a little erratic—quirky, queer sense of humor. Isn't\n that your impression?\"", "\"Stop wearing your loyalty oath on your sleeve,\" he said belligerently.\n \"Sure I want to talk about it. Greatest subject I know. Begin at\n the beginning. Whole thing started back in the Thirties with those\n two refugee mathematicians who used to be here at the Institute for\n Advanced Studies when Einstein was around. Von Morgan and Neumanstern,\n no, Von\nNeu\nmann and\nMor\nganstern. You remember, they did a\n mathematical analysis of all the possible kinds of games, poker,\n tossing pennies, chess, bridge, everything, and they wrote up their\n findings in a volume you certainly know,\nThe Theory of Games\n." ], [ "Guess I was a little previous in packing my soup-and-fish. Soon as I\n was shown to my room in the bachelor dorms, I dug it out and hung it\n way back in the closet, out of sight. When in Rome, etc. Later that day\n I discovered they carry dungarees in the Co-op; luckily, they had the\n pre-faded kind.\nOctober 6, 1959\nMet the boss this morning—hardly out of his thirties, crew-cut,\n wearing a flannel hunting shirt and dirty saddleshoes. I was glad I'd\n thought to change into my dungarees before the interview.\n\n\n \"Parks,\" he said, \"you can count yourself a very fortunate young man.\n You've come to the most important address in America, not excluding the\n Pentagon. In the world, probably. To get you oriented, suppose I sketch\n in some of the background of the place.\"", "\"Do you know him?\" the boss said. \"Good man. One of the best\n brains-and-games men you'll find anywhere.\"\n\n\n I explained that Len had gotten his degree at M.I.T. the year before I\n did. From what I'd heard, I added, he'd done some important work on the\n Remington-Rand ballistics computer.\n\n\n \"He did indeed,\" the boss said, \"but that's not the half of it. After\n that he made some major contributions to the robot chess player. As a\n matter of fact, that's why he's here.\"\n\n\n I said I hadn't heard about the chess player.\n\n\n \"As soon as it began to play a really good game of chess, Washington\n put the whole thing under wraps for security reasons. Which is why you\n won't hear any more about it from me.\"", "\"Look here, Parks,\" the boss said. He seemed a little peeved.\n \"Cybernetics is teamwork, and the first rule of any team is that not\n everybody can be quarterback. Each man has a specific job on our team,\n one thing he's best suited for, and what\nyou're\nbest suited for,\n obviously, is the Pro lab. We've followed your work closely these last\n few years, and we were quite impressed by the way you handled those\n photo-electric-cell insects. You pulled off a brilliant engineering\n stunt, you know, when you induced nervous breakdown in your robot\n moths and bedbugs, and proved that the oscillations they developed\n corresponded to those which the human animal develops in intention\n tremor and Parkinson's disease. A keen bit of cybernetic thinking,\n that.\nVery\nkeen.\"\n\n\n It was just luck, I told him modestly.", "Now, I've heard talk like that before, and I don't like it. I don't\n like it at all. It so happens that I feel very strongly on the subject.\n I think a scientist should like what he's doing and not want to take\n refuge in Nature from the Laws of Nature (which is downright illogical,\n anyhow). I, for one, enjoy cutting logs precisely\nbecause\n, when my\n saw rasps across a knot, I know that the innermost secret of that\n knot, as of all matter in the Universe, is E=MC\n 2\n . It's my job to\nknow\nit, and it's very satisfying to\nknow\nthat I know it and that\n the general run of people don't. I was about to put this thought into\n words, but before I could open my mouth, somebody behind us spoke up.", "After M. I. T. I\nhad\nspent some time out in California doing\n neuro-cyber research, I explained—but what was\nhe\ndoing here? I'd\n lost track of him after he'd left Boston; the last I'd heard, he'd been\n working on the giant robot brain Remington-Rand was developing for the\n Air Force. I remembered seeing his picture in the paper two or three\n times while he was working on the brain.\n\n\n \"I was with Remington a couple of years,\" he told me. \"If I do say\n so myself, we built the Air Force a real humdinger of a brain—in\n addition to solving the most complex problems in ballistics, it could\n whistle\nDixie\nand, in moments of stress, produce a sound not unlike\n a Bronx cheer. Naturally, for my prowess in the electronic simulation\n of I.Q., I was tapped for the brain department of these hallowed\n precincts.\"", "I was relieved to see him taking it so well because I know how anxious\n he is to get results from the Pro lab. Since Pro is one of the few\n things going on at IFACS that can be talked about, he's impatient for\n us to come up with something he can release to the press. As the public\n relations officer explained it to me at dinner the other night, people\n get worried when they know there's something like IFACS going, but\n don't get any real information about it, so the boss, naturally, wants\n to relieve the public's curiosity with a good, reassuring story about\n our work.\n\n\n I knew I was taking an awful chance spilling the whole K-N thing to him\n the way I did, but I had to lay the groundwork for a little plan I've\n just begun to work on.\n\n\n \"By the way, sir,\" I said, \"I ran into Len Ellsom the other day. I\n didn't know he was here.\"", "I'm no Eniac, but I can occasionally put two and two together myself.\n If the boss's remarks mean anything, they mean that an electronic brain\n capable of playing games has been developed, and that it's led to\n something important militarily. Of course! I could kick myself for not\n having guessed it before.\n\n\n Brains-and-games—that's what MS is all about, obviously. It had to\n happen: out of the mathematical analysis of chess came a robot chess\n player, and out of the chess player came some kind of mechanical brain\n that's useful in military strategy.\nThat's\nwhat Len Ellsom's in the\n middle of.\n\n\n \"Really brilliant mind,\" the boss said after we'd sawed for a while.\n \"Keen. But he's a little erratic—quirky, queer sense of humor. Isn't\n that your impression?\"", "\"Definitely,\" I said. \"I'd be the last one in the world to say a word\n against Len, but he was always a little peculiar. Very gay one moment\n and very sour the next, and inclined to poke fun at things other people\n take seriously. He used to write poetry.\"\n\n\n \"I'm very glad to know that,\" the boss said. \"Confirms my own feeling\n about him.\"\n\n\n So the boss has some doubts about Len.\nOctober 27, 1959\nUnpleasant evening with Len. It all started after dinner when he showed\n up in my room, wagged his finger at me and said, \"Ollie, you've been\n avoiding me. That hurts. Thought we were pals, thick and thin and till\n debt and death do us part.\"\n\n\n I saw immediately that he was drunk—he always gets his words mixed\n up when he's drunk—and I tried to placate him by explaining that it\n wasn't anything like that; I'd been busy.", "\"Sure thing,\" he said. \"You're going to take charge of a very important\n lab. The Pro lab.\" I guess he saw my puzzled look. \"Pro—that's short\n for prosthetics, artificial limbs. You know, it's really a scandal.\n With our present level of technology, we should have artificial limbs\n which in many ways are even better than the originals, but actually\n we're still making do with modifications of the same primitive, clumsy\n pegs and hooks they were using a thousand years ago. I'm counting on\n you to get things hopping in that department. It's a real challenge.\"\n\n\n I said it sure was a challenge, and of course I'd do my level best to\n meet it. Still, I couldn't help feeling a bit disappointed. Around\n cybernetics circles, I hinted, you heard a lot of talk about the\n hush-hush MS work that was going on at IFACS and it sounded so exciting\n that, well, a fellow sort of hoped he might get into\nthat\nend of\n things.", "\"Maybe you know,\" he went on, \"that in the days of Oppenheimer and\n Einstein, this place was called the Institute for Advanced Studies.\n It was run pretty loosely then—in addition to the mathematicians and\n physicists, they had all sorts of queer ducks hanging around—poets,\n egyptologists, numismatists, medievalists, herbalists, God alone knows\n what all. By 1955, however, so many cybernetics labs had sprung up\n around the country that we needed some central coordinating agency,\n so Washington arranged for us to take over here. Naturally, as soon\n as we arrived, we eased out the poets and egyptologists, brought in\n our own people, and changed the name to the Institute for Advanced\nCybernetics\nStudies. We've got some pretty keen projects going now,\npret\n-ty keen.\"\n\n\n I said I'd bet, and did he have any idea which project I would fit into?", "\"Nonsense,\" the boss insisted. \"You're first and foremost a talented\n neuro man, and that's exactly what we need in the Pro department.\n There, you see, the problem is primarily one of duplicating a nervous\n mechanism in the metal, of bridging the gap between the neuronic and\n electronic. So buckle down, and if you hear any more gossip about MS,\n forget it fast—it's not a proper subject of conversation for you. The\n loyalty oath you signed is very specific about the trouble you can get\n into with loose talk. Remember that.\"\n\n\n I said I certainly would, and thanks a whole lot for the advice.", "\"Some tool,\" he sneered. He was so drunk by now that I could hardly\n understand what he was saying. \"The General Staff boys in Washington\n were all hopped up about that little old tool, and for a plenty good\n reason—they understood that mechanized warfare is only the most\n complicated game the human race has invented so far, an elaborate form\n of chess which uses the population of the world for pawns and the\n globe for a chessboard. They saw, too, that when the game of war gets\n this complex, the job of controlling and guiding it becomes too damned\n involved for any number of human brains, no matter how nimble.\n\n\n \"In other words, my beamish Boy Scout, modern war needs just this kind\n of strategy tool; the General Staff has to be mechanized along with\n everything else. So the Pentagon boys set up IFACS and handed us a\n top-priority cybernetics project: to build a superduper chess player\n that could oversee a complicated military maneuver, maybe later a whole\n campaign, maybe ultimately a whole global war.", "\"The day arrives. A's Emsiac is set up in its capital, B's is set up\n in\nits\ncapital. In each capital the citizens gather around their\n strategy machine, the officials turn out in high hats and cut-aways,\n there are speeches, pageants, choral singing, mass dancing—the ritual\n can be worked out in advance. Then, at an agreed time, the crowds\n retreat to a safe distance and a committee of the top cyberneticists\n appears. They climb into planes, take off and—this is beautiful—drop\n all their atom bombs and H-bombs on the machines. It happens\n simultaneously in both countries, you see. That's the neat part of it.\n The occasion is called International Mushroom Day.", "\"Don't get me wrong, Doc,\" he said, much too innocently. \"It's just\n that I've been thinking. Maybe you'd have more luck if you thought of\n me as a bedbug.\"\n\n\n \"Where did you get that idea?\"\n\n\n \"From Doc Ellsom. I was having some beers with him the other night.\n He's got a very high opinion of you, says you build the best bedbugs in\n the business.\"\n\n\n I find it hard to believe that Len Ellsom would say anything really\n nice about me. Must be his guilt about Marilyn that makes him talk that\n way. I don't like his hanging around Kujack.\nOctober 25, 1959\nThe boss came along on our woodcutting expedition this morning and\n volunteered to work the other end of my two-handled saw. He asked how\n things were coming in the Pro lab.", "Damn! Everybody knows MS is the thing to get into. It gives you real\n standing in the field if it gets around that you're an MS man. I had my\n heart set on getting into MS.\nOctober 6, 1959\nIt never rains, etc.: now it turns out that Len Ellsom's here, and\nhe's\nin MS! Found out about it in a funny way. Two mornings a week,\n it seems, the staff members get into their skiing and hunting clothes\n and tramp into the woods to cut logs for their fireplaces. Well, this\n morning I went with them, and as we were walking along the trail\n Goldweiser, my assistant, told me the idea behind these expeditions.", "\"The night is young,\" he said, \"and you're so dutiful. Where was I? Oh\n yes, Bell. At first our electronic pawn-pusher wasn't so hot—it could\n beat the pants off a lousy player, but an expert just made it look\n silly. But we kept improving it, see, building more and more electronic\n anticipation and gambit-plotting powers into it, and finally, one great\n day in '55, we thought we had all the kinks ironed out and were ready\n for the big test. By this time, of course, Washington had stepped in\n and taken over the whole project.\n\n\n \"Well, we got hold of Fortunescu, the world's champion chess player,\n sat him down and turned the robot loose on him. For four hours straight\n we followed the match, with a delegation of big brass from Washington,\n and for four hours straight the machine trounced Fortunescu every game.\n That was when I began to get scared. I went out that night and got\n really loaded.\"", "\"We're aiming at a military strategy machine which can digest reports\n from all the units on all the fronts and from moment to moment, on\n the basis of that steady stream of information, grind out an elastic\n overall strategy and dictate concrete tactical directives to all the\n units. Wiener warned this might happen, and he was right. A very nifty\n tool. Never mind how far we've gotten with the thing, but I will tell\n you this: I'm a lot more scared today than I was three years ago.\"\n\n\n So\nthat\nwas the secret of MS! The most extraordinary machine ever\n devised by the human mind! It was hard to conceal the thrill of\n excitement I felt, even as a relative outsider.\n\n\n \"Why all the jitters?\" I said. \"This could be the most wonderful tool\n ever invented. It might eliminate war altogether.\"\n\n\n Len was quiet for a while, gulping his beer and looking off into space.\n Then he turned to me.", "\"Stop wearing your loyalty oath on your sleeve,\" he said belligerently.\n \"Sure I want to talk about it. Greatest subject I know. Begin at\n the beginning. Whole thing started back in the Thirties with those\n two refugee mathematicians who used to be here at the Institute for\n Advanced Studies when Einstein was around. Von Morgan and Neumanstern,\n no, Von\nNeu\nmann and\nMor\nganstern. You remember, they did a\n mathematical analysis of all the possible kinds of games, poker,\n tossing pennies, chess, bridge, everything, and they wrote up their\n findings in a volume you certainly know,\nThe Theory of Games\n.", "\"Lushing it up,\" he said. \"Getting stinking from drinking.\" He still\n likes to use the most flamboyant slang; I consider it an infantile form\n of protest against what he regards as the \"genteel\" manner of academic\n people. \"I got sort of restless this morning, so I ducked out and beat\n it into New York and looked up my friend Steve Lundy in the Village.\n Spent the afternoon liquidating our joint assets. Liquidating our\n assets in the joints.\"\n\n\n What, I wanted to know, was he feeling restless about?\n\n\n \"Restless for going on three years now.\" His face grew solemn, as\n though he were thinking it over very carefully. \"I'll amend that\n statement. Hell with the Aesopian language. I've been a plain lush for\n going on three years. Ever since—\"\n\n\n If it was something personal—I suggested.", "What had he been so scared about? It seemed to me he should have felt\n happy.\n\n\n \"Listen, Ollie,\" he said, \"for Christ's sake, stop talking like a Boy\n Scout for once in your life.\"\n\n\n If he was going to insult me—\n\n\n \"No insult intended. Just listen. I'm a terrible chess player. Any\n five-year-old could chatemeck—checkmate—me with his brains tied\n behind his back. But this machine which I built, helped build, is the\n champion chess player of the world. In other words, my brain has given\n birth to a brain which can do things my brain could never do. Don't you\n find that terrifying?\"\n\n\n \"Not at all,\" I said. \"\nYou\nmade the machine, didn't you? Therefore,\n no matter what it does, it's only an extension of you. You should feel\n proud to have devised a powerful new tool.\"" ], [ "\"Definitely,\" I said. \"I'd be the last one in the world to say a word\n against Len, but he was always a little peculiar. Very gay one moment\n and very sour the next, and inclined to poke fun at things other people\n take seriously. He used to write poetry.\"\n\n\n \"I'm very glad to know that,\" the boss said. \"Confirms my own feeling\n about him.\"\n\n\n So the boss has some doubts about Len.\nOctober 27, 1959\nUnpleasant evening with Len. It all started after dinner when he showed\n up in my room, wagged his finger at me and said, \"Ollie, you've been\n avoiding me. That hurts. Thought we were pals, thick and thin and till\n debt and death do us part.\"\n\n\n I saw immediately that he was drunk—he always gets his words mixed\n up when he's drunk—and I tried to placate him by explaining that it\n wasn't anything like that; I'd been busy.", "\"If we're pals,\" he said, \"come on and have a beer with me.\"\n\n\n There was no shaking him off, so I followed him down to his car and we\n drove to this sleazy little bar in the Negro part of town. As soon as\n we sat down in a booth, Len borrowed all the nickels I had, put them\n in the jukebox and pressed the levers for a lot of old Louie Armstrong\n records.\n\n\n \"Sorry, kid,\" he said. \"I know how you hate this real jazzy stuff, but\n can't have a reunion without music, and there isn't a polka or cowboy\n ballad or hillbilly stomp in the box. They lack the folksy touch on\n this side of the tracks.\" Len has always been very snobbish about my\n interest in folk music.\n\n\n I asked him what he'd been doing during the day.", "Now, I've heard talk like that before, and I don't like it. I don't\n like it at all. It so happens that I feel very strongly on the subject.\n I think a scientist should like what he's doing and not want to take\n refuge in Nature from the Laws of Nature (which is downright illogical,\n anyhow). I, for one, enjoy cutting logs precisely\nbecause\n, when my\n saw rasps across a knot, I know that the innermost secret of that\n knot, as of all matter in the Universe, is E=MC\n 2\n . It's my job to\nknow\nit, and it's very satisfying to\nknow\nthat I know it and that\n the general run of people don't. I was about to put this thought into\n words, but before I could open my mouth, somebody behind us spoke up.", "\"Don't get me wrong, Doc,\" he said, much too innocently. \"It's just\n that I've been thinking. Maybe you'd have more luck if you thought of\n me as a bedbug.\"\n\n\n \"Where did you get that idea?\"\n\n\n \"From Doc Ellsom. I was having some beers with him the other night.\n He's got a very high opinion of you, says you build the best bedbugs in\n the business.\"\n\n\n I find it hard to believe that Len Ellsom would say anything really\n nice about me. Must be his guilt about Marilyn that makes him talk that\n way. I don't like his hanging around Kujack.\nOctober 25, 1959\nThe boss came along on our woodcutting expedition this morning and\n volunteered to work the other end of my two-handled saw. He asked how\n things were coming in the Pro lab.", "\"Look here, Parks,\" the boss said. He seemed a little peeved.\n \"Cybernetics is teamwork, and the first rule of any team is that not\n everybody can be quarterback. Each man has a specific job on our team,\n one thing he's best suited for, and what\nyou're\nbest suited for,\n obviously, is the Pro lab. We've followed your work closely these last\n few years, and we were quite impressed by the way you handled those\n photo-electric-cell insects. You pulled off a brilliant engineering\n stunt, you know, when you induced nervous breakdown in your robot\n moths and bedbugs, and proved that the oscillations they developed\n corresponded to those which the human animal develops in intention\n tremor and Parkinson's disease. A keen bit of cybernetic thinking,\n that.\nVery\nkeen.\"\n\n\n It was just luck, I told him modestly.", "\"Lushing it up,\" he said. \"Getting stinking from drinking.\" He still\n likes to use the most flamboyant slang; I consider it an infantile form\n of protest against what he regards as the \"genteel\" manner of academic\n people. \"I got sort of restless this morning, so I ducked out and beat\n it into New York and looked up my friend Steve Lundy in the Village.\n Spent the afternoon liquidating our joint assets. Liquidating our\n assets in the joints.\"\n\n\n What, I wanted to know, was he feeling restless about?\n\n\n \"Restless for going on three years now.\" His face grew solemn, as\n though he were thinking it over very carefully. \"I'll amend that\n statement. Hell with the Aesopian language. I've been a plain lush for\n going on three years. Ever since—\"\n\n\n If it was something personal—I suggested.", "\"Nonsense,\" the boss insisted. \"You're first and foremost a talented\n neuro man, and that's exactly what we need in the Pro department.\n There, you see, the problem is primarily one of duplicating a nervous\n mechanism in the metal, of bridging the gap between the neuronic and\n electronic. So buckle down, and if you hear any more gossip about MS,\n forget it fast—it's not a proper subject of conversation for you. The\n loyalty oath you signed is very specific about the trouble you can get\n into with loose talk. Remember that.\"\n\n\n I said I certainly would, and thanks a whole lot for the advice.", "Guess I was a little previous in packing my soup-and-fish. Soon as I\n was shown to my room in the bachelor dorms, I dug it out and hung it\n way back in the closet, out of sight. When in Rome, etc. Later that day\n I discovered they carry dungarees in the Co-op; luckily, they had the\n pre-faded kind.\nOctober 6, 1959\nMet the boss this morning—hardly out of his thirties, crew-cut,\n wearing a flannel hunting shirt and dirty saddleshoes. I was glad I'd\n thought to change into my dungarees before the interview.\n\n\n \"Parks,\" he said, \"you can count yourself a very fortunate young man.\n You've come to the most important address in America, not excluding the\n Pentagon. In the world, probably. To get you oriented, suppose I sketch\n in some of the background of the place.\"", "But our job calls for even more. The pro mustn't only\nequal\nthe\n real thing, it must be\nsuperior\n! That means creating a synthetic\n neuro-muscular system that actually\nimproves\non the nerves and\n muscles Nature created in the original!\n\n\n When our twenty-fourth experimental model turned out to be a dud last\n week—it just hung from Kujack's stump, quivering like one of my robot\n bedbugs, as though it had a bad case of intention tremor—Goldweiser\n said something that made an impression on me.\n\"They don't want much from us,\" he said sarcastically. \"They just want\n us to be God.\"", "I didn't care for his cynical attitude at all, but he had a point. Len\n Ellsom just has to build a fancy adding machine to get his picture in\n the papers.\nI\nhave to be God!\nOctober 22, 1959\nDon't know what to make of Kujack. His attitude is peculiar. Of course,\n he's very co-operative, lies back on the fitting table and doesn't\n even wince when we snap on the pros, and he does his best to carry out\n instructions. Still, there's something funny about the way he looks at\n me. There's a kind of malicious expression in his eyes. At times, come\n to think of it, he reminds me of Len.", "\"Oh?\" I said. \"Does that mean you're in MS?\" It wasn't an easy idea to\n accept, but I think I was pretty successful in keeping my tone casual.\n\n\n \"Ollie, my boy,\" he said in an exaggerated stage whisper, putting his\n finger to his lips, \"in the beginning was the word and the word was\n mum. Leave us avoid the subject of brains in this\nkeen\nplace. We\n all have a job to do on the team.\" I suppose that was meant to be a\n humorous imitation of the boss; Len always did fancy himself quite a\n clown.\n\n\n We were separated during the sawing, but he caught up with me on the\n way back and said, \"Let's get together soon and have a talk, Ollie.\n It's been a long time.\"", "I was relieved to see him taking it so well because I know how anxious\n he is to get results from the Pro lab. Since Pro is one of the few\n things going on at IFACS that can be talked about, he's impatient for\n us to come up with something he can release to the press. As the public\n relations officer explained it to me at dinner the other night, people\n get worried when they know there's something like IFACS going, but\n don't get any real information about it, so the boss, naturally, wants\n to relieve the public's curiosity with a good, reassuring story about\n our work.\n\n\n I knew I was taking an awful chance spilling the whole K-N thing to him\n the way I did, but I had to lay the groundwork for a little plan I've\n just begun to work on.\n\n\n \"By the way, sir,\" I said, \"I ran into Len Ellsom the other day. I\n didn't know he was here.\"", "Take this afternoon, for instance. I've just worked out an entirely\n different kind of leg based on a whole new arrangement of solenoids to\n duplicate the muscle systems, and I decided to give it a try. When I\n was slipping the model into place, I looked up and caught Kujack's eye\n for a moment. He seemed to be laughing at something, although his face\n was expressionless.\n\n\n \"All right,\" I said. \"Let's make a test. I understand you used to be\n quite a football player. Well, just think of how you used to kick a\n football and try to do it now.\"\n\n\n He really seemed to be trying; the effort made him sweat. All that\n happened, though, was that the big toe wriggled a little and the knee\n buckled. Dud Number Twenty-five. I was sore, of course, especially when\n I noticed that Kujack was more amused than ever.\n\n\n \"You seem to think something's pretty funny,\" I said.", "Damn! Everybody knows MS is the thing to get into. It gives you real\n standing in the field if it gets around that you're an MS man. I had my\n heart set on getting into MS.\nOctober 6, 1959\nIt never rains, etc.: now it turns out that Len Ellsom's here, and\nhe's\nin MS! Found out about it in a funny way. Two mornings a week,\n it seems, the staff members get into their skiing and hunting clothes\n and tramp into the woods to cut logs for their fireplaces. Well, this\n morning I went with them, and as we were walking along the trail\n Goldweiser, my assistant, told me the idea behind these expeditions.", "\"The night is young,\" he said, \"and you're so dutiful. Where was I? Oh\n yes, Bell. At first our electronic pawn-pusher wasn't so hot—it could\n beat the pants off a lousy player, but an expert just made it look\n silly. But we kept improving it, see, building more and more electronic\n anticipation and gambit-plotting powers into it, and finally, one great\n day in '55, we thought we had all the kinks ironed out and were ready\n for the big test. By this time, of course, Washington had stepped in\n and taken over the whole project.\n\n\n \"Well, we got hold of Fortunescu, the world's champion chess player,\n sat him down and turned the robot loose on him. For four hours straight\n we followed the match, with a delegation of big brass from Washington,\n and for four hours straight the machine trounced Fortunescu every game.\n That was when I began to get scared. I went out that night and got\n really loaded.\"", "I'm no Eniac, but I can occasionally put two and two together myself.\n If the boss's remarks mean anything, they mean that an electronic brain\n capable of playing games has been developed, and that it's led to\n something important militarily. Of course! I could kick myself for not\n having guessed it before.\n\n\n Brains-and-games—that's what MS is all about, obviously. It had to\n happen: out of the mathematical analysis of chess came a robot chess\n player, and out of the chess player came some kind of mechanical brain\n that's useful in military strategy.\nThat's\nwhat Len Ellsom's in the\n middle of.\n\n\n \"Really brilliant mind,\" the boss said after we'd sawed for a while.\n \"Keen. But he's a little erratic—quirky, queer sense of humor. Isn't\n that your impression?\"", "\"As I see it,\" I said, \"there are two sides to the problem, the\n kinesthetic and the neural. We're making definite progress on the K\n side—I've worked out a new solenoid system, with some miniature motors\n tied in, and I think it'll give us a leg that\nmoves\ndamned well. I\n don't know about the N side, though. It's pretty tough figuring out\n how to hook the thing up electrically with the central nervous system\n so that the brain can control it. Some sort of compromise system of\n operation, along mechanical rather than neural lines, would be a lot\n simpler.\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" the boss said with a smile, \"that it's stumping you.\"", "What had he been so scared about? It seemed to me he should have felt\n happy.\n\n\n \"Listen, Ollie,\" he said, \"for Christ's sake, stop talking like a Boy\n Scout for once in your life.\"\n\n\n If he was going to insult me—\n\n\n \"No insult intended. Just listen. I'm a terrible chess player. Any\n five-year-old could chatemeck—checkmate—me with his brains tied\n behind his back. But this machine which I built, helped build, is the\n champion chess player of the world. In other words, my brain has given\n birth to a brain which can do things my brain could never do. Don't you\n find that terrifying?\"\n\n\n \"Not at all,\" I said. \"\nYou\nmade the machine, didn't you? Therefore,\n no matter what it does, it's only an extension of you. You should feel\n proud to have devised a powerful new tool.\"", "\"Do you know him?\" the boss said. \"Good man. One of the best\n brains-and-games men you'll find anywhere.\"\n\n\n I explained that Len had gotten his degree at M.I.T. the year before I\n did. From what I'd heard, I added, he'd done some important work on the\n Remington-Rand ballistics computer.\n\n\n \"He did indeed,\" the boss said, \"but that's not the half of it. After\n that he made some major contributions to the robot chess player. As a\n matter of fact, that's why he's here.\"\n\n\n I said I hadn't heard about the chess player.\n\n\n \"As soon as it began to play a really good game of chess, Washington\n put the whole thing under wraps for security reasons. Which is why you\n won't hear any more about it from me.\"", "\"Stop wearing your loyalty oath on your sleeve,\" he said belligerently.\n \"Sure I want to talk about it. Greatest subject I know. Begin at\n the beginning. Whole thing started back in the Thirties with those\n two refugee mathematicians who used to be here at the Institute for\n Advanced Studies when Einstein was around. Von Morgan and Neumanstern,\n no, Von\nNeu\nmann and\nMor\nganstern. You remember, they did a\n mathematical analysis of all the possible kinds of games, poker,\n tossing pennies, chess, bridge, everything, and they wrote up their\n findings in a volume you certainly know,\nThe Theory of Games\n." ], [ "\"Sure thing,\" he said. \"You're going to take charge of a very important\n lab. The Pro lab.\" I guess he saw my puzzled look. \"Pro—that's short\n for prosthetics, artificial limbs. You know, it's really a scandal.\n With our present level of technology, we should have artificial limbs\n which in many ways are even better than the originals, but actually\n we're still making do with modifications of the same primitive, clumsy\n pegs and hooks they were using a thousand years ago. I'm counting on\n you to get things hopping in that department. It's a real challenge.\"\n\n\n I said it sure was a challenge, and of course I'd do my level best to\n meet it. Still, I couldn't help feeling a bit disappointed. Around\n cybernetics circles, I hinted, you heard a lot of talk about the\n hush-hush MS work that was going on at IFACS and it sounded so exciting\n that, well, a fellow sort of hoped he might get into\nthat\nend of\n things.", "\"Definitely,\" I said. \"I'd be the last one in the world to say a word\n against Len, but he was always a little peculiar. Very gay one moment\n and very sour the next, and inclined to poke fun at things other people\n take seriously. He used to write poetry.\"\n\n\n \"I'm very glad to know that,\" the boss said. \"Confirms my own feeling\n about him.\"\n\n\n So the boss has some doubts about Len.\nOctober 27, 1959\nUnpleasant evening with Len. It all started after dinner when he showed\n up in my room, wagged his finger at me and said, \"Ollie, you've been\n avoiding me. That hurts. Thought we were pals, thick and thin and till\n debt and death do us part.\"\n\n\n I saw immediately that he was drunk—he always gets his words mixed\n up when he's drunk—and I tried to placate him by explaining that it\n wasn't anything like that; I'd been busy.", "Guess I was a little previous in packing my soup-and-fish. Soon as I\n was shown to my room in the bachelor dorms, I dug it out and hung it\n way back in the closet, out of sight. When in Rome, etc. Later that day\n I discovered they carry dungarees in the Co-op; luckily, they had the\n pre-faded kind.\nOctober 6, 1959\nMet the boss this morning—hardly out of his thirties, crew-cut,\n wearing a flannel hunting shirt and dirty saddleshoes. I was glad I'd\n thought to change into my dungarees before the interview.\n\n\n \"Parks,\" he said, \"you can count yourself a very fortunate young man.\n You've come to the most important address in America, not excluding the\n Pentagon. In the world, probably. To get you oriented, suppose I sketch\n in some of the background of the place.\"", "Now, I've heard talk like that before, and I don't like it. I don't\n like it at all. It so happens that I feel very strongly on the subject.\n I think a scientist should like what he's doing and not want to take\n refuge in Nature from the Laws of Nature (which is downright illogical,\n anyhow). I, for one, enjoy cutting logs precisely\nbecause\n, when my\n saw rasps across a knot, I know that the innermost secret of that\n knot, as of all matter in the Universe, is E=MC\n 2\n . It's my job to\nknow\nit, and it's very satisfying to\nknow\nthat I know it and that\n the general run of people don't. I was about to put this thought into\n words, but before I could open my mouth, somebody behind us spoke up.", "\"Look here, Parks,\" the boss said. He seemed a little peeved.\n \"Cybernetics is teamwork, and the first rule of any team is that not\n everybody can be quarterback. Each man has a specific job on our team,\n one thing he's best suited for, and what\nyou're\nbest suited for,\n obviously, is the Pro lab. We've followed your work closely these last\n few years, and we were quite impressed by the way you handled those\n photo-electric-cell insects. You pulled off a brilliant engineering\n stunt, you know, when you induced nervous breakdown in your robot\n moths and bedbugs, and proved that the oscillations they developed\n corresponded to those which the human animal develops in intention\n tremor and Parkinson's disease. A keen bit of cybernetic thinking,\n that.\nVery\nkeen.\"\n\n\n It was just luck, I told him modestly.", "I was relieved to see him taking it so well because I know how anxious\n he is to get results from the Pro lab. Since Pro is one of the few\n things going on at IFACS that can be talked about, he's impatient for\n us to come up with something he can release to the press. As the public\n relations officer explained it to me at dinner the other night, people\n get worried when they know there's something like IFACS going, but\n don't get any real information about it, so the boss, naturally, wants\n to relieve the public's curiosity with a good, reassuring story about\n our work.\n\n\n I knew I was taking an awful chance spilling the whole K-N thing to him\n the way I did, but I had to lay the groundwork for a little plan I've\n just begun to work on.\n\n\n \"By the way, sir,\" I said, \"I ran into Len Ellsom the other day. I\n didn't know he was here.\"", "\"Lushing it up,\" he said. \"Getting stinking from drinking.\" He still\n likes to use the most flamboyant slang; I consider it an infantile form\n of protest against what he regards as the \"genteel\" manner of academic\n people. \"I got sort of restless this morning, so I ducked out and beat\n it into New York and looked up my friend Steve Lundy in the Village.\n Spent the afternoon liquidating our joint assets. Liquidating our\n assets in the joints.\"\n\n\n What, I wanted to know, was he feeling restless about?\n\n\n \"Restless for going on three years now.\" His face grew solemn, as\n though he were thinking it over very carefully. \"I'll amend that\n statement. Hell with the Aesopian language. I've been a plain lush for\n going on three years. Ever since—\"\n\n\n If it was something personal—I suggested.", "\"Maybe you know,\" he went on, \"that in the days of Oppenheimer and\n Einstein, this place was called the Institute for Advanced Studies.\n It was run pretty loosely then—in addition to the mathematicians and\n physicists, they had all sorts of queer ducks hanging around—poets,\n egyptologists, numismatists, medievalists, herbalists, God alone knows\n what all. By 1955, however, so many cybernetics labs had sprung up\n around the country that we needed some central coordinating agency,\n so Washington arranged for us to take over here. Naturally, as soon\n as we arrived, we eased out the poets and egyptologists, brought in\n our own people, and changed the name to the Institute for Advanced\nCybernetics\nStudies. We've got some pretty keen projects going now,\npret\n-ty keen.\"\n\n\n I said I'd bet, and did he have any idea which project I would fit into?", "\"If we're pals,\" he said, \"come on and have a beer with me.\"\n\n\n There was no shaking him off, so I followed him down to his car and we\n drove to this sleazy little bar in the Negro part of town. As soon as\n we sat down in a booth, Len borrowed all the nickels I had, put them\n in the jukebox and pressed the levers for a lot of old Louie Armstrong\n records.\n\n\n \"Sorry, kid,\" he said. \"I know how you hate this real jazzy stuff, but\n can't have a reunion without music, and there isn't a polka or cowboy\n ballad or hillbilly stomp in the box. They lack the folksy touch on\n this side of the tracks.\" Len has always been very snobbish about my\n interest in folk music.\n\n\n I asked him what he'd been doing during the day.", "After M. I. T. I\nhad\nspent some time out in California doing\n neuro-cyber research, I explained—but what was\nhe\ndoing here? I'd\n lost track of him after he'd left Boston; the last I'd heard, he'd been\n working on the giant robot brain Remington-Rand was developing for the\n Air Force. I remembered seeing his picture in the paper two or three\n times while he was working on the brain.\n\n\n \"I was with Remington a couple of years,\" he told me. \"If I do say\n so myself, we built the Air Force a real humdinger of a brain—in\n addition to solving the most complex problems in ballistics, it could\n whistle\nDixie\nand, in moments of stress, produce a sound not unlike\n a Bronx cheer. Naturally, for my prowess in the electronic simulation\n of I.Q., I was tapped for the brain department of these hallowed\n precincts.\"", "\"Nonsense,\" the boss insisted. \"You're first and foremost a talented\n neuro man, and that's exactly what we need in the Pro department.\n There, you see, the problem is primarily one of duplicating a nervous\n mechanism in the metal, of bridging the gap between the neuronic and\n electronic. So buckle down, and if you hear any more gossip about MS,\n forget it fast—it's not a proper subject of conversation for you. The\n loyalty oath you signed is very specific about the trouble you can get\n into with loose talk. Remember that.\"\n\n\n I said I certainly would, and thanks a whole lot for the advice.", "Damn! Everybody knows MS is the thing to get into. It gives you real\n standing in the field if it gets around that you're an MS man. I had my\n heart set on getting into MS.\nOctober 6, 1959\nIt never rains, etc.: now it turns out that Len Ellsom's here, and\nhe's\nin MS! Found out about it in a funny way. Two mornings a week,\n it seems, the staff members get into their skiing and hunting clothes\n and tramp into the woods to cut logs for their fireplaces. Well, this\n morning I went with them, and as we were walking along the trail\n Goldweiser, my assistant, told me the idea behind these expeditions.", "Take this afternoon, for instance. I've just worked out an entirely\n different kind of leg based on a whole new arrangement of solenoids to\n duplicate the muscle systems, and I decided to give it a try. When I\n was slipping the model into place, I looked up and caught Kujack's eye\n for a moment. He seemed to be laughing at something, although his face\n was expressionless.\n\n\n \"All right,\" I said. \"Let's make a test. I understand you used to be\n quite a football player. Well, just think of how you used to kick a\n football and try to do it now.\"\n\n\n He really seemed to be trying; the effort made him sweat. All that\n happened, though, was that the big toe wriggled a little and the knee\n buckled. Dud Number Twenty-five. I was sore, of course, especially when\n I noticed that Kujack was more amused than ever.\n\n\n \"You seem to think something's pretty funny,\" I said.", "\"Oh?\" I said. \"Does that mean you're in MS?\" It wasn't an easy idea to\n accept, but I think I was pretty successful in keeping my tone casual.\n\n\n \"Ollie, my boy,\" he said in an exaggerated stage whisper, putting his\n finger to his lips, \"in the beginning was the word and the word was\n mum. Leave us avoid the subject of brains in this\nkeen\nplace. We\n all have a job to do on the team.\" I suppose that was meant to be a\n humorous imitation of the boss; Len always did fancy himself quite a\n clown.\n\n\n We were separated during the sawing, but he caught up with me on the\n way back and said, \"Let's get together soon and have a talk, Ollie.\n It's been a long time.\"", "\"Some tool,\" he sneered. He was so drunk by now that I could hardly\n understand what he was saying. \"The General Staff boys in Washington\n were all hopped up about that little old tool, and for a plenty good\n reason—they understood that mechanized warfare is only the most\n complicated game the human race has invented so far, an elaborate form\n of chess which uses the population of the world for pawns and the\n globe for a chessboard. They saw, too, that when the game of war gets\n this complex, the job of controlling and guiding it becomes too damned\n involved for any number of human brains, no matter how nimble.\n\n\n \"In other words, my beamish Boy Scout, modern war needs just this kind\n of strategy tool; the General Staff has to be mechanized along with\n everything else. So the Pentagon boys set up IFACS and handed us a\n top-priority cybernetics project: to build a superduper chess player\n that could oversee a complicated military maneuver, maybe later a whole\n campaign, maybe ultimately a whole global war.", "\"The night is young,\" he said, \"and you're so dutiful. Where was I? Oh\n yes, Bell. At first our electronic pawn-pusher wasn't so hot—it could\n beat the pants off a lousy player, but an expert just made it look\n silly. But we kept improving it, see, building more and more electronic\n anticipation and gambit-plotting powers into it, and finally, one great\n day in '55, we thought we had all the kinks ironed out and were ready\n for the big test. By this time, of course, Washington had stepped in\n and taken over the whole project.\n\n\n \"Well, we got hold of Fortunescu, the world's champion chess player,\n sat him down and turned the robot loose on him. For four hours straight\n we followed the match, with a delegation of big brass from Washington,\n and for four hours straight the machine trounced Fortunescu every game.\n That was when I began to get scared. I went out that night and got\n really loaded.\"", "\"We're aiming at a military strategy machine which can digest reports\n from all the units on all the fronts and from moment to moment, on\n the basis of that steady stream of information, grind out an elastic\n overall strategy and dictate concrete tactical directives to all the\n units. Wiener warned this might happen, and he was right. A very nifty\n tool. Never mind how far we've gotten with the thing, but I will tell\n you this: I'm a lot more scared today than I was three years ago.\"\n\n\n So\nthat\nwas the secret of MS! The most extraordinary machine ever\n devised by the human mind! It was hard to conceal the thrill of\n excitement I felt, even as a relative outsider.\n\n\n \"Why all the jitters?\" I said. \"This could be the most wonderful tool\n ever invented. It might eliminate war altogether.\"\n\n\n Len was quiet for a while, gulping his beer and looking off into space.\n Then he turned to me.", "\"Don't get me wrong, Doc,\" he said, much too innocently. \"It's just\n that I've been thinking. Maybe you'd have more luck if you thought of\n me as a bedbug.\"\n\n\n \"Where did you get that idea?\"\n\n\n \"From Doc Ellsom. I was having some beers with him the other night.\n He's got a very high opinion of you, says you build the best bedbugs in\n the business.\"\n\n\n I find it hard to believe that Len Ellsom would say anything really\n nice about me. Must be his guilt about Marilyn that makes him talk that\n way. I don't like his hanging around Kujack.\nOctober 25, 1959\nThe boss came along on our woodcutting expedition this morning and\n volunteered to work the other end of my two-handled saw. He asked how\n things were coming in the Pro lab.", "I didn't care for his cynical attitude at all, but he had a point. Len\n Ellsom just has to build a fancy adding machine to get his picture in\n the papers.\nI\nhave to be God!\nOctober 22, 1959\nDon't know what to make of Kujack. His attitude is peculiar. Of course,\n he's very co-operative, lies back on the fitting table and doesn't\n even wince when we snap on the pros, and he does his best to carry out\n instructions. Still, there's something funny about the way he looks at\n me. There's a kind of malicious expression in his eyes. At times, come\n to think of it, he reminds me of Len.", "What had he been so scared about? It seemed to me he should have felt\n happy.\n\n\n \"Listen, Ollie,\" he said, \"for Christ's sake, stop talking like a Boy\n Scout for once in your life.\"\n\n\n If he was going to insult me—\n\n\n \"No insult intended. Just listen. I'm a terrible chess player. Any\n five-year-old could chatemeck—checkmate—me with his brains tied\n behind his back. But this machine which I built, helped build, is the\n champion chess player of the world. In other words, my brain has given\n birth to a brain which can do things my brain could never do. Don't you\n find that terrifying?\"\n\n\n \"Not at all,\" I said. \"\nYou\nmade the machine, didn't you? Therefore,\n no matter what it does, it's only an extension of you. You should feel\n proud to have devised a powerful new tool.\"" ], [ "I was relieved to see him taking it so well because I know how anxious\n he is to get results from the Pro lab. Since Pro is one of the few\n things going on at IFACS that can be talked about, he's impatient for\n us to come up with something he can release to the press. As the public\n relations officer explained it to me at dinner the other night, people\n get worried when they know there's something like IFACS going, but\n don't get any real information about it, so the boss, naturally, wants\n to relieve the public's curiosity with a good, reassuring story about\n our work.\n\n\n I knew I was taking an awful chance spilling the whole K-N thing to him\n the way I did, but I had to lay the groundwork for a little plan I've\n just begun to work on.\n\n\n \"By the way, sir,\" I said, \"I ran into Len Ellsom the other day. I\n didn't know he was here.\"", "I didn't care for his cynical attitude at all, but he had a point. Len\n Ellsom just has to build a fancy adding machine to get his picture in\n the papers.\nI\nhave to be God!\nOctober 22, 1959\nDon't know what to make of Kujack. His attitude is peculiar. Of course,\n he's very co-operative, lies back on the fitting table and doesn't\n even wince when we snap on the pros, and he does his best to carry out\n instructions. Still, there's something funny about the way he looks at\n me. There's a kind of malicious expression in his eyes. At times, come\n to think of it, he reminds me of Len.", "\"Definitely,\" I said. \"I'd be the last one in the world to say a word\n against Len, but he was always a little peculiar. Very gay one moment\n and very sour the next, and inclined to poke fun at things other people\n take seriously. He used to write poetry.\"\n\n\n \"I'm very glad to know that,\" the boss said. \"Confirms my own feeling\n about him.\"\n\n\n So the boss has some doubts about Len.\nOctober 27, 1959\nUnpleasant evening with Len. It all started after dinner when he showed\n up in my room, wagged his finger at me and said, \"Ollie, you've been\n avoiding me. That hurts. Thought we were pals, thick and thin and till\n debt and death do us part.\"\n\n\n I saw immediately that he was drunk—he always gets his words mixed\n up when he's drunk—and I tried to placate him by explaining that it\n wasn't anything like that; I'd been busy.", "I'm no Eniac, but I can occasionally put two and two together myself.\n If the boss's remarks mean anything, they mean that an electronic brain\n capable of playing games has been developed, and that it's led to\n something important militarily. Of course! I could kick myself for not\n having guessed it before.\n\n\n Brains-and-games—that's what MS is all about, obviously. It had to\n happen: out of the mathematical analysis of chess came a robot chess\n player, and out of the chess player came some kind of mechanical brain\n that's useful in military strategy.\nThat's\nwhat Len Ellsom's in the\n middle of.\n\n\n \"Really brilliant mind,\" the boss said after we'd sawed for a while.\n \"Keen. But he's a little erratic—quirky, queer sense of humor. Isn't\n that your impression?\"", "Damn! Everybody knows MS is the thing to get into. It gives you real\n standing in the field if it gets around that you're an MS man. I had my\n heart set on getting into MS.\nOctober 6, 1959\nIt never rains, etc.: now it turns out that Len Ellsom's here, and\nhe's\nin MS! Found out about it in a funny way. Two mornings a week,\n it seems, the staff members get into their skiing and hunting clothes\n and tramp into the woods to cut logs for their fireplaces. Well, this\n morning I went with them, and as we were walking along the trail\n Goldweiser, my assistant, told me the idea behind these expeditions.", "\"Don't get me wrong, Doc,\" he said, much too innocently. \"It's just\n that I've been thinking. Maybe you'd have more luck if you thought of\n me as a bedbug.\"\n\n\n \"Where did you get that idea?\"\n\n\n \"From Doc Ellsom. I was having some beers with him the other night.\n He's got a very high opinion of you, says you build the best bedbugs in\n the business.\"\n\n\n I find it hard to believe that Len Ellsom would say anything really\n nice about me. Must be his guilt about Marilyn that makes him talk that\n way. I don't like his hanging around Kujack.\nOctober 25, 1959\nThe boss came along on our woodcutting expedition this morning and\n volunteered to work the other end of my two-handled saw. He asked how\n things were coming in the Pro lab.", "\"Bravo, Goldie,\" he said. \"Let us by all means pretend that we belong\n to the human race. Make way for the new cyberneticists with their old\n saws. Cyberneticist, spare that tree!\"\n\n\n I turned around to see who could be making jokes in such bad taste\n and—as I might have guessed—it was Len Ellsom. He was just as\n surprised as I was.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said, \"if it isn't Ollie Parks! I thought you were out in\n Cal Tech, building schizophrenic bedbugs.\"", "He wants to talk about Marilyn, I suppose. Naturally. He has a guilty\n conscience. I'll have to make it quite clear to him that the whole\n episode is a matter of complete indifference to me. Marilyn is a closed\n book in my life; he must understand that. But can you beat that? He's\n right in the middle of MS! That lad certainly gets around. It's the\n usual Ellsom charm, I suppose.\n\n\n The usual Ellsom technique for irritating people, too. He's still\n trying to get my goat; he knows how much I've always hated to be called\n Ollie. Must watch Goldweiser. Thought he laughed pretty heartily at\n Len's wisecracks.\nOctober 18, 1959\nThings are shaping up in the Pro lab. Here's how I get the picture.", "\"If we're pals,\" he said, \"come on and have a beer with me.\"\n\n\n There was no shaking him off, so I followed him down to his car and we\n drove to this sleazy little bar in the Negro part of town. As soon as\n we sat down in a booth, Len borrowed all the nickels I had, put them\n in the jukebox and pressed the levers for a lot of old Louie Armstrong\n records.\n\n\n \"Sorry, kid,\" he said. \"I know how you hate this real jazzy stuff, but\n can't have a reunion without music, and there isn't a polka or cowboy\n ballad or hillbilly stomp in the box. They lack the folksy touch on\n this side of the tracks.\" Len has always been very snobbish about my\n interest in folk music.\n\n\n I asked him what he'd been doing during the day.", "\"Oh?\" I said. \"Does that mean you're in MS?\" It wasn't an easy idea to\n accept, but I think I was pretty successful in keeping my tone casual.\n\n\n \"Ollie, my boy,\" he said in an exaggerated stage whisper, putting his\n finger to his lips, \"in the beginning was the word and the word was\n mum. Leave us avoid the subject of brains in this\nkeen\nplace. We\n all have a job to do on the team.\" I suppose that was meant to be a\n humorous imitation of the boss; Len always did fancy himself quite a\n clown.\n\n\n We were separated during the sawing, but he caught up with me on the\n way back and said, \"Let's get together soon and have a talk, Ollie.\n It's been a long time.\"", "Now, I've heard talk like that before, and I don't like it. I don't\n like it at all. It so happens that I feel very strongly on the subject.\n I think a scientist should like what he's doing and not want to take\n refuge in Nature from the Laws of Nature (which is downright illogical,\n anyhow). I, for one, enjoy cutting logs precisely\nbecause\n, when my\n saw rasps across a knot, I know that the innermost secret of that\n knot, as of all matter in the Universe, is E=MC\n 2\n . It's my job to\nknow\nit, and it's very satisfying to\nknow\nthat I know it and that\n the general run of people don't. I was about to put this thought into\n words, but before I could open my mouth, somebody behind us spoke up.", "\"Do you know him?\" the boss said. \"Good man. One of the best\n brains-and-games men you'll find anywhere.\"\n\n\n I explained that Len had gotten his degree at M.I.T. the year before I\n did. From what I'd heard, I added, he'd done some important work on the\n Remington-Rand ballistics computer.\n\n\n \"He did indeed,\" the boss said, \"but that's not the half of it. After\n that he made some major contributions to the robot chess player. As a\n matter of fact, that's why he's here.\"\n\n\n I said I hadn't heard about the chess player.\n\n\n \"As soon as it began to play a really good game of chess, Washington\n put the whole thing under wraps for security reasons. Which is why you\n won't hear any more about it from me.\"", "\"We're aiming at a military strategy machine which can digest reports\n from all the units on all the fronts and from moment to moment, on\n the basis of that steady stream of information, grind out an elastic\n overall strategy and dictate concrete tactical directives to all the\n units. Wiener warned this might happen, and he was right. A very nifty\n tool. Never mind how far we've gotten with the thing, but I will tell\n you this: I'm a lot more scared today than I was three years ago.\"\n\n\n So\nthat\nwas the secret of MS! The most extraordinary machine ever\n devised by the human mind! It was hard to conceal the thrill of\n excitement I felt, even as a relative outsider.\n\n\n \"Why all the jitters?\" I said. \"This could be the most wonderful tool\n ever invented. It might eliminate war altogether.\"\n\n\n Len was quiet for a while, gulping his beer and looking off into space.\n Then he turned to me.", "\"Lushing it up,\" he said. \"Getting stinking from drinking.\" He still\n likes to use the most flamboyant slang; I consider it an infantile form\n of protest against what he regards as the \"genteel\" manner of academic\n people. \"I got sort of restless this morning, so I ducked out and beat\n it into New York and looked up my friend Steve Lundy in the Village.\n Spent the afternoon liquidating our joint assets. Liquidating our\n assets in the joints.\"\n\n\n What, I wanted to know, was he feeling restless about?\n\n\n \"Restless for going on three years now.\" His face grew solemn, as\n though he were thinking it over very carefully. \"I'll amend that\n statement. Hell with the Aesopian language. I've been a plain lush for\n going on three years. Ever since—\"\n\n\n If it was something personal—I suggested.", "\"It is\nnot\nsomething personal,\" he said, mimicking me. \"Guess I can\n tell an old cyberneticist pal about it. Been a lush for three years\n because I've been scared for three years. Been scared for three years\n because three years ago I saw a machine beat a man at a game of chess.\"\n\n\n A machine that plays chess? That was interesting, I said.\n\n\n \"Didn't tell you the whole truth the other day,\" Len mumbled. \"I\ndid\nwork on the Remington-Rand computer, sure, but I didn't come to IFACS\n directly from that. In between I spent a couple years at the Bell\n Telephone Labs. Claude Shannon—or, rather, to begin with there was\n Norbert Wiener back at M.I.T.—it's complicated....\"\n\n\n \"Look,\" I said, \"are you sure you want to talk about it?\"", "Take this afternoon, for instance. I've just worked out an entirely\n different kind of leg based on a whole new arrangement of solenoids to\n duplicate the muscle systems, and I decided to give it a try. When I\n was slipping the model into place, I looked up and caught Kujack's eye\n for a moment. He seemed to be laughing at something, although his face\n was expressionless.\n\n\n \"All right,\" I said. \"Let's make a test. I understand you used to be\n quite a football player. Well, just think of how you used to kick a\n football and try to do it now.\"\n\n\n He really seemed to be trying; the effort made him sweat. All that\n happened, though, was that the big toe wriggled a little and the knee\n buckled. Dud Number Twenty-five. I was sore, of course, especially when\n I noticed that Kujack was more amused than ever.\n\n\n \"You seem to think something's pretty funny,\" I said.", "\"Look here, Parks,\" the boss said. He seemed a little peeved.\n \"Cybernetics is teamwork, and the first rule of any team is that not\n everybody can be quarterback. Each man has a specific job on our team,\n one thing he's best suited for, and what\nyou're\nbest suited for,\n obviously, is the Pro lab. We've followed your work closely these last\n few years, and we were quite impressed by the way you handled those\n photo-electric-cell insects. You pulled off a brilliant engineering\n stunt, you know, when you induced nervous breakdown in your robot\n moths and bedbugs, and proved that the oscillations they developed\n corresponded to those which the human animal develops in intention\n tremor and Parkinson's disease. A keen bit of cybernetic thinking,\n that.\nVery\nkeen.\"\n\n\n It was just luck, I told him modestly.", "Guess I was a little previous in packing my soup-and-fish. Soon as I\n was shown to my room in the bachelor dorms, I dug it out and hung it\n way back in the closet, out of sight. When in Rome, etc. Later that day\n I discovered they carry dungarees in the Co-op; luckily, they had the\n pre-faded kind.\nOctober 6, 1959\nMet the boss this morning—hardly out of his thirties, crew-cut,\n wearing a flannel hunting shirt and dirty saddleshoes. I was glad I'd\n thought to change into my dungarees before the interview.\n\n\n \"Parks,\" he said, \"you can count yourself a very fortunate young man.\n You've come to the most important address in America, not excluding the\n Pentagon. In the world, probably. To get you oriented, suppose I sketch\n in some of the background of the place.\"", "\"The night is young,\" he said, \"and you're so dutiful. Where was I? Oh\n yes, Bell. At first our electronic pawn-pusher wasn't so hot—it could\n beat the pants off a lousy player, but an expert just made it look\n silly. But we kept improving it, see, building more and more electronic\n anticipation and gambit-plotting powers into it, and finally, one great\n day in '55, we thought we had all the kinks ironed out and were ready\n for the big test. By this time, of course, Washington had stepped in\n and taken over the whole project.\n\n\n \"Well, we got hold of Fortunescu, the world's champion chess player,\n sat him down and turned the robot loose on him. For four hours straight\n we followed the match, with a delegation of big brass from Washington,\n and for four hours straight the machine trounced Fortunescu every game.\n That was when I began to get scared. I went out that night and got\n really loaded.\"", "But our job calls for even more. The pro mustn't only\nequal\nthe\n real thing, it must be\nsuperior\n! That means creating a synthetic\n neuro-muscular system that actually\nimproves\non the nerves and\n muscles Nature created in the original!\n\n\n When our twenty-fourth experimental model turned out to be a dud last\n week—it just hung from Kujack's stump, quivering like one of my robot\n bedbugs, as though it had a bad case of intention tremor—Goldweiser\n said something that made an impression on me.\n\"They don't want much from us,\" he said sarcastically. \"They just want\n us to be God.\"" ], [ "A year ago, the boss laid down a policy for the lab: begin with legs\n because, while the neuro-motor systems in legs and arms are a lot\n alike, those in legs are much simpler. If we build satisfactory legs,\n the boss figures, we can then tackle arms; the main difficulties will\n have been licked.\n\n\n Well, last summer, in line with this approach, the Army picked out\n a double amputee from the outpatient department of Walter Reed\n Hospital—fellow by the name of Kujack, who lost both his legs in a\n land mine explosion outside Pyongyang—and shipped him up here to be a\n subject in our experiments.", "Now, I've heard talk like that before, and I don't like it. I don't\n like it at all. It so happens that I feel very strongly on the subject.\n I think a scientist should like what he's doing and not want to take\n refuge in Nature from the Laws of Nature (which is downright illogical,\n anyhow). I, for one, enjoy cutting logs precisely\nbecause\n, when my\n saw rasps across a knot, I know that the innermost secret of that\n knot, as of all matter in the Universe, is E=MC\n 2\n . It's my job to\nknow\nit, and it's very satisfying to\nknow\nthat I know it and that\n the general run of people don't. I was about to put this thought into\n words, but before I could open my mouth, somebody behind us spoke up.", "\"Maybe you know,\" he went on, \"that in the days of Oppenheimer and\n Einstein, this place was called the Institute for Advanced Studies.\n It was run pretty loosely then—in addition to the mathematicians and\n physicists, they had all sorts of queer ducks hanging around—poets,\n egyptologists, numismatists, medievalists, herbalists, God alone knows\n what all. By 1955, however, so many cybernetics labs had sprung up\n around the country that we needed some central coordinating agency,\n so Washington arranged for us to take over here. Naturally, as soon\n as we arrived, we eased out the poets and egyptologists, brought in\n our own people, and changed the name to the Institute for Advanced\nCybernetics\nStudies. We've got some pretty keen projects going now,\npret\n-ty keen.\"\n\n\n I said I'd bet, and did he have any idea which project I would fit into?", "\"Look here, Parks,\" the boss said. He seemed a little peeved.\n \"Cybernetics is teamwork, and the first rule of any team is that not\n everybody can be quarterback. Each man has a specific job on our team,\n one thing he's best suited for, and what\nyou're\nbest suited for,\n obviously, is the Pro lab. We've followed your work closely these last\n few years, and we were quite impressed by the way you handled those\n photo-electric-cell insects. You pulled off a brilliant engineering\n stunt, you know, when you induced nervous breakdown in your robot\n moths and bedbugs, and proved that the oscillations they developed\n corresponded to those which the human animal develops in intention\n tremor and Parkinson's disease. A keen bit of cybernetic thinking,\n that.\nVery\nkeen.\"\n\n\n It was just luck, I told him modestly.", "Take this afternoon, for instance. I've just worked out an entirely\n different kind of leg based on a whole new arrangement of solenoids to\n duplicate the muscle systems, and I decided to give it a try. When I\n was slipping the model into place, I looked up and caught Kujack's eye\n for a moment. He seemed to be laughing at something, although his face\n was expressionless.\n\n\n \"All right,\" I said. \"Let's make a test. I understand you used to be\n quite a football player. Well, just think of how you used to kick a\n football and try to do it now.\"\n\n\n He really seemed to be trying; the effort made him sweat. All that\n happened, though, was that the big toe wriggled a little and the knee\n buckled. Dud Number Twenty-five. I was sore, of course, especially when\n I noticed that Kujack was more amused than ever.\n\n\n \"You seem to think something's pretty funny,\" I said.", "I was relieved to see him taking it so well because I know how anxious\n he is to get results from the Pro lab. Since Pro is one of the few\n things going on at IFACS that can be talked about, he's impatient for\n us to come up with something he can release to the press. As the public\n relations officer explained it to me at dinner the other night, people\n get worried when they know there's something like IFACS going, but\n don't get any real information about it, so the boss, naturally, wants\n to relieve the public's curiosity with a good, reassuring story about\n our work.\n\n\n I knew I was taking an awful chance spilling the whole K-N thing to him\n the way I did, but I had to lay the groundwork for a little plan I've\n just begun to work on.\n\n\n \"By the way, sir,\" I said, \"I ran into Len Ellsom the other day. I\n didn't know he was here.\"", "\"Definitely,\" I said. \"I'd be the last one in the world to say a word\n against Len, but he was always a little peculiar. Very gay one moment\n and very sour the next, and inclined to poke fun at things other people\n take seriously. He used to write poetry.\"\n\n\n \"I'm very glad to know that,\" the boss said. \"Confirms my own feeling\n about him.\"\n\n\n So the boss has some doubts about Len.\nOctober 27, 1959\nUnpleasant evening with Len. It all started after dinner when he showed\n up in my room, wagged his finger at me and said, \"Ollie, you've been\n avoiding me. That hurts. Thought we were pals, thick and thin and till\n debt and death do us part.\"\n\n\n I saw immediately that he was drunk—he always gets his words mixed\n up when he's drunk—and I tried to placate him by explaining that it\n wasn't anything like that; I'd been busy.", "\"Lushing it up,\" he said. \"Getting stinking from drinking.\" He still\n likes to use the most flamboyant slang; I consider it an infantile form\n of protest against what he regards as the \"genteel\" manner of academic\n people. \"I got sort of restless this morning, so I ducked out and beat\n it into New York and looked up my friend Steve Lundy in the Village.\n Spent the afternoon liquidating our joint assets. Liquidating our\n assets in the joints.\"\n\n\n What, I wanted to know, was he feeling restless about?\n\n\n \"Restless for going on three years now.\" His face grew solemn, as\n though he were thinking it over very carefully. \"I'll amend that\n statement. Hell with the Aesopian language. I've been a plain lush for\n going on three years. Ever since—\"\n\n\n If it was something personal—I suggested.", "He wants to talk about Marilyn, I suppose. Naturally. He has a guilty\n conscience. I'll have to make it quite clear to him that the whole\n episode is a matter of complete indifference to me. Marilyn is a closed\n book in my life; he must understand that. But can you beat that? He's\n right in the middle of MS! That lad certainly gets around. It's the\n usual Ellsom charm, I suppose.\n\n\n The usual Ellsom technique for irritating people, too. He's still\n trying to get my goat; he knows how much I've always hated to be called\n Ollie. Must watch Goldweiser. Thought he laughed pretty heartily at\n Len's wisecracks.\nOctober 18, 1959\nThings are shaping up in the Pro lab. Here's how I get the picture.", "\"Oh?\" I said. \"Does that mean you're in MS?\" It wasn't an easy idea to\n accept, but I think I was pretty successful in keeping my tone casual.\n\n\n \"Ollie, my boy,\" he said in an exaggerated stage whisper, putting his\n finger to his lips, \"in the beginning was the word and the word was\n mum. Leave us avoid the subject of brains in this\nkeen\nplace. We\n all have a job to do on the team.\" I suppose that was meant to be a\n humorous imitation of the boss; Len always did fancy himself quite a\n clown.\n\n\n We were separated during the sawing, but he caught up with me on the\n way back and said, \"Let's get together soon and have a talk, Ollie.\n It's been a long time.\"", "I didn't care for his cynical attitude at all, but he had a point. Len\n Ellsom just has to build a fancy adding machine to get his picture in\n the papers.\nI\nhave to be God!\nOctober 22, 1959\nDon't know what to make of Kujack. His attitude is peculiar. Of course,\n he's very co-operative, lies back on the fitting table and doesn't\n even wince when we snap on the pros, and he does his best to carry out\n instructions. Still, there's something funny about the way he looks at\n me. There's a kind of malicious expression in his eyes. At times, come\n to think of it, he reminds me of Len.", "\"Don't get me wrong, Doc,\" he said, much too innocently. \"It's just\n that I've been thinking. Maybe you'd have more luck if you thought of\n me as a bedbug.\"\n\n\n \"Where did you get that idea?\"\n\n\n \"From Doc Ellsom. I was having some beers with him the other night.\n He's got a very high opinion of you, says you build the best bedbugs in\n the business.\"\n\n\n I find it hard to believe that Len Ellsom would say anything really\n nice about me. Must be his guilt about Marilyn that makes him talk that\n way. I don't like his hanging around Kujack.\nOctober 25, 1959\nThe boss came along on our woodcutting expedition this morning and\n volunteered to work the other end of my two-handled saw. He asked how\n things were coming in the Pro lab.", "But our job calls for even more. The pro mustn't only\nequal\nthe\n real thing, it must be\nsuperior\n! That means creating a synthetic\n neuro-muscular system that actually\nimproves\non the nerves and\n muscles Nature created in the original!\n\n\n When our twenty-fourth experimental model turned out to be a dud last\n week—it just hung from Kujack's stump, quivering like one of my robot\n bedbugs, as though it had a bad case of intention tremor—Goldweiser\n said something that made an impression on me.\n\"They don't want much from us,\" he said sarcastically. \"They just want\n us to be God.\"", "When Kujack arrived, the neuro boys made a major decision. It didn't\n make sense, they agreed, to keep building experimental legs directly\n into the muscles and nerves of Kujack's stumps; the surgical procedure\n in these cine-plastic jobs is complicated as all getout, involves a\n lot of pain for the subject and, what's more to the point, means long\n delays each time while the tissues heal.\n\n\n Instead, they hit on the idea of integrating permanent metal and\n plastic sockets into the stumps, so constructed that each new\n experimental limb can be snapped into place whenever it's ready for a\n trial.\nBy the time I took over, two weeks ago, Goldweiser had the sockets\n worked out and fitted to Kujack's stumps, and the muscular and\n neural tissues had knitted satisfactorily. There was only one hitch:\n twenty-three limbs had been designed, and all twenty-three had been\n dismal flops. That's when the boss called me in.", "\"Some tool,\" he sneered. He was so drunk by now that I could hardly\n understand what he was saying. \"The General Staff boys in Washington\n were all hopped up about that little old tool, and for a plenty good\n reason—they understood that mechanized warfare is only the most\n complicated game the human race has invented so far, an elaborate form\n of chess which uses the population of the world for pawns and the\n globe for a chessboard. They saw, too, that when the game of war gets\n this complex, the job of controlling and guiding it becomes too damned\n involved for any number of human brains, no matter how nimble.\n\n\n \"In other words, my beamish Boy Scout, modern war needs just this kind\n of strategy tool; the General Staff has to be mechanized along with\n everything else. So the Pentagon boys set up IFACS and handed us a\n top-priority cybernetics project: to build a superduper chess player\n that could oversee a complicated military maneuver, maybe later a whole\n campaign, maybe ultimately a whole global war.", "\"Sure thing,\" he said. \"You're going to take charge of a very important\n lab. The Pro lab.\" I guess he saw my puzzled look. \"Pro—that's short\n for prosthetics, artificial limbs. You know, it's really a scandal.\n With our present level of technology, we should have artificial limbs\n which in many ways are even better than the originals, but actually\n we're still making do with modifications of the same primitive, clumsy\n pegs and hooks they were using a thousand years ago. I'm counting on\n you to get things hopping in that department. It's a real challenge.\"\n\n\n I said it sure was a challenge, and of course I'd do my level best to\n meet it. Still, I couldn't help feeling a bit disappointed. Around\n cybernetics circles, I hinted, you heard a lot of talk about the\n hush-hush MS work that was going on at IFACS and it sounded so exciting\n that, well, a fellow sort of hoped he might get into\nthat\nend of\n things.", "\"Stop wearing your loyalty oath on your sleeve,\" he said belligerently.\n \"Sure I want to talk about it. Greatest subject I know. Begin at\n the beginning. Whole thing started back in the Thirties with those\n two refugee mathematicians who used to be here at the Institute for\n Advanced Studies when Einstein was around. Von Morgan and Neumanstern,\n no, Von\nNeu\nmann and\nMor\nganstern. You remember, they did a\n mathematical analysis of all the possible kinds of games, poker,\n tossing pennies, chess, bridge, everything, and they wrote up their\n findings in a volume you certainly know,\nThe Theory of Games\n.", "After M. I. T. I\nhad\nspent some time out in California doing\n neuro-cyber research, I explained—but what was\nhe\ndoing here? I'd\n lost track of him after he'd left Boston; the last I'd heard, he'd been\n working on the giant robot brain Remington-Rand was developing for the\n Air Force. I remembered seeing his picture in the paper two or three\n times while he was working on the brain.\n\n\n \"I was with Remington a couple of years,\" he told me. \"If I do say\n so myself, we built the Air Force a real humdinger of a brain—in\n addition to solving the most complex problems in ballistics, it could\n whistle\nDixie\nand, in moments of stress, produce a sound not unlike\n a Bronx cheer. Naturally, for my prowess in the electronic simulation\n of I.Q., I was tapped for the brain department of these hallowed\n precincts.\"", "\"The night is young,\" he said, \"and you're so dutiful. Where was I? Oh\n yes, Bell. At first our electronic pawn-pusher wasn't so hot—it could\n beat the pants off a lousy player, but an expert just made it look\n silly. But we kept improving it, see, building more and more electronic\n anticipation and gambit-plotting powers into it, and finally, one great\n day in '55, we thought we had all the kinks ironed out and were ready\n for the big test. By this time, of course, Washington had stepped in\n and taken over the whole project.\n\n\n \"Well, we got hold of Fortunescu, the world's champion chess player,\n sat him down and turned the robot loose on him. For four hours straight\n we followed the match, with a delegation of big brass from Washington,\n and for four hours straight the machine trounced Fortunescu every game.\n That was when I began to get scared. I went out that night and got\n really loaded.\"", "Damn! Everybody knows MS is the thing to get into. It gives you real\n standing in the field if it gets around that you're an MS man. I had my\n heart set on getting into MS.\nOctober 6, 1959\nIt never rains, etc.: now it turns out that Len Ellsom's here, and\nhe's\nin MS! Found out about it in a funny way. Two mornings a week,\n it seems, the staff members get into their skiing and hunting clothes\n and tramp into the woods to cut logs for their fireplaces. Well, this\n morning I went with them, and as we were walking along the trail\n Goldweiser, my assistant, told me the idea behind these expeditions." ], [ "Now, I've heard talk like that before, and I don't like it. I don't\n like it at all. It so happens that I feel very strongly on the subject.\n I think a scientist should like what he's doing and not want to take\n refuge in Nature from the Laws of Nature (which is downright illogical,\n anyhow). I, for one, enjoy cutting logs precisely\nbecause\n, when my\n saw rasps across a knot, I know that the innermost secret of that\n knot, as of all matter in the Universe, is E=MC\n 2\n . It's my job to\nknow\nit, and it's very satisfying to\nknow\nthat I know it and that\n the general run of people don't. I was about to put this thought into\n words, but before I could open my mouth, somebody behind us spoke up.", "\"Look here, Parks,\" the boss said. He seemed a little peeved.\n \"Cybernetics is teamwork, and the first rule of any team is that not\n everybody can be quarterback. Each man has a specific job on our team,\n one thing he's best suited for, and what\nyou're\nbest suited for,\n obviously, is the Pro lab. We've followed your work closely these last\n few years, and we were quite impressed by the way you handled those\n photo-electric-cell insects. You pulled off a brilliant engineering\n stunt, you know, when you induced nervous breakdown in your robot\n moths and bedbugs, and proved that the oscillations they developed\n corresponded to those which the human animal develops in intention\n tremor and Parkinson's disease. A keen bit of cybernetic thinking,\n that.\nVery\nkeen.\"\n\n\n It was just luck, I told him modestly.", "But our job calls for even more. The pro mustn't only\nequal\nthe\n real thing, it must be\nsuperior\n! That means creating a synthetic\n neuro-muscular system that actually\nimproves\non the nerves and\n muscles Nature created in the original!\n\n\n When our twenty-fourth experimental model turned out to be a dud last\n week—it just hung from Kujack's stump, quivering like one of my robot\n bedbugs, as though it had a bad case of intention tremor—Goldweiser\n said something that made an impression on me.\n\"They don't want much from us,\" he said sarcastically. \"They just want\n us to be God.\"", "\"Nonsense,\" the boss insisted. \"You're first and foremost a talented\n neuro man, and that's exactly what we need in the Pro department.\n There, you see, the problem is primarily one of duplicating a nervous\n mechanism in the metal, of bridging the gap between the neuronic and\n electronic. So buckle down, and if you hear any more gossip about MS,\n forget it fast—it's not a proper subject of conversation for you. The\n loyalty oath you signed is very specific about the trouble you can get\n into with loose talk. Remember that.\"\n\n\n I said I certainly would, and thanks a whole lot for the advice.", "Damn! Everybody knows MS is the thing to get into. It gives you real\n standing in the field if it gets around that you're an MS man. I had my\n heart set on getting into MS.\nOctober 6, 1959\nIt never rains, etc.: now it turns out that Len Ellsom's here, and\nhe's\nin MS! Found out about it in a funny way. Two mornings a week,\n it seems, the staff members get into their skiing and hunting clothes\n and tramp into the woods to cut logs for their fireplaces. Well, this\n morning I went with them, and as we were walking along the trail\n Goldweiser, my assistant, told me the idea behind these expeditions.", "After M. I. T. I\nhad\nspent some time out in California doing\n neuro-cyber research, I explained—but what was\nhe\ndoing here? I'd\n lost track of him after he'd left Boston; the last I'd heard, he'd been\n working on the giant robot brain Remington-Rand was developing for the\n Air Force. I remembered seeing his picture in the paper two or three\n times while he was working on the brain.\n\n\n \"I was with Remington a couple of years,\" he told me. \"If I do say\n so myself, we built the Air Force a real humdinger of a brain—in\n addition to solving the most complex problems in ballistics, it could\n whistle\nDixie\nand, in moments of stress, produce a sound not unlike\n a Bronx cheer. Naturally, for my prowess in the electronic simulation\n of I.Q., I was tapped for the brain department of these hallowed\n precincts.\"", "There's no mystery about the failures. Not to me, anyhow. Cybernetics\n is simply the science of building machines that will duplicate and\n improve on the organs and functions of the animal, based on what we\n know about the systems of communication and control in the animal. All\n right. But in any particular cybernetics project, everything depends\n on just how\nmany\nof the functions you want to duplicate, just how\nmuch\nof the total organ you want to replace.\n\n\n That's why the robot-brain boys can get such quick and spectacular\n results, have their pictures in the papers all the time, and become\n the real glamor boys of the profession. They're not asked to duplicate\n the human brain in its\nentirety\n—all they have to do is isolate and\n imitate one particular function of the brain, whether it's a simple\n operation in mathematics or a certain type of elementary logic.", "\"Oh?\" I said. \"Does that mean you're in MS?\" It wasn't an easy idea to\n accept, but I think I was pretty successful in keeping my tone casual.\n\n\n \"Ollie, my boy,\" he said in an exaggerated stage whisper, putting his\n finger to his lips, \"in the beginning was the word and the word was\n mum. Leave us avoid the subject of brains in this\nkeen\nplace. We\n all have a job to do on the team.\" I suppose that was meant to be a\n humorous imitation of the boss; Len always did fancy himself quite a\n clown.\n\n\n We were separated during the sawing, but he caught up with me on the\n way back and said, \"Let's get together soon and have a talk, Ollie.\n It's been a long time.\"", "\"You can't get away from it,\" he said. \"E=MC\n 2\n is in a tree trunk\n as well as in a uranium atom or a solar system. When you're hacking\n away at a particular tree, though, you don't think much about such\n intangibles—like any good, untheoretical lumberjack, you're a lot\n more concerned with superficialities, such as which way the grain\n runs, how to avoid the knots, and so on. It's very restful. So long\n as a cyberneticist is sawing and chopping, he's not a sliver of\n uncontaminated cerebrum contemplating the eternal slippery verities of\n gravity and electromagnetism; he's just one more guy trying to slice\n up one more log. Makes him feel he belongs to the human race again.\n Einstein, you know, used to get the same results with a violin.\"", "A year ago, the boss laid down a policy for the lab: begin with legs\n because, while the neuro-motor systems in legs and arms are a lot\n alike, those in legs are much simpler. If we build satisfactory legs,\n the boss figures, we can then tackle arms; the main difficulties will\n have been licked.\n\n\n Well, last summer, in line with this approach, the Army picked out\n a double amputee from the outpatient department of Walter Reed\n Hospital—fellow by the name of Kujack, who lost both his legs in a\n land mine explosion outside Pyongyang—and shipped him up here to be a\n subject in our experiments.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nIn the credo of this inspiringly selfless\n \ncyberneticist, nothing was too good for his colleagues\n \nin science.\nMuch\ntoo good for them\n!\nOctober 5, 1959\nWell, here I am at Princeton. IFACS is quite a place,\nquite\na place,\n but the atmosphere's darned informal. My colleagues seem to be mostly\n youngish fellows dressed in sloppy dungarees, sweatshirts (the kind\n Einstein made so famous) and moccasins, and when they're not puttering", "\"As I see it,\" I said, \"there are two sides to the problem, the\n kinesthetic and the neural. We're making definite progress on the K\n side—I've worked out a new solenoid system, with some miniature motors\n tied in, and I think it'll give us a leg that\nmoves\ndamned well. I\n don't know about the N side, though. It's pretty tough figuring out\n how to hook the thing up electrically with the central nervous system\n so that the brain can control it. Some sort of compromise system of\n operation, along mechanical rather than neural lines, would be a lot\n simpler.\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" the boss said with a smile, \"that it's stumping you.\"", "\"Bravo, Goldie,\" he said. \"Let us by all means pretend that we belong\n to the human race. Make way for the new cyberneticists with their old\n saws. Cyberneticist, spare that tree!\"\n\n\n I turned around to see who could be making jokes in such bad taste\n and—as I might have guessed—it was Len Ellsom. He was just as\n surprised as I was.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said, \"if it isn't Ollie Parks! I thought you were out in\n Cal Tech, building schizophrenic bedbugs.\"", "\"Lushing it up,\" he said. \"Getting stinking from drinking.\" He still\n likes to use the most flamboyant slang; I consider it an infantile form\n of protest against what he regards as the \"genteel\" manner of academic\n people. \"I got sort of restless this morning, so I ducked out and beat\n it into New York and looked up my friend Steve Lundy in the Village.\n Spent the afternoon liquidating our joint assets. Liquidating our\n assets in the joints.\"\n\n\n What, I wanted to know, was he feeling restless about?\n\n\n \"Restless for going on three years now.\" His face grew solemn, as\n though he were thinking it over very carefully. \"I'll amend that\n statement. Hell with the Aesopian language. I've been a plain lush for\n going on three years. Ever since—\"\n\n\n If it was something personal—I suggested.", "\"Sure thing,\" he said. \"You're going to take charge of a very important\n lab. The Pro lab.\" I guess he saw my puzzled look. \"Pro—that's short\n for prosthetics, artificial limbs. You know, it's really a scandal.\n With our present level of technology, we should have artificial limbs\n which in many ways are even better than the originals, but actually\n we're still making do with modifications of the same primitive, clumsy\n pegs and hooks they were using a thousand years ago. I'm counting on\n you to get things hopping in that department. It's a real challenge.\"\n\n\n I said it sure was a challenge, and of course I'd do my level best to\n meet it. Still, I couldn't help feeling a bit disappointed. Around\n cybernetics circles, I hinted, you heard a lot of talk about the\n hush-hush MS work that was going on at IFACS and it sounded so exciting\n that, well, a fellow sort of hoped he might get into\nthat\nend of\n things.", "\"Maybe you know,\" he went on, \"that in the days of Oppenheimer and\n Einstein, this place was called the Institute for Advanced Studies.\n It was run pretty loosely then—in addition to the mathematicians and\n physicists, they had all sorts of queer ducks hanging around—poets,\n egyptologists, numismatists, medievalists, herbalists, God alone knows\n what all. By 1955, however, so many cybernetics labs had sprung up\n around the country that we needed some central coordinating agency,\n so Washington arranged for us to take over here. Naturally, as soon\n as we arrived, we eased out the poets and egyptologists, brought in\n our own people, and changed the name to the Institute for Advanced\nCybernetics\nStudies. We've got some pretty keen projects going now,\npret\n-ty keen.\"\n\n\n I said I'd bet, and did he have any idea which project I would fit into?", "I was relieved to see him taking it so well because I know how anxious\n he is to get results from the Pro lab. Since Pro is one of the few\n things going on at IFACS that can be talked about, he's impatient for\n us to come up with something he can release to the press. As the public\n relations officer explained it to me at dinner the other night, people\n get worried when they know there's something like IFACS going, but\n don't get any real information about it, so the boss, naturally, wants\n to relieve the public's curiosity with a good, reassuring story about\n our work.\n\n\n I knew I was taking an awful chance spilling the whole K-N thing to him\n the way I did, but I had to lay the groundwork for a little plan I've\n just begun to work on.\n\n\n \"By the way, sir,\" I said, \"I ran into Len Ellsom the other day. I\n didn't know he was here.\"", "\"Don't get me wrong, Doc,\" he said, much too innocently. \"It's just\n that I've been thinking. Maybe you'd have more luck if you thought of\n me as a bedbug.\"\n\n\n \"Where did you get that idea?\"\n\n\n \"From Doc Ellsom. I was having some beers with him the other night.\n He's got a very high opinion of you, says you build the best bedbugs in\n the business.\"\n\n\n I find it hard to believe that Len Ellsom would say anything really\n nice about me. Must be his guilt about Marilyn that makes him talk that\n way. I don't like his hanging around Kujack.\nOctober 25, 1959\nThe boss came along on our woodcutting expedition this morning and\n volunteered to work the other end of my two-handled saw. He asked how\n things were coming in the Pro lab.", "The robot brain called the Eniac, for example, is exactly what its\n name implies—an Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, and\n it just has to be able to integrate and compute figures faster and\n more accurately than the human brain can. It doesn't have to have\n daydreams and nightmares, make wisecracks, suffer from anxiety, and\n all that. What's more, it doesn't even have to\nlook\nlike a brain or\n fit into the tiny space occupied by a real brain. It can be housed\n in a six-story building and look like an overgrown typewriter or an\n automobile dashboard or even a pogo stick. All it has to do is tell you\n that two times two equals four, and tell you fast.", "in the labs they're likely to be lolling on the grass, lounging in\n front of the fire in commons, or slouching around in conference rooms\n chalking up equations on a blackboard. No way of telling, of course,\n but a lot of these collegiate-looking chaps must be in the MS end,\n whatever that is. You'd think fellows in something secret like that\n would dress and behave with a little more dignity." ], [ "Now, I've heard talk like that before, and I don't like it. I don't\n like it at all. It so happens that I feel very strongly on the subject.\n I think a scientist should like what he's doing and not want to take\n refuge in Nature from the Laws of Nature (which is downright illogical,\n anyhow). I, for one, enjoy cutting logs precisely\nbecause\n, when my\n saw rasps across a knot, I know that the innermost secret of that\n knot, as of all matter in the Universe, is E=MC\n 2\n . It's my job to\nknow\nit, and it's very satisfying to\nknow\nthat I know it and that\n the general run of people don't. I was about to put this thought into\n words, but before I could open my mouth, somebody behind us spoke up.", "\"If we're pals,\" he said, \"come on and have a beer with me.\"\n\n\n There was no shaking him off, so I followed him down to his car and we\n drove to this sleazy little bar in the Negro part of town. As soon as\n we sat down in a booth, Len borrowed all the nickels I had, put them\n in the jukebox and pressed the levers for a lot of old Louie Armstrong\n records.\n\n\n \"Sorry, kid,\" he said. \"I know how you hate this real jazzy stuff, but\n can't have a reunion without music, and there isn't a polka or cowboy\n ballad or hillbilly stomp in the box. They lack the folksy touch on\n this side of the tracks.\" Len has always been very snobbish about my\n interest in folk music.\n\n\n I asked him what he'd been doing during the day.", "\"Definitely,\" I said. \"I'd be the last one in the world to say a word\n against Len, but he was always a little peculiar. Very gay one moment\n and very sour the next, and inclined to poke fun at things other people\n take seriously. He used to write poetry.\"\n\n\n \"I'm very glad to know that,\" the boss said. \"Confirms my own feeling\n about him.\"\n\n\n So the boss has some doubts about Len.\nOctober 27, 1959\nUnpleasant evening with Len. It all started after dinner when he showed\n up in my room, wagged his finger at me and said, \"Ollie, you've been\n avoiding me. That hurts. Thought we were pals, thick and thin and till\n debt and death do us part.\"\n\n\n I saw immediately that he was drunk—he always gets his words mixed\n up when he's drunk—and I tried to placate him by explaining that it\n wasn't anything like that; I'd been busy.", "But our job calls for even more. The pro mustn't only\nequal\nthe\n real thing, it must be\nsuperior\n! That means creating a synthetic\n neuro-muscular system that actually\nimproves\non the nerves and\n muscles Nature created in the original!\n\n\n When our twenty-fourth experimental model turned out to be a dud last\n week—it just hung from Kujack's stump, quivering like one of my robot\n bedbugs, as though it had a bad case of intention tremor—Goldweiser\n said something that made an impression on me.\n\"They don't want much from us,\" he said sarcastically. \"They just want\n us to be God.\"", "\"Lushing it up,\" he said. \"Getting stinking from drinking.\" He still\n likes to use the most flamboyant slang; I consider it an infantile form\n of protest against what he regards as the \"genteel\" manner of academic\n people. \"I got sort of restless this morning, so I ducked out and beat\n it into New York and looked up my friend Steve Lundy in the Village.\n Spent the afternoon liquidating our joint assets. Liquidating our\n assets in the joints.\"\n\n\n What, I wanted to know, was he feeling restless about?\n\n\n \"Restless for going on three years now.\" His face grew solemn, as\n though he were thinking it over very carefully. \"I'll amend that\n statement. Hell with the Aesopian language. I've been a plain lush for\n going on three years. Ever since—\"\n\n\n If it was something personal—I suggested.", "\"The night is young,\" he said, \"and you're so dutiful. Where was I? Oh\n yes, Bell. At first our electronic pawn-pusher wasn't so hot—it could\n beat the pants off a lousy player, but an expert just made it look\n silly. But we kept improving it, see, building more and more electronic\n anticipation and gambit-plotting powers into it, and finally, one great\n day in '55, we thought we had all the kinks ironed out and were ready\n for the big test. By this time, of course, Washington had stepped in\n and taken over the whole project.\n\n\n \"Well, we got hold of Fortunescu, the world's champion chess player,\n sat him down and turned the robot loose on him. For four hours straight\n we followed the match, with a delegation of big brass from Washington,\n and for four hours straight the machine trounced Fortunescu every game.\n That was when I began to get scared. I went out that night and got\n really loaded.\"", "What had he been so scared about? It seemed to me he should have felt\n happy.\n\n\n \"Listen, Ollie,\" he said, \"for Christ's sake, stop talking like a Boy\n Scout for once in your life.\"\n\n\n If he was going to insult me—\n\n\n \"No insult intended. Just listen. I'm a terrible chess player. Any\n five-year-old could chatemeck—checkmate—me with his brains tied\n behind his back. But this machine which I built, helped build, is the\n champion chess player of the world. In other words, my brain has given\n birth to a brain which can do things my brain could never do. Don't you\n find that terrifying?\"\n\n\n \"Not at all,\" I said. \"\nYou\nmade the machine, didn't you? Therefore,\n no matter what it does, it's only an extension of you. You should feel\n proud to have devised a powerful new tool.\"", "\"Look here, Parks,\" the boss said. He seemed a little peeved.\n \"Cybernetics is teamwork, and the first rule of any team is that not\n everybody can be quarterback. Each man has a specific job on our team,\n one thing he's best suited for, and what\nyou're\nbest suited for,\n obviously, is the Pro lab. We've followed your work closely these last\n few years, and we were quite impressed by the way you handled those\n photo-electric-cell insects. You pulled off a brilliant engineering\n stunt, you know, when you induced nervous breakdown in your robot\n moths and bedbugs, and proved that the oscillations they developed\n corresponded to those which the human animal develops in intention\n tremor and Parkinson's disease. A keen bit of cybernetic thinking,\n that.\nVery\nkeen.\"\n\n\n It was just luck, I told him modestly.", "\"Don't get me wrong, Doc,\" he said, much too innocently. \"It's just\n that I've been thinking. Maybe you'd have more luck if you thought of\n me as a bedbug.\"\n\n\n \"Where did you get that idea?\"\n\n\n \"From Doc Ellsom. I was having some beers with him the other night.\n He's got a very high opinion of you, says you build the best bedbugs in\n the business.\"\n\n\n I find it hard to believe that Len Ellsom would say anything really\n nice about me. Must be his guilt about Marilyn that makes him talk that\n way. I don't like his hanging around Kujack.\nOctober 25, 1959\nThe boss came along on our woodcutting expedition this morning and\n volunteered to work the other end of my two-handled saw. He asked how\n things were coming in the Pro lab.", "Take this afternoon, for instance. I've just worked out an entirely\n different kind of leg based on a whole new arrangement of solenoids to\n duplicate the muscle systems, and I decided to give it a try. When I\n was slipping the model into place, I looked up and caught Kujack's eye\n for a moment. He seemed to be laughing at something, although his face\n was expressionless.\n\n\n \"All right,\" I said. \"Let's make a test. I understand you used to be\n quite a football player. Well, just think of how you used to kick a\n football and try to do it now.\"\n\n\n He really seemed to be trying; the effort made him sweat. All that\n happened, though, was that the big toe wriggled a little and the knee\n buckled. Dud Number Twenty-five. I was sore, of course, especially when\n I noticed that Kujack was more amused than ever.\n\n\n \"You seem to think something's pretty funny,\" I said.", "Guess I was a little previous in packing my soup-and-fish. Soon as I\n was shown to my room in the bachelor dorms, I dug it out and hung it\n way back in the closet, out of sight. When in Rome, etc. Later that day\n I discovered they carry dungarees in the Co-op; luckily, they had the\n pre-faded kind.\nOctober 6, 1959\nMet the boss this morning—hardly out of his thirties, crew-cut,\n wearing a flannel hunting shirt and dirty saddleshoes. I was glad I'd\n thought to change into my dungarees before the interview.\n\n\n \"Parks,\" he said, \"you can count yourself a very fortunate young man.\n You've come to the most important address in America, not excluding the\n Pentagon. In the world, probably. To get you oriented, suppose I sketch\n in some of the background of the place.\"", "\"Oh?\" I said. \"Does that mean you're in MS?\" It wasn't an easy idea to\n accept, but I think I was pretty successful in keeping my tone casual.\n\n\n \"Ollie, my boy,\" he said in an exaggerated stage whisper, putting his\n finger to his lips, \"in the beginning was the word and the word was\n mum. Leave us avoid the subject of brains in this\nkeen\nplace. We\n all have a job to do on the team.\" I suppose that was meant to be a\n humorous imitation of the boss; Len always did fancy himself quite a\n clown.\n\n\n We were separated during the sawing, but he caught up with me on the\n way back and said, \"Let's get together soon and have a talk, Ollie.\n It's been a long time.\"", "I didn't care for his cynical attitude at all, but he had a point. Len\n Ellsom just has to build a fancy adding machine to get his picture in\n the papers.\nI\nhave to be God!\nOctober 22, 1959\nDon't know what to make of Kujack. His attitude is peculiar. Of course,\n he's very co-operative, lies back on the fitting table and doesn't\n even wince when we snap on the pros, and he does his best to carry out\n instructions. Still, there's something funny about the way he looks at\n me. There's a kind of malicious expression in his eyes. At times, come\n to think of it, he reminds me of Len.", "I was relieved to see him taking it so well because I know how anxious\n he is to get results from the Pro lab. Since Pro is one of the few\n things going on at IFACS that can be talked about, he's impatient for\n us to come up with something he can release to the press. As the public\n relations officer explained it to me at dinner the other night, people\n get worried when they know there's something like IFACS going, but\n don't get any real information about it, so the boss, naturally, wants\n to relieve the public's curiosity with a good, reassuring story about\n our work.\n\n\n I knew I was taking an awful chance spilling the whole K-N thing to him\n the way I did, but I had to lay the groundwork for a little plan I've\n just begun to work on.\n\n\n \"By the way, sir,\" I said, \"I ran into Len Ellsom the other day. I\n didn't know he was here.\"", "\"Stop wearing your loyalty oath on your sleeve,\" he said belligerently.\n \"Sure I want to talk about it. Greatest subject I know. Begin at\n the beginning. Whole thing started back in the Thirties with those\n two refugee mathematicians who used to be here at the Institute for\n Advanced Studies when Einstein was around. Von Morgan and Neumanstern,\n no, Von\nNeu\nmann and\nMor\nganstern. You remember, they did a\n mathematical analysis of all the possible kinds of games, poker,\n tossing pennies, chess, bridge, everything, and they wrote up their\n findings in a volume you certainly know,\nThe Theory of Games\n.", "Damn! Everybody knows MS is the thing to get into. It gives you real\n standing in the field if it gets around that you're an MS man. I had my\n heart set on getting into MS.\nOctober 6, 1959\nIt never rains, etc.: now it turns out that Len Ellsom's here, and\nhe's\nin MS! Found out about it in a funny way. Two mornings a week,\n it seems, the staff members get into their skiing and hunting clothes\n and tramp into the woods to cut logs for their fireplaces. Well, this\n morning I went with them, and as we were walking along the trail\n Goldweiser, my assistant, told me the idea behind these expeditions.", "\"Maybe you know,\" he went on, \"that in the days of Oppenheimer and\n Einstein, this place was called the Institute for Advanced Studies.\n It was run pretty loosely then—in addition to the mathematicians and\n physicists, they had all sorts of queer ducks hanging around—poets,\n egyptologists, numismatists, medievalists, herbalists, God alone knows\n what all. By 1955, however, so many cybernetics labs had sprung up\n around the country that we needed some central coordinating agency,\n so Washington arranged for us to take over here. Naturally, as soon\n as we arrived, we eased out the poets and egyptologists, brought in\n our own people, and changed the name to the Institute for Advanced\nCybernetics\nStudies. We've got some pretty keen projects going now,\npret\n-ty keen.\"\n\n\n I said I'd bet, and did he have any idea which project I would fit into?", "\"Sure thing,\" he said. \"You're going to take charge of a very important\n lab. The Pro lab.\" I guess he saw my puzzled look. \"Pro—that's short\n for prosthetics, artificial limbs. You know, it's really a scandal.\n With our present level of technology, we should have artificial limbs\n which in many ways are even better than the originals, but actually\n we're still making do with modifications of the same primitive, clumsy\n pegs and hooks they were using a thousand years ago. I'm counting on\n you to get things hopping in that department. It's a real challenge.\"\n\n\n I said it sure was a challenge, and of course I'd do my level best to\n meet it. Still, I couldn't help feeling a bit disappointed. Around\n cybernetics circles, I hinted, you heard a lot of talk about the\n hush-hush MS work that was going on at IFACS and it sounded so exciting\n that, well, a fellow sort of hoped he might get into\nthat\nend of\n things.", "\"Some tool,\" he sneered. He was so drunk by now that I could hardly\n understand what he was saying. \"The General Staff boys in Washington\n were all hopped up about that little old tool, and for a plenty good\n reason—they understood that mechanized warfare is only the most\n complicated game the human race has invented so far, an elaborate form\n of chess which uses the population of the world for pawns and the\n globe for a chessboard. They saw, too, that when the game of war gets\n this complex, the job of controlling and guiding it becomes too damned\n involved for any number of human brains, no matter how nimble.\n\n\n \"In other words, my beamish Boy Scout, modern war needs just this kind\n of strategy tool; the General Staff has to be mechanized along with\n everything else. So the Pentagon boys set up IFACS and handed us a\n top-priority cybernetics project: to build a superduper chess player\n that could oversee a complicated military maneuver, maybe later a whole\n campaign, maybe ultimately a whole global war.", "\"Bravo, Goldie,\" he said. \"Let us by all means pretend that we belong\n to the human race. Make way for the new cyberneticists with their old\n saws. Cyberneticist, spare that tree!\"\n\n\n I turned around to see who could be making jokes in such bad taste\n and—as I might have guessed—it was Len Ellsom. He was just as\n surprised as I was.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said, \"if it isn't Ollie Parks! I thought you were out in\n Cal Tech, building schizophrenic bedbugs.\"" ], [ "\"Definitely,\" I said. \"I'd be the last one in the world to say a word\n against Len, but he was always a little peculiar. Very gay one moment\n and very sour the next, and inclined to poke fun at things other people\n take seriously. He used to write poetry.\"\n\n\n \"I'm very glad to know that,\" the boss said. \"Confirms my own feeling\n about him.\"\n\n\n So the boss has some doubts about Len.\nOctober 27, 1959\nUnpleasant evening with Len. It all started after dinner when he showed\n up in my room, wagged his finger at me and said, \"Ollie, you've been\n avoiding me. That hurts. Thought we were pals, thick and thin and till\n debt and death do us part.\"\n\n\n I saw immediately that he was drunk—he always gets his words mixed\n up when he's drunk—and I tried to placate him by explaining that it\n wasn't anything like that; I'd been busy.", "\"Lushing it up,\" he said. \"Getting stinking from drinking.\" He still\n likes to use the most flamboyant slang; I consider it an infantile form\n of protest against what he regards as the \"genteel\" manner of academic\n people. \"I got sort of restless this morning, so I ducked out and beat\n it into New York and looked up my friend Steve Lundy in the Village.\n Spent the afternoon liquidating our joint assets. Liquidating our\n assets in the joints.\"\n\n\n What, I wanted to know, was he feeling restless about?\n\n\n \"Restless for going on three years now.\" His face grew solemn, as\n though he were thinking it over very carefully. \"I'll amend that\n statement. Hell with the Aesopian language. I've been a plain lush for\n going on three years. Ever since—\"\n\n\n If it was something personal—I suggested.", "\"If we're pals,\" he said, \"come on and have a beer with me.\"\n\n\n There was no shaking him off, so I followed him down to his car and we\n drove to this sleazy little bar in the Negro part of town. As soon as\n we sat down in a booth, Len borrowed all the nickels I had, put them\n in the jukebox and pressed the levers for a lot of old Louie Armstrong\n records.\n\n\n \"Sorry, kid,\" he said. \"I know how you hate this real jazzy stuff, but\n can't have a reunion without music, and there isn't a polka or cowboy\n ballad or hillbilly stomp in the box. They lack the folksy touch on\n this side of the tracks.\" Len has always been very snobbish about my\n interest in folk music.\n\n\n I asked him what he'd been doing during the day.", "\"It is\nnot\nsomething personal,\" he said, mimicking me. \"Guess I can\n tell an old cyberneticist pal about it. Been a lush for three years\n because I've been scared for three years. Been scared for three years\n because three years ago I saw a machine beat a man at a game of chess.\"\n\n\n A machine that plays chess? That was interesting, I said.\n\n\n \"Didn't tell you the whole truth the other day,\" Len mumbled. \"I\ndid\nwork on the Remington-Rand computer, sure, but I didn't come to IFACS\n directly from that. In between I spent a couple years at the Bell\n Telephone Labs. Claude Shannon—or, rather, to begin with there was\n Norbert Wiener back at M.I.T.—it's complicated....\"\n\n\n \"Look,\" I said, \"are you sure you want to talk about it?\"", "\"Oh?\" I said. \"Does that mean you're in MS?\" It wasn't an easy idea to\n accept, but I think I was pretty successful in keeping my tone casual.\n\n\n \"Ollie, my boy,\" he said in an exaggerated stage whisper, putting his\n finger to his lips, \"in the beginning was the word and the word was\n mum. Leave us avoid the subject of brains in this\nkeen\nplace. We\n all have a job to do on the team.\" I suppose that was meant to be a\n humorous imitation of the boss; Len always did fancy himself quite a\n clown.\n\n\n We were separated during the sawing, but he caught up with me on the\n way back and said, \"Let's get together soon and have a talk, Ollie.\n It's been a long time.\"", "I didn't care for his cynical attitude at all, but he had a point. Len\n Ellsom just has to build a fancy adding machine to get his picture in\n the papers.\nI\nhave to be God!\nOctober 22, 1959\nDon't know what to make of Kujack. His attitude is peculiar. Of course,\n he's very co-operative, lies back on the fitting table and doesn't\n even wince when we snap on the pros, and he does his best to carry out\n instructions. Still, there's something funny about the way he looks at\n me. There's a kind of malicious expression in his eyes. At times, come\n to think of it, he reminds me of Len.", "\"We're aiming at a military strategy machine which can digest reports\n from all the units on all the fronts and from moment to moment, on\n the basis of that steady stream of information, grind out an elastic\n overall strategy and dictate concrete tactical directives to all the\n units. Wiener warned this might happen, and he was right. A very nifty\n tool. Never mind how far we've gotten with the thing, but I will tell\n you this: I'm a lot more scared today than I was three years ago.\"\n\n\n So\nthat\nwas the secret of MS! The most extraordinary machine ever\n devised by the human mind! It was hard to conceal the thrill of\n excitement I felt, even as a relative outsider.\n\n\n \"Why all the jitters?\" I said. \"This could be the most wonderful tool\n ever invented. It might eliminate war altogether.\"\n\n\n Len was quiet for a while, gulping his beer and looking off into space.\n Then he turned to me.", "I was relieved to see him taking it so well because I know how anxious\n he is to get results from the Pro lab. Since Pro is one of the few\n things going on at IFACS that can be talked about, he's impatient for\n us to come up with something he can release to the press. As the public\n relations officer explained it to me at dinner the other night, people\n get worried when they know there's something like IFACS going, but\n don't get any real information about it, so the boss, naturally, wants\n to relieve the public's curiosity with a good, reassuring story about\n our work.\n\n\n I knew I was taking an awful chance spilling the whole K-N thing to him\n the way I did, but I had to lay the groundwork for a little plan I've\n just begun to work on.\n\n\n \"By the way, sir,\" I said, \"I ran into Len Ellsom the other day. I\n didn't know he was here.\"", "\"Don't get me wrong, Doc,\" he said, much too innocently. \"It's just\n that I've been thinking. Maybe you'd have more luck if you thought of\n me as a bedbug.\"\n\n\n \"Where did you get that idea?\"\n\n\n \"From Doc Ellsom. I was having some beers with him the other night.\n He's got a very high opinion of you, says you build the best bedbugs in\n the business.\"\n\n\n I find it hard to believe that Len Ellsom would say anything really\n nice about me. Must be his guilt about Marilyn that makes him talk that\n way. I don't like his hanging around Kujack.\nOctober 25, 1959\nThe boss came along on our woodcutting expedition this morning and\n volunteered to work the other end of my two-handled saw. He asked how\n things were coming in the Pro lab.", "\"Do you know him?\" the boss said. \"Good man. One of the best\n brains-and-games men you'll find anywhere.\"\n\n\n I explained that Len had gotten his degree at M.I.T. the year before I\n did. From what I'd heard, I added, he'd done some important work on the\n Remington-Rand ballistics computer.\n\n\n \"He did indeed,\" the boss said, \"but that's not the half of it. After\n that he made some major contributions to the robot chess player. As a\n matter of fact, that's why he's here.\"\n\n\n I said I hadn't heard about the chess player.\n\n\n \"As soon as it began to play a really good game of chess, Washington\n put the whole thing under wraps for security reasons. Which is why you\n won't hear any more about it from me.\"", "I'm no Eniac, but I can occasionally put two and two together myself.\n If the boss's remarks mean anything, they mean that an electronic brain\n capable of playing games has been developed, and that it's led to\n something important militarily. Of course! I could kick myself for not\n having guessed it before.\n\n\n Brains-and-games—that's what MS is all about, obviously. It had to\n happen: out of the mathematical analysis of chess came a robot chess\n player, and out of the chess player came some kind of mechanical brain\n that's useful in military strategy.\nThat's\nwhat Len Ellsom's in the\n middle of.\n\n\n \"Really brilliant mind,\" the boss said after we'd sawed for a while.\n \"Keen. But he's a little erratic—quirky, queer sense of humor. Isn't\n that your impression?\"", "He wants to talk about Marilyn, I suppose. Naturally. He has a guilty\n conscience. I'll have to make it quite clear to him that the whole\n episode is a matter of complete indifference to me. Marilyn is a closed\n book in my life; he must understand that. But can you beat that? He's\n right in the middle of MS! That lad certainly gets around. It's the\n usual Ellsom charm, I suppose.\n\n\n The usual Ellsom technique for irritating people, too. He's still\n trying to get my goat; he knows how much I've always hated to be called\n Ollie. Must watch Goldweiser. Thought he laughed pretty heartily at\n Len's wisecracks.\nOctober 18, 1959\nThings are shaping up in the Pro lab. Here's how I get the picture.", "Damn! Everybody knows MS is the thing to get into. It gives you real\n standing in the field if it gets around that you're an MS man. I had my\n heart set on getting into MS.\nOctober 6, 1959\nIt never rains, etc.: now it turns out that Len Ellsom's here, and\nhe's\nin MS! Found out about it in a funny way. Two mornings a week,\n it seems, the staff members get into their skiing and hunting clothes\n and tramp into the woods to cut logs for their fireplaces. Well, this\n morning I went with them, and as we were walking along the trail\n Goldweiser, my assistant, told me the idea behind these expeditions.", "\"The night is young,\" he said, \"and you're so dutiful. Where was I? Oh\n yes, Bell. At first our electronic pawn-pusher wasn't so hot—it could\n beat the pants off a lousy player, but an expert just made it look\n silly. But we kept improving it, see, building more and more electronic\n anticipation and gambit-plotting powers into it, and finally, one great\n day in '55, we thought we had all the kinks ironed out and were ready\n for the big test. By this time, of course, Washington had stepped in\n and taken over the whole project.\n\n\n \"Well, we got hold of Fortunescu, the world's champion chess player,\n sat him down and turned the robot loose on him. For four hours straight\n we followed the match, with a delegation of big brass from Washington,\n and for four hours straight the machine trounced Fortunescu every game.\n That was when I began to get scared. I went out that night and got\n really loaded.\"", "\"Stop wearing your loyalty oath on your sleeve,\" he said belligerently.\n \"Sure I want to talk about it. Greatest subject I know. Begin at\n the beginning. Whole thing started back in the Thirties with those\n two refugee mathematicians who used to be here at the Institute for\n Advanced Studies when Einstein was around. Von Morgan and Neumanstern,\n no, Von\nNeu\nmann and\nMor\nganstern. You remember, they did a\n mathematical analysis of all the possible kinds of games, poker,\n tossing pennies, chess, bridge, everything, and they wrote up their\n findings in a volume you certainly know,\nThe Theory of Games\n.", "\"Some tool,\" he sneered. He was so drunk by now that I could hardly\n understand what he was saying. \"The General Staff boys in Washington\n were all hopped up about that little old tool, and for a plenty good\n reason—they understood that mechanized warfare is only the most\n complicated game the human race has invented so far, an elaborate form\n of chess which uses the population of the world for pawns and the\n globe for a chessboard. They saw, too, that when the game of war gets\n this complex, the job of controlling and guiding it becomes too damned\n involved for any number of human brains, no matter how nimble.\n\n\n \"In other words, my beamish Boy Scout, modern war needs just this kind\n of strategy tool; the General Staff has to be mechanized along with\n everything else. So the Pentagon boys set up IFACS and handed us a\n top-priority cybernetics project: to build a superduper chess player\n that could oversee a complicated military maneuver, maybe later a whole\n campaign, maybe ultimately a whole global war.", "Now, I've heard talk like that before, and I don't like it. I don't\n like it at all. It so happens that I feel very strongly on the subject.\n I think a scientist should like what he's doing and not want to take\n refuge in Nature from the Laws of Nature (which is downright illogical,\n anyhow). I, for one, enjoy cutting logs precisely\nbecause\n, when my\n saw rasps across a knot, I know that the innermost secret of that\n knot, as of all matter in the Universe, is E=MC\n 2\n . It's my job to\nknow\nit, and it's very satisfying to\nknow\nthat I know it and that\n the general run of people don't. I was about to put this thought into\n words, but before I could open my mouth, somebody behind us spoke up.", "\"Bravo, Goldie,\" he said. \"Let us by all means pretend that we belong\n to the human race. Make way for the new cyberneticists with their old\n saws. Cyberneticist, spare that tree!\"\n\n\n I turned around to see who could be making jokes in such bad taste\n and—as I might have guessed—it was Len Ellsom. He was just as\n surprised as I was.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said, \"if it isn't Ollie Parks! I thought you were out in\n Cal Tech, building schizophrenic bedbugs.\"", "Take this afternoon, for instance. I've just worked out an entirely\n different kind of leg based on a whole new arrangement of solenoids to\n duplicate the muscle systems, and I decided to give it a try. When I\n was slipping the model into place, I looked up and caught Kujack's eye\n for a moment. He seemed to be laughing at something, although his face\n was expressionless.\n\n\n \"All right,\" I said. \"Let's make a test. I understand you used to be\n quite a football player. Well, just think of how you used to kick a\n football and try to do it now.\"\n\n\n He really seemed to be trying; the effort made him sweat. All that\n happened, though, was that the big toe wriggled a little and the knee\n buckled. Dud Number Twenty-five. I was sore, of course, especially when\n I noticed that Kujack was more amused than ever.\n\n\n \"You seem to think something's pretty funny,\" I said.", "\"Well, that got Wiener started. You may remember that when he founded\n the science of cybernetics, he announced that on the basis of the\n theory of games, it was feasible to design a robot computing machine\n that would play a better than average game of chess. Right after that,\n back in '49 or maybe it was '50, Claude Shannon of the Bell Labs said\n Wiener wasn't just talking, and to prove it he was going to\nbuild\nthe robot chess player. Which he proceeded withforth—forthwith—to\n do. Sometime in '53, I was taken off the Remington-Rand project and\n assigned to Bell to work with him.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe we ought to start back,\" I cut in. \"I've got a lot of work to\n do.\"" ], [ "\"Definitely,\" I said. \"I'd be the last one in the world to say a word\n against Len, but he was always a little peculiar. Very gay one moment\n and very sour the next, and inclined to poke fun at things other people\n take seriously. He used to write poetry.\"\n\n\n \"I'm very glad to know that,\" the boss said. \"Confirms my own feeling\n about him.\"\n\n\n So the boss has some doubts about Len.\nOctober 27, 1959\nUnpleasant evening with Len. It all started after dinner when he showed\n up in my room, wagged his finger at me and said, \"Ollie, you've been\n avoiding me. That hurts. Thought we were pals, thick and thin and till\n debt and death do us part.\"\n\n\n I saw immediately that he was drunk—he always gets his words mixed\n up when he's drunk—and I tried to placate him by explaining that it\n wasn't anything like that; I'd been busy.", "I was relieved to see him taking it so well because I know how anxious\n he is to get results from the Pro lab. Since Pro is one of the few\n things going on at IFACS that can be talked about, he's impatient for\n us to come up with something he can release to the press. As the public\n relations officer explained it to me at dinner the other night, people\n get worried when they know there's something like IFACS going, but\n don't get any real information about it, so the boss, naturally, wants\n to relieve the public's curiosity with a good, reassuring story about\n our work.\n\n\n I knew I was taking an awful chance spilling the whole K-N thing to him\n the way I did, but I had to lay the groundwork for a little plan I've\n just begun to work on.\n\n\n \"By the way, sir,\" I said, \"I ran into Len Ellsom the other day. I\n didn't know he was here.\"", "\"Oh?\" I said. \"Does that mean you're in MS?\" It wasn't an easy idea to\n accept, but I think I was pretty successful in keeping my tone casual.\n\n\n \"Ollie, my boy,\" he said in an exaggerated stage whisper, putting his\n finger to his lips, \"in the beginning was the word and the word was\n mum. Leave us avoid the subject of brains in this\nkeen\nplace. We\n all have a job to do on the team.\" I suppose that was meant to be a\n humorous imitation of the boss; Len always did fancy himself quite a\n clown.\n\n\n We were separated during the sawing, but he caught up with me on the\n way back and said, \"Let's get together soon and have a talk, Ollie.\n It's been a long time.\"", "What had he been so scared about? It seemed to me he should have felt\n happy.\n\n\n \"Listen, Ollie,\" he said, \"for Christ's sake, stop talking like a Boy\n Scout for once in your life.\"\n\n\n If he was going to insult me—\n\n\n \"No insult intended. Just listen. I'm a terrible chess player. Any\n five-year-old could chatemeck—checkmate—me with his brains tied\n behind his back. But this machine which I built, helped build, is the\n champion chess player of the world. In other words, my brain has given\n birth to a brain which can do things my brain could never do. Don't you\n find that terrifying?\"\n\n\n \"Not at all,\" I said. \"\nYou\nmade the machine, didn't you? Therefore,\n no matter what it does, it's only an extension of you. You should feel\n proud to have devised a powerful new tool.\"", "I didn't care for his cynical attitude at all, but he had a point. Len\n Ellsom just has to build a fancy adding machine to get his picture in\n the papers.\nI\nhave to be God!\nOctober 22, 1959\nDon't know what to make of Kujack. His attitude is peculiar. Of course,\n he's very co-operative, lies back on the fitting table and doesn't\n even wince when we snap on the pros, and he does his best to carry out\n instructions. Still, there's something funny about the way he looks at\n me. There's a kind of malicious expression in his eyes. At times, come\n to think of it, he reminds me of Len.", "\"If we're pals,\" he said, \"come on and have a beer with me.\"\n\n\n There was no shaking him off, so I followed him down to his car and we\n drove to this sleazy little bar in the Negro part of town. As soon as\n we sat down in a booth, Len borrowed all the nickels I had, put them\n in the jukebox and pressed the levers for a lot of old Louie Armstrong\n records.\n\n\n \"Sorry, kid,\" he said. \"I know how you hate this real jazzy stuff, but\n can't have a reunion without music, and there isn't a polka or cowboy\n ballad or hillbilly stomp in the box. They lack the folksy touch on\n this side of the tracks.\" Len has always been very snobbish about my\n interest in folk music.\n\n\n I asked him what he'd been doing during the day.", "\"Do you know him?\" the boss said. \"Good man. One of the best\n brains-and-games men you'll find anywhere.\"\n\n\n I explained that Len had gotten his degree at M.I.T. the year before I\n did. From what I'd heard, I added, he'd done some important work on the\n Remington-Rand ballistics computer.\n\n\n \"He did indeed,\" the boss said, \"but that's not the half of it. After\n that he made some major contributions to the robot chess player. As a\n matter of fact, that's why he's here.\"\n\n\n I said I hadn't heard about the chess player.\n\n\n \"As soon as it began to play a really good game of chess, Washington\n put the whole thing under wraps for security reasons. Which is why you\n won't hear any more about it from me.\"", "\"Bravo, Goldie,\" he said. \"Let us by all means pretend that we belong\n to the human race. Make way for the new cyberneticists with their old\n saws. Cyberneticist, spare that tree!\"\n\n\n I turned around to see who could be making jokes in such bad taste\n and—as I might have guessed—it was Len Ellsom. He was just as\n surprised as I was.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said, \"if it isn't Ollie Parks! I thought you were out in\n Cal Tech, building schizophrenic bedbugs.\"", "\"Don't get me wrong, Doc,\" he said, much too innocently. \"It's just\n that I've been thinking. Maybe you'd have more luck if you thought of\n me as a bedbug.\"\n\n\n \"Where did you get that idea?\"\n\n\n \"From Doc Ellsom. I was having some beers with him the other night.\n He's got a very high opinion of you, says you build the best bedbugs in\n the business.\"\n\n\n I find it hard to believe that Len Ellsom would say anything really\n nice about me. Must be his guilt about Marilyn that makes him talk that\n way. I don't like his hanging around Kujack.\nOctober 25, 1959\nThe boss came along on our woodcutting expedition this morning and\n volunteered to work the other end of my two-handled saw. He asked how\n things were coming in the Pro lab.", "I'm no Eniac, but I can occasionally put two and two together myself.\n If the boss's remarks mean anything, they mean that an electronic brain\n capable of playing games has been developed, and that it's led to\n something important militarily. Of course! I could kick myself for not\n having guessed it before.\n\n\n Brains-and-games—that's what MS is all about, obviously. It had to\n happen: out of the mathematical analysis of chess came a robot chess\n player, and out of the chess player came some kind of mechanical brain\n that's useful in military strategy.\nThat's\nwhat Len Ellsom's in the\n middle of.\n\n\n \"Really brilliant mind,\" the boss said after we'd sawed for a while.\n \"Keen. But he's a little erratic—quirky, queer sense of humor. Isn't\n that your impression?\"", "\"We're aiming at a military strategy machine which can digest reports\n from all the units on all the fronts and from moment to moment, on\n the basis of that steady stream of information, grind out an elastic\n overall strategy and dictate concrete tactical directives to all the\n units. Wiener warned this might happen, and he was right. A very nifty\n tool. Never mind how far we've gotten with the thing, but I will tell\n you this: I'm a lot more scared today than I was three years ago.\"\n\n\n So\nthat\nwas the secret of MS! The most extraordinary machine ever\n devised by the human mind! It was hard to conceal the thrill of\n excitement I felt, even as a relative outsider.\n\n\n \"Why all the jitters?\" I said. \"This could be the most wonderful tool\n ever invented. It might eliminate war altogether.\"\n\n\n Len was quiet for a while, gulping his beer and looking off into space.\n Then he turned to me.", "He wants to talk about Marilyn, I suppose. Naturally. He has a guilty\n conscience. I'll have to make it quite clear to him that the whole\n episode is a matter of complete indifference to me. Marilyn is a closed\n book in my life; he must understand that. But can you beat that? He's\n right in the middle of MS! That lad certainly gets around. It's the\n usual Ellsom charm, I suppose.\n\n\n The usual Ellsom technique for irritating people, too. He's still\n trying to get my goat; he knows how much I've always hated to be called\n Ollie. Must watch Goldweiser. Thought he laughed pretty heartily at\n Len's wisecracks.\nOctober 18, 1959\nThings are shaping up in the Pro lab. Here's how I get the picture.", "Now, I've heard talk like that before, and I don't like it. I don't\n like it at all. It so happens that I feel very strongly on the subject.\n I think a scientist should like what he's doing and not want to take\n refuge in Nature from the Laws of Nature (which is downright illogical,\n anyhow). I, for one, enjoy cutting logs precisely\nbecause\n, when my\n saw rasps across a knot, I know that the innermost secret of that\n knot, as of all matter in the Universe, is E=MC\n 2\n . It's my job to\nknow\nit, and it's very satisfying to\nknow\nthat I know it and that\n the general run of people don't. I was about to put this thought into\n words, but before I could open my mouth, somebody behind us spoke up.", "\"It is\nnot\nsomething personal,\" he said, mimicking me. \"Guess I can\n tell an old cyberneticist pal about it. Been a lush for three years\n because I've been scared for three years. Been scared for three years\n because three years ago I saw a machine beat a man at a game of chess.\"\n\n\n A machine that plays chess? That was interesting, I said.\n\n\n \"Didn't tell you the whole truth the other day,\" Len mumbled. \"I\ndid\nwork on the Remington-Rand computer, sure, but I didn't come to IFACS\n directly from that. In between I spent a couple years at the Bell\n Telephone Labs. Claude Shannon—or, rather, to begin with there was\n Norbert Wiener back at M.I.T.—it's complicated....\"\n\n\n \"Look,\" I said, \"are you sure you want to talk about it?\"", "\"Look here, Parks,\" the boss said. He seemed a little peeved.\n \"Cybernetics is teamwork, and the first rule of any team is that not\n everybody can be quarterback. Each man has a specific job on our team,\n one thing he's best suited for, and what\nyou're\nbest suited for,\n obviously, is the Pro lab. We've followed your work closely these last\n few years, and we were quite impressed by the way you handled those\n photo-electric-cell insects. You pulled off a brilliant engineering\n stunt, you know, when you induced nervous breakdown in your robot\n moths and bedbugs, and proved that the oscillations they developed\n corresponded to those which the human animal develops in intention\n tremor and Parkinson's disease. A keen bit of cybernetic thinking,\n that.\nVery\nkeen.\"\n\n\n It was just luck, I told him modestly.", "Damn! Everybody knows MS is the thing to get into. It gives you real\n standing in the field if it gets around that you're an MS man. I had my\n heart set on getting into MS.\nOctober 6, 1959\nIt never rains, etc.: now it turns out that Len Ellsom's here, and\nhe's\nin MS! Found out about it in a funny way. Two mornings a week,\n it seems, the staff members get into their skiing and hunting clothes\n and tramp into the woods to cut logs for their fireplaces. Well, this\n morning I went with them, and as we were walking along the trail\n Goldweiser, my assistant, told me the idea behind these expeditions.", "\"Lushing it up,\" he said. \"Getting stinking from drinking.\" He still\n likes to use the most flamboyant slang; I consider it an infantile form\n of protest against what he regards as the \"genteel\" manner of academic\n people. \"I got sort of restless this morning, so I ducked out and beat\n it into New York and looked up my friend Steve Lundy in the Village.\n Spent the afternoon liquidating our joint assets. Liquidating our\n assets in the joints.\"\n\n\n What, I wanted to know, was he feeling restless about?\n\n\n \"Restless for going on three years now.\" His face grew solemn, as\n though he were thinking it over very carefully. \"I'll amend that\n statement. Hell with the Aesopian language. I've been a plain lush for\n going on three years. Ever since—\"\n\n\n If it was something personal—I suggested.", "Take this afternoon, for instance. I've just worked out an entirely\n different kind of leg based on a whole new arrangement of solenoids to\n duplicate the muscle systems, and I decided to give it a try. When I\n was slipping the model into place, I looked up and caught Kujack's eye\n for a moment. He seemed to be laughing at something, although his face\n was expressionless.\n\n\n \"All right,\" I said. \"Let's make a test. I understand you used to be\n quite a football player. Well, just think of how you used to kick a\n football and try to do it now.\"\n\n\n He really seemed to be trying; the effort made him sweat. All that\n happened, though, was that the big toe wriggled a little and the knee\n buckled. Dud Number Twenty-five. I was sore, of course, especially when\n I noticed that Kujack was more amused than ever.\n\n\n \"You seem to think something's pretty funny,\" I said.", "\"The night is young,\" he said, \"and you're so dutiful. Where was I? Oh\n yes, Bell. At first our electronic pawn-pusher wasn't so hot—it could\n beat the pants off a lousy player, but an expert just made it look\n silly. But we kept improving it, see, building more and more electronic\n anticipation and gambit-plotting powers into it, and finally, one great\n day in '55, we thought we had all the kinks ironed out and were ready\n for the big test. By this time, of course, Washington had stepped in\n and taken over the whole project.\n\n\n \"Well, we got hold of Fortunescu, the world's champion chess player,\n sat him down and turned the robot loose on him. For four hours straight\n we followed the match, with a delegation of big brass from Washington,\n and for four hours straight the machine trounced Fortunescu every game.\n That was when I began to get scared. I went out that night and got\n really loaded.\"", "\"Sure thing,\" he said. \"You're going to take charge of a very important\n lab. The Pro lab.\" I guess he saw my puzzled look. \"Pro—that's short\n for prosthetics, artificial limbs. You know, it's really a scandal.\n With our present level of technology, we should have artificial limbs\n which in many ways are even better than the originals, but actually\n we're still making do with modifications of the same primitive, clumsy\n pegs and hooks they were using a thousand years ago. I'm counting on\n you to get things hopping in that department. It's a real challenge.\"\n\n\n I said it sure was a challenge, and of course I'd do my level best to\n meet it. Still, I couldn't help feeling a bit disappointed. Around\n cybernetics circles, I hinted, you heard a lot of talk about the\n hush-hush MS work that was going on at IFACS and it sounded so exciting\n that, well, a fellow sort of hoped he might get into\nthat\nend of\n things." ] ]
test	29170	[ "Which of the following is not a direct consequence of spending extensive time in space?", "What is a “hoofer”?", "What is Parker’s financial situation?", "What is a “tumbler”?", "What is most likely to happen next in the story?", "How does Hooky know Parker?", "How did Parker’s forehead get injured?", "Why were people tolerant of Parker on the bus?", "What is Big Bottomless?" ]	[ [ "Swollen hands", "Bad vision", "Imbalance", "Fear of open spaces" ], [ "Someone who hitches rides from others", "Someone who walks long distances", "Someone who works on a farm", "Someone who lives on Earth" ], [ "He’s retired and ready to buy a farm.", "He needs to continue working in space to support his family.", "He worked overtime and has saved a large sum for his family.", "He worked overtime but gambled the money away." ], [ "Someone who drinks too much", "Someone who frequently gets in fights", "Someone who drives a car", "Someone who works in space" ], [ "Parker will stay home for a few months and then go back out to space.", "Parker will open a business with the money he’s saved.", "Parker will be taken in by Marie’s family.", "Parker will buy a farm for his family to live on." ], [ "They lived on neighboring farms.", "Hooky replaced Parker on the spaceship.", "Hooky lived with the family of Parker’s wife.", "Parker met him at a bar." ], [ "Hitting a fence post", "Fighting in the bar", "Fighting on the bus", "Falling into a cement pit" ], [ "They were scared of him.", "They understood the challenges he faced.", "They were friends of Marie’s.", "They wanted money from him." ], [ "Space", "Despair", "Ocean", "Brand of Gin" ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n\n\n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n\n\n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"", "It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n\n\n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n\n\n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n \"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n\n\n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.", "The light was on in the house\n again, and he heard faint sounds.\n The stirring-about woke the baby\n again, and once more the infant's\n wail came on the breeze.\nMake the kid shut up, make the\n kid shut up ...\nBut that was no good. It wasn't\n the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's\n fault. No fathers allowed in space,\n they said, but it wasn't their fault\n either. They were right, and he had\n only himself to blame. The kid was\n an accident, but that didn't change\n anything. Not a thing in the world.\n It remained a tragedy.", "Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n\n\n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n \"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n\n\n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.", "Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while—rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes—all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\nEverything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that\nall\nways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n\n\n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n\n\n It was a baby crying.", "The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n\n\n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n\n\n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n \"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n\n\n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n \"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say—\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"", "Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same:\nOne more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake—enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\nAnd she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n\n\n \"\nWhy?\n\" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.", "\"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n\n\n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n\n\n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n \"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler—\nhuk!\n—only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"", "The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n\n\n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.", "A wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a\n shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed\n by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his\n absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly\n human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told\n with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.\nthe\n \nhoofer\nby ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.\nA space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man\n in the full vigor of youth do—if his heart cries out for a home?\nThey all\n knew he was a spacer\n because of the white goggle marks", "\"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n\n\n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n\n\n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light—the space station—rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was—Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.", "When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n\n\n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n\n\n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown—probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.", "\"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n\n\n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n\n\n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n\n\n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.", "He shook his head. It wasn't really\n the sun. The sun, the real sun,\n was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in\n the dead black pit. It painted everything\n with pure white pain, and you\n saw things by the reflected pain-light.\n The fat red sun was strictly a\n phoney, and it didn't fool him any.\n He hated it for what he knew it was\n behind the gory mask, and for what\n it had done to his eyes.\nWith a grunt, he got to his feet,\n managed to shoulder the duffle bag,\n and started off down the middle of\n the farm road, lurching from side\n to side, and keeping his eyes on the\n rolling distances. Another car turned\n onto the side-road, honking angrily.", "A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n\n\n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n\n\n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to\nlittle\nHogey.", "It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n\n\n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.", "It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n\n\n They're hoofers, that's all—just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means—God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n\n\n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...", "\"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'll be—! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n\n\n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n\n\n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n \"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say—eh,\n Martha?\"", "It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n\n\n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer—well, it added up.", "When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n\n\n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n\n\n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag." ], [ "\"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n\n\n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n\n\n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n \"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler—\nhuk!\n—only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"", "\"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n\n\n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n\n\n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n\n\n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.", "The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n\n\n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n\n\n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n\n\n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n\n\n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n 'im.\"\n\n\n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n\n\n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy—here!\"", "It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n\n\n They're hoofers, that's all—just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means—God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n\n\n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...", "Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n\n\n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n\n\n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"", "The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n \"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n\n\n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n\n\n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.", "\"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'll be—! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n\n\n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n\n\n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n \"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say—eh,\n Martha?\"", "\"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n\n\n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n \"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n \"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n\n\n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n\n\n \"Never mind.\"", "He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n\n\n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n\n\n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n\n\n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n \"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"", "When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n\n\n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n\n\n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.", "It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n\n\n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.", "\"\nHuk!\n—who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n \"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n \"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore—woo-\nhoo\n!—is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n\n\n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n\n\n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n \"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n\n\n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n \"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n\n\n Hogey nodded forlornly.", "A wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a\n shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed\n by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his\n absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly\n human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told\n with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.\nthe\n \nhoofer\nby ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.\nA space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man\n in the full vigor of youth do—if his heart cries out for a home?\nThey all\n knew he was a spacer\n because of the white goggle marks", "The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n \"\nRrrooff!\n\" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n\n\n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n\n\n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n\n\n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n\n\n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were—his woman,\n his son.", "It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n\n\n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n\n\n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n \"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n\n\n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.", "It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n\n\n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer—well, it added up.", "What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n\n\n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went\nsquelch\nand\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n\n\n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud—sticky sandy\n mud.", "A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n\n\n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n\n\n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to\nlittle\nHogey.", "Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n\n\n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n \"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n\n\n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.", "\"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n\n\n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n\n\n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n\n\n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n\n\n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills." ], [ "\"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'll be—! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n\n\n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n\n\n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n \"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say—eh,\n Martha?\"", "The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n\n\n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n\n\n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n \"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n\n\n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n \"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say—\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"", "Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same:\nOne more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake—enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\nAnd she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n\n\n \"\nWhy?\n\" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.", "He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close—close\n to home and woman and child.\n\n\n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n\n\n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?", "The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n \"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n\n\n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n\n\n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.", "\"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n\n\n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n \"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n \"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n\n\n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n\n\n \"Never mind.\"", "When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n\n\n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n\n\n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown—probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.", "\"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n\n\n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n\n\n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n \"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler—\nhuk!\n—only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"", "He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n\n\n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n\n\n \"\nShhh!\n\" he hissed, and moved\n on.", "What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n\n\n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went\nsquelch\nand\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n\n\n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud—sticky sandy\n mud.", "When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n\n\n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n\n\n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.", "A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n\n\n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n\n\n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to\nlittle\nHogey.", "The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n \"\nRrrooff!\n\" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n\n\n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n\n\n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n\n\n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n\n\n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were—his woman,\n his son.", "The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n\n\n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n\n\n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n\n\n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n\n\n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n 'im.\"\n\n\n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n\n\n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy—here!\"", "It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n\n\n They're hoofers, that's all—just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means—God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n\n\n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...", "It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n\n\n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.", "\"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n\n\n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n\n\n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n\n\n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.", "It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n\n\n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n\n\n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n \"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n\n\n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.", "Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n\n\n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n\n\n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"", "It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n\n\n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer—well, it added up." ], [ "What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n\n\n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went\nsquelch\nand\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n\n\n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud—sticky sandy\n mud.", "A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n\n\n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n\n\n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to\nlittle\nHogey.", "\"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n\n\n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n\n\n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n \"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler—\nhuk!\n—only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"", "It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n\n\n They're hoofers, that's all—just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means—God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n\n\n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...", "It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n\n\n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer—well, it added up.", "\"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n\n\n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n\n\n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n\n\n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.", "He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n\n\n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n\n\n \"\nShhh!\n\" he hissed, and moved\n on.", "The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n\n\n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n\n\n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n\n\n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n\n\n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n 'im.\"\n\n\n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n\n\n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy—here!\"", "When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n\n\n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n\n\n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown—probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.", "\"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n\n\n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n \"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n \"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n\n\n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n\n\n \"Never mind.\"", "When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n\n\n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n\n\n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.", "The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n\n\n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.", "It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n\n\n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.", "Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while—rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes—all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\nEverything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that\nall\nways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n\n\n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n\n\n It was a baby crying.", "The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n \"\nRrrooff!\n\" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n\n\n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n\n\n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n\n\n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n\n\n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were—his woman,\n his son.", "Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n\n\n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n \"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n\n\n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.", "Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n\n\n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n\n\n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"", "He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n\n\n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n\n\n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n\n\n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n \"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"", "He gripped his ankles and pulled,\n but his feet wouldn't budge. In\n sudden terror, he tried to stand up,\n but his ankles were clutched by the\n concrete too, and he fell back in\n the sand with a low moan. He lay\n still for several minutes, considering\n carefully.\n\n\n He pulled at his left foot. It was\n locked in a vise. He tugged even\n more desperately at his right foot.\n It was equally immovable.\n\n\n He sat up with a whimper and\n clawed at the rough concrete until\n his nails tore and his fingertips\n bled. The surface still felt damp,\n but it had hardened while he slept.\n\n\n He sat there stunned until Hooky\n began licking at his scuffed fingers.\n He shouldered the dog away, and\n dug his hands into the sand-pile to\n stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at\n his face, panting love.", "\"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'll be—! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n\n\n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n\n\n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n \"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say—eh,\n Martha?\"" ], [ "He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n\n\n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n\n\n \"\nShhh!\n\" he hissed, and moved\n on.", "A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n\n\n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n\n\n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to\nlittle\nHogey.", "He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close—close\n to home and woman and child.\n\n\n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n\n\n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?", "It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n\n\n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer—well, it added up.", "It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n\n\n They're hoofers, that's all—just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means—God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n\n\n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...", "\"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n\n\n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n\n\n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n\n\n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.", "\"\nHuk!\n—who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n \"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n \"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore—woo-\nhoo\n!—is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n\n\n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n\n\n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n \"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n\n\n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n \"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n\n\n Hogey nodded forlornly.", "The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n\n\n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n\n\n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n\n\n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n\n\n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n 'im.\"\n\n\n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n\n\n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy—here!\"", "It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n\n\n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.", "The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n \"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n\n\n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n\n\n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.", "He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n\n\n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n\n\n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n\n\n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n \"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"", "The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n \"\nRrrooff!\n\" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n\n\n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n\n\n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n\n\n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n\n\n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were—his woman,\n his son.", "What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n\n\n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went\nsquelch\nand\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n\n\n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud—sticky sandy\n mud.", "It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n\n\n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n\n\n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n \"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n\n\n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.", "When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n\n\n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n\n\n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown—probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.", "Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same:\nOne more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake—enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\nAnd she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n\n\n \"\nWhy?\n\" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.", "When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n\n\n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n\n\n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.", "\"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'll be—! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n\n\n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n\n\n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n \"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say—eh,\n Martha?\"", "\"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n\n\n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n\n\n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light—the space station—rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was—Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.", "He gripped his ankles and pulled,\n but his feet wouldn't budge. In\n sudden terror, he tried to stand up,\n but his ankles were clutched by the\n concrete too, and he fell back in\n the sand with a low moan. He lay\n still for several minutes, considering\n carefully.\n\n\n He pulled at his left foot. It was\n locked in a vise. He tugged even\n more desperately at his right foot.\n It was equally immovable.\n\n\n He sat up with a whimper and\n clawed at the rough concrete until\n his nails tore and his fingertips\n bled. The surface still felt damp,\n but it had hardened while he slept.\n\n\n He sat there stunned until Hooky\n began licking at his scuffed fingers.\n He shouldered the dog away, and\n dug his hands into the sand-pile to\n stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at\n his face, panting love." ], [ "The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n\n\n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n\n\n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n\n\n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n\n\n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n 'im.\"\n\n\n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n\n\n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy—here!\"", "The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n \"\nRrrooff!\n\" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n\n\n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n\n\n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n\n\n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n\n\n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were—his woman,\n his son.", "\"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'll be—! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n\n\n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n\n\n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n \"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say—eh,\n Martha?\"", "\"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n\n\n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n \"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n \"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n\n\n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n\n\n \"Never mind.\"", "\"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n\n\n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n\n\n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n \"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler—\nhuk!\n—only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"", "He gripped his ankles and pulled,\n but his feet wouldn't budge. In\n sudden terror, he tried to stand up,\n but his ankles were clutched by the\n concrete too, and he fell back in\n the sand with a low moan. He lay\n still for several minutes, considering\n carefully.\n\n\n He pulled at his left foot. It was\n locked in a vise. He tugged even\n more desperately at his right foot.\n It was equally immovable.\n\n\n He sat up with a whimper and\n clawed at the rough concrete until\n his nails tore and his fingertips\n bled. The surface still felt damp,\n but it had hardened while he slept.\n\n\n He sat there stunned until Hooky\n began licking at his scuffed fingers.\n He shouldered the dog away, and\n dug his hands into the sand-pile to\n stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at\n his face, panting love.", "\"\nHuk!\n—who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n \"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n \"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore—woo-\nhoo\n!—is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n\n\n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n\n\n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n \"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n\n\n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n \"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n\n\n Hogey nodded forlornly.", "The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n\n\n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n\n\n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n \"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n\n\n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n \"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say—\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"", "It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n\n\n They're hoofers, that's all—just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means—God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n\n\n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...", "The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n \"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n\n\n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n\n\n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.", "\"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n\n\n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n\n\n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n\n\n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n\n\n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.", "\"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n\n\n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n\n\n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light—the space station—rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was—Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.", "\"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n\n\n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n\n\n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n\n\n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.", "It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n\n\n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.", "He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n\n\n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n\n\n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n\n\n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n \"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"", "When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n\n\n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n\n\n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.", "A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n\n\n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n\n\n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to\nlittle\nHogey.", "Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n\n\n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n\n\n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"", "What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n\n\n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went\nsquelch\nand\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n\n\n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud—sticky sandy\n mud.", "Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while—rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes—all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\nEverything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that\nall\nways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n\n\n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n\n\n It was a baby crying." ], [ "\"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n\n\n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n \"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n \"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n\n\n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n\n\n \"Never mind.\"", "\"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'll be—! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n\n\n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n\n\n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n \"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say—eh,\n Martha?\"", "He shook his head. It wasn't really\n the sun. The sun, the real sun,\n was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in\n the dead black pit. It painted everything\n with pure white pain, and you\n saw things by the reflected pain-light.\n The fat red sun was strictly a\n phoney, and it didn't fool him any.\n He hated it for what he knew it was\n behind the gory mask, and for what\n it had done to his eyes.\nWith a grunt, he got to his feet,\n managed to shoulder the duffle bag,\n and started off down the middle of\n the farm road, lurching from side\n to side, and keeping his eyes on the\n rolling distances. Another car turned\n onto the side-road, honking angrily.", "The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n\n\n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n\n\n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n \"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n\n\n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n \"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say—\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"", "What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n\n\n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went\nsquelch\nand\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n\n\n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud—sticky sandy\n mud.", "He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n\n\n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n\n\n \"\nShhh!\n\" he hissed, and moved\n on.", "\"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n\n\n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n\n\n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n\n\n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.", "\"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n\n\n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n\n\n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n \"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler—\nhuk!\n—only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"", "He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close—close\n to home and woman and child.\n\n\n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n\n\n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?", "When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n\n\n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n\n\n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.", "It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n\n\n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer—well, it added up.", "It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n\n\n They're hoofers, that's all—just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means—God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n\n\n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...", "The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n \"\nRrrooff!\n\" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n\n\n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n\n\n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n\n\n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n\n\n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were—his woman,\n his son.", "When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n\n\n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n\n\n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown—probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.", "on his sun-scorched face, and so\n they tolerated him and helped him.\n They even made allowances for him\n when he staggered and fell in the\n aisle of the bus while pursuing the\n harassed little housewife from seat\n to seat and cajoling her to sit and\n talk with him.", "Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n\n\n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n\n\n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"", "Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n\n\n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n \"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n\n\n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.", "The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n \"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n\n\n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n\n\n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.", "It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n\n\n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n\n\n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n \"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n\n\n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.", "It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n\n\n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen." ], [ "on his sun-scorched face, and so\n they tolerated him and helped him.\n They even made allowances for him\n when he staggered and fell in the\n aisle of the bus while pursuing the\n harassed little housewife from seat\n to seat and cajoling her to sit and\n talk with him.", "\"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n\n\n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n \"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n \"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n\n\n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n\n\n \"Never mind.\"", "He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n\n\n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n\n\n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n\n\n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n \"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"", "\"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'll be—! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n\n\n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n\n\n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n \"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say—eh,\n Martha?\"", "\"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n\n\n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n\n\n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n\n\n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.", "When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n\n\n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n\n\n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.", "Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n\n\n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n \"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n\n\n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.", "\"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n\n\n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n\n\n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n \"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler—\nhuk!\n—only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"", "The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n \"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n\n\n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n\n\n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.", "The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n \"\nRrrooff!\n\" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n\n\n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n\n\n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n\n\n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n\n\n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were—his woman,\n his son.", "\"\nHuk!\n—who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n \"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n \"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore—woo-\nhoo\n!—is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n\n\n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n\n\n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n \"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n\n\n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n \"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n\n\n Hogey nodded forlornly.", "The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n\n\n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n\n\n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n \"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n\n\n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n \"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say—\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"", "It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n\n\n They're hoofers, that's all—just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means—God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n\n\n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...", "The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n\n\n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n\n\n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n\n\n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n\n\n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n 'im.\"\n\n\n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n\n\n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy—here!\"", "\"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n\n\n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n\n\n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n\n\n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n\n\n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.", "It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n\n\n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.", "He shook his head. It wasn't really\n the sun. The sun, the real sun,\n was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in\n the dead black pit. It painted everything\n with pure white pain, and you\n saw things by the reflected pain-light.\n The fat red sun was strictly a\n phoney, and it didn't fool him any.\n He hated it for what he knew it was\n behind the gory mask, and for what\n it had done to his eyes.\nWith a grunt, he got to his feet,\n managed to shoulder the duffle bag,\n and started off down the middle of\n the farm road, lurching from side\n to side, and keeping his eyes on the\n rolling distances. Another car turned\n onto the side-road, honking angrily.", "It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n\n\n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n\n\n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n \"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n\n\n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.", "A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n\n\n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n\n\n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to\nlittle\nHogey.", "The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n\n\n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came." ], [ "He sat there with his feet locked\n in the solid concrete of the footing,\n staring out into Big Bottomless\n while his son's cry came from the\n house and the Hauptman menfolk\n came wading through the tall grass\n in search of someone who had cried\n out. His feet were stuck tight, and\n he wouldn't ever get them out. He\n was sobbing softly when they found\n him.\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nFantastic Universe\nSeptember 1955.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.", "When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n\n\n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n\n\n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.", "Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n\n\n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n \"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n\n\n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.", "Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while—rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes—all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\nEverything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that\nall\nways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n\n\n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n\n\n It was a baby crying.", "The bottom of the ditch was wet,\n and he crawled up the embankment\n with mud-soaked knees, and sat on\n the shoulder again. The gin bottle\n was still intact. He had himself a\n long fiery drink, and it warmed him\n deep down. He blinked around at\n the gaunt and treeless land.\n\n\n The sun was almost down, forge-red\n on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked\n sky faded into sulphurous\n yellow toward the zenith, and the\n very air that hung over the land\n seemed full of yellow smoke, the\n omnipresent dust of the plains.\n\n\n A farm truck turned onto the\n side-road and moaned away, its\n driver hardly glancing at the dark\n young man who sat swaying on his\n duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey\n scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just\n kept staring at the crazy sun.", "\"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n\n\n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n\n\n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n\n\n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.", "What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n\n\n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went\nsquelch\nand\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n\n\n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud—sticky sandy\n mud.", "It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n\n\n They're hoofers, that's all—just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means—God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n\n\n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...", "Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n\n\n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n\n\n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"", "It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n\n\n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.", "The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n\n\n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.", "He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n\n\n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n\n\n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n\n\n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n \"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"", "\"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n\n\n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n\n\n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light—the space station—rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was—Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.", "\"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n\n\n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n\n\n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n \"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler—\nhuk!\n—only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"", "\"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'll be—! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n\n\n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n\n\n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n \"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say—eh,\n Martha?\"", "\"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n\n\n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n \"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n \"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n\n\n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n\n\n \"Never mind.\"", "It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n\n\n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n\n\n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n \"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n\n\n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.", "When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n\n\n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n\n\n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown—probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.", "It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n\n\n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer—well, it added up.", "The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n \"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n\n\n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n\n\n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction." ] ]
test	25629	[ "How did Preston save the Ganymede colony?", "What was most surprising to Preston about his new job?", "Why was Earth unaware of the iceworm situation on Ganymede?", "Why was Preston initially upset about his new assignment?", "What happened when Gunderson, Mellors, and Preston encountered the pirate ships on the way to Ganymede?", "Why did the Chief assign Preston to the Postal duty?", "Why had the Chief been looking for Preston at Nome Spaceport in Alaska?", "Why does the representative from Ganymede tell Preston he can't land there to deliver his mail?", "Why did his former Patrol sidekicks join Preston on his mission to Ganymede?" ]	[ [ "He affixed a gas tank to the empty gun turret on his postal ship, dropped it on the mass of iceworms, and ignited them with the fire from his jets.", "He dumped fuel into the gun turrets mounted to the firing stud and dumped it over the mass of writhing iceworms covering the Ganymede Dome.", "He dove the mail ship into a mass of them, exploding his fuel tank, and burning the iceworms in the process. Due to his burning fuel tank, he was forced to make an emergency landing.", "He mounted a heavy gun on the firing stud and filled it with the spare ammo he found in crates in the back of the mail ship and used those rounds to kill the iceworms." ], [ "The fact that there were empty carts in the back of his mail ship that had previously been filled with ammo, and there were no gun turrets mounted to the firing stud.", "He had been assigned to deliver mail to Ganymede when he thought he would be dropping mail at Callisto.", "His first day delivering mail had been far more dangerous than his old assignment as Patrol man.", "He had not expected to have to pass through the Pirate Belt, but he was happy to have Mellors and Gunderson as part of his convoy." ], [ "An iceworm had eaten through the long-range transmitter antenna, which was the only form of communication the Ganymede colony had with the outside world.", "It had been several months since the last mail dispatch had landed, and this was their primary form of communication with the Nome Spaceport in Alaska.", "An iceworm had destroyed the antenna for the transmitter with a wide enough range to reach Earth, so the colonists on Ganymede were stuck using the short-range transmitter.", "Their long-range radio was not able to transmit through the thick mass of iceworms that had covered the Dome, so they were forced to communicate with a short-range transmitter, which was highly ineffective." ], [ "He had not been consulted by the Chief prior to the assignment, so he felt that the re-assignment had come out of nowhere.", "Mail ships and Patrol ships were very different, and he did not have the proper training prior to his first deployment to Ganymede.", "He was embarrassed to be assigned to Postal because it was widely considered to be the easiest and least respectable kind of work available at Nome Spaceport.", "He was honored to be a Patrol man for many years and proud of the skills and abilities he used in that position. He felt being a mailman was beneath him." ], [ "Preston maneuvered his mail ship into such a position that he was able to help Gunderson and Mellors destroy the first ship before being taken out by the second one.", "Preston took shelter behind their Patrol ships, and they destroyed the first pirate ship. However, the second pirate killed them both as Preston managed to escape.", "Gunderson and Mellors fought the one pirate ship that appeared suddenly and were quickly destroyed by it, giving Preston plenty of time to escape and make his way to Ganymede.", "After Gunderson was killed by the first pirate ship, Mellors ran head-first into the second ship, killing both him and the pirate. Preston was able to escape." ], [ " The Chief had intel about the iceworms attacking Ganymede, and he trusted Preston to be able to maneuver his way through the Pirate Belt, destroy the iceworms, and get the mail delivered.", "Lieutenant Preston had gotten too comfortable as a Patrol man over the years, and the Chief felt it was time for him to take on a new kind of challenge.", "Captain Preston had worked for the Patrol for many, many years, so it was time for him to retire and make room for younger Patrol men.", "Lieutenant Preston was one of the best Patrol men, and he wanted someone who could protect themselves if the Patrol men failed to protect the mail ship." ], [ "He wanted him to get started on his journey to deliver mail to Ganymede.", "He wanted to offer an explanation for his decision to re-assign Preston from the Space Patrol Service to Postal, which Preston had been notified of via letter.", "He wanted him to join him for a drink at the Nome Spaceport bar before walking over to Administration and getting registered in the Postal department.", "He wanted to inform him of his re-assignment from the Space Patrol Service to Postal." ], [ "When they first built the Dome, the iceworms were hibernating, but now they have surfaced and are attacking the colonists on the surface of the moon.", "The colonists of Ganymede are dealing with an infestation of iceworms from another planet that are attacking their Dome and have cut off their communications with Earth. ", "They are not familiar with Preston and are used to a different mail delivery representative, so when he makes contact with them, they are suspicious about his true identity.", "The colonists are under siege by hundreds of giant iceworms that are covering their Dome, effectively trapping them inside and preventing others from entering." ], [ "They wanted to show their solidarity to him, knowing that he would be upset about the transition from Patrol Service to Postal.", "They knew about the iceworm attack on Ganymede and wanted to join his convoy knowing that his new mail rig was not equipped with the proper equipment to protect itself.", "They were still Patrol men and assigned as his convoy to help protect him as they passed through the Pirate Belt since he didn't have any weapons on the mail ship.", "They were eager to hunt for pirate ships that they knew would be lying in wait to attack Preston's mail ship as it passed through." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "He centered the ship as\n well as he could on the Dome\n below and threw it into automatic\n pilot. Jumping from\n the control panel, he ran back\n toward the gun turret and slammed\n shut the plexilite screen.\n Its outer wall opened and the\n fuel-tank went tumbling outward\n and down. He returned\n to his control-panel seat and\n looked at the viewscreen. He\n smiled.\n\n\n The fuel-tank was lying\n near the Dome—right in the\n middle of the nest of iceworms.\n The fuel was leaking\n from the puncture.\n\n\n The iceworms writhed in\n from all sides.\n\n\n \"Now!\" Preston said grimly.\n\n\n The ship roared down, jets\n blasting. The fire licked out,\n heated the ground, melted\n snow—ignited the fuel-tank!\n A gigantic flame blazed up,\n reflected harshly off the\n snows of Ganymede.", "Preston didn't answer. He\n broke contact and scribbled\n some more figures. Seven\n miles of iceworms, eh? That\n was too much to handle. He\n had planned on dropping\n flaming fuel on them and\n burning them out, but he\n couldn't do it that way.\n\n\n He'd have to try a different\n tactic.\n\n\n Down below, he could see\n the blue-white ammonia ice\n that was the frozen atmosphere\n of Ganymede. Shimmering\n gently amid the whiteness was the\n transparent yellow of the Dome\n beneath whose curved walls\n lived the Ganymede Colony.\n Even forewarned, Preston\n shuddered. Surrounding the\n Dome was a living, writhing\n belt of giant worms.\n\n\n \"Lovely,\" he said. \"Just\n lovely.\"", "It was one against one,\n now—Gunderson against the\n pirate. Preston dropped back\n again to take advantage of\n the Patrol ship's protection.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try a diversionary\n tactic,\" Gunderson\n said on untappable tight-beam.\n \"Get ready to cut under\n and streak for Ganymede\n with all you got.\"\n\n\n \"Check.\"\n\n\n Preston watched as the\n tactic got under way. Gunderson's\n ship traveled in a long,\n looping spiral that drew the\n pirate into the upper quadrant\n of space. His path free,\n Preston guided his ship under\n the other two and toward unobstructed\n freedom. As he\n looked back, he saw Gunderson\n steaming for the pirate\n on a sure collision orbit.\n\n\n He turned away. The score\n was two Patrolmen dead, two\n ships wrecked—but the mails\n would get through.", "\"The antenna for our long-range\n transmitter was outside\n the Dome. One of the\n worms came by and chewed\n the antenna right off. All\n we've got left is this short-range\n thing we're using and\n it's no good more than ten\n thousand miles from here.\n You're the first one who's\n been this close since it happened.\"\n\n\n \"I get it.\" Preston closed\n his eyes for a second, trying\n to think things out.\nThe Colony was under\n blockade by hostile alien life,\n thereby making it impossible\n for him to deliver the mail.\n Okay. If he'd been a regular\n member of the Postal Service,\n he'd have given it up as a\n bad job and gone back to\n Earth to report the difficulty.\nBut I'm not going back.\n I'll be the best damned mailman\n they've got.\n\"Give me a landing orbit\n anyway, Ganymede.\"", "His scratch-pad began to\n fill with notations.\nFuel storage—\nEscape velocity—\nMargin of error—\nSafety factor—\nFinally he looked up. He\n had computed exactly how\n much spare fuel he had, how\n much he could afford to\n waste. It was a small figure—too\n small, perhaps.\n\n\n He turned to the radio.\n \"Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Where are you, Postal\n Ship?\"\n\n\n \"I'm in a tight orbit about\n a hundred miles up,\" Preston\n said. \"Give me the figures on\n the circumference of your\n Dome, Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Seven miles,\" the colonist\n said. \"What are you planning\n to do?\"", "\"Okay, I've got them. Now\n sit tight and wait.\" He\n glanced contemptuously at\n the three mail-pouches behind\n him, grinned, and started\n setting up the orbit.\nMailman, am I? I'll show\n them!\nHe brought the Postal Ship\n down with all the skill of his\n years in the Patrol, spiralling\n in around the big satellite of\n Jupiter as cautiously and as\n precisely as if he were zeroing\n in on a pirate lair in the\n asteroid belt. In its own way,\n this was as dangerous, perhaps\n even more so.\n\n\n Preston guided the ship\n into an ever-narrowing orbit,\n which he stabilized about a\n hundred miles over the surface\n of Ganymede. As his\n ship swung around the\n moon's poles in its tight orbit,\n he began to figure some fuel\n computations.", "The man in charge gestured\n to two young colonists,\n who donned spacesuits and\n dashed through the airlock.\n Preston watched as they\n raced to the ship, climbed in,\n and returned a few moments\n later with the mail sacks.\n\n\n \"You've got it all,\" Preston\n said. \"I'm checking out. I'll\n get word to the Patrol to get\n here and clean up that mess\n for you.\"\n\n\n \"How can we thank you?\"\n the official-looking man asked.\n\n\n \"No need to,\" Preston said\n casually. \"I had to get that\n mail down here some way,\n didn't I?\"", "\"Can you beat that?\" Gunderson\n asked incredulously.\n \"Hal Preston, on a Postal\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Incredible, isn't it?\"\n Preston asked bitterly. \"You\n can't believe your ears. Well,\n you better believe it, because\n here I am.\"\n\n\n \"Must be some clerical\n error,\" Gunderson said.\n\n\n \"Let's change the subject,\"\n Preston snapped.\n\n\n They were silent for a few\n moments, as the three ships—two\n armed, one loaded with\n mail for Ganymede—streaked\n outward away from Earth.\n Manipulating his controls\n with the ease of long experience,\n Preston guided the ship\n smoothly toward the gleaming\n bulk of far-off Jupiter.\n Even at this distance, he\n could see five or six bright\n pips surrounding the huge\n planet. There was Callisto,\n and—ah—there was Ganymede.", "He turned away, smiling to\n himself. Maybe the Chief\nhad\nknown what he was doing\n when he took an experienced\n Patrol man and dumped him\n into Postal. Delivering the\n mail to Ganymede had been\n more hazardous than fighting\n off half a dozen space pirates.\nI guess I was wrong\n, Preston\n thought.\nThis is no snap job\n for old men.\nPreoccupied, he started out\n through the airlock. The man\n in charge caught his arm.\n \"Say, we don't even know\n your name! Here you are a\n hero, and—\"", "Shaking his head, Preston\n leaned forward over his control\n board and headed on toward\n Ganymede.\nThe blue-white, frozen\n moon hung beneath him.\n Preston snapped on the radio.\n\n\n \"Ganymede Colony? Come\n in, please. This is your Postal\n Ship.\" The words tasted sour\n in his mouth.\n\n\n There was silence for a\n second. \"Come in, Ganymede,\"\n Preston repeated impatiently—and\n then the\n sound of a distress signal cut\n across his audio pickup.\n\n\n It was coming on wide\n beam from the satellite below—and\n they had cut out all receiving\n facilities in an attempt\n to step up their transmitter.\n Preston reached for\n the wide-beam stud, pressed\n it.\n\n\n \"Okay, I pick up your signal,\n Ganymede. Come in,\n now!\"", "Getting up, he clambered\n over the mail sacks and\n headed toward the rear of the\n ship, hunting for the auxiliary\n fuel-tanks.\n\n\n Working rapidly, he lugged\n one out and strapped it into\n an empty gun turret, making\n sure he could get it loose\n again when he'd need it.\n\n\n He wiped away sweat and\n checked the angle at which\n the fuel-tank would face the\n ground when he came down\n for a landing. Satisfied, he\n knocked a hole in the side of\n the fuel-tank.\n\n\n \"Okay, Ganymede,\" he radioed.\n \"I'm coming down.\"\n\n\n He blasted loose from the\n tight orbit and rocked the\n ship down on manual. The\n forbidding surface of Ganymede\n grew closer and closer.\n Now he could see the iceworms\n plainly.", "It was near midnight, and\n the sky over Nome Spaceport\n was bright with stars. Preston's\n trained eye picked out\n Mars, Jupiter, Uranus. There\n they were—waiting. But he\n would spend the rest of his\n days ferrying letters on the\n Ganymede run.\n\n\n He sucked in the cold night\n air of summertime Alaska\n and squared his shoulders.\nTwo hours later, Preston\n sat at the controls of a one-man\n patrol ship just as he\n had in the old days. Only the\n control panel was bare where\n the firing studs for the heavy\n guns was found in regular\n patrol ships. And in the cargo\n hold instead of crates of\n spare ammo there were three\n bulging sacks of mail destined\n for the colony on Ganymede.\nSlight difference\n, Preston\n thought, as he set up his\n blasting pattern.\n\n\n \"Okay, Preston,\" came the\n voice from the tower. \"You've\n got clearance.\"", "Hideous, thick creatures,\n lying coiled in masses around\n the Dome. Preston checked\n his spacesuit, making sure it\n was sealed. The instruments\n told him he was a bare ten\n miles above Ganymede now.\n One more swing around the\n poles would do it.\n\n\n He peered out as the Dome\n came below and once again\n snapped on the radio.\n\"I'm going to come down\n and burn a path through\n those worms of yours. Watch\n me carefully, and jump to it\n when you see me land. I want\n that airlock open, or else.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No buts!\"\n\n\n He was right overhead\n now. Just one ordinary-type\n gun would solve the whole\n problem, he thought. But\n Postal Ships didn't get guns.\n They weren't supposed to\n need them.", "\"This is Ganymede,\" a\n tense voice said. \"We've got\n trouble down here. Who are\n you?\"\n\n\n \"Mail ship,\" Preston said.\n \"From Earth. What's going\n on?\"\n\n\n There was the sound of\n voices whispering somewhere\n near the microphone. Finally:\n \"Hello, Mail Ship?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah?\"\n\n\n \"You're going to have to\n turn back to Earth, fellow.\n You can't land here. It's\n rough on us, missing a mail\n trip, but—\"\n\n\n Preston said impatiently,\n \"Why can't I land? What the\n devil's going on down there?\"\n\n\n \"We've been invaded,\" the\n tired voice said. \"The colony's\n been completely surrounded\n by iceworms.\"\n\n\n \"Iceworms?\"", "Preston felt his face go hot\n with shame. Mellors! Gunderson!\n They would stick two of\n his old sidekicks on the job\n of guarding him.\n\n\n \"Please acknowledge,\" Mellors\n said.\n\"The iceworms were not expecting any mail—just the mailman.\"\nPreston paused. Then:\n \"Postal Ship 1872, Lieutenant\n Preston aboard. I acknowledge\n message.\"\n\n\n There was a stunned silence.\n \"\nPreston?\nHal Preston?\"\n\n\n \"The one and only,\" Preston\n said.\n\n\n \"What are you doing on a\n Postal ship?\" Mellors asked.\n\n\n \"Why don't you ask the\n Chief that? He's the one who\n yanked me out of the Patrol\n and put me here.\"", "Suddenly a bright spear of\n flame lashed out across space\n and the hull of Gunderson's\n ship glowed cherry red. \"I'm\n okay,\" Gunderson reported\n immediately. \"Screens took\n the charge.\"\n\n\n Preston gripped his controls\n and threw the ship into\n a plunging dive that dropped\n it back behind the protection\n of both Patrol ships. He saw\n Gunderson and Mellors converge\n on one of the pirates.\n Two blue beams licked out,\n and the pirate ship exploded.\n\n\n But then the second pirate\n swooped down in an unexpected\n dive. \"Look out!\"\n Preston yelled helplessly—but\n it was too late. Beams ripped\n into the hull of Mellors' ship,\n and a dark fissure line opened\n down the side of the ship.\n Preston smashed his hand\n against the control panel.\n Better to die in an honest\n dogfight than to live this\n way!", "\"Cheers,\" Preston said,\n and yanked the blast-lever.\n The ship jolted upward, and\n for a second he felt a little\n of the old thrill—until he remembered.\n\n\n He took the ship out in\n space, saw the blackness in\n the viewplate. The radio\n crackled.\n\n\n \"Come in, Postal Ship.\n Come in, Postal Ship.\"\n\n\n \"I'm in. What do you\n want?\"\n\n\n \"We're your convoy,\" a\n hard voice said. \"Patrol Ship\n 08756, Lieutenant Mellors,\n above you. Down at three\n o'clock, Patrol Ship 10732,\n Lieutenant Gunderson. We'll\n take you through the Pirate\n Belt.\"", "\"But you can't come down!\n How will you leave your\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that,\"\n Preston said calmly.\n\n\n \"We have to worry! We\n don't dare open the Dome,\n with those creatures outside.\n You\ncan't\ncome down, Postal\n Ship.\"\n\n\n \"You want your mail or\n don't you?\"\n\n\n The colonist paused.\n \"Well—\"\n\n\n \"Okay, then,\" Preston said.\n \"Shut up and give me landing\n coordinates!\"\n\n\n There was a pause, and\n then the figures started coming\n over. Preston jotted them\n down on a scratch-pad.", "He made computations,\n checked his controls, figured\n orbits. Anything to keep from\n having to talk to his two ex-Patrolmates\n or from having\n to think about the humiliating\n job he was on. Anything to—\n\"\nPirates! Moving up at two\n o'clock!\n\"\n\n\n Preston came awake. He\n picked off the location of the\n pirate ships—there were two\n of them, coming up out of the\n asteroid belt. Small, deadly,\n compact, they orbited toward\n him.\n\n\n He pounded the instrument\n panel in impotent rage, looking\n for the guns that weren't\n there.\n\n\n \"Don't worry, Pres,\" came\n Mellors' voice. \"We'll take\n care of them for you.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Preston said bitterly.\n He watched as the pirate\n ships approached, longing\n to trade places with the\n men in the Patrol ships above\n and below him.", "\"No,\" Preston said reflectively.\n He gulped his drink\n and stood up. \"Okay. I'm\n ready. Neither snow nor rain\n shall stay me from my appointed\n rounds, or however\n the damned thing goes.\"\n\n\n \"That's a smart attitude,\n Preston. Come on—I'll walk\n you over to Administration.\"\nSavagely, Preston ripped\n away the hand that the other\n had put around his shoulders.\n \"I can get there myself. At\n least give me credit for that!\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Dawes said, shrugging.\n \"Well—good luck,\n Preston.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Thanks. Thanks\n real lots.\"\n\n\n He pushed his way past the\n man in Space Grays and\n shouldered past a couple of\n barflies as he left. He pushed\n open the door of the bar and\n stood outside for a moment." ], [ "\"No,\" Preston said reflectively.\n He gulped his drink\n and stood up. \"Okay. I'm\n ready. Neither snow nor rain\n shall stay me from my appointed\n rounds, or however\n the damned thing goes.\"\n\n\n \"That's a smart attitude,\n Preston. Come on—I'll walk\n you over to Administration.\"\nSavagely, Preston ripped\n away the hand that the other\n had put around his shoulders.\n \"I can get there myself. At\n least give me credit for that!\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Dawes said, shrugging.\n \"Well—good luck,\n Preston.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Thanks. Thanks\n real lots.\"\n\n\n He pushed his way past the\n man in Space Grays and\n shouldered past a couple of\n barflies as he left. He pushed\n open the door of the bar and\n stood outside for a moment.", "Preston felt his face go hot\n with shame. Mellors! Gunderson!\n They would stick two of\n his old sidekicks on the job\n of guarding him.\n\n\n \"Please acknowledge,\" Mellors\n said.\n\"The iceworms were not expecting any mail—just the mailman.\"\nPreston paused. Then:\n \"Postal Ship 1872, Lieutenant\n Preston aboard. I acknowledge\n message.\"\n\n\n There was a stunned silence.\n \"\nPreston?\nHal Preston?\"\n\n\n \"The one and only,\" Preston\n said.\n\n\n \"What are you doing on a\n Postal ship?\" Mellors asked.\n\n\n \"Why don't you ask the\n Chief that? He's the one who\n yanked me out of the Patrol\n and put me here.\"", "Suddenly, Preston felt a\n hand on his shoulder. He\n looked up and saw a man in\n the trim gray of a Patrolman's\n uniform.\n\n\n \"What do you want,\n Dawes?\"\n\n\n \"Chief's been looking for\n you, Preston. It's time for\n you to get going on your run.\"\n\n\n Preston scowled. \"Time to\n go deliver the mail, eh?\" He\n spat. \"Don't they have anything\n better to do with good\n spacemen than make letter\n carriers out of them?\"\nThe other man shook his\n head. \"You won't get anywhere\n grousing about it,\n Preston. Your papers don't\n specify which branch you're\n assigned to, and if they want\n to make you carry the mail—that's\n it.\" His voice became\n suddenly gentle. \"Come on,\n Pres. One last drink, and\n then let's go. You don't want\n to spoil a good record, do\n you?\"", "He turned away, smiling to\n himself. Maybe the Chief\nhad\nknown what he was doing\n when he took an experienced\n Patrol man and dumped him\n into Postal. Delivering the\n mail to Ganymede had been\n more hazardous than fighting\n off half a dozen space pirates.\nI guess I was wrong\n, Preston\n thought.\nThis is no snap job\n for old men.\nPreoccupied, he started out\n through the airlock. The man\n in charge caught his arm.\n \"Say, we don't even know\n your name! Here you are a\n hero, and—\"", "\"Cheers,\" Preston said,\n and yanked the blast-lever.\n The ship jolted upward, and\n for a second he felt a little\n of the old thrill—until he remembered.\n\n\n He took the ship out in\n space, saw the blackness in\n the viewplate. The radio\n crackled.\n\n\n \"Come in, Postal Ship.\n Come in, Postal Ship.\"\n\n\n \"I'm in. What do you\n want?\"\n\n\n \"We're your convoy,\" a\n hard voice said. \"Patrol Ship\n 08756, Lieutenant Mellors,\n above you. Down at three\n o'clock, Patrol Ship 10732,\n Lieutenant Gunderson. We'll\n take you through the Pirate\n Belt.\"", "He made computations,\n checked his controls, figured\n orbits. Anything to keep from\n having to talk to his two ex-Patrolmates\n or from having\n to think about the humiliating\n job he was on. Anything to—\n\"\nPirates! Moving up at two\n o'clock!\n\"\n\n\n Preston came awake. He\n picked off the location of the\n pirate ships—there were two\n of them, coming up out of the\n asteroid belt. Small, deadly,\n compact, they orbited toward\n him.\n\n\n He pounded the instrument\n panel in impotent rage, looking\n for the guns that weren't\n there.\n\n\n \"Don't worry, Pres,\" came\n Mellors' voice. \"We'll take\n care of them for you.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Preston said bitterly.\n He watched as the pirate\n ships approached, longing\n to trade places with the\n men in the Patrol ships above\n and below him.", "The man in charge gestured\n to two young colonists,\n who donned spacesuits and\n dashed through the airlock.\n Preston watched as they\n raced to the ship, climbed in,\n and returned a few moments\n later with the mail sacks.\n\n\n \"You've got it all,\" Preston\n said. \"I'm checking out. I'll\n get word to the Patrol to get\n here and clean up that mess\n for you.\"\n\n\n \"How can we thank you?\"\n the official-looking man asked.\n\n\n \"No need to,\" Preston said\n casually. \"I had to get that\n mail down here some way,\n didn't I?\"", "\"Okay, I've got them. Now\n sit tight and wait.\" He\n glanced contemptuously at\n the three mail-pouches behind\n him, grinned, and started\n setting up the orbit.\nMailman, am I? I'll show\n them!\nHe brought the Postal Ship\n down with all the skill of his\n years in the Patrol, spiralling\n in around the big satellite of\n Jupiter as cautiously and as\n precisely as if he were zeroing\n in on a pirate lair in the\n asteroid belt. In its own way,\n this was as dangerous, perhaps\n even more so.\n\n\n Preston guided the ship\n into an ever-narrowing orbit,\n which he stabilized about a\n hundred miles over the surface\n of Ganymede. As his\n ship swung around the\n moon's poles in its tight orbit,\n he began to figure some fuel\n computations.", "Preston didn't answer. He\n broke contact and scribbled\n some more figures. Seven\n miles of iceworms, eh? That\n was too much to handle. He\n had planned on dropping\n flaming fuel on them and\n burning them out, but he\n couldn't do it that way.\n\n\n He'd have to try a different\n tactic.\n\n\n Down below, he could see\n the blue-white ammonia ice\n that was the frozen atmosphere\n of Ganymede. Shimmering\n gently amid the whiteness was the\n transparent yellow of the Dome\n beneath whose curved walls\n lived the Ganymede Colony.\n Even forewarned, Preston\n shuddered. Surrounding the\n Dome was a living, writhing\n belt of giant worms.\n\n\n \"Lovely,\" he said. \"Just\n lovely.\"", "\"Can you beat that?\" Gunderson\n asked incredulously.\n \"Hal Preston, on a Postal\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Incredible, isn't it?\"\n Preston asked bitterly. \"You\n can't believe your ears. Well,\n you better believe it, because\n here I am.\"\n\n\n \"Must be some clerical\n error,\" Gunderson said.\n\n\n \"Let's change the subject,\"\n Preston snapped.\n\n\n They were silent for a few\n moments, as the three ships—two\n armed, one loaded with\n mail for Ganymede—streaked\n outward away from Earth.\n Manipulating his controls\n with the ease of long experience,\n Preston guided the ship\n smoothly toward the gleaming\n bulk of far-off Jupiter.\n Even at this distance, he\n could see five or six bright\n pips surrounding the huge\n planet. There was Callisto,\n and—ah—there was Ganymede.", "\"Hero?\" Preston shrugged.\n \"All I did was deliver the\n mail. It's all in a day's work,\n you know. The mail's got to\n get through!\"\nTHE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAmazing Stories\nSeptember 1957.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.", "And the mindless iceworms\n came, marching toward the\n fire, being consumed, as still\n others devoured the bodies of\n the dead and dying.\n\n\n Preston looked away and\n concentrated on the business\n of finding a place to land the\n ship.\nThe holocaust still raged as\n he leaped down from the catwalk\n of the ship, clutching\n one of the heavy mail sacks,\n and struggled through the\n melting snows to the airlock.\n\n\n He grinned. The airlock\n was open.\n\n\n Arms grabbed him, pulled\n him through. Someone opened\n his helmet.\n\n\n \"Great job, Postman!\"\n\n\n \"There are two more mail sacks,\"\n Preston said. \"Get\n men out after them.\"", "It was near midnight, and\n the sky over Nome Spaceport\n was bright with stars. Preston's\n trained eye picked out\n Mars, Jupiter, Uranus. There\n they were—waiting. But he\n would spend the rest of his\n days ferrying letters on the\n Ganymede run.\n\n\n He sucked in the cold night\n air of summertime Alaska\n and squared his shoulders.\nTwo hours later, Preston\n sat at the controls of a one-man\n patrol ship just as he\n had in the old days. Only the\n control panel was bare where\n the firing studs for the heavy\n guns was found in regular\n patrol ships. And in the cargo\n hold instead of crates of\n spare ammo there were three\n bulging sacks of mail destined\n for the colony on Ganymede.\nSlight difference\n, Preston\n thought, as he set up his\n blasting pattern.\n\n\n \"Okay, Preston,\" came the\n voice from the tower. \"You've\n got clearance.\"", "Shaking his head, Preston\n leaned forward over his control\n board and headed on toward\n Ganymede.\nThe blue-white, frozen\n moon hung beneath him.\n Preston snapped on the radio.\n\n\n \"Ganymede Colony? Come\n in, please. This is your Postal\n Ship.\" The words tasted sour\n in his mouth.\n\n\n There was silence for a\n second. \"Come in, Ganymede,\"\n Preston repeated impatiently—and\n then the\n sound of a distress signal cut\n across his audio pickup.\n\n\n It was coming on wide\n beam from the satellite below—and\n they had cut out all receiving\n facilities in an attempt\n to step up their transmitter.\n Preston reached for\n the wide-beam stud, pressed\n it.\n\n\n \"Okay, I pick up your signal,\n Ganymede. Come in,\n now!\"", "\"But you can't come down!\n How will you leave your\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that,\"\n Preston said calmly.\n\n\n \"We have to worry! We\n don't dare open the Dome,\n with those creatures outside.\n You\ncan't\ncome down, Postal\n Ship.\"\n\n\n \"You want your mail or\n don't you?\"\n\n\n The colonist paused.\n \"Well—\"\n\n\n \"Okay, then,\" Preston said.\n \"Shut up and give me landing\n coordinates!\"\n\n\n There was a pause, and\n then the figures started coming\n over. Preston jotted them\n down on a scratch-pad.", "\"The antenna for our long-range\n transmitter was outside\n the Dome. One of the\n worms came by and chewed\n the antenna right off. All\n we've got left is this short-range\n thing we're using and\n it's no good more than ten\n thousand miles from here.\n You're the first one who's\n been this close since it happened.\"\n\n\n \"I get it.\" Preston closed\n his eyes for a second, trying\n to think things out.\nThe Colony was under\n blockade by hostile alien life,\n thereby making it impossible\n for him to deliver the mail.\n Okay. If he'd been a regular\n member of the Postal Service,\n he'd have given it up as a\n bad job and gone back to\n Earth to report the difficulty.\nBut I'm not going back.\n I'll be the best damned mailman\n they've got.\n\"Give me a landing orbit\n anyway, Ganymede.\"", "It was one against one,\n now—Gunderson against the\n pirate. Preston dropped back\n again to take advantage of\n the Patrol ship's protection.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try a diversionary\n tactic,\" Gunderson\n said on untappable tight-beam.\n \"Get ready to cut under\n and streak for Ganymede\n with all you got.\"\n\n\n \"Check.\"\n\n\n Preston watched as the\n tactic got under way. Gunderson's\n ship traveled in a long,\n looping spiral that drew the\n pirate into the upper quadrant\n of space. His path free,\n Preston guided his ship under\n the other two and toward unobstructed\n freedom. As he\n looked back, he saw Gunderson\n steaming for the pirate\n on a sure collision orbit.\n\n\n He turned away. The score\n was two Patrolmen dead, two\n ships wrecked—but the mails\n would get through.", "Hideous, thick creatures,\n lying coiled in masses around\n the Dome. Preston checked\n his spacesuit, making sure it\n was sealed. The instruments\n told him he was a bare ten\n miles above Ganymede now.\n One more swing around the\n poles would do it.\n\n\n He peered out as the Dome\n came below and once again\n snapped on the radio.\n\"I'm going to come down\n and burn a path through\n those worms of yours. Watch\n me carefully, and jump to it\n when you see me land. I want\n that airlock open, or else.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No buts!\"\n\n\n He was right overhead\n now. Just one ordinary-type\n gun would solve the whole\n problem, he thought. But\n Postal Ships didn't get guns.\n They weren't supposed to\n need them.", "Suddenly a bright spear of\n flame lashed out across space\n and the hull of Gunderson's\n ship glowed cherry red. \"I'm\n okay,\" Gunderson reported\n immediately. \"Screens took\n the charge.\"\n\n\n Preston gripped his controls\n and threw the ship into\n a plunging dive that dropped\n it back behind the protection\n of both Patrol ships. He saw\n Gunderson and Mellors converge\n on one of the pirates.\n Two blue beams licked out,\n and the pirate ship exploded.\n\n\n But then the second pirate\n swooped down in an unexpected\n dive. \"Look out!\"\n Preston yelled helplessly—but\n it was too late. Beams ripped\n into the hull of Mellors' ship,\n and a dark fissure line opened\n down the side of the ship.\n Preston smashed his hand\n against the control panel.\n Better to die in an honest\n dogfight than to live this\n way!", "His scratch-pad began to\n fill with notations.\nFuel storage—\nEscape velocity—\nMargin of error—\nSafety factor—\nFinally he looked up. He\n had computed exactly how\n much spare fuel he had, how\n much he could afford to\n waste. It was a small figure—too\n small, perhaps.\n\n\n He turned to the radio.\n \"Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Where are you, Postal\n Ship?\"\n\n\n \"I'm in a tight orbit about\n a hundred miles up,\" Preston\n said. \"Give me the figures on\n the circumference of your\n Dome, Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Seven miles,\" the colonist\n said. \"What are you planning\n to do?\"" ], [ "\"This is Ganymede,\" a\n tense voice said. \"We've got\n trouble down here. Who are\n you?\"\n\n\n \"Mail ship,\" Preston said.\n \"From Earth. What's going\n on?\"\n\n\n There was the sound of\n voices whispering somewhere\n near the microphone. Finally:\n \"Hello, Mail Ship?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah?\"\n\n\n \"You're going to have to\n turn back to Earth, fellow.\n You can't land here. It's\n rough on us, missing a mail\n trip, but—\"\n\n\n Preston said impatiently,\n \"Why can't I land? What the\n devil's going on down there?\"\n\n\n \"We've been invaded,\" the\n tired voice said. \"The colony's\n been completely surrounded\n by iceworms.\"\n\n\n \"Iceworms?\"", "Preston didn't answer. He\n broke contact and scribbled\n some more figures. Seven\n miles of iceworms, eh? That\n was too much to handle. He\n had planned on dropping\n flaming fuel on them and\n burning them out, but he\n couldn't do it that way.\n\n\n He'd have to try a different\n tactic.\n\n\n Down below, he could see\n the blue-white ammonia ice\n that was the frozen atmosphere\n of Ganymede. Shimmering\n gently amid the whiteness was the\n transparent yellow of the Dome\n beneath whose curved walls\n lived the Ganymede Colony.\n Even forewarned, Preston\n shuddered. Surrounding the\n Dome was a living, writhing\n belt of giant worms.\n\n\n \"Lovely,\" he said. \"Just\n lovely.\"", "He centered the ship as\n well as he could on the Dome\n below and threw it into automatic\n pilot. Jumping from\n the control panel, he ran back\n toward the gun turret and slammed\n shut the plexilite screen.\n Its outer wall opened and the\n fuel-tank went tumbling outward\n and down. He returned\n to his control-panel seat and\n looked at the viewscreen. He\n smiled.\n\n\n The fuel-tank was lying\n near the Dome—right in the\n middle of the nest of iceworms.\n The fuel was leaking\n from the puncture.\n\n\n The iceworms writhed in\n from all sides.\n\n\n \"Now!\" Preston said grimly.\n\n\n The ship roared down, jets\n blasting. The fire licked out,\n heated the ground, melted\n snow—ignited the fuel-tank!\n A gigantic flame blazed up,\n reflected harshly off the\n snows of Ganymede.", "\"The local native life,\" the\n colonist explained. \"They're\n about thirty feet long, a foot\n wide, and mostly mouth.\n There's a ring of them about\n a hundred yards wide surrounding\n the Dome. They can't get in and\n we can't get out—and we can't figure\n out any possible approach for\n you.\"\n\n\n \"Pretty,\" Preston said.\n \"But why didn't the things\n bother you while you were\n building your Dome?\"\n\n\n \"Apparently they have a\n very long hibernation-cycle.\n We've only been here two\n years, you know. The iceworms\n must all have been\n asleep when we came. But\n they came swarming out of\n the ice by the hundreds last\n month.\"\n\n\n \"How come Earth doesn't\n know?\"", "Getting up, he clambered\n over the mail sacks and\n headed toward the rear of the\n ship, hunting for the auxiliary\n fuel-tanks.\n\n\n Working rapidly, he lugged\n one out and strapped it into\n an empty gun turret, making\n sure he could get it loose\n again when he'd need it.\n\n\n He wiped away sweat and\n checked the angle at which\n the fuel-tank would face the\n ground when he came down\n for a landing. Satisfied, he\n knocked a hole in the side of\n the fuel-tank.\n\n\n \"Okay, Ganymede,\" he radioed.\n \"I'm coming down.\"\n\n\n He blasted loose from the\n tight orbit and rocked the\n ship down on manual. The\n forbidding surface of Ganymede\n grew closer and closer.\n Now he could see the iceworms\n plainly.", "Hideous, thick creatures,\n lying coiled in masses around\n the Dome. Preston checked\n his spacesuit, making sure it\n was sealed. The instruments\n told him he was a bare ten\n miles above Ganymede now.\n One more swing around the\n poles would do it.\n\n\n He peered out as the Dome\n came below and once again\n snapped on the radio.\n\"I'm going to come down\n and burn a path through\n those worms of yours. Watch\n me carefully, and jump to it\n when you see me land. I want\n that airlock open, or else.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No buts!\"\n\n\n He was right overhead\n now. Just one ordinary-type\n gun would solve the whole\n problem, he thought. But\n Postal Ships didn't get guns.\n They weren't supposed to\n need them.", "\"The antenna for our long-range\n transmitter was outside\n the Dome. One of the\n worms came by and chewed\n the antenna right off. All\n we've got left is this short-range\n thing we're using and\n it's no good more than ten\n thousand miles from here.\n You're the first one who's\n been this close since it happened.\"\n\n\n \"I get it.\" Preston closed\n his eyes for a second, trying\n to think things out.\nThe Colony was under\n blockade by hostile alien life,\n thereby making it impossible\n for him to deliver the mail.\n Okay. If he'd been a regular\n member of the Postal Service,\n he'd have given it up as a\n bad job and gone back to\n Earth to report the difficulty.\nBut I'm not going back.\n I'll be the best damned mailman\n they've got.\n\"Give me a landing orbit\n anyway, Ganymede.\"", "\"Can you beat that?\" Gunderson\n asked incredulously.\n \"Hal Preston, on a Postal\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Incredible, isn't it?\"\n Preston asked bitterly. \"You\n can't believe your ears. Well,\n you better believe it, because\n here I am.\"\n\n\n \"Must be some clerical\n error,\" Gunderson said.\n\n\n \"Let's change the subject,\"\n Preston snapped.\n\n\n They were silent for a few\n moments, as the three ships—two\n armed, one loaded with\n mail for Ganymede—streaked\n outward away from Earth.\n Manipulating his controls\n with the ease of long experience,\n Preston guided the ship\n smoothly toward the gleaming\n bulk of far-off Jupiter.\n Even at this distance, he\n could see five or six bright\n pips surrounding the huge\n planet. There was Callisto,\n and—ah—there was Ganymede.", "And the mindless iceworms\n came, marching toward the\n fire, being consumed, as still\n others devoured the bodies of\n the dead and dying.\n\n\n Preston looked away and\n concentrated on the business\n of finding a place to land the\n ship.\nThe holocaust still raged as\n he leaped down from the catwalk\n of the ship, clutching\n one of the heavy mail sacks,\n and struggled through the\n melting snows to the airlock.\n\n\n He grinned. The airlock\n was open.\n\n\n Arms grabbed him, pulled\n him through. Someone opened\n his helmet.\n\n\n \"Great job, Postman!\"\n\n\n \"There are two more mail sacks,\"\n Preston said. \"Get\n men out after them.\"", "Shaking his head, Preston\n leaned forward over his control\n board and headed on toward\n Ganymede.\nThe blue-white, frozen\n moon hung beneath him.\n Preston snapped on the radio.\n\n\n \"Ganymede Colony? Come\n in, please. This is your Postal\n Ship.\" The words tasted sour\n in his mouth.\n\n\n There was silence for a\n second. \"Come in, Ganymede,\"\n Preston repeated impatiently—and\n then the\n sound of a distress signal cut\n across his audio pickup.\n\n\n It was coming on wide\n beam from the satellite below—and\n they had cut out all receiving\n facilities in an attempt\n to step up their transmitter.\n Preston reached for\n the wide-beam stud, pressed\n it.\n\n\n \"Okay, I pick up your signal,\n Ganymede. Come in,\n now!\"", "It was near midnight, and\n the sky over Nome Spaceport\n was bright with stars. Preston's\n trained eye picked out\n Mars, Jupiter, Uranus. There\n they were—waiting. But he\n would spend the rest of his\n days ferrying letters on the\n Ganymede run.\n\n\n He sucked in the cold night\n air of summertime Alaska\n and squared his shoulders.\nTwo hours later, Preston\n sat at the controls of a one-man\n patrol ship just as he\n had in the old days. Only the\n control panel was bare where\n the firing studs for the heavy\n guns was found in regular\n patrol ships. And in the cargo\n hold instead of crates of\n spare ammo there were three\n bulging sacks of mail destined\n for the colony on Ganymede.\nSlight difference\n, Preston\n thought, as he set up his\n blasting pattern.\n\n\n \"Okay, Preston,\" came the\n voice from the tower. \"You've\n got clearance.\"", "Preston felt his face go hot\n with shame. Mellors! Gunderson!\n They would stick two of\n his old sidekicks on the job\n of guarding him.\n\n\n \"Please acknowledge,\" Mellors\n said.\n\"The iceworms were not expecting any mail—just the mailman.\"\nPreston paused. Then:\n \"Postal Ship 1872, Lieutenant\n Preston aboard. I acknowledge\n message.\"\n\n\n There was a stunned silence.\n \"\nPreston?\nHal Preston?\"\n\n\n \"The one and only,\" Preston\n said.\n\n\n \"What are you doing on a\n Postal ship?\" Mellors asked.\n\n\n \"Why don't you ask the\n Chief that? He's the one who\n yanked me out of the Patrol\n and put me here.\"", "\"Okay, I've got them. Now\n sit tight and wait.\" He\n glanced contemptuously at\n the three mail-pouches behind\n him, grinned, and started\n setting up the orbit.\nMailman, am I? I'll show\n them!\nHe brought the Postal Ship\n down with all the skill of his\n years in the Patrol, spiralling\n in around the big satellite of\n Jupiter as cautiously and as\n precisely as if he were zeroing\n in on a pirate lair in the\n asteroid belt. In its own way,\n this was as dangerous, perhaps\n even more so.\n\n\n Preston guided the ship\n into an ever-narrowing orbit,\n which he stabilized about a\n hundred miles over the surface\n of Ganymede. As his\n ship swung around the\n moon's poles in its tight orbit,\n he began to figure some fuel\n computations.", "His scratch-pad began to\n fill with notations.\nFuel storage—\nEscape velocity—\nMargin of error—\nSafety factor—\nFinally he looked up. He\n had computed exactly how\n much spare fuel he had, how\n much he could afford to\n waste. It was a small figure—too\n small, perhaps.\n\n\n He turned to the radio.\n \"Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Where are you, Postal\n Ship?\"\n\n\n \"I'm in a tight orbit about\n a hundred miles up,\" Preston\n said. \"Give me the figures on\n the circumference of your\n Dome, Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Seven miles,\" the colonist\n said. \"What are you planning\n to do?\"", "Consider the poor mailman of the future. To \"sleet and snow\n and dead of night\"—things that must not keep him from his\n appointed rounds—will be added, sub-zero void, meteors, and\n planets that won't stay put. Maybe he'll decide that for six\n cents an ounce it just ain't worth it.\nPOSTMARK\n\n GANYMEDE\nBy\n\n ROBERT\n\n SILVERBERG\n\"I'm\n washed up,\" Preston\n growled bitterly. \"They\n made a postman out of me.\n Me—a postman!\"\n\n\n He crumpled the assignment\n memo into a small, hard\n ball and hurled it at the\n bristly image of himself in\n the bar mirror. He hadn't\n shaved in three days—which\n was how long it had been\n since he had been notified of\n his removal from Space Patrol\n Service and his transfer\n to Postal Delivery.", "It was one against one,\n now—Gunderson against the\n pirate. Preston dropped back\n again to take advantage of\n the Patrol ship's protection.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try a diversionary\n tactic,\" Gunderson\n said on untappable tight-beam.\n \"Get ready to cut under\n and streak for Ganymede\n with all you got.\"\n\n\n \"Check.\"\n\n\n Preston watched as the\n tactic got under way. Gunderson's\n ship traveled in a long,\n looping spiral that drew the\n pirate into the upper quadrant\n of space. His path free,\n Preston guided his ship under\n the other two and toward unobstructed\n freedom. As he\n looked back, he saw Gunderson\n steaming for the pirate\n on a sure collision orbit.\n\n\n He turned away. The score\n was two Patrolmen dead, two\n ships wrecked—but the mails\n would get through.", "He turned away, smiling to\n himself. Maybe the Chief\nhad\nknown what he was doing\n when he took an experienced\n Patrol man and dumped him\n into Postal. Delivering the\n mail to Ganymede had been\n more hazardous than fighting\n off half a dozen space pirates.\nI guess I was wrong\n, Preston\n thought.\nThis is no snap job\n for old men.\nPreoccupied, he started out\n through the airlock. The man\n in charge caught his arm.\n \"Say, we don't even know\n your name! Here you are a\n hero, and—\"", "The man in charge gestured\n to two young colonists,\n who donned spacesuits and\n dashed through the airlock.\n Preston watched as they\n raced to the ship, climbed in,\n and returned a few moments\n later with the mail sacks.\n\n\n \"You've got it all,\" Preston\n said. \"I'm checking out. I'll\n get word to the Patrol to get\n here and clean up that mess\n for you.\"\n\n\n \"How can we thank you?\"\n the official-looking man asked.\n\n\n \"No need to,\" Preston said\n casually. \"I had to get that\n mail down here some way,\n didn't I?\"", "Suddenly a bright spear of\n flame lashed out across space\n and the hull of Gunderson's\n ship glowed cherry red. \"I'm\n okay,\" Gunderson reported\n immediately. \"Screens took\n the charge.\"\n\n\n Preston gripped his controls\n and threw the ship into\n a plunging dive that dropped\n it back behind the protection\n of both Patrol ships. He saw\n Gunderson and Mellors converge\n on one of the pirates.\n Two blue beams licked out,\n and the pirate ship exploded.\n\n\n But then the second pirate\n swooped down in an unexpected\n dive. \"Look out!\"\n Preston yelled helplessly—but\n it was too late. Beams ripped\n into the hull of Mellors' ship,\n and a dark fissure line opened\n down the side of the ship.\n Preston smashed his hand\n against the control panel.\n Better to die in an honest\n dogfight than to live this\n way!", "Suddenly, Preston felt a\n hand on his shoulder. He\n looked up and saw a man in\n the trim gray of a Patrolman's\n uniform.\n\n\n \"What do you want,\n Dawes?\"\n\n\n \"Chief's been looking for\n you, Preston. It's time for\n you to get going on your run.\"\n\n\n Preston scowled. \"Time to\n go deliver the mail, eh?\" He\n spat. \"Don't they have anything\n better to do with good\n spacemen than make letter\n carriers out of them?\"\nThe other man shook his\n head. \"You won't get anywhere\n grousing about it,\n Preston. Your papers don't\n specify which branch you're\n assigned to, and if they want\n to make you carry the mail—that's\n it.\" His voice became\n suddenly gentle. \"Come on,\n Pres. One last drink, and\n then let's go. You don't want\n to spoil a good record, do\n you?\"" ], [ "\"No,\" Preston said reflectively.\n He gulped his drink\n and stood up. \"Okay. I'm\n ready. Neither snow nor rain\n shall stay me from my appointed\n rounds, or however\n the damned thing goes.\"\n\n\n \"That's a smart attitude,\n Preston. Come on—I'll walk\n you over to Administration.\"\nSavagely, Preston ripped\n away the hand that the other\n had put around his shoulders.\n \"I can get there myself. At\n least give me credit for that!\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Dawes said, shrugging.\n \"Well—good luck,\n Preston.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Thanks. Thanks\n real lots.\"\n\n\n He pushed his way past the\n man in Space Grays and\n shouldered past a couple of\n barflies as he left. He pushed\n open the door of the bar and\n stood outside for a moment.", "Suddenly, Preston felt a\n hand on his shoulder. He\n looked up and saw a man in\n the trim gray of a Patrolman's\n uniform.\n\n\n \"What do you want,\n Dawes?\"\n\n\n \"Chief's been looking for\n you, Preston. It's time for\n you to get going on your run.\"\n\n\n Preston scowled. \"Time to\n go deliver the mail, eh?\" He\n spat. \"Don't they have anything\n better to do with good\n spacemen than make letter\n carriers out of them?\"\nThe other man shook his\n head. \"You won't get anywhere\n grousing about it,\n Preston. Your papers don't\n specify which branch you're\n assigned to, and if they want\n to make you carry the mail—that's\n it.\" His voice became\n suddenly gentle. \"Come on,\n Pres. One last drink, and\n then let's go. You don't want\n to spoil a good record, do\n you?\"", "Preston felt his face go hot\n with shame. Mellors! Gunderson!\n They would stick two of\n his old sidekicks on the job\n of guarding him.\n\n\n \"Please acknowledge,\" Mellors\n said.\n\"The iceworms were not expecting any mail—just the mailman.\"\nPreston paused. Then:\n \"Postal Ship 1872, Lieutenant\n Preston aboard. I acknowledge\n message.\"\n\n\n There was a stunned silence.\n \"\nPreston?\nHal Preston?\"\n\n\n \"The one and only,\" Preston\n said.\n\n\n \"What are you doing on a\n Postal ship?\" Mellors asked.\n\n\n \"Why don't you ask the\n Chief that? He's the one who\n yanked me out of the Patrol\n and put me here.\"", "He turned away, smiling to\n himself. Maybe the Chief\nhad\nknown what he was doing\n when he took an experienced\n Patrol man and dumped him\n into Postal. Delivering the\n mail to Ganymede had been\n more hazardous than fighting\n off half a dozen space pirates.\nI guess I was wrong\n, Preston\n thought.\nThis is no snap job\n for old men.\nPreoccupied, he started out\n through the airlock. The man\n in charge caught his arm.\n \"Say, we don't even know\n your name! Here you are a\n hero, and—\"", "He made computations,\n checked his controls, figured\n orbits. Anything to keep from\n having to talk to his two ex-Patrolmates\n or from having\n to think about the humiliating\n job he was on. Anything to—\n\"\nPirates! Moving up at two\n o'clock!\n\"\n\n\n Preston came awake. He\n picked off the location of the\n pirate ships—there were two\n of them, coming up out of the\n asteroid belt. Small, deadly,\n compact, they orbited toward\n him.\n\n\n He pounded the instrument\n panel in impotent rage, looking\n for the guns that weren't\n there.\n\n\n \"Don't worry, Pres,\" came\n Mellors' voice. \"We'll take\n care of them for you.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Preston said bitterly.\n He watched as the pirate\n ships approached, longing\n to trade places with the\n men in the Patrol ships above\n and below him.", "\"Cheers,\" Preston said,\n and yanked the blast-lever.\n The ship jolted upward, and\n for a second he felt a little\n of the old thrill—until he remembered.\n\n\n He took the ship out in\n space, saw the blackness in\n the viewplate. The radio\n crackled.\n\n\n \"Come in, Postal Ship.\n Come in, Postal Ship.\"\n\n\n \"I'm in. What do you\n want?\"\n\n\n \"We're your convoy,\" a\n hard voice said. \"Patrol Ship\n 08756, Lieutenant Mellors,\n above you. Down at three\n o'clock, Patrol Ship 10732,\n Lieutenant Gunderson. We'll\n take you through the Pirate\n Belt.\"", "The man in charge gestured\n to two young colonists,\n who donned spacesuits and\n dashed through the airlock.\n Preston watched as they\n raced to the ship, climbed in,\n and returned a few moments\n later with the mail sacks.\n\n\n \"You've got it all,\" Preston\n said. \"I'm checking out. I'll\n get word to the Patrol to get\n here and clean up that mess\n for you.\"\n\n\n \"How can we thank you?\"\n the official-looking man asked.\n\n\n \"No need to,\" Preston said\n casually. \"I had to get that\n mail down here some way,\n didn't I?\"", "Preston didn't answer. He\n broke contact and scribbled\n some more figures. Seven\n miles of iceworms, eh? That\n was too much to handle. He\n had planned on dropping\n flaming fuel on them and\n burning them out, but he\n couldn't do it that way.\n\n\n He'd have to try a different\n tactic.\n\n\n Down below, he could see\n the blue-white ammonia ice\n that was the frozen atmosphere\n of Ganymede. Shimmering\n gently amid the whiteness was the\n transparent yellow of the Dome\n beneath whose curved walls\n lived the Ganymede Colony.\n Even forewarned, Preston\n shuddered. Surrounding the\n Dome was a living, writhing\n belt of giant worms.\n\n\n \"Lovely,\" he said. \"Just\n lovely.\"", "\"Can you beat that?\" Gunderson\n asked incredulously.\n \"Hal Preston, on a Postal\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Incredible, isn't it?\"\n Preston asked bitterly. \"You\n can't believe your ears. Well,\n you better believe it, because\n here I am.\"\n\n\n \"Must be some clerical\n error,\" Gunderson said.\n\n\n \"Let's change the subject,\"\n Preston snapped.\n\n\n They were silent for a few\n moments, as the three ships—two\n armed, one loaded with\n mail for Ganymede—streaked\n outward away from Earth.\n Manipulating his controls\n with the ease of long experience,\n Preston guided the ship\n smoothly toward the gleaming\n bulk of far-off Jupiter.\n Even at this distance, he\n could see five or six bright\n pips surrounding the huge\n planet. There was Callisto,\n and—ah—there was Ganymede.", "\"The antenna for our long-range\n transmitter was outside\n the Dome. One of the\n worms came by and chewed\n the antenna right off. All\n we've got left is this short-range\n thing we're using and\n it's no good more than ten\n thousand miles from here.\n You're the first one who's\n been this close since it happened.\"\n\n\n \"I get it.\" Preston closed\n his eyes for a second, trying\n to think things out.\nThe Colony was under\n blockade by hostile alien life,\n thereby making it impossible\n for him to deliver the mail.\n Okay. If he'd been a regular\n member of the Postal Service,\n he'd have given it up as a\n bad job and gone back to\n Earth to report the difficulty.\nBut I'm not going back.\n I'll be the best damned mailman\n they've got.\n\"Give me a landing orbit\n anyway, Ganymede.\"", "Shaking his head, Preston\n leaned forward over his control\n board and headed on toward\n Ganymede.\nThe blue-white, frozen\n moon hung beneath him.\n Preston snapped on the radio.\n\n\n \"Ganymede Colony? Come\n in, please. This is your Postal\n Ship.\" The words tasted sour\n in his mouth.\n\n\n There was silence for a\n second. \"Come in, Ganymede,\"\n Preston repeated impatiently—and\n then the\n sound of a distress signal cut\n across his audio pickup.\n\n\n It was coming on wide\n beam from the satellite below—and\n they had cut out all receiving\n facilities in an attempt\n to step up their transmitter.\n Preston reached for\n the wide-beam stud, pressed\n it.\n\n\n \"Okay, I pick up your signal,\n Ganymede. Come in,\n now!\"", "\"Okay, I've got them. Now\n sit tight and wait.\" He\n glanced contemptuously at\n the three mail-pouches behind\n him, grinned, and started\n setting up the orbit.\nMailman, am I? I'll show\n them!\nHe brought the Postal Ship\n down with all the skill of his\n years in the Patrol, spiralling\n in around the big satellite of\n Jupiter as cautiously and as\n precisely as if he were zeroing\n in on a pirate lair in the\n asteroid belt. In its own way,\n this was as dangerous, perhaps\n even more so.\n\n\n Preston guided the ship\n into an ever-narrowing orbit,\n which he stabilized about a\n hundred miles over the surface\n of Ganymede. As his\n ship swung around the\n moon's poles in its tight orbit,\n he began to figure some fuel\n computations.", "\"But you can't come down!\n How will you leave your\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that,\"\n Preston said calmly.\n\n\n \"We have to worry! We\n don't dare open the Dome,\n with those creatures outside.\n You\ncan't\ncome down, Postal\n Ship.\"\n\n\n \"You want your mail or\n don't you?\"\n\n\n The colonist paused.\n \"Well—\"\n\n\n \"Okay, then,\" Preston said.\n \"Shut up and give me landing\n coordinates!\"\n\n\n There was a pause, and\n then the figures started coming\n over. Preston jotted them\n down on a scratch-pad.", "It was near midnight, and\n the sky over Nome Spaceport\n was bright with stars. Preston's\n trained eye picked out\n Mars, Jupiter, Uranus. There\n they were—waiting. But he\n would spend the rest of his\n days ferrying letters on the\n Ganymede run.\n\n\n He sucked in the cold night\n air of summertime Alaska\n and squared his shoulders.\nTwo hours later, Preston\n sat at the controls of a one-man\n patrol ship just as he\n had in the old days. Only the\n control panel was bare where\n the firing studs for the heavy\n guns was found in regular\n patrol ships. And in the cargo\n hold instead of crates of\n spare ammo there were three\n bulging sacks of mail destined\n for the colony on Ganymede.\nSlight difference\n, Preston\n thought, as he set up his\n blasting pattern.\n\n\n \"Okay, Preston,\" came the\n voice from the tower. \"You've\n got clearance.\"", "Consider the poor mailman of the future. To \"sleet and snow\n and dead of night\"—things that must not keep him from his\n appointed rounds—will be added, sub-zero void, meteors, and\n planets that won't stay put. Maybe he'll decide that for six\n cents an ounce it just ain't worth it.\nPOSTMARK\n\n GANYMEDE\nBy\n\n ROBERT\n\n SILVERBERG\n\"I'm\n washed up,\" Preston\n growled bitterly. \"They\n made a postman out of me.\n Me—a postman!\"\n\n\n He crumpled the assignment\n memo into a small, hard\n ball and hurled it at the\n bristly image of himself in\n the bar mirror. He hadn't\n shaved in three days—which\n was how long it had been\n since he had been notified of\n his removal from Space Patrol\n Service and his transfer\n to Postal Delivery.", "It was one against one,\n now—Gunderson against the\n pirate. Preston dropped back\n again to take advantage of\n the Patrol ship's protection.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try a diversionary\n tactic,\" Gunderson\n said on untappable tight-beam.\n \"Get ready to cut under\n and streak for Ganymede\n with all you got.\"\n\n\n \"Check.\"\n\n\n Preston watched as the\n tactic got under way. Gunderson's\n ship traveled in a long,\n looping spiral that drew the\n pirate into the upper quadrant\n of space. His path free,\n Preston guided his ship under\n the other two and toward unobstructed\n freedom. As he\n looked back, he saw Gunderson\n steaming for the pirate\n on a sure collision orbit.\n\n\n He turned away. The score\n was two Patrolmen dead, two\n ships wrecked—but the mails\n would get through.", "And the mindless iceworms\n came, marching toward the\n fire, being consumed, as still\n others devoured the bodies of\n the dead and dying.\n\n\n Preston looked away and\n concentrated on the business\n of finding a place to land the\n ship.\nThe holocaust still raged as\n he leaped down from the catwalk\n of the ship, clutching\n one of the heavy mail sacks,\n and struggled through the\n melting snows to the airlock.\n\n\n He grinned. The airlock\n was open.\n\n\n Arms grabbed him, pulled\n him through. Someone opened\n his helmet.\n\n\n \"Great job, Postman!\"\n\n\n \"There are two more mail sacks,\"\n Preston said. \"Get\n men out after them.\"", "Suddenly a bright spear of\n flame lashed out across space\n and the hull of Gunderson's\n ship glowed cherry red. \"I'm\n okay,\" Gunderson reported\n immediately. \"Screens took\n the charge.\"\n\n\n Preston gripped his controls\n and threw the ship into\n a plunging dive that dropped\n it back behind the protection\n of both Patrol ships. He saw\n Gunderson and Mellors converge\n on one of the pirates.\n Two blue beams licked out,\n and the pirate ship exploded.\n\n\n But then the second pirate\n swooped down in an unexpected\n dive. \"Look out!\"\n Preston yelled helplessly—but\n it was too late. Beams ripped\n into the hull of Mellors' ship,\n and a dark fissure line opened\n down the side of the ship.\n Preston smashed his hand\n against the control panel.\n Better to die in an honest\n dogfight than to live this\n way!", "\"Hero?\" Preston shrugged.\n \"All I did was deliver the\n mail. It's all in a day's work,\n you know. The mail's got to\n get through!\"\nTHE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAmazing Stories\nSeptember 1957.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.", "He centered the ship as\n well as he could on the Dome\n below and threw it into automatic\n pilot. Jumping from\n the control panel, he ran back\n toward the gun turret and slammed\n shut the plexilite screen.\n Its outer wall opened and the\n fuel-tank went tumbling outward\n and down. He returned\n to his control-panel seat and\n looked at the viewscreen. He\n smiled.\n\n\n The fuel-tank was lying\n near the Dome—right in the\n middle of the nest of iceworms.\n The fuel was leaking\n from the puncture.\n\n\n The iceworms writhed in\n from all sides.\n\n\n \"Now!\" Preston said grimly.\n\n\n The ship roared down, jets\n blasting. The fire licked out,\n heated the ground, melted\n snow—ignited the fuel-tank!\n A gigantic flame blazed up,\n reflected harshly off the\n snows of Ganymede." ], [ "It was one against one,\n now—Gunderson against the\n pirate. Preston dropped back\n again to take advantage of\n the Patrol ship's protection.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try a diversionary\n tactic,\" Gunderson\n said on untappable tight-beam.\n \"Get ready to cut under\n and streak for Ganymede\n with all you got.\"\n\n\n \"Check.\"\n\n\n Preston watched as the\n tactic got under way. Gunderson's\n ship traveled in a long,\n looping spiral that drew the\n pirate into the upper quadrant\n of space. His path free,\n Preston guided his ship under\n the other two and toward unobstructed\n freedom. As he\n looked back, he saw Gunderson\n steaming for the pirate\n on a sure collision orbit.\n\n\n He turned away. The score\n was two Patrolmen dead, two\n ships wrecked—but the mails\n would get through.", "Suddenly a bright spear of\n flame lashed out across space\n and the hull of Gunderson's\n ship glowed cherry red. \"I'm\n okay,\" Gunderson reported\n immediately. \"Screens took\n the charge.\"\n\n\n Preston gripped his controls\n and threw the ship into\n a plunging dive that dropped\n it back behind the protection\n of both Patrol ships. He saw\n Gunderson and Mellors converge\n on one of the pirates.\n Two blue beams licked out,\n and the pirate ship exploded.\n\n\n But then the second pirate\n swooped down in an unexpected\n dive. \"Look out!\"\n Preston yelled helplessly—but\n it was too late. Beams ripped\n into the hull of Mellors' ship,\n and a dark fissure line opened\n down the side of the ship.\n Preston smashed his hand\n against the control panel.\n Better to die in an honest\n dogfight than to live this\n way!", "\"Can you beat that?\" Gunderson\n asked incredulously.\n \"Hal Preston, on a Postal\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Incredible, isn't it?\"\n Preston asked bitterly. \"You\n can't believe your ears. Well,\n you better believe it, because\n here I am.\"\n\n\n \"Must be some clerical\n error,\" Gunderson said.\n\n\n \"Let's change the subject,\"\n Preston snapped.\n\n\n They were silent for a few\n moments, as the three ships—two\n armed, one loaded with\n mail for Ganymede—streaked\n outward away from Earth.\n Manipulating his controls\n with the ease of long experience,\n Preston guided the ship\n smoothly toward the gleaming\n bulk of far-off Jupiter.\n Even at this distance, he\n could see five or six bright\n pips surrounding the huge\n planet. There was Callisto,\n and—ah—there was Ganymede.", "He made computations,\n checked his controls, figured\n orbits. Anything to keep from\n having to talk to his two ex-Patrolmates\n or from having\n to think about the humiliating\n job he was on. Anything to—\n\"\nPirates! Moving up at two\n o'clock!\n\"\n\n\n Preston came awake. He\n picked off the location of the\n pirate ships—there were two\n of them, coming up out of the\n asteroid belt. Small, deadly,\n compact, they orbited toward\n him.\n\n\n He pounded the instrument\n panel in impotent rage, looking\n for the guns that weren't\n there.\n\n\n \"Don't worry, Pres,\" came\n Mellors' voice. \"We'll take\n care of them for you.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Preston said bitterly.\n He watched as the pirate\n ships approached, longing\n to trade places with the\n men in the Patrol ships above\n and below him.", "\"Cheers,\" Preston said,\n and yanked the blast-lever.\n The ship jolted upward, and\n for a second he felt a little\n of the old thrill—until he remembered.\n\n\n He took the ship out in\n space, saw the blackness in\n the viewplate. The radio\n crackled.\n\n\n \"Come in, Postal Ship.\n Come in, Postal Ship.\"\n\n\n \"I'm in. What do you\n want?\"\n\n\n \"We're your convoy,\" a\n hard voice said. \"Patrol Ship\n 08756, Lieutenant Mellors,\n above you. Down at three\n o'clock, Patrol Ship 10732,\n Lieutenant Gunderson. We'll\n take you through the Pirate\n Belt.\"", "He centered the ship as\n well as he could on the Dome\n below and threw it into automatic\n pilot. Jumping from\n the control panel, he ran back\n toward the gun turret and slammed\n shut the plexilite screen.\n Its outer wall opened and the\n fuel-tank went tumbling outward\n and down. He returned\n to his control-panel seat and\n looked at the viewscreen. He\n smiled.\n\n\n The fuel-tank was lying\n near the Dome—right in the\n middle of the nest of iceworms.\n The fuel was leaking\n from the puncture.\n\n\n The iceworms writhed in\n from all sides.\n\n\n \"Now!\" Preston said grimly.\n\n\n The ship roared down, jets\n blasting. The fire licked out,\n heated the ground, melted\n snow—ignited the fuel-tank!\n A gigantic flame blazed up,\n reflected harshly off the\n snows of Ganymede.", "\"Okay, I've got them. Now\n sit tight and wait.\" He\n glanced contemptuously at\n the three mail-pouches behind\n him, grinned, and started\n setting up the orbit.\nMailman, am I? I'll show\n them!\nHe brought the Postal Ship\n down with all the skill of his\n years in the Patrol, spiralling\n in around the big satellite of\n Jupiter as cautiously and as\n precisely as if he were zeroing\n in on a pirate lair in the\n asteroid belt. In its own way,\n this was as dangerous, perhaps\n even more so.\n\n\n Preston guided the ship\n into an ever-narrowing orbit,\n which he stabilized about a\n hundred miles over the surface\n of Ganymede. As his\n ship swung around the\n moon's poles in its tight orbit,\n he began to figure some fuel\n computations.", "It was near midnight, and\n the sky over Nome Spaceport\n was bright with stars. Preston's\n trained eye picked out\n Mars, Jupiter, Uranus. There\n they were—waiting. But he\n would spend the rest of his\n days ferrying letters on the\n Ganymede run.\n\n\n He sucked in the cold night\n air of summertime Alaska\n and squared his shoulders.\nTwo hours later, Preston\n sat at the controls of a one-man\n patrol ship just as he\n had in the old days. Only the\n control panel was bare where\n the firing studs for the heavy\n guns was found in regular\n patrol ships. And in the cargo\n hold instead of crates of\n spare ammo there were three\n bulging sacks of mail destined\n for the colony on Ganymede.\nSlight difference\n, Preston\n thought, as he set up his\n blasting pattern.\n\n\n \"Okay, Preston,\" came the\n voice from the tower. \"You've\n got clearance.\"", "Preston felt his face go hot\n with shame. Mellors! Gunderson!\n They would stick two of\n his old sidekicks on the job\n of guarding him.\n\n\n \"Please acknowledge,\" Mellors\n said.\n\"The iceworms were not expecting any mail—just the mailman.\"\nPreston paused. Then:\n \"Postal Ship 1872, Lieutenant\n Preston aboard. I acknowledge\n message.\"\n\n\n There was a stunned silence.\n \"\nPreston?\nHal Preston?\"\n\n\n \"The one and only,\" Preston\n said.\n\n\n \"What are you doing on a\n Postal ship?\" Mellors asked.\n\n\n \"Why don't you ask the\n Chief that? He's the one who\n yanked me out of the Patrol\n and put me here.\"", "Getting up, he clambered\n over the mail sacks and\n headed toward the rear of the\n ship, hunting for the auxiliary\n fuel-tanks.\n\n\n Working rapidly, he lugged\n one out and strapped it into\n an empty gun turret, making\n sure he could get it loose\n again when he'd need it.\n\n\n He wiped away sweat and\n checked the angle at which\n the fuel-tank would face the\n ground when he came down\n for a landing. Satisfied, he\n knocked a hole in the side of\n the fuel-tank.\n\n\n \"Okay, Ganymede,\" he radioed.\n \"I'm coming down.\"\n\n\n He blasted loose from the\n tight orbit and rocked the\n ship down on manual. The\n forbidding surface of Ganymede\n grew closer and closer.\n Now he could see the iceworms\n plainly.", "Hideous, thick creatures,\n lying coiled in masses around\n the Dome. Preston checked\n his spacesuit, making sure it\n was sealed. The instruments\n told him he was a bare ten\n miles above Ganymede now.\n One more swing around the\n poles would do it.\n\n\n He peered out as the Dome\n came below and once again\n snapped on the radio.\n\"I'm going to come down\n and burn a path through\n those worms of yours. Watch\n me carefully, and jump to it\n when you see me land. I want\n that airlock open, or else.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No buts!\"\n\n\n He was right overhead\n now. Just one ordinary-type\n gun would solve the whole\n problem, he thought. But\n Postal Ships didn't get guns.\n They weren't supposed to\n need them.", "Preston didn't answer. He\n broke contact and scribbled\n some more figures. Seven\n miles of iceworms, eh? That\n was too much to handle. He\n had planned on dropping\n flaming fuel on them and\n burning them out, but he\n couldn't do it that way.\n\n\n He'd have to try a different\n tactic.\n\n\n Down below, he could see\n the blue-white ammonia ice\n that was the frozen atmosphere\n of Ganymede. Shimmering\n gently amid the whiteness was the\n transparent yellow of the Dome\n beneath whose curved walls\n lived the Ganymede Colony.\n Even forewarned, Preston\n shuddered. Surrounding the\n Dome was a living, writhing\n belt of giant worms.\n\n\n \"Lovely,\" he said. \"Just\n lovely.\"", "Shaking his head, Preston\n leaned forward over his control\n board and headed on toward\n Ganymede.\nThe blue-white, frozen\n moon hung beneath him.\n Preston snapped on the radio.\n\n\n \"Ganymede Colony? Come\n in, please. This is your Postal\n Ship.\" The words tasted sour\n in his mouth.\n\n\n There was silence for a\n second. \"Come in, Ganymede,\"\n Preston repeated impatiently—and\n then the\n sound of a distress signal cut\n across his audio pickup.\n\n\n It was coming on wide\n beam from the satellite below—and\n they had cut out all receiving\n facilities in an attempt\n to step up their transmitter.\n Preston reached for\n the wide-beam stud, pressed\n it.\n\n\n \"Okay, I pick up your signal,\n Ganymede. Come in,\n now!\"", "\"The antenna for our long-range\n transmitter was outside\n the Dome. One of the\n worms came by and chewed\n the antenna right off. All\n we've got left is this short-range\n thing we're using and\n it's no good more than ten\n thousand miles from here.\n You're the first one who's\n been this close since it happened.\"\n\n\n \"I get it.\" Preston closed\n his eyes for a second, trying\n to think things out.\nThe Colony was under\n blockade by hostile alien life,\n thereby making it impossible\n for him to deliver the mail.\n Okay. If he'd been a regular\n member of the Postal Service,\n he'd have given it up as a\n bad job and gone back to\n Earth to report the difficulty.\nBut I'm not going back.\n I'll be the best damned mailman\n they've got.\n\"Give me a landing orbit\n anyway, Ganymede.\"", "\"This is Ganymede,\" a\n tense voice said. \"We've got\n trouble down here. Who are\n you?\"\n\n\n \"Mail ship,\" Preston said.\n \"From Earth. What's going\n on?\"\n\n\n There was the sound of\n voices whispering somewhere\n near the microphone. Finally:\n \"Hello, Mail Ship?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah?\"\n\n\n \"You're going to have to\n turn back to Earth, fellow.\n You can't land here. It's\n rough on us, missing a mail\n trip, but—\"\n\n\n Preston said impatiently,\n \"Why can't I land? What the\n devil's going on down there?\"\n\n\n \"We've been invaded,\" the\n tired voice said. \"The colony's\n been completely surrounded\n by iceworms.\"\n\n\n \"Iceworms?\"", "He turned away, smiling to\n himself. Maybe the Chief\nhad\nknown what he was doing\n when he took an experienced\n Patrol man and dumped him\n into Postal. Delivering the\n mail to Ganymede had been\n more hazardous than fighting\n off half a dozen space pirates.\nI guess I was wrong\n, Preston\n thought.\nThis is no snap job\n for old men.\nPreoccupied, he started out\n through the airlock. The man\n in charge caught his arm.\n \"Say, we don't even know\n your name! Here you are a\n hero, and—\"", "His scratch-pad began to\n fill with notations.\nFuel storage—\nEscape velocity—\nMargin of error—\nSafety factor—\nFinally he looked up. He\n had computed exactly how\n much spare fuel he had, how\n much he could afford to\n waste. It was a small figure—too\n small, perhaps.\n\n\n He turned to the radio.\n \"Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Where are you, Postal\n Ship?\"\n\n\n \"I'm in a tight orbit about\n a hundred miles up,\" Preston\n said. \"Give me the figures on\n the circumference of your\n Dome, Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Seven miles,\" the colonist\n said. \"What are you planning\n to do?\"", "The man in charge gestured\n to two young colonists,\n who donned spacesuits and\n dashed through the airlock.\n Preston watched as they\n raced to the ship, climbed in,\n and returned a few moments\n later with the mail sacks.\n\n\n \"You've got it all,\" Preston\n said. \"I'm checking out. I'll\n get word to the Patrol to get\n here and clean up that mess\n for you.\"\n\n\n \"How can we thank you?\"\n the official-looking man asked.\n\n\n \"No need to,\" Preston said\n casually. \"I had to get that\n mail down here some way,\n didn't I?\"", "\"But you can't come down!\n How will you leave your\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that,\"\n Preston said calmly.\n\n\n \"We have to worry! We\n don't dare open the Dome,\n with those creatures outside.\n You\ncan't\ncome down, Postal\n Ship.\"\n\n\n \"You want your mail or\n don't you?\"\n\n\n The colonist paused.\n \"Well—\"\n\n\n \"Okay, then,\" Preston said.\n \"Shut up and give me landing\n coordinates!\"\n\n\n There was a pause, and\n then the figures started coming\n over. Preston jotted them\n down on a scratch-pad.", "And the mindless iceworms\n came, marching toward the\n fire, being consumed, as still\n others devoured the bodies of\n the dead and dying.\n\n\n Preston looked away and\n concentrated on the business\n of finding a place to land the\n ship.\nThe holocaust still raged as\n he leaped down from the catwalk\n of the ship, clutching\n one of the heavy mail sacks,\n and struggled through the\n melting snows to the airlock.\n\n\n He grinned. The airlock\n was open.\n\n\n Arms grabbed him, pulled\n him through. Someone opened\n his helmet.\n\n\n \"Great job, Postman!\"\n\n\n \"There are two more mail sacks,\"\n Preston said. \"Get\n men out after them.\"" ], [ "Preston felt his face go hot\n with shame. Mellors! Gunderson!\n They would stick two of\n his old sidekicks on the job\n of guarding him.\n\n\n \"Please acknowledge,\" Mellors\n said.\n\"The iceworms were not expecting any mail—just the mailman.\"\nPreston paused. Then:\n \"Postal Ship 1872, Lieutenant\n Preston aboard. I acknowledge\n message.\"\n\n\n There was a stunned silence.\n \"\nPreston?\nHal Preston?\"\n\n\n \"The one and only,\" Preston\n said.\n\n\n \"What are you doing on a\n Postal ship?\" Mellors asked.\n\n\n \"Why don't you ask the\n Chief that? He's the one who\n yanked me out of the Patrol\n and put me here.\"", "Suddenly, Preston felt a\n hand on his shoulder. He\n looked up and saw a man in\n the trim gray of a Patrolman's\n uniform.\n\n\n \"What do you want,\n Dawes?\"\n\n\n \"Chief's been looking for\n you, Preston. It's time for\n you to get going on your run.\"\n\n\n Preston scowled. \"Time to\n go deliver the mail, eh?\" He\n spat. \"Don't they have anything\n better to do with good\n spacemen than make letter\n carriers out of them?\"\nThe other man shook his\n head. \"You won't get anywhere\n grousing about it,\n Preston. Your papers don't\n specify which branch you're\n assigned to, and if they want\n to make you carry the mail—that's\n it.\" His voice became\n suddenly gentle. \"Come on,\n Pres. One last drink, and\n then let's go. You don't want\n to spoil a good record, do\n you?\"", "\"No,\" Preston said reflectively.\n He gulped his drink\n and stood up. \"Okay. I'm\n ready. Neither snow nor rain\n shall stay me from my appointed\n rounds, or however\n the damned thing goes.\"\n\n\n \"That's a smart attitude,\n Preston. Come on—I'll walk\n you over to Administration.\"\nSavagely, Preston ripped\n away the hand that the other\n had put around his shoulders.\n \"I can get there myself. At\n least give me credit for that!\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Dawes said, shrugging.\n \"Well—good luck,\n Preston.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Thanks. Thanks\n real lots.\"\n\n\n He pushed his way past the\n man in Space Grays and\n shouldered past a couple of\n barflies as he left. He pushed\n open the door of the bar and\n stood outside for a moment.", "He turned away, smiling to\n himself. Maybe the Chief\nhad\nknown what he was doing\n when he took an experienced\n Patrol man and dumped him\n into Postal. Delivering the\n mail to Ganymede had been\n more hazardous than fighting\n off half a dozen space pirates.\nI guess I was wrong\n, Preston\n thought.\nThis is no snap job\n for old men.\nPreoccupied, he started out\n through the airlock. The man\n in charge caught his arm.\n \"Say, we don't even know\n your name! Here you are a\n hero, and—\"", "The man in charge gestured\n to two young colonists,\n who donned spacesuits and\n dashed through the airlock.\n Preston watched as they\n raced to the ship, climbed in,\n and returned a few moments\n later with the mail sacks.\n\n\n \"You've got it all,\" Preston\n said. \"I'm checking out. I'll\n get word to the Patrol to get\n here and clean up that mess\n for you.\"\n\n\n \"How can we thank you?\"\n the official-looking man asked.\n\n\n \"No need to,\" Preston said\n casually. \"I had to get that\n mail down here some way,\n didn't I?\"", "\"Cheers,\" Preston said,\n and yanked the blast-lever.\n The ship jolted upward, and\n for a second he felt a little\n of the old thrill—until he remembered.\n\n\n He took the ship out in\n space, saw the blackness in\n the viewplate. The radio\n crackled.\n\n\n \"Come in, Postal Ship.\n Come in, Postal Ship.\"\n\n\n \"I'm in. What do you\n want?\"\n\n\n \"We're your convoy,\" a\n hard voice said. \"Patrol Ship\n 08756, Lieutenant Mellors,\n above you. Down at three\n o'clock, Patrol Ship 10732,\n Lieutenant Gunderson. We'll\n take you through the Pirate\n Belt.\"", "\"The antenna for our long-range\n transmitter was outside\n the Dome. One of the\n worms came by and chewed\n the antenna right off. All\n we've got left is this short-range\n thing we're using and\n it's no good more than ten\n thousand miles from here.\n You're the first one who's\n been this close since it happened.\"\n\n\n \"I get it.\" Preston closed\n his eyes for a second, trying\n to think things out.\nThe Colony was under\n blockade by hostile alien life,\n thereby making it impossible\n for him to deliver the mail.\n Okay. If he'd been a regular\n member of the Postal Service,\n he'd have given it up as a\n bad job and gone back to\n Earth to report the difficulty.\nBut I'm not going back.\n I'll be the best damned mailman\n they've got.\n\"Give me a landing orbit\n anyway, Ganymede.\"", "\"Okay, I've got them. Now\n sit tight and wait.\" He\n glanced contemptuously at\n the three mail-pouches behind\n him, grinned, and started\n setting up the orbit.\nMailman, am I? I'll show\n them!\nHe brought the Postal Ship\n down with all the skill of his\n years in the Patrol, spiralling\n in around the big satellite of\n Jupiter as cautiously and as\n precisely as if he were zeroing\n in on a pirate lair in the\n asteroid belt. In its own way,\n this was as dangerous, perhaps\n even more so.\n\n\n Preston guided the ship\n into an ever-narrowing orbit,\n which he stabilized about a\n hundred miles over the surface\n of Ganymede. As his\n ship swung around the\n moon's poles in its tight orbit,\n he began to figure some fuel\n computations.", "\"But you can't come down!\n How will you leave your\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that,\"\n Preston said calmly.\n\n\n \"We have to worry! We\n don't dare open the Dome,\n with those creatures outside.\n You\ncan't\ncome down, Postal\n Ship.\"\n\n\n \"You want your mail or\n don't you?\"\n\n\n The colonist paused.\n \"Well—\"\n\n\n \"Okay, then,\" Preston said.\n \"Shut up and give me landing\n coordinates!\"\n\n\n There was a pause, and\n then the figures started coming\n over. Preston jotted them\n down on a scratch-pad.", "Consider the poor mailman of the future. To \"sleet and snow\n and dead of night\"—things that must not keep him from his\n appointed rounds—will be added, sub-zero void, meteors, and\n planets that won't stay put. Maybe he'll decide that for six\n cents an ounce it just ain't worth it.\nPOSTMARK\n\n GANYMEDE\nBy\n\n ROBERT\n\n SILVERBERG\n\"I'm\n washed up,\" Preston\n growled bitterly. \"They\n made a postman out of me.\n Me—a postman!\"\n\n\n He crumpled the assignment\n memo into a small, hard\n ball and hurled it at the\n bristly image of himself in\n the bar mirror. He hadn't\n shaved in three days—which\n was how long it had been\n since he had been notified of\n his removal from Space Patrol\n Service and his transfer\n to Postal Delivery.", "\"Can you beat that?\" Gunderson\n asked incredulously.\n \"Hal Preston, on a Postal\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Incredible, isn't it?\"\n Preston asked bitterly. \"You\n can't believe your ears. Well,\n you better believe it, because\n here I am.\"\n\n\n \"Must be some clerical\n error,\" Gunderson said.\n\n\n \"Let's change the subject,\"\n Preston snapped.\n\n\n They were silent for a few\n moments, as the three ships—two\n armed, one loaded with\n mail for Ganymede—streaked\n outward away from Earth.\n Manipulating his controls\n with the ease of long experience,\n Preston guided the ship\n smoothly toward the gleaming\n bulk of far-off Jupiter.\n Even at this distance, he\n could see five or six bright\n pips surrounding the huge\n planet. There was Callisto,\n and—ah—there was Ganymede.", "It was near midnight, and\n the sky over Nome Spaceport\n was bright with stars. Preston's\n trained eye picked out\n Mars, Jupiter, Uranus. There\n they were—waiting. But he\n would spend the rest of his\n days ferrying letters on the\n Ganymede run.\n\n\n He sucked in the cold night\n air of summertime Alaska\n and squared his shoulders.\nTwo hours later, Preston\n sat at the controls of a one-man\n patrol ship just as he\n had in the old days. Only the\n control panel was bare where\n the firing studs for the heavy\n guns was found in regular\n patrol ships. And in the cargo\n hold instead of crates of\n spare ammo there were three\n bulging sacks of mail destined\n for the colony on Ganymede.\nSlight difference\n, Preston\n thought, as he set up his\n blasting pattern.\n\n\n \"Okay, Preston,\" came the\n voice from the tower. \"You've\n got clearance.\"", "Shaking his head, Preston\n leaned forward over his control\n board and headed on toward\n Ganymede.\nThe blue-white, frozen\n moon hung beneath him.\n Preston snapped on the radio.\n\n\n \"Ganymede Colony? Come\n in, please. This is your Postal\n Ship.\" The words tasted sour\n in his mouth.\n\n\n There was silence for a\n second. \"Come in, Ganymede,\"\n Preston repeated impatiently—and\n then the\n sound of a distress signal cut\n across his audio pickup.\n\n\n It was coming on wide\n beam from the satellite below—and\n they had cut out all receiving\n facilities in an attempt\n to step up their transmitter.\n Preston reached for\n the wide-beam stud, pressed\n it.\n\n\n \"Okay, I pick up your signal,\n Ganymede. Come in,\n now!\"", "And the mindless iceworms\n came, marching toward the\n fire, being consumed, as still\n others devoured the bodies of\n the dead and dying.\n\n\n Preston looked away and\n concentrated on the business\n of finding a place to land the\n ship.\nThe holocaust still raged as\n he leaped down from the catwalk\n of the ship, clutching\n one of the heavy mail sacks,\n and struggled through the\n melting snows to the airlock.\n\n\n He grinned. The airlock\n was open.\n\n\n Arms grabbed him, pulled\n him through. Someone opened\n his helmet.\n\n\n \"Great job, Postman!\"\n\n\n \"There are two more mail sacks,\"\n Preston said. \"Get\n men out after them.\"", "\"Hero?\" Preston shrugged.\n \"All I did was deliver the\n mail. It's all in a day's work,\n you know. The mail's got to\n get through!\"\nTHE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAmazing Stories\nSeptember 1957.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.", "Hideous, thick creatures,\n lying coiled in masses around\n the Dome. Preston checked\n his spacesuit, making sure it\n was sealed. The instruments\n told him he was a bare ten\n miles above Ganymede now.\n One more swing around the\n poles would do it.\n\n\n He peered out as the Dome\n came below and once again\n snapped on the radio.\n\"I'm going to come down\n and burn a path through\n those worms of yours. Watch\n me carefully, and jump to it\n when you see me land. I want\n that airlock open, or else.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No buts!\"\n\n\n He was right overhead\n now. Just one ordinary-type\n gun would solve the whole\n problem, he thought. But\n Postal Ships didn't get guns.\n They weren't supposed to\n need them.", "He made computations,\n checked his controls, figured\n orbits. Anything to keep from\n having to talk to his two ex-Patrolmates\n or from having\n to think about the humiliating\n job he was on. Anything to—\n\"\nPirates! Moving up at two\n o'clock!\n\"\n\n\n Preston came awake. He\n picked off the location of the\n pirate ships—there were two\n of them, coming up out of the\n asteroid belt. Small, deadly,\n compact, they orbited toward\n him.\n\n\n He pounded the instrument\n panel in impotent rage, looking\n for the guns that weren't\n there.\n\n\n \"Don't worry, Pres,\" came\n Mellors' voice. \"We'll take\n care of them for you.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Preston said bitterly.\n He watched as the pirate\n ships approached, longing\n to trade places with the\n men in the Patrol ships above\n and below him.", "It was one against one,\n now—Gunderson against the\n pirate. Preston dropped back\n again to take advantage of\n the Patrol ship's protection.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try a diversionary\n tactic,\" Gunderson\n said on untappable tight-beam.\n \"Get ready to cut under\n and streak for Ganymede\n with all you got.\"\n\n\n \"Check.\"\n\n\n Preston watched as the\n tactic got under way. Gunderson's\n ship traveled in a long,\n looping spiral that drew the\n pirate into the upper quadrant\n of space. His path free,\n Preston guided his ship under\n the other two and toward unobstructed\n freedom. As he\n looked back, he saw Gunderson\n steaming for the pirate\n on a sure collision orbit.\n\n\n He turned away. The score\n was two Patrolmen dead, two\n ships wrecked—but the mails\n would get through.", "His scratch-pad began to\n fill with notations.\nFuel storage—\nEscape velocity—\nMargin of error—\nSafety factor—\nFinally he looked up. He\n had computed exactly how\n much spare fuel he had, how\n much he could afford to\n waste. It was a small figure—too\n small, perhaps.\n\n\n He turned to the radio.\n \"Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Where are you, Postal\n Ship?\"\n\n\n \"I'm in a tight orbit about\n a hundred miles up,\" Preston\n said. \"Give me the figures on\n the circumference of your\n Dome, Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Seven miles,\" the colonist\n said. \"What are you planning\n to do?\"", "Preston didn't answer. He\n broke contact and scribbled\n some more figures. Seven\n miles of iceworms, eh? That\n was too much to handle. He\n had planned on dropping\n flaming fuel on them and\n burning them out, but he\n couldn't do it that way.\n\n\n He'd have to try a different\n tactic.\n\n\n Down below, he could see\n the blue-white ammonia ice\n that was the frozen atmosphere\n of Ganymede. Shimmering\n gently amid the whiteness was the\n transparent yellow of the Dome\n beneath whose curved walls\n lived the Ganymede Colony.\n Even forewarned, Preston\n shuddered. Surrounding the\n Dome was a living, writhing\n belt of giant worms.\n\n\n \"Lovely,\" he said. \"Just\n lovely.\"" ], [ "It was near midnight, and\n the sky over Nome Spaceport\n was bright with stars. Preston's\n trained eye picked out\n Mars, Jupiter, Uranus. There\n they were—waiting. But he\n would spend the rest of his\n days ferrying letters on the\n Ganymede run.\n\n\n He sucked in the cold night\n air of summertime Alaska\n and squared his shoulders.\nTwo hours later, Preston\n sat at the controls of a one-man\n patrol ship just as he\n had in the old days. Only the\n control panel was bare where\n the firing studs for the heavy\n guns was found in regular\n patrol ships. And in the cargo\n hold instead of crates of\n spare ammo there were three\n bulging sacks of mail destined\n for the colony on Ganymede.\nSlight difference\n, Preston\n thought, as he set up his\n blasting pattern.\n\n\n \"Okay, Preston,\" came the\n voice from the tower. \"You've\n got clearance.\"", "Preston felt his face go hot\n with shame. Mellors! Gunderson!\n They would stick two of\n his old sidekicks on the job\n of guarding him.\n\n\n \"Please acknowledge,\" Mellors\n said.\n\"The iceworms were not expecting any mail—just the mailman.\"\nPreston paused. Then:\n \"Postal Ship 1872, Lieutenant\n Preston aboard. I acknowledge\n message.\"\n\n\n There was a stunned silence.\n \"\nPreston?\nHal Preston?\"\n\n\n \"The one and only,\" Preston\n said.\n\n\n \"What are you doing on a\n Postal ship?\" Mellors asked.\n\n\n \"Why don't you ask the\n Chief that? He's the one who\n yanked me out of the Patrol\n and put me here.\"", "Suddenly, Preston felt a\n hand on his shoulder. He\n looked up and saw a man in\n the trim gray of a Patrolman's\n uniform.\n\n\n \"What do you want,\n Dawes?\"\n\n\n \"Chief's been looking for\n you, Preston. It's time for\n you to get going on your run.\"\n\n\n Preston scowled. \"Time to\n go deliver the mail, eh?\" He\n spat. \"Don't they have anything\n better to do with good\n spacemen than make letter\n carriers out of them?\"\nThe other man shook his\n head. \"You won't get anywhere\n grousing about it,\n Preston. Your papers don't\n specify which branch you're\n assigned to, and if they want\n to make you carry the mail—that's\n it.\" His voice became\n suddenly gentle. \"Come on,\n Pres. One last drink, and\n then let's go. You don't want\n to spoil a good record, do\n you?\"", "He turned away, smiling to\n himself. Maybe the Chief\nhad\nknown what he was doing\n when he took an experienced\n Patrol man and dumped him\n into Postal. Delivering the\n mail to Ganymede had been\n more hazardous than fighting\n off half a dozen space pirates.\nI guess I was wrong\n, Preston\n thought.\nThis is no snap job\n for old men.\nPreoccupied, he started out\n through the airlock. The man\n in charge caught his arm.\n \"Say, we don't even know\n your name! Here you are a\n hero, and—\"", "\"No,\" Preston said reflectively.\n He gulped his drink\n and stood up. \"Okay. I'm\n ready. Neither snow nor rain\n shall stay me from my appointed\n rounds, or however\n the damned thing goes.\"\n\n\n \"That's a smart attitude,\n Preston. Come on—I'll walk\n you over to Administration.\"\nSavagely, Preston ripped\n away the hand that the other\n had put around his shoulders.\n \"I can get there myself. At\n least give me credit for that!\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Dawes said, shrugging.\n \"Well—good luck,\n Preston.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Thanks. Thanks\n real lots.\"\n\n\n He pushed his way past the\n man in Space Grays and\n shouldered past a couple of\n barflies as he left. He pushed\n open the door of the bar and\n stood outside for a moment.", "\"Cheers,\" Preston said,\n and yanked the blast-lever.\n The ship jolted upward, and\n for a second he felt a little\n of the old thrill—until he remembered.\n\n\n He took the ship out in\n space, saw the blackness in\n the viewplate. The radio\n crackled.\n\n\n \"Come in, Postal Ship.\n Come in, Postal Ship.\"\n\n\n \"I'm in. What do you\n want?\"\n\n\n \"We're your convoy,\" a\n hard voice said. \"Patrol Ship\n 08756, Lieutenant Mellors,\n above you. Down at three\n o'clock, Patrol Ship 10732,\n Lieutenant Gunderson. We'll\n take you through the Pirate\n Belt.\"", "The man in charge gestured\n to two young colonists,\n who donned spacesuits and\n dashed through the airlock.\n Preston watched as they\n raced to the ship, climbed in,\n and returned a few moments\n later with the mail sacks.\n\n\n \"You've got it all,\" Preston\n said. \"I'm checking out. I'll\n get word to the Patrol to get\n here and clean up that mess\n for you.\"\n\n\n \"How can we thank you?\"\n the official-looking man asked.\n\n\n \"No need to,\" Preston said\n casually. \"I had to get that\n mail down here some way,\n didn't I?\"", "\"The antenna for our long-range\n transmitter was outside\n the Dome. One of the\n worms came by and chewed\n the antenna right off. All\n we've got left is this short-range\n thing we're using and\n it's no good more than ten\n thousand miles from here.\n You're the first one who's\n been this close since it happened.\"\n\n\n \"I get it.\" Preston closed\n his eyes for a second, trying\n to think things out.\nThe Colony was under\n blockade by hostile alien life,\n thereby making it impossible\n for him to deliver the mail.\n Okay. If he'd been a regular\n member of the Postal Service,\n he'd have given it up as a\n bad job and gone back to\n Earth to report the difficulty.\nBut I'm not going back.\n I'll be the best damned mailman\n they've got.\n\"Give me a landing orbit\n anyway, Ganymede.\"", "He made computations,\n checked his controls, figured\n orbits. Anything to keep from\n having to talk to his two ex-Patrolmates\n or from having\n to think about the humiliating\n job he was on. Anything to—\n\"\nPirates! Moving up at two\n o'clock!\n\"\n\n\n Preston came awake. He\n picked off the location of the\n pirate ships—there were two\n of them, coming up out of the\n asteroid belt. Small, deadly,\n compact, they orbited toward\n him.\n\n\n He pounded the instrument\n panel in impotent rage, looking\n for the guns that weren't\n there.\n\n\n \"Don't worry, Pres,\" came\n Mellors' voice. \"We'll take\n care of them for you.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Preston said bitterly.\n He watched as the pirate\n ships approached, longing\n to trade places with the\n men in the Patrol ships above\n and below him.", "\"Can you beat that?\" Gunderson\n asked incredulously.\n \"Hal Preston, on a Postal\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Incredible, isn't it?\"\n Preston asked bitterly. \"You\n can't believe your ears. Well,\n you better believe it, because\n here I am.\"\n\n\n \"Must be some clerical\n error,\" Gunderson said.\n\n\n \"Let's change the subject,\"\n Preston snapped.\n\n\n They were silent for a few\n moments, as the three ships—two\n armed, one loaded with\n mail for Ganymede—streaked\n outward away from Earth.\n Manipulating his controls\n with the ease of long experience,\n Preston guided the ship\n smoothly toward the gleaming\n bulk of far-off Jupiter.\n Even at this distance, he\n could see five or six bright\n pips surrounding the huge\n planet. There was Callisto,\n and—ah—there was Ganymede.", "\"Okay, I've got them. Now\n sit tight and wait.\" He\n glanced contemptuously at\n the three mail-pouches behind\n him, grinned, and started\n setting up the orbit.\nMailman, am I? I'll show\n them!\nHe brought the Postal Ship\n down with all the skill of his\n years in the Patrol, spiralling\n in around the big satellite of\n Jupiter as cautiously and as\n precisely as if he were zeroing\n in on a pirate lair in the\n asteroid belt. In its own way,\n this was as dangerous, perhaps\n even more so.\n\n\n Preston guided the ship\n into an ever-narrowing orbit,\n which he stabilized about a\n hundred miles over the surface\n of Ganymede. As his\n ship swung around the\n moon's poles in its tight orbit,\n he began to figure some fuel\n computations.", "And the mindless iceworms\n came, marching toward the\n fire, being consumed, as still\n others devoured the bodies of\n the dead and dying.\n\n\n Preston looked away and\n concentrated on the business\n of finding a place to land the\n ship.\nThe holocaust still raged as\n he leaped down from the catwalk\n of the ship, clutching\n one of the heavy mail sacks,\n and struggled through the\n melting snows to the airlock.\n\n\n He grinned. The airlock\n was open.\n\n\n Arms grabbed him, pulled\n him through. Someone opened\n his helmet.\n\n\n \"Great job, Postman!\"\n\n\n \"There are two more mail sacks,\"\n Preston said. \"Get\n men out after them.\"", "Shaking his head, Preston\n leaned forward over his control\n board and headed on toward\n Ganymede.\nThe blue-white, frozen\n moon hung beneath him.\n Preston snapped on the radio.\n\n\n \"Ganymede Colony? Come\n in, please. This is your Postal\n Ship.\" The words tasted sour\n in his mouth.\n\n\n There was silence for a\n second. \"Come in, Ganymede,\"\n Preston repeated impatiently—and\n then the\n sound of a distress signal cut\n across his audio pickup.\n\n\n It was coming on wide\n beam from the satellite below—and\n they had cut out all receiving\n facilities in an attempt\n to step up their transmitter.\n Preston reached for\n the wide-beam stud, pressed\n it.\n\n\n \"Okay, I pick up your signal,\n Ganymede. Come in,\n now!\"", "\"But you can't come down!\n How will you leave your\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that,\"\n Preston said calmly.\n\n\n \"We have to worry! We\n don't dare open the Dome,\n with those creatures outside.\n You\ncan't\ncome down, Postal\n Ship.\"\n\n\n \"You want your mail or\n don't you?\"\n\n\n The colonist paused.\n \"Well—\"\n\n\n \"Okay, then,\" Preston said.\n \"Shut up and give me landing\n coordinates!\"\n\n\n There was a pause, and\n then the figures started coming\n over. Preston jotted them\n down on a scratch-pad.", "Preston didn't answer. He\n broke contact and scribbled\n some more figures. Seven\n miles of iceworms, eh? That\n was too much to handle. He\n had planned on dropping\n flaming fuel on them and\n burning them out, but he\n couldn't do it that way.\n\n\n He'd have to try a different\n tactic.\n\n\n Down below, he could see\n the blue-white ammonia ice\n that was the frozen atmosphere\n of Ganymede. Shimmering\n gently amid the whiteness was the\n transparent yellow of the Dome\n beneath whose curved walls\n lived the Ganymede Colony.\n Even forewarned, Preston\n shuddered. Surrounding the\n Dome was a living, writhing\n belt of giant worms.\n\n\n \"Lovely,\" he said. \"Just\n lovely.\"", "It was one against one,\n now—Gunderson against the\n pirate. Preston dropped back\n again to take advantage of\n the Patrol ship's protection.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try a diversionary\n tactic,\" Gunderson\n said on untappable tight-beam.\n \"Get ready to cut under\n and streak for Ganymede\n with all you got.\"\n\n\n \"Check.\"\n\n\n Preston watched as the\n tactic got under way. Gunderson's\n ship traveled in a long,\n looping spiral that drew the\n pirate into the upper quadrant\n of space. His path free,\n Preston guided his ship under\n the other two and toward unobstructed\n freedom. As he\n looked back, he saw Gunderson\n steaming for the pirate\n on a sure collision orbit.\n\n\n He turned away. The score\n was two Patrolmen dead, two\n ships wrecked—but the mails\n would get through.", "He centered the ship as\n well as he could on the Dome\n below and threw it into automatic\n pilot. Jumping from\n the control panel, he ran back\n toward the gun turret and slammed\n shut the plexilite screen.\n Its outer wall opened and the\n fuel-tank went tumbling outward\n and down. He returned\n to his control-panel seat and\n looked at the viewscreen. He\n smiled.\n\n\n The fuel-tank was lying\n near the Dome—right in the\n middle of the nest of iceworms.\n The fuel was leaking\n from the puncture.\n\n\n The iceworms writhed in\n from all sides.\n\n\n \"Now!\" Preston said grimly.\n\n\n The ship roared down, jets\n blasting. The fire licked out,\n heated the ground, melted\n snow—ignited the fuel-tank!\n A gigantic flame blazed up,\n reflected harshly off the\n snows of Ganymede.", "Hideous, thick creatures,\n lying coiled in masses around\n the Dome. Preston checked\n his spacesuit, making sure it\n was sealed. The instruments\n told him he was a bare ten\n miles above Ganymede now.\n One more swing around the\n poles would do it.\n\n\n He peered out as the Dome\n came below and once again\n snapped on the radio.\n\"I'm going to come down\n and burn a path through\n those worms of yours. Watch\n me carefully, and jump to it\n when you see me land. I want\n that airlock open, or else.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No buts!\"\n\n\n He was right overhead\n now. Just one ordinary-type\n gun would solve the whole\n problem, he thought. But\n Postal Ships didn't get guns.\n They weren't supposed to\n need them.", "His scratch-pad began to\n fill with notations.\nFuel storage—\nEscape velocity—\nMargin of error—\nSafety factor—\nFinally he looked up. He\n had computed exactly how\n much spare fuel he had, how\n much he could afford to\n waste. It was a small figure—too\n small, perhaps.\n\n\n He turned to the radio.\n \"Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Where are you, Postal\n Ship?\"\n\n\n \"I'm in a tight orbit about\n a hundred miles up,\" Preston\n said. \"Give me the figures on\n the circumference of your\n Dome, Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Seven miles,\" the colonist\n said. \"What are you planning\n to do?\"", "Getting up, he clambered\n over the mail sacks and\n headed toward the rear of the\n ship, hunting for the auxiliary\n fuel-tanks.\n\n\n Working rapidly, he lugged\n one out and strapped it into\n an empty gun turret, making\n sure he could get it loose\n again when he'd need it.\n\n\n He wiped away sweat and\n checked the angle at which\n the fuel-tank would face the\n ground when he came down\n for a landing. Satisfied, he\n knocked a hole in the side of\n the fuel-tank.\n\n\n \"Okay, Ganymede,\" he radioed.\n \"I'm coming down.\"\n\n\n He blasted loose from the\n tight orbit and rocked the\n ship down on manual. The\n forbidding surface of Ganymede\n grew closer and closer.\n Now he could see the iceworms\n plainly." ], [ "\"The antenna for our long-range\n transmitter was outside\n the Dome. One of the\n worms came by and chewed\n the antenna right off. All\n we've got left is this short-range\n thing we're using and\n it's no good more than ten\n thousand miles from here.\n You're the first one who's\n been this close since it happened.\"\n\n\n \"I get it.\" Preston closed\n his eyes for a second, trying\n to think things out.\nThe Colony was under\n blockade by hostile alien life,\n thereby making it impossible\n for him to deliver the mail.\n Okay. If he'd been a regular\n member of the Postal Service,\n he'd have given it up as a\n bad job and gone back to\n Earth to report the difficulty.\nBut I'm not going back.\n I'll be the best damned mailman\n they've got.\n\"Give me a landing orbit\n anyway, Ganymede.\"", "\"Okay, I've got them. Now\n sit tight and wait.\" He\n glanced contemptuously at\n the three mail-pouches behind\n him, grinned, and started\n setting up the orbit.\nMailman, am I? I'll show\n them!\nHe brought the Postal Ship\n down with all the skill of his\n years in the Patrol, spiralling\n in around the big satellite of\n Jupiter as cautiously and as\n precisely as if he were zeroing\n in on a pirate lair in the\n asteroid belt. In its own way,\n this was as dangerous, perhaps\n even more so.\n\n\n Preston guided the ship\n into an ever-narrowing orbit,\n which he stabilized about a\n hundred miles over the surface\n of Ganymede. As his\n ship swung around the\n moon's poles in its tight orbit,\n he began to figure some fuel\n computations.", "\"Can you beat that?\" Gunderson\n asked incredulously.\n \"Hal Preston, on a Postal\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Incredible, isn't it?\"\n Preston asked bitterly. \"You\n can't believe your ears. Well,\n you better believe it, because\n here I am.\"\n\n\n \"Must be some clerical\n error,\" Gunderson said.\n\n\n \"Let's change the subject,\"\n Preston snapped.\n\n\n They were silent for a few\n moments, as the three ships—two\n armed, one loaded with\n mail for Ganymede—streaked\n outward away from Earth.\n Manipulating his controls\n with the ease of long experience,\n Preston guided the ship\n smoothly toward the gleaming\n bulk of far-off Jupiter.\n Even at this distance, he\n could see five or six bright\n pips surrounding the huge\n planet. There was Callisto,\n and—ah—there was Ganymede.", "It was near midnight, and\n the sky over Nome Spaceport\n was bright with stars. Preston's\n trained eye picked out\n Mars, Jupiter, Uranus. There\n they were—waiting. But he\n would spend the rest of his\n days ferrying letters on the\n Ganymede run.\n\n\n He sucked in the cold night\n air of summertime Alaska\n and squared his shoulders.\nTwo hours later, Preston\n sat at the controls of a one-man\n patrol ship just as he\n had in the old days. Only the\n control panel was bare where\n the firing studs for the heavy\n guns was found in regular\n patrol ships. And in the cargo\n hold instead of crates of\n spare ammo there were three\n bulging sacks of mail destined\n for the colony on Ganymede.\nSlight difference\n, Preston\n thought, as he set up his\n blasting pattern.\n\n\n \"Okay, Preston,\" came the\n voice from the tower. \"You've\n got clearance.\"", "Consider the poor mailman of the future. To \"sleet and snow\n and dead of night\"—things that must not keep him from his\n appointed rounds—will be added, sub-zero void, meteors, and\n planets that won't stay put. Maybe he'll decide that for six\n cents an ounce it just ain't worth it.\nPOSTMARK\n\n GANYMEDE\nBy\n\n ROBERT\n\n SILVERBERG\n\"I'm\n washed up,\" Preston\n growled bitterly. \"They\n made a postman out of me.\n Me—a postman!\"\n\n\n He crumpled the assignment\n memo into a small, hard\n ball and hurled it at the\n bristly image of himself in\n the bar mirror. He hadn't\n shaved in three days—which\n was how long it had been\n since he had been notified of\n his removal from Space Patrol\n Service and his transfer\n to Postal Delivery.", "Shaking his head, Preston\n leaned forward over his control\n board and headed on toward\n Ganymede.\nThe blue-white, frozen\n moon hung beneath him.\n Preston snapped on the radio.\n\n\n \"Ganymede Colony? Come\n in, please. This is your Postal\n Ship.\" The words tasted sour\n in his mouth.\n\n\n There was silence for a\n second. \"Come in, Ganymede,\"\n Preston repeated impatiently—and\n then the\n sound of a distress signal cut\n across his audio pickup.\n\n\n It was coming on wide\n beam from the satellite below—and\n they had cut out all receiving\n facilities in an attempt\n to step up their transmitter.\n Preston reached for\n the wide-beam stud, pressed\n it.\n\n\n \"Okay, I pick up your signal,\n Ganymede. Come in,\n now!\"", "\"This is Ganymede,\" a\n tense voice said. \"We've got\n trouble down here. Who are\n you?\"\n\n\n \"Mail ship,\" Preston said.\n \"From Earth. What's going\n on?\"\n\n\n There was the sound of\n voices whispering somewhere\n near the microphone. Finally:\n \"Hello, Mail Ship?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah?\"\n\n\n \"You're going to have to\n turn back to Earth, fellow.\n You can't land here. It's\n rough on us, missing a mail\n trip, but—\"\n\n\n Preston said impatiently,\n \"Why can't I land? What the\n devil's going on down there?\"\n\n\n \"We've been invaded,\" the\n tired voice said. \"The colony's\n been completely surrounded\n by iceworms.\"\n\n\n \"Iceworms?\"", "He turned away, smiling to\n himself. Maybe the Chief\nhad\nknown what he was doing\n when he took an experienced\n Patrol man and dumped him\n into Postal. Delivering the\n mail to Ganymede had been\n more hazardous than fighting\n off half a dozen space pirates.\nI guess I was wrong\n, Preston\n thought.\nThis is no snap job\n for old men.\nPreoccupied, he started out\n through the airlock. The man\n in charge caught his arm.\n \"Say, we don't even know\n your name! Here you are a\n hero, and—\"", "\"But you can't come down!\n How will you leave your\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that,\"\n Preston said calmly.\n\n\n \"We have to worry! We\n don't dare open the Dome,\n with those creatures outside.\n You\ncan't\ncome down, Postal\n Ship.\"\n\n\n \"You want your mail or\n don't you?\"\n\n\n The colonist paused.\n \"Well—\"\n\n\n \"Okay, then,\" Preston said.\n \"Shut up and give me landing\n coordinates!\"\n\n\n There was a pause, and\n then the figures started coming\n over. Preston jotted them\n down on a scratch-pad.", "Suddenly, Preston felt a\n hand on his shoulder. He\n looked up and saw a man in\n the trim gray of a Patrolman's\n uniform.\n\n\n \"What do you want,\n Dawes?\"\n\n\n \"Chief's been looking for\n you, Preston. It's time for\n you to get going on your run.\"\n\n\n Preston scowled. \"Time to\n go deliver the mail, eh?\" He\n spat. \"Don't they have anything\n better to do with good\n spacemen than make letter\n carriers out of them?\"\nThe other man shook his\n head. \"You won't get anywhere\n grousing about it,\n Preston. Your papers don't\n specify which branch you're\n assigned to, and if they want\n to make you carry the mail—that's\n it.\" His voice became\n suddenly gentle. \"Come on,\n Pres. One last drink, and\n then let's go. You don't want\n to spoil a good record, do\n you?\"", "The man in charge gestured\n to two young colonists,\n who donned spacesuits and\n dashed through the airlock.\n Preston watched as they\n raced to the ship, climbed in,\n and returned a few moments\n later with the mail sacks.\n\n\n \"You've got it all,\" Preston\n said. \"I'm checking out. I'll\n get word to the Patrol to get\n here and clean up that mess\n for you.\"\n\n\n \"How can we thank you?\"\n the official-looking man asked.\n\n\n \"No need to,\" Preston said\n casually. \"I had to get that\n mail down here some way,\n didn't I?\"", "Hideous, thick creatures,\n lying coiled in masses around\n the Dome. Preston checked\n his spacesuit, making sure it\n was sealed. The instruments\n told him he was a bare ten\n miles above Ganymede now.\n One more swing around the\n poles would do it.\n\n\n He peered out as the Dome\n came below and once again\n snapped on the radio.\n\"I'm going to come down\n and burn a path through\n those worms of yours. Watch\n me carefully, and jump to it\n when you see me land. I want\n that airlock open, or else.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No buts!\"\n\n\n He was right overhead\n now. Just one ordinary-type\n gun would solve the whole\n problem, he thought. But\n Postal Ships didn't get guns.\n They weren't supposed to\n need them.", "His scratch-pad began to\n fill with notations.\nFuel storage—\nEscape velocity—\nMargin of error—\nSafety factor—\nFinally he looked up. He\n had computed exactly how\n much spare fuel he had, how\n much he could afford to\n waste. It was a small figure—too\n small, perhaps.\n\n\n He turned to the radio.\n \"Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Where are you, Postal\n Ship?\"\n\n\n \"I'm in a tight orbit about\n a hundred miles up,\" Preston\n said. \"Give me the figures on\n the circumference of your\n Dome, Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Seven miles,\" the colonist\n said. \"What are you planning\n to do?\"", "Preston felt his face go hot\n with shame. Mellors! Gunderson!\n They would stick two of\n his old sidekicks on the job\n of guarding him.\n\n\n \"Please acknowledge,\" Mellors\n said.\n\"The iceworms were not expecting any mail—just the mailman.\"\nPreston paused. Then:\n \"Postal Ship 1872, Lieutenant\n Preston aboard. I acknowledge\n message.\"\n\n\n There was a stunned silence.\n \"\nPreston?\nHal Preston?\"\n\n\n \"The one and only,\" Preston\n said.\n\n\n \"What are you doing on a\n Postal ship?\" Mellors asked.\n\n\n \"Why don't you ask the\n Chief that? He's the one who\n yanked me out of the Patrol\n and put me here.\"", "Preston didn't answer. He\n broke contact and scribbled\n some more figures. Seven\n miles of iceworms, eh? That\n was too much to handle. He\n had planned on dropping\n flaming fuel on them and\n burning them out, but he\n couldn't do it that way.\n\n\n He'd have to try a different\n tactic.\n\n\n Down below, he could see\n the blue-white ammonia ice\n that was the frozen atmosphere\n of Ganymede. Shimmering\n gently amid the whiteness was the\n transparent yellow of the Dome\n beneath whose curved walls\n lived the Ganymede Colony.\n Even forewarned, Preston\n shuddered. Surrounding the\n Dome was a living, writhing\n belt of giant worms.\n\n\n \"Lovely,\" he said. \"Just\n lovely.\"", "It was one against one,\n now—Gunderson against the\n pirate. Preston dropped back\n again to take advantage of\n the Patrol ship's protection.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try a diversionary\n tactic,\" Gunderson\n said on untappable tight-beam.\n \"Get ready to cut under\n and streak for Ganymede\n with all you got.\"\n\n\n \"Check.\"\n\n\n Preston watched as the\n tactic got under way. Gunderson's\n ship traveled in a long,\n looping spiral that drew the\n pirate into the upper quadrant\n of space. His path free,\n Preston guided his ship under\n the other two and toward unobstructed\n freedom. As he\n looked back, he saw Gunderson\n steaming for the pirate\n on a sure collision orbit.\n\n\n He turned away. The score\n was two Patrolmen dead, two\n ships wrecked—but the mails\n would get through.", "\"Cheers,\" Preston said,\n and yanked the blast-lever.\n The ship jolted upward, and\n for a second he felt a little\n of the old thrill—until he remembered.\n\n\n He took the ship out in\n space, saw the blackness in\n the viewplate. The radio\n crackled.\n\n\n \"Come in, Postal Ship.\n Come in, Postal Ship.\"\n\n\n \"I'm in. What do you\n want?\"\n\n\n \"We're your convoy,\" a\n hard voice said. \"Patrol Ship\n 08756, Lieutenant Mellors,\n above you. Down at three\n o'clock, Patrol Ship 10732,\n Lieutenant Gunderson. We'll\n take you through the Pirate\n Belt.\"", "He centered the ship as\n well as he could on the Dome\n below and threw it into automatic\n pilot. Jumping from\n the control panel, he ran back\n toward the gun turret and slammed\n shut the plexilite screen.\n Its outer wall opened and the\n fuel-tank went tumbling outward\n and down. He returned\n to his control-panel seat and\n looked at the viewscreen. He\n smiled.\n\n\n The fuel-tank was lying\n near the Dome—right in the\n middle of the nest of iceworms.\n The fuel was leaking\n from the puncture.\n\n\n The iceworms writhed in\n from all sides.\n\n\n \"Now!\" Preston said grimly.\n\n\n The ship roared down, jets\n blasting. The fire licked out,\n heated the ground, melted\n snow—ignited the fuel-tank!\n A gigantic flame blazed up,\n reflected harshly off the\n snows of Ganymede.", "Getting up, he clambered\n over the mail sacks and\n headed toward the rear of the\n ship, hunting for the auxiliary\n fuel-tanks.\n\n\n Working rapidly, he lugged\n one out and strapped it into\n an empty gun turret, making\n sure he could get it loose\n again when he'd need it.\n\n\n He wiped away sweat and\n checked the angle at which\n the fuel-tank would face the\n ground when he came down\n for a landing. Satisfied, he\n knocked a hole in the side of\n the fuel-tank.\n\n\n \"Okay, Ganymede,\" he radioed.\n \"I'm coming down.\"\n\n\n He blasted loose from the\n tight orbit and rocked the\n ship down on manual. The\n forbidding surface of Ganymede\n grew closer and closer.\n Now he could see the iceworms\n plainly.", "\"No,\" Preston said reflectively.\n He gulped his drink\n and stood up. \"Okay. I'm\n ready. Neither snow nor rain\n shall stay me from my appointed\n rounds, or however\n the damned thing goes.\"\n\n\n \"That's a smart attitude,\n Preston. Come on—I'll walk\n you over to Administration.\"\nSavagely, Preston ripped\n away the hand that the other\n had put around his shoulders.\n \"I can get there myself. At\n least give me credit for that!\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Dawes said, shrugging.\n \"Well—good luck,\n Preston.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Thanks. Thanks\n real lots.\"\n\n\n He pushed his way past the\n man in Space Grays and\n shouldered past a couple of\n barflies as he left. He pushed\n open the door of the bar and\n stood outside for a moment." ], [ "Preston felt his face go hot\n with shame. Mellors! Gunderson!\n They would stick two of\n his old sidekicks on the job\n of guarding him.\n\n\n \"Please acknowledge,\" Mellors\n said.\n\"The iceworms were not expecting any mail—just the mailman.\"\nPreston paused. Then:\n \"Postal Ship 1872, Lieutenant\n Preston aboard. I acknowledge\n message.\"\n\n\n There was a stunned silence.\n \"\nPreston?\nHal Preston?\"\n\n\n \"The one and only,\" Preston\n said.\n\n\n \"What are you doing on a\n Postal ship?\" Mellors asked.\n\n\n \"Why don't you ask the\n Chief that? He's the one who\n yanked me out of the Patrol\n and put me here.\"", "It was one against one,\n now—Gunderson against the\n pirate. Preston dropped back\n again to take advantage of\n the Patrol ship's protection.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try a diversionary\n tactic,\" Gunderson\n said on untappable tight-beam.\n \"Get ready to cut under\n and streak for Ganymede\n with all you got.\"\n\n\n \"Check.\"\n\n\n Preston watched as the\n tactic got under way. Gunderson's\n ship traveled in a long,\n looping spiral that drew the\n pirate into the upper quadrant\n of space. His path free,\n Preston guided his ship under\n the other two and toward unobstructed\n freedom. As he\n looked back, he saw Gunderson\n steaming for the pirate\n on a sure collision orbit.\n\n\n He turned away. The score\n was two Patrolmen dead, two\n ships wrecked—but the mails\n would get through.", "He turned away, smiling to\n himself. Maybe the Chief\nhad\nknown what he was doing\n when he took an experienced\n Patrol man and dumped him\n into Postal. Delivering the\n mail to Ganymede had been\n more hazardous than fighting\n off half a dozen space pirates.\nI guess I was wrong\n, Preston\n thought.\nThis is no snap job\n for old men.\nPreoccupied, he started out\n through the airlock. The man\n in charge caught his arm.\n \"Say, we don't even know\n your name! Here you are a\n hero, and—\"", "\"Okay, I've got them. Now\n sit tight and wait.\" He\n glanced contemptuously at\n the three mail-pouches behind\n him, grinned, and started\n setting up the orbit.\nMailman, am I? I'll show\n them!\nHe brought the Postal Ship\n down with all the skill of his\n years in the Patrol, spiralling\n in around the big satellite of\n Jupiter as cautiously and as\n precisely as if he were zeroing\n in on a pirate lair in the\n asteroid belt. In its own way,\n this was as dangerous, perhaps\n even more so.\n\n\n Preston guided the ship\n into an ever-narrowing orbit,\n which he stabilized about a\n hundred miles over the surface\n of Ganymede. As his\n ship swung around the\n moon's poles in its tight orbit,\n he began to figure some fuel\n computations.", "He made computations,\n checked his controls, figured\n orbits. Anything to keep from\n having to talk to his two ex-Patrolmates\n or from having\n to think about the humiliating\n job he was on. Anything to—\n\"\nPirates! Moving up at two\n o'clock!\n\"\n\n\n Preston came awake. He\n picked off the location of the\n pirate ships—there were two\n of them, coming up out of the\n asteroid belt. Small, deadly,\n compact, they orbited toward\n him.\n\n\n He pounded the instrument\n panel in impotent rage, looking\n for the guns that weren't\n there.\n\n\n \"Don't worry, Pres,\" came\n Mellors' voice. \"We'll take\n care of them for you.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Preston said bitterly.\n He watched as the pirate\n ships approached, longing\n to trade places with the\n men in the Patrol ships above\n and below him.", "\"The antenna for our long-range\n transmitter was outside\n the Dome. One of the\n worms came by and chewed\n the antenna right off. All\n we've got left is this short-range\n thing we're using and\n it's no good more than ten\n thousand miles from here.\n You're the first one who's\n been this close since it happened.\"\n\n\n \"I get it.\" Preston closed\n his eyes for a second, trying\n to think things out.\nThe Colony was under\n blockade by hostile alien life,\n thereby making it impossible\n for him to deliver the mail.\n Okay. If he'd been a regular\n member of the Postal Service,\n he'd have given it up as a\n bad job and gone back to\n Earth to report the difficulty.\nBut I'm not going back.\n I'll be the best damned mailman\n they've got.\n\"Give me a landing orbit\n anyway, Ganymede.\"", "The man in charge gestured\n to two young colonists,\n who donned spacesuits and\n dashed through the airlock.\n Preston watched as they\n raced to the ship, climbed in,\n and returned a few moments\n later with the mail sacks.\n\n\n \"You've got it all,\" Preston\n said. \"I'm checking out. I'll\n get word to the Patrol to get\n here and clean up that mess\n for you.\"\n\n\n \"How can we thank you?\"\n the official-looking man asked.\n\n\n \"No need to,\" Preston said\n casually. \"I had to get that\n mail down here some way,\n didn't I?\"", "Suddenly, Preston felt a\n hand on his shoulder. He\n looked up and saw a man in\n the trim gray of a Patrolman's\n uniform.\n\n\n \"What do you want,\n Dawes?\"\n\n\n \"Chief's been looking for\n you, Preston. It's time for\n you to get going on your run.\"\n\n\n Preston scowled. \"Time to\n go deliver the mail, eh?\" He\n spat. \"Don't they have anything\n better to do with good\n spacemen than make letter\n carriers out of them?\"\nThe other man shook his\n head. \"You won't get anywhere\n grousing about it,\n Preston. Your papers don't\n specify which branch you're\n assigned to, and if they want\n to make you carry the mail—that's\n it.\" His voice became\n suddenly gentle. \"Come on,\n Pres. One last drink, and\n then let's go. You don't want\n to spoil a good record, do\n you?\"", "Suddenly a bright spear of\n flame lashed out across space\n and the hull of Gunderson's\n ship glowed cherry red. \"I'm\n okay,\" Gunderson reported\n immediately. \"Screens took\n the charge.\"\n\n\n Preston gripped his controls\n and threw the ship into\n a plunging dive that dropped\n it back behind the protection\n of both Patrol ships. He saw\n Gunderson and Mellors converge\n on one of the pirates.\n Two blue beams licked out,\n and the pirate ship exploded.\n\n\n But then the second pirate\n swooped down in an unexpected\n dive. \"Look out!\"\n Preston yelled helplessly—but\n it was too late. Beams ripped\n into the hull of Mellors' ship,\n and a dark fissure line opened\n down the side of the ship.\n Preston smashed his hand\n against the control panel.\n Better to die in an honest\n dogfight than to live this\n way!", "It was near midnight, and\n the sky over Nome Spaceport\n was bright with stars. Preston's\n trained eye picked out\n Mars, Jupiter, Uranus. There\n they were—waiting. But he\n would spend the rest of his\n days ferrying letters on the\n Ganymede run.\n\n\n He sucked in the cold night\n air of summertime Alaska\n and squared his shoulders.\nTwo hours later, Preston\n sat at the controls of a one-man\n patrol ship just as he\n had in the old days. Only the\n control panel was bare where\n the firing studs for the heavy\n guns was found in regular\n patrol ships. And in the cargo\n hold instead of crates of\n spare ammo there were three\n bulging sacks of mail destined\n for the colony on Ganymede.\nSlight difference\n, Preston\n thought, as he set up his\n blasting pattern.\n\n\n \"Okay, Preston,\" came the\n voice from the tower. \"You've\n got clearance.\"", "\"Cheers,\" Preston said,\n and yanked the blast-lever.\n The ship jolted upward, and\n for a second he felt a little\n of the old thrill—until he remembered.\n\n\n He took the ship out in\n space, saw the blackness in\n the viewplate. The radio\n crackled.\n\n\n \"Come in, Postal Ship.\n Come in, Postal Ship.\"\n\n\n \"I'm in. What do you\n want?\"\n\n\n \"We're your convoy,\" a\n hard voice said. \"Patrol Ship\n 08756, Lieutenant Mellors,\n above you. Down at three\n o'clock, Patrol Ship 10732,\n Lieutenant Gunderson. We'll\n take you through the Pirate\n Belt.\"", "\"Can you beat that?\" Gunderson\n asked incredulously.\n \"Hal Preston, on a Postal\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Incredible, isn't it?\"\n Preston asked bitterly. \"You\n can't believe your ears. Well,\n you better believe it, because\n here I am.\"\n\n\n \"Must be some clerical\n error,\" Gunderson said.\n\n\n \"Let's change the subject,\"\n Preston snapped.\n\n\n They were silent for a few\n moments, as the three ships—two\n armed, one loaded with\n mail for Ganymede—streaked\n outward away from Earth.\n Manipulating his controls\n with the ease of long experience,\n Preston guided the ship\n smoothly toward the gleaming\n bulk of far-off Jupiter.\n Even at this distance, he\n could see five or six bright\n pips surrounding the huge\n planet. There was Callisto,\n and—ah—there was Ganymede.", "He centered the ship as\n well as he could on the Dome\n below and threw it into automatic\n pilot. Jumping from\n the control panel, he ran back\n toward the gun turret and slammed\n shut the plexilite screen.\n Its outer wall opened and the\n fuel-tank went tumbling outward\n and down. He returned\n to his control-panel seat and\n looked at the viewscreen. He\n smiled.\n\n\n The fuel-tank was lying\n near the Dome—right in the\n middle of the nest of iceworms.\n The fuel was leaking\n from the puncture.\n\n\n The iceworms writhed in\n from all sides.\n\n\n \"Now!\" Preston said grimly.\n\n\n The ship roared down, jets\n blasting. The fire licked out,\n heated the ground, melted\n snow—ignited the fuel-tank!\n A gigantic flame blazed up,\n reflected harshly off the\n snows of Ganymede.", "Preston didn't answer. He\n broke contact and scribbled\n some more figures. Seven\n miles of iceworms, eh? That\n was too much to handle. He\n had planned on dropping\n flaming fuel on them and\n burning them out, but he\n couldn't do it that way.\n\n\n He'd have to try a different\n tactic.\n\n\n Down below, he could see\n the blue-white ammonia ice\n that was the frozen atmosphere\n of Ganymede. Shimmering\n gently amid the whiteness was the\n transparent yellow of the Dome\n beneath whose curved walls\n lived the Ganymede Colony.\n Even forewarned, Preston\n shuddered. Surrounding the\n Dome was a living, writhing\n belt of giant worms.\n\n\n \"Lovely,\" he said. \"Just\n lovely.\"", "Hideous, thick creatures,\n lying coiled in masses around\n the Dome. Preston checked\n his spacesuit, making sure it\n was sealed. The instruments\n told him he was a bare ten\n miles above Ganymede now.\n One more swing around the\n poles would do it.\n\n\n He peered out as the Dome\n came below and once again\n snapped on the radio.\n\"I'm going to come down\n and burn a path through\n those worms of yours. Watch\n me carefully, and jump to it\n when you see me land. I want\n that airlock open, or else.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No buts!\"\n\n\n He was right overhead\n now. Just one ordinary-type\n gun would solve the whole\n problem, he thought. But\n Postal Ships didn't get guns.\n They weren't supposed to\n need them.", "Shaking his head, Preston\n leaned forward over his control\n board and headed on toward\n Ganymede.\nThe blue-white, frozen\n moon hung beneath him.\n Preston snapped on the radio.\n\n\n \"Ganymede Colony? Come\n in, please. This is your Postal\n Ship.\" The words tasted sour\n in his mouth.\n\n\n There was silence for a\n second. \"Come in, Ganymede,\"\n Preston repeated impatiently—and\n then the\n sound of a distress signal cut\n across his audio pickup.\n\n\n It was coming on wide\n beam from the satellite below—and\n they had cut out all receiving\n facilities in an attempt\n to step up their transmitter.\n Preston reached for\n the wide-beam stud, pressed\n it.\n\n\n \"Okay, I pick up your signal,\n Ganymede. Come in,\n now!\"", "Getting up, he clambered\n over the mail sacks and\n headed toward the rear of the\n ship, hunting for the auxiliary\n fuel-tanks.\n\n\n Working rapidly, he lugged\n one out and strapped it into\n an empty gun turret, making\n sure he could get it loose\n again when he'd need it.\n\n\n He wiped away sweat and\n checked the angle at which\n the fuel-tank would face the\n ground when he came down\n for a landing. Satisfied, he\n knocked a hole in the side of\n the fuel-tank.\n\n\n \"Okay, Ganymede,\" he radioed.\n \"I'm coming down.\"\n\n\n He blasted loose from the\n tight orbit and rocked the\n ship down on manual. The\n forbidding surface of Ganymede\n grew closer and closer.\n Now he could see the iceworms\n plainly.", "\"No,\" Preston said reflectively.\n He gulped his drink\n and stood up. \"Okay. I'm\n ready. Neither snow nor rain\n shall stay me from my appointed\n rounds, or however\n the damned thing goes.\"\n\n\n \"That's a smart attitude,\n Preston. Come on—I'll walk\n you over to Administration.\"\nSavagely, Preston ripped\n away the hand that the other\n had put around his shoulders.\n \"I can get there myself. At\n least give me credit for that!\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Dawes said, shrugging.\n \"Well—good luck,\n Preston.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Thanks. Thanks\n real lots.\"\n\n\n He pushed his way past the\n man in Space Grays and\n shouldered past a couple of\n barflies as he left. He pushed\n open the door of the bar and\n stood outside for a moment.", "His scratch-pad began to\n fill with notations.\nFuel storage—\nEscape velocity—\nMargin of error—\nSafety factor—\nFinally he looked up. He\n had computed exactly how\n much spare fuel he had, how\n much he could afford to\n waste. It was a small figure—too\n small, perhaps.\n\n\n He turned to the radio.\n \"Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Where are you, Postal\n Ship?\"\n\n\n \"I'm in a tight orbit about\n a hundred miles up,\" Preston\n said. \"Give me the figures on\n the circumference of your\n Dome, Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Seven miles,\" the colonist\n said. \"What are you planning\n to do?\"", "\"This is Ganymede,\" a\n tense voice said. \"We've got\n trouble down here. Who are\n you?\"\n\n\n \"Mail ship,\" Preston said.\n \"From Earth. What's going\n on?\"\n\n\n There was the sound of\n voices whispering somewhere\n near the microphone. Finally:\n \"Hello, Mail Ship?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah?\"\n\n\n \"You're going to have to\n turn back to Earth, fellow.\n You can't land here. It's\n rough on us, missing a mail\n trip, but—\"\n\n\n Preston said impatiently,\n \"Why can't I land? What the\n devil's going on down there?\"\n\n\n \"We've been invaded,\" the\n tired voice said. \"The colony's\n been completely surrounded\n by iceworms.\"\n\n\n \"Iceworms?\"" ] ]
train	62324	[ "Why does Joseph lie about the water supply?", "What is \"La-anago Yergis\"?", "Why do Harvey and Joe change thier plan when confronting Johnson about the water?", "What makes Johnson's son so different?", "How is Joe's asteroid fever cured? ", "Johnson claims to have a multitude of jobs. Which title best describes him and what he does? ", "Why does Johnson stay on the asteroid, even though few people come by? ", "How does Johnson trick the duo into paying for things more than once?" ]	[ [ "There isn't a lot of water there, and he needs to be able to ration it out. ", "He wants people to believe they need to pay for it. ", "He wants to keep the fresh water for himself. ", "He thinks that people would prefer to buy filtered water. " ], [ "It's a panacea that can cure any ailment. ", "It's medicine. It's a cure for \"asteroid fever.\" ", "It's purified water. ", "It's a placebo. It's not real medicine. " ], [ "Joe suddenly feels unwell, and Harvey needs to help him. ", "They want to buy Genius, and don't want there to be bad blood. ", "Joseph's son is large and intimidating, and they want to avoid a fight. ", "They don't think they could take Joseph in a fight. " ], [ "He grew up without Earth's gravity, allowing him to grow larger than most people.", "He is much larger than the average man. ", "Like Genius, he is not human. ", "He's been living isolated from other humans with his father. " ], [ "The La-anago Yergis cures him.", "Nothing does - his sickness was a ruse. ", "The bitter water that Harvey switched in cures him. ", "The fresh water from the planet cures him. " ], [ "Conman. ", "Bartender. ", "Mayor. ", "Sheriff. " ], [ "Here he's able to meet traders like Harvey and Joe and barter with them. ", "He's able to run business even with few customers. ", "Here he's able to take advantage of travelers who are lost or in need of supplies. ", "He doesn't want to give up the spring of water. " ], [ "He strong arms them into buying with his son.", "He is dishonest. He offers something for free, without mentioning the actual price of it or that there even is a price.", "He takes advantage of their good will. ", "He doesn't trick anyone - he is an honest man that is running several jobs. " ] ]	[ 2, 4, 3, 1, 2, 1, 3, 2 ]	[ 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "\"Now, Joseph! Consider my quandary when I came back here to manufacture\n our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling\n yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods—an entire case,\n mind you. Was I to mix the extract with the water for which we had been\n swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? Where would our profit have\n been, then? No; I had to use the bitter free water, of course.\"\n\n\n \"But why use it on me?\" Joe demanded furiously.\n\n\n Harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. \"Did Johnson ask to\n taste it, or did he not? One must look ahead, Joseph. I had to produce\n the same\nmedicine\nthat we will now manufacture. Thus, you were a\n guinea pig for a splendid cause.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, okay,\" Joe said. \"But you shoulda charged him more.\"", "\"Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?\" said Harvey as he and Joe\n picked up buckets that hung on the tank. \"Johnson, as I saw instantly,\n is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly.\"\n\n\n \"Just the same,\" Joe griped, \"paying for water isn't something you can\n get used to in ten minutes.\"\n\n\n In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from\n the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents,\n according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their\n buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more.\nIt was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on\n a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign\n in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping\n a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to\n investigate.", "But Joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and\n tasting it.\n\n\n \"Sweet!\" he snarled.\n\n\n They rushed back to the first pool, where Joe again tasted a sample.\n His mouth went wry. \"Bitter! He uses only one pool, the sweet one! The\n only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's\n conscience.\"\n\n\n \"The asteroidal Poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on,\" said\n Harvey slowly. His eyes grew cold. \"Joseph, the good-natured artist in\n me has become a hard and merciless avenger. I shall not rest until we\n have had the best of this colonial con-man! Watch your cues from this\n point hence.\"\n\n\n Fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. But at the door they\n stopped and their fists unclenched.", "\"If that's an apology, I accept it. Now the mayor'll discuss filling\n your tanks. That's me. I'm also justice of the peace, official\n recorder, fire chief....\"\n\n\n \"And chief of police, no doubt,\" said Harvey jocosely.\n\n\n \"Nope. That's my son, Jed. Angus Johnson's my name. Folks here just\n call me Chief. I run this town, and run it right. How much water will\n you need?\"\n\n\n Joe estimated quickly. \"About seventy-five liters, if we go on half\n rations,\" he answered. He waited apprehensively.\n\n\n \"Let's say ten buckos a liter,\" the mayor said. \"On account of the\n quantity, I'm able to quote a bargain price. Shucks, boys, it hurts me\n more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. I just got to,\n that's all.\"", "Among the skimpy ground-crawling vines, they saw a long slender mound\n that was unmistakably a buried pipe.\n\n\n \"What's this doing here?\" Harvey asked, puzzled. \"I thought Johnson had\n to transport water in pails.\"\n\n\n \"Wonder where it leads to,\" Joe said uneasily.\n\n\n \"It leads\nto\nthe saloon,\" said Harvey, his eyes rapidly tracing the\n pipe back toward the spaceport. \"What I am concerned with is where it\n leads\nfrom\n.\"\n\n\n Five minutes later, panting heavily from the unaccustomed exertion of\n scrambling through the tangle of planetorial undergrowth, they burst\n into the open—before a clear, sparkling pool.\n\n\n Mutely, Harvey pointed out a pipe-end jutting under the water.\n\n\n \"I am growing suspicious,\" he said in a rigidly controlled voice.", "Without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out\n two glasses of water. The interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked\n for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. Meanwhile, the bartender\n had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey.\n\n\n Harvey and Joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so\n fast, but they were beginning to revive. They noticed the bartender's\n impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly.\n\n\n \"Strangers, eh?\" he asked at last.\n\n\n \"Solar salesmen, my colonial friend,\" Harvey answered in his usual\n lush manner. \"We purvey that renowned Martian remedy,\nLa-anago\n Yergis\n, the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in\n the ancient ruined city of La-anago. Medical science is unanimous in\n proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history\n of therapeutics.\"", "\"Folks are always thinkin' the other feller's out to do 'em,\" he said,\n shaking his head. \"Lemme explain about the water here. It's bitter\n as some kinds of sin before it's purified. Have to bring it in with\n buckets and make it sweet. That takes time and labor. Waddya think—I\n was chargin' feller critters for water just out of devilment? I charge\n because I gotta.\"\n\n\n \"Friend,\" said Harvey, taking out a wallet and counting off eight\n five-bucko bills, \"here is your money. What's fair is fair, and you\n have put a different complexion on what seemed at first to be an\n unconscionable interjection of a middleman between Nature and man's\n thirst.\"\n\n\n The saloon man removed his dirty apron and came around the bar.", "\"Joseph, I promise you that we shall get back every redsent of which\n that swindler cheated us, besides whatever other funds or valuables he\n possesses. We could not be content with less.\"\n\n\n \"Well, we're starting all right,\" admitted Joe. \"How about that thing\n with six arms? He looks like a valuable. Can't we grab him off?\"\n\n\n Harvey stopped filling bottles and looked up pensively.", "\"Medicine,\" Harvey propounded, \"should taste like medicine.\" To Joe he\n said: \"Come, my esteemed colleague. We must perform the sacred task to\n which we have dedicated ourselves.\"\n\n\n With Joe stumbling along behind, he left the saloon, crossed the\n clearing and entered the ship. As soon as they were inside, Joe dropped\n his murderous silence and cried:\n\n\n \"What kind of a dirty trick was that, giving me poison instead of that\n snake oil?\"\n\n\n \"That was not poison,\" Harvey contradicted quietly. \"It was\nLa-anago\n Yergis\nextract, plus.\"\n\n\n \"Plus what—arsenic?\"", "The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. \"What is it?\" he\n asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its\n worst and expects nothing better.\n\n\n \"Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of\n the ship,\" Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: \"You must see\n the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner\n will soon have it here for your astonishment.\"\n\n\n Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. \"Aw, Harv,\" he\n protested, \"do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were\n getting the key!\"\n\n\n \"We must not be selfish, my boy,\" Harvey said nobly. \"We have had our\n chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might\n have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here.\"", "\"We absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen,\" Harvey\n whispered excitedly when Johnson and the native were both in the\n kitchen, attending to the next course. \"He would make any society\n hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum\n to women like Mrs. van Schuyler-Morgan, merely for his hire.\"\n\n\n \"Think of a fast one fast,\" Joe agreed. \"You're right.\"\n\n\n \"But I dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often,\"\n complained Harvey. \"I wish Johnson would stay either swindler or honest\n merchant. This dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet I estimate\n our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents.\"\n\n\n The mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion.\n\n\n \"It's been a great honor, gents,\" he said. \"Ain't often I have\n visitors, and I like the best, like you two gents.\"", "\"That's the stuff, all right,\" he said, swallowing hard. He counted\n out the money into Harvey's hand, at a moderate rate that precariously\n balanced between his pleasure at getting the fever remedy and his pain\n at paying for it. Then he glanced out to see the position of Jupiter,\n and asked: \"You gents eaten yet? The restaurant's open now.\"\n\n\n Harvey and Joe looked at each other. They hadn't been thinking about\n food at all, but suddenly they realized that they were hungry.\n\n\n \"It's only water we were short of,\" Harvey said apprehensively. \"We've\n got rations back at the ship.\"\n\n\n \"\nH-mph!\n\" the mayor grunted. \"Powdered concentrates. Compressed pap.\n Suit yourselves. We treat our stomachs better here. And you're welcome\n to our hospitality.\"\n\n\n \"Your hospitality,\" said Harvey, \"depends on the prices you charge.\"", "Instead of replying, Harvey hurried outside to the ungainly second-hand\n rocket ship in the center of the shabby spaceport. He returned within a\n few minutes, carrying a bottle.\nJoe was still stretched out on the bar, panting, his eyes slowly\n crossing and uncrossing. Harvey lifted the patient's head tenderly,\n put the bottle to his lips and tilted it until he was forced to drink.\n When Joe tried to pull away, Harvey was inexorable. He made his partner\n drink until most of the liquid was gone. Then he stepped back and\n waited for the inevitable result.\n\n\n Joe's performance was better than ever. He lay supine for several\n moments, his face twisted into an expression that seemed doomed\n to perpetual wryness. Slowly, however, he sat up and his features\n straightened out.\n\n\n \"Are—are you all right?\" asked the mayor anxiously.\n\n\n \"Much better,\" said Joe in a weak voice.", "The mayor gestured to the native, who shuffled out to the tanks with\n them. The planetoid man worked the pump while the mayor intently\n watched the crude level-gauge, crying \"Stop!\" when it registered the\n proper amount. Then Johnson rubbed his thumb on his index finger and\n wetted his lips expectantly.\n\n\n Harvey bravely counted off the bills. He asked: \"But what are we to\n do about replenishing our battery fluid? Ten buckos a liter would be\n preposterous. We simply can't afford it.\"\n\n\n Johnson's response almost floored them. \"Who said anything about\n charging you for battery water? You can have all you want for nothing.\n It's just the purified stuff that comes so high.\"\n\n\n After giving them directions that would take them to the free-water\n pool, the ponderous factotum of Planetoid 42 shook hands and headed\n back to the saloon. His six-armed assistant followed him inside.", "\"I have every hope of luring away the profitable monstrosity.\n Apparently you have also surmised the fortune we could make with him.\n At first I purpose to exhibit him on our interplanetary tours with our\n streamlined panacea; he would be a spectacular attraction for bucolic\n suckers. Later, a brief period of demonstrating his abilities on the\n audio-visiphone. Then our triumph—we shall sell him at a stupendous\n figure to the zoo!\"\nJoe was still dazed by that monetary vista when he and Harvey carried\n the case of medicine to the saloon. The mayor had already cleared a\n place of honor in the cluttered back room, where he told them to put it\n down carefully. Then he took the elaborate bottle-opener Harvey gave\n him, reverently uncorked a bottle and sampled it. It must have been at\n least as good as the first; he gagged.", "Johnson sighed ponderously. \"I was afraid you'd act like that,\" he said\n with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on\n his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. \"Afraid I'll have to\n ask the sheriff to take over.\"\n\n\n Johnson, the \"sheriff,\" collected the money, and Johnson, the\n \"restaurateur,\" pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to\n remain calm.\n\n\n \"My friend,\" he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a\n schoolmasterish severity, \"your long absence from Earth has perhaps\n made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the\n folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly\n to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound\n foolish.'\"\n\n\n \"I don't get the connection,\" objected Johnson.", "Harvey nodded in relief. \"We have attempted to repay our host, Joseph.\n He has spurned our generosity. We have now the chance to continue our\n study, which I am positive will soon reward us with the key to an\n enormous fortune.\"\n\n\n \"Well, that's no plating off our bow,\" Joe grunted. \"I'm glad he did\n turn it down. I hated to give it up after working on it for three whole\n years.\"\n\n\n He picked up the radio and began walking toward the door.\n\n\n \"Now, hold on!\" the mayor cried. \"I ain't\nsaying\nI'll buy, but what\n is it I'm turning down?\"\n\n\n Joe returned and set the instrument down on the bar. His face\n sorrowful, Harvey fondly stroked the scarred plasticoid cabinet.", "\"Yeah?\" said the bartender disinterestedly, polishing the chaser\n glasses without washing them. \"Where you heading?\"\n\n\n \"Out of Mars for Ganymede. Our condenser broke down, and we've gone\n without water for five ghastly days.\"\n\n\n \"Got a mechanic around this dumping ground you call a port?\" Joe asked.\n\n\n \"We did. He came near starving and moved on to Titan. Ships don't land\n here unless they're in trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Then where's the water lead-in? We'll fill up and push off.\"\n\n\n \"Mayor takes care of that,\" replied the saloon owner. \"If you gents're\n finished at the bar, your drinks'll be forty buckos.\"\n\n\n Harvey grinned puzzledly. \"We didn't take any whiskey.\"", "\"Well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying,\" answered\n the mayor promptly. \"What's more, the kind of dinner I serve here you\n can't get anywhere else for any price.\"\n\n\n Swiftly, Harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. He saw\n none.\n\n\n \"Let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, Joe,\" he said guardedly.\n\n\n Johnson immediately fell into the role of \"mine host.\"\n\n\n \"Come right in, gents,\" he invited. \"Right into the dining room.\"\n\n\n He seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or\n less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little\n chance of company.", "The pursuit of vengeance, Harvey realized, had taken a quick and\n unpleasant turn. Something shrewd was called for....\n\n\n \"Joseph!\" he exclaimed, looking at his partner in alarm. \"Don't you\n feel well?\"\n\n\n Even before the others could turn to him, Joe's practiced eyes were\n gently crossing. He sagged against the door frame, all his features\n drooping like a bloodhound's.\n\n\n \"Bring him in here!\" Johnson cried. \"I mean, get him away! He's coming\n down with asteroid fever!\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" replied Harvey calmly. \"Any fool knows the first symptoms\n of the disease that once scourged the universe.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean,\nonce\n?\" demanded Johnson. \"I come down with it\n every year, and I ain't hankering to have it in an off-season. Get him\n out of here!\"" ], [ "\"Medicine,\" Harvey propounded, \"should taste like medicine.\" To Joe he\n said: \"Come, my esteemed colleague. We must perform the sacred task to\n which we have dedicated ourselves.\"\n\n\n With Joe stumbling along behind, he left the saloon, crossed the\n clearing and entered the ship. As soon as they were inside, Joe dropped\n his murderous silence and cried:\n\n\n \"What kind of a dirty trick was that, giving me poison instead of that\n snake oil?\"\n\n\n \"That was not poison,\" Harvey contradicted quietly. \"It was\nLa-anago\n Yergis\nextract, plus.\"\n\n\n \"Plus what—arsenic?\"", "\"Maybe you need another dose,\" Harvey suggested.\n\n\n Joe recoiled. \"I'm fine now!\" he cried, and sprang off the bar to prove\n it.\n\n\n Astonished, Johnson and his son drew closer. They searched Joe's face,\n and then the mayor timidly felt his pulse.\n\n\n \"Well, I'll be hanged!\" Johnson ejaculated.\n\n\n \"\nLa-anago Yergis\nnever fails, my friend,\" Harvey explained. \"By\n actual test, it conquers asteroid fever in from four to twenty-three\n minutes, depending on the severity of the attack. Luckily, we caught\n this one before it grew formidable.\"\n\n\n The mayor's eyes became clouded mirrors of an inward conflict. \"If you\n don't charge too much,\" he said warily, \"I might think of buying some.\"", "Without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out\n two glasses of water. The interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked\n for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. Meanwhile, the bartender\n had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey.\n\n\n Harvey and Joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so\n fast, but they were beginning to revive. They noticed the bartender's\n impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly.\n\n\n \"Strangers, eh?\" he asked at last.\n\n\n \"Solar salesmen, my colonial friend,\" Harvey answered in his usual\n lush manner. \"We purvey that renowned Martian remedy,\nLa-anago\n Yergis\n, the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in\n the ancient ruined city of La-anago. Medical science is unanimous in\n proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history\n of therapeutics.\"", "\"Joseph, I promise you that we shall get back every redsent of which\n that swindler cheated us, besides whatever other funds or valuables he\n possesses. We could not be content with less.\"\n\n\n \"Well, we're starting all right,\" admitted Joe. \"How about that thing\n with six arms? He looks like a valuable. Can't we grab him off?\"\n\n\n Harvey stopped filling bottles and looked up pensively.", "As if on cue, Genius came out and put the check down between Joe and\n Harvey. Harvey picked it up negligently, but his casual air vanished in\n a yelp of horror.\n\n\n \"What the devil is this?\" he shouted.—\"How do you arrive at this\n fantastic, idiotic figure—\nthree hundred and twenty-eight buckos\n!\"\nJohnson didn't answer. Neither did Genius; he simply put on the table,\n not a fingerbowl, but a magnifying glass. With one of his thirty\n fingers he pointed politely to the bottom of the menu.\n\n\n Harvey focused on the microscopic print, and his face went pasty with\n rage. The minute note read: \"Services and entertainment, 327 buckos 80\n redsents.\"\n\n\n \"You can go to hell!\" Joe growled. \"We won't pay it!\"", "\"We absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen,\" Harvey\n whispered excitedly when Johnson and the native were both in the\n kitchen, attending to the next course. \"He would make any society\n hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum\n to women like Mrs. van Schuyler-Morgan, merely for his hire.\"\n\n\n \"Think of a fast one fast,\" Joe agreed. \"You're right.\"\n\n\n \"But I dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often,\"\n complained Harvey. \"I wish Johnson would stay either swindler or honest\n merchant. This dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet I estimate\n our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents.\"\n\n\n The mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion.\n\n\n \"It's been a great honor, gents,\" he said. \"Ain't often I have\n visitors, and I like the best, like you two gents.\"", "\"If that's an apology, I accept it. Now the mayor'll discuss filling\n your tanks. That's me. I'm also justice of the peace, official\n recorder, fire chief....\"\n\n\n \"And chief of police, no doubt,\" said Harvey jocosely.\n\n\n \"Nope. That's my son, Jed. Angus Johnson's my name. Folks here just\n call me Chief. I run this town, and run it right. How much water will\n you need?\"\n\n\n Joe estimated quickly. \"About seventy-five liters, if we go on half\n rations,\" he answered. He waited apprehensively.\n\n\n \"Let's say ten buckos a liter,\" the mayor said. \"On account of the\n quantity, I'm able to quote a bargain price. Shucks, boys, it hurts me\n more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. I just got to,\n that's all.\"", "Johnson sighed ponderously. \"I was afraid you'd act like that,\" he said\n with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on\n his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. \"Afraid I'll have to\n ask the sheriff to take over.\"\n\n\n Johnson, the \"sheriff,\" collected the money, and Johnson, the\n \"restaurateur,\" pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to\n remain calm.\n\n\n \"My friend,\" he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a\n schoolmasterish severity, \"your long absence from Earth has perhaps\n made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the\n folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly\n to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound\n foolish.'\"\n\n\n \"I don't get the connection,\" objected Johnson.", "\"Well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying,\" answered\n the mayor promptly. \"What's more, the kind of dinner I serve here you\n can't get anywhere else for any price.\"\n\n\n Swiftly, Harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. He saw\n none.\n\n\n \"Let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, Joe,\" he said guardedly.\n\n\n Johnson immediately fell into the role of \"mine host.\"\n\n\n \"Come right in, gents,\" he invited. \"Right into the dining room.\"\n\n\n He seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or\n less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little\n chance of company.", "The pursuit of vengeance, Harvey realized, had taken a quick and\n unpleasant turn. Something shrewd was called for....\n\n\n \"Joseph!\" he exclaimed, looking at his partner in alarm. \"Don't you\n feel well?\"\n\n\n Even before the others could turn to him, Joe's practiced eyes were\n gently crossing. He sagged against the door frame, all his features\n drooping like a bloodhound's.\n\n\n \"Bring him in here!\" Johnson cried. \"I mean, get him away! He's coming\n down with asteroid fever!\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" replied Harvey calmly. \"Any fool knows the first symptoms\n of the disease that once scourged the universe.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean,\nonce\n?\" demanded Johnson. \"I come down with it\n every year, and I ain't hankering to have it in an off-season. Get him\n out of here!\"", "In their hectic voyages from planet to planet, the pair of panacea\n purveyors had encountered the usual strange life-forms. But never had\n they seen anything like the amazing creature in that colonial saloon.\n\n\n Paying no attention to them, it was carrying a case of liquor in two\n hands, six siphons in two others, and a broom and dustpan in the\n remaining pair. The bartender, a big man resembling the plumpish\n Harvey in build, was leaning negligently on the counter, ordering this\n impossible being to fill the partly-emptied bottles, squeeze fruit\n juice and sweep the floor, all of which the native did simultaneously.\n\n\n \"Nonsense,\" Harvey croaked uncertainly. \"We have seen enough queer\n things to know there are always more.\"\n\n\n He led the way inside. Through thirst-cracked lips he rasped:\n \"Water—quick!\"", "Genius, the six-armed native, appeared from the dingy kitchen with\n two menus in one hand, two glasses of water in another, plus napkins,\n silverware, a pitcher, plates, saucers, cups, and their cocktails,\n which were on the house. Then he stood by for orders.\n\n\n Harvey and Joe studied the menu critically. The prices were\n phenomenally low. When they glanced up at Johnson in perplexity, he\n grinned, bowed and asked: \"Everything satisfactory, gents?\"\n\n\n \"Quite,\" said Harvey. \"We shall order.\"\n\n\n For an hour they were served amazing dishes, both fresh and canned, the\n culinary wealth of this planetoid and all the system. And the service\n was as extraordinary as the meal itself. With four hands, Genius played\n deftly upon a pair of mellow Venusian\nviotars\n, using his other two\n hands for waiting on the table.", "But Joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and\n tasting it.\n\n\n \"Sweet!\" he snarled.\n\n\n They rushed back to the first pool, where Joe again tasted a sample.\n His mouth went wry. \"Bitter! He uses only one pool, the sweet one! The\n only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's\n conscience.\"\n\n\n \"The asteroidal Poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on,\" said\n Harvey slowly. His eyes grew cold. \"Joseph, the good-natured artist in\n me has become a hard and merciless avenger. I shall not rest until we\n have had the best of this colonial con-man! Watch your cues from this\n point hence.\"\n\n\n Fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. But at the door they\n stopped and their fists unclenched.", "\"Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?\" said Harvey as he and Joe\n picked up buckets that hung on the tank. \"Johnson, as I saw instantly,\n is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly.\"\n\n\n \"Just the same,\" Joe griped, \"paying for water isn't something you can\n get used to in ten minutes.\"\n\n\n In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from\n the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents,\n according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their\n buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more.\nIt was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on\n a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign\n in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping\n a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to\n investigate.", "\"In good time. He can't be moved immediately.\"\n\n\n \"Then he'll be here for months!\"\n\n\n Harvey helped Joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. The mayor and\n his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe\n in tiny, uncontaminating gasps.\n\n\n \"You'll find everything you want in the back room,\" Johnson said\n frantically, \"sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction\n cups—\"\n\n\n \"Relics of the past,\" Harvey stated. \"One medication is all modern man\n requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\" asked the mayor without conviction.", "Instead of replying, Harvey hurried outside to the ungainly second-hand\n rocket ship in the center of the shabby spaceport. He returned within a\n few minutes, carrying a bottle.\nJoe was still stretched out on the bar, panting, his eyes slowly\n crossing and uncrossing. Harvey lifted the patient's head tenderly,\n put the bottle to his lips and tilted it until he was forced to drink.\n When Joe tried to pull away, Harvey was inexorable. He made his partner\n drink until most of the liquid was gone. Then he stepped back and\n waited for the inevitable result.\n\n\n Joe's performance was better than ever. He lay supine for several\n moments, his face twisted into an expression that seemed doomed\n to perpetual wryness. Slowly, however, he sat up and his features\n straightened out.\n\n\n \"Are—are you all right?\" asked the mayor anxiously.\n\n\n \"Much better,\" said Joe in a weak voice.", "\"That's the stuff, all right,\" he said, swallowing hard. He counted\n out the money into Harvey's hand, at a moderate rate that precariously\n balanced between his pleasure at getting the fever remedy and his pain\n at paying for it. Then he glanced out to see the position of Jupiter,\n and asked: \"You gents eaten yet? The restaurant's open now.\"\n\n\n Harvey and Joe looked at each other. They hadn't been thinking about\n food at all, but suddenly they realized that they were hungry.\n\n\n \"It's only water we were short of,\" Harvey said apprehensively. \"We've\n got rations back at the ship.\"\n\n\n \"\nH-mph!\n\" the mayor grunted. \"Powdered concentrates. Compressed pap.\n Suit yourselves. We treat our stomachs better here. And you're welcome\n to our hospitality.\"\n\n\n \"Your hospitality,\" said Harvey, \"depends on the prices you charge.\"", "\"I have every hope of luring away the profitable monstrosity.\n Apparently you have also surmised the fortune we could make with him.\n At first I purpose to exhibit him on our interplanetary tours with our\n streamlined panacea; he would be a spectacular attraction for bucolic\n suckers. Later, a brief period of demonstrating his abilities on the\n audio-visiphone. Then our triumph—we shall sell him at a stupendous\n figure to the zoo!\"\nJoe was still dazed by that monetary vista when he and Harvey carried\n the case of medicine to the saloon. The mayor had already cleared a\n place of honor in the cluttered back room, where he told them to put it\n down carefully. Then he took the elaborate bottle-opener Harvey gave\n him, reverently uncorked a bottle and sampled it. It must have been at\n least as good as the first; he gagged.", "\"Now, Joseph! Consider my quandary when I came back here to manufacture\n our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling\n yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods—an entire case,\n mind you. Was I to mix the extract with the water for which we had been\n swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? Where would our profit have\n been, then? No; I had to use the bitter free water, of course.\"\n\n\n \"But why use it on me?\" Joe demanded furiously.\n\n\n Harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. \"Did Johnson ask to\n taste it, or did he not? One must look ahead, Joseph. I had to produce\n the same\nmedicine\nthat we will now manufacture. Thus, you were a\n guinea pig for a splendid cause.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, okay,\" Joe said. \"But you shoulda charged him more.\"", "\"Well, by obliging us to pay such a high price for your dinner, you put\n out of your reach the chance of profiting from a really substantial\n deal. My partner and I were prepared to make you a sizable offer for\n the peculiar creature you call Genius. But by reducing our funds the\n way you have—\"\n\n\n \"Who said I wanted to sell him?\" the mayor interrupted. He rubbed his\n fingers together and asked disinterestedly: \"What were you going to\n offer, anyhow?\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter any longer,\" Harvey said with elaborate\n carelessness. \"Perhaps you wouldn't have accepted it, anyway.\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Johnson came back emphatically. \"But what would your\n offer have been which I would have turned down?\"\n\n\n \"Which one? The one we were going to make, or the one we can make now?\"\n\n\n \"Either one. It don't make no difference. Genius is too valuable to\n sell.\"" ], [ "\"Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?\" said Harvey as he and Joe\n picked up buckets that hung on the tank. \"Johnson, as I saw instantly,\n is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly.\"\n\n\n \"Just the same,\" Joe griped, \"paying for water isn't something you can\n get used to in ten minutes.\"\n\n\n In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from\n the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents,\n according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their\n buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more.\nIt was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on\n a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign\n in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping\n a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to\n investigate.", "But Joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and\n tasting it.\n\n\n \"Sweet!\" he snarled.\n\n\n They rushed back to the first pool, where Joe again tasted a sample.\n His mouth went wry. \"Bitter! He uses only one pool, the sweet one! The\n only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's\n conscience.\"\n\n\n \"The asteroidal Poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on,\" said\n Harvey slowly. His eyes grew cold. \"Joseph, the good-natured artist in\n me has become a hard and merciless avenger. I shall not rest until we\n have had the best of this colonial con-man! Watch your cues from this\n point hence.\"\n\n\n Fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. But at the door they\n stopped and their fists unclenched.", "Among the skimpy ground-crawling vines, they saw a long slender mound\n that was unmistakably a buried pipe.\n\n\n \"What's this doing here?\" Harvey asked, puzzled. \"I thought Johnson had\n to transport water in pails.\"\n\n\n \"Wonder where it leads to,\" Joe said uneasily.\n\n\n \"It leads\nto\nthe saloon,\" said Harvey, his eyes rapidly tracing the\n pipe back toward the spaceport. \"What I am concerned with is where it\n leads\nfrom\n.\"\n\n\n Five minutes later, panting heavily from the unaccustomed exertion of\n scrambling through the tangle of planetorial undergrowth, they burst\n into the open—before a clear, sparkling pool.\n\n\n Mutely, Harvey pointed out a pipe-end jutting under the water.\n\n\n \"I am growing suspicious,\" he said in a rigidly controlled voice.", "\"If that's an apology, I accept it. Now the mayor'll discuss filling\n your tanks. That's me. I'm also justice of the peace, official\n recorder, fire chief....\"\n\n\n \"And chief of police, no doubt,\" said Harvey jocosely.\n\n\n \"Nope. That's my son, Jed. Angus Johnson's my name. Folks here just\n call me Chief. I run this town, and run it right. How much water will\n you need?\"\n\n\n Joe estimated quickly. \"About seventy-five liters, if we go on half\n rations,\" he answered. He waited apprehensively.\n\n\n \"Let's say ten buckos a liter,\" the mayor said. \"On account of the\n quantity, I'm able to quote a bargain price. Shucks, boys, it hurts me\n more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. I just got to,\n that's all.\"", "\"Now, Joseph! Consider my quandary when I came back here to manufacture\n our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling\n yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods—an entire case,\n mind you. Was I to mix the extract with the water for which we had been\n swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? Where would our profit have\n been, then? No; I had to use the bitter free water, of course.\"\n\n\n \"But why use it on me?\" Joe demanded furiously.\n\n\n Harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. \"Did Johnson ask to\n taste it, or did he not? One must look ahead, Joseph. I had to produce\n the same\nmedicine\nthat we will now manufacture. Thus, you were a\n guinea pig for a splendid cause.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, okay,\" Joe said. \"But you shoulda charged him more.\"", "Johnson sighed ponderously. \"I was afraid you'd act like that,\" he said\n with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on\n his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. \"Afraid I'll have to\n ask the sheriff to take over.\"\n\n\n Johnson, the \"sheriff,\" collected the money, and Johnson, the\n \"restaurateur,\" pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to\n remain calm.\n\n\n \"My friend,\" he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a\n schoolmasterish severity, \"your long absence from Earth has perhaps\n made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the\n folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly\n to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound\n foolish.'\"\n\n\n \"I don't get the connection,\" objected Johnson.", "\"Well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying,\" answered\n the mayor promptly. \"What's more, the kind of dinner I serve here you\n can't get anywhere else for any price.\"\n\n\n Swiftly, Harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. He saw\n none.\n\n\n \"Let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, Joe,\" he said guardedly.\n\n\n Johnson immediately fell into the role of \"mine host.\"\n\n\n \"Come right in, gents,\" he invited. \"Right into the dining room.\"\n\n\n He seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or\n less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little\n chance of company.", "\"Medicine,\" Harvey propounded, \"should taste like medicine.\" To Joe he\n said: \"Come, my esteemed colleague. We must perform the sacred task to\n which we have dedicated ourselves.\"\n\n\n With Joe stumbling along behind, he left the saloon, crossed the\n clearing and entered the ship. As soon as they were inside, Joe dropped\n his murderous silence and cried:\n\n\n \"What kind of a dirty trick was that, giving me poison instead of that\n snake oil?\"\n\n\n \"That was not poison,\" Harvey contradicted quietly. \"It was\nLa-anago\n Yergis\nextract, plus.\"\n\n\n \"Plus what—arsenic?\"", "\"In good time. He can't be moved immediately.\"\n\n\n \"Then he'll be here for months!\"\n\n\n Harvey helped Joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. The mayor and\n his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe\n in tiny, uncontaminating gasps.\n\n\n \"You'll find everything you want in the back room,\" Johnson said\n frantically, \"sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction\n cups—\"\n\n\n \"Relics of the past,\" Harvey stated. \"One medication is all modern man\n requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\" asked the mayor without conviction.", "\"We absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen,\" Harvey\n whispered excitedly when Johnson and the native were both in the\n kitchen, attending to the next course. \"He would make any society\n hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum\n to women like Mrs. van Schuyler-Morgan, merely for his hire.\"\n\n\n \"Think of a fast one fast,\" Joe agreed. \"You're right.\"\n\n\n \"But I dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often,\"\n complained Harvey. \"I wish Johnson would stay either swindler or honest\n merchant. This dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet I estimate\n our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents.\"\n\n\n The mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion.\n\n\n \"It's been a great honor, gents,\" he said. \"Ain't often I have\n visitors, and I like the best, like you two gents.\"", "Unwillingly, Joe turned and shuffled out.\nOn a larger and heavier world than Planetoid 42, Johnson's curiosity\n would probably have had weight and mass. He was bursting with\n questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. For\n his part, Harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a Venusian amoeba\n until Joe came in, lugging a radio.\n\n\n \"Is that what you were talking about?\" the mayor snorted. \"What makes\n you think I want a radio? I came here to get away from singers and\n political speech-makers.\"\n\n\n \"Do not jump to hasty conclusions,\" Harvey cautioned. \"Another word,\n and I shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had,\n with the sole exceptions of Joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor\n of this absolutely awe-inspiring device.\"\n\n\n \"I ain't in the market for a radio,\" Johnson said stubbornly.", "\"Joseph, I promise you that we shall get back every redsent of which\n that swindler cheated us, besides whatever other funds or valuables he\n possesses. We could not be content with less.\"\n\n\n \"Well, we're starting all right,\" admitted Joe. \"How about that thing\n with six arms? He looks like a valuable. Can't we grab him off?\"\n\n\n Harvey stopped filling bottles and looked up pensively.", "The pursuit of vengeance, Harvey realized, had taken a quick and\n unpleasant turn. Something shrewd was called for....\n\n\n \"Joseph!\" he exclaimed, looking at his partner in alarm. \"Don't you\n feel well?\"\n\n\n Even before the others could turn to him, Joe's practiced eyes were\n gently crossing. He sagged against the door frame, all his features\n drooping like a bloodhound's.\n\n\n \"Bring him in here!\" Johnson cried. \"I mean, get him away! He's coming\n down with asteroid fever!\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" replied Harvey calmly. \"Any fool knows the first symptoms\n of the disease that once scourged the universe.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean,\nonce\n?\" demanded Johnson. \"I come down with it\n every year, and I ain't hankering to have it in an off-season. Get him\n out of here!\"", "The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. \"What is it?\" he\n asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its\n worst and expects nothing better.\n\n\n \"Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of\n the ship,\" Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: \"You must see\n the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner\n will soon have it here for your astonishment.\"\n\n\n Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. \"Aw, Harv,\" he\n protested, \"do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were\n getting the key!\"\n\n\n \"We must not be selfish, my boy,\" Harvey said nobly. \"We have had our\n chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might\n have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here.\"", "Instead of replying, Harvey hurried outside to the ungainly second-hand\n rocket ship in the center of the shabby spaceport. He returned within a\n few minutes, carrying a bottle.\nJoe was still stretched out on the bar, panting, his eyes slowly\n crossing and uncrossing. Harvey lifted the patient's head tenderly,\n put the bottle to his lips and tilted it until he was forced to drink.\n When Joe tried to pull away, Harvey was inexorable. He made his partner\n drink until most of the liquid was gone. Then he stepped back and\n waited for the inevitable result.\n\n\n Joe's performance was better than ever. He lay supine for several\n moments, his face twisted into an expression that seemed doomed\n to perpetual wryness. Slowly, however, he sat up and his features\n straightened out.\n\n\n \"Are—are you all right?\" asked the mayor anxiously.\n\n\n \"Much better,\" said Joe in a weak voice.", "Without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out\n two glasses of water. The interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked\n for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. Meanwhile, the bartender\n had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey.\n\n\n Harvey and Joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so\n fast, but they were beginning to revive. They noticed the bartender's\n impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly.\n\n\n \"Strangers, eh?\" he asked at last.\n\n\n \"Solar salesmen, my colonial friend,\" Harvey answered in his usual\n lush manner. \"We purvey that renowned Martian remedy,\nLa-anago\n Yergis\n, the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in\n the ancient ruined city of La-anago. Medical science is unanimous in\n proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history\n of therapeutics.\"", "\"Folks are always thinkin' the other feller's out to do 'em,\" he said,\n shaking his head. \"Lemme explain about the water here. It's bitter\n as some kinds of sin before it's purified. Have to bring it in with\n buckets and make it sweet. That takes time and labor. Waddya think—I\n was chargin' feller critters for water just out of devilment? I charge\n because I gotta.\"\n\n\n \"Friend,\" said Harvey, taking out a wallet and counting off eight\n five-bucko bills, \"here is your money. What's fair is fair, and you\n have put a different complexion on what seemed at first to be an\n unconscionable interjection of a middleman between Nature and man's\n thirst.\"\n\n\n The saloon man removed his dirty apron and came around the bar.", "\"Oh, come now, Mr. Johnson. Don't tell me no amount of money would\n tempt you!\"\n\n\n \"Nope. But how much did you say?\"\n\n\n \"Ah, then you will consider releasing Genius!\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'll tell you something,\" said the mayor confidentially. \"When\n you've got one thing, you've got one thing. But when you've got money,\n it's the same as having a lot of things. Because, if you've got money,\n you can buy this and that and this and that and—\"\n\n\n \"This and that,\" concluded Joe. \"We'll give you five hundred buckos.\"\n\n\n \"Now, gents!\" Johnson remonstrated. \"Why, six hundred would hardly—\"\n\n\n \"You haven't left us much money,\" Harvey put in.", "Harvey nodded in relief. \"We have attempted to repay our host, Joseph.\n He has spurned our generosity. We have now the chance to continue our\n study, which I am positive will soon reward us with the key to an\n enormous fortune.\"\n\n\n \"Well, that's no plating off our bow,\" Joe grunted. \"I'm glad he did\n turn it down. I hated to give it up after working on it for three whole\n years.\"\n\n\n He picked up the radio and began walking toward the door.\n\n\n \"Now, hold on!\" the mayor cried. \"I ain't\nsaying\nI'll buy, but what\n is it I'm turning down?\"\n\n\n Joe returned and set the instrument down on the bar. His face\n sorrowful, Harvey fondly stroked the scarred plasticoid cabinet.", "\"That's the stuff, all right,\" he said, swallowing hard. He counted\n out the money into Harvey's hand, at a moderate rate that precariously\n balanced between his pleasure at getting the fever remedy and his pain\n at paying for it. Then he glanced out to see the position of Jupiter,\n and asked: \"You gents eaten yet? The restaurant's open now.\"\n\n\n Harvey and Joe looked at each other. They hadn't been thinking about\n food at all, but suddenly they realized that they were hungry.\n\n\n \"It's only water we were short of,\" Harvey said apprehensively. \"We've\n got rations back at the ship.\"\n\n\n \"\nH-mph!\n\" the mayor grunted. \"Powdered concentrates. Compressed pap.\n Suit yourselves. We treat our stomachs better here. And you're welcome\n to our hospitality.\"\n\n\n \"Your hospitality,\" said Harvey, \"depends on the prices you charge.\"" ], [ "\"Thought you gents were leaving,\" the mayor called out, seeing them\n frozen in the doorway. \"Glad you didn't. Now you can meet my son, Jed.\n Him and me are the whole Earthman population of Johnson City.\"\n\n\n \"You don't need any more,\" said Harvey, dismayed.\n\n\n Johnson's eight-foot son, topped by a massive roof of sun-bleached hair\n and held up by a foundation that seemed immovable, had obviously been\n born and raised in low gravity. For any decent-sized world would have\n kept him down near the general dimensions of a man.\n\n\n He held out an acre of palm. Harvey studied it worriedly, put his own\n hand somewhere on it, swallowed as it closed, then breathed again when\n his fingers were released in five units instead of a single compressed\n one.\n\n\n \"Pleased to meet you,\" piped a voice that had never known a dense\n atmosphere.", "\"We absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen,\" Harvey\n whispered excitedly when Johnson and the native were both in the\n kitchen, attending to the next course. \"He would make any society\n hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum\n to women like Mrs. van Schuyler-Morgan, merely for his hire.\"\n\n\n \"Think of a fast one fast,\" Joe agreed. \"You're right.\"\n\n\n \"But I dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often,\"\n complained Harvey. \"I wish Johnson would stay either swindler or honest\n merchant. This dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet I estimate\n our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents.\"\n\n\n The mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion.\n\n\n \"It's been a great honor, gents,\" he said. \"Ain't often I have\n visitors, and I like the best, like you two gents.\"", "The mayor frowned. \"All right, we'll split the difference. Make it\n five-fifty.\"\n\n\n Harvey was quick to pay out, for this was a genuine windfall. Then he\n stood up and admired the astonishing possession he had so inexpensively\n acquired.\n\n\n \"I really hate to deprive you of this unique creature,\" he said to\n Johnson. \"I should imagine you will be rather lonely, with only your\n filial mammoth to keep you company.\"\n\n\n \"I sure will,\" Johnson confessed glumly. \"I got pretty attached to\n Genius, and I'm going to miss him something awful.\"\n\n\n Harvey forcibly removed his eyes from the native, who was clearing off\n the table almost all at once.\n\n\n \"My friend,\" he said, \"we take your only solace, it is true, but in his\n place we can offer something no less amazing and instructive.\"", "Johnson winced. \"Is that what you want to unload on me?\"\n\n\n \"For a very good reason, sir. Patience is the virtue that will be\n rewarded with the key to these fourth dimensional broadcasts. A man who\n could devote his life to improving this lonely worldlet is obviously a\n person with unusual patience.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" the mayor said grudgingly, \"I ain't exactly flighty.\"\n\n\n \"Therefore, you are the man who could unravel the problem!\"\n\n\n Johnson asked skeptically: \"How about a sample first?\"", "\"Oh, come now, Mr. Johnson. Don't tell me no amount of money would\n tempt you!\"\n\n\n \"Nope. But how much did you say?\"\n\n\n \"Ah, then you will consider releasing Genius!\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'll tell you something,\" said the mayor confidentially. \"When\n you've got one thing, you've got one thing. But when you've got money,\n it's the same as having a lot of things. Because, if you've got money,\n you can buy this and that and this and that and—\"\n\n\n \"This and that,\" concluded Joe. \"We'll give you five hundred buckos.\"\n\n\n \"Now, gents!\" Johnson remonstrated. \"Why, six hundred would hardly—\"\n\n\n \"You haven't left us much money,\" Harvey put in.", "Johnson sighed ponderously. \"I was afraid you'd act like that,\" he said\n with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on\n his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. \"Afraid I'll have to\n ask the sheriff to take over.\"\n\n\n Johnson, the \"sheriff,\" collected the money, and Johnson, the\n \"restaurateur,\" pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to\n remain calm.\n\n\n \"My friend,\" he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a\n schoolmasterish severity, \"your long absence from Earth has perhaps\n made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the\n folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly\n to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound\n foolish.'\"\n\n\n \"I don't get the connection,\" objected Johnson.", "\"In good time. He can't be moved immediately.\"\n\n\n \"Then he'll be here for months!\"\n\n\n Harvey helped Joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. The mayor and\n his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe\n in tiny, uncontaminating gasps.\n\n\n \"You'll find everything you want in the back room,\" Johnson said\n frantically, \"sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction\n cups—\"\n\n\n \"Relics of the past,\" Harvey stated. \"One medication is all modern man\n requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\" asked the mayor without conviction.", "\"We do not sell this unbelievable remedy,\" Harvey replied with dignity.\n \"It sells itself.\"\n\n\n \"'Course, I'd expect a considerable reduction if I bought a whole\n case,\" said Johnson.\n\n\n \"That would be the smallest investment you could make, compared with\n the vast loss of time and strength the fever involves.\"\n\n\n \"How much?\" asked the mayor unhappily.\n\n\n \"For you, since you have taken us in so hospitably, a mere five hundred\n buckos.\"\n\n\n Johnson did not actually stagger back, but he gave the impression of\n doing so. \"F-four hundred,\" he offered.\n\n\n \"Not a red cent less than four seventy-five,\" Harvey said flatly.\n\n\n \"Make it four fifty,\" quavered Johnson.\n\n\n \"I dislike haggling,\" said Harvey.", "\"To make a long story, Mr. Johnson,\" he said, \"Joseph and I were among\n the chosen few who knew the famous Doctor Dean intimately. Just before\n his tragic death, you will recall, Dean allegedly went insane.\" He\n banged his fist on the bar. \"I have said it before, and I repeat again,\n that was a malicious lie, spread by the doctor's enemies to discredit\n his greatest invention—this fourth dimensional radio!\"\n\n\n \"This what?\" Johnson blurted out.\n\n\n \"In simple terms,\" clarified Harvey, \"the ingenious doctor discovered\n that the yawning chasm between the dimensions could be bridged by\n energy of all quanta. There has never been any question that the\n inhabitants of the super-dimension would be far more civilized than\n ourselves. Consequently, the man who could tap their knowledge would\n find himself in possession of a powerful, undreamt-of science!\"\n\n\n The mayor looked respectfully at the silent box on the bar.", "The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. \"What is it?\" he\n asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its\n worst and expects nothing better.\n\n\n \"Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of\n the ship,\" Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: \"You must see\n the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner\n will soon have it here for your astonishment.\"\n\n\n Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. \"Aw, Harv,\" he\n protested, \"do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were\n getting the key!\"\n\n\n \"We must not be selfish, my boy,\" Harvey said nobly. \"We have had our\n chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might\n have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here.\"", "\"Well, by obliging us to pay such a high price for your dinner, you put\n out of your reach the chance of profiting from a really substantial\n deal. My partner and I were prepared to make you a sizable offer for\n the peculiar creature you call Genius. But by reducing our funds the\n way you have—\"\n\n\n \"Who said I wanted to sell him?\" the mayor interrupted. He rubbed his\n fingers together and asked disinterestedly: \"What were you going to\n offer, anyhow?\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter any longer,\" Harvey said with elaborate\n carelessness. \"Perhaps you wouldn't have accepted it, anyway.\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Johnson came back emphatically. \"But what would your\n offer have been which I would have turned down?\"\n\n\n \"Which one? The one we were going to make, or the one we can make now?\"\n\n\n \"Either one. It don't make no difference. Genius is too valuable to\n sell.\"", "Unwillingly, Joe turned and shuffled out.\nOn a larger and heavier world than Planetoid 42, Johnson's curiosity\n would probably have had weight and mass. He was bursting with\n questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. For\n his part, Harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a Venusian amoeba\n until Joe came in, lugging a radio.\n\n\n \"Is that what you were talking about?\" the mayor snorted. \"What makes\n you think I want a radio? I came here to get away from singers and\n political speech-makers.\"\n\n\n \"Do not jump to hasty conclusions,\" Harvey cautioned. \"Another word,\n and I shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had,\n with the sole exceptions of Joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor\n of this absolutely awe-inspiring device.\"\n\n\n \"I ain't in the market for a radio,\" Johnson said stubbornly.", "\"Well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying,\" answered\n the mayor promptly. \"What's more, the kind of dinner I serve here you\n can't get anywhere else for any price.\"\n\n\n Swiftly, Harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. He saw\n none.\n\n\n \"Let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, Joe,\" he said guardedly.\n\n\n Johnson immediately fell into the role of \"mine host.\"\n\n\n \"Come right in, gents,\" he invited. \"Right into the dining room.\"\n\n\n He seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or\n less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little\n chance of company.", "\"Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?\" said Harvey as he and Joe\n picked up buckets that hung on the tank. \"Johnson, as I saw instantly,\n is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly.\"\n\n\n \"Just the same,\" Joe griped, \"paying for water isn't something you can\n get used to in ten minutes.\"\n\n\n In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from\n the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents,\n according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their\n buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more.\nIt was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on\n a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign\n in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping\n a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to\n investigate.", "\"Naturally,\" Harvey agreed, mollified. \"I'm sorry I lost my temper.\n But it is a matter of record that the doctor proved the broadcasts\n emanating from the super-dimension were in English! Why should that be\n so difficult to believe? Is it impossible that at one time there was\n communication between the dimensions, that the super-beings admired\n our language and adopted it in all its beauty, adding to it their own\n hyper-scientific trimmings?\"\n\n\n \"Why, I don't know,\" Johnson said in confusion.\n\n\n \"For three years, Joseph and I lost sleep and hair, trying to detect\n the simple key that would translate the somewhat metamorphosed\n broadcasts into our primitive English. It eluded us. Even the doctor\n failed. But that was understandable; a sensitive soul like his could\n stand only so much. And the combination of ridicule and failure to\n solve the mystery caused him to take his own life.\"", "\"If that's an apology, I accept it. Now the mayor'll discuss filling\n your tanks. That's me. I'm also justice of the peace, official\n recorder, fire chief....\"\n\n\n \"And chief of police, no doubt,\" said Harvey jocosely.\n\n\n \"Nope. That's my son, Jed. Angus Johnson's my name. Folks here just\n call me Chief. I run this town, and run it right. How much water will\n you need?\"\n\n\n Joe estimated quickly. \"About seventy-five liters, if we go on half\n rations,\" he answered. He waited apprehensively.\n\n\n \"Let's say ten buckos a liter,\" the mayor said. \"On account of the\n quantity, I'm able to quote a bargain price. Shucks, boys, it hurts me\n more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. I just got to,\n that's all.\"", "\"Medicine,\" Harvey propounded, \"should taste like medicine.\" To Joe he\n said: \"Come, my esteemed colleague. We must perform the sacred task to\n which we have dedicated ourselves.\"\n\n\n With Joe stumbling along behind, he left the saloon, crossed the\n clearing and entered the ship. As soon as they were inside, Joe dropped\n his murderous silence and cried:\n\n\n \"What kind of a dirty trick was that, giving me poison instead of that\n snake oil?\"\n\n\n \"That was not poison,\" Harvey contradicted quietly. \"It was\nLa-anago\n Yergis\nextract, plus.\"\n\n\n \"Plus what—arsenic?\"", "Genius, the six-armed native, appeared from the dingy kitchen with\n two menus in one hand, two glasses of water in another, plus napkins,\n silverware, a pitcher, plates, saucers, cups, and their cocktails,\n which were on the house. Then he stood by for orders.\n\n\n Harvey and Joe studied the menu critically. The prices were\n phenomenally low. When they glanced up at Johnson in perplexity, he\n grinned, bowed and asked: \"Everything satisfactory, gents?\"\n\n\n \"Quite,\" said Harvey. \"We shall order.\"\n\n\n For an hour they were served amazing dishes, both fresh and canned, the\n culinary wealth of this planetoid and all the system. And the service\n was as extraordinary as the meal itself. With four hands, Genius played\n deftly upon a pair of mellow Venusian\nviotars\n, using his other two\n hands for waiting on the table.", "\"Maybe you need another dose,\" Harvey suggested.\n\n\n Joe recoiled. \"I'm fine now!\" he cried, and sprang off the bar to prove\n it.\n\n\n Astonished, Johnson and his son drew closer. They searched Joe's face,\n and then the mayor timidly felt his pulse.\n\n\n \"Well, I'll be hanged!\" Johnson ejaculated.\n\n\n \"\nLa-anago Yergis\nnever fails, my friend,\" Harvey explained. \"By\n actual test, it conquers asteroid fever in from four to twenty-three\n minutes, depending on the severity of the attack. Luckily, we caught\n this one before it grew formidable.\"\n\n\n The mayor's eyes became clouded mirrors of an inward conflict. \"If you\n don't charge too much,\" he said warily, \"I might think of buying some.\"", "As if on cue, Genius came out and put the check down between Joe and\n Harvey. Harvey picked it up negligently, but his casual air vanished in\n a yelp of horror.\n\n\n \"What the devil is this?\" he shouted.—\"How do you arrive at this\n fantastic, idiotic figure—\nthree hundred and twenty-eight buckos\n!\"\nJohnson didn't answer. Neither did Genius; he simply put on the table,\n not a fingerbowl, but a magnifying glass. With one of his thirty\n fingers he pointed politely to the bottom of the menu.\n\n\n Harvey focused on the microscopic print, and his face went pasty with\n rage. The minute note read: \"Services and entertainment, 327 buckos 80\n redsents.\"\n\n\n \"You can go to hell!\" Joe growled. \"We won't pay it!\"" ], [ "The pursuit of vengeance, Harvey realized, had taken a quick and\n unpleasant turn. Something shrewd was called for....\n\n\n \"Joseph!\" he exclaimed, looking at his partner in alarm. \"Don't you\n feel well?\"\n\n\n Even before the others could turn to him, Joe's practiced eyes were\n gently crossing. He sagged against the door frame, all his features\n drooping like a bloodhound's.\n\n\n \"Bring him in here!\" Johnson cried. \"I mean, get him away! He's coming\n down with asteroid fever!\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" replied Harvey calmly. \"Any fool knows the first symptoms\n of the disease that once scourged the universe.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean,\nonce\n?\" demanded Johnson. \"I come down with it\n every year, and I ain't hankering to have it in an off-season. Get him\n out of here!\"", "\"In good time. He can't be moved immediately.\"\n\n\n \"Then he'll be here for months!\"\n\n\n Harvey helped Joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. The mayor and\n his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe\n in tiny, uncontaminating gasps.\n\n\n \"You'll find everything you want in the back room,\" Johnson said\n frantically, \"sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction\n cups—\"\n\n\n \"Relics of the past,\" Harvey stated. \"One medication is all modern man\n requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\" asked the mayor without conviction.", "\"Maybe you need another dose,\" Harvey suggested.\n\n\n Joe recoiled. \"I'm fine now!\" he cried, and sprang off the bar to prove\n it.\n\n\n Astonished, Johnson and his son drew closer. They searched Joe's face,\n and then the mayor timidly felt his pulse.\n\n\n \"Well, I'll be hanged!\" Johnson ejaculated.\n\n\n \"\nLa-anago Yergis\nnever fails, my friend,\" Harvey explained. \"By\n actual test, it conquers asteroid fever in from four to twenty-three\n minutes, depending on the severity of the attack. Luckily, we caught\n this one before it grew formidable.\"\n\n\n The mayor's eyes became clouded mirrors of an inward conflict. \"If you\n don't charge too much,\" he said warily, \"I might think of buying some.\"", "But Joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and\n tasting it.\n\n\n \"Sweet!\" he snarled.\n\n\n They rushed back to the first pool, where Joe again tasted a sample.\n His mouth went wry. \"Bitter! He uses only one pool, the sweet one! The\n only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's\n conscience.\"\n\n\n \"The asteroidal Poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on,\" said\n Harvey slowly. His eyes grew cold. \"Joseph, the good-natured artist in\n me has become a hard and merciless avenger. I shall not rest until we\n have had the best of this colonial con-man! Watch your cues from this\n point hence.\"\n\n\n Fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. But at the door they\n stopped and their fists unclenched.", "Instead of replying, Harvey hurried outside to the ungainly second-hand\n rocket ship in the center of the shabby spaceport. He returned within a\n few minutes, carrying a bottle.\nJoe was still stretched out on the bar, panting, his eyes slowly\n crossing and uncrossing. Harvey lifted the patient's head tenderly,\n put the bottle to his lips and tilted it until he was forced to drink.\n When Joe tried to pull away, Harvey was inexorable. He made his partner\n drink until most of the liquid was gone. Then he stepped back and\n waited for the inevitable result.\n\n\n Joe's performance was better than ever. He lay supine for several\n moments, his face twisted into an expression that seemed doomed\n to perpetual wryness. Slowly, however, he sat up and his features\n straightened out.\n\n\n \"Are—are you all right?\" asked the mayor anxiously.\n\n\n \"Much better,\" said Joe in a weak voice.", "\"That's the stuff, all right,\" he said, swallowing hard. He counted\n out the money into Harvey's hand, at a moderate rate that precariously\n balanced between his pleasure at getting the fever remedy and his pain\n at paying for it. Then he glanced out to see the position of Jupiter,\n and asked: \"You gents eaten yet? The restaurant's open now.\"\n\n\n Harvey and Joe looked at each other. They hadn't been thinking about\n food at all, but suddenly they realized that they were hungry.\n\n\n \"It's only water we were short of,\" Harvey said apprehensively. \"We've\n got rations back at the ship.\"\n\n\n \"\nH-mph!\n\" the mayor grunted. \"Powdered concentrates. Compressed pap.\n Suit yourselves. We treat our stomachs better here. And you're welcome\n to our hospitality.\"\n\n\n \"Your hospitality,\" said Harvey, \"depends on the prices you charge.\"", "\"Now, Joseph! Consider my quandary when I came back here to manufacture\n our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling\n yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods—an entire case,\n mind you. Was I to mix the extract with the water for which we had been\n swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? Where would our profit have\n been, then? No; I had to use the bitter free water, of course.\"\n\n\n \"But why use it on me?\" Joe demanded furiously.\n\n\n Harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. \"Did Johnson ask to\n taste it, or did he not? One must look ahead, Joseph. I had to produce\n the same\nmedicine\nthat we will now manufacture. Thus, you were a\n guinea pig for a splendid cause.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, okay,\" Joe said. \"But you shoulda charged him more.\"", "\"Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?\" said Harvey as he and Joe\n picked up buckets that hung on the tank. \"Johnson, as I saw instantly,\n is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly.\"\n\n\n \"Just the same,\" Joe griped, \"paying for water isn't something you can\n get used to in ten minutes.\"\n\n\n In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from\n the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents,\n according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their\n buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more.\nIt was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on\n a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign\n in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping\n a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to\n investigate.", "\"Medicine,\" Harvey propounded, \"should taste like medicine.\" To Joe he\n said: \"Come, my esteemed colleague. We must perform the sacred task to\n which we have dedicated ourselves.\"\n\n\n With Joe stumbling along behind, he left the saloon, crossed the\n clearing and entered the ship. As soon as they were inside, Joe dropped\n his murderous silence and cried:\n\n\n \"What kind of a dirty trick was that, giving me poison instead of that\n snake oil?\"\n\n\n \"That was not poison,\" Harvey contradicted quietly. \"It was\nLa-anago\n Yergis\nextract, plus.\"\n\n\n \"Plus what—arsenic?\"", "\"I have every hope of luring away the profitable monstrosity.\n Apparently you have also surmised the fortune we could make with him.\n At first I purpose to exhibit him on our interplanetary tours with our\n streamlined panacea; he would be a spectacular attraction for bucolic\n suckers. Later, a brief period of demonstrating his abilities on the\n audio-visiphone. Then our triumph—we shall sell him at a stupendous\n figure to the zoo!\"\nJoe was still dazed by that monetary vista when he and Harvey carried\n the case of medicine to the saloon. The mayor had already cleared a\n place of honor in the cluttered back room, where he told them to put it\n down carefully. Then he took the elaborate bottle-opener Harvey gave\n him, reverently uncorked a bottle and sampled it. It must have been at\n least as good as the first; he gagged.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nCharacteristically, Harvey Ellsworth tried to maintain his dignity,\n though his parched tongue was almost hanging out. But Joe Mallon, with\n no dignity to maintain, lurched across the rubbish-strewn patch of land\n that had been termed a spaceport. When Harvey staggered pontifically\n into the battered metalloy saloon—the only one on Planetoid 42—his\n tall, gangling partner was already stumbling out, mouthing something\n incoherent. They met in the doorway, violently.\n\n\n \"We're delirious!\" Joe cried. \"It's a mirage!\"\n\n\n \"What is?\" asked Harvey through a mouthful of cotton.\n\n\n Joe reeled aside, and Harvey saw what had upset his partner. He stared,\n speechless for once.", "The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. \"What is it?\" he\n asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its\n worst and expects nothing better.\n\n\n \"Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of\n the ship,\" Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: \"You must see\n the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner\n will soon have it here for your astonishment.\"\n\n\n Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. \"Aw, Harv,\" he\n protested, \"do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were\n getting the key!\"\n\n\n \"We must not be selfish, my boy,\" Harvey said nobly. \"We have had our\n chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might\n have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here.\"", "Without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out\n two glasses of water. The interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked\n for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. Meanwhile, the bartender\n had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey.\n\n\n Harvey and Joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so\n fast, but they were beginning to revive. They noticed the bartender's\n impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly.\n\n\n \"Strangers, eh?\" he asked at last.\n\n\n \"Solar salesmen, my colonial friend,\" Harvey answered in his usual\n lush manner. \"We purvey that renowned Martian remedy,\nLa-anago\n Yergis\n, the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in\n the ancient ruined city of La-anago. Medical science is unanimous in\n proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history\n of therapeutics.\"", "Unwillingly, Joe turned and shuffled out.\nOn a larger and heavier world than Planetoid 42, Johnson's curiosity\n would probably have had weight and mass. He was bursting with\n questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. For\n his part, Harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a Venusian amoeba\n until Joe came in, lugging a radio.\n\n\n \"Is that what you were talking about?\" the mayor snorted. \"What makes\n you think I want a radio? I came here to get away from singers and\n political speech-makers.\"\n\n\n \"Do not jump to hasty conclusions,\" Harvey cautioned. \"Another word,\n and I shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had,\n with the sole exceptions of Joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor\n of this absolutely awe-inspiring device.\"\n\n\n \"I ain't in the market for a radio,\" Johnson said stubbornly.", "GRIFTERS' ASTEROID\nBy H. L. GOLD\nHarvey and Joe were the slickest con-men ever\n\n to gyp a space-lane sucker. Or so they thought!\n\n Angus Johnson knew differently. He charged them\n\n five buckos for a glass of water—and got it!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories May 1943.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that", "Johnson sighed ponderously. \"I was afraid you'd act like that,\" he said\n with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on\n his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. \"Afraid I'll have to\n ask the sheriff to take over.\"\n\n\n Johnson, the \"sheriff,\" collected the money, and Johnson, the\n \"restaurateur,\" pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to\n remain calm.\n\n\n \"My friend,\" he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a\n schoolmasterish severity, \"your long absence from Earth has perhaps\n made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the\n folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly\n to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound\n foolish.'\"\n\n\n \"I don't get the connection,\" objected Johnson.", "\"We do not sell this unbelievable remedy,\" Harvey replied with dignity.\n \"It sells itself.\"\n\n\n \"'Course, I'd expect a considerable reduction if I bought a whole\n case,\" said Johnson.\n\n\n \"That would be the smallest investment you could make, compared with\n the vast loss of time and strength the fever involves.\"\n\n\n \"How much?\" asked the mayor unhappily.\n\n\n \"For you, since you have taken us in so hospitably, a mere five hundred\n buckos.\"\n\n\n Johnson did not actually stagger back, but he gave the impression of\n doing so. \"F-four hundred,\" he offered.\n\n\n \"Not a red cent less than four seventy-five,\" Harvey said flatly.\n\n\n \"Make it four fifty,\" quavered Johnson.\n\n\n \"I dislike haggling,\" said Harvey.", "The final price, however, was four hundred and sixty-nine buckos and\n fifty redsents. Magnanimously, Harvey added: \"And we will include,\ngratis\n, an elegant bottle-opener, a superb product of Mercurian\n handicraftsmanship.\"\n\n\n Johnson stabbed out a warning finger. \"No tricks now. I want a taste of\n that stuff. You're not switching some worthless junk on me.\"\n\n\n Harvey took a glass from the bar and poured him a generous sample. The\n mayor sniffed it, grimaced, then threw it down his gullet. The ensuing\n minute saw a grim battle between a man and his stomach, a battle which\n the man gradually won.\n\n\n \"There ain't no words for that taste,\" he gulped when it was safe to\n talk again.", "Harvey nodded in relief. \"We have attempted to repay our host, Joseph.\n He has spurned our generosity. We have now the chance to continue our\n study, which I am positive will soon reward us with the key to an\n enormous fortune.\"\n\n\n \"Well, that's no plating off our bow,\" Joe grunted. \"I'm glad he did\n turn it down. I hated to give it up after working on it for three whole\n years.\"\n\n\n He picked up the radio and began walking toward the door.\n\n\n \"Now, hold on!\" the mayor cried. \"I ain't\nsaying\nI'll buy, but what\n is it I'm turning down?\"\n\n\n Joe returned and set the instrument down on the bar. His face\n sorrowful, Harvey fondly stroked the scarred plasticoid cabinet.", "\"Might as well. Water's five buckos a glass. Liquor's free with every\n chaser.\"\n\n\n Harvey's eyes bulged. Joe gulped. \"That—that's robbery!\" the lanky man\n managed to get out in a thin quaver.\n\n\n The barkeeper shrugged. \"When there ain't many customers, you gotta\n make more on each one. Besides—\"\n\n\n \"Besides nothing!\" Joe roared, finding his voice again. \"You dirty\n crook—robbing poor spacemen! You—\"\n\"You dirty crook!\" Joe roared. \"Robbing honest spacemen!\"\nHarvey nudged him warningly. \"Easy, my boy, easy.\" He turned to the\n bartender apologetically. \"Don't mind my friend. His adrenal glands are\n sometimes overactive. You were going to say—?\"\nThe round face of the barkeeper had assumed an aggrieved expression." ], [ "\"We absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen,\" Harvey\n whispered excitedly when Johnson and the native were both in the\n kitchen, attending to the next course. \"He would make any society\n hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum\n to women like Mrs. van Schuyler-Morgan, merely for his hire.\"\n\n\n \"Think of a fast one fast,\" Joe agreed. \"You're right.\"\n\n\n \"But I dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often,\"\n complained Harvey. \"I wish Johnson would stay either swindler or honest\n merchant. This dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet I estimate\n our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents.\"\n\n\n The mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion.\n\n\n \"It's been a great honor, gents,\" he said. \"Ain't often I have\n visitors, and I like the best, like you two gents.\"", "Johnson sighed ponderously. \"I was afraid you'd act like that,\" he said\n with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on\n his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. \"Afraid I'll have to\n ask the sheriff to take over.\"\n\n\n Johnson, the \"sheriff,\" collected the money, and Johnson, the\n \"restaurateur,\" pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to\n remain calm.\n\n\n \"My friend,\" he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a\n schoolmasterish severity, \"your long absence from Earth has perhaps\n made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the\n folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly\n to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound\n foolish.'\"\n\n\n \"I don't get the connection,\" objected Johnson.", "Johnson winced. \"Is that what you want to unload on me?\"\n\n\n \"For a very good reason, sir. Patience is the virtue that will be\n rewarded with the key to these fourth dimensional broadcasts. A man who\n could devote his life to improving this lonely worldlet is obviously a\n person with unusual patience.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" the mayor said grudgingly, \"I ain't exactly flighty.\"\n\n\n \"Therefore, you are the man who could unravel the problem!\"\n\n\n Johnson asked skeptically: \"How about a sample first?\"", "\"Oh, come now, Mr. Johnson. Don't tell me no amount of money would\n tempt you!\"\n\n\n \"Nope. But how much did you say?\"\n\n\n \"Ah, then you will consider releasing Genius!\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'll tell you something,\" said the mayor confidentially. \"When\n you've got one thing, you've got one thing. But when you've got money,\n it's the same as having a lot of things. Because, if you've got money,\n you can buy this and that and this and that and—\"\n\n\n \"This and that,\" concluded Joe. \"We'll give you five hundred buckos.\"\n\n\n \"Now, gents!\" Johnson remonstrated. \"Why, six hundred would hardly—\"\n\n\n \"You haven't left us much money,\" Harvey put in.", "\"We do not sell this unbelievable remedy,\" Harvey replied with dignity.\n \"It sells itself.\"\n\n\n \"'Course, I'd expect a considerable reduction if I bought a whole\n case,\" said Johnson.\n\n\n \"That would be the smallest investment you could make, compared with\n the vast loss of time and strength the fever involves.\"\n\n\n \"How much?\" asked the mayor unhappily.\n\n\n \"For you, since you have taken us in so hospitably, a mere five hundred\n buckos.\"\n\n\n Johnson did not actually stagger back, but he gave the impression of\n doing so. \"F-four hundred,\" he offered.\n\n\n \"Not a red cent less than four seventy-five,\" Harvey said flatly.\n\n\n \"Make it four fifty,\" quavered Johnson.\n\n\n \"I dislike haggling,\" said Harvey.", "The mayor frowned. \"All right, we'll split the difference. Make it\n five-fifty.\"\n\n\n Harvey was quick to pay out, for this was a genuine windfall. Then he\n stood up and admired the astonishing possession he had so inexpensively\n acquired.\n\n\n \"I really hate to deprive you of this unique creature,\" he said to\n Johnson. \"I should imagine you will be rather lonely, with only your\n filial mammoth to keep you company.\"\n\n\n \"I sure will,\" Johnson confessed glumly. \"I got pretty attached to\n Genius, and I'm going to miss him something awful.\"\n\n\n Harvey forcibly removed his eyes from the native, who was clearing off\n the table almost all at once.\n\n\n \"My friend,\" he said, \"we take your only solace, it is true, but in his\n place we can offer something no less amazing and instructive.\"", "\"Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?\" said Harvey as he and Joe\n picked up buckets that hung on the tank. \"Johnson, as I saw instantly,\n is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly.\"\n\n\n \"Just the same,\" Joe griped, \"paying for water isn't something you can\n get used to in ten minutes.\"\n\n\n In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from\n the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents,\n according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their\n buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more.\nIt was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on\n a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign\n in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping\n a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to\n investigate.", "\"Joseph, I promise you that we shall get back every redsent of which\n that swindler cheated us, besides whatever other funds or valuables he\n possesses. We could not be content with less.\"\n\n\n \"Well, we're starting all right,\" admitted Joe. \"How about that thing\n with six arms? He looks like a valuable. Can't we grab him off?\"\n\n\n Harvey stopped filling bottles and looked up pensively.", "Genius, the six-armed native, appeared from the dingy kitchen with\n two menus in one hand, two glasses of water in another, plus napkins,\n silverware, a pitcher, plates, saucers, cups, and their cocktails,\n which were on the house. Then he stood by for orders.\n\n\n Harvey and Joe studied the menu critically. The prices were\n phenomenally low. When they glanced up at Johnson in perplexity, he\n grinned, bowed and asked: \"Everything satisfactory, gents?\"\n\n\n \"Quite,\" said Harvey. \"We shall order.\"\n\n\n For an hour they were served amazing dishes, both fresh and canned, the\n culinary wealth of this planetoid and all the system. And the service\n was as extraordinary as the meal itself. With four hands, Genius played\n deftly upon a pair of mellow Venusian\nviotars\n, using his other two\n hands for waiting on the table.", "\"And this thing gets broadcasts from the fourth dimension?\"\n\n\n \"It does, Mr. Johnson! Only charlatans like those who envied Doctor\n Dean's magnificent accomplishments could deny that fact.\"\n\n\n The mayor put his hands in his pockets, unswiveled one hip and stared\n thoughtfully at the battered cabinet.\n\n\n \"Well, let's say it picks up fourth dimensional broadcasts,\" he\n conceded. \"But how could you understand what they're saying? Folks up\n there wouldn't talk our language.\"\n\n\n Again Harvey smashed his fist down. \"Do you dare to repeat the scurvy\n lie that broke Dean's spirit and drove him to suicide?\"\n\n\n Johnson recoiled. \"No—no,\nof course not\n. I mean, being up here, I\n naturally couldn't get all the details.\"", "The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. \"What is it?\" he\n asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its\n worst and expects nothing better.\n\n\n \"Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of\n the ship,\" Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: \"You must see\n the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner\n will soon have it here for your astonishment.\"\n\n\n Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. \"Aw, Harv,\" he\n protested, \"do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were\n getting the key!\"\n\n\n \"We must not be selfish, my boy,\" Harvey said nobly. \"We have had our\n chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might\n have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here.\"", "Unwillingly, Joe turned and shuffled out.\nOn a larger and heavier world than Planetoid 42, Johnson's curiosity\n would probably have had weight and mass. He was bursting with\n questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. For\n his part, Harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a Venusian amoeba\n until Joe came in, lugging a radio.\n\n\n \"Is that what you were talking about?\" the mayor snorted. \"What makes\n you think I want a radio? I came here to get away from singers and\n political speech-makers.\"\n\n\n \"Do not jump to hasty conclusions,\" Harvey cautioned. \"Another word,\n and I shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had,\n with the sole exceptions of Joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor\n of this absolutely awe-inspiring device.\"\n\n\n \"I ain't in the market for a radio,\" Johnson said stubbornly.", "\"To make a long story, Mr. Johnson,\" he said, \"Joseph and I were among\n the chosen few who knew the famous Doctor Dean intimately. Just before\n his tragic death, you will recall, Dean allegedly went insane.\" He\n banged his fist on the bar. \"I have said it before, and I repeat again,\n that was a malicious lie, spread by the doctor's enemies to discredit\n his greatest invention—this fourth dimensional radio!\"\n\n\n \"This what?\" Johnson blurted out.\n\n\n \"In simple terms,\" clarified Harvey, \"the ingenious doctor discovered\n that the yawning chasm between the dimensions could be bridged by\n energy of all quanta. There has never been any question that the\n inhabitants of the super-dimension would be far more civilized than\n ourselves. Consequently, the man who could tap their knowledge would\n find himself in possession of a powerful, undreamt-of science!\"\n\n\n The mayor looked respectfully at the silent box on the bar.", "\"Well, by obliging us to pay such a high price for your dinner, you put\n out of your reach the chance of profiting from a really substantial\n deal. My partner and I were prepared to make you a sizable offer for\n the peculiar creature you call Genius. But by reducing our funds the\n way you have—\"\n\n\n \"Who said I wanted to sell him?\" the mayor interrupted. He rubbed his\n fingers together and asked disinterestedly: \"What were you going to\n offer, anyhow?\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter any longer,\" Harvey said with elaborate\n carelessness. \"Perhaps you wouldn't have accepted it, anyway.\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Johnson came back emphatically. \"But what would your\n offer have been which I would have turned down?\"\n\n\n \"Which one? The one we were going to make, or the one we can make now?\"\n\n\n \"Either one. It don't make no difference. Genius is too valuable to\n sell.\"", "\"Well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying,\" answered\n the mayor promptly. \"What's more, the kind of dinner I serve here you\n can't get anywhere else for any price.\"\n\n\n Swiftly, Harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. He saw\n none.\n\n\n \"Let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, Joe,\" he said guardedly.\n\n\n Johnson immediately fell into the role of \"mine host.\"\n\n\n \"Come right in, gents,\" he invited. \"Right into the dining room.\"\n\n\n He seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or\n less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little\n chance of company.", "In their hectic voyages from planet to planet, the pair of panacea\n purveyors had encountered the usual strange life-forms. But never had\n they seen anything like the amazing creature in that colonial saloon.\n\n\n Paying no attention to them, it was carrying a case of liquor in two\n hands, six siphons in two others, and a broom and dustpan in the\n remaining pair. The bartender, a big man resembling the plumpish\n Harvey in build, was leaning negligently on the counter, ordering this\n impossible being to fill the partly-emptied bottles, squeeze fruit\n juice and sweep the floor, all of which the native did simultaneously.\n\n\n \"Nonsense,\" Harvey croaked uncertainly. \"We have seen enough queer\n things to know there are always more.\"\n\n\n He led the way inside. Through thirst-cracked lips he rasped:\n \"Water—quick!\"", "\"Thought you gents were leaving,\" the mayor called out, seeing them\n frozen in the doorway. \"Glad you didn't. Now you can meet my son, Jed.\n Him and me are the whole Earthman population of Johnson City.\"\n\n\n \"You don't need any more,\" said Harvey, dismayed.\n\n\n Johnson's eight-foot son, topped by a massive roof of sun-bleached hair\n and held up by a foundation that seemed immovable, had obviously been\n born and raised in low gravity. For any decent-sized world would have\n kept him down near the general dimensions of a man.\n\n\n He held out an acre of palm. Harvey studied it worriedly, put his own\n hand somewhere on it, swallowed as it closed, then breathed again when\n his fingers were released in five units instead of a single compressed\n one.\n\n\n \"Pleased to meet you,\" piped a voice that had never known a dense\n atmosphere.", "\"In good time. He can't be moved immediately.\"\n\n\n \"Then he'll be here for months!\"\n\n\n Harvey helped Joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. The mayor and\n his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe\n in tiny, uncontaminating gasps.\n\n\n \"You'll find everything you want in the back room,\" Johnson said\n frantically, \"sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction\n cups—\"\n\n\n \"Relics of the past,\" Harvey stated. \"One medication is all modern man\n requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\" asked the mayor without conviction.", "The final price, however, was four hundred and sixty-nine buckos and\n fifty redsents. Magnanimously, Harvey added: \"And we will include,\ngratis\n, an elegant bottle-opener, a superb product of Mercurian\n handicraftsmanship.\"\n\n\n Johnson stabbed out a warning finger. \"No tricks now. I want a taste of\n that stuff. You're not switching some worthless junk on me.\"\n\n\n Harvey took a glass from the bar and poured him a generous sample. The\n mayor sniffed it, grimaced, then threw it down his gullet. The ensuing\n minute saw a grim battle between a man and his stomach, a battle which\n the man gradually won.\n\n\n \"There ain't no words for that taste,\" he gulped when it was safe to\n talk again.", "\"If that's an apology, I accept it. Now the mayor'll discuss filling\n your tanks. That's me. I'm also justice of the peace, official\n recorder, fire chief....\"\n\n\n \"And chief of police, no doubt,\" said Harvey jocosely.\n\n\n \"Nope. That's my son, Jed. Angus Johnson's my name. Folks here just\n call me Chief. I run this town, and run it right. How much water will\n you need?\"\n\n\n Joe estimated quickly. \"About seventy-five liters, if we go on half\n rations,\" he answered. He waited apprehensively.\n\n\n \"Let's say ten buckos a liter,\" the mayor said. \"On account of the\n quantity, I'm able to quote a bargain price. Shucks, boys, it hurts me\n more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. I just got to,\n that's all.\"" ], [ "\"In good time. He can't be moved immediately.\"\n\n\n \"Then he'll be here for months!\"\n\n\n Harvey helped Joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. The mayor and\n his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe\n in tiny, uncontaminating gasps.\n\n\n \"You'll find everything you want in the back room,\" Johnson said\n frantically, \"sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction\n cups—\"\n\n\n \"Relics of the past,\" Harvey stated. \"One medication is all modern man\n requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\" asked the mayor without conviction.", "The pursuit of vengeance, Harvey realized, had taken a quick and\n unpleasant turn. Something shrewd was called for....\n\n\n \"Joseph!\" he exclaimed, looking at his partner in alarm. \"Don't you\n feel well?\"\n\n\n Even before the others could turn to him, Joe's practiced eyes were\n gently crossing. He sagged against the door frame, all his features\n drooping like a bloodhound's.\n\n\n \"Bring him in here!\" Johnson cried. \"I mean, get him away! He's coming\n down with asteroid fever!\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" replied Harvey calmly. \"Any fool knows the first symptoms\n of the disease that once scourged the universe.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean,\nonce\n?\" demanded Johnson. \"I come down with it\n every year, and I ain't hankering to have it in an off-season. Get him\n out of here!\"", "Johnson sighed ponderously. \"I was afraid you'd act like that,\" he said\n with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on\n his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. \"Afraid I'll have to\n ask the sheriff to take over.\"\n\n\n Johnson, the \"sheriff,\" collected the money, and Johnson, the\n \"restaurateur,\" pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to\n remain calm.\n\n\n \"My friend,\" he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a\n schoolmasterish severity, \"your long absence from Earth has perhaps\n made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the\n folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly\n to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound\n foolish.'\"\n\n\n \"I don't get the connection,\" objected Johnson.", "Unwillingly, Joe turned and shuffled out.\nOn a larger and heavier world than Planetoid 42, Johnson's curiosity\n would probably have had weight and mass. He was bursting with\n questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. For\n his part, Harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a Venusian amoeba\n until Joe came in, lugging a radio.\n\n\n \"Is that what you were talking about?\" the mayor snorted. \"What makes\n you think I want a radio? I came here to get away from singers and\n political speech-makers.\"\n\n\n \"Do not jump to hasty conclusions,\" Harvey cautioned. \"Another word,\n and I shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had,\n with the sole exceptions of Joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor\n of this absolutely awe-inspiring device.\"\n\n\n \"I ain't in the market for a radio,\" Johnson said stubbornly.", "\"Thought you gents were leaving,\" the mayor called out, seeing them\n frozen in the doorway. \"Glad you didn't. Now you can meet my son, Jed.\n Him and me are the whole Earthman population of Johnson City.\"\n\n\n \"You don't need any more,\" said Harvey, dismayed.\n\n\n Johnson's eight-foot son, topped by a massive roof of sun-bleached hair\n and held up by a foundation that seemed immovable, had obviously been\n born and raised in low gravity. For any decent-sized world would have\n kept him down near the general dimensions of a man.\n\n\n He held out an acre of palm. Harvey studied it worriedly, put his own\n hand somewhere on it, swallowed as it closed, then breathed again when\n his fingers were released in five units instead of a single compressed\n one.\n\n\n \"Pleased to meet you,\" piped a voice that had never known a dense\n atmosphere.", "\"Maybe you need another dose,\" Harvey suggested.\n\n\n Joe recoiled. \"I'm fine now!\" he cried, and sprang off the bar to prove\n it.\n\n\n Astonished, Johnson and his son drew closer. They searched Joe's face,\n and then the mayor timidly felt his pulse.\n\n\n \"Well, I'll be hanged!\" Johnson ejaculated.\n\n\n \"\nLa-anago Yergis\nnever fails, my friend,\" Harvey explained. \"By\n actual test, it conquers asteroid fever in from four to twenty-three\n minutes, depending on the severity of the attack. Luckily, we caught\n this one before it grew formidable.\"\n\n\n The mayor's eyes became clouded mirrors of an inward conflict. \"If you\n don't charge too much,\" he said warily, \"I might think of buying some.\"", "The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. \"What is it?\" he\n asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its\n worst and expects nothing better.\n\n\n \"Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of\n the ship,\" Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: \"You must see\n the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner\n will soon have it here for your astonishment.\"\n\n\n Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. \"Aw, Harv,\" he\n protested, \"do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were\n getting the key!\"\n\n\n \"We must not be selfish, my boy,\" Harvey said nobly. \"We have had our\n chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might\n have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here.\"", "\"Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?\" said Harvey as he and Joe\n picked up buckets that hung on the tank. \"Johnson, as I saw instantly,\n is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly.\"\n\n\n \"Just the same,\" Joe griped, \"paying for water isn't something you can\n get used to in ten minutes.\"\n\n\n In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from\n the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents,\n according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their\n buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more.\nIt was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on\n a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign\n in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping\n a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to\n investigate.", "Johnson winced. \"Is that what you want to unload on me?\"\n\n\n \"For a very good reason, sir. Patience is the virtue that will be\n rewarded with the key to these fourth dimensional broadcasts. A man who\n could devote his life to improving this lonely worldlet is obviously a\n person with unusual patience.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" the mayor said grudgingly, \"I ain't exactly flighty.\"\n\n\n \"Therefore, you are the man who could unravel the problem!\"\n\n\n Johnson asked skeptically: \"How about a sample first?\"", "GRIFTERS' ASTEROID\nBy H. L. GOLD\nHarvey and Joe were the slickest con-men ever\n\n to gyp a space-lane sucker. Or so they thought!\n\n Angus Johnson knew differently. He charged them\n\n five buckos for a glass of water—and got it!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories May 1943.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that", "\"That's the stuff, all right,\" he said, swallowing hard. He counted\n out the money into Harvey's hand, at a moderate rate that precariously\n balanced between his pleasure at getting the fever remedy and his pain\n at paying for it. Then he glanced out to see the position of Jupiter,\n and asked: \"You gents eaten yet? The restaurant's open now.\"\n\n\n Harvey and Joe looked at each other. They hadn't been thinking about\n food at all, but suddenly they realized that they were hungry.\n\n\n \"It's only water we were short of,\" Harvey said apprehensively. \"We've\n got rations back at the ship.\"\n\n\n \"\nH-mph!\n\" the mayor grunted. \"Powdered concentrates. Compressed pap.\n Suit yourselves. We treat our stomachs better here. And you're welcome\n to our hospitality.\"\n\n\n \"Your hospitality,\" said Harvey, \"depends on the prices you charge.\"", "But Joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and\n tasting it.\n\n\n \"Sweet!\" he snarled.\n\n\n They rushed back to the first pool, where Joe again tasted a sample.\n His mouth went wry. \"Bitter! He uses only one pool, the sweet one! The\n only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's\n conscience.\"\n\n\n \"The asteroidal Poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on,\" said\n Harvey slowly. His eyes grew cold. \"Joseph, the good-natured artist in\n me has become a hard and merciless avenger. I shall not rest until we\n have had the best of this colonial con-man! Watch your cues from this\n point hence.\"\n\n\n Fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. But at the door they\n stopped and their fists unclenched.", "\"Yeah?\" said the bartender disinterestedly, polishing the chaser\n glasses without washing them. \"Where you heading?\"\n\n\n \"Out of Mars for Ganymede. Our condenser broke down, and we've gone\n without water for five ghastly days.\"\n\n\n \"Got a mechanic around this dumping ground you call a port?\" Joe asked.\n\n\n \"We did. He came near starving and moved on to Titan. Ships don't land\n here unless they're in trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Then where's the water lead-in? We'll fill up and push off.\"\n\n\n \"Mayor takes care of that,\" replied the saloon owner. \"If you gents're\n finished at the bar, your drinks'll be forty buckos.\"\n\n\n Harvey grinned puzzledly. \"We didn't take any whiskey.\"", "The final price, however, was four hundred and sixty-nine buckos and\n fifty redsents. Magnanimously, Harvey added: \"And we will include,\ngratis\n, an elegant bottle-opener, a superb product of Mercurian\n handicraftsmanship.\"\n\n\n Johnson stabbed out a warning finger. \"No tricks now. I want a taste of\n that stuff. You're not switching some worthless junk on me.\"\n\n\n Harvey took a glass from the bar and poured him a generous sample. The\n mayor sniffed it, grimaced, then threw it down his gullet. The ensuing\n minute saw a grim battle between a man and his stomach, a battle which\n the man gradually won.\n\n\n \"There ain't no words for that taste,\" he gulped when it was safe to\n talk again.", "The mayor gestured to the native, who shuffled out to the tanks with\n them. The planetoid man worked the pump while the mayor intently\n watched the crude level-gauge, crying \"Stop!\" when it registered the\n proper amount. Then Johnson rubbed his thumb on his index finger and\n wetted his lips expectantly.\n\n\n Harvey bravely counted off the bills. He asked: \"But what are we to\n do about replenishing our battery fluid? Ten buckos a liter would be\n preposterous. We simply can't afford it.\"\n\n\n Johnson's response almost floored them. \"Who said anything about\n charging you for battery water? You can have all you want for nothing.\n It's just the purified stuff that comes so high.\"\n\n\n After giving them directions that would take them to the free-water\n pool, the ponderous factotum of Planetoid 42 shook hands and headed\n back to the saloon. His six-armed assistant followed him inside.", "Genius, the six-armed native, appeared from the dingy kitchen with\n two menus in one hand, two glasses of water in another, plus napkins,\n silverware, a pitcher, plates, saucers, cups, and their cocktails,\n which were on the house. Then he stood by for orders.\n\n\n Harvey and Joe studied the menu critically. The prices were\n phenomenally low. When they glanced up at Johnson in perplexity, he\n grinned, bowed and asked: \"Everything satisfactory, gents?\"\n\n\n \"Quite,\" said Harvey. \"We shall order.\"\n\n\n For an hour they were served amazing dishes, both fresh and canned, the\n culinary wealth of this planetoid and all the system. And the service\n was as extraordinary as the meal itself. With four hands, Genius played\n deftly upon a pair of mellow Venusian\nviotars\n, using his other two\n hands for waiting on the table.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nCharacteristically, Harvey Ellsworth tried to maintain his dignity,\n though his parched tongue was almost hanging out. But Joe Mallon, with\n no dignity to maintain, lurched across the rubbish-strewn patch of land\n that had been termed a spaceport. When Harvey staggered pontifically\n into the battered metalloy saloon—the only one on Planetoid 42—his\n tall, gangling partner was already stumbling out, mouthing something\n incoherent. They met in the doorway, violently.\n\n\n \"We're delirious!\" Joe cried. \"It's a mirage!\"\n\n\n \"What is?\" asked Harvey through a mouthful of cotton.\n\n\n Joe reeled aside, and Harvey saw what had upset his partner. He stared,\n speechless for once.", "\"Might as well. Water's five buckos a glass. Liquor's free with every\n chaser.\"\n\n\n Harvey's eyes bulged. Joe gulped. \"That—that's robbery!\" the lanky man\n managed to get out in a thin quaver.\n\n\n The barkeeper shrugged. \"When there ain't many customers, you gotta\n make more on each one. Besides—\"\n\n\n \"Besides nothing!\" Joe roared, finding his voice again. \"You dirty\n crook—robbing poor spacemen! You—\"\n\"You dirty crook!\" Joe roared. \"Robbing honest spacemen!\"\nHarvey nudged him warningly. \"Easy, my boy, easy.\" He turned to the\n bartender apologetically. \"Don't mind my friend. His adrenal glands are\n sometimes overactive. You were going to say—?\"\nThe round face of the barkeeper had assumed an aggrieved expression.", "Without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out\n two glasses of water. The interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked\n for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. Meanwhile, the bartender\n had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey.\n\n\n Harvey and Joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so\n fast, but they were beginning to revive. They noticed the bartender's\n impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly.\n\n\n \"Strangers, eh?\" he asked at last.\n\n\n \"Solar salesmen, my colonial friend,\" Harvey answered in his usual\n lush manner. \"We purvey that renowned Martian remedy,\nLa-anago\n Yergis\n, the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in\n the ancient ruined city of La-anago. Medical science is unanimous in\n proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history\n of therapeutics.\"", "\"Now, Joseph! Consider my quandary when I came back here to manufacture\n our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling\n yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods—an entire case,\n mind you. Was I to mix the extract with the water for which we had been\n swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? Where would our profit have\n been, then? No; I had to use the bitter free water, of course.\"\n\n\n \"But why use it on me?\" Joe demanded furiously.\n\n\n Harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. \"Did Johnson ask to\n taste it, or did he not? One must look ahead, Joseph. I had to produce\n the same\nmedicine\nthat we will now manufacture. Thus, you were a\n guinea pig for a splendid cause.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, okay,\" Joe said. \"But you shoulda charged him more.\"" ], [ "\"We absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen,\" Harvey\n whispered excitedly when Johnson and the native were both in the\n kitchen, attending to the next course. \"He would make any society\n hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum\n to women like Mrs. van Schuyler-Morgan, merely for his hire.\"\n\n\n \"Think of a fast one fast,\" Joe agreed. \"You're right.\"\n\n\n \"But I dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often,\"\n complained Harvey. \"I wish Johnson would stay either swindler or honest\n merchant. This dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet I estimate\n our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents.\"\n\n\n The mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion.\n\n\n \"It's been a great honor, gents,\" he said. \"Ain't often I have\n visitors, and I like the best, like you two gents.\"", "Johnson sighed ponderously. \"I was afraid you'd act like that,\" he said\n with regret. He pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on\n his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. \"Afraid I'll have to\n ask the sheriff to take over.\"\n\n\n Johnson, the \"sheriff,\" collected the money, and Johnson, the\n \"restaurateur,\" pocketed it. Meanwhile, Harvey tipped Joe the sign to\n remain calm.\n\n\n \"My friend,\" he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a\n schoolmasterish severity, \"your long absence from Earth has perhaps\n made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the\n folk-lore of your native planet. Such as, for example: 'It is folly\n to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'Penny wise is pound\n foolish.'\"\n\n\n \"I don't get the connection,\" objected Johnson.", "As if on cue, Genius came out and put the check down between Joe and\n Harvey. Harvey picked it up negligently, but his casual air vanished in\n a yelp of horror.\n\n\n \"What the devil is this?\" he shouted.—\"How do you arrive at this\n fantastic, idiotic figure—\nthree hundred and twenty-eight buckos\n!\"\nJohnson didn't answer. Neither did Genius; he simply put on the table,\n not a fingerbowl, but a magnifying glass. With one of his thirty\n fingers he pointed politely to the bottom of the menu.\n\n\n Harvey focused on the microscopic print, and his face went pasty with\n rage. The minute note read: \"Services and entertainment, 327 buckos 80\n redsents.\"\n\n\n \"You can go to hell!\" Joe growled. \"We won't pay it!\"", "\"Well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying,\" answered\n the mayor promptly. \"What's more, the kind of dinner I serve here you\n can't get anywhere else for any price.\"\n\n\n Swiftly, Harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. He saw\n none.\n\n\n \"Let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, Joe,\" he said guardedly.\n\n\n Johnson immediately fell into the role of \"mine host.\"\n\n\n \"Come right in, gents,\" he invited. \"Right into the dining room.\"\n\n\n He seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or\n less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little\n chance of company.", "\"Oh, come now, Mr. Johnson. Don't tell me no amount of money would\n tempt you!\"\n\n\n \"Nope. But how much did you say?\"\n\n\n \"Ah, then you will consider releasing Genius!\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'll tell you something,\" said the mayor confidentially. \"When\n you've got one thing, you've got one thing. But when you've got money,\n it's the same as having a lot of things. Because, if you've got money,\n you can buy this and that and this and that and—\"\n\n\n \"This and that,\" concluded Joe. \"We'll give you five hundred buckos.\"\n\n\n \"Now, gents!\" Johnson remonstrated. \"Why, six hundred would hardly—\"\n\n\n \"You haven't left us much money,\" Harvey put in.", "Without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out\n two glasses of water. The interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked\n for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. Meanwhile, the bartender\n had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey.\n\n\n Harvey and Joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so\n fast, but they were beginning to revive. They noticed the bartender's\n impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly.\n\n\n \"Strangers, eh?\" he asked at last.\n\n\n \"Solar salesmen, my colonial friend,\" Harvey answered in his usual\n lush manner. \"We purvey that renowned Martian remedy,\nLa-anago\n Yergis\n, the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in\n the ancient ruined city of La-anago. Medical science is unanimous in\n proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history\n of therapeutics.\"", "The mayor frowned. \"All right, we'll split the difference. Make it\n five-fifty.\"\n\n\n Harvey was quick to pay out, for this was a genuine windfall. Then he\n stood up and admired the astonishing possession he had so inexpensively\n acquired.\n\n\n \"I really hate to deprive you of this unique creature,\" he said to\n Johnson. \"I should imagine you will be rather lonely, with only your\n filial mammoth to keep you company.\"\n\n\n \"I sure will,\" Johnson confessed glumly. \"I got pretty attached to\n Genius, and I'm going to miss him something awful.\"\n\n\n Harvey forcibly removed his eyes from the native, who was clearing off\n the table almost all at once.\n\n\n \"My friend,\" he said, \"we take your only solace, it is true, but in his\n place we can offer something no less amazing and instructive.\"", "\"Now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?\" said Harvey as he and Joe\n picked up buckets that hung on the tank. \"Johnson, as I saw instantly,\n is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly.\"\n\n\n \"Just the same,\" Joe griped, \"paying for water isn't something you can\n get used to in ten minutes.\"\n\n\n In the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from\n the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents,\n according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. They filled their\n buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more.\nIt was on the sixth trip that Joe caught a glimpse of Jupiter-shine on\n a bright surface off to the left. The figure, 750, with the bucko sign\n in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping\n a faint suspicion alive in him. So he called Harvey and they went to\n investigate.", "\"We do not sell this unbelievable remedy,\" Harvey replied with dignity.\n \"It sells itself.\"\n\n\n \"'Course, I'd expect a considerable reduction if I bought a whole\n case,\" said Johnson.\n\n\n \"That would be the smallest investment you could make, compared with\n the vast loss of time and strength the fever involves.\"\n\n\n \"How much?\" asked the mayor unhappily.\n\n\n \"For you, since you have taken us in so hospitably, a mere five hundred\n buckos.\"\n\n\n Johnson did not actually stagger back, but he gave the impression of\n doing so. \"F-four hundred,\" he offered.\n\n\n \"Not a red cent less than four seventy-five,\" Harvey said flatly.\n\n\n \"Make it four fifty,\" quavered Johnson.\n\n\n \"I dislike haggling,\" said Harvey.", "\"Now, Joseph! Consider my quandary when I came back here to manufacture\n our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling\n yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods—an entire case,\n mind you. Was I to mix the extract with the water for which we had been\n swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? Where would our profit have\n been, then? No; I had to use the bitter free water, of course.\"\n\n\n \"But why use it on me?\" Joe demanded furiously.\n\n\n Harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. \"Did Johnson ask to\n taste it, or did he not? One must look ahead, Joseph. I had to produce\n the same\nmedicine\nthat we will now manufacture. Thus, you were a\n guinea pig for a splendid cause.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, okay,\" Joe said. \"But you shoulda charged him more.\"", "\"Well, by obliging us to pay such a high price for your dinner, you put\n out of your reach the chance of profiting from a really substantial\n deal. My partner and I were prepared to make you a sizable offer for\n the peculiar creature you call Genius. But by reducing our funds the\n way you have—\"\n\n\n \"Who said I wanted to sell him?\" the mayor interrupted. He rubbed his\n fingers together and asked disinterestedly: \"What were you going to\n offer, anyhow?\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter any longer,\" Harvey said with elaborate\n carelessness. \"Perhaps you wouldn't have accepted it, anyway.\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Johnson came back emphatically. \"But what would your\n offer have been which I would have turned down?\"\n\n\n \"Which one? The one we were going to make, or the one we can make now?\"\n\n\n \"Either one. It don't make no difference. Genius is too valuable to\n sell.\"", "The final price, however, was four hundred and sixty-nine buckos and\n fifty redsents. Magnanimously, Harvey added: \"And we will include,\ngratis\n, an elegant bottle-opener, a superb product of Mercurian\n handicraftsmanship.\"\n\n\n Johnson stabbed out a warning finger. \"No tricks now. I want a taste of\n that stuff. You're not switching some worthless junk on me.\"\n\n\n Harvey took a glass from the bar and poured him a generous sample. The\n mayor sniffed it, grimaced, then threw it down his gullet. The ensuing\n minute saw a grim battle between a man and his stomach, a battle which\n the man gradually won.\n\n\n \"There ain't no words for that taste,\" he gulped when it was safe to\n talk again.", "Genius, the six-armed native, appeared from the dingy kitchen with\n two menus in one hand, two glasses of water in another, plus napkins,\n silverware, a pitcher, plates, saucers, cups, and their cocktails,\n which were on the house. Then he stood by for orders.\n\n\n Harvey and Joe studied the menu critically. The prices were\n phenomenally low. When they glanced up at Johnson in perplexity, he\n grinned, bowed and asked: \"Everything satisfactory, gents?\"\n\n\n \"Quite,\" said Harvey. \"We shall order.\"\n\n\n For an hour they were served amazing dishes, both fresh and canned, the\n culinary wealth of this planetoid and all the system. And the service\n was as extraordinary as the meal itself. With four hands, Genius played\n deftly upon a pair of mellow Venusian\nviotars\n, using his other two\n hands for waiting on the table.", "But Joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and\n tasting it.\n\n\n \"Sweet!\" he snarled.\n\n\n They rushed back to the first pool, where Joe again tasted a sample.\n His mouth went wry. \"Bitter! He uses only one pool, the sweet one! The\n only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's\n conscience.\"\n\n\n \"The asteroidal Poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on,\" said\n Harvey slowly. His eyes grew cold. \"Joseph, the good-natured artist in\n me has become a hard and merciless avenger. I shall not rest until we\n have had the best of this colonial con-man! Watch your cues from this\n point hence.\"\n\n\n Fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. But at the door they\n stopped and their fists unclenched.", "Unwillingly, Joe turned and shuffled out.\nOn a larger and heavier world than Planetoid 42, Johnson's curiosity\n would probably have had weight and mass. He was bursting with\n questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. For\n his part, Harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a Venusian amoeba\n until Joe came in, lugging a radio.\n\n\n \"Is that what you were talking about?\" the mayor snorted. \"What makes\n you think I want a radio? I came here to get away from singers and\n political speech-makers.\"\n\n\n \"Do not jump to hasty conclusions,\" Harvey cautioned. \"Another word,\n and I shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had,\n with the sole exceptions of Joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor\n of this absolutely awe-inspiring device.\"\n\n\n \"I ain't in the market for a radio,\" Johnson said stubbornly.", "\"I have every hope of luring away the profitable monstrosity.\n Apparently you have also surmised the fortune we could make with him.\n At first I purpose to exhibit him on our interplanetary tours with our\n streamlined panacea; he would be a spectacular attraction for bucolic\n suckers. Later, a brief period of demonstrating his abilities on the\n audio-visiphone. Then our triumph—we shall sell him at a stupendous\n figure to the zoo!\"\nJoe was still dazed by that monetary vista when he and Harvey carried\n the case of medicine to the saloon. The mayor had already cleared a\n place of honor in the cluttered back room, where he told them to put it\n down carefully. Then he took the elaborate bottle-opener Harvey gave\n him, reverently uncorked a bottle and sampled it. It must have been at\n least as good as the first; he gagged.", "The mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. \"What is it?\" he\n asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its\n worst and expects nothing better.\n\n\n \"Joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of\n the ship,\" Harvey instructed. To Johnson he explained: \"You must see\n the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. My partner\n will soon have it here for your astonishment.\"\n\n\n Joe's face grew as glum as Johnson's had been. \"Aw, Harv,\" he\n protested, \"do we have to sell it? And right when I thought we were\n getting the key!\"\n\n\n \"We must not be selfish, my boy,\" Harvey said nobly. \"We have had our\n chance; now we must relinquish Fate to the hands of a man who might\n have more success than we. Go, Joseph. Bring it here.\"", "\"Folks are always thinkin' the other feller's out to do 'em,\" he said,\n shaking his head. \"Lemme explain about the water here. It's bitter\n as some kinds of sin before it's purified. Have to bring it in with\n buckets and make it sweet. That takes time and labor. Waddya think—I\n was chargin' feller critters for water just out of devilment? I charge\n because I gotta.\"\n\n\n \"Friend,\" said Harvey, taking out a wallet and counting off eight\n five-bucko bills, \"here is your money. What's fair is fair, and you\n have put a different complexion on what seemed at first to be an\n unconscionable interjection of a middleman between Nature and man's\n thirst.\"\n\n\n The saloon man removed his dirty apron and came around the bar.", "\"Joseph, I promise you that we shall get back every redsent of which\n that swindler cheated us, besides whatever other funds or valuables he\n possesses. We could not be content with less.\"\n\n\n \"Well, we're starting all right,\" admitted Joe. \"How about that thing\n with six arms? He looks like a valuable. Can't we grab him off?\"\n\n\n Harvey stopped filling bottles and looked up pensively.", "\"If that's an apology, I accept it. Now the mayor'll discuss filling\n your tanks. That's me. I'm also justice of the peace, official\n recorder, fire chief....\"\n\n\n \"And chief of police, no doubt,\" said Harvey jocosely.\n\n\n \"Nope. That's my son, Jed. Angus Johnson's my name. Folks here just\n call me Chief. I run this town, and run it right. How much water will\n you need?\"\n\n\n Joe estimated quickly. \"About seventy-five liters, if we go on half\n rations,\" he answered. He waited apprehensively.\n\n\n \"Let's say ten buckos a liter,\" the mayor said. \"On account of the\n quantity, I'm able to quote a bargain price. Shucks, boys, it hurts me\n more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. I just got to,\n that's all.\"" ] ]
train	63304	[ "How do Lowry and the Exec feel about the Venusians?", "How did Svan feel about the Earthlings?", "How did the other five people feel about Svan?", "What didn't Svan do to try to save his planet?", "What were the lights Lowry saw in the dark?", "Why did Svan smile when he was getting ready to leave them?", "Which of the following isn't a reason that Svan's plan failed?", "How did Ingra feel at the end?", "Who drew the fatal slip?" ]	[ [ "Lowry is hoping the Earth immigrants will easily defeat the Venusians, but the Exec doesn't want immigration.", "They both believe that the immigrants from Earth will easily conquer them.", "The Exec hates them, but Lowry feels bad for them.", "They both despise the Venusians because of their un-human-like features." ], [ "They're evil, and the Venusians should fight them.", "They need to be destroyed, no matter the cost.", "Some may have good intentions, but they shouldn't be allowed to come back.", "They can't be trusted, and they should continue to spy on them." ], [ "They don't want to upset him, but they won't tell him he's wrong.", "Scared of his dangerous plan, but willing to follow him.", "Unsure that what he's doing is best for Venus.", "They think he's gone too far and aren't willing to do the dangerous deed." ], [ "Blow up his own vehicle and friends", "Spy on the people from Earth", "Plant a bomb on the ship from Earth", "Kill a Venusian guard" ], [ "Svan and his conspirators", "The guards", "The delegation", "Another spy-ray" ], [ "He knew they would be safe, since he was doing the dangerous job", "He was glad the others were going to blow up soon", "He was excited to follow through with his plan", "He had feelings for Ingra" ], [ "Ingra came back for Svan because guards were after them", "A guard stopped them and wouldn't let them get through", "There were more people guarding the ship because of the spy-ray", "A guard knocked him unconscious and brought him to the Earth ship" ], [ "Upset because she knew Svan planted a bomb in the car", "Excited to fight the guards that were chasing them", "Mad at Svan for his dangerous plan", "Worried for Svan and all of them" ], [ "Svan", "Ingra", "Toller", "Ingra's aunt" ] ]	[ 3, 2, 2, 3, 1, 2, 4, 4, 1 ]	[ 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "\"Acclimation,\" Lowry said scientifically. \"They had to acclimate\n themselves to Venus's climate. They're friendly enough.\"\n\n\n The Exec shrugged again. He stared at the wooden shacks that were the\n outskirts of the native city, dimly visible through the ever-present\n Venusian mist. The native guard of honor, posted a hundred yards from\n the Earth-ship, stood stolidly at attention with their old-fashioned\n proton-rifles slung over their backs. A few natives were gazing\n wonderingly at the great ship, but made no move to pass the line of\n guards.", "\"Everything shipshape, I take it!\" he commented.\n\n\n The OD nodded. \"I'll have a blank log if this keeps up,\" he said.\n \"Every man accounted for except the delegation, cargo stowed, drivers\n ready to lift as soon as they come back.\"\n\n\n The Exec tossed away his cigarette. \"\nIf\nthey come back.\"\n\n\n \"Is there any question?\"\n\n\n The Exec shrugged. \"I don't know, Lowry,\" he said. \"This is a funny\n place. I don't trust the natives.\"\n\n\n Lowry lifted his eyebrows. \"Oh? But after all, they're human beings,\n just like us—\"\n\n\n \"Not any more. Four or five generations ago they were. Lord, they don't\n even look human any more. Those white, flabby skins—I don't like them.\"", "Lowry, interrupted in the middle of a word, jerked his head back and\n stared unbelievingly at the tell-tale next to the annunciator. Sure\n enough, it was glowing red—might have been glowing for minutes. He\n snatched at the hand-phone dangling from the wall, shouted into it.\n \"Set up a screen! Notify the delegation! Alert a landing party!\" But\n even while he was giving orders, the warning light flickered suddenly\n and went out. Stricken, Lowry turned to the Exec.\n\n\n The Executive Officer nodded gloomily. He said, \"You see!\"\n\"You see?\"\n\n\n Svan clicked off the listening-machine and turned around. The five\n others in the room looked apprehensive. \"You see?\" Svan repeated. \"From\n their own mouths you have heard it. The Council was right.\"", "Svan strode back to the car. \"Hurry up,\" he gasped to the girl. \"Now\n there is danger for all of us, if they discover he is missing. And keep\n a watch for other guards.\"\nVenus has no moon, and no star can shine through its vast cloud layer.\n Ensign Lowry, staring anxiously out through the astro-dome in the bow\n of the Earth-ship, cursed the blackness.\n\n\n \"Can't see a thing,\" he complained to the Exec, steadily writing away\n at the computer's table. \"Look—are those lights over there?\"\n\n\n The Exec looked up wearily. He shrugged. \"Probably the guards. Of\n course, you can't tell. Might be a raiding party.\"\n\n\n Lowry, stung, looked to see if the Exec was smiling, but found no\n answer in his stolid face. \"Don't joke about it,\" he said. \"Suppose\n something happens to the delegation?\"", "\"Then we're in the soup,\" the Exec said philosophically. \"I told you\n the natives were dangerous. Spy-rays! They've been prohibited for the\n last three hundred years.\"\n\n\n \"It isn't all the natives,\" Lowry said. \"Look how they've doubled the\n guard around us. The administration is co-operating every way they\n know how. You heard the delegation's report on the intercom. It's this\n secret group they call the Council.\"", "\"Of course,\" Lowry said suddenly, \"there's a minority who are afraid\n of us. I was in town yesterday, and I talked with some of the natives.\n They think there will be hordes of immigrants from Earth, now that we\n know Venus is habitable. And there's some sort of a paltry underground\n group that is spreading the word that the immigrants will drive the\n native Venusians—the descendants of the first expedition, that\n is—right down into the mud. Well—\" he laughed—\"maybe they will.\n After all, the fittest survive. That's a basic law of—\"\n\n\n The annunciator over the open lock clanged vigorously, and a metallic\n voice rasped: \"Officer of the Deck! Post Number One! Instruments\n reports a spy ray focused on the main lock!\"", "\"No,\" she said slowly. \"I do not object.\"\n\n\n \"And the rest of us? Does any of us object?\"\n\n\n Svan eyed them, each in turn. There was a slow but unanimous gesture of\n assent.\n\n\n \"Good,\" said Svan. \"Then we must act. The Council has told us that we\n alone will decide our course of action. We have agreed that, if the\n Earth-ship returns, it means disaster for Venus. Therefore, it must not\n return.\"\n\n\n An old man shifted restlessly. \"But they are strong, Svan,\" he\n complained. \"They have weapons. We cannot force them to stay.\"\n\n\n Svan nodded. \"No. They will leave. But they will never get back to\n Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Never get back to Earth?\" the old man gasped. \"Has the Council\n authorized—murder?\"", "DOUBLECROSS\nby JAMES Mac CREIGH\nRevolt was brewing on Venus, led by the\n\n descendant of the first Earthmen to\n\n land. Svan was the leader making the final\n\n plans—plotting them a bit too well.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Winter 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe Officer of the Deck was pleased as he returned to the main lock.\n There was no reason why everything shouldn't have been functioning\n perfectly, of course, but he was pleased to have it confirmed, all the\n same. The Executive Officer was moodily smoking a cigarette in the open\n lock, staring out over the dank Venusian terrain at the native town. He\n turned.", "Lowry, a bewildered expression on his beardless face, held out the two\n halves of a metallic sphere. Dangling ends of wires showed where a\n connection had been broken. \"He had a bomb,\" he said. \"A magnetic-type,\n delayed-action atomite bomb. There must have been another in the car,\n and it went off. They—they were planning to bomb us.\"\n\n\n \"Amazing,\" the surgeon said dryly. \"Well, they won't do any bombing\n now.\"\n\n\n Lowry was staring at the huddled, mutilated form of Svan. He shuddered.\n The surgeon, seeing the shudder, grasped his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Better them than us,\" he said. \"It's poetic justice if I ever saw it.\n They had it coming....\" He paused thoughtfully, staring at a piece of\n paper between his fingers. \"This is the only part I don't get,\" he said.", "The younger of the two women sighed. She might have been beautiful, in\n spite of her dead-white skin, if there had been a scrap of hair on her\n head. \"Svan, I'm afraid,\" she said. \"Who are we to decide if this\n is a good thing? Our parents came from Earth. Perhaps there will be\n trouble at first, if colonists come, but we are of the same blood.\"\n\n\n Svan laughed harshly. \"\nThey\ndon't think so. You heard them. We are\n not human any more. The officer said it.\"\n\n\n The other woman spoke unexpectedly. \"The Council was right,\" she\n agreed. \"Svan, what must we do?\"\n\n\n Svan raised his hand, thoughtfully. \"One moment. Ingra, do you still\n object?\"\n\n\n The younger woman shrank back before the glare in his eyes. She looked\n around at the others, found them reluctant and uneasy, but visibly\n convinced by Svan.", "There was an instant of doubt in his steel-shackled mind, then it was\n driven away. Perhaps she was loyal, yet certainly she was weak. And\n since he could not know which was the one who had received the marked\n slip, and feared to admit it, it was better they all should die.\n\n\n He advanced along the midnight road to where the ground rose and the\n jungle plants thinned out. Ahead, on an elevation, were the rain-dimmed\n lights of the Earth-ship, set down in the center of a clearing made by\n its own fierce rockets. Svan's mist-trained eyes spotted the circling\n figures of sentries, and knew that these would be the ship's own.\n They would not be as easily overcome as the natives, not with those\n slim-shafted blasters they carried. Only deceit could get him to the\n side of the ship.", "\"Where are you going?\" he growled.\n\n\n Svan spoke up. \"We want to look at the Earth-ship,\" he said. He opened\n the door beside him and stepped out, careless of the drizzle. \"We heard\n it was leaving tonight,\" he continued, \"and we have not seen it. Is\n that not permitted?\"\n\n\n The guard shook his head sourly. \"No one is allowed near the ship. The\n order was just issued. It is thought there is danger.\"\n\n\n Svan stepped closer, his teeth bared in what passed for a smile. \"It\n is urgent,\" he purred. His right hand flashed across his chest in a\n complicated gesture. \"Do you understand?\"", "She looked at him, and he was surprised to find compassion in her\n eyes. Silently she nodded, advanced the fuel-handle so that the clumsy\n car jolted a trace more rapidly over the corduroy road. It was quite\n dark now. The car's driving light flared yellowishly in front of them,\n illuminating the narrow road and the pale, distorted vegetation of the\n jungle that surrounded them. Svan noticed it was raining a little. The\n present shower would deepen and intensify until midnight, then fall off\n again, to halt before morning. But before then they would be done.\n\n\n A proton-bolt lanced across the road in front of them. In the silence\n that followed its thunderous crash, a man's voice bellowed: \"Halt!\"\n\n\n The girl, Ingra, gasped something indistinguishable, slammed on the\n brakes. A Venusian in the trappings of the State Guard advanced on them\n from the side of the road, proton-rifle held ready to fire again.", "He stared unseeingly at the light. \"Go away!\" he croaked unbelievingly.\n Then his muscles jerked into action. The time was almost up—the bomb\n in the car—\n\n\n \"Go away!\" he shrieked, and turned to run. His fists clenched and\n swinging at his side, he made a dozen floundering steps before\n something immense pounded at him from behind. He felt himself lifted\n from the road, sailing, swooping, dropping with annihilating force\n onto the hard, charred earth of the clearing. Only then did he hear the\n sound of the explosion, and as the immense echoes died away he began to\n feel the pain seeping into him from his hideously racked body....\n\n\n The Flight Surgeon rose from beside him. \"He's still alive,\" he said\n callously to Lowry, who had just come up. \"It won't last long, though.\n What've you got there?\"", "\"And how do you know the guards themselves don't belong to it?\" the\n Exec retorted. \"They're all the same to me.... Look, your light's gone\n out now. Must have been the guard. They're on the wrong side to be\n coming from the town, anyhow....\"\nSvan hesitated only a fraction of a second after the girl turned the\n lights out and stopped the car. Then he reached in the compartment\n under the seat. If he took a little longer than seemed necessary to get\n the atomite bomb out of the compartment, none of the others noticed.\n Certainly it did not occur to them that there had been\ntwo\nbombs in\n the compartment, though Svan's hand emerged with only one.\n\n\n He got out of the car, holding the sphere. \"This will do for me,\" he\n said. \"They won't be expecting anyone to come from behind the ship—we\n were wise to circle around. Now, you know what you must do?\"", "Svan settled himself at the side of the road, waiting for his chance.\n He had perhaps three minutes to wait; he reckoned. His fingers went\n absently to the pouch in his wide belt, closed on the slip of paper. He\n turned it over without looking at it, wondering who had drawn the first\n cross, and been a coward. Ingra? One of the men?\nHe became abruptly conscious of a commotion behind him. A ground car\n was racing along the road. He spun around and was caught in the glare\n of its blinding driving-light, as it bumped to a slithering stop.\n\n\n Paralyzed, he heard the girl's voice. \"Svan! They're coming! They found\n the guard's rifle, and they're looking for us! Thirty Earthmen, Svan,\n with those frightful guns. They fired at us, but we got away and came\n for you. We must flee!\"", "Svan shrugged. \"The Council did not know what we would face. The\n Councilmen could not come to the city and see what strength the\n Earth-ship has.\" He paused dangerously. \"Toller,\" he said, \"do you\n object?\"\n\n\n Like the girl, the old man retreated before his eyes. His voice was\n dull. \"What is your plan?\" he asked.\n\n\n Svan smiled, and it was like a dark flame. He reached to a box at his\n feet, held up a shiny metal globe. \"One of us will plant this in the\n ship. It will be set by means of this dial—\" he touched a spot on the\n surface of the globe with a pallid finger—\"to do nothing for forty\n hours. Then—it will explode. Atomite.\"", "There was comprehension in their eyes, Svan saw ... but still that\n uncertainty. Impatiently, he crackled: \"Look at the slips!\"\n\n\n Though he had willed his eyes away from it, his fingers had rebelled.\n Instinctively they had opened the slip, turned it over and over,\n striving to detect if it was the fatal one. They had felt nothing....\n\n\n And his eyes saw nothing. The slip was blank. He gave it but a second's\n glance, then looked up to see who had won the lethal game of chance.\n Almost he was disappointed.\n\n\n Each of the others had looked in that same second. And each was looking\n up now, around at his neighbors. Svan waited impatiently for the chosen\n one to announce it—a second, ten seconds....\n\n\n Then gray understanding came to him.\nA traitor!\nhis subconscious\n whispered.\nA coward!\nHe stared at them in a new light, saw their\n indecision magnified, became opposition.", "Silently the girl picked up an opaque glass bowl from the broad arm\n of her chair. It had held Venus-tobacco cigarettes; there were a few\n left. She shook them out and handed the bowl to Svan, who was rapidly\n creasing the six fatal slips. He dropped them in the bowl, stirred it\n with his hand, offered it to the girl. \"You first, Ingra,\" he said.\n\n\n She reached in mechanically, her eyes intent on his, took out a slip\n and held it without opening it. The bowl went the rounds, till Svan\n himself took the last. All eyes were on him. No one had looked at their\n slips.", "Svan, too, had left his unopened. He sat at the table, facing them.\n \"This is the plan,\" he said. \"We will go, all six of us, in my ground\n car, to look at the Earth-ship. No one will suspect—the whole city\n has been to see it already. One will get out, at the best point we can\n find. It is almost dusk now. He can hide, surely, in the vegetation.\n The other five will start back. Something will go wrong with the\n car—perhaps it will run off the road, start to sink in the swamp. The\n guards will be called. There will be commotion—that is easy enough,\n after all; a hysterical woman, a few screams, that's all there is to\n it. And the sixth person will have his chance to steal to the side\n of the ship. The bomb is magnetic. It will not be noticed in the\n dark—they will take off before sunrise, because they must travel away\n from the sun to return—in forty hours the danger is removed.\"" ], [ "Svan settled himself at the side of the road, waiting for his chance.\n He had perhaps three minutes to wait; he reckoned. His fingers went\n absently to the pouch in his wide belt, closed on the slip of paper. He\n turned it over without looking at it, wondering who had drawn the first\n cross, and been a coward. Ingra? One of the men?\nHe became abruptly conscious of a commotion behind him. A ground car\n was racing along the road. He spun around and was caught in the glare\n of its blinding driving-light, as it bumped to a slithering stop.\n\n\n Paralyzed, he heard the girl's voice. \"Svan! They're coming! They found\n the guard's rifle, and they're looking for us! Thirty Earthmen, Svan,\n with those frightful guns. They fired at us, but we got away and came\n for you. We must flee!\"", "There was an instant of doubt in his steel-shackled mind, then it was\n driven away. Perhaps she was loyal, yet certainly she was weak. And\n since he could not know which was the one who had received the marked\n slip, and feared to admit it, it was better they all should die.\n\n\n He advanced along the midnight road to where the ground rose and the\n jungle plants thinned out. Ahead, on an elevation, were the rain-dimmed\n lights of the Earth-ship, set down in the center of a clearing made by\n its own fierce rockets. Svan's mist-trained eyes spotted the circling\n figures of sentries, and knew that these would be the ship's own.\n They would not be as easily overcome as the natives, not with those\n slim-shafted blasters they carried. Only deceit could get him to the\n side of the ship.", "\"Where are you going?\" he growled.\n\n\n Svan spoke up. \"We want to look at the Earth-ship,\" he said. He opened\n the door beside him and stepped out, careless of the drizzle. \"We heard\n it was leaving tonight,\" he continued, \"and we have not seen it. Is\n that not permitted?\"\n\n\n The guard shook his head sourly. \"No one is allowed near the ship. The\n order was just issued. It is thought there is danger.\"\n\n\n Svan stepped closer, his teeth bared in what passed for a smile. \"It\n is urgent,\" he purred. His right hand flashed across his chest in a\n complicated gesture. \"Do you understand?\"", "Svan, too, had left his unopened. He sat at the table, facing them.\n \"This is the plan,\" he said. \"We will go, all six of us, in my ground\n car, to look at the Earth-ship. No one will suspect—the whole city\n has been to see it already. One will get out, at the best point we can\n find. It is almost dusk now. He can hide, surely, in the vegetation.\n The other five will start back. Something will go wrong with the\n car—perhaps it will run off the road, start to sink in the swamp. The\n guards will be called. There will be commotion—that is easy enough,\n after all; a hysterical woman, a few screams, that's all there is to\n it. And the sixth person will have his chance to steal to the side\n of the ship. The bomb is magnetic. It will not be noticed in the\n dark—they will take off before sunrise, because they must travel away\n from the sun to return—in forty hours the danger is removed.\"", "The younger of the two women sighed. She might have been beautiful, in\n spite of her dead-white skin, if there had been a scrap of hair on her\n head. \"Svan, I'm afraid,\" she said. \"Who are we to decide if this\n is a good thing? Our parents came from Earth. Perhaps there will be\n trouble at first, if colonists come, but we are of the same blood.\"\n\n\n Svan laughed harshly. \"\nThey\ndon't think so. You heard them. We are\n not human any more. The officer said it.\"\n\n\n The other woman spoke unexpectedly. \"The Council was right,\" she\n agreed. \"Svan, what must we do?\"\n\n\n Svan raised his hand, thoughtfully. \"One moment. Ingra, do you still\n object?\"\n\n\n The younger woman shrank back before the glare in his eyes. She looked\n around at the others, found them reluctant and uneasy, but visibly\n convinced by Svan.", "Svan shrugged. \"The Council did not know what we would face. The\n Councilmen could not come to the city and see what strength the\n Earth-ship has.\" He paused dangerously. \"Toller,\" he said, \"do you\n object?\"\n\n\n Like the girl, the old man retreated before his eyes. His voice was\n dull. \"What is your plan?\" he asked.\n\n\n Svan smiled, and it was like a dark flame. He reached to a box at his\n feet, held up a shiny metal globe. \"One of us will plant this in the\n ship. It will be set by means of this dial—\" he touched a spot on the\n surface of the globe with a pallid finger—\"to do nothing for forty\n hours. Then—it will explode. Atomite.\"", "\"Good,\" said Svan, observing them. \"The delegation is still here. We\n have ample time.\"\n\n\n He half turned in the broad front seat next to the driver, searching\n the faces of the others in the car. Which was the coward? he wondered.\n Ingra? Her aunt? One of the men?\n\n\n The right answer leaped up at him.\nThey all are\n, he thought.\nNot one\n of them understands what this means. They're afraid.\nHe clamped his lips. \"Go faster, Ingra,\" he ordered the girl who was\n driving. \"Let's get this done with.\"", "\"No,\" she said slowly. \"I do not object.\"\n\n\n \"And the rest of us? Does any of us object?\"\n\n\n Svan eyed them, each in turn. There was a slow but unanimous gesture of\n assent.\n\n\n \"Good,\" said Svan. \"Then we must act. The Council has told us that we\n alone will decide our course of action. We have agreed that, if the\n Earth-ship returns, it means disaster for Venus. Therefore, it must not\n return.\"\n\n\n An old man shifted restlessly. \"But they are strong, Svan,\" he\n complained. \"They have weapons. We cannot force them to stay.\"\n\n\n Svan nodded. \"No. They will leave. But they will never get back to\n Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Never get back to Earth?\" the old man gasped. \"Has the Council\n authorized—murder?\"", "Svan thought faster than ever before in his life. If there was a\n coward, it would do no good to unmask him. All were wavering, any might\n be the one who had drawn the fatal slip. He could insist on inspecting\n every one, but—suppose the coward, cornered, fought back? In fractions\n of a second, Svan had considered the evidence and reached his decision.\n Masked by the table, his hand, still holding the pencil, moved swiftly\n beneath the table, marked his own slip.\n\n\n In the palm of his hand, Svan held up the slip he had just marked in\n secret. His voice was very tired as he said, \"I will plant the bomb.\"\nThe six conspirators in Svan's old ground car moved slowly along the\n main street of the native town. Two Earth-ship sailors, unarmed except\n for deceptively flimsy-looking pistols at their hips, stood before the\n entrance to the town's Hall of Justice.", "There was comprehension in their eyes, Svan saw ... but still that\n uncertainty. Impatiently, he crackled: \"Look at the slips!\"\n\n\n Though he had willed his eyes away from it, his fingers had rebelled.\n Instinctively they had opened the slip, turned it over and over,\n striving to detect if it was the fatal one. They had felt nothing....\n\n\n And his eyes saw nothing. The slip was blank. He gave it but a second's\n glance, then looked up to see who had won the lethal game of chance.\n Almost he was disappointed.\n\n\n Each of the others had looked in that same second. And each was looking\n up now, around at his neighbors. Svan waited impatiently for the chosen\n one to announce it—a second, ten seconds....\n\n\n Then gray understanding came to him.\nA traitor!\nhis subconscious\n whispered.\nA coward!\nHe stared at them in a new light, saw their\n indecision magnified, became opposition.", "Confusion furrowed the guard's hairless brows, then was replaced by\n a sudden flare of understanding—and fear. \"The Council!\" he roared.\n \"By heaven, yes, I understand! You are the swine that caused this—\"\n He strove instinctively to bring the clumsy rifle up, but Svan was\n faster. His gamble had failed; there was only one course remaining.\n He hurled his gross white bulk at the guard, bowled him over against\n the splintery logs of the road. The proton-rifle went flying, and Svan\n savagely tore at the throat of the guard. Knees, elbows and claw-like\n nails—Svan battered at the astonished man with every ounce of strength\n in his body. The guard was as big as Svan, but Svan had the initial", "Abruptly he swallowed, reminded of the bomb that was silently counting\n off the seconds. \"Go ahead,\" he ordered. \"I will wait here.\"\n\n\n \"Svan.\" The girl, Ingra, leaned over to him. Impulsively she reached\n for him, kissed him. \"Good luck to you, Svan,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Good luck,\" repeated the others. Then silently the electric motor of\n the car took hold. Skilfully the girl backed it up, turned it around,\n sent it lumbering back down the road. Only after she had traveled a few\n hundred feet by the feel of the road did she turn the lights on again.\n\n\n Svan looked after them. The kiss had surprised him. What did it mean?\n Was it an error that the girl should die with the others?", "Svan strode back to the car. \"Hurry up,\" he gasped to the girl. \"Now\n there is danger for all of us, if they discover he is missing. And keep\n a watch for other guards.\"\nVenus has no moon, and no star can shine through its vast cloud layer.\n Ensign Lowry, staring anxiously out through the astro-dome in the bow\n of the Earth-ship, cursed the blackness.\n\n\n \"Can't see a thing,\" he complained to the Exec, steadily writing away\n at the computer's table. \"Look—are those lights over there?\"\n\n\n The Exec looked up wearily. He shrugged. \"Probably the guards. Of\n course, you can't tell. Might be a raiding party.\"\n\n\n Lowry, stung, looked to see if the Exec was smiling, but found no\n answer in his stolid face. \"Don't joke about it,\" he said. \"Suppose\n something happens to the delegation?\"", "She looked at him, and he was surprised to find compassion in her\n eyes. Silently she nodded, advanced the fuel-handle so that the clumsy\n car jolted a trace more rapidly over the corduroy road. It was quite\n dark now. The car's driving light flared yellowishly in front of them,\n illuminating the narrow road and the pale, distorted vegetation of the\n jungle that surrounded them. Svan noticed it was raining a little. The\n present shower would deepen and intensify until midnight, then fall off\n again, to halt before morning. But before then they would be done.\n\n\n A proton-bolt lanced across the road in front of them. In the silence\n that followed its thunderous crash, a man's voice bellowed: \"Halt!\"\n\n\n The girl, Ingra, gasped something indistinguishable, slammed on the\n brakes. A Venusian in the trappings of the State Guard advanced on them\n from the side of the road, proton-rifle held ready to fire again.", "He grinned triumphantly, looking from face to face. The grin\n faded uncertainly as he saw what was in their eyes—uncertainty,\n irresolution. Abruptly he set the bomb down, savagely ripped six leaves\n off a writing tablet on the table next him. He took a pencil and made a\n mark on one of them, held it up.\n\n\n \"We will let chance decide who is to do the work,\" he said angrily. \"Is\n there anyone here who is afraid? There will be danger, I think....\"\n\n\n No answer. Svan jerked his head. \"Good,\" he said. \"Ingra, bring me that\n bowl.\"", "Ingra nodded, while the others remained mute. \"We must circle back\n again,\" she parroted. \"We are to wait five minutes, then drive the car\n into the swamp. We will create a commotion, attract the guards.\"\n\n\n Svan, listening, thought:\nIt's not much of a plan. The guards would\n not be drawn away. I am glad I can't trust these five any more. If\n they must be destroyed, it is good that their destruction will serve a\n purpose.\nAloud, he said, \"You understand. If I get through, I will return to the\n city on foot. No one will suspect anything if I am not caught, because\n the bomb will not explode until the ship is far out in space. Remember,\n you are in no danger from the guards.\"\nFrom the guards\n, his mind echoed. He smiled. At least, they would\n feel no pain, never know what happened. With the amount of atomite in\n that bomb in the compartment, they would merely be obliterated in a\n ground-shaking crash.", "Lowry, interrupted in the middle of a word, jerked his head back and\n stared unbelievingly at the tell-tale next to the annunciator. Sure\n enough, it was glowing red—might have been glowing for minutes. He\n snatched at the hand-phone dangling from the wall, shouted into it.\n \"Set up a screen! Notify the delegation! Alert a landing party!\" But\n even while he was giving orders, the warning light flickered suddenly\n and went out. Stricken, Lowry turned to the Exec.\n\n\n The Executive Officer nodded gloomily. He said, \"You see!\"\n\"You see?\"\n\n\n Svan clicked off the listening-machine and turned around. The five\n others in the room looked apprehensive. \"You see?\" Svan repeated. \"From\n their own mouths you have heard it. The Council was right.\"", "advantage ... and it was only a matter of seconds before the guard\n lay unconscious, his skull a mass of gore at the back where Svan had\n ruthlessly pounded it against the road.\nSvan grunted as his fingers constricted brutally.\nSvan rose, panting, stared around. No one else was in sight, save the\n petrified five and the ground car. Svan glared at them contemptuously,\n then reached down and heaved on the senseless body of the guard. Over\n the shoulder of the road the body went, onto the damp swampland of the\n jungle. Even while Svan watched the body began to sink. There would be\n no trace.", "DOUBLECROSS\nby JAMES Mac CREIGH\nRevolt was brewing on Venus, led by the\n\n descendant of the first Earthmen to\n\n land. Svan was the leader making the final\n\n plans—plotting them a bit too well.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Winter 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe Officer of the Deck was pleased as he returned to the main lock.\n There was no reason why everything shouldn't have been functioning\n perfectly, of course, but he was pleased to have it confirmed, all the\n same. The Executive Officer was moodily smoking a cigarette in the open\n lock, staring out over the dank Venusian terrain at the native town. He\n turned.", "\"Everything shipshape, I take it!\" he commented.\n\n\n The OD nodded. \"I'll have a blank log if this keeps up,\" he said.\n \"Every man accounted for except the delegation, cargo stowed, drivers\n ready to lift as soon as they come back.\"\n\n\n The Exec tossed away his cigarette. \"\nIf\nthey come back.\"\n\n\n \"Is there any question?\"\n\n\n The Exec shrugged. \"I don't know, Lowry,\" he said. \"This is a funny\n place. I don't trust the natives.\"\n\n\n Lowry lifted his eyebrows. \"Oh? But after all, they're human beings,\n just like us—\"\n\n\n \"Not any more. Four or five generations ago they were. Lord, they don't\n even look human any more. Those white, flabby skins—I don't like them.\"" ], [ "\"Good,\" said Svan, observing them. \"The delegation is still here. We\n have ample time.\"\n\n\n He half turned in the broad front seat next to the driver, searching\n the faces of the others in the car. Which was the coward? he wondered.\n Ingra? Her aunt? One of the men?\n\n\n The right answer leaped up at him.\nThey all are\n, he thought.\nNot one\n of them understands what this means. They're afraid.\nHe clamped his lips. \"Go faster, Ingra,\" he ordered the girl who was\n driving. \"Let's get this done with.\"", "He grinned triumphantly, looking from face to face. The grin\n faded uncertainly as he saw what was in their eyes—uncertainty,\n irresolution. Abruptly he set the bomb down, savagely ripped six leaves\n off a writing tablet on the table next him. He took a pencil and made a\n mark on one of them, held it up.\n\n\n \"We will let chance decide who is to do the work,\" he said angrily. \"Is\n there anyone here who is afraid? There will be danger, I think....\"\n\n\n No answer. Svan jerked his head. \"Good,\" he said. \"Ingra, bring me that\n bowl.\"", "There was comprehension in their eyes, Svan saw ... but still that\n uncertainty. Impatiently, he crackled: \"Look at the slips!\"\n\n\n Though he had willed his eyes away from it, his fingers had rebelled.\n Instinctively they had opened the slip, turned it over and over,\n striving to detect if it was the fatal one. They had felt nothing....\n\n\n And his eyes saw nothing. The slip was blank. He gave it but a second's\n glance, then looked up to see who had won the lethal game of chance.\n Almost he was disappointed.\n\n\n Each of the others had looked in that same second. And each was looking\n up now, around at his neighbors. Svan waited impatiently for the chosen\n one to announce it—a second, ten seconds....\n\n\n Then gray understanding came to him.\nA traitor!\nhis subconscious\n whispered.\nA coward!\nHe stared at them in a new light, saw their\n indecision magnified, became opposition.", "Svan, too, had left his unopened. He sat at the table, facing them.\n \"This is the plan,\" he said. \"We will go, all six of us, in my ground\n car, to look at the Earth-ship. No one will suspect—the whole city\n has been to see it already. One will get out, at the best point we can\n find. It is almost dusk now. He can hide, surely, in the vegetation.\n The other five will start back. Something will go wrong with the\n car—perhaps it will run off the road, start to sink in the swamp. The\n guards will be called. There will be commotion—that is easy enough,\n after all; a hysterical woman, a few screams, that's all there is to\n it. And the sixth person will have his chance to steal to the side\n of the ship. The bomb is magnetic. It will not be noticed in the\n dark—they will take off before sunrise, because they must travel away\n from the sun to return—in forty hours the danger is removed.\"", "Abruptly he swallowed, reminded of the bomb that was silently counting\n off the seconds. \"Go ahead,\" he ordered. \"I will wait here.\"\n\n\n \"Svan.\" The girl, Ingra, leaned over to him. Impulsively she reached\n for him, kissed him. \"Good luck to you, Svan,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Good luck,\" repeated the others. Then silently the electric motor of\n the car took hold. Skilfully the girl backed it up, turned it around,\n sent it lumbering back down the road. Only after she had traveled a few\n hundred feet by the feel of the road did she turn the lights on again.\n\n\n Svan looked after them. The kiss had surprised him. What did it mean?\n Was it an error that the girl should die with the others?", "Svan settled himself at the side of the road, waiting for his chance.\n He had perhaps three minutes to wait; he reckoned. His fingers went\n absently to the pouch in his wide belt, closed on the slip of paper. He\n turned it over without looking at it, wondering who had drawn the first\n cross, and been a coward. Ingra? One of the men?\nHe became abruptly conscious of a commotion behind him. A ground car\n was racing along the road. He spun around and was caught in the glare\n of its blinding driving-light, as it bumped to a slithering stop.\n\n\n Paralyzed, he heard the girl's voice. \"Svan! They're coming! They found\n the guard's rifle, and they're looking for us! Thirty Earthmen, Svan,\n with those frightful guns. They fired at us, but we got away and came\n for you. We must flee!\"", "Ingra nodded, while the others remained mute. \"We must circle back\n again,\" she parroted. \"We are to wait five minutes, then drive the car\n into the swamp. We will create a commotion, attract the guards.\"\n\n\n Svan, listening, thought:\nIt's not much of a plan. The guards would\n not be drawn away. I am glad I can't trust these five any more. If\n they must be destroyed, it is good that their destruction will serve a\n purpose.\nAloud, he said, \"You understand. If I get through, I will return to the\n city on foot. No one will suspect anything if I am not caught, because\n the bomb will not explode until the ship is far out in space. Remember,\n you are in no danger from the guards.\"\nFrom the guards\n, his mind echoed. He smiled. At least, they would\n feel no pain, never know what happened. With the amount of atomite in\n that bomb in the compartment, they would merely be obliterated in a\n ground-shaking crash.", "Svan thought faster than ever before in his life. If there was a\n coward, it would do no good to unmask him. All were wavering, any might\n be the one who had drawn the fatal slip. He could insist on inspecting\n every one, but—suppose the coward, cornered, fought back? In fractions\n of a second, Svan had considered the evidence and reached his decision.\n Masked by the table, his hand, still holding the pencil, moved swiftly\n beneath the table, marked his own slip.\n\n\n In the palm of his hand, Svan held up the slip he had just marked in\n secret. His voice was very tired as he said, \"I will plant the bomb.\"\nThe six conspirators in Svan's old ground car moved slowly along the\n main street of the native town. Two Earth-ship sailors, unarmed except\n for deceptively flimsy-looking pistols at their hips, stood before the\n entrance to the town's Hall of Justice.", "advantage ... and it was only a matter of seconds before the guard\n lay unconscious, his skull a mass of gore at the back where Svan had\n ruthlessly pounded it against the road.\nSvan grunted as his fingers constricted brutally.\nSvan rose, panting, stared around. No one else was in sight, save the\n petrified five and the ground car. Svan glared at them contemptuously,\n then reached down and heaved on the senseless body of the guard. Over\n the shoulder of the road the body went, onto the damp swampland of the\n jungle. Even while Svan watched the body began to sink. There would be\n no trace.", "Silently the girl picked up an opaque glass bowl from the broad arm\n of her chair. It had held Venus-tobacco cigarettes; there were a few\n left. She shook them out and handed the bowl to Svan, who was rapidly\n creasing the six fatal slips. He dropped them in the bowl, stirred it\n with his hand, offered it to the girl. \"You first, Ingra,\" he said.\n\n\n She reached in mechanically, her eyes intent on his, took out a slip\n and held it without opening it. The bowl went the rounds, till Svan\n himself took the last. All eyes were on him. No one had looked at their\n slips.", "There was an instant of doubt in his steel-shackled mind, then it was\n driven away. Perhaps she was loyal, yet certainly she was weak. And\n since he could not know which was the one who had received the marked\n slip, and feared to admit it, it was better they all should die.\n\n\n He advanced along the midnight road to where the ground rose and the\n jungle plants thinned out. Ahead, on an elevation, were the rain-dimmed\n lights of the Earth-ship, set down in the center of a clearing made by\n its own fierce rockets. Svan's mist-trained eyes spotted the circling\n figures of sentries, and knew that these would be the ship's own.\n They would not be as easily overcome as the natives, not with those\n slim-shafted blasters they carried. Only deceit could get him to the\n side of the ship.", "The younger of the two women sighed. She might have been beautiful, in\n spite of her dead-white skin, if there had been a scrap of hair on her\n head. \"Svan, I'm afraid,\" she said. \"Who are we to decide if this\n is a good thing? Our parents came from Earth. Perhaps there will be\n trouble at first, if colonists come, but we are of the same blood.\"\n\n\n Svan laughed harshly. \"\nThey\ndon't think so. You heard them. We are\n not human any more. The officer said it.\"\n\n\n The other woman spoke unexpectedly. \"The Council was right,\" she\n agreed. \"Svan, what must we do?\"\n\n\n Svan raised his hand, thoughtfully. \"One moment. Ingra, do you still\n object?\"\n\n\n The younger woman shrank back before the glare in his eyes. She looked\n around at the others, found them reluctant and uneasy, but visibly\n convinced by Svan.", "Confusion furrowed the guard's hairless brows, then was replaced by\n a sudden flare of understanding—and fear. \"The Council!\" he roared.\n \"By heaven, yes, I understand! You are the swine that caused this—\"\n He strove instinctively to bring the clumsy rifle up, but Svan was\n faster. His gamble had failed; there was only one course remaining.\n He hurled his gross white bulk at the guard, bowled him over against\n the splintery logs of the road. The proton-rifle went flying, and Svan\n savagely tore at the throat of the guard. Knees, elbows and claw-like\n nails—Svan battered at the astonished man with every ounce of strength\n in his body. The guard was as big as Svan, but Svan had the initial", "Svan shrugged. \"The Council did not know what we would face. The\n Councilmen could not come to the city and see what strength the\n Earth-ship has.\" He paused dangerously. \"Toller,\" he said, \"do you\n object?\"\n\n\n Like the girl, the old man retreated before his eyes. His voice was\n dull. \"What is your plan?\" he asked.\n\n\n Svan smiled, and it was like a dark flame. He reached to a box at his\n feet, held up a shiny metal globe. \"One of us will plant this in the\n ship. It will be set by means of this dial—\" he touched a spot on the\n surface of the globe with a pallid finger—\"to do nothing for forty\n hours. Then—it will explode. Atomite.\"", "\"Where are you going?\" he growled.\n\n\n Svan spoke up. \"We want to look at the Earth-ship,\" he said. He opened\n the door beside him and stepped out, careless of the drizzle. \"We heard\n it was leaving tonight,\" he continued, \"and we have not seen it. Is\n that not permitted?\"\n\n\n The guard shook his head sourly. \"No one is allowed near the ship. The\n order was just issued. It is thought there is danger.\"\n\n\n Svan stepped closer, his teeth bared in what passed for a smile. \"It\n is urgent,\" he purred. His right hand flashed across his chest in a\n complicated gesture. \"Do you understand?\"", "She looked at him, and he was surprised to find compassion in her\n eyes. Silently she nodded, advanced the fuel-handle so that the clumsy\n car jolted a trace more rapidly over the corduroy road. It was quite\n dark now. The car's driving light flared yellowishly in front of them,\n illuminating the narrow road and the pale, distorted vegetation of the\n jungle that surrounded them. Svan noticed it was raining a little. The\n present shower would deepen and intensify until midnight, then fall off\n again, to halt before morning. But before then they would be done.\n\n\n A proton-bolt lanced across the road in front of them. In the silence\n that followed its thunderous crash, a man's voice bellowed: \"Halt!\"\n\n\n The girl, Ingra, gasped something indistinguishable, slammed on the\n brakes. A Venusian in the trappings of the State Guard advanced on them\n from the side of the road, proton-rifle held ready to fire again.", "\"And how do you know the guards themselves don't belong to it?\" the\n Exec retorted. \"They're all the same to me.... Look, your light's gone\n out now. Must have been the guard. They're on the wrong side to be\n coming from the town, anyhow....\"\nSvan hesitated only a fraction of a second after the girl turned the\n lights out and stopped the car. Then he reached in the compartment\n under the seat. If he took a little longer than seemed necessary to get\n the atomite bomb out of the compartment, none of the others noticed.\n Certainly it did not occur to them that there had been\ntwo\nbombs in\n the compartment, though Svan's hand emerged with only one.\n\n\n He got out of the car, holding the sphere. \"This will do for me,\" he\n said. \"They won't be expecting anyone to come from behind the ship—we\n were wise to circle around. Now, you know what you must do?\"", "Lowry, a bewildered expression on his beardless face, held out the two\n halves of a metallic sphere. Dangling ends of wires showed where a\n connection had been broken. \"He had a bomb,\" he said. \"A magnetic-type,\n delayed-action atomite bomb. There must have been another in the car,\n and it went off. They—they were planning to bomb us.\"\n\n\n \"Amazing,\" the surgeon said dryly. \"Well, they won't do any bombing\n now.\"\n\n\n Lowry was staring at the huddled, mutilated form of Svan. He shuddered.\n The surgeon, seeing the shudder, grasped his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Better them than us,\" he said. \"It's poetic justice if I ever saw it.\n They had it coming....\" He paused thoughtfully, staring at a piece of\n paper between his fingers. \"This is the only part I don't get,\" he said.", "Svan strode back to the car. \"Hurry up,\" he gasped to the girl. \"Now\n there is danger for all of us, if they discover he is missing. And keep\n a watch for other guards.\"\nVenus has no moon, and no star can shine through its vast cloud layer.\n Ensign Lowry, staring anxiously out through the astro-dome in the bow\n of the Earth-ship, cursed the blackness.\n\n\n \"Can't see a thing,\" he complained to the Exec, steadily writing away\n at the computer's table. \"Look—are those lights over there?\"\n\n\n The Exec looked up wearily. He shrugged. \"Probably the guards. Of\n course, you can't tell. Might be a raiding party.\"\n\n\n Lowry, stung, looked to see if the Exec was smiling, but found no\n answer in his stolid face. \"Don't joke about it,\" he said. \"Suppose\n something happens to the delegation?\"", "\"No,\" she said slowly. \"I do not object.\"\n\n\n \"And the rest of us? Does any of us object?\"\n\n\n Svan eyed them, each in turn. There was a slow but unanimous gesture of\n assent.\n\n\n \"Good,\" said Svan. \"Then we must act. The Council has told us that we\n alone will decide our course of action. We have agreed that, if the\n Earth-ship returns, it means disaster for Venus. Therefore, it must not\n return.\"\n\n\n An old man shifted restlessly. \"But they are strong, Svan,\" he\n complained. \"They have weapons. We cannot force them to stay.\"\n\n\n Svan nodded. \"No. They will leave. But they will never get back to\n Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Never get back to Earth?\" the old man gasped. \"Has the Council\n authorized—murder?\"" ], [ "Svan settled himself at the side of the road, waiting for his chance.\n He had perhaps three minutes to wait; he reckoned. His fingers went\n absently to the pouch in his wide belt, closed on the slip of paper. He\n turned it over without looking at it, wondering who had drawn the first\n cross, and been a coward. Ingra? One of the men?\nHe became abruptly conscious of a commotion behind him. A ground car\n was racing along the road. He spun around and was caught in the glare\n of its blinding driving-light, as it bumped to a slithering stop.\n\n\n Paralyzed, he heard the girl's voice. \"Svan! They're coming! They found\n the guard's rifle, and they're looking for us! Thirty Earthmen, Svan,\n with those frightful guns. They fired at us, but we got away and came\n for you. We must flee!\"", "Svan shrugged. \"The Council did not know what we would face. The\n Councilmen could not come to the city and see what strength the\n Earth-ship has.\" He paused dangerously. \"Toller,\" he said, \"do you\n object?\"\n\n\n Like the girl, the old man retreated before his eyes. His voice was\n dull. \"What is your plan?\" he asked.\n\n\n Svan smiled, and it was like a dark flame. He reached to a box at his\n feet, held up a shiny metal globe. \"One of us will plant this in the\n ship. It will be set by means of this dial—\" he touched a spot on the\n surface of the globe with a pallid finger—\"to do nothing for forty\n hours. Then—it will explode. Atomite.\"", "Svan, too, had left his unopened. He sat at the table, facing them.\n \"This is the plan,\" he said. \"We will go, all six of us, in my ground\n car, to look at the Earth-ship. No one will suspect—the whole city\n has been to see it already. One will get out, at the best point we can\n find. It is almost dusk now. He can hide, surely, in the vegetation.\n The other five will start back. Something will go wrong with the\n car—perhaps it will run off the road, start to sink in the swamp. The\n guards will be called. There will be commotion—that is easy enough,\n after all; a hysterical woman, a few screams, that's all there is to\n it. And the sixth person will have his chance to steal to the side\n of the ship. The bomb is magnetic. It will not be noticed in the\n dark—they will take off before sunrise, because they must travel away\n from the sun to return—in forty hours the danger is removed.\"", "Confusion furrowed the guard's hairless brows, then was replaced by\n a sudden flare of understanding—and fear. \"The Council!\" he roared.\n \"By heaven, yes, I understand! You are the swine that caused this—\"\n He strove instinctively to bring the clumsy rifle up, but Svan was\n faster. His gamble had failed; there was only one course remaining.\n He hurled his gross white bulk at the guard, bowled him over against\n the splintery logs of the road. The proton-rifle went flying, and Svan\n savagely tore at the throat of the guard. Knees, elbows and claw-like\n nails—Svan battered at the astonished man with every ounce of strength\n in his body. The guard was as big as Svan, but Svan had the initial", "There was an instant of doubt in his steel-shackled mind, then it was\n driven away. Perhaps she was loyal, yet certainly she was weak. And\n since he could not know which was the one who had received the marked\n slip, and feared to admit it, it was better they all should die.\n\n\n He advanced along the midnight road to where the ground rose and the\n jungle plants thinned out. Ahead, on an elevation, were the rain-dimmed\n lights of the Earth-ship, set down in the center of a clearing made by\n its own fierce rockets. Svan's mist-trained eyes spotted the circling\n figures of sentries, and knew that these would be the ship's own.\n They would not be as easily overcome as the natives, not with those\n slim-shafted blasters they carried. Only deceit could get him to the\n side of the ship.", "\"No,\" she said slowly. \"I do not object.\"\n\n\n \"And the rest of us? Does any of us object?\"\n\n\n Svan eyed them, each in turn. There was a slow but unanimous gesture of\n assent.\n\n\n \"Good,\" said Svan. \"Then we must act. The Council has told us that we\n alone will decide our course of action. We have agreed that, if the\n Earth-ship returns, it means disaster for Venus. Therefore, it must not\n return.\"\n\n\n An old man shifted restlessly. \"But they are strong, Svan,\" he\n complained. \"They have weapons. We cannot force them to stay.\"\n\n\n Svan nodded. \"No. They will leave. But they will never get back to\n Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Never get back to Earth?\" the old man gasped. \"Has the Council\n authorized—murder?\"", "\"Where are you going?\" he growled.\n\n\n Svan spoke up. \"We want to look at the Earth-ship,\" he said. He opened\n the door beside him and stepped out, careless of the drizzle. \"We heard\n it was leaving tonight,\" he continued, \"and we have not seen it. Is\n that not permitted?\"\n\n\n The guard shook his head sourly. \"No one is allowed near the ship. The\n order was just issued. It is thought there is danger.\"\n\n\n Svan stepped closer, his teeth bared in what passed for a smile. \"It\n is urgent,\" he purred. His right hand flashed across his chest in a\n complicated gesture. \"Do you understand?\"", "\"Good,\" said Svan, observing them. \"The delegation is still here. We\n have ample time.\"\n\n\n He half turned in the broad front seat next to the driver, searching\n the faces of the others in the car. Which was the coward? he wondered.\n Ingra? Her aunt? One of the men?\n\n\n The right answer leaped up at him.\nThey all are\n, he thought.\nNot one\n of them understands what this means. They're afraid.\nHe clamped his lips. \"Go faster, Ingra,\" he ordered the girl who was\n driving. \"Let's get this done with.\"", "Svan thought faster than ever before in his life. If there was a\n coward, it would do no good to unmask him. All were wavering, any might\n be the one who had drawn the fatal slip. He could insist on inspecting\n every one, but—suppose the coward, cornered, fought back? In fractions\n of a second, Svan had considered the evidence and reached his decision.\n Masked by the table, his hand, still holding the pencil, moved swiftly\n beneath the table, marked his own slip.\n\n\n In the palm of his hand, Svan held up the slip he had just marked in\n secret. His voice was very tired as he said, \"I will plant the bomb.\"\nThe six conspirators in Svan's old ground car moved slowly along the\n main street of the native town. Two Earth-ship sailors, unarmed except\n for deceptively flimsy-looking pistols at their hips, stood before the\n entrance to the town's Hall of Justice.", "Abruptly he swallowed, reminded of the bomb that was silently counting\n off the seconds. \"Go ahead,\" he ordered. \"I will wait here.\"\n\n\n \"Svan.\" The girl, Ingra, leaned over to him. Impulsively she reached\n for him, kissed him. \"Good luck to you, Svan,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Good luck,\" repeated the others. Then silently the electric motor of\n the car took hold. Skilfully the girl backed it up, turned it around,\n sent it lumbering back down the road. Only after she had traveled a few\n hundred feet by the feel of the road did she turn the lights on again.\n\n\n Svan looked after them. The kiss had surprised him. What did it mean?\n Was it an error that the girl should die with the others?", "There was comprehension in their eyes, Svan saw ... but still that\n uncertainty. Impatiently, he crackled: \"Look at the slips!\"\n\n\n Though he had willed his eyes away from it, his fingers had rebelled.\n Instinctively they had opened the slip, turned it over and over,\n striving to detect if it was the fatal one. They had felt nothing....\n\n\n And his eyes saw nothing. The slip was blank. He gave it but a second's\n glance, then looked up to see who had won the lethal game of chance.\n Almost he was disappointed.\n\n\n Each of the others had looked in that same second. And each was looking\n up now, around at his neighbors. Svan waited impatiently for the chosen\n one to announce it—a second, ten seconds....\n\n\n Then gray understanding came to him.\nA traitor!\nhis subconscious\n whispered.\nA coward!\nHe stared at them in a new light, saw their\n indecision magnified, became opposition.", "Svan strode back to the car. \"Hurry up,\" he gasped to the girl. \"Now\n there is danger for all of us, if they discover he is missing. And keep\n a watch for other guards.\"\nVenus has no moon, and no star can shine through its vast cloud layer.\n Ensign Lowry, staring anxiously out through the astro-dome in the bow\n of the Earth-ship, cursed the blackness.\n\n\n \"Can't see a thing,\" he complained to the Exec, steadily writing away\n at the computer's table. \"Look—are those lights over there?\"\n\n\n The Exec looked up wearily. He shrugged. \"Probably the guards. Of\n course, you can't tell. Might be a raiding party.\"\n\n\n Lowry, stung, looked to see if the Exec was smiling, but found no\n answer in his stolid face. \"Don't joke about it,\" he said. \"Suppose\n something happens to the delegation?\"", "The younger of the two women sighed. She might have been beautiful, in\n spite of her dead-white skin, if there had been a scrap of hair on her\n head. \"Svan, I'm afraid,\" she said. \"Who are we to decide if this\n is a good thing? Our parents came from Earth. Perhaps there will be\n trouble at first, if colonists come, but we are of the same blood.\"\n\n\n Svan laughed harshly. \"\nThey\ndon't think so. You heard them. We are\n not human any more. The officer said it.\"\n\n\n The other woman spoke unexpectedly. \"The Council was right,\" she\n agreed. \"Svan, what must we do?\"\n\n\n Svan raised his hand, thoughtfully. \"One moment. Ingra, do you still\n object?\"\n\n\n The younger woman shrank back before the glare in his eyes. She looked\n around at the others, found them reluctant and uneasy, but visibly\n convinced by Svan.", "Ingra nodded, while the others remained mute. \"We must circle back\n again,\" she parroted. \"We are to wait five minutes, then drive the car\n into the swamp. We will create a commotion, attract the guards.\"\n\n\n Svan, listening, thought:\nIt's not much of a plan. The guards would\n not be drawn away. I am glad I can't trust these five any more. If\n they must be destroyed, it is good that their destruction will serve a\n purpose.\nAloud, he said, \"You understand. If I get through, I will return to the\n city on foot. No one will suspect anything if I am not caught, because\n the bomb will not explode until the ship is far out in space. Remember,\n you are in no danger from the guards.\"\nFrom the guards\n, his mind echoed. He smiled. At least, they would\n feel no pain, never know what happened. With the amount of atomite in\n that bomb in the compartment, they would merely be obliterated in a\n ground-shaking crash.", "She looked at him, and he was surprised to find compassion in her\n eyes. Silently she nodded, advanced the fuel-handle so that the clumsy\n car jolted a trace more rapidly over the corduroy road. It was quite\n dark now. The car's driving light flared yellowishly in front of them,\n illuminating the narrow road and the pale, distorted vegetation of the\n jungle that surrounded them. Svan noticed it was raining a little. The\n present shower would deepen and intensify until midnight, then fall off\n again, to halt before morning. But before then they would be done.\n\n\n A proton-bolt lanced across the road in front of them. In the silence\n that followed its thunderous crash, a man's voice bellowed: \"Halt!\"\n\n\n The girl, Ingra, gasped something indistinguishable, slammed on the\n brakes. A Venusian in the trappings of the State Guard advanced on them\n from the side of the road, proton-rifle held ready to fire again.", "He grinned triumphantly, looking from face to face. The grin\n faded uncertainly as he saw what was in their eyes—uncertainty,\n irresolution. Abruptly he set the bomb down, savagely ripped six leaves\n off a writing tablet on the table next him. He took a pencil and made a\n mark on one of them, held it up.\n\n\n \"We will let chance decide who is to do the work,\" he said angrily. \"Is\n there anyone here who is afraid? There will be danger, I think....\"\n\n\n No answer. Svan jerked his head. \"Good,\" he said. \"Ingra, bring me that\n bowl.\"", "Lowry, interrupted in the middle of a word, jerked his head back and\n stared unbelievingly at the tell-tale next to the annunciator. Sure\n enough, it was glowing red—might have been glowing for minutes. He\n snatched at the hand-phone dangling from the wall, shouted into it.\n \"Set up a screen! Notify the delegation! Alert a landing party!\" But\n even while he was giving orders, the warning light flickered suddenly\n and went out. Stricken, Lowry turned to the Exec.\n\n\n The Executive Officer nodded gloomily. He said, \"You see!\"\n\"You see?\"\n\n\n Svan clicked off the listening-machine and turned around. The five\n others in the room looked apprehensive. \"You see?\" Svan repeated. \"From\n their own mouths you have heard it. The Council was right.\"", "\"And how do you know the guards themselves don't belong to it?\" the\n Exec retorted. \"They're all the same to me.... Look, your light's gone\n out now. Must have been the guard. They're on the wrong side to be\n coming from the town, anyhow....\"\nSvan hesitated only a fraction of a second after the girl turned the\n lights out and stopped the car. Then he reached in the compartment\n under the seat. If he took a little longer than seemed necessary to get\n the atomite bomb out of the compartment, none of the others noticed.\n Certainly it did not occur to them that there had been\ntwo\nbombs in\n the compartment, though Svan's hand emerged with only one.\n\n\n He got out of the car, holding the sphere. \"This will do for me,\" he\n said. \"They won't be expecting anyone to come from behind the ship—we\n were wise to circle around. Now, you know what you must do?\"", "advantage ... and it was only a matter of seconds before the guard\n lay unconscious, his skull a mass of gore at the back where Svan had\n ruthlessly pounded it against the road.\nSvan grunted as his fingers constricted brutally.\nSvan rose, panting, stared around. No one else was in sight, save the\n petrified five and the ground car. Svan glared at them contemptuously,\n then reached down and heaved on the senseless body of the guard. Over\n the shoulder of the road the body went, onto the damp swampland of the\n jungle. Even while Svan watched the body began to sink. There would be\n no trace.", "Lowry, a bewildered expression on his beardless face, held out the two\n halves of a metallic sphere. Dangling ends of wires showed where a\n connection had been broken. \"He had a bomb,\" he said. \"A magnetic-type,\n delayed-action atomite bomb. There must have been another in the car,\n and it went off. They—they were planning to bomb us.\"\n\n\n \"Amazing,\" the surgeon said dryly. \"Well, they won't do any bombing\n now.\"\n\n\n Lowry was staring at the huddled, mutilated form of Svan. He shuddered.\n The surgeon, seeing the shudder, grasped his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Better them than us,\" he said. \"It's poetic justice if I ever saw it.\n They had it coming....\" He paused thoughtfully, staring at a piece of\n paper between his fingers. \"This is the only part I don't get,\" he said." ], [ "He stared unseeingly at the light. \"Go away!\" he croaked unbelievingly.\n Then his muscles jerked into action. The time was almost up—the bomb\n in the car—\n\n\n \"Go away!\" he shrieked, and turned to run. His fists clenched and\n swinging at his side, he made a dozen floundering steps before\n something immense pounded at him from behind. He felt himself lifted\n from the road, sailing, swooping, dropping with annihilating force\n onto the hard, charred earth of the clearing. Only then did he hear the\n sound of the explosion, and as the immense echoes died away he began to\n feel the pain seeping into him from his hideously racked body....\n\n\n The Flight Surgeon rose from beside him. \"He's still alive,\" he said\n callously to Lowry, who had just come up. \"It won't last long, though.\n What've you got there?\"", "\"What's that?\" Lowry craned his neck. \"A piece of paper with a cross on\n it? What about it?\"\n\n\n The surgeon shrugged. \"He had it clenched in his hand,\" he said. \"Had\n the devil of a time getting it loose from him.\" He turned it over\n slowly, displayed the other side. \"Now what in the world would he be\n doing carrying a scrap of paper with a cross marked on both sides?\"", "There was an instant of doubt in his steel-shackled mind, then it was\n driven away. Perhaps she was loyal, yet certainly she was weak. And\n since he could not know which was the one who had received the marked\n slip, and feared to admit it, it was better they all should die.\n\n\n He advanced along the midnight road to where the ground rose and the\n jungle plants thinned out. Ahead, on an elevation, were the rain-dimmed\n lights of the Earth-ship, set down in the center of a clearing made by\n its own fierce rockets. Svan's mist-trained eyes spotted the circling\n figures of sentries, and knew that these would be the ship's own.\n They would not be as easily overcome as the natives, not with those\n slim-shafted blasters they carried. Only deceit could get him to the\n side of the ship.", "Svan strode back to the car. \"Hurry up,\" he gasped to the girl. \"Now\n there is danger for all of us, if they discover he is missing. And keep\n a watch for other guards.\"\nVenus has no moon, and no star can shine through its vast cloud layer.\n Ensign Lowry, staring anxiously out through the astro-dome in the bow\n of the Earth-ship, cursed the blackness.\n\n\n \"Can't see a thing,\" he complained to the Exec, steadily writing away\n at the computer's table. \"Look—are those lights over there?\"\n\n\n The Exec looked up wearily. He shrugged. \"Probably the guards. Of\n course, you can't tell. Might be a raiding party.\"\n\n\n Lowry, stung, looked to see if the Exec was smiling, but found no\n answer in his stolid face. \"Don't joke about it,\" he said. \"Suppose\n something happens to the delegation?\"", "She looked at him, and he was surprised to find compassion in her\n eyes. Silently she nodded, advanced the fuel-handle so that the clumsy\n car jolted a trace more rapidly over the corduroy road. It was quite\n dark now. The car's driving light flared yellowishly in front of them,\n illuminating the narrow road and the pale, distorted vegetation of the\n jungle that surrounded them. Svan noticed it was raining a little. The\n present shower would deepen and intensify until midnight, then fall off\n again, to halt before morning. But before then they would be done.\n\n\n A proton-bolt lanced across the road in front of them. In the silence\n that followed its thunderous crash, a man's voice bellowed: \"Halt!\"\n\n\n The girl, Ingra, gasped something indistinguishable, slammed on the\n brakes. A Venusian in the trappings of the State Guard advanced on them\n from the side of the road, proton-rifle held ready to fire again.", "Lowry, a bewildered expression on his beardless face, held out the two\n halves of a metallic sphere. Dangling ends of wires showed where a\n connection had been broken. \"He had a bomb,\" he said. \"A magnetic-type,\n delayed-action atomite bomb. There must have been another in the car,\n and it went off. They—they were planning to bomb us.\"\n\n\n \"Amazing,\" the surgeon said dryly. \"Well, they won't do any bombing\n now.\"\n\n\n Lowry was staring at the huddled, mutilated form of Svan. He shuddered.\n The surgeon, seeing the shudder, grasped his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Better them than us,\" he said. \"It's poetic justice if I ever saw it.\n They had it coming....\" He paused thoughtfully, staring at a piece of\n paper between his fingers. \"This is the only part I don't get,\" he said.", "Lowry, interrupted in the middle of a word, jerked his head back and\n stared unbelievingly at the tell-tale next to the annunciator. Sure\n enough, it was glowing red—might have been glowing for minutes. He\n snatched at the hand-phone dangling from the wall, shouted into it.\n \"Set up a screen! Notify the delegation! Alert a landing party!\" But\n even while he was giving orders, the warning light flickered suddenly\n and went out. Stricken, Lowry turned to the Exec.\n\n\n The Executive Officer nodded gloomily. He said, \"You see!\"\n\"You see?\"\n\n\n Svan clicked off the listening-machine and turned around. The five\n others in the room looked apprehensive. \"You see?\" Svan repeated. \"From\n their own mouths you have heard it. The Council was right.\"", "\"And how do you know the guards themselves don't belong to it?\" the\n Exec retorted. \"They're all the same to me.... Look, your light's gone\n out now. Must have been the guard. They're on the wrong side to be\n coming from the town, anyhow....\"\nSvan hesitated only a fraction of a second after the girl turned the\n lights out and stopped the car. Then he reached in the compartment\n under the seat. If he took a little longer than seemed necessary to get\n the atomite bomb out of the compartment, none of the others noticed.\n Certainly it did not occur to them that there had been\ntwo\nbombs in\n the compartment, though Svan's hand emerged with only one.\n\n\n He got out of the car, holding the sphere. \"This will do for me,\" he\n said. \"They won't be expecting anyone to come from behind the ship—we\n were wise to circle around. Now, you know what you must do?\"", "\"Where are you going?\" he growled.\n\n\n Svan spoke up. \"We want to look at the Earth-ship,\" he said. He opened\n the door beside him and stepped out, careless of the drizzle. \"We heard\n it was leaving tonight,\" he continued, \"and we have not seen it. Is\n that not permitted?\"\n\n\n The guard shook his head sourly. \"No one is allowed near the ship. The\n order was just issued. It is thought there is danger.\"\n\n\n Svan stepped closer, his teeth bared in what passed for a smile. \"It\n is urgent,\" he purred. His right hand flashed across his chest in a\n complicated gesture. \"Do you understand?\"", "Svan settled himself at the side of the road, waiting for his chance.\n He had perhaps three minutes to wait; he reckoned. His fingers went\n absently to the pouch in his wide belt, closed on the slip of paper. He\n turned it over without looking at it, wondering who had drawn the first\n cross, and been a coward. Ingra? One of the men?\nHe became abruptly conscious of a commotion behind him. A ground car\n was racing along the road. He spun around and was caught in the glare\n of its blinding driving-light, as it bumped to a slithering stop.\n\n\n Paralyzed, he heard the girl's voice. \"Svan! They're coming! They found\n the guard's rifle, and they're looking for us! Thirty Earthmen, Svan,\n with those frightful guns. They fired at us, but we got away and came\n for you. We must flee!\"", "There was comprehension in their eyes, Svan saw ... but still that\n uncertainty. Impatiently, he crackled: \"Look at the slips!\"\n\n\n Though he had willed his eyes away from it, his fingers had rebelled.\n Instinctively they had opened the slip, turned it over and over,\n striving to detect if it was the fatal one. They had felt nothing....\n\n\n And his eyes saw nothing. The slip was blank. He gave it but a second's\n glance, then looked up to see who had won the lethal game of chance.\n Almost he was disappointed.\n\n\n Each of the others had looked in that same second. And each was looking\n up now, around at his neighbors. Svan waited impatiently for the chosen\n one to announce it—a second, ten seconds....\n\n\n Then gray understanding came to him.\nA traitor!\nhis subconscious\n whispered.\nA coward!\nHe stared at them in a new light, saw their\n indecision magnified, became opposition.", "Silently the girl picked up an opaque glass bowl from the broad arm\n of her chair. It had held Venus-tobacco cigarettes; there were a few\n left. She shook them out and handed the bowl to Svan, who was rapidly\n creasing the six fatal slips. He dropped them in the bowl, stirred it\n with his hand, offered it to the girl. \"You first, Ingra,\" he said.\n\n\n She reached in mechanically, her eyes intent on his, took out a slip\n and held it without opening it. The bowl went the rounds, till Svan\n himself took the last. All eyes were on him. No one had looked at their\n slips.", "Svan thought faster than ever before in his life. If there was a\n coward, it would do no good to unmask him. All were wavering, any might\n be the one who had drawn the fatal slip. He could insist on inspecting\n every one, but—suppose the coward, cornered, fought back? In fractions\n of a second, Svan had considered the evidence and reached his decision.\n Masked by the table, his hand, still holding the pencil, moved swiftly\n beneath the table, marked his own slip.\n\n\n In the palm of his hand, Svan held up the slip he had just marked in\n secret. His voice was very tired as he said, \"I will plant the bomb.\"\nThe six conspirators in Svan's old ground car moved slowly along the\n main street of the native town. Two Earth-ship sailors, unarmed except\n for deceptively flimsy-looking pistols at their hips, stood before the\n entrance to the town's Hall of Justice.", "\"Everything shipshape, I take it!\" he commented.\n\n\n The OD nodded. \"I'll have a blank log if this keeps up,\" he said.\n \"Every man accounted for except the delegation, cargo stowed, drivers\n ready to lift as soon as they come back.\"\n\n\n The Exec tossed away his cigarette. \"\nIf\nthey come back.\"\n\n\n \"Is there any question?\"\n\n\n The Exec shrugged. \"I don't know, Lowry,\" he said. \"This is a funny\n place. I don't trust the natives.\"\n\n\n Lowry lifted his eyebrows. \"Oh? But after all, they're human beings,\n just like us—\"\n\n\n \"Not any more. Four or five generations ago they were. Lord, they don't\n even look human any more. Those white, flabby skins—I don't like them.\"", "Abruptly he swallowed, reminded of the bomb that was silently counting\n off the seconds. \"Go ahead,\" he ordered. \"I will wait here.\"\n\n\n \"Svan.\" The girl, Ingra, leaned over to him. Impulsively she reached\n for him, kissed him. \"Good luck to you, Svan,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Good luck,\" repeated the others. Then silently the electric motor of\n the car took hold. Skilfully the girl backed it up, turned it around,\n sent it lumbering back down the road. Only after she had traveled a few\n hundred feet by the feel of the road did she turn the lights on again.\n\n\n Svan looked after them. The kiss had surprised him. What did it mean?\n Was it an error that the girl should die with the others?", "Svan, too, had left his unopened. He sat at the table, facing them.\n \"This is the plan,\" he said. \"We will go, all six of us, in my ground\n car, to look at the Earth-ship. No one will suspect—the whole city\n has been to see it already. One will get out, at the best point we can\n find. It is almost dusk now. He can hide, surely, in the vegetation.\n The other five will start back. Something will go wrong with the\n car—perhaps it will run off the road, start to sink in the swamp. The\n guards will be called. There will be commotion—that is easy enough,\n after all; a hysterical woman, a few screams, that's all there is to\n it. And the sixth person will have his chance to steal to the side\n of the ship. The bomb is magnetic. It will not be noticed in the\n dark—they will take off before sunrise, because they must travel away\n from the sun to return—in forty hours the danger is removed.\"", "\"Of course,\" Lowry said suddenly, \"there's a minority who are afraid\n of us. I was in town yesterday, and I talked with some of the natives.\n They think there will be hordes of immigrants from Earth, now that we\n know Venus is habitable. And there's some sort of a paltry underground\n group that is spreading the word that the immigrants will drive the\n native Venusians—the descendants of the first expedition, that\n is—right down into the mud. Well—\" he laughed—\"maybe they will.\n After all, the fittest survive. That's a basic law of—\"\n\n\n The annunciator over the open lock clanged vigorously, and a metallic\n voice rasped: \"Officer of the Deck! Post Number One! Instruments\n reports a spy ray focused on the main lock!\"", "Confusion furrowed the guard's hairless brows, then was replaced by\n a sudden flare of understanding—and fear. \"The Council!\" he roared.\n \"By heaven, yes, I understand! You are the swine that caused this—\"\n He strove instinctively to bring the clumsy rifle up, but Svan was\n faster. His gamble had failed; there was only one course remaining.\n He hurled his gross white bulk at the guard, bowled him over against\n the splintery logs of the road. The proton-rifle went flying, and Svan\n savagely tore at the throat of the guard. Knees, elbows and claw-like\n nails—Svan battered at the astonished man with every ounce of strength\n in his body. The guard was as big as Svan, but Svan had the initial", "He grinned triumphantly, looking from face to face. The grin\n faded uncertainly as he saw what was in their eyes—uncertainty,\n irresolution. Abruptly he set the bomb down, savagely ripped six leaves\n off a writing tablet on the table next him. He took a pencil and made a\n mark on one of them, held it up.\n\n\n \"We will let chance decide who is to do the work,\" he said angrily. \"Is\n there anyone here who is afraid? There will be danger, I think....\"\n\n\n No answer. Svan jerked his head. \"Good,\" he said. \"Ingra, bring me that\n bowl.\"", "advantage ... and it was only a matter of seconds before the guard\n lay unconscious, his skull a mass of gore at the back where Svan had\n ruthlessly pounded it against the road.\nSvan grunted as his fingers constricted brutally.\nSvan rose, panting, stared around. No one else was in sight, save the\n petrified five and the ground car. Svan glared at them contemptuously,\n then reached down and heaved on the senseless body of the guard. Over\n the shoulder of the road the body went, onto the damp swampland of the\n jungle. Even while Svan watched the body began to sink. There would be\n no trace." ], [ "Svan, too, had left his unopened. He sat at the table, facing them.\n \"This is the plan,\" he said. \"We will go, all six of us, in my ground\n car, to look at the Earth-ship. No one will suspect—the whole city\n has been to see it already. One will get out, at the best point we can\n find. It is almost dusk now. He can hide, surely, in the vegetation.\n The other five will start back. Something will go wrong with the\n car—perhaps it will run off the road, start to sink in the swamp. The\n guards will be called. There will be commotion—that is easy enough,\n after all; a hysterical woman, a few screams, that's all there is to\n it. And the sixth person will have his chance to steal to the side\n of the ship. The bomb is magnetic. It will not be noticed in the\n dark—they will take off before sunrise, because they must travel away\n from the sun to return—in forty hours the danger is removed.\"", "\"Good,\" said Svan, observing them. \"The delegation is still here. We\n have ample time.\"\n\n\n He half turned in the broad front seat next to the driver, searching\n the faces of the others in the car. Which was the coward? he wondered.\n Ingra? Her aunt? One of the men?\n\n\n The right answer leaped up at him.\nThey all are\n, he thought.\nNot one\n of them understands what this means. They're afraid.\nHe clamped his lips. \"Go faster, Ingra,\" he ordered the girl who was\n driving. \"Let's get this done with.\"", "\"Where are you going?\" he growled.\n\n\n Svan spoke up. \"We want to look at the Earth-ship,\" he said. He opened\n the door beside him and stepped out, careless of the drizzle. \"We heard\n it was leaving tonight,\" he continued, \"and we have not seen it. Is\n that not permitted?\"\n\n\n The guard shook his head sourly. \"No one is allowed near the ship. The\n order was just issued. It is thought there is danger.\"\n\n\n Svan stepped closer, his teeth bared in what passed for a smile. \"It\n is urgent,\" he purred. His right hand flashed across his chest in a\n complicated gesture. \"Do you understand?\"", "Svan settled himself at the side of the road, waiting for his chance.\n He had perhaps three minutes to wait; he reckoned. His fingers went\n absently to the pouch in his wide belt, closed on the slip of paper. He\n turned it over without looking at it, wondering who had drawn the first\n cross, and been a coward. Ingra? One of the men?\nHe became abruptly conscious of a commotion behind him. A ground car\n was racing along the road. He spun around and was caught in the glare\n of its blinding driving-light, as it bumped to a slithering stop.\n\n\n Paralyzed, he heard the girl's voice. \"Svan! They're coming! They found\n the guard's rifle, and they're looking for us! Thirty Earthmen, Svan,\n with those frightful guns. They fired at us, but we got away and came\n for you. We must flee!\"", "Abruptly he swallowed, reminded of the bomb that was silently counting\n off the seconds. \"Go ahead,\" he ordered. \"I will wait here.\"\n\n\n \"Svan.\" The girl, Ingra, leaned over to him. Impulsively she reached\n for him, kissed him. \"Good luck to you, Svan,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Good luck,\" repeated the others. Then silently the electric motor of\n the car took hold. Skilfully the girl backed it up, turned it around,\n sent it lumbering back down the road. Only after she had traveled a few\n hundred feet by the feel of the road did she turn the lights on again.\n\n\n Svan looked after them. The kiss had surprised him. What did it mean?\n Was it an error that the girl should die with the others?", "He grinned triumphantly, looking from face to face. The grin\n faded uncertainly as he saw what was in their eyes—uncertainty,\n irresolution. Abruptly he set the bomb down, savagely ripped six leaves\n off a writing tablet on the table next him. He took a pencil and made a\n mark on one of them, held it up.\n\n\n \"We will let chance decide who is to do the work,\" he said angrily. \"Is\n there anyone here who is afraid? There will be danger, I think....\"\n\n\n No answer. Svan jerked his head. \"Good,\" he said. \"Ingra, bring me that\n bowl.\"", "advantage ... and it was only a matter of seconds before the guard\n lay unconscious, his skull a mass of gore at the back where Svan had\n ruthlessly pounded it against the road.\nSvan grunted as his fingers constricted brutally.\nSvan rose, panting, stared around. No one else was in sight, save the\n petrified five and the ground car. Svan glared at them contemptuously,\n then reached down and heaved on the senseless body of the guard. Over\n the shoulder of the road the body went, onto the damp swampland of the\n jungle. Even while Svan watched the body began to sink. There would be\n no trace.", "Svan thought faster than ever before in his life. If there was a\n coward, it would do no good to unmask him. All were wavering, any might\n be the one who had drawn the fatal slip. He could insist on inspecting\n every one, but—suppose the coward, cornered, fought back? In fractions\n of a second, Svan had considered the evidence and reached his decision.\n Masked by the table, his hand, still holding the pencil, moved swiftly\n beneath the table, marked his own slip.\n\n\n In the palm of his hand, Svan held up the slip he had just marked in\n secret. His voice was very tired as he said, \"I will plant the bomb.\"\nThe six conspirators in Svan's old ground car moved slowly along the\n main street of the native town. Two Earth-ship sailors, unarmed except\n for deceptively flimsy-looking pistols at their hips, stood before the\n entrance to the town's Hall of Justice.", "There was comprehension in their eyes, Svan saw ... but still that\n uncertainty. Impatiently, he crackled: \"Look at the slips!\"\n\n\n Though he had willed his eyes away from it, his fingers had rebelled.\n Instinctively they had opened the slip, turned it over and over,\n striving to detect if it was the fatal one. They had felt nothing....\n\n\n And his eyes saw nothing. The slip was blank. He gave it but a second's\n glance, then looked up to see who had won the lethal game of chance.\n Almost he was disappointed.\n\n\n Each of the others had looked in that same second. And each was looking\n up now, around at his neighbors. Svan waited impatiently for the chosen\n one to announce it—a second, ten seconds....\n\n\n Then gray understanding came to him.\nA traitor!\nhis subconscious\n whispered.\nA coward!\nHe stared at them in a new light, saw their\n indecision magnified, became opposition.", "Confusion furrowed the guard's hairless brows, then was replaced by\n a sudden flare of understanding—and fear. \"The Council!\" he roared.\n \"By heaven, yes, I understand! You are the swine that caused this—\"\n He strove instinctively to bring the clumsy rifle up, but Svan was\n faster. His gamble had failed; there was only one course remaining.\n He hurled his gross white bulk at the guard, bowled him over against\n the splintery logs of the road. The proton-rifle went flying, and Svan\n savagely tore at the throat of the guard. Knees, elbows and claw-like\n nails—Svan battered at the astonished man with every ounce of strength\n in his body. The guard was as big as Svan, but Svan had the initial", "There was an instant of doubt in his steel-shackled mind, then it was\n driven away. Perhaps she was loyal, yet certainly she was weak. And\n since he could not know which was the one who had received the marked\n slip, and feared to admit it, it was better they all should die.\n\n\n He advanced along the midnight road to where the ground rose and the\n jungle plants thinned out. Ahead, on an elevation, were the rain-dimmed\n lights of the Earth-ship, set down in the center of a clearing made by\n its own fierce rockets. Svan's mist-trained eyes spotted the circling\n figures of sentries, and knew that these would be the ship's own.\n They would not be as easily overcome as the natives, not with those\n slim-shafted blasters they carried. Only deceit could get him to the\n side of the ship.", "Ingra nodded, while the others remained mute. \"We must circle back\n again,\" she parroted. \"We are to wait five minutes, then drive the car\n into the swamp. We will create a commotion, attract the guards.\"\n\n\n Svan, listening, thought:\nIt's not much of a plan. The guards would\n not be drawn away. I am glad I can't trust these five any more. If\n they must be destroyed, it is good that their destruction will serve a\n purpose.\nAloud, he said, \"You understand. If I get through, I will return to the\n city on foot. No one will suspect anything if I am not caught, because\n the bomb will not explode until the ship is far out in space. Remember,\n you are in no danger from the guards.\"\nFrom the guards\n, his mind echoed. He smiled. At least, they would\n feel no pain, never know what happened. With the amount of atomite in\n that bomb in the compartment, they would merely be obliterated in a\n ground-shaking crash.", "Silently the girl picked up an opaque glass bowl from the broad arm\n of her chair. It had held Venus-tobacco cigarettes; there were a few\n left. She shook them out and handed the bowl to Svan, who was rapidly\n creasing the six fatal slips. He dropped them in the bowl, stirred it\n with his hand, offered it to the girl. \"You first, Ingra,\" he said.\n\n\n She reached in mechanically, her eyes intent on his, took out a slip\n and held it without opening it. The bowl went the rounds, till Svan\n himself took the last. All eyes were on him. No one had looked at their\n slips.", "Svan shrugged. \"The Council did not know what we would face. The\n Councilmen could not come to the city and see what strength the\n Earth-ship has.\" He paused dangerously. \"Toller,\" he said, \"do you\n object?\"\n\n\n Like the girl, the old man retreated before his eyes. His voice was\n dull. \"What is your plan?\" he asked.\n\n\n Svan smiled, and it was like a dark flame. He reached to a box at his\n feet, held up a shiny metal globe. \"One of us will plant this in the\n ship. It will be set by means of this dial—\" he touched a spot on the\n surface of the globe with a pallid finger—\"to do nothing for forty\n hours. Then—it will explode. Atomite.\"", "\"And how do you know the guards themselves don't belong to it?\" the\n Exec retorted. \"They're all the same to me.... Look, your light's gone\n out now. Must have been the guard. They're on the wrong side to be\n coming from the town, anyhow....\"\nSvan hesitated only a fraction of a second after the girl turned the\n lights out and stopped the car. Then he reached in the compartment\n under the seat. If he took a little longer than seemed necessary to get\n the atomite bomb out of the compartment, none of the others noticed.\n Certainly it did not occur to them that there had been\ntwo\nbombs in\n the compartment, though Svan's hand emerged with only one.\n\n\n He got out of the car, holding the sphere. \"This will do for me,\" he\n said. \"They won't be expecting anyone to come from behind the ship—we\n were wise to circle around. Now, you know what you must do?\"", "She looked at him, and he was surprised to find compassion in her\n eyes. Silently she nodded, advanced the fuel-handle so that the clumsy\n car jolted a trace more rapidly over the corduroy road. It was quite\n dark now. The car's driving light flared yellowishly in front of them,\n illuminating the narrow road and the pale, distorted vegetation of the\n jungle that surrounded them. Svan noticed it was raining a little. The\n present shower would deepen and intensify until midnight, then fall off\n again, to halt before morning. But before then they would be done.\n\n\n A proton-bolt lanced across the road in front of them. In the silence\n that followed its thunderous crash, a man's voice bellowed: \"Halt!\"\n\n\n The girl, Ingra, gasped something indistinguishable, slammed on the\n brakes. A Venusian in the trappings of the State Guard advanced on them\n from the side of the road, proton-rifle held ready to fire again.", "Lowry, a bewildered expression on his beardless face, held out the two\n halves of a metallic sphere. Dangling ends of wires showed where a\n connection had been broken. \"He had a bomb,\" he said. \"A magnetic-type,\n delayed-action atomite bomb. There must have been another in the car,\n and it went off. They—they were planning to bomb us.\"\n\n\n \"Amazing,\" the surgeon said dryly. \"Well, they won't do any bombing\n now.\"\n\n\n Lowry was staring at the huddled, mutilated form of Svan. He shuddered.\n The surgeon, seeing the shudder, grasped his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Better them than us,\" he said. \"It's poetic justice if I ever saw it.\n They had it coming....\" He paused thoughtfully, staring at a piece of\n paper between his fingers. \"This is the only part I don't get,\" he said.", "Svan strode back to the car. \"Hurry up,\" he gasped to the girl. \"Now\n there is danger for all of us, if they discover he is missing. And keep\n a watch for other guards.\"\nVenus has no moon, and no star can shine through its vast cloud layer.\n Ensign Lowry, staring anxiously out through the astro-dome in the bow\n of the Earth-ship, cursed the blackness.\n\n\n \"Can't see a thing,\" he complained to the Exec, steadily writing away\n at the computer's table. \"Look—are those lights over there?\"\n\n\n The Exec looked up wearily. He shrugged. \"Probably the guards. Of\n course, you can't tell. Might be a raiding party.\"\n\n\n Lowry, stung, looked to see if the Exec was smiling, but found no\n answer in his stolid face. \"Don't joke about it,\" he said. \"Suppose\n something happens to the delegation?\"", "The younger of the two women sighed. She might have been beautiful, in\n spite of her dead-white skin, if there had been a scrap of hair on her\n head. \"Svan, I'm afraid,\" she said. \"Who are we to decide if this\n is a good thing? Our parents came from Earth. Perhaps there will be\n trouble at first, if colonists come, but we are of the same blood.\"\n\n\n Svan laughed harshly. \"\nThey\ndon't think so. You heard them. We are\n not human any more. The officer said it.\"\n\n\n The other woman spoke unexpectedly. \"The Council was right,\" she\n agreed. \"Svan, what must we do?\"\n\n\n Svan raised his hand, thoughtfully. \"One moment. Ingra, do you still\n object?\"\n\n\n The younger woman shrank back before the glare in his eyes. She looked\n around at the others, found them reluctant and uneasy, but visibly\n convinced by Svan.", "DOUBLECROSS\nby JAMES Mac CREIGH\nRevolt was brewing on Venus, led by the\n\n descendant of the first Earthmen to\n\n land. Svan was the leader making the final\n\n plans—plotting them a bit too well.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Winter 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe Officer of the Deck was pleased as he returned to the main lock.\n There was no reason why everything shouldn't have been functioning\n perfectly, of course, but he was pleased to have it confirmed, all the\n same. The Executive Officer was moodily smoking a cigarette in the open\n lock, staring out over the dank Venusian terrain at the native town. He\n turned." ], [ "Svan, too, had left his unopened. He sat at the table, facing them.\n \"This is the plan,\" he said. \"We will go, all six of us, in my ground\n car, to look at the Earth-ship. No one will suspect—the whole city\n has been to see it already. One will get out, at the best point we can\n find. It is almost dusk now. He can hide, surely, in the vegetation.\n The other five will start back. Something will go wrong with the\n car—perhaps it will run off the road, start to sink in the swamp. The\n guards will be called. There will be commotion—that is easy enough,\n after all; a hysterical woman, a few screams, that's all there is to\n it. And the sixth person will have his chance to steal to the side\n of the ship. The bomb is magnetic. It will not be noticed in the\n dark—they will take off before sunrise, because they must travel away\n from the sun to return—in forty hours the danger is removed.\"", "\"Good,\" said Svan, observing them. \"The delegation is still here. We\n have ample time.\"\n\n\n He half turned in the broad front seat next to the driver, searching\n the faces of the others in the car. Which was the coward? he wondered.\n Ingra? Her aunt? One of the men?\n\n\n The right answer leaped up at him.\nThey all are\n, he thought.\nNot one\n of them understands what this means. They're afraid.\nHe clamped his lips. \"Go faster, Ingra,\" he ordered the girl who was\n driving. \"Let's get this done with.\"", "Svan settled himself at the side of the road, waiting for his chance.\n He had perhaps three minutes to wait; he reckoned. His fingers went\n absently to the pouch in his wide belt, closed on the slip of paper. He\n turned it over without looking at it, wondering who had drawn the first\n cross, and been a coward. Ingra? One of the men?\nHe became abruptly conscious of a commotion behind him. A ground car\n was racing along the road. He spun around and was caught in the glare\n of its blinding driving-light, as it bumped to a slithering stop.\n\n\n Paralyzed, he heard the girl's voice. \"Svan! They're coming! They found\n the guard's rifle, and they're looking for us! Thirty Earthmen, Svan,\n with those frightful guns. They fired at us, but we got away and came\n for you. We must flee!\"", "Ingra nodded, while the others remained mute. \"We must circle back\n again,\" she parroted. \"We are to wait five minutes, then drive the car\n into the swamp. We will create a commotion, attract the guards.\"\n\n\n Svan, listening, thought:\nIt's not much of a plan. The guards would\n not be drawn away. I am glad I can't trust these five any more. If\n they must be destroyed, it is good that their destruction will serve a\n purpose.\nAloud, he said, \"You understand. If I get through, I will return to the\n city on foot. No one will suspect anything if I am not caught, because\n the bomb will not explode until the ship is far out in space. Remember,\n you are in no danger from the guards.\"\nFrom the guards\n, his mind echoed. He smiled. At least, they would\n feel no pain, never know what happened. With the amount of atomite in\n that bomb in the compartment, they would merely be obliterated in a\n ground-shaking crash.", "Svan shrugged. \"The Council did not know what we would face. The\n Councilmen could not come to the city and see what strength the\n Earth-ship has.\" He paused dangerously. \"Toller,\" he said, \"do you\n object?\"\n\n\n Like the girl, the old man retreated before his eyes. His voice was\n dull. \"What is your plan?\" he asked.\n\n\n Svan smiled, and it was like a dark flame. He reached to a box at his\n feet, held up a shiny metal globe. \"One of us will plant this in the\n ship. It will be set by means of this dial—\" he touched a spot on the\n surface of the globe with a pallid finger—\"to do nothing for forty\n hours. Then—it will explode. Atomite.\"", "Confusion furrowed the guard's hairless brows, then was replaced by\n a sudden flare of understanding—and fear. \"The Council!\" he roared.\n \"By heaven, yes, I understand! You are the swine that caused this—\"\n He strove instinctively to bring the clumsy rifle up, but Svan was\n faster. His gamble had failed; there was only one course remaining.\n He hurled his gross white bulk at the guard, bowled him over against\n the splintery logs of the road. The proton-rifle went flying, and Svan\n savagely tore at the throat of the guard. Knees, elbows and claw-like\n nails—Svan battered at the astonished man with every ounce of strength\n in his body. The guard was as big as Svan, but Svan had the initial", "There was an instant of doubt in his steel-shackled mind, then it was\n driven away. Perhaps she was loyal, yet certainly she was weak. And\n since he could not know which was the one who had received the marked\n slip, and feared to admit it, it was better they all should die.\n\n\n He advanced along the midnight road to where the ground rose and the\n jungle plants thinned out. Ahead, on an elevation, were the rain-dimmed\n lights of the Earth-ship, set down in the center of a clearing made by\n its own fierce rockets. Svan's mist-trained eyes spotted the circling\n figures of sentries, and knew that these would be the ship's own.\n They would not be as easily overcome as the natives, not with those\n slim-shafted blasters they carried. Only deceit could get him to the\n side of the ship.", "There was comprehension in their eyes, Svan saw ... but still that\n uncertainty. Impatiently, he crackled: \"Look at the slips!\"\n\n\n Though he had willed his eyes away from it, his fingers had rebelled.\n Instinctively they had opened the slip, turned it over and over,\n striving to detect if it was the fatal one. They had felt nothing....\n\n\n And his eyes saw nothing. The slip was blank. He gave it but a second's\n glance, then looked up to see who had won the lethal game of chance.\n Almost he was disappointed.\n\n\n Each of the others had looked in that same second. And each was looking\n up now, around at his neighbors. Svan waited impatiently for the chosen\n one to announce it—a second, ten seconds....\n\n\n Then gray understanding came to him.\nA traitor!\nhis subconscious\n whispered.\nA coward!\nHe stared at them in a new light, saw their\n indecision magnified, became opposition.", "Svan thought faster than ever before in his life. If there was a\n coward, it would do no good to unmask him. All were wavering, any might\n be the one who had drawn the fatal slip. He could insist on inspecting\n every one, but—suppose the coward, cornered, fought back? In fractions\n of a second, Svan had considered the evidence and reached his decision.\n Masked by the table, his hand, still holding the pencil, moved swiftly\n beneath the table, marked his own slip.\n\n\n In the palm of his hand, Svan held up the slip he had just marked in\n secret. His voice was very tired as he said, \"I will plant the bomb.\"\nThe six conspirators in Svan's old ground car moved slowly along the\n main street of the native town. Two Earth-ship sailors, unarmed except\n for deceptively flimsy-looking pistols at their hips, stood before the\n entrance to the town's Hall of Justice.", "Abruptly he swallowed, reminded of the bomb that was silently counting\n off the seconds. \"Go ahead,\" he ordered. \"I will wait here.\"\n\n\n \"Svan.\" The girl, Ingra, leaned over to him. Impulsively she reached\n for him, kissed him. \"Good luck to you, Svan,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Good luck,\" repeated the others. Then silently the electric motor of\n the car took hold. Skilfully the girl backed it up, turned it around,\n sent it lumbering back down the road. Only after she had traveled a few\n hundred feet by the feel of the road did she turn the lights on again.\n\n\n Svan looked after them. The kiss had surprised him. What did it mean?\n Was it an error that the girl should die with the others?", "advantage ... and it was only a matter of seconds before the guard\n lay unconscious, his skull a mass of gore at the back where Svan had\n ruthlessly pounded it against the road.\nSvan grunted as his fingers constricted brutally.\nSvan rose, panting, stared around. No one else was in sight, save the\n petrified five and the ground car. Svan glared at them contemptuously,\n then reached down and heaved on the senseless body of the guard. Over\n the shoulder of the road the body went, onto the damp swampland of the\n jungle. Even while Svan watched the body began to sink. There would be\n no trace.", "He grinned triumphantly, looking from face to face. The grin\n faded uncertainly as he saw what was in their eyes—uncertainty,\n irresolution. Abruptly he set the bomb down, savagely ripped six leaves\n off a writing tablet on the table next him. He took a pencil and made a\n mark on one of them, held it up.\n\n\n \"We will let chance decide who is to do the work,\" he said angrily. \"Is\n there anyone here who is afraid? There will be danger, I think....\"\n\n\n No answer. Svan jerked his head. \"Good,\" he said. \"Ingra, bring me that\n bowl.\"", "\"And how do you know the guards themselves don't belong to it?\" the\n Exec retorted. \"They're all the same to me.... Look, your light's gone\n out now. Must have been the guard. They're on the wrong side to be\n coming from the town, anyhow....\"\nSvan hesitated only a fraction of a second after the girl turned the\n lights out and stopped the car. Then he reached in the compartment\n under the seat. If he took a little longer than seemed necessary to get\n the atomite bomb out of the compartment, none of the others noticed.\n Certainly it did not occur to them that there had been\ntwo\nbombs in\n the compartment, though Svan's hand emerged with only one.\n\n\n He got out of the car, holding the sphere. \"This will do for me,\" he\n said. \"They won't be expecting anyone to come from behind the ship—we\n were wise to circle around. Now, you know what you must do?\"", "Lowry, a bewildered expression on his beardless face, held out the two\n halves of a metallic sphere. Dangling ends of wires showed where a\n connection had been broken. \"He had a bomb,\" he said. \"A magnetic-type,\n delayed-action atomite bomb. There must have been another in the car,\n and it went off. They—they were planning to bomb us.\"\n\n\n \"Amazing,\" the surgeon said dryly. \"Well, they won't do any bombing\n now.\"\n\n\n Lowry was staring at the huddled, mutilated form of Svan. He shuddered.\n The surgeon, seeing the shudder, grasped his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Better them than us,\" he said. \"It's poetic justice if I ever saw it.\n They had it coming....\" He paused thoughtfully, staring at a piece of\n paper between his fingers. \"This is the only part I don't get,\" he said.", "\"Where are you going?\" he growled.\n\n\n Svan spoke up. \"We want to look at the Earth-ship,\" he said. He opened\n the door beside him and stepped out, careless of the drizzle. \"We heard\n it was leaving tonight,\" he continued, \"and we have not seen it. Is\n that not permitted?\"\n\n\n The guard shook his head sourly. \"No one is allowed near the ship. The\n order was just issued. It is thought there is danger.\"\n\n\n Svan stepped closer, his teeth bared in what passed for a smile. \"It\n is urgent,\" he purred. His right hand flashed across his chest in a\n complicated gesture. \"Do you understand?\"", "Silently the girl picked up an opaque glass bowl from the broad arm\n of her chair. It had held Venus-tobacco cigarettes; there were a few\n left. She shook them out and handed the bowl to Svan, who was rapidly\n creasing the six fatal slips. He dropped them in the bowl, stirred it\n with his hand, offered it to the girl. \"You first, Ingra,\" he said.\n\n\n She reached in mechanically, her eyes intent on his, took out a slip\n and held it without opening it. The bowl went the rounds, till Svan\n himself took the last. All eyes were on him. No one had looked at their\n slips.", "Svan strode back to the car. \"Hurry up,\" he gasped to the girl. \"Now\n there is danger for all of us, if they discover he is missing. And keep\n a watch for other guards.\"\nVenus has no moon, and no star can shine through its vast cloud layer.\n Ensign Lowry, staring anxiously out through the astro-dome in the bow\n of the Earth-ship, cursed the blackness.\n\n\n \"Can't see a thing,\" he complained to the Exec, steadily writing away\n at the computer's table. \"Look—are those lights over there?\"\n\n\n The Exec looked up wearily. He shrugged. \"Probably the guards. Of\n course, you can't tell. Might be a raiding party.\"\n\n\n Lowry, stung, looked to see if the Exec was smiling, but found no\n answer in his stolid face. \"Don't joke about it,\" he said. \"Suppose\n something happens to the delegation?\"", "\"No,\" she said slowly. \"I do not object.\"\n\n\n \"And the rest of us? Does any of us object?\"\n\n\n Svan eyed them, each in turn. There was a slow but unanimous gesture of\n assent.\n\n\n \"Good,\" said Svan. \"Then we must act. The Council has told us that we\n alone will decide our course of action. We have agreed that, if the\n Earth-ship returns, it means disaster for Venus. Therefore, it must not\n return.\"\n\n\n An old man shifted restlessly. \"But they are strong, Svan,\" he\n complained. \"They have weapons. We cannot force them to stay.\"\n\n\n Svan nodded. \"No. They will leave. But they will never get back to\n Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Never get back to Earth?\" the old man gasped. \"Has the Council\n authorized—murder?\"", "She looked at him, and he was surprised to find compassion in her\n eyes. Silently she nodded, advanced the fuel-handle so that the clumsy\n car jolted a trace more rapidly over the corduroy road. It was quite\n dark now. The car's driving light flared yellowishly in front of them,\n illuminating the narrow road and the pale, distorted vegetation of the\n jungle that surrounded them. Svan noticed it was raining a little. The\n present shower would deepen and intensify until midnight, then fall off\n again, to halt before morning. But before then they would be done.\n\n\n A proton-bolt lanced across the road in front of them. In the silence\n that followed its thunderous crash, a man's voice bellowed: \"Halt!\"\n\n\n The girl, Ingra, gasped something indistinguishable, slammed on the\n brakes. A Venusian in the trappings of the State Guard advanced on them\n from the side of the road, proton-rifle held ready to fire again.", "Lowry, interrupted in the middle of a word, jerked his head back and\n stared unbelievingly at the tell-tale next to the annunciator. Sure\n enough, it was glowing red—might have been glowing for minutes. He\n snatched at the hand-phone dangling from the wall, shouted into it.\n \"Set up a screen! Notify the delegation! Alert a landing party!\" But\n even while he was giving orders, the warning light flickered suddenly\n and went out. Stricken, Lowry turned to the Exec.\n\n\n The Executive Officer nodded gloomily. He said, \"You see!\"\n\"You see?\"\n\n\n Svan clicked off the listening-machine and turned around. The five\n others in the room looked apprehensive. \"You see?\" Svan repeated. \"From\n their own mouths you have heard it. The Council was right.\"" ], [ "Abruptly he swallowed, reminded of the bomb that was silently counting\n off the seconds. \"Go ahead,\" he ordered. \"I will wait here.\"\n\n\n \"Svan.\" The girl, Ingra, leaned over to him. Impulsively she reached\n for him, kissed him. \"Good luck to you, Svan,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Good luck,\" repeated the others. Then silently the electric motor of\n the car took hold. Skilfully the girl backed it up, turned it around,\n sent it lumbering back down the road. Only after she had traveled a few\n hundred feet by the feel of the road did she turn the lights on again.\n\n\n Svan looked after them. The kiss had surprised him. What did it mean?\n Was it an error that the girl should die with the others?", "\"Good,\" said Svan, observing them. \"The delegation is still here. We\n have ample time.\"\n\n\n He half turned in the broad front seat next to the driver, searching\n the faces of the others in the car. Which was the coward? he wondered.\n Ingra? Her aunt? One of the men?\n\n\n The right answer leaped up at him.\nThey all are\n, he thought.\nNot one\n of them understands what this means. They're afraid.\nHe clamped his lips. \"Go faster, Ingra,\" he ordered the girl who was\n driving. \"Let's get this done with.\"", "Ingra nodded, while the others remained mute. \"We must circle back\n again,\" she parroted. \"We are to wait five minutes, then drive the car\n into the swamp. We will create a commotion, attract the guards.\"\n\n\n Svan, listening, thought:\nIt's not much of a plan. The guards would\n not be drawn away. I am glad I can't trust these five any more. If\n they must be destroyed, it is good that their destruction will serve a\n purpose.\nAloud, he said, \"You understand. If I get through, I will return to the\n city on foot. No one will suspect anything if I am not caught, because\n the bomb will not explode until the ship is far out in space. Remember,\n you are in no danger from the guards.\"\nFrom the guards\n, his mind echoed. He smiled. At least, they would\n feel no pain, never know what happened. With the amount of atomite in\n that bomb in the compartment, they would merely be obliterated in a\n ground-shaking crash.", "She looked at him, and he was surprised to find compassion in her\n eyes. Silently she nodded, advanced the fuel-handle so that the clumsy\n car jolted a trace more rapidly over the corduroy road. It was quite\n dark now. The car's driving light flared yellowishly in front of them,\n illuminating the narrow road and the pale, distorted vegetation of the\n jungle that surrounded them. Svan noticed it was raining a little. The\n present shower would deepen and intensify until midnight, then fall off\n again, to halt before morning. But before then they would be done.\n\n\n A proton-bolt lanced across the road in front of them. In the silence\n that followed its thunderous crash, a man's voice bellowed: \"Halt!\"\n\n\n The girl, Ingra, gasped something indistinguishable, slammed on the\n brakes. A Venusian in the trappings of the State Guard advanced on them\n from the side of the road, proton-rifle held ready to fire again.", "He grinned triumphantly, looking from face to face. The grin\n faded uncertainly as he saw what was in their eyes—uncertainty,\n irresolution. Abruptly he set the bomb down, savagely ripped six leaves\n off a writing tablet on the table next him. He took a pencil and made a\n mark on one of them, held it up.\n\n\n \"We will let chance decide who is to do the work,\" he said angrily. \"Is\n there anyone here who is afraid? There will be danger, I think....\"\n\n\n No answer. Svan jerked his head. \"Good,\" he said. \"Ingra, bring me that\n bowl.\"", "Silently the girl picked up an opaque glass bowl from the broad arm\n of her chair. It had held Venus-tobacco cigarettes; there were a few\n left. She shook them out and handed the bowl to Svan, who was rapidly\n creasing the six fatal slips. He dropped them in the bowl, stirred it\n with his hand, offered it to the girl. \"You first, Ingra,\" he said.\n\n\n She reached in mechanically, her eyes intent on his, took out a slip\n and held it without opening it. The bowl went the rounds, till Svan\n himself took the last. All eyes were on him. No one had looked at their\n slips.", "Svan settled himself at the side of the road, waiting for his chance.\n He had perhaps three minutes to wait; he reckoned. His fingers went\n absently to the pouch in his wide belt, closed on the slip of paper. He\n turned it over without looking at it, wondering who had drawn the first\n cross, and been a coward. Ingra? One of the men?\nHe became abruptly conscious of a commotion behind him. A ground car\n was racing along the road. He spun around and was caught in the glare\n of its blinding driving-light, as it bumped to a slithering stop.\n\n\n Paralyzed, he heard the girl's voice. \"Svan! They're coming! They found\n the guard's rifle, and they're looking for us! Thirty Earthmen, Svan,\n with those frightful guns. They fired at us, but we got away and came\n for you. We must flee!\"", "There was comprehension in their eyes, Svan saw ... but still that\n uncertainty. Impatiently, he crackled: \"Look at the slips!\"\n\n\n Though he had willed his eyes away from it, his fingers had rebelled.\n Instinctively they had opened the slip, turned it over and over,\n striving to detect if it was the fatal one. They had felt nothing....\n\n\n And his eyes saw nothing. The slip was blank. He gave it but a second's\n glance, then looked up to see who had won the lethal game of chance.\n Almost he was disappointed.\n\n\n Each of the others had looked in that same second. And each was looking\n up now, around at his neighbors. Svan waited impatiently for the chosen\n one to announce it—a second, ten seconds....\n\n\n Then gray understanding came to him.\nA traitor!\nhis subconscious\n whispered.\nA coward!\nHe stared at them in a new light, saw their\n indecision magnified, became opposition.", "The younger of the two women sighed. She might have been beautiful, in\n spite of her dead-white skin, if there had been a scrap of hair on her\n head. \"Svan, I'm afraid,\" she said. \"Who are we to decide if this\n is a good thing? Our parents came from Earth. Perhaps there will be\n trouble at first, if colonists come, but we are of the same blood.\"\n\n\n Svan laughed harshly. \"\nThey\ndon't think so. You heard them. We are\n not human any more. The officer said it.\"\n\n\n The other woman spoke unexpectedly. \"The Council was right,\" she\n agreed. \"Svan, what must we do?\"\n\n\n Svan raised his hand, thoughtfully. \"One moment. Ingra, do you still\n object?\"\n\n\n The younger woman shrank back before the glare in his eyes. She looked\n around at the others, found them reluctant and uneasy, but visibly\n convinced by Svan.", "There was an instant of doubt in his steel-shackled mind, then it was\n driven away. Perhaps she was loyal, yet certainly she was weak. And\n since he could not know which was the one who had received the marked\n slip, and feared to admit it, it was better they all should die.\n\n\n He advanced along the midnight road to where the ground rose and the\n jungle plants thinned out. Ahead, on an elevation, were the rain-dimmed\n lights of the Earth-ship, set down in the center of a clearing made by\n its own fierce rockets. Svan's mist-trained eyes spotted the circling\n figures of sentries, and knew that these would be the ship's own.\n They would not be as easily overcome as the natives, not with those\n slim-shafted blasters they carried. Only deceit could get him to the\n side of the ship.", "He stared unseeingly at the light. \"Go away!\" he croaked unbelievingly.\n Then his muscles jerked into action. The time was almost up—the bomb\n in the car—\n\n\n \"Go away!\" he shrieked, and turned to run. His fists clenched and\n swinging at his side, he made a dozen floundering steps before\n something immense pounded at him from behind. He felt himself lifted\n from the road, sailing, swooping, dropping with annihilating force\n onto the hard, charred earth of the clearing. Only then did he hear the\n sound of the explosion, and as the immense echoes died away he began to\n feel the pain seeping into him from his hideously racked body....\n\n\n The Flight Surgeon rose from beside him. \"He's still alive,\" he said\n callously to Lowry, who had just come up. \"It won't last long, though.\n What've you got there?\"", "Svan thought faster than ever before in his life. If there was a\n coward, it would do no good to unmask him. All were wavering, any might\n be the one who had drawn the fatal slip. He could insist on inspecting\n every one, but—suppose the coward, cornered, fought back? In fractions\n of a second, Svan had considered the evidence and reached his decision.\n Masked by the table, his hand, still holding the pencil, moved swiftly\n beneath the table, marked his own slip.\n\n\n In the palm of his hand, Svan held up the slip he had just marked in\n secret. His voice was very tired as he said, \"I will plant the bomb.\"\nThe six conspirators in Svan's old ground car moved slowly along the\n main street of the native town. Two Earth-ship sailors, unarmed except\n for deceptively flimsy-looking pistols at their hips, stood before the\n entrance to the town's Hall of Justice.", "Svan, too, had left his unopened. He sat at the table, facing them.\n \"This is the plan,\" he said. \"We will go, all six of us, in my ground\n car, to look at the Earth-ship. No one will suspect—the whole city\n has been to see it already. One will get out, at the best point we can\n find. It is almost dusk now. He can hide, surely, in the vegetation.\n The other five will start back. Something will go wrong with the\n car—perhaps it will run off the road, start to sink in the swamp. The\n guards will be called. There will be commotion—that is easy enough,\n after all; a hysterical woman, a few screams, that's all there is to\n it. And the sixth person will have his chance to steal to the side\n of the ship. The bomb is magnetic. It will not be noticed in the\n dark—they will take off before sunrise, because they must travel away\n from the sun to return—in forty hours the danger is removed.\"", "Confusion furrowed the guard's hairless brows, then was replaced by\n a sudden flare of understanding—and fear. \"The Council!\" he roared.\n \"By heaven, yes, I understand! You are the swine that caused this—\"\n He strove instinctively to bring the clumsy rifle up, but Svan was\n faster. His gamble had failed; there was only one course remaining.\n He hurled his gross white bulk at the guard, bowled him over against\n the splintery logs of the road. The proton-rifle went flying, and Svan\n savagely tore at the throat of the guard. Knees, elbows and claw-like\n nails—Svan battered at the astonished man with every ounce of strength\n in his body. The guard was as big as Svan, but Svan had the initial", "advantage ... and it was only a matter of seconds before the guard\n lay unconscious, his skull a mass of gore at the back where Svan had\n ruthlessly pounded it against the road.\nSvan grunted as his fingers constricted brutally.\nSvan rose, panting, stared around. No one else was in sight, save the\n petrified five and the ground car. Svan glared at them contemptuously,\n then reached down and heaved on the senseless body of the guard. Over\n the shoulder of the road the body went, onto the damp swampland of the\n jungle. Even while Svan watched the body began to sink. There would be\n no trace.", "\"Where are you going?\" he growled.\n\n\n Svan spoke up. \"We want to look at the Earth-ship,\" he said. He opened\n the door beside him and stepped out, careless of the drizzle. \"We heard\n it was leaving tonight,\" he continued, \"and we have not seen it. Is\n that not permitted?\"\n\n\n The guard shook his head sourly. \"No one is allowed near the ship. The\n order was just issued. It is thought there is danger.\"\n\n\n Svan stepped closer, his teeth bared in what passed for a smile. \"It\n is urgent,\" he purred. His right hand flashed across his chest in a\n complicated gesture. \"Do you understand?\"", "Svan shrugged. \"The Council did not know what we would face. The\n Councilmen could not come to the city and see what strength the\n Earth-ship has.\" He paused dangerously. \"Toller,\" he said, \"do you\n object?\"\n\n\n Like the girl, the old man retreated before his eyes. His voice was\n dull. \"What is your plan?\" he asked.\n\n\n Svan smiled, and it was like a dark flame. He reached to a box at his\n feet, held up a shiny metal globe. \"One of us will plant this in the\n ship. It will be set by means of this dial—\" he touched a spot on the\n surface of the globe with a pallid finger—\"to do nothing for forty\n hours. Then—it will explode. Atomite.\"", "Lowry, a bewildered expression on his beardless face, held out the two\n halves of a metallic sphere. Dangling ends of wires showed where a\n connection had been broken. \"He had a bomb,\" he said. \"A magnetic-type,\n delayed-action atomite bomb. There must have been another in the car,\n and it went off. They—they were planning to bomb us.\"\n\n\n \"Amazing,\" the surgeon said dryly. \"Well, they won't do any bombing\n now.\"\n\n\n Lowry was staring at the huddled, mutilated form of Svan. He shuddered.\n The surgeon, seeing the shudder, grasped his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Better them than us,\" he said. \"It's poetic justice if I ever saw it.\n They had it coming....\" He paused thoughtfully, staring at a piece of\n paper between his fingers. \"This is the only part I don't get,\" he said.", "\"What's that?\" Lowry craned his neck. \"A piece of paper with a cross on\n it? What about it?\"\n\n\n The surgeon shrugged. \"He had it clenched in his hand,\" he said. \"Had\n the devil of a time getting it loose from him.\" He turned it over\n slowly, displayed the other side. \"Now what in the world would he be\n doing carrying a scrap of paper with a cross marked on both sides?\"", "\"And how do you know the guards themselves don't belong to it?\" the\n Exec retorted. \"They're all the same to me.... Look, your light's gone\n out now. Must have been the guard. They're on the wrong side to be\n coming from the town, anyhow....\"\nSvan hesitated only a fraction of a second after the girl turned the\n lights out and stopped the car. Then he reached in the compartment\n under the seat. If he took a little longer than seemed necessary to get\n the atomite bomb out of the compartment, none of the others noticed.\n Certainly it did not occur to them that there had been\ntwo\nbombs in\n the compartment, though Svan's hand emerged with only one.\n\n\n He got out of the car, holding the sphere. \"This will do for me,\" he\n said. \"They won't be expecting anyone to come from behind the ship—we\n were wise to circle around. Now, you know what you must do?\"" ], [ "Silently the girl picked up an opaque glass bowl from the broad arm\n of her chair. It had held Venus-tobacco cigarettes; there were a few\n left. She shook them out and handed the bowl to Svan, who was rapidly\n creasing the six fatal slips. He dropped them in the bowl, stirred it\n with his hand, offered it to the girl. \"You first, Ingra,\" he said.\n\n\n She reached in mechanically, her eyes intent on his, took out a slip\n and held it without opening it. The bowl went the rounds, till Svan\n himself took the last. All eyes were on him. No one had looked at their\n slips.", "There was comprehension in their eyes, Svan saw ... but still that\n uncertainty. Impatiently, he crackled: \"Look at the slips!\"\n\n\n Though he had willed his eyes away from it, his fingers had rebelled.\n Instinctively they had opened the slip, turned it over and over,\n striving to detect if it was the fatal one. They had felt nothing....\n\n\n And his eyes saw nothing. The slip was blank. He gave it but a second's\n glance, then looked up to see who had won the lethal game of chance.\n Almost he was disappointed.\n\n\n Each of the others had looked in that same second. And each was looking\n up now, around at his neighbors. Svan waited impatiently for the chosen\n one to announce it—a second, ten seconds....\n\n\n Then gray understanding came to him.\nA traitor!\nhis subconscious\n whispered.\nA coward!\nHe stared at them in a new light, saw their\n indecision magnified, became opposition.", "Svan thought faster than ever before in his life. If there was a\n coward, it would do no good to unmask him. All were wavering, any might\n be the one who had drawn the fatal slip. He could insist on inspecting\n every one, but—suppose the coward, cornered, fought back? In fractions\n of a second, Svan had considered the evidence and reached his decision.\n Masked by the table, his hand, still holding the pencil, moved swiftly\n beneath the table, marked his own slip.\n\n\n In the palm of his hand, Svan held up the slip he had just marked in\n secret. His voice was very tired as he said, \"I will plant the bomb.\"\nThe six conspirators in Svan's old ground car moved slowly along the\n main street of the native town. Two Earth-ship sailors, unarmed except\n for deceptively flimsy-looking pistols at their hips, stood before the\n entrance to the town's Hall of Justice.", "He grinned triumphantly, looking from face to face. The grin\n faded uncertainly as he saw what was in their eyes—uncertainty,\n irresolution. Abruptly he set the bomb down, savagely ripped six leaves\n off a writing tablet on the table next him. He took a pencil and made a\n mark on one of them, held it up.\n\n\n \"We will let chance decide who is to do the work,\" he said angrily. \"Is\n there anyone here who is afraid? There will be danger, I think....\"\n\n\n No answer. Svan jerked his head. \"Good,\" he said. \"Ingra, bring me that\n bowl.\"", "There was an instant of doubt in his steel-shackled mind, then it was\n driven away. Perhaps she was loyal, yet certainly she was weak. And\n since he could not know which was the one who had received the marked\n slip, and feared to admit it, it was better they all should die.\n\n\n He advanced along the midnight road to where the ground rose and the\n jungle plants thinned out. Ahead, on an elevation, were the rain-dimmed\n lights of the Earth-ship, set down in the center of a clearing made by\n its own fierce rockets. Svan's mist-trained eyes spotted the circling\n figures of sentries, and knew that these would be the ship's own.\n They would not be as easily overcome as the natives, not with those\n slim-shafted blasters they carried. Only deceit could get him to the\n side of the ship.", "Svan settled himself at the side of the road, waiting for his chance.\n He had perhaps three minutes to wait; he reckoned. His fingers went\n absently to the pouch in his wide belt, closed on the slip of paper. He\n turned it over without looking at it, wondering who had drawn the first\n cross, and been a coward. Ingra? One of the men?\nHe became abruptly conscious of a commotion behind him. A ground car\n was racing along the road. He spun around and was caught in the glare\n of its blinding driving-light, as it bumped to a slithering stop.\n\n\n Paralyzed, he heard the girl's voice. \"Svan! They're coming! They found\n the guard's rifle, and they're looking for us! Thirty Earthmen, Svan,\n with those frightful guns. They fired at us, but we got away and came\n for you. We must flee!\"", "Svan, too, had left his unopened. He sat at the table, facing them.\n \"This is the plan,\" he said. \"We will go, all six of us, in my ground\n car, to look at the Earth-ship. No one will suspect—the whole city\n has been to see it already. One will get out, at the best point we can\n find. It is almost dusk now. He can hide, surely, in the vegetation.\n The other five will start back. Something will go wrong with the\n car—perhaps it will run off the road, start to sink in the swamp. The\n guards will be called. There will be commotion—that is easy enough,\n after all; a hysterical woman, a few screams, that's all there is to\n it. And the sixth person will have his chance to steal to the side\n of the ship. The bomb is magnetic. It will not be noticed in the\n dark—they will take off before sunrise, because they must travel away\n from the sun to return—in forty hours the danger is removed.\"", "Confusion furrowed the guard's hairless brows, then was replaced by\n a sudden flare of understanding—and fear. \"The Council!\" he roared.\n \"By heaven, yes, I understand! You are the swine that caused this—\"\n He strove instinctively to bring the clumsy rifle up, but Svan was\n faster. His gamble had failed; there was only one course remaining.\n He hurled his gross white bulk at the guard, bowled him over against\n the splintery logs of the road. The proton-rifle went flying, and Svan\n savagely tore at the throat of the guard. Knees, elbows and claw-like\n nails—Svan battered at the astonished man with every ounce of strength\n in his body. The guard was as big as Svan, but Svan had the initial", "\"What's that?\" Lowry craned his neck. \"A piece of paper with a cross on\n it? What about it?\"\n\n\n The surgeon shrugged. \"He had it clenched in his hand,\" he said. \"Had\n the devil of a time getting it loose from him.\" He turned it over\n slowly, displayed the other side. \"Now what in the world would he be\n doing carrying a scrap of paper with a cross marked on both sides?\"", "He stared unseeingly at the light. \"Go away!\" he croaked unbelievingly.\n Then his muscles jerked into action. The time was almost up—the bomb\n in the car—\n\n\n \"Go away!\" he shrieked, and turned to run. His fists clenched and\n swinging at his side, he made a dozen floundering steps before\n something immense pounded at him from behind. He felt himself lifted\n from the road, sailing, swooping, dropping with annihilating force\n onto the hard, charred earth of the clearing. Only then did he hear the\n sound of the explosion, and as the immense echoes died away he began to\n feel the pain seeping into him from his hideously racked body....\n\n\n The Flight Surgeon rose from beside him. \"He's still alive,\" he said\n callously to Lowry, who had just come up. \"It won't last long, though.\n What've you got there?\"", "Abruptly he swallowed, reminded of the bomb that was silently counting\n off the seconds. \"Go ahead,\" he ordered. \"I will wait here.\"\n\n\n \"Svan.\" The girl, Ingra, leaned over to him. Impulsively she reached\n for him, kissed him. \"Good luck to you, Svan,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Good luck,\" repeated the others. Then silently the electric motor of\n the car took hold. Skilfully the girl backed it up, turned it around,\n sent it lumbering back down the road. Only after she had traveled a few\n hundred feet by the feel of the road did she turn the lights on again.\n\n\n Svan looked after them. The kiss had surprised him. What did it mean?\n Was it an error that the girl should die with the others?", "\"Good,\" said Svan, observing them. \"The delegation is still here. We\n have ample time.\"\n\n\n He half turned in the broad front seat next to the driver, searching\n the faces of the others in the car. Which was the coward? he wondered.\n Ingra? Her aunt? One of the men?\n\n\n The right answer leaped up at him.\nThey all are\n, he thought.\nNot one\n of them understands what this means. They're afraid.\nHe clamped his lips. \"Go faster, Ingra,\" he ordered the girl who was\n driving. \"Let's get this done with.\"", "Svan shrugged. \"The Council did not know what we would face. The\n Councilmen could not come to the city and see what strength the\n Earth-ship has.\" He paused dangerously. \"Toller,\" he said, \"do you\n object?\"\n\n\n Like the girl, the old man retreated before his eyes. His voice was\n dull. \"What is your plan?\" he asked.\n\n\n Svan smiled, and it was like a dark flame. He reached to a box at his\n feet, held up a shiny metal globe. \"One of us will plant this in the\n ship. It will be set by means of this dial—\" he touched a spot on the\n surface of the globe with a pallid finger—\"to do nothing for forty\n hours. Then—it will explode. Atomite.\"", "Ingra nodded, while the others remained mute. \"We must circle back\n again,\" she parroted. \"We are to wait five minutes, then drive the car\n into the swamp. We will create a commotion, attract the guards.\"\n\n\n Svan, listening, thought:\nIt's not much of a plan. The guards would\n not be drawn away. I am glad I can't trust these five any more. If\n they must be destroyed, it is good that their destruction will serve a\n purpose.\nAloud, he said, \"You understand. If I get through, I will return to the\n city on foot. No one will suspect anything if I am not caught, because\n the bomb will not explode until the ship is far out in space. Remember,\n you are in no danger from the guards.\"\nFrom the guards\n, his mind echoed. He smiled. At least, they would\n feel no pain, never know what happened. With the amount of atomite in\n that bomb in the compartment, they would merely be obliterated in a\n ground-shaking crash.", "\"Where are you going?\" he growled.\n\n\n Svan spoke up. \"We want to look at the Earth-ship,\" he said. He opened\n the door beside him and stepped out, careless of the drizzle. \"We heard\n it was leaving tonight,\" he continued, \"and we have not seen it. Is\n that not permitted?\"\n\n\n The guard shook his head sourly. \"No one is allowed near the ship. The\n order was just issued. It is thought there is danger.\"\n\n\n Svan stepped closer, his teeth bared in what passed for a smile. \"It\n is urgent,\" he purred. His right hand flashed across his chest in a\n complicated gesture. \"Do you understand?\"", "advantage ... and it was only a matter of seconds before the guard\n lay unconscious, his skull a mass of gore at the back where Svan had\n ruthlessly pounded it against the road.\nSvan grunted as his fingers constricted brutally.\nSvan rose, panting, stared around. No one else was in sight, save the\n petrified five and the ground car. Svan glared at them contemptuously,\n then reached down and heaved on the senseless body of the guard. Over\n the shoulder of the road the body went, onto the damp swampland of the\n jungle. Even while Svan watched the body began to sink. There would be\n no trace.", "Lowry, a bewildered expression on his beardless face, held out the two\n halves of a metallic sphere. Dangling ends of wires showed where a\n connection had been broken. \"He had a bomb,\" he said. \"A magnetic-type,\n delayed-action atomite bomb. There must have been another in the car,\n and it went off. They—they were planning to bomb us.\"\n\n\n \"Amazing,\" the surgeon said dryly. \"Well, they won't do any bombing\n now.\"\n\n\n Lowry was staring at the huddled, mutilated form of Svan. He shuddered.\n The surgeon, seeing the shudder, grasped his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Better them than us,\" he said. \"It's poetic justice if I ever saw it.\n They had it coming....\" He paused thoughtfully, staring at a piece of\n paper between his fingers. \"This is the only part I don't get,\" he said.", "\"And how do you know the guards themselves don't belong to it?\" the\n Exec retorted. \"They're all the same to me.... Look, your light's gone\n out now. Must have been the guard. They're on the wrong side to be\n coming from the town, anyhow....\"\nSvan hesitated only a fraction of a second after the girl turned the\n lights out and stopped the car. Then he reached in the compartment\n under the seat. If he took a little longer than seemed necessary to get\n the atomite bomb out of the compartment, none of the others noticed.\n Certainly it did not occur to them that there had been\ntwo\nbombs in\n the compartment, though Svan's hand emerged with only one.\n\n\n He got out of the car, holding the sphere. \"This will do for me,\" he\n said. \"They won't be expecting anyone to come from behind the ship—we\n were wise to circle around. Now, you know what you must do?\"", "She looked at him, and he was surprised to find compassion in her\n eyes. Silently she nodded, advanced the fuel-handle so that the clumsy\n car jolted a trace more rapidly over the corduroy road. It was quite\n dark now. The car's driving light flared yellowishly in front of them,\n illuminating the narrow road and the pale, distorted vegetation of the\n jungle that surrounded them. Svan noticed it was raining a little. The\n present shower would deepen and intensify until midnight, then fall off\n again, to halt before morning. But before then they would be done.\n\n\n A proton-bolt lanced across the road in front of them. In the silence\n that followed its thunderous crash, a man's voice bellowed: \"Halt!\"\n\n\n The girl, Ingra, gasped something indistinguishable, slammed on the\n brakes. A Venusian in the trappings of the State Guard advanced on them\n from the side of the road, proton-rifle held ready to fire again.", "Lowry, interrupted in the middle of a word, jerked his head back and\n stared unbelievingly at the tell-tale next to the annunciator. Sure\n enough, it was glowing red—might have been glowing for minutes. He\n snatched at the hand-phone dangling from the wall, shouted into it.\n \"Set up a screen! Notify the delegation! Alert a landing party!\" But\n even while he was giving orders, the warning light flickered suddenly\n and went out. Stricken, Lowry turned to the Exec.\n\n\n The Executive Officer nodded gloomily. He said, \"You see!\"\n\"You see?\"\n\n\n Svan clicked off the listening-machine and turned around. The five\n others in the room looked apprehensive. \"You see?\" Svan repeated. \"From\n their own mouths you have heard it. The Council was right.\"" ] ]
train	62619	[ "Why did Lorelei choose to not keep up with the news for herself?", "When Peter woke in the hospital, how long was he told that he had been there?", "What was Peter's occupation?", "Why did Robert choose to not return to Earth after Peter had told him that he was ready?", "Why did Peter choose to go on the mission by himself rather than taking Lorelei with him?", "Why did Peter choose to break all the mirrors inside the ship?", "How did Peter get the scar on his cheek?", "What emotions could likely be behind the expression on Peter's face at the end of the passage when he was told that they could not return to Earth?", "Why was Robert the only choice for returning to Earh?", "Based on the remainder of the passage, from whose perspective is the introduction?" ]	[ [ "Peter always kept her informed well enough. ", "She didn't care enough to know the news. ", "She found it to be depressing or boring. ", "She didn't have time to keep up with current events. " ], [ "nine and a half days ", "nine and a half months", "Three days", "Three months" ], [ "Doctor", "Lab Technician", "Scientist", "Journalist" ], [ "He wanted to stay with Peter, alone. ", "His fear of the Invaders after hearing the story from Peter's diary", "His logic wouldn't allow him to fulfill the purpose", "He couldn't decipher the difference in killing the humans and the Invaders" ], [ "Women needed to stay underground for reproduction purposes", "There was only room for one passenger in the ship. ", "There was a slim chance of survial", "Lorelei was too afraid to make the journey with him. " ], [ "The mirrors were harmful to the embryos ", "The mirrors reflected too much light. ", "He needed his full attention on the task at hand. ", "He didn't want to see the changes to himself due to the rays." ], [ "From an accidental talon scratch", "From traveling through the dangerous rays.", "From the construction of his ship", "From the Invaders attack." ], [ "Fear", "Satisfaction", "Defeat", "Contentment" ], [ "He was the only changeling-child who grew to have no fear. ", "He was the only changeling-child who had not been destroyed", "He was the only one will the powerfully strong talons that could defeat the Invaders", "He was the strongest of the group" ], [ "Robert", "Peter", "An Invader", "Lorelei" ] ]	[ 3, 4, 3, 3, 3, 4, 1, 3, 2, 1 ]	[ 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "He said, \"Have you seen the news recently?\"\n\n\n She frowned. \"Why, no—Harry and I have been working for thirty-six\n hours straight. Haven't seen anybody, haven't heard anything. Why?\"\n\n\n \"You wouldn't believe me. Where's your newsbox?\"\n\n\n She came around the desk and put her hands on his shoulders. \"Pete,\n you know I haven't one—it bores me or upsets me, depending on whether\n there's trouble or not. What—\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, I forgot,\" he said. \"But you have a scanner?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, of course. But really, Pete—\"\n\n\n \"You'll understand in a minute. Turn it on, Lorelei.\"", "She gazed at him levelly for a moment, kissed him impulsively, and then\n walked over to the video panel on the wall and swept a mountain of\n papers away from in front of it. She turned the selector dial to \"News\"\n and pressed the stud.\n\n\n A faint wash of color appeared on the panel, strengthened slowly, and\n suddenly leapt into full brilliance.\n\n\n Lorelei caught her breath.\n\n\n It was a street scene in the Science City of Manhattan, flooded by\n the warm spring sunshine. Down on the lowest level, visible past the\n transport and passenger tubes, the parks and moving ways should have\n been dotted with colorful, holiday crowds. The people were there,\n yes but they were flowing away in a swiftly-widening circle. They\n disappeared into buildings, and the ways snatched them up, and in a\n heartbeat they were gone.", "He stared after it, stunned into immobility. Down in the street\n somewhere, a portable video was shrilling a popular song; after a\n moment he heard the faint swish of a tube car going past. Everything\n was normal. Nothing, on examination, seemed to have changed. But the\n world had grown suddenly unreal.\n\n\n One part of his brain had been shocked into its shell. It was hiding\n from the thing that had hurt it, and it refused to respond. But the\n other part was going calmly, lucidly on, quite without his volition.\n It considered the possibility that he had gone temporarily insane, and\n decided that this was probable.\n\n\n Hardly knowing what he did, he found a cigarette and lit it. His hands\n were shaking. He stared at them dully, and then he reached over to the\n newsbox on his desk, and switched it on.\n\n\n There were flaring red headlines.", "He heard a faint sound behind him, and whirled. It was the first\n time he had realized that Lorelei had followed him. She stood there,\n swaying, very pale, looking at the red Invaders. Her eyes swiveled\n slowly....\n\n\n \"\nOpreniktoulestritifenrelngetnaktwiltoctpre.\n\"\n\n\n His voice was hoarse. \"Don't look! Don't—Go back!\" The horrible,\n mindless noise in his throat was almost beyond his power to repress.\n His insides writhed to thrust it out.\n\n\n She didn't see him. Her eyes glazed, and she dropped limply to the\n floor.", "Peter's head began spinning just a little. Glass clinked from a metal\n stand near his head; the nurse bent over him with a glass half full of\n milky fluid. It tasted awful, but she made him drink it all.\n\n\n In a moment he began to relax, and the room got fuzzy again. Just\n before he drifted off, he said sleepily, \"You can't—fool me. It's been\nmore\n—than three—months.\"\n\n\n He was right. All the nurses, and even Dr. Arnold, were evasive, but he\n kept asking them why he couldn't see Lorelei, and finally he wormed it\n out of them. It had been nine and a half months, not three, and he'd\n been in a coma all that time. Lorelei, it seemed, had recovered much\n sooner.", "The scream came out then. Before he knew, even, that he could hold\n it back no longer, his mouth was wide open, his muscles tensed, his\n fingernails slicing his palms. It echoed with unbelievable volume in\n the room. It was a scream to split eardrums; a scream to wake the dead.\nSomebody said, \"Doctor!\"\n\n\n He wanted to say, \"Yes, get a doctor. Lorelei—\" but his mouth only\n twitched feebly. He couldn't seem to get it to work properly.\n\n\n He tried again. \"Doctor.\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\" A gentle, masculine voice.\n\n\n He opened his eyes with an effort. There was a blurred face before him;\n in a moment it grew clearer. The strong, clean-shaven chin contrasted\n oddly with the haggard circles under the eyes. There was a clean,\n starched odor.", "There were left only two blood-red, malignant monstrosities somehow\n defiling the air they floated in; and below them, a pitiful huddle of\n flesh no longer recognizable as human beings. They were not dead, those\n men and women, but they wanted to be. Their bodies had been impossibly\n joined, fused together into a single obscene, floundering mass of\n helpless protoplasm. The thin moaning that went up from them was more\n horrible than any cry of agony.\n\n\n \"The Invaders are here, citizens,\" the commentator was saying in a\n strangled voice. \"Stay off the streets. Hide yourselves. Stay off the\n streets....\" His voice droned on, but neither of them heard it.\nLorelei buried her head on his chest, clutching at him desperately.\n \"Peter!\" she said faintly. \"Why do they broadcast such things?\"", "Relief washed over him, leaving him breathless. He was horrified,\n of course, but only abstractedly. For the moment he could only be\n glad that what he had seen was terrible reality rather than even more\n terrible illusion.\nINVADERS APPEAR IN BOSTON.\n\n 200 DEAD\n\n\n Then lines of type, and farther down:\n50 CHILDREN DISAPPEAR FROM\n\n PARIS MATERNITY CENTER\n\n\n He pressed the stud. The roll was full of them.\nMOON SHIP DESTROYED\n\n IN TRANSIT\n\n NO COMMUNICATION FROM\n\n ANTARCTICA IN 6 HOURS\n\n STRANGE FORCE DEFLECTS\n\n PLANES FROM SAHARA AREA\n\n WORLD POLICE MOBILIZING", "\"Where am I?\" he said. He tried to turn his head, but a firm hand\n pressed him back into the sheets.\n\n\n \"You're in a hospital. Just lie quietly, please.\"\n\n\n He tried to get up again. \"Where's Lorelei?\"\n\n\n \"She's well, and you'll see her soon. Now lie quietly. You've been a\n very sick man.\"\n\n\n Peter sank back in the bed. The room was coming into focus. He looked\n around him slowly. He felt very weak, but perfectly lucid.\n\n\n \"Yes....\" he said. \"How long have I been here, Doctor?\"\n\n\n The man hesitated, looked at him intently. \"Three months,\" he said. He\n turned and gave low-voiced instructions to a nurse, and then went away.", "\"She was only suffering from ordinary shock,\" Arnold explained.\n \"Seeing that assistant of hers—it was enough to knock anybody out,\n especially a woman. But you stood actual mental contact with\nthem\nfor approximately five minutes. Yes, we know—you talked a lot. It's a\n miracle you're alive, and rational.\"\n\n\n \"But where is she?\" Peter complained. \"You still haven't explained why\n I haven't been able to see her.\"\n\n\n Arnold frowned. \"All right,\" he said. \"I guess you're strong enough to\n take it. She's underground, with the rest of the women and children,\n and a good two-thirds of the male population. That's where you'll go,\n as soon as you're well enough to be moved. We started digging in six\n months ago.\"\n\n\n \"But why?\" Peter whispered.\n\n\n Arnold's strong jaw knotted. \"We're hiding,\" he said. \"Everything else\n has failed.\"", "\"\nWill\nwe?\" he asked himself softly.\nIt was only two stories down the moving ramp to Lorelei Cooper's\n laboratory. Peter took it in fifteen seconds, running, and stumbled to\n a halt in front of the door marked \"Radiation.\" She had set her door\n mechanism to \"Etaoin Shrdlu,\" principally because he hated double-talk.\n He mouthed the syllables, had to repeat them because he put an accent\n in the wrong place, and squeezed through the door as soon as it opened\n far enough to admit him.\n\n\n Lorelei, beautiful in spite of dark-circled eyes and a smear of grease\n on her chin, looked up from a huge ledger at the end of the room. One\n blonde eyebrow arched in the quizzical expression he knew so well.\n\n\n \"What makes, Peter my love?\" she asked, and bent back to the ledger.\n Then she did a double-take, looked at his face intently, and said,\n \"Darling, what's wrong?\"", "\"They have to,\" he told her grimly. \"There will be panics and suicides,\n and they know it; but they have to do it. This isn't like a war, where\n the noncombatants' morale has to be kept up. There aren't going to be\n any noncombatants, this time. Everybody in the world has to know about\n them, so that he can fight them—and then it may not be enough.\"\n\n\n The viewpoint of the teleo sender changed as the two red beings soared\n away from their victims and angled slowly up the street. Peter reached\n out to switch off the scanner, and froze. The girl felt his muscles\n tense abruptly, looked back at the scene. The Invaders were floating\n up the sloping side of a tall, pure white structure that dominated the\n rest.\n\n\n \"That's the Atlas building,\" she said unbelievingly. \"Us!\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"", "She was after him, clinging to his arms. \"No, Peter! Don't go in there!\nPeter!\n\" But he pushed her away again, woodenly, and stalked forward.\n\n\n There was a space in the middle of the room where machinery had been\n cleared away to make room for an incompleted setup. Peter walked down\n the narrow aisle, past bakelite-sheathed mechanisms and rows of animal\n cages, and paused just short of it.\n\n\n The two red beings were there, formless bodies hazy in midair, the\n distorted, hairless skulls in profile, staring at something outside his\n range of vision.\nPeter forced himself forward another step. Little Harry Kanin,\n Lorelei's assistant, was crumpled in a corner, half supported by the\n broad base of an X-ray chamber. His face was flaccid and bloated. His\n glazed eyes, impassive yet somehow pleading, stared at nothingness\n straight ahead of him.", "\"I do not understand 'friend,'\" I said.\n\n\n I did understand \"gratitude,\" a little. It was a reciprocal\n arrangement: I did what Peter wished, so long as I did not actively\n want to do otherwise, because he had done things for me. Very well,\n then we must not go back. It was very simple, but I knew that he could\n not comprehend it.\n\n\n I tried to explain it to him, however. But he only stared at me, with\n an expression on his face that I had never seen there before, and that,\n somehow, I did not like to see. It was disquieting, and so I hastened\n to the end that I knew was inevitable.", "A man had just finished engraving the final stroke on its nameplate, to\n the left of the airlock—\nThe Avenger\n. He stepped away now, and joined\n the group a little distance away, silently waiting.\n\n\n Lorelei said, \"You can't do it. I won't let you! Peter—\"\n\n\n \"Darling,\" he began wearily.\n\n\n \"Don't throw your life away! Give us time—there must be another way.\"", "\"Out there, in space, the cosmics change unshielded life. They\n make tentacles out of arms; or scales out of hair; or twelve toes,\n or a dozen ears—or a better brain. Out of those millions of\n possible mutations, there's one that will save the human race. We\n can't fight\nthem\n, but a superman could. That's our only chance.\n Lorelei—darling—don't you see that?\"\n\n\n She choked, \"But why can't you take me along?\"\n\n\n He stared unseeingly past her wet, upturned face. \"You know why,\" he\n said bitterly. \"Those rays are strong. They don't only work on embryos;\n they change adult life forms, too. I have one chance in seven of\n staying alive. You'd have one chance in a million of staying beautiful.\n I couldn't stand that. I'd kill myself, and then humanity would die,\n too. You'd be their murderer.\"", "Her sobs gradually died away. She straightened slowly until he no\n longer had to support her, but all the vitality and resilience was gone\n out of her body. \"All right,\" she said in a lifeless voice. \"You'll\n come back, Peter.\"\n\n\n He turned away suddenly, not trusting himself to kiss her goodbye. A\n line from an old film kept echoing through his head. \"\nThey'll\ncome\n back—but not as\nboys\n!\"\n\n\n We'll come back, but not as men.\n\n\n We'll come back, but not as elephants.\n\n\n We'll come back, but not as octopi.\nHe was trembling violently. He ran the last few steps, stumbled into\n the airlock, and pressed the stud that would seal the door behind him.\nWe'll come back....\nHe heard the massive disk sink home, closing him\n off. Then he sank down on the floor of the airlock and put his head in\n shaking hands.", "He looked at me, a little oddly, almost as if he had some instinctive\n knowledge of what was to come. But he went on swiftly, \"On Earth we\n had a saying: 'Fight fire with fire.' That is the way it will be with\n you. You are completely, coldly logical, just as\nthey\nare. You can\n understand them, and so you can conquer them.\"\n\n\n I said, \"That is the reason why we will not go back to Earth.\"\n\n\n He stared at me, his jaw slack, his hands trembling. \"What—what did\n you say?\"\n\n\n I repeated it patiently.\n\n\n \"But why?\" he cried, sinking down into the chair before me. In an\n instant all the joy had gone out of him. I could not understand his\n suffering, but I could recognize it.", "\"There's no other way,\" Peter said. He gripped her arms tightly, as if\n he could compel her to understand by the sheer pressure of his fingers.\n \"Darling, listen to me. We've tried everything. We've gone underground,\n but that's only delaying the end.\nThey\nstill come down here, only not\n as many. The mortality rate is up, the suicide rate is up, the birth\n rate is down, in spite of anything we can do. You've seen the figures:\n we're riding a curve that ends in extinction fifty years from now.\n\n\n \"They'll live, and we'll die, because they're a superior race. We're a\n million years too far back even to understand what they are or where\n they came from. Besides them, we're apes. There's only one answer.\"\n\n\n She was crying now, silently, with great racking sobs that shook her\n slender body. But he went remorselessly on.", "before: tiny, myriad points of light, infinitely far away. They had not\n changed, and yet they were suddenly no longer friendly. They were cold\n and alien. It was I who had changed: something inside me was dead, like\n the machinery, and like Peter.\nIt was a kind of indefinable emptiness. I do not think it was what\n Peter called an emotion; and yet it had nothing to do with logic,\n either. It was just an emptiness—a void that could not be filled by\n eating or drinking.\nIt was not a longing. I had no desire that things should be otherwise\n than they were. I did not even wish that Peter were not dead, for\n reason had told me that he had to die. That was the end of it.\nBut the void was still there, unexplainable and impossible to ignore." ], [ "Peter's head began spinning just a little. Glass clinked from a metal\n stand near his head; the nurse bent over him with a glass half full of\n milky fluid. It tasted awful, but she made him drink it all.\n\n\n In a moment he began to relax, and the room got fuzzy again. Just\n before he drifted off, he said sleepily, \"You can't—fool me. It's been\nmore\n—than three—months.\"\n\n\n He was right. All the nurses, and even Dr. Arnold, were evasive, but he\n kept asking them why he couldn't see Lorelei, and finally he wormed it\n out of them. It had been nine and a half months, not three, and he'd\n been in a coma all that time. Lorelei, it seemed, had recovered much\n sooner.", "\"Where am I?\" he said. He tried to turn his head, but a firm hand\n pressed him back into the sheets.\n\n\n \"You're in a hospital. Just lie quietly, please.\"\n\n\n He tried to get up again. \"Where's Lorelei?\"\n\n\n \"She's well, and you'll see her soon. Now lie quietly. You've been a\n very sick man.\"\n\n\n Peter sank back in the bed. The room was coming into focus. He looked\n around him slowly. He felt very weak, but perfectly lucid.\n\n\n \"Yes....\" he said. \"How long have I been here, Doctor?\"\n\n\n The man hesitated, looked at him intently. \"Three months,\" he said. He\n turned and gave low-voiced instructions to a nurse, and then went away.", "The scream came out then. Before he knew, even, that he could hold\n it back no longer, his mouth was wide open, his muscles tensed, his\n fingernails slicing his palms. It echoed with unbelievable volume in\n the room. It was a scream to split eardrums; a scream to wake the dead.\nSomebody said, \"Doctor!\"\n\n\n He wanted to say, \"Yes, get a doctor. Lorelei—\" but his mouth only\n twitched feebly. He couldn't seem to get it to work properly.\n\n\n He tried again. \"Doctor.\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\" A gentle, masculine voice.\n\n\n He opened his eyes with an effort. There was a blurred face before him;\n in a moment it grew clearer. The strong, clean-shaven chin contrasted\n oddly with the haggard circles under the eyes. There was a clean,\n starched odor.", "She was after him, clinging to his arms. \"No, Peter! Don't go in there!\nPeter!\n\" But he pushed her away again, woodenly, and stalked forward.\n\n\n There was a space in the middle of the room where machinery had been\n cleared away to make room for an incompleted setup. Peter walked down\n the narrow aisle, past bakelite-sheathed mechanisms and rows of animal\n cages, and paused just short of it.\n\n\n The two red beings were there, formless bodies hazy in midair, the\n distorted, hairless skulls in profile, staring at something outside his\n range of vision.\nPeter forced himself forward another step. Little Harry Kanin,\n Lorelei's assistant, was crumpled in a corner, half supported by the\n broad base of an X-ray chamber. His face was flaccid and bloated. His\n glazed eyes, impassive yet somehow pleading, stared at nothingness\n straight ahead of him.", "\"\nWill\nwe?\" he asked himself softly.\nIt was only two stories down the moving ramp to Lorelei Cooper's\n laboratory. Peter took it in fifteen seconds, running, and stumbled to\n a halt in front of the door marked \"Radiation.\" She had set her door\n mechanism to \"Etaoin Shrdlu,\" principally because he hated double-talk.\n He mouthed the syllables, had to repeat them because he put an accent\n in the wrong place, and squeezed through the door as soon as it opened\n far enough to admit him.\n\n\n Lorelei, beautiful in spite of dark-circled eyes and a smear of grease\n on her chin, looked up from a huge ledger at the end of the room. One\n blonde eyebrow arched in the quizzical expression he knew so well.\n\n\n \"What makes, Peter my love?\" she asked, and bent back to the ledger.\n Then she did a double-take, looked at his face intently, and said,\n \"Darling, what's wrong?\"", "He stared after it, stunned into immobility. Down in the street\n somewhere, a portable video was shrilling a popular song; after a\n moment he heard the faint swish of a tube car going past. Everything\n was normal. Nothing, on examination, seemed to have changed. But the\n world had grown suddenly unreal.\n\n\n One part of his brain had been shocked into its shell. It was hiding\n from the thing that had hurt it, and it refused to respond. But the\n other part was going calmly, lucidly on, quite without his volition.\n It considered the possibility that he had gone temporarily insane, and\n decided that this was probable.\n\n\n Hardly knowing what he did, he found a cigarette and lit it. His hands\n were shaking. He stared at them dully, and then he reached over to the\n newsbox on his desk, and switched it on.\n\n\n There were flaring red headlines.", "\"She was only suffering from ordinary shock,\" Arnold explained.\n \"Seeing that assistant of hers—it was enough to knock anybody out,\n especially a woman. But you stood actual mental contact with\nthem\nfor approximately five minutes. Yes, we know—you talked a lot. It's a\n miracle you're alive, and rational.\"\n\n\n \"But where is she?\" Peter complained. \"You still haven't explained why\n I haven't been able to see her.\"\n\n\n Arnold frowned. \"All right,\" he said. \"I guess you're strong enough to\n take it. She's underground, with the rest of the women and children,\n and a good two-thirds of the male population. That's where you'll go,\n as soon as you're well enough to be moved. We started digging in six\n months ago.\"\n\n\n \"But why?\" Peter whispered.\n\n\n Arnold's strong jaw knotted. \"We're hiding,\" he said. \"Everything else\n has failed.\"", "Peter couldn't think of anything to say. Dr. Arnold's voice went on\n after a moment, musingly. \"We're burrowing into the earth, like worms.\n It didn't take us long to find out we couldn't kill them. They didn't\n even take any notice of our attempts to do so, except once. That was\n when a squadron of the Police caught about fifty of them together at\n one time, and attacked with flame guns and a new secret weapon. It\n didn't hurt them, but it annoyed them. It was the first time they'd\n been annoyed, I think. They blew up half a state, and it's still\n smoldering.\"\n\n\n \"And since then?\" Peter asked huskily.", "He said, \"Have you seen the news recently?\"\n\n\n She frowned. \"Why, no—Harry and I have been working for thirty-six\n hours straight. Haven't seen anybody, haven't heard anything. Why?\"\n\n\n \"You wouldn't believe me. Where's your newsbox?\"\n\n\n She came around the desk and put her hands on his shoulders. \"Pete,\n you know I haven't one—it bores me or upsets me, depending on whether\n there's trouble or not. What—\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, I forgot,\" he said. \"But you have a scanner?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, of course. But really, Pete—\"\n\n\n \"You'll understand in a minute. Turn it on, Lorelei.\"", "\"I do not understand 'friend,'\" I said.\n\n\n I did understand \"gratitude,\" a little. It was a reciprocal\n arrangement: I did what Peter wished, so long as I did not actively\n want to do otherwise, because he had done things for me. Very well,\n then we must not go back. It was very simple, but I knew that he could\n not comprehend it.\n\n\n I tried to explain it to him, however. But he only stared at me, with\n an expression on his face that I had never seen there before, and that,\n somehow, I did not like to see. It was disquieting, and so I hastened\n to the end that I knew was inevitable.", "Silently, they counted stories as the two beings rose. Forty-five ...\n forty-six ... forty-seven ... forty-eight. Inevitably, they halted.\n Then they faded slowly. It was impossible to say whether they had gone\n through the solid wall, or simply melted away.\n\n\n The man and woman clung together, waiting.\n\n\n There was a thick, oppressive silence, full of small rustlings and\n other faint sounds that were no longer normal. Then, very near, a man\n screamed in a high, inhuman voice. The screamed dwindled into a throaty\n gurgle and died, leaving silence again.\n\n\n Peter's lips were cold with sweat. Tiny nerves in his face and arms\n were jumping convulsively. His stomach crawled. He thrust the girl away\n from him and started toward the inner room.\n\n\n \"Wait here,\" he mouthed.", "Her sobs gradually died away. She straightened slowly until he no\n longer had to support her, but all the vitality and resilience was gone\n out of her body. \"All right,\" she said in a lifeless voice. \"You'll\n come back, Peter.\"\n\n\n He turned away suddenly, not trusting himself to kiss her goodbye. A\n line from an old film kept echoing through his head. \"\nThey'll\ncome\n back—but not as\nboys\n!\"\n\n\n We'll come back, but not as men.\n\n\n We'll come back, but not as elephants.\n\n\n We'll come back, but not as octopi.\nHe was trembling violently. He ran the last few steps, stumbled into\n the airlock, and pressed the stud that would seal the door behind him.\nWe'll come back....\nHe heard the massive disk sink home, closing him\n off. Then he sank down on the floor of the airlock and put his head in\n shaking hands.", "\"I see,\" said Peter. And for the first time, he thought of the\nCitadel\n. No plan leaped full-born into his mind, but,\nmaybe\n, he\n thought,\nthere's a chance\n....\nIt wasn't very big, the thing that had been his shining dream. It lay\n there in its rough cradle, a globe of raw dura-steel not more than\n five hundred meters in diameter, where the\nCitadel\nwas to have been a\n thousand. It wouldn't house a hundred scientists, eagerly delving into\n the hinterland of research. The huge compartments weren't filled with\n the latest equipment for chemical and physical experiment; instead,\n there was compressed oxygen there, and concentrated food, enough to\n last a lifetime.\n\n\n It was a new world, all by itself; or else it was a tomb. And there was\n one other change, one that you couldn't see from the outside. The solid\n meters of lead in its outer skin, the shielding to keep out cosmic\n rays, were gone.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nPeter Karson was dead. He had been dead for some time now, but\n the dark blood was still oozing from the crushed ruin of his face,\n trickling down into his sodden sleeve, and falling, drop by slow drop,\n from his fingertips. His head was tilted over the back of the chair at\n a queer, unnatural angle, so that the light made deep pools of shadow\n where his eyes had been.\nThere was no sound in the room except for the small splashing the\n blood made as it dropped into the sticky pool on the floor. The great\n banks of machinery around the walls were silent. I knew that they would\n never come to life again.\nI rose and walked over to the window. Outside, the stars were as", "The Invaders ignored Peter, staring expressionlessly down at Kanin.\n In a moment Peter realized what they were doing to him. He stood,\n paralyzed with horror, and watched it happen.\n\n\n The little man's body was sagging, ever so slowly, as if he were\n relaxing tiredly. His torso was telescoping, bit by bit; his spread\n legs grew wider and more shapeless, his cheeks caved in and his skull\n grew gradually flatter.\n\n\n When it was over, the thing that had been Kanin was a limp, boneless\n puddle of flesh. Peter could not look at it.\n\n\n There was a scream in his throat that would not come out. He was beyond\n fear, beyond agony. He turned to the still-hovering monsters and said\n in a terrible voice, \"Why? Why?\"\n\n\n The nearest being turned slowly to regard him. Its lips did not move,\n but there was a tiny sound in Peter's brain, a thin, dry whispering.", "He heard a faint sound behind him, and whirled. It was the first\n time he had realized that Lorelei had followed him. She stood there,\n swaying, very pale, looking at the red Invaders. Her eyes swiveled\n slowly....\n\n\n \"\nOpreniktoulestritifenrelngetnaktwiltoctpre.\n\"\n\n\n His voice was hoarse. \"Don't look! Don't—Go back!\" The horrible,\n mindless noise in his throat was almost beyond his power to repress.\n His insides writhed to thrust it out.\n\n\n She didn't see him. Her eyes glazed, and she dropped limply to the\n floor.", "There were left only two blood-red, malignant monstrosities somehow\n defiling the air they floated in; and below them, a pitiful huddle of\n flesh no longer recognizable as human beings. They were not dead, those\n men and women, but they wanted to be. Their bodies had been impossibly\n joined, fused together into a single obscene, floundering mass of\n helpless protoplasm. The thin moaning that went up from them was more\n horrible than any cry of agony.\n\n\n \"The Invaders are here, citizens,\" the commentator was saying in a\n strangled voice. \"Stay off the streets. Hide yourselves. Stay off the\n streets....\" His voice droned on, but neither of them heard it.\nLorelei buried her head on his chest, clutching at him desperately.\n \"Peter!\" she said faintly. \"Why do they broadcast such things?\"", "before: tiny, myriad points of light, infinitely far away. They had not\n changed, and yet they were suddenly no longer friendly. They were cold\n and alien. It was I who had changed: something inside me was dead, like\n the machinery, and like Peter.\nIt was a kind of indefinable emptiness. I do not think it was what\n Peter called an emotion; and yet it had nothing to do with logic,\n either. It was just an emptiness—a void that could not be filled by\n eating or drinking.\nIt was not a longing. I had no desire that things should be otherwise\n than they were. I did not even wish that Peter were not dead, for\n reason had told me that he had to die. That was the end of it.\nBut the void was still there, unexplainable and impossible to ignore.", "He flashed on out, past the moon, past Mars, over the asteroid belt.\n The days merged into weeks, then months, and finally, far out,\nThe\n Avenger\ncurved into an orbit and held it. The great motors died, and\n the silence pressed in about him.\n\n\n Already he could feel the invisible rays burning resistlessly through\n his flesh as if it were water, shifting the cells of his body, working\n its slow, monstrous alchemy upon him. Peter waited until the changes\n were unmistakably evident in his skin and hair, and then he smashed all\n the mirrors in the ship.\n\n\n The embryos were pulsing with unnatural life, even in the suspended\n animation of their crystal cells. One by one he allowed them to\n mature, and after weeks or years destroyed the monstrosities that came\n from the incubators. Time went by, meaninglessly. He ate when he was\n hungry, slept when his driving purpose let him, and worked unceasingly,\n searching for the million-to-one chance.", "Relief washed over him, leaving him breathless. He was horrified,\n of course, but only abstractedly. For the moment he could only be\n glad that what he had seen was terrible reality rather than even more\n terrible illusion.\nINVADERS APPEAR IN BOSTON.\n\n 200 DEAD\n\n\n Then lines of type, and farther down:\n50 CHILDREN DISAPPEAR FROM\n\n PARIS MATERNITY CENTER\n\n\n He pressed the stud. The roll was full of them.\nMOON SHIP DESTROYED\n\n IN TRANSIT\n\n NO COMMUNICATION FROM\n\n ANTARCTICA IN 6 HOURS\n\n STRANGE FORCE DEFLECTS\n\n PLANES FROM SAHARA AREA\n\n WORLD POLICE MOBILIZING" ], [ "She was after him, clinging to his arms. \"No, Peter! Don't go in there!\nPeter!\n\" But he pushed her away again, woodenly, and stalked forward.\n\n\n There was a space in the middle of the room where machinery had been\n cleared away to make room for an incompleted setup. Peter walked down\n the narrow aisle, past bakelite-sheathed mechanisms and rows of animal\n cages, and paused just short of it.\n\n\n The two red beings were there, formless bodies hazy in midair, the\n distorted, hairless skulls in profile, staring at something outside his\n range of vision.\nPeter forced himself forward another step. Little Harry Kanin,\n Lorelei's assistant, was crumpled in a corner, half supported by the\n broad base of an X-ray chamber. His face was flaccid and bloated. His\n glazed eyes, impassive yet somehow pleading, stared at nothingness\n straight ahead of him.", "\"\nWill\nwe?\" he asked himself softly.\nIt was only two stories down the moving ramp to Lorelei Cooper's\n laboratory. Peter took it in fifteen seconds, running, and stumbled to\n a halt in front of the door marked \"Radiation.\" She had set her door\n mechanism to \"Etaoin Shrdlu,\" principally because he hated double-talk.\n He mouthed the syllables, had to repeat them because he put an accent\n in the wrong place, and squeezed through the door as soon as it opened\n far enough to admit him.\n\n\n Lorelei, beautiful in spite of dark-circled eyes and a smear of grease\n on her chin, looked up from a huge ledger at the end of the room. One\n blonde eyebrow arched in the quizzical expression he knew so well.\n\n\n \"What makes, Peter my love?\" she asked, and bent back to the ledger.\n Then she did a double-take, looked at his face intently, and said,\n \"Darling, what's wrong?\"", "Peter couldn't think of anything to say. Dr. Arnold's voice went on\n after a moment, musingly. \"We're burrowing into the earth, like worms.\n It didn't take us long to find out we couldn't kill them. They didn't\n even take any notice of our attempts to do so, except once. That was\n when a squadron of the Police caught about fifty of them together at\n one time, and attacked with flame guns and a new secret weapon. It\n didn't hurt them, but it annoyed them. It was the first time they'd\n been annoyed, I think. They blew up half a state, and it's still\n smoldering.\"\n\n\n \"And since then?\" Peter asked huskily.", "Her sobs gradually died away. She straightened slowly until he no\n longer had to support her, but all the vitality and resilience was gone\n out of her body. \"All right,\" she said in a lifeless voice. \"You'll\n come back, Peter.\"\n\n\n He turned away suddenly, not trusting himself to kiss her goodbye. A\n line from an old film kept echoing through his head. \"\nThey'll\ncome\n back—but not as\nboys\n!\"\n\n\n We'll come back, but not as men.\n\n\n We'll come back, but not as elephants.\n\n\n We'll come back, but not as octopi.\nHe was trembling violently. He ran the last few steps, stumbled into\n the airlock, and pressed the stud that would seal the door behind him.\nWe'll come back....\nHe heard the massive disk sink home, closing him\n off. Then he sank down on the floor of the airlock and put his head in\n shaking hands.", "\"I see,\" said Peter. And for the first time, he thought of the\nCitadel\n. No plan leaped full-born into his mind, but,\nmaybe\n, he\n thought,\nthere's a chance\n....\nIt wasn't very big, the thing that had been his shining dream. It lay\n there in its rough cradle, a globe of raw dura-steel not more than\n five hundred meters in diameter, where the\nCitadel\nwas to have been a\n thousand. It wouldn't house a hundred scientists, eagerly delving into\n the hinterland of research. The huge compartments weren't filled with\n the latest equipment for chemical and physical experiment; instead,\n there was compressed oxygen there, and concentrated food, enough to\n last a lifetime.\n\n\n It was a new world, all by itself; or else it was a tomb. And there was\n one other change, one that you couldn't see from the outside. The solid\n meters of lead in its outer skin, the shielding to keep out cosmic\n rays, were gone.", "\"I do not understand 'friend,'\" I said.\n\n\n I did understand \"gratitude,\" a little. It was a reciprocal\n arrangement: I did what Peter wished, so long as I did not actively\n want to do otherwise, because he had done things for me. Very well,\n then we must not go back. It was very simple, but I knew that he could\n not comprehend it.\n\n\n I tried to explain it to him, however. But he only stared at me, with\n an expression on his face that I had never seen there before, and that,\n somehow, I did not like to see. It was disquieting, and so I hastened\n to the end that I knew was inevitable.", "\"She was only suffering from ordinary shock,\" Arnold explained.\n \"Seeing that assistant of hers—it was enough to knock anybody out,\n especially a woman. But you stood actual mental contact with\nthem\nfor approximately five minutes. Yes, we know—you talked a lot. It's a\n miracle you're alive, and rational.\"\n\n\n \"But where is she?\" Peter complained. \"You still haven't explained why\n I haven't been able to see her.\"\n\n\n Arnold frowned. \"All right,\" he said. \"I guess you're strong enough to\n take it. She's underground, with the rest of the women and children,\n and a good two-thirds of the male population. That's where you'll go,\n as soon as you're well enough to be moved. We started digging in six\n months ago.\"\n\n\n \"But why?\" Peter whispered.\n\n\n Arnold's strong jaw knotted. \"We're hiding,\" he said. \"Everything else\n has failed.\"", "Silently, they counted stories as the two beings rose. Forty-five ...\n forty-six ... forty-seven ... forty-eight. Inevitably, they halted.\n Then they faded slowly. It was impossible to say whether they had gone\n through the solid wall, or simply melted away.\n\n\n The man and woman clung together, waiting.\n\n\n There was a thick, oppressive silence, full of small rustlings and\n other faint sounds that were no longer normal. Then, very near, a man\n screamed in a high, inhuman voice. The screamed dwindled into a throaty\n gurgle and died, leaving silence again.\n\n\n Peter's lips were cold with sweat. Tiny nerves in his face and arms\n were jumping convulsively. His stomach crawled. He thrust the girl away\n from him and started toward the inner room.\n\n\n \"Wait here,\" he mouthed.", "Peter's head began spinning just a little. Glass clinked from a metal\n stand near his head; the nurse bent over him with a glass half full of\n milky fluid. It tasted awful, but she made him drink it all.\n\n\n In a moment he began to relax, and the room got fuzzy again. Just\n before he drifted off, he said sleepily, \"You can't—fool me. It's been\nmore\n—than three—months.\"\n\n\n He was right. All the nurses, and even Dr. Arnold, were evasive, but he\n kept asking them why he couldn't see Lorelei, and finally he wormed it\n out of them. It had been nine and a half months, not three, and he'd\n been in a coma all that time. Lorelei, it seemed, had recovered much\n sooner.", "\"Since then, we've been burrowing. All the big cities.... It would be\n an impossible task if we tried to include all the thinly-populated\n areas, of course, but it doesn't matter. By the time we excavate\n enough to take care of a quarter of the earth's population, the other\n three-quarters will be dead, or worse.\"\n\n\n \"I wonder,\" Peter said shakily, \"if I am strong enough to take it.\"\n\n\n Arnold laughed harshly. \"You are. You've got to be. You're part of our\n last hope, you see.\"\n\n\n \"Our last hope?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. You're a scientist.\"", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nPeter Karson was dead. He had been dead for some time now, but\n the dark blood was still oozing from the crushed ruin of his face,\n trickling down into his sodden sleeve, and falling, drop by slow drop,\n from his fingertips. His head was tilted over the back of the chair at\n a queer, unnatural angle, so that the light made deep pools of shadow\n where his eyes had been.\nThere was no sound in the room except for the small splashing the\n blood made as it dropped into the sticky pool on the floor. The great\n banks of machinery around the walls were silent. I knew that they would\n never come to life again.\nI rose and walked over to the window. Outside, the stars were as", "\"Where am I?\" he said. He tried to turn his head, but a firm hand\n pressed him back into the sheets.\n\n\n \"You're in a hospital. Just lie quietly, please.\"\n\n\n He tried to get up again. \"Where's Lorelei?\"\n\n\n \"She's well, and you'll see her soon. Now lie quietly. You've been a\n very sick man.\"\n\n\n Peter sank back in the bed. The room was coming into focus. He looked\n around him slowly. He felt very weak, but perfectly lucid.\n\n\n \"Yes....\" he said. \"How long have I been here, Doctor?\"\n\n\n The man hesitated, looked at him intently. \"Three months,\" he said. He\n turned and gave low-voiced instructions to a nurse, and then went away.", "A man had just finished engraving the final stroke on its nameplate, to\n the left of the airlock—\nThe Avenger\n. He stepped away now, and joined\n the group a little distance away, silently waiting.\n\n\n Lorelei said, \"You can't do it. I won't let you! Peter—\"\n\n\n \"Darling,\" he began wearily.\n\n\n \"Don't throw your life away! Give us time—there must be another way.\"", "He said, \"Have you seen the news recently?\"\n\n\n She frowned. \"Why, no—Harry and I have been working for thirty-six\n hours straight. Haven't seen anybody, haven't heard anything. Why?\"\n\n\n \"You wouldn't believe me. Where's your newsbox?\"\n\n\n She came around the desk and put her hands on his shoulders. \"Pete,\n you know I haven't one—it bores me or upsets me, depending on whether\n there's trouble or not. What—\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, I forgot,\" he said. \"But you have a scanner?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, of course. But really, Pete—\"\n\n\n \"You'll understand in a minute. Turn it on, Lorelei.\"", "The Invaders ignored Peter, staring expressionlessly down at Kanin.\n In a moment Peter realized what they were doing to him. He stood,\n paralyzed with horror, and watched it happen.\n\n\n The little man's body was sagging, ever so slowly, as if he were\n relaxing tiredly. His torso was telescoping, bit by bit; his spread\n legs grew wider and more shapeless, his cheeks caved in and his skull\n grew gradually flatter.\n\n\n When it was over, the thing that had been Kanin was a limp, boneless\n puddle of flesh. Peter could not look at it.\n\n\n There was a scream in his throat that would not come out. He was beyond\n fear, beyond agony. He turned to the still-hovering monsters and said\n in a terrible voice, \"Why? Why?\"\n\n\n The nearest being turned slowly to regard him. Its lips did not move,\n but there was a tiny sound in Peter's brain, a thin, dry whispering.", "There were left only two blood-red, malignant monstrosities somehow\n defiling the air they floated in; and below them, a pitiful huddle of\n flesh no longer recognizable as human beings. They were not dead, those\n men and women, but they wanted to be. Their bodies had been impossibly\n joined, fused together into a single obscene, floundering mass of\n helpless protoplasm. The thin moaning that went up from them was more\n horrible than any cry of agony.\n\n\n \"The Invaders are here, citizens,\" the commentator was saying in a\n strangled voice. \"Stay off the streets. Hide yourselves. Stay off the\n streets....\" His voice droned on, but neither of them heard it.\nLorelei buried her head on his chest, clutching at him desperately.\n \"Peter!\" she said faintly. \"Why do they broadcast such things?\"", "\"There's no other way,\" Peter said. He gripped her arms tightly, as if\n he could compel her to understand by the sheer pressure of his fingers.\n \"Darling, listen to me. We've tried everything. We've gone underground,\n but that's only delaying the end.\nThey\nstill come down here, only not\n as many. The mortality rate is up, the suicide rate is up, the birth\n rate is down, in spite of anything we can do. You've seen the figures:\n we're riding a curve that ends in extinction fifty years from now.\n\n\n \"They'll live, and we'll die, because they're a superior race. We're a\n million years too far back even to understand what they are or where\n they came from. Besides them, we're apes. There's only one answer.\"\n\n\n She was crying now, silently, with great racking sobs that shook her\n slender body. But he went remorselessly on.", "For the first time in all my life I had found a problem that I could\n not solve. Strange, disturbing sensations stirred and whispered within\n me, nagging, gnawing. And suddenly—something moved on the skin of my\n cheek. I raised a hand to it, slowly.\nA tear was trickling down my cheek.\nYoung Peter Karson put the last black-print down and sighed with\n satisfaction. His dream was perfect; the\nCitadel\nwas complete, every\n minutest detail provided for—on paper. In two weeks they would be\n laying the core, and then the metal giant itself would begin to grow,\n glittering, pulsing with each increment of power, until at last it lay\n finished, a living thing.", "before: tiny, myriad points of light, infinitely far away. They had not\n changed, and yet they were suddenly no longer friendly. They were cold\n and alien. It was I who had changed: something inside me was dead, like\n the machinery, and like Peter.\nIt was a kind of indefinable emptiness. I do not think it was what\n Peter called an emotion; and yet it had nothing to do with logic,\n either. It was just an emptiness—a void that could not be filled by\n eating or drinking.\nIt was not a longing. I had no desire that things should be otherwise\n than they were. I did not even wish that Peter were not dead, for\n reason had told me that he had to die. That was the end of it.\nBut the void was still there, unexplainable and impossible to ignore.", "He flashed on out, past the moon, past Mars, over the asteroid belt.\n The days merged into weeks, then months, and finally, far out,\nThe\n Avenger\ncurved into an orbit and held it. The great motors died, and\n the silence pressed in about him.\n\n\n Already he could feel the invisible rays burning resistlessly through\n his flesh as if it were water, shifting the cells of his body, working\n its slow, monstrous alchemy upon him. Peter waited until the changes\n were unmistakably evident in his skin and hair, and then he smashed all\n the mirrors in the ship.\n\n\n The embryos were pulsing with unnatural life, even in the suspended\n animation of their crystal cells. One by one he allowed them to\n mature, and after weeks or years destroyed the monstrosities that came\n from the incubators. Time went by, meaninglessly. He ate when he was\n hungry, slept when his driving purpose let him, and worked unceasingly,\n searching for the million-to-one chance." ], [ "Her sobs gradually died away. She straightened slowly until he no\n longer had to support her, but all the vitality and resilience was gone\n out of her body. \"All right,\" she said in a lifeless voice. \"You'll\n come back, Peter.\"\n\n\n He turned away suddenly, not trusting himself to kiss her goodbye. A\n line from an old film kept echoing through his head. \"\nThey'll\ncome\n back—but not as\nboys\n!\"\n\n\n We'll come back, but not as men.\n\n\n We'll come back, but not as elephants.\n\n\n We'll come back, but not as octopi.\nHe was trembling violently. He ran the last few steps, stumbled into\n the airlock, and pressed the stud that would seal the door behind him.\nWe'll come back....\nHe heard the massive disk sink home, closing him\n off. Then he sank down on the floor of the airlock and put his head in\n shaking hands.", "\"You yourself have said it,\" I told him. \"I am a being of logic, just\n as the beings who have invaded your planet are. I do not comprehend the\n things which you call hate, fear, joy and love, as they do not. If I\n went to Earth, I would use your people to further my knowledge, just as\n the invaders do. I would have no reason to kill the invaders. They are\n more nearly kin to me than your people.\"\nPeter's eyes were dull, his limbs slumped. For a moment I thought that\n the shock had deranged his mind.\n\n\n His voice trembled when he said, \"But if I ask you to kill them, and\n not my people?\"\n\n\n \"To do so would be illogical.\"\n\n\n He waved his hands helplessly. \"Gratitude?\" he muttered.\n\n\n \"No, you don't understand that, either.\"\n\n\n Then he cried suddenly, \"But I am your friend, Robert!\"", "\"I see,\" said Peter. And for the first time, he thought of the\nCitadel\n. No plan leaped full-born into his mind, but,\nmaybe\n, he\n thought,\nthere's a chance\n....\nIt wasn't very big, the thing that had been his shining dream. It lay\n there in its rough cradle, a globe of raw dura-steel not more than\n five hundred meters in diameter, where the\nCitadel\nwas to have been a\n thousand. It wouldn't house a hundred scientists, eagerly delving into\n the hinterland of research. The huge compartments weren't filled with\n the latest equipment for chemical and physical experiment; instead,\n there was compressed oxygen there, and concentrated food, enough to\n last a lifetime.\n\n\n It was a new world, all by itself; or else it was a tomb. And there was\n one other change, one that you couldn't see from the outside. The solid\n meters of lead in its outer skin, the shielding to keep out cosmic\n rays, were gone.", "\"I do not understand 'friend,'\" I said.\n\n\n I did understand \"gratitude,\" a little. It was a reciprocal\n arrangement: I did what Peter wished, so long as I did not actively\n want to do otherwise, because he had done things for me. Very well,\n then we must not go back. It was very simple, but I knew that he could\n not comprehend it.\n\n\n I tried to explain it to him, however. But he only stared at me, with\n an expression on his face that I had never seen there before, and that,\n somehow, I did not like to see. It was disquieting, and so I hastened\n to the end that I knew was inevitable.", "He looked at me, a little oddly, almost as if he had some instinctive\n knowledge of what was to come. But he went on swiftly, \"On Earth we\n had a saying: 'Fight fire with fire.' That is the way it will be with\n you. You are completely, coldly logical, just as\nthey\nare. You can\n understand them, and so you can conquer them.\"\n\n\n I said, \"That is the reason why we will not go back to Earth.\"\n\n\n He stared at me, his jaw slack, his hands trembling. \"What—what did\n you say?\"\n\n\n I repeated it patiently.\n\n\n \"But why?\" he cried, sinking down into the chair before me. In an\n instant all the joy had gone out of him. I could not understand his\n suffering, but I could recognize it.", "He rose and strode nervously over to the window. I watched him as he\n stood there, outlined against the blazing galaxies. He had changed but\n little in the years that I had known him. His lank gray hair straggled\n over his sunken eyes; his cheeks were blobbed with excresences of\n flesh; one corner of his mouth was drawn up in a perpetual grin. He had\n a tiny sixth finger on his left hand.\n\n\n He turned again, and I saw the old scar on his cheek where I had once\n accidentally drawn one of my talons across his face.\n\n\n \"And now,\" he said softly, \"we will go home. I've waited so\n long—keeping the control chamber and the engine room locked away from\n you, not telling you, even, about Earth until now—because I had to be\n sure. But now, the waiting is over.\n\n\n \"They're still there, I'm sure of it—the people, and the Invaders. You\n can kill the Invaders, Robert.\"", "He stared sometimes through changed eyes at the tiny blue star that was\n Earth, wondering if the race he had left behind still burrowed in its\n worm-tunnels, digging deeper and deeper away from the sunlight. But\n after a time he ceased even to wonder.\n\n\n And one changeling-child he did not destroy. He fed knowledge to its\n eager brain, and watched it through the swift years, with a dawning\n hope....\nPeter closed the diary. \"The rest you know, Robert,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I told him. \"I was that child. I am the millionth mutation you\n were searching for.\"\n\n\n His eyes glowed suddenly in their misshapen sockets. \"You are. Your\n brain is as superior to mine as mine is to an anthropoid's. You solve\n instinctively problems that would take our mechanical computers hours\n of work. You are a superman.\"\n\n\n \"I am without your imperfections,\" I said, flexing my arms.", "Then there would remain only the task of blasting the great, shining\n ship out into the carefully-calculated orbit that would be its home.\n In his mind's eye he could see it, slowly wheeling, like a second\n satellite, about the Earth; endlessly gathering knowledge into its\n insatiable mechanisms. He could see, too, the level on level of\n laboratories and storerooms that filled its interlocking segments; the\n meteor deflectors, the air renewal system, the mighty engines at the\n stern—all the children of his brain.\n\n\n Out there, away from the muffling, distorting, damnable blanket of\n atmosphere, away from Earth's inexorable gravitational pull, would be\n a laboratory such as man had never seen. The ship would be filled with\n the sounds of busy men and women, wresting secrets from the reluctant\n ether. A new chemistry, a new physics; perhaps even a new biochemistry.", "A man had just finished engraving the final stroke on its nameplate, to\n the left of the airlock—\nThe Avenger\n. He stepped away now, and joined\n the group a little distance away, silently waiting.\n\n\n Lorelei said, \"You can't do it. I won't let you! Peter—\"\n\n\n \"Darling,\" he began wearily.\n\n\n \"Don't throw your life away! Give us time—there must be another way.\"", "\"There's no other way,\" Peter said. He gripped her arms tightly, as if\n he could compel her to understand by the sheer pressure of his fingers.\n \"Darling, listen to me. We've tried everything. We've gone underground,\n but that's only delaying the end.\nThey\nstill come down here, only not\n as many. The mortality rate is up, the suicide rate is up, the birth\n rate is down, in spite of anything we can do. You've seen the figures:\n we're riding a curve that ends in extinction fifty years from now.\n\n\n \"They'll live, and we'll die, because they're a superior race. We're a\n million years too far back even to understand what they are or where\n they came from. Besides them, we're apes. There's only one answer.\"\n\n\n She was crying now, silently, with great racking sobs that shook her\n slender body. But he went remorselessly on.", "\"Since the Invaders first appeared in Wood River, Oregon, 24 hours\n ago, they have not once acknowledged our attempts to communicate, or\n in any way taken notice of our existence as reasoning beings. They\n have treated us precisely as we, in less enlightened days, might\n have treated a newly-discovered race of lower animals. They have not\n attacked our centers of government, nor immobilized our communications,\n nor laid siege to our defenses. But in instance after instance, they\n have done as they would with us. They have examined us, dissected us,\n driven us mad, killed us with no discernable provocation; and this is\n more intolerable than any normal invasion.\n\n\n \"I have no fear that the people of Earth will fail to meet this\n challenge, for there is no alternative. Not only our individual lives\n are threatened, but our existence as a race. We must, and will, destroy\n the Invaders!\"\n\n\n Peter sank back in his chair, the full shock of it striking him for the\n first time.", "He flashed on out, past the moon, past Mars, over the asteroid belt.\n The days merged into weeks, then months, and finally, far out,\nThe\n Avenger\ncurved into an orbit and held it. The great motors died, and\n the silence pressed in about him.\n\n\n Already he could feel the invisible rays burning resistlessly through\n his flesh as if it were water, shifting the cells of his body, working\n its slow, monstrous alchemy upon him. Peter waited until the changes\n were unmistakably evident in his skin and hair, and then he smashed all\n the mirrors in the ship.\n\n\n The embryos were pulsing with unnatural life, even in the suspended\n animation of their crystal cells. One by one he allowed them to\n mature, and after weeks or years destroyed the monstrosities that came\n from the incubators. Time went by, meaninglessly. He ate when he was\n hungry, slept when his driving purpose let him, and worked unceasingly,\n searching for the million-to-one chance.", "She was after him, clinging to his arms. \"No, Peter! Don't go in there!\nPeter!\n\" But he pushed her away again, woodenly, and stalked forward.\n\n\n There was a space in the middle of the room where machinery had been\n cleared away to make room for an incompleted setup. Peter walked down\n the narrow aisle, past bakelite-sheathed mechanisms and rows of animal\n cages, and paused just short of it.\n\n\n The two red beings were there, formless bodies hazy in midair, the\n distorted, hairless skulls in profile, staring at something outside his\n range of vision.\nPeter forced himself forward another step. Little Harry Kanin,\n Lorelei's assistant, was crumpled in a corner, half supported by the\n broad base of an X-ray chamber. His face was flaccid and bloated. His\n glazed eyes, impassive yet somehow pleading, stared at nothingness\n straight ahead of him.", "Peter couldn't think of anything to say. Dr. Arnold's voice went on\n after a moment, musingly. \"We're burrowing into the earth, like worms.\n It didn't take us long to find out we couldn't kill them. They didn't\n even take any notice of our attempts to do so, except once. That was\n when a squadron of the Police caught about fifty of them together at\n one time, and attacked with flame guns and a new secret weapon. It\n didn't hurt them, but it annoyed them. It was the first time they'd\n been annoyed, I think. They blew up half a state, and it's still\n smoldering.\"\n\n\n \"And since then?\" Peter asked huskily.", "The Invaders ignored Peter, staring expressionlessly down at Kanin.\n In a moment Peter realized what they were doing to him. He stood,\n paralyzed with horror, and watched it happen.\n\n\n The little man's body was sagging, ever so slowly, as if he were\n relaxing tiredly. His torso was telescoping, bit by bit; his spread\n legs grew wider and more shapeless, his cheeks caved in and his skull\n grew gradually flatter.\n\n\n When it was over, the thing that had been Kanin was a limp, boneless\n puddle of flesh. Peter could not look at it.\n\n\n There was a scream in his throat that would not come out. He was beyond\n fear, beyond agony. He turned to the still-hovering monsters and said\n in a terrible voice, \"Why? Why?\"\n\n\n The nearest being turned slowly to regard him. Its lips did not move,\n but there was a tiny sound in Peter's brain, a thin, dry whispering.", "before: tiny, myriad points of light, infinitely far away. They had not\n changed, and yet they were suddenly no longer friendly. They were cold\n and alien. It was I who had changed: something inside me was dead, like\n the machinery, and like Peter.\nIt was a kind of indefinable emptiness. I do not think it was what\n Peter called an emotion; and yet it had nothing to do with logic,\n either. It was just an emptiness—a void that could not be filled by\n eating or drinking.\nIt was not a longing. I had no desire that things should be otherwise\n than they were. I did not even wish that Peter were not dead, for\n reason had told me that he had to die. That was the end of it.\nBut the void was still there, unexplainable and impossible to ignore.", "\"Since then, we've been burrowing. All the big cities.... It would be\n an impossible task if we tried to include all the thinly-populated\n areas, of course, but it doesn't matter. By the time we excavate\n enough to take care of a quarter of the earth's population, the other\n three-quarters will be dead, or worse.\"\n\n\n \"I wonder,\" Peter said shakily, \"if I am strong enough to take it.\"\n\n\n Arnold laughed harshly. \"You are. You've got to be. You're part of our\n last hope, you see.\"\n\n\n \"Our last hope?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. You're a scientist.\"", "\"\nWill\nwe?\" he asked himself softly.\nIt was only two stories down the moving ramp to Lorelei Cooper's\n laboratory. Peter took it in fifteen seconds, running, and stumbled to\n a halt in front of the door marked \"Radiation.\" She had set her door\n mechanism to \"Etaoin Shrdlu,\" principally because he hated double-talk.\n He mouthed the syllables, had to repeat them because he put an accent\n in the wrong place, and squeezed through the door as soon as it opened\n far enough to admit him.\n\n\n Lorelei, beautiful in spite of dark-circled eyes and a smear of grease\n on her chin, looked up from a huge ledger at the end of the room. One\n blonde eyebrow arched in the quizzical expression he knew so well.\n\n\n \"What makes, Peter my love?\" she asked, and bent back to the ledger.\n Then she did a double-take, looked at his face intently, and said,\n \"Darling, what's wrong?\"", "After a while he roused himself, closed the inner door of the lock\n behind him, and walked down the long corridor into the control chamber.\n The shining banks of keys were there, waiting for his touch; he slumped\n down before them and listlessly closed the contact of the visiplate.\n\n\n He swung its field slowly, scanning for the last time the bare walls\n of the underground chamber, making sure that all the spectators had\n retired out of the way of the blast. Then his clawed fingers poised\n over the keys, hovered a moment, and thrust down.\n\n\n Acceleration pressed him deep into his chair. In the visiplate, the\n heavy doors that closed the tunnel above him flashed back, one by one.\n The energy-charged screen flickered off to let him pass, and closed\n smoothly behind him. The last doors, cleverly camouflaged, slipped back\n into place and then dwindled in the distance. It was done.", "\"She was only suffering from ordinary shock,\" Arnold explained.\n \"Seeing that assistant of hers—it was enough to knock anybody out,\n especially a woman. But you stood actual mental contact with\nthem\nfor approximately five minutes. Yes, we know—you talked a lot. It's a\n miracle you're alive, and rational.\"\n\n\n \"But where is she?\" Peter complained. \"You still haven't explained why\n I haven't been able to see her.\"\n\n\n Arnold frowned. \"All right,\" he said. \"I guess you're strong enough to\n take it. She's underground, with the rest of the women and children,\n and a good two-thirds of the male population. That's where you'll go,\n as soon as you're well enough to be moved. We started digging in six\n months ago.\"\n\n\n \"But why?\" Peter whispered.\n\n\n Arnold's strong jaw knotted. \"We're hiding,\" he said. \"Everything else\n has failed.\"" ], [ "A man had just finished engraving the final stroke on its nameplate, to\n the left of the airlock—\nThe Avenger\n. He stepped away now, and joined\n the group a little distance away, silently waiting.\n\n\n Lorelei said, \"You can't do it. I won't let you! Peter—\"\n\n\n \"Darling,\" he began wearily.\n\n\n \"Don't throw your life away! Give us time—there must be another way.\"", "\"\nWill\nwe?\" he asked himself softly.\nIt was only two stories down the moving ramp to Lorelei Cooper's\n laboratory. Peter took it in fifteen seconds, running, and stumbled to\n a halt in front of the door marked \"Radiation.\" She had set her door\n mechanism to \"Etaoin Shrdlu,\" principally because he hated double-talk.\n He mouthed the syllables, had to repeat them because he put an accent\n in the wrong place, and squeezed through the door as soon as it opened\n far enough to admit him.\n\n\n Lorelei, beautiful in spite of dark-circled eyes and a smear of grease\n on her chin, looked up from a huge ledger at the end of the room. One\n blonde eyebrow arched in the quizzical expression he knew so well.\n\n\n \"What makes, Peter my love?\" she asked, and bent back to the ledger.\n Then she did a double-take, looked at his face intently, and said,\n \"Darling, what's wrong?\"", "Her sobs gradually died away. She straightened slowly until he no\n longer had to support her, but all the vitality and resilience was gone\n out of her body. \"All right,\" she said in a lifeless voice. \"You'll\n come back, Peter.\"\n\n\n He turned away suddenly, not trusting himself to kiss her goodbye. A\n line from an old film kept echoing through his head. \"\nThey'll\ncome\n back—but not as\nboys\n!\"\n\n\n We'll come back, but not as men.\n\n\n We'll come back, but not as elephants.\n\n\n We'll come back, but not as octopi.\nHe was trembling violently. He ran the last few steps, stumbled into\n the airlock, and pressed the stud that would seal the door behind him.\nWe'll come back....\nHe heard the massive disk sink home, closing him\n off. Then he sank down on the floor of the airlock and put his head in\n shaking hands.", "She was after him, clinging to his arms. \"No, Peter! Don't go in there!\nPeter!\n\" But he pushed her away again, woodenly, and stalked forward.\n\n\n There was a space in the middle of the room where machinery had been\n cleared away to make room for an incompleted setup. Peter walked down\n the narrow aisle, past bakelite-sheathed mechanisms and rows of animal\n cages, and paused just short of it.\n\n\n The two red beings were there, formless bodies hazy in midair, the\n distorted, hairless skulls in profile, staring at something outside his\n range of vision.\nPeter forced himself forward another step. Little Harry Kanin,\n Lorelei's assistant, was crumpled in a corner, half supported by the\n broad base of an X-ray chamber. His face was flaccid and bloated. His\n glazed eyes, impassive yet somehow pleading, stared at nothingness\n straight ahead of him.", "\"I do not understand 'friend,'\" I said.\n\n\n I did understand \"gratitude,\" a little. It was a reciprocal\n arrangement: I did what Peter wished, so long as I did not actively\n want to do otherwise, because he had done things for me. Very well,\n then we must not go back. It was very simple, but I knew that he could\n not comprehend it.\n\n\n I tried to explain it to him, however. But he only stared at me, with\n an expression on his face that I had never seen there before, and that,\n somehow, I did not like to see. It was disquieting, and so I hastened\n to the end that I knew was inevitable.", "\"I see,\" said Peter. And for the first time, he thought of the\nCitadel\n. No plan leaped full-born into his mind, but,\nmaybe\n, he\n thought,\nthere's a chance\n....\nIt wasn't very big, the thing that had been his shining dream. It lay\n there in its rough cradle, a globe of raw dura-steel not more than\n five hundred meters in diameter, where the\nCitadel\nwas to have been a\n thousand. It wouldn't house a hundred scientists, eagerly delving into\n the hinterland of research. The huge compartments weren't filled with\n the latest equipment for chemical and physical experiment; instead,\n there was compressed oxygen there, and concentrated food, enough to\n last a lifetime.\n\n\n It was a new world, all by itself; or else it was a tomb. And there was\n one other change, one that you couldn't see from the outside. The solid\n meters of lead in its outer skin, the shielding to keep out cosmic\n rays, were gone.", "Peter's head began spinning just a little. Glass clinked from a metal\n stand near his head; the nurse bent over him with a glass half full of\n milky fluid. It tasted awful, but she made him drink it all.\n\n\n In a moment he began to relax, and the room got fuzzy again. Just\n before he drifted off, he said sleepily, \"You can't—fool me. It's been\nmore\n—than three—months.\"\n\n\n He was right. All the nurses, and even Dr. Arnold, were evasive, but he\n kept asking them why he couldn't see Lorelei, and finally he wormed it\n out of them. It had been nine and a half months, not three, and he'd\n been in a coma all that time. Lorelei, it seemed, had recovered much\n sooner.", "He heard a faint sound behind him, and whirled. It was the first\n time he had realized that Lorelei had followed him. She stood there,\n swaying, very pale, looking at the red Invaders. Her eyes swiveled\n slowly....\n\n\n \"\nOpreniktoulestritifenrelngetnaktwiltoctpre.\n\"\n\n\n His voice was hoarse. \"Don't look! Don't—Go back!\" The horrible,\n mindless noise in his throat was almost beyond his power to repress.\n His insides writhed to thrust it out.\n\n\n She didn't see him. Her eyes glazed, and she dropped limply to the\n floor.", "He said, \"Have you seen the news recently?\"\n\n\n She frowned. \"Why, no—Harry and I have been working for thirty-six\n hours straight. Haven't seen anybody, haven't heard anything. Why?\"\n\n\n \"You wouldn't believe me. Where's your newsbox?\"\n\n\n She came around the desk and put her hands on his shoulders. \"Pete,\n you know I haven't one—it bores me or upsets me, depending on whether\n there's trouble or not. What—\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, I forgot,\" he said. \"But you have a scanner?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, of course. But really, Pete—\"\n\n\n \"You'll understand in a minute. Turn it on, Lorelei.\"", "\"Where am I?\" he said. He tried to turn his head, but a firm hand\n pressed him back into the sheets.\n\n\n \"You're in a hospital. Just lie quietly, please.\"\n\n\n He tried to get up again. \"Where's Lorelei?\"\n\n\n \"She's well, and you'll see her soon. Now lie quietly. You've been a\n very sick man.\"\n\n\n Peter sank back in the bed. The room was coming into focus. He looked\n around him slowly. He felt very weak, but perfectly lucid.\n\n\n \"Yes....\" he said. \"How long have I been here, Doctor?\"\n\n\n The man hesitated, looked at him intently. \"Three months,\" he said. He\n turned and gave low-voiced instructions to a nurse, and then went away.", "\"She was only suffering from ordinary shock,\" Arnold explained.\n \"Seeing that assistant of hers—it was enough to knock anybody out,\n especially a woman. But you stood actual mental contact with\nthem\nfor approximately five minutes. Yes, we know—you talked a lot. It's a\n miracle you're alive, and rational.\"\n\n\n \"But where is she?\" Peter complained. \"You still haven't explained why\n I haven't been able to see her.\"\n\n\n Arnold frowned. \"All right,\" he said. \"I guess you're strong enough to\n take it. She's underground, with the rest of the women and children,\n and a good two-thirds of the male population. That's where you'll go,\n as soon as you're well enough to be moved. We started digging in six\n months ago.\"\n\n\n \"But why?\" Peter whispered.\n\n\n Arnold's strong jaw knotted. \"We're hiding,\" he said. \"Everything else\n has failed.\"", "He flashed on out, past the moon, past Mars, over the asteroid belt.\n The days merged into weeks, then months, and finally, far out,\nThe\n Avenger\ncurved into an orbit and held it. The great motors died, and\n the silence pressed in about him.\n\n\n Already he could feel the invisible rays burning resistlessly through\n his flesh as if it were water, shifting the cells of his body, working\n its slow, monstrous alchemy upon him. Peter waited until the changes\n were unmistakably evident in his skin and hair, and then he smashed all\n the mirrors in the ship.\n\n\n The embryos were pulsing with unnatural life, even in the suspended\n animation of their crystal cells. One by one he allowed them to\n mature, and after weeks or years destroyed the monstrosities that came\n from the incubators. Time went by, meaninglessly. He ate when he was\n hungry, slept when his driving purpose let him, and worked unceasingly,\n searching for the million-to-one chance.", "\"Out there, in space, the cosmics change unshielded life. They\n make tentacles out of arms; or scales out of hair; or twelve toes,\n or a dozen ears—or a better brain. Out of those millions of\n possible mutations, there's one that will save the human race. We\n can't fight\nthem\n, but a superman could. That's our only chance.\n Lorelei—darling—don't you see that?\"\n\n\n She choked, \"But why can't you take me along?\"\n\n\n He stared unseeingly past her wet, upturned face. \"You know why,\" he\n said bitterly. \"Those rays are strong. They don't only work on embryos;\n they change adult life forms, too. I have one chance in seven of\n staying alive. You'd have one chance in a million of staying beautiful.\n I couldn't stand that. I'd kill myself, and then humanity would die,\n too. You'd be their murderer.\"", "There were left only two blood-red, malignant monstrosities somehow\n defiling the air they floated in; and below them, a pitiful huddle of\n flesh no longer recognizable as human beings. They were not dead, those\n men and women, but they wanted to be. Their bodies had been impossibly\n joined, fused together into a single obscene, floundering mass of\n helpless protoplasm. The thin moaning that went up from them was more\n horrible than any cry of agony.\n\n\n \"The Invaders are here, citizens,\" the commentator was saying in a\n strangled voice. \"Stay off the streets. Hide yourselves. Stay off the\n streets....\" His voice droned on, but neither of them heard it.\nLorelei buried her head on his chest, clutching at him desperately.\n \"Peter!\" she said faintly. \"Why do they broadcast such things?\"", "\"There's no other way,\" Peter said. He gripped her arms tightly, as if\n he could compel her to understand by the sheer pressure of his fingers.\n \"Darling, listen to me. We've tried everything. We've gone underground,\n but that's only delaying the end.\nThey\nstill come down here, only not\n as many. The mortality rate is up, the suicide rate is up, the birth\n rate is down, in spite of anything we can do. You've seen the figures:\n we're riding a curve that ends in extinction fifty years from now.\n\n\n \"They'll live, and we'll die, because they're a superior race. We're a\n million years too far back even to understand what they are or where\n they came from. Besides them, we're apes. There's only one answer.\"\n\n\n She was crying now, silently, with great racking sobs that shook her\n slender body. But he went remorselessly on.", "\"You yourself have said it,\" I told him. \"I am a being of logic, just\n as the beings who have invaded your planet are. I do not comprehend the\n things which you call hate, fear, joy and love, as they do not. If I\n went to Earth, I would use your people to further my knowledge, just as\n the invaders do. I would have no reason to kill the invaders. They are\n more nearly kin to me than your people.\"\nPeter's eyes were dull, his limbs slumped. For a moment I thought that\n the shock had deranged his mind.\n\n\n His voice trembled when he said, \"But if I ask you to kill them, and\n not my people?\"\n\n\n \"To do so would be illogical.\"\n\n\n He waved his hands helplessly. \"Gratitude?\" he muttered.\n\n\n \"No, you don't understand that, either.\"\n\n\n Then he cried suddenly, \"But I am your friend, Robert!\"", "He looked at me, a little oddly, almost as if he had some instinctive\n knowledge of what was to come. But he went on swiftly, \"On Earth we\n had a saying: 'Fight fire with fire.' That is the way it will be with\n you. You are completely, coldly logical, just as\nthey\nare. You can\n understand them, and so you can conquer them.\"\n\n\n I said, \"That is the reason why we will not go back to Earth.\"\n\n\n He stared at me, his jaw slack, his hands trembling. \"What—what did\n you say?\"\n\n\n I repeated it patiently.\n\n\n \"But why?\" he cried, sinking down into the chair before me. In an\n instant all the joy had gone out of him. I could not understand his\n suffering, but I could recognize it.", "The scream came out then. Before he knew, even, that he could hold\n it back no longer, his mouth was wide open, his muscles tensed, his\n fingernails slicing his palms. It echoed with unbelievable volume in\n the room. It was a scream to split eardrums; a scream to wake the dead.\nSomebody said, \"Doctor!\"\n\n\n He wanted to say, \"Yes, get a doctor. Lorelei—\" but his mouth only\n twitched feebly. He couldn't seem to get it to work properly.\n\n\n He tried again. \"Doctor.\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\" A gentle, masculine voice.\n\n\n He opened his eyes with an effort. There was a blurred face before him;\n in a moment it grew clearer. The strong, clean-shaven chin contrasted\n oddly with the haggard circles under the eyes. There was a clean,\n starched odor.", "Peter couldn't think of anything to say. Dr. Arnold's voice went on\n after a moment, musingly. \"We're burrowing into the earth, like worms.\n It didn't take us long to find out we couldn't kill them. They didn't\n even take any notice of our attempts to do so, except once. That was\n when a squadron of the Police caught about fifty of them together at\n one time, and attacked with flame guns and a new secret weapon. It\n didn't hurt them, but it annoyed them. It was the first time they'd\n been annoyed, I think. They blew up half a state, and it's still\n smoldering.\"\n\n\n \"And since then?\" Peter asked huskily.", "Silently, they counted stories as the two beings rose. Forty-five ...\n forty-six ... forty-seven ... forty-eight. Inevitably, they halted.\n Then they faded slowly. It was impossible to say whether they had gone\n through the solid wall, or simply melted away.\n\n\n The man and woman clung together, waiting.\n\n\n There was a thick, oppressive silence, full of small rustlings and\n other faint sounds that were no longer normal. Then, very near, a man\n screamed in a high, inhuman voice. The screamed dwindled into a throaty\n gurgle and died, leaving silence again.\n\n\n Peter's lips were cold with sweat. Tiny nerves in his face and arms\n were jumping convulsively. His stomach crawled. He thrust the girl away\n from him and started toward the inner room.\n\n\n \"Wait here,\" he mouthed." ], [ "\"I see,\" said Peter. And for the first time, he thought of the\nCitadel\n. No plan leaped full-born into his mind, but,\nmaybe\n, he\n thought,\nthere's a chance\n....\nIt wasn't very big, the thing that had been his shining dream. It lay\n there in its rough cradle, a globe of raw dura-steel not more than\n five hundred meters in diameter, where the\nCitadel\nwas to have been a\n thousand. It wouldn't house a hundred scientists, eagerly delving into\n the hinterland of research. The huge compartments weren't filled with\n the latest equipment for chemical and physical experiment; instead,\n there was compressed oxygen there, and concentrated food, enough to\n last a lifetime.\n\n\n It was a new world, all by itself; or else it was a tomb. And there was\n one other change, one that you couldn't see from the outside. The solid\n meters of lead in its outer skin, the shielding to keep out cosmic\n rays, were gone.", "She was after him, clinging to his arms. \"No, Peter! Don't go in there!\nPeter!\n\" But he pushed her away again, woodenly, and stalked forward.\n\n\n There was a space in the middle of the room where machinery had been\n cleared away to make room for an incompleted setup. Peter walked down\n the narrow aisle, past bakelite-sheathed mechanisms and rows of animal\n cages, and paused just short of it.\n\n\n The two red beings were there, formless bodies hazy in midair, the\n distorted, hairless skulls in profile, staring at something outside his\n range of vision.\nPeter forced himself forward another step. Little Harry Kanin,\n Lorelei's assistant, was crumpled in a corner, half supported by the\n broad base of an X-ray chamber. His face was flaccid and bloated. His\n glazed eyes, impassive yet somehow pleading, stared at nothingness\n straight ahead of him.", "Her sobs gradually died away. She straightened slowly until he no\n longer had to support her, but all the vitality and resilience was gone\n out of her body. \"All right,\" she said in a lifeless voice. \"You'll\n come back, Peter.\"\n\n\n He turned away suddenly, not trusting himself to kiss her goodbye. A\n line from an old film kept echoing through his head. \"\nThey'll\ncome\n back—but not as\nboys\n!\"\n\n\n We'll come back, but not as men.\n\n\n We'll come back, but not as elephants.\n\n\n We'll come back, but not as octopi.\nHe was trembling violently. He ran the last few steps, stumbled into\n the airlock, and pressed the stud that would seal the door behind him.\nWe'll come back....\nHe heard the massive disk sink home, closing him\n off. Then he sank down on the floor of the airlock and put his head in\n shaking hands.", "He flashed on out, past the moon, past Mars, over the asteroid belt.\n The days merged into weeks, then months, and finally, far out,\nThe\n Avenger\ncurved into an orbit and held it. The great motors died, and\n the silence pressed in about him.\n\n\n Already he could feel the invisible rays burning resistlessly through\n his flesh as if it were water, shifting the cells of his body, working\n its slow, monstrous alchemy upon him. Peter waited until the changes\n were unmistakably evident in his skin and hair, and then he smashed all\n the mirrors in the ship.\n\n\n The embryos were pulsing with unnatural life, even in the suspended\n animation of their crystal cells. One by one he allowed them to\n mature, and after weeks or years destroyed the monstrosities that came\n from the incubators. Time went by, meaninglessly. He ate when he was\n hungry, slept when his driving purpose let him, and worked unceasingly,\n searching for the million-to-one chance.", "A man had just finished engraving the final stroke on its nameplate, to\n the left of the airlock—\nThe Avenger\n. He stepped away now, and joined\n the group a little distance away, silently waiting.\n\n\n Lorelei said, \"You can't do it. I won't let you! Peter—\"\n\n\n \"Darling,\" he began wearily.\n\n\n \"Don't throw your life away! Give us time—there must be another way.\"", "\"I do not understand 'friend,'\" I said.\n\n\n I did understand \"gratitude,\" a little. It was a reciprocal\n arrangement: I did what Peter wished, so long as I did not actively\n want to do otherwise, because he had done things for me. Very well,\n then we must not go back. It was very simple, but I knew that he could\n not comprehend it.\n\n\n I tried to explain it to him, however. But he only stared at me, with\n an expression on his face that I had never seen there before, and that,\n somehow, I did not like to see. It was disquieting, and so I hastened\n to the end that I knew was inevitable.", "The Invaders ignored Peter, staring expressionlessly down at Kanin.\n In a moment Peter realized what they were doing to him. He stood,\n paralyzed with horror, and watched it happen.\n\n\n The little man's body was sagging, ever so slowly, as if he were\n relaxing tiredly. His torso was telescoping, bit by bit; his spread\n legs grew wider and more shapeless, his cheeks caved in and his skull\n grew gradually flatter.\n\n\n When it was over, the thing that had been Kanin was a limp, boneless\n puddle of flesh. Peter could not look at it.\n\n\n There was a scream in his throat that would not come out. He was beyond\n fear, beyond agony. He turned to the still-hovering monsters and said\n in a terrible voice, \"Why? Why?\"\n\n\n The nearest being turned slowly to regard him. Its lips did not move,\n but there was a tiny sound in Peter's brain, a thin, dry whispering.", "After a while he roused himself, closed the inner door of the lock\n behind him, and walked down the long corridor into the control chamber.\n The shining banks of keys were there, waiting for his touch; he slumped\n down before them and listlessly closed the contact of the visiplate.\n\n\n He swung its field slowly, scanning for the last time the bare walls\n of the underground chamber, making sure that all the spectators had\n retired out of the way of the blast. Then his clawed fingers poised\n over the keys, hovered a moment, and thrust down.\n\n\n Acceleration pressed him deep into his chair. In the visiplate, the\n heavy doors that closed the tunnel above him flashed back, one by one.\n The energy-charged screen flickered off to let him pass, and closed\n smoothly behind him. The last doors, cleverly camouflaged, slipped back\n into place and then dwindled in the distance. It was done.", "\"She was only suffering from ordinary shock,\" Arnold explained.\n \"Seeing that assistant of hers—it was enough to knock anybody out,\n especially a woman. But you stood actual mental contact with\nthem\nfor approximately five minutes. Yes, we know—you talked a lot. It's a\n miracle you're alive, and rational.\"\n\n\n \"But where is she?\" Peter complained. \"You still haven't explained why\n I haven't been able to see her.\"\n\n\n Arnold frowned. \"All right,\" he said. \"I guess you're strong enough to\n take it. She's underground, with the rest of the women and children,\n and a good two-thirds of the male population. That's where you'll go,\n as soon as you're well enough to be moved. We started digging in six\n months ago.\"\n\n\n \"But why?\" Peter whispered.\n\n\n Arnold's strong jaw knotted. \"We're hiding,\" he said. \"Everything else\n has failed.\"", "before: tiny, myriad points of light, infinitely far away. They had not\n changed, and yet they were suddenly no longer friendly. They were cold\n and alien. It was I who had changed: something inside me was dead, like\n the machinery, and like Peter.\nIt was a kind of indefinable emptiness. I do not think it was what\n Peter called an emotion; and yet it had nothing to do with logic,\n either. It was just an emptiness—a void that could not be filled by\n eating or drinking.\nIt was not a longing. I had no desire that things should be otherwise\n than they were. I did not even wish that Peter were not dead, for\n reason had told me that he had to die. That was the end of it.\nBut the void was still there, unexplainable and impossible to ignore.", "Then there would remain only the task of blasting the great, shining\n ship out into the carefully-calculated orbit that would be its home.\n In his mind's eye he could see it, slowly wheeling, like a second\n satellite, about the Earth; endlessly gathering knowledge into its\n insatiable mechanisms. He could see, too, the level on level of\n laboratories and storerooms that filled its interlocking segments; the\n meteor deflectors, the air renewal system, the mighty engines at the\n stern—all the children of his brain.\n\n\n Out there, away from the muffling, distorting, damnable blanket of\n atmosphere, away from Earth's inexorable gravitational pull, would be\n a laboratory such as man had never seen. The ship would be filled with\n the sounds of busy men and women, wresting secrets from the reluctant\n ether. A new chemistry, a new physics; perhaps even a new biochemistry.", "\"\nWill\nwe?\" he asked himself softly.\nIt was only two stories down the moving ramp to Lorelei Cooper's\n laboratory. Peter took it in fifteen seconds, running, and stumbled to\n a halt in front of the door marked \"Radiation.\" She had set her door\n mechanism to \"Etaoin Shrdlu,\" principally because he hated double-talk.\n He mouthed the syllables, had to repeat them because he put an accent\n in the wrong place, and squeezed through the door as soon as it opened\n far enough to admit him.\n\n\n Lorelei, beautiful in spite of dark-circled eyes and a smear of grease\n on her chin, looked up from a huge ledger at the end of the room. One\n blonde eyebrow arched in the quizzical expression he knew so well.\n\n\n \"What makes, Peter my love?\" she asked, and bent back to the ledger.\n Then she did a double-take, looked at his face intently, and said,\n \"Darling, what's wrong?\"", "Silently, they counted stories as the two beings rose. Forty-five ...\n forty-six ... forty-seven ... forty-eight. Inevitably, they halted.\n Then they faded slowly. It was impossible to say whether they had gone\n through the solid wall, or simply melted away.\n\n\n The man and woman clung together, waiting.\n\n\n There was a thick, oppressive silence, full of small rustlings and\n other faint sounds that were no longer normal. Then, very near, a man\n screamed in a high, inhuman voice. The screamed dwindled into a throaty\n gurgle and died, leaving silence again.\n\n\n Peter's lips were cold with sweat. Tiny nerves in his face and arms\n were jumping convulsively. His stomach crawled. He thrust the girl away\n from him and started toward the inner room.\n\n\n \"Wait here,\" he mouthed.", "Peter couldn't think of anything to say. Dr. Arnold's voice went on\n after a moment, musingly. \"We're burrowing into the earth, like worms.\n It didn't take us long to find out we couldn't kill them. They didn't\n even take any notice of our attempts to do so, except once. That was\n when a squadron of the Police caught about fifty of them together at\n one time, and attacked with flame guns and a new secret weapon. It\n didn't hurt them, but it annoyed them. It was the first time they'd\n been annoyed, I think. They blew up half a state, and it's still\n smoldering.\"\n\n\n \"And since then?\" Peter asked huskily.", "\"There's no other way,\" Peter said. He gripped her arms tightly, as if\n he could compel her to understand by the sheer pressure of his fingers.\n \"Darling, listen to me. We've tried everything. We've gone underground,\n but that's only delaying the end.\nThey\nstill come down here, only not\n as many. The mortality rate is up, the suicide rate is up, the birth\n rate is down, in spite of anything we can do. You've seen the figures:\n we're riding a curve that ends in extinction fifty years from now.\n\n\n \"They'll live, and we'll die, because they're a superior race. We're a\n million years too far back even to understand what they are or where\n they came from. Besides them, we're apes. There's only one answer.\"\n\n\n She was crying now, silently, with great racking sobs that shook her\n slender body. But he went remorselessly on.", "He looked at me, a little oddly, almost as if he had some instinctive\n knowledge of what was to come. But he went on swiftly, \"On Earth we\n had a saying: 'Fight fire with fire.' That is the way it will be with\n you. You are completely, coldly logical, just as\nthey\nare. You can\n understand them, and so you can conquer them.\"\n\n\n I said, \"That is the reason why we will not go back to Earth.\"\n\n\n He stared at me, his jaw slack, his hands trembling. \"What—what did\n you say?\"\n\n\n I repeated it patiently.\n\n\n \"But why?\" he cried, sinking down into the chair before me. In an\n instant all the joy had gone out of him. I could not understand his\n suffering, but I could recognize it.", "\"Since the Invaders first appeared in Wood River, Oregon, 24 hours\n ago, they have not once acknowledged our attempts to communicate, or\n in any way taken notice of our existence as reasoning beings. They\n have treated us precisely as we, in less enlightened days, might\n have treated a newly-discovered race of lower animals. They have not\n attacked our centers of government, nor immobilized our communications,\n nor laid siege to our defenses. But in instance after instance, they\n have done as they would with us. They have examined us, dissected us,\n driven us mad, killed us with no discernable provocation; and this is\n more intolerable than any normal invasion.\n\n\n \"I have no fear that the people of Earth will fail to meet this\n challenge, for there is no alternative. Not only our individual lives\n are threatened, but our existence as a race. We must, and will, destroy\n the Invaders!\"\n\n\n Peter sank back in his chair, the full shock of it striking him for the\n first time.", "He heard a faint sound behind him, and whirled. It was the first\n time he had realized that Lorelei had followed him. She stood there,\n swaying, very pale, looking at the red Invaders. Her eyes swiveled\n slowly....\n\n\n \"\nOpreniktoulestritifenrelngetnaktwiltoctpre.\n\"\n\n\n His voice was hoarse. \"Don't look! Don't—Go back!\" The horrible,\n mindless noise in his throat was almost beyond his power to repress.\n His insides writhed to thrust it out.\n\n\n She didn't see him. Her eyes glazed, and she dropped limply to the\n floor.", "\"You yourself have said it,\" I told him. \"I am a being of logic, just\n as the beings who have invaded your planet are. I do not comprehend the\n things which you call hate, fear, joy and love, as they do not. If I\n went to Earth, I would use your people to further my knowledge, just as\n the invaders do. I would have no reason to kill the invaders. They are\n more nearly kin to me than your people.\"\nPeter's eyes were dull, his limbs slumped. For a moment I thought that\n the shock had deranged his mind.\n\n\n His voice trembled when he said, \"But if I ask you to kill them, and\n not my people?\"\n\n\n \"To do so would be illogical.\"\n\n\n He waved his hands helplessly. \"Gratitude?\" he muttered.\n\n\n \"No, you don't understand that, either.\"\n\n\n Then he cried suddenly, \"But I am your friend, Robert!\"", "He stared sometimes through changed eyes at the tiny blue star that was\n Earth, wondering if the race he had left behind still burrowed in its\n worm-tunnels, digging deeper and deeper away from the sunlight. But\n after a time he ceased even to wonder.\n\n\n And one changeling-child he did not destroy. He fed knowledge to its\n eager brain, and watched it through the swift years, with a dawning\n hope....\nPeter closed the diary. \"The rest you know, Robert,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I told him. \"I was that child. I am the millionth mutation you\n were searching for.\"\n\n\n His eyes glowed suddenly in their misshapen sockets. \"You are. Your\n brain is as superior to mine as mine is to an anthropoid's. You solve\n instinctively problems that would take our mechanical computers hours\n of work. You are a superman.\"\n\n\n \"I am without your imperfections,\" I said, flexing my arms." ], [ "She was after him, clinging to his arms. \"No, Peter! Don't go in there!\nPeter!\n\" But he pushed her away again, woodenly, and stalked forward.\n\n\n There was a space in the middle of the room where machinery had been\n cleared away to make room for an incompleted setup. Peter walked down\n the narrow aisle, past bakelite-sheathed mechanisms and rows of animal\n cages, and paused just short of it.\n\n\n The two red beings were there, formless bodies hazy in midair, the\n distorted, hairless skulls in profile, staring at something outside his\n range of vision.\nPeter forced himself forward another step. Little Harry Kanin,\n Lorelei's assistant, was crumpled in a corner, half supported by the\n broad base of an X-ray chamber. His face was flaccid and bloated. His\n glazed eyes, impassive yet somehow pleading, stared at nothingness\n straight ahead of him.", "Peter's head began spinning just a little. Glass clinked from a metal\n stand near his head; the nurse bent over him with a glass half full of\n milky fluid. It tasted awful, but she made him drink it all.\n\n\n In a moment he began to relax, and the room got fuzzy again. Just\n before he drifted off, he said sleepily, \"You can't—fool me. It's been\nmore\n—than three—months.\"\n\n\n He was right. All the nurses, and even Dr. Arnold, were evasive, but he\n kept asking them why he couldn't see Lorelei, and finally he wormed it\n out of them. It had been nine and a half months, not three, and he'd\n been in a coma all that time. Lorelei, it seemed, had recovered much\n sooner.", "The scream came out then. Before he knew, even, that he could hold\n it back no longer, his mouth was wide open, his muscles tensed, his\n fingernails slicing his palms. It echoed with unbelievable volume in\n the room. It was a scream to split eardrums; a scream to wake the dead.\nSomebody said, \"Doctor!\"\n\n\n He wanted to say, \"Yes, get a doctor. Lorelei—\" but his mouth only\n twitched feebly. He couldn't seem to get it to work properly.\n\n\n He tried again. \"Doctor.\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\" A gentle, masculine voice.\n\n\n He opened his eyes with an effort. There was a blurred face before him;\n in a moment it grew clearer. The strong, clean-shaven chin contrasted\n oddly with the haggard circles under the eyes. There was a clean,\n starched odor.", "\"I do not understand 'friend,'\" I said.\n\n\n I did understand \"gratitude,\" a little. It was a reciprocal\n arrangement: I did what Peter wished, so long as I did not actively\n want to do otherwise, because he had done things for me. Very well,\n then we must not go back. It was very simple, but I knew that he could\n not comprehend it.\n\n\n I tried to explain it to him, however. But he only stared at me, with\n an expression on his face that I had never seen there before, and that,\n somehow, I did not like to see. It was disquieting, and so I hastened\n to the end that I knew was inevitable.", "\"\nWill\nwe?\" he asked himself softly.\nIt was only two stories down the moving ramp to Lorelei Cooper's\n laboratory. Peter took it in fifteen seconds, running, and stumbled to\n a halt in front of the door marked \"Radiation.\" She had set her door\n mechanism to \"Etaoin Shrdlu,\" principally because he hated double-talk.\n He mouthed the syllables, had to repeat them because he put an accent\n in the wrong place, and squeezed through the door as soon as it opened\n far enough to admit him.\n\n\n Lorelei, beautiful in spite of dark-circled eyes and a smear of grease\n on her chin, looked up from a huge ledger at the end of the room. One\n blonde eyebrow arched in the quizzical expression he knew so well.\n\n\n \"What makes, Peter my love?\" she asked, and bent back to the ledger.\n Then she did a double-take, looked at his face intently, and said,\n \"Darling, what's wrong?\"", "Peter couldn't think of anything to say. Dr. Arnold's voice went on\n after a moment, musingly. \"We're burrowing into the earth, like worms.\n It didn't take us long to find out we couldn't kill them. They didn't\n even take any notice of our attempts to do so, except once. That was\n when a squadron of the Police caught about fifty of them together at\n one time, and attacked with flame guns and a new secret weapon. It\n didn't hurt them, but it annoyed them. It was the first time they'd\n been annoyed, I think. They blew up half a state, and it's still\n smoldering.\"\n\n\n \"And since then?\" Peter asked huskily.", "He flashed on out, past the moon, past Mars, over the asteroid belt.\n The days merged into weeks, then months, and finally, far out,\nThe\n Avenger\ncurved into an orbit and held it. The great motors died, and\n the silence pressed in about him.\n\n\n Already he could feel the invisible rays burning resistlessly through\n his flesh as if it were water, shifting the cells of his body, working\n its slow, monstrous alchemy upon him. Peter waited until the changes\n were unmistakably evident in his skin and hair, and then he smashed all\n the mirrors in the ship.\n\n\n The embryos were pulsing with unnatural life, even in the suspended\n animation of their crystal cells. One by one he allowed them to\n mature, and after weeks or years destroyed the monstrosities that came\n from the incubators. Time went by, meaninglessly. He ate when he was\n hungry, slept when his driving purpose let him, and worked unceasingly,\n searching for the million-to-one chance.", "For the first time in all my life I had found a problem that I could\n not solve. Strange, disturbing sensations stirred and whispered within\n me, nagging, gnawing. And suddenly—something moved on the skin of my\n cheek. I raised a hand to it, slowly.\nA tear was trickling down my cheek.\nYoung Peter Karson put the last black-print down and sighed with\n satisfaction. His dream was perfect; the\nCitadel\nwas complete, every\n minutest detail provided for—on paper. In two weeks they would be\n laying the core, and then the metal giant itself would begin to grow,\n glittering, pulsing with each increment of power, until at last it lay\n finished, a living thing.", "\"Where am I?\" he said. He tried to turn his head, but a firm hand\n pressed him back into the sheets.\n\n\n \"You're in a hospital. Just lie quietly, please.\"\n\n\n He tried to get up again. \"Where's Lorelei?\"\n\n\n \"She's well, and you'll see her soon. Now lie quietly. You've been a\n very sick man.\"\n\n\n Peter sank back in the bed. The room was coming into focus. He looked\n around him slowly. He felt very weak, but perfectly lucid.\n\n\n \"Yes....\" he said. \"How long have I been here, Doctor?\"\n\n\n The man hesitated, looked at him intently. \"Three months,\" he said. He\n turned and gave low-voiced instructions to a nurse, and then went away.", "He stared sometimes through changed eyes at the tiny blue star that was\n Earth, wondering if the race he had left behind still burrowed in its\n worm-tunnels, digging deeper and deeper away from the sunlight. But\n after a time he ceased even to wonder.\n\n\n And one changeling-child he did not destroy. He fed knowledge to its\n eager brain, and watched it through the swift years, with a dawning\n hope....\nPeter closed the diary. \"The rest you know, Robert,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I told him. \"I was that child. I am the millionth mutation you\n were searching for.\"\n\n\n His eyes glowed suddenly in their misshapen sockets. \"You are. Your\n brain is as superior to mine as mine is to an anthropoid's. You solve\n instinctively problems that would take our mechanical computers hours\n of work. You are a superman.\"\n\n\n \"I am without your imperfections,\" I said, flexing my arms.", "He said, \"Have you seen the news recently?\"\n\n\n She frowned. \"Why, no—Harry and I have been working for thirty-six\n hours straight. Haven't seen anybody, haven't heard anything. Why?\"\n\n\n \"You wouldn't believe me. Where's your newsbox?\"\n\n\n She came around the desk and put her hands on his shoulders. \"Pete,\n you know I haven't one—it bores me or upsets me, depending on whether\n there's trouble or not. What—\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, I forgot,\" he said. \"But you have a scanner?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, of course. But really, Pete—\"\n\n\n \"You'll understand in a minute. Turn it on, Lorelei.\"", "The Invaders ignored Peter, staring expressionlessly down at Kanin.\n In a moment Peter realized what they were doing to him. He stood,\n paralyzed with horror, and watched it happen.\n\n\n The little man's body was sagging, ever so slowly, as if he were\n relaxing tiredly. His torso was telescoping, bit by bit; his spread\n legs grew wider and more shapeless, his cheeks caved in and his skull\n grew gradually flatter.\n\n\n When it was over, the thing that had been Kanin was a limp, boneless\n puddle of flesh. Peter could not look at it.\n\n\n There was a scream in his throat that would not come out. He was beyond\n fear, beyond agony. He turned to the still-hovering monsters and said\n in a terrible voice, \"Why? Why?\"\n\n\n The nearest being turned slowly to regard him. Its lips did not move,\n but there was a tiny sound in Peter's brain, a thin, dry whispering.", "Her sobs gradually died away. She straightened slowly until he no\n longer had to support her, but all the vitality and resilience was gone\n out of her body. \"All right,\" she said in a lifeless voice. \"You'll\n come back, Peter.\"\n\n\n He turned away suddenly, not trusting himself to kiss her goodbye. A\n line from an old film kept echoing through his head. \"\nThey'll\ncome\n back—but not as\nboys\n!\"\n\n\n We'll come back, but not as men.\n\n\n We'll come back, but not as elephants.\n\n\n We'll come back, but not as octopi.\nHe was trembling violently. He ran the last few steps, stumbled into\n the airlock, and pressed the stud that would seal the door behind him.\nWe'll come back....\nHe heard the massive disk sink home, closing him\n off. Then he sank down on the floor of the airlock and put his head in\n shaking hands.", "He rose and strode nervously over to the window. I watched him as he\n stood there, outlined against the blazing galaxies. He had changed but\n little in the years that I had known him. His lank gray hair straggled\n over his sunken eyes; his cheeks were blobbed with excresences of\n flesh; one corner of his mouth was drawn up in a perpetual grin. He had\n a tiny sixth finger on his left hand.\n\n\n He turned again, and I saw the old scar on his cheek where I had once\n accidentally drawn one of my talons across his face.\n\n\n \"And now,\" he said softly, \"we will go home. I've waited so\n long—keeping the control chamber and the engine room locked away from\n you, not telling you, even, about Earth until now—because I had to be\n sure. But now, the waiting is over.\n\n\n \"They're still there, I'm sure of it—the people, and the Invaders. You\n can kill the Invaders, Robert.\"", "\"I see,\" said Peter. And for the first time, he thought of the\nCitadel\n. No plan leaped full-born into his mind, but,\nmaybe\n, he\n thought,\nthere's a chance\n....\nIt wasn't very big, the thing that had been his shining dream. It lay\n there in its rough cradle, a globe of raw dura-steel not more than\n five hundred meters in diameter, where the\nCitadel\nwas to have been a\n thousand. It wouldn't house a hundred scientists, eagerly delving into\n the hinterland of research. The huge compartments weren't filled with\n the latest equipment for chemical and physical experiment; instead,\n there was compressed oxygen there, and concentrated food, enough to\n last a lifetime.\n\n\n It was a new world, all by itself; or else it was a tomb. And there was\n one other change, one that you couldn't see from the outside. The solid\n meters of lead in its outer skin, the shielding to keep out cosmic\n rays, were gone.", "There were left only two blood-red, malignant monstrosities somehow\n defiling the air they floated in; and below them, a pitiful huddle of\n flesh no longer recognizable as human beings. They were not dead, those\n men and women, but they wanted to be. Their bodies had been impossibly\n joined, fused together into a single obscene, floundering mass of\n helpless protoplasm. The thin moaning that went up from them was more\n horrible than any cry of agony.\n\n\n \"The Invaders are here, citizens,\" the commentator was saying in a\n strangled voice. \"Stay off the streets. Hide yourselves. Stay off the\n streets....\" His voice droned on, but neither of them heard it.\nLorelei buried her head on his chest, clutching at him desperately.\n \"Peter!\" she said faintly. \"Why do they broadcast such things?\"", "Silently, they counted stories as the two beings rose. Forty-five ...\n forty-six ... forty-seven ... forty-eight. Inevitably, they halted.\n Then they faded slowly. It was impossible to say whether they had gone\n through the solid wall, or simply melted away.\n\n\n The man and woman clung together, waiting.\n\n\n There was a thick, oppressive silence, full of small rustlings and\n other faint sounds that were no longer normal. Then, very near, a man\n screamed in a high, inhuman voice. The screamed dwindled into a throaty\n gurgle and died, leaving silence again.\n\n\n Peter's lips were cold with sweat. Tiny nerves in his face and arms\n were jumping convulsively. His stomach crawled. He thrust the girl away\n from him and started toward the inner room.\n\n\n \"Wait here,\" he mouthed.", "\"She was only suffering from ordinary shock,\" Arnold explained.\n \"Seeing that assistant of hers—it was enough to knock anybody out,\n especially a woman. But you stood actual mental contact with\nthem\nfor approximately five minutes. Yes, we know—you talked a lot. It's a\n miracle you're alive, and rational.\"\n\n\n \"But where is she?\" Peter complained. \"You still haven't explained why\n I haven't been able to see her.\"\n\n\n Arnold frowned. \"All right,\" he said. \"I guess you're strong enough to\n take it. She's underground, with the rest of the women and children,\n and a good two-thirds of the male population. That's where you'll go,\n as soon as you're well enough to be moved. We started digging in six\n months ago.\"\n\n\n \"But why?\" Peter whispered.\n\n\n Arnold's strong jaw knotted. \"We're hiding,\" he said. \"Everything else\n has failed.\"", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nPeter Karson was dead. He had been dead for some time now, but\n the dark blood was still oozing from the crushed ruin of his face,\n trickling down into his sodden sleeve, and falling, drop by slow drop,\n from his fingertips. His head was tilted over the back of the chair at\n a queer, unnatural angle, so that the light made deep pools of shadow\n where his eyes had been.\nThere was no sound in the room except for the small splashing the\n blood made as it dropped into the sticky pool on the floor. The great\n banks of machinery around the walls were silent. I knew that they would\n never come to life again.\nI rose and walked over to the window. Outside, the stars were as", "He stared after it, stunned into immobility. Down in the street\n somewhere, a portable video was shrilling a popular song; after a\n moment he heard the faint swish of a tube car going past. Everything\n was normal. Nothing, on examination, seemed to have changed. But the\n world had grown suddenly unreal.\n\n\n One part of his brain had been shocked into its shell. It was hiding\n from the thing that had hurt it, and it refused to respond. But the\n other part was going calmly, lucidly on, quite without his volition.\n It considered the possibility that he had gone temporarily insane, and\n decided that this was probable.\n\n\n Hardly knowing what he did, he found a cigarette and lit it. His hands\n were shaking. He stared at them dully, and then he reached over to the\n newsbox on his desk, and switched it on.\n\n\n There were flaring red headlines." ], [ "Her sobs gradually died away. She straightened slowly until he no\n longer had to support her, but all the vitality and resilience was gone\n out of her body. \"All right,\" she said in a lifeless voice. \"You'll\n come back, Peter.\"\n\n\n He turned away suddenly, not trusting himself to kiss her goodbye. A\n line from an old film kept echoing through his head. \"\nThey'll\ncome\n back—but not as\nboys\n!\"\n\n\n We'll come back, but not as men.\n\n\n We'll come back, but not as elephants.\n\n\n We'll come back, but not as octopi.\nHe was trembling violently. He ran the last few steps, stumbled into\n the airlock, and pressed the stud that would seal the door behind him.\nWe'll come back....\nHe heard the massive disk sink home, closing him\n off. Then he sank down on the floor of the airlock and put his head in\n shaking hands.", "\"I see,\" said Peter. And for the first time, he thought of the\nCitadel\n. No plan leaped full-born into his mind, but,\nmaybe\n, he\n thought,\nthere's a chance\n....\nIt wasn't very big, the thing that had been his shining dream. It lay\n there in its rough cradle, a globe of raw dura-steel not more than\n five hundred meters in diameter, where the\nCitadel\nwas to have been a\n thousand. It wouldn't house a hundred scientists, eagerly delving into\n the hinterland of research. The huge compartments weren't filled with\n the latest equipment for chemical and physical experiment; instead,\n there was compressed oxygen there, and concentrated food, enough to\n last a lifetime.\n\n\n It was a new world, all by itself; or else it was a tomb. And there was\n one other change, one that you couldn't see from the outside. The solid\n meters of lead in its outer skin, the shielding to keep out cosmic\n rays, were gone.", "He looked at me, a little oddly, almost as if he had some instinctive\n knowledge of what was to come. But he went on swiftly, \"On Earth we\n had a saying: 'Fight fire with fire.' That is the way it will be with\n you. You are completely, coldly logical, just as\nthey\nare. You can\n understand them, and so you can conquer them.\"\n\n\n I said, \"That is the reason why we will not go back to Earth.\"\n\n\n He stared at me, his jaw slack, his hands trembling. \"What—what did\n you say?\"\n\n\n I repeated it patiently.\n\n\n \"But why?\" he cried, sinking down into the chair before me. In an\n instant all the joy had gone out of him. I could not understand his\n suffering, but I could recognize it.", "before: tiny, myriad points of light, infinitely far away. They had not\n changed, and yet they were suddenly no longer friendly. They were cold\n and alien. It was I who had changed: something inside me was dead, like\n the machinery, and like Peter.\nIt was a kind of indefinable emptiness. I do not think it was what\n Peter called an emotion; and yet it had nothing to do with logic,\n either. It was just an emptiness—a void that could not be filled by\n eating or drinking.\nIt was not a longing. I had no desire that things should be otherwise\n than they were. I did not even wish that Peter were not dead, for\n reason had told me that he had to die. That was the end of it.\nBut the void was still there, unexplainable and impossible to ignore.", "She was after him, clinging to his arms. \"No, Peter! Don't go in there!\nPeter!\n\" But he pushed her away again, woodenly, and stalked forward.\n\n\n There was a space in the middle of the room where machinery had been\n cleared away to make room for an incompleted setup. Peter walked down\n the narrow aisle, past bakelite-sheathed mechanisms and rows of animal\n cages, and paused just short of it.\n\n\n The two red beings were there, formless bodies hazy in midair, the\n distorted, hairless skulls in profile, staring at something outside his\n range of vision.\nPeter forced himself forward another step. Little Harry Kanin,\n Lorelei's assistant, was crumpled in a corner, half supported by the\n broad base of an X-ray chamber. His face was flaccid and bloated. His\n glazed eyes, impassive yet somehow pleading, stared at nothingness\n straight ahead of him.", "\"You yourself have said it,\" I told him. \"I am a being of logic, just\n as the beings who have invaded your planet are. I do not comprehend the\n things which you call hate, fear, joy and love, as they do not. If I\n went to Earth, I would use your people to further my knowledge, just as\n the invaders do. I would have no reason to kill the invaders. They are\n more nearly kin to me than your people.\"\nPeter's eyes were dull, his limbs slumped. For a moment I thought that\n the shock had deranged his mind.\n\n\n His voice trembled when he said, \"But if I ask you to kill them, and\n not my people?\"\n\n\n \"To do so would be illogical.\"\n\n\n He waved his hands helplessly. \"Gratitude?\" he muttered.\n\n\n \"No, you don't understand that, either.\"\n\n\n Then he cried suddenly, \"But I am your friend, Robert!\"", "A man had just finished engraving the final stroke on its nameplate, to\n the left of the airlock—\nThe Avenger\n. He stepped away now, and joined\n the group a little distance away, silently waiting.\n\n\n Lorelei said, \"You can't do it. I won't let you! Peter—\"\n\n\n \"Darling,\" he began wearily.\n\n\n \"Don't throw your life away! Give us time—there must be another way.\"", "He rose and strode nervously over to the window. I watched him as he\n stood there, outlined against the blazing galaxies. He had changed but\n little in the years that I had known him. His lank gray hair straggled\n over his sunken eyes; his cheeks were blobbed with excresences of\n flesh; one corner of his mouth was drawn up in a perpetual grin. He had\n a tiny sixth finger on his left hand.\n\n\n He turned again, and I saw the old scar on his cheek where I had once\n accidentally drawn one of my talons across his face.\n\n\n \"And now,\" he said softly, \"we will go home. I've waited so\n long—keeping the control chamber and the engine room locked away from\n you, not telling you, even, about Earth until now—because I had to be\n sure. But now, the waiting is over.\n\n\n \"They're still there, I'm sure of it—the people, and the Invaders. You\n can kill the Invaders, Robert.\"", "Peter couldn't think of anything to say. Dr. Arnold's voice went on\n after a moment, musingly. \"We're burrowing into the earth, like worms.\n It didn't take us long to find out we couldn't kill them. They didn't\n even take any notice of our attempts to do so, except once. That was\n when a squadron of the Police caught about fifty of them together at\n one time, and attacked with flame guns and a new secret weapon. It\n didn't hurt them, but it annoyed them. It was the first time they'd\n been annoyed, I think. They blew up half a state, and it's still\n smoldering.\"\n\n\n \"And since then?\" Peter asked huskily.", "The Invaders ignored Peter, staring expressionlessly down at Kanin.\n In a moment Peter realized what they were doing to him. He stood,\n paralyzed with horror, and watched it happen.\n\n\n The little man's body was sagging, ever so slowly, as if he were\n relaxing tiredly. His torso was telescoping, bit by bit; his spread\n legs grew wider and more shapeless, his cheeks caved in and his skull\n grew gradually flatter.\n\n\n When it was over, the thing that had been Kanin was a limp, boneless\n puddle of flesh. Peter could not look at it.\n\n\n There was a scream in his throat that would not come out. He was beyond\n fear, beyond agony. He turned to the still-hovering monsters and said\n in a terrible voice, \"Why? Why?\"\n\n\n The nearest being turned slowly to regard him. Its lips did not move,\n but there was a tiny sound in Peter's brain, a thin, dry whispering.", "\"I do not understand 'friend,'\" I said.\n\n\n I did understand \"gratitude,\" a little. It was a reciprocal\n arrangement: I did what Peter wished, so long as I did not actively\n want to do otherwise, because he had done things for me. Very well,\n then we must not go back. It was very simple, but I knew that he could\n not comprehend it.\n\n\n I tried to explain it to him, however. But he only stared at me, with\n an expression on his face that I had never seen there before, and that,\n somehow, I did not like to see. It was disquieting, and so I hastened\n to the end that I knew was inevitable.", "Then there would remain only the task of blasting the great, shining\n ship out into the carefully-calculated orbit that would be its home.\n In his mind's eye he could see it, slowly wheeling, like a second\n satellite, about the Earth; endlessly gathering knowledge into its\n insatiable mechanisms. He could see, too, the level on level of\n laboratories and storerooms that filled its interlocking segments; the\n meteor deflectors, the air renewal system, the mighty engines at the\n stern—all the children of his brain.\n\n\n Out there, away from the muffling, distorting, damnable blanket of\n atmosphere, away from Earth's inexorable gravitational pull, would be\n a laboratory such as man had never seen. The ship would be filled with\n the sounds of busy men and women, wresting secrets from the reluctant\n ether. A new chemistry, a new physics; perhaps even a new biochemistry.", "He flashed on out, past the moon, past Mars, over the asteroid belt.\n The days merged into weeks, then months, and finally, far out,\nThe\n Avenger\ncurved into an orbit and held it. The great motors died, and\n the silence pressed in about him.\n\n\n Already he could feel the invisible rays burning resistlessly through\n his flesh as if it were water, shifting the cells of his body, working\n its slow, monstrous alchemy upon him. Peter waited until the changes\n were unmistakably evident in his skin and hair, and then he smashed all\n the mirrors in the ship.\n\n\n The embryos were pulsing with unnatural life, even in the suspended\n animation of their crystal cells. One by one he allowed them to\n mature, and after weeks or years destroyed the monstrosities that came\n from the incubators. Time went by, meaninglessly. He ate when he was\n hungry, slept when his driving purpose let him, and worked unceasingly,\n searching for the million-to-one chance.", "He stared sometimes through changed eyes at the tiny blue star that was\n Earth, wondering if the race he had left behind still burrowed in its\n worm-tunnels, digging deeper and deeper away from the sunlight. But\n after a time he ceased even to wonder.\n\n\n And one changeling-child he did not destroy. He fed knowledge to its\n eager brain, and watched it through the swift years, with a dawning\n hope....\nPeter closed the diary. \"The rest you know, Robert,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I told him. \"I was that child. I am the millionth mutation you\n were searching for.\"\n\n\n His eyes glowed suddenly in their misshapen sockets. \"You are. Your\n brain is as superior to mine as mine is to an anthropoid's. You solve\n instinctively problems that would take our mechanical computers hours\n of work. You are a superman.\"\n\n\n \"I am without your imperfections,\" I said, flexing my arms.", "\"\nWill\nwe?\" he asked himself softly.\nIt was only two stories down the moving ramp to Lorelei Cooper's\n laboratory. Peter took it in fifteen seconds, running, and stumbled to\n a halt in front of the door marked \"Radiation.\" She had set her door\n mechanism to \"Etaoin Shrdlu,\" principally because he hated double-talk.\n He mouthed the syllables, had to repeat them because he put an accent\n in the wrong place, and squeezed through the door as soon as it opened\n far enough to admit him.\n\n\n Lorelei, beautiful in spite of dark-circled eyes and a smear of grease\n on her chin, looked up from a huge ledger at the end of the room. One\n blonde eyebrow arched in the quizzical expression he knew so well.\n\n\n \"What makes, Peter my love?\" she asked, and bent back to the ledger.\n Then she did a double-take, looked at his face intently, and said,\n \"Darling, what's wrong?\"", "\"There's no other way,\" Peter said. He gripped her arms tightly, as if\n he could compel her to understand by the sheer pressure of his fingers.\n \"Darling, listen to me. We've tried everything. We've gone underground,\n but that's only delaying the end.\nThey\nstill come down here, only not\n as many. The mortality rate is up, the suicide rate is up, the birth\n rate is down, in spite of anything we can do. You've seen the figures:\n we're riding a curve that ends in extinction fifty years from now.\n\n\n \"They'll live, and we'll die, because they're a superior race. We're a\n million years too far back even to understand what they are or where\n they came from. Besides them, we're apes. There's only one answer.\"\n\n\n She was crying now, silently, with great racking sobs that shook her\n slender body. But he went remorselessly on.", "Silently, they counted stories as the two beings rose. Forty-five ...\n forty-six ... forty-seven ... forty-eight. Inevitably, they halted.\n Then they faded slowly. It was impossible to say whether they had gone\n through the solid wall, or simply melted away.\n\n\n The man and woman clung together, waiting.\n\n\n There was a thick, oppressive silence, full of small rustlings and\n other faint sounds that were no longer normal. Then, very near, a man\n screamed in a high, inhuman voice. The screamed dwindled into a throaty\n gurgle and died, leaving silence again.\n\n\n Peter's lips were cold with sweat. Tiny nerves in his face and arms\n were jumping convulsively. His stomach crawled. He thrust the girl away\n from him and started toward the inner room.\n\n\n \"Wait here,\" he mouthed.", "\"Since the Invaders first appeared in Wood River, Oregon, 24 hours\n ago, they have not once acknowledged our attempts to communicate, or\n in any way taken notice of our existence as reasoning beings. They\n have treated us precisely as we, in less enlightened days, might\n have treated a newly-discovered race of lower animals. They have not\n attacked our centers of government, nor immobilized our communications,\n nor laid siege to our defenses. But in instance after instance, they\n have done as they would with us. They have examined us, dissected us,\n driven us mad, killed us with no discernable provocation; and this is\n more intolerable than any normal invasion.\n\n\n \"I have no fear that the people of Earth will fail to meet this\n challenge, for there is no alternative. Not only our individual lives\n are threatened, but our existence as a race. We must, and will, destroy\n the Invaders!\"\n\n\n Peter sank back in his chair, the full shock of it striking him for the\n first time.", "There were left only two blood-red, malignant monstrosities somehow\n defiling the air they floated in; and below them, a pitiful huddle of\n flesh no longer recognizable as human beings. They were not dead, those\n men and women, but they wanted to be. Their bodies had been impossibly\n joined, fused together into a single obscene, floundering mass of\n helpless protoplasm. The thin moaning that went up from them was more\n horrible than any cry of agony.\n\n\n \"The Invaders are here, citizens,\" the commentator was saying in a\n strangled voice. \"Stay off the streets. Hide yourselves. Stay off the\n streets....\" His voice droned on, but neither of them heard it.\nLorelei buried her head on his chest, clutching at him desperately.\n \"Peter!\" she said faintly. \"Why do they broadcast such things?\"", "For the first time in all my life I had found a problem that I could\n not solve. Strange, disturbing sensations stirred and whispered within\n me, nagging, gnawing. And suddenly—something moved on the skin of my\n cheek. I raised a hand to it, slowly.\nA tear was trickling down my cheek.\nYoung Peter Karson put the last black-print down and sighed with\n satisfaction. His dream was perfect; the\nCitadel\nwas complete, every\n minutest detail provided for—on paper. In two weeks they would be\n laying the core, and then the metal giant itself would begin to grow,\n glittering, pulsing with each increment of power, until at last it lay\n finished, a living thing." ], [ "He looked at me, a little oddly, almost as if he had some instinctive\n knowledge of what was to come. But he went on swiftly, \"On Earth we\n had a saying: 'Fight fire with fire.' That is the way it will be with\n you. You are completely, coldly logical, just as\nthey\nare. You can\n understand them, and so you can conquer them.\"\n\n\n I said, \"That is the reason why we will not go back to Earth.\"\n\n\n He stared at me, his jaw slack, his hands trembling. \"What—what did\n you say?\"\n\n\n I repeated it patiently.\n\n\n \"But why?\" he cried, sinking down into the chair before me. In an\n instant all the joy had gone out of him. I could not understand his\n suffering, but I could recognize it.", "He rose and strode nervously over to the window. I watched him as he\n stood there, outlined against the blazing galaxies. He had changed but\n little in the years that I had known him. His lank gray hair straggled\n over his sunken eyes; his cheeks were blobbed with excresences of\n flesh; one corner of his mouth was drawn up in a perpetual grin. He had\n a tiny sixth finger on his left hand.\n\n\n He turned again, and I saw the old scar on his cheek where I had once\n accidentally drawn one of my talons across his face.\n\n\n \"And now,\" he said softly, \"we will go home. I've waited so\n long—keeping the control chamber and the engine room locked away from\n you, not telling you, even, about Earth until now—because I had to be\n sure. But now, the waiting is over.\n\n\n \"They're still there, I'm sure of it—the people, and the Invaders. You\n can kill the Invaders, Robert.\"", "Her sobs gradually died away. She straightened slowly until he no\n longer had to support her, but all the vitality and resilience was gone\n out of her body. \"All right,\" she said in a lifeless voice. \"You'll\n come back, Peter.\"\n\n\n He turned away suddenly, not trusting himself to kiss her goodbye. A\n line from an old film kept echoing through his head. \"\nThey'll\ncome\n back—but not as\nboys\n!\"\n\n\n We'll come back, but not as men.\n\n\n We'll come back, but not as elephants.\n\n\n We'll come back, but not as octopi.\nHe was trembling violently. He ran the last few steps, stumbled into\n the airlock, and pressed the stud that would seal the door behind him.\nWe'll come back....\nHe heard the massive disk sink home, closing him\n off. Then he sank down on the floor of the airlock and put his head in\n shaking hands.", "\"I see,\" said Peter. And for the first time, he thought of the\nCitadel\n. No plan leaped full-born into his mind, but,\nmaybe\n, he\n thought,\nthere's a chance\n....\nIt wasn't very big, the thing that had been his shining dream. It lay\n there in its rough cradle, a globe of raw dura-steel not more than\n five hundred meters in diameter, where the\nCitadel\nwas to have been a\n thousand. It wouldn't house a hundred scientists, eagerly delving into\n the hinterland of research. The huge compartments weren't filled with\n the latest equipment for chemical and physical experiment; instead,\n there was compressed oxygen there, and concentrated food, enough to\n last a lifetime.\n\n\n It was a new world, all by itself; or else it was a tomb. And there was\n one other change, one that you couldn't see from the outside. The solid\n meters of lead in its outer skin, the shielding to keep out cosmic\n rays, were gone.", "\"You yourself have said it,\" I told him. \"I am a being of logic, just\n as the beings who have invaded your planet are. I do not comprehend the\n things which you call hate, fear, joy and love, as they do not. If I\n went to Earth, I would use your people to further my knowledge, just as\n the invaders do. I would have no reason to kill the invaders. They are\n more nearly kin to me than your people.\"\nPeter's eyes were dull, his limbs slumped. For a moment I thought that\n the shock had deranged his mind.\n\n\n His voice trembled when he said, \"But if I ask you to kill them, and\n not my people?\"\n\n\n \"To do so would be illogical.\"\n\n\n He waved his hands helplessly. \"Gratitude?\" he muttered.\n\n\n \"No, you don't understand that, either.\"\n\n\n Then he cried suddenly, \"But I am your friend, Robert!\"", "Then there would remain only the task of blasting the great, shining\n ship out into the carefully-calculated orbit that would be its home.\n In his mind's eye he could see it, slowly wheeling, like a second\n satellite, about the Earth; endlessly gathering knowledge into its\n insatiable mechanisms. He could see, too, the level on level of\n laboratories and storerooms that filled its interlocking segments; the\n meteor deflectors, the air renewal system, the mighty engines at the\n stern—all the children of his brain.\n\n\n Out there, away from the muffling, distorting, damnable blanket of\n atmosphere, away from Earth's inexorable gravitational pull, would be\n a laboratory such as man had never seen. The ship would be filled with\n the sounds of busy men and women, wresting secrets from the reluctant\n ether. A new chemistry, a new physics; perhaps even a new biochemistry.", "He stared sometimes through changed eyes at the tiny blue star that was\n Earth, wondering if the race he had left behind still burrowed in its\n worm-tunnels, digging deeper and deeper away from the sunlight. But\n after a time he ceased even to wonder.\n\n\n And one changeling-child he did not destroy. He fed knowledge to its\n eager brain, and watched it through the swift years, with a dawning\n hope....\nPeter closed the diary. \"The rest you know, Robert,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I told him. \"I was that child. I am the millionth mutation you\n were searching for.\"\n\n\n His eyes glowed suddenly in their misshapen sockets. \"You are. Your\n brain is as superior to mine as mine is to an anthropoid's. You solve\n instinctively problems that would take our mechanical computers hours\n of work. You are a superman.\"\n\n\n \"I am without your imperfections,\" I said, flexing my arms.", "\"There's no other way,\" Peter said. He gripped her arms tightly, as if\n he could compel her to understand by the sheer pressure of his fingers.\n \"Darling, listen to me. We've tried everything. We've gone underground,\n but that's only delaying the end.\nThey\nstill come down here, only not\n as many. The mortality rate is up, the suicide rate is up, the birth\n rate is down, in spite of anything we can do. You've seen the figures:\n we're riding a curve that ends in extinction fifty years from now.\n\n\n \"They'll live, and we'll die, because they're a superior race. We're a\n million years too far back even to understand what they are or where\n they came from. Besides them, we're apes. There's only one answer.\"\n\n\n She was crying now, silently, with great racking sobs that shook her\n slender body. But he went remorselessly on.", "\"Out there, in space, the cosmics change unshielded life. They\n make tentacles out of arms; or scales out of hair; or twelve toes,\n or a dozen ears—or a better brain. Out of those millions of\n possible mutations, there's one that will save the human race. We\n can't fight\nthem\n, but a superman could. That's our only chance.\n Lorelei—darling—don't you see that?\"\n\n\n She choked, \"But why can't you take me along?\"\n\n\n He stared unseeingly past her wet, upturned face. \"You know why,\" he\n said bitterly. \"Those rays are strong. They don't only work on embryos;\n they change adult life forms, too. I have one chance in seven of\n staying alive. You'd have one chance in a million of staying beautiful.\n I couldn't stand that. I'd kill myself, and then humanity would die,\n too. You'd be their murderer.\"", "\"Since then, we've been burrowing. All the big cities.... It would be\n an impossible task if we tried to include all the thinly-populated\n areas, of course, but it doesn't matter. By the time we excavate\n enough to take care of a quarter of the earth's population, the other\n three-quarters will be dead, or worse.\"\n\n\n \"I wonder,\" Peter said shakily, \"if I am strong enough to take it.\"\n\n\n Arnold laughed harshly. \"You are. You've got to be. You're part of our\n last hope, you see.\"\n\n\n \"Our last hope?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. You're a scientist.\"", "A man had just finished engraving the final stroke on its nameplate, to\n the left of the airlock—\nThe Avenger\n. He stepped away now, and joined\n the group a little distance away, silently waiting.\n\n\n Lorelei said, \"You can't do it. I won't let you! Peter—\"\n\n\n \"Darling,\" he began wearily.\n\n\n \"Don't throw your life away! Give us time—there must be another way.\"", "\"Since the Invaders first appeared in Wood River, Oregon, 24 hours\n ago, they have not once acknowledged our attempts to communicate, or\n in any way taken notice of our existence as reasoning beings. They\n have treated us precisely as we, in less enlightened days, might\n have treated a newly-discovered race of lower animals. They have not\n attacked our centers of government, nor immobilized our communications,\n nor laid siege to our defenses. But in instance after instance, they\n have done as they would with us. They have examined us, dissected us,\n driven us mad, killed us with no discernable provocation; and this is\n more intolerable than any normal invasion.\n\n\n \"I have no fear that the people of Earth will fail to meet this\n challenge, for there is no alternative. Not only our individual lives\n are threatened, but our existence as a race. We must, and will, destroy\n the Invaders!\"\n\n\n Peter sank back in his chair, the full shock of it striking him for the\n first time.", "\"She was only suffering from ordinary shock,\" Arnold explained.\n \"Seeing that assistant of hers—it was enough to knock anybody out,\n especially a woman. But you stood actual mental contact with\nthem\nfor approximately five minutes. Yes, we know—you talked a lot. It's a\n miracle you're alive, and rational.\"\n\n\n \"But where is she?\" Peter complained. \"You still haven't explained why\n I haven't been able to see her.\"\n\n\n Arnold frowned. \"All right,\" he said. \"I guess you're strong enough to\n take it. She's underground, with the rest of the women and children,\n and a good two-thirds of the male population. That's where you'll go,\n as soon as you're well enough to be moved. We started digging in six\n months ago.\"\n\n\n \"But why?\" Peter whispered.\n\n\n Arnold's strong jaw knotted. \"We're hiding,\" he said. \"Everything else\n has failed.\"", "After a while he roused himself, closed the inner door of the lock\n behind him, and walked down the long corridor into the control chamber.\n The shining banks of keys were there, waiting for his touch; he slumped\n down before them and listlessly closed the contact of the visiplate.\n\n\n He swung its field slowly, scanning for the last time the bare walls\n of the underground chamber, making sure that all the spectators had\n retired out of the way of the blast. Then his clawed fingers poised\n over the keys, hovered a moment, and thrust down.\n\n\n Acceleration pressed him deep into his chair. In the visiplate, the\n heavy doors that closed the tunnel above him flashed back, one by one.\n The energy-charged screen flickered off to let him pass, and closed\n smoothly behind him. The last doors, cleverly camouflaged, slipped back\n into place and then dwindled in the distance. It was done.", "\"I do not understand 'friend,'\" I said.\n\n\n I did understand \"gratitude,\" a little. It was a reciprocal\n arrangement: I did what Peter wished, so long as I did not actively\n want to do otherwise, because he had done things for me. Very well,\n then we must not go back. It was very simple, but I knew that he could\n not comprehend it.\n\n\n I tried to explain it to him, however. But he only stared at me, with\n an expression on his face that I had never seen there before, and that,\n somehow, I did not like to see. It was disquieting, and so I hastened\n to the end that I knew was inevitable.", "He flashed on out, past the moon, past Mars, over the asteroid belt.\n The days merged into weeks, then months, and finally, far out,\nThe\n Avenger\ncurved into an orbit and held it. The great motors died, and\n the silence pressed in about him.\n\n\n Already he could feel the invisible rays burning resistlessly through\n his flesh as if it were water, shifting the cells of his body, working\n its slow, monstrous alchemy upon him. Peter waited until the changes\n were unmistakably evident in his skin and hair, and then he smashed all\n the mirrors in the ship.\n\n\n The embryos were pulsing with unnatural life, even in the suspended\n animation of their crystal cells. One by one he allowed them to\n mature, and after weeks or years destroyed the monstrosities that came\n from the incubators. Time went by, meaninglessly. He ate when he was\n hungry, slept when his driving purpose let him, and worked unceasingly,\n searching for the million-to-one chance.", "The Invaders ignored Peter, staring expressionlessly down at Kanin.\n In a moment Peter realized what they were doing to him. He stood,\n paralyzed with horror, and watched it happen.\n\n\n The little man's body was sagging, ever so slowly, as if he were\n relaxing tiredly. His torso was telescoping, bit by bit; his spread\n legs grew wider and more shapeless, his cheeks caved in and his skull\n grew gradually flatter.\n\n\n When it was over, the thing that had been Kanin was a limp, boneless\n puddle of flesh. Peter could not look at it.\n\n\n There was a scream in his throat that would not come out. He was beyond\n fear, beyond agony. He turned to the still-hovering monsters and said\n in a terrible voice, \"Why? Why?\"\n\n\n The nearest being turned slowly to regard him. Its lips did not move,\n but there was a tiny sound in Peter's brain, a thin, dry whispering.", "He heard a faint sound behind him, and whirled. It was the first\n time he had realized that Lorelei had followed him. She stood there,\n swaying, very pale, looking at the red Invaders. Her eyes swiveled\n slowly....\n\n\n \"\nOpreniktoulestritifenrelngetnaktwiltoctpre.\n\"\n\n\n His voice was hoarse. \"Don't look! Don't—Go back!\" The horrible,\n mindless noise in his throat was almost beyond his power to repress.\n His insides writhed to thrust it out.\n\n\n She didn't see him. Her eyes glazed, and she dropped limply to the\n floor.", "\"They have to,\" he told her grimly. \"There will be panics and suicides,\n and they know it; but they have to do it. This isn't like a war, where\n the noncombatants' morale has to be kept up. There aren't going to be\n any noncombatants, this time. Everybody in the world has to know about\n them, so that he can fight them—and then it may not be enough.\"\n\n\n The viewpoint of the teleo sender changed as the two red beings soared\n away from their victims and angled slowly up the street. Peter reached\n out to switch off the scanner, and froze. The girl felt his muscles\n tense abruptly, looked back at the scene. The Invaders were floating\n up the sloping side of a tall, pure white structure that dominated the\n rest.\n\n\n \"That's the Atlas building,\" she said unbelievingly. \"Us!\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"", "Peter couldn't think of anything to say. Dr. Arnold's voice went on\n after a moment, musingly. \"We're burrowing into the earth, like worms.\n It didn't take us long to find out we couldn't kill them. They didn't\n even take any notice of our attempts to do so, except once. That was\n when a squadron of the Police caught about fifty of them together at\n one time, and attacked with flame guns and a new secret weapon. It\n didn't hurt them, but it annoyed them. It was the first time they'd\n been annoyed, I think. They blew up half a state, and it's still\n smoldering.\"\n\n\n \"And since then?\" Peter asked huskily." ], [ "She was after him, clinging to his arms. \"No, Peter! Don't go in there!\nPeter!\n\" But he pushed her away again, woodenly, and stalked forward.\n\n\n There was a space in the middle of the room where machinery had been\n cleared away to make room for an incompleted setup. Peter walked down\n the narrow aisle, past bakelite-sheathed mechanisms and rows of animal\n cages, and paused just short of it.\n\n\n The two red beings were there, formless bodies hazy in midair, the\n distorted, hairless skulls in profile, staring at something outside his\n range of vision.\nPeter forced himself forward another step. Little Harry Kanin,\n Lorelei's assistant, was crumpled in a corner, half supported by the\n broad base of an X-ray chamber. His face was flaccid and bloated. His\n glazed eyes, impassive yet somehow pleading, stared at nothingness\n straight ahead of him.", "The scream came out then. Before he knew, even, that he could hold\n it back no longer, his mouth was wide open, his muscles tensed, his\n fingernails slicing his palms. It echoed with unbelievable volume in\n the room. It was a scream to split eardrums; a scream to wake the dead.\nSomebody said, \"Doctor!\"\n\n\n He wanted to say, \"Yes, get a doctor. Lorelei—\" but his mouth only\n twitched feebly. He couldn't seem to get it to work properly.\n\n\n He tried again. \"Doctor.\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\" A gentle, masculine voice.\n\n\n He opened his eyes with an effort. There was a blurred face before him;\n in a moment it grew clearer. The strong, clean-shaven chin contrasted\n oddly with the haggard circles under the eyes. There was a clean,\n starched odor.", "A discordant note suddenly entered his fantasy. He looked up, conscious\n of the walls of his office again, but could see nothing unusual. Still,\n that thin, dark whisper of dread was at the back of his mind. Slowly,\n as if reluctantly compelled, he turned around to face the window at his\n back.\n\n\n There, outside the window, fifty stories up, a face was staring\n impassively in at him. That was the first impression he got; just a\n face, staring. Then he saw, with a queer, icy chill, that the face was\n blood-red and subtly inhuman. It tapered off into a formless, shriveled\n body.\n\n\n For a moment or an eternity it hung there, unsupported, the bulging\n eyes staring at him. Then it grew misty at the edges. It dissolved\n slowly away and was gone.\n\n\n \"Lord!\" he said.", "He stared after it, stunned into immobility. Down in the street\n somewhere, a portable video was shrilling a popular song; after a\n moment he heard the faint swish of a tube car going past. Everything\n was normal. Nothing, on examination, seemed to have changed. But the\n world had grown suddenly unreal.\n\n\n One part of his brain had been shocked into its shell. It was hiding\n from the thing that had hurt it, and it refused to respond. But the\n other part was going calmly, lucidly on, quite without his volition.\n It considered the possibility that he had gone temporarily insane, and\n decided that this was probable.\n\n\n Hardly knowing what he did, he found a cigarette and lit it. His hands\n were shaking. He stared at them dully, and then he reached over to the\n newsbox on his desk, and switched it on.\n\n\n There were flaring red headlines.", "He heard a faint sound behind him, and whirled. It was the first\n time he had realized that Lorelei had followed him. She stood there,\n swaying, very pale, looking at the red Invaders. Her eyes swiveled\n slowly....\n\n\n \"\nOpreniktoulestritifenrelngetnaktwiltoctpre.\n\"\n\n\n His voice was hoarse. \"Don't look! Don't—Go back!\" The horrible,\n mindless noise in his throat was almost beyond his power to repress.\n His insides writhed to thrust it out.\n\n\n She didn't see him. Her eyes glazed, and she dropped limply to the\n floor.", "There were left only two blood-red, malignant monstrosities somehow\n defiling the air they floated in; and below them, a pitiful huddle of\n flesh no longer recognizable as human beings. They were not dead, those\n men and women, but they wanted to be. Their bodies had been impossibly\n joined, fused together into a single obscene, floundering mass of\n helpless protoplasm. The thin moaning that went up from them was more\n horrible than any cry of agony.\n\n\n \"The Invaders are here, citizens,\" the commentator was saying in a\n strangled voice. \"Stay off the streets. Hide yourselves. Stay off the\n streets....\" His voice droned on, but neither of them heard it.\nLorelei buried her head on his chest, clutching at him desperately.\n \"Peter!\" she said faintly. \"Why do they broadcast such things?\"", "He said, \"Have you seen the news recently?\"\n\n\n She frowned. \"Why, no—Harry and I have been working for thirty-six\n hours straight. Haven't seen anybody, haven't heard anything. Why?\"\n\n\n \"You wouldn't believe me. Where's your newsbox?\"\n\n\n She came around the desk and put her hands on his shoulders. \"Pete,\n you know I haven't one—it bores me or upsets me, depending on whether\n there's trouble or not. What—\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, I forgot,\" he said. \"But you have a scanner?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, of course. But really, Pete—\"\n\n\n \"You'll understand in a minute. Turn it on, Lorelei.\"", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nPeter Karson was dead. He had been dead for some time now, but\n the dark blood was still oozing from the crushed ruin of his face,\n trickling down into his sodden sleeve, and falling, drop by slow drop,\n from his fingertips. His head was tilted over the back of the chair at\n a queer, unnatural angle, so that the light made deep pools of shadow\n where his eyes had been.\nThere was no sound in the room except for the small splashing the\n blood made as it dropped into the sticky pool on the floor. The great\n banks of machinery around the walls were silent. I knew that they would\n never come to life again.\nI rose and walked over to the window. Outside, the stars were as", "\"\nWill\nwe?\" he asked himself softly.\nIt was only two stories down the moving ramp to Lorelei Cooper's\n laboratory. Peter took it in fifteen seconds, running, and stumbled to\n a halt in front of the door marked \"Radiation.\" She had set her door\n mechanism to \"Etaoin Shrdlu,\" principally because he hated double-talk.\n He mouthed the syllables, had to repeat them because he put an accent\n in the wrong place, and squeezed through the door as soon as it opened\n far enough to admit him.\n\n\n Lorelei, beautiful in spite of dark-circled eyes and a smear of grease\n on her chin, looked up from a huge ledger at the end of the room. One\n blonde eyebrow arched in the quizzical expression he knew so well.\n\n\n \"What makes, Peter my love?\" she asked, and bent back to the ledger.\n Then she did a double-take, looked at his face intently, and said,\n \"Darling, what's wrong?\"", "before: tiny, myriad points of light, infinitely far away. They had not\n changed, and yet they were suddenly no longer friendly. They were cold\n and alien. It was I who had changed: something inside me was dead, like\n the machinery, and like Peter.\nIt was a kind of indefinable emptiness. I do not think it was what\n Peter called an emotion; and yet it had nothing to do with logic,\n either. It was just an emptiness—a void that could not be filled by\n eating or drinking.\nIt was not a longing. I had no desire that things should be otherwise\n than they were. I did not even wish that Peter were not dead, for\n reason had told me that he had to die. That was the end of it.\nBut the void was still there, unexplainable and impossible to ignore.", "He stared sometimes through changed eyes at the tiny blue star that was\n Earth, wondering if the race he had left behind still burrowed in its\n worm-tunnels, digging deeper and deeper away from the sunlight. But\n after a time he ceased even to wonder.\n\n\n And one changeling-child he did not destroy. He fed knowledge to its\n eager brain, and watched it through the swift years, with a dawning\n hope....\nPeter closed the diary. \"The rest you know, Robert,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I told him. \"I was that child. I am the millionth mutation you\n were searching for.\"\n\n\n His eyes glowed suddenly in their misshapen sockets. \"You are. Your\n brain is as superior to mine as mine is to an anthropoid's. You solve\n instinctively problems that would take our mechanical computers hours\n of work. You are a superman.\"\n\n\n \"I am without your imperfections,\" I said, flexing my arms.", "\"I do not understand 'friend,'\" I said.\n\n\n I did understand \"gratitude,\" a little. It was a reciprocal\n arrangement: I did what Peter wished, so long as I did not actively\n want to do otherwise, because he had done things for me. Very well,\n then we must not go back. It was very simple, but I knew that he could\n not comprehend it.\n\n\n I tried to explain it to him, however. But he only stared at me, with\n an expression on his face that I had never seen there before, and that,\n somehow, I did not like to see. It was disquieting, and so I hastened\n to the end that I knew was inevitable.", "After a while he roused himself, closed the inner door of the lock\n behind him, and walked down the long corridor into the control chamber.\n The shining banks of keys were there, waiting for his touch; he slumped\n down before them and listlessly closed the contact of the visiplate.\n\n\n He swung its field slowly, scanning for the last time the bare walls\n of the underground chamber, making sure that all the spectators had\n retired out of the way of the blast. Then his clawed fingers poised\n over the keys, hovered a moment, and thrust down.\n\n\n Acceleration pressed him deep into his chair. In the visiplate, the\n heavy doors that closed the tunnel above him flashed back, one by one.\n The energy-charged screen flickered off to let him pass, and closed\n smoothly behind him. The last doors, cleverly camouflaged, slipped back\n into place and then dwindled in the distance. It was done.", "\"They have to,\" he told her grimly. \"There will be panics and suicides,\n and they know it; but they have to do it. This isn't like a war, where\n the noncombatants' morale has to be kept up. There aren't going to be\n any noncombatants, this time. Everybody in the world has to know about\n them, so that he can fight them—and then it may not be enough.\"\n\n\n The viewpoint of the teleo sender changed as the two red beings soared\n away from their victims and angled slowly up the street. Peter reached\n out to switch off the scanner, and froze. The girl felt his muscles\n tense abruptly, looked back at the scene. The Invaders were floating\n up the sloping side of a tall, pure white structure that dominated the\n rest.\n\n\n \"That's the Atlas building,\" she said unbelievingly. \"Us!\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"", "He looked at me, a little oddly, almost as if he had some instinctive\n knowledge of what was to come. But he went on swiftly, \"On Earth we\n had a saying: 'Fight fire with fire.' That is the way it will be with\n you. You are completely, coldly logical, just as\nthey\nare. You can\n understand them, and so you can conquer them.\"\n\n\n I said, \"That is the reason why we will not go back to Earth.\"\n\n\n He stared at me, his jaw slack, his hands trembling. \"What—what did\n you say?\"\n\n\n I repeated it patiently.\n\n\n \"But why?\" he cried, sinking down into the chair before me. In an\n instant all the joy had gone out of him. I could not understand his\n suffering, but I could recognize it.", "\"Where am I?\" he said. He tried to turn his head, but a firm hand\n pressed him back into the sheets.\n\n\n \"You're in a hospital. Just lie quietly, please.\"\n\n\n He tried to get up again. \"Where's Lorelei?\"\n\n\n \"She's well, and you'll see her soon. Now lie quietly. You've been a\n very sick man.\"\n\n\n Peter sank back in the bed. The room was coming into focus. He looked\n around him slowly. He felt very weak, but perfectly lucid.\n\n\n \"Yes....\" he said. \"How long have I been here, Doctor?\"\n\n\n The man hesitated, looked at him intently. \"Three months,\" he said. He\n turned and gave low-voiced instructions to a nurse, and then went away.", "\"There's no other way,\" Peter said. He gripped her arms tightly, as if\n he could compel her to understand by the sheer pressure of his fingers.\n \"Darling, listen to me. We've tried everything. We've gone underground,\n but that's only delaying the end.\nThey\nstill come down here, only not\n as many. The mortality rate is up, the suicide rate is up, the birth\n rate is down, in spite of anything we can do. You've seen the figures:\n we're riding a curve that ends in extinction fifty years from now.\n\n\n \"They'll live, and we'll die, because they're a superior race. We're a\n million years too far back even to understand what they are or where\n they came from. Besides them, we're apes. There's only one answer.\"\n\n\n She was crying now, silently, with great racking sobs that shook her\n slender body. But he went remorselessly on.", "Relief washed over him, leaving him breathless. He was horrified,\n of course, but only abstractedly. For the moment he could only be\n glad that what he had seen was terrible reality rather than even more\n terrible illusion.\nINVADERS APPEAR IN BOSTON.\n\n 200 DEAD\n\n\n Then lines of type, and farther down:\n50 CHILDREN DISAPPEAR FROM\n\n PARIS MATERNITY CENTER\n\n\n He pressed the stud. The roll was full of them.\nMOON SHIP DESTROYED\n\n IN TRANSIT\n\n NO COMMUNICATION FROM\n\n ANTARCTICA IN 6 HOURS\n\n STRANGE FORCE DEFLECTS\n\n PLANES FROM SAHARA AREA\n\n WORLD POLICE MOBILIZING", "Silently, they counted stories as the two beings rose. Forty-five ...\n forty-six ... forty-seven ... forty-eight. Inevitably, they halted.\n Then they faded slowly. It was impossible to say whether they had gone\n through the solid wall, or simply melted away.\n\n\n The man and woman clung together, waiting.\n\n\n There was a thick, oppressive silence, full of small rustlings and\n other faint sounds that were no longer normal. Then, very near, a man\n screamed in a high, inhuman voice. The screamed dwindled into a throaty\n gurgle and died, leaving silence again.\n\n\n Peter's lips were cold with sweat. Tiny nerves in his face and arms\n were jumping convulsively. His stomach crawled. He thrust the girl away\n from him and started toward the inner room.\n\n\n \"Wait here,\" he mouthed.", "\"She was only suffering from ordinary shock,\" Arnold explained.\n \"Seeing that assistant of hers—it was enough to knock anybody out,\n especially a woman. But you stood actual mental contact with\nthem\nfor approximately five minutes. Yes, we know—you talked a lot. It's a\n miracle you're alive, and rational.\"\n\n\n \"But where is she?\" Peter complained. \"You still haven't explained why\n I haven't been able to see her.\"\n\n\n Arnold frowned. \"All right,\" he said. \"I guess you're strong enough to\n take it. She's underground, with the rest of the women and children,\n and a good two-thirds of the male population. That's where you'll go,\n as soon as you're well enough to be moved. We started digging in six\n months ago.\"\n\n\n \"But why?\" Peter whispered.\n\n\n Arnold's strong jaw knotted. \"We're hiding,\" he said. \"Everything else\n has failed.\"" ] ]
train	53269	[ "In Chapter one, what is the significance of describing Mr. Taylor as not having aged much? \n", "Who is Teena and what role does she play in Chapter one and chapter two?\n", "What is the Geiger counter and how exactly is it used in the present chapters? \n", "What dream does Eddie have and why is it significant? \n", "How does Eddie’s interest in radioactivity affect the story’s plot? \n", "Why doesn’t Eddie act excited about Teena going prospecting with him? \n", "Why did Eddie’s mother forget to make dinner? \n", "What is the significance of describing Mr. Ross as a funny person? \n", "How many times does Eddie go over to Teena’s house? What is the common thread, or reason, for Eddie going over there? \n", "How does Teena find out about radioactivity? \n" ]	[ [ "It provides the notion that Mr. Taylor is a fun, understanding, and competent professor. \n", "It provides the notion that despite Mr. Taylor’s dangerous job, the radioactivity hasn’t aged him a day. \n", "It provides a contrast for later in the story, when Mr. Taylor is described as looking aged and wary after the isotope is stolen. \n", "It provides a contrast against Mr. Ross, who is described as older and balding. \n" ], [ "Teena is Eddie’s friend and neighbor. She accompanies Eddie on a hike through the hills behind the college, where he teaches her all about isotopes. \n", "Teena is Eddie’s friend and neighbor. She accompanies him on a prospecting hike, where they don’t find any trace of radioactivity but still enjoy a lunch together. \n", "Teena is Eddie’s friend and neighbor. She accompanies Eddie to Cedar Point, where they are looking for traces of radioactivity. \n", "Teena is Eddie’s friend and neighbor. She accompanies Eddie to Cedar Point, where they eat sandwiches and prospect for radioactivity.\n" ], [ "A Geiger counter is used to measure radioactivity. Mr. Taylor uses it at Cedar Point. \n", "A Geiger counter is used to measure radioactivity. Mr. Taylor uses it to measure the radiation present in the hills behind his college.\n", "A Geiger counter is used to measure radioactivity. Eddie uses it to prospect the hills behind the college.", "A Geiger counter is used to measure radioactivity. Eddie uses it to prospect Cedar Point. \n" ], [ "Eddie has a dream about prospecting with his father at Cedar point. This dream is what inspires him to find out what happened to the missing isotope by searching the hills behind the college. \n", "Eddie has a dream about prospecting with his father’s Geiger counter. The dream is what inspires his hike to Cedar Point. \n", "Eddie has a dream about prospecting with his father’s Geiger counter. The dream is what inspires Eddie to go over to Teena’s house and teach her about isotopes. \n", "Eddie has a dream about prospecting with his father’s Geiger counter. The dream is what inspires the hike he has with Teena. \n" ], [ "It causes major holes for the reader when Eddie doesn’t explain his scientific jargon. \n", "It provides a basic subject matter for Eddie to use to get closer to Teena. \n", "It provides basic subject matter for the story and informs the brunt of Eddie’s characterization. \n", "It is used as a way of putting Eddie in contact with the story’s antagonist: Mr. Ross\n" ], [ "Eddie doesn’t want Teena to come because there isn’t much time left in the day for prospecting Cedar Point. \n", "Eddie has a crush on Teena, and therefore doesn’t want to act too eager and uncool.\n", "Eddie doesn’t want Teena to feel like she is obligated to help him fulfill his dream of finding radioactivity at Cedar Point.\n", "It is implied that Eddie doesn’t want Teena to feel like he knows a lot more science than she does. Eddie feels this will make Teena not like him. \n" ], [ "Eddie forgot to do some of his chores, so she had to do them for him. \n", "Mr. Taylor was injured at work. \n", "Mr. Taylor’s isotope was stolen\n", "Eddie forgot was home earlier than expected, so sinner wasn’t ready yet. \n" ], [ "It provides a stark contrast to the stressed Mr. Ross we meet in Chapter Two. It shows the reader that something has gone horribly wrong at Mr. Ross’s job.\n", "It demonstrates to the reader that Eddie will be able to get along with him, and therefore share what he knows about radiation. \n", "It throws Eddie off the scent of Mr. Ross being a culprit responsible for Mr. Taylor’s missing isotope. \n", "It provides a comparison to Mr. Taylor, who is more successful than Mr. Ross and therefore doesn’t have to rely on humor. \n" ], [ "Three times. Each time concern Eddie’s infatuation with Teena, which is why he makes up excuses like going prospecting at Cedar point. \n", "Twice. Both times concern Eddie’s infatuation with Teena, which is why he makes up excuses like going prospecting for uranium. \n", "Twice. Both times concern something to do with Eddie’s interest in radioactivity. \n", "Three times. Each time concern something to do with Eddie’s interest in radioactivity.\n" ], [ "Eddie teaches her about radioactivity during their hike to Cedar Point.\n", "Eddie teaches her about radioactivity while he helps her finish doing the dishes.\n", "Eddie teaches her about radioactivity when he is explaining the dream he had about Cedar Point.\n", "Eddie teaches Teena and her mother about about radioactivity after the news gets out about Mr. Taylor’s isotope being stolen. \n" ] ]	[ 3, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 3, 1, 3, 4 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "Then Eddie heard the sound of his father’s\n voice coming from the den. There was a\n strange urgent tone in it. The door to the den\n was open. Eddie went through the dining\n room and glanced into the den. His father\n sat stiffly behind his homemade desk, talking\n rapidly into the telephone. Eddie caught only\n the last few sketchy words. Then his father\n placed the telephone in its cradle, glanced up,\n and saw Eddie.\n\n\n If there had been even the slightest doubt\n in Eddie’s mind about something being\n wrong, it vanished now. Mr. Taylor looked\n years older than he had that very morning.\n Worry lay deep in his eyes. He fumbled\n thoughtfully with a pencil, turning it end over\n end on his desk.\n\n\n “Hello, son,” he said. He didn’t even ask\n whether Eddie had discovered any uranium\n ore that day. Always before, he had shown\n genuine interest in Eddie’s prospecting trips.", "Mr. Taylor opened the door. He was a big\n man, broad-shouldered and still thin-waisted.\n Eddie found it easy to believe the stories he\n had heard about his father being an outstanding\n football player in his time. Even his glasses\n and the gray hair at his temples didn’t add\n much age, although Eddie knew it had been\n eighteen years since his father had played his\n last game of college football.\n\n\n “You may use the Geiger counter any time\n you want, Eddie,” Mr. Taylor said, “as long as\n you take good care of it. You figured out where\n you can find some uranium ore?”\n\n\n Eddie smiled sheepishly. “I—I had a\n dream,” he said. “Plain as day. It was out on\n Cedar Point. I was walking along over some\n rocks. Suddenly the Geiger counter began\n clicking like everything.”\n\n13", "24\n\n After putting Sandy on his long chain and\n filling his water dish, Eddie went in the back\n door. He put the Geiger counter in the closet\n and went into the kitchen.\n\n\n “What’s for dinner, Mom?” he asked.\n\n\n Mrs. Taylor turned from the sink. Eddie\n knew at once, just seeing the expression on\n his mother’s face, that something was wrong.\n\n\n “Dinner?” his mother said absently. “It’s\n not quite four o’clock yet, Eddie. Besides,\n dinner may be a little late today.”\n\n\n “But this morning you said it would be\n early,” Eddie reminded her, puzzled.\n\n\n “This morning I didn’t know what might\n happen.”\n\n25", "“No arguments, son,” his father put in\n calmly but firmly. “School vacation doesn’t\n mean that your chores around here are on\n vacation, too. Get at it right away, and you’ll\n still have time to hunt your uranium.\n\n\n “Well,” Mr. Taylor added, excusing himself\n from the table, “I’d better be getting over\n to school. I’m expecting to receive shipment\n of a new radioisotope today.”", "“Why not? You’re in a hurry, aren’t you?\n I can make the sandwiches while you dry the\n silverware.” She smiled, putting tiny crinkles\n in her small, slightly upturned nose. She wore\n her hair in a pony tail. Even though her hair\n was blond all year long, it seemed even\n lighter in the summer. Eddie couldn’t tell\n whether the sun had faded it, or whether her\n deep summer tan simply made her hair look\n lighter by contrast. Maybe both.\n\n\n “Hello, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross said, coming into\n the kitchen. “Looks like Teena put you to\n work.”\n\n\n “She always does, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie said,\n pretending great injury. “Don’t know why I\n keep coming over here.”\n\n\n “I know,” Teena spoke up quickly. “It’s\n because we’re friends, that’s why.”\n\n21", "“Dad,” Eddie said anxiously, “what—what’s\n the matter?”\n\n\n “It shows that much, does it, son?” his\n father said tiredly.\n\n\n “What’s wrong, Dad?” Eddie prompted.\n “Or can’t you tell me?”\n\n\n Mr. Taylor leaned back. “Quite a bit’s\n wrong, Eddie,” he said, “and I guess there’s\n no reason why I shouldn’t tell you. It’ll be in\n the evening papers, anyway.”\n\n26\n\n “Evening papers?”\n\n\n “Eddie, you remember me mentioning this\n morning about that radioisotope shipment I\n was expecting today?”\n\n\n “I remember,” Eddie said. “Did it come?”\n\n\n “It did—and it didn’t,” his father said.", "“I guess not, dear,” Mrs. Taylor said, smiling\n over his hasty retreat. “What are you going\n to do?”\n\n\n “Think I’ll do a little prospecting,” Eddie\n said.\n\n\n “Where?”\n\n\n “Probably in the hills beyond the college,”\n Eddie said. The more he thought about it, the\n more he realized it was a little late in the day\n to go to Cedar Point. The best way to get\n there was by rowboat across Moon Bay, and\n that was too long a row to be starting now.\n Besides, there were plenty of other places\n around the outskirts of Oceanview where\n likely looking rock formations invited search\n with a Geiger counter.\n\n18\n\n “Are you going alone?” his mother asked.", "“What does that mean, Dad?” Eddie asked,\n puzzled.\n\n\n “The delivery truck arrived at the school\n with it,” his father explained, “but while the\n driver was inquiring where to put it, the container\n disappeared.”\n\n\n “Disappeared?”\n\n\n “The radioisotope was stolen, Eddie,” his\n father said slowly. “Stolen right out from\n under our noses!”\n\n27\nCHAPTER TWO\nAt the moment, Eddie didn’t pry for further\n information on the theft of the valuable radioactive\n isotope. His father had plenty on his\n mind, as it was. The main information was in\n the evening\nGlobe\n, which Eddie rushed out\n to get as soon as he heard it plop onto the\n front porch.\n\n\n He took the newspaper to his father to read\n first. After having finished, Mr. Taylor handed\n the paper to Eddie and leaned back thoughtfully\n in his chair.\n\n28", "“Eddie was telling us about atoms,” Teena’s\n mother said. “Did you know there were three\n million billion of them in a period?”\n\n\n “How many in a comma?” Mr. Ross said to\n Eddie, then added quickly, “forget it, Eddie.\n It wasn’t very funny. I—I’m afraid I don’t feel\n very funny tonight.”\n\n\n “Sit down, dear,” Mrs. Ross said. “I’ll warm\n your dinner. You didn’t sound very cheerful\n when you called to say you would be late. How\n did everything go at the plant today?”\n\n\n “Not so good,” Teena’s father said tiredly.\n “In fact, not good at all.”\n\n\n Problems. It seemed that everyone had\n problems, Eddie thought, as he started to\n leave.", "“Oh, guess I’ll stop by and see if Teena\n wants to go,” Eddie answered casually. He\n tried to make it sound as though he would\n be doing Teena Ross a big favor. After all,\n she was only a girl. Eddie didn’t figure a girl\n would make a very good uranium prospecting\n partner, but most of the fellows he knew were\n away at camp, or vacationing with their folks,\n or something like that.\n\n\n “She’ll enjoy it, I’m sure,” his mother said.\n\n\n “I’ll take Sandy, too,” Eddie said. “He needs\n the exercise.”\n\n\n “That’s a good idea, dear. Be back in time\n for an early dinner.”\n\n\n Eddie let Sandy off his chain. The taffy-colored\n cocker spaniel yipped wildly over his\n freedom, racing back and forth as Eddie\n started down the street.\n\n19", "“They’ve got it pretty straight, at that,” Mr.\n Taylor said, “but I’m afraid this is going to\n stir up quite a bit of trouble.”\n\n\n “It wasn’t your fault, was it, Dad?” Eddie\n defended.\n\n\n “It was as much mine as anybody’s, son,”\n his father said. “Probably more so. After all,\n I am head of the department. I knew about\n the shipment. That should make it my responsibility\n to see that it was properly received\n and placed in our atomic-materials storage\n vault. But there is little point in trying to\n place the blame on anyone. I’m willing to accept\n that part of it. The important thing is\n that we recover that radioisotope. Not only is\n it of a secret nature, but it is also dangerously\n radioactive if improperly handled.”\n\n\n “But—but wasn’t it in a safe container?”\n Eddie asked.\n\n29", "Eddie pulled on his trousers and T shirt\n and went into the bathroom. He washed hurriedly,\n knowing that even if he missed a spot\n or two, he was fairly safe. During the summer\n months his freckles got so thick and dark that\n it would take a magnifying glass to detect any\n small smudges of dirt hiding among them. He\n plastered some water on his dark-red hair,\n pushed a comb through it, and shrugged as it\n snapped back almost to its original position.\n Oh, well, he had tried.\n\n14\n\n He grinned into the mirror, reached a\n finger into his mouth, and unhooked the\n small rubber bands from his tooth braces.\n He dropped them into the waste basket. He’d\n put fresh ones in after breakfast.\n\n\n He brushed his teeth carefully, taking particular\n pains around the metal braces. The\n tooth-straightening orthodontist had warned\n him about letting food gather around the\n metal clamps. It could start cavities.", "Eddie laughed. “I sure wouldn’t want the\n job of trying to feed a herd of them the size of\n a period,” he said. “Did you know that there\n are about three million billion atoms of carbon\n in a single period printed at the end of a\n sentence. That’s how small atoms are.”\n\n\n “Three million billion is a lot of something,”\n a man’s voice spoke behind him.\n “What are we talking about, Eddie?”\n\n\n “Oh, hello, Mr. Ross,” Eddie said, turning\n around and standing up. “I didn’t hear you\n come in.”\n\n44\n\n Teena’s father was a medium-sized man\n with light-brown hair which was getting somewhat\n thin on top. He was usually quite cheerful\n and full of fun, but tonight his face seemed\n unusually drawn and sober. He stepped to the\n table, leaned over, and gave both Teena and\n Mrs. Ross a kiss on the cheek.", "YOUNG READERS\n\n Atom Mystery\n11\nCHAPTER ONE\nIt was only a dream. Eddie Taylor would like\n to have finished it, but the bar of morning sunlight\n poking in under the window shade pried\n his eyes open. The dream fled. Eddie kicked\n off the sheet, swung his feet to the floor, and\n groped under the bed for his tennis shoes.\n\n\n He heard his father’s heavy footsteps in the\n hallway. They stopped outside of his bedroom\n door.\n\n\n “You awake, Eddie?”\n\n\n “I’m awake, Dad,” Eddie answered.\n\n\n “Breakfast’s ready. Get washed and\n dressed.”\n\n12\n\n “Be right there,” Eddie said. Then, remembering\n the dream, he added, “Oh, Dad, is it\n all right if I use the Geiger counter today?”", "“Oh, we’re glad you did, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross\n said. “I’m afraid too few of us know anything\n about this atom business.”\n\n43\n\n “That’s right, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie agreed.\n “People should talk more and read more about\n it. After all, this is an atomic age. We might as\n well face it. My father says that in horse-and-buggy\n days everyone knew how to feed a horse\n and grease a wagon wheel. They knew what was\n needed to get the work done. But now that\n atoms are being harnessed to do the work, not\n many people even bother to find out what an\n atom is.”\n\n\n Mrs. Ross smiled. “I guess you’re right,\n Eddie,” she said, “but I wouldn’t quite know\n how to go about feeding an atom.”\n\n\n “Or greasing one,” Teena added.", "“Well, you were together most of the day,”\n his mother said, “but I guess it’s all right. Be\n back in about an hour, though.”\n\n\n It was a balmy evening. On such evenings,\n he and Teena sometimes walked along the\n beach barefoot, collecting sea shells. Today\n Eddie had no desire to do that. He ran down\n the block.\n\n\n Teena answered his knock.\n\n\n “Come on in, Eddie,” she invited, seeming\n surprised to see him. “Mother and I are just\n finishing dinner.”\n\n\n “Oh, I figured you’d be through by now,”\n Eddie apologized, following her inside.\n\n35\n\n “Hello, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross said, but she\n didn’t seem as cheerful as usual.", "They walked past the college campus, and\n toward the rocky foothills beyond. At various\n rock mounds and outcroppings, Eddie\n switched on the Geiger counter. The needle\n of the dial on the black box wavered slightly.\n A slow clicking came through the earphones,\n but Eddie knew these indicated no more than\n a normal background count. There were slight\n traces of radioactivity in almost all earth or\n rocks. It was in the air itself, caused by mysterious\n and ever-present cosmic rays, so there\n was always a mild background count when\n the Geiger counter was turned on; but to\n mean anything, the needle had to jump far\n ahead on the gauge, and the clicking through\n the earphones had to speed up until it sounded\n almost like bacon frying in a hot skillet.\n\n23\n\n There was none of that today. After they\n had hiked and searched most of the forenoon,\n Eddie said, “We might as well call it a day,\n Teena. Doesn’t seem to be anything out here.”", "“It’s all right with me,” Teena agreed,\n plucking foxtails from Sandy’s ears. “Pretty\n hot, anyway. Let’s eat our sandwiches and go\n back home.”\n\n\n “All right,” Eddie said. “You know, one of\n these days I’d like to go out to Cedar Point\n and scout around. Maybe we’ll find something\n there.” Then he told Teena about his dream.\n\n\n Teena smiled. “A dream sure isn’t much to\n go on,” she said, “but they say it’s pretty out on\n Cedar Point. I’ll go any time you want to,\n Eddie.” She handed him one of the sandwiches.\n\n\n It was midafternoon by the time they arrived\n back at Teena’s house. They worked a while\n on a new jigsaw puzzle Teena had received\n on a recent birthday. Then Eddie said good-by\n and went on down the street toward his\n own home.", "“I’ll only be a minute.” She pushed the\n screen door open for him. “I’ll make us some\n sandwiches.”\n\n\n “Stay here, Sandy,” Eddie said. “Sit.” The\n dog minded, although he looked a bit rebellious.\n\n20\n\n Eddie went inside and followed Teena to\n the kitchen. He felt triumphant about the\n sandwiches.\n\n\n Teena tossed him a dish towel. “You dry\n them,” she said.\n\n\n “Who, me?”", "Dusty footprints on the pavement around\n the rear of the truck indicated that two men\n had carried out the theft. A heavy iron pry bar\n had been dropped at the rear of the truck after\n the lock was sprung. It was a common type\n used by carpenters. There were no fingerprints\n or other identifying marks on it. The footprints\n were barely visible and of no help other\n than to indicate that two men were involved\n in the crime.\n\n31\n\n “Dad,” Eddie asked, looking up from the\n paper, “how could anyone carry away something\n weighing fifty pounds without being noticed?”" ], [ "“Oh, guess I’ll stop by and see if Teena\n wants to go,” Eddie answered casually. He\n tried to make it sound as though he would\n be doing Teena Ross a big favor. After all,\n she was only a girl. Eddie didn’t figure a girl\n would make a very good uranium prospecting\n partner, but most of the fellows he knew were\n away at camp, or vacationing with their folks,\n or something like that.\n\n\n “She’ll enjoy it, I’m sure,” his mother said.\n\n\n “I’ll take Sandy, too,” Eddie said. “He needs\n the exercise.”\n\n\n “That’s a good idea, dear. Be back in time\n for an early dinner.”\n\n\n Eddie let Sandy off his chain. The taffy-colored\n cocker spaniel yipped wildly over his\n freedom, racing back and forth as Eddie\n started down the street.\n\n19", "“It’s all right with me,” Teena agreed,\n plucking foxtails from Sandy’s ears. “Pretty\n hot, anyway. Let’s eat our sandwiches and go\n back home.”\n\n\n “All right,” Eddie said. “You know, one of\n these days I’d like to go out to Cedar Point\n and scout around. Maybe we’ll find something\n there.” Then he told Teena about his dream.\n\n\n Teena smiled. “A dream sure isn’t much to\n go on,” she said, “but they say it’s pretty out on\n Cedar Point. I’ll go any time you want to,\n Eddie.” She handed him one of the sandwiches.\n\n\n It was midafternoon by the time they arrived\n back at Teena’s house. They worked a while\n on a new jigsaw puzzle Teena had received\n on a recent birthday. Then Eddie said good-by\n and went on down the street toward his\n own home.", "“I’ll only be a minute.” She pushed the\n screen door open for him. “I’ll make us some\n sandwiches.”\n\n\n “Stay here, Sandy,” Eddie said. “Sit.” The\n dog minded, although he looked a bit rebellious.\n\n20\n\n Eddie went inside and followed Teena to\n the kitchen. He felt triumphant about the\n sandwiches.\n\n\n Teena tossed him a dish towel. “You dry\n them,” she said.\n\n\n “Who, me?”", "“Well, you were together most of the day,”\n his mother said, “but I guess it’s all right. Be\n back in about an hour, though.”\n\n\n It was a balmy evening. On such evenings,\n he and Teena sometimes walked along the\n beach barefoot, collecting sea shells. Today\n Eddie had no desire to do that. He ran down\n the block.\n\n\n Teena answered his knock.\n\n\n “Come on in, Eddie,” she invited, seeming\n surprised to see him. “Mother and I are just\n finishing dinner.”\n\n\n “Oh, I figured you’d be through by now,”\n Eddie apologized, following her inside.\n\n35\n\n “Hello, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross said, but she\n didn’t seem as cheerful as usual.", "“Why not? You’re in a hurry, aren’t you?\n I can make the sandwiches while you dry the\n silverware.” She smiled, putting tiny crinkles\n in her small, slightly upturned nose. She wore\n her hair in a pony tail. Even though her hair\n was blond all year long, it seemed even\n lighter in the summer. Eddie couldn’t tell\n whether the sun had faded it, or whether her\n deep summer tan simply made her hair look\n lighter by contrast. Maybe both.\n\n\n “Hello, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross said, coming into\n the kitchen. “Looks like Teena put you to\n work.”\n\n\n “She always does, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie said,\n pretending great injury. “Don’t know why I\n keep coming over here.”\n\n\n “I know,” Teena spoke up quickly. “It’s\n because we’re friends, that’s why.”\n\n21", "Christina Ross—whom everybody called\n Teena—lived at the far end of the block.\n Eddie went around to the side door of the\n light-green stucco house and knocked.\n\n\n “Oh, hi, Eddie,” Teena greeted him, appearing\n at the screen door. “I was hoping\n you’d come over.”\n\n\n “Well, I—I just happened to be going by,”\n Eddie said. “Thought you might want to\n watch me do a little prospecting with the Geiger\n counter. But maybe you’re too busy.”\n\n\n That’s how to handle it, Eddie thought.\n Don’t act anxious. Let Teena be anxious.\n Then maybe she’ll even offer to bring along\n a couple of sandwiches or some fruit.\n\n\n “Oh, I’d love to go,” Teena said eagerly,\n “but I’m just finishing the dishes. Come on\n in.”\n\n\n “I’m in kind of a hurry.”", "“I agree,” Mrs. Ross said. “But even if you\n don’t find it, you both seem to enjoy your\n hikes.”\n\n22\n\n “Oh, yes, it’s fun, Mother,” Teena replied,\n wrapping wax paper around a sandwich.\n “Guess I’m ready. I’ve got a bone for Sandy,\n too.”\n\n\n “Don’t go too far out from town,” Mrs.\n Ross cautioned, as Eddie picked up the Geiger\n counter. “And stick near the main roads.\n You know the rules.”\n\n\n “We sure do, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie assured\n her. “And we’ll be back early.”", "Eddie knew she was right. They were\n friends—good friends. They had been ever\n since Eddie’s family had moved to Oceanview\n and his father had become head of the college’s\n atomic-science department. In fact, their\n parents were close friends, also. Teena’s father\n was chief engineer for the Acme Aviation\n Company, one of the coast town’s largest\n manufacturing concerns.\n\n\n “Well, I’ll be glad to finish them, Eddie,”\n Mrs. Ross offered. “I know how boys detest\n doing dishes.”\n\n\n “Oh, I don’t really mind, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie\n said. “Besides, Teena’s making sandwiches to\n take with us.”\n\n\n “Another prospecting trip?” Teena’s\n mother glanced at the Geiger counter which\n Eddie had set carefully on the dinette table.\n\n\n “I still think there must be some uranium\n around here,” Eddie insisted. “And we can\n find it if anyone can.”", "“Good evening, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie said. “I—I\n hope I’m not making a pest of myself.” He\n looked around for Mr. Ross, but Teena’s\n father apparently hadn’t arrived home from\n Acme Aircraft yet. There wasn’t a place set for\n him at the table, either.\n\n\n “You’re never a pest, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross assured\n him. “I was going to call your mother in\n a little while about that newspaper write-up.”\n\n\n “Oh, you read it?” Eddie said.\n\n\n “How could anyone miss it?” Teena said.\n “Right on the front page.”\n\n\n “I suppose your father is quite concerned\n over it,” Teena’s mother said.\n\n\n “Oh, yes,” Eddie affirmed. “He was the one\n who ordered the isotope.”\n\n\n “What’s an isotope?” Teena asked.", "They walked past the college campus, and\n toward the rocky foothills beyond. At various\n rock mounds and outcroppings, Eddie\n switched on the Geiger counter. The needle\n of the dial on the black box wavered slightly.\n A slow clicking came through the earphones,\n but Eddie knew these indicated no more than\n a normal background count. There were slight\n traces of radioactivity in almost all earth or\n rocks. It was in the air itself, caused by mysterious\n and ever-present cosmic rays, so there\n was always a mild background count when\n the Geiger counter was turned on; but to\n mean anything, the needle had to jump far\n ahead on the gauge, and the clicking through\n the earphones had to speed up until it sounded\n almost like bacon frying in a hot skillet.\n\n23\n\n There was none of that today. After they\n had hiked and searched most of the forenoon,\n Eddie said, “We might as well call it a day,\n Teena. Doesn’t seem to be anything out here.”", "“Eddie was telling us about atoms,” Teena’s\n mother said. “Did you know there were three\n million billion of them in a period?”\n\n\n “How many in a comma?” Mr. Ross said to\n Eddie, then added quickly, “forget it, Eddie.\n It wasn’t very funny. I—I’m afraid I don’t feel\n very funny tonight.”\n\n\n “Sit down, dear,” Mrs. Ross said. “I’ll warm\n your dinner. You didn’t sound very cheerful\n when you called to say you would be late. How\n did everything go at the plant today?”\n\n\n “Not so good,” Teena’s father said tiredly.\n “In fact, not good at all.”\n\n\n Problems. It seemed that everyone had\n problems, Eddie thought, as he started to\n leave.", "Eddie laughed. “I sure wouldn’t want the\n job of trying to feed a herd of them the size of\n a period,” he said. “Did you know that there\n are about three million billion atoms of carbon\n in a single period printed at the end of a\n sentence. That’s how small atoms are.”\n\n\n “Three million billion is a lot of something,”\n a man’s voice spoke behind him.\n “What are we talking about, Eddie?”\n\n\n “Oh, hello, Mr. Ross,” Eddie said, turning\n around and standing up. “I didn’t hear you\n come in.”\n\n44\n\n Teena’s father was a medium-sized man\n with light-brown hair which was getting somewhat\n thin on top. He was usually quite cheerful\n and full of fun, but tonight his face seemed\n unusually drawn and sober. He stepped to the\n table, leaned over, and gave both Teena and\n Mrs. Ross a kiss on the cheek.", "Eddie nodded. It was even more serious\n than its threat of danger to anyone who\n handled it carelessly. It was a new isotope—a\n secret isotope. His father hadn’t said whether\n it had been developed for curing things or for\n destroying things. But many radioisotopes\n could do either; it depended on how they were\n used. Eddie assumed that anyone who would\n stoop to stealing isotopes more than likely\n would be interested in their ability to destroy\n rather than their ability to benefit mankind.\n\n\n “Well, I certainly do hope everything works\n out all right,” Teena’s mother said.\n\n\n “So do I,” Teena agreed.\n\n\n Eddie glanced at the kitchen clock. “Oh,\n boy,” he said, “I’d better be heading back\n home. I didn’t mean to come over here and\n talk so long.”", "“Perhaps to some other country.”\n\n\n “Then—then you mean whoever stole it\n were spies!” Eddie exclaimed breathlessly.\n\n\n “That’s entirely possible,” his father said.\n “In fact, it’s the only logical explanation I can\n think of. People simply don’t go around stealing\n radioactive isotopes without a mighty important\n reason.”\n\n34\n\n “Dinner’s ready,” Eddie’s mother called\n from the kitchen.\n\n\n During dinner Eddie wasn’t sure just what\n he was eating. The idea of spies stealing atomic\n materials kept building up in his mind. By the\n time dessert was finished, he was anxious to\n talk with someone, yet he knew he shouldn’t\n bother his father with any more questions. He\n asked if he could go over and visit with Teena\n for a while.", "“My, that’s interesting, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross\n said.\n\n\n “I’ve seen them do it,” Eddie said proudly,\n then added, “from behind a protective shield,\n of course. When the material has soaked up\n enough radiation, they pull it back out. They\n say it’s ‘cooked.’”\n\n\n “You mean it’s hot?” Teena asked.\n\n\n “It’s hot,” Eddie said, “but not like if it\n came out of a stove. By hot, they mean it’s\n radioactive. If you touched it, or even got near\n it, you would get burned, but you probably\n wouldn’t even know it for a while. It would be\n a radiation burn. That’s a kind of burn you\n don’t feel, but it destroys your blood cells and\n tissues, and—well, you’ve had it.”", "“I remember it,” Teena said.\n\n\n “Well, the reactor is about four stories\n high,” Eddie went on. “They call it a uranium\n ‘pile.’ It’s made up of hundreds and hundreds\n of graphite bricks. That’s where they get the\n name ‘pile’—from brick pile. Anyway, scattered\n around in between the bricks are small\n bits of uranium. Uranium atoms are radioactive.\n That is, they keep splitting up and sending\n out rays.”\n\n\n “Why do they do that?” Teena asked.\n\n37", "“Goodness. Eight feet is a lot of cement.”\n\n\n “It takes a lot to stop radioactive atomic\n particles,” Eddie explained. “Especially the\n gamma rays. They’re the fastest and most dangerous,\n and the hardest to stop. Alpha and beta\n rays are fairly easy to stop. But the gamma\n rays are regular high-velocity invisible bullets.\n They’ll go right through a stone wall unless\n it’s plenty thick. Of course, you can’t see them.\n Not with even the most powerful microscope\n in the world.”\n\n39\n\n “I wouldn’t want to work around a place\n where I might get shot at by—by dangerous\n rays you can’t even see,” Teena said.", "“What kind was the one stolen from the\n college today?” Teena asked.\n\n\n “Dad didn’t say exactly,” Eddie answered,\n “except he did say that if whoever took it\n didn’t know what he was doing and opened up\n the lead capsule, it could kill him. Of course,\n even the mild isotopes are deadly if they’re not\n handled right.”\n\n\n “My goodness, it is a serious matter, isn’t\n it?” Mrs. Ross said.\n\n42", "24\n\n After putting Sandy on his long chain and\n filling his water dish, Eddie went in the back\n door. He put the Geiger counter in the closet\n and went into the kitchen.\n\n\n “What’s for dinner, Mom?” he asked.\n\n\n Mrs. Taylor turned from the sink. Eddie\n knew at once, just seeing the expression on\n his mother’s face, that something was wrong.\n\n\n “Dinner?” his mother said absently. “It’s\n not quite four o’clock yet, Eddie. Besides,\n dinner may be a little late today.”\n\n\n “But this morning you said it would be\n early,” Eddie reminded her, puzzled.\n\n\n “This morning I didn’t know what might\n happen.”\n\n25", "“Oh, we’re glad you did, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross\n said. “I’m afraid too few of us know anything\n about this atom business.”\n\n43\n\n “That’s right, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie agreed.\n “People should talk more and read more about\n it. After all, this is an atomic age. We might as\n well face it. My father says that in horse-and-buggy\n days everyone knew how to feed a horse\n and grease a wagon wheel. They knew what was\n needed to get the work done. But now that\n atoms are being harnessed to do the work, not\n many people even bother to find out what an\n atom is.”\n\n\n Mrs. Ross smiled. “I guess you’re right,\n Eddie,” she said, “but I wouldn’t quite know\n how to go about feeding an atom.”\n\n\n “Or greasing one,” Teena added." ], [ "“Wouldn’t think of leaving it home,” his\n father said, smiling. “By the way, I put new\n batteries in it the other day. Take it easy on\n them. Remember to switch it off when you’re\n not actually using it.”\n\n\n “I will,” Eddie promised. He had forgotten\n several times before, weakening the batteries.\n\n17\n\n It took Eddie over an hour to sort out the\n newspapers and magazines in the garage, tie\n them in neat bundles, and place them out on\n the front curb for the Goodwill pickup. By\n that time the sun was high overhead. It had\n driven off the coolness which the ocean air\n had provided during the earlier hours.\n\n\n “Anything else, Mom?” he asked, returning\n to the house and getting the Geiger counter\n out of the closet. He edged toward the back\n door before his mother had much time to\n think of something more for him to do.", "24\n\n After putting Sandy on his long chain and\n filling his water dish, Eddie went in the back\n door. He put the Geiger counter in the closet\n and went into the kitchen.\n\n\n “What’s for dinner, Mom?” he asked.\n\n\n Mrs. Taylor turned from the sink. Eddie\n knew at once, just seeing the expression on\n his mother’s face, that something was wrong.\n\n\n “Dinner?” his mother said absently. “It’s\n not quite four o’clock yet, Eddie. Besides,\n dinner may be a little late today.”\n\n\n “But this morning you said it would be\n early,” Eddie reminded her, puzzled.\n\n\n “This morning I didn’t know what might\n happen.”\n\n25", "Mr. Taylor opened the door. He was a big\n man, broad-shouldered and still thin-waisted.\n Eddie found it easy to believe the stories he\n had heard about his father being an outstanding\n football player in his time. Even his glasses\n and the gray hair at his temples didn’t add\n much age, although Eddie knew it had been\n eighteen years since his father had played his\n last game of college football.\n\n\n “You may use the Geiger counter any time\n you want, Eddie,” Mr. Taylor said, “as long as\n you take good care of it. You figured out where\n you can find some uranium ore?”\n\n\n Eddie smiled sheepishly. “I—I had a\n dream,” he said. “Plain as day. It was out on\n Cedar Point. I was walking along over some\n rocks. Suddenly the Geiger counter began\n clicking like everything.”\n\n13", "They walked past the college campus, and\n toward the rocky foothills beyond. At various\n rock mounds and outcroppings, Eddie\n switched on the Geiger counter. The needle\n of the dial on the black box wavered slightly.\n A slow clicking came through the earphones,\n but Eddie knew these indicated no more than\n a normal background count. There were slight\n traces of radioactivity in almost all earth or\n rocks. It was in the air itself, caused by mysterious\n and ever-present cosmic rays, so there\n was always a mild background count when\n the Geiger counter was turned on; but to\n mean anything, the needle had to jump far\n ahead on the gauge, and the clicking through\n the earphones had to speed up until it sounded\n almost like bacon frying in a hot skillet.\n\n23\n\n There was none of that today. After they\n had hiked and searched most of the forenoon,\n Eddie said, “We might as well call it a day,\n Teena. Doesn’t seem to be anything out here.”", "YOUNG READERS\n\n Atom Mystery\n11\nCHAPTER ONE\nIt was only a dream. Eddie Taylor would like\n to have finished it, but the bar of morning sunlight\n poking in under the window shade pried\n his eyes open. The dream fled. Eddie kicked\n off the sheet, swung his feet to the floor, and\n groped under the bed for his tennis shoes.\n\n\n He heard his father’s heavy footsteps in the\n hallway. They stopped outside of his bedroom\n door.\n\n\n “You awake, Eddie?”\n\n\n “I’m awake, Dad,” Eddie answered.\n\n\n “Breakfast’s ready. Get washed and\n dressed.”\n\n12\n\n “Be right there,” Eddie said. Then, remembering\n the dream, he added, “Oh, Dad, is it\n all right if I use the Geiger counter today?”", "“Goodness. Eight feet is a lot of cement.”\n\n\n “It takes a lot to stop radioactive atomic\n particles,” Eddie explained. “Especially the\n gamma rays. They’re the fastest and most dangerous,\n and the hardest to stop. Alpha and beta\n rays are fairly easy to stop. But the gamma\n rays are regular high-velocity invisible bullets.\n They’ll go right through a stone wall unless\n it’s plenty thick. Of course, you can’t see them.\n Not with even the most powerful microscope\n in the world.”\n\n39\n\n “I wouldn’t want to work around a place\n where I might get shot at by—by dangerous\n rays you can’t even see,” Teena said.", "“I agree,” Mrs. Ross said. “But even if you\n don’t find it, you both seem to enjoy your\n hikes.”\n\n22\n\n “Oh, yes, it’s fun, Mother,” Teena replied,\n wrapping wax paper around a sandwich.\n “Guess I’m ready. I’ve got a bone for Sandy,\n too.”\n\n\n “Don’t go too far out from town,” Mrs.\n Ross cautioned, as Eddie picked up the Geiger\n counter. “And stick near the main roads.\n You know the rules.”\n\n\n “We sure do, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie assured\n her. “And we’ll be back early.”", "“Dad,” Eddie said anxiously, “what—what’s\n the matter?”\n\n\n “It shows that much, does it, son?” his\n father said tiredly.\n\n\n “What’s wrong, Dad?” Eddie prompted.\n “Or can’t you tell me?”\n\n\n Mr. Taylor leaned back. “Quite a bit’s\n wrong, Eddie,” he said, “and I guess there’s\n no reason why I shouldn’t tell you. It’ll be in\n the evening papers, anyway.”\n\n26\n\n “Evening papers?”\n\n\n “Eddie, you remember me mentioning this\n morning about that radioisotope shipment I\n was expecting today?”\n\n\n “I remember,” Eddie said. “Did it come?”\n\n\n “It did—and it didn’t,” his father said.", "“I guess not, dear,” Mrs. Taylor said, smiling\n over his hasty retreat. “What are you going\n to do?”\n\n\n “Think I’ll do a little prospecting,” Eddie\n said.\n\n\n “Where?”\n\n\n “Probably in the hills beyond the college,”\n Eddie said. The more he thought about it, the\n more he realized it was a little late in the day\n to go to Cedar Point. The best way to get\n there was by rowboat across Moon Bay, and\n that was too long a row to be starting now.\n Besides, there were plenty of other places\n around the outskirts of Oceanview where\n likely looking rock formations invited search\n with a Geiger counter.\n\n18\n\n “Are you going alone?” his mother asked.", "Christina Ross—whom everybody called\n Teena—lived at the far end of the block.\n Eddie went around to the side door of the\n light-green stucco house and knocked.\n\n\n “Oh, hi, Eddie,” Teena greeted him, appearing\n at the screen door. “I was hoping\n you’d come over.”\n\n\n “Well, I—I just happened to be going by,”\n Eddie said. “Thought you might want to\n watch me do a little prospecting with the Geiger\n counter. But maybe you’re too busy.”\n\n\n That’s how to handle it, Eddie thought.\n Don’t act anxious. Let Teena be anxious.\n Then maybe she’ll even offer to bring along\n a couple of sandwiches or some fruit.\n\n\n “Oh, I’d love to go,” Teena said eagerly,\n “but I’m just finishing the dishes. Come on\n in.”\n\n\n “I’m in kind of a hurry.”", "“But the atomic piles control the reaction,”\n Eddie said. “The graphite bricks keep the\n splitting-up atoms apart so one neutron won’t\n go smashing into other atoms unless they want\n it to. They have ways of controlling it so that\n only as much radiation builds up as they want.\n You can even hear the reactor hum as the radioactive\n rays go tearing through it. But by\n careful tending, the scientists keep the atomic\n collisions far enough apart so the thing doesn’t\n blow up.”\n\n\n “Boy, that sounds dangerous,” Teena said.\n\n\n “Well, they know just how to do it,” Eddie\n replied.\n\n\n “Aren’t the rays dangerous?” Mrs. Ross\n asked.\n\n\n “I’ll say they’re dangerous,” Eddie said.\n “But the whole pile is covered by a shield of\n concrete about eight feet thick. That keeps the\n rays from getting out and injuring the workmen.”", "“My, that’s interesting, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross\n said.\n\n\n “I’ve seen them do it,” Eddie said proudly,\n then added, “from behind a protective shield,\n of course. When the material has soaked up\n enough radiation, they pull it back out. They\n say it’s ‘cooked.’”\n\n\n “You mean it’s hot?” Teena asked.\n\n\n “It’s hot,” Eddie said, “but not like if it\n came out of a stove. By hot, they mean it’s\n radioactive. If you touched it, or even got near\n it, you would get burned, but you probably\n wouldn’t even know it for a while. It would be\n a radiation burn. That’s a kind of burn you\n don’t feel, but it destroys your blood cells and\n tissues, and—well, you’ve had it.”", "“I don’t see what anyone would want with\n a radioisotope,” Eddie said. “Maybe they figured\n there was something else inside of that\n lead capsule.”\n\n\n “That’s unlikely, son,” Mr. Taylor said.\n “Believe me, it was no common theft. Nor\n were the thieves ordinary thieves. That isotope\n was a new one. A very secret one. Our job at\n the college was to conduct various tests with it\n in order to find out exactly how it could best\n be put to use as a cure for disease, or for sterilizing\n food, or even as a source of power.”\n\n\n “Power?” Eddie said. “Boy, it must have\n been a strong isotope.” He knew that the\n strength of radioisotopes could be controlled\n largely by the length of time they were allowed\n to “cook” in an atomic reactor and soak up\n radioactivity.\n\n33", "“Of course,” his father said. “There were\n only two ounces of it in a fifty-pound lead\n capsule. As long as it remains in that capsule\n it’s safe. As you know, the lead prevents any\n radiation from escaping. Out of that capsule,\n however, those two ounces of radioisotope can\n be very dangerous.”\n\n\n “Fifty pounds,” Eddie said thoughtfully.\n “That’s a pretty big thing to steal, isn’t it?”\n\n\n “Not when it’s lead, son,” his father replied.\n “Not much bigger than a two-quart\n milk bottle, in fact.”\n\n\n “Even at that, no kid could have taken it,”\n Eddie said.\n\n\n “Kid?” His father smiled thinly. “We don’t\n think it was any kid, Eddie. Not by a long\n shot. The whole thing was carefully planned\n and carefully carried out. It was not the work\n of amateurs.”", "“I’m not sure I know, either,” Mrs. Ross\n said. “Maybe we could understand more of\n what it’s all about if you could explain what a\n radioisotope is, Eddie.”\n\n36\n\n “Well,” Eddie said slowly, “it’s not easy to\n explain, but I’ll try. You know how rare\n uranium is. There’s not nearly enough of it to\n fill all the needs for radioactive materials. Besides,\n pure uranium is so powerful and expensive\n and dangerous to handle that it’s not\n a very good idea to try using it in its true form.\n So they build an atomic reactor like the one at\n Drake Ridge.”\n\n\n “We’ve driven by it,” Mrs. Ross said. “My,\n it’s a big place.”\n\n\n “I’ll say,” Eddie agreed. “Of course, only\n one building holds the reactor itself. It’s the\n biggest building near the center.”", "“I would,” Eddie said. “Everyone is carefully\n protected. They see to that. Well, anyway,\n if all of those uranium atoms were shooting\n radioactive rays around inside of that pile\n and doing nothing, there would be an awful\n lot of energy going to waste. So the atomic\n scientists take certain elements which aren’t\n radioactive, but can be made radioactive, and\n shove small pieces of them into holes drilled\n in the pile.”\n\n\n “Isn’t that dangerous?” Teena asked.\n\n\n “They don’t shove them in with their bare\n hands,” Eddie said, trying not to show exasperation.\n “They use long holders to push the\n small chunks of material into the holes in the\n reactor. Then, as those uranium atoms keep\n splitting up and shooting particles around inside\n of the pile, some of them smack into the\n chunks of material, and stick there. Most elements\n will soak up radiation, just like a sponge\n soaks up water.”\n\n40", "“They’ve got it pretty straight, at that,” Mr.\n Taylor said, “but I’m afraid this is going to\n stir up quite a bit of trouble.”\n\n\n “It wasn’t your fault, was it, Dad?” Eddie\n defended.\n\n\n “It was as much mine as anybody’s, son,”\n his father said. “Probably more so. After all,\n I am head of the department. I knew about\n the shipment. That should make it my responsibility\n to see that it was properly received\n and placed in our atomic-materials storage\n vault. But there is little point in trying to\n place the blame on anyone. I’m willing to accept\n that part of it. The important thing is\n that we recover that radioisotope. Not only is\n it of a secret nature, but it is also dangerously\n radioactive if improperly handled.”\n\n\n “But—but wasn’t it in a safe container?”\n Eddie asked.\n\n29", "“I remember it,” Teena said.\n\n\n “Well, the reactor is about four stories\n high,” Eddie went on. “They call it a uranium\n ‘pile.’ It’s made up of hundreds and hundreds\n of graphite bricks. That’s where they get the\n name ‘pile’—from brick pile. Anyway, scattered\n around in between the bricks are small\n bits of uranium. Uranium atoms are radioactive.\n That is, they keep splitting up and sending\n out rays.”\n\n\n “Why do they do that?” Teena asked.\n\n37", "“Why don’t college professors get summer\n vacations, too?” Eddie asked. One reason for\n asking that particular question was to keep\n from prying deeper into the subject of the\n radioisotope. Much of his father’s work at\n Oceanview College was of a secret nature.\n Eddie had learned not to ask questions about\n it. His father usually volunteered any information\n he wanted known, so Eddie stuck to\n questions which could and would be answered.\n\n\n “We get vacations,” his father said. “But—well,\n my work is a little different, you know.\n At the speed atomic science is moving today,\n we simply can’t afford to waste time. But don’t\n worry. We’ll take a week or so off before school\n starts in the fall. Maybe head for the mountains\n with our tent and sleeping bags.”\n\n\n “And Geiger counter?” Eddie asked\n eagerly.", "“What does that mean, Dad?” Eddie asked,\n puzzled.\n\n\n “The delivery truck arrived at the school\n with it,” his father explained, “but while the\n driver was inquiring where to put it, the container\n disappeared.”\n\n\n “Disappeared?”\n\n\n “The radioisotope was stolen, Eddie,” his\n father said slowly. “Stolen right out from\n under our noses!”\n\n27\nCHAPTER TWO\nAt the moment, Eddie didn’t pry for further\n information on the theft of the valuable radioactive\n isotope. His father had plenty on his\n mind, as it was. The main information was in\n the evening\nGlobe\n, which Eddie rushed out\n to get as soon as he heard it plop onto the\n front porch.\n\n\n He took the newspaper to his father to read\n first. After having finished, Mr. Taylor handed\n the paper to Eddie and leaned back thoughtfully\n in his chair.\n\n28" ], [ "“It’s all right with me,” Teena agreed,\n plucking foxtails from Sandy’s ears. “Pretty\n hot, anyway. Let’s eat our sandwiches and go\n back home.”\n\n\n “All right,” Eddie said. “You know, one of\n these days I’d like to go out to Cedar Point\n and scout around. Maybe we’ll find something\n there.” Then he told Teena about his dream.\n\n\n Teena smiled. “A dream sure isn’t much to\n go on,” she said, “but they say it’s pretty out on\n Cedar Point. I’ll go any time you want to,\n Eddie.” She handed him one of the sandwiches.\n\n\n It was midafternoon by the time they arrived\n back at Teena’s house. They worked a while\n on a new jigsaw puzzle Teena had received\n on a recent birthday. Then Eddie said good-by\n and went on down the street toward his\n own home.", "Then Eddie heard the sound of his father’s\n voice coming from the den. There was a\n strange urgent tone in it. The door to the den\n was open. Eddie went through the dining\n room and glanced into the den. His father\n sat stiffly behind his homemade desk, talking\n rapidly into the telephone. Eddie caught only\n the last few sketchy words. Then his father\n placed the telephone in its cradle, glanced up,\n and saw Eddie.\n\n\n If there had been even the slightest doubt\n in Eddie’s mind about something being\n wrong, it vanished now. Mr. Taylor looked\n years older than he had that very morning.\n Worry lay deep in his eyes. He fumbled\n thoughtfully with a pencil, turning it end over\n end on his desk.\n\n\n “Hello, son,” he said. He didn’t even ask\n whether Eddie had discovered any uranium\n ore that day. Always before, he had shown\n genuine interest in Eddie’s prospecting trips.", "24\n\n After putting Sandy on his long chain and\n filling his water dish, Eddie went in the back\n door. He put the Geiger counter in the closet\n and went into the kitchen.\n\n\n “What’s for dinner, Mom?” he asked.\n\n\n Mrs. Taylor turned from the sink. Eddie\n knew at once, just seeing the expression on\n his mother’s face, that something was wrong.\n\n\n “Dinner?” his mother said absently. “It’s\n not quite four o’clock yet, Eddie. Besides,\n dinner may be a little late today.”\n\n\n “But this morning you said it would be\n early,” Eddie reminded her, puzzled.\n\n\n “This morning I didn’t know what might\n happen.”\n\n25", "Mr. Taylor opened the door. He was a big\n man, broad-shouldered and still thin-waisted.\n Eddie found it easy to believe the stories he\n had heard about his father being an outstanding\n football player in his time. Even his glasses\n and the gray hair at his temples didn’t add\n much age, although Eddie knew it had been\n eighteen years since his father had played his\n last game of college football.\n\n\n “You may use the Geiger counter any time\n you want, Eddie,” Mr. Taylor said, “as long as\n you take good care of it. You figured out where\n you can find some uranium ore?”\n\n\n Eddie smiled sheepishly. “I—I had a\n dream,” he said. “Plain as day. It was out on\n Cedar Point. I was walking along over some\n rocks. Suddenly the Geiger counter began\n clicking like everything.”\n\n13", "“Oh, guess I’ll stop by and see if Teena\n wants to go,” Eddie answered casually. He\n tried to make it sound as though he would\n be doing Teena Ross a big favor. After all,\n she was only a girl. Eddie didn’t figure a girl\n would make a very good uranium prospecting\n partner, but most of the fellows he knew were\n away at camp, or vacationing with their folks,\n or something like that.\n\n\n “She’ll enjoy it, I’m sure,” his mother said.\n\n\n “I’ll take Sandy, too,” Eddie said. “He needs\n the exercise.”\n\n\n “That’s a good idea, dear. Be back in time\n for an early dinner.”\n\n\n Eddie let Sandy off his chain. The taffy-colored\n cocker spaniel yipped wildly over his\n freedom, racing back and forth as Eddie\n started down the street.\n\n19", "Eddie pulled on his trousers and T shirt\n and went into the bathroom. He washed hurriedly,\n knowing that even if he missed a spot\n or two, he was fairly safe. During the summer\n months his freckles got so thick and dark that\n it would take a magnifying glass to detect any\n small smudges of dirt hiding among them. He\n plastered some water on his dark-red hair,\n pushed a comb through it, and shrugged as it\n snapped back almost to its original position.\n Oh, well, he had tried.\n\n14\n\n He grinned into the mirror, reached a\n finger into his mouth, and unhooked the\n small rubber bands from his tooth braces.\n He dropped them into the waste basket. He’d\n put fresh ones in after breakfast.\n\n\n He brushed his teeth carefully, taking particular\n pains around the metal braces. The\n tooth-straightening orthodontist had warned\n him about letting food gather around the\n metal clamps. It could start cavities.", "“Eddie was telling us about atoms,” Teena’s\n mother said. “Did you know there were three\n million billion of them in a period?”\n\n\n “How many in a comma?” Mr. Ross said to\n Eddie, then added quickly, “forget it, Eddie.\n It wasn’t very funny. I—I’m afraid I don’t feel\n very funny tonight.”\n\n\n “Sit down, dear,” Mrs. Ross said. “I’ll warm\n your dinner. You didn’t sound very cheerful\n when you called to say you would be late. How\n did everything go at the plant today?”\n\n\n “Not so good,” Teena’s father said tiredly.\n “In fact, not good at all.”\n\n\n Problems. It seemed that everyone had\n problems, Eddie thought, as he started to\n leave.", "YOUNG READERS\n\n Atom Mystery\n11\nCHAPTER ONE\nIt was only a dream. Eddie Taylor would like\n to have finished it, but the bar of morning sunlight\n poking in under the window shade pried\n his eyes open. The dream fled. Eddie kicked\n off the sheet, swung his feet to the floor, and\n groped under the bed for his tennis shoes.\n\n\n He heard his father’s heavy footsteps in the\n hallway. They stopped outside of his bedroom\n door.\n\n\n “You awake, Eddie?”\n\n\n “I’m awake, Dad,” Eddie answered.\n\n\n “Breakfast’s ready. Get washed and\n dressed.”\n\n12\n\n “Be right there,” Eddie said. Then, remembering\n the dream, he added, “Oh, Dad, is it\n all right if I use the Geiger counter today?”", "“I’ll only be a minute.” She pushed the\n screen door open for him. “I’ll make us some\n sandwiches.”\n\n\n “Stay here, Sandy,” Eddie said. “Sit.” The\n dog minded, although he looked a bit rebellious.\n\n20\n\n Eddie went inside and followed Teena to\n the kitchen. He felt triumphant about the\n sandwiches.\n\n\n Teena tossed him a dish towel. “You dry\n them,” she said.\n\n\n “Who, me?”", "“Cedar Point?” his father asked. “I’ve\n never been out there. But, from what I hear,\n there are plenty of rock formations. Might\n be worth a try, at that. You never can tell\n where you might strike some radioactivity.”\n\n\n “Do you believe in dreams, Dad?”\n\n\n “Well, now, that’s a tough question, son.\n I can’t say that I really do. Still, one clue is\n as good as another when it comes to hunting\n uranium ore, I guess. But right now we’d\n better get out to breakfast before your mother\n scalps us. Hurry it up.” His father turned\n and went back down the hallway toward the\n kitchen.", "Finished, Eddie went out to breakfast.\n\n\n “Good morning, dear,” his mother greeted\n him, handing him a plate of eggs.\n\n\n “Hi, Mom,” Eddie said. “Gotta hurry. Big\n day today.”\n\n\n “So your father says. But I’m afraid your\n big day will have to start with sorting out and\n tying up those newspapers and magazines that\n have been collecting in the garage.”\n\n\n “Aw, Mom—”\n\n\n “Eddie, I asked you to do it three days ago.\n Remember? And the Goodwill truck comes\n around today.”\n\n\n “But, Mom—”\n\n15", "“Well, you were together most of the day,”\n his mother said, “but I guess it’s all right. Be\n back in about an hour, though.”\n\n\n It was a balmy evening. On such evenings,\n he and Teena sometimes walked along the\n beach barefoot, collecting sea shells. Today\n Eddie had no desire to do that. He ran down\n the block.\n\n\n Teena answered his knock.\n\n\n “Come on in, Eddie,” she invited, seeming\n surprised to see him. “Mother and I are just\n finishing dinner.”\n\n\n “Oh, I figured you’d be through by now,”\n Eddie apologized, following her inside.\n\n35\n\n “Hello, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross said, but she\n didn’t seem as cheerful as usual.", "“My, that’s interesting, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross\n said.\n\n\n “I’ve seen them do it,” Eddie said proudly,\n then added, “from behind a protective shield,\n of course. When the material has soaked up\n enough radiation, they pull it back out. They\n say it’s ‘cooked.’”\n\n\n “You mean it’s hot?” Teena asked.\n\n\n “It’s hot,” Eddie said, “but not like if it\n came out of a stove. By hot, they mean it’s\n radioactive. If you touched it, or even got near\n it, you would get burned, but you probably\n wouldn’t even know it for a while. It would be\n a radiation burn. That’s a kind of burn you\n don’t feel, but it destroys your blood cells and\n tissues, and—well, you’ve had it.”", "“Why not? You’re in a hurry, aren’t you?\n I can make the sandwiches while you dry the\n silverware.” She smiled, putting tiny crinkles\n in her small, slightly upturned nose. She wore\n her hair in a pony tail. Even though her hair\n was blond all year long, it seemed even\n lighter in the summer. Eddie couldn’t tell\n whether the sun had faded it, or whether her\n deep summer tan simply made her hair look\n lighter by contrast. Maybe both.\n\n\n “Hello, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross said, coming into\n the kitchen. “Looks like Teena put you to\n work.”\n\n\n “She always does, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie said,\n pretending great injury. “Don’t know why I\n keep coming over here.”\n\n\n “I know,” Teena spoke up quickly. “It’s\n because we’re friends, that’s why.”\n\n21", "“Dad,” Eddie said anxiously, “what—what’s\n the matter?”\n\n\n “It shows that much, does it, son?” his\n father said tiredly.\n\n\n “What’s wrong, Dad?” Eddie prompted.\n “Or can’t you tell me?”\n\n\n Mr. Taylor leaned back. “Quite a bit’s\n wrong, Eddie,” he said, “and I guess there’s\n no reason why I shouldn’t tell you. It’ll be in\n the evening papers, anyway.”\n\n26\n\n “Evening papers?”\n\n\n “Eddie, you remember me mentioning this\n morning about that radioisotope shipment I\n was expecting today?”\n\n\n “I remember,” Eddie said. “Did it come?”\n\n\n “It did—and it didn’t,” his father said.", "Eddie laughed. “I sure wouldn’t want the\n job of trying to feed a herd of them the size of\n a period,” he said. “Did you know that there\n are about three million billion atoms of carbon\n in a single period printed at the end of a\n sentence. That’s how small atoms are.”\n\n\n “Three million billion is a lot of something,”\n a man’s voice spoke behind him.\n “What are we talking about, Eddie?”\n\n\n “Oh, hello, Mr. Ross,” Eddie said, turning\n around and standing up. “I didn’t hear you\n come in.”\n\n44\n\n Teena’s father was a medium-sized man\n with light-brown hair which was getting somewhat\n thin on top. He was usually quite cheerful\n and full of fun, but tonight his face seemed\n unusually drawn and sober. He stepped to the\n table, leaned over, and gave both Teena and\n Mrs. Ross a kiss on the cheek.", "Eddie nodded. It was even more serious\n than its threat of danger to anyone who\n handled it carelessly. It was a new isotope—a\n secret isotope. His father hadn’t said whether\n it had been developed for curing things or for\n destroying things. But many radioisotopes\n could do either; it depended on how they were\n used. Eddie assumed that anyone who would\n stoop to stealing isotopes more than likely\n would be interested in their ability to destroy\n rather than their ability to benefit mankind.\n\n\n “Well, I certainly do hope everything works\n out all right,” Teena’s mother said.\n\n\n “So do I,” Teena agreed.\n\n\n Eddie glanced at the kitchen clock. “Oh,\n boy,” he said, “I’d better be heading back\n home. I didn’t mean to come over here and\n talk so long.”", "They walked past the college campus, and\n toward the rocky foothills beyond. At various\n rock mounds and outcroppings, Eddie\n switched on the Geiger counter. The needle\n of the dial on the black box wavered slightly.\n A slow clicking came through the earphones,\n but Eddie knew these indicated no more than\n a normal background count. There were slight\n traces of radioactivity in almost all earth or\n rocks. It was in the air itself, caused by mysterious\n and ever-present cosmic rays, so there\n was always a mild background count when\n the Geiger counter was turned on; but to\n mean anything, the needle had to jump far\n ahead on the gauge, and the clicking through\n the earphones had to speed up until it sounded\n almost like bacon frying in a hot skillet.\n\n23\n\n There was none of that today. After they\n had hiked and searched most of the forenoon,\n Eddie said, “We might as well call it a day,\n Teena. Doesn’t seem to be anything out here.”", "“Good evening, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie said. “I—I\n hope I’m not making a pest of myself.” He\n looked around for Mr. Ross, but Teena’s\n father apparently hadn’t arrived home from\n Acme Aircraft yet. There wasn’t a place set for\n him at the table, either.\n\n\n “You’re never a pest, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross assured\n him. “I was going to call your mother in\n a little while about that newspaper write-up.”\n\n\n “Oh, you read it?” Eddie said.\n\n\n “How could anyone miss it?” Teena said.\n “Right on the front page.”\n\n\n “I suppose your father is quite concerned\n over it,” Teena’s mother said.\n\n\n “Oh, yes,” Eddie affirmed. “He was the one\n who ordered the isotope.”\n\n\n “What’s an isotope?” Teena asked.", "“Wouldn’t think of leaving it home,” his\n father said, smiling. “By the way, I put new\n batteries in it the other day. Take it easy on\n them. Remember to switch it off when you’re\n not actually using it.”\n\n\n “I will,” Eddie promised. He had forgotten\n several times before, weakening the batteries.\n\n17\n\n It took Eddie over an hour to sort out the\n newspapers and magazines in the garage, tie\n them in neat bundles, and place them out on\n the front curb for the Goodwill pickup. By\n that time the sun was high overhead. It had\n driven off the coolness which the ocean air\n had provided during the earlier hours.\n\n\n “Anything else, Mom?” he asked, returning\n to the house and getting the Geiger counter\n out of the closet. He edged toward the back\n door before his mother had much time to\n think of something more for him to do." ], [ "“My, that’s interesting, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross\n said.\n\n\n “I’ve seen them do it,” Eddie said proudly,\n then added, “from behind a protective shield,\n of course. When the material has soaked up\n enough radiation, they pull it back out. They\n say it’s ‘cooked.’”\n\n\n “You mean it’s hot?” Teena asked.\n\n\n “It’s hot,” Eddie said, “but not like if it\n came out of a stove. By hot, they mean it’s\n radioactive. If you touched it, or even got near\n it, you would get burned, but you probably\n wouldn’t even know it for a while. It would be\n a radiation burn. That’s a kind of burn you\n don’t feel, but it destroys your blood cells and\n tissues, and—well, you’ve had it.”", "Then Eddie heard the sound of his father’s\n voice coming from the den. There was a\n strange urgent tone in it. The door to the den\n was open. Eddie went through the dining\n room and glanced into the den. His father\n sat stiffly behind his homemade desk, talking\n rapidly into the telephone. Eddie caught only\n the last few sketchy words. Then his father\n placed the telephone in its cradle, glanced up,\n and saw Eddie.\n\n\n If there had been even the slightest doubt\n in Eddie’s mind about something being\n wrong, it vanished now. Mr. Taylor looked\n years older than he had that very morning.\n Worry lay deep in his eyes. He fumbled\n thoughtfully with a pencil, turning it end over\n end on his desk.\n\n\n “Hello, son,” he said. He didn’t even ask\n whether Eddie had discovered any uranium\n ore that day. Always before, he had shown\n genuine interest in Eddie’s prospecting trips.", "“Dad,” Eddie said anxiously, “what—what’s\n the matter?”\n\n\n “It shows that much, does it, son?” his\n father said tiredly.\n\n\n “What’s wrong, Dad?” Eddie prompted.\n “Or can’t you tell me?”\n\n\n Mr. Taylor leaned back. “Quite a bit’s\n wrong, Eddie,” he said, “and I guess there’s\n no reason why I shouldn’t tell you. It’ll be in\n the evening papers, anyway.”\n\n26\n\n “Evening papers?”\n\n\n “Eddie, you remember me mentioning this\n morning about that radioisotope shipment I\n was expecting today?”\n\n\n “I remember,” Eddie said. “Did it come?”\n\n\n “It did—and it didn’t,” his father said.", "24\n\n After putting Sandy on his long chain and\n filling his water dish, Eddie went in the back\n door. He put the Geiger counter in the closet\n and went into the kitchen.\n\n\n “What’s for dinner, Mom?” he asked.\n\n\n Mrs. Taylor turned from the sink. Eddie\n knew at once, just seeing the expression on\n his mother’s face, that something was wrong.\n\n\n “Dinner?” his mother said absently. “It’s\n not quite four o’clock yet, Eddie. Besides,\n dinner may be a little late today.”\n\n\n “But this morning you said it would be\n early,” Eddie reminded her, puzzled.\n\n\n “This morning I didn’t know what might\n happen.”\n\n25", "“I don’t see what anyone would want with\n a radioisotope,” Eddie said. “Maybe they figured\n there was something else inside of that\n lead capsule.”\n\n\n “That’s unlikely, son,” Mr. Taylor said.\n “Believe me, it was no common theft. Nor\n were the thieves ordinary thieves. That isotope\n was a new one. A very secret one. Our job at\n the college was to conduct various tests with it\n in order to find out exactly how it could best\n be put to use as a cure for disease, or for sterilizing\n food, or even as a source of power.”\n\n\n “Power?” Eddie said. “Boy, it must have\n been a strong isotope.” He knew that the\n strength of radioisotopes could be controlled\n largely by the length of time they were allowed\n to “cook” in an atomic reactor and soak up\n radioactivity.\n\n33", "Eddie nodded. It was even more serious\n than its threat of danger to anyone who\n handled it carelessly. It was a new isotope—a\n secret isotope. His father hadn’t said whether\n it had been developed for curing things or for\n destroying things. But many radioisotopes\n could do either; it depended on how they were\n used. Eddie assumed that anyone who would\n stoop to stealing isotopes more than likely\n would be interested in their ability to destroy\n rather than their ability to benefit mankind.\n\n\n “Well, I certainly do hope everything works\n out all right,” Teena’s mother said.\n\n\n “So do I,” Teena agreed.\n\n\n Eddie glanced at the kitchen clock. “Oh,\n boy,” he said, “I’d better be heading back\n home. I didn’t mean to come over here and\n talk so long.”", "“Goodness. Eight feet is a lot of cement.”\n\n\n “It takes a lot to stop radioactive atomic\n particles,” Eddie explained. “Especially the\n gamma rays. They’re the fastest and most dangerous,\n and the hardest to stop. Alpha and beta\n rays are fairly easy to stop. But the gamma\n rays are regular high-velocity invisible bullets.\n They’ll go right through a stone wall unless\n it’s plenty thick. Of course, you can’t see them.\n Not with even the most powerful microscope\n in the world.”\n\n39\n\n “I wouldn’t want to work around a place\n where I might get shot at by—by dangerous\n rays you can’t even see,” Teena said.", "They walked past the college campus, and\n toward the rocky foothills beyond. At various\n rock mounds and outcroppings, Eddie\n switched on the Geiger counter. The needle\n of the dial on the black box wavered slightly.\n A slow clicking came through the earphones,\n but Eddie knew these indicated no more than\n a normal background count. There were slight\n traces of radioactivity in almost all earth or\n rocks. It was in the air itself, caused by mysterious\n and ever-present cosmic rays, so there\n was always a mild background count when\n the Geiger counter was turned on; but to\n mean anything, the needle had to jump far\n ahead on the gauge, and the clicking through\n the earphones had to speed up until it sounded\n almost like bacon frying in a hot skillet.\n\n23\n\n There was none of that today. After they\n had hiked and searched most of the forenoon,\n Eddie said, “We might as well call it a day,\n Teena. Doesn’t seem to be anything out here.”", "“Of course,” his father said. “There were\n only two ounces of it in a fifty-pound lead\n capsule. As long as it remains in that capsule\n it’s safe. As you know, the lead prevents any\n radiation from escaping. Out of that capsule,\n however, those two ounces of radioisotope can\n be very dangerous.”\n\n\n “Fifty pounds,” Eddie said thoughtfully.\n “That’s a pretty big thing to steal, isn’t it?”\n\n\n “Not when it’s lead, son,” his father replied.\n “Not much bigger than a two-quart\n milk bottle, in fact.”\n\n\n “Even at that, no kid could have taken it,”\n Eddie said.\n\n\n “Kid?” His father smiled thinly. “We don’t\n think it was any kid, Eddie. Not by a long\n shot. The whole thing was carefully planned\n and carefully carried out. It was not the work\n of amateurs.”", "“What does that mean, Dad?” Eddie asked,\n puzzled.\n\n\n “The delivery truck arrived at the school\n with it,” his father explained, “but while the\n driver was inquiring where to put it, the container\n disappeared.”\n\n\n “Disappeared?”\n\n\n “The radioisotope was stolen, Eddie,” his\n father said slowly. “Stolen right out from\n under our noses!”\n\n27\nCHAPTER TWO\nAt the moment, Eddie didn’t pry for further\n information on the theft of the valuable radioactive\n isotope. His father had plenty on his\n mind, as it was. The main information was in\n the evening\nGlobe\n, which Eddie rushed out\n to get as soon as he heard it plop onto the\n front porch.\n\n\n He took the newspaper to his father to read\n first. After having finished, Mr. Taylor handed\n the paper to Eddie and leaned back thoughtfully\n in his chair.\n\n28", "The very word excited Eddie. In fact, anything\n having to do with atomic science\n excited him. He knew something about\n isotopes—pronounced\neye-suh-tope\n. You\n couldn’t have a father who was head of the\n atomic-science department at Oceanview\n College without picking up a little knowledge\n along the way. Eddie knew that a radioisotope\n was a material which had been “cooked” in an\n atomic reactor until it was “hot” with radioactivity.\n When carefully controlled, the radiation\n stored up in such isotopes was used in\n many beneficial ways.\n\n16", "“So that’s what a radioisotope is,” Mrs. Ross\n said. “It’s like a sponge. Only instead of soaking\n up water, it soaks up radiation.”\n\n41\n\n “That’s about it,” Eddie said. “My dad says\n that as more is learned about the ways to use\n isotopes, the whole world is going to be improved.\n You’ve heard of radiocobalt for curing\n cancer. Well, that’s an isotope. They make it\n by cooking cobalt in an atomic reactor. Oh,\n there are hundreds of different isotopes. Like\n I said, isotopes can be made of most of the\n elements. And there are over a hundred elements.\n Some soak up a lot of radioactivity, and\n are strong and dangerous. Others absorb only\n a little and are pretty safe to use. Depends, too,\n on how long they let them cook in the reactor.”", "“I would,” Eddie said. “Everyone is carefully\n protected. They see to that. Well, anyway,\n if all of those uranium atoms were shooting\n radioactive rays around inside of that pile\n and doing nothing, there would be an awful\n lot of energy going to waste. So the atomic\n scientists take certain elements which aren’t\n radioactive, but can be made radioactive, and\n shove small pieces of them into holes drilled\n in the pile.”\n\n\n “Isn’t that dangerous?” Teena asked.\n\n\n “They don’t shove them in with their bare\n hands,” Eddie said, trying not to show exasperation.\n “They use long holders to push the\n small chunks of material into the holes in the\n reactor. Then, as those uranium atoms keep\n splitting up and shooting particles around inside\n of the pile, some of them smack into the\n chunks of material, and stick there. Most elements\n will soak up radiation, just like a sponge\n soaks up water.”\n\n40", "Mr. Taylor opened the door. He was a big\n man, broad-shouldered and still thin-waisted.\n Eddie found it easy to believe the stories he\n had heard about his father being an outstanding\n football player in his time. Even his glasses\n and the gray hair at his temples didn’t add\n much age, although Eddie knew it had been\n eighteen years since his father had played his\n last game of college football.\n\n\n “You may use the Geiger counter any time\n you want, Eddie,” Mr. Taylor said, “as long as\n you take good care of it. You figured out where\n you can find some uranium ore?”\n\n\n Eddie smiled sheepishly. “I—I had a\n dream,” he said. “Plain as day. It was out on\n Cedar Point. I was walking along over some\n rocks. Suddenly the Geiger counter began\n clicking like everything.”\n\n13", "“Wouldn’t think of leaving it home,” his\n father said, smiling. “By the way, I put new\n batteries in it the other day. Take it easy on\n them. Remember to switch it off when you’re\n not actually using it.”\n\n\n “I will,” Eddie promised. He had forgotten\n several times before, weakening the batteries.\n\n17\n\n It took Eddie over an hour to sort out the\n newspapers and magazines in the garage, tie\n them in neat bundles, and place them out on\n the front curb for the Goodwill pickup. By\n that time the sun was high overhead. It had\n driven off the coolness which the ocean air\n had provided during the earlier hours.\n\n\n “Anything else, Mom?” he asked, returning\n to the house and getting the Geiger counter\n out of the closet. He edged toward the back\n door before his mother had much time to\n think of something more for him to do.", "“I’m not sure I know, either,” Mrs. Ross\n said. “Maybe we could understand more of\n what it’s all about if you could explain what a\n radioisotope is, Eddie.”\n\n36\n\n “Well,” Eddie said slowly, “it’s not easy to\n explain, but I’ll try. You know how rare\n uranium is. There’s not nearly enough of it to\n fill all the needs for radioactive materials. Besides,\n pure uranium is so powerful and expensive\n and dangerous to handle that it’s not\n a very good idea to try using it in its true form.\n So they build an atomic reactor like the one at\n Drake Ridge.”\n\n\n “We’ve driven by it,” Mrs. Ross said. “My,\n it’s a big place.”\n\n\n “I’ll say,” Eddie agreed. “Of course, only\n one building holds the reactor itself. It’s the\n biggest building near the center.”", "Eddie knew she was right. They were\n friends—good friends. They had been ever\n since Eddie’s family had moved to Oceanview\n and his father had become head of the college’s\n atomic-science department. In fact, their\n parents were close friends, also. Teena’s father\n was chief engineer for the Acme Aviation\n Company, one of the coast town’s largest\n manufacturing concerns.\n\n\n “Well, I’ll be glad to finish them, Eddie,”\n Mrs. Ross offered. “I know how boys detest\n doing dishes.”\n\n\n “Oh, I don’t really mind, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie\n said. “Besides, Teena’s making sandwiches to\n take with us.”\n\n\n “Another prospecting trip?” Teena’s\n mother glanced at the Geiger counter which\n Eddie had set carefully on the dinette table.\n\n\n “I still think there must be some uranium\n around here,” Eddie insisted. “And we can\n find it if anyone can.”", "“Good evening, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie said. “I—I\n hope I’m not making a pest of myself.” He\n looked around for Mr. Ross, but Teena’s\n father apparently hadn’t arrived home from\n Acme Aircraft yet. There wasn’t a place set for\n him at the table, either.\n\n\n “You’re never a pest, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross assured\n him. “I was going to call your mother in\n a little while about that newspaper write-up.”\n\n\n “Oh, you read it?” Eddie said.\n\n\n “How could anyone miss it?” Teena said.\n “Right on the front page.”\n\n\n “I suppose your father is quite concerned\n over it,” Teena’s mother said.\n\n\n “Oh, yes,” Eddie affirmed. “He was the one\n who ordered the isotope.”\n\n\n “What’s an isotope?” Teena asked.", "“But the atomic piles control the reaction,”\n Eddie said. “The graphite bricks keep the\n splitting-up atoms apart so one neutron won’t\n go smashing into other atoms unless they want\n it to. They have ways of controlling it so that\n only as much radiation builds up as they want.\n You can even hear the reactor hum as the radioactive\n rays go tearing through it. But by\n careful tending, the scientists keep the atomic\n collisions far enough apart so the thing doesn’t\n blow up.”\n\n\n “Boy, that sounds dangerous,” Teena said.\n\n\n “Well, they know just how to do it,” Eddie\n replied.\n\n\n “Aren’t the rays dangerous?” Mrs. Ross\n asked.\n\n\n “I’ll say they’re dangerous,” Eddie said.\n “But the whole pile is covered by a shield of\n concrete about eight feet thick. That keeps the\n rays from getting out and injuring the workmen.”", "“We weren’t planning to run a submarine\n with it,” his father said. “It wasn’t that strong.\n Still, it doesn’t take so very much radioactivity\n to make two ounces of an isotope quite powerful—and\n quite deadly. I only hope whoever\n stole it knows what he’s doing. However, I’m\n sure he does.”\n\n\n “You mean he must have been an atomic\n scientist himself?” Eddie asked.\n\n\n “Let’s just say he—or both of them—have\n enough training in the subject to know how to\n handle that isotope safely,” Mr. Taylor said.\n\n\n “But, Dad,” Eddie wondered, “what could\n they do with it?”\n\n\n “They could study it,” his father explained.\n “At least, they could send it somewhere to be\n broken down and studied. Being a new isotope,\n the formula is of great value.”\n\n\n “What do you mean, send it somewhere?”\n Eddie asked." ], [ "“Oh, guess I’ll stop by and see if Teena\n wants to go,” Eddie answered casually. He\n tried to make it sound as though he would\n be doing Teena Ross a big favor. After all,\n she was only a girl. Eddie didn’t figure a girl\n would make a very good uranium prospecting\n partner, but most of the fellows he knew were\n away at camp, or vacationing with their folks,\n or something like that.\n\n\n “She’ll enjoy it, I’m sure,” his mother said.\n\n\n “I’ll take Sandy, too,” Eddie said. “He needs\n the exercise.”\n\n\n “That’s a good idea, dear. Be back in time\n for an early dinner.”\n\n\n Eddie let Sandy off his chain. The taffy-colored\n cocker spaniel yipped wildly over his\n freedom, racing back and forth as Eddie\n started down the street.\n\n19", "Christina Ross—whom everybody called\n Teena—lived at the far end of the block.\n Eddie went around to the side door of the\n light-green stucco house and knocked.\n\n\n “Oh, hi, Eddie,” Teena greeted him, appearing\n at the screen door. “I was hoping\n you’d come over.”\n\n\n “Well, I—I just happened to be going by,”\n Eddie said. “Thought you might want to\n watch me do a little prospecting with the Geiger\n counter. But maybe you’re too busy.”\n\n\n That’s how to handle it, Eddie thought.\n Don’t act anxious. Let Teena be anxious.\n Then maybe she’ll even offer to bring along\n a couple of sandwiches or some fruit.\n\n\n “Oh, I’d love to go,” Teena said eagerly,\n “but I’m just finishing the dishes. Come on\n in.”\n\n\n “I’m in kind of a hurry.”", "“It’s all right with me,” Teena agreed,\n plucking foxtails from Sandy’s ears. “Pretty\n hot, anyway. Let’s eat our sandwiches and go\n back home.”\n\n\n “All right,” Eddie said. “You know, one of\n these days I’d like to go out to Cedar Point\n and scout around. Maybe we’ll find something\n there.” Then he told Teena about his dream.\n\n\n Teena smiled. “A dream sure isn’t much to\n go on,” she said, “but they say it’s pretty out on\n Cedar Point. I’ll go any time you want to,\n Eddie.” She handed him one of the sandwiches.\n\n\n It was midafternoon by the time they arrived\n back at Teena’s house. They worked a while\n on a new jigsaw puzzle Teena had received\n on a recent birthday. Then Eddie said good-by\n and went on down the street toward his\n own home.", "Eddie knew she was right. They were\n friends—good friends. They had been ever\n since Eddie’s family had moved to Oceanview\n and his father had become head of the college’s\n atomic-science department. In fact, their\n parents were close friends, also. Teena’s father\n was chief engineer for the Acme Aviation\n Company, one of the coast town’s largest\n manufacturing concerns.\n\n\n “Well, I’ll be glad to finish them, Eddie,”\n Mrs. Ross offered. “I know how boys detest\n doing dishes.”\n\n\n “Oh, I don’t really mind, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie\n said. “Besides, Teena’s making sandwiches to\n take with us.”\n\n\n “Another prospecting trip?” Teena’s\n mother glanced at the Geiger counter which\n Eddie had set carefully on the dinette table.\n\n\n “I still think there must be some uranium\n around here,” Eddie insisted. “And we can\n find it if anyone can.”", "“I agree,” Mrs. Ross said. “But even if you\n don’t find it, you both seem to enjoy your\n hikes.”\n\n22\n\n “Oh, yes, it’s fun, Mother,” Teena replied,\n wrapping wax paper around a sandwich.\n “Guess I’m ready. I’ve got a bone for Sandy,\n too.”\n\n\n “Don’t go too far out from town,” Mrs.\n Ross cautioned, as Eddie picked up the Geiger\n counter. “And stick near the main roads.\n You know the rules.”\n\n\n “We sure do, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie assured\n her. “And we’ll be back early.”", "“I’ll only be a minute.” She pushed the\n screen door open for him. “I’ll make us some\n sandwiches.”\n\n\n “Stay here, Sandy,” Eddie said. “Sit.” The\n dog minded, although he looked a bit rebellious.\n\n20\n\n Eddie went inside and followed Teena to\n the kitchen. He felt triumphant about the\n sandwiches.\n\n\n Teena tossed him a dish towel. “You dry\n them,” she said.\n\n\n “Who, me?”", "“I guess not, dear,” Mrs. Taylor said, smiling\n over his hasty retreat. “What are you going\n to do?”\n\n\n “Think I’ll do a little prospecting,” Eddie\n said.\n\n\n “Where?”\n\n\n “Probably in the hills beyond the college,”\n Eddie said. The more he thought about it, the\n more he realized it was a little late in the day\n to go to Cedar Point. The best way to get\n there was by rowboat across Moon Bay, and\n that was too long a row to be starting now.\n Besides, there were plenty of other places\n around the outskirts of Oceanview where\n likely looking rock formations invited search\n with a Geiger counter.\n\n18\n\n “Are you going alone?” his mother asked.", "They walked past the college campus, and\n toward the rocky foothills beyond. At various\n rock mounds and outcroppings, Eddie\n switched on the Geiger counter. The needle\n of the dial on the black box wavered slightly.\n A slow clicking came through the earphones,\n but Eddie knew these indicated no more than\n a normal background count. There were slight\n traces of radioactivity in almost all earth or\n rocks. It was in the air itself, caused by mysterious\n and ever-present cosmic rays, so there\n was always a mild background count when\n the Geiger counter was turned on; but to\n mean anything, the needle had to jump far\n ahead on the gauge, and the clicking through\n the earphones had to speed up until it sounded\n almost like bacon frying in a hot skillet.\n\n23\n\n There was none of that today. After they\n had hiked and searched most of the forenoon,\n Eddie said, “We might as well call it a day,\n Teena. Doesn’t seem to be anything out here.”", "“Well, you were together most of the day,”\n his mother said, “but I guess it’s all right. Be\n back in about an hour, though.”\n\n\n It was a balmy evening. On such evenings,\n he and Teena sometimes walked along the\n beach barefoot, collecting sea shells. Today\n Eddie had no desire to do that. He ran down\n the block.\n\n\n Teena answered his knock.\n\n\n “Come on in, Eddie,” she invited, seeming\n surprised to see him. “Mother and I are just\n finishing dinner.”\n\n\n “Oh, I figured you’d be through by now,”\n Eddie apologized, following her inside.\n\n35\n\n “Hello, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross said, but she\n didn’t seem as cheerful as usual.", "Then Eddie heard the sound of his father’s\n voice coming from the den. There was a\n strange urgent tone in it. The door to the den\n was open. Eddie went through the dining\n room and glanced into the den. His father\n sat stiffly behind his homemade desk, talking\n rapidly into the telephone. Eddie caught only\n the last few sketchy words. Then his father\n placed the telephone in its cradle, glanced up,\n and saw Eddie.\n\n\n If there had been even the slightest doubt\n in Eddie’s mind about something being\n wrong, it vanished now. Mr. Taylor looked\n years older than he had that very morning.\n Worry lay deep in his eyes. He fumbled\n thoughtfully with a pencil, turning it end over\n end on his desk.\n\n\n “Hello, son,” he said. He didn’t even ask\n whether Eddie had discovered any uranium\n ore that day. Always before, he had shown\n genuine interest in Eddie’s prospecting trips.", "“Eddie was telling us about atoms,” Teena’s\n mother said. “Did you know there were three\n million billion of them in a period?”\n\n\n “How many in a comma?” Mr. Ross said to\n Eddie, then added quickly, “forget it, Eddie.\n It wasn’t very funny. I—I’m afraid I don’t feel\n very funny tonight.”\n\n\n “Sit down, dear,” Mrs. Ross said. “I’ll warm\n your dinner. You didn’t sound very cheerful\n when you called to say you would be late. How\n did everything go at the plant today?”\n\n\n “Not so good,” Teena’s father said tiredly.\n “In fact, not good at all.”\n\n\n Problems. It seemed that everyone had\n problems, Eddie thought, as he started to\n leave.", "“Good evening, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie said. “I—I\n hope I’m not making a pest of myself.” He\n looked around for Mr. Ross, but Teena’s\n father apparently hadn’t arrived home from\n Acme Aircraft yet. There wasn’t a place set for\n him at the table, either.\n\n\n “You’re never a pest, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross assured\n him. “I was going to call your mother in\n a little while about that newspaper write-up.”\n\n\n “Oh, you read it?” Eddie said.\n\n\n “How could anyone miss it?” Teena said.\n “Right on the front page.”\n\n\n “I suppose your father is quite concerned\n over it,” Teena’s mother said.\n\n\n “Oh, yes,” Eddie affirmed. “He was the one\n who ordered the isotope.”\n\n\n “What’s an isotope?” Teena asked.", "“Why not? You’re in a hurry, aren’t you?\n I can make the sandwiches while you dry the\n silverware.” She smiled, putting tiny crinkles\n in her small, slightly upturned nose. She wore\n her hair in a pony tail. Even though her hair\n was blond all year long, it seemed even\n lighter in the summer. Eddie couldn’t tell\n whether the sun had faded it, or whether her\n deep summer tan simply made her hair look\n lighter by contrast. Maybe both.\n\n\n “Hello, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross said, coming into\n the kitchen. “Looks like Teena put you to\n work.”\n\n\n “She always does, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie said,\n pretending great injury. “Don’t know why I\n keep coming over here.”\n\n\n “I know,” Teena spoke up quickly. “It’s\n because we’re friends, that’s why.”\n\n21", "Eddie nodded. It was even more serious\n than its threat of danger to anyone who\n handled it carelessly. It was a new isotope—a\n secret isotope. His father hadn’t said whether\n it had been developed for curing things or for\n destroying things. But many radioisotopes\n could do either; it depended on how they were\n used. Eddie assumed that anyone who would\n stoop to stealing isotopes more than likely\n would be interested in their ability to destroy\n rather than their ability to benefit mankind.\n\n\n “Well, I certainly do hope everything works\n out all right,” Teena’s mother said.\n\n\n “So do I,” Teena agreed.\n\n\n Eddie glanced at the kitchen clock. “Oh,\n boy,” he said, “I’d better be heading back\n home. I didn’t mean to come over here and\n talk so long.”", "Eddie laughed. “I sure wouldn’t want the\n job of trying to feed a herd of them the size of\n a period,” he said. “Did you know that there\n are about three million billion atoms of carbon\n in a single period printed at the end of a\n sentence. That’s how small atoms are.”\n\n\n “Three million billion is a lot of something,”\n a man’s voice spoke behind him.\n “What are we talking about, Eddie?”\n\n\n “Oh, hello, Mr. Ross,” Eddie said, turning\n around and standing up. “I didn’t hear you\n come in.”\n\n44\n\n Teena’s father was a medium-sized man\n with light-brown hair which was getting somewhat\n thin on top. He was usually quite cheerful\n and full of fun, but tonight his face seemed\n unusually drawn and sober. He stepped to the\n table, leaned over, and gave both Teena and\n Mrs. Ross a kiss on the cheek.", "24\n\n After putting Sandy on his long chain and\n filling his water dish, Eddie went in the back\n door. He put the Geiger counter in the closet\n and went into the kitchen.\n\n\n “What’s for dinner, Mom?” he asked.\n\n\n Mrs. Taylor turned from the sink. Eddie\n knew at once, just seeing the expression on\n his mother’s face, that something was wrong.\n\n\n “Dinner?” his mother said absently. “It’s\n not quite four o’clock yet, Eddie. Besides,\n dinner may be a little late today.”\n\n\n “But this morning you said it would be\n early,” Eddie reminded her, puzzled.\n\n\n “This morning I didn’t know what might\n happen.”\n\n25", "“Perhaps to some other country.”\n\n\n “Then—then you mean whoever stole it\n were spies!” Eddie exclaimed breathlessly.\n\n\n “That’s entirely possible,” his father said.\n “In fact, it’s the only logical explanation I can\n think of. People simply don’t go around stealing\n radioactive isotopes without a mighty important\n reason.”\n\n34\n\n “Dinner’s ready,” Eddie’s mother called\n from the kitchen.\n\n\n During dinner Eddie wasn’t sure just what\n he was eating. The idea of spies stealing atomic\n materials kept building up in his mind. By the\n time dessert was finished, he was anxious to\n talk with someone, yet he knew he shouldn’t\n bother his father with any more questions. He\n asked if he could go over and visit with Teena\n for a while.", "“Oh, we’re glad you did, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross\n said. “I’m afraid too few of us know anything\n about this atom business.”\n\n43\n\n “That’s right, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie agreed.\n “People should talk more and read more about\n it. After all, this is an atomic age. We might as\n well face it. My father says that in horse-and-buggy\n days everyone knew how to feed a horse\n and grease a wagon wheel. They knew what was\n needed to get the work done. But now that\n atoms are being harnessed to do the work, not\n many people even bother to find out what an\n atom is.”\n\n\n Mrs. Ross smiled. “I guess you’re right,\n Eddie,” she said, “but I wouldn’t quite know\n how to go about feeding an atom.”\n\n\n “Or greasing one,” Teena added.", "“My, that’s interesting, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross\n said.\n\n\n “I’ve seen them do it,” Eddie said proudly,\n then added, “from behind a protective shield,\n of course. When the material has soaked up\n enough radiation, they pull it back out. They\n say it’s ‘cooked.’”\n\n\n “You mean it’s hot?” Teena asked.\n\n\n “It’s hot,” Eddie said, “but not like if it\n came out of a stove. By hot, they mean it’s\n radioactive. If you touched it, or even got near\n it, you would get burned, but you probably\n wouldn’t even know it for a while. It would be\n a radiation burn. That’s a kind of burn you\n don’t feel, but it destroys your blood cells and\n tissues, and—well, you’ve had it.”", "“Goodness. Eight feet is a lot of cement.”\n\n\n “It takes a lot to stop radioactive atomic\n particles,” Eddie explained. “Especially the\n gamma rays. They’re the fastest and most dangerous,\n and the hardest to stop. Alpha and beta\n rays are fairly easy to stop. But the gamma\n rays are regular high-velocity invisible bullets.\n They’ll go right through a stone wall unless\n it’s plenty thick. Of course, you can’t see them.\n Not with even the most powerful microscope\n in the world.”\n\n39\n\n “I wouldn’t want to work around a place\n where I might get shot at by—by dangerous\n rays you can’t even see,” Teena said." ], [ "24\n\n After putting Sandy on his long chain and\n filling his water dish, Eddie went in the back\n door. He put the Geiger counter in the closet\n and went into the kitchen.\n\n\n “What’s for dinner, Mom?” he asked.\n\n\n Mrs. Taylor turned from the sink. Eddie\n knew at once, just seeing the expression on\n his mother’s face, that something was wrong.\n\n\n “Dinner?” his mother said absently. “It’s\n not quite four o’clock yet, Eddie. Besides,\n dinner may be a little late today.”\n\n\n “But this morning you said it would be\n early,” Eddie reminded her, puzzled.\n\n\n “This morning I didn’t know what might\n happen.”\n\n25", "“Well, you were together most of the day,”\n his mother said, “but I guess it’s all right. Be\n back in about an hour, though.”\n\n\n It was a balmy evening. On such evenings,\n he and Teena sometimes walked along the\n beach barefoot, collecting sea shells. Today\n Eddie had no desire to do that. He ran down\n the block.\n\n\n Teena answered his knock.\n\n\n “Come on in, Eddie,” she invited, seeming\n surprised to see him. “Mother and I are just\n finishing dinner.”\n\n\n “Oh, I figured you’d be through by now,”\n Eddie apologized, following her inside.\n\n35\n\n “Hello, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross said, but she\n didn’t seem as cheerful as usual.", "“Eddie was telling us about atoms,” Teena’s\n mother said. “Did you know there were three\n million billion of them in a period?”\n\n\n “How many in a comma?” Mr. Ross said to\n Eddie, then added quickly, “forget it, Eddie.\n It wasn’t very funny. I—I’m afraid I don’t feel\n very funny tonight.”\n\n\n “Sit down, dear,” Mrs. Ross said. “I’ll warm\n your dinner. You didn’t sound very cheerful\n when you called to say you would be late. How\n did everything go at the plant today?”\n\n\n “Not so good,” Teena’s father said tiredly.\n “In fact, not good at all.”\n\n\n Problems. It seemed that everyone had\n problems, Eddie thought, as he started to\n leave.", "“Oh, guess I’ll stop by and see if Teena\n wants to go,” Eddie answered casually. He\n tried to make it sound as though he would\n be doing Teena Ross a big favor. After all,\n she was only a girl. Eddie didn’t figure a girl\n would make a very good uranium prospecting\n partner, but most of the fellows he knew were\n away at camp, or vacationing with their folks,\n or something like that.\n\n\n “She’ll enjoy it, I’m sure,” his mother said.\n\n\n “I’ll take Sandy, too,” Eddie said. “He needs\n the exercise.”\n\n\n “That’s a good idea, dear. Be back in time\n for an early dinner.”\n\n\n Eddie let Sandy off his chain. The taffy-colored\n cocker spaniel yipped wildly over his\n freedom, racing back and forth as Eddie\n started down the street.\n\n19", "Then Eddie heard the sound of his father’s\n voice coming from the den. There was a\n strange urgent tone in it. The door to the den\n was open. Eddie went through the dining\n room and glanced into the den. His father\n sat stiffly behind his homemade desk, talking\n rapidly into the telephone. Eddie caught only\n the last few sketchy words. Then his father\n placed the telephone in its cradle, glanced up,\n and saw Eddie.\n\n\n If there had been even the slightest doubt\n in Eddie’s mind about something being\n wrong, it vanished now. Mr. Taylor looked\n years older than he had that very morning.\n Worry lay deep in his eyes. He fumbled\n thoughtfully with a pencil, turning it end over\n end on his desk.\n\n\n “Hello, son,” he said. He didn’t even ask\n whether Eddie had discovered any uranium\n ore that day. Always before, he had shown\n genuine interest in Eddie’s prospecting trips.", "“I’ll only be a minute.” She pushed the\n screen door open for him. “I’ll make us some\n sandwiches.”\n\n\n “Stay here, Sandy,” Eddie said. “Sit.” The\n dog minded, although he looked a bit rebellious.\n\n20\n\n Eddie went inside and followed Teena to\n the kitchen. He felt triumphant about the\n sandwiches.\n\n\n Teena tossed him a dish towel. “You dry\n them,” she said.\n\n\n “Who, me?”", "“Good evening, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie said. “I—I\n hope I’m not making a pest of myself.” He\n looked around for Mr. Ross, but Teena’s\n father apparently hadn’t arrived home from\n Acme Aircraft yet. There wasn’t a place set for\n him at the table, either.\n\n\n “You’re never a pest, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross assured\n him. “I was going to call your mother in\n a little while about that newspaper write-up.”\n\n\n “Oh, you read it?” Eddie said.\n\n\n “How could anyone miss it?” Teena said.\n “Right on the front page.”\n\n\n “I suppose your father is quite concerned\n over it,” Teena’s mother said.\n\n\n “Oh, yes,” Eddie affirmed. “He was the one\n who ordered the isotope.”\n\n\n “What’s an isotope?” Teena asked.", "“Why not? You’re in a hurry, aren’t you?\n I can make the sandwiches while you dry the\n silverware.” She smiled, putting tiny crinkles\n in her small, slightly upturned nose. She wore\n her hair in a pony tail. Even though her hair\n was blond all year long, it seemed even\n lighter in the summer. Eddie couldn’t tell\n whether the sun had faded it, or whether her\n deep summer tan simply made her hair look\n lighter by contrast. Maybe both.\n\n\n “Hello, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross said, coming into\n the kitchen. “Looks like Teena put you to\n work.”\n\n\n “She always does, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie said,\n pretending great injury. “Don’t know why I\n keep coming over here.”\n\n\n “I know,” Teena spoke up quickly. “It’s\n because we’re friends, that’s why.”\n\n21", "“I guess not, dear,” Mrs. Taylor said, smiling\n over his hasty retreat. “What are you going\n to do?”\n\n\n “Think I’ll do a little prospecting,” Eddie\n said.\n\n\n “Where?”\n\n\n “Probably in the hills beyond the college,”\n Eddie said. The more he thought about it, the\n more he realized it was a little late in the day\n to go to Cedar Point. The best way to get\n there was by rowboat across Moon Bay, and\n that was too long a row to be starting now.\n Besides, there were plenty of other places\n around the outskirts of Oceanview where\n likely looking rock formations invited search\n with a Geiger counter.\n\n18\n\n “Are you going alone?” his mother asked.", "Finished, Eddie went out to breakfast.\n\n\n “Good morning, dear,” his mother greeted\n him, handing him a plate of eggs.\n\n\n “Hi, Mom,” Eddie said. “Gotta hurry. Big\n day today.”\n\n\n “So your father says. But I’m afraid your\n big day will have to start with sorting out and\n tying up those newspapers and magazines that\n have been collecting in the garage.”\n\n\n “Aw, Mom—”\n\n\n “Eddie, I asked you to do it three days ago.\n Remember? And the Goodwill truck comes\n around today.”\n\n\n “But, Mom—”\n\n15", "Eddie nodded. It was even more serious\n than its threat of danger to anyone who\n handled it carelessly. It was a new isotope—a\n secret isotope. His father hadn’t said whether\n it had been developed for curing things or for\n destroying things. But many radioisotopes\n could do either; it depended on how they were\n used. Eddie assumed that anyone who would\n stoop to stealing isotopes more than likely\n would be interested in their ability to destroy\n rather than their ability to benefit mankind.\n\n\n “Well, I certainly do hope everything works\n out all right,” Teena’s mother said.\n\n\n “So do I,” Teena agreed.\n\n\n Eddie glanced at the kitchen clock. “Oh,\n boy,” he said, “I’d better be heading back\n home. I didn’t mean to come over here and\n talk so long.”", "“Wouldn’t think of leaving it home,” his\n father said, smiling. “By the way, I put new\n batteries in it the other day. Take it easy on\n them. Remember to switch it off when you’re\n not actually using it.”\n\n\n “I will,” Eddie promised. He had forgotten\n several times before, weakening the batteries.\n\n17\n\n It took Eddie over an hour to sort out the\n newspapers and magazines in the garage, tie\n them in neat bundles, and place them out on\n the front curb for the Goodwill pickup. By\n that time the sun was high overhead. It had\n driven off the coolness which the ocean air\n had provided during the earlier hours.\n\n\n “Anything else, Mom?” he asked, returning\n to the house and getting the Geiger counter\n out of the closet. He edged toward the back\n door before his mother had much time to\n think of something more for him to do.", "Eddie knew she was right. They were\n friends—good friends. They had been ever\n since Eddie’s family had moved to Oceanview\n and his father had become head of the college’s\n atomic-science department. In fact, their\n parents were close friends, also. Teena’s father\n was chief engineer for the Acme Aviation\n Company, one of the coast town’s largest\n manufacturing concerns.\n\n\n “Well, I’ll be glad to finish them, Eddie,”\n Mrs. Ross offered. “I know how boys detest\n doing dishes.”\n\n\n “Oh, I don’t really mind, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie\n said. “Besides, Teena’s making sandwiches to\n take with us.”\n\n\n “Another prospecting trip?” Teena’s\n mother glanced at the Geiger counter which\n Eddie had set carefully on the dinette table.\n\n\n “I still think there must be some uranium\n around here,” Eddie insisted. “And we can\n find it if anyone can.”", "Eddie laughed. “I sure wouldn’t want the\n job of trying to feed a herd of them the size of\n a period,” he said. “Did you know that there\n are about three million billion atoms of carbon\n in a single period printed at the end of a\n sentence. That’s how small atoms are.”\n\n\n “Three million billion is a lot of something,”\n a man’s voice spoke behind him.\n “What are we talking about, Eddie?”\n\n\n “Oh, hello, Mr. Ross,” Eddie said, turning\n around and standing up. “I didn’t hear you\n come in.”\n\n44\n\n Teena’s father was a medium-sized man\n with light-brown hair which was getting somewhat\n thin on top. He was usually quite cheerful\n and full of fun, but tonight his face seemed\n unusually drawn and sober. He stepped to the\n table, leaned over, and gave both Teena and\n Mrs. Ross a kiss on the cheek.", "“My, that’s interesting, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross\n said.\n\n\n “I’ve seen them do it,” Eddie said proudly,\n then added, “from behind a protective shield,\n of course. When the material has soaked up\n enough radiation, they pull it back out. They\n say it’s ‘cooked.’”\n\n\n “You mean it’s hot?” Teena asked.\n\n\n “It’s hot,” Eddie said, “but not like if it\n came out of a stove. By hot, they mean it’s\n radioactive. If you touched it, or even got near\n it, you would get burned, but you probably\n wouldn’t even know it for a while. It would be\n a radiation burn. That’s a kind of burn you\n don’t feel, but it destroys your blood cells and\n tissues, and—well, you’ve had it.”", "“It’s all right with me,” Teena agreed,\n plucking foxtails from Sandy’s ears. “Pretty\n hot, anyway. Let’s eat our sandwiches and go\n back home.”\n\n\n “All right,” Eddie said. “You know, one of\n these days I’d like to go out to Cedar Point\n and scout around. Maybe we’ll find something\n there.” Then he told Teena about his dream.\n\n\n Teena smiled. “A dream sure isn’t much to\n go on,” she said, “but they say it’s pretty out on\n Cedar Point. I’ll go any time you want to,\n Eddie.” She handed him one of the sandwiches.\n\n\n It was midafternoon by the time they arrived\n back at Teena’s house. They worked a while\n on a new jigsaw puzzle Teena had received\n on a recent birthday. Then Eddie said good-by\n and went on down the street toward his\n own home.", "“I agree,” Mrs. Ross said. “But even if you\n don’t find it, you both seem to enjoy your\n hikes.”\n\n22\n\n “Oh, yes, it’s fun, Mother,” Teena replied,\n wrapping wax paper around a sandwich.\n “Guess I’m ready. I’ve got a bone for Sandy,\n too.”\n\n\n “Don’t go too far out from town,” Mrs.\n Ross cautioned, as Eddie picked up the Geiger\n counter. “And stick near the main roads.\n You know the rules.”\n\n\n “We sure do, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie assured\n her. “And we’ll be back early.”", "Christina Ross—whom everybody called\n Teena—lived at the far end of the block.\n Eddie went around to the side door of the\n light-green stucco house and knocked.\n\n\n “Oh, hi, Eddie,” Teena greeted him, appearing\n at the screen door. “I was hoping\n you’d come over.”\n\n\n “Well, I—I just happened to be going by,”\n Eddie said. “Thought you might want to\n watch me do a little prospecting with the Geiger\n counter. But maybe you’re too busy.”\n\n\n That’s how to handle it, Eddie thought.\n Don’t act anxious. Let Teena be anxious.\n Then maybe she’ll even offer to bring along\n a couple of sandwiches or some fruit.\n\n\n “Oh, I’d love to go,” Teena said eagerly,\n “but I’m just finishing the dishes. Come on\n in.”\n\n\n “I’m in kind of a hurry.”", "“Perhaps to some other country.”\n\n\n “Then—then you mean whoever stole it\n were spies!” Eddie exclaimed breathlessly.\n\n\n “That’s entirely possible,” his father said.\n “In fact, it’s the only logical explanation I can\n think of. People simply don’t go around stealing\n radioactive isotopes without a mighty important\n reason.”\n\n34\n\n “Dinner’s ready,” Eddie’s mother called\n from the kitchen.\n\n\n During dinner Eddie wasn’t sure just what\n he was eating. The idea of spies stealing atomic\n materials kept building up in his mind. By the\n time dessert was finished, he was anxious to\n talk with someone, yet he knew he shouldn’t\n bother his father with any more questions. He\n asked if he could go over and visit with Teena\n for a while.", "Eddie pulled on his trousers and T shirt\n and went into the bathroom. He washed hurriedly,\n knowing that even if he missed a spot\n or two, he was fairly safe. During the summer\n months his freckles got so thick and dark that\n it would take a magnifying glass to detect any\n small smudges of dirt hiding among them. He\n plastered some water on his dark-red hair,\n pushed a comb through it, and shrugged as it\n snapped back almost to its original position.\n Oh, well, he had tried.\n\n14\n\n He grinned into the mirror, reached a\n finger into his mouth, and unhooked the\n small rubber bands from his tooth braces.\n He dropped them into the waste basket. He’d\n put fresh ones in after breakfast.\n\n\n He brushed his teeth carefully, taking particular\n pains around the metal braces. The\n tooth-straightening orthodontist had warned\n him about letting food gather around the\n metal clamps. It could start cavities." ], [ "“Eddie was telling us about atoms,” Teena’s\n mother said. “Did you know there were three\n million billion of them in a period?”\n\n\n “How many in a comma?” Mr. Ross said to\n Eddie, then added quickly, “forget it, Eddie.\n It wasn’t very funny. I—I’m afraid I don’t feel\n very funny tonight.”\n\n\n “Sit down, dear,” Mrs. Ross said. “I’ll warm\n your dinner. You didn’t sound very cheerful\n when you called to say you would be late. How\n did everything go at the plant today?”\n\n\n “Not so good,” Teena’s father said tiredly.\n “In fact, not good at all.”\n\n\n Problems. It seemed that everyone had\n problems, Eddie thought, as he started to\n leave.", "Eddie laughed. “I sure wouldn’t want the\n job of trying to feed a herd of them the size of\n a period,” he said. “Did you know that there\n are about three million billion atoms of carbon\n in a single period printed at the end of a\n sentence. That’s how small atoms are.”\n\n\n “Three million billion is a lot of something,”\n a man’s voice spoke behind him.\n “What are we talking about, Eddie?”\n\n\n “Oh, hello, Mr. Ross,” Eddie said, turning\n around and standing up. “I didn’t hear you\n come in.”\n\n44\n\n Teena’s father was a medium-sized man\n with light-brown hair which was getting somewhat\n thin on top. He was usually quite cheerful\n and full of fun, but tonight his face seemed\n unusually drawn and sober. He stepped to the\n table, leaned over, and gave both Teena and\n Mrs. Ross a kiss on the cheek.", "“Why not? You’re in a hurry, aren’t you?\n I can make the sandwiches while you dry the\n silverware.” She smiled, putting tiny crinkles\n in her small, slightly upturned nose. She wore\n her hair in a pony tail. Even though her hair\n was blond all year long, it seemed even\n lighter in the summer. Eddie couldn’t tell\n whether the sun had faded it, or whether her\n deep summer tan simply made her hair look\n lighter by contrast. Maybe both.\n\n\n “Hello, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross said, coming into\n the kitchen. “Looks like Teena put you to\n work.”\n\n\n “She always does, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie said,\n pretending great injury. “Don’t know why I\n keep coming over here.”\n\n\n “I know,” Teena spoke up quickly. “It’s\n because we’re friends, that’s why.”\n\n21", "“Oh, we’re glad you did, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross\n said. “I’m afraid too few of us know anything\n about this atom business.”\n\n43\n\n “That’s right, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie agreed.\n “People should talk more and read more about\n it. After all, this is an atomic age. We might as\n well face it. My father says that in horse-and-buggy\n days everyone knew how to feed a horse\n and grease a wagon wheel. They knew what was\n needed to get the work done. But now that\n atoms are being harnessed to do the work, not\n many people even bother to find out what an\n atom is.”\n\n\n Mrs. Ross smiled. “I guess you’re right,\n Eddie,” she said, “but I wouldn’t quite know\n how to go about feeding an atom.”\n\n\n “Or greasing one,” Teena added.", "“Oh, guess I’ll stop by and see if Teena\n wants to go,” Eddie answered casually. He\n tried to make it sound as though he would\n be doing Teena Ross a big favor. After all,\n she was only a girl. Eddie didn’t figure a girl\n would make a very good uranium prospecting\n partner, but most of the fellows he knew were\n away at camp, or vacationing with their folks,\n or something like that.\n\n\n “She’ll enjoy it, I’m sure,” his mother said.\n\n\n “I’ll take Sandy, too,” Eddie said. “He needs\n the exercise.”\n\n\n “That’s a good idea, dear. Be back in time\n for an early dinner.”\n\n\n Eddie let Sandy off his chain. The taffy-colored\n cocker spaniel yipped wildly over his\n freedom, racing back and forth as Eddie\n started down the street.\n\n19", "“Good evening, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie said. “I—I\n hope I’m not making a pest of myself.” He\n looked around for Mr. Ross, but Teena’s\n father apparently hadn’t arrived home from\n Acme Aircraft yet. There wasn’t a place set for\n him at the table, either.\n\n\n “You’re never a pest, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross assured\n him. “I was going to call your mother in\n a little while about that newspaper write-up.”\n\n\n “Oh, you read it?” Eddie said.\n\n\n “How could anyone miss it?” Teena said.\n “Right on the front page.”\n\n\n “I suppose your father is quite concerned\n over it,” Teena’s mother said.\n\n\n “Oh, yes,” Eddie affirmed. “He was the one\n who ordered the isotope.”\n\n\n “What’s an isotope?” Teena asked.", "“I agree,” Mrs. Ross said. “But even if you\n don’t find it, you both seem to enjoy your\n hikes.”\n\n22\n\n “Oh, yes, it’s fun, Mother,” Teena replied,\n wrapping wax paper around a sandwich.\n “Guess I’m ready. I’ve got a bone for Sandy,\n too.”\n\n\n “Don’t go too far out from town,” Mrs.\n Ross cautioned, as Eddie picked up the Geiger\n counter. “And stick near the main roads.\n You know the rules.”\n\n\n “We sure do, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie assured\n her. “And we’ll be back early.”", "“Well, you were together most of the day,”\n his mother said, “but I guess it’s all right. Be\n back in about an hour, though.”\n\n\n It was a balmy evening. On such evenings,\n he and Teena sometimes walked along the\n beach barefoot, collecting sea shells. Today\n Eddie had no desire to do that. He ran down\n the block.\n\n\n Teena answered his knock.\n\n\n “Come on in, Eddie,” she invited, seeming\n surprised to see him. “Mother and I are just\n finishing dinner.”\n\n\n “Oh, I figured you’d be through by now,”\n Eddie apologized, following her inside.\n\n35\n\n “Hello, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross said, but she\n didn’t seem as cheerful as usual.", "Then Eddie heard the sound of his father’s\n voice coming from the den. There was a\n strange urgent tone in it. The door to the den\n was open. Eddie went through the dining\n room and glanced into the den. His father\n sat stiffly behind his homemade desk, talking\n rapidly into the telephone. Eddie caught only\n the last few sketchy words. Then his father\n placed the telephone in its cradle, glanced up,\n and saw Eddie.\n\n\n If there had been even the slightest doubt\n in Eddie’s mind about something being\n wrong, it vanished now. Mr. Taylor looked\n years older than he had that very morning.\n Worry lay deep in his eyes. He fumbled\n thoughtfully with a pencil, turning it end over\n end on his desk.\n\n\n “Hello, son,” he said. He didn’t even ask\n whether Eddie had discovered any uranium\n ore that day. Always before, he had shown\n genuine interest in Eddie’s prospecting trips.", "“What kind was the one stolen from the\n college today?” Teena asked.\n\n\n “Dad didn’t say exactly,” Eddie answered,\n “except he did say that if whoever took it\n didn’t know what he was doing and opened up\n the lead capsule, it could kill him. Of course,\n even the mild isotopes are deadly if they’re not\n handled right.”\n\n\n “My goodness, it is a serious matter, isn’t\n it?” Mrs. Ross said.\n\n42", "“My, that’s interesting, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross\n said.\n\n\n “I’ve seen them do it,” Eddie said proudly,\n then added, “from behind a protective shield,\n of course. When the material has soaked up\n enough radiation, they pull it back out. They\n say it’s ‘cooked.’”\n\n\n “You mean it’s hot?” Teena asked.\n\n\n “It’s hot,” Eddie said, “but not like if it\n came out of a stove. By hot, they mean it’s\n radioactive. If you touched it, or even got near\n it, you would get burned, but you probably\n wouldn’t even know it for a while. It would be\n a radiation burn. That’s a kind of burn you\n don’t feel, but it destroys your blood cells and\n tissues, and—well, you’ve had it.”", "Christina Ross—whom everybody called\n Teena—lived at the far end of the block.\n Eddie went around to the side door of the\n light-green stucco house and knocked.\n\n\n “Oh, hi, Eddie,” Teena greeted him, appearing\n at the screen door. “I was hoping\n you’d come over.”\n\n\n “Well, I—I just happened to be going by,”\n Eddie said. “Thought you might want to\n watch me do a little prospecting with the Geiger\n counter. But maybe you’re too busy.”\n\n\n That’s how to handle it, Eddie thought.\n Don’t act anxious. Let Teena be anxious.\n Then maybe she’ll even offer to bring along\n a couple of sandwiches or some fruit.\n\n\n “Oh, I’d love to go,” Teena said eagerly,\n “but I’m just finishing the dishes. Come on\n in.”\n\n\n “I’m in kind of a hurry.”", "Mr. Taylor opened the door. He was a big\n man, broad-shouldered and still thin-waisted.\n Eddie found it easy to believe the stories he\n had heard about his father being an outstanding\n football player in his time. Even his glasses\n and the gray hair at his temples didn’t add\n much age, although Eddie knew it had been\n eighteen years since his father had played his\n last game of college football.\n\n\n “You may use the Geiger counter any time\n you want, Eddie,” Mr. Taylor said, “as long as\n you take good care of it. You figured out where\n you can find some uranium ore?”\n\n\n Eddie smiled sheepishly. “I—I had a\n dream,” he said. “Plain as day. It was out on\n Cedar Point. I was walking along over some\n rocks. Suddenly the Geiger counter began\n clicking like everything.”\n\n13", "“No arguments, son,” his father put in\n calmly but firmly. “School vacation doesn’t\n mean that your chores around here are on\n vacation, too. Get at it right away, and you’ll\n still have time to hunt your uranium.\n\n\n “Well,” Mr. Taylor added, excusing himself\n from the table, “I’d better be getting over\n to school. I’m expecting to receive shipment\n of a new radioisotope today.”", "Eddie pulled on his trousers and T shirt\n and went into the bathroom. He washed hurriedly,\n knowing that even if he missed a spot\n or two, he was fairly safe. During the summer\n months his freckles got so thick and dark that\n it would take a magnifying glass to detect any\n small smudges of dirt hiding among them. He\n plastered some water on his dark-red hair,\n pushed a comb through it, and shrugged as it\n snapped back almost to its original position.\n Oh, well, he had tried.\n\n14\n\n He grinned into the mirror, reached a\n finger into his mouth, and unhooked the\n small rubber bands from his tooth braces.\n He dropped them into the waste basket. He’d\n put fresh ones in after breakfast.\n\n\n He brushed his teeth carefully, taking particular\n pains around the metal braces. The\n tooth-straightening orthodontist had warned\n him about letting food gather around the\n metal clamps. It could start cavities.", "Eddie knew she was right. They were\n friends—good friends. They had been ever\n since Eddie’s family had moved to Oceanview\n and his father had become head of the college’s\n atomic-science department. In fact, their\n parents were close friends, also. Teena’s father\n was chief engineer for the Acme Aviation\n Company, one of the coast town’s largest\n manufacturing concerns.\n\n\n “Well, I’ll be glad to finish them, Eddie,”\n Mrs. Ross offered. “I know how boys detest\n doing dishes.”\n\n\n “Oh, I don’t really mind, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie\n said. “Besides, Teena’s making sandwiches to\n take with us.”\n\n\n “Another prospecting trip?” Teena’s\n mother glanced at the Geiger counter which\n Eddie had set carefully on the dinette table.\n\n\n “I still think there must be some uranium\n around here,” Eddie insisted. “And we can\n find it if anyone can.”", "24\n\n After putting Sandy on his long chain and\n filling his water dish, Eddie went in the back\n door. He put the Geiger counter in the closet\n and went into the kitchen.\n\n\n “What’s for dinner, Mom?” he asked.\n\n\n Mrs. Taylor turned from the sink. Eddie\n knew at once, just seeing the expression on\n his mother’s face, that something was wrong.\n\n\n “Dinner?” his mother said absently. “It’s\n not quite four o’clock yet, Eddie. Besides,\n dinner may be a little late today.”\n\n\n “But this morning you said it would be\n early,” Eddie reminded her, puzzled.\n\n\n “This morning I didn’t know what might\n happen.”\n\n25", "“I’ll only be a minute.” She pushed the\n screen door open for him. “I’ll make us some\n sandwiches.”\n\n\n “Stay here, Sandy,” Eddie said. “Sit.” The\n dog minded, although he looked a bit rebellious.\n\n20\n\n Eddie went inside and followed Teena to\n the kitchen. He felt triumphant about the\n sandwiches.\n\n\n Teena tossed him a dish towel. “You dry\n them,” she said.\n\n\n “Who, me?”", "“I’m not sure I know, either,” Mrs. Ross\n said. “Maybe we could understand more of\n what it’s all about if you could explain what a\n radioisotope is, Eddie.”\n\n36\n\n “Well,” Eddie said slowly, “it’s not easy to\n explain, but I’ll try. You know how rare\n uranium is. There’s not nearly enough of it to\n fill all the needs for radioactive materials. Besides,\n pure uranium is so powerful and expensive\n and dangerous to handle that it’s not\n a very good idea to try using it in its true form.\n So they build an atomic reactor like the one at\n Drake Ridge.”\n\n\n “We’ve driven by it,” Mrs. Ross said. “My,\n it’s a big place.”\n\n\n “I’ll say,” Eddie agreed. “Of course, only\n one building holds the reactor itself. It’s the\n biggest building near the center.”", "“Cedar Point?” his father asked. “I’ve\n never been out there. But, from what I hear,\n there are plenty of rock formations. Might\n be worth a try, at that. You never can tell\n where you might strike some radioactivity.”\n\n\n “Do you believe in dreams, Dad?”\n\n\n “Well, now, that’s a tough question, son.\n I can’t say that I really do. Still, one clue is\n as good as another when it comes to hunting\n uranium ore, I guess. But right now we’d\n better get out to breakfast before your mother\n scalps us. Hurry it up.” His father turned\n and went back down the hallway toward the\n kitchen." ], [ "“It’s all right with me,” Teena agreed,\n plucking foxtails from Sandy’s ears. “Pretty\n hot, anyway. Let’s eat our sandwiches and go\n back home.”\n\n\n “All right,” Eddie said. “You know, one of\n these days I’d like to go out to Cedar Point\n and scout around. Maybe we’ll find something\n there.” Then he told Teena about his dream.\n\n\n Teena smiled. “A dream sure isn’t much to\n go on,” she said, “but they say it’s pretty out on\n Cedar Point. I’ll go any time you want to,\n Eddie.” She handed him one of the sandwiches.\n\n\n It was midafternoon by the time they arrived\n back at Teena’s house. They worked a while\n on a new jigsaw puzzle Teena had received\n on a recent birthday. Then Eddie said good-by\n and went on down the street toward his\n own home.", "“Well, you were together most of the day,”\n his mother said, “but I guess it’s all right. Be\n back in about an hour, though.”\n\n\n It was a balmy evening. On such evenings,\n he and Teena sometimes walked along the\n beach barefoot, collecting sea shells. Today\n Eddie had no desire to do that. He ran down\n the block.\n\n\n Teena answered his knock.\n\n\n “Come on in, Eddie,” she invited, seeming\n surprised to see him. “Mother and I are just\n finishing dinner.”\n\n\n “Oh, I figured you’d be through by now,”\n Eddie apologized, following her inside.\n\n35\n\n “Hello, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross said, but she\n didn’t seem as cheerful as usual.", "“Oh, guess I’ll stop by and see if Teena\n wants to go,” Eddie answered casually. He\n tried to make it sound as though he would\n be doing Teena Ross a big favor. After all,\n she was only a girl. Eddie didn’t figure a girl\n would make a very good uranium prospecting\n partner, but most of the fellows he knew were\n away at camp, or vacationing with their folks,\n or something like that.\n\n\n “She’ll enjoy it, I’m sure,” his mother said.\n\n\n “I’ll take Sandy, too,” Eddie said. “He needs\n the exercise.”\n\n\n “That’s a good idea, dear. Be back in time\n for an early dinner.”\n\n\n Eddie let Sandy off his chain. The taffy-colored\n cocker spaniel yipped wildly over his\n freedom, racing back and forth as Eddie\n started down the street.\n\n19", "Christina Ross—whom everybody called\n Teena—lived at the far end of the block.\n Eddie went around to the side door of the\n light-green stucco house and knocked.\n\n\n “Oh, hi, Eddie,” Teena greeted him, appearing\n at the screen door. “I was hoping\n you’d come over.”\n\n\n “Well, I—I just happened to be going by,”\n Eddie said. “Thought you might want to\n watch me do a little prospecting with the Geiger\n counter. But maybe you’re too busy.”\n\n\n That’s how to handle it, Eddie thought.\n Don’t act anxious. Let Teena be anxious.\n Then maybe she’ll even offer to bring along\n a couple of sandwiches or some fruit.\n\n\n “Oh, I’d love to go,” Teena said eagerly,\n “but I’m just finishing the dishes. Come on\n in.”\n\n\n “I’m in kind of a hurry.”", "“Why not? You’re in a hurry, aren’t you?\n I can make the sandwiches while you dry the\n silverware.” She smiled, putting tiny crinkles\n in her small, slightly upturned nose. She wore\n her hair in a pony tail. Even though her hair\n was blond all year long, it seemed even\n lighter in the summer. Eddie couldn’t tell\n whether the sun had faded it, or whether her\n deep summer tan simply made her hair look\n lighter by contrast. Maybe both.\n\n\n “Hello, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross said, coming into\n the kitchen. “Looks like Teena put you to\n work.”\n\n\n “She always does, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie said,\n pretending great injury. “Don’t know why I\n keep coming over here.”\n\n\n “I know,” Teena spoke up quickly. “It’s\n because we’re friends, that’s why.”\n\n21", "“I’ll only be a minute.” She pushed the\n screen door open for him. “I’ll make us some\n sandwiches.”\n\n\n “Stay here, Sandy,” Eddie said. “Sit.” The\n dog minded, although he looked a bit rebellious.\n\n20\n\n Eddie went inside and followed Teena to\n the kitchen. He felt triumphant about the\n sandwiches.\n\n\n Teena tossed him a dish towel. “You dry\n them,” she said.\n\n\n “Who, me?”", "“Eddie was telling us about atoms,” Teena’s\n mother said. “Did you know there were three\n million billion of them in a period?”\n\n\n “How many in a comma?” Mr. Ross said to\n Eddie, then added quickly, “forget it, Eddie.\n It wasn’t very funny. I—I’m afraid I don’t feel\n very funny tonight.”\n\n\n “Sit down, dear,” Mrs. Ross said. “I’ll warm\n your dinner. You didn’t sound very cheerful\n when you called to say you would be late. How\n did everything go at the plant today?”\n\n\n “Not so good,” Teena’s father said tiredly.\n “In fact, not good at all.”\n\n\n Problems. It seemed that everyone had\n problems, Eddie thought, as he started to\n leave.", "Eddie knew she was right. They were\n friends—good friends. They had been ever\n since Eddie’s family had moved to Oceanview\n and his father had become head of the college’s\n atomic-science department. In fact, their\n parents were close friends, also. Teena’s father\n was chief engineer for the Acme Aviation\n Company, one of the coast town’s largest\n manufacturing concerns.\n\n\n “Well, I’ll be glad to finish them, Eddie,”\n Mrs. Ross offered. “I know how boys detest\n doing dishes.”\n\n\n “Oh, I don’t really mind, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie\n said. “Besides, Teena’s making sandwiches to\n take with us.”\n\n\n “Another prospecting trip?” Teena’s\n mother glanced at the Geiger counter which\n Eddie had set carefully on the dinette table.\n\n\n “I still think there must be some uranium\n around here,” Eddie insisted. “And we can\n find it if anyone can.”", "Eddie nodded. It was even more serious\n than its threat of danger to anyone who\n handled it carelessly. It was a new isotope—a\n secret isotope. His father hadn’t said whether\n it had been developed for curing things or for\n destroying things. But many radioisotopes\n could do either; it depended on how they were\n used. Eddie assumed that anyone who would\n stoop to stealing isotopes more than likely\n would be interested in their ability to destroy\n rather than their ability to benefit mankind.\n\n\n “Well, I certainly do hope everything works\n out all right,” Teena’s mother said.\n\n\n “So do I,” Teena agreed.\n\n\n Eddie glanced at the kitchen clock. “Oh,\n boy,” he said, “I’d better be heading back\n home. I didn’t mean to come over here and\n talk so long.”", "“Good evening, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie said. “I—I\n hope I’m not making a pest of myself.” He\n looked around for Mr. Ross, but Teena’s\n father apparently hadn’t arrived home from\n Acme Aircraft yet. There wasn’t a place set for\n him at the table, either.\n\n\n “You’re never a pest, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross assured\n him. “I was going to call your mother in\n a little while about that newspaper write-up.”\n\n\n “Oh, you read it?” Eddie said.\n\n\n “How could anyone miss it?” Teena said.\n “Right on the front page.”\n\n\n “I suppose your father is quite concerned\n over it,” Teena’s mother said.\n\n\n “Oh, yes,” Eddie affirmed. “He was the one\n who ordered the isotope.”\n\n\n “What’s an isotope?” Teena asked.", "They walked past the college campus, and\n toward the rocky foothills beyond. At various\n rock mounds and outcroppings, Eddie\n switched on the Geiger counter. The needle\n of the dial on the black box wavered slightly.\n A slow clicking came through the earphones,\n but Eddie knew these indicated no more than\n a normal background count. There were slight\n traces of radioactivity in almost all earth or\n rocks. It was in the air itself, caused by mysterious\n and ever-present cosmic rays, so there\n was always a mild background count when\n the Geiger counter was turned on; but to\n mean anything, the needle had to jump far\n ahead on the gauge, and the clicking through\n the earphones had to speed up until it sounded\n almost like bacon frying in a hot skillet.\n\n23\n\n There was none of that today. After they\n had hiked and searched most of the forenoon,\n Eddie said, “We might as well call it a day,\n Teena. Doesn’t seem to be anything out here.”", "“Perhaps to some other country.”\n\n\n “Then—then you mean whoever stole it\n were spies!” Eddie exclaimed breathlessly.\n\n\n “That’s entirely possible,” his father said.\n “In fact, it’s the only logical explanation I can\n think of. People simply don’t go around stealing\n radioactive isotopes without a mighty important\n reason.”\n\n34\n\n “Dinner’s ready,” Eddie’s mother called\n from the kitchen.\n\n\n During dinner Eddie wasn’t sure just what\n he was eating. The idea of spies stealing atomic\n materials kept building up in his mind. By the\n time dessert was finished, he was anxious to\n talk with someone, yet he knew he shouldn’t\n bother his father with any more questions. He\n asked if he could go over and visit with Teena\n for a while.", "Eddie pulled on his trousers and T shirt\n and went into the bathroom. He washed hurriedly,\n knowing that even if he missed a spot\n or two, he was fairly safe. During the summer\n months his freckles got so thick and dark that\n it would take a magnifying glass to detect any\n small smudges of dirt hiding among them. He\n plastered some water on his dark-red hair,\n pushed a comb through it, and shrugged as it\n snapped back almost to its original position.\n Oh, well, he had tried.\n\n14\n\n He grinned into the mirror, reached a\n finger into his mouth, and unhooked the\n small rubber bands from his tooth braces.\n He dropped them into the waste basket. He’d\n put fresh ones in after breakfast.\n\n\n He brushed his teeth carefully, taking particular\n pains around the metal braces. The\n tooth-straightening orthodontist had warned\n him about letting food gather around the\n metal clamps. It could start cavities.", "“I agree,” Mrs. Ross said. “But even if you\n don’t find it, you both seem to enjoy your\n hikes.”\n\n22\n\n “Oh, yes, it’s fun, Mother,” Teena replied,\n wrapping wax paper around a sandwich.\n “Guess I’m ready. I’ve got a bone for Sandy,\n too.”\n\n\n “Don’t go too far out from town,” Mrs.\n Ross cautioned, as Eddie picked up the Geiger\n counter. “And stick near the main roads.\n You know the rules.”\n\n\n “We sure do, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie assured\n her. “And we’ll be back early.”", "Eddie laughed. “I sure wouldn’t want the\n job of trying to feed a herd of them the size of\n a period,” he said. “Did you know that there\n are about three million billion atoms of carbon\n in a single period printed at the end of a\n sentence. That’s how small atoms are.”\n\n\n “Three million billion is a lot of something,”\n a man’s voice spoke behind him.\n “What are we talking about, Eddie?”\n\n\n “Oh, hello, Mr. Ross,” Eddie said, turning\n around and standing up. “I didn’t hear you\n come in.”\n\n44\n\n Teena’s father was a medium-sized man\n with light-brown hair which was getting somewhat\n thin on top. He was usually quite cheerful\n and full of fun, but tonight his face seemed\n unusually drawn and sober. He stepped to the\n table, leaned over, and gave both Teena and\n Mrs. Ross a kiss on the cheek.", "24\n\n After putting Sandy on his long chain and\n filling his water dish, Eddie went in the back\n door. He put the Geiger counter in the closet\n and went into the kitchen.\n\n\n “What’s for dinner, Mom?” he asked.\n\n\n Mrs. Taylor turned from the sink. Eddie\n knew at once, just seeing the expression on\n his mother’s face, that something was wrong.\n\n\n “Dinner?” his mother said absently. “It’s\n not quite four o’clock yet, Eddie. Besides,\n dinner may be a little late today.”\n\n\n “But this morning you said it would be\n early,” Eddie reminded her, puzzled.\n\n\n “This morning I didn’t know what might\n happen.”\n\n25", "“Goodness. Eight feet is a lot of cement.”\n\n\n “It takes a lot to stop radioactive atomic\n particles,” Eddie explained. “Especially the\n gamma rays. They’re the fastest and most dangerous,\n and the hardest to stop. Alpha and beta\n rays are fairly easy to stop. But the gamma\n rays are regular high-velocity invisible bullets.\n They’ll go right through a stone wall unless\n it’s plenty thick. Of course, you can’t see them.\n Not with even the most powerful microscope\n in the world.”\n\n39\n\n “I wouldn’t want to work around a place\n where I might get shot at by—by dangerous\n rays you can’t even see,” Teena said.", "Then Eddie heard the sound of his father’s\n voice coming from the den. There was a\n strange urgent tone in it. The door to the den\n was open. Eddie went through the dining\n room and glanced into the den. His father\n sat stiffly behind his homemade desk, talking\n rapidly into the telephone. Eddie caught only\n the last few sketchy words. Then his father\n placed the telephone in its cradle, glanced up,\n and saw Eddie.\n\n\n If there had been even the slightest doubt\n in Eddie’s mind about something being\n wrong, it vanished now. Mr. Taylor looked\n years older than he had that very morning.\n Worry lay deep in his eyes. He fumbled\n thoughtfully with a pencil, turning it end over\n end on his desk.\n\n\n “Hello, son,” he said. He didn’t even ask\n whether Eddie had discovered any uranium\n ore that day. Always before, he had shown\n genuine interest in Eddie’s prospecting trips.", "Finished, Eddie went out to breakfast.\n\n\n “Good morning, dear,” his mother greeted\n him, handing him a plate of eggs.\n\n\n “Hi, Mom,” Eddie said. “Gotta hurry. Big\n day today.”\n\n\n “So your father says. But I’m afraid your\n big day will have to start with sorting out and\n tying up those newspapers and magazines that\n have been collecting in the garage.”\n\n\n “Aw, Mom—”\n\n\n “Eddie, I asked you to do it three days ago.\n Remember? And the Goodwill truck comes\n around today.”\n\n\n “But, Mom—”\n\n15", "“My, that’s interesting, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross\n said.\n\n\n “I’ve seen them do it,” Eddie said proudly,\n then added, “from behind a protective shield,\n of course. When the material has soaked up\n enough radiation, they pull it back out. They\n say it’s ‘cooked.’”\n\n\n “You mean it’s hot?” Teena asked.\n\n\n “It’s hot,” Eddie said, “but not like if it\n came out of a stove. By hot, they mean it’s\n radioactive. If you touched it, or even got near\n it, you would get burned, but you probably\n wouldn’t even know it for a while. It would be\n a radiation burn. That’s a kind of burn you\n don’t feel, but it destroys your blood cells and\n tissues, and—well, you’ve had it.”" ], [ "“My, that’s interesting, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross\n said.\n\n\n “I’ve seen them do it,” Eddie said proudly,\n then added, “from behind a protective shield,\n of course. When the material has soaked up\n enough radiation, they pull it back out. They\n say it’s ‘cooked.’”\n\n\n “You mean it’s hot?” Teena asked.\n\n\n “It’s hot,” Eddie said, “but not like if it\n came out of a stove. By hot, they mean it’s\n radioactive. If you touched it, or even got near\n it, you would get burned, but you probably\n wouldn’t even know it for a while. It would be\n a radiation burn. That’s a kind of burn you\n don’t feel, but it destroys your blood cells and\n tissues, and—well, you’ve had it.”", "They walked past the college campus, and\n toward the rocky foothills beyond. At various\n rock mounds and outcroppings, Eddie\n switched on the Geiger counter. The needle\n of the dial on the black box wavered slightly.\n A slow clicking came through the earphones,\n but Eddie knew these indicated no more than\n a normal background count. There were slight\n traces of radioactivity in almost all earth or\n rocks. It was in the air itself, caused by mysterious\n and ever-present cosmic rays, so there\n was always a mild background count when\n the Geiger counter was turned on; but to\n mean anything, the needle had to jump far\n ahead on the gauge, and the clicking through\n the earphones had to speed up until it sounded\n almost like bacon frying in a hot skillet.\n\n23\n\n There was none of that today. After they\n had hiked and searched most of the forenoon,\n Eddie said, “We might as well call it a day,\n Teena. Doesn’t seem to be anything out here.”", "“I remember it,” Teena said.\n\n\n “Well, the reactor is about four stories\n high,” Eddie went on. “They call it a uranium\n ‘pile.’ It’s made up of hundreds and hundreds\n of graphite bricks. That’s where they get the\n name ‘pile’—from brick pile. Anyway, scattered\n around in between the bricks are small\n bits of uranium. Uranium atoms are radioactive.\n That is, they keep splitting up and sending\n out rays.”\n\n\n “Why do they do that?” Teena asked.\n\n37", "“Goodness. Eight feet is a lot of cement.”\n\n\n “It takes a lot to stop radioactive atomic\n particles,” Eddie explained. “Especially the\n gamma rays. They’re the fastest and most dangerous,\n and the hardest to stop. Alpha and beta\n rays are fairly easy to stop. But the gamma\n rays are regular high-velocity invisible bullets.\n They’ll go right through a stone wall unless\n it’s plenty thick. Of course, you can’t see them.\n Not with even the most powerful microscope\n in the world.”\n\n39\n\n “I wouldn’t want to work around a place\n where I might get shot at by—by dangerous\n rays you can’t even see,” Teena said.", "Eddie nodded. It was even more serious\n than its threat of danger to anyone who\n handled it carelessly. It was a new isotope—a\n secret isotope. His father hadn’t said whether\n it had been developed for curing things or for\n destroying things. But many radioisotopes\n could do either; it depended on how they were\n used. Eddie assumed that anyone who would\n stoop to stealing isotopes more than likely\n would be interested in their ability to destroy\n rather than their ability to benefit mankind.\n\n\n “Well, I certainly do hope everything works\n out all right,” Teena’s mother said.\n\n\n “So do I,” Teena agreed.\n\n\n Eddie glanced at the kitchen clock. “Oh,\n boy,” he said, “I’d better be heading back\n home. I didn’t mean to come over here and\n talk so long.”", "“Good evening, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie said. “I—I\n hope I’m not making a pest of myself.” He\n looked around for Mr. Ross, but Teena’s\n father apparently hadn’t arrived home from\n Acme Aircraft yet. There wasn’t a place set for\n him at the table, either.\n\n\n “You’re never a pest, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross assured\n him. “I was going to call your mother in\n a little while about that newspaper write-up.”\n\n\n “Oh, you read it?” Eddie said.\n\n\n “How could anyone miss it?” Teena said.\n “Right on the front page.”\n\n\n “I suppose your father is quite concerned\n over it,” Teena’s mother said.\n\n\n “Oh, yes,” Eddie affirmed. “He was the one\n who ordered the isotope.”\n\n\n “What’s an isotope?” Teena asked.", "“Perhaps to some other country.”\n\n\n “Then—then you mean whoever stole it\n were spies!” Eddie exclaimed breathlessly.\n\n\n “That’s entirely possible,” his father said.\n “In fact, it’s the only logical explanation I can\n think of. People simply don’t go around stealing\n radioactive isotopes without a mighty important\n reason.”\n\n34\n\n “Dinner’s ready,” Eddie’s mother called\n from the kitchen.\n\n\n During dinner Eddie wasn’t sure just what\n he was eating. The idea of spies stealing atomic\n materials kept building up in his mind. By the\n time dessert was finished, he was anxious to\n talk with someone, yet he knew he shouldn’t\n bother his father with any more questions. He\n asked if he could go over and visit with Teena\n for a while.", "“But the atomic piles control the reaction,”\n Eddie said. “The graphite bricks keep the\n splitting-up atoms apart so one neutron won’t\n go smashing into other atoms unless they want\n it to. They have ways of controlling it so that\n only as much radiation builds up as they want.\n You can even hear the reactor hum as the radioactive\n rays go tearing through it. But by\n careful tending, the scientists keep the atomic\n collisions far enough apart so the thing doesn’t\n blow up.”\n\n\n “Boy, that sounds dangerous,” Teena said.\n\n\n “Well, they know just how to do it,” Eddie\n replied.\n\n\n “Aren’t the rays dangerous?” Mrs. Ross\n asked.\n\n\n “I’ll say they’re dangerous,” Eddie said.\n “But the whole pile is covered by a shield of\n concrete about eight feet thick. That keeps the\n rays from getting out and injuring the workmen.”", "Eddie knew she was right. They were\n friends—good friends. They had been ever\n since Eddie’s family had moved to Oceanview\n and his father had become head of the college’s\n atomic-science department. In fact, their\n parents were close friends, also. Teena’s father\n was chief engineer for the Acme Aviation\n Company, one of the coast town’s largest\n manufacturing concerns.\n\n\n “Well, I’ll be glad to finish them, Eddie,”\n Mrs. Ross offered. “I know how boys detest\n doing dishes.”\n\n\n “Oh, I don’t really mind, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie\n said. “Besides, Teena’s making sandwiches to\n take with us.”\n\n\n “Another prospecting trip?” Teena’s\n mother glanced at the Geiger counter which\n Eddie had set carefully on the dinette table.\n\n\n “I still think there must be some uranium\n around here,” Eddie insisted. “And we can\n find it if anyone can.”", "“I agree,” Mrs. Ross said. “But even if you\n don’t find it, you both seem to enjoy your\n hikes.”\n\n22\n\n “Oh, yes, it’s fun, Mother,” Teena replied,\n wrapping wax paper around a sandwich.\n “Guess I’m ready. I’ve got a bone for Sandy,\n too.”\n\n\n “Don’t go too far out from town,” Mrs.\n Ross cautioned, as Eddie picked up the Geiger\n counter. “And stick near the main roads.\n You know the rules.”\n\n\n “We sure do, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie assured\n her. “And we’ll be back early.”", "“I would,” Eddie said. “Everyone is carefully\n protected. They see to that. Well, anyway,\n if all of those uranium atoms were shooting\n radioactive rays around inside of that pile\n and doing nothing, there would be an awful\n lot of energy going to waste. So the atomic\n scientists take certain elements which aren’t\n radioactive, but can be made radioactive, and\n shove small pieces of them into holes drilled\n in the pile.”\n\n\n “Isn’t that dangerous?” Teena asked.\n\n\n “They don’t shove them in with their bare\n hands,” Eddie said, trying not to show exasperation.\n “They use long holders to push the\n small chunks of material into the holes in the\n reactor. Then, as those uranium atoms keep\n splitting up and shooting particles around inside\n of the pile, some of them smack into the\n chunks of material, and stick there. Most elements\n will soak up radiation, just like a sponge\n soaks up water.”\n\n40", "“What kind was the one stolen from the\n college today?” Teena asked.\n\n\n “Dad didn’t say exactly,” Eddie answered,\n “except he did say that if whoever took it\n didn’t know what he was doing and opened up\n the lead capsule, it could kill him. Of course,\n even the mild isotopes are deadly if they’re not\n handled right.”\n\n\n “My goodness, it is a serious matter, isn’t\n it?” Mrs. Ross said.\n\n42", "Christina Ross—whom everybody called\n Teena—lived at the far end of the block.\n Eddie went around to the side door of the\n light-green stucco house and knocked.\n\n\n “Oh, hi, Eddie,” Teena greeted him, appearing\n at the screen door. “I was hoping\n you’d come over.”\n\n\n “Well, I—I just happened to be going by,”\n Eddie said. “Thought you might want to\n watch me do a little prospecting with the Geiger\n counter. But maybe you’re too busy.”\n\n\n That’s how to handle it, Eddie thought.\n Don’t act anxious. Let Teena be anxious.\n Then maybe she’ll even offer to bring along\n a couple of sandwiches or some fruit.\n\n\n “Oh, I’d love to go,” Teena said eagerly,\n “but I’m just finishing the dishes. Come on\n in.”\n\n\n “I’m in kind of a hurry.”", "“It’s just the way nature made uranium, I\n guess,” Eddie said. “Most atoms stay in one\n piece, although they move around lickety-split\n all of the time. Uranium atoms not only move\n around, but they break apart. They shoot out\n little particles called neutrons. These neutrons\n hit other atoms and split them apart, sending\n out more neutrons. It’s a regular chain reaction.”\n\n\n “I’ve heard of chain reactions,” Mrs. Ross\n said.\n\n\n “Well, with all of the splitting up and moving\n around of the uranium atoms,” Eddie went\n on, “an awful lot of heat builds up. If they\n don’t control it—well, you’ve seen pictures of\n atomic-bomb explosions. That’s a chain reaction\n out of control.”\n\n\n “Out of control is right,” Teena said.\n\n38", "24\n\n After putting Sandy on his long chain and\n filling his water dish, Eddie went in the back\n door. He put the Geiger counter in the closet\n and went into the kitchen.\n\n\n “What’s for dinner, Mom?” he asked.\n\n\n Mrs. Taylor turned from the sink. Eddie\n knew at once, just seeing the expression on\n his mother’s face, that something was wrong.\n\n\n “Dinner?” his mother said absently. “It’s\n not quite four o’clock yet, Eddie. Besides,\n dinner may be a little late today.”\n\n\n “But this morning you said it would be\n early,” Eddie reminded her, puzzled.\n\n\n “This morning I didn’t know what might\n happen.”\n\n25", "“Oh, we’re glad you did, Eddie,” Mrs. Ross\n said. “I’m afraid too few of us know anything\n about this atom business.”\n\n43\n\n “That’s right, Mrs. Ross,” Eddie agreed.\n “People should talk more and read more about\n it. After all, this is an atomic age. We might as\n well face it. My father says that in horse-and-buggy\n days everyone knew how to feed a horse\n and grease a wagon wheel. They knew what was\n needed to get the work done. But now that\n atoms are being harnessed to do the work, not\n many people even bother to find out what an\n atom is.”\n\n\n Mrs. Ross smiled. “I guess you’re right,\n Eddie,” she said, “but I wouldn’t quite know\n how to go about feeding an atom.”\n\n\n “Or greasing one,” Teena added.", "“I’m not sure I know, either,” Mrs. Ross\n said. “Maybe we could understand more of\n what it’s all about if you could explain what a\n radioisotope is, Eddie.”\n\n36\n\n “Well,” Eddie said slowly, “it’s not easy to\n explain, but I’ll try. You know how rare\n uranium is. There’s not nearly enough of it to\n fill all the needs for radioactive materials. Besides,\n pure uranium is so powerful and expensive\n and dangerous to handle that it’s not\n a very good idea to try using it in its true form.\n So they build an atomic reactor like the one at\n Drake Ridge.”\n\n\n “We’ve driven by it,” Mrs. Ross said. “My,\n it’s a big place.”\n\n\n “I’ll say,” Eddie agreed. “Of course, only\n one building holds the reactor itself. It’s the\n biggest building near the center.”", "“Oh, guess I’ll stop by and see if Teena\n wants to go,” Eddie answered casually. He\n tried to make it sound as though he would\n be doing Teena Ross a big favor. After all,\n she was only a girl. Eddie didn’t figure a girl\n would make a very good uranium prospecting\n partner, but most of the fellows he knew were\n away at camp, or vacationing with their folks,\n or something like that.\n\n\n “She’ll enjoy it, I’m sure,” his mother said.\n\n\n “I’ll take Sandy, too,” Eddie said. “He needs\n the exercise.”\n\n\n “That’s a good idea, dear. Be back in time\n for an early dinner.”\n\n\n Eddie let Sandy off his chain. The taffy-colored\n cocker spaniel yipped wildly over his\n freedom, racing back and forth as Eddie\n started down the street.\n\n19", "“Eddie was telling us about atoms,” Teena’s\n mother said. “Did you know there were three\n million billion of them in a period?”\n\n\n “How many in a comma?” Mr. Ross said to\n Eddie, then added quickly, “forget it, Eddie.\n It wasn’t very funny. I—I’m afraid I don’t feel\n very funny tonight.”\n\n\n “Sit down, dear,” Mrs. Ross said. “I’ll warm\n your dinner. You didn’t sound very cheerful\n when you called to say you would be late. How\n did everything go at the plant today?”\n\n\n “Not so good,” Teena’s father said tiredly.\n “In fact, not good at all.”\n\n\n Problems. It seemed that everyone had\n problems, Eddie thought, as he started to\n leave.", "“Dad,” Eddie said anxiously, “what—what’s\n the matter?”\n\n\n “It shows that much, does it, son?” his\n father said tiredly.\n\n\n “What’s wrong, Dad?” Eddie prompted.\n “Or can’t you tell me?”\n\n\n Mr. Taylor leaned back. “Quite a bit’s\n wrong, Eddie,” he said, “and I guess there’s\n no reason why I shouldn’t tell you. It’ll be in\n the evening papers, anyway.”\n\n26\n\n “Evening papers?”\n\n\n “Eddie, you remember me mentioning this\n morning about that radioisotope shipment I\n was expecting today?”\n\n\n “I remember,” Eddie said. “Did it come?”\n\n\n “It did—and it didn’t,” his father said." ] ]
train	50869	[ "What is Glmpauszn's goal?", "Why might the stories be true?", "What is the conflict between Glmpauszn and the not-world?", "How does Glmpauszn change over the story?", "The speaker sometimes writes in gibberish. Why is this? ", "How does the phrase \"to be or not to be\" tie into the overall story? ", "How does the format of the story supplement the character?" ]	[ [ "To escape the not-world. ", "To eliminate humans to protect his world. ", "To venture into the human world and learn more about them. ", "To reconnect with Joe in the not-world. " ], [ "The disappearance of Joe Binkle and Ed Smith, along with the letters and leftover clothes all point to it. ", "Joe Binkle has disappeared, which means Glmpauszn must have reconnected with him, ", " Glmpauszn has proven in his letters that he knows things that no else possibly could. ", "The letters are all from different parts of the world, proving that different people wrote them. " ], [ "Glmpauszn's world wants to conquer the not-world, because they deem the not-world valuable. ", "The not-world unkowningly overlaps and disrupts his.", "The not-world is full of humans that terrorize his. ", "Glmpauszn's world doesn't understand how people in the not-world operate.. " ], [ "He finds that he doesn't want to invate the not-world. ", "He understands humans less as he encounters them and tries to mirror their behavior. ", "He eventually finds defeat in his conquest. ", "He seems more and more interested in human mannerisms and in adopting them. " ], [ "Glmpauszn sometimes forgets his own words. ", "It's when there are no words for whatever alien equivalent he means. ", "It's a gag. Whoever is writing this is doing so throw off the reader. ", "The person writing is incapable of replicating it. " ], [ "It is what Glmpauszn has to ask himself as he invades the not-world. ", "It plays into the nature of Glmpauszn's people, and how they exist along side ours. ", "It references Glmpauszn's disappearance, and the question if he was ever really there. ", "It plays into the uncertain nature of the story's truth." ], [ "Each letter comes from a different location, lending credence to this character's story.", "It proves that Glmpauszn is lying. ", "The way the letters are presented makes the speaker seem unreliable. ", "The way information is presented allows the reader to infer their own judgements of the character," ] ]	[ 2, 1, 2, 4, 2, 2, 1 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "Quickly, from the not-world vibrations about you, I learned the\n not-knowledge of your location. So I must communicate with you by what\n the not-world calls \"mail\" till we meet. For this purpose I must\n utilize the feeble vibrations of various not-people through whose\n inadequate articulation I will attempt to make my moves known to you.\n Each time I will pick a city other than the one I am in at the time.\n\n\n I, Glmpauszn, come equipped with powers evolved from your fragmentary\n reports before you ceased to vibrate to us and with a vast treasury\n of facts from indirect sources. Soon our tortured people will be free\n of the fearsome not-folk and I will be their liberator. You failed in\n your task, but I will try to get you off with light punishment when we\n return again.", "My kid, he reads. He says it's no joke. He wants to call the cops or\n maybe some doctor. But I say no. He reads your magazine so he says\n write to you, send you the letters. You know what to do. Now you have\n them. Maybe you print. Whatever you do, Mr. Editor, remember my place,\n the Plaza Ritz Arms, is straight establishment. I don't drink. I never\n touch junk, not even aspirin.\nYours very truly,\n\n Ivan Smernda\nBombay, India\n\n June 8\n\n\n Mr. Joe Binkle\n\n Plaza Ritz Arms\n\n New York City\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Greetings, greetings, greetings. Hold firm in your wretched projection,\n for tomorrow you will not be alone in the not-world. In two days I,\n Glmpauszn, will be born.", "Then comes your letter today telling of the fate that befell you as a\n result of drinking alcohol. Our wrenchingly attuned faculties in these\n not-world bodies need the loathsome drug to escape from the reality\n of not-reality. It's true. I cannot do without it now. The day is only\n half over and I have consumed a quart and a half. And it is dulling all\n my powers as it has practically obliterated yours. I can't even become\n invisible any more.\n\n\n I must find the formula that will wipe out the not-world men quickly.\n\n\n Quickly!\nGlmpauszn\nFlorence, Italy\n\n September 10\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "Your letter was imponderable till I had thrashed through long passages\n in my information catalog that I had never imagined I would need.\n Biological functions and bodily processes which are labeled here\n \"revolting\" are used freely in your missive. You can be sure they are\n all being forwarded to Blgftury. If I were not involved in the most\n important part of my journey—completion of the weapon against the\n not-worlders—I would come to New York immediately. You would rue that\n day, I assure you.\nGlmpauszn\nBoise, Idaho\n\n July 15\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "We must use care. Stock in as much gin as you are able. I will bring\n with me all that I can. Meanwhile I must return to my original place of\n birth into this world of horrors. There I will secure the gateway, a\n large mirror, the vibrational point at which we shall meet and slowly\n climb the frequency scale to emerge into our own beautiful, now secure\n world. You and I together, Joe, conquerors, liberators.\n\n\n You say you eat little and drink as much as you can. The same with\n me. Even in this revolting world I am a sad sight. My not-world senses\n falter. This is the last letter. Tomorrow I come with the gateway. When\n the gin is gone, we will plant the mold in the hotel where you live.\n\n\n In only a single gleeb it will begin to work. The men of this queer\n world will be no more. But we can't say we didn't have some fun, can\n we, Joe?", "The latter atrocity is perpetrated through what these people call\n mediums, spiritualists and other fatuous names. I intend to visit one\n of them at the first opportunity to see for myself.\n\n\n Meanwhile, as to you, I would offer a few words of advice. I picked\n them up while examining the \"slang\" portion of my information catalog\n which you unfortunately caused me to use. So, for the ultimate\n cause—in this, the penultimate adventure, and for the glory and peace\n of our world—shake a leg, bub. Straighten up and fly right. In short,\n get hep.\n\n\n As far as the five bucks is concerned, no dice.\nGlmpauszn\nDes Moines, Iowa\n\n June 19\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "All is well, only they shot this information file into my matrix too\n fast. I'm having a hard time sorting facts and make the right decision.\n Gezsltrysk, what a task!\n\n\n Farewell till later.\nGlmpauszn\nWichita, Kansas\n\n June 13\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Mnghjkl, fhfjgfhjklop phelnoprausynks. No. When I communicate with you,\n I see I must avoid those complexities of procedure for which there are\n no terms in this language. There is no way of describing to you in\n not-language what I had to go through during the first moments of my\n birth.", "I became alarmed, dived into a bush and used a mechanism that you\n unfortunately do not have—invisibility. I lay there and listened.\n\n\n \"He was stark naked,\" the girl with the sneakers said.\n\n\n A figure I recognized as a police officer spoke to her.\n\n\n \"Lizzy, you'll just have to keep these crackpot friends of yours out of\n this area.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No more buck-bathing, Lizzy,\" the officer ordered. \"No more speeches\n in the Square. Not when it results in riots at five in the morning. Now\n where is your naked friend? I'm going to make an example of him.\"", "I was baffled. What could I tell him?\n\n\n \"Don't you like the rooms?\" he persisted. \"Isn't the service good?\"\n\n\n \"It's the rooms,\" I told him. \"They're—they're—\"\n\n\n \"They're what?\" he wanted to know.\n\n\n \"They're not safe.\"\n\n\n \"Not safe? But that is ridiculous. This hotel is....\"\n\n\n At this point the blast came. My nerves were a wreck from the alcohol.\n\n\n \"See?\" I screamed. \"Not safe. I knew they were going to blow up!\"\n\n\n He stood paralyzed as I ran from the lobby. Oh, well, never say die.\n Another day, another hotel. I swear I'm even beginning to think like\n the not-men, curse them.\nGlmpauszn\nRochester, New York", "They apprehended him on the stairs and I heard him babble something\n about my being a monster and no child of his. My not-mother appeared at\n the doorway and instead of being pleased at the progress of my growth,\n she fell down heavily. She made a distinct\nthump\non the floor.\n\n\n This brought the rest of them on the run, so I climbed out the window\n and retreated across a nearby field. A prolonged search was launched,\n but I eluded them. What unpredictable beings!\n\n\n I reported my tremendous progress back to our world, including the\n cleverness by which I managed to escape my pursuers. I received a reply\n from Blgftury which, on careful analysis, seems to be small praise\n indeed. In fact, some of his phrases apparently contain veiled threats.\n But you know old Blgftury. He wanted to go on this expedition himself\n and it's his nature never to flatter anyone.", "I am now beginning to feel the effects of this alcohol again. Ha. Don't\n I wish old Blgftury were here in the vibrational pattern of an olive?\n I'd get the blonde in and have her eat him out of a Martini. That is a\n gin mixture.\n\n\n I think I'll get a hot report off to the old so-and-so right now. It'll\n take him a gleeb to figure this one out. I'll tell him I'm setting up\n an atomic reactor in the sewage systems here and that all we have to do\n is activate it and all the not-people will die of chain asphyxiation.\n\n\n Boy, what an easy job this turned out to be. It's just a vacation. Joe,\n you old gold-bricker, imagine you here all these gleebs living off the\n fat of the land. Yak, yak. Affectionately.\nGlmpauszn\nSacramento, Calif.\n\n July 25", "That was it—I had forgotten clothes. There is only one answer to this\n oversight on my part. My mind is confused by the barrage of impressions\n that assault it. I must retire now and get them all classified. Beauty,\n pain, fear, hate, love, laughter. I don't know one from the other. I\n must feel each, become accustomed to it.\n\n\n The more I think about it, the more I realize that the information I\n have been given is very unrealistic. You have been inefficient, Joe.\n What will Blgftury and the others say of this? My great mission is\n impaired. Farewell, till I find a more intelligent mind so I can write\n you with more enlightenment.\nGlmpauszn\nMoscow, Idaho\n\n June 17\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "And just let Blgftury make one crack. Just one xyzprlt. I'll have\n hgutry before the ghjdksla!\nGlmpauszn\nDear Editor:\n\n\n These guys might be queer drunk hopheads. But if not? If soon brain\n dissolve, body fall apart, how long have we got? Please, anybody who\n knows answer, write to me—Ivan Smernda, Plaza Ritz Arms—how long is a\n gleeb?", "Anyway.... Ahhh. Pardon me. I got myself enough money to fill ten or\n fifteen rooms. By the end of the week I should have all eighteen spare\n rooms filled with money. If I don't love it then, I'll feel I have\n failed. This alcohol is taking effect now.\n\n\n Blgftury has been goading me for reports. To hell with his reports!\n I've got a lot more emotions to try, such as romantic love. I've been\n studying this phenomenon, along with other racial characteristics of\n these people, in the movies. This is the best place to see these\n people as they really are. They all go into the movie houses and there\n do homage to their own images. Very quaint type of idolatry.\n\n\n Love. Ha! What an adventure this is becoming.", "From now on I will refer to not-people simply as people, dropping the\n qualifying preface except where comparisons must be made between this\n alleged world and our own. It is merely an offshoot of our primitive\n mythology when this was considered a spirit world, just as these people\n refer to our world as never-never land and other anomalies. But we\n learned otherwise, while they never have.\n\n\n New sensations crowd into my consciousness and I am having a hard\n time classifying them. Anyway, I shall carry on swiftly now to the\n inevitable climax in which I singlehanded will obliterate the terror of\n the not-world and return to our world a hero. I cannot understand your\n not replying to my letters. I have given you a box number. What could\n have happened to your vibrations?\nGlmpauszn\nAlbuquerque, New Mexico\n\n June 15\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "The hand that writes this letter is that of a boy in the not-city of\n Bombay in the not-country of India. He does not know he writes it.\n Tomorrow it will be someone else. You must never know of my exact\n location, for the not-people might have access to the information.\n\n\n I must leave off now because the not-child is about to be born. When it\n is alone in the room, it will be spirited away and I will spring from\n the pod on the gateway into its crib and will be its exact vibrational\n likeness.\n\n\n I have tremendous powers. But the not-people must never know I am among\n them. This is the only way I could arrive in the room where the gateway\n lies without arousing suspicion. I will grow up as the not-child in\n order that I might destroy the not-people completely.", "A Gleeb for Earth\nBy CHARLES SHAFHAUSER\n\n\n Illustrated by EMSH\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction May 1953.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nNot to be or not to not be ... that was the\n \nnot-question for the invader of the not-world.\nDear Editor:\n\n\n My 14 year old boy, Ronnie, is typing this letter for me because he\n can do it neater and use better grammar. I had to get in touch with\n somebody about this because if there is something to it, then somebody,\n everybody, is going to point finger at me, Ivan Smernda, and say, \"Why\n didn't you warn us?\"", "There are long hours during which I am so well-integrated into this\n body and this world that I almost consider myself a member of it. Now\n I can function efficiently. I sent Blgftury some long reports today\n outlining my experiments in the realm of chemistry where we must\n finally defeat these people. Of course, I haven't made the experiments\n yet, but I will. This is not deceit, merely realistic anticipation of\n the inevitable. Anyway, what the old xbyzrt doesn't know won't muss his\n vibrations.\n\n\n I went to what they call a nightclub here and picked out a\n blonde-haired woman, the kind that the books say men prefer. She was\n attracted to me instantly. After all, the body I have devised is\n perfect in every detail ... actually a not-world ideal.", "I gazed about me at the mixture of lights, forms and impressions.\n It was strange and ... now I know ... beautiful. However, I hurried\n immediately toward the nearest chemist. At the same time I looked up\n and all about me at the beauty.\n\n\n Soon an individual approached. I knew what to do from my information. I\n simply acted natural. You know, one of your earliest instructions was\n to realize that these people see nothing unusual in you if you do not\n let yourself believe they do.\n\n\n This individual I classified as a female of a singular variety here.\n Her hair was short, her upper torso clad in a woolen garment. She\n wore ... what are they? ... oh, yes, sneakers. My attention was\n diverted by a scream as I passed her. I stopped.\n\n\n The woman gesticulated and continued to scream. People hurried from\n nearby houses. I linked my hands behind me and watched the scene with\n an attitude of mild interest. They weren't interested in me, I told\n myself. But they were.", "In simple terms then: I crept into a cave and slipped into a kind of\n sleep, directing my squhjkl ulytz & uhrytzg ... no, it won't come out.\n Anyway, I grew overnight to the size of an average person here.\n\n\n As I said before, floods of impressions are driving into my xzbyl ...\n my brain ... from various nerve and sense areas and I am having a hard\n time classifying them. My one idea was to get to a chemist and acquire\n the stuff needed for the destruction of these people.\n\n\n Sunrise came as I expected. According to my catalog of information, the\n impressions aroused by it are of beauty. It took little conditioning\n for me finally to react in this manner. This is truly an efficient\n mechanism I inhabit." ], [ "My kid, he reads. He says it's no joke. He wants to call the cops or\n maybe some doctor. But I say no. He reads your magazine so he says\n write to you, send you the letters. You know what to do. Now you have\n them. Maybe you print. Whatever you do, Mr. Editor, remember my place,\n the Plaza Ritz Arms, is straight establishment. I don't drink. I never\n touch junk, not even aspirin.\nYours very truly,\n\n Ivan Smernda\nBombay, India\n\n June 8\n\n\n Mr. Joe Binkle\n\n Plaza Ritz Arms\n\n New York City\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Greetings, greetings, greetings. Hold firm in your wretched projection,\n for tomorrow you will not be alone in the not-world. In two days I,\n Glmpauszn, will be born.", "They apprehended him on the stairs and I heard him babble something\n about my being a monster and no child of his. My not-mother appeared at\n the doorway and instead of being pleased at the progress of my growth,\n she fell down heavily. She made a distinct\nthump\non the floor.\n\n\n This brought the rest of them on the run, so I climbed out the window\n and retreated across a nearby field. A prolonged search was launched,\n but I eluded them. What unpredictable beings!\n\n\n I reported my tremendous progress back to our world, including the\n cleverness by which I managed to escape my pursuers. I received a reply\n from Blgftury which, on careful analysis, seems to be small praise\n indeed. In fact, some of his phrases apparently contain veiled threats.\n But you know old Blgftury. He wanted to go on this expedition himself\n and it's his nature never to flatter anyone.", "In Smith's room on Wednesday I find only a suit of clothes, the same\n suit he wore when he came in. In the coat the vest, in the vest the\n shirt, in the shirt the underwear. Also in the pants. Also all in the\n middle of the floor. Against the far wall stands the frame of the\n mirror. Only the frame!\n\n\n What a spot to be in! Now it might have been a gag. Sometimes these\n guys get funny ideas when they are on the stuff. But then I read\n the letters. This knocks me for a loop. They are all in different\n handwritings. All from different places. Stamps all legit, my kid says.\n India, China, England, everywhere.", "Now I know what difficulties you must have had with your limited\n equipment. These not-people are unpredictable and strange. Their doctor\n came in and weighed me again the day after my birth. Consternation\n reigned when it was discovered I was ten pounds heavier. What\n difference could it possibly make? Many doctors then came in to see me.\n As they arrived hourly, they found me heavier and heavier. Naturally,\n since I am growing. This is part of my instructions. My not-mother\n (Gezsltrysk!) then burst into tears. The doctors conferred, threw up\n their hands and left.\n\n\n I learned the following day that the opposite component of my\n not-mother, my not-father, had been away riding on some conveyance\n during my birth. He was out on ... what did they call it? Oh, yes, a\n bender. He did not arrive till three days after I was born.", "I was baffled. What could I tell him?\n\n\n \"Don't you like the rooms?\" he persisted. \"Isn't the service good?\"\n\n\n \"It's the rooms,\" I told him. \"They're—they're—\"\n\n\n \"They're what?\" he wanted to know.\n\n\n \"They're not safe.\"\n\n\n \"Not safe? But that is ridiculous. This hotel is....\"\n\n\n At this point the blast came. My nerves were a wreck from the alcohol.\n\n\n \"See?\" I screamed. \"Not safe. I knew they were going to blow up!\"\n\n\n He stood paralyzed as I ran from the lobby. Oh, well, never say die.\n Another day, another hotel. I swear I'm even beginning to think like\n the not-men, curse them.\nGlmpauszn\nRochester, New York", "Now get this. In one room, that of Joe Binkle, which maybe is an alias,\n I find nothing but a suit of clothes, some butts and the letters I\n include here in same package. Binkle had only one suit. That I know.\n And this was it laying right in the middle of the room. Inside the\n coat was the vest, inside the vest the shirt, inside the shirt the\n underwear. The pants were up in the coat and inside of them was also\n the underwear. All this was buttoned up like Binkle had melted out of\n it and dripped through a crack in the floor. In a bureau drawer were\n the letters I told you about.\n\n\n Now. In the room right under Binkle's lived another stew bum that\n checked in Thursday ... name Ed Smith, alias maybe, too. This guy was a\n real case. He brought with him a big mirror with a heavy bronze frame.\n Airloom, he says. He pays a week in advance, staggers up the stairs to\n his room with the mirror and that's the last I see of him.", "Anyway.... Ahhh. Pardon me. I got myself enough money to fill ten or\n fifteen rooms. By the end of the week I should have all eighteen spare\n rooms filled with money. If I don't love it then, I'll feel I have\n failed. This alcohol is taking effect now.\n\n\n Blgftury has been goading me for reports. To hell with his reports!\n I've got a lot more emotions to try, such as romantic love. I've been\n studying this phenomenon, along with other racial characteristics of\n these people, in the movies. This is the best place to see these\n people as they really are. They all go into the movie houses and there\n do homage to their own images. Very quaint type of idolatry.\n\n\n Love. Ha! What an adventure this is becoming.", "When I heard them say that he was straightening up to come see me, I\n made a special effort and grew marvelously in one afternoon. I was 36\n not-world inches tall by evening. My not-father entered while I was\n standing by the crib examining a syringe the doctor had left behind.\n He stopped in his tracks on entering the room and seemed incapable of\n speech.\n\n\n Dredging into the treasury of knowledge I had come equipped with, I\n produced the proper phrase for occasions of this kind in the not-world.\n\n\n \"Poppa,\" I said.\n\n\n This was the first use I had made of the so-called vocal cords that\n are now part of my extended matrix. The sound I emitted sounded\n low-pitched, guttural and penetrating even to myself. It must have\n jarred on my not-father's ears, for he turned and ran shouting from the\n room.", "We must use care. Stock in as much gin as you are able. I will bring\n with me all that I can. Meanwhile I must return to my original place of\n birth into this world of horrors. There I will secure the gateway, a\n large mirror, the vibrational point at which we shall meet and slowly\n climb the frequency scale to emerge into our own beautiful, now secure\n world. You and I together, Joe, conquerors, liberators.\n\n\n You say you eat little and drink as much as you can. The same with\n me. Even in this revolting world I am a sad sight. My not-world senses\n falter. This is the last letter. Tomorrow I come with the gateway. When\n the gin is gone, we will plant the mold in the hotel where you live.\n\n\n In only a single gleeb it will begin to work. The men of this queer\n world will be no more. But we can't say we didn't have some fun, can\n we, Joe?", "I gazed about me at the mixture of lights, forms and impressions.\n It was strange and ... now I know ... beautiful. However, I hurried\n immediately toward the nearest chemist. At the same time I looked up\n and all about me at the beauty.\n\n\n Soon an individual approached. I knew what to do from my information. I\n simply acted natural. You know, one of your earliest instructions was\n to realize that these people see nothing unusual in you if you do not\n let yourself believe they do.\n\n\n This individual I classified as a female of a singular variety here.\n Her hair was short, her upper torso clad in a woolen garment. She\n wore ... what are they? ... oh, yes, sneakers. My attention was\n diverted by a scream as I passed her. I stopped.\n\n\n The woman gesticulated and continued to scream. People hurried from\n nearby houses. I linked my hands behind me and watched the scene with\n an attitude of mild interest. They weren't interested in me, I told\n myself. But they were.", "Now in all the motion pictures—true representations of life and love\n in this world—the man with a lot of money or virtue kisses the girl\n and tries to induce her to do something biological. She then refuses.\n This pleases both of them, for he wanted her to refuse. She, in turn,\n wanted him to want her, but also wanted to prevent him so that he would\n have a high opinion of her. Do I make myself clear?\n\n\n I kissed the blonde girl and gave her to understand what I then wanted.\n Well, you can imagine my surprise when she said yes! So I had failed. I\n had not found love.\n\n\n I became so abstracted by this problem that the blonde girl fell\n asleep. I thoughtfully drank quantities of excellent alcohol called gin\n and didn't even notice when the blonde girl left.", "I became alarmed, dived into a bush and used a mechanism that you\n unfortunately do not have—invisibility. I lay there and listened.\n\n\n \"He was stark naked,\" the girl with the sneakers said.\n\n\n A figure I recognized as a police officer spoke to her.\n\n\n \"Lizzy, you'll just have to keep these crackpot friends of yours out of\n this area.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No more buck-bathing, Lizzy,\" the officer ordered. \"No more speeches\n in the Square. Not when it results in riots at five in the morning. Now\n where is your naked friend? I'm going to make an example of him.\"", "I had tremendous difficulty getting a letter off to you this time.\n My process—original with myself, by the way—is to send out feeler\n vibrations for what these people call the psychic individual. Then I\n establish contact with him while he sleeps and compel him without his\n knowledge to translate my ideas into written language. He writes my\n letter and mails it to you. Of course, he has no awareness of what he\n has done.\n\n\n My first five tries were unfortunate. Each time I took control of an\n individual who could not read or write! Finally I found my man, but\n I fear his words are limited. Ah, well. I had great things to tell\n you about my progress, but I cannot convey even a hint of how I have\n accomplished these miracles through the thick skull of this incompetent.", "In simple terms then: I crept into a cave and slipped into a kind of\n sleep, directing my squhjkl ulytz & uhrytzg ... no, it won't come out.\n Anyway, I grew overnight to the size of an average person here.\n\n\n As I said before, floods of impressions are driving into my xzbyl ...\n my brain ... from various nerve and sense areas and I am having a hard\n time classifying them. My one idea was to get to a chemist and acquire\n the stuff needed for the destruction of these people.\n\n\n Sunrise came as I expected. According to my catalog of information, the\n impressions aroused by it are of beauty. It took little conditioning\n for me finally to react in this manner. This is truly an efficient\n mechanism I inhabit.", "There are long hours during which I am so well-integrated into this\n body and this world that I almost consider myself a member of it. Now\n I can function efficiently. I sent Blgftury some long reports today\n outlining my experiments in the realm of chemistry where we must\n finally defeat these people. Of course, I haven't made the experiments\n yet, but I will. This is not deceit, merely realistic anticipation of\n the inevitable. Anyway, what the old xbyzrt doesn't know won't muss his\n vibrations.\n\n\n I went to what they call a nightclub here and picked out a\n blonde-haired woman, the kind that the books say men prefer. She was\n attracted to me instantly. After all, the body I have devised is\n perfect in every detail ... actually a not-world ideal.", "From now on I will refer to not-people simply as people, dropping the\n qualifying preface except where comparisons must be made between this\n alleged world and our own. It is merely an offshoot of our primitive\n mythology when this was considered a spirit world, just as these people\n refer to our world as never-never land and other anomalies. But we\n learned otherwise, while they never have.\n\n\n New sensations crowd into my consciousness and I am having a hard\n time classifying them. Anyway, I shall carry on swiftly now to the\n inevitable climax in which I singlehanded will obliterate the terror of\n the not-world and return to our world a hero. I cannot understand your\n not replying to my letters. I have given you a box number. What could\n have happened to your vibrations?\nGlmpauszn\nAlbuquerque, New Mexico\n\n June 15\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "Then comes your letter today telling of the fate that befell you as a\n result of drinking alcohol. Our wrenchingly attuned faculties in these\n not-world bodies need the loathsome drug to escape from the reality\n of not-reality. It's true. I cannot do without it now. The day is only\n half over and I have consumed a quart and a half. And it is dulling all\n my powers as it has practically obliterated yours. I can't even become\n invisible any more.\n\n\n I must find the formula that will wipe out the not-world men quickly.\n\n\n Quickly!\nGlmpauszn\nFlorence, Italy\n\n September 10\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "The hand that writes this letter is that of a boy in the not-city of\n Bombay in the not-country of India. He does not know he writes it.\n Tomorrow it will be someone else. You must never know of my exact\n location, for the not-people might have access to the information.\n\n\n I must leave off now because the not-child is about to be born. When it\n is alone in the room, it will be spirited away and I will spring from\n the pod on the gateway into its crib and will be its exact vibrational\n likeness.\n\n\n I have tremendous powers. But the not-people must never know I am among\n them. This is the only way I could arrive in the room where the gateway\n lies without arousing suspicion. I will grow up as the not-child in\n order that I might destroy the not-people completely.", "Dear Joe:\n\n\n All is lost unless we work swiftly. I received your revealing letter\n the morning after having a terrible experience of my own. I drank a\n lot of gin for two days and then decided to go to one of these seance\n things.\n\n\n Somewhere along the way I picked up a red-headed girl. When we got\n to the darkened seance room, I took the redhead into a corner and\n continued my investigations into the realm of love. I failed again\n because she said yes immediately.\n\n\n The nerves of my dermis were working overtime when suddenly I had the\n most frightening experience of my life. Now I know what a horror these\n people really are to our world.\n\n\n The medium had turned out all the lights. He said there was a strong\n psychic influence in the room somewhere. That was me, of course, but I\n was too busy with the redhead to notice.", "Anyway, Mrs. Somebody wanted to make contact with her paternal\n grandmother, Lucy, from the beyond. The medium went into his act. He\n concentrated and sweated and suddenly something began to take form in\n the room. The best way to describe it in not-world language is a white,\n shapeless cascade of light.\n\n\n Mrs. Somebody reared to her feet and screeched, \"Grandma Lucy!\" Then I\n really took notice.\n\n\n Grandma Lucy, nothing! This medium had actually brought Blgftury\n partially across the vibration barrier. He must have been vibrating in\n the fringe area and got caught in the works. Did he look mad! His zyhku\n was open and his btgrimms were down.\n\n\n Worst of all, he saw me. Looked right at me with an unbelievable\n pattern of pain, anger, fear and amazement in his matrix. Me and the\n redhead." ], [ "Quickly, from the not-world vibrations about you, I learned the\n not-knowledge of your location. So I must communicate with you by what\n the not-world calls \"mail\" till we meet. For this purpose I must\n utilize the feeble vibrations of various not-people through whose\n inadequate articulation I will attempt to make my moves known to you.\n Each time I will pick a city other than the one I am in at the time.\n\n\n I, Glmpauszn, come equipped with powers evolved from your fragmentary\n reports before you ceased to vibrate to us and with a vast treasury\n of facts from indirect sources. Soon our tortured people will be free\n of the fearsome not-folk and I will be their liberator. You failed in\n your task, but I will try to get you off with light punishment when we\n return again.", "From now on I will refer to not-people simply as people, dropping the\n qualifying preface except where comparisons must be made between this\n alleged world and our own. It is merely an offshoot of our primitive\n mythology when this was considered a spirit world, just as these people\n refer to our world as never-never land and other anomalies. But we\n learned otherwise, while they never have.\n\n\n New sensations crowd into my consciousness and I am having a hard\n time classifying them. Anyway, I shall carry on swiftly now to the\n inevitable climax in which I singlehanded will obliterate the terror of\n the not-world and return to our world a hero. I cannot understand your\n not replying to my letters. I have given you a box number. What could\n have happened to your vibrations?\nGlmpauszn\nAlbuquerque, New Mexico\n\n June 15\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "Then comes your letter today telling of the fate that befell you as a\n result of drinking alcohol. Our wrenchingly attuned faculties in these\n not-world bodies need the loathsome drug to escape from the reality\n of not-reality. It's true. I cannot do without it now. The day is only\n half over and I have consumed a quart and a half. And it is dulling all\n my powers as it has practically obliterated yours. I can't even become\n invisible any more.\n\n\n I must find the formula that will wipe out the not-world men quickly.\n\n\n Quickly!\nGlmpauszn\nFlorence, Italy\n\n September 10\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "When I heard them say that he was straightening up to come see me, I\n made a special effort and grew marvelously in one afternoon. I was 36\n not-world inches tall by evening. My not-father entered while I was\n standing by the crib examining a syringe the doctor had left behind.\n He stopped in his tracks on entering the room and seemed incapable of\n speech.\n\n\n Dredging into the treasury of knowledge I had come equipped with, I\n produced the proper phrase for occasions of this kind in the not-world.\n\n\n \"Poppa,\" I said.\n\n\n This was the first use I had made of the so-called vocal cords that\n are now part of my extended matrix. The sound I emitted sounded\n low-pitched, guttural and penetrating even to myself. It must have\n jarred on my not-father's ears, for he turned and ran shouting from the\n room.", "Even our eminent, all-high Frequency himself has often been jeopardized\n by these people. The not-world and our world are like two baskets\n as you and I see them in our present forms. Baskets woven with the\n greatest intricacy, design and color; but baskets whose convex sides\n are joined by a thin fringe of filaments. Our world, on the vibrational\n plane, extends just a bit into this, the not-world. But being a world\n of higher vibration, it is ultimately tenuous to these gross peoples.\n While we vibrate only within a restricted plane because of our purer,\n more stable existence, these people radiate widely into our world.\n\n\n They even send what they call psychic reproductions of their own selves\n into ours. And most infamous of all, they sometimes are able to force\n some of our individuals over the fringe into their world temporarily,\n causing them much agony and fright.", "We must use care. Stock in as much gin as you are able. I will bring\n with me all that I can. Meanwhile I must return to my original place of\n birth into this world of horrors. There I will secure the gateway, a\n large mirror, the vibrational point at which we shall meet and slowly\n climb the frequency scale to emerge into our own beautiful, now secure\n world. You and I together, Joe, conquerors, liberators.\n\n\n You say you eat little and drink as much as you can. The same with\n me. Even in this revolting world I am a sad sight. My not-world senses\n falter. This is the last letter. Tomorrow I come with the gateway. When\n the gin is gone, we will plant the mold in the hotel where you live.\n\n\n In only a single gleeb it will begin to work. The men of this queer\n world will be no more. But we can't say we didn't have some fun, can\n we, Joe?", "My kid, he reads. He says it's no joke. He wants to call the cops or\n maybe some doctor. But I say no. He reads your magazine so he says\n write to you, send you the letters. You know what to do. Now you have\n them. Maybe you print. Whatever you do, Mr. Editor, remember my place,\n the Plaza Ritz Arms, is straight establishment. I don't drink. I never\n touch junk, not even aspirin.\nYours very truly,\n\n Ivan Smernda\nBombay, India\n\n June 8\n\n\n Mr. Joe Binkle\n\n Plaza Ritz Arms\n\n New York City\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Greetings, greetings, greetings. Hold firm in your wretched projection,\n for tomorrow you will not be alone in the not-world. In two days I,\n Glmpauszn, will be born.", "Your letter was imponderable till I had thrashed through long passages\n in my information catalog that I had never imagined I would need.\n Biological functions and bodily processes which are labeled here\n \"revolting\" are used freely in your missive. You can be sure they are\n all being forwarded to Blgftury. If I were not involved in the most\n important part of my journey—completion of the weapon against the\n not-worlders—I would come to New York immediately. You would rue that\n day, I assure you.\nGlmpauszn\nBoise, Idaho\n\n July 15\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "A Gleeb for Earth\nBy CHARLES SHAFHAUSER\n\n\n Illustrated by EMSH\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction May 1953.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nNot to be or not to not be ... that was the\n \nnot-question for the invader of the not-world.\nDear Editor:\n\n\n My 14 year old boy, Ronnie, is typing this letter for me because he\n can do it neater and use better grammar. I had to get in touch with\n somebody about this because if there is something to it, then somebody,\n everybody, is going to point finger at me, Ivan Smernda, and say, \"Why\n didn't you warn us?\"", "Today I hang in our newly developed not-pod just within the mirror\n gateway, torn with the agony that we calculated must go with such\n tremendous wavelength fluctuations. I have attuned myself to a fetus\n within the body of a not-woman in the not-world. Already I am static\n and for hours have looked into this weird extension of the Universe\n with fear and trepidation.\n\n\n As soon as my stasis was achieved, I tried to contact you, but got\n no response. What could have diminished your powers of articulate\n wave interaction to make you incapable of receiving my messages and\n returning them? My wave went out to yours and found it, barely pulsing\n and surrounded with an impregnable chimera.", "The hand that writes this letter is that of a boy in the not-city of\n Bombay in the not-country of India. He does not know he writes it.\n Tomorrow it will be someone else. You must never know of my exact\n location, for the not-people might have access to the information.\n\n\n I must leave off now because the not-child is about to be born. When it\n is alone in the room, it will be spirited away and I will spring from\n the pod on the gateway into its crib and will be its exact vibrational\n likeness.\n\n\n I have tremendous powers. But the not-people must never know I am among\n them. This is the only way I could arrive in the room where the gateway\n lies without arousing suspicion. I will grow up as the not-child in\n order that I might destroy the not-people completely.", "All is well, only they shot this information file into my matrix too\n fast. I'm having a hard time sorting facts and make the right decision.\n Gezsltrysk, what a task!\n\n\n Farewell till later.\nGlmpauszn\nWichita, Kansas\n\n June 13\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Mnghjkl, fhfjgfhjklop phelnoprausynks. No. When I communicate with you,\n I see I must avoid those complexities of procedure for which there are\n no terms in this language. There is no way of describing to you in\n not-language what I had to go through during the first moments of my\n birth.", "They apprehended him on the stairs and I heard him babble something\n about my being a monster and no child of his. My not-mother appeared at\n the doorway and instead of being pleased at the progress of my growth,\n she fell down heavily. She made a distinct\nthump\non the floor.\n\n\n This brought the rest of them on the run, so I climbed out the window\n and retreated across a nearby field. A prolonged search was launched,\n but I eluded them. What unpredictable beings!\n\n\n I reported my tremendous progress back to our world, including the\n cleverness by which I managed to escape my pursuers. I received a reply\n from Blgftury which, on careful analysis, seems to be small praise\n indeed. In fact, some of his phrases apparently contain veiled threats.\n But you know old Blgftury. He wanted to go on this expedition himself\n and it's his nature never to flatter anyone.", "I was baffled. What could I tell him?\n\n\n \"Don't you like the rooms?\" he persisted. \"Isn't the service good?\"\n\n\n \"It's the rooms,\" I told him. \"They're—they're—\"\n\n\n \"They're what?\" he wanted to know.\n\n\n \"They're not safe.\"\n\n\n \"Not safe? But that is ridiculous. This hotel is....\"\n\n\n At this point the blast came. My nerves were a wreck from the alcohol.\n\n\n \"See?\" I screamed. \"Not safe. I knew they were going to blow up!\"\n\n\n He stood paralyzed as I ran from the lobby. Oh, well, never say die.\n Another day, another hotel. I swear I'm even beginning to think like\n the not-men, curse them.\nGlmpauszn\nRochester, New York", "Anyway, Mrs. Somebody wanted to make contact with her paternal\n grandmother, Lucy, from the beyond. The medium went into his act. He\n concentrated and sweated and suddenly something began to take form in\n the room. The best way to describe it in not-world language is a white,\n shapeless cascade of light.\n\n\n Mrs. Somebody reared to her feet and screeched, \"Grandma Lucy!\" Then I\n really took notice.\n\n\n Grandma Lucy, nothing! This medium had actually brought Blgftury\n partially across the vibration barrier. He must have been vibrating in\n the fringe area and got caught in the works. Did he look mad! His zyhku\n was open and his btgrimms were down.\n\n\n Worst of all, he saw me. Looked right at me with an unbelievable\n pattern of pain, anger, fear and amazement in his matrix. Me and the\n redhead.", "There are long hours during which I am so well-integrated into this\n body and this world that I almost consider myself a member of it. Now\n I can function efficiently. I sent Blgftury some long reports today\n outlining my experiments in the realm of chemistry where we must\n finally defeat these people. Of course, I haven't made the experiments\n yet, but I will. This is not deceit, merely realistic anticipation of\n the inevitable. Anyway, what the old xbyzrt doesn't know won't muss his\n vibrations.\n\n\n I went to what they call a nightclub here and picked out a\n blonde-haired woman, the kind that the books say men prefer. She was\n attracted to me instantly. After all, the body I have devised is\n perfect in every detail ... actually a not-world ideal.", "Now I know what difficulties you must have had with your limited\n equipment. These not-people are unpredictable and strange. Their doctor\n came in and weighed me again the day after my birth. Consternation\n reigned when it was discovered I was ten pounds heavier. What\n difference could it possibly make? Many doctors then came in to see me.\n As they arrived hourly, they found me heavier and heavier. Naturally,\n since I am growing. This is part of my instructions. My not-mother\n (Gezsltrysk!) then burst into tears. The doctors conferred, threw up\n their hands and left.\n\n\n I learned the following day that the opposite component of my\n not-mother, my not-father, had been away riding on some conveyance\n during my birth. He was out on ... what did they call it? Oh, yes, a\n bender. He did not arrive till three days after I was born.", "I received your first communication today. It baffles me. Do you greet\n me in the proper fringe-zone manner? No. Do you express joy, hope,\n pride, helpfulness at my arrival? No. You ask me for a loan of five\n bucks!\n\n\n It took me some time, culling my information catalog to come up with\n the correct variant of the slang term \"buck.\" Is it possible that you\n are powerless even to provide yourself with the wherewithal to live in\n this inferior world?\n\n\n A reminder, please. You and I—I in particular—are now engaged in\n a struggle to free our world from the terrible, maiming intrusions\n of this not-world. Through many long gleebs, our people have lived\n a semi-terrorized existence while errant vibrations from this world\n ripped across the closely joined vibration flux, whose individual\n fluctuations make up our sentient population.", "That was it—I had forgotten clothes. There is only one answer to this\n oversight on my part. My mind is confused by the barrage of impressions\n that assault it. I must retire now and get them all classified. Beauty,\n pain, fear, hate, love, laughter. I don't know one from the other. I\n must feel each, become accustomed to it.\n\n\n The more I think about it, the more I realize that the information I\n have been given is very unrealistic. You have been inefficient, Joe.\n What will Blgftury and the others say of this? My great mission is\n impaired. Farewell, till I find a more intelligent mind so I can write\n you with more enlightenment.\nGlmpauszn\nMoscow, Idaho\n\n June 17\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "In simple terms then: I crept into a cave and slipped into a kind of\n sleep, directing my squhjkl ulytz & uhrytzg ... no, it won't come out.\n Anyway, I grew overnight to the size of an average person here.\n\n\n As I said before, floods of impressions are driving into my xzbyl ...\n my brain ... from various nerve and sense areas and I am having a hard\n time classifying them. My one idea was to get to a chemist and acquire\n the stuff needed for the destruction of these people.\n\n\n Sunrise came as I expected. According to my catalog of information, the\n impressions aroused by it are of beauty. It took little conditioning\n for me finally to react in this manner. This is truly an efficient\n mechanism I inhabit." ], [ "Quickly, from the not-world vibrations about you, I learned the\n not-knowledge of your location. So I must communicate with you by what\n the not-world calls \"mail\" till we meet. For this purpose I must\n utilize the feeble vibrations of various not-people through whose\n inadequate articulation I will attempt to make my moves known to you.\n Each time I will pick a city other than the one I am in at the time.\n\n\n I, Glmpauszn, come equipped with powers evolved from your fragmentary\n reports before you ceased to vibrate to us and with a vast treasury\n of facts from indirect sources. Soon our tortured people will be free\n of the fearsome not-folk and I will be their liberator. You failed in\n your task, but I will try to get you off with light punishment when we\n return again.", "My kid, he reads. He says it's no joke. He wants to call the cops or\n maybe some doctor. But I say no. He reads your magazine so he says\n write to you, send you the letters. You know what to do. Now you have\n them. Maybe you print. Whatever you do, Mr. Editor, remember my place,\n the Plaza Ritz Arms, is straight establishment. I don't drink. I never\n touch junk, not even aspirin.\nYours very truly,\n\n Ivan Smernda\nBombay, India\n\n June 8\n\n\n Mr. Joe Binkle\n\n Plaza Ritz Arms\n\n New York City\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Greetings, greetings, greetings. Hold firm in your wretched projection,\n for tomorrow you will not be alone in the not-world. In two days I,\n Glmpauszn, will be born.", "Then comes your letter today telling of the fate that befell you as a\n result of drinking alcohol. Our wrenchingly attuned faculties in these\n not-world bodies need the loathsome drug to escape from the reality\n of not-reality. It's true. I cannot do without it now. The day is only\n half over and I have consumed a quart and a half. And it is dulling all\n my powers as it has practically obliterated yours. I can't even become\n invisible any more.\n\n\n I must find the formula that will wipe out the not-world men quickly.\n\n\n Quickly!\nGlmpauszn\nFlorence, Italy\n\n September 10\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "In simple terms then: I crept into a cave and slipped into a kind of\n sleep, directing my squhjkl ulytz & uhrytzg ... no, it won't come out.\n Anyway, I grew overnight to the size of an average person here.\n\n\n As I said before, floods of impressions are driving into my xzbyl ...\n my brain ... from various nerve and sense areas and I am having a hard\n time classifying them. My one idea was to get to a chemist and acquire\n the stuff needed for the destruction of these people.\n\n\n Sunrise came as I expected. According to my catalog of information, the\n impressions aroused by it are of beauty. It took little conditioning\n for me finally to react in this manner. This is truly an efficient\n mechanism I inhabit.", "We must use care. Stock in as much gin as you are able. I will bring\n with me all that I can. Meanwhile I must return to my original place of\n birth into this world of horrors. There I will secure the gateway, a\n large mirror, the vibrational point at which we shall meet and slowly\n climb the frequency scale to emerge into our own beautiful, now secure\n world. You and I together, Joe, conquerors, liberators.\n\n\n You say you eat little and drink as much as you can. The same with\n me. Even in this revolting world I am a sad sight. My not-world senses\n falter. This is the last letter. Tomorrow I come with the gateway. When\n the gin is gone, we will plant the mold in the hotel where you live.\n\n\n In only a single gleeb it will begin to work. The men of this queer\n world will be no more. But we can't say we didn't have some fun, can\n we, Joe?", "That was it—I had forgotten clothes. There is only one answer to this\n oversight on my part. My mind is confused by the barrage of impressions\n that assault it. I must retire now and get them all classified. Beauty,\n pain, fear, hate, love, laughter. I don't know one from the other. I\n must feel each, become accustomed to it.\n\n\n The more I think about it, the more I realize that the information I\n have been given is very unrealistic. You have been inefficient, Joe.\n What will Blgftury and the others say of this? My great mission is\n impaired. Farewell, till I find a more intelligent mind so I can write\n you with more enlightenment.\nGlmpauszn\nMoscow, Idaho\n\n June 17\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "Your letter was imponderable till I had thrashed through long passages\n in my information catalog that I had never imagined I would need.\n Biological functions and bodily processes which are labeled here\n \"revolting\" are used freely in your missive. You can be sure they are\n all being forwarded to Blgftury. If I were not involved in the most\n important part of my journey—completion of the weapon against the\n not-worlders—I would come to New York immediately. You would rue that\n day, I assure you.\nGlmpauszn\nBoise, Idaho\n\n July 15\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "I became alarmed, dived into a bush and used a mechanism that you\n unfortunately do not have—invisibility. I lay there and listened.\n\n\n \"He was stark naked,\" the girl with the sneakers said.\n\n\n A figure I recognized as a police officer spoke to her.\n\n\n \"Lizzy, you'll just have to keep these crackpot friends of yours out of\n this area.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No more buck-bathing, Lizzy,\" the officer ordered. \"No more speeches\n in the Square. Not when it results in riots at five in the morning. Now\n where is your naked friend? I'm going to make an example of him.\"", "I was baffled. What could I tell him?\n\n\n \"Don't you like the rooms?\" he persisted. \"Isn't the service good?\"\n\n\n \"It's the rooms,\" I told him. \"They're—they're—\"\n\n\n \"They're what?\" he wanted to know.\n\n\n \"They're not safe.\"\n\n\n \"Not safe? But that is ridiculous. This hotel is....\"\n\n\n At this point the blast came. My nerves were a wreck from the alcohol.\n\n\n \"See?\" I screamed. \"Not safe. I knew they were going to blow up!\"\n\n\n He stood paralyzed as I ran from the lobby. Oh, well, never say die.\n Another day, another hotel. I swear I'm even beginning to think like\n the not-men, curse them.\nGlmpauszn\nRochester, New York", "They apprehended him on the stairs and I heard him babble something\n about my being a monster and no child of his. My not-mother appeared at\n the doorway and instead of being pleased at the progress of my growth,\n she fell down heavily. She made a distinct\nthump\non the floor.\n\n\n This brought the rest of them on the run, so I climbed out the window\n and retreated across a nearby field. A prolonged search was launched,\n but I eluded them. What unpredictable beings!\n\n\n I reported my tremendous progress back to our world, including the\n cleverness by which I managed to escape my pursuers. I received a reply\n from Blgftury which, on careful analysis, seems to be small praise\n indeed. In fact, some of his phrases apparently contain veiled threats.\n But you know old Blgftury. He wanted to go on this expedition himself\n and it's his nature never to flatter anyone.", "The latter atrocity is perpetrated through what these people call\n mediums, spiritualists and other fatuous names. I intend to visit one\n of them at the first opportunity to see for myself.\n\n\n Meanwhile, as to you, I would offer a few words of advice. I picked\n them up while examining the \"slang\" portion of my information catalog\n which you unfortunately caused me to use. So, for the ultimate\n cause—in this, the penultimate adventure, and for the glory and peace\n of our world—shake a leg, bub. Straighten up and fly right. In short,\n get hep.\n\n\n As far as the five bucks is concerned, no dice.\nGlmpauszn\nDes Moines, Iowa\n\n June 19\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "When I heard them say that he was straightening up to come see me, I\n made a special effort and grew marvelously in one afternoon. I was 36\n not-world inches tall by evening. My not-father entered while I was\n standing by the crib examining a syringe the doctor had left behind.\n He stopped in his tracks on entering the room and seemed incapable of\n speech.\n\n\n Dredging into the treasury of knowledge I had come equipped with, I\n produced the proper phrase for occasions of this kind in the not-world.\n\n\n \"Poppa,\" I said.\n\n\n This was the first use I had made of the so-called vocal cords that\n are now part of my extended matrix. The sound I emitted sounded\n low-pitched, guttural and penetrating even to myself. It must have\n jarred on my not-father's ears, for he turned and ran shouting from the\n room.", "I gazed about me at the mixture of lights, forms and impressions.\n It was strange and ... now I know ... beautiful. However, I hurried\n immediately toward the nearest chemist. At the same time I looked up\n and all about me at the beauty.\n\n\n Soon an individual approached. I knew what to do from my information. I\n simply acted natural. You know, one of your earliest instructions was\n to realize that these people see nothing unusual in you if you do not\n let yourself believe they do.\n\n\n This individual I classified as a female of a singular variety here.\n Her hair was short, her upper torso clad in a woolen garment. She\n wore ... what are they? ... oh, yes, sneakers. My attention was\n diverted by a scream as I passed her. I stopped.\n\n\n The woman gesticulated and continued to scream. People hurried from\n nearby houses. I linked my hands behind me and watched the scene with\n an attitude of mild interest. They weren't interested in me, I told\n myself. But they were.", "All is well, only they shot this information file into my matrix too\n fast. I'm having a hard time sorting facts and make the right decision.\n Gezsltrysk, what a task!\n\n\n Farewell till later.\nGlmpauszn\nWichita, Kansas\n\n June 13\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Mnghjkl, fhfjgfhjklop phelnoprausynks. No. When I communicate with you,\n I see I must avoid those complexities of procedure for which there are\n no terms in this language. There is no way of describing to you in\n not-language what I had to go through during the first moments of my\n birth.", "Anyway.... Ahhh. Pardon me. I got myself enough money to fill ten or\n fifteen rooms. By the end of the week I should have all eighteen spare\n rooms filled with money. If I don't love it then, I'll feel I have\n failed. This alcohol is taking effect now.\n\n\n Blgftury has been goading me for reports. To hell with his reports!\n I've got a lot more emotions to try, such as romantic love. I've been\n studying this phenomenon, along with other racial characteristics of\n these people, in the movies. This is the best place to see these\n people as they really are. They all go into the movie houses and there\n do homage to their own images. Very quaint type of idolatry.\n\n\n Love. Ha! What an adventure this is becoming.", "I am now beginning to feel the effects of this alcohol again. Ha. Don't\n I wish old Blgftury were here in the vibrational pattern of an olive?\n I'd get the blonde in and have her eat him out of a Martini. That is a\n gin mixture.\n\n\n I think I'll get a hot report off to the old so-and-so right now. It'll\n take him a gleeb to figure this one out. I'll tell him I'm setting up\n an atomic reactor in the sewage systems here and that all we have to do\n is activate it and all the not-people will die of chain asphyxiation.\n\n\n Boy, what an easy job this turned out to be. It's just a vacation. Joe,\n you old gold-bricker, imagine you here all these gleebs living off the\n fat of the land. Yak, yak. Affectionately.\nGlmpauszn\nSacramento, Calif.\n\n July 25", "There are long hours during which I am so well-integrated into this\n body and this world that I almost consider myself a member of it. Now\n I can function efficiently. I sent Blgftury some long reports today\n outlining my experiments in the realm of chemistry where we must\n finally defeat these people. Of course, I haven't made the experiments\n yet, but I will. This is not deceit, merely realistic anticipation of\n the inevitable. Anyway, what the old xbyzrt doesn't know won't muss his\n vibrations.\n\n\n I went to what they call a nightclub here and picked out a\n blonde-haired woman, the kind that the books say men prefer. She was\n attracted to me instantly. After all, the body I have devised is\n perfect in every detail ... actually a not-world ideal.", "From now on I will refer to not-people simply as people, dropping the\n qualifying preface except where comparisons must be made between this\n alleged world and our own. It is merely an offshoot of our primitive\n mythology when this was considered a spirit world, just as these people\n refer to our world as never-never land and other anomalies. But we\n learned otherwise, while they never have.\n\n\n New sensations crowd into my consciousness and I am having a hard\n time classifying them. Anyway, I shall carry on swiftly now to the\n inevitable climax in which I singlehanded will obliterate the terror of\n the not-world and return to our world a hero. I cannot understand your\n not replying to my letters. I have given you a box number. What could\n have happened to your vibrations?\nGlmpauszn\nAlbuquerque, New Mexico\n\n June 15\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "I didn't lose any time overwhelming her susceptibilities. I remember\n distinctly that just as I stooped to pick up a large roll of money I\n had dropped, her eyes met mine and in them I could see her admiration.\n We went to my suite and I showed her one of the money rooms. Would you\n believe it? She actually took off her shoes and ran around through the\n money in her bare feet! Then we kissed.\n\n\n Concealed in the dermis of the lips are tiny, highly sensitized nerve\n ends which send sensations to the brain. The brain interprets these\n impulses in a certain manner. As a result, the fate of secretion in the\n adrenals on the ends of the kidneys increases and an enlivening of the\n entire endocrine system follows. Thus I felt the beginnings of love.\n\n\n I sat her down on a pile of money and kissed her again. Again the\n tingling, again the secretion and activation. I integrated myself\n quickly.", "And just let Blgftury make one crack. Just one xyzprlt. I'll have\n hgutry before the ghjdksla!\nGlmpauszn\nDear Editor:\n\n\n These guys might be queer drunk hopheads. But if not? If soon brain\n dissolve, body fall apart, how long have we got? Please, anybody who\n knows answer, write to me—Ivan Smernda, Plaza Ritz Arms—how long is a\n gleeb?" ], [ "We must use care. Stock in as much gin as you are able. I will bring\n with me all that I can. Meanwhile I must return to my original place of\n birth into this world of horrors. There I will secure the gateway, a\n large mirror, the vibrational point at which we shall meet and slowly\n climb the frequency scale to emerge into our own beautiful, now secure\n world. You and I together, Joe, conquerors, liberators.\n\n\n You say you eat little and drink as much as you can. The same with\n me. Even in this revolting world I am a sad sight. My not-world senses\n falter. This is the last letter. Tomorrow I come with the gateway. When\n the gin is gone, we will plant the mold in the hotel where you live.\n\n\n In only a single gleeb it will begin to work. The men of this queer\n world will be no more. But we can't say we didn't have some fun, can\n we, Joe?", "I had tremendous difficulty getting a letter off to you this time.\n My process—original with myself, by the way—is to send out feeler\n vibrations for what these people call the psychic individual. Then I\n establish contact with him while he sleeps and compel him without his\n knowledge to translate my ideas into written language. He writes my\n letter and mails it to you. Of course, he has no awareness of what he\n has done.\n\n\n My first five tries were unfortunate. Each time I took control of an\n individual who could not read or write! Finally I found my man, but\n I fear his words are limited. Ah, well. I had great things to tell\n you about my progress, but I cannot convey even a hint of how I have\n accomplished these miracles through the thick skull of this incompetent.", "I am now beginning to feel the effects of this alcohol again. Ha. Don't\n I wish old Blgftury were here in the vibrational pattern of an olive?\n I'd get the blonde in and have her eat him out of a Martini. That is a\n gin mixture.\n\n\n I think I'll get a hot report off to the old so-and-so right now. It'll\n take him a gleeb to figure this one out. I'll tell him I'm setting up\n an atomic reactor in the sewage systems here and that all we have to do\n is activate it and all the not-people will die of chain asphyxiation.\n\n\n Boy, what an easy job this turned out to be. It's just a vacation. Joe,\n you old gold-bricker, imagine you here all these gleebs living off the\n fat of the land. Yak, yak. Affectionately.\nGlmpauszn\nSacramento, Calif.\n\n July 25", "In Smith's room on Wednesday I find only a suit of clothes, the same\n suit he wore when he came in. In the coat the vest, in the vest the\n shirt, in the shirt the underwear. Also in the pants. Also all in the\n middle of the floor. Against the far wall stands the frame of the\n mirror. Only the frame!\n\n\n What a spot to be in! Now it might have been a gag. Sometimes these\n guys get funny ideas when they are on the stuff. But then I read\n the letters. This knocks me for a loop. They are all in different\n handwritings. All from different places. Stamps all legit, my kid says.\n India, China, England, everywhere.", "My kid, he reads. He says it's no joke. He wants to call the cops or\n maybe some doctor. But I say no. He reads your magazine so he says\n write to you, send you the letters. You know what to do. Now you have\n them. Maybe you print. Whatever you do, Mr. Editor, remember my place,\n the Plaza Ritz Arms, is straight establishment. I don't drink. I never\n touch junk, not even aspirin.\nYours very truly,\n\n Ivan Smernda\nBombay, India\n\n June 8\n\n\n Mr. Joe Binkle\n\n Plaza Ritz Arms\n\n New York City\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Greetings, greetings, greetings. Hold firm in your wretched projection,\n for tomorrow you will not be alone in the not-world. In two days I,\n Glmpauszn, will be born.", "Your letter was imponderable till I had thrashed through long passages\n in my information catalog that I had never imagined I would need.\n Biological functions and bodily processes which are labeled here\n \"revolting\" are used freely in your missive. You can be sure they are\n all being forwarded to Blgftury. If I were not involved in the most\n important part of my journey—completion of the weapon against the\n not-worlders—I would come to New York immediately. You would rue that\n day, I assure you.\nGlmpauszn\nBoise, Idaho\n\n July 15\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "That was it—I had forgotten clothes. There is only one answer to this\n oversight on my part. My mind is confused by the barrage of impressions\n that assault it. I must retire now and get them all classified. Beauty,\n pain, fear, hate, love, laughter. I don't know one from the other. I\n must feel each, become accustomed to it.\n\n\n The more I think about it, the more I realize that the information I\n have been given is very unrealistic. You have been inefficient, Joe.\n What will Blgftury and the others say of this? My great mission is\n impaired. Farewell, till I find a more intelligent mind so I can write\n you with more enlightenment.\nGlmpauszn\nMoscow, Idaho\n\n June 17\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "Anyway.... Ahhh. Pardon me. I got myself enough money to fill ten or\n fifteen rooms. By the end of the week I should have all eighteen spare\n rooms filled with money. If I don't love it then, I'll feel I have\n failed. This alcohol is taking effect now.\n\n\n Blgftury has been goading me for reports. To hell with his reports!\n I've got a lot more emotions to try, such as romantic love. I've been\n studying this phenomenon, along with other racial characteristics of\n these people, in the movies. This is the best place to see these\n people as they really are. They all go into the movie houses and there\n do homage to their own images. Very quaint type of idolatry.\n\n\n Love. Ha! What an adventure this is becoming.", "I became alarmed, dived into a bush and used a mechanism that you\n unfortunately do not have—invisibility. I lay there and listened.\n\n\n \"He was stark naked,\" the girl with the sneakers said.\n\n\n A figure I recognized as a police officer spoke to her.\n\n\n \"Lizzy, you'll just have to keep these crackpot friends of yours out of\n this area.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No more buck-bathing, Lizzy,\" the officer ordered. \"No more speeches\n in the Square. Not when it results in riots at five in the morning. Now\n where is your naked friend? I'm going to make an example of him.\"", "Then comes your letter today telling of the fate that befell you as a\n result of drinking alcohol. Our wrenchingly attuned faculties in these\n not-world bodies need the loathsome drug to escape from the reality\n of not-reality. It's true. I cannot do without it now. The day is only\n half over and I have consumed a quart and a half. And it is dulling all\n my powers as it has practically obliterated yours. I can't even become\n invisible any more.\n\n\n I must find the formula that will wipe out the not-world men quickly.\n\n\n Quickly!\nGlmpauszn\nFlorence, Italy\n\n September 10\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "Now in all the motion pictures—true representations of life and love\n in this world—the man with a lot of money or virtue kisses the girl\n and tries to induce her to do something biological. She then refuses.\n This pleases both of them, for he wanted her to refuse. She, in turn,\n wanted him to want her, but also wanted to prevent him so that he would\n have a high opinion of her. Do I make myself clear?\n\n\n I kissed the blonde girl and gave her to understand what I then wanted.\n Well, you can imagine my surprise when she said yes! So I had failed. I\n had not found love.\n\n\n I became so abstracted by this problem that the blonde girl fell\n asleep. I thoughtfully drank quantities of excellent alcohol called gin\n and didn't even notice when the blonde girl left.", "The latter atrocity is perpetrated through what these people call\n mediums, spiritualists and other fatuous names. I intend to visit one\n of them at the first opportunity to see for myself.\n\n\n Meanwhile, as to you, I would offer a few words of advice. I picked\n them up while examining the \"slang\" portion of my information catalog\n which you unfortunately caused me to use. So, for the ultimate\n cause—in this, the penultimate adventure, and for the glory and peace\n of our world—shake a leg, bub. Straighten up and fly right. In short,\n get hep.\n\n\n As far as the five bucks is concerned, no dice.\nGlmpauszn\nDes Moines, Iowa\n\n June 19\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "When I heard them say that he was straightening up to come see me, I\n made a special effort and grew marvelously in one afternoon. I was 36\n not-world inches tall by evening. My not-father entered while I was\n standing by the crib examining a syringe the doctor had left behind.\n He stopped in his tracks on entering the room and seemed incapable of\n speech.\n\n\n Dredging into the treasury of knowledge I had come equipped with, I\n produced the proper phrase for occasions of this kind in the not-world.\n\n\n \"Poppa,\" I said.\n\n\n This was the first use I had made of the so-called vocal cords that\n are now part of my extended matrix. The sound I emitted sounded\n low-pitched, guttural and penetrating even to myself. It must have\n jarred on my not-father's ears, for he turned and ran shouting from the\n room.", "A great deal has happened to me since I wrote to you last.\n Systematically, I have tested each emotion and sensation listed in\n our catalog. I have been, as has been said in this world, like a reed\n bending before the winds of passion. In fact, I'm rather badly bent\n indeed. Ah! You'll pardon me, but I just took time for what is known\n quaintly in this tongue as a \"hooker of red-eye.\" Ha! I've mastered\n even the vagaries of slang in the not-language.... Ahhh! Pardon me\n again. I feel much better now.\n\n\n You see, Joe, as I attuned myself to the various impressions that\n constantly assaulted my mind through this body, I conditioned myself to\n react exactly as our information catalog instructed me to.\n\n\n Now it is all automatic, pure reflex. A sensation comes to me when I am\n burned; then I experience a burning pain. If the sensation is a tickle,\n I experience a tickle.", "By the way, Joe, I'm forwarding that five dollars. You see, it won't\n cost me anything. It'll come out of the pocket of the idiot who's\n writing this letter. Pretty shrewd of me, eh?\n\n\n I'm going out and look at that money again. I think I'm at last\n learning to love it, though not as much as I admire liquor. Well, one\n simply must persevere, I always say.\nGlmpauszn\nPenobscot, Maine\n\n July 20\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Now you tell me not to drink alcohol. Why not? You never mentioned it\n in any of your vibrations to us, gleebs ago, when you first came across\n to this world. It will stint my powers? Nonsense! Already I have had a\n quart of the liquid today. I feel wonderful. Get that? I actually feel\n wonderful, in spite of this miserable imitation of a body.", "And just let Blgftury make one crack. Just one xyzprlt. I'll have\n hgutry before the ghjdksla!\nGlmpauszn\nDear Editor:\n\n\n These guys might be queer drunk hopheads. But if not? If soon brain\n dissolve, body fall apart, how long have we got? Please, anybody who\n knows answer, write to me—Ivan Smernda, Plaza Ritz Arms—how long is a\n gleeb?", "The hand that writes this letter is that of a boy in the not-city of\n Bombay in the not-country of India. He does not know he writes it.\n Tomorrow it will be someone else. You must never know of my exact\n location, for the not-people might have access to the information.\n\n\n I must leave off now because the not-child is about to be born. When it\n is alone in the room, it will be spirited away and I will spring from\n the pod on the gateway into its crib and will be its exact vibrational\n likeness.\n\n\n I have tremendous powers. But the not-people must never know I am among\n them. This is the only way I could arrive in the room where the gateway\n lies without arousing suspicion. I will grow up as the not-child in\n order that I might destroy the not-people completely.", "All is well, only they shot this information file into my matrix too\n fast. I'm having a hard time sorting facts and make the right decision.\n Gezsltrysk, what a task!\n\n\n Farewell till later.\nGlmpauszn\nWichita, Kansas\n\n June 13\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Mnghjkl, fhfjgfhjklop phelnoprausynks. No. When I communicate with you,\n I see I must avoid those complexities of procedure for which there are\n no terms in this language. There is no way of describing to you in\n not-language what I had to go through during the first moments of my\n birth.", "There are long hours during which I am so well-integrated into this\n body and this world that I almost consider myself a member of it. Now\n I can function efficiently. I sent Blgftury some long reports today\n outlining my experiments in the realm of chemistry where we must\n finally defeat these people. Of course, I haven't made the experiments\n yet, but I will. This is not deceit, merely realistic anticipation of\n the inevitable. Anyway, what the old xbyzrt doesn't know won't muss his\n vibrations.\n\n\n I went to what they call a nightclub here and picked out a\n blonde-haired woman, the kind that the books say men prefer. She was\n attracted to me instantly. After all, the body I have devised is\n perfect in every detail ... actually a not-world ideal.", "Dear Joe:\n\n\n All is lost unless we work swiftly. I received your revealing letter\n the morning after having a terrible experience of my own. I drank a\n lot of gin for two days and then decided to go to one of these seance\n things.\n\n\n Somewhere along the way I picked up a red-headed girl. When we got\n to the darkened seance room, I took the redhead into a corner and\n continued my investigations into the realm of love. I failed again\n because she said yes immediately.\n\n\n The nerves of my dermis were working overtime when suddenly I had the\n most frightening experience of my life. Now I know what a horror these\n people really are to our world.\n\n\n The medium had turned out all the lights. He said there was a strong\n psychic influence in the room somewhere. That was me, of course, but I\n was too busy with the redhead to notice." ], [ "We must use care. Stock in as much gin as you are able. I will bring\n with me all that I can. Meanwhile I must return to my original place of\n birth into this world of horrors. There I will secure the gateway, a\n large mirror, the vibrational point at which we shall meet and slowly\n climb the frequency scale to emerge into our own beautiful, now secure\n world. You and I together, Joe, conquerors, liberators.\n\n\n You say you eat little and drink as much as you can. The same with\n me. Even in this revolting world I am a sad sight. My not-world senses\n falter. This is the last letter. Tomorrow I come with the gateway. When\n the gin is gone, we will plant the mold in the hotel where you live.\n\n\n In only a single gleeb it will begin to work. The men of this queer\n world will be no more. But we can't say we didn't have some fun, can\n we, Joe?", "When I heard them say that he was straightening up to come see me, I\n made a special effort and grew marvelously in one afternoon. I was 36\n not-world inches tall by evening. My not-father entered while I was\n standing by the crib examining a syringe the doctor had left behind.\n He stopped in his tracks on entering the room and seemed incapable of\n speech.\n\n\n Dredging into the treasury of knowledge I had come equipped with, I\n produced the proper phrase for occasions of this kind in the not-world.\n\n\n \"Poppa,\" I said.\n\n\n This was the first use I had made of the so-called vocal cords that\n are now part of my extended matrix. The sound I emitted sounded\n low-pitched, guttural and penetrating even to myself. It must have\n jarred on my not-father's ears, for he turned and ran shouting from the\n room.", "Then comes your letter today telling of the fate that befell you as a\n result of drinking alcohol. Our wrenchingly attuned faculties in these\n not-world bodies need the loathsome drug to escape from the reality\n of not-reality. It's true. I cannot do without it now. The day is only\n half over and I have consumed a quart and a half. And it is dulling all\n my powers as it has practically obliterated yours. I can't even become\n invisible any more.\n\n\n I must find the formula that will wipe out the not-world men quickly.\n\n\n Quickly!\nGlmpauszn\nFlorence, Italy\n\n September 10\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "In Smith's room on Wednesday I find only a suit of clothes, the same\n suit he wore when he came in. In the coat the vest, in the vest the\n shirt, in the shirt the underwear. Also in the pants. Also all in the\n middle of the floor. Against the far wall stands the frame of the\n mirror. Only the frame!\n\n\n What a spot to be in! Now it might have been a gag. Sometimes these\n guys get funny ideas when they are on the stuff. But then I read\n the letters. This knocks me for a loop. They are all in different\n handwritings. All from different places. Stamps all legit, my kid says.\n India, China, England, everywhere.", "The hand that writes this letter is that of a boy in the not-city of\n Bombay in the not-country of India. He does not know he writes it.\n Tomorrow it will be someone else. You must never know of my exact\n location, for the not-people might have access to the information.\n\n\n I must leave off now because the not-child is about to be born. When it\n is alone in the room, it will be spirited away and I will spring from\n the pod on the gateway into its crib and will be its exact vibrational\n likeness.\n\n\n I have tremendous powers. But the not-people must never know I am among\n them. This is the only way I could arrive in the room where the gateway\n lies without arousing suspicion. I will grow up as the not-child in\n order that I might destroy the not-people completely.", "A great deal has happened to me since I wrote to you last.\n Systematically, I have tested each emotion and sensation listed in\n our catalog. I have been, as has been said in this world, like a reed\n bending before the winds of passion. In fact, I'm rather badly bent\n indeed. Ah! You'll pardon me, but I just took time for what is known\n quaintly in this tongue as a \"hooker of red-eye.\" Ha! I've mastered\n even the vagaries of slang in the not-language.... Ahhh! Pardon me\n again. I feel much better now.\n\n\n You see, Joe, as I attuned myself to the various impressions that\n constantly assaulted my mind through this body, I conditioned myself to\n react exactly as our information catalog instructed me to.\n\n\n Now it is all automatic, pure reflex. A sensation comes to me when I am\n burned; then I experience a burning pain. If the sensation is a tickle,\n I experience a tickle.", "Now get this. In one room, that of Joe Binkle, which maybe is an alias,\n I find nothing but a suit of clothes, some butts and the letters I\n include here in same package. Binkle had only one suit. That I know.\n And this was it laying right in the middle of the room. Inside the\n coat was the vest, inside the vest the shirt, inside the shirt the\n underwear. The pants were up in the coat and inside of them was also\n the underwear. All this was buttoned up like Binkle had melted out of\n it and dripped through a crack in the floor. In a bureau drawer were\n the letters I told you about.\n\n\n Now. In the room right under Binkle's lived another stew bum that\n checked in Thursday ... name Ed Smith, alias maybe, too. This guy was a\n real case. He brought with him a big mirror with a heavy bronze frame.\n Airloom, he says. He pays a week in advance, staggers up the stairs to\n his room with the mirror and that's the last I see of him.", "There are long hours during which I am so well-integrated into this\n body and this world that I almost consider myself a member of it. Now\n I can function efficiently. I sent Blgftury some long reports today\n outlining my experiments in the realm of chemistry where we must\n finally defeat these people. Of course, I haven't made the experiments\n yet, but I will. This is not deceit, merely realistic anticipation of\n the inevitable. Anyway, what the old xbyzrt doesn't know won't muss his\n vibrations.\n\n\n I went to what they call a nightclub here and picked out a\n blonde-haired woman, the kind that the books say men prefer. She was\n attracted to me instantly. After all, the body I have devised is\n perfect in every detail ... actually a not-world ideal.", "A Gleeb for Earth\nBy CHARLES SHAFHAUSER\n\n\n Illustrated by EMSH\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction May 1953.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nNot to be or not to not be ... that was the\n \nnot-question for the invader of the not-world.\nDear Editor:\n\n\n My 14 year old boy, Ronnie, is typing this letter for me because he\n can do it neater and use better grammar. I had to get in touch with\n somebody about this because if there is something to it, then somebody,\n everybody, is going to point finger at me, Ivan Smernda, and say, \"Why\n didn't you warn us?\"", "In simple terms then: I crept into a cave and slipped into a kind of\n sleep, directing my squhjkl ulytz & uhrytzg ... no, it won't come out.\n Anyway, I grew overnight to the size of an average person here.\n\n\n As I said before, floods of impressions are driving into my xzbyl ...\n my brain ... from various nerve and sense areas and I am having a hard\n time classifying them. My one idea was to get to a chemist and acquire\n the stuff needed for the destruction of these people.\n\n\n Sunrise came as I expected. According to my catalog of information, the\n impressions aroused by it are of beauty. It took little conditioning\n for me finally to react in this manner. This is truly an efficient\n mechanism I inhabit.", "This morning I have what is known medically as a syndrome ... a group\n of symptoms popularly referred to as a hangover ... Ahhh! Pardon me\n again. Strangely ... now what was I saying? Oh, yes. Ha, ha. Strangely\n enough, the reactions that come easiest to the people in this world\n came most difficult to me. Money-love, for example. It is a great thing\n here, both among those who haven't got it and those who have.\n\n\n I went out and got plenty of money. I walked invisible into a bank and\n carried away piles of it. Then I sat and looked at it. I took the money\n to a remote room of the twenty room suite I have rented in the best\n hotel here in—no, sorry—and stared at it for hours.\n\n\n Nothing happened. I didn't love the stuff or feel one way or the other\n about it. Yet all around me people are actually killing one another for\n the love of it.", "My kid, he reads. He says it's no joke. He wants to call the cops or\n maybe some doctor. But I say no. He reads your magazine so he says\n write to you, send you the letters. You know what to do. Now you have\n them. Maybe you print. Whatever you do, Mr. Editor, remember my place,\n the Plaza Ritz Arms, is straight establishment. I don't drink. I never\n touch junk, not even aspirin.\nYours very truly,\n\n Ivan Smernda\nBombay, India\n\n June 8\n\n\n Mr. Joe Binkle\n\n Plaza Ritz Arms\n\n New York City\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Greetings, greetings, greetings. Hold firm in your wretched projection,\n for tomorrow you will not be alone in the not-world. In two days I,\n Glmpauszn, will be born.", "Anyway.... Ahhh. Pardon me. I got myself enough money to fill ten or\n fifteen rooms. By the end of the week I should have all eighteen spare\n rooms filled with money. If I don't love it then, I'll feel I have\n failed. This alcohol is taking effect now.\n\n\n Blgftury has been goading me for reports. To hell with his reports!\n I've got a lot more emotions to try, such as romantic love. I've been\n studying this phenomenon, along with other racial characteristics of\n these people, in the movies. This is the best place to see these\n people as they really are. They all go into the movie houses and there\n do homage to their own images. Very quaint type of idolatry.\n\n\n Love. Ha! What an adventure this is becoming.", "They apprehended him on the stairs and I heard him babble something\n about my being a monster and no child of his. My not-mother appeared at\n the doorway and instead of being pleased at the progress of my growth,\n she fell down heavily. She made a distinct\nthump\non the floor.\n\n\n This brought the rest of them on the run, so I climbed out the window\n and retreated across a nearby field. A prolonged search was launched,\n but I eluded them. What unpredictable beings!\n\n\n I reported my tremendous progress back to our world, including the\n cleverness by which I managed to escape my pursuers. I received a reply\n from Blgftury which, on careful analysis, seems to be small praise\n indeed. In fact, some of his phrases apparently contain veiled threats.\n But you know old Blgftury. He wanted to go on this expedition himself\n and it's his nature never to flatter anyone.", "Your letter was imponderable till I had thrashed through long passages\n in my information catalog that I had never imagined I would need.\n Biological functions and bodily processes which are labeled here\n \"revolting\" are used freely in your missive. You can be sure they are\n all being forwarded to Blgftury. If I were not involved in the most\n important part of my journey—completion of the weapon against the\n not-worlders—I would come to New York immediately. You would rue that\n day, I assure you.\nGlmpauszn\nBoise, Idaho\n\n July 15\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "Now in all the motion pictures—true representations of life and love\n in this world—the man with a lot of money or virtue kisses the girl\n and tries to induce her to do something biological. She then refuses.\n This pleases both of them, for he wanted her to refuse. She, in turn,\n wanted him to want her, but also wanted to prevent him so that he would\n have a high opinion of her. Do I make myself clear?\n\n\n I kissed the blonde girl and gave her to understand what I then wanted.\n Well, you can imagine my surprise when she said yes! So I had failed. I\n had not found love.\n\n\n I became so abstracted by this problem that the blonde girl fell\n asleep. I thoughtfully drank quantities of excellent alcohol called gin\n and didn't even notice when the blonde girl left.", "I didn't lose any time overwhelming her susceptibilities. I remember\n distinctly that just as I stooped to pick up a large roll of money I\n had dropped, her eyes met mine and in them I could see her admiration.\n We went to my suite and I showed her one of the money rooms. Would you\n believe it? She actually took off her shoes and ran around through the\n money in her bare feet! Then we kissed.\n\n\n Concealed in the dermis of the lips are tiny, highly sensitized nerve\n ends which send sensations to the brain. The brain interprets these\n impulses in a certain manner. As a result, the fate of secretion in the\n adrenals on the ends of the kidneys increases and an enlivening of the\n entire endocrine system follows. Thus I felt the beginnings of love.\n\n\n I sat her down on a pile of money and kissed her again. Again the\n tingling, again the secretion and activation. I integrated myself\n quickly.", "Now I know what difficulties you must have had with your limited\n equipment. These not-people are unpredictable and strange. Their doctor\n came in and weighed me again the day after my birth. Consternation\n reigned when it was discovered I was ten pounds heavier. What\n difference could it possibly make? Many doctors then came in to see me.\n As they arrived hourly, they found me heavier and heavier. Naturally,\n since I am growing. This is part of my instructions. My not-mother\n (Gezsltrysk!) then burst into tears. The doctors conferred, threw up\n their hands and left.\n\n\n I learned the following day that the opposite component of my\n not-mother, my not-father, had been away riding on some conveyance\n during my birth. He was out on ... what did they call it? Oh, yes, a\n bender. He did not arrive till three days after I was born.", "I became alarmed, dived into a bush and used a mechanism that you\n unfortunately do not have—invisibility. I lay there and listened.\n\n\n \"He was stark naked,\" the girl with the sneakers said.\n\n\n A figure I recognized as a police officer spoke to her.\n\n\n \"Lizzy, you'll just have to keep these crackpot friends of yours out of\n this area.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No more buck-bathing, Lizzy,\" the officer ordered. \"No more speeches\n in the Square. Not when it results in riots at five in the morning. Now\n where is your naked friend? I'm going to make an example of him.\"", "Quickly, from the not-world vibrations about you, I learned the\n not-knowledge of your location. So I must communicate with you by what\n the not-world calls \"mail\" till we meet. For this purpose I must\n utilize the feeble vibrations of various not-people through whose\n inadequate articulation I will attempt to make my moves known to you.\n Each time I will pick a city other than the one I am in at the time.\n\n\n I, Glmpauszn, come equipped with powers evolved from your fragmentary\n reports before you ceased to vibrate to us and with a vast treasury\n of facts from indirect sources. Soon our tortured people will be free\n of the fearsome not-folk and I will be their liberator. You failed in\n your task, but I will try to get you off with light punishment when we\n return again." ], [ "In Smith's room on Wednesday I find only a suit of clothes, the same\n suit he wore when he came in. In the coat the vest, in the vest the\n shirt, in the shirt the underwear. Also in the pants. Also all in the\n middle of the floor. Against the far wall stands the frame of the\n mirror. Only the frame!\n\n\n What a spot to be in! Now it might have been a gag. Sometimes these\n guys get funny ideas when they are on the stuff. But then I read\n the letters. This knocks me for a loop. They are all in different\n handwritings. All from different places. Stamps all legit, my kid says.\n India, China, England, everywhere.", "Now get this. In one room, that of Joe Binkle, which maybe is an alias,\n I find nothing but a suit of clothes, some butts and the letters I\n include here in same package. Binkle had only one suit. That I know.\n And this was it laying right in the middle of the room. Inside the\n coat was the vest, inside the vest the shirt, inside the shirt the\n underwear. The pants were up in the coat and inside of them was also\n the underwear. All this was buttoned up like Binkle had melted out of\n it and dripped through a crack in the floor. In a bureau drawer were\n the letters I told you about.\n\n\n Now. In the room right under Binkle's lived another stew bum that\n checked in Thursday ... name Ed Smith, alias maybe, too. This guy was a\n real case. He brought with him a big mirror with a heavy bronze frame.\n Airloom, he says. He pays a week in advance, staggers up the stairs to\n his room with the mirror and that's the last I see of him.", "When I heard them say that he was straightening up to come see me, I\n made a special effort and grew marvelously in one afternoon. I was 36\n not-world inches tall by evening. My not-father entered while I was\n standing by the crib examining a syringe the doctor had left behind.\n He stopped in his tracks on entering the room and seemed incapable of\n speech.\n\n\n Dredging into the treasury of knowledge I had come equipped with, I\n produced the proper phrase for occasions of this kind in the not-world.\n\n\n \"Poppa,\" I said.\n\n\n This was the first use I had made of the so-called vocal cords that\n are now part of my extended matrix. The sound I emitted sounded\n low-pitched, guttural and penetrating even to myself. It must have\n jarred on my not-father's ears, for he turned and ran shouting from the\n room.", "There are long hours during which I am so well-integrated into this\n body and this world that I almost consider myself a member of it. Now\n I can function efficiently. I sent Blgftury some long reports today\n outlining my experiments in the realm of chemistry where we must\n finally defeat these people. Of course, I haven't made the experiments\n yet, but I will. This is not deceit, merely realistic anticipation of\n the inevitable. Anyway, what the old xbyzrt doesn't know won't muss his\n vibrations.\n\n\n I went to what they call a nightclub here and picked out a\n blonde-haired woman, the kind that the books say men prefer. She was\n attracted to me instantly. After all, the body I have devised is\n perfect in every detail ... actually a not-world ideal.", "I had tremendous difficulty getting a letter off to you this time.\n My process—original with myself, by the way—is to send out feeler\n vibrations for what these people call the psychic individual. Then I\n establish contact with him while he sleeps and compel him without his\n knowledge to translate my ideas into written language. He writes my\n letter and mails it to you. Of course, he has no awareness of what he\n has done.\n\n\n My first five tries were unfortunate. Each time I took control of an\n individual who could not read or write! Finally I found my man, but\n I fear his words are limited. Ah, well. I had great things to tell\n you about my progress, but I cannot convey even a hint of how I have\n accomplished these miracles through the thick skull of this incompetent.", "Anyway.... Ahhh. Pardon me. I got myself enough money to fill ten or\n fifteen rooms. By the end of the week I should have all eighteen spare\n rooms filled with money. If I don't love it then, I'll feel I have\n failed. This alcohol is taking effect now.\n\n\n Blgftury has been goading me for reports. To hell with his reports!\n I've got a lot more emotions to try, such as romantic love. I've been\n studying this phenomenon, along with other racial characteristics of\n these people, in the movies. This is the best place to see these\n people as they really are. They all go into the movie houses and there\n do homage to their own images. Very quaint type of idolatry.\n\n\n Love. Ha! What an adventure this is becoming.", "I gazed about me at the mixture of lights, forms and impressions.\n It was strange and ... now I know ... beautiful. However, I hurried\n immediately toward the nearest chemist. At the same time I looked up\n and all about me at the beauty.\n\n\n Soon an individual approached. I knew what to do from my information. I\n simply acted natural. You know, one of your earliest instructions was\n to realize that these people see nothing unusual in you if you do not\n let yourself believe they do.\n\n\n This individual I classified as a female of a singular variety here.\n Her hair was short, her upper torso clad in a woolen garment. She\n wore ... what are they? ... oh, yes, sneakers. My attention was\n diverted by a scream as I passed her. I stopped.\n\n\n The woman gesticulated and continued to scream. People hurried from\n nearby houses. I linked my hands behind me and watched the scene with\n an attitude of mild interest. They weren't interested in me, I told\n myself. But they were.", "They apprehended him on the stairs and I heard him babble something\n about my being a monster and no child of his. My not-mother appeared at\n the doorway and instead of being pleased at the progress of my growth,\n she fell down heavily. She made a distinct\nthump\non the floor.\n\n\n This brought the rest of them on the run, so I climbed out the window\n and retreated across a nearby field. A prolonged search was launched,\n but I eluded them. What unpredictable beings!\n\n\n I reported my tremendous progress back to our world, including the\n cleverness by which I managed to escape my pursuers. I received a reply\n from Blgftury which, on careful analysis, seems to be small praise\n indeed. In fact, some of his phrases apparently contain veiled threats.\n But you know old Blgftury. He wanted to go on this expedition himself\n and it's his nature never to flatter anyone.", "In simple terms then: I crept into a cave and slipped into a kind of\n sleep, directing my squhjkl ulytz & uhrytzg ... no, it won't come out.\n Anyway, I grew overnight to the size of an average person here.\n\n\n As I said before, floods of impressions are driving into my xzbyl ...\n my brain ... from various nerve and sense areas and I am having a hard\n time classifying them. My one idea was to get to a chemist and acquire\n the stuff needed for the destruction of these people.\n\n\n Sunrise came as I expected. According to my catalog of information, the\n impressions aroused by it are of beauty. It took little conditioning\n for me finally to react in this manner. This is truly an efficient\n mechanism I inhabit.", "We must use care. Stock in as much gin as you are able. I will bring\n with me all that I can. Meanwhile I must return to my original place of\n birth into this world of horrors. There I will secure the gateway, a\n large mirror, the vibrational point at which we shall meet and slowly\n climb the frequency scale to emerge into our own beautiful, now secure\n world. You and I together, Joe, conquerors, liberators.\n\n\n You say you eat little and drink as much as you can. The same with\n me. Even in this revolting world I am a sad sight. My not-world senses\n falter. This is the last letter. Tomorrow I come with the gateway. When\n the gin is gone, we will plant the mold in the hotel where you live.\n\n\n In only a single gleeb it will begin to work. The men of this queer\n world will be no more. But we can't say we didn't have some fun, can\n we, Joe?", "I didn't lose any time overwhelming her susceptibilities. I remember\n distinctly that just as I stooped to pick up a large roll of money I\n had dropped, her eyes met mine and in them I could see her admiration.\n We went to my suite and I showed her one of the money rooms. Would you\n believe it? She actually took off her shoes and ran around through the\n money in her bare feet! Then we kissed.\n\n\n Concealed in the dermis of the lips are tiny, highly sensitized nerve\n ends which send sensations to the brain. The brain interprets these\n impulses in a certain manner. As a result, the fate of secretion in the\n adrenals on the ends of the kidneys increases and an enlivening of the\n entire endocrine system follows. Thus I felt the beginnings of love.\n\n\n I sat her down on a pile of money and kissed her again. Again the\n tingling, again the secretion and activation. I integrated myself\n quickly.", "My kid, he reads. He says it's no joke. He wants to call the cops or\n maybe some doctor. But I say no. He reads your magazine so he says\n write to you, send you the letters. You know what to do. Now you have\n them. Maybe you print. Whatever you do, Mr. Editor, remember my place,\n the Plaza Ritz Arms, is straight establishment. I don't drink. I never\n touch junk, not even aspirin.\nYours very truly,\n\n Ivan Smernda\nBombay, India\n\n June 8\n\n\n Mr. Joe Binkle\n\n Plaza Ritz Arms\n\n New York City\n\n\n Dear Joe:\n\n\n Greetings, greetings, greetings. Hold firm in your wretched projection,\n for tomorrow you will not be alone in the not-world. In two days I,\n Glmpauszn, will be born.", "Then comes your letter today telling of the fate that befell you as a\n result of drinking alcohol. Our wrenchingly attuned faculties in these\n not-world bodies need the loathsome drug to escape from the reality\n of not-reality. It's true. I cannot do without it now. The day is only\n half over and I have consumed a quart and a half. And it is dulling all\n my powers as it has practically obliterated yours. I can't even become\n invisible any more.\n\n\n I must find the formula that will wipe out the not-world men quickly.\n\n\n Quickly!\nGlmpauszn\nFlorence, Italy\n\n September 10\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "I became alarmed, dived into a bush and used a mechanism that you\n unfortunately do not have—invisibility. I lay there and listened.\n\n\n \"He was stark naked,\" the girl with the sneakers said.\n\n\n A figure I recognized as a police officer spoke to her.\n\n\n \"Lizzy, you'll just have to keep these crackpot friends of yours out of\n this area.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No more buck-bathing, Lizzy,\" the officer ordered. \"No more speeches\n in the Square. Not when it results in riots at five in the morning. Now\n where is your naked friend? I'm going to make an example of him.\"", "A great deal has happened to me since I wrote to you last.\n Systematically, I have tested each emotion and sensation listed in\n our catalog. I have been, as has been said in this world, like a reed\n bending before the winds of passion. In fact, I'm rather badly bent\n indeed. Ah! You'll pardon me, but I just took time for what is known\n quaintly in this tongue as a \"hooker of red-eye.\" Ha! I've mastered\n even the vagaries of slang in the not-language.... Ahhh! Pardon me\n again. I feel much better now.\n\n\n You see, Joe, as I attuned myself to the various impressions that\n constantly assaulted my mind through this body, I conditioned myself to\n react exactly as our information catalog instructed me to.\n\n\n Now it is all automatic, pure reflex. A sensation comes to me when I am\n burned; then I experience a burning pain. If the sensation is a tickle,\n I experience a tickle.", "This morning I have what is known medically as a syndrome ... a group\n of symptoms popularly referred to as a hangover ... Ahhh! Pardon me\n again. Strangely ... now what was I saying? Oh, yes. Ha, ha. Strangely\n enough, the reactions that come easiest to the people in this world\n came most difficult to me. Money-love, for example. It is a great thing\n here, both among those who haven't got it and those who have.\n\n\n I went out and got plenty of money. I walked invisible into a bank and\n carried away piles of it. Then I sat and looked at it. I took the money\n to a remote room of the twenty room suite I have rented in the best\n hotel here in—no, sorry—and stared at it for hours.\n\n\n Nothing happened. I didn't love the stuff or feel one way or the other\n about it. Yet all around me people are actually killing one another for\n the love of it.", "That was it—I had forgotten clothes. There is only one answer to this\n oversight on my part. My mind is confused by the barrage of impressions\n that assault it. I must retire now and get them all classified. Beauty,\n pain, fear, hate, love, laughter. I don't know one from the other. I\n must feel each, become accustomed to it.\n\n\n The more I think about it, the more I realize that the information I\n have been given is very unrealistic. You have been inefficient, Joe.\n What will Blgftury and the others say of this? My great mission is\n impaired. Farewell, till I find a more intelligent mind so I can write\n you with more enlightenment.\nGlmpauszn\nMoscow, Idaho\n\n June 17\n\n\n Dear Joe:", "The hand that writes this letter is that of a boy in the not-city of\n Bombay in the not-country of India. He does not know he writes it.\n Tomorrow it will be someone else. You must never know of my exact\n location, for the not-people might have access to the information.\n\n\n I must leave off now because the not-child is about to be born. When it\n is alone in the room, it will be spirited away and I will spring from\n the pod on the gateway into its crib and will be its exact vibrational\n likeness.\n\n\n I have tremendous powers. But the not-people must never know I am among\n them. This is the only way I could arrive in the room where the gateway\n lies without arousing suspicion. I will grow up as the not-child in\n order that I might destroy the not-people completely.", "Now I know what difficulties you must have had with your limited\n equipment. These not-people are unpredictable and strange. Their doctor\n came in and weighed me again the day after my birth. Consternation\n reigned when it was discovered I was ten pounds heavier. What\n difference could it possibly make? Many doctors then came in to see me.\n As they arrived hourly, they found me heavier and heavier. Naturally,\n since I am growing. This is part of my instructions. My not-mother\n (Gezsltrysk!) then burst into tears. The doctors conferred, threw up\n their hands and left.\n\n\n I learned the following day that the opposite component of my\n not-mother, my not-father, had been away riding on some conveyance\n during my birth. He was out on ... what did they call it? Oh, yes, a\n bender. He did not arrive till three days after I was born.", "This telepathic control becomes more difficult every time. I must pick\n closer points of communication soon. I have nothing to report but\n failure. I bought a ton of equipment and went to work on the formula\n that is half complete in my instructions. Six of my hotel rooms were\n filled with tubes, pipes and apparatus of all kinds.\n\n\n I had got my mechanism as close to perfect as possible when I\n realized that, in my befuddled condition, I had set off a reaction\n that inevitably would result in an explosion. I had to leave there\n immediately, but I could not create suspicion. The management was not\n aware of the nature of my activities.\n\n\n I moved swiftly. I could not afford time to bring my baggage. I\n stuffed as much money into my pockets as I could and then sauntered\n into the hotel lobby. Assuming my most casual air, I told the manager\n I was checking out. Naturally he was stunned since I was his best\n customer.\n\n\n \"But why, sir?\" he asked plaintively." ] ]
train	51361	[ "Why were the beings readily applying for the trip to Earth?", "Why was the Vegan not chosen to make the trip to Earth?", "Why was the large Kallerian not chosen for the journey?", "Why did the Wazzenazzian feel that he would be beneficial as an employee to the recruiter?", "Why did Lawrence close his eyes and toddle around in a 360-degree rotation?", "Why did the recruiter offer Lawrence $50 Galactic a week?", "Why were the Sirian spiders rejected for the travel plan?", "Why was the interviewer uninterested in Gorb?", "Why was the Stortulian so determined to make it to Earth?", "What was shocking about the Stortulian's return to the interview office later in the day?" ]	[ [ "They were looking for a way to overturn Earth. ", "If was their only opportunity after the Terra for Terrans movement. ", "They were bored of their lives on their home planets. ", "They were hoping for handouts. " ], [ "There were too many of his kind already in inventory.", "They were worrisome and difficult to work with. ", "He was much to large in size to accommodate. ", "The upkeep for the species was too much. " ], [ "There were already four Kallerians in inventory. ", "His species was too large to travel in the group. ", "He was argumentative during the interview process. ", "His payout demands exceeded their budget. " ], [ "He could morph into any species he wanted for outwards appearance. ", "He said he knew all there is to know about alien life-forms", "He was capable of speaking all languages. ", "He was powerful among the Wazzenazzian and capable of swaying decisions. " ], [ "That was a sign that he was happy. ", "That was a sign that he was irritated with the recruiter's decision. ", "That was a sign that he was giving an apologetic smile. ", "He was disoriented. " ], [ "That was what was promised to all travelers to Earth for display.", "He was able to offer him less, knowing he would still accept and be grateful. ", "He could be paid less because he was smaller and less of an attraction. ", "He would be paid less because he would also be reimbursed for expenses and have free travel. " ], [ "They demanded too high of payment. ", "They had an over-supply of their species.", "They all expected a handout", "They were difficult to work with. " ], [ "He was demanding and rude, which the interviewer did not bend for. ", "He was a fugitive. ", "He appeared to be a human.", "He was bargaining with sympathy, which the interviewer did not bend for. " ], [ "He wanted to seek revenge on his wife. ", "He was desperate for money.", "He wanted to find and bring back his wife. ", "He was fearful of his future with the other Stortulians. " ], [ "His depression was building to a suicide attempt. ", "He had morphed into a larger being. ", "He was motivated to commit murder. ", "He was disguising himself as another being. " ] ]	[ 2, 4, 1, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "The being closed his eyes and toddled around in a 360-degree rotation,\n remaining in place. On his world, that gesture is the equivalent of\n an apologetic smile. \"My Regulan name no longer matters. I am now and\n shall evermore be Lawrence R. Fitzgerald. I am a Terraphile, you see.\"\nThe little Regulan was as good as hired. Only the formalities remained.\n \"You understand our terms, Mr. Fitzgerald?\"\n\n\n \"I'll be placed on exhibition at your Institute on Earth. You'll pay\n for my services, transportation and expenses. I'll be required to\n remain on exhibit no more than one-third of each Terran sidereal day.\"\n\n\n \"And the pay will be—ah—$50 Galactic a week, plus expenses and\n transportation.\"\n\n\n The spherical creature clapped his hands in joy, three hands clapping\n on one side, two on the other. \"Wonderful! I will see Earth at last! I\n accept the terms!\"", "Through the front window of the office, I could see our big gay tridim\n sign plastered to a facing wall: WANTED—EXTRATERRESTRIALS! We had\n saturated MacTavish IV with our promotional poop for a month preceding\n arrival. Stuff like this:\nWant to visit Earth—see the Galaxy's most glittering and exclusive\n world? Want to draw good pay, work short hours, experience the thrills\n of show business on romantic Terra? If you are a non-terrestrial,\n there may be a place for you in the Corrigan Institute of\n Morphological Science. No freaks wanted—normal beings only. J. F.\n Corrigan will hold interviews in person on Ghryne from Thirdday to", "The Stortulian seemed to shrivel. His eyelids closed half-way to mask\n his tears. He turned and shambled slowly to the door, walking like a\n living dishrag. In a bleak voice, he said, \"There is no hope then. All\n is lost. I will never see my soulmate again. Good day, Earthman.\"\n\n\n He spoke in a drab monotone that almost, but not quite, had me weeping.\n I watched him shuffle out. I do have\nsome\nconscience, and I had the\n uneasy feeling I had just been talking to a being who was about to\n commit suicide on my account.\nAbout fifty more applicants were processed without a hitch. Then life\n started to get complicated again.\n\n\n Nine of the fifty were okay. The rest were unacceptable for one reason\n or another, and they took the bad news quietly enough. The haul for the\n day so far was close to two dozen new life-forms under contract.", "That's what the Corrigan Institute of Morphological Science really is,\n of course. A zoo. But we don't go out and hunt for our specimens; we\n advertise and they come flocking to us. Every alien wants to see Earth\n once in his lifetime, and there's only one way he can do it.\n\n\n We don't keep too big an inventory. At last count, we had 690 specimens\n before this trip, representing 298 different intelligent life-forms.\n My goal is at least one member of at least 500 different races. When I\n reach that, I'll sit back and let the competition catch up—if it can.\n\n\n After an hour of steady work that morning, we had signed eleven new\n specimens. At the same time, we had turned away a dozen ursinoids,\n fifty of the reptilian natives of Ghryne, seven Sirian spiders, and no\n less than nineteen chlorine-breathing Procyonites wearing gas masks.", "It was also my sad duty to nix a Vegan who was negotiating through a\n Ghrynian agent. A Vegan would be a top-flight attraction, being some\n 400 feet long and appropriately fearsome to the eye, but I didn't see\n how we could take one on. They're gentle and likable beings, but their\n upkeep runs into literally tons of fresh meat a day, and not just any\n old kind of meat either. So we had to do without the Vegan.\n\n\n \"One more specimen before lunch,\" I told Stebbins, \"to make it an even\n dozen.\"\n\n\n He looked at me queerly and nodded. A being entered. I took a long\n close look at the life-form when it came in, and after that I took\n another one. I wondered what kind of stunt was being pulled. So far as\n I could tell, the being was quite plainly nothing but an Earthman.", "Fifthday of Tenmonth. His last visit to the Caledonia Cluster until\n 2937, so don't miss your chance! Hurry! A life of wonder and riches\n can be yours!\nBroadsides like that, distributed wholesale in half a thousand\n languages, always bring them running. And the Corrigan Institute really\n packs in the crowds back on Earth. Why not? It's the best of its kind,\n the only really decent place where Earthmen can get a gander at the\n other species of the universe.", "You'd think it would be sort of humiliating to become a specimen in a\n zoo, but most of these races take it as an honor. And there's always\n the chance that, by picking a given member of a race, we're insulting\n all the others.\n\n\n I nudged the trouble-button on the side of my desk and Auchinleck and\n Ludlow appeared simultaneously from the two doors at right and left.\n They surrounded the towering Kallerian and sweet-talkingly led him\n away. He wasn't minded to quarrel physically, or he could have knocked\n them both into the next city with a backhand swipe of his shaggy paw,\n but he kept up a growling flow of invective and threats until he was\n out in the hall.\n\n\n I mopped sweat from my forehead and began to buzz Stebbins for the next\n applicant. But before my finger touched the button, the door popped\n open and a small being came scooting in, followed by an angry Stebbins.", "The office buzzer sounded. Auchinleck said unctuously, \"The first\n applicant is ready to see you, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Send him, her or it in.\"\n\n\n The door opened and a timid-looking life-form advanced toward me on\n nervous little legs. He was a globular creature about the size of a\n big basketball, yellowish-green, with two spindly double-kneed legs and\n five double-elbowed arms, the latter spaced regularly around his body.\n There was a lidless eye at the top of his head and five lidded ones,\n one above each arm. Plus a big, gaping, toothless mouth.\nHis voice was a surprisingly resounding basso. \"You are Mr. Corrigan?\"\n\n\n \"That's right.\" I reached for a data blank. \"Before we begin, I'll need\n certain information about—\"", "The next applicant was a beefy ursinoid from Aldebaran IX. Our outfit\n has all the ursinoids it needs or is likely to need in the next few\n decades, and so I got rid of him in a couple of minutes. He was\n followed by a roly-poly blue-skinned humanoid from Donovan's Planet,\n four feet high and five hundred pounds heavy. We already had a couple\n of his species in the show, but they made good crowd-pleasers, being\n so plump and cheerful. I passed him along to Auchinleck to sign at\n anything short of top rate.\n\n\n Next came a bedraggled Sirian spider who was more interested in a\n handout than a job. If there's any species we have a real over-supply\n of, it's those silver-colored spiders, but this seedy specimen gave it\n a try anyway. He got the gate in half a minute, and he didn't even get\n the handout he was angling for. I don't approve of begging.", "I glanced down at the inventory chart until I found the Stortulian\n entry. \"Yes, that's her name.\"\n\n\n The little being immediately emitted a soul-shaking gasp. \"It is she!\n It is she!\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid we don't have room for any more—\"\n\n\n \"You are not in full understanding of my plight. The female Tiress,\n she is—was—my own Fire-sent spouse, my comfort and my warmth, my life\n and my love.\"\n\n\n \"Funny,\" I said. \"When we signed her three years ago, she said she was\n single. It's right here on the chart.\"\n\n\n \"She lied! She left my burrow because she longed to see the splendors\n of Earth. And I am alone, bound by our sacred customs never to remarry,\n languishing in sadness and pining for her return. You\nmust\ntake me to\n Earth!\"", "I buzzed for Ludlow and gave him the fast signal that meant we were\n signing this alien up at half the usual pay, and Ludlow took him into\n the other office to sign him up.\n\n\n I grinned, pleased with myself. We needed a green Regulan in our show;\n the last one had quit four years ago. But just because we needed him\n didn't mean we had to be extravagant in hiring him. A Terraphile alien\n who goes to the extent of rechristening himself with a Terran monicker\n would work for nothing, or even pay us, just so long as we let him get\n to Earth. My conscience won't let me really\nexploit\na being, but I\n don't believe in throwing money away, either.", "\"Then try elsewhere. Suppose you stop wasting my time, bud. You're as\n Earthborn as I am.\"\n\n\n \"I've never been within a dozen parsecs of Earth,\" he said smoothly. \"I\n happen to be a representative of the only Earthlike race that exists\n anywhere in the Galaxy but on Earth itself. Wazzenazz XIII is a small\n and little-known planet in the Crab Nebula. Through an evolutionary\n fluke, my race is identical with yours. Now, don't you want me in your\n circus?\"\n\n\n \"No. And it's not a circus. It's—\"\n\n\n \"A scientific institute. I stand corrected.\"\n\n\n There was something glib and appealing about this preposterous phony. I\n guess I recognized a kindred spirit or I would have tossed him out on\n his ear without another word. Instead I played along. \"If you're from\n such a distant place, how come you speak English so well?\"", "\"Come here, you!\"\n\n\n \"Stebbins?\" I said gently.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Mr. Corrigan. I lost sight of this one for a moment, and he\n came running in—\"\n\n\n \"Please, please,\" squeaked the little alien pitifully. \"I must see you,\n honored sir!\"\n\n\n \"It isn't his turn in line,\" Stebbins protested. \"There are at least\n fifty ahead of him.\"\n\"All right,\" I said tiredly. \"As long as he's in here already, I might\n as well see him. Be more careful next time, Stebbins.\"", "But I wasn't buying it, even if I could appreciate his cleverness\n intellectually. There's no such place as Wazzenazz XIII and there's\n only one human race in the Galaxy—on Earth. I was going to need some\n real good reason before I gave a down-and-out grifter a free ticket\n home.\n\n\n I didn't know it then, but before the day was out, I would have that\n reason. And, with it, plenty of trouble on my hands.\nThe first harbinger of woe turned up after lunch in the person of a\n Kallerian. The Kallerian was the sixth applicant that afternoon. I\n had turned away three more ursinoids, hired a vegetable from Miazan,\n and said no to a scaly pseudo-armadillo from one of the Delta Worlds.\n Hardly had the 'dillo scuttled dejectedly out of my office when the\n Kallerian came striding in, not even waiting for Stebbins to admit him\n officially.", "The beady little eyes flashed like beacons in the fur. \"Yes, you have\n four representatives—of the Clan Verdrokh! None of the Clan Gursdrinn!\n For three years, I have waited for a chance to avenge this insult to\n the noble Clan Gursdrinn!\"\n\n\n At the key-word\navenge\n, I readied myself to ensnarl the Kallerian\n in a spume of tanglemesh the instant he went for his blaster, but he\n didn't move. He bellowed, \"I have vowed a vow, Earthman. Take me to\n Earth, enroll a Gursdrinn, or the consequences will be terrible!\"\nI'm a man of principles, like all straightforward double-dealers, and\n one of the most important of those principles is that I never let\n myself be bullied by anyone. \"I deeply regret having unintentionally\n insulted your clan, Freeman Heraal. Will you accept my apologies?\"\n\n\n He glared at me in silence.", "\"But—\"\n\n\n \"I must see her—her and this disgrace-bringing lover of hers. I must\n reason with her. Earthman, can't you see I must appeal to her inner\n flame?\nI must bring her back!\n\"\n\n\n My face was expressionless. \"You don't really intend to join our\n organization at all—you just want free passage to Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes!\" wailed the Stortulian. \"Find some other member of my race,\n if you must! Let me have my wife again, Earthman! Is your heart a dead\n lump of stone?\"\nIt isn't, but another of my principles is to refuse to be swayed by\n sentiment. I felt sorry for this being's domestic troubles, but I\n wasn't going to break up a good act just to make an alien squirrel\n happy—not to mention footing the transportation.", "The flora of applicants was steady. Ghryne is in the heart of the\n Caledonia Cluster, where the interstellar crossroads meet. We had\n figured to pick up plenty of new exhibits here and we were right.\nIt was the isolationism of the late 29th century that turned me into\n the successful proprietor of Corrigan's Institute, after some years\n as an impoverished carnival man in the Betelgeuse system. Back in\n 2903, the World Congress declared Terra off-bounds for non-terrestrial\n beings, as an offshoot of the Terra for Terrans movement.\n\n\n Before then, anyone could visit Earth. After the gate clanged down,\n a non-terrestrial could only get onto Sol III as a specimen in a\n scientific collection—in short, as an exhibit in a zoo.", "I said, \"I don't see how we can manage it. The laws are very strict\n on the subject of bringing alien life to Earth. It has to be for\n scientific purposes only. And if I know in advance that your purpose in\n coming isn't scientific, I can't in all conscience\nlie\nfor you, can\n I?\"\n\n\n \"Well—\"\n\n\n \"Of course not.\" I took advantage of his pathetic upset to steam right\n along. \"Now if you had come in here and simply asked me to sign you up,\n I might conceivably have done it. But no—you had to go unburden your\n heart to me.\"\n\n\n \"I thought the truth would move you.\"\n\n\n \"It did. But in effect you're now asking me to conspire in a fraudulent\n criminal act. Friend, I can't do it. My reputation means too much to\n me,\" I said piously.\n\n\n \"Then you will refuse me?\"", "He sat down facing me without being asked and crossed his legs. He was\n tall and extremely thin, with pale blue eyes and dirty-blond hair, and\n though he was clean and reasonably well dressed, he had a shabby look\n about him. He said, in level Terran accents, \"I'm looking for a job\n with your outfit, Corrigan.\"\n\n\n \"There's been a mistake. We're interested in non-terrestrials only.\"\n\n\n \"I'm a non-terrestrial. My name is Ildwar Gorb, of the planet Wazzenazz\n XIII.\"\nI don't mind conning the public from time to time, but I draw the line\n at getting bilked myself. \"Look, friend, I'm busy, and I'm not known\n for my sense of humor. Or my generosity.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not panhandling. I'm looking for a job.\"", "\"I am a being of Regulus II,\" came the grave, booming reply, even\n before I had picked up the blank. \"I need no special care and I am not\n a fugitive from the law of any world.\"\n\n\n \"Your name?\"\n\n\n \"Lawrence R. Fitzgerald.\"\n\n\n I throttled my exclamation of surprise, concealing it behind a quick\n cough. \"Let me have that again, please?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. My name is Lawrence R. Fitzgerald. The 'R' stands for\n Raymond.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, that's not the name you were born with.\"" ], [ "It was also my sad duty to nix a Vegan who was negotiating through a\n Ghrynian agent. A Vegan would be a top-flight attraction, being some\n 400 feet long and appropriately fearsome to the eye, but I didn't see\n how we could take one on. They're gentle and likable beings, but their\n upkeep runs into literally tons of fresh meat a day, and not just any\n old kind of meat either. So we had to do without the Vegan.\n\n\n \"One more specimen before lunch,\" I told Stebbins, \"to make it an even\n dozen.\"\n\n\n He looked at me queerly and nodded. A being entered. I took a long\n close look at the life-form when it came in, and after that I took\n another one. I wondered what kind of stunt was being pulled. So far as\n I could tell, the being was quite plainly nothing but an Earthman.", "The beady little eyes flashed like beacons in the fur. \"Yes, you have\n four representatives—of the Clan Verdrokh! None of the Clan Gursdrinn!\n For three years, I have waited for a chance to avenge this insult to\n the noble Clan Gursdrinn!\"\n\n\n At the key-word\navenge\n, I readied myself to ensnarl the Kallerian\n in a spume of tanglemesh the instant he went for his blaster, but he\n didn't move. He bellowed, \"I have vowed a vow, Earthman. Take me to\n Earth, enroll a Gursdrinn, or the consequences will be terrible!\"\nI'm a man of principles, like all straightforward double-dealers, and\n one of the most important of those principles is that I never let\n myself be bullied by anyone. \"I deeply regret having unintentionally\n insulted your clan, Freeman Heraal. Will you accept my apologies?\"\n\n\n He glared at me in silence.", "The next applicant was a beefy ursinoid from Aldebaran IX. Our outfit\n has all the ursinoids it needs or is likely to need in the next few\n decades, and so I got rid of him in a couple of minutes. He was\n followed by a roly-poly blue-skinned humanoid from Donovan's Planet,\n four feet high and five hundred pounds heavy. We already had a couple\n of his species in the show, but they made good crowd-pleasers, being\n so plump and cheerful. I passed him along to Auchinleck to sign at\n anything short of top rate.\n\n\n Next came a bedraggled Sirian spider who was more interested in a\n handout than a job. If there's any species we have a real over-supply\n of, it's those silver-colored spiders, but this seedy specimen gave it\n a try anyway. He got the gate in half a minute, and he didn't even get\n the handout he was angling for. I don't approve of begging.", "\"But—\"\n\n\n \"I must see her—her and this disgrace-bringing lover of hers. I must\n reason with her. Earthman, can't you see I must appeal to her inner\n flame?\nI must bring her back!\n\"\n\n\n My face was expressionless. \"You don't really intend to join our\n organization at all—you just want free passage to Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes!\" wailed the Stortulian. \"Find some other member of my race,\n if you must! Let me have my wife again, Earthman! Is your heart a dead\n lump of stone?\"\nIt isn't, but another of my principles is to refuse to be swayed by\n sentiment. I felt sorry for this being's domestic troubles, but I\n wasn't going to break up a good act just to make an alien squirrel\n happy—not to mention footing the transportation.", "I glanced down at the inventory chart until I found the Stortulian\n entry. \"Yes, that's her name.\"\n\n\n The little being immediately emitted a soul-shaking gasp. \"It is she!\n It is she!\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid we don't have room for any more—\"\n\n\n \"You are not in full understanding of my plight. The female Tiress,\n she is—was—my own Fire-sent spouse, my comfort and my warmth, my life\n and my love.\"\n\n\n \"Funny,\" I said. \"When we signed her three years ago, she said she was\n single. It's right here on the chart.\"\n\n\n \"She lied! She left my burrow because she longed to see the splendors\n of Earth. And I am alone, bound by our sacred customs never to remarry,\n languishing in sadness and pining for her return. You\nmust\ntake me to\n Earth!\"", "The being closed his eyes and toddled around in a 360-degree rotation,\n remaining in place. On his world, that gesture is the equivalent of\n an apologetic smile. \"My Regulan name no longer matters. I am now and\n shall evermore be Lawrence R. Fitzgerald. I am a Terraphile, you see.\"\nThe little Regulan was as good as hired. Only the formalities remained.\n \"You understand our terms, Mr. Fitzgerald?\"\n\n\n \"I'll be placed on exhibition at your Institute on Earth. You'll pay\n for my services, transportation and expenses. I'll be required to\n remain on exhibit no more than one-third of each Terran sidereal day.\"\n\n\n \"And the pay will be—ah—$50 Galactic a week, plus expenses and\n transportation.\"\n\n\n The spherical creature clapped his hands in joy, three hands clapping\n on one side, two on the other. \"Wonderful! I will see Earth at last! I\n accept the terms!\"", "\"Then try elsewhere. Suppose you stop wasting my time, bud. You're as\n Earthborn as I am.\"\n\n\n \"I've never been within a dozen parsecs of Earth,\" he said smoothly. \"I\n happen to be a representative of the only Earthlike race that exists\n anywhere in the Galaxy but on Earth itself. Wazzenazz XIII is a small\n and little-known planet in the Crab Nebula. Through an evolutionary\n fluke, my race is identical with yours. Now, don't you want me in your\n circus?\"\n\n\n \"No. And it's not a circus. It's—\"\n\n\n \"A scientific institute. I stand corrected.\"\n\n\n There was something glib and appealing about this preposterous phony. I\n guess I recognized a kindred spirit or I would have tossed him out on\n his ear without another word. Instead I played along. \"If you're from\n such a distant place, how come you speak English so well?\"", "You'd think it would be sort of humiliating to become a specimen in a\n zoo, but most of these races take it as an honor. And there's always\n the chance that, by picking a given member of a race, we're insulting\n all the others.\n\n\n I nudged the trouble-button on the side of my desk and Auchinleck and\n Ludlow appeared simultaneously from the two doors at right and left.\n They surrounded the towering Kallerian and sweet-talkingly led him\n away. He wasn't minded to quarrel physically, or he could have knocked\n them both into the next city with a backhand swipe of his shaggy paw,\n but he kept up a growling flow of invective and threats until he was\n out in the hall.\n\n\n I mopped sweat from my forehead and began to buzz Stebbins for the next\n applicant. But before my finger touched the button, the door popped\n open and a small being came scooting in, followed by an angry Stebbins.", "The Stortulian seemed to shrivel. His eyelids closed half-way to mask\n his tears. He turned and shambled slowly to the door, walking like a\n living dishrag. In a bleak voice, he said, \"There is no hope then. All\n is lost. I will never see my soulmate again. Good day, Earthman.\"\n\n\n He spoke in a drab monotone that almost, but not quite, had me weeping.\n I watched him shuffle out. I do have\nsome\nconscience, and I had the\n uneasy feeling I had just been talking to a being who was about to\n commit suicide on my account.\nAbout fifty more applicants were processed without a hitch. Then life\n started to get complicated again.\n\n\n Nine of the fifty were okay. The rest were unacceptable for one reason\n or another, and they took the bad news quietly enough. The haul for the\n day so far was close to two dozen new life-forms under contract.", "Stebbins nodded dolefully and backed out.\nThe alien was a pathetic sight: a Stortulian, a squirrely-looking\n creature about three feet high. His fur, which should have been a\n lustrous black, was a dull gray, and his eyes were wet and sad. His\n tail drooped. His voice was little more than a faint whimper, even at\n full volume.\n\n\n \"Begging your most honored pardon most humbly, important sir. I am a\n being of Stortul XII, having sold my last few possessions to travel\n to Ghryne for the miserable purpose of obtaining an interview with\n yourself.\"\n\n\n I said, \"I'd better tell you right at the outset that we're already\n carrying our full complement of Stortulians. We have both a male and a\n female now and—\"\n\n\n \"This is known to me. The female—is her name perchance Tiress?\"", "But I wasn't buying it, even if I could appreciate his cleverness\n intellectually. There's no such place as Wazzenazz XIII and there's\n only one human race in the Galaxy—on Earth. I was going to need some\n real good reason before I gave a down-and-out grifter a free ticket\n home.\n\n\n I didn't know it then, but before the day was out, I would have that\n reason. And, with it, plenty of trouble on my hands.\nThe first harbinger of woe turned up after lunch in the person of a\n Kallerian. The Kallerian was the sixth applicant that afternoon. I\n had turned away three more ursinoids, hired a vegetable from Miazan,\n and said no to a scaly pseudo-armadillo from one of the Delta Worlds.\n Hardly had the 'dillo scuttled dejectedly out of my office when the\n Kallerian came striding in, not even waiting for Stebbins to admit him\n officially.", "I said, \"I don't see how we can manage it. The laws are very strict\n on the subject of bringing alien life to Earth. It has to be for\n scientific purposes only. And if I know in advance that your purpose in\n coming isn't scientific, I can't in all conscience\nlie\nfor you, can\n I?\"\n\n\n \"Well—\"\n\n\n \"Of course not.\" I took advantage of his pathetic upset to steam right\n along. \"Now if you had come in here and simply asked me to sign you up,\n I might conceivably have done it. But no—you had to go unburden your\n heart to me.\"\n\n\n \"I thought the truth would move you.\"\n\n\n \"It did. But in effect you're now asking me to conspire in a fraudulent\n criminal act. Friend, I can't do it. My reputation means too much to\n me,\" I said piously.\n\n\n \"Then you will refuse me?\"", "The flora of applicants was steady. Ghryne is in the heart of the\n Caledonia Cluster, where the interstellar crossroads meet. We had\n figured to pick up plenty of new exhibits here and we were right.\nIt was the isolationism of the late 29th century that turned me into\n the successful proprietor of Corrigan's Institute, after some years\n as an impoverished carnival man in the Betelgeuse system. Back in\n 2903, the World Congress declared Terra off-bounds for non-terrestrial\n beings, as an offshoot of the Terra for Terrans movement.\n\n\n Before then, anyone could visit Earth. After the gate clanged down,\n a non-terrestrial could only get onto Sol III as a specimen in a\n scientific collection—in short, as an exhibit in a zoo.", "\"I am a being of Regulus II,\" came the grave, booming reply, even\n before I had picked up the blank. \"I need no special care and I am not\n a fugitive from the law of any world.\"\n\n\n \"Your name?\"\n\n\n \"Lawrence R. Fitzgerald.\"\n\n\n I throttled my exclamation of surprise, concealing it behind a quick\n cough. \"Let me have that again, please?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. My name is Lawrence R. Fitzgerald. The 'R' stands for\n Raymond.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, that's not the name you were born with.\"", "That's what the Corrigan Institute of Morphological Science really is,\n of course. A zoo. But we don't go out and hunt for our specimens; we\n advertise and they come flocking to us. Every alien wants to see Earth\n once in his lifetime, and there's only one way he can do it.\n\n\n We don't keep too big an inventory. At last count, we had 690 specimens\n before this trip, representing 298 different intelligent life-forms.\n My goal is at least one member of at least 500 different races. When I\n reach that, I'll sit back and let the competition catch up—if it can.\n\n\n After an hour of steady work that morning, we had signed eleven new\n specimens. At the same time, we had turned away a dozen ursinoids,\n fifty of the reptilian natives of Ghryne, seven Sirian spiders, and no\n less than nineteen chlorine-breathing Procyonites wearing gas masks.", "I had just about begun to forget about the incidents of the Kallerian's\n outraged pride and the Stortulian's flighty wife when the door opened\n and the Earthman who called himself Ildwar Gorb of Wazzenazz XIII\n stepped in.\n\n\n \"How did\nyou\nget in here?\" I demanded.\n\n\n \"Your man happened to be looking the wrong way,\" he said cheerily.\n \"Change your mind about me yet?\"\n\n\n \"Get out before I have you thrown out.\"\n\n\n Gorb shrugged. \"I figured you hadn't changed your mind, so I've changed\n my pitch a bit. If you won't believe I'm from Wazzenazz XIII, suppose I\n tell you that I\nam\nEarthborn, and that I'm looking for a job on your\n staff.\"\n\n\n \"I don't care\nwhat\nyour story is! Get out or—\"", "Fifthday of Tenmonth. His last visit to the Caledonia Cluster until\n 2937, so don't miss your chance! Hurry! A life of wonder and riches\n can be yours!\nBroadsides like that, distributed wholesale in half a thousand\n languages, always bring them running. And the Corrigan Institute really\n packs in the crowds back on Earth. Why not? It's the best of its kind,\n the only really decent place where Earthmen can get a gander at the\n other species of the universe.", "I buzzed for Ludlow and gave him the fast signal that meant we were\n signing this alien up at half the usual pay, and Ludlow took him into\n the other office to sign him up.\n\n\n I grinned, pleased with myself. We needed a green Regulan in our show;\n the last one had quit four years ago. But just because we needed him\n didn't mean we had to be extravagant in hiring him. A Terraphile alien\n who goes to the extent of rechristening himself with a Terran monicker\n would work for nothing, or even pay us, just so long as we let him get\n to Earth. My conscience won't let me really\nexploit\na being, but I\n don't believe in throwing money away, either.", "He sat down facing me without being asked and crossed his legs. He was\n tall and extremely thin, with pale blue eyes and dirty-blond hair, and\n though he was clean and reasonably well dressed, he had a shabby look\n about him. He said, in level Terran accents, \"I'm looking for a job\n with your outfit, Corrigan.\"\n\n\n \"There's been a mistake. We're interested in non-terrestrials only.\"\n\n\n \"I'm a non-terrestrial. My name is Ildwar Gorb, of the planet Wazzenazz\n XIII.\"\nI don't mind conning the public from time to time, but I draw the line\n at getting bilked myself. \"Look, friend, I'm busy, and I'm not known\n for my sense of humor. Or my generosity.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not panhandling. I'm looking for a job.\"", "\"—you'll have me thrown out. Okay, okay. Just give me half a second.\n Corrigan, you're no fool, and neither am I—but that fellow of yours\n outside\nis\n. He doesn't know how to handle alien beings. How many\n times today has a life-form come in here unexpectedly?\"\n\n\n I scowled at him. \"Too damn many.\"\n\n\n \"You see? He's incompetent. Suppose you fire him, take me on instead.\n I've been living in the outworlds half my life; I know all there is to\n know about alien life-forms. You can use me, Corrigan.\"" ], [ "I went on, \"Please be assured that I'll undo the insult at the earliest\n possible opportunity. It's not feasible for us to hire another\n Kallerian now, but I'll give preference to the Clan Gursdrinn as soon\n as a vacancy—\"\n\n\n \"No. You will hire me now.\"\n\n\n \"It can't be done, Freeman Heraal. We have a budget, and we stick to\n it.\"\n\n\n \"You will rue! I will take drastic measures!\"\n\n\n \"Threats will get you nowhere, Freeman Heraal. I give you my word I'll\n get in touch with you as soon as our organization has room for another\n Kallerian. And now, please, there are many applicants waiting—\"", "He was big even for his kind—in the neighborhood of nine feet high,\n and getting on toward a ton. He planted himself firmly on his three\n stocky feet, extended his massive arms in a Kallerian greeting-gesture,\n and growled, \"I am Vallo Heraal, Freeman of Kaller IV. You will sign me\n immediately to a contract.\"\n\n\n \"Sit down, Freeman Heraal. I like to make my own decisions, thanks.\"\n\n\n \"You will grant me a contract!\"\n\n\n \"Will you please sit down?\"\n\n\n He said sulkily, \"I will remain standing.\"\n\n\n \"As you prefer.\" My desk has a few concealed features which are\n sometimes useful in dealing with belligerent or disappointed\n life-forms. My fingers roamed to the meshgun trigger, just in case of\n trouble.", "The beady little eyes flashed like beacons in the fur. \"Yes, you have\n four representatives—of the Clan Verdrokh! None of the Clan Gursdrinn!\n For three years, I have waited for a chance to avenge this insult to\n the noble Clan Gursdrinn!\"\n\n\n At the key-word\navenge\n, I readied myself to ensnarl the Kallerian\n in a spume of tanglemesh the instant he went for his blaster, but he\n didn't move. He bellowed, \"I have vowed a vow, Earthman. Take me to\n Earth, enroll a Gursdrinn, or the consequences will be terrible!\"\nI'm a man of principles, like all straightforward double-dealers, and\n one of the most important of those principles is that I never let\n myself be bullied by anyone. \"I deeply regret having unintentionally\n insulted your clan, Freeman Heraal. Will you accept my apologies?\"\n\n\n He glared at me in silence.", "I had just about begun to forget about the incidents of the Kallerian's\n outraged pride and the Stortulian's flighty wife when the door opened\n and the Earthman who called himself Ildwar Gorb of Wazzenazz XIII\n stepped in.\n\n\n \"How did\nyou\nget in here?\" I demanded.\n\n\n \"Your man happened to be looking the wrong way,\" he said cheerily.\n \"Change your mind about me yet?\"\n\n\n \"Get out before I have you thrown out.\"\n\n\n Gorb shrugged. \"I figured you hadn't changed your mind, so I've changed\n my pitch a bit. If you won't believe I'm from Wazzenazz XIII, suppose I\n tell you that I\nam\nEarthborn, and that I'm looking for a job on your\n staff.\"\n\n\n \"I don't care\nwhat\nyour story is! Get out or—\"", "The small figure of the Stortulian trudged through the open doorway\n and stationed itself limply near the threshold. The three Ghrynian\n policemen and my three assistants forgot the dead Kallerian for a\n moment and turned to eye the newcomer.\n\n\n I had visions of unending troubles with the law here on Ghryne. I\n resolved never to come here on a recruiting trip again—or, if I\ndid\ncome, to figure out some more effective way of screening myself against\n crackpots.\n\n\n In heart-rending tones, the Stortulian declared, \"Life is no longer\n worth living. My last hope is gone. There is only one thing left for me\n to do.\"\n\n\n I was quivering at the thought of another hundred thousand smackers\n going down the drain. \"Stop him, somebody! He's going to kill himself!\n He's—\"", "The Kallerian stood motionless before me. They're hairy creatures, and\n this one had a coarse, thick mat of blue fur completely covering his\n body. Two fierce eyes glimmered out through the otherwise dense blanket\n of fur. He was wearing the kilt, girdle and ceremonial blaster of his\n warlike race.\n\n\n I said, \"You'll have to understand, Freeman Heraal, that it's not our\n policy to maintain more than a few members of each species at our\n Institute. And we're not currently in need of any Kallerian males,\n because—\"\n\n\n \"You will hire me or trouble I will make!\"\n\n\n I opened our inventory chart. I showed him that we were already\n carrying four Kallerians, and that was more than plenty.", "The office door crashed open at that point and Heraal, the Kallerian,\n came thundering in. He was dressed from head to toe in glittering\n metalfoil, and instead of his ceremonial blaster, he was wielding\n a sword the length of a human being. Stebbins and Auchinleck came\n dragging helplessly along in his wake, hanging desperately to his belt.\n\n\n \"Sorry, Chief,\" Stebbins gasped. \"I tried to keep him out, but—\"\n\n\n Heraal, who had planted himself in front of my desk, drowned him out\n with a roar. \"Earthman, you have mortally insulted the Clan Gursdrinn!\"\nSitting with my hands poised near the meshgun trigger, I was ready to\n let him have it at the first sight of actual violence.", "You'd think it would be sort of humiliating to become a specimen in a\n zoo, but most of these races take it as an honor. And there's always\n the chance that, by picking a given member of a race, we're insulting\n all the others.\n\n\n I nudged the trouble-button on the side of my desk and Auchinleck and\n Ludlow appeared simultaneously from the two doors at right and left.\n They surrounded the towering Kallerian and sweet-talkingly led him\n away. He wasn't minded to quarrel physically, or he could have knocked\n them both into the next city with a backhand swipe of his shaggy paw,\n but he kept up a growling flow of invective and threats until he was\n out in the hall.\n\n\n I mopped sweat from my forehead and began to buzz Stebbins for the next\n applicant. But before my finger touched the button, the door popped\n open and a small being came scooting in, followed by an angry Stebbins.", "But I wasn't buying it, even if I could appreciate his cleverness\n intellectually. There's no such place as Wazzenazz XIII and there's\n only one human race in the Galaxy—on Earth. I was going to need some\n real good reason before I gave a down-and-out grifter a free ticket\n home.\n\n\n I didn't know it then, but before the day was out, I would have that\n reason. And, with it, plenty of trouble on my hands.\nThe first harbinger of woe turned up after lunch in the person of a\n Kallerian. The Kallerian was the sixth applicant that afternoon. I\n had turned away three more ursinoids, hired a vegetable from Miazan,\n and said no to a scaly pseudo-armadillo from one of the Delta Worlds.\n Hardly had the 'dillo scuttled dejectedly out of my office when the\n Kallerian came striding in, not even waiting for Stebbins to admit him\n officially.", "\"These aliens. Big blustery Heraal came in with murder in his eye and\n killed\nhimself\n, and the pint-sized Stortulian who looked so meek and\n pathetic damn near blew my head off.\" I shuddered. \"Thanks for the\n tackle job.\"\n\n\n \"Don't mention it,\" Gorb said.\n\n\n I glared at the Ghrynian police. \"Well? What are you waiting for? Take\n that murderous little beast out of here! Or isn't murder against the\n local laws?\"\n\n\n \"The Stortulian will be duly punished,\" replied the leader of the\n Ghrynian cops calmly. \"But there is the matter of the dead Kallerian\n and the fine of—\"", "The next applicant was a beefy ursinoid from Aldebaran IX. Our outfit\n has all the ursinoids it needs or is likely to need in the next few\n decades, and so I got rid of him in a couple of minutes. He was\n followed by a roly-poly blue-skinned humanoid from Donovan's Planet,\n four feet high and five hundred pounds heavy. We already had a couple\n of his species in the show, but they made good crowd-pleasers, being\n so plump and cheerful. I passed him along to Auchinleck to sign at\n anything short of top rate.\n\n\n Next came a bedraggled Sirian spider who was more interested in a\n handout than a job. If there's any species we have a real over-supply\n of, it's those silver-colored spiders, but this seedy specimen gave it\n a try anyway. He got the gate in half a minute, and he didn't even get\n the handout he was angling for. I don't approve of begging.", "I said, \"I don't see how we can manage it. The laws are very strict\n on the subject of bringing alien life to Earth. It has to be for\n scientific purposes only. And if I know in advance that your purpose in\n coming isn't scientific, I can't in all conscience\nlie\nfor you, can\n I?\"\n\n\n \"Well—\"\n\n\n \"Of course not.\" I took advantage of his pathetic upset to steam right\n along. \"Now if you had come in here and simply asked me to sign you up,\n I might conceivably have done it. But no—you had to go unburden your\n heart to me.\"\n\n\n \"I thought the truth would move you.\"\n\n\n \"It did. But in effect you're now asking me to conspire in a fraudulent\n criminal act. Friend, I can't do it. My reputation means too much to\n me,\" I said piously.\n\n\n \"Then you will refuse me?\"", "I took a deep breath and glanced all around the paneled ceiling of\n the office before I spoke. \"Listen, Gorb, or whatever your name is,\n I've had a hard day. There's been a Kallerian in here who just about\n threatened murder, and there's been a Stortulian in here who's about\n to commit suicide because of me. I have a conscience and it's troubling\n me. But get this: I just want to finish off my recruiting, pack up and\n go home to Earth. I don't want you hanging around here bothering me.\n I'm not looking to hire new staff members, and if you switch back to\n claiming you're an unknown life-form from Wazzenazz XIII, the answer is\n that I'm not looking for any of\nthose\neither. Now will you scram or—\"", "Stebbins nodded dolefully and backed out.\nThe alien was a pathetic sight: a Stortulian, a squirrely-looking\n creature about three feet high. His fur, which should have been a\n lustrous black, was a dull gray, and his eyes were wet and sad. His\n tail drooped. His voice was little more than a faint whimper, even at\n full volume.\n\n\n \"Begging your most honored pardon most humbly, important sir. I am a\n being of Stortul XII, having sold my last few possessions to travel\n to Ghryne for the miserable purpose of obtaining an interview with\n yourself.\"\n\n\n I said, \"I'd better tell you right at the outset that we're already\n carrying our full complement of Stortulians. We have both a male and a\n female now and—\"\n\n\n \"This is known to me. The female—is her name perchance Tiress?\"", "\"But—\"\n\n\n \"I must see her—her and this disgrace-bringing lover of hers. I must\n reason with her. Earthman, can't you see I must appeal to her inner\n flame?\nI must bring her back!\n\"\n\n\n My face was expressionless. \"You don't really intend to join our\n organization at all—you just want free passage to Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes!\" wailed the Stortulian. \"Find some other member of my race,\n if you must! Let me have my wife again, Earthman! Is your heart a dead\n lump of stone?\"\nIt isn't, but another of my principles is to refuse to be swayed by\n sentiment. I felt sorry for this being's domestic troubles, but I\n wasn't going to break up a good act just to make an alien squirrel\n happy—not to mention footing the transportation.", "I glanced down at the inventory chart until I found the Stortulian\n entry. \"Yes, that's her name.\"\n\n\n The little being immediately emitted a soul-shaking gasp. \"It is she!\n It is she!\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid we don't have room for any more—\"\n\n\n \"You are not in full understanding of my plight. The female Tiress,\n she is—was—my own Fire-sent spouse, my comfort and my warmth, my life\n and my love.\"\n\n\n \"Funny,\" I said. \"When we signed her three years ago, she said she was\n single. It's right here on the chart.\"\n\n\n \"She lied! She left my burrow because she longed to see the splendors\n of Earth. And I am alone, bound by our sacred customs never to remarry,\n languishing in sadness and pining for her return. You\nmust\ntake me to\n Earth!\"", "It was also my sad duty to nix a Vegan who was negotiating through a\n Ghrynian agent. A Vegan would be a top-flight attraction, being some\n 400 feet long and appropriately fearsome to the eye, but I didn't see\n how we could take one on. They're gentle and likable beings, but their\n upkeep runs into literally tons of fresh meat a day, and not just any\n old kind of meat either. So we had to do without the Vegan.\n\n\n \"One more specimen before lunch,\" I told Stebbins, \"to make it an even\n dozen.\"\n\n\n He looked at me queerly and nodded. A being entered. I took a long\n close look at the life-form when it came in, and after that I took\n another one. I wondered what kind of stunt was being pulled. So far as\n I could tell, the being was quite plainly nothing but an Earthman.", "Then somebody sprinted toward me, hit me amidships, and knocked me\n flying out from behind my desk before I had a chance to fire the\n meshgun. My head walloped the floor, and for five or six seconds, I\n guess I wasn't fully aware of what was going on.\n\n\n Gradually the scene took shape around me. There was a monstrous hole\n in the wall behind my desk; a smoking blaster lay on the floor, and I\n saw the three Ghrynian policemen sitting on the raving Stortulian. The\n man who called himself Ildwar Gorb was getting to his feet and dusting\n himself off.\n\n\n He helped me up. \"Sorry to have had to tackle you, Corrigan. But that\n Stortulian wasn't here to commit suicide, you see. He was out to get\n you.\"", "\"Come here, you!\"\n\n\n \"Stebbins?\" I said gently.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Mr. Corrigan. I lost sight of this one for a moment, and he\n came running in—\"\n\n\n \"Please, please,\" squeaked the little alien pitifully. \"I must see you,\n honored sir!\"\n\n\n \"It isn't his turn in line,\" Stebbins protested. \"There are at least\n fifty ahead of him.\"\n\"All right,\" I said tiredly. \"As long as he's in here already, I might\n as well see him. Be more careful next time, Stebbins.\"", "\"You are J. F. Corrigan?\" the leader asked.\n\n\n \"Y-yes.\"\n\n\n \"We have received word of a complaint against you. Said complaint\n being—\"\n\n\n \"—that your unethical actions have directly contributed to the\n untimely death of an intelligent life-form,\" filled in the second of\n the Ghrynian policemen.\n\n\n \"The evidence lies before us,\" intoned the leader, \"in the cadaver\n of the unfortunate Kallerian who filed the complaint with us several\n minutes ago.\"\n\n\n \"And therefore,\" said the third lizard, \"it is our duty to arrest\n you for this crime and declare you subject to a fine of no less than\n $100,000 Galactic or two years in prison.\"\n\n\n \"Hold on!\" I stormed. \"You mean that any being from anywhere in the\n Universe can come in here and gut himself on my carpet, and\nI'm\nresponsible?\"" ], [ "He sat down facing me without being asked and crossed his legs. He was\n tall and extremely thin, with pale blue eyes and dirty-blond hair, and\n though he was clean and reasonably well dressed, he had a shabby look\n about him. He said, in level Terran accents, \"I'm looking for a job\n with your outfit, Corrigan.\"\n\n\n \"There's been a mistake. We're interested in non-terrestrials only.\"\n\n\n \"I'm a non-terrestrial. My name is Ildwar Gorb, of the planet Wazzenazz\n XIII.\"\nI don't mind conning the public from time to time, but I draw the line\n at getting bilked myself. \"Look, friend, I'm busy, and I'm not known\n for my sense of humor. Or my generosity.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not panhandling. I'm looking for a job.\"", "I had just about begun to forget about the incidents of the Kallerian's\n outraged pride and the Stortulian's flighty wife when the door opened\n and the Earthman who called himself Ildwar Gorb of Wazzenazz XIII\n stepped in.\n\n\n \"How did\nyou\nget in here?\" I demanded.\n\n\n \"Your man happened to be looking the wrong way,\" he said cheerily.\n \"Change your mind about me yet?\"\n\n\n \"Get out before I have you thrown out.\"\n\n\n Gorb shrugged. \"I figured you hadn't changed your mind, so I've changed\n my pitch a bit. If you won't believe I'm from Wazzenazz XIII, suppose I\n tell you that I\nam\nEarthborn, and that I'm looking for a job on your\n staff.\"\n\n\n \"I don't care\nwhat\nyour story is! Get out or—\"", "I took a deep breath and glanced all around the paneled ceiling of\n the office before I spoke. \"Listen, Gorb, or whatever your name is,\n I've had a hard day. There's been a Kallerian in here who just about\n threatened murder, and there's been a Stortulian in here who's about\n to commit suicide because of me. I have a conscience and it's troubling\n me. But get this: I just want to finish off my recruiting, pack up and\n go home to Earth. I don't want you hanging around here bothering me.\n I'm not looking to hire new staff members, and if you switch back to\n claiming you're an unknown life-form from Wazzenazz XIII, the answer is\n that I'm not looking for any of\nthose\neither. Now will you scram or—\"", "\"Then try elsewhere. Suppose you stop wasting my time, bud. You're as\n Earthborn as I am.\"\n\n\n \"I've never been within a dozen parsecs of Earth,\" he said smoothly. \"I\n happen to be a representative of the only Earthlike race that exists\n anywhere in the Galaxy but on Earth itself. Wazzenazz XIII is a small\n and little-known planet in the Crab Nebula. Through an evolutionary\n fluke, my race is identical with yours. Now, don't you want me in your\n circus?\"\n\n\n \"No. And it's not a circus. It's—\"\n\n\n \"A scientific institute. I stand corrected.\"\n\n\n There was something glib and appealing about this preposterous phony. I\n guess I recognized a kindred spirit or I would have tossed him out on\n his ear without another word. Instead I played along. \"If you're from\n such a distant place, how come you speak English so well?\"", "But I wasn't buying it, even if I could appreciate his cleverness\n intellectually. There's no such place as Wazzenazz XIII and there's\n only one human race in the Galaxy—on Earth. I was going to need some\n real good reason before I gave a down-and-out grifter a free ticket\n home.\n\n\n I didn't know it then, but before the day was out, I would have that\n reason. And, with it, plenty of trouble on my hands.\nThe first harbinger of woe turned up after lunch in the person of a\n Kallerian. The Kallerian was the sixth applicant that afternoon. I\n had turned away three more ursinoids, hired a vegetable from Miazan,\n and said no to a scaly pseudo-armadillo from one of the Delta Worlds.\n Hardly had the 'dillo scuttled dejectedly out of my office when the\n Kallerian came striding in, not even waiting for Stebbins to admit him\n officially.", "I buzzed for Ludlow and gave him the fast signal that meant we were\n signing this alien up at half the usual pay, and Ludlow took him into\n the other office to sign him up.\n\n\n I grinned, pleased with myself. We needed a green Regulan in our show;\n the last one had quit four years ago. But just because we needed him\n didn't mean we had to be extravagant in hiring him. A Terraphile alien\n who goes to the extent of rechristening himself with a Terran monicker\n would work for nothing, or even pay us, just so long as we let him get\n to Earth. My conscience won't let me really\nexploit\na being, but I\n don't believe in throwing money away, either.", "The small figure of the Stortulian trudged through the open doorway\n and stationed itself limply near the threshold. The three Ghrynian\n policemen and my three assistants forgot the dead Kallerian for a\n moment and turned to eye the newcomer.\n\n\n I had visions of unending troubles with the law here on Ghryne. I\n resolved never to come here on a recruiting trip again—or, if I\ndid\ncome, to figure out some more effective way of screening myself against\n crackpots.\n\n\n In heart-rending tones, the Stortulian declared, \"Life is no longer\n worth living. My last hope is gone. There is only one thing left for me\n to do.\"\n\n\n I was quivering at the thought of another hundred thousand smackers\n going down the drain. \"Stop him, somebody! He's going to kill himself!\n He's—\"", "The office buzzer sounded. Auchinleck said unctuously, \"The first\n applicant is ready to see you, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Send him, her or it in.\"\n\n\n The door opened and a timid-looking life-form advanced toward me on\n nervous little legs. He was a globular creature about the size of a\n big basketball, yellowish-green, with two spindly double-kneed legs and\n five double-elbowed arms, the latter spaced regularly around his body.\n There was a lidless eye at the top of his head and five lidded ones,\n one above each arm. Plus a big, gaping, toothless mouth.\nHis voice was a surprisingly resounding basso. \"You are Mr. Corrigan?\"\n\n\n \"That's right.\" I reached for a data blank. \"Before we begin, I'll need\n certain information about—\"", "\"—one hundred thousand dollars. I know.\" I groaned and turned to\n Stebbins. \"Get the Terran Consulate on the phone, Stebbins. Have them\n send down a legal adviser. Find out if there's any way we can get out\n of this mess with our skins intact.\"\n\n\n \"Right, Chief.\" Stebbins moved toward the visiphone.\n\n\n Gorb stepped forward and put a hand on his chest.\n\n\n \"Hold it,\" the Wazzenazzian said crisply. \"The Consulate can't help\n you. I can.\"\n\n\n \"You?\" I said.\n\n\n \"I can get you out of this cheap.\"\n\n\n \"\nHow\ncheap?\"", "I went on, \"Please be assured that I'll undo the insult at the earliest\n possible opportunity. It's not feasible for us to hire another\n Kallerian now, but I'll give preference to the Clan Gursdrinn as soon\n as a vacancy—\"\n\n\n \"No. You will hire me now.\"\n\n\n \"It can't be done, Freeman Heraal. We have a budget, and we stick to\n it.\"\n\n\n \"You will rue! I will take drastic measures!\"\n\n\n \"Threats will get you nowhere, Freeman Heraal. I give you my word I'll\n get in touch with you as soon as our organization has room for another\n Kallerian. And now, please, there are many applicants waiting—\"", "The being closed his eyes and toddled around in a 360-degree rotation,\n remaining in place. On his world, that gesture is the equivalent of\n an apologetic smile. \"My Regulan name no longer matters. I am now and\n shall evermore be Lawrence R. Fitzgerald. I am a Terraphile, you see.\"\nThe little Regulan was as good as hired. Only the formalities remained.\n \"You understand our terms, Mr. Fitzgerald?\"\n\n\n \"I'll be placed on exhibition at your Institute on Earth. You'll pay\n for my services, transportation and expenses. I'll be required to\n remain on exhibit no more than one-third of each Terran sidereal day.\"\n\n\n \"And the pay will be—ah—$50 Galactic a week, plus expenses and\n transportation.\"\n\n\n The spherical creature clapped his hands in joy, three hands clapping\n on one side, two on the other. \"Wonderful! I will see Earth at last! I\n accept the terms!\"", "I weaved dizzily toward my desk and dropped into my chair. A flying\n fragment of wall had deflated my pneumatic cushion. The smell of ashed\n plaster was everywhere. The police were effectively cocooning the\n struggling little alien in an unbreakable tanglemesh.\n\n\n \"Evidently you don't know as much as you think you do about Stortulian\n psychology, Corrigan,\" Gorb said lightly. \"Suicide is completely\n abhorrent to them. When they're troubled, they kill the person who\n caused their trouble. In this case, you.\"\nI began to chuckle—more of a tension-relieving snicker than a\n full-bodied laugh.\n\n\n \"Funny,\" I said.\n\n\n \"What is?\" asked the self-styled Wazzenazzian.", "\"—you'll have me thrown out. Okay, okay. Just give me half a second.\n Corrigan, you're no fool, and neither am I—but that fellow of yours\n outside\nis\n. He doesn't know how to handle alien beings. How many\n times today has a life-form come in here unexpectedly?\"\n\n\n I scowled at him. \"Too damn many.\"\n\n\n \"You see? He's incompetent. Suppose you fire him, take me on instead.\n I've been living in the outworlds half my life; I know all there is to\n know about alien life-forms. You can use me, Corrigan.\"", "The next applicant was a beefy ursinoid from Aldebaran IX. Our outfit\n has all the ursinoids it needs or is likely to need in the next few\n decades, and so I got rid of him in a couple of minutes. He was\n followed by a roly-poly blue-skinned humanoid from Donovan's Planet,\n four feet high and five hundred pounds heavy. We already had a couple\n of his species in the show, but they made good crowd-pleasers, being\n so plump and cheerful. I passed him along to Auchinleck to sign at\n anything short of top rate.\n\n\n Next came a bedraggled Sirian spider who was more interested in a\n handout than a job. If there's any species we have a real over-supply\n of, it's those silver-colored spiders, but this seedy specimen gave it\n a try anyway. He got the gate in half a minute, and he didn't even get\n the handout he was angling for. I don't approve of begging.", "You'd think it would be sort of humiliating to become a specimen in a\n zoo, but most of these races take it as an honor. And there's always\n the chance that, by picking a given member of a race, we're insulting\n all the others.\n\n\n I nudged the trouble-button on the side of my desk and Auchinleck and\n Ludlow appeared simultaneously from the two doors at right and left.\n They surrounded the towering Kallerian and sweet-talkingly led him\n away. He wasn't minded to quarrel physically, or he could have knocked\n them both into the next city with a backhand swipe of his shaggy paw,\n but he kept up a growling flow of invective and threats until he was\n out in the hall.\n\n\n I mopped sweat from my forehead and began to buzz Stebbins for the next\n applicant. But before my finger touched the button, the door popped\n open and a small being came scooting in, followed by an angry Stebbins.", "\"I'm not speaking. I'm a telepath—not the kind that reads minds, just\n the kind that projects. I communicate in symbols that you translate\n back to colloquial speech.\"\n\n\n \"Very clever, Mr. Gorb.\" I grinned at him and shook my head. \"You spin\n a good yarn—but for my money, you're really Sam Jones or Phil Smith\n from Earth, stranded here and out of cash. You want a free trip back to\n Earth. No deal. The demand for beings from Wazzenazz XIII is pretty low\n these days. Zero, in fact. Good-by, Mr. Gorb.\"\n\n\n He pointed a finger squarely at me and said, \"You're making a big\n mistake. I'm just what your outfit needs. A representative of a\n hitherto utterly unknown race identical to humanity in every respect!\n Look here, examine my teeth. Absolutely like human teeth! And—\"", "He was big even for his kind—in the neighborhood of nine feet high,\n and getting on toward a ton. He planted himself firmly on his three\n stocky feet, extended his massive arms in a Kallerian greeting-gesture,\n and growled, \"I am Vallo Heraal, Freeman of Kaller IV. You will sign me\n immediately to a contract.\"\n\n\n \"Sit down, Freeman Heraal. I like to make my own decisions, thanks.\"\n\n\n \"You will grant me a contract!\"\n\n\n \"Will you please sit down?\"\n\n\n He said sulkily, \"I will remain standing.\"\n\n\n \"As you prefer.\" My desk has a few concealed features which are\n sometimes useful in dealing with belligerent or disappointed\n life-forms. My fingers roamed to the meshgun trigger, just in case of\n trouble.", "\"Come here, you!\"\n\n\n \"Stebbins?\" I said gently.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Mr. Corrigan. I lost sight of this one for a moment, and he\n came running in—\"\n\n\n \"Please, please,\" squeaked the little alien pitifully. \"I must see you,\n honored sir!\"\n\n\n \"It isn't his turn in line,\" Stebbins protested. \"There are at least\n fifty ahead of him.\"\n\"All right,\" I said tiredly. \"As long as he's in here already, I might\n as well see him. Be more careful next time, Stebbins.\"", "Through the front window of the office, I could see our big gay tridim\n sign plastered to a facing wall: WANTED—EXTRATERRESTRIALS! We had\n saturated MacTavish IV with our promotional poop for a month preceding\n arrival. Stuff like this:\nWant to visit Earth—see the Galaxy's most glittering and exclusive\n world? Want to draw good pay, work short hours, experience the thrills\n of show business on romantic Terra? If you are a non-terrestrial,\n there may be a place for you in the Corrigan Institute of\n Morphological Science. No freaks wanted—normal beings only. J. F.\n Corrigan will hold interviews in person on Ghryne from Thirdday to", "The Kallerian stood motionless before me. They're hairy creatures, and\n this one had a coarse, thick mat of blue fur completely covering his\n body. Two fierce eyes glimmered out through the otherwise dense blanket\n of fur. He was wearing the kilt, girdle and ceremonial blaster of his\n warlike race.\n\n\n I said, \"You'll have to understand, Freeman Heraal, that it's not our\n policy to maintain more than a few members of each species at our\n Institute. And we're not currently in need of any Kallerian males,\n because—\"\n\n\n \"You will hire me or trouble I will make!\"\n\n\n I opened our inventory chart. I showed him that we were already\n carrying four Kallerians, and that was more than plenty." ], [ "The being closed his eyes and toddled around in a 360-degree rotation,\n remaining in place. On his world, that gesture is the equivalent of\n an apologetic smile. \"My Regulan name no longer matters. I am now and\n shall evermore be Lawrence R. Fitzgerald. I am a Terraphile, you see.\"\nThe little Regulan was as good as hired. Only the formalities remained.\n \"You understand our terms, Mr. Fitzgerald?\"\n\n\n \"I'll be placed on exhibition at your Institute on Earth. You'll pay\n for my services, transportation and expenses. I'll be required to\n remain on exhibit no more than one-third of each Terran sidereal day.\"\n\n\n \"And the pay will be—ah—$50 Galactic a week, plus expenses and\n transportation.\"\n\n\n The spherical creature clapped his hands in joy, three hands clapping\n on one side, two on the other. \"Wonderful! I will see Earth at last! I\n accept the terms!\"", "I weaved dizzily toward my desk and dropped into my chair. A flying\n fragment of wall had deflated my pneumatic cushion. The smell of ashed\n plaster was everywhere. The police were effectively cocooning the\n struggling little alien in an unbreakable tanglemesh.\n\n\n \"Evidently you don't know as much as you think you do about Stortulian\n psychology, Corrigan,\" Gorb said lightly. \"Suicide is completely\n abhorrent to them. When they're troubled, they kill the person who\n caused their trouble. In this case, you.\"\nI began to chuckle—more of a tension-relieving snicker than a\n full-bodied laugh.\n\n\n \"Funny,\" I said.\n\n\n \"What is?\" asked the self-styled Wazzenazzian.", "Then somebody sprinted toward me, hit me amidships, and knocked me\n flying out from behind my desk before I had a chance to fire the\n meshgun. My head walloped the floor, and for five or six seconds, I\n guess I wasn't fully aware of what was going on.\n\n\n Gradually the scene took shape around me. There was a monstrous hole\n in the wall behind my desk; a smoking blaster lay on the floor, and I\n saw the three Ghrynian policemen sitting on the raving Stortulian. The\n man who called himself Ildwar Gorb was getting to his feet and dusting\n himself off.\n\n\n He helped me up. \"Sorry to have had to tackle you, Corrigan. But that\n Stortulian wasn't here to commit suicide, you see. He was out to get\n you.\"", "\"This is the law. Do you deny that your stubborn refusal to yield to\n this late life-form's request lies at the root of his sad demise?\"\n\n\n \"Well, no, but—\"\n\n\n \"Failure to deny is admission of guilt. You are guilty, Earthman.\"\nClosing my eyes wearily, I tried to wish the whole babbling lot of them\n away. If I had to, I could pony up the hundred-grand fine, but it was\n going to put an awful dent in this year's take. And I shuddered when I\n remembered that any minute that scrawny little Stortulian was likely to\n come bursting in here to kill himself too. Was it a fine of $100,000\n per suicide? At that rate, I could be out of business by nightfall.\n\n\n I was spared further such morbid thoughts by yet another unannounced\n arrival.", "The small figure of the Stortulian trudged through the open doorway\n and stationed itself limply near the threshold. The three Ghrynian\n policemen and my three assistants forgot the dead Kallerian for a\n moment and turned to eye the newcomer.\n\n\n I had visions of unending troubles with the law here on Ghryne. I\n resolved never to come here on a recruiting trip again—or, if I\ndid\ncome, to figure out some more effective way of screening myself against\n crackpots.\n\n\n In heart-rending tones, the Stortulian declared, \"Life is no longer\n worth living. My last hope is gone. There is only one thing left for me\n to do.\"\n\n\n I was quivering at the thought of another hundred thousand smackers\n going down the drain. \"Stop him, somebody! He's going to kill himself!\n He's—\"", "\"I am a being of Regulus II,\" came the grave, booming reply, even\n before I had picked up the blank. \"I need no special care and I am not\n a fugitive from the law of any world.\"\n\n\n \"Your name?\"\n\n\n \"Lawrence R. Fitzgerald.\"\n\n\n I throttled my exclamation of surprise, concealing it behind a quick\n cough. \"Let me have that again, please?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. My name is Lawrence R. Fitzgerald. The 'R' stands for\n Raymond.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, that's not the name you were born with.\"", "The office buzzer sounded. Auchinleck said unctuously, \"The first\n applicant is ready to see you, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Send him, her or it in.\"\n\n\n The door opened and a timid-looking life-form advanced toward me on\n nervous little legs. He was a globular creature about the size of a\n big basketball, yellowish-green, with two spindly double-kneed legs and\n five double-elbowed arms, the latter spaced regularly around his body.\n There was a lidless eye at the top of his head and five lidded ones,\n one above each arm. Plus a big, gaping, toothless mouth.\nHis voice was a surprisingly resounding basso. \"You are Mr. Corrigan?\"\n\n\n \"That's right.\" I reached for a data blank. \"Before we begin, I'll need\n certain information about—\"", "I said, \"I don't see how we can manage it. The laws are very strict\n on the subject of bringing alien life to Earth. It has to be for\n scientific purposes only. And if I know in advance that your purpose in\n coming isn't scientific, I can't in all conscience\nlie\nfor you, can\n I?\"\n\n\n \"Well—\"\n\n\n \"Of course not.\" I took advantage of his pathetic upset to steam right\n along. \"Now if you had come in here and simply asked me to sign you up,\n I might conceivably have done it. But no—you had to go unburden your\n heart to me.\"\n\n\n \"I thought the truth would move you.\"\n\n\n \"It did. But in effect you're now asking me to conspire in a fraudulent\n criminal act. Friend, I can't do it. My reputation means too much to\n me,\" I said piously.\n\n\n \"Then you will refuse me?\"", "I pulled away from his yawning mouth. \"Good-by, Mr. Gorb,\" I repeated.\n\n\n \"All I ask is a contract, Corrigan. It isn't much. I'll be a big\n attraction. I'll—\"\n\n\n \"\nGood-by, Mr. Gorb!\n\"\n\n\n He glowered at me reproachfully for a moment, stood up and sauntered to\n the door. \"I thought you were a man of acumen, Corrigan. Well, think\n it over. Maybe you'll regret your hastiness. I'll be back to give you\n another chance.\"\n\n\n He slammed the door and I let my grim expression relax into a smile.\n This was the best con switch yet—an Earthman posing as an alien to get\n a job!", "The beady little eyes flashed like beacons in the fur. \"Yes, you have\n four representatives—of the Clan Verdrokh! None of the Clan Gursdrinn!\n For three years, I have waited for a chance to avenge this insult to\n the noble Clan Gursdrinn!\"\n\n\n At the key-word\navenge\n, I readied myself to ensnarl the Kallerian\n in a spume of tanglemesh the instant he went for his blaster, but he\n didn't move. He bellowed, \"I have vowed a vow, Earthman. Take me to\n Earth, enroll a Gursdrinn, or the consequences will be terrible!\"\nI'm a man of principles, like all straightforward double-dealers, and\n one of the most important of those principles is that I never let\n myself be bullied by anyone. \"I deeply regret having unintentionally\n insulted your clan, Freeman Heraal. Will you accept my apologies?\"\n\n\n He glared at me in silence.", "I had just about begun to forget about the incidents of the Kallerian's\n outraged pride and the Stortulian's flighty wife when the door opened\n and the Earthman who called himself Ildwar Gorb of Wazzenazz XIII\n stepped in.\n\n\n \"How did\nyou\nget in here?\" I demanded.\n\n\n \"Your man happened to be looking the wrong way,\" he said cheerily.\n \"Change your mind about me yet?\"\n\n\n \"Get out before I have you thrown out.\"\n\n\n Gorb shrugged. \"I figured you hadn't changed your mind, so I've changed\n my pitch a bit. If you won't believe I'm from Wazzenazz XIII, suppose I\n tell you that I\nam\nEarthborn, and that I'm looking for a job on your\n staff.\"\n\n\n \"I don't care\nwhat\nyour story is! Get out or—\"", "\"Come here, you!\"\n\n\n \"Stebbins?\" I said gently.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Mr. Corrigan. I lost sight of this one for a moment, and he\n came running in—\"\n\n\n \"Please, please,\" squeaked the little alien pitifully. \"I must see you,\n honored sir!\"\n\n\n \"It isn't his turn in line,\" Stebbins protested. \"There are at least\n fifty ahead of him.\"\n\"All right,\" I said tiredly. \"As long as he's in here already, I might\n as well see him. Be more careful next time, Stebbins.\"", "He was big even for his kind—in the neighborhood of nine feet high,\n and getting on toward a ton. He planted himself firmly on his three\n stocky feet, extended his massive arms in a Kallerian greeting-gesture,\n and growled, \"I am Vallo Heraal, Freeman of Kaller IV. You will sign me\n immediately to a contract.\"\n\n\n \"Sit down, Freeman Heraal. I like to make my own decisions, thanks.\"\n\n\n \"You will grant me a contract!\"\n\n\n \"Will you please sit down?\"\n\n\n He said sulkily, \"I will remain standing.\"\n\n\n \"As you prefer.\" My desk has a few concealed features which are\n sometimes useful in dealing with belligerent or disappointed\n life-forms. My fingers roamed to the meshgun trigger, just in case of\n trouble.", "It was also my sad duty to nix a Vegan who was negotiating through a\n Ghrynian agent. A Vegan would be a top-flight attraction, being some\n 400 feet long and appropriately fearsome to the eye, but I didn't see\n how we could take one on. They're gentle and likable beings, but their\n upkeep runs into literally tons of fresh meat a day, and not just any\n old kind of meat either. So we had to do without the Vegan.\n\n\n \"One more specimen before lunch,\" I told Stebbins, \"to make it an even\n dozen.\"\n\n\n He looked at me queerly and nodded. A being entered. I took a long\n close look at the life-form when it came in, and after that I took\n another one. I wondered what kind of stunt was being pulled. So far as\n I could tell, the being was quite plainly nothing but an Earthman.", "The flora of applicants was steady. Ghryne is in the heart of the\n Caledonia Cluster, where the interstellar crossroads meet. We had\n figured to pick up plenty of new exhibits here and we were right.\nIt was the isolationism of the late 29th century that turned me into\n the successful proprietor of Corrigan's Institute, after some years\n as an impoverished carnival man in the Betelgeuse system. Back in\n 2903, the World Congress declared Terra off-bounds for non-terrestrial\n beings, as an offshoot of the Terra for Terrans movement.\n\n\n Before then, anyone could visit Earth. After the gate clanged down,\n a non-terrestrial could only get onto Sol III as a specimen in a\n scientific collection—in short, as an exhibit in a zoo.", "\"You are J. F. Corrigan?\" the leader asked.\n\n\n \"Y-yes.\"\n\n\n \"We have received word of a complaint against you. Said complaint\n being—\"\n\n\n \"—that your unethical actions have directly contributed to the\n untimely death of an intelligent life-form,\" filled in the second of\n the Ghrynian policemen.\n\n\n \"The evidence lies before us,\" intoned the leader, \"in the cadaver\n of the unfortunate Kallerian who filed the complaint with us several\n minutes ago.\"\n\n\n \"And therefore,\" said the third lizard, \"it is our duty to arrest\n you for this crime and declare you subject to a fine of no less than\n $100,000 Galactic or two years in prison.\"\n\n\n \"Hold on!\" I stormed. \"You mean that any being from anywhere in the\n Universe can come in here and gut himself on my carpet, and\nI'm\nresponsible?\"", "The office door crashed open at that point and Heraal, the Kallerian,\n came thundering in. He was dressed from head to toe in glittering\n metalfoil, and instead of his ceremonial blaster, he was wielding\n a sword the length of a human being. Stebbins and Auchinleck came\n dragging helplessly along in his wake, hanging desperately to his belt.\n\n\n \"Sorry, Chief,\" Stebbins gasped. \"I tried to keep him out, but—\"\n\n\n Heraal, who had planted himself in front of my desk, drowned him out\n with a roar. \"Earthman, you have mortally insulted the Clan Gursdrinn!\"\nSitting with my hands poised near the meshgun trigger, I was ready to\n let him have it at the first sight of actual violence.", "Heraal boomed, \"You are responsible for what is to happen now. I have\n notified the authorities and you prosecuted will be for causing the\n death of a life-form! Suffer, Earthborn ape! Suffer!\"\n\n\n \"Watch it, Chief,\" Stebbins yelled. \"He's going to—\"\n\n\n An instant before my numb fingers could tighten on the meshgun\n trigger, Heraal swung that huge sword through the air and plunged it\n savagely through his body. He toppled forward onto the carpet with the\n sword projecting a couple of feet out of his back. A few driblets of\n bluish-purple blood spread from beneath him.\n\n\n Before I could react to the big life-form's hara-kiri, the office door\n flew open again and three sleek reptilian beings entered, garbed in the\n green sashes of the local police force. Their golden eyes goggled down\n at the figure on the floor, then came to rest on me.", "\"But—\"\n\n\n \"I must see her—her and this disgrace-bringing lover of hers. I must\n reason with her. Earthman, can't you see I must appeal to her inner\n flame?\nI must bring her back!\n\"\n\n\n My face was expressionless. \"You don't really intend to join our\n organization at all—you just want free passage to Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes!\" wailed the Stortulian. \"Find some other member of my race,\n if you must! Let me have my wife again, Earthman! Is your heart a dead\n lump of stone?\"\nIt isn't, but another of my principles is to refuse to be swayed by\n sentiment. I felt sorry for this being's domestic troubles, but I\n wasn't going to break up a good act just to make an alien squirrel\n happy—not to mention footing the transportation.", "\"Then try elsewhere. Suppose you stop wasting my time, bud. You're as\n Earthborn as I am.\"\n\n\n \"I've never been within a dozen parsecs of Earth,\" he said smoothly. \"I\n happen to be a representative of the only Earthlike race that exists\n anywhere in the Galaxy but on Earth itself. Wazzenazz XIII is a small\n and little-known planet in the Crab Nebula. Through an evolutionary\n fluke, my race is identical with yours. Now, don't you want me in your\n circus?\"\n\n\n \"No. And it's not a circus. It's—\"\n\n\n \"A scientific institute. I stand corrected.\"\n\n\n There was something glib and appealing about this preposterous phony. I\n guess I recognized a kindred spirit or I would have tossed him out on\n his ear without another word. Instead I played along. \"If you're from\n such a distant place, how come you speak English so well?\"" ], [ "The being closed his eyes and toddled around in a 360-degree rotation,\n remaining in place. On his world, that gesture is the equivalent of\n an apologetic smile. \"My Regulan name no longer matters. I am now and\n shall evermore be Lawrence R. Fitzgerald. I am a Terraphile, you see.\"\nThe little Regulan was as good as hired. Only the formalities remained.\n \"You understand our terms, Mr. Fitzgerald?\"\n\n\n \"I'll be placed on exhibition at your Institute on Earth. You'll pay\n for my services, transportation and expenses. I'll be required to\n remain on exhibit no more than one-third of each Terran sidereal day.\"\n\n\n \"And the pay will be—ah—$50 Galactic a week, plus expenses and\n transportation.\"\n\n\n The spherical creature clapped his hands in joy, three hands clapping\n on one side, two on the other. \"Wonderful! I will see Earth at last! I\n accept the terms!\"", "I buzzed for Ludlow and gave him the fast signal that meant we were\n signing this alien up at half the usual pay, and Ludlow took him into\n the other office to sign him up.\n\n\n I grinned, pleased with myself. We needed a green Regulan in our show;\n the last one had quit four years ago. But just because we needed him\n didn't mean we had to be extravagant in hiring him. A Terraphile alien\n who goes to the extent of rechristening himself with a Terran monicker\n would work for nothing, or even pay us, just so long as we let him get\n to Earth. My conscience won't let me really\nexploit\na being, but I\n don't believe in throwing money away, either.", "The small figure of the Stortulian trudged through the open doorway\n and stationed itself limply near the threshold. The three Ghrynian\n policemen and my three assistants forgot the dead Kallerian for a\n moment and turned to eye the newcomer.\n\n\n I had visions of unending troubles with the law here on Ghryne. I\n resolved never to come here on a recruiting trip again—or, if I\ndid\ncome, to figure out some more effective way of screening myself against\n crackpots.\n\n\n In heart-rending tones, the Stortulian declared, \"Life is no longer\n worth living. My last hope is gone. There is only one thing left for me\n to do.\"\n\n\n I was quivering at the thought of another hundred thousand smackers\n going down the drain. \"Stop him, somebody! He's going to kill himself!\n He's—\"", "He sat down facing me without being asked and crossed his legs. He was\n tall and extremely thin, with pale blue eyes and dirty-blond hair, and\n though he was clean and reasonably well dressed, he had a shabby look\n about him. He said, in level Terran accents, \"I'm looking for a job\n with your outfit, Corrigan.\"\n\n\n \"There's been a mistake. We're interested in non-terrestrials only.\"\n\n\n \"I'm a non-terrestrial. My name is Ildwar Gorb, of the planet Wazzenazz\n XIII.\"\nI don't mind conning the public from time to time, but I draw the line\n at getting bilked myself. \"Look, friend, I'm busy, and I'm not known\n for my sense of humor. Or my generosity.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not panhandling. I'm looking for a job.\"", "I took a deep breath and glanced all around the paneled ceiling of\n the office before I spoke. \"Listen, Gorb, or whatever your name is,\n I've had a hard day. There's been a Kallerian in here who just about\n threatened murder, and there's been a Stortulian in here who's about\n to commit suicide because of me. I have a conscience and it's troubling\n me. But get this: I just want to finish off my recruiting, pack up and\n go home to Earth. I don't want you hanging around here bothering me.\n I'm not looking to hire new staff members, and if you switch back to\n claiming you're an unknown life-form from Wazzenazz XIII, the answer is\n that I'm not looking for any of\nthose\neither. Now will you scram or—\"", "The next applicant was a beefy ursinoid from Aldebaran IX. Our outfit\n has all the ursinoids it needs or is likely to need in the next few\n decades, and so I got rid of him in a couple of minutes. He was\n followed by a roly-poly blue-skinned humanoid from Donovan's Planet,\n four feet high and five hundred pounds heavy. We already had a couple\n of his species in the show, but they made good crowd-pleasers, being\n so plump and cheerful. I passed him along to Auchinleck to sign at\n anything short of top rate.\n\n\n Next came a bedraggled Sirian spider who was more interested in a\n handout than a job. If there's any species we have a real over-supply\n of, it's those silver-colored spiders, but this seedy specimen gave it\n a try anyway. He got the gate in half a minute, and he didn't even get\n the handout he was angling for. I don't approve of begging.", "Gorb grinned rakishly. \"Five thousand in cash plus a contract as a\n specimen with your outfit. In advance, of course. That's a heck of a\n lot better than forking over a hundred grand, isn't it?\"\n\n\n I eyed Gorb uncertainly. The Terran Consulate people probably wouldn't\n be much help; they tried to keep out of local squabbles unless they\n were really serious, and I knew from past experiences that no officials\n ever worried much about the state of my pocketbook. On the other hand,\n giving this slyster a contract might be a risky proposition.\n\n\n \"Tell you what,\" I said finally. \"You've got yourself a deal—but on\n a contingency basis. Get me out of this and you'll have five grand and\n the contract. Otherwise, nothing.\"\n\n\n Gorb shrugged. \"What have I to lose?\"", "He was big even for his kind—in the neighborhood of nine feet high,\n and getting on toward a ton. He planted himself firmly on his three\n stocky feet, extended his massive arms in a Kallerian greeting-gesture,\n and growled, \"I am Vallo Heraal, Freeman of Kaller IV. You will sign me\n immediately to a contract.\"\n\n\n \"Sit down, Freeman Heraal. I like to make my own decisions, thanks.\"\n\n\n \"You will grant me a contract!\"\n\n\n \"Will you please sit down?\"\n\n\n He said sulkily, \"I will remain standing.\"\n\n\n \"As you prefer.\" My desk has a few concealed features which are\n sometimes useful in dealing with belligerent or disappointed\n life-forms. My fingers roamed to the meshgun trigger, just in case of\n trouble.", "\"I am a being of Regulus II,\" came the grave, booming reply, even\n before I had picked up the blank. \"I need no special care and I am not\n a fugitive from the law of any world.\"\n\n\n \"Your name?\"\n\n\n \"Lawrence R. Fitzgerald.\"\n\n\n I throttled my exclamation of surprise, concealing it behind a quick\n cough. \"Let me have that again, please?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. My name is Lawrence R. Fitzgerald. The 'R' stands for\n Raymond.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, that's not the name you were born with.\"", "Through the front window of the office, I could see our big gay tridim\n sign plastered to a facing wall: WANTED—EXTRATERRESTRIALS! We had\n saturated MacTavish IV with our promotional poop for a month preceding\n arrival. Stuff like this:\nWant to visit Earth—see the Galaxy's most glittering and exclusive\n world? Want to draw good pay, work short hours, experience the thrills\n of show business on romantic Terra? If you are a non-terrestrial,\n there may be a place for you in the Corrigan Institute of\n Morphological Science. No freaks wanted—normal beings only. J. F.\n Corrigan will hold interviews in person on Ghryne from Thirdday to", "My three staff men, Auchinleck, Stebbins and Ludlow, walked shieldwise\n in front of me. I peered between them to size the crop up. The aliens\n came in every shape and form, in all colors and textures—and all of\n them eager for a Corrigan contract. The Galaxy is full of bizarre\n beings, but there's barely a species anywhere that can resist the old\n exhibitionist urge.\n\n\n \"Send them in one at a time,\" I told Stebbins. I ducked into the\n office, took my place back of the desk and waited for the procession to\n begin.\n\n\n The name of the planet was MacTavish IV (if you went by the official\n Terran listing) or Ghryne (if you called it by what its people were\n accustomed to calling it). I thought of it privately as MacTavish IV\n and referred to it publicly as Ghryne. I believe in keeping the locals\n happy wherever I go.", "The office buzzer sounded. Auchinleck said unctuously, \"The first\n applicant is ready to see you, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Send him, her or it in.\"\n\n\n The door opened and a timid-looking life-form advanced toward me on\n nervous little legs. He was a globular creature about the size of a\n big basketball, yellowish-green, with two spindly double-kneed legs and\n five double-elbowed arms, the latter spaced regularly around his body.\n There was a lidless eye at the top of his head and five lidded ones,\n one above each arm. Plus a big, gaping, toothless mouth.\nHis voice was a surprisingly resounding basso. \"You are Mr. Corrigan?\"\n\n\n \"That's right.\" I reached for a data blank. \"Before we begin, I'll need\n certain information about—\"", "\"—you'll have me thrown out. Okay, okay. Just give me half a second.\n Corrigan, you're no fool, and neither am I—but that fellow of yours\n outside\nis\n. He doesn't know how to handle alien beings. How many\n times today has a life-form come in here unexpectedly?\"\n\n\n I scowled at him. \"Too damn many.\"\n\n\n \"You see? He's incompetent. Suppose you fire him, take me on instead.\n I've been living in the outworlds half my life; I know all there is to\n know about alien life-forms. You can use me, Corrigan.\"", "I said, \"I don't see how we can manage it. The laws are very strict\n on the subject of bringing alien life to Earth. It has to be for\n scientific purposes only. And if I know in advance that your purpose in\n coming isn't scientific, I can't in all conscience\nlie\nfor you, can\n I?\"\n\n\n \"Well—\"\n\n\n \"Of course not.\" I took advantage of his pathetic upset to steam right\n along. \"Now if you had come in here and simply asked me to sign you up,\n I might conceivably have done it. But no—you had to go unburden your\n heart to me.\"\n\n\n \"I thought the truth would move you.\"\n\n\n \"It did. But in effect you're now asking me to conspire in a fraudulent\n criminal act. Friend, I can't do it. My reputation means too much to\n me,\" I said piously.\n\n\n \"Then you will refuse me?\"", "\"—one hundred thousand dollars. I know.\" I groaned and turned to\n Stebbins. \"Get the Terran Consulate on the phone, Stebbins. Have them\n send down a legal adviser. Find out if there's any way we can get out\n of this mess with our skins intact.\"\n\n\n \"Right, Chief.\" Stebbins moved toward the visiphone.\n\n\n Gorb stepped forward and put a hand on his chest.\n\n\n \"Hold it,\" the Wazzenazzian said crisply. \"The Consulate can't help\n you. I can.\"\n\n\n \"You?\" I said.\n\n\n \"I can get you out of this cheap.\"\n\n\n \"\nHow\ncheap?\"", "\"But—\"\n\n\n \"I must see her—her and this disgrace-bringing lover of hers. I must\n reason with her. Earthman, can't you see I must appeal to her inner\n flame?\nI must bring her back!\n\"\n\n\n My face was expressionless. \"You don't really intend to join our\n organization at all—you just want free passage to Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes!\" wailed the Stortulian. \"Find some other member of my race,\n if you must! Let me have my wife again, Earthman! Is your heart a dead\n lump of stone?\"\nIt isn't, but another of my principles is to refuse to be swayed by\n sentiment. I felt sorry for this being's domestic troubles, but I\n wasn't going to break up a good act just to make an alien squirrel\n happy—not to mention footing the transportation.", "I had just about begun to forget about the incidents of the Kallerian's\n outraged pride and the Stortulian's flighty wife when the door opened\n and the Earthman who called himself Ildwar Gorb of Wazzenazz XIII\n stepped in.\n\n\n \"How did\nyou\nget in here?\" I demanded.\n\n\n \"Your man happened to be looking the wrong way,\" he said cheerily.\n \"Change your mind about me yet?\"\n\n\n \"Get out before I have you thrown out.\"\n\n\n Gorb shrugged. \"I figured you hadn't changed your mind, so I've changed\n my pitch a bit. If you won't believe I'm from Wazzenazz XIII, suppose I\n tell you that I\nam\nEarthborn, and that I'm looking for a job on your\n staff.\"\n\n\n \"I don't care\nwhat\nyour story is! Get out or—\"", "\"You are J. F. Corrigan?\" the leader asked.\n\n\n \"Y-yes.\"\n\n\n \"We have received word of a complaint against you. Said complaint\n being—\"\n\n\n \"—that your unethical actions have directly contributed to the\n untimely death of an intelligent life-form,\" filled in the second of\n the Ghrynian policemen.\n\n\n \"The evidence lies before us,\" intoned the leader, \"in the cadaver\n of the unfortunate Kallerian who filed the complaint with us several\n minutes ago.\"\n\n\n \"And therefore,\" said the third lizard, \"it is our duty to arrest\n you for this crime and declare you subject to a fine of no less than\n $100,000 Galactic or two years in prison.\"\n\n\n \"Hold on!\" I stormed. \"You mean that any being from anywhere in the\n Universe can come in here and gut himself on my carpet, and\nI'm\nresponsible?\"", "The Kallerian stood motionless before me. They're hairy creatures, and\n this one had a coarse, thick mat of blue fur completely covering his\n body. Two fierce eyes glimmered out through the otherwise dense blanket\n of fur. He was wearing the kilt, girdle and ceremonial blaster of his\n warlike race.\n\n\n I said, \"You'll have to understand, Freeman Heraal, that it's not our\n policy to maintain more than a few members of each species at our\n Institute. And we're not currently in need of any Kallerian males,\n because—\"\n\n\n \"You will hire me or trouble I will make!\"\n\n\n I opened our inventory chart. I showed him that we were already\n carrying four Kallerians, and that was more than plenty.", "Birds of a Feather\nBy ROBERT SILVERBERG\n\n\n Illustrated by WOOD\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine November 1958.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nGetting specimens for the interstellar zoo\n \nwas no problem—they battled for the honor—but\n \nnow I had to fight like a wildcat to\n \nkeep a display from making a monkey of me!\nIt was our first day of recruiting on the planet, and the alien\n life-forms had lined up for hundreds of feet back from my rented\n office. As I came down the block from the hotel, I could hear and see\n and smell them with ease." ], [ "The next applicant was a beefy ursinoid from Aldebaran IX. Our outfit\n has all the ursinoids it needs or is likely to need in the next few\n decades, and so I got rid of him in a couple of minutes. He was\n followed by a roly-poly blue-skinned humanoid from Donovan's Planet,\n four feet high and five hundred pounds heavy. We already had a couple\n of his species in the show, but they made good crowd-pleasers, being\n so plump and cheerful. I passed him along to Auchinleck to sign at\n anything short of top rate.\n\n\n Next came a bedraggled Sirian spider who was more interested in a\n handout than a job. If there's any species we have a real over-supply\n of, it's those silver-colored spiders, but this seedy specimen gave it\n a try anyway. He got the gate in half a minute, and he didn't even get\n the handout he was angling for. I don't approve of begging.", "It was also my sad duty to nix a Vegan who was negotiating through a\n Ghrynian agent. A Vegan would be a top-flight attraction, being some\n 400 feet long and appropriately fearsome to the eye, but I didn't see\n how we could take one on. They're gentle and likable beings, but their\n upkeep runs into literally tons of fresh meat a day, and not just any\n old kind of meat either. So we had to do without the Vegan.\n\n\n \"One more specimen before lunch,\" I told Stebbins, \"to make it an even\n dozen.\"\n\n\n He looked at me queerly and nodded. A being entered. I took a long\n close look at the life-form when it came in, and after that I took\n another one. I wondered what kind of stunt was being pulled. So far as\n I could tell, the being was quite plainly nothing but an Earthman.", "That's what the Corrigan Institute of Morphological Science really is,\n of course. A zoo. But we don't go out and hunt for our specimens; we\n advertise and they come flocking to us. Every alien wants to see Earth\n once in his lifetime, and there's only one way he can do it.\n\n\n We don't keep too big an inventory. At last count, we had 690 specimens\n before this trip, representing 298 different intelligent life-forms.\n My goal is at least one member of at least 500 different races. When I\n reach that, I'll sit back and let the competition catch up—if it can.\n\n\n After an hour of steady work that morning, we had signed eleven new\n specimens. At the same time, we had turned away a dozen ursinoids,\n fifty of the reptilian natives of Ghryne, seven Sirian spiders, and no\n less than nineteen chlorine-breathing Procyonites wearing gas masks.", "Stebbins nodded dolefully and backed out.\nThe alien was a pathetic sight: a Stortulian, a squirrely-looking\n creature about three feet high. His fur, which should have been a\n lustrous black, was a dull gray, and his eyes were wet and sad. His\n tail drooped. His voice was little more than a faint whimper, even at\n full volume.\n\n\n \"Begging your most honored pardon most humbly, important sir. I am a\n being of Stortul XII, having sold my last few possessions to travel\n to Ghryne for the miserable purpose of obtaining an interview with\n yourself.\"\n\n\n I said, \"I'd better tell you right at the outset that we're already\n carrying our full complement of Stortulians. We have both a male and a\n female now and—\"\n\n\n \"This is known to me. The female—is her name perchance Tiress?\"", "I glanced down at the inventory chart until I found the Stortulian\n entry. \"Yes, that's her name.\"\n\n\n The little being immediately emitted a soul-shaking gasp. \"It is she!\n It is she!\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid we don't have room for any more—\"\n\n\n \"You are not in full understanding of my plight. The female Tiress,\n she is—was—my own Fire-sent spouse, my comfort and my warmth, my life\n and my love.\"\n\n\n \"Funny,\" I said. \"When we signed her three years ago, she said she was\n single. It's right here on the chart.\"\n\n\n \"She lied! She left my burrow because she longed to see the splendors\n of Earth. And I am alone, bound by our sacred customs never to remarry,\n languishing in sadness and pining for her return. You\nmust\ntake me to\n Earth!\"", "I said, \"I don't see how we can manage it. The laws are very strict\n on the subject of bringing alien life to Earth. It has to be for\n scientific purposes only. And if I know in advance that your purpose in\n coming isn't scientific, I can't in all conscience\nlie\nfor you, can\n I?\"\n\n\n \"Well—\"\n\n\n \"Of course not.\" I took advantage of his pathetic upset to steam right\n along. \"Now if you had come in here and simply asked me to sign you up,\n I might conceivably have done it. But no—you had to go unburden your\n heart to me.\"\n\n\n \"I thought the truth would move you.\"\n\n\n \"It did. But in effect you're now asking me to conspire in a fraudulent\n criminal act. Friend, I can't do it. My reputation means too much to\n me,\" I said piously.\n\n\n \"Then you will refuse me?\"", "The beady little eyes flashed like beacons in the fur. \"Yes, you have\n four representatives—of the Clan Verdrokh! None of the Clan Gursdrinn!\n For three years, I have waited for a chance to avenge this insult to\n the noble Clan Gursdrinn!\"\n\n\n At the key-word\navenge\n, I readied myself to ensnarl the Kallerian\n in a spume of tanglemesh the instant he went for his blaster, but he\n didn't move. He bellowed, \"I have vowed a vow, Earthman. Take me to\n Earth, enroll a Gursdrinn, or the consequences will be terrible!\"\nI'm a man of principles, like all straightforward double-dealers, and\n one of the most important of those principles is that I never let\n myself be bullied by anyone. \"I deeply regret having unintentionally\n insulted your clan, Freeman Heraal. Will you accept my apologies?\"\n\n\n He glared at me in silence.", "He was big even for his kind—in the neighborhood of nine feet high,\n and getting on toward a ton. He planted himself firmly on his three\n stocky feet, extended his massive arms in a Kallerian greeting-gesture,\n and growled, \"I am Vallo Heraal, Freeman of Kaller IV. You will sign me\n immediately to a contract.\"\n\n\n \"Sit down, Freeman Heraal. I like to make my own decisions, thanks.\"\n\n\n \"You will grant me a contract!\"\n\n\n \"Will you please sit down?\"\n\n\n He said sulkily, \"I will remain standing.\"\n\n\n \"As you prefer.\" My desk has a few concealed features which are\n sometimes useful in dealing with belligerent or disappointed\n life-forms. My fingers roamed to the meshgun trigger, just in case of\n trouble.", "The Kallerian stood motionless before me. They're hairy creatures, and\n this one had a coarse, thick mat of blue fur completely covering his\n body. Two fierce eyes glimmered out through the otherwise dense blanket\n of fur. He was wearing the kilt, girdle and ceremonial blaster of his\n warlike race.\n\n\n I said, \"You'll have to understand, Freeman Heraal, that it's not our\n policy to maintain more than a few members of each species at our\n Institute. And we're not currently in need of any Kallerian males,\n because—\"\n\n\n \"You will hire me or trouble I will make!\"\n\n\n I opened our inventory chart. I showed him that we were already\n carrying four Kallerians, and that was more than plenty.", "The office buzzer sounded. Auchinleck said unctuously, \"The first\n applicant is ready to see you, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Send him, her or it in.\"\n\n\n The door opened and a timid-looking life-form advanced toward me on\n nervous little legs. He was a globular creature about the size of a\n big basketball, yellowish-green, with two spindly double-kneed legs and\n five double-elbowed arms, the latter spaced regularly around his body.\n There was a lidless eye at the top of his head and five lidded ones,\n one above each arm. Plus a big, gaping, toothless mouth.\nHis voice was a surprisingly resounding basso. \"You are Mr. Corrigan?\"\n\n\n \"That's right.\" I reached for a data blank. \"Before we begin, I'll need\n certain information about—\"", "The Stortulian seemed to shrivel. His eyelids closed half-way to mask\n his tears. He turned and shambled slowly to the door, walking like a\n living dishrag. In a bleak voice, he said, \"There is no hope then. All\n is lost. I will never see my soulmate again. Good day, Earthman.\"\n\n\n He spoke in a drab monotone that almost, but not quite, had me weeping.\n I watched him shuffle out. I do have\nsome\nconscience, and I had the\n uneasy feeling I had just been talking to a being who was about to\n commit suicide on my account.\nAbout fifty more applicants were processed without a hitch. Then life\n started to get complicated again.\n\n\n Nine of the fifty were okay. The rest were unacceptable for one reason\n or another, and they took the bad news quietly enough. The haul for the\n day so far was close to two dozen new life-forms under contract.", "My three staff men, Auchinleck, Stebbins and Ludlow, walked shieldwise\n in front of me. I peered between them to size the crop up. The aliens\n came in every shape and form, in all colors and textures—and all of\n them eager for a Corrigan contract. The Galaxy is full of bizarre\n beings, but there's barely a species anywhere that can resist the old\n exhibitionist urge.\n\n\n \"Send them in one at a time,\" I told Stebbins. I ducked into the\n office, took my place back of the desk and waited for the procession to\n begin.\n\n\n The name of the planet was MacTavish IV (if you went by the official\n Terran listing) or Ghryne (if you called it by what its people were\n accustomed to calling it). I thought of it privately as MacTavish IV\n and referred to it publicly as Ghryne. I believe in keeping the locals\n happy wherever I go.", "But I wasn't buying it, even if I could appreciate his cleverness\n intellectually. There's no such place as Wazzenazz XIII and there's\n only one human race in the Galaxy—on Earth. I was going to need some\n real good reason before I gave a down-and-out grifter a free ticket\n home.\n\n\n I didn't know it then, but before the day was out, I would have that\n reason. And, with it, plenty of trouble on my hands.\nThe first harbinger of woe turned up after lunch in the person of a\n Kallerian. The Kallerian was the sixth applicant that afternoon. I\n had turned away three more ursinoids, hired a vegetable from Miazan,\n and said no to a scaly pseudo-armadillo from one of the Delta Worlds.\n Hardly had the 'dillo scuttled dejectedly out of my office when the\n Kallerian came striding in, not even waiting for Stebbins to admit him\n officially.", "\"But—\"\n\n\n \"I must see her—her and this disgrace-bringing lover of hers. I must\n reason with her. Earthman, can't you see I must appeal to her inner\n flame?\nI must bring her back!\n\"\n\n\n My face was expressionless. \"You don't really intend to join our\n organization at all—you just want free passage to Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes!\" wailed the Stortulian. \"Find some other member of my race,\n if you must! Let me have my wife again, Earthman! Is your heart a dead\n lump of stone?\"\nIt isn't, but another of my principles is to refuse to be swayed by\n sentiment. I felt sorry for this being's domestic troubles, but I\n wasn't going to break up a good act just to make an alien squirrel\n happy—not to mention footing the transportation.", "He sat down facing me without being asked and crossed his legs. He was\n tall and extremely thin, with pale blue eyes and dirty-blond hair, and\n though he was clean and reasonably well dressed, he had a shabby look\n about him. He said, in level Terran accents, \"I'm looking for a job\n with your outfit, Corrigan.\"\n\n\n \"There's been a mistake. We're interested in non-terrestrials only.\"\n\n\n \"I'm a non-terrestrial. My name is Ildwar Gorb, of the planet Wazzenazz\n XIII.\"\nI don't mind conning the public from time to time, but I draw the line\n at getting bilked myself. \"Look, friend, I'm busy, and I'm not known\n for my sense of humor. Or my generosity.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not panhandling. I'm looking for a job.\"", "Through the front window of the office, I could see our big gay tridim\n sign plastered to a facing wall: WANTED—EXTRATERRESTRIALS! We had\n saturated MacTavish IV with our promotional poop for a month preceding\n arrival. Stuff like this:\nWant to visit Earth—see the Galaxy's most glittering and exclusive\n world? Want to draw good pay, work short hours, experience the thrills\n of show business on romantic Terra? If you are a non-terrestrial,\n there may be a place for you in the Corrigan Institute of\n Morphological Science. No freaks wanted—normal beings only. J. F.\n Corrigan will hold interviews in person on Ghryne from Thirdday to", "The being closed his eyes and toddled around in a 360-degree rotation,\n remaining in place. On his world, that gesture is the equivalent of\n an apologetic smile. \"My Regulan name no longer matters. I am now and\n shall evermore be Lawrence R. Fitzgerald. I am a Terraphile, you see.\"\nThe little Regulan was as good as hired. Only the formalities remained.\n \"You understand our terms, Mr. Fitzgerald?\"\n\n\n \"I'll be placed on exhibition at your Institute on Earth. You'll pay\n for my services, transportation and expenses. I'll be required to\n remain on exhibit no more than one-third of each Terran sidereal day.\"\n\n\n \"And the pay will be—ah—$50 Galactic a week, plus expenses and\n transportation.\"\n\n\n The spherical creature clapped his hands in joy, three hands clapping\n on one side, two on the other. \"Wonderful! I will see Earth at last! I\n accept the terms!\"", "The flora of applicants was steady. Ghryne is in the heart of the\n Caledonia Cluster, where the interstellar crossroads meet. We had\n figured to pick up plenty of new exhibits here and we were right.\nIt was the isolationism of the late 29th century that turned me into\n the successful proprietor of Corrigan's Institute, after some years\n as an impoverished carnival man in the Betelgeuse system. Back in\n 2903, the World Congress declared Terra off-bounds for non-terrestrial\n beings, as an offshoot of the Terra for Terrans movement.\n\n\n Before then, anyone could visit Earth. After the gate clanged down,\n a non-terrestrial could only get onto Sol III as a specimen in a\n scientific collection—in short, as an exhibit in a zoo.", "You'd think it would be sort of humiliating to become a specimen in a\n zoo, but most of these races take it as an honor. And there's always\n the chance that, by picking a given member of a race, we're insulting\n all the others.\n\n\n I nudged the trouble-button on the side of my desk and Auchinleck and\n Ludlow appeared simultaneously from the two doors at right and left.\n They surrounded the towering Kallerian and sweet-talkingly led him\n away. He wasn't minded to quarrel physically, or he could have knocked\n them both into the next city with a backhand swipe of his shaggy paw,\n but he kept up a growling flow of invective and threats until he was\n out in the hall.\n\n\n I mopped sweat from my forehead and began to buzz Stebbins for the next\n applicant. But before my finger touched the button, the door popped\n open and a small being came scooting in, followed by an angry Stebbins.", "I had just about begun to forget about the incidents of the Kallerian's\n outraged pride and the Stortulian's flighty wife when the door opened\n and the Earthman who called himself Ildwar Gorb of Wazzenazz XIII\n stepped in.\n\n\n \"How did\nyou\nget in here?\" I demanded.\n\n\n \"Your man happened to be looking the wrong way,\" he said cheerily.\n \"Change your mind about me yet?\"\n\n\n \"Get out before I have you thrown out.\"\n\n\n Gorb shrugged. \"I figured you hadn't changed your mind, so I've changed\n my pitch a bit. If you won't believe I'm from Wazzenazz XIII, suppose I\n tell you that I\nam\nEarthborn, and that I'm looking for a job on your\n staff.\"\n\n\n \"I don't care\nwhat\nyour story is! Get out or—\"" ], [ "I pulled away from his yawning mouth. \"Good-by, Mr. Gorb,\" I repeated.\n\n\n \"All I ask is a contract, Corrigan. It isn't much. I'll be a big\n attraction. I'll—\"\n\n\n \"\nGood-by, Mr. Gorb!\n\"\n\n\n He glowered at me reproachfully for a moment, stood up and sauntered to\n the door. \"I thought you were a man of acumen, Corrigan. Well, think\n it over. Maybe you'll regret your hastiness. I'll be back to give you\n another chance.\"\n\n\n He slammed the door and I let my grim expression relax into a smile.\n This was the best con switch yet—an Earthman posing as an alien to get\n a job!", "I took a deep breath and glanced all around the paneled ceiling of\n the office before I spoke. \"Listen, Gorb, or whatever your name is,\n I've had a hard day. There's been a Kallerian in here who just about\n threatened murder, and there's been a Stortulian in here who's about\n to commit suicide because of me. I have a conscience and it's troubling\n me. But get this: I just want to finish off my recruiting, pack up and\n go home to Earth. I don't want you hanging around here bothering me.\n I'm not looking to hire new staff members, and if you switch back to\n claiming you're an unknown life-form from Wazzenazz XIII, the answer is\n that I'm not looking for any of\nthose\neither. Now will you scram or—\"", "I had just about begun to forget about the incidents of the Kallerian's\n outraged pride and the Stortulian's flighty wife when the door opened\n and the Earthman who called himself Ildwar Gorb of Wazzenazz XIII\n stepped in.\n\n\n \"How did\nyou\nget in here?\" I demanded.\n\n\n \"Your man happened to be looking the wrong way,\" he said cheerily.\n \"Change your mind about me yet?\"\n\n\n \"Get out before I have you thrown out.\"\n\n\n Gorb shrugged. \"I figured you hadn't changed your mind, so I've changed\n my pitch a bit. If you won't believe I'm from Wazzenazz XIII, suppose I\n tell you that I\nam\nEarthborn, and that I'm looking for a job on your\n staff.\"\n\n\n \"I don't care\nwhat\nyour story is! Get out or—\"", "Then somebody sprinted toward me, hit me amidships, and knocked me\n flying out from behind my desk before I had a chance to fire the\n meshgun. My head walloped the floor, and for five or six seconds, I\n guess I wasn't fully aware of what was going on.\n\n\n Gradually the scene took shape around me. There was a monstrous hole\n in the wall behind my desk; a smoking blaster lay on the floor, and I\n saw the three Ghrynian policemen sitting on the raving Stortulian. The\n man who called himself Ildwar Gorb was getting to his feet and dusting\n himself off.\n\n\n He helped me up. \"Sorry to have had to tackle you, Corrigan. But that\n Stortulian wasn't here to commit suicide, you see. He was out to get\n you.\"", "I weaved dizzily toward my desk and dropped into my chair. A flying\n fragment of wall had deflated my pneumatic cushion. The smell of ashed\n plaster was everywhere. The police were effectively cocooning the\n struggling little alien in an unbreakable tanglemesh.\n\n\n \"Evidently you don't know as much as you think you do about Stortulian\n psychology, Corrigan,\" Gorb said lightly. \"Suicide is completely\n abhorrent to them. When they're troubled, they kill the person who\n caused their trouble. In this case, you.\"\nI began to chuckle—more of a tension-relieving snicker than a\n full-bodied laugh.\n\n\n \"Funny,\" I said.\n\n\n \"What is?\" asked the self-styled Wazzenazzian.", "He sat down facing me without being asked and crossed his legs. He was\n tall and extremely thin, with pale blue eyes and dirty-blond hair, and\n though he was clean and reasonably well dressed, he had a shabby look\n about him. He said, in level Terran accents, \"I'm looking for a job\n with your outfit, Corrigan.\"\n\n\n \"There's been a mistake. We're interested in non-terrestrials only.\"\n\n\n \"I'm a non-terrestrial. My name is Ildwar Gorb, of the planet Wazzenazz\n XIII.\"\nI don't mind conning the public from time to time, but I draw the line\n at getting bilked myself. \"Look, friend, I'm busy, and I'm not known\n for my sense of humor. Or my generosity.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not panhandling. I'm looking for a job.\"", "\"I'm not speaking. I'm a telepath—not the kind that reads minds, just\n the kind that projects. I communicate in symbols that you translate\n back to colloquial speech.\"\n\n\n \"Very clever, Mr. Gorb.\" I grinned at him and shook my head. \"You spin\n a good yarn—but for my money, you're really Sam Jones or Phil Smith\n from Earth, stranded here and out of cash. You want a free trip back to\n Earth. No deal. The demand for beings from Wazzenazz XIII is pretty low\n these days. Zero, in fact. Good-by, Mr. Gorb.\"\n\n\n He pointed a finger squarely at me and said, \"You're making a big\n mistake. I'm just what your outfit needs. A representative of a\n hitherto utterly unknown race identical to humanity in every respect!\n Look here, examine my teeth. Absolutely like human teeth! And—\"", "The office buzzer sounded. Auchinleck said unctuously, \"The first\n applicant is ready to see you, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Send him, her or it in.\"\n\n\n The door opened and a timid-looking life-form advanced toward me on\n nervous little legs. He was a globular creature about the size of a\n big basketball, yellowish-green, with two spindly double-kneed legs and\n five double-elbowed arms, the latter spaced regularly around his body.\n There was a lidless eye at the top of his head and five lidded ones,\n one above each arm. Plus a big, gaping, toothless mouth.\nHis voice was a surprisingly resounding basso. \"You are Mr. Corrigan?\"\n\n\n \"That's right.\" I reached for a data blank. \"Before we begin, I'll need\n certain information about—\"", "The small figure of the Stortulian trudged through the open doorway\n and stationed itself limply near the threshold. The three Ghrynian\n policemen and my three assistants forgot the dead Kallerian for a\n moment and turned to eye the newcomer.\n\n\n I had visions of unending troubles with the law here on Ghryne. I\n resolved never to come here on a recruiting trip again—or, if I\ndid\ncome, to figure out some more effective way of screening myself against\n crackpots.\n\n\n In heart-rending tones, the Stortulian declared, \"Life is no longer\n worth living. My last hope is gone. There is only one thing left for me\n to do.\"\n\n\n I was quivering at the thought of another hundred thousand smackers\n going down the drain. \"Stop him, somebody! He's going to kill himself!\n He's—\"", "I went on, \"Please be assured that I'll undo the insult at the earliest\n possible opportunity. It's not feasible for us to hire another\n Kallerian now, but I'll give preference to the Clan Gursdrinn as soon\n as a vacancy—\"\n\n\n \"No. You will hire me now.\"\n\n\n \"It can't be done, Freeman Heraal. We have a budget, and we stick to\n it.\"\n\n\n \"You will rue! I will take drastic measures!\"\n\n\n \"Threats will get you nowhere, Freeman Heraal. I give you my word I'll\n get in touch with you as soon as our organization has room for another\n Kallerian. And now, please, there are many applicants waiting—\"", "\"These aliens. Big blustery Heraal came in with murder in his eye and\n killed\nhimself\n, and the pint-sized Stortulian who looked so meek and\n pathetic damn near blew my head off.\" I shuddered. \"Thanks for the\n tackle job.\"\n\n\n \"Don't mention it,\" Gorb said.\n\n\n I glared at the Ghrynian police. \"Well? What are you waiting for? Take\n that murderous little beast out of here! Or isn't murder against the\n local laws?\"\n\n\n \"The Stortulian will be duly punished,\" replied the leader of the\n Ghrynian cops calmly. \"But there is the matter of the dead Kallerian\n and the fine of—\"", "\"Come here, you!\"\n\n\n \"Stebbins?\" I said gently.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Mr. Corrigan. I lost sight of this one for a moment, and he\n came running in—\"\n\n\n \"Please, please,\" squeaked the little alien pitifully. \"I must see you,\n honored sir!\"\n\n\n \"It isn't his turn in line,\" Stebbins protested. \"There are at least\n fifty ahead of him.\"\n\"All right,\" I said tiredly. \"As long as he's in here already, I might\n as well see him. Be more careful next time, Stebbins.\"", "Gorb grinned rakishly. \"Five thousand in cash plus a contract as a\n specimen with your outfit. In advance, of course. That's a heck of a\n lot better than forking over a hundred grand, isn't it?\"\n\n\n I eyed Gorb uncertainly. The Terran Consulate people probably wouldn't\n be much help; they tried to keep out of local squabbles unless they\n were really serious, and I knew from past experiences that no officials\n ever worried much about the state of my pocketbook. On the other hand,\n giving this slyster a contract might be a risky proposition.\n\n\n \"Tell you what,\" I said finally. \"You've got yourself a deal—but on\n a contingency basis. Get me out of this and you'll have five grand and\n the contract. Otherwise, nothing.\"\n\n\n Gorb shrugged. \"What have I to lose?\"", "Stebbins nodded dolefully and backed out.\nThe alien was a pathetic sight: a Stortulian, a squirrely-looking\n creature about three feet high. His fur, which should have been a\n lustrous black, was a dull gray, and his eyes were wet and sad. His\n tail drooped. His voice was little more than a faint whimper, even at\n full volume.\n\n\n \"Begging your most honored pardon most humbly, important sir. I am a\n being of Stortul XII, having sold my last few possessions to travel\n to Ghryne for the miserable purpose of obtaining an interview with\n yourself.\"\n\n\n I said, \"I'd better tell you right at the outset that we're already\n carrying our full complement of Stortulians. We have both a male and a\n female now and—\"\n\n\n \"This is known to me. The female—is her name perchance Tiress?\"", "Through the front window of the office, I could see our big gay tridim\n sign plastered to a facing wall: WANTED—EXTRATERRESTRIALS! We had\n saturated MacTavish IV with our promotional poop for a month preceding\n arrival. Stuff like this:\nWant to visit Earth—see the Galaxy's most glittering and exclusive\n world? Want to draw good pay, work short hours, experience the thrills\n of show business on romantic Terra? If you are a non-terrestrial,\n there may be a place for you in the Corrigan Institute of\n Morphological Science. No freaks wanted—normal beings only. J. F.\n Corrigan will hold interviews in person on Ghryne from Thirdday to", "The beady little eyes flashed like beacons in the fur. \"Yes, you have\n four representatives—of the Clan Verdrokh! None of the Clan Gursdrinn!\n For three years, I have waited for a chance to avenge this insult to\n the noble Clan Gursdrinn!\"\n\n\n At the key-word\navenge\n, I readied myself to ensnarl the Kallerian\n in a spume of tanglemesh the instant he went for his blaster, but he\n didn't move. He bellowed, \"I have vowed a vow, Earthman. Take me to\n Earth, enroll a Gursdrinn, or the consequences will be terrible!\"\nI'm a man of principles, like all straightforward double-dealers, and\n one of the most important of those principles is that I never let\n myself be bullied by anyone. \"I deeply regret having unintentionally\n insulted your clan, Freeman Heraal. Will you accept my apologies?\"\n\n\n He glared at me in silence.", "The office door crashed open at that point and Heraal, the Kallerian,\n came thundering in. He was dressed from head to toe in glittering\n metalfoil, and instead of his ceremonial blaster, he was wielding\n a sword the length of a human being. Stebbins and Auchinleck came\n dragging helplessly along in his wake, hanging desperately to his belt.\n\n\n \"Sorry, Chief,\" Stebbins gasped. \"I tried to keep him out, but—\"\n\n\n Heraal, who had planted himself in front of my desk, drowned him out\n with a roar. \"Earthman, you have mortally insulted the Clan Gursdrinn!\"\nSitting with my hands poised near the meshgun trigger, I was ready to\n let him have it at the first sight of actual violence.", "The next applicant was a beefy ursinoid from Aldebaran IX. Our outfit\n has all the ursinoids it needs or is likely to need in the next few\n decades, and so I got rid of him in a couple of minutes. He was\n followed by a roly-poly blue-skinned humanoid from Donovan's Planet,\n four feet high and five hundred pounds heavy. We already had a couple\n of his species in the show, but they made good crowd-pleasers, being\n so plump and cheerful. I passed him along to Auchinleck to sign at\n anything short of top rate.\n\n\n Next came a bedraggled Sirian spider who was more interested in a\n handout than a job. If there's any species we have a real over-supply\n of, it's those silver-colored spiders, but this seedy specimen gave it\n a try anyway. He got the gate in half a minute, and he didn't even get\n the handout he was angling for. I don't approve of begging.", "\"You are J. F. Corrigan?\" the leader asked.\n\n\n \"Y-yes.\"\n\n\n \"We have received word of a complaint against you. Said complaint\n being—\"\n\n\n \"—that your unethical actions have directly contributed to the\n untimely death of an intelligent life-form,\" filled in the second of\n the Ghrynian policemen.\n\n\n \"The evidence lies before us,\" intoned the leader, \"in the cadaver\n of the unfortunate Kallerian who filed the complaint with us several\n minutes ago.\"\n\n\n \"And therefore,\" said the third lizard, \"it is our duty to arrest\n you for this crime and declare you subject to a fine of no less than\n $100,000 Galactic or two years in prison.\"\n\n\n \"Hold on!\" I stormed. \"You mean that any being from anywhere in the\n Universe can come in here and gut himself on my carpet, and\nI'm\nresponsible?\"", "You'd think it would be sort of humiliating to become a specimen in a\n zoo, but most of these races take it as an honor. And there's always\n the chance that, by picking a given member of a race, we're insulting\n all the others.\n\n\n I nudged the trouble-button on the side of my desk and Auchinleck and\n Ludlow appeared simultaneously from the two doors at right and left.\n They surrounded the towering Kallerian and sweet-talkingly led him\n away. He wasn't minded to quarrel physically, or he could have knocked\n them both into the next city with a backhand swipe of his shaggy paw,\n but he kept up a growling flow of invective and threats until he was\n out in the hall.\n\n\n I mopped sweat from my forehead and began to buzz Stebbins for the next\n applicant. But before my finger touched the button, the door popped\n open and a small being came scooting in, followed by an angry Stebbins." ], [ "The Stortulian seemed to shrivel. His eyelids closed half-way to mask\n his tears. He turned and shambled slowly to the door, walking like a\n living dishrag. In a bleak voice, he said, \"There is no hope then. All\n is lost. I will never see my soulmate again. Good day, Earthman.\"\n\n\n He spoke in a drab monotone that almost, but not quite, had me weeping.\n I watched him shuffle out. I do have\nsome\nconscience, and I had the\n uneasy feeling I had just been talking to a being who was about to\n commit suicide on my account.\nAbout fifty more applicants were processed without a hitch. Then life\n started to get complicated again.\n\n\n Nine of the fifty were okay. The rest were unacceptable for one reason\n or another, and they took the bad news quietly enough. The haul for the\n day so far was close to two dozen new life-forms under contract.", "\"But—\"\n\n\n \"I must see her—her and this disgrace-bringing lover of hers. I must\n reason with her. Earthman, can't you see I must appeal to her inner\n flame?\nI must bring her back!\n\"\n\n\n My face was expressionless. \"You don't really intend to join our\n organization at all—you just want free passage to Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes!\" wailed the Stortulian. \"Find some other member of my race,\n if you must! Let me have my wife again, Earthman! Is your heart a dead\n lump of stone?\"\nIt isn't, but another of my principles is to refuse to be swayed by\n sentiment. I felt sorry for this being's domestic troubles, but I\n wasn't going to break up a good act just to make an alien squirrel\n happy—not to mention footing the transportation.", "I glanced down at the inventory chart until I found the Stortulian\n entry. \"Yes, that's her name.\"\n\n\n The little being immediately emitted a soul-shaking gasp. \"It is she!\n It is she!\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid we don't have room for any more—\"\n\n\n \"You are not in full understanding of my plight. The female Tiress,\n she is—was—my own Fire-sent spouse, my comfort and my warmth, my life\n and my love.\"\n\n\n \"Funny,\" I said. \"When we signed her three years ago, she said she was\n single. It's right here on the chart.\"\n\n\n \"She lied! She left my burrow because she longed to see the splendors\n of Earth. And I am alone, bound by our sacred customs never to remarry,\n languishing in sadness and pining for her return. You\nmust\ntake me to\n Earth!\"", "The small figure of the Stortulian trudged through the open doorway\n and stationed itself limply near the threshold. The three Ghrynian\n policemen and my three assistants forgot the dead Kallerian for a\n moment and turned to eye the newcomer.\n\n\n I had visions of unending troubles with the law here on Ghryne. I\n resolved never to come here on a recruiting trip again—or, if I\ndid\ncome, to figure out some more effective way of screening myself against\n crackpots.\n\n\n In heart-rending tones, the Stortulian declared, \"Life is no longer\n worth living. My last hope is gone. There is only one thing left for me\n to do.\"\n\n\n I was quivering at the thought of another hundred thousand smackers\n going down the drain. \"Stop him, somebody! He's going to kill himself!\n He's—\"", "\"My heart melts to nothingness for you. But I can't take you to Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Perhaps you will send my wife to me here?\"\n\n\n There's a clause in every contract that allows me to jettison an\n unwanted specimen. All I have to do is declare it no longer of\n scientific interest, and the World Government will deport the\n undesirable alien back to its home world. But I wouldn't pull a low\n trick like that on our female Stortulian.\n\n\n I said, \"I'll ask her about coming home. But I won't ship her back\n against her will. And maybe she's happier where she is.\"", "Stebbins nodded dolefully and backed out.\nThe alien was a pathetic sight: a Stortulian, a squirrely-looking\n creature about three feet high. His fur, which should have been a\n lustrous black, was a dull gray, and his eyes were wet and sad. His\n tail drooped. His voice was little more than a faint whimper, even at\n full volume.\n\n\n \"Begging your most honored pardon most humbly, important sir. I am a\n being of Stortul XII, having sold my last few possessions to travel\n to Ghryne for the miserable purpose of obtaining an interview with\n yourself.\"\n\n\n I said, \"I'd better tell you right at the outset that we're already\n carrying our full complement of Stortulians. We have both a male and a\n female now and—\"\n\n\n \"This is known to me. The female—is her name perchance Tiress?\"", "I had just about begun to forget about the incidents of the Kallerian's\n outraged pride and the Stortulian's flighty wife when the door opened\n and the Earthman who called himself Ildwar Gorb of Wazzenazz XIII\n stepped in.\n\n\n \"How did\nyou\nget in here?\" I demanded.\n\n\n \"Your man happened to be looking the wrong way,\" he said cheerily.\n \"Change your mind about me yet?\"\n\n\n \"Get out before I have you thrown out.\"\n\n\n Gorb shrugged. \"I figured you hadn't changed your mind, so I've changed\n my pitch a bit. If you won't believe I'm from Wazzenazz XIII, suppose I\n tell you that I\nam\nEarthborn, and that I'm looking for a job on your\n staff.\"\n\n\n \"I don't care\nwhat\nyour story is! Get out or—\"", "Then somebody sprinted toward me, hit me amidships, and knocked me\n flying out from behind my desk before I had a chance to fire the\n meshgun. My head walloped the floor, and for five or six seconds, I\n guess I wasn't fully aware of what was going on.\n\n\n Gradually the scene took shape around me. There was a monstrous hole\n in the wall behind my desk; a smoking blaster lay on the floor, and I\n saw the three Ghrynian policemen sitting on the raving Stortulian. The\n man who called himself Ildwar Gorb was getting to his feet and dusting\n himself off.\n\n\n He helped me up. \"Sorry to have had to tackle you, Corrigan. But that\n Stortulian wasn't here to commit suicide, you see. He was out to get\n you.\"", "I weaved dizzily toward my desk and dropped into my chair. A flying\n fragment of wall had deflated my pneumatic cushion. The smell of ashed\n plaster was everywhere. The police were effectively cocooning the\n struggling little alien in an unbreakable tanglemesh.\n\n\n \"Evidently you don't know as much as you think you do about Stortulian\n psychology, Corrigan,\" Gorb said lightly. \"Suicide is completely\n abhorrent to them. When they're troubled, they kill the person who\n caused their trouble. In this case, you.\"\nI began to chuckle—more of a tension-relieving snicker than a\n full-bodied laugh.\n\n\n \"Funny,\" I said.\n\n\n \"What is?\" asked the self-styled Wazzenazzian.", "I took a deep breath and glanced all around the paneled ceiling of\n the office before I spoke. \"Listen, Gorb, or whatever your name is,\n I've had a hard day. There's been a Kallerian in here who just about\n threatened murder, and there's been a Stortulian in here who's about\n to commit suicide because of me. I have a conscience and it's troubling\n me. But get this: I just want to finish off my recruiting, pack up and\n go home to Earth. I don't want you hanging around here bothering me.\n I'm not looking to hire new staff members, and if you switch back to\n claiming you're an unknown life-form from Wazzenazz XIII, the answer is\n that I'm not looking for any of\nthose\neither. Now will you scram or—\"", "I said, \"I don't see how we can manage it. The laws are very strict\n on the subject of bringing alien life to Earth. It has to be for\n scientific purposes only. And if I know in advance that your purpose in\n coming isn't scientific, I can't in all conscience\nlie\nfor you, can\n I?\"\n\n\n \"Well—\"\n\n\n \"Of course not.\" I took advantage of his pathetic upset to steam right\n along. \"Now if you had come in here and simply asked me to sign you up,\n I might conceivably have done it. But no—you had to go unburden your\n heart to me.\"\n\n\n \"I thought the truth would move you.\"\n\n\n \"It did. But in effect you're now asking me to conspire in a fraudulent\n criminal act. Friend, I can't do it. My reputation means too much to\n me,\" I said piously.\n\n\n \"Then you will refuse me?\"", "\"These aliens. Big blustery Heraal came in with murder in his eye and\n killed\nhimself\n, and the pint-sized Stortulian who looked so meek and\n pathetic damn near blew my head off.\" I shuddered. \"Thanks for the\n tackle job.\"\n\n\n \"Don't mention it,\" Gorb said.\n\n\n I glared at the Ghrynian police. \"Well? What are you waiting for? Take\n that murderous little beast out of here! Or isn't murder against the\n local laws?\"\n\n\n \"The Stortulian will be duly punished,\" replied the leader of the\n Ghrynian cops calmly. \"But there is the matter of the dead Kallerian\n and the fine of—\"", "\"This is the law. Do you deny that your stubborn refusal to yield to\n this late life-form's request lies at the root of his sad demise?\"\n\n\n \"Well, no, but—\"\n\n\n \"Failure to deny is admission of guilt. You are guilty, Earthman.\"\nClosing my eyes wearily, I tried to wish the whole babbling lot of them\n away. If I had to, I could pony up the hundred-grand fine, but it was\n going to put an awful dent in this year's take. And I shuddered when I\n remembered that any minute that scrawny little Stortulian was likely to\n come bursting in here to kill himself too. Was it a fine of $100,000\n per suicide? At that rate, I could be out of business by nightfall.\n\n\n I was spared further such morbid thoughts by yet another unannounced\n arrival.", "The being closed his eyes and toddled around in a 360-degree rotation,\n remaining in place. On his world, that gesture is the equivalent of\n an apologetic smile. \"My Regulan name no longer matters. I am now and\n shall evermore be Lawrence R. Fitzgerald. I am a Terraphile, you see.\"\nThe little Regulan was as good as hired. Only the formalities remained.\n \"You understand our terms, Mr. Fitzgerald?\"\n\n\n \"I'll be placed on exhibition at your Institute on Earth. You'll pay\n for my services, transportation and expenses. I'll be required to\n remain on exhibit no more than one-third of each Terran sidereal day.\"\n\n\n \"And the pay will be—ah—$50 Galactic a week, plus expenses and\n transportation.\"\n\n\n The spherical creature clapped his hands in joy, three hands clapping\n on one side, two on the other. \"Wonderful! I will see Earth at last! I\n accept the terms!\"", "The beady little eyes flashed like beacons in the fur. \"Yes, you have\n four representatives—of the Clan Verdrokh! None of the Clan Gursdrinn!\n For three years, I have waited for a chance to avenge this insult to\n the noble Clan Gursdrinn!\"\n\n\n At the key-word\navenge\n, I readied myself to ensnarl the Kallerian\n in a spume of tanglemesh the instant he went for his blaster, but he\n didn't move. He bellowed, \"I have vowed a vow, Earthman. Take me to\n Earth, enroll a Gursdrinn, or the consequences will be terrible!\"\nI'm a man of principles, like all straightforward double-dealers, and\n one of the most important of those principles is that I never let\n myself be bullied by anyone. \"I deeply regret having unintentionally\n insulted your clan, Freeman Heraal. Will you accept my apologies?\"\n\n\n He glared at me in silence.", "\"Come here, you!\"\n\n\n \"Stebbins?\" I said gently.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Mr. Corrigan. I lost sight of this one for a moment, and he\n came running in—\"\n\n\n \"Please, please,\" squeaked the little alien pitifully. \"I must see you,\n honored sir!\"\n\n\n \"It isn't his turn in line,\" Stebbins protested. \"There are at least\n fifty ahead of him.\"\n\"All right,\" I said tiredly. \"As long as he's in here already, I might\n as well see him. Be more careful next time, Stebbins.\"", "Through the front window of the office, I could see our big gay tridim\n sign plastered to a facing wall: WANTED—EXTRATERRESTRIALS! We had\n saturated MacTavish IV with our promotional poop for a month preceding\n arrival. Stuff like this:\nWant to visit Earth—see the Galaxy's most glittering and exclusive\n world? Want to draw good pay, work short hours, experience the thrills\n of show business on romantic Terra? If you are a non-terrestrial,\n there may be a place for you in the Corrigan Institute of\n Morphological Science. No freaks wanted—normal beings only. J. F.\n Corrigan will hold interviews in person on Ghryne from Thirdday to", "\"Then try elsewhere. Suppose you stop wasting my time, bud. You're as\n Earthborn as I am.\"\n\n\n \"I've never been within a dozen parsecs of Earth,\" he said smoothly. \"I\n happen to be a representative of the only Earthlike race that exists\n anywhere in the Galaxy but on Earth itself. Wazzenazz XIII is a small\n and little-known planet in the Crab Nebula. Through an evolutionary\n fluke, my race is identical with yours. Now, don't you want me in your\n circus?\"\n\n\n \"No. And it's not a circus. It's—\"\n\n\n \"A scientific institute. I stand corrected.\"\n\n\n There was something glib and appealing about this preposterous phony. I\n guess I recognized a kindred spirit or I would have tossed him out on\n his ear without another word. Instead I played along. \"If you're from\n such a distant place, how come you speak English so well?\"", "Fifthday of Tenmonth. His last visit to the Caledonia Cluster until\n 2937, so don't miss your chance! Hurry! A life of wonder and riches\n can be yours!\nBroadsides like that, distributed wholesale in half a thousand\n languages, always bring them running. And the Corrigan Institute really\n packs in the crowds back on Earth. Why not? It's the best of its kind,\n the only really decent place where Earthmen can get a gander at the\n other species of the universe.", "He sat down facing me without being asked and crossed his legs. He was\n tall and extremely thin, with pale blue eyes and dirty-blond hair, and\n though he was clean and reasonably well dressed, he had a shabby look\n about him. He said, in level Terran accents, \"I'm looking for a job\n with your outfit, Corrigan.\"\n\n\n \"There's been a mistake. We're interested in non-terrestrials only.\"\n\n\n \"I'm a non-terrestrial. My name is Ildwar Gorb, of the planet Wazzenazz\n XIII.\"\nI don't mind conning the public from time to time, but I draw the line\n at getting bilked myself. \"Look, friend, I'm busy, and I'm not known\n for my sense of humor. Or my generosity.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not panhandling. I'm looking for a job.\"" ], [ "Then somebody sprinted toward me, hit me amidships, and knocked me\n flying out from behind my desk before I had a chance to fire the\n meshgun. My head walloped the floor, and for five or six seconds, I\n guess I wasn't fully aware of what was going on.\n\n\n Gradually the scene took shape around me. There was a monstrous hole\n in the wall behind my desk; a smoking blaster lay on the floor, and I\n saw the three Ghrynian policemen sitting on the raving Stortulian. The\n man who called himself Ildwar Gorb was getting to his feet and dusting\n himself off.\n\n\n He helped me up. \"Sorry to have had to tackle you, Corrigan. But that\n Stortulian wasn't here to commit suicide, you see. He was out to get\n you.\"", "I weaved dizzily toward my desk and dropped into my chair. A flying\n fragment of wall had deflated my pneumatic cushion. The smell of ashed\n plaster was everywhere. The police were effectively cocooning the\n struggling little alien in an unbreakable tanglemesh.\n\n\n \"Evidently you don't know as much as you think you do about Stortulian\n psychology, Corrigan,\" Gorb said lightly. \"Suicide is completely\n abhorrent to them. When they're troubled, they kill the person who\n caused their trouble. In this case, you.\"\nI began to chuckle—more of a tension-relieving snicker than a\n full-bodied laugh.\n\n\n \"Funny,\" I said.\n\n\n \"What is?\" asked the self-styled Wazzenazzian.", "The Stortulian seemed to shrivel. His eyelids closed half-way to mask\n his tears. He turned and shambled slowly to the door, walking like a\n living dishrag. In a bleak voice, he said, \"There is no hope then. All\n is lost. I will never see my soulmate again. Good day, Earthman.\"\n\n\n He spoke in a drab monotone that almost, but not quite, had me weeping.\n I watched him shuffle out. I do have\nsome\nconscience, and I had the\n uneasy feeling I had just been talking to a being who was about to\n commit suicide on my account.\nAbout fifty more applicants were processed without a hitch. Then life\n started to get complicated again.\n\n\n Nine of the fifty were okay. The rest were unacceptable for one reason\n or another, and they took the bad news quietly enough. The haul for the\n day so far was close to two dozen new life-forms under contract.", "The small figure of the Stortulian trudged through the open doorway\n and stationed itself limply near the threshold. The three Ghrynian\n policemen and my three assistants forgot the dead Kallerian for a\n moment and turned to eye the newcomer.\n\n\n I had visions of unending troubles with the law here on Ghryne. I\n resolved never to come here on a recruiting trip again—or, if I\ndid\ncome, to figure out some more effective way of screening myself against\n crackpots.\n\n\n In heart-rending tones, the Stortulian declared, \"Life is no longer\n worth living. My last hope is gone. There is only one thing left for me\n to do.\"\n\n\n I was quivering at the thought of another hundred thousand smackers\n going down the drain. \"Stop him, somebody! He's going to kill himself!\n He's—\"", "I had just about begun to forget about the incidents of the Kallerian's\n outraged pride and the Stortulian's flighty wife when the door opened\n and the Earthman who called himself Ildwar Gorb of Wazzenazz XIII\n stepped in.\n\n\n \"How did\nyou\nget in here?\" I demanded.\n\n\n \"Your man happened to be looking the wrong way,\" he said cheerily.\n \"Change your mind about me yet?\"\n\n\n \"Get out before I have you thrown out.\"\n\n\n Gorb shrugged. \"I figured you hadn't changed your mind, so I've changed\n my pitch a bit. If you won't believe I'm from Wazzenazz XIII, suppose I\n tell you that I\nam\nEarthborn, and that I'm looking for a job on your\n staff.\"\n\n\n \"I don't care\nwhat\nyour story is! Get out or—\"", "I took a deep breath and glanced all around the paneled ceiling of\n the office before I spoke. \"Listen, Gorb, or whatever your name is,\n I've had a hard day. There's been a Kallerian in here who just about\n threatened murder, and there's been a Stortulian in here who's about\n to commit suicide because of me. I have a conscience and it's troubling\n me. But get this: I just want to finish off my recruiting, pack up and\n go home to Earth. I don't want you hanging around here bothering me.\n I'm not looking to hire new staff members, and if you switch back to\n claiming you're an unknown life-form from Wazzenazz XIII, the answer is\n that I'm not looking for any of\nthose\neither. Now will you scram or—\"", "The office buzzer sounded. Auchinleck said unctuously, \"The first\n applicant is ready to see you, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Send him, her or it in.\"\n\n\n The door opened and a timid-looking life-form advanced toward me on\n nervous little legs. He was a globular creature about the size of a\n big basketball, yellowish-green, with two spindly double-kneed legs and\n five double-elbowed arms, the latter spaced regularly around his body.\n There was a lidless eye at the top of his head and five lidded ones,\n one above each arm. Plus a big, gaping, toothless mouth.\nHis voice was a surprisingly resounding basso. \"You are Mr. Corrigan?\"\n\n\n \"That's right.\" I reached for a data blank. \"Before we begin, I'll need\n certain information about—\"", "Stebbins nodded dolefully and backed out.\nThe alien was a pathetic sight: a Stortulian, a squirrely-looking\n creature about three feet high. His fur, which should have been a\n lustrous black, was a dull gray, and his eyes were wet and sad. His\n tail drooped. His voice was little more than a faint whimper, even at\n full volume.\n\n\n \"Begging your most honored pardon most humbly, important sir. I am a\n being of Stortul XII, having sold my last few possessions to travel\n to Ghryne for the miserable purpose of obtaining an interview with\n yourself.\"\n\n\n I said, \"I'd better tell you right at the outset that we're already\n carrying our full complement of Stortulians. We have both a male and a\n female now and—\"\n\n\n \"This is known to me. The female—is her name perchance Tiress?\"", "The office door crashed open at that point and Heraal, the Kallerian,\n came thundering in. He was dressed from head to toe in glittering\n metalfoil, and instead of his ceremonial blaster, he was wielding\n a sword the length of a human being. Stebbins and Auchinleck came\n dragging helplessly along in his wake, hanging desperately to his belt.\n\n\n \"Sorry, Chief,\" Stebbins gasped. \"I tried to keep him out, but—\"\n\n\n Heraal, who had planted himself in front of my desk, drowned him out\n with a roar. \"Earthman, you have mortally insulted the Clan Gursdrinn!\"\nSitting with my hands poised near the meshgun trigger, I was ready to\n let him have it at the first sight of actual violence.", "\"Come here, you!\"\n\n\n \"Stebbins?\" I said gently.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Mr. Corrigan. I lost sight of this one for a moment, and he\n came running in—\"\n\n\n \"Please, please,\" squeaked the little alien pitifully. \"I must see you,\n honored sir!\"\n\n\n \"It isn't his turn in line,\" Stebbins protested. \"There are at least\n fifty ahead of him.\"\n\"All right,\" I said tiredly. \"As long as he's in here already, I might\n as well see him. Be more careful next time, Stebbins.\"", "\"These aliens. Big blustery Heraal came in with murder in his eye and\n killed\nhimself\n, and the pint-sized Stortulian who looked so meek and\n pathetic damn near blew my head off.\" I shuddered. \"Thanks for the\n tackle job.\"\n\n\n \"Don't mention it,\" Gorb said.\n\n\n I glared at the Ghrynian police. \"Well? What are you waiting for? Take\n that murderous little beast out of here! Or isn't murder against the\n local laws?\"\n\n\n \"The Stortulian will be duly punished,\" replied the leader of the\n Ghrynian cops calmly. \"But there is the matter of the dead Kallerian\n and the fine of—\"", "Through the front window of the office, I could see our big gay tridim\n sign plastered to a facing wall: WANTED—EXTRATERRESTRIALS! We had\n saturated MacTavish IV with our promotional poop for a month preceding\n arrival. Stuff like this:\nWant to visit Earth—see the Galaxy's most glittering and exclusive\n world? Want to draw good pay, work short hours, experience the thrills\n of show business on romantic Terra? If you are a non-terrestrial,\n there may be a place for you in the Corrigan Institute of\n Morphological Science. No freaks wanted—normal beings only. J. F.\n Corrigan will hold interviews in person on Ghryne from Thirdday to", "\"This is the law. Do you deny that your stubborn refusal to yield to\n this late life-form's request lies at the root of his sad demise?\"\n\n\n \"Well, no, but—\"\n\n\n \"Failure to deny is admission of guilt. You are guilty, Earthman.\"\nClosing my eyes wearily, I tried to wish the whole babbling lot of them\n away. If I had to, I could pony up the hundred-grand fine, but it was\n going to put an awful dent in this year's take. And I shuddered when I\n remembered that any minute that scrawny little Stortulian was likely to\n come bursting in here to kill himself too. Was it a fine of $100,000\n per suicide? At that rate, I could be out of business by nightfall.\n\n\n I was spared further such morbid thoughts by yet another unannounced\n arrival.", "\"But—\"\n\n\n \"I must see her—her and this disgrace-bringing lover of hers. I must\n reason with her. Earthman, can't you see I must appeal to her inner\n flame?\nI must bring her back!\n\"\n\n\n My face was expressionless. \"You don't really intend to join our\n organization at all—you just want free passage to Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes!\" wailed the Stortulian. \"Find some other member of my race,\n if you must! Let me have my wife again, Earthman! Is your heart a dead\n lump of stone?\"\nIt isn't, but another of my principles is to refuse to be swayed by\n sentiment. I felt sorry for this being's domestic troubles, but I\n wasn't going to break up a good act just to make an alien squirrel\n happy—not to mention footing the transportation.", "I glanced down at the inventory chart until I found the Stortulian\n entry. \"Yes, that's her name.\"\n\n\n The little being immediately emitted a soul-shaking gasp. \"It is she!\n It is she!\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid we don't have room for any more—\"\n\n\n \"You are not in full understanding of my plight. The female Tiress,\n she is—was—my own Fire-sent spouse, my comfort and my warmth, my life\n and my love.\"\n\n\n \"Funny,\" I said. \"When we signed her three years ago, she said she was\n single. It's right here on the chart.\"\n\n\n \"She lied! She left my burrow because she longed to see the splendors\n of Earth. And I am alone, bound by our sacred customs never to remarry,\n languishing in sadness and pining for her return. You\nmust\ntake me to\n Earth!\"", "Heraal boomed, \"You are responsible for what is to happen now. I have\n notified the authorities and you prosecuted will be for causing the\n death of a life-form! Suffer, Earthborn ape! Suffer!\"\n\n\n \"Watch it, Chief,\" Stebbins yelled. \"He's going to—\"\n\n\n An instant before my numb fingers could tighten on the meshgun\n trigger, Heraal swung that huge sword through the air and plunged it\n savagely through his body. He toppled forward onto the carpet with the\n sword projecting a couple of feet out of his back. A few driblets of\n bluish-purple blood spread from beneath him.\n\n\n Before I could react to the big life-form's hara-kiri, the office door\n flew open again and three sleek reptilian beings entered, garbed in the\n green sashes of the local police force. Their golden eyes goggled down\n at the figure on the floor, then came to rest on me.", "I went on, \"Please be assured that I'll undo the insult at the earliest\n possible opportunity. It's not feasible for us to hire another\n Kallerian now, but I'll give preference to the Clan Gursdrinn as soon\n as a vacancy—\"\n\n\n \"No. You will hire me now.\"\n\n\n \"It can't be done, Freeman Heraal. We have a budget, and we stick to\n it.\"\n\n\n \"You will rue! I will take drastic measures!\"\n\n\n \"Threats will get you nowhere, Freeman Heraal. I give you my word I'll\n get in touch with you as soon as our organization has room for another\n Kallerian. And now, please, there are many applicants waiting—\"", "You'd think it would be sort of humiliating to become a specimen in a\n zoo, but most of these races take it as an honor. And there's always\n the chance that, by picking a given member of a race, we're insulting\n all the others.\n\n\n I nudged the trouble-button on the side of my desk and Auchinleck and\n Ludlow appeared simultaneously from the two doors at right and left.\n They surrounded the towering Kallerian and sweet-talkingly led him\n away. He wasn't minded to quarrel physically, or he could have knocked\n them both into the next city with a backhand swipe of his shaggy paw,\n but he kept up a growling flow of invective and threats until he was\n out in the hall.\n\n\n I mopped sweat from my forehead and began to buzz Stebbins for the next\n applicant. But before my finger touched the button, the door popped\n open and a small being came scooting in, followed by an angry Stebbins.", "I pulled away from his yawning mouth. \"Good-by, Mr. Gorb,\" I repeated.\n\n\n \"All I ask is a contract, Corrigan. It isn't much. I'll be a big\n attraction. I'll—\"\n\n\n \"\nGood-by, Mr. Gorb!\n\"\n\n\n He glowered at me reproachfully for a moment, stood up and sauntered to\n the door. \"I thought you were a man of acumen, Corrigan. Well, think\n it over. Maybe you'll regret your hastiness. I'll be back to give you\n another chance.\"\n\n\n He slammed the door and I let my grim expression relax into a smile.\n This was the best con switch yet—an Earthman posing as an alien to get\n a job!", "\"You are J. F. Corrigan?\" the leader asked.\n\n\n \"Y-yes.\"\n\n\n \"We have received word of a complaint against you. Said complaint\n being—\"\n\n\n \"—that your unethical actions have directly contributed to the\n untimely death of an intelligent life-form,\" filled in the second of\n the Ghrynian policemen.\n\n\n \"The evidence lies before us,\" intoned the leader, \"in the cadaver\n of the unfortunate Kallerian who filed the complaint with us several\n minutes ago.\"\n\n\n \"And therefore,\" said the third lizard, \"it is our duty to arrest\n you for this crime and declare you subject to a fine of no less than\n $100,000 Galactic or two years in prison.\"\n\n\n \"Hold on!\" I stormed. \"You mean that any being from anywhere in the\n Universe can come in here and gut himself on my carpet, and\nI'm\nresponsible?\"" ] ]
train	51330	[ "What wouldn't Mr. Graham likely wish for at the beginning of the story?", "Which doesn't describe how Molly feels towards her husband?", "Which word best describes Nat?", "Which word least describes McGill?", "Which didn't distract Mr. Graham from getting dinner the first time?", "What didn't happen with the telephone?", "Which good thing didn't come because of Mr. Graham's strange luck?", "Who seemed to get the least annoyed at the restaurant?" ]	[ [ "better weather", "kinder neighbors", "his wife to come home", "a better job" ], [ "wishes he was less clumsy", "loves him dearly", "worries about him when she's gone", "likes taking care of him" ], [ "dishonest", "respectable", "enthusiastic", "partier" ], [ "lucky", "intelligent", "reliable", "logical" ], [ "his wife coming home early", "his telephone was broken", "watching two men fight on the sidewalk", "another encounter with the police officer" ], [ "it worked whenever Mr. Graham tried to use it", "it repeatedly called Molly's mother", "someone needed to come to fix it", "Mr. Graham dropped it" ], [ "Nat got a lead on an exciting new story", "Mr. Graham found inspiration for his book", "his wife came home", "Mr. Graham's neighbor won his poker game" ], [ "the man who ordered cold cuts", "the lady in the evening gown", "the waiter", "the bartender" ] ]	[ 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 4, 2, 3 ]	[ 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "While I waited, I thought I might try getting down a few paragraphs of\n my novel—perhaps something would come now. It did, but as I came to a\n point where I was about to put down the word \"agurgling,\" I decided it\n was too reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan, and stopped at the letter\n \"R.\" Then I saw that I had unaccountably hit all four keys one step to\n the side of the correct ones, and tore out the page, with my face red.\n\n\n This was absolutely not my day.\n\"Well,\" McGill said, \"nothing you've told me is impossible or\n supernatural. Just very, very improbable. In fact, the odds against\n that poker game alone would lead me to suspect Nat, well as I know him.\n It's all those other things....\"\n\n\n He got up and walked over to the window and looked at the hot twilight\n while I waited. Then he turned around; he had a look of concern.", "\"If you want your umbrella, Mrs. Graham,\" Danny said, \"it's at the\n station house. What there's left of it, that is.\"\n\n\n Molly thanked him and there was a short pause, during which I felt\n the speculative regard of the lieutenant. I pulled out a packet of\n cigarettes, which I had opened, as always, by tearing off the top. I\n happened to have it upside down and all the cigarettes fell out. Before\n I could move my foot to obliterate what they had spelled out on the\n sidewalk, the two cops saw it. The lieutenant gave me a hard look, but\n said nothing. I quickly kicked the insulting cigarettes into the gutter.", "\"All right, smart guy!\" they shouted in unison, and barged ahead,\n only to collide. They backed off and threw simultaneous punches\n which met in mid-air. Then began one of the most remarkable bouts\n ever witnessed—a fight in which fist hit fist but never anything\n else, until both champions backed away undefeated, muttering identical\n excuses and threats.\nDanny appeared at that moment. His face was dripping. \"You all right,\n Mr. Graham?\" he asked. \"I don't know what's going on around here, but\n ever since I came on this afternoon, things are going crazy. Bartley!\"\n he shouted—he could succeed as a hog-caller. \"Bring those dames over\n here!\"\n\n\n Three women in a confused wrangle, with their half-open umbrellas\n intertwined, were brought across the street, which meant climbing over\n fenders. Bartley, a fine young patrolman, seemed self-conscious; the\n ladies seemed not to be.", "\"I was so worried, and when I saw all this, I didn't know what to\n think.\" She pointed to the stalled cars. \"Are you really all right?\"\n\n\n \"Of course I'm all right. But why....\"\n\n\n \"The Oyster Bay operator said someone kept dialing and dialing Mother's\n number and there wasn't anyone on the line, so then she had it traced\n and it came from our phone here. I kept calling up, but I only got a\n busy signal. Oh, dear, are you\nsure\nyou're all right?\"\n\n\n I put my arm around her and glanced at McGill. He had an inward look.\n Then I caught Danny's eye. It had a thoughtful, almost suspicious cast\n to it.\n\n\n \"Trouble does seem to follow you, Mr. Graham,\" was all he said.", "McGill grinned. \"Don't be superstitious. And especially don't be\n anthropomorphic.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if it's the opposite of random, it's got to be a form of life.\"\n\n\n \"On what basis? All we know for certain is that random motions are\n being rearranged. A crystal, for example, is not life, but it's a\n non-random arrangement of particles.... I wonder.\" He had a faraway,\n frowning look.\n\n\n I was beginning to feel hungry and the drinks had worn off.\n\n\n \"Let's go out and eat,\" I said, \"There's not a damn thing in the\n kitchen and I'm not allowed to cook. Only eggs and coffee.\"", "Damn the heat, damn the pencil, damn Madison Avenue and advertising.\n My drink was gone and I went back to the kitchen and read Molly's\n notes again to see if they would be like a letter from her. I noticed\n one that I had missed, pinned to the door of the dumbwaiter: \"Garbage\n picked up at 6:30 AM so the idea is to Put it Here the Night Before. I\n love you.\" What can you do when the girl loves you?\n\n\n I made another drink and went and stared out of the living room window\n at the roof opposite. The Sun was out again and a man with a stick was\n exercising his flock of pigeons. They wheeled in a circle, hoping to be\n allowed to perch, but were not allowed to.", "Intimidated, I took my drink into the living room and sat down in\n front of the typewriter. As I stared at the novel that was to liberate\n me from Madison Avenue, I noticed a mistake and picked up a pencil.\n When I put it down, it rolled off the desk, and with my eyes on the\n manuscript, I groped under the chair for it. Then I looked down. The\n pencil was standing on its end.\nThere, I thought to myself, is that one chance in a million we hear\n about, and picked up the pencil. I turned back to my novel and drank\n some of the highball in hopes of inspiration and surcease from the\n muggy heat, but nothing came. I went back and read the whole chapter\n to try to get a forward momentum, but came to a dead stop at the last\n sentence.", "I went into our little kitchen to make a drink and reread the\n directions Molly had left, telling me how to get along by myself until\n she got back from her mother's in Oyster Bay, a matter of ten days.\n How to make coffee, how to open a can, whom to call if I took sick and\n such. My wife used to be a trained nurse and she is quite convinced\n that I cannot take a breath without her. She is right, but not for the\n reasons she supposes.\n\n\n I opened the refrigerator to get some ice and saw another notice: \"When\n you take out the Milk or Butter, Put it Right Back. And Close the Door,\n too.\"", "When I picked up the receiver, the line sounded dead and I thought,\nmore\ntrouble. Then I heard a man cough and I said hello. McGill's\n voice said, \"Alec? You must have picked up the receiver just as we were\n connected. That's a damn funny coincidence.\"\n\n\n \"Not in the least,\" I said. \"Come on over here. I've got something for\n you to work on.\"\n\n\n \"Well, as a matter of fact, I was calling up to ask you and Molly—\"\n\n\n \"Molly's away for the week. Can you get over here quick? It's urgent.\"\n\n\n \"At once,\" he said, and hung up.", "suddenly turned into a monstrosity of order!\nWhen I got home from the office, I was not so much tired as beaten\n down, but the effect is similar. I let myself into the apartment, which\n had an absentee-wife look, and took a cold shower. The present downtown\n temperature, according to the radio, was eighty-seven degrees, but\n according to my Greenwich Village thermometer, it was ninety-six. I got\n dressed and went into the living room, and wished ardently that my\n wife Molly were here to tell me why the whole place looked so woebegone.\n\n\n What do they do, I asked myself, that I have left undone? I've vacuumed\n the carpet, I've dusted and I've straightened the cushions.... Ah! The\n ashtrays. I emptied them, washed them and put them back, but still the\n place looked wife-deserted.", "\"Never seen anything to equal it,\" he said. \"Wouldn't have believed\n it. Those guys\ndidn't\nbelieve it. Every round normal, nothing\n unusual about the hands—three of a kind, a low straight, that sort\n of thing and one guy got queens over tens, until it gets to be\nmy\ndeal. Brother! Straight flush to the king—every time! And each time,\n somebody else has four aces....\"\n\n\n He started to sweat again, so I got up to fix him another drink. There\n was one quart of club soda left, but when I tried to open it, the top\n broke and glass chips got into the bottle.\n\n\n \"I'll have to go down for more soda,\" I said.\n\n\n \"I'll come, too. I need air.\"", "\"I'll stay for one more drink and then I'm due at the office,\" he said.\n \"You know, I think this would make an item for the paper.\" He grinned\n and nodded toward the pandemonium.\n\n\n When he was gone, I noticed it was getting dark and turned on the desk\n lamp. Then I saw the curtains. They were all tied in knots, except\n one. That was tied in three knots.\n\n\n All\nright\n, I told myself, it was the wind. But I felt the time had\n come for me to get expert advice, so I went to the phone to call\n McGill. McGill is an assistant professor of mathematics at a university\n uptown and lives near us. He is highly imaginative, but we believe he\n knows everything.", "It was, and I had the feeling the place was quieter—a background noise\n had stopped. It dawned on me that I no longer heard the faint hum of\n the air-conditioner over the door, and as I started to say so, I made\n a gesture toward it. My hand collided with Molly's when she tapped her\n cigarette over the ashtray, and the cigarette landed in the neighboring\n vichyssoise.\n\n\n \"Hey! What's the idea?\" snarled the sour-looking man.\n\n\n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" I said. \"It was an accident. I—\"\n\n\n \"Throwing cigarettes at people!\" the fat lady said.", "There was a faint bang and the thing disintegrated. It knocked him on\n his back, but he got right up and I realized he was not hurt. At the\n moment of the explosion—if so feeble a thing can be called one—I\n felt something sting my face and, on touching it, found blood on my\n hand. I mopped at it with my handkerchief but, though slight, the\n bleeding would not stop, so I went into a drugstore and bought some\n pink adhesive which I put on the tiny cut. When I got to the studio, I\n found that I had missed the story conference.\n\n\n During the day, by actual count, I heard the phrase \"I'm just\n spitballing\" eight times, and another Madison Avenue favorite,\n \"The whole ball of wax,\" twelve times. However, my story had been\n accepted without change because nobody had noticed my absence from the\n conference room. There you have what is known as the Advertising World,\n the Advertising game or the advertising racket, depending upon which\n rung of the ladder you have achieved.", "The subway gave a repeat performance going home, and as I got to the\n apartment house we live in, the cop on the afternoon beat was standing\n there talking to the doorman.\n\n\n He said, \"Hello, Mr. Graham. I guess you must have just have missed it\n at your office building.\" I looked blank and he explained, \"We just\n heard it a little while ago: all six elevators in your building jammed\n at the same time. Sounds crazy. I guess you just missed it.\"\n\n\n Anything can happen in advertising, I thought. \"That's right, Danny, I\n just missed it,\" I said, and went on in.\n\n\n Psychiatry tells us that some people are accident-prone; I, on the\n other hand, seemed recently to be coincidence-prone, fluke-happy, and\n except for the alarm clock, I'd had no control over what had been going\n on.", "\"Do you mean,\" I asked in some confusion, \"that some form of life is\n controlling the coins and—the other things?\"\nHe shook his head. \"No. All I mean is that improbable things usually\n have improbable explanations. When I see a natural law being broken,\n I don't say to myself, 'Here's a miracle.' I revise my version of the\n book of rules. Something—I don't know what—is going on, and it seems\n to involve probability, and it seems to center around you. Were you\n still in that building when the elevators stuck? Or near it?\"\n\n\n \"I guess I must have been. It happened just after I left.\"\n\n\n \"Hm. You're the center, all right. But why?\"\n\n\n \"Center of what?\" I asked. \"I feel as though I were the center of an\n electrical storm. Something has it in for me!\"", "It had been a bad day; I had forgotten to wind the alarm clock, so I'd\n had to hurry to make a story conference at one of the TV studios I\n write for. I didn't notice the impending rain storm and had no umbrella\n when I reached the sidewalk, to find myself confronted with an almost\n tropical downpour. I would have turned back, but a taxi came up and a\n woman got out, so I dashed through the rain and got in.\n\n\n \"Madison and Fifty-fourth,\" I said.\n\n\n \"Right,\" said the driver, and I heard the starter grind, and then go\n on grinding. After some futile efforts, he turned to me. \"Sorry, Mac.\n You'll have to find another cab. Good hunting.\"", "The other bartender gave him a fresh shaker, but the same thing\n happened, and I saw no more because the customers sitting at the bar\n crowded around in front of him, offering advice. Our waiter came back,\n baffled, saying he'd have the drinks in a moment, and went to the\n kitchen. When he returned, he had madame's vichyssoise and some rolls,\n which he put down, and then went to the bar, where the audience had\n grown larger.\n\n\n Molly lit a cigarette and said, \"I suppose this is all part of it,\n Alec. Incidentally, it seems to be getting warmer in here.\"", "At the delicatessen on the corner, the man gave me three bottles in\n what must have been a wet bag, because as he handed them to me over the\n top of the cold-meat display, the bottom gave and they fell onto the\n tile floor. None of them broke, although the fall must have been from\n at least five feet. Nat was too wound up in his thoughts to notice and\n I was getting used to miracles. We left the proprietor with his mouth\n open and met Danny, the cop, looking in at the door, also with his\n mouth open.\nOn the sidewalk, a man walking in front of Nat stooped suddenly to tie\n his shoe and Nat, to avoid bumping him, stepped off the curb and a taxi\n swerved to avoid Nat. The street was still wet and the taxi skidded,", "\"Well,\" I said, \"what more do you want?\"\n\n\n \"Great Scott,\" he said, and sat down. \"I suppose you know that\n there are two great apparently opposite principles governing the\n Universe—random and design. The sands on the beach are an example\n of random distribution and life is an example of design. The motions\n of the particles of a gas are what we call random, but there are so\n many of them, we treat them statistically and derive the Second Law of\n Thermodynamics—quite reliable. It isn't theoretically hard-and-fast;\n it's just a matter of extreme probability. Now life, on the other\n hand, seems not to depend on probability at all; actually, it goes\n against it. Or you might say it is certainly not an accidental\n manifestation.\"" ], [ "\"All right, now, Mrs. Mac-Philip!\" one of them said. \"Leave go of my\n umbrella and we'll say no more about it!\"\n\n\n \"And so now it's Missus Mac-Philip, is it?\" said her adversary.\n\n\n The third, a younger one with her back turned to us, her umbrella also\n caught in the tangle, pulled at it in a tentative way, at which the\n other two glared at her. She turned her head away and tried to let go,\n but the handle was caught in her glove. She looked up and I saw it was\n Molly. My nurse-wife.\n\n\n \"Oh, Alec!\" she said, and managed to detach herself. \"Are you all\n right?\" Was\nI\nall right!\n\n\n \"Molly! What are you doing here?\"", "Damn the heat, damn the pencil, damn Madison Avenue and advertising.\n My drink was gone and I went back to the kitchen and read Molly's\n notes again to see if they would be like a letter from her. I noticed\n one that I had missed, pinned to the door of the dumbwaiter: \"Garbage\n picked up at 6:30 AM so the idea is to Put it Here the Night Before. I\n love you.\" What can you do when the girl loves you?\n\n\n I made another drink and went and stared out of the living room window\n at the roof opposite. The Sun was out again and a man with a stick was\n exercising his flock of pigeons. They wheeled in a circle, hoping to be\n allowed to perch, but were not allowed to.", "I went into our little kitchen to make a drink and reread the\n directions Molly had left, telling me how to get along by myself until\n she got back from her mother's in Oyster Bay, a matter of ten days.\n How to make coffee, how to open a can, whom to call if I took sick and\n such. My wife used to be a trained nurse and she is quite convinced\n that I cannot take a breath without her. She is right, but not for the\n reasons she supposes.\n\n\n I opened the refrigerator to get some ice and saw another notice: \"When\n you take out the Milk or Butter, Put it Right Back. And Close the Door,\n too.\"", "suddenly turned into a monstrosity of order!\nWhen I got home from the office, I was not so much tired as beaten\n down, but the effect is similar. I let myself into the apartment, which\n had an absentee-wife look, and took a cold shower. The present downtown\n temperature, according to the radio, was eighty-seven degrees, but\n according to my Greenwich Village thermometer, it was ninety-six. I got\n dressed and went into the living room, and wished ardently that my\n wife Molly were here to tell me why the whole place looked so woebegone.\n\n\n What do they do, I asked myself, that I have left undone? I've vacuumed\n the carpet, I've dusted and I've straightened the cushions.... Ah! The\n ashtrays. I emptied them, washed them and put them back, but still the\n place looked wife-deserted.", "\"Not quite. It has a center. Alec is the center.\"\nMolly looked at me with a curious expression for a moment. \"Do you\nfeel\nall right, darling?\" she asked me. I nodded brightly. \"You'll\n think this silly of me,\" she went on to McGill, \"but why isn't it\n something like an overactive poltergeist?\"\n\n\n \"Pure concept,\" he said. \"No genuine evidence.\"\n\n\n \"Magnetism?\"", "The other bartender gave him a fresh shaker, but the same thing\n happened, and I saw no more because the customers sitting at the bar\n crowded around in front of him, offering advice. Our waiter came back,\n baffled, saying he'd have the drinks in a moment, and went to the\n kitchen. When he returned, he had madame's vichyssoise and some rolls,\n which he put down, and then went to the bar, where the audience had\n grown larger.\n\n\n Molly lit a cigarette and said, \"I suppose this is all part of it,\n Alec. Incidentally, it seems to be getting warmer in here.\"", "It was, and I had the feeling the place was quieter—a background noise\n had stopped. It dawned on me that I no longer heard the faint hum of\n the air-conditioner over the door, and as I started to say so, I made\n a gesture toward it. My hand collided with Molly's when she tapped her\n cigarette over the ashtray, and the cigarette landed in the neighboring\n vichyssoise.\n\n\n \"Hey! What's the idea?\" snarled the sour-looking man.\n\n\n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" I said. \"It was an accident. I—\"\n\n\n \"Throwing cigarettes at people!\" the fat lady said.", "When we got upstairs, I turned to McGill. \"Explain to Molly,\" I said.\n \"And incidentally to me. I'm not properly briefed yet.\"\n\n\n He did so, and when he got to the summing up, I had the feeling she was\n a jump ahead of him.\n\n\n \"In other words, you think it's something organic?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" McGill said, \"I'm trying to think of anything else it might be.\n I'm not doing so well,\" he confessed.\n\n\n \"But so far as I can see,\" Molly answered, \"it's mere probability, and\n without any over-all pattern.\"", "\"But for Pete's sake, Molly says the calls were going on for a long\n time! I phoned you only a short time ago and it must have taken her\n nearly two hours to get here from Oyster Bay.\"\n\n\n \"Then you must have done it twice and the vibrations in the\n floor—something like that—just happened to cause the right induction\n impulses. Yes, I know how you feel,\" he said, seeing my expression.\n \"It's beginning to bear down.\"\n\n\n Molly was through telephoning and suggested going out for dinner. I was\n so pleased to see her that I'd forgotten all about being hungry.\n\n\n \"I'm in no mood to cook,\" she said. \"Let's get away from all this.\"\n\n\n McGill raised an eyebrow. \"If all this, as you call it, will let us.\"\n\n\n In the lobby, we ran into Nat, looking smug in a journalistic way.", "When I picked up the receiver, the line sounded dead and I thought,\nmore\ntrouble. Then I heard a man cough and I said hello. McGill's\n voice said, \"Alec? You must have picked up the receiver just as we were\n connected. That's a damn funny coincidence.\"\n\n\n \"Not in the least,\" I said. \"Come on over here. I've got something for\n you to work on.\"\n\n\n \"Well, as a matter of fact, I was calling up to ask you and Molly—\"\n\n\n \"Molly's away for the week. Can you get over here quick? It's urgent.\"\n\n\n \"At once,\" he said, and hung up.", "\"If you want your umbrella, Mrs. Graham,\" Danny said, \"it's at the\n station house. What there's left of it, that is.\"\n\n\n Molly thanked him and there was a short pause, during which I felt\n the speculative regard of the lieutenant. I pulled out a packet of\n cigarettes, which I had opened, as always, by tearing off the top. I\n happened to have it upside down and all the cigarettes fell out. Before\n I could move my foot to obliterate what they had spelled out on the\n sidewalk, the two cops saw it. The lieutenant gave me a hard look, but\n said nothing. I quickly kicked the insulting cigarettes into the gutter.", "While I waited, I thought I might try getting down a few paragraphs of\n my novel—perhaps something would come now. It did, but as I came to a\n point where I was about to put down the word \"agurgling,\" I decided it\n was too reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan, and stopped at the letter\n \"R.\" Then I saw that I had unaccountably hit all four keys one step to\n the side of the correct ones, and tore out the page, with my face red.\n\n\n This was absolutely not my day.\n\"Well,\" McGill said, \"nothing you've told me is impossible or\n supernatural. Just very, very improbable. In fact, the odds against\n that poker game alone would lead me to suspect Nat, well as I know him.\n It's all those other things....\"\n\n\n He got up and walked over to the window and looked at the hot twilight\n while I waited. Then he turned around; he had a look of concern.", "When we got to the restaurant, it was crowded but cool—although it\n didn't stay cool for long. We sat down at a side table near the door\n and ordered Tom Collinses as we looked at the menu. Sitting at the\n next table were a fat lady, wearing a very long, brilliant green\n evening gown, and a dried-up sour-looking man in a tux. When the waiter\n returned, they preempted him and began ordering dinner fussily: cold\n cuts for the man, and vichyssoise, lobster salad and strawberry parfait\n for the fat lady.", "There was a faint bang and the thing disintegrated. It knocked him on\n his back, but he got right up and I realized he was not hurt. At the\n moment of the explosion—if so feeble a thing can be called one—I\n felt something sting my face and, on touching it, found blood on my\n hand. I mopped at it with my handkerchief but, though slight, the\n bleeding would not stop, so I went into a drugstore and bought some\n pink adhesive which I put on the tiny cut. When I got to the studio, I\n found that I had missed the story conference.\n\n\n During the day, by actual count, I heard the phrase \"I'm just\n spitballing\" eight times, and another Madison Avenue favorite,\n \"The whole ball of wax,\" twelve times. However, my story had been\n accepted without change because nobody had noticed my absence from the\n conference room. There you have what is known as the Advertising World,\n the Advertising game or the advertising racket, depending upon which\n rung of the ladder you have achieved.", "\"Only an analogy,\" said McGill. \"A crystal resembles life in that it\n has a definite shape and exhibits growth, but that's all. I'll agree\n this—thing—has no discernible shape and motion\nis\ninvolved, but\n plants don't move and amebas have no shape. Then a crystal feeds, but\n it does not convert what it feeds on; it merely rearranges it into a\n non-random pattern. In this case, it's rearranging random motions and\n it has a nucleus and it seems to be growing—at least in what you might\n call improbability.\"\n\n\n Molly frowned. \"Then what\nis\nit? What's it made of?\"", "\"I really didn't mean to,\" I began again, getting up. There must have\n been a hole in the edge of their tablecloth which one of my cuff\n buttons caught in, because as I stepped out from between the closely\n set tables, I pulled everything—tablecloth, silver, water glasses,\n ashtrays and the vichyssoise-à-la-nicotine—onto the floor.\n\n\n The fat lady surged from the banquette and slapped me meatily. The man\n licked his thumb and danced as boxers are popularly supposed to do. The\n owner of the place, a man with thick black eyebrows, hustled toward us\n with a determined manner. I tried to explain what had happened, but I\n was outshouted, and the owner frowned darkly.", "\"I should say it was made of the motions. There's a similar idea about\n the atom. Another thing that's like a crystal is that it appears to\n be forming around a nucleus not of its own material—the way a speck\n of sand thrown into a supersaturated solution becomes the nucleus of\n crystallization.\"\n\n\n \"Sounds like the pearl in an oyster,\" Molly said, and gave me an\n impertinent look.\n\n\n \"Why,\" I asked McGill, \"did you say the coins couldn't have the same\n date? I mean apart from the off chance I got them that way.\"\n\n\n \"Because I don't think this thing got going before today and\n everything that's happened can all be described as improbable motions\n here and now. The dates were already there, and to change them would\n require retroactive action, reversing time. That's out, in my book.\n That telephone now—\"", "Intimidated, I took my drink into the living room and sat down in\n front of the typewriter. As I stared at the novel that was to liberate\n me from Madison Avenue, I noticed a mistake and picked up a pencil.\n When I put it down, it rolled off the desk, and with my eyes on the\n manuscript, I groped under the chair for it. Then I looked down. The\n pencil was standing on its end.\nThere, I thought to myself, is that one chance in a million we hear\n about, and picked up the pencil. I turned back to my novel and drank\n some of the highball in hopes of inspiration and surcease from the\n muggy heat, but nothing came. I went back and read the whole chapter\n to try to get a forward momentum, but came to a dead stop at the last\n sentence.", "\"All right, smart guy!\" they shouted in unison, and barged ahead,\n only to collide. They backed off and threw simultaneous punches\n which met in mid-air. Then began one of the most remarkable bouts\n ever witnessed—a fight in which fist hit fist but never anything\n else, until both champions backed away undefeated, muttering identical\n excuses and threats.\nDanny appeared at that moment. His face was dripping. \"You all right,\n Mr. Graham?\" he asked. \"I don't know what's going on around here, but\n ever since I came on this afternoon, things are going crazy. Bartley!\"\n he shouted—he could succeed as a hog-caller. \"Bring those dames over\n here!\"\n\n\n Three women in a confused wrangle, with their half-open umbrellas\n intertwined, were brought across the street, which meant climbing over\n fenders. Bartley, a fine young patrolman, seemed self-conscious; the\n ladies seemed not to be.", "The sight of this threw another driver into a skid, and when he and\n the taxi had stopped sliding around, they were face to face, arranged\n crosswise to the street. This gave them exactly no room to move either\n forward or backward, for the car had its back to a hydrant and the taxi\n to a lamp.\n\n\n Although rather narrow, this is a two-way street, and in no time at\n all, traffic was stacked up from both directions as far as the avenues.\n Everyone was honking his horn.\n\n\n Danny was furious—more so when he tried to put through a call to his\n station house from the box opposite.\n\n\n It was out of order.\nUpstairs, the wind was blowing into the apartment and I closed the\n windows, mainly to shut out the tumult and the shouting. Nat had\n brightened up considerably." ], [ "While I waited, I thought I might try getting down a few paragraphs of\n my novel—perhaps something would come now. It did, but as I came to a\n point where I was about to put down the word \"agurgling,\" I decided it\n was too reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan, and stopped at the letter\n \"R.\" Then I saw that I had unaccountably hit all four keys one step to\n the side of the correct ones, and tore out the page, with my face red.\n\n\n This was absolutely not my day.\n\"Well,\" McGill said, \"nothing you've told me is impossible or\n supernatural. Just very, very improbable. In fact, the odds against\n that poker game alone would lead me to suspect Nat, well as I know him.\n It's all those other things....\"\n\n\n He got up and walked over to the window and looked at the hot twilight\n while I waited. Then he turned around; he had a look of concern.", "At the delicatessen on the corner, the man gave me three bottles in\n what must have been a wet bag, because as he handed them to me over the\n top of the cold-meat display, the bottom gave and they fell onto the\n tile floor. None of them broke, although the fall must have been from\n at least five feet. Nat was too wound up in his thoughts to notice and\n I was getting used to miracles. We left the proprietor with his mouth\n open and met Danny, the cop, looking in at the door, also with his\n mouth open.\nOn the sidewalk, a man walking in front of Nat stooped suddenly to tie\n his shoe and Nat, to avoid bumping him, stepped off the curb and a taxi\n swerved to avoid Nat. The street was still wet and the taxi skidded,", "The sight of this threw another driver into a skid, and when he and\n the taxi had stopped sliding around, they were face to face, arranged\n crosswise to the street. This gave them exactly no room to move either\n forward or backward, for the car had its back to a hydrant and the taxi\n to a lamp.\n\n\n Although rather narrow, this is a two-way street, and in no time at\n all, traffic was stacked up from both directions as far as the avenues.\n Everyone was honking his horn.\n\n\n Danny was furious—more so when he tried to put through a call to his\n station house from the box opposite.\n\n\n It was out of order.\nUpstairs, the wind was blowing into the apartment and I closed the\n windows, mainly to shut out the tumult and the shouting. Nat had\n brightened up considerably.", "Pigeons fly as a rule in formation and turn simultaneously, so that\n their wings all catch the sunlight at the same time. I was thinking\n about this decorative fact when I saw that as they were making a turn,\n they seemed to bunch up together. By some curious chance, they all\n wanted the same place in the sky to turn in, and several collided and\n fell.\n\n\n The man was as surprised as I and went to one of the dazed birds and\n picked it up. He stood there shaking his head from side to side,\n stroking its feathers.\n\n\n My speculations about this peculiar aerial traffic accident were\n interrupted by loud voices in the hallway. Since our building is\n usually very well behaved, I was astonished to hear what sounded like\n an incipient free-for-all, and among the angry voices I recognized that\n of my neighbor, Nat, a very quiet guy who works on a newspaper and has\n never, to my knowledge, given wild parties, particularly in the late\n afternoon.", "\"You can't say a thing like that to me!\" I heard him shout. \"I tell you\n I got that deck this afternoon and they weren't opened till we started\n to play!\"\n\n\n Several other loud voices started at the same time.\n\n\n \"Nobody gets five straight-flushes in a row!\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, and only when you were dealer!\"\n\n\n The tone of the argument was beginning to get ugly, and I opened the\n door to offer Nat help if he needed it. There were four men confronting\n him, evidently torn between the desire to make an angry exit and the\n impulse to stay and beat him up. His face was furiously red and he\n looked stunned.\n\n\n \"Here!\" he said, holding out a deck of cards, \"For Pete's sake, look at\n 'em yourselves if you think they're marked!\"", "\"All right, smart guy!\" they shouted in unison, and barged ahead,\n only to collide. They backed off and threw simultaneous punches\n which met in mid-air. Then began one of the most remarkable bouts\n ever witnessed—a fight in which fist hit fist but never anything\n else, until both champions backed away undefeated, muttering identical\n excuses and threats.\nDanny appeared at that moment. His face was dripping. \"You all right,\n Mr. Graham?\" he asked. \"I don't know what's going on around here, but\n ever since I came on this afternoon, things are going crazy. Bartley!\"\n he shouted—he could succeed as a hog-caller. \"Bring those dames over\n here!\"\n\n\n Three women in a confused wrangle, with their half-open umbrellas\n intertwined, were brought across the street, which meant climbing over\n fenders. Bartley, a fine young patrolman, seemed self-conscious; the\n ladies seemed not to be.", "\"But for Pete's sake, Molly says the calls were going on for a long\n time! I phoned you only a short time ago and it must have taken her\n nearly two hours to get here from Oyster Bay.\"\n\n\n \"Then you must have done it twice and the vibrations in the\n floor—something like that—just happened to cause the right induction\n impulses. Yes, I know how you feel,\" he said, seeing my expression.\n \"It's beginning to bear down.\"\n\n\n Molly was through telephoning and suggested going out for dinner. I was\n so pleased to see her that I'd forgotten all about being hungry.\n\n\n \"I'm in no mood to cook,\" she said. \"Let's get away from all this.\"\n\n\n McGill raised an eyebrow. \"If all this, as you call it, will let us.\"\n\n\n In the lobby, we ran into Nat, looking smug in a journalistic way.", "\"I really didn't mean to,\" I began again, getting up. There must have\n been a hole in the edge of their tablecloth which one of my cuff\n buttons caught in, because as I stepped out from between the closely\n set tables, I pulled everything—tablecloth, silver, water glasses,\n ashtrays and the vichyssoise-à-la-nicotine—onto the floor.\n\n\n The fat lady surged from the banquette and slapped me meatily. The man\n licked his thumb and danced as boxers are popularly supposed to do. The\n owner of the place, a man with thick black eyebrows, hustled toward us\n with a determined manner. I tried to explain what had happened, but I\n was outshouted, and the owner frowned darkly.", "Damn the heat, damn the pencil, damn Madison Avenue and advertising.\n My drink was gone and I went back to the kitchen and read Molly's\n notes again to see if they would be like a letter from her. I noticed\n one that I had missed, pinned to the door of the dumbwaiter: \"Garbage\n picked up at 6:30 AM so the idea is to Put it Here the Night Before. I\n love you.\" What can you do when the girl loves you?\n\n\n I made another drink and went and stared out of the living room window\n at the roof opposite. The Sun was out again and a man with a stick was\n exercising his flock of pigeons. They wheeled in a circle, hoping to be\n allowed to perch, but were not allowed to.", "There was a faint bang and the thing disintegrated. It knocked him on\n his back, but he got right up and I realized he was not hurt. At the\n moment of the explosion—if so feeble a thing can be called one—I\n felt something sting my face and, on touching it, found blood on my\n hand. I mopped at it with my handkerchief but, though slight, the\n bleeding would not stop, so I went into a drugstore and bought some\n pink adhesive which I put on the tiny cut. When I got to the studio, I\n found that I had missed the story conference.\n\n\n During the day, by actual count, I heard the phrase \"I'm just\n spitballing\" eight times, and another Madison Avenue favorite,\n \"The whole ball of wax,\" twelve times. However, my story had been\n accepted without change because nobody had noticed my absence from the\n conference room. There you have what is known as the Advertising World,\n the Advertising game or the advertising racket, depending upon which\n rung of the ladder you have achieved.", "suddenly turned into a monstrosity of order!\nWhen I got home from the office, I was not so much tired as beaten\n down, but the effect is similar. I let myself into the apartment, which\n had an absentee-wife look, and took a cold shower. The present downtown\n temperature, according to the radio, was eighty-seven degrees, but\n according to my Greenwich Village thermometer, it was ninety-six. I got\n dressed and went into the living room, and wished ardently that my\n wife Molly were here to tell me why the whole place looked so woebegone.\n\n\n What do they do, I asked myself, that I have left undone? I've vacuumed\n the carpet, I've dusted and I've straightened the cushions.... Ah! The\n ashtrays. I emptied them, washed them and put them back, but still the\n place looked wife-deserted.", "We put on our hats and went down to the street. From either end, we\n could hear wrecking trucks towing away the stalled cars. There were,\n by this time, a number of harassed cops directing the maneuver and we\n heard one of them say to Danny, \"I don't know what the hell's going\n on around here. Every goddam car's got something the matter with it.\n They can't none of them back out for one reason or another. Never seen\n anything like it.\"\n\n\n Near us, two pedestrians were doing a curious little two-step as they\n tried to pass one another; as soon as one of them moved aside to let\n the other pass, the other would move to the same side. They both had\n embarrassed grins on their faces, but before long their grins were\n replaced by looks of suspicion and then determination.", "It was, and I had the feeling the place was quieter—a background noise\n had stopped. It dawned on me that I no longer heard the faint hum of\n the air-conditioner over the door, and as I started to say so, I made\n a gesture toward it. My hand collided with Molly's when she tapped her\n cigarette over the ashtray, and the cigarette landed in the neighboring\n vichyssoise.\n\n\n \"Hey! What's the idea?\" snarled the sour-looking man.\n\n\n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" I said. \"It was an accident. I—\"\n\n\n \"Throwing cigarettes at people!\" the fat lady said.", "\"All right, now, Mrs. Mac-Philip!\" one of them said. \"Leave go of my\n umbrella and we'll say no more about it!\"\n\n\n \"And so now it's Missus Mac-Philip, is it?\" said her adversary.\n\n\n The third, a younger one with her back turned to us, her umbrella also\n caught in the tangle, pulled at it in a tentative way, at which the\n other two glared at her. She turned her head away and tried to let go,\n but the handle was caught in her glove. She looked up and I saw it was\n Molly. My nurse-wife.\n\n\n \"Oh, Alec!\" she said, and managed to detach herself. \"Are you all\n right?\" Was\nI\nall right!\n\n\n \"Molly! What are you doing here?\"", "When we got to the restaurant, it was crowded but cool—although it\n didn't stay cool for long. We sat down at a side table near the door\n and ordered Tom Collinses as we looked at the menu. Sitting at the\n next table were a fat lady, wearing a very long, brilliant green\n evening gown, and a dried-up sour-looking man in a tux. When the waiter\n returned, they preempted him and began ordering dinner fussily: cold\n cuts for the man, and vichyssoise, lobster salad and strawberry parfait\n for the fat lady.", "\"If you want your umbrella, Mrs. Graham,\" Danny said, \"it's at the\n station house. What there's left of it, that is.\"\n\n\n Molly thanked him and there was a short pause, during which I felt\n the speculative regard of the lieutenant. I pulled out a packet of\n cigarettes, which I had opened, as always, by tearing off the top. I\n happened to have it upside down and all the cigarettes fell out. Before\n I could move my foot to obliterate what they had spelled out on the\n sidewalk, the two cops saw it. The lieutenant gave me a hard look, but\n said nothing. I quickly kicked the insulting cigarettes into the gutter.", "If possible, it was raining still harder. I opened my newspaper over\n my hat and ran for the subway: three blocks. Whizzing traffic held\n me up at each crossing and I was soaked when I reached the platform,\n just in time to miss the local. After an abnormal delay, I got one\n which exactly missed the express at Fourteenth Street. The same thing\n happened at both ends of the crosstown shuttle, but I found the rain\n had stopped when I got out at Fifty-first and Lexington.\nAs I walked across to Madison Avenue, I passed a big excavation where\n they were getting ready to put up a new office building. There was the\n usual crowd of buffs watching the digging machines and, in particular,\n a man with a pneumatic drill who was breaking up some hard-packed clay.", "\"Not quite. It has a center. Alec is the center.\"\nMolly looked at me with a curious expression for a moment. \"Do you\nfeel\nall right, darling?\" she asked me. I nodded brightly. \"You'll\n think this silly of me,\" she went on to McGill, \"but why isn't it\n something like an overactive poltergeist?\"\n\n\n \"Pure concept,\" he said. \"No genuine evidence.\"\n\n\n \"Magnetism?\"", "I went into our little kitchen to make a drink and reread the\n directions Molly had left, telling me how to get along by myself until\n she got back from her mother's in Oyster Bay, a matter of ten days.\n How to make coffee, how to open a can, whom to call if I took sick and\n such. My wife used to be a trained nurse and she is quite convinced\n that I cannot take a breath without her. She is right, but not for the\n reasons she supposes.\n\n\n I opened the refrigerator to get some ice and saw another notice: \"When\n you take out the Milk or Butter, Put it Right Back. And Close the Door,\n too.\"", "Intimidated, I took my drink into the living room and sat down in\n front of the typewriter. As I stared at the novel that was to liberate\n me from Madison Avenue, I noticed a mistake and picked up a pencil.\n When I put it down, it rolled off the desk, and with my eyes on the\n manuscript, I groped under the chair for it. Then I looked down. The\n pencil was standing on its end.\nThere, I thought to myself, is that one chance in a million we hear\n about, and picked up the pencil. I turned back to my novel and drank\n some of the highball in hopes of inspiration and surcease from the\n muggy heat, but nothing came. I went back and read the whole chapter\n to try to get a forward momentum, but came to a dead stop at the last\n sentence." ], [ "When we got upstairs, I turned to McGill. \"Explain to Molly,\" I said.\n \"And incidentally to me. I'm not properly briefed yet.\"\n\n\n He did so, and when he got to the summing up, I had the feeling she was\n a jump ahead of him.\n\n\n \"In other words, you think it's something organic?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" McGill said, \"I'm trying to think of anything else it might be.\n I'm not doing so well,\" he confessed.\n\n\n \"But so far as I can see,\" Molly answered, \"it's mere probability, and\n without any over-all pattern.\"", "While I waited, I thought I might try getting down a few paragraphs of\n my novel—perhaps something would come now. It did, but as I came to a\n point where I was about to put down the word \"agurgling,\" I decided it\n was too reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan, and stopped at the letter\n \"R.\" Then I saw that I had unaccountably hit all four keys one step to\n the side of the correct ones, and tore out the page, with my face red.\n\n\n This was absolutely not my day.\n\"Well,\" McGill said, \"nothing you've told me is impossible or\n supernatural. Just very, very improbable. In fact, the odds against\n that poker game alone would lead me to suspect Nat, well as I know him.\n It's all those other things....\"\n\n\n He got up and walked over to the window and looked at the hot twilight\n while I waited. Then he turned around; he had a look of concern.", "When I picked up the receiver, the line sounded dead and I thought,\nmore\ntrouble. Then I heard a man cough and I said hello. McGill's\n voice said, \"Alec? You must have picked up the receiver just as we were\n connected. That's a damn funny coincidence.\"\n\n\n \"Not in the least,\" I said. \"Come on over here. I've got something for\n you to work on.\"\n\n\n \"Well, as a matter of fact, I was calling up to ask you and Molly—\"\n\n\n \"Molly's away for the week. Can you get over here quick? It's urgent.\"\n\n\n \"At once,\" he said, and hung up.", "McGill grinned. \"Don't be superstitious. And especially don't be\n anthropomorphic.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if it's the opposite of random, it's got to be a form of life.\"\n\n\n \"On what basis? All we know for certain is that random motions are\n being rearranged. A crystal, for example, is not life, but it's a\n non-random arrangement of particles.... I wonder.\" He had a faraway,\n frowning look.\n\n\n I was beginning to feel hungry and the drinks had worn off.\n\n\n \"Let's go out and eat,\" I said, \"There's not a damn thing in the\n kitchen and I'm not allowed to cook. Only eggs and coffee.\"", "\"Not quite. It has a center. Alec is the center.\"\nMolly looked at me with a curious expression for a moment. \"Do you\nfeel\nall right, darling?\" she asked me. I nodded brightly. \"You'll\n think this silly of me,\" she went on to McGill, \"but why isn't it\n something like an overactive poltergeist?\"\n\n\n \"Pure concept,\" he said. \"No genuine evidence.\"\n\n\n \"Magnetism?\"", "\"Only an analogy,\" said McGill. \"A crystal resembles life in that it\n has a definite shape and exhibits growth, but that's all. I'll agree\n this—thing—has no discernible shape and motion\nis\ninvolved, but\n plants don't move and amebas have no shape. Then a crystal feeds, but\n it does not convert what it feeds on; it merely rearranges it into a\n non-random pattern. In this case, it's rearranging random motions and\n it has a nucleus and it seems to be growing—at least in what you might\n call improbability.\"\n\n\n Molly frowned. \"Then what\nis\nit? What's it made of?\"", "\"I'll stay for one more drink and then I'm due at the office,\" he said.\n \"You know, I think this would make an item for the paper.\" He grinned\n and nodded toward the pandemonium.\n\n\n When he was gone, I noticed it was getting dark and turned on the desk\n lamp. Then I saw the curtains. They were all tied in knots, except\n one. That was tied in three knots.\n\n\n All\nright\n, I told myself, it was the wind. But I felt the time had\n come for me to get expert advice, so I went to the phone to call\n McGill. McGill is an assistant professor of mathematics at a university\n uptown and lives near us. He is highly imaginative, but we believe he\n knows everything.", "\"I've been put on the story—who could be better?—I live here. So far,\n I don't quite get what's been happening. I've been talking to Danny,\n but he didn't say much. I got the feeling he thinks you're involved in\n some mystical, Hibernian way. Hello, McGill, what's with you?\"\n\n\n \"He's got a theory,\" said Molly. \"Come and eat with us and he'll tell\n you all about it.\"\n\n\n Since we decided on an air-conditioned restaurant nearby on Sixth\n Avenue, we walked. The jam of cars didn't seem to be any less than\n before and we saw Danny again. He was talking to a police lieutenant,\n and when he caught sight of us, he said something that made the\n lieutenant look at us with interest. Particularly at me.", "\"All right, smart guy!\" they shouted in unison, and barged ahead,\n only to collide. They backed off and threw simultaneous punches\n which met in mid-air. Then began one of the most remarkable bouts\n ever witnessed—a fight in which fist hit fist but never anything\n else, until both champions backed away undefeated, muttering identical\n excuses and threats.\nDanny appeared at that moment. His face was dripping. \"You all right,\n Mr. Graham?\" he asked. \"I don't know what's going on around here, but\n ever since I came on this afternoon, things are going crazy. Bartley!\"\n he shouted—he could succeed as a hog-caller. \"Bring those dames over\n here!\"\n\n\n Three women in a confused wrangle, with their half-open umbrellas\n intertwined, were brought across the street, which meant climbing over\n fenders. Bartley, a fine young patrolman, seemed self-conscious; the\n ladies seemed not to be.", "There was a faint bang and the thing disintegrated. It knocked him on\n his back, but he got right up and I realized he was not hurt. At the\n moment of the explosion—if so feeble a thing can be called one—I\n felt something sting my face and, on touching it, found blood on my\n hand. I mopped at it with my handkerchief but, though slight, the\n bleeding would not stop, so I went into a drugstore and bought some\n pink adhesive which I put on the tiny cut. When I got to the studio, I\n found that I had missed the story conference.\n\n\n During the day, by actual count, I heard the phrase \"I'm just\n spitballing\" eight times, and another Madison Avenue favorite,\n \"The whole ball of wax,\" twelve times. However, my story had been\n accepted without change because nobody had noticed my absence from the\n conference room. There you have what is known as the Advertising World,\n the Advertising game or the advertising racket, depending upon which\n rung of the ladder you have achieved.", "\"I was so worried, and when I saw all this, I didn't know what to\n think.\" She pointed to the stalled cars. \"Are you really all right?\"\n\n\n \"Of course I'm all right. But why....\"\n\n\n \"The Oyster Bay operator said someone kept dialing and dialing Mother's\n number and there wasn't anyone on the line, so then she had it traced\n and it came from our phone here. I kept calling up, but I only got a\n busy signal. Oh, dear, are you\nsure\nyou're all right?\"\n\n\n I put my arm around her and glanced at McGill. He had an inward look.\n Then I caught Danny's eye. It had a thoughtful, almost suspicious cast\n to it.\n\n\n \"Trouble does seem to follow you, Mr. Graham,\" was all he said.", "\"But for Pete's sake, Molly says the calls were going on for a long\n time! I phoned you only a short time ago and it must have taken her\n nearly two hours to get here from Oyster Bay.\"\n\n\n \"Then you must have done it twice and the vibrations in the\n floor—something like that—just happened to cause the right induction\n impulses. Yes, I know how you feel,\" he said, seeing my expression.\n \"It's beginning to bear down.\"\n\n\n Molly was through telephoning and suggested going out for dinner. I was\n so pleased to see her that I'd forgotten all about being hungry.\n\n\n \"I'm in no mood to cook,\" she said. \"Let's get away from all this.\"\n\n\n McGill raised an eyebrow. \"If all this, as you call it, will let us.\"\n\n\n In the lobby, we ran into Nat, looking smug in a journalistic way.", "Damn the heat, damn the pencil, damn Madison Avenue and advertising.\n My drink was gone and I went back to the kitchen and read Molly's\n notes again to see if they would be like a letter from her. I noticed\n one that I had missed, pinned to the door of the dumbwaiter: \"Garbage\n picked up at 6:30 AM so the idea is to Put it Here the Night Before. I\n love you.\" What can you do when the girl loves you?\n\n\n I made another drink and went and stared out of the living room window\n at the roof opposite. The Sun was out again and a man with a stick was\n exercising his flock of pigeons. They wheeled in a circle, hoping to be\n allowed to perch, but were not allowed to.", "When we got to the restaurant, it was crowded but cool—although it\n didn't stay cool for long. We sat down at a side table near the door\n and ordered Tom Collinses as we looked at the menu. Sitting at the\n next table were a fat lady, wearing a very long, brilliant green\n evening gown, and a dried-up sour-looking man in a tux. When the waiter\n returned, they preempted him and began ordering dinner fussily: cold\n cuts for the man, and vichyssoise, lobster salad and strawberry parfait\n for the fat lady.", "It was, and I had the feeling the place was quieter—a background noise\n had stopped. It dawned on me that I no longer heard the faint hum of\n the air-conditioner over the door, and as I started to say so, I made\n a gesture toward it. My hand collided with Molly's when she tapped her\n cigarette over the ashtray, and the cigarette landed in the neighboring\n vichyssoise.\n\n\n \"Hey! What's the idea?\" snarled the sour-looking man.\n\n\n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" I said. \"It was an accident. I—\"\n\n\n \"Throwing cigarettes at people!\" the fat lady said.", "The doorbell rang. We were not surprised to find it was the telephone\n repairman. He took the set apart and clucked like a hen.\n\n\n \"I guess you dropped it on the floor, mister,\" he said with strong\n disapproval.\n\n\n \"Certainly not,\" I said. \"Is it broken?\"\n\n\n \"Not exactly\nbroken\n, but—\" He shook his head and took it apart some\n more.\nMcGill went over and they discussed the problem in undertones. Finally\n the man left and Molly called her mother to reassure her. McGill tried\n to explain to me what had happened with the phone.\n\n\n \"You must have joggled something loose. And then you replaced the\n receiver in such a way that the contact wasn't quite open.\"", "\"If you want your umbrella, Mrs. Graham,\" Danny said, \"it's at the\n station house. What there's left of it, that is.\"\n\n\n Molly thanked him and there was a short pause, during which I felt\n the speculative regard of the lieutenant. I pulled out a packet of\n cigarettes, which I had opened, as always, by tearing off the top. I\n happened to have it upside down and all the cigarettes fell out. Before\n I could move my foot to obliterate what they had spelled out on the\n sidewalk, the two cops saw it. The lieutenant gave me a hard look, but\n said nothing. I quickly kicked the insulting cigarettes into the gutter.", "Intimidated, I took my drink into the living room and sat down in\n front of the typewriter. As I stared at the novel that was to liberate\n me from Madison Avenue, I noticed a mistake and picked up a pencil.\n When I put it down, it rolled off the desk, and with my eyes on the\n manuscript, I groped under the chair for it. Then I looked down. The\n pencil was standing on its end.\nThere, I thought to myself, is that one chance in a million we hear\n about, and picked up the pencil. I turned back to my novel and drank\n some of the highball in hopes of inspiration and surcease from the\n muggy heat, but nothing came. I went back and read the whole chapter\n to try to get a forward momentum, but came to a dead stop at the last\n sentence.", "\"All right, now, Mrs. Mac-Philip!\" one of them said. \"Leave go of my\n umbrella and we'll say no more about it!\"\n\n\n \"And so now it's Missus Mac-Philip, is it?\" said her adversary.\n\n\n The third, a younger one with her back turned to us, her umbrella also\n caught in the tangle, pulled at it in a tentative way, at which the\n other two glared at her. She turned her head away and tried to let go,\n but the handle was caught in her glove. She looked up and I saw it was\n Molly. My nurse-wife.\n\n\n \"Oh, Alec!\" she said, and managed to detach herself. \"Are you all\n right?\" Was\nI\nall right!\n\n\n \"Molly! What are you doing here?\"", "\"Did you accumulate all that change today?\"\n\n\n \"No. During the week.\"\n\n\n He shook his head. \"In that case, no. Discounting the fact that you\n could have prearranged it, if my dim provisional theory is right, that\n would be\nactually\nimpossible. It would involve time-reversal. I'll\n tell you about it later. No, just throw down the change. Let's see if\n they all come up heads.\"\n\n\n I moved away from the carpet and tossed the handful of coins onto the\n floor. They clattered and bounced—and bounced together—and stacked\n themselves into a neat pile.\n\n\n I looked at McGill. His eyes were narrowed. Without a word, he took a\n handful of coins from his own pocket and threw them.\n\n\n These coins didn't stack. They just fell into an exactly straight line,\n the adjacent ones touching." ], [ "\"I was so worried, and when I saw all this, I didn't know what to\n think.\" She pointed to the stalled cars. \"Are you really all right?\"\n\n\n \"Of course I'm all right. But why....\"\n\n\n \"The Oyster Bay operator said someone kept dialing and dialing Mother's\n number and there wasn't anyone on the line, so then she had it traced\n and it came from our phone here. I kept calling up, but I only got a\n busy signal. Oh, dear, are you\nsure\nyou're all right?\"\n\n\n I put my arm around her and glanced at McGill. He had an inward look.\n Then I caught Danny's eye. It had a thoughtful, almost suspicious cast\n to it.\n\n\n \"Trouble does seem to follow you, Mr. Graham,\" was all he said.", "\"All right, smart guy!\" they shouted in unison, and barged ahead,\n only to collide. They backed off and threw simultaneous punches\n which met in mid-air. Then began one of the most remarkable bouts\n ever witnessed—a fight in which fist hit fist but never anything\n else, until both champions backed away undefeated, muttering identical\n excuses and threats.\nDanny appeared at that moment. His face was dripping. \"You all right,\n Mr. Graham?\" he asked. \"I don't know what's going on around here, but\n ever since I came on this afternoon, things are going crazy. Bartley!\"\n he shouted—he could succeed as a hog-caller. \"Bring those dames over\n here!\"\n\n\n Three women in a confused wrangle, with their half-open umbrellas\n intertwined, were brought across the street, which meant climbing over\n fenders. Bartley, a fine young patrolman, seemed self-conscious; the\n ladies seemed not to be.", "\"But for Pete's sake, Molly says the calls were going on for a long\n time! I phoned you only a short time ago and it must have taken her\n nearly two hours to get here from Oyster Bay.\"\n\n\n \"Then you must have done it twice and the vibrations in the\n floor—something like that—just happened to cause the right induction\n impulses. Yes, I know how you feel,\" he said, seeing my expression.\n \"It's beginning to bear down.\"\n\n\n Molly was through telephoning and suggested going out for dinner. I was\n so pleased to see her that I'd forgotten all about being hungry.\n\n\n \"I'm in no mood to cook,\" she said. \"Let's get away from all this.\"\n\n\n McGill raised an eyebrow. \"If all this, as you call it, will let us.\"\n\n\n In the lobby, we ran into Nat, looking smug in a journalistic way.", "When we got to the restaurant, it was crowded but cool—although it\n didn't stay cool for long. We sat down at a side table near the door\n and ordered Tom Collinses as we looked at the menu. Sitting at the\n next table were a fat lady, wearing a very long, brilliant green\n evening gown, and a dried-up sour-looking man in a tux. When the waiter\n returned, they preempted him and began ordering dinner fussily: cold\n cuts for the man, and vichyssoise, lobster salad and strawberry parfait\n for the fat lady.", "\"If you want your umbrella, Mrs. Graham,\" Danny said, \"it's at the\n station house. What there's left of it, that is.\"\n\n\n Molly thanked him and there was a short pause, during which I felt\n the speculative regard of the lieutenant. I pulled out a packet of\n cigarettes, which I had opened, as always, by tearing off the top. I\n happened to have it upside down and all the cigarettes fell out. Before\n I could move my foot to obliterate what they had spelled out on the\n sidewalk, the two cops saw it. The lieutenant gave me a hard look, but\n said nothing. I quickly kicked the insulting cigarettes into the gutter.", "The other bartender gave him a fresh shaker, but the same thing\n happened, and I saw no more because the customers sitting at the bar\n crowded around in front of him, offering advice. Our waiter came back,\n baffled, saying he'd have the drinks in a moment, and went to the\n kitchen. When he returned, he had madame's vichyssoise and some rolls,\n which he put down, and then went to the bar, where the audience had\n grown larger.\n\n\n Molly lit a cigarette and said, \"I suppose this is all part of it,\n Alec. Incidentally, it seems to be getting warmer in here.\"", "It was, and I had the feeling the place was quieter—a background noise\n had stopped. It dawned on me that I no longer heard the faint hum of\n the air-conditioner over the door, and as I started to say so, I made\n a gesture toward it. My hand collided with Molly's when she tapped her\n cigarette over the ashtray, and the cigarette landed in the neighboring\n vichyssoise.\n\n\n \"Hey! What's the idea?\" snarled the sour-looking man.\n\n\n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" I said. \"It was an accident. I—\"\n\n\n \"Throwing cigarettes at people!\" the fat lady said.", "While I waited, I thought I might try getting down a few paragraphs of\n my novel—perhaps something would come now. It did, but as I came to a\n point where I was about to put down the word \"agurgling,\" I decided it\n was too reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan, and stopped at the letter\n \"R.\" Then I saw that I had unaccountably hit all four keys one step to\n the side of the correct ones, and tore out the page, with my face red.\n\n\n This was absolutely not my day.\n\"Well,\" McGill said, \"nothing you've told me is impossible or\n supernatural. Just very, very improbable. In fact, the odds against\n that poker game alone would lead me to suspect Nat, well as I know him.\n It's all those other things....\"\n\n\n He got up and walked over to the window and looked at the hot twilight\n while I waited. Then he turned around; he had a look of concern.", "When I picked up the receiver, the line sounded dead and I thought,\nmore\ntrouble. Then I heard a man cough and I said hello. McGill's\n voice said, \"Alec? You must have picked up the receiver just as we were\n connected. That's a damn funny coincidence.\"\n\n\n \"Not in the least,\" I said. \"Come on over here. I've got something for\n you to work on.\"\n\n\n \"Well, as a matter of fact, I was calling up to ask you and Molly—\"\n\n\n \"Molly's away for the week. Can you get over here quick? It's urgent.\"\n\n\n \"At once,\" he said, and hung up.", "The sight of this threw another driver into a skid, and when he and\n the taxi had stopped sliding around, they were face to face, arranged\n crosswise to the street. This gave them exactly no room to move either\n forward or backward, for the car had its back to a hydrant and the taxi\n to a lamp.\n\n\n Although rather narrow, this is a two-way street, and in no time at\n all, traffic was stacked up from both directions as far as the avenues.\n Everyone was honking his horn.\n\n\n Danny was furious—more so when he tried to put through a call to his\n station house from the box opposite.\n\n\n It was out of order.\nUpstairs, the wind was blowing into the apartment and I closed the\n windows, mainly to shut out the tumult and the shouting. Nat had\n brightened up considerably.", "McGill grinned. \"Don't be superstitious. And especially don't be\n anthropomorphic.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if it's the opposite of random, it's got to be a form of life.\"\n\n\n \"On what basis? All we know for certain is that random motions are\n being rearranged. A crystal, for example, is not life, but it's a\n non-random arrangement of particles.... I wonder.\" He had a faraway,\n frowning look.\n\n\n I was beginning to feel hungry and the drinks had worn off.\n\n\n \"Let's go out and eat,\" I said, \"There's not a damn thing in the\n kitchen and I'm not allowed to cook. Only eggs and coffee.\"", "Damn the heat, damn the pencil, damn Madison Avenue and advertising.\n My drink was gone and I went back to the kitchen and read Molly's\n notes again to see if they would be like a letter from her. I noticed\n one that I had missed, pinned to the door of the dumbwaiter: \"Garbage\n picked up at 6:30 AM so the idea is to Put it Here the Night Before. I\n love you.\" What can you do when the girl loves you?\n\n\n I made another drink and went and stared out of the living room window\n at the roof opposite. The Sun was out again and a man with a stick was\n exercising his flock of pigeons. They wheeled in a circle, hoping to be\n allowed to perch, but were not allowed to.", "\"I'll stay for one more drink and then I'm due at the office,\" he said.\n \"You know, I think this would make an item for the paper.\" He grinned\n and nodded toward the pandemonium.\n\n\n When he was gone, I noticed it was getting dark and turned on the desk\n lamp. Then I saw the curtains. They were all tied in knots, except\n one. That was tied in three knots.\n\n\n All\nright\n, I told myself, it was the wind. But I felt the time had\n come for me to get expert advice, so I went to the phone to call\n McGill. McGill is an assistant professor of mathematics at a university\n uptown and lives near us. He is highly imaginative, but we believe he\n knows everything.", "I went into our little kitchen to make a drink and reread the\n directions Molly had left, telling me how to get along by myself until\n she got back from her mother's in Oyster Bay, a matter of ten days.\n How to make coffee, how to open a can, whom to call if I took sick and\n such. My wife used to be a trained nurse and she is quite convinced\n that I cannot take a breath without her. She is right, but not for the\n reasons she supposes.\n\n\n I opened the refrigerator to get some ice and saw another notice: \"When\n you take out the Milk or Butter, Put it Right Back. And Close the Door,\n too.\"", "suddenly turned into a monstrosity of order!\nWhen I got home from the office, I was not so much tired as beaten\n down, but the effect is similar. I let myself into the apartment, which\n had an absentee-wife look, and took a cold shower. The present downtown\n temperature, according to the radio, was eighty-seven degrees, but\n according to my Greenwich Village thermometer, it was ninety-six. I got\n dressed and went into the living room, and wished ardently that my\n wife Molly were here to tell me why the whole place looked so woebegone.\n\n\n What do they do, I asked myself, that I have left undone? I've vacuumed\n the carpet, I've dusted and I've straightened the cushions.... Ah! The\n ashtrays. I emptied them, washed them and put them back, but still the\n place looked wife-deserted.", "\"I really didn't mean to,\" I began again, getting up. There must have\n been a hole in the edge of their tablecloth which one of my cuff\n buttons caught in, because as I stepped out from between the closely\n set tables, I pulled everything—tablecloth, silver, water glasses,\n ashtrays and the vichyssoise-à-la-nicotine—onto the floor.\n\n\n The fat lady surged from the banquette and slapped me meatily. The man\n licked his thumb and danced as boxers are popularly supposed to do. The\n owner of the place, a man with thick black eyebrows, hustled toward us\n with a determined manner. I tried to explain what had happened, but I\n was outshouted, and the owner frowned darkly.", "The subway gave a repeat performance going home, and as I got to the\n apartment house we live in, the cop on the afternoon beat was standing\n there talking to the doorman.\n\n\n He said, \"Hello, Mr. Graham. I guess you must have just have missed it\n at your office building.\" I looked blank and he explained, \"We just\n heard it a little while ago: all six elevators in your building jammed\n at the same time. Sounds crazy. I guess you just missed it.\"\n\n\n Anything can happen in advertising, I thought. \"That's right, Danny, I\n just missed it,\" I said, and went on in.\n\n\n Psychiatry tells us that some people are accident-prone; I, on the\n other hand, seemed recently to be coincidence-prone, fluke-happy, and\n except for the alarm clock, I'd had no control over what had been going\n on.", "There was a faint bang and the thing disintegrated. It knocked him on\n his back, but he got right up and I realized he was not hurt. At the\n moment of the explosion—if so feeble a thing can be called one—I\n felt something sting my face and, on touching it, found blood on my\n hand. I mopped at it with my handkerchief but, though slight, the\n bleeding would not stop, so I went into a drugstore and bought some\n pink adhesive which I put on the tiny cut. When I got to the studio, I\n found that I had missed the story conference.\n\n\n During the day, by actual count, I heard the phrase \"I'm just\n spitballing\" eight times, and another Madison Avenue favorite,\n \"The whole ball of wax,\" twelve times. However, my story had been\n accepted without change because nobody had noticed my absence from the\n conference room. There you have what is known as the Advertising World,\n the Advertising game or the advertising racket, depending upon which\n rung of the ladder you have achieved.", "\"I've been put on the story—who could be better?—I live here. So far,\n I don't quite get what's been happening. I've been talking to Danny,\n but he didn't say much. I got the feeling he thinks you're involved in\n some mystical, Hibernian way. Hello, McGill, what's with you?\"\n\n\n \"He's got a theory,\" said Molly. \"Come and eat with us and he'll tell\n you all about it.\"\n\n\n Since we decided on an air-conditioned restaurant nearby on Sixth\n Avenue, we walked. The jam of cars didn't seem to be any less than\n before and we saw Danny again. He was talking to a police lieutenant,\n and when he caught sight of us, he said something that made the\n lieutenant look at us with interest. Particularly at me.", "The doorbell rang. We were not surprised to find it was the telephone\n repairman. He took the set apart and clucked like a hen.\n\n\n \"I guess you dropped it on the floor, mister,\" he said with strong\n disapproval.\n\n\n \"Certainly not,\" I said. \"Is it broken?\"\n\n\n \"Not exactly\nbroken\n, but—\" He shook his head and took it apart some\n more.\nMcGill went over and they discussed the problem in undertones. Finally\n the man left and Molly called her mother to reassure her. McGill tried\n to explain to me what had happened with the phone.\n\n\n \"You must have joggled something loose. And then you replaced the\n receiver in such a way that the contact wasn't quite open.\"" ], [ "The doorbell rang. We were not surprised to find it was the telephone\n repairman. He took the set apart and clucked like a hen.\n\n\n \"I guess you dropped it on the floor, mister,\" he said with strong\n disapproval.\n\n\n \"Certainly not,\" I said. \"Is it broken?\"\n\n\n \"Not exactly\nbroken\n, but—\" He shook his head and took it apart some\n more.\nMcGill went over and they discussed the problem in undertones. Finally\n the man left and Molly called her mother to reassure her. McGill tried\n to explain to me what had happened with the phone.\n\n\n \"You must have joggled something loose. And then you replaced the\n receiver in such a way that the contact wasn't quite open.\"", "\"But for Pete's sake, Molly says the calls were going on for a long\n time! I phoned you only a short time ago and it must have taken her\n nearly two hours to get here from Oyster Bay.\"\n\n\n \"Then you must have done it twice and the vibrations in the\n floor—something like that—just happened to cause the right induction\n impulses. Yes, I know how you feel,\" he said, seeing my expression.\n \"It's beginning to bear down.\"\n\n\n Molly was through telephoning and suggested going out for dinner. I was\n so pleased to see her that I'd forgotten all about being hungry.\n\n\n \"I'm in no mood to cook,\" she said. \"Let's get away from all this.\"\n\n\n McGill raised an eyebrow. \"If all this, as you call it, will let us.\"\n\n\n In the lobby, we ran into Nat, looking smug in a journalistic way.", "When I picked up the receiver, the line sounded dead and I thought,\nmore\ntrouble. Then I heard a man cough and I said hello. McGill's\n voice said, \"Alec? You must have picked up the receiver just as we were\n connected. That's a damn funny coincidence.\"\n\n\n \"Not in the least,\" I said. \"Come on over here. I've got something for\n you to work on.\"\n\n\n \"Well, as a matter of fact, I was calling up to ask you and Molly—\"\n\n\n \"Molly's away for the week. Can you get over here quick? It's urgent.\"\n\n\n \"At once,\" he said, and hung up.", "\"I was so worried, and when I saw all this, I didn't know what to\n think.\" She pointed to the stalled cars. \"Are you really all right?\"\n\n\n \"Of course I'm all right. But why....\"\n\n\n \"The Oyster Bay operator said someone kept dialing and dialing Mother's\n number and there wasn't anyone on the line, so then she had it traced\n and it came from our phone here. I kept calling up, but I only got a\n busy signal. Oh, dear, are you\nsure\nyou're all right?\"\n\n\n I put my arm around her and glanced at McGill. He had an inward look.\n Then I caught Danny's eye. It had a thoughtful, almost suspicious cast\n to it.\n\n\n \"Trouble does seem to follow you, Mr. Graham,\" was all he said.", "It was, and I had the feeling the place was quieter—a background noise\n had stopped. It dawned on me that I no longer heard the faint hum of\n the air-conditioner over the door, and as I started to say so, I made\n a gesture toward it. My hand collided with Molly's when she tapped her\n cigarette over the ashtray, and the cigarette landed in the neighboring\n vichyssoise.\n\n\n \"Hey! What's the idea?\" snarled the sour-looking man.\n\n\n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" I said. \"It was an accident. I—\"\n\n\n \"Throwing cigarettes at people!\" the fat lady said.", "The sight of this threw another driver into a skid, and when he and\n the taxi had stopped sliding around, they were face to face, arranged\n crosswise to the street. This gave them exactly no room to move either\n forward or backward, for the car had its back to a hydrant and the taxi\n to a lamp.\n\n\n Although rather narrow, this is a two-way street, and in no time at\n all, traffic was stacked up from both directions as far as the avenues.\n Everyone was honking his horn.\n\n\n Danny was furious—more so when he tried to put through a call to his\n station house from the box opposite.\n\n\n It was out of order.\nUpstairs, the wind was blowing into the apartment and I closed the\n windows, mainly to shut out the tumult and the shouting. Nat had\n brightened up considerably.", "While I waited, I thought I might try getting down a few paragraphs of\n my novel—perhaps something would come now. It did, but as I came to a\n point where I was about to put down the word \"agurgling,\" I decided it\n was too reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan, and stopped at the letter\n \"R.\" Then I saw that I had unaccountably hit all four keys one step to\n the side of the correct ones, and tore out the page, with my face red.\n\n\n This was absolutely not my day.\n\"Well,\" McGill said, \"nothing you've told me is impossible or\n supernatural. Just very, very improbable. In fact, the odds against\n that poker game alone would lead me to suspect Nat, well as I know him.\n It's all those other things....\"\n\n\n He got up and walked over to the window and looked at the hot twilight\n while I waited. Then he turned around; he had a look of concern.", "We put on our hats and went down to the street. From either end, we\n could hear wrecking trucks towing away the stalled cars. There were,\n by this time, a number of harassed cops directing the maneuver and we\n heard one of them say to Danny, \"I don't know what the hell's going\n on around here. Every goddam car's got something the matter with it.\n They can't none of them back out for one reason or another. Never seen\n anything like it.\"\n\n\n Near us, two pedestrians were doing a curious little two-step as they\n tried to pass one another; as soon as one of them moved aside to let\n the other pass, the other would move to the same side. They both had\n embarrassed grins on their faces, but before long their grins were\n replaced by looks of suspicion and then determination.", "The subway gave a repeat performance going home, and as I got to the\n apartment house we live in, the cop on the afternoon beat was standing\n there talking to the doorman.\n\n\n He said, \"Hello, Mr. Graham. I guess you must have just have missed it\n at your office building.\" I looked blank and he explained, \"We just\n heard it a little while ago: all six elevators in your building jammed\n at the same time. Sounds crazy. I guess you just missed it.\"\n\n\n Anything can happen in advertising, I thought. \"That's right, Danny, I\n just missed it,\" I said, and went on in.\n\n\n Psychiatry tells us that some people are accident-prone; I, on the\n other hand, seemed recently to be coincidence-prone, fluke-happy, and\n except for the alarm clock, I'd had no control over what had been going\n on.", "The other bartender gave him a fresh shaker, but the same thing\n happened, and I saw no more because the customers sitting at the bar\n crowded around in front of him, offering advice. Our waiter came back,\n baffled, saying he'd have the drinks in a moment, and went to the\n kitchen. When he returned, he had madame's vichyssoise and some rolls,\n which he put down, and then went to the bar, where the audience had\n grown larger.\n\n\n Molly lit a cigarette and said, \"I suppose this is all part of it,\n Alec. Incidentally, it seems to be getting warmer in here.\"", "\"All right, smart guy!\" they shouted in unison, and barged ahead,\n only to collide. They backed off and threw simultaneous punches\n which met in mid-air. Then began one of the most remarkable bouts\n ever witnessed—a fight in which fist hit fist but never anything\n else, until both champions backed away undefeated, muttering identical\n excuses and threats.\nDanny appeared at that moment. His face was dripping. \"You all right,\n Mr. Graham?\" he asked. \"I don't know what's going on around here, but\n ever since I came on this afternoon, things are going crazy. Bartley!\"\n he shouted—he could succeed as a hog-caller. \"Bring those dames over\n here!\"\n\n\n Three women in a confused wrangle, with their half-open umbrellas\n intertwined, were brought across the street, which meant climbing over\n fenders. Bartley, a fine young patrolman, seemed self-conscious; the\n ladies seemed not to be.", "There was a faint bang and the thing disintegrated. It knocked him on\n his back, but he got right up and I realized he was not hurt. At the\n moment of the explosion—if so feeble a thing can be called one—I\n felt something sting my face and, on touching it, found blood on my\n hand. I mopped at it with my handkerchief but, though slight, the\n bleeding would not stop, so I went into a drugstore and bought some\n pink adhesive which I put on the tiny cut. When I got to the studio, I\n found that I had missed the story conference.\n\n\n During the day, by actual count, I heard the phrase \"I'm just\n spitballing\" eight times, and another Madison Avenue favorite,\n \"The whole ball of wax,\" twelve times. However, my story had been\n accepted without change because nobody had noticed my absence from the\n conference room. There you have what is known as the Advertising World,\n the Advertising game or the advertising racket, depending upon which\n rung of the ladder you have achieved.", "suddenly turned into a monstrosity of order!\nWhen I got home from the office, I was not so much tired as beaten\n down, but the effect is similar. I let myself into the apartment, which\n had an absentee-wife look, and took a cold shower. The present downtown\n temperature, according to the radio, was eighty-seven degrees, but\n according to my Greenwich Village thermometer, it was ninety-six. I got\n dressed and went into the living room, and wished ardently that my\n wife Molly were here to tell me why the whole place looked so woebegone.\n\n\n What do they do, I asked myself, that I have left undone? I've vacuumed\n the carpet, I've dusted and I've straightened the cushions.... Ah! The\n ashtrays. I emptied them, washed them and put them back, but still the\n place looked wife-deserted.", "\"I'll stay for one more drink and then I'm due at the office,\" he said.\n \"You know, I think this would make an item for the paper.\" He grinned\n and nodded toward the pandemonium.\n\n\n When he was gone, I noticed it was getting dark and turned on the desk\n lamp. Then I saw the curtains. They were all tied in knots, except\n one. That was tied in three knots.\n\n\n All\nright\n, I told myself, it was the wind. But I felt the time had\n come for me to get expert advice, so I went to the phone to call\n McGill. McGill is an assistant professor of mathematics at a university\n uptown and lives near us. He is highly imaginative, but we believe he\n knows everything.", "\"I should say it was made of the motions. There's a similar idea about\n the atom. Another thing that's like a crystal is that it appears to\n be forming around a nucleus not of its own material—the way a speck\n of sand thrown into a supersaturated solution becomes the nucleus of\n crystallization.\"\n\n\n \"Sounds like the pearl in an oyster,\" Molly said, and gave me an\n impertinent look.\n\n\n \"Why,\" I asked McGill, \"did you say the coins couldn't have the same\n date? I mean apart from the off chance I got them that way.\"\n\n\n \"Because I don't think this thing got going before today and\n everything that's happened can all be described as improbable motions\n here and now. The dates were already there, and to change them would\n require retroactive action, reversing time. That's out, in my book.\n That telephone now—\"", "Intimidated, I took my drink into the living room and sat down in\n front of the typewriter. As I stared at the novel that was to liberate\n me from Madison Avenue, I noticed a mistake and picked up a pencil.\n When I put it down, it rolled off the desk, and with my eyes on the\n manuscript, I groped under the chair for it. Then I looked down. The\n pencil was standing on its end.\nThere, I thought to myself, is that one chance in a million we hear\n about, and picked up the pencil. I turned back to my novel and drank\n some of the highball in hopes of inspiration and surcease from the\n muggy heat, but nothing came. I went back and read the whole chapter\n to try to get a forward momentum, but came to a dead stop at the last\n sentence.", "\"I really didn't mean to,\" I began again, getting up. There must have\n been a hole in the edge of their tablecloth which one of my cuff\n buttons caught in, because as I stepped out from between the closely\n set tables, I pulled everything—tablecloth, silver, water glasses,\n ashtrays and the vichyssoise-à-la-nicotine—onto the floor.\n\n\n The fat lady surged from the banquette and slapped me meatily. The man\n licked his thumb and danced as boxers are popularly supposed to do. The\n owner of the place, a man with thick black eyebrows, hustled toward us\n with a determined manner. I tried to explain what had happened, but I\n was outshouted, and the owner frowned darkly.", "The nearest man struck them up from his hand. \"Okay, Houdini! So\n they're not marked! All I know is five straight....\"\n\n\n His voice trailed away. He and the others stared at the scattered cards\n on the floor. About half were face down, as might be expected, and the\n rest face up—all red.\nSomeone must have rung, because at that moment the elevator arrived and\n the four men, with half frightened, incredulous looks, and in silence,\n got in and were taken down. My friend stood looking at the neatly\n arranged cards.\n\n\n \"Judas!\" he said, and started to pick them up. \"Will you look at that!\n My God, what a session....\"\n\n\n I helped him and said to come in for a drink and tell me all about it,\n but I had an idea what I would hear.\n\n\n After a while, he calmed down, but he still seemed dazed.", "\"All right, now, Mrs. Mac-Philip!\" one of them said. \"Leave go of my\n umbrella and we'll say no more about it!\"\n\n\n \"And so now it's Missus Mac-Philip, is it?\" said her adversary.\n\n\n The third, a younger one with her back turned to us, her umbrella also\n caught in the tangle, pulled at it in a tentative way, at which the\n other two glared at her. She turned her head away and tried to let go,\n but the handle was caught in her glove. She looked up and I saw it was\n Molly. My nurse-wife.\n\n\n \"Oh, Alec!\" she said, and managed to detach herself. \"Are you all\n right?\" Was\nI\nall right!\n\n\n \"Molly! What are you doing here?\"", "When we got upstairs, I turned to McGill. \"Explain to Molly,\" I said.\n \"And incidentally to me. I'm not properly briefed yet.\"\n\n\n He did so, and when he got to the summing up, I had the feeling she was\n a jump ahead of him.\n\n\n \"In other words, you think it's something organic?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" McGill said, \"I'm trying to think of anything else it might be.\n I'm not doing so well,\" he confessed.\n\n\n \"But so far as I can see,\" Molly answered, \"it's mere probability, and\n without any over-all pattern.\"" ], [ "\"All right, smart guy!\" they shouted in unison, and barged ahead,\n only to collide. They backed off and threw simultaneous punches\n which met in mid-air. Then began one of the most remarkable bouts\n ever witnessed—a fight in which fist hit fist but never anything\n else, until both champions backed away undefeated, muttering identical\n excuses and threats.\nDanny appeared at that moment. His face was dripping. \"You all right,\n Mr. Graham?\" he asked. \"I don't know what's going on around here, but\n ever since I came on this afternoon, things are going crazy. Bartley!\"\n he shouted—he could succeed as a hog-caller. \"Bring those dames over\n here!\"\n\n\n Three women in a confused wrangle, with their half-open umbrellas\n intertwined, were brought across the street, which meant climbing over\n fenders. Bartley, a fine young patrolman, seemed self-conscious; the\n ladies seemed not to be.", "The subway gave a repeat performance going home, and as I got to the\n apartment house we live in, the cop on the afternoon beat was standing\n there talking to the doorman.\n\n\n He said, \"Hello, Mr. Graham. I guess you must have just have missed it\n at your office building.\" I looked blank and he explained, \"We just\n heard it a little while ago: all six elevators in your building jammed\n at the same time. Sounds crazy. I guess you just missed it.\"\n\n\n Anything can happen in advertising, I thought. \"That's right, Danny, I\n just missed it,\" I said, and went on in.\n\n\n Psychiatry tells us that some people are accident-prone; I, on the\n other hand, seemed recently to be coincidence-prone, fluke-happy, and\n except for the alarm clock, I'd had no control over what had been going\n on.", "While I waited, I thought I might try getting down a few paragraphs of\n my novel—perhaps something would come now. It did, but as I came to a\n point where I was about to put down the word \"agurgling,\" I decided it\n was too reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan, and stopped at the letter\n \"R.\" Then I saw that I had unaccountably hit all four keys one step to\n the side of the correct ones, and tore out the page, with my face red.\n\n\n This was absolutely not my day.\n\"Well,\" McGill said, \"nothing you've told me is impossible or\n supernatural. Just very, very improbable. In fact, the odds against\n that poker game alone would lead me to suspect Nat, well as I know him.\n It's all those other things....\"\n\n\n He got up and walked over to the window and looked at the hot twilight\n while I waited. Then he turned around; he had a look of concern.", "\"If you want your umbrella, Mrs. Graham,\" Danny said, \"it's at the\n station house. What there's left of it, that is.\"\n\n\n Molly thanked him and there was a short pause, during which I felt\n the speculative regard of the lieutenant. I pulled out a packet of\n cigarettes, which I had opened, as always, by tearing off the top. I\n happened to have it upside down and all the cigarettes fell out. Before\n I could move my foot to obliterate what they had spelled out on the\n sidewalk, the two cops saw it. The lieutenant gave me a hard look, but\n said nothing. I quickly kicked the insulting cigarettes into the gutter.", "\"I was so worried, and when I saw all this, I didn't know what to\n think.\" She pointed to the stalled cars. \"Are you really all right?\"\n\n\n \"Of course I'm all right. But why....\"\n\n\n \"The Oyster Bay operator said someone kept dialing and dialing Mother's\n number and there wasn't anyone on the line, so then she had it traced\n and it came from our phone here. I kept calling up, but I only got a\n busy signal. Oh, dear, are you\nsure\nyou're all right?\"\n\n\n I put my arm around her and glanced at McGill. He had an inward look.\n Then I caught Danny's eye. It had a thoughtful, almost suspicious cast\n to it.\n\n\n \"Trouble does seem to follow you, Mr. Graham,\" was all he said.", "\"Never seen anything to equal it,\" he said. \"Wouldn't have believed\n it. Those guys\ndidn't\nbelieve it. Every round normal, nothing\n unusual about the hands—three of a kind, a low straight, that sort\n of thing and one guy got queens over tens, until it gets to be\nmy\ndeal. Brother! Straight flush to the king—every time! And each time,\n somebody else has four aces....\"\n\n\n He started to sweat again, so I got up to fix him another drink. There\n was one quart of club soda left, but when I tried to open it, the top\n broke and glass chips got into the bottle.\n\n\n \"I'll have to go down for more soda,\" I said.\n\n\n \"I'll come, too. I need air.\"", "\"Do you mean,\" I asked in some confusion, \"that some form of life is\n controlling the coins and—the other things?\"\nHe shook his head. \"No. All I mean is that improbable things usually\n have improbable explanations. When I see a natural law being broken,\n I don't say to myself, 'Here's a miracle.' I revise my version of the\n book of rules. Something—I don't know what—is going on, and it seems\n to involve probability, and it seems to center around you. Were you\n still in that building when the elevators stuck? Or near it?\"\n\n\n \"I guess I must have been. It happened just after I left.\"\n\n\n \"Hm. You're the center, all right. But why?\"\n\n\n \"Center of what?\" I asked. \"I feel as though I were the center of an\n electrical storm. Something has it in for me!\"", "McGill grinned. \"Don't be superstitious. And especially don't be\n anthropomorphic.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if it's the opposite of random, it's got to be a form of life.\"\n\n\n \"On what basis? All we know for certain is that random motions are\n being rearranged. A crystal, for example, is not life, but it's a\n non-random arrangement of particles.... I wonder.\" He had a faraway,\n frowning look.\n\n\n I was beginning to feel hungry and the drinks had worn off.\n\n\n \"Let's go out and eat,\" I said, \"There's not a damn thing in the\n kitchen and I'm not allowed to cook. Only eggs and coffee.\"", "Intimidated, I took my drink into the living room and sat down in\n front of the typewriter. As I stared at the novel that was to liberate\n me from Madison Avenue, I noticed a mistake and picked up a pencil.\n When I put it down, it rolled off the desk, and with my eyes on the\n manuscript, I groped under the chair for it. Then I looked down. The\n pencil was standing on its end.\nThere, I thought to myself, is that one chance in a million we hear\n about, and picked up the pencil. I turned back to my novel and drank\n some of the highball in hopes of inspiration and surcease from the\n muggy heat, but nothing came. I went back and read the whole chapter\n to try to get a forward momentum, but came to a dead stop at the last\n sentence.", "When we got upstairs, I turned to McGill. \"Explain to Molly,\" I said.\n \"And incidentally to me. I'm not properly briefed yet.\"\n\n\n He did so, and when he got to the summing up, I had the feeling she was\n a jump ahead of him.\n\n\n \"In other words, you think it's something organic?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" McGill said, \"I'm trying to think of anything else it might be.\n I'm not doing so well,\" he confessed.\n\n\n \"But so far as I can see,\" Molly answered, \"it's mere probability, and\n without any over-all pattern.\"", "At the delicatessen on the corner, the man gave me three bottles in\n what must have been a wet bag, because as he handed them to me over the\n top of the cold-meat display, the bottom gave and they fell onto the\n tile floor. None of them broke, although the fall must have been from\n at least five feet. Nat was too wound up in his thoughts to notice and\n I was getting used to miracles. We left the proprietor with his mouth\n open and met Danny, the cop, looking in at the door, also with his\n mouth open.\nOn the sidewalk, a man walking in front of Nat stooped suddenly to tie\n his shoe and Nat, to avoid bumping him, stepped off the curb and a taxi\n swerved to avoid Nat. The street was still wet and the taxi skidded,", "There was a faint bang and the thing disintegrated. It knocked him on\n his back, but he got right up and I realized he was not hurt. At the\n moment of the explosion—if so feeble a thing can be called one—I\n felt something sting my face and, on touching it, found blood on my\n hand. I mopped at it with my handkerchief but, though slight, the\n bleeding would not stop, so I went into a drugstore and bought some\n pink adhesive which I put on the tiny cut. When I got to the studio, I\n found that I had missed the story conference.\n\n\n During the day, by actual count, I heard the phrase \"I'm just\n spitballing\" eight times, and another Madison Avenue favorite,\n \"The whole ball of wax,\" twelve times. However, my story had been\n accepted without change because nobody had noticed my absence from the\n conference room. There you have what is known as the Advertising World,\n the Advertising game or the advertising racket, depending upon which\n rung of the ladder you have achieved.", "The other bartender gave him a fresh shaker, but the same thing\n happened, and I saw no more because the customers sitting at the bar\n crowded around in front of him, offering advice. Our waiter came back,\n baffled, saying he'd have the drinks in a moment, and went to the\n kitchen. When he returned, he had madame's vichyssoise and some rolls,\n which he put down, and then went to the bar, where the audience had\n grown larger.\n\n\n Molly lit a cigarette and said, \"I suppose this is all part of it,\n Alec. Incidentally, it seems to be getting warmer in here.\"", "It was, and I had the feeling the place was quieter—a background noise\n had stopped. It dawned on me that I no longer heard the faint hum of\n the air-conditioner over the door, and as I started to say so, I made\n a gesture toward it. My hand collided with Molly's when she tapped her\n cigarette over the ashtray, and the cigarette landed in the neighboring\n vichyssoise.\n\n\n \"Hey! What's the idea?\" snarled the sour-looking man.\n\n\n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" I said. \"It was an accident. I—\"\n\n\n \"Throwing cigarettes at people!\" the fat lady said.", "We put on our hats and went down to the street. From either end, we\n could hear wrecking trucks towing away the stalled cars. There were,\n by this time, a number of harassed cops directing the maneuver and we\n heard one of them say to Danny, \"I don't know what the hell's going\n on around here. Every goddam car's got something the matter with it.\n They can't none of them back out for one reason or another. Never seen\n anything like it.\"\n\n\n Near us, two pedestrians were doing a curious little two-step as they\n tried to pass one another; as soon as one of them moved aside to let\n the other pass, the other would move to the same side. They both had\n embarrassed grins on their faces, but before long their grins were\n replaced by looks of suspicion and then determination.", "When I picked up the receiver, the line sounded dead and I thought,\nmore\ntrouble. Then I heard a man cough and I said hello. McGill's\n voice said, \"Alec? You must have picked up the receiver just as we were\n connected. That's a damn funny coincidence.\"\n\n\n \"Not in the least,\" I said. \"Come on over here. I've got something for\n you to work on.\"\n\n\n \"Well, as a matter of fact, I was calling up to ask you and Molly—\"\n\n\n \"Molly's away for the week. Can you get over here quick? It's urgent.\"\n\n\n \"At once,\" he said, and hung up.", "\"I'll stay for one more drink and then I'm due at the office,\" he said.\n \"You know, I think this would make an item for the paper.\" He grinned\n and nodded toward the pandemonium.\n\n\n When he was gone, I noticed it was getting dark and turned on the desk\n lamp. Then I saw the curtains. They were all tied in knots, except\n one. That was tied in three knots.\n\n\n All\nright\n, I told myself, it was the wind. But I felt the time had\n come for me to get expert advice, so I went to the phone to call\n McGill. McGill is an assistant professor of mathematics at a university\n uptown and lives near us. He is highly imaginative, but we believe he\n knows everything.", "\"Not quite. It has a center. Alec is the center.\"\nMolly looked at me with a curious expression for a moment. \"Do you\nfeel\nall right, darling?\" she asked me. I nodded brightly. \"You'll\n think this silly of me,\" she went on to McGill, \"but why isn't it\n something like an overactive poltergeist?\"\n\n\n \"Pure concept,\" he said. \"No genuine evidence.\"\n\n\n \"Magnetism?\"", "The sight of this threw another driver into a skid, and when he and\n the taxi had stopped sliding around, they were face to face, arranged\n crosswise to the street. This gave them exactly no room to move either\n forward or backward, for the car had its back to a hydrant and the taxi\n to a lamp.\n\n\n Although rather narrow, this is a two-way street, and in no time at\n all, traffic was stacked up from both directions as far as the avenues.\n Everyone was honking his horn.\n\n\n Danny was furious—more so when he tried to put through a call to his\n station house from the box opposite.\n\n\n It was out of order.\nUpstairs, the wind was blowing into the apartment and I closed the\n windows, mainly to shut out the tumult and the shouting. Nat had\n brightened up considerably.", "Damn the heat, damn the pencil, damn Madison Avenue and advertising.\n My drink was gone and I went back to the kitchen and read Molly's\n notes again to see if they would be like a letter from her. I noticed\n one that I had missed, pinned to the door of the dumbwaiter: \"Garbage\n picked up at 6:30 AM so the idea is to Put it Here the Night Before. I\n love you.\" What can you do when the girl loves you?\n\n\n I made another drink and went and stared out of the living room window\n at the roof opposite. The Sun was out again and a man with a stick was\n exercising his flock of pigeons. They wheeled in a circle, hoping to be\n allowed to perch, but were not allowed to." ], [ "When we got to the restaurant, it was crowded but cool—although it\n didn't stay cool for long. We sat down at a side table near the door\n and ordered Tom Collinses as we looked at the menu. Sitting at the\n next table were a fat lady, wearing a very long, brilliant green\n evening gown, and a dried-up sour-looking man in a tux. When the waiter\n returned, they preempted him and began ordering dinner fussily: cold\n cuts for the man, and vichyssoise, lobster salad and strawberry parfait\n for the fat lady.", "\"I really didn't mean to,\" I began again, getting up. There must have\n been a hole in the edge of their tablecloth which one of my cuff\n buttons caught in, because as I stepped out from between the closely\n set tables, I pulled everything—tablecloth, silver, water glasses,\n ashtrays and the vichyssoise-à-la-nicotine—onto the floor.\n\n\n The fat lady surged from the banquette and slapped me meatily. The man\n licked his thumb and danced as boxers are popularly supposed to do. The\n owner of the place, a man with thick black eyebrows, hustled toward us\n with a determined manner. I tried to explain what had happened, but I\n was outshouted, and the owner frowned darkly.", "The other bartender gave him a fresh shaker, but the same thing\n happened, and I saw no more because the customers sitting at the bar\n crowded around in front of him, offering advice. Our waiter came back,\n baffled, saying he'd have the drinks in a moment, and went to the\n kitchen. When he returned, he had madame's vichyssoise and some rolls,\n which he put down, and then went to the bar, where the audience had\n grown larger.\n\n\n Molly lit a cigarette and said, \"I suppose this is all part of it,\n Alec. Incidentally, it seems to be getting warmer in here.\"", "It was, and I had the feeling the place was quieter—a background noise\n had stopped. It dawned on me that I no longer heard the faint hum of\n the air-conditioner over the door, and as I started to say so, I made\n a gesture toward it. My hand collided with Molly's when she tapped her\n cigarette over the ashtray, and the cigarette landed in the neighboring\n vichyssoise.\n\n\n \"Hey! What's the idea?\" snarled the sour-looking man.\n\n\n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" I said. \"It was an accident. I—\"\n\n\n \"Throwing cigarettes at people!\" the fat lady said.", "The sight of this threw another driver into a skid, and when he and\n the taxi had stopped sliding around, they were face to face, arranged\n crosswise to the street. This gave them exactly no room to move either\n forward or backward, for the car had its back to a hydrant and the taxi\n to a lamp.\n\n\n Although rather narrow, this is a two-way street, and in no time at\n all, traffic was stacked up from both directions as far as the avenues.\n Everyone was honking his horn.\n\n\n Danny was furious—more so when he tried to put through a call to his\n station house from the box opposite.\n\n\n It was out of order.\nUpstairs, the wind was blowing into the apartment and I closed the\n windows, mainly to shut out the tumult and the shouting. Nat had\n brightened up considerably.", "\"All right, smart guy!\" they shouted in unison, and barged ahead,\n only to collide. They backed off and threw simultaneous punches\n which met in mid-air. Then began one of the most remarkable bouts\n ever witnessed—a fight in which fist hit fist but never anything\n else, until both champions backed away undefeated, muttering identical\n excuses and threats.\nDanny appeared at that moment. His face was dripping. \"You all right,\n Mr. Graham?\" he asked. \"I don't know what's going on around here, but\n ever since I came on this afternoon, things are going crazy. Bartley!\"\n he shouted—he could succeed as a hog-caller. \"Bring those dames over\n here!\"\n\n\n Three women in a confused wrangle, with their half-open umbrellas\n intertwined, were brought across the street, which meant climbing over\n fenders. Bartley, a fine young patrolman, seemed self-conscious; the\n ladies seemed not to be.", "We put on our hats and went down to the street. From either end, we\n could hear wrecking trucks towing away the stalled cars. There were,\n by this time, a number of harassed cops directing the maneuver and we\n heard one of them say to Danny, \"I don't know what the hell's going\n on around here. Every goddam car's got something the matter with it.\n They can't none of them back out for one reason or another. Never seen\n anything like it.\"\n\n\n Near us, two pedestrians were doing a curious little two-step as they\n tried to pass one another; as soon as one of them moved aside to let\n the other pass, the other would move to the same side. They both had\n embarrassed grins on their faces, but before long their grins were\n replaced by looks of suspicion and then determination.", "\"I've been put on the story—who could be better?—I live here. So far,\n I don't quite get what's been happening. I've been talking to Danny,\n but he didn't say much. I got the feeling he thinks you're involved in\n some mystical, Hibernian way. Hello, McGill, what's with you?\"\n\n\n \"He's got a theory,\" said Molly. \"Come and eat with us and he'll tell\n you all about it.\"\n\n\n Since we decided on an air-conditioned restaurant nearby on Sixth\n Avenue, we walked. The jam of cars didn't seem to be any less than\n before and we saw Danny again. He was talking to a police lieutenant,\n and when he caught sight of us, he said something that made the\n lieutenant look at us with interest. Particularly at me.", "\"But for Pete's sake, Molly says the calls were going on for a long\n time! I phoned you only a short time ago and it must have taken her\n nearly two hours to get here from Oyster Bay.\"\n\n\n \"Then you must have done it twice and the vibrations in the\n floor—something like that—just happened to cause the right induction\n impulses. Yes, I know how you feel,\" he said, seeing my expression.\n \"It's beginning to bear down.\"\n\n\n Molly was through telephoning and suggested going out for dinner. I was\n so pleased to see her that I'd forgotten all about being hungry.\n\n\n \"I'm in no mood to cook,\" she said. \"Let's get away from all this.\"\n\n\n McGill raised an eyebrow. \"If all this, as you call it, will let us.\"\n\n\n In the lobby, we ran into Nat, looking smug in a journalistic way.", "\"I was so worried, and when I saw all this, I didn't know what to\n think.\" She pointed to the stalled cars. \"Are you really all right?\"\n\n\n \"Of course I'm all right. But why....\"\n\n\n \"The Oyster Bay operator said someone kept dialing and dialing Mother's\n number and there wasn't anyone on the line, so then she had it traced\n and it came from our phone here. I kept calling up, but I only got a\n busy signal. Oh, dear, are you\nsure\nyou're all right?\"\n\n\n I put my arm around her and glanced at McGill. He had an inward look.\n Then I caught Danny's eye. It had a thoughtful, almost suspicious cast\n to it.\n\n\n \"Trouble does seem to follow you, Mr. Graham,\" was all he said.", "Damn the heat, damn the pencil, damn Madison Avenue and advertising.\n My drink was gone and I went back to the kitchen and read Molly's\n notes again to see if they would be like a letter from her. I noticed\n one that I had missed, pinned to the door of the dumbwaiter: \"Garbage\n picked up at 6:30 AM so the idea is to Put it Here the Night Before. I\n love you.\" What can you do when the girl loves you?\n\n\n I made another drink and went and stared out of the living room window\n at the roof opposite. The Sun was out again and a man with a stick was\n exercising his flock of pigeons. They wheeled in a circle, hoping to be\n allowed to perch, but were not allowed to.", "\"If you want your umbrella, Mrs. Graham,\" Danny said, \"it's at the\n station house. What there's left of it, that is.\"\n\n\n Molly thanked him and there was a short pause, during which I felt\n the speculative regard of the lieutenant. I pulled out a packet of\n cigarettes, which I had opened, as always, by tearing off the top. I\n happened to have it upside down and all the cigarettes fell out. Before\n I could move my foot to obliterate what they had spelled out on the\n sidewalk, the two cops saw it. The lieutenant gave me a hard look, but\n said nothing. I quickly kicked the insulting cigarettes into the gutter.", "While I waited, I thought I might try getting down a few paragraphs of\n my novel—perhaps something would come now. It did, but as I came to a\n point where I was about to put down the word \"agurgling,\" I decided it\n was too reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan, and stopped at the letter\n \"R.\" Then I saw that I had unaccountably hit all four keys one step to\n the side of the correct ones, and tore out the page, with my face red.\n\n\n This was absolutely not my day.\n\"Well,\" McGill said, \"nothing you've told me is impossible or\n supernatural. Just very, very improbable. In fact, the odds against\n that poker game alone would lead me to suspect Nat, well as I know him.\n It's all those other things....\"\n\n\n He got up and walked over to the window and looked at the hot twilight\n while I waited. Then he turned around; he had a look of concern.", "McGill grinned. \"Don't be superstitious. And especially don't be\n anthropomorphic.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if it's the opposite of random, it's got to be a form of life.\"\n\n\n \"On what basis? All we know for certain is that random motions are\n being rearranged. A crystal, for example, is not life, but it's a\n non-random arrangement of particles.... I wonder.\" He had a faraway,\n frowning look.\n\n\n I was beginning to feel hungry and the drinks had worn off.\n\n\n \"Let's go out and eat,\" I said, \"There's not a damn thing in the\n kitchen and I'm not allowed to cook. Only eggs and coffee.\"", "suddenly turned into a monstrosity of order!\nWhen I got home from the office, I was not so much tired as beaten\n down, but the effect is similar. I let myself into the apartment, which\n had an absentee-wife look, and took a cold shower. The present downtown\n temperature, according to the radio, was eighty-seven degrees, but\n according to my Greenwich Village thermometer, it was ninety-six. I got\n dressed and went into the living room, and wished ardently that my\n wife Molly were here to tell me why the whole place looked so woebegone.\n\n\n What do they do, I asked myself, that I have left undone? I've vacuumed\n the carpet, I've dusted and I've straightened the cushions.... Ah! The\n ashtrays. I emptied them, washed them and put them back, but still the\n place looked wife-deserted.", "\"All right, now, Mrs. Mac-Philip!\" one of them said. \"Leave go of my\n umbrella and we'll say no more about it!\"\n\n\n \"And so now it's Missus Mac-Philip, is it?\" said her adversary.\n\n\n The third, a younger one with her back turned to us, her umbrella also\n caught in the tangle, pulled at it in a tentative way, at which the\n other two glared at her. She turned her head away and tried to let go,\n but the handle was caught in her glove. She looked up and I saw it was\n Molly. My nurse-wife.\n\n\n \"Oh, Alec!\" she said, and managed to detach herself. \"Are you all\n right?\" Was\nI\nall right!\n\n\n \"Molly! What are you doing here?\"", "I went into our little kitchen to make a drink and reread the\n directions Molly had left, telling me how to get along by myself until\n she got back from her mother's in Oyster Bay, a matter of ten days.\n How to make coffee, how to open a can, whom to call if I took sick and\n such. My wife used to be a trained nurse and she is quite convinced\n that I cannot take a breath without her. She is right, but not for the\n reasons she supposes.\n\n\n I opened the refrigerator to get some ice and saw another notice: \"When\n you take out the Milk or Butter, Put it Right Back. And Close the Door,\n too.\"", "There was a faint bang and the thing disintegrated. It knocked him on\n his back, but he got right up and I realized he was not hurt. At the\n moment of the explosion—if so feeble a thing can be called one—I\n felt something sting my face and, on touching it, found blood on my\n hand. I mopped at it with my handkerchief but, though slight, the\n bleeding would not stop, so I went into a drugstore and bought some\n pink adhesive which I put on the tiny cut. When I got to the studio, I\n found that I had missed the story conference.\n\n\n During the day, by actual count, I heard the phrase \"I'm just\n spitballing\" eight times, and another Madison Avenue favorite,\n \"The whole ball of wax,\" twelve times. However, my story had been\n accepted without change because nobody had noticed my absence from the\n conference room. There you have what is known as the Advertising World,\n the Advertising game or the advertising racket, depending upon which\n rung of the ladder you have achieved.", "At the delicatessen on the corner, the man gave me three bottles in\n what must have been a wet bag, because as he handed them to me over the\n top of the cold-meat display, the bottom gave and they fell onto the\n tile floor. None of them broke, although the fall must have been from\n at least five feet. Nat was too wound up in his thoughts to notice and\n I was getting used to miracles. We left the proprietor with his mouth\n open and met Danny, the cop, looking in at the door, also with his\n mouth open.\nOn the sidewalk, a man walking in front of Nat stooped suddenly to tie\n his shoe and Nat, to avoid bumping him, stepped off the curb and a taxi\n swerved to avoid Nat. The street was still wet and the taxi skidded,", "When I picked up the receiver, the line sounded dead and I thought,\nmore\ntrouble. Then I heard a man cough and I said hello. McGill's\n voice said, \"Alec? You must have picked up the receiver just as we were\n connected. That's a damn funny coincidence.\"\n\n\n \"Not in the least,\" I said. \"Come on over here. I've got something for\n you to work on.\"\n\n\n \"Well, as a matter of fact, I was calling up to ask you and Molly—\"\n\n\n \"Molly's away for the week. Can you get over here quick? It's urgent.\"\n\n\n \"At once,\" he said, and hung up." ] ]
train	20028	[ "Which isn't true of this test?", "Which word best describes the author's feeling about the test?", "What is something the testers weren't given?", "What isn't a generalization that can be made from the data?", "Which isn't true of the test results?", "What isn't true of Sam Adams?", "What isn't a conclusion drawn?" ]	[ [ "the beers being used were fancy", "all testers receive the same order of beers", "it has a small testing group", "the testers come from a diverse area" ], [ "methodical", "prestigious", "formal", "amusing" ], [ "Hefeweizens", "saltines", "an import beer", "10 cups" ], [ "the most expensive beers aren't always the best", "best is very subjective", "if all people dislike the same beer, they're likely to all like the same beer", "people can rank the same item differently on two separate days" ], [ "some people were able to identify the beer based on taste", "not all people knew beers as well as they thought they did", "American beers typically scored higher", "Hefeweizens were not popular among the testers" ], [ "it is a lager the testers liked", "it scored the highest on the previous test", "people scored it differently on the second test", "it was still considered one of the Bests" ], [ "Michelob Hefeweizen is a great beer for the cost", "Anheuser-Busch lived up to its popularity", "Sam Adams was easily identifiable", "Pyramid Hefeweizen is not worth the money" ] ]	[ 4, 4, 2, 3, 4, 4, 3 ]	[ 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "on the employee-ranking scale (which determines--gasp!--how many new stock options they receive) would assume that their skill as tasters was on trial, just as much as the beer was. Of course they were right, which is what made this round", "The point of the second test was not to find the difference between cheap and expensive beers but instead to compare a variety of top-of-the-line beers. Was there one kind the tasters preferred consistently? Could they detect any of the subtleties of brewing style and provenance that microbrew customers pay such attention to when choosing some Doppelbock over a cream ale?", "For scientists who want to continue this work at home, here are a few suggestions for further research: \n\n \n\n Tell the testers ahead of time what beers they will be drinking. Ask them to rank the beers, 1 through 10, based on how well they like them. Then compare the list with the \"revealed preferences\" that come from the blind test. \n\n As a variation, show them the list ahead of time and ask them to pick out the beer they know they love and the one they know they hate. Then compare this with the \"after\" list. \n\n If you're going to test imported lagers, try Foster's or Corona rather than Grolsch. \n\n Remember to stay strictly in the scientist's role. Don't take the test yourself.", "Since the tasting panel had left the first round grumbling that cheap lagers were not a fair test of their abilities, this second round of testing was advertised to the panel as a reward.", "panelists' unspoken but obvious assumption that this time they would \"do better\" on the test. Intellectual vanity being what it is, people who had fought for and won jobs at Microsoft and who still must fight every six months for primacy", "d) Taster skill. As members of the tasting panel began to suspect, they themselves were being judged while they judged the beer. One of the tasters, No. 7, decided to live dangerously and give specific brands and breweries for Samples A through J. This man was the only panel member whose job does not involve designing Microsoft Word--and the only one to identify two or more of the beers accurately and specifically. (He spotted Redhook IPA and Redhook ESB.) The fact that the beers correctly identified were the two most popular microbrews in the Seattle area suggests that familiarity is the main ingredient in knowing your beer.", "Here is what happened and what it meant: \n\n 1. Procedure. This was similar in most ways to the experimental approach of Round 1. The nine testers who showed up were a subset of the original 12. The missing three dropped out with excuses of \"my wife is sick\" (one person) and \"meeting is running long\" (two). \n\n As before, each tester found before him on a table 10 red plastic cups, labeled A through J. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the beers. The A-to-J labeling scheme was the same for all testers. Instead of saltines for palate-cleansing, this time we had popcorn and nuts. As they began, the tasters were given these and only these clues: \n\n \n\n that the flight included one \"holdover\" beer from the previous round (Sam Adams); \n\n that it included at least one import (Bass);", "4. Data Analysis. \n\n a) Best and Worst. Compared to the lager test, we would expect the range of \"best\" choices to be more varied, since all the tested beers were supposed to be good. This expectation was most dramatically borne out in the \"Best and Worst\" rankings. \n\n The nine tasters cast a total of nine Worst votes and 11.5 Best votes. (Tester No. 1 turned in a sheet with three Best selections, or two more than his theoretical quota. Tester No. 4 listed a Best and a Best-minus, which counted as half a vote.)", "of the reward was that they would presumably enjoy the actual testing more--fewer rueful beer descriptions along the lines of \"urine\" or \"get it away!\" were expected than in the first round. The other aspect of anticipated reward was the", "But, of course, there is another possibility: that what is excluded in a blind taste test is in fact what we want, and are happy to pay for, when we sit down with a beer. The complicated label, the fancy bottle, the exotic concept that this beer has traveled from some far-off corner of Bohemia or even the Yakima Valley--all this may be cheap at the $1.25-per-pint cost difference between the cheapest and the most expensive beers. In elementary school, we all endured a standard science experiment: If you shut your eyes and pinch your nose closed, can you tell any difference in the taste of a slice of apple, of carrot, of pear? You can't--but that doesn't mean that from then on you should close your eyes, hold your nose, and chew a cheap carrot when you feel like having some fruit. There is a time and place for carrots, but also for juicy pears. There is a time for Busch, but also for Full Sail \"Equinox.\"", "To this the beer scientist must say: Book-learning is fine in its place. But let's be realistic. Actual drinking experience teaches the American beer consumer that a) all cheap beers are lagers; and b) most lagers are light-colored and weak. The first test was designed to evaluate low-end beers and therefore had to be lager-centric. This one is designed to test fancy beers--but in the spirit of open-mindedness and technical accuracy, it includes a few \"strong\" lagers too. \n\n 3. \n\n Materials. The 10 test beers were chosen with several goals in mind: \n\n \n\n To cover at least a modest range of fancy beer types--extra special bitter, India pale ale, Hefeweizen, and so on.", "If we are Gradgrind-like empiricists, living our life for \"welfare maximization\" as described in introductory econ. courses, the conclusion is obvious. We learned from the first experiment to buy either Sam Adams (when we wanted maximum lager enjoyment per bottle) or Busch (for maximum taste and snob appeal per dollar). From this second round we see an even more efficient possibility: Buy Michelob Hefeweizen and nothing else, since on the basis of this test it's the best liked and the cheapest beer. By the way, if there is a single company whose achievements the testing panel honored, it would be Anheuser-Busch . From its brewing tanks came two of the double-crown winners of the taste tests: plain old Busch , the Taste-o-meter and Snob-o-meter victor of Round 1, and Michelob Hefeweizen , the preference-point and Val-u-meter winner this time.", "The first two anomalies can be written off as testament to the power of a blind taste test. The third suggests an important difference in concepts of \"bestness.\" Sometimes a product seems to be the best of a group simply because it's the most unusual or distinctive. This is why very high Wine Spectator ratings often go to wines that mainly taste odd. But another kind of bestness involves an unobtrusive, day-in day-out acceptability. That seems to be Michelob Hefe 's achievement here: no one's first choice, but high on everyone's list. Let's go to the charts: \n\n This table shows how the beers performed on \"raw score\"--that is, without the advanced statistical adjustment of throwing out the highest and lowest score each beer received. \n\n \n\n Next, we have \"corrected average preference points,\" throwing out the high and low marks for each beer. The result is basically the same:", "It is worth noting the fate of Sam Adams on these charts. Here it ends up with a score of less than 61. These were the numbers awarded by the very same tasters who gave it a corrected preference rating of 83.33 the last time around--and 10 \"Best\" votes, vs. one Best (and one Worst) this time. The shift in Bests is understandable and demonstrates the importance of picking your competition. The severe drop in preference points illustrates more acutely the ancient principle of being a big fish in a small pond. These same tasters thought that Sam Adams was objectively much better when it was surrounded by Busch and Schmidt's.", "that it included at least one macrobrew , specifically, a member of the vast Anheuser-Busch family (Michelob Hefeweizen). \n\n \n\n After sampling all beers, the tasters rated them as follows: \n\n \n\n Overall quality points, from zero to 100, reflecting their personal, subjective fondness for the beer. \n\n Descriptions of and comments about each beer's taste--\"smooth and nutty,\" \"too strong,\" etc. If the first ranking was a measure of how good each beer was, this was an attempt to explain what made it good. \n\n Best and Worst , one of each from the group.", "2. Philosophy. The first round of testing was All Lager. This second round was All Fancy, and Mainly Not Lager. As several correspondents (for instance, the of Best American Beers ) have helpfully pointed out, the definition of lager provided last time was not exactly \"accurate.\" If you want to stay within the realm of textbook definitions, a lager is a beer brewed a particular way--slowly, at cool temperatures, with yeast that settles on the bottom of the vat. This is in contrast with an ale, which is brewed faster, warmer, and with the yeast on top. By this same reasoning, lagers don't have to be light-colored, weak-flavored, and watery, as mainstream American lagers are. In principle, lagers can be dark, fierce, manly. Therefore, the correspondents suggest, it was wrong to impugn Sam Adams or Pete's Wicked for deceptive labeling, in presenting their tawnier, more flavorful beers as lagers too.", "Every beer in Round 2 would be a fancy beer. A microbrew. A \"craft beer.\" A prestigious import. These were the kinds of beer the panel members said they liked--and the ones they said they were most familiar with. One aspect", "Many others were simply lost. Barely half the tasters, five of nine, recognized that Michelob Hefeweizen was a Hefeweizen. Before the test, nine of nine would have said that picking out a Hefe was easy, because of its cloudy look and wheaty flavor. Three tasters thought Sam Adams was an IPA ; two thought Redhook's IPA was a Hefeweizen. In fairness, six of nine testers identified Pyramid Hefeweizen as a Hefe, and six recognized Full Sail ESB as a bitter. Much in the fashion of blind men describing an elephant, here is a how the testers handled Sam Adams Boston Lager : \n\n \n\n 5. Implications and Directions for Future Research. Science does not always answer questions; often, it raises many new ones. This excursion into beer science mainly raises the question: What kind of people are we?", "c) Value rankings. Last time this calculation led to what the colorful French would call a bouleversement. One of the cheapest beers, Busch, which had been in the lower ranks on overall preference points, came out at the top on value-for-money ratings, because it was so cheap. The big surprise now is that the highest-rated beer was also the cheapest one, Michelob Hefe , so the value calculation turned into a rout: \n\n \n\n Pyramid \n\n Hefeweizen was expensive on top of being unpopular, so its position at the bottom was hammered home--but not as painfully as that of Bass Ale . Bass had been in the respectable lower middle class of the preference rankings, so its disappointing Val-u-meter showing mainly reflects the fact that it was the only beer not on \"sale\" and therefore by far the costliest entry in the experiment.", "To include both imported and domestic beers. Among the domestic microbrews, there's an obvious skew toward beers from the Pacific Northwest. But as Microsoft would put it, that's a feature not a bug. These beers all came from the Safeway nearest the Redmond, Wash., \"main campus\" of Microsoft, and microbrews are supposed to be local. \n\n To include one holdover from the previous test, as a scientific control on our tasters' preferences. This was Sam Adams , runaway winner of Round 1. \n\n To include one fancy product from a monster-scale U.S. mass brewery, to see if the tasters liked it better or worse than the cute little microbrews. This was Michelob Hefeweizen , from the pride of St. Louis, Anheuser-Busch. \n\n \n\n Click for pricing information and pre-quaffing evaluations. The beers tasted were:" ], [ "of the reward was that they would presumably enjoy the actual testing more--fewer rueful beer descriptions along the lines of \"urine\" or \"get it away!\" were expected than in the first round. The other aspect of anticipated reward was the", "panelists' unspoken but obvious assumption that this time they would \"do better\" on the test. Intellectual vanity being what it is, people who had fought for and won jobs at Microsoft and who still must fight every six months for primacy", "4. Data Analysis. \n\n a) Best and Worst. Compared to the lager test, we would expect the range of \"best\" choices to be more varied, since all the tested beers were supposed to be good. This expectation was most dramatically borne out in the \"Best and Worst\" rankings. \n\n The nine tasters cast a total of nine Worst votes and 11.5 Best votes. (Tester No. 1 turned in a sheet with three Best selections, or two more than his theoretical quota. Tester No. 4 listed a Best and a Best-minus, which counted as half a vote.)", "on the employee-ranking scale (which determines--gasp!--how many new stock options they receive) would assume that their skill as tasters was on trial, just as much as the beer was. Of course they were right, which is what made this round", "Since the tasting panel had left the first round grumbling that cheap lagers were not a fair test of their abilities, this second round of testing was advertised to the panel as a reward.", "that it included at least one macrobrew , specifically, a member of the vast Anheuser-Busch family (Michelob Hefeweizen). \n\n \n\n After sampling all beers, the tasters rated them as follows: \n\n \n\n Overall quality points, from zero to 100, reflecting their personal, subjective fondness for the beer. \n\n Descriptions of and comments about each beer's taste--\"smooth and nutty,\" \"too strong,\" etc. If the first ranking was a measure of how good each beer was, this was an attempt to explain what made it good. \n\n Best and Worst , one of each from the group.", "d) Taster skill. As members of the tasting panel began to suspect, they themselves were being judged while they judged the beer. One of the tasters, No. 7, decided to live dangerously and give specific brands and breweries for Samples A through J. This man was the only panel member whose job does not involve designing Microsoft Word--and the only one to identify two or more of the beers accurately and specifically. (He spotted Redhook IPA and Redhook ESB.) The fact that the beers correctly identified were the two most popular microbrews in the Seattle area suggests that familiarity is the main ingredient in knowing your beer.", "Here is what happened and what it meant: \n\n 1. Procedure. This was similar in most ways to the experimental approach of Round 1. The nine testers who showed up were a subset of the original 12. The missing three dropped out with excuses of \"my wife is sick\" (one person) and \"meeting is running long\" (two). \n\n As before, each tester found before him on a table 10 red plastic cups, labeled A through J. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the beers. The A-to-J labeling scheme was the same for all testers. Instead of saltines for palate-cleansing, this time we had popcorn and nuts. As they began, the tasters were given these and only these clues: \n\n \n\n that the flight included one \"holdover\" beer from the previous round (Sam Adams); \n\n that it included at least one import (Bass);", "For scientists who want to continue this work at home, here are a few suggestions for further research: \n\n \n\n Tell the testers ahead of time what beers they will be drinking. Ask them to rank the beers, 1 through 10, based on how well they like them. Then compare the list with the \"revealed preferences\" that come from the blind test. \n\n As a variation, show them the list ahead of time and ask them to pick out the beer they know they love and the one they know they hate. Then compare this with the \"after\" list. \n\n If you're going to test imported lagers, try Foster's or Corona rather than Grolsch. \n\n Remember to stay strictly in the scientist's role. Don't take the test yourself.", "The point of the second test was not to find the difference between cheap and expensive beers but instead to compare a variety of top-of-the-line beers. Was there one kind the tasters preferred consistently? Could they detect any of the subtleties of brewing style and provenance that microbrew customers pay such attention to when choosing some Doppelbock over a cream ale?", "More Booze You Can Use \n\n When we last heard from them, the members of the \n\n Slate beer-testing team were coping with lagers and trying to see if they could taste the 3-to-1 price difference between the most- and least-expensive brands. (Click for a wrap-up of the first round of beer tasting.) The answer was: They found one beer they really liked, Samuel Adams Boston Lager , and one they really hated, imported Grolsch from Holland. Both were expensive beers--Grolsch was the most expensive in the test--and otherwise the testers had a hard time telling beers apart. The members of the team, as noted in the original article, all hold day jobs at Microsoft, mainly as designers, managers, and coders for Microsoft Word.", "The first two anomalies can be written off as testament to the power of a blind taste test. The third suggests an important difference in concepts of \"bestness.\" Sometimes a product seems to be the best of a group simply because it's the most unusual or distinctive. This is why very high Wine Spectator ratings often go to wines that mainly taste odd. But another kind of bestness involves an unobtrusive, day-in day-out acceptability. That seems to be Michelob Hefe 's achievement here: no one's first choice, but high on everyone's list. Let's go to the charts: \n\n This table shows how the beers performed on \"raw score\"--that is, without the advanced statistical adjustment of throwing out the highest and lowest score each beer received. \n\n \n\n Next, we have \"corrected average preference points,\" throwing out the high and low marks for each beer. The result is basically the same:", "It is worth noting the fate of Sam Adams on these charts. Here it ends up with a score of less than 61. These were the numbers awarded by the very same tasters who gave it a corrected preference rating of 83.33 the last time around--and 10 \"Best\" votes, vs. one Best (and one Worst) this time. The shift in Bests is understandable and demonstrates the importance of picking your competition. The severe drop in preference points illustrates more acutely the ancient principle of being a big fish in a small pond. These same tasters thought that Sam Adams was objectively much better when it was surrounded by Busch and Schmidt's.", "The results were clearest at the bottom: three Worsts for Pyramid Hefeweizen , even though most comments about the beer were more or less respectful. (\"Bitter, drinkable.\") But at the top and middle the situation was muddier: \n\n \n\n There were three Bests for Full Sail ESB , which most of the tasters later said they weren't familiar with, and 2.5 for Redhook IPA , which all the tasters knew. But each of these also got a Worst vote, and most of the other beers had a mixed reading. So far, the tasters are meeting expectations, finding something to like in nearly all these fancy beers.", "If we are Gradgrind-like empiricists, living our life for \"welfare maximization\" as described in introductory econ. courses, the conclusion is obvious. We learned from the first experiment to buy either Sam Adams (when we wanted maximum lager enjoyment per bottle) or Busch (for maximum taste and snob appeal per dollar). From this second round we see an even more efficient possibility: Buy Michelob Hefeweizen and nothing else, since on the basis of this test it's the best liked and the cheapest beer. By the way, if there is a single company whose achievements the testing panel honored, it would be Anheuser-Busch . From its brewing tanks came two of the double-crown winners of the taste tests: plain old Busch , the Taste-o-meter and Snob-o-meter victor of Round 1, and Michelob Hefeweizen , the preference-point and Val-u-meter winner this time.", "But, of course, there is another possibility: that what is excluded in a blind taste test is in fact what we want, and are happy to pay for, when we sit down with a beer. The complicated label, the fancy bottle, the exotic concept that this beer has traveled from some far-off corner of Bohemia or even the Yakima Valley--all this may be cheap at the $1.25-per-pint cost difference between the cheapest and the most expensive beers. In elementary school, we all endured a standard science experiment: If you shut your eyes and pinch your nose closed, can you tell any difference in the taste of a slice of apple, of carrot, of pear? You can't--but that doesn't mean that from then on you should close your eyes, hold your nose, and chew a cheap carrot when you feel like having some fruit. There is a time and place for carrots, but also for juicy pears. There is a time for Busch, but also for Full Sail \"Equinox.\"", "c) Value rankings. Last time this calculation led to what the colorful French would call a bouleversement. One of the cheapest beers, Busch, which had been in the lower ranks on overall preference points, came out at the top on value-for-money ratings, because it was so cheap. The big surprise now is that the highest-rated beer was also the cheapest one, Michelob Hefe , so the value calculation turned into a rout: \n\n \n\n Pyramid \n\n Hefeweizen was expensive on top of being unpopular, so its position at the bottom was hammered home--but not as painfully as that of Bass Ale . Bass had been in the respectable lower middle class of the preference rankings, so its disappointing Val-u-meter showing mainly reflects the fact that it was the only beer not on \"sale\" and therefore by far the costliest entry in the experiment.", "To this the beer scientist must say: Book-learning is fine in its place. But let's be realistic. Actual drinking experience teaches the American beer consumer that a) all cheap beers are lagers; and b) most lagers are light-colored and weak. The first test was designed to evaluate low-end beers and therefore had to be lager-centric. This one is designed to test fancy beers--but in the spirit of open-mindedness and technical accuracy, it includes a few \"strong\" lagers too. \n\n 3. \n\n Materials. The 10 test beers were chosen with several goals in mind: \n\n \n\n To cover at least a modest range of fancy beer types--extra special bitter, India pale ale, Hefeweizen, and so on.", "Every beer in Round 2 would be a fancy beer. A microbrew. A \"craft beer.\" A prestigious import. These were the kinds of beer the panel members said they liked--and the ones they said they were most familiar with. One aspect", "b) Overall preference points. Here the complications increase. The loser was again apparent: Pyramid Hefeweizen came in last on rating points, as it had in the Best/Worst derby. But the amazing dark horse winner was Michelob Hefeweizen . The three elements of surprise here, in ascending order of unexpectedness, are: \n\n \n\n This best-liked beer belonged to the same category, Hefeweizen, as the least-liked product, from Pyramid. \n\n This was also the only outright Anheuser-Busch product in the contest (the Redhooks are 75 percent A-B free). It is safe to say that all tasters would have said beforehand that they would rank an American macrobrew last, and Anheuser-Busch last of all. \n\n Although it clearly won on overall preference points, Michelob Hefeweizen was the only beer not to have received a single \"Best\" vote." ], [ "on the employee-ranking scale (which determines--gasp!--how many new stock options they receive) would assume that their skill as tasters was on trial, just as much as the beer was. Of course they were right, which is what made this round", "Since the tasting panel had left the first round grumbling that cheap lagers were not a fair test of their abilities, this second round of testing was advertised to the panel as a reward.", "of the reward was that they would presumably enjoy the actual testing more--fewer rueful beer descriptions along the lines of \"urine\" or \"get it away!\" were expected than in the first round. The other aspect of anticipated reward was the", "Here is what happened and what it meant: \n\n 1. Procedure. This was similar in most ways to the experimental approach of Round 1. The nine testers who showed up were a subset of the original 12. The missing three dropped out with excuses of \"my wife is sick\" (one person) and \"meeting is running long\" (two). \n\n As before, each tester found before him on a table 10 red plastic cups, labeled A through J. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the beers. The A-to-J labeling scheme was the same for all testers. Instead of saltines for palate-cleansing, this time we had popcorn and nuts. As they began, the tasters were given these and only these clues: \n\n \n\n that the flight included one \"holdover\" beer from the previous round (Sam Adams); \n\n that it included at least one import (Bass);", "For scientists who want to continue this work at home, here are a few suggestions for further research: \n\n \n\n Tell the testers ahead of time what beers they will be drinking. Ask them to rank the beers, 1 through 10, based on how well they like them. Then compare the list with the \"revealed preferences\" that come from the blind test. \n\n As a variation, show them the list ahead of time and ask them to pick out the beer they know they love and the one they know they hate. Then compare this with the \"after\" list. \n\n If you're going to test imported lagers, try Foster's or Corona rather than Grolsch. \n\n Remember to stay strictly in the scientist's role. Don't take the test yourself.", "4. Data Analysis. \n\n a) Best and Worst. Compared to the lager test, we would expect the range of \"best\" choices to be more varied, since all the tested beers were supposed to be good. This expectation was most dramatically borne out in the \"Best and Worst\" rankings. \n\n The nine tasters cast a total of nine Worst votes and 11.5 Best votes. (Tester No. 1 turned in a sheet with three Best selections, or two more than his theoretical quota. Tester No. 4 listed a Best and a Best-minus, which counted as half a vote.)", "panelists' unspoken but obvious assumption that this time they would \"do better\" on the test. Intellectual vanity being what it is, people who had fought for and won jobs at Microsoft and who still must fight every six months for primacy", "The point of the second test was not to find the difference between cheap and expensive beers but instead to compare a variety of top-of-the-line beers. Was there one kind the tasters preferred consistently? Could they detect any of the subtleties of brewing style and provenance that microbrew customers pay such attention to when choosing some Doppelbock over a cream ale?", "d) Taster skill. As members of the tasting panel began to suspect, they themselves were being judged while they judged the beer. One of the tasters, No. 7, decided to live dangerously and give specific brands and breweries for Samples A through J. This man was the only panel member whose job does not involve designing Microsoft Word--and the only one to identify two or more of the beers accurately and specifically. (He spotted Redhook IPA and Redhook ESB.) The fact that the beers correctly identified were the two most popular microbrews in the Seattle area suggests that familiarity is the main ingredient in knowing your beer.", "More Booze You Can Use \n\n When we last heard from them, the members of the \n\n Slate beer-testing team were coping with lagers and trying to see if they could taste the 3-to-1 price difference between the most- and least-expensive brands. (Click for a wrap-up of the first round of beer tasting.) The answer was: They found one beer they really liked, Samuel Adams Boston Lager , and one they really hated, imported Grolsch from Holland. Both were expensive beers--Grolsch was the most expensive in the test--and otherwise the testers had a hard time telling beers apart. The members of the team, as noted in the original article, all hold day jobs at Microsoft, mainly as designers, managers, and coders for Microsoft Word.", "To include both imported and domestic beers. Among the domestic microbrews, there's an obvious skew toward beers from the Pacific Northwest. But as Microsoft would put it, that's a feature not a bug. These beers all came from the Safeway nearest the Redmond, Wash., \"main campus\" of Microsoft, and microbrews are supposed to be local. \n\n To include one holdover from the previous test, as a scientific control on our tasters' preferences. This was Sam Adams , runaway winner of Round 1. \n\n To include one fancy product from a monster-scale U.S. mass brewery, to see if the tasters liked it better or worse than the cute little microbrews. This was Michelob Hefeweizen , from the pride of St. Louis, Anheuser-Busch. \n\n \n\n Click for pricing information and pre-quaffing evaluations. The beers tasted were:", "that it included at least one macrobrew , specifically, a member of the vast Anheuser-Busch family (Michelob Hefeweizen). \n\n \n\n After sampling all beers, the tasters rated them as follows: \n\n \n\n Overall quality points, from zero to 100, reflecting their personal, subjective fondness for the beer. \n\n Descriptions of and comments about each beer's taste--\"smooth and nutty,\" \"too strong,\" etc. If the first ranking was a measure of how good each beer was, this was an attempt to explain what made it good. \n\n Best and Worst , one of each from the group.", "Every beer in Round 2 would be a fancy beer. A microbrew. A \"craft beer.\" A prestigious import. These were the kinds of beer the panel members said they liked--and the ones they said they were most familiar with. One aspect", "But, of course, there is another possibility: that what is excluded in a blind taste test is in fact what we want, and are happy to pay for, when we sit down with a beer. The complicated label, the fancy bottle, the exotic concept that this beer has traveled from some far-off corner of Bohemia or even the Yakima Valley--all this may be cheap at the $1.25-per-pint cost difference between the cheapest and the most expensive beers. In elementary school, we all endured a standard science experiment: If you shut your eyes and pinch your nose closed, can you tell any difference in the taste of a slice of apple, of carrot, of pear? You can't--but that doesn't mean that from then on you should close your eyes, hold your nose, and chew a cheap carrot when you feel like having some fruit. There is a time and place for carrots, but also for juicy pears. There is a time for Busch, but also for Full Sail \"Equinox.\"", "Name that beer! The tasters were told that some of the drinks were Hefeweizens, some might be IPAs (India pale ales), some might be bitters, and so on. They were asked to put each beer in its proper category--and to name a specific brewery and brand if they could. The idea here was to test the veteran beer drinkers' claim to recognize the distinctive tastes of famous brands. (To see all the grids for all the beers, click .)", "It is worth noting the fate of Sam Adams on these charts. Here it ends up with a score of less than 61. These were the numbers awarded by the very same tasters who gave it a corrected preference rating of 83.33 the last time around--and 10 \"Best\" votes, vs. one Best (and one Worst) this time. The shift in Bests is understandable and demonstrates the importance of picking your competition. The severe drop in preference points illustrates more acutely the ancient principle of being a big fish in a small pond. These same tasters thought that Sam Adams was objectively much better when it was surrounded by Busch and Schmidt's.", "The first two anomalies can be written off as testament to the power of a blind taste test. The third suggests an important difference in concepts of \"bestness.\" Sometimes a product seems to be the best of a group simply because it's the most unusual or distinctive. This is why very high Wine Spectator ratings often go to wines that mainly taste odd. But another kind of bestness involves an unobtrusive, day-in day-out acceptability. That seems to be Michelob Hefe 's achievement here: no one's first choice, but high on everyone's list. Let's go to the charts: \n\n This table shows how the beers performed on \"raw score\"--that is, without the advanced statistical adjustment of throwing out the highest and lowest score each beer received. \n\n \n\n Next, we have \"corrected average preference points,\" throwing out the high and low marks for each beer. The result is basically the same:", "as amusing to administer as the first one had been.", "To this the beer scientist must say: Book-learning is fine in its place. But let's be realistic. Actual drinking experience teaches the American beer consumer that a) all cheap beers are lagers; and b) most lagers are light-colored and weak. The first test was designed to evaluate low-end beers and therefore had to be lager-centric. This one is designed to test fancy beers--but in the spirit of open-mindedness and technical accuracy, it includes a few \"strong\" lagers too. \n\n 3. \n\n Materials. The 10 test beers were chosen with several goals in mind: \n\n \n\n To cover at least a modest range of fancy beer types--extra special bitter, India pale ale, Hefeweizen, and so on.", "Many others were simply lost. Barely half the tasters, five of nine, recognized that Michelob Hefeweizen was a Hefeweizen. Before the test, nine of nine would have said that picking out a Hefe was easy, because of its cloudy look and wheaty flavor. Three tasters thought Sam Adams was an IPA ; two thought Redhook's IPA was a Hefeweizen. In fairness, six of nine testers identified Pyramid Hefeweizen as a Hefe, and six recognized Full Sail ESB as a bitter. Much in the fashion of blind men describing an elephant, here is a how the testers handled Sam Adams Boston Lager : \n\n \n\n 5. Implications and Directions for Future Research. Science does not always answer questions; often, it raises many new ones. This excursion into beer science mainly raises the question: What kind of people are we?" ], [ "4. Data Analysis. \n\n a) Best and Worst. Compared to the lager test, we would expect the range of \"best\" choices to be more varied, since all the tested beers were supposed to be good. This expectation was most dramatically borne out in the \"Best and Worst\" rankings. \n\n The nine tasters cast a total of nine Worst votes and 11.5 Best votes. (Tester No. 1 turned in a sheet with three Best selections, or two more than his theoretical quota. Tester No. 4 listed a Best and a Best-minus, which counted as half a vote.)", "d) Taster skill. As members of the tasting panel began to suspect, they themselves were being judged while they judged the beer. One of the tasters, No. 7, decided to live dangerously and give specific brands and breweries for Samples A through J. This man was the only panel member whose job does not involve designing Microsoft Word--and the only one to identify two or more of the beers accurately and specifically. (He spotted Redhook IPA and Redhook ESB.) The fact that the beers correctly identified were the two most popular microbrews in the Seattle area suggests that familiarity is the main ingredient in knowing your beer.", "that it included at least one macrobrew , specifically, a member of the vast Anheuser-Busch family (Michelob Hefeweizen). \n\n \n\n After sampling all beers, the tasters rated them as follows: \n\n \n\n Overall quality points, from zero to 100, reflecting their personal, subjective fondness for the beer. \n\n Descriptions of and comments about each beer's taste--\"smooth and nutty,\" \"too strong,\" etc. If the first ranking was a measure of how good each beer was, this was an attempt to explain what made it good. \n\n Best and Worst , one of each from the group.", "For scientists who want to continue this work at home, here are a few suggestions for further research: \n\n \n\n Tell the testers ahead of time what beers they will be drinking. Ask them to rank the beers, 1 through 10, based on how well they like them. Then compare the list with the \"revealed preferences\" that come from the blind test. \n\n As a variation, show them the list ahead of time and ask them to pick out the beer they know they love and the one they know they hate. Then compare this with the \"after\" list. \n\n If you're going to test imported lagers, try Foster's or Corona rather than Grolsch. \n\n Remember to stay strictly in the scientist's role. Don't take the test yourself.", "Here is what happened and what it meant: \n\n 1. Procedure. This was similar in most ways to the experimental approach of Round 1. The nine testers who showed up were a subset of the original 12. The missing three dropped out with excuses of \"my wife is sick\" (one person) and \"meeting is running long\" (two). \n\n As before, each tester found before him on a table 10 red plastic cups, labeled A through J. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the beers. The A-to-J labeling scheme was the same for all testers. Instead of saltines for palate-cleansing, this time we had popcorn and nuts. As they began, the tasters were given these and only these clues: \n\n \n\n that the flight included one \"holdover\" beer from the previous round (Sam Adams); \n\n that it included at least one import (Bass);", "If we are Gradgrind-like empiricists, living our life for \"welfare maximization\" as described in introductory econ. courses, the conclusion is obvious. We learned from the first experiment to buy either Sam Adams (when we wanted maximum lager enjoyment per bottle) or Busch (for maximum taste and snob appeal per dollar). From this second round we see an even more efficient possibility: Buy Michelob Hefeweizen and nothing else, since on the basis of this test it's the best liked and the cheapest beer. By the way, if there is a single company whose achievements the testing panel honored, it would be Anheuser-Busch . From its brewing tanks came two of the double-crown winners of the taste tests: plain old Busch , the Taste-o-meter and Snob-o-meter victor of Round 1, and Michelob Hefeweizen , the preference-point and Val-u-meter winner this time.", "on the employee-ranking scale (which determines--gasp!--how many new stock options they receive) would assume that their skill as tasters was on trial, just as much as the beer was. Of course they were right, which is what made this round", "It is worth noting the fate of Sam Adams on these charts. Here it ends up with a score of less than 61. These were the numbers awarded by the very same tasters who gave it a corrected preference rating of 83.33 the last time around--and 10 \"Best\" votes, vs. one Best (and one Worst) this time. The shift in Bests is understandable and demonstrates the importance of picking your competition. The severe drop in preference points illustrates more acutely the ancient principle of being a big fish in a small pond. These same tasters thought that Sam Adams was objectively much better when it was surrounded by Busch and Schmidt's.", "panelists' unspoken but obvious assumption that this time they would \"do better\" on the test. Intellectual vanity being what it is, people who had fought for and won jobs at Microsoft and who still must fight every six months for primacy", "The point of the second test was not to find the difference between cheap and expensive beers but instead to compare a variety of top-of-the-line beers. Was there one kind the tasters preferred consistently? Could they detect any of the subtleties of brewing style and provenance that microbrew customers pay such attention to when choosing some Doppelbock over a cream ale?", "The first two anomalies can be written off as testament to the power of a blind taste test. The third suggests an important difference in concepts of \"bestness.\" Sometimes a product seems to be the best of a group simply because it's the most unusual or distinctive. This is why very high Wine Spectator ratings often go to wines that mainly taste odd. But another kind of bestness involves an unobtrusive, day-in day-out acceptability. That seems to be Michelob Hefe 's achievement here: no one's first choice, but high on everyone's list. Let's go to the charts: \n\n This table shows how the beers performed on \"raw score\"--that is, without the advanced statistical adjustment of throwing out the highest and lowest score each beer received. \n\n \n\n Next, we have \"corrected average preference points,\" throwing out the high and low marks for each beer. The result is basically the same:", "But, of course, there is another possibility: that what is excluded in a blind taste test is in fact what we want, and are happy to pay for, when we sit down with a beer. The complicated label, the fancy bottle, the exotic concept that this beer has traveled from some far-off corner of Bohemia or even the Yakima Valley--all this may be cheap at the $1.25-per-pint cost difference between the cheapest and the most expensive beers. In elementary school, we all endured a standard science experiment: If you shut your eyes and pinch your nose closed, can you tell any difference in the taste of a slice of apple, of carrot, of pear? You can't--but that doesn't mean that from then on you should close your eyes, hold your nose, and chew a cheap carrot when you feel like having some fruit. There is a time and place for carrots, but also for juicy pears. There is a time for Busch, but also for Full Sail \"Equinox.\"", "c) Value rankings. Last time this calculation led to what the colorful French would call a bouleversement. One of the cheapest beers, Busch, which had been in the lower ranks on overall preference points, came out at the top on value-for-money ratings, because it was so cheap. The big surprise now is that the highest-rated beer was also the cheapest one, Michelob Hefe , so the value calculation turned into a rout: \n\n \n\n Pyramid \n\n Hefeweizen was expensive on top of being unpopular, so its position at the bottom was hammered home--but not as painfully as that of Bass Ale . Bass had been in the respectable lower middle class of the preference rankings, so its disappointing Val-u-meter showing mainly reflects the fact that it was the only beer not on \"sale\" and therefore by far the costliest entry in the experiment.", "b) Overall preference points. Here the complications increase. The loser was again apparent: Pyramid Hefeweizen came in last on rating points, as it had in the Best/Worst derby. But the amazing dark horse winner was Michelob Hefeweizen . The three elements of surprise here, in ascending order of unexpectedness, are: \n\n \n\n This best-liked beer belonged to the same category, Hefeweizen, as the least-liked product, from Pyramid. \n\n This was also the only outright Anheuser-Busch product in the contest (the Redhooks are 75 percent A-B free). It is safe to say that all tasters would have said beforehand that they would rank an American macrobrew last, and Anheuser-Busch last of all. \n\n Although it clearly won on overall preference points, Michelob Hefeweizen was the only beer not to have received a single \"Best\" vote.", "of the reward was that they would presumably enjoy the actual testing more--fewer rueful beer descriptions along the lines of \"urine\" or \"get it away!\" were expected than in the first round. The other aspect of anticipated reward was the", "The results were clearest at the bottom: three Worsts for Pyramid Hefeweizen , even though most comments about the beer were more or less respectful. (\"Bitter, drinkable.\") But at the top and middle the situation was muddier: \n\n \n\n There were three Bests for Full Sail ESB , which most of the tasters later said they weren't familiar with, and 2.5 for Redhook IPA , which all the tasters knew. But each of these also got a Worst vote, and most of the other beers had a mixed reading. So far, the tasters are meeting expectations, finding something to like in nearly all these fancy beers.", "Many others were simply lost. Barely half the tasters, five of nine, recognized that Michelob Hefeweizen was a Hefeweizen. Before the test, nine of nine would have said that picking out a Hefe was easy, because of its cloudy look and wheaty flavor. Three tasters thought Sam Adams was an IPA ; two thought Redhook's IPA was a Hefeweizen. In fairness, six of nine testers identified Pyramid Hefeweizen as a Hefe, and six recognized Full Sail ESB as a bitter. Much in the fashion of blind men describing an elephant, here is a how the testers handled Sam Adams Boston Lager : \n\n \n\n 5. Implications and Directions for Future Research. Science does not always answer questions; often, it raises many new ones. This excursion into beer science mainly raises the question: What kind of people are we?", "Since the tasting panel had left the first round grumbling that cheap lagers were not a fair test of their abilities, this second round of testing was advertised to the panel as a reward.", "Every beer in Round 2 would be a fancy beer. A microbrew. A \"craft beer.\" A prestigious import. These were the kinds of beer the panel members said they liked--and the ones they said they were most familiar with. One aspect", "More Booze You Can Use \n\n When we last heard from them, the members of the \n\n Slate beer-testing team were coping with lagers and trying to see if they could taste the 3-to-1 price difference between the most- and least-expensive brands. (Click for a wrap-up of the first round of beer tasting.) The answer was: They found one beer they really liked, Samuel Adams Boston Lager , and one they really hated, imported Grolsch from Holland. Both were expensive beers--Grolsch was the most expensive in the test--and otherwise the testers had a hard time telling beers apart. The members of the team, as noted in the original article, all hold day jobs at Microsoft, mainly as designers, managers, and coders for Microsoft Word." ], [ "4. Data Analysis. \n\n a) Best and Worst. Compared to the lager test, we would expect the range of \"best\" choices to be more varied, since all the tested beers were supposed to be good. This expectation was most dramatically borne out in the \"Best and Worst\" rankings. \n\n The nine tasters cast a total of nine Worst votes and 11.5 Best votes. (Tester No. 1 turned in a sheet with three Best selections, or two more than his theoretical quota. Tester No. 4 listed a Best and a Best-minus, which counted as half a vote.)", "For scientists who want to continue this work at home, here are a few suggestions for further research: \n\n \n\n Tell the testers ahead of time what beers they will be drinking. Ask them to rank the beers, 1 through 10, based on how well they like them. Then compare the list with the \"revealed preferences\" that come from the blind test. \n\n As a variation, show them the list ahead of time and ask them to pick out the beer they know they love and the one they know they hate. Then compare this with the \"after\" list. \n\n If you're going to test imported lagers, try Foster's or Corona rather than Grolsch. \n\n Remember to stay strictly in the scientist's role. Don't take the test yourself.", "The point of the second test was not to find the difference between cheap and expensive beers but instead to compare a variety of top-of-the-line beers. Was there one kind the tasters preferred consistently? Could they detect any of the subtleties of brewing style and provenance that microbrew customers pay such attention to when choosing some Doppelbock over a cream ale?", "Here is what happened and what it meant: \n\n 1. Procedure. This was similar in most ways to the experimental approach of Round 1. The nine testers who showed up were a subset of the original 12. The missing three dropped out with excuses of \"my wife is sick\" (one person) and \"meeting is running long\" (two). \n\n As before, each tester found before him on a table 10 red plastic cups, labeled A through J. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the beers. The A-to-J labeling scheme was the same for all testers. Instead of saltines for palate-cleansing, this time we had popcorn and nuts. As they began, the tasters were given these and only these clues: \n\n \n\n that the flight included one \"holdover\" beer from the previous round (Sam Adams); \n\n that it included at least one import (Bass);", "on the employee-ranking scale (which determines--gasp!--how many new stock options they receive) would assume that their skill as tasters was on trial, just as much as the beer was. Of course they were right, which is what made this round", "Since the tasting panel had left the first round grumbling that cheap lagers were not a fair test of their abilities, this second round of testing was advertised to the panel as a reward.", "d) Taster skill. As members of the tasting panel began to suspect, they themselves were being judged while they judged the beer. One of the tasters, No. 7, decided to live dangerously and give specific brands and breweries for Samples A through J. This man was the only panel member whose job does not involve designing Microsoft Word--and the only one to identify two or more of the beers accurately and specifically. (He spotted Redhook IPA and Redhook ESB.) The fact that the beers correctly identified were the two most popular microbrews in the Seattle area suggests that familiarity is the main ingredient in knowing your beer.", "The first two anomalies can be written off as testament to the power of a blind taste test. The third suggests an important difference in concepts of \"bestness.\" Sometimes a product seems to be the best of a group simply because it's the most unusual or distinctive. This is why very high Wine Spectator ratings often go to wines that mainly taste odd. But another kind of bestness involves an unobtrusive, day-in day-out acceptability. That seems to be Michelob Hefe 's achievement here: no one's first choice, but high on everyone's list. Let's go to the charts: \n\n This table shows how the beers performed on \"raw score\"--that is, without the advanced statistical adjustment of throwing out the highest and lowest score each beer received. \n\n \n\n Next, we have \"corrected average preference points,\" throwing out the high and low marks for each beer. The result is basically the same:", "panelists' unspoken but obvious assumption that this time they would \"do better\" on the test. Intellectual vanity being what it is, people who had fought for and won jobs at Microsoft and who still must fight every six months for primacy", "It is worth noting the fate of Sam Adams on these charts. Here it ends up with a score of less than 61. These were the numbers awarded by the very same tasters who gave it a corrected preference rating of 83.33 the last time around--and 10 \"Best\" votes, vs. one Best (and one Worst) this time. The shift in Bests is understandable and demonstrates the importance of picking your competition. The severe drop in preference points illustrates more acutely the ancient principle of being a big fish in a small pond. These same tasters thought that Sam Adams was objectively much better when it was surrounded by Busch and Schmidt's.", "If we are Gradgrind-like empiricists, living our life for \"welfare maximization\" as described in introductory econ. courses, the conclusion is obvious. We learned from the first experiment to buy either Sam Adams (when we wanted maximum lager enjoyment per bottle) or Busch (for maximum taste and snob appeal per dollar). From this second round we see an even more efficient possibility: Buy Michelob Hefeweizen and nothing else, since on the basis of this test it's the best liked and the cheapest beer. By the way, if there is a single company whose achievements the testing panel honored, it would be Anheuser-Busch . From its brewing tanks came two of the double-crown winners of the taste tests: plain old Busch , the Taste-o-meter and Snob-o-meter victor of Round 1, and Michelob Hefeweizen , the preference-point and Val-u-meter winner this time.", "of the reward was that they would presumably enjoy the actual testing more--fewer rueful beer descriptions along the lines of \"urine\" or \"get it away!\" were expected than in the first round. The other aspect of anticipated reward was the", "But, of course, there is another possibility: that what is excluded in a blind taste test is in fact what we want, and are happy to pay for, when we sit down with a beer. The complicated label, the fancy bottle, the exotic concept that this beer has traveled from some far-off corner of Bohemia or even the Yakima Valley--all this may be cheap at the $1.25-per-pint cost difference between the cheapest and the most expensive beers. In elementary school, we all endured a standard science experiment: If you shut your eyes and pinch your nose closed, can you tell any difference in the taste of a slice of apple, of carrot, of pear? You can't--but that doesn't mean that from then on you should close your eyes, hold your nose, and chew a cheap carrot when you feel like having some fruit. There is a time and place for carrots, but also for juicy pears. There is a time for Busch, but also for Full Sail \"Equinox.\"", "that it included at least one macrobrew , specifically, a member of the vast Anheuser-Busch family (Michelob Hefeweizen). \n\n \n\n After sampling all beers, the tasters rated them as follows: \n\n \n\n Overall quality points, from zero to 100, reflecting their personal, subjective fondness for the beer. \n\n Descriptions of and comments about each beer's taste--\"smooth and nutty,\" \"too strong,\" etc. If the first ranking was a measure of how good each beer was, this was an attempt to explain what made it good. \n\n Best and Worst , one of each from the group.", "The results were clearest at the bottom: three Worsts for Pyramid Hefeweizen , even though most comments about the beer were more or less respectful. (\"Bitter, drinkable.\") But at the top and middle the situation was muddier: \n\n \n\n There were three Bests for Full Sail ESB , which most of the tasters later said they weren't familiar with, and 2.5 for Redhook IPA , which all the tasters knew. But each of these also got a Worst vote, and most of the other beers had a mixed reading. So far, the tasters are meeting expectations, finding something to like in nearly all these fancy beers.", "To this the beer scientist must say: Book-learning is fine in its place. But let's be realistic. Actual drinking experience teaches the American beer consumer that a) all cheap beers are lagers; and b) most lagers are light-colored and weak. The first test was designed to evaluate low-end beers and therefore had to be lager-centric. This one is designed to test fancy beers--but in the spirit of open-mindedness and technical accuracy, it includes a few \"strong\" lagers too. \n\n 3. \n\n Materials. The 10 test beers were chosen with several goals in mind: \n\n \n\n To cover at least a modest range of fancy beer types--extra special bitter, India pale ale, Hefeweizen, and so on.", "c) Value rankings. Last time this calculation led to what the colorful French would call a bouleversement. One of the cheapest beers, Busch, which had been in the lower ranks on overall preference points, came out at the top on value-for-money ratings, because it was so cheap. The big surprise now is that the highest-rated beer was also the cheapest one, Michelob Hefe , so the value calculation turned into a rout: \n\n \n\n Pyramid \n\n Hefeweizen was expensive on top of being unpopular, so its position at the bottom was hammered home--but not as painfully as that of Bass Ale . Bass had been in the respectable lower middle class of the preference rankings, so its disappointing Val-u-meter showing mainly reflects the fact that it was the only beer not on \"sale\" and therefore by far the costliest entry in the experiment.", "Every beer in Round 2 would be a fancy beer. A microbrew. A \"craft beer.\" A prestigious import. These were the kinds of beer the panel members said they liked--and the ones they said they were most familiar with. One aspect", "2. Philosophy. The first round of testing was All Lager. This second round was All Fancy, and Mainly Not Lager. As several correspondents (for instance, the of Best American Beers ) have helpfully pointed out, the definition of lager provided last time was not exactly \"accurate.\" If you want to stay within the realm of textbook definitions, a lager is a beer brewed a particular way--slowly, at cool temperatures, with yeast that settles on the bottom of the vat. This is in contrast with an ale, which is brewed faster, warmer, and with the yeast on top. By this same reasoning, lagers don't have to be light-colored, weak-flavored, and watery, as mainstream American lagers are. In principle, lagers can be dark, fierce, manly. Therefore, the correspondents suggest, it was wrong to impugn Sam Adams or Pete's Wicked for deceptive labeling, in presenting their tawnier, more flavorful beers as lagers too.", "Many others were simply lost. Barely half the tasters, five of nine, recognized that Michelob Hefeweizen was a Hefeweizen. Before the test, nine of nine would have said that picking out a Hefe was easy, because of its cloudy look and wheaty flavor. Three tasters thought Sam Adams was an IPA ; two thought Redhook's IPA was a Hefeweizen. In fairness, six of nine testers identified Pyramid Hefeweizen as a Hefe, and six recognized Full Sail ESB as a bitter. Much in the fashion of blind men describing an elephant, here is a how the testers handled Sam Adams Boston Lager : \n\n \n\n 5. Implications and Directions for Future Research. Science does not always answer questions; often, it raises many new ones. This excursion into beer science mainly raises the question: What kind of people are we?" ], [ "It is worth noting the fate of Sam Adams on these charts. Here it ends up with a score of less than 61. These were the numbers awarded by the very same tasters who gave it a corrected preference rating of 83.33 the last time around--and 10 \"Best\" votes, vs. one Best (and one Worst) this time. The shift in Bests is understandable and demonstrates the importance of picking your competition. The severe drop in preference points illustrates more acutely the ancient principle of being a big fish in a small pond. These same tasters thought that Sam Adams was objectively much better when it was surrounded by Busch and Schmidt's.", "2. Philosophy. The first round of testing was All Lager. This second round was All Fancy, and Mainly Not Lager. As several correspondents (for instance, the of Best American Beers ) have helpfully pointed out, the definition of lager provided last time was not exactly \"accurate.\" If you want to stay within the realm of textbook definitions, a lager is a beer brewed a particular way--slowly, at cool temperatures, with yeast that settles on the bottom of the vat. This is in contrast with an ale, which is brewed faster, warmer, and with the yeast on top. By this same reasoning, lagers don't have to be light-colored, weak-flavored, and watery, as mainstream American lagers are. In principle, lagers can be dark, fierce, manly. Therefore, the correspondents suggest, it was wrong to impugn Sam Adams or Pete's Wicked for deceptive labeling, in presenting their tawnier, more flavorful beers as lagers too.", "Here is what happened and what it meant: \n\n 1. Procedure. This was similar in most ways to the experimental approach of Round 1. The nine testers who showed up were a subset of the original 12. The missing three dropped out with excuses of \"my wife is sick\" (one person) and \"meeting is running long\" (two). \n\n As before, each tester found before him on a table 10 red plastic cups, labeled A through J. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the beers. The A-to-J labeling scheme was the same for all testers. Instead of saltines for palate-cleansing, this time we had popcorn and nuts. As they began, the tasters were given these and only these clues: \n\n \n\n that the flight included one \"holdover\" beer from the previous round (Sam Adams); \n\n that it included at least one import (Bass);", "Since the tasting panel had left the first round grumbling that cheap lagers were not a fair test of their abilities, this second round of testing was advertised to the panel as a reward.", "d) Taster skill. As members of the tasting panel began to suspect, they themselves were being judged while they judged the beer. One of the tasters, No. 7, decided to live dangerously and give specific brands and breweries for Samples A through J. This man was the only panel member whose job does not involve designing Microsoft Word--and the only one to identify two or more of the beers accurately and specifically. (He spotted Redhook IPA and Redhook ESB.) The fact that the beers correctly identified were the two most popular microbrews in the Seattle area suggests that familiarity is the main ingredient in knowing your beer.", "If we are Gradgrind-like empiricists, living our life for \"welfare maximization\" as described in introductory econ. courses, the conclusion is obvious. We learned from the first experiment to buy either Sam Adams (when we wanted maximum lager enjoyment per bottle) or Busch (for maximum taste and snob appeal per dollar). From this second round we see an even more efficient possibility: Buy Michelob Hefeweizen and nothing else, since on the basis of this test it's the best liked and the cheapest beer. By the way, if there is a single company whose achievements the testing panel honored, it would be Anheuser-Busch . From its brewing tanks came two of the double-crown winners of the taste tests: plain old Busch , the Taste-o-meter and Snob-o-meter victor of Round 1, and Michelob Hefeweizen , the preference-point and Val-u-meter winner this time.", "More Booze You Can Use \n\n When we last heard from them, the members of the \n\n Slate beer-testing team were coping with lagers and trying to see if they could taste the 3-to-1 price difference between the most- and least-expensive brands. (Click for a wrap-up of the first round of beer tasting.) The answer was: They found one beer they really liked, Samuel Adams Boston Lager , and one they really hated, imported Grolsch from Holland. Both were expensive beers--Grolsch was the most expensive in the test--and otherwise the testers had a hard time telling beers apart. The members of the team, as noted in the original article, all hold day jobs at Microsoft, mainly as designers, managers, and coders for Microsoft Word.", "Many others were simply lost. Barely half the tasters, five of nine, recognized that Michelob Hefeweizen was a Hefeweizen. Before the test, nine of nine would have said that picking out a Hefe was easy, because of its cloudy look and wheaty flavor. Three tasters thought Sam Adams was an IPA ; two thought Redhook's IPA was a Hefeweizen. In fairness, six of nine testers identified Pyramid Hefeweizen as a Hefe, and six recognized Full Sail ESB as a bitter. Much in the fashion of blind men describing an elephant, here is a how the testers handled Sam Adams Boston Lager : \n\n \n\n 5. Implications and Directions for Future Research. Science does not always answer questions; often, it raises many new ones. This excursion into beer science mainly raises the question: What kind of people are we?", "on the employee-ranking scale (which determines--gasp!--how many new stock options they receive) would assume that their skill as tasters was on trial, just as much as the beer was. Of course they were right, which is what made this round", "Every beer in Round 2 would be a fancy beer. A microbrew. A \"craft beer.\" A prestigious import. These were the kinds of beer the panel members said they liked--and the ones they said they were most familiar with. One aspect", "The first two anomalies can be written off as testament to the power of a blind taste test. The third suggests an important difference in concepts of \"bestness.\" Sometimes a product seems to be the best of a group simply because it's the most unusual or distinctive. This is why very high Wine Spectator ratings often go to wines that mainly taste odd. But another kind of bestness involves an unobtrusive, day-in day-out acceptability. That seems to be Michelob Hefe 's achievement here: no one's first choice, but high on everyone's list. Let's go to the charts: \n\n This table shows how the beers performed on \"raw score\"--that is, without the advanced statistical adjustment of throwing out the highest and lowest score each beer received. \n\n \n\n Next, we have \"corrected average preference points,\" throwing out the high and low marks for each beer. The result is basically the same:", "The point of the second test was not to find the difference between cheap and expensive beers but instead to compare a variety of top-of-the-line beers. Was there one kind the tasters preferred consistently? Could they detect any of the subtleties of brewing style and provenance that microbrew customers pay such attention to when choosing some Doppelbock over a cream ale?", "But, of course, there is another possibility: that what is excluded in a blind taste test is in fact what we want, and are happy to pay for, when we sit down with a beer. The complicated label, the fancy bottle, the exotic concept that this beer has traveled from some far-off corner of Bohemia or even the Yakima Valley--all this may be cheap at the $1.25-per-pint cost difference between the cheapest and the most expensive beers. In elementary school, we all endured a standard science experiment: If you shut your eyes and pinch your nose closed, can you tell any difference in the taste of a slice of apple, of carrot, of pear? You can't--but that doesn't mean that from then on you should close your eyes, hold your nose, and chew a cheap carrot when you feel like having some fruit. There is a time and place for carrots, but also for juicy pears. There is a time for Busch, but also for Full Sail \"Equinox.\"", "that it included at least one macrobrew , specifically, a member of the vast Anheuser-Busch family (Michelob Hefeweizen). \n\n \n\n After sampling all beers, the tasters rated them as follows: \n\n \n\n Overall quality points, from zero to 100, reflecting their personal, subjective fondness for the beer. \n\n Descriptions of and comments about each beer's taste--\"smooth and nutty,\" \"too strong,\" etc. If the first ranking was a measure of how good each beer was, this was an attempt to explain what made it good. \n\n Best and Worst , one of each from the group.", "To include both imported and domestic beers. Among the domestic microbrews, there's an obvious skew toward beers from the Pacific Northwest. But as Microsoft would put it, that's a feature not a bug. These beers all came from the Safeway nearest the Redmond, Wash., \"main campus\" of Microsoft, and microbrews are supposed to be local. \n\n To include one holdover from the previous test, as a scientific control on our tasters' preferences. This was Sam Adams , runaway winner of Round 1. \n\n To include one fancy product from a monster-scale U.S. mass brewery, to see if the tasters liked it better or worse than the cute little microbrews. This was Michelob Hefeweizen , from the pride of St. Louis, Anheuser-Busch. \n\n \n\n Click for pricing information and pre-quaffing evaluations. The beers tasted were:", "The results were clearest at the bottom: three Worsts for Pyramid Hefeweizen , even though most comments about the beer were more or less respectful. (\"Bitter, drinkable.\") But at the top and middle the situation was muddier: \n\n \n\n There were three Bests for Full Sail ESB , which most of the tasters later said they weren't familiar with, and 2.5 for Redhook IPA , which all the tasters knew. But each of these also got a Worst vote, and most of the other beers had a mixed reading. So far, the tasters are meeting expectations, finding something to like in nearly all these fancy beers.", "Name that beer! The tasters were told that some of the drinks were Hefeweizens, some might be IPAs (India pale ales), some might be bitters, and so on. They were asked to put each beer in its proper category--and to name a specific brewery and brand if they could. The idea here was to test the veteran beer drinkers' claim to recognize the distinctive tastes of famous brands. (To see all the grids for all the beers, click .)", "b) Overall preference points. Here the complications increase. The loser was again apparent: Pyramid Hefeweizen came in last on rating points, as it had in the Best/Worst derby. But the amazing dark horse winner was Michelob Hefeweizen . The three elements of surprise here, in ascending order of unexpectedness, are: \n\n \n\n This best-liked beer belonged to the same category, Hefeweizen, as the least-liked product, from Pyramid. \n\n This was also the only outright Anheuser-Busch product in the contest (the Redhooks are 75 percent A-B free). It is safe to say that all tasters would have said beforehand that they would rank an American macrobrew last, and Anheuser-Busch last of all. \n\n Although it clearly won on overall preference points, Michelob Hefeweizen was the only beer not to have received a single \"Best\" vote.", "To this the beer scientist must say: Book-learning is fine in its place. But let's be realistic. Actual drinking experience teaches the American beer consumer that a) all cheap beers are lagers; and b) most lagers are light-colored and weak. The first test was designed to evaluate low-end beers and therefore had to be lager-centric. This one is designed to test fancy beers--but in the spirit of open-mindedness and technical accuracy, it includes a few \"strong\" lagers too. \n\n 3. \n\n Materials. The 10 test beers were chosen with several goals in mind: \n\n \n\n To cover at least a modest range of fancy beer types--extra special bitter, India pale ale, Hefeweizen, and so on.", "4. Data Analysis. \n\n a) Best and Worst. Compared to the lager test, we would expect the range of \"best\" choices to be more varied, since all the tested beers were supposed to be good. This expectation was most dramatically borne out in the \"Best and Worst\" rankings. \n\n The nine tasters cast a total of nine Worst votes and 11.5 Best votes. (Tester No. 1 turned in a sheet with three Best selections, or two more than his theoretical quota. Tester No. 4 listed a Best and a Best-minus, which counted as half a vote.)" ], [ "Here is what happened and what it meant: \n\n 1. Procedure. This was similar in most ways to the experimental approach of Round 1. The nine testers who showed up were a subset of the original 12. The missing three dropped out with excuses of \"my wife is sick\" (one person) and \"meeting is running long\" (two). \n\n As before, each tester found before him on a table 10 red plastic cups, labeled A through J. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the beers. The A-to-J labeling scheme was the same for all testers. Instead of saltines for palate-cleansing, this time we had popcorn and nuts. As they began, the tasters were given these and only these clues: \n\n \n\n that the flight included one \"holdover\" beer from the previous round (Sam Adams); \n\n that it included at least one import (Bass);", "4. Data Analysis. \n\n a) Best and Worst. Compared to the lager test, we would expect the range of \"best\" choices to be more varied, since all the tested beers were supposed to be good. This expectation was most dramatically borne out in the \"Best and Worst\" rankings. \n\n The nine tasters cast a total of nine Worst votes and 11.5 Best votes. (Tester No. 1 turned in a sheet with three Best selections, or two more than his theoretical quota. Tester No. 4 listed a Best and a Best-minus, which counted as half a vote.)", "For scientists who want to continue this work at home, here are a few suggestions for further research: \n\n \n\n Tell the testers ahead of time what beers they will be drinking. Ask them to rank the beers, 1 through 10, based on how well they like them. Then compare the list with the \"revealed preferences\" that come from the blind test. \n\n As a variation, show them the list ahead of time and ask them to pick out the beer they know they love and the one they know they hate. Then compare this with the \"after\" list. \n\n If you're going to test imported lagers, try Foster's or Corona rather than Grolsch. \n\n Remember to stay strictly in the scientist's role. Don't take the test yourself.", "The point of the second test was not to find the difference between cheap and expensive beers but instead to compare a variety of top-of-the-line beers. Was there one kind the tasters preferred consistently? Could they detect any of the subtleties of brewing style and provenance that microbrew customers pay such attention to when choosing some Doppelbock over a cream ale?", "d) Taster skill. As members of the tasting panel began to suspect, they themselves were being judged while they judged the beer. One of the tasters, No. 7, decided to live dangerously and give specific brands and breweries for Samples A through J. This man was the only panel member whose job does not involve designing Microsoft Word--and the only one to identify two or more of the beers accurately and specifically. (He spotted Redhook IPA and Redhook ESB.) The fact that the beers correctly identified were the two most popular microbrews in the Seattle area suggests that familiarity is the main ingredient in knowing your beer.", "But, of course, there is another possibility: that what is excluded in a blind taste test is in fact what we want, and are happy to pay for, when we sit down with a beer. The complicated label, the fancy bottle, the exotic concept that this beer has traveled from some far-off corner of Bohemia or even the Yakima Valley--all this may be cheap at the $1.25-per-pint cost difference between the cheapest and the most expensive beers. In elementary school, we all endured a standard science experiment: If you shut your eyes and pinch your nose closed, can you tell any difference in the taste of a slice of apple, of carrot, of pear? You can't--but that doesn't mean that from then on you should close your eyes, hold your nose, and chew a cheap carrot when you feel like having some fruit. There is a time and place for carrots, but also for juicy pears. There is a time for Busch, but also for Full Sail \"Equinox.\"", "on the employee-ranking scale (which determines--gasp!--how many new stock options they receive) would assume that their skill as tasters was on trial, just as much as the beer was. Of course they were right, which is what made this round", "If we are Gradgrind-like empiricists, living our life for \"welfare maximization\" as described in introductory econ. courses, the conclusion is obvious. We learned from the first experiment to buy either Sam Adams (when we wanted maximum lager enjoyment per bottle) or Busch (for maximum taste and snob appeal per dollar). From this second round we see an even more efficient possibility: Buy Michelob Hefeweizen and nothing else, since on the basis of this test it's the best liked and the cheapest beer. By the way, if there is a single company whose achievements the testing panel honored, it would be Anheuser-Busch . From its brewing tanks came two of the double-crown winners of the taste tests: plain old Busch , the Taste-o-meter and Snob-o-meter victor of Round 1, and Michelob Hefeweizen , the preference-point and Val-u-meter winner this time.", "Since the tasting panel had left the first round grumbling that cheap lagers were not a fair test of their abilities, this second round of testing was advertised to the panel as a reward.", "of the reward was that they would presumably enjoy the actual testing more--fewer rueful beer descriptions along the lines of \"urine\" or \"get it away!\" were expected than in the first round. The other aspect of anticipated reward was the", "panelists' unspoken but obvious assumption that this time they would \"do better\" on the test. Intellectual vanity being what it is, people who had fought for and won jobs at Microsoft and who still must fight every six months for primacy", "that it included at least one macrobrew , specifically, a member of the vast Anheuser-Busch family (Michelob Hefeweizen). \n\n \n\n After sampling all beers, the tasters rated them as follows: \n\n \n\n Overall quality points, from zero to 100, reflecting their personal, subjective fondness for the beer. \n\n Descriptions of and comments about each beer's taste--\"smooth and nutty,\" \"too strong,\" etc. If the first ranking was a measure of how good each beer was, this was an attempt to explain what made it good. \n\n Best and Worst , one of each from the group.", "The first two anomalies can be written off as testament to the power of a blind taste test. The third suggests an important difference in concepts of \"bestness.\" Sometimes a product seems to be the best of a group simply because it's the most unusual or distinctive. This is why very high Wine Spectator ratings often go to wines that mainly taste odd. But another kind of bestness involves an unobtrusive, day-in day-out acceptability. That seems to be Michelob Hefe 's achievement here: no one's first choice, but high on everyone's list. Let's go to the charts: \n\n This table shows how the beers performed on \"raw score\"--that is, without the advanced statistical adjustment of throwing out the highest and lowest score each beer received. \n\n \n\n Next, we have \"corrected average preference points,\" throwing out the high and low marks for each beer. The result is basically the same:", "b) Overall preference points. Here the complications increase. The loser was again apparent: Pyramid Hefeweizen came in last on rating points, as it had in the Best/Worst derby. But the amazing dark horse winner was Michelob Hefeweizen . The three elements of surprise here, in ascending order of unexpectedness, are: \n\n \n\n This best-liked beer belonged to the same category, Hefeweizen, as the least-liked product, from Pyramid. \n\n This was also the only outright Anheuser-Busch product in the contest (the Redhooks are 75 percent A-B free). It is safe to say that all tasters would have said beforehand that they would rank an American macrobrew last, and Anheuser-Busch last of all. \n\n Although it clearly won on overall preference points, Michelob Hefeweizen was the only beer not to have received a single \"Best\" vote.", "c) Value rankings. Last time this calculation led to what the colorful French would call a bouleversement. One of the cheapest beers, Busch, which had been in the lower ranks on overall preference points, came out at the top on value-for-money ratings, because it was so cheap. The big surprise now is that the highest-rated beer was also the cheapest one, Michelob Hefe , so the value calculation turned into a rout: \n\n \n\n Pyramid \n\n Hefeweizen was expensive on top of being unpopular, so its position at the bottom was hammered home--but not as painfully as that of Bass Ale . Bass had been in the respectable lower middle class of the preference rankings, so its disappointing Val-u-meter showing mainly reflects the fact that it was the only beer not on \"sale\" and therefore by far the costliest entry in the experiment.", "Many others were simply lost. Barely half the tasters, five of nine, recognized that Michelob Hefeweizen was a Hefeweizen. Before the test, nine of nine would have said that picking out a Hefe was easy, because of its cloudy look and wheaty flavor. Three tasters thought Sam Adams was an IPA ; two thought Redhook's IPA was a Hefeweizen. In fairness, six of nine testers identified Pyramid Hefeweizen as a Hefe, and six recognized Full Sail ESB as a bitter. Much in the fashion of blind men describing an elephant, here is a how the testers handled Sam Adams Boston Lager : \n\n \n\n 5. Implications and Directions for Future Research. Science does not always answer questions; often, it raises many new ones. This excursion into beer science mainly raises the question: What kind of people are we?", "It is worth noting the fate of Sam Adams on these charts. Here it ends up with a score of less than 61. These were the numbers awarded by the very same tasters who gave it a corrected preference rating of 83.33 the last time around--and 10 \"Best\" votes, vs. one Best (and one Worst) this time. The shift in Bests is understandable and demonstrates the importance of picking your competition. The severe drop in preference points illustrates more acutely the ancient principle of being a big fish in a small pond. These same tasters thought that Sam Adams was objectively much better when it was surrounded by Busch and Schmidt's.", "Every beer in Round 2 would be a fancy beer. A microbrew. A \"craft beer.\" A prestigious import. These were the kinds of beer the panel members said they liked--and the ones they said they were most familiar with. One aspect", "The results were clearest at the bottom: three Worsts for Pyramid Hefeweizen , even though most comments about the beer were more or less respectful. (\"Bitter, drinkable.\") But at the top and middle the situation was muddier: \n\n \n\n There were three Bests for Full Sail ESB , which most of the tasters later said they weren't familiar with, and 2.5 for Redhook IPA , which all the tasters knew. But each of these also got a Worst vote, and most of the other beers had a mixed reading. So far, the tasters are meeting expectations, finding something to like in nearly all these fancy beers.", "2. Philosophy. The first round of testing was All Lager. This second round was All Fancy, and Mainly Not Lager. As several correspondents (for instance, the of Best American Beers ) have helpfully pointed out, the definition of lager provided last time was not exactly \"accurate.\" If you want to stay within the realm of textbook definitions, a lager is a beer brewed a particular way--slowly, at cool temperatures, with yeast that settles on the bottom of the vat. This is in contrast with an ale, which is brewed faster, warmer, and with the yeast on top. By this same reasoning, lagers don't have to be light-colored, weak-flavored, and watery, as mainstream American lagers are. In principle, lagers can be dark, fierce, manly. Therefore, the correspondents suggest, it was wrong to impugn Sam Adams or Pete's Wicked for deceptive labeling, in presenting their tawnier, more flavorful beers as lagers too." ] ]
train	20071	[ "Of the four films reviewed in the passage, which one has received the MOST positive review?", "All four of the films reviewed share the following theme:", "In the review of \"Fight Club,\" lines from Tyler Durden cited by the reviewer illustrate the following literary device:", "Which of the following terms DOES NOT describe the reviewer's tone toward the director and screenwriter of \"Fight Club\"?", "The reviewer of \"Fight Club\" believes that the film could have benefitted from:", "Which terms describe how the reviewers compare Brad Pitt's performance to Hilary Swank's, respectively?", "According to the reviewers, Jack from \"Fight Club\" and Brandon Teena from \"Boys Don't Cry\" share the following:", "According to the reviewer of \"Boys Don't Cry,\" Brandon Teena feels more connected to their true identity by engaging in all of the following acts EXCEPT:", "Of the four films reviewed in the passage, which one has received the LEAST positive review?" ]	[ [ "Fight Club", "Happy Texas", "Boys Don't Cry", "Mumford" ], [ "gender", "sexuality", "consumerism", "identity" ], [ "allusion", "personification", "metaphor", "irony" ], [ "confused", "critical", "unimpressed", "condescending" ], [ "More diverse points-of-view", "More explicit commentary on the dangers of consumerism", "A less predictable and facetious ending", "Less obvious situational irony" ], [ "Irritating / Courageous", "Facetious / Naive", "Disjointed / Measured", "Conceited / Captivating" ], [ "An unsupportive family", "An addictive personality", "A fascination with masculinity", "A sleep disorder" ], [ "Confiding in their family", "Getting dirty", "Flirting with women", "Drinking in a bar" ], [ "Fight Club", "Mumford", "Boys Don't Cry", "Happy Texas" ] ]	[ 3, 4, 3, 1, 1, 4, 3, 1, 4 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 ]	[ [ ", which has apparently flopped but which you can still catch at second- and third-tier theaters. It looks peculiar--a Norman Rockwell painting with noir shadows. And its tale of a small town healed by a", "Until then, however, he has done a fabulous job of keeping it spinning. The most thrilling thing about Fight Club isn't what it says but how Uhls and Fincher pull you into its narrator's head and simulate his adrenalin rushes. A veteran of rock videos, Fincher is one of those filmmakers who helps make the case that MTV--along with digital editing--has transformed cinema for better as well as worse. The syntax has become more intricate. Voice-over narration, once considered uncinematic, is back in style, along with novelistic asides, digressions, fantasies, and flashbacks. To make a point, you can jazzily interject anything--even, as in Three Kings , a shot of a bullet slicing through internal organs. Films like Fight Club might not gel, but they have a breathless, free-associational quality that points to new possibilities in storytelling. Or maybe old possibilities: The language of movies hasn't seemed this unfettered since the pre-sound days of Sergei Eisenstein and Abel Gance.", "Boys Do Bleed \n\n Fight Club is silly stuff, sensationalism that mistakes itself for satire, but it's also a brash and transporting piece of moviemaking, like Raging Bull on acid. The film opens with--literally--a surge of adrenalin, which travels through the bloodstream and into the brain of its protagonist, Jack (Edward Norton), who's viewed, as the camera pulls out of his insides, with a gun stuck in his mouth. How'd he get into this pickle? He's going to tell you, breezily, and the director, David Fincher, is going to illustrate his narrative--violently. Fincher ( Seven , 1995; The Game , 1997) is out to bombard you with so much feverish imagery that you have no choice but to succumb to the movie's reeling, punch-drunk worldview. By the end, you might feel as if you, too, have a mouthful of blood.", "in the morning,\" someone tells Brandon after a barroom brawl, and he takes the news with a glee that's almost mystical: \"I am????? Oh, shit!!!\" he cries, grinning. That might be my favorite moment in the picture, because", "Actually, Pitt isn't as terrible as usual: He's playing not a character but a conceit, and he can bask in his movie-idol arrogance, which seems to be the most authentic emotion he has. But the film belongs to Norton. As a ferocious skinhead in last year's American History X , Norton was taut and ropy, his long torso curled into a sneer; here, he's skinny and wilting, a quivering pansy. Even when he fights he doesn't transform--he's a raging wimp. The performance is marvelous, and it makes poetic sense in light of the movie's climactic twist. But that twist will annoy more people than it will delight, if only because it shifts the drama from the realm of the sociological to that of the psychoanalytic. The finale, scored with the Pixies' great \"Where Is My Mind?\" comes off facetiously--as if Fincher is throwing the movie away.", "Though harrowing, the second half of Boys Don't Cry isn't as great as the first. The early scenes evoke elation and dread simultaneously, the later ones just dread; and the last half-hour is unrelieved torture. What keeps the movie tantalizing is Chloë Sevigny's Lana, who might or might not know that Brandon is a girl but who's entranced by him anyway. With her lank hair, hooded eyes, and air of sleepy sensuality, Sevigny--maybe even more than Swank--embodies the mystery of sex that's at the core of Boys Don't Cry . Everything she does is deliberate, ironic, slightly unreadable--and unyielding. She's could be saying, \"I'm in this world but not of it. ... You'd never dream what's underneath.\"", "depressive (Loren Dean) posing as a psychologist is full of doddering misconceptions about psychotherapy. I almost don't know why I loved it, but the relaxed pacing and the witty turns by Martin Short, Ted Danson, David Paymer, and Mary", "posseses the cinema's most expressive honking-nasal voice and who slumps through the movie like the world's most lyrical anti-ballerina. Even her puffy cheeks are eloquent: They made me think of Mumford as the home of the psychological mumps.", "The novel, the first by Chuck Palahniuk (the surname sounds like Eskimo for \"palooka\"--which somehow fits), walks a line between the straight and ironic--it isn't always clear if its glib sociological pronouncements are meant to be taken straight or as the ravings of a delusional mama's boy. But onscreen, when Pitt announces to the assembled fighters that they are the \"middle children of history\" with \"no purpose and no place\"--emasculated on one hand by the lack of a unifying crisis (a world war or depression) and on the other by lack of material wealth as promised by television--he seems meant to be intoning gospel. \"We are a generation of men raised by women,\" Tyler announces, and adds, \"If our fathers bail, what does that tell you about God?\" (I give up: What?)", "Fincher and his screenwriter, Jim Uhls, seem to think they've broken new ground in Fight Club , that their metaphor for our discontents hits harder than anyone else's. Certainly it produces more bloody splatter. But 20 years ago, the same impulse was called punk and, as Greil Marcus documents in Lipstick Traces , it was other things before that. Yes, the mixture of Johnny Rotten, Jake La Motta, and Jesus is unique; and the Faludi-esque emasculation themes are more explicit. But there's something deeply movie-ish about the whole conceit, as if the novelist and director were weaned on Martin Scorsese pictures and never stopped dreaming of recapturing that first masochistic rush.", "I n brief: If a friend tells you you'll love Happy Texas , rethink the friendship. This clunky mistaken-identity comedy about escaped cons who impersonate gay pageant directors doesn't even make sense on its own low farcical terms; it's mostly one lame homo joke after another. The only bright spot is Steve Zahn, who could be the offspring of Michael J. Fox and Crispin Glover if they'd mated on the set of Back to the Future (1985).", "shorn of her hated female tresses and becoming \"Brandon,\" who swaggers around in tight jeans and leather jackets. The joy is in watching the actor transform, and I don't just mean Swank: I mean Teena Brandon playing Brandon Teena--the", "It's hard to make a serious case for Lawrence Kasdan's Mumford", "Swank's ecstatic expression carries us through the next hour, as Brandon acts out his urban-cowboy fantasies--\"surfing\" from the bumper of a pickup truck, rolling in the mud, and straddling a barstool with one hand on a brewski and", "That the people with whom Brandon feels most at home would kill him if they knew his true gender is the movie's most tragic irony--and the one that lifts it out of the realm of gay-martyr hagiography and into something more complex and irreducible: a meditation on the irrelevance of gender. Peirce's triumph is to make these scenes at once exuberant (occasionally hilarious) and foreboding, so that all the seeds of Brandon's killing are right there on the screen. John (Peter Sarsgaard), one of his future rapists and murderers, calls him \"little buddy\" and seems almost attracted to him; Sarsgaard's performance is a finely chiseled study of how unresolved emotion can suddenly resolve itself into violence.", "human fat) and small (he splices frames from porn flicks into kiddie movies). When Jack's apartment mysteriously explodes--along with his carefully chosen IKEA furniture--he moves into Tyler's squalid warehouse and helps to found a new religion: Fight Club,", "An actress named Hilary Swank gives one of the most rapturous performances I've ever seen as the cross-dressing Brandon Teena (a k a Teena Brandon) in Kimberly Peirce's stark and astonishingly", "Not to mention a hole in your head. Fight Club careers from one resonant satirical idea to the next without quite deciding whether its characters are full of crap or are Gen X prophets.", "role she has been longing for her whole life. In a redneck Nebraska bar, Brandon throws back a shot of whiskey and the gesture--a macho cliché--becomes an act of self-discovery. Every gesture does. \"You're gonna have a shiner", "F ight Club could use a few different perspectives: a woman's, obviously, but also an African-American's--someone who'd have a different take on the \"healing\" properties of violence. It's also unclear just what has emasculated Jack: Is it that he's a materialist or that the materials themselves (i.e., IKEA's lacquered particle boards) don't measure up to his fantasies of opulence? Is he motivated by spiritual hunger or envy? Tyler's subsequent idea of confining his group's mayhem to franchise coffee bars and corporate-subsidized art is a witty one--it's like a parody of neo-Nazism as re-enacted by yuppies. It might have been a howl if performed by, say, the troupe of artsy German nihilists in Joel and Ethan Coen's The Big Lebowski (1998). Somehow Brad Pitt doesn't have the same piquancy." ], [ "human fat) and small (he splices frames from porn flicks into kiddie movies). When Jack's apartment mysteriously explodes--along with his carefully chosen IKEA furniture--he moves into Tyler's squalid warehouse and helps to found a new religion: Fight Club,", "Fincher and his screenwriter, Jim Uhls, seem to think they've broken new ground in Fight Club , that their metaphor for our discontents hits harder than anyone else's. Certainly it produces more bloody splatter. But 20 years ago, the same impulse was called punk and, as Greil Marcus documents in Lipstick Traces , it was other things before that. Yes, the mixture of Johnny Rotten, Jake La Motta, and Jesus is unique; and the Faludi-esque emasculation themes are more explicit. But there's something deeply movie-ish about the whole conceit, as if the novelist and director were weaned on Martin Scorsese pictures and never stopped dreaming of recapturing that first masochistic rush.", "The novel, the first by Chuck Palahniuk (the surname sounds like Eskimo for \"palooka\"--which somehow fits), walks a line between the straight and ironic--it isn't always clear if its glib sociological pronouncements are meant to be taken straight or as the ravings of a delusional mama's boy. But onscreen, when Pitt announces to the assembled fighters that they are the \"middle children of history\" with \"no purpose and no place\"--emasculated on one hand by the lack of a unifying crisis (a world war or depression) and on the other by lack of material wealth as promised by television--he seems meant to be intoning gospel. \"We are a generation of men raised by women,\" Tyler announces, and adds, \"If our fathers bail, what does that tell you about God?\" (I give up: What?)", "role she has been longing for her whole life. In a redneck Nebraska bar, Brandon throws back a shot of whiskey and the gesture--a macho cliché--becomes an act of self-discovery. Every gesture does. \"You're gonna have a shiner", ", which has apparently flopped but which you can still catch at second- and third-tier theaters. It looks peculiar--a Norman Rockwell painting with noir shadows. And its tale of a small town healed by a", "Boys Do Bleed \n\n Fight Club is silly stuff, sensationalism that mistakes itself for satire, but it's also a brash and transporting piece of moviemaking, like Raging Bull on acid. The film opens with--literally--a surge of adrenalin, which travels through the bloodstream and into the brain of its protagonist, Jack (Edward Norton), who's viewed, as the camera pulls out of his insides, with a gun stuck in his mouth. How'd he get into this pickle? He's going to tell you, breezily, and the director, David Fincher, is going to illustrate his narrative--violently. Fincher ( Seven , 1995; The Game , 1997) is out to bombard you with so much feverish imagery that you have no choice but to succumb to the movie's reeling, punch-drunk worldview. By the end, you might feel as if you, too, have a mouthful of blood.", "It always gives you a rush, though. At first, it goofs on the absurd feminization of an absurdly macho culture. An increasingly desperate insomniac, Jack finds relief (and release) only at meetings for the terminally ill. At a testicular cancer", "Until then, however, he has done a fabulous job of keeping it spinning. The most thrilling thing about Fight Club isn't what it says but how Uhls and Fincher pull you into its narrator's head and simulate his adrenalin rushes. A veteran of rock videos, Fincher is one of those filmmakers who helps make the case that MTV--along with digital editing--has transformed cinema for better as well as worse. The syntax has become more intricate. Voice-over narration, once considered uncinematic, is back in style, along with novelistic asides, digressions, fantasies, and flashbacks. To make a point, you can jazzily interject anything--even, as in Three Kings , a shot of a bullet slicing through internal organs. Films like Fight Club might not gel, but they have a breathless, free-associational quality that points to new possibilities in storytelling. Or maybe old possibilities: The language of movies hasn't seemed this unfettered since the pre-sound days of Sergei Eisenstein and Abel Gance.", "in which young males gather after hours in the basement of a nightclub to pound one another (and be pounded) to a bloody pulp. That last parenthesis isn't so parenthetical. In some ways, it's the longing to be beaten into", "That the people with whom Brandon feels most at home would kill him if they knew his true gender is the movie's most tragic irony--and the one that lifts it out of the realm of gay-martyr hagiography and into something more complex and irreducible: a meditation on the irrelevance of gender. Peirce's triumph is to make these scenes at once exuberant (occasionally hilarious) and foreboding, so that all the seeds of Brandon's killing are right there on the screen. John (Peter Sarsgaard), one of his future rapists and murderers, calls him \"little buddy\" and seems almost attracted to him; Sarsgaard's performance is a finely chiseled study of how unresolved emotion can suddenly resolve itself into violence.", "They cling to each other and sob. But Jack's idyll is rudely disrupted by--wouldn't you know it?--a woman. A dark-eyed, sepulchral head case named Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) begins showing up at all the same disparate", "in the morning,\" someone tells Brandon after a barroom brawl, and he takes the news with a glee that's almost mystical: \"I am????? Oh, shit!!!\" he cries, grinning. That might be my favorite moment in the picture, because", "Not to mention a hole in your head. Fight Club careers from one resonant satirical idea to the next without quite deciding whether its characters are full of crap or are Gen X prophets.", "oblivion that's the strongest. \"Self-improvement,\" explains Tyler, \"is masturbation\"; self-destruction is the new way. Tyler's manifesto calls for an end to consumerism (\"Things you own end up owning you\"), and since society is going down (\"Martha Stewart", "shorn of her hated female tresses and becoming \"Brandon,\" who swaggers around in tight jeans and leather jackets. The joy is in watching the actor transform, and I don't just mean Swank: I mean Teena Brandon playing Brandon Teena--the", "is polishing brass on the Titanic \"), the only creative outlet left is annihilation. \"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything,\" he says.", "meetings for essentially the same voyeuristic ends, and the presence of this \"tourist\" makes it impossible for Jack to emote.", "F ight Club could use a few different perspectives: a woman's, obviously, but also an African-American's--someone who'd have a different take on the \"healing\" properties of violence. It's also unclear just what has emasculated Jack: Is it that he's a materialist or that the materials themselves (i.e., IKEA's lacquered particle boards) don't measure up to his fantasies of opulence? Is he motivated by spiritual hunger or envy? Tyler's subsequent idea of confining his group's mayhem to franchise coffee bars and corporate-subsidized art is a witty one--it's like a parody of neo-Nazism as re-enacted by yuppies. It might have been a howl if performed by, say, the troupe of artsy German nihilists in Joel and Ethan Coen's The Big Lebowski (1998). Somehow Brad Pitt doesn't have the same piquancy.", "posseses the cinema's most expressive honking-nasal voice and who slumps through the movie like the world's most lyrical anti-ballerina. Even her puffy cheeks are eloquent: They made me think of Mumford as the home of the psychological mumps.", "Swank's ecstatic expression carries us through the next hour, as Brandon acts out his urban-cowboy fantasies--\"surfing\" from the bumper of a pickup truck, rolling in the mud, and straddling a barstool with one hand on a brewski and" ], [ "The novel, the first by Chuck Palahniuk (the surname sounds like Eskimo for \"palooka\"--which somehow fits), walks a line between the straight and ironic--it isn't always clear if its glib sociological pronouncements are meant to be taken straight or as the ravings of a delusional mama's boy. But onscreen, when Pitt announces to the assembled fighters that they are the \"middle children of history\" with \"no purpose and no place\"--emasculated on one hand by the lack of a unifying crisis (a world war or depression) and on the other by lack of material wealth as promised by television--he seems meant to be intoning gospel. \"We are a generation of men raised by women,\" Tyler announces, and adds, \"If our fathers bail, what does that tell you about God?\" (I give up: What?)", "Fincher and his screenwriter, Jim Uhls, seem to think they've broken new ground in Fight Club , that their metaphor for our discontents hits harder than anyone else's. Certainly it produces more bloody splatter. But 20 years ago, the same impulse was called punk and, as Greil Marcus documents in Lipstick Traces , it was other things before that. Yes, the mixture of Johnny Rotten, Jake La Motta, and Jesus is unique; and the Faludi-esque emasculation themes are more explicit. But there's something deeply movie-ish about the whole conceit, as if the novelist and director were weaned on Martin Scorsese pictures and never stopped dreaming of recapturing that first masochistic rush.", "Until then, however, he has done a fabulous job of keeping it spinning. The most thrilling thing about Fight Club isn't what it says but how Uhls and Fincher pull you into its narrator's head and simulate his adrenalin rushes. A veteran of rock videos, Fincher is one of those filmmakers who helps make the case that MTV--along with digital editing--has transformed cinema for better as well as worse. The syntax has become more intricate. Voice-over narration, once considered uncinematic, is back in style, along with novelistic asides, digressions, fantasies, and flashbacks. To make a point, you can jazzily interject anything--even, as in Three Kings , a shot of a bullet slicing through internal organs. Films like Fight Club might not gel, but they have a breathless, free-associational quality that points to new possibilities in storytelling. Or maybe old possibilities: The language of movies hasn't seemed this unfettered since the pre-sound days of Sergei Eisenstein and Abel Gance.", "Boys Do Bleed \n\n Fight Club is silly stuff, sensationalism that mistakes itself for satire, but it's also a brash and transporting piece of moviemaking, like Raging Bull on acid. The film opens with--literally--a surge of adrenalin, which travels through the bloodstream and into the brain of its protagonist, Jack (Edward Norton), who's viewed, as the camera pulls out of his insides, with a gun stuck in his mouth. How'd he get into this pickle? He's going to tell you, breezily, and the director, David Fincher, is going to illustrate his narrative--violently. Fincher ( Seven , 1995; The Game , 1997) is out to bombard you with so much feverish imagery that you have no choice but to succumb to the movie's reeling, punch-drunk worldview. By the end, you might feel as if you, too, have a mouthful of blood.", "human fat) and small (he splices frames from porn flicks into kiddie movies). When Jack's apartment mysteriously explodes--along with his carefully chosen IKEA furniture--he moves into Tyler's squalid warehouse and helps to found a new religion: Fight Club,", "Not to mention a hole in your head. Fight Club careers from one resonant satirical idea to the next without quite deciding whether its characters are full of crap or are Gen X prophets.", "F ight Club could use a few different perspectives: a woman's, obviously, but also an African-American's--someone who'd have a different take on the \"healing\" properties of violence. It's also unclear just what has emasculated Jack: Is it that he's a materialist or that the materials themselves (i.e., IKEA's lacquered particle boards) don't measure up to his fantasies of opulence? Is he motivated by spiritual hunger or envy? Tyler's subsequent idea of confining his group's mayhem to franchise coffee bars and corporate-subsidized art is a witty one--it's like a parody of neo-Nazism as re-enacted by yuppies. It might have been a howl if performed by, say, the troupe of artsy German nihilists in Joel and Ethan Coen's The Big Lebowski (1998). Somehow Brad Pitt doesn't have the same piquancy.", "Jack finds another outlet, though. On a plane, he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a cryptic hipster with a penchant for subversive acts both large (he makes high-priced soaps from liposuctioned", "oblivion that's the strongest. \"Self-improvement,\" explains Tyler, \"is masturbation\"; self-destruction is the new way. Tyler's manifesto calls for an end to consumerism (\"Things you own end up owning you\"), and since society is going down (\"Martha Stewart", "Actually, Pitt isn't as terrible as usual: He's playing not a character but a conceit, and he can bask in his movie-idol arrogance, which seems to be the most authentic emotion he has. But the film belongs to Norton. As a ferocious skinhead in last year's American History X , Norton was taut and ropy, his long torso curled into a sneer; here, he's skinny and wilting, a quivering pansy. Even when he fights he doesn't transform--he's a raging wimp. The performance is marvelous, and it makes poetic sense in light of the movie's climactic twist. But that twist will annoy more people than it will delight, if only because it shifts the drama from the realm of the sociological to that of the psychoanalytic. The finale, scored with the Pixies' great \"Where Is My Mind?\" comes off facetiously--as if Fincher is throwing the movie away.", "in which young males gather after hours in the basement of a nightclub to pound one another (and be pounded) to a bloody pulp. That last parenthesis isn't so parenthetical. In some ways, it's the longing to be beaten into", "role she has been longing for her whole life. In a redneck Nebraska bar, Brandon throws back a shot of whiskey and the gesture--a macho cliché--becomes an act of self-discovery. Every gesture does. \"You're gonna have a shiner", "in the morning,\" someone tells Brandon after a barroom brawl, and he takes the news with a glee that's almost mystical: \"I am????? Oh, shit!!!\" he cries, grinning. That might be my favorite moment in the picture, because", "It always gives you a rush, though. At first, it goofs on the absurd feminization of an absurdly macho culture. An increasingly desperate insomniac, Jack finds relief (and release) only at meetings for the terminally ill. At a testicular cancer", "is polishing brass on the Titanic \"), the only creative outlet left is annihilation. \"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything,\" he says.", "They cling to each other and sob. But Jack's idyll is rudely disrupted by--wouldn't you know it?--a woman. A dark-eyed, sepulchral head case named Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) begins showing up at all the same disparate", "That the people with whom Brandon feels most at home would kill him if they knew his true gender is the movie's most tragic irony--and the one that lifts it out of the realm of gay-martyr hagiography and into something more complex and irreducible: a meditation on the irrelevance of gender. Peirce's triumph is to make these scenes at once exuberant (occasionally hilarious) and foreboding, so that all the seeds of Brandon's killing are right there on the screen. John (Peter Sarsgaard), one of his future rapists and murderers, calls him \"little buddy\" and seems almost attracted to him; Sarsgaard's performance is a finely chiseled study of how unresolved emotion can suddenly resolve itself into violence.", "Though harrowing, the second half of Boys Don't Cry isn't as great as the first. The early scenes evoke elation and dread simultaneously, the later ones just dread; and the last half-hour is unrelieved torture. What keeps the movie tantalizing is Chloë Sevigny's Lana, who might or might not know that Brandon is a girl but who's entranced by him anyway. With her lank hair, hooded eyes, and air of sleepy sensuality, Sevigny--maybe even more than Swank--embodies the mystery of sex that's at the core of Boys Don't Cry . Everything she does is deliberate, ironic, slightly unreadable--and unyielding. She's could be saying, \"I'm in this world but not of it. ... You'd never dream what's underneath.\"", "Swank's ecstatic expression carries us through the next hour, as Brandon acts out his urban-cowboy fantasies--\"surfing\" from the bumper of a pickup truck, rolling in the mud, and straddling a barstool with one hand on a brewski and", "posseses the cinema's most expressive honking-nasal voice and who slumps through the movie like the world's most lyrical anti-ballerina. Even her puffy cheeks are eloquent: They made me think of Mumford as the home of the psychological mumps." ], [ "Fincher and his screenwriter, Jim Uhls, seem to think they've broken new ground in Fight Club , that their metaphor for our discontents hits harder than anyone else's. Certainly it produces more bloody splatter. But 20 years ago, the same impulse was called punk and, as Greil Marcus documents in Lipstick Traces , it was other things before that. Yes, the mixture of Johnny Rotten, Jake La Motta, and Jesus is unique; and the Faludi-esque emasculation themes are more explicit. But there's something deeply movie-ish about the whole conceit, as if the novelist and director were weaned on Martin Scorsese pictures and never stopped dreaming of recapturing that first masochistic rush.", "Boys Do Bleed \n\n Fight Club is silly stuff, sensationalism that mistakes itself for satire, but it's also a brash and transporting piece of moviemaking, like Raging Bull on acid. The film opens with--literally--a surge of adrenalin, which travels through the bloodstream and into the brain of its protagonist, Jack (Edward Norton), who's viewed, as the camera pulls out of his insides, with a gun stuck in his mouth. How'd he get into this pickle? He's going to tell you, breezily, and the director, David Fincher, is going to illustrate his narrative--violently. Fincher ( Seven , 1995; The Game , 1997) is out to bombard you with so much feverish imagery that you have no choice but to succumb to the movie's reeling, punch-drunk worldview. By the end, you might feel as if you, too, have a mouthful of blood.", "Until then, however, he has done a fabulous job of keeping it spinning. The most thrilling thing about Fight Club isn't what it says but how Uhls and Fincher pull you into its narrator's head and simulate his adrenalin rushes. A veteran of rock videos, Fincher is one of those filmmakers who helps make the case that MTV--along with digital editing--has transformed cinema for better as well as worse. The syntax has become more intricate. Voice-over narration, once considered uncinematic, is back in style, along with novelistic asides, digressions, fantasies, and flashbacks. To make a point, you can jazzily interject anything--even, as in Three Kings , a shot of a bullet slicing through internal organs. Films like Fight Club might not gel, but they have a breathless, free-associational quality that points to new possibilities in storytelling. Or maybe old possibilities: The language of movies hasn't seemed this unfettered since the pre-sound days of Sergei Eisenstein and Abel Gance.", "The novel, the first by Chuck Palahniuk (the surname sounds like Eskimo for \"palooka\"--which somehow fits), walks a line between the straight and ironic--it isn't always clear if its glib sociological pronouncements are meant to be taken straight or as the ravings of a delusional mama's boy. But onscreen, when Pitt announces to the assembled fighters that they are the \"middle children of history\" with \"no purpose and no place\"--emasculated on one hand by the lack of a unifying crisis (a world war or depression) and on the other by lack of material wealth as promised by television--he seems meant to be intoning gospel. \"We are a generation of men raised by women,\" Tyler announces, and adds, \"If our fathers bail, what does that tell you about God?\" (I give up: What?)", "F ight Club could use a few different perspectives: a woman's, obviously, but also an African-American's--someone who'd have a different take on the \"healing\" properties of violence. It's also unclear just what has emasculated Jack: Is it that he's a materialist or that the materials themselves (i.e., IKEA's lacquered particle boards) don't measure up to his fantasies of opulence? Is he motivated by spiritual hunger or envy? Tyler's subsequent idea of confining his group's mayhem to franchise coffee bars and corporate-subsidized art is a witty one--it's like a parody of neo-Nazism as re-enacted by yuppies. It might have been a howl if performed by, say, the troupe of artsy German nihilists in Joel and Ethan Coen's The Big Lebowski (1998). Somehow Brad Pitt doesn't have the same piquancy.", "Not to mention a hole in your head. Fight Club careers from one resonant satirical idea to the next without quite deciding whether its characters are full of crap or are Gen X prophets.", "Actually, Pitt isn't as terrible as usual: He's playing not a character but a conceit, and he can bask in his movie-idol arrogance, which seems to be the most authentic emotion he has. But the film belongs to Norton. As a ferocious skinhead in last year's American History X , Norton was taut and ropy, his long torso curled into a sneer; here, he's skinny and wilting, a quivering pansy. Even when he fights he doesn't transform--he's a raging wimp. The performance is marvelous, and it makes poetic sense in light of the movie's climactic twist. But that twist will annoy more people than it will delight, if only because it shifts the drama from the realm of the sociological to that of the psychoanalytic. The finale, scored with the Pixies' great \"Where Is My Mind?\" comes off facetiously--as if Fincher is throwing the movie away.", "human fat) and small (he splices frames from porn flicks into kiddie movies). When Jack's apartment mysteriously explodes--along with his carefully chosen IKEA furniture--he moves into Tyler's squalid warehouse and helps to found a new religion: Fight Club,", "in which young males gather after hours in the basement of a nightclub to pound one another (and be pounded) to a bloody pulp. That last parenthesis isn't so parenthetical. In some ways, it's the longing to be beaten into", "Jack finds another outlet, though. On a plane, he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a cryptic hipster with a penchant for subversive acts both large (he makes high-priced soaps from liposuctioned", "in the morning,\" someone tells Brandon after a barroom brawl, and he takes the news with a glee that's almost mystical: \"I am????? Oh, shit!!!\" he cries, grinning. That might be my favorite moment in the picture, because", "depressive (Loren Dean) posing as a psychologist is full of doddering misconceptions about psychotherapy. I almost don't know why I loved it, but the relaxed pacing and the witty turns by Martin Short, Ted Danson, David Paymer, and Mary", "oblivion that's the strongest. \"Self-improvement,\" explains Tyler, \"is masturbation\"; self-destruction is the new way. Tyler's manifesto calls for an end to consumerism (\"Things you own end up owning you\"), and since society is going down (\"Martha Stewart", "Though harrowing, the second half of Boys Don't Cry isn't as great as the first. The early scenes evoke elation and dread simultaneously, the later ones just dread; and the last half-hour is unrelieved torture. What keeps the movie tantalizing is Chloë Sevigny's Lana, who might or might not know that Brandon is a girl but who's entranced by him anyway. With her lank hair, hooded eyes, and air of sleepy sensuality, Sevigny--maybe even more than Swank--embodies the mystery of sex that's at the core of Boys Don't Cry . Everything she does is deliberate, ironic, slightly unreadable--and unyielding. She's could be saying, \"I'm in this world but not of it. ... You'd never dream what's underneath.\"", "It always gives you a rush, though. At first, it goofs on the absurd feminization of an absurdly macho culture. An increasingly desperate insomniac, Jack finds relief (and release) only at meetings for the terminally ill. At a testicular cancer", "That the people with whom Brandon feels most at home would kill him if they knew his true gender is the movie's most tragic irony--and the one that lifts it out of the realm of gay-martyr hagiography and into something more complex and irreducible: a meditation on the irrelevance of gender. Peirce's triumph is to make these scenes at once exuberant (occasionally hilarious) and foreboding, so that all the seeds of Brandon's killing are right there on the screen. John (Peter Sarsgaard), one of his future rapists and murderers, calls him \"little buddy\" and seems almost attracted to him; Sarsgaard's performance is a finely chiseled study of how unresolved emotion can suddenly resolve itself into violence.", "role she has been longing for her whole life. In a redneck Nebraska bar, Brandon throws back a shot of whiskey and the gesture--a macho cliché--becomes an act of self-discovery. Every gesture does. \"You're gonna have a shiner", "is polishing brass on the Titanic \"), the only creative outlet left is annihilation. \"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything,\" he says.", ", which has apparently flopped but which you can still catch at second- and third-tier theaters. It looks peculiar--a Norman Rockwell painting with noir shadows. And its tale of a small town healed by a", "posseses the cinema's most expressive honking-nasal voice and who slumps through the movie like the world's most lyrical anti-ballerina. Even her puffy cheeks are eloquent: They made me think of Mumford as the home of the psychological mumps." ], [ "F ight Club could use a few different perspectives: a woman's, obviously, but also an African-American's--someone who'd have a different take on the \"healing\" properties of violence. It's also unclear just what has emasculated Jack: Is it that he's a materialist or that the materials themselves (i.e., IKEA's lacquered particle boards) don't measure up to his fantasies of opulence? Is he motivated by spiritual hunger or envy? Tyler's subsequent idea of confining his group's mayhem to franchise coffee bars and corporate-subsidized art is a witty one--it's like a parody of neo-Nazism as re-enacted by yuppies. It might have been a howl if performed by, say, the troupe of artsy German nihilists in Joel and Ethan Coen's The Big Lebowski (1998). Somehow Brad Pitt doesn't have the same piquancy.", "Fincher and his screenwriter, Jim Uhls, seem to think they've broken new ground in Fight Club , that their metaphor for our discontents hits harder than anyone else's. Certainly it produces more bloody splatter. But 20 years ago, the same impulse was called punk and, as Greil Marcus documents in Lipstick Traces , it was other things before that. Yes, the mixture of Johnny Rotten, Jake La Motta, and Jesus is unique; and the Faludi-esque emasculation themes are more explicit. But there's something deeply movie-ish about the whole conceit, as if the novelist and director were weaned on Martin Scorsese pictures and never stopped dreaming of recapturing that first masochistic rush.", "Until then, however, he has done a fabulous job of keeping it spinning. The most thrilling thing about Fight Club isn't what it says but how Uhls and Fincher pull you into its narrator's head and simulate his adrenalin rushes. A veteran of rock videos, Fincher is one of those filmmakers who helps make the case that MTV--along with digital editing--has transformed cinema for better as well as worse. The syntax has become more intricate. Voice-over narration, once considered uncinematic, is back in style, along with novelistic asides, digressions, fantasies, and flashbacks. To make a point, you can jazzily interject anything--even, as in Three Kings , a shot of a bullet slicing through internal organs. Films like Fight Club might not gel, but they have a breathless, free-associational quality that points to new possibilities in storytelling. Or maybe old possibilities: The language of movies hasn't seemed this unfettered since the pre-sound days of Sergei Eisenstein and Abel Gance.", "Boys Do Bleed \n\n Fight Club is silly stuff, sensationalism that mistakes itself for satire, but it's also a brash and transporting piece of moviemaking, like Raging Bull on acid. The film opens with--literally--a surge of adrenalin, which travels through the bloodstream and into the brain of its protagonist, Jack (Edward Norton), who's viewed, as the camera pulls out of his insides, with a gun stuck in his mouth. How'd he get into this pickle? He's going to tell you, breezily, and the director, David Fincher, is going to illustrate his narrative--violently. Fincher ( Seven , 1995; The Game , 1997) is out to bombard you with so much feverish imagery that you have no choice but to succumb to the movie's reeling, punch-drunk worldview. By the end, you might feel as if you, too, have a mouthful of blood.", "The novel, the first by Chuck Palahniuk (the surname sounds like Eskimo for \"palooka\"--which somehow fits), walks a line between the straight and ironic--it isn't always clear if its glib sociological pronouncements are meant to be taken straight or as the ravings of a delusional mama's boy. But onscreen, when Pitt announces to the assembled fighters that they are the \"middle children of history\" with \"no purpose and no place\"--emasculated on one hand by the lack of a unifying crisis (a world war or depression) and on the other by lack of material wealth as promised by television--he seems meant to be intoning gospel. \"We are a generation of men raised by women,\" Tyler announces, and adds, \"If our fathers bail, what does that tell you about God?\" (I give up: What?)", "Not to mention a hole in your head. Fight Club careers from one resonant satirical idea to the next without quite deciding whether its characters are full of crap or are Gen X prophets.", "Actually, Pitt isn't as terrible as usual: He's playing not a character but a conceit, and he can bask in his movie-idol arrogance, which seems to be the most authentic emotion he has. But the film belongs to Norton. As a ferocious skinhead in last year's American History X , Norton was taut and ropy, his long torso curled into a sneer; here, he's skinny and wilting, a quivering pansy. Even when he fights he doesn't transform--he's a raging wimp. The performance is marvelous, and it makes poetic sense in light of the movie's climactic twist. But that twist will annoy more people than it will delight, if only because it shifts the drama from the realm of the sociological to that of the psychoanalytic. The finale, scored with the Pixies' great \"Where Is My Mind?\" comes off facetiously--as if Fincher is throwing the movie away.", "human fat) and small (he splices frames from porn flicks into kiddie movies). When Jack's apartment mysteriously explodes--along with his carefully chosen IKEA furniture--he moves into Tyler's squalid warehouse and helps to found a new religion: Fight Club,", "in which young males gather after hours in the basement of a nightclub to pound one another (and be pounded) to a bloody pulp. That last parenthesis isn't so parenthetical. In some ways, it's the longing to be beaten into", "Jack finds another outlet, though. On a plane, he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a cryptic hipster with a penchant for subversive acts both large (he makes high-priced soaps from liposuctioned", "oblivion that's the strongest. \"Self-improvement,\" explains Tyler, \"is masturbation\"; self-destruction is the new way. Tyler's manifesto calls for an end to consumerism (\"Things you own end up owning you\"), and since society is going down (\"Martha Stewart", "Though harrowing, the second half of Boys Don't Cry isn't as great as the first. The early scenes evoke elation and dread simultaneously, the later ones just dread; and the last half-hour is unrelieved torture. What keeps the movie tantalizing is Chloë Sevigny's Lana, who might or might not know that Brandon is a girl but who's entranced by him anyway. With her lank hair, hooded eyes, and air of sleepy sensuality, Sevigny--maybe even more than Swank--embodies the mystery of sex that's at the core of Boys Don't Cry . Everything she does is deliberate, ironic, slightly unreadable--and unyielding. She's could be saying, \"I'm in this world but not of it. ... You'd never dream what's underneath.\"", "in the morning,\" someone tells Brandon after a barroom brawl, and he takes the news with a glee that's almost mystical: \"I am????? Oh, shit!!!\" he cries, grinning. That might be my favorite moment in the picture, because", "It always gives you a rush, though. At first, it goofs on the absurd feminization of an absurdly macho culture. An increasingly desperate insomniac, Jack finds relief (and release) only at meetings for the terminally ill. At a testicular cancer", "That the people with whom Brandon feels most at home would kill him if they knew his true gender is the movie's most tragic irony--and the one that lifts it out of the realm of gay-martyr hagiography and into something more complex and irreducible: a meditation on the irrelevance of gender. Peirce's triumph is to make these scenes at once exuberant (occasionally hilarious) and foreboding, so that all the seeds of Brandon's killing are right there on the screen. John (Peter Sarsgaard), one of his future rapists and murderers, calls him \"little buddy\" and seems almost attracted to him; Sarsgaard's performance is a finely chiseled study of how unresolved emotion can suddenly resolve itself into violence.", ", which has apparently flopped but which you can still catch at second- and third-tier theaters. It looks peculiar--a Norman Rockwell painting with noir shadows. And its tale of a small town healed by a", "is polishing brass on the Titanic \"), the only creative outlet left is annihilation. \"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything,\" he says.", "role she has been longing for her whole life. In a redneck Nebraska bar, Brandon throws back a shot of whiskey and the gesture--a macho cliché--becomes an act of self-discovery. Every gesture does. \"You're gonna have a shiner", "shorn of her hated female tresses and becoming \"Brandon,\" who swaggers around in tight jeans and leather jackets. The joy is in watching the actor transform, and I don't just mean Swank: I mean Teena Brandon playing Brandon Teena--the", "Swank's ecstatic expression carries us through the next hour, as Brandon acts out his urban-cowboy fantasies--\"surfing\" from the bumper of a pickup truck, rolling in the mud, and straddling a barstool with one hand on a brewski and" ], [ "An actress named Hilary Swank gives one of the most rapturous performances I've ever seen as the cross-dressing Brandon Teena (a k a Teena Brandon) in Kimberly Peirce's stark and astonishingly", "shorn of her hated female tresses and becoming \"Brandon,\" who swaggers around in tight jeans and leather jackets. The joy is in watching the actor transform, and I don't just mean Swank: I mean Teena Brandon playing Brandon Teena--the", "Though harrowing, the second half of Boys Don't Cry isn't as great as the first. The early scenes evoke elation and dread simultaneously, the later ones just dread; and the last half-hour is unrelieved torture. What keeps the movie tantalizing is Chloë Sevigny's Lana, who might or might not know that Brandon is a girl but who's entranced by him anyway. With her lank hair, hooded eyes, and air of sleepy sensuality, Sevigny--maybe even more than Swank--embodies the mystery of sex that's at the core of Boys Don't Cry . Everything she does is deliberate, ironic, slightly unreadable--and unyielding. She's could be saying, \"I'm in this world but not of it. ... You'd never dream what's underneath.\"", "Actually, Pitt isn't as terrible as usual: He's playing not a character but a conceit, and he can bask in his movie-idol arrogance, which seems to be the most authentic emotion he has. But the film belongs to Norton. As a ferocious skinhead in last year's American History X , Norton was taut and ropy, his long torso curled into a sneer; here, he's skinny and wilting, a quivering pansy. Even when he fights he doesn't transform--he's a raging wimp. The performance is marvelous, and it makes poetic sense in light of the movie's climactic twist. But that twist will annoy more people than it will delight, if only because it shifts the drama from the realm of the sociological to that of the psychoanalytic. The finale, scored with the Pixies' great \"Where Is My Mind?\" comes off facetiously--as if Fincher is throwing the movie away.", "The novel, the first by Chuck Palahniuk (the surname sounds like Eskimo for \"palooka\"--which somehow fits), walks a line between the straight and ironic--it isn't always clear if its glib sociological pronouncements are meant to be taken straight or as the ravings of a delusional mama's boy. But onscreen, when Pitt announces to the assembled fighters that they are the \"middle children of history\" with \"no purpose and no place\"--emasculated on one hand by the lack of a unifying crisis (a world war or depression) and on the other by lack of material wealth as promised by television--he seems meant to be intoning gospel. \"We are a generation of men raised by women,\" Tyler announces, and adds, \"If our fathers bail, what does that tell you about God?\" (I give up: What?)", "That the people with whom Brandon feels most at home would kill him if they knew his true gender is the movie's most tragic irony--and the one that lifts it out of the realm of gay-martyr hagiography and into something more complex and irreducible: a meditation on the irrelevance of gender. Peirce's triumph is to make these scenes at once exuberant (occasionally hilarious) and foreboding, so that all the seeds of Brandon's killing are right there on the screen. John (Peter Sarsgaard), one of his future rapists and murderers, calls him \"little buddy\" and seems almost attracted to him; Sarsgaard's performance is a finely chiseled study of how unresolved emotion can suddenly resolve itself into violence.", "F ight Club could use a few different perspectives: a woman's, obviously, but also an African-American's--someone who'd have a different take on the \"healing\" properties of violence. It's also unclear just what has emasculated Jack: Is it that he's a materialist or that the materials themselves (i.e., IKEA's lacquered particle boards) don't measure up to his fantasies of opulence? Is he motivated by spiritual hunger or envy? Tyler's subsequent idea of confining his group's mayhem to franchise coffee bars and corporate-subsidized art is a witty one--it's like a parody of neo-Nazism as re-enacted by yuppies. It might have been a howl if performed by, say, the troupe of artsy German nihilists in Joel and Ethan Coen's The Big Lebowski (1998). Somehow Brad Pitt doesn't have the same piquancy.", "Swank's ecstatic expression carries us through the next hour, as Brandon acts out his urban-cowboy fantasies--\"surfing\" from the bumper of a pickup truck, rolling in the mud, and straddling a barstool with one hand on a brewski and", "Boys Do Bleed \n\n Fight Club is silly stuff, sensationalism that mistakes itself for satire, but it's also a brash and transporting piece of moviemaking, like Raging Bull on acid. The film opens with--literally--a surge of adrenalin, which travels through the bloodstream and into the brain of its protagonist, Jack (Edward Norton), who's viewed, as the camera pulls out of his insides, with a gun stuck in his mouth. How'd he get into this pickle? He's going to tell you, breezily, and the director, David Fincher, is going to illustrate his narrative--violently. Fincher ( Seven , 1995; The Game , 1997) is out to bombard you with so much feverish imagery that you have no choice but to succumb to the movie's reeling, punch-drunk worldview. By the end, you might feel as if you, too, have a mouthful of blood.", "role she has been longing for her whole life. In a redneck Nebraska bar, Brandon throws back a shot of whiskey and the gesture--a macho cliché--becomes an act of self-discovery. Every gesture does. \"You're gonna have a shiner", "McDonnell surely helped. I can't decide if the weirdly affectless Dean is inspired or inept, but my indecision suggests why he works in the role. There's no doubt, however, about his even more depressive love object, Hope Davis, who", "Fincher and his screenwriter, Jim Uhls, seem to think they've broken new ground in Fight Club , that their metaphor for our discontents hits harder than anyone else's. Certainly it produces more bloody splatter. But 20 years ago, the same impulse was called punk and, as Greil Marcus documents in Lipstick Traces , it was other things before that. Yes, the mixture of Johnny Rotten, Jake La Motta, and Jesus is unique; and the Faludi-esque emasculation themes are more explicit. But there's something deeply movie-ish about the whole conceit, as if the novelist and director were weaned on Martin Scorsese pictures and never stopped dreaming of recapturing that first masochistic rush.", "posseses the cinema's most expressive honking-nasal voice and who slumps through the movie like the world's most lyrical anti-ballerina. Even her puffy cheeks are eloquent: They made me think of Mumford as the home of the psychological mumps.", "Jack finds another outlet, though. On a plane, he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a cryptic hipster with a penchant for subversive acts both large (he makes high-priced soaps from liposuctioned", "Until then, however, he has done a fabulous job of keeping it spinning. The most thrilling thing about Fight Club isn't what it says but how Uhls and Fincher pull you into its narrator's head and simulate his adrenalin rushes. A veteran of rock videos, Fincher is one of those filmmakers who helps make the case that MTV--along with digital editing--has transformed cinema for better as well as worse. The syntax has become more intricate. Voice-over narration, once considered uncinematic, is back in style, along with novelistic asides, digressions, fantasies, and flashbacks. To make a point, you can jazzily interject anything--even, as in Three Kings , a shot of a bullet slicing through internal organs. Films like Fight Club might not gel, but they have a breathless, free-associational quality that points to new possibilities in storytelling. Or maybe old possibilities: The language of movies hasn't seemed this unfettered since the pre-sound days of Sergei Eisenstein and Abel Gance.", "I n brief: If a friend tells you you'll love Happy Texas , rethink the friendship. This clunky mistaken-identity comedy about escaped cons who impersonate gay pageant directors doesn't even make sense on its own low farcical terms; it's mostly one lame homo joke after another. The only bright spot is Steve Zahn, who could be the offspring of Michael J. Fox and Crispin Glover if they'd mated on the set of Back to the Future (1985).", "in the morning,\" someone tells Brandon after a barroom brawl, and he takes the news with a glee that's almost mystical: \"I am????? Oh, shit!!!\" he cries, grinning. That might be my favorite moment in the picture, because", "depressive (Loren Dean) posing as a psychologist is full of doddering misconceptions about psychotherapy. I almost don't know why I loved it, but the relaxed pacing and the witty turns by Martin Short, Ted Danson, David Paymer, and Mary", "group, he's enfolded in the ample arms of Bob (the singer Meat Loaf Aday), a former bodybuilder who ruined his health with steroids and now has \"bitch tits.\" Jack and Bob subscribe to a new form of male bonding:", "beautiful debut feature, Boys Don't Cry . The movie opens with Teena being" ], [ "Boys Do Bleed \n\n Fight Club is silly stuff, sensationalism that mistakes itself for satire, but it's also a brash and transporting piece of moviemaking, like Raging Bull on acid. The film opens with--literally--a surge of adrenalin, which travels through the bloodstream and into the brain of its protagonist, Jack (Edward Norton), who's viewed, as the camera pulls out of his insides, with a gun stuck in his mouth. How'd he get into this pickle? He's going to tell you, breezily, and the director, David Fincher, is going to illustrate his narrative--violently. Fincher ( Seven , 1995; The Game , 1997) is out to bombard you with so much feverish imagery that you have no choice but to succumb to the movie's reeling, punch-drunk worldview. By the end, you might feel as if you, too, have a mouthful of blood.", "Fincher and his screenwriter, Jim Uhls, seem to think they've broken new ground in Fight Club , that their metaphor for our discontents hits harder than anyone else's. Certainly it produces more bloody splatter. But 20 years ago, the same impulse was called punk and, as Greil Marcus documents in Lipstick Traces , it was other things before that. Yes, the mixture of Johnny Rotten, Jake La Motta, and Jesus is unique; and the Faludi-esque emasculation themes are more explicit. But there's something deeply movie-ish about the whole conceit, as if the novelist and director were weaned on Martin Scorsese pictures and never stopped dreaming of recapturing that first masochistic rush.", "shorn of her hated female tresses and becoming \"Brandon,\" who swaggers around in tight jeans and leather jackets. The joy is in watching the actor transform, and I don't just mean Swank: I mean Teena Brandon playing Brandon Teena--the", "That the people with whom Brandon feels most at home would kill him if they knew his true gender is the movie's most tragic irony--and the one that lifts it out of the realm of gay-martyr hagiography and into something more complex and irreducible: a meditation on the irrelevance of gender. Peirce's triumph is to make these scenes at once exuberant (occasionally hilarious) and foreboding, so that all the seeds of Brandon's killing are right there on the screen. John (Peter Sarsgaard), one of his future rapists and murderers, calls him \"little buddy\" and seems almost attracted to him; Sarsgaard's performance is a finely chiseled study of how unresolved emotion can suddenly resolve itself into violence.", "Though harrowing, the second half of Boys Don't Cry isn't as great as the first. The early scenes evoke elation and dread simultaneously, the later ones just dread; and the last half-hour is unrelieved torture. What keeps the movie tantalizing is Chloë Sevigny's Lana, who might or might not know that Brandon is a girl but who's entranced by him anyway. With her lank hair, hooded eyes, and air of sleepy sensuality, Sevigny--maybe even more than Swank--embodies the mystery of sex that's at the core of Boys Don't Cry . Everything she does is deliberate, ironic, slightly unreadable--and unyielding. She's could be saying, \"I'm in this world but not of it. ... You'd never dream what's underneath.\"", "An actress named Hilary Swank gives one of the most rapturous performances I've ever seen as the cross-dressing Brandon Teena (a k a Teena Brandon) in Kimberly Peirce's stark and astonishingly", "The novel, the first by Chuck Palahniuk (the surname sounds like Eskimo for \"palooka\"--which somehow fits), walks a line between the straight and ironic--it isn't always clear if its glib sociological pronouncements are meant to be taken straight or as the ravings of a delusional mama's boy. But onscreen, when Pitt announces to the assembled fighters that they are the \"middle children of history\" with \"no purpose and no place\"--emasculated on one hand by the lack of a unifying crisis (a world war or depression) and on the other by lack of material wealth as promised by television--he seems meant to be intoning gospel. \"We are a generation of men raised by women,\" Tyler announces, and adds, \"If our fathers bail, what does that tell you about God?\" (I give up: What?)", "human fat) and small (he splices frames from porn flicks into kiddie movies). When Jack's apartment mysteriously explodes--along with his carefully chosen IKEA furniture--he moves into Tyler's squalid warehouse and helps to found a new religion: Fight Club,", "Jack finds another outlet, though. On a plane, he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a cryptic hipster with a penchant for subversive acts both large (he makes high-priced soaps from liposuctioned", "F ight Club could use a few different perspectives: a woman's, obviously, but also an African-American's--someone who'd have a different take on the \"healing\" properties of violence. It's also unclear just what has emasculated Jack: Is it that he's a materialist or that the materials themselves (i.e., IKEA's lacquered particle boards) don't measure up to his fantasies of opulence? Is he motivated by spiritual hunger or envy? Tyler's subsequent idea of confining his group's mayhem to franchise coffee bars and corporate-subsidized art is a witty one--it's like a parody of neo-Nazism as re-enacted by yuppies. It might have been a howl if performed by, say, the troupe of artsy German nihilists in Joel and Ethan Coen's The Big Lebowski (1998). Somehow Brad Pitt doesn't have the same piquancy.", "Until then, however, he has done a fabulous job of keeping it spinning. The most thrilling thing about Fight Club isn't what it says but how Uhls and Fincher pull you into its narrator's head and simulate his adrenalin rushes. A veteran of rock videos, Fincher is one of those filmmakers who helps make the case that MTV--along with digital editing--has transformed cinema for better as well as worse. The syntax has become more intricate. Voice-over narration, once considered uncinematic, is back in style, along with novelistic asides, digressions, fantasies, and flashbacks. To make a point, you can jazzily interject anything--even, as in Three Kings , a shot of a bullet slicing through internal organs. Films like Fight Club might not gel, but they have a breathless, free-associational quality that points to new possibilities in storytelling. Or maybe old possibilities: The language of movies hasn't seemed this unfettered since the pre-sound days of Sergei Eisenstein and Abel Gance.", "beautiful debut feature, Boys Don't Cry . The movie opens with Teena being", "role she has been longing for her whole life. In a redneck Nebraska bar, Brandon throws back a shot of whiskey and the gesture--a macho cliché--becomes an act of self-discovery. Every gesture does. \"You're gonna have a shiner", "Not to mention a hole in your head. Fight Club careers from one resonant satirical idea to the next without quite deciding whether its characters are full of crap or are Gen X prophets.", "It always gives you a rush, though. At first, it goofs on the absurd feminization of an absurdly macho culture. An increasingly desperate insomniac, Jack finds relief (and release) only at meetings for the terminally ill. At a testicular cancer", "Actually, Pitt isn't as terrible as usual: He's playing not a character but a conceit, and he can bask in his movie-idol arrogance, which seems to be the most authentic emotion he has. But the film belongs to Norton. As a ferocious skinhead in last year's American History X , Norton was taut and ropy, his long torso curled into a sneer; here, he's skinny and wilting, a quivering pansy. Even when he fights he doesn't transform--he's a raging wimp. The performance is marvelous, and it makes poetic sense in light of the movie's climactic twist. But that twist will annoy more people than it will delight, if only because it shifts the drama from the realm of the sociological to that of the psychoanalytic. The finale, scored with the Pixies' great \"Where Is My Mind?\" comes off facetiously--as if Fincher is throwing the movie away.", "in which young males gather after hours in the basement of a nightclub to pound one another (and be pounded) to a bloody pulp. That last parenthesis isn't so parenthetical. In some ways, it's the longing to be beaten into", "They cling to each other and sob. But Jack's idyll is rudely disrupted by--wouldn't you know it?--a woman. A dark-eyed, sepulchral head case named Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) begins showing up at all the same disparate", "group, he's enfolded in the ample arms of Bob (the singer Meat Loaf Aday), a former bodybuilder who ruined his health with steroids and now has \"bitch tits.\" Jack and Bob subscribe to a new form of male bonding:", "Swank's ecstatic expression carries us through the next hour, as Brandon acts out his urban-cowboy fantasies--\"surfing\" from the bumper of a pickup truck, rolling in the mud, and straddling a barstool with one hand on a brewski and" ], [ "shorn of her hated female tresses and becoming \"Brandon,\" who swaggers around in tight jeans and leather jackets. The joy is in watching the actor transform, and I don't just mean Swank: I mean Teena Brandon playing Brandon Teena--the", "Though harrowing, the second half of Boys Don't Cry isn't as great as the first. The early scenes evoke elation and dread simultaneously, the later ones just dread; and the last half-hour is unrelieved torture. What keeps the movie tantalizing is Chloë Sevigny's Lana, who might or might not know that Brandon is a girl but who's entranced by him anyway. With her lank hair, hooded eyes, and air of sleepy sensuality, Sevigny--maybe even more than Swank--embodies the mystery of sex that's at the core of Boys Don't Cry . Everything she does is deliberate, ironic, slightly unreadable--and unyielding. She's could be saying, \"I'm in this world but not of it. ... You'd never dream what's underneath.\"", "An actress named Hilary Swank gives one of the most rapturous performances I've ever seen as the cross-dressing Brandon Teena (a k a Teena Brandon) in Kimberly Peirce's stark and astonishingly", "That the people with whom Brandon feels most at home would kill him if they knew his true gender is the movie's most tragic irony--and the one that lifts it out of the realm of gay-martyr hagiography and into something more complex and irreducible: a meditation on the irrelevance of gender. Peirce's triumph is to make these scenes at once exuberant (occasionally hilarious) and foreboding, so that all the seeds of Brandon's killing are right there on the screen. John (Peter Sarsgaard), one of his future rapists and murderers, calls him \"little buddy\" and seems almost attracted to him; Sarsgaard's performance is a finely chiseled study of how unresolved emotion can suddenly resolve itself into violence.", "role she has been longing for her whole life. In a redneck Nebraska bar, Brandon throws back a shot of whiskey and the gesture--a macho cliché--becomes an act of self-discovery. Every gesture does. \"You're gonna have a shiner", "beautiful debut feature, Boys Don't Cry . The movie opens with Teena being", "Swank's ecstatic expression carries us through the next hour, as Brandon acts out his urban-cowboy fantasies--\"surfing\" from the bumper of a pickup truck, rolling in the mud, and straddling a barstool with one hand on a brewski and", "in the morning,\" someone tells Brandon after a barroom brawl, and he takes the news with a glee that's almost mystical: \"I am????? Oh, shit!!!\" he cries, grinning. That might be my favorite moment in the picture, because", "in which young males gather after hours in the basement of a nightclub to pound one another (and be pounded) to a bloody pulp. That last parenthesis isn't so parenthetical. In some ways, it's the longing to be beaten into", "Boys Do Bleed \n\n Fight Club is silly stuff, sensationalism that mistakes itself for satire, but it's also a brash and transporting piece of moviemaking, like Raging Bull on acid. The film opens with--literally--a surge of adrenalin, which travels through the bloodstream and into the brain of its protagonist, Jack (Edward Norton), who's viewed, as the camera pulls out of his insides, with a gun stuck in his mouth. How'd he get into this pickle? He's going to tell you, breezily, and the director, David Fincher, is going to illustrate his narrative--violently. Fincher ( Seven , 1995; The Game , 1997) is out to bombard you with so much feverish imagery that you have no choice but to succumb to the movie's reeling, punch-drunk worldview. By the end, you might feel as if you, too, have a mouthful of blood.", "It always gives you a rush, though. At first, it goofs on the absurd feminization of an absurdly macho culture. An increasingly desperate insomniac, Jack finds relief (and release) only at meetings for the terminally ill. At a testicular cancer", "group, he's enfolded in the ample arms of Bob (the singer Meat Loaf Aday), a former bodybuilder who ruined his health with steroids and now has \"bitch tits.\" Jack and Bob subscribe to a new form of male bonding:", "The novel, the first by Chuck Palahniuk (the surname sounds like Eskimo for \"palooka\"--which somehow fits), walks a line between the straight and ironic--it isn't always clear if its glib sociological pronouncements are meant to be taken straight or as the ravings of a delusional mama's boy. But onscreen, when Pitt announces to the assembled fighters that they are the \"middle children of history\" with \"no purpose and no place\"--emasculated on one hand by the lack of a unifying crisis (a world war or depression) and on the other by lack of material wealth as promised by television--he seems meant to be intoning gospel. \"We are a generation of men raised by women,\" Tyler announces, and adds, \"If our fathers bail, what does that tell you about God?\" (I give up: What?)", "Fincher and his screenwriter, Jim Uhls, seem to think they've broken new ground in Fight Club , that their metaphor for our discontents hits harder than anyone else's. Certainly it produces more bloody splatter. But 20 years ago, the same impulse was called punk and, as Greil Marcus documents in Lipstick Traces , it was other things before that. Yes, the mixture of Johnny Rotten, Jake La Motta, and Jesus is unique; and the Faludi-esque emasculation themes are more explicit. But there's something deeply movie-ish about the whole conceit, as if the novelist and director were weaned on Martin Scorsese pictures and never stopped dreaming of recapturing that first masochistic rush.", "is polishing brass on the Titanic \"), the only creative outlet left is annihilation. \"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything,\" he says.", "oblivion that's the strongest. \"Self-improvement,\" explains Tyler, \"is masturbation\"; self-destruction is the new way. Tyler's manifesto calls for an end to consumerism (\"Things you own end up owning you\"), and since society is going down (\"Martha Stewart", "human fat) and small (he splices frames from porn flicks into kiddie movies). When Jack's apartment mysteriously explodes--along with his carefully chosen IKEA furniture--he moves into Tyler's squalid warehouse and helps to found a new religion: Fight Club,", "meetings for essentially the same voyeuristic ends, and the presence of this \"tourist\" makes it impossible for Jack to emote.", "Not to mention a hole in your head. Fight Club careers from one resonant satirical idea to the next without quite deciding whether its characters are full of crap or are Gen X prophets.", "Actually, Pitt isn't as terrible as usual: He's playing not a character but a conceit, and he can bask in his movie-idol arrogance, which seems to be the most authentic emotion he has. But the film belongs to Norton. As a ferocious skinhead in last year's American History X , Norton was taut and ropy, his long torso curled into a sneer; here, he's skinny and wilting, a quivering pansy. Even when he fights he doesn't transform--he's a raging wimp. The performance is marvelous, and it makes poetic sense in light of the movie's climactic twist. But that twist will annoy more people than it will delight, if only because it shifts the drama from the realm of the sociological to that of the psychoanalytic. The finale, scored with the Pixies' great \"Where Is My Mind?\" comes off facetiously--as if Fincher is throwing the movie away." ], [ ", which has apparently flopped but which you can still catch at second- and third-tier theaters. It looks peculiar--a Norman Rockwell painting with noir shadows. And its tale of a small town healed by a", "Until then, however, he has done a fabulous job of keeping it spinning. The most thrilling thing about Fight Club isn't what it says but how Uhls and Fincher pull you into its narrator's head and simulate his adrenalin rushes. A veteran of rock videos, Fincher is one of those filmmakers who helps make the case that MTV--along with digital editing--has transformed cinema for better as well as worse. The syntax has become more intricate. Voice-over narration, once considered uncinematic, is back in style, along with novelistic asides, digressions, fantasies, and flashbacks. To make a point, you can jazzily interject anything--even, as in Three Kings , a shot of a bullet slicing through internal organs. Films like Fight Club might not gel, but they have a breathless, free-associational quality that points to new possibilities in storytelling. Or maybe old possibilities: The language of movies hasn't seemed this unfettered since the pre-sound days of Sergei Eisenstein and Abel Gance.", "I n brief: If a friend tells you you'll love Happy Texas , rethink the friendship. This clunky mistaken-identity comedy about escaped cons who impersonate gay pageant directors doesn't even make sense on its own low farcical terms; it's mostly one lame homo joke after another. The only bright spot is Steve Zahn, who could be the offspring of Michael J. Fox and Crispin Glover if they'd mated on the set of Back to the Future (1985).", "Boys Do Bleed \n\n Fight Club is silly stuff, sensationalism that mistakes itself for satire, but it's also a brash and transporting piece of moviemaking, like Raging Bull on acid. The film opens with--literally--a surge of adrenalin, which travels through the bloodstream and into the brain of its protagonist, Jack (Edward Norton), who's viewed, as the camera pulls out of his insides, with a gun stuck in his mouth. How'd he get into this pickle? He's going to tell you, breezily, and the director, David Fincher, is going to illustrate his narrative--violently. Fincher ( Seven , 1995; The Game , 1997) is out to bombard you with so much feverish imagery that you have no choice but to succumb to the movie's reeling, punch-drunk worldview. By the end, you might feel as if you, too, have a mouthful of blood.", "The novel, the first by Chuck Palahniuk (the surname sounds like Eskimo for \"palooka\"--which somehow fits), walks a line between the straight and ironic--it isn't always clear if its glib sociological pronouncements are meant to be taken straight or as the ravings of a delusional mama's boy. But onscreen, when Pitt announces to the assembled fighters that they are the \"middle children of history\" with \"no purpose and no place\"--emasculated on one hand by the lack of a unifying crisis (a world war or depression) and on the other by lack of material wealth as promised by television--he seems meant to be intoning gospel. \"We are a generation of men raised by women,\" Tyler announces, and adds, \"If our fathers bail, what does that tell you about God?\" (I give up: What?)", "Actually, Pitt isn't as terrible as usual: He's playing not a character but a conceit, and he can bask in his movie-idol arrogance, which seems to be the most authentic emotion he has. But the film belongs to Norton. As a ferocious skinhead in last year's American History X , Norton was taut and ropy, his long torso curled into a sneer; here, he's skinny and wilting, a quivering pansy. Even when he fights he doesn't transform--he's a raging wimp. The performance is marvelous, and it makes poetic sense in light of the movie's climactic twist. But that twist will annoy more people than it will delight, if only because it shifts the drama from the realm of the sociological to that of the psychoanalytic. The finale, scored with the Pixies' great \"Where Is My Mind?\" comes off facetiously--as if Fincher is throwing the movie away.", "posseses the cinema's most expressive honking-nasal voice and who slumps through the movie like the world's most lyrical anti-ballerina. Even her puffy cheeks are eloquent: They made me think of Mumford as the home of the psychological mumps.", "depressive (Loren Dean) posing as a psychologist is full of doddering misconceptions about psychotherapy. I almost don't know why I loved it, but the relaxed pacing and the witty turns by Martin Short, Ted Danson, David Paymer, and Mary", "Fincher and his screenwriter, Jim Uhls, seem to think they've broken new ground in Fight Club , that their metaphor for our discontents hits harder than anyone else's. Certainly it produces more bloody splatter. But 20 years ago, the same impulse was called punk and, as Greil Marcus documents in Lipstick Traces , it was other things before that. Yes, the mixture of Johnny Rotten, Jake La Motta, and Jesus is unique; and the Faludi-esque emasculation themes are more explicit. But there's something deeply movie-ish about the whole conceit, as if the novelist and director were weaned on Martin Scorsese pictures and never stopped dreaming of recapturing that first masochistic rush.", "It's hard to make a serious case for Lawrence Kasdan's Mumford", "Though harrowing, the second half of Boys Don't Cry isn't as great as the first. The early scenes evoke elation and dread simultaneously, the later ones just dread; and the last half-hour is unrelieved torture. What keeps the movie tantalizing is Chloë Sevigny's Lana, who might or might not know that Brandon is a girl but who's entranced by him anyway. With her lank hair, hooded eyes, and air of sleepy sensuality, Sevigny--maybe even more than Swank--embodies the mystery of sex that's at the core of Boys Don't Cry . Everything she does is deliberate, ironic, slightly unreadable--and unyielding. She's could be saying, \"I'm in this world but not of it. ... You'd never dream what's underneath.\"", "in the morning,\" someone tells Brandon after a barroom brawl, and he takes the news with a glee that's almost mystical: \"I am????? Oh, shit!!!\" he cries, grinning. That might be my favorite moment in the picture, because", "shorn of her hated female tresses and becoming \"Brandon,\" who swaggers around in tight jeans and leather jackets. The joy is in watching the actor transform, and I don't just mean Swank: I mean Teena Brandon playing Brandon Teena--the", "human fat) and small (he splices frames from porn flicks into kiddie movies). When Jack's apartment mysteriously explodes--along with his carefully chosen IKEA furniture--he moves into Tyler's squalid warehouse and helps to found a new religion: Fight Club,", "Swank's ecstatic expression carries us through the next hour, as Brandon acts out his urban-cowboy fantasies--\"surfing\" from the bumper of a pickup truck, rolling in the mud, and straddling a barstool with one hand on a brewski and", "That the people with whom Brandon feels most at home would kill him if they knew his true gender is the movie's most tragic irony--and the one that lifts it out of the realm of gay-martyr hagiography and into something more complex and irreducible: a meditation on the irrelevance of gender. Peirce's triumph is to make these scenes at once exuberant (occasionally hilarious) and foreboding, so that all the seeds of Brandon's killing are right there on the screen. John (Peter Sarsgaard), one of his future rapists and murderers, calls him \"little buddy\" and seems almost attracted to him; Sarsgaard's performance is a finely chiseled study of how unresolved emotion can suddenly resolve itself into violence.", "Not to mention a hole in your head. Fight Club careers from one resonant satirical idea to the next without quite deciding whether its characters are full of crap or are Gen X prophets.", "F ight Club could use a few different perspectives: a woman's, obviously, but also an African-American's--someone who'd have a different take on the \"healing\" properties of violence. It's also unclear just what has emasculated Jack: Is it that he's a materialist or that the materials themselves (i.e., IKEA's lacquered particle boards) don't measure up to his fantasies of opulence? Is he motivated by spiritual hunger or envy? Tyler's subsequent idea of confining his group's mayhem to franchise coffee bars and corporate-subsidized art is a witty one--it's like a parody of neo-Nazism as re-enacted by yuppies. It might have been a howl if performed by, say, the troupe of artsy German nihilists in Joel and Ethan Coen's The Big Lebowski (1998). Somehow Brad Pitt doesn't have the same piquancy.", "is polishing brass on the Titanic \"), the only creative outlet left is annihilation. \"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything,\" he says.", "role she has been longing for her whole life. In a redneck Nebraska bar, Brandon throws back a shot of whiskey and the gesture--a macho cliché--becomes an act of self-discovery. Every gesture does. \"You're gonna have a shiner" ] ]
train	24517	[ "Who are the Chingsi?", "What happened to the Whale?", "What is the Minnow?", "Who is James?", "What was the mission of the Whale?", "Why does Matt feel the need to warn people about the Chingsi?", "Where is Matt from?" ]	[ [ "The Chingsi are the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri.", "A race of cat-like humanoids from the planet Chang.", "Chingsi is what the people of China call themselves in this story.", "The Chingsi are genetically mutated cats." ], [ "Charlie sabotaged the deuterium fusion drive. The drive shut down, and the Whale crashed into the Pacific.", "The ion rockets on the Whale exploded. It then crashed into the Pacific.", "The Cazamian laser exploded, causing the Whale to crash down into the Pacific.", "The Whale came out of its star-jump in the wrong position. It then crashed into the Pacific." ], [ "The Minnow is Charlie's spaceship.", "The Minnow is the most powerful ship ever built.", "The Minnow is a shuttlecraft.", "The Minnow is an escape pod." ], [ "James is the captain of the Minnow.", "James is the ship's navigator.", "James is the ship's doctor.", "James is the captain of the Whale." ], [ "The mission is to make peace with Alpha Centauri.", "The mission is to invade Chang.", "The mission is a test flight and astronomical survey.", "The mission is to make contact with Chang." ], [ "Matt is convinced the Chingsi are bad luck.", "Matt is convinced that Charlie deliberately destroyed the Whale.", "Matt is convinced the Chingsi are evil.", "Matt is convinced that Charlie deliberately destroyed the Minnow." ], [ "Matt is from France.", "Matt is from the United States.", "Matt is from a colony on Mars.", "Matt is from a colony on the Moon." ] ]	[ 2, 4, 3, 4, 3, 1, 4 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "\"The second thing I want to say is\n about the Chingsi, and here it is:\n watch out for them. Those jokers are\n dangerous. I'm not telling how because\n I've got a scientific reputation\n to watch. You'll have to figure it out\n for yourselves. Here are the clues:\n(1) The Chingsi talk and laugh but\n after all they aren't human. On\n an alien world a hundred light-years\n away, why shouldn't alien\n talents develop? A talent that's\n so uncertain and rudimentary\n here that most people don't believe\n it, might be highly developed\n out there.\n(2) The\nWhale\nexpedition did fine\n till it found Chang. Then it hit\n a seam of bad luck. Real stinking\n bad luck that went on and\n on till it looks fishy. We lost\n the ship, we lost the launch, all\n but one of us lost our lives. We\n couldn't even win a game of\n ping-pong.", "\"All the same, search the space-flight\n records, talk to the actuaries.\n When a ship is working perfectly\n and is operated by a hand-picked\n crew of highly trained men in perfect\n condition, how often is it wrecked\n by a series of silly errors happening\n one after another in defiance of\n probability?\n\n\n \"I'll sign off with two thoughts,\n one depressing and one cheering. A\n single Chingsi wrecked our ship and\n our launch. What could a whole\n planetful of them do?", "\"It was funny the way they won\n all the time at table tennis. They certainly\n weren't so hot at it. Maybe\n that ten per cent extra gravity put us\n off our strokes. As for chess, Svendlov\n was our champion. He won\n sometimes. The rest of us seemed to\n lose whichever Chingsi we played.\n There again it wasn't so much that\n they were good. How could they be,\n in the time? It was more that we all\n seemed to make silly mistakes when\n we played them and that's fatal in\n chess. Of course it's a screwy situation,\n playing chess with something\n that grows its own fur coat, has yellow\n eyes an inch and a half long\n and long white whiskers. Could\nyou\nhave kept your mind on the game?", "\"Where had I got to? I'd told you\n how we happened to find Chang,\n hadn't I? That's what the natives called\n it. Walking, talking natives on a\n blue sky planet with 1.1 g gravity\n and a twenty per cent oxygen atmosphere\n at fifteen p.s.i. The odds\n against finding Chang on a six-sun\n survey on the first star jump ever\n must be up in the googols. We certainly\n were lucky.\n\n\n \"The Chang natives aren't very\n technical—haven't got space travel\n for instance. They're good astronomers,\n though. We were able to show\n them our sun, in their telescopes. In\n their way, they're a highly civilized\n people. Look more like cats than\n people, but they're people all right.\n If you doubt it, chew these facts\n over.\n\n\n \"One, they learned our language\n in four weeks. When I say they, I\n mean a ten-man team of them.", "\"Two, they brew a near-beer that's\n a lot nearer than the canned stuff we\n had aboard the\nWhale\n.\n\n\n \"Three, they've a great sense of\n humor. Ran rather to silly practical\n jokes, but still. Can't say I care for\n that hot-foot and belly-laugh stuff\n myself, but tastes differ.\n\n\n \"Four, the ten-man language team\n also learned chess and table tennis.\n\n\n \"But why go on? People who talk\n English, drink beer, like jokes and\n beat me at chess or table-tennis are\n people for my money, even if they\n look like tigers in trousers.", "\"And don't think I fell victim to\n their feline charm. The children were\n pets, but you didn't feel like patting\n the adults on their big grinning\n heads. Personally I didn't like the one\n I knew best. He was called—well, we\n called him Charley, and he was the\n ethnologist, ambassador, contact man,\n or whatever you like to call him, who\n came back with us. Why I disliked\n him was because he was always trying\n to get the edge on you. All the\n time he had to be top. Great sense\n of humor, of course. I nearly broke\n my neck on that butter-slide he fixed\n up in the metal alleyway to the\nWhale's\nengine room. Charley laughed\n fit to bust, everyone laughed, I\n even laughed myself though doing it\n hurt me more than the tumble had.\n Yes, life and soul of the party, old\n Charley ...", "\"My last sight of the\nMinnow\nwas\n a cabin full of dead and dying men,\n the sweetish stink of burned flesh\n and the choking reek of scorching insulation,\n the boat jolting and shuddering\n and beginning to break up,\n and in the middle of the flames, still\n unhurt, was Charley. He was laughing ...", "\"Anyway, we took good care with\n the next lot of measurements. That's\n why we were out there so long. They\n were cross-checked about five times.\n I got sick so I climbed into a spacesuit\n and went outside and took some\n photographs of the Sun which I hoped\n would help to determine hydrogen\n density in the outer regions. When\n I got back everything was ready. We\n disposed ourselves about the control\n room and relaxed for all we were\n worth. We were all praying that this\n time nothing would go wrong, and\n all looking forward to seeing Earth\n again after four months subjective\n time away, except for Charley, who\n was still chuckling and shaking his\n head, and Captain James who was\n glaring at Charley and obviously\n wishing human dignity permitted him\n to tear Charley limb from limb. Then\n James pressed the button.", "\"James got us all into the\nMinnow\nat a dead run. There was no time to\n take anything at all except the clothes\n we stood in. The\nMinnow\nwas meant\n for short heavy hops to planets or\n asteroids. In addition to the ion drive\n it had emergency atomic rockets,\n using steam for reaction mass. We\n thanked God for that when Cazamian\n canceled our downwards velocity\n with them in a few seconds. We\n curved away up over China and from\n about fifty miles high we saw the\nWhale\nhit the Pacific. Six hundred\n tons of mass at well over two thousand\n miles an hour make an almighty\n splash. By now you'll have divers\n down, but I doubt they'll salvage\n much you can use.\n\n\n \"I wonder why James went down\n with the ship, as the saying is? Not\n that it made any difference. It must\n have broken his heart to know that\n his lovely ship was getting the chopper.\n Or did he suspect another human\n error?", "\"I've tried my hands and arms\n and they seem to work,\" it began.\n \"I've wiggled my toes with entire\n success. It's well on the cards that\n I'm all in one piece and not broken\n up at all, though I don't see how it\n could happen. Right now I don't\n feel like struggling up and finding\n out. I'm fine where I am. I'll just lie\n here for a while and relax, and get\n some of the story on tape. This suit's\n got a built-in recorder, I might as\n well use it. That way even if I'm not\n as well as I feel, I'll leave a message.\n You probably know we're back\n and wonder what went wrong.\n\n\n \"I suppose I'm in a state of shock.\n That's why I can't seem to get up.\n Who wouldn't be shocked after luck\n like that?", "\"We didn't have time to think\n about that, or even to get the radio\n working. The steam rockets blew\n up. Poor Cazamian was burnt to a\n crisp. Only thing that saved me was\n the spacesuit I was still wearing. I\n snapped the face plate down because\n the cabin was filling with fumes. I\n saw Charley coming out of the toilet—that's\n how he'd escaped—and I\n saw him beginning to laugh. Then\n the port side collapsed and I fell out.\n\n\n \"I saw the launch spinning away,\n glowing red against a purplish black\n sky. I tumbled head over heels towards\n the huge curved shield of\n earth fifty miles below. I shut my\n eyes and that's about all I remember.\n I don't see how any of us could have\n survived. I think we're all dead.", "\"I'll have to get up and crack this\n suit and let some air in. But I can't.\n I fell fifty miles without a parachute.\n I'm dead so I can't stand up.\"\nThere was silence for a while except\n for the vicious howl of the wind.\n Then snow began to shift on the\n ledge. A man crawled stiffly out and\n came shakily to his feet. He moved\n slowly around for some time. After\n about two hours he returned to the\n hollow, squatted down and switched\n on the recorder. The voice began\n again, considerably wearier.", "\"Everything twanged like a bowstring.\n I felt myself turned inside out,\n passed through a small sieve, and\n poured back into shape. The entire\n bow wall-screen was full of Earth.\n Something was wrong all right, and\n this time it was much, much worse.\n We'd come out of the jump about\n two hundred miles above the Pacific,\n pointed straight down, traveling at a\n relative speed of about two thousand\n miles an hour.\n\n\n \"It was a fantastic situation. Here\n was the\nWhale\n, the most powerful\n ship ever built, which could cover\n fifty light-years in a subjective time\n of one second, and it was helpless.\n For, as of course you know, the\n star-drive couldn't be used again for\n at least two hours.", "Nothing grew, nothing flew, nothing\n walked, nothing talked. But the\n thing in the hollow was stirring in\n stiff jerks like a snake with its back\n broken or a clockwork toy running\n down. When the movements stopped,\n there was a click and a strange\n sound began. Thin, scratchy, inaudible\n more than a yard away, weary\n but still cocky, there leaked from the\n shape in the hollow the sound of a\n human voice.", "\"Just before I start the climb there\n are two things I want to get on tape.\n The first is how I got here. I've remembered\n something from my military\n training, when I did some parachute\n jumps. Terminal velocity for a\n human body falling through air is\n about one hundred twenty m.p.h.\n Falling fifty miles is no worse than\n falling five hundred feet. You'd be\n lucky to live through a five hundred\n foot fall, true, but I've been lucky.\n The suit is bulky but light and probably\n slowed my fall. I hit a sixty mile\n an hour updraft this side of the\n mountain, skidded downhill through\n about half a mile of snow and fetched\n up in a drift. The suit is part\n worn but still operational. I'm fine.", "\"It still seems incredible. To program\n the ship for a star-jump, you\n merely told it where you were and\n where you wanted to go. In practical\n terms, that entailed first a series of\n exact measurements which had to be\n translated into the somewhat abstruse\n co-ordinate system we used based on\n the topological order of mass-points\n in the galaxy. Then you cut a tape on\n the computer and hit the button.\n Nothing was wrong with the computer.\n Nothing was wrong with the\n engines. We'd hit the right button\n and we'd gone to the place we'd aimed\n for. All we'd done was aim for\n the wrong place. It hurts me to tell", "\"On the other hand, a talent that\n manipulates chance events is bound\n to be chancy. No matter how highly\n developed it can't be surefire. The\n proof is that I've survived to tell the\n tale.\"\nAt twenty below zero and fifty\n miles an hour the wind ravaged the\n mountain. Peering through his polarized\n vizor at the white waste and the\n snow-filled air howling over it, sliding\n and stumbling with every step\n on a slope that got gradually steeper\n and seemed to go on forever, Matt\n Hennessy began to inch his way up\n the north face of Mount Everest.\nTHE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAstounding Science Fiction\nFebruary 1959.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.", "\"Hello there. I'm in the bleakest\n wilderness I've ever seen. This place\n makes the moon look cozy. There's\n precipice around me every way but\n one and that's up. So it's up I'll have\n to go till I find a way to go down.\n I've been chewing snow to quench\n my thirst but I could eat a horse. I\n picked up a short-wave broadcast on\n my suit but couldn't understand a\n word. Not English, not French, and\n there I stick. Listened to it for fifteen\n minutes just to hear a human voice\n again. I haven't much hope of reaching\n anyone with my five milliwatt\n suit transmitter but I'll keep trying.", "\"I was telling about the return\n journey, wasn't I? The long jump\n back home, which should have dumped\n us between the orbits of Earth\n and Mars. Instead of which, when\n James took his finger off the button,\n the mass-detector showed nothing\n except the noise-level of the universe.\n\n\n \"We were out in that no place for\n a day. We astronomers had to establish\n our exact position relative to the\n solar system. The crew had to find\n out exactly what went wrong. The\n physicists had to make mystic passes\n in front of meters and mutter about\n residual folds in stress-free space.\n Our task was easy, because we were\n about half a light-year from the sun.\n The crew's job was also easy: they\n found what went wrong in less than\n half an hour.", "\"You'll want to know if the ship\n worked. Well, she did. Went like a\n bomb. We got lined up between\n Earth and Mars, you'll remember,\n and James pushed the button marked\n 'Jump'. Took his finger off the button\n and there we were:\nAlpha Centauri\n.\n Two months later your time,\n one second later by us. We covered\n our whole survey assignment like\n that, smooth as a pint of old and\n mild which right now I could certainly\n use. Better yet would be a pint\n of hot black coffee with sugar in.\n Failing that, I could even go for a\n long drink of cold water. There was\n never anything wrong with the\nWhale\ntill right at the end and even then I\n doubt if it was the ship itself that\n fouled things up." ], [ "\"My last sight of the\nMinnow\nwas\n a cabin full of dead and dying men,\n the sweetish stink of burned flesh\n and the choking reek of scorching insulation,\n the boat jolting and shuddering\n and beginning to break up,\n and in the middle of the flames, still\n unhurt, was Charley. He was laughing ...", "\"James got us all into the\nMinnow\nat a dead run. There was no time to\n take anything at all except the clothes\n we stood in. The\nMinnow\nwas meant\n for short heavy hops to planets or\n asteroids. In addition to the ion drive\n it had emergency atomic rockets,\n using steam for reaction mass. We\n thanked God for that when Cazamian\n canceled our downwards velocity\n with them in a few seconds. We\n curved away up over China and from\n about fifty miles high we saw the\nWhale\nhit the Pacific. Six hundred\n tons of mass at well over two thousand\n miles an hour make an almighty\n splash. By now you'll have divers\n down, but I doubt they'll salvage\n much you can use.\n\n\n \"I wonder why James went down\n with the ship, as the saying is? Not\n that it made any difference. It must\n have broken his heart to know that\n his lovely ship was getting the chopper.\n Or did he suspect another human\n error?", "\"You'll want to know if the ship\n worked. Well, she did. Went like a\n bomb. We got lined up between\n Earth and Mars, you'll remember,\n and James pushed the button marked\n 'Jump'. Took his finger off the button\n and there we were:\nAlpha Centauri\n.\n Two months later your time,\n one second later by us. We covered\n our whole survey assignment like\n that, smooth as a pint of old and\n mild which right now I could certainly\n use. Better yet would be a pint\n of hot black coffee with sugar in.\n Failing that, I could even go for a\n long drink of cold water. There was\n never anything wrong with the\nWhale\ntill right at the end and even then I\n doubt if it was the ship itself that\n fouled things up.", "\"Everything twanged like a bowstring.\n I felt myself turned inside out,\n passed through a small sieve, and\n poured back into shape. The entire\n bow wall-screen was full of Earth.\n Something was wrong all right, and\n this time it was much, much worse.\n We'd come out of the jump about\n two hundred miles above the Pacific,\n pointed straight down, traveling at a\n relative speed of about two thousand\n miles an hour.\n\n\n \"It was a fantastic situation. Here\n was the\nWhale\n, the most powerful\n ship ever built, which could cover\n fifty light-years in a subjective time\n of one second, and it was helpless.\n For, as of course you know, the\n star-drive couldn't be used again for\n at least two hours.", "\"The\nWhale\nalso had ion rockets\n of course, the standard deuterium-fusion\n thing with direct conversion.\n As again you know, this is good for\n interplanetary flight because you can\n run it continuously and it has extremely\n high exhaust velocity. But in\n our situation it was no good because\n it has rather a low thrust. It would\n have taken more time than we had to\n deflect us enough to avoid a smash.\n We had five minutes to abandon\n ship.", "\"And don't think I fell victim to\n their feline charm. The children were\n pets, but you didn't feel like patting\n the adults on their big grinning\n heads. Personally I didn't like the one\n I knew best. He was called—well, we\n called him Charley, and he was the\n ethnologist, ambassador, contact man,\n or whatever you like to call him, who\n came back with us. Why I disliked\n him was because he was always trying\n to get the edge on you. All the\n time he had to be top. Great sense\n of humor, of course. I nearly broke\n my neck on that butter-slide he fixed\n up in the metal alleyway to the\nWhale's\nengine room. Charley laughed\n fit to bust, everyone laughed, I\n even laughed myself though doing it\n hurt me more than the tumble had.\n Yes, life and soul of the party, old\n Charley ...", "\"The second thing I want to say is\n about the Chingsi, and here it is:\n watch out for them. Those jokers are\n dangerous. I'm not telling how because\n I've got a scientific reputation\n to watch. You'll have to figure it out\n for yourselves. Here are the clues:\n(1) The Chingsi talk and laugh but\n after all they aren't human. On\n an alien world a hundred light-years\n away, why shouldn't alien\n talents develop? A talent that's\n so uncertain and rudimentary\n here that most people don't believe\n it, might be highly developed\n out there.\n(2) The\nWhale\nexpedition did fine\n till it found Chang. Then it hit\n a seam of bad luck. Real stinking\n bad luck that went on and\n on till it looks fishy. We lost\n the ship, we lost the launch, all\n but one of us lost our lives. We\n couldn't even win a game of\n ping-pong.", "\"I've tried my hands and arms\n and they seem to work,\" it began.\n \"I've wiggled my toes with entire\n success. It's well on the cards that\n I'm all in one piece and not broken\n up at all, though I don't see how it\n could happen. Right now I don't\n feel like struggling up and finding\n out. I'm fine where I am. I'll just lie\n here for a while and relax, and get\n some of the story on tape. This suit's\n got a built-in recorder, I might as\n well use it. That way even if I'm not\n as well as I feel, I'll leave a message.\n You probably know we're back\n and wonder what went wrong.\n\n\n \"I suppose I'm in a state of shock.\n That's why I can't seem to get up.\n Who wouldn't be shocked after luck\n like that?", "\"Two, they brew a near-beer that's\n a lot nearer than the canned stuff we\n had aboard the\nWhale\n.\n\n\n \"Three, they've a great sense of\n humor. Ran rather to silly practical\n jokes, but still. Can't say I care for\n that hot-foot and belly-laugh stuff\n myself, but tastes differ.\n\n\n \"Four, the ten-man language team\n also learned chess and table tennis.\n\n\n \"But why go on? People who talk\n English, drink beer, like jokes and\n beat me at chess or table-tennis are\n people for my money, even if they\n look like tigers in trousers.", "Nothing grew, nothing flew, nothing\n walked, nothing talked. But the\n thing in the hollow was stirring in\n stiff jerks like a snake with its back\n broken or a clockwork toy running\n down. When the movements stopped,\n there was a click and a strange\n sound began. Thin, scratchy, inaudible\n more than a yard away, weary\n but still cocky, there leaked from the\n shape in the hollow the sound of a\n human voice.", "\"Anyway, we took good care with\n the next lot of measurements. That's\n why we were out there so long. They\n were cross-checked about five times.\n I got sick so I climbed into a spacesuit\n and went outside and took some\n photographs of the Sun which I hoped\n would help to determine hydrogen\n density in the outer regions. When\n I got back everything was ready. We\n disposed ourselves about the control\n room and relaxed for all we were\n worth. We were all praying that this\n time nothing would go wrong, and\n all looking forward to seeing Earth\n again after four months subjective\n time away, except for Charley, who\n was still chuckling and shaking his\n head, and Captain James who was\n glaring at Charley and obviously\n wishing human dignity permitted him\n to tear Charley limb from limb. Then\n James pressed the button.", "\"We didn't have time to think\n about that, or even to get the radio\n working. The steam rockets blew\n up. Poor Cazamian was burnt to a\n crisp. Only thing that saved me was\n the spacesuit I was still wearing. I\n snapped the face plate down because\n the cabin was filling with fumes. I\n saw Charley coming out of the toilet—that's\n how he'd escaped—and I\n saw him beginning to laugh. Then\n the port side collapsed and I fell out.\n\n\n \"I saw the launch spinning away,\n glowing red against a purplish black\n sky. I tumbled head over heels towards\n the huge curved shield of\n earth fifty miles below. I shut my\n eyes and that's about all I remember.\n I don't see how any of us could have\n survived. I think we're all dead.", "\"I'll have to get up and crack this\n suit and let some air in. But I can't.\n I fell fifty miles without a parachute.\n I'm dead so I can't stand up.\"\nThere was silence for a while except\n for the vicious howl of the wind.\n Then snow began to shift on the\n ledge. A man crawled stiffly out and\n came shakily to his feet. He moved\n slowly around for some time. After\n about two hours he returned to the\n hollow, squatted down and switched\n on the recorder. The voice began\n again, considerably wearier.", "\"That was some survey assignment.\n We astronomers really lived.\n Wait till you see—but of course you\n won't. I could weep when I think of\n those miles of lovely color film, all\n gone up in smoke.\n\"I'm shocked all right. I never said\n who I was. Matt Hennessy, from Farside\n Observatory, back of the Moon,\n just back from a proving flight\ncum\nastronomical survey in the starship\nWhale\n. Whoever you are who finds\n this tape, you're made. Take it to\n any radio station or newspaper office.\n You'll find you can name your price\n and don't take any wooden nickels.", "\"I've always been lucky, I guess.\n Luck got me a place in the\nWhale\n.\n Sure I'm a good astronomer but so\n are lots of other guys. If I were ten\n years older, it would have been an\n honor, being picked for the first long\n jump in the first starship ever. At my\n age it was luck.", "\"Sorry about that. I passed out. I\n don't know what I said, if anything,\n and the suit recorder has no playback\n or eraser. What must have happened\n is that the suit ran out of\n oxygen, and I lost consciousness due\n to anoxia. I dreamed I switched on\n the radio, but I actually switched on\n the emergency tank, thank the Lord,\n and that brought me round.\n\n\n \"Come to think of it, why not\n crack the suit and breath fresh air\n instead of bottled?\n\n\n \"No. I'd have to get up to do that.\n I think I'll just lie here a little bit\n longer and get properly rested up\n before I try anything big like standing\n up.", "ACCIDENTAL DEATH\nBY PETER BAILY\nThe most\n dangerous of weapons\n \n is the one you don't know is loaded.\nIllustrated by Schoenherr\nThe\n wind howled out of\n the northwest, blind\n with snow and barbed\n with ice crystals. All\n the way up the half-mile\n precipice it fingered and wrenched\n away at groaning ice-slabs. It\n screamed over the top, whirled snow\n in a dervish dance around the hollow\n there, piled snow into the long furrow\n plowed ruler-straight through\n streamlined hummocks of snow.\n\n\n The sun glinted on black rock\n glazed by ice, chasms and ridges and\n bridges of ice. It lit the snow slope\n to a frozen glare, penciled black\n shadow down the long furrow, and\n flashed at the furrow's end on a\n thing of metal and plastics, an artifact\n thrown down in the dead wilderness.", "\"It still seems incredible. To program\n the ship for a star-jump, you\n merely told it where you were and\n where you wanted to go. In practical\n terms, that entailed first a series of\n exact measurements which had to be\n translated into the somewhat abstruse\n co-ordinate system we used based on\n the topological order of mass-points\n in the galaxy. Then you cut a tape on\n the computer and hit the button.\n Nothing was wrong with the computer.\n Nothing was wrong with the\n engines. We'd hit the right button\n and we'd gone to the place we'd aimed\n for. All we'd done was aim for\n the wrong place. It hurts me to tell", "\"I was telling about the return\n journey, wasn't I? The long jump\n back home, which should have dumped\n us between the orbits of Earth\n and Mars. Instead of which, when\n James took his finger off the button,\n the mass-detector showed nothing\n except the noise-level of the universe.\n\n\n \"We were out in that no place for\n a day. We astronomers had to establish\n our exact position relative to the\n solar system. The crew had to find\n out exactly what went wrong. The\n physicists had to make mystic passes\n in front of meters and mutter about\n residual folds in stress-free space.\n Our task was easy, because we were\n about half a light-year from the sun.\n The crew's job was also easy: they\n found what went wrong in less than\n half an hour.", "\"All the same, search the space-flight\n records, talk to the actuaries.\n When a ship is working perfectly\n and is operated by a hand-picked\n crew of highly trained men in perfect\n condition, how often is it wrecked\n by a series of silly errors happening\n one after another in defiance of\n probability?\n\n\n \"I'll sign off with two thoughts,\n one depressing and one cheering. A\n single Chingsi wrecked our ship and\n our launch. What could a whole\n planetful of them do?" ], [ "\"My last sight of the\nMinnow\nwas\n a cabin full of dead and dying men,\n the sweetish stink of burned flesh\n and the choking reek of scorching insulation,\n the boat jolting and shuddering\n and beginning to break up,\n and in the middle of the flames, still\n unhurt, was Charley. He was laughing ...", "\"James got us all into the\nMinnow\nat a dead run. There was no time to\n take anything at all except the clothes\n we stood in. The\nMinnow\nwas meant\n for short heavy hops to planets or\n asteroids. In addition to the ion drive\n it had emergency atomic rockets,\n using steam for reaction mass. We\n thanked God for that when Cazamian\n canceled our downwards velocity\n with them in a few seconds. We\n curved away up over China and from\n about fifty miles high we saw the\nWhale\nhit the Pacific. Six hundred\n tons of mass at well over two thousand\n miles an hour make an almighty\n splash. By now you'll have divers\n down, but I doubt they'll salvage\n much you can use.\n\n\n \"I wonder why James went down\n with the ship, as the saying is? Not\n that it made any difference. It must\n have broken his heart to know that\n his lovely ship was getting the chopper.\n Or did he suspect another human\n error?", "\"The second thing I want to say is\n about the Chingsi, and here it is:\n watch out for them. Those jokers are\n dangerous. I'm not telling how because\n I've got a scientific reputation\n to watch. You'll have to figure it out\n for yourselves. Here are the clues:\n(1) The Chingsi talk and laugh but\n after all they aren't human. On\n an alien world a hundred light-years\n away, why shouldn't alien\n talents develop? A talent that's\n so uncertain and rudimentary\n here that most people don't believe\n it, might be highly developed\n out there.\n(2) The\nWhale\nexpedition did fine\n till it found Chang. Then it hit\n a seam of bad luck. Real stinking\n bad luck that went on and\n on till it looks fishy. We lost\n the ship, we lost the launch, all\n but one of us lost our lives. We\n couldn't even win a game of\n ping-pong.", "\"Everything twanged like a bowstring.\n I felt myself turned inside out,\n passed through a small sieve, and\n poured back into shape. The entire\n bow wall-screen was full of Earth.\n Something was wrong all right, and\n this time it was much, much worse.\n We'd come out of the jump about\n two hundred miles above the Pacific,\n pointed straight down, traveling at a\n relative speed of about two thousand\n miles an hour.\n\n\n \"It was a fantastic situation. Here\n was the\nWhale\n, the most powerful\n ship ever built, which could cover\n fifty light-years in a subjective time\n of one second, and it was helpless.\n For, as of course you know, the\n star-drive couldn't be used again for\n at least two hours.", "\"Two, they brew a near-beer that's\n a lot nearer than the canned stuff we\n had aboard the\nWhale\n.\n\n\n \"Three, they've a great sense of\n humor. Ran rather to silly practical\n jokes, but still. Can't say I care for\n that hot-foot and belly-laugh stuff\n myself, but tastes differ.\n\n\n \"Four, the ten-man language team\n also learned chess and table tennis.\n\n\n \"But why go on? People who talk\n English, drink beer, like jokes and\n beat me at chess or table-tennis are\n people for my money, even if they\n look like tigers in trousers.", "\"You'll want to know if the ship\n worked. Well, she did. Went like a\n bomb. We got lined up between\n Earth and Mars, you'll remember,\n and James pushed the button marked\n 'Jump'. Took his finger off the button\n and there we were:\nAlpha Centauri\n.\n Two months later your time,\n one second later by us. We covered\n our whole survey assignment like\n that, smooth as a pint of old and\n mild which right now I could certainly\n use. Better yet would be a pint\n of hot black coffee with sugar in.\n Failing that, I could even go for a\n long drink of cold water. There was\n never anything wrong with the\nWhale\ntill right at the end and even then I\n doubt if it was the ship itself that\n fouled things up.", "Nothing grew, nothing flew, nothing\n walked, nothing talked. But the\n thing in the hollow was stirring in\n stiff jerks like a snake with its back\n broken or a clockwork toy running\n down. When the movements stopped,\n there was a click and a strange\n sound began. Thin, scratchy, inaudible\n more than a yard away, weary\n but still cocky, there leaked from the\n shape in the hollow the sound of a\n human voice.", "\"And don't think I fell victim to\n their feline charm. The children were\n pets, but you didn't feel like patting\n the adults on their big grinning\n heads. Personally I didn't like the one\n I knew best. He was called—well, we\n called him Charley, and he was the\n ethnologist, ambassador, contact man,\n or whatever you like to call him, who\n came back with us. Why I disliked\n him was because he was always trying\n to get the edge on you. All the\n time he had to be top. Great sense\n of humor, of course. I nearly broke\n my neck on that butter-slide he fixed\n up in the metal alleyway to the\nWhale's\nengine room. Charley laughed\n fit to bust, everyone laughed, I\n even laughed myself though doing it\n hurt me more than the tumble had.\n Yes, life and soul of the party, old\n Charley ...", "\"I've tried my hands and arms\n and they seem to work,\" it began.\n \"I've wiggled my toes with entire\n success. It's well on the cards that\n I'm all in one piece and not broken\n up at all, though I don't see how it\n could happen. Right now I don't\n feel like struggling up and finding\n out. I'm fine where I am. I'll just lie\n here for a while and relax, and get\n some of the story on tape. This suit's\n got a built-in recorder, I might as\n well use it. That way even if I'm not\n as well as I feel, I'll leave a message.\n You probably know we're back\n and wonder what went wrong.\n\n\n \"I suppose I'm in a state of shock.\n That's why I can't seem to get up.\n Who wouldn't be shocked after luck\n like that?", "\"Anyway, we took good care with\n the next lot of measurements. That's\n why we were out there so long. They\n were cross-checked about five times.\n I got sick so I climbed into a spacesuit\n and went outside and took some\n photographs of the Sun which I hoped\n would help to determine hydrogen\n density in the outer regions. When\n I got back everything was ready. We\n disposed ourselves about the control\n room and relaxed for all we were\n worth. We were all praying that this\n time nothing would go wrong, and\n all looking forward to seeing Earth\n again after four months subjective\n time away, except for Charley, who\n was still chuckling and shaking his\n head, and Captain James who was\n glaring at Charley and obviously\n wishing human dignity permitted him\n to tear Charley limb from limb. Then\n James pressed the button.", "\"The\nWhale\nalso had ion rockets\n of course, the standard deuterium-fusion\n thing with direct conversion.\n As again you know, this is good for\n interplanetary flight because you can\n run it continuously and it has extremely\n high exhaust velocity. But in\n our situation it was no good because\n it has rather a low thrust. It would\n have taken more time than we had to\n deflect us enough to avoid a smash.\n We had five minutes to abandon\n ship.", "\"That was some survey assignment.\n We astronomers really lived.\n Wait till you see—but of course you\n won't. I could weep when I think of\n those miles of lovely color film, all\n gone up in smoke.\n\"I'm shocked all right. I never said\n who I was. Matt Hennessy, from Farside\n Observatory, back of the Moon,\n just back from a proving flight\ncum\nastronomical survey in the starship\nWhale\n. Whoever you are who finds\n this tape, you're made. Take it to\n any radio station or newspaper office.\n You'll find you can name your price\n and don't take any wooden nickels.", "\"All the same, search the space-flight\n records, talk to the actuaries.\n When a ship is working perfectly\n and is operated by a hand-picked\n crew of highly trained men in perfect\n condition, how often is it wrecked\n by a series of silly errors happening\n one after another in defiance of\n probability?\n\n\n \"I'll sign off with two thoughts,\n one depressing and one cheering. A\n single Chingsi wrecked our ship and\n our launch. What could a whole\n planetful of them do?", "\"It was funny the way they won\n all the time at table tennis. They certainly\n weren't so hot at it. Maybe\n that ten per cent extra gravity put us\n off our strokes. As for chess, Svendlov\n was our champion. He won\n sometimes. The rest of us seemed to\n lose whichever Chingsi we played.\n There again it wasn't so much that\n they were good. How could they be,\n in the time? It was more that we all\n seemed to make silly mistakes when\n we played them and that's fatal in\n chess. Of course it's a screwy situation,\n playing chess with something\n that grows its own fur coat, has yellow\n eyes an inch and a half long\n and long white whiskers. Could\nyou\nhave kept your mind on the game?", "\"Where had I got to? I'd told you\n how we happened to find Chang,\n hadn't I? That's what the natives called\n it. Walking, talking natives on a\n blue sky planet with 1.1 g gravity\n and a twenty per cent oxygen atmosphere\n at fifteen p.s.i. The odds\n against finding Chang on a six-sun\n survey on the first star jump ever\n must be up in the googols. We certainly\n were lucky.\n\n\n \"The Chang natives aren't very\n technical—haven't got space travel\n for instance. They're good astronomers,\n though. We were able to show\n them our sun, in their telescopes. In\n their way, they're a highly civilized\n people. Look more like cats than\n people, but they're people all right.\n If you doubt it, chew these facts\n over.\n\n\n \"One, they learned our language\n in four weeks. When I say they, I\n mean a ten-man team of them.", "\"Hello there. I'm in the bleakest\n wilderness I've ever seen. This place\n makes the moon look cozy. There's\n precipice around me every way but\n one and that's up. So it's up I'll have\n to go till I find a way to go down.\n I've been chewing snow to quench\n my thirst but I could eat a horse. I\n picked up a short-wave broadcast on\n my suit but couldn't understand a\n word. Not English, not French, and\n there I stick. Listened to it for fifteen\n minutes just to hear a human voice\n again. I haven't much hope of reaching\n anyone with my five milliwatt\n suit transmitter but I'll keep trying.", "\"It still seems incredible. To program\n the ship for a star-jump, you\n merely told it where you were and\n where you wanted to go. In practical\n terms, that entailed first a series of\n exact measurements which had to be\n translated into the somewhat abstruse\n co-ordinate system we used based on\n the topological order of mass-points\n in the galaxy. Then you cut a tape on\n the computer and hit the button.\n Nothing was wrong with the computer.\n Nothing was wrong with the\n engines. We'd hit the right button\n and we'd gone to the place we'd aimed\n for. All we'd done was aim for\n the wrong place. It hurts me to tell", "\"I'll have to get up and crack this\n suit and let some air in. But I can't.\n I fell fifty miles without a parachute.\n I'm dead so I can't stand up.\"\nThere was silence for a while except\n for the vicious howl of the wind.\n Then snow began to shift on the\n ledge. A man crawled stiffly out and\n came shakily to his feet. He moved\n slowly around for some time. After\n about two hours he returned to the\n hollow, squatted down and switched\n on the recorder. The voice began\n again, considerably wearier.", "\"Sorry about that. I passed out. I\n don't know what I said, if anything,\n and the suit recorder has no playback\n or eraser. What must have happened\n is that the suit ran out of\n oxygen, and I lost consciousness due\n to anoxia. I dreamed I switched on\n the radio, but I actually switched on\n the emergency tank, thank the Lord,\n and that brought me round.\n\n\n \"Come to think of it, why not\n crack the suit and breath fresh air\n instead of bottled?\n\n\n \"No. I'd have to get up to do that.\n I think I'll just lie here a little bit\n longer and get properly rested up\n before I try anything big like standing\n up.", "\"I was telling about the return\n journey, wasn't I? The long jump\n back home, which should have dumped\n us between the orbits of Earth\n and Mars. Instead of which, when\n James took his finger off the button,\n the mass-detector showed nothing\n except the noise-level of the universe.\n\n\n \"We were out in that no place for\n a day. We astronomers had to establish\n our exact position relative to the\n solar system. The crew had to find\n out exactly what went wrong. The\n physicists had to make mystic passes\n in front of meters and mutter about\n residual folds in stress-free space.\n Our task was easy, because we were\n about half a light-year from the sun.\n The crew's job was also easy: they\n found what went wrong in less than\n half an hour." ], [ "\"James got us all into the\nMinnow\nat a dead run. There was no time to\n take anything at all except the clothes\n we stood in. The\nMinnow\nwas meant\n for short heavy hops to planets or\n asteroids. In addition to the ion drive\n it had emergency atomic rockets,\n using steam for reaction mass. We\n thanked God for that when Cazamian\n canceled our downwards velocity\n with them in a few seconds. We\n curved away up over China and from\n about fifty miles high we saw the\nWhale\nhit the Pacific. Six hundred\n tons of mass at well over two thousand\n miles an hour make an almighty\n splash. By now you'll have divers\n down, but I doubt they'll salvage\n much you can use.\n\n\n \"I wonder why James went down\n with the ship, as the saying is? Not\n that it made any difference. It must\n have broken his heart to know that\n his lovely ship was getting the chopper.\n Or did he suspect another human\n error?", "\"Anyway, we took good care with\n the next lot of measurements. That's\n why we were out there so long. They\n were cross-checked about five times.\n I got sick so I climbed into a spacesuit\n and went outside and took some\n photographs of the Sun which I hoped\n would help to determine hydrogen\n density in the outer regions. When\n I got back everything was ready. We\n disposed ourselves about the control\n room and relaxed for all we were\n worth. We were all praying that this\n time nothing would go wrong, and\n all looking forward to seeing Earth\n again after four months subjective\n time away, except for Charley, who\n was still chuckling and shaking his\n head, and Captain James who was\n glaring at Charley and obviously\n wishing human dignity permitted him\n to tear Charley limb from limb. Then\n James pressed the button.", "\"And don't think I fell victim to\n their feline charm. The children were\n pets, but you didn't feel like patting\n the adults on their big grinning\n heads. Personally I didn't like the one\n I knew best. He was called—well, we\n called him Charley, and he was the\n ethnologist, ambassador, contact man,\n or whatever you like to call him, who\n came back with us. Why I disliked\n him was because he was always trying\n to get the edge on you. All the\n time he had to be top. Great sense\n of humor, of course. I nearly broke\n my neck on that butter-slide he fixed\n up in the metal alleyway to the\nWhale's\nengine room. Charley laughed\n fit to bust, everyone laughed, I\n even laughed myself though doing it\n hurt me more than the tumble had.\n Yes, life and soul of the party, old\n Charley ...", "\"You'll want to know if the ship\n worked. Well, she did. Went like a\n bomb. We got lined up between\n Earth and Mars, you'll remember,\n and James pushed the button marked\n 'Jump'. Took his finger off the button\n and there we were:\nAlpha Centauri\n.\n Two months later your time,\n one second later by us. We covered\n our whole survey assignment like\n that, smooth as a pint of old and\n mild which right now I could certainly\n use. Better yet would be a pint\n of hot black coffee with sugar in.\n Failing that, I could even go for a\n long drink of cold water. There was\n never anything wrong with the\nWhale\ntill right at the end and even then I\n doubt if it was the ship itself that\n fouled things up.", "\"I've tried my hands and arms\n and they seem to work,\" it began.\n \"I've wiggled my toes with entire\n success. It's well on the cards that\n I'm all in one piece and not broken\n up at all, though I don't see how it\n could happen. Right now I don't\n feel like struggling up and finding\n out. I'm fine where I am. I'll just lie\n here for a while and relax, and get\n some of the story on tape. This suit's\n got a built-in recorder, I might as\n well use it. That way even if I'm not\n as well as I feel, I'll leave a message.\n You probably know we're back\n and wonder what went wrong.\n\n\n \"I suppose I'm in a state of shock.\n That's why I can't seem to get up.\n Who wouldn't be shocked after luck\n like that?", "\"The second thing I want to say is\n about the Chingsi, and here it is:\n watch out for them. Those jokers are\n dangerous. I'm not telling how because\n I've got a scientific reputation\n to watch. You'll have to figure it out\n for yourselves. Here are the clues:\n(1) The Chingsi talk and laugh but\n after all they aren't human. On\n an alien world a hundred light-years\n away, why shouldn't alien\n talents develop? A talent that's\n so uncertain and rudimentary\n here that most people don't believe\n it, might be highly developed\n out there.\n(2) The\nWhale\nexpedition did fine\n till it found Chang. Then it hit\n a seam of bad luck. Real stinking\n bad luck that went on and\n on till it looks fishy. We lost\n the ship, we lost the launch, all\n but one of us lost our lives. We\n couldn't even win a game of\n ping-pong.", "\"I'll have to get up and crack this\n suit and let some air in. But I can't.\n I fell fifty miles without a parachute.\n I'm dead so I can't stand up.\"\nThere was silence for a while except\n for the vicious howl of the wind.\n Then snow began to shift on the\n ledge. A man crawled stiffly out and\n came shakily to his feet. He moved\n slowly around for some time. After\n about two hours he returned to the\n hollow, squatted down and switched\n on the recorder. The voice began\n again, considerably wearier.", "\"My last sight of the\nMinnow\nwas\n a cabin full of dead and dying men,\n the sweetish stink of burned flesh\n and the choking reek of scorching insulation,\n the boat jolting and shuddering\n and beginning to break up,\n and in the middle of the flames, still\n unhurt, was Charley. He was laughing ...", "\"I was telling about the return\n journey, wasn't I? The long jump\n back home, which should have dumped\n us between the orbits of Earth\n and Mars. Instead of which, when\n James took his finger off the button,\n the mass-detector showed nothing\n except the noise-level of the universe.\n\n\n \"We were out in that no place for\n a day. We astronomers had to establish\n our exact position relative to the\n solar system. The crew had to find\n out exactly what went wrong. The\n physicists had to make mystic passes\n in front of meters and mutter about\n residual folds in stress-free space.\n Our task was easy, because we were\n about half a light-year from the sun.\n The crew's job was also easy: they\n found what went wrong in less than\n half an hour.", "\"That was some survey assignment.\n We astronomers really lived.\n Wait till you see—but of course you\n won't. I could weep when I think of\n those miles of lovely color film, all\n gone up in smoke.\n\"I'm shocked all right. I never said\n who I was. Matt Hennessy, from Farside\n Observatory, back of the Moon,\n just back from a proving flight\ncum\nastronomical survey in the starship\nWhale\n. Whoever you are who finds\n this tape, you're made. Take it to\n any radio station or newspaper office.\n You'll find you can name your price\n and don't take any wooden nickels.", "\"Just before I start the climb there\n are two things I want to get on tape.\n The first is how I got here. I've remembered\n something from my military\n training, when I did some parachute\n jumps. Terminal velocity for a\n human body falling through air is\n about one hundred twenty m.p.h.\n Falling fifty miles is no worse than\n falling five hundred feet. You'd be\n lucky to live through a five hundred\n foot fall, true, but I've been lucky.\n The suit is bulky but light and probably\n slowed my fall. I hit a sixty mile\n an hour updraft this side of the\n mountain, skidded downhill through\n about half a mile of snow and fetched\n up in a drift. The suit is part\n worn but still operational. I'm fine.", "\"We didn't have time to think\n about that, or even to get the radio\n working. The steam rockets blew\n up. Poor Cazamian was burnt to a\n crisp. Only thing that saved me was\n the spacesuit I was still wearing. I\n snapped the face plate down because\n the cabin was filling with fumes. I\n saw Charley coming out of the toilet—that's\n how he'd escaped—and I\n saw him beginning to laugh. Then\n the port side collapsed and I fell out.\n\n\n \"I saw the launch spinning away,\n glowing red against a purplish black\n sky. I tumbled head over heels towards\n the huge curved shield of\n earth fifty miles below. I shut my\n eyes and that's about all I remember.\n I don't see how any of us could have\n survived. I think we're all dead.", "\"It still seems incredible. To program\n the ship for a star-jump, you\n merely told it where you were and\n where you wanted to go. In practical\n terms, that entailed first a series of\n exact measurements which had to be\n translated into the somewhat abstruse\n co-ordinate system we used based on\n the topological order of mass-points\n in the galaxy. Then you cut a tape on\n the computer and hit the button.\n Nothing was wrong with the computer.\n Nothing was wrong with the\n engines. We'd hit the right button\n and we'd gone to the place we'd aimed\n for. All we'd done was aim for\n the wrong place. It hurts me to tell", "\"Sorry about that. I passed out. I\n don't know what I said, if anything,\n and the suit recorder has no playback\n or eraser. What must have happened\n is that the suit ran out of\n oxygen, and I lost consciousness due\n to anoxia. I dreamed I switched on\n the radio, but I actually switched on\n the emergency tank, thank the Lord,\n and that brought me round.\n\n\n \"Come to think of it, why not\n crack the suit and breath fresh air\n instead of bottled?\n\n\n \"No. I'd have to get up to do that.\n I think I'll just lie here a little bit\n longer and get properly rested up\n before I try anything big like standing\n up.", "\"Two, they brew a near-beer that's\n a lot nearer than the canned stuff we\n had aboard the\nWhale\n.\n\n\n \"Three, they've a great sense of\n humor. Ran rather to silly practical\n jokes, but still. Can't say I care for\n that hot-foot and belly-laugh stuff\n myself, but tastes differ.\n\n\n \"Four, the ten-man language team\n also learned chess and table tennis.\n\n\n \"But why go on? People who talk\n English, drink beer, like jokes and\n beat me at chess or table-tennis are\n people for my money, even if they\n look like tigers in trousers.", "\"Hello there. I'm in the bleakest\n wilderness I've ever seen. This place\n makes the moon look cozy. There's\n precipice around me every way but\n one and that's up. So it's up I'll have\n to go till I find a way to go down.\n I've been chewing snow to quench\n my thirst but I could eat a horse. I\n picked up a short-wave broadcast on\n my suit but couldn't understand a\n word. Not English, not French, and\n there I stick. Listened to it for fifteen\n minutes just to hear a human voice\n again. I haven't much hope of reaching\n anyone with my five milliwatt\n suit transmitter but I'll keep trying.", "\"Everything twanged like a bowstring.\n I felt myself turned inside out,\n passed through a small sieve, and\n poured back into shape. The entire\n bow wall-screen was full of Earth.\n Something was wrong all right, and\n this time it was much, much worse.\n We'd come out of the jump about\n two hundred miles above the Pacific,\n pointed straight down, traveling at a\n relative speed of about two thousand\n miles an hour.\n\n\n \"It was a fantastic situation. Here\n was the\nWhale\n, the most powerful\n ship ever built, which could cover\n fifty light-years in a subjective time\n of one second, and it was helpless.\n For, as of course you know, the\n star-drive couldn't be used again for\n at least two hours.", "ACCIDENTAL DEATH\nBY PETER BAILY\nThe most\n dangerous of weapons\n \n is the one you don't know is loaded.\nIllustrated by Schoenherr\nThe\n wind howled out of\n the northwest, blind\n with snow and barbed\n with ice crystals. All\n the way up the half-mile\n precipice it fingered and wrenched\n away at groaning ice-slabs. It\n screamed over the top, whirled snow\n in a dervish dance around the hollow\n there, piled snow into the long furrow\n plowed ruler-straight through\n streamlined hummocks of snow.\n\n\n The sun glinted on black rock\n glazed by ice, chasms and ridges and\n bridges of ice. It lit the snow slope\n to a frozen glare, penciled black\n shadow down the long furrow, and\n flashed at the furrow's end on a\n thing of metal and plastics, an artifact\n thrown down in the dead wilderness.", "\"Where had I got to? I'd told you\n how we happened to find Chang,\n hadn't I? That's what the natives called\n it. Walking, talking natives on a\n blue sky planet with 1.1 g gravity\n and a twenty per cent oxygen atmosphere\n at fifteen p.s.i. The odds\n against finding Chang on a six-sun\n survey on the first star jump ever\n must be up in the googols. We certainly\n were lucky.\n\n\n \"The Chang natives aren't very\n technical—haven't got space travel\n for instance. They're good astronomers,\n though. We were able to show\n them our sun, in their telescopes. In\n their way, they're a highly civilized\n people. Look more like cats than\n people, but they're people all right.\n If you doubt it, chew these facts\n over.\n\n\n \"One, they learned our language\n in four weeks. When I say they, I\n mean a ten-man team of them.", "and glimmers, the fumbling touch of\n a rudimentary talent. There's the evil\n eye legend and the Jonah, bad luck\n bringers. Superstition? Maybe; but\n ask the insurance companies about\n accident prones. What's in a name?\n Call a man unlucky and you're superstitious.\n Call him accident prone and\n that's sound business sense. I've said\n enough." ], [ "\"James got us all into the\nMinnow\nat a dead run. There was no time to\n take anything at all except the clothes\n we stood in. The\nMinnow\nwas meant\n for short heavy hops to planets or\n asteroids. In addition to the ion drive\n it had emergency atomic rockets,\n using steam for reaction mass. We\n thanked God for that when Cazamian\n canceled our downwards velocity\n with them in a few seconds. We\n curved away up over China and from\n about fifty miles high we saw the\nWhale\nhit the Pacific. Six hundred\n tons of mass at well over two thousand\n miles an hour make an almighty\n splash. By now you'll have divers\n down, but I doubt they'll salvage\n much you can use.\n\n\n \"I wonder why James went down\n with the ship, as the saying is? Not\n that it made any difference. It must\n have broken his heart to know that\n his lovely ship was getting the chopper.\n Or did he suspect another human\n error?", "\"Everything twanged like a bowstring.\n I felt myself turned inside out,\n passed through a small sieve, and\n poured back into shape. The entire\n bow wall-screen was full of Earth.\n Something was wrong all right, and\n this time it was much, much worse.\n We'd come out of the jump about\n two hundred miles above the Pacific,\n pointed straight down, traveling at a\n relative speed of about two thousand\n miles an hour.\n\n\n \"It was a fantastic situation. Here\n was the\nWhale\n, the most powerful\n ship ever built, which could cover\n fifty light-years in a subjective time\n of one second, and it was helpless.\n For, as of course you know, the\n star-drive couldn't be used again for\n at least two hours.", "\"The\nWhale\nalso had ion rockets\n of course, the standard deuterium-fusion\n thing with direct conversion.\n As again you know, this is good for\n interplanetary flight because you can\n run it continuously and it has extremely\n high exhaust velocity. But in\n our situation it was no good because\n it has rather a low thrust. It would\n have taken more time than we had to\n deflect us enough to avoid a smash.\n We had five minutes to abandon\n ship.", "\"The second thing I want to say is\n about the Chingsi, and here it is:\n watch out for them. Those jokers are\n dangerous. I'm not telling how because\n I've got a scientific reputation\n to watch. You'll have to figure it out\n for yourselves. Here are the clues:\n(1) The Chingsi talk and laugh but\n after all they aren't human. On\n an alien world a hundred light-years\n away, why shouldn't alien\n talents develop? A talent that's\n so uncertain and rudimentary\n here that most people don't believe\n it, might be highly developed\n out there.\n(2) The\nWhale\nexpedition did fine\n till it found Chang. Then it hit\n a seam of bad luck. Real stinking\n bad luck that went on and\n on till it looks fishy. We lost\n the ship, we lost the launch, all\n but one of us lost our lives. We\n couldn't even win a game of\n ping-pong.", "\"And don't think I fell victim to\n their feline charm. The children were\n pets, but you didn't feel like patting\n the adults on their big grinning\n heads. Personally I didn't like the one\n I knew best. He was called—well, we\n called him Charley, and he was the\n ethnologist, ambassador, contact man,\n or whatever you like to call him, who\n came back with us. Why I disliked\n him was because he was always trying\n to get the edge on you. All the\n time he had to be top. Great sense\n of humor, of course. I nearly broke\n my neck on that butter-slide he fixed\n up in the metal alleyway to the\nWhale's\nengine room. Charley laughed\n fit to bust, everyone laughed, I\n even laughed myself though doing it\n hurt me more than the tumble had.\n Yes, life and soul of the party, old\n Charley ...", "\"You'll want to know if the ship\n worked. Well, she did. Went like a\n bomb. We got lined up between\n Earth and Mars, you'll remember,\n and James pushed the button marked\n 'Jump'. Took his finger off the button\n and there we were:\nAlpha Centauri\n.\n Two months later your time,\n one second later by us. We covered\n our whole survey assignment like\n that, smooth as a pint of old and\n mild which right now I could certainly\n use. Better yet would be a pint\n of hot black coffee with sugar in.\n Failing that, I could even go for a\n long drink of cold water. There was\n never anything wrong with the\nWhale\ntill right at the end and even then I\n doubt if it was the ship itself that\n fouled things up.", "\"Two, they brew a near-beer that's\n a lot nearer than the canned stuff we\n had aboard the\nWhale\n.\n\n\n \"Three, they've a great sense of\n humor. Ran rather to silly practical\n jokes, but still. Can't say I care for\n that hot-foot and belly-laugh stuff\n myself, but tastes differ.\n\n\n \"Four, the ten-man language team\n also learned chess and table tennis.\n\n\n \"But why go on? People who talk\n English, drink beer, like jokes and\n beat me at chess or table-tennis are\n people for my money, even if they\n look like tigers in trousers.", "\"My last sight of the\nMinnow\nwas\n a cabin full of dead and dying men,\n the sweetish stink of burned flesh\n and the choking reek of scorching insulation,\n the boat jolting and shuddering\n and beginning to break up,\n and in the middle of the flames, still\n unhurt, was Charley. He was laughing ...", "\"I've always been lucky, I guess.\n Luck got me a place in the\nWhale\n.\n Sure I'm a good astronomer but so\n are lots of other guys. If I were ten\n years older, it would have been an\n honor, being picked for the first long\n jump in the first starship ever. At my\n age it was luck.", "\"Anyway, we took good care with\n the next lot of measurements. That's\n why we were out there so long. They\n were cross-checked about five times.\n I got sick so I climbed into a spacesuit\n and went outside and took some\n photographs of the Sun which I hoped\n would help to determine hydrogen\n density in the outer regions. When\n I got back everything was ready. We\n disposed ourselves about the control\n room and relaxed for all we were\n worth. We were all praying that this\n time nothing would go wrong, and\n all looking forward to seeing Earth\n again after four months subjective\n time away, except for Charley, who\n was still chuckling and shaking his\n head, and Captain James who was\n glaring at Charley and obviously\n wishing human dignity permitted him\n to tear Charley limb from limb. Then\n James pressed the button.", "\"That was some survey assignment.\n We astronomers really lived.\n Wait till you see—but of course you\n won't. I could weep when I think of\n those miles of lovely color film, all\n gone up in smoke.\n\"I'm shocked all right. I never said\n who I was. Matt Hennessy, from Farside\n Observatory, back of the Moon,\n just back from a proving flight\ncum\nastronomical survey in the starship\nWhale\n. Whoever you are who finds\n this tape, you're made. Take it to\n any radio station or newspaper office.\n You'll find you can name your price\n and don't take any wooden nickels.", "\"It still seems incredible. To program\n the ship for a star-jump, you\n merely told it where you were and\n where you wanted to go. In practical\n terms, that entailed first a series of\n exact measurements which had to be\n translated into the somewhat abstruse\n co-ordinate system we used based on\n the topological order of mass-points\n in the galaxy. Then you cut a tape on\n the computer and hit the button.\n Nothing was wrong with the computer.\n Nothing was wrong with the\n engines. We'd hit the right button\n and we'd gone to the place we'd aimed\n for. All we'd done was aim for\n the wrong place. It hurts me to tell", "\"All the same, search the space-flight\n records, talk to the actuaries.\n When a ship is working perfectly\n and is operated by a hand-picked\n crew of highly trained men in perfect\n condition, how often is it wrecked\n by a series of silly errors happening\n one after another in defiance of\n probability?\n\n\n \"I'll sign off with two thoughts,\n one depressing and one cheering. A\n single Chingsi wrecked our ship and\n our launch. What could a whole\n planetful of them do?", "\"I've tried my hands and arms\n and they seem to work,\" it began.\n \"I've wiggled my toes with entire\n success. It's well on the cards that\n I'm all in one piece and not broken\n up at all, though I don't see how it\n could happen. Right now I don't\n feel like struggling up and finding\n out. I'm fine where I am. I'll just lie\n here for a while and relax, and get\n some of the story on tape. This suit's\n got a built-in recorder, I might as\n well use it. That way even if I'm not\n as well as I feel, I'll leave a message.\n You probably know we're back\n and wonder what went wrong.\n\n\n \"I suppose I'm in a state of shock.\n That's why I can't seem to get up.\n Who wouldn't be shocked after luck\n like that?", "\"I was telling about the return\n journey, wasn't I? The long jump\n back home, which should have dumped\n us between the orbits of Earth\n and Mars. Instead of which, when\n James took his finger off the button,\n the mass-detector showed nothing\n except the noise-level of the universe.\n\n\n \"We were out in that no place for\n a day. We astronomers had to establish\n our exact position relative to the\n solar system. The crew had to find\n out exactly what went wrong. The\n physicists had to make mystic passes\n in front of meters and mutter about\n residual folds in stress-free space.\n Our task was easy, because we were\n about half a light-year from the sun.\n The crew's job was also easy: they\n found what went wrong in less than\n half an hour.", "\"Where had I got to? I'd told you\n how we happened to find Chang,\n hadn't I? That's what the natives called\n it. Walking, talking natives on a\n blue sky planet with 1.1 g gravity\n and a twenty per cent oxygen atmosphere\n at fifteen p.s.i. The odds\n against finding Chang on a six-sun\n survey on the first star jump ever\n must be up in the googols. We certainly\n were lucky.\n\n\n \"The Chang natives aren't very\n technical—haven't got space travel\n for instance. They're good astronomers,\n though. We were able to show\n them our sun, in their telescopes. In\n their way, they're a highly civilized\n people. Look more like cats than\n people, but they're people all right.\n If you doubt it, chew these facts\n over.\n\n\n \"One, they learned our language\n in four weeks. When I say they, I\n mean a ten-man team of them.", "\"Just before I start the climb there\n are two things I want to get on tape.\n The first is how I got here. I've remembered\n something from my military\n training, when I did some parachute\n jumps. Terminal velocity for a\n human body falling through air is\n about one hundred twenty m.p.h.\n Falling fifty miles is no worse than\n falling five hundred feet. You'd be\n lucky to live through a five hundred\n foot fall, true, but I've been lucky.\n The suit is bulky but light and probably\n slowed my fall. I hit a sixty mile\n an hour updraft this side of the\n mountain, skidded downhill through\n about half a mile of snow and fetched\n up in a drift. The suit is part\n worn but still operational. I'm fine.", "\"We didn't have time to think\n about that, or even to get the radio\n working. The steam rockets blew\n up. Poor Cazamian was burnt to a\n crisp. Only thing that saved me was\n the spacesuit I was still wearing. I\n snapped the face plate down because\n the cabin was filling with fumes. I\n saw Charley coming out of the toilet—that's\n how he'd escaped—and I\n saw him beginning to laugh. Then\n the port side collapsed and I fell out.\n\n\n \"I saw the launch spinning away,\n glowing red against a purplish black\n sky. I tumbled head over heels towards\n the huge curved shield of\n earth fifty miles below. I shut my\n eyes and that's about all I remember.\n I don't see how any of us could have\n survived. I think we're all dead.", "\"Hello there. I'm in the bleakest\n wilderness I've ever seen. This place\n makes the moon look cozy. There's\n precipice around me every way but\n one and that's up. So it's up I'll have\n to go till I find a way to go down.\n I've been chewing snow to quench\n my thirst but I could eat a horse. I\n picked up a short-wave broadcast on\n my suit but couldn't understand a\n word. Not English, not French, and\n there I stick. Listened to it for fifteen\n minutes just to hear a human voice\n again. I haven't much hope of reaching\n anyone with my five milliwatt\n suit transmitter but I'll keep trying.", "\"It was funny the way they won\n all the time at table tennis. They certainly\n weren't so hot at it. Maybe\n that ten per cent extra gravity put us\n off our strokes. As for chess, Svendlov\n was our champion. He won\n sometimes. The rest of us seemed to\n lose whichever Chingsi we played.\n There again it wasn't so much that\n they were good. How could they be,\n in the time? It was more that we all\n seemed to make silly mistakes when\n we played them and that's fatal in\n chess. Of course it's a screwy situation,\n playing chess with something\n that grows its own fur coat, has yellow\n eyes an inch and a half long\n and long white whiskers. Could\nyou\nhave kept your mind on the game?" ], [ "\"The second thing I want to say is\n about the Chingsi, and here it is:\n watch out for them. Those jokers are\n dangerous. I'm not telling how because\n I've got a scientific reputation\n to watch. You'll have to figure it out\n for yourselves. Here are the clues:\n(1) The Chingsi talk and laugh but\n after all they aren't human. On\n an alien world a hundred light-years\n away, why shouldn't alien\n talents develop? A talent that's\n so uncertain and rudimentary\n here that most people don't believe\n it, might be highly developed\n out there.\n(2) The\nWhale\nexpedition did fine\n till it found Chang. Then it hit\n a seam of bad luck. Real stinking\n bad luck that went on and\n on till it looks fishy. We lost\n the ship, we lost the launch, all\n but one of us lost our lives. We\n couldn't even win a game of\n ping-pong.", "\"All the same, search the space-flight\n records, talk to the actuaries.\n When a ship is working perfectly\n and is operated by a hand-picked\n crew of highly trained men in perfect\n condition, how often is it wrecked\n by a series of silly errors happening\n one after another in defiance of\n probability?\n\n\n \"I'll sign off with two thoughts,\n one depressing and one cheering. A\n single Chingsi wrecked our ship and\n our launch. What could a whole\n planetful of them do?", "\"It was funny the way they won\n all the time at table tennis. They certainly\n weren't so hot at it. Maybe\n that ten per cent extra gravity put us\n off our strokes. As for chess, Svendlov\n was our champion. He won\n sometimes. The rest of us seemed to\n lose whichever Chingsi we played.\n There again it wasn't so much that\n they were good. How could they be,\n in the time? It was more that we all\n seemed to make silly mistakes when\n we played them and that's fatal in\n chess. Of course it's a screwy situation,\n playing chess with something\n that grows its own fur coat, has yellow\n eyes an inch and a half long\n and long white whiskers. Could\nyou\nhave kept your mind on the game?", "\"And don't think I fell victim to\n their feline charm. The children were\n pets, but you didn't feel like patting\n the adults on their big grinning\n heads. Personally I didn't like the one\n I knew best. He was called—well, we\n called him Charley, and he was the\n ethnologist, ambassador, contact man,\n or whatever you like to call him, who\n came back with us. Why I disliked\n him was because he was always trying\n to get the edge on you. All the\n time he had to be top. Great sense\n of humor, of course. I nearly broke\n my neck on that butter-slide he fixed\n up in the metal alleyway to the\nWhale's\nengine room. Charley laughed\n fit to bust, everyone laughed, I\n even laughed myself though doing it\n hurt me more than the tumble had.\n Yes, life and soul of the party, old\n Charley ...", "\"Two, they brew a near-beer that's\n a lot nearer than the canned stuff we\n had aboard the\nWhale\n.\n\n\n \"Three, they've a great sense of\n humor. Ran rather to silly practical\n jokes, but still. Can't say I care for\n that hot-foot and belly-laugh stuff\n myself, but tastes differ.\n\n\n \"Four, the ten-man language team\n also learned chess and table tennis.\n\n\n \"But why go on? People who talk\n English, drink beer, like jokes and\n beat me at chess or table-tennis are\n people for my money, even if they\n look like tigers in trousers.", "\"James got us all into the\nMinnow\nat a dead run. There was no time to\n take anything at all except the clothes\n we stood in. The\nMinnow\nwas meant\n for short heavy hops to planets or\n asteroids. In addition to the ion drive\n it had emergency atomic rockets,\n using steam for reaction mass. We\n thanked God for that when Cazamian\n canceled our downwards velocity\n with them in a few seconds. We\n curved away up over China and from\n about fifty miles high we saw the\nWhale\nhit the Pacific. Six hundred\n tons of mass at well over two thousand\n miles an hour make an almighty\n splash. By now you'll have divers\n down, but I doubt they'll salvage\n much you can use.\n\n\n \"I wonder why James went down\n with the ship, as the saying is? Not\n that it made any difference. It must\n have broken his heart to know that\n his lovely ship was getting the chopper.\n Or did he suspect another human\n error?", "\"Where had I got to? I'd told you\n how we happened to find Chang,\n hadn't I? That's what the natives called\n it. Walking, talking natives on a\n blue sky planet with 1.1 g gravity\n and a twenty per cent oxygen atmosphere\n at fifteen p.s.i. The odds\n against finding Chang on a six-sun\n survey on the first star jump ever\n must be up in the googols. We certainly\n were lucky.\n\n\n \"The Chang natives aren't very\n technical—haven't got space travel\n for instance. They're good astronomers,\n though. We were able to show\n them our sun, in their telescopes. In\n their way, they're a highly civilized\n people. Look more like cats than\n people, but they're people all right.\n If you doubt it, chew these facts\n over.\n\n\n \"One, they learned our language\n in four weeks. When I say they, I\n mean a ten-man team of them.", "\"My last sight of the\nMinnow\nwas\n a cabin full of dead and dying men,\n the sweetish stink of burned flesh\n and the choking reek of scorching insulation,\n the boat jolting and shuddering\n and beginning to break up,\n and in the middle of the flames, still\n unhurt, was Charley. He was laughing ...", "\"On the other hand, a talent that\n manipulates chance events is bound\n to be chancy. No matter how highly\n developed it can't be surefire. The\n proof is that I've survived to tell the\n tale.\"\nAt twenty below zero and fifty\n miles an hour the wind ravaged the\n mountain. Peering through his polarized\n vizor at the white waste and the\n snow-filled air howling over it, sliding\n and stumbling with every step\n on a slope that got gradually steeper\n and seemed to go on forever, Matt\n Hennessy began to inch his way up\n the north face of Mount Everest.\nTHE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAstounding Science Fiction\nFebruary 1959.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.", "\"We didn't have time to think\n about that, or even to get the radio\n working. The steam rockets blew\n up. Poor Cazamian was burnt to a\n crisp. Only thing that saved me was\n the spacesuit I was still wearing. I\n snapped the face plate down because\n the cabin was filling with fumes. I\n saw Charley coming out of the toilet—that's\n how he'd escaped—and I\n saw him beginning to laugh. Then\n the port side collapsed and I fell out.\n\n\n \"I saw the launch spinning away,\n glowing red against a purplish black\n sky. I tumbled head over heels towards\n the huge curved shield of\n earth fifty miles below. I shut my\n eyes and that's about all I remember.\n I don't see how any of us could have\n survived. I think we're all dead.", "\"Just before I start the climb there\n are two things I want to get on tape.\n The first is how I got here. I've remembered\n something from my military\n training, when I did some parachute\n jumps. Terminal velocity for a\n human body falling through air is\n about one hundred twenty m.p.h.\n Falling fifty miles is no worse than\n falling five hundred feet. You'd be\n lucky to live through a five hundred\n foot fall, true, but I've been lucky.\n The suit is bulky but light and probably\n slowed my fall. I hit a sixty mile\n an hour updraft this side of the\n mountain, skidded downhill through\n about half a mile of snow and fetched\n up in a drift. The suit is part\n worn but still operational. I'm fine.", "\"I've tried my hands and arms\n and they seem to work,\" it began.\n \"I've wiggled my toes with entire\n success. It's well on the cards that\n I'm all in one piece and not broken\n up at all, though I don't see how it\n could happen. Right now I don't\n feel like struggling up and finding\n out. I'm fine where I am. I'll just lie\n here for a while and relax, and get\n some of the story on tape. This suit's\n got a built-in recorder, I might as\n well use it. That way even if I'm not\n as well as I feel, I'll leave a message.\n You probably know we're back\n and wonder what went wrong.\n\n\n \"I suppose I'm in a state of shock.\n That's why I can't seem to get up.\n Who wouldn't be shocked after luck\n like that?", "\"I'll have to get up and crack this\n suit and let some air in. But I can't.\n I fell fifty miles without a parachute.\n I'm dead so I can't stand up.\"\nThere was silence for a while except\n for the vicious howl of the wind.\n Then snow began to shift on the\n ledge. A man crawled stiffly out and\n came shakily to his feet. He moved\n slowly around for some time. After\n about two hours he returned to the\n hollow, squatted down and switched\n on the recorder. The voice began\n again, considerably wearier.", "\"That was some survey assignment.\n We astronomers really lived.\n Wait till you see—but of course you\n won't. I could weep when I think of\n those miles of lovely color film, all\n gone up in smoke.\n\"I'm shocked all right. I never said\n who I was. Matt Hennessy, from Farside\n Observatory, back of the Moon,\n just back from a proving flight\ncum\nastronomical survey in the starship\nWhale\n. Whoever you are who finds\n this tape, you're made. Take it to\n any radio station or newspaper office.\n You'll find you can name your price\n and don't take any wooden nickels.", "\"Anyway, we took good care with\n the next lot of measurements. That's\n why we were out there so long. They\n were cross-checked about five times.\n I got sick so I climbed into a spacesuit\n and went outside and took some\n photographs of the Sun which I hoped\n would help to determine hydrogen\n density in the outer regions. When\n I got back everything was ready. We\n disposed ourselves about the control\n room and relaxed for all we were\n worth. We were all praying that this\n time nothing would go wrong, and\n all looking forward to seeing Earth\n again after four months subjective\n time away, except for Charley, who\n was still chuckling and shaking his\n head, and Captain James who was\n glaring at Charley and obviously\n wishing human dignity permitted him\n to tear Charley limb from limb. Then\n James pressed the button.", "and glimmers, the fumbling touch of\n a rudimentary talent. There's the evil\n eye legend and the Jonah, bad luck\n bringers. Superstition? Maybe; but\n ask the insurance companies about\n accident prones. What's in a name?\n Call a man unlucky and you're superstitious.\n Call him accident prone and\n that's sound business sense. I've said\n enough.", "Nothing grew, nothing flew, nothing\n walked, nothing talked. But the\n thing in the hollow was stirring in\n stiff jerks like a snake with its back\n broken or a clockwork toy running\n down. When the movements stopped,\n there was a click and a strange\n sound began. Thin, scratchy, inaudible\n more than a yard away, weary\n but still cocky, there leaked from the\n shape in the hollow the sound of a\n human voice.", "\"Hello there. I'm in the bleakest\n wilderness I've ever seen. This place\n makes the moon look cozy. There's\n precipice around me every way but\n one and that's up. So it's up I'll have\n to go till I find a way to go down.\n I've been chewing snow to quench\n my thirst but I could eat a horse. I\n picked up a short-wave broadcast on\n my suit but couldn't understand a\n word. Not English, not French, and\n there I stick. Listened to it for fifteen\n minutes just to hear a human voice\n again. I haven't much hope of reaching\n anyone with my five milliwatt\n suit transmitter but I'll keep trying.", "\"It still seems incredible. To program\n the ship for a star-jump, you\n merely told it where you were and\n where you wanted to go. In practical\n terms, that entailed first a series of\n exact measurements which had to be\n translated into the somewhat abstruse\n co-ordinate system we used based on\n the topological order of mass-points\n in the galaxy. Then you cut a tape on\n the computer and hit the button.\n Nothing was wrong with the computer.\n Nothing was wrong with the\n engines. We'd hit the right button\n and we'd gone to the place we'd aimed\n for. All we'd done was aim for\n the wrong place. It hurts me to tell", "\"Sorry about that. I passed out. I\n don't know what I said, if anything,\n and the suit recorder has no playback\n or eraser. What must have happened\n is that the suit ran out of\n oxygen, and I lost consciousness due\n to anoxia. I dreamed I switched on\n the radio, but I actually switched on\n the emergency tank, thank the Lord,\n and that brought me round.\n\n\n \"Come to think of it, why not\n crack the suit and breath fresh air\n instead of bottled?\n\n\n \"No. I'd have to get up to do that.\n I think I'll just lie here a little bit\n longer and get properly rested up\n before I try anything big like standing\n up." ], [ "\"That was some survey assignment.\n We astronomers really lived.\n Wait till you see—but of course you\n won't. I could weep when I think of\n those miles of lovely color film, all\n gone up in smoke.\n\"I'm shocked all right. I never said\n who I was. Matt Hennessy, from Farside\n Observatory, back of the Moon,\n just back from a proving flight\ncum\nastronomical survey in the starship\nWhale\n. Whoever you are who finds\n this tape, you're made. Take it to\n any radio station or newspaper office.\n You'll find you can name your price\n and don't take any wooden nickels.", "\"On the other hand, a talent that\n manipulates chance events is bound\n to be chancy. No matter how highly\n developed it can't be surefire. The\n proof is that I've survived to tell the\n tale.\"\nAt twenty below zero and fifty\n miles an hour the wind ravaged the\n mountain. Peering through his polarized\n vizor at the white waste and the\n snow-filled air howling over it, sliding\n and stumbling with every step\n on a slope that got gradually steeper\n and seemed to go on forever, Matt\n Hennessy began to inch his way up\n the north face of Mount Everest.\nTHE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAstounding Science Fiction\nFebruary 1959.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.", "\"My last sight of the\nMinnow\nwas\n a cabin full of dead and dying men,\n the sweetish stink of burned flesh\n and the choking reek of scorching insulation,\n the boat jolting and shuddering\n and beginning to break up,\n and in the middle of the flames, still\n unhurt, was Charley. He was laughing ...", "\"I've tried my hands and arms\n and they seem to work,\" it began.\n \"I've wiggled my toes with entire\n success. It's well on the cards that\n I'm all in one piece and not broken\n up at all, though I don't see how it\n could happen. Right now I don't\n feel like struggling up and finding\n out. I'm fine where I am. I'll just lie\n here for a while and relax, and get\n some of the story on tape. This suit's\n got a built-in recorder, I might as\n well use it. That way even if I'm not\n as well as I feel, I'll leave a message.\n You probably know we're back\n and wonder what went wrong.\n\n\n \"I suppose I'm in a state of shock.\n That's why I can't seem to get up.\n Who wouldn't be shocked after luck\n like that?", "\"And don't think I fell victim to\n their feline charm. The children were\n pets, but you didn't feel like patting\n the adults on their big grinning\n heads. Personally I didn't like the one\n I knew best. He was called—well, we\n called him Charley, and he was the\n ethnologist, ambassador, contact man,\n or whatever you like to call him, who\n came back with us. Why I disliked\n him was because he was always trying\n to get the edge on you. All the\n time he had to be top. Great sense\n of humor, of course. I nearly broke\n my neck on that butter-slide he fixed\n up in the metal alleyway to the\nWhale's\nengine room. Charley laughed\n fit to bust, everyone laughed, I\n even laughed myself though doing it\n hurt me more than the tumble had.\n Yes, life and soul of the party, old\n Charley ...", "\"I'll have to get up and crack this\n suit and let some air in. But I can't.\n I fell fifty miles without a parachute.\n I'm dead so I can't stand up.\"\nThere was silence for a while except\n for the vicious howl of the wind.\n Then snow began to shift on the\n ledge. A man crawled stiffly out and\n came shakily to his feet. He moved\n slowly around for some time. After\n about two hours he returned to the\n hollow, squatted down and switched\n on the recorder. The voice began\n again, considerably wearier.", "\"Hello there. I'm in the bleakest\n wilderness I've ever seen. This place\n makes the moon look cozy. There's\n precipice around me every way but\n one and that's up. So it's up I'll have\n to go till I find a way to go down.\n I've been chewing snow to quench\n my thirst but I could eat a horse. I\n picked up a short-wave broadcast on\n my suit but couldn't understand a\n word. Not English, not French, and\n there I stick. Listened to it for fifteen\n minutes just to hear a human voice\n again. I haven't much hope of reaching\n anyone with my five milliwatt\n suit transmitter but I'll keep trying.", "\"Two, they brew a near-beer that's\n a lot nearer than the canned stuff we\n had aboard the\nWhale\n.\n\n\n \"Three, they've a great sense of\n humor. Ran rather to silly practical\n jokes, but still. Can't say I care for\n that hot-foot and belly-laugh stuff\n myself, but tastes differ.\n\n\n \"Four, the ten-man language team\n also learned chess and table tennis.\n\n\n \"But why go on? People who talk\n English, drink beer, like jokes and\n beat me at chess or table-tennis are\n people for my money, even if they\n look like tigers in trousers.", "\"James got us all into the\nMinnow\nat a dead run. There was no time to\n take anything at all except the clothes\n we stood in. The\nMinnow\nwas meant\n for short heavy hops to planets or\n asteroids. In addition to the ion drive\n it had emergency atomic rockets,\n using steam for reaction mass. We\n thanked God for that when Cazamian\n canceled our downwards velocity\n with them in a few seconds. We\n curved away up over China and from\n about fifty miles high we saw the\nWhale\nhit the Pacific. Six hundred\n tons of mass at well over two thousand\n miles an hour make an almighty\n splash. By now you'll have divers\n down, but I doubt they'll salvage\n much you can use.\n\n\n \"I wonder why James went down\n with the ship, as the saying is? Not\n that it made any difference. It must\n have broken his heart to know that\n his lovely ship was getting the chopper.\n Or did he suspect another human\n error?", "\"Just before I start the climb there\n are two things I want to get on tape.\n The first is how I got here. I've remembered\n something from my military\n training, when I did some parachute\n jumps. Terminal velocity for a\n human body falling through air is\n about one hundred twenty m.p.h.\n Falling fifty miles is no worse than\n falling five hundred feet. You'd be\n lucky to live through a five hundred\n foot fall, true, but I've been lucky.\n The suit is bulky but light and probably\n slowed my fall. I hit a sixty mile\n an hour updraft this side of the\n mountain, skidded downhill through\n about half a mile of snow and fetched\n up in a drift. The suit is part\n worn but still operational. I'm fine.", "Nothing grew, nothing flew, nothing\n walked, nothing talked. But the\n thing in the hollow was stirring in\n stiff jerks like a snake with its back\n broken or a clockwork toy running\n down. When the movements stopped,\n there was a click and a strange\n sound began. Thin, scratchy, inaudible\n more than a yard away, weary\n but still cocky, there leaked from the\n shape in the hollow the sound of a\n human voice.", "\"Where had I got to? I'd told you\n how we happened to find Chang,\n hadn't I? That's what the natives called\n it. Walking, talking natives on a\n blue sky planet with 1.1 g gravity\n and a twenty per cent oxygen atmosphere\n at fifteen p.s.i. The odds\n against finding Chang on a six-sun\n survey on the first star jump ever\n must be up in the googols. We certainly\n were lucky.\n\n\n \"The Chang natives aren't very\n technical—haven't got space travel\n for instance. They're good astronomers,\n though. We were able to show\n them our sun, in their telescopes. In\n their way, they're a highly civilized\n people. Look more like cats than\n people, but they're people all right.\n If you doubt it, chew these facts\n over.\n\n\n \"One, they learned our language\n in four weeks. When I say they, I\n mean a ten-man team of them.", "\"The second thing I want to say is\n about the Chingsi, and here it is:\n watch out for them. Those jokers are\n dangerous. I'm not telling how because\n I've got a scientific reputation\n to watch. You'll have to figure it out\n for yourselves. Here are the clues:\n(1) The Chingsi talk and laugh but\n after all they aren't human. On\n an alien world a hundred light-years\n away, why shouldn't alien\n talents develop? A talent that's\n so uncertain and rudimentary\n here that most people don't believe\n it, might be highly developed\n out there.\n(2) The\nWhale\nexpedition did fine\n till it found Chang. Then it hit\n a seam of bad luck. Real stinking\n bad luck that went on and\n on till it looks fishy. We lost\n the ship, we lost the launch, all\n but one of us lost our lives. We\n couldn't even win a game of\n ping-pong.", "\"It was funny the way they won\n all the time at table tennis. They certainly\n weren't so hot at it. Maybe\n that ten per cent extra gravity put us\n off our strokes. As for chess, Svendlov\n was our champion. He won\n sometimes. The rest of us seemed to\n lose whichever Chingsi we played.\n There again it wasn't so much that\n they were good. How could they be,\n in the time? It was more that we all\n seemed to make silly mistakes when\n we played them and that's fatal in\n chess. Of course it's a screwy situation,\n playing chess with something\n that grows its own fur coat, has yellow\n eyes an inch and a half long\n and long white whiskers. Could\nyou\nhave kept your mind on the game?", "\"Anyway, we took good care with\n the next lot of measurements. That's\n why we were out there so long. They\n were cross-checked about five times.\n I got sick so I climbed into a spacesuit\n and went outside and took some\n photographs of the Sun which I hoped\n would help to determine hydrogen\n density in the outer regions. When\n I got back everything was ready. We\n disposed ourselves about the control\n room and relaxed for all we were\n worth. We were all praying that this\n time nothing would go wrong, and\n all looking forward to seeing Earth\n again after four months subjective\n time away, except for Charley, who\n was still chuckling and shaking his\n head, and Captain James who was\n glaring at Charley and obviously\n wishing human dignity permitted him\n to tear Charley limb from limb. Then\n James pressed the button.", "ACCIDENTAL DEATH\nBY PETER BAILY\nThe most\n dangerous of weapons\n \n is the one you don't know is loaded.\nIllustrated by Schoenherr\nThe\n wind howled out of\n the northwest, blind\n with snow and barbed\n with ice crystals. All\n the way up the half-mile\n precipice it fingered and wrenched\n away at groaning ice-slabs. It\n screamed over the top, whirled snow\n in a dervish dance around the hollow\n there, piled snow into the long furrow\n plowed ruler-straight through\n streamlined hummocks of snow.\n\n\n The sun glinted on black rock\n glazed by ice, chasms and ridges and\n bridges of ice. It lit the snow slope\n to a frozen glare, penciled black\n shadow down the long furrow, and\n flashed at the furrow's end on a\n thing of metal and plastics, an artifact\n thrown down in the dead wilderness.", "\"I've always been lucky, I guess.\n Luck got me a place in the\nWhale\n.\n Sure I'm a good astronomer but so\n are lots of other guys. If I were ten\n years older, it would have been an\n honor, being picked for the first long\n jump in the first starship ever. At my\n age it was luck.", "\"We didn't have time to think\n about that, or even to get the radio\n working. The steam rockets blew\n up. Poor Cazamian was burnt to a\n crisp. Only thing that saved me was\n the spacesuit I was still wearing. I\n snapped the face plate down because\n the cabin was filling with fumes. I\n saw Charley coming out of the toilet—that's\n how he'd escaped—and I\n saw him beginning to laugh. Then\n the port side collapsed and I fell out.\n\n\n \"I saw the launch spinning away,\n glowing red against a purplish black\n sky. I tumbled head over heels towards\n the huge curved shield of\n earth fifty miles below. I shut my\n eyes and that's about all I remember.\n I don't see how any of us could have\n survived. I think we're all dead.", "\"Sorry about that. I passed out. I\n don't know what I said, if anything,\n and the suit recorder has no playback\n or eraser. What must have happened\n is that the suit ran out of\n oxygen, and I lost consciousness due\n to anoxia. I dreamed I switched on\n the radio, but I actually switched on\n the emergency tank, thank the Lord,\n and that brought me round.\n\n\n \"Come to think of it, why not\n crack the suit and breath fresh air\n instead of bottled?\n\n\n \"No. I'd have to get up to do that.\n I think I'll just lie here a little bit\n longer and get properly rested up\n before I try anything big like standing\n up.", "\"Everything twanged like a bowstring.\n I felt myself turned inside out,\n passed through a small sieve, and\n poured back into shape. The entire\n bow wall-screen was full of Earth.\n Something was wrong all right, and\n this time it was much, much worse.\n We'd come out of the jump about\n two hundred miles above the Pacific,\n pointed straight down, traveling at a\n relative speed of about two thousand\n miles an hour.\n\n\n \"It was a fantastic situation. Here\n was the\nWhale\n, the most powerful\n ship ever built, which could cover\n fifty light-years in a subjective time\n of one second, and it was helpless.\n For, as of course you know, the\n star-drive couldn't be used again for\n at least two hours." ] ]
train	31355	[ "Which best describes the relationship between Russell and Dunbar?", "Which isn't a reason why Russell didn't tell Johnson and Alvar directly that he thought Dunbar was crazy?", "Which of these is the best representation of the connection between Old Dunbar and the rest of the crew?", "Which of these is not a reason Russell killed Dunbar?", "What most likely happened to Russell after the story ended?", "Which of these was not an impact of Russell's decision to kill Dunbar?", "Which effect of Russell's decision to kill Dunbar was likely most surprising to Russell?", "What is the role of the pirate ship story that Dunbar tells?", "Which of these is not true about Dunbar?" ]	[ [ "They have similar goals but do not necessarily work well together", "They both have respect for each other but are sick of each other's company", "Neither of them likes the other, in a way that hinders group dynamics", "The appreciate each other's insight when looking for solutions but don't like to talk about personal details" ], [ "All of their communication systems are connected", "He had already given up on life", "He might have been secretly curious about the stories", "He wanted them to find out for themselves" ], [ "He tagged along when they escaped their previous situation", "They are all former members of the military on equal footing", "He led the group out of their previous lives", "He thinks he is in charge but does not call any of the shots in reality" ], [ "The time in space was driving him nuts", "He wanted it to be more quiet", "He thought it would be the only way to go the right direction", "He wanted his ration supply" ], [ "His body would be preserved in a museum", "He found somewhere to settle and managed to live out the rest of his life", "He would die once he tried to land on the planet", "He likely died floating in space" ], [ "Russell would have to travel alone", "He was able to pick the path to the correct sun", "It became quieter in general", "Arguments increased amongst the team" ], [ "The fact that nobody agreed on which sun was the correct one", "The decrease in chatter in the communication system", "The way the Dunbar died without much drama", "He sabotaged himself by ensuring his loneliness" ], [ "It proves that he knows where he's going and he had the right choice all along", "It is a fantastic story meant to keep the crew entertained while floating in space", "It points to who will rescue his body when he arrives at the planet", "It helps to clarify what is true for the reader when the aliens find his body" ], [ "He never had a chance of making it to a safe planet", "He was thankful to interact with whoever was around him", "He has committed some number of crimes", "He dreams big and always an adventure" ] ]	[ 1, 4, 3, 4, 4, 2, 4, 4, 1 ]	[ 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Four men, thought Russell, held together by an invisible string of\n gravity, plunging through a lost pocket of hell's dark where there had\n never been any sound or life, with old Dunbar the first in line,\n taking the lead because he was older and knew where he was and where\n he was going. Maybe Johnson, second in line, and Alvar who was third,\n knew too, but were afraid to admit it.\n\n\n But Russell knew it and he'd admitted it from the first—that old\n Dunbar was as crazy as a Jovian juke-bird.", "Sometimes Russell thought of other things besides his growing hatred\n of the old man. Sometimes he thought about the ship, lost back there\n in the void, and he wondered if wrecked space ships were ever found.\n Compared with the universe in which one of them drifted, a wrecked\n ship was a lot smaller than a grain of sand on a nice warm beach back\n on Earth, or one of those specks of silver dust that floated like\n strange seeds down the night winds of Venus.\n\n\n And a human was smaller still, thought Russell when he was not hating\n Dunbar. Out here, a human being is the smallest thing of all. He\n thought then of what Dunbar would say to such a thought, how Dunbar\n would laugh that high piping squawking laugh of his and say that the\n human being was bigger than the Universe itself.\n\n\n Dunbar had a big answer for every little thing.", "\"I always come through, boys. I'm lucky. Angel women will take us to\n their houses on the edges of cool lakes, little houses that sit there\n in the sun like fancy jewels. And we'll walk under colored fountains,\n pretty colored fountains just splashing and splashing like pretty rain\n on our hungry hides. That's worth waiting for.\"\n\n\n Russell did it before he hardly realized he was killing the old man.\n It was something he had had to do for a long time and that made it\n easy. There was a flash of burning oxygen from inside the suit of\n Dunbar. If he'd aimed right, Russell knew the fire-bullet should have\n pierced Dunbar's back. Now the fire was gone, extinguished\n automatically by units inside the suit. The suit was still inflated,\n self-sealing. Nothing appeared to have changed. The four of them\n hurtling on together, but inside that first suit up there on the front\n of the gravity rope, Dunbar was dead.", "Dunbar laughed. \"Sure, they all maybe have a touch of red, but it\n isn't the same, boys. I can tell the difference. Trust me—\"\n\n\n Russell half choked on his words. \"You old goat! With those old eyes\n of yours, you couldn't see your way into a fire!\"\n\n\n \"Don't get panicky now. Keep your heads. In another year, we'll be\n there—\"\n\n\n \"God, you gotta' be sure,\" Alvar said. \"I don't mind dyin' out here.\n But after a year of this, and then to get to a world that was only\n ashes, and not able to go any further—\"", "Russell was very sick of the old man's voice. He was at least glad he\n didn't have to look at the old man now. His bald head, his skinny\n bobbing neck, his simpering watery blue eyes. But he still had to\n suffer that immutable babbling, that idiotic cheerfulness ... and\n knowing all the time the old man was crazy, that he was leading them\n wrong.\n\n\n I'd break away, go it alone to the right sun, Russell thought—but I'd\n never make it alone. A little while out here alone and I'd be nuttier\n than old Dunbar will ever be, even if he keeps on getting nuttier all\n the time.\n\n\n Somewhere, sometime then ... Russell got the idea that the only way\n was to get rid of Dunbar.\nYou mean to tell us there are people living by that red-rimmed sun,\"\n Russell said.", "How long ago that had been, Russell didn't know. All Russell knew was\n that they were millions of light years from any place he had ever\n heard about, where the galactic space lanterns had absolutely no\n recognizable pattern. But Dunbar knew. And Russell was looking at\n Dunbar's suit up ahead, watching it more and more intently, thinking\n about how Dunbar looked inside that suit—and hating Dunbar more and\n more for claiming he knew when he didn't, for his drooling\n optimism—because he was taking them on into deeper darkness and\n calling their destination Paradise.\n\n\n Russell wanted to laugh, but the last time he'd given way to this\n impulse, the results inside his helmet had been too unpleasant to\n repeat.", "\"Lost people ... lost ... who knows how long,\" Dunbar said, as the\n four of them hurtled along. \"You never know where you'll find people\n on a world somewhere nobody's ever named or knows about. Places where\n a lost ship's landed and never got up again, or wrecked itself so far\n off the lanes they'll never be found except by accident for millions\n of years. That's what this world is, boys. Must have been a ship load\n of beautiful people, maybe actresses and people like that being hauled\n to some outpost to entertain. They're like angels now, living in a\n land all free from care. Every place you see green forests and fields\n and blue lakes, and at nights there's three moons that come around the\n sky in a thousand different colors. And it never gets cold ... it's\n always spring, always spring, boys, and the music plays all night,\n every night of a long long year....\"\n\n\n Russell suddenly shouted. \"Keep quiet, Dunbar. Shut up will you?\"", "\"That's right! That's right,\" Dunbar yelled. \"That's the only one—and\n it's a paradise. Not just a place to live, boys—but a place you'll\n have trouble believing in because it's like a dream!\"\n\n\n \"And none of these other three suns have worlds we could live on,\n Dunbar?\" Russell asked. Keep the old duck talking like this and maybe\n Alvar and Johnson would see that he was cracked.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Alvar. \"You still say that, Dunbar?\"\n\n\n \"No life, boys, nothing,\" Dunbar laughed. \"Nothing on these other\n worlds but ashes ... just ashes and iron and dried blood, dried a\n million years or more.\"\n\n\n \"When in hell were you ever here?\" Johnson said. \"You say you were\n here before. You never said when, or why or anything!\"", "Dunbar laughed. \"Boys, boys, don't get panicky. Keep your heads. Just\n stick to old Dunbar and he'll see you through. I'm always lucky. Only\n one way to go ... an' that's straight ahead to the sun with the\n red-rim around it ... and then we tune in the gravity repellers, and\n coast down, floating and singing down through the clouds to\n paradise.\"\n\n\n After that they traveled on for what seemed months to Russell, but it\n couldn't have been over a day or two of the kind of time-sense he had\n inherited from Earth.\n\n\n Then he saw how the other two stars also were beginning to develop red\n rims. He yelled this fact out to the others. And Alvar said. \"Russ's\n right. That sun to the right, and the one behind us ... now they ALL\n have red rims around them. Dunbar—\" A pause and no awareness of\n motion.", "\"We'll make it, boys. Trust ole' Dunbar. What's a year when we know\n we're getting to Paradise at the end of it? What's a year out here ...\n it's paradise ain't it, compared with that prison hole we were rotting\n in? We can make it. We have the food concentrates, and all the rest.\n All we need's the will, boys, and we got that. The whole damn Universe\n isn't big enough to kill the will of a human being, boys. I been over\n a whole lot of it, and I know. In the old days—\"\n\n\n \"The hell with the old days,\" screamed Russell.\n\n\n \"Now quiet down, Russ,\" Dunbar said in a kind of dreadful crooning\n whisper. \"You calm down now. You younger fellows—you don't look at\n things the way we used to. Thing is, we got to go straight. People\n trapped like this liable to start meandering. Liable to start losing\n the old will-power.\"", "Old Dunbar laughed. The sound brought blood hotly to Russell's face.\n \"We're heading to the right one, boys. Don't doubt me ... I been here.\n We explored all these sun systems. And I remember it all. The second\n planet from that red-rimmed sun. You come down through a soft\n atmosphere, floating like in a dream. You see the green lakes coming\n up through the clouds and the women dancing and the music playing. I\n remember seeing a ship there that brought those women there, a long\n long time before ever I got there. A land like heaven and women like\n angels singing and dancing and laughing with red lips and arms white\n as milk, and soft silky hair floating in the winds.\"", "\"All right,\" Johnson said. \"Good-bye.\"\n\n\n Russell felt the release, felt the sudden inexplicable isolation and\n aloneness even before Alvar and Johnson used their life-guns and shot\n out of sight, Johnson toward the left and Alvar back toward that other\n red-rimmed sun behind them.\n\n\n And old Dunbar shooting right on ahead. And all three of them\n dwindling and dwindling and blinking out like little lights.\n\n\n Fading, he could hear their voices. \"Each to his own star,\" Johnson\n said. \"On a bee line.\"\n\n\n \"On a bee line,\" Alvar said.\n\n\n Russell used his own life-gun and in a little while he didn't hear\n Alvar or Johnson's voices, nor could he see them. They were thousands\n of miles away, and going further all the time.", "He was dead and his mouth was shut for good.\n\n\n Dunbar's last faint cry from inside his suit still rang in Russell's\n ears, and he knew Alvar and Johnson had heard it too. Alvar and\n Johnson both called Dunbar's name a few times. There was no answer.\n\n\n \"Russ—you shouldn't have done that,\" Johnson whispered. \"You\n shouldn't have done that to the old man!\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Alvar said, so low he could barely be heard. \"You shouldn't have\n done it.\"", "We all look alike out here in these big rocket pressure suits, Russell\n thought. No one for God only knew how many of millions of light years\n away could see or care. Still—we might have a chance to live, even\n now, Russell thought—if it weren't for old crazy Dunbar.\n\n\n They might have a chance if Alvar and Johnson weren't so damn lacking\n in self-confidence as to put all their trust in that crazed old\n rum-dum. Russell had known now for some time that they were going in\n the wrong direction. No reason for knowing. Just a hunch. And Russell\n was sure his hunch was right.\nRussell said. \"Look—look to your left and to your right and behind\n us. Four suns. You guys see those other three suns all around you,\n don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" someone said.", "\"I did it for the three of us,\" Russell said. \"It was either him or us.\n Lies ... lies that was all he had left in his crazy head. Paradise ...\n don't tell me you guys don't see the red rims around all four suns, all\n four suns all around us. Don't tell me you guys didn't know he was batty,\n that you really believed all that stuff he was spouting all the time!\"\n\n\n \"Maybe he was lying, maybe not,\" Johnson said. \"Now he's dead anyway.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe he was wrong, crazy, full of lies,\" Alvar said. \"But now he's\n dead.\"\n\n\n \"How could he see any difference in those four stars?\" Russell said,\n louder.\n\n\n \"He thought he was right,\" Alvar said. \"He wanted to take us to\n paradise. He was happy, nothing could stop the old man—but he's dead\n now.\"", "\"Well, if you'll notice,\" Russell said, \"the one on the left also now\n has a red rim around it. Can't you guys see that?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I see it,\" Alvar said.\n\n\n \"So now,\" Johnson said, \"there's two suns with red rims around them.\"\n\n\n \"We're about in the middle of those four suns aren't we, Dunbar?\"\n Russell said.\n\n\n \"That's right, boys!\" yelled old Dunbar in that sickeningly optimistic\n voice. Like a hysterical old woman's. \"Just about in the sweet dark\n old middle.\"\n\n\n \"You're still sure it's the sun up ahead ... that's the only one with\n life on it, Dunbar ... the only one we can live on?\" Russell asked.", "Johnson said. \"Dunbar—how long'll it take us?\"\n\n\n \"Six months to a year, I'd say,\" Dunbar yelled happily. \"That is—of\n our hereditary time.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" croaked Alvar.\n\n\n Johnson didn't say anything at all.\n\n\n Russell screamed at Dunbar, then quieted down. He whispered. \"Six\n months to a year—out here—cooped up in these damn suits. You're\n crazy as hell, Dunbar. Crazy ... crazy! Nobody could stand it. We'll\n all be crazier than you are—\"", "\"And the old man,\" Alvar said, \"can keep right on going toward what he\n thought was right. And he'll keep on going. Course he won't be able to\n give himself another boost with the life-gun, but he'll keep going.\n Someday he'll get to that red-rimmed star of his. Out here in space,\n once you're going, you never stop ... and I guess there isn't any\n other body to pull him off his course. And what will time matter to\n old Dunbar? Even less than to us, I guess. He's dead and he won't\n care.\"\n\n\n \"Ready,\" Johnson said. \"I'll cut off the gravity rope.\"\n\n\n \"I'm ready,\" Alvar said. \"To go back toward whatever it was I started\n from.\"\n\n\n \"Ready, Russ?\"\n\n\n Russell couldn't say anything. He stared at the endless void which now\n he would share with no one. Not even crazy old Dunbar.", "\"I know we're going right,\" Dunbar said cheerfully. \"I can tell. Like\n I said—you can tell it because of the red rim around it.\"\n\n\n \"But the sun on our left, you can see—it's got a red rim too now,\"\n Russell said.\n\n\n \"Yeah, that's right,\" said Alvar. \"Sometimes I see a red rim around\n the one we're going for, sometimes a red rim around that one on the\n left. Now, sometimes I'm not sure either of them's got a red rim. You\n said that one had a red rim, Dunbar, and I wanted to believe it. So\n now maybe we're all seeing a red rim that was never there.\"", "\"Paradise and there we'll be like gods, like Mercuries with wings\n flying on nights of sweet song. These other suns, don't let them\n bother you. They're Jezebels of stars. All painted up in the darkness\n and pretty and waiting and calling and lying! They make you think of\n nice green worlds all running waters and dews and forests thick as\n fleas on a wet dog. But it ain't there, boys. I know this place. I\n been here, long time back.\"\n\n\n Russell said tightly. \"It'll take us a long time won't it? If it's got\n air we can breath, and water we can drink and shade we can rest\n in—that'll be paradise enough for us. But it'll take a long time\n won't it? And what if it isn't there—what if after all the time we\n spend hoping and getting there—there won't be nothing but ashes and\n cracked clay?\"" ], [ "Four men, thought Russell, held together by an invisible string of\n gravity, plunging through a lost pocket of hell's dark where there had\n never been any sound or life, with old Dunbar the first in line,\n taking the lead because he was older and knew where he was and where\n he was going. Maybe Johnson, second in line, and Alvar who was third,\n knew too, but were afraid to admit it.\n\n\n But Russell knew it and he'd admitted it from the first—that old\n Dunbar was as crazy as a Jovian juke-bird.", "\"I did it for the three of us,\" Russell said. \"It was either him or us.\n Lies ... lies that was all he had left in his crazy head. Paradise ...\n don't tell me you guys don't see the red rims around all four suns, all\n four suns all around us. Don't tell me you guys didn't know he was batty,\n that you really believed all that stuff he was spouting all the time!\"\n\n\n \"Maybe he was lying, maybe not,\" Johnson said. \"Now he's dead anyway.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe he was wrong, crazy, full of lies,\" Alvar said. \"But now he's\n dead.\"\n\n\n \"How could he see any difference in those four stars?\" Russell said,\n louder.\n\n\n \"He thought he was right,\" Alvar said. \"He wanted to take us to\n paradise. He was happy, nothing could stop the old man—but he's dead\n now.\"", "Johnson said. \"Dunbar—how long'll it take us?\"\n\n\n \"Six months to a year, I'd say,\" Dunbar yelled happily. \"That is—of\n our hereditary time.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" croaked Alvar.\n\n\n Johnson didn't say anything at all.\n\n\n Russell screamed at Dunbar, then quieted down. He whispered. \"Six\n months to a year—out here—cooped up in these damn suits. You're\n crazy as hell, Dunbar. Crazy ... crazy! Nobody could stand it. We'll\n all be crazier than you are—\"", "He was dead and his mouth was shut for good.\n\n\n Dunbar's last faint cry from inside his suit still rang in Russell's\n ears, and he knew Alvar and Johnson had heard it too. Alvar and\n Johnson both called Dunbar's name a few times. There was no answer.\n\n\n \"Russ—you shouldn't have done that,\" Johnson whispered. \"You\n shouldn't have done that to the old man!\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Alvar said, so low he could barely be heard. \"You shouldn't have\n done it.\"", "\"That's right! That's right,\" Dunbar yelled. \"That's the only one—and\n it's a paradise. Not just a place to live, boys—but a place you'll\n have trouble believing in because it's like a dream!\"\n\n\n \"And none of these other three suns have worlds we could live on,\n Dunbar?\" Russell asked. Keep the old duck talking like this and maybe\n Alvar and Johnson would see that he was cracked.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Alvar. \"You still say that, Dunbar?\"\n\n\n \"No life, boys, nothing,\" Dunbar laughed. \"Nothing on these other\n worlds but ashes ... just ashes and iron and dried blood, dried a\n million years or more.\"\n\n\n \"When in hell were you ever here?\" Johnson said. \"You say you were\n here before. You never said when, or why or anything!\"", "Russell was very sick of the old man's voice. He was at least glad he\n didn't have to look at the old man now. His bald head, his skinny\n bobbing neck, his simpering watery blue eyes. But he still had to\n suffer that immutable babbling, that idiotic cheerfulness ... and\n knowing all the time the old man was crazy, that he was leading them\n wrong.\n\n\n I'd break away, go it alone to the right sun, Russell thought—but I'd\n never make it alone. A little while out here alone and I'd be nuttier\n than old Dunbar will ever be, even if he keeps on getting nuttier all\n the time.\n\n\n Somewhere, sometime then ... Russell got the idea that the only way\n was to get rid of Dunbar.\nYou mean to tell us there are people living by that red-rimmed sun,\"\n Russell said.", "Dunbar laughed. \"Sure, they all maybe have a touch of red, but it\n isn't the same, boys. I can tell the difference. Trust me—\"\n\n\n Russell half choked on his words. \"You old goat! With those old eyes\n of yours, you couldn't see your way into a fire!\"\n\n\n \"Don't get panicky now. Keep your heads. In another year, we'll be\n there—\"\n\n\n \"God, you gotta' be sure,\" Alvar said. \"I don't mind dyin' out here.\n But after a year of this, and then to get to a world that was only\n ashes, and not able to go any further—\"", "We all look alike out here in these big rocket pressure suits, Russell\n thought. No one for God only knew how many of millions of light years\n away could see or care. Still—we might have a chance to live, even\n now, Russell thought—if it weren't for old crazy Dunbar.\n\n\n They might have a chance if Alvar and Johnson weren't so damn lacking\n in self-confidence as to put all their trust in that crazed old\n rum-dum. Russell had known now for some time that they were going in\n the wrong direction. No reason for knowing. Just a hunch. And Russell\n was sure his hunch was right.\nRussell said. \"Look—look to your left and to your right and behind\n us. Four suns. You guys see those other three suns all around you,\n don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" someone said.", "And Alvar said, \"Guess he was crazy all right, and I guess we trusted\n him because we didn't have the strength to make up our own minds. Why\n does a crazy man's laugh sound so good when you're desperate and don't\n know what to do?\"\n\n\n \"I always had a feeling we were going wrong,\" Johnson said. \"Anyway,\n it's forgotten, Russ. It's swallowed up in the darkness all around.\n It's never been.\"\n\n\n Russell said, \"I've had a hunch all along that maybe the old man was\n here before, and that he was right about there being a star here with\n a world we can live on. But I've known we was heading wrong. I've had\n a hunch all along that the right star was the one to the left.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Johnson sighed. \"I been feeling partial toward that\n one on the right. What about you, Alvar?\"", "Sometimes Russell thought of other things besides his growing hatred\n of the old man. Sometimes he thought about the ship, lost back there\n in the void, and he wondered if wrecked space ships were ever found.\n Compared with the universe in which one of them drifted, a wrecked\n ship was a lot smaller than a grain of sand on a nice warm beach back\n on Earth, or one of those specks of silver dust that floated like\n strange seeds down the night winds of Venus.\n\n\n And a human was smaller still, thought Russell when he was not hating\n Dunbar. Out here, a human being is the smallest thing of all. He\n thought then of what Dunbar would say to such a thought, how Dunbar\n would laugh that high piping squawking laugh of his and say that the\n human being was bigger than the Universe itself.\n\n\n Dunbar had a big answer for every little thing.", "How long ago that had been, Russell didn't know. All Russell knew was\n that they were millions of light years from any place he had ever\n heard about, where the galactic space lanterns had absolutely no\n recognizable pattern. But Dunbar knew. And Russell was looking at\n Dunbar's suit up ahead, watching it more and more intently, thinking\n about how Dunbar looked inside that suit—and hating Dunbar more and\n more for claiming he knew when he didn't, for his drooling\n optimism—because he was taking them on into deeper darkness and\n calling their destination Paradise.\n\n\n Russell wanted to laugh, but the last time he'd given way to this\n impulse, the results inside his helmet had been too unpleasant to\n repeat.", "Johnson started to laugh. Russell was yelling wildly at them, and\n above his own yelling he could hear Johnson's rising laughter. \"Every\n guy's got a star of his own,\" Johnson said when he stopped laughing.\n \"And we got ours. A nice red-rimmed sun for each of us to call his\n very own.\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Alvar said. \"We cut off the gravity rope, and each to his own\n sun.\"\n\n\n Now Russell wasn't saying anything.", "\"I always come through, boys. I'm lucky. Angel women will take us to\n their houses on the edges of cool lakes, little houses that sit there\n in the sun like fancy jewels. And we'll walk under colored fountains,\n pretty colored fountains just splashing and splashing like pretty rain\n on our hungry hides. That's worth waiting for.\"\n\n\n Russell did it before he hardly realized he was killing the old man.\n It was something he had had to do for a long time and that made it\n easy. There was a flash of burning oxygen from inside the suit of\n Dunbar. If he'd aimed right, Russell knew the fire-bullet should have\n pierced Dunbar's back. Now the fire was gone, extinguished\n automatically by units inside the suit. The suit was still inflated,\n self-sealing. Nothing appeared to have changed. The four of them\n hurtling on together, but inside that first suit up there on the front\n of the gravity rope, Dunbar was dead.", "\"I always thought we were going straight in the opposite direction\n from what we should, I guess. I always wanted to turn around and go\n back. It won't make over maybe a month's difference. And what does a\n month matter anyway out here—hell there never was any time out here\n until we came along. We make our own time here, and a month don't\n matter to me.\"\n\n\n Sweat ran down Russell's face. His voice trembled. \"No—that's wrong.\n You're both wrong.\" He could see himself going it alone. Going crazy\n because he was alone. He'd have broken away, gone his own direction,\n long ago but for that fear.", "\"Lost people ... lost ... who knows how long,\" Dunbar said, as the\n four of them hurtled along. \"You never know where you'll find people\n on a world somewhere nobody's ever named or knows about. Places where\n a lost ship's landed and never got up again, or wrecked itself so far\n off the lanes they'll never be found except by accident for millions\n of years. That's what this world is, boys. Must have been a ship load\n of beautiful people, maybe actresses and people like that being hauled\n to some outpost to entertain. They're like angels now, living in a\n land all free from care. Every place you see green forests and fields\n and blue lakes, and at nights there's three moons that come around the\n sky in a thousand different colors. And it never gets cold ... it's\n always spring, always spring, boys, and the music plays all night,\n every night of a long long year....\"\n\n\n Russell suddenly shouted. \"Keep quiet, Dunbar. Shut up will you?\"", "\"Well, if you'll notice,\" Russell said, \"the one on the left also now\n has a red rim around it. Can't you guys see that?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I see it,\" Alvar said.\n\n\n \"So now,\" Johnson said, \"there's two suns with red rims around them.\"\n\n\n \"We're about in the middle of those four suns aren't we, Dunbar?\"\n Russell said.\n\n\n \"That's right, boys!\" yelled old Dunbar in that sickeningly optimistic\n voice. Like a hysterical old woman's. \"Just about in the sweet dark\n old middle.\"\n\n\n \"You're still sure it's the sun up ahead ... that's the only one with\n life on it, Dunbar ... the only one we can live on?\" Russell asked.", "\"All right,\" Johnson said. \"Good-bye.\"\n\n\n Russell felt the release, felt the sudden inexplicable isolation and\n aloneness even before Alvar and Johnson used their life-guns and shot\n out of sight, Johnson toward the left and Alvar back toward that other\n red-rimmed sun behind them.\n\n\n And old Dunbar shooting right on ahead. And all three of them\n dwindling and dwindling and blinking out like little lights.\n\n\n Fading, he could hear their voices. \"Each to his own star,\" Johnson\n said. \"On a bee line.\"\n\n\n \"On a bee line,\" Alvar said.\n\n\n Russell used his own life-gun and in a little while he didn't hear\n Alvar or Johnson's voices, nor could he see them. They were thousands\n of miles away, and going further all the time.", "\"And the old man,\" Alvar said, \"can keep right on going toward what he\n thought was right. And he'll keep on going. Course he won't be able to\n give himself another boost with the life-gun, but he'll keep going.\n Someday he'll get to that red-rimmed star of his. Out here in space,\n once you're going, you never stop ... and I guess there isn't any\n other body to pull him off his course. And what will time matter to\n old Dunbar? Even less than to us, I guess. He's dead and he won't\n care.\"\n\n\n \"Ready,\" Johnson said. \"I'll cut off the gravity rope.\"\n\n\n \"I'm ready,\" Alvar said. \"To go back toward whatever it was I started\n from.\"\n\n\n \"Ready, Russ?\"\n\n\n Russell couldn't say anything. He stared at the endless void which now\n he would share with no one. Not even crazy old Dunbar.", "Dunbar laughed. \"Boys, boys, don't get panicky. Keep your heads. Just\n stick to old Dunbar and he'll see you through. I'm always lucky. Only\n one way to go ... an' that's straight ahead to the sun with the\n red-rim around it ... and then we tune in the gravity repellers, and\n coast down, floating and singing down through the clouds to\n paradise.\"\n\n\n After that they traveled on for what seemed months to Russell, but it\n couldn't have been over a day or two of the kind of time-sense he had\n inherited from Earth.\n\n\n Then he saw how the other two stars also were beginning to develop red\n rims. He yelled this fact out to the others. And Alvar said. \"Russ's\n right. That sun to the right, and the one behind us ... now they ALL\n have red rims around them. Dunbar—\" A pause and no awareness of\n motion.", "He sighed.\n\n\n \"He was taking us wrong ... wrong!\" Russell screamed. \"Angels—music\n all night—houses like jewels—and women like angels—\"\n\n\n \"\nShhhh\n,\" said Alvar. It was quiet. How could it be so quiet, Russell\n thought? And up ahead the old man's pressure suit with a corpse inside\n went on ahead, leading the other three at the front of the\n gravity-rope.\n\n\n \"Maybe he was wrong,\" Alvar said. \"But now do we know which way is\n right?\"\nSometime later, Johnson said, \"We got to decide now. Let's forget the\n old man. Let's forget him and all that's gone and let's start now and\n decide what to do.\"" ], [ "Four men, thought Russell, held together by an invisible string of\n gravity, plunging through a lost pocket of hell's dark where there had\n never been any sound or life, with old Dunbar the first in line,\n taking the lead because he was older and knew where he was and where\n he was going. Maybe Johnson, second in line, and Alvar who was third,\n knew too, but were afraid to admit it.\n\n\n But Russell knew it and he'd admitted it from the first—that old\n Dunbar was as crazy as a Jovian juke-bird.", "After the wreck, the four of them had floated a while, floated and\n drifted together, four men in bulbous pressure suits like small\n individual rockets, held together by an awful pressing need for each\n other and by the \"gravity-rope\" beam.\n\n\n Dunbar, the oldest of the four, an old space-buster with a face\n wrinkled like a dried prune, burned by cosmic rays and the suns of\n worlds so far away they were scarcely credible, had taken command.\n Suddenly, Old Dunbar had known where they were. Suddenly, Dunbar knew\n where they were going.", "\"We'll make it, boys. Trust ole' Dunbar. What's a year when we know\n we're getting to Paradise at the end of it? What's a year out here ...\n it's paradise ain't it, compared with that prison hole we were rotting\n in? We can make it. We have the food concentrates, and all the rest.\n All we need's the will, boys, and we got that. The whole damn Universe\n isn't big enough to kill the will of a human being, boys. I been over\n a whole lot of it, and I know. In the old days—\"\n\n\n \"The hell with the old days,\" screamed Russell.\n\n\n \"Now quiet down, Russ,\" Dunbar said in a kind of dreadful crooning\n whisper. \"You calm down now. You younger fellows—you don't look at\n things the way we used to. Thing is, we got to go straight. People\n trapped like this liable to start meandering. Liable to start losing\n the old will-power.\"", "Sometimes Russell thought of other things besides his growing hatred\n of the old man. Sometimes he thought about the ship, lost back there\n in the void, and he wondered if wrecked space ships were ever found.\n Compared with the universe in which one of them drifted, a wrecked\n ship was a lot smaller than a grain of sand on a nice warm beach back\n on Earth, or one of those specks of silver dust that floated like\n strange seeds down the night winds of Venus.\n\n\n And a human was smaller still, thought Russell when he was not hating\n Dunbar. Out here, a human being is the smallest thing of all. He\n thought then of what Dunbar would say to such a thought, how Dunbar\n would laugh that high piping squawking laugh of his and say that the\n human being was bigger than the Universe itself.\n\n\n Dunbar had a big answer for every little thing.", "Old Dunbar laughed. The sound brought blood hotly to Russell's face.\n \"We're heading to the right one, boys. Don't doubt me ... I been here.\n We explored all these sun systems. And I remember it all. The second\n planet from that red-rimmed sun. You come down through a soft\n atmosphere, floating like in a dream. You see the green lakes coming\n up through the clouds and the women dancing and the music playing. I\n remember seeing a ship there that brought those women there, a long\n long time before ever I got there. A land like heaven and women like\n angels singing and dancing and laughing with red lips and arms white\n as milk, and soft silky hair floating in the winds.\"", "Dunbar laughed. \"Sure, they all maybe have a touch of red, but it\n isn't the same, boys. I can tell the difference. Trust me—\"\n\n\n Russell half choked on his words. \"You old goat! With those old eyes\n of yours, you couldn't see your way into a fire!\"\n\n\n \"Don't get panicky now. Keep your heads. In another year, we'll be\n there—\"\n\n\n \"God, you gotta' be sure,\" Alvar said. \"I don't mind dyin' out here.\n But after a year of this, and then to get to a world that was only\n ashes, and not able to go any further—\"", "\"And the old man,\" Alvar said, \"can keep right on going toward what he\n thought was right. And he'll keep on going. Course he won't be able to\n give himself another boost with the life-gun, but he'll keep going.\n Someday he'll get to that red-rimmed star of his. Out here in space,\n once you're going, you never stop ... and I guess there isn't any\n other body to pull him off his course. And what will time matter to\n old Dunbar? Even less than to us, I guess. He's dead and he won't\n care.\"\n\n\n \"Ready,\" Johnson said. \"I'll cut off the gravity rope.\"\n\n\n \"I'm ready,\" Alvar said. \"To go back toward whatever it was I started\n from.\"\n\n\n \"Ready, Russ?\"\n\n\n Russell couldn't say anything. He stared at the endless void which now\n he would share with no one. Not even crazy old Dunbar.", "Dunbar laughed. \"Boys, boys, don't get panicky. Keep your heads. Just\n stick to old Dunbar and he'll see you through. I'm always lucky. Only\n one way to go ... an' that's straight ahead to the sun with the\n red-rim around it ... and then we tune in the gravity repellers, and\n coast down, floating and singing down through the clouds to\n paradise.\"\n\n\n After that they traveled on for what seemed months to Russell, but it\n couldn't have been over a day or two of the kind of time-sense he had\n inherited from Earth.\n\n\n Then he saw how the other two stars also were beginning to develop red\n rims. He yelled this fact out to the others. And Alvar said. \"Russ's\n right. That sun to the right, and the one behind us ... now they ALL\n have red rims around them. Dunbar—\" A pause and no awareness of\n motion.", "\"Lost people ... lost ... who knows how long,\" Dunbar said, as the\n four of them hurtled along. \"You never know where you'll find people\n on a world somewhere nobody's ever named or knows about. Places where\n a lost ship's landed and never got up again, or wrecked itself so far\n off the lanes they'll never be found except by accident for millions\n of years. That's what this world is, boys. Must have been a ship load\n of beautiful people, maybe actresses and people like that being hauled\n to some outpost to entertain. They're like angels now, living in a\n land all free from care. Every place you see green forests and fields\n and blue lakes, and at nights there's three moons that come around the\n sky in a thousand different colors. And it never gets cold ... it's\n always spring, always spring, boys, and the music plays all night,\n every night of a long long year....\"\n\n\n Russell suddenly shouted. \"Keep quiet, Dunbar. Shut up will you?\"", "He was dead and his mouth was shut for good.\n\n\n Dunbar's last faint cry from inside his suit still rang in Russell's\n ears, and he knew Alvar and Johnson had heard it too. Alvar and\n Johnson both called Dunbar's name a few times. There was no answer.\n\n\n \"Russ—you shouldn't have done that,\" Johnson whispered. \"You\n shouldn't have done that to the old man!\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Alvar said, so low he could barely be heard. \"You shouldn't have\n done it.\"", "\"That's right! That's right,\" Dunbar yelled. \"That's the only one—and\n it's a paradise. Not just a place to live, boys—but a place you'll\n have trouble believing in because it's like a dream!\"\n\n\n \"And none of these other three suns have worlds we could live on,\n Dunbar?\" Russell asked. Keep the old duck talking like this and maybe\n Alvar and Johnson would see that he was cracked.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Alvar. \"You still say that, Dunbar?\"\n\n\n \"No life, boys, nothing,\" Dunbar laughed. \"Nothing on these other\n worlds but ashes ... just ashes and iron and dried blood, dried a\n million years or more.\"\n\n\n \"When in hell were you ever here?\" Johnson said. \"You say you were\n here before. You never said when, or why or anything!\"", "Russell was very sick of the old man's voice. He was at least glad he\n didn't have to look at the old man now. His bald head, his skinny\n bobbing neck, his simpering watery blue eyes. But he still had to\n suffer that immutable babbling, that idiotic cheerfulness ... and\n knowing all the time the old man was crazy, that he was leading them\n wrong.\n\n\n I'd break away, go it alone to the right sun, Russell thought—but I'd\n never make it alone. A little while out here alone and I'd be nuttier\n than old Dunbar will ever be, even if he keeps on getting nuttier all\n the time.\n\n\n Somewhere, sometime then ... Russell got the idea that the only way\n was to get rid of Dunbar.\nYou mean to tell us there are people living by that red-rimmed sun,\"\n Russell said.", "\"I always come through, boys. I'm lucky. Angel women will take us to\n their houses on the edges of cool lakes, little houses that sit there\n in the sun like fancy jewels. And we'll walk under colored fountains,\n pretty colored fountains just splashing and splashing like pretty rain\n on our hungry hides. That's worth waiting for.\"\n\n\n Russell did it before he hardly realized he was killing the old man.\n It was something he had had to do for a long time and that made it\n easy. There was a flash of burning oxygen from inside the suit of\n Dunbar. If he'd aimed right, Russell knew the fire-bullet should have\n pierced Dunbar's back. Now the fire was gone, extinguished\n automatically by units inside the suit. The suit was still inflated,\n self-sealing. Nothing appeared to have changed. The four of them\n hurtling on together, but inside that first suit up there on the front\n of the gravity rope, Dunbar was dead.", "Johnson said. \"Dunbar—how long'll it take us?\"\n\n\n \"Six months to a year, I'd say,\" Dunbar yelled happily. \"That is—of\n our hereditary time.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" croaked Alvar.\n\n\n Johnson didn't say anything at all.\n\n\n Russell screamed at Dunbar, then quieted down. He whispered. \"Six\n months to a year—out here—cooped up in these damn suits. You're\n crazy as hell, Dunbar. Crazy ... crazy! Nobody could stand it. We'll\n all be crazier than you are—\"", "\"All right,\" Johnson said. \"Good-bye.\"\n\n\n Russell felt the release, felt the sudden inexplicable isolation and\n aloneness even before Alvar and Johnson used their life-guns and shot\n out of sight, Johnson toward the left and Alvar back toward that other\n red-rimmed sun behind them.\n\n\n And old Dunbar shooting right on ahead. And all three of them\n dwindling and dwindling and blinking out like little lights.\n\n\n Fading, he could hear their voices. \"Each to his own star,\" Johnson\n said. \"On a bee line.\"\n\n\n \"On a bee line,\" Alvar said.\n\n\n Russell used his own life-gun and in a little while he didn't hear\n Alvar or Johnson's voices, nor could he see them. They were thousands\n of miles away, and going further all the time.", "How long ago that had been, Russell didn't know. All Russell knew was\n that they were millions of light years from any place he had ever\n heard about, where the galactic space lanterns had absolutely no\n recognizable pattern. But Dunbar knew. And Russell was looking at\n Dunbar's suit up ahead, watching it more and more intently, thinking\n about how Dunbar looked inside that suit—and hating Dunbar more and\n more for claiming he knew when he didn't, for his drooling\n optimism—because he was taking them on into deeper darkness and\n calling their destination Paradise.\n\n\n Russell wanted to laugh, but the last time he'd given way to this\n impulse, the results inside his helmet had been too unpleasant to\n repeat.", "We all look alike out here in these big rocket pressure suits, Russell\n thought. No one for God only knew how many of millions of light years\n away could see or care. Still—we might have a chance to live, even\n now, Russell thought—if it weren't for old crazy Dunbar.\n\n\n They might have a chance if Alvar and Johnson weren't so damn lacking\n in self-confidence as to put all their trust in that crazed old\n rum-dum. Russell had known now for some time that they were going in\n the wrong direction. No reason for knowing. Just a hunch. And Russell\n was sure his hunch was right.\nRussell said. \"Look—look to your left and to your right and behind\n us. Four suns. You guys see those other three suns all around you,\n don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" someone said.", "\"Well, if you'll notice,\" Russell said, \"the one on the left also now\n has a red rim around it. Can't you guys see that?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I see it,\" Alvar said.\n\n\n \"So now,\" Johnson said, \"there's two suns with red rims around them.\"\n\n\n \"We're about in the middle of those four suns aren't we, Dunbar?\"\n Russell said.\n\n\n \"That's right, boys!\" yelled old Dunbar in that sickeningly optimistic\n voice. Like a hysterical old woman's. \"Just about in the sweet dark\n old middle.\"\n\n\n \"You're still sure it's the sun up ahead ... that's the only one with\n life on it, Dunbar ... the only one we can live on?\" Russell asked.", "When the four of them had escaped from that prison colony on a\n sizzling hot asteroid rock in the Ronlwhyn system, that wasn't enough\n for Dunbar. Hell no—Dunbar had to start talking about a place they\n could go where they'd never be apprehended, in a system no one else\n had ever heard of, where they could live like gods on a green soft\n world like the Earth had been a long time back.\n\n\n And Dunbar had spouted endlessly about a world of treasure they would\n find, if they would just follow old Dunbar. That's what all four of\n them had been trying to find all their lives in the big cold grabbag\n of eternity—a rich star, a rich far fertile star where no one else\n had ever been, loaded with treasure that had no name, that no one had\n ever heard of before. And was, because of that, the richest treasure\n of all.", "And Alvar said, \"Guess he was crazy all right, and I guess we trusted\n him because we didn't have the strength to make up our own minds. Why\n does a crazy man's laugh sound so good when you're desperate and don't\n know what to do?\"\n\n\n \"I always had a feeling we were going wrong,\" Johnson said. \"Anyway,\n it's forgotten, Russ. It's swallowed up in the darkness all around.\n It's never been.\"\n\n\n Russell said, \"I've had a hunch all along that maybe the old man was\n here before, and that he was right about there being a star here with\n a world we can live on. But I've known we was heading wrong. I've had\n a hunch all along that the right star was the one to the left.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Johnson sighed. \"I been feeling partial toward that\n one on the right. What about you, Alvar?\"" ], [ "\"I always come through, boys. I'm lucky. Angel women will take us to\n their houses on the edges of cool lakes, little houses that sit there\n in the sun like fancy jewels. And we'll walk under colored fountains,\n pretty colored fountains just splashing and splashing like pretty rain\n on our hungry hides. That's worth waiting for.\"\n\n\n Russell did it before he hardly realized he was killing the old man.\n It was something he had had to do for a long time and that made it\n easy. There was a flash of burning oxygen from inside the suit of\n Dunbar. If he'd aimed right, Russell knew the fire-bullet should have\n pierced Dunbar's back. Now the fire was gone, extinguished\n automatically by units inside the suit. The suit was still inflated,\n self-sealing. Nothing appeared to have changed. The four of them\n hurtling on together, but inside that first suit up there on the front\n of the gravity rope, Dunbar was dead.", "Four men, thought Russell, held together by an invisible string of\n gravity, plunging through a lost pocket of hell's dark where there had\n never been any sound or life, with old Dunbar the first in line,\n taking the lead because he was older and knew where he was and where\n he was going. Maybe Johnson, second in line, and Alvar who was third,\n knew too, but were afraid to admit it.\n\n\n But Russell knew it and he'd admitted it from the first—that old\n Dunbar was as crazy as a Jovian juke-bird.", "Russell was very sick of the old man's voice. He was at least glad he\n didn't have to look at the old man now. His bald head, his skinny\n bobbing neck, his simpering watery blue eyes. But he still had to\n suffer that immutable babbling, that idiotic cheerfulness ... and\n knowing all the time the old man was crazy, that he was leading them\n wrong.\n\n\n I'd break away, go it alone to the right sun, Russell thought—but I'd\n never make it alone. A little while out here alone and I'd be nuttier\n than old Dunbar will ever be, even if he keeps on getting nuttier all\n the time.\n\n\n Somewhere, sometime then ... Russell got the idea that the only way\n was to get rid of Dunbar.\nYou mean to tell us there are people living by that red-rimmed sun,\"\n Russell said.", "Sometimes Russell thought of other things besides his growing hatred\n of the old man. Sometimes he thought about the ship, lost back there\n in the void, and he wondered if wrecked space ships were ever found.\n Compared with the universe in which one of them drifted, a wrecked\n ship was a lot smaller than a grain of sand on a nice warm beach back\n on Earth, or one of those specks of silver dust that floated like\n strange seeds down the night winds of Venus.\n\n\n And a human was smaller still, thought Russell when he was not hating\n Dunbar. Out here, a human being is the smallest thing of all. He\n thought then of what Dunbar would say to such a thought, how Dunbar\n would laugh that high piping squawking laugh of his and say that the\n human being was bigger than the Universe itself.\n\n\n Dunbar had a big answer for every little thing.", "\"I did it for the three of us,\" Russell said. \"It was either him or us.\n Lies ... lies that was all he had left in his crazy head. Paradise ...\n don't tell me you guys don't see the red rims around all four suns, all\n four suns all around us. Don't tell me you guys didn't know he was batty,\n that you really believed all that stuff he was spouting all the time!\"\n\n\n \"Maybe he was lying, maybe not,\" Johnson said. \"Now he's dead anyway.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe he was wrong, crazy, full of lies,\" Alvar said. \"But now he's\n dead.\"\n\n\n \"How could he see any difference in those four stars?\" Russell said,\n louder.\n\n\n \"He thought he was right,\" Alvar said. \"He wanted to take us to\n paradise. He was happy, nothing could stop the old man—but he's dead\n now.\"", "He was dead and his mouth was shut for good.\n\n\n Dunbar's last faint cry from inside his suit still rang in Russell's\n ears, and he knew Alvar and Johnson had heard it too. Alvar and\n Johnson both called Dunbar's name a few times. There was no answer.\n\n\n \"Russ—you shouldn't have done that,\" Johnson whispered. \"You\n shouldn't have done that to the old man!\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Alvar said, so low he could barely be heard. \"You shouldn't have\n done it.\"", "Dunbar laughed. \"Sure, they all maybe have a touch of red, but it\n isn't the same, boys. I can tell the difference. Trust me—\"\n\n\n Russell half choked on his words. \"You old goat! With those old eyes\n of yours, you couldn't see your way into a fire!\"\n\n\n \"Don't get panicky now. Keep your heads. In another year, we'll be\n there—\"\n\n\n \"God, you gotta' be sure,\" Alvar said. \"I don't mind dyin' out here.\n But after a year of this, and then to get to a world that was only\n ashes, and not able to go any further—\"", "\"That's right! That's right,\" Dunbar yelled. \"That's the only one—and\n it's a paradise. Not just a place to live, boys—but a place you'll\n have trouble believing in because it's like a dream!\"\n\n\n \"And none of these other three suns have worlds we could live on,\n Dunbar?\" Russell asked. Keep the old duck talking like this and maybe\n Alvar and Johnson would see that he was cracked.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Alvar. \"You still say that, Dunbar?\"\n\n\n \"No life, boys, nothing,\" Dunbar laughed. \"Nothing on these other\n worlds but ashes ... just ashes and iron and dried blood, dried a\n million years or more.\"\n\n\n \"When in hell were you ever here?\" Johnson said. \"You say you were\n here before. You never said when, or why or anything!\"", "\"Lost people ... lost ... who knows how long,\" Dunbar said, as the\n four of them hurtled along. \"You never know where you'll find people\n on a world somewhere nobody's ever named or knows about. Places where\n a lost ship's landed and never got up again, or wrecked itself so far\n off the lanes they'll never be found except by accident for millions\n of years. That's what this world is, boys. Must have been a ship load\n of beautiful people, maybe actresses and people like that being hauled\n to some outpost to entertain. They're like angels now, living in a\n land all free from care. Every place you see green forests and fields\n and blue lakes, and at nights there's three moons that come around the\n sky in a thousand different colors. And it never gets cold ... it's\n always spring, always spring, boys, and the music plays all night,\n every night of a long long year....\"\n\n\n Russell suddenly shouted. \"Keep quiet, Dunbar. Shut up will you?\"", "How long ago that had been, Russell didn't know. All Russell knew was\n that they were millions of light years from any place he had ever\n heard about, where the galactic space lanterns had absolutely no\n recognizable pattern. But Dunbar knew. And Russell was looking at\n Dunbar's suit up ahead, watching it more and more intently, thinking\n about how Dunbar looked inside that suit—and hating Dunbar more and\n more for claiming he knew when he didn't, for his drooling\n optimism—because he was taking them on into deeper darkness and\n calling their destination Paradise.\n\n\n Russell wanted to laugh, but the last time he'd given way to this\n impulse, the results inside his helmet had been too unpleasant to\n repeat.", "\"All right,\" Johnson said. \"Good-bye.\"\n\n\n Russell felt the release, felt the sudden inexplicable isolation and\n aloneness even before Alvar and Johnson used their life-guns and shot\n out of sight, Johnson toward the left and Alvar back toward that other\n red-rimmed sun behind them.\n\n\n And old Dunbar shooting right on ahead. And all three of them\n dwindling and dwindling and blinking out like little lights.\n\n\n Fading, he could hear their voices. \"Each to his own star,\" Johnson\n said. \"On a bee line.\"\n\n\n \"On a bee line,\" Alvar said.\n\n\n Russell used his own life-gun and in a little while he didn't hear\n Alvar or Johnson's voices, nor could he see them. They were thousands\n of miles away, and going further all the time.", "We all look alike out here in these big rocket pressure suits, Russell\n thought. No one for God only knew how many of millions of light years\n away could see or care. Still—we might have a chance to live, even\n now, Russell thought—if it weren't for old crazy Dunbar.\n\n\n They might have a chance if Alvar and Johnson weren't so damn lacking\n in self-confidence as to put all their trust in that crazed old\n rum-dum. Russell had known now for some time that they were going in\n the wrong direction. No reason for knowing. Just a hunch. And Russell\n was sure his hunch was right.\nRussell said. \"Look—look to your left and to your right and behind\n us. Four suns. You guys see those other three suns all around you,\n don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" someone said.", "Dunbar laughed. \"Boys, boys, don't get panicky. Keep your heads. Just\n stick to old Dunbar and he'll see you through. I'm always lucky. Only\n one way to go ... an' that's straight ahead to the sun with the\n red-rim around it ... and then we tune in the gravity repellers, and\n coast down, floating and singing down through the clouds to\n paradise.\"\n\n\n After that they traveled on for what seemed months to Russell, but it\n couldn't have been over a day or two of the kind of time-sense he had\n inherited from Earth.\n\n\n Then he saw how the other two stars also were beginning to develop red\n rims. He yelled this fact out to the others. And Alvar said. \"Russ's\n right. That sun to the right, and the one behind us ... now they ALL\n have red rims around them. Dunbar—\" A pause and no awareness of\n motion.", "\"We'll make it, boys. Trust ole' Dunbar. What's a year when we know\n we're getting to Paradise at the end of it? What's a year out here ...\n it's paradise ain't it, compared with that prison hole we were rotting\n in? We can make it. We have the food concentrates, and all the rest.\n All we need's the will, boys, and we got that. The whole damn Universe\n isn't big enough to kill the will of a human being, boys. I been over\n a whole lot of it, and I know. In the old days—\"\n\n\n \"The hell with the old days,\" screamed Russell.\n\n\n \"Now quiet down, Russ,\" Dunbar said in a kind of dreadful crooning\n whisper. \"You calm down now. You younger fellows—you don't look at\n things the way we used to. Thing is, we got to go straight. People\n trapped like this liable to start meandering. Liable to start losing\n the old will-power.\"", "Johnson said. \"Dunbar—how long'll it take us?\"\n\n\n \"Six months to a year, I'd say,\" Dunbar yelled happily. \"That is—of\n our hereditary time.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" croaked Alvar.\n\n\n Johnson didn't say anything at all.\n\n\n Russell screamed at Dunbar, then quieted down. He whispered. \"Six\n months to a year—out here—cooped up in these damn suits. You're\n crazy as hell, Dunbar. Crazy ... crazy! Nobody could stand it. We'll\n all be crazier than you are—\"", "Russell's head fell forward against the front of his helmet, and he\n closed his eyes. \"Maybe,\" he thought, \"I shouldn't have killed the old\n man. Maybe one sun's as good as another....\"\n\n\n Then he raised his body and looked out into the year of blackness that\n waited for him, stretching away to the red-rimmed sun. Even if he were\n right—he was sure now he'd never make it alone.\nThe body inside the pressure suit drifted into a low-level orbit\n around the second planet from the sun of its choice, and drifted there\n a long time. A strato-cruiser detected it by chance because of the\n strong concentration of radio-activity that came from it.\n\n\n They took the body down to one of the small, quiet towns on the edge\n of one of the many blue lakes where the domed houses were like bright\n joyful jewels. They got the leathery, well-preserved body from the\n pressure suit.", "\"Well, if you'll notice,\" Russell said, \"the one on the left also now\n has a red rim around it. Can't you guys see that?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I see it,\" Alvar said.\n\n\n \"So now,\" Johnson said, \"there's two suns with red rims around them.\"\n\n\n \"We're about in the middle of those four suns aren't we, Dunbar?\"\n Russell said.\n\n\n \"That's right, boys!\" yelled old Dunbar in that sickeningly optimistic\n voice. Like a hysterical old woman's. \"Just about in the sweet dark\n old middle.\"\n\n\n \"You're still sure it's the sun up ahead ... that's the only one with\n life on it, Dunbar ... the only one we can live on?\" Russell asked.", "Old Dunbar laughed. The sound brought blood hotly to Russell's face.\n \"We're heading to the right one, boys. Don't doubt me ... I been here.\n We explored all these sun systems. And I remember it all. The second\n planet from that red-rimmed sun. You come down through a soft\n atmosphere, floating like in a dream. You see the green lakes coming\n up through the clouds and the women dancing and the music playing. I\n remember seeing a ship there that brought those women there, a long\n long time before ever I got there. A land like heaven and women like\n angels singing and dancing and laughing with red lips and arms white\n as milk, and soft silky hair floating in the winds.\"", "\"And the old man,\" Alvar said, \"can keep right on going toward what he\n thought was right. And he'll keep on going. Course he won't be able to\n give himself another boost with the life-gun, but he'll keep going.\n Someday he'll get to that red-rimmed star of his. Out here in space,\n once you're going, you never stop ... and I guess there isn't any\n other body to pull him off his course. And what will time matter to\n old Dunbar? Even less than to us, I guess. He's dead and he won't\n care.\"\n\n\n \"Ready,\" Johnson said. \"I'll cut off the gravity rope.\"\n\n\n \"I'm ready,\" Alvar said. \"To go back toward whatever it was I started\n from.\"\n\n\n \"Ready, Russ?\"\n\n\n Russell couldn't say anything. He stared at the endless void which now\n he would share with no one. Not even crazy old Dunbar.", "\"I always thought we were going straight in the opposite direction\n from what we should, I guess. I always wanted to turn around and go\n back. It won't make over maybe a month's difference. And what does a\n month matter anyway out here—hell there never was any time out here\n until we came along. We make our own time here, and a month don't\n matter to me.\"\n\n\n Sweat ran down Russell's face. His voice trembled. \"No—that's wrong.\n You're both wrong.\" He could see himself going it alone. Going crazy\n because he was alone. He'd have broken away, gone his own direction,\n long ago but for that fear." ], [ "\"I always come through, boys. I'm lucky. Angel women will take us to\n their houses on the edges of cool lakes, little houses that sit there\n in the sun like fancy jewels. And we'll walk under colored fountains,\n pretty colored fountains just splashing and splashing like pretty rain\n on our hungry hides. That's worth waiting for.\"\n\n\n Russell did it before he hardly realized he was killing the old man.\n It was something he had had to do for a long time and that made it\n easy. There was a flash of burning oxygen from inside the suit of\n Dunbar. If he'd aimed right, Russell knew the fire-bullet should have\n pierced Dunbar's back. Now the fire was gone, extinguished\n automatically by units inside the suit. The suit was still inflated,\n self-sealing. Nothing appeared to have changed. The four of them\n hurtling on together, but inside that first suit up there on the front\n of the gravity rope, Dunbar was dead.", "\"I did it for the three of us,\" Russell said. \"It was either him or us.\n Lies ... lies that was all he had left in his crazy head. Paradise ...\n don't tell me you guys don't see the red rims around all four suns, all\n four suns all around us. Don't tell me you guys didn't know he was batty,\n that you really believed all that stuff he was spouting all the time!\"\n\n\n \"Maybe he was lying, maybe not,\" Johnson said. \"Now he's dead anyway.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe he was wrong, crazy, full of lies,\" Alvar said. \"But now he's\n dead.\"\n\n\n \"How could he see any difference in those four stars?\" Russell said,\n louder.\n\n\n \"He thought he was right,\" Alvar said. \"He wanted to take us to\n paradise. He was happy, nothing could stop the old man—but he's dead\n now.\"", "Russell's head fell forward against the front of his helmet, and he\n closed his eyes. \"Maybe,\" he thought, \"I shouldn't have killed the old\n man. Maybe one sun's as good as another....\"\n\n\n Then he raised his body and looked out into the year of blackness that\n waited for him, stretching away to the red-rimmed sun. Even if he were\n right—he was sure now he'd never make it alone.\nThe body inside the pressure suit drifted into a low-level orbit\n around the second planet from the sun of its choice, and drifted there\n a long time. A strato-cruiser detected it by chance because of the\n strong concentration of radio-activity that came from it.\n\n\n They took the body down to one of the small, quiet towns on the edge\n of one of the many blue lakes where the domed houses were like bright\n joyful jewels. They got the leathery, well-preserved body from the\n pressure suit.", "A lot of time had rushed past into darkness. Russell had no idea now\n how long the four of them had been plunging toward the red-rimmed sun\n that never seemed to get any nearer. When the ultra-drive had gone\n crazy the four of them had blanked out and nobody could say now how\n long an interim that had been. Nobody knew what happened to a man who\n suffered a space-time warping like that. When they had regained\n consciousness, the ship was pretty banged up, and the meteor-repeller\n shields cracked. A meteor ripped the ship down the center like an old\n breakfast cannister.", "He was dead and his mouth was shut for good.\n\n\n Dunbar's last faint cry from inside his suit still rang in Russell's\n ears, and he knew Alvar and Johnson had heard it too. Alvar and\n Johnson both called Dunbar's name a few times. There was no answer.\n\n\n \"Russ—you shouldn't have done that,\" Johnson whispered. \"You\n shouldn't have done that to the old man!\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Alvar said, so low he could barely be heard. \"You shouldn't have\n done it.\"", "\"All right,\" Johnson said. \"Good-bye.\"\n\n\n Russell felt the release, felt the sudden inexplicable isolation and\n aloneness even before Alvar and Johnson used their life-guns and shot\n out of sight, Johnson toward the left and Alvar back toward that other\n red-rimmed sun behind them.\n\n\n And old Dunbar shooting right on ahead. And all three of them\n dwindling and dwindling and blinking out like little lights.\n\n\n Fading, he could hear their voices. \"Each to his own star,\" Johnson\n said. \"On a bee line.\"\n\n\n \"On a bee line,\" Alvar said.\n\n\n Russell used his own life-gun and in a little while he didn't hear\n Alvar or Johnson's voices, nor could he see them. They were thousands\n of miles away, and going further all the time.", "\"And the old man,\" Alvar said, \"can keep right on going toward what he\n thought was right. And he'll keep on going. Course he won't be able to\n give himself another boost with the life-gun, but he'll keep going.\n Someday he'll get to that red-rimmed star of his. Out here in space,\n once you're going, you never stop ... and I guess there isn't any\n other body to pull him off his course. And what will time matter to\n old Dunbar? Even less than to us, I guess. He's dead and he won't\n care.\"\n\n\n \"Ready,\" Johnson said. \"I'll cut off the gravity rope.\"\n\n\n \"I'm ready,\" Alvar said. \"To go back toward whatever it was I started\n from.\"\n\n\n \"Ready, Russ?\"\n\n\n Russell couldn't say anything. He stared at the endless void which now\n he would share with no one. Not even crazy old Dunbar.", "Sometimes Russell thought of other things besides his growing hatred\n of the old man. Sometimes he thought about the ship, lost back there\n in the void, and he wondered if wrecked space ships were ever found.\n Compared with the universe in which one of them drifted, a wrecked\n ship was a lot smaller than a grain of sand on a nice warm beach back\n on Earth, or one of those specks of silver dust that floated like\n strange seeds down the night winds of Venus.\n\n\n And a human was smaller still, thought Russell when he was not hating\n Dunbar. Out here, a human being is the smallest thing of all. He\n thought then of what Dunbar would say to such a thought, how Dunbar\n would laugh that high piping squawking laugh of his and say that the\n human being was bigger than the Universe itself.\n\n\n Dunbar had a big answer for every little thing.", "And Alvar said, \"Guess he was crazy all right, and I guess we trusted\n him because we didn't have the strength to make up our own minds. Why\n does a crazy man's laugh sound so good when you're desperate and don't\n know what to do?\"\n\n\n \"I always had a feeling we were going wrong,\" Johnson said. \"Anyway,\n it's forgotten, Russ. It's swallowed up in the darkness all around.\n It's never been.\"\n\n\n Russell said, \"I've had a hunch all along that maybe the old man was\n here before, and that he was right about there being a star here with\n a world we can live on. But I've known we was heading wrong. I've had\n a hunch all along that the right star was the one to the left.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Johnson sighed. \"I been feeling partial toward that\n one on the right. What about you, Alvar?\"", "Russell was very sick of the old man's voice. He was at least glad he\n didn't have to look at the old man now. His bald head, his skinny\n bobbing neck, his simpering watery blue eyes. But he still had to\n suffer that immutable babbling, that idiotic cheerfulness ... and\n knowing all the time the old man was crazy, that he was leading them\n wrong.\n\n\n I'd break away, go it alone to the right sun, Russell thought—but I'd\n never make it alone. A little while out here alone and I'd be nuttier\n than old Dunbar will ever be, even if he keeps on getting nuttier all\n the time.\n\n\n Somewhere, sometime then ... Russell got the idea that the only way\n was to get rid of Dunbar.\nYou mean to tell us there are people living by that red-rimmed sun,\"\n Russell said.", "He sighed.\n\n\n \"He was taking us wrong ... wrong!\" Russell screamed. \"Angels—music\n all night—houses like jewels—and women like angels—\"\n\n\n \"\nShhhh\n,\" said Alvar. It was quiet. How could it be so quiet, Russell\n thought? And up ahead the old man's pressure suit with a corpse inside\n went on ahead, leading the other three at the front of the\n gravity-rope.\n\n\n \"Maybe he was wrong,\" Alvar said. \"But now do we know which way is\n right?\"\nSometime later, Johnson said, \"We got to decide now. Let's forget the\n old man. Let's forget him and all that's gone and let's start now and\n decide what to do.\"", "Johnson started to laugh. Russell was yelling wildly at them, and\n above his own yelling he could hear Johnson's rising laughter. \"Every\n guy's got a star of his own,\" Johnson said when he stopped laughing.\n \"And we got ours. A nice red-rimmed sun for each of us to call his\n very own.\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Alvar said. \"We cut off the gravity rope, and each to his own\n sun.\"\n\n\n Now Russell wasn't saying anything.", "Dunbar laughed. \"Sure, they all maybe have a touch of red, but it\n isn't the same, boys. I can tell the difference. Trust me—\"\n\n\n Russell half choked on his words. \"You old goat! With those old eyes\n of yours, you couldn't see your way into a fire!\"\n\n\n \"Don't get panicky now. Keep your heads. In another year, we'll be\n there—\"\n\n\n \"God, you gotta' be sure,\" Alvar said. \"I don't mind dyin' out here.\n But after a year of this, and then to get to a world that was only\n ashes, and not able to go any further—\"", "Dunbar laughed. \"Boys, boys, don't get panicky. Keep your heads. Just\n stick to old Dunbar and he'll see you through. I'm always lucky. Only\n one way to go ... an' that's straight ahead to the sun with the\n red-rim around it ... and then we tune in the gravity repellers, and\n coast down, floating and singing down through the clouds to\n paradise.\"\n\n\n After that they traveled on for what seemed months to Russell, but it\n couldn't have been over a day or two of the kind of time-sense he had\n inherited from Earth.\n\n\n Then he saw how the other two stars also were beginning to develop red\n rims. He yelled this fact out to the others. And Alvar said. \"Russ's\n right. That sun to the right, and the one behind us ... now they ALL\n have red rims around them. Dunbar—\" A pause and no awareness of\n motion.", "Four men, thought Russell, held together by an invisible string of\n gravity, plunging through a lost pocket of hell's dark where there had\n never been any sound or life, with old Dunbar the first in line,\n taking the lead because he was older and knew where he was and where\n he was going. Maybe Johnson, second in line, and Alvar who was third,\n knew too, but were afraid to admit it.\n\n\n But Russell knew it and he'd admitted it from the first—that old\n Dunbar was as crazy as a Jovian juke-bird.", "How long ago that had been, Russell didn't know. All Russell knew was\n that they were millions of light years from any place he had ever\n heard about, where the galactic space lanterns had absolutely no\n recognizable pattern. But Dunbar knew. And Russell was looking at\n Dunbar's suit up ahead, watching it more and more intently, thinking\n about how Dunbar looked inside that suit—and hating Dunbar more and\n more for claiming he knew when he didn't, for his drooling\n optimism—because he was taking them on into deeper darkness and\n calling their destination Paradise.\n\n\n Russell wanted to laugh, but the last time he'd given way to this\n impulse, the results inside his helmet had been too unpleasant to\n repeat.", "We all look alike out here in these big rocket pressure suits, Russell\n thought. No one for God only knew how many of millions of light years\n away could see or care. Still—we might have a chance to live, even\n now, Russell thought—if it weren't for old crazy Dunbar.\n\n\n They might have a chance if Alvar and Johnson weren't so damn lacking\n in self-confidence as to put all their trust in that crazed old\n rum-dum. Russell had known now for some time that they were going in\n the wrong direction. No reason for knowing. Just a hunch. And Russell\n was sure his hunch was right.\nRussell said. \"Look—look to your left and to your right and behind\n us. Four suns. You guys see those other three suns all around you,\n don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" someone said.", "\"I always thought we were going straight in the opposite direction\n from what we should, I guess. I always wanted to turn around and go\n back. It won't make over maybe a month's difference. And what does a\n month matter anyway out here—hell there never was any time out here\n until we came along. We make our own time here, and a month don't\n matter to me.\"\n\n\n Sweat ran down Russell's face. His voice trembled. \"No—that's wrong.\n You're both wrong.\" He could see himself going it alone. Going crazy\n because he was alone. He'd have broken away, gone his own direction,\n long ago but for that fear.", "\"Lost people ... lost ... who knows how long,\" Dunbar said, as the\n four of them hurtled along. \"You never know where you'll find people\n on a world somewhere nobody's ever named or knows about. Places where\n a lost ship's landed and never got up again, or wrecked itself so far\n off the lanes they'll never be found except by accident for millions\n of years. That's what this world is, boys. Must have been a ship load\n of beautiful people, maybe actresses and people like that being hauled\n to some outpost to entertain. They're like angels now, living in a\n land all free from care. Every place you see green forests and fields\n and blue lakes, and at nights there's three moons that come around the\n sky in a thousand different colors. And it never gets cold ... it's\n always spring, always spring, boys, and the music plays all night,\n every night of a long long year....\"\n\n\n Russell suddenly shouted. \"Keep quiet, Dunbar. Shut up will you?\"", "\"That's it,\" said Alvar. \"There's three suns that look like they might\n be right seeing as how we all agree the old man was wrong. But we\n believe there is one we can live by, because we all seem to agree that\n the old man might have been right about that. If we stick together,\n the chance is three to one against us. But if each of us makes for one\n star, one of us has a chance to live. Maybe not in paradise like the\n old man said, but a place where we can live. And maybe there'll be\n intelligent life, maybe even a ship, and whoever gets the right star\n can come and help the other two....\"\n\n\n \"No ... God no....\" Russell whispered over and over. \"None of us can\n ever make it alone....\"\n\n\n Alvar said, \"We each take the star he likes best. I'll go back the\n other way. Russ, you take the left. And you, Johnson, go to the\n right.\"" ], [ "\"I always come through, boys. I'm lucky. Angel women will take us to\n their houses on the edges of cool lakes, little houses that sit there\n in the sun like fancy jewels. And we'll walk under colored fountains,\n pretty colored fountains just splashing and splashing like pretty rain\n on our hungry hides. That's worth waiting for.\"\n\n\n Russell did it before he hardly realized he was killing the old man.\n It was something he had had to do for a long time and that made it\n easy. There was a flash of burning oxygen from inside the suit of\n Dunbar. If he'd aimed right, Russell knew the fire-bullet should have\n pierced Dunbar's back. Now the fire was gone, extinguished\n automatically by units inside the suit. The suit was still inflated,\n self-sealing. Nothing appeared to have changed. The four of them\n hurtling on together, but inside that first suit up there on the front\n of the gravity rope, Dunbar was dead.", "Russell was very sick of the old man's voice. He was at least glad he\n didn't have to look at the old man now. His bald head, his skinny\n bobbing neck, his simpering watery blue eyes. But he still had to\n suffer that immutable babbling, that idiotic cheerfulness ... and\n knowing all the time the old man was crazy, that he was leading them\n wrong.\n\n\n I'd break away, go it alone to the right sun, Russell thought—but I'd\n never make it alone. A little while out here alone and I'd be nuttier\n than old Dunbar will ever be, even if he keeps on getting nuttier all\n the time.\n\n\n Somewhere, sometime then ... Russell got the idea that the only way\n was to get rid of Dunbar.\nYou mean to tell us there are people living by that red-rimmed sun,\"\n Russell said.", "Four men, thought Russell, held together by an invisible string of\n gravity, plunging through a lost pocket of hell's dark where there had\n never been any sound or life, with old Dunbar the first in line,\n taking the lead because he was older and knew where he was and where\n he was going. Maybe Johnson, second in line, and Alvar who was third,\n knew too, but were afraid to admit it.\n\n\n But Russell knew it and he'd admitted it from the first—that old\n Dunbar was as crazy as a Jovian juke-bird.", "He was dead and his mouth was shut for good.\n\n\n Dunbar's last faint cry from inside his suit still rang in Russell's\n ears, and he knew Alvar and Johnson had heard it too. Alvar and\n Johnson both called Dunbar's name a few times. There was no answer.\n\n\n \"Russ—you shouldn't have done that,\" Johnson whispered. \"You\n shouldn't have done that to the old man!\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Alvar said, so low he could barely be heard. \"You shouldn't have\n done it.\"", "Sometimes Russell thought of other things besides his growing hatred\n of the old man. Sometimes he thought about the ship, lost back there\n in the void, and he wondered if wrecked space ships were ever found.\n Compared with the universe in which one of them drifted, a wrecked\n ship was a lot smaller than a grain of sand on a nice warm beach back\n on Earth, or one of those specks of silver dust that floated like\n strange seeds down the night winds of Venus.\n\n\n And a human was smaller still, thought Russell when he was not hating\n Dunbar. Out here, a human being is the smallest thing of all. He\n thought then of what Dunbar would say to such a thought, how Dunbar\n would laugh that high piping squawking laugh of his and say that the\n human being was bigger than the Universe itself.\n\n\n Dunbar had a big answer for every little thing.", "\"I did it for the three of us,\" Russell said. \"It was either him or us.\n Lies ... lies that was all he had left in his crazy head. Paradise ...\n don't tell me you guys don't see the red rims around all four suns, all\n four suns all around us. Don't tell me you guys didn't know he was batty,\n that you really believed all that stuff he was spouting all the time!\"\n\n\n \"Maybe he was lying, maybe not,\" Johnson said. \"Now he's dead anyway.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe he was wrong, crazy, full of lies,\" Alvar said. \"But now he's\n dead.\"\n\n\n \"How could he see any difference in those four stars?\" Russell said,\n louder.\n\n\n \"He thought he was right,\" Alvar said. \"He wanted to take us to\n paradise. He was happy, nothing could stop the old man—but he's dead\n now.\"", "Dunbar laughed. \"Sure, they all maybe have a touch of red, but it\n isn't the same, boys. I can tell the difference. Trust me—\"\n\n\n Russell half choked on his words. \"You old goat! With those old eyes\n of yours, you couldn't see your way into a fire!\"\n\n\n \"Don't get panicky now. Keep your heads. In another year, we'll be\n there—\"\n\n\n \"God, you gotta' be sure,\" Alvar said. \"I don't mind dyin' out here.\n But after a year of this, and then to get to a world that was only\n ashes, and not able to go any further—\"", "\"All right,\" Johnson said. \"Good-bye.\"\n\n\n Russell felt the release, felt the sudden inexplicable isolation and\n aloneness even before Alvar and Johnson used their life-guns and shot\n out of sight, Johnson toward the left and Alvar back toward that other\n red-rimmed sun behind them.\n\n\n And old Dunbar shooting right on ahead. And all three of them\n dwindling and dwindling and blinking out like little lights.\n\n\n Fading, he could hear their voices. \"Each to his own star,\" Johnson\n said. \"On a bee line.\"\n\n\n \"On a bee line,\" Alvar said.\n\n\n Russell used his own life-gun and in a little while he didn't hear\n Alvar or Johnson's voices, nor could he see them. They were thousands\n of miles away, and going further all the time.", "\"Lost people ... lost ... who knows how long,\" Dunbar said, as the\n four of them hurtled along. \"You never know where you'll find people\n on a world somewhere nobody's ever named or knows about. Places where\n a lost ship's landed and never got up again, or wrecked itself so far\n off the lanes they'll never be found except by accident for millions\n of years. That's what this world is, boys. Must have been a ship load\n of beautiful people, maybe actresses and people like that being hauled\n to some outpost to entertain. They're like angels now, living in a\n land all free from care. Every place you see green forests and fields\n and blue lakes, and at nights there's three moons that come around the\n sky in a thousand different colors. And it never gets cold ... it's\n always spring, always spring, boys, and the music plays all night,\n every night of a long long year....\"\n\n\n Russell suddenly shouted. \"Keep quiet, Dunbar. Shut up will you?\"", "Dunbar laughed. \"Boys, boys, don't get panicky. Keep your heads. Just\n stick to old Dunbar and he'll see you through. I'm always lucky. Only\n one way to go ... an' that's straight ahead to the sun with the\n red-rim around it ... and then we tune in the gravity repellers, and\n coast down, floating and singing down through the clouds to\n paradise.\"\n\n\n After that they traveled on for what seemed months to Russell, but it\n couldn't have been over a day or two of the kind of time-sense he had\n inherited from Earth.\n\n\n Then he saw how the other two stars also were beginning to develop red\n rims. He yelled this fact out to the others. And Alvar said. \"Russ's\n right. That sun to the right, and the one behind us ... now they ALL\n have red rims around them. Dunbar—\" A pause and no awareness of\n motion.", "\"And the old man,\" Alvar said, \"can keep right on going toward what he\n thought was right. And he'll keep on going. Course he won't be able to\n give himself another boost with the life-gun, but he'll keep going.\n Someday he'll get to that red-rimmed star of his. Out here in space,\n once you're going, you never stop ... and I guess there isn't any\n other body to pull him off his course. And what will time matter to\n old Dunbar? Even less than to us, I guess. He's dead and he won't\n care.\"\n\n\n \"Ready,\" Johnson said. \"I'll cut off the gravity rope.\"\n\n\n \"I'm ready,\" Alvar said. \"To go back toward whatever it was I started\n from.\"\n\n\n \"Ready, Russ?\"\n\n\n Russell couldn't say anything. He stared at the endless void which now\n he would share with no one. Not even crazy old Dunbar.", "\"That's right! That's right,\" Dunbar yelled. \"That's the only one—and\n it's a paradise. Not just a place to live, boys—but a place you'll\n have trouble believing in because it's like a dream!\"\n\n\n \"And none of these other three suns have worlds we could live on,\n Dunbar?\" Russell asked. Keep the old duck talking like this and maybe\n Alvar and Johnson would see that he was cracked.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Alvar. \"You still say that, Dunbar?\"\n\n\n \"No life, boys, nothing,\" Dunbar laughed. \"Nothing on these other\n worlds but ashes ... just ashes and iron and dried blood, dried a\n million years or more.\"\n\n\n \"When in hell were you ever here?\" Johnson said. \"You say you were\n here before. You never said when, or why or anything!\"", "How long ago that had been, Russell didn't know. All Russell knew was\n that they were millions of light years from any place he had ever\n heard about, where the galactic space lanterns had absolutely no\n recognizable pattern. But Dunbar knew. And Russell was looking at\n Dunbar's suit up ahead, watching it more and more intently, thinking\n about how Dunbar looked inside that suit—and hating Dunbar more and\n more for claiming he knew when he didn't, for his drooling\n optimism—because he was taking them on into deeper darkness and\n calling their destination Paradise.\n\n\n Russell wanted to laugh, but the last time he'd given way to this\n impulse, the results inside his helmet had been too unpleasant to\n repeat.", "He sighed.\n\n\n \"He was taking us wrong ... wrong!\" Russell screamed. \"Angels—music\n all night—houses like jewels—and women like angels—\"\n\n\n \"\nShhhh\n,\" said Alvar. It was quiet. How could it be so quiet, Russell\n thought? And up ahead the old man's pressure suit with a corpse inside\n went on ahead, leading the other three at the front of the\n gravity-rope.\n\n\n \"Maybe he was wrong,\" Alvar said. \"But now do we know which way is\n right?\"\nSometime later, Johnson said, \"We got to decide now. Let's forget the\n old man. Let's forget him and all that's gone and let's start now and\n decide what to do.\"", "We all look alike out here in these big rocket pressure suits, Russell\n thought. No one for God only knew how many of millions of light years\n away could see or care. Still—we might have a chance to live, even\n now, Russell thought—if it weren't for old crazy Dunbar.\n\n\n They might have a chance if Alvar and Johnson weren't so damn lacking\n in self-confidence as to put all their trust in that crazed old\n rum-dum. Russell had known now for some time that they were going in\n the wrong direction. No reason for knowing. Just a hunch. And Russell\n was sure his hunch was right.\nRussell said. \"Look—look to your left and to your right and behind\n us. Four suns. You guys see those other three suns all around you,\n don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" someone said.", "Russell's head fell forward against the front of his helmet, and he\n closed his eyes. \"Maybe,\" he thought, \"I shouldn't have killed the old\n man. Maybe one sun's as good as another....\"\n\n\n Then he raised his body and looked out into the year of blackness that\n waited for him, stretching away to the red-rimmed sun. Even if he were\n right—he was sure now he'd never make it alone.\nThe body inside the pressure suit drifted into a low-level orbit\n around the second planet from the sun of its choice, and drifted there\n a long time. A strato-cruiser detected it by chance because of the\n strong concentration of radio-activity that came from it.\n\n\n They took the body down to one of the small, quiet towns on the edge\n of one of the many blue lakes where the domed houses were like bright\n joyful jewels. They got the leathery, well-preserved body from the\n pressure suit.", "\"We'll make it, boys. Trust ole' Dunbar. What's a year when we know\n we're getting to Paradise at the end of it? What's a year out here ...\n it's paradise ain't it, compared with that prison hole we were rotting\n in? We can make it. We have the food concentrates, and all the rest.\n All we need's the will, boys, and we got that. The whole damn Universe\n isn't big enough to kill the will of a human being, boys. I been over\n a whole lot of it, and I know. In the old days—\"\n\n\n \"The hell with the old days,\" screamed Russell.\n\n\n \"Now quiet down, Russ,\" Dunbar said in a kind of dreadful crooning\n whisper. \"You calm down now. You younger fellows—you don't look at\n things the way we used to. Thing is, we got to go straight. People\n trapped like this liable to start meandering. Liable to start losing\n the old will-power.\"", "Johnson said. \"Dunbar—how long'll it take us?\"\n\n\n \"Six months to a year, I'd say,\" Dunbar yelled happily. \"That is—of\n our hereditary time.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" croaked Alvar.\n\n\n Johnson didn't say anything at all.\n\n\n Russell screamed at Dunbar, then quieted down. He whispered. \"Six\n months to a year—out here—cooped up in these damn suits. You're\n crazy as hell, Dunbar. Crazy ... crazy! Nobody could stand it. We'll\n all be crazier than you are—\"", "\"Well, if you'll notice,\" Russell said, \"the one on the left also now\n has a red rim around it. Can't you guys see that?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I see it,\" Alvar said.\n\n\n \"So now,\" Johnson said, \"there's two suns with red rims around them.\"\n\n\n \"We're about in the middle of those four suns aren't we, Dunbar?\"\n Russell said.\n\n\n \"That's right, boys!\" yelled old Dunbar in that sickeningly optimistic\n voice. Like a hysterical old woman's. \"Just about in the sweet dark\n old middle.\"\n\n\n \"You're still sure it's the sun up ahead ... that's the only one with\n life on it, Dunbar ... the only one we can live on?\" Russell asked.", "A lot of time had rushed past into darkness. Russell had no idea now\n how long the four of them had been plunging toward the red-rimmed sun\n that never seemed to get any nearer. When the ultra-drive had gone\n crazy the four of them had blanked out and nobody could say now how\n long an interim that had been. Nobody knew what happened to a man who\n suffered a space-time warping like that. When they had regained\n consciousness, the ship was pretty banged up, and the meteor-repeller\n shields cracked. A meteor ripped the ship down the center like an old\n breakfast cannister." ], [ "\"I always come through, boys. I'm lucky. Angel women will take us to\n their houses on the edges of cool lakes, little houses that sit there\n in the sun like fancy jewels. And we'll walk under colored fountains,\n pretty colored fountains just splashing and splashing like pretty rain\n on our hungry hides. That's worth waiting for.\"\n\n\n Russell did it before he hardly realized he was killing the old man.\n It was something he had had to do for a long time and that made it\n easy. There was a flash of burning oxygen from inside the suit of\n Dunbar. If he'd aimed right, Russell knew the fire-bullet should have\n pierced Dunbar's back. Now the fire was gone, extinguished\n automatically by units inside the suit. The suit was still inflated,\n self-sealing. Nothing appeared to have changed. The four of them\n hurtling on together, but inside that first suit up there on the front\n of the gravity rope, Dunbar was dead.", "Russell was very sick of the old man's voice. He was at least glad he\n didn't have to look at the old man now. His bald head, his skinny\n bobbing neck, his simpering watery blue eyes. But he still had to\n suffer that immutable babbling, that idiotic cheerfulness ... and\n knowing all the time the old man was crazy, that he was leading them\n wrong.\n\n\n I'd break away, go it alone to the right sun, Russell thought—but I'd\n never make it alone. A little while out here alone and I'd be nuttier\n than old Dunbar will ever be, even if he keeps on getting nuttier all\n the time.\n\n\n Somewhere, sometime then ... Russell got the idea that the only way\n was to get rid of Dunbar.\nYou mean to tell us there are people living by that red-rimmed sun,\"\n Russell said.", "Four men, thought Russell, held together by an invisible string of\n gravity, plunging through a lost pocket of hell's dark where there had\n never been any sound or life, with old Dunbar the first in line,\n taking the lead because he was older and knew where he was and where\n he was going. Maybe Johnson, second in line, and Alvar who was third,\n knew too, but were afraid to admit it.\n\n\n But Russell knew it and he'd admitted it from the first—that old\n Dunbar was as crazy as a Jovian juke-bird.", "Dunbar laughed. \"Sure, they all maybe have a touch of red, but it\n isn't the same, boys. I can tell the difference. Trust me—\"\n\n\n Russell half choked on his words. \"You old goat! With those old eyes\n of yours, you couldn't see your way into a fire!\"\n\n\n \"Don't get panicky now. Keep your heads. In another year, we'll be\n there—\"\n\n\n \"God, you gotta' be sure,\" Alvar said. \"I don't mind dyin' out here.\n But after a year of this, and then to get to a world that was only\n ashes, and not able to go any further—\"", "Sometimes Russell thought of other things besides his growing hatred\n of the old man. Sometimes he thought about the ship, lost back there\n in the void, and he wondered if wrecked space ships were ever found.\n Compared with the universe in which one of them drifted, a wrecked\n ship was a lot smaller than a grain of sand on a nice warm beach back\n on Earth, or one of those specks of silver dust that floated like\n strange seeds down the night winds of Venus.\n\n\n And a human was smaller still, thought Russell when he was not hating\n Dunbar. Out here, a human being is the smallest thing of all. He\n thought then of what Dunbar would say to such a thought, how Dunbar\n would laugh that high piping squawking laugh of his and say that the\n human being was bigger than the Universe itself.\n\n\n Dunbar had a big answer for every little thing.", "He was dead and his mouth was shut for good.\n\n\n Dunbar's last faint cry from inside his suit still rang in Russell's\n ears, and he knew Alvar and Johnson had heard it too. Alvar and\n Johnson both called Dunbar's name a few times. There was no answer.\n\n\n \"Russ—you shouldn't have done that,\" Johnson whispered. \"You\n shouldn't have done that to the old man!\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Alvar said, so low he could barely be heard. \"You shouldn't have\n done it.\"", "How long ago that had been, Russell didn't know. All Russell knew was\n that they were millions of light years from any place he had ever\n heard about, where the galactic space lanterns had absolutely no\n recognizable pattern. But Dunbar knew. And Russell was looking at\n Dunbar's suit up ahead, watching it more and more intently, thinking\n about how Dunbar looked inside that suit—and hating Dunbar more and\n more for claiming he knew when he didn't, for his drooling\n optimism—because he was taking them on into deeper darkness and\n calling their destination Paradise.\n\n\n Russell wanted to laugh, but the last time he'd given way to this\n impulse, the results inside his helmet had been too unpleasant to\n repeat.", "\"I did it for the three of us,\" Russell said. \"It was either him or us.\n Lies ... lies that was all he had left in his crazy head. Paradise ...\n don't tell me you guys don't see the red rims around all four suns, all\n four suns all around us. Don't tell me you guys didn't know he was batty,\n that you really believed all that stuff he was spouting all the time!\"\n\n\n \"Maybe he was lying, maybe not,\" Johnson said. \"Now he's dead anyway.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe he was wrong, crazy, full of lies,\" Alvar said. \"But now he's\n dead.\"\n\n\n \"How could he see any difference in those four stars?\" Russell said,\n louder.\n\n\n \"He thought he was right,\" Alvar said. \"He wanted to take us to\n paradise. He was happy, nothing could stop the old man—but he's dead\n now.\"", "\"Lost people ... lost ... who knows how long,\" Dunbar said, as the\n four of them hurtled along. \"You never know where you'll find people\n on a world somewhere nobody's ever named or knows about. Places where\n a lost ship's landed and never got up again, or wrecked itself so far\n off the lanes they'll never be found except by accident for millions\n of years. That's what this world is, boys. Must have been a ship load\n of beautiful people, maybe actresses and people like that being hauled\n to some outpost to entertain. They're like angels now, living in a\n land all free from care. Every place you see green forests and fields\n and blue lakes, and at nights there's three moons that come around the\n sky in a thousand different colors. And it never gets cold ... it's\n always spring, always spring, boys, and the music plays all night,\n every night of a long long year....\"\n\n\n Russell suddenly shouted. \"Keep quiet, Dunbar. Shut up will you?\"", "\"All right,\" Johnson said. \"Good-bye.\"\n\n\n Russell felt the release, felt the sudden inexplicable isolation and\n aloneness even before Alvar and Johnson used their life-guns and shot\n out of sight, Johnson toward the left and Alvar back toward that other\n red-rimmed sun behind them.\n\n\n And old Dunbar shooting right on ahead. And all three of them\n dwindling and dwindling and blinking out like little lights.\n\n\n Fading, he could hear their voices. \"Each to his own star,\" Johnson\n said. \"On a bee line.\"\n\n\n \"On a bee line,\" Alvar said.\n\n\n Russell used his own life-gun and in a little while he didn't hear\n Alvar or Johnson's voices, nor could he see them. They were thousands\n of miles away, and going further all the time.", "Dunbar laughed. \"Boys, boys, don't get panicky. Keep your heads. Just\n stick to old Dunbar and he'll see you through. I'm always lucky. Only\n one way to go ... an' that's straight ahead to the sun with the\n red-rim around it ... and then we tune in the gravity repellers, and\n coast down, floating and singing down through the clouds to\n paradise.\"\n\n\n After that they traveled on for what seemed months to Russell, but it\n couldn't have been over a day or two of the kind of time-sense he had\n inherited from Earth.\n\n\n Then he saw how the other two stars also were beginning to develop red\n rims. He yelled this fact out to the others. And Alvar said. \"Russ's\n right. That sun to the right, and the one behind us ... now they ALL\n have red rims around them. Dunbar—\" A pause and no awareness of\n motion.", "\"That's right! That's right,\" Dunbar yelled. \"That's the only one—and\n it's a paradise. Not just a place to live, boys—but a place you'll\n have trouble believing in because it's like a dream!\"\n\n\n \"And none of these other three suns have worlds we could live on,\n Dunbar?\" Russell asked. Keep the old duck talking like this and maybe\n Alvar and Johnson would see that he was cracked.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Alvar. \"You still say that, Dunbar?\"\n\n\n \"No life, boys, nothing,\" Dunbar laughed. \"Nothing on these other\n worlds but ashes ... just ashes and iron and dried blood, dried a\n million years or more.\"\n\n\n \"When in hell were you ever here?\" Johnson said. \"You say you were\n here before. You never said when, or why or anything!\"", "Johnson said. \"Dunbar—how long'll it take us?\"\n\n\n \"Six months to a year, I'd say,\" Dunbar yelled happily. \"That is—of\n our hereditary time.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" croaked Alvar.\n\n\n Johnson didn't say anything at all.\n\n\n Russell screamed at Dunbar, then quieted down. He whispered. \"Six\n months to a year—out here—cooped up in these damn suits. You're\n crazy as hell, Dunbar. Crazy ... crazy! Nobody could stand it. We'll\n all be crazier than you are—\"", "We all look alike out here in these big rocket pressure suits, Russell\n thought. No one for God only knew how many of millions of light years\n away could see or care. Still—we might have a chance to live, even\n now, Russell thought—if it weren't for old crazy Dunbar.\n\n\n They might have a chance if Alvar and Johnson weren't so damn lacking\n in self-confidence as to put all their trust in that crazed old\n rum-dum. Russell had known now for some time that they were going in\n the wrong direction. No reason for knowing. Just a hunch. And Russell\n was sure his hunch was right.\nRussell said. \"Look—look to your left and to your right and behind\n us. Four suns. You guys see those other three suns all around you,\n don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" someone said.", "Russell's head fell forward against the front of his helmet, and he\n closed his eyes. \"Maybe,\" he thought, \"I shouldn't have killed the old\n man. Maybe one sun's as good as another....\"\n\n\n Then he raised his body and looked out into the year of blackness that\n waited for him, stretching away to the red-rimmed sun. Even if he were\n right—he was sure now he'd never make it alone.\nThe body inside the pressure suit drifted into a low-level orbit\n around the second planet from the sun of its choice, and drifted there\n a long time. A strato-cruiser detected it by chance because of the\n strong concentration of radio-activity that came from it.\n\n\n They took the body down to one of the small, quiet towns on the edge\n of one of the many blue lakes where the domed houses were like bright\n joyful jewels. They got the leathery, well-preserved body from the\n pressure suit.", "\"And the old man,\" Alvar said, \"can keep right on going toward what he\n thought was right. And he'll keep on going. Course he won't be able to\n give himself another boost with the life-gun, but he'll keep going.\n Someday he'll get to that red-rimmed star of his. Out here in space,\n once you're going, you never stop ... and I guess there isn't any\n other body to pull him off his course. And what will time matter to\n old Dunbar? Even less than to us, I guess. He's dead and he won't\n care.\"\n\n\n \"Ready,\" Johnson said. \"I'll cut off the gravity rope.\"\n\n\n \"I'm ready,\" Alvar said. \"To go back toward whatever it was I started\n from.\"\n\n\n \"Ready, Russ?\"\n\n\n Russell couldn't say anything. He stared at the endless void which now\n he would share with no one. Not even crazy old Dunbar.", "\"We'll make it, boys. Trust ole' Dunbar. What's a year when we know\n we're getting to Paradise at the end of it? What's a year out here ...\n it's paradise ain't it, compared with that prison hole we were rotting\n in? We can make it. We have the food concentrates, and all the rest.\n All we need's the will, boys, and we got that. The whole damn Universe\n isn't big enough to kill the will of a human being, boys. I been over\n a whole lot of it, and I know. In the old days—\"\n\n\n \"The hell with the old days,\" screamed Russell.\n\n\n \"Now quiet down, Russ,\" Dunbar said in a kind of dreadful crooning\n whisper. \"You calm down now. You younger fellows—you don't look at\n things the way we used to. Thing is, we got to go straight. People\n trapped like this liable to start meandering. Liable to start losing\n the old will-power.\"", "He sighed.\n\n\n \"He was taking us wrong ... wrong!\" Russell screamed. \"Angels—music\n all night—houses like jewels—and women like angels—\"\n\n\n \"\nShhhh\n,\" said Alvar. It was quiet. How could it be so quiet, Russell\n thought? And up ahead the old man's pressure suit with a corpse inside\n went on ahead, leading the other three at the front of the\n gravity-rope.\n\n\n \"Maybe he was wrong,\" Alvar said. \"But now do we know which way is\n right?\"\nSometime later, Johnson said, \"We got to decide now. Let's forget the\n old man. Let's forget him and all that's gone and let's start now and\n decide what to do.\"", "\"Well, if you'll notice,\" Russell said, \"the one on the left also now\n has a red rim around it. Can't you guys see that?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I see it,\" Alvar said.\n\n\n \"So now,\" Johnson said, \"there's two suns with red rims around them.\"\n\n\n \"We're about in the middle of those four suns aren't we, Dunbar?\"\n Russell said.\n\n\n \"That's right, boys!\" yelled old Dunbar in that sickeningly optimistic\n voice. Like a hysterical old woman's. \"Just about in the sweet dark\n old middle.\"\n\n\n \"You're still sure it's the sun up ahead ... that's the only one with\n life on it, Dunbar ... the only one we can live on?\" Russell asked.", "\"I always thought we were going straight in the opposite direction\n from what we should, I guess. I always wanted to turn around and go\n back. It won't make over maybe a month's difference. And what does a\n month matter anyway out here—hell there never was any time out here\n until we came along. We make our own time here, and a month don't\n matter to me.\"\n\n\n Sweat ran down Russell's face. His voice trembled. \"No—that's wrong.\n You're both wrong.\" He could see himself going it alone. Going crazy\n because he was alone. He'd have broken away, gone his own direction,\n long ago but for that fear." ], [ "\"Lost people ... lost ... who knows how long,\" Dunbar said, as the\n four of them hurtled along. \"You never know where you'll find people\n on a world somewhere nobody's ever named or knows about. Places where\n a lost ship's landed and never got up again, or wrecked itself so far\n off the lanes they'll never be found except by accident for millions\n of years. That's what this world is, boys. Must have been a ship load\n of beautiful people, maybe actresses and people like that being hauled\n to some outpost to entertain. They're like angels now, living in a\n land all free from care. Every place you see green forests and fields\n and blue lakes, and at nights there's three moons that come around the\n sky in a thousand different colors. And it never gets cold ... it's\n always spring, always spring, boys, and the music plays all night,\n every night of a long long year....\"\n\n\n Russell suddenly shouted. \"Keep quiet, Dunbar. Shut up will you?\"", "Sometimes Russell thought of other things besides his growing hatred\n of the old man. Sometimes he thought about the ship, lost back there\n in the void, and he wondered if wrecked space ships were ever found.\n Compared with the universe in which one of them drifted, a wrecked\n ship was a lot smaller than a grain of sand on a nice warm beach back\n on Earth, or one of those specks of silver dust that floated like\n strange seeds down the night winds of Venus.\n\n\n And a human was smaller still, thought Russell when he was not hating\n Dunbar. Out here, a human being is the smallest thing of all. He\n thought then of what Dunbar would say to such a thought, how Dunbar\n would laugh that high piping squawking laugh of his and say that the\n human being was bigger than the Universe itself.\n\n\n Dunbar had a big answer for every little thing.", "When the four of them had escaped from that prison colony on a\n sizzling hot asteroid rock in the Ronlwhyn system, that wasn't enough\n for Dunbar. Hell no—Dunbar had to start talking about a place they\n could go where they'd never be apprehended, in a system no one else\n had ever heard of, where they could live like gods on a green soft\n world like the Earth had been a long time back.\n\n\n And Dunbar had spouted endlessly about a world of treasure they would\n find, if they would just follow old Dunbar. That's what all four of\n them had been trying to find all their lives in the big cold grabbag\n of eternity—a rich star, a rich far fertile star where no one else\n had ever been, loaded with treasure that had no name, that no one had\n ever heard of before. And was, because of that, the richest treasure\n of all.", "Old Dunbar laughed. The sound brought blood hotly to Russell's face.\n \"We're heading to the right one, boys. Don't doubt me ... I been here.\n We explored all these sun systems. And I remember it all. The second\n planet from that red-rimmed sun. You come down through a soft\n atmosphere, floating like in a dream. You see the green lakes coming\n up through the clouds and the women dancing and the music playing. I\n remember seeing a ship there that brought those women there, a long\n long time before ever I got there. A land like heaven and women like\n angels singing and dancing and laughing with red lips and arms white\n as milk, and soft silky hair floating in the winds.\"", "Dunbar laughed. \"Boys, boys, don't get panicky. Keep your heads. Just\n stick to old Dunbar and he'll see you through. I'm always lucky. Only\n one way to go ... an' that's straight ahead to the sun with the\n red-rim around it ... and then we tune in the gravity repellers, and\n coast down, floating and singing down through the clouds to\n paradise.\"\n\n\n After that they traveled on for what seemed months to Russell, but it\n couldn't have been over a day or two of the kind of time-sense he had\n inherited from Earth.\n\n\n Then he saw how the other two stars also were beginning to develop red\n rims. He yelled this fact out to the others. And Alvar said. \"Russ's\n right. That sun to the right, and the one behind us ... now they ALL\n have red rims around them. Dunbar—\" A pause and no awareness of\n motion.", "\"We'll make it, boys. Trust ole' Dunbar. What's a year when we know\n we're getting to Paradise at the end of it? What's a year out here ...\n it's paradise ain't it, compared with that prison hole we were rotting\n in? We can make it. We have the food concentrates, and all the rest.\n All we need's the will, boys, and we got that. The whole damn Universe\n isn't big enough to kill the will of a human being, boys. I been over\n a whole lot of it, and I know. In the old days—\"\n\n\n \"The hell with the old days,\" screamed Russell.\n\n\n \"Now quiet down, Russ,\" Dunbar said in a kind of dreadful crooning\n whisper. \"You calm down now. You younger fellows—you don't look at\n things the way we used to. Thing is, we got to go straight. People\n trapped like this liable to start meandering. Liable to start losing\n the old will-power.\"", "\"That's right! That's right,\" Dunbar yelled. \"That's the only one—and\n it's a paradise. Not just a place to live, boys—but a place you'll\n have trouble believing in because it's like a dream!\"\n\n\n \"And none of these other three suns have worlds we could live on,\n Dunbar?\" Russell asked. Keep the old duck talking like this and maybe\n Alvar and Johnson would see that he was cracked.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Alvar. \"You still say that, Dunbar?\"\n\n\n \"No life, boys, nothing,\" Dunbar laughed. \"Nothing on these other\n worlds but ashes ... just ashes and iron and dried blood, dried a\n million years or more.\"\n\n\n \"When in hell were you ever here?\" Johnson said. \"You say you were\n here before. You never said when, or why or anything!\"", "Four men, thought Russell, held together by an invisible string of\n gravity, plunging through a lost pocket of hell's dark where there had\n never been any sound or life, with old Dunbar the first in line,\n taking the lead because he was older and knew where he was and where\n he was going. Maybe Johnson, second in line, and Alvar who was third,\n knew too, but were afraid to admit it.\n\n\n But Russell knew it and he'd admitted it from the first—that old\n Dunbar was as crazy as a Jovian juke-bird.", "\"I always come through, boys. I'm lucky. Angel women will take us to\n their houses on the edges of cool lakes, little houses that sit there\n in the sun like fancy jewels. And we'll walk under colored fountains,\n pretty colored fountains just splashing and splashing like pretty rain\n on our hungry hides. That's worth waiting for.\"\n\n\n Russell did it before he hardly realized he was killing the old man.\n It was something he had had to do for a long time and that made it\n easy. There was a flash of burning oxygen from inside the suit of\n Dunbar. If he'd aimed right, Russell knew the fire-bullet should have\n pierced Dunbar's back. Now the fire was gone, extinguished\n automatically by units inside the suit. The suit was still inflated,\n self-sealing. Nothing appeared to have changed. The four of them\n hurtling on together, but inside that first suit up there on the front\n of the gravity rope, Dunbar was dead.", "Dunbar laughed. \"Sure, they all maybe have a touch of red, but it\n isn't the same, boys. I can tell the difference. Trust me—\"\n\n\n Russell half choked on his words. \"You old goat! With those old eyes\n of yours, you couldn't see your way into a fire!\"\n\n\n \"Don't get panicky now. Keep your heads. In another year, we'll be\n there—\"\n\n\n \"God, you gotta' be sure,\" Alvar said. \"I don't mind dyin' out here.\n But after a year of this, and then to get to a world that was only\n ashes, and not able to go any further—\"", "Russell was very sick of the old man's voice. He was at least glad he\n didn't have to look at the old man now. His bald head, his skinny\n bobbing neck, his simpering watery blue eyes. But he still had to\n suffer that immutable babbling, that idiotic cheerfulness ... and\n knowing all the time the old man was crazy, that he was leading them\n wrong.\n\n\n I'd break away, go it alone to the right sun, Russell thought—but I'd\n never make it alone. A little while out here alone and I'd be nuttier\n than old Dunbar will ever be, even if he keeps on getting nuttier all\n the time.\n\n\n Somewhere, sometime then ... Russell got the idea that the only way\n was to get rid of Dunbar.\nYou mean to tell us there are people living by that red-rimmed sun,\"\n Russell said.", "\"It was a long time back boys. Don't remember too well, but it was\n when we had an old ship called the DOG STAR that I was here. A pirate\n ship and I was second in command, and we came through this sector.\n That was—hell, it musta' been fifty years ago. I been too many places\n nobody's ever bothered to name or chart, to remember where it is, but\n I been here. I remember those four suns all spotted to form a perfect\n circle from this point, with us squarely in the middle. We explored\n all these suns and the worlds that go round 'em. Trust me, boys, and\n we'll reach the right one. And that one's just like Paradise.\"\n\n\n \"Paradise is it,\" Russell whispered hoarsely.", "After the wreck, the four of them had floated a while, floated and\n drifted together, four men in bulbous pressure suits like small\n individual rockets, held together by an awful pressing need for each\n other and by the \"gravity-rope\" beam.\n\n\n Dunbar, the oldest of the four, an old space-buster with a face\n wrinkled like a dried prune, burned by cosmic rays and the suns of\n worlds so far away they were scarcely credible, had taken command.\n Suddenly, Old Dunbar had known where they were. Suddenly, Dunbar knew\n where they were going.", "How long ago that had been, Russell didn't know. All Russell knew was\n that they were millions of light years from any place he had ever\n heard about, where the galactic space lanterns had absolutely no\n recognizable pattern. But Dunbar knew. And Russell was looking at\n Dunbar's suit up ahead, watching it more and more intently, thinking\n about how Dunbar looked inside that suit—and hating Dunbar more and\n more for claiming he knew when he didn't, for his drooling\n optimism—because he was taking them on into deeper darkness and\n calling their destination Paradise.\n\n\n Russell wanted to laugh, but the last time he'd given way to this\n impulse, the results inside his helmet had been too unpleasant to\n repeat.", "\"And the old man,\" Alvar said, \"can keep right on going toward what he\n thought was right. And he'll keep on going. Course he won't be able to\n give himself another boost with the life-gun, but he'll keep going.\n Someday he'll get to that red-rimmed star of his. Out here in space,\n once you're going, you never stop ... and I guess there isn't any\n other body to pull him off his course. And what will time matter to\n old Dunbar? Even less than to us, I guess. He's dead and he won't\n care.\"\n\n\n \"Ready,\" Johnson said. \"I'll cut off the gravity rope.\"\n\n\n \"I'm ready,\" Alvar said. \"To go back toward whatever it was I started\n from.\"\n\n\n \"Ready, Russ?\"\n\n\n Russell couldn't say anything. He stared at the endless void which now\n he would share with no one. Not even crazy old Dunbar.", "\"I know we're going right,\" Dunbar said cheerfully. \"I can tell. Like\n I said—you can tell it because of the red rim around it.\"\n\n\n \"But the sun on our left, you can see—it's got a red rim too now,\"\n Russell said.\n\n\n \"Yeah, that's right,\" said Alvar. \"Sometimes I see a red rim around\n the one we're going for, sometimes a red rim around that one on the\n left. Now, sometimes I'm not sure either of them's got a red rim. You\n said that one had a red rim, Dunbar, and I wanted to believe it. So\n now maybe we're all seeing a red rim that was never there.\"", "\"All right,\" Johnson said. \"Good-bye.\"\n\n\n Russell felt the release, felt the sudden inexplicable isolation and\n aloneness even before Alvar and Johnson used their life-guns and shot\n out of sight, Johnson toward the left and Alvar back toward that other\n red-rimmed sun behind them.\n\n\n And old Dunbar shooting right on ahead. And all three of them\n dwindling and dwindling and blinking out like little lights.\n\n\n Fading, he could hear their voices. \"Each to his own star,\" Johnson\n said. \"On a bee line.\"\n\n\n \"On a bee line,\" Alvar said.\n\n\n Russell used his own life-gun and in a little while he didn't hear\n Alvar or Johnson's voices, nor could he see them. They were thousands\n of miles away, and going further all the time.", "\"I did it for the three of us,\" Russell said. \"It was either him or us.\n Lies ... lies that was all he had left in his crazy head. Paradise ...\n don't tell me you guys don't see the red rims around all four suns, all\n four suns all around us. Don't tell me you guys didn't know he was batty,\n that you really believed all that stuff he was spouting all the time!\"\n\n\n \"Maybe he was lying, maybe not,\" Johnson said. \"Now he's dead anyway.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe he was wrong, crazy, full of lies,\" Alvar said. \"But now he's\n dead.\"\n\n\n \"How could he see any difference in those four stars?\" Russell said,\n louder.\n\n\n \"He thought he was right,\" Alvar said. \"He wanted to take us to\n paradise. He was happy, nothing could stop the old man—but he's dead\n now.\"", "He was dead and his mouth was shut for good.\n\n\n Dunbar's last faint cry from inside his suit still rang in Russell's\n ears, and he knew Alvar and Johnson had heard it too. Alvar and\n Johnson both called Dunbar's name a few times. There was no answer.\n\n\n \"Russ—you shouldn't have done that,\" Johnson whispered. \"You\n shouldn't have done that to the old man!\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Alvar said, so low he could barely be heard. \"You shouldn't have\n done it.\"", "\"Well, if you'll notice,\" Russell said, \"the one on the left also now\n has a red rim around it. Can't you guys see that?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I see it,\" Alvar said.\n\n\n \"So now,\" Johnson said, \"there's two suns with red rims around them.\"\n\n\n \"We're about in the middle of those four suns aren't we, Dunbar?\"\n Russell said.\n\n\n \"That's right, boys!\" yelled old Dunbar in that sickeningly optimistic\n voice. Like a hysterical old woman's. \"Just about in the sweet dark\n old middle.\"\n\n\n \"You're still sure it's the sun up ahead ... that's the only one with\n life on it, Dunbar ... the only one we can live on?\" Russell asked." ], [ "Dunbar laughed. \"Sure, they all maybe have a touch of red, but it\n isn't the same, boys. I can tell the difference. Trust me—\"\n\n\n Russell half choked on his words. \"You old goat! With those old eyes\n of yours, you couldn't see your way into a fire!\"\n\n\n \"Don't get panicky now. Keep your heads. In another year, we'll be\n there—\"\n\n\n \"God, you gotta' be sure,\" Alvar said. \"I don't mind dyin' out here.\n But after a year of this, and then to get to a world that was only\n ashes, and not able to go any further—\"", "\"That's right! That's right,\" Dunbar yelled. \"That's the only one—and\n it's a paradise. Not just a place to live, boys—but a place you'll\n have trouble believing in because it's like a dream!\"\n\n\n \"And none of these other three suns have worlds we could live on,\n Dunbar?\" Russell asked. Keep the old duck talking like this and maybe\n Alvar and Johnson would see that he was cracked.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Alvar. \"You still say that, Dunbar?\"\n\n\n \"No life, boys, nothing,\" Dunbar laughed. \"Nothing on these other\n worlds but ashes ... just ashes and iron and dried blood, dried a\n million years or more.\"\n\n\n \"When in hell were you ever here?\" Johnson said. \"You say you were\n here before. You never said when, or why or anything!\"", "Four men, thought Russell, held together by an invisible string of\n gravity, plunging through a lost pocket of hell's dark where there had\n never been any sound or life, with old Dunbar the first in line,\n taking the lead because he was older and knew where he was and where\n he was going. Maybe Johnson, second in line, and Alvar who was third,\n knew too, but were afraid to admit it.\n\n\n But Russell knew it and he'd admitted it from the first—that old\n Dunbar was as crazy as a Jovian juke-bird.", "\"Lost people ... lost ... who knows how long,\" Dunbar said, as the\n four of them hurtled along. \"You never know where you'll find people\n on a world somewhere nobody's ever named or knows about. Places where\n a lost ship's landed and never got up again, or wrecked itself so far\n off the lanes they'll never be found except by accident for millions\n of years. That's what this world is, boys. Must have been a ship load\n of beautiful people, maybe actresses and people like that being hauled\n to some outpost to entertain. They're like angels now, living in a\n land all free from care. Every place you see green forests and fields\n and blue lakes, and at nights there's three moons that come around the\n sky in a thousand different colors. And it never gets cold ... it's\n always spring, always spring, boys, and the music plays all night,\n every night of a long long year....\"\n\n\n Russell suddenly shouted. \"Keep quiet, Dunbar. Shut up will you?\"", "Sometimes Russell thought of other things besides his growing hatred\n of the old man. Sometimes he thought about the ship, lost back there\n in the void, and he wondered if wrecked space ships were ever found.\n Compared with the universe in which one of them drifted, a wrecked\n ship was a lot smaller than a grain of sand on a nice warm beach back\n on Earth, or one of those specks of silver dust that floated like\n strange seeds down the night winds of Venus.\n\n\n And a human was smaller still, thought Russell when he was not hating\n Dunbar. Out here, a human being is the smallest thing of all. He\n thought then of what Dunbar would say to such a thought, how Dunbar\n would laugh that high piping squawking laugh of his and say that the\n human being was bigger than the Universe itself.\n\n\n Dunbar had a big answer for every little thing.", "Dunbar laughed. \"Boys, boys, don't get panicky. Keep your heads. Just\n stick to old Dunbar and he'll see you through. I'm always lucky. Only\n one way to go ... an' that's straight ahead to the sun with the\n red-rim around it ... and then we tune in the gravity repellers, and\n coast down, floating and singing down through the clouds to\n paradise.\"\n\n\n After that they traveled on for what seemed months to Russell, but it\n couldn't have been over a day or two of the kind of time-sense he had\n inherited from Earth.\n\n\n Then he saw how the other two stars also were beginning to develop red\n rims. He yelled this fact out to the others. And Alvar said. \"Russ's\n right. That sun to the right, and the one behind us ... now they ALL\n have red rims around them. Dunbar—\" A pause and no awareness of\n motion.", "He was dead and his mouth was shut for good.\n\n\n Dunbar's last faint cry from inside his suit still rang in Russell's\n ears, and he knew Alvar and Johnson had heard it too. Alvar and\n Johnson both called Dunbar's name a few times. There was no answer.\n\n\n \"Russ—you shouldn't have done that,\" Johnson whispered. \"You\n shouldn't have done that to the old man!\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Alvar said, so low he could barely be heard. \"You shouldn't have\n done it.\"", "Old Dunbar laughed. The sound brought blood hotly to Russell's face.\n \"We're heading to the right one, boys. Don't doubt me ... I been here.\n We explored all these sun systems. And I remember it all. The second\n planet from that red-rimmed sun. You come down through a soft\n atmosphere, floating like in a dream. You see the green lakes coming\n up through the clouds and the women dancing and the music playing. I\n remember seeing a ship there that brought those women there, a long\n long time before ever I got there. A land like heaven and women like\n angels singing and dancing and laughing with red lips and arms white\n as milk, and soft silky hair floating in the winds.\"", "\"I always come through, boys. I'm lucky. Angel women will take us to\n their houses on the edges of cool lakes, little houses that sit there\n in the sun like fancy jewels. And we'll walk under colored fountains,\n pretty colored fountains just splashing and splashing like pretty rain\n on our hungry hides. That's worth waiting for.\"\n\n\n Russell did it before he hardly realized he was killing the old man.\n It was something he had had to do for a long time and that made it\n easy. There was a flash of burning oxygen from inside the suit of\n Dunbar. If he'd aimed right, Russell knew the fire-bullet should have\n pierced Dunbar's back. Now the fire was gone, extinguished\n automatically by units inside the suit. The suit was still inflated,\n self-sealing. Nothing appeared to have changed. The four of them\n hurtling on together, but inside that first suit up there on the front\n of the gravity rope, Dunbar was dead.", "When the four of them had escaped from that prison colony on a\n sizzling hot asteroid rock in the Ronlwhyn system, that wasn't enough\n for Dunbar. Hell no—Dunbar had to start talking about a place they\n could go where they'd never be apprehended, in a system no one else\n had ever heard of, where they could live like gods on a green soft\n world like the Earth had been a long time back.\n\n\n And Dunbar had spouted endlessly about a world of treasure they would\n find, if they would just follow old Dunbar. That's what all four of\n them had been trying to find all their lives in the big cold grabbag\n of eternity—a rich star, a rich far fertile star where no one else\n had ever been, loaded with treasure that had no name, that no one had\n ever heard of before. And was, because of that, the richest treasure\n of all.", "Russell was very sick of the old man's voice. He was at least glad he\n didn't have to look at the old man now. His bald head, his skinny\n bobbing neck, his simpering watery blue eyes. But he still had to\n suffer that immutable babbling, that idiotic cheerfulness ... and\n knowing all the time the old man was crazy, that he was leading them\n wrong.\n\n\n I'd break away, go it alone to the right sun, Russell thought—but I'd\n never make it alone. A little while out here alone and I'd be nuttier\n than old Dunbar will ever be, even if he keeps on getting nuttier all\n the time.\n\n\n Somewhere, sometime then ... Russell got the idea that the only way\n was to get rid of Dunbar.\nYou mean to tell us there are people living by that red-rimmed sun,\"\n Russell said.", "\"We'll make it, boys. Trust ole' Dunbar. What's a year when we know\n we're getting to Paradise at the end of it? What's a year out here ...\n it's paradise ain't it, compared with that prison hole we were rotting\n in? We can make it. We have the food concentrates, and all the rest.\n All we need's the will, boys, and we got that. The whole damn Universe\n isn't big enough to kill the will of a human being, boys. I been over\n a whole lot of it, and I know. In the old days—\"\n\n\n \"The hell with the old days,\" screamed Russell.\n\n\n \"Now quiet down, Russ,\" Dunbar said in a kind of dreadful crooning\n whisper. \"You calm down now. You younger fellows—you don't look at\n things the way we used to. Thing is, we got to go straight. People\n trapped like this liable to start meandering. Liable to start losing\n the old will-power.\"", "Johnson said. \"Dunbar—how long'll it take us?\"\n\n\n \"Six months to a year, I'd say,\" Dunbar yelled happily. \"That is—of\n our hereditary time.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" croaked Alvar.\n\n\n Johnson didn't say anything at all.\n\n\n Russell screamed at Dunbar, then quieted down. He whispered. \"Six\n months to a year—out here—cooped up in these damn suits. You're\n crazy as hell, Dunbar. Crazy ... crazy! Nobody could stand it. We'll\n all be crazier than you are—\"", "We all look alike out here in these big rocket pressure suits, Russell\n thought. No one for God only knew how many of millions of light years\n away could see or care. Still—we might have a chance to live, even\n now, Russell thought—if it weren't for old crazy Dunbar.\n\n\n They might have a chance if Alvar and Johnson weren't so damn lacking\n in self-confidence as to put all their trust in that crazed old\n rum-dum. Russell had known now for some time that they were going in\n the wrong direction. No reason for knowing. Just a hunch. And Russell\n was sure his hunch was right.\nRussell said. \"Look—look to your left and to your right and behind\n us. Four suns. You guys see those other three suns all around you,\n don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" someone said.", "\"I did it for the three of us,\" Russell said. \"It was either him or us.\n Lies ... lies that was all he had left in his crazy head. Paradise ...\n don't tell me you guys don't see the red rims around all four suns, all\n four suns all around us. Don't tell me you guys didn't know he was batty,\n that you really believed all that stuff he was spouting all the time!\"\n\n\n \"Maybe he was lying, maybe not,\" Johnson said. \"Now he's dead anyway.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe he was wrong, crazy, full of lies,\" Alvar said. \"But now he's\n dead.\"\n\n\n \"How could he see any difference in those four stars?\" Russell said,\n louder.\n\n\n \"He thought he was right,\" Alvar said. \"He wanted to take us to\n paradise. He was happy, nothing could stop the old man—but he's dead\n now.\"", "How long ago that had been, Russell didn't know. All Russell knew was\n that they were millions of light years from any place he had ever\n heard about, where the galactic space lanterns had absolutely no\n recognizable pattern. But Dunbar knew. And Russell was looking at\n Dunbar's suit up ahead, watching it more and more intently, thinking\n about how Dunbar looked inside that suit—and hating Dunbar more and\n more for claiming he knew when he didn't, for his drooling\n optimism—because he was taking them on into deeper darkness and\n calling their destination Paradise.\n\n\n Russell wanted to laugh, but the last time he'd given way to this\n impulse, the results inside his helmet had been too unpleasant to\n repeat.", "\"I know we're going right,\" Dunbar said cheerfully. \"I can tell. Like\n I said—you can tell it because of the red rim around it.\"\n\n\n \"But the sun on our left, you can see—it's got a red rim too now,\"\n Russell said.\n\n\n \"Yeah, that's right,\" said Alvar. \"Sometimes I see a red rim around\n the one we're going for, sometimes a red rim around that one on the\n left. Now, sometimes I'm not sure either of them's got a red rim. You\n said that one had a red rim, Dunbar, and I wanted to believe it. So\n now maybe we're all seeing a red rim that was never there.\"", "After the wreck, the four of them had floated a while, floated and\n drifted together, four men in bulbous pressure suits like small\n individual rockets, held together by an awful pressing need for each\n other and by the \"gravity-rope\" beam.\n\n\n Dunbar, the oldest of the four, an old space-buster with a face\n wrinkled like a dried prune, burned by cosmic rays and the suns of\n worlds so far away they were scarcely credible, had taken command.\n Suddenly, Old Dunbar had known where they were. Suddenly, Dunbar knew\n where they were going.", "\"And the old man,\" Alvar said, \"can keep right on going toward what he\n thought was right. And he'll keep on going. Course he won't be able to\n give himself another boost with the life-gun, but he'll keep going.\n Someday he'll get to that red-rimmed star of his. Out here in space,\n once you're going, you never stop ... and I guess there isn't any\n other body to pull him off his course. And what will time matter to\n old Dunbar? Even less than to us, I guess. He's dead and he won't\n care.\"\n\n\n \"Ready,\" Johnson said. \"I'll cut off the gravity rope.\"\n\n\n \"I'm ready,\" Alvar said. \"To go back toward whatever it was I started\n from.\"\n\n\n \"Ready, Russ?\"\n\n\n Russell couldn't say anything. He stared at the endless void which now\n he would share with no one. Not even crazy old Dunbar.", "\"Well, if you'll notice,\" Russell said, \"the one on the left also now\n has a red rim around it. Can't you guys see that?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I see it,\" Alvar said.\n\n\n \"So now,\" Johnson said, \"there's two suns with red rims around them.\"\n\n\n \"We're about in the middle of those four suns aren't we, Dunbar?\"\n Russell said.\n\n\n \"That's right, boys!\" yelled old Dunbar in that sickeningly optimistic\n voice. Like a hysterical old woman's. \"Just about in the sweet dark\n old middle.\"\n\n\n \"You're still sure it's the sun up ahead ... that's the only one with\n life on it, Dunbar ... the only one we can live on?\" Russell asked." ] ]
train	99923	[ "What is Sharism?", "What is a neuron?", "What do neurons do?", "The less you share...", "Bloggers...", "When bloggers adjust their tone and privacy settings, they...", "What will be the politics of the next global superpower?" ]	[ [ "Community respect", "Future-oriented cultural initiatives", "A mental practice", "A social-psychological attitude" ], [ "A part of the nervous system", "A simple organic cell", "A synapse", "A very powerful, electrically excitable biological processor" ], [ "Form vastly interconnected networks", "Process information and learn", "Change the strength of the synapses between cells", "Share chemical signals with neighboring cells" ], [ "...the more privacy you have.", "...the more your intellectual property is protected.", "...the less power you have.", "...the less your cultural goods will be appropriated." ], [ "...connect to each other with RSS.", "...generate lively and timely information.", "...are recording human history in a new way.", "---fill discrete gaps in human experience." ], [ "...are expanding the blogosphere.", "...are self-censoring.", "...are keeping the social context of their posts in mind.", "...are smartly expressing themselves in a way to stay out of trouble." ], [ "Sharism", "Axiology", "Epistemology", "Socialism" ] ]	[ 4, 4, 1, 3, 2, 4, 1 ]	[ 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "Sharism: A Mind Revolution\nWith the People of the World Wide Web communicating more fully and\n freely in Social Media while rallying a Web 2.0 content boom, the inner\n dynamics of such a creative explosion must be studied more closely. What\n motivates those who join this movement and what future will they create?\n A key fact is that a superabundance of community respect and social\n capital are being accumulated by those who share. The key motivator of\n Social Media and the core spirit of Web 2.0 is a mind switch called\n Sharism. Sharism suggests a re-orientation of personal values. We see it\n in User Generated Content. It is the pledge of Creative Commons. It is\n in the plans of future-oriented cultural initiatives. Sharism is also a\n mental practice that anyone can try, a social-psychological attitude to", "property. Under Sharism, you can keep ownership, if you want. But I like\n to share. And this is how I choose to spread ideas, and prosperity\nSharism is totally based on your own consensus. It’s not a very hard\n concept to understand, especially since copyleft movements like the Free\n Software Foundation and Creative Commons have been around for years.\n These movements are redefining a more flexible spectrum of licenses for\n both developers and end-users to tag their works. Because the new\n licenses can be recognized by either humans or machines, it’s becoming\n easier to re-share those works in new online ecosystems.\nThe Spirit of the Web, a Social Brain\nSharism is the Spirit of the Age of Web 2.0. It has the consistency of a\n naturalized Epistemology and modernized Axiology, but also promises the", "the majority. Since Sharism can improve communication, collaboration and\n mutual understanding, I believe it has a place within the educational\n system. Sharism can be applied to any cultural discourse, CoP (Community\n of Practice) or problem-solving context. It is also an antidote to\n social depression, since sharelessness is just dragging our society\n down. In present or formerly totalitarian countries, this downward cycle\n is even more apparent. The future world will be a hybrid of human and\n machine that will generate better and faster decisions anytime,\n anywhere. The flow of information between minds will become more\n flexible and more productive. These vast networks of sharing will create\n a new social order−A Mind Revolution!", "power of a new Internet philosophy. Sharism will transform the world\n into an emergent Social Brain: a networked hybrid of people and\n software. We are Networked Neurons connected by the synapses of Social\n Software.\nThis is an evolutionary leap, a small step for us and a giant one for\n human society. With new “hairy” emergent technologies sprouting all\n around us, we can generate higher connectivities and increase the\n throughput of our social links. The more open and strongly connected we\n social neurons are, the better the sharing environment will be for all\n people. The more collective our intelligence, the wiser our actions will\n be. People have always found better solutions through conversations. Now\n we can put it all online.\nSharism will be the politics of the next global superpower. It will not", "also be the gatekeepers of your rights. Even if you are a traditional\n copyright holder, this sounds ideal.\nFurthermore, by realizing all the immediate and emergent rewards that\n can be had by sharing, you may eventually find that copyright and “All\n Rights Reserved” are far from your mind. You will enjoy sharing too much\n to worry about who is keeping a copy. The new economic formula is, the\n more people remix your works, the higher the return.\nI want to point out that Sharism is not Communism, nor Socialism. As for\n those die- hard Communists we know, they have often abused people’s\n sharing nature and forced them to give up their rights, and their\n property. Socialism, that tender Communism, in our experience also\n lacked respect for these rights. Under these systems, the state owns all", "These mind-switches are too subtle to be felt. But since the brain, and\n society, is a connected system, the accumulation of these\n micro-attitudes, from neuron to neuron and person to person, can result\n in observable behavior. It is easy to tell if a person, a group, a\n company, a nation is oriented toward Sharism or not. For those who are\n not, what they defend as “cultural goods” and “intellectual property”\n are just excuses for the status quo of keeping a community closed. Much\n of their “culture” will be protected, but the net result is the direct\n loss of many other precious ideas, and the subsequent loss of all the\n potential gains of sharing. This lost knowledge is a black hole in our\n life, which may start to swallow other values as well.", "transform a wide and isolated world into a super-smart Social Brain.\nThe Neuron Doctrine\nSharism is encoded in the Human Genome. Although eclipsed by the many\n pragmatisms of daily life, the theory of Sharism finds basis in\n neuroscience and its study of the working model of the human brain.\n Although we can’t entirely say how the brain works as a whole, we do\n have a model of the functional mechanism of the nervous system and its\n neurons. A neuron is not a simple organic cell, but a very powerful,\n electrically excitable biological processor. Groups of neurons form\n vastly interconnected networks, which, by changing the strength of the\n synapses between cells, can process information, and learn. A neuron, by\n sharing chemical signals with its neighbors, can be integrated into more", "result, such a Micro-pipeline system is making Social Media a true\n alternative to broadcast media. These new technologies are reviving\n Sharism in our closed culture.\nLocal Practice, Global Gain\nIf you happened to lose your Sharism in a bad educational or cultural\n setting, it’s hard to get it back. But it’s not impossible. A\n persistence of practice can lead to a full recovery. You can think of\n Sharism as a spiritual practice. But you must practice everyday.\n Otherwise, you might lose the power of sharing. Permanently.\nYou might need something to spur you on, to keep you from quitting and\n returning to a closed mindset. Here’s an idea: put a sticky note on your\n desk that says, “What do you want to share today?” I’m not kidding.", "choices, beyond the binary options of “Yes” or “No” referenda.\n Representative democracy will become more timely and diligent, because\n we will represent ourselves within the system.\nSharism will result in better social justice. In a healthy sharing\n environment, any evidence of injustice can get amplified to get the\n public’s attention. Anyone who has been abused can get real and instant\n support from her peers and her peers’ peers. Appeals to justice will\n take the form of petitions through multiple, interconnected channels.\n Using these tools, anyone can create a large social impact. With\n multiple devices and many social applications, each of us can become\n more sociable, and society more individual. We no longer have to act\n alone.\nEmergent democracy will only happen when Sharism becomes the literacy of", "one choice could easily snowball into more creations along the sharing\n path, from people at key nodes in the network who are all as passionate\n about creating and sharing as you are. After many iterative rounds of\n development, a large creative work may spring from your choice to share.\n Of course, you will get the credit that you asked for, and deserve. And\n it’s okay to seek financial rewards. But you will in every case get\n something just as substantial: Happiness.\nThe more people who create in the spirit of Sharism, the easier it will\n be to attain well- balanced and equitable Social Media that is woven by\n people themselves. Media won’t be controlled by any single person but\n will rely on the even distribution of social networking. These “Shaeros”\n (Sharing Heroes) will naturally become the opinion leaders in the first", "wave of Social Media. However, these media rights will belong to\n everyone. You yourself can be both producer and consumer in such a\n system.\nSharism Safeguards Your Rights\nStill, many questions will be raised about Sharism as an initiative in\n new age. The main one is copyright. One concern is that any loss of\n control over copyrighted content will lead to noticeable deficits in\n personal wealth, or just loss of control. 5 years ago, I would have said\n that this was a possibility. But things are changing today. The sharing\n environment is more protected than you might think. Many new social\n applications make it easy to set terms-of-use along your sharing path.\n Any infringement of those terms will be challenged not just by the law,\n but by your community. Your audience, who benefit form your sharing, can", "Then, if anything interesting comes your way: Share It! The easiest way\n to both start and keep sharing is by using different kinds of social\n software applications. Your first meme you want to share may be small,\n but you can amplify it with new technologies. Enlist some people from\n your network and invite them into a new social application. At first it\n might be hard to feel the gains of Sharism. The true test then is to see\n if you can keep track of the feedback that you get from sharing. You\n will realize that almost all sharing activities will generate positive\n results. The happiness that this will obtain is only the most immediate\n reward. But there are others.\nThe first type of reward that you will get comes in the form of\n comments. Then you know you’ve provoked interest, appreciation,\n excitement. The second reward is access to all the other stuff being", "you can engineer a feedback loop of happiness, which will help you\n generate even more ideas in return. It’s a kind of butterfly- effect, as\n the small creative energy you spend will eventually return to make you,\n and the world, more creative.\nHowever, daily decisions for most adults are quite low in creative\n productivity, if only because they’ve switched off their sharing paths.\n People generally like to share what they create, but in a culture that\n tells them to be protective of their ideas, people start to believe in\n the danger of sharing. Then Sharism will be degraded in their mind and\n not encouraged in their society. But if we can encourage someone to\n share, her sharing paths will stay open. Sharism will be kept in her\n mind as a memory and an instinct. If in the future she faces a creative\n choice, her choice will be, “Share.”", "Non-sharing culture misleads us with its absolute separation of Private\n and Public space. It makes creative action a binary choice between\n public and private, open and closed. This creates a gap in the spectrum\n of knowledge. Although this gap has the potential to become a valuable\n creative space, concerns about privacy make this gap hard to fill. We\n shouldn’t be surprised that, to be safe, most people keep their sharing\n private and stay “closed.” They may fear the Internet creates a\n potential for abuse that they can’t fight alone. However, the paradox\n is: The less you share, the less power you have.\nNew Technologies and the Rise of Sharism\nLet’s track back to 1999, when there were only a few hundred pioneer\n bloggers around the world, and no more than ten times that many readers", "can have better control over a wide spectrum of relationships. Like how\n Flickr allows people to share their photos widely, but safely. The\n checkbox-based privacy of Flickr may seem unfamiliar to a new user, but\n you can use it to toy with the mind-switches of Sharism. By checking a\n box we can choose to share or not to share. From my observations, I have\n seen photographers on Flickr become more open to sharing, while\n retaining flexible choices.\nThe rapid emergence of Social Applications that can communicate and\n cooperate, by allowing people to output content from one service to\n another, is letting users pump their memes into a pipeline-like\n ecosystem. This interconnectedness allows memes to travel along multiple\n online social networks, and potentially reach a huge audience. As a", "shared by friends in your network. Since you know and trust them, you\n will be that much more interested in what they have to share. Already,\n the return is a multiple of the small meme you first shared. But the\n third type of return is more dramatic still. Anything you share can be\n forwarded, circulated and republished via other people’s networks. This\n cascade effect can spread your work to the networked masses.\nImprovements in social software are making the speed of dissemination as\n fast as a mouse-click. You should get to know the Sharism-You. You’re\n about to become popular, and fast\nThis brings us to the fourth and final type of return. It has a meaning\n not only for you, but for the whole of society. If you so choose, you\n may allow others to create derivative works from what you share. This", "small site, it’s hard to stop. We can’t explain this fact with a theory\n of addiction. It’s an impulse to share. It’s the energy of the memes\n that want to be passed from mouth to mouth and mind to mind. It’s more\n than just E-mail. It’s Sharism.\nBloggers are always keen to keep the social context of their posts in\n mind, by asking themselves, “Who is going to see this?” Bloggers are\n agile in adjusting their tone−and privacy settings−to advance ideas and\n stay out of trouble. It’s not self-censorship, but a sense of smart\n expression. But once blogs reached the tipping point, they expanded into\n the blogosphere. This required a more delicate social networking system\n and content- sharing architecture. But people now understand that they", "meaningful patterns that keep the neuron active and alive. Moreover,\n such a simple logic can be iterated and amplified, since all neurons\n work on a similar principle of connecting and sharing. Originally, the\n brain is quite open. A neural network exists to share activity and\n information, and I believe this model of the brain should inspire ideas\n and decisions about human networks.\nThus, our brain supports sharing in its very system-nature. This has\n profound implications for the creative process. Whenever you have an\n intention to create, you will find it easier to generate more creative\n ideas if you keep the sharing process firmly in mind. The\n idea-forming-process is not linear, but more like an avalanche of\n amplifications along the thinking path. It moves with the momentum of a\n creative snowball. If your internal cognitive system encourages sharing,", "be a country, but a new human network joined by Social Software. This\n may remain a distant dream, and even a well-defined public sharing\n policy might not be close at hand. But the ideas that I’m discussing can\n improve governments today. We can integrate our current and emerging\n democratic systems with new folksonomies (based on the collaborative,\n social indexing of information) to enable people to make queries, share\n data and remix information for public use. The collective intelligence\n of a vast and equitable sharing environment can be the gatekeeper of our\n rights, and a government watchdog. In the future, policymaking can be\n made more nuanced with the micro-involvement of the sharing community.\n This “Emergent Democracy” is more real-time than periodical\n parliamentary sessions. It will also increase the spectrum of our", "following each blog. Human history is always so: something important was\n happening, but the rest of the world hadn’t yet realized it. The shift\n toward easy-to-use online publishing triggered a soft revolution in just\n five years. People made a quick and easy transition from reading blogs,\n to leaving comments and taking part in online conversations, and then to\n the sudden realization that they should become bloggers themselves. More\n bloggers created more readers, and more readers made more blogs. The\n revolution was viral.\nBloggers generate lively and timely information on the Internet, and\n connect to each other with RSS, hyperlinks, comments, trackbacks and\n quotes. The small-scale granularity of the content can fill discrete\n gaps in experience and thus record a new human history. Once you become\n a blogger, once you have accumulated so much social capital in such a" ], [ "transform a wide and isolated world into a super-smart Social Brain.\nThe Neuron Doctrine\nSharism is encoded in the Human Genome. Although eclipsed by the many\n pragmatisms of daily life, the theory of Sharism finds basis in\n neuroscience and its study of the working model of the human brain.\n Although we can’t entirely say how the brain works as a whole, we do\n have a model of the functional mechanism of the nervous system and its\n neurons. A neuron is not a simple organic cell, but a very powerful,\n electrically excitable biological processor. Groups of neurons form\n vastly interconnected networks, which, by changing the strength of the\n synapses between cells, can process information, and learn. A neuron, by\n sharing chemical signals with its neighbors, can be integrated into more", "meaningful patterns that keep the neuron active and alive. Moreover,\n such a simple logic can be iterated and amplified, since all neurons\n work on a similar principle of connecting and sharing. Originally, the\n brain is quite open. A neural network exists to share activity and\n information, and I believe this model of the brain should inspire ideas\n and decisions about human networks.\nThus, our brain supports sharing in its very system-nature. This has\n profound implications for the creative process. Whenever you have an\n intention to create, you will find it easier to generate more creative\n ideas if you keep the sharing process firmly in mind. The\n idea-forming-process is not linear, but more like an avalanche of\n amplifications along the thinking path. It moves with the momentum of a\n creative snowball. If your internal cognitive system encourages sharing,", "These mind-switches are too subtle to be felt. But since the brain, and\n society, is a connected system, the accumulation of these\n micro-attitudes, from neuron to neuron and person to person, can result\n in observable behavior. It is easy to tell if a person, a group, a\n company, a nation is oriented toward Sharism or not. For those who are\n not, what they defend as “cultural goods” and “intellectual property”\n are just excuses for the status quo of keeping a community closed. Much\n of their “culture” will be protected, but the net result is the direct\n loss of many other precious ideas, and the subsequent loss of all the\n potential gains of sharing. This lost knowledge is a black hole in our\n life, which may start to swallow other values as well.", "power of a new Internet philosophy. Sharism will transform the world\n into an emergent Social Brain: a networked hybrid of people and\n software. We are Networked Neurons connected by the synapses of Social\n Software.\nThis is an evolutionary leap, a small step for us and a giant one for\n human society. With new “hairy” emergent technologies sprouting all\n around us, we can generate higher connectivities and increase the\n throughput of our social links. The more open and strongly connected we\n social neurons are, the better the sharing environment will be for all\n people. The more collective our intelligence, the wiser our actions will\n be. People have always found better solutions through conversations. Now\n we can put it all online.\nSharism will be the politics of the next global superpower. It will not", "small site, it’s hard to stop. We can’t explain this fact with a theory\n of addiction. It’s an impulse to share. It’s the energy of the memes\n that want to be passed from mouth to mouth and mind to mind. It’s more\n than just E-mail. It’s Sharism.\nBloggers are always keen to keep the social context of their posts in\n mind, by asking themselves, “Who is going to see this?” Bloggers are\n agile in adjusting their tone−and privacy settings−to advance ideas and\n stay out of trouble. It’s not self-censorship, but a sense of smart\n expression. But once blogs reached the tipping point, they expanded into\n the blogosphere. This required a more delicate social networking system\n and content- sharing architecture. But people now understand that they", "you can engineer a feedback loop of happiness, which will help you\n generate even more ideas in return. It’s a kind of butterfly- effect, as\n the small creative energy you spend will eventually return to make you,\n and the world, more creative.\nHowever, daily decisions for most adults are quite low in creative\n productivity, if only because they’ve switched off their sharing paths.\n People generally like to share what they create, but in a culture that\n tells them to be protective of their ideas, people start to believe in\n the danger of sharing. Then Sharism will be degraded in their mind and\n not encouraged in their society. But if we can encourage someone to\n share, her sharing paths will stay open. Sharism will be kept in her\n mind as a memory and an instinct. If in the future she faces a creative\n choice, her choice will be, “Share.”", "Then, if anything interesting comes your way: Share It! The easiest way\n to both start and keep sharing is by using different kinds of social\n software applications. Your first meme you want to share may be small,\n but you can amplify it with new technologies. Enlist some people from\n your network and invite them into a new social application. At first it\n might be hard to feel the gains of Sharism. The true test then is to see\n if you can keep track of the feedback that you get from sharing. You\n will realize that almost all sharing activities will generate positive\n results. The happiness that this will obtain is only the most immediate\n reward. But there are others.\nThe first type of reward that you will get comes in the form of\n comments. Then you know you’ve provoked interest, appreciation,\n excitement. The second reward is access to all the other stuff being", "following each blog. Human history is always so: something important was\n happening, but the rest of the world hadn’t yet realized it. The shift\n toward easy-to-use online publishing triggered a soft revolution in just\n five years. People made a quick and easy transition from reading blogs,\n to leaving comments and taking part in online conversations, and then to\n the sudden realization that they should become bloggers themselves. More\n bloggers created more readers, and more readers made more blogs. The\n revolution was viral.\nBloggers generate lively and timely information on the Internet, and\n connect to each other with RSS, hyperlinks, comments, trackbacks and\n quotes. The small-scale granularity of the content can fill discrete\n gaps in experience and thus record a new human history. Once you become\n a blogger, once you have accumulated so much social capital in such a", "Sharism: A Mind Revolution\nWith the People of the World Wide Web communicating more fully and\n freely in Social Media while rallying a Web 2.0 content boom, the inner\n dynamics of such a creative explosion must be studied more closely. What\n motivates those who join this movement and what future will they create?\n A key fact is that a superabundance of community respect and social\n capital are being accumulated by those who share. The key motivator of\n Social Media and the core spirit of Web 2.0 is a mind switch called\n Sharism. Sharism suggests a re-orientation of personal values. We see it\n in User Generated Content. It is the pledge of Creative Commons. It is\n in the plans of future-oriented cultural initiatives. Sharism is also a\n mental practice that anyone can try, a social-psychological attitude to", "can have better control over a wide spectrum of relationships. Like how\n Flickr allows people to share their photos widely, but safely. The\n checkbox-based privacy of Flickr may seem unfamiliar to a new user, but\n you can use it to toy with the mind-switches of Sharism. By checking a\n box we can choose to share or not to share. From my observations, I have\n seen photographers on Flickr become more open to sharing, while\n retaining flexible choices.\nThe rapid emergence of Social Applications that can communicate and\n cooperate, by allowing people to output content from one service to\n another, is letting users pump their memes into a pipeline-like\n ecosystem. This interconnectedness allows memes to travel along multiple\n online social networks, and potentially reach a huge audience. As a", "the majority. Since Sharism can improve communication, collaboration and\n mutual understanding, I believe it has a place within the educational\n system. Sharism can be applied to any cultural discourse, CoP (Community\n of Practice) or problem-solving context. It is also an antidote to\n social depression, since sharelessness is just dragging our society\n down. In present or formerly totalitarian countries, this downward cycle\n is even more apparent. The future world will be a hybrid of human and\n machine that will generate better and faster decisions anytime,\n anywhere. The flow of information between minds will become more\n flexible and more productive. These vast networks of sharing will create\n a new social order−A Mind Revolution!", "one choice could easily snowball into more creations along the sharing\n path, from people at key nodes in the network who are all as passionate\n about creating and sharing as you are. After many iterative rounds of\n development, a large creative work may spring from your choice to share.\n Of course, you will get the credit that you asked for, and deserve. And\n it’s okay to seek financial rewards. But you will in every case get\n something just as substantial: Happiness.\nThe more people who create in the spirit of Sharism, the easier it will\n be to attain well- balanced and equitable Social Media that is woven by\n people themselves. Media won’t be controlled by any single person but\n will rely on the even distribution of social networking. These “Shaeros”\n (Sharing Heroes) will naturally become the opinion leaders in the first", "shared by friends in your network. Since you know and trust them, you\n will be that much more interested in what they have to share. Already,\n the return is a multiple of the small meme you first shared. But the\n third type of return is more dramatic still. Anything you share can be\n forwarded, circulated and republished via other people’s networks. This\n cascade effect can spread your work to the networked masses.\nImprovements in social software are making the speed of dissemination as\n fast as a mouse-click. You should get to know the Sharism-You. You’re\n about to become popular, and fast\nThis brings us to the fourth and final type of return. It has a meaning\n not only for you, but for the whole of society. If you so choose, you\n may allow others to create derivative works from what you share. This", "result, such a Micro-pipeline system is making Social Media a true\n alternative to broadcast media. These new technologies are reviving\n Sharism in our closed culture.\nLocal Practice, Global Gain\nIf you happened to lose your Sharism in a bad educational or cultural\n setting, it’s hard to get it back. But it’s not impossible. A\n persistence of practice can lead to a full recovery. You can think of\n Sharism as a spiritual practice. But you must practice everyday.\n Otherwise, you might lose the power of sharing. Permanently.\nYou might need something to spur you on, to keep you from quitting and\n returning to a closed mindset. Here’s an idea: put a sticky note on your\n desk that says, “What do you want to share today?” I’m not kidding.", "property. Under Sharism, you can keep ownership, if you want. But I like\n to share. And this is how I choose to spread ideas, and prosperity\nSharism is totally based on your own consensus. It’s not a very hard\n concept to understand, especially since copyleft movements like the Free\n Software Foundation and Creative Commons have been around for years.\n These movements are redefining a more flexible spectrum of licenses for\n both developers and end-users to tag their works. Because the new\n licenses can be recognized by either humans or machines, it’s becoming\n easier to re-share those works in new online ecosystems.\nThe Spirit of the Web, a Social Brain\nSharism is the Spirit of the Age of Web 2.0. It has the consistency of a\n naturalized Epistemology and modernized Axiology, but also promises the", "Non-sharing culture misleads us with its absolute separation of Private\n and Public space. It makes creative action a binary choice between\n public and private, open and closed. This creates a gap in the spectrum\n of knowledge. Although this gap has the potential to become a valuable\n creative space, concerns about privacy make this gap hard to fill. We\n shouldn’t be surprised that, to be safe, most people keep their sharing\n private and stay “closed.” They may fear the Internet creates a\n potential for abuse that they can’t fight alone. However, the paradox\n is: The less you share, the less power you have.\nNew Technologies and the Rise of Sharism\nLet’s track back to 1999, when there were only a few hundred pioneer\n bloggers around the world, and no more than ten times that many readers", "also be the gatekeepers of your rights. Even if you are a traditional\n copyright holder, this sounds ideal.\nFurthermore, by realizing all the immediate and emergent rewards that\n can be had by sharing, you may eventually find that copyright and “All\n Rights Reserved” are far from your mind. You will enjoy sharing too much\n to worry about who is keeping a copy. The new economic formula is, the\n more people remix your works, the higher the return.\nI want to point out that Sharism is not Communism, nor Socialism. As for\n those die- hard Communists we know, they have often abused people’s\n sharing nature and forced them to give up their rights, and their\n property. Socialism, that tender Communism, in our experience also\n lacked respect for these rights. Under these systems, the state owns all", "be a country, but a new human network joined by Social Software. This\n may remain a distant dream, and even a well-defined public sharing\n policy might not be close at hand. But the ideas that I’m discussing can\n improve governments today. We can integrate our current and emerging\n democratic systems with new folksonomies (based on the collaborative,\n social indexing of information) to enable people to make queries, share\n data and remix information for public use. The collective intelligence\n of a vast and equitable sharing environment can be the gatekeeper of our\n rights, and a government watchdog. In the future, policymaking can be\n made more nuanced with the micro-involvement of the sharing community.\n This “Emergent Democracy” is more real-time than periodical\n parliamentary sessions. It will also increase the spectrum of our", "choices, beyond the binary options of “Yes” or “No” referenda.\n Representative democracy will become more timely and diligent, because\n we will represent ourselves within the system.\nSharism will result in better social justice. In a healthy sharing\n environment, any evidence of injustice can get amplified to get the\n public’s attention. Anyone who has been abused can get real and instant\n support from her peers and her peers’ peers. Appeals to justice will\n take the form of petitions through multiple, interconnected channels.\n Using these tools, anyone can create a large social impact. With\n multiple devices and many social applications, each of us can become\n more sociable, and society more individual. We no longer have to act\n alone.\nEmergent democracy will only happen when Sharism becomes the literacy of", "wave of Social Media. However, these media rights will belong to\n everyone. You yourself can be both producer and consumer in such a\n system.\nSharism Safeguards Your Rights\nStill, many questions will be raised about Sharism as an initiative in\n new age. The main one is copyright. One concern is that any loss of\n control over copyrighted content will lead to noticeable deficits in\n personal wealth, or just loss of control. 5 years ago, I would have said\n that this was a possibility. But things are changing today. The sharing\n environment is more protected than you might think. Many new social\n applications make it easy to set terms-of-use along your sharing path.\n Any infringement of those terms will be challenged not just by the law,\n but by your community. Your audience, who benefit form your sharing, can" ], [ "transform a wide and isolated world into a super-smart Social Brain.\nThe Neuron Doctrine\nSharism is encoded in the Human Genome. Although eclipsed by the many\n pragmatisms of daily life, the theory of Sharism finds basis in\n neuroscience and its study of the working model of the human brain.\n Although we can’t entirely say how the brain works as a whole, we do\n have a model of the functional mechanism of the nervous system and its\n neurons. A neuron is not a simple organic cell, but a very powerful,\n electrically excitable biological processor. Groups of neurons form\n vastly interconnected networks, which, by changing the strength of the\n synapses between cells, can process information, and learn. A neuron, by\n sharing chemical signals with its neighbors, can be integrated into more", "meaningful patterns that keep the neuron active and alive. Moreover,\n such a simple logic can be iterated and amplified, since all neurons\n work on a similar principle of connecting and sharing. Originally, the\n brain is quite open. A neural network exists to share activity and\n information, and I believe this model of the brain should inspire ideas\n and decisions about human networks.\nThus, our brain supports sharing in its very system-nature. This has\n profound implications for the creative process. Whenever you have an\n intention to create, you will find it easier to generate more creative\n ideas if you keep the sharing process firmly in mind. The\n idea-forming-process is not linear, but more like an avalanche of\n amplifications along the thinking path. It moves with the momentum of a\n creative snowball. If your internal cognitive system encourages sharing,", "These mind-switches are too subtle to be felt. But since the brain, and\n society, is a connected system, the accumulation of these\n micro-attitudes, from neuron to neuron and person to person, can result\n in observable behavior. It is easy to tell if a person, a group, a\n company, a nation is oriented toward Sharism or not. For those who are\n not, what they defend as “cultural goods” and “intellectual property”\n are just excuses for the status quo of keeping a community closed. Much\n of their “culture” will be protected, but the net result is the direct\n loss of many other precious ideas, and the subsequent loss of all the\n potential gains of sharing. This lost knowledge is a black hole in our\n life, which may start to swallow other values as well.", "power of a new Internet philosophy. Sharism will transform the world\n into an emergent Social Brain: a networked hybrid of people and\n software. We are Networked Neurons connected by the synapses of Social\n Software.\nThis is an evolutionary leap, a small step for us and a giant one for\n human society. With new “hairy” emergent technologies sprouting all\n around us, we can generate higher connectivities and increase the\n throughput of our social links. The more open and strongly connected we\n social neurons are, the better the sharing environment will be for all\n people. The more collective our intelligence, the wiser our actions will\n be. People have always found better solutions through conversations. Now\n we can put it all online.\nSharism will be the politics of the next global superpower. It will not", "small site, it’s hard to stop. We can’t explain this fact with a theory\n of addiction. It’s an impulse to share. It’s the energy of the memes\n that want to be passed from mouth to mouth and mind to mind. It’s more\n than just E-mail. It’s Sharism.\nBloggers are always keen to keep the social context of their posts in\n mind, by asking themselves, “Who is going to see this?” Bloggers are\n agile in adjusting their tone−and privacy settings−to advance ideas and\n stay out of trouble. It’s not self-censorship, but a sense of smart\n expression. But once blogs reached the tipping point, they expanded into\n the blogosphere. This required a more delicate social networking system\n and content- sharing architecture. But people now understand that they", "you can engineer a feedback loop of happiness, which will help you\n generate even more ideas in return. It’s a kind of butterfly- effect, as\n the small creative energy you spend will eventually return to make you,\n and the world, more creative.\nHowever, daily decisions for most adults are quite low in creative\n productivity, if only because they’ve switched off their sharing paths.\n People generally like to share what they create, but in a culture that\n tells them to be protective of their ideas, people start to believe in\n the danger of sharing. Then Sharism will be degraded in their mind and\n not encouraged in their society. But if we can encourage someone to\n share, her sharing paths will stay open. Sharism will be kept in her\n mind as a memory and an instinct. If in the future she faces a creative\n choice, her choice will be, “Share.”", "Then, if anything interesting comes your way: Share It! The easiest way\n to both start and keep sharing is by using different kinds of social\n software applications. Your first meme you want to share may be small,\n but you can amplify it with new technologies. Enlist some people from\n your network and invite them into a new social application. At first it\n might be hard to feel the gains of Sharism. The true test then is to see\n if you can keep track of the feedback that you get from sharing. You\n will realize that almost all sharing activities will generate positive\n results. The happiness that this will obtain is only the most immediate\n reward. But there are others.\nThe first type of reward that you will get comes in the form of\n comments. Then you know you’ve provoked interest, appreciation,\n excitement. The second reward is access to all the other stuff being", "one choice could easily snowball into more creations along the sharing\n path, from people at key nodes in the network who are all as passionate\n about creating and sharing as you are. After many iterative rounds of\n development, a large creative work may spring from your choice to share.\n Of course, you will get the credit that you asked for, and deserve. And\n it’s okay to seek financial rewards. But you will in every case get\n something just as substantial: Happiness.\nThe more people who create in the spirit of Sharism, the easier it will\n be to attain well- balanced and equitable Social Media that is woven by\n people themselves. Media won’t be controlled by any single person but\n will rely on the even distribution of social networking. These “Shaeros”\n (Sharing Heroes) will naturally become the opinion leaders in the first", "can have better control over a wide spectrum of relationships. Like how\n Flickr allows people to share their photos widely, but safely. The\n checkbox-based privacy of Flickr may seem unfamiliar to a new user, but\n you can use it to toy with the mind-switches of Sharism. By checking a\n box we can choose to share or not to share. From my observations, I have\n seen photographers on Flickr become more open to sharing, while\n retaining flexible choices.\nThe rapid emergence of Social Applications that can communicate and\n cooperate, by allowing people to output content from one service to\n another, is letting users pump their memes into a pipeline-like\n ecosystem. This interconnectedness allows memes to travel along multiple\n online social networks, and potentially reach a huge audience. As a", "Sharism: A Mind Revolution\nWith the People of the World Wide Web communicating more fully and\n freely in Social Media while rallying a Web 2.0 content boom, the inner\n dynamics of such a creative explosion must be studied more closely. What\n motivates those who join this movement and what future will they create?\n A key fact is that a superabundance of community respect and social\n capital are being accumulated by those who share. The key motivator of\n Social Media and the core spirit of Web 2.0 is a mind switch called\n Sharism. Sharism suggests a re-orientation of personal values. We see it\n in User Generated Content. It is the pledge of Creative Commons. It is\n in the plans of future-oriented cultural initiatives. Sharism is also a\n mental practice that anyone can try, a social-psychological attitude to", "following each blog. Human history is always so: something important was\n happening, but the rest of the world hadn’t yet realized it. The shift\n toward easy-to-use online publishing triggered a soft revolution in just\n five years. People made a quick and easy transition from reading blogs,\n to leaving comments and taking part in online conversations, and then to\n the sudden realization that they should become bloggers themselves. More\n bloggers created more readers, and more readers made more blogs. The\n revolution was viral.\nBloggers generate lively and timely information on the Internet, and\n connect to each other with RSS, hyperlinks, comments, trackbacks and\n quotes. The small-scale granularity of the content can fill discrete\n gaps in experience and thus record a new human history. Once you become\n a blogger, once you have accumulated so much social capital in such a", "shared by friends in your network. Since you know and trust them, you\n will be that much more interested in what they have to share. Already,\n the return is a multiple of the small meme you first shared. But the\n third type of return is more dramatic still. Anything you share can be\n forwarded, circulated and republished via other people’s networks. This\n cascade effect can spread your work to the networked masses.\nImprovements in social software are making the speed of dissemination as\n fast as a mouse-click. You should get to know the Sharism-You. You’re\n about to become popular, and fast\nThis brings us to the fourth and final type of return. It has a meaning\n not only for you, but for the whole of society. If you so choose, you\n may allow others to create derivative works from what you share. This", "the majority. Since Sharism can improve communication, collaboration and\n mutual understanding, I believe it has a place within the educational\n system. Sharism can be applied to any cultural discourse, CoP (Community\n of Practice) or problem-solving context. It is also an antidote to\n social depression, since sharelessness is just dragging our society\n down. In present or formerly totalitarian countries, this downward cycle\n is even more apparent. The future world will be a hybrid of human and\n machine that will generate better and faster decisions anytime,\n anywhere. The flow of information between minds will become more\n flexible and more productive. These vast networks of sharing will create\n a new social order−A Mind Revolution!", "result, such a Micro-pipeline system is making Social Media a true\n alternative to broadcast media. These new technologies are reviving\n Sharism in our closed culture.\nLocal Practice, Global Gain\nIf you happened to lose your Sharism in a bad educational or cultural\n setting, it’s hard to get it back. But it’s not impossible. A\n persistence of practice can lead to a full recovery. You can think of\n Sharism as a spiritual practice. But you must practice everyday.\n Otherwise, you might lose the power of sharing. Permanently.\nYou might need something to spur you on, to keep you from quitting and\n returning to a closed mindset. Here’s an idea: put a sticky note on your\n desk that says, “What do you want to share today?” I’m not kidding.", "property. Under Sharism, you can keep ownership, if you want. But I like\n to share. And this is how I choose to spread ideas, and prosperity\nSharism is totally based on your own consensus. It’s not a very hard\n concept to understand, especially since copyleft movements like the Free\n Software Foundation and Creative Commons have been around for years.\n These movements are redefining a more flexible spectrum of licenses for\n both developers and end-users to tag their works. Because the new\n licenses can be recognized by either humans or machines, it’s becoming\n easier to re-share those works in new online ecosystems.\nThe Spirit of the Web, a Social Brain\nSharism is the Spirit of the Age of Web 2.0. It has the consistency of a\n naturalized Epistemology and modernized Axiology, but also promises the", "also be the gatekeepers of your rights. Even if you are a traditional\n copyright holder, this sounds ideal.\nFurthermore, by realizing all the immediate and emergent rewards that\n can be had by sharing, you may eventually find that copyright and “All\n Rights Reserved” are far from your mind. You will enjoy sharing too much\n to worry about who is keeping a copy. The new economic formula is, the\n more people remix your works, the higher the return.\nI want to point out that Sharism is not Communism, nor Socialism. As for\n those die- hard Communists we know, they have often abused people’s\n sharing nature and forced them to give up their rights, and their\n property. Socialism, that tender Communism, in our experience also\n lacked respect for these rights. Under these systems, the state owns all", "choices, beyond the binary options of “Yes” or “No” referenda.\n Representative democracy will become more timely and diligent, because\n we will represent ourselves within the system.\nSharism will result in better social justice. In a healthy sharing\n environment, any evidence of injustice can get amplified to get the\n public’s attention. Anyone who has been abused can get real and instant\n support from her peers and her peers’ peers. Appeals to justice will\n take the form of petitions through multiple, interconnected channels.\n Using these tools, anyone can create a large social impact. With\n multiple devices and many social applications, each of us can become\n more sociable, and society more individual. We no longer have to act\n alone.\nEmergent democracy will only happen when Sharism becomes the literacy of", "be a country, but a new human network joined by Social Software. This\n may remain a distant dream, and even a well-defined public sharing\n policy might not be close at hand. But the ideas that I’m discussing can\n improve governments today. We can integrate our current and emerging\n democratic systems with new folksonomies (based on the collaborative,\n social indexing of information) to enable people to make queries, share\n data and remix information for public use. The collective intelligence\n of a vast and equitable sharing environment can be the gatekeeper of our\n rights, and a government watchdog. In the future, policymaking can be\n made more nuanced with the micro-involvement of the sharing community.\n This “Emergent Democracy” is more real-time than periodical\n parliamentary sessions. It will also increase the spectrum of our", "Non-sharing culture misleads us with its absolute separation of Private\n and Public space. It makes creative action a binary choice between\n public and private, open and closed. This creates a gap in the spectrum\n of knowledge. Although this gap has the potential to become a valuable\n creative space, concerns about privacy make this gap hard to fill. We\n shouldn’t be surprised that, to be safe, most people keep their sharing\n private and stay “closed.” They may fear the Internet creates a\n potential for abuse that they can’t fight alone. However, the paradox\n is: The less you share, the less power you have.\nNew Technologies and the Rise of Sharism\nLet’s track back to 1999, when there were only a few hundred pioneer\n bloggers around the world, and no more than ten times that many readers", "wave of Social Media. However, these media rights will belong to\n everyone. You yourself can be both producer and consumer in such a\n system.\nSharism Safeguards Your Rights\nStill, many questions will be raised about Sharism as an initiative in\n new age. The main one is copyright. One concern is that any loss of\n control over copyrighted content will lead to noticeable deficits in\n personal wealth, or just loss of control. 5 years ago, I would have said\n that this was a possibility. But things are changing today. The sharing\n environment is more protected than you might think. Many new social\n applications make it easy to set terms-of-use along your sharing path.\n Any infringement of those terms will be challenged not just by the law,\n but by your community. Your audience, who benefit form your sharing, can" ], [ "you can engineer a feedback loop of happiness, which will help you\n generate even more ideas in return. It’s a kind of butterfly- effect, as\n the small creative energy you spend will eventually return to make you,\n and the world, more creative.\nHowever, daily decisions for most adults are quite low in creative\n productivity, if only because they’ve switched off their sharing paths.\n People generally like to share what they create, but in a culture that\n tells them to be protective of their ideas, people start to believe in\n the danger of sharing. Then Sharism will be degraded in their mind and\n not encouraged in their society. But if we can encourage someone to\n share, her sharing paths will stay open. Sharism will be kept in her\n mind as a memory and an instinct. If in the future she faces a creative\n choice, her choice will be, “Share.”", "Non-sharing culture misleads us with its absolute separation of Private\n and Public space. It makes creative action a binary choice between\n public and private, open and closed. This creates a gap in the spectrum\n of knowledge. Although this gap has the potential to become a valuable\n creative space, concerns about privacy make this gap hard to fill. We\n shouldn’t be surprised that, to be safe, most people keep their sharing\n private and stay “closed.” They may fear the Internet creates a\n potential for abuse that they can’t fight alone. However, the paradox\n is: The less you share, the less power you have.\nNew Technologies and the Rise of Sharism\nLet’s track back to 1999, when there were only a few hundred pioneer\n bloggers around the world, and no more than ten times that many readers", "result, such a Micro-pipeline system is making Social Media a true\n alternative to broadcast media. These new technologies are reviving\n Sharism in our closed culture.\nLocal Practice, Global Gain\nIf you happened to lose your Sharism in a bad educational or cultural\n setting, it’s hard to get it back. But it’s not impossible. A\n persistence of practice can lead to a full recovery. You can think of\n Sharism as a spiritual practice. But you must practice everyday.\n Otherwise, you might lose the power of sharing. Permanently.\nYou might need something to spur you on, to keep you from quitting and\n returning to a closed mindset. Here’s an idea: put a sticky note on your\n desk that says, “What do you want to share today?” I’m not kidding.", "These mind-switches are too subtle to be felt. But since the brain, and\n society, is a connected system, the accumulation of these\n micro-attitudes, from neuron to neuron and person to person, can result\n in observable behavior. It is easy to tell if a person, a group, a\n company, a nation is oriented toward Sharism or not. For those who are\n not, what they defend as “cultural goods” and “intellectual property”\n are just excuses for the status quo of keeping a community closed. Much\n of their “culture” will be protected, but the net result is the direct\n loss of many other precious ideas, and the subsequent loss of all the\n potential gains of sharing. This lost knowledge is a black hole in our\n life, which may start to swallow other values as well.", "Then, if anything interesting comes your way: Share It! The easiest way\n to both start and keep sharing is by using different kinds of social\n software applications. Your first meme you want to share may be small,\n but you can amplify it with new technologies. Enlist some people from\n your network and invite them into a new social application. At first it\n might be hard to feel the gains of Sharism. The true test then is to see\n if you can keep track of the feedback that you get from sharing. You\n will realize that almost all sharing activities will generate positive\n results. The happiness that this will obtain is only the most immediate\n reward. But there are others.\nThe first type of reward that you will get comes in the form of\n comments. Then you know you’ve provoked interest, appreciation,\n excitement. The second reward is access to all the other stuff being", "one choice could easily snowball into more creations along the sharing\n path, from people at key nodes in the network who are all as passionate\n about creating and sharing as you are. After many iterative rounds of\n development, a large creative work may spring from your choice to share.\n Of course, you will get the credit that you asked for, and deserve. And\n it’s okay to seek financial rewards. But you will in every case get\n something just as substantial: Happiness.\nThe more people who create in the spirit of Sharism, the easier it will\n be to attain well- balanced and equitable Social Media that is woven by\n people themselves. Media won’t be controlled by any single person but\n will rely on the even distribution of social networking. These “Shaeros”\n (Sharing Heroes) will naturally become the opinion leaders in the first", "meaningful patterns that keep the neuron active and alive. Moreover,\n such a simple logic can be iterated and amplified, since all neurons\n work on a similar principle of connecting and sharing. Originally, the\n brain is quite open. A neural network exists to share activity and\n information, and I believe this model of the brain should inspire ideas\n and decisions about human networks.\nThus, our brain supports sharing in its very system-nature. This has\n profound implications for the creative process. Whenever you have an\n intention to create, you will find it easier to generate more creative\n ideas if you keep the sharing process firmly in mind. The\n idea-forming-process is not linear, but more like an avalanche of\n amplifications along the thinking path. It moves with the momentum of a\n creative snowball. If your internal cognitive system encourages sharing,", "also be the gatekeepers of your rights. Even if you are a traditional\n copyright holder, this sounds ideal.\nFurthermore, by realizing all the immediate and emergent rewards that\n can be had by sharing, you may eventually find that copyright and “All\n Rights Reserved” are far from your mind. You will enjoy sharing too much\n to worry about who is keeping a copy. The new economic formula is, the\n more people remix your works, the higher the return.\nI want to point out that Sharism is not Communism, nor Socialism. As for\n those die- hard Communists we know, they have often abused people’s\n sharing nature and forced them to give up their rights, and their\n property. Socialism, that tender Communism, in our experience also\n lacked respect for these rights. Under these systems, the state owns all", "small site, it’s hard to stop. We can’t explain this fact with a theory\n of addiction. It’s an impulse to share. It’s the energy of the memes\n that want to be passed from mouth to mouth and mind to mind. It’s more\n than just E-mail. It’s Sharism.\nBloggers are always keen to keep the social context of their posts in\n mind, by asking themselves, “Who is going to see this?” Bloggers are\n agile in adjusting their tone−and privacy settings−to advance ideas and\n stay out of trouble. It’s not self-censorship, but a sense of smart\n expression. But once blogs reached the tipping point, they expanded into\n the blogosphere. This required a more delicate social networking system\n and content- sharing architecture. But people now understand that they", "the majority. Since Sharism can improve communication, collaboration and\n mutual understanding, I believe it has a place within the educational\n system. Sharism can be applied to any cultural discourse, CoP (Community\n of Practice) or problem-solving context. It is also an antidote to\n social depression, since sharelessness is just dragging our society\n down. In present or formerly totalitarian countries, this downward cycle\n is even more apparent. The future world will be a hybrid of human and\n machine that will generate better and faster decisions anytime,\n anywhere. The flow of information between minds will become more\n flexible and more productive. These vast networks of sharing will create\n a new social order−A Mind Revolution!", "can have better control over a wide spectrum of relationships. Like how\n Flickr allows people to share their photos widely, but safely. The\n checkbox-based privacy of Flickr may seem unfamiliar to a new user, but\n you can use it to toy with the mind-switches of Sharism. By checking a\n box we can choose to share or not to share. From my observations, I have\n seen photographers on Flickr become more open to sharing, while\n retaining flexible choices.\nThe rapid emergence of Social Applications that can communicate and\n cooperate, by allowing people to output content from one service to\n another, is letting users pump their memes into a pipeline-like\n ecosystem. This interconnectedness allows memes to travel along multiple\n online social networks, and potentially reach a huge audience. As a", "shared by friends in your network. Since you know and trust them, you\n will be that much more interested in what they have to share. Already,\n the return is a multiple of the small meme you first shared. But the\n third type of return is more dramatic still. Anything you share can be\n forwarded, circulated and republished via other people’s networks. This\n cascade effect can spread your work to the networked masses.\nImprovements in social software are making the speed of dissemination as\n fast as a mouse-click. You should get to know the Sharism-You. You’re\n about to become popular, and fast\nThis brings us to the fourth and final type of return. It has a meaning\n not only for you, but for the whole of society. If you so choose, you\n may allow others to create derivative works from what you share. This", "transform a wide and isolated world into a super-smart Social Brain.\nThe Neuron Doctrine\nSharism is encoded in the Human Genome. Although eclipsed by the many\n pragmatisms of daily life, the theory of Sharism finds basis in\n neuroscience and its study of the working model of the human brain.\n Although we can’t entirely say how the brain works as a whole, we do\n have a model of the functional mechanism of the nervous system and its\n neurons. A neuron is not a simple organic cell, but a very powerful,\n electrically excitable biological processor. Groups of neurons form\n vastly interconnected networks, which, by changing the strength of the\n synapses between cells, can process information, and learn. A neuron, by\n sharing chemical signals with its neighbors, can be integrated into more", "Sharism: A Mind Revolution\nWith the People of the World Wide Web communicating more fully and\n freely in Social Media while rallying a Web 2.0 content boom, the inner\n dynamics of such a creative explosion must be studied more closely. What\n motivates those who join this movement and what future will they create?\n A key fact is that a superabundance of community respect and social\n capital are being accumulated by those who share. The key motivator of\n Social Media and the core spirit of Web 2.0 is a mind switch called\n Sharism. Sharism suggests a re-orientation of personal values. We see it\n in User Generated Content. It is the pledge of Creative Commons. It is\n in the plans of future-oriented cultural initiatives. Sharism is also a\n mental practice that anyone can try, a social-psychological attitude to", "property. Under Sharism, you can keep ownership, if you want. But I like\n to share. And this is how I choose to spread ideas, and prosperity\nSharism is totally based on your own consensus. It’s not a very hard\n concept to understand, especially since copyleft movements like the Free\n Software Foundation and Creative Commons have been around for years.\n These movements are redefining a more flexible spectrum of licenses for\n both developers and end-users to tag their works. Because the new\n licenses can be recognized by either humans or machines, it’s becoming\n easier to re-share those works in new online ecosystems.\nThe Spirit of the Web, a Social Brain\nSharism is the Spirit of the Age of Web 2.0. It has the consistency of a\n naturalized Epistemology and modernized Axiology, but also promises the", "wave of Social Media. However, these media rights will belong to\n everyone. You yourself can be both producer and consumer in such a\n system.\nSharism Safeguards Your Rights\nStill, many questions will be raised about Sharism as an initiative in\n new age. The main one is copyright. One concern is that any loss of\n control over copyrighted content will lead to noticeable deficits in\n personal wealth, or just loss of control. 5 years ago, I would have said\n that this was a possibility. But things are changing today. The sharing\n environment is more protected than you might think. Many new social\n applications make it easy to set terms-of-use along your sharing path.\n Any infringement of those terms will be challenged not just by the law,\n but by your community. Your audience, who benefit form your sharing, can", "power of a new Internet philosophy. Sharism will transform the world\n into an emergent Social Brain: a networked hybrid of people and\n software. We are Networked Neurons connected by the synapses of Social\n Software.\nThis is an evolutionary leap, a small step for us and a giant one for\n human society. With new “hairy” emergent technologies sprouting all\n around us, we can generate higher connectivities and increase the\n throughput of our social links. The more open and strongly connected we\n social neurons are, the better the sharing environment will be for all\n people. The more collective our intelligence, the wiser our actions will\n be. People have always found better solutions through conversations. Now\n we can put it all online.\nSharism will be the politics of the next global superpower. It will not", "choices, beyond the binary options of “Yes” or “No” referenda.\n Representative democracy will become more timely and diligent, because\n we will represent ourselves within the system.\nSharism will result in better social justice. In a healthy sharing\n environment, any evidence of injustice can get amplified to get the\n public’s attention. Anyone who has been abused can get real and instant\n support from her peers and her peers’ peers. Appeals to justice will\n take the form of petitions through multiple, interconnected channels.\n Using these tools, anyone can create a large social impact. With\n multiple devices and many social applications, each of us can become\n more sociable, and society more individual. We no longer have to act\n alone.\nEmergent democracy will only happen when Sharism becomes the literacy of", "be a country, but a new human network joined by Social Software. This\n may remain a distant dream, and even a well-defined public sharing\n policy might not be close at hand. But the ideas that I’m discussing can\n improve governments today. We can integrate our current and emerging\n democratic systems with new folksonomies (based on the collaborative,\n social indexing of information) to enable people to make queries, share\n data and remix information for public use. The collective intelligence\n of a vast and equitable sharing environment can be the gatekeeper of our\n rights, and a government watchdog. In the future, policymaking can be\n made more nuanced with the micro-involvement of the sharing community.\n This “Emergent Democracy” is more real-time than periodical\n parliamentary sessions. It will also increase the spectrum of our", "following each blog. Human history is always so: something important was\n happening, but the rest of the world hadn’t yet realized it. The shift\n toward easy-to-use online publishing triggered a soft revolution in just\n five years. People made a quick and easy transition from reading blogs,\n to leaving comments and taking part in online conversations, and then to\n the sudden realization that they should become bloggers themselves. More\n bloggers created more readers, and more readers made more blogs. The\n revolution was viral.\nBloggers generate lively and timely information on the Internet, and\n connect to each other with RSS, hyperlinks, comments, trackbacks and\n quotes. The small-scale granularity of the content can fill discrete\n gaps in experience and thus record a new human history. Once you become\n a blogger, once you have accumulated so much social capital in such a" ], [ "following each blog. Human history is always so: something important was\n happening, but the rest of the world hadn’t yet realized it. The shift\n toward easy-to-use online publishing triggered a soft revolution in just\n five years. People made a quick and easy transition from reading blogs,\n to leaving comments and taking part in online conversations, and then to\n the sudden realization that they should become bloggers themselves. More\n bloggers created more readers, and more readers made more blogs. The\n revolution was viral.\nBloggers generate lively and timely information on the Internet, and\n connect to each other with RSS, hyperlinks, comments, trackbacks and\n quotes. The small-scale granularity of the content can fill discrete\n gaps in experience and thus record a new human history. Once you become\n a blogger, once you have accumulated so much social capital in such a", "small site, it’s hard to stop. We can’t explain this fact with a theory\n of addiction. It’s an impulse to share. It’s the energy of the memes\n that want to be passed from mouth to mouth and mind to mind. It’s more\n than just E-mail. It’s Sharism.\nBloggers are always keen to keep the social context of their posts in\n mind, by asking themselves, “Who is going to see this?” Bloggers are\n agile in adjusting their tone−and privacy settings−to advance ideas and\n stay out of trouble. It’s not self-censorship, but a sense of smart\n expression. But once blogs reached the tipping point, they expanded into\n the blogosphere. This required a more delicate social networking system\n and content- sharing architecture. But people now understand that they", "Non-sharing culture misleads us with its absolute separation of Private\n and Public space. It makes creative action a binary choice between\n public and private, open and closed. This creates a gap in the spectrum\n of knowledge. Although this gap has the potential to become a valuable\n creative space, concerns about privacy make this gap hard to fill. We\n shouldn’t be surprised that, to be safe, most people keep their sharing\n private and stay “closed.” They may fear the Internet creates a\n potential for abuse that they can’t fight alone. However, the paradox\n is: The less you share, the less power you have.\nNew Technologies and the Rise of Sharism\nLet’s track back to 1999, when there were only a few hundred pioneer\n bloggers around the world, and no more than ten times that many readers", "Sharism: A Mind Revolution\nWith the People of the World Wide Web communicating more fully and\n freely in Social Media while rallying a Web 2.0 content boom, the inner\n dynamics of such a creative explosion must be studied more closely. What\n motivates those who join this movement and what future will they create?\n A key fact is that a superabundance of community respect and social\n capital are being accumulated by those who share. The key motivator of\n Social Media and the core spirit of Web 2.0 is a mind switch called\n Sharism. Sharism suggests a re-orientation of personal values. We see it\n in User Generated Content. It is the pledge of Creative Commons. It is\n in the plans of future-oriented cultural initiatives. Sharism is also a\n mental practice that anyone can try, a social-psychological attitude to", "one choice could easily snowball into more creations along the sharing\n path, from people at key nodes in the network who are all as passionate\n about creating and sharing as you are. After many iterative rounds of\n development, a large creative work may spring from your choice to share.\n Of course, you will get the credit that you asked for, and deserve. And\n it’s okay to seek financial rewards. But you will in every case get\n something just as substantial: Happiness.\nThe more people who create in the spirit of Sharism, the easier it will\n be to attain well- balanced and equitable Social Media that is woven by\n people themselves. Media won’t be controlled by any single person but\n will rely on the even distribution of social networking. These “Shaeros”\n (Sharing Heroes) will naturally become the opinion leaders in the first", "be a country, but a new human network joined by Social Software. This\n may remain a distant dream, and even a well-defined public sharing\n policy might not be close at hand. But the ideas that I’m discussing can\n improve governments today. We can integrate our current and emerging\n democratic systems with new folksonomies (based on the collaborative,\n social indexing of information) to enable people to make queries, share\n data and remix information for public use. The collective intelligence\n of a vast and equitable sharing environment can be the gatekeeper of our\n rights, and a government watchdog. In the future, policymaking can be\n made more nuanced with the micro-involvement of the sharing community.\n This “Emergent Democracy” is more real-time than periodical\n parliamentary sessions. It will also increase the spectrum of our", "Then, if anything interesting comes your way: Share It! The easiest way\n to both start and keep sharing is by using different kinds of social\n software applications. Your first meme you want to share may be small,\n but you can amplify it with new technologies. Enlist some people from\n your network and invite them into a new social application. At first it\n might be hard to feel the gains of Sharism. The true test then is to see\n if you can keep track of the feedback that you get from sharing. You\n will realize that almost all sharing activities will generate positive\n results. The happiness that this will obtain is only the most immediate\n reward. But there are others.\nThe first type of reward that you will get comes in the form of\n comments. Then you know you’ve provoked interest, appreciation,\n excitement. The second reward is access to all the other stuff being", "can have better control over a wide spectrum of relationships. Like how\n Flickr allows people to share their photos widely, but safely. The\n checkbox-based privacy of Flickr may seem unfamiliar to a new user, but\n you can use it to toy with the mind-switches of Sharism. By checking a\n box we can choose to share or not to share. From my observations, I have\n seen photographers on Flickr become more open to sharing, while\n retaining flexible choices.\nThe rapid emergence of Social Applications that can communicate and\n cooperate, by allowing people to output content from one service to\n another, is letting users pump their memes into a pipeline-like\n ecosystem. This interconnectedness allows memes to travel along multiple\n online social networks, and potentially reach a huge audience. As a", "power of a new Internet philosophy. Sharism will transform the world\n into an emergent Social Brain: a networked hybrid of people and\n software. We are Networked Neurons connected by the synapses of Social\n Software.\nThis is an evolutionary leap, a small step for us and a giant one for\n human society. With new “hairy” emergent technologies sprouting all\n around us, we can generate higher connectivities and increase the\n throughput of our social links. The more open and strongly connected we\n social neurons are, the better the sharing environment will be for all\n people. The more collective our intelligence, the wiser our actions will\n be. People have always found better solutions through conversations. Now\n we can put it all online.\nSharism will be the politics of the next global superpower. It will not", "result, such a Micro-pipeline system is making Social Media a true\n alternative to broadcast media. These new technologies are reviving\n Sharism in our closed culture.\nLocal Practice, Global Gain\nIf you happened to lose your Sharism in a bad educational or cultural\n setting, it’s hard to get it back. But it’s not impossible. A\n persistence of practice can lead to a full recovery. You can think of\n Sharism as a spiritual practice. But you must practice everyday.\n Otherwise, you might lose the power of sharing. Permanently.\nYou might need something to spur you on, to keep you from quitting and\n returning to a closed mindset. Here’s an idea: put a sticky note on your\n desk that says, “What do you want to share today?” I’m not kidding.", "These mind-switches are too subtle to be felt. But since the brain, and\n society, is a connected system, the accumulation of these\n micro-attitudes, from neuron to neuron and person to person, can result\n in observable behavior. It is easy to tell if a person, a group, a\n company, a nation is oriented toward Sharism or not. For those who are\n not, what they defend as “cultural goods” and “intellectual property”\n are just excuses for the status quo of keeping a community closed. Much\n of their “culture” will be protected, but the net result is the direct\n loss of many other precious ideas, and the subsequent loss of all the\n potential gains of sharing. This lost knowledge is a black hole in our\n life, which may start to swallow other values as well.", "shared by friends in your network. Since you know and trust them, you\n will be that much more interested in what they have to share. Already,\n the return is a multiple of the small meme you first shared. But the\n third type of return is more dramatic still. Anything you share can be\n forwarded, circulated and republished via other people’s networks. This\n cascade effect can spread your work to the networked masses.\nImprovements in social software are making the speed of dissemination as\n fast as a mouse-click. You should get to know the Sharism-You. You’re\n about to become popular, and fast\nThis brings us to the fourth and final type of return. It has a meaning\n not only for you, but for the whole of society. If you so choose, you\n may allow others to create derivative works from what you share. This", "choices, beyond the binary options of “Yes” or “No” referenda.\n Representative democracy will become more timely and diligent, because\n we will represent ourselves within the system.\nSharism will result in better social justice. In a healthy sharing\n environment, any evidence of injustice can get amplified to get the\n public’s attention. Anyone who has been abused can get real and instant\n support from her peers and her peers’ peers. Appeals to justice will\n take the form of petitions through multiple, interconnected channels.\n Using these tools, anyone can create a large social impact. With\n multiple devices and many social applications, each of us can become\n more sociable, and society more individual. We no longer have to act\n alone.\nEmergent democracy will only happen when Sharism becomes the literacy of", "also be the gatekeepers of your rights. Even if you are a traditional\n copyright holder, this sounds ideal.\nFurthermore, by realizing all the immediate and emergent rewards that\n can be had by sharing, you may eventually find that copyright and “All\n Rights Reserved” are far from your mind. You will enjoy sharing too much\n to worry about who is keeping a copy. The new economic formula is, the\n more people remix your works, the higher the return.\nI want to point out that Sharism is not Communism, nor Socialism. As for\n those die- hard Communists we know, they have often abused people’s\n sharing nature and forced them to give up their rights, and their\n property. Socialism, that tender Communism, in our experience also\n lacked respect for these rights. Under these systems, the state owns all", "wave of Social Media. However, these media rights will belong to\n everyone. You yourself can be both producer and consumer in such a\n system.\nSharism Safeguards Your Rights\nStill, many questions will be raised about Sharism as an initiative in\n new age. The main one is copyright. One concern is that any loss of\n control over copyrighted content will lead to noticeable deficits in\n personal wealth, or just loss of control. 5 years ago, I would have said\n that this was a possibility. But things are changing today. The sharing\n environment is more protected than you might think. Many new social\n applications make it easy to set terms-of-use along your sharing path.\n Any infringement of those terms will be challenged not just by the law,\n but by your community. Your audience, who benefit form your sharing, can", "property. Under Sharism, you can keep ownership, if you want. But I like\n to share. And this is how I choose to spread ideas, and prosperity\nSharism is totally based on your own consensus. It’s not a very hard\n concept to understand, especially since copyleft movements like the Free\n Software Foundation and Creative Commons have been around for years.\n These movements are redefining a more flexible spectrum of licenses for\n both developers and end-users to tag their works. Because the new\n licenses can be recognized by either humans or machines, it’s becoming\n easier to re-share those works in new online ecosystems.\nThe Spirit of the Web, a Social Brain\nSharism is the Spirit of the Age of Web 2.0. It has the consistency of a\n naturalized Epistemology and modernized Axiology, but also promises the", "you can engineer a feedback loop of happiness, which will help you\n generate even more ideas in return. It’s a kind of butterfly- effect, as\n the small creative energy you spend will eventually return to make you,\n and the world, more creative.\nHowever, daily decisions for most adults are quite low in creative\n productivity, if only because they’ve switched off their sharing paths.\n People generally like to share what they create, but in a culture that\n tells them to be protective of their ideas, people start to believe in\n the danger of sharing. Then Sharism will be degraded in their mind and\n not encouraged in their society. But if we can encourage someone to\n share, her sharing paths will stay open. Sharism will be kept in her\n mind as a memory and an instinct. If in the future she faces a creative\n choice, her choice will be, “Share.”", "meaningful patterns that keep the neuron active and alive. Moreover,\n such a simple logic can be iterated and amplified, since all neurons\n work on a similar principle of connecting and sharing. Originally, the\n brain is quite open. A neural network exists to share activity and\n information, and I believe this model of the brain should inspire ideas\n and decisions about human networks.\nThus, our brain supports sharing in its very system-nature. This has\n profound implications for the creative process. Whenever you have an\n intention to create, you will find it easier to generate more creative\n ideas if you keep the sharing process firmly in mind. The\n idea-forming-process is not linear, but more like an avalanche of\n amplifications along the thinking path. It moves with the momentum of a\n creative snowball. If your internal cognitive system encourages sharing,", "the majority. Since Sharism can improve communication, collaboration and\n mutual understanding, I believe it has a place within the educational\n system. Sharism can be applied to any cultural discourse, CoP (Community\n of Practice) or problem-solving context. It is also an antidote to\n social depression, since sharelessness is just dragging our society\n down. In present or formerly totalitarian countries, this downward cycle\n is even more apparent. The future world will be a hybrid of human and\n machine that will generate better and faster decisions anytime,\n anywhere. The flow of information between minds will become more\n flexible and more productive. These vast networks of sharing will create\n a new social order−A Mind Revolution!", "transform a wide and isolated world into a super-smart Social Brain.\nThe Neuron Doctrine\nSharism is encoded in the Human Genome. Although eclipsed by the many\n pragmatisms of daily life, the theory of Sharism finds basis in\n neuroscience and its study of the working model of the human brain.\n Although we can’t entirely say how the brain works as a whole, we do\n have a model of the functional mechanism of the nervous system and its\n neurons. A neuron is not a simple organic cell, but a very powerful,\n electrically excitable biological processor. Groups of neurons form\n vastly interconnected networks, which, by changing the strength of the\n synapses between cells, can process information, and learn. A neuron, by\n sharing chemical signals with its neighbors, can be integrated into more" ], [ "small site, it’s hard to stop. We can’t explain this fact with a theory\n of addiction. It’s an impulse to share. It’s the energy of the memes\n that want to be passed from mouth to mouth and mind to mind. It’s more\n than just E-mail. It’s Sharism.\nBloggers are always keen to keep the social context of their posts in\n mind, by asking themselves, “Who is going to see this?” Bloggers are\n agile in adjusting their tone−and privacy settings−to advance ideas and\n stay out of trouble. It’s not self-censorship, but a sense of smart\n expression. But once blogs reached the tipping point, they expanded into\n the blogosphere. This required a more delicate social networking system\n and content- sharing architecture. But people now understand that they", "following each blog. Human history is always so: something important was\n happening, but the rest of the world hadn’t yet realized it. The shift\n toward easy-to-use online publishing triggered a soft revolution in just\n five years. People made a quick and easy transition from reading blogs,\n to leaving comments and taking part in online conversations, and then to\n the sudden realization that they should become bloggers themselves. More\n bloggers created more readers, and more readers made more blogs. The\n revolution was viral.\nBloggers generate lively and timely information on the Internet, and\n connect to each other with RSS, hyperlinks, comments, trackbacks and\n quotes. The small-scale granularity of the content can fill discrete\n gaps in experience and thus record a new human history. Once you become\n a blogger, once you have accumulated so much social capital in such a", "Non-sharing culture misleads us with its absolute separation of Private\n and Public space. It makes creative action a binary choice between\n public and private, open and closed. This creates a gap in the spectrum\n of knowledge. Although this gap has the potential to become a valuable\n creative space, concerns about privacy make this gap hard to fill. We\n shouldn’t be surprised that, to be safe, most people keep their sharing\n private and stay “closed.” They may fear the Internet creates a\n potential for abuse that they can’t fight alone. However, the paradox\n is: The less you share, the less power you have.\nNew Technologies and the Rise of Sharism\nLet’s track back to 1999, when there were only a few hundred pioneer\n bloggers around the world, and no more than ten times that many readers", "can have better control over a wide spectrum of relationships. Like how\n Flickr allows people to share their photos widely, but safely. The\n checkbox-based privacy of Flickr may seem unfamiliar to a new user, but\n you can use it to toy with the mind-switches of Sharism. By checking a\n box we can choose to share or not to share. From my observations, I have\n seen photographers on Flickr become more open to sharing, while\n retaining flexible choices.\nThe rapid emergence of Social Applications that can communicate and\n cooperate, by allowing people to output content from one service to\n another, is letting users pump their memes into a pipeline-like\n ecosystem. This interconnectedness allows memes to travel along multiple\n online social networks, and potentially reach a huge audience. As a", "be a country, but a new human network joined by Social Software. This\n may remain a distant dream, and even a well-defined public sharing\n policy might not be close at hand. But the ideas that I’m discussing can\n improve governments today. We can integrate our current and emerging\n democratic systems with new folksonomies (based on the collaborative,\n social indexing of information) to enable people to make queries, share\n data and remix information for public use. The collective intelligence\n of a vast and equitable sharing environment can be the gatekeeper of our\n rights, and a government watchdog. In the future, policymaking can be\n made more nuanced with the micro-involvement of the sharing community.\n This “Emergent Democracy” is more real-time than periodical\n parliamentary sessions. It will also increase the spectrum of our", "These mind-switches are too subtle to be felt. But since the brain, and\n society, is a connected system, the accumulation of these\n micro-attitudes, from neuron to neuron and person to person, can result\n in observable behavior. It is easy to tell if a person, a group, a\n company, a nation is oriented toward Sharism or not. For those who are\n not, what they defend as “cultural goods” and “intellectual property”\n are just excuses for the status quo of keeping a community closed. Much\n of their “culture” will be protected, but the net result is the direct\n loss of many other precious ideas, and the subsequent loss of all the\n potential gains of sharing. This lost knowledge is a black hole in our\n life, which may start to swallow other values as well.", "Sharism: A Mind Revolution\nWith the People of the World Wide Web communicating more fully and\n freely in Social Media while rallying a Web 2.0 content boom, the inner\n dynamics of such a creative explosion must be studied more closely. What\n motivates those who join this movement and what future will they create?\n A key fact is that a superabundance of community respect and social\n capital are being accumulated by those who share. The key motivator of\n Social Media and the core spirit of Web 2.0 is a mind switch called\n Sharism. Sharism suggests a re-orientation of personal values. We see it\n in User Generated Content. It is the pledge of Creative Commons. It is\n in the plans of future-oriented cultural initiatives. Sharism is also a\n mental practice that anyone can try, a social-psychological attitude to", "one choice could easily snowball into more creations along the sharing\n path, from people at key nodes in the network who are all as passionate\n about creating and sharing as you are. After many iterative rounds of\n development, a large creative work may spring from your choice to share.\n Of course, you will get the credit that you asked for, and deserve. And\n it’s okay to seek financial rewards. But you will in every case get\n something just as substantial: Happiness.\nThe more people who create in the spirit of Sharism, the easier it will\n be to attain well- balanced and equitable Social Media that is woven by\n people themselves. Media won’t be controlled by any single person but\n will rely on the even distribution of social networking. These “Shaeros”\n (Sharing Heroes) will naturally become the opinion leaders in the first", "result, such a Micro-pipeline system is making Social Media a true\n alternative to broadcast media. These new technologies are reviving\n Sharism in our closed culture.\nLocal Practice, Global Gain\nIf you happened to lose your Sharism in a bad educational or cultural\n setting, it’s hard to get it back. But it’s not impossible. A\n persistence of practice can lead to a full recovery. You can think of\n Sharism as a spiritual practice. But you must practice everyday.\n Otherwise, you might lose the power of sharing. Permanently.\nYou might need something to spur you on, to keep you from quitting and\n returning to a closed mindset. Here’s an idea: put a sticky note on your\n desk that says, “What do you want to share today?” I’m not kidding.", "Then, if anything interesting comes your way: Share It! The easiest way\n to both start and keep sharing is by using different kinds of social\n software applications. Your first meme you want to share may be small,\n but you can amplify it with new technologies. Enlist some people from\n your network and invite them into a new social application. At first it\n might be hard to feel the gains of Sharism. The true test then is to see\n if you can keep track of the feedback that you get from sharing. You\n will realize that almost all sharing activities will generate positive\n results. The happiness that this will obtain is only the most immediate\n reward. But there are others.\nThe first type of reward that you will get comes in the form of\n comments. Then you know you’ve provoked interest, appreciation,\n excitement. The second reward is access to all the other stuff being", "shared by friends in your network. Since you know and trust them, you\n will be that much more interested in what they have to share. Already,\n the return is a multiple of the small meme you first shared. But the\n third type of return is more dramatic still. Anything you share can be\n forwarded, circulated and republished via other people’s networks. This\n cascade effect can spread your work to the networked masses.\nImprovements in social software are making the speed of dissemination as\n fast as a mouse-click. You should get to know the Sharism-You. You’re\n about to become popular, and fast\nThis brings us to the fourth and final type of return. It has a meaning\n not only for you, but for the whole of society. If you so choose, you\n may allow others to create derivative works from what you share. This", "wave of Social Media. However, these media rights will belong to\n everyone. You yourself can be both producer and consumer in such a\n system.\nSharism Safeguards Your Rights\nStill, many questions will be raised about Sharism as an initiative in\n new age. The main one is copyright. One concern is that any loss of\n control over copyrighted content will lead to noticeable deficits in\n personal wealth, or just loss of control. 5 years ago, I would have said\n that this was a possibility. But things are changing today. The sharing\n environment is more protected than you might think. Many new social\n applications make it easy to set terms-of-use along your sharing path.\n Any infringement of those terms will be challenged not just by the law,\n but by your community. Your audience, who benefit form your sharing, can", "choices, beyond the binary options of “Yes” or “No” referenda.\n Representative democracy will become more timely and diligent, because\n we will represent ourselves within the system.\nSharism will result in better social justice. In a healthy sharing\n environment, any evidence of injustice can get amplified to get the\n public’s attention. Anyone who has been abused can get real and instant\n support from her peers and her peers’ peers. Appeals to justice will\n take the form of petitions through multiple, interconnected channels.\n Using these tools, anyone can create a large social impact. With\n multiple devices and many social applications, each of us can become\n more sociable, and society more individual. We no longer have to act\n alone.\nEmergent democracy will only happen when Sharism becomes the literacy of", "also be the gatekeepers of your rights. Even if you are a traditional\n copyright holder, this sounds ideal.\nFurthermore, by realizing all the immediate and emergent rewards that\n can be had by sharing, you may eventually find that copyright and “All\n Rights Reserved” are far from your mind. You will enjoy sharing too much\n to worry about who is keeping a copy. The new economic formula is, the\n more people remix your works, the higher the return.\nI want to point out that Sharism is not Communism, nor Socialism. As for\n those die- hard Communists we know, they have often abused people’s\n sharing nature and forced them to give up their rights, and their\n property. Socialism, that tender Communism, in our experience also\n lacked respect for these rights. Under these systems, the state owns all", "you can engineer a feedback loop of happiness, which will help you\n generate even more ideas in return. It’s a kind of butterfly- effect, as\n the small creative energy you spend will eventually return to make you,\n and the world, more creative.\nHowever, daily decisions for most adults are quite low in creative\n productivity, if only because they’ve switched off their sharing paths.\n People generally like to share what they create, but in a culture that\n tells them to be protective of their ideas, people start to believe in\n the danger of sharing. Then Sharism will be degraded in their mind and\n not encouraged in their society. But if we can encourage someone to\n share, her sharing paths will stay open. Sharism will be kept in her\n mind as a memory and an instinct. If in the future she faces a creative\n choice, her choice will be, “Share.”", "power of a new Internet philosophy. Sharism will transform the world\n into an emergent Social Brain: a networked hybrid of people and\n software. We are Networked Neurons connected by the synapses of Social\n Software.\nThis is an evolutionary leap, a small step for us and a giant one for\n human society. With new “hairy” emergent technologies sprouting all\n around us, we can generate higher connectivities and increase the\n throughput of our social links. The more open and strongly connected we\n social neurons are, the better the sharing environment will be for all\n people. The more collective our intelligence, the wiser our actions will\n be. People have always found better solutions through conversations. Now\n we can put it all online.\nSharism will be the politics of the next global superpower. It will not", "the majority. Since Sharism can improve communication, collaboration and\n mutual understanding, I believe it has a place within the educational\n system. Sharism can be applied to any cultural discourse, CoP (Community\n of Practice) or problem-solving context. It is also an antidote to\n social depression, since sharelessness is just dragging our society\n down. In present or formerly totalitarian countries, this downward cycle\n is even more apparent. The future world will be a hybrid of human and\n machine that will generate better and faster decisions anytime,\n anywhere. The flow of information between minds will become more\n flexible and more productive. These vast networks of sharing will create\n a new social order−A Mind Revolution!", "meaningful patterns that keep the neuron active and alive. Moreover,\n such a simple logic can be iterated and amplified, since all neurons\n work on a similar principle of connecting and sharing. Originally, the\n brain is quite open. A neural network exists to share activity and\n information, and I believe this model of the brain should inspire ideas\n and decisions about human networks.\nThus, our brain supports sharing in its very system-nature. This has\n profound implications for the creative process. Whenever you have an\n intention to create, you will find it easier to generate more creative\n ideas if you keep the sharing process firmly in mind. The\n idea-forming-process is not linear, but more like an avalanche of\n amplifications along the thinking path. It moves with the momentum of a\n creative snowball. If your internal cognitive system encourages sharing,", "property. Under Sharism, you can keep ownership, if you want. But I like\n to share. And this is how I choose to spread ideas, and prosperity\nSharism is totally based on your own consensus. It’s not a very hard\n concept to understand, especially since copyleft movements like the Free\n Software Foundation and Creative Commons have been around for years.\n These movements are redefining a more flexible spectrum of licenses for\n both developers and end-users to tag their works. Because the new\n licenses can be recognized by either humans or machines, it’s becoming\n easier to re-share those works in new online ecosystems.\nThe Spirit of the Web, a Social Brain\nSharism is the Spirit of the Age of Web 2.0. It has the consistency of a\n naturalized Epistemology and modernized Axiology, but also promises the", "transform a wide and isolated world into a super-smart Social Brain.\nThe Neuron Doctrine\nSharism is encoded in the Human Genome. Although eclipsed by the many\n pragmatisms of daily life, the theory of Sharism finds basis in\n neuroscience and its study of the working model of the human brain.\n Although we can’t entirely say how the brain works as a whole, we do\n have a model of the functional mechanism of the nervous system and its\n neurons. A neuron is not a simple organic cell, but a very powerful,\n electrically excitable biological processor. Groups of neurons form\n vastly interconnected networks, which, by changing the strength of the\n synapses between cells, can process information, and learn. A neuron, by\n sharing chemical signals with its neighbors, can be integrated into more" ], [ "power of a new Internet philosophy. Sharism will transform the world\n into an emergent Social Brain: a networked hybrid of people and\n software. We are Networked Neurons connected by the synapses of Social\n Software.\nThis is an evolutionary leap, a small step for us and a giant one for\n human society. With new “hairy” emergent technologies sprouting all\n around us, we can generate higher connectivities and increase the\n throughput of our social links. The more open and strongly connected we\n social neurons are, the better the sharing environment will be for all\n people. The more collective our intelligence, the wiser our actions will\n be. People have always found better solutions through conversations. Now\n we can put it all online.\nSharism will be the politics of the next global superpower. It will not", "choices, beyond the binary options of “Yes” or “No” referenda.\n Representative democracy will become more timely and diligent, because\n we will represent ourselves within the system.\nSharism will result in better social justice. In a healthy sharing\n environment, any evidence of injustice can get amplified to get the\n public’s attention. Anyone who has been abused can get real and instant\n support from her peers and her peers’ peers. Appeals to justice will\n take the form of petitions through multiple, interconnected channels.\n Using these tools, anyone can create a large social impact. With\n multiple devices and many social applications, each of us can become\n more sociable, and society more individual. We no longer have to act\n alone.\nEmergent democracy will only happen when Sharism becomes the literacy of", "be a country, but a new human network joined by Social Software. This\n may remain a distant dream, and even a well-defined public sharing\n policy might not be close at hand. But the ideas that I’m discussing can\n improve governments today. We can integrate our current and emerging\n democratic systems with new folksonomies (based on the collaborative,\n social indexing of information) to enable people to make queries, share\n data and remix information for public use. The collective intelligence\n of a vast and equitable sharing environment can be the gatekeeper of our\n rights, and a government watchdog. In the future, policymaking can be\n made more nuanced with the micro-involvement of the sharing community.\n This “Emergent Democracy” is more real-time than periodical\n parliamentary sessions. It will also increase the spectrum of our", "the majority. Since Sharism can improve communication, collaboration and\n mutual understanding, I believe it has a place within the educational\n system. Sharism can be applied to any cultural discourse, CoP (Community\n of Practice) or problem-solving context. It is also an antidote to\n social depression, since sharelessness is just dragging our society\n down. In present or formerly totalitarian countries, this downward cycle\n is even more apparent. The future world will be a hybrid of human and\n machine that will generate better and faster decisions anytime,\n anywhere. The flow of information between minds will become more\n flexible and more productive. These vast networks of sharing will create\n a new social order−A Mind Revolution!", "result, such a Micro-pipeline system is making Social Media a true\n alternative to broadcast media. These new technologies are reviving\n Sharism in our closed culture.\nLocal Practice, Global Gain\nIf you happened to lose your Sharism in a bad educational or cultural\n setting, it’s hard to get it back. But it’s not impossible. A\n persistence of practice can lead to a full recovery. You can think of\n Sharism as a spiritual practice. But you must practice everyday.\n Otherwise, you might lose the power of sharing. Permanently.\nYou might need something to spur you on, to keep you from quitting and\n returning to a closed mindset. Here’s an idea: put a sticky note on your\n desk that says, “What do you want to share today?” I’m not kidding.", "These mind-switches are too subtle to be felt. But since the brain, and\n society, is a connected system, the accumulation of these\n micro-attitudes, from neuron to neuron and person to person, can result\n in observable behavior. It is easy to tell if a person, a group, a\n company, a nation is oriented toward Sharism or not. For those who are\n not, what they defend as “cultural goods” and “intellectual property”\n are just excuses for the status quo of keeping a community closed. Much\n of their “culture” will be protected, but the net result is the direct\n loss of many other precious ideas, and the subsequent loss of all the\n potential gains of sharing. This lost knowledge is a black hole in our\n life, which may start to swallow other values as well.", "Sharism: A Mind Revolution\nWith the People of the World Wide Web communicating more fully and\n freely in Social Media while rallying a Web 2.0 content boom, the inner\n dynamics of such a creative explosion must be studied more closely. What\n motivates those who join this movement and what future will they create?\n A key fact is that a superabundance of community respect and social\n capital are being accumulated by those who share. The key motivator of\n Social Media and the core spirit of Web 2.0 is a mind switch called\n Sharism. Sharism suggests a re-orientation of personal values. We see it\n in User Generated Content. It is the pledge of Creative Commons. It is\n in the plans of future-oriented cultural initiatives. Sharism is also a\n mental practice that anyone can try, a social-psychological attitude to", "also be the gatekeepers of your rights. Even if you are a traditional\n copyright holder, this sounds ideal.\nFurthermore, by realizing all the immediate and emergent rewards that\n can be had by sharing, you may eventually find that copyright and “All\n Rights Reserved” are far from your mind. You will enjoy sharing too much\n to worry about who is keeping a copy. The new economic formula is, the\n more people remix your works, the higher the return.\nI want to point out that Sharism is not Communism, nor Socialism. As for\n those die- hard Communists we know, they have often abused people’s\n sharing nature and forced them to give up their rights, and their\n property. Socialism, that tender Communism, in our experience also\n lacked respect for these rights. Under these systems, the state owns all", "one choice could easily snowball into more creations along the sharing\n path, from people at key nodes in the network who are all as passionate\n about creating and sharing as you are. After many iterative rounds of\n development, a large creative work may spring from your choice to share.\n Of course, you will get the credit that you asked for, and deserve. And\n it’s okay to seek financial rewards. But you will in every case get\n something just as substantial: Happiness.\nThe more people who create in the spirit of Sharism, the easier it will\n be to attain well- balanced and equitable Social Media that is woven by\n people themselves. Media won’t be controlled by any single person but\n will rely on the even distribution of social networking. These “Shaeros”\n (Sharing Heroes) will naturally become the opinion leaders in the first", "transform a wide and isolated world into a super-smart Social Brain.\nThe Neuron Doctrine\nSharism is encoded in the Human Genome. Although eclipsed by the many\n pragmatisms of daily life, the theory of Sharism finds basis in\n neuroscience and its study of the working model of the human brain.\n Although we can’t entirely say how the brain works as a whole, we do\n have a model of the functional mechanism of the nervous system and its\n neurons. A neuron is not a simple organic cell, but a very powerful,\n electrically excitable biological processor. Groups of neurons form\n vastly interconnected networks, which, by changing the strength of the\n synapses between cells, can process information, and learn. A neuron, by\n sharing chemical signals with its neighbors, can be integrated into more", "Non-sharing culture misleads us with its absolute separation of Private\n and Public space. It makes creative action a binary choice between\n public and private, open and closed. This creates a gap in the spectrum\n of knowledge. Although this gap has the potential to become a valuable\n creative space, concerns about privacy make this gap hard to fill. We\n shouldn’t be surprised that, to be safe, most people keep their sharing\n private and stay “closed.” They may fear the Internet creates a\n potential for abuse that they can’t fight alone. However, the paradox\n is: The less you share, the less power you have.\nNew Technologies and the Rise of Sharism\nLet’s track back to 1999, when there were only a few hundred pioneer\n bloggers around the world, and no more than ten times that many readers", "following each blog. Human history is always so: something important was\n happening, but the rest of the world hadn’t yet realized it. The shift\n toward easy-to-use online publishing triggered a soft revolution in just\n five years. People made a quick and easy transition from reading blogs,\n to leaving comments and taking part in online conversations, and then to\n the sudden realization that they should become bloggers themselves. More\n bloggers created more readers, and more readers made more blogs. The\n revolution was viral.\nBloggers generate lively and timely information on the Internet, and\n connect to each other with RSS, hyperlinks, comments, trackbacks and\n quotes. The small-scale granularity of the content can fill discrete\n gaps in experience and thus record a new human history. Once you become\n a blogger, once you have accumulated so much social capital in such a", "property. Under Sharism, you can keep ownership, if you want. But I like\n to share. And this is how I choose to spread ideas, and prosperity\nSharism is totally based on your own consensus. It’s not a very hard\n concept to understand, especially since copyleft movements like the Free\n Software Foundation and Creative Commons have been around for years.\n These movements are redefining a more flexible spectrum of licenses for\n both developers and end-users to tag their works. Because the new\n licenses can be recognized by either humans or machines, it’s becoming\n easier to re-share those works in new online ecosystems.\nThe Spirit of the Web, a Social Brain\nSharism is the Spirit of the Age of Web 2.0. It has the consistency of a\n naturalized Epistemology and modernized Axiology, but also promises the", "wave of Social Media. However, these media rights will belong to\n everyone. You yourself can be both producer and consumer in such a\n system.\nSharism Safeguards Your Rights\nStill, many questions will be raised about Sharism as an initiative in\n new age. The main one is copyright. One concern is that any loss of\n control over copyrighted content will lead to noticeable deficits in\n personal wealth, or just loss of control. 5 years ago, I would have said\n that this was a possibility. But things are changing today. The sharing\n environment is more protected than you might think. Many new social\n applications make it easy to set terms-of-use along your sharing path.\n Any infringement of those terms will be challenged not just by the law,\n but by your community. Your audience, who benefit form your sharing, can", "small site, it’s hard to stop. We can’t explain this fact with a theory\n of addiction. It’s an impulse to share. It’s the energy of the memes\n that want to be passed from mouth to mouth and mind to mind. It’s more\n than just E-mail. It’s Sharism.\nBloggers are always keen to keep the social context of their posts in\n mind, by asking themselves, “Who is going to see this?” Bloggers are\n agile in adjusting their tone−and privacy settings−to advance ideas and\n stay out of trouble. It’s not self-censorship, but a sense of smart\n expression. But once blogs reached the tipping point, they expanded into\n the blogosphere. This required a more delicate social networking system\n and content- sharing architecture. But people now understand that they", "Then, if anything interesting comes your way: Share It! The easiest way\n to both start and keep sharing is by using different kinds of social\n software applications. Your first meme you want to share may be small,\n but you can amplify it with new technologies. Enlist some people from\n your network and invite them into a new social application. At first it\n might be hard to feel the gains of Sharism. The true test then is to see\n if you can keep track of the feedback that you get from sharing. You\n will realize that almost all sharing activities will generate positive\n results. The happiness that this will obtain is only the most immediate\n reward. But there are others.\nThe first type of reward that you will get comes in the form of\n comments. Then you know you’ve provoked interest, appreciation,\n excitement. The second reward is access to all the other stuff being", "you can engineer a feedback loop of happiness, which will help you\n generate even more ideas in return. It’s a kind of butterfly- effect, as\n the small creative energy you spend will eventually return to make you,\n and the world, more creative.\nHowever, daily decisions for most adults are quite low in creative\n productivity, if only because they’ve switched off their sharing paths.\n People generally like to share what they create, but in a culture that\n tells them to be protective of their ideas, people start to believe in\n the danger of sharing. Then Sharism will be degraded in their mind and\n not encouraged in their society. But if we can encourage someone to\n share, her sharing paths will stay open. Sharism will be kept in her\n mind as a memory and an instinct. If in the future she faces a creative\n choice, her choice will be, “Share.”", "can have better control over a wide spectrum of relationships. Like how\n Flickr allows people to share their photos widely, but safely. The\n checkbox-based privacy of Flickr may seem unfamiliar to a new user, but\n you can use it to toy with the mind-switches of Sharism. By checking a\n box we can choose to share or not to share. From my observations, I have\n seen photographers on Flickr become more open to sharing, while\n retaining flexible choices.\nThe rapid emergence of Social Applications that can communicate and\n cooperate, by allowing people to output content from one service to\n another, is letting users pump their memes into a pipeline-like\n ecosystem. This interconnectedness allows memes to travel along multiple\n online social networks, and potentially reach a huge audience. As a", "meaningful patterns that keep the neuron active and alive. Moreover,\n such a simple logic can be iterated and amplified, since all neurons\n work on a similar principle of connecting and sharing. Originally, the\n brain is quite open. A neural network exists to share activity and\n information, and I believe this model of the brain should inspire ideas\n and decisions about human networks.\nThus, our brain supports sharing in its very system-nature. This has\n profound implications for the creative process. Whenever you have an\n intention to create, you will find it easier to generate more creative\n ideas if you keep the sharing process firmly in mind. The\n idea-forming-process is not linear, but more like an avalanche of\n amplifications along the thinking path. It moves with the momentum of a\n creative snowball. If your internal cognitive system encourages sharing,", "shared by friends in your network. Since you know and trust them, you\n will be that much more interested in what they have to share. Already,\n the return is a multiple of the small meme you first shared. But the\n third type of return is more dramatic still. Anything you share can be\n forwarded, circulated and republished via other people’s networks. This\n cascade effect can spread your work to the networked masses.\nImprovements in social software are making the speed of dissemination as\n fast as a mouse-click. You should get to know the Sharism-You. You’re\n about to become popular, and fast\nThis brings us to the fourth and final type of return. It has a meaning\n not only for you, but for the whole of society. If you so choose, you\n may allow others to create derivative works from what you share. This" ] ]
train	24247	[ "What is Prantera referring to when he mentions 'Quentin'?", "What is Prantera referring to when he mentions a 'mouthpiece'?", "What is Prantera referring to when he mentions a 'pressure cooker'?", "What central theme of the story is revealed in the conclusion?", "How does Prantera initially gain trust with Temple-Tracy?", "Why are Reston-Farrell and Brett-James not willing to assassinate Temple-Tracy themselves?", "All of the following motivate Prantera to accept the proposal from Brett-James and Reston-Ferrell EXCEPT:" ]	[ [ "a target", "an asylum", "an associate", "a prison" ], [ "a lawyer", "a weapon", "a disguise", "a crime boss" ], [ "a courtroom", "an interrogation room", "a mental asylum", "a set-up" ], [ "The more good you do for others, the more opportunity for them to criticize you", "If someone is willing to take a life, you cannot trust them to make moral decisions", "When cornered, threatened creatures will do anything to survive", "The prosperity of a nation is more important than any individual life" ], [ "Giving him information about his opponents", "Speaking to him in Amer-English", "Revealing his potential assassins", "Giving him a 1925 Old Calendar" ], [ "They would feel such guilt after taking a fellow human's life as to cause them long-lasting anguish", "They are fearful of Temple-Tracy's followers using him as a martyr to strengthen their cause", "They are afraid of what might happen if they are forced to receive psychiatric treatment", "They do not possess hatred in their genetic sequence and are incapable of committing vile acts" ], [ "He does not need to worry about Temple-Tracy's followers seeking revenge", "He does not have to fear being arrested by the police", "He is unlikely to encounter someone with weapons during the job", "He does not have a chance of being sent back to 1960" ] ]	[ 4, 1, 3, 2, 2, 4, 1 ]	[ 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "Joe Prantera looked at the other\n expressionlessly. Maybe the old duck\n was one of these foreign doctors, like.\n\n\n The newcomer said, \"You have undoubtedly\n been through a most harrowing\n experience. If you have any\n untoward symptoms, possibly I could\n be of assistance.\"\n\n\n Joe couldn't figure out how he\n stood. For one thing, there should\n have been some kind of police guard.\n\n\n The other said, \"Perhaps a bit of\n stimulant?\"\n\n\n Joe said flatly, \"I wanta lawyer.\"\n\n\n The newcomer frowned at him. \"A\n lawyer?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not sayin' nothin'. Not until I\n get a mouthpiece.\"\n\n\n The newcomer started off on another\n tack. \"My name is Lawrence\n Reston-Farrell. If I am not mistaken,\n you are Joseph Salviati-Prantera.\"", "Joe Prantera had never been exposed\n to the concept of time travel.\n He had simply never associated with\n anyone who had ever even remotely\n considered such an idea. Now he said,\n \"You mean, like, I been asleep all\n that time?\"\n\n\n \"Not exactly,\" Brett-James said,\n frowning.\n\n\n Reston-Farrell said, \"Suffice to say,\n you are now one hundred and seventy-three\n years after the last memory you\n have.\"\n\n\n Joe Prantera's mind suddenly reverted\n to those last memories and his\n eyes narrowed dangerously. He felt\n suddenly at bay. He said, \"Maybe\n you guys better let me in on what's\n this all about.\"\n\n\n Reston-Farrell said, \"Mr. Prantera,\n we have brought you from your era\n to perform a task for us.\"", "He said, \"O.K. See you guys later.\"\n He left them and entered the building.\n\n\n An elevator—he still wasn't used\n to their speed in this era—whooshed\n him to the penthouse duplex occupied\n by Citizen Howard Temple-Tracy.\n\n\n There were two persons in the reception\n room but they left on Joe's\n arrival, without bothering to look at\n him more than glancingly.\n\n\n He spotted the screen immediately\n and went over and stood before it.\n\n\n The screen lit and revealed a\n heavy-set, dour of countenance man\n seated at a desk. He looked into Joe\n Prantera's face, scowled and said\n something.\n\n\n Joe said, \"Joseph Salviati-Prantera\n to interview Citizen Howard Temple-Tracy.\"\n\n\n The other's shaggy eyebrows rose.\n \"Indeed,\" he said. \"In Amer-English?\"", "He was in, he thought, a hospital\n and his first reaction was to think,\nThis here California. Everything different.\nThen his second thought was\nSomething went wrong. Big Louis, he\n ain't going to like this.\nHe brought his thinking to the\n present. So far as he could remember,\n he hadn't completely pulled the trigger.\n That at least meant that whatever\n the rap was it wouldn't be too\n tough. With luck, the syndicate would\n get him off with a couple of years at\n Quentin.\n\n\n A door slid open in the wall in a\n way that Joe had never seen a door\n operate before.\nThis here California.\nThe clothes on the newcomer were\n wrong, too. For the first time, Joe\n Prantera began to sense an alienness—a\n something that was awfully\n wrong.\n\n\n The other spoke precisely and\n slowly, the way a highly educated man\n speaks a language which he reads\n and writes fluently but has little occasion\n to practice vocally. \"You have recovered?\"", "Joe Prantera had been rocking\n with the mental blows he had been\n assimilating, but this was the final\n haymaker. He was stuck in this\n squaresville of a world.\nJoe Prantera on a job was thorough.\n\n\n Careful, painstaking, competent.\n\n\n He spent the first three days of his\n life in the year 2133 getting the feel\n of things. Brett-James and Reston-Farrell\n had been appointed to work\n with him. Joe didn't meet any of the\n others who belonged to the group\n which had taken the measures to\n bring him from the past. He didn't\n want to meet them. The fewer persons\n involved, the better.", "\"That is why we brought you here,\n Mr. Prantera. You were ... you\n are, a professional assassin.\"\n\n\n \"Hey, wait a minute, now.\"\n\n\n Reston-Farrell went on, ignoring\n the interruption. \"There is small\n point in denying your calling. Pray\n remember that at the point when we\n ...\ntransported\nyou, you were about\n to dispose of a contemporary named\n Alphonso Annunziata-Rossi. A citizen,\n I might say, whose demise would\n probably have caused small dismay to\n society.\"\n\n\n They had him pegged all right. Joe\n said, \"But why me? Why don't you\n get some heavy from now? Somebody\n knows the ropes these days.\"\n\n\n Brett-James said, \"Mr. Prantera,\n there are no professional assassins in\n this age, nor have there been for over\n a century and a half.\"", "Brett-James said to Joe Prantera,\n \"Had we not, ah, taken you at the\n time we did, do you realize what\n would have happened?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Joe grunted. \"I woulda let\n old Al Rossi have it right in the guts,\n five times. Then I woulda took the\n plane back to Chi.\"\n\n\n Brett-James was shaking his head.\n \"No. You see, by coincidence, a police\n squad car was coming down the\n street just at that moment to arrest\n Mr. Rossi. You would have been apprehended.\n As I understand Californian\n law of the period, your life\n would have been forfeit, Mr. Prantera.\"\n\n\n Joe winced. It didn't occur to him\n to doubt their word.", "He was dressed in a hospital-type\n nightgown. He looked down at it and\n snorted and made his way over to the\n closet. It opened on his approach, the\n door sliding back into the wall in\n much the same manner as the room's\n door had opened for Reston-Farrell.\n\n\n Joe Prantera scowled and said,\n \"These ain't my clothes.\"\n\n\n \"No, I am afraid not.\"\n\n\n \"You think I'd be seen dead wearing\n this stuff? What is this, some religious\n crackpot hospital?\"\n\n\n Reston-Farrell said, \"I am afraid,\n Mr. Salviati-Prantera, that these are\n the only garments available. I suggest\n you look out the window there.\"", "\"Yes,\" Brett-James said evenly.\n\n\n \"Well then, figure something else.\n You think I'm stupid?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Prantera,\" Dr. Reston-Farrell\n said, \"there has been as much progress\n in the field of psychiatry in the\n past two centuries as there has in\n any other. Your treatment would be\n brief and painless, believe me.\"\n\n\n Joe said coldly, \"And what happens\n to you guys? How do you know I\n won't rat on you?\"\n\n\n Brett-James said gently, \"The moment\n after you have accomplished\n your mission, we plan to turn ourselves\n over to the nearest institution\n to have determined whether or not\n we also need therapy.\"\n\n\n \"Now I'm beginning to wonder\n about you guys,\" Joe said. \"Look, all\n over again, what'd'ya wanta give it to\n this guy for?\"", "Joe gave him a long, chill look\n and then stepped to the window. He\n couldn't figure the other. Unless he\n was a fruitcake. Maybe he was in\n some kind of pressure cooker and\n this was one of the fruitcakes.\n\n\n He looked out, however, not on the\n lawns and walks of a sanitarium but\n upon a wide boulevard of what was\n obviously a populous city.\n\n\n And for a moment again, Joe Prantera\n felt the depths of nausea.\n\n\n This was not his world.\n\n\n He stared for a long, long moment.\n The cars didn't even have wheels, he\n noted dully. He turned slowly and\n faced the older man.\n\n\n Reston-Farrell said compassionately,\n \"Try this, it's excellent cognac.\"\n\n\n Joe Prantera stared at him, said finally,\n flatly, \"What's it all about?\"", "\"See here, Mr. Prantera,\" Brett-James\n said softly. \"We no longer have\n capital punishment, you must realize.\"\n\n\n \"O.K. I still don't wanta get caught.\n What\nis\nthe rap these days, huh?\"\n Joe scowled. \"You said they didn't\n have no jails any more.\"\n\n\n \"This is difficult for you to understand,\n I imagine,\" Reston-Farrell told\n him, \"but, you see, we no longer punish\n people in this era.\"\n\n\n That took a long, unbelieving moment\n to sink in. \"You mean, like, no\n matter what they do? That's crazy.\n Everybody'd be running around giving\n it to everybody else.\"", "Joe stared at him, and then at the\n other. He couldn't believe he was getting\n through to them. Or, at least,\n that they were to him.\n\n\n Finally he said, \"If I get this, you\n want me to do a job for you.\"\n\n\n \"That is correct.\"\n\n\n Joe said, \"You guys know the kind\n of jobs I do?\"\n\n\n \"That is correct.\"\n\n\n \"Like hell you do. You think I'm\n stupid? I never even seen you before.\"\n Joe Prantera came abruptly to\n his feet. \"I'm gettin' outta here.\"\n\n\n For the second time, Reston-Farrell\n said, \"Where would you go, Mr.\n Prantera?\"", "Joe glared at him. Then sat down\n again, as abruptly as he'd arisen.\n\"Let's start all over again. I got this\n straight, you brought me, some\n screwy way, all the way ... here.\n O.K., I'll buy that. I seen what it looks\n like out that window—\" The real\n comprehension was seeping through\n to him even as he talked. \"Everybody\n I know, Jessie, Tony, the Kid, Big\n Louis, everybody, they're dead. Even\n Big Louis.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Brett-James said, his voice\n soft. \"They are all dead, Mr. Prantera.\n Their children are all dead, and their\n grandchildren.\"\n\n\n The two men of the future said\n nothing more for long minutes while\n Joe Prantera's mind whirled its confusion.\n\n\n Finally he said, \"What's this bit\n about you wanting me to give it to\n some guy.\"", "\"Well, then do it yourself.\" Joe\n Prantera's irritation over this whole\n complicated mess was growing. And\n already he was beginning to long for\n the things he knew—for Jessie and\n Tony and the others, for his favorite\n bar, for the lasagne down at Papa\n Giovanni's. Right now he could have\n welcomed a calling down at the hands\n of Big Louis.\n\n\n Reston-Farrell had come to his feet\n and walked to one of the large room's\n windows. He looked out, as though\n unseeing. Then, his back turned, he\n said, \"We have tried, but it is simply\n not in us, Mr. Prantera.\"\n\n\n \"You mean you're yella?\"\n\n\n \"No, if by that you mean afraid. It\n is simply not within us to take the\n life of a fellow creature—not to speak\n of a fellow man.\"", "And at that moment, the universe\n caved inward upon Joseph Marie\n Prantera.\n\n\n There was nausea and nausea upon\n nausea.\n\n\n There was a falling through all\n space and through all time. There was\n doubling and twisting and twitching\n of every muscle and nerve.\n\n\n There was pain, horror and tumultuous\n fear.\n\n\n And he came out of it as quickly\n and completely as he'd gone in.", "The doctor nodded at the validity\n of the question. \"Mr. Prantera,\nHomo\n sapiens\nis a unique animal. Physically\n he matures at approximately the age\n of thirteen. However, mental maturity\n and adjustment is often not fully\n realized until thirty or even more.\n Indeed, it is sometimes never\n achieved. Before such maturity is\n reached, our youth are susceptible to\n romantic appeal. Nationalism, chauvinism,\n racism, the supposed glory of\n the military, all seem romantic to the\n immature. They rebel at the orderliness\n of present society. They seek entertainment\n in excitement. Citizen\n Temple-Tracy is aware of this and\n finds his recruits among the young.\"\n\n\n \"O.K., so this guy is dangerous.\n You want him knocked off before he\n screws everything up. But the way\n things are, there's no way of making\n a get. So you'll have to get some other\n patsy. Not me.\"", "\"I am afraid you have no alternative,\"\n Brett-James said gently. \"Without\n us, what will you do? Mr. Prantera,\n you do not even speak the language.\"\n\n\n \"What'd'ya mean? I don't understand\n summa the big words you eggheads\n use, but I get by O.K.\"\n\n\n Brett-James said, \"Amer-English is\n no longer the language spoken by the\n man in the street, Mr. Prantera. Only\n students of such subjects any longer\n speak such tongues as Amer-English,\n French, Russian or the many others\n that once confused the race with\n their limitations as a means of communication.\"", "The doctor said, \"We explained\n the other day, Mr. Prantera. Citizen\n Howard Temple-Tracy is a dangerous,\n atavistic, evil genius. We are\n afraid for our institutions if his plans\n are allowed to mature.\"\n\n\n \"Well if you got things so good,\n everybody's got it made, like, who'd\n listen to him?\"", "Joe snapped: \"Everything you guys\n say sounds crazy. Let's start all over\n again.\"\n\n\n Brett-James said, \"Let me do it,\n Lawrence.\" He turned his eyes to Joe.\n \"Mr. Prantera, in your own era, did\n you ever consider the future?\"\n\n\n Joe looked at him blankly.\n\n\n \"In your day you were confronted\n with national and international, problems.\n Just as we are today and just as\n nations were a century or a millennium\n ago.\"\n\n\n \"Sure, O.K., so we had problems. I\n know whatcha mean—like wars, and\n depressions and dictators and like\n that.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, like that,\" Brett-James\n nodded.", "\"O.K., O.K.,\" Joe Prantera growled.\n \"So everybody's got it made. What I\n wanta know is what's all this about\n me giving it ta somebody? If everything's\n so great, how come you want\n me to knock this guy off?\"\n\n\n Reston-Farrell bent forward and\n thumped his right index finger twice\n on the table. \"The bacterium of hate—a\n new strain—has found the human\n race unprotected from its disease.\n We had thought our vaccines\n immunized us.\"\n\n\n \"What's that suppose to mean?\"\n\n\n Brett-James took up the ball again.\n \"Mr. Prantera, have you ever heard of\n Ghengis Khan, of Tamerlane, Alexander,\n Caesar?\"\n\n\n Joe Prantera scowled at him emptily.\n\n\n \"Or, more likely, of Napoleon, Hitler,\n Stalin?\"" ], [ "Joe Prantera looked at the other\n expressionlessly. Maybe the old duck\n was one of these foreign doctors, like.\n\n\n The newcomer said, \"You have undoubtedly\n been through a most harrowing\n experience. If you have any\n untoward symptoms, possibly I could\n be of assistance.\"\n\n\n Joe couldn't figure out how he\n stood. For one thing, there should\n have been some kind of police guard.\n\n\n The other said, \"Perhaps a bit of\n stimulant?\"\n\n\n Joe said flatly, \"I wanta lawyer.\"\n\n\n The newcomer frowned at him. \"A\n lawyer?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not sayin' nothin'. Not until I\n get a mouthpiece.\"\n\n\n The newcomer started off on another\n tack. \"My name is Lawrence\n Reston-Farrell. If I am not mistaken,\n you are Joseph Salviati-Prantera.\"", "He said, \"O.K. See you guys later.\"\n He left them and entered the building.\n\n\n An elevator—he still wasn't used\n to their speed in this era—whooshed\n him to the penthouse duplex occupied\n by Citizen Howard Temple-Tracy.\n\n\n There were two persons in the reception\n room but they left on Joe's\n arrival, without bothering to look at\n him more than glancingly.\n\n\n He spotted the screen immediately\n and went over and stood before it.\n\n\n The screen lit and revealed a\n heavy-set, dour of countenance man\n seated at a desk. He looked into Joe\n Prantera's face, scowled and said\n something.\n\n\n Joe said, \"Joseph Salviati-Prantera\n to interview Citizen Howard Temple-Tracy.\"\n\n\n The other's shaggy eyebrows rose.\n \"Indeed,\" he said. \"In Amer-English?\"", "\"Look, before I can give it to this\n guy I gotta know some place where\n he'll be at some time. Get it? Like Al\n Rossi. My finger, he works in Rossi's\n house, see? He lets me know every\n Wednesday night, eight o'clock, Al\n leaves the house all by hisself. O.K.,\n so I can make plans, like, to give it\n to him.\" Joe Prantera wound it up\n reasonably. \"You gotta have a finger.\"\n\n\n Brett-James said, \"Why not just go\n to Temple-Tracy's apartment and, ah,\n dispose of him?\"\n\n\n \"Jest walk in, eh? You think I'm\n stupid? How do I know how many\n witnesses hangin' around? How do I\n know if the guy's carryin' heat?\"\n\n\n \"Heat?\"", "\"I am afraid you have no alternative,\"\n Brett-James said gently. \"Without\n us, what will you do? Mr. Prantera,\n you do not even speak the language.\"\n\n\n \"What'd'ya mean? I don't understand\n summa the big words you eggheads\n use, but I get by O.K.\"\n\n\n Brett-James said, \"Amer-English is\n no longer the language spoken by the\n man in the street, Mr. Prantera. Only\n students of such subjects any longer\n speak such tongues as Amer-English,\n French, Russian or the many others\n that once confused the race with\n their limitations as a means of communication.\"", "He was in, he thought, a hospital\n and his first reaction was to think,\nThis here California. Everything different.\nThen his second thought was\nSomething went wrong. Big Louis, he\n ain't going to like this.\nHe brought his thinking to the\n present. So far as he could remember,\n he hadn't completely pulled the trigger.\n That at least meant that whatever\n the rap was it wouldn't be too\n tough. With luck, the syndicate would\n get him off with a couple of years at\n Quentin.\n\n\n A door slid open in the wall in a\n way that Joe had never seen a door\n operate before.\nThis here California.\nThe clothes on the newcomer were\n wrong, too. For the first time, Joe\n Prantera began to sense an alienness—a\n something that was awfully\n wrong.\n\n\n The other spoke precisely and\n slowly, the way a highly educated man\n speaks a language which he reads\n and writes fluently but has little occasion\n to practice vocally. \"You have recovered?\"", "\"That is why we brought you here,\n Mr. Prantera. You were ... you\n are, a professional assassin.\"\n\n\n \"Hey, wait a minute, now.\"\n\n\n Reston-Farrell went on, ignoring\n the interruption. \"There is small\n point in denying your calling. Pray\n remember that at the point when we\n ...\ntransported\nyou, you were about\n to dispose of a contemporary named\n Alphonso Annunziata-Rossi. A citizen,\n I might say, whose demise would\n probably have caused small dismay to\n society.\"\n\n\n They had him pegged all right. Joe\n said, \"But why me? Why don't you\n get some heavy from now? Somebody\n knows the ropes these days.\"\n\n\n Brett-James said, \"Mr. Prantera,\n there are no professional assassins in\n this age, nor have there been for over\n a century and a half.\"", "Brett-James said to Joe Prantera,\n \"Had we not, ah, taken you at the\n time we did, do you realize what\n would have happened?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Joe grunted. \"I woulda let\n old Al Rossi have it right in the guts,\n five times. Then I woulda took the\n plane back to Chi.\"\n\n\n Brett-James was shaking his head.\n \"No. You see, by coincidence, a police\n squad car was coming down the\n street just at that moment to arrest\n Mr. Rossi. You would have been apprehended.\n As I understand Californian\n law of the period, your life\n would have been forfeit, Mr. Prantera.\"\n\n\n Joe winced. It didn't occur to him\n to doubt their word.", "\"Yes,\" Brett-James said evenly.\n\n\n \"Well then, figure something else.\n You think I'm stupid?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Prantera,\" Dr. Reston-Farrell\n said, \"there has been as much progress\n in the field of psychiatry in the\n past two centuries as there has in\n any other. Your treatment would be\n brief and painless, believe me.\"\n\n\n Joe said coldly, \"And what happens\n to you guys? How do you know I\n won't rat on you?\"\n\n\n Brett-James said gently, \"The moment\n after you have accomplished\n your mission, we plan to turn ourselves\n over to the nearest institution\n to have determined whether or not\n we also need therapy.\"\n\n\n \"Now I'm beginning to wonder\n about you guys,\" Joe said. \"Look, all\n over again, what'd'ya wanta give it to\n this guy for?\"", "Joe Prantera had been rocking\n with the mental blows he had been\n assimilating, but this was the final\n haymaker. He was stuck in this\n squaresville of a world.\nJoe Prantera on a job was thorough.\n\n\n Careful, painstaking, competent.\n\n\n He spent the first three days of his\n life in the year 2133 getting the feel\n of things. Brett-James and Reston-Farrell\n had been appointed to work\n with him. Joe didn't meet any of the\n others who belonged to the group\n which had taken the measures to\n bring him from the past. He didn't\n want to meet them. The fewer persons\n involved, the better.", "The doctor nodded at the validity\n of the question. \"Mr. Prantera,\nHomo\n sapiens\nis a unique animal. Physically\n he matures at approximately the age\n of thirteen. However, mental maturity\n and adjustment is often not fully\n realized until thirty or even more.\n Indeed, it is sometimes never\n achieved. Before such maturity is\n reached, our youth are susceptible to\n romantic appeal. Nationalism, chauvinism,\n racism, the supposed glory of\n the military, all seem romantic to the\n immature. They rebel at the orderliness\n of present society. They seek entertainment\n in excitement. Citizen\n Temple-Tracy is aware of this and\n finds his recruits among the young.\"\n\n\n \"O.K., so this guy is dangerous.\n You want him knocked off before he\n screws everything up. But the way\n things are, there's no way of making\n a get. So you'll have to get some other\n patsy. Not me.\"", "Joe Prantera had never been exposed\n to the concept of time travel.\n He had simply never associated with\n anyone who had ever even remotely\n considered such an idea. Now he said,\n \"You mean, like, I been asleep all\n that time?\"\n\n\n \"Not exactly,\" Brett-James said,\n frowning.\n\n\n Reston-Farrell said, \"Suffice to say,\n you are now one hundred and seventy-three\n years after the last memory you\n have.\"\n\n\n Joe Prantera's mind suddenly reverted\n to those last memories and his\n eyes narrowed dangerously. He felt\n suddenly at bay. He said, \"Maybe\n you guys better let me in on what's\n this all about.\"\n\n\n Reston-Farrell said, \"Mr. Prantera,\n we have brought you from your era\n to perform a task for us.\"", "The doctor said, \"We explained\n the other day, Mr. Prantera. Citizen\n Howard Temple-Tracy is a dangerous,\n atavistic, evil genius. We are\n afraid for our institutions if his plans\n are allowed to mature.\"\n\n\n \"Well if you got things so good,\n everybody's got it made, like, who'd\n listen to him?\"", "He was dressed in a hospital-type\n nightgown. He looked down at it and\n snorted and made his way over to the\n closet. It opened on his approach, the\n door sliding back into the wall in\n much the same manner as the room's\n door had opened for Reston-Farrell.\n\n\n Joe Prantera scowled and said,\n \"These ain't my clothes.\"\n\n\n \"No, I am afraid not.\"\n\n\n \"You think I'd be seen dead wearing\n this stuff? What is this, some religious\n crackpot hospital?\"\n\n\n Reston-Farrell said, \"I am afraid,\n Mr. Salviati-Prantera, that these are\n the only garments available. I suggest\n you look out the window there.\"", "Joe nodded.\n\n\n \"Enter,\" the other said.\n\n\n A door had slid open on the other\n side of the room. Joe walked through\n it and into what was obviously an office.\n Citizen Temple-Tracy sat at a\n desk. There was only one other chair\n in the room. Joe Prantera ignored it\n and remained standing.\n\n\n Citizen Temple-Tracy said, \"What\n can I do for you?\"\n\n\n Joe looked at him for a long, long\n moment. Then he reached down to\n his belt and brought forth the .45\n automatic. He moistened his lips.\n\n\n Joe said softly, \"You know what\n this here is?\"\n\n\n Temple-Tracy stared at the weapon.\n \"It's a handgun, circa, I would\n say, about 1925 Old Calendar. What\n in the world are you doing with it?\"", "\"Well, then do it yourself.\" Joe\n Prantera's irritation over this whole\n complicated mess was growing. And\n already he was beginning to long for\n the things he knew—for Jessie and\n Tony and the others, for his favorite\n bar, for the lasagne down at Papa\n Giovanni's. Right now he could have\n welcomed a calling down at the hands\n of Big Louis.\n\n\n Reston-Farrell had come to his feet\n and walked to one of the large room's\n windows. He looked out, as though\n unseeing. Then, his back turned, he\n said, \"We have tried, but it is simply\n not in us, Mr. Prantera.\"\n\n\n \"You mean you're yella?\"\n\n\n \"No, if by that you mean afraid. It\n is simply not within us to take the\n life of a fellow creature—not to speak\n of a fellow man.\"", "Joe stared at him, and then at the\n other. He couldn't believe he was getting\n through to them. Or, at least,\n that they were to him.\n\n\n Finally he said, \"If I get this, you\n want me to do a job for you.\"\n\n\n \"That is correct.\"\n\n\n Joe said, \"You guys know the kind\n of jobs I do?\"\n\n\n \"That is correct.\"\n\n\n \"Like hell you do. You think I'm\n stupid? I never even seen you before.\"\n Joe Prantera came abruptly to\n his feet. \"I'm gettin' outta here.\"\n\n\n For the second time, Reston-Farrell\n said, \"Where would you go, Mr.\n Prantera?\"", "Joe glared at him. Then sat down\n again, as abruptly as he'd arisen.\n\"Let's start all over again. I got this\n straight, you brought me, some\n screwy way, all the way ... here.\n O.K., I'll buy that. I seen what it looks\n like out that window—\" The real\n comprehension was seeping through\n to him even as he talked. \"Everybody\n I know, Jessie, Tony, the Kid, Big\n Louis, everybody, they're dead. Even\n Big Louis.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Brett-James said, his voice\n soft. \"They are all dead, Mr. Prantera.\n Their children are all dead, and their\n grandchildren.\"\n\n\n The two men of the future said\n nothing more for long minutes while\n Joe Prantera's mind whirled its confusion.\n\n\n Finally he said, \"What's this bit\n about you wanting me to give it to\n some guy.\"", "\"See here, Mr. Prantera,\" Brett-James\n said softly. \"We no longer have\n capital punishment, you must realize.\"\n\n\n \"O.K. I still don't wanta get caught.\n What\nis\nthe rap these days, huh?\"\n Joe scowled. \"You said they didn't\n have no jails any more.\"\n\n\n \"This is difficult for you to understand,\n I imagine,\" Reston-Farrell told\n him, \"but, you see, we no longer punish\n people in this era.\"\n\n\n That took a long, unbelieving moment\n to sink in. \"You mean, like, no\n matter what they do? That's crazy.\n Everybody'd be running around giving\n it to everybody else.\"", "Brett-James nodded to him, friendly,\n so far as Joe could see. He said\n gently, \"I think it would be Mr. Joseph\n Prantera, wouldn't it? The maternal\n linage was almost universally\n ignored.\" His voice too gave the impression\n he was speaking a language\n not usually on his tongue.\n\n\n Joe took an empty chair, hardly\n bothering to note its alien qualities.\n His body seemed to\nfit\ninto the piece\n of furniture, as though it had been\n molded to his order.\n\n\n Joe said, \"I think maybe I'll take\n that there drink, Doc.\"\n\n\n Reston-Farrell said, \"Of course,\"\n and then something else Joe didn't\n get. Whatever the something else\n was, a slot opened in the middle of\n the table and a glass, so clear of texture\n as to be all but invisible, was\n elevated. It contained possibly three\n ounces of golden fluid.", "\"You mean there's no place in the\n whole world where they talk American?\"\n Joe demanded, aghast.\nDr. Reston-Farrell controlled the\n car. Joe Prantera sat in the seat next\n to him and Warren Brett-James sat\n in the back. Joe had, tucked in his\n belt, a .45 caliber automatic, once displayed\n in a museum. It had been\n more easily procured than the ammunition\n to fit it, but that problem too\n had been solved.\n\n\n The others were nervous, obviously\n repelled by the very conception of\n what they had planned.\n\n\n Inwardly, Joe was amused. Now\n that they had got in the clutch, the\n others were on the verge of chickening\n out. He knew it wouldn't have\n taken much for them to cancel the\n project. It wasn't any answer though.\n If they allowed him to call it off today,\n they'd talk themselves into it\n again before the week was through." ], [ "Joe gave him a long, chill look\n and then stepped to the window. He\n couldn't figure the other. Unless he\n was a fruitcake. Maybe he was in\n some kind of pressure cooker and\n this was one of the fruitcakes.\n\n\n He looked out, however, not on the\n lawns and walks of a sanitarium but\n upon a wide boulevard of what was\n obviously a populous city.\n\n\n And for a moment again, Joe Prantera\n felt the depths of nausea.\n\n\n This was not his world.\n\n\n He stared for a long, long moment.\n The cars didn't even have wheels, he\n noted dully. He turned slowly and\n faced the older man.\n\n\n Reston-Farrell said compassionately,\n \"Try this, it's excellent cognac.\"\n\n\n Joe Prantera stared at him, said finally,\n flatly, \"What's it all about?\"", "Joe Prantera looked at the other\n expressionlessly. Maybe the old duck\n was one of these foreign doctors, like.\n\n\n The newcomer said, \"You have undoubtedly\n been through a most harrowing\n experience. If you have any\n untoward symptoms, possibly I could\n be of assistance.\"\n\n\n Joe couldn't figure out how he\n stood. For one thing, there should\n have been some kind of police guard.\n\n\n The other said, \"Perhaps a bit of\n stimulant?\"\n\n\n Joe said flatly, \"I wanta lawyer.\"\n\n\n The newcomer frowned at him. \"A\n lawyer?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not sayin' nothin'. Not until I\n get a mouthpiece.\"\n\n\n The newcomer started off on another\n tack. \"My name is Lawrence\n Reston-Farrell. If I am not mistaken,\n you are Joseph Salviati-Prantera.\"", "And at that moment, the universe\n caved inward upon Joseph Marie\n Prantera.\n\n\n There was nausea and nausea upon\n nausea.\n\n\n There was a falling through all\n space and through all time. There was\n doubling and twisting and twitching\n of every muscle and nerve.\n\n\n There was pain, horror and tumultuous\n fear.\n\n\n And he came out of it as quickly\n and completely as he'd gone in.", "He was in, he thought, a hospital\n and his first reaction was to think,\nThis here California. Everything different.\nThen his second thought was\nSomething went wrong. Big Louis, he\n ain't going to like this.\nHe brought his thinking to the\n present. So far as he could remember,\n he hadn't completely pulled the trigger.\n That at least meant that whatever\n the rap was it wouldn't be too\n tough. With luck, the syndicate would\n get him off with a couple of years at\n Quentin.\n\n\n A door slid open in the wall in a\n way that Joe had never seen a door\n operate before.\nThis here California.\nThe clothes on the newcomer were\n wrong, too. For the first time, Joe\n Prantera began to sense an alienness—a\n something that was awfully\n wrong.\n\n\n The other spoke precisely and\n slowly, the way a highly educated man\n speaks a language which he reads\n and writes fluently but has little occasion\n to practice vocally. \"You have recovered?\"", "Joe Prantera had been rocking\n with the mental blows he had been\n assimilating, but this was the final\n haymaker. He was stuck in this\n squaresville of a world.\nJoe Prantera on a job was thorough.\n\n\n Careful, painstaking, competent.\n\n\n He spent the first three days of his\n life in the year 2133 getting the feel\n of things. Brett-James and Reston-Farrell\n had been appointed to work\n with him. Joe didn't meet any of the\n others who belonged to the group\n which had taken the measures to\n bring him from the past. He didn't\n want to meet them. The fewer persons\n involved, the better.", "He said, \"O.K. See you guys later.\"\n He left them and entered the building.\n\n\n An elevator—he still wasn't used\n to their speed in this era—whooshed\n him to the penthouse duplex occupied\n by Citizen Howard Temple-Tracy.\n\n\n There were two persons in the reception\n room but they left on Joe's\n arrival, without bothering to look at\n him more than glancingly.\n\n\n He spotted the screen immediately\n and went over and stood before it.\n\n\n The screen lit and revealed a\n heavy-set, dour of countenance man\n seated at a desk. He looked into Joe\n Prantera's face, scowled and said\n something.\n\n\n Joe said, \"Joseph Salviati-Prantera\n to interview Citizen Howard Temple-Tracy.\"\n\n\n The other's shaggy eyebrows rose.\n \"Indeed,\" he said. \"In Amer-English?\"", "The doctor said, \"We explained\n the other day, Mr. Prantera. Citizen\n Howard Temple-Tracy is a dangerous,\n atavistic, evil genius. We are\n afraid for our institutions if his plans\n are allowed to mature.\"\n\n\n \"Well if you got things so good,\n everybody's got it made, like, who'd\n listen to him?\"", "\"Yes,\" Brett-James said evenly.\n\n\n \"Well then, figure something else.\n You think I'm stupid?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Prantera,\" Dr. Reston-Farrell\n said, \"there has been as much progress\n in the field of psychiatry in the\n past two centuries as there has in\n any other. Your treatment would be\n brief and painless, believe me.\"\n\n\n Joe said coldly, \"And what happens\n to you guys? How do you know I\n won't rat on you?\"\n\n\n Brett-James said gently, \"The moment\n after you have accomplished\n your mission, we plan to turn ourselves\n over to the nearest institution\n to have determined whether or not\n we also need therapy.\"\n\n\n \"Now I'm beginning to wonder\n about you guys,\" Joe said. \"Look, all\n over again, what'd'ya wanta give it to\n this guy for?\"", "\"I am afraid you have no alternative,\"\n Brett-James said gently. \"Without\n us, what will you do? Mr. Prantera,\n you do not even speak the language.\"\n\n\n \"What'd'ya mean? I don't understand\n summa the big words you eggheads\n use, but I get by O.K.\"\n\n\n Brett-James said, \"Amer-English is\n no longer the language spoken by the\n man in the street, Mr. Prantera. Only\n students of such subjects any longer\n speak such tongues as Amer-English,\n French, Russian or the many others\n that once confused the race with\n their limitations as a means of communication.\"", "Joe Prantera had never been exposed\n to the concept of time travel.\n He had simply never associated with\n anyone who had ever even remotely\n considered such an idea. Now he said,\n \"You mean, like, I been asleep all\n that time?\"\n\n\n \"Not exactly,\" Brett-James said,\n frowning.\n\n\n Reston-Farrell said, \"Suffice to say,\n you are now one hundred and seventy-three\n years after the last memory you\n have.\"\n\n\n Joe Prantera's mind suddenly reverted\n to those last memories and his\n eyes narrowed dangerously. He felt\n suddenly at bay. He said, \"Maybe\n you guys better let me in on what's\n this all about.\"\n\n\n Reston-Farrell said, \"Mr. Prantera,\n we have brought you from your era\n to perform a task for us.\"", "\"Well, then do it yourself.\" Joe\n Prantera's irritation over this whole\n complicated mess was growing. And\n already he was beginning to long for\n the things he knew—for Jessie and\n Tony and the others, for his favorite\n bar, for the lasagne down at Papa\n Giovanni's. Right now he could have\n welcomed a calling down at the hands\n of Big Louis.\n\n\n Reston-Farrell had come to his feet\n and walked to one of the large room's\n windows. He looked out, as though\n unseeing. Then, his back turned, he\n said, \"We have tried, but it is simply\n not in us, Mr. Prantera.\"\n\n\n \"You mean you're yella?\"\n\n\n \"No, if by that you mean afraid. It\n is simply not within us to take the\n life of a fellow creature—not to speak\n of a fellow man.\"", "\"O.K., O.K.,\" Joe Prantera growled.\n \"So everybody's got it made. What I\n wanta know is what's all this about\n me giving it ta somebody? If everything's\n so great, how come you want\n me to knock this guy off?\"\n\n\n Reston-Farrell bent forward and\n thumped his right index finger twice\n on the table. \"The bacterium of hate—a\n new strain—has found the human\n race unprotected from its disease.\n We had thought our vaccines\n immunized us.\"\n\n\n \"What's that suppose to mean?\"\n\n\n Brett-James took up the ball again.\n \"Mr. Prantera, have you ever heard of\n Ghengis Khan, of Tamerlane, Alexander,\n Caesar?\"\n\n\n Joe Prantera scowled at him emptily.\n\n\n \"Or, more likely, of Napoleon, Hitler,\n Stalin?\"", "\"See here, Mr. Prantera,\" Brett-James\n said softly. \"We no longer have\n capital punishment, you must realize.\"\n\n\n \"O.K. I still don't wanta get caught.\n What\nis\nthe rap these days, huh?\"\n Joe scowled. \"You said they didn't\n have no jails any more.\"\n\n\n \"This is difficult for you to understand,\n I imagine,\" Reston-Farrell told\n him, \"but, you see, we no longer punish\n people in this era.\"\n\n\n That took a long, unbelieving moment\n to sink in. \"You mean, like, no\n matter what they do? That's crazy.\n Everybody'd be running around giving\n it to everybody else.\"", "There was nothing else to do. Joe\n dressed, then followed him.\nIn the adjoining room was a circular\n table that would have accommodated\n a dozen persons. Two were\n seated there now, papers, books and\n soiled coffee cups before them. There\n had evidently been a long wait.\n\n\n Reston-Farrell, the one Joe had already\n met, was tall and drawn of face\n and with a chainsmoker's nervousness.\n The other was heavier and more\n at ease. They were both, Joe estimated,\n somewhere in their middle fifties.\n They both looked like docs. He\n wondered, all over again, if this was\n some kind of pressure cooker.\n\n\n But that didn't explain the view\n from the window.\n\n\n Reston-Farrell said, \"May I present\n my colleague, Citizen Warren Brett-James?\n Warren, this is our guest from\n ... from yesteryear, Mr. Joseph Salviati-Prantera.\"", "He was dressed in a hospital-type\n nightgown. He looked down at it and\n snorted and made his way over to the\n closet. It opened on his approach, the\n door sliding back into the wall in\n much the same manner as the room's\n door had opened for Reston-Farrell.\n\n\n Joe Prantera scowled and said,\n \"These ain't my clothes.\"\n\n\n \"No, I am afraid not.\"\n\n\n \"You think I'd be seen dead wearing\n this stuff? What is this, some religious\n crackpot hospital?\"\n\n\n Reston-Farrell said, \"I am afraid,\n Mr. Salviati-Prantera, that these are\n the only garments available. I suggest\n you look out the window there.\"", "Brett-James said to Joe Prantera,\n \"Had we not, ah, taken you at the\n time we did, do you realize what\n would have happened?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Joe grunted. \"I woulda let\n old Al Rossi have it right in the guts,\n five times. Then I woulda took the\n plane back to Chi.\"\n\n\n Brett-James was shaking his head.\n \"No. You see, by coincidence, a police\n squad car was coming down the\n street just at that moment to arrest\n Mr. Rossi. You would have been apprehended.\n As I understand Californian\n law of the period, your life\n would have been forfeit, Mr. Prantera.\"\n\n\n Joe winced. It didn't occur to him\n to doubt their word.", "The doctor nodded at the validity\n of the question. \"Mr. Prantera,\nHomo\n sapiens\nis a unique animal. Physically\n he matures at approximately the age\n of thirteen. However, mental maturity\n and adjustment is often not fully\n realized until thirty or even more.\n Indeed, it is sometimes never\n achieved. Before such maturity is\n reached, our youth are susceptible to\n romantic appeal. Nationalism, chauvinism,\n racism, the supposed glory of\n the military, all seem romantic to the\n immature. They rebel at the orderliness\n of present society. They seek entertainment\n in excitement. Citizen\n Temple-Tracy is aware of this and\n finds his recruits among the young.\"\n\n\n \"O.K., so this guy is dangerous.\n You want him knocked off before he\n screws everything up. But the way\n things are, there's no way of making\n a get. So you'll have to get some other\n patsy. Not me.\"", "\"That is why we brought you here,\n Mr. Prantera. You were ... you\n are, a professional assassin.\"\n\n\n \"Hey, wait a minute, now.\"\n\n\n Reston-Farrell went on, ignoring\n the interruption. \"There is small\n point in denying your calling. Pray\n remember that at the point when we\n ...\ntransported\nyou, you were about\n to dispose of a contemporary named\n Alphonso Annunziata-Rossi. A citizen,\n I might say, whose demise would\n probably have caused small dismay to\n society.\"\n\n\n They had him pegged all right. Joe\n said, \"But why me? Why don't you\n get some heavy from now? Somebody\n knows the ropes these days.\"\n\n\n Brett-James said, \"Mr. Prantera,\n there are no professional assassins in\n this age, nor have there been for over\n a century and a half.\"", "\"Look, before I can give it to this\n guy I gotta know some place where\n he'll be at some time. Get it? Like Al\n Rossi. My finger, he works in Rossi's\n house, see? He lets me know every\n Wednesday night, eight o'clock, Al\n leaves the house all by hisself. O.K.,\n so I can make plans, like, to give it\n to him.\" Joe Prantera wound it up\n reasonably. \"You gotta have a finger.\"\n\n\n Brett-James said, \"Why not just go\n to Temple-Tracy's apartment and, ah,\n dispose of him?\"\n\n\n \"Jest walk in, eh? You think I'm\n stupid? How do I know how many\n witnesses hangin' around? How do I\n know if the guy's carryin' heat?\"\n\n\n \"Heat?\"", "Joe stared at him, and then at the\n other. He couldn't believe he was getting\n through to them. Or, at least,\n that they were to him.\n\n\n Finally he said, \"If I get this, you\n want me to do a job for you.\"\n\n\n \"That is correct.\"\n\n\n Joe said, \"You guys know the kind\n of jobs I do?\"\n\n\n \"That is correct.\"\n\n\n \"Like hell you do. You think I'm\n stupid? I never even seen you before.\"\n Joe Prantera came abruptly to\n his feet. \"I'm gettin' outta here.\"\n\n\n For the second time, Reston-Farrell\n said, \"Where would you go, Mr.\n Prantera?\"" ], [ "Joe glared at him. Then sat down\n again, as abruptly as he'd arisen.\n\"Let's start all over again. I got this\n straight, you brought me, some\n screwy way, all the way ... here.\n O.K., I'll buy that. I seen what it looks\n like out that window—\" The real\n comprehension was seeping through\n to him even as he talked. \"Everybody\n I know, Jessie, Tony, the Kid, Big\n Louis, everybody, they're dead. Even\n Big Louis.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Brett-James said, his voice\n soft. \"They are all dead, Mr. Prantera.\n Their children are all dead, and their\n grandchildren.\"\n\n\n The two men of the future said\n nothing more for long minutes while\n Joe Prantera's mind whirled its confusion.\n\n\n Finally he said, \"What's this bit\n about you wanting me to give it to\n some guy.\"", "The heavy-set man paused a moment.\n \"Yes, like that,\" he repeated.\n \"That we confront you now indicates\n that the problems of your day were\n solved. Hadn't they been, the world\n most surely would have destroyed itself.\n Wars? Our pedagogues are hard\n put to convince their students that\n such ever existed. More than a century\n and a half ago our society eliminated\n the reasons for international\n conflict. For that matter,\" he added\n musingly, \"we eliminated most international\n boundaries. Depressions?\n Shortly after your own period, man\n awoke to the fact that he had achieved\n to the point where it was possible to\n produce an abundance for all with a", "And at that moment, the universe\n caved inward upon Joseph Marie\n Prantera.\n\n\n There was nausea and nausea upon\n nausea.\n\n\n There was a falling through all\n space and through all time. There was\n doubling and twisting and twitching\n of every muscle and nerve.\n\n\n There was pain, horror and tumultuous\n fear.\n\n\n And he came out of it as quickly\n and completely as he'd gone in.", "\"Yes,\" Brett-James said evenly.\n\n\n \"Well then, figure something else.\n You think I'm stupid?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Prantera,\" Dr. Reston-Farrell\n said, \"there has been as much progress\n in the field of psychiatry in the\n past two centuries as there has in\n any other. Your treatment would be\n brief and painless, believe me.\"\n\n\n Joe said coldly, \"And what happens\n to you guys? How do you know I\n won't rat on you?\"\n\n\n Brett-James said gently, \"The moment\n after you have accomplished\n your mission, we plan to turn ourselves\n over to the nearest institution\n to have determined whether or not\n we also need therapy.\"\n\n\n \"Now I'm beginning to wonder\n about you guys,\" Joe said. \"Look, all\n over again, what'd'ya wanta give it to\n this guy for?\"", "\"A gun, a gun. Ya think I'm stupid?\n I come to give it to him and he\n gives it to me instead.\"\n\n\n Dr. Reston-Farrell said, \"Howard\n Temple-Tracy lives alone. He customarily\n receives visitors every afternoon,\n largely potential followers. He\n is attempting to recruit members to\n an organization he is forming. It\n would be quite simple for you to\n enter his establishment and dispose\n of him. I assure you, he does not possess\n weapons.\"\n\n\n Joe was indignant. \"Just like that,\n eh?\" he said sarcastically. \"Then what\n happens? How do I get out of the\n building? Where's my get car parked?\n Where do I hide out? Where do I\n dump the heat?\"\n\n\n \"Dump the heat?\"\n\n\n \"Get rid of the gun. You want I\n should get caught with the gun on\n me? I'd wind up in the gas chamber\n so quick—\"", "He was in, he thought, a hospital\n and his first reaction was to think,\nThis here California. Everything different.\nThen his second thought was\nSomething went wrong. Big Louis, he\n ain't going to like this.\nHe brought his thinking to the\n present. So far as he could remember,\n he hadn't completely pulled the trigger.\n That at least meant that whatever\n the rap was it wouldn't be too\n tough. With luck, the syndicate would\n get him off with a couple of years at\n Quentin.\n\n\n A door slid open in the wall in a\n way that Joe had never seen a door\n operate before.\nThis here California.\nThe clothes on the newcomer were\n wrong, too. For the first time, Joe\n Prantera began to sense an alienness—a\n something that was awfully\n wrong.\n\n\n The other spoke precisely and\n slowly, the way a highly educated man\n speaks a language which he reads\n and writes fluently but has little occasion\n to practice vocally. \"You have recovered?\"", "The doctor nodded at the validity\n of the question. \"Mr. Prantera,\nHomo\n sapiens\nis a unique animal. Physically\n he matures at approximately the age\n of thirteen. However, mental maturity\n and adjustment is often not fully\n realized until thirty or even more.\n Indeed, it is sometimes never\n achieved. Before such maturity is\n reached, our youth are susceptible to\n romantic appeal. Nationalism, chauvinism,\n racism, the supposed glory of\n the military, all seem romantic to the\n immature. They rebel at the orderliness\n of present society. They seek entertainment\n in excitement. Citizen\n Temple-Tracy is aware of this and\n finds his recruits among the young.\"\n\n\n \"O.K., so this guy is dangerous.\n You want him knocked off before he\n screws everything up. But the way\n things are, there's no way of making\n a get. So you'll have to get some other\n patsy. Not me.\"", "The other put down the unaccepted\n glass. \"We were afraid first\n realization would be a shock to you,\"\n he said. \"My colleague is in the adjoining\n room. We will be glad to explain\n to you if you will join us there.\"\n\n\n \"I wanta get out of here,\" Joe said.\n\n\n \"Where would you go?\"\n\n\n The fear of police, of Al Rossi's\n vengeance, of the measures that\n might be taken by Big Louis on his\n failure, were now far away.\n\n\n Reston-Farrell had approached the\n door by which he had entered and it\n reopened for him. He went through\n it without looking back.", "Joe said, very slowly, \"Chief, in the\n line you're in these days you needa\n heavy around with wunna these. Otherwise,\n Chief, you're gunna wind up\n in some gutter with a lotta holes in\n you. What I'm doin', I'm askin' for a\n job. You need a good man knows how\n to handle wunna these, Chief.\"\n\n\n Citizen Howard Temple-Tracy\n eyed him appraisingly. \"Perhaps,\" he\n said, \"you are right at that. In the near\n future, I may well need an assistant\n knowledgeable in the field of violence.\n Tell me more about yourself.\n You surprise me considerably.\"", "\"Sure, Chief. It's kinda a long\n story, though. First off, I better tell\n you you got some bad enemies, Chief.\n Two guys special, named Brett-James\n and Doc Reston-Farrell. I think one\n of the first jobs I'm gunna hafta do\n for you, Chief, is to give it to those\n two.\"\nTHE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAnalog\nDecember\n 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.", "\"O.K., O.K.,\" Joe Prantera growled.\n \"So everybody's got it made. What I\n wanta know is what's all this about\n me giving it ta somebody? If everything's\n so great, how come you want\n me to knock this guy off?\"\n\n\n Reston-Farrell bent forward and\n thumped his right index finger twice\n on the table. \"The bacterium of hate—a\n new strain—has found the human\n race unprotected from its disease.\n We had thought our vaccines\n immunized us.\"\n\n\n \"What's that suppose to mean?\"\n\n\n Brett-James took up the ball again.\n \"Mr. Prantera, have you ever heard of\n Ghengis Khan, of Tamerlane, Alexander,\n Caesar?\"\n\n\n Joe Prantera scowled at him emptily.\n\n\n \"Or, more likely, of Napoleon, Hitler,\n Stalin?\"", "Brett-James said to Joe Prantera,\n \"Had we not, ah, taken you at the\n time we did, do you realize what\n would have happened?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Joe grunted. \"I woulda let\n old Al Rossi have it right in the guts,\n five times. Then I woulda took the\n plane back to Chi.\"\n\n\n Brett-James was shaking his head.\n \"No. You see, by coincidence, a police\n squad car was coming down the\n street just at that moment to arrest\n Mr. Rossi. You would have been apprehended.\n As I understand Californian\n law of the period, your life\n would have been forfeit, Mr. Prantera.\"\n\n\n Joe winced. It didn't occur to him\n to doubt their word.", "\"Well, then do it yourself.\" Joe\n Prantera's irritation over this whole\n complicated mess was growing. And\n already he was beginning to long for\n the things he knew—for Jessie and\n Tony and the others, for his favorite\n bar, for the lasagne down at Papa\n Giovanni's. Right now he could have\n welcomed a calling down at the hands\n of Big Louis.\n\n\n Reston-Farrell had come to his feet\n and walked to one of the large room's\n windows. He looked out, as though\n unseeing. Then, his back turned, he\n said, \"We have tried, but it is simply\n not in us, Mr. Prantera.\"\n\n\n \"You mean you're yella?\"\n\n\n \"No, if by that you mean afraid. It\n is simply not within us to take the\n life of a fellow creature—not to speak\n of a fellow man.\"", "Besides, already Joe was beginning\n to feel the comfortable, pleasurable,\n warm feeling that came to him on\n occasions like this.\n\n\n He said, \"You're sure this guy talks\n American, eh?\"\n\n\n Warren Brett-James said, \"Quite\n sure. He is a student of history.\"\n\n\n \"And he won't think it's funny I\n talk American to him, eh?\"\n\n\n \"He'll undoubtedly be intrigued.\"\n\n\n They pulled up before a large\n apartment building that overlooked\n the area once known as Wilmington.\n\n\n Joe was coolly efficient now. He\n pulled out the automatic, held it\n down below his knees and threw a\n shell into the barrel. He eased the\n hammer down, thumbed on the\n safety, stuck the weapon back in his\n belt and beneath the jacketlike garment\n he wore.", "Joe nodded.\n\n\n \"Enter,\" the other said.\n\n\n A door had slid open on the other\n side of the room. Joe walked through\n it and into what was obviously an office.\n Citizen Temple-Tracy sat at a\n desk. There was only one other chair\n in the room. Joe Prantera ignored it\n and remained standing.\n\n\n Citizen Temple-Tracy said, \"What\n can I do for you?\"\n\n\n Joe looked at him for a long, long\n moment. Then he reached down to\n his belt and brought forth the .45\n automatic. He moistened his lips.\n\n\n Joe said softly, \"You know what\n this here is?\"\n\n\n Temple-Tracy stared at the weapon.\n \"It's a handgun, circa, I would\n say, about 1925 Old Calendar. What\n in the world are you doing with it?\"", "Joe Prantera had been rocking\n with the mental blows he had been\n assimilating, but this was the final\n haymaker. He was stuck in this\n squaresville of a world.\nJoe Prantera on a job was thorough.\n\n\n Careful, painstaking, competent.\n\n\n He spent the first three days of his\n life in the year 2133 getting the feel\n of things. Brett-James and Reston-Farrell\n had been appointed to work\n with him. Joe didn't meet any of the\n others who belonged to the group\n which had taken the measures to\n bring him from the past. He didn't\n want to meet them. The fewer persons\n involved, the better.", "Joe stared at him, and then at the\n other. He couldn't believe he was getting\n through to them. Or, at least,\n that they were to him.\n\n\n Finally he said, \"If I get this, you\n want me to do a job for you.\"\n\n\n \"That is correct.\"\n\n\n Joe said, \"You guys know the kind\n of jobs I do?\"\n\n\n \"That is correct.\"\n\n\n \"Like hell you do. You think I'm\n stupid? I never even seen you before.\"\n Joe Prantera came abruptly to\n his feet. \"I'm gettin' outta here.\"\n\n\n For the second time, Reston-Farrell\n said, \"Where would you go, Mr.\n Prantera?\"", "\"The motivation for crime has\n been removed, Mr. Prantera,\" Reston-Farrell\n attempted to explain. \"A\n person who commits a violence\n against another is obviously in need\n of medical care. And, consequently,\n receives it.\"\n\n\n \"You mean, like, if I steal a car or\n something, they just take me to a\n doctor?\" Joe Prantera was unbelieving.\n\n\n \"Why would anybody wish to steal\n a car?\" Reston-Farrell said easily.\n\n\n \"But if I\ngive it\nto somebody?\"\n\n\n \"You will be turned over to a medical\n institution. Citizen Howard Temple-Tracy\n is the last man you will\n ever kill, Mr. Prantera.\"\n\n\n A chillness was in the belly of Joe\n Prantera. He said very slowly, very\n dangerously, \"You guys figure on me\n getting caught, don't you?\"", "There was nothing else to do. Joe\n dressed, then followed him.\nIn the adjoining room was a circular\n table that would have accommodated\n a dozen persons. Two were\n seated there now, papers, books and\n soiled coffee cups before them. There\n had evidently been a long wait.\n\n\n Reston-Farrell, the one Joe had already\n met, was tall and drawn of face\n and with a chainsmoker's nervousness.\n The other was heavier and more\n at ease. They were both, Joe estimated,\n somewhere in their middle fifties.\n They both looked like docs. He\n wondered, all over again, if this was\n some kind of pressure cooker.\n\n\n But that didn't explain the view\n from the window.\n\n\n Reston-Farrell said, \"May I present\n my colleague, Citizen Warren Brett-James?\n Warren, this is our guest from\n ... from yesteryear, Mr. Joseph Salviati-Prantera.\"", "He was dressed in a hospital-type\n nightgown. He looked down at it and\n snorted and made his way over to the\n closet. It opened on his approach, the\n door sliding back into the wall in\n much the same manner as the room's\n door had opened for Reston-Farrell.\n\n\n Joe Prantera scowled and said,\n \"These ain't my clothes.\"\n\n\n \"No, I am afraid not.\"\n\n\n \"You think I'd be seen dead wearing\n this stuff? What is this, some religious\n crackpot hospital?\"\n\n\n Reston-Farrell said, \"I am afraid,\n Mr. Salviati-Prantera, that these are\n the only garments available. I suggest\n you look out the window there.\"" ], [ "He said, \"O.K. See you guys later.\"\n He left them and entered the building.\n\n\n An elevator—he still wasn't used\n to their speed in this era—whooshed\n him to the penthouse duplex occupied\n by Citizen Howard Temple-Tracy.\n\n\n There were two persons in the reception\n room but they left on Joe's\n arrival, without bothering to look at\n him more than glancingly.\n\n\n He spotted the screen immediately\n and went over and stood before it.\n\n\n The screen lit and revealed a\n heavy-set, dour of countenance man\n seated at a desk. He looked into Joe\n Prantera's face, scowled and said\n something.\n\n\n Joe said, \"Joseph Salviati-Prantera\n to interview Citizen Howard Temple-Tracy.\"\n\n\n The other's shaggy eyebrows rose.\n \"Indeed,\" he said. \"In Amer-English?\"", "Joe nodded.\n\n\n \"Enter,\" the other said.\n\n\n A door had slid open on the other\n side of the room. Joe walked through\n it and into what was obviously an office.\n Citizen Temple-Tracy sat at a\n desk. There was only one other chair\n in the room. Joe Prantera ignored it\n and remained standing.\n\n\n Citizen Temple-Tracy said, \"What\n can I do for you?\"\n\n\n Joe looked at him for a long, long\n moment. Then he reached down to\n his belt and brought forth the .45\n automatic. He moistened his lips.\n\n\n Joe said softly, \"You know what\n this here is?\"\n\n\n Temple-Tracy stared at the weapon.\n \"It's a handgun, circa, I would\n say, about 1925 Old Calendar. What\n in the world are you doing with it?\"", "The doctor said, \"We explained\n the other day, Mr. Prantera. Citizen\n Howard Temple-Tracy is a dangerous,\n atavistic, evil genius. We are\n afraid for our institutions if his plans\n are allowed to mature.\"\n\n\n \"Well if you got things so good,\n everybody's got it made, like, who'd\n listen to him?\"", "The doctor nodded at the validity\n of the question. \"Mr. Prantera,\nHomo\n sapiens\nis a unique animal. Physically\n he matures at approximately the age\n of thirteen. However, mental maturity\n and adjustment is often not fully\n realized until thirty or even more.\n Indeed, it is sometimes never\n achieved. Before such maturity is\n reached, our youth are susceptible to\n romantic appeal. Nationalism, chauvinism,\n racism, the supposed glory of\n the military, all seem romantic to the\n immature. They rebel at the orderliness\n of present society. They seek entertainment\n in excitement. Citizen\n Temple-Tracy is aware of this and\n finds his recruits among the young.\"\n\n\n \"O.K., so this guy is dangerous.\n You want him knocked off before he\n screws everything up. But the way\n things are, there's no way of making\n a get. So you'll have to get some other\n patsy. Not me.\"", "\"Look, before I can give it to this\n guy I gotta know some place where\n he'll be at some time. Get it? Like Al\n Rossi. My finger, he works in Rossi's\n house, see? He lets me know every\n Wednesday night, eight o'clock, Al\n leaves the house all by hisself. O.K.,\n so I can make plans, like, to give it\n to him.\" Joe Prantera wound it up\n reasonably. \"You gotta have a finger.\"\n\n\n Brett-James said, \"Why not just go\n to Temple-Tracy's apartment and, ah,\n dispose of him?\"\n\n\n \"Jest walk in, eh? You think I'm\n stupid? How do I know how many\n witnesses hangin' around? How do I\n know if the guy's carryin' heat?\"\n\n\n \"Heat?\"", "Brett-James cleared his throat.\n \"Mr. Prantera, there are no banks.\"\n\n\n \"No banks! You gotta have banks!\"\n\n\n \"And no money to put in them.\n We found it a rather antiquated\n method of distribution well over a\n century ago.\"\n\n\n Joe had given up. Now he merely\n stared.\n\n\n Brett-James said reasonably, \"We\n found we were devoting as much\n time to financial matters in all their\n endless ramifications—including\n bank robberies—as we were to productive\n efforts. So we turned to more\n efficient methods of distribution.\"\nOn the fourth day, Joe said, \"O.K.,\n let's get down to facts. Summa the\n things you guys say don't stick together\n so good. Now, first place,\n where's this guy Temple-Tracy you\n want knocked off?\"", "Brett-James said to Joe Prantera,\n \"Had we not, ah, taken you at the\n time we did, do you realize what\n would have happened?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Joe grunted. \"I woulda let\n old Al Rossi have it right in the guts,\n five times. Then I woulda took the\n plane back to Chi.\"\n\n\n Brett-James was shaking his head.\n \"No. You see, by coincidence, a police\n squad car was coming down the\n street just at that moment to arrest\n Mr. Rossi. You would have been apprehended.\n As I understand Californian\n law of the period, your life\n would have been forfeit, Mr. Prantera.\"\n\n\n Joe winced. It didn't occur to him\n to doubt their word.", "\"Yes,\" Brett-James said evenly.\n\n\n \"Well then, figure something else.\n You think I'm stupid?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Prantera,\" Dr. Reston-Farrell\n said, \"there has been as much progress\n in the field of psychiatry in the\n past two centuries as there has in\n any other. Your treatment would be\n brief and painless, believe me.\"\n\n\n Joe said coldly, \"And what happens\n to you guys? How do you know I\n won't rat on you?\"\n\n\n Brett-James said gently, \"The moment\n after you have accomplished\n your mission, we plan to turn ourselves\n over to the nearest institution\n to have determined whether or not\n we also need therapy.\"\n\n\n \"Now I'm beginning to wonder\n about you guys,\" Joe said. \"Look, all\n over again, what'd'ya wanta give it to\n this guy for?\"", "Joe stared at him, and then at the\n other. He couldn't believe he was getting\n through to them. Or, at least,\n that they were to him.\n\n\n Finally he said, \"If I get this, you\n want me to do a job for you.\"\n\n\n \"That is correct.\"\n\n\n Joe said, \"You guys know the kind\n of jobs I do?\"\n\n\n \"That is correct.\"\n\n\n \"Like hell you do. You think I'm\n stupid? I never even seen you before.\"\n Joe Prantera came abruptly to\n his feet. \"I'm gettin' outta here.\"\n\n\n For the second time, Reston-Farrell\n said, \"Where would you go, Mr.\n Prantera?\"", "Joe Prantera looked at the other\n expressionlessly. Maybe the old duck\n was one of these foreign doctors, like.\n\n\n The newcomer said, \"You have undoubtedly\n been through a most harrowing\n experience. If you have any\n untoward symptoms, possibly I could\n be of assistance.\"\n\n\n Joe couldn't figure out how he\n stood. For one thing, there should\n have been some kind of police guard.\n\n\n The other said, \"Perhaps a bit of\n stimulant?\"\n\n\n Joe said flatly, \"I wanta lawyer.\"\n\n\n The newcomer frowned at him. \"A\n lawyer?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not sayin' nothin'. Not until I\n get a mouthpiece.\"\n\n\n The newcomer started off on another\n tack. \"My name is Lawrence\n Reston-Farrell. If I am not mistaken,\n you are Joseph Salviati-Prantera.\"", "Joe Prantera had never been exposed\n to the concept of time travel.\n He had simply never associated with\n anyone who had ever even remotely\n considered such an idea. Now he said,\n \"You mean, like, I been asleep all\n that time?\"\n\n\n \"Not exactly,\" Brett-James said,\n frowning.\n\n\n Reston-Farrell said, \"Suffice to say,\n you are now one hundred and seventy-three\n years after the last memory you\n have.\"\n\n\n Joe Prantera's mind suddenly reverted\n to those last memories and his\n eyes narrowed dangerously. He felt\n suddenly at bay. He said, \"Maybe\n you guys better let me in on what's\n this all about.\"\n\n\n Reston-Farrell said, \"Mr. Prantera,\n we have brought you from your era\n to perform a task for us.\"", "Joe said, very slowly, \"Chief, in the\n line you're in these days you needa\n heavy around with wunna these. Otherwise,\n Chief, you're gunna wind up\n in some gutter with a lotta holes in\n you. What I'm doin', I'm askin' for a\n job. You need a good man knows how\n to handle wunna these, Chief.\"\n\n\n Citizen Howard Temple-Tracy\n eyed him appraisingly. \"Perhaps,\" he\n said, \"you are right at that. In the near\n future, I may well need an assistant\n knowledgeable in the field of violence.\n Tell me more about yourself.\n You surprise me considerably.\"", "Joe Prantera had been rocking\n with the mental blows he had been\n assimilating, but this was the final\n haymaker. He was stuck in this\n squaresville of a world.\nJoe Prantera on a job was thorough.\n\n\n Careful, painstaking, competent.\n\n\n He spent the first three days of his\n life in the year 2133 getting the feel\n of things. Brett-James and Reston-Farrell\n had been appointed to work\n with him. Joe didn't meet any of the\n others who belonged to the group\n which had taken the measures to\n bring him from the past. He didn't\n want to meet them. The fewer persons\n involved, the better.", "He was in, he thought, a hospital\n and his first reaction was to think,\nThis here California. Everything different.\nThen his second thought was\nSomething went wrong. Big Louis, he\n ain't going to like this.\nHe brought his thinking to the\n present. So far as he could remember,\n he hadn't completely pulled the trigger.\n That at least meant that whatever\n the rap was it wouldn't be too\n tough. With luck, the syndicate would\n get him off with a couple of years at\n Quentin.\n\n\n A door slid open in the wall in a\n way that Joe had never seen a door\n operate before.\nThis here California.\nThe clothes on the newcomer were\n wrong, too. For the first time, Joe\n Prantera began to sense an alienness—a\n something that was awfully\n wrong.\n\n\n The other spoke precisely and\n slowly, the way a highly educated man\n speaks a language which he reads\n and writes fluently but has little occasion\n to practice vocally. \"You have recovered?\"", "\"The motivation for crime has\n been removed, Mr. Prantera,\" Reston-Farrell\n attempted to explain. \"A\n person who commits a violence\n against another is obviously in need\n of medical care. And, consequently,\n receives it.\"\n\n\n \"You mean, like, if I steal a car or\n something, they just take me to a\n doctor?\" Joe Prantera was unbelieving.\n\n\n \"Why would anybody wish to steal\n a car?\" Reston-Farrell said easily.\n\n\n \"But if I\ngive it\nto somebody?\"\n\n\n \"You will be turned over to a medical\n institution. Citizen Howard Temple-Tracy\n is the last man you will\n ever kill, Mr. Prantera.\"\n\n\n A chillness was in the belly of Joe\n Prantera. He said very slowly, very\n dangerously, \"You guys figure on me\n getting caught, don't you?\"", "\"A gun, a gun. Ya think I'm stupid?\n I come to give it to him and he\n gives it to me instead.\"\n\n\n Dr. Reston-Farrell said, \"Howard\n Temple-Tracy lives alone. He customarily\n receives visitors every afternoon,\n largely potential followers. He\n is attempting to recruit members to\n an organization he is forming. It\n would be quite simple for you to\n enter his establishment and dispose\n of him. I assure you, he does not possess\n weapons.\"\n\n\n Joe was indignant. \"Just like that,\n eh?\" he said sarcastically. \"Then what\n happens? How do I get out of the\n building? Where's my get car parked?\n Where do I hide out? Where do I\n dump the heat?\"\n\n\n \"Dump the heat?\"\n\n\n \"Get rid of the gun. You want I\n should get caught with the gun on\n me? I'd wind up in the gas chamber\n so quick—\"", "Joe glared at him. Then sat down\n again, as abruptly as he'd arisen.\n\"Let's start all over again. I got this\n straight, you brought me, some\n screwy way, all the way ... here.\n O.K., I'll buy that. I seen what it looks\n like out that window—\" The real\n comprehension was seeping through\n to him even as he talked. \"Everybody\n I know, Jessie, Tony, the Kid, Big\n Louis, everybody, they're dead. Even\n Big Louis.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Brett-James said, his voice\n soft. \"They are all dead, Mr. Prantera.\n Their children are all dead, and their\n grandchildren.\"\n\n\n The two men of the future said\n nothing more for long minutes while\n Joe Prantera's mind whirled its confusion.\n\n\n Finally he said, \"What's this bit\n about you wanting me to give it to\n some guy.\"", "Brett-James nodded to him, friendly,\n so far as Joe could see. He said\n gently, \"I think it would be Mr. Joseph\n Prantera, wouldn't it? The maternal\n linage was almost universally\n ignored.\" His voice too gave the impression\n he was speaking a language\n not usually on his tongue.\n\n\n Joe took an empty chair, hardly\n bothering to note its alien qualities.\n His body seemed to\nfit\ninto the piece\n of furniture, as though it had been\n molded to his order.\n\n\n Joe said, \"I think maybe I'll take\n that there drink, Doc.\"\n\n\n Reston-Farrell said, \"Of course,\"\n and then something else Joe didn't\n get. Whatever the something else\n was, a slot opened in the middle of\n the table and a glass, so clear of texture\n as to be all but invisible, was\n elevated. It contained possibly three\n ounces of golden fluid.", "He was dressed in a hospital-type\n nightgown. He looked down at it and\n snorted and made his way over to the\n closet. It opened on his approach, the\n door sliding back into the wall in\n much the same manner as the room's\n door had opened for Reston-Farrell.\n\n\n Joe Prantera scowled and said,\n \"These ain't my clothes.\"\n\n\n \"No, I am afraid not.\"\n\n\n \"You think I'd be seen dead wearing\n this stuff? What is this, some religious\n crackpot hospital?\"\n\n\n Reston-Farrell said, \"I am afraid,\n Mr. Salviati-Prantera, that these are\n the only garments available. I suggest\n you look out the window there.\"", "Joe gave him a long, chill look\n and then stepped to the window. He\n couldn't figure the other. Unless he\n was a fruitcake. Maybe he was in\n some kind of pressure cooker and\n this was one of the fruitcakes.\n\n\n He looked out, however, not on the\n lawns and walks of a sanitarium but\n upon a wide boulevard of what was\n obviously a populous city.\n\n\n And for a moment again, Joe Prantera\n felt the depths of nausea.\n\n\n This was not his world.\n\n\n He stared for a long, long moment.\n The cars didn't even have wheels, he\n noted dully. He turned slowly and\n faced the older man.\n\n\n Reston-Farrell said compassionately,\n \"Try this, it's excellent cognac.\"\n\n\n Joe Prantera stared at him, said finally,\n flatly, \"What's it all about?\"" ], [ "Reston-Farrell and Brett-James\n were both present. The three of them\n sat in the living room of the latter's\n apartment, sipping a sparkling wine\n which seemed to be the prevailing\n beverage of the day. For Joe's taste\n it was insipid stuff. Happily, rye was\n available to those who wanted it.\n\n\n Reston-Farrell said, \"You mean,\n where does he reside? Why, here in\n this city.\"\n\n\n \"Well, that's handy, eh?\" Joe\n scratched himself thoughtfully. \"You\n got somebody can finger him for me?\"\n\n\n \"Finger him?\"", "\"Yes,\" Brett-James said evenly.\n\n\n \"Well then, figure something else.\n You think I'm stupid?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Prantera,\" Dr. Reston-Farrell\n said, \"there has been as much progress\n in the field of psychiatry in the\n past two centuries as there has in\n any other. Your treatment would be\n brief and painless, believe me.\"\n\n\n Joe said coldly, \"And what happens\n to you guys? How do you know I\n won't rat on you?\"\n\n\n Brett-James said gently, \"The moment\n after you have accomplished\n your mission, we plan to turn ourselves\n over to the nearest institution\n to have determined whether or not\n we also need therapy.\"\n\n\n \"Now I'm beginning to wonder\n about you guys,\" Joe said. \"Look, all\n over again, what'd'ya wanta give it to\n this guy for?\"", "\"Well, then do it yourself.\" Joe\n Prantera's irritation over this whole\n complicated mess was growing. And\n already he was beginning to long for\n the things he knew—for Jessie and\n Tony and the others, for his favorite\n bar, for the lasagne down at Papa\n Giovanni's. Right now he could have\n welcomed a calling down at the hands\n of Big Louis.\n\n\n Reston-Farrell had come to his feet\n and walked to one of the large room's\n windows. He looked out, as though\n unseeing. Then, his back turned, he\n said, \"We have tried, but it is simply\n not in us, Mr. Prantera.\"\n\n\n \"You mean you're yella?\"\n\n\n \"No, if by that you mean afraid. It\n is simply not within us to take the\n life of a fellow creature—not to speak\n of a fellow man.\"", "\"That is why we brought you here,\n Mr. Prantera. You were ... you\n are, a professional assassin.\"\n\n\n \"Hey, wait a minute, now.\"\n\n\n Reston-Farrell went on, ignoring\n the interruption. \"There is small\n point in denying your calling. Pray\n remember that at the point when we\n ...\ntransported\nyou, you were about\n to dispose of a contemporary named\n Alphonso Annunziata-Rossi. A citizen,\n I might say, whose demise would\n probably have caused small dismay to\n society.\"\n\n\n They had him pegged all right. Joe\n said, \"But why me? Why don't you\n get some heavy from now? Somebody\n knows the ropes these days.\"\n\n\n Brett-James said, \"Mr. Prantera,\n there are no professional assassins in\n this age, nor have there been for over\n a century and a half.\"", "\"A gun, a gun. Ya think I'm stupid?\n I come to give it to him and he\n gives it to me instead.\"\n\n\n Dr. Reston-Farrell said, \"Howard\n Temple-Tracy lives alone. He customarily\n receives visitors every afternoon,\n largely potential followers. He\n is attempting to recruit members to\n an organization he is forming. It\n would be quite simple for you to\n enter his establishment and dispose\n of him. I assure you, he does not possess\n weapons.\"\n\n\n Joe was indignant. \"Just like that,\n eh?\" he said sarcastically. \"Then what\n happens? How do I get out of the\n building? Where's my get car parked?\n Where do I hide out? Where do I\n dump the heat?\"\n\n\n \"Dump the heat?\"\n\n\n \"Get rid of the gun. You want I\n should get caught with the gun on\n me? I'd wind up in the gas chamber\n so quick—\"", "The doctor nodded at the validity\n of the question. \"Mr. Prantera,\nHomo\n sapiens\nis a unique animal. Physically\n he matures at approximately the age\n of thirteen. However, mental maturity\n and adjustment is often not fully\n realized until thirty or even more.\n Indeed, it is sometimes never\n achieved. Before such maturity is\n reached, our youth are susceptible to\n romantic appeal. Nationalism, chauvinism,\n racism, the supposed glory of\n the military, all seem romantic to the\n immature. They rebel at the orderliness\n of present society. They seek entertainment\n in excitement. Citizen\n Temple-Tracy is aware of this and\n finds his recruits among the young.\"\n\n\n \"O.K., so this guy is dangerous.\n You want him knocked off before he\n screws everything up. But the way\n things are, there's no way of making\n a get. So you'll have to get some other\n patsy. Not me.\"", "There was nothing else to do. Joe\n dressed, then followed him.\nIn the adjoining room was a circular\n table that would have accommodated\n a dozen persons. Two were\n seated there now, papers, books and\n soiled coffee cups before them. There\n had evidently been a long wait.\n\n\n Reston-Farrell, the one Joe had already\n met, was tall and drawn of face\n and with a chainsmoker's nervousness.\n The other was heavier and more\n at ease. They were both, Joe estimated,\n somewhere in their middle fifties.\n They both looked like docs. He\n wondered, all over again, if this was\n some kind of pressure cooker.\n\n\n But that didn't explain the view\n from the window.\n\n\n Reston-Farrell said, \"May I present\n my colleague, Citizen Warren Brett-James?\n Warren, this is our guest from\n ... from yesteryear, Mr. Joseph Salviati-Prantera.\"", "\"O.K., O.K.,\" Joe Prantera growled.\n \"So everybody's got it made. What I\n wanta know is what's all this about\n me giving it ta somebody? If everything's\n so great, how come you want\n me to knock this guy off?\"\n\n\n Reston-Farrell bent forward and\n thumped his right index finger twice\n on the table. \"The bacterium of hate—a\n new strain—has found the human\n race unprotected from its disease.\n We had thought our vaccines\n immunized us.\"\n\n\n \"What's that suppose to mean?\"\n\n\n Brett-James took up the ball again.\n \"Mr. Prantera, have you ever heard of\n Ghengis Khan, of Tamerlane, Alexander,\n Caesar?\"\n\n\n Joe Prantera scowled at him emptily.\n\n\n \"Or, more likely, of Napoleon, Hitler,\n Stalin?\"", "\"The motivation for crime has\n been removed, Mr. Prantera,\" Reston-Farrell\n attempted to explain. \"A\n person who commits a violence\n against another is obviously in need\n of medical care. And, consequently,\n receives it.\"\n\n\n \"You mean, like, if I steal a car or\n something, they just take me to a\n doctor?\" Joe Prantera was unbelieving.\n\n\n \"Why would anybody wish to steal\n a car?\" Reston-Farrell said easily.\n\n\n \"But if I\ngive it\nto somebody?\"\n\n\n \"You will be turned over to a medical\n institution. Citizen Howard Temple-Tracy\n is the last man you will\n ever kill, Mr. Prantera.\"\n\n\n A chillness was in the belly of Joe\n Prantera. He said very slowly, very\n dangerously, \"You guys figure on me\n getting caught, don't you?\"", "Reston-Farrell said, \"As to reward,\n Mr. Prantera, we have already told\n you there is ultra-abundance in this\n age. Once this task has been performed,\n we will sponsor your entry\n into present day society. Competent\n psychiatric therapy will soon remove\n your present—\"\n\n\n \"Waita minute, now. You figure on\n gettin' me candled by some head\n shrinker, eh? No thanks, Buster. I'm\n going back to my own—\"\n\n\n Brett-James was shaking his head\n again. \"I am afraid there is no return,\n Mr. Prantera. Time travel works but\n in one direction,\nwith\nthe flow of the\n time stream. There can be no return\n to your own era.\"", "Brett-James cleared his throat.\n \"Mr. Prantera, there are no banks.\"\n\n\n \"No banks! You gotta have banks!\"\n\n\n \"And no money to put in them.\n We found it a rather antiquated\n method of distribution well over a\n century ago.\"\n\n\n Joe had given up. Now he merely\n stared.\n\n\n Brett-James said reasonably, \"We\n found we were devoting as much\n time to financial matters in all their\n endless ramifications—including\n bank robberies—as we were to productive\n efforts. So we turned to more\n efficient methods of distribution.\"\nOn the fourth day, Joe said, \"O.K.,\n let's get down to facts. Summa the\n things you guys say don't stick together\n so good. Now, first place,\n where's this guy Temple-Tracy you\n want knocked off?\"", "\"Look, before I can give it to this\n guy I gotta know some place where\n he'll be at some time. Get it? Like Al\n Rossi. My finger, he works in Rossi's\n house, see? He lets me know every\n Wednesday night, eight o'clock, Al\n leaves the house all by hisself. O.K.,\n so I can make plans, like, to give it\n to him.\" Joe Prantera wound it up\n reasonably. \"You gotta have a finger.\"\n\n\n Brett-James said, \"Why not just go\n to Temple-Tracy's apartment and, ah,\n dispose of him?\"\n\n\n \"Jest walk in, eh? You think I'm\n stupid? How do I know how many\n witnesses hangin' around? How do I\n know if the guy's carryin' heat?\"\n\n\n \"Heat?\"", "Brett-James said to Joe Prantera,\n \"Had we not, ah, taken you at the\n time we did, do you realize what\n would have happened?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Joe grunted. \"I woulda let\n old Al Rossi have it right in the guts,\n five times. Then I woulda took the\n plane back to Chi.\"\n\n\n Brett-James was shaking his head.\n \"No. You see, by coincidence, a police\n squad car was coming down the\n street just at that moment to arrest\n Mr. Rossi. You would have been apprehended.\n As I understand Californian\n law of the period, your life\n would have been forfeit, Mr. Prantera.\"\n\n\n Joe winced. It didn't occur to him\n to doubt their word.", "\"You mean there's no place in the\n whole world where they talk American?\"\n Joe demanded, aghast.\nDr. Reston-Farrell controlled the\n car. Joe Prantera sat in the seat next\n to him and Warren Brett-James sat\n in the back. Joe had, tucked in his\n belt, a .45 caliber automatic, once displayed\n in a museum. It had been\n more easily procured than the ammunition\n to fit it, but that problem too\n had been solved.\n\n\n The others were nervous, obviously\n repelled by the very conception of\n what they had planned.\n\n\n Inwardly, Joe was amused. Now\n that they had got in the clutch, the\n others were on the verge of chickening\n out. He knew it wouldn't have\n taken much for them to cancel the\n project. It wasn't any answer though.\n If they allowed him to call it off today,\n they'd talk themselves into it\n again before the week was through.", "The other put down the unaccepted\n glass. \"We were afraid first\n realization would be a shock to you,\"\n he said. \"My colleague is in the adjoining\n room. We will be glad to explain\n to you if you will join us there.\"\n\n\n \"I wanta get out of here,\" Joe said.\n\n\n \"Where would you go?\"\n\n\n The fear of police, of Al Rossi's\n vengeance, of the measures that\n might be taken by Big Louis on his\n failure, were now far away.\n\n\n Reston-Farrell had approached the\n door by which he had entered and it\n reopened for him. He went through\n it without looking back.", "\"See here, Mr. Prantera,\" Brett-James\n said softly. \"We no longer have\n capital punishment, you must realize.\"\n\n\n \"O.K. I still don't wanta get caught.\n What\nis\nthe rap these days, huh?\"\n Joe scowled. \"You said they didn't\n have no jails any more.\"\n\n\n \"This is difficult for you to understand,\n I imagine,\" Reston-Farrell told\n him, \"but, you see, we no longer punish\n people in this era.\"\n\n\n That took a long, unbelieving moment\n to sink in. \"You mean, like, no\n matter what they do? That's crazy.\n Everybody'd be running around giving\n it to everybody else.\"", "Joe stared at him, and then at the\n other. He couldn't believe he was getting\n through to them. Or, at least,\n that they were to him.\n\n\n Finally he said, \"If I get this, you\n want me to do a job for you.\"\n\n\n \"That is correct.\"\n\n\n Joe said, \"You guys know the kind\n of jobs I do?\"\n\n\n \"That is correct.\"\n\n\n \"Like hell you do. You think I'm\n stupid? I never even seen you before.\"\n Joe Prantera came abruptly to\n his feet. \"I'm gettin' outta here.\"\n\n\n For the second time, Reston-Farrell\n said, \"Where would you go, Mr.\n Prantera?\"", "Besides, already Joe was beginning\n to feel the comfortable, pleasurable,\n warm feeling that came to him on\n occasions like this.\n\n\n He said, \"You're sure this guy talks\n American, eh?\"\n\n\n Warren Brett-James said, \"Quite\n sure. He is a student of history.\"\n\n\n \"And he won't think it's funny I\n talk American to him, eh?\"\n\n\n \"He'll undoubtedly be intrigued.\"\n\n\n They pulled up before a large\n apartment building that overlooked\n the area once known as Wilmington.\n\n\n Joe was coolly efficient now. He\n pulled out the automatic, held it\n down below his knees and threw a\n shell into the barrel. He eased the\n hammer down, thumbed on the\n safety, stuck the weapon back in his\n belt and beneath the jacketlike garment\n he wore.", "\"Sure, Chief. It's kinda a long\n story, though. First off, I better tell\n you you got some bad enemies, Chief.\n Two guys special, named Brett-James\n and Doc Reston-Farrell. I think one\n of the first jobs I'm gunna hafta do\n for you, Chief, is to give it to those\n two.\"\nTHE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAnalog\nDecember\n 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.", "\"Sure I heard of Hitler and Stalin,\"\n Joe growled. \"I ain't stupid.\"\n\n\n The other nodded. \"Such men are\n unique. They have a drive ... a\n drive to power which exceeds by far\n the ambitions of the average man.\n They are genii in their way, Mr. Prantera,\n genii of evil. Such a genius of\n evil has appeared on the current\n scene.\"\n\n\n \"Now we're getting somewheres,\"\n Joe snorted. \"So you got a guy what's\n a little ambitious, like, eh? And you\n guys ain't got the guts to give it to\n him. O.K. What's in it for me?\"\n\n\n The two of them frowned, exchanged\n glances. Reston-Farrell said,\n \"You know, that is one aspect we had\n not considered.\"" ], [ "\"Yes,\" Brett-James said evenly.\n\n\n \"Well then, figure something else.\n You think I'm stupid?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Prantera,\" Dr. Reston-Farrell\n said, \"there has been as much progress\n in the field of psychiatry in the\n past two centuries as there has in\n any other. Your treatment would be\n brief and painless, believe me.\"\n\n\n Joe said coldly, \"And what happens\n to you guys? How do you know I\n won't rat on you?\"\n\n\n Brett-James said gently, \"The moment\n after you have accomplished\n your mission, we plan to turn ourselves\n over to the nearest institution\n to have determined whether or not\n we also need therapy.\"\n\n\n \"Now I'm beginning to wonder\n about you guys,\" Joe said. \"Look, all\n over again, what'd'ya wanta give it to\n this guy for?\"", "Joe Prantera had never been exposed\n to the concept of time travel.\n He had simply never associated with\n anyone who had ever even remotely\n considered such an idea. Now he said,\n \"You mean, like, I been asleep all\n that time?\"\n\n\n \"Not exactly,\" Brett-James said,\n frowning.\n\n\n Reston-Farrell said, \"Suffice to say,\n you are now one hundred and seventy-three\n years after the last memory you\n have.\"\n\n\n Joe Prantera's mind suddenly reverted\n to those last memories and his\n eyes narrowed dangerously. He felt\n suddenly at bay. He said, \"Maybe\n you guys better let me in on what's\n this all about.\"\n\n\n Reston-Farrell said, \"Mr. Prantera,\n we have brought you from your era\n to perform a task for us.\"", "Reston-Farrell said, \"As to reward,\n Mr. Prantera, we have already told\n you there is ultra-abundance in this\n age. Once this task has been performed,\n we will sponsor your entry\n into present day society. Competent\n psychiatric therapy will soon remove\n your present—\"\n\n\n \"Waita minute, now. You figure on\n gettin' me candled by some head\n shrinker, eh? No thanks, Buster. I'm\n going back to my own—\"\n\n\n Brett-James was shaking his head\n again. \"I am afraid there is no return,\n Mr. Prantera. Time travel works but\n in one direction,\nwith\nthe flow of the\n time stream. There can be no return\n to your own era.\"", "Brett-James said to Joe Prantera,\n \"Had we not, ah, taken you at the\n time we did, do you realize what\n would have happened?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Joe grunted. \"I woulda let\n old Al Rossi have it right in the guts,\n five times. Then I woulda took the\n plane back to Chi.\"\n\n\n Brett-James was shaking his head.\n \"No. You see, by coincidence, a police\n squad car was coming down the\n street just at that moment to arrest\n Mr. Rossi. You would have been apprehended.\n As I understand Californian\n law of the period, your life\n would have been forfeit, Mr. Prantera.\"\n\n\n Joe winced. It didn't occur to him\n to doubt their word.", "There was nothing else to do. Joe\n dressed, then followed him.\nIn the adjoining room was a circular\n table that would have accommodated\n a dozen persons. Two were\n seated there now, papers, books and\n soiled coffee cups before them. There\n had evidently been a long wait.\n\n\n Reston-Farrell, the one Joe had already\n met, was tall and drawn of face\n and with a chainsmoker's nervousness.\n The other was heavier and more\n at ease. They were both, Joe estimated,\n somewhere in their middle fifties.\n They both looked like docs. He\n wondered, all over again, if this was\n some kind of pressure cooker.\n\n\n But that didn't explain the view\n from the window.\n\n\n Reston-Farrell said, \"May I present\n my colleague, Citizen Warren Brett-James?\n Warren, this is our guest from\n ... from yesteryear, Mr. Joseph Salviati-Prantera.\"", "\"O.K., O.K.,\" Joe Prantera growled.\n \"So everybody's got it made. What I\n wanta know is what's all this about\n me giving it ta somebody? If everything's\n so great, how come you want\n me to knock this guy off?\"\n\n\n Reston-Farrell bent forward and\n thumped his right index finger twice\n on the table. \"The bacterium of hate—a\n new strain—has found the human\n race unprotected from its disease.\n We had thought our vaccines\n immunized us.\"\n\n\n \"What's that suppose to mean?\"\n\n\n Brett-James took up the ball again.\n \"Mr. Prantera, have you ever heard of\n Ghengis Khan, of Tamerlane, Alexander,\n Caesar?\"\n\n\n Joe Prantera scowled at him emptily.\n\n\n \"Or, more likely, of Napoleon, Hitler,\n Stalin?\"", "\"That is why we brought you here,\n Mr. Prantera. You were ... you\n are, a professional assassin.\"\n\n\n \"Hey, wait a minute, now.\"\n\n\n Reston-Farrell went on, ignoring\n the interruption. \"There is small\n point in denying your calling. Pray\n remember that at the point when we\n ...\ntransported\nyou, you were about\n to dispose of a contemporary named\n Alphonso Annunziata-Rossi. A citizen,\n I might say, whose demise would\n probably have caused small dismay to\n society.\"\n\n\n They had him pegged all right. Joe\n said, \"But why me? Why don't you\n get some heavy from now? Somebody\n knows the ropes these days.\"\n\n\n Brett-James said, \"Mr. Prantera,\n there are no professional assassins in\n this age, nor have there been for over\n a century and a half.\"", "Joe glared at him. Then sat down\n again, as abruptly as he'd arisen.\n\"Let's start all over again. I got this\n straight, you brought me, some\n screwy way, all the way ... here.\n O.K., I'll buy that. I seen what it looks\n like out that window—\" The real\n comprehension was seeping through\n to him even as he talked. \"Everybody\n I know, Jessie, Tony, the Kid, Big\n Louis, everybody, they're dead. Even\n Big Louis.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Brett-James said, his voice\n soft. \"They are all dead, Mr. Prantera.\n Their children are all dead, and their\n grandchildren.\"\n\n\n The two men of the future said\n nothing more for long minutes while\n Joe Prantera's mind whirled its confusion.\n\n\n Finally he said, \"What's this bit\n about you wanting me to give it to\n some guy.\"", "\"See here, Mr. Prantera,\" Brett-James\n said softly. \"We no longer have\n capital punishment, you must realize.\"\n\n\n \"O.K. I still don't wanta get caught.\n What\nis\nthe rap these days, huh?\"\n Joe scowled. \"You said they didn't\n have no jails any more.\"\n\n\n \"This is difficult for you to understand,\n I imagine,\" Reston-Farrell told\n him, \"but, you see, we no longer punish\n people in this era.\"\n\n\n That took a long, unbelieving moment\n to sink in. \"You mean, like, no\n matter what they do? That's crazy.\n Everybody'd be running around giving\n it to everybody else.\"", "Brett-James nodded to him, friendly,\n so far as Joe could see. He said\n gently, \"I think it would be Mr. Joseph\n Prantera, wouldn't it? The maternal\n linage was almost universally\n ignored.\" His voice too gave the impression\n he was speaking a language\n not usually on his tongue.\n\n\n Joe took an empty chair, hardly\n bothering to note its alien qualities.\n His body seemed to\nfit\ninto the piece\n of furniture, as though it had been\n molded to his order.\n\n\n Joe said, \"I think maybe I'll take\n that there drink, Doc.\"\n\n\n Reston-Farrell said, \"Of course,\"\n and then something else Joe didn't\n get. Whatever the something else\n was, a slot opened in the middle of\n the table and a glass, so clear of texture\n as to be all but invisible, was\n elevated. It contained possibly three\n ounces of golden fluid.", "Joe Prantera had been rocking\n with the mental blows he had been\n assimilating, but this was the final\n haymaker. He was stuck in this\n squaresville of a world.\nJoe Prantera on a job was thorough.\n\n\n Careful, painstaking, competent.\n\n\n He spent the first three days of his\n life in the year 2133 getting the feel\n of things. Brett-James and Reston-Farrell\n had been appointed to work\n with him. Joe didn't meet any of the\n others who belonged to the group\n which had taken the measures to\n bring him from the past. He didn't\n want to meet them. The fewer persons\n involved, the better.", "\"Well, then do it yourself.\" Joe\n Prantera's irritation over this whole\n complicated mess was growing. And\n already he was beginning to long for\n the things he knew—for Jessie and\n Tony and the others, for his favorite\n bar, for the lasagne down at Papa\n Giovanni's. Right now he could have\n welcomed a calling down at the hands\n of Big Louis.\n\n\n Reston-Farrell had come to his feet\n and walked to one of the large room's\n windows. He looked out, as though\n unseeing. Then, his back turned, he\n said, \"We have tried, but it is simply\n not in us, Mr. Prantera.\"\n\n\n \"You mean you're yella?\"\n\n\n \"No, if by that you mean afraid. It\n is simply not within us to take the\n life of a fellow creature—not to speak\n of a fellow man.\"", "\"I am afraid you have no alternative,\"\n Brett-James said gently. \"Without\n us, what will you do? Mr. Prantera,\n you do not even speak the language.\"\n\n\n \"What'd'ya mean? I don't understand\n summa the big words you eggheads\n use, but I get by O.K.\"\n\n\n Brett-James said, \"Amer-English is\n no longer the language spoken by the\n man in the street, Mr. Prantera. Only\n students of such subjects any longer\n speak such tongues as Amer-English,\n French, Russian or the many others\n that once confused the race with\n their limitations as a means of communication.\"", "\"The motivation for crime has\n been removed, Mr. Prantera,\" Reston-Farrell\n attempted to explain. \"A\n person who commits a violence\n against another is obviously in need\n of medical care. And, consequently,\n receives it.\"\n\n\n \"You mean, like, if I steal a car or\n something, they just take me to a\n doctor?\" Joe Prantera was unbelieving.\n\n\n \"Why would anybody wish to steal\n a car?\" Reston-Farrell said easily.\n\n\n \"But if I\ngive it\nto somebody?\"\n\n\n \"You will be turned over to a medical\n institution. Citizen Howard Temple-Tracy\n is the last man you will\n ever kill, Mr. Prantera.\"\n\n\n A chillness was in the belly of Joe\n Prantera. He said very slowly, very\n dangerously, \"You guys figure on me\n getting caught, don't you?\"", "Joe snapped: \"Everything you guys\n say sounds crazy. Let's start all over\n again.\"\n\n\n Brett-James said, \"Let me do it,\n Lawrence.\" He turned his eyes to Joe.\n \"Mr. Prantera, in your own era, did\n you ever consider the future?\"\n\n\n Joe looked at him blankly.\n\n\n \"In your day you were confronted\n with national and international, problems.\n Just as we are today and just as\n nations were a century or a millennium\n ago.\"\n\n\n \"Sure, O.K., so we had problems. I\n know whatcha mean—like wars, and\n depressions and dictators and like\n that.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, like that,\" Brett-James\n nodded.", "Reston-Farrell and Brett-James\n were both present. The three of them\n sat in the living room of the latter's\n apartment, sipping a sparkling wine\n which seemed to be the prevailing\n beverage of the day. For Joe's taste\n it was insipid stuff. Happily, rye was\n available to those who wanted it.\n\n\n Reston-Farrell said, \"You mean,\n where does he reside? Why, here in\n this city.\"\n\n\n \"Well, that's handy, eh?\" Joe\n scratched himself thoughtfully. \"You\n got somebody can finger him for me?\"\n\n\n \"Finger him?\"", "\"Sure I heard of Hitler and Stalin,\"\n Joe growled. \"I ain't stupid.\"\n\n\n The other nodded. \"Such men are\n unique. They have a drive ... a\n drive to power which exceeds by far\n the ambitions of the average man.\n They are genii in their way, Mr. Prantera,\n genii of evil. Such a genius of\n evil has appeared on the current\n scene.\"\n\n\n \"Now we're getting somewheres,\"\n Joe snorted. \"So you got a guy what's\n a little ambitious, like, eh? And you\n guys ain't got the guts to give it to\n him. O.K. What's in it for me?\"\n\n\n The two of them frowned, exchanged\n glances. Reston-Farrell said,\n \"You know, that is one aspect we had\n not considered.\"", "\"You mean there's no place in the\n whole world where they talk American?\"\n Joe demanded, aghast.\nDr. Reston-Farrell controlled the\n car. Joe Prantera sat in the seat next\n to him and Warren Brett-James sat\n in the back. Joe had, tucked in his\n belt, a .45 caliber automatic, once displayed\n in a museum. It had been\n more easily procured than the ammunition\n to fit it, but that problem too\n had been solved.\n\n\n The others were nervous, obviously\n repelled by the very conception of\n what they had planned.\n\n\n Inwardly, Joe was amused. Now\n that they had got in the clutch, the\n others were on the verge of chickening\n out. He knew it wouldn't have\n taken much for them to cancel the\n project. It wasn't any answer though.\n If they allowed him to call it off today,\n they'd talk themselves into it\n again before the week was through.", "Joe Prantera looked at the other\n expressionlessly. Maybe the old duck\n was one of these foreign doctors, like.\n\n\n The newcomer said, \"You have undoubtedly\n been through a most harrowing\n experience. If you have any\n untoward symptoms, possibly I could\n be of assistance.\"\n\n\n Joe couldn't figure out how he\n stood. For one thing, there should\n have been some kind of police guard.\n\n\n The other said, \"Perhaps a bit of\n stimulant?\"\n\n\n Joe said flatly, \"I wanta lawyer.\"\n\n\n The newcomer frowned at him. \"A\n lawyer?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not sayin' nothin'. Not until I\n get a mouthpiece.\"\n\n\n The newcomer started off on another\n tack. \"My name is Lawrence\n Reston-Farrell. If I am not mistaken,\n you are Joseph Salviati-Prantera.\"", "Joe stared at him, and then at the\n other. He couldn't believe he was getting\n through to them. Or, at least,\n that they were to him.\n\n\n Finally he said, \"If I get this, you\n want me to do a job for you.\"\n\n\n \"That is correct.\"\n\n\n Joe said, \"You guys know the kind\n of jobs I do?\"\n\n\n \"That is correct.\"\n\n\n \"Like hell you do. You think I'm\n stupid? I never even seen you before.\"\n Joe Prantera came abruptly to\n his feet. \"I'm gettin' outta here.\"\n\n\n For the second time, Reston-Farrell\n said, \"Where would you go, Mr.\n Prantera?\"" ] ]
valid	61430	[ "Why did the supreme ruler deliver a scroll message to Jorgenson?\n", "What is the purpose of the Witnesses?", "Why was Jorgenson so angry to have his business taken by Glen-U?", "What would the Thrid likely believe drives their system of governance?", "What happened if a local governor made a mistake that was recognized?", "What is the definition of truth to the Thrid?", "Why were Jorgenson and Ganti not put to death?", "In what way was Jorgenson’s reasoning similar to that of the Thrid?" ]	[ [ "To acquire his lucrative business", "To lure him into an elaborate brainwashing scheme", "To silence his ideas within Thrid society", "To frighten him into behaving as the Thrid did" ], [ "To observe and report those who challenge the supreme ruler", "To deliver scroll messages from the Never-Mistaken Glen-U", "To carry the elaborate vessels in which the supreme ruler travels", "To burden those they witness with social pressure" ], [ "Glen-U had made his closest friend disappear", "He needed his business to support his family", "He came to the planet to defeat Glen-U’s dictatorship", "He believed anyone to be capable of making mistakes" ], [ "Extensive study of nearby planetary governance successes", "Their ancient scriptures", "Opinion", "Wisdom of the supreme family lineage" ], [ "The accuser was heavily medicated to become non-contrarian", "The accuser was put to a painful death by rudimentary weapons of the Thrid", "The accuser was never again seen by a rational being.", "The accuser was banished from the planet and their goods forfeited to the supreme ruler." ], [ "That which is observed by the Witnesses", "That which is dictated by those in power", "That which can be proven by scientific principles", "That which is outlined in their Thriddar stories" ], [ "It was never ordered", "They had intellectually outsmarted the Thrid by making it seem a mistake to kill them", "They had ally Witnesses in the government that secretly kept them alive", "They proved to be useful in their resourcefulness" ], [ "Neither required evidence to draw conclusions", "Neither allowed nuance", "Both were skeptical of novel ideas", "Both followed intuition" ] ]	[ 1, 1, 4, 4, 3, 2, 1, 2 ]	[ 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Jorgenson reflected sourly that the governors and the rulers of the\n universe were whoever happened to be within hearing of the Grand\n Panjandrum. They were not imposing. They were scared. Everybody is\n always scared under an absolute ruler, but the Grand Panjandrum was\n worse than that. He couldn't make a mistake. Whatever he said had to\n be true, because he said it, and sometimes it had drastic results. But\n past Grand Panjandrums had spoken highly of the trading post. Jorgenson\n shouldn't have much to worry about. He waited. He thought of Ganti. He\n scowled.", "This morning was especially beyond the limit. There was a new Grand\n Panjandrum—the term was Jorgenson's own for the supreme ruler over\n all the Thrid—and when Jorgenson finished his breakfast a high Thrid\n official waited in the trading-post compound. Around him clustered\n other Thrid, wearing the formal headgear that said they were Witnesses\n to an official act.\n\n\n Jorgenson went out, scowling, and exchanged the customary ceremonial\n greetings. Then the high official beamed at him and extracted a scroll\n from his voluminous garments. Jorgenson saw the glint of gold and was\n suspicious at once. The words of a current Grand Panjandrum were always\n written in gold. If they didn't get written in gold they didn't get\n written at all; but it was too bad if anybody ignored any of them.", "The high official rolled up the scroll, while Jorgenson exploded inside.\nA part of this was reaction as a business man. A part was recognition\n of all the intolerable things that the Thrid took as a matter of\n course. If Jorgenson had reacted solely as a business man he'd have\n swallowed it, departed on the next Rim Stars trading-ship—which would\n not have left any trade-goods behind—and left the Grand Panjandrum to\n realize what he had lost when no off-planet goods arrived on Thriddar.\n In time he'd speak and say and observe that he, out of his generosity,\n gave the loot back. Then the trading could resume. But Jorgenson didn't\n feel only like a business man this morning. He thought of Ganti, who\n was a particular case of everything he disliked on Thriddar.", "Jorgenson laid the matter indignantly before him, repeating the exact\n phrases that said the trading company wanted—wanted!—practically to\n give itself to the Never-Mistaken Glen-U, who was the Grand Panjandrum\n of Thriddar. He waited to be told that it couldn't have happened; that\n anyhow it couldn't be intended. But the theologian's Thriddish ears\n went limp, which amounted to the same thing as a man's face turning\n pale. He stammered agitatedly that if the Grand Panjandrum said it, it\n was true. It couldn't be otherwise! If the trading company wanted to\n give itself to him, there was nothing to be done. It wanted to! The\n Grand Panjandrum had said so!\n\n\n \"He also said,\" said Jorgenson irritably, \"that I'm to vanish and\n nevermore be seen face to face by any rational being. How does that\n happen? Do I get speared?\"", "The high official unrolled the scroll. The Thrid around him, wearing\n Witness hats, became utterly silent. The high official made a sound\n equivalent to clearing his throat. The stillness became death-like.\n\n\n \"On this day,\" intoned the high official, while the Witnesses\n listened reverently, \"on this day did Glen-U the Never-Mistaken, as\n have been his predecessors throughout the ages;—on this day did the\n Never-Mistaken Glen-U speak and say and observe a truth in the presence\n of the governors and the rulers of the universe.\"", "He fumed because creatures intelligent enough to build steam fliers\n weren't intelligent enough to see what a racket their government was.\n Now that the new Grand Panjandrum had moved against him, Jorgenson made\n an angry, dogged resolution to do something permanent to make matters\n better. For the Thrid themselves. Here he thought not as a business\n man only, but as a humanitarian. As both. When a whim of the Grand\n Panjandrum could ruin a business, something should be done. And when\n Ganti and countless others had been victims of capricious tyranny....\n And Jorgenson was slated to vanish from sight and never again be\n seen.... It definitely called for strong measures!\n\n\n He reflected with grim pleasure that the Grand Panjandrum would soon\n be in the position of a Thrid whom everybody knew was mistaken. With\n the trading-post denied him and Jorgenson still visible, he'd be\n notoriously wrong. And he couldn't be, and still be Grand Panjandrum!", "Now it was evidently to be arranged that he would never again be seen\n face to face by a rational being. The Grand Panjandrum had won the\n argument. Within a few months a Rim Stars trading ship would land, and\n Jorgenson would be gone and the trading post confiscated. It would be\n hopeless to ask questions, and worse than hopeless to try to trade. So\n the ship would lift off and there'd be no more ships for at least a\n generation. Then there might—there might!—be another.\n\n\n Jorgenson swore fluently and with passion.\n\n\n \"It will not be long,\" said a tranquil voice.\n\n\n Jorgenson changed from human-speech profanity to Thrid. He directed\n his words to the unseen creature who'd spoken. That Thrid listened,\n apparently without emotion. When Jorgenson ran out of breath, the voice\n said severely:", "But the local Thrid governor had spoken and said and observed that\n Ganti's wife wanted to enter his household. He added that Ganti wanted\n to yield her to him.\n\n\n Jorgenson had fumed—but not as a business man—when the transfer took\n place. But Ganti had been conditioned to believe that when a governor\n said he wanted to do something, he did. He couldn't quite grasp the\n contrary idea. But he moped horribly, and Jorgenson talked sardonically\n to him, and he almost doubted that an official was necessarily right.\n When his former wife died of grief, his disbelief became positive. And\n immediately afterward he disappeared.\n\n\n Jorgenson couldn't find out what had become of him. Dour reflection on\n the happening had put him in the bad mood which had started things,\n this morning.", "It was not wise to be moved by such sympathetic feelings. The Grand\n Panjandrum could not be mistaken. It was definitely unwise to\n contradict him. It could even be dangerous. Jorgenson was in a nasty\n spot.\n\n\n The Witnesses murmured reverently:\n\n\n \"We hear the words of the Never-Mistaken Glen-U.\"\n\n\n The high official tucked away the scroll and said blandly:\n\n\n \"I will receive the moneys, goods, and benefactions it is the desire\n of the Rim Stars Trading Corporation to present to the great and\n Never-Mistaken Glen-U.\"\n\n\n Jorgenson, boiling inside, nevertheless knew what he was doing. He said\n succinctly:\n\n\n \"Like hell you will!\"\n\n\n There was an idiom in Thrid speech that had exactly the meaning of the\n human phrase. Jorgenson used it.", "\"Somebody dug it out,\" said Ganti without resentment. \"To keep busy.\n Maybe one prisoner only began it. A later one saw it started and worked\n on it to keep busy. Then others in their turn. It took a good many\n lives to make this cave.\"\n\n\n Jorgenson ground his teeth a second time.\n\n\n \"And just because they'd contradicted somebody who couldn't be wrong!\n Or because they had a business an official wanted!\"\n\n\n \"Or a wife,\" agreed Ganti. \"Here!\"\n\n\n He offered food. Jorgenson ate, scowling. Afterward, near sundown, he\n went over the island.", "\"Is mistaken!\" said Jorgenson bitingly. \"He's wrong! The Rim Stars\n Trading Corporation does\nnot\nwant to give him anything! What he has\n said is not true!\" This was the equivalent of treason, blasphemy and\n the ultimate of indecorous behavior toward a virgin Pelean princess. \"I\n won't give him anything! I'm not even vanishing from sight! Glen-U is\n wrong about that, too! Now—git!\"\n\n\n He jerked out his blaster and pulled the trigger.\n\n\n There was an explosive burst of flame from the ground between the\n official and himself. The official fled. With him fled all the\n Witnesses, some even losing their headgear in their haste to get away.\nJorgenson stamped into the trading-post building. His eyes were stormy\n and his jaw was set.", "\"This is a prison,\" Ganti explained matter-of-factly. \"They let me\n down here and dropped food and water for a week. They went away. I\n found there'd been another prisoner here before me. His skeleton was in\n this cave. I reasoned it out. There must have been others before him.\n When there is a prisoner here, every so often a copter drops food and\n water. When the prisoner doesn't pick it up, they stop coming. When,\n presently, they have another prisoner they drop him off, like me, and\n he finds the skeleton of the previous prisoner, like me, and he dumps\n it overboard as I did. They'll drop food and water for me until I stop\n picking it up. And presently they'll do the same thing all over again.\"\n\n\n Jorgenson glowered. That was his reaction as a person. Then he gestured\n to the cave around him. There was a pile of dried-out seaweed for\n sleeping purposes.\n\n\n \"And this?\"", "Then he saw a figure on the island. It was a Thrid stripped of all\n clothing like Jorgenson and darkened by the sun. That figure came\n agilely toward where he was let down. It caught him. It checked his\n wild swingings, which could have broken bones. The rope slackened. The\n Thrid laid Jorgenson down.\n\n\n He did not cast off the rope. He seemed to essay to climb it.\n\n\n It was cut at the steam-copter and came tumbling down all over both of\n them. The Thrid waved his arms wildly and seemed to screech gibberish\n at the sky. There was an impact nearby, of something dropped. Jorgenson\n heard the throbbing sound of the copter as it lifted and swept away.\n\n\n Then he felt the bounds about his arms and legs being removed. Then a\n Thrid voice—amazingly, a familiar Thrid voice—said:\n\n\n \"This is not good, Jorgenson. Who did you contradict?\"", "Jorgenson had stood it longer than most because in spite of their\n convictions he liked the Thrid. Their minds did do outside loops, and\n come up with intolerable convictions. But they were intelligent enough.\n They had steam-power and even steam-driven atmosphere fliers, but they\n didn't have missile weapons and they did have a social system that\n humans simply couldn't accept—even though it applied only to Thrid.\n The ordinary Thrid, with whom Jorgenson did business, weren't bad\n people. It was the officials who made him grind his teeth. And though\n it was his business only to run the trading post of the Rim Stars\n Trading Corporation, sometimes he got fed up.", "The Thrid was Ganti, of whom Jorgenson had once had hopes as a business\n man, and for whose disaster he had felt indignation as something else.\n He loosened the last of Jorgenson's bonds and helped him sit up.\n\n\n Jorgenson glared around. The island was roughly one hundred feet by\n two. It was twisted, curdled yellow stone from one end to the other.\n There were stone hillocks and a miniature stony peak, and a narrow\n valley between two patches of higher rock. Huge seas boomed against\n the windward shore, throwing spray higher than the island's topmost\n point. There were some places where sand had gathered. There was one\n spot—perhaps a square yard of it—where sand had been made fertile by\n the droppings of flying things and where two or three starveling plants\n showed foliage of sorts. That was all. Jorgenson ground his teeth.\n\n\n \"Go ahead,\" said Ganti grimly, \"but it may be even worse than you\n think.\"", "The high official looked at him in utter stupefaction. Nobody\n contradicted the Grand Panjandrum! Nobody! The Thrid had noticed long\n ago that they were the most intelligent race in the universe. Since\n that was so, obviously they must have the most perfect government.\n But no government could be perfect if its officials made mistakes. So\n no Thrid official ever made a mistake. In particular the great and\n Never-Mistaken Glen-U could not conceivably blunder! When he said a\n thing, it was true! It had to be! He'd said it! And this was the\n fundamental fact in the culture of the Thrid.\n\n\n \"Like hell you'll receive moneys and goods and such!\" snapped\n Jorgenson. \"Like hell you will!\"\n\n\n The high official literally couldn't believe his ears.\n\n\n \"But—but the great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U—\"", "The trading-post theologian quivered. Jorgenson made things much worse.\n\n\n \"This,\" he raged, \"this is crazy! The Grand Panjandrum's an ordinary\n Thrid just like you are! Of course he can make a mistake! There's\n nobody who can't be wrong!\"\n\n\n The theologian put up feebly protesting, human-like hands. He begged\n hysterically to be allowed to go home before Jorgenson vanished, with\n unknown consequences for any Thrid who might be nearby.\n\n\n When Jorgenson opened a door to kick him out of it, the whole staff of\n the trading-post plunged after him. They'd been eavesdropping and they\n fled in pure horror.", "It would be a nice situation for Glen-U. He'd have to do something\n about it, and there was nothing he could do. He'd blundered, and it\n would soon be public knowledge.\n\n\n Jorgenson dozed lightly. Then more heavily. Then more heavily still.\n The night was not two hours old when the warning sirens made a terrific\n uproar. The Thrid for miles around heard the wailing, ullulating sound\n of the sirens that should have awakened Jorgenson.\n\n\n But they didn't wake him. He slept on.\nWhen he woke, he knew that he was cold. His muscles were cramped. Half\n awake, he tried to move and could not.", "Jorgenson found that a fish-fillet, strongly squeezed and wrung like a\n wet cloth, would yield a drinkable liquid which was not salt and would\n substitute for water. And this was a reason to make a string bag in\n which caught fish could be let back into the sea so they were there\n when wanted but could not escape.\n\n\n They had used it for weeks when he saw Ganti, carrying it to place it\n where they left it overboard, swinging it idly back and forth as he\n walked.\nIf Jorgenson had been only a businessman, it would have had no\n particular meaning. But he was also a person, filled with hatred of\n the Thrid who had condemned him for life to this small island. He saw\n the swinging of the fish. It gave him an idea.\n\n\n He did not speak at all during all the rest of that day. He was\n thinking. The matter needed much thought. Ganti left him alone.", "Presently the motion of the copter changed. He knew the ship was\n descending. There were more violent swayings, as if from wind gusts\n deflected by something large and solid. Jorgenson even heard deep-bass\n rumblings like sea upon a rocky coast. Then there were movements near\n him, a rope went around his waist, a loading-bay opened and he found\n himself lifted and lowered through it.\nHe dangled in midair, a couple of hundred feet above an utterly barren\n island on which huge ocean swells beat. The downdraft from the copter\n made him sway wildly, and once it had him spinning dizzily. The horizon\n was empty. He was being lowered swiftly to the island. And his hands\n and feet were still securely tied." ], [ "The high official unrolled the scroll. The Thrid around him, wearing\n Witness hats, became utterly silent. The high official made a sound\n equivalent to clearing his throat. The stillness became death-like.\n\n\n \"On this day,\" intoned the high official, while the Witnesses\n listened reverently, \"on this day did Glen-U the Never-Mistaken, as\n have been his predecessors throughout the ages;—on this day did the\n Never-Mistaken Glen-U speak and say and observe a truth in the presence\n of the governors and the rulers of the universe.\"", "It was not wise to be moved by such sympathetic feelings. The Grand\n Panjandrum could not be mistaken. It was definitely unwise to\n contradict him. It could even be dangerous. Jorgenson was in a nasty\n spot.\n\n\n The Witnesses murmured reverently:\n\n\n \"We hear the words of the Never-Mistaken Glen-U.\"\n\n\n The high official tucked away the scroll and said blandly:\n\n\n \"I will receive the moneys, goods, and benefactions it is the desire\n of the Rim Stars Trading Corporation to present to the great and\n Never-Mistaken Glen-U.\"\n\n\n Jorgenson, boiling inside, nevertheless knew what he was doing. He said\n succinctly:\n\n\n \"Like hell you will!\"\n\n\n There was an idiom in Thrid speech that had exactly the meaning of the\n human phrase. Jorgenson used it.", "Then he tried to waken fully, and he couldn't do that either. He stayed\n in a dream-like, frustrated state which was partly like a nightmare,\n while very gradually new sensations came to him. He felt a cushioned\n throbbing against his chest, in the very hard surface on which he lay\n face down. That surface swayed and rocked slightly. He tried again to\n move, and realized that his hands and feet were bound. He found that he\n shivered, and realized that his clothing had been taken from him.\n\n\n He was completely helpless and lying on his stomach in the cargo-space\n of a steam helicopter: now he could hear the sound of its machinery.\n\n\n Then he knew what had happened. He'd committed The unthinkable\n crime—or lunacy—of declaring the Grand Panjandrum mistaken. So by the\n operation of truth, which was really an anesthetic gas cloud drifted\n over the trading post, he had vanished from sight.", "The copter came and dropped food and water. When it left, they\n practiced. When it came again they were not practicing, but when it\n went away they practiced. They were a naked man and a naked Thrid,\n left upon a morsel of rock in a boundless sea, rehearsing themselves\n in an art so long-forgotten that they had to reinvent the finer parts\n of the technique. They experimented. They tried this. They tried that.\n When the copter appeared, they showed themselves. They rushed upon the\n dropped bag containing food and water as if fiercely trying to deny\n each other a full share. Once they seemed to fight over the dropped\n bag. The copter hovered to watch. The fight seemed furious and deadly,\n but inconclusive.\n\n\n When the copter went away Jorgenson and Ganti went briskly back to\n their practicing.", "\"The great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U,\" intoned the official again,\n \"in the presence of the governors and the rulers of the universe, did\n speak and say and observe that it is the desire of the Rim Star Trading\n Corporation to present to him, the great and never-mistaken Glen-U, all\n of the present possessions of the said Rim Stars Trading Corporation,\n and thereafter to remit to him all moneys, goods, and benefactions\n to and of the said Rim Stars Trading Corporation as they shall be\n received. The great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U did further speak and say\n and observe that anyone hindering this loyal and admirable gift must,\n by the operation of truth, vanish from sight and nevermore be seen face\n to face by any rational being.\"", "Jorgenson laid the matter indignantly before him, repeating the exact\n phrases that said the trading company wanted—wanted!—practically to\n give itself to the Never-Mistaken Glen-U, who was the Grand Panjandrum\n of Thriddar. He waited to be told that it couldn't have happened; that\n anyhow it couldn't be intended. But the theologian's Thriddish ears\n went limp, which amounted to the same thing as a man's face turning\n pale. He stammered agitatedly that if the Grand Panjandrum said it, it\n was true. It couldn't be otherwise! If the trading company wanted to\n give itself to him, there was nothing to be done. It wanted to! The\n Grand Panjandrum had said so!\n\n\n \"He also said,\" said Jorgenson irritably, \"that I'm to vanish and\n nevermore be seen face to face by any rational being. How does that\n happen? Do I get speared?\"", "\"Is mistaken!\" said Jorgenson bitingly. \"He's wrong! The Rim Stars\n Trading Corporation does\nnot\nwant to give him anything! What he has\n said is not true!\" This was the equivalent of treason, blasphemy and\n the ultimate of indecorous behavior toward a virgin Pelean princess. \"I\n won't give him anything! I'm not even vanishing from sight! Glen-U is\n wrong about that, too! Now—git!\"\n\n\n He jerked out his blaster and pulled the trigger.\n\n\n There was an explosive burst of flame from the ground between the\n official and himself. The official fled. With him fled all the\n Witnesses, some even losing their headgear in their haste to get away.\nJorgenson stamped into the trading-post building. His eyes were stormy\n and his jaw was set.", "\"Somebody dug it out,\" said Ganti without resentment. \"To keep busy.\n Maybe one prisoner only began it. A later one saw it started and worked\n on it to keep busy. Then others in their turn. It took a good many\n lives to make this cave.\"\n\n\n Jorgenson ground his teeth a second time.\n\n\n \"And just because they'd contradicted somebody who couldn't be wrong!\n Or because they had a business an official wanted!\"\n\n\n \"Or a wife,\" agreed Ganti. \"Here!\"\n\n\n He offered food. Jorgenson ate, scowling. Afterward, near sundown, he\n went over the island.", "Then he saw a figure on the island. It was a Thrid stripped of all\n clothing like Jorgenson and darkened by the sun. That figure came\n agilely toward where he was let down. It caught him. It checked his\n wild swingings, which could have broken bones. The rope slackened. The\n Thrid laid Jorgenson down.\n\n\n He did not cast off the rope. He seemed to essay to climb it.\n\n\n It was cut at the steam-copter and came tumbling down all over both of\n them. The Thrid waved his arms wildly and seemed to screech gibberish\n at the sky. There was an impact nearby, of something dropped. Jorgenson\n heard the throbbing sound of the copter as it lifted and swept away.\n\n\n Then he felt the bounds about his arms and legs being removed. Then a\n Thrid voice—amazingly, a familiar Thrid voice—said:\n\n\n \"This is not good, Jorgenson. Who did you contradict?\"", "Jorgenson reflected sourly that the governors and the rulers of the\n universe were whoever happened to be within hearing of the Grand\n Panjandrum. They were not imposing. They were scared. Everybody is\n always scared under an absolute ruler, but the Grand Panjandrum was\n worse than that. He couldn't make a mistake. Whatever he said had to\n be true, because he said it, and sometimes it had drastic results. But\n past Grand Panjandrums had spoken highly of the trading post. Jorgenson\n shouldn't have much to worry about. He waited. He thought of Ganti. He\n scowled.", "He snapped orders. The hired Thrid of the trading-post staff had not\n quite grasped the situation. They couldn't believe it. Automatically,\n as he commanded the iron doors and shutters of the trading post closed,\n they obeyed. They saw him turn on the shocker-field so that nobody\n could cross the compound without getting an electric shock that would\n discourage him. They began to believe.\n\n\n Then he sent for the trading-post Thrid consultant. On Earth he'd have\n called for a lawyer. On a hostile world there'd have been a soldier to\n advise him. On Thrid the specialist to be consulted wasn't exactly a\n theologian, but he was nearer that than anything else.", "Now it was evidently to be arranged that he would never again be seen\n face to face by a rational being. The Grand Panjandrum had won the\n argument. Within a few months a Rim Stars trading ship would land, and\n Jorgenson would be gone and the trading post confiscated. It would be\n hopeless to ask questions, and worse than hopeless to try to trade. So\n the ship would lift off and there'd be no more ships for at least a\n generation. Then there might—there might!—be another.\n\n\n Jorgenson swore fluently and with passion.\n\n\n \"It will not be long,\" said a tranquil voice.\n\n\n Jorgenson changed from human-speech profanity to Thrid. He directed\n his words to the unseen creature who'd spoken. That Thrid listened,\n apparently without emotion. When Jorgenson ran out of breath, the voice\n said severely:", "\"But I'm crazy,\" said Ganti calmly. \"I tried to kill the governor\n who'd taken my wife. So he said I was crazy and that made it true. So\n I wasn't put in a chained group of laborers. Somebody might have seen\n me and thought about it. But, sent here, it's worse for me and I'm\n probably forgotten by now.\"\n\n\n He was calm about it. Only a Thrid would have been so calm. But they've\n had at least hundreds of generations in which to get used to injustice.\n He accepted it. But Jorgenson frowned.\n\n\n \"You've got brains, Ganti. What's the chance of escape?\"\n\n\n \"None,\" said Ganti unemotionally. \"You'd better get out of the sun.\n It'll burn you badly. Come along.\"", "This morning was especially beyond the limit. There was a new Grand\n Panjandrum—the term was Jorgenson's own for the supreme ruler over\n all the Thrid—and when Jorgenson finished his breakfast a high Thrid\n official waited in the trading-post compound. Around him clustered\n other Thrid, wearing the formal headgear that said they were Witnesses\n to an official act.\n\n\n Jorgenson went out, scowling, and exchanged the customary ceremonial\n greetings. Then the high official beamed at him and extracted a scroll\n from his voluminous garments. Jorgenson saw the glint of gold and was\n suspicious at once. The words of a current Grand Panjandrum were always\n written in gold. If they didn't get written in gold they didn't get\n written at all; but it was too bad if anybody ignored any of them.", "\"This is a prison,\" Ganti explained matter-of-factly. \"They let me\n down here and dropped food and water for a week. They went away. I\n found there'd been another prisoner here before me. His skeleton was in\n this cave. I reasoned it out. There must have been others before him.\n When there is a prisoner here, every so often a copter drops food and\n water. When the prisoner doesn't pick it up, they stop coming. When,\n presently, they have another prisoner they drop him off, like me, and\n he finds the skeleton of the previous prisoner, like me, and he dumps\n it overboard as I did. They'll drop food and water for me until I stop\n picking it up. And presently they'll do the same thing all over again.\"\n\n\n Jorgenson glowered. That was his reaction as a person. Then he gestured\n to the cave around him. There was a pile of dried-out seaweed for\n sleeping purposes.\n\n\n \"And this?\"", "Ganti looked skeptical. Jorgenson explained. He had to demonstrate\n crudely. The whole idea was novel to Ganti, but the Thrid were smart.\n Presently he grasped it. He said:\n\n\n \"I see the theory. If we can make it work, all right. But how do we\n make the copter land?\"\n\n\n Jorgenson realized that they talked oddly. They spoke with leisurely\n lack of haste, with the lack of hope normal to prisoners to whom escape\n is impossible, even when they talk about escape. They could have been\n discussing a matter that would not affect either of them. But Jorgenson\n quivered inside. He hoped.\n\n\n \"We'll try it,\" said Ganti detachedly, when he'd explained again. \"If\n it fails, they'll only stop giving us food and water.\"\n\n\n That, of course, did not seem either to him or Jorgenson a reason to\n hesitate to try what Jorgenson had planned.", "He fumed because creatures intelligent enough to build steam fliers\n weren't intelligent enough to see what a racket their government was.\n Now that the new Grand Panjandrum had moved against him, Jorgenson made\n an angry, dogged resolution to do something permanent to make matters\n better. For the Thrid themselves. Here he thought not as a business\n man only, but as a humanitarian. As both. When a whim of the Grand\n Panjandrum could ruin a business, something should be done. And when\n Ganti and countless others had been victims of capricious tyranny....\n And Jorgenson was slated to vanish from sight and never again be\n seen.... It definitely called for strong measures!\n\n\n He reflected with grim pleasure that the Grand Panjandrum would soon\n be in the position of a Thrid whom everybody knew was mistaken. With\n the trading-post denied him and Jorgenson still visible, he'd be\n notoriously wrong. And he couldn't be, and still be Grand Panjandrum!", "\"You declared the great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U mistaken. This could\n not be. It proved you either a criminal or insane, because no rational\n creature could believe him mistaken. He declared you insane, and he\n cannot be wrong. So soon you will arrive where you are to be confined\n and no rational being will ever see you face to face.\"\n\n\n Jorgenson switched back to human swearing. Then he blended both\n languages, using all the applicable words he knew both in human speech\n and Thrid. He knew a great many. The soft throbbing of the steam-driven\n rotors went on, and Jorgenson swore both as a business man and a\n humanitarian. Both were frustrated.", "So Thrid younglings were trained not to think; not to have any opinion\n about anything; only to repeat what nobody questioned; only to do what\n they were told by authority. It occurred to Jorgenson that on a planet\n with such a population, a skeptic could make a great deal of confusion.\n\n\n Then, another time, Jorgenson decided to make use of the weathering\n cord which had been cut from the copter when he was landed. He cut\n off a part of it with a sharp-edged fragment of stone from the pile\n some former prisoner on the island had made. He unravelled the twisted\n fibers. Then he ground fishhooks from shells attached to the island's\n rocky walls just below water-line. After that they fished. Sometimes\n they even caught something to eat. But they never fished when the\n copter was due.", "Jorgenson swore impartially at all of them and turned the shocker-field\n back on. He plugged in a capacity circuit which would turn on warning\n sirens if anything like a steam-driven copter passed or hovered over\n the trading-post. He put blasters in handy positions. The Thrid used\n only spears, knives and scimitars. Blasters would defend the post\n against a multitude.\n\n\n As a business man, he'd acted very foolishly. But he'd acted even less\n sensibly as a human being. He'd gotten fed up with a social system\n and a—call it—theology it wasn't his business to change. True, the\n Thrid way of life was appalling, and what had happened to Ganti was\n probably typical. But it wasn't Jorgenson's affair. He'd been unwise to\n let it disturb him. If the Thrid wanted things this way, it was their\n privilege." ], [ "\"Is mistaken!\" said Jorgenson bitingly. \"He's wrong! The Rim Stars\n Trading Corporation does\nnot\nwant to give him anything! What he has\n said is not true!\" This was the equivalent of treason, blasphemy and\n the ultimate of indecorous behavior toward a virgin Pelean princess. \"I\n won't give him anything! I'm not even vanishing from sight! Glen-U is\n wrong about that, too! Now—git!\"\n\n\n He jerked out his blaster and pulled the trigger.\n\n\n There was an explosive burst of flame from the ground between the\n official and himself. The official fled. With him fled all the\n Witnesses, some even losing their headgear in their haste to get away.\nJorgenson stamped into the trading-post building. His eyes were stormy\n and his jaw was set.", "The real trouble was that Jorgenson saw things as a business man does.\n But also, and contradictorily, he saw them as right and just, or as\n wrong and intolerable. As a business man, he should have kept his mind\n on business and never bothered about Ganti. As a believer in right and\n wrong, it would have been wiser for him to have stayed off the planet\n Thriddar altogether. Thriddar was no place for him, anyhow you look at\n it. On this particular morning it was especially the wrong place for\n him to be trying to live and do business.\n\n\n He woke up thinking of Ganti, and in consequence he was in a bad mood\n right away. Most humans couldn't take the sort of thing that went on on\n Thriddar. Most of them wanted to use missile weapons—which the Thrid\n did not use—to change the local social system. Most humans got off\n Thriddar—fast! And boiling mad.", "The high official rolled up the scroll, while Jorgenson exploded inside.\nA part of this was reaction as a business man. A part was recognition\n of all the intolerable things that the Thrid took as a matter of\n course. If Jorgenson had reacted solely as a business man he'd have\n swallowed it, departed on the next Rim Stars trading-ship—which would\n not have left any trade-goods behind—and left the Grand Panjandrum to\n realize what he had lost when no off-planet goods arrived on Thriddar.\n In time he'd speak and say and observe that he, out of his generosity,\n gave the loot back. Then the trading could resume. But Jorgenson didn't\n feel only like a business man this morning. He thought of Ganti, who\n was a particular case of everything he disliked on Thriddar.", "It was not wise to be moved by such sympathetic feelings. The Grand\n Panjandrum could not be mistaken. It was definitely unwise to\n contradict him. It could even be dangerous. Jorgenson was in a nasty\n spot.\n\n\n The Witnesses murmured reverently:\n\n\n \"We hear the words of the Never-Mistaken Glen-U.\"\n\n\n The high official tucked away the scroll and said blandly:\n\n\n \"I will receive the moneys, goods, and benefactions it is the desire\n of the Rim Stars Trading Corporation to present to the great and\n Never-Mistaken Glen-U.\"\n\n\n Jorgenson, boiling inside, nevertheless knew what he was doing. He said\n succinctly:\n\n\n \"Like hell you will!\"\n\n\n There was an idiom in Thrid speech that had exactly the meaning of the\n human phrase. Jorgenson used it.", "\"You declared the great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U mistaken. This could\n not be. It proved you either a criminal or insane, because no rational\n creature could believe him mistaken. He declared you insane, and he\n cannot be wrong. So soon you will arrive where you are to be confined\n and no rational being will ever see you face to face.\"\n\n\n Jorgenson switched back to human swearing. Then he blended both\n languages, using all the applicable words he knew both in human speech\n and Thrid. He knew a great many. The soft throbbing of the steam-driven\n rotors went on, and Jorgenson swore both as a business man and a\n humanitarian. Both were frustrated.", "Jorgenson laid the matter indignantly before him, repeating the exact\n phrases that said the trading company wanted—wanted!—practically to\n give itself to the Never-Mistaken Glen-U, who was the Grand Panjandrum\n of Thriddar. He waited to be told that it couldn't have happened; that\n anyhow it couldn't be intended. But the theologian's Thriddish ears\n went limp, which amounted to the same thing as a man's face turning\n pale. He stammered agitatedly that if the Grand Panjandrum said it, it\n was true. It couldn't be otherwise! If the trading company wanted to\n give itself to him, there was nothing to be done. It wanted to! The\n Grand Panjandrum had said so!\n\n\n \"He also said,\" said Jorgenson irritably, \"that I'm to vanish and\n nevermore be seen face to face by any rational being. How does that\n happen? Do I get speared?\"", "He fumed because creatures intelligent enough to build steam fliers\n weren't intelligent enough to see what a racket their government was.\n Now that the new Grand Panjandrum had moved against him, Jorgenson made\n an angry, dogged resolution to do something permanent to make matters\n better. For the Thrid themselves. Here he thought not as a business\n man only, but as a humanitarian. As both. When a whim of the Grand\n Panjandrum could ruin a business, something should be done. And when\n Ganti and countless others had been victims of capricious tyranny....\n And Jorgenson was slated to vanish from sight and never again be\n seen.... It definitely called for strong measures!\n\n\n He reflected with grim pleasure that the Grand Panjandrum would soon\n be in the position of a Thrid whom everybody knew was mistaken. With\n the trading-post denied him and Jorgenson still visible, he'd be\n notoriously wrong. And he couldn't be, and still be Grand Panjandrum!", "Jorgenson had stood it longer than most because in spite of their\n convictions he liked the Thrid. Their minds did do outside loops, and\n come up with intolerable convictions. But they were intelligent enough.\n They had steam-power and even steam-driven atmosphere fliers, but they\n didn't have missile weapons and they did have a social system that\n humans simply couldn't accept—even though it applied only to Thrid.\n The ordinary Thrid, with whom Jorgenson did business, weren't bad\n people. It was the officials who made him grind his teeth. And though\n it was his business only to run the trading post of the Rim Stars\n Trading Corporation, sometimes he got fed up.", "But the local Thrid governor had spoken and said and observed that\n Ganti's wife wanted to enter his household. He added that Ganti wanted\n to yield her to him.\n\n\n Jorgenson had fumed—but not as a business man—when the transfer took\n place. But Ganti had been conditioned to believe that when a governor\n said he wanted to do something, he did. He couldn't quite grasp the\n contrary idea. But he moped horribly, and Jorgenson talked sardonically\n to him, and he almost doubted that an official was necessarily right.\n When his former wife died of grief, his disbelief became positive. And\n immediately afterward he disappeared.\n\n\n Jorgenson couldn't find out what had become of him. Dour reflection on\n the happening had put him in the bad mood which had started things,\n this morning.", "The Thrid was Ganti, of whom Jorgenson had once had hopes as a business\n man, and for whose disaster he had felt indignation as something else.\n He loosened the last of Jorgenson's bonds and helped him sit up.\n\n\n Jorgenson glared around. The island was roughly one hundred feet by\n two. It was twisted, curdled yellow stone from one end to the other.\n There were stone hillocks and a miniature stony peak, and a narrow\n valley between two patches of higher rock. Huge seas boomed against\n the windward shore, throwing spray higher than the island's topmost\n point. There were some places where sand had gathered. There was one\n spot—perhaps a square yard of it—where sand had been made fertile by\n the droppings of flying things and where two or three starveling plants\n showed foliage of sorts. That was all. Jorgenson ground his teeth.\n\n\n \"Go ahead,\" said Ganti grimly, \"but it may be even worse than you\n think.\"", "It would be a nice situation for Glen-U. He'd have to do something\n about it, and there was nothing he could do. He'd blundered, and it\n would soon be public knowledge.\n\n\n Jorgenson dozed lightly. Then more heavily. Then more heavily still.\n The night was not two hours old when the warning sirens made a terrific\n uproar. The Thrid for miles around heard the wailing, ullulating sound\n of the sirens that should have awakened Jorgenson.\n\n\n But they didn't wake him. He slept on.\nWhen he woke, he knew that he was cold. His muscles were cramped. Half\n awake, he tried to move and could not.", "Jorgenson reflected sourly that the governors and the rulers of the\n universe were whoever happened to be within hearing of the Grand\n Panjandrum. They were not imposing. They were scared. Everybody is\n always scared under an absolute ruler, but the Grand Panjandrum was\n worse than that. He couldn't make a mistake. Whatever he said had to\n be true, because he said it, and sometimes it had drastic results. But\n past Grand Panjandrums had spoken highly of the trading post. Jorgenson\n shouldn't have much to worry about. He waited. He thought of Ganti. He\n scowled.", "Jorgenson swore impartially at all of them and turned the shocker-field\n back on. He plugged in a capacity circuit which would turn on warning\n sirens if anything like a steam-driven copter passed or hovered over\n the trading-post. He put blasters in handy positions. The Thrid used\n only spears, knives and scimitars. Blasters would defend the post\n against a multitude.\n\n\n As a business man, he'd acted very foolishly. But he'd acted even less\n sensibly as a human being. He'd gotten fed up with a social system\n and a—call it—theology it wasn't his business to change. True, the\n Thrid way of life was appalling, and what had happened to Ganti was\n probably typical. But it wasn't Jorgenson's affair. He'd been unwise to\n let it disturb him. If the Thrid wanted things this way, it was their\n privilege.", "Now it was evidently to be arranged that he would never again be seen\n face to face by a rational being. The Grand Panjandrum had won the\n argument. Within a few months a Rim Stars trading ship would land, and\n Jorgenson would be gone and the trading post confiscated. It would be\n hopeless to ask questions, and worse than hopeless to try to trade. So\n the ship would lift off and there'd be no more ships for at least a\n generation. Then there might—there might!—be another.\n\n\n Jorgenson swore fluently and with passion.\n\n\n \"It will not be long,\" said a tranquil voice.\n\n\n Jorgenson changed from human-speech profanity to Thrid. He directed\n his words to the unseen creature who'd spoken. That Thrid listened,\n apparently without emotion. When Jorgenson ran out of breath, the voice\n said severely:", "\"Somebody dug it out,\" said Ganti without resentment. \"To keep busy.\n Maybe one prisoner only began it. A later one saw it started and worked\n on it to keep busy. Then others in their turn. It took a good many\n lives to make this cave.\"\n\n\n Jorgenson ground his teeth a second time.\n\n\n \"And just because they'd contradicted somebody who couldn't be wrong!\n Or because they had a business an official wanted!\"\n\n\n \"Or a wife,\" agreed Ganti. \"Here!\"\n\n\n He offered food. Jorgenson ate, scowling. Afterward, near sundown, he\n went over the island.", "The high official looked at him in utter stupefaction. Nobody\n contradicted the Grand Panjandrum! Nobody! The Thrid had noticed long\n ago that they were the most intelligent race in the universe. Since\n that was so, obviously they must have the most perfect government.\n But no government could be perfect if its officials made mistakes. So\n no Thrid official ever made a mistake. In particular the great and\n Never-Mistaken Glen-U could not conceivably blunder! When he said a\n thing, it was true! It had to be! He'd said it! And this was the\n fundamental fact in the culture of the Thrid.\n\n\n \"Like hell you'll receive moneys and goods and such!\" snapped\n Jorgenson. \"Like hell you will!\"\n\n\n The high official literally couldn't believe his ears.\n\n\n \"But—but the great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U—\"", "Jorgenson found that a fish-fillet, strongly squeezed and wrung like a\n wet cloth, would yield a drinkable liquid which was not salt and would\n substitute for water. And this was a reason to make a string bag in\n which caught fish could be let back into the sea so they were there\n when wanted but could not escape.\n\n\n They had used it for weeks when he saw Ganti, carrying it to place it\n where they left it overboard, swinging it idly back and forth as he\n walked.\nIf Jorgenson had been only a businessman, it would have had no\n particular meaning. But he was also a person, filled with hatred of\n the Thrid who had condemned him for life to this small island. He saw\n the swinging of the fish. It gave him an idea.\n\n\n He did not speak at all during all the rest of that day. He was\n thinking. The matter needed much thought. Ganti left him alone.", "He led the way over the bare, scorching rocky surface. He turned past a\n small pinnacle. There was shadow. Jorgenson crawled into it, and found\n himself in a cave. It was not a natural one. It had been hacked out,\n morsel by morsel. It was cool inside. It was astonishingly roomy.\n\n\n \"How'd this happen?\" demanded Jorgenson the business man.", "This morning was especially beyond the limit. There was a new Grand\n Panjandrum—the term was Jorgenson's own for the supreme ruler over\n all the Thrid—and when Jorgenson finished his breakfast a high Thrid\n official waited in the trading-post compound. Around him clustered\n other Thrid, wearing the formal headgear that said they were Witnesses\n to an official act.\n\n\n Jorgenson went out, scowling, and exchanged the customary ceremonial\n greetings. Then the high official beamed at him and extracted a scroll\n from his voluminous garments. Jorgenson saw the glint of gold and was\n suspicious at once. The words of a current Grand Panjandrum were always\n written in gold. If they didn't get written in gold they didn't get\n written at all; but it was too bad if anybody ignored any of them.", "Time passed. He had the trading-post in a position of defense. He\n prepared his lunch, and glowered. More time passed. He cooked his\n dinner, and ate. Afterward he went up on the trading-post roof to smoke\n and to coddle his anger. He observed the sunset. There was always some\n haze in the air on Thriddar, and the colorings were very beautiful. He\n could see the towers of the capital city of the Thrid. He could see a\n cumbersome but still graceful steam-driven aircraft descend heavily to\n the field at the city's edge. Later he saw another steam-plane rise\n slowly but reliably and head away somewhere else. He saw the steam\n helicopters go skittering above the city's buildings." ], [ "In theory, no Thrid should ever make a mistake, because he belonged\n to the most intelligent race in the universe. But a local governor\n was even more intelligent. If an ordinary Thrid challenged a local\n governor's least and lightest remark—why—he must be either a criminal\n or insane. The local governor decided—correctly, of course—which\n he was. If he was a criminal, he spent the rest of his life in a gang\n of criminals chained together and doing the most exhausting labor the\n Thrid could contrive. If he was mad, he was confined for life.\nThere'd been Ganti, a Thrid of whom Jorgenson had had much hope. He\n believed that Ganti could learn to run the trading post without human\n supervision. If he could, the trading company could simply bring trade\n goods to Thriddar and take away other trade goods. The cost of doing\n business would be decreased. There could be no human-Thrid friction.\n Jorgenson had been training Ganti for this work.", "\"But I'm crazy,\" said Ganti calmly. \"I tried to kill the governor\n who'd taken my wife. So he said I was crazy and that made it true. So\n I wasn't put in a chained group of laborers. Somebody might have seen\n me and thought about it. But, sent here, it's worse for me and I'm\n probably forgotten by now.\"\n\n\n He was calm about it. Only a Thrid would have been so calm. But they've\n had at least hundreds of generations in which to get used to injustice.\n He accepted it. But Jorgenson frowned.\n\n\n \"You've got brains, Ganti. What's the chance of escape?\"\n\n\n \"None,\" said Ganti unemotionally. \"You'd better get out of the sun.\n It'll burn you badly. Come along.\"", "But the local Thrid governor had spoken and said and observed that\n Ganti's wife wanted to enter his household. He added that Ganti wanted\n to yield her to him.\n\n\n Jorgenson had fumed—but not as a business man—when the transfer took\n place. But Ganti had been conditioned to believe that when a governor\n said he wanted to do something, he did. He couldn't quite grasp the\n contrary idea. But he moped horribly, and Jorgenson talked sardonically\n to him, and he almost doubted that an official was necessarily right.\n When his former wife died of grief, his disbelief became positive. And\n immediately afterward he disappeared.\n\n\n Jorgenson couldn't find out what had become of him. Dour reflection on\n the happening had put him in the bad mood which had started things,\n this morning.", "Jorgenson had stood it longer than most because in spite of their\n convictions he liked the Thrid. Their minds did do outside loops, and\n come up with intolerable convictions. But they were intelligent enough.\n They had steam-power and even steam-driven atmosphere fliers, but they\n didn't have missile weapons and they did have a social system that\n humans simply couldn't accept—even though it applied only to Thrid.\n The ordinary Thrid, with whom Jorgenson did business, weren't bad\n people. It was the officials who made him grind his teeth. And though\n it was his business only to run the trading post of the Rim Stars\n Trading Corporation, sometimes he got fed up.", "He fumed because creatures intelligent enough to build steam fliers\n weren't intelligent enough to see what a racket their government was.\n Now that the new Grand Panjandrum had moved against him, Jorgenson made\n an angry, dogged resolution to do something permanent to make matters\n better. For the Thrid themselves. Here he thought not as a business\n man only, but as a humanitarian. As both. When a whim of the Grand\n Panjandrum could ruin a business, something should be done. And when\n Ganti and countless others had been victims of capricious tyranny....\n And Jorgenson was slated to vanish from sight and never again be\n seen.... It definitely called for strong measures!\n\n\n He reflected with grim pleasure that the Grand Panjandrum would soon\n be in the position of a Thrid whom everybody knew was mistaken. With\n the trading-post denied him and Jorgenson still visible, he'd be\n notoriously wrong. And he couldn't be, and still be Grand Panjandrum!", "The high official looked at him in utter stupefaction. Nobody\n contradicted the Grand Panjandrum! Nobody! The Thrid had noticed long\n ago that they were the most intelligent race in the universe. Since\n that was so, obviously they must have the most perfect government.\n But no government could be perfect if its officials made mistakes. So\n no Thrid official ever made a mistake. In particular the great and\n Never-Mistaken Glen-U could not conceivably blunder! When he said a\n thing, it was true! It had to be! He'd said it! And this was the\n fundamental fact in the culture of the Thrid.\n\n\n \"Like hell you'll receive moneys and goods and such!\" snapped\n Jorgenson. \"Like hell you will!\"\n\n\n The high official literally couldn't believe his ears.\n\n\n \"But—but the great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U—\"", "He snapped orders. The hired Thrid of the trading-post staff had not\n quite grasped the situation. They couldn't believe it. Automatically,\n as he commanded the iron doors and shutters of the trading post closed,\n they obeyed. They saw him turn on the shocker-field so that nobody\n could cross the compound without getting an electric shock that would\n discourage him. They began to believe.\n\n\n Then he sent for the trading-post Thrid consultant. On Earth he'd have\n called for a lawyer. On a hostile world there'd have been a soldier to\n advise him. On Thrid the specialist to be consulted wasn't exactly a\n theologian, but he was nearer that than anything else.", "The high official unrolled the scroll. The Thrid around him, wearing\n Witness hats, became utterly silent. The high official made a sound\n equivalent to clearing his throat. The stillness became death-like.\n\n\n \"On this day,\" intoned the high official, while the Witnesses\n listened reverently, \"on this day did Glen-U the Never-Mistaken, as\n have been his predecessors throughout the ages;—on this day did the\n Never-Mistaken Glen-U speak and say and observe a truth in the presence\n of the governors and the rulers of the universe.\"", "Jorgenson reflected sourly that the governors and the rulers of the\n universe were whoever happened to be within hearing of the Grand\n Panjandrum. They were not imposing. They were scared. Everybody is\n always scared under an absolute ruler, but the Grand Panjandrum was\n worse than that. He couldn't make a mistake. Whatever he said had to\n be true, because he said it, and sometimes it had drastic results. But\n past Grand Panjandrums had spoken highly of the trading post. Jorgenson\n shouldn't have much to worry about. He waited. He thought of Ganti. He\n scowled.", "Jorgenson swore impartially at all of them and turned the shocker-field\n back on. He plugged in a capacity circuit which would turn on warning\n sirens if anything like a steam-driven copter passed or hovered over\n the trading-post. He put blasters in handy positions. The Thrid used\n only spears, knives and scimitars. Blasters would defend the post\n against a multitude.\n\n\n As a business man, he'd acted very foolishly. But he'd acted even less\n sensibly as a human being. He'd gotten fed up with a social system\n and a—call it—theology it wasn't his business to change. True, the\n Thrid way of life was appalling, and what had happened to Ganti was\n probably typical. But it wasn't Jorgenson's affair. He'd been unwise to\n let it disturb him. If the Thrid wanted things this way, it was their\n privilege.", "The trading-post theologian quivered. Jorgenson made things much worse.\n\n\n \"This,\" he raged, \"this is crazy! The Grand Panjandrum's an ordinary\n Thrid just like you are! Of course he can make a mistake! There's\n nobody who can't be wrong!\"\n\n\n The theologian put up feebly protesting, human-like hands. He begged\n hysterically to be allowed to go home before Jorgenson vanished, with\n unknown consequences for any Thrid who might be nearby.\n\n\n When Jorgenson opened a door to kick him out of it, the whole staff of\n the trading-post plunged after him. They'd been eavesdropping and they\n fled in pure horror.", "The real trouble was that Jorgenson saw things as a business man does.\n But also, and contradictorily, he saw them as right and just, or as\n wrong and intolerable. As a business man, he should have kept his mind\n on business and never bothered about Ganti. As a believer in right and\n wrong, it would have been wiser for him to have stayed off the planet\n Thriddar altogether. Thriddar was no place for him, anyhow you look at\n it. On this particular morning it was especially the wrong place for\n him to be trying to live and do business.\n\n\n He woke up thinking of Ganti, and in consequence he was in a bad mood\n right away. Most humans couldn't take the sort of thing that went on on\n Thriddar. Most of them wanted to use missile weapons—which the Thrid\n did not use—to change the local social system. Most humans got off\n Thriddar—fast! And boiling mad.", "It was not wise to be moved by such sympathetic feelings. The Grand\n Panjandrum could not be mistaken. It was definitely unwise to\n contradict him. It could even be dangerous. Jorgenson was in a nasty\n spot.\n\n\n The Witnesses murmured reverently:\n\n\n \"We hear the words of the Never-Mistaken Glen-U.\"\n\n\n The high official tucked away the scroll and said blandly:\n\n\n \"I will receive the moneys, goods, and benefactions it is the desire\n of the Rim Stars Trading Corporation to present to the great and\n Never-Mistaken Glen-U.\"\n\n\n Jorgenson, boiling inside, nevertheless knew what he was doing. He said\n succinctly:\n\n\n \"Like hell you will!\"\n\n\n There was an idiom in Thrid speech that had exactly the meaning of the\n human phrase. Jorgenson used it.", "\"You declared the great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U mistaken. This could\n not be. It proved you either a criminal or insane, because no rational\n creature could believe him mistaken. He declared you insane, and he\n cannot be wrong. So soon you will arrive where you are to be confined\n and no rational being will ever see you face to face.\"\n\n\n Jorgenson switched back to human swearing. Then he blended both\n languages, using all the applicable words he knew both in human speech\n and Thrid. He knew a great many. The soft throbbing of the steam-driven\n rotors went on, and Jorgenson swore both as a business man and a\n humanitarian. Both were frustrated.", "Ganti looked skeptical. Jorgenson explained. He had to demonstrate\n crudely. The whole idea was novel to Ganti, but the Thrid were smart.\n Presently he grasped it. He said:\n\n\n \"I see the theory. If we can make it work, all right. But how do we\n make the copter land?\"\n\n\n Jorgenson realized that they talked oddly. They spoke with leisurely\n lack of haste, with the lack of hope normal to prisoners to whom escape\n is impossible, even when they talk about escape. They could have been\n discussing a matter that would not affect either of them. But Jorgenson\n quivered inside. He hoped.\n\n\n \"We'll try it,\" said Ganti detachedly, when he'd explained again. \"If\n it fails, they'll only stop giving us food and water.\"\n\n\n That, of course, did not seem either to him or Jorgenson a reason to\n hesitate to try what Jorgenson had planned.", "This morning was especially beyond the limit. There was a new Grand\n Panjandrum—the term was Jorgenson's own for the supreme ruler over\n all the Thrid—and when Jorgenson finished his breakfast a high Thrid\n official waited in the trading-post compound. Around him clustered\n other Thrid, wearing the formal headgear that said they were Witnesses\n to an official act.\n\n\n Jorgenson went out, scowling, and exchanged the customary ceremonial\n greetings. Then the high official beamed at him and extracted a scroll\n from his voluminous garments. Jorgenson saw the glint of gold and was\n suspicious at once. The words of a current Grand Panjandrum were always\n written in gold. If they didn't get written in gold they didn't get\n written at all; but it was too bad if anybody ignored any of them.", "So Thrid younglings were trained not to think; not to have any opinion\n about anything; only to repeat what nobody questioned; only to do what\n they were told by authority. It occurred to Jorgenson that on a planet\n with such a population, a skeptic could make a great deal of confusion.\n\n\n Then, another time, Jorgenson decided to make use of the weathering\n cord which had been cut from the copter when he was landed. He cut\n off a part of it with a sharp-edged fragment of stone from the pile\n some former prisoner on the island had made. He unravelled the twisted\n fibers. Then he ground fishhooks from shells attached to the island's\n rocky walls just below water-line. After that they fished. Sometimes\n they even caught something to eat. But they never fished when the\n copter was due.", "Jorgenson laid the matter indignantly before him, repeating the exact\n phrases that said the trading company wanted—wanted!—practically to\n give itself to the Never-Mistaken Glen-U, who was the Grand Panjandrum\n of Thriddar. He waited to be told that it couldn't have happened; that\n anyhow it couldn't be intended. But the theologian's Thriddish ears\n went limp, which amounted to the same thing as a man's face turning\n pale. He stammered agitatedly that if the Grand Panjandrum said it, it\n was true. It couldn't be otherwise! If the trading company wanted to\n give itself to him, there was nothing to be done. It wanted to! The\n Grand Panjandrum had said so!\n\n\n \"He also said,\" said Jorgenson irritably, \"that I'm to vanish and\n nevermore be seen face to face by any rational being. How does that\n happen? Do I get speared?\"", "The copter came and dropped food and water. When it left, they\n practiced. When it came again they were not practicing, but when it\n went away they practiced. They were a naked man and a naked Thrid,\n left upon a morsel of rock in a boundless sea, rehearsing themselves\n in an art so long-forgotten that they had to reinvent the finer parts\n of the technique. They experimented. They tried this. They tried that.\n When the copter appeared, they showed themselves. They rushed upon the\n dropped bag containing food and water as if fiercely trying to deny\n each other a full share. Once they seemed to fight over the dropped\n bag. The copter hovered to watch. The fight seemed furious and deadly,\n but inconclusive.\n\n\n When the copter went away Jorgenson and Ganti went briskly back to\n their practicing.", "Now it was evidently to be arranged that he would never again be seen\n face to face by a rational being. The Grand Panjandrum had won the\n argument. Within a few months a Rim Stars trading ship would land, and\n Jorgenson would be gone and the trading post confiscated. It would be\n hopeless to ask questions, and worse than hopeless to try to trade. So\n the ship would lift off and there'd be no more ships for at least a\n generation. Then there might—there might!—be another.\n\n\n Jorgenson swore fluently and with passion.\n\n\n \"It will not be long,\" said a tranquil voice.\n\n\n Jorgenson changed from human-speech profanity to Thrid. He directed\n his words to the unseen creature who'd spoken. That Thrid listened,\n apparently without emotion. When Jorgenson ran out of breath, the voice\n said severely:" ], [ "In theory, no Thrid should ever make a mistake, because he belonged\n to the most intelligent race in the universe. But a local governor\n was even more intelligent. If an ordinary Thrid challenged a local\n governor's least and lightest remark—why—he must be either a criminal\n or insane. The local governor decided—correctly, of course—which\n he was. If he was a criminal, he spent the rest of his life in a gang\n of criminals chained together and doing the most exhausting labor the\n Thrid could contrive. If he was mad, he was confined for life.\nThere'd been Ganti, a Thrid of whom Jorgenson had had much hope. He\n believed that Ganti could learn to run the trading post without human\n supervision. If he could, the trading company could simply bring trade\n goods to Thriddar and take away other trade goods. The cost of doing\n business would be decreased. There could be no human-Thrid friction.\n Jorgenson had been training Ganti for this work.", "Jorgenson reflected sourly that the governors and the rulers of the\n universe were whoever happened to be within hearing of the Grand\n Panjandrum. They were not imposing. They were scared. Everybody is\n always scared under an absolute ruler, but the Grand Panjandrum was\n worse than that. He couldn't make a mistake. Whatever he said had to\n be true, because he said it, and sometimes it had drastic results. But\n past Grand Panjandrums had spoken highly of the trading post. Jorgenson\n shouldn't have much to worry about. He waited. He thought of Ganti. He\n scowled.", "But the local Thrid governor had spoken and said and observed that\n Ganti's wife wanted to enter his household. He added that Ganti wanted\n to yield her to him.\n\n\n Jorgenson had fumed—but not as a business man—when the transfer took\n place. But Ganti had been conditioned to believe that when a governor\n said he wanted to do something, he did. He couldn't quite grasp the\n contrary idea. But he moped horribly, and Jorgenson talked sardonically\n to him, and he almost doubted that an official was necessarily right.\n When his former wife died of grief, his disbelief became positive. And\n immediately afterward he disappeared.\n\n\n Jorgenson couldn't find out what had become of him. Dour reflection on\n the happening had put him in the bad mood which had started things,\n this morning.", "\"The great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U,\" intoned the official again,\n \"in the presence of the governors and the rulers of the universe, did\n speak and say and observe that it is the desire of the Rim Star Trading\n Corporation to present to him, the great and never-mistaken Glen-U, all\n of the present possessions of the said Rim Stars Trading Corporation,\n and thereafter to remit to him all moneys, goods, and benefactions\n to and of the said Rim Stars Trading Corporation as they shall be\n received. The great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U did further speak and say\n and observe that anyone hindering this loyal and admirable gift must,\n by the operation of truth, vanish from sight and nevermore be seen face\n to face by any rational being.\"", "The high official unrolled the scroll. The Thrid around him, wearing\n Witness hats, became utterly silent. The high official made a sound\n equivalent to clearing his throat. The stillness became death-like.\n\n\n \"On this day,\" intoned the high official, while the Witnesses\n listened reverently, \"on this day did Glen-U the Never-Mistaken, as\n have been his predecessors throughout the ages;—on this day did the\n Never-Mistaken Glen-U speak and say and observe a truth in the presence\n of the governors and the rulers of the universe.\"", "The high official looked at him in utter stupefaction. Nobody\n contradicted the Grand Panjandrum! Nobody! The Thrid had noticed long\n ago that they were the most intelligent race in the universe. Since\n that was so, obviously they must have the most perfect government.\n But no government could be perfect if its officials made mistakes. So\n no Thrid official ever made a mistake. In particular the great and\n Never-Mistaken Glen-U could not conceivably blunder! When he said a\n thing, it was true! It had to be! He'd said it! And this was the\n fundamental fact in the culture of the Thrid.\n\n\n \"Like hell you'll receive moneys and goods and such!\" snapped\n Jorgenson. \"Like hell you will!\"\n\n\n The high official literally couldn't believe his ears.\n\n\n \"But—but the great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U—\"", "There were other incidents, of course. The dried seaweed they slept on\n turned to powdery trash. They got more seaweed hauling long kelp-like\n strands of it ashore from where it clung to the island's submerged\n rocks. Ganti mentioned that they must do it right after the copter\n came, so there would be no sign of enterprise to be seen from aloft.\n The seaweed had long, flexible stems of which no use whatever could be\n made. When it dried, it became stiff and brittle but without strength.\n\n\n Once Ganti abruptly began to talk of his youth. As if he were examining\n something he'd never noticed before, he told of the incredible\n conditioning-education of the young members of his race. They learned\n that they must never make a mistake. Never! It did not matter if they\n were unskilled or inefficient. It did not matter if they accomplished\n nothing. There was no penalty for anything but making mistakes or\n differing from officials who could not make mistakes.", "It was not wise to be moved by such sympathetic feelings. The Grand\n Panjandrum could not be mistaken. It was definitely unwise to\n contradict him. It could even be dangerous. Jorgenson was in a nasty\n spot.\n\n\n The Witnesses murmured reverently:\n\n\n \"We hear the words of the Never-Mistaken Glen-U.\"\n\n\n The high official tucked away the scroll and said blandly:\n\n\n \"I will receive the moneys, goods, and benefactions it is the desire\n of the Rim Stars Trading Corporation to present to the great and\n Never-Mistaken Glen-U.\"\n\n\n Jorgenson, boiling inside, nevertheless knew what he was doing. He said\n succinctly:\n\n\n \"Like hell you will!\"\n\n\n There was an idiom in Thrid speech that had exactly the meaning of the\n human phrase. Jorgenson used it.", "He fumed because creatures intelligent enough to build steam fliers\n weren't intelligent enough to see what a racket their government was.\n Now that the new Grand Panjandrum had moved against him, Jorgenson made\n an angry, dogged resolution to do something permanent to make matters\n better. For the Thrid themselves. Here he thought not as a business\n man only, but as a humanitarian. As both. When a whim of the Grand\n Panjandrum could ruin a business, something should be done. And when\n Ganti and countless others had been victims of capricious tyranny....\n And Jorgenson was slated to vanish from sight and never again be\n seen.... It definitely called for strong measures!\n\n\n He reflected with grim pleasure that the Grand Panjandrum would soon\n be in the position of a Thrid whom everybody knew was mistaken. With\n the trading-post denied him and Jorgenson still visible, he'd be\n notoriously wrong. And he couldn't be, and still be Grand Panjandrum!", "The trading-post theologian quivered. Jorgenson made things much worse.\n\n\n \"This,\" he raged, \"this is crazy! The Grand Panjandrum's an ordinary\n Thrid just like you are! Of course he can make a mistake! There's\n nobody who can't be wrong!\"\n\n\n The theologian put up feebly protesting, human-like hands. He begged\n hysterically to be allowed to go home before Jorgenson vanished, with\n unknown consequences for any Thrid who might be nearby.\n\n\n When Jorgenson opened a door to kick him out of it, the whole staff of\n the trading-post plunged after him. They'd been eavesdropping and they\n fled in pure horror.", "Jorgenson laid the matter indignantly before him, repeating the exact\n phrases that said the trading company wanted—wanted!—practically to\n give itself to the Never-Mistaken Glen-U, who was the Grand Panjandrum\n of Thriddar. He waited to be told that it couldn't have happened; that\n anyhow it couldn't be intended. But the theologian's Thriddish ears\n went limp, which amounted to the same thing as a man's face turning\n pale. He stammered agitatedly that if the Grand Panjandrum said it, it\n was true. It couldn't be otherwise! If the trading company wanted to\n give itself to him, there was nothing to be done. It wanted to! The\n Grand Panjandrum had said so!\n\n\n \"He also said,\" said Jorgenson irritably, \"that I'm to vanish and\n nevermore be seen face to face by any rational being. How does that\n happen? Do I get speared?\"", "\"Is mistaken!\" said Jorgenson bitingly. \"He's wrong! The Rim Stars\n Trading Corporation does\nnot\nwant to give him anything! What he has\n said is not true!\" This was the equivalent of treason, blasphemy and\n the ultimate of indecorous behavior toward a virgin Pelean princess. \"I\n won't give him anything! I'm not even vanishing from sight! Glen-U is\n wrong about that, too! Now—git!\"\n\n\n He jerked out his blaster and pulled the trigger.\n\n\n There was an explosive burst of flame from the ground between the\n official and himself. The official fled. With him fled all the\n Witnesses, some even losing their headgear in their haste to get away.\nJorgenson stamped into the trading-post building. His eyes were stormy\n and his jaw was set.", "\"But I'm crazy,\" said Ganti calmly. \"I tried to kill the governor\n who'd taken my wife. So he said I was crazy and that made it true. So\n I wasn't put in a chained group of laborers. Somebody might have seen\n me and thought about it. But, sent here, it's worse for me and I'm\n probably forgotten by now.\"\n\n\n He was calm about it. Only a Thrid would have been so calm. But they've\n had at least hundreds of generations in which to get used to injustice.\n He accepted it. But Jorgenson frowned.\n\n\n \"You've got brains, Ganti. What's the chance of escape?\"\n\n\n \"None,\" said Ganti unemotionally. \"You'd better get out of the sun.\n It'll burn you badly. Come along.\"", "\"Somebody dug it out,\" said Ganti without resentment. \"To keep busy.\n Maybe one prisoner only began it. A later one saw it started and worked\n on it to keep busy. Then others in their turn. It took a good many\n lives to make this cave.\"\n\n\n Jorgenson ground his teeth a second time.\n\n\n \"And just because they'd contradicted somebody who couldn't be wrong!\n Or because they had a business an official wanted!\"\n\n\n \"Or a wife,\" agreed Ganti. \"Here!\"\n\n\n He offered food. Jorgenson ate, scowling. Afterward, near sundown, he\n went over the island.", "This morning was especially beyond the limit. There was a new Grand\n Panjandrum—the term was Jorgenson's own for the supreme ruler over\n all the Thrid—and when Jorgenson finished his breakfast a high Thrid\n official waited in the trading-post compound. Around him clustered\n other Thrid, wearing the formal headgear that said they were Witnesses\n to an official act.\n\n\n Jorgenson went out, scowling, and exchanged the customary ceremonial\n greetings. Then the high official beamed at him and extracted a scroll\n from his voluminous garments. Jorgenson saw the glint of gold and was\n suspicious at once. The words of a current Grand Panjandrum were always\n written in gold. If they didn't get written in gold they didn't get\n written at all; but it was too bad if anybody ignored any of them.", "\"You declared the great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U mistaken. This could\n not be. It proved you either a criminal or insane, because no rational\n creature could believe him mistaken. He declared you insane, and he\n cannot be wrong. So soon you will arrive where you are to be confined\n and no rational being will ever see you face to face.\"\n\n\n Jorgenson switched back to human swearing. Then he blended both\n languages, using all the applicable words he knew both in human speech\n and Thrid. He knew a great many. The soft throbbing of the steam-driven\n rotors went on, and Jorgenson swore both as a business man and a\n humanitarian. Both were frustrated.", "Then he tried to waken fully, and he couldn't do that either. He stayed\n in a dream-like, frustrated state which was partly like a nightmare,\n while very gradually new sensations came to him. He felt a cushioned\n throbbing against his chest, in the very hard surface on which he lay\n face down. That surface swayed and rocked slightly. He tried again to\n move, and realized that his hands and feet were bound. He found that he\n shivered, and realized that his clothing had been taken from him.\n\n\n He was completely helpless and lying on his stomach in the cargo-space\n of a steam helicopter: now he could hear the sound of its machinery.\n\n\n Then he knew what had happened. He'd committed The unthinkable\n crime—or lunacy—of declaring the Grand Panjandrum mistaken. So by the\n operation of truth, which was really an anesthetic gas cloud drifted\n over the trading post, he had vanished from sight.", "The high official rolled up the scroll, while Jorgenson exploded inside.\nA part of this was reaction as a business man. A part was recognition\n of all the intolerable things that the Thrid took as a matter of\n course. If Jorgenson had reacted solely as a business man he'd have\n swallowed it, departed on the next Rim Stars trading-ship—which would\n not have left any trade-goods behind—and left the Grand Panjandrum to\n realize what he had lost when no off-planet goods arrived on Thriddar.\n In time he'd speak and say and observe that he, out of his generosity,\n gave the loot back. Then the trading could resume. But Jorgenson didn't\n feel only like a business man this morning. He thought of Ganti, who\n was a particular case of everything he disliked on Thriddar.", "He snapped orders. The hired Thrid of the trading-post staff had not\n quite grasped the situation. They couldn't believe it. Automatically,\n as he commanded the iron doors and shutters of the trading post closed,\n they obeyed. They saw him turn on the shocker-field so that nobody\n could cross the compound without getting an electric shock that would\n discourage him. They began to believe.\n\n\n Then he sent for the trading-post Thrid consultant. On Earth he'd have\n called for a lawyer. On a hostile world there'd have been a soldier to\n advise him. On Thrid the specialist to be consulted wasn't exactly a\n theologian, but he was nearer that than anything else.", "It would be a nice situation for Glen-U. He'd have to do something\n about it, and there was nothing he could do. He'd blundered, and it\n would soon be public knowledge.\n\n\n Jorgenson dozed lightly. Then more heavily. Then more heavily still.\n The night was not two hours old when the warning sirens made a terrific\n uproar. The Thrid for miles around heard the wailing, ullulating sound\n of the sirens that should have awakened Jorgenson.\n\n\n But they didn't wake him. He slept on.\nWhen he woke, he knew that he was cold. His muscles were cramped. Half\n awake, he tried to move and could not." ], [ "The high official unrolled the scroll. The Thrid around him, wearing\n Witness hats, became utterly silent. The high official made a sound\n equivalent to clearing his throat. The stillness became death-like.\n\n\n \"On this day,\" intoned the high official, while the Witnesses\n listened reverently, \"on this day did Glen-U the Never-Mistaken, as\n have been his predecessors throughout the ages;—on this day did the\n Never-Mistaken Glen-U speak and say and observe a truth in the presence\n of the governors and the rulers of the universe.\"", "The high official looked at him in utter stupefaction. Nobody\n contradicted the Grand Panjandrum! Nobody! The Thrid had noticed long\n ago that they were the most intelligent race in the universe. Since\n that was so, obviously they must have the most perfect government.\n But no government could be perfect if its officials made mistakes. So\n no Thrid official ever made a mistake. In particular the great and\n Never-Mistaken Glen-U could not conceivably blunder! When he said a\n thing, it was true! It had to be! He'd said it! And this was the\n fundamental fact in the culture of the Thrid.\n\n\n \"Like hell you'll receive moneys and goods and such!\" snapped\n Jorgenson. \"Like hell you will!\"\n\n\n The high official literally couldn't believe his ears.\n\n\n \"But—but the great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U—\"", "Jorgenson laid the matter indignantly before him, repeating the exact\n phrases that said the trading company wanted—wanted!—practically to\n give itself to the Never-Mistaken Glen-U, who was the Grand Panjandrum\n of Thriddar. He waited to be told that it couldn't have happened; that\n anyhow it couldn't be intended. But the theologian's Thriddish ears\n went limp, which amounted to the same thing as a man's face turning\n pale. He stammered agitatedly that if the Grand Panjandrum said it, it\n was true. It couldn't be otherwise! If the trading company wanted to\n give itself to him, there was nothing to be done. It wanted to! The\n Grand Panjandrum had said so!\n\n\n \"He also said,\" said Jorgenson irritably, \"that I'm to vanish and\n nevermore be seen face to face by any rational being. How does that\n happen? Do I get speared?\"", "He snapped orders. The hired Thrid of the trading-post staff had not\n quite grasped the situation. They couldn't believe it. Automatically,\n as he commanded the iron doors and shutters of the trading post closed,\n they obeyed. They saw him turn on the shocker-field so that nobody\n could cross the compound without getting an electric shock that would\n discourage him. They began to believe.\n\n\n Then he sent for the trading-post Thrid consultant. On Earth he'd have\n called for a lawyer. On a hostile world there'd have been a soldier to\n advise him. On Thrid the specialist to be consulted wasn't exactly a\n theologian, but he was nearer that than anything else.", "The trading-post theologian quivered. Jorgenson made things much worse.\n\n\n \"This,\" he raged, \"this is crazy! The Grand Panjandrum's an ordinary\n Thrid just like you are! Of course he can make a mistake! There's\n nobody who can't be wrong!\"\n\n\n The theologian put up feebly protesting, human-like hands. He begged\n hysterically to be allowed to go home before Jorgenson vanished, with\n unknown consequences for any Thrid who might be nearby.\n\n\n When Jorgenson opened a door to kick him out of it, the whole staff of\n the trading-post plunged after him. They'd been eavesdropping and they\n fled in pure horror.", "\"But I'm crazy,\" said Ganti calmly. \"I tried to kill the governor\n who'd taken my wife. So he said I was crazy and that made it true. So\n I wasn't put in a chained group of laborers. Somebody might have seen\n me and thought about it. But, sent here, it's worse for me and I'm\n probably forgotten by now.\"\n\n\n He was calm about it. Only a Thrid would have been so calm. But they've\n had at least hundreds of generations in which to get used to injustice.\n He accepted it. But Jorgenson frowned.\n\n\n \"You've got brains, Ganti. What's the chance of escape?\"\n\n\n \"None,\" said Ganti unemotionally. \"You'd better get out of the sun.\n It'll burn you badly. Come along.\"", "It was not wise to be moved by such sympathetic feelings. The Grand\n Panjandrum could not be mistaken. It was definitely unwise to\n contradict him. It could even be dangerous. Jorgenson was in a nasty\n spot.\n\n\n The Witnesses murmured reverently:\n\n\n \"We hear the words of the Never-Mistaken Glen-U.\"\n\n\n The high official tucked away the scroll and said blandly:\n\n\n \"I will receive the moneys, goods, and benefactions it is the desire\n of the Rim Stars Trading Corporation to present to the great and\n Never-Mistaken Glen-U.\"\n\n\n Jorgenson, boiling inside, nevertheless knew what he was doing. He said\n succinctly:\n\n\n \"Like hell you will!\"\n\n\n There was an idiom in Thrid speech that had exactly the meaning of the\n human phrase. Jorgenson used it.", "In theory, no Thrid should ever make a mistake, because he belonged\n to the most intelligent race in the universe. But a local governor\n was even more intelligent. If an ordinary Thrid challenged a local\n governor's least and lightest remark—why—he must be either a criminal\n or insane. The local governor decided—correctly, of course—which\n he was. If he was a criminal, he spent the rest of his life in a gang\n of criminals chained together and doing the most exhausting labor the\n Thrid could contrive. If he was mad, he was confined for life.\nThere'd been Ganti, a Thrid of whom Jorgenson had had much hope. He\n believed that Ganti could learn to run the trading post without human\n supervision. If he could, the trading company could simply bring trade\n goods to Thriddar and take away other trade goods. The cost of doing\n business would be decreased. There could be no human-Thrid friction.\n Jorgenson had been training Ganti for this work.", "MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE THRID\nBY MURRAY LEINSTER\nThe Thrid were the wisest creatures in\n\n space—they even said so themselves!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI", "\"You declared the great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U mistaken. This could\n not be. It proved you either a criminal or insane, because no rational\n creature could believe him mistaken. He declared you insane, and he\n cannot be wrong. So soon you will arrive where you are to be confined\n and no rational being will ever see you face to face.\"\n\n\n Jorgenson switched back to human swearing. Then he blended both\n languages, using all the applicable words he knew both in human speech\n and Thrid. He knew a great many. The soft throbbing of the steam-driven\n rotors went on, and Jorgenson swore both as a business man and a\n humanitarian. Both were frustrated.", "Then he saw a figure on the island. It was a Thrid stripped of all\n clothing like Jorgenson and darkened by the sun. That figure came\n agilely toward where he was let down. It caught him. It checked his\n wild swingings, which could have broken bones. The rope slackened. The\n Thrid laid Jorgenson down.\n\n\n He did not cast off the rope. He seemed to essay to climb it.\n\n\n It was cut at the steam-copter and came tumbling down all over both of\n them. The Thrid waved his arms wildly and seemed to screech gibberish\n at the sky. There was an impact nearby, of something dropped. Jorgenson\n heard the throbbing sound of the copter as it lifted and swept away.\n\n\n Then he felt the bounds about his arms and legs being removed. Then a\n Thrid voice—amazingly, a familiar Thrid voice—said:\n\n\n \"This is not good, Jorgenson. Who did you contradict?\"", "But the local Thrid governor had spoken and said and observed that\n Ganti's wife wanted to enter his household. He added that Ganti wanted\n to yield her to him.\n\n\n Jorgenson had fumed—but not as a business man—when the transfer took\n place. But Ganti had been conditioned to believe that when a governor\n said he wanted to do something, he did. He couldn't quite grasp the\n contrary idea. But he moped horribly, and Jorgenson talked sardonically\n to him, and he almost doubted that an official was necessarily right.\n When his former wife died of grief, his disbelief became positive. And\n immediately afterward he disappeared.\n\n\n Jorgenson couldn't find out what had become of him. Dour reflection on\n the happening had put him in the bad mood which had started things,\n this morning.", "So Thrid younglings were trained not to think; not to have any opinion\n about anything; only to repeat what nobody questioned; only to do what\n they were told by authority. It occurred to Jorgenson that on a planet\n with such a population, a skeptic could make a great deal of confusion.\n\n\n Then, another time, Jorgenson decided to make use of the weathering\n cord which had been cut from the copter when he was landed. He cut\n off a part of it with a sharp-edged fragment of stone from the pile\n some former prisoner on the island had made. He unravelled the twisted\n fibers. Then he ground fishhooks from shells attached to the island's\n rocky walls just below water-line. After that they fished. Sometimes\n they even caught something to eat. But they never fished when the\n copter was due.", "Jorgenson swore impartially at all of them and turned the shocker-field\n back on. He plugged in a capacity circuit which would turn on warning\n sirens if anything like a steam-driven copter passed or hovered over\n the trading-post. He put blasters in handy positions. The Thrid used\n only spears, knives and scimitars. Blasters would defend the post\n against a multitude.\n\n\n As a business man, he'd acted very foolishly. But he'd acted even less\n sensibly as a human being. He'd gotten fed up with a social system\n and a—call it—theology it wasn't his business to change. True, the\n Thrid way of life was appalling, and what had happened to Ganti was\n probably typical. But it wasn't Jorgenson's affair. He'd been unwise to\n let it disturb him. If the Thrid wanted things this way, it was their\n privilege.", "Then he tried to waken fully, and he couldn't do that either. He stayed\n in a dream-like, frustrated state which was partly like a nightmare,\n while very gradually new sensations came to him. He felt a cushioned\n throbbing against his chest, in the very hard surface on which he lay\n face down. That surface swayed and rocked slightly. He tried again to\n move, and realized that his hands and feet were bound. He found that he\n shivered, and realized that his clothing had been taken from him.\n\n\n He was completely helpless and lying on his stomach in the cargo-space\n of a steam helicopter: now he could hear the sound of its machinery.\n\n\n Then he knew what had happened. He'd committed The unthinkable\n crime—or lunacy—of declaring the Grand Panjandrum mistaken. So by the\n operation of truth, which was really an anesthetic gas cloud drifted\n over the trading post, he had vanished from sight.", "He fumed because creatures intelligent enough to build steam fliers\n weren't intelligent enough to see what a racket their government was.\n Now that the new Grand Panjandrum had moved against him, Jorgenson made\n an angry, dogged resolution to do something permanent to make matters\n better. For the Thrid themselves. Here he thought not as a business\n man only, but as a humanitarian. As both. When a whim of the Grand\n Panjandrum could ruin a business, something should be done. And when\n Ganti and countless others had been victims of capricious tyranny....\n And Jorgenson was slated to vanish from sight and never again be\n seen.... It definitely called for strong measures!\n\n\n He reflected with grim pleasure that the Grand Panjandrum would soon\n be in the position of a Thrid whom everybody knew was mistaken. With\n the trading-post denied him and Jorgenson still visible, he'd be\n notoriously wrong. And he couldn't be, and still be Grand Panjandrum!", "Ganti looked skeptical. Jorgenson explained. He had to demonstrate\n crudely. The whole idea was novel to Ganti, but the Thrid were smart.\n Presently he grasped it. He said:\n\n\n \"I see the theory. If we can make it work, all right. But how do we\n make the copter land?\"\n\n\n Jorgenson realized that they talked oddly. They spoke with leisurely\n lack of haste, with the lack of hope normal to prisoners to whom escape\n is impossible, even when they talk about escape. They could have been\n discussing a matter that would not affect either of them. But Jorgenson\n quivered inside. He hoped.\n\n\n \"We'll try it,\" said Ganti detachedly, when he'd explained again. \"If\n it fails, they'll only stop giving us food and water.\"\n\n\n That, of course, did not seem either to him or Jorgenson a reason to\n hesitate to try what Jorgenson had planned.", "This morning was especially beyond the limit. There was a new Grand\n Panjandrum—the term was Jorgenson's own for the supreme ruler over\n all the Thrid—and when Jorgenson finished his breakfast a high Thrid\n official waited in the trading-post compound. Around him clustered\n other Thrid, wearing the formal headgear that said they were Witnesses\n to an official act.\n\n\n Jorgenson went out, scowling, and exchanged the customary ceremonial\n greetings. Then the high official beamed at him and extracted a scroll\n from his voluminous garments. Jorgenson saw the glint of gold and was\n suspicious at once. The words of a current Grand Panjandrum were always\n written in gold. If they didn't get written in gold they didn't get\n written at all; but it was too bad if anybody ignored any of them.", "Now it was evidently to be arranged that he would never again be seen\n face to face by a rational being. The Grand Panjandrum had won the\n argument. Within a few months a Rim Stars trading ship would land, and\n Jorgenson would be gone and the trading post confiscated. It would be\n hopeless to ask questions, and worse than hopeless to try to trade. So\n the ship would lift off and there'd be no more ships for at least a\n generation. Then there might—there might!—be another.\n\n\n Jorgenson swore fluently and with passion.\n\n\n \"It will not be long,\" said a tranquil voice.\n\n\n Jorgenson changed from human-speech profanity to Thrid. He directed\n his words to the unseen creature who'd spoken. That Thrid listened,\n apparently without emotion. When Jorgenson ran out of breath, the voice\n said severely:", "The Thrid was Ganti, of whom Jorgenson had once had hopes as a business\n man, and for whose disaster he had felt indignation as something else.\n He loosened the last of Jorgenson's bonds and helped him sit up.\n\n\n Jorgenson glared around. The island was roughly one hundred feet by\n two. It was twisted, curdled yellow stone from one end to the other.\n There were stone hillocks and a miniature stony peak, and a narrow\n valley between two patches of higher rock. Huge seas boomed against\n the windward shore, throwing spray higher than the island's topmost\n point. There were some places where sand had gathered. There was one\n spot—perhaps a square yard of it—where sand had been made fertile by\n the droppings of flying things and where two or three starveling plants\n showed foliage of sorts. That was all. Jorgenson ground his teeth.\n\n\n \"Go ahead,\" said Ganti grimly, \"but it may be even worse than you\n think.\"" ], [ "Jorgenson reflected sourly that the governors and the rulers of the\n universe were whoever happened to be within hearing of the Grand\n Panjandrum. They were not imposing. They were scared. Everybody is\n always scared under an absolute ruler, but the Grand Panjandrum was\n worse than that. He couldn't make a mistake. Whatever he said had to\n be true, because he said it, and sometimes it had drastic results. But\n past Grand Panjandrums had spoken highly of the trading post. Jorgenson\n shouldn't have much to worry about. He waited. He thought of Ganti. He\n scowled.", "\"Somebody dug it out,\" said Ganti without resentment. \"To keep busy.\n Maybe one prisoner only began it. A later one saw it started and worked\n on it to keep busy. Then others in their turn. It took a good many\n lives to make this cave.\"\n\n\n Jorgenson ground his teeth a second time.\n\n\n \"And just because they'd contradicted somebody who couldn't be wrong!\n Or because they had a business an official wanted!\"\n\n\n \"Or a wife,\" agreed Ganti. \"Here!\"\n\n\n He offered food. Jorgenson ate, scowling. Afterward, near sundown, he\n went over the island.", "Ganti looked skeptical. Jorgenson explained. He had to demonstrate\n crudely. The whole idea was novel to Ganti, but the Thrid were smart.\n Presently he grasped it. He said:\n\n\n \"I see the theory. If we can make it work, all right. But how do we\n make the copter land?\"\n\n\n Jorgenson realized that they talked oddly. They spoke with leisurely\n lack of haste, with the lack of hope normal to prisoners to whom escape\n is impossible, even when they talk about escape. They could have been\n discussing a matter that would not affect either of them. But Jorgenson\n quivered inside. He hoped.\n\n\n \"We'll try it,\" said Ganti detachedly, when he'd explained again. \"If\n it fails, they'll only stop giving us food and water.\"\n\n\n That, of course, did not seem either to him or Jorgenson a reason to\n hesitate to try what Jorgenson had planned.", "The Thrid was Ganti, of whom Jorgenson had once had hopes as a business\n man, and for whose disaster he had felt indignation as something else.\n He loosened the last of Jorgenson's bonds and helped him sit up.\n\n\n Jorgenson glared around. The island was roughly one hundred feet by\n two. It was twisted, curdled yellow stone from one end to the other.\n There were stone hillocks and a miniature stony peak, and a narrow\n valley between two patches of higher rock. Huge seas boomed against\n the windward shore, throwing spray higher than the island's topmost\n point. There were some places where sand had gathered. There was one\n spot—perhaps a square yard of it—where sand had been made fertile by\n the droppings of flying things and where two or three starveling plants\n showed foliage of sorts. That was all. Jorgenson ground his teeth.\n\n\n \"Go ahead,\" said Ganti grimly, \"but it may be even worse than you\n think.\"", "\"This is a prison,\" Ganti explained matter-of-factly. \"They let me\n down here and dropped food and water for a week. They went away. I\n found there'd been another prisoner here before me. His skeleton was in\n this cave. I reasoned it out. There must have been others before him.\n When there is a prisoner here, every so often a copter drops food and\n water. When the prisoner doesn't pick it up, they stop coming. When,\n presently, they have another prisoner they drop him off, like me, and\n he finds the skeleton of the previous prisoner, like me, and he dumps\n it overboard as I did. They'll drop food and water for me until I stop\n picking it up. And presently they'll do the same thing all over again.\"\n\n\n Jorgenson glowered. That was his reaction as a person. Then he gestured\n to the cave around him. There was a pile of dried-out seaweed for\n sleeping purposes.\n\n\n \"And this?\"", "Jorgenson swore impartially at all of them and turned the shocker-field\n back on. He plugged in a capacity circuit which would turn on warning\n sirens if anything like a steam-driven copter passed or hovered over\n the trading-post. He put blasters in handy positions. The Thrid used\n only spears, knives and scimitars. Blasters would defend the post\n against a multitude.\n\n\n As a business man, he'd acted very foolishly. But he'd acted even less\n sensibly as a human being. He'd gotten fed up with a social system\n and a—call it—theology it wasn't his business to change. True, the\n Thrid way of life was appalling, and what had happened to Ganti was\n probably typical. But it wasn't Jorgenson's affair. He'd been unwise to\n let it disturb him. If the Thrid wanted things this way, it was their\n privilege.", "\"But I'm crazy,\" said Ganti calmly. \"I tried to kill the governor\n who'd taken my wife. So he said I was crazy and that made it true. So\n I wasn't put in a chained group of laborers. Somebody might have seen\n me and thought about it. But, sent here, it's worse for me and I'm\n probably forgotten by now.\"\n\n\n He was calm about it. Only a Thrid would have been so calm. But they've\n had at least hundreds of generations in which to get used to injustice.\n He accepted it. But Jorgenson frowned.\n\n\n \"You've got brains, Ganti. What's the chance of escape?\"\n\n\n \"None,\" said Ganti unemotionally. \"You'd better get out of the sun.\n It'll burn you badly. Come along.\"", "In theory, no Thrid should ever make a mistake, because he belonged\n to the most intelligent race in the universe. But a local governor\n was even more intelligent. If an ordinary Thrid challenged a local\n governor's least and lightest remark—why—he must be either a criminal\n or insane. The local governor decided—correctly, of course—which\n he was. If he was a criminal, he spent the rest of his life in a gang\n of criminals chained together and doing the most exhausting labor the\n Thrid could contrive. If he was mad, he was confined for life.\nThere'd been Ganti, a Thrid of whom Jorgenson had had much hope. He\n believed that Ganti could learn to run the trading post without human\n supervision. If he could, the trading company could simply bring trade\n goods to Thriddar and take away other trade goods. The cost of doing\n business would be decreased. There could be no human-Thrid friction.\n Jorgenson had been training Ganti for this work.", "The real trouble was that Jorgenson saw things as a business man does.\n But also, and contradictorily, he saw them as right and just, or as\n wrong and intolerable. As a business man, he should have kept his mind\n on business and never bothered about Ganti. As a believer in right and\n wrong, it would have been wiser for him to have stayed off the planet\n Thriddar altogether. Thriddar was no place for him, anyhow you look at\n it. On this particular morning it was especially the wrong place for\n him to be trying to live and do business.\n\n\n He woke up thinking of Ganti, and in consequence he was in a bad mood\n right away. Most humans couldn't take the sort of thing that went on on\n Thriddar. Most of them wanted to use missile weapons—which the Thrid\n did not use—to change the local social system. Most humans got off\n Thriddar—fast! And boiling mad.", "Jorgenson laid the matter indignantly before him, repeating the exact\n phrases that said the trading company wanted—wanted!—practically to\n give itself to the Never-Mistaken Glen-U, who was the Grand Panjandrum\n of Thriddar. He waited to be told that it couldn't have happened; that\n anyhow it couldn't be intended. But the theologian's Thriddish ears\n went limp, which amounted to the same thing as a man's face turning\n pale. He stammered agitatedly that if the Grand Panjandrum said it, it\n was true. It couldn't be otherwise! If the trading company wanted to\n give itself to him, there was nothing to be done. It wanted to! The\n Grand Panjandrum had said so!\n\n\n \"He also said,\" said Jorgenson irritably, \"that I'm to vanish and\n nevermore be seen face to face by any rational being. How does that\n happen? Do I get speared?\"", "But the local Thrid governor had spoken and said and observed that\n Ganti's wife wanted to enter his household. He added that Ganti wanted\n to yield her to him.\n\n\n Jorgenson had fumed—but not as a business man—when the transfer took\n place. But Ganti had been conditioned to believe that when a governor\n said he wanted to do something, he did. He couldn't quite grasp the\n contrary idea. But he moped horribly, and Jorgenson talked sardonically\n to him, and he almost doubted that an official was necessarily right.\n When his former wife died of grief, his disbelief became positive. And\n immediately afterward he disappeared.\n\n\n Jorgenson couldn't find out what had become of him. Dour reflection on\n the happening had put him in the bad mood which had started things,\n this morning.", "Jorgenson found that a fish-fillet, strongly squeezed and wrung like a\n wet cloth, would yield a drinkable liquid which was not salt and would\n substitute for water. And this was a reason to make a string bag in\n which caught fish could be let back into the sea so they were there\n when wanted but could not escape.\n\n\n They had used it for weeks when he saw Ganti, carrying it to place it\n where they left it overboard, swinging it idly back and forth as he\n walked.\nIf Jorgenson had been only a businessman, it would have had no\n particular meaning. But he was also a person, filled with hatred of\n the Thrid who had condemned him for life to this small island. He saw\n the swinging of the fish. It gave him an idea.\n\n\n He did not speak at all during all the rest of that day. He was\n thinking. The matter needed much thought. Ganti left him alone.", "Jorgenson had stood it longer than most because in spite of their\n convictions he liked the Thrid. Their minds did do outside loops, and\n come up with intolerable convictions. But they were intelligent enough.\n They had steam-power and even steam-driven atmosphere fliers, but they\n didn't have missile weapons and they did have a social system that\n humans simply couldn't accept—even though it applied only to Thrid.\n The ordinary Thrid, with whom Jorgenson did business, weren't bad\n people. It was the officials who made him grind his teeth. And though\n it was his business only to run the trading post of the Rim Stars\n Trading Corporation, sometimes he got fed up.", "The high official rolled up the scroll, while Jorgenson exploded inside.\nA part of this was reaction as a business man. A part was recognition\n of all the intolerable things that the Thrid took as a matter of\n course. If Jorgenson had reacted solely as a business man he'd have\n swallowed it, departed on the next Rim Stars trading-ship—which would\n not have left any trade-goods behind—and left the Grand Panjandrum to\n realize what he had lost when no off-planet goods arrived on Thriddar.\n In time he'd speak and say and observe that he, out of his generosity,\n gave the loot back. Then the trading could resume. But Jorgenson didn't\n feel only like a business man this morning. He thought of Ganti, who\n was a particular case of everything he disliked on Thriddar.", "It would be a nice situation for Glen-U. He'd have to do something\n about it, and there was nothing he could do. He'd blundered, and it\n would soon be public knowledge.\n\n\n Jorgenson dozed lightly. Then more heavily. Then more heavily still.\n The night was not two hours old when the warning sirens made a terrific\n uproar. The Thrid for miles around heard the wailing, ullulating sound\n of the sirens that should have awakened Jorgenson.\n\n\n But they didn't wake him. He slept on.\nWhen he woke, he knew that he was cold. His muscles were cramped. Half\n awake, he tried to move and could not.", "It was not wise to be moved by such sympathetic feelings. The Grand\n Panjandrum could not be mistaken. It was definitely unwise to\n contradict him. It could even be dangerous. Jorgenson was in a nasty\n spot.\n\n\n The Witnesses murmured reverently:\n\n\n \"We hear the words of the Never-Mistaken Glen-U.\"\n\n\n The high official tucked away the scroll and said blandly:\n\n\n \"I will receive the moneys, goods, and benefactions it is the desire\n of the Rim Stars Trading Corporation to present to the great and\n Never-Mistaken Glen-U.\"\n\n\n Jorgenson, boiling inside, nevertheless knew what he was doing. He said\n succinctly:\n\n\n \"Like hell you will!\"\n\n\n There was an idiom in Thrid speech that had exactly the meaning of the\n human phrase. Jorgenson used it.", "He fumed because creatures intelligent enough to build steam fliers\n weren't intelligent enough to see what a racket their government was.\n Now that the new Grand Panjandrum had moved against him, Jorgenson made\n an angry, dogged resolution to do something permanent to make matters\n better. For the Thrid themselves. Here he thought not as a business\n man only, but as a humanitarian. As both. When a whim of the Grand\n Panjandrum could ruin a business, something should be done. And when\n Ganti and countless others had been victims of capricious tyranny....\n And Jorgenson was slated to vanish from sight and never again be\n seen.... It definitely called for strong measures!\n\n\n He reflected with grim pleasure that the Grand Panjandrum would soon\n be in the position of a Thrid whom everybody knew was mistaken. With\n the trading-post denied him and Jorgenson still visible, he'd be\n notoriously wrong. And he couldn't be, and still be Grand Panjandrum!", "\"You declared the great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U mistaken. This could\n not be. It proved you either a criminal or insane, because no rational\n creature could believe him mistaken. He declared you insane, and he\n cannot be wrong. So soon you will arrive where you are to be confined\n and no rational being will ever see you face to face.\"\n\n\n Jorgenson switched back to human swearing. Then he blended both\n languages, using all the applicable words he knew both in human speech\n and Thrid. He knew a great many. The soft throbbing of the steam-driven\n rotors went on, and Jorgenson swore both as a business man and a\n humanitarian. Both were frustrated.", "\"Is mistaken!\" said Jorgenson bitingly. \"He's wrong! The Rim Stars\n Trading Corporation does\nnot\nwant to give him anything! What he has\n said is not true!\" This was the equivalent of treason, blasphemy and\n the ultimate of indecorous behavior toward a virgin Pelean princess. \"I\n won't give him anything! I'm not even vanishing from sight! Glen-U is\n wrong about that, too! Now—git!\"\n\n\n He jerked out his blaster and pulled the trigger.\n\n\n There was an explosive burst of flame from the ground between the\n official and himself. The official fled. With him fled all the\n Witnesses, some even losing their headgear in their haste to get away.\nJorgenson stamped into the trading-post building. His eyes were stormy\n and his jaw was set.", "Now it was evidently to be arranged that he would never again be seen\n face to face by a rational being. The Grand Panjandrum had won the\n argument. Within a few months a Rim Stars trading ship would land, and\n Jorgenson would be gone and the trading post confiscated. It would be\n hopeless to ask questions, and worse than hopeless to try to trade. So\n the ship would lift off and there'd be no more ships for at least a\n generation. Then there might—there might!—be another.\n\n\n Jorgenson swore fluently and with passion.\n\n\n \"It will not be long,\" said a tranquil voice.\n\n\n Jorgenson changed from human-speech profanity to Thrid. He directed\n his words to the unseen creature who'd spoken. That Thrid listened,\n apparently without emotion. When Jorgenson ran out of breath, the voice\n said severely:" ], [ "Jorgenson laid the matter indignantly before him, repeating the exact\n phrases that said the trading company wanted—wanted!—practically to\n give itself to the Never-Mistaken Glen-U, who was the Grand Panjandrum\n of Thriddar. He waited to be told that it couldn't have happened; that\n anyhow it couldn't be intended. But the theologian's Thriddish ears\n went limp, which amounted to the same thing as a man's face turning\n pale. He stammered agitatedly that if the Grand Panjandrum said it, it\n was true. It couldn't be otherwise! If the trading company wanted to\n give itself to him, there was nothing to be done. It wanted to! The\n Grand Panjandrum had said so!\n\n\n \"He also said,\" said Jorgenson irritably, \"that I'm to vanish and\n nevermore be seen face to face by any rational being. How does that\n happen? Do I get speared?\"", "Jorgenson reflected sourly that the governors and the rulers of the\n universe were whoever happened to be within hearing of the Grand\n Panjandrum. They were not imposing. They were scared. Everybody is\n always scared under an absolute ruler, but the Grand Panjandrum was\n worse than that. He couldn't make a mistake. Whatever he said had to\n be true, because he said it, and sometimes it had drastic results. But\n past Grand Panjandrums had spoken highly of the trading post. Jorgenson\n shouldn't have much to worry about. He waited. He thought of Ganti. He\n scowled.", "Jorgenson had stood it longer than most because in spite of their\n convictions he liked the Thrid. Their minds did do outside loops, and\n come up with intolerable convictions. But they were intelligent enough.\n They had steam-power and even steam-driven atmosphere fliers, but they\n didn't have missile weapons and they did have a social system that\n humans simply couldn't accept—even though it applied only to Thrid.\n The ordinary Thrid, with whom Jorgenson did business, weren't bad\n people. It was the officials who made him grind his teeth. And though\n it was his business only to run the trading post of the Rim Stars\n Trading Corporation, sometimes he got fed up.", "Jorgenson swore impartially at all of them and turned the shocker-field\n back on. He plugged in a capacity circuit which would turn on warning\n sirens if anything like a steam-driven copter passed or hovered over\n the trading-post. He put blasters in handy positions. The Thrid used\n only spears, knives and scimitars. Blasters would defend the post\n against a multitude.\n\n\n As a business man, he'd acted very foolishly. But he'd acted even less\n sensibly as a human being. He'd gotten fed up with a social system\n and a—call it—theology it wasn't his business to change. True, the\n Thrid way of life was appalling, and what had happened to Ganti was\n probably typical. But it wasn't Jorgenson's affair. He'd been unwise to\n let it disturb him. If the Thrid wanted things this way, it was their\n privilege.", "The real trouble was that Jorgenson saw things as a business man does.\n But also, and contradictorily, he saw them as right and just, or as\n wrong and intolerable. As a business man, he should have kept his mind\n on business and never bothered about Ganti. As a believer in right and\n wrong, it would have been wiser for him to have stayed off the planet\n Thriddar altogether. Thriddar was no place for him, anyhow you look at\n it. On this particular morning it was especially the wrong place for\n him to be trying to live and do business.\n\n\n He woke up thinking of Ganti, and in consequence he was in a bad mood\n right away. Most humans couldn't take the sort of thing that went on on\n Thriddar. Most of them wanted to use missile weapons—which the Thrid\n did not use—to change the local social system. Most humans got off\n Thriddar—fast! And boiling mad.", "\"This is a prison,\" Ganti explained matter-of-factly. \"They let me\n down here and dropped food and water for a week. They went away. I\n found there'd been another prisoner here before me. His skeleton was in\n this cave. I reasoned it out. There must have been others before him.\n When there is a prisoner here, every so often a copter drops food and\n water. When the prisoner doesn't pick it up, they stop coming. When,\n presently, they have another prisoner they drop him off, like me, and\n he finds the skeleton of the previous prisoner, like me, and he dumps\n it overboard as I did. They'll drop food and water for me until I stop\n picking it up. And presently they'll do the same thing all over again.\"\n\n\n Jorgenson glowered. That was his reaction as a person. Then he gestured\n to the cave around him. There was a pile of dried-out seaweed for\n sleeping purposes.\n\n\n \"And this?\"", "\"You declared the great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U mistaken. This could\n not be. It proved you either a criminal or insane, because no rational\n creature could believe him mistaken. He declared you insane, and he\n cannot be wrong. So soon you will arrive where you are to be confined\n and no rational being will ever see you face to face.\"\n\n\n Jorgenson switched back to human swearing. Then he blended both\n languages, using all the applicable words he knew both in human speech\n and Thrid. He knew a great many. The soft throbbing of the steam-driven\n rotors went on, and Jorgenson swore both as a business man and a\n humanitarian. Both were frustrated.", "The Thrid was Ganti, of whom Jorgenson had once had hopes as a business\n man, and for whose disaster he had felt indignation as something else.\n He loosened the last of Jorgenson's bonds and helped him sit up.\n\n\n Jorgenson glared around. The island was roughly one hundred feet by\n two. It was twisted, curdled yellow stone from one end to the other.\n There were stone hillocks and a miniature stony peak, and a narrow\n valley between two patches of higher rock. Huge seas boomed against\n the windward shore, throwing spray higher than the island's topmost\n point. There were some places where sand had gathered. There was one\n spot—perhaps a square yard of it—where sand had been made fertile by\n the droppings of flying things and where two or three starveling plants\n showed foliage of sorts. That was all. Jorgenson ground his teeth.\n\n\n \"Go ahead,\" said Ganti grimly, \"but it may be even worse than you\n think.\"", "The trading-post theologian quivered. Jorgenson made things much worse.\n\n\n \"This,\" he raged, \"this is crazy! The Grand Panjandrum's an ordinary\n Thrid just like you are! Of course he can make a mistake! There's\n nobody who can't be wrong!\"\n\n\n The theologian put up feebly protesting, human-like hands. He begged\n hysterically to be allowed to go home before Jorgenson vanished, with\n unknown consequences for any Thrid who might be nearby.\n\n\n When Jorgenson opened a door to kick him out of it, the whole staff of\n the trading-post plunged after him. They'd been eavesdropping and they\n fled in pure horror.", "Jorgenson found that a fish-fillet, strongly squeezed and wrung like a\n wet cloth, would yield a drinkable liquid which was not salt and would\n substitute for water. And this was a reason to make a string bag in\n which caught fish could be let back into the sea so they were there\n when wanted but could not escape.\n\n\n They had used it for weeks when he saw Ganti, carrying it to place it\n where they left it overboard, swinging it idly back and forth as he\n walked.\nIf Jorgenson had been only a businessman, it would have had no\n particular meaning. But he was also a person, filled with hatred of\n the Thrid who had condemned him for life to this small island. He saw\n the swinging of the fish. It gave him an idea.\n\n\n He did not speak at all during all the rest of that day. He was\n thinking. The matter needed much thought. Ganti left him alone.", "Now it was evidently to be arranged that he would never again be seen\n face to face by a rational being. The Grand Panjandrum had won the\n argument. Within a few months a Rim Stars trading ship would land, and\n Jorgenson would be gone and the trading post confiscated. It would be\n hopeless to ask questions, and worse than hopeless to try to trade. So\n the ship would lift off and there'd be no more ships for at least a\n generation. Then there might—there might!—be another.\n\n\n Jorgenson swore fluently and with passion.\n\n\n \"It will not be long,\" said a tranquil voice.\n\n\n Jorgenson changed from human-speech profanity to Thrid. He directed\n his words to the unseen creature who'd spoken. That Thrid listened,\n apparently without emotion. When Jorgenson ran out of breath, the voice\n said severely:", "But the local Thrid governor had spoken and said and observed that\n Ganti's wife wanted to enter his household. He added that Ganti wanted\n to yield her to him.\n\n\n Jorgenson had fumed—but not as a business man—when the transfer took\n place. But Ganti had been conditioned to believe that when a governor\n said he wanted to do something, he did. He couldn't quite grasp the\n contrary idea. But he moped horribly, and Jorgenson talked sardonically\n to him, and he almost doubted that an official was necessarily right.\n When his former wife died of grief, his disbelief became positive. And\n immediately afterward he disappeared.\n\n\n Jorgenson couldn't find out what had become of him. Dour reflection on\n the happening had put him in the bad mood which had started things,\n this morning.", "He fumed because creatures intelligent enough to build steam fliers\n weren't intelligent enough to see what a racket their government was.\n Now that the new Grand Panjandrum had moved against him, Jorgenson made\n an angry, dogged resolution to do something permanent to make matters\n better. For the Thrid themselves. Here he thought not as a business\n man only, but as a humanitarian. As both. When a whim of the Grand\n Panjandrum could ruin a business, something should be done. And when\n Ganti and countless others had been victims of capricious tyranny....\n And Jorgenson was slated to vanish from sight and never again be\n seen.... It definitely called for strong measures!\n\n\n He reflected with grim pleasure that the Grand Panjandrum would soon\n be in the position of a Thrid whom everybody knew was mistaken. With\n the trading-post denied him and Jorgenson still visible, he'd be\n notoriously wrong. And he couldn't be, and still be Grand Panjandrum!", "\"Somebody dug it out,\" said Ganti without resentment. \"To keep busy.\n Maybe one prisoner only began it. A later one saw it started and worked\n on it to keep busy. Then others in their turn. It took a good many\n lives to make this cave.\"\n\n\n Jorgenson ground his teeth a second time.\n\n\n \"And just because they'd contradicted somebody who couldn't be wrong!\n Or because they had a business an official wanted!\"\n\n\n \"Or a wife,\" agreed Ganti. \"Here!\"\n\n\n He offered food. Jorgenson ate, scowling. Afterward, near sundown, he\n went over the island.", "It was not wise to be moved by such sympathetic feelings. The Grand\n Panjandrum could not be mistaken. It was definitely unwise to\n contradict him. It could even be dangerous. Jorgenson was in a nasty\n spot.\n\n\n The Witnesses murmured reverently:\n\n\n \"We hear the words of the Never-Mistaken Glen-U.\"\n\n\n The high official tucked away the scroll and said blandly:\n\n\n \"I will receive the moneys, goods, and benefactions it is the desire\n of the Rim Stars Trading Corporation to present to the great and\n Never-Mistaken Glen-U.\"\n\n\n Jorgenson, boiling inside, nevertheless knew what he was doing. He said\n succinctly:\n\n\n \"Like hell you will!\"\n\n\n There was an idiom in Thrid speech that had exactly the meaning of the\n human phrase. Jorgenson used it.", "Then he saw a figure on the island. It was a Thrid stripped of all\n clothing like Jorgenson and darkened by the sun. That figure came\n agilely toward where he was let down. It caught him. It checked his\n wild swingings, which could have broken bones. The rope slackened. The\n Thrid laid Jorgenson down.\n\n\n He did not cast off the rope. He seemed to essay to climb it.\n\n\n It was cut at the steam-copter and came tumbling down all over both of\n them. The Thrid waved his arms wildly and seemed to screech gibberish\n at the sky. There was an impact nearby, of something dropped. Jorgenson\n heard the throbbing sound of the copter as it lifted and swept away.\n\n\n Then he felt the bounds about his arms and legs being removed. Then a\n Thrid voice—amazingly, a familiar Thrid voice—said:\n\n\n \"This is not good, Jorgenson. Who did you contradict?\"", "\"Is mistaken!\" said Jorgenson bitingly. \"He's wrong! The Rim Stars\n Trading Corporation does\nnot\nwant to give him anything! What he has\n said is not true!\" This was the equivalent of treason, blasphemy and\n the ultimate of indecorous behavior toward a virgin Pelean princess. \"I\n won't give him anything! I'm not even vanishing from sight! Glen-U is\n wrong about that, too! Now—git!\"\n\n\n He jerked out his blaster and pulled the trigger.\n\n\n There was an explosive burst of flame from the ground between the\n official and himself. The official fled. With him fled all the\n Witnesses, some even losing their headgear in their haste to get away.\nJorgenson stamped into the trading-post building. His eyes were stormy\n and his jaw was set.", "It would be a nice situation for Glen-U. He'd have to do something\n about it, and there was nothing he could do. He'd blundered, and it\n would soon be public knowledge.\n\n\n Jorgenson dozed lightly. Then more heavily. Then more heavily still.\n The night was not two hours old when the warning sirens made a terrific\n uproar. The Thrid for miles around heard the wailing, ullulating sound\n of the sirens that should have awakened Jorgenson.\n\n\n But they didn't wake him. He slept on.\nWhen he woke, he knew that he was cold. His muscles were cramped. Half\n awake, he tried to move and could not.", "Ganti looked skeptical. Jorgenson explained. He had to demonstrate\n crudely. The whole idea was novel to Ganti, but the Thrid were smart.\n Presently he grasped it. He said:\n\n\n \"I see the theory. If we can make it work, all right. But how do we\n make the copter land?\"\n\n\n Jorgenson realized that they talked oddly. They spoke with leisurely\n lack of haste, with the lack of hope normal to prisoners to whom escape\n is impossible, even when they talk about escape. They could have been\n discussing a matter that would not affect either of them. But Jorgenson\n quivered inside. He hoped.\n\n\n \"We'll try it,\" said Ganti detachedly, when he'd explained again. \"If\n it fails, they'll only stop giving us food and water.\"\n\n\n That, of course, did not seem either to him or Jorgenson a reason to\n hesitate to try what Jorgenson had planned.", "The high official rolled up the scroll, while Jorgenson exploded inside.\nA part of this was reaction as a business man. A part was recognition\n of all the intolerable things that the Thrid took as a matter of\n course. If Jorgenson had reacted solely as a business man he'd have\n swallowed it, departed on the next Rim Stars trading-ship—which would\n not have left any trade-goods behind—and left the Grand Panjandrum to\n realize what he had lost when no off-planet goods arrived on Thriddar.\n In time he'd speak and say and observe that he, out of his generosity,\n gave the loot back. Then the trading could resume. But Jorgenson didn't\n feel only like a business man this morning. He thought of Ganti, who\n was a particular case of everything he disliked on Thriddar." ] ]
valid	63150	[ "Why did Dennis' girlfriend leave him?", "Why did Dennis frown at the dancer?", "Where is International Police headquarters located?", "What would have happened if Dennis had not gone to the chamber?", "Why was Dennis sent on the mission even though he was grounded?", "Why was the journey not a new adventure for the captain?", "What is the most likely reason Dennis was sympathetic toward Randall even though his failure caused a catastrophe?", "What caused the shadow behind Koerber's ship" ]	[ [ "She wanted to take a new job", "She was upset about his visit to the chamber", "She was upset he cheated with 5 or 6 women from other planets", "She couldn't compete with his love of space travel" ], [ "It was too cold", "She was writhing", "She was beautiful", "He wanted to be left alone to think" ], [ "Mercury", "Mars", "Venus", "Terra" ], [ "Bertram would have been upset", "Marla would not have been captured by Koerber", "Koerber would not have been captured", "Dennis would have been grounded" ], [ "They wanted Koerber brought back alive", "His grounding had been done in error", "He was sent by mistake", "The mission was likely to be deadly" ], [ "He disliked flying lightning fast", "He'd never spent sleepless nights in eternal vigilance", "He did not have his usual luxurious office onboard", "He was the only one who had been to the outer planets before" ], [ "He was angry at Dallas for criticizing Randall", "He thought Randall had no place in the I S P", "He could relate Randall's behavior to his experience with Koerber", "He knew Randall was a coward" ], [ "A transport ship", "A large planet", "An asteroid", "A small planet" ] ]	[ 2, 4, 4, 2, 4, 4, 3, 4 ]	[ 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "Dennis Brooke shrugged his shoulders, shoulders that would have put to\n shame the Athenian statues of another age. A faint, bitter smile curved\n his generous mouth. \"I'm grounded, Gillian, it'd take the capture of\n Koerber himself to set me right with the I.S.P. again—you don't know\n Bertram! To him an infraction of rules is a major crime. Damn Venus!\"\n He reached for his glass of\nVerbena\nbut the table had turned over\n during the struggle, and the glass was a shattered mass of gleaming\nBacca-glas\nshards. He laughed shortly as he became conscious of the\n venomous stare of the Mercurian Dancer, of the excited voices of the\n guests and the emphatic disapproval of the Venusian proprietor who\n was shocked at having a brawl in his ultra-expensive, ultra-exclusive\n Palace.", "Dennis Brooke's space-tanned features had gone pale. His large hazel\n eyes, fringed with auburn lashes, too long for a man, were bright slits\n that smouldered. He stood silent, his hands clenched at his sides,\n while something cold and sharp seemed to dig at his heart with cruel\n precision.\n\n\n \"Marla!\" He breathed at last. The thought of Marla in the power\n of Koerber sent a wave of anguish that seared through him like an\n atom-blast.", "Dennis Brooke was thirty, the time when youth no longer seems unending.\n When the minor adventures of the heart begin to pall. If the loss of\n Marla left an aching void that all the women of five planets could not\n fill, the loss of Space, was quite as deadly. For he had been grounded.\n True, Koerber's escape from the I.S.P. net had not quite been his\n fault; but had he not been enjoying the joys of a voluptuous Jovian\n Chamber, in Venus' fabulous Inter-planetary Palace, he would have been\n ready for duty to complete the last link in the net of I.S.P. cruisers\n that almost surrounded the space pirate.", "Dennis tried not to think of Marla, too great an ache was involved in\n thinking of her and all he had lost. When he finally spoke, his voice\n was harsh, laconic:\n\n\n \"Prepare to return!\"\n\n\n Scotty Byrnes, the cruiser's nurse, who could take his motors through a\n major battle, or hell and high water and back again, for that matter,\n shifted the Venusian weed that made a perpetual bulge on his cheek and\n gazed curiously at Captain Brooke. They all knew the story in various\n versions, and with special additions. But they were spacemen, implicit\n in their loyalty, and with Dennis Brooke they could and did feel safe.", "The barbaric rhythms of the\nCongahua\n, were a background of annoyance\n in Dennis' mind; he frowned slightly as the maneuvers of the Mercurian\n dancer, who writhed among the guests of the notorious pleasure palace,\n began to leave no doubt as to her intentions. The girl was beautiful,\n in a sultry, almost incandescent sort of way, but her open promise left\n him cold. He wanted solitude, somewhere to coordinate his thoughts\n in silence and salvage something out of the wreck of his heart, not\n to speak of his career. But Venus, in the throes of a gigantic boom\n upon the discovery of radio-active fields, could offer only one\n solitude—the fatal one of her swamps and virgin forests.", "\"Thank you, sir!\" Randall seemed to hesitate for a moment, opened his\n mouth to speak further, but feeling the other's calculating gaze upon\n him, he whirled and re-entered the ship.\n\n\n \"But for him we wouldn't be here!\" Dallas exclaimed. \"Aagh!\" He shook\n his head in disgust until the several folds of flesh under his chin\n shook like gelatin. \"Cowards are hell!\" He spat.\n\n\n \"Easy, Dallas, Randall's a kid, give 'im a chance.\" Dennis observed.\n\n\n \"You Captain ... you're defending 'im? Why you had a greater stake in\n this than we, and he's spoiled it for you!\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" Dennis nodded. \"But I'm still keeping my senses clear. No feuds\n on my ship. Get it!\" The last two words cut like a scimitar.", "Dennis sighed, he tilted his red, curly head and drank deeply of the\n insidious\nVerbena\n, fragrant as a mint garden, in the tall frosty\n glass of Martian\nBacca-glas\n, and as he did so, his brilliant hazel\n eyes found themselves gazing into the unwinking, violet stare of a\n young Martian at the next table. There was a smouldering hatred in\n those eyes, and something else ... envy, perhaps, or was it jealousy?\n Dennis couldn't tell. But his senses became instantly alert. Danger\n brought a faint vibration which his superbly trained faculties could\n instantly denote.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\"\nAnd so, my dear\n,\" Dennis detected a faint irony in the phrase, \"\nI'm\n afraid I can offer no competition to the beauties of five planets—or\n is it six? With regret I bow myself out, and knowing me as you do,\n you'll understand the futility of trying to convince me again. Anyway,\n there will be no temptation, for I'm sailing on a new assignment I've\n accepted. I did love you.... Good-by.\n\"\n\n\n Dennis Brooke had lost count of the times he'd read Marla's last\n letter, but every time he came to these final, poignant lines, they\n never failed to conjure a vision of her tawny loveliness, slender as\n the palms of Venus, and of the blue ecstasy of her eyes, wide with a\n perpetual wonder—limpid as a child's.", "Commander Bertram turned slowly to face the young I.S.P. captain, whose\n features were a mask devoid of all expression now, save for the pallor\n and the burning fire in his eyes.\n\n\n \"And that's the sixth one in a month. Sometimes the survivors reach\n Terra in emergency spacers, or are picked up in space by other\n transports ... and sometimes son ... well, as you know, sometimes\n they're never seen again.\"\n\n\n \"When do I leave, Commander!\" Dennis Brooke's voice was like a javelin\n of ice.", "Some of the guests laughed, others stared in plain envy at the\n handsome, red-haired spacer, but from the table across, came the\n tinkling sound of a fragile glass being crushed in a powerful hand,\n and a muffled Martian curse. Without warning, the Martian was on his\n feet with the speed of an Hellacorium, the table went crashing to one\n side as he leaped with deadly intent on the sprawled figure of Dennis\n Brooke. A high-pitched scream brought instant silence as a Terran girl\n cried out. Then the Martian's hand reached out hungrily. But Dennis was\n not there.\nLeaping to one side, impervious to the fall of the dancer, he avoided\n the murderous rush of the Martian youth, then he wheeled swiftly and\n planted a sledge-hammer blow in that most vulnerable spot of all\n Martians, the spot just below their narrow, wasp-like waist, and as the\n Martian half-doubled over, he lefted him with a short jab to the chin\n that staggered and all but dropped him.", "\"Commander,\" Dennis said, and his rich baritone voice had depths of\n emotion so great that they startled Commander Bertram himself—and\n that grizzled veteran of the I.S.P., had at one time or another known\n every change of torture that could possibly be wrung on a human soul.\n \"Commander, give me one ...\none\nchance at that spawn of unthinkable\n begetting! Let me try, and I promise you ...\" in his torture, Dennis\n was unconsciously banging a knotted fist on the chaste, satiny surface\n of the priceless desk, \"I promise you that I will either bring you\n Koerber, or forfeit my life!\"\n\n\n Commander Bertram nodded his head. \"I brought you here for that\n purpose, son. We have reached a point in our war with Koerber, where\n the last stakes must be played ... and the last stake is death!\"", "A night in the Jovian Chamber, was to be emperor for one night. Every\n dream of a man's desire was marvelously induced through the skilful use\n of hypnotics; the rarest viands and most delectable drinks appeared as\n if by magic; the unearthly peace of an Olympus descended on a man's\n soul, and beauty ... beauty such as men dreamed of was a warm reality\n under the ineffable illumination of the Chamber.\n\n\n It cost a young fortune. But to pleasure mad, boom-ridden Venus, a\n fortune was a bagatelle. Only it had cost Dennis Brooke far more than a\n sheaf of credits—it had cost him the severe rebuff of the I.S.P., and\n most of his heart in Marla.", "\"Sit down, Dennis. I've sent for you, despite your grounding, for\n two reasons. The first one you already know—your capture of one of\n Koerber's henchmen—has given us a line as to his present orbit of\n piracy, and the means of a check on his activities. But that's not\n really why I've brought you here.\" He frowned again as if what he had\n to say were difficult indeed.\n\n\n \"Marla Starland, your fiancee, accepted an assignment we offered her—a\n delicate piece of work here on Terra that only a very beautiful, and\n very clever young lady could perform. And,\" he paused, grimacing,\n \"somewhere between Venus and Terra, the interplanetary spacer bringing\n her and several other passengers, began to send distress signals.\n Finally, we couldn't contact the ship any more. It is three days\n overdue. All passengers, a cargo of radium from Venus worth untold\n millions, the spacer itself—seem to have vanished.\"", "\"Better come to Headquarters with me, Dennis,\" the lieutenant said\n gently. \"We'll say you captured him, and if he's Koerber's, the\n credit's yours. A trip to Terra's what you need, Venus for you is a\n hoodoo!\"\nThe stern, white haired I.S.P. Commander behind the immense Aluminil\n desk, frowned slightly as Dennis Brooke entered. He eyed the six foot\n four frame of the Captain before him with a mixture of feelings, as\n if uncertain how to begin. Finally, he sighed as if, having come to a\n decision, he were forcing himself to speak:", "\"Sir, I wanted to know if ... if I might help Scotty with the welding\n job....\" That wasn't at all what he'd intended to say. But somehow the\n words had stuck in his throat and his face flushed deep scarlet. His\n candid blue eyes were suspiciously brilliant, and the white bandage\n with its crimson stains made an appealing, boyish figure. It softened\n the anger in Brooke's heart. Thinking it over calmly, Dennis realized\n this was the youngster's first trip into the outer orbits, and better\n men than he had cracked in those vast reaches of space. But there had\n been an instant when he'd found Randall cowering in the rocket-room, in\n the grip of paralyzing hysteria, when he could cheerfully have wrung\n his neck!\n\n\n \"Certainly, Randall,\" he replied in a much more kindly tone. \"We'll\n need all hands now.\"", "He reached over and flipped up the activator on a small telecast set\n on his desk; instantly the viso-screen lighted up. \"You'll now see\n a visual record of all we know about the passenger spacer that left\n Venus with passengers and cargo, as far as we could contact the vessel\n in space. This, Dennis,\" the Commander emphasized his words, \"is your\n chance to redeem yourself!\" He fell silent, while the viso-screen began\n to show a crowded space port on Venus, and a gigantic passenger spacer\n up-tilted in its cradle.\nThey watched the parabola it made in its trajectory as it flashed into\n space and then fell into orbit there beyond the planetary attraction of\n Venus. On the three-dimensional viso-screen it was uncannily real.", "\"But, you may as well know it,\" Scotty replied quietly. \"That parting\n shot of Koerber's severed our main rocket feed. I had to use the\n emergency tank to make it down here!\"\n\n\n For a long moment the four men looked at each other in silence. Dennis\n Brooke's face was still impassive but for the flaming hazel eyes. Tom\n tugged at the torn sleeve of his I.S.P. uniform, while Scotty gazed\n mournfully at the damaged ship. Dallas Bernan looked at the long,\n ragged line of cliffs.\n\n\n \"I think we got Koerber, though,\" he said at last. \"While Tom was doing\n a job of navigation, I had one last glimpse of him coming down fast\n and out of control somewhere behind those crags over there!\"\n\n\n \"To hell with Koerber!\" Tom Jeffery exploded. \"You mean we're stuck in\n this hellish rock-pile?\"", "Dallas nodded and lowered his eyes. Scotty shifted his cud and spat\n a thin stream of juice over the iridescent ground. One by one they\n re-entered the cruiser.", "\"Looks like your brawl has turned out to be a piece of fool's luck,\n Brooke!\" The Police Lieutenant favored Dennis with a wry smile. \"If\n I'm not mistaken this chap's a member of Bren Koerber's pirate crew.\n Who else could afford to risk his neck at the International, and have\n in his possession a disintegrator? Pity we have no complete records\n on that devil's crew! Anyway, we'll radio the I.S.P., perhaps they\n have details on this dandy!\" He eyed admiringly the priceless Martian\n embroideries on the unconscious Martian's tunic, the costly border of\n red, ocelandian fur, and the magnificent black\nacerine\non his finger.", "\"Pretty much of a mess!\" Dennis Brooke's face was impassive as he\n turned to Scotty Byrnes. \"What's your opinion? Think we can patch her\n up, or are we stuck here indefinitely?\"\n\n\n Scotty eyed the damage. The atom-blast had penetrated the hull into\n the forward fuel chambers and the armor had blossomed out like flower\n petals. The crash-landing had not helped either.\n\n\n \"Well, there's a few beryloid plates in the storage locker, Captain,\n but,\" he scratched his head ruminatively and shifted his precious cud.\n\n\n \"But what? Speak up man!\" It was Tom Jeffery, his nerves on edge, his\n ordinarily gentle voice like a lash." ], [ "Dennis Brooke shrugged his shoulders, shoulders that would have put to\n shame the Athenian statues of another age. A faint, bitter smile curved\n his generous mouth. \"I'm grounded, Gillian, it'd take the capture of\n Koerber himself to set me right with the I.S.P. again—you don't know\n Bertram! To him an infraction of rules is a major crime. Damn Venus!\"\n He reached for his glass of\nVerbena\nbut the table had turned over\n during the struggle, and the glass was a shattered mass of gleaming\nBacca-glas\nshards. He laughed shortly as he became conscious of the\n venomous stare of the Mercurian Dancer, of the excited voices of the\n guests and the emphatic disapproval of the Venusian proprietor who\n was shocked at having a brawl in his ultra-expensive, ultra-exclusive\n Palace.", "Dennis sighed, he tilted his red, curly head and drank deeply of the\n insidious\nVerbena\n, fragrant as a mint garden, in the tall frosty\n glass of Martian\nBacca-glas\n, and as he did so, his brilliant hazel\n eyes found themselves gazing into the unwinking, violet stare of a\n young Martian at the next table. There was a smouldering hatred in\n those eyes, and something else ... envy, perhaps, or was it jealousy?\n Dennis couldn't tell. But his senses became instantly alert. Danger\n brought a faint vibration which his superbly trained faculties could\n instantly denote.", "The barbaric rhythms of the\nCongahua\n, were a background of annoyance\n in Dennis' mind; he frowned slightly as the maneuvers of the Mercurian\n dancer, who writhed among the guests of the notorious pleasure palace,\n began to leave no doubt as to her intentions. The girl was beautiful,\n in a sultry, almost incandescent sort of way, but her open promise left\n him cold. He wanted solitude, somewhere to coordinate his thoughts\n in silence and salvage something out of the wreck of his heart, not\n to speak of his career. But Venus, in the throes of a gigantic boom\n upon the discovery of radio-active fields, could offer only one\n solitude—the fatal one of her swamps and virgin forests.", "Dennis Brooke's space-tanned features had gone pale. His large hazel\n eyes, fringed with auburn lashes, too long for a man, were bright slits\n that smouldered. He stood silent, his hands clenched at his sides,\n while something cold and sharp seemed to dig at his heart with cruel\n precision.\n\n\n \"Marla!\" He breathed at last. The thought of Marla in the power\n of Koerber sent a wave of anguish that seared through him like an\n atom-blast.", "Some of the guests laughed, others stared in plain envy at the\n handsome, red-haired spacer, but from the table across, came the\n tinkling sound of a fragile glass being crushed in a powerful hand,\n and a muffled Martian curse. Without warning, the Martian was on his\n feet with the speed of an Hellacorium, the table went crashing to one\n side as he leaped with deadly intent on the sprawled figure of Dennis\n Brooke. A high-pitched scream brought instant silence as a Terran girl\n cried out. Then the Martian's hand reached out hungrily. But Dennis was\n not there.\nLeaping to one side, impervious to the fall of the dancer, he avoided\n the murderous rush of the Martian youth, then he wheeled swiftly and\n planted a sledge-hammer blow in that most vulnerable spot of all\n Martians, the spot just below their narrow, wasp-like waist, and as the\n Martian half-doubled over, he lefted him with a short jab to the chin\n that staggered and all but dropped him.", "His steady, bronzed hand lowered the drink, and his eyes narrowed\n slightly. Absorbed in trying to puzzle the sudden enmity of this\n Martian stranger, he was unaware of the Mercurian Dancer. The latter\n had edged closer, whirling in prismatic flashes from the myriad\n semi-precious stones that studded her brief gauze skirt. And now, in\n a final bid for the spacer's favor she flung herself in his lap and\n tilted back invitingly.", "\"Looks like your brawl has turned out to be a piece of fool's luck,\n Brooke!\" The Police Lieutenant favored Dennis with a wry smile. \"If\n I'm not mistaken this chap's a member of Bren Koerber's pirate crew.\n Who else could afford to risk his neck at the International, and have\n in his possession a disintegrator? Pity we have no complete records\n on that devil's crew! Anyway, we'll radio the I.S.P., perhaps they\n have details on this dandy!\" He eyed admiringly the priceless Martian\n embroideries on the unconscious Martian's tunic, the costly border of\n red, ocelandian fur, and the magnificent black\nacerine\non his finger.", "\"Thank you, sir!\" Randall seemed to hesitate for a moment, opened his\n mouth to speak further, but feeling the other's calculating gaze upon\n him, he whirled and re-entered the ship.\n\n\n \"But for him we wouldn't be here!\" Dallas exclaimed. \"Aagh!\" He shook\n his head in disgust until the several folds of flesh under his chin\n shook like gelatin. \"Cowards are hell!\" He spat.\n\n\n \"Easy, Dallas, Randall's a kid, give 'im a chance.\" Dennis observed.\n\n\n \"You Captain ... you're defending 'im? Why you had a greater stake in\n this than we, and he's spoiled it for you!\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" Dennis nodded. \"But I'm still keeping my senses clear. No feuds\n on my ship. Get it!\" The last two words cut like a scimitar.", "Dennis tried not to think of Marla, too great an ache was involved in\n thinking of her and all he had lost. When he finally spoke, his voice\n was harsh, laconic:\n\n\n \"Prepare to return!\"\n\n\n Scotty Byrnes, the cruiser's nurse, who could take his motors through a\n major battle, or hell and high water and back again, for that matter,\n shifted the Venusian weed that made a perpetual bulge on his cheek and\n gazed curiously at Captain Brooke. They all knew the story in various\n versions, and with special additions. But they were spacemen, implicit\n in their loyalty, and with Dennis Brooke they could and did feel safe.", "Dallas nodded and lowered his eyes. Scotty shifted his cud and spat\n a thin stream of juice over the iridescent ground. One by one they\n re-entered the cruiser.", "Dennis Brooke was thirty, the time when youth no longer seems unending.\n When the minor adventures of the heart begin to pall. If the loss of\n Marla left an aching void that all the women of five planets could not\n fill, the loss of Space, was quite as deadly. For he had been grounded.\n True, Koerber's escape from the I.S.P. net had not quite been his\n fault; but had he not been enjoying the joys of a voluptuous Jovian\n Chamber, in Venus' fabulous Inter-planetary Palace, he would have been\n ready for duty to complete the last link in the net of I.S.P. cruisers\n that almost surrounded the space pirate.", "\"Better come to Headquarters with me, Dennis,\" the lieutenant said\n gently. \"We'll say you captured him, and if he's Koerber's, the\n credit's yours. A trip to Terra's what you need, Venus for you is a\n hoodoo!\"\nThe stern, white haired I.S.P. Commander behind the immense Aluminil\n desk, frowned slightly as Dennis Brooke entered. He eyed the six foot\n four frame of the Captain before him with a mixture of feelings, as\n if uncertain how to begin. Finally, he sighed as if, having come to a\n decision, he were forcing himself to speak:", "A night in the Jovian Chamber, was to be emperor for one night. Every\n dream of a man's desire was marvelously induced through the skilful use\n of hypnotics; the rarest viands and most delectable drinks appeared as\n if by magic; the unearthly peace of an Olympus descended on a man's\n soul, and beauty ... beauty such as men dreamed of was a warm reality\n under the ineffable illumination of the Chamber.\n\n\n It cost a young fortune. But to pleasure mad, boom-ridden Venus, a\n fortune was a bagatelle. Only it had cost Dennis Brooke far more than a\n sheaf of credits—it had cost him the severe rebuff of the I.S.P., and\n most of his heart in Marla.", "\"Commander,\" Dennis said, and his rich baritone voice had depths of\n emotion so great that they startled Commander Bertram himself—and\n that grizzled veteran of the I.S.P., had at one time or another known\n every change of torture that could possibly be wrung on a human soul.\n \"Commander, give me one ...\none\nchance at that spawn of unthinkable\n begetting! Let me try, and I promise you ...\" in his torture, Dennis\n was unconsciously banging a knotted fist on the chaste, satiny surface\n of the priceless desk, \"I promise you that I will either bring you\n Koerber, or forfeit my life!\"\n\n\n Commander Bertram nodded his head. \"I brought you here for that\n purpose, son. We have reached a point in our war with Koerber, where\n the last stakes must be played ... and the last stake is death!\"", "The Martian's violet eyes were black with fury now. He staggered back\n and sucked in air, his face contorted with excruciating pain. But he\n was not through. His powerful right shot like a blast straight for\n Dennis' chest, striking like a piston just below the heart. Dennis took\n it, flat-footed, without flinching; then he let his right ride over\n with all the force at his command. It caught the Martian on the jaw and\n spun him like a top, the pale, imperious face went crimson as he slowly\n sagged to his knees and rolled to the impeccable mosaics of the floor.\n\n\n Dennis, breathing heavily, stood over him until the international\n police arrived, and then he had the surprise of his life. Upon search,\n the police found a tiny, but fatal silvery tube holstered under his\n left arm-pit—an atomic-disintegrator, forbidden throughout the\n interplanetary League. Only major criminals and space pirates still\n without the law were known to possess them.", "He reached over and flipped up the activator on a small telecast set\n on his desk; instantly the viso-screen lighted up. \"You'll now see\n a visual record of all we know about the passenger spacer that left\n Venus with passengers and cargo, as far as we could contact the vessel\n in space. This, Dennis,\" the Commander emphasized his words, \"is your\n chance to redeem yourself!\" He fell silent, while the viso-screen began\n to show a crowded space port on Venus, and a gigantic passenger spacer\n up-tilted in its cradle.\nThey watched the parabola it made in its trajectory as it flashed into\n space and then fell into orbit there beyond the planetary attraction of\n Venus. On the three-dimensional viso-screen it was uncannily real.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\"\nAnd so, my dear\n,\" Dennis detected a faint irony in the phrase, \"\nI'm\n afraid I can offer no competition to the beauties of five planets—or\n is it six? With regret I bow myself out, and knowing me as you do,\n you'll understand the futility of trying to convince me again. Anyway,\n there will be no temptation, for I'm sailing on a new assignment I've\n accepted. I did love you.... Good-by.\n\"\n\n\n Dennis Brooke had lost count of the times he'd read Marla's last\n letter, but every time he came to these final, poignant lines, they\n never failed to conjure a vision of her tawny loveliness, slender as\n the palms of Venus, and of the blue ecstasy of her eyes, wide with a\n perpetual wonder—limpid as a child's.", "\"Sit down, Dennis. I've sent for you, despite your grounding, for\n two reasons. The first one you already know—your capture of one of\n Koerber's henchmen—has given us a line as to his present orbit of\n piracy, and the means of a check on his activities. But that's not\n really why I've brought you here.\" He frowned again as if what he had\n to say were difficult indeed.\n\n\n \"Marla Starland, your fiancee, accepted an assignment we offered her—a\n delicate piece of work here on Terra that only a very beautiful, and\n very clever young lady could perform. And,\" he paused, grimacing,\n \"somewhere between Venus and Terra, the interplanetary spacer bringing\n her and several other passengers, began to send distress signals.\n Finally, we couldn't contact the ship any more. It is three days\n overdue. All passengers, a cargo of radium from Venus worth untold\n millions, the spacer itself—seem to have vanished.\"", "\"Sir, I wanted to know if ... if I might help Scotty with the welding\n job....\" That wasn't at all what he'd intended to say. But somehow the\n words had stuck in his throat and his face flushed deep scarlet. His\n candid blue eyes were suspiciously brilliant, and the white bandage\n with its crimson stains made an appealing, boyish figure. It softened\n the anger in Brooke's heart. Thinking it over calmly, Dennis realized\n this was the youngster's first trip into the outer orbits, and better\n men than he had cracked in those vast reaches of space. But there had\n been an instant when he'd found Randall cowering in the rocket-room, in\n the grip of paralyzing hysteria, when he could cheerfully have wrung\n his neck!\n\n\n \"Certainly, Randall,\" he replied in a much more kindly tone. \"We'll\n need all hands now.\"", "But at last, when the enemy cruiser showed on the viso-screen,\n unmistakably for what it was—a pirate craft, it showed by its sudden\n maneuver that it had detected the I.S.P. cruiser. For it had described\n a parabola in space and headed for the dangerous asteroid belt. As if\n navigated by a masterly hand that knew each and every orbit of the\n asteroids, it plunged directly into the asteroid drift, hoping to lose\n the I.S.P. cruiser with such a maneuver. Ordinarily, it would have\n succeeded, no I.S.P. patrol ship would have dared to venture into such\n a trap without specific orders. But to Dennis Brooke, directing the\n chase from the control room, even certain death was welcome, if only he\n could take Koerber with him." ], [ "\"Looks like your brawl has turned out to be a piece of fool's luck,\n Brooke!\" The Police Lieutenant favored Dennis with a wry smile. \"If\n I'm not mistaken this chap's a member of Bren Koerber's pirate crew.\n Who else could afford to risk his neck at the International, and have\n in his possession a disintegrator? Pity we have no complete records\n on that devil's crew! Anyway, we'll radio the I.S.P., perhaps they\n have details on this dandy!\" He eyed admiringly the priceless Martian\n embroideries on the unconscious Martian's tunic, the costly border of\n red, ocelandian fur, and the magnificent black\nacerine\non his finger.", "\"Better come to Headquarters with me, Dennis,\" the lieutenant said\n gently. \"We'll say you captured him, and if he's Koerber's, the\n credit's yours. A trip to Terra's what you need, Venus for you is a\n hoodoo!\"\nThe stern, white haired I.S.P. Commander behind the immense Aluminil\n desk, frowned slightly as Dennis Brooke entered. He eyed the six foot\n four frame of the Captain before him with a mixture of feelings, as\n if uncertain how to begin. Finally, he sighed as if, having come to a\n decision, he were forcing himself to speak:", "The Martian's violet eyes were black with fury now. He staggered back\n and sucked in air, his face contorted with excruciating pain. But he\n was not through. His powerful right shot like a blast straight for\n Dennis' chest, striking like a piston just below the heart. Dennis took\n it, flat-footed, without flinching; then he let his right ride over\n with all the force at his command. It caught the Martian on the jaw and\n spun him like a top, the pale, imperious face went crimson as he slowly\n sagged to his knees and rolled to the impeccable mosaics of the floor.\n\n\n Dennis, breathing heavily, stood over him until the international\n police arrived, and then he had the surprise of his life. Upon search,\n the police found a tiny, but fatal silvery tube holstered under his\n left arm-pit—an atomic-disintegrator, forbidden throughout the\n interplanetary League. Only major criminals and space pirates still\n without the law were known to possess them.", "Dennis Brooke was thirty, the time when youth no longer seems unending.\n When the minor adventures of the heart begin to pall. If the loss of\n Marla left an aching void that all the women of five planets could not\n fill, the loss of Space, was quite as deadly. For he had been grounded.\n True, Koerber's escape from the I.S.P. net had not quite been his\n fault; but had he not been enjoying the joys of a voluptuous Jovian\n Chamber, in Venus' fabulous Inter-planetary Palace, he would have been\n ready for duty to complete the last link in the net of I.S.P. cruisers\n that almost surrounded the space pirate.", "\"Commander,\" Dennis said, and his rich baritone voice had depths of\n emotion so great that they startled Commander Bertram himself—and\n that grizzled veteran of the I.S.P., had at one time or another known\n every change of torture that could possibly be wrung on a human soul.\n \"Commander, give me one ...\none\nchance at that spawn of unthinkable\n begetting! Let me try, and I promise you ...\" in his torture, Dennis\n was unconsciously banging a knotted fist on the chaste, satiny surface\n of the priceless desk, \"I promise you that I will either bring you\n Koerber, or forfeit my life!\"\n\n\n Commander Bertram nodded his head. \"I brought you here for that\n purpose, son. We have reached a point in our war with Koerber, where\n the last stakes must be played ... and the last stake is death!\"", "Dennis Brooke shrugged his shoulders, shoulders that would have put to\n shame the Athenian statues of another age. A faint, bitter smile curved\n his generous mouth. \"I'm grounded, Gillian, it'd take the capture of\n Koerber himself to set me right with the I.S.P. again—you don't know\n Bertram! To him an infraction of rules is a major crime. Damn Venus!\"\n He reached for his glass of\nVerbena\nbut the table had turned over\n during the struggle, and the glass was a shattered mass of gleaming\nBacca-glas\nshards. He laughed shortly as he became conscious of the\n venomous stare of the Mercurian Dancer, of the excited voices of the\n guests and the emphatic disapproval of the Venusian proprietor who\n was shocked at having a brawl in his ultra-expensive, ultra-exclusive\n Palace.", "Commander Bertram turned slowly to face the young I.S.P. captain, whose\n features were a mask devoid of all expression now, save for the pallor\n and the burning fire in his eyes.\n\n\n \"And that's the sixth one in a month. Sometimes the survivors reach\n Terra in emergency spacers, or are picked up in space by other\n transports ... and sometimes son ... well, as you know, sometimes\n they're never seen again.\"\n\n\n \"When do I leave, Commander!\" Dennis Brooke's voice was like a javelin\n of ice.", "Tom Jeffery, the tall, angular and red-faced Navigator, whose slow,\n easygoing movements belied the feral persistence of a tiger, and the\n swiftness of a striking cobra in a fight, led the small procession of\n men toward the emergency planes. Behind him came Dallas Bernan, third\n lieutenant, looming like a young asteroid in his space suit, followed\n by Scotty, and finally Captain Brooke himself. All left in silence, as\n if the tragedy that had occurred aboard the wrecked liner, had touched\n them intimately.\nAboard the I.S.P. Cruiser, a surprise awaited them. It was young George\n Randall, whose excited face met them as soon as they had entered the\n airlocks and removed the space suits.", "To all but Captain Brooke, this was a new adventure, their first\n assignment to duty in a search that went beyond the realm of the\n inner planets, where men spent sleepless nights in eternal vigilance\n against stray asteroids and outlaw crews of ruthless vandal ships. Even\n their cruiser was a new experience, the long, tapering fighter lacked\n the luxurious offices and appointments of the regular I.S.P. Patrol\n spacers. It placed a maximum on speed, and all available space was\n hoarded for fuel. The lightning fast tiger of the space-lanes, was a\n thing of beauty, but of grim, sleek beauty instinct with power, not the\n comfortable luxury that they knew.\n\n\n Day after day they went through their drills, donning space suits,\n manning battle stations; aiming deadly atom-cannon at empty space, and\n eternally scanning the vast empty reaches by means of the telecast.", "In the compact, super-armored control room, Captain Brooke watched\n the telecast's viso-screen, with hungry eyes that were golden with\n anticipation. It seemed to him as if an eternity passed before at\n last, a black speck danced on the illuminated screen, until it finally\n reached the center of the viso-screen and remained there. It grew by\n leaps and bounds as the terrific speed of the cruiser minimized the\n distance long before the quarry was aware of pursuit.", "Dennis sighed, he tilted his red, curly head and drank deeply of the\n insidious\nVerbena\n, fragrant as a mint garden, in the tall frosty\n glass of Martian\nBacca-glas\n, and as he did so, his brilliant hazel\n eyes found themselves gazing into the unwinking, violet stare of a\n young Martian at the next table. There was a smouldering hatred in\n those eyes, and something else ... envy, perhaps, or was it jealousy?\n Dennis couldn't tell. But his senses became instantly alert. Danger\n brought a faint vibration which his superbly trained faculties could\n instantly denote.", "Dallas nodded and lowered his eyes. Scotty shifted his cud and spat\n a thin stream of juice over the iridescent ground. One by one they\n re-entered the cruiser.", "And suddenly, out of the void, as they had all but given up the search\n as a wild goose chase, a speck was limned in the lighted surface of the\n viso-screen in the control room. Instantly the I.S.P. cruiser came to\n life. In a burst of magnificent speed, the cruiser literally devoured\n the space leagues, until the spacer became a flashing streak. On the\n viso-screen, the speck grew larger, took on contours, growing and\n becoming slowly the drifting shell of what had been a transport.\n\n\n Presently they were within reaching distance, and Captain Brooke\n commanded through the teleradio from the control room:\n\n\n \"Prepare to board!\"", "But at last, when the enemy cruiser showed on the viso-screen,\n unmistakably for what it was—a pirate craft, it showed by its sudden\n maneuver that it had detected the I.S.P. cruiser. For it had described\n a parabola in space and headed for the dangerous asteroid belt. As if\n navigated by a masterly hand that knew each and every orbit of the\n asteroids, it plunged directly into the asteroid drift, hoping to lose\n the I.S.P. cruiser with such a maneuver. Ordinarily, it would have\n succeeded, no I.S.P. patrol ship would have dared to venture into such\n a trap without specific orders. But to Dennis Brooke, directing the\n chase from the control room, even certain death was welcome, if only he\n could take Koerber with him.", "\"But, you may as well know it,\" Scotty replied quietly. \"That parting\n shot of Koerber's severed our main rocket feed. I had to use the\n emergency tank to make it down here!\"\n\n\n For a long moment the four men looked at each other in silence. Dennis\n Brooke's face was still impassive but for the flaming hazel eyes. Tom\n tugged at the torn sleeve of his I.S.P. uniform, while Scotty gazed\n mournfully at the damaged ship. Dallas Bernan looked at the long,\n ragged line of cliffs.\n\n\n \"I think we got Koerber, though,\" he said at last. \"While Tom was doing\n a job of navigation, I had one last glimpse of him coming down fast\n and out of control somewhere behind those crags over there!\"\n\n\n \"To hell with Koerber!\" Tom Jeffery exploded. \"You mean we're stuck in\n this hellish rock-pile?\"", "The barbaric rhythms of the\nCongahua\n, were a background of annoyance\n in Dennis' mind; he frowned slightly as the maneuvers of the Mercurian\n dancer, who writhed among the guests of the notorious pleasure palace,\n began to leave no doubt as to her intentions. The girl was beautiful,\n in a sultry, almost incandescent sort of way, but her open promise left\n him cold. He wanted solitude, somewhere to coordinate his thoughts\n in silence and salvage something out of the wreck of his heart, not\n to speak of his career. But Venus, in the throes of a gigantic boom\n upon the discovery of radio-active fields, could offer only one\n solitude—the fatal one of her swamps and virgin forests.", "He reached over and flipped up the activator on a small telecast set\n on his desk; instantly the viso-screen lighted up. \"You'll now see\n a visual record of all we know about the passenger spacer that left\n Venus with passengers and cargo, as far as we could contact the vessel\n in space. This, Dennis,\" the Commander emphasized his words, \"is your\n chance to redeem yourself!\" He fell silent, while the viso-screen began\n to show a crowded space port on Venus, and a gigantic passenger spacer\n up-tilted in its cradle.\nThey watched the parabola it made in its trajectory as it flashed into\n space and then fell into orbit there beyond the planetary attraction of\n Venus. On the three-dimensional viso-screen it was uncannily real.", "\"Sit down, Dennis. I've sent for you, despite your grounding, for\n two reasons. The first one you already know—your capture of one of\n Koerber's henchmen—has given us a line as to his present orbit of\n piracy, and the means of a check on his activities. But that's not\n really why I've brought you here.\" He frowned again as if what he had\n to say were difficult indeed.\n\n\n \"Marla Starland, your fiancee, accepted an assignment we offered her—a\n delicate piece of work here on Terra that only a very beautiful, and\n very clever young lady could perform. And,\" he paused, grimacing,\n \"somewhere between Venus and Terra, the interplanetary spacer bringing\n her and several other passengers, began to send distress signals.\n Finally, we couldn't contact the ship any more. It is three days\n overdue. All passengers, a cargo of radium from Venus worth untold\n millions, the spacer itself—seem to have vanished.\"", "Scotty Byrnes was already dashing to the engine room, where his beloved\n motors purred with an ascending hum. Aboard the I.S.P. Cruiser each\n member of the crew raced to his assigned task without delay. Action\n impended, and after days and nights of inertia, it was a blessed\n relief. Smiles appeared on haggard faces, and the banter of men\n suddenly galvanized by a powerful incentive was bandied back and forth.\n All but George Randall. Now that action was imminent. Something gripped\n his throat until he could hardly stand the tight collar of his I.S.P.\n uniform. A growing nausea gripped his bowels, and although he strove to\n keep calm, his hands trembled beyond control.", "Dennis, Tom Jeffery and Scotty Byrnes raced to the control room,\n followed by the ponderous Dallas to whom hurry in any form was\n anathema. There could be no doubt now! The \"Jet Analyzer\" recorded\n powerful disturbance, atomic—could be nothing else.\n\n\n Instantly Captain Brooke was at the inter-communication speaker:\n\n\n \"Crew, battle stations! Engine room, full speed!\"" ], [ "\"Commander,\" Dennis said, and his rich baritone voice had depths of\n emotion so great that they startled Commander Bertram himself—and\n that grizzled veteran of the I.S.P., had at one time or another known\n every change of torture that could possibly be wrung on a human soul.\n \"Commander, give me one ...\none\nchance at that spawn of unthinkable\n begetting! Let me try, and I promise you ...\" in his torture, Dennis\n was unconsciously banging a knotted fist on the chaste, satiny surface\n of the priceless desk, \"I promise you that I will either bring you\n Koerber, or forfeit my life!\"\n\n\n Commander Bertram nodded his head. \"I brought you here for that\n purpose, son. We have reached a point in our war with Koerber, where\n the last stakes must be played ... and the last stake is death!\"", "A night in the Jovian Chamber, was to be emperor for one night. Every\n dream of a man's desire was marvelously induced through the skilful use\n of hypnotics; the rarest viands and most delectable drinks appeared as\n if by magic; the unearthly peace of an Olympus descended on a man's\n soul, and beauty ... beauty such as men dreamed of was a warm reality\n under the ineffable illumination of the Chamber.\n\n\n It cost a young fortune. But to pleasure mad, boom-ridden Venus, a\n fortune was a bagatelle. Only it had cost Dennis Brooke far more than a\n sheaf of credits—it had cost him the severe rebuff of the I.S.P., and\n most of his heart in Marla.", "\"Thank you, sir!\" Randall seemed to hesitate for a moment, opened his\n mouth to speak further, but feeling the other's calculating gaze upon\n him, he whirled and re-entered the ship.\n\n\n \"But for him we wouldn't be here!\" Dallas exclaimed. \"Aagh!\" He shook\n his head in disgust until the several folds of flesh under his chin\n shook like gelatin. \"Cowards are hell!\" He spat.\n\n\n \"Easy, Dallas, Randall's a kid, give 'im a chance.\" Dennis observed.\n\n\n \"You Captain ... you're defending 'im? Why you had a greater stake in\n this than we, and he's spoiled it for you!\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" Dennis nodded. \"But I'm still keeping my senses clear. No feuds\n on my ship. Get it!\" The last two words cut like a scimitar.", "Dennis Brooke's space-tanned features had gone pale. His large hazel\n eyes, fringed with auburn lashes, too long for a man, were bright slits\n that smouldered. He stood silent, his hands clenched at his sides,\n while something cold and sharp seemed to dig at his heart with cruel\n precision.\n\n\n \"Marla!\" He breathed at last. The thought of Marla in the power\n of Koerber sent a wave of anguish that seared through him like an\n atom-blast.", "Dennis Brooke was thirty, the time when youth no longer seems unending.\n When the minor adventures of the heart begin to pall. If the loss of\n Marla left an aching void that all the women of five planets could not\n fill, the loss of Space, was quite as deadly. For he had been grounded.\n True, Koerber's escape from the I.S.P. net had not quite been his\n fault; but had he not been enjoying the joys of a voluptuous Jovian\n Chamber, in Venus' fabulous Inter-planetary Palace, he would have been\n ready for duty to complete the last link in the net of I.S.P. cruisers\n that almost surrounded the space pirate.", "Dennis tried not to think of Marla, too great an ache was involved in\n thinking of her and all he had lost. When he finally spoke, his voice\n was harsh, laconic:\n\n\n \"Prepare to return!\"\n\n\n Scotty Byrnes, the cruiser's nurse, who could take his motors through a\n major battle, or hell and high water and back again, for that matter,\n shifted the Venusian weed that made a perpetual bulge on his cheek and\n gazed curiously at Captain Brooke. They all knew the story in various\n versions, and with special additions. But they were spacemen, implicit\n in their loyalty, and with Dennis Brooke they could and did feel safe.", "\"Better come to Headquarters with me, Dennis,\" the lieutenant said\n gently. \"We'll say you captured him, and if he's Koerber's, the\n credit's yours. A trip to Terra's what you need, Venus for you is a\n hoodoo!\"\nThe stern, white haired I.S.P. Commander behind the immense Aluminil\n desk, frowned slightly as Dennis Brooke entered. He eyed the six foot\n four frame of the Captain before him with a mixture of feelings, as\n if uncertain how to begin. Finally, he sighed as if, having come to a\n decision, he were forcing himself to speak:", "Dennis Brooke shrugged his shoulders, shoulders that would have put to\n shame the Athenian statues of another age. A faint, bitter smile curved\n his generous mouth. \"I'm grounded, Gillian, it'd take the capture of\n Koerber himself to set me right with the I.S.P. again—you don't know\n Bertram! To him an infraction of rules is a major crime. Damn Venus!\"\n He reached for his glass of\nVerbena\nbut the table had turned over\n during the struggle, and the glass was a shattered mass of gleaming\nBacca-glas\nshards. He laughed shortly as he became conscious of the\n venomous stare of the Mercurian Dancer, of the excited voices of the\n guests and the emphatic disapproval of the Venusian proprietor who\n was shocked at having a brawl in his ultra-expensive, ultra-exclusive\n Palace.", "\"Sir, I wanted to know if ... if I might help Scotty with the welding\n job....\" That wasn't at all what he'd intended to say. But somehow the\n words had stuck in his throat and his face flushed deep scarlet. His\n candid blue eyes were suspiciously brilliant, and the white bandage\n with its crimson stains made an appealing, boyish figure. It softened\n the anger in Brooke's heart. Thinking it over calmly, Dennis realized\n this was the youngster's first trip into the outer orbits, and better\n men than he had cracked in those vast reaches of space. But there had\n been an instant when he'd found Randall cowering in the rocket-room, in\n the grip of paralyzing hysteria, when he could cheerfully have wrung\n his neck!\n\n\n \"Certainly, Randall,\" he replied in a much more kindly tone. \"We'll\n need all hands now.\"", "Dennis, Tom Jeffery and Scotty Byrnes raced to the control room,\n followed by the ponderous Dallas to whom hurry in any form was\n anathema. There could be no doubt now! The \"Jet Analyzer\" recorded\n powerful disturbance, atomic—could be nothing else.\n\n\n Instantly Captain Brooke was at the inter-communication speaker:\n\n\n \"Crew, battle stations! Engine room, full speed!\"", "\"Looks like your brawl has turned out to be a piece of fool's luck,\n Brooke!\" The Police Lieutenant favored Dennis with a wry smile. \"If\n I'm not mistaken this chap's a member of Bren Koerber's pirate crew.\n Who else could afford to risk his neck at the International, and have\n in his possession a disintegrator? Pity we have no complete records\n on that devil's crew! Anyway, we'll radio the I.S.P., perhaps they\n have details on this dandy!\" He eyed admiringly the priceless Martian\n embroideries on the unconscious Martian's tunic, the costly border of\n red, ocelandian fur, and the magnificent black\nacerine\non his finger.", "But at last, when the enemy cruiser showed on the viso-screen,\n unmistakably for what it was—a pirate craft, it showed by its sudden\n maneuver that it had detected the I.S.P. cruiser. For it had described\n a parabola in space and headed for the dangerous asteroid belt. As if\n navigated by a masterly hand that knew each and every orbit of the\n asteroids, it plunged directly into the asteroid drift, hoping to lose\n the I.S.P. cruiser with such a maneuver. Ordinarily, it would have\n succeeded, no I.S.P. patrol ship would have dared to venture into such\n a trap without specific orders. But to Dennis Brooke, directing the\n chase from the control room, even certain death was welcome, if only he\n could take Koerber with him.", "\"But, you may as well know it,\" Scotty replied quietly. \"That parting\n shot of Koerber's severed our main rocket feed. I had to use the\n emergency tank to make it down here!\"\n\n\n For a long moment the four men looked at each other in silence. Dennis\n Brooke's face was still impassive but for the flaming hazel eyes. Tom\n tugged at the torn sleeve of his I.S.P. uniform, while Scotty gazed\n mournfully at the damaged ship. Dallas Bernan looked at the long,\n ragged line of cliffs.\n\n\n \"I think we got Koerber, though,\" he said at last. \"While Tom was doing\n a job of navigation, I had one last glimpse of him coming down fast\n and out of control somewhere behind those crags over there!\"\n\n\n \"To hell with Koerber!\" Tom Jeffery exploded. \"You mean we're stuck in\n this hellish rock-pile?\"", "He reached over and flipped up the activator on a small telecast set\n on his desk; instantly the viso-screen lighted up. \"You'll now see\n a visual record of all we know about the passenger spacer that left\n Venus with passengers and cargo, as far as we could contact the vessel\n in space. This, Dennis,\" the Commander emphasized his words, \"is your\n chance to redeem yourself!\" He fell silent, while the viso-screen began\n to show a crowded space port on Venus, and a gigantic passenger spacer\n up-tilted in its cradle.\nThey watched the parabola it made in its trajectory as it flashed into\n space and then fell into orbit there beyond the planetary attraction of\n Venus. On the three-dimensional viso-screen it was uncannily real.", "Commander Bertram turned slowly to face the young I.S.P. captain, whose\n features were a mask devoid of all expression now, save for the pallor\n and the burning fire in his eyes.\n\n\n \"And that's the sixth one in a month. Sometimes the survivors reach\n Terra in emergency spacers, or are picked up in space by other\n transports ... and sometimes son ... well, as you know, sometimes\n they're never seen again.\"\n\n\n \"When do I leave, Commander!\" Dennis Brooke's voice was like a javelin\n of ice.", "Dennis sighed, he tilted his red, curly head and drank deeply of the\n insidious\nVerbena\n, fragrant as a mint garden, in the tall frosty\n glass of Martian\nBacca-glas\n, and as he did so, his brilliant hazel\n eyes found themselves gazing into the unwinking, violet stare of a\n young Martian at the next table. There was a smouldering hatred in\n those eyes, and something else ... envy, perhaps, or was it jealousy?\n Dennis couldn't tell. But his senses became instantly alert. Danger\n brought a faint vibration which his superbly trained faculties could\n instantly denote.", "George Randall breathed a sigh of relief. He watched them bridge the\n space to the drifting wreck, then saw them enter what had once been a\n proud interplanetary liner, now soon to be but drifting dust, and he\n turned away with a look of shame.\n\n\n Inside the liner, Captain Dennis Brooke had finished making a detailed\n survey.\n\n\n \"No doubt about it,\" he spoke through the radio in his helmet. \"Cargo\n missing. No survivors. No indication that the repulsion fields were\n out of order. And finally, those Genton shells could only have been\n fired by Koerber!\" He tried to maintain a calm exterior, but inwardly\n he seethed in a cold fury more deadly than any he had ever experienced.\n Somehow he had expected to find at least one compartment unharmed,\n where life might have endured, but now, all hope was gone. Only a great\n resolve to deal with Koerber once and for all remained to him.", "It was then that Dennis Brooke saw the immense dark shadow looming\n immediately behind Koerber's ship. He saw the pirate cruiser zoom\n desperately in an effort to break the gravity trap of the looming mass,\n but too late. It struggled like a fly caught in a spider-web to no\n avail. It was then that Koerber played his last card. Sensing he was\n doomed, he tried to draw the I.S.P. Cruiser down with him. A powerful\n magnetic beam lashed out to spear the I.S.P. Cruiser.\nWith a wrenching turn that almost threw them out of control, Dennis\n maneuvered to avoid the beam. Again Koerber's beam lashed out, as he\n sank lower into the looming mass, and again Dennis anticipating the\n maneuver avoided it.\n\n\n \"George Randall!\" He shouted desperately into the speaker. \"Cut all\n jets in the rocket room! Hurry, man!\" He banked again and then zoomed\n out of the increasing gravity trap.", "\"Pretty much of a mess!\" Dennis Brooke's face was impassive as he\n turned to Scotty Byrnes. \"What's your opinion? Think we can patch her\n up, or are we stuck here indefinitely?\"\n\n\n Scotty eyed the damage. The atom-blast had penetrated the hull into\n the forward fuel chambers and the armor had blossomed out like flower\n petals. The crash-landing had not helped either.\n\n\n \"Well, there's a few beryloid plates in the storage locker, Captain,\n but,\" he scratched his head ruminatively and shifted his precious cud.\n\n\n \"But what? Speak up man!\" It was Tom Jeffery, his nerves on edge, his\n ordinarily gentle voice like a lash.", "\"Sit down, Dennis. I've sent for you, despite your grounding, for\n two reasons. The first one you already know—your capture of one of\n Koerber's henchmen—has given us a line as to his present orbit of\n piracy, and the means of a check on his activities. But that's not\n really why I've brought you here.\" He frowned again as if what he had\n to say were difficult indeed.\n\n\n \"Marla Starland, your fiancee, accepted an assignment we offered her—a\n delicate piece of work here on Terra that only a very beautiful, and\n very clever young lady could perform. And,\" he paused, grimacing,\n \"somewhere between Venus and Terra, the interplanetary spacer bringing\n her and several other passengers, began to send distress signals.\n Finally, we couldn't contact the ship any more. It is three days\n overdue. All passengers, a cargo of radium from Venus worth untold\n millions, the spacer itself—seem to have vanished.\"" ], [ "\"Thank you, sir!\" Randall seemed to hesitate for a moment, opened his\n mouth to speak further, but feeling the other's calculating gaze upon\n him, he whirled and re-entered the ship.\n\n\n \"But for him we wouldn't be here!\" Dallas exclaimed. \"Aagh!\" He shook\n his head in disgust until the several folds of flesh under his chin\n shook like gelatin. \"Cowards are hell!\" He spat.\n\n\n \"Easy, Dallas, Randall's a kid, give 'im a chance.\" Dennis observed.\n\n\n \"You Captain ... you're defending 'im? Why you had a greater stake in\n this than we, and he's spoiled it for you!\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" Dennis nodded. \"But I'm still keeping my senses clear. No feuds\n on my ship. Get it!\" The last two words cut like a scimitar.", "\"Sit down, Dennis. I've sent for you, despite your grounding, for\n two reasons. The first one you already know—your capture of one of\n Koerber's henchmen—has given us a line as to his present orbit of\n piracy, and the means of a check on his activities. But that's not\n really why I've brought you here.\" He frowned again as if what he had\n to say were difficult indeed.\n\n\n \"Marla Starland, your fiancee, accepted an assignment we offered her—a\n delicate piece of work here on Terra that only a very beautiful, and\n very clever young lady could perform. And,\" he paused, grimacing,\n \"somewhere between Venus and Terra, the interplanetary spacer bringing\n her and several other passengers, began to send distress signals.\n Finally, we couldn't contact the ship any more. It is three days\n overdue. All passengers, a cargo of radium from Venus worth untold\n millions, the spacer itself—seem to have vanished.\"", "Dennis Brooke was thirty, the time when youth no longer seems unending.\n When the minor adventures of the heart begin to pall. If the loss of\n Marla left an aching void that all the women of five planets could not\n fill, the loss of Space, was quite as deadly. For he had been grounded.\n True, Koerber's escape from the I.S.P. net had not quite been his\n fault; but had he not been enjoying the joys of a voluptuous Jovian\n Chamber, in Venus' fabulous Inter-planetary Palace, he would have been\n ready for duty to complete the last link in the net of I.S.P. cruisers\n that almost surrounded the space pirate.", "\"Commander,\" Dennis said, and his rich baritone voice had depths of\n emotion so great that they startled Commander Bertram himself—and\n that grizzled veteran of the I.S.P., had at one time or another known\n every change of torture that could possibly be wrung on a human soul.\n \"Commander, give me one ...\none\nchance at that spawn of unthinkable\n begetting! Let me try, and I promise you ...\" in his torture, Dennis\n was unconsciously banging a knotted fist on the chaste, satiny surface\n of the priceless desk, \"I promise you that I will either bring you\n Koerber, or forfeit my life!\"\n\n\n Commander Bertram nodded his head. \"I brought you here for that\n purpose, son. We have reached a point in our war with Koerber, where\n the last stakes must be played ... and the last stake is death!\"", "Dennis Brooke shrugged his shoulders, shoulders that would have put to\n shame the Athenian statues of another age. A faint, bitter smile curved\n his generous mouth. \"I'm grounded, Gillian, it'd take the capture of\n Koerber himself to set me right with the I.S.P. again—you don't know\n Bertram! To him an infraction of rules is a major crime. Damn Venus!\"\n He reached for his glass of\nVerbena\nbut the table had turned over\n during the struggle, and the glass was a shattered mass of gleaming\nBacca-glas\nshards. He laughed shortly as he became conscious of the\n venomous stare of the Mercurian Dancer, of the excited voices of the\n guests and the emphatic disapproval of the Venusian proprietor who\n was shocked at having a brawl in his ultra-expensive, ultra-exclusive\n Palace.", "Dennis tried not to think of Marla, too great an ache was involved in\n thinking of her and all he had lost. When he finally spoke, his voice\n was harsh, laconic:\n\n\n \"Prepare to return!\"\n\n\n Scotty Byrnes, the cruiser's nurse, who could take his motors through a\n major battle, or hell and high water and back again, for that matter,\n shifted the Venusian weed that made a perpetual bulge on his cheek and\n gazed curiously at Captain Brooke. They all knew the story in various\n versions, and with special additions. But they were spacemen, implicit\n in their loyalty, and with Dennis Brooke they could and did feel safe.", "\"Better come to Headquarters with me, Dennis,\" the lieutenant said\n gently. \"We'll say you captured him, and if he's Koerber's, the\n credit's yours. A trip to Terra's what you need, Venus for you is a\n hoodoo!\"\nThe stern, white haired I.S.P. Commander behind the immense Aluminil\n desk, frowned slightly as Dennis Brooke entered. He eyed the six foot\n four frame of the Captain before him with a mixture of feelings, as\n if uncertain how to begin. Finally, he sighed as if, having come to a\n decision, he were forcing himself to speak:", "\"Sir, I wanted to know if ... if I might help Scotty with the welding\n job....\" That wasn't at all what he'd intended to say. But somehow the\n words had stuck in his throat and his face flushed deep scarlet. His\n candid blue eyes were suspiciously brilliant, and the white bandage\n with its crimson stains made an appealing, boyish figure. It softened\n the anger in Brooke's heart. Thinking it over calmly, Dennis realized\n this was the youngster's first trip into the outer orbits, and better\n men than he had cracked in those vast reaches of space. But there had\n been an instant when he'd found Randall cowering in the rocket-room, in\n the grip of paralyzing hysteria, when he could cheerfully have wrung\n his neck!\n\n\n \"Certainly, Randall,\" he replied in a much more kindly tone. \"We'll\n need all hands now.\"", "He reached over and flipped up the activator on a small telecast set\n on his desk; instantly the viso-screen lighted up. \"You'll now see\n a visual record of all we know about the passenger spacer that left\n Venus with passengers and cargo, as far as we could contact the vessel\n in space. This, Dennis,\" the Commander emphasized his words, \"is your\n chance to redeem yourself!\" He fell silent, while the viso-screen began\n to show a crowded space port on Venus, and a gigantic passenger spacer\n up-tilted in its cradle.\nThey watched the parabola it made in its trajectory as it flashed into\n space and then fell into orbit there beyond the planetary attraction of\n Venus. On the three-dimensional viso-screen it was uncannily real.", "Dennis Brooke's space-tanned features had gone pale. His large hazel\n eyes, fringed with auburn lashes, too long for a man, were bright slits\n that smouldered. He stood silent, his hands clenched at his sides,\n while something cold and sharp seemed to dig at his heart with cruel\n precision.\n\n\n \"Marla!\" He breathed at last. The thought of Marla in the power\n of Koerber sent a wave of anguish that seared through him like an\n atom-blast.", "Dennis sighed, he tilted his red, curly head and drank deeply of the\n insidious\nVerbena\n, fragrant as a mint garden, in the tall frosty\n glass of Martian\nBacca-glas\n, and as he did so, his brilliant hazel\n eyes found themselves gazing into the unwinking, violet stare of a\n young Martian at the next table. There was a smouldering hatred in\n those eyes, and something else ... envy, perhaps, or was it jealousy?\n Dennis couldn't tell. But his senses became instantly alert. Danger\n brought a faint vibration which his superbly trained faculties could\n instantly denote.", "Commander Bertram turned slowly to face the young I.S.P. captain, whose\n features were a mask devoid of all expression now, save for the pallor\n and the burning fire in his eyes.\n\n\n \"And that's the sixth one in a month. Sometimes the survivors reach\n Terra in emergency spacers, or are picked up in space by other\n transports ... and sometimes son ... well, as you know, sometimes\n they're never seen again.\"\n\n\n \"When do I leave, Commander!\" Dennis Brooke's voice was like a javelin\n of ice.", "\"But, you may as well know it,\" Scotty replied quietly. \"That parting\n shot of Koerber's severed our main rocket feed. I had to use the\n emergency tank to make it down here!\"\n\n\n For a long moment the four men looked at each other in silence. Dennis\n Brooke's face was still impassive but for the flaming hazel eyes. Tom\n tugged at the torn sleeve of his I.S.P. uniform, while Scotty gazed\n mournfully at the damaged ship. Dallas Bernan looked at the long,\n ragged line of cliffs.\n\n\n \"I think we got Koerber, though,\" he said at last. \"While Tom was doing\n a job of navigation, I had one last glimpse of him coming down fast\n and out of control somewhere behind those crags over there!\"\n\n\n \"To hell with Koerber!\" Tom Jeffery exploded. \"You mean we're stuck in\n this hellish rock-pile?\"", "But at last, when the enemy cruiser showed on the viso-screen,\n unmistakably for what it was—a pirate craft, it showed by its sudden\n maneuver that it had detected the I.S.P. cruiser. For it had described\n a parabola in space and headed for the dangerous asteroid belt. As if\n navigated by a masterly hand that knew each and every orbit of the\n asteroids, it plunged directly into the asteroid drift, hoping to lose\n the I.S.P. cruiser with such a maneuver. Ordinarily, it would have\n succeeded, no I.S.P. patrol ship would have dared to venture into such\n a trap without specific orders. But to Dennis Brooke, directing the\n chase from the control room, even certain death was welcome, if only he\n could take Koerber with him.", "Some of the guests laughed, others stared in plain envy at the\n handsome, red-haired spacer, but from the table across, came the\n tinkling sound of a fragile glass being crushed in a powerful hand,\n and a muffled Martian curse. Without warning, the Martian was on his\n feet with the speed of an Hellacorium, the table went crashing to one\n side as he leaped with deadly intent on the sprawled figure of Dennis\n Brooke. A high-pitched scream brought instant silence as a Terran girl\n cried out. Then the Martian's hand reached out hungrily. But Dennis was\n not there.\nLeaping to one side, impervious to the fall of the dancer, he avoided\n the murderous rush of the Martian youth, then he wheeled swiftly and\n planted a sledge-hammer blow in that most vulnerable spot of all\n Martians, the spot just below their narrow, wasp-like waist, and as the\n Martian half-doubled over, he lefted him with a short jab to the chin\n that staggered and all but dropped him.", "\"Better break out those repair plates,\" Dennis said to Scotty. \"Tom,\n you get the welders ready. I've got a few entries to make in the log\n book, and then we'll decide on a party to explore the terrain and try\n to find out what happened to Koerber's ship. I must know,\" he said in a\n low voice, but with such passion that the others were startled.\n\n\n A figure appeared in the slanting doorway of the ship in time to hear\n the last words. It was George Randall, adjusting a bandaged forehead\n bumped during the crash landing.\n\n\n \"Captain ... I ... I wanted ...\" he paused unable to continue.\n\n\n \"You wanted what?\" Captain Brooke's voice was terse. \"Perhaps you\n wanted to explain why you weren't at your battle station?\"", "Dennis, Tom Jeffery and Scotty Byrnes raced to the control room,\n followed by the ponderous Dallas to whom hurry in any form was\n anathema. There could be no doubt now! The \"Jet Analyzer\" recorded\n powerful disturbance, atomic—could be nothing else.\n\n\n Instantly Captain Brooke was at the inter-communication speaker:\n\n\n \"Crew, battle stations! Engine room, full speed!\"", "Dallas nodded and lowered his eyes. Scotty shifted his cud and spat\n a thin stream of juice over the iridescent ground. One by one they\n re-entered the cruiser.", "\"Looks like your brawl has turned out to be a piece of fool's luck,\n Brooke!\" The Police Lieutenant favored Dennis with a wry smile. \"If\n I'm not mistaken this chap's a member of Bren Koerber's pirate crew.\n Who else could afford to risk his neck at the International, and have\n in his possession a disintegrator? Pity we have no complete records\n on that devil's crew! Anyway, we'll radio the I.S.P., perhaps they\n have details on this dandy!\" He eyed admiringly the priceless Martian\n embroideries on the unconscious Martian's tunic, the costly border of\n red, ocelandian fur, and the magnificent black\nacerine\non his finger.", "\"Pretty much of a mess!\" Dennis Brooke's face was impassive as he\n turned to Scotty Byrnes. \"What's your opinion? Think we can patch her\n up, or are we stuck here indefinitely?\"\n\n\n Scotty eyed the damage. The atom-blast had penetrated the hull into\n the forward fuel chambers and the armor had blossomed out like flower\n petals. The crash-landing had not helped either.\n\n\n \"Well, there's a few beryloid plates in the storage locker, Captain,\n but,\" he scratched his head ruminatively and shifted his precious cud.\n\n\n \"But what? Speak up man!\" It was Tom Jeffery, his nerves on edge, his\n ordinarily gentle voice like a lash." ], [ "To all but Captain Brooke, this was a new adventure, their first\n assignment to duty in a search that went beyond the realm of the\n inner planets, where men spent sleepless nights in eternal vigilance\n against stray asteroids and outlaw crews of ruthless vandal ships. Even\n their cruiser was a new experience, the long, tapering fighter lacked\n the luxurious offices and appointments of the regular I.S.P. Patrol\n spacers. It placed a maximum on speed, and all available space was\n hoarded for fuel. The lightning fast tiger of the space-lanes, was a\n thing of beauty, but of grim, sleek beauty instinct with power, not the\n comfortable luxury that they knew.\n\n\n Day after day they went through their drills, donning space suits,\n manning battle stations; aiming deadly atom-cannon at empty space, and\n eternally scanning the vast empty reaches by means of the telecast.", "Dennis tried not to think of Marla, too great an ache was involved in\n thinking of her and all he had lost. When he finally spoke, his voice\n was harsh, laconic:\n\n\n \"Prepare to return!\"\n\n\n Scotty Byrnes, the cruiser's nurse, who could take his motors through a\n major battle, or hell and high water and back again, for that matter,\n shifted the Venusian weed that made a perpetual bulge on his cheek and\n gazed curiously at Captain Brooke. They all knew the story in various\n versions, and with special additions. But they were spacemen, implicit\n in their loyalty, and with Dennis Brooke they could and did feel safe.", "Scotty Byrnes was already dashing to the engine room, where his beloved\n motors purred with an ascending hum. Aboard the I.S.P. Cruiser each\n member of the crew raced to his assigned task without delay. Action\n impended, and after days and nights of inertia, it was a blessed\n relief. Smiles appeared on haggard faces, and the banter of men\n suddenly galvanized by a powerful incentive was bandied back and forth.\n All but George Randall. Now that action was imminent. Something gripped\n his throat until he could hardly stand the tight collar of his I.S.P.\n uniform. A growing nausea gripped his bowels, and although he strove to\n keep calm, his hands trembled beyond control.", "In the compact, super-armored control room, Captain Brooke watched\n the telecast's viso-screen, with hungry eyes that were golden with\n anticipation. It seemed to him as if an eternity passed before at\n last, a black speck danced on the illuminated screen, until it finally\n reached the center of the viso-screen and remained there. It grew by\n leaps and bounds as the terrific speed of the cruiser minimized the\n distance long before the quarry was aware of pursuit.", "Dennis Brooke was thirty, the time when youth no longer seems unending.\n When the minor adventures of the heart begin to pall. If the loss of\n Marla left an aching void that all the women of five planets could not\n fill, the loss of Space, was quite as deadly. For he had been grounded.\n True, Koerber's escape from the I.S.P. net had not quite been his\n fault; but had he not been enjoying the joys of a voluptuous Jovian\n Chamber, in Venus' fabulous Inter-planetary Palace, he would have been\n ready for duty to complete the last link in the net of I.S.P. cruisers\n that almost surrounded the space pirate.", "Every member of the crew wanted to be among the boarding party, for\n all but George Randall, the junior member of the crew had served his\n apprenticeship among the inner planets, Mars, Venus and Terra. He felt\n nauseated at the very thought of going out there in that vast abyss of\n space. His young, beardless face, with the candid blue eyes went pale\n when the order was given. But presently, Captain Brooke named those who\n were to go beside himself:\n\n\n \"You, Tom and Scotty, take one emergency plane, and Dallas!\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Captain!\" Dallas Bernan, the immense third lieutenant boomed in\n his basso-profundo voice.\n\n\n \"You and I'll take a second emergency!\" There was a pause in the voice\n of the Captain from the control room, then: \"Test space suits. Test\n oxygen helmets! Atom-blasts only, ready in five minutes!\"", "But at last, when the enemy cruiser showed on the viso-screen,\n unmistakably for what it was—a pirate craft, it showed by its sudden\n maneuver that it had detected the I.S.P. cruiser. For it had described\n a parabola in space and headed for the dangerous asteroid belt. As if\n navigated by a masterly hand that knew each and every orbit of the\n asteroids, it plunged directly into the asteroid drift, hoping to lose\n the I.S.P. cruiser with such a maneuver. Ordinarily, it would have\n succeeded, no I.S.P. patrol ship would have dared to venture into such\n a trap without specific orders. But to Dennis Brooke, directing the\n chase from the control room, even certain death was welcome, if only he\n could take Koerber with him.", "\"Thank you, sir!\" Randall seemed to hesitate for a moment, opened his\n mouth to speak further, but feeling the other's calculating gaze upon\n him, he whirled and re-entered the ship.\n\n\n \"But for him we wouldn't be here!\" Dallas exclaimed. \"Aagh!\" He shook\n his head in disgust until the several folds of flesh under his chin\n shook like gelatin. \"Cowards are hell!\" He spat.\n\n\n \"Easy, Dallas, Randall's a kid, give 'im a chance.\" Dennis observed.\n\n\n \"You Captain ... you're defending 'im? Why you had a greater stake in\n this than we, and he's spoiled it for you!\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" Dennis nodded. \"But I'm still keeping my senses clear. No feuds\n on my ship. Get it!\" The last two words cut like a scimitar.", "\"Right now, if you wish. We have a new cruiser armored in beryloid with\n double hull—a new design against Genton shells, but it's the speed\n of the thing that you'll want to know about. It just about surpasses\n anything ever invented. Get the figures and data from the coordination\n room, son; it's serviced and fueled and the crew's aboard.\" He\n extended his hand. \"You're the best spacer we have—aside from your\n recklessness—and on your success depends far more than the capture of\n an outlaw.\" Bertram smiled thinly. \"Happy landing!\"\nII\n\n\n Their nerves were ragged. Days and days of fruitless search for a\n phantom ship that seemed to have vanished from space, and an equally\n elusive pirate whose whereabouts were hidden in the depths of\n fathomless space.", "\"Captain Brooke ... Captain, recordings are showing on the new 'Jet\n Analyzers' must be the trail of some spacer. Can't be far!\" He was\n fairly dancing in his excitement, as if the marvelous work of the\n new invention that detected the disturbance of atomic jets at great\n distance were his own achievement.\n\n\n Dennis Brooke smiled. His own heart was hammering, and inwardly he\n prayed that it were Koerber. It had to be! No interplanetary passenger\n spacer could possibly be out here at the intersection of angles Kp\n 39 degrees, 12 minutes, Fp 67 degrees of Ceres elliptic plane. None\n but a pirate crew with swift battle cruisers could dare! This was the\n dangerous asteroid belt, where even planetoids drifted in eccentric\n uncharted orbits.", "Tom Jeffery, the tall, angular and red-faced Navigator, whose slow,\n easygoing movements belied the feral persistence of a tiger, and the\n swiftness of a striking cobra in a fight, led the small procession of\n men toward the emergency planes. Behind him came Dallas Bernan, third\n lieutenant, looming like a young asteroid in his space suit, followed\n by Scotty, and finally Captain Brooke himself. All left in silence, as\n if the tragedy that had occurred aboard the wrecked liner, had touched\n them intimately.\nAboard the I.S.P. Cruiser, a surprise awaited them. It was young George\n Randall, whose excited face met them as soon as they had entered the\n airlocks and removed the space suits.", "And suddenly, out of the void, as they had all but given up the search\n as a wild goose chase, a speck was limned in the lighted surface of the\n viso-screen in the control room. Instantly the I.S.P. cruiser came to\n life. In a burst of magnificent speed, the cruiser literally devoured\n the space leagues, until the spacer became a flashing streak. On the\n viso-screen, the speck grew larger, took on contours, growing and\n becoming slowly the drifting shell of what had been a transport.\n\n\n Presently they were within reaching distance, and Captain Brooke\n commanded through the teleradio from the control room:\n\n\n \"Prepare to board!\"", "Commander Bertram turned slowly to face the young I.S.P. captain, whose\n features were a mask devoid of all expression now, save for the pallor\n and the burning fire in his eyes.\n\n\n \"And that's the sixth one in a month. Sometimes the survivors reach\n Terra in emergency spacers, or are picked up in space by other\n transports ... and sometimes son ... well, as you know, sometimes\n they're never seen again.\"\n\n\n \"When do I leave, Commander!\" Dennis Brooke's voice was like a javelin\n of ice.", "A flight that had taken many hours to accomplish, was shortened on\n the viso-screen to a matter of minutes. They saw the great, proud\n interplanetary transport speeding majestically through the starry void,\n and suddenly, they saw her swerve in a great arc; again she swerved\n as if avoiding something deadly in space, and point upwards gaining\n altitude. It was zig-zagging now, desperately maneuvering in an erratic\n course, and as if by magic, a tiny spot appeared on the transport's\n side.\n\n\n Tiny on the viso-screen, the fatal spots must have been huge in\n actuality. To the Commander of the I.S.P., and to Captain Brooke, it\n was an old story. Atom-blasts were pitting the spacer's hull with\n deadly Genton shells. The great transport trembled under the impact of\n the barrage, and suddenly, the screen went blank.", "\"But, you may as well know it,\" Scotty replied quietly. \"That parting\n shot of Koerber's severed our main rocket feed. I had to use the\n emergency tank to make it down here!\"\n\n\n For a long moment the four men looked at each other in silence. Dennis\n Brooke's face was still impassive but for the flaming hazel eyes. Tom\n tugged at the torn sleeve of his I.S.P. uniform, while Scotty gazed\n mournfully at the damaged ship. Dallas Bernan looked at the long,\n ragged line of cliffs.\n\n\n \"I think we got Koerber, though,\" he said at last. \"While Tom was doing\n a job of navigation, I had one last glimpse of him coming down fast\n and out of control somewhere behind those crags over there!\"\n\n\n \"To hell with Koerber!\" Tom Jeffery exploded. \"You mean we're stuck in\n this hellish rock-pile?\"", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\"\nAnd so, my dear\n,\" Dennis detected a faint irony in the phrase, \"\nI'm\n afraid I can offer no competition to the beauties of five planets—or\n is it six? With regret I bow myself out, and knowing me as you do,\n you'll understand the futility of trying to convince me again. Anyway,\n there will be no temptation, for I'm sailing on a new assignment I've\n accepted. I did love you.... Good-by.\n\"\n\n\n Dennis Brooke had lost count of the times he'd read Marla's last\n letter, but every time he came to these final, poignant lines, they\n never failed to conjure a vision of her tawny loveliness, slender as\n the palms of Venus, and of the blue ecstasy of her eyes, wide with a\n perpetual wonder—limpid as a child's.", "Dennis, Tom Jeffery and Scotty Byrnes raced to the control room,\n followed by the ponderous Dallas to whom hurry in any form was\n anathema. There could be no doubt now! The \"Jet Analyzer\" recorded\n powerful disturbance, atomic—could be nothing else.\n\n\n Instantly Captain Brooke was at the inter-communication speaker:\n\n\n \"Crew, battle stations! Engine room, full speed!\"", "And then began another type of battle. Hearing the Captain's orders to\n Randall, and noting that no result had been obtained, Scotty Byrnes\n himself cut the jets. The Magnetic Repulsion Plates went into action,\n too late to save them from being drawn, but at least they could prevent\n a crash. Far in the distance they could see Koerber's ship preceding\n them in a free fall, then the Planetoid was rushing up to engulf them.\nIII\n\n\n The atmosphere was somewhat tenuous, but it was breathable, provided\n a man didn't exert himself. To the silent crew of the I.S.P. Cruiser,\n the strange world to which Koerber's magnetic Beam had drawn them,\n was anything but reassuring. Towering crags jutted raggedly against\n the sky, and the iridescent soil of the narrow valley that walled in\n the cruiser, had a poisonous, deadly look. As far as their eyes could\n reach, the desolate, denuded vista stretched to the horizon.", "\"Sir, I wanted to know if ... if I might help Scotty with the welding\n job....\" That wasn't at all what he'd intended to say. But somehow the\n words had stuck in his throat and his face flushed deep scarlet. His\n candid blue eyes were suspiciously brilliant, and the white bandage\n with its crimson stains made an appealing, boyish figure. It softened\n the anger in Brooke's heart. Thinking it over calmly, Dennis realized\n this was the youngster's first trip into the outer orbits, and better\n men than he had cracked in those vast reaches of space. But there had\n been an instant when he'd found Randall cowering in the rocket-room, in\n the grip of paralyzing hysteria, when he could cheerfully have wrung\n his neck!\n\n\n \"Certainly, Randall,\" he replied in a much more kindly tone. \"We'll\n need all hands now.\"", "\"Better break out those repair plates,\" Dennis said to Scotty. \"Tom,\n you get the welders ready. I've got a few entries to make in the log\n book, and then we'll decide on a party to explore the terrain and try\n to find out what happened to Koerber's ship. I must know,\" he said in a\n low voice, but with such passion that the others were startled.\n\n\n A figure appeared in the slanting doorway of the ship in time to hear\n the last words. It was George Randall, adjusting a bandaged forehead\n bumped during the crash landing.\n\n\n \"Captain ... I ... I wanted ...\" he paused unable to continue.\n\n\n \"You wanted what?\" Captain Brooke's voice was terse. \"Perhaps you\n wanted to explain why you weren't at your battle station?\"" ], [ "\"Thank you, sir!\" Randall seemed to hesitate for a moment, opened his\n mouth to speak further, but feeling the other's calculating gaze upon\n him, he whirled and re-entered the ship.\n\n\n \"But for him we wouldn't be here!\" Dallas exclaimed. \"Aagh!\" He shook\n his head in disgust until the several folds of flesh under his chin\n shook like gelatin. \"Cowards are hell!\" He spat.\n\n\n \"Easy, Dallas, Randall's a kid, give 'im a chance.\" Dennis observed.\n\n\n \"You Captain ... you're defending 'im? Why you had a greater stake in\n this than we, and he's spoiled it for you!\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" Dennis nodded. \"But I'm still keeping my senses clear. No feuds\n on my ship. Get it!\" The last two words cut like a scimitar.", "\"Sir, I wanted to know if ... if I might help Scotty with the welding\n job....\" That wasn't at all what he'd intended to say. But somehow the\n words had stuck in his throat and his face flushed deep scarlet. His\n candid blue eyes were suspiciously brilliant, and the white bandage\n with its crimson stains made an appealing, boyish figure. It softened\n the anger in Brooke's heart. Thinking it over calmly, Dennis realized\n this was the youngster's first trip into the outer orbits, and better\n men than he had cracked in those vast reaches of space. But there had\n been an instant when he'd found Randall cowering in the rocket-room, in\n the grip of paralyzing hysteria, when he could cheerfully have wrung\n his neck!\n\n\n \"Certainly, Randall,\" he replied in a much more kindly tone. \"We'll\n need all hands now.\"", "Dennis tried not to think of Marla, too great an ache was involved in\n thinking of her and all he had lost. When he finally spoke, his voice\n was harsh, laconic:\n\n\n \"Prepare to return!\"\n\n\n Scotty Byrnes, the cruiser's nurse, who could take his motors through a\n major battle, or hell and high water and back again, for that matter,\n shifted the Venusian weed that made a perpetual bulge on his cheek and\n gazed curiously at Captain Brooke. They all knew the story in various\n versions, and with special additions. But they were spacemen, implicit\n in their loyalty, and with Dennis Brooke they could and did feel safe.", "Dennis Brooke was thirty, the time when youth no longer seems unending.\n When the minor adventures of the heart begin to pall. If the loss of\n Marla left an aching void that all the women of five planets could not\n fill, the loss of Space, was quite as deadly. For he had been grounded.\n True, Koerber's escape from the I.S.P. net had not quite been his\n fault; but had he not been enjoying the joys of a voluptuous Jovian\n Chamber, in Venus' fabulous Inter-planetary Palace, he would have been\n ready for duty to complete the last link in the net of I.S.P. cruisers\n that almost surrounded the space pirate.", "\"Commander,\" Dennis said, and his rich baritone voice had depths of\n emotion so great that they startled Commander Bertram himself—and\n that grizzled veteran of the I.S.P., had at one time or another known\n every change of torture that could possibly be wrung on a human soul.\n \"Commander, give me one ...\none\nchance at that spawn of unthinkable\n begetting! Let me try, and I promise you ...\" in his torture, Dennis\n was unconsciously banging a knotted fist on the chaste, satiny surface\n of the priceless desk, \"I promise you that I will either bring you\n Koerber, or forfeit my life!\"\n\n\n Commander Bertram nodded his head. \"I brought you here for that\n purpose, son. We have reached a point in our war with Koerber, where\n the last stakes must be played ... and the last stake is death!\"", "Dennis Brooke's space-tanned features had gone pale. His large hazel\n eyes, fringed with auburn lashes, too long for a man, were bright slits\n that smouldered. He stood silent, his hands clenched at his sides,\n while something cold and sharp seemed to dig at his heart with cruel\n precision.\n\n\n \"Marla!\" He breathed at last. The thought of Marla in the power\n of Koerber sent a wave of anguish that seared through him like an\n atom-blast.", "George Randall breathed a sigh of relief. He watched them bridge the\n space to the drifting wreck, then saw them enter what had once been a\n proud interplanetary liner, now soon to be but drifting dust, and he\n turned away with a look of shame.\n\n\n Inside the liner, Captain Dennis Brooke had finished making a detailed\n survey.\n\n\n \"No doubt about it,\" he spoke through the radio in his helmet. \"Cargo\n missing. No survivors. No indication that the repulsion fields were\n out of order. And finally, those Genton shells could only have been\n fired by Koerber!\" He tried to maintain a calm exterior, but inwardly\n he seethed in a cold fury more deadly than any he had ever experienced.\n Somehow he had expected to find at least one compartment unharmed,\n where life might have endured, but now, all hope was gone. Only a great\n resolve to deal with Koerber once and for all remained to him.", "Dennis Brooke shrugged his shoulders, shoulders that would have put to\n shame the Athenian statues of another age. A faint, bitter smile curved\n his generous mouth. \"I'm grounded, Gillian, it'd take the capture of\n Koerber himself to set me right with the I.S.P. again—you don't know\n Bertram! To him an infraction of rules is a major crime. Damn Venus!\"\n He reached for his glass of\nVerbena\nbut the table had turned over\n during the struggle, and the glass was a shattered mass of gleaming\nBacca-glas\nshards. He laughed shortly as he became conscious of the\n venomous stare of the Mercurian Dancer, of the excited voices of the\n guests and the emphatic disapproval of the Venusian proprietor who\n was shocked at having a brawl in his ultra-expensive, ultra-exclusive\n Palace.", "\"Better come to Headquarters with me, Dennis,\" the lieutenant said\n gently. \"We'll say you captured him, and if he's Koerber's, the\n credit's yours. A trip to Terra's what you need, Venus for you is a\n hoodoo!\"\nThe stern, white haired I.S.P. Commander behind the immense Aluminil\n desk, frowned slightly as Dennis Brooke entered. He eyed the six foot\n four frame of the Captain before him with a mixture of feelings, as\n if uncertain how to begin. Finally, he sighed as if, having come to a\n decision, he were forcing himself to speak:", "\"Better break out those repair plates,\" Dennis said to Scotty. \"Tom,\n you get the welders ready. I've got a few entries to make in the log\n book, and then we'll decide on a party to explore the terrain and try\n to find out what happened to Koerber's ship. I must know,\" he said in a\n low voice, but with such passion that the others were startled.\n\n\n A figure appeared in the slanting doorway of the ship in time to hear\n the last words. It was George Randall, adjusting a bandaged forehead\n bumped during the crash landing.\n\n\n \"Captain ... I ... I wanted ...\" he paused unable to continue.\n\n\n \"You wanted what?\" Captain Brooke's voice was terse. \"Perhaps you\n wanted to explain why you weren't at your battle station?\"", "Tom Jeffery, the tall, angular and red-faced Navigator, whose slow,\n easygoing movements belied the feral persistence of a tiger, and the\n swiftness of a striking cobra in a fight, led the small procession of\n men toward the emergency planes. Behind him came Dallas Bernan, third\n lieutenant, looming like a young asteroid in his space suit, followed\n by Scotty, and finally Captain Brooke himself. All left in silence, as\n if the tragedy that had occurred aboard the wrecked liner, had touched\n them intimately.\nAboard the I.S.P. Cruiser, a surprise awaited them. It was young George\n Randall, whose excited face met them as soon as they had entered the\n airlocks and removed the space suits.", "Scotty Byrnes was already dashing to the engine room, where his beloved\n motors purred with an ascending hum. Aboard the I.S.P. Cruiser each\n member of the crew raced to his assigned task without delay. Action\n impended, and after days and nights of inertia, it was a blessed\n relief. Smiles appeared on haggard faces, and the banter of men\n suddenly galvanized by a powerful incentive was bandied back and forth.\n All but George Randall. Now that action was imminent. Something gripped\n his throat until he could hardly stand the tight collar of his I.S.P.\n uniform. A growing nausea gripped his bowels, and although he strove to\n keep calm, his hands trembled beyond control.", "But at last, when the enemy cruiser showed on the viso-screen,\n unmistakably for what it was—a pirate craft, it showed by its sudden\n maneuver that it had detected the I.S.P. cruiser. For it had described\n a parabola in space and headed for the dangerous asteroid belt. As if\n navigated by a masterly hand that knew each and every orbit of the\n asteroids, it plunged directly into the asteroid drift, hoping to lose\n the I.S.P. cruiser with such a maneuver. Ordinarily, it would have\n succeeded, no I.S.P. patrol ship would have dared to venture into such\n a trap without specific orders. But to Dennis Brooke, directing the\n chase from the control room, even certain death was welcome, if only he\n could take Koerber with him.", "It was then that Dennis Brooke saw the immense dark shadow looming\n immediately behind Koerber's ship. He saw the pirate cruiser zoom\n desperately in an effort to break the gravity trap of the looming mass,\n but too late. It struggled like a fly caught in a spider-web to no\n avail. It was then that Koerber played his last card. Sensing he was\n doomed, he tried to draw the I.S.P. Cruiser down with him. A powerful\n magnetic beam lashed out to spear the I.S.P. Cruiser.\nWith a wrenching turn that almost threw them out of control, Dennis\n maneuvered to avoid the beam. Again Koerber's beam lashed out, as he\n sank lower into the looming mass, and again Dennis anticipating the\n maneuver avoided it.\n\n\n \"George Randall!\" He shouted desperately into the speaker. \"Cut all\n jets in the rocket room! Hurry, man!\" He banked again and then zoomed\n out of the increasing gravity trap.", "\"Looks like your brawl has turned out to be a piece of fool's luck,\n Brooke!\" The Police Lieutenant favored Dennis with a wry smile. \"If\n I'm not mistaken this chap's a member of Bren Koerber's pirate crew.\n Who else could afford to risk his neck at the International, and have\n in his possession a disintegrator? Pity we have no complete records\n on that devil's crew! Anyway, we'll radio the I.S.P., perhaps they\n have details on this dandy!\" He eyed admiringly the priceless Martian\n embroideries on the unconscious Martian's tunic, the costly border of\n red, ocelandian fur, and the magnificent black\nacerine\non his finger.", "He reached over and flipped up the activator on a small telecast set\n on his desk; instantly the viso-screen lighted up. \"You'll now see\n a visual record of all we know about the passenger spacer that left\n Venus with passengers and cargo, as far as we could contact the vessel\n in space. This, Dennis,\" the Commander emphasized his words, \"is your\n chance to redeem yourself!\" He fell silent, while the viso-screen began\n to show a crowded space port on Venus, and a gigantic passenger spacer\n up-tilted in its cradle.\nThey watched the parabola it made in its trajectory as it flashed into\n space and then fell into orbit there beyond the planetary attraction of\n Venus. On the three-dimensional viso-screen it was uncannily real.", "Dennis sighed, he tilted his red, curly head and drank deeply of the\n insidious\nVerbena\n, fragrant as a mint garden, in the tall frosty\n glass of Martian\nBacca-glas\n, and as he did so, his brilliant hazel\n eyes found themselves gazing into the unwinking, violet stare of a\n young Martian at the next table. There was a smouldering hatred in\n those eyes, and something else ... envy, perhaps, or was it jealousy?\n Dennis couldn't tell. But his senses became instantly alert. Danger\n brought a faint vibration which his superbly trained faculties could\n instantly denote.", "\"But, you may as well know it,\" Scotty replied quietly. \"That parting\n shot of Koerber's severed our main rocket feed. I had to use the\n emergency tank to make it down here!\"\n\n\n For a long moment the four men looked at each other in silence. Dennis\n Brooke's face was still impassive but for the flaming hazel eyes. Tom\n tugged at the torn sleeve of his I.S.P. uniform, while Scotty gazed\n mournfully at the damaged ship. Dallas Bernan looked at the long,\n ragged line of cliffs.\n\n\n \"I think we got Koerber, though,\" he said at last. \"While Tom was doing\n a job of navigation, I had one last glimpse of him coming down fast\n and out of control somewhere behind those crags over there!\"\n\n\n \"To hell with Koerber!\" Tom Jeffery exploded. \"You mean we're stuck in\n this hellish rock-pile?\"", "\"Easy, Tom!\" Captain Brooke's tones were like ice. On his pale,\n impassive face, his eyes were like flaming topaz. \"Where's Randall?\"\n\n\n \"Probably hiding his head under a bunk!\" Dallas laughed with scorn. His\n contemptuous remark voiced the feelings of the entire crew. A man who\n failed to be at his battle-station in time of emergency, had no place\n in the I.S.P.\n\n\n \"Considering the gravity of this planetoid,\" Dennis Brooke said\n thoughtfully, \"it's going to take some blast to get us off!\"\n\n\n \"Maybe we can locate a deposit of anerioum or uranium or something for\n our atom-busters to chew on!\" Scotty said hopefully. He was an eternal\n optimist.", "\"Pretty much of a mess!\" Dennis Brooke's face was impassive as he\n turned to Scotty Byrnes. \"What's your opinion? Think we can patch her\n up, or are we stuck here indefinitely?\"\n\n\n Scotty eyed the damage. The atom-blast had penetrated the hull into\n the forward fuel chambers and the armor had blossomed out like flower\n petals. The crash-landing had not helped either.\n\n\n \"Well, there's a few beryloid plates in the storage locker, Captain,\n but,\" he scratched his head ruminatively and shifted his precious cud.\n\n\n \"But what? Speak up man!\" It was Tom Jeffery, his nerves on edge, his\n ordinarily gentle voice like a lash." ], [ "It was then that Dennis Brooke saw the immense dark shadow looming\n immediately behind Koerber's ship. He saw the pirate cruiser zoom\n desperately in an effort to break the gravity trap of the looming mass,\n but too late. It struggled like a fly caught in a spider-web to no\n avail. It was then that Koerber played his last card. Sensing he was\n doomed, he tried to draw the I.S.P. Cruiser down with him. A powerful\n magnetic beam lashed out to spear the I.S.P. Cruiser.\nWith a wrenching turn that almost threw them out of control, Dennis\n maneuvered to avoid the beam. Again Koerber's beam lashed out, as he\n sank lower into the looming mass, and again Dennis anticipating the\n maneuver avoided it.\n\n\n \"George Randall!\" He shouted desperately into the speaker. \"Cut all\n jets in the rocket room! Hurry, man!\" He banked again and then zoomed\n out of the increasing gravity trap.", "But at last, when the enemy cruiser showed on the viso-screen,\n unmistakably for what it was—a pirate craft, it showed by its sudden\n maneuver that it had detected the I.S.P. cruiser. For it had described\n a parabola in space and headed for the dangerous asteroid belt. As if\n navigated by a masterly hand that knew each and every orbit of the\n asteroids, it plunged directly into the asteroid drift, hoping to lose\n the I.S.P. cruiser with such a maneuver. Ordinarily, it would have\n succeeded, no I.S.P. patrol ship would have dared to venture into such\n a trap without specific orders. But to Dennis Brooke, directing the\n chase from the control room, even certain death was welcome, if only he\n could take Koerber with him.", "George Randall breathed a sigh of relief. He watched them bridge the\n space to the drifting wreck, then saw them enter what had once been a\n proud interplanetary liner, now soon to be but drifting dust, and he\n turned away with a look of shame.\n\n\n Inside the liner, Captain Dennis Brooke had finished making a detailed\n survey.\n\n\n \"No doubt about it,\" he spoke through the radio in his helmet. \"Cargo\n missing. No survivors. No indication that the repulsion fields were\n out of order. And finally, those Genton shells could only have been\n fired by Koerber!\" He tried to maintain a calm exterior, but inwardly\n he seethed in a cold fury more deadly than any he had ever experienced.\n Somehow he had expected to find at least one compartment unharmed,\n where life might have endured, but now, all hope was gone. Only a great\n resolve to deal with Koerber once and for all remained to him.", "Dennis Brooke's space-tanned features had gone pale. His large hazel\n eyes, fringed with auburn lashes, too long for a man, were bright slits\n that smouldered. He stood silent, his hands clenched at his sides,\n while something cold and sharp seemed to dig at his heart with cruel\n precision.\n\n\n \"Marla!\" He breathed at last. The thought of Marla in the power\n of Koerber sent a wave of anguish that seared through him like an\n atom-blast.", "And then began another type of battle. Hearing the Captain's orders to\n Randall, and noting that no result had been obtained, Scotty Byrnes\n himself cut the jets. The Magnetic Repulsion Plates went into action,\n too late to save them from being drawn, but at least they could prevent\n a crash. Far in the distance they could see Koerber's ship preceding\n them in a free fall, then the Planetoid was rushing up to engulf them.\nIII\n\n\n The atmosphere was somewhat tenuous, but it was breathable, provided\n a man didn't exert himself. To the silent crew of the I.S.P. Cruiser,\n the strange world to which Koerber's magnetic Beam had drawn them,\n was anything but reassuring. Towering crags jutted raggedly against\n the sky, and the iridescent soil of the narrow valley that walled in\n the cruiser, had a poisonous, deadly look. As far as their eyes could\n reach, the desolate, denuded vista stretched to the horizon.", "\"But, you may as well know it,\" Scotty replied quietly. \"That parting\n shot of Koerber's severed our main rocket feed. I had to use the\n emergency tank to make it down here!\"\n\n\n For a long moment the four men looked at each other in silence. Dennis\n Brooke's face was still impassive but for the flaming hazel eyes. Tom\n tugged at the torn sleeve of his I.S.P. uniform, while Scotty gazed\n mournfully at the damaged ship. Dallas Bernan looked at the long,\n ragged line of cliffs.\n\n\n \"I think we got Koerber, though,\" he said at last. \"While Tom was doing\n a job of navigation, I had one last glimpse of him coming down fast\n and out of control somewhere behind those crags over there!\"\n\n\n \"To hell with Koerber!\" Tom Jeffery exploded. \"You mean we're stuck in\n this hellish rock-pile?\"", "\"Commander,\" Dennis said, and his rich baritone voice had depths of\n emotion so great that they startled Commander Bertram himself—and\n that grizzled veteran of the I.S.P., had at one time or another known\n every change of torture that could possibly be wrung on a human soul.\n \"Commander, give me one ...\none\nchance at that spawn of unthinkable\n begetting! Let me try, and I promise you ...\" in his torture, Dennis\n was unconsciously banging a knotted fist on the chaste, satiny surface\n of the priceless desk, \"I promise you that I will either bring you\n Koerber, or forfeit my life!\"\n\n\n Commander Bertram nodded his head. \"I brought you here for that\n purpose, son. We have reached a point in our war with Koerber, where\n the last stakes must be played ... and the last stake is death!\"", "\"Randall! I've got to use the magnetic repulsion plates.... Cut all the\n jets!\" But there was no response. Randall's screen remained blank. Then\n Koerber's lashing magnetic beam touched and the I.S.P. ship was caught,\n forced to follow the pirate ship's plunge like the weight at the end of\n a whiplash. Koerber's gunners sent one parting shot, an atom-blast that\n shook the trapped cruiser like a leaf.\n\n\n Beneath them, growing larger by the second, a small world rushed up to\n meet them. The readings in the Planetograph seemed to have gone crazy.\n It showed diameter 1200 miles; composition mineral and radio-active.\n Gravity seven-eighths of Terra. It couldn't be! Unless perhaps this\n unknown planetoid was the legendary core of the world that at one time\n was supposed to have existed between Jupiter and Mars. Only that could\n possibly explain the incredible gravity.", "\"Better break out those repair plates,\" Dennis said to Scotty. \"Tom,\n you get the welders ready. I've got a few entries to make in the log\n book, and then we'll decide on a party to explore the terrain and try\n to find out what happened to Koerber's ship. I must know,\" he said in a\n low voice, but with such passion that the others were startled.\n\n\n A figure appeared in the slanting doorway of the ship in time to hear\n the last words. It was George Randall, adjusting a bandaged forehead\n bumped during the crash landing.\n\n\n \"Captain ... I ... I wanted ...\" he paused unable to continue.\n\n\n \"You wanted what?\" Captain Brooke's voice was terse. \"Perhaps you\n wanted to explain why you weren't at your battle station?\"", "\"Captain Brooke ... Captain, recordings are showing on the new 'Jet\n Analyzers' must be the trail of some spacer. Can't be far!\" He was\n fairly dancing in his excitement, as if the marvelous work of the\n new invention that detected the disturbance of atomic jets at great\n distance were his own achievement.\n\n\n Dennis Brooke smiled. His own heart was hammering, and inwardly he\n prayed that it were Koerber. It had to be! No interplanetary passenger\n spacer could possibly be out here at the intersection of angles Kp\n 39 degrees, 12 minutes, Fp 67 degrees of Ceres elliptic plane. None\n but a pirate crew with swift battle cruisers could dare! This was the\n dangerous asteroid belt, where even planetoids drifted in eccentric\n uncharted orbits.", "Weaving through the deadly belt for several hours, Dennis saw his\n quarry slow down. Instantly he seized the chance and ordered a salvo\n from starboard. Koerber's powerful spacer reeled, dived and came up\n spewing Genton-shells. The battle was on at last.\n\n\n From the banked atom-cannon of the I.S.P. Cruiser, a deadly curtain\n of atomic fire blazed at the pirate craft. A ragged rent back toward\n midship showed on Koerber's Cruiser which trembled as if it had been\n mortally wounded. Then Dennis maneuvered his cruiser into a power\n dive as a rain of Genton-shells swept the space lane above him, but as\n he came up, a lone shell struck. At such close range, super-armor was\n ripped, second armor penetrated and the magnificent vessel shook under\n the detonating impact.", "Tom Jeffery, the tall, angular and red-faced Navigator, whose slow,\n easygoing movements belied the feral persistence of a tiger, and the\n swiftness of a striking cobra in a fight, led the small procession of\n men toward the emergency planes. Behind him came Dallas Bernan, third\n lieutenant, looming like a young asteroid in his space suit, followed\n by Scotty, and finally Captain Brooke himself. All left in silence, as\n if the tragedy that had occurred aboard the wrecked liner, had touched\n them intimately.\nAboard the I.S.P. Cruiser, a surprise awaited them. It was young George\n Randall, whose excited face met them as soon as they had entered the\n airlocks and removed the space suits.", "\"Right now, if you wish. We have a new cruiser armored in beryloid with\n double hull—a new design against Genton shells, but it's the speed\n of the thing that you'll want to know about. It just about surpasses\n anything ever invented. Get the figures and data from the coordination\n room, son; it's serviced and fueled and the crew's aboard.\" He\n extended his hand. \"You're the best spacer we have—aside from your\n recklessness—and on your success depends far more than the capture of\n an outlaw.\" Bertram smiled thinly. \"Happy landing!\"\nII\n\n\n Their nerves were ragged. Days and days of fruitless search for a\n phantom ship that seemed to have vanished from space, and an equally\n elusive pirate whose whereabouts were hidden in the depths of\n fathomless space.", "A flight that had taken many hours to accomplish, was shortened on\n the viso-screen to a matter of minutes. They saw the great, proud\n interplanetary transport speeding majestically through the starry void,\n and suddenly, they saw her swerve in a great arc; again she swerved\n as if avoiding something deadly in space, and point upwards gaining\n altitude. It was zig-zagging now, desperately maneuvering in an erratic\n course, and as if by magic, a tiny spot appeared on the transport's\n side.\n\n\n Tiny on the viso-screen, the fatal spots must have been huge in\n actuality. To the Commander of the I.S.P., and to Captain Brooke, it\n was an old story. Atom-blasts were pitting the spacer's hull with\n deadly Genton shells. The great transport trembled under the impact of\n the barrage, and suddenly, the screen went blank.", "Dennis Brooke was thirty, the time when youth no longer seems unending.\n When the minor adventures of the heart begin to pall. If the loss of\n Marla left an aching void that all the women of five planets could not\n fill, the loss of Space, was quite as deadly. For he had been grounded.\n True, Koerber's escape from the I.S.P. net had not quite been his\n fault; but had he not been enjoying the joys of a voluptuous Jovian\n Chamber, in Venus' fabulous Inter-planetary Palace, he would have been\n ready for duty to complete the last link in the net of I.S.P. cruisers\n that almost surrounded the space pirate.", "And suddenly, out of the void, as they had all but given up the search\n as a wild goose chase, a speck was limned in the lighted surface of the\n viso-screen in the control room. Instantly the I.S.P. cruiser came to\n life. In a burst of magnificent speed, the cruiser literally devoured\n the space leagues, until the spacer became a flashing streak. On the\n viso-screen, the speck grew larger, took on contours, growing and\n becoming slowly the drifting shell of what had been a transport.\n\n\n Presently they were within reaching distance, and Captain Brooke\n commanded through the teleradio from the control room:\n\n\n \"Prepare to board!\"", "Commander Bertram turned slowly to face the young I.S.P. captain, whose\n features were a mask devoid of all expression now, save for the pallor\n and the burning fire in his eyes.\n\n\n \"And that's the sixth one in a month. Sometimes the survivors reach\n Terra in emergency spacers, or are picked up in space by other\n transports ... and sometimes son ... well, as you know, sometimes\n they're never seen again.\"\n\n\n \"When do I leave, Commander!\" Dennis Brooke's voice was like a javelin\n of ice.", "\"Better come to Headquarters with me, Dennis,\" the lieutenant said\n gently. \"We'll say you captured him, and if he's Koerber's, the\n credit's yours. A trip to Terra's what you need, Venus for you is a\n hoodoo!\"\nThe stern, white haired I.S.P. Commander behind the immense Aluminil\n desk, frowned slightly as Dennis Brooke entered. He eyed the six foot\n four frame of the Captain before him with a mixture of feelings, as\n if uncertain how to begin. Finally, he sighed as if, having come to a\n decision, he were forcing himself to speak:", "Dennis Brooke shrugged his shoulders, shoulders that would have put to\n shame the Athenian statues of another age. A faint, bitter smile curved\n his generous mouth. \"I'm grounded, Gillian, it'd take the capture of\n Koerber himself to set me right with the I.S.P. again—you don't know\n Bertram! To him an infraction of rules is a major crime. Damn Venus!\"\n He reached for his glass of\nVerbena\nbut the table had turned over\n during the struggle, and the glass was a shattered mass of gleaming\nBacca-glas\nshards. He laughed shortly as he became conscious of the\n venomous stare of the Mercurian Dancer, of the excited voices of the\n guests and the emphatic disapproval of the Venusian proprietor who\n was shocked at having a brawl in his ultra-expensive, ultra-exclusive\n Palace.", "In the compact, super-armored control room, Captain Brooke watched\n the telecast's viso-screen, with hungry eyes that were golden with\n anticipation. It seemed to him as if an eternity passed before at\n last, a black speck danced on the illuminated screen, until it finally\n reached the center of the viso-screen and remained there. It grew by\n leaps and bounds as the terrific speed of the cruiser minimized the\n distance long before the quarry was aware of pursuit." ] ]
valid	55815	[ "How were physical features of the actors and actresses treated in this story?", "Why was it easy for the main female characters to be supportive of each other?", "If Peggy does secure this role, what would likely happen?", "If Peggy doesn't secure this role, what would likely happen?", "What would you say is true when describing the group of the main female characters in this story?", "What was the narrative purpose of having Amy not audition for a role?", "Who would most likely enjoy this excerpt?", "Of the following options, which best summarizes this story?", "Which of the following was not an element of the audition process?" ]	[ [ "People were being kind, especially because there was a bit of flexibility in what the characters in the play could look like.", "People were only being supportive with each other (though not to a sugar-coating extent).", "People were being kind, but the looks of the characters had to be a certain way, so people were generally honest about looks.", "People were complimenting their friends and criticizing others." ], [ "They all know they're unlikely to be cast because Randy and Mal are trying hard to not play favorites.", "They all know there will be other opportunities in the future they're likely to secure if they miss out this time around.", "None of them are auditioning for the same role, which is usually a major source of competition.", "They've all been friends for a long time." ], [ "She would visit home in four months.", "She'd probably be happy for a short bit, but then stressed that it wouldn't be enough to prove herself to her parents.", "She wouldn't go home in four months.", "She would feel like she'd completely earned it without any favoritism." ], [ "She'd find another role quickly because she has good connections and networking skills.", "She'd try to secure a role within four months.", "A new role wouldn't be guaranteed, but she'd convince Randy to write her into a future play.", "She'd get the approval from her parents to stay for an extra year; they want the best for her and believe in her skills." ], [ "They're all competitive, caring, and beautiful", "They're all insecure, anxious, and stressed", "They're all tough, jaded, and beautiful", "They're all kind, non-competitive, and pretty" ], [ "It helped illustrate that she and Peggy are close with Randy and Mal, because she helped them during auditions.", "It helped illustrate that she doesn't want to compete with Peggy, because if she'd auditioned they'd go for the same role.", "It helped illustrate that she doesn't want to compete with Paula, because if she'd auditioned they'd go for the same role.", "It helped illustrate that she wants the play to succeed and that she thinks she needs to help with auditions in order for that to happen." ], [ "A grandmother who wants to relate with her granddaughter who's entering the theater industry", "Someone who likes theater and enjoys thinking about the audition process and seeing it play out", "A male actor trying to see what the audition process feels like to actresses during their auditions", "A young child who dreams to be an actress and primarily wants to hear success stories" ], [ "A woman auditions for her friend's play and gains perspective for what her future as an actress might be like.", "A woman auditions for her friend's play and makes friends and connections in the process.", "A woman auditions for her friend's play and wants to prove to her friend that he should write a role for her in the future.", "A woman auditions for her friend's play and has a lot of fun seeing the audition process." ], [ "People had to improvise in-character to show that they understood their mannerisms and how they'd act in certain situations", "People had to read for the role they chose if their physical appearance matched well with the character", "People had to initially select the specific role they were auditioning for", "People had to read through the entire script within a few days" ] ]	[ 3, 3, 3, 2, 4, 1, 2, 2, 1 ]	[ 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "It was at this point that Mal and Randy came in,\n with pleasant, if somewhat brisk, nods to the assembled\n actors and actresses, and a special smile for\n Amy and Peggy. In a businesslike manner, they settled\n themselves at a table near the windows, spread\n out scripts and pads and pencils, and prepared for\n the chore that faced them. Amy, who was there to\n help the boys by acting as secretary for the occasion,\n wished Peggy good luck, and joined the boys at the\n table. Her job was to take names and addresses, and\n to jot down any facts about each actor that Randy\n and Mal wanted to be sure to remember.", "Each actor, no matter how good or how bad, was\n treated with impersonal courtesy by Mal, and each\n left looking sure that the part was his. Peggy was\n glad that she would not have to see their faces when\n they learned that they had not been selected.\n\n\n “The pity of it,” she whispered to Randy, “isn’t\n that there are so many bad ones, but that there are\n so many good ones, and that only one can be selected\n for each role. I wish there were some way of telling\n the good ones you can’t take that they were really\n good, but that you just couldn’t take everyone!”\n\n\n “You can’t let yourself worry about that,” Randy\n replied. “The good ones know they’re good, and\n they’re not going to be discouraged by the loss of a\n role. And the bad ones think they’re good, too, and\n most of them have tremendous egos to protect\n them from ever finding out—or even thinking—otherwise!”", "This time, there were not so many applicants and\n Peggy remembered Randy telling her that this\n would be one of their most difficult roles to cast.\n Only four actresses came forward, and Mal, with\n difficulty, reviewed them all. Unable to eliminate by\n type, he gave them all scripts and asked them to\n come to the theater. Then he called for “character\n ingénues” and Peggy joined seven other girls in the\n “livestock show.”\n\n\n Mal reviewed them carefully, managing to look at\n Peggy with complete lack of recognition. He gently\n eliminated three of them on the basis of hair coloring,\n height or general type. Another, curiously\n enough, was eliminated, like Amy, for a Southern accent,\n and a fifth, also like Amy, was too beautiful.\n “The part calls for a pretty girl,” Mal said with a rare\n smile, “but not for a girl so pretty that she’ll dominate\n the stage! It was a pleasure to look at you, but I’m\n afraid you’re not quite right for the part.”", "“Oh, they won’t be doing readings today,” Peggy\n replied, glad to turn her attention from what was becoming\n a difficult subject for thought. “This is just a\n first cast call. All they want to do today is pick people\n for type. They’ll select all the possible ones, send\n the impossible ones away, and then go into elimination\n readings later.”\n\n3\n\n “But what if the people they pick for looks can’t\n act?” Amy asked. “And what if some of the rejects\n are wonderful actors?”\n\n\n “They won’t go back to the rejects,” Peggy explained,\n “because they both have a pretty good idea\n of what the characters in the play should look like.\n And if the people they pick aren’t good enough actors,\n then they hold another cast call and try again.\n Mal says that sometimes certain parts are so hard to\n cast that they have to go through a dozen calls just\n to find one actor.”", "“It seems kind of unfair, doesn’t it, to be eliminated\n just because you’re not the right physical\n type,” Amy said, “but I can understand it. They have\n to start somewhere, and I guess that’s as good a place\n as any.” Then she smiled and added, “I guess I’m\n just feeling sorry for myself, because Mal told me\n there was no sense in my trying out at all, because I\n didn’t look or sound right for any part in the play. If\n I don’t get rid of this Southern accent of mine, I\n may never get a part at all, except in a Tennessee\n Williams play!”\n\n\n Peggy nodded sympathetically. “But it wasn’t just\n your accent, Amy,” she said. “It’s your looks, too. At\n least for this play. Mal and Randy told you that\n you’re just too pretty for any of the parts that fit\n your age, and that’s nothing to feel bad about. If\n anybody ought to feel insulted, it’s me, because\n they asked me to try out!”", "Mal’s first concern in reviewing the actresses was,\n of course, for the leading role. And, of course, it was\n for this role that he had the most applicants. More\n than twenty girls came forward when the announcement\n was made, and Peggy thought that she had\n never seen so many striking and beautiful faces and\n figures. It was not going to be easy for Mal to make a\n choice. As Paula, her new friend, went forward to\n join the others, Peggy whispered a word of encouragement,\n then stood to one side to watch.", "“I don’t doubt that you could,” Mal said gently,\n “but if you did, the play would suffer. I’m afraid the\n comedian we need for this must be a large, rather\n bluff-looking person, like these three gentlemen\n whom I have chosen to hear. The part calls for it.\n I’m sorry.”\n\n\n Mr. Lang nodded sadly, mumbled, “I understand,”\n and walked off, his head hanging and his\n hands thrust deep in his pockets, looking less like a\n comedian than any man in the world. Peggy\n watched him go, not knowing whether to feel sorrier\n for him or for Mal.", "On the stage, a “businessman type” was reading\n his lines. Peggy knew, after the first few words, that\n he would not do. He had somehow completely\n missed the character of the man he was portraying,\n and was heavily overplaying. Mal, being perhaps\n more patient than Peggy, listened and watched\n with great care. Amy, who was acting as Mal’s assistant\n for the production, sat in a chair by the proscenium,\n reading her script by the light of a small\n lamp and feeding the actor cue lines. Mal followed\n the whole sequence with no visible sign of impatience\n and, when the actor was through, said,\n “Thank you. We’ll let you know our decision in a day\n or two.”\n\n13", "4\n\n “Oh, they were just sweet-talking me,” Amy replied.\n “And as for you, you know you don’t have to\n worry about your looks. You have a wonderful face!\n You can look beautiful, or comic, or pathetic, or\n cute or anything. I’m stuck with just being a South’n\n Belle, blond and helpless, po’ li’l ol’ me, lookin’ sad\n and sweet through those ol’ magnolia blossoms!”\n She broadened her slight, soft accent until it sounded\n like something you could spread on hot cornbread,\n and both girls broke into laughter that sounded odd\n in the strained atmosphere of the bare rehearsal\n studio.", "Four men separated themselves from the crowd\n and approached the table. Peggy watched with interest\n as Mal and Randy looked them over, murmured\n to Amy to take notes, and asked questions.\n After a few minutes, the men left, two of them looking\n happy, two resigned. Then Mal stood and called\n for leading man types, late twenties or early thirties,\n tall and athletic. As six tall, athletic, handsome\n young men came forward, Peggy felt that she just\n couldn’t stand watching the casting interviews any\n longer. It reminded her too much of the livestock\n shows she had attended as a youngster in her home\n town of Rockport, Wisconsin. Necessary though it\n was, she felt it was hardly a way to have to deal\n with human beings.\n\n\n Slipping back through the crowd of waiting actors,\n she joined the actresses in the rear of the room, and\n found an empty seat next to a young girl.\n\n\n “Hi,” she said. “What’s the matter, can’t you watch\n it either?”", "The same process was then followed for the leading\n men, and the same wide range of talent and understanding\n of the part was displayed. Some seemed\n to have no idea at all about the play or its meaning,\n and Peggy was sure that these men had read only\n the parts marked for them. Others had a clear understanding\n of the kind of character they were playing,\n and tried to create him in the brief time they had on\n stage. Others still were actors who had one rather\n inflexible way of playing, and used it for all kinds of\n parts. Their performances were uniform imitations of\n each other, and all were imitations of the early acting\n style of Marlon Brando. They seemed to forget,\n Peggy thought, that Brando’s style developed\n from the roles he had to play, and that as he got\n other roles, he showed other facets of a rounded talent.\n It made her angry that some actors thought\n they could get ahead in a creative field by being\n imitative.\n\n14", "“I think you do have a chance,” Peggy said. “In\n fact, if you can act, I bet you’ll get the part. I’ve read\n the play, and I know the author and director, and\n unless I’m way off, you look just the way the lead\n should look. In fact, it’s almost uncanny. You look as\n if you just walked out of the script!”\n\n\n “Oh, I hope you’re right!” Paula said with animation.\n “And I hope you get a part, too. I have a feeling\n that you’re going to bring me good luck!”\n\n\n “The one who needs luck is me, I’m afraid,” Peggy\n said. “Being friendly with Randy and Mal isn’t going\n to help me in the least, and I’m going to have to be\n awfully good to get the part. And it’s really important\n to me, too, because I’m getting near the end of\n my trial year.”", "“All right, gentlemen,” Mal called out. “That takes\n care of the male roles. All of you who are left will be\n given copies of the play to study, marked at the passages\n I want to hear. Be sure to read the whole play\n carefully, so that you understand the workings of the\n characters you have been selected to read. You have\n three days to look it over. We’ll meet at ten o’clock\n on Saturday morning at the Penthouse Theater to\n hear you. Thank you. And now for the ladies.”\n\n9\n\n The men left, after being given their scripts, and\n though they chatted amiably with one another,\n Peggy was sure that each was casting rather hostile\n looks toward others who were trying for the same\n parts. Keeping friendships in the theater was not an\n easy thing, she thought, particularly for people of\n similar physical types!", "The next “businessman type” was better, but still\n not quite on target, Peggy thought. He seemed to be\n playing the part for laughs, and although there were\n some comic values to be extracted from the role, it\n was really far more a straight dramatic character.\n Still, he was clearly a better actor than the first,\n and with direction might do well.\n\n\n Following his reading, Mal again repeated his\n polite, invariable formula, “Thank you. We’ll let you\n know our decision in a day or two,” and called for\n the next reading.\n\n\n Peggy watched the remaining actors try for the\n role, and made mental notes of which ones were possible,\n which probable, and which stood no chance at\n all.", "“My parents are very practical people,” Peggy said\n with a smile, “and they made sure that I learned\n routine office skills before they would let me think\n about other and more glamorous kinds of careers.\n Daddy owns the newspaper in our small town in\n Wisconsin, and I’ve worked with him as a typist and\n a reporter of sorts and as a proofreader, too. I’ll always\n be grateful that he made me learn all those\n things. I don’t think he has much faith in the acting\n business, but he’s been wonderful about giving me a\n chance. What do your parents think of your wanting\n to be an actress?”\n\n\n Instead of answering, Paula suddenly stood up.\n “Let’s go see how they’re coming with the actors,” she\n said. “I think they’re almost finished.”\n\n8", "But despite this knowledge, she could not help\n looking ahead—all the way ahead—to the restless\n stir of the opening-night audience out front, the last-minute\n preparations backstage, the bright, hot lights\n and the smell of make-up and scenery paint as she\n waited to go on in Act One, Scene One of\nCome\n Closer\n, Randy Brewster’s brilliant new play in which\n Peggy Lane would be discovered!\n\n12\nII\n\n The Hopefuls\nThe audience consisted of a handful of actors and\n actresses, and Randy Brewster and Mallory Seton.\n The stage lighting was a cold splash produced by two\n floodlights without color gels to soften them. The\n scenery was the brick back wall of the stage, two\n ladders, a table and two straight-backed chairs. Only\n the front row of house lights was on, and the back of\n the theater was dark, empty and gloomy, a shadowy\n wasteland of empty rows of seats like tombstones.", "Not wanting to press Paula further, and feeling\n that perhaps she had asked too personal a question\n on such short acquaintance, Peggy reluctantly stood\n too, and joined Paula to watch the last of what she\n now could only think of as the livestock show.\n\n\n As she drew closer to the table, she heard Mal saying,\n “I’m really sorry, Mr. Lang, but you’re just not\n the right type for the role. Perhaps some other....”\n and his voice trailed off in embarrassment.\n\n\n Lang, a short, thin, unhappy young man, answered\n almost tearfully, “But, Mr. Seton, looks aren’t everything.\n I’m really a funny comedian. Honestly! If you\n would only give me a chance to read for you, I know\n that I could make you change your mind about the\n way this character should look!”", "“... so, you see,” Peggy concluded, “we were\n each explaining how good the others were and how\n bad we were, and when Randy started telling us how\n bad he had been as a writer, we just couldn’t stand\n it!”\n\n\n It was Mal who got them back to sane ground.\n With his tough face, like a movie gangster’s or private\n detective’s, and his gentle, cultured English voice and\n assured manner, he calmly gave his opinion of the\n afternoon’s auditions.", "Mal started the proceedings by introducing himself\n and Randy. Then, estimating the crowd, he said,\n “Since there are fewer men here, and also fewer male\n roles to cast, we’re going to do them first. I hope that\n you ladies won’t mind. We won’t keep you waiting\n long, but if we worked with you first, we’d have these\n gentlemen waiting most of the day. Shall we get\n started?” After a brief glance at his notes, he called\n out, “First, I’d like to see businessman types, young\n forties. How many have we?”\n\n5", "“I think it’s wonderful! I hope more than ever that\n I get the part! Do you really think I have a chance?”\n\n\n Greta nodded decisively. “If you can act, you’re\n made for it,” she said.\n\n\n “That’s just what Peggy said!”\n\n\n Peggy stole a glance through the doors to the theater.\n “I think we’re about ready to find out whether or\n not you can act,” she said. “They seem to be about\n through with the actors, and that means you’re on\n next!”\n\n\n Wishing each other good luck, they entered the\n darkened part of the house and prepared for what\n Peggy could only think of as their ordeal.\nAfterward, as Peggy, Amy, Paula, and Greta sat at\n a table in a nearby coffeehouse waiting for Mal and\n Randy to join them, each was sure that she had been\n terrible." ], [ "“Oh, I’m just beginning,” Peggy said. “I’m still\n studying at the New York Dramatic Academy. I hope\n I can get some kind of supporting role in this play,\n but I don’t think I’m ready for anything big yet. By\n the way, my name is Peggy Lane. What’s yours?”\n\n6\n\n “I’m Paula Andrews,” the girl answered, “and\n maybe I’m shooting too high, but I’m trying out for\n the female lead. I hope I have a chance for it.”\n\n\n Peggy looked carefully at her new friend, at the\n somewhat uncertain smile that played about her\n well-formed, generous mouth and the intelligence\n that shone from her large, widely placed green eyes.\n Her rather long face was saved from severity by a\n soft halo of red-brown hair, the whole effect being an\n appealing combination of strength and feminine softness.", "4\n\n “Oh, they were just sweet-talking me,” Amy replied.\n “And as for you, you know you don’t have to\n worry about your looks. You have a wonderful face!\n You can look beautiful, or comic, or pathetic, or\n cute or anything. I’m stuck with just being a South’n\n Belle, blond and helpless, po’ li’l ol’ me, lookin’ sad\n and sweet through those ol’ magnolia blossoms!”\n She broadened her slight, soft accent until it sounded\n like something you could spread on hot cornbread,\n and both girls broke into laughter that sounded odd\n in the strained atmosphere of the bare rehearsal\n studio.", "Only when Amy started to laugh did the three\n others realize how much alike they had sounded.\n Then they joined in the laughter and couldn’t seem\n to stop. When they seemed at the point of dissolving\n helplessly into a permanent attack of the giggles,\n Randy and Mal joined them.\n\n\n “If you’re laughing at the play,” Randy said\n gloomily, “I can hardly blame you. You never know\n just how badly you’ve written until someone gets up\n and starts to read your lines.”\n\n\n All at the same time, the girls started to reassure\n him and tell him how good the play was, and how\n badly the actors, including themselves, had handled\n the lines, but this was so much like their last exchange\n of conversation that once more they broke up\n in helpless laughter.\n\n\n When they got their breath back, and when coffee\n and pastry had been ordered, they tried to explain\n the cause of their hilarity to the boys.", "“Yes. There are about a dozen of us, more or less.\n We live in a place called the Gramercy Arms—a\n wonderful place—and we live like one big noisy family.\n The Arms is run just for young actresses, so we\n all have a lot in common. I haven’t seen Greta for\n weeks—she’s been out of town with a play—and I’m\n just getting over being stunned at seeing her now.”\n\n\n “Peggy tactfully neglected to mention that the\n play flopped,” Greta laughed, “and now I’m back in\n town without a job. In fact, that’s why I’m here.”\n\n\n “You mean you’re going to read for Mal?” Peggy\n asked excitedly.", "Mal’s first concern in reviewing the actresses was,\n of course, for the leading role. And, of course, it was\n for this role that he had the most applicants. More\n than twenty girls came forward when the announcement\n was made, and Peggy thought that she had\n never seen so many striking and beautiful faces and\n figures. It was not going to be easy for Mal to make a\n choice. As Paula, her new friend, went forward to\n join the others, Peggy whispered a word of encouragement,\n then stood to one side to watch.", "“All right, gentlemen,” Mal called out. “That takes\n care of the male roles. All of you who are left will be\n given copies of the play to study, marked at the passages\n I want to hear. Be sure to read the whole play\n carefully, so that you understand the workings of the\n characters you have been selected to read. You have\n three days to look it over. We’ll meet at ten o’clock\n on Saturday morning at the Penthouse Theater to\n hear you. Thank you. And now for the ladies.”\n\n9\n\n The men left, after being given their scripts, and\n though they chatted amiably with one another,\n Peggy was sure that each was casting rather hostile\n looks toward others who were trying for the same\n parts. Keeping friendships in the theater was not an\n easy thing, she thought, particularly for people of\n similar physical types!", "It was at this point that Mal and Randy came in,\n with pleasant, if somewhat brisk, nods to the assembled\n actors and actresses, and a special smile for\n Amy and Peggy. In a businesslike manner, they settled\n themselves at a table near the windows, spread\n out scripts and pads and pencils, and prepared for\n the chore that faced them. Amy, who was there to\n help the boys by acting as secretary for the occasion,\n wished Peggy good luck, and joined the boys at the\n table. Her job was to take names and addresses, and\n to jot down any facts about each actor that Randy\n and Mal wanted to be sure to remember.", "Peggy’s friend and housemate, Amy Preston,\n smiled in agreement and said, “It’s not an easy business,\n honey, is it? But the ones I feel sorriest for\n right now are Mal and Randy. After all, they have\n the unpleasant job of choosing and refusing, and a\n lot of these folks are their friends. I wouldn’t want\n to be in their shoes.”\n\n2", "This time, there were not so many applicants and\n Peggy remembered Randy telling her that this\n would be one of their most difficult roles to cast.\n Only four actresses came forward, and Mal, with\n difficulty, reviewed them all. Unable to eliminate by\n type, he gave them all scripts and asked them to\n come to the theater. Then he called for “character\n ingénues” and Peggy joined seven other girls in the\n “livestock show.”\n\n\n Mal reviewed them carefully, managing to look at\n Peggy with complete lack of recognition. He gently\n eliminated three of them on the basis of hair coloring,\n height or general type. Another, curiously\n enough, was eliminated, like Amy, for a Southern accent,\n and a fifth, also like Amy, was too beautiful.\n “The part calls for a pretty girl,” Mal said with a rare\n smile, “but not for a girl so pretty that she’ll dominate\n the stage! It was a pleasure to look at you, but I’m\n afraid you’re not quite right for the part.”", "“... so, you see,” Peggy concluded, “we were\n each explaining how good the others were and how\n bad we were, and when Randy started telling us how\n bad he had been as a writer, we just couldn’t stand\n it!”\n\n\n It was Mal who got them back to sane ground.\n With his tough face, like a movie gangster’s or private\n detective’s, and his gentle, cultured English voice and\n assured manner, he calmly gave his opinion of the\n afternoon’s auditions.", "When he was done, Peggy and two others were\n given scripts and told to come to the theater on Saturday.\n Feeling lightheaded and giddy, Peggy settled\n herself on one of the folding chairs that lined\n the back wall, and waited for Mal, Randy, and Amy\n to finish so she could join them for coffee.\n\n11\n\n Scarcely noticing the rest of the proceedings, she\n thought only about the coming readings. She was\n so familiar with the play that she knew she had an\n advantage, perhaps unfairly, over the other two girls.\n She had watched the script grow from its first rough\n draft to the finished text now in her hands, and had\n discussed it with Randy through each revision. She\n knew she could play the part; in fact, she suspected\n secretly that Randy had written it for her, and the\n thought made her blush. Still, it would not be easy,\n she knew. Mal’s sense of fairness and his absolute\n devotion to the play above everything else would\n keep him from making up his mind in advance.", "Four men separated themselves from the crowd\n and approached the table. Peggy watched with interest\n as Mal and Randy looked them over, murmured\n to Amy to take notes, and asked questions.\n After a few minutes, the men left, two of them looking\n happy, two resigned. Then Mal stood and called\n for leading man types, late twenties or early thirties,\n tall and athletic. As six tall, athletic, handsome\n young men came forward, Peggy felt that she just\n couldn’t stand watching the casting interviews any\n longer. It reminded her too much of the livestock\n shows she had attended as a youngster in her home\n town of Rockport, Wisconsin. Necessary though it\n was, she felt it was hardly a way to have to deal\n with human beings.\n\n\n Slipping back through the crowd of waiting actors,\n she joined the actresses in the rear of the room, and\n found an empty seat next to a young girl.\n\n\n “Hi,” she said. “What’s the matter, can’t you watch\n it either?”", "As she went up the aisle as unobtrusively as possible,\n Peggy glanced at the actresses who had just\n come in. She recognized a few of their faces from\n the casting call of three days ago, but did not see her\n new friend among them. She decided to go out to the\n lobby to wait for her there. A new group of girls\n entered the theater as Peggy was leaving and, as she\n passed, one reached out and grabbed her arm.\n\n\n Peggy turned in surprise to find herself greeted\n with a broad grin and a quick companionable kiss.\n\n\n “Greta!” she cried. “What are you doing here?”\n\n\n “Come on out to the lobby, and I’ll tell you,” Greta\n Larsen said, with a toss of her head that made her\n thick blond braid spin around and settle over her\n shoulder.", "“I think you do have a chance,” Peggy said. “In\n fact, if you can act, I bet you’ll get the part. I’ve read\n the play, and I know the author and director, and\n unless I’m way off, you look just the way the lead\n should look. In fact, it’s almost uncanny. You look as\n if you just walked out of the script!”\n\n\n “Oh, I hope you’re right!” Paula said with animation.\n “And I hope you get a part, too. I have a feeling\n that you’re going to bring me good luck!”\n\n\n “The one who needs luck is me, I’m afraid,” Peggy\n said. “Being friendly with Randy and Mal isn’t going\n to help me in the least, and I’m going to have to be\n awfully good to get the part. And it’s really important\n to me, too, because I’m getting near the end of\n my trial year.”", "Peggy nodded thoughtfully, and reflected that it\n must, indeed, be more wearing on the boys. Mallory\n Seton, director of the new play, had been an upper-class\n student at the Academy when Peggy had\n started there, and he was a good friend of hers. She\n had worked with him before, as a general assistant,\n when they had discovered a theater. It would not be\n easy for him to consider Peggy for an acting role, and\n to do so completely without bias. It would not be a\n question of playing favorites, Peggy knew, but quite\n the reverse. Mal’s sense of fair play would make him\n bend over backward to keep from giving favors to\n his friends. If she was to get a role in this new production,\n she would really have to work for it.", "“I think it’s wonderful! I hope more than ever that\n I get the part! Do you really think I have a chance?”\n\n\n Greta nodded decisively. “If you can act, you’re\n made for it,” she said.\n\n\n “That’s just what Peggy said!”\n\n\n Peggy stole a glance through the doors to the theater.\n “I think we’re about ready to find out whether or\n not you can act,” she said. “They seem to be about\n through with the actors, and that means you’re on\n next!”\n\n\n Wishing each other good luck, they entered the\n darkened part of the house and prepared for what\n Peggy could only think of as their ordeal.\nAfterward, as Peggy, Amy, Paula, and Greta sat at\n a table in a nearby coffeehouse waiting for Mal and\n Randy to join them, each was sure that she had been\n terrible.", "And if it was difficult for Mal, she thought, it was\n more so for Randy Brewster, the author of the play,\n for her friendship with him was of a different sort\n than with Mal. Mal was just a friend—a good one,\n to be sure—but with Randy Brewster, somehow,\n things were different. There was nothing “serious,”\n she assured herself, but they had gone on dates together\n with a regularity that was a little more than\n casual and, whatever his feelings were for her, she\n was sure that they were more complicated than\n Mal’s.\n\n\n “Do you think they’ll ever get through all these\n people?” Amy asked, interrupting her thoughts.\n “How can they hope to hear so many actors read for\n them in just one afternoon?”", "The girl smiled in understanding. “It always upsets\n me,” she replied, “but it’s something we simply\n have to learn to live with. At least until we get well-known,\n or get agents to do this sort of thing for us.”\n\n\n “It sounds as if you’ve been in a few of these before,”\n Peggy said.\n\n\n “I have. But not here in the East,” the girl replied.\n “I’m from California, and I’ve been in a few little-theater\n things there, but nobody seems to pay much\n attention to them. I heard that off-Broadway theater\n in New York attracts a lot of critics, and I thought\n that I’d do better here. Have you had any luck?”", "Mal went down the line, regretfully dismissing one\n after the other of the girls, and occasionally asking\n one to step aside to try for another role. His tough-looking\n expression hardly varied as he spoke to each\n one, but Peggy thought she saw the ghost of a smile\n cross his face when he spoke to Paula Andrews. Another\n review of the remaining girls eliminated a few\n more. Finally, there were only four left, Paula\n among them. Mal thanked them, distributed scripts,\n and asked them to be at the Penthouse Theater on\n Saturday at noon.\n\n\n Paula returned to Peggy with eyes shining. “Oh,\n Peggy! I think you were right! I just know I’m going\n to get the part! I know it!”\n\n10", "The door at the back of the theater opened quietly,\n and Peggy, turning around in her seat, saw a few of\n the actresses entering. They quietly found seats in\n the rear and settled down to await their turn.\n\n\n “I think I’ll go back there with the girls,” Peggy\n whispered. “I’m looking for a girl I met at the casting\n call, and I’d like to chat with her for a few minutes\n when she comes. Do you mind if I don’t look at all\n this?”\n\n\n Randy grinned. “Go ahead. I’d get out of here,\n too, if I could without getting Mal mad at me. This\n kind of thing always breaks my heart, too!”\n\n15" ], [ "“I think you do have a chance,” Peggy said. “In\n fact, if you can act, I bet you’ll get the part. I’ve read\n the play, and I know the author and director, and\n unless I’m way off, you look just the way the lead\n should look. In fact, it’s almost uncanny. You look as\n if you just walked out of the script!”\n\n\n “Oh, I hope you’re right!” Paula said with animation.\n “And I hope you get a part, too. I have a feeling\n that you’re going to bring me good luck!”\n\n\n “The one who needs luck is me, I’m afraid,” Peggy\n said. “Being friendly with Randy and Mal isn’t going\n to help me in the least, and I’m going to have to be\n awfully good to get the part. And it’s really important\n to me, too, because I’m getting near the end of\n my trial year.”", "PEGGY PLAYS OFF-BROADWAY\nI\n\n Cast Call\n“First casting calls are so difficult,” Peggy Lane\n said, looking ruefully at the fifty or more actresses\n and actors who milled about nervously, chatting with\n one another, or sat on the few folding chairs trying\n to read.\n\n\n “With only nine roles to be filled,” she continued,\n “it doesn’t matter how good these people are; most\n of them just haven’t got a chance. I can’t help feeling\n sorry for them—for all of us, I mean. After all, I’m\n trying for a part, too.”", "“Don’t count too much on it,” Peggy cautioned,\n “or you may be too bitterly disappointed if you don’t\n get it. But,” she added, enthusiastically violating her\n own rule of caution, “I’m sure, too! I’ll see you Saturday.\n Even if I don’t get a script, I’ll be there just to\n hear you read!”\n\n\n Then, with a smile of farewell, Peggy turned her\n attention to the “career woman, early thirties” classification\n that Mal had called for next. Once that\n was out of the way, she knew it would be her turn.", "Mal went down the line, regretfully dismissing one\n after the other of the girls, and occasionally asking\n one to step aside to try for another role. His tough-looking\n expression hardly varied as he spoke to each\n one, but Peggy thought she saw the ghost of a smile\n cross his face when he spoke to Paula Andrews. Another\n review of the remaining girls eliminated a few\n more. Finally, there were only four left, Paula\n among them. Mal thanked them, distributed scripts,\n and asked them to be at the Penthouse Theater on\n Saturday at noon.\n\n\n Paula returned to Peggy with eyes shining. “Oh,\n Peggy! I think you were right! I just know I’m going\n to get the part! I know it!”\n\n10", "When he was done, Peggy and two others were\n given scripts and told to come to the theater on Saturday.\n Feeling lightheaded and giddy, Peggy settled\n herself on one of the folding chairs that lined\n the back wall, and waited for Mal, Randy, and Amy\n to finish so she could join them for coffee.\n\n11\n\n Scarcely noticing the rest of the proceedings, she\n thought only about the coming readings. She was\n so familiar with the play that she knew she had an\n advantage, perhaps unfairly, over the other two girls.\n She had watched the script grow from its first rough\n draft to the finished text now in her hands, and had\n discussed it with Randy through each revision. She\n knew she could play the part; in fact, she suspected\n secretly that Randy had written it for her, and the\n thought made her blush. Still, it would not be easy,\n she knew. Mal’s sense of fairness and his absolute\n devotion to the play above everything else would\n keep him from making up his mind in advance.", "Peggy nodded thoughtfully, and reflected that it\n must, indeed, be more wearing on the boys. Mallory\n Seton, director of the new play, had been an upper-class\n student at the Academy when Peggy had\n started there, and he was a good friend of hers. She\n had worked with him before, as a general assistant,\n when they had discovered a theater. It would not be\n easy for him to consider Peggy for an acting role, and\n to do so completely without bias. It would not be a\n question of playing favorites, Peggy knew, but quite\n the reverse. Mal’s sense of fair play would make him\n bend over backward to keep from giving favors to\n his friends. If she was to get a role in this new production,\n she would really have to work for it.", "“I think it’s wonderful! I hope more than ever that\n I get the part! Do you really think I have a chance?”\n\n\n Greta nodded decisively. “If you can act, you’re\n made for it,” she said.\n\n\n “That’s just what Peggy said!”\n\n\n Peggy stole a glance through the doors to the theater.\n “I think we’re about ready to find out whether or\n not you can act,” she said. “They seem to be about\n through with the actors, and that means you’re on\n next!”\n\n\n Wishing each other good luck, they entered the\n darkened part of the house and prepared for what\n Peggy could only think of as their ordeal.\nAfterward, as Peggy, Amy, Paula, and Greta sat at\n a table in a nearby coffeehouse waiting for Mal and\n Randy to join them, each was sure that she had been\n terrible.", "The girl smiled in understanding. “It always upsets\n me,” she replied, “but it’s something we simply\n have to learn to live with. At least until we get well-known,\n or get agents to do this sort of thing for us.”\n\n\n “It sounds as if you’ve been in a few of these before,”\n Peggy said.\n\n\n “I have. But not here in the East,” the girl replied.\n “I’m from California, and I’ve been in a few little-theater\n things there, but nobody seems to pay much\n attention to them. I heard that off-Broadway theater\n in New York attracts a lot of critics, and I thought\n that I’d do better here. Have you had any luck?”", "This time, there were not so many applicants and\n Peggy remembered Randy telling her that this\n would be one of their most difficult roles to cast.\n Only four actresses came forward, and Mal, with\n difficulty, reviewed them all. Unable to eliminate by\n type, he gave them all scripts and asked them to\n come to the theater. Then he called for “character\n ingénues” and Peggy joined seven other girls in the\n “livestock show.”\n\n\n Mal reviewed them carefully, managing to look at\n Peggy with complete lack of recognition. He gently\n eliminated three of them on the basis of hair coloring,\n height or general type. Another, curiously\n enough, was eliminated, like Amy, for a Southern accent,\n and a fifth, also like Amy, was too beautiful.\n “The part calls for a pretty girl,” Mal said with a rare\n smile, “but not for a girl so pretty that she’ll dominate\n the stage! It was a pleasure to look at you, but I’m\n afraid you’re not quite right for the part.”", "The next “businessman type” was better, but still\n not quite on target, Peggy thought. He seemed to be\n playing the part for laughs, and although there were\n some comic values to be extracted from the role, it\n was really far more a straight dramatic character.\n Still, he was clearly a better actor than the first,\n and with direction might do well.\n\n\n Following his reading, Mal again repeated his\n polite, invariable formula, “Thank you. We’ll let you\n know our decision in a day or two,” and called for\n the next reading.\n\n\n Peggy watched the remaining actors try for the\n role, and made mental notes of which ones were possible,\n which probable, and which stood no chance at\n all.", "Mal’s first concern in reviewing the actresses was,\n of course, for the leading role. And, of course, it was\n for this role that he had the most applicants. More\n than twenty girls came forward when the announcement\n was made, and Peggy thought that she had\n never seen so many striking and beautiful faces and\n figures. It was not going to be easy for Mal to make a\n choice. As Paula, her new friend, went forward to\n join the others, Peggy whispered a word of encouragement,\n then stood to one side to watch.", "On the stage, a “businessman type” was reading\n his lines. Peggy knew, after the first few words, that\n he would not do. He had somehow completely\n missed the character of the man he was portraying,\n and was heavily overplaying. Mal, being perhaps\n more patient than Peggy, listened and watched\n with great care. Amy, who was acting as Mal’s assistant\n for the production, sat in a chair by the proscenium,\n reading her script by the light of a small\n lamp and feeding the actor cue lines. Mal followed\n the whole sequence with no visible sign of impatience\n and, when the actor was through, said,\n “Thank you. We’ll let you know our decision in a day\n or two.”\n\n13", "“My parents are very practical people,” Peggy said\n with a smile, “and they made sure that I learned\n routine office skills before they would let me think\n about other and more glamorous kinds of careers.\n Daddy owns the newspaper in our small town in\n Wisconsin, and I’ve worked with him as a typist and\n a reporter of sorts and as a proofreader, too. I’ll always\n be grateful that he made me learn all those\n things. I don’t think he has much faith in the acting\n business, but he’s been wonderful about giving me a\n chance. What do your parents think of your wanting\n to be an actress?”\n\n\n Instead of answering, Paula suddenly stood up.\n “Let’s go see how they’re coming with the actors,” she\n said. “I think they’re almost finished.”\n\n8", "“All right, gentlemen,” Mal called out. “That takes\n care of the male roles. All of you who are left will be\n given copies of the play to study, marked at the passages\n I want to hear. Be sure to read the whole play\n carefully, so that you understand the workings of the\n characters you have been selected to read. You have\n three days to look it over. We’ll meet at ten o’clock\n on Saturday morning at the Penthouse Theater to\n hear you. Thank you. And now for the ladies.”\n\n9\n\n The men left, after being given their scripts, and\n though they chatted amiably with one another,\n Peggy was sure that each was casting rather hostile\n looks toward others who were trying for the same\n parts. Keeping friendships in the theater was not an\n easy thing, she thought, particularly for people of\n similar physical types!", "“Oh, I’m just beginning,” Peggy said. “I’m still\n studying at the New York Dramatic Academy. I hope\n I can get some kind of supporting role in this play,\n but I don’t think I’m ready for anything big yet. By\n the way, my name is Peggy Lane. What’s yours?”\n\n6\n\n “I’m Paula Andrews,” the girl answered, “and\n maybe I’m shooting too high, but I’m trying out for\n the female lead. I hope I have a chance for it.”\n\n\n Peggy looked carefully at her new friend, at the\n somewhat uncertain smile that played about her\n well-formed, generous mouth and the intelligence\n that shone from her large, widely placed green eyes.\n Her rather long face was saved from severity by a\n soft halo of red-brown hair, the whole effect being an\n appealing combination of strength and feminine softness.", "Four men separated themselves from the crowd\n and approached the table. Peggy watched with interest\n as Mal and Randy looked them over, murmured\n to Amy to take notes, and asked questions.\n After a few minutes, the men left, two of them looking\n happy, two resigned. Then Mal stood and called\n for leading man types, late twenties or early thirties,\n tall and athletic. As six tall, athletic, handsome\n young men came forward, Peggy felt that she just\n couldn’t stand watching the casting interviews any\n longer. It reminded her too much of the livestock\n shows she had attended as a youngster in her home\n town of Rockport, Wisconsin. Necessary though it\n was, she felt it was hardly a way to have to deal\n with human beings.\n\n\n Slipping back through the crowd of waiting actors,\n she joined the actresses in the rear of the room, and\n found an empty seat next to a young girl.\n\n\n “Hi,” she said. “What’s the matter, can’t you watch\n it either?”", "Not wanting to press Paula further, and feeling\n that perhaps she had asked too personal a question\n on such short acquaintance, Peggy reluctantly stood\n too, and joined Paula to watch the last of what she\n now could only think of as the livestock show.\n\n\n As she drew closer to the table, she heard Mal saying,\n “I’m really sorry, Mr. Lang, but you’re just not\n the right type for the role. Perhaps some other....”\n and his voice trailed off in embarrassment.\n\n\n Lang, a short, thin, unhappy young man, answered\n almost tearfully, “But, Mr. Seton, looks aren’t everything.\n I’m really a funny comedian. Honestly! If you\n would only give me a chance to read for you, I know\n that I could make you change your mind about the\n way this character should look!”", "As she went up the aisle as unobtrusively as possible,\n Peggy glanced at the actresses who had just\n come in. She recognized a few of their faces from\n the casting call of three days ago, but did not see her\n new friend among them. She decided to go out to the\n lobby to wait for her there. A new group of girls\n entered the theater as Peggy was leaving and, as she\n passed, one reached out and grabbed her arm.\n\n\n Peggy turned in surprise to find herself greeted\n with a broad grin and a quick companionable kiss.\n\n\n “Greta!” she cried. “What are you doing here?”\n\n\n “Come on out to the lobby, and I’ll tell you,” Greta\n Larsen said, with a toss of her head that made her\n thick blond braid spin around and settle over her\n shoulder.", "It was at this point that Mal and Randy came in,\n with pleasant, if somewhat brisk, nods to the assembled\n actors and actresses, and a special smile for\n Amy and Peggy. In a businesslike manner, they settled\n themselves at a table near the windows, spread\n out scripts and pads and pencils, and prepared for\n the chore that faced them. Amy, who was there to\n help the boys by acting as secretary for the occasion,\n wished Peggy good luck, and joined the boys at the\n table. Her job was to take names and addresses, and\n to jot down any facts about each actor that Randy\n and Mal wanted to be sure to remember.", "The door at the back of the theater opened quietly,\n and Peggy, turning around in her seat, saw a few of\n the actresses entering. They quietly found seats in\n the rear and settled down to await their turn.\n\n\n “I think I’ll go back there with the girls,” Peggy\n whispered. “I’m looking for a girl I met at the casting\n call, and I’d like to chat with her for a few minutes\n when she comes. Do you mind if I don’t look at all\n this?”\n\n\n Randy grinned. “Go ahead. I’d get out of here,\n too, if I could without getting Mal mad at me. This\n kind of thing always breaks my heart, too!”\n\n15" ], [ "“I think you do have a chance,” Peggy said. “In\n fact, if you can act, I bet you’ll get the part. I’ve read\n the play, and I know the author and director, and\n unless I’m way off, you look just the way the lead\n should look. In fact, it’s almost uncanny. You look as\n if you just walked out of the script!”\n\n\n “Oh, I hope you’re right!” Paula said with animation.\n “And I hope you get a part, too. I have a feeling\n that you’re going to bring me good luck!”\n\n\n “The one who needs luck is me, I’m afraid,” Peggy\n said. “Being friendly with Randy and Mal isn’t going\n to help me in the least, and I’m going to have to be\n awfully good to get the part. And it’s really important\n to me, too, because I’m getting near the end of\n my trial year.”", "PEGGY PLAYS OFF-BROADWAY\nI\n\n Cast Call\n“First casting calls are so difficult,” Peggy Lane\n said, looking ruefully at the fifty or more actresses\n and actors who milled about nervously, chatting with\n one another, or sat on the few folding chairs trying\n to read.\n\n\n “With only nine roles to be filled,” she continued,\n “it doesn’t matter how good these people are; most\n of them just haven’t got a chance. I can’t help feeling\n sorry for them—for all of us, I mean. After all, I’m\n trying for a part, too.”", "This time, there were not so many applicants and\n Peggy remembered Randy telling her that this\n would be one of their most difficult roles to cast.\n Only four actresses came forward, and Mal, with\n difficulty, reviewed them all. Unable to eliminate by\n type, he gave them all scripts and asked them to\n come to the theater. Then he called for “character\n ingénues” and Peggy joined seven other girls in the\n “livestock show.”\n\n\n Mal reviewed them carefully, managing to look at\n Peggy with complete lack of recognition. He gently\n eliminated three of them on the basis of hair coloring,\n height or general type. Another, curiously\n enough, was eliminated, like Amy, for a Southern accent,\n and a fifth, also like Amy, was too beautiful.\n “The part calls for a pretty girl,” Mal said with a rare\n smile, “but not for a girl so pretty that she’ll dominate\n the stage! It was a pleasure to look at you, but I’m\n afraid you’re not quite right for the part.”", "“Don’t count too much on it,” Peggy cautioned,\n “or you may be too bitterly disappointed if you don’t\n get it. But,” she added, enthusiastically violating her\n own rule of caution, “I’m sure, too! I’ll see you Saturday.\n Even if I don’t get a script, I’ll be there just to\n hear you read!”\n\n\n Then, with a smile of farewell, Peggy turned her\n attention to the “career woman, early thirties” classification\n that Mal had called for next. Once that\n was out of the way, she knew it would be her turn.", "Peggy nodded thoughtfully, and reflected that it\n must, indeed, be more wearing on the boys. Mallory\n Seton, director of the new play, had been an upper-class\n student at the Academy when Peggy had\n started there, and he was a good friend of hers. She\n had worked with him before, as a general assistant,\n when they had discovered a theater. It would not be\n easy for him to consider Peggy for an acting role, and\n to do so completely without bias. It would not be a\n question of playing favorites, Peggy knew, but quite\n the reverse. Mal’s sense of fair play would make him\n bend over backward to keep from giving favors to\n his friends. If she was to get a role in this new production,\n she would really have to work for it.", "Mal went down the line, regretfully dismissing one\n after the other of the girls, and occasionally asking\n one to step aside to try for another role. His tough-looking\n expression hardly varied as he spoke to each\n one, but Peggy thought she saw the ghost of a smile\n cross his face when he spoke to Paula Andrews. Another\n review of the remaining girls eliminated a few\n more. Finally, there were only four left, Paula\n among them. Mal thanked them, distributed scripts,\n and asked them to be at the Penthouse Theater on\n Saturday at noon.\n\n\n Paula returned to Peggy with eyes shining. “Oh,\n Peggy! I think you were right! I just know I’m going\n to get the part! I know it!”\n\n10", "On the stage, a “businessman type” was reading\n his lines. Peggy knew, after the first few words, that\n he would not do. He had somehow completely\n missed the character of the man he was portraying,\n and was heavily overplaying. Mal, being perhaps\n more patient than Peggy, listened and watched\n with great care. Amy, who was acting as Mal’s assistant\n for the production, sat in a chair by the proscenium,\n reading her script by the light of a small\n lamp and feeding the actor cue lines. Mal followed\n the whole sequence with no visible sign of impatience\n and, when the actor was through, said,\n “Thank you. We’ll let you know our decision in a day\n or two.”\n\n13", "The girl smiled in understanding. “It always upsets\n me,” she replied, “but it’s something we simply\n have to learn to live with. At least until we get well-known,\n or get agents to do this sort of thing for us.”\n\n\n “It sounds as if you’ve been in a few of these before,”\n Peggy said.\n\n\n “I have. But not here in the East,” the girl replied.\n “I’m from California, and I’ve been in a few little-theater\n things there, but nobody seems to pay much\n attention to them. I heard that off-Broadway theater\n in New York attracts a lot of critics, and I thought\n that I’d do better here. Have you had any luck?”", "“But I thought you were in New Haven, getting\n ready to open\nOver the Hill\n,” Peggy said, when they\n had reached the lobby. “What on earth are you doing\n here?”\n\n\n “I’m afraid you don’t read your\nVariety\nvery carefully,”\n Greta said. “\nOver the Hill\nopened in New\n Haven to such bad notices that the producer decided\n to close out of town. At first we thought he’d\n call in a play doctor to try to fix things up, but he\n finally decided, and very sensibly, that it would be\n easier to just throw the whole thing out. I’m afraid\n he lost a lot of money, and he didn’t have any more\n left.”\n\n\n “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Peggy said. “And it was a real\n chance for you, wasn’t it?”\n\n16", "Each actor, no matter how good or how bad, was\n treated with impersonal courtesy by Mal, and each\n left looking sure that the part was his. Peggy was\n glad that she would not have to see their faces when\n they learned that they had not been selected.\n\n\n “The pity of it,” she whispered to Randy, “isn’t\n that there are so many bad ones, but that there are\n so many good ones, and that only one can be selected\n for each role. I wish there were some way of telling\n the good ones you can’t take that they were really\n good, but that you just couldn’t take everyone!”\n\n\n “You can’t let yourself worry about that,” Randy\n replied. “The good ones know they’re good, and\n they’re not going to be discouraged by the loss of a\n role. And the bad ones think they’re good, too, and\n most of them have tremendous egos to protect\n them from ever finding out—or even thinking—otherwise!”", "The next “businessman type” was better, but still\n not quite on target, Peggy thought. He seemed to be\n playing the part for laughs, and although there were\n some comic values to be extracted from the role, it\n was really far more a straight dramatic character.\n Still, he was clearly a better actor than the first,\n and with direction might do well.\n\n\n Following his reading, Mal again repeated his\n polite, invariable formula, “Thank you. We’ll let you\n know our decision in a day or two,” and called for\n the next reading.\n\n\n Peggy watched the remaining actors try for the\n role, and made mental notes of which ones were possible,\n which probable, and which stood no chance at\n all.", "“I think it’s wonderful! I hope more than ever that\n I get the part! Do you really think I have a chance?”\n\n\n Greta nodded decisively. “If you can act, you’re\n made for it,” she said.\n\n\n “That’s just what Peggy said!”\n\n\n Peggy stole a glance through the doors to the theater.\n “I think we’re about ready to find out whether or\n not you can act,” she said. “They seem to be about\n through with the actors, and that means you’re on\n next!”\n\n\n Wishing each other good luck, they entered the\n darkened part of the house and prepared for what\n Peggy could only think of as their ordeal.\nAfterward, as Peggy, Amy, Paula, and Greta sat at\n a table in a nearby coffeehouse waiting for Mal and\n Randy to join them, each was sure that she had been\n terrible.", "Mal’s first concern in reviewing the actresses was,\n of course, for the leading role. And, of course, it was\n for this role that he had the most applicants. More\n than twenty girls came forward when the announcement\n was made, and Peggy thought that she had\n never seen so many striking and beautiful faces and\n figures. It was not going to be easy for Mal to make a\n choice. As Paula, her new friend, went forward to\n join the others, Peggy whispered a word of encouragement,\n then stood to one side to watch.", "Not wanting to press Paula further, and feeling\n that perhaps she had asked too personal a question\n on such short acquaintance, Peggy reluctantly stood\n too, and joined Paula to watch the last of what she\n now could only think of as the livestock show.\n\n\n As she drew closer to the table, she heard Mal saying,\n “I’m really sorry, Mr. Lang, but you’re just not\n the right type for the role. Perhaps some other....”\n and his voice trailed off in embarrassment.\n\n\n Lang, a short, thin, unhappy young man, answered\n almost tearfully, “But, Mr. Seton, looks aren’t everything.\n I’m really a funny comedian. Honestly! If you\n would only give me a chance to read for you, I know\n that I could make you change your mind about the\n way this character should look!”", "Peggy’s friend and housemate, Amy Preston,\n smiled in agreement and said, “It’s not an easy business,\n honey, is it? But the ones I feel sorriest for\n right now are Mal and Randy. After all, they have\n the unpleasant job of choosing and refusing, and a\n lot of these folks are their friends. I wouldn’t want\n to be in their shoes.”\n\n2", "When he was done, Peggy and two others were\n given scripts and told to come to the theater on Saturday.\n Feeling lightheaded and giddy, Peggy settled\n herself on one of the folding chairs that lined\n the back wall, and waited for Mal, Randy, and Amy\n to finish so she could join them for coffee.\n\n11\n\n Scarcely noticing the rest of the proceedings, she\n thought only about the coming readings. She was\n so familiar with the play that she knew she had an\n advantage, perhaps unfairly, over the other two girls.\n She had watched the script grow from its first rough\n draft to the finished text now in her hands, and had\n discussed it with Randy through each revision. She\n knew she could play the part; in fact, she suspected\n secretly that Randy had written it for her, and the\n thought made her blush. Still, it would not be easy,\n she knew. Mal’s sense of fairness and his absolute\n devotion to the play above everything else would\n keep him from making up his mind in advance.", "“All right, gentlemen,” Mal called out. “That takes\n care of the male roles. All of you who are left will be\n given copies of the play to study, marked at the passages\n I want to hear. Be sure to read the whole play\n carefully, so that you understand the workings of the\n characters you have been selected to read. You have\n three days to look it over. We’ll meet at ten o’clock\n on Saturday morning at the Penthouse Theater to\n hear you. Thank you. And now for the ladies.”\n\n9\n\n The men left, after being given their scripts, and\n though they chatted amiably with one another,\n Peggy was sure that each was casting rather hostile\n looks toward others who were trying for the same\n parts. Keeping friendships in the theater was not an\n easy thing, she thought, particularly for people of\n similar physical types!", "“My parents are very practical people,” Peggy said\n with a smile, “and they made sure that I learned\n routine office skills before they would let me think\n about other and more glamorous kinds of careers.\n Daddy owns the newspaper in our small town in\n Wisconsin, and I’ve worked with him as a typist and\n a reporter of sorts and as a proofreader, too. I’ll always\n be grateful that he made me learn all those\n things. I don’t think he has much faith in the acting\n business, but he’s been wonderful about giving me a\n chance. What do your parents think of your wanting\n to be an actress?”\n\n\n Instead of answering, Paula suddenly stood up.\n “Let’s go see how they’re coming with the actors,” she\n said. “I think they’re almost finished.”\n\n8", "“I don’t doubt that you could,” Mal said gently,\n “but if you did, the play would suffer. I’m afraid the\n comedian we need for this must be a large, rather\n bluff-looking person, like these three gentlemen\n whom I have chosen to hear. The part calls for it.\n I’m sorry.”\n\n\n Mr. Lang nodded sadly, mumbled, “I understand,”\n and walked off, his head hanging and his\n hands thrust deep in his pockets, looking less like a\n comedian than any man in the world. Peggy\n watched him go, not knowing whether to feel sorrier\n for him or for Mal.", "Four men separated themselves from the crowd\n and approached the table. Peggy watched with interest\n as Mal and Randy looked them over, murmured\n to Amy to take notes, and asked questions.\n After a few minutes, the men left, two of them looking\n happy, two resigned. Then Mal stood and called\n for leading man types, late twenties or early thirties,\n tall and athletic. As six tall, athletic, handsome\n young men came forward, Peggy felt that she just\n couldn’t stand watching the casting interviews any\n longer. It reminded her too much of the livestock\n shows she had attended as a youngster in her home\n town of Rockport, Wisconsin. Necessary though it\n was, she felt it was hardly a way to have to deal\n with human beings.\n\n\n Slipping back through the crowd of waiting actors,\n she joined the actresses in the rear of the room, and\n found an empty seat next to a young girl.\n\n\n “Hi,” she said. “What’s the matter, can’t you watch\n it either?”" ], [ "Only when Amy started to laugh did the three\n others realize how much alike they had sounded.\n Then they joined in the laughter and couldn’t seem\n to stop. When they seemed at the point of dissolving\n helplessly into a permanent attack of the giggles,\n Randy and Mal joined them.\n\n\n “If you’re laughing at the play,” Randy said\n gloomily, “I can hardly blame you. You never know\n just how badly you’ve written until someone gets up\n and starts to read your lines.”\n\n\n All at the same time, the girls started to reassure\n him and tell him how good the play was, and how\n badly the actors, including themselves, had handled\n the lines, but this was so much like their last exchange\n of conversation that once more they broke up\n in helpless laughter.\n\n\n When they got their breath back, and when coffee\n and pastry had been ordered, they tried to explain\n the cause of their hilarity to the boys.", "4\n\n “Oh, they were just sweet-talking me,” Amy replied.\n “And as for you, you know you don’t have to\n worry about your looks. You have a wonderful face!\n You can look beautiful, or comic, or pathetic, or\n cute or anything. I’m stuck with just being a South’n\n Belle, blond and helpless, po’ li’l ol’ me, lookin’ sad\n and sweet through those ol’ magnolia blossoms!”\n She broadened her slight, soft accent until it sounded\n like something you could spread on hot cornbread,\n and both girls broke into laughter that sounded odd\n in the strained atmosphere of the bare rehearsal\n studio.", "“Yes. There are about a dozen of us, more or less.\n We live in a place called the Gramercy Arms—a\n wonderful place—and we live like one big noisy family.\n The Arms is run just for young actresses, so we\n all have a lot in common. I haven’t seen Greta for\n weeks—she’s been out of town with a play—and I’m\n just getting over being stunned at seeing her now.”\n\n\n “Peggy tactfully neglected to mention that the\n play flopped,” Greta laughed, “and now I’m back in\n town without a job. In fact, that’s why I’m here.”\n\n\n “You mean you’re going to read for Mal?” Peggy\n asked excitedly.", "“Oh, I’m just beginning,” Peggy said. “I’m still\n studying at the New York Dramatic Academy. I hope\n I can get some kind of supporting role in this play,\n but I don’t think I’m ready for anything big yet. By\n the way, my name is Peggy Lane. What’s yours?”\n\n6\n\n “I’m Paula Andrews,” the girl answered, “and\n maybe I’m shooting too high, but I’m trying out for\n the female lead. I hope I have a chance for it.”\n\n\n Peggy looked carefully at her new friend, at the\n somewhat uncertain smile that played about her\n well-formed, generous mouth and the intelligence\n that shone from her large, widely placed green eyes.\n Her rather long face was saved from severity by a\n soft halo of red-brown hair, the whole effect being an\n appealing combination of strength and feminine softness.", "“... so, you see,” Peggy concluded, “we were\n each explaining how good the others were and how\n bad we were, and when Randy started telling us how\n bad he had been as a writer, we just couldn’t stand\n it!”\n\n\n It was Mal who got them back to sane ground.\n With his tough face, like a movie gangster’s or private\n detective’s, and his gentle, cultured English voice and\n assured manner, he calmly gave his opinion of the\n afternoon’s auditions.", "Peggy’s friend and housemate, Amy Preston,\n smiled in agreement and said, “It’s not an easy business,\n honey, is it? But the ones I feel sorriest for\n right now are Mal and Randy. After all, they have\n the unpleasant job of choosing and refusing, and a\n lot of these folks are their friends. I wouldn’t want\n to be in their shoes.”\n\n2", "Mal’s first concern in reviewing the actresses was,\n of course, for the leading role. And, of course, it was\n for this role that he had the most applicants. More\n than twenty girls came forward when the announcement\n was made, and Peggy thought that she had\n never seen so many striking and beautiful faces and\n figures. It was not going to be easy for Mal to make a\n choice. As Paula, her new friend, went forward to\n join the others, Peggy whispered a word of encouragement,\n then stood to one side to watch.", "Four men separated themselves from the crowd\n and approached the table. Peggy watched with interest\n as Mal and Randy looked them over, murmured\n to Amy to take notes, and asked questions.\n After a few minutes, the men left, two of them looking\n happy, two resigned. Then Mal stood and called\n for leading man types, late twenties or early thirties,\n tall and athletic. As six tall, athletic, handsome\n young men came forward, Peggy felt that she just\n couldn’t stand watching the casting interviews any\n longer. It reminded her too much of the livestock\n shows she had attended as a youngster in her home\n town of Rockport, Wisconsin. Necessary though it\n was, she felt it was hardly a way to have to deal\n with human beings.\n\n\n Slipping back through the crowd of waiting actors,\n she joined the actresses in the rear of the room, and\n found an empty seat next to a young girl.\n\n\n “Hi,” she said. “What’s the matter, can’t you watch\n it either?”", "This time, there were not so many applicants and\n Peggy remembered Randy telling her that this\n would be one of their most difficult roles to cast.\n Only four actresses came forward, and Mal, with\n difficulty, reviewed them all. Unable to eliminate by\n type, he gave them all scripts and asked them to\n come to the theater. Then he called for “character\n ingénues” and Peggy joined seven other girls in the\n “livestock show.”\n\n\n Mal reviewed them carefully, managing to look at\n Peggy with complete lack of recognition. He gently\n eliminated three of them on the basis of hair coloring,\n height or general type. Another, curiously\n enough, was eliminated, like Amy, for a Southern accent,\n and a fifth, also like Amy, was too beautiful.\n “The part calls for a pretty girl,” Mal said with a rare\n smile, “but not for a girl so pretty that she’ll dominate\n the stage! It was a pleasure to look at you, but I’m\n afraid you’re not quite right for the part.”", "“Oh, no!” Peggy said. “You two were just marvelous!\n But I couldn’t have been worse. I know I read\n the part wrong. I thought I had the character clear in\n my mind, but I’m sure that the way it came out was a\n mile off!”\n\n\n “You have a lot more talent than judgment,” Greta\n said mournfully. “You were perfect. And so was\n Paula. As for me....” Her voice trailed off in despair.\n\n\n “I don’t know how you can say that, Greta,” Paula\n put in. “I know you were the best in your part, and\n nobody even came close to Peggy. But I’ve never\n felt so off in my life as I did reading that part. It’s a\n wonder any of you even want to be seen with me!”\n\n18", "“All right, gentlemen,” Mal called out. “That takes\n care of the male roles. All of you who are left will be\n given copies of the play to study, marked at the passages\n I want to hear. Be sure to read the whole play\n carefully, so that you understand the workings of the\n characters you have been selected to read. You have\n three days to look it over. We’ll meet at ten o’clock\n on Saturday morning at the Penthouse Theater to\n hear you. Thank you. And now for the ladies.”\n\n9\n\n The men left, after being given their scripts, and\n though they chatted amiably with one another,\n Peggy was sure that each was casting rather hostile\n looks toward others who were trying for the same\n parts. Keeping friendships in the theater was not an\n easy thing, she thought, particularly for people of\n similar physical types!", "Mal went down the line, regretfully dismissing one\n after the other of the girls, and occasionally asking\n one to step aside to try for another role. His tough-looking\n expression hardly varied as he spoke to each\n one, but Peggy thought she saw the ghost of a smile\n cross his face when he spoke to Paula Andrews. Another\n review of the remaining girls eliminated a few\n more. Finally, there were only four left, Paula\n among them. Mal thanked them, distributed scripts,\n and asked them to be at the Penthouse Theater on\n Saturday at noon.\n\n\n Paula returned to Peggy with eyes shining. “Oh,\n Peggy! I think you were right! I just know I’m going\n to get the part! I know it!”\n\n10", "“I think it’s wonderful! I hope more than ever that\n I get the part! Do you really think I have a chance?”\n\n\n Greta nodded decisively. “If you can act, you’re\n made for it,” she said.\n\n\n “That’s just what Peggy said!”\n\n\n Peggy stole a glance through the doors to the theater.\n “I think we’re about ready to find out whether or\n not you can act,” she said. “They seem to be about\n through with the actors, and that means you’re on\n next!”\n\n\n Wishing each other good luck, they entered the\n darkened part of the house and prepared for what\n Peggy could only think of as their ordeal.\nAfterward, as Peggy, Amy, Paula, and Greta sat at\n a table in a nearby coffeehouse waiting for Mal and\n Randy to join them, each was sure that she had been\n terrible.", "The same process was then followed for the leading\n men, and the same wide range of talent and understanding\n of the part was displayed. Some seemed\n to have no idea at all about the play or its meaning,\n and Peggy was sure that these men had read only\n the parts marked for them. Others had a clear understanding\n of the kind of character they were playing,\n and tried to create him in the brief time they had on\n stage. Others still were actors who had one rather\n inflexible way of playing, and used it for all kinds of\n parts. Their performances were uniform imitations of\n each other, and all were imitations of the early acting\n style of Marlon Brando. They seemed to forget,\n Peggy thought, that Brando’s style developed\n from the roles he had to play, and that as he got\n other roles, he showed other facets of a rounded talent.\n It made her angry that some actors thought\n they could get ahead in a creative field by being\n imitative.\n\n14", "When he was done, Peggy and two others were\n given scripts and told to come to the theater on Saturday.\n Feeling lightheaded and giddy, Peggy settled\n herself on one of the folding chairs that lined\n the back wall, and waited for Mal, Randy, and Amy\n to finish so she could join them for coffee.\n\n11\n\n Scarcely noticing the rest of the proceedings, she\n thought only about the coming readings. She was\n so familiar with the play that she knew she had an\n advantage, perhaps unfairly, over the other two girls.\n She had watched the script grow from its first rough\n draft to the finished text now in her hands, and had\n discussed it with Randy through each revision. She\n knew she could play the part; in fact, she suspected\n secretly that Randy had written it for her, and the\n thought made her blush. Still, it would not be easy,\n she knew. Mal’s sense of fairness and his absolute\n devotion to the play above everything else would\n keep him from making up his mind in advance.", "The door at the back of the theater opened quietly,\n and Peggy, turning around in her seat, saw a few of\n the actresses entering. They quietly found seats in\n the rear and settled down to await their turn.\n\n\n “I think I’ll go back there with the girls,” Peggy\n whispered. “I’m looking for a girl I met at the casting\n call, and I’d like to chat with her for a few minutes\n when she comes. Do you mind if I don’t look at all\n this?”\n\n\n Randy grinned. “Go ahead. I’d get out of here,\n too, if I could without getting Mal mad at me. This\n kind of thing always breaks my heart, too!”\n\n15", "But despite this knowledge, she could not help\n looking ahead—all the way ahead—to the restless\n stir of the opening-night audience out front, the last-minute\n preparations backstage, the bright, hot lights\n and the smell of make-up and scenery paint as she\n waited to go on in Act One, Scene One of\nCome\n Closer\n, Randy Brewster’s brilliant new play in which\n Peggy Lane would be discovered!\n\n12\nII\n\n The Hopefuls\nThe audience consisted of a handful of actors and\n actresses, and Randy Brewster and Mallory Seton.\n The stage lighting was a cold splash produced by two\n floodlights without color gels to soften them. The\n scenery was the brick back wall of the stage, two\n ladders, a table and two straight-backed chairs. Only\n the front row of house lights was on, and the back of\n the theater was dark, empty and gloomy, a shadowy\n wasteland of empty rows of seats like tombstones.", "As she went up the aisle as unobtrusively as possible,\n Peggy glanced at the actresses who had just\n come in. She recognized a few of their faces from\n the casting call of three days ago, but did not see her\n new friend among them. She decided to go out to the\n lobby to wait for her there. A new group of girls\n entered the theater as Peggy was leaving and, as she\n passed, one reached out and grabbed her arm.\n\n\n Peggy turned in surprise to find herself greeted\n with a broad grin and a quick companionable kiss.\n\n\n “Greta!” she cried. “What are you doing here?”\n\n\n “Come on out to the lobby, and I’ll tell you,” Greta\n Larsen said, with a toss of her head that made her\n thick blond braid spin around and settle over her\n shoulder.", "“I think you do have a chance,” Peggy said. “In\n fact, if you can act, I bet you’ll get the part. I’ve read\n the play, and I know the author and director, and\n unless I’m way off, you look just the way the lead\n should look. In fact, it’s almost uncanny. You look as\n if you just walked out of the script!”\n\n\n “Oh, I hope you’re right!” Paula said with animation.\n “And I hope you get a part, too. I have a feeling\n that you’re going to bring me good luck!”\n\n\n “The one who needs luck is me, I’m afraid,” Peggy\n said. “Being friendly with Randy and Mal isn’t going\n to help me in the least, and I’m going to have to be\n awfully good to get the part. And it’s really important\n to me, too, because I’m getting near the end of\n my trial year.”", "“It seems kind of unfair, doesn’t it, to be eliminated\n just because you’re not the right physical\n type,” Amy said, “but I can understand it. They have\n to start somewhere, and I guess that’s as good a place\n as any.” Then she smiled and added, “I guess I’m\n just feeling sorry for myself, because Mal told me\n there was no sense in my trying out at all, because I\n didn’t look or sound right for any part in the play. If\n I don’t get rid of this Southern accent of mine, I\n may never get a part at all, except in a Tennessee\n Williams play!”\n\n\n Peggy nodded sympathetically. “But it wasn’t just\n your accent, Amy,” she said. “It’s your looks, too. At\n least for this play. Mal and Randy told you that\n you’re just too pretty for any of the parts that fit\n your age, and that’s nothing to feel bad about. If\n anybody ought to feel insulted, it’s me, because\n they asked me to try out!”" ], [ "This time, there were not so many applicants and\n Peggy remembered Randy telling her that this\n would be one of their most difficult roles to cast.\n Only four actresses came forward, and Mal, with\n difficulty, reviewed them all. Unable to eliminate by\n type, he gave them all scripts and asked them to\n come to the theater. Then he called for “character\n ingénues” and Peggy joined seven other girls in the\n “livestock show.”\n\n\n Mal reviewed them carefully, managing to look at\n Peggy with complete lack of recognition. He gently\n eliminated three of them on the basis of hair coloring,\n height or general type. Another, curiously\n enough, was eliminated, like Amy, for a Southern accent,\n and a fifth, also like Amy, was too beautiful.\n “The part calls for a pretty girl,” Mal said with a rare\n smile, “but not for a girl so pretty that she’ll dominate\n the stage! It was a pleasure to look at you, but I’m\n afraid you’re not quite right for the part.”", "On the stage, a “businessman type” was reading\n his lines. Peggy knew, after the first few words, that\n he would not do. He had somehow completely\n missed the character of the man he was portraying,\n and was heavily overplaying. Mal, being perhaps\n more patient than Peggy, listened and watched\n with great care. Amy, who was acting as Mal’s assistant\n for the production, sat in a chair by the proscenium,\n reading her script by the light of a small\n lamp and feeding the actor cue lines. Mal followed\n the whole sequence with no visible sign of impatience\n and, when the actor was through, said,\n “Thank you. We’ll let you know our decision in a day\n or two.”\n\n13", "“I think it’s wonderful! I hope more than ever that\n I get the part! Do you really think I have a chance?”\n\n\n Greta nodded decisively. “If you can act, you’re\n made for it,” she said.\n\n\n “That’s just what Peggy said!”\n\n\n Peggy stole a glance through the doors to the theater.\n “I think we’re about ready to find out whether or\n not you can act,” she said. “They seem to be about\n through with the actors, and that means you’re on\n next!”\n\n\n Wishing each other good luck, they entered the\n darkened part of the house and prepared for what\n Peggy could only think of as their ordeal.\nAfterward, as Peggy, Amy, Paula, and Greta sat at\n a table in a nearby coffeehouse waiting for Mal and\n Randy to join them, each was sure that she had been\n terrible.", "“It seems kind of unfair, doesn’t it, to be eliminated\n just because you’re not the right physical\n type,” Amy said, “but I can understand it. They have\n to start somewhere, and I guess that’s as good a place\n as any.” Then she smiled and added, “I guess I’m\n just feeling sorry for myself, because Mal told me\n there was no sense in my trying out at all, because I\n didn’t look or sound right for any part in the play. If\n I don’t get rid of this Southern accent of mine, I\n may never get a part at all, except in a Tennessee\n Williams play!”\n\n\n Peggy nodded sympathetically. “But it wasn’t just\n your accent, Amy,” she said. “It’s your looks, too. At\n least for this play. Mal and Randy told you that\n you’re just too pretty for any of the parts that fit\n your age, and that’s nothing to feel bad about. If\n anybody ought to feel insulted, it’s me, because\n they asked me to try out!”", "4\n\n “Oh, they were just sweet-talking me,” Amy replied.\n “And as for you, you know you don’t have to\n worry about your looks. You have a wonderful face!\n You can look beautiful, or comic, or pathetic, or\n cute or anything. I’m stuck with just being a South’n\n Belle, blond and helpless, po’ li’l ol’ me, lookin’ sad\n and sweet through those ol’ magnolia blossoms!”\n She broadened her slight, soft accent until it sounded\n like something you could spread on hot cornbread,\n and both girls broke into laughter that sounded odd\n in the strained atmosphere of the bare rehearsal\n studio.", "Four men separated themselves from the crowd\n and approached the table. Peggy watched with interest\n as Mal and Randy looked them over, murmured\n to Amy to take notes, and asked questions.\n After a few minutes, the men left, two of them looking\n happy, two resigned. Then Mal stood and called\n for leading man types, late twenties or early thirties,\n tall and athletic. As six tall, athletic, handsome\n young men came forward, Peggy felt that she just\n couldn’t stand watching the casting interviews any\n longer. It reminded her too much of the livestock\n shows she had attended as a youngster in her home\n town of Rockport, Wisconsin. Necessary though it\n was, she felt it was hardly a way to have to deal\n with human beings.\n\n\n Slipping back through the crowd of waiting actors,\n she joined the actresses in the rear of the room, and\n found an empty seat next to a young girl.\n\n\n “Hi,” she said. “What’s the matter, can’t you watch\n it either?”", "When he was done, Peggy and two others were\n given scripts and told to come to the theater on Saturday.\n Feeling lightheaded and giddy, Peggy settled\n herself on one of the folding chairs that lined\n the back wall, and waited for Mal, Randy, and Amy\n to finish so she could join them for coffee.\n\n11\n\n Scarcely noticing the rest of the proceedings, she\n thought only about the coming readings. She was\n so familiar with the play that she knew she had an\n advantage, perhaps unfairly, over the other two girls.\n She had watched the script grow from its first rough\n draft to the finished text now in her hands, and had\n discussed it with Randy through each revision. She\n knew she could play the part; in fact, she suspected\n secretly that Randy had written it for her, and the\n thought made her blush. Still, it would not be easy,\n she knew. Mal’s sense of fairness and his absolute\n devotion to the play above everything else would\n keep him from making up his mind in advance.", "It was at this point that Mal and Randy came in,\n with pleasant, if somewhat brisk, nods to the assembled\n actors and actresses, and a special smile for\n Amy and Peggy. In a businesslike manner, they settled\n themselves at a table near the windows, spread\n out scripts and pads and pencils, and prepared for\n the chore that faced them. Amy, who was there to\n help the boys by acting as secretary for the occasion,\n wished Peggy good luck, and joined the boys at the\n table. Her job was to take names and addresses, and\n to jot down any facts about each actor that Randy\n and Mal wanted to be sure to remember.", "And if it was difficult for Mal, she thought, it was\n more so for Randy Brewster, the author of the play,\n for her friendship with him was of a different sort\n than with Mal. Mal was just a friend—a good one,\n to be sure—but with Randy Brewster, somehow,\n things were different. There was nothing “serious,”\n she assured herself, but they had gone on dates together\n with a regularity that was a little more than\n casual and, whatever his feelings were for her, she\n was sure that they were more complicated than\n Mal’s.\n\n\n “Do you think they’ll ever get through all these\n people?” Amy asked, interrupting her thoughts.\n “How can they hope to hear so many actors read for\n them in just one afternoon?”", "“Oh, they won’t be doing readings today,” Peggy\n replied, glad to turn her attention from what was becoming\n a difficult subject for thought. “This is just a\n first cast call. All they want to do today is pick people\n for type. They’ll select all the possible ones, send\n the impossible ones away, and then go into elimination\n readings later.”\n\n3\n\n “But what if the people they pick for looks can’t\n act?” Amy asked. “And what if some of the rejects\n are wonderful actors?”\n\n\n “They won’t go back to the rejects,” Peggy explained,\n “because they both have a pretty good idea\n of what the characters in the play should look like.\n And if the people they pick aren’t good enough actors,\n then they hold another cast call and try again.\n Mal says that sometimes certain parts are so hard to\n cast that they have to go through a dozen calls just\n to find one actor.”", "Mal went down the line, regretfully dismissing one\n after the other of the girls, and occasionally asking\n one to step aside to try for another role. His tough-looking\n expression hardly varied as he spoke to each\n one, but Peggy thought she saw the ghost of a smile\n cross his face when he spoke to Paula Andrews. Another\n review of the remaining girls eliminated a few\n more. Finally, there were only four left, Paula\n among them. Mal thanked them, distributed scripts,\n and asked them to be at the Penthouse Theater on\n Saturday at noon.\n\n\n Paula returned to Peggy with eyes shining. “Oh,\n Peggy! I think you were right! I just know I’m going\n to get the part! I know it!”\n\n10", "“My parents are very practical people,” Peggy said\n with a smile, “and they made sure that I learned\n routine office skills before they would let me think\n about other and more glamorous kinds of careers.\n Daddy owns the newspaper in our small town in\n Wisconsin, and I’ve worked with him as a typist and\n a reporter of sorts and as a proofreader, too. I’ll always\n be grateful that he made me learn all those\n things. I don’t think he has much faith in the acting\n business, but he’s been wonderful about giving me a\n chance. What do your parents think of your wanting\n to be an actress?”\n\n\n Instead of answering, Paula suddenly stood up.\n “Let’s go see how they’re coming with the actors,” she\n said. “I think they’re almost finished.”\n\n8", "Peggy’s friend and housemate, Amy Preston,\n smiled in agreement and said, “It’s not an easy business,\n honey, is it? But the ones I feel sorriest for\n right now are Mal and Randy. After all, they have\n the unpleasant job of choosing and refusing, and a\n lot of these folks are their friends. I wouldn’t want\n to be in their shoes.”\n\n2", "The door at the back of the theater opened quietly,\n and Peggy, turning around in her seat, saw a few of\n the actresses entering. They quietly found seats in\n the rear and settled down to await their turn.\n\n\n “I think I’ll go back there with the girls,” Peggy\n whispered. “I’m looking for a girl I met at the casting\n call, and I’d like to chat with her for a few minutes\n when she comes. Do you mind if I don’t look at all\n this?”\n\n\n Randy grinned. “Go ahead. I’d get out of here,\n too, if I could without getting Mal mad at me. This\n kind of thing always breaks my heart, too!”\n\n15", "Each actor, no matter how good or how bad, was\n treated with impersonal courtesy by Mal, and each\n left looking sure that the part was his. Peggy was\n glad that she would not have to see their faces when\n they learned that they had not been selected.\n\n\n “The pity of it,” she whispered to Randy, “isn’t\n that there are so many bad ones, but that there are\n so many good ones, and that only one can be selected\n for each role. I wish there were some way of telling\n the good ones you can’t take that they were really\n good, but that you just couldn’t take everyone!”\n\n\n “You can’t let yourself worry about that,” Randy\n replied. “The good ones know they’re good, and\n they’re not going to be discouraged by the loss of a\n role. And the bad ones think they’re good, too, and\n most of them have tremendous egos to protect\n them from ever finding out—or even thinking—otherwise!”", "“All right, gentlemen,” Mal called out. “That takes\n care of the male roles. All of you who are left will be\n given copies of the play to study, marked at the passages\n I want to hear. Be sure to read the whole play\n carefully, so that you understand the workings of the\n characters you have been selected to read. You have\n three days to look it over. We’ll meet at ten o’clock\n on Saturday morning at the Penthouse Theater to\n hear you. Thank you. And now for the ladies.”\n\n9\n\n The men left, after being given their scripts, and\n though they chatted amiably with one another,\n Peggy was sure that each was casting rather hostile\n looks toward others who were trying for the same\n parts. Keeping friendships in the theater was not an\n easy thing, she thought, particularly for people of\n similar physical types!", "“I think you do have a chance,” Peggy said. “In\n fact, if you can act, I bet you’ll get the part. I’ve read\n the play, and I know the author and director, and\n unless I’m way off, you look just the way the lead\n should look. In fact, it’s almost uncanny. You look as\n if you just walked out of the script!”\n\n\n “Oh, I hope you’re right!” Paula said with animation.\n “And I hope you get a part, too. I have a feeling\n that you’re going to bring me good luck!”\n\n\n “The one who needs luck is me, I’m afraid,” Peggy\n said. “Being friendly with Randy and Mal isn’t going\n to help me in the least, and I’m going to have to be\n awfully good to get the part. And it’s really important\n to me, too, because I’m getting near the end of\n my trial year.”", "Not wanting to press Paula further, and feeling\n that perhaps she had asked too personal a question\n on such short acquaintance, Peggy reluctantly stood\n too, and joined Paula to watch the last of what she\n now could only think of as the livestock show.\n\n\n As she drew closer to the table, she heard Mal saying,\n “I’m really sorry, Mr. Lang, but you’re just not\n the right type for the role. Perhaps some other....”\n and his voice trailed off in embarrassment.\n\n\n Lang, a short, thin, unhappy young man, answered\n almost tearfully, “But, Mr. Seton, looks aren’t everything.\n I’m really a funny comedian. Honestly! If you\n would only give me a chance to read for you, I know\n that I could make you change your mind about the\n way this character should look!”", "“Oh, I’m just beginning,” Peggy said. “I’m still\n studying at the New York Dramatic Academy. I hope\n I can get some kind of supporting role in this play,\n but I don’t think I’m ready for anything big yet. By\n the way, my name is Peggy Lane. What’s yours?”\n\n6\n\n “I’m Paula Andrews,” the girl answered, “and\n maybe I’m shooting too high, but I’m trying out for\n the female lead. I hope I have a chance for it.”\n\n\n Peggy looked carefully at her new friend, at the\n somewhat uncertain smile that played about her\n well-formed, generous mouth and the intelligence\n that shone from her large, widely placed green eyes.\n Her rather long face was saved from severity by a\n soft halo of red-brown hair, the whole effect being an\n appealing combination of strength and feminine softness.", "“I don’t doubt that you could,” Mal said gently,\n “but if you did, the play would suffer. I’m afraid the\n comedian we need for this must be a large, rather\n bluff-looking person, like these three gentlemen\n whom I have chosen to hear. The part calls for it.\n I’m sorry.”\n\n\n Mr. Lang nodded sadly, mumbled, “I understand,”\n and walked off, his head hanging and his\n hands thrust deep in his pockets, looking less like a\n comedian than any man in the world. Peggy\n watched him go, not knowing whether to feel sorrier\n for him or for Mal." ], [ "Only when Amy started to laugh did the three\n others realize how much alike they had sounded.\n Then they joined in the laughter and couldn’t seem\n to stop. When they seemed at the point of dissolving\n helplessly into a permanent attack of the giggles,\n Randy and Mal joined them.\n\n\n “If you’re laughing at the play,” Randy said\n gloomily, “I can hardly blame you. You never know\n just how badly you’ve written until someone gets up\n and starts to read your lines.”\n\n\n All at the same time, the girls started to reassure\n him and tell him how good the play was, and how\n badly the actors, including themselves, had handled\n the lines, but this was so much like their last exchange\n of conversation that once more they broke up\n in helpless laughter.\n\n\n When they got their breath back, and when coffee\n and pastry had been ordered, they tried to explain\n the cause of their hilarity to the boys.", "But despite this knowledge, she could not help\n looking ahead—all the way ahead—to the restless\n stir of the opening-night audience out front, the last-minute\n preparations backstage, the bright, hot lights\n and the smell of make-up and scenery paint as she\n waited to go on in Act One, Scene One of\nCome\n Closer\n, Randy Brewster’s brilliant new play in which\n Peggy Lane would be discovered!\n\n12\nII\n\n The Hopefuls\nThe audience consisted of a handful of actors and\n actresses, and Randy Brewster and Mallory Seton.\n The stage lighting was a cold splash produced by two\n floodlights without color gels to soften them. The\n scenery was the brick back wall of the stage, two\n ladders, a table and two straight-backed chairs. Only\n the front row of house lights was on, and the back of\n the theater was dark, empty and gloomy, a shadowy\n wasteland of empty rows of seats like tombstones.", "When he was done, Peggy and two others were\n given scripts and told to come to the theater on Saturday.\n Feeling lightheaded and giddy, Peggy settled\n herself on one of the folding chairs that lined\n the back wall, and waited for Mal, Randy, and Amy\n to finish so she could join them for coffee.\n\n11\n\n Scarcely noticing the rest of the proceedings, she\n thought only about the coming readings. She was\n so familiar with the play that she knew she had an\n advantage, perhaps unfairly, over the other two girls.\n She had watched the script grow from its first rough\n draft to the finished text now in her hands, and had\n discussed it with Randy through each revision. She\n knew she could play the part; in fact, she suspected\n secretly that Randy had written it for her, and the\n thought made her blush. Still, it would not be easy,\n she knew. Mal’s sense of fairness and his absolute\n devotion to the play above everything else would\n keep him from making up his mind in advance.", "“Don’t count too much on it,” Peggy cautioned,\n “or you may be too bitterly disappointed if you don’t\n get it. But,” she added, enthusiastically violating her\n own rule of caution, “I’m sure, too! I’ll see you Saturday.\n Even if I don’t get a script, I’ll be there just to\n hear you read!”\n\n\n Then, with a smile of farewell, Peggy turned her\n attention to the “career woman, early thirties” classification\n that Mal had called for next. Once that\n was out of the way, she knew it would be her turn.", "Peggy’s friend and housemate, Amy Preston,\n smiled in agreement and said, “It’s not an easy business,\n honey, is it? But the ones I feel sorriest for\n right now are Mal and Randy. After all, they have\n the unpleasant job of choosing and refusing, and a\n lot of these folks are their friends. I wouldn’t want\n to be in their shoes.”\n\n2", "“I think you do have a chance,” Peggy said. “In\n fact, if you can act, I bet you’ll get the part. I’ve read\n the play, and I know the author and director, and\n unless I’m way off, you look just the way the lead\n should look. In fact, it’s almost uncanny. You look as\n if you just walked out of the script!”\n\n\n “Oh, I hope you’re right!” Paula said with animation.\n “And I hope you get a part, too. I have a feeling\n that you’re going to bring me good luck!”\n\n\n “The one who needs luck is me, I’m afraid,” Peggy\n said. “Being friendly with Randy and Mal isn’t going\n to help me in the least, and I’m going to have to be\n awfully good to get the part. And it’s really important\n to me, too, because I’m getting near the end of\n my trial year.”", "Four men separated themselves from the crowd\n and approached the table. Peggy watched with interest\n as Mal and Randy looked them over, murmured\n to Amy to take notes, and asked questions.\n After a few minutes, the men left, two of them looking\n happy, two resigned. Then Mal stood and called\n for leading man types, late twenties or early thirties,\n tall and athletic. As six tall, athletic, handsome\n young men came forward, Peggy felt that she just\n couldn’t stand watching the casting interviews any\n longer. It reminded her too much of the livestock\n shows she had attended as a youngster in her home\n town of Rockport, Wisconsin. Necessary though it\n was, she felt it was hardly a way to have to deal\n with human beings.\n\n\n Slipping back through the crowd of waiting actors,\n she joined the actresses in the rear of the room, and\n found an empty seat next to a young girl.\n\n\n “Hi,” she said. “What’s the matter, can’t you watch\n it either?”", "“I think it’s wonderful! I hope more than ever that\n I get the part! Do you really think I have a chance?”\n\n\n Greta nodded decisively. “If you can act, you’re\n made for it,” she said.\n\n\n “That’s just what Peggy said!”\n\n\n Peggy stole a glance through the doors to the theater.\n “I think we’re about ready to find out whether or\n not you can act,” she said. “They seem to be about\n through with the actors, and that means you’re on\n next!”\n\n\n Wishing each other good luck, they entered the\n darkened part of the house and prepared for what\n Peggy could only think of as their ordeal.\nAfterward, as Peggy, Amy, Paula, and Greta sat at\n a table in a nearby coffeehouse waiting for Mal and\n Randy to join them, each was sure that she had been\n terrible.", "On the stage, a “businessman type” was reading\n his lines. Peggy knew, after the first few words, that\n he would not do. He had somehow completely\n missed the character of the man he was portraying,\n and was heavily overplaying. Mal, being perhaps\n more patient than Peggy, listened and watched\n with great care. Amy, who was acting as Mal’s assistant\n for the production, sat in a chair by the proscenium,\n reading her script by the light of a small\n lamp and feeding the actor cue lines. Mal followed\n the whole sequence with no visible sign of impatience\n and, when the actor was through, said,\n “Thank you. We’ll let you know our decision in a day\n or two.”\n\n13", "Each actor, no matter how good or how bad, was\n treated with impersonal courtesy by Mal, and each\n left looking sure that the part was his. Peggy was\n glad that she would not have to see their faces when\n they learned that they had not been selected.\n\n\n “The pity of it,” she whispered to Randy, “isn’t\n that there are so many bad ones, but that there are\n so many good ones, and that only one can be selected\n for each role. I wish there were some way of telling\n the good ones you can’t take that they were really\n good, but that you just couldn’t take everyone!”\n\n\n “You can’t let yourself worry about that,” Randy\n replied. “The good ones know they’re good, and\n they’re not going to be discouraged by the loss of a\n role. And the bad ones think they’re good, too, and\n most of them have tremendous egos to protect\n them from ever finding out—or even thinking—otherwise!”", "“I don’t doubt that you could,” Mal said gently,\n “but if you did, the play would suffer. I’m afraid the\n comedian we need for this must be a large, rather\n bluff-looking person, like these three gentlemen\n whom I have chosen to hear. The part calls for it.\n I’m sorry.”\n\n\n Mr. Lang nodded sadly, mumbled, “I understand,”\n and walked off, his head hanging and his\n hands thrust deep in his pockets, looking less like a\n comedian than any man in the world. Peggy\n watched him go, not knowing whether to feel sorrier\n for him or for Mal.", "Not wanting to press Paula further, and feeling\n that perhaps she had asked too personal a question\n on such short acquaintance, Peggy reluctantly stood\n too, and joined Paula to watch the last of what she\n now could only think of as the livestock show.\n\n\n As she drew closer to the table, she heard Mal saying,\n “I’m really sorry, Mr. Lang, but you’re just not\n the right type for the role. Perhaps some other....”\n and his voice trailed off in embarrassment.\n\n\n Lang, a short, thin, unhappy young man, answered\n almost tearfully, “But, Mr. Seton, looks aren’t everything.\n I’m really a funny comedian. Honestly! If you\n would only give me a chance to read for you, I know\n that I could make you change your mind about the\n way this character should look!”", "“... so, you see,” Peggy concluded, “we were\n each explaining how good the others were and how\n bad we were, and when Randy started telling us how\n bad he had been as a writer, we just couldn’t stand\n it!”\n\n\n It was Mal who got them back to sane ground.\n With his tough face, like a movie gangster’s or private\n detective’s, and his gentle, cultured English voice and\n assured manner, he calmly gave his opinion of the\n afternoon’s auditions.", "And if it was difficult for Mal, she thought, it was\n more so for Randy Brewster, the author of the play,\n for her friendship with him was of a different sort\n than with Mal. Mal was just a friend—a good one,\n to be sure—but with Randy Brewster, somehow,\n things were different. There was nothing “serious,”\n she assured herself, but they had gone on dates together\n with a regularity that was a little more than\n casual and, whatever his feelings were for her, she\n was sure that they were more complicated than\n Mal’s.\n\n\n “Do you think they’ll ever get through all these\n people?” Amy asked, interrupting her thoughts.\n “How can they hope to hear so many actors read for\n them in just one afternoon?”", "Mal started the proceedings by introducing himself\n and Randy. Then, estimating the crowd, he said,\n “Since there are fewer men here, and also fewer male\n roles to cast, we’re going to do them first. I hope that\n you ladies won’t mind. We won’t keep you waiting\n long, but if we worked with you first, we’d have these\n gentlemen waiting most of the day. Shall we get\n started?” After a brief glance at his notes, he called\n out, “First, I’d like to see businessman types, young\n forties. How many have we?”\n\n5", "The girl smiled in understanding. “It always upsets\n me,” she replied, “but it’s something we simply\n have to learn to live with. At least until we get well-known,\n or get agents to do this sort of thing for us.”\n\n\n “It sounds as if you’ve been in a few of these before,”\n Peggy said.\n\n\n “I have. But not here in the East,” the girl replied.\n “I’m from California, and I’ve been in a few little-theater\n things there, but nobody seems to pay much\n attention to them. I heard that off-Broadway theater\n in New York attracts a lot of critics, and I thought\n that I’d do better here. Have you had any luck?”", "“Uh-huh. I met him on the street an hour or so\n ago, and he told me he had a part he thought I should\n try out for, and that he was thinking of me for it all\n along, but assumed that I wouldn’t be available.\n Well, you can’t be more available than I am, so here\n I am!”\n\n\n “Have you read the play?” Paula asked.\n\n\n “I’m lucky there,” Greta replied. “I’ve seen it\n in three different drafts since it started. Peggy’s\n friendly with Randy Brewster, the boy who wrote it,\n and each time she brought a draft home, I got to\n read it. So I’m not at a disadvantage.”\n\n17\n\n “What do you think of\nCome Closer\n, Paula?” asked\n Peggy.", "The same process was then followed for the leading\n men, and the same wide range of talent and understanding\n of the part was displayed. Some seemed\n to have no idea at all about the play or its meaning,\n and Peggy was sure that these men had read only\n the parts marked for them. Others had a clear understanding\n of the kind of character they were playing,\n and tried to create him in the brief time they had on\n stage. Others still were actors who had one rather\n inflexible way of playing, and used it for all kinds of\n parts. Their performances were uniform imitations of\n each other, and all were imitations of the early acting\n style of Marlon Brando. They seemed to forget,\n Peggy thought, that Brando’s style developed\n from the roles he had to play, and that as he got\n other roles, he showed other facets of a rounded talent.\n It made her angry that some actors thought\n they could get ahead in a creative field by being\n imitative.\n\n14", "“Yes. There are about a dozen of us, more or less.\n We live in a place called the Gramercy Arms—a\n wonderful place—and we live like one big noisy family.\n The Arms is run just for young actresses, so we\n all have a lot in common. I haven’t seen Greta for\n weeks—she’s been out of town with a play—and I’m\n just getting over being stunned at seeing her now.”\n\n\n “Peggy tactfully neglected to mention that the\n play flopped,” Greta laughed, “and now I’m back in\n town without a job. In fact, that’s why I’m here.”\n\n\n “You mean you’re going to read for Mal?” Peggy\n asked excitedly.", "The next “businessman type” was better, but still\n not quite on target, Peggy thought. He seemed to be\n playing the part for laughs, and although there were\n some comic values to be extracted from the role, it\n was really far more a straight dramatic character.\n Still, he was clearly a better actor than the first,\n and with direction might do well.\n\n\n Following his reading, Mal again repeated his\n polite, invariable formula, “Thank you. We’ll let you\n know our decision in a day or two,” and called for\n the next reading.\n\n\n Peggy watched the remaining actors try for the\n role, and made mental notes of which ones were possible,\n which probable, and which stood no chance at\n all." ], [ "Only when Amy started to laugh did the three\n others realize how much alike they had sounded.\n Then they joined in the laughter and couldn’t seem\n to stop. When they seemed at the point of dissolving\n helplessly into a permanent attack of the giggles,\n Randy and Mal joined them.\n\n\n “If you’re laughing at the play,” Randy said\n gloomily, “I can hardly blame you. You never know\n just how badly you’ve written until someone gets up\n and starts to read your lines.”\n\n\n All at the same time, the girls started to reassure\n him and tell him how good the play was, and how\n badly the actors, including themselves, had handled\n the lines, but this was so much like their last exchange\n of conversation that once more they broke up\n in helpless laughter.\n\n\n When they got their breath back, and when coffee\n and pastry had been ordered, they tried to explain\n the cause of their hilarity to the boys.", "But despite this knowledge, she could not help\n looking ahead—all the way ahead—to the restless\n stir of the opening-night audience out front, the last-minute\n preparations backstage, the bright, hot lights\n and the smell of make-up and scenery paint as she\n waited to go on in Act One, Scene One of\nCome\n Closer\n, Randy Brewster’s brilliant new play in which\n Peggy Lane would be discovered!\n\n12\nII\n\n The Hopefuls\nThe audience consisted of a handful of actors and\n actresses, and Randy Brewster and Mallory Seton.\n The stage lighting was a cold splash produced by two\n floodlights without color gels to soften them. The\n scenery was the brick back wall of the stage, two\n ladders, a table and two straight-backed chairs. Only\n the front row of house lights was on, and the back of\n the theater was dark, empty and gloomy, a shadowy\n wasteland of empty rows of seats like tombstones.", "“... so, you see,” Peggy concluded, “we were\n each explaining how good the others were and how\n bad we were, and when Randy started telling us how\n bad he had been as a writer, we just couldn’t stand\n it!”\n\n\n It was Mal who got them back to sane ground.\n With his tough face, like a movie gangster’s or private\n detective’s, and his gentle, cultured English voice and\n assured manner, he calmly gave his opinion of the\n afternoon’s auditions.", "Peggy’s friend and housemate, Amy Preston,\n smiled in agreement and said, “It’s not an easy business,\n honey, is it? But the ones I feel sorriest for\n right now are Mal and Randy. After all, they have\n the unpleasant job of choosing and refusing, and a\n lot of these folks are their friends. I wouldn’t want\n to be in their shoes.”\n\n2", "Not wanting to press Paula further, and feeling\n that perhaps she had asked too personal a question\n on such short acquaintance, Peggy reluctantly stood\n too, and joined Paula to watch the last of what she\n now could only think of as the livestock show.\n\n\n As she drew closer to the table, she heard Mal saying,\n “I’m really sorry, Mr. Lang, but you’re just not\n the right type for the role. Perhaps some other....”\n and his voice trailed off in embarrassment.\n\n\n Lang, a short, thin, unhappy young man, answered\n almost tearfully, “But, Mr. Seton, looks aren’t everything.\n I’m really a funny comedian. Honestly! If you\n would only give me a chance to read for you, I know\n that I could make you change your mind about the\n way this character should look!”", "When he was done, Peggy and two others were\n given scripts and told to come to the theater on Saturday.\n Feeling lightheaded and giddy, Peggy settled\n herself on one of the folding chairs that lined\n the back wall, and waited for Mal, Randy, and Amy\n to finish so she could join them for coffee.\n\n11\n\n Scarcely noticing the rest of the proceedings, she\n thought only about the coming readings. She was\n so familiar with the play that she knew she had an\n advantage, perhaps unfairly, over the other two girls.\n She had watched the script grow from its first rough\n draft to the finished text now in her hands, and had\n discussed it with Randy through each revision. She\n knew she could play the part; in fact, she suspected\n secretly that Randy had written it for her, and the\n thought made her blush. Still, it would not be easy,\n she knew. Mal’s sense of fairness and his absolute\n devotion to the play above everything else would\n keep him from making up his mind in advance.", "4\n\n “Oh, they were just sweet-talking me,” Amy replied.\n “And as for you, you know you don’t have to\n worry about your looks. You have a wonderful face!\n You can look beautiful, or comic, or pathetic, or\n cute or anything. I’m stuck with just being a South’n\n Belle, blond and helpless, po’ li’l ol’ me, lookin’ sad\n and sweet through those ol’ magnolia blossoms!”\n She broadened her slight, soft accent until it sounded\n like something you could spread on hot cornbread,\n and both girls broke into laughter that sounded odd\n in the strained atmosphere of the bare rehearsal\n studio.", "“Oh, no!” Peggy said. “You two were just marvelous!\n But I couldn’t have been worse. I know I read\n the part wrong. I thought I had the character clear in\n my mind, but I’m sure that the way it came out was a\n mile off!”\n\n\n “You have a lot more talent than judgment,” Greta\n said mournfully. “You were perfect. And so was\n Paula. As for me....” Her voice trailed off in despair.\n\n\n “I don’t know how you can say that, Greta,” Paula\n put in. “I know you were the best in your part, and\n nobody even came close to Peggy. But I’ve never\n felt so off in my life as I did reading that part. It’s a\n wonder any of you even want to be seen with me!”\n\n18", "On the stage, a “businessman type” was reading\n his lines. Peggy knew, after the first few words, that\n he would not do. He had somehow completely\n missed the character of the man he was portraying,\n and was heavily overplaying. Mal, being perhaps\n more patient than Peggy, listened and watched\n with great care. Amy, who was acting as Mal’s assistant\n for the production, sat in a chair by the proscenium,\n reading her script by the light of a small\n lamp and feeding the actor cue lines. Mal followed\n the whole sequence with no visible sign of impatience\n and, when the actor was through, said,\n “Thank you. We’ll let you know our decision in a day\n or two.”\n\n13", "Four men separated themselves from the crowd\n and approached the table. Peggy watched with interest\n as Mal and Randy looked them over, murmured\n to Amy to take notes, and asked questions.\n After a few minutes, the men left, two of them looking\n happy, two resigned. Then Mal stood and called\n for leading man types, late twenties or early thirties,\n tall and athletic. As six tall, athletic, handsome\n young men came forward, Peggy felt that she just\n couldn’t stand watching the casting interviews any\n longer. It reminded her too much of the livestock\n shows she had attended as a youngster in her home\n town of Rockport, Wisconsin. Necessary though it\n was, she felt it was hardly a way to have to deal\n with human beings.\n\n\n Slipping back through the crowd of waiting actors,\n she joined the actresses in the rear of the room, and\n found an empty seat next to a young girl.\n\n\n “Hi,” she said. “What’s the matter, can’t you watch\n it either?”", "The same process was then followed for the leading\n men, and the same wide range of talent and understanding\n of the part was displayed. Some seemed\n to have no idea at all about the play or its meaning,\n and Peggy was sure that these men had read only\n the parts marked for them. Others had a clear understanding\n of the kind of character they were playing,\n and tried to create him in the brief time they had on\n stage. Others still were actors who had one rather\n inflexible way of playing, and used it for all kinds of\n parts. Their performances were uniform imitations of\n each other, and all were imitations of the early acting\n style of Marlon Brando. They seemed to forget,\n Peggy thought, that Brando’s style developed\n from the roles he had to play, and that as he got\n other roles, he showed other facets of a rounded talent.\n It made her angry that some actors thought\n they could get ahead in a creative field by being\n imitative.\n\n14", "Each actor, no matter how good or how bad, was\n treated with impersonal courtesy by Mal, and each\n left looking sure that the part was his. Peggy was\n glad that she would not have to see their faces when\n they learned that they had not been selected.\n\n\n “The pity of it,” she whispered to Randy, “isn’t\n that there are so many bad ones, but that there are\n so many good ones, and that only one can be selected\n for each role. I wish there were some way of telling\n the good ones you can’t take that they were really\n good, but that you just couldn’t take everyone!”\n\n\n “You can’t let yourself worry about that,” Randy\n replied. “The good ones know they’re good, and\n they’re not going to be discouraged by the loss of a\n role. And the bad ones think they’re good, too, and\n most of them have tremendous egos to protect\n them from ever finding out—or even thinking—otherwise!”", "The girl smiled in understanding. “It always upsets\n me,” she replied, “but it’s something we simply\n have to learn to live with. At least until we get well-known,\n or get agents to do this sort of thing for us.”\n\n\n “It sounds as if you’ve been in a few of these before,”\n Peggy said.\n\n\n “I have. But not here in the East,” the girl replied.\n “I’m from California, and I’ve been in a few little-theater\n things there, but nobody seems to pay much\n attention to them. I heard that off-Broadway theater\n in New York attracts a lot of critics, and I thought\n that I’d do better here. Have you had any luck?”", "It was at this point that Mal and Randy came in,\n with pleasant, if somewhat brisk, nods to the assembled\n actors and actresses, and a special smile for\n Amy and Peggy. In a businesslike manner, they settled\n themselves at a table near the windows, spread\n out scripts and pads and pencils, and prepared for\n the chore that faced them. Amy, who was there to\n help the boys by acting as secretary for the occasion,\n wished Peggy good luck, and joined the boys at the\n table. Her job was to take names and addresses, and\n to jot down any facts about each actor that Randy\n and Mal wanted to be sure to remember.", "“I don’t doubt that you could,” Mal said gently,\n “but if you did, the play would suffer. I’m afraid the\n comedian we need for this must be a large, rather\n bluff-looking person, like these three gentlemen\n whom I have chosen to hear. The part calls for it.\n I’m sorry.”\n\n\n Mr. Lang nodded sadly, mumbled, “I understand,”\n and walked off, his head hanging and his\n hands thrust deep in his pockets, looking less like a\n comedian than any man in the world. Peggy\n watched him go, not knowing whether to feel sorrier\n for him or for Mal.", "“I think it’s wonderful! I hope more than ever that\n I get the part! Do you really think I have a chance?”\n\n\n Greta nodded decisively. “If you can act, you’re\n made for it,” she said.\n\n\n “That’s just what Peggy said!”\n\n\n Peggy stole a glance through the doors to the theater.\n “I think we’re about ready to find out whether or\n not you can act,” she said. “They seem to be about\n through with the actors, and that means you’re on\n next!”\n\n\n Wishing each other good luck, they entered the\n darkened part of the house and prepared for what\n Peggy could only think of as their ordeal.\nAfterward, as Peggy, Amy, Paula, and Greta sat at\n a table in a nearby coffeehouse waiting for Mal and\n Randy to join them, each was sure that she had been\n terrible.", "“Don’t count too much on it,” Peggy cautioned,\n “or you may be too bitterly disappointed if you don’t\n get it. But,” she added, enthusiastically violating her\n own rule of caution, “I’m sure, too! I’ll see you Saturday.\n Even if I don’t get a script, I’ll be there just to\n hear you read!”\n\n\n Then, with a smile of farewell, Peggy turned her\n attention to the “career woman, early thirties” classification\n that Mal had called for next. Once that\n was out of the way, she knew it would be her turn.", "The next “businessman type” was better, but still\n not quite on target, Peggy thought. He seemed to be\n playing the part for laughs, and although there were\n some comic values to be extracted from the role, it\n was really far more a straight dramatic character.\n Still, he was clearly a better actor than the first,\n and with direction might do well.\n\n\n Following his reading, Mal again repeated his\n polite, invariable formula, “Thank you. We’ll let you\n know our decision in a day or two,” and called for\n the next reading.\n\n\n Peggy watched the remaining actors try for the\n role, and made mental notes of which ones were possible,\n which probable, and which stood no chance at\n all.", "“Yes. There are about a dozen of us, more or less.\n We live in a place called the Gramercy Arms—a\n wonderful place—and we live like one big noisy family.\n The Arms is run just for young actresses, so we\n all have a lot in common. I haven’t seen Greta for\n weeks—she’s been out of town with a play—and I’m\n just getting over being stunned at seeing her now.”\n\n\n “Peggy tactfully neglected to mention that the\n play flopped,” Greta laughed, “and now I’m back in\n town without a job. In fact, that’s why I’m here.”\n\n\n “You mean you’re going to read for Mal?” Peggy\n asked excitedly.", "And if it was difficult for Mal, she thought, it was\n more so for Randy Brewster, the author of the play,\n for her friendship with him was of a different sort\n than with Mal. Mal was just a friend—a good one,\n to be sure—but with Randy Brewster, somehow,\n things were different. There was nothing “serious,”\n she assured herself, but they had gone on dates together\n with a regularity that was a little more than\n casual and, whatever his feelings were for her, she\n was sure that they were more complicated than\n Mal’s.\n\n\n “Do you think they’ll ever get through all these\n people?” Amy asked, interrupting her thoughts.\n “How can they hope to hear so many actors read for\n them in just one afternoon?”" ], [ "This time, there were not so many applicants and\n Peggy remembered Randy telling her that this\n would be one of their most difficult roles to cast.\n Only four actresses came forward, and Mal, with\n difficulty, reviewed them all. Unable to eliminate by\n type, he gave them all scripts and asked them to\n come to the theater. Then he called for “character\n ingénues” and Peggy joined seven other girls in the\n “livestock show.”\n\n\n Mal reviewed them carefully, managing to look at\n Peggy with complete lack of recognition. He gently\n eliminated three of them on the basis of hair coloring,\n height or general type. Another, curiously\n enough, was eliminated, like Amy, for a Southern accent,\n and a fifth, also like Amy, was too beautiful.\n “The part calls for a pretty girl,” Mal said with a rare\n smile, “but not for a girl so pretty that she’ll dominate\n the stage! It was a pleasure to look at you, but I’m\n afraid you’re not quite right for the part.”", "It was at this point that Mal and Randy came in,\n with pleasant, if somewhat brisk, nods to the assembled\n actors and actresses, and a special smile for\n Amy and Peggy. In a businesslike manner, they settled\n themselves at a table near the windows, spread\n out scripts and pads and pencils, and prepared for\n the chore that faced them. Amy, who was there to\n help the boys by acting as secretary for the occasion,\n wished Peggy good luck, and joined the boys at the\n table. Her job was to take names and addresses, and\n to jot down any facts about each actor that Randy\n and Mal wanted to be sure to remember.", "“... so, you see,” Peggy concluded, “we were\n each explaining how good the others were and how\n bad we were, and when Randy started telling us how\n bad he had been as a writer, we just couldn’t stand\n it!”\n\n\n It was Mal who got them back to sane ground.\n With his tough face, like a movie gangster’s or private\n detective’s, and his gentle, cultured English voice and\n assured manner, he calmly gave his opinion of the\n afternoon’s auditions.", "On the stage, a “businessman type” was reading\n his lines. Peggy knew, after the first few words, that\n he would not do. He had somehow completely\n missed the character of the man he was portraying,\n and was heavily overplaying. Mal, being perhaps\n more patient than Peggy, listened and watched\n with great care. Amy, who was acting as Mal’s assistant\n for the production, sat in a chair by the proscenium,\n reading her script by the light of a small\n lamp and feeding the actor cue lines. Mal followed\n the whole sequence with no visible sign of impatience\n and, when the actor was through, said,\n “Thank you. We’ll let you know our decision in a day\n or two.”\n\n13", "Four men separated themselves from the crowd\n and approached the table. Peggy watched with interest\n as Mal and Randy looked them over, murmured\n to Amy to take notes, and asked questions.\n After a few minutes, the men left, two of them looking\n happy, two resigned. Then Mal stood and called\n for leading man types, late twenties or early thirties,\n tall and athletic. As six tall, athletic, handsome\n young men came forward, Peggy felt that she just\n couldn’t stand watching the casting interviews any\n longer. It reminded her too much of the livestock\n shows she had attended as a youngster in her home\n town of Rockport, Wisconsin. Necessary though it\n was, she felt it was hardly a way to have to deal\n with human beings.\n\n\n Slipping back through the crowd of waiting actors,\n she joined the actresses in the rear of the room, and\n found an empty seat next to a young girl.\n\n\n “Hi,” she said. “What’s the matter, can’t you watch\n it either?”", "“Oh, they won’t be doing readings today,” Peggy\n replied, glad to turn her attention from what was becoming\n a difficult subject for thought. “This is just a\n first cast call. All they want to do today is pick people\n for type. They’ll select all the possible ones, send\n the impossible ones away, and then go into elimination\n readings later.”\n\n3\n\n “But what if the people they pick for looks can’t\n act?” Amy asked. “And what if some of the rejects\n are wonderful actors?”\n\n\n “They won’t go back to the rejects,” Peggy explained,\n “because they both have a pretty good idea\n of what the characters in the play should look like.\n And if the people they pick aren’t good enough actors,\n then they hold another cast call and try again.\n Mal says that sometimes certain parts are so hard to\n cast that they have to go through a dozen calls just\n to find one actor.”", "“I think it’s wonderful! I hope more than ever that\n I get the part! Do you really think I have a chance?”\n\n\n Greta nodded decisively. “If you can act, you’re\n made for it,” she said.\n\n\n “That’s just what Peggy said!”\n\n\n Peggy stole a glance through the doors to the theater.\n “I think we’re about ready to find out whether or\n not you can act,” she said. “They seem to be about\n through with the actors, and that means you’re on\n next!”\n\n\n Wishing each other good luck, they entered the\n darkened part of the house and prepared for what\n Peggy could only think of as their ordeal.\nAfterward, as Peggy, Amy, Paula, and Greta sat at\n a table in a nearby coffeehouse waiting for Mal and\n Randy to join them, each was sure that she had been\n terrible.", "Each actor, no matter how good or how bad, was\n treated with impersonal courtesy by Mal, and each\n left looking sure that the part was his. Peggy was\n glad that she would not have to see their faces when\n they learned that they had not been selected.\n\n\n “The pity of it,” she whispered to Randy, “isn’t\n that there are so many bad ones, but that there are\n so many good ones, and that only one can be selected\n for each role. I wish there were some way of telling\n the good ones you can’t take that they were really\n good, but that you just couldn’t take everyone!”\n\n\n “You can’t let yourself worry about that,” Randy\n replied. “The good ones know they’re good, and\n they’re not going to be discouraged by the loss of a\n role. And the bad ones think they’re good, too, and\n most of them have tremendous egos to protect\n them from ever finding out—or even thinking—otherwise!”", "Mal went down the line, regretfully dismissing one\n after the other of the girls, and occasionally asking\n one to step aside to try for another role. His tough-looking\n expression hardly varied as he spoke to each\n one, but Peggy thought she saw the ghost of a smile\n cross his face when he spoke to Paula Andrews. Another\n review of the remaining girls eliminated a few\n more. Finally, there were only four left, Paula\n among them. Mal thanked them, distributed scripts,\n and asked them to be at the Penthouse Theater on\n Saturday at noon.\n\n\n Paula returned to Peggy with eyes shining. “Oh,\n Peggy! I think you were right! I just know I’m going\n to get the part! I know it!”\n\n10", "The next “businessman type” was better, but still\n not quite on target, Peggy thought. He seemed to be\n playing the part for laughs, and although there were\n some comic values to be extracted from the role, it\n was really far more a straight dramatic character.\n Still, he was clearly a better actor than the first,\n and with direction might do well.\n\n\n Following his reading, Mal again repeated his\n polite, invariable formula, “Thank you. We’ll let you\n know our decision in a day or two,” and called for\n the next reading.\n\n\n Peggy watched the remaining actors try for the\n role, and made mental notes of which ones were possible,\n which probable, and which stood no chance at\n all.", "When he was done, Peggy and two others were\n given scripts and told to come to the theater on Saturday.\n Feeling lightheaded and giddy, Peggy settled\n herself on one of the folding chairs that lined\n the back wall, and waited for Mal, Randy, and Amy\n to finish so she could join them for coffee.\n\n11\n\n Scarcely noticing the rest of the proceedings, she\n thought only about the coming readings. She was\n so familiar with the play that she knew she had an\n advantage, perhaps unfairly, over the other two girls.\n She had watched the script grow from its first rough\n draft to the finished text now in her hands, and had\n discussed it with Randy through each revision. She\n knew she could play the part; in fact, she suspected\n secretly that Randy had written it for her, and the\n thought made her blush. Still, it would not be easy,\n she knew. Mal’s sense of fairness and his absolute\n devotion to the play above everything else would\n keep him from making up his mind in advance.", "4\n\n “Oh, they were just sweet-talking me,” Amy replied.\n “And as for you, you know you don’t have to\n worry about your looks. You have a wonderful face!\n You can look beautiful, or comic, or pathetic, or\n cute or anything. I’m stuck with just being a South’n\n Belle, blond and helpless, po’ li’l ol’ me, lookin’ sad\n and sweet through those ol’ magnolia blossoms!”\n She broadened her slight, soft accent until it sounded\n like something you could spread on hot cornbread,\n and both girls broke into laughter that sounded odd\n in the strained atmosphere of the bare rehearsal\n studio.", "The same process was then followed for the leading\n men, and the same wide range of talent and understanding\n of the part was displayed. Some seemed\n to have no idea at all about the play or its meaning,\n and Peggy was sure that these men had read only\n the parts marked for them. Others had a clear understanding\n of the kind of character they were playing,\n and tried to create him in the brief time they had on\n stage. Others still were actors who had one rather\n inflexible way of playing, and used it for all kinds of\n parts. Their performances were uniform imitations of\n each other, and all were imitations of the early acting\n style of Marlon Brando. They seemed to forget,\n Peggy thought, that Brando’s style developed\n from the roles he had to play, and that as he got\n other roles, he showed other facets of a rounded talent.\n It made her angry that some actors thought\n they could get ahead in a creative field by being\n imitative.\n\n14", "“It seems kind of unfair, doesn’t it, to be eliminated\n just because you’re not the right physical\n type,” Amy said, “but I can understand it. They have\n to start somewhere, and I guess that’s as good a place\n as any.” Then she smiled and added, “I guess I’m\n just feeling sorry for myself, because Mal told me\n there was no sense in my trying out at all, because I\n didn’t look or sound right for any part in the play. If\n I don’t get rid of this Southern accent of mine, I\n may never get a part at all, except in a Tennessee\n Williams play!”\n\n\n Peggy nodded sympathetically. “But it wasn’t just\n your accent, Amy,” she said. “It’s your looks, too. At\n least for this play. Mal and Randy told you that\n you’re just too pretty for any of the parts that fit\n your age, and that’s nothing to feel bad about. If\n anybody ought to feel insulted, it’s me, because\n they asked me to try out!”", "Mal started the proceedings by introducing himself\n and Randy. Then, estimating the crowd, he said,\n “Since there are fewer men here, and also fewer male\n roles to cast, we’re going to do them first. I hope that\n you ladies won’t mind. We won’t keep you waiting\n long, but if we worked with you first, we’d have these\n gentlemen waiting most of the day. Shall we get\n started?” After a brief glance at his notes, he called\n out, “First, I’d like to see businessman types, young\n forties. How many have we?”\n\n5", "“All right, gentlemen,” Mal called out. “That takes\n care of the male roles. All of you who are left will be\n given copies of the play to study, marked at the passages\n I want to hear. Be sure to read the whole play\n carefully, so that you understand the workings of the\n characters you have been selected to read. You have\n three days to look it over. We’ll meet at ten o’clock\n on Saturday morning at the Penthouse Theater to\n hear you. Thank you. And now for the ladies.”\n\n9\n\n The men left, after being given their scripts, and\n though they chatted amiably with one another,\n Peggy was sure that each was casting rather hostile\n looks toward others who were trying for the same\n parts. Keeping friendships in the theater was not an\n easy thing, she thought, particularly for people of\n similar physical types!", "But despite this knowledge, she could not help\n looking ahead—all the way ahead—to the restless\n stir of the opening-night audience out front, the last-minute\n preparations backstage, the bright, hot lights\n and the smell of make-up and scenery paint as she\n waited to go on in Act One, Scene One of\nCome\n Closer\n, Randy Brewster’s brilliant new play in which\n Peggy Lane would be discovered!\n\n12\nII\n\n The Hopefuls\nThe audience consisted of a handful of actors and\n actresses, and Randy Brewster and Mallory Seton.\n The stage lighting was a cold splash produced by two\n floodlights without color gels to soften them. The\n scenery was the brick back wall of the stage, two\n ladders, a table and two straight-backed chairs. Only\n the front row of house lights was on, and the back of\n the theater was dark, empty and gloomy, a shadowy\n wasteland of empty rows of seats like tombstones.", "“I don’t doubt that you could,” Mal said gently,\n “but if you did, the play would suffer. I’m afraid the\n comedian we need for this must be a large, rather\n bluff-looking person, like these three gentlemen\n whom I have chosen to hear. The part calls for it.\n I’m sorry.”\n\n\n Mr. Lang nodded sadly, mumbled, “I understand,”\n and walked off, his head hanging and his\n hands thrust deep in his pockets, looking less like a\n comedian than any man in the world. Peggy\n watched him go, not knowing whether to feel sorrier\n for him or for Mal.", "Mal’s first concern in reviewing the actresses was,\n of course, for the leading role. And, of course, it was\n for this role that he had the most applicants. More\n than twenty girls came forward when the announcement\n was made, and Peggy thought that she had\n never seen so many striking and beautiful faces and\n figures. It was not going to be easy for Mal to make a\n choice. As Paula, her new friend, went forward to\n join the others, Peggy whispered a word of encouragement,\n then stood to one side to watch.", "Not wanting to press Paula further, and feeling\n that perhaps she had asked too personal a question\n on such short acquaintance, Peggy reluctantly stood\n too, and joined Paula to watch the last of what she\n now could only think of as the livestock show.\n\n\n As she drew closer to the table, she heard Mal saying,\n “I’m really sorry, Mr. Lang, but you’re just not\n the right type for the role. Perhaps some other....”\n and his voice trailed off in embarrassment.\n\n\n Lang, a short, thin, unhappy young man, answered\n almost tearfully, “But, Mr. Seton, looks aren’t everything.\n I’m really a funny comedian. Honestly! If you\n would only give me a chance to read for you, I know\n that I could make you change your mind about the\n way this character should look!”" ] ]
valid	51351	[ "What did the captain think was causing the scanning blackout?", "From whose point of view is the story told?", "Why was it his first trip as Captain?", "How did Quade feel about the situation?", "How did Quade compare himself to the captain?", "Which of the following could not be caused by transphasia?", "How did Quade feel about what he said?", "What helped mitigate the effects of the anomaly?", "Why was Nagurski happy to no longer be a captain?" ]	[ [ "Many planetary gravitational fields", "He was uncertain", "The kites being taken out by hostiles", "Transphasia" ], [ "Multiple people", "Nagurski", "Gavin", "Quade" ], [ "He used to be First Officer", "He used to work with gemstones", "He used to be an Ordinary Spaceman", "He used to work as an officer on Earth" ], [ "He was less cautious than others", "He wished he was getting hazard pay", "It was completely unfamiliar to him", "He was more cautious than others" ], [ "He felt vastly inferior", "He felt a little inferior", "He felt superior", "He felt equal" ], [ "Feeling an earthquake", "Smelling the color red", "Hearing the sunlight", "Tasting a cry for help" ], [ "That it was pretty", "That it was ugly", "That it left a bad taste", "That it was incorrect" ], [ "Talking", "Moving around", "The training of the spacemen", "The ship" ], [ "The men didn't trust him", "He was suspicious of everything", "He had only wanted to do it for a few years", "He wanted less stress at work" ] ]	[ 3, 3, 2, 1, 3, 1, 1, 4, 4 ]	[ 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "\"Captain Gavin,\" Quade said patiently, \"you must realize that an\n outsider like you, among a crew of skilled spacemen, can never be more\n than a figurehead.\"\n\n\n Was this the way I was to be treated? Why, this man had deliberately\n insulted me, his captain. I controlled myself, remembering the\n familiarity that had always existed between members of a crew working\n under close conditions, from the time of the ancient submarines and the\n first orbital ships.\n\n\n \"Quade,\" I said, \"there's only one way for us to find out which of us\n is right about the cause of our scanning blackout.\"\n\n\n \"We go out and find the reason.\"\n\n\n \"Exactly. We go. You and me. I hope you can stand my company.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not sure I can,\" he answered reluctantly. \"My hazard pay doesn't\n cover exploring with rookies. With all due respect, Captain.\"", "\"Can't,\" I told him. \"I can't trust your opinion. I can't trust\nanything\n. That's why I'm Captain.\"\n\n\n \"You'll get over feeling like that.\"\n\n\n \"I know. Then I'll become First Officer.\"\n\n\n \"But look at that screen, sir,\" Quade said with an emphatic swing of\n his scarred arm. \"I've seen blank scanning like that before and you\n haven't—it's your first trip. This always means transphasia—cortex\n dissolution, motor area feedback, the Aitchell Effect—call it anything\n you like, it's still transphasia.\"\n\n\n \"I know what transphasia is,\" I said moderately. \"It means an\n electrogravitational disturbance of incoming sense data, rechanneling\n it to the wrong receptive areas. Besides the human brain, it also\n effects electronic equipment, like radar and television.\"", "\"I'm not sure I do want to find out what that was just now. I didn't\n like the feel of it. But the important thing is for us not to get any\n further from the ship.\"\n\n\n \"That's important, Captain?\"\n\n\n \"To the best of my judgment, yes. This—condition—didn't begin until\n we got so far away from the spacer—in time or distance. I don't want\n it to get any worse. It's troublesome not to know black from white, but\n it would be a downright inconvenience not to know which way is up.\"\n\n\n \"Not for an experienced spaceman,\" Quade griped. \"I'm used to\n free-fall.\"\n\n\n But he turned back.\n\n\n \"Just a minute,\" I said. \"There was something strange up ahead. I want\n to see if short-range radar can get through our electrogravitational\n jamming here.\"", "\"I believe you,\" I said quickly. \"Let's leave it at that. I don't know\n what he will hear; what's worrying me is\nhow\nhe'll hear it, in what\n sensory medium. I hope the sound doesn't blind him. His radar is his\n only chance.\"\n\n\n \"How do you figure on getting a better edge yourself, sir?\"\n\n\n \"I have the idea, but not the word for it. Tonal compensation, I\n suppose. If you can't shut out the noise, we'll have to drown it out.\"\n\n\n Farley nodded. \"Beat like a telephone time signal?\"\n\n\n \"That would do it.\"\n\n\n \"It would do something else. It would drive you nuts.\"\nI shrugged. \"It might be distracting.\"\n\n\n \"Captain, take my word for it,\" argued Farley. \"Constant sonic\n feedback inside a spacesuit will set you rocking against the grain.\"", "\"I don't understand it,\" Quade admitted. \"Transphasia hits you a foul\n as soon as you let it into the airlock.\"\n\n\n \"Apparently, Quade,\nthis\nthing is going to creep up on us.\"\n\n\n \"Don't sound smug, Captain. It's pitty-pattying behind you too.\"\n\n\n The keening call across the surface of consciousness postponed my reply.\n\n\n The wail was ominously forlorn, defiant of description. I turned my\n head around slowly inside my helmet, not even sure that I had heard it.\n\n\n But what else can you do with a wail but\nhear\nit?\n\n\n Quade nodded. \"I've felt this before. It usually hits sooner. Let's\n trace it.\"", "\"How far can we run it back?\"\n\n\n Quade shrugged. \"Miles.\"\n\n\n \"How many?\"\n\n\n \"We have three miles of cable. As long as you can feel, taste, see,\n smell or hear that rope anchoring you to home, you aren't lost.\"\n\n\n \"Three miles isn't good enough. We don't have enough fuel to change\n sites that often. You can't use the drive in a gravitational field, you\n know.\"\n\n\n \"What else can we do, Captain?\" Nagurski asked puzzledly.\n\n\n \"You've said that the spaceship is our only protection from\n transphasia. Is that it?\"\n\n\n Quade gave a curt nod.", "How could we be less vulnerable, or preferably invulnerable?\n\"Captain, you got nothing to worry about,\" Quartermaster Farley said.\n He patted a space helmet paternally. \"You got yourself a self-contained\n environment. The suit's eye looks into yours at the arteries in the\n back of your eyeball so it can read your amber corpuscles and feed\n you your oxygen in the right amounts; you're a bottle-fed baby. If\n transphasia gets you seeing limburger, turn on the radar and you're\n air-conditioned as an igloo. Nothing short of a cosmic blast can dent\n that hide. You got it made.\"\n\n\n \"You are right,\" I said, \"only transphasia comes right through these\n air-fast joints.\"\n\n\n \"Something strange about the trance, Captain,\" Farley said darkly. \"Any\n spaceman can tell you that. Things we don't understand.\"", "THE SPICY SOUND OF SUCCESS\nBy JIM HARMON\n\n\n Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine August 1959.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nNow was the captain's chance to prove he knew\n \nless than the crew—all their lives hung upon it!\nThere was nothing showing on the video screen. That was why we were\n looking at it so analytically.\n\n\n \"Transphasia, that's what it is,\" Ordinary Spaceman Quade stated with\n a definite thrust of his angular jaw in my direction. \"You can take my\n word on that, Captain Gavin.\"", "\"Obviously.\" Quade glanced disgustedly at the screen.\n\n\n \"Too obvious. This time it might not be a familiar condition of many\n planetary gravitational fields. On this planet, that blank kinescope\n may mean our Big Brother kites were knocked down by hostile natives.\"\n\n\n \"You are plain wrong, Captain. Traditionally, alien races never\n interfere with our explorations. Generally, they are so alien to us\n they can't even recognize our existence.\"\nI drew myself up to my full height—and noticed in irritation it was\n still an inch less than Quade's. \"I don't understand you men. Look at\n yourself, Quade. You've been busted to Ordinary Spaceman for just that\n kind of thinking, for relying on tradition, on things that have worked\n before. Not only your thinking is slipshod, you've grown careless about\n everything else, even your own life.\"", "\"The hell it is,\" Quade said grimly. \"It's his deadliest liability.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I must inform you that I am demoting you to Acting\n Executive Officer.\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\" Quade gawked. \"But dammit, Captain, you can't do that to me!\n I'll lose hazard pay and be that much further from retirement!\"\n\n\n \"That's tough,\" I sympathized, \"but in every service a chap gets broken\n in rank now and then.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe it's worth it,\" Quade said heavily. \"Now maybe I've learned how\n to stay alive out here. I just hope I don't forget.\"\n\n\n I thought about that. I was nearly through with my first mission and\n I could speak with experience, even if it was the least amount of\n experience aboard.", "The thought intruded itself:\nwhy\nhadn't I recognized this before I\n let Quade escape to almost certain death? Wasn't it because I wanted\n him dead, because I resented the crew's resentment of my authority, and\n recognized in him the leader and symbol of this resentment?\n\n\n I threw away that idea along with my half-used cigarette. It might very\n well be true, but how did that help now?\n\n\n I had to\nthink\n.\n\n\n I was going after him, that was certain. Not only for humane\n reasons—he was the most important member of the crew. With him around,\n there were only two opinions, his and mine. Without him, I'd have\n endless opinions to contend with.", "Before I could agree with one of his theories for once, a streak of\n spice shot past us. It bounced back tangily and made a bitter rip\n between the two of us. There was no time to judge its size, if it had\n size, or its decibel range, or its caloric count, before a small, sharp\n pain dug in and dwindled down to nothing in one long second.\n\n\n The new odor pattern in my head told me Quade was saying something I\n couldn't quite make out.\n\n\n Quade then pulled me in the direction of the nasty little pain.\n\n\n \"Wait a minute, Spaceman!\" I bellowed. \"Where the devil do you think\n you're dragging me? Halt! That's a direct order.\"\n\n\n He stopped. \"Don't you want to find out what that was? This\nis\nan\n exploration party, you know, sir.\"", "\"In departing from standard procedure that we have learned to trust,\n you are risking more than a few men—you risk the whole mission in\n gambling so much of the ship. A captain doesn't take chances like that!\"\n\n\n \"I never said I wouldn't take chances. But I'm not going to take\nstupid\nchances. I\nmight\nbe doing the wrong thing, but I can see you\nwould\nbe doing it wrong.\"\n\n\n \"You know nothing about space, Captain! You have to trust\nus\n.\"\n\n\n \"That's it exactly, First Officer Nagurski,\" I said sociably. \"If you\n lazy, lax, complacent slobs want to do something in a particular way, I\n know it\nhas\nto be wrong.\"\n\n\n I turned and found Wallace, the personnel man, standing in the hatchway.\n\n\n \"Pardon, Captain, but would you say we also lacked initiative?\"", "I clapped him on the shoulder. \"But, man, you have just been telling\n me all we had to worry about was common transphasia. A man with your\n experience could protect himself and cover even a rookie, under such\n familiar conditions—right?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir, I suppose I could,\" Quade said, bitterly aware he had lost\n out somewhere and hoping that it wasn't the start of a trend.\n\"Looks okay to me,\" I said. Quade passed a gauntlet over his faceplate.\n \"It's real. I can blur it with a smudged visor. When it blurs, it's\n solid.\"\n\n\n The landscape beyond the black corona left by our landing rockets was\n unimpressive. The rocky desert was made up of silicon and iron oxide,\n so it looked much the same as a terrestrial location. Yellowish-white\n sand ran up to and around reddish brown rock clawing into the pink\n sunlight.", "\"Then,\" I told them, \"we will have to start tearing apart this ship.\"\nSergeant-Major Hoffman and his team were doing a good job of ripping\n out the side of the afterhold. Through the portal I could see the\n suited men expertly guiding the huge curved sections on their ray\n projectors.\n\n\n \"Cannibalizing is dangerous.\" Nagurski put his pipe in his teeth and\n shook his head disapprovingly.\n\n\n \"Spaceships have parts as interchangeable as Erector sets. We can\n take apart the tractors and put our ship back together again after we\n complete the survey.\"\n\n\n \"You can't assemble a jigsaw puzzle if some of the pieces are missing.\"\n\n\n \"You can't get a complete picture, but you can get a good idea of\n what it looks like. We can take off in a reasonable facsimile of a\n spaceship.\"", "\"Quail,\" Nagurski replied. \"That's what I see.\"\n\n\n \"You,\" I said carefully, \"have been in space a\nlong\ntime. Look again.\"\n\n\n \"I see our old buddy, Quail.\"\n\n\n I took another slosh of burgundy and peered up ahead. It\nwas\nQuade. A\n man in a spacesuit, faceplate in the dust, two hundred yards ahead.\nGrudgingly I stepped forward, out of the shadow of the ridge.\n A hysterically screaming wind rocked me on my toes. We pushed\n on sluggishly to Quade's side, moving to the tempo of\nPomp and\n Circumstance\n.\n\n\n Farley lugged Quade over on his back and read his gauges.", "I leaned forward, elbows on knees. \"Let me tell\nyou\na thing,\n Nagurski. Your trust of these damn-fool spacemen is why you are no\n longer a captain. You can't trust anything out here in space, much less\n human nature. Even I know that much!\"\n\n\n He was pained. \"If you don't trust the men, they won't trust you, Gav.\"\n\n\n \"They don't have to trust me. All they have to do is\nobey\nme or, by\n Jupiter, get frozen stiff and thawed out just in time for court-marshal\n back home. Listen,\" I continued earnestly, \"these men aren't going to\n think of me—of\nus\n, the officers, as their leaders. As far as the\n crew is concerned, Ordinary Spaceman Quade is the best man on this\n ship.\"", "\"Bruce is content,\" I admitted. \"He couldn't be any more content and\n still be alive. But I'm not sure that theory works out with men. We'd\n have anarchy if I tried to let these starbucks pick their own master.\"\n\n\n \"\nI\nhad no trouble when I was a captain,\" Nagurski said. \"Ease the\n reins on the men. Just offer them your advice, your guidance. They\n will soon see why the service selected you as captain; they will pick\n you themselves.\"\n\n\n \"Did your crew voluntarily elect you as their leader?\"\n\n\n \"Of course they did, Gav. I'm an old hand at controlling crews.\"\n\n\n \"Then why are you First Officer under me now?\"", "\"He\nis\na good man,\" Nagurski said. \"You mustn't be jealous of his\n status.\"\n\n\n The dog growled. He must have sensed what I almost did to Nagurski.\n\n\n \"Never mind that for now,\" I said wearily. \"What was your idea for\n getting our exploration parties through this transphasia?\"\n\n\n \"There's only one idea for that,\" said Quade, ducking his long head\n and stepping through the connecting hatch. \"With the Captain's\n permission....\"\n\n\n \"Go ahead, Quade, tell him,\" Nagurski invited.\n\n\n \"There's only one way to wade through transphasia with any\n reliability,\" Quade told me. \"You keep some kind of physical contact\n with the spaceship. Parties are strung out on guide line, like we were,\n but the cable has to be run back and made fast to the hull.\"", "\"I would,\" I answered levelly.\n\n\n \"Then you'll be interested to hear that Spaceman Quade took a suit and\n a cartographer unit. He's out there somewhere, alone.\"\n\n\n \"The idiot!\" I yelped. \"Everyone needs a partner out there. Send out a\n team to follow his cable and drag him in here by it.\"\n\n\n \"He didn't hook on a cable, Captain,\" Wallace said. \"I suppose he\n intended to go beyond the three-mile limit as you demanded.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up, Wallace. You don't have to like me, but you can't twist what\n I said as long as I command this spacer.\"\n\n\n \"Cool off, Gav,\" Nagurski advised me. \"It's been done before. Anybody\n else would have been a fool to go out alone, but Quade is the most\n experienced man we have. He knows transphasia. Trust him.\"" ], [ "I took a sighting. My helmet set projected the pattern on the cornea.\n Sweetness building up to a stab of pure salt—those were the blips.\n\n\n Beside me, there was a thin thread of violet. Quade had whistled. He\n was reading the map too.\n\n\n The slope fell away sharply in front of us, becoming a deep gorge.\n There was something broken and twisted at the bottom, something we had\n known for an instant as a streak of spice.\n\n\n \"There's one free-fall,\" I said, \"where you wouldn't live long enough\n to get used to it.\"\n\n\n He said nothing on the route back to the spacer.\n\"I know all about this sort of thing, Gav,\" First Officer Nagurski said\n expansively. He was rubbing the well-worn ears of our beagle mascot,\n Bruce. A heavy tail thudded on the steel deck from time to time.", "\"Yes, sir,\" Farley said obediently. \"I'll give spacemen a few quarts of\n wine, telling them to use it carefully for scientific purposes only,\n and then they will be able to see where they are going. Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n I turned to leave, then paused briefly. \"You can come along, Farley.\n I'm sure you want to see that we don't waste any of the stuff.\"\n\"There they are!\" Nagurski called. \"Quade's footsteps again, just\n beyond that rocky ridge.\"\n\n\n The landscape was rich chocolate ice cream smothered with chocolate\n syrup, caramel, peanuts and maple syrup, eaten while you smoked an old,\n mellow Havana. The footsteps were faint traces of whipped cream across\n the dark, rich taste of the planet.", "\"Quail,\" Nagurski replied. \"That's what I see.\"\n\n\n \"You,\" I said carefully, \"have been in space a\nlong\ntime. Look again.\"\n\n\n \"I see our old buddy, Quail.\"\n\n\n I took another slosh of burgundy and peered up ahead. It\nwas\nQuade. A\n man in a spacesuit, faceplate in the dust, two hundred yards ahead.\nGrudgingly I stepped forward, out of the shadow of the ridge.\n A hysterically screaming wind rocked me on my toes. We pushed\n on sluggishly to Quade's side, moving to the tempo of\nPomp and\n Circumstance\n.\n\n\n Farley lugged Quade over on his back and read his gauges.", "\"Yes, this is definitely the trail of Quail,\" Nagurski said soberly.\n \"This is serious business. I must ask whoever has been giggling on\n this channel to shut up. Pardon me, Captain.\nYou\nweren't giggling,\n sir?\"\n\n\n \"I have never giggled in my life, Nagurski.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. That's what we all thought.\"\n\n\n A moment later, Nagurski added, \"Anyway, I just noticed it was my\n shelf—my, that is, self.\"\n\n\n The basso profundo performing\nFigaro\non my headset climbed to a\n girlish shriek. A sliver of ice. This was the call Quade and I had\n first heard as we were about to troop over a cliff. I dug in my heels.\n\n\n \"Take a good look around, boys,\" I said. \"What do you see?\"", "Before I could agree with one of his theories for once, a streak of\n spice shot past us. It bounced back tangily and made a bitter rip\n between the two of us. There was no time to judge its size, if it had\n size, or its decibel range, or its caloric count, before a small, sharp\n pain dug in and dwindled down to nothing in one long second.\n\n\n The new odor pattern in my head told me Quade was saying something I\n couldn't quite make out.\n\n\n Quade then pulled me in the direction of the nasty little pain.\n\n\n \"Wait a minute, Spaceman!\" I bellowed. \"Where the devil do you think\n you're dragging me? Halt! That's a direct order.\"\n\n\n He stopped. \"Don't you want to find out what that was? This\nis\nan\n exploration party, you know, sir.\"", "The men followed the First Officer's example, and the rope tying them\n to him. I went along cheerfully myself, until an enormous rump struck\n me violently in the face. My leaded boots were driven down into fertile\n soil, and my helmet was ringing like a bell. I got a jerky picture of\n the beast jumping up and down on top of the others joyously. Only the\n stiff space armor was holding up our slack frames.\n\n\n \"Let's let him escape,\" Hoffman suggested on the audio circuit.\n\n\n \"I'd like to,\" Nagurski admitted, \"but the other beasts won't let us\n get past their circle.\"\n\n\n It was true. The aliens formed a ring around us, and each time a\n bouncing boy hit the line, he only bounced back on top of us.\n\n\n \"Flat!\" I yelled. \"Our seams can't take much more of this beating.\"", "\"I don't like this,\" I admitted. \"It's not at all what I expected from\n what you said about transphasia. It must be something else.\"\n\n\n \"It couldn't be anything else. I know what to expect. You don't. You\n may begin smelling sensations, tasting sounds, hearing sights, seeing\n tastes, touching odors—or any other combination. Don't let it bother\n you.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not. I'll soothe my nerves by counting little shocks of\n lanolin jumping over a loud fence.\"\n\n\n Quade grinned behind his faceplate. \"Good idea.\"\n\n\n \"Then you can have it. I'm going to try keeping my eyes open and\n staying alive.\"\n\n\n There was no reply.", "The Quartermaster rose with grim deliberation, and hiccuped. \"Better\n get him back to the spaceship fast. I've seen this kind of thing\n before with transphasia. His body cooled down because of the screaming\n wind—psychosomatic reaction—and his heating circuits compensated for\n the cool flesh. The poor devil's got frostbite and heat prostration.\"\nThe four of us managed to haul Quade back by using the powered joints\n in our suits. Hoffman suggested that he had once seen an injured\n man walked back inside his suit like a robot, but it was a delicate\n adjustment, controlling power circuits from outside a suit. It was too\n much for us—we were too tired, too numb, too drunk.\n\n\n At first sight of the spacer in the distance, transphasia left me with\n only a chocolate-tasting pink after-image on my retina. It was now\n showing bare skeleton from cannibalization for tractor parts, but it\n looked good to me, like home.", "I leaned forward, elbows on knees. \"Let me tell\nyou\na thing,\n Nagurski. Your trust of these damn-fool spacemen is why you are no\n longer a captain. You can't trust anything out here in space, much less\n human nature. Even I know that much!\"\n\n\n He was pained. \"If you don't trust the men, they won't trust you, Gav.\"\n\n\n \"They don't have to trust me. All they have to do is\nobey\nme or, by\n Jupiter, get frozen stiff and thawed out just in time for court-marshal\n back home. Listen,\" I continued earnestly, \"these men aren't going to\n think of me—of\nus\n, the officers, as their leaders. As far as the\n crew is concerned, Ordinary Spaceman Quade is the best man on this\n ship.\"", "The thought intruded itself:\nwhy\nhadn't I recognized this before I\n let Quade escape to almost certain death? Wasn't it because I wanted\n him dead, because I resented the crew's resentment of my authority, and\n recognized in him the leader and symbol of this resentment?\n\n\n I threw away that idea along with my half-used cigarette. It might very\n well be true, but how did that help now?\n\n\n I had to\nthink\n.\n\n\n I was going after him, that was certain. Not only for humane\n reasons—he was the most important member of the crew. With him around,\n there were only two opinions, his and mine. Without him, I'd have\n endless opinions to contend with.", "\"I trusted him too far by letting him run around loose. He needs a\n leash in more ways than one, and I'm going to put one on him.\"\nFor me, it was a nightmare. I lay down in my cabin and thought. I had\n to think things through very carefully. One mistake was too many for\n me. My worst fear had been that someday I would overlook one tiny flaw\n and ruin a gem. Now I might have ruined an exploration and destroyed a\n man, not a stone, because I had missed the flaw.\n\n\n No one but a reckless fool would have gone out alone on a strange\n planet with a terrifying phenomenon, but I'd had enough evidence to see\n that space exploration\nmade\na man a reckless fool by doing things on\n one planet he had once found safe and wise on some other world.", "I couldn't stop them. Being in Alpine rope with them, I went along. At\n the time, it even seemed vaguely like a good idea.\n\n\n As we lumbered toward them, the aliens fell back in a solid line except\n for the first curious-looking one. Quade got there ahead of us and made\n a grab. The creature rose into the air with a screaming vibration of\n his tail and landed on top of him, flattening him instantly.\n\n\n \"Sssh, men,\" Nagurski said. \"Leave it to me. I'll surround him.\"", "I splashed some wine from my drinking tube against the roof of my mouth\n to sharpen my taste. It brought out the footsteps sharper. It also made\n the landscape more of a teen-ager's caloric nightmare.\n\n\n The four of us pulled ourselves closer together by reeling in more\n of our safety line. Farley and Hoffman, Nagurski and myself, we were\n cabled together. It gave us a larger hunk of reality to hold onto. Even\n so, things wavered for me during a wisp of time.\n\n\n We stumbled over the ridge, feeling out the territory. It was a sticky\n job crawling over a melting, chunk-style Hershey bar. I was thankful\n for the invigorating Sousa march blasting inside my helmet. Before the\n tape had cut in, kicked on by the decibel gauge, I had heard or felt\n something dark and ominous in the outside air.", "His expression was tart and greasy despite all his light talk, and\n I knew mine was the same. I tested the security rope between our\n pressure suits. It was a taut and virile bass.\n\n\n We scaled a staccato of rocks, our suits grinding pepper against our\n hides.\n\n\n The musk summit rose before us, a minor-key horizon with a shifting\n treble for as far as I could smell. It was primitive beauty that made\n you feel shocking pink inside. The most beautiful vista I had ever\n tasted, it couldn't be dulled even by the sensation of beef broth under\n my skin.\n\n\n \"Is this transphasia?\" I asked in awe.\n\n\n \"It always has been before,\" Quade remarked. \"Ready to swallow your\n words about this being something an old hand wouldn't recognize,\n Captain?\"\n\n\n \"I'm swallowing no words until I find out precisely how they taste\n here.\"", "The wailing call sounded through the amber twilight.\n\n\n I realized that I was actually\nhearing\nit for the first time.\n\n\n The alien stood between us and the ship. It was a great pot-bellied\n lizard as tall as a man. Its sound came from a flat, vibrating beaver\n tail. Others of its kind were coming into view behind it.\n\n\n \"Stand your ground,\" I warned the others thickly. \"They may be\n dangerous.\"\n\n\n Quade sat up on our crisscross litter of arms. \"Aliens can't be\n hostile. Ethnic impossibility. I'll show you.\"\n\n\n Quade was delirious and we were drunk. He got away from us and jogged\n toward the herd.\n\n\n \"Let's give him a hand!\" Farley shouted. \"We'll take us a specimen!\"", "How could we be less vulnerable, or preferably invulnerable?\n\"Captain, you got nothing to worry about,\" Quartermaster Farley said.\n He patted a space helmet paternally. \"You got yourself a self-contained\n environment. The suit's eye looks into yours at the arteries in the\n back of your eyeball so it can read your amber corpuscles and feed\n you your oxygen in the right amounts; you're a bottle-fed baby. If\n transphasia gets you seeing limburger, turn on the radar and you're\n air-conditioned as an igloo. Nothing short of a cosmic blast can dent\n that hide. You got it made.\"\n\n\n \"You are right,\" I said, \"only transphasia comes right through these\n air-fast joints.\"\n\n\n \"Something strange about the trance, Captain,\" Farley said darkly. \"Any\n spaceman can tell you that. Things we don't understand.\"", "My finger could barely get in the chafing band of my regulation collar.\n I was hot and tired, fresh—in only the chronological sense—from a\n pressure suit.\n\n\n \"What do you know all about, Nagurski? Dogs? Spacemen? Women?\n Transphasia?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he answered casually. \"But I had immediate reference to our\n current psychophysiological phenomenon.\"\n\n\n I collapsed into the swivel in front of the chart table. \"First off,\n let's hear what you know about—never mind, make it dogs.\"\n\n\n \"Take Bruce, for example, then—\"\n\n\n \"No, thanks. I was wondering why\nyou\ndid.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't.\" His dark, round face was bland. \"Bruce picked me. Followed\n me home one night in Chicago Port. The dog or the man who picks his own\n master is the most content.\"", "Quade squirmed. \"Yes, sir. One thing, sir—I don't understand how you\n got me away from those aliens.\"\n\n\n \"The aliens were trying to help. They knew something was wrong and they\n were prodding and probing. When the first tractor pulled up and the men\n got out, they seemed to realize our own people could help us easier\n than they could.\"\n\n\n \"I am not quite convinced that those babies just meant to help us all\n the time.\"\n\n\n \"But they did! First, that call of theirs—it wasn't to lead us into\n danger, but to warn us of the cliff, the freezing wind. They saw we\n were trying to find out things about their world, so they even offered\n us one of their own kind to study. Unfortunately, he was too much for\n us. They didn't give us their top man, of course, only the village\n idiot. It's just as well. We aren't allowed to dissect creatures that\n far up the intelligence scale.\"", "\"Can't,\" I told him. \"I can't trust your opinion. I can't trust\nanything\n. That's why I'm Captain.\"\n\n\n \"You'll get over feeling like that.\"\n\n\n \"I know. Then I'll become First Officer.\"\n\n\n \"But look at that screen, sir,\" Quade said with an emphatic swing of\n his scarred arm. \"I've seen blank scanning like that before and you\n haven't—it's your first trip. This always means transphasia—cortex\n dissolution, motor area feedback, the Aitchell Effect—call it anything\n you like, it's still transphasia.\"\n\n\n \"I know what transphasia is,\" I said moderately. \"It means an\n electrogravitational disturbance of incoming sense data, rechanneling\n it to the wrong receptive areas. Besides the human brain, it also\n effects electronic equipment, like radar and television.\"", "\"He\nis\na good man,\" Nagurski said. \"You mustn't be jealous of his\n status.\"\n\n\n The dog growled. He must have sensed what I almost did to Nagurski.\n\n\n \"Never mind that for now,\" I said wearily. \"What was your idea for\n getting our exploration parties through this transphasia?\"\n\n\n \"There's only one idea for that,\" said Quade, ducking his long head\n and stepping through the connecting hatch. \"With the Captain's\n permission....\"\n\n\n \"Go ahead, Quade, tell him,\" Nagurski invited.\n\n\n \"There's only one way to wade through transphasia with any\n reliability,\" Quade told me. \"You keep some kind of physical contact\n with the spaceship. Parties are strung out on guide line, like we were,\n but the cable has to be run back and made fast to the hull.\"" ], [ "\"Can't,\" I told him. \"I can't trust your opinion. I can't trust\nanything\n. That's why I'm Captain.\"\n\n\n \"You'll get over feeling like that.\"\n\n\n \"I know. Then I'll become First Officer.\"\n\n\n \"But look at that screen, sir,\" Quade said with an emphatic swing of\n his scarred arm. \"I've seen blank scanning like that before and you\n haven't—it's your first trip. This always means transphasia—cortex\n dissolution, motor area feedback, the Aitchell Effect—call it anything\n you like, it's still transphasia.\"\n\n\n \"I know what transphasia is,\" I said moderately. \"It means an\n electrogravitational disturbance of incoming sense data, rechanneling\n it to the wrong receptive areas. Besides the human brain, it also\n effects electronic equipment, like radar and television.\"", "\"In departing from standard procedure that we have learned to trust,\n you are risking more than a few men—you risk the whole mission in\n gambling so much of the ship. A captain doesn't take chances like that!\"\n\n\n \"I never said I wouldn't take chances. But I'm not going to take\nstupid\nchances. I\nmight\nbe doing the wrong thing, but I can see you\nwould\nbe doing it wrong.\"\n\n\n \"You know nothing about space, Captain! You have to trust\nus\n.\"\n\n\n \"That's it exactly, First Officer Nagurski,\" I said sociably. \"If you\n lazy, lax, complacent slobs want to do something in a particular way, I\n know it\nhas\nto be wrong.\"\n\n\n I turned and found Wallace, the personnel man, standing in the hatchway.\n\n\n \"Pardon, Captain, but would you say we also lacked initiative?\"", "\"Bruce is content,\" I admitted. \"He couldn't be any more content and\n still be alive. But I'm not sure that theory works out with men. We'd\n have anarchy if I tried to let these starbucks pick their own master.\"\n\n\n \"\nI\nhad no trouble when I was a captain,\" Nagurski said. \"Ease the\n reins on the men. Just offer them your advice, your guidance. They\n will soon see why the service selected you as captain; they will pick\n you themselves.\"\n\n\n \"Did your crew voluntarily elect you as their leader?\"\n\n\n \"Of course they did, Gav. I'm an old hand at controlling crews.\"\n\n\n \"Then why are you First Officer under me now?\"", "He blinked, then decided to laugh. \"I've been in space a good many\n years. I really wanted to relax a little bit more. Besides, the\n increase in hazard pay was actually more than my salary as a captain.\n I'm a notch nearer retirement too.\"\n\n\n \"Tell me, did you always feel this way about letting the men select\n their own leader?\"\nNagurski brought out a pipe. He would have a pipe, I decided.\n\n\n \"No, not always. I was like you at first. Fresh from the cosmic energy\n test lab, suspicious of everything, trying to tell the old hands what\n to do. But I learned that they are pretty smart boys; they know what\n they are doing. You can rely on them absolutely.\"", "\"The hell it is,\" Quade said grimly. \"It's his deadliest liability.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I must inform you that I am demoting you to Acting\n Executive Officer.\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\" Quade gawked. \"But dammit, Captain, you can't do that to me!\n I'll lose hazard pay and be that much further from retirement!\"\n\n\n \"That's tough,\" I sympathized, \"but in every service a chap gets broken\n in rank now and then.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe it's worth it,\" Quade said heavily. \"Now maybe I've learned how\n to stay alive out here. I just hope I don't forget.\"\n\n\n I thought about that. I was nearly through with my first mission and\n I could speak with experience, even if it was the least amount of\n experience aboard.", "\"Captain Gavin,\" Quade said patiently, \"you must realize that an\n outsider like you, among a crew of skilled spacemen, can never be more\n than a figurehead.\"\n\n\n Was this the way I was to be treated? Why, this man had deliberately\n insulted me, his captain. I controlled myself, remembering the\n familiarity that had always existed between members of a crew working\n under close conditions, from the time of the ancient submarines and the\n first orbital ships.\n\n\n \"Quade,\" I said, \"there's only one way for us to find out which of us\n is right about the cause of our scanning blackout.\"\n\n\n \"We go out and find the reason.\"\n\n\n \"Exactly. We go. You and me. I hope you can stand my company.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not sure I can,\" he answered reluctantly. \"My hazard pay doesn't\n cover exploring with rookies. With all due respect, Captain.\"", "The thought intruded itself:\nwhy\nhadn't I recognized this before I\n let Quade escape to almost certain death? Wasn't it because I wanted\n him dead, because I resented the crew's resentment of my authority, and\n recognized in him the leader and symbol of this resentment?\n\n\n I threw away that idea along with my half-used cigarette. It might very\n well be true, but how did that help now?\n\n\n I had to\nthink\n.\n\n\n I was going after him, that was certain. Not only for humane\n reasons—he was the most important member of the crew. With him around,\n there were only two opinions, his and mine. Without him, I'd have\n endless opinions to contend with.", "I leaned forward, elbows on knees. \"Let me tell\nyou\na thing,\n Nagurski. Your trust of these damn-fool spacemen is why you are no\n longer a captain. You can't trust anything out here in space, much less\n human nature. Even I know that much!\"\n\n\n He was pained. \"If you don't trust the men, they won't trust you, Gav.\"\n\n\n \"They don't have to trust me. All they have to do is\nobey\nme or, by\n Jupiter, get frozen stiff and thawed out just in time for court-marshal\n back home. Listen,\" I continued earnestly, \"these men aren't going to\n think of me—of\nus\n, the officers, as their leaders. As far as the\n crew is concerned, Ordinary Spaceman Quade is the best man on this\n ship.\"", "\"I would,\" I answered levelly.\n\n\n \"Then you'll be interested to hear that Spaceman Quade took a suit and\n a cartographer unit. He's out there somewhere, alone.\"\n\n\n \"The idiot!\" I yelped. \"Everyone needs a partner out there. Send out a\n team to follow his cable and drag him in here by it.\"\n\n\n \"He didn't hook on a cable, Captain,\" Wallace said. \"I suppose he\n intended to go beyond the three-mile limit as you demanded.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up, Wallace. You don't have to like me, but you can't twist what\n I said as long as I command this spacer.\"\n\n\n \"Cool off, Gav,\" Nagurski advised me. \"It's been done before. Anybody\n else would have been a fool to go out alone, but Quade is the most\n experienced man we have. He knows transphasia. Trust him.\"", "Before I could agree with one of his theories for once, a streak of\n spice shot past us. It bounced back tangily and made a bitter rip\n between the two of us. There was no time to judge its size, if it had\n size, or its decibel range, or its caloric count, before a small, sharp\n pain dug in and dwindled down to nothing in one long second.\n\n\n The new odor pattern in my head told me Quade was saying something I\n couldn't quite make out.\n\n\n Quade then pulled me in the direction of the nasty little pain.\n\n\n \"Wait a minute, Spaceman!\" I bellowed. \"Where the devil do you think\n you're dragging me? Halt! That's a direct order.\"\n\n\n He stopped. \"Don't you want to find out what that was? This\nis\nan\n exploration party, you know, sir.\"", "\"How far can we run it back?\"\n\n\n Quade shrugged. \"Miles.\"\n\n\n \"How many?\"\n\n\n \"We have three miles of cable. As long as you can feel, taste, see,\n smell or hear that rope anchoring you to home, you aren't lost.\"\n\n\n \"Three miles isn't good enough. We don't have enough fuel to change\n sites that often. You can't use the drive in a gravitational field, you\n know.\"\n\n\n \"What else can we do, Captain?\" Nagurski asked puzzledly.\n\n\n \"You've said that the spaceship is our only protection from\n transphasia. Is that it?\"\n\n\n Quade gave a curt nod.", "\"He\nis\na good man,\" Nagurski said. \"You mustn't be jealous of his\n status.\"\n\n\n The dog growled. He must have sensed what I almost did to Nagurski.\n\n\n \"Never mind that for now,\" I said wearily. \"What was your idea for\n getting our exploration parties through this transphasia?\"\n\n\n \"There's only one idea for that,\" said Quade, ducking his long head\n and stepping through the connecting hatch. \"With the Captain's\n permission....\"\n\n\n \"Go ahead, Quade, tell him,\" Nagurski invited.\n\n\n \"There's only one way to wade through transphasia with any\n reliability,\" Quade told me. \"You keep some kind of physical contact\n with the spaceship. Parties are strung out on guide line, like we were,\n but the cable has to be run back and made fast to the hull.\"", "\"I trusted him too far by letting him run around loose. He needs a\n leash in more ways than one, and I'm going to put one on him.\"\nFor me, it was a nightmare. I lay down in my cabin and thought. I had\n to think things through very carefully. One mistake was too many for\n me. My worst fear had been that someday I would overlook one tiny flaw\n and ruin a gem. Now I might have ruined an exploration and destroyed a\n man, not a stone, because I had missed the flaw.\n\n\n No one but a reckless fool would have gone out alone on a strange\n planet with a terrifying phenomenon, but I'd had enough evidence to see\n that space exploration\nmade\na man a reckless fool by doing things on\n one planet he had once found safe and wise on some other world.", "\"Yes, sir,\" Farley said obediently. \"I'll give spacemen a few quarts of\n wine, telling them to use it carefully for scientific purposes only,\n and then they will be able to see where they are going. Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n I turned to leave, then paused briefly. \"You can come along, Farley.\n I'm sure you want to see that we don't waste any of the stuff.\"\n\"There they are!\" Nagurski called. \"Quade's footsteps again, just\n beyond that rocky ridge.\"\n\n\n The landscape was rich chocolate ice cream smothered with chocolate\n syrup, caramel, peanuts and maple syrup, eaten while you smoked an old,\n mellow Havana. The footsteps were faint traces of whipped cream across\n the dark, rich taste of the planet.", "\"But, sir,\" Farley protested, \"you don't give alcohol to the crew in\n the middle of a mission. It's not done. What reason can you have?\"\n\n\n \"To sharpen their taste and olfactory senses. We can turn up or block\n out sound. We can use radar to extend our sight, but the Space Service\n hasn't yet developed anything to make spacemen taste or smell better.\"\n\n\n \"They are going to smell like a herd of winos,\" Farley said. \"I don't\n like to think how they would taste.\"\n\n\n \"It's an entirely practical idea. Tea-tasters used to drink\n almond-and-barley water to sharpen their senses. I've observed that\n wine helps you appreciate culinary art more. Considering the mixed-up\n sensory data under transphasia, wine may help us to see where we are\n going.\"", "THE SPICY SOUND OF SUCCESS\nBy JIM HARMON\n\n\n Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine August 1959.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nNow was the captain's chance to prove he knew\n \nless than the crew—all their lives hung upon it!\nThere was nothing showing on the video screen. That was why we were\n looking at it so analytically.\n\n\n \"Transphasia, that's what it is,\" Ordinary Spaceman Quade stated with\n a definite thrust of his angular jaw in my direction. \"You can take my\n word on that, Captain Gavin.\"", "The men followed the First Officer's example, and the rope tying them\n to him. I went along cheerfully myself, until an enormous rump struck\n me violently in the face. My leaded boots were driven down into fertile\n soil, and my helmet was ringing like a bell. I got a jerky picture of\n the beast jumping up and down on top of the others joyously. Only the\n stiff space armor was holding up our slack frames.\n\n\n \"Let's let him escape,\" Hoffman suggested on the audio circuit.\n\n\n \"I'd like to,\" Nagurski admitted, \"but the other beasts won't let us\n get past their circle.\"\n\n\n It was true. The aliens formed a ring around us, and each time a\n bouncing boy hit the line, he only bounced back on top of us.\n\n\n \"Flat!\" I yelled. \"Our seams can't take much more of this beating.\"", "\"Obviously.\" Quade glanced disgustedly at the screen.\n\n\n \"Too obvious. This time it might not be a familiar condition of many\n planetary gravitational fields. On this planet, that blank kinescope\n may mean our Big Brother kites were knocked down by hostile natives.\"\n\n\n \"You are plain wrong, Captain. Traditionally, alien races never\n interfere with our explorations. Generally, they are so alien to us\n they can't even recognize our existence.\"\nI drew myself up to my full height—and noticed in irritation it was\n still an inch less than Quade's. \"I don't understand you men. Look at\n yourself, Quade. You've been busted to Ordinary Spaceman for just that\n kind of thinking, for relying on tradition, on things that have worked\n before. Not only your thinking is slipshod, you've grown careless about\n everything else, even your own life.\"", "His expression was tart and greasy despite all his light talk, and\n I knew mine was the same. I tested the security rope between our\n pressure suits. It was a taut and virile bass.\n\n\n We scaled a staccato of rocks, our suits grinding pepper against our\n hides.\n\n\n The musk summit rose before us, a minor-key horizon with a shifting\n treble for as far as I could smell. It was primitive beauty that made\n you feel shocking pink inside. The most beautiful vista I had ever\n tasted, it couldn't be dulled even by the sensation of beef broth under\n my skin.\n\n\n \"Is this transphasia?\" I asked in awe.\n\n\n \"It always has been before,\" Quade remarked. \"Ready to swallow your\n words about this being something an old hand wouldn't recognize,\n Captain?\"\n\n\n \"I'm swallowing no words until I find out precisely how they taste\n here.\"", "\"I'm not sure I do want to find out what that was just now. I didn't\n like the feel of it. But the important thing is for us not to get any\n further from the ship.\"\n\n\n \"That's important, Captain?\"\n\n\n \"To the best of my judgment, yes. This—condition—didn't begin until\n we got so far away from the spacer—in time or distance. I don't want\n it to get any worse. It's troublesome not to know black from white, but\n it would be a downright inconvenience not to know which way is up.\"\n\n\n \"Not for an experienced spaceman,\" Quade griped. \"I'm used to\n free-fall.\"\n\n\n But he turned back.\n\n\n \"Just a minute,\" I said. \"There was something strange up ahead. I want\n to see if short-range radar can get through our electrogravitational\n jamming here.\"" ], [ "\"Quade,\" I said, \"space isn't as dangerous as all that.\" I clapped him\n on the shoulder fraternally. \"You worry too much!\"", "The thought intruded itself:\nwhy\nhadn't I recognized this before I\n let Quade escape to almost certain death? Wasn't it because I wanted\n him dead, because I resented the crew's resentment of my authority, and\n recognized in him the leader and symbol of this resentment?\n\n\n I threw away that idea along with my half-used cigarette. It might very\n well be true, but how did that help now?\n\n\n I had to\nthink\n.\n\n\n I was going after him, that was certain. Not only for humane\n reasons—he was the most important member of the crew. With him around,\n there were only two opinions, his and mine. Without him, I'd have\n endless opinions to contend with.", "\"Quail,\" Nagurski replied. \"That's what I see.\"\n\n\n \"You,\" I said carefully, \"have been in space a\nlong\ntime. Look again.\"\n\n\n \"I see our old buddy, Quail.\"\n\n\n I took another slosh of burgundy and peered up ahead. It\nwas\nQuade. A\n man in a spacesuit, faceplate in the dust, two hundred yards ahead.\nGrudgingly I stepped forward, out of the shadow of the ridge.\n A hysterically screaming wind rocked me on my toes. We pushed\n on sluggishly to Quade's side, moving to the tempo of\nPomp and\n Circumstance\n.\n\n\n Farley lugged Quade over on his back and read his gauges.", "Quade squirmed. \"Yes, sir. One thing, sir—I don't understand how you\n got me away from those aliens.\"\n\n\n \"The aliens were trying to help. They knew something was wrong and they\n were prodding and probing. When the first tractor pulled up and the men\n got out, they seemed to realize our own people could help us easier\n than they could.\"\n\n\n \"I am not quite convinced that those babies just meant to help us all\n the time.\"\n\n\n \"But they did! First, that call of theirs—it wasn't to lead us into\n danger, but to warn us of the cliff, the freezing wind. They saw we\n were trying to find out things about their world, so they even offered\n us one of their own kind to study. Unfortunately, he was too much for\n us. They didn't give us their top man, of course, only the village\n idiot. It's just as well. We aren't allowed to dissect creatures that\n far up the intelligence scale.\"", "\"Yes, this is definitely the trail of Quail,\" Nagurski said soberly.\n \"This is serious business. I must ask whoever has been giggling on\n this channel to shut up. Pardon me, Captain.\nYou\nweren't giggling,\n sir?\"\n\n\n \"I have never giggled in my life, Nagurski.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. That's what we all thought.\"\n\n\n A moment later, Nagurski added, \"Anyway, I just noticed it was my\n shelf—my, that is, self.\"\n\n\n The basso profundo performing\nFigaro\non my headset climbed to a\n girlish shriek. A sliver of ice. This was the call Quade and I had\n first heard as we were about to troop over a cliff. I dug in my heels.\n\n\n \"Take a good look around, boys,\" I said. \"What do you see?\"", "\"The hell it is,\" Quade said grimly. \"It's his deadliest liability.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I must inform you that I am demoting you to Acting\n Executive Officer.\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\" Quade gawked. \"But dammit, Captain, you can't do that to me!\n I'll lose hazard pay and be that much further from retirement!\"\n\n\n \"That's tough,\" I sympathized, \"but in every service a chap gets broken\n in rank now and then.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe it's worth it,\" Quade said heavily. \"Now maybe I've learned how\n to stay alive out here. I just hope I don't forget.\"\n\n\n I thought about that. I was nearly through with my first mission and\n I could speak with experience, even if it was the least amount of\n experience aboard.", "I clapped him on the shoulder. \"But, man, you have just been telling\n me all we had to worry about was common transphasia. A man with your\n experience could protect himself and cover even a rookie, under such\n familiar conditions—right?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir, I suppose I could,\" Quade said, bitterly aware he had lost\n out somewhere and hoping that it wasn't the start of a trend.\n\"Looks okay to me,\" I said. Quade passed a gauntlet over his faceplate.\n \"It's real. I can blur it with a smudged visor. When it blurs, it's\n solid.\"\n\n\n The landscape beyond the black corona left by our landing rockets was\n unimpressive. The rocky desert was made up of silicon and iron oxide,\n so it looked much the same as a terrestrial location. Yellowish-white\n sand ran up to and around reddish brown rock clawing into the pink\n sunlight.", "\"I don't understand it,\" Quade admitted. \"Transphasia hits you a foul\n as soon as you let it into the airlock.\"\n\n\n \"Apparently, Quade,\nthis\nthing is going to creep up on us.\"\n\n\n \"Don't sound smug, Captain. It's pitty-pattying behind you too.\"\n\n\n The keening call across the surface of consciousness postponed my reply.\n\n\n The wail was ominously forlorn, defiant of description. I turned my\n head around slowly inside my helmet, not even sure that I had heard it.\n\n\n But what else can you do with a wail but\nhear\nit?\n\n\n Quade nodded. \"I've felt this before. It usually hits sooner. Let's\n trace it.\"", "I couldn't stop them. Being in Alpine rope with them, I went along. At\n the time, it even seemed vaguely like a good idea.\n\n\n As we lumbered toward them, the aliens fell back in a solid line except\n for the first curious-looking one. Quade got there ahead of us and made\n a grab. The creature rose into the air with a screaming vibration of\n his tail and landed on top of him, flattening him instantly.\n\n\n \"Sssh, men,\" Nagurski said. \"Leave it to me. I'll surround him.\"", "\"I don't like this,\" I admitted. \"It's not at all what I expected from\n what you said about transphasia. It must be something else.\"\n\n\n \"It couldn't be anything else. I know what to expect. You don't. You\n may begin smelling sensations, tasting sounds, hearing sights, seeing\n tastes, touching odors—or any other combination. Don't let it bother\n you.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not. I'll soothe my nerves by counting little shocks of\n lanolin jumping over a loud fence.\"\n\n\n Quade grinned behind his faceplate. \"Good idea.\"\n\n\n \"Then you can have it. I'm going to try keeping my eyes open and\n staying alive.\"\n\n\n There was no reply.", "\"I would,\" I answered levelly.\n\n\n \"Then you'll be interested to hear that Spaceman Quade took a suit and\n a cartographer unit. He's out there somewhere, alone.\"\n\n\n \"The idiot!\" I yelped. \"Everyone needs a partner out there. Send out a\n team to follow his cable and drag him in here by it.\"\n\n\n \"He didn't hook on a cable, Captain,\" Wallace said. \"I suppose he\n intended to go beyond the three-mile limit as you demanded.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up, Wallace. You don't have to like me, but you can't twist what\n I said as long as I command this spacer.\"\n\n\n \"Cool off, Gav,\" Nagurski advised me. \"It's been done before. Anybody\n else would have been a fool to go out alone, but Quade is the most\n experienced man we have. He knows transphasia. Trust him.\"", "The Quartermaster rose with grim deliberation, and hiccuped. \"Better\n get him back to the spaceship fast. I've seen this kind of thing\n before with transphasia. His body cooled down because of the screaming\n wind—psychosomatic reaction—and his heating circuits compensated for\n the cool flesh. The poor devil's got frostbite and heat prostration.\"\nThe four of us managed to haul Quade back by using the powered joints\n in our suits. Hoffman suggested that he had once seen an injured\n man walked back inside his suit like a robot, but it was a delicate\n adjustment, controlling power circuits from outside a suit. It was too\n much for us—we were too tired, too numb, too drunk.\n\n\n At first sight of the spacer in the distance, transphasia left me with\n only a chocolate-tasting pink after-image on my retina. It was now\n showing bare skeleton from cannibalization for tractor parts, but it\n looked good to me, like home.", "But it wouldn't do any good to go out no better equipped than he.\n There was no time to wait for tractors to be built if we wanted to\n reach him alive, and we certainly couldn't reach him five or ten\n miles out with our three miles of safety line. We would have to go in\n spacesuits.\n\n\n But how would that leave us any better off than Quade?\n\n\n Why was Quade vulnerable in his spacesuit, as I knew from experience he\n would be?", "\"I'm not sure I do want to find out what that was just now. I didn't\n like the feel of it. But the important thing is for us not to get any\n further from the ship.\"\n\n\n \"That's important, Captain?\"\n\n\n \"To the best of my judgment, yes. This—condition—didn't begin until\n we got so far away from the spacer—in time or distance. I don't want\n it to get any worse. It's troublesome not to know black from white, but\n it would be a downright inconvenience not to know which way is up.\"\n\n\n \"Not for an experienced spaceman,\" Quade griped. \"I'm used to\n free-fall.\"\n\n\n But he turned back.\n\n\n \"Just a minute,\" I said. \"There was something strange up ahead. I want\n to see if short-range radar can get through our electrogravitational\n jamming here.\"", "\"How far can we run it back?\"\n\n\n Quade shrugged. \"Miles.\"\n\n\n \"How many?\"\n\n\n \"We have three miles of cable. As long as you can feel, taste, see,\n smell or hear that rope anchoring you to home, you aren't lost.\"\n\n\n \"Three miles isn't good enough. We don't have enough fuel to change\n sites that often. You can't use the drive in a gravitational field, you\n know.\"\n\n\n \"What else can we do, Captain?\" Nagurski asked puzzledly.\n\n\n \"You've said that the spaceship is our only protection from\n transphasia. Is that it?\"\n\n\n Quade gave a curt nod.", "I followed my own advice and landed in the dirt beside Quade.\n\n\n The bouncer came to rest and regarded us silently, head on an\n eighty-degree angle.\n\n\n I was stone sober.\n\n\n The others were lying around me quietly, passed out, knocked out, or\n taking cover.\n\n\n The ring of aliens drew in about us, closer, tighter, as the bouncer\n sat on his haunches and waited for us to move.\n\"Feeling better?\" I asked Quade in the infirmary.\n\n\n He punched up his pillow and settled back. \"I guess so. But when I\n think of all the ways I nearly got myself killed out there.... How far\n have you got in the tractors?\"\n\n\n \"I'm having the tractors torn down and the parts put back into the\n spaceship where they belong. We\nshouldn't\nrisk losing them and\n getting stuck here.\"", "\"Obviously.\" Quade glanced disgustedly at the screen.\n\n\n \"Too obvious. This time it might not be a familiar condition of many\n planetary gravitational fields. On this planet, that blank kinescope\n may mean our Big Brother kites were knocked down by hostile natives.\"\n\n\n \"You are plain wrong, Captain. Traditionally, alien races never\n interfere with our explorations. Generally, they are so alien to us\n they can't even recognize our existence.\"\nI drew myself up to my full height—and noticed in irritation it was\n still an inch less than Quade's. \"I don't understand you men. Look at\n yourself, Quade. You've been busted to Ordinary Spaceman for just that\n kind of thinking, for relying on tradition, on things that have worked\n before. Not only your thinking is slipshod, you've grown careless about\n everything else, even your own life.\"", "Before I could agree with one of his theories for once, a streak of\n spice shot past us. It bounced back tangily and made a bitter rip\n between the two of us. There was no time to judge its size, if it had\n size, or its decibel range, or its caloric count, before a small, sharp\n pain dug in and dwindled down to nothing in one long second.\n\n\n The new odor pattern in my head told me Quade was saying something I\n couldn't quite make out.\n\n\n Quade then pulled me in the direction of the nasty little pain.\n\n\n \"Wait a minute, Spaceman!\" I bellowed. \"Where the devil do you think\n you're dragging me? Halt! That's a direct order.\"\n\n\n He stopped. \"Don't you want to find out what that was? This\nis\nan\n exploration party, you know, sir.\"", "\"Yes, sir,\" Farley said obediently. \"I'll give spacemen a few quarts of\n wine, telling them to use it carefully for scientific purposes only,\n and then they will be able to see where they are going. Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n I turned to leave, then paused briefly. \"You can come along, Farley.\n I'm sure you want to see that we don't waste any of the stuff.\"\n\"There they are!\" Nagurski called. \"Quade's footsteps again, just\n beyond that rocky ridge.\"\n\n\n The landscape was rich chocolate ice cream smothered with chocolate\n syrup, caramel, peanuts and maple syrup, eaten while you smoked an old,\n mellow Havana. The footsteps were faint traces of whipped cream across\n the dark, rich taste of the planet.", "I splashed some wine from my drinking tube against the roof of my mouth\n to sharpen my taste. It brought out the footsteps sharper. It also made\n the landscape more of a teen-ager's caloric nightmare.\n\n\n The four of us pulled ourselves closer together by reeling in more\n of our safety line. Farley and Hoffman, Nagurski and myself, we were\n cabled together. It gave us a larger hunk of reality to hold onto. Even\n so, things wavered for me during a wisp of time.\n\n\n We stumbled over the ridge, feeling out the territory. It was a sticky\n job crawling over a melting, chunk-style Hershey bar. I was thankful\n for the invigorating Sousa march blasting inside my helmet. Before the\n tape had cut in, kicked on by the decibel gauge, I had heard or felt\n something dark and ominous in the outside air." ], [ "I leaned forward, elbows on knees. \"Let me tell\nyou\na thing,\n Nagurski. Your trust of these damn-fool spacemen is why you are no\n longer a captain. You can't trust anything out here in space, much less\n human nature. Even I know that much!\"\n\n\n He was pained. \"If you don't trust the men, they won't trust you, Gav.\"\n\n\n \"They don't have to trust me. All they have to do is\nobey\nme or, by\n Jupiter, get frozen stiff and thawed out just in time for court-marshal\n back home. Listen,\" I continued earnestly, \"these men aren't going to\n think of me—of\nus\n, the officers, as their leaders. As far as the\n crew is concerned, Ordinary Spaceman Quade is the best man on this\n ship.\"", "The thought intruded itself:\nwhy\nhadn't I recognized this before I\n let Quade escape to almost certain death? Wasn't it because I wanted\n him dead, because I resented the crew's resentment of my authority, and\n recognized in him the leader and symbol of this resentment?\n\n\n I threw away that idea along with my half-used cigarette. It might very\n well be true, but how did that help now?\n\n\n I had to\nthink\n.\n\n\n I was going after him, that was certain. Not only for humane\n reasons—he was the most important member of the crew. With him around,\n there were only two opinions, his and mine. Without him, I'd have\n endless opinions to contend with.", "\"The hell it is,\" Quade said grimly. \"It's his deadliest liability.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I must inform you that I am demoting you to Acting\n Executive Officer.\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\" Quade gawked. \"But dammit, Captain, you can't do that to me!\n I'll lose hazard pay and be that much further from retirement!\"\n\n\n \"That's tough,\" I sympathized, \"but in every service a chap gets broken\n in rank now and then.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe it's worth it,\" Quade said heavily. \"Now maybe I've learned how\n to stay alive out here. I just hope I don't forget.\"\n\n\n I thought about that. I was nearly through with my first mission and\n I could speak with experience, even if it was the least amount of\n experience aboard.", "\"Quade,\" I said, \"space isn't as dangerous as all that.\" I clapped him\n on the shoulder fraternally. \"You worry too much!\"", "\"Bruce is content,\" I admitted. \"He couldn't be any more content and\n still be alive. But I'm not sure that theory works out with men. We'd\n have anarchy if I tried to let these starbucks pick their own master.\"\n\n\n \"\nI\nhad no trouble when I was a captain,\" Nagurski said. \"Ease the\n reins on the men. Just offer them your advice, your guidance. They\n will soon see why the service selected you as captain; they will pick\n you themselves.\"\n\n\n \"Did your crew voluntarily elect you as their leader?\"\n\n\n \"Of course they did, Gav. I'm an old hand at controlling crews.\"\n\n\n \"Then why are you First Officer under me now?\"", "\"Captain Gavin,\" Quade said patiently, \"you must realize that an\n outsider like you, among a crew of skilled spacemen, can never be more\n than a figurehead.\"\n\n\n Was this the way I was to be treated? Why, this man had deliberately\n insulted me, his captain. I controlled myself, remembering the\n familiarity that had always existed between members of a crew working\n under close conditions, from the time of the ancient submarines and the\n first orbital ships.\n\n\n \"Quade,\" I said, \"there's only one way for us to find out which of us\n is right about the cause of our scanning blackout.\"\n\n\n \"We go out and find the reason.\"\n\n\n \"Exactly. We go. You and me. I hope you can stand my company.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not sure I can,\" he answered reluctantly. \"My hazard pay doesn't\n cover exploring with rookies. With all due respect, Captain.\"", "He blinked, then decided to laugh. \"I've been in space a good many\n years. I really wanted to relax a little bit more. Besides, the\n increase in hazard pay was actually more than my salary as a captain.\n I'm a notch nearer retirement too.\"\n\n\n \"Tell me, did you always feel this way about letting the men select\n their own leader?\"\nNagurski brought out a pipe. He would have a pipe, I decided.\n\n\n \"No, not always. I was like you at first. Fresh from the cosmic energy\n test lab, suspicious of everything, trying to tell the old hands what\n to do. But I learned that they are pretty smart boys; they know what\n they are doing. You can rely on them absolutely.\"", "\"Yes, this is definitely the trail of Quail,\" Nagurski said soberly.\n \"This is serious business. I must ask whoever has been giggling on\n this channel to shut up. Pardon me, Captain.\nYou\nweren't giggling,\n sir?\"\n\n\n \"I have never giggled in my life, Nagurski.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. That's what we all thought.\"\n\n\n A moment later, Nagurski added, \"Anyway, I just noticed it was my\n shelf—my, that is, self.\"\n\n\n The basso profundo performing\nFigaro\non my headset climbed to a\n girlish shriek. A sliver of ice. This was the call Quade and I had\n first heard as we were about to troop over a cliff. I dug in my heels.\n\n\n \"Take a good look around, boys,\" I said. \"What do you see?\"", "\"Can't,\" I told him. \"I can't trust your opinion. I can't trust\nanything\n. That's why I'm Captain.\"\n\n\n \"You'll get over feeling like that.\"\n\n\n \"I know. Then I'll become First Officer.\"\n\n\n \"But look at that screen, sir,\" Quade said with an emphatic swing of\n his scarred arm. \"I've seen blank scanning like that before and you\n haven't—it's your first trip. This always means transphasia—cortex\n dissolution, motor area feedback, the Aitchell Effect—call it anything\n you like, it's still transphasia.\"\n\n\n \"I know what transphasia is,\" I said moderately. \"It means an\n electrogravitational disturbance of incoming sense data, rechanneling\n it to the wrong receptive areas. Besides the human brain, it also\n effects electronic equipment, like radar and television.\"", "\"I would,\" I answered levelly.\n\n\n \"Then you'll be interested to hear that Spaceman Quade took a suit and\n a cartographer unit. He's out there somewhere, alone.\"\n\n\n \"The idiot!\" I yelped. \"Everyone needs a partner out there. Send out a\n team to follow his cable and drag him in here by it.\"\n\n\n \"He didn't hook on a cable, Captain,\" Wallace said. \"I suppose he\n intended to go beyond the three-mile limit as you demanded.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up, Wallace. You don't have to like me, but you can't twist what\n I said as long as I command this spacer.\"\n\n\n \"Cool off, Gav,\" Nagurski advised me. \"It's been done before. Anybody\n else would have been a fool to go out alone, but Quade is the most\n experienced man we have. He knows transphasia. Trust him.\"", "\"Quail,\" Nagurski replied. \"That's what I see.\"\n\n\n \"You,\" I said carefully, \"have been in space a\nlong\ntime. Look again.\"\n\n\n \"I see our old buddy, Quail.\"\n\n\n I took another slosh of burgundy and peered up ahead. It\nwas\nQuade. A\n man in a spacesuit, faceplate in the dust, two hundred yards ahead.\nGrudgingly I stepped forward, out of the shadow of the ridge.\n A hysterically screaming wind rocked me on my toes. We pushed\n on sluggishly to Quade's side, moving to the tempo of\nPomp and\n Circumstance\n.\n\n\n Farley lugged Quade over on his back and read his gauges.", "\"In departing from standard procedure that we have learned to trust,\n you are risking more than a few men—you risk the whole mission in\n gambling so much of the ship. A captain doesn't take chances like that!\"\n\n\n \"I never said I wouldn't take chances. But I'm not going to take\nstupid\nchances. I\nmight\nbe doing the wrong thing, but I can see you\nwould\nbe doing it wrong.\"\n\n\n \"You know nothing about space, Captain! You have to trust\nus\n.\"\n\n\n \"That's it exactly, First Officer Nagurski,\" I said sociably. \"If you\n lazy, lax, complacent slobs want to do something in a particular way, I\n know it\nhas\nto be wrong.\"\n\n\n I turned and found Wallace, the personnel man, standing in the hatchway.\n\n\n \"Pardon, Captain, but would you say we also lacked initiative?\"", "\"Obviously.\" Quade glanced disgustedly at the screen.\n\n\n \"Too obvious. This time it might not be a familiar condition of many\n planetary gravitational fields. On this planet, that blank kinescope\n may mean our Big Brother kites were knocked down by hostile natives.\"\n\n\n \"You are plain wrong, Captain. Traditionally, alien races never\n interfere with our explorations. Generally, they are so alien to us\n they can't even recognize our existence.\"\nI drew myself up to my full height—and noticed in irritation it was\n still an inch less than Quade's. \"I don't understand you men. Look at\n yourself, Quade. You've been busted to Ordinary Spaceman for just that\n kind of thinking, for relying on tradition, on things that have worked\n before. Not only your thinking is slipshod, you've grown careless about\n everything else, even your own life.\"", "Before I could agree with one of his theories for once, a streak of\n spice shot past us. It bounced back tangily and made a bitter rip\n between the two of us. There was no time to judge its size, if it had\n size, or its decibel range, or its caloric count, before a small, sharp\n pain dug in and dwindled down to nothing in one long second.\n\n\n The new odor pattern in my head told me Quade was saying something I\n couldn't quite make out.\n\n\n Quade then pulled me in the direction of the nasty little pain.\n\n\n \"Wait a minute, Spaceman!\" I bellowed. \"Where the devil do you think\n you're dragging me? Halt! That's a direct order.\"\n\n\n He stopped. \"Don't you want to find out what that was? This\nis\nan\n exploration party, you know, sir.\"", "\"How far can we run it back?\"\n\n\n Quade shrugged. \"Miles.\"\n\n\n \"How many?\"\n\n\n \"We have three miles of cable. As long as you can feel, taste, see,\n smell or hear that rope anchoring you to home, you aren't lost.\"\n\n\n \"Three miles isn't good enough. We don't have enough fuel to change\n sites that often. You can't use the drive in a gravitational field, you\n know.\"\n\n\n \"What else can we do, Captain?\" Nagurski asked puzzledly.\n\n\n \"You've said that the spaceship is our only protection from\n transphasia. Is that it?\"\n\n\n Quade gave a curt nod.", "\"Yes, sir,\" Farley said obediently. \"I'll give spacemen a few quarts of\n wine, telling them to use it carefully for scientific purposes only,\n and then they will be able to see where they are going. Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n I turned to leave, then paused briefly. \"You can come along, Farley.\n I'm sure you want to see that we don't waste any of the stuff.\"\n\"There they are!\" Nagurski called. \"Quade's footsteps again, just\n beyond that rocky ridge.\"\n\n\n The landscape was rich chocolate ice cream smothered with chocolate\n syrup, caramel, peanuts and maple syrup, eaten while you smoked an old,\n mellow Havana. The footsteps were faint traces of whipped cream across\n the dark, rich taste of the planet.", "Quade squirmed. \"Yes, sir. One thing, sir—I don't understand how you\n got me away from those aliens.\"\n\n\n \"The aliens were trying to help. They knew something was wrong and they\n were prodding and probing. When the first tractor pulled up and the men\n got out, they seemed to realize our own people could help us easier\n than they could.\"\n\n\n \"I am not quite convinced that those babies just meant to help us all\n the time.\"\n\n\n \"But they did! First, that call of theirs—it wasn't to lead us into\n danger, but to warn us of the cliff, the freezing wind. They saw we\n were trying to find out things about their world, so they even offered\n us one of their own kind to study. Unfortunately, he was too much for\n us. They didn't give us their top man, of course, only the village\n idiot. It's just as well. We aren't allowed to dissect creatures that\n far up the intelligence scale.\"", "THE SPICY SOUND OF SUCCESS\nBy JIM HARMON\n\n\n Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine August 1959.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nNow was the captain's chance to prove he knew\n \nless than the crew—all their lives hung upon it!\nThere was nothing showing on the video screen. That was why we were\n looking at it so analytically.\n\n\n \"Transphasia, that's what it is,\" Ordinary Spaceman Quade stated with\n a definite thrust of his angular jaw in my direction. \"You can take my\n word on that, Captain Gavin.\"", "I couldn't stop them. Being in Alpine rope with them, I went along. At\n the time, it even seemed vaguely like a good idea.\n\n\n As we lumbered toward them, the aliens fell back in a solid line except\n for the first curious-looking one. Quade got there ahead of us and made\n a grab. The creature rose into the air with a screaming vibration of\n his tail and landed on top of him, flattening him instantly.\n\n\n \"Sssh, men,\" Nagurski said. \"Leave it to me. I'll surround him.\"", "\"But why should they want to help us?\" Quade demanded suspiciously.\n\n\n \"I think it's like Nagurski's dog. The dog came to him when it wanted\n somebody to own it, protect it, feed it, love it. These aliens\nwant\nEarthmen to colonize the planet. We came here, you see, same as the dog\n came to Nagurski.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I've learned one thing from all of this,\" Quade said. \"I've been\n a blind, arrogant, cocksure fool, following courses that were good on\nsome\nworlds,\nmost\nworlds, but not good on\nall\nworlds. I'm never\n going to be that foolhardy again.\"\n\n\n \"But you're losing\nconfidence\n, Quade! You aren't sure of yourself any\n more. Isn't confidence a spaceman's most valuable asset?\"" ], [ "\"I don't like this,\" I admitted. \"It's not at all what I expected from\n what you said about transphasia. It must be something else.\"\n\n\n \"It couldn't be anything else. I know what to expect. You don't. You\n may begin smelling sensations, tasting sounds, hearing sights, seeing\n tastes, touching odors—or any other combination. Don't let it bother\n you.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not. I'll soothe my nerves by counting little shocks of\n lanolin jumping over a loud fence.\"\n\n\n Quade grinned behind his faceplate. \"Good idea.\"\n\n\n \"Then you can have it. I'm going to try keeping my eyes open and\n staying alive.\"\n\n\n There was no reply.", "\"I don't understand it,\" Quade admitted. \"Transphasia hits you a foul\n as soon as you let it into the airlock.\"\n\n\n \"Apparently, Quade,\nthis\nthing is going to creep up on us.\"\n\n\n \"Don't sound smug, Captain. It's pitty-pattying behind you too.\"\n\n\n The keening call across the surface of consciousness postponed my reply.\n\n\n The wail was ominously forlorn, defiant of description. I turned my\n head around slowly inside my helmet, not even sure that I had heard it.\n\n\n But what else can you do with a wail but\nhear\nit?\n\n\n Quade nodded. \"I've felt this before. It usually hits sooner. Let's\n trace it.\"", "How could we be less vulnerable, or preferably invulnerable?\n\"Captain, you got nothing to worry about,\" Quartermaster Farley said.\n He patted a space helmet paternally. \"You got yourself a self-contained\n environment. The suit's eye looks into yours at the arteries in the\n back of your eyeball so it can read your amber corpuscles and feed\n you your oxygen in the right amounts; you're a bottle-fed baby. If\n transphasia gets you seeing limburger, turn on the radar and you're\n air-conditioned as an igloo. Nothing short of a cosmic blast can dent\n that hide. You got it made.\"\n\n\n \"You are right,\" I said, \"only transphasia comes right through these\n air-fast joints.\"\n\n\n \"Something strange about the trance, Captain,\" Farley said darkly. \"Any\n spaceman can tell you that. Things we don't understand.\"", "\"Can't,\" I told him. \"I can't trust your opinion. I can't trust\nanything\n. That's why I'm Captain.\"\n\n\n \"You'll get over feeling like that.\"\n\n\n \"I know. Then I'll become First Officer.\"\n\n\n \"But look at that screen, sir,\" Quade said with an emphatic swing of\n his scarred arm. \"I've seen blank scanning like that before and you\n haven't—it's your first trip. This always means transphasia—cortex\n dissolution, motor area feedback, the Aitchell Effect—call it anything\n you like, it's still transphasia.\"\n\n\n \"I know what transphasia is,\" I said moderately. \"It means an\n electrogravitational disturbance of incoming sense data, rechanneling\n it to the wrong receptive areas. Besides the human brain, it also\n effects electronic equipment, like radar and television.\"", "His expression was tart and greasy despite all his light talk, and\n I knew mine was the same. I tested the security rope between our\n pressure suits. It was a taut and virile bass.\n\n\n We scaled a staccato of rocks, our suits grinding pepper against our\n hides.\n\n\n The musk summit rose before us, a minor-key horizon with a shifting\n treble for as far as I could smell. It was primitive beauty that made\n you feel shocking pink inside. The most beautiful vista I had ever\n tasted, it couldn't be dulled even by the sensation of beef broth under\n my skin.\n\n\n \"Is this transphasia?\" I asked in awe.\n\n\n \"It always has been before,\" Quade remarked. \"Ready to swallow your\n words about this being something an old hand wouldn't recognize,\n Captain?\"\n\n\n \"I'm swallowing no words until I find out precisely how they taste\n here.\"", "THE SPICY SOUND OF SUCCESS\nBy JIM HARMON\n\n\n Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine August 1959.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nNow was the captain's chance to prove he knew\n \nless than the crew—all their lives hung upon it!\nThere was nothing showing on the video screen. That was why we were\n looking at it so analytically.\n\n\n \"Transphasia, that's what it is,\" Ordinary Spaceman Quade stated with\n a definite thrust of his angular jaw in my direction. \"You can take my\n word on that, Captain Gavin.\"", "I clapped him on the shoulder. \"But, man, you have just been telling\n me all we had to worry about was common transphasia. A man with your\n experience could protect himself and cover even a rookie, under such\n familiar conditions—right?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir, I suppose I could,\" Quade said, bitterly aware he had lost\n out somewhere and hoping that it wasn't the start of a trend.\n\"Looks okay to me,\" I said. Quade passed a gauntlet over his faceplate.\n \"It's real. I can blur it with a smudged visor. When it blurs, it's\n solid.\"\n\n\n The landscape beyond the black corona left by our landing rockets was\n unimpressive. The rocky desert was made up of silicon and iron oxide,\n so it looked much the same as a terrestrial location. Yellowish-white\n sand ran up to and around reddish brown rock clawing into the pink\n sunlight.", "\"How far can we run it back?\"\n\n\n Quade shrugged. \"Miles.\"\n\n\n \"How many?\"\n\n\n \"We have three miles of cable. As long as you can feel, taste, see,\n smell or hear that rope anchoring you to home, you aren't lost.\"\n\n\n \"Three miles isn't good enough. We don't have enough fuel to change\n sites that often. You can't use the drive in a gravitational field, you\n know.\"\n\n\n \"What else can we do, Captain?\" Nagurski asked puzzledly.\n\n\n \"You've said that the spaceship is our only protection from\n transphasia. Is that it?\"\n\n\n Quade gave a curt nod.", "The Quartermaster rose with grim deliberation, and hiccuped. \"Better\n get him back to the spaceship fast. I've seen this kind of thing\n before with transphasia. His body cooled down because of the screaming\n wind—psychosomatic reaction—and his heating circuits compensated for\n the cool flesh. The poor devil's got frostbite and heat prostration.\"\nThe four of us managed to haul Quade back by using the powered joints\n in our suits. Hoffman suggested that he had once seen an injured\n man walked back inside his suit like a robot, but it was a delicate\n adjustment, controlling power circuits from outside a suit. It was too\n much for us—we were too tired, too numb, too drunk.\n\n\n At first sight of the spacer in the distance, transphasia left me with\n only a chocolate-tasting pink after-image on my retina. It was now\n showing bare skeleton from cannibalization for tractor parts, but it\n looked good to me, like home.", "\"Not a bad taste. They're pretty. Or haven't you noticed?\"\n\n\n \"Quade, you're right! About the colors anyway. This reminds me of an\n illiscope recording from a cybernetic translator.\"\n\n\n \"It should. I don't suppose we could understand each other if it wasn't\n for our morphistudy courses in reading cross-sense translations of\n Centauri blushtalk and the like.\"\n\n\n It became difficult to understand him, difficult to try talking in the\n face of such splendor. You never really appreciate colors until you\n smell them for the first time.\nQuade was as conversational as ever, though. \"I can't see\n irregularities occurring in a gravitational field. We must have\n compensated for the transphasia while we still had a point of\n reference, the solid reality of the spaceship. But out here, where all\n we have to hang onto is each other, our concept of reality goes\nbang\nand deflates to a tired joke.\"", "\"He\nis\na good man,\" Nagurski said. \"You mustn't be jealous of his\n status.\"\n\n\n The dog growled. He must have sensed what I almost did to Nagurski.\n\n\n \"Never mind that for now,\" I said wearily. \"What was your idea for\n getting our exploration parties through this transphasia?\"\n\n\n \"There's only one idea for that,\" said Quade, ducking his long head\n and stepping through the connecting hatch. \"With the Captain's\n permission....\"\n\n\n \"Go ahead, Quade, tell him,\" Nagurski invited.\n\n\n \"There's only one way to wade through transphasia with any\n reliability,\" Quade told me. \"You keep some kind of physical contact\n with the spaceship. Parties are strung out on guide line, like we were,\n but the cable has to be run back and made fast to the hull.\"", "\"But, sir,\" Farley protested, \"you don't give alcohol to the crew in\n the middle of a mission. It's not done. What reason can you have?\"\n\n\n \"To sharpen their taste and olfactory senses. We can turn up or block\n out sound. We can use radar to extend our sight, but the Space Service\n hasn't yet developed anything to make spacemen taste or smell better.\"\n\n\n \"They are going to smell like a herd of winos,\" Farley said. \"I don't\n like to think how they would taste.\"\n\n\n \"It's an entirely practical idea. Tea-tasters used to drink\n almond-and-barley water to sharpen their senses. I've observed that\n wine helps you appreciate culinary art more. Considering the mixed-up\n sensory data under transphasia, wine may help us to see where we are\n going.\"", "My finger could barely get in the chafing band of my regulation collar.\n I was hot and tired, fresh—in only the chronological sense—from a\n pressure suit.\n\n\n \"What do you know all about, Nagurski? Dogs? Spacemen? Women?\n Transphasia?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he answered casually. \"But I had immediate reference to our\n current psychophysiological phenomenon.\"\n\n\n I collapsed into the swivel in front of the chart table. \"First off,\n let's hear what you know about—never mind, make it dogs.\"\n\n\n \"Take Bruce, for example, then—\"\n\n\n \"No, thanks. I was wondering why\nyou\ndid.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't.\" His dark, round face was bland. \"Bruce picked me. Followed\n me home one night in Chicago Port. The dog or the man who picks his own\n master is the most content.\"", "\"Are you settling for a primary exploration?\"\n\n\n \"No. I think I had the right idea on your rescue party. You have to\n meet and fight a planet on its own terms. Fighting confused sounds and\n tastes with music and wine was crude, but it was on the right track.\n Out there, we understood language because we were familiar with alien\n languages changed to other sense mediums by cybernetic translators.\n Using the translator, we can learn to recognize all confused data as\n easily. I'm starting indoctrination courses.\"\n\n\n \"I doubt that that is necessary, sir,\" Quade said. \"Experienced\n spacemen are experienced with transphasia. You don't have to worry. In\n the future, I'll be able to resist sensations that tell me I'm freezing\n to death—if my gauges tell me it's a lie.\"\n\n\n I examined his bandisprayed hide. \"I think my way of gaining experience\n is less painful and more efficient.\"", "\"I'm not sure I do want to find out what that was just now. I didn't\n like the feel of it. But the important thing is for us not to get any\n further from the ship.\"\n\n\n \"That's important, Captain?\"\n\n\n \"To the best of my judgment, yes. This—condition—didn't begin until\n we got so far away from the spacer—in time or distance. I don't want\n it to get any worse. It's troublesome not to know black from white, but\n it would be a downright inconvenience not to know which way is up.\"\n\n\n \"Not for an experienced spaceman,\" Quade griped. \"I'm used to\n free-fall.\"\n\n\n But he turned back.\n\n\n \"Just a minute,\" I said. \"There was something strange up ahead. I want\n to see if short-range radar can get through our electrogravitational\n jamming here.\"", "\"I believe you,\" I said quickly. \"Let's leave it at that. I don't know\n what he will hear; what's worrying me is\nhow\nhe'll hear it, in what\n sensory medium. I hope the sound doesn't blind him. His radar is his\n only chance.\"\n\n\n \"How do you figure on getting a better edge yourself, sir?\"\n\n\n \"I have the idea, but not the word for it. Tonal compensation, I\n suppose. If you can't shut out the noise, we'll have to drown it out.\"\n\n\n Farley nodded. \"Beat like a telephone time signal?\"\n\n\n \"That would do it.\"\n\n\n \"It would do something else. It would drive you nuts.\"\nI shrugged. \"It might be distracting.\"\n\n\n \"Captain, take my word for it,\" argued Farley. \"Constant sonic\n feedback inside a spacesuit will set you rocking against the grain.\"", "\"Devise some regular system of interruptions,\" I suggested.\n\n\n \"Then the pattern will drive you crazy. Maybe in a few months, with\n luck, I could plan some harmonic scale you could tolerate—\"\n\n\n \"We don't have a few months,\" I said. \"How about music? There's a\n harmonic scale for you, and we can endure it, some of it.\nFigaro\nand\nAsleep in the Cradle of the Deep\ncan compensate for high-pitched\n outside temperatures, and\nFlight of the Bumble Bee\nto block bass\n notes.\"\n\n\n Farley nodded. \"Might work. I can program the tapes from the library.\"\n\n\n \"Good. There's one more thing—how are our stores of medicinal liquor?\"\n\n\n Farley paled. \"Captain, are you implying that\nI\nshould be running\n short on alcohol? Where do you get off suggesting a thing like that?\"", "\"Quail,\" Nagurski replied. \"That's what I see.\"\n\n\n \"You,\" I said carefully, \"have been in space a\nlong\ntime. Look again.\"\n\n\n \"I see our old buddy, Quail.\"\n\n\n I took another slosh of burgundy and peered up ahead. It\nwas\nQuade. A\n man in a spacesuit, faceplate in the dust, two hundred yards ahead.\nGrudgingly I stepped forward, out of the shadow of the ridge.\n A hysterically screaming wind rocked me on my toes. We pushed\n on sluggishly to Quade's side, moving to the tempo of\nPomp and\n Circumstance\n.\n\n\n Farley lugged Quade over on his back and read his gauges.", "\"I would,\" I answered levelly.\n\n\n \"Then you'll be interested to hear that Spaceman Quade took a suit and\n a cartographer unit. He's out there somewhere, alone.\"\n\n\n \"The idiot!\" I yelped. \"Everyone needs a partner out there. Send out a\n team to follow his cable and drag him in here by it.\"\n\n\n \"He didn't hook on a cable, Captain,\" Wallace said. \"I suppose he\n intended to go beyond the three-mile limit as you demanded.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up, Wallace. You don't have to like me, but you can't twist what\n I said as long as I command this spacer.\"\n\n\n \"Cool off, Gav,\" Nagurski advised me. \"It's been done before. Anybody\n else would have been a fool to go out alone, but Quade is the most\n experienced man we have. He knows transphasia. Trust him.\"", "Before I could agree with one of his theories for once, a streak of\n spice shot past us. It bounced back tangily and made a bitter rip\n between the two of us. There was no time to judge its size, if it had\n size, or its decibel range, or its caloric count, before a small, sharp\n pain dug in and dwindled down to nothing in one long second.\n\n\n The new odor pattern in my head told me Quade was saying something I\n couldn't quite make out.\n\n\n Quade then pulled me in the direction of the nasty little pain.\n\n\n \"Wait a minute, Spaceman!\" I bellowed. \"Where the devil do you think\n you're dragging me? Halt! That's a direct order.\"\n\n\n He stopped. \"Don't you want to find out what that was? This\nis\nan\n exploration party, you know, sir.\"" ], [ "\"Quade,\" I said, \"space isn't as dangerous as all that.\" I clapped him\n on the shoulder fraternally. \"You worry too much!\"", "\"Quail,\" Nagurski replied. \"That's what I see.\"\n\n\n \"You,\" I said carefully, \"have been in space a\nlong\ntime. Look again.\"\n\n\n \"I see our old buddy, Quail.\"\n\n\n I took another slosh of burgundy and peered up ahead. It\nwas\nQuade. A\n man in a spacesuit, faceplate in the dust, two hundred yards ahead.\nGrudgingly I stepped forward, out of the shadow of the ridge.\n A hysterically screaming wind rocked me on my toes. We pushed\n on sluggishly to Quade's side, moving to the tempo of\nPomp and\n Circumstance\n.\n\n\n Farley lugged Quade over on his back and read his gauges.", "The thought intruded itself:\nwhy\nhadn't I recognized this before I\n let Quade escape to almost certain death? Wasn't it because I wanted\n him dead, because I resented the crew's resentment of my authority, and\n recognized in him the leader and symbol of this resentment?\n\n\n I threw away that idea along with my half-used cigarette. It might very\n well be true, but how did that help now?\n\n\n I had to\nthink\n.\n\n\n I was going after him, that was certain. Not only for humane\n reasons—he was the most important member of the crew. With him around,\n there were only two opinions, his and mine. Without him, I'd have\n endless opinions to contend with.", "\"Yes, this is definitely the trail of Quail,\" Nagurski said soberly.\n \"This is serious business. I must ask whoever has been giggling on\n this channel to shut up. Pardon me, Captain.\nYou\nweren't giggling,\n sir?\"\n\n\n \"I have never giggled in my life, Nagurski.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. That's what we all thought.\"\n\n\n A moment later, Nagurski added, \"Anyway, I just noticed it was my\n shelf—my, that is, self.\"\n\n\n The basso profundo performing\nFigaro\non my headset climbed to a\n girlish shriek. A sliver of ice. This was the call Quade and I had\n first heard as we were about to troop over a cliff. I dug in my heels.\n\n\n \"Take a good look around, boys,\" I said. \"What do you see?\"", "\"The hell it is,\" Quade said grimly. \"It's his deadliest liability.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I must inform you that I am demoting you to Acting\n Executive Officer.\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\" Quade gawked. \"But dammit, Captain, you can't do that to me!\n I'll lose hazard pay and be that much further from retirement!\"\n\n\n \"That's tough,\" I sympathized, \"but in every service a chap gets broken\n in rank now and then.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe it's worth it,\" Quade said heavily. \"Now maybe I've learned how\n to stay alive out here. I just hope I don't forget.\"\n\n\n I thought about that. I was nearly through with my first mission and\n I could speak with experience, even if it was the least amount of\n experience aboard.", "Quade squirmed. \"Yes, sir. One thing, sir—I don't understand how you\n got me away from those aliens.\"\n\n\n \"The aliens were trying to help. They knew something was wrong and they\n were prodding and probing. When the first tractor pulled up and the men\n got out, they seemed to realize our own people could help us easier\n than they could.\"\n\n\n \"I am not quite convinced that those babies just meant to help us all\n the time.\"\n\n\n \"But they did! First, that call of theirs—it wasn't to lead us into\n danger, but to warn us of the cliff, the freezing wind. They saw we\n were trying to find out things about their world, so they even offered\n us one of their own kind to study. Unfortunately, he was too much for\n us. They didn't give us their top man, of course, only the village\n idiot. It's just as well. We aren't allowed to dissect creatures that\n far up the intelligence scale.\"", "\"I don't like this,\" I admitted. \"It's not at all what I expected from\n what you said about transphasia. It must be something else.\"\n\n\n \"It couldn't be anything else. I know what to expect. You don't. You\n may begin smelling sensations, tasting sounds, hearing sights, seeing\n tastes, touching odors—or any other combination. Don't let it bother\n you.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not. I'll soothe my nerves by counting little shocks of\n lanolin jumping over a loud fence.\"\n\n\n Quade grinned behind his faceplate. \"Good idea.\"\n\n\n \"Then you can have it. I'm going to try keeping my eyes open and\n staying alive.\"\n\n\n There was no reply.", "Before I could agree with one of his theories for once, a streak of\n spice shot past us. It bounced back tangily and made a bitter rip\n between the two of us. There was no time to judge its size, if it had\n size, or its decibel range, or its caloric count, before a small, sharp\n pain dug in and dwindled down to nothing in one long second.\n\n\n The new odor pattern in my head told me Quade was saying something I\n couldn't quite make out.\n\n\n Quade then pulled me in the direction of the nasty little pain.\n\n\n \"Wait a minute, Spaceman!\" I bellowed. \"Where the devil do you think\n you're dragging me? Halt! That's a direct order.\"\n\n\n He stopped. \"Don't you want to find out what that was? This\nis\nan\n exploration party, you know, sir.\"", "\"I would,\" I answered levelly.\n\n\n \"Then you'll be interested to hear that Spaceman Quade took a suit and\n a cartographer unit. He's out there somewhere, alone.\"\n\n\n \"The idiot!\" I yelped. \"Everyone needs a partner out there. Send out a\n team to follow his cable and drag him in here by it.\"\n\n\n \"He didn't hook on a cable, Captain,\" Wallace said. \"I suppose he\n intended to go beyond the three-mile limit as you demanded.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up, Wallace. You don't have to like me, but you can't twist what\n I said as long as I command this spacer.\"\n\n\n \"Cool off, Gav,\" Nagurski advised me. \"It's been done before. Anybody\n else would have been a fool to go out alone, but Quade is the most\n experienced man we have. He knows transphasia. Trust him.\"", "\"I don't understand it,\" Quade admitted. \"Transphasia hits you a foul\n as soon as you let it into the airlock.\"\n\n\n \"Apparently, Quade,\nthis\nthing is going to creep up on us.\"\n\n\n \"Don't sound smug, Captain. It's pitty-pattying behind you too.\"\n\n\n The keening call across the surface of consciousness postponed my reply.\n\n\n The wail was ominously forlorn, defiant of description. I turned my\n head around slowly inside my helmet, not even sure that I had heard it.\n\n\n But what else can you do with a wail but\nhear\nit?\n\n\n Quade nodded. \"I've felt this before. It usually hits sooner. Let's\n trace it.\"", "The Quartermaster rose with grim deliberation, and hiccuped. \"Better\n get him back to the spaceship fast. I've seen this kind of thing\n before with transphasia. His body cooled down because of the screaming\n wind—psychosomatic reaction—and his heating circuits compensated for\n the cool flesh. The poor devil's got frostbite and heat prostration.\"\nThe four of us managed to haul Quade back by using the powered joints\n in our suits. Hoffman suggested that he had once seen an injured\n man walked back inside his suit like a robot, but it was a delicate\n adjustment, controlling power circuits from outside a suit. It was too\n much for us—we were too tired, too numb, too drunk.\n\n\n At first sight of the spacer in the distance, transphasia left me with\n only a chocolate-tasting pink after-image on my retina. It was now\n showing bare skeleton from cannibalization for tractor parts, but it\n looked good to me, like home.", "I clapped him on the shoulder. \"But, man, you have just been telling\n me all we had to worry about was common transphasia. A man with your\n experience could protect himself and cover even a rookie, under such\n familiar conditions—right?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir, I suppose I could,\" Quade said, bitterly aware he had lost\n out somewhere and hoping that it wasn't the start of a trend.\n\"Looks okay to me,\" I said. Quade passed a gauntlet over his faceplate.\n \"It's real. I can blur it with a smudged visor. When it blurs, it's\n solid.\"\n\n\n The landscape beyond the black corona left by our landing rockets was\n unimpressive. The rocky desert was made up of silicon and iron oxide,\n so it looked much the same as a terrestrial location. Yellowish-white\n sand ran up to and around reddish brown rock clawing into the pink\n sunlight.", "I couldn't stop them. Being in Alpine rope with them, I went along. At\n the time, it even seemed vaguely like a good idea.\n\n\n As we lumbered toward them, the aliens fell back in a solid line except\n for the first curious-looking one. Quade got there ahead of us and made\n a grab. The creature rose into the air with a screaming vibration of\n his tail and landed on top of him, flattening him instantly.\n\n\n \"Sssh, men,\" Nagurski said. \"Leave it to me. I'll surround him.\"", "\"Yes, sir,\" Farley said obediently. \"I'll give spacemen a few quarts of\n wine, telling them to use it carefully for scientific purposes only,\n and then they will be able to see where they are going. Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n I turned to leave, then paused briefly. \"You can come along, Farley.\n I'm sure you want to see that we don't waste any of the stuff.\"\n\"There they are!\" Nagurski called. \"Quade's footsteps again, just\n beyond that rocky ridge.\"\n\n\n The landscape was rich chocolate ice cream smothered with chocolate\n syrup, caramel, peanuts and maple syrup, eaten while you smoked an old,\n mellow Havana. The footsteps were faint traces of whipped cream across\n the dark, rich taste of the planet.", "His expression was tart and greasy despite all his light talk, and\n I knew mine was the same. I tested the security rope between our\n pressure suits. It was a taut and virile bass.\n\n\n We scaled a staccato of rocks, our suits grinding pepper against our\n hides.\n\n\n The musk summit rose before us, a minor-key horizon with a shifting\n treble for as far as I could smell. It was primitive beauty that made\n you feel shocking pink inside. The most beautiful vista I had ever\n tasted, it couldn't be dulled even by the sensation of beef broth under\n my skin.\n\n\n \"Is this transphasia?\" I asked in awe.\n\n\n \"It always has been before,\" Quade remarked. \"Ready to swallow your\n words about this being something an old hand wouldn't recognize,\n Captain?\"\n\n\n \"I'm swallowing no words until I find out precisely how they taste\n here.\"", "\"Can't,\" I told him. \"I can't trust your opinion. I can't trust\nanything\n. That's why I'm Captain.\"\n\n\n \"You'll get over feeling like that.\"\n\n\n \"I know. Then I'll become First Officer.\"\n\n\n \"But look at that screen, sir,\" Quade said with an emphatic swing of\n his scarred arm. \"I've seen blank scanning like that before and you\n haven't—it's your first trip. This always means transphasia—cortex\n dissolution, motor area feedback, the Aitchell Effect—call it anything\n you like, it's still transphasia.\"\n\n\n \"I know what transphasia is,\" I said moderately. \"It means an\n electrogravitational disturbance of incoming sense data, rechanneling\n it to the wrong receptive areas. Besides the human brain, it also\n effects electronic equipment, like radar and television.\"", "I leaned forward, elbows on knees. \"Let me tell\nyou\na thing,\n Nagurski. Your trust of these damn-fool spacemen is why you are no\n longer a captain. You can't trust anything out here in space, much less\n human nature. Even I know that much!\"\n\n\n He was pained. \"If you don't trust the men, they won't trust you, Gav.\"\n\n\n \"They don't have to trust me. All they have to do is\nobey\nme or, by\n Jupiter, get frozen stiff and thawed out just in time for court-marshal\n back home. Listen,\" I continued earnestly, \"these men aren't going to\n think of me—of\nus\n, the officers, as their leaders. As far as the\n crew is concerned, Ordinary Spaceman Quade is the best man on this\n ship.\"", "\"Obviously.\" Quade glanced disgustedly at the screen.\n\n\n \"Too obvious. This time it might not be a familiar condition of many\n planetary gravitational fields. On this planet, that blank kinescope\n may mean our Big Brother kites were knocked down by hostile natives.\"\n\n\n \"You are plain wrong, Captain. Traditionally, alien races never\n interfere with our explorations. Generally, they are so alien to us\n they can't even recognize our existence.\"\nI drew myself up to my full height—and noticed in irritation it was\n still an inch less than Quade's. \"I don't understand you men. Look at\n yourself, Quade. You've been busted to Ordinary Spaceman for just that\n kind of thinking, for relying on tradition, on things that have worked\n before. Not only your thinking is slipshod, you've grown careless about\n everything else, even your own life.\"", "But it wouldn't do any good to go out no better equipped than he.\n There was no time to wait for tractors to be built if we wanted to\n reach him alive, and we certainly couldn't reach him five or ten\n miles out with our three miles of safety line. We would have to go in\n spacesuits.\n\n\n But how would that leave us any better off than Quade?\n\n\n Why was Quade vulnerable in his spacesuit, as I knew from experience he\n would be?", "I followed my own advice and landed in the dirt beside Quade.\n\n\n The bouncer came to rest and regarded us silently, head on an\n eighty-degree angle.\n\n\n I was stone sober.\n\n\n The others were lying around me quietly, passed out, knocked out, or\n taking cover.\n\n\n The ring of aliens drew in about us, closer, tighter, as the bouncer\n sat on his haunches and waited for us to move.\n\"Feeling better?\" I asked Quade in the infirmary.\n\n\n He punched up his pillow and settled back. \"I guess so. But when I\n think of all the ways I nearly got myself killed out there.... How far\n have you got in the tractors?\"\n\n\n \"I'm having the tractors torn down and the parts put back into the\n spaceship where they belong. We\nshouldn't\nrisk losing them and\n getting stuck here.\"" ], [ "\"How far can we run it back?\"\n\n\n Quade shrugged. \"Miles.\"\n\n\n \"How many?\"\n\n\n \"We have three miles of cable. As long as you can feel, taste, see,\n smell or hear that rope anchoring you to home, you aren't lost.\"\n\n\n \"Three miles isn't good enough. We don't have enough fuel to change\n sites that often. You can't use the drive in a gravitational field, you\n know.\"\n\n\n \"What else can we do, Captain?\" Nagurski asked puzzledly.\n\n\n \"You've said that the spaceship is our only protection from\n transphasia. Is that it?\"\n\n\n Quade gave a curt nod.", "How could we be less vulnerable, or preferably invulnerable?\n\"Captain, you got nothing to worry about,\" Quartermaster Farley said.\n He patted a space helmet paternally. \"You got yourself a self-contained\n environment. The suit's eye looks into yours at the arteries in the\n back of your eyeball so it can read your amber corpuscles and feed\n you your oxygen in the right amounts; you're a bottle-fed baby. If\n transphasia gets you seeing limburger, turn on the radar and you're\n air-conditioned as an igloo. Nothing short of a cosmic blast can dent\n that hide. You got it made.\"\n\n\n \"You are right,\" I said, \"only transphasia comes right through these\n air-fast joints.\"\n\n\n \"Something strange about the trance, Captain,\" Farley said darkly. \"Any\n spaceman can tell you that. Things we don't understand.\"", "\"I'm not sure I do want to find out what that was just now. I didn't\n like the feel of it. But the important thing is for us not to get any\n further from the ship.\"\n\n\n \"That's important, Captain?\"\n\n\n \"To the best of my judgment, yes. This—condition—didn't begin until\n we got so far away from the spacer—in time or distance. I don't want\n it to get any worse. It's troublesome not to know black from white, but\n it would be a downright inconvenience not to know which way is up.\"\n\n\n \"Not for an experienced spaceman,\" Quade griped. \"I'm used to\n free-fall.\"\n\n\n But he turned back.\n\n\n \"Just a minute,\" I said. \"There was something strange up ahead. I want\n to see if short-range radar can get through our electrogravitational\n jamming here.\"", "\"I trusted him too far by letting him run around loose. He needs a\n leash in more ways than one, and I'm going to put one on him.\"\nFor me, it was a nightmare. I lay down in my cabin and thought. I had\n to think things through very carefully. One mistake was too many for\n me. My worst fear had been that someday I would overlook one tiny flaw\n and ruin a gem. Now I might have ruined an exploration and destroyed a\n man, not a stone, because I had missed the flaw.\n\n\n No one but a reckless fool would have gone out alone on a strange\n planet with a terrifying phenomenon, but I'd had enough evidence to see\n that space exploration\nmade\na man a reckless fool by doing things on\n one planet he had once found safe and wise on some other world.", "\"I don't understand it,\" Quade admitted. \"Transphasia hits you a foul\n as soon as you let it into the airlock.\"\n\n\n \"Apparently, Quade,\nthis\nthing is going to creep up on us.\"\n\n\n \"Don't sound smug, Captain. It's pitty-pattying behind you too.\"\n\n\n The keening call across the surface of consciousness postponed my reply.\n\n\n The wail was ominously forlorn, defiant of description. I turned my\n head around slowly inside my helmet, not even sure that I had heard it.\n\n\n But what else can you do with a wail but\nhear\nit?\n\n\n Quade nodded. \"I've felt this before. It usually hits sooner. Let's\n trace it.\"", "Quade squirmed. \"Yes, sir. One thing, sir—I don't understand how you\n got me away from those aliens.\"\n\n\n \"The aliens were trying to help. They knew something was wrong and they\n were prodding and probing. When the first tractor pulled up and the men\n got out, they seemed to realize our own people could help us easier\n than they could.\"\n\n\n \"I am not quite convinced that those babies just meant to help us all\n the time.\"\n\n\n \"But they did! First, that call of theirs—it wasn't to lead us into\n danger, but to warn us of the cliff, the freezing wind. They saw we\n were trying to find out things about their world, so they even offered\n us one of their own kind to study. Unfortunately, he was too much for\n us. They didn't give us their top man, of course, only the village\n idiot. It's just as well. We aren't allowed to dissect creatures that\n far up the intelligence scale.\"", "\"He\nis\na good man,\" Nagurski said. \"You mustn't be jealous of his\n status.\"\n\n\n The dog growled. He must have sensed what I almost did to Nagurski.\n\n\n \"Never mind that for now,\" I said wearily. \"What was your idea for\n getting our exploration parties through this transphasia?\"\n\n\n \"There's only one idea for that,\" said Quade, ducking his long head\n and stepping through the connecting hatch. \"With the Captain's\n permission....\"\n\n\n \"Go ahead, Quade, tell him,\" Nagurski invited.\n\n\n \"There's only one way to wade through transphasia with any\n reliability,\" Quade told me. \"You keep some kind of physical contact\n with the spaceship. Parties are strung out on guide line, like we were,\n but the cable has to be run back and made fast to the hull.\"", "I clapped him on the shoulder. \"But, man, you have just been telling\n me all we had to worry about was common transphasia. A man with your\n experience could protect himself and cover even a rookie, under such\n familiar conditions—right?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir, I suppose I could,\" Quade said, bitterly aware he had lost\n out somewhere and hoping that it wasn't the start of a trend.\n\"Looks okay to me,\" I said. Quade passed a gauntlet over his faceplate.\n \"It's real. I can blur it with a smudged visor. When it blurs, it's\n solid.\"\n\n\n The landscape beyond the black corona left by our landing rockets was\n unimpressive. The rocky desert was made up of silicon and iron oxide,\n so it looked much the same as a terrestrial location. Yellowish-white\n sand ran up to and around reddish brown rock clawing into the pink\n sunlight.", "\"I believe you,\" I said quickly. \"Let's leave it at that. I don't know\n what he will hear; what's worrying me is\nhow\nhe'll hear it, in what\n sensory medium. I hope the sound doesn't blind him. His radar is his\n only chance.\"\n\n\n \"How do you figure on getting a better edge yourself, sir?\"\n\n\n \"I have the idea, but not the word for it. Tonal compensation, I\n suppose. If you can't shut out the noise, we'll have to drown it out.\"\n\n\n Farley nodded. \"Beat like a telephone time signal?\"\n\n\n \"That would do it.\"\n\n\n \"It would do something else. It would drive you nuts.\"\nI shrugged. \"It might be distracting.\"\n\n\n \"Captain, take my word for it,\" argued Farley. \"Constant sonic\n feedback inside a spacesuit will set you rocking against the grain.\"", "\"Not,\" he persisted, \"if\ntoo\nmany parts are missing.\"\n\n\n \"Nagurski, if you are looking for a job safer than space exploration,\n why don't you go back to testing cosmic bomb shelters?\"\n\n\n Nagurski flushed. \"Look here, Captain, you are being too damned\n cautious. There is a way one handles the survey of a planet like this,\n and this isn't the way.\"\n\n\n \"It's my way. You heard what Quade said. You know it yourself. The men\n have to have something tangible to hang onto out there. One slender\n cable isn't enough of an edge on sensory anarchy. If the product of\n their own technological civilization can keep them sane, I say let 'em\n take a part of that environment with them.\"", "\"The hell it is,\" Quade said grimly. \"It's his deadliest liability.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I must inform you that I am demoting you to Acting\n Executive Officer.\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\" Quade gawked. \"But dammit, Captain, you can't do that to me!\n I'll lose hazard pay and be that much further from retirement!\"\n\n\n \"That's tough,\" I sympathized, \"but in every service a chap gets broken\n in rank now and then.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe it's worth it,\" Quade said heavily. \"Now maybe I've learned how\n to stay alive out here. I just hope I don't forget.\"\n\n\n I thought about that. I was nearly through with my first mission and\n I could speak with experience, even if it was the least amount of\n experience aboard.", "\"Can't,\" I told him. \"I can't trust your opinion. I can't trust\nanything\n. That's why I'm Captain.\"\n\n\n \"You'll get over feeling like that.\"\n\n\n \"I know. Then I'll become First Officer.\"\n\n\n \"But look at that screen, sir,\" Quade said with an emphatic swing of\n his scarred arm. \"I've seen blank scanning like that before and you\n haven't—it's your first trip. This always means transphasia—cortex\n dissolution, motor area feedback, the Aitchell Effect—call it anything\n you like, it's still transphasia.\"\n\n\n \"I know what transphasia is,\" I said moderately. \"It means an\n electrogravitational disturbance of incoming sense data, rechanneling\n it to the wrong receptive areas. Besides the human brain, it also\n effects electronic equipment, like radar and television.\"", "I took a sighting. My helmet set projected the pattern on the cornea.\n Sweetness building up to a stab of pure salt—those were the blips.\n\n\n Beside me, there was a thin thread of violet. Quade had whistled. He\n was reading the map too.\n\n\n The slope fell away sharply in front of us, becoming a deep gorge.\n There was something broken and twisted at the bottom, something we had\n known for an instant as a streak of spice.\n\n\n \"There's one free-fall,\" I said, \"where you wouldn't live long enough\n to get used to it.\"\n\n\n He said nothing on the route back to the spacer.\n\"I know all about this sort of thing, Gav,\" First Officer Nagurski said\n expansively. He was rubbing the well-worn ears of our beagle mascot,\n Bruce. A heavy tail thudded on the steel deck from time to time.", "The Quartermaster rose with grim deliberation, and hiccuped. \"Better\n get him back to the spaceship fast. I've seen this kind of thing\n before with transphasia. His body cooled down because of the screaming\n wind—psychosomatic reaction—and his heating circuits compensated for\n the cool flesh. The poor devil's got frostbite and heat prostration.\"\nThe four of us managed to haul Quade back by using the powered joints\n in our suits. Hoffman suggested that he had once seen an injured\n man walked back inside his suit like a robot, but it was a delicate\n adjustment, controlling power circuits from outside a suit. It was too\n much for us—we were too tired, too numb, too drunk.\n\n\n At first sight of the spacer in the distance, transphasia left me with\n only a chocolate-tasting pink after-image on my retina. It was now\n showing bare skeleton from cannibalization for tractor parts, but it\n looked good to me, like home.", "\"Quail,\" Nagurski replied. \"That's what I see.\"\n\n\n \"You,\" I said carefully, \"have been in space a\nlong\ntime. Look again.\"\n\n\n \"I see our old buddy, Quail.\"\n\n\n I took another slosh of burgundy and peered up ahead. It\nwas\nQuade. A\n man in a spacesuit, faceplate in the dust, two hundred yards ahead.\nGrudgingly I stepped forward, out of the shadow of the ridge.\n A hysterically screaming wind rocked me on my toes. We pushed\n on sluggishly to Quade's side, moving to the tempo of\nPomp and\n Circumstance\n.\n\n\n Farley lugged Quade over on his back and read his gauges.", "But it wouldn't do any good to go out no better equipped than he.\n There was no time to wait for tractors to be built if we wanted to\n reach him alive, and we certainly couldn't reach him five or ten\n miles out with our three miles of safety line. We would have to go in\n spacesuits.\n\n\n But how would that leave us any better off than Quade?\n\n\n Why was Quade vulnerable in his spacesuit, as I knew from experience he\n would be?", "Before I could agree with one of his theories for once, a streak of\n spice shot past us. It bounced back tangily and made a bitter rip\n between the two of us. There was no time to judge its size, if it had\n size, or its decibel range, or its caloric count, before a small, sharp\n pain dug in and dwindled down to nothing in one long second.\n\n\n The new odor pattern in my head told me Quade was saying something I\n couldn't quite make out.\n\n\n Quade then pulled me in the direction of the nasty little pain.\n\n\n \"Wait a minute, Spaceman!\" I bellowed. \"Where the devil do you think\n you're dragging me? Halt! That's a direct order.\"\n\n\n He stopped. \"Don't you want to find out what that was? This\nis\nan\n exploration party, you know, sir.\"", "The men followed the First Officer's example, and the rope tying them\n to him. I went along cheerfully myself, until an enormous rump struck\n me violently in the face. My leaded boots were driven down into fertile\n soil, and my helmet was ringing like a bell. I got a jerky picture of\n the beast jumping up and down on top of the others joyously. Only the\n stiff space armor was holding up our slack frames.\n\n\n \"Let's let him escape,\" Hoffman suggested on the audio circuit.\n\n\n \"I'd like to,\" Nagurski admitted, \"but the other beasts won't let us\n get past their circle.\"\n\n\n It was true. The aliens formed a ring around us, and each time a\n bouncing boy hit the line, he only bounced back on top of us.\n\n\n \"Flat!\" I yelled. \"Our seams can't take much more of this beating.\"", "\"Then,\" I told them, \"we will have to start tearing apart this ship.\"\nSergeant-Major Hoffman and his team were doing a good job of ripping\n out the side of the afterhold. Through the portal I could see the\n suited men expertly guiding the huge curved sections on their ray\n projectors.\n\n\n \"Cannibalizing is dangerous.\" Nagurski put his pipe in his teeth and\n shook his head disapprovingly.\n\n\n \"Spaceships have parts as interchangeable as Erector sets. We can\n take apart the tractors and put our ship back together again after we\n complete the survey.\"\n\n\n \"You can't assemble a jigsaw puzzle if some of the pieces are missing.\"\n\n\n \"You can't get a complete picture, but you can get a good idea of\n what it looks like. We can take off in a reasonable facsimile of a\n spaceship.\"", "\"Devise some regular system of interruptions,\" I suggested.\n\n\n \"Then the pattern will drive you crazy. Maybe in a few months, with\n luck, I could plan some harmonic scale you could tolerate—\"\n\n\n \"We don't have a few months,\" I said. \"How about music? There's a\n harmonic scale for you, and we can endure it, some of it.\nFigaro\nand\nAsleep in the Cradle of the Deep\ncan compensate for high-pitched\n outside temperatures, and\nFlight of the Bumble Bee\nto block bass\n notes.\"\n\n\n Farley nodded. \"Might work. I can program the tapes from the library.\"\n\n\n \"Good. There's one more thing—how are our stores of medicinal liquor?\"\n\n\n Farley paled. \"Captain, are you implying that\nI\nshould be running\n short on alcohol? Where do you get off suggesting a thing like that?\"" ], [ "He blinked, then decided to laugh. \"I've been in space a good many\n years. I really wanted to relax a little bit more. Besides, the\n increase in hazard pay was actually more than my salary as a captain.\n I'm a notch nearer retirement too.\"\n\n\n \"Tell me, did you always feel this way about letting the men select\n their own leader?\"\nNagurski brought out a pipe. He would have a pipe, I decided.\n\n\n \"No, not always. I was like you at first. Fresh from the cosmic energy\n test lab, suspicious of everything, trying to tell the old hands what\n to do. But I learned that they are pretty smart boys; they know what\n they are doing. You can rely on them absolutely.\"", "\"Bruce is content,\" I admitted. \"He couldn't be any more content and\n still be alive. But I'm not sure that theory works out with men. We'd\n have anarchy if I tried to let these starbucks pick their own master.\"\n\n\n \"\nI\nhad no trouble when I was a captain,\" Nagurski said. \"Ease the\n reins on the men. Just offer them your advice, your guidance. They\n will soon see why the service selected you as captain; they will pick\n you themselves.\"\n\n\n \"Did your crew voluntarily elect you as their leader?\"\n\n\n \"Of course they did, Gav. I'm an old hand at controlling crews.\"\n\n\n \"Then why are you First Officer under me now?\"", "I leaned forward, elbows on knees. \"Let me tell\nyou\na thing,\n Nagurski. Your trust of these damn-fool spacemen is why you are no\n longer a captain. You can't trust anything out here in space, much less\n human nature. Even I know that much!\"\n\n\n He was pained. \"If you don't trust the men, they won't trust you, Gav.\"\n\n\n \"They don't have to trust me. All they have to do is\nobey\nme or, by\n Jupiter, get frozen stiff and thawed out just in time for court-marshal\n back home. Listen,\" I continued earnestly, \"these men aren't going to\n think of me—of\nus\n, the officers, as their leaders. As far as the\n crew is concerned, Ordinary Spaceman Quade is the best man on this\n ship.\"", "\"In departing from standard procedure that we have learned to trust,\n you are risking more than a few men—you risk the whole mission in\n gambling so much of the ship. A captain doesn't take chances like that!\"\n\n\n \"I never said I wouldn't take chances. But I'm not going to take\nstupid\nchances. I\nmight\nbe doing the wrong thing, but I can see you\nwould\nbe doing it wrong.\"\n\n\n \"You know nothing about space, Captain! You have to trust\nus\n.\"\n\n\n \"That's it exactly, First Officer Nagurski,\" I said sociably. \"If you\n lazy, lax, complacent slobs want to do something in a particular way, I\n know it\nhas\nto be wrong.\"\n\n\n I turned and found Wallace, the personnel man, standing in the hatchway.\n\n\n \"Pardon, Captain, but would you say we also lacked initiative?\"", "\"Yes, this is definitely the trail of Quail,\" Nagurski said soberly.\n \"This is serious business. I must ask whoever has been giggling on\n this channel to shut up. Pardon me, Captain.\nYou\nweren't giggling,\n sir?\"\n\n\n \"I have never giggled in my life, Nagurski.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. That's what we all thought.\"\n\n\n A moment later, Nagurski added, \"Anyway, I just noticed it was my\n shelf—my, that is, self.\"\n\n\n The basso profundo performing\nFigaro\non my headset climbed to a\n girlish shriek. A sliver of ice. This was the call Quade and I had\n first heard as we were about to troop over a cliff. I dug in my heels.\n\n\n \"Take a good look around, boys,\" I said. \"What do you see?\"", "I couldn't stop them. Being in Alpine rope with them, I went along. At\n the time, it even seemed vaguely like a good idea.\n\n\n As we lumbered toward them, the aliens fell back in a solid line except\n for the first curious-looking one. Quade got there ahead of us and made\n a grab. The creature rose into the air with a screaming vibration of\n his tail and landed on top of him, flattening him instantly.\n\n\n \"Sssh, men,\" Nagurski said. \"Leave it to me. I'll surround him.\"", "The thought intruded itself:\nwhy\nhadn't I recognized this before I\n let Quade escape to almost certain death? Wasn't it because I wanted\n him dead, because I resented the crew's resentment of my authority, and\n recognized in him the leader and symbol of this resentment?\n\n\n I threw away that idea along with my half-used cigarette. It might very\n well be true, but how did that help now?\n\n\n I had to\nthink\n.\n\n\n I was going after him, that was certain. Not only for humane\n reasons—he was the most important member of the crew. With him around,\n there were only two opinions, his and mine. Without him, I'd have\n endless opinions to contend with.", "\"I would,\" I answered levelly.\n\n\n \"Then you'll be interested to hear that Spaceman Quade took a suit and\n a cartographer unit. He's out there somewhere, alone.\"\n\n\n \"The idiot!\" I yelped. \"Everyone needs a partner out there. Send out a\n team to follow his cable and drag him in here by it.\"\n\n\n \"He didn't hook on a cable, Captain,\" Wallace said. \"I suppose he\n intended to go beyond the three-mile limit as you demanded.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up, Wallace. You don't have to like me, but you can't twist what\n I said as long as I command this spacer.\"\n\n\n \"Cool off, Gav,\" Nagurski advised me. \"It's been done before. Anybody\n else would have been a fool to go out alone, but Quade is the most\n experienced man we have. He knows transphasia. Trust him.\"", "\"Not,\" he persisted, \"if\ntoo\nmany parts are missing.\"\n\n\n \"Nagurski, if you are looking for a job safer than space exploration,\n why don't you go back to testing cosmic bomb shelters?\"\n\n\n Nagurski flushed. \"Look here, Captain, you are being too damned\n cautious. There is a way one handles the survey of a planet like this,\n and this isn't the way.\"\n\n\n \"It's my way. You heard what Quade said. You know it yourself. The men\n have to have something tangible to hang onto out there. One slender\n cable isn't enough of an edge on sensory anarchy. If the product of\n their own technological civilization can keep them sane, I say let 'em\n take a part of that environment with them.\"", "\"Yes, sir,\" Farley said obediently. \"I'll give spacemen a few quarts of\n wine, telling them to use it carefully for scientific purposes only,\n and then they will be able to see where they are going. Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n I turned to leave, then paused briefly. \"You can come along, Farley.\n I'm sure you want to see that we don't waste any of the stuff.\"\n\"There they are!\" Nagurski called. \"Quade's footsteps again, just\n beyond that rocky ridge.\"\n\n\n The landscape was rich chocolate ice cream smothered with chocolate\n syrup, caramel, peanuts and maple syrup, eaten while you smoked an old,\n mellow Havana. The footsteps were faint traces of whipped cream across\n the dark, rich taste of the planet.", "\"How far can we run it back?\"\n\n\n Quade shrugged. \"Miles.\"\n\n\n \"How many?\"\n\n\n \"We have three miles of cable. As long as you can feel, taste, see,\n smell or hear that rope anchoring you to home, you aren't lost.\"\n\n\n \"Three miles isn't good enough. We don't have enough fuel to change\n sites that often. You can't use the drive in a gravitational field, you\n know.\"\n\n\n \"What else can we do, Captain?\" Nagurski asked puzzledly.\n\n\n \"You've said that the spaceship is our only protection from\n transphasia. Is that it?\"\n\n\n Quade gave a curt nod.", "My finger could barely get in the chafing band of my regulation collar.\n I was hot and tired, fresh—in only the chronological sense—from a\n pressure suit.\n\n\n \"What do you know all about, Nagurski? Dogs? Spacemen? Women?\n Transphasia?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he answered casually. \"But I had immediate reference to our\n current psychophysiological phenomenon.\"\n\n\n I collapsed into the swivel in front of the chart table. \"First off,\n let's hear what you know about—never mind, make it dogs.\"\n\n\n \"Take Bruce, for example, then—\"\n\n\n \"No, thanks. I was wondering why\nyou\ndid.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't.\" His dark, round face was bland. \"Bruce picked me. Followed\n me home one night in Chicago Port. The dog or the man who picks his own\n master is the most content.\"", "\"He\nis\na good man,\" Nagurski said. \"You mustn't be jealous of his\n status.\"\n\n\n The dog growled. He must have sensed what I almost did to Nagurski.\n\n\n \"Never mind that for now,\" I said wearily. \"What was your idea for\n getting our exploration parties through this transphasia?\"\n\n\n \"There's only one idea for that,\" said Quade, ducking his long head\n and stepping through the connecting hatch. \"With the Captain's\n permission....\"\n\n\n \"Go ahead, Quade, tell him,\" Nagurski invited.\n\n\n \"There's only one way to wade through transphasia with any\n reliability,\" Quade told me. \"You keep some kind of physical contact\n with the spaceship. Parties are strung out on guide line, like we were,\n but the cable has to be run back and made fast to the hull.\"", "\"The hell it is,\" Quade said grimly. \"It's his deadliest liability.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I must inform you that I am demoting you to Acting\n Executive Officer.\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\" Quade gawked. \"But dammit, Captain, you can't do that to me!\n I'll lose hazard pay and be that much further from retirement!\"\n\n\n \"That's tough,\" I sympathized, \"but in every service a chap gets broken\n in rank now and then.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe it's worth it,\" Quade said heavily. \"Now maybe I've learned how\n to stay alive out here. I just hope I don't forget.\"\n\n\n I thought about that. I was nearly through with my first mission and\n I could speak with experience, even if it was the least amount of\n experience aboard.", "The men followed the First Officer's example, and the rope tying them\n to him. I went along cheerfully myself, until an enormous rump struck\n me violently in the face. My leaded boots were driven down into fertile\n soil, and my helmet was ringing like a bell. I got a jerky picture of\n the beast jumping up and down on top of the others joyously. Only the\n stiff space armor was holding up our slack frames.\n\n\n \"Let's let him escape,\" Hoffman suggested on the audio circuit.\n\n\n \"I'd like to,\" Nagurski admitted, \"but the other beasts won't let us\n get past their circle.\"\n\n\n It was true. The aliens formed a ring around us, and each time a\n bouncing boy hit the line, he only bounced back on top of us.\n\n\n \"Flat!\" I yelled. \"Our seams can't take much more of this beating.\"", "\"Quail,\" Nagurski replied. \"That's what I see.\"\n\n\n \"You,\" I said carefully, \"have been in space a\nlong\ntime. Look again.\"\n\n\n \"I see our old buddy, Quail.\"\n\n\n I took another slosh of burgundy and peered up ahead. It\nwas\nQuade. A\n man in a spacesuit, faceplate in the dust, two hundred yards ahead.\nGrudgingly I stepped forward, out of the shadow of the ridge.\n A hysterically screaming wind rocked me on my toes. We pushed\n on sluggishly to Quade's side, moving to the tempo of\nPomp and\n Circumstance\n.\n\n\n Farley lugged Quade over on his back and read his gauges.", "\"But why should they want to help us?\" Quade demanded suspiciously.\n\n\n \"I think it's like Nagurski's dog. The dog came to him when it wanted\n somebody to own it, protect it, feed it, love it. These aliens\nwant\nEarthmen to colonize the planet. We came here, you see, same as the dog\n came to Nagurski.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I've learned one thing from all of this,\" Quade said. \"I've been\n a blind, arrogant, cocksure fool, following courses that were good on\nsome\nworlds,\nmost\nworlds, but not good on\nall\nworlds. I'm never\n going to be that foolhardy again.\"\n\n\n \"But you're losing\nconfidence\n, Quade! You aren't sure of yourself any\n more. Isn't confidence a spaceman's most valuable asset?\"", "I splashed some wine from my drinking tube against the roof of my mouth\n to sharpen my taste. It brought out the footsteps sharper. It also made\n the landscape more of a teen-ager's caloric nightmare.\n\n\n The four of us pulled ourselves closer together by reeling in more\n of our safety line. Farley and Hoffman, Nagurski and myself, we were\n cabled together. It gave us a larger hunk of reality to hold onto. Even\n so, things wavered for me during a wisp of time.\n\n\n We stumbled over the ridge, feeling out the territory. It was a sticky\n job crawling over a melting, chunk-style Hershey bar. I was thankful\n for the invigorating Sousa march blasting inside my helmet. Before the\n tape had cut in, kicked on by the decibel gauge, I had heard or felt\n something dark and ominous in the outside air.", "\"Then,\" I told them, \"we will have to start tearing apart this ship.\"\nSergeant-Major Hoffman and his team were doing a good job of ripping\n out the side of the afterhold. Through the portal I could see the\n suited men expertly guiding the huge curved sections on their ray\n projectors.\n\n\n \"Cannibalizing is dangerous.\" Nagurski put his pipe in his teeth and\n shook his head disapprovingly.\n\n\n \"Spaceships have parts as interchangeable as Erector sets. We can\n take apart the tractors and put our ship back together again after we\n complete the survey.\"\n\n\n \"You can't assemble a jigsaw puzzle if some of the pieces are missing.\"\n\n\n \"You can't get a complete picture, but you can get a good idea of\n what it looks like. We can take off in a reasonable facsimile of a\n spaceship.\"", "Before I could agree with one of his theories for once, a streak of\n spice shot past us. It bounced back tangily and made a bitter rip\n between the two of us. There was no time to judge its size, if it had\n size, or its decibel range, or its caloric count, before a small, sharp\n pain dug in and dwindled down to nothing in one long second.\n\n\n The new odor pattern in my head told me Quade was saying something I\n couldn't quite make out.\n\n\n Quade then pulled me in the direction of the nasty little pain.\n\n\n \"Wait a minute, Spaceman!\" I bellowed. \"Where the devil do you think\n you're dragging me? Halt! That's a direct order.\"\n\n\n He stopped. \"Don't you want to find out what that was? This\nis\nan\n exploration party, you know, sir.\"" ] ]
valid	51483	[ "What kind of life is on the moon in the story?", "How does Chapman feel about being relieved from his duty?", "How many buildings are on the moon?", "What is the relationship like between Dahl and Chapman?", "What is the real reason the characters are stationed on the moon?", "Who was the young boy reluctant to go into space?", "What nations do the astronauts on the moon represent?", "What are the living conditions of the astronauts on the moon?", "How many people live on the moon at any one time?", "What makes Chapman so qualified to train crews on the moon?" ]	[ [ "Water is collected for drinking", "Insects invade the bunkers", "Plants are scientifically sampled", "There is zero life" ], [ "Proud to pass on the duty to such a worthy colleague", "Worried that the younger astronaut will ruin what he accomplished", "Slighted that a younger scientist was offered the role in his place", "Elated to finally be released" ], [ "One", "Two", "None", "Several" ], [ "They were adversaries in university but came to support each other living together on the moon", "Friendly colleagues who went to university together to train for space", "Colleagues, but they are not friends", "They are brothers in-law and Dahl is eager to return to his wife" ], [ "It’s just a stopover on the way to Venus", "Spying on Venus for Earth", "Erecting a telescope", "Running scientific experiments" ], [ "The son of a moon astronaut", "A young physicist ", "Dahl at a younger age", "Chapman at a younger age" ], [ "United Kingdom", "United States", "United States, Russia", "Unknown" ], [ "It’s almost the same at their life on Earth", "They are able to grow food", "They have artificial gravity in their living quarters", "They sleep strapped into vertical beds" ], [ "People are coming and going all the time", "About a dozen", "About half a dozen", "Several dozen" ], [ "His attention to scientific details", "His technical skills and leadership", "His lack of ties back home on Earth", "His mechanical background and military training" ] ]	[ 3, 4, 1, 3, 4, 1, 4, 3, 3, 2 ]	[ 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Three years on the Moon and they didn't want him to come back.\n\n\n Three years on the Moon and they thought he'd be glad to stay for more.\n Just raise his salary or give him a bonus, the every-man-has-his-price\n idea. They probably thought he liked it there.\n\n\n Oh, sure, he loved it. Canned coffee, canned beans, canned pills,\n and canned air until your insides felt as though they were plated\n with tin. Life in a cramped, smelly little hut where you could take\n only ten steps in any one direction. Their little scientific home of\n tomorrow with none of the modern conveniences, a charming place where\n you couldn't take a shower, couldn't brush your teeth, and your kidneys\n didn't work right.\n\n\n And for double his salary they thought he'd be glad to stay for another\n year and a half. Or maybe three. He should probably be glad he had the\n opportunity.", "\"Well, don't let it throw you. They've never been here on the Moon.\n They don't know what it's like. All they're trying to do is get a good\n man to stay on the job a while longer.\"\n\n\n \"\nAll\nthey're trying to do,\" Chapman said sarcastically. \"They've got\n a fat chance.\"\n\n\n \"They think you've found a home here,\" Donley said.\n\n\n \"Why the hell don't you guys shut up until morning?\" Dahl was awake,\n looking bitter. \"Some of us still have to stay here, you know. Some of\n us aren't going back today.\"\n\n\n No, Chapman thought, some of us aren't going back. You aren't. And\n Dixon's staying, too. Only Dixon isn't ever going back.", "\"I like the feel of it,\" he said simply.\n\n\n Chapman cut off a single blade with his fingernail and put it between\n his lips. It had been years since he had seen grass and had the luxury\n of walking on it and lying on its cool thickness during those sultry\n summer nights when it was too hot to sleep indoors.\n\n\n Williams blushed. \"I thought we could spare a little water for it and\n maybe use the ultraviolet lamp on it some of the time. Couldn't help\n but bring it along; it seemed sort of like a symbol....\" He looked\n embarrassed.\n\n\n Chapman sympathized. If he had had any sense, he'd have tried to\n smuggle something like that up to the Moon instead of his phonograph.\n\n\n \"That's valuable grass,\" Dahl said sharply. \"Do you realize that at\n current freight rates up here, it's worth about ten dollars a blade?\"", "Klein jerked his thumb toward Dahl's bunk, held a finger to his lips,\n and walked noiselessly over to the small electric stove. It was his day\n for breakfast duty.\n\n\n The others started lacing up their bunks, getting ready for their last\n day of work on the Moon. In a few hours they'd be relieved by members\n of the Third research group and they'd be on their way back to Earth.\n\n\n And that includes me, Chapman thought. I'm going home. I'm finally\n going home.\n\n\n He walked silently to the one small, quartz window in the room. It was\n morning—the Moon's \"morning\"—and he shivered slightly. The rays of\n the Sun were just striking the far rim of the crater and long shadows\n shot across the crater floor. The rest of it was still blanketed in\n a dark jumble of powdery pumice and jagged peaks that would make the\n Black Hills of Dakota look like paradise.", "\"Is that all?\"\n\n\n Eberlein was ill at ease. \"Naturally you'd be paid well. I don't\n imagine any man would like being here all the time. They're prepared to\n double your salary—maybe even a bonus in addition—and let you have\n full charge. You'd be Director of the Luna Laboratories.\"\n\n\n All this and a title too, Chapman thought.\n\n\n \"That's it?\" Chapman asked.\n\n\n Eberlein frowned. \"Well, the Commission said they'd be willing to\n consider anything else you had in mind, if it was more money or....\"\n\n\n \"The answer is no,\" Chapman said. \"I'm not interested in more money\n for staying because I'm not interested in staying. Money can't buy it,\n captain. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid that you'd have to stay up here to\n appreciate that.", "A hundred yards from the research bunker he could make out the small\n mound of stones and the forlorn homemade cross, jury-rigged out of\n small condensed milk tins slid over crossed iron bars. You could still\n see the footprints in the powdery soil where the group had gathered\n about the grave. It had been more than eighteen months ago, but there\n was no wind to wear those tracks away. They'd be there forever.\n\n\n That's what happened to guys like Dixon, Chapman thought. On the Moon,\n one mistake could use up your whole quota of chances.\n\n\n Klein came back with the coffee. Chapman took a cup, gagged, and forced\n himself to swallow the rest of it. It had been in the can for so long\n you could almost taste the glue on the label.\nDonley was warming himself over his cup, looking thoughtful. Dowden and\n Bening were struggling into their suits, getting ready to go outside.\n Dahl was still sitting on his hammock, trying to ignore them.", "They laughed. Somebody said: \"Go play your record, Chap. Today's the\n day for it.\"\n\n\n The phonograph was a small, wind-up model that Chapman had smuggled in\n when he had landed with the First group. The record was old and the\n shellac was nearly worn off, but the music was good.\n\n\n Way Back Home by Al Lewis.\nThey ran through it twice. They were beginning to feel it now, Chapman\n thought. They were going to go home in a little while and the idea was\n just starting to sink in.\n\n\n \"You know, Chap,\" Donley said, \"it won't seem like the same old Moon\n without you on it. Why, we'll look at it when we're out spooning or\n something and it just won't have the same old appeal.\"\n\n\n \"Like they say in the army,\" Bening said, \"you never had it so good.\n You found a home here.\"", "The others chimed in and Chapman grinned. Yesterday or a week ago they\n couldn't have done it. He had been there too long and he had hated it\n too much.\n\n\n The party quieted down after a while and Dowden and Bening finished\n getting into their suits. They still had a section of the sky to map\n before they left. Donley was right after them. There was an outcropping\n of rock that he wanted a sample of and some strata he wished to\n investigate.\n\n\n And the time went faster when you kept busy.\nChapman stopped them at the lock. \"Remember to check your suits for\n leaks,\" he warned. \"And check the valves of your oxygen tanks.\"\n\n\n Donley looked sour. \"I've gone out at least five hundred times,\" he\n said, \"and you check me each time.\"", "\"He died,\" Chapman said. \"He was a good kid, all wrapped up in science.\n Being on the Moon was the opportunity of a lifetime. He thought so much\n about it that he forgot a lot of little things—like how to stay alive.\n The day before the Second group came, he went out to finish some work\n he was interested in. He forgot to check for leaks and whether or not\n the valve on his tank was all the way closed. We couldn't get to him in\n time.\"\n\n\n \"He had his walkie-talkie with him?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. It worked fine, too. We heard everything that went through his\n mind at the end.\"\n\n\n Klein's face was blank. \"What's your real job here, Chap? Why does\n somebody have to stay for stopover?\"", "He stopped, feeling embarrassed. Klein's expression was encouraging.\n \"And then I think I'd like to go downtown and just watch the shoppers\n on the sidewalks. Or maybe go to a burlesque house and smell the cheap\n perfume and the popcorn and the people sweating in the dark.\"\n\n\n He studied his hands. \"I think what I miss most is people—all kinds\n of people. Bad people and good people and fat people and thin people,\n and people I can't understand. People who wouldn't know an atom from an\n artichoke. And people who wouldn't give a damn. We're a quarter of a\n million miles from nowhere, Julius, and to make it literary, I think I\n miss my fellow man more than anything.\"\n\n\n \"Got a girl back home?\" Klein asked almost casually.\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"You're not like Dahl. You've never mentioned it.\"", "\"And I'd check you five hundred more,\" Chapman said. \"It takes only\n one mistake. And watch out for blisters under the pumice crust. You go\n through one of those and that's it, brother.\"\n\n\n Donley sighed. \"Chap, you watch us like an old mother hen. You see we\n check our suits, you settle our arguments, you see that we're not bored\n and that we stay healthy and happy. I think you'd blow our noses for us\n if we caught cold. But some day, Chap old man, you're gonna find out\n that your little boys can watch out for themselves!\"\n\n\n But he checked his suit for leaks and tested the valve of his tank\n before he left.\nOnly Klein and Chapman were left in the bunker. Klein was at the work\n table, carefully labeling some lichen specimens.\n\n\n \"I never knew you were married,\" Chapman said.", "Chapman and Klein watched them dash across the pumice, making the\n tremendous leaps they used to read about in the Sunday supplements. The\n port of the rocket had opened and tiny figures were climbing down the\n ladder. The small figures from the bunker reached them and did a short\n jig of welcome. Then the figures linked arms and started back. Chapman\n noticed one—it was probably Donley—pat the ship affectionately before\n he started back.\nThey were in the lock and the air pumped in and then they were in\n the bunker, taking off their suits. The newcomers were impressed and\n solemn, very much aware of the tremendous responsibility that rested on\n their shoulders. Like Donley and Klein and the members of the Second\n group had been when they had landed. Like Chapman had been in the First.\n\n\n Donley and the others were all over them.\nHow was it back on Earth? Who had won the series? Was so-and-so still\n teaching at the university? What was the international situation?", "The older man blew a smoke ring and watched it drift toward the air\n exhaust vent.\n\"You mean you would miss it here, the people you've known and grown\n up with, the little familiar things that have made up your life here.\n You're afraid the glamor would wear off and you would get to hate it on\n Venus.\"\nThe very young man nodded miserably. \"I guess that's it.\"\n\"Anything else?\"\nThe very young man found his fingernails extremely fascinating again\n and finally said, in a low voice, \"Yes, there is.\"\n\"A girl?\"\nA nod confirmed this.\nIt was the older man's turn to look thoughtful. \"You know, I'm sure,\n that psychologists and research men agree that research stations should", "He had just locked the bag when he heard the rumble of the airlock and\n the soft hiss of air. Somebody had come back earlier than expected. He\n watched the inner door swing open and the spacesuited figure clump in\n and unscrew its helmet.\n\n\n Dahl. He had gone out to help Dowden on the Schmidt telescope. Maybe\n Dowden hadn't needed any help, with Bening along. Or more likely,\n considering the circumstances, Dahl wasn't much good at helping anybody\n today.\n\n\n Dahl stripped off his suit. His face was covered with light beads of\n sweat and his eyes were frightened.\n\n\n He moistened his lips slightly. \"Do—do you think they'll ever have\n relief ships up here more often than every eighteen months, Chap? I\n mean, considering the advance of—\"", "\"Hell, lots of reasons, Julius. You can't get a whole relief crew and\n let them take over cold. They have to know where you left off. They\n have to know where things are, how things work, what to watch out for.\n And then, because you've been here a year and a half and know the\n ropes, you have to watch them to see that they stay alive in spite of\n themselves. The Moon's a new environment and you have to learn how to\n live in it. There's a lot of things to learn—and some people just\n never learn.\"\n\n\n \"You're nursemaid, then.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose you could call it that.\"\nKlein said, \"You're not a scientist, are you?\"", "\"Think we ought to radio the space station and see if they've left\n there yet?\" Klein asked.\n\n\n \"I talked to them on the last call,\" Chapman said. \"The relief ship\n left there twelve hours ago. They should get here\"—he looked at his\n watch—\"in about six and a half hours.\"\n\n\n \"Chap, you know, I've been thinking,\" Donley said quietly. \"You've\n been here just twice as long as the rest of us. What's the first thing\n you're going to do once you get back?\"\n\n\n It hit them, then. Dowden and Bening looked blank for a minute and\n blindly found packing cases to sit on. The top halves of their suits\n were still hanging on the bulkhead. Klein lowered his coffee cup and\n looked grave. Even Dahl glanced up expectantly.", "pioneers stay put and scholars do the exploring!\nThe very young man sat on the edge of the sofa and looked nervous. He\n carefully studied his fingernails and ran his hands through his hair\n and picked imaginary lint off the upholstery.\n\"I have a chance to go with the first research expedition to Venus,\"\n he said.\nThe older man studied the very young man thoughtfully and then leaned\n over to his humidor and offered him a cigaret. \"It's nice to have the\n new air units now. There was a time when we had to be very careful\n about things like smoking.\"\nThe very young man was annoyed.\n\"I don't think I want to go,\" he blurted. \"I don't think I would care\n to spend two years there.\"", "They walked over to one corner of the bunker. \"This is about as private\n as we can get, captain,\" Chapman said. \"What's on your mind?\"\nEberlein found a packing crate and made himself comfortable. He looked\n at Chapman.\n\n\n \"I've always wanted to meet the man who's spent more time here than\n anybody else,\" he began.\n\n\n \"I'm sure you wanted to see me for more reasons than just curiosity.\"\n\n\n Eberlein took out a pack of cigarets. \"Mind if I smoke?\"\n\n\n Chapman jerked a thumb toward Dahl. \"Ask him. He's in charge now.\"\n\n\n The captain didn't bother. He put the pack away. \"You know we have big\n plans for the station,\" he said.\n\n\n \"I hadn't heard of them.\"", "Lord, Chapman thought, I'll be happy when I can see some other faces.\n\n\n \"What'd they want?\" Klein had one eyelid open and a questioning look on\n his face.\n\n\n \"They wanted me to stay until the next relief ship lands,\" Chapman\n whispered back.\n\n\n \"What did you say?\"\n\n\n He shrugged. \"No.\"\n\n\n \"You kept it short,\" somebody else whispered. It was Donley, up and\n sitting on the side of his hammock. \"If it had been me, I would have\n told them just what they could do about it.\"\nThe others were awake now, with the exception of Dahl who had his face\n to the bulkhead and a pillow over his head.\n\n\n Dowden rubbed his eyes sleepily. \"Sore, aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"Kind of. Who wouldn't be?\"", "He hadn't actually needed to pack, of course. In less than twenty-four\n hours he'd be back on Earth where he could drown himself in toothpaste\n and buy more tee shirts than he could wear in a lifetime. He could\n leave behind his shorts and socks and the outsize shirts he had\n inherited from—who was it? Driesbach?—of the First group. Dahl could\n probably use them or maybe one of the boys in the Third.\nBut it wasn't like going home unless you packed. It was part of the\n ritual, like marking off the last three weeks in pencil on the gray\n steel of the bulkhead beside his hammock. Just a few hours ago, when he\n woke up, he had made the last check mark and signed his name and the\n date. His signature was right beneath Dixon's.\n\n\n He frowned when he thought of Dixon and slid back the catch on the top\n of the bag and locked it. They should never have sent a kid like Dixon\n to the Moon." ], [ "Dahl took the plunge. \"Well, you see,\" he started eagerly, too far gone\n to remember such a thing as pride, \"you know my father's pretty well\n fixed. We would make it worth your while, Chap.\" He was feverish. \"It\n would mean eighteen more months, Chap, but they'd be well-paid months!\"\n\n\n Chapman felt tired. The good feeling he had about going home was slowly\n evaporating.\n\n\n \"If you have any report to make, I think you had better get at it,\"\n he cut in, keeping all the harshness he felt out of his voice. \"It'll\n be too late after the relief ship leaves. It'll be easier to give the\n captain your report than try to radio it back to Earth from here.\"\n\n\n He felt sorrier for Dahl than he could ever remember having felt for\n anybody. Long after going home, Dahl would remember this.\n\n\n It would eat at him like a cancer.", "Chapman frowned. \"Frankly, I hadn't thought of that. I don't believe\n I care. I've put in my time; it's somebody else's turn now. He\n volunteered for it. I think I was fair in explaining all about the job\n when you talked it over among yourselves.\"\n\n\n \"You did, but I don't think Dahl's the man for it. He's too young, too\n much of a kid. He volunteered because he thought it made him look like\n a hero. He doesn't have the judgment that an older man would have. That\n you have.\"\n\n\n Chapman turned slowly around and faced Klein.\n\n\n \"I'm not the indispensable man,\" he said slowly, \"and even if I was, it\n wouldn't make any difference to me. I'm sorry if Dahl is young. So was\n I. I've lost three years up here. And I don't intend to lose any more.\"", "Klein held up his hands. \"Look, Chap, I didn't mean you should stay. I\n know how much you hate it and the time you put in up here. It's just—\"\n His voice trailed away. \"It's just that I think it's such a damn\n important job.\"\n\n\n Klein had gone out in a last search for rock lichens and Chapman\n enjoyed one of his relatively few moments of privacy. He wandered over\n to his bunk and opened his barracks bag. He checked the underwear and\n his toothbrush and shaving kit for maybe the hundredth time and pushed\n the clothing down farther in the canvas. It was foolish because the\n bag was already packed and had been for a week. He remembered stalling\n it off for as long as he could and then the quiet satisfaction about a\n week before, when he had opened his small gear locker and transferred\n its meager belongings to the bag.", "Lord, Chapman thought, I'll be happy when I can see some other faces.\n\n\n \"What'd they want?\" Klein had one eyelid open and a questioning look on\n his face.\n\n\n \"They wanted me to stay until the next relief ship lands,\" Chapman\n whispered back.\n\n\n \"What did you say?\"\n\n\n He shrugged. \"No.\"\n\n\n \"You kept it short,\" somebody else whispered. It was Donley, up and\n sitting on the side of his hammock. \"If it had been me, I would have\n told them just what they could do about it.\"\nThe others were awake now, with the exception of Dahl who had his face\n to the bulkhead and a pillow over his head.\n\n\n Dowden rubbed his eyes sleepily. \"Sore, aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"Kind of. Who wouldn't be?\"", "\"Oh, yes,\nbig plans\n. They're working on unmanned, open-side rockets\n now that could carry cargo and sheet steel for more bunkers like this.\n Enable us to enlarge the unit, have a series of bunkers all linked\n together. Make good laboratories and living quarters for you people.\"\n His eyes swept the room. \"Have a little privacy for a change.\"\n\n\n Chapman nodded. \"They could use a little privacy up here.\"\n\n\n The captain noticed the pronoun. \"Well, that's one of the reasons why\n I wanted to talk to you, Chapman. The Commission talked it over and\n they'd like to see you stay. They feel if they're going to enlarge it,\n add more bunkers and have more men up here, that a man of practical\n experience should be running things. They figure that you're the only\n man who's capable and who's had the experience.\"\n\n\n The captain vaguely felt the approach was all wrong.", "Williams looked stricken and somebody said, \"Oh, shut up, Dahl.\"\n\n\n One of the men separated from the group and came over to Chapman. He\n held out his hand and said, \"My name's Eberlein. Captain of the relief\n ship. I understand you're in charge here?\"\n\n\n Chapman nodded and shook hands. They hadn't had a captain on the First\n ship. Just a pilot and crew. Eberlein looked every inch a captain, too.\n Craggy face, gray hair, the firm chin of a man who was sure of himself.\n\n\n \"You might say I'm in charge here,\" Chapman said.\n\n\n \"Well, look, Mr. Chapman, is there any place where we can talk together\n privately?\"", "It hurt to look in Dahl's eyes. They were the eyes of a man who was\n trying desperately to stop what he was about to do, but just couldn't\n help himself.\n\n\n \"Well, yes, more or less. Oh, God, Chap, I know you want to go home!\n But I couldn't ask any of the others; you were the only one who could,\n the only one who was qualified!\"\nDahl looked as though he was going to be sick. Chapman tried to recall\n all he knew about him. Dahl, Robert. Good mathematician. Graduate from\n one of the Ivy League schools. Father was a manufacturer of stoves or\n something.\n\n\n It still didn't add, not quite. \"You know I don't like it here any more\n than you do,\" Chapman said slowly. \"I may have commitments at home,\n too. What made you think I would change my mind?\"", "\"I don't know,\" Chapman said slowly. \"I guess I was trying not to think\n of that. I suppose none of us have. We've been like little kids who\n have waited so long for Christmas that they just can't believe it when\n it's finally Christmas Eve.\"\n\n\n Klein nodded in agreement. \"I haven't been here three years like you\n have, but I think I know what you mean.\" He warmed up to it as the idea\n sank in. \"Just what the hell\nare\nyou going to do?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing very spectacular,\" Chapman said, smiling. \"I'm going to rent\n a room over Times Square, get a recording of a rikky-tik piano, and\n drink and listen to the music and watch the people on the street below.\n Then I think I'll see somebody.\"\n\n\n \"Who's the somebody?\" Donley asked.\n\n\n Chapman grinned. \"Oh, just somebody. What are you going to do, Dick?\"", "\"Think we ought to radio the space station and see if they've left\n there yet?\" Klein asked.\n\n\n \"I talked to them on the last call,\" Chapman said. \"The relief ship\n left there twelve hours ago. They should get here\"—he looked at his\n watch—\"in about six and a half hours.\"\n\n\n \"Chap, you know, I've been thinking,\" Donley said quietly. \"You've\n been here just twice as long as the rest of us. What's the first thing\n you're going to do once you get back?\"\n\n\n It hit them, then. Dowden and Bening looked blank for a minute and\n blindly found packing cases to sit on. The top halves of their suits\n were still hanging on the bulkhead. Klein lowered his coffee cup and\n looked grave. Even Dahl glanced up expectantly.", "\"And I'd check you five hundred more,\" Chapman said. \"It takes only\n one mistake. And watch out for blisters under the pumice crust. You go\n through one of those and that's it, brother.\"\n\n\n Donley sighed. \"Chap, you watch us like an old mother hen. You see we\n check our suits, you settle our arguments, you see that we're not bored\n and that we stay healthy and happy. I think you'd blow our noses for us\n if we caught cold. But some day, Chap old man, you're gonna find out\n that your little boys can watch out for themselves!\"\n\n\n But he checked his suit for leaks and tested the valve of his tank\n before he left.\nOnly Klein and Chapman were left in the bunker. Klein was at the work\n table, carefully labeling some lichen specimens.\n\n\n \"I never knew you were married,\" Chapman said.", "The others chimed in and Chapman grinned. Yesterday or a week ago they\n couldn't have done it. He had been there too long and he had hated it\n too much.\n\n\n The party quieted down after a while and Dowden and Bening finished\n getting into their suits. They still had a section of the sky to map\n before they left. Donley was right after them. There was an outcropping\n of rock that he wanted a sample of and some strata he wished to\n investigate.\n\n\n And the time went faster when you kept busy.\nChapman stopped them at the lock. \"Remember to check your suits for\n leaks,\" he warned. \"And check the valves of your oxygen tanks.\"\n\n\n Donley looked sour. \"I've gone out at least five hundred times,\" he\n said, \"and you check me each time.\"", "\"Is that all?\"\n\n\n Eberlein was ill at ease. \"Naturally you'd be paid well. I don't\n imagine any man would like being here all the time. They're prepared to\n double your salary—maybe even a bonus in addition—and let you have\n full charge. You'd be Director of the Luna Laboratories.\"\n\n\n All this and a title too, Chapman thought.\n\n\n \"That's it?\" Chapman asked.\n\n\n Eberlein frowned. \"Well, the Commission said they'd be willing to\n consider anything else you had in mind, if it was more money or....\"\n\n\n \"The answer is no,\" Chapman said. \"I'm not interested in more money\n for staying because I'm not interested in staying. Money can't buy it,\n captain. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid that you'd have to stay up here to\n appreciate that.", "\"Well, you see,\" Dahl started, \"that's why I came back early. I wanted\n to see you about stopover. It's that—well, I'll put it this way.\" He\n seemed to be groping for an easy way to say what he wanted to. \"I'm\n engaged back home. Really nice girl, Chap, you'd like her if you knew\n her.\" He fumbled in his pocket and found a photograph and put it on\n the desk. \"That's a picture of Alice, taken at a picnic we were on\n together.\" Chapman didn't look. \"She—we—expected to be married when\n I got back. I never told her about stopover, Chap. She thinks I'll be\n home tomorrow. I kept thinking, hoping, that maybe somehow—\"\n\n\n He was fumbling it badly, Chapman thought.\n\n\n \"You wanted to trade places with me, didn't you, Bob? You thought I\n might stay for stopover again, in your place?\"", "\"No,\" Chapman interrupted bluntly. \"I don't. Not at least for ten\n years. The fuel's too expensive and the trip's too hazardous. On\n freight charges alone you're worth your weight in platinum when they\n send you here. Even if it becomes cheaper, Bob, it won't come about\n so it will shorten stopover right away.\" He stopped, feeling a little\n sorry for Dahl. \"It won't be too bad. There'll be new men up here and\n you'll pass a lot of time getting to know them.\"", "They laughed. Somebody said: \"Go play your record, Chap. Today's the\n day for it.\"\n\n\n The phonograph was a small, wind-up model that Chapman had smuggled in\n when he had landed with the First group. The record was old and the\n shellac was nearly worn off, but the music was good.\n\n\n Way Back Home by Al Lewis.\nThey ran through it twice. They were beginning to feel it now, Chapman\n thought. They were going to go home in a little while and the idea was\n just starting to sink in.\n\n\n \"You know, Chap,\" Donley said, \"it won't seem like the same old Moon\n without you on it. Why, we'll look at it when we're out spooning or\n something and it just won't have the same old appeal.\"\n\n\n \"Like they say in the army,\" Bening said, \"you never had it so good.\n You found a home here.\"", "Cowardice is the one thing for which no man ever forgives himself.\nDonley was eating a sandwich and looking out the port, so, naturally,\n he saw the ship first. \"Well, whaddya know!\" he shouted. \"We got\n company!\" He dashed for his suit. Dowden and Bening piled after him and\n all three started for the lock.\n\n\n Chapman was standing in front of it. \"Check your suits,\" he said\n softly. \"Just be sure to check.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, what the hell, Chap!\" Donley started angrily. Then he shut up and\n went over his suit. He got to his tank and turned white. Empty. It was\n only half a mile to the relief rocket, so somebody would probably have\n got to him in time, but.... He bit his lips and got a full tank.", "\"Same reason you didn't mention your wife. You get to thinking about\n it.\"\n\n\n Klein flipped the lid on the specimen box. \"Going to get married when\n you get back?\"\n\n\n Chapman was at the port again, staring out at the bleak landscape. \"We\n hope to.\"\n\n\n \"Settle down in a small cottage and raise lots of little Chapmans, eh?\"\n\n\n Chapman nodded.\n\n\n \"That's the only future,\" Klein said.\n\n\n He put away the box and came over to the port. Chapman moved over so\n they both could look out.\n\n\n \"Chap.\" Klein hesitated a moment. \"What happened to Dixon?\"", "\"No, you should know that. I came as the pilot of the first ship. We\n made the bunker out of parts of the ship so there wasn't anything to\n go back on. I'm a good mechanic and I made myself useful with the\n machinery. When it occurred to us that somebody was going to have to\n stay over, I volunteered. I thought the others were so important that\n it was better they should take their samples and data back to Earth\n when the first relief ship came.\"\n\n\n \"You wouldn't do it again, though, would you?\"\n\n\n \"No, I wouldn't.\"\n\n\n \"Do you think Dahl will do as good a job as you've done here?\"", "\"Well, don't let it throw you. They've never been here on the Moon.\n They don't know what it's like. All they're trying to do is get a good\n man to stay on the job a while longer.\"\n\n\n \"\nAll\nthey're trying to do,\" Chapman said sarcastically. \"They've got\n a fat chance.\"\n\n\n \"They think you've found a home here,\" Donley said.\n\n\n \"Why the hell don't you guys shut up until morning?\" Dahl was awake,\n looking bitter. \"Some of us still have to stay here, you know. Some of\n us aren't going back today.\"\n\n\n No, Chapman thought, some of us aren't going back. You aren't. And\n Dixon's staying, too. Only Dixon isn't ever going back.", "Klein didn't look up. \"There wasn't much sense in talking about it. You\n just get to thinking and wanting—and there's nothing you can do about\n it. You talk about it and it just makes it worse.\"\n\n\n \"She let you go without any fuss, huh?\"\n\n\n \"No, she didn't make any fuss. But I don't think she liked to see me\n go, either.\" He laughed a little. \"At least I hope she didn't.\"\nThey were silent for a while. \"What do you miss most, Chap?\" Klein\n asked. \"Oh, I know what we said a little while ago, but I mean\n seriously.\"\n\n\n Chapman thought a minute. \"I think I miss the sky,\" he said quietly.\n \"The blue sky and the green grass and trees with leaves on them that\n turn color in the Fall. I think, when I go back, that I'd like to go\n out in a rain storm and strip and feel the rain on my skin.\"" ], [ "Klein jerked his thumb toward Dahl's bunk, held a finger to his lips,\n and walked noiselessly over to the small electric stove. It was his day\n for breakfast duty.\n\n\n The others started lacing up their bunks, getting ready for their last\n day of work on the Moon. In a few hours they'd be relieved by members\n of the Third research group and they'd be on their way back to Earth.\n\n\n And that includes me, Chapman thought. I'm going home. I'm finally\n going home.\n\n\n He walked silently to the one small, quartz window in the room. It was\n morning—the Moon's \"morning\"—and he shivered slightly. The rays of\n the Sun were just striking the far rim of the crater and long shadows\n shot across the crater floor. The rest of it was still blanketed in\n a dark jumble of powdery pumice and jagged peaks that would make the\n Black Hills of Dakota look like paradise.", "A hundred yards from the research bunker he could make out the small\n mound of stones and the forlorn homemade cross, jury-rigged out of\n small condensed milk tins slid over crossed iron bars. You could still\n see the footprints in the powdery soil where the group had gathered\n about the grave. It had been more than eighteen months ago, but there\n was no wind to wear those tracks away. They'd be there forever.\n\n\n That's what happened to guys like Dixon, Chapman thought. On the Moon,\n one mistake could use up your whole quota of chances.\n\n\n Klein came back with the coffee. Chapman took a cup, gagged, and forced\n himself to swallow the rest of it. It had been in the can for so long\n you could almost taste the glue on the label.\nDonley was warming himself over his cup, looking thoughtful. Dowden and\n Bening were struggling into their suits, getting ready to go outside.\n Dahl was still sitting on his hammock, trying to ignore them.", "\"Well, don't let it throw you. They've never been here on the Moon.\n They don't know what it's like. All they're trying to do is get a good\n man to stay on the job a while longer.\"\n\n\n \"\nAll\nthey're trying to do,\" Chapman said sarcastically. \"They've got\n a fat chance.\"\n\n\n \"They think you've found a home here,\" Donley said.\n\n\n \"Why the hell don't you guys shut up until morning?\" Dahl was awake,\n looking bitter. \"Some of us still have to stay here, you know. Some of\n us aren't going back today.\"\n\n\n No, Chapman thought, some of us aren't going back. You aren't. And\n Dixon's staying, too. Only Dixon isn't ever going back.", "Three years on the Moon and they didn't want him to come back.\n\n\n Three years on the Moon and they thought he'd be glad to stay for more.\n Just raise his salary or give him a bonus, the every-man-has-his-price\n idea. They probably thought he liked it there.\n\n\n Oh, sure, he loved it. Canned coffee, canned beans, canned pills,\n and canned air until your insides felt as though they were plated\n with tin. Life in a cramped, smelly little hut where you could take\n only ten steps in any one direction. Their little scientific home of\n tomorrow with none of the modern conveniences, a charming place where\n you couldn't take a shower, couldn't brush your teeth, and your kidneys\n didn't work right.\n\n\n And for double his salary they thought he'd be glad to stay for another\n year and a half. Or maybe three. He should probably be glad he had the\n opportunity.", "\"I like the feel of it,\" he said simply.\n\n\n Chapman cut off a single blade with his fingernail and put it between\n his lips. It had been years since he had seen grass and had the luxury\n of walking on it and lying on its cool thickness during those sultry\n summer nights when it was too hot to sleep indoors.\n\n\n Williams blushed. \"I thought we could spare a little water for it and\n maybe use the ultraviolet lamp on it some of the time. Couldn't help\n but bring it along; it seemed sort of like a symbol....\" He looked\n embarrassed.\n\n\n Chapman sympathized. If he had had any sense, he'd have tried to\n smuggle something like that up to the Moon instead of his phonograph.\n\n\n \"That's valuable grass,\" Dahl said sharply. \"Do you realize that at\n current freight rates up here, it's worth about ten dollars a blade?\"", "The others chimed in and Chapman grinned. Yesterday or a week ago they\n couldn't have done it. He had been there too long and he had hated it\n too much.\n\n\n The party quieted down after a while and Dowden and Bening finished\n getting into their suits. They still had a section of the sky to map\n before they left. Donley was right after them. There was an outcropping\n of rock that he wanted a sample of and some strata he wished to\n investigate.\n\n\n And the time went faster when you kept busy.\nChapman stopped them at the lock. \"Remember to check your suits for\n leaks,\" he warned. \"And check the valves of your oxygen tanks.\"\n\n\n Donley looked sour. \"I've gone out at least five hundred times,\" he\n said, \"and you check me each time.\"", "\"Is that all?\"\n\n\n Eberlein was ill at ease. \"Naturally you'd be paid well. I don't\n imagine any man would like being here all the time. They're prepared to\n double your salary—maybe even a bonus in addition—and let you have\n full charge. You'd be Director of the Luna Laboratories.\"\n\n\n All this and a title too, Chapman thought.\n\n\n \"That's it?\" Chapman asked.\n\n\n Eberlein frowned. \"Well, the Commission said they'd be willing to\n consider anything else you had in mind, if it was more money or....\"\n\n\n \"The answer is no,\" Chapman said. \"I'm not interested in more money\n for staying because I'm not interested in staying. Money can't buy it,\n captain. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid that you'd have to stay up here to\n appreciate that.", "They laughed. Somebody said: \"Go play your record, Chap. Today's the\n day for it.\"\n\n\n The phonograph was a small, wind-up model that Chapman had smuggled in\n when he had landed with the First group. The record was old and the\n shellac was nearly worn off, but the music was good.\n\n\n Way Back Home by Al Lewis.\nThey ran through it twice. They were beginning to feel it now, Chapman\n thought. They were going to go home in a little while and the idea was\n just starting to sink in.\n\n\n \"You know, Chap,\" Donley said, \"it won't seem like the same old Moon\n without you on it. Why, we'll look at it when we're out spooning or\n something and it just won't have the same old appeal.\"\n\n\n \"Like they say in the army,\" Bening said, \"you never had it so good.\n You found a home here.\"", "He stopped, feeling embarrassed. Klein's expression was encouraging.\n \"And then I think I'd like to go downtown and just watch the shoppers\n on the sidewalks. Or maybe go to a burlesque house and smell the cheap\n perfume and the popcorn and the people sweating in the dark.\"\n\n\n He studied his hands. \"I think what I miss most is people—all kinds\n of people. Bad people and good people and fat people and thin people,\n and people I can't understand. People who wouldn't know an atom from an\n artichoke. And people who wouldn't give a damn. We're a quarter of a\n million miles from nowhere, Julius, and to make it literary, I think I\n miss my fellow man more than anything.\"\n\n\n \"Got a girl back home?\" Klein asked almost casually.\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"You're not like Dahl. You've never mentioned it.\"", "\"He died,\" Chapman said. \"He was a good kid, all wrapped up in science.\n Being on the Moon was the opportunity of a lifetime. He thought so much\n about it that he forgot a lot of little things—like how to stay alive.\n The day before the Second group came, he went out to finish some work\n he was interested in. He forgot to check for leaks and whether or not\n the valve on his tank was all the way closed. We couldn't get to him in\n time.\"\n\n\n \"He had his walkie-talkie with him?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. It worked fine, too. We heard everything that went through his\n mind at the end.\"\n\n\n Klein's face was blank. \"What's your real job here, Chap? Why does\n somebody have to stay for stopover?\"", "Chapman and Klein watched them dash across the pumice, making the\n tremendous leaps they used to read about in the Sunday supplements. The\n port of the rocket had opened and tiny figures were climbing down the\n ladder. The small figures from the bunker reached them and did a short\n jig of welcome. Then the figures linked arms and started back. Chapman\n noticed one—it was probably Donley—pat the ship affectionately before\n he started back.\nThey were in the lock and the air pumped in and then they were in\n the bunker, taking off their suits. The newcomers were impressed and\n solemn, very much aware of the tremendous responsibility that rested on\n their shoulders. Like Donley and Klein and the members of the Second\n group had been when they had landed. Like Chapman had been in the First.\n\n\n Donley and the others were all over them.\nHow was it back on Earth? Who had won the series? Was so-and-so still\n teaching at the university? What was the international situation?", "\"And I'd check you five hundred more,\" Chapman said. \"It takes only\n one mistake. And watch out for blisters under the pumice crust. You go\n through one of those and that's it, brother.\"\n\n\n Donley sighed. \"Chap, you watch us like an old mother hen. You see we\n check our suits, you settle our arguments, you see that we're not bored\n and that we stay healthy and happy. I think you'd blow our noses for us\n if we caught cold. But some day, Chap old man, you're gonna find out\n that your little boys can watch out for themselves!\"\n\n\n But he checked his suit for leaks and tested the valve of his tank\n before he left.\nOnly Klein and Chapman were left in the bunker. Klein was at the work\n table, carefully labeling some lichen specimens.\n\n\n \"I never knew you were married,\" Chapman said.", "\"Think we ought to radio the space station and see if they've left\n there yet?\" Klein asked.\n\n\n \"I talked to them on the last call,\" Chapman said. \"The relief ship\n left there twelve hours ago. They should get here\"—he looked at his\n watch—\"in about six and a half hours.\"\n\n\n \"Chap, you know, I've been thinking,\" Donley said quietly. \"You've\n been here just twice as long as the rest of us. What's the first thing\n you're going to do once you get back?\"\n\n\n It hit them, then. Dowden and Bening looked blank for a minute and\n blindly found packing cases to sit on. The top halves of their suits\n were still hanging on the bulkhead. Klein lowered his coffee cup and\n looked grave. Even Dahl glanced up expectantly.", "He had just locked the bag when he heard the rumble of the airlock and\n the soft hiss of air. Somebody had come back earlier than expected. He\n watched the inner door swing open and the spacesuited figure clump in\n and unscrew its helmet.\n\n\n Dahl. He had gone out to help Dowden on the Schmidt telescope. Maybe\n Dowden hadn't needed any help, with Bening along. Or more likely,\n considering the circumstances, Dahl wasn't much good at helping anybody\n today.\n\n\n Dahl stripped off his suit. His face was covered with light beads of\n sweat and his eyes were frightened.\n\n\n He moistened his lips slightly. \"Do—do you think they'll ever have\n relief ships up here more often than every eighteen months, Chap? I\n mean, considering the advance of—\"", "\"Hell, lots of reasons, Julius. You can't get a whole relief crew and\n let them take over cold. They have to know where you left off. They\n have to know where things are, how things work, what to watch out for.\n And then, because you've been here a year and a half and know the\n ropes, you have to watch them to see that they stay alive in spite of\n themselves. The Moon's a new environment and you have to learn how to\n live in it. There's a lot of things to learn—and some people just\n never learn.\"\n\n\n \"You're nursemaid, then.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose you could call it that.\"\nKlein said, \"You're not a scientist, are you?\"", "They walked over to one corner of the bunker. \"This is about as private\n as we can get, captain,\" Chapman said. \"What's on your mind?\"\nEberlein found a packing crate and made himself comfortable. He looked\n at Chapman.\n\n\n \"I've always wanted to meet the man who's spent more time here than\n anybody else,\" he began.\n\n\n \"I'm sure you wanted to see me for more reasons than just curiosity.\"\n\n\n Eberlein took out a pack of cigarets. \"Mind if I smoke?\"\n\n\n Chapman jerked a thumb toward Dahl. \"Ask him. He's in charge now.\"\n\n\n The captain didn't bother. He put the pack away. \"You know we have big\n plans for the station,\" he said.\n\n\n \"I hadn't heard of them.\"", "The older man blew a smoke ring and watched it drift toward the air\n exhaust vent.\n\"You mean you would miss it here, the people you've known and grown\n up with, the little familiar things that have made up your life here.\n You're afraid the glamor would wear off and you would get to hate it on\n Venus.\"\nThe very young man nodded miserably. \"I guess that's it.\"\n\"Anything else?\"\nThe very young man found his fingernails extremely fascinating again\n and finally said, in a low voice, \"Yes, there is.\"\n\"A girl?\"\nA nod confirmed this.\nIt was the older man's turn to look thoughtful. \"You know, I'm sure,\n that psychologists and research men agree that research stations should", "\"Oh, yes,\nbig plans\n. They're working on unmanned, open-side rockets\n now that could carry cargo and sheet steel for more bunkers like this.\n Enable us to enlarge the unit, have a series of bunkers all linked\n together. Make good laboratories and living quarters for you people.\"\n His eyes swept the room. \"Have a little privacy for a change.\"\n\n\n Chapman nodded. \"They could use a little privacy up here.\"\n\n\n The captain noticed the pronoun. \"Well, that's one of the reasons why\n I wanted to talk to you, Chapman. The Commission talked it over and\n they'd like to see you stay. They feel if they're going to enlarge it,\n add more bunkers and have more men up here, that a man of practical\n experience should be running things. They figure that you're the only\n man who's capable and who's had the experience.\"\n\n\n The captain vaguely felt the approach was all wrong.", "Lord, Chapman thought, I'll be happy when I can see some other faces.\n\n\n \"What'd they want?\" Klein had one eyelid open and a questioning look on\n his face.\n\n\n \"They wanted me to stay until the next relief ship lands,\" Chapman\n whispered back.\n\n\n \"What did you say?\"\n\n\n He shrugged. \"No.\"\n\n\n \"You kept it short,\" somebody else whispered. It was Donley, up and\n sitting on the side of his hammock. \"If it had been me, I would have\n told them just what they could do about it.\"\nThe others were awake now, with the exception of Dahl who had his face\n to the bulkhead and a pillow over his head.\n\n\n Dowden rubbed his eyes sleepily. \"Sore, aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"Kind of. Who wouldn't be?\"", "The key started to stutter again, demanding an answer.\n\n\n He tapped out his reply: \"\nNo!\n\"\n\n\n There was a silence and then the key stammered once more in a sudden\n fit of bureaucratic rage. Chapman stuffed a rag under it and ignored\n it. He turned to the hammocks, strung against the bulkhead on the other\n side of the room.\n\n\n The chattering of the key hadn't awakened anybody; they were still\n asleep, making the animal noises that people usually make in slumber.\n Dowden, half in the bottom hammock and half on the floor, was snoring\n peacefully. Dahl, the poor kid who was due for stopover, was mumbling\n to himself. Julius Klein, with that look of ineffable happiness on his\n face, looked as if he had just squirmed under the tent to his personal\n idea of heaven. Donley and Bening were lying perfectly still, their\n covers not mussed, sleeping very lightly." ], [ "Chapman frowned. \"Frankly, I hadn't thought of that. I don't believe\n I care. I've put in my time; it's somebody else's turn now. He\n volunteered for it. I think I was fair in explaining all about the job\n when you talked it over among yourselves.\"\n\n\n \"You did, but I don't think Dahl's the man for it. He's too young, too\n much of a kid. He volunteered because he thought it made him look like\n a hero. He doesn't have the judgment that an older man would have. That\n you have.\"\n\n\n Chapman turned slowly around and faced Klein.\n\n\n \"I'm not the indispensable man,\" he said slowly, \"and even if I was, it\n wouldn't make any difference to me. I'm sorry if Dahl is young. So was\n I. I've lost three years up here. And I don't intend to lose any more.\"", "It hurt to look in Dahl's eyes. They were the eyes of a man who was\n trying desperately to stop what he was about to do, but just couldn't\n help himself.\n\n\n \"Well, yes, more or less. Oh, God, Chap, I know you want to go home!\n But I couldn't ask any of the others; you were the only one who could,\n the only one who was qualified!\"\nDahl looked as though he was going to be sick. Chapman tried to recall\n all he knew about him. Dahl, Robert. Good mathematician. Graduate from\n one of the Ivy League schools. Father was a manufacturer of stoves or\n something.\n\n\n It still didn't add, not quite. \"You know I don't like it here any more\n than you do,\" Chapman said slowly. \"I may have commitments at home,\n too. What made you think I would change my mind?\"", "Dahl took the plunge. \"Well, you see,\" he started eagerly, too far gone\n to remember such a thing as pride, \"you know my father's pretty well\n fixed. We would make it worth your while, Chap.\" He was feverish. \"It\n would mean eighteen more months, Chap, but they'd be well-paid months!\"\n\n\n Chapman felt tired. The good feeling he had about going home was slowly\n evaporating.\n\n\n \"If you have any report to make, I think you had better get at it,\"\n he cut in, keeping all the harshness he felt out of his voice. \"It'll\n be too late after the relief ship leaves. It'll be easier to give the\n captain your report than try to radio it back to Earth from here.\"\n\n\n He felt sorrier for Dahl than he could ever remember having felt for\n anybody. Long after going home, Dahl would remember this.\n\n\n It would eat at him like a cancer.", "Williams looked stricken and somebody said, \"Oh, shut up, Dahl.\"\n\n\n One of the men separated from the group and came over to Chapman. He\n held out his hand and said, \"My name's Eberlein. Captain of the relief\n ship. I understand you're in charge here?\"\n\n\n Chapman nodded and shook hands. They hadn't had a captain on the First\n ship. Just a pilot and crew. Eberlein looked every inch a captain, too.\n Craggy face, gray hair, the firm chin of a man who was sure of himself.\n\n\n \"You might say I'm in charge here,\" Chapman said.\n\n\n \"Well, look, Mr. Chapman, is there any place where we can talk together\n privately?\"", "\"Well, you see,\" Dahl started, \"that's why I came back early. I wanted\n to see you about stopover. It's that—well, I'll put it this way.\" He\n seemed to be groping for an easy way to say what he wanted to. \"I'm\n engaged back home. Really nice girl, Chap, you'd like her if you knew\n her.\" He fumbled in his pocket and found a photograph and put it on\n the desk. \"That's a picture of Alice, taken at a picnic we were on\n together.\" Chapman didn't look. \"She—we—expected to be married when\n I got back. I never told her about stopover, Chap. She thinks I'll be\n home tomorrow. I kept thinking, hoping, that maybe somehow—\"\n\n\n He was fumbling it badly, Chapman thought.\n\n\n \"You wanted to trade places with me, didn't you, Bob? You thought I\n might stay for stopover again, in your place?\"", "They walked over to one corner of the bunker. \"This is about as private\n as we can get, captain,\" Chapman said. \"What's on your mind?\"\nEberlein found a packing crate and made himself comfortable. He looked\n at Chapman.\n\n\n \"I've always wanted to meet the man who's spent more time here than\n anybody else,\" he began.\n\n\n \"I'm sure you wanted to see me for more reasons than just curiosity.\"\n\n\n Eberlein took out a pack of cigarets. \"Mind if I smoke?\"\n\n\n Chapman jerked a thumb toward Dahl. \"Ask him. He's in charge now.\"\n\n\n The captain didn't bother. He put the pack away. \"You know we have big\n plans for the station,\" he said.\n\n\n \"I hadn't heard of them.\"", "\"Oh, yes,\nbig plans\n. They're working on unmanned, open-side rockets\n now that could carry cargo and sheet steel for more bunkers like this.\n Enable us to enlarge the unit, have a series of bunkers all linked\n together. Make good laboratories and living quarters for you people.\"\n His eyes swept the room. \"Have a little privacy for a change.\"\n\n\n Chapman nodded. \"They could use a little privacy up here.\"\n\n\n The captain noticed the pronoun. \"Well, that's one of the reasons why\n I wanted to talk to you, Chapman. The Commission talked it over and\n they'd like to see you stay. They feel if they're going to enlarge it,\n add more bunkers and have more men up here, that a man of practical\n experience should be running things. They figure that you're the only\n man who's capable and who's had the experience.\"\n\n\n The captain vaguely felt the approach was all wrong.", "\"Well, don't let it throw you. They've never been here on the Moon.\n They don't know what it's like. All they're trying to do is get a good\n man to stay on the job a while longer.\"\n\n\n \"\nAll\nthey're trying to do,\" Chapman said sarcastically. \"They've got\n a fat chance.\"\n\n\n \"They think you've found a home here,\" Donley said.\n\n\n \"Why the hell don't you guys shut up until morning?\" Dahl was awake,\n looking bitter. \"Some of us still have to stay here, you know. Some of\n us aren't going back today.\"\n\n\n No, Chapman thought, some of us aren't going back. You aren't. And\n Dixon's staying, too. Only Dixon isn't ever going back.", "Klein held up his hands. \"Look, Chap, I didn't mean you should stay. I\n know how much you hate it and the time you put in up here. It's just—\"\n His voice trailed away. \"It's just that I think it's such a damn\n important job.\"\n\n\n Klein had gone out in a last search for rock lichens and Chapman\n enjoyed one of his relatively few moments of privacy. He wandered over\n to his bunk and opened his barracks bag. He checked the underwear and\n his toothbrush and shaving kit for maybe the hundredth time and pushed\n the clothing down farther in the canvas. It was foolish because the\n bag was already packed and had been for a week. He remembered stalling\n it off for as long as he could and then the quiet satisfaction about a\n week before, when he had opened his small gear locker and transferred\n its meager belongings to the bag.", "\"Same reason you didn't mention your wife. You get to thinking about\n it.\"\n\n\n Klein flipped the lid on the specimen box. \"Going to get married when\n you get back?\"\n\n\n Chapman was at the port again, staring out at the bleak landscape. \"We\n hope to.\"\n\n\n \"Settle down in a small cottage and raise lots of little Chapmans, eh?\"\n\n\n Chapman nodded.\n\n\n \"That's the only future,\" Klein said.\n\n\n He put away the box and came over to the port. Chapman moved over so\n they both could look out.\n\n\n \"Chap.\" Klein hesitated a moment. \"What happened to Dixon?\"", "\"And I'd check you five hundred more,\" Chapman said. \"It takes only\n one mistake. And watch out for blisters under the pumice crust. You go\n through one of those and that's it, brother.\"\n\n\n Donley sighed. \"Chap, you watch us like an old mother hen. You see we\n check our suits, you settle our arguments, you see that we're not bored\n and that we stay healthy and happy. I think you'd blow our noses for us\n if we caught cold. But some day, Chap old man, you're gonna find out\n that your little boys can watch out for themselves!\"\n\n\n But he checked his suit for leaks and tested the valve of his tank\n before he left.\nOnly Klein and Chapman were left in the bunker. Klein was at the work\n table, carefully labeling some lichen specimens.\n\n\n \"I never knew you were married,\" Chapman said.", "\"I don't know,\" Chapman said slowly. \"I guess I was trying not to think\n of that. I suppose none of us have. We've been like little kids who\n have waited so long for Christmas that they just can't believe it when\n it's finally Christmas Eve.\"\n\n\n Klein nodded in agreement. \"I haven't been here three years like you\n have, but I think I know what you mean.\" He warmed up to it as the idea\n sank in. \"Just what the hell\nare\nyou going to do?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing very spectacular,\" Chapman said, smiling. \"I'm going to rent\n a room over Times Square, get a recording of a rikky-tik piano, and\n drink and listen to the music and watch the people on the street below.\n Then I think I'll see somebody.\"\n\n\n \"Who's the somebody?\" Donley asked.\n\n\n Chapman grinned. \"Oh, just somebody. What are you going to do, Dick?\"", "\"No,\" Chapman interrupted bluntly. \"I don't. Not at least for ten\n years. The fuel's too expensive and the trip's too hazardous. On\n freight charges alone you're worth your weight in platinum when they\n send you here. Even if it becomes cheaper, Bob, it won't come about\n so it will shorten stopover right away.\" He stopped, feeling a little\n sorry for Dahl. \"It won't be too bad. There'll be new men up here and\n you'll pass a lot of time getting to know them.\"", "\"No, you should know that. I came as the pilot of the first ship. We\n made the bunker out of parts of the ship so there wasn't anything to\n go back on. I'm a good mechanic and I made myself useful with the\n machinery. When it occurred to us that somebody was going to have to\n stay over, I volunteered. I thought the others were so important that\n it was better they should take their samples and data back to Earth\n when the first relief ship came.\"\n\n\n \"You wouldn't do it again, though, would you?\"\n\n\n \"No, I wouldn't.\"\n\n\n \"Do you think Dahl will do as good a job as you've done here?\"", "Klein jerked his thumb toward Dahl's bunk, held a finger to his lips,\n and walked noiselessly over to the small electric stove. It was his day\n for breakfast duty.\n\n\n The others started lacing up their bunks, getting ready for their last\n day of work on the Moon. In a few hours they'd be relieved by members\n of the Third research group and they'd be on their way back to Earth.\n\n\n And that includes me, Chapman thought. I'm going home. I'm finally\n going home.\n\n\n He walked silently to the one small, quartz window in the room. It was\n morning—the Moon's \"morning\"—and he shivered slightly. The rays of\n the Sun were just striking the far rim of the crater and long shadows\n shot across the crater floor. The rest of it was still blanketed in\n a dark jumble of powdery pumice and jagged peaks that would make the\n Black Hills of Dakota look like paradise.", "Lord, Chapman thought, I'll be happy when I can see some other faces.\n\n\n \"What'd they want?\" Klein had one eyelid open and a questioning look on\n his face.\n\n\n \"They wanted me to stay until the next relief ship lands,\" Chapman\n whispered back.\n\n\n \"What did you say?\"\n\n\n He shrugged. \"No.\"\n\n\n \"You kept it short,\" somebody else whispered. It was Donley, up and\n sitting on the side of his hammock. \"If it had been me, I would have\n told them just what they could do about it.\"\nThe others were awake now, with the exception of Dahl who had his face\n to the bulkhead and a pillow over his head.\n\n\n Dowden rubbed his eyes sleepily. \"Sore, aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"Kind of. Who wouldn't be?\"", "A hundred yards from the research bunker he could make out the small\n mound of stones and the forlorn homemade cross, jury-rigged out of\n small condensed milk tins slid over crossed iron bars. You could still\n see the footprints in the powdery soil where the group had gathered\n about the grave. It had been more than eighteen months ago, but there\n was no wind to wear those tracks away. They'd be there forever.\n\n\n That's what happened to guys like Dixon, Chapman thought. On the Moon,\n one mistake could use up your whole quota of chances.\n\n\n Klein came back with the coffee. Chapman took a cup, gagged, and forced\n himself to swallow the rest of it. It had been in the can for so long\n you could almost taste the glue on the label.\nDonley was warming himself over his cup, looking thoughtful. Dowden and\n Bening were struggling into their suits, getting ready to go outside.\n Dahl was still sitting on his hammock, trying to ignore them.", "Chapman and Klein watched them dash across the pumice, making the\n tremendous leaps they used to read about in the Sunday supplements. The\n port of the rocket had opened and tiny figures were climbing down the\n ladder. The small figures from the bunker reached them and did a short\n jig of welcome. Then the figures linked arms and started back. Chapman\n noticed one—it was probably Donley—pat the ship affectionately before\n he started back.\nThey were in the lock and the air pumped in and then they were in\n the bunker, taking off their suits. The newcomers were impressed and\n solemn, very much aware of the tremendous responsibility that rested on\n their shoulders. Like Donley and Klein and the members of the Second\n group had been when they had landed. Like Chapman had been in the First.\n\n\n Donley and the others were all over them.\nHow was it back on Earth? Who had won the series? Was so-and-so still\n teaching at the university? What was the international situation?", "The key started to stutter again, demanding an answer.\n\n\n He tapped out his reply: \"\nNo!\n\"\n\n\n There was a silence and then the key stammered once more in a sudden\n fit of bureaucratic rage. Chapman stuffed a rag under it and ignored\n it. He turned to the hammocks, strung against the bulkhead on the other\n side of the room.\n\n\n The chattering of the key hadn't awakened anybody; they were still\n asleep, making the animal noises that people usually make in slumber.\n Dowden, half in the bottom hammock and half on the floor, was snoring\n peacefully. Dahl, the poor kid who was due for stopover, was mumbling\n to himself. Julius Klein, with that look of ineffable happiness on his\n face, looked as if he had just squirmed under the tent to his personal\n idea of heaven. Donley and Bening were lying perfectly still, their\n covers not mussed, sleeping very lightly.", "Was the sky still blue, was the grass still green, did the leaves still\n turn color in the autumn, did people still love and cry and were there\n still people who didn't know what an atom was and didn't give a damn?\n\n\n Chapman had gone through it all before. But was Ginny still Ginny?\n\n\n Some of the men in the Third had their luggage with them. One of\n them—a husky, red-faced kid named Williams—was opening a box about a\n foot square and six inches deep. Chapman watched him curiously.\n\n\n \"Well, I'll be damned!\" Klein said. \"Hey, guys, look what we've got\n here!\"\n\n\n Chapman and the others crowded around and suddenly Donley leaned over\n and took a deep breath. In the box, covering a thick layer of ordinary\n dirt, was a plot of grass. They looked at it, awed. Klein put out his\n hand and laid it on top of the grass." ], [ "\"Well, don't let it throw you. They've never been here on the Moon.\n They don't know what it's like. All they're trying to do is get a good\n man to stay on the job a while longer.\"\n\n\n \"\nAll\nthey're trying to do,\" Chapman said sarcastically. \"They've got\n a fat chance.\"\n\n\n \"They think you've found a home here,\" Donley said.\n\n\n \"Why the hell don't you guys shut up until morning?\" Dahl was awake,\n looking bitter. \"Some of us still have to stay here, you know. Some of\n us aren't going back today.\"\n\n\n No, Chapman thought, some of us aren't going back. You aren't. And\n Dixon's staying, too. Only Dixon isn't ever going back.", "\"He died,\" Chapman said. \"He was a good kid, all wrapped up in science.\n Being on the Moon was the opportunity of a lifetime. He thought so much\n about it that he forgot a lot of little things—like how to stay alive.\n The day before the Second group came, he went out to finish some work\n he was interested in. He forgot to check for leaks and whether or not\n the valve on his tank was all the way closed. We couldn't get to him in\n time.\"\n\n\n \"He had his walkie-talkie with him?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. It worked fine, too. We heard everything that went through his\n mind at the end.\"\n\n\n Klein's face was blank. \"What's your real job here, Chap? Why does\n somebody have to stay for stopover?\"", "Three years on the Moon and they didn't want him to come back.\n\n\n Three years on the Moon and they thought he'd be glad to stay for more.\n Just raise his salary or give him a bonus, the every-man-has-his-price\n idea. They probably thought he liked it there.\n\n\n Oh, sure, he loved it. Canned coffee, canned beans, canned pills,\n and canned air until your insides felt as though they were plated\n with tin. Life in a cramped, smelly little hut where you could take\n only ten steps in any one direction. Their little scientific home of\n tomorrow with none of the modern conveniences, a charming place where\n you couldn't take a shower, couldn't brush your teeth, and your kidneys\n didn't work right.\n\n\n And for double his salary they thought he'd be glad to stay for another\n year and a half. Or maybe three. He should probably be glad he had the\n opportunity.", "\"Is that all?\"\n\n\n Eberlein was ill at ease. \"Naturally you'd be paid well. I don't\n imagine any man would like being here all the time. They're prepared to\n double your salary—maybe even a bonus in addition—and let you have\n full charge. You'd be Director of the Luna Laboratories.\"\n\n\n All this and a title too, Chapman thought.\n\n\n \"That's it?\" Chapman asked.\n\n\n Eberlein frowned. \"Well, the Commission said they'd be willing to\n consider anything else you had in mind, if it was more money or....\"\n\n\n \"The answer is no,\" Chapman said. \"I'm not interested in more money\n for staying because I'm not interested in staying. Money can't buy it,\n captain. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid that you'd have to stay up here to\n appreciate that.", "\"Hell, lots of reasons, Julius. You can't get a whole relief crew and\n let them take over cold. They have to know where you left off. They\n have to know where things are, how things work, what to watch out for.\n And then, because you've been here a year and a half and know the\n ropes, you have to watch them to see that they stay alive in spite of\n themselves. The Moon's a new environment and you have to learn how to\n live in it. There's a lot of things to learn—and some people just\n never learn.\"\n\n\n \"You're nursemaid, then.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose you could call it that.\"\nKlein said, \"You're not a scientist, are you?\"", "\"Think we ought to radio the space station and see if they've left\n there yet?\" Klein asked.\n\n\n \"I talked to them on the last call,\" Chapman said. \"The relief ship\n left there twelve hours ago. They should get here\"—he looked at his\n watch—\"in about six and a half hours.\"\n\n\n \"Chap, you know, I've been thinking,\" Donley said quietly. \"You've\n been here just twice as long as the rest of us. What's the first thing\n you're going to do once you get back?\"\n\n\n It hit them, then. Dowden and Bening looked blank for a minute and\n blindly found packing cases to sit on. The top halves of their suits\n were still hanging on the bulkhead. Klein lowered his coffee cup and\n looked grave. Even Dahl glanced up expectantly.", "The others chimed in and Chapman grinned. Yesterday or a week ago they\n couldn't have done it. He had been there too long and he had hated it\n too much.\n\n\n The party quieted down after a while and Dowden and Bening finished\n getting into their suits. They still had a section of the sky to map\n before they left. Donley was right after them. There was an outcropping\n of rock that he wanted a sample of and some strata he wished to\n investigate.\n\n\n And the time went faster when you kept busy.\nChapman stopped them at the lock. \"Remember to check your suits for\n leaks,\" he warned. \"And check the valves of your oxygen tanks.\"\n\n\n Donley looked sour. \"I've gone out at least five hundred times,\" he\n said, \"and you check me each time.\"", "A hundred yards from the research bunker he could make out the small\n mound of stones and the forlorn homemade cross, jury-rigged out of\n small condensed milk tins slid over crossed iron bars. You could still\n see the footprints in the powdery soil where the group had gathered\n about the grave. It had been more than eighteen months ago, but there\n was no wind to wear those tracks away. They'd be there forever.\n\n\n That's what happened to guys like Dixon, Chapman thought. On the Moon,\n one mistake could use up your whole quota of chances.\n\n\n Klein came back with the coffee. Chapman took a cup, gagged, and forced\n himself to swallow the rest of it. It had been in the can for so long\n you could almost taste the glue on the label.\nDonley was warming himself over his cup, looking thoughtful. Dowden and\n Bening were struggling into their suits, getting ready to go outside.\n Dahl was still sitting on his hammock, trying to ignore them.", "Klein jerked his thumb toward Dahl's bunk, held a finger to his lips,\n and walked noiselessly over to the small electric stove. It was his day\n for breakfast duty.\n\n\n The others started lacing up their bunks, getting ready for their last\n day of work on the Moon. In a few hours they'd be relieved by members\n of the Third research group and they'd be on their way back to Earth.\n\n\n And that includes me, Chapman thought. I'm going home. I'm finally\n going home.\n\n\n He walked silently to the one small, quartz window in the room. It was\n morning—the Moon's \"morning\"—and he shivered slightly. The rays of\n the Sun were just striking the far rim of the crater and long shadows\n shot across the crater floor. The rest of it was still blanketed in\n a dark jumble of powdery pumice and jagged peaks that would make the\n Black Hills of Dakota look like paradise.", "They laughed. Somebody said: \"Go play your record, Chap. Today's the\n day for it.\"\n\n\n The phonograph was a small, wind-up model that Chapman had smuggled in\n when he had landed with the First group. The record was old and the\n shellac was nearly worn off, but the music was good.\n\n\n Way Back Home by Al Lewis.\nThey ran through it twice. They were beginning to feel it now, Chapman\n thought. They were going to go home in a little while and the idea was\n just starting to sink in.\n\n\n \"You know, Chap,\" Donley said, \"it won't seem like the same old Moon\n without you on it. Why, we'll look at it when we're out spooning or\n something and it just won't have the same old appeal.\"\n\n\n \"Like they say in the army,\" Bening said, \"you never had it so good.\n You found a home here.\"", "They walked over to one corner of the bunker. \"This is about as private\n as we can get, captain,\" Chapman said. \"What's on your mind?\"\nEberlein found a packing crate and made himself comfortable. He looked\n at Chapman.\n\n\n \"I've always wanted to meet the man who's spent more time here than\n anybody else,\" he began.\n\n\n \"I'm sure you wanted to see me for more reasons than just curiosity.\"\n\n\n Eberlein took out a pack of cigarets. \"Mind if I smoke?\"\n\n\n Chapman jerked a thumb toward Dahl. \"Ask him. He's in charge now.\"\n\n\n The captain didn't bother. He put the pack away. \"You know we have big\n plans for the station,\" he said.\n\n\n \"I hadn't heard of them.\"", "\"And I'd check you five hundred more,\" Chapman said. \"It takes only\n one mistake. And watch out for blisters under the pumice crust. You go\n through one of those and that's it, brother.\"\n\n\n Donley sighed. \"Chap, you watch us like an old mother hen. You see we\n check our suits, you settle our arguments, you see that we're not bored\n and that we stay healthy and happy. I think you'd blow our noses for us\n if we caught cold. But some day, Chap old man, you're gonna find out\n that your little boys can watch out for themselves!\"\n\n\n But he checked his suit for leaks and tested the valve of his tank\n before he left.\nOnly Klein and Chapman were left in the bunker. Klein was at the work\n table, carefully labeling some lichen specimens.\n\n\n \"I never knew you were married,\" Chapman said.", "\"Oh, yes,\nbig plans\n. They're working on unmanned, open-side rockets\n now that could carry cargo and sheet steel for more bunkers like this.\n Enable us to enlarge the unit, have a series of bunkers all linked\n together. Make good laboratories and living quarters for you people.\"\n His eyes swept the room. \"Have a little privacy for a change.\"\n\n\n Chapman nodded. \"They could use a little privacy up here.\"\n\n\n The captain noticed the pronoun. \"Well, that's one of the reasons why\n I wanted to talk to you, Chapman. The Commission talked it over and\n they'd like to see you stay. They feel if they're going to enlarge it,\n add more bunkers and have more men up here, that a man of practical\n experience should be running things. They figure that you're the only\n man who's capable and who's had the experience.\"\n\n\n The captain vaguely felt the approach was all wrong.", "Chapman and Klein watched them dash across the pumice, making the\n tremendous leaps they used to read about in the Sunday supplements. The\n port of the rocket had opened and tiny figures were climbing down the\n ladder. The small figures from the bunker reached them and did a short\n jig of welcome. Then the figures linked arms and started back. Chapman\n noticed one—it was probably Donley—pat the ship affectionately before\n he started back.\nThey were in the lock and the air pumped in and then they were in\n the bunker, taking off their suits. The newcomers were impressed and\n solemn, very much aware of the tremendous responsibility that rested on\n their shoulders. Like Donley and Klein and the members of the Second\n group had been when they had landed. Like Chapman had been in the First.\n\n\n Donley and the others were all over them.\nHow was it back on Earth? Who had won the series? Was so-and-so still\n teaching at the university? What was the international situation?", "He had just locked the bag when he heard the rumble of the airlock and\n the soft hiss of air. Somebody had come back earlier than expected. He\n watched the inner door swing open and the spacesuited figure clump in\n and unscrew its helmet.\n\n\n Dahl. He had gone out to help Dowden on the Schmidt telescope. Maybe\n Dowden hadn't needed any help, with Bening along. Or more likely,\n considering the circumstances, Dahl wasn't much good at helping anybody\n today.\n\n\n Dahl stripped off his suit. His face was covered with light beads of\n sweat and his eyes were frightened.\n\n\n He moistened his lips slightly. \"Do—do you think they'll ever have\n relief ships up here more often than every eighteen months, Chap? I\n mean, considering the advance of—\"", "\"I like the feel of it,\" he said simply.\n\n\n Chapman cut off a single blade with his fingernail and put it between\n his lips. It had been years since he had seen grass and had the luxury\n of walking on it and lying on its cool thickness during those sultry\n summer nights when it was too hot to sleep indoors.\n\n\n Williams blushed. \"I thought we could spare a little water for it and\n maybe use the ultraviolet lamp on it some of the time. Couldn't help\n but bring it along; it seemed sort of like a symbol....\" He looked\n embarrassed.\n\n\n Chapman sympathized. If he had had any sense, he'd have tried to\n smuggle something like that up to the Moon instead of his phonograph.\n\n\n \"That's valuable grass,\" Dahl said sharply. \"Do you realize that at\n current freight rates up here, it's worth about ten dollars a blade?\"", "\"No,\" Chapman interrupted bluntly. \"I don't. Not at least for ten\n years. The fuel's too expensive and the trip's too hazardous. On\n freight charges alone you're worth your weight in platinum when they\n send you here. Even if it becomes cheaper, Bob, it won't come about\n so it will shorten stopover right away.\" He stopped, feeling a little\n sorry for Dahl. \"It won't be too bad. There'll be new men up here and\n you'll pass a lot of time getting to know them.\"", "The older man blew a smoke ring and watched it drift toward the air\n exhaust vent.\n\"You mean you would miss it here, the people you've known and grown\n up with, the little familiar things that have made up your life here.\n You're afraid the glamor would wear off and you would get to hate it on\n Venus.\"\nThe very young man nodded miserably. \"I guess that's it.\"\n\"Anything else?\"\nThe very young man found his fingernails extremely fascinating again\n and finally said, in a low voice, \"Yes, there is.\"\n\"A girl?\"\nA nod confirmed this.\nIt was the older man's turn to look thoughtful. \"You know, I'm sure,\n that psychologists and research men agree that research stations should", "He stopped, feeling embarrassed. Klein's expression was encouraging.\n \"And then I think I'd like to go downtown and just watch the shoppers\n on the sidewalks. Or maybe go to a burlesque house and smell the cheap\n perfume and the popcorn and the people sweating in the dark.\"\n\n\n He studied his hands. \"I think what I miss most is people—all kinds\n of people. Bad people and good people and fat people and thin people,\n and people I can't understand. People who wouldn't know an atom from an\n artichoke. And people who wouldn't give a damn. We're a quarter of a\n million miles from nowhere, Julius, and to make it literary, I think I\n miss my fellow man more than anything.\"\n\n\n \"Got a girl back home?\" Klein asked almost casually.\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"You're not like Dahl. You've never mentioned it.\"", "Lord, Chapman thought, I'll be happy when I can see some other faces.\n\n\n \"What'd they want?\" Klein had one eyelid open and a questioning look on\n his face.\n\n\n \"They wanted me to stay until the next relief ship lands,\" Chapman\n whispered back.\n\n\n \"What did you say?\"\n\n\n He shrugged. \"No.\"\n\n\n \"You kept it short,\" somebody else whispered. It was Donley, up and\n sitting on the side of his hammock. \"If it had been me, I would have\n told them just what they could do about it.\"\nThe others were awake now, with the exception of Dahl who had his face\n to the bulkhead and a pillow over his head.\n\n\n Dowden rubbed his eyes sleepily. \"Sore, aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"Kind of. Who wouldn't be?\"" ], [ "\"Think we ought to radio the space station and see if they've left\n there yet?\" Klein asked.\n\n\n \"I talked to them on the last call,\" Chapman said. \"The relief ship\n left there twelve hours ago. They should get here\"—he looked at his\n watch—\"in about six and a half hours.\"\n\n\n \"Chap, you know, I've been thinking,\" Donley said quietly. \"You've\n been here just twice as long as the rest of us. What's the first thing\n you're going to do once you get back?\"\n\n\n It hit them, then. Dowden and Bening looked blank for a minute and\n blindly found packing cases to sit on. The top halves of their suits\n were still hanging on the bulkhead. Klein lowered his coffee cup and\n looked grave. Even Dahl glanced up expectantly.", "The older man blew a smoke ring and watched it drift toward the air\n exhaust vent.\n\"You mean you would miss it here, the people you've known and grown\n up with, the little familiar things that have made up your life here.\n You're afraid the glamor would wear off and you would get to hate it on\n Venus.\"\nThe very young man nodded miserably. \"I guess that's it.\"\n\"Anything else?\"\nThe very young man found his fingernails extremely fascinating again\n and finally said, in a low voice, \"Yes, there is.\"\n\"A girl?\"\nA nod confirmed this.\nIt was the older man's turn to look thoughtful. \"You know, I'm sure,\n that psychologists and research men agree that research stations should", "The others chimed in and Chapman grinned. Yesterday or a week ago they\n couldn't have done it. He had been there too long and he had hated it\n too much.\n\n\n The party quieted down after a while and Dowden and Bening finished\n getting into their suits. They still had a section of the sky to map\n before they left. Donley was right after them. There was an outcropping\n of rock that he wanted a sample of and some strata he wished to\n investigate.\n\n\n And the time went faster when you kept busy.\nChapman stopped them at the lock. \"Remember to check your suits for\n leaks,\" he warned. \"And check the valves of your oxygen tanks.\"\n\n\n Donley looked sour. \"I've gone out at least five hundred times,\" he\n said, \"and you check me each time.\"", "\"No, you should know that. I came as the pilot of the first ship. We\n made the bunker out of parts of the ship so there wasn't anything to\n go back on. I'm a good mechanic and I made myself useful with the\n machinery. When it occurred to us that somebody was going to have to\n stay over, I volunteered. I thought the others were so important that\n it was better they should take their samples and data back to Earth\n when the first relief ship came.\"\n\n\n \"You wouldn't do it again, though, would you?\"\n\n\n \"No, I wouldn't.\"\n\n\n \"Do you think Dahl will do as good a job as you've done here?\"", "He hadn't actually needed to pack, of course. In less than twenty-four\n hours he'd be back on Earth where he could drown himself in toothpaste\n and buy more tee shirts than he could wear in a lifetime. He could\n leave behind his shorts and socks and the outsize shirts he had\n inherited from—who was it? Driesbach?—of the First group. Dahl could\n probably use them or maybe one of the boys in the Third.\nBut it wasn't like going home unless you packed. It was part of the\n ritual, like marking off the last three weeks in pencil on the gray\n steel of the bulkhead beside his hammock. Just a few hours ago, when he\n woke up, he had made the last check mark and signed his name and the\n date. His signature was right beneath Dixon's.\n\n\n He frowned when he thought of Dixon and slid back the catch on the top\n of the bag and locked it. They should never have sent a kid like Dixon\n to the Moon.", "Three years on the Moon and they didn't want him to come back.\n\n\n Three years on the Moon and they thought he'd be glad to stay for more.\n Just raise his salary or give him a bonus, the every-man-has-his-price\n idea. They probably thought he liked it there.\n\n\n Oh, sure, he loved it. Canned coffee, canned beans, canned pills,\n and canned air until your insides felt as though they were plated\n with tin. Life in a cramped, smelly little hut where you could take\n only ten steps in any one direction. Their little scientific home of\n tomorrow with none of the modern conveniences, a charming place where\n you couldn't take a shower, couldn't brush your teeth, and your kidneys\n didn't work right.\n\n\n And for double his salary they thought he'd be glad to stay for another\n year and a half. Or maybe three. He should probably be glad he had the\n opportunity.", "Lord, Chapman thought, I'll be happy when I can see some other faces.\n\n\n \"What'd they want?\" Klein had one eyelid open and a questioning look on\n his face.\n\n\n \"They wanted me to stay until the next relief ship lands,\" Chapman\n whispered back.\n\n\n \"What did you say?\"\n\n\n He shrugged. \"No.\"\n\n\n \"You kept it short,\" somebody else whispered. It was Donley, up and\n sitting on the side of his hammock. \"If it had been me, I would have\n told them just what they could do about it.\"\nThe others were awake now, with the exception of Dahl who had his face\n to the bulkhead and a pillow over his head.\n\n\n Dowden rubbed his eyes sleepily. \"Sore, aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"Kind of. Who wouldn't be?\"", "He stopped, feeling embarrassed. Klein's expression was encouraging.\n \"And then I think I'd like to go downtown and just watch the shoppers\n on the sidewalks. Or maybe go to a burlesque house and smell the cheap\n perfume and the popcorn and the people sweating in the dark.\"\n\n\n He studied his hands. \"I think what I miss most is people—all kinds\n of people. Bad people and good people and fat people and thin people,\n and people I can't understand. People who wouldn't know an atom from an\n artichoke. And people who wouldn't give a damn. We're a quarter of a\n million miles from nowhere, Julius, and to make it literary, I think I\n miss my fellow man more than anything.\"\n\n\n \"Got a girl back home?\" Klein asked almost casually.\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"You're not like Dahl. You've never mentioned it.\"", "\"And I'd check you five hundred more,\" Chapman said. \"It takes only\n one mistake. And watch out for blisters under the pumice crust. You go\n through one of those and that's it, brother.\"\n\n\n Donley sighed. \"Chap, you watch us like an old mother hen. You see we\n check our suits, you settle our arguments, you see that we're not bored\n and that we stay healthy and happy. I think you'd blow our noses for us\n if we caught cold. But some day, Chap old man, you're gonna find out\n that your little boys can watch out for themselves!\"\n\n\n But he checked his suit for leaks and tested the valve of his tank\n before he left.\nOnly Klein and Chapman were left in the bunker. Klein was at the work\n table, carefully labeling some lichen specimens.\n\n\n \"I never knew you were married,\" Chapman said.", "He had just locked the bag when he heard the rumble of the airlock and\n the soft hiss of air. Somebody had come back earlier than expected. He\n watched the inner door swing open and the spacesuited figure clump in\n and unscrew its helmet.\n\n\n Dahl. He had gone out to help Dowden on the Schmidt telescope. Maybe\n Dowden hadn't needed any help, with Bening along. Or more likely,\n considering the circumstances, Dahl wasn't much good at helping anybody\n today.\n\n\n Dahl stripped off his suit. His face was covered with light beads of\n sweat and his eyes were frightened.\n\n\n He moistened his lips slightly. \"Do—do you think they'll ever have\n relief ships up here more often than every eighteen months, Chap? I\n mean, considering the advance of—\"", "pioneers stay put and scholars do the exploring!\nThe very young man sat on the edge of the sofa and looked nervous. He\n carefully studied his fingernails and ran his hands through his hair\n and picked imaginary lint off the upholstery.\n\"I have a chance to go with the first research expedition to Venus,\"\n he said.\nThe older man studied the very young man thoughtfully and then leaned\n over to his humidor and offered him a cigaret. \"It's nice to have the\n new air units now. There was a time when we had to be very careful\n about things like smoking.\"\nThe very young man was annoyed.\n\"I don't think I want to go,\" he blurted. \"I don't think I would care\n to spend two years there.\"", "The Reluctant Heroes\nBy FRANK M. ROBINSON\n\n\n Illustrated by DON SIBLEY\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction January 1951.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nPioneers have always resented their wanderlust, hated\n\n their hardships. But the future brings a new grudge—when", "Chapman frowned. \"Frankly, I hadn't thought of that. I don't believe\n I care. I've put in my time; it's somebody else's turn now. He\n volunteered for it. I think I was fair in explaining all about the job\n when you talked it over among yourselves.\"\n\n\n \"You did, but I don't think Dahl's the man for it. He's too young, too\n much of a kid. He volunteered because he thought it made him look like\n a hero. He doesn't have the judgment that an older man would have. That\n you have.\"\n\n\n Chapman turned slowly around and faced Klein.\n\n\n \"I'm not the indispensable man,\" he said slowly, \"and even if I was, it\n wouldn't make any difference to me. I'm sorry if Dahl is young. So was\n I. I've lost three years up here. And I don't intend to lose any more.\"", "Williams looked stricken and somebody said, \"Oh, shut up, Dahl.\"\n\n\n One of the men separated from the group and came over to Chapman. He\n held out his hand and said, \"My name's Eberlein. Captain of the relief\n ship. I understand you're in charge here?\"\n\n\n Chapman nodded and shook hands. They hadn't had a captain on the First\n ship. Just a pilot and crew. Eberlein looked every inch a captain, too.\n Craggy face, gray hair, the firm chin of a man who was sure of himself.\n\n\n \"You might say I'm in charge here,\" Chapman said.\n\n\n \"Well, look, Mr. Chapman, is there any place where we can talk together\n privately?\"", "Dahl took the plunge. \"Well, you see,\" he started eagerly, too far gone\n to remember such a thing as pride, \"you know my father's pretty well\n fixed. We would make it worth your while, Chap.\" He was feverish. \"It\n would mean eighteen more months, Chap, but they'd be well-paid months!\"\n\n\n Chapman felt tired. The good feeling he had about going home was slowly\n evaporating.\n\n\n \"If you have any report to make, I think you had better get at it,\"\n he cut in, keeping all the harshness he felt out of his voice. \"It'll\n be too late after the relief ship leaves. It'll be easier to give the\n captain your report than try to radio it back to Earth from here.\"\n\n\n He felt sorrier for Dahl than he could ever remember having felt for\n anybody. Long after going home, Dahl would remember this.\n\n\n It would eat at him like a cancer.", "Cowardice is the one thing for which no man ever forgives himself.\nDonley was eating a sandwich and looking out the port, so, naturally,\n he saw the ship first. \"Well, whaddya know!\" he shouted. \"We got\n company!\" He dashed for his suit. Dowden and Bening piled after him and\n all three started for the lock.\n\n\n Chapman was standing in front of it. \"Check your suits,\" he said\n softly. \"Just be sure to check.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, what the hell, Chap!\" Donley started angrily. Then he shut up and\n went over his suit. He got to his tank and turned white. Empty. It was\n only half a mile to the relief rocket, so somebody would probably have\n got to him in time, but.... He bit his lips and got a full tank.", "\"Well, don't let it throw you. They've never been here on the Moon.\n They don't know what it's like. All they're trying to do is get a good\n man to stay on the job a while longer.\"\n\n\n \"\nAll\nthey're trying to do,\" Chapman said sarcastically. \"They've got\n a fat chance.\"\n\n\n \"They think you've found a home here,\" Donley said.\n\n\n \"Why the hell don't you guys shut up until morning?\" Dahl was awake,\n looking bitter. \"Some of us still have to stay here, you know. Some of\n us aren't going back today.\"\n\n\n No, Chapman thought, some of us aren't going back. You aren't. And\n Dixon's staying, too. Only Dixon isn't ever going back.", "Klein jerked his thumb toward Dahl's bunk, held a finger to his lips,\n and walked noiselessly over to the small electric stove. It was his day\n for breakfast duty.\n\n\n The others started lacing up their bunks, getting ready for their last\n day of work on the Moon. In a few hours they'd be relieved by members\n of the Third research group and they'd be on their way back to Earth.\n\n\n And that includes me, Chapman thought. I'm going home. I'm finally\n going home.\n\n\n He walked silently to the one small, quartz window in the room. It was\n morning—the Moon's \"morning\"—and he shivered slightly. The rays of\n the Sun were just striking the far rim of the crater and long shadows\n shot across the crater floor. The rest of it was still blanketed in\n a dark jumble of powdery pumice and jagged peaks that would make the\n Black Hills of Dakota look like paradise.", "A hundred yards from the research bunker he could make out the small\n mound of stones and the forlorn homemade cross, jury-rigged out of\n small condensed milk tins slid over crossed iron bars. You could still\n see the footprints in the powdery soil where the group had gathered\n about the grave. It had been more than eighteen months ago, but there\n was no wind to wear those tracks away. They'd be there forever.\n\n\n That's what happened to guys like Dixon, Chapman thought. On the Moon,\n one mistake could use up your whole quota of chances.\n\n\n Klein came back with the coffee. Chapman took a cup, gagged, and forced\n himself to swallow the rest of it. It had been in the can for so long\n you could almost taste the glue on the label.\nDonley was warming himself over his cup, looking thoughtful. Dowden and\n Bening were struggling into their suits, getting ready to go outside.\n Dahl was still sitting on his hammock, trying to ignore them.", "\"Is that all?\"\n\n\n Eberlein was ill at ease. \"Naturally you'd be paid well. I don't\n imagine any man would like being here all the time. They're prepared to\n double your salary—maybe even a bonus in addition—and let you have\n full charge. You'd be Director of the Luna Laboratories.\"\n\n\n All this and a title too, Chapman thought.\n\n\n \"That's it?\" Chapman asked.\n\n\n Eberlein frowned. \"Well, the Commission said they'd be willing to\n consider anything else you had in mind, if it was more money or....\"\n\n\n \"The answer is no,\" Chapman said. \"I'm not interested in more money\n for staying because I'm not interested in staying. Money can't buy it,\n captain. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid that you'd have to stay up here to\n appreciate that." ], [ "\"Well, don't let it throw you. They've never been here on the Moon.\n They don't know what it's like. All they're trying to do is get a good\n man to stay on the job a while longer.\"\n\n\n \"\nAll\nthey're trying to do,\" Chapman said sarcastically. \"They've got\n a fat chance.\"\n\n\n \"They think you've found a home here,\" Donley said.\n\n\n \"Why the hell don't you guys shut up until morning?\" Dahl was awake,\n looking bitter. \"Some of us still have to stay here, you know. Some of\n us aren't going back today.\"\n\n\n No, Chapman thought, some of us aren't going back. You aren't. And\n Dixon's staying, too. Only Dixon isn't ever going back.", "Chapman and Klein watched them dash across the pumice, making the\n tremendous leaps they used to read about in the Sunday supplements. The\n port of the rocket had opened and tiny figures were climbing down the\n ladder. The small figures from the bunker reached them and did a short\n jig of welcome. Then the figures linked arms and started back. Chapman\n noticed one—it was probably Donley—pat the ship affectionately before\n he started back.\nThey were in the lock and the air pumped in and then they were in\n the bunker, taking off their suits. The newcomers were impressed and\n solemn, very much aware of the tremendous responsibility that rested on\n their shoulders. Like Donley and Klein and the members of the Second\n group had been when they had landed. Like Chapman had been in the First.\n\n\n Donley and the others were all over them.\nHow was it back on Earth? Who had won the series? Was so-and-so still\n teaching at the university? What was the international situation?", "They laughed. Somebody said: \"Go play your record, Chap. Today's the\n day for it.\"\n\n\n The phonograph was a small, wind-up model that Chapman had smuggled in\n when he had landed with the First group. The record was old and the\n shellac was nearly worn off, but the music was good.\n\n\n Way Back Home by Al Lewis.\nThey ran through it twice. They were beginning to feel it now, Chapman\n thought. They were going to go home in a little while and the idea was\n just starting to sink in.\n\n\n \"You know, Chap,\" Donley said, \"it won't seem like the same old Moon\n without you on it. Why, we'll look at it when we're out spooning or\n something and it just won't have the same old appeal.\"\n\n\n \"Like they say in the army,\" Bening said, \"you never had it so good.\n You found a home here.\"", "The others chimed in and Chapman grinned. Yesterday or a week ago they\n couldn't have done it. He had been there too long and he had hated it\n too much.\n\n\n The party quieted down after a while and Dowden and Bening finished\n getting into their suits. They still had a section of the sky to map\n before they left. Donley was right after them. There was an outcropping\n of rock that he wanted a sample of and some strata he wished to\n investigate.\n\n\n And the time went faster when you kept busy.\nChapman stopped them at the lock. \"Remember to check your suits for\n leaks,\" he warned. \"And check the valves of your oxygen tanks.\"\n\n\n Donley looked sour. \"I've gone out at least five hundred times,\" he\n said, \"and you check me each time.\"", "A hundred yards from the research bunker he could make out the small\n mound of stones and the forlorn homemade cross, jury-rigged out of\n small condensed milk tins slid over crossed iron bars. You could still\n see the footprints in the powdery soil where the group had gathered\n about the grave. It had been more than eighteen months ago, but there\n was no wind to wear those tracks away. They'd be there forever.\n\n\n That's what happened to guys like Dixon, Chapman thought. On the Moon,\n one mistake could use up your whole quota of chances.\n\n\n Klein came back with the coffee. Chapman took a cup, gagged, and forced\n himself to swallow the rest of it. It had been in the can for so long\n you could almost taste the glue on the label.\nDonley was warming himself over his cup, looking thoughtful. Dowden and\n Bening were struggling into their suits, getting ready to go outside.\n Dahl was still sitting on his hammock, trying to ignore them.", "Klein jerked his thumb toward Dahl's bunk, held a finger to his lips,\n and walked noiselessly over to the small electric stove. It was his day\n for breakfast duty.\n\n\n The others started lacing up their bunks, getting ready for their last\n day of work on the Moon. In a few hours they'd be relieved by members\n of the Third research group and they'd be on their way back to Earth.\n\n\n And that includes me, Chapman thought. I'm going home. I'm finally\n going home.\n\n\n He walked silently to the one small, quartz window in the room. It was\n morning—the Moon's \"morning\"—and he shivered slightly. The rays of\n the Sun were just striking the far rim of the crater and long shadows\n shot across the crater floor. The rest of it was still blanketed in\n a dark jumble of powdery pumice and jagged peaks that would make the\n Black Hills of Dakota look like paradise.", "\"And I'd check you five hundred more,\" Chapman said. \"It takes only\n one mistake. And watch out for blisters under the pumice crust. You go\n through one of those and that's it, brother.\"\n\n\n Donley sighed. \"Chap, you watch us like an old mother hen. You see we\n check our suits, you settle our arguments, you see that we're not bored\n and that we stay healthy and happy. I think you'd blow our noses for us\n if we caught cold. But some day, Chap old man, you're gonna find out\n that your little boys can watch out for themselves!\"\n\n\n But he checked his suit for leaks and tested the valve of his tank\n before he left.\nOnly Klein and Chapman were left in the bunker. Klein was at the work\n table, carefully labeling some lichen specimens.\n\n\n \"I never knew you were married,\" Chapman said.", "\"He died,\" Chapman said. \"He was a good kid, all wrapped up in science.\n Being on the Moon was the opportunity of a lifetime. He thought so much\n about it that he forgot a lot of little things—like how to stay alive.\n The day before the Second group came, he went out to finish some work\n he was interested in. He forgot to check for leaks and whether or not\n the valve on his tank was all the way closed. We couldn't get to him in\n time.\"\n\n\n \"He had his walkie-talkie with him?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. It worked fine, too. We heard everything that went through his\n mind at the end.\"\n\n\n Klein's face was blank. \"What's your real job here, Chap? Why does\n somebody have to stay for stopover?\"", "\"Think we ought to radio the space station and see if they've left\n there yet?\" Klein asked.\n\n\n \"I talked to them on the last call,\" Chapman said. \"The relief ship\n left there twelve hours ago. They should get here\"—he looked at his\n watch—\"in about six and a half hours.\"\n\n\n \"Chap, you know, I've been thinking,\" Donley said quietly. \"You've\n been here just twice as long as the rest of us. What's the first thing\n you're going to do once you get back?\"\n\n\n It hit them, then. Dowden and Bening looked blank for a minute and\n blindly found packing cases to sit on. The top halves of their suits\n were still hanging on the bulkhead. Klein lowered his coffee cup and\n looked grave. Even Dahl glanced up expectantly.", "Three years on the Moon and they didn't want him to come back.\n\n\n Three years on the Moon and they thought he'd be glad to stay for more.\n Just raise his salary or give him a bonus, the every-man-has-his-price\n idea. They probably thought he liked it there.\n\n\n Oh, sure, he loved it. Canned coffee, canned beans, canned pills,\n and canned air until your insides felt as though they were plated\n with tin. Life in a cramped, smelly little hut where you could take\n only ten steps in any one direction. Their little scientific home of\n tomorrow with none of the modern conveniences, a charming place where\n you couldn't take a shower, couldn't brush your teeth, and your kidneys\n didn't work right.\n\n\n And for double his salary they thought he'd be glad to stay for another\n year and a half. Or maybe three. He should probably be glad he had the\n opportunity.", "\"Hell, lots of reasons, Julius. You can't get a whole relief crew and\n let them take over cold. They have to know where you left off. They\n have to know where things are, how things work, what to watch out for.\n And then, because you've been here a year and a half and know the\n ropes, you have to watch them to see that they stay alive in spite of\n themselves. The Moon's a new environment and you have to learn how to\n live in it. There's a lot of things to learn—and some people just\n never learn.\"\n\n\n \"You're nursemaid, then.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose you could call it that.\"\nKlein said, \"You're not a scientist, are you?\"", "\"I like the feel of it,\" he said simply.\n\n\n Chapman cut off a single blade with his fingernail and put it between\n his lips. It had been years since he had seen grass and had the luxury\n of walking on it and lying on its cool thickness during those sultry\n summer nights when it was too hot to sleep indoors.\n\n\n Williams blushed. \"I thought we could spare a little water for it and\n maybe use the ultraviolet lamp on it some of the time. Couldn't help\n but bring it along; it seemed sort of like a symbol....\" He looked\n embarrassed.\n\n\n Chapman sympathized. If he had had any sense, he'd have tried to\n smuggle something like that up to the Moon instead of his phonograph.\n\n\n \"That's valuable grass,\" Dahl said sharply. \"Do you realize that at\n current freight rates up here, it's worth about ten dollars a blade?\"", "He stopped, feeling embarrassed. Klein's expression was encouraging.\n \"And then I think I'd like to go downtown and just watch the shoppers\n on the sidewalks. Or maybe go to a burlesque house and smell the cheap\n perfume and the popcorn and the people sweating in the dark.\"\n\n\n He studied his hands. \"I think what I miss most is people—all kinds\n of people. Bad people and good people and fat people and thin people,\n and people I can't understand. People who wouldn't know an atom from an\n artichoke. And people who wouldn't give a damn. We're a quarter of a\n million miles from nowhere, Julius, and to make it literary, I think I\n miss my fellow man more than anything.\"\n\n\n \"Got a girl back home?\" Klein asked almost casually.\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"You're not like Dahl. You've never mentioned it.\"", "\"Is that all?\"\n\n\n Eberlein was ill at ease. \"Naturally you'd be paid well. I don't\n imagine any man would like being here all the time. They're prepared to\n double your salary—maybe even a bonus in addition—and let you have\n full charge. You'd be Director of the Luna Laboratories.\"\n\n\n All this and a title too, Chapman thought.\n\n\n \"That's it?\" Chapman asked.\n\n\n Eberlein frowned. \"Well, the Commission said they'd be willing to\n consider anything else you had in mind, if it was more money or....\"\n\n\n \"The answer is no,\" Chapman said. \"I'm not interested in more money\n for staying because I'm not interested in staying. Money can't buy it,\n captain. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid that you'd have to stay up here to\n appreciate that.", "He had just locked the bag when he heard the rumble of the airlock and\n the soft hiss of air. Somebody had come back earlier than expected. He\n watched the inner door swing open and the spacesuited figure clump in\n and unscrew its helmet.\n\n\n Dahl. He had gone out to help Dowden on the Schmidt telescope. Maybe\n Dowden hadn't needed any help, with Bening along. Or more likely,\n considering the circumstances, Dahl wasn't much good at helping anybody\n today.\n\n\n Dahl stripped off his suit. His face was covered with light beads of\n sweat and his eyes were frightened.\n\n\n He moistened his lips slightly. \"Do—do you think they'll ever have\n relief ships up here more often than every eighteen months, Chap? I\n mean, considering the advance of—\"", "The older man blew a smoke ring and watched it drift toward the air\n exhaust vent.\n\"You mean you would miss it here, the people you've known and grown\n up with, the little familiar things that have made up your life here.\n You're afraid the glamor would wear off and you would get to hate it on\n Venus.\"\nThe very young man nodded miserably. \"I guess that's it.\"\n\"Anything else?\"\nThe very young man found his fingernails extremely fascinating again\n and finally said, in a low voice, \"Yes, there is.\"\n\"A girl?\"\nA nod confirmed this.\nIt was the older man's turn to look thoughtful. \"You know, I'm sure,\n that psychologists and research men agree that research stations should", "Lord, Chapman thought, I'll be happy when I can see some other faces.\n\n\n \"What'd they want?\" Klein had one eyelid open and a questioning look on\n his face.\n\n\n \"They wanted me to stay until the next relief ship lands,\" Chapman\n whispered back.\n\n\n \"What did you say?\"\n\n\n He shrugged. \"No.\"\n\n\n \"You kept it short,\" somebody else whispered. It was Donley, up and\n sitting on the side of his hammock. \"If it had been me, I would have\n told them just what they could do about it.\"\nThe others were awake now, with the exception of Dahl who had his face\n to the bulkhead and a pillow over his head.\n\n\n Dowden rubbed his eyes sleepily. \"Sore, aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"Kind of. Who wouldn't be?\"", "Williams looked stricken and somebody said, \"Oh, shut up, Dahl.\"\n\n\n One of the men separated from the group and came over to Chapman. He\n held out his hand and said, \"My name's Eberlein. Captain of the relief\n ship. I understand you're in charge here?\"\n\n\n Chapman nodded and shook hands. They hadn't had a captain on the First\n ship. Just a pilot and crew. Eberlein looked every inch a captain, too.\n Craggy face, gray hair, the firm chin of a man who was sure of himself.\n\n\n \"You might say I'm in charge here,\" Chapman said.\n\n\n \"Well, look, Mr. Chapman, is there any place where we can talk together\n privately?\"", "pioneers stay put and scholars do the exploring!\nThe very young man sat on the edge of the sofa and looked nervous. He\n carefully studied his fingernails and ran his hands through his hair\n and picked imaginary lint off the upholstery.\n\"I have a chance to go with the first research expedition to Venus,\"\n he said.\nThe older man studied the very young man thoughtfully and then leaned\n over to his humidor and offered him a cigaret. \"It's nice to have the\n new air units now. There was a time when we had to be very careful\n about things like smoking.\"\nThe very young man was annoyed.\n\"I don't think I want to go,\" he blurted. \"I don't think I would care\n to spend two years there.\"", "They walked over to one corner of the bunker. \"This is about as private\n as we can get, captain,\" Chapman said. \"What's on your mind?\"\nEberlein found a packing crate and made himself comfortable. He looked\n at Chapman.\n\n\n \"I've always wanted to meet the man who's spent more time here than\n anybody else,\" he began.\n\n\n \"I'm sure you wanted to see me for more reasons than just curiosity.\"\n\n\n Eberlein took out a pack of cigarets. \"Mind if I smoke?\"\n\n\n Chapman jerked a thumb toward Dahl. \"Ask him. He's in charge now.\"\n\n\n The captain didn't bother. He put the pack away. \"You know we have big\n plans for the station,\" he said.\n\n\n \"I hadn't heard of them.\"" ], [ "A hundred yards from the research bunker he could make out the small\n mound of stones and the forlorn homemade cross, jury-rigged out of\n small condensed milk tins slid over crossed iron bars. You could still\n see the footprints in the powdery soil where the group had gathered\n about the grave. It had been more than eighteen months ago, but there\n was no wind to wear those tracks away. They'd be there forever.\n\n\n That's what happened to guys like Dixon, Chapman thought. On the Moon,\n one mistake could use up your whole quota of chances.\n\n\n Klein came back with the coffee. Chapman took a cup, gagged, and forced\n himself to swallow the rest of it. It had been in the can for so long\n you could almost taste the glue on the label.\nDonley was warming himself over his cup, looking thoughtful. Dowden and\n Bening were struggling into their suits, getting ready to go outside.\n Dahl was still sitting on his hammock, trying to ignore them.", "\"I like the feel of it,\" he said simply.\n\n\n Chapman cut off a single blade with his fingernail and put it between\n his lips. It had been years since he had seen grass and had the luxury\n of walking on it and lying on its cool thickness during those sultry\n summer nights when it was too hot to sleep indoors.\n\n\n Williams blushed. \"I thought we could spare a little water for it and\n maybe use the ultraviolet lamp on it some of the time. Couldn't help\n but bring it along; it seemed sort of like a symbol....\" He looked\n embarrassed.\n\n\n Chapman sympathized. If he had had any sense, he'd have tried to\n smuggle something like that up to the Moon instead of his phonograph.\n\n\n \"That's valuable grass,\" Dahl said sharply. \"Do you realize that at\n current freight rates up here, it's worth about ten dollars a blade?\"", "Three years on the Moon and they didn't want him to come back.\n\n\n Three years on the Moon and they thought he'd be glad to stay for more.\n Just raise his salary or give him a bonus, the every-man-has-his-price\n idea. They probably thought he liked it there.\n\n\n Oh, sure, he loved it. Canned coffee, canned beans, canned pills,\n and canned air until your insides felt as though they were plated\n with tin. Life in a cramped, smelly little hut where you could take\n only ten steps in any one direction. Their little scientific home of\n tomorrow with none of the modern conveniences, a charming place where\n you couldn't take a shower, couldn't brush your teeth, and your kidneys\n didn't work right.\n\n\n And for double his salary they thought he'd be glad to stay for another\n year and a half. Or maybe three. He should probably be glad he had the\n opportunity.", "\"Well, don't let it throw you. They've never been here on the Moon.\n They don't know what it's like. All they're trying to do is get a good\n man to stay on the job a while longer.\"\n\n\n \"\nAll\nthey're trying to do,\" Chapman said sarcastically. \"They've got\n a fat chance.\"\n\n\n \"They think you've found a home here,\" Donley said.\n\n\n \"Why the hell don't you guys shut up until morning?\" Dahl was awake,\n looking bitter. \"Some of us still have to stay here, you know. Some of\n us aren't going back today.\"\n\n\n No, Chapman thought, some of us aren't going back. You aren't. And\n Dixon's staying, too. Only Dixon isn't ever going back.", "Klein jerked his thumb toward Dahl's bunk, held a finger to his lips,\n and walked noiselessly over to the small electric stove. It was his day\n for breakfast duty.\n\n\n The others started lacing up their bunks, getting ready for their last\n day of work on the Moon. In a few hours they'd be relieved by members\n of the Third research group and they'd be on their way back to Earth.\n\n\n And that includes me, Chapman thought. I'm going home. I'm finally\n going home.\n\n\n He walked silently to the one small, quartz window in the room. It was\n morning—the Moon's \"morning\"—and he shivered slightly. The rays of\n the Sun were just striking the far rim of the crater and long shadows\n shot across the crater floor. The rest of it was still blanketed in\n a dark jumble of powdery pumice and jagged peaks that would make the\n Black Hills of Dakota look like paradise.", "The others chimed in and Chapman grinned. Yesterday or a week ago they\n couldn't have done it. He had been there too long and he had hated it\n too much.\n\n\n The party quieted down after a while and Dowden and Bening finished\n getting into their suits. They still had a section of the sky to map\n before they left. Donley was right after them. There was an outcropping\n of rock that he wanted a sample of and some strata he wished to\n investigate.\n\n\n And the time went faster when you kept busy.\nChapman stopped them at the lock. \"Remember to check your suits for\n leaks,\" he warned. \"And check the valves of your oxygen tanks.\"\n\n\n Donley looked sour. \"I've gone out at least five hundred times,\" he\n said, \"and you check me each time.\"", "\"And I'd check you five hundred more,\" Chapman said. \"It takes only\n one mistake. And watch out for blisters under the pumice crust. You go\n through one of those and that's it, brother.\"\n\n\n Donley sighed. \"Chap, you watch us like an old mother hen. You see we\n check our suits, you settle our arguments, you see that we're not bored\n and that we stay healthy and happy. I think you'd blow our noses for us\n if we caught cold. But some day, Chap old man, you're gonna find out\n that your little boys can watch out for themselves!\"\n\n\n But he checked his suit for leaks and tested the valve of his tank\n before he left.\nOnly Klein and Chapman were left in the bunker. Klein was at the work\n table, carefully labeling some lichen specimens.\n\n\n \"I never knew you were married,\" Chapman said.", "\"Is that all?\"\n\n\n Eberlein was ill at ease. \"Naturally you'd be paid well. I don't\n imagine any man would like being here all the time. They're prepared to\n double your salary—maybe even a bonus in addition—and let you have\n full charge. You'd be Director of the Luna Laboratories.\"\n\n\n All this and a title too, Chapman thought.\n\n\n \"That's it?\" Chapman asked.\n\n\n Eberlein frowned. \"Well, the Commission said they'd be willing to\n consider anything else you had in mind, if it was more money or....\"\n\n\n \"The answer is no,\" Chapman said. \"I'm not interested in more money\n for staying because I'm not interested in staying. Money can't buy it,\n captain. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid that you'd have to stay up here to\n appreciate that.", "They laughed. Somebody said: \"Go play your record, Chap. Today's the\n day for it.\"\n\n\n The phonograph was a small, wind-up model that Chapman had smuggled in\n when he had landed with the First group. The record was old and the\n shellac was nearly worn off, but the music was good.\n\n\n Way Back Home by Al Lewis.\nThey ran through it twice. They were beginning to feel it now, Chapman\n thought. They were going to go home in a little while and the idea was\n just starting to sink in.\n\n\n \"You know, Chap,\" Donley said, \"it won't seem like the same old Moon\n without you on it. Why, we'll look at it when we're out spooning or\n something and it just won't have the same old appeal.\"\n\n\n \"Like they say in the army,\" Bening said, \"you never had it so good.\n You found a home here.\"", "Chapman and Klein watched them dash across the pumice, making the\n tremendous leaps they used to read about in the Sunday supplements. The\n port of the rocket had opened and tiny figures were climbing down the\n ladder. The small figures from the bunker reached them and did a short\n jig of welcome. Then the figures linked arms and started back. Chapman\n noticed one—it was probably Donley—pat the ship affectionately before\n he started back.\nThey were in the lock and the air pumped in and then they were in\n the bunker, taking off their suits. The newcomers were impressed and\n solemn, very much aware of the tremendous responsibility that rested on\n their shoulders. Like Donley and Klein and the members of the Second\n group had been when they had landed. Like Chapman had been in the First.\n\n\n Donley and the others were all over them.\nHow was it back on Earth? Who had won the series? Was so-and-so still\n teaching at the university? What was the international situation?", "\"Think we ought to radio the space station and see if they've left\n there yet?\" Klein asked.\n\n\n \"I talked to them on the last call,\" Chapman said. \"The relief ship\n left there twelve hours ago. They should get here\"—he looked at his\n watch—\"in about six and a half hours.\"\n\n\n \"Chap, you know, I've been thinking,\" Donley said quietly. \"You've\n been here just twice as long as the rest of us. What's the first thing\n you're going to do once you get back?\"\n\n\n It hit them, then. Dowden and Bening looked blank for a minute and\n blindly found packing cases to sit on. The top halves of their suits\n were still hanging on the bulkhead. Klein lowered his coffee cup and\n looked grave. Even Dahl glanced up expectantly.", "\"He died,\" Chapman said. \"He was a good kid, all wrapped up in science.\n Being on the Moon was the opportunity of a lifetime. He thought so much\n about it that he forgot a lot of little things—like how to stay alive.\n The day before the Second group came, he went out to finish some work\n he was interested in. He forgot to check for leaks and whether or not\n the valve on his tank was all the way closed. We couldn't get to him in\n time.\"\n\n\n \"He had his walkie-talkie with him?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. It worked fine, too. We heard everything that went through his\n mind at the end.\"\n\n\n Klein's face was blank. \"What's your real job here, Chap? Why does\n somebody have to stay for stopover?\"", "He had just locked the bag when he heard the rumble of the airlock and\n the soft hiss of air. Somebody had come back earlier than expected. He\n watched the inner door swing open and the spacesuited figure clump in\n and unscrew its helmet.\n\n\n Dahl. He had gone out to help Dowden on the Schmidt telescope. Maybe\n Dowden hadn't needed any help, with Bening along. Or more likely,\n considering the circumstances, Dahl wasn't much good at helping anybody\n today.\n\n\n Dahl stripped off his suit. His face was covered with light beads of\n sweat and his eyes were frightened.\n\n\n He moistened his lips slightly. \"Do—do you think they'll ever have\n relief ships up here more often than every eighteen months, Chap? I\n mean, considering the advance of—\"", "He stopped, feeling embarrassed. Klein's expression was encouraging.\n \"And then I think I'd like to go downtown and just watch the shoppers\n on the sidewalks. Or maybe go to a burlesque house and smell the cheap\n perfume and the popcorn and the people sweating in the dark.\"\n\n\n He studied his hands. \"I think what I miss most is people—all kinds\n of people. Bad people and good people and fat people and thin people,\n and people I can't understand. People who wouldn't know an atom from an\n artichoke. And people who wouldn't give a damn. We're a quarter of a\n million miles from nowhere, Julius, and to make it literary, I think I\n miss my fellow man more than anything.\"\n\n\n \"Got a girl back home?\" Klein asked almost casually.\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"You're not like Dahl. You've never mentioned it.\"", "\"Hell, lots of reasons, Julius. You can't get a whole relief crew and\n let them take over cold. They have to know where you left off. They\n have to know where things are, how things work, what to watch out for.\n And then, because you've been here a year and a half and know the\n ropes, you have to watch them to see that they stay alive in spite of\n themselves. The Moon's a new environment and you have to learn how to\n live in it. There's a lot of things to learn—and some people just\n never learn.\"\n\n\n \"You're nursemaid, then.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose you could call it that.\"\nKlein said, \"You're not a scientist, are you?\"", "They walked over to one corner of the bunker. \"This is about as private\n as we can get, captain,\" Chapman said. \"What's on your mind?\"\nEberlein found a packing crate and made himself comfortable. He looked\n at Chapman.\n\n\n \"I've always wanted to meet the man who's spent more time here than\n anybody else,\" he began.\n\n\n \"I'm sure you wanted to see me for more reasons than just curiosity.\"\n\n\n Eberlein took out a pack of cigarets. \"Mind if I smoke?\"\n\n\n Chapman jerked a thumb toward Dahl. \"Ask him. He's in charge now.\"\n\n\n The captain didn't bother. He put the pack away. \"You know we have big\n plans for the station,\" he said.\n\n\n \"I hadn't heard of them.\"", "Lord, Chapman thought, I'll be happy when I can see some other faces.\n\n\n \"What'd they want?\" Klein had one eyelid open and a questioning look on\n his face.\n\n\n \"They wanted me to stay until the next relief ship lands,\" Chapman\n whispered back.\n\n\n \"What did you say?\"\n\n\n He shrugged. \"No.\"\n\n\n \"You kept it short,\" somebody else whispered. It was Donley, up and\n sitting on the side of his hammock. \"If it had been me, I would have\n told them just what they could do about it.\"\nThe others were awake now, with the exception of Dahl who had his face\n to the bulkhead and a pillow over his head.\n\n\n Dowden rubbed his eyes sleepily. \"Sore, aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"Kind of. Who wouldn't be?\"", "\"No,\" Chapman interrupted bluntly. \"I don't. Not at least for ten\n years. The fuel's too expensive and the trip's too hazardous. On\n freight charges alone you're worth your weight in platinum when they\n send you here. Even if it becomes cheaper, Bob, it won't come about\n so it will shorten stopover right away.\" He stopped, feeling a little\n sorry for Dahl. \"It won't be too bad. There'll be new men up here and\n you'll pass a lot of time getting to know them.\"", "\"No, you should know that. I came as the pilot of the first ship. We\n made the bunker out of parts of the ship so there wasn't anything to\n go back on. I'm a good mechanic and I made myself useful with the\n machinery. When it occurred to us that somebody was going to have to\n stay over, I volunteered. I thought the others were so important that\n it was better they should take their samples and data back to Earth\n when the first relief ship came.\"\n\n\n \"You wouldn't do it again, though, would you?\"\n\n\n \"No, I wouldn't.\"\n\n\n \"Do you think Dahl will do as good a job as you've done here?\"", "He hadn't actually needed to pack, of course. In less than twenty-four\n hours he'd be back on Earth where he could drown himself in toothpaste\n and buy more tee shirts than he could wear in a lifetime. He could\n leave behind his shorts and socks and the outsize shirts he had\n inherited from—who was it? Driesbach?—of the First group. Dahl could\n probably use them or maybe one of the boys in the Third.\nBut it wasn't like going home unless you packed. It was part of the\n ritual, like marking off the last three weeks in pencil on the gray\n steel of the bulkhead beside his hammock. Just a few hours ago, when he\n woke up, he had made the last check mark and signed his name and the\n date. His signature was right beneath Dixon's.\n\n\n He frowned when he thought of Dixon and slid back the catch on the top\n of the bag and locked it. They should never have sent a kid like Dixon\n to the Moon." ], [ "\"Well, don't let it throw you. They've never been here on the Moon.\n They don't know what it's like. All they're trying to do is get a good\n man to stay on the job a while longer.\"\n\n\n \"\nAll\nthey're trying to do,\" Chapman said sarcastically. \"They've got\n a fat chance.\"\n\n\n \"They think you've found a home here,\" Donley said.\n\n\n \"Why the hell don't you guys shut up until morning?\" Dahl was awake,\n looking bitter. \"Some of us still have to stay here, you know. Some of\n us aren't going back today.\"\n\n\n No, Chapman thought, some of us aren't going back. You aren't. And\n Dixon's staying, too. Only Dixon isn't ever going back.", "Klein jerked his thumb toward Dahl's bunk, held a finger to his lips,\n and walked noiselessly over to the small electric stove. It was his day\n for breakfast duty.\n\n\n The others started lacing up their bunks, getting ready for their last\n day of work on the Moon. In a few hours they'd be relieved by members\n of the Third research group and they'd be on their way back to Earth.\n\n\n And that includes me, Chapman thought. I'm going home. I'm finally\n going home.\n\n\n He walked silently to the one small, quartz window in the room. It was\n morning—the Moon's \"morning\"—and he shivered slightly. The rays of\n the Sun were just striking the far rim of the crater and long shadows\n shot across the crater floor. The rest of it was still blanketed in\n a dark jumble of powdery pumice and jagged peaks that would make the\n Black Hills of Dakota look like paradise.", "The others chimed in and Chapman grinned. Yesterday or a week ago they\n couldn't have done it. He had been there too long and he had hated it\n too much.\n\n\n The party quieted down after a while and Dowden and Bening finished\n getting into their suits. They still had a section of the sky to map\n before they left. Donley was right after them. There was an outcropping\n of rock that he wanted a sample of and some strata he wished to\n investigate.\n\n\n And the time went faster when you kept busy.\nChapman stopped them at the lock. \"Remember to check your suits for\n leaks,\" he warned. \"And check the valves of your oxygen tanks.\"\n\n\n Donley looked sour. \"I've gone out at least five hundred times,\" he\n said, \"and you check me each time.\"", "Three years on the Moon and they didn't want him to come back.\n\n\n Three years on the Moon and they thought he'd be glad to stay for more.\n Just raise his salary or give him a bonus, the every-man-has-his-price\n idea. They probably thought he liked it there.\n\n\n Oh, sure, he loved it. Canned coffee, canned beans, canned pills,\n and canned air until your insides felt as though they were plated\n with tin. Life in a cramped, smelly little hut where you could take\n only ten steps in any one direction. Their little scientific home of\n tomorrow with none of the modern conveniences, a charming place where\n you couldn't take a shower, couldn't brush your teeth, and your kidneys\n didn't work right.\n\n\n And for double his salary they thought he'd be glad to stay for another\n year and a half. Or maybe three. He should probably be glad he had the\n opportunity.", "\"Is that all?\"\n\n\n Eberlein was ill at ease. \"Naturally you'd be paid well. I don't\n imagine any man would like being here all the time. They're prepared to\n double your salary—maybe even a bonus in addition—and let you have\n full charge. You'd be Director of the Luna Laboratories.\"\n\n\n All this and a title too, Chapman thought.\n\n\n \"That's it?\" Chapman asked.\n\n\n Eberlein frowned. \"Well, the Commission said they'd be willing to\n consider anything else you had in mind, if it was more money or....\"\n\n\n \"The answer is no,\" Chapman said. \"I'm not interested in more money\n for staying because I'm not interested in staying. Money can't buy it,\n captain. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid that you'd have to stay up here to\n appreciate that.", "They laughed. Somebody said: \"Go play your record, Chap. Today's the\n day for it.\"\n\n\n The phonograph was a small, wind-up model that Chapman had smuggled in\n when he had landed with the First group. The record was old and the\n shellac was nearly worn off, but the music was good.\n\n\n Way Back Home by Al Lewis.\nThey ran through it twice. They were beginning to feel it now, Chapman\n thought. They were going to go home in a little while and the idea was\n just starting to sink in.\n\n\n \"You know, Chap,\" Donley said, \"it won't seem like the same old Moon\n without you on it. Why, we'll look at it when we're out spooning or\n something and it just won't have the same old appeal.\"\n\n\n \"Like they say in the army,\" Bening said, \"you never had it so good.\n You found a home here.\"", "\"He died,\" Chapman said. \"He was a good kid, all wrapped up in science.\n Being on the Moon was the opportunity of a lifetime. He thought so much\n about it that he forgot a lot of little things—like how to stay alive.\n The day before the Second group came, he went out to finish some work\n he was interested in. He forgot to check for leaks and whether or not\n the valve on his tank was all the way closed. We couldn't get to him in\n time.\"\n\n\n \"He had his walkie-talkie with him?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. It worked fine, too. We heard everything that went through his\n mind at the end.\"\n\n\n Klein's face was blank. \"What's your real job here, Chap? Why does\n somebody have to stay for stopover?\"", "A hundred yards from the research bunker he could make out the small\n mound of stones and the forlorn homemade cross, jury-rigged out of\n small condensed milk tins slid over crossed iron bars. You could still\n see the footprints in the powdery soil where the group had gathered\n about the grave. It had been more than eighteen months ago, but there\n was no wind to wear those tracks away. They'd be there forever.\n\n\n That's what happened to guys like Dixon, Chapman thought. On the Moon,\n one mistake could use up your whole quota of chances.\n\n\n Klein came back with the coffee. Chapman took a cup, gagged, and forced\n himself to swallow the rest of it. It had been in the can for so long\n you could almost taste the glue on the label.\nDonley was warming himself over his cup, looking thoughtful. Dowden and\n Bening were struggling into their suits, getting ready to go outside.\n Dahl was still sitting on his hammock, trying to ignore them.", "\"Hell, lots of reasons, Julius. You can't get a whole relief crew and\n let them take over cold. They have to know where you left off. They\n have to know where things are, how things work, what to watch out for.\n And then, because you've been here a year and a half and know the\n ropes, you have to watch them to see that they stay alive in spite of\n themselves. The Moon's a new environment and you have to learn how to\n live in it. There's a lot of things to learn—and some people just\n never learn.\"\n\n\n \"You're nursemaid, then.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose you could call it that.\"\nKlein said, \"You're not a scientist, are you?\"", "Chapman and Klein watched them dash across the pumice, making the\n tremendous leaps they used to read about in the Sunday supplements. The\n port of the rocket had opened and tiny figures were climbing down the\n ladder. The small figures from the bunker reached them and did a short\n jig of welcome. Then the figures linked arms and started back. Chapman\n noticed one—it was probably Donley—pat the ship affectionately before\n he started back.\nThey were in the lock and the air pumped in and then they were in\n the bunker, taking off their suits. The newcomers were impressed and\n solemn, very much aware of the tremendous responsibility that rested on\n their shoulders. Like Donley and Klein and the members of the Second\n group had been when they had landed. Like Chapman had been in the First.\n\n\n Donley and the others were all over them.\nHow was it back on Earth? Who had won the series? Was so-and-so still\n teaching at the university? What was the international situation?", "\"And I'd check you five hundred more,\" Chapman said. \"It takes only\n one mistake. And watch out for blisters under the pumice crust. You go\n through one of those and that's it, brother.\"\n\n\n Donley sighed. \"Chap, you watch us like an old mother hen. You see we\n check our suits, you settle our arguments, you see that we're not bored\n and that we stay healthy and happy. I think you'd blow our noses for us\n if we caught cold. But some day, Chap old man, you're gonna find out\n that your little boys can watch out for themselves!\"\n\n\n But he checked his suit for leaks and tested the valve of his tank\n before he left.\nOnly Klein and Chapman were left in the bunker. Klein was at the work\n table, carefully labeling some lichen specimens.\n\n\n \"I never knew you were married,\" Chapman said.", "He stopped, feeling embarrassed. Klein's expression was encouraging.\n \"And then I think I'd like to go downtown and just watch the shoppers\n on the sidewalks. Or maybe go to a burlesque house and smell the cheap\n perfume and the popcorn and the people sweating in the dark.\"\n\n\n He studied his hands. \"I think what I miss most is people—all kinds\n of people. Bad people and good people and fat people and thin people,\n and people I can't understand. People who wouldn't know an atom from an\n artichoke. And people who wouldn't give a damn. We're a quarter of a\n million miles from nowhere, Julius, and to make it literary, I think I\n miss my fellow man more than anything.\"\n\n\n \"Got a girl back home?\" Klein asked almost casually.\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"You're not like Dahl. You've never mentioned it.\"", "\"Think we ought to radio the space station and see if they've left\n there yet?\" Klein asked.\n\n\n \"I talked to them on the last call,\" Chapman said. \"The relief ship\n left there twelve hours ago. They should get here\"—he looked at his\n watch—\"in about six and a half hours.\"\n\n\n \"Chap, you know, I've been thinking,\" Donley said quietly. \"You've\n been here just twice as long as the rest of us. What's the first thing\n you're going to do once you get back?\"\n\n\n It hit them, then. Dowden and Bening looked blank for a minute and\n blindly found packing cases to sit on. The top halves of their suits\n were still hanging on the bulkhead. Klein lowered his coffee cup and\n looked grave. Even Dahl glanced up expectantly.", "He had just locked the bag when he heard the rumble of the airlock and\n the soft hiss of air. Somebody had come back earlier than expected. He\n watched the inner door swing open and the spacesuited figure clump in\n and unscrew its helmet.\n\n\n Dahl. He had gone out to help Dowden on the Schmidt telescope. Maybe\n Dowden hadn't needed any help, with Bening along. Or more likely,\n considering the circumstances, Dahl wasn't much good at helping anybody\n today.\n\n\n Dahl stripped off his suit. His face was covered with light beads of\n sweat and his eyes were frightened.\n\n\n He moistened his lips slightly. \"Do—do you think they'll ever have\n relief ships up here more often than every eighteen months, Chap? I\n mean, considering the advance of—\"", "\"I like the feel of it,\" he said simply.\n\n\n Chapman cut off a single blade with his fingernail and put it between\n his lips. It had been years since he had seen grass and had the luxury\n of walking on it and lying on its cool thickness during those sultry\n summer nights when it was too hot to sleep indoors.\n\n\n Williams blushed. \"I thought we could spare a little water for it and\n maybe use the ultraviolet lamp on it some of the time. Couldn't help\n but bring it along; it seemed sort of like a symbol....\" He looked\n embarrassed.\n\n\n Chapman sympathized. If he had had any sense, he'd have tried to\n smuggle something like that up to the Moon instead of his phonograph.\n\n\n \"That's valuable grass,\" Dahl said sharply. \"Do you realize that at\n current freight rates up here, it's worth about ten dollars a blade?\"", "The older man blew a smoke ring and watched it drift toward the air\n exhaust vent.\n\"You mean you would miss it here, the people you've known and grown\n up with, the little familiar things that have made up your life here.\n You're afraid the glamor would wear off and you would get to hate it on\n Venus.\"\nThe very young man nodded miserably. \"I guess that's it.\"\n\"Anything else?\"\nThe very young man found his fingernails extremely fascinating again\n and finally said, in a low voice, \"Yes, there is.\"\n\"A girl?\"\nA nod confirmed this.\nIt was the older man's turn to look thoughtful. \"You know, I'm sure,\n that psychologists and research men agree that research stations should", "\"No,\" Chapman interrupted bluntly. \"I don't. Not at least for ten\n years. The fuel's too expensive and the trip's too hazardous. On\n freight charges alone you're worth your weight in platinum when they\n send you here. Even if it becomes cheaper, Bob, it won't come about\n so it will shorten stopover right away.\" He stopped, feeling a little\n sorry for Dahl. \"It won't be too bad. There'll be new men up here and\n you'll pass a lot of time getting to know them.\"", "They walked over to one corner of the bunker. \"This is about as private\n as we can get, captain,\" Chapman said. \"What's on your mind?\"\nEberlein found a packing crate and made himself comfortable. He looked\n at Chapman.\n\n\n \"I've always wanted to meet the man who's spent more time here than\n anybody else,\" he began.\n\n\n \"I'm sure you wanted to see me for more reasons than just curiosity.\"\n\n\n Eberlein took out a pack of cigarets. \"Mind if I smoke?\"\n\n\n Chapman jerked a thumb toward Dahl. \"Ask him. He's in charge now.\"\n\n\n The captain didn't bother. He put the pack away. \"You know we have big\n plans for the station,\" he said.\n\n\n \"I hadn't heard of them.\"", "Lord, Chapman thought, I'll be happy when I can see some other faces.\n\n\n \"What'd they want?\" Klein had one eyelid open and a questioning look on\n his face.\n\n\n \"They wanted me to stay until the next relief ship lands,\" Chapman\n whispered back.\n\n\n \"What did you say?\"\n\n\n He shrugged. \"No.\"\n\n\n \"You kept it short,\" somebody else whispered. It was Donley, up and\n sitting on the side of his hammock. \"If it had been me, I would have\n told them just what they could do about it.\"\nThe others were awake now, with the exception of Dahl who had his face\n to the bulkhead and a pillow over his head.\n\n\n Dowden rubbed his eyes sleepily. \"Sore, aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"Kind of. Who wouldn't be?\"", "The key started to stutter again, demanding an answer.\n\n\n He tapped out his reply: \"\nNo!\n\"\n\n\n There was a silence and then the key stammered once more in a sudden\n fit of bureaucratic rage. Chapman stuffed a rag under it and ignored\n it. He turned to the hammocks, strung against the bulkhead on the other\n side of the room.\n\n\n The chattering of the key hadn't awakened anybody; they were still\n asleep, making the animal noises that people usually make in slumber.\n Dowden, half in the bottom hammock and half on the floor, was snoring\n peacefully. Dahl, the poor kid who was due for stopover, was mumbling\n to himself. Julius Klein, with that look of ineffable happiness on his\n face, looked as if he had just squirmed under the tent to his personal\n idea of heaven. Donley and Bening were lying perfectly still, their\n covers not mussed, sleeping very lightly." ], [ "\"Well, don't let it throw you. They've never been here on the Moon.\n They don't know what it's like. All they're trying to do is get a good\n man to stay on the job a while longer.\"\n\n\n \"\nAll\nthey're trying to do,\" Chapman said sarcastically. \"They've got\n a fat chance.\"\n\n\n \"They think you've found a home here,\" Donley said.\n\n\n \"Why the hell don't you guys shut up until morning?\" Dahl was awake,\n looking bitter. \"Some of us still have to stay here, you know. Some of\n us aren't going back today.\"\n\n\n No, Chapman thought, some of us aren't going back. You aren't. And\n Dixon's staying, too. Only Dixon isn't ever going back.", "\"He died,\" Chapman said. \"He was a good kid, all wrapped up in science.\n Being on the Moon was the opportunity of a lifetime. He thought so much\n about it that he forgot a lot of little things—like how to stay alive.\n The day before the Second group came, he went out to finish some work\n he was interested in. He forgot to check for leaks and whether or not\n the valve on his tank was all the way closed. We couldn't get to him in\n time.\"\n\n\n \"He had his walkie-talkie with him?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. It worked fine, too. We heard everything that went through his\n mind at the end.\"\n\n\n Klein's face was blank. \"What's your real job here, Chap? Why does\n somebody have to stay for stopover?\"", "\"Oh, yes,\nbig plans\n. They're working on unmanned, open-side rockets\n now that could carry cargo and sheet steel for more bunkers like this.\n Enable us to enlarge the unit, have a series of bunkers all linked\n together. Make good laboratories and living quarters for you people.\"\n His eyes swept the room. \"Have a little privacy for a change.\"\n\n\n Chapman nodded. \"They could use a little privacy up here.\"\n\n\n The captain noticed the pronoun. \"Well, that's one of the reasons why\n I wanted to talk to you, Chapman. The Commission talked it over and\n they'd like to see you stay. They feel if they're going to enlarge it,\n add more bunkers and have more men up here, that a man of practical\n experience should be running things. They figure that you're the only\n man who's capable and who's had the experience.\"\n\n\n The captain vaguely felt the approach was all wrong.", "The others chimed in and Chapman grinned. Yesterday or a week ago they\n couldn't have done it. He had been there too long and he had hated it\n too much.\n\n\n The party quieted down after a while and Dowden and Bening finished\n getting into their suits. They still had a section of the sky to map\n before they left. Donley was right after them. There was an outcropping\n of rock that he wanted a sample of and some strata he wished to\n investigate.\n\n\n And the time went faster when you kept busy.\nChapman stopped them at the lock. \"Remember to check your suits for\n leaks,\" he warned. \"And check the valves of your oxygen tanks.\"\n\n\n Donley looked sour. \"I've gone out at least five hundred times,\" he\n said, \"and you check me each time.\"", "\"Is that all?\"\n\n\n Eberlein was ill at ease. \"Naturally you'd be paid well. I don't\n imagine any man would like being here all the time. They're prepared to\n double your salary—maybe even a bonus in addition—and let you have\n full charge. You'd be Director of the Luna Laboratories.\"\n\n\n All this and a title too, Chapman thought.\n\n\n \"That's it?\" Chapman asked.\n\n\n Eberlein frowned. \"Well, the Commission said they'd be willing to\n consider anything else you had in mind, if it was more money or....\"\n\n\n \"The answer is no,\" Chapman said. \"I'm not interested in more money\n for staying because I'm not interested in staying. Money can't buy it,\n captain. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid that you'd have to stay up here to\n appreciate that.", "\"And I'd check you five hundred more,\" Chapman said. \"It takes only\n one mistake. And watch out for blisters under the pumice crust. You go\n through one of those and that's it, brother.\"\n\n\n Donley sighed. \"Chap, you watch us like an old mother hen. You see we\n check our suits, you settle our arguments, you see that we're not bored\n and that we stay healthy and happy. I think you'd blow our noses for us\n if we caught cold. But some day, Chap old man, you're gonna find out\n that your little boys can watch out for themselves!\"\n\n\n But he checked his suit for leaks and tested the valve of his tank\n before he left.\nOnly Klein and Chapman were left in the bunker. Klein was at the work\n table, carefully labeling some lichen specimens.\n\n\n \"I never knew you were married,\" Chapman said.", "They laughed. Somebody said: \"Go play your record, Chap. Today's the\n day for it.\"\n\n\n The phonograph was a small, wind-up model that Chapman had smuggled in\n when he had landed with the First group. The record was old and the\n shellac was nearly worn off, but the music was good.\n\n\n Way Back Home by Al Lewis.\nThey ran through it twice. They were beginning to feel it now, Chapman\n thought. They were going to go home in a little while and the idea was\n just starting to sink in.\n\n\n \"You know, Chap,\" Donley said, \"it won't seem like the same old Moon\n without you on it. Why, we'll look at it when we're out spooning or\n something and it just won't have the same old appeal.\"\n\n\n \"Like they say in the army,\" Bening said, \"you never had it so good.\n You found a home here.\"", "A hundred yards from the research bunker he could make out the small\n mound of stones and the forlorn homemade cross, jury-rigged out of\n small condensed milk tins slid over crossed iron bars. You could still\n see the footprints in the powdery soil where the group had gathered\n about the grave. It had been more than eighteen months ago, but there\n was no wind to wear those tracks away. They'd be there forever.\n\n\n That's what happened to guys like Dixon, Chapman thought. On the Moon,\n one mistake could use up your whole quota of chances.\n\n\n Klein came back with the coffee. Chapman took a cup, gagged, and forced\n himself to swallow the rest of it. It had been in the can for so long\n you could almost taste the glue on the label.\nDonley was warming himself over his cup, looking thoughtful. Dowden and\n Bening were struggling into their suits, getting ready to go outside.\n Dahl was still sitting on his hammock, trying to ignore them.", "\"No,\" Chapman interrupted bluntly. \"I don't. Not at least for ten\n years. The fuel's too expensive and the trip's too hazardous. On\n freight charges alone you're worth your weight in platinum when they\n send you here. Even if it becomes cheaper, Bob, it won't come about\n so it will shorten stopover right away.\" He stopped, feeling a little\n sorry for Dahl. \"It won't be too bad. There'll be new men up here and\n you'll pass a lot of time getting to know them.\"", "\"Hell, lots of reasons, Julius. You can't get a whole relief crew and\n let them take over cold. They have to know where you left off. They\n have to know where things are, how things work, what to watch out for.\n And then, because you've been here a year and a half and know the\n ropes, you have to watch them to see that they stay alive in spite of\n themselves. The Moon's a new environment and you have to learn how to\n live in it. There's a lot of things to learn—and some people just\n never learn.\"\n\n\n \"You're nursemaid, then.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose you could call it that.\"\nKlein said, \"You're not a scientist, are you?\"", "Klein jerked his thumb toward Dahl's bunk, held a finger to his lips,\n and walked noiselessly over to the small electric stove. It was his day\n for breakfast duty.\n\n\n The others started lacing up their bunks, getting ready for their last\n day of work on the Moon. In a few hours they'd be relieved by members\n of the Third research group and they'd be on their way back to Earth.\n\n\n And that includes me, Chapman thought. I'm going home. I'm finally\n going home.\n\n\n He walked silently to the one small, quartz window in the room. It was\n morning—the Moon's \"morning\"—and he shivered slightly. The rays of\n the Sun were just striking the far rim of the crater and long shadows\n shot across the crater floor. The rest of it was still blanketed in\n a dark jumble of powdery pumice and jagged peaks that would make the\n Black Hills of Dakota look like paradise.", "Chapman frowned. \"Frankly, I hadn't thought of that. I don't believe\n I care. I've put in my time; it's somebody else's turn now. He\n volunteered for it. I think I was fair in explaining all about the job\n when you talked it over among yourselves.\"\n\n\n \"You did, but I don't think Dahl's the man for it. He's too young, too\n much of a kid. He volunteered because he thought it made him look like\n a hero. He doesn't have the judgment that an older man would have. That\n you have.\"\n\n\n Chapman turned slowly around and faced Klein.\n\n\n \"I'm not the indispensable man,\" he said slowly, \"and even if I was, it\n wouldn't make any difference to me. I'm sorry if Dahl is young. So was\n I. I've lost three years up here. And I don't intend to lose any more.\"", "Chapman and Klein watched them dash across the pumice, making the\n tremendous leaps they used to read about in the Sunday supplements. The\n port of the rocket had opened and tiny figures were climbing down the\n ladder. The small figures from the bunker reached them and did a short\n jig of welcome. Then the figures linked arms and started back. Chapman\n noticed one—it was probably Donley—pat the ship affectionately before\n he started back.\nThey were in the lock and the air pumped in and then they were in\n the bunker, taking off their suits. The newcomers were impressed and\n solemn, very much aware of the tremendous responsibility that rested on\n their shoulders. Like Donley and Klein and the members of the Second\n group had been when they had landed. Like Chapman had been in the First.\n\n\n Donley and the others were all over them.\nHow was it back on Earth? Who had won the series? Was so-and-so still\n teaching at the university? What was the international situation?", "They walked over to one corner of the bunker. \"This is about as private\n as we can get, captain,\" Chapman said. \"What's on your mind?\"\nEberlein found a packing crate and made himself comfortable. He looked\n at Chapman.\n\n\n \"I've always wanted to meet the man who's spent more time here than\n anybody else,\" he began.\n\n\n \"I'm sure you wanted to see me for more reasons than just curiosity.\"\n\n\n Eberlein took out a pack of cigarets. \"Mind if I smoke?\"\n\n\n Chapman jerked a thumb toward Dahl. \"Ask him. He's in charge now.\"\n\n\n The captain didn't bother. He put the pack away. \"You know we have big\n plans for the station,\" he said.\n\n\n \"I hadn't heard of them.\"", "Dahl took the plunge. \"Well, you see,\" he started eagerly, too far gone\n to remember such a thing as pride, \"you know my father's pretty well\n fixed. We would make it worth your while, Chap.\" He was feverish. \"It\n would mean eighteen more months, Chap, but they'd be well-paid months!\"\n\n\n Chapman felt tired. The good feeling he had about going home was slowly\n evaporating.\n\n\n \"If you have any report to make, I think you had better get at it,\"\n he cut in, keeping all the harshness he felt out of his voice. \"It'll\n be too late after the relief ship leaves. It'll be easier to give the\n captain your report than try to radio it back to Earth from here.\"\n\n\n He felt sorrier for Dahl than he could ever remember having felt for\n anybody. Long after going home, Dahl would remember this.\n\n\n It would eat at him like a cancer.", "Williams looked stricken and somebody said, \"Oh, shut up, Dahl.\"\n\n\n One of the men separated from the group and came over to Chapman. He\n held out his hand and said, \"My name's Eberlein. Captain of the relief\n ship. I understand you're in charge here?\"\n\n\n Chapman nodded and shook hands. They hadn't had a captain on the First\n ship. Just a pilot and crew. Eberlein looked every inch a captain, too.\n Craggy face, gray hair, the firm chin of a man who was sure of himself.\n\n\n \"You might say I'm in charge here,\" Chapman said.\n\n\n \"Well, look, Mr. Chapman, is there any place where we can talk together\n privately?\"", "\"Think we ought to radio the space station and see if they've left\n there yet?\" Klein asked.\n\n\n \"I talked to them on the last call,\" Chapman said. \"The relief ship\n left there twelve hours ago. They should get here\"—he looked at his\n watch—\"in about six and a half hours.\"\n\n\n \"Chap, you know, I've been thinking,\" Donley said quietly. \"You've\n been here just twice as long as the rest of us. What's the first thing\n you're going to do once you get back?\"\n\n\n It hit them, then. Dowden and Bening looked blank for a minute and\n blindly found packing cases to sit on. The top halves of their suits\n were still hanging on the bulkhead. Klein lowered his coffee cup and\n looked grave. Even Dahl glanced up expectantly.", "Lord, Chapman thought, I'll be happy when I can see some other faces.\n\n\n \"What'd they want?\" Klein had one eyelid open and a questioning look on\n his face.\n\n\n \"They wanted me to stay until the next relief ship lands,\" Chapman\n whispered back.\n\n\n \"What did you say?\"\n\n\n He shrugged. \"No.\"\n\n\n \"You kept it short,\" somebody else whispered. It was Donley, up and\n sitting on the side of his hammock. \"If it had been me, I would have\n told them just what they could do about it.\"\nThe others were awake now, with the exception of Dahl who had his face\n to the bulkhead and a pillow over his head.\n\n\n Dowden rubbed his eyes sleepily. \"Sore, aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"Kind of. Who wouldn't be?\"", "It hurt to look in Dahl's eyes. They were the eyes of a man who was\n trying desperately to stop what he was about to do, but just couldn't\n help himself.\n\n\n \"Well, yes, more or less. Oh, God, Chap, I know you want to go home!\n But I couldn't ask any of the others; you were the only one who could,\n the only one who was qualified!\"\nDahl looked as though he was going to be sick. Chapman tried to recall\n all he knew about him. Dahl, Robert. Good mathematician. Graduate from\n one of the Ivy League schools. Father was a manufacturer of stoves or\n something.\n\n\n It still didn't add, not quite. \"You know I don't like it here any more\n than you do,\" Chapman said slowly. \"I may have commitments at home,\n too. What made you think I would change my mind?\"", "\"I like the feel of it,\" he said simply.\n\n\n Chapman cut off a single blade with his fingernail and put it between\n his lips. It had been years since he had seen grass and had the luxury\n of walking on it and lying on its cool thickness during those sultry\n summer nights when it was too hot to sleep indoors.\n\n\n Williams blushed. \"I thought we could spare a little water for it and\n maybe use the ultraviolet lamp on it some of the time. Couldn't help\n but bring it along; it seemed sort of like a symbol....\" He looked\n embarrassed.\n\n\n Chapman sympathized. If he had had any sense, he'd have tried to\n smuggle something like that up to the Moon instead of his phonograph.\n\n\n \"That's valuable grass,\" Dahl said sharply. \"Do you realize that at\n current freight rates up here, it's worth about ten dollars a blade?\"" ] ]
valid	20044	[ "What is a strategy that the author outlines stadium owners are using to increase revenue?", "What is the trend happening in new stadium construction?", "What does the author explain is happening with the price of seating?", "What is the difference between how baseball stadiums used to be paid for and how they are paid for at the time of this writing?", "How many baseball teams in the article are not playing in new stadiums or presently remodeling old ones at the time of the article?", "What are some of the things that the author thinks are detrimental about new stadium design?", "What are the themes of the piece?", "What are some of the design features that the author highlights as beneficial about the new park designs?" ]	[ [ "Build stadiums in city centers", "Having attached theme parks", "Not prioritizing parking", "Building the stadium away from a city center" ], [ "There are escalators to bring fans right from the parking lots", "All seats are getting closer to the action with new steel construction methods", "Fans spend more time in the restaurants than at their seats", "Cheap seats are getting further away from the action due to being higher from the field" ], [ "The prices are unpredictable and based on attendance", "There are less luxury seats and more cheap seats", "Seat pricing is lower in the new stadiums because they can hold more people", "There are less low-cost seats than before" ], [ "They have always been paid for by stadium owners, and the owners now have so much more money they can upgrade the parks", "They were paid for by team owners, and now mostly by taxpayers", "They have always been paid by taxpayers, but now there is more tax money going towards it", "They used to be payed for by taxes, but as they became more expensive the team owners began having to pay for them" ], [ "26", "0", "1", "6" ], [ "There are columns blocking the view from some seats", "The parking lots aren’t built efficiently", "There are not enough bathrooms for the expanding attendance", "The seating divides people in castes" ], [ "Stadiums are less intimate, seats are getting further away and more expensive", "Stadium construction has adapted to mimic the old style and create equal viewing opportunities for all patrons", "Stadium owners should be applauded for taking on paying for the stadiums, but the stadiums are getting less intimate", "Although stadium size is increasing, it draws more economic activity to the community, but seats are getting further from the action" ], [ "The fields have new shapes", "There are more seats closer to the action", "There is a greater diversity of dining", "There are more parking spaces" ] ]	[ 4, 4, 4, 2, 4, 4, 1, 1 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "The San Francisco Giants are planning a similar arrangement for their bayfront stadium, assembling about $240 million in private funds and persuading the city to pay for some of the infrastructure. The Giants say that other team owners are rooting against their scheme, because it calls into question the profligate public subsidies. Some of the subsidies exceed capital and maintenance costs: If the White Sox fail to draw 1.5 million annual fans at New Comiskey Park in the 11th through 20th years of their lease, the state of Illinois is contractually obliged to cover the shortfall at the gate by buying upto 300,000 tickets. \n\n You'd expect that the public would get something, perhaps affordable seats, in return for subsidizing stadiums. Instead, the cheap seats in the new parks are scarcer. The Seattle Mariners' proposed park, for instance, will contain about one-fourth as many general-admission seats as the present location. This erosion of low-cost seats is a long-running trend.", "So too is the dramatic increase in luxury seating, which is the primary real reason for the ballpark-building boom. The real gold mines are the posh luxury suites that lease for between $30,000 and $200,000 a year (payable in advance). A comparable moneymaker is the club deck, just above the first-tier seating. These pricey sections are occupied usually on a season-ticket basis, and offer the best sightlines, roomier seats, and wait staff who peddle gourmet fare. \n\n The gilding doesn't end there: New parks also include members-only stadium clubs and on-premises bars and restaurants.", "Naturally, owners don't advertise their new parks as a means of making life better for elite ticketholders. They say that only a new stadium will allow them to make enough money to stay in town or to field a competitive team and to allow fans to savor that old-time baseball flavor in greater comfort and convenience. Local taxpayers tend to lay off this pitch--they have voted these measures down in Illinois, Washington state, California, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Politically savvy owners usually bypass the voters and tap state governments directly for the money.", "Lately, the cost of stadiums has ranged from about $300 million to $500 million. The multipurpose stadium that the Yankees want built on Manhattan's lower west side tentatively carries a $1 billion price tag. Add the financing and maintenance costs, and even a midpriced project goes through the retractable roof. At one point, the cost of the Brewers' proposed stadium grew from $250 million to $845 million, and that's not counting the value of the land. \n\n The good news is that not every owner is demanding a castle for his team. All Pittsburgh Pirates owner Kevin McClatchy wants is a \"35,000-to-37,000-seat park with natural grass and no roof, bells, or whistles.\" Though his attitude is commendable, the proposed park will still cost about $200 million, and perhaps an equal amount in interest.", "Modern conveniences aside, the new baseball shrines are a mixed bag. Most are visually impressive, boast interestingly shaped playing fields, and start off as box-office hits. But too many of them are large and expensive, tend to live on the dole, and are hampered by seat layouts that create a caste system among fans. At their best, they strengthen their cities; at their worst, they exploit them. \n\n The decision-making process behind the financing and building of new ballparks has become predictable, as have the designs. But the good news is that our stadium boom is far from over. If owners and public agencies can be persuaded to take a longer view of stadium economics and community concerns, we may yet see parks that better unite traditional character with modern convenience.", "\"If you put them in the wrong place, it's a colossal waste of money,\" says the planning director of the city of Cleveland. \"But if you put them in the right place, the benefits are phenomenal,\" \n\n Recent attendance patterns show that urban parks generate much better patronage than suburban ones or those in neither/nor locations. There are also strong indicators that suggest new urban parks have \"legs,\" retaining more of their patrons after the novelty wears off. But some teams deliberately seek isolated locations, where they can better monopolize parking revenues and game-related food, drink, and souvenir business. This is why the White Sox moated their park with 100 acres of parking, why the Milwaukee Brewers refuse to build downtown, and why the Mariners insisted on the most remote of Seattle's three ballpark-siting options.", "Why should the public chip in? Taxpayer subsidies don't produce cheaper tickets--they produce more expensive tickets. The average admission price (not counting club seats and suites) rises about 35 percent when a team moves into new digs. And independent economists (i.e., those not hired by stadium proponents) discount the claim that new stadiums spur regional economic growth. \n\n But one compelling argument for subsidies is that new stadiums can pull their cities together when properly designed and sited. This requires a downtown or neighborhood location where lots of fans can take the bus or the train to the game; where they can walk to the stadium from work, hotels, restaurants, or bars; and where getting to the game is a communal event that is part of a broader urban experience. This is the case with older parks such as Wrigley Field and Fenway Park, and the new ones in Toronto, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Denver.", "Larger and more lavish stadiums translate into greater land and construction costs. Operable roofs, such as those in Toronto's SkyDome, Phoenix's BankOne Ballpark, and those proposed for Seattle and Milwaukee, are budget-busters. Since most teams put up little (if any) of their own money, they have scant incentive to economize on the parks. In Seattle, Mariner management has demanded an operable roof even though the city has the driest weather in MLB outside California. The real problem with the Seattle climate is cold weather in spring and fall, but the unsealed roof won't make the park warmer or totally free of wind.", "Design references to golden-age ballparks are only one parallel between that period and ours. We are also matching that era's frenzied pace of construction: Twenty-six of Major League Baseball's 32 franchises occupy a park that is less than 10 years old; has been, or will be, extensively remodeled; or hope to move into a new one soon. \n\n One of the classic parks' merits was that they were unsubsidized. Team owners bought land and paid for stadium construction--some even built trolley lines to transport fans to the games. In all but two cases during the last 65 years, taxpayers have covered most or all of the costs of stadium building.", "For the new parks' charms, we should be thankful. But in actual size, the new ballyards are not intimate. All their amenities--elevators, wider concourses, abundant toilets (especially for women), bathrooms, escalators, plentiful food stands, and luxury suites--make them far larger than the parks they claim to emulate. These parks are larger than even the multipurpose hulks we all love to hate. Compare, for instance, the spanking new Ballpark at Arlington (49,100 seats), which rests on 13.6 acres, to Seattle's Kingdome, a 58,000-seat multipurpose stadium that opened in 1976 and covers 9.3 acres. (Ebbets Field, home to the Brooklyn Dodgers, occupied a mere 5.7 acres and seated 32,000.)", "Or compare heights: New Comiskey Park's roof is 146 feet above field level; old Comiskey Park was about 75 feet high. This is not ballpark trivia, but an indicator of fan experience: Upper-deck seats in the new, taller stadiums are farther away from the action. At Arlington, the fan sitting in the middle-row, upper-deck seat closest to home plate is 224 feet from the batter, compared to 125 feet at Tiger Stadium, a park with 4,300 more seats. \n\n Why are upper-deck seats in the new parks so far from the game? Two reasons: column placement and luxury seating.", "In the old parks, the structural columns stood within the seating areas, placing the upper-deck seats closer to the game. The trade-off was that these columns obstructed the view of some fans. Today's architects \"remedy\" the problem by placing the columns behind the seating areas, thus moving the upper decks back from the field. (It should be noted that the new parks' claim that they have no impaired-view seats is an overstatement.) \n\n Added tiers devoted to luxury seating at the new parks also push the upper deck away from the field. The retreat of that deck is a century-long process, but it can be stemmed. The Orioles pressed for several design changes that lowered Camden Yards' top deck and produced a middle-row viewing distance of 199 feet, about eight rows closer than Arlington's.", "A year later, a new--yet more genuinely old--ballpark arrived to dispel the gloom. Baltimore's Oriole Park at Camden Yards revived the idea of a quirkily asymmetrical, relatively intimate, steel-structured, city-friendly ballpark. \"Once this opens,\" predicted Commissioner of Baseball Bart Giamatti, \"everyone will want one like it.\" And so it came to be: Camden Yards' successors in Cleveland, Arlington (Texas), and Denver, and those designed for Milwaukee, Seattle, and San Francisco, take their cues from Baltimore's conceptual breakthrough. Even totally nontraditional parks, like those in Phoenix, Miami, and Tampa Bay, emulate the asymmetry of the Camden Yards outfield. It's almost as though a disembodied voice intoned, \"If you build it, they will copy.\"", "While Camden Yards and its offspring are almost universally praised, some of them don't deserve the hype. The most annoying hype is that all the new parks are intimate, and that every seat is better at the new place than the old. Intimacy has two aspects--actual size and the subjective perception of size and scale. A good architect can ace the second part of the test through convincing forms, good proportions, and attractive materials. The exposed steelwork, brick, stone, tile, and well-placed wall openings of the new parks beat the cold and sterile stadiums of a generation ago.", "Diamonds in the Rough \n\n Fourscore and seven years ago, the first steel and concrete baseball palace opened for business. Philadelphia's Shibe Park, home to the Athletics and later the Phillies, was one of 13 urban ballparks built in the seven-year period now regarded as the golden age of ballpark architecture. All but three (Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, and Tiger Stadium) have since been razed. \n\n Replacing parks built of wood, these ballyards set new standards for size, fire safety, intimacy, and convenience. As places to watch ballgames, they were vastly superior to the post-World War II parks, especially the facilities designed in the late '60s and '70s that doubled as football stadiums. But these concrete monsters, plopped into vast parking lots in Houston, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and elsewhere, lack the character of the classic parks.", "Chicago's New Comiskey Park, which opened in 1991, attempted to address the character question with a superficial postmodern facade that in some ways resembled the exterior of the golden-era park it replaced. New Comiskey was marketed as an old-fashioned park with all the modern conveniences. But inside, it was still a symmetrical concrete monster, and it sat in the middle of a 7,000-car parking lot rather than in an urban neighborhood." ], [ "Modern conveniences aside, the new baseball shrines are a mixed bag. Most are visually impressive, boast interestingly shaped playing fields, and start off as box-office hits. But too many of them are large and expensive, tend to live on the dole, and are hampered by seat layouts that create a caste system among fans. At their best, they strengthen their cities; at their worst, they exploit them. \n\n The decision-making process behind the financing and building of new ballparks has become predictable, as have the designs. But the good news is that our stadium boom is far from over. If owners and public agencies can be persuaded to take a longer view of stadium economics and community concerns, we may yet see parks that better unite traditional character with modern convenience.", "The San Francisco Giants are planning a similar arrangement for their bayfront stadium, assembling about $240 million in private funds and persuading the city to pay for some of the infrastructure. The Giants say that other team owners are rooting against their scheme, because it calls into question the profligate public subsidies. Some of the subsidies exceed capital and maintenance costs: If the White Sox fail to draw 1.5 million annual fans at New Comiskey Park in the 11th through 20th years of their lease, the state of Illinois is contractually obliged to cover the shortfall at the gate by buying upto 300,000 tickets. \n\n You'd expect that the public would get something, perhaps affordable seats, in return for subsidizing stadiums. Instead, the cheap seats in the new parks are scarcer. The Seattle Mariners' proposed park, for instance, will contain about one-fourth as many general-admission seats as the present location. This erosion of low-cost seats is a long-running trend.", "For the new parks' charms, we should be thankful. But in actual size, the new ballyards are not intimate. All their amenities--elevators, wider concourses, abundant toilets (especially for women), bathrooms, escalators, plentiful food stands, and luxury suites--make them far larger than the parks they claim to emulate. These parks are larger than even the multipurpose hulks we all love to hate. Compare, for instance, the spanking new Ballpark at Arlington (49,100 seats), which rests on 13.6 acres, to Seattle's Kingdome, a 58,000-seat multipurpose stadium that opened in 1976 and covers 9.3 acres. (Ebbets Field, home to the Brooklyn Dodgers, occupied a mere 5.7 acres and seated 32,000.)", "Lately, the cost of stadiums has ranged from about $300 million to $500 million. The multipurpose stadium that the Yankees want built on Manhattan's lower west side tentatively carries a $1 billion price tag. Add the financing and maintenance costs, and even a midpriced project goes through the retractable roof. At one point, the cost of the Brewers' proposed stadium grew from $250 million to $845 million, and that's not counting the value of the land. \n\n The good news is that not every owner is demanding a castle for his team. All Pittsburgh Pirates owner Kevin McClatchy wants is a \"35,000-to-37,000-seat park with natural grass and no roof, bells, or whistles.\" Though his attitude is commendable, the proposed park will still cost about $200 million, and perhaps an equal amount in interest.", "So too is the dramatic increase in luxury seating, which is the primary real reason for the ballpark-building boom. The real gold mines are the posh luxury suites that lease for between $30,000 and $200,000 a year (payable in advance). A comparable moneymaker is the club deck, just above the first-tier seating. These pricey sections are occupied usually on a season-ticket basis, and offer the best sightlines, roomier seats, and wait staff who peddle gourmet fare. \n\n The gilding doesn't end there: New parks also include members-only stadium clubs and on-premises bars and restaurants.", "Design references to golden-age ballparks are only one parallel between that period and ours. We are also matching that era's frenzied pace of construction: Twenty-six of Major League Baseball's 32 franchises occupy a park that is less than 10 years old; has been, or will be, extensively remodeled; or hope to move into a new one soon. \n\n One of the classic parks' merits was that they were unsubsidized. Team owners bought land and paid for stadium construction--some even built trolley lines to transport fans to the games. In all but two cases during the last 65 years, taxpayers have covered most or all of the costs of stadium building.", "Larger and more lavish stadiums translate into greater land and construction costs. Operable roofs, such as those in Toronto's SkyDome, Phoenix's BankOne Ballpark, and those proposed for Seattle and Milwaukee, are budget-busters. Since most teams put up little (if any) of their own money, they have scant incentive to economize on the parks. In Seattle, Mariner management has demanded an operable roof even though the city has the driest weather in MLB outside California. The real problem with the Seattle climate is cold weather in spring and fall, but the unsealed roof won't make the park warmer or totally free of wind.", "Naturally, owners don't advertise their new parks as a means of making life better for elite ticketholders. They say that only a new stadium will allow them to make enough money to stay in town or to field a competitive team and to allow fans to savor that old-time baseball flavor in greater comfort and convenience. Local taxpayers tend to lay off this pitch--they have voted these measures down in Illinois, Washington state, California, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Politically savvy owners usually bypass the voters and tap state governments directly for the money.", "Or compare heights: New Comiskey Park's roof is 146 feet above field level; old Comiskey Park was about 75 feet high. This is not ballpark trivia, but an indicator of fan experience: Upper-deck seats in the new, taller stadiums are farther away from the action. At Arlington, the fan sitting in the middle-row, upper-deck seat closest to home plate is 224 feet from the batter, compared to 125 feet at Tiger Stadium, a park with 4,300 more seats. \n\n Why are upper-deck seats in the new parks so far from the game? Two reasons: column placement and luxury seating.", "In the old parks, the structural columns stood within the seating areas, placing the upper-deck seats closer to the game. The trade-off was that these columns obstructed the view of some fans. Today's architects \"remedy\" the problem by placing the columns behind the seating areas, thus moving the upper decks back from the field. (It should be noted that the new parks' claim that they have no impaired-view seats is an overstatement.) \n\n Added tiers devoted to luxury seating at the new parks also push the upper deck away from the field. The retreat of that deck is a century-long process, but it can be stemmed. The Orioles pressed for several design changes that lowered Camden Yards' top deck and produced a middle-row viewing distance of 199 feet, about eight rows closer than Arlington's.", "While Camden Yards and its offspring are almost universally praised, some of them don't deserve the hype. The most annoying hype is that all the new parks are intimate, and that every seat is better at the new place than the old. Intimacy has two aspects--actual size and the subjective perception of size and scale. A good architect can ace the second part of the test through convincing forms, good proportions, and attractive materials. The exposed steelwork, brick, stone, tile, and well-placed wall openings of the new parks beat the cold and sterile stadiums of a generation ago.", "A year later, a new--yet more genuinely old--ballpark arrived to dispel the gloom. Baltimore's Oriole Park at Camden Yards revived the idea of a quirkily asymmetrical, relatively intimate, steel-structured, city-friendly ballpark. \"Once this opens,\" predicted Commissioner of Baseball Bart Giamatti, \"everyone will want one like it.\" And so it came to be: Camden Yards' successors in Cleveland, Arlington (Texas), and Denver, and those designed for Milwaukee, Seattle, and San Francisco, take their cues from Baltimore's conceptual breakthrough. Even totally nontraditional parks, like those in Phoenix, Miami, and Tampa Bay, emulate the asymmetry of the Camden Yards outfield. It's almost as though a disembodied voice intoned, \"If you build it, they will copy.\"", "Why should the public chip in? Taxpayer subsidies don't produce cheaper tickets--they produce more expensive tickets. The average admission price (not counting club seats and suites) rises about 35 percent when a team moves into new digs. And independent economists (i.e., those not hired by stadium proponents) discount the claim that new stadiums spur regional economic growth. \n\n But one compelling argument for subsidies is that new stadiums can pull their cities together when properly designed and sited. This requires a downtown or neighborhood location where lots of fans can take the bus or the train to the game; where they can walk to the stadium from work, hotels, restaurants, or bars; and where getting to the game is a communal event that is part of a broader urban experience. This is the case with older parks such as Wrigley Field and Fenway Park, and the new ones in Toronto, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Denver.", "Chicago's New Comiskey Park, which opened in 1991, attempted to address the character question with a superficial postmodern facade that in some ways resembled the exterior of the golden-era park it replaced. New Comiskey was marketed as an old-fashioned park with all the modern conveniences. But inside, it was still a symmetrical concrete monster, and it sat in the middle of a 7,000-car parking lot rather than in an urban neighborhood.", "Diamonds in the Rough \n\n Fourscore and seven years ago, the first steel and concrete baseball palace opened for business. Philadelphia's Shibe Park, home to the Athletics and later the Phillies, was one of 13 urban ballparks built in the seven-year period now regarded as the golden age of ballpark architecture. All but three (Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, and Tiger Stadium) have since been razed. \n\n Replacing parks built of wood, these ballyards set new standards for size, fire safety, intimacy, and convenience. As places to watch ballgames, they were vastly superior to the post-World War II parks, especially the facilities designed in the late '60s and '70s that doubled as football stadiums. But these concrete monsters, plopped into vast parking lots in Houston, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and elsewhere, lack the character of the classic parks.", "\"If you put them in the wrong place, it's a colossal waste of money,\" says the planning director of the city of Cleveland. \"But if you put them in the right place, the benefits are phenomenal,\" \n\n Recent attendance patterns show that urban parks generate much better patronage than suburban ones or those in neither/nor locations. There are also strong indicators that suggest new urban parks have \"legs,\" retaining more of their patrons after the novelty wears off. But some teams deliberately seek isolated locations, where they can better monopolize parking revenues and game-related food, drink, and souvenir business. This is why the White Sox moated their park with 100 acres of parking, why the Milwaukee Brewers refuse to build downtown, and why the Mariners insisted on the most remote of Seattle's three ballpark-siting options." ], [ "So too is the dramatic increase in luxury seating, which is the primary real reason for the ballpark-building boom. The real gold mines are the posh luxury suites that lease for between $30,000 and $200,000 a year (payable in advance). A comparable moneymaker is the club deck, just above the first-tier seating. These pricey sections are occupied usually on a season-ticket basis, and offer the best sightlines, roomier seats, and wait staff who peddle gourmet fare. \n\n The gilding doesn't end there: New parks also include members-only stadium clubs and on-premises bars and restaurants.", "The San Francisco Giants are planning a similar arrangement for their bayfront stadium, assembling about $240 million in private funds and persuading the city to pay for some of the infrastructure. The Giants say that other team owners are rooting against their scheme, because it calls into question the profligate public subsidies. Some of the subsidies exceed capital and maintenance costs: If the White Sox fail to draw 1.5 million annual fans at New Comiskey Park in the 11th through 20th years of their lease, the state of Illinois is contractually obliged to cover the shortfall at the gate by buying upto 300,000 tickets. \n\n You'd expect that the public would get something, perhaps affordable seats, in return for subsidizing stadiums. Instead, the cheap seats in the new parks are scarcer. The Seattle Mariners' proposed park, for instance, will contain about one-fourth as many general-admission seats as the present location. This erosion of low-cost seats is a long-running trend.", "In the old parks, the structural columns stood within the seating areas, placing the upper-deck seats closer to the game. The trade-off was that these columns obstructed the view of some fans. Today's architects \"remedy\" the problem by placing the columns behind the seating areas, thus moving the upper decks back from the field. (It should be noted that the new parks' claim that they have no impaired-view seats is an overstatement.) \n\n Added tiers devoted to luxury seating at the new parks also push the upper deck away from the field. The retreat of that deck is a century-long process, but it can be stemmed. The Orioles pressed for several design changes that lowered Camden Yards' top deck and produced a middle-row viewing distance of 199 feet, about eight rows closer than Arlington's.", "Or compare heights: New Comiskey Park's roof is 146 feet above field level; old Comiskey Park was about 75 feet high. This is not ballpark trivia, but an indicator of fan experience: Upper-deck seats in the new, taller stadiums are farther away from the action. At Arlington, the fan sitting in the middle-row, upper-deck seat closest to home plate is 224 feet from the batter, compared to 125 feet at Tiger Stadium, a park with 4,300 more seats. \n\n Why are upper-deck seats in the new parks so far from the game? Two reasons: column placement and luxury seating.", "Why should the public chip in? Taxpayer subsidies don't produce cheaper tickets--they produce more expensive tickets. The average admission price (not counting club seats and suites) rises about 35 percent when a team moves into new digs. And independent economists (i.e., those not hired by stadium proponents) discount the claim that new stadiums spur regional economic growth. \n\n But one compelling argument for subsidies is that new stadiums can pull their cities together when properly designed and sited. This requires a downtown or neighborhood location where lots of fans can take the bus or the train to the game; where they can walk to the stadium from work, hotels, restaurants, or bars; and where getting to the game is a communal event that is part of a broader urban experience. This is the case with older parks such as Wrigley Field and Fenway Park, and the new ones in Toronto, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Denver.", "Lately, the cost of stadiums has ranged from about $300 million to $500 million. The multipurpose stadium that the Yankees want built on Manhattan's lower west side tentatively carries a $1 billion price tag. Add the financing and maintenance costs, and even a midpriced project goes through the retractable roof. At one point, the cost of the Brewers' proposed stadium grew from $250 million to $845 million, and that's not counting the value of the land. \n\n The good news is that not every owner is demanding a castle for his team. All Pittsburgh Pirates owner Kevin McClatchy wants is a \"35,000-to-37,000-seat park with natural grass and no roof, bells, or whistles.\" Though his attitude is commendable, the proposed park will still cost about $200 million, and perhaps an equal amount in interest.", "For the new parks' charms, we should be thankful. But in actual size, the new ballyards are not intimate. All their amenities--elevators, wider concourses, abundant toilets (especially for women), bathrooms, escalators, plentiful food stands, and luxury suites--make them far larger than the parks they claim to emulate. These parks are larger than even the multipurpose hulks we all love to hate. Compare, for instance, the spanking new Ballpark at Arlington (49,100 seats), which rests on 13.6 acres, to Seattle's Kingdome, a 58,000-seat multipurpose stadium that opened in 1976 and covers 9.3 acres. (Ebbets Field, home to the Brooklyn Dodgers, occupied a mere 5.7 acres and seated 32,000.)", "Modern conveniences aside, the new baseball shrines are a mixed bag. Most are visually impressive, boast interestingly shaped playing fields, and start off as box-office hits. But too many of them are large and expensive, tend to live on the dole, and are hampered by seat layouts that create a caste system among fans. At their best, they strengthen their cities; at their worst, they exploit them. \n\n The decision-making process behind the financing and building of new ballparks has become predictable, as have the designs. But the good news is that our stadium boom is far from over. If owners and public agencies can be persuaded to take a longer view of stadium economics and community concerns, we may yet see parks that better unite traditional character with modern convenience.", "\"If you put them in the wrong place, it's a colossal waste of money,\" says the planning director of the city of Cleveland. \"But if you put them in the right place, the benefits are phenomenal,\" \n\n Recent attendance patterns show that urban parks generate much better patronage than suburban ones or those in neither/nor locations. There are also strong indicators that suggest new urban parks have \"legs,\" retaining more of their patrons after the novelty wears off. But some teams deliberately seek isolated locations, where they can better monopolize parking revenues and game-related food, drink, and souvenir business. This is why the White Sox moated their park with 100 acres of parking, why the Milwaukee Brewers refuse to build downtown, and why the Mariners insisted on the most remote of Seattle's three ballpark-siting options.", "Larger and more lavish stadiums translate into greater land and construction costs. Operable roofs, such as those in Toronto's SkyDome, Phoenix's BankOne Ballpark, and those proposed for Seattle and Milwaukee, are budget-busters. Since most teams put up little (if any) of their own money, they have scant incentive to economize on the parks. In Seattle, Mariner management has demanded an operable roof even though the city has the driest weather in MLB outside California. The real problem with the Seattle climate is cold weather in spring and fall, but the unsealed roof won't make the park warmer or totally free of wind.", "Naturally, owners don't advertise their new parks as a means of making life better for elite ticketholders. They say that only a new stadium will allow them to make enough money to stay in town or to field a competitive team and to allow fans to savor that old-time baseball flavor in greater comfort and convenience. Local taxpayers tend to lay off this pitch--they have voted these measures down in Illinois, Washington state, California, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Politically savvy owners usually bypass the voters and tap state governments directly for the money.", "Design references to golden-age ballparks are only one parallel between that period and ours. We are also matching that era's frenzied pace of construction: Twenty-six of Major League Baseball's 32 franchises occupy a park that is less than 10 years old; has been, or will be, extensively remodeled; or hope to move into a new one soon. \n\n One of the classic parks' merits was that they were unsubsidized. Team owners bought land and paid for stadium construction--some even built trolley lines to transport fans to the games. In all but two cases during the last 65 years, taxpayers have covered most or all of the costs of stadium building.", "While Camden Yards and its offspring are almost universally praised, some of them don't deserve the hype. The most annoying hype is that all the new parks are intimate, and that every seat is better at the new place than the old. Intimacy has two aspects--actual size and the subjective perception of size and scale. A good architect can ace the second part of the test through convincing forms, good proportions, and attractive materials. The exposed steelwork, brick, stone, tile, and well-placed wall openings of the new parks beat the cold and sterile stadiums of a generation ago.", "Diamonds in the Rough \n\n Fourscore and seven years ago, the first steel and concrete baseball palace opened for business. Philadelphia's Shibe Park, home to the Athletics and later the Phillies, was one of 13 urban ballparks built in the seven-year period now regarded as the golden age of ballpark architecture. All but three (Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, and Tiger Stadium) have since been razed. \n\n Replacing parks built of wood, these ballyards set new standards for size, fire safety, intimacy, and convenience. As places to watch ballgames, they were vastly superior to the post-World War II parks, especially the facilities designed in the late '60s and '70s that doubled as football stadiums. But these concrete monsters, plopped into vast parking lots in Houston, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and elsewhere, lack the character of the classic parks.", "Chicago's New Comiskey Park, which opened in 1991, attempted to address the character question with a superficial postmodern facade that in some ways resembled the exterior of the golden-era park it replaced. New Comiskey was marketed as an old-fashioned park with all the modern conveniences. But inside, it was still a symmetrical concrete monster, and it sat in the middle of a 7,000-car parking lot rather than in an urban neighborhood.", "A year later, a new--yet more genuinely old--ballpark arrived to dispel the gloom. Baltimore's Oriole Park at Camden Yards revived the idea of a quirkily asymmetrical, relatively intimate, steel-structured, city-friendly ballpark. \"Once this opens,\" predicted Commissioner of Baseball Bart Giamatti, \"everyone will want one like it.\" And so it came to be: Camden Yards' successors in Cleveland, Arlington (Texas), and Denver, and those designed for Milwaukee, Seattle, and San Francisco, take their cues from Baltimore's conceptual breakthrough. Even totally nontraditional parks, like those in Phoenix, Miami, and Tampa Bay, emulate the asymmetry of the Camden Yards outfield. It's almost as though a disembodied voice intoned, \"If you build it, they will copy.\"" ], [ "Design references to golden-age ballparks are only one parallel between that period and ours. We are also matching that era's frenzied pace of construction: Twenty-six of Major League Baseball's 32 franchises occupy a park that is less than 10 years old; has been, or will be, extensively remodeled; or hope to move into a new one soon. \n\n One of the classic parks' merits was that they were unsubsidized. Team owners bought land and paid for stadium construction--some even built trolley lines to transport fans to the games. In all but two cases during the last 65 years, taxpayers have covered most or all of the costs of stadium building.", "The San Francisco Giants are planning a similar arrangement for their bayfront stadium, assembling about $240 million in private funds and persuading the city to pay for some of the infrastructure. The Giants say that other team owners are rooting against their scheme, because it calls into question the profligate public subsidies. Some of the subsidies exceed capital and maintenance costs: If the White Sox fail to draw 1.5 million annual fans at New Comiskey Park in the 11th through 20th years of their lease, the state of Illinois is contractually obliged to cover the shortfall at the gate by buying upto 300,000 tickets. \n\n You'd expect that the public would get something, perhaps affordable seats, in return for subsidizing stadiums. Instead, the cheap seats in the new parks are scarcer. The Seattle Mariners' proposed park, for instance, will contain about one-fourth as many general-admission seats as the present location. This erosion of low-cost seats is a long-running trend.", "Modern conveniences aside, the new baseball shrines are a mixed bag. Most are visually impressive, boast interestingly shaped playing fields, and start off as box-office hits. But too many of them are large and expensive, tend to live on the dole, and are hampered by seat layouts that create a caste system among fans. At their best, they strengthen their cities; at their worst, they exploit them. \n\n The decision-making process behind the financing and building of new ballparks has become predictable, as have the designs. But the good news is that our stadium boom is far from over. If owners and public agencies can be persuaded to take a longer view of stadium economics and community concerns, we may yet see parks that better unite traditional character with modern convenience.", "Naturally, owners don't advertise their new parks as a means of making life better for elite ticketholders. They say that only a new stadium will allow them to make enough money to stay in town or to field a competitive team and to allow fans to savor that old-time baseball flavor in greater comfort and convenience. Local taxpayers tend to lay off this pitch--they have voted these measures down in Illinois, Washington state, California, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Politically savvy owners usually bypass the voters and tap state governments directly for the money.", "So too is the dramatic increase in luxury seating, which is the primary real reason for the ballpark-building boom. The real gold mines are the posh luxury suites that lease for between $30,000 and $200,000 a year (payable in advance). A comparable moneymaker is the club deck, just above the first-tier seating. These pricey sections are occupied usually on a season-ticket basis, and offer the best sightlines, roomier seats, and wait staff who peddle gourmet fare. \n\n The gilding doesn't end there: New parks also include members-only stadium clubs and on-premises bars and restaurants.", "Lately, the cost of stadiums has ranged from about $300 million to $500 million. The multipurpose stadium that the Yankees want built on Manhattan's lower west side tentatively carries a $1 billion price tag. Add the financing and maintenance costs, and even a midpriced project goes through the retractable roof. At one point, the cost of the Brewers' proposed stadium grew from $250 million to $845 million, and that's not counting the value of the land. \n\n The good news is that not every owner is demanding a castle for his team. All Pittsburgh Pirates owner Kevin McClatchy wants is a \"35,000-to-37,000-seat park with natural grass and no roof, bells, or whistles.\" Though his attitude is commendable, the proposed park will still cost about $200 million, and perhaps an equal amount in interest.", "For the new parks' charms, we should be thankful. But in actual size, the new ballyards are not intimate. All their amenities--elevators, wider concourses, abundant toilets (especially for women), bathrooms, escalators, plentiful food stands, and luxury suites--make them far larger than the parks they claim to emulate. These parks are larger than even the multipurpose hulks we all love to hate. Compare, for instance, the spanking new Ballpark at Arlington (49,100 seats), which rests on 13.6 acres, to Seattle's Kingdome, a 58,000-seat multipurpose stadium that opened in 1976 and covers 9.3 acres. (Ebbets Field, home to the Brooklyn Dodgers, occupied a mere 5.7 acres and seated 32,000.)", "Diamonds in the Rough \n\n Fourscore and seven years ago, the first steel and concrete baseball palace opened for business. Philadelphia's Shibe Park, home to the Athletics and later the Phillies, was one of 13 urban ballparks built in the seven-year period now regarded as the golden age of ballpark architecture. All but three (Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, and Tiger Stadium) have since been razed. \n\n Replacing parks built of wood, these ballyards set new standards for size, fire safety, intimacy, and convenience. As places to watch ballgames, they were vastly superior to the post-World War II parks, especially the facilities designed in the late '60s and '70s that doubled as football stadiums. But these concrete monsters, plopped into vast parking lots in Houston, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and elsewhere, lack the character of the classic parks.", "Why should the public chip in? Taxpayer subsidies don't produce cheaper tickets--they produce more expensive tickets. The average admission price (not counting club seats and suites) rises about 35 percent when a team moves into new digs. And independent economists (i.e., those not hired by stadium proponents) discount the claim that new stadiums spur regional economic growth. \n\n But one compelling argument for subsidies is that new stadiums can pull their cities together when properly designed and sited. This requires a downtown or neighborhood location where lots of fans can take the bus or the train to the game; where they can walk to the stadium from work, hotels, restaurants, or bars; and where getting to the game is a communal event that is part of a broader urban experience. This is the case with older parks such as Wrigley Field and Fenway Park, and the new ones in Toronto, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Denver.", "Or compare heights: New Comiskey Park's roof is 146 feet above field level; old Comiskey Park was about 75 feet high. This is not ballpark trivia, but an indicator of fan experience: Upper-deck seats in the new, taller stadiums are farther away from the action. At Arlington, the fan sitting in the middle-row, upper-deck seat closest to home plate is 224 feet from the batter, compared to 125 feet at Tiger Stadium, a park with 4,300 more seats. \n\n Why are upper-deck seats in the new parks so far from the game? Two reasons: column placement and luxury seating.", "Larger and more lavish stadiums translate into greater land and construction costs. Operable roofs, such as those in Toronto's SkyDome, Phoenix's BankOne Ballpark, and those proposed for Seattle and Milwaukee, are budget-busters. Since most teams put up little (if any) of their own money, they have scant incentive to economize on the parks. In Seattle, Mariner management has demanded an operable roof even though the city has the driest weather in MLB outside California. The real problem with the Seattle climate is cold weather in spring and fall, but the unsealed roof won't make the park warmer or totally free of wind.", "In the old parks, the structural columns stood within the seating areas, placing the upper-deck seats closer to the game. The trade-off was that these columns obstructed the view of some fans. Today's architects \"remedy\" the problem by placing the columns behind the seating areas, thus moving the upper decks back from the field. (It should be noted that the new parks' claim that they have no impaired-view seats is an overstatement.) \n\n Added tiers devoted to luxury seating at the new parks also push the upper deck away from the field. The retreat of that deck is a century-long process, but it can be stemmed. The Orioles pressed for several design changes that lowered Camden Yards' top deck and produced a middle-row viewing distance of 199 feet, about eight rows closer than Arlington's.", "\"If you put them in the wrong place, it's a colossal waste of money,\" says the planning director of the city of Cleveland. \"But if you put them in the right place, the benefits are phenomenal,\" \n\n Recent attendance patterns show that urban parks generate much better patronage than suburban ones or those in neither/nor locations. There are also strong indicators that suggest new urban parks have \"legs,\" retaining more of their patrons after the novelty wears off. But some teams deliberately seek isolated locations, where they can better monopolize parking revenues and game-related food, drink, and souvenir business. This is why the White Sox moated their park with 100 acres of parking, why the Milwaukee Brewers refuse to build downtown, and why the Mariners insisted on the most remote of Seattle's three ballpark-siting options.", "A year later, a new--yet more genuinely old--ballpark arrived to dispel the gloom. Baltimore's Oriole Park at Camden Yards revived the idea of a quirkily asymmetrical, relatively intimate, steel-structured, city-friendly ballpark. \"Once this opens,\" predicted Commissioner of Baseball Bart Giamatti, \"everyone will want one like it.\" And so it came to be: Camden Yards' successors in Cleveland, Arlington (Texas), and Denver, and those designed for Milwaukee, Seattle, and San Francisco, take their cues from Baltimore's conceptual breakthrough. Even totally nontraditional parks, like those in Phoenix, Miami, and Tampa Bay, emulate the asymmetry of the Camden Yards outfield. It's almost as though a disembodied voice intoned, \"If you build it, they will copy.\"", "While Camden Yards and its offspring are almost universally praised, some of them don't deserve the hype. The most annoying hype is that all the new parks are intimate, and that every seat is better at the new place than the old. Intimacy has two aspects--actual size and the subjective perception of size and scale. A good architect can ace the second part of the test through convincing forms, good proportions, and attractive materials. The exposed steelwork, brick, stone, tile, and well-placed wall openings of the new parks beat the cold and sterile stadiums of a generation ago.", "Chicago's New Comiskey Park, which opened in 1991, attempted to address the character question with a superficial postmodern facade that in some ways resembled the exterior of the golden-era park it replaced. New Comiskey was marketed as an old-fashioned park with all the modern conveniences. But inside, it was still a symmetrical concrete monster, and it sat in the middle of a 7,000-car parking lot rather than in an urban neighborhood." ], [ "Modern conveniences aside, the new baseball shrines are a mixed bag. Most are visually impressive, boast interestingly shaped playing fields, and start off as box-office hits. But too many of them are large and expensive, tend to live on the dole, and are hampered by seat layouts that create a caste system among fans. At their best, they strengthen their cities; at their worst, they exploit them. \n\n The decision-making process behind the financing and building of new ballparks has become predictable, as have the designs. But the good news is that our stadium boom is far from over. If owners and public agencies can be persuaded to take a longer view of stadium economics and community concerns, we may yet see parks that better unite traditional character with modern convenience.", "Design references to golden-age ballparks are only one parallel between that period and ours. We are also matching that era's frenzied pace of construction: Twenty-six of Major League Baseball's 32 franchises occupy a park that is less than 10 years old; has been, or will be, extensively remodeled; or hope to move into a new one soon. \n\n One of the classic parks' merits was that they were unsubsidized. Team owners bought land and paid for stadium construction--some even built trolley lines to transport fans to the games. In all but two cases during the last 65 years, taxpayers have covered most or all of the costs of stadium building.", "The San Francisco Giants are planning a similar arrangement for their bayfront stadium, assembling about $240 million in private funds and persuading the city to pay for some of the infrastructure. The Giants say that other team owners are rooting against their scheme, because it calls into question the profligate public subsidies. Some of the subsidies exceed capital and maintenance costs: If the White Sox fail to draw 1.5 million annual fans at New Comiskey Park in the 11th through 20th years of their lease, the state of Illinois is contractually obliged to cover the shortfall at the gate by buying upto 300,000 tickets. \n\n You'd expect that the public would get something, perhaps affordable seats, in return for subsidizing stadiums. Instead, the cheap seats in the new parks are scarcer. The Seattle Mariners' proposed park, for instance, will contain about one-fourth as many general-admission seats as the present location. This erosion of low-cost seats is a long-running trend.", "Diamonds in the Rough \n\n Fourscore and seven years ago, the first steel and concrete baseball palace opened for business. Philadelphia's Shibe Park, home to the Athletics and later the Phillies, was one of 13 urban ballparks built in the seven-year period now regarded as the golden age of ballpark architecture. All but three (Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, and Tiger Stadium) have since been razed. \n\n Replacing parks built of wood, these ballyards set new standards for size, fire safety, intimacy, and convenience. As places to watch ballgames, they were vastly superior to the post-World War II parks, especially the facilities designed in the late '60s and '70s that doubled as football stadiums. But these concrete monsters, plopped into vast parking lots in Houston, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and elsewhere, lack the character of the classic parks.", "For the new parks' charms, we should be thankful. But in actual size, the new ballyards are not intimate. All their amenities--elevators, wider concourses, abundant toilets (especially for women), bathrooms, escalators, plentiful food stands, and luxury suites--make them far larger than the parks they claim to emulate. These parks are larger than even the multipurpose hulks we all love to hate. Compare, for instance, the spanking new Ballpark at Arlington (49,100 seats), which rests on 13.6 acres, to Seattle's Kingdome, a 58,000-seat multipurpose stadium that opened in 1976 and covers 9.3 acres. (Ebbets Field, home to the Brooklyn Dodgers, occupied a mere 5.7 acres and seated 32,000.)", "Lately, the cost of stadiums has ranged from about $300 million to $500 million. The multipurpose stadium that the Yankees want built on Manhattan's lower west side tentatively carries a $1 billion price tag. Add the financing and maintenance costs, and even a midpriced project goes through the retractable roof. At one point, the cost of the Brewers' proposed stadium grew from $250 million to $845 million, and that's not counting the value of the land. \n\n The good news is that not every owner is demanding a castle for his team. All Pittsburgh Pirates owner Kevin McClatchy wants is a \"35,000-to-37,000-seat park with natural grass and no roof, bells, or whistles.\" Though his attitude is commendable, the proposed park will still cost about $200 million, and perhaps an equal amount in interest.", "Naturally, owners don't advertise their new parks as a means of making life better for elite ticketholders. They say that only a new stadium will allow them to make enough money to stay in town or to field a competitive team and to allow fans to savor that old-time baseball flavor in greater comfort and convenience. Local taxpayers tend to lay off this pitch--they have voted these measures down in Illinois, Washington state, California, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Politically savvy owners usually bypass the voters and tap state governments directly for the money.", "Larger and more lavish stadiums translate into greater land and construction costs. Operable roofs, such as those in Toronto's SkyDome, Phoenix's BankOne Ballpark, and those proposed for Seattle and Milwaukee, are budget-busters. Since most teams put up little (if any) of their own money, they have scant incentive to economize on the parks. In Seattle, Mariner management has demanded an operable roof even though the city has the driest weather in MLB outside California. The real problem with the Seattle climate is cold weather in spring and fall, but the unsealed roof won't make the park warmer or totally free of wind.", "A year later, a new--yet more genuinely old--ballpark arrived to dispel the gloom. Baltimore's Oriole Park at Camden Yards revived the idea of a quirkily asymmetrical, relatively intimate, steel-structured, city-friendly ballpark. \"Once this opens,\" predicted Commissioner of Baseball Bart Giamatti, \"everyone will want one like it.\" And so it came to be: Camden Yards' successors in Cleveland, Arlington (Texas), and Denver, and those designed for Milwaukee, Seattle, and San Francisco, take their cues from Baltimore's conceptual breakthrough. Even totally nontraditional parks, like those in Phoenix, Miami, and Tampa Bay, emulate the asymmetry of the Camden Yards outfield. It's almost as though a disembodied voice intoned, \"If you build it, they will copy.\"", "So too is the dramatic increase in luxury seating, which is the primary real reason for the ballpark-building boom. The real gold mines are the posh luxury suites that lease for between $30,000 and $200,000 a year (payable in advance). A comparable moneymaker is the club deck, just above the first-tier seating. These pricey sections are occupied usually on a season-ticket basis, and offer the best sightlines, roomier seats, and wait staff who peddle gourmet fare. \n\n The gilding doesn't end there: New parks also include members-only stadium clubs and on-premises bars and restaurants.", "\"If you put them in the wrong place, it's a colossal waste of money,\" says the planning director of the city of Cleveland. \"But if you put them in the right place, the benefits are phenomenal,\" \n\n Recent attendance patterns show that urban parks generate much better patronage than suburban ones or those in neither/nor locations. There are also strong indicators that suggest new urban parks have \"legs,\" retaining more of their patrons after the novelty wears off. But some teams deliberately seek isolated locations, where they can better monopolize parking revenues and game-related food, drink, and souvenir business. This is why the White Sox moated their park with 100 acres of parking, why the Milwaukee Brewers refuse to build downtown, and why the Mariners insisted on the most remote of Seattle's three ballpark-siting options.", "In the old parks, the structural columns stood within the seating areas, placing the upper-deck seats closer to the game. The trade-off was that these columns obstructed the view of some fans. Today's architects \"remedy\" the problem by placing the columns behind the seating areas, thus moving the upper decks back from the field. (It should be noted that the new parks' claim that they have no impaired-view seats is an overstatement.) \n\n Added tiers devoted to luxury seating at the new parks also push the upper deck away from the field. The retreat of that deck is a century-long process, but it can be stemmed. The Orioles pressed for several design changes that lowered Camden Yards' top deck and produced a middle-row viewing distance of 199 feet, about eight rows closer than Arlington's.", "Why should the public chip in? Taxpayer subsidies don't produce cheaper tickets--they produce more expensive tickets. The average admission price (not counting club seats and suites) rises about 35 percent when a team moves into new digs. And independent economists (i.e., those not hired by stadium proponents) discount the claim that new stadiums spur regional economic growth. \n\n But one compelling argument for subsidies is that new stadiums can pull their cities together when properly designed and sited. This requires a downtown or neighborhood location where lots of fans can take the bus or the train to the game; where they can walk to the stadium from work, hotels, restaurants, or bars; and where getting to the game is a communal event that is part of a broader urban experience. This is the case with older parks such as Wrigley Field and Fenway Park, and the new ones in Toronto, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Denver.", "Or compare heights: New Comiskey Park's roof is 146 feet above field level; old Comiskey Park was about 75 feet high. This is not ballpark trivia, but an indicator of fan experience: Upper-deck seats in the new, taller stadiums are farther away from the action. At Arlington, the fan sitting in the middle-row, upper-deck seat closest to home plate is 224 feet from the batter, compared to 125 feet at Tiger Stadium, a park with 4,300 more seats. \n\n Why are upper-deck seats in the new parks so far from the game? Two reasons: column placement and luxury seating.", "Chicago's New Comiskey Park, which opened in 1991, attempted to address the character question with a superficial postmodern facade that in some ways resembled the exterior of the golden-era park it replaced. New Comiskey was marketed as an old-fashioned park with all the modern conveniences. But inside, it was still a symmetrical concrete monster, and it sat in the middle of a 7,000-car parking lot rather than in an urban neighborhood.", "While Camden Yards and its offspring are almost universally praised, some of them don't deserve the hype. The most annoying hype is that all the new parks are intimate, and that every seat is better at the new place than the old. Intimacy has two aspects--actual size and the subjective perception of size and scale. A good architect can ace the second part of the test through convincing forms, good proportions, and attractive materials. The exposed steelwork, brick, stone, tile, and well-placed wall openings of the new parks beat the cold and sterile stadiums of a generation ago." ], [ "Modern conveniences aside, the new baseball shrines are a mixed bag. Most are visually impressive, boast interestingly shaped playing fields, and start off as box-office hits. But too many of them are large and expensive, tend to live on the dole, and are hampered by seat layouts that create a caste system among fans. At their best, they strengthen their cities; at their worst, they exploit them. \n\n The decision-making process behind the financing and building of new ballparks has become predictable, as have the designs. But the good news is that our stadium boom is far from over. If owners and public agencies can be persuaded to take a longer view of stadium economics and community concerns, we may yet see parks that better unite traditional character with modern convenience.", "While Camden Yards and its offspring are almost universally praised, some of them don't deserve the hype. The most annoying hype is that all the new parks are intimate, and that every seat is better at the new place than the old. Intimacy has two aspects--actual size and the subjective perception of size and scale. A good architect can ace the second part of the test through convincing forms, good proportions, and attractive materials. The exposed steelwork, brick, stone, tile, and well-placed wall openings of the new parks beat the cold and sterile stadiums of a generation ago.", "For the new parks' charms, we should be thankful. But in actual size, the new ballyards are not intimate. All their amenities--elevators, wider concourses, abundant toilets (especially for women), bathrooms, escalators, plentiful food stands, and luxury suites--make them far larger than the parks they claim to emulate. These parks are larger than even the multipurpose hulks we all love to hate. Compare, for instance, the spanking new Ballpark at Arlington (49,100 seats), which rests on 13.6 acres, to Seattle's Kingdome, a 58,000-seat multipurpose stadium that opened in 1976 and covers 9.3 acres. (Ebbets Field, home to the Brooklyn Dodgers, occupied a mere 5.7 acres and seated 32,000.)", "In the old parks, the structural columns stood within the seating areas, placing the upper-deck seats closer to the game. The trade-off was that these columns obstructed the view of some fans. Today's architects \"remedy\" the problem by placing the columns behind the seating areas, thus moving the upper decks back from the field. (It should be noted that the new parks' claim that they have no impaired-view seats is an overstatement.) \n\n Added tiers devoted to luxury seating at the new parks also push the upper deck away from the field. The retreat of that deck is a century-long process, but it can be stemmed. The Orioles pressed for several design changes that lowered Camden Yards' top deck and produced a middle-row viewing distance of 199 feet, about eight rows closer than Arlington's.", "Design references to golden-age ballparks are only one parallel between that period and ours. We are also matching that era's frenzied pace of construction: Twenty-six of Major League Baseball's 32 franchises occupy a park that is less than 10 years old; has been, or will be, extensively remodeled; or hope to move into a new one soon. \n\n One of the classic parks' merits was that they were unsubsidized. Team owners bought land and paid for stadium construction--some even built trolley lines to transport fans to the games. In all but two cases during the last 65 years, taxpayers have covered most or all of the costs of stadium building.", "Why should the public chip in? Taxpayer subsidies don't produce cheaper tickets--they produce more expensive tickets. The average admission price (not counting club seats and suites) rises about 35 percent when a team moves into new digs. And independent economists (i.e., those not hired by stadium proponents) discount the claim that new stadiums spur regional economic growth. \n\n But one compelling argument for subsidies is that new stadiums can pull their cities together when properly designed and sited. This requires a downtown or neighborhood location where lots of fans can take the bus or the train to the game; where they can walk to the stadium from work, hotels, restaurants, or bars; and where getting to the game is a communal event that is part of a broader urban experience. This is the case with older parks such as Wrigley Field and Fenway Park, and the new ones in Toronto, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Denver.", "Or compare heights: New Comiskey Park's roof is 146 feet above field level; old Comiskey Park was about 75 feet high. This is not ballpark trivia, but an indicator of fan experience: Upper-deck seats in the new, taller stadiums are farther away from the action. At Arlington, the fan sitting in the middle-row, upper-deck seat closest to home plate is 224 feet from the batter, compared to 125 feet at Tiger Stadium, a park with 4,300 more seats. \n\n Why are upper-deck seats in the new parks so far from the game? Two reasons: column placement and luxury seating.", "The San Francisco Giants are planning a similar arrangement for their bayfront stadium, assembling about $240 million in private funds and persuading the city to pay for some of the infrastructure. The Giants say that other team owners are rooting against their scheme, because it calls into question the profligate public subsidies. Some of the subsidies exceed capital and maintenance costs: If the White Sox fail to draw 1.5 million annual fans at New Comiskey Park in the 11th through 20th years of their lease, the state of Illinois is contractually obliged to cover the shortfall at the gate by buying upto 300,000 tickets. \n\n You'd expect that the public would get something, perhaps affordable seats, in return for subsidizing stadiums. Instead, the cheap seats in the new parks are scarcer. The Seattle Mariners' proposed park, for instance, will contain about one-fourth as many general-admission seats as the present location. This erosion of low-cost seats is a long-running trend.", "Diamonds in the Rough \n\n Fourscore and seven years ago, the first steel and concrete baseball palace opened for business. Philadelphia's Shibe Park, home to the Athletics and later the Phillies, was one of 13 urban ballparks built in the seven-year period now regarded as the golden age of ballpark architecture. All but three (Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, and Tiger Stadium) have since been razed. \n\n Replacing parks built of wood, these ballyards set new standards for size, fire safety, intimacy, and convenience. As places to watch ballgames, they were vastly superior to the post-World War II parks, especially the facilities designed in the late '60s and '70s that doubled as football stadiums. But these concrete monsters, plopped into vast parking lots in Houston, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and elsewhere, lack the character of the classic parks.", "Lately, the cost of stadiums has ranged from about $300 million to $500 million. The multipurpose stadium that the Yankees want built on Manhattan's lower west side tentatively carries a $1 billion price tag. Add the financing and maintenance costs, and even a midpriced project goes through the retractable roof. At one point, the cost of the Brewers' proposed stadium grew from $250 million to $845 million, and that's not counting the value of the land. \n\n The good news is that not every owner is demanding a castle for his team. All Pittsburgh Pirates owner Kevin McClatchy wants is a \"35,000-to-37,000-seat park with natural grass and no roof, bells, or whistles.\" Though his attitude is commendable, the proposed park will still cost about $200 million, and perhaps an equal amount in interest.", "Chicago's New Comiskey Park, which opened in 1991, attempted to address the character question with a superficial postmodern facade that in some ways resembled the exterior of the golden-era park it replaced. New Comiskey was marketed as an old-fashioned park with all the modern conveniences. But inside, it was still a symmetrical concrete monster, and it sat in the middle of a 7,000-car parking lot rather than in an urban neighborhood.", "\"If you put them in the wrong place, it's a colossal waste of money,\" says the planning director of the city of Cleveland. \"But if you put them in the right place, the benefits are phenomenal,\" \n\n Recent attendance patterns show that urban parks generate much better patronage than suburban ones or those in neither/nor locations. There are also strong indicators that suggest new urban parks have \"legs,\" retaining more of their patrons after the novelty wears off. But some teams deliberately seek isolated locations, where they can better monopolize parking revenues and game-related food, drink, and souvenir business. This is why the White Sox moated their park with 100 acres of parking, why the Milwaukee Brewers refuse to build downtown, and why the Mariners insisted on the most remote of Seattle's three ballpark-siting options.", "Larger and more lavish stadiums translate into greater land and construction costs. Operable roofs, such as those in Toronto's SkyDome, Phoenix's BankOne Ballpark, and those proposed for Seattle and Milwaukee, are budget-busters. Since most teams put up little (if any) of their own money, they have scant incentive to economize on the parks. In Seattle, Mariner management has demanded an operable roof even though the city has the driest weather in MLB outside California. The real problem with the Seattle climate is cold weather in spring and fall, but the unsealed roof won't make the park warmer or totally free of wind.", "So too is the dramatic increase in luxury seating, which is the primary real reason for the ballpark-building boom. The real gold mines are the posh luxury suites that lease for between $30,000 and $200,000 a year (payable in advance). A comparable moneymaker is the club deck, just above the first-tier seating. These pricey sections are occupied usually on a season-ticket basis, and offer the best sightlines, roomier seats, and wait staff who peddle gourmet fare. \n\n The gilding doesn't end there: New parks also include members-only stadium clubs and on-premises bars and restaurants.", "Naturally, owners don't advertise their new parks as a means of making life better for elite ticketholders. They say that only a new stadium will allow them to make enough money to stay in town or to field a competitive team and to allow fans to savor that old-time baseball flavor in greater comfort and convenience. Local taxpayers tend to lay off this pitch--they have voted these measures down in Illinois, Washington state, California, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Politically savvy owners usually bypass the voters and tap state governments directly for the money.", "A year later, a new--yet more genuinely old--ballpark arrived to dispel the gloom. Baltimore's Oriole Park at Camden Yards revived the idea of a quirkily asymmetrical, relatively intimate, steel-structured, city-friendly ballpark. \"Once this opens,\" predicted Commissioner of Baseball Bart Giamatti, \"everyone will want one like it.\" And so it came to be: Camden Yards' successors in Cleveland, Arlington (Texas), and Denver, and those designed for Milwaukee, Seattle, and San Francisco, take their cues from Baltimore's conceptual breakthrough. Even totally nontraditional parks, like those in Phoenix, Miami, and Tampa Bay, emulate the asymmetry of the Camden Yards outfield. It's almost as though a disembodied voice intoned, \"If you build it, they will copy.\"" ], [ "Modern conveniences aside, the new baseball shrines are a mixed bag. Most are visually impressive, boast interestingly shaped playing fields, and start off as box-office hits. But too many of them are large and expensive, tend to live on the dole, and are hampered by seat layouts that create a caste system among fans. At their best, they strengthen their cities; at their worst, they exploit them. \n\n The decision-making process behind the financing and building of new ballparks has become predictable, as have the designs. But the good news is that our stadium boom is far from over. If owners and public agencies can be persuaded to take a longer view of stadium economics and community concerns, we may yet see parks that better unite traditional character with modern convenience.", "Design references to golden-age ballparks are only one parallel between that period and ours. We are also matching that era's frenzied pace of construction: Twenty-six of Major League Baseball's 32 franchises occupy a park that is less than 10 years old; has been, or will be, extensively remodeled; or hope to move into a new one soon. \n\n One of the classic parks' merits was that they were unsubsidized. Team owners bought land and paid for stadium construction--some even built trolley lines to transport fans to the games. In all but two cases during the last 65 years, taxpayers have covered most or all of the costs of stadium building.", "\"If you put them in the wrong place, it's a colossal waste of money,\" says the planning director of the city of Cleveland. \"But if you put them in the right place, the benefits are phenomenal,\" \n\n Recent attendance patterns show that urban parks generate much better patronage than suburban ones or those in neither/nor locations. There are also strong indicators that suggest new urban parks have \"legs,\" retaining more of their patrons after the novelty wears off. But some teams deliberately seek isolated locations, where they can better monopolize parking revenues and game-related food, drink, and souvenir business. This is why the White Sox moated their park with 100 acres of parking, why the Milwaukee Brewers refuse to build downtown, and why the Mariners insisted on the most remote of Seattle's three ballpark-siting options.", "For the new parks' charms, we should be thankful. But in actual size, the new ballyards are not intimate. All their amenities--elevators, wider concourses, abundant toilets (especially for women), bathrooms, escalators, plentiful food stands, and luxury suites--make them far larger than the parks they claim to emulate. These parks are larger than even the multipurpose hulks we all love to hate. Compare, for instance, the spanking new Ballpark at Arlington (49,100 seats), which rests on 13.6 acres, to Seattle's Kingdome, a 58,000-seat multipurpose stadium that opened in 1976 and covers 9.3 acres. (Ebbets Field, home to the Brooklyn Dodgers, occupied a mere 5.7 acres and seated 32,000.)", "A year later, a new--yet more genuinely old--ballpark arrived to dispel the gloom. Baltimore's Oriole Park at Camden Yards revived the idea of a quirkily asymmetrical, relatively intimate, steel-structured, city-friendly ballpark. \"Once this opens,\" predicted Commissioner of Baseball Bart Giamatti, \"everyone will want one like it.\" And so it came to be: Camden Yards' successors in Cleveland, Arlington (Texas), and Denver, and those designed for Milwaukee, Seattle, and San Francisco, take their cues from Baltimore's conceptual breakthrough. Even totally nontraditional parks, like those in Phoenix, Miami, and Tampa Bay, emulate the asymmetry of the Camden Yards outfield. It's almost as though a disembodied voice intoned, \"If you build it, they will copy.\"", "Chicago's New Comiskey Park, which opened in 1991, attempted to address the character question with a superficial postmodern facade that in some ways resembled the exterior of the golden-era park it replaced. New Comiskey was marketed as an old-fashioned park with all the modern conveniences. But inside, it was still a symmetrical concrete monster, and it sat in the middle of a 7,000-car parking lot rather than in an urban neighborhood.", "In the old parks, the structural columns stood within the seating areas, placing the upper-deck seats closer to the game. The trade-off was that these columns obstructed the view of some fans. Today's architects \"remedy\" the problem by placing the columns behind the seating areas, thus moving the upper decks back from the field. (It should be noted that the new parks' claim that they have no impaired-view seats is an overstatement.) \n\n Added tiers devoted to luxury seating at the new parks also push the upper deck away from the field. The retreat of that deck is a century-long process, but it can be stemmed. The Orioles pressed for several design changes that lowered Camden Yards' top deck and produced a middle-row viewing distance of 199 feet, about eight rows closer than Arlington's.", "So too is the dramatic increase in luxury seating, which is the primary real reason for the ballpark-building boom. The real gold mines are the posh luxury suites that lease for between $30,000 and $200,000 a year (payable in advance). A comparable moneymaker is the club deck, just above the first-tier seating. These pricey sections are occupied usually on a season-ticket basis, and offer the best sightlines, roomier seats, and wait staff who peddle gourmet fare. \n\n The gilding doesn't end there: New parks also include members-only stadium clubs and on-premises bars and restaurants.", "While Camden Yards and its offspring are almost universally praised, some of them don't deserve the hype. The most annoying hype is that all the new parks are intimate, and that every seat is better at the new place than the old. Intimacy has two aspects--actual size and the subjective perception of size and scale. A good architect can ace the second part of the test through convincing forms, good proportions, and attractive materials. The exposed steelwork, brick, stone, tile, and well-placed wall openings of the new parks beat the cold and sterile stadiums of a generation ago.", "Diamonds in the Rough \n\n Fourscore and seven years ago, the first steel and concrete baseball palace opened for business. Philadelphia's Shibe Park, home to the Athletics and later the Phillies, was one of 13 urban ballparks built in the seven-year period now regarded as the golden age of ballpark architecture. All but three (Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, and Tiger Stadium) have since been razed. \n\n Replacing parks built of wood, these ballyards set new standards for size, fire safety, intimacy, and convenience. As places to watch ballgames, they were vastly superior to the post-World War II parks, especially the facilities designed in the late '60s and '70s that doubled as football stadiums. But these concrete monsters, plopped into vast parking lots in Houston, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and elsewhere, lack the character of the classic parks.", "The San Francisco Giants are planning a similar arrangement for their bayfront stadium, assembling about $240 million in private funds and persuading the city to pay for some of the infrastructure. The Giants say that other team owners are rooting against their scheme, because it calls into question the profligate public subsidies. Some of the subsidies exceed capital and maintenance costs: If the White Sox fail to draw 1.5 million annual fans at New Comiskey Park in the 11th through 20th years of their lease, the state of Illinois is contractually obliged to cover the shortfall at the gate by buying upto 300,000 tickets. \n\n You'd expect that the public would get something, perhaps affordable seats, in return for subsidizing stadiums. Instead, the cheap seats in the new parks are scarcer. The Seattle Mariners' proposed park, for instance, will contain about one-fourth as many general-admission seats as the present location. This erosion of low-cost seats is a long-running trend.", "Naturally, owners don't advertise their new parks as a means of making life better for elite ticketholders. They say that only a new stadium will allow them to make enough money to stay in town or to field a competitive team and to allow fans to savor that old-time baseball flavor in greater comfort and convenience. Local taxpayers tend to lay off this pitch--they have voted these measures down in Illinois, Washington state, California, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Politically savvy owners usually bypass the voters and tap state governments directly for the money.", "Or compare heights: New Comiskey Park's roof is 146 feet above field level; old Comiskey Park was about 75 feet high. This is not ballpark trivia, but an indicator of fan experience: Upper-deck seats in the new, taller stadiums are farther away from the action. At Arlington, the fan sitting in the middle-row, upper-deck seat closest to home plate is 224 feet from the batter, compared to 125 feet at Tiger Stadium, a park with 4,300 more seats. \n\n Why are upper-deck seats in the new parks so far from the game? Two reasons: column placement and luxury seating.", "Why should the public chip in? Taxpayer subsidies don't produce cheaper tickets--they produce more expensive tickets. The average admission price (not counting club seats and suites) rises about 35 percent when a team moves into new digs. And independent economists (i.e., those not hired by stadium proponents) discount the claim that new stadiums spur regional economic growth. \n\n But one compelling argument for subsidies is that new stadiums can pull their cities together when properly designed and sited. This requires a downtown or neighborhood location where lots of fans can take the bus or the train to the game; where they can walk to the stadium from work, hotels, restaurants, or bars; and where getting to the game is a communal event that is part of a broader urban experience. This is the case with older parks such as Wrigley Field and Fenway Park, and the new ones in Toronto, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Denver.", "Lately, the cost of stadiums has ranged from about $300 million to $500 million. The multipurpose stadium that the Yankees want built on Manhattan's lower west side tentatively carries a $1 billion price tag. Add the financing and maintenance costs, and even a midpriced project goes through the retractable roof. At one point, the cost of the Brewers' proposed stadium grew from $250 million to $845 million, and that's not counting the value of the land. \n\n The good news is that not every owner is demanding a castle for his team. All Pittsburgh Pirates owner Kevin McClatchy wants is a \"35,000-to-37,000-seat park with natural grass and no roof, bells, or whistles.\" Though his attitude is commendable, the proposed park will still cost about $200 million, and perhaps an equal amount in interest.", "Larger and more lavish stadiums translate into greater land and construction costs. Operable roofs, such as those in Toronto's SkyDome, Phoenix's BankOne Ballpark, and those proposed for Seattle and Milwaukee, are budget-busters. Since most teams put up little (if any) of their own money, they have scant incentive to economize on the parks. In Seattle, Mariner management has demanded an operable roof even though the city has the driest weather in MLB outside California. The real problem with the Seattle climate is cold weather in spring and fall, but the unsealed roof won't make the park warmer or totally free of wind." ], [ "Modern conveniences aside, the new baseball shrines are a mixed bag. Most are visually impressive, boast interestingly shaped playing fields, and start off as box-office hits. But too many of them are large and expensive, tend to live on the dole, and are hampered by seat layouts that create a caste system among fans. At their best, they strengthen their cities; at their worst, they exploit them. \n\n The decision-making process behind the financing and building of new ballparks has become predictable, as have the designs. But the good news is that our stadium boom is far from over. If owners and public agencies can be persuaded to take a longer view of stadium economics and community concerns, we may yet see parks that better unite traditional character with modern convenience.", "\"If you put them in the wrong place, it's a colossal waste of money,\" says the planning director of the city of Cleveland. \"But if you put them in the right place, the benefits are phenomenal,\" \n\n Recent attendance patterns show that urban parks generate much better patronage than suburban ones or those in neither/nor locations. There are also strong indicators that suggest new urban parks have \"legs,\" retaining more of their patrons after the novelty wears off. But some teams deliberately seek isolated locations, where they can better monopolize parking revenues and game-related food, drink, and souvenir business. This is why the White Sox moated their park with 100 acres of parking, why the Milwaukee Brewers refuse to build downtown, and why the Mariners insisted on the most remote of Seattle's three ballpark-siting options.", "For the new parks' charms, we should be thankful. But in actual size, the new ballyards are not intimate. All their amenities--elevators, wider concourses, abundant toilets (especially for women), bathrooms, escalators, plentiful food stands, and luxury suites--make them far larger than the parks they claim to emulate. These parks are larger than even the multipurpose hulks we all love to hate. Compare, for instance, the spanking new Ballpark at Arlington (49,100 seats), which rests on 13.6 acres, to Seattle's Kingdome, a 58,000-seat multipurpose stadium that opened in 1976 and covers 9.3 acres. (Ebbets Field, home to the Brooklyn Dodgers, occupied a mere 5.7 acres and seated 32,000.)", "Chicago's New Comiskey Park, which opened in 1991, attempted to address the character question with a superficial postmodern facade that in some ways resembled the exterior of the golden-era park it replaced. New Comiskey was marketed as an old-fashioned park with all the modern conveniences. But inside, it was still a symmetrical concrete monster, and it sat in the middle of a 7,000-car parking lot rather than in an urban neighborhood.", "In the old parks, the structural columns stood within the seating areas, placing the upper-deck seats closer to the game. The trade-off was that these columns obstructed the view of some fans. Today's architects \"remedy\" the problem by placing the columns behind the seating areas, thus moving the upper decks back from the field. (It should be noted that the new parks' claim that they have no impaired-view seats is an overstatement.) \n\n Added tiers devoted to luxury seating at the new parks also push the upper deck away from the field. The retreat of that deck is a century-long process, but it can be stemmed. The Orioles pressed for several design changes that lowered Camden Yards' top deck and produced a middle-row viewing distance of 199 feet, about eight rows closer than Arlington's.", "Design references to golden-age ballparks are only one parallel between that period and ours. We are also matching that era's frenzied pace of construction: Twenty-six of Major League Baseball's 32 franchises occupy a park that is less than 10 years old; has been, or will be, extensively remodeled; or hope to move into a new one soon. \n\n One of the classic parks' merits was that they were unsubsidized. Team owners bought land and paid for stadium construction--some even built trolley lines to transport fans to the games. In all but two cases during the last 65 years, taxpayers have covered most or all of the costs of stadium building.", "A year later, a new--yet more genuinely old--ballpark arrived to dispel the gloom. Baltimore's Oriole Park at Camden Yards revived the idea of a quirkily asymmetrical, relatively intimate, steel-structured, city-friendly ballpark. \"Once this opens,\" predicted Commissioner of Baseball Bart Giamatti, \"everyone will want one like it.\" And so it came to be: Camden Yards' successors in Cleveland, Arlington (Texas), and Denver, and those designed for Milwaukee, Seattle, and San Francisco, take their cues from Baltimore's conceptual breakthrough. Even totally nontraditional parks, like those in Phoenix, Miami, and Tampa Bay, emulate the asymmetry of the Camden Yards outfield. It's almost as though a disembodied voice intoned, \"If you build it, they will copy.\"", "While Camden Yards and its offspring are almost universally praised, some of them don't deserve the hype. The most annoying hype is that all the new parks are intimate, and that every seat is better at the new place than the old. Intimacy has two aspects--actual size and the subjective perception of size and scale. A good architect can ace the second part of the test through convincing forms, good proportions, and attractive materials. The exposed steelwork, brick, stone, tile, and well-placed wall openings of the new parks beat the cold and sterile stadiums of a generation ago.", "Diamonds in the Rough \n\n Fourscore and seven years ago, the first steel and concrete baseball palace opened for business. Philadelphia's Shibe Park, home to the Athletics and later the Phillies, was one of 13 urban ballparks built in the seven-year period now regarded as the golden age of ballpark architecture. All but three (Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, and Tiger Stadium) have since been razed. \n\n Replacing parks built of wood, these ballyards set new standards for size, fire safety, intimacy, and convenience. As places to watch ballgames, they were vastly superior to the post-World War II parks, especially the facilities designed in the late '60s and '70s that doubled as football stadiums. But these concrete monsters, plopped into vast parking lots in Houston, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and elsewhere, lack the character of the classic parks.", "Or compare heights: New Comiskey Park's roof is 146 feet above field level; old Comiskey Park was about 75 feet high. This is not ballpark trivia, but an indicator of fan experience: Upper-deck seats in the new, taller stadiums are farther away from the action. At Arlington, the fan sitting in the middle-row, upper-deck seat closest to home plate is 224 feet from the batter, compared to 125 feet at Tiger Stadium, a park with 4,300 more seats. \n\n Why are upper-deck seats in the new parks so far from the game? Two reasons: column placement and luxury seating.", "Naturally, owners don't advertise their new parks as a means of making life better for elite ticketholders. They say that only a new stadium will allow them to make enough money to stay in town or to field a competitive team and to allow fans to savor that old-time baseball flavor in greater comfort and convenience. Local taxpayers tend to lay off this pitch--they have voted these measures down in Illinois, Washington state, California, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Politically savvy owners usually bypass the voters and tap state governments directly for the money.", "The San Francisco Giants are planning a similar arrangement for their bayfront stadium, assembling about $240 million in private funds and persuading the city to pay for some of the infrastructure. The Giants say that other team owners are rooting against their scheme, because it calls into question the profligate public subsidies. Some of the subsidies exceed capital and maintenance costs: If the White Sox fail to draw 1.5 million annual fans at New Comiskey Park in the 11th through 20th years of their lease, the state of Illinois is contractually obliged to cover the shortfall at the gate by buying upto 300,000 tickets. \n\n You'd expect that the public would get something, perhaps affordable seats, in return for subsidizing stadiums. Instead, the cheap seats in the new parks are scarcer. The Seattle Mariners' proposed park, for instance, will contain about one-fourth as many general-admission seats as the present location. This erosion of low-cost seats is a long-running trend.", "So too is the dramatic increase in luxury seating, which is the primary real reason for the ballpark-building boom. The real gold mines are the posh luxury suites that lease for between $30,000 and $200,000 a year (payable in advance). A comparable moneymaker is the club deck, just above the first-tier seating. These pricey sections are occupied usually on a season-ticket basis, and offer the best sightlines, roomier seats, and wait staff who peddle gourmet fare. \n\n The gilding doesn't end there: New parks also include members-only stadium clubs and on-premises bars and restaurants.", "Why should the public chip in? Taxpayer subsidies don't produce cheaper tickets--they produce more expensive tickets. The average admission price (not counting club seats and suites) rises about 35 percent when a team moves into new digs. And independent economists (i.e., those not hired by stadium proponents) discount the claim that new stadiums spur regional economic growth. \n\n But one compelling argument for subsidies is that new stadiums can pull their cities together when properly designed and sited. This requires a downtown or neighborhood location where lots of fans can take the bus or the train to the game; where they can walk to the stadium from work, hotels, restaurants, or bars; and where getting to the game is a communal event that is part of a broader urban experience. This is the case with older parks such as Wrigley Field and Fenway Park, and the new ones in Toronto, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Denver.", "Larger and more lavish stadiums translate into greater land and construction costs. Operable roofs, such as those in Toronto's SkyDome, Phoenix's BankOne Ballpark, and those proposed for Seattle and Milwaukee, are budget-busters. Since most teams put up little (if any) of their own money, they have scant incentive to economize on the parks. In Seattle, Mariner management has demanded an operable roof even though the city has the driest weather in MLB outside California. The real problem with the Seattle climate is cold weather in spring and fall, but the unsealed roof won't make the park warmer or totally free of wind.", "Lately, the cost of stadiums has ranged from about $300 million to $500 million. The multipurpose stadium that the Yankees want built on Manhattan's lower west side tentatively carries a $1 billion price tag. Add the financing and maintenance costs, and even a midpriced project goes through the retractable roof. At one point, the cost of the Brewers' proposed stadium grew from $250 million to $845 million, and that's not counting the value of the land. \n\n The good news is that not every owner is demanding a castle for his team. All Pittsburgh Pirates owner Kevin McClatchy wants is a \"35,000-to-37,000-seat park with natural grass and no roof, bells, or whistles.\" Though his attitude is commendable, the proposed park will still cost about $200 million, and perhaps an equal amount in interest." ] ]
valid	22102	[ "Why does Kimmy feel disdain for Steinhart?", "Why did Kimmy's wife leave him?", "What aspect of Kimmy's psychological state was beneficial to the long space flight?", "What is an example given of Kimmy's schizophrenic tendencies?", "Where had Kimmy arrived after waking from his slumber in the ship?", "Where was the music from the phonograph coming from?", "What did Kimmy do after getting dressed in the morning?", "What is the significance of Kimmy's trip?", "What did Kimmy realize that Steinhart was right about?" ]	[ [ "He refused to pilot a rocket", "His blond hair and pale skin", "He tried to halt the assignment", "He doesn't like therapists " ], [ "She was worried about his mental health issues", "She thought he was an extra terrestrial", "She knew he did not want to remain on Earth", "She thought he was neglectful" ], [ "His complete lack of anxiety", "His antisocial behaviors", "His tendency to dissociate into his own imagination", "His extreme lethargy and patience" ], [ "He believed an old faucet was a radium pistol ", "His questioning of the doctor's motives", "His dreaming of his wife during the flight", "He was imperceptive of time" ], [ "Mars", "Venus", "Korus", "Earth" ], [ "The bottom of the Valley Dor", "Kimmy was imagining the music", "Dr. Steinhart was playing it to study Kimmy's reaction", "Matai Shang's house" ], [ "Walked across a river", "Boarded the rocket", "Put some music on the phonograph", "Sat through a press briefing" ], [ "He will be the first man on Mars", "He will be the first trip to space in two years", "He will finally return home", "He is going to defeat the Plant Men" ], [ "He did indeed escape reality with his overactive imagination", "He was overjoyed to have made it to another planet", "He did feel younger after the trip", "He felt at home upon arriving" ] ]	[ 3, 3, 3, 1, 1, 2, 4, 1, 1 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "As they filed out of the briefing shack, Steinhart climbed into the\n command car with Kimball. Chance or design? Kimball wondered. The\n others, he noticed, were leaving both of them alone.\n\n\n “We haven’t gotten on too well, have we, Colonel?” Steinhart\n observed in a quiet voice.\n\n\n Kimball thought: He’s pale skinned and very blond. What is it that he\n reminds me of? Shouldn’t there be a diadem on his forehead? He smiled\n vaguely into the rumbling night. That’s what it was. Odd that he should\n have forgotten. How many rocket pilots, he wondered, were weaned on\n Burroughs’ books? And how many remembered now that the Thern priests all\n wore yellow wings and a circlet of gold with some fantastic jewel on\n their forehead?\n\n\n “We’ve done as well as could be expected,” he said.", "Steinhart reached for a cigaret and then stopped, remembering that\n Kimball had had to give them up because of the flight. Kimball caught\n the movement and half-smiled.\n\n\n “I didn’t try to kill the assignment for you, Kim,” the\n psych said.\n\n\n “It doesn’t matter now.”\n\n\n “No, I suppose not.”\n\n\n “You just didn’t think I was the man for the job.”\n\n\n “Your record is good all the way. You know that,” Steinhart\n [119]\n said. “It’s just some of the things——”\n\n\n Kimball said: “I talked too much.”\n\n\n “You had to.”\n\n\n “You wouldn’t think my secret life was so dangerous, would\n you,” the Colonel said smiling.\n\n\n “You were married, Kim. What happened?”", "On the dais nearby, listening to the PRO, but watching Kimball, sat\n Steinhart, the team analyst. Kimball returned his steady gaze thinking:\n They start out burning with desire to cure the human mind and end with\n the shadow of the images. The words become the fact, the therapy the\n aim. What could Steinhart know of longing? No, he thought, I’m not being\n fair. Steinhart was only doing his job.\n\n\n The big clock on the back wall of the briefing shack said three\n fifty-five. Zero minus one hour and five minutes.\n\n\n Kimball looked around the room at the pale faces, the open mouths. What\n have I to do with you now, he thought?\nOutside, the winter night lay cold and still over the Base. Floodlights\n spilled brilliance over the dunes and the scrubby earth, high fences\n casting laced shadows across the burning white expanses of\n ferroconcrete.", "“Thanks.” Vaguely, as though from across a deep and widening\n gulf.\n\n\n “What will you do?”\n\n\n “You know the answers as well as I,” the Colonel said\n impatiently. “Set up the camp and wait for the next rocket. If it\n comes.”\n\n\n “In two years.”\n\n\n “In two years,” the plastic figure said. Didn’t he know that\n it didn’t matter?\n\n\n He glanced at his watch. Zero minus fifty-six minutes.\n\n\n “Kim,” Steinhart said slowly. “There’s something you\n should know about. Something you really should be prepared for.”\n\n\n “Yes?” Disinterest in his voice now, Steinhart noted\n clinically. Natural under the circumstances? Or neurosis building up\n already?", "“More therapy?”\n\n\n “I’d like to know. This is for me.”\nKimball shrugged. “It didn’t work. She was a fine girl—but she\n finally told me it was no go. ‘You don’t live here’ was the\n way she put it.”\n\n\n “She knew you were a career officer; what did she\n expect——?”\n\n\n “That isn’t what she meant. You know that.”\n\n\n “Yes,” the psych said slowly. “I know that.”\n\n\n They rode in silence, across the dark Base, between the concrete sheds\n and the wooden barracks. Overhead, the stars like dust across the sky.\n Kimball, swathed in plastic, a fantastic figure not of earth, watched\n them wheel across the clear, deep night.\n\n\n “I wish you luck, Kim,” Steinhart said. “I mean\n that.”", "And his mother, tall and shadowy, standing on the porch of the rented\n cottage and saying exasperatedly: “\nWhy do you run off by\n yourself, Kimmy? I worry about you so——\n”\n\n\n And his sisters: “\nPlaying with his wooden swords and his radium\n pistol and never wanting to take his nose out of those awful\n books——\n”\n\n\n He dreamed of the low, beamed ceiling of the cottage, sweltering in the\n heat of the summer nights and the thick longing in his throat for red\n hills and a sky that burned deep blue through the long, long days and\n canals, clear and still. A land that he knew somehow never was, but\n which lived, for him, through some alchemy of the mind. He dreamed of\n Mars.\n\n\n And Steinhart: “\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\n”\nThe hours stretched into days, the days into months. Time wasn’t. Time\n was a deep night and a starshot void. And dreams.", "Silence. The rumble of the tires on the packed sand of the road, the\n murmur of the command car’s engine, spinning oilily, and lit by tiny\n sunbright flashes deep in the hollows of the hot metal.\n\n\n “You’re glad to be leaving, aren’t you—” Steinhart said\n finally. “Happy to be the first man to try for the\n planets——”\n\n\n Kimball nodded absently, wishing the man would be quiet. Mars, a dull\n rusty point of light low on the horizon, seemed to beckon.", "Kimmy’s eyes narrowed and he waded stealthily across the sacred river.\n That would be Matai Shang, the Father of Holy Therns—spreading his arms\n to the sunset and standing safely on his high balcony in the Golden\n Cliffs while the Plant Men gathered to attack the poor pilgrims Iss had\n brought to this cursed valley.\n\n\n “Sing me to sleep, lullaby of the leaves”—the phonograph\n sang. Kimmy stepped cautiously ashore and moved into the cover of a\n clump of willows. The sky was darkening fast. Other stars were shining\n through. There wasn’t much time left.\nKimball stood now in the bright glare of the briefing shack, a strange\n figure in blood-colored plastic. The representatives of the press had\n been handed the mimeographed releases by the PRO and now they sat in\n silence, studying the red figure of the man who was to ride the rocket.", "“Our tests showed you to be a schizoid—well-compensated, of\n course. You know there’s no such thing as a\nnormal\nhuman being. We all\n have tendencies toward one or more types of psychoses. In your case the\n symptoms are an overly active imagination and in some cases an inability\n to distinguish reality from—well, fancy.”\nKimball turned to regard the psych\n coolly\n .\n “What’s reality, Steinhart? Do\nyou\nknow?”\n\n\n The analyst flushed. “No.”\n\n\n “I didn’t think so.”\n\n\n “You lived pretty much in your mind when you were a child,”\n Steinhart went on doggedly. “You were a solitary, a lonely\n child.”\n\n\n [120]\n Kimball was watching the sky again.\n\n\n Steinhart felt futile and out of his depth. “We know so little\n about the psychology of space-flight, Kim——”", "Then he stopped smiling and turned away from the window. It hadn’t been\n an easy path and what was coming up now was the hardest part. The goddam\n psychs were the toughest, always wanting him to bug out on the deal\n because of their brainwave graphs and word association tests and their\n Rorschach blots.\n\n\n “You’re a lonely man, Colonel Kimball——”\n\n\n “Too much imagination could be bad for this job.”\n\n\n How could you sit there with pentothal in your veins and wires running\n out of your head and tell them about the still waters of Korus, or the\n pennons flying from the twin towers of Greater Helium or the way the\n tiny, slanting sun gleamed at dawn through the rigging of a flyer?", "Kimball tried to see him in the black gloom. He hadn’t been asleep. It\n would have been hard to waste this last night that way. Instead he had\n been remembering. “All right, Sergeant,” he said.\n “Coming up.”\n\n\n He swung his feet to the bare boards and sat for a moment, wishing he\n hadn’t had to give up smoking. He could almost imagine the textured\n taste of the cigaret on his tongue.\n\n\n Oddly enough, he wasn’t tired. He wasn’t excited, either. And that was\n much stranger. He stood up and opened the window to look out into the\n desert night. Overhead the stars were brilliant and cold. Mars gleamed\n russet-colored against the sable sky. He smiled, remembering again. So\n long a road, he thought, from then to now.", "The keening sound of air over the wings brought a thrill. Below him, a\n great curving disk of reds and browns and yellows. He could see dust\n storms raging and the heavy, darkened lines of the canals.\n\n\n There was skill in his hands. He righted the rocket, balanced it. Began\n the tricky task of landing. It took all of his talent, all of his\n training. Ponderously, the ship settled into the iron sand; slowly, the\n internal fires died.\nKimball stood in the control room, his heart pounding. Slowly, the ports\n opened. Through the thick quartz he could see the endless plain. Reddish\n brown, empty. The basin of some long ago sea. The sky was a deep,\n burning blue with stars shining at midday at the zenith. It looked\n unreal, a painting of unworldly quiet and desolation.\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\nSteinhart was right, he thought vaguely. A tear streaked his cheek. He\n had never been so alone.", "He knew he should answer them, but he did not. Behind him he could hear\n the awful Plant Men approaching. He shivered with delicious horror.\n\n\n He stood very still, listening to his sisters talking, letting their\n voices carry down to where he hid from the dangers of the Valley Dor.\n\n\n “Where is that little brat, anyway?”\n\n\n “He always wanders off just at dinnertime and then we have to find\n him——”\n\n\n “Playing with that old faucet—” Mimicry. “‘My\n rad-ium pis-tol——’”\n\n\n “Cracked—just cracked. Oh, where IS he, anyway? Kimmm-eee, you\n AN-swer!”", "Something died in him. It wasn’t a faucet, it WAS a radium pistol. He\n looked at his sisters with dismay. They weren’t really his sisters. They\n were Therns, with their yellow hair and their pale skins. He and John\n Carter and Tars Tarkas had fought them many times, piling their bodies\n for barricades and weaving a flashing pattern of skillful swords in the\n shifting light of the two moons.\n\n\n [121]\n “Kimmmm—eeee Mom’s going to be mad at you! Answer us!”\n\n\n If only Tars Tarkas would come now. If only the great Green Jeddak would\n come splashing across the stream on his huge thoat, his two swords\n clashing——\n\n\n “He’s up there in that clump of willows—hiding!”\n\n\n “Kimmy! You come down here this instant!”", "Kimball snapped on a light and looked at his watch. 0310. Zero minus one\n fifty. He opened the steel locker and began to dress.\nThe water swirled warm and velvety around his ankles. There, behind\n that madrone, Kimmy thought. Was that a Plant Man? The thick white trunk\n and the grasping, blood-sucking arms——\n\n\n The radium pistol’s weight made his wrist ache, but he clung to it\n tightly, knowing that he\n [117]\n could never cope with a Plant Man with a sword\n alone. The certainty of coming battle made him smile a little, the way\n John Carter would smile if he were here in the Valley Dor ready to\n attack the white Therns and their Plant Men.", "They were thinking: Why him? Out of all the scores of\n applicants—because there are always applicants for a sure-death\n job—and all the qualified pilots, why this one?\n\n\n The Public Relations Officer was speaking now, reading from the mimeoed\n release as though these civilians couldn’t be trusted to get the sparse\n information given them straight without his help, given grudgingly and\n without expression.\n\n\n [118]\n Kimball listened, only half aware of what was being said. He watched the\n faces of the men sitting on the rows of folding chairs, saw their eyes\n like wounds, red from the early morning hour and the murmuring reception\n of the night before in the Officers’ Club. They are wondering how\nI\nfeel, he was thinking. And asking themselves why I want to go.", "They topped the last hillock and dropped down into the lighted bowl of\n the launching site. The rocket towered, winged and monstrously checkered\n in white and orange, against the first flickerings of the false dawn.\nKimmy saw the girls before they saw him. In their new, low waisted\n middies and skirts, they looked strange and out of place standing by the\n pebbled shore of the River Iss.\n\n\n They were his sisters, Rose and Margaret. Older than he at fifteen and\n seventeen. But they walked by the river and into danger. Behind him he\n could hear the rustling sound of the Plant Men as the evening breeze\n came up.\n\n\n “Kimm-eeeee—”\n\n\n They were calling him. In the deepening dusk their voices carried far\n down the river. “Kimmmmm—eeeeeeeeee—”", "From downstream came the faint sounds of music. It might have been a\n phonograph playing in one of the summer cabins with names like Polly Ann\n Roost and Patches and Seventh Heaven, but to Kimmy it was the hated cry\n of the Father of Therns calling the dreadful Plant Men to their feast of\n victims borne into\n [116]\n this Valley Dor by the mysterious Iss.\n\n\n Kimmy shifted the heavy Martian pistol into his left hand and checked\n his harness. A soft smile touched his lips. He was well armed; there was\n nothing he had to fear from the Plant Men. His bare feet turned\n up-stream, away from the sound of the phonograph, toward the shallows in\n the river that would permit him to cross and continue his search along\n the base of the Golden Cliffs—\nThe sergeant's voice cut through the pre-dawn darkness. “Oh, three\n hundred, Colonel.... Briefing in thirty minutes.”", "For a moment, Kimmy felt a thrill of apprehension. The deepening\n stillness of the river was closing in around him. Even the music from\n the phonograph was very, very faint. Above him, the great vault of the\n sky was changing from pink to gray to dusty blue. A bright star was\n breaking through the curtain of fading light. He knew it was Venus, the\n Evening Star. But let it be Earth, he thought. And instead of white, let\n it be the color of an emerald.\n\n\n He paused in midstream, letting the warm water riffle around his feet.\n Looking up at the green beacon of his home planet, he thought: I’ve left\n all that behind me. It was never really what I wanted. Mars is where I\n belong. With my friends, Tars Tarkas the great Green Jeddak, and Carter,\n the Warlord, and all the beautiful brave people.\nThe phonograph sang with Vallee’s voice: “Cradle me where\n southern skies can watch me with a million eyes——”", "He dropped to the sand and dug his hands into the dry powdery soil. He\n could scarcely see now, for blackness was flickering at the edges of his\n vision and his failing heart and lungs were near collapse.\nKimmm-eee!\n[123]\n A huge green warrior on a gray monster of a thoat was beckoning to him.\n Pointing toward the low hills on the oddly near horizon.\nKimmmm-eeeee!\nThe voice was thin and distant on the icy wind. Kimball knew that voice.\n He knew it from long ago in the Valley Dor, from the shores of the Lost\n Sea of Korus where the tideless waters lay black and deep——\n\n\n He began stumbling across the empty, lifeless plain. He knew the voice,\n he knew the man, and he knew the hills that he must reach, quickly now,\n or die." ], [ "Steinhart reached for a cigaret and then stopped, remembering that\n Kimball had had to give them up because of the flight. Kimball caught\n the movement and half-smiled.\n\n\n “I didn’t try to kill the assignment for you, Kim,” the\n psych said.\n\n\n “It doesn’t matter now.”\n\n\n “No, I suppose not.”\n\n\n “You just didn’t think I was the man for the job.”\n\n\n “Your record is good all the way. You know that,” Steinhart\n [119]\n said. “It’s just some of the things——”\n\n\n Kimball said: “I talked too much.”\n\n\n “You had to.”\n\n\n “You wouldn’t think my secret life was so dangerous, would\n you,” the Colonel said smiling.\n\n\n “You were married, Kim. What happened?”", "Kimball tried to see him in the black gloom. He hadn’t been asleep. It\n would have been hard to waste this last night that way. Instead he had\n been remembering. “All right, Sergeant,” he said.\n “Coming up.”\n\n\n He swung his feet to the bare boards and sat for a moment, wishing he\n hadn’t had to give up smoking. He could almost imagine the textured\n taste of the cigaret on his tongue.\n\n\n Oddly enough, he wasn’t tired. He wasn’t excited, either. And that was\n much stranger. He stood up and opened the window to look out into the\n desert night. Overhead the stars were brilliant and cold. Mars gleamed\n russet-colored against the sable sky. He smiled, remembering again. So\n long a road, he thought, from then to now.", "And his mother, tall and shadowy, standing on the porch of the rented\n cottage and saying exasperatedly: “\nWhy do you run off by\n yourself, Kimmy? I worry about you so——\n”\n\n\n And his sisters: “\nPlaying with his wooden swords and his radium\n pistol and never wanting to take his nose out of those awful\n books——\n”\n\n\n He dreamed of the low, beamed ceiling of the cottage, sweltering in the\n heat of the summer nights and the thick longing in his throat for red\n hills and a sky that burned deep blue through the long, long days and\n canals, clear and still. A land that he knew somehow never was, but\n which lived, for him, through some alchemy of the mind. He dreamed of\n Mars.\n\n\n And Steinhart: “\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\n”\nThe hours stretched into days, the days into months. Time wasn’t. Time\n was a deep night and a starshot void. And dreams.", "“More therapy?”\n\n\n “I’d like to know. This is for me.”\nKimball shrugged. “It didn’t work. She was a fine girl—but she\n finally told me it was no go. ‘You don’t live here’ was the\n way she put it.”\n\n\n “She knew you were a career officer; what did she\n expect——?”\n\n\n “That isn’t what she meant. You know that.”\n\n\n “Yes,” the psych said slowly. “I know that.”\n\n\n They rode in silence, across the dark Base, between the concrete sheds\n and the wooden barracks. Overhead, the stars like dust across the sky.\n Kimball, swathed in plastic, a fantastic figure not of earth, watched\n them wheel across the clear, deep night.\n\n\n “I wish you luck, Kim,” Steinhart said. “I mean\n that.”", "Kimmy’s eyes narrowed and he waded stealthily across the sacred river.\n That would be Matai Shang, the Father of Holy Therns—spreading his arms\n to the sunset and standing safely on his high balcony in the Golden\n Cliffs while the Plant Men gathered to attack the poor pilgrims Iss had\n brought to this cursed valley.\n\n\n “Sing me to sleep, lullaby of the leaves”—the phonograph\n sang. Kimmy stepped cautiously ashore and moved into the cover of a\n clump of willows. The sky was darkening fast. Other stars were shining\n through. There wasn’t much time left.\nKimball stood now in the bright glare of the briefing shack, a strange\n figure in blood-colored plastic. The representatives of the press had\n been handed the mimeographed releases by the PRO and now they sat in\n silence, studying the red figure of the man who was to ride the rocket.", "They topped the last hillock and dropped down into the lighted bowl of\n the launching site. The rocket towered, winged and monstrously checkered\n in white and orange, against the first flickerings of the false dawn.\nKimmy saw the girls before they saw him. In their new, low waisted\n middies and skirts, they looked strange and out of place standing by the\n pebbled shore of the River Iss.\n\n\n They were his sisters, Rose and Margaret. Older than he at fifteen and\n seventeen. But they walked by the river and into danger. Behind him he\n could hear the rustling sound of the Plant Men as the evening breeze\n came up.\n\n\n “Kimm-eeeee—”\n\n\n They were calling him. In the deepening dusk their voices carried far\n down the river. “Kimmmmm—eeeeeeeeee—”", "For a moment, Kimmy felt a thrill of apprehension. The deepening\n stillness of the river was closing in around him. Even the music from\n the phonograph was very, very faint. Above him, the great vault of the\n sky was changing from pink to gray to dusty blue. A bright star was\n breaking through the curtain of fading light. He knew it was Venus, the\n Evening Star. But let it be Earth, he thought. And instead of white, let\n it be the color of an emerald.\n\n\n He paused in midstream, letting the warm water riffle around his feet.\n Looking up at the green beacon of his home planet, he thought: I’ve left\n all that behind me. It was never really what I wanted. Mars is where I\n belong. With my friends, Tars Tarkas the great Green Jeddak, and Carter,\n the Warlord, and all the beautiful brave people.\nThe phonograph sang with Vallee’s voice: “Cradle me where\n southern skies can watch me with a million eyes——”", "Then he stopped smiling and turned away from the window. It hadn’t been\n an easy path and what was coming up now was the hardest part. The goddam\n psychs were the toughest, always wanting him to bug out on the deal\n because of their brainwave graphs and word association tests and their\n Rorschach blots.\n\n\n “You’re a lonely man, Colonel Kimball——”\n\n\n “Too much imagination could be bad for this job.”\n\n\n How could you sit there with pentothal in your veins and wires running\n out of your head and tell them about the still waters of Korus, or the\n pennons flying from the twin towers of Greater Helium or the way the\n tiny, slanting sun gleamed at dawn through the rigging of a flyer?", "Something died in him. It wasn’t a faucet, it WAS a radium pistol. He\n looked at his sisters with dismay. They weren’t really his sisters. They\n were Therns, with their yellow hair and their pale skins. He and John\n Carter and Tars Tarkas had fought them many times, piling their bodies\n for barricades and weaving a flashing pattern of skillful swords in the\n shifting light of the two moons.\n\n\n [121]\n “Kimmmm—eeee Mom’s going to be mad at you! Answer us!”\n\n\n If only Tars Tarkas would come now. If only the great Green Jeddak would\n come splashing across the stream on his huge thoat, his two swords\n clashing——\n\n\n “He’s up there in that clump of willows—hiding!”\n\n\n “Kimmy! You come down here this instant!”", "He knew he should answer them, but he did not. Behind him he could hear\n the awful Plant Men approaching. He shivered with delicious horror.\n\n\n He stood very still, listening to his sisters talking, letting their\n voices carry down to where he hid from the dangers of the Valley Dor.\n\n\n “Where is that little brat, anyway?”\n\n\n “He always wanders off just at dinnertime and then we have to find\n him——”\n\n\n “Playing with that old faucet—” Mimicry. “‘My\n rad-ium pis-tol——’”\n\n\n “Cracked—just cracked. Oh, where IS he, anyway? Kimmm-eee, you\n AN-swer!”", "As they filed out of the briefing shack, Steinhart climbed into the\n command car with Kimball. Chance or design? Kimball wondered. The\n others, he noticed, were leaving both of them alone.\n\n\n “We haven’t gotten on too well, have we, Colonel?” Steinhart\n observed in a quiet voice.\n\n\n Kimball thought: He’s pale skinned and very blond. What is it that he\n reminds me of? Shouldn’t there be a diadem on his forehead? He smiled\n vaguely into the rumbling night. That’s what it was. Odd that he should\n have forgotten. How many rocket pilots, he wondered, were weaned on\n Burroughs’ books? And how many remembered now that the Thern priests all\n wore yellow wings and a circlet of gold with some fantastic jewel on\n their forehead?\n\n\n “We’ve done as well as could be expected,” he said.", "He dropped to the sand and dug his hands into the dry powdery soil. He\n could scarcely see now, for blackness was flickering at the edges of his\n vision and his failing heart and lungs were near collapse.\nKimmm-eee!\n[123]\n A huge green warrior on a gray monster of a thoat was beckoning to him.\n Pointing toward the low hills on the oddly near horizon.\nKimmmm-eeeee!\nThe voice was thin and distant on the icy wind. Kimball knew that voice.\n He knew it from long ago in the Valley Dor, from the shores of the Lost\n Sea of Korus where the tideless waters lay black and deep——\n\n\n He began stumbling across the empty, lifeless plain. He knew the voice,\n he knew the man, and he knew the hills that he must reach, quickly now,\n or die.", "They were thinking: Why him? Out of all the scores of\n applicants—because there are always applicants for a sure-death\n job—and all the qualified pilots, why this one?\n\n\n The Public Relations Officer was speaking now, reading from the mimeoed\n release as though these civilians couldn’t be trusted to get the sparse\n information given them straight without his help, given grudgingly and\n without expression.\n\n\n [118]\n Kimball listened, only half aware of what was being said. He watched the\n faces of the men sitting on the rows of folding chairs, saw their eyes\n like wounds, red from the early morning hour and the murmuring reception\n of the night before in the Officers’ Club. They are wondering how\nI\nfeel, he was thinking. And asking themselves why I want to go.", "Silence. The rumble of the tires on the packed sand of the road, the\n murmur of the command car’s engine, spinning oilily, and lit by tiny\n sunbright flashes deep in the hollows of the hot metal.\n\n\n “You’re glad to be leaving, aren’t you—” Steinhart said\n finally. “Happy to be the first man to try for the\n planets——”\n\n\n Kimball nodded absently, wishing the man would be quiet. Mars, a dull\n rusty point of light low on the horizon, seemed to beckon.", "On the dais nearby, listening to the PRO, but watching Kimball, sat\n Steinhart, the team analyst. Kimball returned his steady gaze thinking:\n They start out burning with desire to cure the human mind and end with\n the shadow of the images. The words become the fact, the therapy the\n aim. What could Steinhart know of longing? No, he thought, I’m not being\n fair. Steinhart was only doing his job.\n\n\n The big clock on the back wall of the briefing shack said three\n fifty-five. Zero minus one hour and five minutes.\n\n\n Kimball looked around the room at the pale faces, the open mouths. What\n have I to do with you now, he thought?\nOutside, the winter night lay cold and still over the Base. Floodlights\n spilled brilliance over the dunes and the scrubby earth, high fences\n casting laced shadows across the burning white expanses of\n ferroconcrete.", "“Our tests showed you to be a schizoid—well-compensated, of\n course. You know there’s no such thing as a\nnormal\nhuman being. We all\n have tendencies toward one or more types of psychoses. In your case the\n symptoms are an overly active imagination and in some cases an inability\n to distinguish reality from—well, fancy.”\nKimball turned to regard the psych\n coolly\n .\n “What’s reality, Steinhart? Do\nyou\nknow?”\n\n\n The analyst flushed. “No.”\n\n\n “I didn’t think so.”\n\n\n “You lived pretty much in your mind when you were a child,”\n Steinhart went on doggedly. “You were a solitary, a lonely\n child.”\n\n\n [120]\n Kimball was watching the sky again.\n\n\n Steinhart felt futile and out of his depth. “We know so little\n about the psychology of space-flight, Kim——”", "Kimball snapped on a light and looked at his watch. 0310. Zero minus one\n fifty. He opened the steel locker and began to dress.\nThe water swirled warm and velvety around his ankles. There, behind\n that madrone, Kimmy thought. Was that a Plant Man? The thick white trunk\n and the grasping, blood-sucking arms——\n\n\n The radium pistol’s weight made his wrist ache, but he clung to it\n tightly, knowing that he\n [117]\n could never cope with a Plant Man with a sword\n alone. The certainty of coming battle made him smile a little, the way\n John Carter would smile if he were here in the Valley Dor ready to\n attack the white Therns and their Plant Men.", "From downstream came the faint sounds of music. It might have been a\n phonograph playing in one of the summer cabins with names like Polly Ann\n Roost and Patches and Seventh Heaven, but to Kimmy it was the hated cry\n of the Father of Therns calling the dreadful Plant Men to their feast of\n victims borne into\n [116]\n this Valley Dor by the mysterious Iss.\n\n\n Kimmy shifted the heavy Martian pistol into his left hand and checked\n his harness. A soft smile touched his lips. He was well armed; there was\n nothing he had to fear from the Plant Men. His bare feet turned\n up-stream, away from the sound of the phonograph, toward the shallows in\n the river that would permit him to cross and continue his search along\n the base of the Golden Cliffs—\nThe sergeant's voice cut through the pre-dawn darkness. “Oh, three\n hundred, Colonel.... Briefing in thirty minutes.”", "The keening sound of air over the wings brought a thrill. Below him, a\n great curving disk of reds and browns and yellows. He could see dust\n storms raging and the heavy, darkened lines of the canals.\n\n\n There was skill in his hands. He righted the rocket, balanced it. Began\n the tricky task of landing. It took all of his talent, all of his\n training. Ponderously, the ship settled into the iron sand; slowly, the\n internal fires died.\nKimball stood in the control room, his heart pounding. Slowly, the ports\n opened. Through the thick quartz he could see the endless plain. Reddish\n brown, empty. The basin of some long ago sea. The sky was a deep,\n burning blue with stars shining at midday at the zenith. It looked\n unreal, a painting of unworldly quiet and desolation.\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\nSteinhart was right, he thought vaguely. A tear streaked his cheek. He\n had never been so alone.", "He awoke seldom. His tasks were simple. The plastic sac and the tender\n care of the ship were more real than the routine jobs of telemetering\n information back to the Base across the empty miles, across the rim of\n the world.\n\n\n He dreamed of his wife. “\nYou don’t live here, Kim.\n”\n\n\n She was right, of course. He\n [122]\n wasn’t of earth. Never had been. My love\n is in the sky, he thought, filled with an immense satisfaction.\n\n\n And time slipped by, the weeks into months; the sun dwindled and earth\n was gone. All around him lay the stunning star-dusted night.\n\n\n He lay curled in the plastic womb when the ship turned. He awoke\n sluggishly and dragged himself into awareness.\n\n\n “I’ve changed,” he thought aloud. “My face is younger;\n I feel different.”" ], [ "“Our tests showed you to be a schizoid—well-compensated, of\n course. You know there’s no such thing as a\nnormal\nhuman being. We all\n have tendencies toward one or more types of psychoses. In your case the\n symptoms are an overly active imagination and in some cases an inability\n to distinguish reality from—well, fancy.”\nKimball turned to regard the psych\n coolly\n .\n “What’s reality, Steinhart? Do\nyou\nknow?”\n\n\n The analyst flushed. “No.”\n\n\n “I didn’t think so.”\n\n\n “You lived pretty much in your mind when you were a child,”\n Steinhart went on doggedly. “You were a solitary, a lonely\n child.”\n\n\n [120]\n Kimball was watching the sky again.\n\n\n Steinhart felt futile and out of his depth. “We know so little\n about the psychology of space-flight, Kim——”", "And his mother, tall and shadowy, standing on the porch of the rented\n cottage and saying exasperatedly: “\nWhy do you run off by\n yourself, Kimmy? I worry about you so——\n”\n\n\n And his sisters: “\nPlaying with his wooden swords and his radium\n pistol and never wanting to take his nose out of those awful\n books——\n”\n\n\n He dreamed of the low, beamed ceiling of the cottage, sweltering in the\n heat of the summer nights and the thick longing in his throat for red\n hills and a sky that burned deep blue through the long, long days and\n canals, clear and still. A land that he knew somehow never was, but\n which lived, for him, through some alchemy of the mind. He dreamed of\n Mars.\n\n\n And Steinhart: “\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\n”\nThe hours stretched into days, the days into months. Time wasn’t. Time\n was a deep night and a starshot void. And dreams.", "The keening sound of air over the wings brought a thrill. Below him, a\n great curving disk of reds and browns and yellows. He could see dust\n storms raging and the heavy, darkened lines of the canals.\n\n\n There was skill in his hands. He righted the rocket, balanced it. Began\n the tricky task of landing. It took all of his talent, all of his\n training. Ponderously, the ship settled into the iron sand; slowly, the\n internal fires died.\nKimball stood in the control room, his heart pounding. Slowly, the ports\n opened. Through the thick quartz he could see the endless plain. Reddish\n brown, empty. The basin of some long ago sea. The sky was a deep,\n burning blue with stars shining at midday at the zenith. It looked\n unreal, a painting of unworldly quiet and desolation.\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\nSteinhart was right, he thought vaguely. A tear streaked his cheek. He\n had never been so alone.", "Steinhart reached for a cigaret and then stopped, remembering that\n Kimball had had to give them up because of the flight. Kimball caught\n the movement and half-smiled.\n\n\n “I didn’t try to kill the assignment for you, Kim,” the\n psych said.\n\n\n “It doesn’t matter now.”\n\n\n “No, I suppose not.”\n\n\n “You just didn’t think I was the man for the job.”\n\n\n “Your record is good all the way. You know that,” Steinhart\n [119]\n said. “It’s just some of the things——”\n\n\n Kimball said: “I talked too much.”\n\n\n “You had to.”\n\n\n “You wouldn’t think my secret life was so dangerous, would\n you,” the Colonel said smiling.\n\n\n “You were married, Kim. What happened?”", "Then he stopped smiling and turned away from the window. It hadn’t been\n an easy path and what was coming up now was the hardest part. The goddam\n psychs were the toughest, always wanting him to bug out on the deal\n because of their brainwave graphs and word association tests and their\n Rorschach blots.\n\n\n “You’re a lonely man, Colonel Kimball——”\n\n\n “Too much imagination could be bad for this job.”\n\n\n How could you sit there with pentothal in your veins and wires running\n out of your head and tell them about the still waters of Korus, or the\n pennons flying from the twin towers of Greater Helium or the way the\n tiny, slanting sun gleamed at dawn through the rigging of a flyer?", "“More therapy?”\n\n\n “I’d like to know. This is for me.”\nKimball shrugged. “It didn’t work. She was a fine girl—but she\n finally told me it was no go. ‘You don’t live here’ was the\n way she put it.”\n\n\n “She knew you were a career officer; what did she\n expect——?”\n\n\n “That isn’t what she meant. You know that.”\n\n\n “Yes,” the psych said slowly. “I know that.”\n\n\n They rode in silence, across the dark Base, between the concrete sheds\n and the wooden barracks. Overhead, the stars like dust across the sky.\n Kimball, swathed in plastic, a fantastic figure not of earth, watched\n them wheel across the clear, deep night.\n\n\n “I wish you luck, Kim,” Steinhart said. “I mean\n that.”", "Kimmy’s eyes narrowed and he waded stealthily across the sacred river.\n That would be Matai Shang, the Father of Holy Therns—spreading his arms\n to the sunset and standing safely on his high balcony in the Golden\n Cliffs while the Plant Men gathered to attack the poor pilgrims Iss had\n brought to this cursed valley.\n\n\n “Sing me to sleep, lullaby of the leaves”—the phonograph\n sang. Kimmy stepped cautiously ashore and moved into the cover of a\n clump of willows. The sky was darkening fast. Other stars were shining\n through. There wasn’t much time left.\nKimball stood now in the bright glare of the briefing shack, a strange\n figure in blood-colored plastic. The representatives of the press had\n been handed the mimeographed releases by the PRO and now they sat in\n silence, studying the red figure of the man who was to ride the rocket.", "He awoke seldom. His tasks were simple. The plastic sac and the tender\n care of the ship were more real than the routine jobs of telemetering\n information back to the Base across the empty miles, across the rim of\n the world.\n\n\n He dreamed of his wife. “\nYou don’t live here, Kim.\n”\n\n\n She was right, of course. He\n [122]\n wasn’t of earth. Never had been. My love\n is in the sky, he thought, filled with an immense satisfaction.\n\n\n And time slipped by, the weeks into months; the sun dwindled and earth\n was gone. All around him lay the stunning star-dusted night.\n\n\n He lay curled in the plastic womb when the ship turned. He awoke\n sluggishly and dragged himself into awareness.\n\n\n “I’ve changed,” he thought aloud. “My face is younger;\n I feel different.”", "Kimball tried to see him in the black gloom. He hadn’t been asleep. It\n would have been hard to waste this last night that way. Instead he had\n been remembering. “All right, Sergeant,” he said.\n “Coming up.”\n\n\n He swung his feet to the bare boards and sat for a moment, wishing he\n hadn’t had to give up smoking. He could almost imagine the textured\n taste of the cigaret on his tongue.\n\n\n Oddly enough, he wasn’t tired. He wasn’t excited, either. And that was\n much stranger. He stood up and opened the window to look out into the\n desert night. Overhead the stars were brilliant and cold. Mars gleamed\n russet-colored against the sable sky. He smiled, remembering again. So\n long a road, he thought, from then to now.", "Silence. The rumble of the tires on the packed sand of the road, the\n murmur of the command car’s engine, spinning oilily, and lit by tiny\n sunbright flashes deep in the hollows of the hot metal.\n\n\n “You’re glad to be leaving, aren’t you—” Steinhart said\n finally. “Happy to be the first man to try for the\n planets——”\n\n\n Kimball nodded absently, wishing the man would be quiet. Mars, a dull\n rusty point of light low on the horizon, seemed to beckon.", "They were thinking: Why him? Out of all the scores of\n applicants—because there are always applicants for a sure-death\n job—and all the qualified pilots, why this one?\n\n\n The Public Relations Officer was speaking now, reading from the mimeoed\n release as though these civilians couldn’t be trusted to get the sparse\n information given them straight without his help, given grudgingly and\n without expression.\n\n\n [118]\n Kimball listened, only half aware of what was being said. He watched the\n faces of the men sitting on the rows of folding chairs, saw their eyes\n like wounds, red from the early morning hour and the murmuring reception\n of the night before in the Officers’ Club. They are wondering how\nI\nfeel, he was thinking. And asking themselves why I want to go.", "On the dais nearby, listening to the PRO, but watching Kimball, sat\n Steinhart, the team analyst. Kimball returned his steady gaze thinking:\n They start out burning with desire to cure the human mind and end with\n the shadow of the images. The words become the fact, the therapy the\n aim. What could Steinhart know of longing? No, he thought, I’m not being\n fair. Steinhart was only doing his job.\n\n\n The big clock on the back wall of the briefing shack said three\n fifty-five. Zero minus one hour and five minutes.\n\n\n Kimball looked around the room at the pale faces, the open mouths. What\n have I to do with you now, he thought?\nOutside, the winter night lay cold and still over the Base. Floodlights\n spilled brilliance over the dunes and the scrubby earth, high fences\n casting laced shadows across the burning white expanses of\n ferroconcrete.", "“Thanks.” Vaguely, as though from across a deep and widening\n gulf.\n\n\n “What will you do?”\n\n\n “You know the answers as well as I,” the Colonel said\n impatiently. “Set up the camp and wait for the next rocket. If it\n comes.”\n\n\n “In two years.”\n\n\n “In two years,” the plastic figure said. Didn’t he know that\n it didn’t matter?\n\n\n He glanced at his watch. Zero minus fifty-six minutes.\n\n\n “Kim,” Steinhart said slowly. “There’s something you\n should know about. Something you really should be prepared for.”\n\n\n “Yes?” Disinterest in his voice now, Steinhart noted\n clinically. Natural under the circumstances? Or neurosis building up\n already?", "For a moment, Kimmy felt a thrill of apprehension. The deepening\n stillness of the river was closing in around him. Even the music from\n the phonograph was very, very faint. Above him, the great vault of the\n sky was changing from pink to gray to dusty blue. A bright star was\n breaking through the curtain of fading light. He knew it was Venus, the\n Evening Star. But let it be Earth, he thought. And instead of white, let\n it be the color of an emerald.\n\n\n He paused in midstream, letting the warm water riffle around his feet.\n Looking up at the green beacon of his home planet, he thought: I’ve left\n all that behind me. It was never really what I wanted. Mars is where I\n belong. With my friends, Tars Tarkas the great Green Jeddak, and Carter,\n the Warlord, and all the beautiful brave people.\nThe phonograph sang with Vallee’s voice: “Cradle me where\n southern skies can watch me with a million eyes——”", "The Valley Dor was blurring, fading. The Golden Cliffs were turning into\n sandy, river-worn banks. The faucet felt heavy in his grimy hand. He\n shivered, not with horror now. With cold.\n\n\n He walked slowly out of the willows, stumbling a little over the rocks.\nHe lay like an embryo in the viscera of the ship, protected and quite\n alone. The plastic sac contained him, fed him; and the rocket, silent\n now, coursed through the airless deep like a questing thought. Time was\n measured by the ticking of the telemeters and the timers, but Kimball\n slept insulated and complete.\n\n\n And he dreamed.\n\n\n He dreamed of that summer when the river lay still and deep under the\n hanging willows. He dreamed of his sisters, thin and angular creatures\n as he remembered them through the eyes of a nine-year-old——", "As they filed out of the briefing shack, Steinhart climbed into the\n command car with Kimball. Chance or design? Kimball wondered. The\n others, he noticed, were leaving both of them alone.\n\n\n “We haven’t gotten on too well, have we, Colonel?” Steinhart\n observed in a quiet voice.\n\n\n Kimball thought: He’s pale skinned and very blond. What is it that he\n reminds me of? Shouldn’t there be a diadem on his forehead? He smiled\n vaguely into the rumbling night. That’s what it was. Odd that he should\n have forgotten. How many rocket pilots, he wondered, were weaned on\n Burroughs’ books? And how many remembered now that the Thern priests all\n wore yellow wings and a circlet of gold with some fantastic jewel on\n their forehead?\n\n\n “We’ve done as well as could be expected,” he said.", "They topped the last hillock and dropped down into the lighted bowl of\n the launching site. The rocket towered, winged and monstrously checkered\n in white and orange, against the first flickerings of the false dawn.\nKimmy saw the girls before they saw him. In their new, low waisted\n middies and skirts, they looked strange and out of place standing by the\n pebbled shore of the River Iss.\n\n\n They were his sisters, Rose and Margaret. Older than he at fifteen and\n seventeen. But they walked by the river and into danger. Behind him he\n could hear the rustling sound of the Plant Men as the evening breeze\n came up.\n\n\n “Kimm-eeeee—”\n\n\n They were calling him. In the deepening dusk their voices carried far\n down the river. “Kimmmmm—eeeeeeeeee—”", "From downstream came the faint sounds of music. It might have been a\n phonograph playing in one of the summer cabins with names like Polly Ann\n Roost and Patches and Seventh Heaven, but to Kimmy it was the hated cry\n of the Father of Therns calling the dreadful Plant Men to their feast of\n victims borne into\n [116]\n this Valley Dor by the mysterious Iss.\n\n\n Kimmy shifted the heavy Martian pistol into his left hand and checked\n his harness. A soft smile touched his lips. He was well armed; there was\n nothing he had to fear from the Plant Men. His bare feet turned\n up-stream, away from the sound of the phonograph, toward the shallows in\n the river that would permit him to cross and continue his search along\n the base of the Golden Cliffs—\nThe sergeant's voice cut through the pre-dawn darkness. “Oh, three\n hundred, Colonel.... Briefing in thirty minutes.”", "And then he imagined he saw something moving on the great plain. He\n scrambled down through the ship, past the empty fuel tanks and the\n lashed supplies. His hands were clawing desperately at the dogs of the\n outer valve. Suddenly the pressure jerked the hatch from his hands and\n he gasped at the icy air, his lungs laboring to breathe.\n\n\n He dropped to one knee and sucked at the thin, frigid air. His vision\n was cloudy and his head felt light. But there\nwas\nsomething moving on\n the plain.\n\n\n A shadowy cavalcade.\nStrange monstrous men on\n fantastic\n war-mounts, long spears and\n fluttering pennons. Huge golden chariots with scythes flashing on the\n circling hubs and armored giants, the figments of a long remembered\n dream——", "Kimball snapped on a light and looked at his watch. 0310. Zero minus one\n fifty. He opened the steel locker and began to dress.\nThe water swirled warm and velvety around his ankles. There, behind\n that madrone, Kimmy thought. Was that a Plant Man? The thick white trunk\n and the grasping, blood-sucking arms——\n\n\n The radium pistol’s weight made his wrist ache, but he clung to it\n tightly, knowing that he\n [117]\n could never cope with a Plant Man with a sword\n alone. The certainty of coming battle made him smile a little, the way\n John Carter would smile if he were here in the Valley Dor ready to\n attack the white Therns and their Plant Men." ], [ "“Our tests showed you to be a schizoid—well-compensated, of\n course. You know there’s no such thing as a\nnormal\nhuman being. We all\n have tendencies toward one or more types of psychoses. In your case the\n symptoms are an overly active imagination and in some cases an inability\n to distinguish reality from—well, fancy.”\nKimball turned to regard the psych\n coolly\n .\n “What’s reality, Steinhart? Do\nyou\nknow?”\n\n\n The analyst flushed. “No.”\n\n\n “I didn’t think so.”\n\n\n “You lived pretty much in your mind when you were a child,”\n Steinhart went on doggedly. “You were a solitary, a lonely\n child.”\n\n\n [120]\n Kimball was watching the sky again.\n\n\n Steinhart felt futile and out of his depth. “We know so little\n about the psychology of space-flight, Kim——”", "Then he stopped smiling and turned away from the window. It hadn’t been\n an easy path and what was coming up now was the hardest part. The goddam\n psychs were the toughest, always wanting him to bug out on the deal\n because of their brainwave graphs and word association tests and their\n Rorschach blots.\n\n\n “You’re a lonely man, Colonel Kimball——”\n\n\n “Too much imagination could be bad for this job.”\n\n\n How could you sit there with pentothal in your veins and wires running\n out of your head and tell them about the still waters of Korus, or the\n pennons flying from the twin towers of Greater Helium or the way the\n tiny, slanting sun gleamed at dawn through the rigging of a flyer?", "And his mother, tall and shadowy, standing on the porch of the rented\n cottage and saying exasperatedly: “\nWhy do you run off by\n yourself, Kimmy? I worry about you so——\n”\n\n\n And his sisters: “\nPlaying with his wooden swords and his radium\n pistol and never wanting to take his nose out of those awful\n books——\n”\n\n\n He dreamed of the low, beamed ceiling of the cottage, sweltering in the\n heat of the summer nights and the thick longing in his throat for red\n hills and a sky that burned deep blue through the long, long days and\n canals, clear and still. A land that he knew somehow never was, but\n which lived, for him, through some alchemy of the mind. He dreamed of\n Mars.\n\n\n And Steinhart: “\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\n”\nThe hours stretched into days, the days into months. Time wasn’t. Time\n was a deep night and a starshot void. And dreams.", "Kimmy’s eyes narrowed and he waded stealthily across the sacred river.\n That would be Matai Shang, the Father of Holy Therns—spreading his arms\n to the sunset and standing safely on his high balcony in the Golden\n Cliffs while the Plant Men gathered to attack the poor pilgrims Iss had\n brought to this cursed valley.\n\n\n “Sing me to sleep, lullaby of the leaves”—the phonograph\n sang. Kimmy stepped cautiously ashore and moved into the cover of a\n clump of willows. The sky was darkening fast. Other stars were shining\n through. There wasn’t much time left.\nKimball stood now in the bright glare of the briefing shack, a strange\n figure in blood-colored plastic. The representatives of the press had\n been handed the mimeographed releases by the PRO and now they sat in\n silence, studying the red figure of the man who was to ride the rocket.", "Something died in him. It wasn’t a faucet, it WAS a radium pistol. He\n looked at his sisters with dismay. They weren’t really his sisters. They\n were Therns, with their yellow hair and their pale skins. He and John\n Carter and Tars Tarkas had fought them many times, piling their bodies\n for barricades and weaving a flashing pattern of skillful swords in the\n shifting light of the two moons.\n\n\n [121]\n “Kimmmm—eeee Mom’s going to be mad at you! Answer us!”\n\n\n If only Tars Tarkas would come now. If only the great Green Jeddak would\n come splashing across the stream on his huge thoat, his two swords\n clashing——\n\n\n “He’s up there in that clump of willows—hiding!”\n\n\n “Kimmy! You come down here this instant!”", "He knew he should answer them, but he did not. Behind him he could hear\n the awful Plant Men approaching. He shivered with delicious horror.\n\n\n He stood very still, listening to his sisters talking, letting their\n voices carry down to where he hid from the dangers of the Valley Dor.\n\n\n “Where is that little brat, anyway?”\n\n\n “He always wanders off just at dinnertime and then we have to find\n him——”\n\n\n “Playing with that old faucet—” Mimicry. “‘My\n rad-ium pis-tol——’”\n\n\n “Cracked—just cracked. Oh, where IS he, anyway? Kimmm-eee, you\n AN-swer!”", "On the dais nearby, listening to the PRO, but watching Kimball, sat\n Steinhart, the team analyst. Kimball returned his steady gaze thinking:\n They start out burning with desire to cure the human mind and end with\n the shadow of the images. The words become the fact, the therapy the\n aim. What could Steinhart know of longing? No, he thought, I’m not being\n fair. Steinhart was only doing his job.\n\n\n The big clock on the back wall of the briefing shack said three\n fifty-five. Zero minus one hour and five minutes.\n\n\n Kimball looked around the room at the pale faces, the open mouths. What\n have I to do with you now, he thought?\nOutside, the winter night lay cold and still over the Base. Floodlights\n spilled brilliance over the dunes and the scrubby earth, high fences\n casting laced shadows across the burning white expanses of\n ferroconcrete.", "Steinhart reached for a cigaret and then stopped, remembering that\n Kimball had had to give them up because of the flight. Kimball caught\n the movement and half-smiled.\n\n\n “I didn’t try to kill the assignment for you, Kim,” the\n psych said.\n\n\n “It doesn’t matter now.”\n\n\n “No, I suppose not.”\n\n\n “You just didn’t think I was the man for the job.”\n\n\n “Your record is good all the way. You know that,” Steinhart\n [119]\n said. “It’s just some of the things——”\n\n\n Kimball said: “I talked too much.”\n\n\n “You had to.”\n\n\n “You wouldn’t think my secret life was so dangerous, would\n you,” the Colonel said smiling.\n\n\n “You were married, Kim. What happened?”", "“More therapy?”\n\n\n “I’d like to know. This is for me.”\nKimball shrugged. “It didn’t work. She was a fine girl—but she\n finally told me it was no go. ‘You don’t live here’ was the\n way she put it.”\n\n\n “She knew you were a career officer; what did she\n expect——?”\n\n\n “That isn’t what she meant. You know that.”\n\n\n “Yes,” the psych said slowly. “I know that.”\n\n\n They rode in silence, across the dark Base, between the concrete sheds\n and the wooden barracks. Overhead, the stars like dust across the sky.\n Kimball, swathed in plastic, a fantastic figure not of earth, watched\n them wheel across the clear, deep night.\n\n\n “I wish you luck, Kim,” Steinhart said. “I mean\n that.”", "They topped the last hillock and dropped down into the lighted bowl of\n the launching site. The rocket towered, winged and monstrously checkered\n in white and orange, against the first flickerings of the false dawn.\nKimmy saw the girls before they saw him. In their new, low waisted\n middies and skirts, they looked strange and out of place standing by the\n pebbled shore of the River Iss.\n\n\n They were his sisters, Rose and Margaret. Older than he at fifteen and\n seventeen. But they walked by the river and into danger. Behind him he\n could hear the rustling sound of the Plant Men as the evening breeze\n came up.\n\n\n “Kimm-eeeee—”\n\n\n They were calling him. In the deepening dusk their voices carried far\n down the river. “Kimmmmm—eeeeeeeeee—”", "Kimball tried to see him in the black gloom. He hadn’t been asleep. It\n would have been hard to waste this last night that way. Instead he had\n been remembering. “All right, Sergeant,” he said.\n “Coming up.”\n\n\n He swung his feet to the bare boards and sat for a moment, wishing he\n hadn’t had to give up smoking. He could almost imagine the textured\n taste of the cigaret on his tongue.\n\n\n Oddly enough, he wasn’t tired. He wasn’t excited, either. And that was\n much stranger. He stood up and opened the window to look out into the\n desert night. Overhead the stars were brilliant and cold. Mars gleamed\n russet-colored against the sable sky. He smiled, remembering again. So\n long a road, he thought, from then to now.", "Kimball snapped on a light and looked at his watch. 0310. Zero minus one\n fifty. He opened the steel locker and began to dress.\nThe water swirled warm and velvety around his ankles. There, behind\n that madrone, Kimmy thought. Was that a Plant Man? The thick white trunk\n and the grasping, blood-sucking arms——\n\n\n The radium pistol’s weight made his wrist ache, but he clung to it\n tightly, knowing that he\n [117]\n could never cope with a Plant Man with a sword\n alone. The certainty of coming battle made him smile a little, the way\n John Carter would smile if he were here in the Valley Dor ready to\n attack the white Therns and their Plant Men.", "He dropped to the sand and dug his hands into the dry powdery soil. He\n could scarcely see now, for blackness was flickering at the edges of his\n vision and his failing heart and lungs were near collapse.\nKimmm-eee!\n[123]\n A huge green warrior on a gray monster of a thoat was beckoning to him.\n Pointing toward the low hills on the oddly near horizon.\nKimmmm-eeeee!\nThe voice was thin and distant on the icy wind. Kimball knew that voice.\n He knew it from long ago in the Valley Dor, from the shores of the Lost\n Sea of Korus where the tideless waters lay black and deep——\n\n\n He began stumbling across the empty, lifeless plain. He knew the voice,\n he knew the man, and he knew the hills that he must reach, quickly now,\n or die.", "From downstream came the faint sounds of music. It might have been a\n phonograph playing in one of the summer cabins with names like Polly Ann\n Roost and Patches and Seventh Heaven, but to Kimmy it was the hated cry\n of the Father of Therns calling the dreadful Plant Men to their feast of\n victims borne into\n [116]\n this Valley Dor by the mysterious Iss.\n\n\n Kimmy shifted the heavy Martian pistol into his left hand and checked\n his harness. A soft smile touched his lips. He was well armed; there was\n nothing he had to fear from the Plant Men. His bare feet turned\n up-stream, away from the sound of the phonograph, toward the shallows in\n the river that would permit him to cross and continue his search along\n the base of the Golden Cliffs—\nThe sergeant's voice cut through the pre-dawn darkness. “Oh, three\n hundred, Colonel.... Briefing in thirty minutes.”", "For a moment, Kimmy felt a thrill of apprehension. The deepening\n stillness of the river was closing in around him. Even the music from\n the phonograph was very, very faint. Above him, the great vault of the\n sky was changing from pink to gray to dusty blue. A bright star was\n breaking through the curtain of fading light. He knew it was Venus, the\n Evening Star. But let it be Earth, he thought. And instead of white, let\n it be the color of an emerald.\n\n\n He paused in midstream, letting the warm water riffle around his feet.\n Looking up at the green beacon of his home planet, he thought: I’ve left\n all that behind me. It was never really what I wanted. Mars is where I\n belong. With my friends, Tars Tarkas the great Green Jeddak, and Carter,\n the Warlord, and all the beautiful brave people.\nThe phonograph sang with Vallee’s voice: “Cradle me where\n southern skies can watch me with a million eyes——”", "[115]\nTHE HILLS OF HOME\n\n by Alfred Coppel\n“Normality” is a myth; we're all a little neurotic, and the\n study of neurosis has been able to classify the general types of\n disturbance which are most common. And some types (providing the subject\n is not suffering so extreme a case as to have crossed the border into\n psychosis) can be not only useful, but perhaps necessary for certain\n kinds of work....\nThe river ran still and deep, green and gray in the eddies with the\n warm smell of late summer rising out of the slow water. Madrone and\n birch and willow, limp in the evening quiet, and the taste of\n smouldering leaves....\n\n\n It wasn’t the Russian River. It was the Sacred Iss. The sun had touched\n the gem-encrusted cliffs by the shores of the Lost Sea of Korus and had\n vanished, leaving only the stillness of the dusk and the lonely cry of\n shore birds.", "As they filed out of the briefing shack, Steinhart climbed into the\n command car with Kimball. Chance or design? Kimball wondered. The\n others, he noticed, were leaving both of them alone.\n\n\n “We haven’t gotten on too well, have we, Colonel?” Steinhart\n observed in a quiet voice.\n\n\n Kimball thought: He’s pale skinned and very blond. What is it that he\n reminds me of? Shouldn’t there be a diadem on his forehead? He smiled\n vaguely into the rumbling night. That’s what it was. Odd that he should\n have forgotten. How many rocket pilots, he wondered, were weaned on\n Burroughs’ books? And how many remembered now that the Thern priests all\n wore yellow wings and a circlet of gold with some fantastic jewel on\n their forehead?\n\n\n “We’ve done as well as could be expected,” he said.", "“Thanks.” Vaguely, as though from across a deep and widening\n gulf.\n\n\n “What will you do?”\n\n\n “You know the answers as well as I,” the Colonel said\n impatiently. “Set up the camp and wait for the next rocket. If it\n comes.”\n\n\n “In two years.”\n\n\n “In two years,” the plastic figure said. Didn’t he know that\n it didn’t matter?\n\n\n He glanced at his watch. Zero minus fifty-six minutes.\n\n\n “Kim,” Steinhart said slowly. “There’s something you\n should know about. Something you really should be prepared for.”\n\n\n “Yes?” Disinterest in his voice now, Steinhart noted\n clinically. Natural under the circumstances? Or neurosis building up\n already?", "They were thinking: Why him? Out of all the scores of\n applicants—because there are always applicants for a sure-death\n job—and all the qualified pilots, why this one?\n\n\n The Public Relations Officer was speaking now, reading from the mimeoed\n release as though these civilians couldn’t be trusted to get the sparse\n information given them straight without his help, given grudgingly and\n without expression.\n\n\n [118]\n Kimball listened, only half aware of what was being said. He watched the\n faces of the men sitting on the rows of folding chairs, saw their eyes\n like wounds, red from the early morning hour and the murmuring reception\n of the night before in the Officers’ Club. They are wondering how\nI\nfeel, he was thinking. And asking themselves why I want to go.", "The keening sound of air over the wings brought a thrill. Below him, a\n great curving disk of reds and browns and yellows. He could see dust\n storms raging and the heavy, darkened lines of the canals.\n\n\n There was skill in his hands. He righted the rocket, balanced it. Began\n the tricky task of landing. It took all of his talent, all of his\n training. Ponderously, the ship settled into the iron sand; slowly, the\n internal fires died.\nKimball stood in the control room, his heart pounding. Slowly, the ports\n opened. Through the thick quartz he could see the endless plain. Reddish\n brown, empty. The basin of some long ago sea. The sky was a deep,\n burning blue with stars shining at midday at the zenith. It looked\n unreal, a painting of unworldly quiet and desolation.\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\nSteinhart was right, he thought vaguely. A tear streaked his cheek. He\n had never been so alone." ], [ "Kimmy’s eyes narrowed and he waded stealthily across the sacred river.\n That would be Matai Shang, the Father of Holy Therns—spreading his arms\n to the sunset and standing safely on his high balcony in the Golden\n Cliffs while the Plant Men gathered to attack the poor pilgrims Iss had\n brought to this cursed valley.\n\n\n “Sing me to sleep, lullaby of the leaves”—the phonograph\n sang. Kimmy stepped cautiously ashore and moved into the cover of a\n clump of willows. The sky was darkening fast. Other stars were shining\n through. There wasn’t much time left.\nKimball stood now in the bright glare of the briefing shack, a strange\n figure in blood-colored plastic. The representatives of the press had\n been handed the mimeographed releases by the PRO and now they sat in\n silence, studying the red figure of the man who was to ride the rocket.", "And his mother, tall and shadowy, standing on the porch of the rented\n cottage and saying exasperatedly: “\nWhy do you run off by\n yourself, Kimmy? I worry about you so——\n”\n\n\n And his sisters: “\nPlaying with his wooden swords and his radium\n pistol and never wanting to take his nose out of those awful\n books——\n”\n\n\n He dreamed of the low, beamed ceiling of the cottage, sweltering in the\n heat of the summer nights and the thick longing in his throat for red\n hills and a sky that burned deep blue through the long, long days and\n canals, clear and still. A land that he knew somehow never was, but\n which lived, for him, through some alchemy of the mind. He dreamed of\n Mars.\n\n\n And Steinhart: “\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\n”\nThe hours stretched into days, the days into months. Time wasn’t. Time\n was a deep night and a starshot void. And dreams.", "Kimball tried to see him in the black gloom. He hadn’t been asleep. It\n would have been hard to waste this last night that way. Instead he had\n been remembering. “All right, Sergeant,” he said.\n “Coming up.”\n\n\n He swung his feet to the bare boards and sat for a moment, wishing he\n hadn’t had to give up smoking. He could almost imagine the textured\n taste of the cigaret on his tongue.\n\n\n Oddly enough, he wasn’t tired. He wasn’t excited, either. And that was\n much stranger. He stood up and opened the window to look out into the\n desert night. Overhead the stars were brilliant and cold. Mars gleamed\n russet-colored against the sable sky. He smiled, remembering again. So\n long a road, he thought, from then to now.", "He dropped to the sand and dug his hands into the dry powdery soil. He\n could scarcely see now, for blackness was flickering at the edges of his\n vision and his failing heart and lungs were near collapse.\nKimmm-eee!\n[123]\n A huge green warrior on a gray monster of a thoat was beckoning to him.\n Pointing toward the low hills on the oddly near horizon.\nKimmmm-eeeee!\nThe voice was thin and distant on the icy wind. Kimball knew that voice.\n He knew it from long ago in the Valley Dor, from the shores of the Lost\n Sea of Korus where the tideless waters lay black and deep——\n\n\n He began stumbling across the empty, lifeless plain. He knew the voice,\n he knew the man, and he knew the hills that he must reach, quickly now,\n or die.", "He awoke seldom. His tasks were simple. The plastic sac and the tender\n care of the ship were more real than the routine jobs of telemetering\n information back to the Base across the empty miles, across the rim of\n the world.\n\n\n He dreamed of his wife. “\nYou don’t live here, Kim.\n”\n\n\n She was right, of course. He\n [122]\n wasn’t of earth. Never had been. My love\n is in the sky, he thought, filled with an immense satisfaction.\n\n\n And time slipped by, the weeks into months; the sun dwindled and earth\n was gone. All around him lay the stunning star-dusted night.\n\n\n He lay curled in the plastic womb when the ship turned. He awoke\n sluggishly and dragged himself into awareness.\n\n\n “I’ve changed,” he thought aloud. “My face is younger;\n I feel different.”", "The Valley Dor was blurring, fading. The Golden Cliffs were turning into\n sandy, river-worn banks. The faucet felt heavy in his grimy hand. He\n shivered, not with horror now. With cold.\n\n\n He walked slowly out of the willows, stumbling a little over the rocks.\nHe lay like an embryo in the viscera of the ship, protected and quite\n alone. The plastic sac contained him, fed him; and the rocket, silent\n now, coursed through the airless deep like a questing thought. Time was\n measured by the ticking of the telemeters and the timers, but Kimball\n slept insulated and complete.\n\n\n And he dreamed.\n\n\n He dreamed of that summer when the river lay still and deep under the\n hanging willows. He dreamed of his sisters, thin and angular creatures\n as he remembered them through the eyes of a nine-year-old——", "They topped the last hillock and dropped down into the lighted bowl of\n the launching site. The rocket towered, winged and monstrously checkered\n in white and orange, against the first flickerings of the false dawn.\nKimmy saw the girls before they saw him. In their new, low waisted\n middies and skirts, they looked strange and out of place standing by the\n pebbled shore of the River Iss.\n\n\n They were his sisters, Rose and Margaret. Older than he at fifteen and\n seventeen. But they walked by the river and into danger. Behind him he\n could hear the rustling sound of the Plant Men as the evening breeze\n came up.\n\n\n “Kimm-eeeee—”\n\n\n They were calling him. In the deepening dusk their voices carried far\n down the river. “Kimmmmm—eeeeeeeeee—”", "For a moment, Kimmy felt a thrill of apprehension. The deepening\n stillness of the river was closing in around him. Even the music from\n the phonograph was very, very faint. Above him, the great vault of the\n sky was changing from pink to gray to dusty blue. A bright star was\n breaking through the curtain of fading light. He knew it was Venus, the\n Evening Star. But let it be Earth, he thought. And instead of white, let\n it be the color of an emerald.\n\n\n He paused in midstream, letting the warm water riffle around his feet.\n Looking up at the green beacon of his home planet, he thought: I’ve left\n all that behind me. It was never really what I wanted. Mars is where I\n belong. With my friends, Tars Tarkas the great Green Jeddak, and Carter,\n the Warlord, and all the beautiful brave people.\nThe phonograph sang with Vallee’s voice: “Cradle me where\n southern skies can watch me with a million eyes——”", "The keening sound of air over the wings brought a thrill. Below him, a\n great curving disk of reds and browns and yellows. He could see dust\n storms raging and the heavy, darkened lines of the canals.\n\n\n There was skill in his hands. He righted the rocket, balanced it. Began\n the tricky task of landing. It took all of his talent, all of his\n training. Ponderously, the ship settled into the iron sand; slowly, the\n internal fires died.\nKimball stood in the control room, his heart pounding. Slowly, the ports\n opened. Through the thick quartz he could see the endless plain. Reddish\n brown, empty. The basin of some long ago sea. The sky was a deep,\n burning blue with stars shining at midday at the zenith. It looked\n unreal, a painting of unworldly quiet and desolation.\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\nSteinhart was right, he thought vaguely. A tear streaked his cheek. He\n had never been so alone.", "Kimball snapped on a light and looked at his watch. 0310. Zero minus one\n fifty. He opened the steel locker and began to dress.\nThe water swirled warm and velvety around his ankles. There, behind\n that madrone, Kimmy thought. Was that a Plant Man? The thick white trunk\n and the grasping, blood-sucking arms——\n\n\n The radium pistol’s weight made his wrist ache, but he clung to it\n tightly, knowing that he\n [117]\n could never cope with a Plant Man with a sword\n alone. The certainty of coming battle made him smile a little, the way\n John Carter would smile if he were here in the Valley Dor ready to\n attack the white Therns and their Plant Men.", "From downstream came the faint sounds of music. It might have been a\n phonograph playing in one of the summer cabins with names like Polly Ann\n Roost and Patches and Seventh Heaven, but to Kimmy it was the hated cry\n of the Father of Therns calling the dreadful Plant Men to their feast of\n victims borne into\n [116]\n this Valley Dor by the mysterious Iss.\n\n\n Kimmy shifted the heavy Martian pistol into his left hand and checked\n his harness. A soft smile touched his lips. He was well armed; there was\n nothing he had to fear from the Plant Men. His bare feet turned\n up-stream, away from the sound of the phonograph, toward the shallows in\n the river that would permit him to cross and continue his search along\n the base of the Golden Cliffs—\nThe sergeant's voice cut through the pre-dawn darkness. “Oh, three\n hundred, Colonel.... Briefing in thirty minutes.”", "And then he imagined he saw something moving on the great plain. He\n scrambled down through the ship, past the empty fuel tanks and the\n lashed supplies. His hands were clawing desperately at the dogs of the\n outer valve. Suddenly the pressure jerked the hatch from his hands and\n he gasped at the icy air, his lungs laboring to breathe.\n\n\n He dropped to one knee and sucked at the thin, frigid air. His vision\n was cloudy and his head felt light. But there\nwas\nsomething moving on\n the plain.\n\n\n A shadowy cavalcade.\nStrange monstrous men on\n fantastic\n war-mounts, long spears and\n fluttering pennons. Huge golden chariots with scythes flashing on the\n circling hubs and armored giants, the figments of a long remembered\n dream——", "As they filed out of the briefing shack, Steinhart climbed into the\n command car with Kimball. Chance or design? Kimball wondered. The\n others, he noticed, were leaving both of them alone.\n\n\n “We haven’t gotten on too well, have we, Colonel?” Steinhart\n observed in a quiet voice.\n\n\n Kimball thought: He’s pale skinned and very blond. What is it that he\n reminds me of? Shouldn’t there be a diadem on his forehead? He smiled\n vaguely into the rumbling night. That’s what it was. Odd that he should\n have forgotten. How many rocket pilots, he wondered, were weaned on\n Burroughs’ books? And how many remembered now that the Thern priests all\n wore yellow wings and a circlet of gold with some fantastic jewel on\n their forehead?\n\n\n “We’ve done as well as could be expected,” he said.", "On the dais nearby, listening to the PRO, but watching Kimball, sat\n Steinhart, the team analyst. Kimball returned his steady gaze thinking:\n They start out burning with desire to cure the human mind and end with\n the shadow of the images. The words become the fact, the therapy the\n aim. What could Steinhart know of longing? No, he thought, I’m not being\n fair. Steinhart was only doing his job.\n\n\n The big clock on the back wall of the briefing shack said three\n fifty-five. Zero minus one hour and five minutes.\n\n\n Kimball looked around the room at the pale faces, the open mouths. What\n have I to do with you now, he thought?\nOutside, the winter night lay cold and still over the Base. Floodlights\n spilled brilliance over the dunes and the scrubby earth, high fences\n casting laced shadows across the burning white expanses of\n ferroconcrete.", "Then he stopped smiling and turned away from the window. It hadn’t been\n an easy path and what was coming up now was the hardest part. The goddam\n psychs were the toughest, always wanting him to bug out on the deal\n because of their brainwave graphs and word association tests and their\n Rorschach blots.\n\n\n “You’re a lonely man, Colonel Kimball——”\n\n\n “Too much imagination could be bad for this job.”\n\n\n How could you sit there with pentothal in your veins and wires running\n out of your head and tell them about the still waters of Korus, or the\n pennons flying from the twin towers of Greater Helium or the way the\n tiny, slanting sun gleamed at dawn through the rigging of a flyer?", "Something died in him. It wasn’t a faucet, it WAS a radium pistol. He\n looked at his sisters with dismay. They weren’t really his sisters. They\n were Therns, with their yellow hair and their pale skins. He and John\n Carter and Tars Tarkas had fought them many times, piling their bodies\n for barricades and weaving a flashing pattern of skillful swords in the\n shifting light of the two moons.\n\n\n [121]\n “Kimmmm—eeee Mom’s going to be mad at you! Answer us!”\n\n\n If only Tars Tarkas would come now. If only the great Green Jeddak would\n come splashing across the stream on his huge thoat, his two swords\n clashing——\n\n\n “He’s up there in that clump of willows—hiding!”\n\n\n “Kimmy! You come down here this instant!”", "He knew he should answer them, but he did not. Behind him he could hear\n the awful Plant Men approaching. He shivered with delicious horror.\n\n\n He stood very still, listening to his sisters talking, letting their\n voices carry down to where he hid from the dangers of the Valley Dor.\n\n\n “Where is that little brat, anyway?”\n\n\n “He always wanders off just at dinnertime and then we have to find\n him——”\n\n\n “Playing with that old faucet—” Mimicry. “‘My\n rad-ium pis-tol——’”\n\n\n “Cracked—just cracked. Oh, where IS he, anyway? Kimmm-eee, you\n AN-swer!”", "“Our tests showed you to be a schizoid—well-compensated, of\n course. You know there’s no such thing as a\nnormal\nhuman being. We all\n have tendencies toward one or more types of psychoses. In your case the\n symptoms are an overly active imagination and in some cases an inability\n to distinguish reality from—well, fancy.”\nKimball turned to regard the psych\n coolly\n .\n “What’s reality, Steinhart? Do\nyou\nknow?”\n\n\n The analyst flushed. “No.”\n\n\n “I didn’t think so.”\n\n\n “You lived pretty much in your mind when you were a child,”\n Steinhart went on doggedly. “You were a solitary, a lonely\n child.”\n\n\n [120]\n Kimball was watching the sky again.\n\n\n Steinhart felt futile and out of his depth. “We know so little\n about the psychology of space-flight, Kim——”", "Silence. The rumble of the tires on the packed sand of the road, the\n murmur of the command car’s engine, spinning oilily, and lit by tiny\n sunbright flashes deep in the hollows of the hot metal.\n\n\n “You’re glad to be leaving, aren’t you—” Steinhart said\n finally. “Happy to be the first man to try for the\n planets——”\n\n\n Kimball nodded absently, wishing the man would be quiet. Mars, a dull\n rusty point of light low on the horizon, seemed to beckon.", "“Thanks.” Vaguely, as though from across a deep and widening\n gulf.\n\n\n “What will you do?”\n\n\n “You know the answers as well as I,” the Colonel said\n impatiently. “Set up the camp and wait for the next rocket. If it\n comes.”\n\n\n “In two years.”\n\n\n “In two years,” the plastic figure said. Didn’t he know that\n it didn’t matter?\n\n\n He glanced at his watch. Zero minus fifty-six minutes.\n\n\n “Kim,” Steinhart said slowly. “There’s something you\n should know about. Something you really should be prepared for.”\n\n\n “Yes?” Disinterest in his voice now, Steinhart noted\n clinically. Natural under the circumstances? Or neurosis building up\n already?" ], [ "From downstream came the faint sounds of music. It might have been a\n phonograph playing in one of the summer cabins with names like Polly Ann\n Roost and Patches and Seventh Heaven, but to Kimmy it was the hated cry\n of the Father of Therns calling the dreadful Plant Men to their feast of\n victims borne into\n [116]\n this Valley Dor by the mysterious Iss.\n\n\n Kimmy shifted the heavy Martian pistol into his left hand and checked\n his harness. A soft smile touched his lips. He was well armed; there was\n nothing he had to fear from the Plant Men. His bare feet turned\n up-stream, away from the sound of the phonograph, toward the shallows in\n the river that would permit him to cross and continue his search along\n the base of the Golden Cliffs—\nThe sergeant's voice cut through the pre-dawn darkness. “Oh, three\n hundred, Colonel.... Briefing in thirty minutes.”", "For a moment, Kimmy felt a thrill of apprehension. The deepening\n stillness of the river was closing in around him. Even the music from\n the phonograph was very, very faint. Above him, the great vault of the\n sky was changing from pink to gray to dusty blue. A bright star was\n breaking through the curtain of fading light. He knew it was Venus, the\n Evening Star. But let it be Earth, he thought. And instead of white, let\n it be the color of an emerald.\n\n\n He paused in midstream, letting the warm water riffle around his feet.\n Looking up at the green beacon of his home planet, he thought: I’ve left\n all that behind me. It was never really what I wanted. Mars is where I\n belong. With my friends, Tars Tarkas the great Green Jeddak, and Carter,\n the Warlord, and all the beautiful brave people.\nThe phonograph sang with Vallee’s voice: “Cradle me where\n southern skies can watch me with a million eyes——”", "He knew he should answer them, but he did not. Behind him he could hear\n the awful Plant Men approaching. He shivered with delicious horror.\n\n\n He stood very still, listening to his sisters talking, letting their\n voices carry down to where he hid from the dangers of the Valley Dor.\n\n\n “Where is that little brat, anyway?”\n\n\n “He always wanders off just at dinnertime and then we have to find\n him——”\n\n\n “Playing with that old faucet—” Mimicry. “‘My\n rad-ium pis-tol——’”\n\n\n “Cracked—just cracked. Oh, where IS he, anyway? Kimmm-eee, you\n AN-swer!”", "Something died in him. It wasn’t a faucet, it WAS a radium pistol. He\n looked at his sisters with dismay. They weren’t really his sisters. They\n were Therns, with their yellow hair and their pale skins. He and John\n Carter and Tars Tarkas had fought them many times, piling their bodies\n for barricades and weaving a flashing pattern of skillful swords in the\n shifting light of the two moons.\n\n\n [121]\n “Kimmmm—eeee Mom’s going to be mad at you! Answer us!”\n\n\n If only Tars Tarkas would come now. If only the great Green Jeddak would\n come splashing across the stream on his huge thoat, his two swords\n clashing——\n\n\n “He’s up there in that clump of willows—hiding!”\n\n\n “Kimmy! You come down here this instant!”", "Kimmy’s eyes narrowed and he waded stealthily across the sacred river.\n That would be Matai Shang, the Father of Holy Therns—spreading his arms\n to the sunset and standing safely on his high balcony in the Golden\n Cliffs while the Plant Men gathered to attack the poor pilgrims Iss had\n brought to this cursed valley.\n\n\n “Sing me to sleep, lullaby of the leaves”—the phonograph\n sang. Kimmy stepped cautiously ashore and moved into the cover of a\n clump of willows. The sky was darkening fast. Other stars were shining\n through. There wasn’t much time left.\nKimball stood now in the bright glare of the briefing shack, a strange\n figure in blood-colored plastic. The representatives of the press had\n been handed the mimeographed releases by the PRO and now they sat in\n silence, studying the red figure of the man who was to ride the rocket.", "And then he imagined he saw something moving on the great plain. He\n scrambled down through the ship, past the empty fuel tanks and the\n lashed supplies. His hands were clawing desperately at the dogs of the\n outer valve. Suddenly the pressure jerked the hatch from his hands and\n he gasped at the icy air, his lungs laboring to breathe.\n\n\n He dropped to one knee and sucked at the thin, frigid air. His vision\n was cloudy and his head felt light. But there\nwas\nsomething moving on\n the plain.\n\n\n A shadowy cavalcade.\nStrange monstrous men on\n fantastic\n war-mounts, long spears and\n fluttering pennons. Huge golden chariots with scythes flashing on the\n circling hubs and armored giants, the figments of a long remembered\n dream——", "Kimball tried to see him in the black gloom. He hadn’t been asleep. It\n would have been hard to waste this last night that way. Instead he had\n been remembering. “All right, Sergeant,” he said.\n “Coming up.”\n\n\n He swung his feet to the bare boards and sat for a moment, wishing he\n hadn’t had to give up smoking. He could almost imagine the textured\n taste of the cigaret on his tongue.\n\n\n Oddly enough, he wasn’t tired. He wasn’t excited, either. And that was\n much stranger. He stood up and opened the window to look out into the\n desert night. Overhead the stars were brilliant and cold. Mars gleamed\n russet-colored against the sable sky. He smiled, remembering again. So\n long a road, he thought, from then to now.", "On the dais nearby, listening to the PRO, but watching Kimball, sat\n Steinhart, the team analyst. Kimball returned his steady gaze thinking:\n They start out burning with desire to cure the human mind and end with\n the shadow of the images. The words become the fact, the therapy the\n aim. What could Steinhart know of longing? No, he thought, I’m not being\n fair. Steinhart was only doing his job.\n\n\n The big clock on the back wall of the briefing shack said three\n fifty-five. Zero minus one hour and five minutes.\n\n\n Kimball looked around the room at the pale faces, the open mouths. What\n have I to do with you now, he thought?\nOutside, the winter night lay cold and still over the Base. Floodlights\n spilled brilliance over the dunes and the scrubby earth, high fences\n casting laced shadows across the burning white expanses of\n ferroconcrete.", "Kimball snapped on a light and looked at his watch. 0310. Zero minus one\n fifty. He opened the steel locker and began to dress.\nThe water swirled warm and velvety around his ankles. There, behind\n that madrone, Kimmy thought. Was that a Plant Man? The thick white trunk\n and the grasping, blood-sucking arms——\n\n\n The radium pistol’s weight made his wrist ache, but he clung to it\n tightly, knowing that he\n [117]\n could never cope with a Plant Man with a sword\n alone. The certainty of coming battle made him smile a little, the way\n John Carter would smile if he were here in the Valley Dor ready to\n attack the white Therns and their Plant Men.", "Then he stopped smiling and turned away from the window. It hadn’t been\n an easy path and what was coming up now was the hardest part. The goddam\n psychs were the toughest, always wanting him to bug out on the deal\n because of their brainwave graphs and word association tests and their\n Rorschach blots.\n\n\n “You’re a lonely man, Colonel Kimball——”\n\n\n “Too much imagination could be bad for this job.”\n\n\n How could you sit there with pentothal in your veins and wires running\n out of your head and tell them about the still waters of Korus, or the\n pennons flying from the twin towers of Greater Helium or the way the\n tiny, slanting sun gleamed at dawn through the rigging of a flyer?", "And his mother, tall and shadowy, standing on the porch of the rented\n cottage and saying exasperatedly: “\nWhy do you run off by\n yourself, Kimmy? I worry about you so——\n”\n\n\n And his sisters: “\nPlaying with his wooden swords and his radium\n pistol and never wanting to take his nose out of those awful\n books——\n”\n\n\n He dreamed of the low, beamed ceiling of the cottage, sweltering in the\n heat of the summer nights and the thick longing in his throat for red\n hills and a sky that burned deep blue through the long, long days and\n canals, clear and still. A land that he knew somehow never was, but\n which lived, for him, through some alchemy of the mind. He dreamed of\n Mars.\n\n\n And Steinhart: “\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\n”\nThe hours stretched into days, the days into months. Time wasn’t. Time\n was a deep night and a starshot void. And dreams.", "He dropped to the sand and dug his hands into the dry powdery soil. He\n could scarcely see now, for blackness was flickering at the edges of his\n vision and his failing heart and lungs were near collapse.\nKimmm-eee!\n[123]\n A huge green warrior on a gray monster of a thoat was beckoning to him.\n Pointing toward the low hills on the oddly near horizon.\nKimmmm-eeeee!\nThe voice was thin and distant on the icy wind. Kimball knew that voice.\n He knew it from long ago in the Valley Dor, from the shores of the Lost\n Sea of Korus where the tideless waters lay black and deep——\n\n\n He began stumbling across the empty, lifeless plain. He knew the voice,\n he knew the man, and he knew the hills that he must reach, quickly now,\n or die.", "The Valley Dor was blurring, fading. The Golden Cliffs were turning into\n sandy, river-worn banks. The faucet felt heavy in his grimy hand. He\n shivered, not with horror now. With cold.\n\n\n He walked slowly out of the willows, stumbling a little over the rocks.\nHe lay like an embryo in the viscera of the ship, protected and quite\n alone. The plastic sac contained him, fed him; and the rocket, silent\n now, coursed through the airless deep like a questing thought. Time was\n measured by the ticking of the telemeters and the timers, but Kimball\n slept insulated and complete.\n\n\n And he dreamed.\n\n\n He dreamed of that summer when the river lay still and deep under the\n hanging willows. He dreamed of his sisters, thin and angular creatures\n as he remembered them through the eyes of a nine-year-old——", "The keening sound of air over the wings brought a thrill. Below him, a\n great curving disk of reds and browns and yellows. He could see dust\n storms raging and the heavy, darkened lines of the canals.\n\n\n There was skill in his hands. He righted the rocket, balanced it. Began\n the tricky task of landing. It took all of his talent, all of his\n training. Ponderously, the ship settled into the iron sand; slowly, the\n internal fires died.\nKimball stood in the control room, his heart pounding. Slowly, the ports\n opened. Through the thick quartz he could see the endless plain. Reddish\n brown, empty. The basin of some long ago sea. The sky was a deep,\n burning blue with stars shining at midday at the zenith. It looked\n unreal, a painting of unworldly quiet and desolation.\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\nSteinhart was right, he thought vaguely. A tear streaked his cheek. He\n had never been so alone.", "They topped the last hillock and dropped down into the lighted bowl of\n the launching site. The rocket towered, winged and monstrously checkered\n in white and orange, against the first flickerings of the false dawn.\nKimmy saw the girls before they saw him. In their new, low waisted\n middies and skirts, they looked strange and out of place standing by the\n pebbled shore of the River Iss.\n\n\n They were his sisters, Rose and Margaret. Older than he at fifteen and\n seventeen. But they walked by the river and into danger. Behind him he\n could hear the rustling sound of the Plant Men as the evening breeze\n came up.\n\n\n “Kimm-eeeee—”\n\n\n They were calling him. In the deepening dusk their voices carried far\n down the river. “Kimmmmm—eeeeeeeeee—”", "He awoke seldom. His tasks were simple. The plastic sac and the tender\n care of the ship were more real than the routine jobs of telemetering\n information back to the Base across the empty miles, across the rim of\n the world.\n\n\n He dreamed of his wife. “\nYou don’t live here, Kim.\n”\n\n\n She was right, of course. He\n [122]\n wasn’t of earth. Never had been. My love\n is in the sky, he thought, filled with an immense satisfaction.\n\n\n And time slipped by, the weeks into months; the sun dwindled and earth\n was gone. All around him lay the stunning star-dusted night.\n\n\n He lay curled in the plastic womb when the ship turned. He awoke\n sluggishly and dragged himself into awareness.\n\n\n “I’ve changed,” he thought aloud. “My face is younger;\n I feel different.”", "As they filed out of the briefing shack, Steinhart climbed into the\n command car with Kimball. Chance or design? Kimball wondered. The\n others, he noticed, were leaving both of them alone.\n\n\n “We haven’t gotten on too well, have we, Colonel?” Steinhart\n observed in a quiet voice.\n\n\n Kimball thought: He’s pale skinned and very blond. What is it that he\n reminds me of? Shouldn’t there be a diadem on his forehead? He smiled\n vaguely into the rumbling night. That’s what it was. Odd that he should\n have forgotten. How many rocket pilots, he wondered, were weaned on\n Burroughs’ books? And how many remembered now that the Thern priests all\n wore yellow wings and a circlet of gold with some fantastic jewel on\n their forehead?\n\n\n “We’ve done as well as could be expected,” he said.", "They were thinking: Why him? Out of all the scores of\n applicants—because there are always applicants for a sure-death\n job—and all the qualified pilots, why this one?\n\n\n The Public Relations Officer was speaking now, reading from the mimeoed\n release as though these civilians couldn’t be trusted to get the sparse\n information given them straight without his help, given grudgingly and\n without expression.\n\n\n [118]\n Kimball listened, only half aware of what was being said. He watched the\n faces of the men sitting on the rows of folding chairs, saw their eyes\n like wounds, red from the early morning hour and the murmuring reception\n of the night before in the Officers’ Club. They are wondering how\nI\nfeel, he was thinking. And asking themselves why I want to go.", "[115]\nTHE HILLS OF HOME\n\n by Alfred Coppel\n“Normality” is a myth; we're all a little neurotic, and the\n study of neurosis has been able to classify the general types of\n disturbance which are most common. And some types (providing the subject\n is not suffering so extreme a case as to have crossed the border into\n psychosis) can be not only useful, but perhaps necessary for certain\n kinds of work....\nThe river ran still and deep, green and gray in the eddies with the\n warm smell of late summer rising out of the slow water. Madrone and\n birch and willow, limp in the evening quiet, and the taste of\n smouldering leaves....\n\n\n It wasn’t the Russian River. It was the Sacred Iss. The sun had touched\n the gem-encrusted cliffs by the shores of the Lost Sea of Korus and had\n vanished, leaving only the stillness of the dusk and the lonely cry of\n shore birds.", "Silence. The rumble of the tires on the packed sand of the road, the\n murmur of the command car’s engine, spinning oilily, and lit by tiny\n sunbright flashes deep in the hollows of the hot metal.\n\n\n “You’re glad to be leaving, aren’t you—” Steinhart said\n finally. “Happy to be the first man to try for the\n planets——”\n\n\n Kimball nodded absently, wishing the man would be quiet. Mars, a dull\n rusty point of light low on the horizon, seemed to beckon." ], [ "Kimball tried to see him in the black gloom. He hadn’t been asleep. It\n would have been hard to waste this last night that way. Instead he had\n been remembering. “All right, Sergeant,” he said.\n “Coming up.”\n\n\n He swung his feet to the bare boards and sat for a moment, wishing he\n hadn’t had to give up smoking. He could almost imagine the textured\n taste of the cigaret on his tongue.\n\n\n Oddly enough, he wasn’t tired. He wasn’t excited, either. And that was\n much stranger. He stood up and opened the window to look out into the\n desert night. Overhead the stars were brilliant and cold. Mars gleamed\n russet-colored against the sable sky. He smiled, remembering again. So\n long a road, he thought, from then to now.", "They topped the last hillock and dropped down into the lighted bowl of\n the launching site. The rocket towered, winged and monstrously checkered\n in white and orange, against the first flickerings of the false dawn.\nKimmy saw the girls before they saw him. In their new, low waisted\n middies and skirts, they looked strange and out of place standing by the\n pebbled shore of the River Iss.\n\n\n They were his sisters, Rose and Margaret. Older than he at fifteen and\n seventeen. But they walked by the river and into danger. Behind him he\n could hear the rustling sound of the Plant Men as the evening breeze\n came up.\n\n\n “Kimm-eeeee—”\n\n\n They were calling him. In the deepening dusk their voices carried far\n down the river. “Kimmmmm—eeeeeeeeee—”", "Kimmy’s eyes narrowed and he waded stealthily across the sacred river.\n That would be Matai Shang, the Father of Holy Therns—spreading his arms\n to the sunset and standing safely on his high balcony in the Golden\n Cliffs while the Plant Men gathered to attack the poor pilgrims Iss had\n brought to this cursed valley.\n\n\n “Sing me to sleep, lullaby of the leaves”—the phonograph\n sang. Kimmy stepped cautiously ashore and moved into the cover of a\n clump of willows. The sky was darkening fast. Other stars were shining\n through. There wasn’t much time left.\nKimball stood now in the bright glare of the briefing shack, a strange\n figure in blood-colored plastic. The representatives of the press had\n been handed the mimeographed releases by the PRO and now they sat in\n silence, studying the red figure of the man who was to ride the rocket.", "Kimball snapped on a light and looked at his watch. 0310. Zero minus one\n fifty. He opened the steel locker and began to dress.\nThe water swirled warm and velvety around his ankles. There, behind\n that madrone, Kimmy thought. Was that a Plant Man? The thick white trunk\n and the grasping, blood-sucking arms——\n\n\n The radium pistol’s weight made his wrist ache, but he clung to it\n tightly, knowing that he\n [117]\n could never cope with a Plant Man with a sword\n alone. The certainty of coming battle made him smile a little, the way\n John Carter would smile if he were here in the Valley Dor ready to\n attack the white Therns and their Plant Men.", "And his mother, tall and shadowy, standing on the porch of the rented\n cottage and saying exasperatedly: “\nWhy do you run off by\n yourself, Kimmy? I worry about you so——\n”\n\n\n And his sisters: “\nPlaying with his wooden swords and his radium\n pistol and never wanting to take his nose out of those awful\n books——\n”\n\n\n He dreamed of the low, beamed ceiling of the cottage, sweltering in the\n heat of the summer nights and the thick longing in his throat for red\n hills and a sky that burned deep blue through the long, long days and\n canals, clear and still. A land that he knew somehow never was, but\n which lived, for him, through some alchemy of the mind. He dreamed of\n Mars.\n\n\n And Steinhart: “\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\n”\nThe hours stretched into days, the days into months. Time wasn’t. Time\n was a deep night and a starshot void. And dreams.", "Something died in him. It wasn’t a faucet, it WAS a radium pistol. He\n looked at his sisters with dismay. They weren’t really his sisters. They\n were Therns, with their yellow hair and their pale skins. He and John\n Carter and Tars Tarkas had fought them many times, piling their bodies\n for barricades and weaving a flashing pattern of skillful swords in the\n shifting light of the two moons.\n\n\n [121]\n “Kimmmm—eeee Mom’s going to be mad at you! Answer us!”\n\n\n If only Tars Tarkas would come now. If only the great Green Jeddak would\n come splashing across the stream on his huge thoat, his two swords\n clashing——\n\n\n “He’s up there in that clump of willows—hiding!”\n\n\n “Kimmy! You come down here this instant!”", "On the dais nearby, listening to the PRO, but watching Kimball, sat\n Steinhart, the team analyst. Kimball returned his steady gaze thinking:\n They start out burning with desire to cure the human mind and end with\n the shadow of the images. The words become the fact, the therapy the\n aim. What could Steinhart know of longing? No, he thought, I’m not being\n fair. Steinhart was only doing his job.\n\n\n The big clock on the back wall of the briefing shack said three\n fifty-five. Zero minus one hour and five minutes.\n\n\n Kimball looked around the room at the pale faces, the open mouths. What\n have I to do with you now, he thought?\nOutside, the winter night lay cold and still over the Base. Floodlights\n spilled brilliance over the dunes and the scrubby earth, high fences\n casting laced shadows across the burning white expanses of\n ferroconcrete.", "From downstream came the faint sounds of music. It might have been a\n phonograph playing in one of the summer cabins with names like Polly Ann\n Roost and Patches and Seventh Heaven, but to Kimmy it was the hated cry\n of the Father of Therns calling the dreadful Plant Men to their feast of\n victims borne into\n [116]\n this Valley Dor by the mysterious Iss.\n\n\n Kimmy shifted the heavy Martian pistol into his left hand and checked\n his harness. A soft smile touched his lips. He was well armed; there was\n nothing he had to fear from the Plant Men. His bare feet turned\n up-stream, away from the sound of the phonograph, toward the shallows in\n the river that would permit him to cross and continue his search along\n the base of the Golden Cliffs—\nThe sergeant's voice cut through the pre-dawn darkness. “Oh, three\n hundred, Colonel.... Briefing in thirty minutes.”", "He knew he should answer them, but he did not. Behind him he could hear\n the awful Plant Men approaching. He shivered with delicious horror.\n\n\n He stood very still, listening to his sisters talking, letting their\n voices carry down to where he hid from the dangers of the Valley Dor.\n\n\n “Where is that little brat, anyway?”\n\n\n “He always wanders off just at dinnertime and then we have to find\n him——”\n\n\n “Playing with that old faucet—” Mimicry. “‘My\n rad-ium pis-tol——’”\n\n\n “Cracked—just cracked. Oh, where IS he, anyway? Kimmm-eee, you\n AN-swer!”", "For a moment, Kimmy felt a thrill of apprehension. The deepening\n stillness of the river was closing in around him. Even the music from\n the phonograph was very, very faint. Above him, the great vault of the\n sky was changing from pink to gray to dusty blue. A bright star was\n breaking through the curtain of fading light. He knew it was Venus, the\n Evening Star. But let it be Earth, he thought. And instead of white, let\n it be the color of an emerald.\n\n\n He paused in midstream, letting the warm water riffle around his feet.\n Looking up at the green beacon of his home planet, he thought: I’ve left\n all that behind me. It was never really what I wanted. Mars is where I\n belong. With my friends, Tars Tarkas the great Green Jeddak, and Carter,\n the Warlord, and all the beautiful brave people.\nThe phonograph sang with Vallee’s voice: “Cradle me where\n southern skies can watch me with a million eyes——”", "Then he stopped smiling and turned away from the window. It hadn’t been\n an easy path and what was coming up now was the hardest part. The goddam\n psychs were the toughest, always wanting him to bug out on the deal\n because of their brainwave graphs and word association tests and their\n Rorschach blots.\n\n\n “You’re a lonely man, Colonel Kimball——”\n\n\n “Too much imagination could be bad for this job.”\n\n\n How could you sit there with pentothal in your veins and wires running\n out of your head and tell them about the still waters of Korus, or the\n pennons flying from the twin towers of Greater Helium or the way the\n tiny, slanting sun gleamed at dawn through the rigging of a flyer?", "As they filed out of the briefing shack, Steinhart climbed into the\n command car with Kimball. Chance or design? Kimball wondered. The\n others, he noticed, were leaving both of them alone.\n\n\n “We haven’t gotten on too well, have we, Colonel?” Steinhart\n observed in a quiet voice.\n\n\n Kimball thought: He’s pale skinned and very blond. What is it that he\n reminds me of? Shouldn’t there be a diadem on his forehead? He smiled\n vaguely into the rumbling night. That’s what it was. Odd that he should\n have forgotten. How many rocket pilots, he wondered, were weaned on\n Burroughs’ books? And how many remembered now that the Thern priests all\n wore yellow wings and a circlet of gold with some fantastic jewel on\n their forehead?\n\n\n “We’ve done as well as could be expected,” he said.", "Steinhart reached for a cigaret and then stopped, remembering that\n Kimball had had to give them up because of the flight. Kimball caught\n the movement and half-smiled.\n\n\n “I didn’t try to kill the assignment for you, Kim,” the\n psych said.\n\n\n “It doesn’t matter now.”\n\n\n “No, I suppose not.”\n\n\n “You just didn’t think I was the man for the job.”\n\n\n “Your record is good all the way. You know that,” Steinhart\n [119]\n said. “It’s just some of the things——”\n\n\n Kimball said: “I talked too much.”\n\n\n “You had to.”\n\n\n “You wouldn’t think my secret life was so dangerous, would\n you,” the Colonel said smiling.\n\n\n “You were married, Kim. What happened?”", "“More therapy?”\n\n\n “I’d like to know. This is for me.”\nKimball shrugged. “It didn’t work. She was a fine girl—but she\n finally told me it was no go. ‘You don’t live here’ was the\n way she put it.”\n\n\n “She knew you were a career officer; what did she\n expect——?”\n\n\n “That isn’t what she meant. You know that.”\n\n\n “Yes,” the psych said slowly. “I know that.”\n\n\n They rode in silence, across the dark Base, between the concrete sheds\n and the wooden barracks. Overhead, the stars like dust across the sky.\n Kimball, swathed in plastic, a fantastic figure not of earth, watched\n them wheel across the clear, deep night.\n\n\n “I wish you luck, Kim,” Steinhart said. “I mean\n that.”", "They were thinking: Why him? Out of all the scores of\n applicants—because there are always applicants for a sure-death\n job—and all the qualified pilots, why this one?\n\n\n The Public Relations Officer was speaking now, reading from the mimeoed\n release as though these civilians couldn’t be trusted to get the sparse\n information given them straight without his help, given grudgingly and\n without expression.\n\n\n [118]\n Kimball listened, only half aware of what was being said. He watched the\n faces of the men sitting on the rows of folding chairs, saw their eyes\n like wounds, red from the early morning hour and the murmuring reception\n of the night before in the Officers’ Club. They are wondering how\nI\nfeel, he was thinking. And asking themselves why I want to go.", "He dropped to the sand and dug his hands into the dry powdery soil. He\n could scarcely see now, for blackness was flickering at the edges of his\n vision and his failing heart and lungs were near collapse.\nKimmm-eee!\n[123]\n A huge green warrior on a gray monster of a thoat was beckoning to him.\n Pointing toward the low hills on the oddly near horizon.\nKimmmm-eeeee!\nThe voice was thin and distant on the icy wind. Kimball knew that voice.\n He knew it from long ago in the Valley Dor, from the shores of the Lost\n Sea of Korus where the tideless waters lay black and deep——\n\n\n He began stumbling across the empty, lifeless plain. He knew the voice,\n he knew the man, and he knew the hills that he must reach, quickly now,\n or die.", "The Valley Dor was blurring, fading. The Golden Cliffs were turning into\n sandy, river-worn banks. The faucet felt heavy in his grimy hand. He\n shivered, not with horror now. With cold.\n\n\n He walked slowly out of the willows, stumbling a little over the rocks.\nHe lay like an embryo in the viscera of the ship, protected and quite\n alone. The plastic sac contained him, fed him; and the rocket, silent\n now, coursed through the airless deep like a questing thought. Time was\n measured by the ticking of the telemeters and the timers, but Kimball\n slept insulated and complete.\n\n\n And he dreamed.\n\n\n He dreamed of that summer when the river lay still and deep under the\n hanging willows. He dreamed of his sisters, thin and angular creatures\n as he remembered them through the eyes of a nine-year-old——", "He awoke seldom. His tasks were simple. The plastic sac and the tender\n care of the ship were more real than the routine jobs of telemetering\n information back to the Base across the empty miles, across the rim of\n the world.\n\n\n He dreamed of his wife. “\nYou don’t live here, Kim.\n”\n\n\n She was right, of course. He\n [122]\n wasn’t of earth. Never had been. My love\n is in the sky, he thought, filled with an immense satisfaction.\n\n\n And time slipped by, the weeks into months; the sun dwindled and earth\n was gone. All around him lay the stunning star-dusted night.\n\n\n He lay curled in the plastic womb when the ship turned. He awoke\n sluggishly and dragged himself into awareness.\n\n\n “I’ve changed,” he thought aloud. “My face is younger;\n I feel different.”", "“Thanks.” Vaguely, as though from across a deep and widening\n gulf.\n\n\n “What will you do?”\n\n\n “You know the answers as well as I,” the Colonel said\n impatiently. “Set up the camp and wait for the next rocket. If it\n comes.”\n\n\n “In two years.”\n\n\n “In two years,” the plastic figure said. Didn’t he know that\n it didn’t matter?\n\n\n He glanced at his watch. Zero minus fifty-six minutes.\n\n\n “Kim,” Steinhart said slowly. “There’s something you\n should know about. Something you really should be prepared for.”\n\n\n “Yes?” Disinterest in his voice now, Steinhart noted\n clinically. Natural under the circumstances? Or neurosis building up\n already?", "The keening sound of air over the wings brought a thrill. Below him, a\n great curving disk of reds and browns and yellows. He could see dust\n storms raging and the heavy, darkened lines of the canals.\n\n\n There was skill in his hands. He righted the rocket, balanced it. Began\n the tricky task of landing. It took all of his talent, all of his\n training. Ponderously, the ship settled into the iron sand; slowly, the\n internal fires died.\nKimball stood in the control room, his heart pounding. Slowly, the ports\n opened. Through the thick quartz he could see the endless plain. Reddish\n brown, empty. The basin of some long ago sea. The sky was a deep,\n burning blue with stars shining at midday at the zenith. It looked\n unreal, a painting of unworldly quiet and desolation.\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\nSteinhart was right, he thought vaguely. A tear streaked his cheek. He\n had never been so alone." ], [ "Kimmy’s eyes narrowed and he waded stealthily across the sacred river.\n That would be Matai Shang, the Father of Holy Therns—spreading his arms\n to the sunset and standing safely on his high balcony in the Golden\n Cliffs while the Plant Men gathered to attack the poor pilgrims Iss had\n brought to this cursed valley.\n\n\n “Sing me to sleep, lullaby of the leaves”—the phonograph\n sang. Kimmy stepped cautiously ashore and moved into the cover of a\n clump of willows. The sky was darkening fast. Other stars were shining\n through. There wasn’t much time left.\nKimball stood now in the bright glare of the briefing shack, a strange\n figure in blood-colored plastic. The representatives of the press had\n been handed the mimeographed releases by the PRO and now they sat in\n silence, studying the red figure of the man who was to ride the rocket.", "And his mother, tall and shadowy, standing on the porch of the rented\n cottage and saying exasperatedly: “\nWhy do you run off by\n yourself, Kimmy? I worry about you so——\n”\n\n\n And his sisters: “\nPlaying with his wooden swords and his radium\n pistol and never wanting to take his nose out of those awful\n books——\n”\n\n\n He dreamed of the low, beamed ceiling of the cottage, sweltering in the\n heat of the summer nights and the thick longing in his throat for red\n hills and a sky that burned deep blue through the long, long days and\n canals, clear and still. A land that he knew somehow never was, but\n which lived, for him, through some alchemy of the mind. He dreamed of\n Mars.\n\n\n And Steinhart: “\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\n”\nThe hours stretched into days, the days into months. Time wasn’t. Time\n was a deep night and a starshot void. And dreams.", "They topped the last hillock and dropped down into the lighted bowl of\n the launching site. The rocket towered, winged and monstrously checkered\n in white and orange, against the first flickerings of the false dawn.\nKimmy saw the girls before they saw him. In their new, low waisted\n middies and skirts, they looked strange and out of place standing by the\n pebbled shore of the River Iss.\n\n\n They were his sisters, Rose and Margaret. Older than he at fifteen and\n seventeen. But they walked by the river and into danger. Behind him he\n could hear the rustling sound of the Plant Men as the evening breeze\n came up.\n\n\n “Kimm-eeeee—”\n\n\n They were calling him. In the deepening dusk their voices carried far\n down the river. “Kimmmmm—eeeeeeeeee—”", "Kimball tried to see him in the black gloom. He hadn’t been asleep. It\n would have been hard to waste this last night that way. Instead he had\n been remembering. “All right, Sergeant,” he said.\n “Coming up.”\n\n\n He swung his feet to the bare boards and sat for a moment, wishing he\n hadn’t had to give up smoking. He could almost imagine the textured\n taste of the cigaret on his tongue.\n\n\n Oddly enough, he wasn’t tired. He wasn’t excited, either. And that was\n much stranger. He stood up and opened the window to look out into the\n desert night. Overhead the stars were brilliant and cold. Mars gleamed\n russet-colored against the sable sky. He smiled, remembering again. So\n long a road, he thought, from then to now.", "For a moment, Kimmy felt a thrill of apprehension. The deepening\n stillness of the river was closing in around him. Even the music from\n the phonograph was very, very faint. Above him, the great vault of the\n sky was changing from pink to gray to dusty blue. A bright star was\n breaking through the curtain of fading light. He knew it was Venus, the\n Evening Star. But let it be Earth, he thought. And instead of white, let\n it be the color of an emerald.\n\n\n He paused in midstream, letting the warm water riffle around his feet.\n Looking up at the green beacon of his home planet, he thought: I’ve left\n all that behind me. It was never really what I wanted. Mars is where I\n belong. With my friends, Tars Tarkas the great Green Jeddak, and Carter,\n the Warlord, and all the beautiful brave people.\nThe phonograph sang with Vallee’s voice: “Cradle me where\n southern skies can watch me with a million eyes——”", "Then he stopped smiling and turned away from the window. It hadn’t been\n an easy path and what was coming up now was the hardest part. The goddam\n psychs were the toughest, always wanting him to bug out on the deal\n because of their brainwave graphs and word association tests and their\n Rorschach blots.\n\n\n “You’re a lonely man, Colonel Kimball——”\n\n\n “Too much imagination could be bad for this job.”\n\n\n How could you sit there with pentothal in your veins and wires running\n out of your head and tell them about the still waters of Korus, or the\n pennons flying from the twin towers of Greater Helium or the way the\n tiny, slanting sun gleamed at dawn through the rigging of a flyer?", "He dropped to the sand and dug his hands into the dry powdery soil. He\n could scarcely see now, for blackness was flickering at the edges of his\n vision and his failing heart and lungs were near collapse.\nKimmm-eee!\n[123]\n A huge green warrior on a gray monster of a thoat was beckoning to him.\n Pointing toward the low hills on the oddly near horizon.\nKimmmm-eeeee!\nThe voice was thin and distant on the icy wind. Kimball knew that voice.\n He knew it from long ago in the Valley Dor, from the shores of the Lost\n Sea of Korus where the tideless waters lay black and deep——\n\n\n He began stumbling across the empty, lifeless plain. He knew the voice,\n he knew the man, and he knew the hills that he must reach, quickly now,\n or die.", "“More therapy?”\n\n\n “I’d like to know. This is for me.”\nKimball shrugged. “It didn’t work. She was a fine girl—but she\n finally told me it was no go. ‘You don’t live here’ was the\n way she put it.”\n\n\n “She knew you were a career officer; what did she\n expect——?”\n\n\n “That isn’t what she meant. You know that.”\n\n\n “Yes,” the psych said slowly. “I know that.”\n\n\n They rode in silence, across the dark Base, between the concrete sheds\n and the wooden barracks. Overhead, the stars like dust across the sky.\n Kimball, swathed in plastic, a fantastic figure not of earth, watched\n them wheel across the clear, deep night.\n\n\n “I wish you luck, Kim,” Steinhart said. “I mean\n that.”", "On the dais nearby, listening to the PRO, but watching Kimball, sat\n Steinhart, the team analyst. Kimball returned his steady gaze thinking:\n They start out burning with desire to cure the human mind and end with\n the shadow of the images. The words become the fact, the therapy the\n aim. What could Steinhart know of longing? No, he thought, I’m not being\n fair. Steinhart was only doing his job.\n\n\n The big clock on the back wall of the briefing shack said three\n fifty-five. Zero minus one hour and five minutes.\n\n\n Kimball looked around the room at the pale faces, the open mouths. What\n have I to do with you now, he thought?\nOutside, the winter night lay cold and still over the Base. Floodlights\n spilled brilliance over the dunes and the scrubby earth, high fences\n casting laced shadows across the burning white expanses of\n ferroconcrete.", "Steinhart reached for a cigaret and then stopped, remembering that\n Kimball had had to give them up because of the flight. Kimball caught\n the movement and half-smiled.\n\n\n “I didn’t try to kill the assignment for you, Kim,” the\n psych said.\n\n\n “It doesn’t matter now.”\n\n\n “No, I suppose not.”\n\n\n “You just didn’t think I was the man for the job.”\n\n\n “Your record is good all the way. You know that,” Steinhart\n [119]\n said. “It’s just some of the things——”\n\n\n Kimball said: “I talked too much.”\n\n\n “You had to.”\n\n\n “You wouldn’t think my secret life was so dangerous, would\n you,” the Colonel said smiling.\n\n\n “You were married, Kim. What happened?”", "“Our tests showed you to be a schizoid—well-compensated, of\n course. You know there’s no such thing as a\nnormal\nhuman being. We all\n have tendencies toward one or more types of psychoses. In your case the\n symptoms are an overly active imagination and in some cases an inability\n to distinguish reality from—well, fancy.”\nKimball turned to regard the psych\n coolly\n .\n “What’s reality, Steinhart? Do\nyou\nknow?”\n\n\n The analyst flushed. “No.”\n\n\n “I didn’t think so.”\n\n\n “You lived pretty much in your mind when you were a child,”\n Steinhart went on doggedly. “You were a solitary, a lonely\n child.”\n\n\n [120]\n Kimball was watching the sky again.\n\n\n Steinhart felt futile and out of his depth. “We know so little\n about the psychology of space-flight, Kim——”", "As they filed out of the briefing shack, Steinhart climbed into the\n command car with Kimball. Chance or design? Kimball wondered. The\n others, he noticed, were leaving both of them alone.\n\n\n “We haven’t gotten on too well, have we, Colonel?” Steinhart\n observed in a quiet voice.\n\n\n Kimball thought: He’s pale skinned and very blond. What is it that he\n reminds me of? Shouldn’t there be a diadem on his forehead? He smiled\n vaguely into the rumbling night. That’s what it was. Odd that he should\n have forgotten. How many rocket pilots, he wondered, were weaned on\n Burroughs’ books? And how many remembered now that the Thern priests all\n wore yellow wings and a circlet of gold with some fantastic jewel on\n their forehead?\n\n\n “We’ve done as well as could be expected,” he said.", "Silence. The rumble of the tires on the packed sand of the road, the\n murmur of the command car’s engine, spinning oilily, and lit by tiny\n sunbright flashes deep in the hollows of the hot metal.\n\n\n “You’re glad to be leaving, aren’t you—” Steinhart said\n finally. “Happy to be the first man to try for the\n planets——”\n\n\n Kimball nodded absently, wishing the man would be quiet. Mars, a dull\n rusty point of light low on the horizon, seemed to beckon.", "The keening sound of air over the wings brought a thrill. Below him, a\n great curving disk of reds and browns and yellows. He could see dust\n storms raging and the heavy, darkened lines of the canals.\n\n\n There was skill in his hands. He righted the rocket, balanced it. Began\n the tricky task of landing. It took all of his talent, all of his\n training. Ponderously, the ship settled into the iron sand; slowly, the\n internal fires died.\nKimball stood in the control room, his heart pounding. Slowly, the ports\n opened. Through the thick quartz he could see the endless plain. Reddish\n brown, empty. The basin of some long ago sea. The sky was a deep,\n burning blue with stars shining at midday at the zenith. It looked\n unreal, a painting of unworldly quiet and desolation.\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\nSteinhart was right, he thought vaguely. A tear streaked his cheek. He\n had never been so alone.", "He knew he should answer them, but he did not. Behind him he could hear\n the awful Plant Men approaching. He shivered with delicious horror.\n\n\n He stood very still, listening to his sisters talking, letting their\n voices carry down to where he hid from the dangers of the Valley Dor.\n\n\n “Where is that little brat, anyway?”\n\n\n “He always wanders off just at dinnertime and then we have to find\n him——”\n\n\n “Playing with that old faucet—” Mimicry. “‘My\n rad-ium pis-tol——’”\n\n\n “Cracked—just cracked. Oh, where IS he, anyway? Kimmm-eee, you\n AN-swer!”", "From downstream came the faint sounds of music. It might have been a\n phonograph playing in one of the summer cabins with names like Polly Ann\n Roost and Patches and Seventh Heaven, but to Kimmy it was the hated cry\n of the Father of Therns calling the dreadful Plant Men to their feast of\n victims borne into\n [116]\n this Valley Dor by the mysterious Iss.\n\n\n Kimmy shifted the heavy Martian pistol into his left hand and checked\n his harness. A soft smile touched his lips. He was well armed; there was\n nothing he had to fear from the Plant Men. His bare feet turned\n up-stream, away from the sound of the phonograph, toward the shallows in\n the river that would permit him to cross and continue his search along\n the base of the Golden Cliffs—\nThe sergeant's voice cut through the pre-dawn darkness. “Oh, three\n hundred, Colonel.... Briefing in thirty minutes.”", "Something died in him. It wasn’t a faucet, it WAS a radium pistol. He\n looked at his sisters with dismay. They weren’t really his sisters. They\n were Therns, with their yellow hair and their pale skins. He and John\n Carter and Tars Tarkas had fought them many times, piling their bodies\n for barricades and weaving a flashing pattern of skillful swords in the\n shifting light of the two moons.\n\n\n [121]\n “Kimmmm—eeee Mom’s going to be mad at you! Answer us!”\n\n\n If only Tars Tarkas would come now. If only the great Green Jeddak would\n come splashing across the stream on his huge thoat, his two swords\n clashing——\n\n\n “He’s up there in that clump of willows—hiding!”\n\n\n “Kimmy! You come down here this instant!”", "They were thinking: Why him? Out of all the scores of\n applicants—because there are always applicants for a sure-death\n job—and all the qualified pilots, why this one?\n\n\n The Public Relations Officer was speaking now, reading from the mimeoed\n release as though these civilians couldn’t be trusted to get the sparse\n information given them straight without his help, given grudgingly and\n without expression.\n\n\n [118]\n Kimball listened, only half aware of what was being said. He watched the\n faces of the men sitting on the rows of folding chairs, saw their eyes\n like wounds, red from the early morning hour and the murmuring reception\n of the night before in the Officers’ Club. They are wondering how\nI\nfeel, he was thinking. And asking themselves why I want to go.", "Kimball snapped on a light and looked at his watch. 0310. Zero minus one\n fifty. He opened the steel locker and began to dress.\nThe water swirled warm and velvety around his ankles. There, behind\n that madrone, Kimmy thought. Was that a Plant Man? The thick white trunk\n and the grasping, blood-sucking arms——\n\n\n The radium pistol’s weight made his wrist ache, but he clung to it\n tightly, knowing that he\n [117]\n could never cope with a Plant Man with a sword\n alone. The certainty of coming battle made him smile a little, the way\n John Carter would smile if he were here in the Valley Dor ready to\n attack the white Therns and their Plant Men.", "The Valley Dor was blurring, fading. The Golden Cliffs were turning into\n sandy, river-worn banks. The faucet felt heavy in his grimy hand. He\n shivered, not with horror now. With cold.\n\n\n He walked slowly out of the willows, stumbling a little over the rocks.\nHe lay like an embryo in the viscera of the ship, protected and quite\n alone. The plastic sac contained him, fed him; and the rocket, silent\n now, coursed through the airless deep like a questing thought. Time was\n measured by the ticking of the telemeters and the timers, but Kimball\n slept insulated and complete.\n\n\n And he dreamed.\n\n\n He dreamed of that summer when the river lay still and deep under the\n hanging willows. He dreamed of his sisters, thin and angular creatures\n as he remembered them through the eyes of a nine-year-old——" ], [ "Steinhart reached for a cigaret and then stopped, remembering that\n Kimball had had to give them up because of the flight. Kimball caught\n the movement and half-smiled.\n\n\n “I didn’t try to kill the assignment for you, Kim,” the\n psych said.\n\n\n “It doesn’t matter now.”\n\n\n “No, I suppose not.”\n\n\n “You just didn’t think I was the man for the job.”\n\n\n “Your record is good all the way. You know that,” Steinhart\n [119]\n said. “It’s just some of the things——”\n\n\n Kimball said: “I talked too much.”\n\n\n “You had to.”\n\n\n “You wouldn’t think my secret life was so dangerous, would\n you,” the Colonel said smiling.\n\n\n “You were married, Kim. What happened?”", "As they filed out of the briefing shack, Steinhart climbed into the\n command car with Kimball. Chance or design? Kimball wondered. The\n others, he noticed, were leaving both of them alone.\n\n\n “We haven’t gotten on too well, have we, Colonel?” Steinhart\n observed in a quiet voice.\n\n\n Kimball thought: He’s pale skinned and very blond. What is it that he\n reminds me of? Shouldn’t there be a diadem on his forehead? He smiled\n vaguely into the rumbling night. That’s what it was. Odd that he should\n have forgotten. How many rocket pilots, he wondered, were weaned on\n Burroughs’ books? And how many remembered now that the Thern priests all\n wore yellow wings and a circlet of gold with some fantastic jewel on\n their forehead?\n\n\n “We’ve done as well as could be expected,” he said.", "And his mother, tall and shadowy, standing on the porch of the rented\n cottage and saying exasperatedly: “\nWhy do you run off by\n yourself, Kimmy? I worry about you so——\n”\n\n\n And his sisters: “\nPlaying with his wooden swords and his radium\n pistol and never wanting to take his nose out of those awful\n books——\n”\n\n\n He dreamed of the low, beamed ceiling of the cottage, sweltering in the\n heat of the summer nights and the thick longing in his throat for red\n hills and a sky that burned deep blue through the long, long days and\n canals, clear and still. A land that he knew somehow never was, but\n which lived, for him, through some alchemy of the mind. He dreamed of\n Mars.\n\n\n And Steinhart: “\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\n”\nThe hours stretched into days, the days into months. Time wasn’t. Time\n was a deep night and a starshot void. And dreams.", "On the dais nearby, listening to the PRO, but watching Kimball, sat\n Steinhart, the team analyst. Kimball returned his steady gaze thinking:\n They start out burning with desire to cure the human mind and end with\n the shadow of the images. The words become the fact, the therapy the\n aim. What could Steinhart know of longing? No, he thought, I’m not being\n fair. Steinhart was only doing his job.\n\n\n The big clock on the back wall of the briefing shack said three\n fifty-five. Zero minus one hour and five minutes.\n\n\n Kimball looked around the room at the pale faces, the open mouths. What\n have I to do with you now, he thought?\nOutside, the winter night lay cold and still over the Base. Floodlights\n spilled brilliance over the dunes and the scrubby earth, high fences\n casting laced shadows across the burning white expanses of\n ferroconcrete.", "“More therapy?”\n\n\n “I’d like to know. This is for me.”\nKimball shrugged. “It didn’t work. She was a fine girl—but she\n finally told me it was no go. ‘You don’t live here’ was the\n way she put it.”\n\n\n “She knew you were a career officer; what did she\n expect——?”\n\n\n “That isn’t what she meant. You know that.”\n\n\n “Yes,” the psych said slowly. “I know that.”\n\n\n They rode in silence, across the dark Base, between the concrete sheds\n and the wooden barracks. Overhead, the stars like dust across the sky.\n Kimball, swathed in plastic, a fantastic figure not of earth, watched\n them wheel across the clear, deep night.\n\n\n “I wish you luck, Kim,” Steinhart said. “I mean\n that.”", "“Thanks.” Vaguely, as though from across a deep and widening\n gulf.\n\n\n “What will you do?”\n\n\n “You know the answers as well as I,” the Colonel said\n impatiently. “Set up the camp and wait for the next rocket. If it\n comes.”\n\n\n “In two years.”\n\n\n “In two years,” the plastic figure said. Didn’t he know that\n it didn’t matter?\n\n\n He glanced at his watch. Zero minus fifty-six minutes.\n\n\n “Kim,” Steinhart said slowly. “There’s something you\n should know about. Something you really should be prepared for.”\n\n\n “Yes?” Disinterest in his voice now, Steinhart noted\n clinically. Natural under the circumstances? Or neurosis building up\n already?", "Kimball tried to see him in the black gloom. He hadn’t been asleep. It\n would have been hard to waste this last night that way. Instead he had\n been remembering. “All right, Sergeant,” he said.\n “Coming up.”\n\n\n He swung his feet to the bare boards and sat for a moment, wishing he\n hadn’t had to give up smoking. He could almost imagine the textured\n taste of the cigaret on his tongue.\n\n\n Oddly enough, he wasn’t tired. He wasn’t excited, either. And that was\n much stranger. He stood up and opened the window to look out into the\n desert night. Overhead the stars were brilliant and cold. Mars gleamed\n russet-colored against the sable sky. He smiled, remembering again. So\n long a road, he thought, from then to now.", "The keening sound of air over the wings brought a thrill. Below him, a\n great curving disk of reds and browns and yellows. He could see dust\n storms raging and the heavy, darkened lines of the canals.\n\n\n There was skill in his hands. He righted the rocket, balanced it. Began\n the tricky task of landing. It took all of his talent, all of his\n training. Ponderously, the ship settled into the iron sand; slowly, the\n internal fires died.\nKimball stood in the control room, his heart pounding. Slowly, the ports\n opened. Through the thick quartz he could see the endless plain. Reddish\n brown, empty. The basin of some long ago sea. The sky was a deep,\n burning blue with stars shining at midday at the zenith. It looked\n unreal, a painting of unworldly quiet and desolation.\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\nSteinhart was right, he thought vaguely. A tear streaked his cheek. He\n had never been so alone.", "“Our tests showed you to be a schizoid—well-compensated, of\n course. You know there’s no such thing as a\nnormal\nhuman being. We all\n have tendencies toward one or more types of psychoses. In your case the\n symptoms are an overly active imagination and in some cases an inability\n to distinguish reality from—well, fancy.”\nKimball turned to regard the psych\n coolly\n .\n “What’s reality, Steinhart? Do\nyou\nknow?”\n\n\n The analyst flushed. “No.”\n\n\n “I didn’t think so.”\n\n\n “You lived pretty much in your mind when you were a child,”\n Steinhart went on doggedly. “You were a solitary, a lonely\n child.”\n\n\n [120]\n Kimball was watching the sky again.\n\n\n Steinhart felt futile and out of his depth. “We know so little\n about the psychology of space-flight, Kim——”", "Silence. The rumble of the tires on the packed sand of the road, the\n murmur of the command car’s engine, spinning oilily, and lit by tiny\n sunbright flashes deep in the hollows of the hot metal.\n\n\n “You’re glad to be leaving, aren’t you—” Steinhart said\n finally. “Happy to be the first man to try for the\n planets——”\n\n\n Kimball nodded absently, wishing the man would be quiet. Mars, a dull\n rusty point of light low on the horizon, seemed to beckon.", "Kimmy’s eyes narrowed and he waded stealthily across the sacred river.\n That would be Matai Shang, the Father of Holy Therns—spreading his arms\n to the sunset and standing safely on his high balcony in the Golden\n Cliffs while the Plant Men gathered to attack the poor pilgrims Iss had\n brought to this cursed valley.\n\n\n “Sing me to sleep, lullaby of the leaves”—the phonograph\n sang. Kimmy stepped cautiously ashore and moved into the cover of a\n clump of willows. The sky was darkening fast. Other stars were shining\n through. There wasn’t much time left.\nKimball stood now in the bright glare of the briefing shack, a strange\n figure in blood-colored plastic. The representatives of the press had\n been handed the mimeographed releases by the PRO and now they sat in\n silence, studying the red figure of the man who was to ride the rocket.", "Then he stopped smiling and turned away from the window. It hadn’t been\n an easy path and what was coming up now was the hardest part. The goddam\n psychs were the toughest, always wanting him to bug out on the deal\n because of their brainwave graphs and word association tests and their\n Rorschach blots.\n\n\n “You’re a lonely man, Colonel Kimball——”\n\n\n “Too much imagination could be bad for this job.”\n\n\n How could you sit there with pentothal in your veins and wires running\n out of your head and tell them about the still waters of Korus, or the\n pennons flying from the twin towers of Greater Helium or the way the\n tiny, slanting sun gleamed at dawn through the rigging of a flyer?", "Something died in him. It wasn’t a faucet, it WAS a radium pistol. He\n looked at his sisters with dismay. They weren’t really his sisters. They\n were Therns, with their yellow hair and their pale skins. He and John\n Carter and Tars Tarkas had fought them many times, piling their bodies\n for barricades and weaving a flashing pattern of skillful swords in the\n shifting light of the two moons.\n\n\n [121]\n “Kimmmm—eeee Mom’s going to be mad at you! Answer us!”\n\n\n If only Tars Tarkas would come now. If only the great Green Jeddak would\n come splashing across the stream on his huge thoat, his two swords\n clashing——\n\n\n “He’s up there in that clump of willows—hiding!”\n\n\n “Kimmy! You come down here this instant!”", "He dropped to the sand and dug his hands into the dry powdery soil. He\n could scarcely see now, for blackness was flickering at the edges of his\n vision and his failing heart and lungs were near collapse.\nKimmm-eee!\n[123]\n A huge green warrior on a gray monster of a thoat was beckoning to him.\n Pointing toward the low hills on the oddly near horizon.\nKimmmm-eeeee!\nThe voice was thin and distant on the icy wind. Kimball knew that voice.\n He knew it from long ago in the Valley Dor, from the shores of the Lost\n Sea of Korus where the tideless waters lay black and deep——\n\n\n He began stumbling across the empty, lifeless plain. He knew the voice,\n he knew the man, and he knew the hills that he must reach, quickly now,\n or die.", "He knew he should answer them, but he did not. Behind him he could hear\n the awful Plant Men approaching. He shivered with delicious horror.\n\n\n He stood very still, listening to his sisters talking, letting their\n voices carry down to where he hid from the dangers of the Valley Dor.\n\n\n “Where is that little brat, anyway?”\n\n\n “He always wanders off just at dinnertime and then we have to find\n him——”\n\n\n “Playing with that old faucet—” Mimicry. “‘My\n rad-ium pis-tol——’”\n\n\n “Cracked—just cracked. Oh, where IS he, anyway? Kimmm-eee, you\n AN-swer!”", "For a moment, Kimmy felt a thrill of apprehension. The deepening\n stillness of the river was closing in around him. Even the music from\n the phonograph was very, very faint. Above him, the great vault of the\n sky was changing from pink to gray to dusty blue. A bright star was\n breaking through the curtain of fading light. He knew it was Venus, the\n Evening Star. But let it be Earth, he thought. And instead of white, let\n it be the color of an emerald.\n\n\n He paused in midstream, letting the warm water riffle around his feet.\n Looking up at the green beacon of his home planet, he thought: I’ve left\n all that behind me. It was never really what I wanted. Mars is where I\n belong. With my friends, Tars Tarkas the great Green Jeddak, and Carter,\n the Warlord, and all the beautiful brave people.\nThe phonograph sang with Vallee’s voice: “Cradle me where\n southern skies can watch me with a million eyes——”", "Kimball snapped on a light and looked at his watch. 0310. Zero minus one\n fifty. He opened the steel locker and began to dress.\nThe water swirled warm and velvety around his ankles. There, behind\n that madrone, Kimmy thought. Was that a Plant Man? The thick white trunk\n and the grasping, blood-sucking arms——\n\n\n The radium pistol’s weight made his wrist ache, but he clung to it\n tightly, knowing that he\n [117]\n could never cope with a Plant Man with a sword\n alone. The certainty of coming battle made him smile a little, the way\n John Carter would smile if he were here in the Valley Dor ready to\n attack the white Therns and their Plant Men.", "They topped the last hillock and dropped down into the lighted bowl of\n the launching site. The rocket towered, winged and monstrously checkered\n in white and orange, against the first flickerings of the false dawn.\nKimmy saw the girls before they saw him. In their new, low waisted\n middies and skirts, they looked strange and out of place standing by the\n pebbled shore of the River Iss.\n\n\n They were his sisters, Rose and Margaret. Older than he at fifteen and\n seventeen. But they walked by the river and into danger. Behind him he\n could hear the rustling sound of the Plant Men as the evening breeze\n came up.\n\n\n “Kimm-eeeee—”\n\n\n They were calling him. In the deepening dusk their voices carried far\n down the river. “Kimmmmm—eeeeeeeeee—”", "They were thinking: Why him? Out of all the scores of\n applicants—because there are always applicants for a sure-death\n job—and all the qualified pilots, why this one?\n\n\n The Public Relations Officer was speaking now, reading from the mimeoed\n release as though these civilians couldn’t be trusted to get the sparse\n information given them straight without his help, given grudgingly and\n without expression.\n\n\n [118]\n Kimball listened, only half aware of what was being said. He watched the\n faces of the men sitting on the rows of folding chairs, saw their eyes\n like wounds, red from the early morning hour and the murmuring reception\n of the night before in the Officers’ Club. They are wondering how\nI\nfeel, he was thinking. And asking themselves why I want to go.", "From downstream came the faint sounds of music. It might have been a\n phonograph playing in one of the summer cabins with names like Polly Ann\n Roost and Patches and Seventh Heaven, but to Kimmy it was the hated cry\n of the Father of Therns calling the dreadful Plant Men to their feast of\n victims borne into\n [116]\n this Valley Dor by the mysterious Iss.\n\n\n Kimmy shifted the heavy Martian pistol into his left hand and checked\n his harness. A soft smile touched his lips. He was well armed; there was\n nothing he had to fear from the Plant Men. His bare feet turned\n up-stream, away from the sound of the phonograph, toward the shallows in\n the river that would permit him to cross and continue his search along\n the base of the Golden Cliffs—\nThe sergeant's voice cut through the pre-dawn darkness. “Oh, three\n hundred, Colonel.... Briefing in thirty minutes.”" ] ]
valid	22462	[ "Which old lady helps Coulter return home?", "Why did the Moon stations blow up?", "Which of the following does the title of the story likely reference?", "Why does Coulter help Kovacs on leave?", "What was the ping that Coulter heard?" ]	[ [ "Sylvia", "Both old ladies", "Mrs. RSF", "Mrs. RVS" ], [ "Reds blew it up", "Accident", "Americans blew it up", "Unclear" ], [ "The Space Race", "The Arms Race", "How Coulter treats women", "How spaceships work" ], [ "Coulter doesn't want to be distracted by Marge anymore", "To get Kovacs away from the armaments", "Coulter feels embarrassed for Kovacs", "Coulter likes Kovacs" ], [ "The sound of the lopsided rocket plume in the Red ship", "The sound of an impact in the fuel tanks", "The sound of the cabin depressurizing", "The sound of the Red pilot killing his RV" ] ]	[ 2, 4, 2, 4, 2 ]	[ 0, 1, 0, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Coulter chuckled at the ad lib way\n they operated, remembering the\n courses, the tests, the procedures practiced\n until they could do them backwards\n blindfolded. When they tangled\n with a Red, the Solter co-ordinates\n went out the hatch. They navigated\n by the enemy. There were times\n during a fight when he had no more\n idea of his position than what the\n old ladies told him, and what he\n could see of the Sun, the Earth, and\n the Moon.", "Coulter scanned the full arch of\n sky visible through the curving panels\n of the dome, thinking the turgid\n thoughts that always came when action\n was near. His chest was full of\n the familiar weakness—not fear exactly,\n but a tight, helpless feeling\n that grew and grew with the waiting.\n\n\n His eyes and hands were busy in\n the familiar procedure, readying the\n ship for combat, checking and re-checking\n the details that could mean\n life and death, but his mind watched\n disembodied, yearning back to earth.\n\n\n Sylvia always came back first. Inviting\n smile and outstretched hands.\n Nyloned knees, pink sweater, and\n that clinging, clinging white silk\n skirt. A whirling montage of laughing,\n challenging eyes and tossing sky-black\n hair and soft arms tightening\n around his neck.", "\"O.K., let me know as soon as you\n have his course.\" Coulter squashed\n out his cigar and began his cockpit\n check, grinning without humor as he\n noticed that his breathing had deepened\n and his palms were moist on\n the controls. He looked down to\n make sure his radio was snug in its\n pocket on his leg; checked the thigh\n harness of his emergency rocket,\n wrapped in its thick belly pad; checked\n the paired tanks of oxygen behind\n him, hanging level from his shoulders\n into their niche in the \"cradle.\"\n He flipped his helmet closed, locked\n it, and opened it again. He tossed\n a sardonic salute at the photograph\n of a young lady who graced the side\n of the cockpit. \"Wish us luck, sugar.\"\n He pressed the mike button again.\n\n\n \"You got anything yet, Johnny?\"\n\n\n \"He's going our way, Paul. Have\n it exact in a minute.\"", "until they were well into their run,\n but when he got started he'd made\n them look like slow motion, just the\n same. If he hadn't tried that harebrained\n sudden deceleration....\n Coulter shook his head at the memory.\n And on the last mission they'd\n been lucky to get a draw. Those boys\n were good shots.\n\"We're crossing his track, Paul.\n Turn to nine point five o'clock and\n hold 4 G's for thirty-two seconds,\n starting on the count ... five—four—three—two—one—go!\"\n He completed\n the operation in silence, remarking\n to himself how lucky he was\n to have Johnson. The boy loved a", "Mrs. RVS started to get jittery at\n about ten mps away from home, and\n above fifteen, she was trembling\n steadily. He didn't blame the old\n ladies for worrying. With one hour\n of fuel at 5 G's, you didn't fire a\n single squirt unless there was a good\n reason for it. Most of their time on\n a mission was spent free wheeling,\n in the anxiety-laden boredom that\n fighting men have always known.\nWish the Red was coming in across\n our course.\nIt would have taken less\n fuel, and the chase wouldn't have\n taken them so far out. But then\n they'd probably have been spotted,\n and lost the precious element of surprise.", "It was a ticklish job explaining\n about Kovacs, but when she understood\n that he just wanted to do a\n friend a favor, and she'd still have\n Paul all to herself, she calmed down.\n They made their arrangements quickly,\n and switched off.\n\n\n He hesitated a minute before he\n called Marge. She was quite a dish\n to give up. Once she'd seen him with\n Sylvia, he'd be strictly\npersona non\n grata\n—that was for sure. It was an\n unhappy thought. Well, maybe it was\n in a good cause. He shrugged and\n called her.\n\n\n She nearly cut him off when she\n first heard his request, but he did\n some fast talking. The idea of several\n days at the cottage intrigued her, and\n when he described how smitten\n Kovacs had been, she brightened up\n and agreed to come. He switched off,\n adjusted the drape of his genuine\n silk scarf, and stepped out of the\n booth.", "Then Jean, cool and self-possessed\n and slightly disapproving,\n with warmth and humor peeping\n through from underneath when she\n smiled. A lazy, crinkly kind of smile,\n like Christmas lights going on one\n by one. He wished he'd acted more\n grown up that night they watched\n the rain dance at the pueblo. For the\n hundredth time, he went over what\n he remembered of their last date,\n seeing the gleam of her shoulder, and\n the angry disappointment in her eyes;\n hearing again his awkward apologies.\n She was a nice kid. Silently his mouth\n formed the words. \"You're a nice\n kid.\"\nI think she loves me. She was just\n mad because I got drunk.\nThe tension of approaching combat\n suddenly blended with the memory,\n welling up into a rush of tenderness\n and affection. He whispered her\n name, and suddenly he knew that if\n he got back he was going to ask her\n to marry him.", "\"Right, Johnny. One sixty-five,\n then two minutes.\" He set the timer,\n advanced the throttle to 4 G's, and\n stepped back an inch as the acceleration\n took him snugly into the cradle.\n The Return-To-Station-Fuel and Relative-Velocity-To-Station\n gauges did\n their usual double takes on a change\n of course, as the ship computer recorded\n the new information. He\n liked those two gauges—the two old\n ladies.\n\n\n Mrs. RSF kept track of how much\n more fuel they had than they needed\n to get home. When they were moving\n away from station, she dropped\n in alarmed little jumps, but when\n they were headed home, she inched\n along in serene contentment, or if\n they were coasting, sneaked triumphantly\n back up the dial.", "Anyway, \"right side up\" tied in\n perfectly with the old \"clock\" system\n Garrity had dug out of those magazines\n he was always reading. Once\n they got used to it, it had turned out\n really handy. Old Doc Hoffman, his\n astrogation prof, would have turned\n purple if he'd ever dreamed they'd\n use such a conglomeration. But\n it worked. And when you were\n in a hurry, it worked in a hurry, and\n that was good enough for Coulter.\n He'd submitted a report on it to\n Colonel Silton.\n\n\n \"You've got him, Paul. We're\n dead on his tail, five hundred miles\n back, and matching velocity. Turn\n forty-two degrees right, and you're\n lined up right on him.\" Johnson was\n pleased with the job he'd done.", "They parked the helijet at Municipal\n Field and headed for the public\n PV booths, picking up a coterie of\n two dogs and five assorted children\n on the way. The kids followed quietly\n in their wake, ecstatic at the sight of\n their uniforms.\n\n\n Paul squared his shoulders, as befitted\n a hero, and tousled a couple of\n uncombed heads as they walked. The\n kids clustered around the booths, as\n Kovacs entered one to locate a hotel\n room, and Paul another, to call\n Sylvia.\n\n\n \"Honey, I've been so scared you\n weren't coming back. Where are you?\n When will I see you? Why didn't\n you write?...\" She sputtered to a\n stop as he held up both hands in\n defense.", "Guns spoke quietly to Johnson.\n \"Let me know when we kill his RV.\n Ah may get another shot at him.\"\n\n\n And Johnny answered, hurt,\n \"What do you think I'm doing down\n here—reading one of your magazines?\"\n\n\n Paul was struggling with hundred-pound\n arms, trying to focus the telescope\n that swiveled over the panel.\n As the field cleared, he could see that\n the plume was flaring unevenly, flickering\n red and orange along one side.\n Quietly and viciously, he was talking\n to himself. \"Blow! Blow!\"\nAnd she blew. Like a dirty ragged\n bit of fireworks, throwing tiny handfuls\n of sparks into the blackness.\n Something glowed red for a while,\n and slowly faded.\nThere, but for the grace of God....\nPaul shuddered in a confused\n mixture of relief and revulsion.", "When he finished the letter, he\n opened the copy of \"Lady Chatterley's\n Lover\" he had borrowed from\n Rodriguez's limited but colorful library.\n He couldn't keep his mind on\n it. He kept thinking of the armament\n officer.\n\n\n Kovacs was a quiet, intelligent kid,\n devoted to his work. Coulter wasn't\n too intimate with him. He wasn't a\n spaceman, for one thing. One of those\n illogical but powerful distinctions\n that sub-divided the men of the station.\n And he was a little too polite to\n be easy company.", "Paul remembered the time he had\n walked into the Muroc Base Officer's\n Club with Marge Halpern on his\n arm. The hunger that had lain undisguised\n on Kovacs' face the moment\n he first saw them. Marge was\n a striking blonde with a direct manner,\n who liked men, especially orbit\n station men. He hadn't thought about\n the incident since then, but the look\n in Kovacs' eyes kept coming back to\n him as he tried to read.\n\n\n He wasn't sure how he got there,\n or why, when he found himself walking\n into Colonel Silton's office to ask\n for the leave he'd passed up at his\n fiftieth mission. He'd considered taking\n it several times, but the thought\n of leaving the squadron, even for a\n couple of weeks, had made him feel\n guilty, as though he were quitting.", "Kovacs and the kids were waiting.\n The armament officer had apparently\n been telling them of Paul's exploits.\n They glowed with admiration. The\n oldest boy, about eleven, had true\n worship in his eyes. He hesitated a\n moment, then asked gravely: \"Would\n you tell us how you kill a Red, sir?\"\n\n\n Paul eyed the time-honored weapon\n that dangled from the youngster's\n hand. He bent over and tapped it\n with his finger. His voice was warm\n and confiding, but his eyes were far\n away.", "Now, there were Reds around practically\n every mission.\nThirteen missions to go, after today.\nHe wondered if he'd quit at\n seventy-five. Deep inside him, the old\n pride and excitement were still\n strong. He still got a kick out of the\n way the girls looked at the silver\n rocket on his chest. But he didn't\n feel as lucky as he used to. Twenty-nine\n years old, and he was starting\n to feel like an old man. He pictured\n himself lecturing to a group of eager\n kids.\nHad a couple of close calls, those\n last two missions.\nThat Red had\n looked easy, the way he was wandering\n around. He hadn't spotted them", "Once he had his papers, he started\n to get excited about it. As he cleaned\n up his paper work and packed his\n musette, his hands were fumbling,\n and his mind was full of Sylvia.\nThe vastness of Muroc Base was as\n incredible as ever. Row on uncounted\n row of neat buildings, each resting at\n the top of its own hundred-yard\n deep elevator shaft. A pulsing, throbbing\n city, dedicated to the long slow\n struggle to get into space and stay\n there. The service crew eyed them\n with studied indifference, as they\n writhed out of the small hatch and\n stepped to the ground. They drew a\n helijet at operations, and headed immediately\n for Los Angeles.\n\n\n Kovacs had been impressed when\n Paul asked if he'd care to room together\n while they were on leave. He\n was quiet on the flight, as he had\n been on the way down, listening contentedly,\n while Paul talked combat\n and women with Bob Parandes, another\n pilot going on leave.", "Coulter watched the pip move into\n his sightscreen. It settled less than a\n degree off dead center. He made the\n final corrections in course, set the air\n pressure control to eight pounds, and\n locked his helmet.\n\n\n \"Nice job, Johnny. Let's button\n up. You with us, Guns?\"\n\n\n Garrity sounded lazy as a well-fed\n tiger. \"Ah'm with yew, cap'n.\"", "\"Whoa, baby. One thing at a time.\n I'm at the airport. You'll see me tonight,\n and I'll tell you the rest then.\n That is, if you're free tonight. And\n tomorrow. And the day after, and\n the day after that. Are you free?\"\n\n\n Her hesitation was only momentary.\n \"Well, I was going out—with\n a girl friend. But she'll understand.\n What's up?\"\n\n\n He took a deep breath. \"I'd like\n to get out of the city for a few days,\n where we can take things easy and\n be away from the crowds. And there\n is another guy I'd like to bring\n along.\"\n\n\n \"We could take my helijet out to\n my dad's cottage at—\nWhat did you\n say?\n\"", "Coulter advanced the throttle to\n 5 G's. And with the hiss of power,\n SF 308 began the deadly, intricate,\n precarious maneuver called a combat\n pass—a maneuver inherited from the\n aerial dogfight—though it often turned\n into something more like the\n broadside duels of the old sailing\n ships—as the best and least suicidal\n method of killing a spaceship. To\n start on the enemy's tail, just out of\n his radar range. To come up his track\n at 2 mps relative velocity, firing six\n .30 caliber machine guns from fifty\n miles out. In the last three or four", "Paul felt no surprise, only relief\n at having the trouble located. The\n reaction to the close call might not\n come till hours later. \"This kind of\n luck we can do without. Can you\n patch the holes?\"\n\n\n \"Ah can patch the one where it\n came in, but it musta been explodin'\n on the way out. There's a hole Ah\n could stick mah head through.\"\n\n\n \"That's a good idea.\" Johnson was\n not usually very witty, but this was\n one he couldn't resist." ], [ "A year later the Moon station had\n \"blown up.\" No warning. No survivors.\n Just a brand-new medium-sized\n crater. And six months later,\n the new station, almost completed,\n went up again. The diplomats had\n buzzed like hornets, with accusations\n and threats, but nothing could be\n proven—there\nwere\nbombs stored at\n the station. The implication was clear\n enough. There wasn't going to be\n any Moon station until one government\n ruled Earth. Or until the United\n States and Russia figured out a way\n to get along with each other. And so\n far, getting along with Russia was\n like trying to get along with an\n octopus.\n\n\n Of course there were rumors that\n the psych warfare boys had some\n gimmick cooked up, to turn the\n U. S. S. R. upside down in a revolution,\n the next time power changed\n hands, but he'd been hearing that one\n for years. Still, with four new dictators\n over there in the last eleven\n years, there was always a chance.", "Anyway, he was just a space\n jockey, doing his job in this screwball\n fight out here in the empty reaches.\n Back on Earth, there was no war. The\n statesmen talked, held conferences,\n played international chess as ever.\n Neither side bothered the other's\n satellites, though naturally they were\n on permanent alert. There just wasn't\n going to be any Moon station for a\n while. Nobody knew what there\n might be on the Moon, but if one\n side couldn't have it, then the other\n side wasn't going to have it either.", "The second hand hit forty-five in\n its third cycle, and he stood loose in\n the cradle as the power died.\nSixty-two combat missions but the\n government says there's no war.\nHis\n mind wandered back over eight years\n in the service. Intelligence tests. Physical\n tests. Psychological tests. Six\n months of emotional adjustment in\n the screep. Primary training. Basic\n and advanced training. The pride and\n excitement of being chosen for space\n fighters. By the time he graduated,\n the United States and Russia each had\n several satellite stations operating, but\n in 1979, the United States had won\n the race for a permanent station on\n the Moon. What a grind it had been,\n bringing in the supplies.", "And meanwhile, the struggle was\n growing deadlier, month by month,\n each side groping for the stranglehold,\n looking for the edge that would\n give domination of space, or make\n all-out war a good risk. They hadn't\n found it yet, but it was getting bloodier\n out here all the time. For a while,\n it had been a supreme achievement\n just to get a ship out and back, but\n gradually, as the ships improved,\n there was a little margin left over for\n weapons. Back a year ago, the average\n patrol was nothing but a sightseeing\n tour. Not that there was much to see,\n when you'd been out a few times.", "\"Forget it, lad. If they ever caught\n us pulling a trick like that, they'd\n have us on hydroponic duty for the\n next five years. They just don't want\n us playing around with bombs, till\n the experts get all the angles figured\n out, and build ships to handle them.\n And besides, who do you think will\n rig a bomb like that, without anybody\n finding out? And where do you think\n we'd get a bomb in the first place?\n They don't leave those things lying\n around. Kovacs watches them like a\n mother hen. I think he counts them\n twice a day.\"\n\n\n \"Sorry, cap'n. Ah just figured if\n you could get hold of a bomb, Ah\n know a few of the boys who could\n rig the thing up for us and keep\n their mouths shut.\"\n\n\n \"Well, forget about it. It's not a\n bad idea, but we haven't any bomb.\"", "\"Right, cap'n.\"\nBut it was Paul who couldn't forget\n about it. All the rest of the way\n back to station, he kept seeing visions\n of a panel sliding aside in the nose\n of a sleek and gleaming ship, while\n a small rocket pushed its deadly snout\n forward, and then streaked off at\n tremendous acceleration.\n\n\n Interrogation was brief. The mission\n had turned up nothing new.\n Their kill made eight against seven\n for Doc Miller's crew, and they made\n sure Miller and the boys heard about\n it. They were lightheaded with the\n elation that followed a successful\n mission, swapping insults with the\n rest of the squadron, and reveling in\n the sheer contentment of being back\n safe.\n\n\n It wasn't until he got back to his\n stall, and started to write his father\n a long overdue letter, that he remembered\n he had heard Kovacs say he\n was going on leave.", "Coulter chuckled at the ad lib way\n they operated, remembering the\n courses, the tests, the procedures practiced\n until they could do them backwards\n blindfolded. When they tangled\n with a Red, the Solter co-ordinates\n went out the hatch. They navigated\n by the enemy. There were times\n during a fight when he had no more\n idea of his position than what the\n old ladies told him, and what he\n could see of the Sun, the Earth, and\n the Moon.", "\"Never mind, Guns. A patch that\n big wouldn't be safe to hold air.\"\nThey were about eighty thousand\n miles out. He set course for Earth at\n about five and a half mps, which\n Johnson calculated to bring them in\n on the station on the \"going away\"\n side of its orbit, and settled back for\n the tedious two hours of free wheeling.\n For ten or fifteen minutes, the\n interphone crackled with the gregariousness\n born of recent peril, and\n gradually the ship fell silent as each\n man returned to his own private\n thoughts.\n\n\n Paul was wondering about the men\n on the other ship—whether any of\n them were still alive. Eighty thousand\n miles to fall. That was a little\n beyond the capacity of an emergency\n rocket—about 2 G's for sixty seconds—even\n if they had them. What a\n way to go home! He wondered what\n he'd do if it happened to him. Would\n he wait out his time, or just unlock\n his helmet.", "Now, there were Reds around practically\n every mission.\nThirteen missions to go, after today.\nHe wondered if he'd quit at\n seventy-five. Deep inside him, the old\n pride and excitement were still\n strong. He still got a kick out of the\n way the girls looked at the silver\n rocket on his chest. But he didn't\n feel as lucky as he used to. Twenty-nine\n years old, and he was starting\n to feel like an old man. He pictured\n himself lecturing to a group of eager\n kids.\nHad a couple of close calls, those\n last two missions.\nThat Red had\n looked easy, the way he was wandering\n around. He hadn't spotted them", "Paul remembered the time he had\n walked into the Muroc Base Officer's\n Club with Marge Halpern on his\n arm. The hunger that had lain undisguised\n on Kovacs' face the moment\n he first saw them. Marge was\n a striking blonde with a direct manner,\n who liked men, especially orbit\n station men. He hadn't thought about\n the incident since then, but the look\n in Kovacs' eyes kept coming back to\n him as he tried to read.\n\n\n He wasn't sure how he got there,\n or why, when he found himself walking\n into Colonel Silton's office to ask\n for the leave he'd passed up at his\n fiftieth mission. He'd considered taking\n it several times, but the thought\n of leaving the squadron, even for a\n couple of weeks, had made him feel\n guilty, as though he were quitting.", "Mrs. RVS started to get jittery at\n about ten mps away from home, and\n above fifteen, she was trembling\n steadily. He didn't blame the old\n ladies for worrying. With one hour\n of fuel at 5 G's, you didn't fire a\n single squirt unless there was a good\n reason for it. Most of their time on\n a mission was spent free wheeling,\n in the anxiety-laden boredom that\n fighting men have always known.\nWish the Red was coming in across\n our course.\nIt would have taken less\n fuel, and the chase wouldn't have\n taken them so far out. But then\n they'd probably have been spotted,\n and lost the precious element of surprise.", "Paul felt no surprise, only relief\n at having the trouble located. The\n reaction to the close call might not\n come till hours later. \"This kind of\n luck we can do without. Can you\n patch the holes?\"\n\n\n \"Ah can patch the one where it\n came in, but it musta been explodin'\n on the way out. There's a hole Ah\n could stick mah head through.\"\n\n\n \"That's a good idea.\" Johnson was\n not usually very witty, but this was\n one he couldn't resist.", "He cut back to 4 G's, noting that\n RVS registered about a mile per\n second away from station, and suddenly\n became aware that the red light\n was on for loss of air. The cabin\n pressure gauge read zero, and his\n heart throbbed into his throat as he\n remembered that\npinging\nsound, just\n as they passed the enemy ship. He\n told Garrity to see if he could locate\n the loss, and any other damage, and\n was shortly startled by a low amazed\n whistle in his earphones.\n\n\n \"If Ah wasn't lookin' at it, Ah\n wouldn't believe it. Musta been one\n of his shells went right around the\n fuel tank and out again, without hittin'\n it. There's at least three inches of\n tank on a line between the holes! He\n musta been throwin' curves at us.\n Man, cap'n, this is our lucky day!\"", "Guns spoke quietly to Johnson.\n \"Let me know when we kill his RV.\n Ah may get another shot at him.\"\n\n\n And Johnny answered, hurt,\n \"What do you think I'm doing down\n here—reading one of your magazines?\"\n\n\n Paul was struggling with hundred-pound\n arms, trying to focus the telescope\n that swiveled over the panel.\n As the field cleared, he could see that\n the plume was flaring unevenly, flickering\n red and orange along one side.\n Quietly and viciously, he was talking\n to himself. \"Blow! Blow!\"\nAnd she blew. Like a dirty ragged\n bit of fireworks, throwing tiny handfuls\n of sparks into the blackness.\n Something glowed red for a while,\n and slowly faded.\nThere, but for the grace of God....\nPaul shuddered in a confused\n mixture of relief and revulsion.", "\"Five, six feet, by maybe a foot.\n Weigh at least three hundred\n pounds.\"\n\n\n It was five minutes before Guns\n spoke again. \"Ah been thinkin',\n cap'n. With a little redecoratin', Ah\n think Ah could get a rocket that size\n in here with me. We could weld a\n rail to one of the gun mounts that\n would hold it up to five or six G's.\n Then after we got away from station,\n Ah could take it outside and mount\n it on the rail.\"", "\"Right, Johnny. One sixty-five,\n then two minutes.\" He set the timer,\n advanced the throttle to 4 G's, and\n stepped back an inch as the acceleration\n took him snugly into the cradle.\n The Return-To-Station-Fuel and Relative-Velocity-To-Station\n gauges did\n their usual double takes on a change\n of course, as the ship computer recorded\n the new information. He\n liked those two gauges—the two old\n ladies.\n\n\n Mrs. RSF kept track of how much\n more fuel they had than they needed\n to get home. When they were moving\n away from station, she dropped\n in alarmed little jumps, but when\n they were headed home, she inched\n along in serene contentment, or if\n they were coasting, sneaked triumphantly\n back up the dial.", "At eighty-five seconds, he corrected\n slightly to center the pip. The momentary\n hiss of the rockets was a\n relief. He heard the muffled yammering\n as Guns fired a short burst\n from the .30's standing out of their\n compartments around the sides of the\n ship. They were practically recoilless,\n but the burst drifted him forward\n against the cradle harness.", "seconds, to break out just enough to\n clear him, praying that he won't\n break in the same direction.\nAnd to\n keep on going.\nFour minutes and thirty-four seconds\n to the break.\nSixty seconds at\n 5 G's; one hundred ninety-two seconds\n of free wheeling; and then, if\n they were lucky, the twenty-two frantic\n seconds they were out here for—throwing\n a few pounds of steel slugs\n out before them in one unbroken\n burst, groping out fifty miles into\n the darkness with steel and radar fingers\n to kill a duplicate of themselves.\nThis is the worst. These three minutes\n are the worst.", "And suddenly the waiting was\n over. The ship filled with vibration\n as Guns opened up.\nTwenty-five seconds\n to target.\nHis eyes flicked from\n the sightscreen to the sky ahead,\n looking for the telltale flare of rockets—ready\n to follow like a ferret.\nThere he is!\nAt eighteen miles\n from target, a tiny blue light flickered\n ahead. He forgot everything but the\n sightscreen, concentrating on keeping\n the pip dead center. The guns hammered\n on. It seemed they'd been firing\n for centuries. At ten-mile range,\n the combat radar kicked the automatics\n in, turning the ship ninety\n degrees to her course in one and a\n half seconds. He heard the lee side\n firing cut out, as Garrity hung on\n with two, then three guns.\n\n\n He held it as long as he could.\n Closer than he ever had before. At\n four miles he poured 12 G's for two\n seconds.", "Coulter advanced the throttle to\n 5 G's. And with the hiss of power,\n SF 308 began the deadly, intricate,\n precarious maneuver called a combat\n pass—a maneuver inherited from the\n aerial dogfight—though it often turned\n into something more like the\n broadside duels of the old sailing\n ships—as the best and least suicidal\n method of killing a spaceship. To\n start on the enemy's tail, just out of\n his radar range. To come up his track\n at 2 mps relative velocity, firing six\n .30 caliber machine guns from fifty\n miles out. In the last three or four" ], [ "Guns spoke quietly to Johnson.\n \"Let me know when we kill his RV.\n Ah may get another shot at him.\"\n\n\n And Johnny answered, hurt,\n \"What do you think I'm doing down\n here—reading one of your magazines?\"\n\n\n Paul was struggling with hundred-pound\n arms, trying to focus the telescope\n that swiveled over the panel.\n As the field cleared, he could see that\n the plume was flaring unevenly, flickering\n red and orange along one side.\n Quietly and viciously, he was talking\n to himself. \"Blow! Blow!\"\nAnd she blew. Like a dirty ragged\n bit of fireworks, throwing tiny handfuls\n of sparks into the blackness.\n Something glowed red for a while,\n and slowly faded.\nThere, but for the grace of God....\nPaul shuddered in a confused\n mixture of relief and revulsion.", "Now, there were Reds around practically\n every mission.\nThirteen missions to go, after today.\nHe wondered if he'd quit at\n seventy-five. Deep inside him, the old\n pride and excitement were still\n strong. He still got a kick out of the\n way the girls looked at the silver\n rocket on his chest. But he didn't\n feel as lucky as he used to. Twenty-nine\n years old, and he was starting\n to feel like an old man. He pictured\n himself lecturing to a group of eager\n kids.\nHad a couple of close calls, those\n last two missions.\nThat Red had\n looked easy, the way he was wandering\n around. He hadn't spotted them", "\"O.K., let me know as soon as you\n have his course.\" Coulter squashed\n out his cigar and began his cockpit\n check, grinning without humor as he\n noticed that his breathing had deepened\n and his palms were moist on\n the controls. He looked down to\n make sure his radio was snug in its\n pocket on his leg; checked the thigh\n harness of his emergency rocket,\n wrapped in its thick belly pad; checked\n the paired tanks of oxygen behind\n him, hanging level from his shoulders\n into their niche in the \"cradle.\"\n He flipped his helmet closed, locked\n it, and opened it again. He tossed\n a sardonic salute at the photograph\n of a young lady who graced the side\n of the cockpit. \"Wish us luck, sugar.\"\n He pressed the mike button again.\n\n\n \"You got anything yet, Johnny?\"\n\n\n \"He's going our way, Paul. Have\n it exact in a minute.\"", "He thought of his father, rocking\n on the porch of the Pennsylvania\n farm, pipe in his mouth, the weathered\n old face serene, as he puffed and\n listened to the radio beside him. He\n wished he'd written him last night,\n instead of joining the usual beer and\n bull session in the wardroom. He\n wished—. He wished.\n\n\n \"I've got him, Paul. He's got two\n point seven miles of RV on us. Take\n thirty degrees high on two point one\n o'clock for course to IP.\"\nAutomatically he turned the control\n wheel to the right and eased it\n back. The gyros recorded the turn to\n course.\n\n\n \"Hold 4 G's for one six five seconds,\n then coast two minutes for initial\n point five hundred miles on his\n tail.\"", "Then Jean, cool and self-possessed\n and slightly disapproving,\n with warmth and humor peeping\n through from underneath when she\n smiled. A lazy, crinkly kind of smile,\n like Christmas lights going on one\n by one. He wished he'd acted more\n grown up that night they watched\n the rain dance at the pueblo. For the\n hundredth time, he went over what\n he remembered of their last date,\n seeing the gleam of her shoulder, and\n the angry disappointment in her eyes;\n hearing again his awkward apologies.\n She was a nice kid. Silently his mouth\n formed the words. \"You're a nice\n kid.\"\nI think she loves me. She was just\n mad because I got drunk.\nThe tension of approaching combat\n suddenly blended with the memory,\n welling up into a rush of tenderness\n and affection. He whispered her\n name, and suddenly he knew that if\n he got back he was going to ask her\n to marry him.", "He cut back to 4 G's, noting that\n RVS registered about a mile per\n second away from station, and suddenly\n became aware that the red light\n was on for loss of air. The cabin\n pressure gauge read zero, and his\n heart throbbed into his throat as he\n remembered that\npinging\nsound, just\n as they passed the enemy ship. He\n told Garrity to see if he could locate\n the loss, and any other damage, and\n was shortly startled by a low amazed\n whistle in his earphones.\n\n\n \"If Ah wasn't lookin' at it, Ah\n wouldn't believe it. Musta been one\n of his shells went right around the\n fuel tank and out again, without hittin'\n it. There's at least three inches of\n tank on a line between the holes! He\n musta been throwin' curves at us.\n Man, cap'n, this is our lucky day!\"", "seconds, to break out just enough to\n clear him, praying that he won't\n break in the same direction.\nAnd to\n keep on going.\nFour minutes and thirty-four seconds\n to the break.\nSixty seconds at\n 5 G's; one hundred ninety-two seconds\n of free wheeling; and then, if\n they were lucky, the twenty-two frantic\n seconds they were out here for—throwing\n a few pounds of steel slugs\n out before them in one unbroken\n burst, groping out fifty miles into\n the darkness with steel and radar fingers\n to kill a duplicate of themselves.\nThis is the worst. These three minutes\n are the worst.", "Kovacs and the kids were waiting.\n The armament officer had apparently\n been telling them of Paul's exploits.\n They glowed with admiration. The\n oldest boy, about eleven, had true\n worship in his eyes. He hesitated a\n moment, then asked gravely: \"Would\n you tell us how you kill a Red, sir?\"\n\n\n Paul eyed the time-honored weapon\n that dangled from the youngster's\n hand. He bent over and tapped it\n with his finger. His voice was warm\n and confiding, but his eyes were far\n away.", "Paul felt no surprise, only relief\n at having the trouble located. The\n reaction to the close call might not\n come till hours later. \"This kind of\n luck we can do without. Can you\n patch the holes?\"\n\n\n \"Ah can patch the one where it\n came in, but it musta been explodin'\n on the way out. There's a hole Ah\n could stick mah head through.\"\n\n\n \"That's a good idea.\" Johnson was\n not usually very witty, but this was\n one he couldn't resist.", "The second hand hit forty-five in\n its third cycle, and he stood loose in\n the cradle as the power died.\nSixty-two combat missions but the\n government says there's no war.\nHis\n mind wandered back over eight years\n in the service. Intelligence tests. Physical\n tests. Psychological tests. Six\n months of emotional adjustment in\n the screep. Primary training. Basic\n and advanced training. The pride and\n excitement of being chosen for space\n fighters. By the time he graduated,\n the United States and Russia each had\n several satellite stations operating, but\n in 1979, the United States had won\n the race for a permanent station on\n the Moon. What a grind it had been,\n bringing in the supplies.", "Paul remembered the time he had\n walked into the Muroc Base Officer's\n Club with Marge Halpern on his\n arm. The hunger that had lain undisguised\n on Kovacs' face the moment\n he first saw them. Marge was\n a striking blonde with a direct manner,\n who liked men, especially orbit\n station men. He hadn't thought about\n the incident since then, but the look\n in Kovacs' eyes kept coming back to\n him as he tried to read.\n\n\n He wasn't sure how he got there,\n or why, when he found himself walking\n into Colonel Silton's office to ask\n for the leave he'd passed up at his\n fiftieth mission. He'd considered taking\n it several times, but the thought\n of leaving the squadron, even for a\n couple of weeks, had made him feel\n guilty, as though he were quitting.", "One hundred\n ninety-two eternal seconds of waiting,\n of deathly silence and deathly\n calm, feeling and hearing nothing\n but the slow pounding of their own\n heartbeats. Each time he got back, it\n faded away, and all he remembered\n was the excitement. But each time\n he went through it, it was worse. Just\n standing and waiting in the silence,\n praying they weren't spotted—staring\n at the unmoving firmament and\n knowing he was a projectile hurtling\n two miles each second straight at a\n clump of metal and flesh that was\n the enemy. Knowing the odds were\n twenty to one against their scoring\n a kill ... unless they ran into him.", "until they were well into their run,\n but when he got started he'd made\n them look like slow motion, just the\n same. If he hadn't tried that harebrained\n sudden deceleration....\n Coulter shook his head at the memory.\n And on the last mission they'd\n been lucky to get a draw. Those boys\n were good shots.\n\"We're crossing his track, Paul.\n Turn to nine point five o'clock and\n hold 4 G's for thirty-two seconds,\n starting on the count ... five—four—three—two—one—go!\"\n He completed\n the operation in silence, remarking\n to himself how lucky he was\n to have Johnson. The boy loved a", "When he finished the letter, he\n opened the copy of \"Lady Chatterley's\n Lover\" he had borrowed from\n Rodriguez's limited but colorful library.\n He couldn't keep his mind on\n it. He kept thinking of the armament\n officer.\n\n\n Kovacs was a quiet, intelligent kid,\n devoted to his work. Coulter wasn't\n too intimate with him. He wasn't a\n spaceman, for one thing. One of those\n illogical but powerful distinctions\n that sub-divided the men of the station.\n And he was a little too polite to\n be easy company.", "Mrs. RVS started to get jittery at\n about ten mps away from home, and\n above fifteen, she was trembling\n steadily. He didn't blame the old\n ladies for worrying. With one hour\n of fuel at 5 G's, you didn't fire a\n single squirt unless there was a good\n reason for it. Most of their time on\n a mission was spent free wheeling,\n in the anxiety-laden boredom that\n fighting men have always known.\nWish the Red was coming in across\n our course.\nIt would have taken less\n fuel, and the chase wouldn't have\n taken them so far out. But then\n they'd probably have been spotted,\n and lost the precious element of surprise.", "Coulter scanned the full arch of\n sky visible through the curving panels\n of the dome, thinking the turgid\n thoughts that always came when action\n was near. His chest was full of\n the familiar weakness—not fear exactly,\n but a tight, helpless feeling\n that grew and grew with the waiting.\n\n\n His eyes and hands were busy in\n the familiar procedure, readying the\n ship for combat, checking and re-checking\n the details that could mean\n life and death, but his mind watched\n disembodied, yearning back to earth.\n\n\n Sylvia always came back first. Inviting\n smile and outstretched hands.\n Nyloned knees, pink sweater, and\n that clinging, clinging white silk\n skirt. A whirling montage of laughing,\n challenging eyes and tossing sky-black\n hair and soft arms tightening\n around his neck.", "\"Whoa, baby. One thing at a time.\n I'm at the airport. You'll see me tonight,\n and I'll tell you the rest then.\n That is, if you're free tonight. And\n tomorrow. And the day after, and\n the day after that. Are you free?\"\n\n\n Her hesitation was only momentary.\n \"Well, I was going out—with\n a girl friend. But she'll understand.\n What's up?\"\n\n\n He took a deep breath. \"I'd like\n to get out of the city for a few days,\n where we can take things easy and\n be away from the crowds. And there\n is another guy I'd like to bring\n along.\"\n\n\n \"We could take my helijet out to\n my dad's cottage at—\nWhat did you\n say?\n\"", "It was a ticklish job explaining\n about Kovacs, but when she understood\n that he just wanted to do a\n friend a favor, and she'd still have\n Paul all to herself, she calmed down.\n They made their arrangements quickly,\n and switched off.\n\n\n He hesitated a minute before he\n called Marge. She was quite a dish\n to give up. Once she'd seen him with\n Sylvia, he'd be strictly\npersona non\n grata\n—that was for sure. It was an\n unhappy thought. Well, maybe it was\n in a good cause. He shrugged and\n called her.\n\n\n She nearly cut him off when she\n first heard his request, but he did\n some fast talking. The idea of several\n days at the cottage intrigued her, and\n when he described how smitten\n Kovacs had been, she brightened up\n and agreed to come. He switched off,\n adjusted the drape of his genuine\n silk scarf, and stepped out of the\n booth.", "Once he had his papers, he started\n to get excited about it. As he cleaned\n up his paper work and packed his\n musette, his hands were fumbling,\n and his mind was full of Sylvia.\nThe vastness of Muroc Base was as\n incredible as ever. Row on uncounted\n row of neat buildings, each resting at\n the top of its own hundred-yard\n deep elevator shaft. A pulsing, throbbing\n city, dedicated to the long slow\n struggle to get into space and stay\n there. The service crew eyed them\n with studied indifference, as they\n writhed out of the small hatch and\n stepped to the ground. They drew a\n helijet at operations, and headed immediately\n for Los Angeles.\n\n\n Kovacs had been impressed when\n Paul asked if he'd care to room together\n while they were on leave. He\n was quiet on the flight, as he had\n been on the way down, listening contentedly,\n while Paul talked combat\n and women with Bob Parandes, another\n pilot going on leave.", "\"Right, cap'n.\"\nBut it was Paul who couldn't forget\n about it. All the rest of the way\n back to station, he kept seeing visions\n of a panel sliding aside in the nose\n of a sleek and gleaming ship, while\n a small rocket pushed its deadly snout\n forward, and then streaked off at\n tremendous acceleration.\n\n\n Interrogation was brief. The mission\n had turned up nothing new.\n Their kill made eight against seven\n for Doc Miller's crew, and they made\n sure Miller and the boys heard about\n it. They were lightheaded with the\n elation that followed a successful\n mission, swapping insults with the\n rest of the squadron, and reveling in\n the sheer contentment of being back\n safe.\n\n\n It wasn't until he got back to his\n stall, and started to write his father\n a long overdue letter, that he remembered\n he had heard Kovacs say he\n was going on leave." ], [ "Paul remembered the time he had\n walked into the Muroc Base Officer's\n Club with Marge Halpern on his\n arm. The hunger that had lain undisguised\n on Kovacs' face the moment\n he first saw them. Marge was\n a striking blonde with a direct manner,\n who liked men, especially orbit\n station men. He hadn't thought about\n the incident since then, but the look\n in Kovacs' eyes kept coming back to\n him as he tried to read.\n\n\n He wasn't sure how he got there,\n or why, when he found himself walking\n into Colonel Silton's office to ask\n for the leave he'd passed up at his\n fiftieth mission. He'd considered taking\n it several times, but the thought\n of leaving the squadron, even for a\n couple of weeks, had made him feel\n guilty, as though he were quitting.", "\"Right, cap'n.\"\nBut it was Paul who couldn't forget\n about it. All the rest of the way\n back to station, he kept seeing visions\n of a panel sliding aside in the nose\n of a sleek and gleaming ship, while\n a small rocket pushed its deadly snout\n forward, and then streaked off at\n tremendous acceleration.\n\n\n Interrogation was brief. The mission\n had turned up nothing new.\n Their kill made eight against seven\n for Doc Miller's crew, and they made\n sure Miller and the boys heard about\n it. They were lightheaded with the\n elation that followed a successful\n mission, swapping insults with the\n rest of the squadron, and reveling in\n the sheer contentment of being back\n safe.\n\n\n It wasn't until he got back to his\n stall, and started to write his father\n a long overdue letter, that he remembered\n he had heard Kovacs say he\n was going on leave.", "When he finished the letter, he\n opened the copy of \"Lady Chatterley's\n Lover\" he had borrowed from\n Rodriguez's limited but colorful library.\n He couldn't keep his mind on\n it. He kept thinking of the armament\n officer.\n\n\n Kovacs was a quiet, intelligent kid,\n devoted to his work. Coulter wasn't\n too intimate with him. He wasn't a\n spaceman, for one thing. One of those\n illogical but powerful distinctions\n that sub-divided the men of the station.\n And he was a little too polite to\n be easy company.", "Once he had his papers, he started\n to get excited about it. As he cleaned\n up his paper work and packed his\n musette, his hands were fumbling,\n and his mind was full of Sylvia.\nThe vastness of Muroc Base was as\n incredible as ever. Row on uncounted\n row of neat buildings, each resting at\n the top of its own hundred-yard\n deep elevator shaft. A pulsing, throbbing\n city, dedicated to the long slow\n struggle to get into space and stay\n there. The service crew eyed them\n with studied indifference, as they\n writhed out of the small hatch and\n stepped to the ground. They drew a\n helijet at operations, and headed immediately\n for Los Angeles.\n\n\n Kovacs had been impressed when\n Paul asked if he'd care to room together\n while they were on leave. He\n was quiet on the flight, as he had\n been on the way down, listening contentedly,\n while Paul talked combat\n and women with Bob Parandes, another\n pilot going on leave.", "It was a ticklish job explaining\n about Kovacs, but when she understood\n that he just wanted to do a\n friend a favor, and she'd still have\n Paul all to herself, she calmed down.\n They made their arrangements quickly,\n and switched off.\n\n\n He hesitated a minute before he\n called Marge. She was quite a dish\n to give up. Once she'd seen him with\n Sylvia, he'd be strictly\npersona non\n grata\n—that was for sure. It was an\n unhappy thought. Well, maybe it was\n in a good cause. He shrugged and\n called her.\n\n\n She nearly cut him off when she\n first heard his request, but he did\n some fast talking. The idea of several\n days at the cottage intrigued her, and\n when he described how smitten\n Kovacs had been, she brightened up\n and agreed to come. He switched off,\n adjusted the drape of his genuine\n silk scarf, and stepped out of the\n booth.", "Coulter chuckled at the ad lib way\n they operated, remembering the\n courses, the tests, the procedures practiced\n until they could do them backwards\n blindfolded. When they tangled\n with a Red, the Solter co-ordinates\n went out the hatch. They navigated\n by the enemy. There were times\n during a fight when he had no more\n idea of his position than what the\n old ladies told him, and what he\n could see of the Sun, the Earth, and\n the Moon.", "Coulter scanned the full arch of\n sky visible through the curving panels\n of the dome, thinking the turgid\n thoughts that always came when action\n was near. His chest was full of\n the familiar weakness—not fear exactly,\n but a tight, helpless feeling\n that grew and grew with the waiting.\n\n\n His eyes and hands were busy in\n the familiar procedure, readying the\n ship for combat, checking and re-checking\n the details that could mean\n life and death, but his mind watched\n disembodied, yearning back to earth.\n\n\n Sylvia always came back first. Inviting\n smile and outstretched hands.\n Nyloned knees, pink sweater, and\n that clinging, clinging white silk\n skirt. A whirling montage of laughing,\n challenging eyes and tossing sky-black\n hair and soft arms tightening\n around his neck.", "Kovacs and the kids were waiting.\n The armament officer had apparently\n been telling them of Paul's exploits.\n They glowed with admiration. The\n oldest boy, about eleven, had true\n worship in his eyes. He hesitated a\n moment, then asked gravely: \"Would\n you tell us how you kill a Red, sir?\"\n\n\n Paul eyed the time-honored weapon\n that dangled from the youngster's\n hand. He bent over and tapped it\n with his finger. His voice was warm\n and confiding, but his eyes were far\n away.", "Coulter watched the pip move into\n his sightscreen. It settled less than a\n degree off dead center. He made the\n final corrections in course, set the air\n pressure control to eight pounds, and\n locked his helmet.\n\n\n \"Nice job, Johnny. Let's button\n up. You with us, Guns?\"\n\n\n Garrity sounded lazy as a well-fed\n tiger. \"Ah'm with yew, cap'n.\"", "\"O.K., let me know as soon as you\n have his course.\" Coulter squashed\n out his cigar and began his cockpit\n check, grinning without humor as he\n noticed that his breathing had deepened\n and his palms were moist on\n the controls. He looked down to\n make sure his radio was snug in its\n pocket on his leg; checked the thigh\n harness of his emergency rocket,\n wrapped in its thick belly pad; checked\n the paired tanks of oxygen behind\n him, hanging level from his shoulders\n into their niche in the \"cradle.\"\n He flipped his helmet closed, locked\n it, and opened it again. He tossed\n a sardonic salute at the photograph\n of a young lady who graced the side\n of the cockpit. \"Wish us luck, sugar.\"\n He pressed the mike button again.\n\n\n \"You got anything yet, Johnny?\"\n\n\n \"He's going our way, Paul. Have\n it exact in a minute.\"", "Coulter advanced the throttle to\n 5 G's. And with the hiss of power,\n SF 308 began the deadly, intricate,\n precarious maneuver called a combat\n pass—a maneuver inherited from the\n aerial dogfight—though it often turned\n into something more like the\n broadside duels of the old sailing\n ships—as the best and least suicidal\n method of killing a spaceship. To\n start on the enemy's tail, just out of\n his radar range. To come up his track\n at 2 mps relative velocity, firing six\n .30 caliber machine guns from fifty\n miles out. In the last three or four", "until they were well into their run,\n but when he got started he'd made\n them look like slow motion, just the\n same. If he hadn't tried that harebrained\n sudden deceleration....\n Coulter shook his head at the memory.\n And on the last mission they'd\n been lucky to get a draw. Those boys\n were good shots.\n\"We're crossing his track, Paul.\n Turn to nine point five o'clock and\n hold 4 G's for thirty-two seconds,\n starting on the count ... five—four—three—two—one—go!\"\n He completed\n the operation in silence, remarking\n to himself how lucky he was\n to have Johnson. The boy loved a", "They parked the helijet at Municipal\n Field and headed for the public\n PV booths, picking up a coterie of\n two dogs and five assorted children\n on the way. The kids followed quietly\n in their wake, ecstatic at the sight of\n their uniforms.\n\n\n Paul squared his shoulders, as befitted\n a hero, and tousled a couple of\n uncombed heads as they walked. The\n kids clustered around the booths, as\n Kovacs entered one to locate a hotel\n room, and Paul another, to call\n Sylvia.\n\n\n \"Honey, I've been so scared you\n weren't coming back. Where are you?\n When will I see you? Why didn't\n you write?...\" She sputtered to a\n stop as he held up both hands in\n defense.", "Anyway, \"right side up\" tied in\n perfectly with the old \"clock\" system\n Garrity had dug out of those magazines\n he was always reading. Once\n they got used to it, it had turned out\n really handy. Old Doc Hoffman, his\n astrogation prof, would have turned\n purple if he'd ever dreamed they'd\n use such a conglomeration. But\n it worked. And when you were\n in a hurry, it worked in a hurry, and\n that was good enough for Coulter.\n He'd submitted a report on it to\n Colonel Silton.\n\n\n \"You've got him, Paul. We're\n dead on his tail, five hundred miles\n back, and matching velocity. Turn\n forty-two degrees right, and you're\n lined up right on him.\" Johnson was\n pleased with the job he'd done.", "\"Forget it, lad. If they ever caught\n us pulling a trick like that, they'd\n have us on hydroponic duty for the\n next five years. They just don't want\n us playing around with bombs, till\n the experts get all the angles figured\n out, and build ships to handle them.\n And besides, who do you think will\n rig a bomb like that, without anybody\n finding out? And where do you think\n we'd get a bomb in the first place?\n They don't leave those things lying\n around. Kovacs watches them like a\n mother hen. I think he counts them\n twice a day.\"\n\n\n \"Sorry, cap'n. Ah just figured if\n you could get hold of a bomb, Ah\n know a few of the boys who could\n rig the thing up for us and keep\n their mouths shut.\"\n\n\n \"Well, forget about it. It's not a\n bad idea, but we haven't any bomb.\"", "Guns spoke quietly to Johnson.\n \"Let me know when we kill his RV.\n Ah may get another shot at him.\"\n\n\n And Johnny answered, hurt,\n \"What do you think I'm doing down\n here—reading one of your magazines?\"\n\n\n Paul was struggling with hundred-pound\n arms, trying to focus the telescope\n that swiveled over the panel.\n As the field cleared, he could see that\n the plume was flaring unevenly, flickering\n red and orange along one side.\n Quietly and viciously, he was talking\n to himself. \"Blow! Blow!\"\nAnd she blew. Like a dirty ragged\n bit of fireworks, throwing tiny handfuls\n of sparks into the blackness.\n Something glowed red for a while,\n and slowly faded.\nThere, but for the grace of God....\nPaul shuddered in a confused\n mixture of relief and revulsion.", "The second hand hit forty-five in\n its third cycle, and he stood loose in\n the cradle as the power died.\nSixty-two combat missions but the\n government says there's no war.\nHis\n mind wandered back over eight years\n in the service. Intelligence tests. Physical\n tests. Psychological tests. Six\n months of emotional adjustment in\n the screep. Primary training. Basic\n and advanced training. The pride and\n excitement of being chosen for space\n fighters. By the time he graduated,\n the United States and Russia each had\n several satellite stations operating, but\n in 1979, the United States had won\n the race for a permanent station on\n the Moon. What a grind it had been,\n bringing in the supplies.", "Now, there were Reds around practically\n every mission.\nThirteen missions to go, after today.\nHe wondered if he'd quit at\n seventy-five. Deep inside him, the old\n pride and excitement were still\n strong. He still got a kick out of the\n way the girls looked at the silver\n rocket on his chest. But he didn't\n feel as lucky as he used to. Twenty-nine\n years old, and he was starting\n to feel like an old man. He pictured\n himself lecturing to a group of eager\n kids.\nHad a couple of close calls, those\n last two missions.\nThat Red had\n looked easy, the way he was wandering\n around. He hadn't spotted them", "Mrs. RVS started to get jittery at\n about ten mps away from home, and\n above fifteen, she was trembling\n steadily. He didn't blame the old\n ladies for worrying. With one hour\n of fuel at 5 G's, you didn't fire a\n single squirt unless there was a good\n reason for it. Most of their time on\n a mission was spent free wheeling,\n in the anxiety-laden boredom that\n fighting men have always known.\nWish the Red was coming in across\n our course.\nIt would have taken less\n fuel, and the chase wouldn't have\n taken them so far out. But then\n they'd probably have been spotted,\n and lost the precious element of surprise.", "Anyway, he was just a space\n jockey, doing his job in this screwball\n fight out here in the empty reaches.\n Back on Earth, there was no war. The\n statesmen talked, held conferences,\n played international chess as ever.\n Neither side bothered the other's\n satellites, though naturally they were\n on permanent alert. There just wasn't\n going to be any Moon station for a\n while. Nobody knew what there\n might be on the Moon, but if one\n side couldn't have it, then the other\n side wasn't going to have it either." ], [ "Coulter watched the pip move into\n his sightscreen. It settled less than a\n degree off dead center. He made the\n final corrections in course, set the air\n pressure control to eight pounds, and\n locked his helmet.\n\n\n \"Nice job, Johnny. Let's button\n up. You with us, Guns?\"\n\n\n Garrity sounded lazy as a well-fed\n tiger. \"Ah'm with yew, cap'n.\"", "\"O.K., let me know as soon as you\n have his course.\" Coulter squashed\n out his cigar and began his cockpit\n check, grinning without humor as he\n noticed that his breathing had deepened\n and his palms were moist on\n the controls. He looked down to\n make sure his radio was snug in its\n pocket on his leg; checked the thigh\n harness of his emergency rocket,\n wrapped in its thick belly pad; checked\n the paired tanks of oxygen behind\n him, hanging level from his shoulders\n into their niche in the \"cradle.\"\n He flipped his helmet closed, locked\n it, and opened it again. He tossed\n a sardonic salute at the photograph\n of a young lady who graced the side\n of the cockpit. \"Wish us luck, sugar.\"\n He pressed the mike button again.\n\n\n \"You got anything yet, Johnny?\"\n\n\n \"He's going our way, Paul. Have\n it exact in a minute.\"", "Coulter chuckled at the ad lib way\n they operated, remembering the\n courses, the tests, the procedures practiced\n until they could do them backwards\n blindfolded. When they tangled\n with a Red, the Solter co-ordinates\n went out the hatch. They navigated\n by the enemy. There were times\n during a fight when he had no more\n idea of his position than what the\n old ladies told him, and what he\n could see of the Sun, the Earth, and\n the Moon.", "At eighty-five seconds, he corrected\n slightly to center the pip. The momentary\n hiss of the rockets was a\n relief. He heard the muffled yammering\n as Guns fired a short burst\n from the .30's standing out of their\n compartments around the sides of the\n ship. They were practically recoilless,\n but the burst drifted him forward\n against the cradle harness.", "He cut back to 4 G's, noting that\n RVS registered about a mile per\n second away from station, and suddenly\n became aware that the red light\n was on for loss of air. The cabin\n pressure gauge read zero, and his\n heart throbbed into his throat as he\n remembered that\npinging\nsound, just\n as they passed the enemy ship. He\n told Garrity to see if he could locate\n the loss, and any other damage, and\n was shortly startled by a low amazed\n whistle in his earphones.\n\n\n \"If Ah wasn't lookin' at it, Ah\n wouldn't believe it. Musta been one\n of his shells went right around the\n fuel tank and out again, without hittin'\n it. There's at least three inches of\n tank on a line between the holes! He\n musta been throwin' curves at us.\n Man, cap'n, this is our lucky day!\"", "until they were well into their run,\n but when he got started he'd made\n them look like slow motion, just the\n same. If he hadn't tried that harebrained\n sudden deceleration....\n Coulter shook his head at the memory.\n And on the last mission they'd\n been lucky to get a draw. Those boys\n were good shots.\n\"We're crossing his track, Paul.\n Turn to nine point five o'clock and\n hold 4 G's for thirty-two seconds,\n starting on the count ... five—four—three—two—one—go!\"\n He completed\n the operation in silence, remarking\n to himself how lucky he was\n to have Johnson. The boy loved a", "Anyway, \"right side up\" tied in\n perfectly with the old \"clock\" system\n Garrity had dug out of those magazines\n he was always reading. Once\n they got used to it, it had turned out\n really handy. Old Doc Hoffman, his\n astrogation prof, would have turned\n purple if he'd ever dreamed they'd\n use such a conglomeration. But\n it worked. And when you were\n in a hurry, it worked in a hurry, and\n that was good enough for Coulter.\n He'd submitted a report on it to\n Colonel Silton.\n\n\n \"You've got him, Paul. We're\n dead on his tail, five hundred miles\n back, and matching velocity. Turn\n forty-two degrees right, and you're\n lined up right on him.\" Johnson was\n pleased with the job he'd done.", "Coulter scanned the full arch of\n sky visible through the curving panels\n of the dome, thinking the turgid\n thoughts that always came when action\n was near. His chest was full of\n the familiar weakness—not fear exactly,\n but a tight, helpless feeling\n that grew and grew with the waiting.\n\n\n His eyes and hands were busy in\n the familiar procedure, readying the\n ship for combat, checking and re-checking\n the details that could mean\n life and death, but his mind watched\n disembodied, yearning back to earth.\n\n\n Sylvia always came back first. Inviting\n smile and outstretched hands.\n Nyloned knees, pink sweater, and\n that clinging, clinging white silk\n skirt. A whirling montage of laughing,\n challenging eyes and tossing sky-black\n hair and soft arms tightening\n around his neck.", "Coulter advanced the throttle to\n 5 G's. And with the hiss of power,\n SF 308 began the deadly, intricate,\n precarious maneuver called a combat\n pass—a maneuver inherited from the\n aerial dogfight—though it often turned\n into something more like the\n broadside duels of the old sailing\n ships—as the best and least suicidal\n method of killing a spaceship. To\n start on the enemy's tail, just out of\n his radar range. To come up his track\n at 2 mps relative velocity, firing six\n .30 caliber machine guns from fifty\n miles out. In the last three or four", "Paul felt no surprise, only relief\n at having the trouble located. The\n reaction to the close call might not\n come till hours later. \"This kind of\n luck we can do without. Can you\n patch the holes?\"\n\n\n \"Ah can patch the one where it\n came in, but it musta been explodin'\n on the way out. There's a hole Ah\n could stick mah head through.\"\n\n\n \"That's a good idea.\" Johnson was\n not usually very witty, but this was\n one he couldn't resist.", "Kovacs and the kids were waiting.\n The armament officer had apparently\n been telling them of Paul's exploits.\n They glowed with admiration. The\n oldest boy, about eleven, had true\n worship in his eyes. He hesitated a\n moment, then asked gravely: \"Would\n you tell us how you kill a Red, sir?\"\n\n\n Paul eyed the time-honored weapon\n that dangled from the youngster's\n hand. He bent over and tapped it\n with his finger. His voice was warm\n and confiding, but his eyes were far\n away.", "One hundred\n ninety-two eternal seconds of waiting,\n of deathly silence and deathly\n calm, feeling and hearing nothing\n but the slow pounding of their own\n heartbeats. Each time he got back, it\n faded away, and all he remembered\n was the excitement. But each time\n he went through it, it was worse. Just\n standing and waiting in the silence,\n praying they weren't spotted—staring\n at the unmoving firmament and\n knowing he was a projectile hurtling\n two miles each second straight at a\n clump of metal and flesh that was\n the enemy. Knowing the odds were\n twenty to one against their scoring\n a kill ... unless they ran into him.", "Guns spoke quietly to Johnson.\n \"Let me know when we kill his RV.\n Ah may get another shot at him.\"\n\n\n And Johnny answered, hurt,\n \"What do you think I'm doing down\n here—reading one of your magazines?\"\n\n\n Paul was struggling with hundred-pound\n arms, trying to focus the telescope\n that swiveled over the panel.\n As the field cleared, he could see that\n the plume was flaring unevenly, flickering\n red and orange along one side.\n Quietly and viciously, he was talking\n to himself. \"Blow! Blow!\"\nAnd she blew. Like a dirty ragged\n bit of fireworks, throwing tiny handfuls\n of sparks into the blackness.\n Something glowed red for a while,\n and slowly faded.\nThere, but for the grace of God....\nPaul shuddered in a confused\n mixture of relief and revulsion.", "Now, there were Reds around practically\n every mission.\nThirteen missions to go, after today.\nHe wondered if he'd quit at\n seventy-five. Deep inside him, the old\n pride and excitement were still\n strong. He still got a kick out of the\n way the girls looked at the silver\n rocket on his chest. But he didn't\n feel as lucky as he used to. Twenty-nine\n years old, and he was starting\n to feel like an old man. He pictured\n himself lecturing to a group of eager\n kids.\nHad a couple of close calls, those\n last two missions.\nThat Red had\n looked easy, the way he was wandering\n around. He hadn't spotted them", "He thought of his father, rocking\n on the porch of the Pennsylvania\n farm, pipe in his mouth, the weathered\n old face serene, as he puffed and\n listened to the radio beside him. He\n wished he'd written him last night,\n instead of joining the usual beer and\n bull session in the wardroom. He\n wished—. He wished.\n\n\n \"I've got him, Paul. He's got two\n point seven miles of RV on us. Take\n thirty degrees high on two point one\n o'clock for course to IP.\"\nAutomatically he turned the control\n wheel to the right and eased it\n back. The gyros recorded the turn to\n course.\n\n\n \"Hold 4 G's for one six five seconds,\n then coast two minutes for initial\n point five hundred miles on his\n tail.\"", "\"Right, cap'n.\"\nBut it was Paul who couldn't forget\n about it. All the rest of the way\n back to station, he kept seeing visions\n of a panel sliding aside in the nose\n of a sleek and gleaming ship, while\n a small rocket pushed its deadly snout\n forward, and then streaked off at\n tremendous acceleration.\n\n\n Interrogation was brief. The mission\n had turned up nothing new.\n Their kill made eight against seven\n for Doc Miller's crew, and they made\n sure Miller and the boys heard about\n it. They were lightheaded with the\n elation that followed a successful\n mission, swapping insults with the\n rest of the squadron, and reveling in\n the sheer contentment of being back\n safe.\n\n\n It wasn't until he got back to his\n stall, and started to write his father\n a long overdue letter, that he remembered\n he had heard Kovacs say he\n was going on leave.", "They missed ramming by something\n around a hundred yards. The\n enemy ship flashed across his tail in\n a fraction of a second, already turned\n around and heading up its own track,\n yet it seemed to Paul he could make\n out every detail—the bright red star,\n even the tortured face of the pilot.\n Was there something lopsided in the\n shape of that rocket plume, or was\n he just imagining it in the blur of\n their passing? And did he hear a\nping\njust at that instant, feel the\n ship vibrate for a second?\n\n\n He continued the turn in the direction\n the automatics had started, bringing\n his nose around to watch the\n enemy's track. And as the shape of\n the plume told him the other ship\n was still heading back toward Earth,\n he brought the throttle back up to\n 12 G's, trying to overcome the lead\n his pass had given away.", "And suddenly the waiting was\n over. The ship filled with vibration\n as Guns opened up.\nTwenty-five seconds\n to target.\nHis eyes flicked from\n the sightscreen to the sky ahead,\n looking for the telltale flare of rockets—ready\n to follow like a ferret.\nThere he is!\nAt eighteen miles\n from target, a tiny blue light flickered\n ahead. He forgot everything but the\n sightscreen, concentrating on keeping\n the pip dead center. The guns hammered\n on. It seemed they'd been firing\n for centuries. At ten-mile range,\n the combat radar kicked the automatics\n in, turning the ship ninety\n degrees to her course in one and a\n half seconds. He heard the lee side\n firing cut out, as Garrity hung on\n with two, then three guns.\n\n\n He held it as long as he could.\n Closer than he ever had before. At\n four miles he poured 12 G's for two\n seconds.", "The second hand hit forty-five in\n its third cycle, and he stood loose in\n the cradle as the power died.\nSixty-two combat missions but the\n government says there's no war.\nHis\n mind wandered back over eight years\n in the service. Intelligence tests. Physical\n tests. Psychological tests. Six\n months of emotional adjustment in\n the screep. Primary training. Basic\n and advanced training. The pride and\n excitement of being chosen for space\n fighters. By the time he graduated,\n the United States and Russia each had\n several satellite stations operating, but\n in 1979, the United States had won\n the race for a permanent station on\n the Moon. What a grind it had been,\n bringing in the supplies.", "Paul remembered the time he had\n walked into the Muroc Base Officer's\n Club with Marge Halpern on his\n arm. The hunger that had lain undisguised\n on Kovacs' face the moment\n he first saw them. Marge was\n a striking blonde with a direct manner,\n who liked men, especially orbit\n station men. He hadn't thought about\n the incident since then, but the look\n in Kovacs' eyes kept coming back to\n him as he tried to read.\n\n\n He wasn't sure how he got there,\n or why, when he found himself walking\n into Colonel Silton's office to ask\n for the leave he'd passed up at his\n fiftieth mission. He'd considered taking\n it several times, but the thought\n of leaving the squadron, even for a\n couple of weeks, had made him feel\n guilty, as though he were quitting." ] ]
valid	99929	[ "What would the general impact of OA policies on the revenue of entire countries be? ", "How are OA journals able to generate enough income to continue operating? ", "How do researchers feel that the existence of OA journals effects their fields?", "How are authors expected to pay publishing fees for journals?", "Why are authors dissuaded from using OA journals? ", "How are hybrid OA journals different from full OA journals? ", "What is one way that OA journals have started to turn a profit? ", "In which situations do fee-based journals have the most positive impact? " ]	[ [ "It would increase the gross domestic production", "It would decrease the gross domestic production ", "It would have no effect on the economies of entire countries ", "It would only effect the countries with smaller economies " ], [ "By using funding from public sources ", "By selling blocks of subscriptions to organizations", "All of the other choices are correct ", "By charging a fee for publishing articles " ], [ "They feel it has a positive impact ", "They feel that it has a complex impact that is both positive in some ways and negative in others ", "They feel it has a negative impact ", "They feel it has no impact" ], [ "By crowdfunding from end users", "By using sponsor funding ", "Journals are barred from charging publishing fees ", "Out of their own pocket " ], [ "A lack of rights retention as it relates to their own content ", "OA journals always have a publication fee that authors must pay ", "Misleading information and surveys from toll-based research", "Toll-based journals offer a higher quality content " ], [ "Hybrid OA journals employ green OA practices while full OA journals employ gold OA practices", "Hybrid OA journals have some toll-access content and some OA content ", "Hybrid OA journals are much riskier for publishers ", "Hybrid OA journals only have toll-access content " ], [ "Offering paid physical copies of the journal ", "Selling blocks of subscriptions to academic institutions ", "Increasing the amount of toll-access subscriptions", "No longer charging authors to publish content in journals" ], [ "Research fields that are underfunded", "Whenever the topic undergoes large amounts of peer-review", "Research fields that are heavily funded", "Whenever the topic does not undergo any peer-review" ] ]	[ 1, 3, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1, 3 ]	[ 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "Open Access: Economics\nMany publishers who oppose OA concede that OA is better for research and researchers than toll access.\n \n They merely object that we can’t pay for it. But we can pay for it.\nThe first major study of the economic impact of OA policies was conducted by John Houghton and Peter Sheehan in 2006. Using conservative estimates that a nation’s gross expenditure on research and development (GERD) brings social returns of 50 percent, and that OA increases access and efficiency by 5 percent, Houghton and Sheehan calculated that a transition to OA would not only pay for itself, but add $1.7 billion/year to the UK economy and $16 billion/year to the U.S. economy. A later study focusing on Australia used the more conservative estimate that GERD brings social returns of only 25 percent, but still found that the bottom-line economic benefits of OA for publicly funded research were 51 times greater than the costs.", "OA journals that charge publication fees tend to waive them in cases of economic hardship, and journals with institutional subsidies tend not to charge publication fees. OA journals can diversify their funding and get by on lower subsidies, or lower fees, if they also have revenue from print editions, advertising, priced add-ons, or auxiliary services. Some institutions and consortia arrange fee discounts, or purchase annual memberships that include fee waivers or discounts for all affiliated researchers.\nModels that work well in some fields and nations may not work as well in others. No one claims that one size fits all. There’s still room for creativity in finding ways to pay the costs of a peer-reviewed OA journal, and many smart and motivated people are exploring different possibilities. Journals announce new variations almost every week, and we’re far from exhausting our cleverness and imagination.", "The false belief that most OA journals charge author-side fees also infects studies in which authors misinform survey subjects before surveying them. In effect: “At OA journals, authors pay to be published; now let me ask you a series of questions about your attitude toward OA journals.”\nFinally, this false belief undermines calculations about who would bear the financial brunt if we made a general transition from toll-access journals to OA journals. A handful of studies have calculated that after a general conversion of peer-reviewed journals to OA, high-output universities would pay more in author-side fees than they pay now in subscriptions. These calculations make at least two assumptions unjustified by present facts or trends: that all OA journals would charge fees, and that all fees would be paid by universities.", "Even if OA journals had the same production costs as toll-access journals, there’s enough money in the system to pay for peer-reviewed OA journals in every niche where we currently have peer-reviewed toll-access journals, and at the same level of quality. In fact, there’s more than enough, since we wouldn’t have to pay publisher profit margins surpassing those at ExxonMobil. Jan Velterop, the former publisher of BioMed Central, once said that OA publishing can be profitable but will “bring profit margins more in line with the added value.”\nTo support a full range of high-quality OA journals, we don’t need new money. We only need to redirect money we’re currently spending on peer-reviewed journals.", "OA journals pay their bills the way broadcast television and radio stations do—not through advertising or pledge drives, but through a simple generalization on advertising and pledge drives. Those with an interest in disseminating the content pay the production costs upfront so that access can be free of charge for everyone with the right equipment. Elsewhere I’ve called this the “some pay for all” model.\nSome OA journals have a subsidy from a university, library, foundation, society, museum, or government agency. Other OA journals charge a publication fee on accepted articles, to be paid by the author or the author’s sponsor (employer or funder). The party paying the subsidy or fee covers the journal’s expenses and readers pay nothing.", "Independent confirmation of Houghton’s results came in a major study released in April 2011, commissioned by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee, Publishing Research Consortium, Research Information Network, Research Libraries UK, and the Wellcome Trust. After studying five scenarios for improving research access, it concluded that green and gold OA “offer the greatest potential to policy-makers in promoting access. Both have positive, and potentially high, BCRs [benefit-cost ratios]. . . .”\nThe same study noted that “the infrastructure for Green [OA] has largely already been built” and therefore that “increasing access by this route is especially cost-effective. . . .” I can add that repositories scale up more easily than journals to capture unmet demand, and that depositing in a repository costs the depositor nothing. For all these reasons, I’ll focus in this chapter on how to pay for gold OA (journals), not how to pay for green OA (repositories).", "Redirection is also taking place on a large scale, primarily through CERN’s SCOAP3 project (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics). SCOAP3 is an ambitious plan to convert all the major toll-access journals in particle physics to OA, redirect the money formerly spent on reader-side subscription fees to author-side publication fees, and reduce the overall price to the journal-supporting institutions. It’s a peaceful revolution based on negotiation, consent, and self-interest. After four years of patiently building up budget pledges from libraries around the world, SCOAP3 entered its implementation phase in in April 2011.", "Fee-based OA journals tend to work best in fields where most research is funded, and no-fee journals tend to work best in fields and countries where comparatively little research is funded. The successes of these two business models give hope that gold OA can be sustainable in every discipline.\nEvery kind of peer-reviewed journal can become more sustainable by reducing costs. Although peer review is generally performed by unpaid volunteers, organizing or facilitating peer review is an expense. The journal must select referees, distribute files to referees, monitor who has what, track progress, nag dawdlers, collect comments and share them with the right people, facilitate communication, distinguish versions, and collect data on acceptances and rejections. One powerful way to reduce costs without reducing quality is to use free and open-source journal management software to automate the clerical tasks on this list.", "There are many kinds of redirection. One is the voluntary conversion of toll-access journals to OA. Conversion could be a journal’s grudging response to declining library budgets for toll-access journals and exclusion from the big deals that take the lion’s share of library budgets. It could be a grudging response to its own past price increases and rising levels of green OA (see chapter 8 on casualties). Or it could be a hopeful and enthusiastic desire to achieve the benefits of OA for authors (greater audience and impact), readers (freedom from price and permission barriers), and publishers themselves (increased readership, citations, submissions, and quality).\nAnother kind of redirection is the rise of OA journal funds at universities. Even during times of declining budgets, libraries are setting aside money to pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals. The funds help faculty choose OA journals for their new work and help build a sustainable alternative to toll-access journals.", "We should be suspicious when large, venerable, conventional publishers say that in their experience the economics of OA publishing don’t work. Print-era publishers retooling for digital, and toll-access publishers retooling for OA, will inevitably realize smaller savings from OA than lean, mean OA start-ups without legacy equipment, personnel, or overhead from the age of print and subscriptions.\nAbout one-quarter of all peer-reviewed journals today are OA. Like toll-access journals, some are in the black and thriving and some are in the red and struggling. However, the full range of OA journals begins to look like a success story when we consider that the vast majority of the money needed to support peer-reviewed journals is currently tied up in subscriptions to conventional journals. OA journals have reached their current numbers and quality despite the extraordinary squeeze on budgets devoted to the support of peer-reviewed journals.", "Green OA may suffer from invisibility, but gold OA does not. On the contrary, researchers who don’t know about OA repositories still understand that there are OA journals. Sometimes the visibility gap is so large that researchers, journalists, and policy-makers conclude that all OA is gold OA (see section 3.1 on green and gold OA). As a result, most researchers who think about the benefits of OA think about the benefits of gold OA. Here, at least, the news is good. The most comprehensive survey to date shows that an overwhelming 89 percent of researchers from all fields believe that OA journals are beneficial to their fields.", "There are reasons to think that OA journals cost less to produce than toll-access journals of the same quality. OA journals dispense with subscription management (soliciting, negotiating, tracking, renewing subscribers), dispense with digital rights management (authenticating users, distinguishing authorized from unauthorized, blocking access to unauthorized), eliminate legal fees for licensing (drafting, negotiating, monitoring, and enforcing restrictive licenses), and reduce or eliminate marketing. In their place they add back little more than the cost of collecting publication fees or institutional subsidies. Several studies and OA publishers have testified to these lower costs.\nWe shouldn’t count the savings from dropping print, since most toll-access journals in the sciences have already dropped their print editions and those in the humanities are moving in the same direction.", "These false beliefs also support the insinuation that OA journals are more likely than non-OA journals to compromise on peer review. But if charging author-side fees for accepted papers really creates an incentive to lower standards, in order to rake in more fees, then most toll-access journals are guilty and most OA journals are not. In fact, however, when OA journals do charge author-side fees, they create firewalls between their financial and editorial operations. For example, most fee-based OA journals will waive their fees in cases of economic hardship, and take pains to prevent editors and referees engaged in peer review from knowing whether or not an author has requested a fee waiver. By contrast, at toll-access journals levying author-side page or color charges, editors generally know that accepted papers will entail revenue.", "The chief virtue of hybrid OA journals is that they give publishers some firsthand experience with the economics and logistics of OA publishing. But the economics are artificial, since hybrid OA publishers have no incentive to increase author uptake and make the model succeed. The publishers always have subscriptions to fall back on. Moreover, an overwhelming majority of full-OA journals charge no publication fees and the overwhelming majority of hybrid-OA journals never gain firsthand experience with no-fee business models.\nA growing number of for-profit OA publishers are making profits, and a growing number of nonprofit OA publishers are breaking even or making surpluses. Two different business models drive these sustainable publishing programs. BioMed Central makes profits and the Public Library of Science makes surpluses by charging publication fees. MedKnow makes profits without charging publication fees by selling priced print editions of its OA journals.", "There are two kinds of OA journals, full and hybrid. Full OA journals provide OA to all their research articles. Hybrid OA journals provide OA to some and toll-access to others, when the choice is the author’s rather than the editor’s. Most hybrid OA journals charge a publication fee for the OA option. Authors who can find the money get immediate OA, and those who can’t or prefer not to, get toll access. (Many hybrid OA journals provide OA to all their articles after some time period, such as a year.) Some hybrid OA journals promise to reduce subscription prices in proportion to author uptake of the OA option, that is, to charge subscribers only for the toll-access articles. But most hybrid journal publishers don’t make this promise and “double dip” by charging subscription fees and publication fees for the same OA articles.", "Mark Rowse, former CEO of Ingenta, sketched another strategy for large-scale redirection in December 2003. A publisher could “flip” its toll-access journals to OA at one stroke by reinterpreting the payments it receives from university libraries as publication fees for a group of authors rather than subscription fees for a group of readers. One advantage over SCOAP3 is that the Rowsean flip can be tried one journal or one publisher at a time, and doesn’t require discipline-wide coordination. It could also scale up to the largest publishers or the largest coalitions of publishers.\nWe have to be imaginative but we don’t have to improvise. There are some principles we can try to follow. Money freed up by the cancellation or conversion of peer-reviewed TA journals should be spent first on peer-reviewed OA journals, to ensure the continuation of peer review. Large-scale redirection is more efficient than small-scale redirection. Peaceful revolution through negotiation and self-interest is more amicable and potentially more productive than adaptation forced by falling asteroids.", "The leader in this field is Open Journal Systems from the Public Knowledge Project, but there are more than a dozen other open-source packages. While OJS or other open-source software could benefit even toll-access journals, their use is concentrated among OA journals. OJS alone is has more than 9,000 installations (though not all are used for managing journals). This is not merely an example of how one openness movement can help another but also of how fearing openness can lead conventional publishers to forgo financial benefits and leave money on the table.", "The terms “author fees” and “author pays” are specious and damaging. They’re false for the majority of OA journals, which charge no fees. They’re also misleading even for fee-based OA journals, where nearly nine times out of ten the fees are not paid by authors themselves. It’s more accurate to speak of “publication fees,” “processing fees,” or “author-side fees.” The first two don’t specify the payor, and the third merely specifies that the payment comes from the author side of the transaction, rather than the reader side, without implying that it must come from authors themselves.\nThe false beliefs that most OA journals charge author-side fees and that most toll-access journals don’t have caused several kinds of harm. They scare authors away from OA journals. They support the misconception that gold OA excludes indigent authors. When we add in the background myth that all OA is gold OA, this misconception suggests that OA as such—and not just gold OA—excludes indigent authors.", "Hybrid OA is very low-risk for publishers. If the OA option has low uptake, the publisher loses nothing and still has subscription revenue. If it has high uptake, the publisher has subscription revenue for the conventional articles, publication fees for the OA articles, and sometimes both at once for the OA articles. Hence, the model has spread far and fast. The Professional/Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of American Publishers reported in 2011 that 74 percent of surveyed journals offering some form of OA in 2009 offered hybrid OA. At the same time, SHERPA listed more than 90 publishers offering hybrid OA options, including all of the largest publishers. Despite its spread, hybrid OA journals do little or nothing to help researchers, libraries, or publishers. The average rate of uptake for the OA option at hybrid journals is just 2 percent.", "Before turning to gold OA, however, I should note that there are widely varying estimates in the literature on what it costs a university to run an institutional repository. The divergence reflects the fact that repositories can serve many different purposes, and that some repositories serve more of them than others. If the minimum purpose is to host OA copies of faculty articles, and if faculty deposit their own articles, then the cost is minimal. But a repository is a general-purpose tool, and once launched there are good reasons for it to take on other responsibilities, such as long-term preservation, assisting faculty with digitization, permissions, and deposits, and hosting many other sorts of content, such as theses and dissertations, books or book chapters, conference proceedings, courseware, campus publications, digitized special collections, and administrative records. If the average repository is a significant expense today, the reason is that the average repository is doing significantly more than the minimum." ], [ "OA journals pay their bills the way broadcast television and radio stations do—not through advertising or pledge drives, but through a simple generalization on advertising and pledge drives. Those with an interest in disseminating the content pay the production costs upfront so that access can be free of charge for everyone with the right equipment. Elsewhere I’ve called this the “some pay for all” model.\nSome OA journals have a subsidy from a university, library, foundation, society, museum, or government agency. Other OA journals charge a publication fee on accepted articles, to be paid by the author or the author’s sponsor (employer or funder). The party paying the subsidy or fee covers the journal’s expenses and readers pay nothing.", "OA journals that charge publication fees tend to waive them in cases of economic hardship, and journals with institutional subsidies tend not to charge publication fees. OA journals can diversify their funding and get by on lower subsidies, or lower fees, if they also have revenue from print editions, advertising, priced add-ons, or auxiliary services. Some institutions and consortia arrange fee discounts, or purchase annual memberships that include fee waivers or discounts for all affiliated researchers.\nModels that work well in some fields and nations may not work as well in others. No one claims that one size fits all. There’s still room for creativity in finding ways to pay the costs of a peer-reviewed OA journal, and many smart and motivated people are exploring different possibilities. Journals announce new variations almost every week, and we’re far from exhausting our cleverness and imagination.", "The chief virtue of hybrid OA journals is that they give publishers some firsthand experience with the economics and logistics of OA publishing. But the economics are artificial, since hybrid OA publishers have no incentive to increase author uptake and make the model succeed. The publishers always have subscriptions to fall back on. Moreover, an overwhelming majority of full-OA journals charge no publication fees and the overwhelming majority of hybrid-OA journals never gain firsthand experience with no-fee business models.\nA growing number of for-profit OA publishers are making profits, and a growing number of nonprofit OA publishers are breaking even or making surpluses. Two different business models drive these sustainable publishing programs. BioMed Central makes profits and the Public Library of Science makes surpluses by charging publication fees. MedKnow makes profits without charging publication fees by selling priced print editions of its OA journals.", "Even if OA journals had the same production costs as toll-access journals, there’s enough money in the system to pay for peer-reviewed OA journals in every niche where we currently have peer-reviewed toll-access journals, and at the same level of quality. In fact, there’s more than enough, since we wouldn’t have to pay publisher profit margins surpassing those at ExxonMobil. Jan Velterop, the former publisher of BioMed Central, once said that OA publishing can be profitable but will “bring profit margins more in line with the added value.”\nTo support a full range of high-quality OA journals, we don’t need new money. We only need to redirect money we’re currently spending on peer-reviewed journals.", "We should be suspicious when large, venerable, conventional publishers say that in their experience the economics of OA publishing don’t work. Print-era publishers retooling for digital, and toll-access publishers retooling for OA, will inevitably realize smaller savings from OA than lean, mean OA start-ups without legacy equipment, personnel, or overhead from the age of print and subscriptions.\nAbout one-quarter of all peer-reviewed journals today are OA. Like toll-access journals, some are in the black and thriving and some are in the red and struggling. However, the full range of OA journals begins to look like a success story when we consider that the vast majority of the money needed to support peer-reviewed journals is currently tied up in subscriptions to conventional journals. OA journals have reached their current numbers and quality despite the extraordinary squeeze on budgets devoted to the support of peer-reviewed journals.", "There are two kinds of OA journals, full and hybrid. Full OA journals provide OA to all their research articles. Hybrid OA journals provide OA to some and toll-access to others, when the choice is the author’s rather than the editor’s. Most hybrid OA journals charge a publication fee for the OA option. Authors who can find the money get immediate OA, and those who can’t or prefer not to, get toll access. (Many hybrid OA journals provide OA to all their articles after some time period, such as a year.) Some hybrid OA journals promise to reduce subscription prices in proportion to author uptake of the OA option, that is, to charge subscribers only for the toll-access articles. But most hybrid journal publishers don’t make this promise and “double dip” by charging subscription fees and publication fees for the same OA articles.", "Fee-based OA journals tend to work best in fields where most research is funded, and no-fee journals tend to work best in fields and countries where comparatively little research is funded. The successes of these two business models give hope that gold OA can be sustainable in every discipline.\nEvery kind of peer-reviewed journal can become more sustainable by reducing costs. Although peer review is generally performed by unpaid volunteers, organizing or facilitating peer review is an expense. The journal must select referees, distribute files to referees, monitor who has what, track progress, nag dawdlers, collect comments and share them with the right people, facilitate communication, distinguish versions, and collect data on acceptances and rejections. One powerful way to reduce costs without reducing quality is to use free and open-source journal management software to automate the clerical tasks on this list.", "These false beliefs also support the insinuation that OA journals are more likely than non-OA journals to compromise on peer review. But if charging author-side fees for accepted papers really creates an incentive to lower standards, in order to rake in more fees, then most toll-access journals are guilty and most OA journals are not. In fact, however, when OA journals do charge author-side fees, they create firewalls between their financial and editorial operations. For example, most fee-based OA journals will waive their fees in cases of economic hardship, and take pains to prevent editors and referees engaged in peer review from knowing whether or not an author has requested a fee waiver. By contrast, at toll-access journals levying author-side page or color charges, editors generally know that accepted papers will entail revenue.", "There are reasons to think that OA journals cost less to produce than toll-access journals of the same quality. OA journals dispense with subscription management (soliciting, negotiating, tracking, renewing subscribers), dispense with digital rights management (authenticating users, distinguishing authorized from unauthorized, blocking access to unauthorized), eliminate legal fees for licensing (drafting, negotiating, monitoring, and enforcing restrictive licenses), and reduce or eliminate marketing. In their place they add back little more than the cost of collecting publication fees or institutional subsidies. Several studies and OA publishers have testified to these lower costs.\nWe shouldn’t count the savings from dropping print, since most toll-access journals in the sciences have already dropped their print editions and those in the humanities are moving in the same direction.", "Apart from the myth that all OA is gold OA, the most common myth about gold OA is that all OA journals charge “author fees” or use an “author-pays” business model. There are three mistakes here. The first is to assume that there is only one business model for OA journals, when there are many. The second is to assume that charging an upfront fee means authors are the ones expected to pay it. The third is to assume that all or even most OA journals charge upfront fees. In fact, most OA journals (70 percent) charge no upfront or author-side fees at all. By contrast, most toll-access journals (75 percent) do charge author-side fees. Moreover, even within the minority of fee-based OA journals, only 12 percent of those authors end up paying the fees out of pocket. Almost 90 percent of the time, the fees at fee-based journals are waived or paid by sponsors on behalf of authors.\nTerminology", "The false belief that most OA journals charge author-side fees also infects studies in which authors misinform survey subjects before surveying them. In effect: “At OA journals, authors pay to be published; now let me ask you a series of questions about your attitude toward OA journals.”\nFinally, this false belief undermines calculations about who would bear the financial brunt if we made a general transition from toll-access journals to OA journals. A handful of studies have calculated that after a general conversion of peer-reviewed journals to OA, high-output universities would pay more in author-side fees than they pay now in subscriptions. These calculations make at least two assumptions unjustified by present facts or trends: that all OA journals would charge fees, and that all fees would be paid by universities.", "There are many kinds of redirection. One is the voluntary conversion of toll-access journals to OA. Conversion could be a journal’s grudging response to declining library budgets for toll-access journals and exclusion from the big deals that take the lion’s share of library budgets. It could be a grudging response to its own past price increases and rising levels of green OA (see chapter 8 on casualties). Or it could be a hopeful and enthusiastic desire to achieve the benefits of OA for authors (greater audience and impact), readers (freedom from price and permission barriers), and publishers themselves (increased readership, citations, submissions, and quality).\nAnother kind of redirection is the rise of OA journal funds at universities. Even during times of declining budgets, libraries are setting aside money to pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals. The funds help faculty choose OA journals for their new work and help build a sustainable alternative to toll-access journals.", "The terms “author fees” and “author pays” are specious and damaging. They’re false for the majority of OA journals, which charge no fees. They’re also misleading even for fee-based OA journals, where nearly nine times out of ten the fees are not paid by authors themselves. It’s more accurate to speak of “publication fees,” “processing fees,” or “author-side fees.” The first two don’t specify the payor, and the third merely specifies that the payment comes from the author side of the transaction, rather than the reader side, without implying that it must come from authors themselves.\nThe false beliefs that most OA journals charge author-side fees and that most toll-access journals don’t have caused several kinds of harm. They scare authors away from OA journals. They support the misconception that gold OA excludes indigent authors. When we add in the background myth that all OA is gold OA, this misconception suggests that OA as such—and not just gold OA—excludes indigent authors.", "The leader in this field is Open Journal Systems from the Public Knowledge Project, but there are more than a dozen other open-source packages. While OJS or other open-source software could benefit even toll-access journals, their use is concentrated among OA journals. OJS alone is has more than 9,000 installations (though not all are used for managing journals). This is not merely an example of how one openness movement can help another but also of how fearing openness can lead conventional publishers to forgo financial benefits and leave money on the table.", "Independent confirmation of Houghton’s results came in a major study released in April 2011, commissioned by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee, Publishing Research Consortium, Research Information Network, Research Libraries UK, and the Wellcome Trust. After studying five scenarios for improving research access, it concluded that green and gold OA “offer the greatest potential to policy-makers in promoting access. Both have positive, and potentially high, BCRs [benefit-cost ratios]. . . .”\nThe same study noted that “the infrastructure for Green [OA] has largely already been built” and therefore that “increasing access by this route is especially cost-effective. . . .” I can add that repositories scale up more easily than journals to capture unmet demand, and that depositing in a repository costs the depositor nothing. For all these reasons, I’ll focus in this chapter on how to pay for gold OA (journals), not how to pay for green OA (repositories).", "Hybrid OA is very low-risk for publishers. If the OA option has low uptake, the publisher loses nothing and still has subscription revenue. If it has high uptake, the publisher has subscription revenue for the conventional articles, publication fees for the OA articles, and sometimes both at once for the OA articles. Hence, the model has spread far and fast. The Professional/Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of American Publishers reported in 2011 that 74 percent of surveyed journals offering some form of OA in 2009 offered hybrid OA. At the same time, SHERPA listed more than 90 publishers offering hybrid OA options, including all of the largest publishers. Despite its spread, hybrid OA journals do little or nothing to help researchers, libraries, or publishers. The average rate of uptake for the OA option at hybrid journals is just 2 percent.", "Redirection is also taking place on a large scale, primarily through CERN’s SCOAP3 project (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics). SCOAP3 is an ambitious plan to convert all the major toll-access journals in particle physics to OA, redirect the money formerly spent on reader-side subscription fees to author-side publication fees, and reduce the overall price to the journal-supporting institutions. It’s a peaceful revolution based on negotiation, consent, and self-interest. After four years of patiently building up budget pledges from libraries around the world, SCOAP3 entered its implementation phase in in April 2011.", "Green OA may suffer from invisibility, but gold OA does not. On the contrary, researchers who don’t know about OA repositories still understand that there are OA journals. Sometimes the visibility gap is so large that researchers, journalists, and policy-makers conclude that all OA is gold OA (see section 3.1 on green and gold OA). As a result, most researchers who think about the benefits of OA think about the benefits of gold OA. Here, at least, the news is good. The most comprehensive survey to date shows that an overwhelming 89 percent of researchers from all fields believe that OA journals are beneficial to their fields.", "Open Access: Economics\nMany publishers who oppose OA concede that OA is better for research and researchers than toll access.\n \n They merely object that we can’t pay for it. But we can pay for it.\nThe first major study of the economic impact of OA policies was conducted by John Houghton and Peter Sheehan in 2006. Using conservative estimates that a nation’s gross expenditure on research and development (GERD) brings social returns of 50 percent, and that OA increases access and efficiency by 5 percent, Houghton and Sheehan calculated that a transition to OA would not only pay for itself, but add $1.7 billion/year to the UK economy and $16 billion/year to the U.S. economy. A later study focusing on Australia used the more conservative estimate that GERD brings social returns of only 25 percent, but still found that the bottom-line economic benefits of OA for publicly funded research were 51 times greater than the costs.", "For the record, I advocate redirecting money freed up by cancellations or conversions, not canceling journals in order to free up money (except with SCOAP3 or Rowse-like consent and negotiation). This may look like hair-splitting, but the difference is neither small nor subtle. It’s roughly the difference between having great expectations and planning to kill your parents." ], [ "Green OA may suffer from invisibility, but gold OA does not. On the contrary, researchers who don’t know about OA repositories still understand that there are OA journals. Sometimes the visibility gap is so large that researchers, journalists, and policy-makers conclude that all OA is gold OA (see section 3.1 on green and gold OA). As a result, most researchers who think about the benefits of OA think about the benefits of gold OA. Here, at least, the news is good. The most comprehensive survey to date shows that an overwhelming 89 percent of researchers from all fields believe that OA journals are beneficial to their fields.", "The false belief that most OA journals charge author-side fees also infects studies in which authors misinform survey subjects before surveying them. In effect: “At OA journals, authors pay to be published; now let me ask you a series of questions about your attitude toward OA journals.”\nFinally, this false belief undermines calculations about who would bear the financial brunt if we made a general transition from toll-access journals to OA journals. A handful of studies have calculated that after a general conversion of peer-reviewed journals to OA, high-output universities would pay more in author-side fees than they pay now in subscriptions. These calculations make at least two assumptions unjustified by present facts or trends: that all OA journals would charge fees, and that all fees would be paid by universities.", "There are two kinds of OA journals, full and hybrid. Full OA journals provide OA to all their research articles. Hybrid OA journals provide OA to some and toll-access to others, when the choice is the author’s rather than the editor’s. Most hybrid OA journals charge a publication fee for the OA option. Authors who can find the money get immediate OA, and those who can’t or prefer not to, get toll access. (Many hybrid OA journals provide OA to all their articles after some time period, such as a year.) Some hybrid OA journals promise to reduce subscription prices in proportion to author uptake of the OA option, that is, to charge subscribers only for the toll-access articles. But most hybrid journal publishers don’t make this promise and “double dip” by charging subscription fees and publication fees for the same OA articles.", "The leader in this field is Open Journal Systems from the Public Knowledge Project, but there are more than a dozen other open-source packages. While OJS or other open-source software could benefit even toll-access journals, their use is concentrated among OA journals. OJS alone is has more than 9,000 installations (though not all are used for managing journals). This is not merely an example of how one openness movement can help another but also of how fearing openness can lead conventional publishers to forgo financial benefits and leave money on the table.", "Independent confirmation of Houghton’s results came in a major study released in April 2011, commissioned by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee, Publishing Research Consortium, Research Information Network, Research Libraries UK, and the Wellcome Trust. After studying five scenarios for improving research access, it concluded that green and gold OA “offer the greatest potential to policy-makers in promoting access. Both have positive, and potentially high, BCRs [benefit-cost ratios]. . . .”\nThe same study noted that “the infrastructure for Green [OA] has largely already been built” and therefore that “increasing access by this route is especially cost-effective. . . .” I can add that repositories scale up more easily than journals to capture unmet demand, and that depositing in a repository costs the depositor nothing. For all these reasons, I’ll focus in this chapter on how to pay for gold OA (journals), not how to pay for green OA (repositories).", "These false beliefs also support the insinuation that OA journals are more likely than non-OA journals to compromise on peer review. But if charging author-side fees for accepted papers really creates an incentive to lower standards, in order to rake in more fees, then most toll-access journals are guilty and most OA journals are not. In fact, however, when OA journals do charge author-side fees, they create firewalls between their financial and editorial operations. For example, most fee-based OA journals will waive their fees in cases of economic hardship, and take pains to prevent editors and referees engaged in peer review from knowing whether or not an author has requested a fee waiver. By contrast, at toll-access journals levying author-side page or color charges, editors generally know that accepted papers will entail revenue.", "Fee-based OA journals tend to work best in fields where most research is funded, and no-fee journals tend to work best in fields and countries where comparatively little research is funded. The successes of these two business models give hope that gold OA can be sustainable in every discipline.\nEvery kind of peer-reviewed journal can become more sustainable by reducing costs. Although peer review is generally performed by unpaid volunteers, organizing or facilitating peer review is an expense. The journal must select referees, distribute files to referees, monitor who has what, track progress, nag dawdlers, collect comments and share them with the right people, facilitate communication, distinguish versions, and collect data on acceptances and rejections. One powerful way to reduce costs without reducing quality is to use free and open-source journal management software to automate the clerical tasks on this list.", "We should be suspicious when large, venerable, conventional publishers say that in their experience the economics of OA publishing don’t work. Print-era publishers retooling for digital, and toll-access publishers retooling for OA, will inevitably realize smaller savings from OA than lean, mean OA start-ups without legacy equipment, personnel, or overhead from the age of print and subscriptions.\nAbout one-quarter of all peer-reviewed journals today are OA. Like toll-access journals, some are in the black and thriving and some are in the red and struggling. However, the full range of OA journals begins to look like a success story when we consider that the vast majority of the money needed to support peer-reviewed journals is currently tied up in subscriptions to conventional journals. OA journals have reached their current numbers and quality despite the extraordinary squeeze on budgets devoted to the support of peer-reviewed journals.", "OA journals that charge publication fees tend to waive them in cases of economic hardship, and journals with institutional subsidies tend not to charge publication fees. OA journals can diversify their funding and get by on lower subsidies, or lower fees, if they also have revenue from print editions, advertising, priced add-ons, or auxiliary services. Some institutions and consortia arrange fee discounts, or purchase annual memberships that include fee waivers or discounts for all affiliated researchers.\nModels that work well in some fields and nations may not work as well in others. No one claims that one size fits all. There’s still room for creativity in finding ways to pay the costs of a peer-reviewed OA journal, and many smart and motivated people are exploring different possibilities. Journals announce new variations almost every week, and we’re far from exhausting our cleverness and imagination.", "OA journals pay their bills the way broadcast television and radio stations do—not through advertising or pledge drives, but through a simple generalization on advertising and pledge drives. Those with an interest in disseminating the content pay the production costs upfront so that access can be free of charge for everyone with the right equipment. Elsewhere I’ve called this the “some pay for all” model.\nSome OA journals have a subsidy from a university, library, foundation, society, museum, or government agency. Other OA journals charge a publication fee on accepted articles, to be paid by the author or the author’s sponsor (employer or funder). The party paying the subsidy or fee covers the journal’s expenses and readers pay nothing.", "There are many kinds of redirection. One is the voluntary conversion of toll-access journals to OA. Conversion could be a journal’s grudging response to declining library budgets for toll-access journals and exclusion from the big deals that take the lion’s share of library budgets. It could be a grudging response to its own past price increases and rising levels of green OA (see chapter 8 on casualties). Or it could be a hopeful and enthusiastic desire to achieve the benefits of OA for authors (greater audience and impact), readers (freedom from price and permission barriers), and publishers themselves (increased readership, citations, submissions, and quality).\nAnother kind of redirection is the rise of OA journal funds at universities. Even during times of declining budgets, libraries are setting aside money to pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals. The funds help faculty choose OA journals for their new work and help build a sustainable alternative to toll-access journals.", "Even if OA journals had the same production costs as toll-access journals, there’s enough money in the system to pay for peer-reviewed OA journals in every niche where we currently have peer-reviewed toll-access journals, and at the same level of quality. In fact, there’s more than enough, since we wouldn’t have to pay publisher profit margins surpassing those at ExxonMobil. Jan Velterop, the former publisher of BioMed Central, once said that OA publishing can be profitable but will “bring profit margins more in line with the added value.”\nTo support a full range of high-quality OA journals, we don’t need new money. We only need to redirect money we’re currently spending on peer-reviewed journals.", "Open Access: Economics\nMany publishers who oppose OA concede that OA is better for research and researchers than toll access.\n \n They merely object that we can’t pay for it. But we can pay for it.\nThe first major study of the economic impact of OA policies was conducted by John Houghton and Peter Sheehan in 2006. Using conservative estimates that a nation’s gross expenditure on research and development (GERD) brings social returns of 50 percent, and that OA increases access and efficiency by 5 percent, Houghton and Sheehan calculated that a transition to OA would not only pay for itself, but add $1.7 billion/year to the UK economy and $16 billion/year to the U.S. economy. A later study focusing on Australia used the more conservative estimate that GERD brings social returns of only 25 percent, but still found that the bottom-line economic benefits of OA for publicly funded research were 51 times greater than the costs.", "There are reasons to think that OA journals cost less to produce than toll-access journals of the same quality. OA journals dispense with subscription management (soliciting, negotiating, tracking, renewing subscribers), dispense with digital rights management (authenticating users, distinguishing authorized from unauthorized, blocking access to unauthorized), eliminate legal fees for licensing (drafting, negotiating, monitoring, and enforcing restrictive licenses), and reduce or eliminate marketing. In their place they add back little more than the cost of collecting publication fees or institutional subsidies. Several studies and OA publishers have testified to these lower costs.\nWe shouldn’t count the savings from dropping print, since most toll-access journals in the sciences have already dropped their print editions and those in the humanities are moving in the same direction.", "Hybrid OA is very low-risk for publishers. If the OA option has low uptake, the publisher loses nothing and still has subscription revenue. If it has high uptake, the publisher has subscription revenue for the conventional articles, publication fees for the OA articles, and sometimes both at once for the OA articles. Hence, the model has spread far and fast. The Professional/Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of American Publishers reported in 2011 that 74 percent of surveyed journals offering some form of OA in 2009 offered hybrid OA. At the same time, SHERPA listed more than 90 publishers offering hybrid OA options, including all of the largest publishers. Despite its spread, hybrid OA journals do little or nothing to help researchers, libraries, or publishers. The average rate of uptake for the OA option at hybrid journals is just 2 percent.", "The terms “author fees” and “author pays” are specious and damaging. They’re false for the majority of OA journals, which charge no fees. They’re also misleading even for fee-based OA journals, where nearly nine times out of ten the fees are not paid by authors themselves. It’s more accurate to speak of “publication fees,” “processing fees,” or “author-side fees.” The first two don’t specify the payor, and the third merely specifies that the payment comes from the author side of the transaction, rather than the reader side, without implying that it must come from authors themselves.\nThe false beliefs that most OA journals charge author-side fees and that most toll-access journals don’t have caused several kinds of harm. They scare authors away from OA journals. They support the misconception that gold OA excludes indigent authors. When we add in the background myth that all OA is gold OA, this misconception suggests that OA as such—and not just gold OA—excludes indigent authors.", "The chief virtue of hybrid OA journals is that they give publishers some firsthand experience with the economics and logistics of OA publishing. But the economics are artificial, since hybrid OA publishers have no incentive to increase author uptake and make the model succeed. The publishers always have subscriptions to fall back on. Moreover, an overwhelming majority of full-OA journals charge no publication fees and the overwhelming majority of hybrid-OA journals never gain firsthand experience with no-fee business models.\nA growing number of for-profit OA publishers are making profits, and a growing number of nonprofit OA publishers are breaking even or making surpluses. Two different business models drive these sustainable publishing programs. BioMed Central makes profits and the Public Library of Science makes surpluses by charging publication fees. MedKnow makes profits without charging publication fees by selling priced print editions of its OA journals.", "Apart from the myth that all OA is gold OA, the most common myth about gold OA is that all OA journals charge “author fees” or use an “author-pays” business model. There are three mistakes here. The first is to assume that there is only one business model for OA journals, when there are many. The second is to assume that charging an upfront fee means authors are the ones expected to pay it. The third is to assume that all or even most OA journals charge upfront fees. In fact, most OA journals (70 percent) charge no upfront or author-side fees at all. By contrast, most toll-access journals (75 percent) do charge author-side fees. Moreover, even within the minority of fee-based OA journals, only 12 percent of those authors end up paying the fees out of pocket. Almost 90 percent of the time, the fees at fee-based journals are waived or paid by sponsors on behalf of authors.\nTerminology", "Redirection is also taking place on a large scale, primarily through CERN’s SCOAP3 project (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics). SCOAP3 is an ambitious plan to convert all the major toll-access journals in particle physics to OA, redirect the money formerly spent on reader-side subscription fees to author-side publication fees, and reduce the overall price to the journal-supporting institutions. It’s a peaceful revolution based on negotiation, consent, and self-interest. After four years of patiently building up budget pledges from libraries around the world, SCOAP3 entered its implementation phase in in April 2011.", "Before turning to gold OA, however, I should note that there are widely varying estimates in the literature on what it costs a university to run an institutional repository. The divergence reflects the fact that repositories can serve many different purposes, and that some repositories serve more of them than others. If the minimum purpose is to host OA copies of faculty articles, and if faculty deposit their own articles, then the cost is minimal. But a repository is a general-purpose tool, and once launched there are good reasons for it to take on other responsibilities, such as long-term preservation, assisting faculty with digitization, permissions, and deposits, and hosting many other sorts of content, such as theses and dissertations, books or book chapters, conference proceedings, courseware, campus publications, digitized special collections, and administrative records. If the average repository is a significant expense today, the reason is that the average repository is doing significantly more than the minimum." ], [ "OA journals pay their bills the way broadcast television and radio stations do—not through advertising or pledge drives, but through a simple generalization on advertising and pledge drives. Those with an interest in disseminating the content pay the production costs upfront so that access can be free of charge for everyone with the right equipment. Elsewhere I’ve called this the “some pay for all” model.\nSome OA journals have a subsidy from a university, library, foundation, society, museum, or government agency. Other OA journals charge a publication fee on accepted articles, to be paid by the author or the author’s sponsor (employer or funder). The party paying the subsidy or fee covers the journal’s expenses and readers pay nothing.", "The terms “author fees” and “author pays” are specious and damaging. They’re false for the majority of OA journals, which charge no fees. They’re also misleading even for fee-based OA journals, where nearly nine times out of ten the fees are not paid by authors themselves. It’s more accurate to speak of “publication fees,” “processing fees,” or “author-side fees.” The first two don’t specify the payor, and the third merely specifies that the payment comes from the author side of the transaction, rather than the reader side, without implying that it must come from authors themselves.\nThe false beliefs that most OA journals charge author-side fees and that most toll-access journals don’t have caused several kinds of harm. They scare authors away from OA journals. They support the misconception that gold OA excludes indigent authors. When we add in the background myth that all OA is gold OA, this misconception suggests that OA as such—and not just gold OA—excludes indigent authors.", "OA journals that charge publication fees tend to waive them in cases of economic hardship, and journals with institutional subsidies tend not to charge publication fees. OA journals can diversify their funding and get by on lower subsidies, or lower fees, if they also have revenue from print editions, advertising, priced add-ons, or auxiliary services. Some institutions and consortia arrange fee discounts, or purchase annual memberships that include fee waivers or discounts for all affiliated researchers.\nModels that work well in some fields and nations may not work as well in others. No one claims that one size fits all. There’s still room for creativity in finding ways to pay the costs of a peer-reviewed OA journal, and many smart and motivated people are exploring different possibilities. Journals announce new variations almost every week, and we’re far from exhausting our cleverness and imagination.", "The false belief that most OA journals charge author-side fees also infects studies in which authors misinform survey subjects before surveying them. In effect: “At OA journals, authors pay to be published; now let me ask you a series of questions about your attitude toward OA journals.”\nFinally, this false belief undermines calculations about who would bear the financial brunt if we made a general transition from toll-access journals to OA journals. A handful of studies have calculated that after a general conversion of peer-reviewed journals to OA, high-output universities would pay more in author-side fees than they pay now in subscriptions. These calculations make at least two assumptions unjustified by present facts or trends: that all OA journals would charge fees, and that all fees would be paid by universities.", "These false beliefs also support the insinuation that OA journals are more likely than non-OA journals to compromise on peer review. But if charging author-side fees for accepted papers really creates an incentive to lower standards, in order to rake in more fees, then most toll-access journals are guilty and most OA journals are not. In fact, however, when OA journals do charge author-side fees, they create firewalls between their financial and editorial operations. For example, most fee-based OA journals will waive their fees in cases of economic hardship, and take pains to prevent editors and referees engaged in peer review from knowing whether or not an author has requested a fee waiver. By contrast, at toll-access journals levying author-side page or color charges, editors generally know that accepted papers will entail revenue.", "Apart from the myth that all OA is gold OA, the most common myth about gold OA is that all OA journals charge “author fees” or use an “author-pays” business model. There are three mistakes here. The first is to assume that there is only one business model for OA journals, when there are many. The second is to assume that charging an upfront fee means authors are the ones expected to pay it. The third is to assume that all or even most OA journals charge upfront fees. In fact, most OA journals (70 percent) charge no upfront or author-side fees at all. By contrast, most toll-access journals (75 percent) do charge author-side fees. Moreover, even within the minority of fee-based OA journals, only 12 percent of those authors end up paying the fees out of pocket. Almost 90 percent of the time, the fees at fee-based journals are waived or paid by sponsors on behalf of authors.\nTerminology", "Fee-based OA journals tend to work best in fields where most research is funded, and no-fee journals tend to work best in fields and countries where comparatively little research is funded. The successes of these two business models give hope that gold OA can be sustainable in every discipline.\nEvery kind of peer-reviewed journal can become more sustainable by reducing costs. Although peer review is generally performed by unpaid volunteers, organizing or facilitating peer review is an expense. The journal must select referees, distribute files to referees, monitor who has what, track progress, nag dawdlers, collect comments and share them with the right people, facilitate communication, distinguish versions, and collect data on acceptances and rejections. One powerful way to reduce costs without reducing quality is to use free and open-source journal management software to automate the clerical tasks on this list.", "There are two kinds of OA journals, full and hybrid. Full OA journals provide OA to all their research articles. Hybrid OA journals provide OA to some and toll-access to others, when the choice is the author’s rather than the editor’s. Most hybrid OA journals charge a publication fee for the OA option. Authors who can find the money get immediate OA, and those who can’t or prefer not to, get toll access. (Many hybrid OA journals provide OA to all their articles after some time period, such as a year.) Some hybrid OA journals promise to reduce subscription prices in proportion to author uptake of the OA option, that is, to charge subscribers only for the toll-access articles. But most hybrid journal publishers don’t make this promise and “double dip” by charging subscription fees and publication fees for the same OA articles.", "The chief virtue of hybrid OA journals is that they give publishers some firsthand experience with the economics and logistics of OA publishing. But the economics are artificial, since hybrid OA publishers have no incentive to increase author uptake and make the model succeed. The publishers always have subscriptions to fall back on. Moreover, an overwhelming majority of full-OA journals charge no publication fees and the overwhelming majority of hybrid-OA journals never gain firsthand experience with no-fee business models.\nA growing number of for-profit OA publishers are making profits, and a growing number of nonprofit OA publishers are breaking even or making surpluses. Two different business models drive these sustainable publishing programs. BioMed Central makes profits and the Public Library of Science makes surpluses by charging publication fees. MedKnow makes profits without charging publication fees by selling priced print editions of its OA journals.", "Even if OA journals had the same production costs as toll-access journals, there’s enough money in the system to pay for peer-reviewed OA journals in every niche where we currently have peer-reviewed toll-access journals, and at the same level of quality. In fact, there’s more than enough, since we wouldn’t have to pay publisher profit margins surpassing those at ExxonMobil. Jan Velterop, the former publisher of BioMed Central, once said that OA publishing can be profitable but will “bring profit margins more in line with the added value.”\nTo support a full range of high-quality OA journals, we don’t need new money. We only need to redirect money we’re currently spending on peer-reviewed journals.", "There are reasons to think that OA journals cost less to produce than toll-access journals of the same quality. OA journals dispense with subscription management (soliciting, negotiating, tracking, renewing subscribers), dispense with digital rights management (authenticating users, distinguishing authorized from unauthorized, blocking access to unauthorized), eliminate legal fees for licensing (drafting, negotiating, monitoring, and enforcing restrictive licenses), and reduce or eliminate marketing. In their place they add back little more than the cost of collecting publication fees or institutional subsidies. Several studies and OA publishers have testified to these lower costs.\nWe shouldn’t count the savings from dropping print, since most toll-access journals in the sciences have already dropped their print editions and those in the humanities are moving in the same direction.", "There are many kinds of redirection. One is the voluntary conversion of toll-access journals to OA. Conversion could be a journal’s grudging response to declining library budgets for toll-access journals and exclusion from the big deals that take the lion’s share of library budgets. It could be a grudging response to its own past price increases and rising levels of green OA (see chapter 8 on casualties). Or it could be a hopeful and enthusiastic desire to achieve the benefits of OA for authors (greater audience and impact), readers (freedom from price and permission barriers), and publishers themselves (increased readership, citations, submissions, and quality).\nAnother kind of redirection is the rise of OA journal funds at universities. Even during times of declining budgets, libraries are setting aside money to pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals. The funds help faculty choose OA journals for their new work and help build a sustainable alternative to toll-access journals.", "Independent confirmation of Houghton’s results came in a major study released in April 2011, commissioned by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee, Publishing Research Consortium, Research Information Network, Research Libraries UK, and the Wellcome Trust. After studying five scenarios for improving research access, it concluded that green and gold OA “offer the greatest potential to policy-makers in promoting access. Both have positive, and potentially high, BCRs [benefit-cost ratios]. . . .”\nThe same study noted that “the infrastructure for Green [OA] has largely already been built” and therefore that “increasing access by this route is especially cost-effective. . . .” I can add that repositories scale up more easily than journals to capture unmet demand, and that depositing in a repository costs the depositor nothing. For all these reasons, I’ll focus in this chapter on how to pay for gold OA (journals), not how to pay for green OA (repositories).", "We should be suspicious when large, venerable, conventional publishers say that in their experience the economics of OA publishing don’t work. Print-era publishers retooling for digital, and toll-access publishers retooling for OA, will inevitably realize smaller savings from OA than lean, mean OA start-ups without legacy equipment, personnel, or overhead from the age of print and subscriptions.\nAbout one-quarter of all peer-reviewed journals today are OA. Like toll-access journals, some are in the black and thriving and some are in the red and struggling. However, the full range of OA journals begins to look like a success story when we consider that the vast majority of the money needed to support peer-reviewed journals is currently tied up in subscriptions to conventional journals. OA journals have reached their current numbers and quality despite the extraordinary squeeze on budgets devoted to the support of peer-reviewed journals.", "The leader in this field is Open Journal Systems from the Public Knowledge Project, but there are more than a dozen other open-source packages. While OJS or other open-source software could benefit even toll-access journals, their use is concentrated among OA journals. OJS alone is has more than 9,000 installations (though not all are used for managing journals). This is not merely an example of how one openness movement can help another but also of how fearing openness can lead conventional publishers to forgo financial benefits and leave money on the table.", "Redirection is also taking place on a large scale, primarily through CERN’s SCOAP3 project (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics). SCOAP3 is an ambitious plan to convert all the major toll-access journals in particle physics to OA, redirect the money formerly spent on reader-side subscription fees to author-side publication fees, and reduce the overall price to the journal-supporting institutions. It’s a peaceful revolution based on negotiation, consent, and self-interest. After four years of patiently building up budget pledges from libraries around the world, SCOAP3 entered its implementation phase in in April 2011.", "Hybrid OA is very low-risk for publishers. If the OA option has low uptake, the publisher loses nothing and still has subscription revenue. If it has high uptake, the publisher has subscription revenue for the conventional articles, publication fees for the OA articles, and sometimes both at once for the OA articles. Hence, the model has spread far and fast. The Professional/Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of American Publishers reported in 2011 that 74 percent of surveyed journals offering some form of OA in 2009 offered hybrid OA. At the same time, SHERPA listed more than 90 publishers offering hybrid OA options, including all of the largest publishers. Despite its spread, hybrid OA journals do little or nothing to help researchers, libraries, or publishers. The average rate of uptake for the OA option at hybrid journals is just 2 percent.", "Open Access: Economics\nMany publishers who oppose OA concede that OA is better for research and researchers than toll access.\n \n They merely object that we can’t pay for it. But we can pay for it.\nThe first major study of the economic impact of OA policies was conducted by John Houghton and Peter Sheehan in 2006. Using conservative estimates that a nation’s gross expenditure on research and development (GERD) brings social returns of 50 percent, and that OA increases access and efficiency by 5 percent, Houghton and Sheehan calculated that a transition to OA would not only pay for itself, but add $1.7 billion/year to the UK economy and $16 billion/year to the U.S. economy. A later study focusing on Australia used the more conservative estimate that GERD brings social returns of only 25 percent, but still found that the bottom-line economic benefits of OA for publicly funded research were 51 times greater than the costs.", "For the record, I advocate redirecting money freed up by cancellations or conversions, not canceling journals in order to free up money (except with SCOAP3 or Rowse-like consent and negotiation). This may look like hair-splitting, but the difference is neither small nor subtle. It’s roughly the difference between having great expectations and planning to kill your parents.", "Green OA may suffer from invisibility, but gold OA does not. On the contrary, researchers who don’t know about OA repositories still understand that there are OA journals. Sometimes the visibility gap is so large that researchers, journalists, and policy-makers conclude that all OA is gold OA (see section 3.1 on green and gold OA). As a result, most researchers who think about the benefits of OA think about the benefits of gold OA. Here, at least, the news is good. The most comprehensive survey to date shows that an overwhelming 89 percent of researchers from all fields believe that OA journals are beneficial to their fields." ], [ "These false beliefs also support the insinuation that OA journals are more likely than non-OA journals to compromise on peer review. But if charging author-side fees for accepted papers really creates an incentive to lower standards, in order to rake in more fees, then most toll-access journals are guilty and most OA journals are not. In fact, however, when OA journals do charge author-side fees, they create firewalls between their financial and editorial operations. For example, most fee-based OA journals will waive their fees in cases of economic hardship, and take pains to prevent editors and referees engaged in peer review from knowing whether or not an author has requested a fee waiver. By contrast, at toll-access journals levying author-side page or color charges, editors generally know that accepted papers will entail revenue.", "There are two kinds of OA journals, full and hybrid. Full OA journals provide OA to all their research articles. Hybrid OA journals provide OA to some and toll-access to others, when the choice is the author’s rather than the editor’s. Most hybrid OA journals charge a publication fee for the OA option. Authors who can find the money get immediate OA, and those who can’t or prefer not to, get toll access. (Many hybrid OA journals provide OA to all their articles after some time period, such as a year.) Some hybrid OA journals promise to reduce subscription prices in proportion to author uptake of the OA option, that is, to charge subscribers only for the toll-access articles. But most hybrid journal publishers don’t make this promise and “double dip” by charging subscription fees and publication fees for the same OA articles.", "OA journals pay their bills the way broadcast television and radio stations do—not through advertising or pledge drives, but through a simple generalization on advertising and pledge drives. Those with an interest in disseminating the content pay the production costs upfront so that access can be free of charge for everyone with the right equipment. Elsewhere I’ve called this the “some pay for all” model.\nSome OA journals have a subsidy from a university, library, foundation, society, museum, or government agency. Other OA journals charge a publication fee on accepted articles, to be paid by the author or the author’s sponsor (employer or funder). The party paying the subsidy or fee covers the journal’s expenses and readers pay nothing.", "The terms “author fees” and “author pays” are specious and damaging. They’re false for the majority of OA journals, which charge no fees. They’re also misleading even for fee-based OA journals, where nearly nine times out of ten the fees are not paid by authors themselves. It’s more accurate to speak of “publication fees,” “processing fees,” or “author-side fees.” The first two don’t specify the payor, and the third merely specifies that the payment comes from the author side of the transaction, rather than the reader side, without implying that it must come from authors themselves.\nThe false beliefs that most OA journals charge author-side fees and that most toll-access journals don’t have caused several kinds of harm. They scare authors away from OA journals. They support the misconception that gold OA excludes indigent authors. When we add in the background myth that all OA is gold OA, this misconception suggests that OA as such—and not just gold OA—excludes indigent authors.", "There are many kinds of redirection. One is the voluntary conversion of toll-access journals to OA. Conversion could be a journal’s grudging response to declining library budgets for toll-access journals and exclusion from the big deals that take the lion’s share of library budgets. It could be a grudging response to its own past price increases and rising levels of green OA (see chapter 8 on casualties). Or it could be a hopeful and enthusiastic desire to achieve the benefits of OA for authors (greater audience and impact), readers (freedom from price and permission barriers), and publishers themselves (increased readership, citations, submissions, and quality).\nAnother kind of redirection is the rise of OA journal funds at universities. Even during times of declining budgets, libraries are setting aside money to pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals. The funds help faculty choose OA journals for their new work and help build a sustainable alternative to toll-access journals.", "The leader in this field is Open Journal Systems from the Public Knowledge Project, but there are more than a dozen other open-source packages. While OJS or other open-source software could benefit even toll-access journals, their use is concentrated among OA journals. OJS alone is has more than 9,000 installations (though not all are used for managing journals). This is not merely an example of how one openness movement can help another but also of how fearing openness can lead conventional publishers to forgo financial benefits and leave money on the table.", "We should be suspicious when large, venerable, conventional publishers say that in their experience the economics of OA publishing don’t work. Print-era publishers retooling for digital, and toll-access publishers retooling for OA, will inevitably realize smaller savings from OA than lean, mean OA start-ups without legacy equipment, personnel, or overhead from the age of print and subscriptions.\nAbout one-quarter of all peer-reviewed journals today are OA. Like toll-access journals, some are in the black and thriving and some are in the red and struggling. However, the full range of OA journals begins to look like a success story when we consider that the vast majority of the money needed to support peer-reviewed journals is currently tied up in subscriptions to conventional journals. OA journals have reached their current numbers and quality despite the extraordinary squeeze on budgets devoted to the support of peer-reviewed journals.", "Green OA may suffer from invisibility, but gold OA does not. On the contrary, researchers who don’t know about OA repositories still understand that there are OA journals. Sometimes the visibility gap is so large that researchers, journalists, and policy-makers conclude that all OA is gold OA (see section 3.1 on green and gold OA). As a result, most researchers who think about the benefits of OA think about the benefits of gold OA. Here, at least, the news is good. The most comprehensive survey to date shows that an overwhelming 89 percent of researchers from all fields believe that OA journals are beneficial to their fields.", "The false belief that most OA journals charge author-side fees also infects studies in which authors misinform survey subjects before surveying them. In effect: “At OA journals, authors pay to be published; now let me ask you a series of questions about your attitude toward OA journals.”\nFinally, this false belief undermines calculations about who would bear the financial brunt if we made a general transition from toll-access journals to OA journals. A handful of studies have calculated that after a general conversion of peer-reviewed journals to OA, high-output universities would pay more in author-side fees than they pay now in subscriptions. These calculations make at least two assumptions unjustified by present facts or trends: that all OA journals would charge fees, and that all fees would be paid by universities.", "OA journals that charge publication fees tend to waive them in cases of economic hardship, and journals with institutional subsidies tend not to charge publication fees. OA journals can diversify their funding and get by on lower subsidies, or lower fees, if they also have revenue from print editions, advertising, priced add-ons, or auxiliary services. Some institutions and consortia arrange fee discounts, or purchase annual memberships that include fee waivers or discounts for all affiliated researchers.\nModels that work well in some fields and nations may not work as well in others. No one claims that one size fits all. There’s still room for creativity in finding ways to pay the costs of a peer-reviewed OA journal, and many smart and motivated people are exploring different possibilities. Journals announce new variations almost every week, and we’re far from exhausting our cleverness and imagination.", "There are reasons to think that OA journals cost less to produce than toll-access journals of the same quality. OA journals dispense with subscription management (soliciting, negotiating, tracking, renewing subscribers), dispense with digital rights management (authenticating users, distinguishing authorized from unauthorized, blocking access to unauthorized), eliminate legal fees for licensing (drafting, negotiating, monitoring, and enforcing restrictive licenses), and reduce or eliminate marketing. In their place they add back little more than the cost of collecting publication fees or institutional subsidies. Several studies and OA publishers have testified to these lower costs.\nWe shouldn’t count the savings from dropping print, since most toll-access journals in the sciences have already dropped their print editions and those in the humanities are moving in the same direction.", "Fee-based OA journals tend to work best in fields where most research is funded, and no-fee journals tend to work best in fields and countries where comparatively little research is funded. The successes of these two business models give hope that gold OA can be sustainable in every discipline.\nEvery kind of peer-reviewed journal can become more sustainable by reducing costs. Although peer review is generally performed by unpaid volunteers, organizing or facilitating peer review is an expense. The journal must select referees, distribute files to referees, monitor who has what, track progress, nag dawdlers, collect comments and share them with the right people, facilitate communication, distinguish versions, and collect data on acceptances and rejections. One powerful way to reduce costs without reducing quality is to use free and open-source journal management software to automate the clerical tasks on this list.", "The chief virtue of hybrid OA journals is that they give publishers some firsthand experience with the economics and logistics of OA publishing. But the economics are artificial, since hybrid OA publishers have no incentive to increase author uptake and make the model succeed. The publishers always have subscriptions to fall back on. Moreover, an overwhelming majority of full-OA journals charge no publication fees and the overwhelming majority of hybrid-OA journals never gain firsthand experience with no-fee business models.\nA growing number of for-profit OA publishers are making profits, and a growing number of nonprofit OA publishers are breaking even or making surpluses. Two different business models drive these sustainable publishing programs. BioMed Central makes profits and the Public Library of Science makes surpluses by charging publication fees. MedKnow makes profits without charging publication fees by selling priced print editions of its OA journals.", "Hybrid OA is very low-risk for publishers. If the OA option has low uptake, the publisher loses nothing and still has subscription revenue. If it has high uptake, the publisher has subscription revenue for the conventional articles, publication fees for the OA articles, and sometimes both at once for the OA articles. Hence, the model has spread far and fast. The Professional/Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of American Publishers reported in 2011 that 74 percent of surveyed journals offering some form of OA in 2009 offered hybrid OA. At the same time, SHERPA listed more than 90 publishers offering hybrid OA options, including all of the largest publishers. Despite its spread, hybrid OA journals do little or nothing to help researchers, libraries, or publishers. The average rate of uptake for the OA option at hybrid journals is just 2 percent.", "Even if OA journals had the same production costs as toll-access journals, there’s enough money in the system to pay for peer-reviewed OA journals in every niche where we currently have peer-reviewed toll-access journals, and at the same level of quality. In fact, there’s more than enough, since we wouldn’t have to pay publisher profit margins surpassing those at ExxonMobil. Jan Velterop, the former publisher of BioMed Central, once said that OA publishing can be profitable but will “bring profit margins more in line with the added value.”\nTo support a full range of high-quality OA journals, we don’t need new money. We only need to redirect money we’re currently spending on peer-reviewed journals.", "Apart from the myth that all OA is gold OA, the most common myth about gold OA is that all OA journals charge “author fees” or use an “author-pays” business model. There are three mistakes here. The first is to assume that there is only one business model for OA journals, when there are many. The second is to assume that charging an upfront fee means authors are the ones expected to pay it. The third is to assume that all or even most OA journals charge upfront fees. In fact, most OA journals (70 percent) charge no upfront or author-side fees at all. By contrast, most toll-access journals (75 percent) do charge author-side fees. Moreover, even within the minority of fee-based OA journals, only 12 percent of those authors end up paying the fees out of pocket. Almost 90 percent of the time, the fees at fee-based journals are waived or paid by sponsors on behalf of authors.\nTerminology", "Independent confirmation of Houghton’s results came in a major study released in April 2011, commissioned by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee, Publishing Research Consortium, Research Information Network, Research Libraries UK, and the Wellcome Trust. After studying five scenarios for improving research access, it concluded that green and gold OA “offer the greatest potential to policy-makers in promoting access. Both have positive, and potentially high, BCRs [benefit-cost ratios]. . . .”\nThe same study noted that “the infrastructure for Green [OA] has largely already been built” and therefore that “increasing access by this route is especially cost-effective. . . .” I can add that repositories scale up more easily than journals to capture unmet demand, and that depositing in a repository costs the depositor nothing. For all these reasons, I’ll focus in this chapter on how to pay for gold OA (journals), not how to pay for green OA (repositories).", "Redirection is also taking place on a large scale, primarily through CERN’s SCOAP3 project (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics). SCOAP3 is an ambitious plan to convert all the major toll-access journals in particle physics to OA, redirect the money formerly spent on reader-side subscription fees to author-side publication fees, and reduce the overall price to the journal-supporting institutions. It’s a peaceful revolution based on negotiation, consent, and self-interest. After four years of patiently building up budget pledges from libraries around the world, SCOAP3 entered its implementation phase in in April 2011.", "Open Access: Economics\nMany publishers who oppose OA concede that OA is better for research and researchers than toll access.\n \n They merely object that we can’t pay for it. But we can pay for it.\nThe first major study of the economic impact of OA policies was conducted by John Houghton and Peter Sheehan in 2006. Using conservative estimates that a nation’s gross expenditure on research and development (GERD) brings social returns of 50 percent, and that OA increases access and efficiency by 5 percent, Houghton and Sheehan calculated that a transition to OA would not only pay for itself, but add $1.7 billion/year to the UK economy and $16 billion/year to the U.S. economy. A later study focusing on Australia used the more conservative estimate that GERD brings social returns of only 25 percent, but still found that the bottom-line economic benefits of OA for publicly funded research were 51 times greater than the costs.", "For the record, I advocate redirecting money freed up by cancellations or conversions, not canceling journals in order to free up money (except with SCOAP3 or Rowse-like consent and negotiation). This may look like hair-splitting, but the difference is neither small nor subtle. It’s roughly the difference between having great expectations and planning to kill your parents." ], [ "There are two kinds of OA journals, full and hybrid. Full OA journals provide OA to all their research articles. Hybrid OA journals provide OA to some and toll-access to others, when the choice is the author’s rather than the editor’s. Most hybrid OA journals charge a publication fee for the OA option. Authors who can find the money get immediate OA, and those who can’t or prefer not to, get toll access. (Many hybrid OA journals provide OA to all their articles after some time period, such as a year.) Some hybrid OA journals promise to reduce subscription prices in proportion to author uptake of the OA option, that is, to charge subscribers only for the toll-access articles. But most hybrid journal publishers don’t make this promise and “double dip” by charging subscription fees and publication fees for the same OA articles.", "The chief virtue of hybrid OA journals is that they give publishers some firsthand experience with the economics and logistics of OA publishing. But the economics are artificial, since hybrid OA publishers have no incentive to increase author uptake and make the model succeed. The publishers always have subscriptions to fall back on. Moreover, an overwhelming majority of full-OA journals charge no publication fees and the overwhelming majority of hybrid-OA journals never gain firsthand experience with no-fee business models.\nA growing number of for-profit OA publishers are making profits, and a growing number of nonprofit OA publishers are breaking even or making surpluses. Two different business models drive these sustainable publishing programs. BioMed Central makes profits and the Public Library of Science makes surpluses by charging publication fees. MedKnow makes profits without charging publication fees by selling priced print editions of its OA journals.", "Hybrid OA is very low-risk for publishers. If the OA option has low uptake, the publisher loses nothing and still has subscription revenue. If it has high uptake, the publisher has subscription revenue for the conventional articles, publication fees for the OA articles, and sometimes both at once for the OA articles. Hence, the model has spread far and fast. The Professional/Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of American Publishers reported in 2011 that 74 percent of surveyed journals offering some form of OA in 2009 offered hybrid OA. At the same time, SHERPA listed more than 90 publishers offering hybrid OA options, including all of the largest publishers. Despite its spread, hybrid OA journals do little or nothing to help researchers, libraries, or publishers. The average rate of uptake for the OA option at hybrid journals is just 2 percent.", "OA journals pay their bills the way broadcast television and radio stations do—not through advertising or pledge drives, but through a simple generalization on advertising and pledge drives. Those with an interest in disseminating the content pay the production costs upfront so that access can be free of charge for everyone with the right equipment. Elsewhere I’ve called this the “some pay for all” model.\nSome OA journals have a subsidy from a university, library, foundation, society, museum, or government agency. Other OA journals charge a publication fee on accepted articles, to be paid by the author or the author’s sponsor (employer or funder). The party paying the subsidy or fee covers the journal’s expenses and readers pay nothing.", "OA journals that charge publication fees tend to waive them in cases of economic hardship, and journals with institutional subsidies tend not to charge publication fees. OA journals can diversify their funding and get by on lower subsidies, or lower fees, if they also have revenue from print editions, advertising, priced add-ons, or auxiliary services. Some institutions and consortia arrange fee discounts, or purchase annual memberships that include fee waivers or discounts for all affiliated researchers.\nModels that work well in some fields and nations may not work as well in others. No one claims that one size fits all. There’s still room for creativity in finding ways to pay the costs of a peer-reviewed OA journal, and many smart and motivated people are exploring different possibilities. Journals announce new variations almost every week, and we’re far from exhausting our cleverness and imagination.", "Apart from the myth that all OA is gold OA, the most common myth about gold OA is that all OA journals charge “author fees” or use an “author-pays” business model. There are three mistakes here. The first is to assume that there is only one business model for OA journals, when there are many. The second is to assume that charging an upfront fee means authors are the ones expected to pay it. The third is to assume that all or even most OA journals charge upfront fees. In fact, most OA journals (70 percent) charge no upfront or author-side fees at all. By contrast, most toll-access journals (75 percent) do charge author-side fees. Moreover, even within the minority of fee-based OA journals, only 12 percent of those authors end up paying the fees out of pocket. Almost 90 percent of the time, the fees at fee-based journals are waived or paid by sponsors on behalf of authors.\nTerminology", "There are many kinds of redirection. One is the voluntary conversion of toll-access journals to OA. Conversion could be a journal’s grudging response to declining library budgets for toll-access journals and exclusion from the big deals that take the lion’s share of library budgets. It could be a grudging response to its own past price increases and rising levels of green OA (see chapter 8 on casualties). Or it could be a hopeful and enthusiastic desire to achieve the benefits of OA for authors (greater audience and impact), readers (freedom from price and permission barriers), and publishers themselves (increased readership, citations, submissions, and quality).\nAnother kind of redirection is the rise of OA journal funds at universities. Even during times of declining budgets, libraries are setting aside money to pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals. The funds help faculty choose OA journals for their new work and help build a sustainable alternative to toll-access journals.", "These false beliefs also support the insinuation that OA journals are more likely than non-OA journals to compromise on peer review. But if charging author-side fees for accepted papers really creates an incentive to lower standards, in order to rake in more fees, then most toll-access journals are guilty and most OA journals are not. In fact, however, when OA journals do charge author-side fees, they create firewalls between their financial and editorial operations. For example, most fee-based OA journals will waive their fees in cases of economic hardship, and take pains to prevent editors and referees engaged in peer review from knowing whether or not an author has requested a fee waiver. By contrast, at toll-access journals levying author-side page or color charges, editors generally know that accepted papers will entail revenue.", "The leader in this field is Open Journal Systems from the Public Knowledge Project, but there are more than a dozen other open-source packages. While OJS or other open-source software could benefit even toll-access journals, their use is concentrated among OA journals. OJS alone is has more than 9,000 installations (though not all are used for managing journals). This is not merely an example of how one openness movement can help another but also of how fearing openness can lead conventional publishers to forgo financial benefits and leave money on the table.", "We should be suspicious when large, venerable, conventional publishers say that in their experience the economics of OA publishing don’t work. Print-era publishers retooling for digital, and toll-access publishers retooling for OA, will inevitably realize smaller savings from OA than lean, mean OA start-ups without legacy equipment, personnel, or overhead from the age of print and subscriptions.\nAbout one-quarter of all peer-reviewed journals today are OA. Like toll-access journals, some are in the black and thriving and some are in the red and struggling. However, the full range of OA journals begins to look like a success story when we consider that the vast majority of the money needed to support peer-reviewed journals is currently tied up in subscriptions to conventional journals. OA journals have reached their current numbers and quality despite the extraordinary squeeze on budgets devoted to the support of peer-reviewed journals.", "There are reasons to think that OA journals cost less to produce than toll-access journals of the same quality. OA journals dispense with subscription management (soliciting, negotiating, tracking, renewing subscribers), dispense with digital rights management (authenticating users, distinguishing authorized from unauthorized, blocking access to unauthorized), eliminate legal fees for licensing (drafting, negotiating, monitoring, and enforcing restrictive licenses), and reduce or eliminate marketing. In their place they add back little more than the cost of collecting publication fees or institutional subsidies. Several studies and OA publishers have testified to these lower costs.\nWe shouldn’t count the savings from dropping print, since most toll-access journals in the sciences have already dropped their print editions and those in the humanities are moving in the same direction.", "The terms “author fees” and “author pays” are specious and damaging. They’re false for the majority of OA journals, which charge no fees. They’re also misleading even for fee-based OA journals, where nearly nine times out of ten the fees are not paid by authors themselves. It’s more accurate to speak of “publication fees,” “processing fees,” or “author-side fees.” The first two don’t specify the payor, and the third merely specifies that the payment comes from the author side of the transaction, rather than the reader side, without implying that it must come from authors themselves.\nThe false beliefs that most OA journals charge author-side fees and that most toll-access journals don’t have caused several kinds of harm. They scare authors away from OA journals. They support the misconception that gold OA excludes indigent authors. When we add in the background myth that all OA is gold OA, this misconception suggests that OA as such—and not just gold OA—excludes indigent authors.", "Fee-based OA journals tend to work best in fields where most research is funded, and no-fee journals tend to work best in fields and countries where comparatively little research is funded. The successes of these two business models give hope that gold OA can be sustainable in every discipline.\nEvery kind of peer-reviewed journal can become more sustainable by reducing costs. Although peer review is generally performed by unpaid volunteers, organizing or facilitating peer review is an expense. The journal must select referees, distribute files to referees, monitor who has what, track progress, nag dawdlers, collect comments and share them with the right people, facilitate communication, distinguish versions, and collect data on acceptances and rejections. One powerful way to reduce costs without reducing quality is to use free and open-source journal management software to automate the clerical tasks on this list.", "Even if OA journals had the same production costs as toll-access journals, there’s enough money in the system to pay for peer-reviewed OA journals in every niche where we currently have peer-reviewed toll-access journals, and at the same level of quality. In fact, there’s more than enough, since we wouldn’t have to pay publisher profit margins surpassing those at ExxonMobil. Jan Velterop, the former publisher of BioMed Central, once said that OA publishing can be profitable but will “bring profit margins more in line with the added value.”\nTo support a full range of high-quality OA journals, we don’t need new money. We only need to redirect money we’re currently spending on peer-reviewed journals.", "The false belief that most OA journals charge author-side fees also infects studies in which authors misinform survey subjects before surveying them. In effect: “At OA journals, authors pay to be published; now let me ask you a series of questions about your attitude toward OA journals.”\nFinally, this false belief undermines calculations about who would bear the financial brunt if we made a general transition from toll-access journals to OA journals. A handful of studies have calculated that after a general conversion of peer-reviewed journals to OA, high-output universities would pay more in author-side fees than they pay now in subscriptions. These calculations make at least two assumptions unjustified by present facts or trends: that all OA journals would charge fees, and that all fees would be paid by universities.", "Green OA may suffer from invisibility, but gold OA does not. On the contrary, researchers who don’t know about OA repositories still understand that there are OA journals. Sometimes the visibility gap is so large that researchers, journalists, and policy-makers conclude that all OA is gold OA (see section 3.1 on green and gold OA). As a result, most researchers who think about the benefits of OA think about the benefits of gold OA. Here, at least, the news is good. The most comprehensive survey to date shows that an overwhelming 89 percent of researchers from all fields believe that OA journals are beneficial to their fields.", "Independent confirmation of Houghton’s results came in a major study released in April 2011, commissioned by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee, Publishing Research Consortium, Research Information Network, Research Libraries UK, and the Wellcome Trust. After studying five scenarios for improving research access, it concluded that green and gold OA “offer the greatest potential to policy-makers in promoting access. Both have positive, and potentially high, BCRs [benefit-cost ratios]. . . .”\nThe same study noted that “the infrastructure for Green [OA] has largely already been built” and therefore that “increasing access by this route is especially cost-effective. . . .” I can add that repositories scale up more easily than journals to capture unmet demand, and that depositing in a repository costs the depositor nothing. For all these reasons, I’ll focus in this chapter on how to pay for gold OA (journals), not how to pay for green OA (repositories).", "Redirection is also taking place on a large scale, primarily through CERN’s SCOAP3 project (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics). SCOAP3 is an ambitious plan to convert all the major toll-access journals in particle physics to OA, redirect the money formerly spent on reader-side subscription fees to author-side publication fees, and reduce the overall price to the journal-supporting institutions. It’s a peaceful revolution based on negotiation, consent, and self-interest. After four years of patiently building up budget pledges from libraries around the world, SCOAP3 entered its implementation phase in in April 2011.", "Open Access: Economics\nMany publishers who oppose OA concede that OA is better for research and researchers than toll access.\n \n They merely object that we can’t pay for it. But we can pay for it.\nThe first major study of the economic impact of OA policies was conducted by John Houghton and Peter Sheehan in 2006. Using conservative estimates that a nation’s gross expenditure on research and development (GERD) brings social returns of 50 percent, and that OA increases access and efficiency by 5 percent, Houghton and Sheehan calculated that a transition to OA would not only pay for itself, but add $1.7 billion/year to the UK economy and $16 billion/year to the U.S. economy. A later study focusing on Australia used the more conservative estimate that GERD brings social returns of only 25 percent, but still found that the bottom-line economic benefits of OA for publicly funded research were 51 times greater than the costs.", "Before turning to gold OA, however, I should note that there are widely varying estimates in the literature on what it costs a university to run an institutional repository. The divergence reflects the fact that repositories can serve many different purposes, and that some repositories serve more of them than others. If the minimum purpose is to host OA copies of faculty articles, and if faculty deposit their own articles, then the cost is minimal. But a repository is a general-purpose tool, and once launched there are good reasons for it to take on other responsibilities, such as long-term preservation, assisting faculty with digitization, permissions, and deposits, and hosting many other sorts of content, such as theses and dissertations, books or book chapters, conference proceedings, courseware, campus publications, digitized special collections, and administrative records. If the average repository is a significant expense today, the reason is that the average repository is doing significantly more than the minimum." ], [ "The chief virtue of hybrid OA journals is that they give publishers some firsthand experience with the economics and logistics of OA publishing. But the economics are artificial, since hybrid OA publishers have no incentive to increase author uptake and make the model succeed. The publishers always have subscriptions to fall back on. Moreover, an overwhelming majority of full-OA journals charge no publication fees and the overwhelming majority of hybrid-OA journals never gain firsthand experience with no-fee business models.\nA growing number of for-profit OA publishers are making profits, and a growing number of nonprofit OA publishers are breaking even or making surpluses. Two different business models drive these sustainable publishing programs. BioMed Central makes profits and the Public Library of Science makes surpluses by charging publication fees. MedKnow makes profits without charging publication fees by selling priced print editions of its OA journals.", "OA journals pay their bills the way broadcast television and radio stations do—not through advertising or pledge drives, but through a simple generalization on advertising and pledge drives. Those with an interest in disseminating the content pay the production costs upfront so that access can be free of charge for everyone with the right equipment. Elsewhere I’ve called this the “some pay for all” model.\nSome OA journals have a subsidy from a university, library, foundation, society, museum, or government agency. Other OA journals charge a publication fee on accepted articles, to be paid by the author or the author’s sponsor (employer or funder). The party paying the subsidy or fee covers the journal’s expenses and readers pay nothing.", "Even if OA journals had the same production costs as toll-access journals, there’s enough money in the system to pay for peer-reviewed OA journals in every niche where we currently have peer-reviewed toll-access journals, and at the same level of quality. In fact, there’s more than enough, since we wouldn’t have to pay publisher profit margins surpassing those at ExxonMobil. Jan Velterop, the former publisher of BioMed Central, once said that OA publishing can be profitable but will “bring profit margins more in line with the added value.”\nTo support a full range of high-quality OA journals, we don’t need new money. We only need to redirect money we’re currently spending on peer-reviewed journals.", "OA journals that charge publication fees tend to waive them in cases of economic hardship, and journals with institutional subsidies tend not to charge publication fees. OA journals can diversify their funding and get by on lower subsidies, or lower fees, if they also have revenue from print editions, advertising, priced add-ons, or auxiliary services. Some institutions and consortia arrange fee discounts, or purchase annual memberships that include fee waivers or discounts for all affiliated researchers.\nModels that work well in some fields and nations may not work as well in others. No one claims that one size fits all. There’s still room for creativity in finding ways to pay the costs of a peer-reviewed OA journal, and many smart and motivated people are exploring different possibilities. Journals announce new variations almost every week, and we’re far from exhausting our cleverness and imagination.", "We should be suspicious when large, venerable, conventional publishers say that in their experience the economics of OA publishing don’t work. Print-era publishers retooling for digital, and toll-access publishers retooling for OA, will inevitably realize smaller savings from OA than lean, mean OA start-ups without legacy equipment, personnel, or overhead from the age of print and subscriptions.\nAbout one-quarter of all peer-reviewed journals today are OA. Like toll-access journals, some are in the black and thriving and some are in the red and struggling. However, the full range of OA journals begins to look like a success story when we consider that the vast majority of the money needed to support peer-reviewed journals is currently tied up in subscriptions to conventional journals. OA journals have reached their current numbers and quality despite the extraordinary squeeze on budgets devoted to the support of peer-reviewed journals.", "There are many kinds of redirection. One is the voluntary conversion of toll-access journals to OA. Conversion could be a journal’s grudging response to declining library budgets for toll-access journals and exclusion from the big deals that take the lion’s share of library budgets. It could be a grudging response to its own past price increases and rising levels of green OA (see chapter 8 on casualties). Or it could be a hopeful and enthusiastic desire to achieve the benefits of OA for authors (greater audience and impact), readers (freedom from price and permission barriers), and publishers themselves (increased readership, citations, submissions, and quality).\nAnother kind of redirection is the rise of OA journal funds at universities. Even during times of declining budgets, libraries are setting aside money to pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals. The funds help faculty choose OA journals for their new work and help build a sustainable alternative to toll-access journals.", "There are two kinds of OA journals, full and hybrid. Full OA journals provide OA to all their research articles. Hybrid OA journals provide OA to some and toll-access to others, when the choice is the author’s rather than the editor’s. Most hybrid OA journals charge a publication fee for the OA option. Authors who can find the money get immediate OA, and those who can’t or prefer not to, get toll access. (Many hybrid OA journals provide OA to all their articles after some time period, such as a year.) Some hybrid OA journals promise to reduce subscription prices in proportion to author uptake of the OA option, that is, to charge subscribers only for the toll-access articles. But most hybrid journal publishers don’t make this promise and “double dip” by charging subscription fees and publication fees for the same OA articles.", "There are reasons to think that OA journals cost less to produce than toll-access journals of the same quality. OA journals dispense with subscription management (soliciting, negotiating, tracking, renewing subscribers), dispense with digital rights management (authenticating users, distinguishing authorized from unauthorized, blocking access to unauthorized), eliminate legal fees for licensing (drafting, negotiating, monitoring, and enforcing restrictive licenses), and reduce or eliminate marketing. In their place they add back little more than the cost of collecting publication fees or institutional subsidies. Several studies and OA publishers have testified to these lower costs.\nWe shouldn’t count the savings from dropping print, since most toll-access journals in the sciences have already dropped their print editions and those in the humanities are moving in the same direction.", "Fee-based OA journals tend to work best in fields where most research is funded, and no-fee journals tend to work best in fields and countries where comparatively little research is funded. The successes of these two business models give hope that gold OA can be sustainable in every discipline.\nEvery kind of peer-reviewed journal can become more sustainable by reducing costs. Although peer review is generally performed by unpaid volunteers, organizing or facilitating peer review is an expense. The journal must select referees, distribute files to referees, monitor who has what, track progress, nag dawdlers, collect comments and share them with the right people, facilitate communication, distinguish versions, and collect data on acceptances and rejections. One powerful way to reduce costs without reducing quality is to use free and open-source journal management software to automate the clerical tasks on this list.", "The leader in this field is Open Journal Systems from the Public Knowledge Project, but there are more than a dozen other open-source packages. While OJS or other open-source software could benefit even toll-access journals, their use is concentrated among OA journals. OJS alone is has more than 9,000 installations (though not all are used for managing journals). This is not merely an example of how one openness movement can help another but also of how fearing openness can lead conventional publishers to forgo financial benefits and leave money on the table.", "Redirection is also taking place on a large scale, primarily through CERN’s SCOAP3 project (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics). SCOAP3 is an ambitious plan to convert all the major toll-access journals in particle physics to OA, redirect the money formerly spent on reader-side subscription fees to author-side publication fees, and reduce the overall price to the journal-supporting institutions. It’s a peaceful revolution based on negotiation, consent, and self-interest. After four years of patiently building up budget pledges from libraries around the world, SCOAP3 entered its implementation phase in in April 2011.", "Independent confirmation of Houghton’s results came in a major study released in April 2011, commissioned by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee, Publishing Research Consortium, Research Information Network, Research Libraries UK, and the Wellcome Trust. After studying five scenarios for improving research access, it concluded that green and gold OA “offer the greatest potential to policy-makers in promoting access. Both have positive, and potentially high, BCRs [benefit-cost ratios]. . . .”\nThe same study noted that “the infrastructure for Green [OA] has largely already been built” and therefore that “increasing access by this route is especially cost-effective. . . .” I can add that repositories scale up more easily than journals to capture unmet demand, and that depositing in a repository costs the depositor nothing. For all these reasons, I’ll focus in this chapter on how to pay for gold OA (journals), not how to pay for green OA (repositories).", "These false beliefs also support the insinuation that OA journals are more likely than non-OA journals to compromise on peer review. But if charging author-side fees for accepted papers really creates an incentive to lower standards, in order to rake in more fees, then most toll-access journals are guilty and most OA journals are not. In fact, however, when OA journals do charge author-side fees, they create firewalls between their financial and editorial operations. For example, most fee-based OA journals will waive their fees in cases of economic hardship, and take pains to prevent editors and referees engaged in peer review from knowing whether or not an author has requested a fee waiver. By contrast, at toll-access journals levying author-side page or color charges, editors generally know that accepted papers will entail revenue.", "Hybrid OA is very low-risk for publishers. If the OA option has low uptake, the publisher loses nothing and still has subscription revenue. If it has high uptake, the publisher has subscription revenue for the conventional articles, publication fees for the OA articles, and sometimes both at once for the OA articles. Hence, the model has spread far and fast. The Professional/Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of American Publishers reported in 2011 that 74 percent of surveyed journals offering some form of OA in 2009 offered hybrid OA. At the same time, SHERPA listed more than 90 publishers offering hybrid OA options, including all of the largest publishers. Despite its spread, hybrid OA journals do little or nothing to help researchers, libraries, or publishers. The average rate of uptake for the OA option at hybrid journals is just 2 percent.", "The false belief that most OA journals charge author-side fees also infects studies in which authors misinform survey subjects before surveying them. In effect: “At OA journals, authors pay to be published; now let me ask you a series of questions about your attitude toward OA journals.”\nFinally, this false belief undermines calculations about who would bear the financial brunt if we made a general transition from toll-access journals to OA journals. A handful of studies have calculated that after a general conversion of peer-reviewed journals to OA, high-output universities would pay more in author-side fees than they pay now in subscriptions. These calculations make at least two assumptions unjustified by present facts or trends: that all OA journals would charge fees, and that all fees would be paid by universities.", "Apart from the myth that all OA is gold OA, the most common myth about gold OA is that all OA journals charge “author fees” or use an “author-pays” business model. There are three mistakes here. The first is to assume that there is only one business model for OA journals, when there are many. The second is to assume that charging an upfront fee means authors are the ones expected to pay it. The third is to assume that all or even most OA journals charge upfront fees. In fact, most OA journals (70 percent) charge no upfront or author-side fees at all. By contrast, most toll-access journals (75 percent) do charge author-side fees. Moreover, even within the minority of fee-based OA journals, only 12 percent of those authors end up paying the fees out of pocket. Almost 90 percent of the time, the fees at fee-based journals are waived or paid by sponsors on behalf of authors.\nTerminology", "The terms “author fees” and “author pays” are specious and damaging. They’re false for the majority of OA journals, which charge no fees. They’re also misleading even for fee-based OA journals, where nearly nine times out of ten the fees are not paid by authors themselves. It’s more accurate to speak of “publication fees,” “processing fees,” or “author-side fees.” The first two don’t specify the payor, and the third merely specifies that the payment comes from the author side of the transaction, rather than the reader side, without implying that it must come from authors themselves.\nThe false beliefs that most OA journals charge author-side fees and that most toll-access journals don’t have caused several kinds of harm. They scare authors away from OA journals. They support the misconception that gold OA excludes indigent authors. When we add in the background myth that all OA is gold OA, this misconception suggests that OA as such—and not just gold OA—excludes indigent authors.", "Mark Rowse, former CEO of Ingenta, sketched another strategy for large-scale redirection in December 2003. A publisher could “flip” its toll-access journals to OA at one stroke by reinterpreting the payments it receives from university libraries as publication fees for a group of authors rather than subscription fees for a group of readers. One advantage over SCOAP3 is that the Rowsean flip can be tried one journal or one publisher at a time, and doesn’t require discipline-wide coordination. It could also scale up to the largest publishers or the largest coalitions of publishers.\nWe have to be imaginative but we don’t have to improvise. There are some principles we can try to follow. Money freed up by the cancellation or conversion of peer-reviewed TA journals should be spent first on peer-reviewed OA journals, to ensure the continuation of peer review. Large-scale redirection is more efficient than small-scale redirection. Peaceful revolution through negotiation and self-interest is more amicable and potentially more productive than adaptation forced by falling asteroids.", "Open Access: Economics\nMany publishers who oppose OA concede that OA is better for research and researchers than toll access.\n \n They merely object that we can’t pay for it. But we can pay for it.\nThe first major study of the economic impact of OA policies was conducted by John Houghton and Peter Sheehan in 2006. Using conservative estimates that a nation’s gross expenditure on research and development (GERD) brings social returns of 50 percent, and that OA increases access and efficiency by 5 percent, Houghton and Sheehan calculated that a transition to OA would not only pay for itself, but add $1.7 billion/year to the UK economy and $16 billion/year to the U.S. economy. A later study focusing on Australia used the more conservative estimate that GERD brings social returns of only 25 percent, but still found that the bottom-line economic benefits of OA for publicly funded research were 51 times greater than the costs.", "Green OA may suffer from invisibility, but gold OA does not. On the contrary, researchers who don’t know about OA repositories still understand that there are OA journals. Sometimes the visibility gap is so large that researchers, journalists, and policy-makers conclude that all OA is gold OA (see section 3.1 on green and gold OA). As a result, most researchers who think about the benefits of OA think about the benefits of gold OA. Here, at least, the news is good. The most comprehensive survey to date shows that an overwhelming 89 percent of researchers from all fields believe that OA journals are beneficial to their fields." ], [ "Fee-based OA journals tend to work best in fields where most research is funded, and no-fee journals tend to work best in fields and countries where comparatively little research is funded. The successes of these two business models give hope that gold OA can be sustainable in every discipline.\nEvery kind of peer-reviewed journal can become more sustainable by reducing costs. Although peer review is generally performed by unpaid volunteers, organizing or facilitating peer review is an expense. The journal must select referees, distribute files to referees, monitor who has what, track progress, nag dawdlers, collect comments and share them with the right people, facilitate communication, distinguish versions, and collect data on acceptances and rejections. One powerful way to reduce costs without reducing quality is to use free and open-source journal management software to automate the clerical tasks on this list.", "These false beliefs also support the insinuation that OA journals are more likely than non-OA journals to compromise on peer review. But if charging author-side fees for accepted papers really creates an incentive to lower standards, in order to rake in more fees, then most toll-access journals are guilty and most OA journals are not. In fact, however, when OA journals do charge author-side fees, they create firewalls between their financial and editorial operations. For example, most fee-based OA journals will waive their fees in cases of economic hardship, and take pains to prevent editors and referees engaged in peer review from knowing whether or not an author has requested a fee waiver. By contrast, at toll-access journals levying author-side page or color charges, editors generally know that accepted papers will entail revenue.", "OA journals that charge publication fees tend to waive them in cases of economic hardship, and journals with institutional subsidies tend not to charge publication fees. OA journals can diversify their funding and get by on lower subsidies, or lower fees, if they also have revenue from print editions, advertising, priced add-ons, or auxiliary services. Some institutions and consortia arrange fee discounts, or purchase annual memberships that include fee waivers or discounts for all affiliated researchers.\nModels that work well in some fields and nations may not work as well in others. No one claims that one size fits all. There’s still room for creativity in finding ways to pay the costs of a peer-reviewed OA journal, and many smart and motivated people are exploring different possibilities. Journals announce new variations almost every week, and we’re far from exhausting our cleverness and imagination.", "The false belief that most OA journals charge author-side fees also infects studies in which authors misinform survey subjects before surveying them. In effect: “At OA journals, authors pay to be published; now let me ask you a series of questions about your attitude toward OA journals.”\nFinally, this false belief undermines calculations about who would bear the financial brunt if we made a general transition from toll-access journals to OA journals. A handful of studies have calculated that after a general conversion of peer-reviewed journals to OA, high-output universities would pay more in author-side fees than they pay now in subscriptions. These calculations make at least two assumptions unjustified by present facts or trends: that all OA journals would charge fees, and that all fees would be paid by universities.", "Independent confirmation of Houghton’s results came in a major study released in April 2011, commissioned by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee, Publishing Research Consortium, Research Information Network, Research Libraries UK, and the Wellcome Trust. After studying five scenarios for improving research access, it concluded that green and gold OA “offer the greatest potential to policy-makers in promoting access. Both have positive, and potentially high, BCRs [benefit-cost ratios]. . . .”\nThe same study noted that “the infrastructure for Green [OA] has largely already been built” and therefore that “increasing access by this route is especially cost-effective. . . .” I can add that repositories scale up more easily than journals to capture unmet demand, and that depositing in a repository costs the depositor nothing. For all these reasons, I’ll focus in this chapter on how to pay for gold OA (journals), not how to pay for green OA (repositories).", "OA journals pay their bills the way broadcast television and radio stations do—not through advertising or pledge drives, but through a simple generalization on advertising and pledge drives. Those with an interest in disseminating the content pay the production costs upfront so that access can be free of charge for everyone with the right equipment. Elsewhere I’ve called this the “some pay for all” model.\nSome OA journals have a subsidy from a university, library, foundation, society, museum, or government agency. Other OA journals charge a publication fee on accepted articles, to be paid by the author or the author’s sponsor (employer or funder). The party paying the subsidy or fee covers the journal’s expenses and readers pay nothing.", "The terms “author fees” and “author pays” are specious and damaging. They’re false for the majority of OA journals, which charge no fees. They’re also misleading even for fee-based OA journals, where nearly nine times out of ten the fees are not paid by authors themselves. It’s more accurate to speak of “publication fees,” “processing fees,” or “author-side fees.” The first two don’t specify the payor, and the third merely specifies that the payment comes from the author side of the transaction, rather than the reader side, without implying that it must come from authors themselves.\nThe false beliefs that most OA journals charge author-side fees and that most toll-access journals don’t have caused several kinds of harm. They scare authors away from OA journals. They support the misconception that gold OA excludes indigent authors. When we add in the background myth that all OA is gold OA, this misconception suggests that OA as such—and not just gold OA—excludes indigent authors.", "The chief virtue of hybrid OA journals is that they give publishers some firsthand experience with the economics and logistics of OA publishing. But the economics are artificial, since hybrid OA publishers have no incentive to increase author uptake and make the model succeed. The publishers always have subscriptions to fall back on. Moreover, an overwhelming majority of full-OA journals charge no publication fees and the overwhelming majority of hybrid-OA journals never gain firsthand experience with no-fee business models.\nA growing number of for-profit OA publishers are making profits, and a growing number of nonprofit OA publishers are breaking even or making surpluses. Two different business models drive these sustainable publishing programs. BioMed Central makes profits and the Public Library of Science makes surpluses by charging publication fees. MedKnow makes profits without charging publication fees by selling priced print editions of its OA journals.", "The leader in this field is Open Journal Systems from the Public Knowledge Project, but there are more than a dozen other open-source packages. While OJS or other open-source software could benefit even toll-access journals, their use is concentrated among OA journals. OJS alone is has more than 9,000 installations (though not all are used for managing journals). This is not merely an example of how one openness movement can help another but also of how fearing openness can lead conventional publishers to forgo financial benefits and leave money on the table.", "There are two kinds of OA journals, full and hybrid. Full OA journals provide OA to all their research articles. Hybrid OA journals provide OA to some and toll-access to others, when the choice is the author’s rather than the editor’s. Most hybrid OA journals charge a publication fee for the OA option. Authors who can find the money get immediate OA, and those who can’t or prefer not to, get toll access. (Many hybrid OA journals provide OA to all their articles after some time period, such as a year.) Some hybrid OA journals promise to reduce subscription prices in proportion to author uptake of the OA option, that is, to charge subscribers only for the toll-access articles. But most hybrid journal publishers don’t make this promise and “double dip” by charging subscription fees and publication fees for the same OA articles.", "Green OA may suffer from invisibility, but gold OA does not. On the contrary, researchers who don’t know about OA repositories still understand that there are OA journals. Sometimes the visibility gap is so large that researchers, journalists, and policy-makers conclude that all OA is gold OA (see section 3.1 on green and gold OA). As a result, most researchers who think about the benefits of OA think about the benefits of gold OA. Here, at least, the news is good. The most comprehensive survey to date shows that an overwhelming 89 percent of researchers from all fields believe that OA journals are beneficial to their fields.", "There are many kinds of redirection. One is the voluntary conversion of toll-access journals to OA. Conversion could be a journal’s grudging response to declining library budgets for toll-access journals and exclusion from the big deals that take the lion’s share of library budgets. It could be a grudging response to its own past price increases and rising levels of green OA (see chapter 8 on casualties). Or it could be a hopeful and enthusiastic desire to achieve the benefits of OA for authors (greater audience and impact), readers (freedom from price and permission barriers), and publishers themselves (increased readership, citations, submissions, and quality).\nAnother kind of redirection is the rise of OA journal funds at universities. Even during times of declining budgets, libraries are setting aside money to pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals. The funds help faculty choose OA journals for their new work and help build a sustainable alternative to toll-access journals.", "Apart from the myth that all OA is gold OA, the most common myth about gold OA is that all OA journals charge “author fees” or use an “author-pays” business model. There are three mistakes here. The first is to assume that there is only one business model for OA journals, when there are many. The second is to assume that charging an upfront fee means authors are the ones expected to pay it. The third is to assume that all or even most OA journals charge upfront fees. In fact, most OA journals (70 percent) charge no upfront or author-side fees at all. By contrast, most toll-access journals (75 percent) do charge author-side fees. Moreover, even within the minority of fee-based OA journals, only 12 percent of those authors end up paying the fees out of pocket. Almost 90 percent of the time, the fees at fee-based journals are waived or paid by sponsors on behalf of authors.\nTerminology", "We should be suspicious when large, venerable, conventional publishers say that in their experience the economics of OA publishing don’t work. Print-era publishers retooling for digital, and toll-access publishers retooling for OA, will inevitably realize smaller savings from OA than lean, mean OA start-ups without legacy equipment, personnel, or overhead from the age of print and subscriptions.\nAbout one-quarter of all peer-reviewed journals today are OA. Like toll-access journals, some are in the black and thriving and some are in the red and struggling. However, the full range of OA journals begins to look like a success story when we consider that the vast majority of the money needed to support peer-reviewed journals is currently tied up in subscriptions to conventional journals. OA journals have reached their current numbers and quality despite the extraordinary squeeze on budgets devoted to the support of peer-reviewed journals.", "Even if OA journals had the same production costs as toll-access journals, there’s enough money in the system to pay for peer-reviewed OA journals in every niche where we currently have peer-reviewed toll-access journals, and at the same level of quality. In fact, there’s more than enough, since we wouldn’t have to pay publisher profit margins surpassing those at ExxonMobil. Jan Velterop, the former publisher of BioMed Central, once said that OA publishing can be profitable but will “bring profit margins more in line with the added value.”\nTo support a full range of high-quality OA journals, we don’t need new money. We only need to redirect money we’re currently spending on peer-reviewed journals.", "Open Access: Economics\nMany publishers who oppose OA concede that OA is better for research and researchers than toll access.\n \n They merely object that we can’t pay for it. But we can pay for it.\nThe first major study of the economic impact of OA policies was conducted by John Houghton and Peter Sheehan in 2006. Using conservative estimates that a nation’s gross expenditure on research and development (GERD) brings social returns of 50 percent, and that OA increases access and efficiency by 5 percent, Houghton and Sheehan calculated that a transition to OA would not only pay for itself, but add $1.7 billion/year to the UK economy and $16 billion/year to the U.S. economy. A later study focusing on Australia used the more conservative estimate that GERD brings social returns of only 25 percent, but still found that the bottom-line economic benefits of OA for publicly funded research were 51 times greater than the costs.", "Redirection is also taking place on a large scale, primarily through CERN’s SCOAP3 project (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics). SCOAP3 is an ambitious plan to convert all the major toll-access journals in particle physics to OA, redirect the money formerly spent on reader-side subscription fees to author-side publication fees, and reduce the overall price to the journal-supporting institutions. It’s a peaceful revolution based on negotiation, consent, and self-interest. After four years of patiently building up budget pledges from libraries around the world, SCOAP3 entered its implementation phase in in April 2011.", "For the record, I advocate redirecting money freed up by cancellations or conversions, not canceling journals in order to free up money (except with SCOAP3 or Rowse-like consent and negotiation). This may look like hair-splitting, but the difference is neither small nor subtle. It’s roughly the difference between having great expectations and planning to kill your parents.", "There are reasons to think that OA journals cost less to produce than toll-access journals of the same quality. OA journals dispense with subscription management (soliciting, negotiating, tracking, renewing subscribers), dispense with digital rights management (authenticating users, distinguishing authorized from unauthorized, blocking access to unauthorized), eliminate legal fees for licensing (drafting, negotiating, monitoring, and enforcing restrictive licenses), and reduce or eliminate marketing. In their place they add back little more than the cost of collecting publication fees or institutional subsidies. Several studies and OA publishers have testified to these lower costs.\nWe shouldn’t count the savings from dropping print, since most toll-access journals in the sciences have already dropped their print editions and those in the humanities are moving in the same direction.", "Hybrid OA is very low-risk for publishers. If the OA option has low uptake, the publisher loses nothing and still has subscription revenue. If it has high uptake, the publisher has subscription revenue for the conventional articles, publication fees for the OA articles, and sometimes both at once for the OA articles. Hence, the model has spread far and fast. The Professional/Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of American Publishers reported in 2011 that 74 percent of surveyed journals offering some form of OA in 2009 offered hybrid OA. At the same time, SHERPA listed more than 90 publishers offering hybrid OA options, including all of the largest publishers. Despite its spread, hybrid OA journals do little or nothing to help researchers, libraries, or publishers. The average rate of uptake for the OA option at hybrid journals is just 2 percent." ] ]
test	63932	[ "Why did Barry volunteer to perform the spacewalk to repair the ship?", "Which phrase best describes Robson Hind's motivations in this story?", "What phenomenon causes the changes in Barry Barr after his spacewalk?", "What can we infer from the story about the make-up of the Venusian atmosphere?", "Why was Barry's friend able to build the equipment that Barry wanted for his room so quickly?", "What is the most likely explanation for why Barry's humidifier stopped working?", "What is the jet chief of spaceship Four's chief advantage in the competition with Barry for the same woman's affections?", "Why had Dorothy stayed away from Barry while he was in the hospital?" ]	[ [ "Barry felt that he had the best knowledge and experience for making this repair, as well as a strong, sturdy body.", "Barry believed that volunteering for a dangerous task would improve his standing in the eyes of his girlfriend.", "Based on mission guidelines, those with no specific position on a ship were expected to take on dangerous duties, and Barry knew and understood this.", "Barry knew that the captain would order him to do the repair if he didn't volunteer, and he thought he would get a promotion if he did it without being asked to." ], [ "He wants to do everything the lazy way.", "He is insecure and believes that Barry Barr might take his job.", "He is a coward.", "He will do anything to win the competition for his love interest." ], [ "Because of a leak in his spacesuit, Barry Barr was deprived of oxygen during his spacewalk. This caused the changes.", "Barry Barr's long years working in the tropics caused the change, but it only showed up after his spacewalk.", "Barry Barr received a high dose of Sigma radiation. This caused the changes.", "Robson Hind secretly put a toxic material into Barry Barr's spacesuit. This caused the changes." ], [ "It contained enough oxygen to support human life without any assistive devices.", "Everyone had to wear helmets to filter out the noxious gases from the swamps.", "The atmosphere of Venus is made up mainly of carbon dioxide, which supports a lot of plant life.", "The atmosphere contained compounds that caused lung problems for most people." ], [ "Because all of the needed material happened to be sitting nearby, unused.", "Because Barry's equipment drawings were very easy to follow.", "Because Barry was considered a hero, and the colonists wanted to help him.", "Because Barry's friend was extremely influential among the colonists." ], [ "Barry was depressed about Dorothy and tried to commit suicide.", "On Venus, the hot, heavy atmosphere caused machines to break down constantly.", "Dr. Jensen had set up an experiment to determine whether Barry really needed the humidifier.", "A jealous Robson Hind wanted to finish Barry off to eliminate his competitor for Dorothy." ], [ "He is a better engineer, and will therefore achieve a higher social position than Barry.", "He is rich, good-looking and sophisticated.", "The woman simply prefers the jet chief. It's a simple matter of pheromones.", "He is strong and brave, while Barry is slowly turning into a humanoid fish." ], [ "Because she didn't like the hot, humid atmosphere in his hospital room.", "Because she received a letter that purported to be from Barry's lawful spouse on Earth, and she thought he was a cheater.", "Because her duties as toxicologist and dietician, providing for the colonists' needs, kept her too busy to visit him.", "Because she was repulsed by his physical changes and had to overcome that feeling." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with\n a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration.\n But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small\n and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized\n gravitations.\n\n\n The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a\n particularly unpleasant form of death.\n\n\n Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.\n\n\n \"I'm assigned, not expendable,\" he protested hastily. \"If there were\n more trouble later....\" His face was pasty.\n\n\n Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening\n in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in\n Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four\n unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the\n logical man.", "\"For the safety of the ship.\" That phrase, taken from the ancient\n Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the\n indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and\n remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and\n unassigned personnel.\n\n\n For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile\n quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried\n boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some\n of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body,\n built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power,\n balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his\n sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.\n\n\n He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.\n\n\n But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a\n sense of responsibility.\n\n\n \"Nick, will you help me button up?\" he asked with forced calmness.", "Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of\n rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and\n had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have\n himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n\n\n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with\n a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n\n\n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by\n inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but\n enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into\n stuttering action.\n\n\n Then it was done.\n\n\n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to\n start according to calculations.\nBarry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick\n Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.", "Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the\n experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions,\n he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus\n Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form\n was most needed—most particularly a launching ramp—and to study\n native Venusian materials.\n\n\n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the\n limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to\n rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle\n delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian\n materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n\n\n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of\n loneliness had come to an end.", "For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But\n then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his\n hand.\n\n\n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees\n had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three—in\n fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But\n still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the\n brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus\n alive—\nThe blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking\n pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny\n figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified\n breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation\n to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the\n insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.", "Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy\n plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp,\n malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n\n\n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he\n was not an engineer for nothing.\n\n\n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n\n\n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need\n detailed drawings.\n\n\n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n\n\n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the\n Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n\n\n \"Two days?\"\n\n\n Nick looked insulted.", "\"I could eat a cow with the smallpox,\" Barry declared.\n\n\n Nick grinned. \"No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job\n of work out there.\"\n\n\n Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.\n\n\n \"Say,\" he asked anxiously. \"What's haywire with the air?\"\n\n\n Nick looked startled. \"Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off\n watch a few minutes ago.\"\n\n\n Barry shrugged. \"Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a\n handout.\"\n\n\n He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside\n out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on\n him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness\n he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to\n breathe.", "It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was\n dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy\n of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused\n themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n\n\n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular\n driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent\n searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment\n before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n\n\n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering\n a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see\n again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started\n aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly\n that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.", "\"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you\n do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all\n that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in\n her eyes.\n\n\n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n\n\n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted\n off—oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n\n\n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child.\n I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n \"I—think—I—know—who—wrote—that—letter!\" he declared grimly.\n\n\n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt\n in her voice.\n\n\n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.", "Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch\n against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started\n cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task\n requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on\n the events that had brought him here.\n\n\n First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma\n for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was\n perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been\n inherently poor.\n\n\n Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step—to Mars. But men\n had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that\n had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.", "He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around\n him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.\n\n\n The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!\n\n\n Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead.\n The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen\n trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress.\n Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable\n thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.\n\n\n A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of\n exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for\n the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not\n necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was,\n felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.", "Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet\n room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was\n manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One\n by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n\n\n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable\n conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open.\n Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was\n close behind him.\n\n\n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony,\n hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had\n lost its usual ruddiness.", "It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and\n unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying\n vegetation.\n\n\n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in\n his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n\n\n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing\n vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n\n\n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above\n a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby\n the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The\n mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded\n outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in\n their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out\n of the marsh. The Colony!", "\"I believe you, Barry.\"\n\n\n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days\n at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of\n civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had\n awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a\n woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n\n\n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous\n and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger\n simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging\n Robson Hind's features.", "He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A\n power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the\n corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was\n ready.\n\n\n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped\n nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size\n that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that\n fell toward the metal floor.\n\n\n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n\n\n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n\n\n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window\n might invite disaster.", "Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp,\n extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few\n minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n\n\n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk.\n Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one\n particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n\n\n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n\n\n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n\n\n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an\n expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he\n saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.", "The most important question—that of the presence or absence of\n intelligent, civilized Venusians—remained unanswered. Some of the men\n reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near\n open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have\n established contact.\nBarry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had\n done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into\n membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and\n dark parallel lines appeared.\n\n\n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not\n stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had\n to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the\n weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still\n he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's\n failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n\n\n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming.\n Dorothy was leaning over him.", "The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but\n this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had\n made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had\n carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or\n judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook\n some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the\n Five Ship Plan.\n\n\n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n\n\n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n\n\n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead\n tubelight was off.\n\n\n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n\n\n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist\n machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead,\n cut off outside his room.", "But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At\n each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with\n a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come\n to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even\n inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the\n Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged\n animal.\n\n\n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening\n and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day\n progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of\n Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.", "Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno\n himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created\n support of flame.\n\n\n \"You're almost in,\" a voice chanted into his headphones through\n crackling, sizzling static. \"Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it!\n Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!\"\n\n\n The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled,\n steadied.\n\n\n Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting\n with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.\n\n\n \"Airlock open. Both doors.\"\n\n\n Venusian air poured in.\n\n\n \"For this I left Panama?\" one of the men yelped.\n\n\n \"Enough to gag a maggot,\" another agreed with hand to nose." ], [ "She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual\n despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment\n of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed\n emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone,\n and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded\n devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his\n insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.\n\n\n But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the\n business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried\n a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to\n virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.\n\n\n The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened\n to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly\n expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some\n factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.", "The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but\n this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had\n made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had\n carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or\n judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook\n some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the\n Five Ship Plan.\n\n\n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n\n\n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n\n\n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead\n tubelight was off.\n\n\n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n\n\n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist\n machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead,\n cut off outside his room.", "\"I believe you, Barry.\"\n\n\n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days\n at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of\n civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had\n awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a\n woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n\n\n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous\n and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger\n simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging\n Robson Hind's features.", "But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At\n each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with\n a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come\n to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even\n inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the\n Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged\n animal.\n\n\n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening\n and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day\n progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of\n Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.", "For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But\n then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his\n hand.\n\n\n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees\n had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three—in\n fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But\n still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the\n brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus\n alive—\nThe blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking\n pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny\n figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified\n breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation\n to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the\n insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.", "Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with\n a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration.\n But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small\n and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized\n gravitations.\n\n\n The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a\n particularly unpleasant form of death.\n\n\n Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.\n\n\n \"I'm assigned, not expendable,\" he protested hastily. \"If there were\n more trouble later....\" His face was pasty.\n\n\n Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening\n in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in\n Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four\n unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the\n logical man.", "Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp,\n extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few\n minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n\n\n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk.\n Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one\n particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n\n\n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n\n\n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n\n\n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an\n expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he\n saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.", "Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of\n rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and\n had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have\n himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n\n\n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with\n a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n\n\n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by\n inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but\n enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into\n stuttering action.\n\n\n Then it was done.\n\n\n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to\n start according to calculations.\nBarry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick\n Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.", "Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet\n room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was\n manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One\n by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n\n\n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable\n conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open.\n Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was\n close behind him.\n\n\n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony,\n hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had\n lost its usual ruddiness.", "Captain Reno surveyed the havoc. Young Ryan's body floated eerily in\n the zero gravity, charred into instant death by the back-blast. The\n line accelerator was a shapeless ruin, but except for broken meter\n glasses and scorched control handles other mechanical damage appeared\n minor. They had been lucky.\n\n\n \"Turnover starts in six hours twelve minutes,\" the captain said\n meaningfully.\n\n\n Robson Hind cleared his throat. \"We can change accelerators in two\n hours,\" he declared. With a quick reassumption of authority he began to\n order his crew into action.\n\n\n It took nearer three hours than two to change accelerators despite\n Hind's shouted orders.\n\n\n At last the job was completed. Hind made a final check, floated over to\n the control panel and started the fuel feed. With a confident smile he\n threw in the accelerator switch.", "\"For the safety of the ship.\" That phrase, taken from the ancient\n Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the\n indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and\n remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and\n unassigned personnel.\n\n\n For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile\n quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried\n boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some\n of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body,\n built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power,\n balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his\n sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.\n\n\n He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.\n\n\n But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a\n sense of responsibility.\n\n\n \"Nick, will you help me button up?\" he asked with forced calmness.", "The meter needles climbed, soared past the red lines without pausing,\n and just in time to prevent a second blowback, Hind cut the power.\n\n\n \"\nThere's metal in the field!\n\" His voice was high and unsteady.\nEveryone knew what that meant. The slightest trace of magnetic material\n would distort the delicately balanced cylinder of force that contained\n and directed the Hoskins blast, making it suicidal to operate.\n\n\n Calmly Captain Reno voiced the thought in every mind.\n\n\n \"It must be cleared. From the outside.\"\n\n\n Several of the men swore under their breaths. Interplanetary space\n was constantly bombarded, with an intensity inverse to the prevailing\n gravitation, by something called Sigma radiation. Man had never\n encountered it until leaving Earth, and little was known of it\n except that short exposure killed test animals and left their bodies\n unpredictably altered.", "He had swum down the slough and out into the ocean. He tried to turn\n back, obsessed by a desire to be near the colony even though he\n could not go ashore without strangling, but he had lost all sense of\n direction.\n\n\n He was still weak and his lungs were not completely adjusted to\n underwater life. Again he grew dizzy and faint. The slow movements of\n hands and feet that held him just below the surface grew feeble and\n ceased. He sank.\n\n\n Down into dimly luminous water he dropped, and with his respiratory\n system completely water-filled there was no sensation of pressure. At\n last he floated gently to the bottom and lay motionless.", "It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was\n dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy\n of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused\n themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n\n\n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular\n driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent\n searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment\n before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n\n\n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering\n a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see\n again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started\n aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly\n that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.", "Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy\n plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp,\n malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n\n\n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he\n was not an engineer for nothing.\n\n\n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n\n\n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need\n detailed drawings.\n\n\n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n\n\n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the\n Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n\n\n \"Two days?\"\n\n\n Nick looked insulted.", "\"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you\n do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all\n that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in\n her eyes.\n\n\n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n\n\n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted\n off—oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n\n\n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child.\n I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n \"I—think—I—know—who—wrote—that—letter!\" he declared grimly.\n\n\n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt\n in her voice.\n\n\n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.", "It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and\n unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying\n vegetation.\n\n\n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in\n his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n\n\n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing\n vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n\n\n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above\n a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby\n the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The\n mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded\n outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in\n their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out\n of the marsh. The Colony!", "Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno\n himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created\n support of flame.\n\n\n \"You're almost in,\" a voice chanted into his headphones through\n crackling, sizzling static. \"Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it!\n Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!\"\n\n\n The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled,\n steadied.\n\n\n Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting\n with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.\n\n\n \"Airlock open. Both doors.\"\n\n\n Venusian air poured in.\n\n\n \"For this I left Panama?\" one of the men yelped.\n\n\n \"Enough to gag a maggot,\" another agreed with hand to nose.", "Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though\n she were with him—her face with the exotic high cheek-bones—her\n eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair—lips that\n seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to\n fulfil—her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy\n from some venturesome Irishman—her slender yet firmly lithe body.\n\n\n After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came\n in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since\n Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid\n atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.", "Floating droplets were merging and falling to the floor. Soon the air\n would be dry, and he would be choking and strangling. He turned to call\n for help.\n\n\n The door was locked!\n\n\n He tugged and the knob came away in his hand. The retaining screw had\n been removed.\n\n\n He beat upon the panel, first with his fists and then with the metal\n doorknob, but the insulation between the double alloy sheets was\n efficient soundproofing. Furiously he hurled himself upon it, only to\n bounce back with a bruised shoulder. He was trapped.\n\n\n Working against time and eventual death he snatched a metal chair\n and swung with all his force at the window, again, again, yet again.\n A small crack appeared in the transparent plastic, branched under\n continued hammering, became a rough star. He gathered his waning\n strength, then swung once more. The tough plastic shattered." ], [ "The most important question—that of the presence or absence of\n intelligent, civilized Venusians—remained unanswered. Some of the men\n reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near\n open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have\n established contact.\nBarry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had\n done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into\n membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and\n dark parallel lines appeared.\n\n\n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not\n stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had\n to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the\n weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still\n he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's\n failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n\n\n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming.\n Dorothy was leaning over him.", "Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of\n rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and\n had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have\n himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n\n\n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with\n a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n\n\n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by\n inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but\n enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into\n stuttering action.\n\n\n Then it was done.\n\n\n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to\n start according to calculations.\nBarry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick\n Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.", "For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But\n then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his\n hand.\n\n\n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees\n had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three—in\n fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But\n still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the\n brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus\n alive—\nThe blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking\n pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny\n figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified\n breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation\n to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the\n insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.", "Bubbles floated upward and burst. Then Barry Barr was lying in the ooze\n of the bottom. And he was breathing, extracting vital oxygen from the\n brackish, silt-clouded water.\nIII\n\n\n Slowly his racing heartbeat returned to normal. Gradually he became\n aware of the stench of decaying plants and of musky taints he knew\n instinctively were the scents of underwater animals. Then with a shock\n the meaning became clear. He had become a water-breather, cut off from\n all other Earthmen, no longer entirely human. His fellows in the colony\n were separated from him now by a gulf more absolute than the airless\n void between Earth and Venus.\n\n\n Something slippery and alive touched him near one armpit. He opened\n his eyes in the black water and his groping hand clutched something\n burrowing into his skin. With a shudder of revulsion he crushed a fat\n worm between his fingers.", "\"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you\n do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all\n that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in\n her eyes.\n\n\n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n\n\n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted\n off—oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n\n\n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child.\n I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n \"I—think—I—know—who—wrote—that—letter!\" he declared grimly.\n\n\n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt\n in her voice.\n\n\n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.", "\"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes,\" the doctor\n continued, \"and you know as much—more about your condition than I do.\n If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of\n a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems\n to give you relief.\"\n\n\n Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each\n side itched infuriatingly.\n\n\n \"What are these changes?\" he asked. \"What's this?\"\n\n\n \"Those things seem to be—\" the doctor began hesitantly. \"Damn it, I\n know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills.\"\n\n\n Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond\n shock.\n\n\n \"But there must be—\"", "Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with\n a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration.\n But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small\n and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized\n gravitations.\n\n\n The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a\n particularly unpleasant form of death.\n\n\n Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.\n\n\n \"I'm assigned, not expendable,\" he protested hastily. \"If there were\n more trouble later....\" His face was pasty.\n\n\n Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening\n in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in\n Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four\n unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the\n logical man.", "It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was\n dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy\n of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused\n themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n\n\n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular\n driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent\n searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment\n before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n\n\n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering\n a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see\n again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started\n aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly\n that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.", "A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The\n room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost\n liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling\n and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the\n scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water\n from the floor.\n\n\n The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet\n from the short exposure.\n\n\n It was abnormal.\n\n\n But so was Barry Barr.\n\n\n With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some\n of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in\n sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.", "Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the\n experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions,\n he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus\n Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form\n was most needed—most particularly a launching ramp—and to study\n native Venusian materials.\n\n\n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the\n limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to\n rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle\n delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian\n materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n\n\n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of\n loneliness had come to an end.", "Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch\n against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started\n cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task\n requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on\n the events that had brought him here.\n\n\n First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma\n for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was\n perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been\n inherently poor.\n\n\n Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step—to Mars. But men\n had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that\n had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.", "\"I believe you, Barry.\"\n\n\n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days\n at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of\n civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had\n awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a\n woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n\n\n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous\n and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger\n simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging\n Robson Hind's features.", "\"I could eat a cow with the smallpox,\" Barry declared.\n\n\n Nick grinned. \"No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job\n of work out there.\"\n\n\n Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.\n\n\n \"Say,\" he asked anxiously. \"What's haywire with the air?\"\n\n\n Nick looked startled. \"Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off\n watch a few minutes ago.\"\n\n\n Barry shrugged. \"Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a\n handout.\"\n\n\n He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside\n out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on\n him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness\n he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to\n breathe.", "It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and\n unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying\n vegetation.\n\n\n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in\n his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n\n\n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing\n vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n\n\n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above\n a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby\n the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The\n mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded\n outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in\n their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out\n of the marsh. The Colony!", "He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around\n him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.\n\n\n The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!\n\n\n Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead.\n The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen\n trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress.\n Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable\n thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.\n\n\n A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of\n exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for\n the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not\n necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was,\n felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.", "Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet\n room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was\n manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One\n by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n\n\n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable\n conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open.\n Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was\n close behind him.\n\n\n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony,\n hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had\n lost its usual ruddiness.", "Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy\n plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp,\n malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n\n\n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he\n was not an engineer for nothing.\n\n\n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n\n\n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need\n detailed drawings.\n\n\n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n\n\n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the\n Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n\n\n \"Two days?\"\n\n\n Nick looked insulted.", "Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp,\n extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few\n minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n\n\n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk.\n Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one\n particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n\n\n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n\n\n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n\n\n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an\n expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he\n saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.", "Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched\n involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.\nII\n\n\n Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations\n had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr.\n Jensen had mentioned during a second visit—but for that to happen he\n must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.\n\n\n When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine.\n Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.\n\n\n \"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry,\" he began.\n\n\n \"Stuff it,\" the sick man interrupted. \"I want favors. Can do?\"\n\n\n Nick nodded vigorously.\n\n\n \"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open.\"", "He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A\n power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the\n corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was\n ready.\n\n\n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped\n nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size\n that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that\n fell toward the metal floor.\n\n\n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n\n\n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n\n\n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window\n might invite disaster." ], [ "Three had landed beside Two a few months later, bringing\n reinforcements, but the day-by-day demands of the little colony's\n struggle for survival had so far been too pressing to permit extended\n or detailed explorations. Venus remained a planet of unsolved mysteries.\n\n\n The helicopter brought out in Three had made several flights which\n by radar and sound reflection had placed vague outlines on the blank\n maps. The surface appeared to be half water, with land masses mainly\n jungle-covered swamp broken by a few rocky ledges, but landings away\n from base had been judged too hazardous.\n\n\n Test borings from the ledge had located traces of oil and radioactive\n minerals, while enough Venusian plants had proven edible to provide an\n adequate though monotonous food source.\n\n\n Venus was the diametric opposite of lifeless Mars. Through the fog\n gigantic insects hummed and buzzed like lost airplanes, but fortunately\n they were harmless and timid.", "Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno\n himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created\n support of flame.\n\n\n \"You're almost in,\" a voice chanted into his headphones through\n crackling, sizzling static. \"Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it!\n Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!\"\n\n\n The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled,\n steadied.\n\n\n Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting\n with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.\n\n\n \"Airlock open. Both doors.\"\n\n\n Venusian air poured in.\n\n\n \"For this I left Panama?\" one of the men yelped.\n\n\n \"Enough to gag a maggot,\" another agreed with hand to nose.", "He tugged at the jagged pieces still clinging to the frame. Fog-laden\n Venusian air poured in—but it was not enough!\n\n\n He dragged himself head first through the narrow opening, landed\n sprawling on hands and knees in the darkness. In his ears a confused\n rustling drone from the alien swamp mingled with the roar of\n approaching unconsciousness.\n\n\n There was a smell in his nostrils. The smell of water. He lurched\n forward at a shambling run, stumbling over the uneven ground.\n\n\n Then he plunged from the rocky ledge into the slough. Flashes of\n colored light flickered before his eyes as he went under. But Earth\n habits were still strong; instinctively he held his breath.\n\n\n Then he fainted. Voluntary control of his body vanished. His mouth hung\n slack and the breathing reflex that had been an integral part of his\n life since the moment of birth forced him to inhale.", "He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A\n power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the\n corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was\n ready.\n\n\n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped\n nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size\n that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that\n fell toward the metal floor.\n\n\n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n\n\n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n\n\n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window\n might invite disaster.", "Venus, its true surface forever hidden by enshrouding mists, had been\n well within one-way range. But Hoskins fuel requirements for a round\n trip added up to something beyond critical mass. Impossible.\n\n\n But the Five Ship Plan had evolved, a joint enterprise of government\n and various private groups. Five vessels were to go out, each fueled\n to within a whiskered neutron of spontaneous detonation, manned by\n specialists who, it was hoped, could maintain themselves under alien\n conditions.\n\n\n On Venus the leftover fuel from all five would be transferred to\n whichever ship had survived the outbound voyage in best condition.\n That one would return to Earth. Permanent base or homeward voyage with\n colonists crowded aboard like defeated sardines? Only time would tell.", "He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around\n him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.\n\n\n The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!\n\n\n Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead.\n The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen\n trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress.\n Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable\n thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.\n\n\n A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of\n exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for\n the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not\n necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was,\n felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.", "Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy\n plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp,\n malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n\n\n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he\n was not an engineer for nothing.\n\n\n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n\n\n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need\n detailed drawings.\n\n\n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n\n\n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the\n Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n\n\n \"Two days?\"\n\n\n Nick looked insulted.", "Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the\n experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions,\n he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus\n Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form\n was most needed—most particularly a launching ramp—and to study\n native Venusian materials.\n\n\n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the\n limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to\n rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle\n delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian\n materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n\n\n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of\n loneliness had come to an end.", "In the swamps wildly improbable life forms grew and reproduced and\n fought and died, and many of those most harmless in appearance\n possessed surprisingly venomous characteristics.\n\n\n The jungle had been flamed away in a huge circle around the colony to\n minimize the chances of surprise by anything that might attack, but the\n blasting was an almost continuous process. The plants of Venus grew\n with a vigor approaching fury.\n\n\n Most spectacular of the Venusian creatures were the amphibious armored\n monsters, saurian or semi-saurians with a slight resemblance to the\n brontosauri that had once lived on Earth, massive swamp-dwellers that\n used the slough beside the colony's ledge as a highway. They were\n apparently vegetarians, but thorough stupidity in tremendous bulk made\n them dangerous. One had damaged a building by blundering against it,\n and since then the colony had remained alert, using weapons to repel\n the beasts.", "THE LOST TRIBES OF VENUS\nBy ERIK FENNEL\nOn mist-shrouded Venus, where hostile\n \nswamp meets hostile sea ... there did\n \nBarry Barr—Earthman transmuted—swap\n \nhis Terran heritage for the deep dark\n \nwaters of Tana; for the strangely\n \nbeautiful Xintel of the blue-brown skin.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories May 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nEvil luck brought the meteorite to those particular space-time\n coordinates as Number Four rode the downhill spiral toward Venus. The\n football-sized chunk of nickel-iron and rock overtook the ship at a\n relative speed of only a few hundred miles per hour and passed close\n enough to come within the tremendous pseudo-gravatic fields of the\n idling drivers.", "The most important question—that of the presence or absence of\n intelligent, civilized Venusians—remained unanswered. Some of the men\n reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near\n open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have\n established contact.\nBarry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had\n done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into\n membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and\n dark parallel lines appeared.\n\n\n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not\n stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had\n to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the\n weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still\n he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's\n failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n\n\n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming.\n Dorothy was leaning over him.", "Bubbles floated upward and burst. Then Barry Barr was lying in the ooze\n of the bottom. And he was breathing, extracting vital oxygen from the\n brackish, silt-clouded water.\nIII\n\n\n Slowly his racing heartbeat returned to normal. Gradually he became\n aware of the stench of decaying plants and of musky taints he knew\n instinctively were the scents of underwater animals. Then with a shock\n the meaning became clear. He had become a water-breather, cut off from\n all other Earthmen, no longer entirely human. His fellows in the colony\n were separated from him now by a gulf more absolute than the airless\n void between Earth and Venus.\n\n\n Something slippery and alive touched him near one armpit. He opened\n his eyes in the black water and his groping hand clutched something\n burrowing into his skin. With a shudder of revulsion he crushed a fat\n worm between his fingers.", "For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But\n then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his\n hand.\n\n\n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees\n had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three—in\n fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But\n still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the\n brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus\n alive—\nThe blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking\n pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny\n figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified\n breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation\n to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the\n insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.", "But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At\n each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with\n a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come\n to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even\n inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the\n Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged\n animal.\n\n\n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening\n and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day\n progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of\n Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.", "One scooped up the crossbow the girl had dropped. The other ripped at\n her brief skirt and from her belt took a pair of tubes like the one the\n dead Venusian had fired at Barry, handling them as though they were\n loot of the greatest value. He jerked cruelly at the slender metallic\n necklace the girl wore but it did not break.\n\n\n He punched the helpless girl in the abdomen with the butt of his spear.\n The girl writhed but she did not attempt to cry out.\n\n\n Barry bounded toward them in a series of soaring leaps, knife and spear\n ready. One Venusian turned to meet him, grinning maliciously.", "Then Barry struck, felt his knife slice flesh and grate against bone.\n He struck again even as the undersea being screamed and went limp.\n\n\n Barry stared through the reddening water.\n\n\n Another figure plunged toward him. Barry jerked the dead Venusian's\n spear from the mud and raised it defensively.\n\n\n But the figure paid no attention. This one was a female who fled\n desperately from two men closing in from opposite sides. One threw his\n spear, using an odd pushing motion, and as she checked and dodged, the\n other was upon her from behind.\n\n\n One arm went around her neck in a strangler's hold, bending her slender\n body backward. Together captor and struggling captive sank toward the\n bottom. The other recovered his thrown spear and moved in to help\n secure her arms and legs with lengths of cord.", "The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but\n this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had\n made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had\n carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or\n judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook\n some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the\n Five Ship Plan.\n\n\n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n\n\n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n\n\n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead\n tubelight was off.\n\n\n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n\n\n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist\n machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead,\n cut off outside his room.", "Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet\n room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was\n manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One\n by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n\n\n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable\n conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open.\n Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was\n close behind him.\n\n\n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony,\n hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had\n lost its usual ruddiness.", "Barry dug one foot into the bottom and sidestepped a spear thrust. His\n own lunge missed completely. Then he and the Venusian were inside each\n other's spear points, chest to chest. A pointed hook strapped to the\n inside of the creature's wrist just missed Barry's throat. The Earthman\n arched his body backward and his knife flashed upward. The creature\n gasped and pulled away, clutching with both hands at a gaping wound in\n its belly.\n\n\n The other one turned too late as Barry leaped.\n\n\n Barry's hilt cracked against its jawbone.", "It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and\n unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying\n vegetation.\n\n\n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in\n his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n\n\n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing\n vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n\n\n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above\n a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby\n the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The\n mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded\n outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in\n their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out\n of the marsh. The Colony!" ], [ "Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy\n plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp,\n malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n\n\n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he\n was not an engineer for nothing.\n\n\n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n\n\n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need\n detailed drawings.\n\n\n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n\n\n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the\n Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n\n\n \"Two days?\"\n\n\n Nick looked insulted.", "He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A\n power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the\n corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was\n ready.\n\n\n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped\n nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size\n that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that\n fell toward the metal floor.\n\n\n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n\n\n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n\n\n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window\n might invite disaster.", "\"I believe you, Barry.\"\n\n\n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days\n at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of\n civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had\n awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a\n woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n\n\n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous\n and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger\n simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging\n Robson Hind's features.", "Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of\n rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and\n had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have\n himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n\n\n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with\n a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n\n\n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by\n inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but\n enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into\n stuttering action.\n\n\n Then it was done.\n\n\n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to\n start according to calculations.\nBarry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick\n Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.", "A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The\n room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost\n liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling\n and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the\n scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water\n from the floor.\n\n\n The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet\n from the short exposure.\n\n\n It was abnormal.\n\n\n But so was Barry Barr.\n\n\n With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some\n of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in\n sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.", "Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though\n she were with him—her face with the exotic high cheek-bones—her\n eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair—lips that\n seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to\n fulfil—her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy\n from some venturesome Irishman—her slender yet firmly lithe body.\n\n\n After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came\n in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since\n Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid\n atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.", "The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but\n this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had\n made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had\n carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or\n judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook\n some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the\n Five Ship Plan.\n\n\n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n\n\n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n\n\n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead\n tubelight was off.\n\n\n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n\n\n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist\n machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead,\n cut off outside his room.", "Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the\n experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions,\n he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus\n Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form\n was most needed—most particularly a launching ramp—and to study\n native Venusian materials.\n\n\n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the\n limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to\n rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle\n delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian\n materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n\n\n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of\n loneliness had come to an end.", "But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At\n each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with\n a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come\n to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even\n inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the\n Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged\n animal.\n\n\n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening\n and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day\n progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of\n Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.", "She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual\n despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment\n of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed\n emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone,\n and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded\n devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his\n insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.\n\n\n But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the\n business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried\n a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to\n virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.\n\n\n The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened\n to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly\n expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some\n factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.", "Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched\n involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.\nII\n\n\n Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations\n had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr.\n Jensen had mentioned during a second visit—but for that to happen he\n must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.\n\n\n When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine.\n Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.\n\n\n \"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry,\" he began.\n\n\n \"Stuff it,\" the sick man interrupted. \"I want favors. Can do?\"\n\n\n Nick nodded vigorously.\n\n\n \"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open.\"", "It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and\n unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying\n vegetation.\n\n\n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in\n his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n\n\n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing\n vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n\n\n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above\n a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby\n the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The\n mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded\n outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in\n their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out\n of the marsh. The Colony!", "Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp,\n extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few\n minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n\n\n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk.\n Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one\n particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n\n\n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n\n\n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n\n\n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an\n expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he\n saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.", "Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet\n room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was\n manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One\n by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n\n\n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable\n conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open.\n Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was\n close behind him.\n\n\n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony,\n hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had\n lost its usual ruddiness.", "For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But\n then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his\n hand.\n\n\n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees\n had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three—in\n fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But\n still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the\n brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus\n alive—\nThe blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking\n pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny\n figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified\n breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation\n to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the\n insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.", "Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch\n against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started\n cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task\n requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on\n the events that had brought him here.\n\n\n First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma\n for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was\n perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been\n inherently poor.\n\n\n Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step—to Mars. But men\n had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that\n had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.", "\"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you\n do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all\n that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in\n her eyes.\n\n\n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n\n\n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted\n off—oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n\n\n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child.\n I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n \"I—think—I—know—who—wrote—that—letter!\" he declared grimly.\n\n\n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt\n in her voice.\n\n\n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.", "It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was\n dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy\n of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused\n themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n\n\n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular\n driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent\n searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment\n before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n\n\n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering\n a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see\n again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started\n aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly\n that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.", "Barry braced his feet against the bottom and leaped. His head butted\n the attacker's chest and at the same instant he lashed a short jab to\n the creature's belly. It slumped momentarily, its face working.\n\n\n Human—or nearly so—the thing was, with a stocky, powerful body and\n webbed hands and feet. A few scraps of clothing, seemingly worn more\n for ornament than covering, clung to the fishbelly-white skin. The face\n was coarse and savage.\n\n\n It shook off the effects of Barry's punch and one webbed hand snatched\n a short tube from its belt.\n\n\n Barry remembered the spring-opening knife in his pocket, and even as\n he flicked the blade out the tube-weapon fired. Sound thrummed in the\n water and the water grew milky with a myriad of bubbles. Something\n zipped past his head, uncomfortably close.", "Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with\n a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration.\n But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small\n and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized\n gravitations.\n\n\n The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a\n particularly unpleasant form of death.\n\n\n Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.\n\n\n \"I'm assigned, not expendable,\" he protested hastily. \"If there were\n more trouble later....\" His face was pasty.\n\n\n Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening\n in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in\n Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four\n unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the\n logical man." ], [ "A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The\n room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost\n liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling\n and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the\n scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water\n from the floor.\n\n\n The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet\n from the short exposure.\n\n\n It was abnormal.\n\n\n But so was Barry Barr.\n\n\n With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some\n of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in\n sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.", "The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but\n this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had\n made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had\n carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or\n judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook\n some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the\n Five Ship Plan.\n\n\n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n\n\n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n\n\n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead\n tubelight was off.\n\n\n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n\n\n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist\n machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead,\n cut off outside his room.", "\"I believe you, Barry.\"\n\n\n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days\n at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of\n civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had\n awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a\n woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n\n\n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous\n and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger\n simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging\n Robson Hind's features.", "He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A\n power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the\n corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was\n ready.\n\n\n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped\n nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size\n that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that\n fell toward the metal floor.\n\n\n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n\n\n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n\n\n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window\n might invite disaster.", "\"I could eat a cow with the smallpox,\" Barry declared.\n\n\n Nick grinned. \"No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job\n of work out there.\"\n\n\n Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.\n\n\n \"Say,\" he asked anxiously. \"What's haywire with the air?\"\n\n\n Nick looked startled. \"Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off\n watch a few minutes ago.\"\n\n\n Barry shrugged. \"Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a\n handout.\"\n\n\n He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside\n out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on\n him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness\n he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to\n breathe.", "Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy\n plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp,\n malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n\n\n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he\n was not an engineer for nothing.\n\n\n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n\n\n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need\n detailed drawings.\n\n\n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n\n\n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the\n Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n\n\n \"Two days?\"\n\n\n Nick looked insulted.", "It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and\n unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying\n vegetation.\n\n\n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in\n his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n\n\n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing\n vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n\n\n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above\n a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby\n the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The\n mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded\n outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in\n their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out\n of the marsh. The Colony!", "\"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes,\" the doctor\n continued, \"and you know as much—more about your condition than I do.\n If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of\n a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems\n to give you relief.\"\n\n\n Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each\n side itched infuriatingly.\n\n\n \"What are these changes?\" he asked. \"What's this?\"\n\n\n \"Those things seem to be—\" the doctor began hesitantly. \"Damn it, I\n know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills.\"\n\n\n Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond\n shock.\n\n\n \"But there must be—\"", "\"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you\n do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all\n that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in\n her eyes.\n\n\n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n\n\n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted\n off—oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n\n\n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child.\n I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n \"I—think—I—know—who—wrote—that—letter!\" he declared grimly.\n\n\n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt\n in her voice.\n\n\n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.", "By the glow of an overhead tubelight he recognized the kindly, deeply\n lined features of the man bending over him. Dr. Carl Jensen, specialist\n in tropical diseases. He tried to sit up but the doctor laid a\n restraining hand on his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Water!\" Barry croaked.\n\n\n The doctor held out a glass. Then his eyes widened incredulously as his\n patient deliberately drew in a breath while drinking, sucking water\n directly into his lungs.\n\n\n \"Doctor,\" he asked, keeping his voice low to spare his throat. \"What\n are my chances? On the level.\"\n\n\n Dr. Jensen shook his head thoughtfully. \"There's not a thing—not a\n damned solitary thing—I can do. It's something new to medical science.\"\n\n\n Barry lay still.", "Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of\n rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and\n had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have\n himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n\n\n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with\n a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n\n\n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by\n inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but\n enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into\n stuttering action.\n\n\n Then it was done.\n\n\n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to\n start according to calculations.\nBarry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick\n Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.", "Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched\n involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.\nII\n\n\n Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations\n had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr.\n Jensen had mentioned during a second visit—but for that to happen he\n must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.\n\n\n When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine.\n Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.\n\n\n \"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry,\" he began.\n\n\n \"Stuff it,\" the sick man interrupted. \"I want favors. Can do?\"\n\n\n Nick nodded vigorously.\n\n\n \"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open.\"", "Floating droplets were merging and falling to the floor. Soon the air\n would be dry, and he would be choking and strangling. He turned to call\n for help.\n\n\n The door was locked!\n\n\n He tugged and the knob came away in his hand. The retaining screw had\n been removed.\n\n\n He beat upon the panel, first with his fists and then with the metal\n doorknob, but the insulation between the double alloy sheets was\n efficient soundproofing. Furiously he hurled himself upon it, only to\n bounce back with a bruised shoulder. He was trapped.\n\n\n Working against time and eventual death he snatched a metal chair\n and swung with all his force at the window, again, again, yet again.\n A small crack appeared in the transparent plastic, branched under\n continued hammering, became a rough star. He gathered his waning\n strength, then swung once more. The tough plastic shattered.", "Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though\n she were with him—her face with the exotic high cheek-bones—her\n eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair—lips that\n seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to\n fulfil—her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy\n from some venturesome Irishman—her slender yet firmly lithe body.\n\n\n After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came\n in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since\n Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid\n atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.", "The most important question—that of the presence or absence of\n intelligent, civilized Venusians—remained unanswered. Some of the men\n reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near\n open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have\n established contact.\nBarry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had\n done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into\n membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and\n dark parallel lines appeared.\n\n\n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not\n stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had\n to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the\n weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still\n he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's\n failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n\n\n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming.\n Dorothy was leaning over him.", "But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At\n each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with\n a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come\n to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even\n inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the\n Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged\n animal.\n\n\n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening\n and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day\n progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of\n Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.", "It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was\n dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy\n of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused\n themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n\n\n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular\n driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent\n searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment\n before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n\n\n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering\n a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see\n again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started\n aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly\n that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.", "She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual\n despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment\n of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed\n emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone,\n and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded\n devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his\n insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.\n\n\n But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the\n business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried\n a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to\n virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.\n\n\n The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened\n to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly\n expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some\n factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.", "Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet\n room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was\n manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One\n by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n\n\n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable\n conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open.\n Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was\n close behind him.\n\n\n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony,\n hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had\n lost its usual ruddiness.", "Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp,\n extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few\n minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n\n\n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk.\n Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one\n particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n\n\n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n\n\n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n\n\n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an\n expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he\n saw was Robson Hind looming beside her." ], [ "For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But\n then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his\n hand.\n\n\n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees\n had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three—in\n fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But\n still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the\n brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus\n alive—\nThe blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking\n pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny\n figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified\n breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation\n to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the\n insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.", "Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with\n a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration.\n But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small\n and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized\n gravitations.\n\n\n The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a\n particularly unpleasant form of death.\n\n\n Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.\n\n\n \"I'm assigned, not expendable,\" he protested hastily. \"If there were\n more trouble later....\" His face was pasty.\n\n\n Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening\n in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in\n Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four\n unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the\n logical man.", "She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual\n despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment\n of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed\n emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone,\n and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded\n devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his\n insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.\n\n\n But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the\n business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried\n a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to\n virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.\n\n\n The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened\n to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly\n expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some\n factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.", "Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of\n rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and\n had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have\n himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n\n\n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with\n a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n\n\n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by\n inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but\n enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into\n stuttering action.\n\n\n Then it was done.\n\n\n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to\n start according to calculations.\nBarry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick\n Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.", "Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp,\n extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few\n minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n\n\n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk.\n Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one\n particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n\n\n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n\n\n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n\n\n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an\n expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he\n saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.", "Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet\n room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was\n manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One\n by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.\n\n\n The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable\n conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open.\n Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was\n close behind him.\n\n\n Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony,\n hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had\n lost its usual ruddiness.", "It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was\n dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy\n of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused\n themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.\n\n\n In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular\n driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent\n searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment\n before the main circuit breakers could clack open.\n\n\n The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering\n a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see\n again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started\n aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly\n that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.", "\"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you\n do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all\n that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in\n her eyes.\n\n\n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n\n\n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted\n off—oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n\n\n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child.\n I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n \"I—think—I—know—who—wrote—that—letter!\" he declared grimly.\n\n\n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt\n in her voice.\n\n\n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.", "Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the\n experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions,\n he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus\n Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form\n was most needed—most particularly a launching ramp—and to study\n native Venusian materials.\n\n\n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the\n limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to\n rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle\n delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian\n materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n\n\n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of\n loneliness had come to an end.", "It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and\n unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying\n vegetation.\n\n\n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in\n his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n\n\n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing\n vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n\n\n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above\n a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby\n the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The\n mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded\n outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in\n their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out\n of the marsh. The Colony!", "He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around\n him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.\n\n\n The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!\n\n\n Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead.\n The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen\n trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress.\n Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable\n thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.\n\n\n A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of\n exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for\n the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not\n necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was,\n felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.", "Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though\n she were with him—her face with the exotic high cheek-bones—her\n eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair—lips that\n seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to\n fulfil—her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy\n from some venturesome Irishman—her slender yet firmly lithe body.\n\n\n After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came\n in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since\n Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid\n atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.", "Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy\n plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp,\n malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n\n\n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he\n was not an engineer for nothing.\n\n\n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n\n\n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need\n detailed drawings.\n\n\n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n\n\n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the\n Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n\n\n \"Two days?\"\n\n\n Nick looked insulted.", "THE LOST TRIBES OF VENUS\nBy ERIK FENNEL\nOn mist-shrouded Venus, where hostile\n \nswamp meets hostile sea ... there did\n \nBarry Barr—Earthman transmuted—swap\n \nhis Terran heritage for the deep dark\n \nwaters of Tana; for the strangely\n \nbeautiful Xintel of the blue-brown skin.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories May 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nEvil luck brought the meteorite to those particular space-time\n coordinates as Number Four rode the downhill spiral toward Venus. The\n football-sized chunk of nickel-iron and rock overtook the ship at a\n relative speed of only a few hundred miles per hour and passed close\n enough to come within the tremendous pseudo-gravatic fields of the\n idling drivers.", "Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch\n against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started\n cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task\n requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on\n the events that had brought him here.\n\n\n First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma\n for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was\n perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been\n inherently poor.\n\n\n Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step—to Mars. But men\n had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that\n had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.", "Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno\n himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created\n support of flame.\n\n\n \"You're almost in,\" a voice chanted into his headphones through\n crackling, sizzling static. \"Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it!\n Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!\"\n\n\n The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled,\n steadied.\n\n\n Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting\n with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.\n\n\n \"Airlock open. Both doors.\"\n\n\n Venusian air poured in.\n\n\n \"For this I left Panama?\" one of the men yelped.\n\n\n \"Enough to gag a maggot,\" another agreed with hand to nose.", "\"I believe you, Barry.\"\n\n\n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days\n at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of\n civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had\n awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a\n woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n\n\n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous\n and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger\n simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging\n Robson Hind's features.", "Shouting voices awakened him, an exultant battle cry cutting through a\n gasping scream of anguish. Streaks of bright orange light were moving\n toward him in a twisting pattern. At the head of each trail was a\n figure. A human figure that weaved and swam in deadly moving combat.\n One figure drifted limply bottomward.\n\n\n Hallucination, Barry told himself. Then one of the figures broke from\n the group. Almost overhead it turned sharply downward and the feet\n moved in a powerful flutter-kick. A slender spear aimed directly at the\n Earthman.\n\n\n Barry threw himself aside. The spear point plunged deep into the\n sticky, yielding bottom and Barry grappled with its wielder.\n\n\n Pointed fingernails raked his cheek. Barry's balled fist swung\n in a roundhouse blow but water resistance slowed the punch to\n ineffectiveness. The creature only shook its head and came in kicking\n and clawing.", "The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but\n this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had\n made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had\n carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or\n judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook\n some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the\n Five Ship Plan.\n\n\n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n\n\n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n\n\n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead\n tubelight was off.\n\n\n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n\n\n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist\n machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead,\n cut off outside his room.", "The most important question—that of the presence or absence of\n intelligent, civilized Venusians—remained unanswered. Some of the men\n reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near\n open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have\n established contact.\nBarry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had\n done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into\n membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and\n dark parallel lines appeared.\n\n\n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not\n stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had\n to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the\n weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still\n he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's\n failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n\n\n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming.\n Dorothy was leaning over him." ], [ "\"I believe you, Barry.\"\n\n\n She stayed with him for hours, and she had changed since the days\n at Training Base. Long months away from the patterned restraints of\n civilization, living each day on the edge of unknown perils, had\n awakened in her the realization that she was a human being and a\n woman, as well as a toxicologist.\n\n\n When the water-mist finally forced her departure she left Barry joyous\n and confident of his eventual recovery. For a few minutes anger\n simmered in his brain as he contemplated the pleasure of rearranging\n Robson Hind's features.", "But the person for whom he waited most anxiously did not arrive. At\n each knock Barry's heart would leap, and each time he settled back with\n a sigh of disappointment. Days passed and still Dorothy did not come\n to him. He could not go to her, and stubborn pride kept him from even\n inquiring. All the while he was aware of Robson Hind's presence in the\n Colony, and only weakness kept him from pacing his room like a caged\n animal.\n\n\n Through his window he could see nothing but the gradual brightening\n and darkening of the enveloping fog as the slow 82-hour Venusian day\n progressed, but from his visitors' words he learned something of\n Venusian conditions and the story of the Colony.", "She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual\n despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment\n of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed\n emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone,\n and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded\n devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his\n insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.\n\n\n But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the\n business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried\n a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to\n virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.\n\n\n The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened\n to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly\n expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some\n factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.", "A few hours later Dr. Jensen found his patient in a normal sleep. The\n room was warm and the air was so filled with water-mist it was almost\n liquid. Coalescing drops dripped from the walls and curving ceiling\n and furniture, from the half clad body of the sleeping man, and the\n scavenger pump made greedy gulping sounds as it removed excess water\n from the floor.\n\n\n The doctor shook his head as he backed out, his clothes clinging wet\n from the short exposure.\n\n\n It was abnormal.\n\n\n But so was Barry Barr.\n\n\n With breathing no longer a continuous agony Barry began to recover some\n of his strength. But for several days much of his time was spent in\n sleep and Dorothy Voorhees haunted his dreams.", "The most important question—that of the presence or absence of\n intelligent, civilized Venusians—remained unanswered. Some of the men\n reported a disquieting feeling of being watched, particularly when near\n open water, but others argued that any intelligent creatures would have\n established contact.\nBarry developed definite external signs of what the Sigma radiation had\n done to him. The skin between his fingers and toes spread, grew into\n membranous webs. The swellings in his neck became more pronounced and\n dark parallel lines appeared.\n\n\n But despite the doctor's pessimistic reports that the changes had not\n stopped, Barry continued to tell himself he was recovering. He had\n to believe and keep on believing to retain sanity in the face of the\n weird, unclassifiable feelings that surged through his body. Still\n he was subject to fits of almost suicidal depression, and Dorothy's\n failure to visit him did not help his mental condition.\n\n\n Then one day he woke from a nap and thought he was still dreaming.\n Dorothy was leaning over him.", "\"Barry! Barry!\" she whispered. \"I can't help it. I love you even if you\n do have a wife and child in Philadelphia. I know it's wrong but all\n that seems so far away it doesn't matter any more.\" Tears glistened in\n her eyes.\n\n\n \"Huh?\" he grunted. \"Who? Me?\"\n\n\n \"Please, Barry, don't lie. She wrote to me before Three blasted\n off—oh, the most piteous letter!\"\n\n\n Barry was fully awake now. \"I'm not married. I have no child.\n I've never been in Philadelphia,\" he shouted. His lips thinned.\n \"I—think—I—know—who—wrote—that—letter!\" he declared grimly.\n\n\n \"Robson wouldn't!\" she objected, shocked, but there was a note of doubt\n in her voice.\n\n\n Then she was in his arms, sobbing openly.", "Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her as clearly as though\n she were with him—her face with the exotic high cheek-bones—her\n eyes a deep gray in fascinating contrast to her raven hair—lips that\n seemed to promise more of giving than she had ever allowed herself to\n fulfil—her incongruously pert, humorous little nose that was a legacy\n from some venturesome Irishman—her slender yet firmly lithe body.\n\n\n After a few days Dr. Jensen permitted him to have visitors. They came\n in a steady stream, the people from Four and men he had not seen since\n Training Base days, and although none could endure his semi-liquid\n atmosphere more than a few minutes at a time Barry enjoyed their visits.", "Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp,\n extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few\n minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.\n\n\n Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk.\n Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one\n particular figure among the men and women who waited.\n\n\n \"Dorothy!\" he said fervently.\n\n\n Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.\n\n\n Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an\n expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he\n saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.", "Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the\n experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions,\n he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus\n Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form\n was most needed—most particularly a launching ramp—and to study\n native Venusian materials.\n\n\n Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the\n limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to\n rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle\n delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian\n materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.\n\n\n Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of\n loneliness had come to an end.", "Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of\n rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and\n had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have\n himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.\n\n\n But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with\n a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.\n\n\n He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by\n inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but\n enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into\n stuttering action.\n\n\n Then it was done.\n\n\n As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to\n start according to calculations.\nBarry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick\n Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.", "For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But\n then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his\n hand.\n\n\n Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees\n had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three—in\n fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But\n still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the\n brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus\n alive—\nThe blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking\n pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny\n figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified\n breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation\n to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the\n insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.", "Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched\n involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.\nII\n\n\n Barry's mind was working furiously. The changes the Sigma radiations\n had inflicted upon his body might reverse themselves spontaneously, Dr.\n Jensen had mentioned during a second visit—but for that to happen he\n must remain alive. That meant easing all possible strains.\n\n\n When the doctor came in again Barry asked him to find Nick Podtiaguine.\n Within a few minutes the mechanic appeared.\n\n\n \"Cheez, it's good to see you, Barry,\" he began.\n\n\n \"Stuff it,\" the sick man interrupted. \"I want favors. Can do?\"\n\n\n Nick nodded vigorously.\n\n\n \"First cut that air conditioner and get the window open.\"", "\"I could eat a cow with the smallpox,\" Barry declared.\n\n\n Nick grinned. \"No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job\n of work out there.\"\n\n\n Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.\n\n\n \"Say,\" he asked anxiously. \"What's haywire with the air?\"\n\n\n Nick looked startled. \"Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off\n watch a few minutes ago.\"\n\n\n Barry shrugged. \"Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a\n handout.\"\n\n\n He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside\n out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on\n him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness\n he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to\n breathe.", "\"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes,\" the doctor\n continued, \"and you know as much—more about your condition than I do.\n If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of\n a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems\n to give you relief.\"\n\n\n Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each\n side itched infuriatingly.\n\n\n \"What are these changes?\" he asked. \"What's this?\"\n\n\n \"Those things seem to be—\" the doctor began hesitantly. \"Damn it, I\n know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills.\"\n\n\n Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond\n shock.\n\n\n \"But there must be—\"", "He was back in eight hours, and with him came a dozen helpers. A\n power line and water tube were run through the metal partition to the\n corridor, connections were made, and the machine Barry had sketched was\n ready.\n\n\n Nick flipped the switch. The thing whined shrilly. From a fanshaped\n nozzle came innumerable droplets of water, droplets of colloidal size\n that hung in the air and only slowly coalesced into larger drops that\n fell toward the metal floor.\n\n\n Barry nodded, a smile beginning to spread across his drawn features.\n\n\n \"Perfect. Now put the window back.\"\n\n\n Outside lay the unknown world of Venus, and an open, unguarded window\n might invite disaster.", "Nick stared as though he were demented, but obeyed, unbolting the heavy\n plastic window panel and lifting it aside. He made a face at the damp,\n malodorous Venusian air but to Barry it brought relief.\n\n\n It was not enough, but it indicated he was on the right track. And he\n was not an engineer for nothing.\n\n\n \"Got a pencil?\" he asked.\n\n\n He drew only a rough sketch, for Nick was far too competent to need\n detailed drawings.\n\n\n \"Think you can get materials?\"\n\n\n Nick glanced at the sketch. \"Hell, man, for you I can get anything the\n Colony has. You saved Four and everybody knows it.\"\n\n\n \"Two days?\"\n\n\n Nick looked insulted.", "The accident with the scaffold had been remarkably convenient, but\n this time the ruthless, restless, probably psychopathic drive that had\n made Robson Hind more than just another rich man's spoiled son had\n carried him too far. Barry wondered whether it had been inefficiency or\n judiciously distributed money that had made the psychometrists overlook\n some undesirable traits in Hind's personality in accepting him for the\n Five Ship Plan.\n\n\n But even with his trickery Hind had lost.\n\n\n He slept, and woke with a feeling of doom.\n\n\n The slow Venusian twilight had ended in blackness and the overhead\n tubelight was off.\n\n\n He sat up, and apprehension gave way to burning torture in his chest.\n\n\n Silence! He fumbled for the light switch, then knelt beside the mist\n machine that no longer hummed. Power and water supplies were both dead,\n cut off outside his room.", "By the glow of an overhead tubelight he recognized the kindly, deeply\n lined features of the man bending over him. Dr. Carl Jensen, specialist\n in tropical diseases. He tried to sit up but the doctor laid a\n restraining hand on his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Water!\" Barry croaked.\n\n\n The doctor held out a glass. Then his eyes widened incredulously as his\n patient deliberately drew in a breath while drinking, sucking water\n directly into his lungs.\n\n\n \"Doctor,\" he asked, keeping his voice low to spare his throat. \"What\n are my chances? On the level.\"\n\n\n Dr. Jensen shook his head thoughtfully. \"There's not a thing—not a\n damned solitary thing—I can do. It's something new to medical science.\"\n\n\n Barry lay still.", "He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around\n him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.\n\n\n The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!\n\n\n Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead.\n The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen\n trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress.\n Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable\n thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.\n\n\n A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of\n exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for\n the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not\n necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was,\n felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.", "It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and\n unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying\n vegetation.\n\n\n But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in\n his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.\n\n\n The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing\n vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.\n\n\n Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above\n a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby\n the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The\n mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded\n outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in\n their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out\n of the marsh. The Colony!" ] ]
test	61198	[ "Why were some members of SCARS most likely easy to manipulate to do the Groaci's bidding?", "What comparison does Retief offer after suggesting surgical removal of the Fustian horns?", "Why did the youth attack Retief after he left Whonk?", "Why does Magnan scoff at Retief's diplomatic mission?", "What is one physical difference between adult and youth Fustians?", "What was the Groaci's plan?", "How did Slock and some other youths attempt to kill Whonk?", "Who was The Soft One?", "What was unique about the youth that attacked Whonk and tried to attack Retief?" ]	[ [ "Above all else, they hated Fustian adults, so they were willing to do anything to harm them.", "They were disinterested in politics, so they did not think about any political ambitions the Groaci might have.", "The impetuousness of youth blinded them to reality.", "Fustian youth are notoriously stubborn and unwilling to examine all aspects of a situation." ], [ "The two-headed Groaci.", "If people didn't shave, their facial hair would grow too long.", "He pointed out Magnan's extremely long beard.", "He highlighted the unruly outer shells of the adult Fustians." ], [ "Slock despised the Terrestrial Embassy.", "They wanted to steal the pictures he had taken of the ship's blueprints.", "It was part of the Groaci's plan for takeover.", "They were looking for a film he had brought with him about SCARS." ], [ "He doesn't think the Groaci are relevant to the mission.", "He doesn't approve of Retief's interest in the physical characteristics of the Fustians.", "He thinks the time would be better spent building relationships with Fustian youths.", "He thinks Retief should investigate the activities of the SCARS instead." ], [ "The youths tend to wrap their bodies in mantles, and the adults do not.", "The youths have beady yellow eyes, and the adults do not.", "The adults have soft jaws, and the youths have hard jaws.", "The bodies of adult Fustians are protected by scales and shells. The youths' are not." ], [ "To blow up the Terrestrial Embassy.", "To use Slock's help in pinning the bombing of the \"Moss Rock\" on SCARS and the Terrestrial Embassy.", "To purge the Ministry of Youth of its leaders and replace them with their own.", "To prevent the Sexual, Cultural, and Athletic Recreational Society from receiving its sponsorship." ], [ "They dragged him through the streets.", "They beat him up and left him for dead.", "They tried to suffocate him by tying a bag around his head.", "They tried to decapitate him." ], [ "The Groaci.", "Retief.", "Slock.", "Magnan." ], [ "He was actually an adult Fustian whose outer shell had been carefully removed.", "He had horns growing from his toes.", "He was a senior member of SCARS.", "His eyes were attached to the end of long stalks." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids\n have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got\n another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast,\n but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled\n for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is\n enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n\n\n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about\n this gambit.\"\n\n\n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth\n with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"", "\"Well,\" murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, \"I'm gratified to\n see you entering into the spirit of the event at last.\" He turned his\n attention back to the assembled guests. \"If our honored guest will join\n me on the rostrum...?\" he said. \"The gentlemen of the press may want to\n catch a few shots of the presentation.\"\n\n\n Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room,\n took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras.\n\n\n \"How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the\n great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS,\" he said, talking slowly\n for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. \"We'd like to think that\n in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve\n during the years ahead.\"", "\"To the Fustians this is no jesting matter,\" Magnan cut in. \"This\n group—\" he glanced at the paper—\"known as the Sexual, Cultural, and\n Athletic Recreational Society, or SCARS for short, has been awaiting\n sponsorship for a matter of weeks now.\"\n\n\n \"Meaning they want someone to buy them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment\n and anything else they need to complete their sexual, cultural and\n athletic development,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"If we don't act promptly,\" Magnan said, \"the Groaci Embassy may well\n anticipate us. They're very active here.\"\n\n\n \"That's an idea,\" said Retief. \"Let 'em. After awhile they'll go broke\n instead of us.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense. The group requires a sponsor. I can't actually order you to\n step forward. However....\" Magnan let the sentence hang in the air.\n Retief raised one eyebrow.", "\"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back\n to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was\n planned for today. When the\nMoss Rock\nblew, a variety of clues were\n to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all\n over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair\n squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship\n of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n\n\n \"The\nMoss Rock\n?\" said Magnan. \"But that was—Retief! This is idiotic.\n Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n\n\n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip\n loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting\n his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan\n watched, open-mouthed.", "\"Well,\" Retief said. \"It looks like the SCARS are out in force tonight.\n Where's your pal?\" he said to the advancing trio. \"The sticky little\n bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers\n holding the bag, I'll bet.\"\n\n\n \"Shelter behind me, Retief,\" said Whonk.\n\n\n \"Go get 'em, old-timer.\" Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars.\n \"I'll jump around and distract them.\"", "Magnan shuddered. \"Please—never mention the idea to a Fustian.\"\n\n\n Retief stood. \"My own program for the day includes going over to the\n dockyards. There are some features of this new passenger liner the\n Fustians are putting together that I want to look into. With your\n permission, Mr. Ambassador...?\"\n\n\n Magnan snorted. \"Your pre-occupation with the trivial disturbs me,\n Retief. More interest in substantive matters—such as working with\n Youth groups—would create a far better impression.\"\n\n\n \"Before getting too involved with these groups, it might be a good idea\n to find out a little more about them,\" said Retief. \"Who organizes\n them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the\n alignment of this SCARS organization?\"\n\n\n \"You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak,\" Magnan said.\n \"Politics mean nothing to them ... yet.\"", "\"Glad you reporters happened along,\" said Retief to the gaping newsmen.\n \"Slock here had a deal with a sharp operator from the Groaci Embassy.\n The Groaci were to supply the necessary hardware and Slock, as foreman\n at the shipyards, was to see that everything was properly installed.\n The next step, I assume, would have been a local take-over, followed\n by a little interplanetary war on Flamenco or one of the other nearby\n worlds ... for which the Groaci would be glad to supply plenty of ammo.\"\n\n\n Magnan found his tongue. \"Are you mad, Retief?\" he screeched. \"This\n group was vouched for by the Ministry of Youth!\"", "They entered the ship. Soft lights glowed in utter silence. A rough box\n stood on the floor, rollers and pry-bars beside it—a discordant note\n in the muted luxury of the setting. Whonk rummaged in it.\n\n\n \"Curious,\" he said. \"What means this?\" He held up a stained cloak of\n orange and green, a metal bracelet, papers.\n\n\n \"Orange and green,\" mused Relief. \"Whose colors are those?\"\n\n\n \"I know not.\" Whonk glanced at the arm-band. \"But this is lettered.\" He\n passed the metal band to Retief.\n\n\n \"SCARS,\" Retief read. He looked at Whonk. \"It seems to me I've heard\n the name before,\" he murmured. \"Let's get back to the Embassy—fast.\"", "\"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They\n intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their\n purpose.\"\n\n\n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is\n the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n\n\n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much\n chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n\n\n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through\n now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled\n through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in\n Whonk's wake.\n\n\n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a\n code letter. No reply. He tried another.", "The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the\nLament of\n Hatching\n,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of\n instruments—\"\n\n\n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial\n Ambassador suspiciously.\n\n\n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n \"And if I may interrupt a moment—\"\n\n\n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived,\n perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n\n\n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much\n do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"", "\"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He\n flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He\n knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n\n\n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n\n\n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite\n small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the\n Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first\n period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge\nMoss\n Rock\n.\"\n\n\n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n\n\n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements\n after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"", "Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of\n thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a\n sound like a seal coughing.\n\n\n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me—in vain. Then\n they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons\n to complete the task.\"\n\n\n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n\n\n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide\n fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n\n\n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full\n intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the\n block and tackle.\"", "The youth gurgled.\n\n\n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk\n lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump\n that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the\n elder, mouth snapping.\n\n\n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the\n killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n\n\n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance\n with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n\n\n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief\n planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the\n bare back of the Fustian—", "\"Nothing at all,\" the huge Fustian elder rumbled. \"For my taste, all\n Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a\n carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\"\n\n\n \"We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful\n energies,\" said Magnan.\n\n\n \"Labor gangs,\" said the minister. \"In my youth we were indentured to\n the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge.\"\n\n\n \"But in these modern times,\" put in Magnan, \"surely it's incumbent on\n us to make happy these golden hours.\"\n\n\n The minister snorted. \"Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me\n and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit.\"\n\n\n \"But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations,\"\n cried Magnan. \"Their essential tenderness—\"", "\"Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a\n two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but\n business. But what has Fust got that they could use?\"\n\n\n \"You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance,\" said Magnan.\n \"Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci\n are barely ahead of them.\"\n\n\n \"Barely,\" said Retief. \"Just over the line into crude atomics ... like\n fission bombs.\"\n\n\n Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. \"What market exists\n for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your\n attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying\n the social patterns of the local youth.\"\n\n\n \"I've studied them,\" said Retief. \"And before I meet any of the local\n youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack.\"\nII", "\"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was\n unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved\n awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n\n\n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n\n\n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a\n foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw\n his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell\n heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other\n Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied.\n The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another\n vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car,\n tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.", "\"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried\n to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n\n\n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old.\n But I thought—\"\n\n\n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks\n are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the\n carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n\n\n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us\n and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n\n\n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n\n\n Three youths came from behind the sheds.", "He eased through the narrow back entrance, waited until voices were\n raised at the front of the shed, then strolled off toward the gate.\nThe second dark of the third cycle was lightening when Retief left the\n Embassy technical library and crossed the corridor to his office. He\n flipped on a light. A note was tucked under a paperweight:\n\n\n \"Retief—I shall expect your attendance at the IAS dinner at first\n dark of the fourth cycle. There will be a brief but, I hope, impressive\n Sponsorship ceremony for the SCARS group, with full press coverage,\n arrangements for which I have managed to complete in spite of your\n intransigence.\"\n\n\n Retief snorted and glanced at his watch. Less than three hours. Just\n time to creep home by flat-car, dress in ceremonial uniform and creep\n back.", "\"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters\n are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age—\"\n\n\n \"That's right. He'll try anything—in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n\n\n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is\n the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And\n sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the\n Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the\n mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p—that is, cement\n relations with this emergent power group—the leaders of the future.\n You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their\n rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control\n group—\"", "\"A plague on these youths,\" said the oldster, \"who grow more virulent\n day by day.\"\n\n\n \"Why don't you elders clamp down?\"\n\n\n \"Agile are they and we are slow of foot. And this unrest is new.\n Unknown in my youth was such insolence.\"\n\n\n \"The police—\"\n\n\n \"Bah!\" the ancient rumbled. \"None have we worthy of the name, nor have\n we needed ought ere now.\"\n\n\n \"What's behind it?\"\n\n\n \"They have found leaders. The spiv, Slock, is one. And I fear they plot\n mischief.\" He pointed to the window. \"They come, and a Soft One with\n them.\"" ], [ "\"For a minute there,\" he said, \"I thought you were going to make a\n positive statement.\"\nMagnan leaned back, lacing his fingers over his stomach. \"I don't think\n you'll find a diplomat of my experience doing anything so naive,\" he\n said.\n\n\n \"I like the adult Fustians,\" said Retief. \"Too bad they have to lug\n half a ton of horn around on their backs. I wonder if surgery would\n help.\"\n\n\n \"Great heavens, Retief,\" Magnan sputtered. \"I'm amazed that even you\n would bring up a matter of such delicacy. A race's unfortunate physical\n characteristics are hardly a fit matter for Terrestrial curiosity.\"\n\n\n \"Well, of course your experience of the Fustian mentality is greater\n than mine. I've only been here a month. But it's been my experience,\n Mr. Ambassador, that few races are above improving on nature. Otherwise\n you, for example, would be tripping over your beard.\"", "Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of\n thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a\n sound like a seal coughing.\n\n\n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me—in vain. Then\n they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons\n to complete the task.\"\n\n\n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n\n\n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide\n fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n\n\n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full\n intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the\n block and tackle.\"", "The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the\nLament of\n Hatching\n,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of\n instruments—\"\n\n\n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial\n Ambassador suspiciously.\n\n\n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n \"And if I may interrupt a moment—\"\n\n\n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived,\n perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n\n\n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much\n do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"", "The youth gurgled.\n\n\n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk\n lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump\n that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the\n elder, mouth snapping.\n\n\n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the\n killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n\n\n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance\n with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n\n\n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief\n planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the\n bare back of the Fustian—", "Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle\n of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed\n out of alignment ... and the dust had been scraped from the floor\n before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over\n into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged\n Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head.\n\n\n Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine\n and pulled the sack free.\n\n\n \"It's me, old fellow,\" Retief said. \"The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you\n into this.\"", "\"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters\n are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age—\"\n\n\n \"That's right. He'll try anything—in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n\n\n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is\n the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And\n sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the\n Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the\n mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p—that is, cement\n relations with this emergent power group—the leaders of the future.\n You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their\n rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control\n group—\"", "Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low\n steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the\n newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n\n\n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth.\n Slock stared at him, drew back.\n\n\n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk\n told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember?\n It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're\n building.\"\nIV\n\n\n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief—and choked off in mid-cry as\n the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear\n of the floor.", "Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it\n into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away.\n The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered ... then flopped on his chest.\n\n\n Slowly he got to his feet.\n\n\n \"My name is Whonk, fleet one,\" he said. \"My cows are yours.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right\n now, let's get out of here.\"\n\n\n Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp,\n bulldozed them aside. \"Slow am I to anger,\" he said, \"but implacable in\n my wrath. Slock, beware!\"", "The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the\n Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n \"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n\n\n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who\n knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n\n\n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went\n for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get\n to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n\n\n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the\n shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n\n\n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed\n through the drawings, clicking the shutter.", "\"Well,\" murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, \"I'm gratified to\n see you entering into the spirit of the event at last.\" He turned his\n attention back to the assembled guests. \"If our honored guest will join\n me on the rostrum...?\" he said. \"The gentlemen of the press may want to\n catch a few shots of the presentation.\"\n\n\n Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room,\n took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras.\n\n\n \"How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the\n great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS,\" he said, talking slowly\n for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. \"We'd like to think that\n in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve\n during the years ahead.\"", "Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians.\n They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief\n whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed\n it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on\n Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the\nMoss Rock\nas Whonk\n took him in full charge.\n\n\n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian\n on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed\n hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.", "\"Thus I come to the shipyard with frightful speed,\" he said in Fustian.\n \"Well I know the way of the naked-backs, who move always in haste.\"\n\n\n Retief climbed down, handed him a coin. \"You should take up\n professional racing,\" he said. \"Daredevil.\"\n\n\n He crossed the littered yard and tapped at the door of a rambling shed.\n Boards creaked inside. Then the door swung back.\n\n\n A gnarled ancient with tarnished facial scales and a weathered carapace\n peered out at Retief.", "\"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister\n said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled\n boreholes and blasted.\"\n\"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow!\n Slop I believe his name is.\"\n\n\n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And—\"\n\n\n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to\n them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering.\n Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some\n of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose.\n Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green\n wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n\n\n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked,\n breathing deeply.", "Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured\n Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed\n the hut, then started toward it.\n\n\n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I\n wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n\n\n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n \"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n\n\n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n\n\n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well,\n stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n\n\n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"", "AIDE MEMOIRE\nBY KEITH LAUMER\nThe Fustians looked like turtles—but\n\n they could move fast when they chose!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nAcross the table from Retief, Ambassador Magnan rustled a stiff sheet\n of parchment and looked grave.\n\n\n \"This aide memoire,\" he said, \"was just handed to me by the Cultural\n Attache. It's the third on the subject this week. It refers to the\n matter of sponsorship of Youth groups—\"\n\n\n \"Some youths,\" Retief said. \"Average age, seventy-five.\"", "\"To the Fustians this is no jesting matter,\" Magnan cut in. \"This\n group—\" he glanced at the paper—\"known as the Sexual, Cultural, and\n Athletic Recreational Society, or SCARS for short, has been awaiting\n sponsorship for a matter of weeks now.\"\n\n\n \"Meaning they want someone to buy them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment\n and anything else they need to complete their sexual, cultural and\n athletic development,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"If we don't act promptly,\" Magnan said, \"the Groaci Embassy may well\n anticipate us. They're very active here.\"\n\n\n \"That's an idea,\" said Retief. \"Let 'em. After awhile they'll go broke\n instead of us.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense. The group requires a sponsor. I can't actually order you to\n step forward. However....\" Magnan let the sentence hang in the air.\n Retief raised one eyebrow.", "\"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried\n to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n\n\n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old.\n But I thought—\"\n\n\n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks\n are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the\n carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n\n\n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us\n and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n\n\n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n\n\n Three youths came from behind the sheds.", "Retief left the sprawling bungalow-type building that housed the\n chancery of the Terrestrial Embassy, swung aboard a passing flat-car\n and leaned back against the wooden guard rail as the heavy vehicle\n trundled through the city toward the looming gantries of the shipyards.\n\n\n It was a cool morning. A light breeze carried the fishy odor of Fusty\n dwellings across the broad cobbled avenue. A few mature Fustians\n lumbered heavily along in the shade of the low buildings, audibly\n wheezing under the burden of their immense carapaces. Among them,\n shell-less youths trotted briskly on scaly stub legs. The driver of the\n flat-car, a labor-caste Fustian with his guild colors emblazoned on his\n back, heaved at the tiller, swung the unwieldy conveyance through the\n shipyard gates, creaked to a halt.", "\"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was\n unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved\n awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n\n\n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n\n\n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a\n foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw\n his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell\n heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other\n Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied.\n The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another\n vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car,\n tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.", "\"Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a\n two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but\n business. But what has Fust got that they could use?\"\n\n\n \"You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance,\" said Magnan.\n \"Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci\n are barely ahead of them.\"\n\n\n \"Barely,\" said Retief. \"Just over the line into crude atomics ... like\n fission bombs.\"\n\n\n Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. \"What market exists\n for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your\n attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying\n the social patterns of the local youth.\"\n\n\n \"I've studied them,\" said Retief. \"And before I meet any of the local\n youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack.\"\nII" ], [ "The youth gurgled.\n\n\n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk\n lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump\n that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the\n elder, mouth snapping.\n\n\n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the\n killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n\n\n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance\n with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n\n\n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief\n planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the\n bare back of the Fustian—", "Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians.\n They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief\n whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed\n it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on\n Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the\nMoss Rock\nas Whonk\n took him in full charge.\n\n\n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian\n on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed\n hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.", "Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids\n have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got\n another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast,\n but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled\n for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is\n enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n\n\n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about\n this gambit.\"\n\n\n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth\n with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"", "\"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried\n to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n\n\n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old.\n But I thought—\"\n\n\n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks\n are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the\n carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n\n\n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us\n and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n\n\n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n\n\n Three youths came from behind the sheds.", "Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low\n steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the\n newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n\n\n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth.\n Slock stared at him, drew back.\n\n\n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk\n told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember?\n It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're\n building.\"\nIV\n\n\n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief—and choked off in mid-cry as\n the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear\n of the floor.", "Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound ... and turned in time to duck\n the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and\n fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm\n embrace.\n\n\n \"Nice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?\"\n\n\n \"The lout hid there by the storage bin,\" rumbled Whonk. The captive\n youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace.\n\n\n \"Hang onto him,\" said Retief. \"He looks like the biting kind.\"\n\n\n \"No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength.\"\n\n\n \"Ask him where the titanite is tucked away.\"\n\n\n \"Speak, witless grub,\" growled Whonk, \"lest I tweak you in twain.\"", "\"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He\n flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He\n knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n\n\n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n\n\n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite\n small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the\n Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first\n period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge\nMoss\n Rock\n.\"\n\n\n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n\n\n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements\n after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"", "\"Well,\" Retief said. \"It looks like the SCARS are out in force tonight.\n Where's your pal?\" he said to the advancing trio. \"The sticky little\n bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers\n holding the bag, I'll bet.\"\n\n\n \"Shelter behind me, Retief,\" said Whonk.\n\n\n \"Go get 'em, old-timer.\" Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars.\n \"I'll jump around and distract them.\"", "\"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters\n are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age—\"\n\n\n \"That's right. He'll try anything—in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n\n\n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is\n the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And\n sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the\n Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the\n mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p—that is, cement\n relations with this emergent power group—the leaders of the future.\n You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their\n rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control\n group—\"", "Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it\n into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away.\n The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered ... then flopped on his chest.\n\n\n Slowly he got to his feet.\n\n\n \"My name is Whonk, fleet one,\" he said. \"My cows are yours.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right\n now, let's get out of here.\"\n\n\n Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp,\n bulldozed them aside. \"Slow am I to anger,\" he said, \"but implacable in\n my wrath. Slock, beware!\"", "\"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was\n unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved\n awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n\n\n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n\n\n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a\n foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw\n his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell\n heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other\n Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied.\n The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another\n vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car,\n tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.", "\"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister\n said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled\n boreholes and blasted.\"\n\"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow!\n Slop I believe his name is.\"\n\n\n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And—\"\n\n\n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to\n them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering.\n Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some\n of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose.\n Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green\n wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n\n\n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked,\n breathing deeply.", "Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured\n Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed\n the hut, then started toward it.\n\n\n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I\n wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n\n\n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n \"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n\n\n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n\n\n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well,\n stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n\n\n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"", "\"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They\n intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their\n purpose.\"\n\n\n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is\n the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n\n\n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much\n chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n\n\n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through\n now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled\n through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in\n Whonk's wake.\n\n\n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a\n code letter. No reply. He tried another.", "The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the\n Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n \"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n\n\n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who\n knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n\n\n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went\n for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get\n to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n\n\n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the\n shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n\n\n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed\n through the drawings, clicking the shutter.", "Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of\n thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a\n sound like a seal coughing.\n\n\n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me—in vain. Then\n they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons\n to complete the task.\"\n\n\n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n\n\n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide\n fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n\n\n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full\n intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the\n block and tackle.\"", "Retief frowned, dropped the cigar over the side, waited until the\n flat-car negotiated a mud-wallow, then swung down and headed for the\n shipyard.\nThe door, hinges torn loose, had been propped loosely back in position.\n Retief looked around at the battered interior of the shed. The old\n fellow had put up a struggle.\n\n\n There were deep drag-marks in the dust behind the building. Retief\n followed them across the yard. They disappeared under the steel door of\n a warehouse.\n\n\n Retief glanced around. Now, at the mid-hour of the fourth cycle, the\n workmen were heaped along the edge of the refreshment pond, deep in\n their siesta. He took a multi-bladed tool from a pocket, tried various\n fittings in the lock. It snicked open.\n\n\n He eased the door aside far enough to enter.", "\"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back\n to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was\n planned for today. When the\nMoss Rock\nblew, a variety of clues were\n to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all\n over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair\n squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship\n of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n\n\n \"The\nMoss Rock\n?\" said Magnan. \"But that was—Retief! This is idiotic.\n Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n\n\n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip\n loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting\n his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan\n watched, open-mouthed.", "Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle\n of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed\n out of alignment ... and the dust had been scraped from the floor\n before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over\n into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged\n Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head.\n\n\n Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine\n and pulled the sack free.\n\n\n \"It's me, old fellow,\" Retief said. \"The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you\n into this.\"", "\"Oh, forgive me,\" blurted Magnan, dabbing at the wine.\n\n\n \"Too bad the glass gave out,\" said Retief. \"In another minute you'd\n have cleared the hall. And then maybe I could have gotten a word in\n sideways. There's a matter you should know about—\"\n\n\n \"Your attention, please,\" Magnan said, rising. \"I see that our fine\n young guest has arrived, and I hope that the remainder of his committee\n will be along in a moment. It is my pleasure to announce that our Mr.\n Retief has had the good fortune to win out in the keen bidding for the\n pleasure of sponsoring this lovely group.\"\n\n\n Retief tugged at Magnan's sleeve. \"Don't introduce me yet,\" he said. \"I\n want to appear suddenly. More dramatic, you know.\"" ], [ "\"Well,\" murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, \"I'm gratified to\n see you entering into the spirit of the event at last.\" He turned his\n attention back to the assembled guests. \"If our honored guest will join\n me on the rostrum...?\" he said. \"The gentlemen of the press may want to\n catch a few shots of the presentation.\"\n\n\n Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room,\n took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras.\n\n\n \"How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the\n great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS,\" he said, talking slowly\n for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. \"We'd like to think that\n in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve\n during the years ahead.\"", "\"Oh, forgive me,\" blurted Magnan, dabbing at the wine.\n\n\n \"Too bad the glass gave out,\" said Retief. \"In another minute you'd\n have cleared the hall. And then maybe I could have gotten a word in\n sideways. There's a matter you should know about—\"\n\n\n \"Your attention, please,\" Magnan said, rising. \"I see that our fine\n young guest has arrived, and I hope that the remainder of his committee\n will be along in a moment. It is my pleasure to announce that our Mr.\n Retief has had the good fortune to win out in the keen bidding for the\n pleasure of sponsoring this lovely group.\"\n\n\n Retief tugged at Magnan's sleeve. \"Don't introduce me yet,\" he said. \"I\n want to appear suddenly. More dramatic, you know.\"", "\"For a minute there,\" he said, \"I thought you were going to make a\n positive statement.\"\nMagnan leaned back, lacing his fingers over his stomach. \"I don't think\n you'll find a diplomat of my experience doing anything so naive,\" he\n said.\n\n\n \"I like the adult Fustians,\" said Retief. \"Too bad they have to lug\n half a ton of horn around on their backs. I wonder if surgery would\n help.\"\n\n\n \"Great heavens, Retief,\" Magnan sputtered. \"I'm amazed that even you\n would bring up a matter of such delicacy. A race's unfortunate physical\n characteristics are hardly a fit matter for Terrestrial curiosity.\"\n\n\n \"Well, of course your experience of the Fustian mentality is greater\n than mine. I've only been here a month. But it's been my experience,\n Mr. Ambassador, that few races are above improving on nature. Otherwise\n you, for example, would be tripping over your beard.\"", "The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the\nLament of\n Hatching\n,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of\n instruments—\"\n\n\n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial\n Ambassador suspiciously.\n\n\n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n \"And if I may interrupt a moment—\"\n\n\n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived,\n perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n\n\n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much\n do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"", "\"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back\n to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was\n planned for today. When the\nMoss Rock\nblew, a variety of clues were\n to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all\n over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair\n squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship\n of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n\n\n \"The\nMoss Rock\n?\" said Magnan. \"But that was—Retief! This is idiotic.\n Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n\n\n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip\n loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting\n his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan\n watched, open-mouthed.", "Magnan shuddered. \"Please—never mention the idea to a Fustian.\"\n\n\n Retief stood. \"My own program for the day includes going over to the\n dockyards. There are some features of this new passenger liner the\n Fustians are putting together that I want to look into. With your\n permission, Mr. Ambassador...?\"\n\n\n Magnan snorted. \"Your pre-occupation with the trivial disturbs me,\n Retief. More interest in substantive matters—such as working with\n Youth groups—would create a far better impression.\"\n\n\n \"Before getting too involved with these groups, it might be a good idea\n to find out a little more about them,\" said Retief. \"Who organizes\n them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the\n alignment of this SCARS organization?\"\n\n\n \"You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak,\" Magnan said.\n \"Politics mean nothing to them ... yet.\"", "Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low\n steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the\n newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n\n\n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth.\n Slock stared at him, drew back.\n\n\n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk\n told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember?\n It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're\n building.\"\nIV\n\n\n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief—and choked off in mid-cry as\n the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear\n of the floor.", "\"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They\n intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their\n purpose.\"\n\n\n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is\n the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n\n\n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much\n chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n\n\n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through\n now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled\n through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in\n Whonk's wake.\n\n\n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a\n code letter. No reply. He tried another.", "\"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters\n are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age—\"\n\n\n \"That's right. He'll try anything—in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n\n\n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is\n the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And\n sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the\n Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the\n mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p—that is, cement\n relations with this emergent power group—the leaders of the future.\n You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their\n rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control\n group—\"", "\"To the Fustians this is no jesting matter,\" Magnan cut in. \"This\n group—\" he glanced at the paper—\"known as the Sexual, Cultural, and\n Athletic Recreational Society, or SCARS for short, has been awaiting\n sponsorship for a matter of weeks now.\"\n\n\n \"Meaning they want someone to buy them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment\n and anything else they need to complete their sexual, cultural and\n athletic development,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"If we don't act promptly,\" Magnan said, \"the Groaci Embassy may well\n anticipate us. They're very active here.\"\n\n\n \"That's an idea,\" said Retief. \"Let 'em. After awhile they'll go broke\n instead of us.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense. The group requires a sponsor. I can't actually order you to\n step forward. However....\" Magnan let the sentence hang in the air.\n Retief raised one eyebrow.", "\"Glad you reporters happened along,\" said Retief to the gaping newsmen.\n \"Slock here had a deal with a sharp operator from the Groaci Embassy.\n The Groaci were to supply the necessary hardware and Slock, as foreman\n at the shipyards, was to see that everything was properly installed.\n The next step, I assume, would have been a local take-over, followed\n by a little interplanetary war on Flamenco or one of the other nearby\n worlds ... for which the Groaci would be glad to supply plenty of ammo.\"\n\n\n Magnan found his tongue. \"Are you mad, Retief?\" he screeched. \"This\n group was vouched for by the Ministry of Youth!\"", "\"Never mind him, Whonk. We'll tie these two up and leave them here. I\n know where to find the boss.\"\nA stolid crowd filled the low-ceilinged banquet hall. Retief scanned\n the tables for the pale blobs of Terrestrial faces, dwarfed by the\n giant armored bodies of the Fustians. Across the room Magnan fluttered\n a hand. Retief headed toward him. A low-pitched vibration filled the\n air: the rumble of subsonic Fustian music.\n\n\n Retief slid into his place beside Magnan. \"Sorry to be late, Mr.\n Ambassador.\"\n\n\n \"I'm honored that you chose to appear at all,\" said Magnan coldly. He\n turned back to the Fustian on his left.\n\n\n \"Ah, yes, Mr. Minister,\" he said. \"Charming, most charming. So joyous.\"", "\"Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a\n two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but\n business. But what has Fust got that they could use?\"\n\n\n \"You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance,\" said Magnan.\n \"Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci\n are barely ahead of them.\"\n\n\n \"Barely,\" said Retief. \"Just over the line into crude atomics ... like\n fission bombs.\"\n\n\n Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. \"What market exists\n for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your\n attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying\n the social patterns of the local youth.\"\n\n\n \"I've studied them,\" said Retief. \"And before I meet any of the local\n youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack.\"\nII", "Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of\n thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a\n sound like a seal coughing.\n\n\n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me—in vain. Then\n they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons\n to complete the task.\"\n\n\n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n\n\n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide\n fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n\n\n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full\n intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the\n block and tackle.\"", "\"Well,\" Retief said. \"It looks like the SCARS are out in force tonight.\n Where's your pal?\" he said to the advancing trio. \"The sticky little\n bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers\n holding the bag, I'll bet.\"\n\n\n \"Shelter behind me, Retief,\" said Whonk.\n\n\n \"Go get 'em, old-timer.\" Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars.\n \"I'll jump around and distract them.\"", "\"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister\n said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled\n boreholes and blasted.\"\n\"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow!\n Slop I believe his name is.\"\n\n\n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And—\"\n\n\n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to\n them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering.\n Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some\n of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose.\n Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green\n wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n\n\n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked,\n breathing deeply.", "Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured\n Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed\n the hut, then started toward it.\n\n\n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I\n wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n\n\n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n \"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n\n\n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n\n\n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well,\n stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n\n\n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"", "The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the\n Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n \"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n\n\n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who\n knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n\n\n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went\n for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get\n to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n\n\n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the\n shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n\n\n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed\n through the drawings, clicking the shutter.", "Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle\n of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed\n out of alignment ... and the dust had been scraped from the floor\n before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over\n into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged\n Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head.\n\n\n Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine\n and pulled the sack free.\n\n\n \"It's me, old fellow,\" Retief said. \"The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you\n into this.\"", "He eased through the narrow back entrance, waited until voices were\n raised at the front of the shed, then strolled off toward the gate.\nThe second dark of the third cycle was lightening when Retief left the\n Embassy technical library and crossed the corridor to his office. He\n flipped on a light. A note was tucked under a paperweight:\n\n\n \"Retief—I shall expect your attendance at the IAS dinner at first\n dark of the fourth cycle. There will be a brief but, I hope, impressive\n Sponsorship ceremony for the SCARS group, with full press coverage,\n arrangements for which I have managed to complete in spite of your\n intransigence.\"\n\n\n Retief snorted and glanced at his watch. Less than three hours. Just\n time to creep home by flat-car, dress in ceremonial uniform and creep\n back." ], [ "The youth gurgled.\n\n\n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk\n lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump\n that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the\n elder, mouth snapping.\n\n\n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the\n killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n\n\n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance\n with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n\n\n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief\n planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the\n bare back of the Fustian—", "\"Nothing at all,\" the huge Fustian elder rumbled. \"For my taste, all\n Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a\n carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\"\n\n\n \"We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful\n energies,\" said Magnan.\n\n\n \"Labor gangs,\" said the minister. \"In my youth we were indentured to\n the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge.\"\n\n\n \"But in these modern times,\" put in Magnan, \"surely it's incumbent on\n us to make happy these golden hours.\"\n\n\n The minister snorted. \"Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me\n and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit.\"\n\n\n \"But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations,\"\n cried Magnan. \"Their essential tenderness—\"", "\"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was\n unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved\n awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n\n\n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n\n\n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a\n foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw\n his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell\n heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other\n Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied.\n The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another\n vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car,\n tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.", "\"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters\n are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age—\"\n\n\n \"That's right. He'll try anything—in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n\n\n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is\n the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And\n sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the\n Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the\n mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p—that is, cement\n relations with this emergent power group—the leaders of the future.\n You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their\n rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control\n group—\"", "The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the\n Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n \"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n\n\n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who\n knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n\n\n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went\n for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get\n to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n\n\n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the\n shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n\n\n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed\n through the drawings, clicking the shutter.", "The oldster threshed his gnarled legs. He rocked slightly and fell\n back. \"A curse on the cradle that rocked their infant slumbers,\" he\n rumbled. \"But place me back on my feet and I hunt down the youth,\n Slock, though he flee to the bottommost muck of the Sea of Torments.\"\n\n\n \"How am I going to get you out of here? Maybe I'd better get some help.\"\n\n\n \"Nay. The perfidious Youths abound here,\" said the old Fustian. \"It\n would be your life.\"\n\n\n \"I doubt if they'd go that far.\"\n\n\n \"Would they not?\" The Fustian stretched his neck. \"Cast your light\n here. But for the toughness of my hide....\"", "AIDE MEMOIRE\nBY KEITH LAUMER\nThe Fustians looked like turtles—but\n\n they could move fast when they chose!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nAcross the table from Retief, Ambassador Magnan rustled a stiff sheet\n of parchment and looked grave.\n\n\n \"This aide memoire,\" he said, \"was just handed to me by the Cultural\n Attache. It's the third on the subject this week. It refers to the\n matter of sponsorship of Youth groups—\"\n\n\n \"Some youths,\" Retief said. \"Average age, seventy-five.\"", "\"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister\n said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled\n boreholes and blasted.\"\n\"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow!\n Slop I believe his name is.\"\n\n\n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And—\"\n\n\n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to\n them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering.\n Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some\n of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose.\n Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green\n wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n\n\n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked,\n breathing deeply.", "\"Thus I come to the shipyard with frightful speed,\" he said in Fustian.\n \"Well I know the way of the naked-backs, who move always in haste.\"\n\n\n Retief climbed down, handed him a coin. \"You should take up\n professional racing,\" he said. \"Daredevil.\"\n\n\n He crossed the littered yard and tapped at the door of a rambling shed.\n Boards creaked inside. Then the door swung back.\n\n\n A gnarled ancient with tarnished facial scales and a weathered carapace\n peered out at Retief.", "Magnan shuddered. \"Please—never mention the idea to a Fustian.\"\n\n\n Retief stood. \"My own program for the day includes going over to the\n dockyards. There are some features of this new passenger liner the\n Fustians are putting together that I want to look into. With your\n permission, Mr. Ambassador...?\"\n\n\n Magnan snorted. \"Your pre-occupation with the trivial disturbs me,\n Retief. More interest in substantive matters—such as working with\n Youth groups—would create a far better impression.\"\n\n\n \"Before getting too involved with these groups, it might be a good idea\n to find out a little more about them,\" said Retief. \"Who organizes\n them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the\n alignment of this SCARS organization?\"\n\n\n \"You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak,\" Magnan said.\n \"Politics mean nothing to them ... yet.\"", "Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound ... and turned in time to duck\n the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and\n fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm\n embrace.\n\n\n \"Nice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?\"\n\n\n \"The lout hid there by the storage bin,\" rumbled Whonk. The captive\n youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace.\n\n\n \"Hang onto him,\" said Retief. \"He looks like the biting kind.\"\n\n\n \"No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength.\"\n\n\n \"Ask him where the titanite is tucked away.\"\n\n\n \"Speak, witless grub,\" growled Whonk, \"lest I tweak you in twain.\"", "Retief left the sprawling bungalow-type building that housed the\n chancery of the Terrestrial Embassy, swung aboard a passing flat-car\n and leaned back against the wooden guard rail as the heavy vehicle\n trundled through the city toward the looming gantries of the shipyards.\n\n\n It was a cool morning. A light breeze carried the fishy odor of Fusty\n dwellings across the broad cobbled avenue. A few mature Fustians\n lumbered heavily along in the shade of the low buildings, audibly\n wheezing under the burden of their immense carapaces. Among them,\n shell-less youths trotted briskly on scaly stub legs. The driver of the\n flat-car, a labor-caste Fustian with his guild colors emblazoned on his\n back, heaved at the tiller, swung the unwieldy conveyance through the\n shipyard gates, creaked to a halt.", "Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians.\n They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief\n whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed\n it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on\n Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the\nMoss Rock\nas Whonk\n took him in full charge.\n\n\n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian\n on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed\n hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.", "\"What does the naked-back here?\" barked a deep voice behind Retief. He\n turned. A heavy-faced Fustian youth, wrapped in a mantle, stood at the\n open door. Beady yellow eyes set among fine scales bored into Retief.\n\n\n \"I came to take a look at your new liner,\" said Retief.\n\n\n \"We need no prying foreigners here,\" the youth snapped. His eye fell on\n the drawings. He hissed in sudden anger.\n\n\n \"Doddering hulk!\" he snapped at the ancient. \"May you toss in\n nightmares! Put by the plans!\"\n\n\n \"My mistake,\" Retief said. \"I didn't know this was a secret project.\"\nThe youth hesitated. \"It is not a secret project,\" he muttered. \"Why\n should it be secret?\"\n\n\n \"You tell me.\"", "\"For a minute there,\" he said, \"I thought you were going to make a\n positive statement.\"\nMagnan leaned back, lacing his fingers over his stomach. \"I don't think\n you'll find a diplomat of my experience doing anything so naive,\" he\n said.\n\n\n \"I like the adult Fustians,\" said Retief. \"Too bad they have to lug\n half a ton of horn around on their backs. I wonder if surgery would\n help.\"\n\n\n \"Great heavens, Retief,\" Magnan sputtered. \"I'm amazed that even you\n would bring up a matter of such delicacy. A race's unfortunate physical\n characteristics are hardly a fit matter for Terrestrial curiosity.\"\n\n\n \"Well, of course your experience of the Fustian mentality is greater\n than mine. I've only been here a month. But it's been my experience,\n Mr. Ambassador, that few races are above improving on nature. Otherwise\n you, for example, would be tripping over your beard.\"", "The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the\nLament of\n Hatching\n,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of\n instruments—\"\n\n\n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial\n Ambassador suspiciously.\n\n\n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n \"And if I may interrupt a moment—\"\n\n\n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived,\n perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n\n\n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much\n do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"", "\"Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a\n two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but\n business. But what has Fust got that they could use?\"\n\n\n \"You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance,\" said Magnan.\n \"Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci\n are barely ahead of them.\"\n\n\n \"Barely,\" said Retief. \"Just over the line into crude atomics ... like\n fission bombs.\"\n\n\n Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. \"What market exists\n for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your\n attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying\n the social patterns of the local youth.\"\n\n\n \"I've studied them,\" said Retief. \"And before I meet any of the local\n youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack.\"\nII", "Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low\n steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the\n newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n\n\n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth.\n Slock stared at him, drew back.\n\n\n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk\n told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember?\n It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're\n building.\"\nIV\n\n\n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief—and choked off in mid-cry as\n the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear\n of the floor.", "Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured\n Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed\n the hut, then started toward it.\n\n\n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I\n wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n\n\n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n \"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n\n\n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n\n\n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well,\n stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n\n\n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"", "\"A plague on these youths,\" said the oldster, \"who grow more virulent\n day by day.\"\n\n\n \"Why don't you elders clamp down?\"\n\n\n \"Agile are they and we are slow of foot. And this unrest is new.\n Unknown in my youth was such insolence.\"\n\n\n \"The police—\"\n\n\n \"Bah!\" the ancient rumbled. \"None have we worthy of the name, nor have\n we needed ought ere now.\"\n\n\n \"What's behind it?\"\n\n\n \"They have found leaders. The spiv, Slock, is one. And I fear they plot\n mischief.\" He pointed to the window. \"They come, and a Soft One with\n them.\"" ], [ "\"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They\n intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their\n purpose.\"\n\n\n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is\n the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n\n\n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much\n chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n\n\n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through\n now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled\n through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in\n Whonk's wake.\n\n\n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a\n code letter. No reply. He tried another.", "Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids\n have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got\n another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast,\n but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled\n for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is\n enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n\n\n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about\n this gambit.\"\n\n\n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth\n with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"", "\"Then there are the Groaci. Why their passionate interest in a\n two-horse world like Fust? Normally they're concerned with nothing but\n business. But what has Fust got that they could use?\"\n\n\n \"You may rule out the commercial aspect in this instance,\" said Magnan.\n \"Fust possesses a vigorous steel-age manufacturing economy. The Groaci\n are barely ahead of them.\"\n\n\n \"Barely,\" said Retief. \"Just over the line into crude atomics ... like\n fission bombs.\"\n\n\n Magnan shook his head, turned back to his papers. \"What market exists\n for such devices on a world at peace? I suggest you address your\n attention to the less spectacular but more rewarding work of studying\n the social patterns of the local youth.\"\n\n\n \"I've studied them,\" said Retief. \"And before I meet any of the local\n youth socially I want to get myself a good blackjack.\"\nII", "Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of\n thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a\n sound like a seal coughing.\n\n\n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me—in vain. Then\n they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons\n to complete the task.\"\n\n\n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n\n\n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide\n fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n\n\n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full\n intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the\n block and tackle.\"", "Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured\n Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed\n the hut, then started toward it.\n\n\n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I\n wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n\n\n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n \"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n\n\n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n\n\n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well,\n stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n\n\n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"", "\"Glad you reporters happened along,\" said Retief to the gaping newsmen.\n \"Slock here had a deal with a sharp operator from the Groaci Embassy.\n The Groaci were to supply the necessary hardware and Slock, as foreman\n at the shipyards, was to see that everything was properly installed.\n The next step, I assume, would have been a local take-over, followed\n by a little interplanetary war on Flamenco or one of the other nearby\n worlds ... for which the Groaci would be glad to supply plenty of ammo.\"\n\n\n Magnan found his tongue. \"Are you mad, Retief?\" he screeched. \"This\n group was vouched for by the Ministry of Youth!\"", "\"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back\n to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was\n planned for today. When the\nMoss Rock\nblew, a variety of clues were\n to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all\n over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair\n squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship\n of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n\n\n \"The\nMoss Rock\n?\" said Magnan. \"But that was—Retief! This is idiotic.\n Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n\n\n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip\n loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting\n his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan\n watched, open-mouthed.", "\"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He\n flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He\n knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n\n\n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n\n\n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite\n small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the\n Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first\n period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge\nMoss\n Rock\n.\"\n\n\n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n\n\n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements\n after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"", "\"Well,\" murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, \"I'm gratified to\n see you entering into the spirit of the event at last.\" He turned his\n attention back to the assembled guests. \"If our honored guest will join\n me on the rostrum...?\" he said. \"The gentlemen of the press may want to\n catch a few shots of the presentation.\"\n\n\n Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room,\n took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras.\n\n\n \"How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the\n great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS,\" he said, talking slowly\n for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. \"We'd like to think that\n in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve\n during the years ahead.\"", "\"To the Fustians this is no jesting matter,\" Magnan cut in. \"This\n group—\" he glanced at the paper—\"known as the Sexual, Cultural, and\n Athletic Recreational Society, or SCARS for short, has been awaiting\n sponsorship for a matter of weeks now.\"\n\n\n \"Meaning they want someone to buy them a clubhouse, uniforms, equipment\n and anything else they need to complete their sexual, cultural and\n athletic development,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"If we don't act promptly,\" Magnan said, \"the Groaci Embassy may well\n anticipate us. They're very active here.\"\n\n\n \"That's an idea,\" said Retief. \"Let 'em. After awhile they'll go broke\n instead of us.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense. The group requires a sponsor. I can't actually order you to\n step forward. However....\" Magnan let the sentence hang in the air.\n Retief raised one eyebrow.", "The youth gurgled.\n\n\n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk\n lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump\n that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the\n elder, mouth snapping.\n\n\n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the\n killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n\n\n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance\n with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n\n\n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief\n planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the\n bare back of the Fustian—", "Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low\n steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the\n newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n\n\n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth.\n Slock stared at him, drew back.\n\n\n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk\n told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember?\n It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're\n building.\"\nIV\n\n\n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief—and choked off in mid-cry as\n the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear\n of the floor.", "\"What does the naked-back here?\" barked a deep voice behind Retief. He\n turned. A heavy-faced Fustian youth, wrapped in a mantle, stood at the\n open door. Beady yellow eyes set among fine scales bored into Retief.\n\n\n \"I came to take a look at your new liner,\" said Retief.\n\n\n \"We need no prying foreigners here,\" the youth snapped. His eye fell on\n the drawings. He hissed in sudden anger.\n\n\n \"Doddering hulk!\" he snapped at the ancient. \"May you toss in\n nightmares! Put by the plans!\"\n\n\n \"My mistake,\" Retief said. \"I didn't know this was a secret project.\"\nThe youth hesitated. \"It is not a secret project,\" he muttered. \"Why\n should it be secret?\"\n\n\n \"You tell me.\"", "\"Oh, forgive me,\" blurted Magnan, dabbing at the wine.\n\n\n \"Too bad the glass gave out,\" said Retief. \"In another minute you'd\n have cleared the hall. And then maybe I could have gotten a word in\n sideways. There's a matter you should know about—\"\n\n\n \"Your attention, please,\" Magnan said, rising. \"I see that our fine\n young guest has arrived, and I hope that the remainder of his committee\n will be along in a moment. It is my pleasure to announce that our Mr.\n Retief has had the good fortune to win out in the keen bidding for the\n pleasure of sponsoring this lovely group.\"\n\n\n Retief tugged at Magnan's sleeve. \"Don't introduce me yet,\" he said. \"I\n want to appear suddenly. More dramatic, you know.\"", "The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the\n Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n \"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n\n\n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who\n knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n\n\n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went\n for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get\n to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n\n\n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the\n shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n\n\n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed\n through the drawings, clicking the shutter.", "Retief frowned, dropped the cigar over the side, waited until the\n flat-car negotiated a mud-wallow, then swung down and headed for the\n shipyard.\nThe door, hinges torn loose, had been propped loosely back in position.\n Retief looked around at the battered interior of the shed. The old\n fellow had put up a struggle.\n\n\n There were deep drag-marks in the dust behind the building. Retief\n followed them across the yard. They disappeared under the steel door of\n a warehouse.\n\n\n Retief glanced around. Now, at the mid-hour of the fourth cycle, the\n workmen were heaped along the edge of the refreshment pond, deep in\n their siesta. He took a multi-bladed tool from a pocket, tried various\n fittings in the lock. It snicked open.\n\n\n He eased the door aside far enough to enter.", "\"Long-may-you-sleep,\" said Retief. \"I'd like to take a look around, if\n you don't mind. I understand you're laying the bedplate for your new\n liner today.\"\n\"May-you-dream-of-the-deeps,\" the old fellow mumbled. He waved a stumpy\n arm toward a group of shell-less Fustians standing by a massive hoist.\n \"The youths know more of bedplates than do I, who but tend the place of\n papers.\"\n\n\n \"I know how you feel, old-timer,\" said Retief. \"That sounds like the\n story of my life. Among your papers do you have a set of plans for the\n vessel? I understand it's to be a passenger liner.\"\n\n\n The oldster nodded. He shuffled to a drawing file, rummaged, pulled out\n a sheaf of curled prints and spread them on the table. Retief stood\n silently, running a finger over the uppermost drawing, tracing lines....", "So they wanted the film? Retief reflected, thumbing a cigar alight.\n They were a little late. He had already filed it in the Embassy vault,\n after running a copy for the reference files.\n\n\n And a comparison of the drawings with those of the obsolete Mark XXXV\n battle cruiser used two hundred years earlier by the Concordiat Naval\n Arm showed them to be almost identical, gun emplacements and all. The\n term \"obsolete\" was a relative one. A ship which had been outmoded in\n the armories of the Galactic Powers could still be king of the walk in\n the Eastern Arm.\n\n\n But how had these two known of the film? There had been no one present\n but himself and the old-timer—and he was willing to bet the elderly\n Fustian hadn't told them anything.\n\n\n At least not willingly....", "The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the\nLament of\n Hatching\n,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of\n instruments—\"\n\n\n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial\n Ambassador suspiciously.\n\n\n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n \"And if I may interrupt a moment—\"\n\n\n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived,\n perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n\n\n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much\n do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"", "Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle\n of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed\n out of alignment ... and the dust had been scraped from the floor\n before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over\n into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged\n Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head.\n\n\n Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine\n and pulled the sack free.\n\n\n \"It's me, old fellow,\" Retief said. \"The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you\n into this.\"" ], [ "Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low\n steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the\n newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n\n\n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth.\n Slock stared at him, drew back.\n\n\n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk\n told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember?\n It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're\n building.\"\nIV\n\n\n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief—and choked off in mid-cry as\n the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear\n of the floor.", "Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids\n have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got\n another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast,\n but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled\n for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is\n enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n\n\n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about\n this gambit.\"\n\n\n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth\n with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"", "\"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They\n intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their\n purpose.\"\n\n\n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is\n the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n\n\n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much\n chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n\n\n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through\n now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled\n through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in\n Whonk's wake.\n\n\n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a\n code letter. No reply. He tried another.", "Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians.\n They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief\n whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed\n it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on\n Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the\nMoss Rock\nas Whonk\n took him in full charge.\n\n\n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian\n on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed\n hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.", "The youth gurgled.\n\n\n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk\n lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump\n that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the\n elder, mouth snapping.\n\n\n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the\n killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n\n\n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance\n with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n\n\n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief\n planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the\n bare back of the Fustian—", "\"A plague on these youths,\" said the oldster, \"who grow more virulent\n day by day.\"\n\n\n \"Why don't you elders clamp down?\"\n\n\n \"Agile are they and we are slow of foot. And this unrest is new.\n Unknown in my youth was such insolence.\"\n\n\n \"The police—\"\n\n\n \"Bah!\" the ancient rumbled. \"None have we worthy of the name, nor have\n we needed ought ere now.\"\n\n\n \"What's behind it?\"\n\n\n \"They have found leaders. The spiv, Slock, is one. And I fear they plot\n mischief.\" He pointed to the window. \"They come, and a Soft One with\n them.\"", "The oldster threshed his gnarled legs. He rocked slightly and fell\n back. \"A curse on the cradle that rocked their infant slumbers,\" he\n rumbled. \"But place me back on my feet and I hunt down the youth,\n Slock, though he flee to the bottommost muck of the Sea of Torments.\"\n\n\n \"How am I going to get you out of here? Maybe I'd better get some help.\"\n\n\n \"Nay. The perfidious Youths abound here,\" said the old Fustian. \"It\n would be your life.\"\n\n\n \"I doubt if they'd go that far.\"\n\n\n \"Would they not?\" The Fustian stretched his neck. \"Cast your light\n here. But for the toughness of my hide....\"", "\"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back\n to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was\n planned for today. When the\nMoss Rock\nblew, a variety of clues were\n to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all\n over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair\n squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship\n of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n\n\n \"The\nMoss Rock\n?\" said Magnan. \"But that was—Retief! This is idiotic.\n Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n\n\n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip\n loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting\n his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan\n watched, open-mouthed.", "\"Nothing at all,\" the huge Fustian elder rumbled. \"For my taste, all\n Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a\n carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\"\n\n\n \"We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful\n energies,\" said Magnan.\n\n\n \"Labor gangs,\" said the minister. \"In my youth we were indentured to\n the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge.\"\n\n\n \"But in these modern times,\" put in Magnan, \"surely it's incumbent on\n us to make happy these golden hours.\"\n\n\n The minister snorted. \"Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me\n and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit.\"\n\n\n \"But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations,\"\n cried Magnan. \"Their essential tenderness—\"", "\"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister\n said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled\n boreholes and blasted.\"\n\"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow!\n Slop I believe his name is.\"\n\n\n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And—\"\n\n\n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to\n them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering.\n Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some\n of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose.\n Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green\n wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n\n\n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked,\n breathing deeply.", "\"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He\n flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He\n knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n\n\n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n\n\n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite\n small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the\n Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first\n period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge\nMoss\n Rock\n.\"\n\n\n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n\n\n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements\n after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"", "Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound ... and turned in time to duck\n the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and\n fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm\n embrace.\n\n\n \"Nice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?\"\n\n\n \"The lout hid there by the storage bin,\" rumbled Whonk. The captive\n youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace.\n\n\n \"Hang onto him,\" said Retief. \"He looks like the biting kind.\"\n\n\n \"No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength.\"\n\n\n \"Ask him where the titanite is tucked away.\"\n\n\n \"Speak, witless grub,\" growled Whonk, \"lest I tweak you in twain.\"", "\"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried\n to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n\n\n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old.\n But I thought—\"\n\n\n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks\n are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the\n carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n\n\n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us\n and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n\n\n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n\n\n Three youths came from behind the sheds.", "\"Glad you reporters happened along,\" said Retief to the gaping newsmen.\n \"Slock here had a deal with a sharp operator from the Groaci Embassy.\n The Groaci were to supply the necessary hardware and Slock, as foreman\n at the shipyards, was to see that everything was properly installed.\n The next step, I assume, would have been a local take-over, followed\n by a little interplanetary war on Flamenco or one of the other nearby\n worlds ... for which the Groaci would be glad to supply plenty of ammo.\"\n\n\n Magnan found his tongue. \"Are you mad, Retief?\" he screeched. \"This\n group was vouched for by the Ministry of Youth!\"", "\"Well,\" Retief said. \"It looks like the SCARS are out in force tonight.\n Where's your pal?\" he said to the advancing trio. \"The sticky little\n bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers\n holding the bag, I'll bet.\"\n\n\n \"Shelter behind me, Retief,\" said Whonk.\n\n\n \"Go get 'em, old-timer.\" Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars.\n \"I'll jump around and distract them.\"", "\"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was\n unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved\n awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n\n\n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n\n\n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a\n foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw\n his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell\n heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other\n Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied.\n The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another\n vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car,\n tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.", "\"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters\n are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age—\"\n\n\n \"That's right. He'll try anything—in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n\n\n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is\n the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And\n sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the\n Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the\n mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p—that is, cement\n relations with this emergent power group—the leaders of the future.\n You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their\n rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control\n group—\"", "Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it\n into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away.\n The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered ... then flopped on his chest.\n\n\n Slowly he got to his feet.\n\n\n \"My name is Whonk, fleet one,\" he said. \"My cows are yours.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right\n now, let's get out of here.\"\n\n\n Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp,\n bulldozed them aside. \"Slow am I to anger,\" he said, \"but implacable in\n my wrath. Slock, beware!\"", "Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of\n thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a\n sound like a seal coughing.\n\n\n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me—in vain. Then\n they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons\n to complete the task.\"\n\n\n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n\n\n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide\n fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n\n\n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full\n intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the\n block and tackle.\"", "\"Never mind him, Whonk. We'll tie these two up and leave them here. I\n know where to find the boss.\"\nA stolid crowd filled the low-ceilinged banquet hall. Retief scanned\n the tables for the pale blobs of Terrestrial faces, dwarfed by the\n giant armored bodies of the Fustians. Across the room Magnan fluttered\n a hand. Retief headed toward him. A low-pitched vibration filled the\n air: the rumble of subsonic Fustian music.\n\n\n Retief slid into his place beside Magnan. \"Sorry to be late, Mr.\n Ambassador.\"\n\n\n \"I'm honored that you chose to appear at all,\" said Magnan coldly. He\n turned back to the Fustian on his left.\n\n\n \"Ah, yes, Mr. Minister,\" he said. \"Charming, most charming. So joyous.\"" ], [ "\"A plague on these youths,\" said the oldster, \"who grow more virulent\n day by day.\"\n\n\n \"Why don't you elders clamp down?\"\n\n\n \"Agile are they and we are slow of foot. And this unrest is new.\n Unknown in my youth was such insolence.\"\n\n\n \"The police—\"\n\n\n \"Bah!\" the ancient rumbled. \"None have we worthy of the name, nor have\n we needed ought ere now.\"\n\n\n \"What's behind it?\"\n\n\n \"They have found leaders. The spiv, Slock, is one. And I fear they plot\n mischief.\" He pointed to the window. \"They come, and a Soft One with\n them.\"", "Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of\n thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a\n sound like a seal coughing.\n\n\n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me—in vain. Then\n they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons\n to complete the task.\"\n\n\n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n\n\n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide\n fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n\n\n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full\n intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the\n block and tackle.\"", "\"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He\n flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He\n knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n\n\n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n\n\n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite\n small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the\n Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first\n period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge\nMoss\n Rock\n.\"\n\n\n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n\n\n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements\n after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"", "\"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister\n said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled\n boreholes and blasted.\"\n\"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow!\n Slop I believe his name is.\"\n\n\n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And—\"\n\n\n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to\n them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering.\n Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some\n of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose.\n Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green\n wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n\n\n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked,\n breathing deeply.", "Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids\n have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got\n another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast,\n but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled\n for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is\n enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n\n\n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about\n this gambit.\"\n\n\n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth\n with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"", "The oldster threshed his gnarled legs. He rocked slightly and fell\n back. \"A curse on the cradle that rocked their infant slumbers,\" he\n rumbled. \"But place me back on my feet and I hunt down the youth,\n Slock, though he flee to the bottommost muck of the Sea of Torments.\"\n\n\n \"How am I going to get you out of here? Maybe I'd better get some help.\"\n\n\n \"Nay. The perfidious Youths abound here,\" said the old Fustian. \"It\n would be your life.\"\n\n\n \"I doubt if they'd go that far.\"\n\n\n \"Would they not?\" The Fustian stretched his neck. \"Cast your light\n here. But for the toughness of my hide....\"", "The youth gurgled.\n\n\n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk\n lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump\n that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the\n elder, mouth snapping.\n\n\n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the\n killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n\n\n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance\n with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n\n\n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief\n planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the\n bare back of the Fustian—", "\"Nothing at all,\" the huge Fustian elder rumbled. \"For my taste, all\n Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a\n carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\"\n\n\n \"We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful\n energies,\" said Magnan.\n\n\n \"Labor gangs,\" said the minister. \"In my youth we were indentured to\n the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge.\"\n\n\n \"But in these modern times,\" put in Magnan, \"surely it's incumbent on\n us to make happy these golden hours.\"\n\n\n The minister snorted. \"Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me\n and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit.\"\n\n\n \"But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations,\"\n cried Magnan. \"Their essential tenderness—\"", "Heaped bales loomed before him. Snapping on the tiny lamp in the handle\n of the combination tool, Retief looked over the pile. One stack seemed\n out of alignment ... and the dust had been scraped from the floor\n before it. He pocketed the light, climbed up on the bales, looked over\n into a nest made by stacking the bundles around a clear spot. The aged\n Fustian lay in it, on his back, a heavy sack tied over his head.\n\n\n Retief dropped down inside the ring of bales, sawed at the tough twine\n and pulled the sack free.\n\n\n \"It's me, old fellow,\" Retief said. \"The nosy stranger. Sorry I got you\n into this.\"", "They entered the ship. Soft lights glowed in utter silence. A rough box\n stood on the floor, rollers and pry-bars beside it—a discordant note\n in the muted luxury of the setting. Whonk rummaged in it.\n\n\n \"Curious,\" he said. \"What means this?\" He held up a stained cloak of\n orange and green, a metal bracelet, papers.\n\n\n \"Orange and green,\" mused Relief. \"Whose colors are those?\"\n\n\n \"I know not.\" Whonk glanced at the arm-band. \"But this is lettered.\" He\n passed the metal band to Retief.\n\n\n \"SCARS,\" Retief read. He looked at Whonk. \"It seems to me I've heard\n the name before,\" he murmured. \"Let's get back to the Embassy—fast.\"", "\"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They\n intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their\n purpose.\"\n\n\n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is\n the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n\n\n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much\n chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n\n\n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through\n now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled\n through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in\n Whonk's wake.\n\n\n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a\n code letter. No reply. He tried another.", "Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound ... and turned in time to duck\n the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and\n fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm\n embrace.\n\n\n \"Nice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?\"\n\n\n \"The lout hid there by the storage bin,\" rumbled Whonk. The captive\n youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace.\n\n\n \"Hang onto him,\" said Retief. \"He looks like the biting kind.\"\n\n\n \"No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength.\"\n\n\n \"Ask him where the titanite is tucked away.\"\n\n\n \"Speak, witless grub,\" growled Whonk, \"lest I tweak you in twain.\"", "\"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was\n unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved\n awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n\n\n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n\n\n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a\n foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw\n his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell\n heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other\n Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied.\n The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another\n vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car,\n tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.", "The Fustian looked at him, beady-eyed. \"It is the\nLament of\n Hatching\n,\" he said; \"our National Dirge.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said Magnan. \"How interesting. Such a pleasing balance of\n instruments—\"\n\n\n \"It is a droon solo,\" said the Fustian, eyeing the Terrestrial\n Ambassador suspiciously.\n\n\n \"Why don't you just admit you can't hear it,\" Retief whispered loudly.\n \"And if I may interrupt a moment—\"\n\n\n Magnan cleared his throat. \"Now that our Mr. Retief has arrived,\n perhaps we could rush right along to the Sponsorship ceremonies.\"\n\n\n \"This group,\" said Retief, leaning across Magnan, \"the SCARS. How much\n do you know about them, Mr. Minister?\"", "\"Well,\" murmured Magnan, glancing down at Retief, \"I'm gratified to\n see you entering into the spirit of the event at last.\" He turned his\n attention back to the assembled guests. \"If our honored guest will join\n me on the rostrum...?\" he said. \"The gentlemen of the press may want to\n catch a few shots of the presentation.\"\n\n\n Magnan stepped up on the low platform at the center of the wide room,\n took his place beside the robed Fustian youth and beamed at the cameras.\n\n\n \"How gratifying it is to take this opportunity to express once more the\n great pleasure we have in sponsoring SCARS,\" he said, talking slowly\n for the benefit of the scribbling reporters. \"We'd like to think that\n in our modest way we're to be a part of all that the SCARS achieve\n during the years ahead.\"", "Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it\n into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away.\n The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered ... then flopped on his chest.\n\n\n Slowly he got to his feet.\n\n\n \"My name is Whonk, fleet one,\" he said. \"My cows are yours.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right\n now, let's get out of here.\"\n\n\n Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp,\n bulldozed them aside. \"Slow am I to anger,\" he said, \"but implacable in\n my wrath. Slock, beware!\"", "Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low\n steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the\n newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n\n\n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth.\n Slock stared at him, drew back.\n\n\n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk\n told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember?\n It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're\n building.\"\nIV\n\n\n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief—and choked off in mid-cry as\n the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear\n of the floor.", "\"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried\n to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n\n\n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old.\n But I thought—\"\n\n\n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks\n are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the\n carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n\n\n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us\n and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n\n\n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n\n\n Three youths came from behind the sheds.", "Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians.\n They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief\n whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed\n it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on\n Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the\nMoss Rock\nas Whonk\n took him in full charge.\n\n\n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian\n on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed\n hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.", "\"The Ministry's overdue for a purge,\" snapped Retief. He turned back\n to Slock. \"I wonder if you were in on the little diversion that was\n planned for today. When the\nMoss Rock\nblew, a variety of clues were\n to be planted where they'd be easy to find ... with SCARS written all\n over them. The Groaci would thus have neatly laid the whole affair\n squarely at the door of the Terrestrial Embassy ... whose sponsorship\n of the SCARS had received plenty of publicity.\"\n\n\n \"The\nMoss Rock\n?\" said Magnan. \"But that was—Retief! This is idiotic.\n Slock himself was scheduled to go on a cruise tomorrow!\"\n\n\n Slock roared suddenly, twisting violently. Whonk teetered, his grip\n loosened ... and Slock pulled free and was off the platform, butting\n his way through the milling oldsters on the dining room floor. Magnan\n watched, open-mouthed." ], [ "The youth gurgled.\n\n\n \"Better let up before you make a mess of him,\" said Retief. Whonk\n lifted the Youth clear of the floor, then flung him down with a thump\n that made the ground quiver. The younger Fustian glared up at the\n elder, mouth snapping.\n\n\n \"This one was among those who trussed me and hid me away for the\n killing,\" said Whonk. \"In his repentance he will tell all to his elder.\"\n\n\n \"That's the same young squirt that tried to strike up an acquaintance\n with me on the bus,\" Retief said. \"He gets around.\"\n\n\n The youth scrambled to hands and knees, scuttled for freedom. Retief\n planted a foot on his dragging cloak; it ripped free. He stared at the\n bare back of the Fustian—", "Retief leaned on his club, breathing hard. \"Tough heads these kids\n have got. I'm tempted to chase those two lads down, but I've got\n another errand to run. I don't know who the Groaci intended to blast,\n but I have a sneaking suspicion somebody of importance was scheduled\n for a boat ride in the next few hours. And three drums of titanite is\n enough to vaporize this tub and everyone aboard her.\"\n\n\n \"The plot is foiled,\" said Whonk. \"But what reason did they have?\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci are behind it. I have an idea the SCARS didn't know about\n this gambit.\"\n\n\n \"Which of these is the leader?\" asked Whonk. He prodded a fallen Youth\n with a horny toe. \"Arise, dreaming one.\"", "Whonk let out a whistling roar and charged for the immature Fustians.\n They fanned out ... and one tripped, sprawled on his face. Retief\n whirled the metal bar he had thrust between the Fustian's legs, slammed\n it against the skull of another, who shook his head, turned on\n Retief ... and bounced off the steel hull of the\nMoss Rock\nas Whonk\n took him in full charge.\n\n\n Retief used the bar on another head. His third blow laid the Fustian\n on the pavement, oozing purple. The other two club members departed\n hastily, seriously dented but still mobile.", "\"By the Great Egg!\" Whonk exclaimed, tripping the refugee as he tried\n to rise. \"This is no Youth! His carapace has been taken from him!\"\n\n\n Retief looked at the scarred back. \"I thought he looked a little old.\n But I thought—\"\n\n\n \"This is not possible,\" Whonk said wonderingly. \"The great nerve trunks\n are deeply involved. Not even the cleverest surgeon could excise the\n carapace and leave the patient living.\"\n\n\n \"It looks like somebody did the trick. But let's take this boy with us\n and get out of here. His folks may come home.\"\n\n\n \"Too late,\" said Whonk. Retief turned.\n\n\n Three youths came from behind the sheds.", "\"Hold it,\" said Retief suddenly. He sniffed. \"What's that odor?\" He\n flashed the light around, played it over a dry stain on the floor. He\n knelt, sniffed at the spot.\n\n\n \"What kind of cargo was stacked here, Whonk? And where is it now?\"\n\n\n Whonk considered. \"There were drums,\" he said. \"Four of them, quite\n small, painted an evil green, the property of the Soft Ones, the\n Groaci. They lay here a day and a night. At full dark of the first\n period they came with stevedores and loaded them aboard the barge\nMoss\n Rock\n.\"\n\n\n \"The VIP boat. Who's scheduled to use it?\"\n\n\n \"I know not. But what matters this? Let us discuss cargo movements\n after I have settled a score with certain Youths.\"", "\"There are certain films,\" the lead Fustian muttered. His voice was\n unusually deep for a Youth. He was wrapped in a heavy cloak and moved\n awkwardly. His adolescence was nearly at an end, Retief guessed.\n\n\n \"I told you once,\" said Retief. \"Don't crowd me.\"\n\n\n The two stepped close, slit mouths snapping in anger. Retief put out a\n foot, hooked it behind the scaly leg of the overaged juvenile and threw\n his weight against the cloaked chest. The clumsy Fustian tottered, fell\n heavily. Retief was past him and off the flat-car before the other\n Youth had completed his vain lunge toward the spot Retief had occupied.\n The Terrestrial waved cheerfully at the pair, hopped aboard another\n vehicle, watched his would-be assailants lumber down from their car,\n tiny heads twisted to follow his retreating figure.", "Magnan paused as a huge Fustian elder heaved his bulk up the two low\n steps to the rostrum, approached the guest of honor. He watched as the\n newcomer paused behind Slock, who did not see the new arrival.\n\n\n Retief pushed through the crowd, stepped up to face the Fustian youth.\n Slock stared at him, drew back.\n\n\n \"You know me, Slock,\" said Retief loudly. \"An old fellow named Whonk\n told you about me, just before you tried to saw his head off, remember?\n It was when I came out to take a look at that battle cruiser you're\n building.\"\nIV\n\n\n With a bellow Slock reached for Retief—and choked off in mid-cry as\n the Fustian elder, Whonk, pinioned him from behind, lifting him clear\n of the floor.", "Back on the ramp Retief heard a sound ... and turned in time to duck\n the charge of a hulking Fustian youth who thundered past him and\n fetched up against the broad chest of Whonk, who locked him in a warm\n embrace.\n\n\n \"Nice catch, Whonk. Where'd he sneak out of?\"\n\n\n \"The lout hid there by the storage bin,\" rumbled Whonk. The captive\n youth thumped fists and toes fruitlessly against the oldster's carapace.\n\n\n \"Hang onto him,\" said Retief. \"He looks like the biting kind.\"\n\n\n \"No fear. Clumsy I am, yet not without strength.\"\n\n\n \"Ask him where the titanite is tucked away.\"\n\n\n \"Speak, witless grub,\" growled Whonk, \"lest I tweak you in twain.\"", "\"The Fustians are a long-lived people,\" Magnan snapped. \"These matters\n are relative. At seventy-five, a male Fustian is at a trying age—\"\n\n\n \"That's right. He'll try anything—in the hope it will maim somebody.\"\n\n\n \"Precisely the problem,\" Magnan said. \"But the Youth Movement is\n the important news in today's political situation here on Fust. And\n sponsorship of Youth groups is a shrewd stroke on the part of the\n Terrestrial Embassy. At my suggestion, well nigh every member of the\n mission has leaped at the opportunity to score a few p—that is, cement\n relations with this emergent power group—the leaders of the future.\n You, Retief, as Councillor, are the outstanding exception.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not convinced these hoodlums need my help in organizing their\n rumbles,\" Retief said. \"Now, if you have a proposal for a pest control\n group—\"", "\"Well,\" Retief said. \"It looks like the SCARS are out in force tonight.\n Where's your pal?\" he said to the advancing trio. \"The sticky little\n bird with the eye-stalks? Back at his Embassy, leaving you suckers\n holding the bag, I'll bet.\"\n\n\n \"Shelter behind me, Retief,\" said Whonk.\n\n\n \"Go get 'em, old-timer.\" Retief stooped, picked up one of the pry-bars.\n \"I'll jump around and distract them.\"", "\"You'd not find a tender spot on that lout yonder,\" the minister\n said, pointing with a fork at a newly arrived Youth, \"if you drilled\n boreholes and blasted.\"\n\"Why, that's our guest of honor,\" said Magnan, \"a fine young fellow!\n Slop I believe his name is.\"\n\n\n \"Slock,\" said Retief. \"Eight feet of armor-plated orneriness. And—\"\n\n\n Magnan rose and tapped on his glass. The Fustians winced at the, to\n them, supersonic vibrations. They looked at each other muttering.\n Magnan tapped louder. The Minister drew in his head, eyes closed. Some\n of the Fustians rose, tottered for the doors; the noise level rose.\n Magnan redoubled his efforts. The glass broke with a clatter and green\n wine gushed on the tablecloth.\n\n\n \"What in the name of the Great Egg!\" the Minister muttered. He blinked,\n breathing deeply.", "Retief found the hoist where the Fustian directed him, maneuvered it\n into position, hooked onto the edge of the carapace and hauled away.\n The immense Fustian rose slowly, teetered ... then flopped on his chest.\n\n\n Slowly he got to his feet.\n\n\n \"My name is Whonk, fleet one,\" he said. \"My cows are yours.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks. I'm Retief. I'd like to meet the girls some time. But right\n now, let's get out of here.\"\n\n\n Whonk leaned his bulk against the ponderous stacks of baled kelp,\n bulldozed them aside. \"Slow am I to anger,\" he said, \"but implacable in\n my wrath. Slock, beware!\"", "Retief pocketed the camera, glanced out the window. A pale-featured\n Groaci with an ornately decorated crest stood with the youths, who eyed\n the hut, then started toward it.\n\n\n \"That's the military attache of the Groaci Embassy,\" Retief said. \"I\n wonder what he and the boys are cooking up together?\"\n\n\n \"Naught that augurs well for the dignity of Fust,\" the oldster rumbled.\n \"Flee, agile one, while I engage their attentions.\"\n\n\n \"I was just leaving,\" Retief said. \"Which way out?\"\n\n\n \"The rear door,\" the Fustian gestured with a stubby member. \"Rest well,\n stranger on these shores.\" He moved to the entrance.\n\n\n \"Same to you, pop,\" said Retief. \"And thanks.\"", "\"The Groaci were playing a double game, as usual,\" Retief said. \"They\n intended to dispose of this fellow Slock, once he'd served their\n purpose.\"\n\n\n \"Well, don't stand there,\" yelped Magnan over the uproar. \"If Slock is\n the ring-leader of a delinquent gang...!\" He moved to give chase.\n\n\n Retief grabbed his arm. \"Don't jump down there! You'd have as much\n chance of getting through as a jack-rabbit through a threshing contest.\"\n\n\n Ten minutes later the crowd had thinned slightly. \"We can get through\n now,\" Whonk called. \"This way.\" He lowered himself to the floor, bulled\n through to the exit. Flashbulbs popped. Retief and Magnan followed in\n Whonk's wake.\n\n\n In the lounge Retief grabbed the phone, waited for the operator, gave a\n code letter. No reply. He tried another.", "The youth worked his jaws and rocked his head from side to side in the\n Fusty gesture of uncertainty. \"There is nothing to conceal,\" he said.\n \"We merely construct a passenger liner.\"\n\n\n \"Then you don't mind if I look over the drawings,\" said Retief. \"Who\n knows? Maybe some day I'll want to reserve a suite for the trip out.\"\n\n\n The youth turned and disappeared. Retief grinned at the oldster. \"Went\n for his big brother, I guess,\" he said. \"I have a feeling I won't get\n to study these in peace here. Mind if I copy them?\"\n\n\n \"Willingly, light-footed one,\" said the old Fustian. \"And mine is the\n shame for the discourtesy of youth.\"\n\n\n Retief took out a tiny camera, flipped a copying lens in place, leafed\n through the drawings, clicking the shutter.", "Outside he flagged a lumbering bus. He stationed himself in a corner\n and watched the yellow sun, Beta, rise rapidly above the low skyline.\n The nearby sea was at high tide now, under the pull of the major sun\n and the three moons, and the stiff breeze carried a mist of salt spray.\n\n\n Retief turned up his collar against the dampness. In half an hour he\n would be perspiring under the vertical rays of a third-noon sun, but\n the thought failed to keep the chill off.\n\n\n Two Youths clambered up on the platform, moving purposefully toward\n Retief. He moved off the rail, watching them, weight balanced.\n\n\n \"That's close enough, kids,\" he said. \"Plenty of room on this scow. No\n need to crowd up.\"", "Magnan shuddered. \"Please—never mention the idea to a Fustian.\"\n\n\n Retief stood. \"My own program for the day includes going over to the\n dockyards. There are some features of this new passenger liner the\n Fustians are putting together that I want to look into. With your\n permission, Mr. Ambassador...?\"\n\n\n Magnan snorted. \"Your pre-occupation with the trivial disturbs me,\n Retief. More interest in substantive matters—such as working with\n Youth groups—would create a far better impression.\"\n\n\n \"Before getting too involved with these groups, it might be a good idea\n to find out a little more about them,\" said Retief. \"Who organizes\n them? There are three strong political parties here on Fust. What's the\n alignment of this SCARS organization?\"\n\n\n \"You forget, these are merely teenagers, so to speak,\" Magnan said.\n \"Politics mean nothing to them ... yet.\"", "\"What does the naked-back here?\" barked a deep voice behind Retief. He\n turned. A heavy-faced Fustian youth, wrapped in a mantle, stood at the\n open door. Beady yellow eyes set among fine scales bored into Retief.\n\n\n \"I came to take a look at your new liner,\" said Retief.\n\n\n \"We need no prying foreigners here,\" the youth snapped. His eye fell on\n the drawings. He hissed in sudden anger.\n\n\n \"Doddering hulk!\" he snapped at the ancient. \"May you toss in\n nightmares! Put by the plans!\"\n\n\n \"My mistake,\" Retief said. \"I didn't know this was a secret project.\"\nThe youth hesitated. \"It is not a secret project,\" he muttered. \"Why\n should it be secret?\"\n\n\n \"You tell me.\"", "\"Nothing at all,\" the huge Fustian elder rumbled. \"For my taste, all\n Youths should be kept penned with the livestock until they grow a\n carapace to tame their irresponsibility.\"\n\n\n \"We mustn't lose sight of the importance of channeling youthful\n energies,\" said Magnan.\n\n\n \"Labor gangs,\" said the minister. \"In my youth we were indentured to\n the dredge-masters. I myself drew a muck sledge.\"\n\n\n \"But in these modern times,\" put in Magnan, \"surely it's incumbent on\n us to make happy these golden hours.\"\n\n\n The minister snorted. \"Last week I had a golden hour. They set upon me\n and pelted me with overripe stench-fruit.\"\n\n\n \"But this was merely a manifestation of normal youthful frustrations,\"\n cried Magnan. \"Their essential tenderness—\"", "Retief put the beam of the light on the leathery neck. A great smear of\n thick purplish blood welled from a ragged cut. The oldster chuckled, a\n sound like a seal coughing.\n\n\n \"Traitor, they called me. For long they sawed at me—in vain. Then\n they trussed me and dumped me here. They think to return with weapons\n to complete the task.\"\n\n\n \"Weapons? I thought it was illegal!\"\n\n\n \"Their evil genius, the Soft One,\" said the Fustian. \"He would provide\n fuel to the Devil himself.\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci again,\" said Retief. \"I wonder what their angle is.\"\n\n\n \"And I must confess, I told them of you, ere I knew their full\n intentions. Much can I tell you of their doings. But first, I pray, the\n block and tackle.\"" ] ]
test	61412	[ "How do the dynamics of the silth couple differ from conventional couples in today's time?", "How many of the species remain in existence?", "Arnek knows that he would have died many years ago had it not been for", "What do the humans remind Arnek of?", "What effect does the human weapon have on the silths?", "What makes Ptarra realize that they can use the humans as their hosts?", "Why is Ptarra also hopeful for the pair if they can take the humans over to be their hosts?", "What are the silths afraid will happen if the humans catch them during their hibernation period prior to entering their bodies?", "What is the tragic mistake that the silth pair make in regards to their new hosts?" ]	[ [ "The male is expected to tend to the offspring.", "The female is expected to be the hunter/gatherer for the group.", "The male is extra aggressive to the point where the female is often injured during their daily routine.", "The female is the dominate of the pair, and the male is expected to follow her lead." ], [ "400", "2", "3", "8,000" ], [ "the guidance of their leader.", "his love of his offspring.", "his lack of ability to give up when things seem lost.", "the guidance of his mate." ], [ "The love he has for his offspring.", "The love he has for his mate.", "Pets he once had.", "Enemies of his past." ], [ "It blinds one of them.", "They do not have weapons.", "It kills one of them.", "It does nothing to them rather than cause a minor annoyance." ], [ "Humans are the right size to be their host.", "The humans telepathically communicate with her that they welcome them into their bodies.", "She realizes that the human body is filled with the fibers they need in order to exist.", "She realizes that they were supposed to be in human form all along." ], [ "She is hopeful that they will be able to adopt human compassion into their lifestyle.", "She believes that they will be able to mate and rebuild their race with the humans as hosts.", "He is simply looking forward to being in a smaller form.", "She is hopeful that they will be able to inherit human intellect." ], [ "They are afraid that the humans will use their weapons to kill them in their vulnerable position.", "He is afraid them humans will leave to go back to Earth.", "They are afraid that the humans will expel them from their bodies.", "He is afraid that the humans will allow them to starve." ], [ "They enter two male bodies.", "They miss the entry ports into the bodies.", "They enter two female bodies.", "They enter two dead bodies." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "Inside the silth, the two-pound network of converted nerve cells that\n was Arnek brooded darkly in self-pity and resentment against the\n inflexible female logic of his mate. Ptarra had won her point, as she\n always did; now she might at least have shown some consideration for\n him and his silth!\n\n\n \"Arnek!\" The call came sharply on one of the guard frequencies of the\n mental spectrum. \"Arnek, stop lagging and get up here!\"\n\n\n He could feel his nerve body tense from horn tip to tail root, but he\n stifled his response and quickened his pace. Ahead, the trail left by\n Ptarra's legs led through a gully and up a rise to the lip of a small,\n stony basin. The four hundred tons of Ptarra's female silth squatted\n below the edge and the great head was half hidden as it peered downward\n around a boulder.", "A hundred of the marvelously adapted silths of their universe had\n survived the eons of suspended animation to preserve their occupants.\n And then had come the hunt for new silth forms, since the trip had aged\n the others beyond the power of reproduction, in spite of all their\n precautions.\n\n\n Finding a silth form was never easy. There had been only three animals\n that had served in their entire old galaxy. Only a creature with\n several pounds of nerve tissues could hold the nuclear proteins of the\n sentient annas. And that required huge creatures, since nerve tissue\n was always so thinly scattered in normal flesh.\n\n\n They had toured a quadrant of the new galaxy, studying planet after\n planet, before they found this world. Here the great beasts were\n barely sufficiently endowed with nerve fiber. Eight annas had survived\n this far. Six failed to stand the shock of entry and regrowth in the\n new silth forms. Now there was only the one pair—Arnek and Ptarra.", "He could not yet control it, but it had no independent will.\n\n\n \"There is food and water near if we have to rouse from hibernation\n while we grow into these silths,\" Ptarra reported. \"Now—help me if you\n can.\"\n\n\n Arnek let his weak thoughts blend into hers, trying to give strength as\n she had often done to him. She was straining her utmost will.\n\n\n Slowly and in jerks, the arm moved across the control board, and clumsy\n fingers managed to move controls. And at last, from Ptarra's mind,\n Arnek began to see the plan.", "For a moment, she was silent. Then there was a mental shrug, and almost\n amusement as she answered. \"Matching sex isn't logically necessary.\n It might even be an interesting amusement. But I must have the larger\n body.\"\n\n\n She began shifting at once. The silth gasped and tried to thresh about\n in death as Ptarra released control. Arnek sighed to himself and began\n to follow.\n\n\n It was worse than he remembered. After the centuries, the cells hated\n to give up their fixed form. The agony of the silth fed back to him,\n until his withdrawal stopped its heart. But slowly the nuclear matter\n flowed from the cells and up the pathways to their egress, taking the\n minimum of nutrient fluid with them.\n\n\n It took nearly an hour, and he could see the thin film of Ptarra\n already lying over the sleeping human.", "\"Logic!\" Arnek thought softly, and there was wonder at a mind\n like Ptarra's that could achieve such understanding of even alien\n mechanisms. Yet under it there was still a cold knot of fear along his\n nerves.\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts had begun to fade from the strain and the long\n interruption to her hibernation. But now she caught momentary control\n again. There was appreciation in them for his praise. And then there\n was amusement. \"Logic,\" she agreed. \"But perhaps intuition isn't too\n bad for a male. You've been right twice.\"\n\n\n \"Twice?\" Arnek asked. He'd been somehow right that the silths\n controlled their own ships, of course. But....\n\n\n \"Twice,\" Ptarra said. \"I've just realized my silth is a male, as you\n suggested it might be. Amusing, reversing the sexes, isn't it?\"", "Left to himself, Arnek would have perished long ago. Their hope of\n retraining the clumsy forelegs of the silth forms had proved futile,\n and the nerve capacity was too low for them to exercise their full\n faculties. The converted nuclei of the cells was never quite efficient,\n either. And there seemed no hope of ever reproducing their own.\n Certainly no newly budded anna could survive the metamorphosis into\n these awkward bodies; that had been almost impossible for mature\n powers. Nor could a young anna survive long without a silth.\n\n\n Four hundred years! And now—now, he thought, he was tired. It no\n longer mattered. His home lay in ruins eons away. Let Ptarra worry\n about it. He twisted his neck back to put his snout under his tail and\n tried to sleep, while hunger rumbled noisily in his stomach.", "Ptarra grunted. \"Sometimes,\" she admitted, \"you almost think like a\n female. They would kill us, of course, if we stupidly stayed where\n later arrivals could find us. Now come on. We've got to chase the\n creatures around today until they're tired enough to sleep soundly. And\n don't let them get near that ship, either!\"\nIt was a bitter day for Arnek. His stomach protested, and by the end of\n the chase, his legs were beginning to weaken. But ahead of them, the\n two humans were staggering in the light of the setting sun. The smaller\n was leaning on the larger as they finally found and entered the little\n cave near the ship that Ptarra had chosen for them long before.\n\n\n Night had fallen before Ptarra was satisfied. The two silths moved\n forward as softly as they could, but the loud breathing noises went on,\n and there was no stir of alarm anywhere on the mental band.", "She tried to say something else, but the strain was too much, and full\n hibernation swept her mind away from that of Arnek.\n\n\n Arnek sat frozen for a time in his silth, knowing that it was also male.\n\n\n Then he turned it somehow to face the lost galaxy where his race had\n known its day and now entered its eternal night.", "This time Ptarra showed no amusement. Her great head shook in\n puzzlement. \"About one time in ten thousand a crazy male hunch comes\n true,\" she muttered. \"Intuition! It's against all logic. But there are\n only manual controls here. Where\nare\nthose silly creatures?\"\n\n\n The two that had arrived last were pitifully exposed, just within an\n opening in the rocks. It was a shallow space, hopeless to defend. The\n smaller one lay supine, but the larger human faced the two silths,\n holding his pitiful weapon, and waited grimly until they were almost\n within reach. This time the explosive pellets were aimed for their eyes.\n\n\n Ptarra dropped her eyelids, swearing as the missiles stung. She reached\n in with a short foreleg. There was a single shrill cry and the sound of\n the weapon striking against a rock; the low band was suddenly quiet.\n Arnek heard a soft gulp. When he looked, the larger human was gone.", "He began hurrying now, remembering her warning that the humans would\n not stay here once they wakened to find the two abandoned silths dead.\n He forced himself over the hateful dryness of the floor, up to the\n open mouth. Beyond lay the lungs, the circulatory system, and then the\n strange nerve bundle in the skull.\n\n\n Some of it was ugly, and some was hard. But the last stage was almost\n pleasant. He had forgotten how unsatisfactory the nerves of the last\n silth had been. These were like coming home to a friendly world, in a\n universe that had died too long ago and far away. For a time, he was\n almost glad that he had not died with it.\n\n\n Then the first allergic reactions began, and he had to relapse into\n instinct, to let his being fight to save both himself and his host\n cells from the reaction.", "There was no answer to such logic, other than the vague discontent\n Arnek felt. And he knew that was only because of his envy of the\n greater ability of the other sex. He settled back, ruminating hungrily\n and listening to the signal from space.\n\n\n The little box from the wreck was silent now, but the other signals\n were stronger.\n\n\n Ptarra nodded. \"They're coming. After four hundred years, we have\n a chance. New silths to breed. A chance to reproduce ourselves and\n multiply. A new universe for our own.\" There was immense satisfaction\n with self in her thoughts. \"Well, I earned it!\"\nArnek could not deny it. It had been more than four hundred years in\n this galaxy. Eight thousand of them had set out, leaving behind a\n small, ancient universe being wrecked by the horror of an exploding\n supernova. They had been driven out from the planetary conquests of a\n billion years and had sought refuge across intergalactic space to this\n universe.", "The words brought stirrings strongly on the low band, almost but not\n quite understandably. They also brought a vocal reply from the other\n human. \"Be glad you can twitch. Some bug we picked up, but it's better\n than being eaten. We're in the clover, kid. Maybe we still got more cop\n ships tailing us, but let 'em look. When they find the dinosaurs and\n what's left of our ship, they'll stop looking. The heat's going to be\n off! We can get back to Earth in a year or so and really live.\"\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts cut through Arnek's efforts to understand.\n \"Reproduction feelings,\" she reported in satisfaction. \"They must have\n higher fertility than I hoped if they can think of it while sick.\" Then\n her thoughts sharpened. \"Take over your silth!\"\n\n\n The human at the board slumped abruptly. Arnek lashed out from the\n converted cells, felt a brief protest, and then was alone in the brain\n of the silth.", "Arnek sighed, and his stomach rumbled a protest. But he ignored it.\n \"What good is it? We surely can't make a silth out of a tiny thing like\n that?\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Contempt for male thought was mixed with smug satisfaction\n for her own. \"We don't use the other cells anyhow. Oh, there will be\n difficulties. They may be short-lived. But with such high grade fiber,\n we can risk infiltrating a new one as often as we need. There should\n be enough of them. They probably have half a dozen to a litter twice\n a year, like most small forms. Possibly billions of them can live on\n a single planet. And since they're colonizing other worlds like this\n one....\"", "Dim pain impulses stirred in the low mental background. Anger—or\n something like it—came from the other creature.\n\n\n Arnek braked and pivoted sharply. The larger human had run forward\n toward the bloodied smaller figure. But as the silth's head faced\n the creature, one of the human's arms darted to something strapped\n about its middle. There was a surprising blast of sound. A stream of\n tiny, exploding pellets struck against Arnek's snout. He bellowed in\n annoyance and took a step forward, lifting a foreleg to swat at the\n midge.\n\n\n It jerked back. Then it darted forward, bending to lift its companion\n in its forelimbs. Either the gravity here was less than on its home\n world, or the thing was stronger than it looked. The first leap sent\n the burdened human backwards more than twenty feet. Then it was\n bounding off in frantic efforts to reach the further side of the\n depression where a jumble of rocks might give it cover.", "\"Do you remember everything?\" Ptarra asked. \"You've got to regain\n consciousness after the first stage. You can do that, if you set your\n mind to it.\"\n\n\n \"I remember,\" Arnek agreed wearily. He'd had the whole routine drilled\n into him repeatedly until he was sick of it. It was like the horror of\n having her force him to adapt to this present silth. While he had been\n ready to accept assimilation, she had fought with him and with her own\n transformation, refusing to admit even his intuition that their race\n was ended. Only her cold logic had saved them. He could not deny it now.\n\n\n \"Be sure you take the smaller male body,\" she warned again.\n\n\n \"Unless that's the female. You found evolution different in these\n creatures once,\" he reminded her.", "THE COURSE OF LOGIC\nBY LESTER DEL REY\nThey made one little mistake—very\n\n natural—and disastrous!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe male silth plodded forward wearily at sixty miles an hour, pausing\n only long enough to uproot and wolf down one of the rare scrub trees\n directly in its path. Its three hundred tons of massive body shook\n the ground as the great hind legs thumped along, and every cell of it\n ached with hunger. It was warm blooded, despite its vaguely reptilian\n appearance. Only meat could satisfy its need for energy. But the great\n herds lay a thousand miles to the north of this barren land.", "\"It's about time,\" Ptarra's thoughts reached him. They were weak now,\n since it was hard to transmit in a partial stage, but they were cold\n and sure. \"I've been aware for hours, while the silths reached the ship\n and took off. We've been off planet for at least an hour. Long enough\n to study their body controls and to learn how the ship operates.\"\n\n\n Arnek sighed to himself, while the pressure of tension refused to\n leave. \"Are you sure?\"\n\n\n \"Of course I'm sure! These are primitive machines, and I learned most\n of it from dismantling the first. They're primitive—but they're\n logical enough for understanding. I can even control the silth when she\n isn't aware.\"\n\n\n The larger human suddenly moved the controls, then jerked its hand\n back, staring at it. Words came to the ears of the silth in which Arnek\n rode. \"I'm sick, Luke. I've got the twitches.\"", "There was fuel enough to bring them at maximum speed across an eddy\n of the galaxy toward the lone sun they had found long before. There\n a single planet swung in orbit—a planet with food but no dangerous\n animal life. And there they could wait and grow strong, and multiply\n as their silths multiplied. They could reach it almost as soon as they\n came out of hibernation finally, and it would be a safe haven in its\n isolation.\n\n\n There would be no fuel for further travel. But that could wait, while\n their numbers grew, and they could restore their lost technology and\n weapons with the clever hands of the human silths. Then they could take\n over the galaxy—as they had taken the one so long away!\n\n\n The hands fumbled under the limited control, but they moved across the\n board. And the automatic pilot was finally set and sealed.", "He strained to follow the faint wash of impressions on the lower band.\n There was something there that struck a familiar chord in his thoughts,\n but he could not decode it.\n\n\n \"Just instinct,\" Ptarra dismissed it with cool logic. \"A female seeking\n food for its injured mate.\"\n\n\n Arnek sighed uncomfortably. \"It doesn't seem female,\" he objected.\n\n\n \"Another hunch? Don't be silly, Arnek. It has to be a female. The\n larger, stronger and more intelligent form is always female. How else\n could it care for the young? It needs ability for a whole family, while\n the male needs only enough for himself. The laws of evolution are\n logical or we wouldn't have evolved at all.\"", "Arnek tested the three spectra uneasily. At this distance, even a tight\n beam should be detectable. But he could feel nothing. There was only\n the steady wash of inertia-gravitic wavules, the electromagnetic noise\n from the sun and the growing, contemptuous mental leakage from Ptarra.\n Then he squirmed in embarrassment as his eyes detected the cracked base\n of the little ship.\n\n\n Obviously, it had landed hard—probably hard enough to ruin instruments\n and release the two creatures. He should have noticed that at once.\n\n\n There was no time to admit his error, however. Ptarra's silth lunged\n upright and the great rear legs began pulping ground and rocks in a\n full charge. Arnek leaped to follow out of old hunting habit. On a\n down-grade, his lighter silth soon caught up with the other." ], [ "A hundred of the marvelously adapted silths of their universe had\n survived the eons of suspended animation to preserve their occupants.\n And then had come the hunt for new silth forms, since the trip had aged\n the others beyond the power of reproduction, in spite of all their\n precautions.\n\n\n Finding a silth form was never easy. There had been only three animals\n that had served in their entire old galaxy. Only a creature with\n several pounds of nerve tissues could hold the nuclear proteins of the\n sentient annas. And that required huge creatures, since nerve tissue\n was always so thinly scattered in normal flesh.\n\n\n They had toured a quadrant of the new galaxy, studying planet after\n planet, before they found this world. Here the great beasts were\n barely sufficiently endowed with nerve fiber. Eight annas had survived\n this far. Six failed to stand the shock of entry and regrowth in the\n new silth forms. Now there was only the one pair—Arnek and Ptarra.", "She was lunging to her feet, just as an opening appeared in the ship.\n This time something ran out, down the ramp—a tiny gadget of churning\n tracks and metal carapace, chuffing out shrill little motor sounds. It\n circled briefly and then headed across the bowl.\n\n\n \"Stop it,\" Ptarra ordered. \"It may have a camera, so don't waste time.\n The less the builders learn about us, the better.\"\n\n\n Arnek took off. His hunger had so far failed to weaken him, and he was\n covering the ground at two hundred miles an hour before the little\n vehicle had picked up a tenth of that speed.", "Left to himself, Arnek would have perished long ago. Their hope of\n retraining the clumsy forelegs of the silth forms had proved futile,\n and the nerve capacity was too low for them to exercise their full\n faculties. The converted nuclei of the cells was never quite efficient,\n either. And there seemed no hope of ever reproducing their own.\n Certainly no newly budded anna could survive the metamorphosis into\n these awkward bodies; that had been almost impossible for mature\n powers. Nor could a young anna survive long without a silth.\n\n\n Four hundred years! And now—now, he thought, he was tired. It no\n longer mattered. His home lay in ruins eons away. Let Ptarra worry\n about it. He twisted his neck back to put his snout under his tail and\n tried to sleep, while hunger rumbled noisily in his stomach.", "Below, the two humans swung around at the earth-shaking thunder of\n the charge and started a frantic scrambling. They were making shrill\n sounds now, and the extreme low band of the mental spectrum held faint\n impulses.\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts lashed against his nerves. \"Cut them off! Don't let\n them back to the probe. They may have destruct conditioning.\"\n\n\n In the hunt, Arnek had long since become only an extension of his\n dominant mate. Now he folded his forelegs and dropped his head and neck\n into a javelin aimed between humans and ships. The smaller of the two\n was almost at the ramp.\n\n\n At the last moment, moved by a sudden impulse, Arnek dropped his head\n lower and retracted his neck to soften the blow. He felt the human\n midge strike against his snout and go caromming off, to land fifty feet\n away.", "At the last moment, it seemed to be aware of him. There was a wash of\n mental shock and confusion. Then his snout hit the car in a sideswipe\n that tossed it fifty feet to land on its back. He lumbered forward to\n squash it, then hesitated. An opening had appeared and two of the tiny\n humans were staggering out. One was supporting the other. At sight of\n him, both stopped in shock. For a second, they stood rooted to the\n ground. Then the larger one began a clumsy effort at running, half\n carrying the other. Blood left a trail behind them.\n\n\n Arnek could have squashed them with a single thrust of his leg. But\n he stood irresolutely, observing the garments and headgear they wore,\n remembering his youth and a gulla draped with a ribbon and bells. They\n were heading for the rocks nearest them, a long way from where the\n first two had found refuge. For a second, he felt impelled to turn them\n and drive them toward the others.", "It was obviously too small to be more than a message carrier. Yet, as\n he looked more closely, he could see motion. Two tiny creatures, not\n more than six feet in height, were scurrying around near the base.\n Bright patches of fur or decoration covered them, and they seemed to\n move on two of their four limbs.\nArnek shivered down the length of his nerves with an ancient distaste\n for crawling things. \"Let's go back,\" he suggested uneasily. \"There's\n nothing here for us, and I'm hungry.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be silly,\" Ptarra answered, and the old female superiority\n was strong in the thought. \"Of course it's too small for us; I knew\n that when I saw the landing trail yesterday evening. It must be an\n instrument probe, with test animals. If it has telemetering equipment,\n though—\"", "This time Ptarra showed no amusement. Her great head shook in\n puzzlement. \"About one time in ten thousand a crazy male hunch comes\n true,\" she muttered. \"Intuition! It's against all logic. But there are\n only manual controls here. Where\nare\nthose silly creatures?\"\n\n\n The two that had arrived last were pitifully exposed, just within an\n opening in the rocks. It was a shallow space, hopeless to defend. The\n smaller one lay supine, but the larger human faced the two silths,\n holding his pitiful weapon, and waited grimly until they were almost\n within reach. This time the explosive pellets were aimed for their eyes.\n\n\n Ptarra dropped her eyelids, swearing as the missiles stung. She reached\n in with a short foreleg. There was a single shrill cry and the sound of\n the weapon striking against a rock; the low band was suddenly quiet.\n Arnek heard a soft gulp. When he looked, the larger human was gone.", "Ptarra grunted. \"Sometimes,\" she admitted, \"you almost think like a\n female. They would kill us, of course, if we stupidly stayed where\n later arrivals could find us. Now come on. We've got to chase the\n creatures around today until they're tired enough to sleep soundly. And\n don't let them get near that ship, either!\"\nIt was a bitter day for Arnek. His stomach protested, and by the end of\n the chase, his legs were beginning to weaken. But ahead of them, the\n two humans were staggering in the light of the setting sun. The smaller\n was leaning on the larger as they finally found and entered the little\n cave near the ship that Ptarra had chosen for them long before.\n\n\n Night had fallen before Ptarra was satisfied. The two silths moved\n forward as softly as they could, but the loud breathing noises went on,\n and there was no stir of alarm anywhere on the mental band.", "Arnek tested the three spectra uneasily. At this distance, even a tight\n beam should be detectable. But he could feel nothing. There was only\n the steady wash of inertia-gravitic wavules, the electromagnetic noise\n from the sun and the growing, contemptuous mental leakage from Ptarra.\n Then he squirmed in embarrassment as his eyes detected the cracked base\n of the little ship.\n\n\n Obviously, it had landed hard—probably hard enough to ruin instruments\n and release the two creatures. He should have noticed that at once.\n\n\n There was no time to admit his error, however. Ptarra's silth lunged\n upright and the great rear legs began pulping ground and rocks in a\n full charge. Arnek leaped to follow out of old hunting habit. On a\n down-grade, his lighter silth soon caught up with the other.", "A sudden shock ran through Ptarra's thoughts. Her great eyes blinked\n and a huge tongue ran over her lips. \"Nerve fiber!\" Her shout covered\n the entire spectrum. \"Arnek, there are pounds of nerve fiber in the\n creature! High grade—better than that in these silth forms. As good as\n that in any silth. Here, give me the other.\"\n\n\n She didn't wait for Arnek's help, however. She dragged the corpse out\n and began working as delicately as the silth body would permit. Her\n mental signals were a blur. Then she stopped, staring down at what she\n held. \"There—a cavity in the head, filled with nerve fibers. There\n must be three pounds there alone. What freak of evolution would put\n them all together in such a vulnerable spot? And yet, there's a certain\n efficiency about it. It isn't logical—and yet it is.\"\n\n\n Abruptly, the evidence was gone. \"Come on,\" she ordered.", "He began hurrying now, remembering her warning that the humans would\n not stay here once they wakened to find the two abandoned silths dead.\n He forced himself over the hateful dryness of the floor, up to the\n open mouth. Beyond lay the lungs, the circulatory system, and then the\n strange nerve bundle in the skull.\n\n\n Some of it was ugly, and some was hard. But the last stage was almost\n pleasant. He had forgotten how unsatisfactory the nerves of the last\n silth had been. These were like coming home to a friendly world, in a\n universe that had died too long ago and far away. For a time, he was\n almost glad that he had not died with it.\n\n\n Then the first allergic reactions began, and he had to relapse into\n instinct, to let his being fight to save both himself and his host\n cells from the reaction.", "She tried to say something else, but the strain was too much, and full\n hibernation swept her mind away from that of Arnek.\n\n\n Arnek sat frozen for a time in his silth, knowing that it was also male.\n\n\n Then he turned it somehow to face the lost galaxy where his race had\n known its day and now entered its eternal night.", "He strained to follow the faint wash of impressions on the lower band.\n There was something there that struck a familiar chord in his thoughts,\n but he could not decode it.\n\n\n \"Just instinct,\" Ptarra dismissed it with cool logic. \"A female seeking\n food for its injured mate.\"\n\n\n Arnek sighed uncomfortably. \"It doesn't seem female,\" he objected.\n\n\n \"Another hunch? Don't be silly, Arnek. It has to be a female. The\n larger, stronger and more intelligent form is always female. How else\n could it care for the young? It needs ability for a whole family, while\n the male needs only enough for himself. The laws of evolution are\n logical or we wouldn't have evolved at all.\"", "The words brought stirrings strongly on the low band, almost but not\n quite understandably. They also brought a vocal reply from the other\n human. \"Be glad you can twitch. Some bug we picked up, but it's better\n than being eaten. We're in the clover, kid. Maybe we still got more cop\n ships tailing us, but let 'em look. When they find the dinosaurs and\n what's left of our ship, they'll stop looking. The heat's going to be\n off! We can get back to Earth in a year or so and really live.\"\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts cut through Arnek's efforts to understand.\n \"Reproduction feelings,\" she reported in satisfaction. \"They must have\n higher fertility than I hoped if they can think of it while sick.\" Then\n her thoughts sharpened. \"Take over your silth!\"\n\n\n The human at the board slumped abruptly. Arnek lashed out from the\n converted cells, felt a brief protest, and then was alone in the brain\n of the silth.", "Half an hour later, there was another faint quiver of radio waves from\n space, this time completely modulated. Even Arnek could realize that\n it was on the same frequency, but dopplered to indicate something\n approaching their world. He stopped browsing for the few stunted trees\n and came back to join his mate.\n\n\n Night was just falling. Ptarra led them back toward the rock ledge from\n which they had first spied the probe. There was a large fissure in the\n rocks into which they could just squeeze, and which would hide them\n from the sight of any landing craft.\n\n\n A moon came up, and they could see the depression clearly in its light.\n Now Arnek saw the larger human slipping across the ground toward the\n wreck of the probe. It darted about frantically, but with an appearance\n of purpose. A few moments later, it was retreating, carrying a load of\n packages with it.\n\n\n \"It seems almost intelligent,\" he said softly.", "Arnek sighed, and his stomach rumbled a protest. But he ignored it.\n \"What good is it? We surely can't make a silth out of a tiny thing like\n that?\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Contempt for male thought was mixed with smug satisfaction\n for her own. \"We don't use the other cells anyhow. Oh, there will be\n difficulties. They may be short-lived. But with such high grade fiber,\n we can risk infiltrating a new one as often as we need. There should\n be enough of them. They probably have half a dozen to a litter twice\n a year, like most small forms. Possibly billions of them can live on\n a single planet. And since they're colonizing other worlds like this\n one....\"", "THE COURSE OF LOGIC\nBY LESTER DEL REY\nThey made one little mistake—very\n\n natural—and disastrous!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe male silth plodded forward wearily at sixty miles an hour, pausing\n only long enough to uproot and wolf down one of the rare scrub trees\n directly in its path. Its three hundred tons of massive body shook\n the ground as the great hind legs thumped along, and every cell of it\n ached with hunger. It was warm blooded, despite its vaguely reptilian\n appearance. Only meat could satisfy its need for energy. But the great\n herds lay a thousand miles to the north of this barren land.", "The sun was glaring down again when he awoke to the nudging of Ptarra's\n snout, and there was a roaring in the air above. Something rushed\n downwards, bellowing out thrust against gravity. It was another ship,\n landing over the wreckage of the first.\nBut it was no monster such as might have carried new and better silth\n forms. It was hardly larger than the first, though it somehow seemed\n to be better made. It landed smoothly and squatted on the ground,\n sending out signals.\n\n\n \"Another probe,\" Ptarra said. There was disappointment in her thoughts,\n quickly masked by cold logic. \"Naturally, they'd wait to check with\n something like this. There will probably be several probes before they\n decide they have to investigate personally. All right! We'll give them\n something to worry about.\"", "Inside the silth, the two-pound network of converted nerve cells that\n was Arnek brooded darkly in self-pity and resentment against the\n inflexible female logic of his mate. Ptarra had won her point, as she\n always did; now she might at least have shown some consideration for\n him and his silth!\n\n\n \"Arnek!\" The call came sharply on one of the guard frequencies of the\n mental spectrum. \"Arnek, stop lagging and get up here!\"\n\n\n He could feel his nerve body tense from horn tip to tail root, but he\n stifled his response and quickened his pace. Ahead, the trail left by\n Ptarra's legs led through a gully and up a rise to the lip of a small,\n stony basin. The four hundred tons of Ptarra's female silth squatted\n below the edge and the great head was half hidden as it peered downward\n around a boulder.", "There was fuel enough to bring them at maximum speed across an eddy\n of the galaxy toward the lone sun they had found long before. There\n a single planet swung in orbit—a planet with food but no dangerous\n animal life. And there they could wait and grow strong, and multiply\n as their silths multiplied. They could reach it almost as soon as they\n came out of hibernation finally, and it would be a safe haven in its\n isolation.\n\n\n There would be no fuel for further travel. But that could wait, while\n their numbers grew, and they could restore their lost technology and\n weapons with the clever hands of the human silths. Then they could take\n over the galaxy—as they had taken the one so long away!\n\n\n The hands fumbled under the limited control, but they moved across the\n board. And the automatic pilot was finally set and sealed." ], [ "Left to himself, Arnek would have perished long ago. Their hope of\n retraining the clumsy forelegs of the silth forms had proved futile,\n and the nerve capacity was too low for them to exercise their full\n faculties. The converted nuclei of the cells was never quite efficient,\n either. And there seemed no hope of ever reproducing their own.\n Certainly no newly budded anna could survive the metamorphosis into\n these awkward bodies; that had been almost impossible for mature\n powers. Nor could a young anna survive long without a silth.\n\n\n Four hundred years! And now—now, he thought, he was tired. It no\n longer mattered. His home lay in ruins eons away. Let Ptarra worry\n about it. He twisted his neck back to put his snout under his tail and\n tried to sleep, while hunger rumbled noisily in his stomach.", "At the last moment, it seemed to be aware of him. There was a wash of\n mental shock and confusion. Then his snout hit the car in a sideswipe\n that tossed it fifty feet to land on its back. He lumbered forward to\n squash it, then hesitated. An opening had appeared and two of the tiny\n humans were staggering out. One was supporting the other. At sight of\n him, both stopped in shock. For a second, they stood rooted to the\n ground. Then the larger one began a clumsy effort at running, half\n carrying the other. Blood left a trail behind them.\n\n\n Arnek could have squashed them with a single thrust of his leg. But\n he stood irresolutely, observing the garments and headgear they wore,\n remembering his youth and a gulla draped with a ribbon and bells. They\n were heading for the rocks nearest them, a long way from where the\n first two had found refuge. For a second, he felt impelled to turn them\n and drive them toward the others.", "Arnek tested the three spectra uneasily. At this distance, even a tight\n beam should be detectable. But he could feel nothing. There was only\n the steady wash of inertia-gravitic wavules, the electromagnetic noise\n from the sun and the growing, contemptuous mental leakage from Ptarra.\n Then he squirmed in embarrassment as his eyes detected the cracked base\n of the little ship.\n\n\n Obviously, it had landed hard—probably hard enough to ruin instruments\n and release the two creatures. He should have noticed that at once.\n\n\n There was no time to admit his error, however. Ptarra's silth lunged\n upright and the great rear legs began pulping ground and rocks in a\n full charge. Arnek leaped to follow out of old hunting habit. On a\n down-grade, his lighter silth soon caught up with the other.", "There was no answer to such logic, other than the vague discontent\n Arnek felt. And he knew that was only because of his envy of the\n greater ability of the other sex. He settled back, ruminating hungrily\n and listening to the signal from space.\n\n\n The little box from the wreck was silent now, but the other signals\n were stronger.\n\n\n Ptarra nodded. \"They're coming. After four hundred years, we have\n a chance. New silths to breed. A chance to reproduce ourselves and\n multiply. A new universe for our own.\" There was immense satisfaction\n with self in her thoughts. \"Well, I earned it!\"\nArnek could not deny it. It had been more than four hundred years in\n this galaxy. Eight thousand of them had set out, leaving behind a\n small, ancient universe being wrecked by the horror of an exploding\n supernova. They had been driven out from the planetary conquests of a\n billion years and had sought refuge across intergalactic space to this\n universe.", "She tried to say something else, but the strain was too much, and full\n hibernation swept her mind away from that of Arnek.\n\n\n Arnek sat frozen for a time in his silth, knowing that it was also male.\n\n\n Then he turned it somehow to face the lost galaxy where his race had\n known its day and now entered its eternal night.", "Dim pain impulses stirred in the low mental background. Anger—or\n something like it—came from the other creature.\n\n\n Arnek braked and pivoted sharply. The larger human had run forward\n toward the bloodied smaller figure. But as the silth's head faced\n the creature, one of the human's arms darted to something strapped\n about its middle. There was a surprising blast of sound. A stream of\n tiny, exploding pellets struck against Arnek's snout. He bellowed in\n annoyance and took a step forward, lifting a foreleg to swat at the\n midge.\n\n\n It jerked back. Then it darted forward, bending to lift its companion\n in its forelimbs. Either the gravity here was less than on its home\n world, or the thing was stronger than it looked. The first leap sent\n the burdened human backwards more than twenty feet. Then it was\n bounding off in frantic efforts to reach the further side of the\n depression where a jumble of rocks might give it cover.", "Even Arnek could see the logic behind Ptarra's assumption in that.\n Colonizing would explain the sending out of a male and female in each\n ship, with ships spread out days apart. It wasn't the most efficient\n method, but it usually insured against any major accident. His people\n had used the same method at times.\n\n\n It all seemed quite logical, but Arnek felt a tension of intuition\n along his entire nerve network. No anna had ever used a silth capable\n of independent intelligence. There must be something wrong with it.\n Once they infiltrated the new silth, of course, they could soon convert\n enough nerves to blank out all control from their carriers. But....\n\n\n \"Their weapons,\" he cried. \"Ptarra, in those bodies, we'd be vulnerable\n to their weapons. And during the ten days we have to hibernate to grow\n into their nerves, they'd kill us.\"", "Inside the silth, the two-pound network of converted nerve cells that\n was Arnek brooded darkly in self-pity and resentment against the\n inflexible female logic of his mate. Ptarra had won her point, as she\n always did; now she might at least have shown some consideration for\n him and his silth!\n\n\n \"Arnek!\" The call came sharply on one of the guard frequencies of the\n mental spectrum. \"Arnek, stop lagging and get up here!\"\n\n\n He could feel his nerve body tense from horn tip to tail root, but he\n stifled his response and quickened his pace. Ahead, the trail left by\n Ptarra's legs led through a gully and up a rise to the lip of a small,\n stony basin. The four hundred tons of Ptarra's female silth squatted\n below the edge and the great head was half hidden as it peered downward\n around a boulder.", "There was amusement in Ptarra's thoughts. \"If your hunger is so great,\n why didn't you eat them? They aren't much, of course, but the blood\n smells sweet enough.\"\n\n\n Arnek sighed along his nerves, unable to answer.\n\n\n Let Ptarra put it down to another male whim if she liked, but he hadn't\n thought of eating them before. There had been something cute and\n pathetic about them. They reminded him of the little gulla he had owned\n in his youth, in a long-lost, ruined universe.\n\n\n \"It had a weapon,\" he commented, changing the subject.", "The words brought stirrings strongly on the low band, almost but not\n quite understandably. They also brought a vocal reply from the other\n human. \"Be glad you can twitch. Some bug we picked up, but it's better\n than being eaten. We're in the clover, kid. Maybe we still got more cop\n ships tailing us, but let 'em look. When they find the dinosaurs and\n what's left of our ship, they'll stop looking. The heat's going to be\n off! We can get back to Earth in a year or so and really live.\"\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts cut through Arnek's efforts to understand.\n \"Reproduction feelings,\" she reported in satisfaction. \"They must have\n higher fertility than I hoped if they can think of it while sick.\" Then\n her thoughts sharpened. \"Take over your silth!\"\n\n\n The human at the board slumped abruptly. Arnek lashed out from the\n converted cells, felt a brief protest, and then was alone in the brain\n of the silth.", "He began hurrying now, remembering her warning that the humans would\n not stay here once they wakened to find the two abandoned silths dead.\n He forced himself over the hateful dryness of the floor, up to the\n open mouth. Beyond lay the lungs, the circulatory system, and then the\n strange nerve bundle in the skull.\n\n\n Some of it was ugly, and some was hard. But the last stage was almost\n pleasant. He had forgotten how unsatisfactory the nerves of the last\n silth had been. These were like coming home to a friendly world, in a\n universe that had died too long ago and far away. For a time, he was\n almost glad that he had not died with it.\n\n\n Then the first allergic reactions began, and he had to relapse into\n instinct, to let his being fight to save both himself and his host\n cells from the reaction.", "\"Logic!\" Arnek thought softly, and there was wonder at a mind\n like Ptarra's that could achieve such understanding of even alien\n mechanisms. Yet under it there was still a cold knot of fear along his\n nerves.\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts had begun to fade from the strain and the long\n interruption to her hibernation. But now she caught momentary control\n again. There was appreciation in them for his praise. And then there\n was amusement. \"Logic,\" she agreed. \"But perhaps intuition isn't too\n bad for a male. You've been right twice.\"\n\n\n \"Twice?\" Arnek asked. He'd been somehow right that the silths\n controlled their own ships, of course. But....\n\n\n \"Twice,\" Ptarra said. \"I've just realized my silth is a male, as you\n suggested it might be. Amusing, reversing the sexes, isn't it?\"", "A hundred of the marvelously adapted silths of their universe had\n survived the eons of suspended animation to preserve their occupants.\n And then had come the hunt for new silth forms, since the trip had aged\n the others beyond the power of reproduction, in spite of all their\n precautions.\n\n\n Finding a silth form was never easy. There had been only three animals\n that had served in their entire old galaxy. Only a creature with\n several pounds of nerve tissues could hold the nuclear proteins of the\n sentient annas. And that required huge creatures, since nerve tissue\n was always so thinly scattered in normal flesh.\n\n\n They had toured a quadrant of the new galaxy, studying planet after\n planet, before they found this world. Here the great beasts were\n barely sufficiently endowed with nerve fiber. Eight annas had survived\n this far. Six failed to stand the shock of entry and regrowth in the\n new silth forms. Now there was only the one pair—Arnek and Ptarra.", "Ptarra grunted. \"Sometimes,\" she admitted, \"you almost think like a\n female. They would kill us, of course, if we stupidly stayed where\n later arrivals could find us. Now come on. We've got to chase the\n creatures around today until they're tired enough to sleep soundly. And\n don't let them get near that ship, either!\"\nIt was a bitter day for Arnek. His stomach protested, and by the end of\n the chase, his legs were beginning to weaken. But ahead of them, the\n two humans were staggering in the light of the setting sun. The smaller\n was leaning on the larger as they finally found and entered the little\n cave near the ship that Ptarra had chosen for them long before.\n\n\n Night had fallen before Ptarra was satisfied. The two silths moved\n forward as softly as they could, but the loud breathing noises went on,\n and there was no stir of alarm anywhere on the mental band.", "She was lunging to her feet, just as an opening appeared in the ship.\n This time something ran out, down the ramp—a tiny gadget of churning\n tracks and metal carapace, chuffing out shrill little motor sounds. It\n circled briefly and then headed across the bowl.\n\n\n \"Stop it,\" Ptarra ordered. \"It may have a camera, so don't waste time.\n The less the builders learn about us, the better.\"\n\n\n Arnek took off. His hunger had so far failed to weaken him, and he was\n covering the ground at two hundred miles an hour before the little\n vehicle had picked up a tenth of that speed.", "He could not yet control it, but it had no independent will.\n\n\n \"There is food and water near if we have to rouse from hibernation\n while we grow into these silths,\" Ptarra reported. \"Now—help me if you\n can.\"\n\n\n Arnek let his weak thoughts blend into hers, trying to give strength as\n she had often done to him. She was straining her utmost will.\n\n\n Slowly and in jerks, the arm moved across the control board, and clumsy\n fingers managed to move controls. And at last, from Ptarra's mind,\n Arnek began to see the plan.", "Below, the two humans swung around at the earth-shaking thunder of\n the charge and started a frantic scrambling. They were making shrill\n sounds now, and the extreme low band of the mental spectrum held faint\n impulses.\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts lashed against his nerves. \"Cut them off! Don't let\n them back to the probe. They may have destruct conditioning.\"\n\n\n In the hunt, Arnek had long since become only an extension of his\n dominant mate. Now he folded his forelegs and dropped his head and neck\n into a javelin aimed between humans and ships. The smaller of the two\n was almost at the ramp.\n\n\n At the last moment, moved by a sudden impulse, Arnek dropped his head\n lower and retracted his neck to soften the blow. He felt the human\n midge strike against his snout and go caromming off, to land fifty feet\n away.", "This time Ptarra showed no amusement. Her great head shook in\n puzzlement. \"About one time in ten thousand a crazy male hunch comes\n true,\" she muttered. \"Intuition! It's against all logic. But there are\n only manual controls here. Where\nare\nthose silly creatures?\"\n\n\n The two that had arrived last were pitifully exposed, just within an\n opening in the rocks. It was a shallow space, hopeless to defend. The\n smaller one lay supine, but the larger human faced the two silths,\n holding his pitiful weapon, and waited grimly until they were almost\n within reach. This time the explosive pellets were aimed for their eyes.\n\n\n Ptarra dropped her eyelids, swearing as the missiles stung. She reached\n in with a short foreleg. There was a single shrill cry and the sound of\n the weapon striking against a rock; the low band was suddenly quiet.\n Arnek heard a soft gulp. When he looked, the larger human was gone.", "It was obviously too small to be more than a message carrier. Yet, as\n he looked more closely, he could see motion. Two tiny creatures, not\n more than six feet in height, were scurrying around near the base.\n Bright patches of fur or decoration covered them, and they seemed to\n move on two of their four limbs.\nArnek shivered down the length of his nerves with an ancient distaste\n for crawling things. \"Let's go back,\" he suggested uneasily. \"There's\n nothing here for us, and I'm hungry.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be silly,\" Ptarra answered, and the old female superiority\n was strong in the thought. \"Of course it's too small for us; I knew\n that when I saw the landing trail yesterday evening. It must be an\n instrument probe, with test animals. If it has telemetering equipment,\n though—\"", "\"It's about time,\" Ptarra's thoughts reached him. They were weak now,\n since it was hard to transmit in a partial stage, but they were cold\n and sure. \"I've been aware for hours, while the silths reached the ship\n and took off. We've been off planet for at least an hour. Long enough\n to study their body controls and to learn how the ship operates.\"\n\n\n Arnek sighed to himself, while the pressure of tension refused to\n leave. \"Are you sure?\"\n\n\n \"Of course I'm sure! These are primitive machines, and I learned most\n of it from dismantling the first. They're primitive—but they're\n logical enough for understanding. I can even control the silth when she\n isn't aware.\"\n\n\n The larger human suddenly moved the controls, then jerked its hand\n back, staring at it. Words came to the ears of the silth in which Arnek\n rode. \"I'm sick, Luke. I've got the twitches.\"" ], [ "At the last moment, it seemed to be aware of him. There was a wash of\n mental shock and confusion. Then his snout hit the car in a sideswipe\n that tossed it fifty feet to land on its back. He lumbered forward to\n squash it, then hesitated. An opening had appeared and two of the tiny\n humans were staggering out. One was supporting the other. At sight of\n him, both stopped in shock. For a second, they stood rooted to the\n ground. Then the larger one began a clumsy effort at running, half\n carrying the other. Blood left a trail behind them.\n\n\n Arnek could have squashed them with a single thrust of his leg. But\n he stood irresolutely, observing the garments and headgear they wore,\n remembering his youth and a gulla draped with a ribbon and bells. They\n were heading for the rocks nearest them, a long way from where the\n first two had found refuge. For a second, he felt impelled to turn them\n and drive them toward the others.", "Dim pain impulses stirred in the low mental background. Anger—or\n something like it—came from the other creature.\n\n\n Arnek braked and pivoted sharply. The larger human had run forward\n toward the bloodied smaller figure. But as the silth's head faced\n the creature, one of the human's arms darted to something strapped\n about its middle. There was a surprising blast of sound. A stream of\n tiny, exploding pellets struck against Arnek's snout. He bellowed in\n annoyance and took a step forward, lifting a foreleg to swat at the\n midge.\n\n\n It jerked back. Then it darted forward, bending to lift its companion\n in its forelimbs. Either the gravity here was less than on its home\n world, or the thing was stronger than it looked. The first leap sent\n the burdened human backwards more than twenty feet. Then it was\n bounding off in frantic efforts to reach the further side of the\n depression where a jumble of rocks might give it cover.", "It was obviously too small to be more than a message carrier. Yet, as\n he looked more closely, he could see motion. Two tiny creatures, not\n more than six feet in height, were scurrying around near the base.\n Bright patches of fur or decoration covered them, and they seemed to\n move on two of their four limbs.\nArnek shivered down the length of his nerves with an ancient distaste\n for crawling things. \"Let's go back,\" he suggested uneasily. \"There's\n nothing here for us, and I'm hungry.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be silly,\" Ptarra answered, and the old female superiority\n was strong in the thought. \"Of course it's too small for us; I knew\n that when I saw the landing trail yesterday evening. It must be an\n instrument probe, with test animals. If it has telemetering equipment,\n though—\"", "Below, the two humans swung around at the earth-shaking thunder of\n the charge and started a frantic scrambling. They were making shrill\n sounds now, and the extreme low band of the mental spectrum held faint\n impulses.\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts lashed against his nerves. \"Cut them off! Don't let\n them back to the probe. They may have destruct conditioning.\"\n\n\n In the hunt, Arnek had long since become only an extension of his\n dominant mate. Now he folded his forelegs and dropped his head and neck\n into a javelin aimed between humans and ships. The smaller of the two\n was almost at the ramp.\n\n\n At the last moment, moved by a sudden impulse, Arnek dropped his head\n lower and retracted his neck to soften the blow. He felt the human\n midge strike against his snout and go caromming off, to land fifty feet\n away.", "Ptarra grunted. \"Sometimes,\" she admitted, \"you almost think like a\n female. They would kill us, of course, if we stupidly stayed where\n later arrivals could find us. Now come on. We've got to chase the\n creatures around today until they're tired enough to sleep soundly. And\n don't let them get near that ship, either!\"\nIt was a bitter day for Arnek. His stomach protested, and by the end of\n the chase, his legs were beginning to weaken. But ahead of them, the\n two humans were staggering in the light of the setting sun. The smaller\n was leaning on the larger as they finally found and entered the little\n cave near the ship that Ptarra had chosen for them long before.\n\n\n Night had fallen before Ptarra was satisfied. The two silths moved\n forward as softly as they could, but the loud breathing noises went on,\n and there was no stir of alarm anywhere on the mental band.", "Left to himself, Arnek would have perished long ago. Their hope of\n retraining the clumsy forelegs of the silth forms had proved futile,\n and the nerve capacity was too low for them to exercise their full\n faculties. The converted nuclei of the cells was never quite efficient,\n either. And there seemed no hope of ever reproducing their own.\n Certainly no newly budded anna could survive the metamorphosis into\n these awkward bodies; that had been almost impossible for mature\n powers. Nor could a young anna survive long without a silth.\n\n\n Four hundred years! And now—now, he thought, he was tired. It no\n longer mattered. His home lay in ruins eons away. Let Ptarra worry\n about it. He twisted his neck back to put his snout under his tail and\n tried to sleep, while hunger rumbled noisily in his stomach.", "There was amusement in Ptarra's thoughts. \"If your hunger is so great,\n why didn't you eat them? They aren't much, of course, but the blood\n smells sweet enough.\"\n\n\n Arnek sighed along his nerves, unable to answer.\n\n\n Let Ptarra put it down to another male whim if she liked, but he hadn't\n thought of eating them before. There had been something cute and\n pathetic about them. They reminded him of the little gulla he had owned\n in his youth, in a long-lost, ruined universe.\n\n\n \"It had a weapon,\" he commented, changing the subject.", "Arnek tested the three spectra uneasily. At this distance, even a tight\n beam should be detectable. But he could feel nothing. There was only\n the steady wash of inertia-gravitic wavules, the electromagnetic noise\n from the sun and the growing, contemptuous mental leakage from Ptarra.\n Then he squirmed in embarrassment as his eyes detected the cracked base\n of the little ship.\n\n\n Obviously, it had landed hard—probably hard enough to ruin instruments\n and release the two creatures. He should have noticed that at once.\n\n\n There was no time to admit his error, however. Ptarra's silth lunged\n upright and the great rear legs began pulping ground and rocks in a\n full charge. Arnek leaped to follow out of old hunting habit. On a\n down-grade, his lighter silth soon caught up with the other.", "This time Ptarra showed no amusement. Her great head shook in\n puzzlement. \"About one time in ten thousand a crazy male hunch comes\n true,\" she muttered. \"Intuition! It's against all logic. But there are\n only manual controls here. Where\nare\nthose silly creatures?\"\n\n\n The two that had arrived last were pitifully exposed, just within an\n opening in the rocks. It was a shallow space, hopeless to defend. The\n smaller one lay supine, but the larger human faced the two silths,\n holding his pitiful weapon, and waited grimly until they were almost\n within reach. This time the explosive pellets were aimed for their eyes.\n\n\n Ptarra dropped her eyelids, swearing as the missiles stung. She reached\n in with a short foreleg. There was a single shrill cry and the sound of\n the weapon striking against a rock; the low band was suddenly quiet.\n Arnek heard a soft gulp. When he looked, the larger human was gone.", "Half an hour later, there was another faint quiver of radio waves from\n space, this time completely modulated. Even Arnek could realize that\n it was on the same frequency, but dopplered to indicate something\n approaching their world. He stopped browsing for the few stunted trees\n and came back to join his mate.\n\n\n Night was just falling. Ptarra led them back toward the rock ledge from\n which they had first spied the probe. There was a large fissure in the\n rocks into which they could just squeeze, and which would hide them\n from the sight of any landing craft.\n\n\n A moon came up, and they could see the depression clearly in its light.\n Now Arnek saw the larger human slipping across the ground toward the\n wreck of the probe. It darted about frantically, but with an appearance\n of purpose. A few moments later, it was retreating, carrying a load of\n packages with it.\n\n\n \"It seems almost intelligent,\" he said softly.", "She tried to say something else, but the strain was too much, and full\n hibernation swept her mind away from that of Arnek.\n\n\n Arnek sat frozen for a time in his silth, knowing that it was also male.\n\n\n Then he turned it somehow to face the lost galaxy where his race had\n known its day and now entered its eternal night.", "She was lunging to her feet, just as an opening appeared in the ship.\n This time something ran out, down the ramp—a tiny gadget of churning\n tracks and metal carapace, chuffing out shrill little motor sounds. It\n circled briefly and then headed across the bowl.\n\n\n \"Stop it,\" Ptarra ordered. \"It may have a camera, so don't waste time.\n The less the builders learn about us, the better.\"\n\n\n Arnek took off. His hunger had so far failed to weaken him, and he was\n covering the ground at two hundred miles an hour before the little\n vehicle had picked up a tenth of that speed.", "The words brought stirrings strongly on the low band, almost but not\n quite understandably. They also brought a vocal reply from the other\n human. \"Be glad you can twitch. Some bug we picked up, but it's better\n than being eaten. We're in the clover, kid. Maybe we still got more cop\n ships tailing us, but let 'em look. When they find the dinosaurs and\n what's left of our ship, they'll stop looking. The heat's going to be\n off! We can get back to Earth in a year or so and really live.\"\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts cut through Arnek's efforts to understand.\n \"Reproduction feelings,\" she reported in satisfaction. \"They must have\n higher fertility than I hoped if they can think of it while sick.\" Then\n her thoughts sharpened. \"Take over your silth!\"\n\n\n The human at the board slumped abruptly. Arnek lashed out from the\n converted cells, felt a brief protest, and then was alone in the brain\n of the silth.", "Then a wave of amusement from Ptarra checked him. \"They'd never reach\n that far,\" she called. \"They can't survive the crash of their vehicle.\n Let them go.\"\nArnek felt the faint, murky mental signals so low on the band, and he\n knew Ptarra was right. They were staggering now, and the smaller one\n seemed to be only partly conscious. He sighed and scooped up the ground\n car, carrying it back to Ptarra.\n\n\n This time his mate was making no effort to rip the ship apart. She was\n staring through one of the tiny ports, trying to fit her great eye\n against it. And she seemed uncertain. Finally she took the ground car\n and began dismantling it, looking for automatic or remote controls.\n\n\n There were none.\n\n\n \"Maybe the creatures operated it—and the ship,\" Arnek said. He\n expected the same reaction the remark had drawn before.", "A sudden shock ran through Ptarra's thoughts. Her great eyes blinked\n and a huge tongue ran over her lips. \"Nerve fiber!\" Her shout covered\n the entire spectrum. \"Arnek, there are pounds of nerve fiber in the\n creature! High grade—better than that in these silth forms. As good as\n that in any silth. Here, give me the other.\"\n\n\n She didn't wait for Arnek's help, however. She dragged the corpse out\n and began working as delicately as the silth body would permit. Her\n mental signals were a blur. Then she stopped, staring down at what she\n held. \"There—a cavity in the head, filled with nerve fibers. There\n must be three pounds there alone. What freak of evolution would put\n them all together in such a vulnerable spot? And yet, there's a certain\n efficiency about it. It isn't logical—and yet it is.\"\n\n\n Abruptly, the evidence was gone. \"Come on,\" she ordered.", "Inside the silth, the two-pound network of converted nerve cells that\n was Arnek brooded darkly in self-pity and resentment against the\n inflexible female logic of his mate. Ptarra had won her point, as she\n always did; now she might at least have shown some consideration for\n him and his silth!\n\n\n \"Arnek!\" The call came sharply on one of the guard frequencies of the\n mental spectrum. \"Arnek, stop lagging and get up here!\"\n\n\n He could feel his nerve body tense from horn tip to tail root, but he\n stifled his response and quickened his pace. Ahead, the trail left by\n Ptarra's legs led through a gully and up a rise to the lip of a small,\n stony basin. The four hundred tons of Ptarra's female silth squatted\n below the edge and the great head was half hidden as it peered downward\n around a boulder.", "There was no answer to such logic, other than the vague discontent\n Arnek felt. And he knew that was only because of his envy of the\n greater ability of the other sex. He settled back, ruminating hungrily\n and listening to the signal from space.\n\n\n The little box from the wreck was silent now, but the other signals\n were stronger.\n\n\n Ptarra nodded. \"They're coming. After four hundred years, we have\n a chance. New silths to breed. A chance to reproduce ourselves and\n multiply. A new universe for our own.\" There was immense satisfaction\n with self in her thoughts. \"Well, I earned it!\"\nArnek could not deny it. It had been more than four hundred years in\n this galaxy. Eight thousand of them had set out, leaving behind a\n small, ancient universe being wrecked by the horror of an exploding\n supernova. They had been driven out from the planetary conquests of a\n billion years and had sought refuge across intergalactic space to this\n universe.", "A hundred of the marvelously adapted silths of their universe had\n survived the eons of suspended animation to preserve their occupants.\n And then had come the hunt for new silth forms, since the trip had aged\n the others beyond the power of reproduction, in spite of all their\n precautions.\n\n\n Finding a silth form was never easy. There had been only three animals\n that had served in their entire old galaxy. Only a creature with\n several pounds of nerve tissues could hold the nuclear proteins of the\n sentient annas. And that required huge creatures, since nerve tissue\n was always so thinly scattered in normal flesh.\n\n\n They had toured a quadrant of the new galaxy, studying planet after\n planet, before they found this world. Here the great beasts were\n barely sufficiently endowed with nerve fiber. Eight annas had survived\n this far. Six failed to stand the shock of entry and regrowth in the\n new silth forms. Now there was only the one pair—Arnek and Ptarra.", "He strained to follow the faint wash of impressions on the lower band.\n There was something there that struck a familiar chord in his thoughts,\n but he could not decode it.\n\n\n \"Just instinct,\" Ptarra dismissed it with cool logic. \"A female seeking\n food for its injured mate.\"\n\n\n Arnek sighed uncomfortably. \"It doesn't seem female,\" he objected.\n\n\n \"Another hunch? Don't be silly, Arnek. It has to be a female. The\n larger, stronger and more intelligent form is always female. How else\n could it care for the young? It needs ability for a whole family, while\n the male needs only enough for himself. The laws of evolution are\n logical or we wouldn't have evolved at all.\"", "Ptarra rumbled an assent. \"I noticed. Interesting conditioning. The\n probe builders must have superb nerve development to do that to the\n lower orders. They'll make good silths.... Now let's see what we can\n find in the probe.\"\nShe slipped a claw into the base opening and began working it upwards\n as delicately as the clumsy foreleg would permit.\n\n\n Arnek moved forward to help, but she waved him back impatiently, and he\n waited meekly until she finished. She was right, of course. As a male,\n he had no training with mechanisms. He would only have ruined whatever\n lay inside. It was a marvelously delicate set of machinery ... though\n the theory behind the engineering seemed rather elementary.\n\n\n Arnek studied what he could of it, growing more puzzled. \"Maybe the\n creatures operated it,\" he suggested.\n\n\n \"What makes you think so?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. It just seems somehow—\"" ], [ "This time Ptarra showed no amusement. Her great head shook in\n puzzlement. \"About one time in ten thousand a crazy male hunch comes\n true,\" she muttered. \"Intuition! It's against all logic. But there are\n only manual controls here. Where\nare\nthose silly creatures?\"\n\n\n The two that had arrived last were pitifully exposed, just within an\n opening in the rocks. It was a shallow space, hopeless to defend. The\n smaller one lay supine, but the larger human faced the two silths,\n holding his pitiful weapon, and waited grimly until they were almost\n within reach. This time the explosive pellets were aimed for their eyes.\n\n\n Ptarra dropped her eyelids, swearing as the missiles stung. She reached\n in with a short foreleg. There was a single shrill cry and the sound of\n the weapon striking against a rock; the low band was suddenly quiet.\n Arnek heard a soft gulp. When he looked, the larger human was gone.", "Dim pain impulses stirred in the low mental background. Anger—or\n something like it—came from the other creature.\n\n\n Arnek braked and pivoted sharply. The larger human had run forward\n toward the bloodied smaller figure. But as the silth's head faced\n the creature, one of the human's arms darted to something strapped\n about its middle. There was a surprising blast of sound. A stream of\n tiny, exploding pellets struck against Arnek's snout. He bellowed in\n annoyance and took a step forward, lifting a foreleg to swat at the\n midge.\n\n\n It jerked back. Then it darted forward, bending to lift its companion\n in its forelimbs. Either the gravity here was less than on its home\n world, or the thing was stronger than it looked. The first leap sent\n the burdened human backwards more than twenty feet. Then it was\n bounding off in frantic efforts to reach the further side of the\n depression where a jumble of rocks might give it cover.", "Arnek tested the three spectra uneasily. At this distance, even a tight\n beam should be detectable. But he could feel nothing. There was only\n the steady wash of inertia-gravitic wavules, the electromagnetic noise\n from the sun and the growing, contemptuous mental leakage from Ptarra.\n Then he squirmed in embarrassment as his eyes detected the cracked base\n of the little ship.\n\n\n Obviously, it had landed hard—probably hard enough to ruin instruments\n and release the two creatures. He should have noticed that at once.\n\n\n There was no time to admit his error, however. Ptarra's silth lunged\n upright and the great rear legs began pulping ground and rocks in a\n full charge. Arnek leaped to follow out of old hunting habit. On a\n down-grade, his lighter silth soon caught up with the other.", "Ptarra grunted. \"Sometimes,\" she admitted, \"you almost think like a\n female. They would kill us, of course, if we stupidly stayed where\n later arrivals could find us. Now come on. We've got to chase the\n creatures around today until they're tired enough to sleep soundly. And\n don't let them get near that ship, either!\"\nIt was a bitter day for Arnek. His stomach protested, and by the end of\n the chase, his legs were beginning to weaken. But ahead of them, the\n two humans were staggering in the light of the setting sun. The smaller\n was leaning on the larger as they finally found and entered the little\n cave near the ship that Ptarra had chosen for them long before.\n\n\n Night had fallen before Ptarra was satisfied. The two silths moved\n forward as softly as they could, but the loud breathing noises went on,\n and there was no stir of alarm anywhere on the mental band.", "He could not yet control it, but it had no independent will.\n\n\n \"There is food and water near if we have to rouse from hibernation\n while we grow into these silths,\" Ptarra reported. \"Now—help me if you\n can.\"\n\n\n Arnek let his weak thoughts blend into hers, trying to give strength as\n she had often done to him. She was straining her utmost will.\n\n\n Slowly and in jerks, the arm moved across the control board, and clumsy\n fingers managed to move controls. And at last, from Ptarra's mind,\n Arnek began to see the plan.", "He began hurrying now, remembering her warning that the humans would\n not stay here once they wakened to find the two abandoned silths dead.\n He forced himself over the hateful dryness of the floor, up to the\n open mouth. Beyond lay the lungs, the circulatory system, and then the\n strange nerve bundle in the skull.\n\n\n Some of it was ugly, and some was hard. But the last stage was almost\n pleasant. He had forgotten how unsatisfactory the nerves of the last\n silth had been. These were like coming home to a friendly world, in a\n universe that had died too long ago and far away. For a time, he was\n almost glad that he had not died with it.\n\n\n Then the first allergic reactions began, and he had to relapse into\n instinct, to let his being fight to save both himself and his host\n cells from the reaction.", "The sun was glaring down again when he awoke to the nudging of Ptarra's\n snout, and there was a roaring in the air above. Something rushed\n downwards, bellowing out thrust against gravity. It was another ship,\n landing over the wreckage of the first.\nBut it was no monster such as might have carried new and better silth\n forms. It was hardly larger than the first, though it somehow seemed\n to be better made. It landed smoothly and squatted on the ground,\n sending out signals.\n\n\n \"Another probe,\" Ptarra said. There was disappointment in her thoughts,\n quickly masked by cold logic. \"Naturally, they'd wait to check with\n something like this. There will probably be several probes before they\n decide they have to investigate personally. All right! We'll give them\n something to worry about.\"", "Inside the silth, the two-pound network of converted nerve cells that\n was Arnek brooded darkly in self-pity and resentment against the\n inflexible female logic of his mate. Ptarra had won her point, as she\n always did; now she might at least have shown some consideration for\n him and his silth!\n\n\n \"Arnek!\" The call came sharply on one of the guard frequencies of the\n mental spectrum. \"Arnek, stop lagging and get up here!\"\n\n\n He could feel his nerve body tense from horn tip to tail root, but he\n stifled his response and quickened his pace. Ahead, the trail left by\n Ptarra's legs led through a gully and up a rise to the lip of a small,\n stony basin. The four hundred tons of Ptarra's female silth squatted\n below the edge and the great head was half hidden as it peered downward\n around a boulder.", "The words brought stirrings strongly on the low band, almost but not\n quite understandably. They also brought a vocal reply from the other\n human. \"Be glad you can twitch. Some bug we picked up, but it's better\n than being eaten. We're in the clover, kid. Maybe we still got more cop\n ships tailing us, but let 'em look. When they find the dinosaurs and\n what's left of our ship, they'll stop looking. The heat's going to be\n off! We can get back to Earth in a year or so and really live.\"\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts cut through Arnek's efforts to understand.\n \"Reproduction feelings,\" she reported in satisfaction. \"They must have\n higher fertility than I hoped if they can think of it while sick.\" Then\n her thoughts sharpened. \"Take over your silth!\"\n\n\n The human at the board slumped abruptly. Arnek lashed out from the\n converted cells, felt a brief protest, and then was alone in the brain\n of the silth.", "A sudden shock ran through Ptarra's thoughts. Her great eyes blinked\n and a huge tongue ran over her lips. \"Nerve fiber!\" Her shout covered\n the entire spectrum. \"Arnek, there are pounds of nerve fiber in the\n creature! High grade—better than that in these silth forms. As good as\n that in any silth. Here, give me the other.\"\n\n\n She didn't wait for Arnek's help, however. She dragged the corpse out\n and began working as delicately as the silth body would permit. Her\n mental signals were a blur. Then she stopped, staring down at what she\n held. \"There—a cavity in the head, filled with nerve fibers. There\n must be three pounds there alone. What freak of evolution would put\n them all together in such a vulnerable spot? And yet, there's a certain\n efficiency about it. It isn't logical—and yet it is.\"\n\n\n Abruptly, the evidence was gone. \"Come on,\" she ordered.", "\"It's about time,\" Ptarra's thoughts reached him. They were weak now,\n since it was hard to transmit in a partial stage, but they were cold\n and sure. \"I've been aware for hours, while the silths reached the ship\n and took off. We've been off planet for at least an hour. Long enough\n to study their body controls and to learn how the ship operates.\"\n\n\n Arnek sighed to himself, while the pressure of tension refused to\n leave. \"Are you sure?\"\n\n\n \"Of course I'm sure! These are primitive machines, and I learned most\n of it from dismantling the first. They're primitive—but they're\n logical enough for understanding. I can even control the silth when she\n isn't aware.\"\n\n\n The larger human suddenly moved the controls, then jerked its hand\n back, staring at it. Words came to the ears of the silth in which Arnek\n rode. \"I'm sick, Luke. I've got the twitches.\"", "A hundred of the marvelously adapted silths of their universe had\n survived the eons of suspended animation to preserve their occupants.\n And then had come the hunt for new silth forms, since the trip had aged\n the others beyond the power of reproduction, in spite of all their\n precautions.\n\n\n Finding a silth form was never easy. There had been only three animals\n that had served in their entire old galaxy. Only a creature with\n several pounds of nerve tissues could hold the nuclear proteins of the\n sentient annas. And that required huge creatures, since nerve tissue\n was always so thinly scattered in normal flesh.\n\n\n They had toured a quadrant of the new galaxy, studying planet after\n planet, before they found this world. Here the great beasts were\n barely sufficiently endowed with nerve fiber. Eight annas had survived\n this far. Six failed to stand the shock of entry and regrowth in the\n new silth forms. Now there was only the one pair—Arnek and Ptarra.", "There was fuel enough to bring them at maximum speed across an eddy\n of the galaxy toward the lone sun they had found long before. There\n a single planet swung in orbit—a planet with food but no dangerous\n animal life. And there they could wait and grow strong, and multiply\n as their silths multiplied. They could reach it almost as soon as they\n came out of hibernation finally, and it would be a safe haven in its\n isolation.\n\n\n There would be no fuel for further travel. But that could wait, while\n their numbers grew, and they could restore their lost technology and\n weapons with the clever hands of the human silths. Then they could take\n over the galaxy—as they had taken the one so long away!\n\n\n The hands fumbled under the limited control, but they moved across the\n board. And the automatic pilot was finally set and sealed.", "Even Arnek could see the logic behind Ptarra's assumption in that.\n Colonizing would explain the sending out of a male and female in each\n ship, with ships spread out days apart. It wasn't the most efficient\n method, but it usually insured against any major accident. His people\n had used the same method at times.\n\n\n It all seemed quite logical, but Arnek felt a tension of intuition\n along his entire nerve network. No anna had ever used a silth capable\n of independent intelligence. There must be something wrong with it.\n Once they infiltrated the new silth, of course, they could soon convert\n enough nerves to blank out all control from their carriers. But....\n\n\n \"Their weapons,\" he cried. \"Ptarra, in those bodies, we'd be vulnerable\n to their weapons. And during the ten days we have to hibernate to grow\n into their nerves, they'd kill us.\"", "At the last moment, it seemed to be aware of him. There was a wash of\n mental shock and confusion. Then his snout hit the car in a sideswipe\n that tossed it fifty feet to land on its back. He lumbered forward to\n squash it, then hesitated. An opening had appeared and two of the tiny\n humans were staggering out. One was supporting the other. At sight of\n him, both stopped in shock. For a second, they stood rooted to the\n ground. Then the larger one began a clumsy effort at running, half\n carrying the other. Blood left a trail behind them.\n\n\n Arnek could have squashed them with a single thrust of his leg. But\n he stood irresolutely, observing the garments and headgear they wore,\n remembering his youth and a gulla draped with a ribbon and bells. They\n were heading for the rocks nearest them, a long way from where the\n first two had found refuge. For a second, he felt impelled to turn them\n and drive them toward the others.", "There was amusement in Ptarra's thoughts. \"If your hunger is so great,\n why didn't you eat them? They aren't much, of course, but the blood\n smells sweet enough.\"\n\n\n Arnek sighed along his nerves, unable to answer.\n\n\n Let Ptarra put it down to another male whim if she liked, but he hadn't\n thought of eating them before. There had been something cute and\n pathetic about them. They reminded him of the little gulla he had owned\n in his youth, in a long-lost, ruined universe.\n\n\n \"It had a weapon,\" he commented, changing the subject.", "Below, the two humans swung around at the earth-shaking thunder of\n the charge and started a frantic scrambling. They were making shrill\n sounds now, and the extreme low band of the mental spectrum held faint\n impulses.\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts lashed against his nerves. \"Cut them off! Don't let\n them back to the probe. They may have destruct conditioning.\"\n\n\n In the hunt, Arnek had long since become only an extension of his\n dominant mate. Now he folded his forelegs and dropped his head and neck\n into a javelin aimed between humans and ships. The smaller of the two\n was almost at the ramp.\n\n\n At the last moment, moved by a sudden impulse, Arnek dropped his head\n lower and retracted his neck to soften the blow. He felt the human\n midge strike against his snout and go caromming off, to land fifty feet\n away.", "She was lunging to her feet, just as an opening appeared in the ship.\n This time something ran out, down the ramp—a tiny gadget of churning\n tracks and metal carapace, chuffing out shrill little motor sounds. It\n circled briefly and then headed across the bowl.\n\n\n \"Stop it,\" Ptarra ordered. \"It may have a camera, so don't waste time.\n The less the builders learn about us, the better.\"\n\n\n Arnek took off. His hunger had so far failed to weaken him, and he was\n covering the ground at two hundred miles an hour before the little\n vehicle had picked up a tenth of that speed.", "\"Logic!\" Arnek thought softly, and there was wonder at a mind\n like Ptarra's that could achieve such understanding of even alien\n mechanisms. Yet under it there was still a cold knot of fear along his\n nerves.\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts had begun to fade from the strain and the long\n interruption to her hibernation. But now she caught momentary control\n again. There was appreciation in them for his praise. And then there\n was amusement. \"Logic,\" she agreed. \"But perhaps intuition isn't too\n bad for a male. You've been right twice.\"\n\n\n \"Twice?\" Arnek asked. He'd been somehow right that the silths\n controlled their own ships, of course. But....\n\n\n \"Twice,\" Ptarra said. \"I've just realized my silth is a male, as you\n suggested it might be. Amusing, reversing the sexes, isn't it?\"", "Ptarra rumbled an assent. \"I noticed. Interesting conditioning. The\n probe builders must have superb nerve development to do that to the\n lower orders. They'll make good silths.... Now let's see what we can\n find in the probe.\"\nShe slipped a claw into the base opening and began working it upwards\n as delicately as the clumsy foreleg would permit.\n\n\n Arnek moved forward to help, but she waved him back impatiently, and he\n waited meekly until she finished. She was right, of course. As a male,\n he had no training with mechanisms. He would only have ruined whatever\n lay inside. It was a marvelously delicate set of machinery ... though\n the theory behind the engineering seemed rather elementary.\n\n\n Arnek studied what he could of it, growing more puzzled. \"Maybe the\n creatures operated it,\" he suggested.\n\n\n \"What makes you think so?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. It just seems somehow—\"" ], [ "Ptarra grunted. \"Sometimes,\" she admitted, \"you almost think like a\n female. They would kill us, of course, if we stupidly stayed where\n later arrivals could find us. Now come on. We've got to chase the\n creatures around today until they're tired enough to sleep soundly. And\n don't let them get near that ship, either!\"\nIt was a bitter day for Arnek. His stomach protested, and by the end of\n the chase, his legs were beginning to weaken. But ahead of them, the\n two humans were staggering in the light of the setting sun. The smaller\n was leaning on the larger as they finally found and entered the little\n cave near the ship that Ptarra had chosen for them long before.\n\n\n Night had fallen before Ptarra was satisfied. The two silths moved\n forward as softly as they could, but the loud breathing noises went on,\n and there was no stir of alarm anywhere on the mental band.", "\"It's about time,\" Ptarra's thoughts reached him. They were weak now,\n since it was hard to transmit in a partial stage, but they were cold\n and sure. \"I've been aware for hours, while the silths reached the ship\n and took off. We've been off planet for at least an hour. Long enough\n to study their body controls and to learn how the ship operates.\"\n\n\n Arnek sighed to himself, while the pressure of tension refused to\n leave. \"Are you sure?\"\n\n\n \"Of course I'm sure! These are primitive machines, and I learned most\n of it from dismantling the first. They're primitive—but they're\n logical enough for understanding. I can even control the silth when she\n isn't aware.\"\n\n\n The larger human suddenly moved the controls, then jerked its hand\n back, staring at it. Words came to the ears of the silth in which Arnek\n rode. \"I'm sick, Luke. I've got the twitches.\"", "This time Ptarra showed no amusement. Her great head shook in\n puzzlement. \"About one time in ten thousand a crazy male hunch comes\n true,\" she muttered. \"Intuition! It's against all logic. But there are\n only manual controls here. Where\nare\nthose silly creatures?\"\n\n\n The two that had arrived last were pitifully exposed, just within an\n opening in the rocks. It was a shallow space, hopeless to defend. The\n smaller one lay supine, but the larger human faced the two silths,\n holding his pitiful weapon, and waited grimly until they were almost\n within reach. This time the explosive pellets were aimed for their eyes.\n\n\n Ptarra dropped her eyelids, swearing as the missiles stung. She reached\n in with a short foreleg. There was a single shrill cry and the sound of\n the weapon striking against a rock; the low band was suddenly quiet.\n Arnek heard a soft gulp. When he looked, the larger human was gone.", "There was amusement in Ptarra's thoughts. \"If your hunger is so great,\n why didn't you eat them? They aren't much, of course, but the blood\n smells sweet enough.\"\n\n\n Arnek sighed along his nerves, unable to answer.\n\n\n Let Ptarra put it down to another male whim if she liked, but he hadn't\n thought of eating them before. There had been something cute and\n pathetic about them. They reminded him of the little gulla he had owned\n in his youth, in a long-lost, ruined universe.\n\n\n \"It had a weapon,\" he commented, changing the subject.", "Even Arnek could see the logic behind Ptarra's assumption in that.\n Colonizing would explain the sending out of a male and female in each\n ship, with ships spread out days apart. It wasn't the most efficient\n method, but it usually insured against any major accident. His people\n had used the same method at times.\n\n\n It all seemed quite logical, but Arnek felt a tension of intuition\n along his entire nerve network. No anna had ever used a silth capable\n of independent intelligence. There must be something wrong with it.\n Once they infiltrated the new silth, of course, they could soon convert\n enough nerves to blank out all control from their carriers. But....\n\n\n \"Their weapons,\" he cried. \"Ptarra, in those bodies, we'd be vulnerable\n to their weapons. And during the ten days we have to hibernate to grow\n into their nerves, they'd kill us.\"", "Ptarra rumbled an assent. \"I noticed. Interesting conditioning. The\n probe builders must have superb nerve development to do that to the\n lower orders. They'll make good silths.... Now let's see what we can\n find in the probe.\"\nShe slipped a claw into the base opening and began working it upwards\n as delicately as the clumsy foreleg would permit.\n\n\n Arnek moved forward to help, but she waved him back impatiently, and he\n waited meekly until she finished. She was right, of course. As a male,\n he had no training with mechanisms. He would only have ruined whatever\n lay inside. It was a marvelously delicate set of machinery ... though\n the theory behind the engineering seemed rather elementary.\n\n\n Arnek studied what he could of it, growing more puzzled. \"Maybe the\n creatures operated it,\" he suggested.\n\n\n \"What makes you think so?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. It just seems somehow—\"", "Then a wave of amusement from Ptarra checked him. \"They'd never reach\n that far,\" she called. \"They can't survive the crash of their vehicle.\n Let them go.\"\nArnek felt the faint, murky mental signals so low on the band, and he\n knew Ptarra was right. They were staggering now, and the smaller one\n seemed to be only partly conscious. He sighed and scooped up the ground\n car, carrying it back to Ptarra.\n\n\n This time his mate was making no effort to rip the ship apart. She was\n staring through one of the tiny ports, trying to fit her great eye\n against it. And she seemed uncertain. Finally she took the ground car\n and began dismantling it, looking for automatic or remote controls.\n\n\n There were none.\n\n\n \"Maybe the creatures operated it—and the ship,\" Arnek said. He\n expected the same reaction the remark had drawn before.", "A sudden shock ran through Ptarra's thoughts. Her great eyes blinked\n and a huge tongue ran over her lips. \"Nerve fiber!\" Her shout covered\n the entire spectrum. \"Arnek, there are pounds of nerve fiber in the\n creature! High grade—better than that in these silth forms. As good as\n that in any silth. Here, give me the other.\"\n\n\n She didn't wait for Arnek's help, however. She dragged the corpse out\n and began working as delicately as the silth body would permit. Her\n mental signals were a blur. Then she stopped, staring down at what she\n held. \"There—a cavity in the head, filled with nerve fibers. There\n must be three pounds there alone. What freak of evolution would put\n them all together in such a vulnerable spot? And yet, there's a certain\n efficiency about it. It isn't logical—and yet it is.\"\n\n\n Abruptly, the evidence was gone. \"Come on,\" she ordered.", "He could not yet control it, but it had no independent will.\n\n\n \"There is food and water near if we have to rouse from hibernation\n while we grow into these silths,\" Ptarra reported. \"Now—help me if you\n can.\"\n\n\n Arnek let his weak thoughts blend into hers, trying to give strength as\n she had often done to him. She was straining her utmost will.\n\n\n Slowly and in jerks, the arm moved across the control board, and clumsy\n fingers managed to move controls. And at last, from Ptarra's mind,\n Arnek began to see the plan.", "The sun was glaring down again when he awoke to the nudging of Ptarra's\n snout, and there was a roaring in the air above. Something rushed\n downwards, bellowing out thrust against gravity. It was another ship,\n landing over the wreckage of the first.\nBut it was no monster such as might have carried new and better silth\n forms. It was hardly larger than the first, though it somehow seemed\n to be better made. It landed smoothly and squatted on the ground,\n sending out signals.\n\n\n \"Another probe,\" Ptarra said. There was disappointment in her thoughts,\n quickly masked by cold logic. \"Naturally, they'd wait to check with\n something like this. There will probably be several probes before they\n decide they have to investigate personally. All right! We'll give them\n something to worry about.\"", "The words brought stirrings strongly on the low band, almost but not\n quite understandably. They also brought a vocal reply from the other\n human. \"Be glad you can twitch. Some bug we picked up, but it's better\n than being eaten. We're in the clover, kid. Maybe we still got more cop\n ships tailing us, but let 'em look. When they find the dinosaurs and\n what's left of our ship, they'll stop looking. The heat's going to be\n off! We can get back to Earth in a year or so and really live.\"\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts cut through Arnek's efforts to understand.\n \"Reproduction feelings,\" she reported in satisfaction. \"They must have\n higher fertility than I hoped if they can think of it while sick.\" Then\n her thoughts sharpened. \"Take over your silth!\"\n\n\n The human at the board slumped abruptly. Arnek lashed out from the\n converted cells, felt a brief protest, and then was alone in the brain\n of the silth.", "For a moment, she was silent. Then there was a mental shrug, and almost\n amusement as she answered. \"Matching sex isn't logically necessary.\n It might even be an interesting amusement. But I must have the larger\n body.\"\n\n\n She began shifting at once. The silth gasped and tried to thresh about\n in death as Ptarra released control. Arnek sighed to himself and began\n to follow.\n\n\n It was worse than he remembered. After the centuries, the cells hated\n to give up their fixed form. The agony of the silth fed back to him,\n until his withdrawal stopped its heart. But slowly the nuclear matter\n flowed from the cells and up the pathways to their egress, taking the\n minimum of nutrient fluid with them.\n\n\n It took nearly an hour, and he could see the thin film of Ptarra\n already lying over the sleeping human.", "\"Do you remember everything?\" Ptarra asked. \"You've got to regain\n consciousness after the first stage. You can do that, if you set your\n mind to it.\"\n\n\n \"I remember,\" Arnek agreed wearily. He'd had the whole routine drilled\n into him repeatedly until he was sick of it. It was like the horror of\n having her force him to adapt to this present silth. While he had been\n ready to accept assimilation, she had fought with him and with her own\n transformation, refusing to admit even his intuition that their race\n was ended. Only her cold logic had saved them. He could not deny it now.\n\n\n \"Be sure you take the smaller male body,\" she warned again.\n\n\n \"Unless that's the female. You found evolution different in these\n creatures once,\" he reminded her.", "Below, the two humans swung around at the earth-shaking thunder of\n the charge and started a frantic scrambling. They were making shrill\n sounds now, and the extreme low band of the mental spectrum held faint\n impulses.\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts lashed against his nerves. \"Cut them off! Don't let\n them back to the probe. They may have destruct conditioning.\"\n\n\n In the hunt, Arnek had long since become only an extension of his\n dominant mate. Now he folded his forelegs and dropped his head and neck\n into a javelin aimed between humans and ships. The smaller of the two\n was almost at the ramp.\n\n\n At the last moment, moved by a sudden impulse, Arnek dropped his head\n lower and retracted his neck to soften the blow. He felt the human\n midge strike against his snout and go caromming off, to land fifty feet\n away.", "It was obviously too small to be more than a message carrier. Yet, as\n he looked more closely, he could see motion. Two tiny creatures, not\n more than six feet in height, were scurrying around near the base.\n Bright patches of fur or decoration covered them, and they seemed to\n move on two of their four limbs.\nArnek shivered down the length of his nerves with an ancient distaste\n for crawling things. \"Let's go back,\" he suggested uneasily. \"There's\n nothing here for us, and I'm hungry.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be silly,\" Ptarra answered, and the old female superiority\n was strong in the thought. \"Of course it's too small for us; I knew\n that when I saw the landing trail yesterday evening. It must be an\n instrument probe, with test animals. If it has telemetering equipment,\n though—\"", "She was lunging to her feet, just as an opening appeared in the ship.\n This time something ran out, down the ramp—a tiny gadget of churning\n tracks and metal carapace, chuffing out shrill little motor sounds. It\n circled briefly and then headed across the bowl.\n\n\n \"Stop it,\" Ptarra ordered. \"It may have a camera, so don't waste time.\n The less the builders learn about us, the better.\"\n\n\n Arnek took off. His hunger had so far failed to weaken him, and he was\n covering the ground at two hundred miles an hour before the little\n vehicle had picked up a tenth of that speed.", "\"Logic!\" Arnek thought softly, and there was wonder at a mind\n like Ptarra's that could achieve such understanding of even alien\n mechanisms. Yet under it there was still a cold knot of fear along his\n nerves.\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts had begun to fade from the strain and the long\n interruption to her hibernation. But now she caught momentary control\n again. There was appreciation in them for his praise. And then there\n was amusement. \"Logic,\" she agreed. \"But perhaps intuition isn't too\n bad for a male. You've been right twice.\"\n\n\n \"Twice?\" Arnek asked. He'd been somehow right that the silths\n controlled their own ships, of course. But....\n\n\n \"Twice,\" Ptarra said. \"I've just realized my silth is a male, as you\n suggested it might be. Amusing, reversing the sexes, isn't it?\"", "\"Intuition!\" Ptarra snorted. Then she seemed less certain. \"Yet I can't\n blame you this time. It\ndoes\nalmost look that way. But it's logically\n impossible. Besides, there are automatic controls for guiding the\n probe. The builders probably just amused themselves, the way we once\n put slurry-pods in the gulla pens. Ah, this looks sound enough!\"\n\n\n She pulled a tiny box out of the wreckage that had been spread out flat\n on the ground.\n\n\n With infinite care, she managed to hook one claw over a miniature\n control. Almost immediately, radio waves began forming a recurrent\n pattern along their nerves, coming in long and short pulses.", "\"Quiet!\" Ptarra ordered sharply. Then, as Arnek switched from a\n thudding run to a smooth, creeping approach, the mental impulse took\n on a note of triumph. \"Look down there and then tell me I don't know a\n ship trail from a meteor!\"\n\n\n The bowl was bright in the glare of the orange sunlight, but at first\n Arnek saw nothing. Then, as his gaze swept back toward the nearer\n section, he blinked his great eyes, only half believing what they\n registered.\n\n\n It was a small thing, hardly taller than Arnek's silth—maybe not even\n as tall. But it was too regular and obviously artificial, a pointed\n cylinder, to be a meteorite. Between two of the base fins there seemed\n to be an opening, with a miniature ramp leading down to the ground. It\n looked like a delicately precise model of a spaceship from the dawn of\n time.", "Arnek tested the three spectra uneasily. At this distance, even a tight\n beam should be detectable. But he could feel nothing. There was only\n the steady wash of inertia-gravitic wavules, the electromagnetic noise\n from the sun and the growing, contemptuous mental leakage from Ptarra.\n Then he squirmed in embarrassment as his eyes detected the cracked base\n of the little ship.\n\n\n Obviously, it had landed hard—probably hard enough to ruin instruments\n and release the two creatures. He should have noticed that at once.\n\n\n There was no time to admit his error, however. Ptarra's silth lunged\n upright and the great rear legs began pulping ground and rocks in a\n full charge. Arnek leaped to follow out of old hunting habit. On a\n down-grade, his lighter silth soon caught up with the other." ], [ "Ptarra grunted. \"Sometimes,\" she admitted, \"you almost think like a\n female. They would kill us, of course, if we stupidly stayed where\n later arrivals could find us. Now come on. We've got to chase the\n creatures around today until they're tired enough to sleep soundly. And\n don't let them get near that ship, either!\"\nIt was a bitter day for Arnek. His stomach protested, and by the end of\n the chase, his legs were beginning to weaken. But ahead of them, the\n two humans were staggering in the light of the setting sun. The smaller\n was leaning on the larger as they finally found and entered the little\n cave near the ship that Ptarra had chosen for them long before.\n\n\n Night had fallen before Ptarra was satisfied. The two silths moved\n forward as softly as they could, but the loud breathing noises went on,\n and there was no stir of alarm anywhere on the mental band.", "This time Ptarra showed no amusement. Her great head shook in\n puzzlement. \"About one time in ten thousand a crazy male hunch comes\n true,\" she muttered. \"Intuition! It's against all logic. But there are\n only manual controls here. Where\nare\nthose silly creatures?\"\n\n\n The two that had arrived last were pitifully exposed, just within an\n opening in the rocks. It was a shallow space, hopeless to defend. The\n smaller one lay supine, but the larger human faced the two silths,\n holding his pitiful weapon, and waited grimly until they were almost\n within reach. This time the explosive pellets were aimed for their eyes.\n\n\n Ptarra dropped her eyelids, swearing as the missiles stung. She reached\n in with a short foreleg. There was a single shrill cry and the sound of\n the weapon striking against a rock; the low band was suddenly quiet.\n Arnek heard a soft gulp. When he looked, the larger human was gone.", "There was amusement in Ptarra's thoughts. \"If your hunger is so great,\n why didn't you eat them? They aren't much, of course, but the blood\n smells sweet enough.\"\n\n\n Arnek sighed along his nerves, unable to answer.\n\n\n Let Ptarra put it down to another male whim if she liked, but he hadn't\n thought of eating them before. There had been something cute and\n pathetic about them. They reminded him of the little gulla he had owned\n in his youth, in a long-lost, ruined universe.\n\n\n \"It had a weapon,\" he commented, changing the subject.", "\"It's about time,\" Ptarra's thoughts reached him. They were weak now,\n since it was hard to transmit in a partial stage, but they were cold\n and sure. \"I've been aware for hours, while the silths reached the ship\n and took off. We've been off planet for at least an hour. Long enough\n to study their body controls and to learn how the ship operates.\"\n\n\n Arnek sighed to himself, while the pressure of tension refused to\n leave. \"Are you sure?\"\n\n\n \"Of course I'm sure! These are primitive machines, and I learned most\n of it from dismantling the first. They're primitive—but they're\n logical enough for understanding. I can even control the silth when she\n isn't aware.\"\n\n\n The larger human suddenly moved the controls, then jerked its hand\n back, staring at it. Words came to the ears of the silth in which Arnek\n rode. \"I'm sick, Luke. I've got the twitches.\"", "Then a wave of amusement from Ptarra checked him. \"They'd never reach\n that far,\" she called. \"They can't survive the crash of their vehicle.\n Let them go.\"\nArnek felt the faint, murky mental signals so low on the band, and he\n knew Ptarra was right. They were staggering now, and the smaller one\n seemed to be only partly conscious. He sighed and scooped up the ground\n car, carrying it back to Ptarra.\n\n\n This time his mate was making no effort to rip the ship apart. She was\n staring through one of the tiny ports, trying to fit her great eye\n against it. And she seemed uncertain. Finally she took the ground car\n and began dismantling it, looking for automatic or remote controls.\n\n\n There were none.\n\n\n \"Maybe the creatures operated it—and the ship,\" Arnek said. He\n expected the same reaction the remark had drawn before.", "The sun was glaring down again when he awoke to the nudging of Ptarra's\n snout, and there was a roaring in the air above. Something rushed\n downwards, bellowing out thrust against gravity. It was another ship,\n landing over the wreckage of the first.\nBut it was no monster such as might have carried new and better silth\n forms. It was hardly larger than the first, though it somehow seemed\n to be better made. It landed smoothly and squatted on the ground,\n sending out signals.\n\n\n \"Another probe,\" Ptarra said. There was disappointment in her thoughts,\n quickly masked by cold logic. \"Naturally, they'd wait to check with\n something like this. There will probably be several probes before they\n decide they have to investigate personally. All right! We'll give them\n something to worry about.\"", "The words brought stirrings strongly on the low band, almost but not\n quite understandably. They also brought a vocal reply from the other\n human. \"Be glad you can twitch. Some bug we picked up, but it's better\n than being eaten. We're in the clover, kid. Maybe we still got more cop\n ships tailing us, but let 'em look. When they find the dinosaurs and\n what's left of our ship, they'll stop looking. The heat's going to be\n off! We can get back to Earth in a year or so and really live.\"\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts cut through Arnek's efforts to understand.\n \"Reproduction feelings,\" she reported in satisfaction. \"They must have\n higher fertility than I hoped if they can think of it while sick.\" Then\n her thoughts sharpened. \"Take over your silth!\"\n\n\n The human at the board slumped abruptly. Arnek lashed out from the\n converted cells, felt a brief protest, and then was alone in the brain\n of the silth.", "Ptarra rumbled an assent. \"I noticed. Interesting conditioning. The\n probe builders must have superb nerve development to do that to the\n lower orders. They'll make good silths.... Now let's see what we can\n find in the probe.\"\nShe slipped a claw into the base opening and began working it upwards\n as delicately as the clumsy foreleg would permit.\n\n\n Arnek moved forward to help, but she waved him back impatiently, and he\n waited meekly until she finished. She was right, of course. As a male,\n he had no training with mechanisms. He would only have ruined whatever\n lay inside. It was a marvelously delicate set of machinery ... though\n the theory behind the engineering seemed rather elementary.\n\n\n Arnek studied what he could of it, growing more puzzled. \"Maybe the\n creatures operated it,\" he suggested.\n\n\n \"What makes you think so?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. It just seems somehow—\"", "Even Arnek could see the logic behind Ptarra's assumption in that.\n Colonizing would explain the sending out of a male and female in each\n ship, with ships spread out days apart. It wasn't the most efficient\n method, but it usually insured against any major accident. His people\n had used the same method at times.\n\n\n It all seemed quite logical, but Arnek felt a tension of intuition\n along his entire nerve network. No anna had ever used a silth capable\n of independent intelligence. There must be something wrong with it.\n Once they infiltrated the new silth, of course, they could soon convert\n enough nerves to blank out all control from their carriers. But....\n\n\n \"Their weapons,\" he cried. \"Ptarra, in those bodies, we'd be vulnerable\n to their weapons. And during the ten days we have to hibernate to grow\n into their nerves, they'd kill us.\"", "Below, the two humans swung around at the earth-shaking thunder of\n the charge and started a frantic scrambling. They were making shrill\n sounds now, and the extreme low band of the mental spectrum held faint\n impulses.\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts lashed against his nerves. \"Cut them off! Don't let\n them back to the probe. They may have destruct conditioning.\"\n\n\n In the hunt, Arnek had long since become only an extension of his\n dominant mate. Now he folded his forelegs and dropped his head and neck\n into a javelin aimed between humans and ships. The smaller of the two\n was almost at the ramp.\n\n\n At the last moment, moved by a sudden impulse, Arnek dropped his head\n lower and retracted his neck to soften the blow. He felt the human\n midge strike against his snout and go caromming off, to land fifty feet\n away.", "\"Do you remember everything?\" Ptarra asked. \"You've got to regain\n consciousness after the first stage. You can do that, if you set your\n mind to it.\"\n\n\n \"I remember,\" Arnek agreed wearily. He'd had the whole routine drilled\n into him repeatedly until he was sick of it. It was like the horror of\n having her force him to adapt to this present silth. While he had been\n ready to accept assimilation, she had fought with him and with her own\n transformation, refusing to admit even his intuition that their race\n was ended. Only her cold logic had saved them. He could not deny it now.\n\n\n \"Be sure you take the smaller male body,\" she warned again.\n\n\n \"Unless that's the female. You found evolution different in these\n creatures once,\" he reminded her.", "He could not yet control it, but it had no independent will.\n\n\n \"There is food and water near if we have to rouse from hibernation\n while we grow into these silths,\" Ptarra reported. \"Now—help me if you\n can.\"\n\n\n Arnek let his weak thoughts blend into hers, trying to give strength as\n she had often done to him. She was straining her utmost will.\n\n\n Slowly and in jerks, the arm moved across the control board, and clumsy\n fingers managed to move controls. And at last, from Ptarra's mind,\n Arnek began to see the plan.", "It was obviously too small to be more than a message carrier. Yet, as\n he looked more closely, he could see motion. Two tiny creatures, not\n more than six feet in height, were scurrying around near the base.\n Bright patches of fur or decoration covered them, and they seemed to\n move on two of their four limbs.\nArnek shivered down the length of his nerves with an ancient distaste\n for crawling things. \"Let's go back,\" he suggested uneasily. \"There's\n nothing here for us, and I'm hungry.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be silly,\" Ptarra answered, and the old female superiority\n was strong in the thought. \"Of course it's too small for us; I knew\n that when I saw the landing trail yesterday evening. It must be an\n instrument probe, with test animals. If it has telemetering equipment,\n though—\"", "\"Logic!\" Arnek thought softly, and there was wonder at a mind\n like Ptarra's that could achieve such understanding of even alien\n mechanisms. Yet under it there was still a cold knot of fear along his\n nerves.\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts had begun to fade from the strain and the long\n interruption to her hibernation. But now she caught momentary control\n again. There was appreciation in them for his praise. And then there\n was amusement. \"Logic,\" she agreed. \"But perhaps intuition isn't too\n bad for a male. You've been right twice.\"\n\n\n \"Twice?\" Arnek asked. He'd been somehow right that the silths\n controlled their own ships, of course. But....\n\n\n \"Twice,\" Ptarra said. \"I've just realized my silth is a male, as you\n suggested it might be. Amusing, reversing the sexes, isn't it?\"", "For a moment, she was silent. Then there was a mental shrug, and almost\n amusement as she answered. \"Matching sex isn't logically necessary.\n It might even be an interesting amusement. But I must have the larger\n body.\"\n\n\n She began shifting at once. The silth gasped and tried to thresh about\n in death as Ptarra released control. Arnek sighed to himself and began\n to follow.\n\n\n It was worse than he remembered. After the centuries, the cells hated\n to give up their fixed form. The agony of the silth fed back to him,\n until his withdrawal stopped its heart. But slowly the nuclear matter\n flowed from the cells and up the pathways to their egress, taking the\n minimum of nutrient fluid with them.\n\n\n It took nearly an hour, and he could see the thin film of Ptarra\n already lying over the sleeping human.", "A sudden shock ran through Ptarra's thoughts. Her great eyes blinked\n and a huge tongue ran over her lips. \"Nerve fiber!\" Her shout covered\n the entire spectrum. \"Arnek, there are pounds of nerve fiber in the\n creature! High grade—better than that in these silth forms. As good as\n that in any silth. Here, give me the other.\"\n\n\n She didn't wait for Arnek's help, however. She dragged the corpse out\n and began working as delicately as the silth body would permit. Her\n mental signals were a blur. Then she stopped, staring down at what she\n held. \"There—a cavity in the head, filled with nerve fibers. There\n must be three pounds there alone. What freak of evolution would put\n them all together in such a vulnerable spot? And yet, there's a certain\n efficiency about it. It isn't logical—and yet it is.\"\n\n\n Abruptly, the evidence was gone. \"Come on,\" she ordered.", "\"Quiet!\" Ptarra ordered sharply. Then, as Arnek switched from a\n thudding run to a smooth, creeping approach, the mental impulse took\n on a note of triumph. \"Look down there and then tell me I don't know a\n ship trail from a meteor!\"\n\n\n The bowl was bright in the glare of the orange sunlight, but at first\n Arnek saw nothing. Then, as his gaze swept back toward the nearer\n section, he blinked his great eyes, only half believing what they\n registered.\n\n\n It was a small thing, hardly taller than Arnek's silth—maybe not even\n as tall. But it was too regular and obviously artificial, a pointed\n cylinder, to be a meteorite. Between two of the base fins there seemed\n to be an opening, with a miniature ramp leading down to the ground. It\n looked like a delicately precise model of a spaceship from the dawn of\n time.", "She was lunging to her feet, just as an opening appeared in the ship.\n This time something ran out, down the ramp—a tiny gadget of churning\n tracks and metal carapace, chuffing out shrill little motor sounds. It\n circled briefly and then headed across the bowl.\n\n\n \"Stop it,\" Ptarra ordered. \"It may have a camera, so don't waste time.\n The less the builders learn about us, the better.\"\n\n\n Arnek took off. His hunger had so far failed to weaken him, and he was\n covering the ground at two hundred miles an hour before the little\n vehicle had picked up a tenth of that speed.", "There was no answer to such logic, other than the vague discontent\n Arnek felt. And he knew that was only because of his envy of the\n greater ability of the other sex. He settled back, ruminating hungrily\n and listening to the signal from space.\n\n\n The little box from the wreck was silent now, but the other signals\n were stronger.\n\n\n Ptarra nodded. \"They're coming. After four hundred years, we have\n a chance. New silths to breed. A chance to reproduce ourselves and\n multiply. A new universe for our own.\" There was immense satisfaction\n with self in her thoughts. \"Well, I earned it!\"\nArnek could not deny it. It had been more than four hundred years in\n this galaxy. Eight thousand of them had set out, leaving behind a\n small, ancient universe being wrecked by the horror of an exploding\n supernova. They had been driven out from the planetary conquests of a\n billion years and had sought refuge across intergalactic space to this\n universe.", "Half an hour later, there was another faint quiver of radio waves from\n space, this time completely modulated. Even Arnek could realize that\n it was on the same frequency, but dopplered to indicate something\n approaching their world. He stopped browsing for the few stunted trees\n and came back to join his mate.\n\n\n Night was just falling. Ptarra led them back toward the rock ledge from\n which they had first spied the probe. There was a large fissure in the\n rocks into which they could just squeeze, and which would hide them\n from the sight of any landing craft.\n\n\n A moon came up, and they could see the depression clearly in its light.\n Now Arnek saw the larger human slipping across the ground toward the\n wreck of the probe. It darted about frantically, but with an appearance\n of purpose. A few moments later, it was retreating, carrying a load of\n packages with it.\n\n\n \"It seems almost intelligent,\" he said softly." ], [ "He began hurrying now, remembering her warning that the humans would\n not stay here once they wakened to find the two abandoned silths dead.\n He forced himself over the hateful dryness of the floor, up to the\n open mouth. Beyond lay the lungs, the circulatory system, and then the\n strange nerve bundle in the skull.\n\n\n Some of it was ugly, and some was hard. But the last stage was almost\n pleasant. He had forgotten how unsatisfactory the nerves of the last\n silth had been. These were like coming home to a friendly world, in a\n universe that had died too long ago and far away. For a time, he was\n almost glad that he had not died with it.\n\n\n Then the first allergic reactions began, and he had to relapse into\n instinct, to let his being fight to save both himself and his host\n cells from the reaction.", "A hundred of the marvelously adapted silths of their universe had\n survived the eons of suspended animation to preserve their occupants.\n And then had come the hunt for new silth forms, since the trip had aged\n the others beyond the power of reproduction, in spite of all their\n precautions.\n\n\n Finding a silth form was never easy. There had been only three animals\n that had served in their entire old galaxy. Only a creature with\n several pounds of nerve tissues could hold the nuclear proteins of the\n sentient annas. And that required huge creatures, since nerve tissue\n was always so thinly scattered in normal flesh.\n\n\n They had toured a quadrant of the new galaxy, studying planet after\n planet, before they found this world. Here the great beasts were\n barely sufficiently endowed with nerve fiber. Eight annas had survived\n this far. Six failed to stand the shock of entry and regrowth in the\n new silth forms. Now there was only the one pair—Arnek and Ptarra.", "Ptarra grunted. \"Sometimes,\" she admitted, \"you almost think like a\n female. They would kill us, of course, if we stupidly stayed where\n later arrivals could find us. Now come on. We've got to chase the\n creatures around today until they're tired enough to sleep soundly. And\n don't let them get near that ship, either!\"\nIt was a bitter day for Arnek. His stomach protested, and by the end of\n the chase, his legs were beginning to weaken. But ahead of them, the\n two humans were staggering in the light of the setting sun. The smaller\n was leaning on the larger as they finally found and entered the little\n cave near the ship that Ptarra had chosen for them long before.\n\n\n Night had fallen before Ptarra was satisfied. The two silths moved\n forward as softly as they could, but the loud breathing noises went on,\n and there was no stir of alarm anywhere on the mental band.", "He could not yet control it, but it had no independent will.\n\n\n \"There is food and water near if we have to rouse from hibernation\n while we grow into these silths,\" Ptarra reported. \"Now—help me if you\n can.\"\n\n\n Arnek let his weak thoughts blend into hers, trying to give strength as\n she had often done to him. She was straining her utmost will.\n\n\n Slowly and in jerks, the arm moved across the control board, and clumsy\n fingers managed to move controls. And at last, from Ptarra's mind,\n Arnek began to see the plan.", "Even Arnek could see the logic behind Ptarra's assumption in that.\n Colonizing would explain the sending out of a male and female in each\n ship, with ships spread out days apart. It wasn't the most efficient\n method, but it usually insured against any major accident. His people\n had used the same method at times.\n\n\n It all seemed quite logical, but Arnek felt a tension of intuition\n along his entire nerve network. No anna had ever used a silth capable\n of independent intelligence. There must be something wrong with it.\n Once they infiltrated the new silth, of course, they could soon convert\n enough nerves to blank out all control from their carriers. But....\n\n\n \"Their weapons,\" he cried. \"Ptarra, in those bodies, we'd be vulnerable\n to their weapons. And during the ten days we have to hibernate to grow\n into their nerves, they'd kill us.\"", "For a moment, she was silent. Then there was a mental shrug, and almost\n amusement as she answered. \"Matching sex isn't logically necessary.\n It might even be an interesting amusement. But I must have the larger\n body.\"\n\n\n She began shifting at once. The silth gasped and tried to thresh about\n in death as Ptarra released control. Arnek sighed to himself and began\n to follow.\n\n\n It was worse than he remembered. After the centuries, the cells hated\n to give up their fixed form. The agony of the silth fed back to him,\n until his withdrawal stopped its heart. But slowly the nuclear matter\n flowed from the cells and up the pathways to their egress, taking the\n minimum of nutrient fluid with them.\n\n\n It took nearly an hour, and he could see the thin film of Ptarra\n already lying over the sleeping human.", "There was fuel enough to bring them at maximum speed across an eddy\n of the galaxy toward the lone sun they had found long before. There\n a single planet swung in orbit—a planet with food but no dangerous\n animal life. And there they could wait and grow strong, and multiply\n as their silths multiplied. They could reach it almost as soon as they\n came out of hibernation finally, and it would be a safe haven in its\n isolation.\n\n\n There would be no fuel for further travel. But that could wait, while\n their numbers grew, and they could restore their lost technology and\n weapons with the clever hands of the human silths. Then they could take\n over the galaxy—as they had taken the one so long away!\n\n\n The hands fumbled under the limited control, but they moved across the\n board. And the automatic pilot was finally set and sealed.", "Inside the silth, the two-pound network of converted nerve cells that\n was Arnek brooded darkly in self-pity and resentment against the\n inflexible female logic of his mate. Ptarra had won her point, as she\n always did; now she might at least have shown some consideration for\n him and his silth!\n\n\n \"Arnek!\" The call came sharply on one of the guard frequencies of the\n mental spectrum. \"Arnek, stop lagging and get up here!\"\n\n\n He could feel his nerve body tense from horn tip to tail root, but he\n stifled his response and quickened his pace. Ahead, the trail left by\n Ptarra's legs led through a gully and up a rise to the lip of a small,\n stony basin. The four hundred tons of Ptarra's female silth squatted\n below the edge and the great head was half hidden as it peered downward\n around a boulder.", "Left to himself, Arnek would have perished long ago. Their hope of\n retraining the clumsy forelegs of the silth forms had proved futile,\n and the nerve capacity was too low for them to exercise their full\n faculties. The converted nuclei of the cells was never quite efficient,\n either. And there seemed no hope of ever reproducing their own.\n Certainly no newly budded anna could survive the metamorphosis into\n these awkward bodies; that had been almost impossible for mature\n powers. Nor could a young anna survive long without a silth.\n\n\n Four hundred years! And now—now, he thought, he was tired. It no\n longer mattered. His home lay in ruins eons away. Let Ptarra worry\n about it. He twisted his neck back to put his snout under his tail and\n tried to sleep, while hunger rumbled noisily in his stomach.", "She tried to say something else, but the strain was too much, and full\n hibernation swept her mind away from that of Arnek.\n\n\n Arnek sat frozen for a time in his silth, knowing that it was also male.\n\n\n Then he turned it somehow to face the lost galaxy where his race had\n known its day and now entered its eternal night.", "This time Ptarra showed no amusement. Her great head shook in\n puzzlement. \"About one time in ten thousand a crazy male hunch comes\n true,\" she muttered. \"Intuition! It's against all logic. But there are\n only manual controls here. Where\nare\nthose silly creatures?\"\n\n\n The two that had arrived last were pitifully exposed, just within an\n opening in the rocks. It was a shallow space, hopeless to defend. The\n smaller one lay supine, but the larger human faced the two silths,\n holding his pitiful weapon, and waited grimly until they were almost\n within reach. This time the explosive pellets were aimed for their eyes.\n\n\n Ptarra dropped her eyelids, swearing as the missiles stung. She reached\n in with a short foreleg. There was a single shrill cry and the sound of\n the weapon striking against a rock; the low band was suddenly quiet.\n Arnek heard a soft gulp. When he looked, the larger human was gone.", "The sun was glaring down again when he awoke to the nudging of Ptarra's\n snout, and there was a roaring in the air above. Something rushed\n downwards, bellowing out thrust against gravity. It was another ship,\n landing over the wreckage of the first.\nBut it was no monster such as might have carried new and better silth\n forms. It was hardly larger than the first, though it somehow seemed\n to be better made. It landed smoothly and squatted on the ground,\n sending out signals.\n\n\n \"Another probe,\" Ptarra said. There was disappointment in her thoughts,\n quickly masked by cold logic. \"Naturally, they'd wait to check with\n something like this. There will probably be several probes before they\n decide they have to investigate personally. All right! We'll give them\n something to worry about.\"", "Arnek sighed, and his stomach rumbled a protest. But he ignored it.\n \"What good is it? We surely can't make a silth out of a tiny thing like\n that?\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Contempt for male thought was mixed with smug satisfaction\n for her own. \"We don't use the other cells anyhow. Oh, there will be\n difficulties. They may be short-lived. But with such high grade fiber,\n we can risk infiltrating a new one as often as we need. There should\n be enough of them. They probably have half a dozen to a litter twice\n a year, like most small forms. Possibly billions of them can live on\n a single planet. And since they're colonizing other worlds like this\n one....\"", "Arnek tested the three spectra uneasily. At this distance, even a tight\n beam should be detectable. But he could feel nothing. There was only\n the steady wash of inertia-gravitic wavules, the electromagnetic noise\n from the sun and the growing, contemptuous mental leakage from Ptarra.\n Then he squirmed in embarrassment as his eyes detected the cracked base\n of the little ship.\n\n\n Obviously, it had landed hard—probably hard enough to ruin instruments\n and release the two creatures. He should have noticed that at once.\n\n\n There was no time to admit his error, however. Ptarra's silth lunged\n upright and the great rear legs began pulping ground and rocks in a\n full charge. Arnek leaped to follow out of old hunting habit. On a\n down-grade, his lighter silth soon caught up with the other.", "The words brought stirrings strongly on the low band, almost but not\n quite understandably. They also brought a vocal reply from the other\n human. \"Be glad you can twitch. Some bug we picked up, but it's better\n than being eaten. We're in the clover, kid. Maybe we still got more cop\n ships tailing us, but let 'em look. When they find the dinosaurs and\n what's left of our ship, they'll stop looking. The heat's going to be\n off! We can get back to Earth in a year or so and really live.\"\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts cut through Arnek's efforts to understand.\n \"Reproduction feelings,\" she reported in satisfaction. \"They must have\n higher fertility than I hoped if they can think of it while sick.\" Then\n her thoughts sharpened. \"Take over your silth!\"\n\n\n The human at the board slumped abruptly. Arnek lashed out from the\n converted cells, felt a brief protest, and then was alone in the brain\n of the silth.", "\"Logic!\" Arnek thought softly, and there was wonder at a mind\n like Ptarra's that could achieve such understanding of even alien\n mechanisms. Yet under it there was still a cold knot of fear along his\n nerves.\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts had begun to fade from the strain and the long\n interruption to her hibernation. But now she caught momentary control\n again. There was appreciation in them for his praise. And then there\n was amusement. \"Logic,\" she agreed. \"But perhaps intuition isn't too\n bad for a male. You've been right twice.\"\n\n\n \"Twice?\" Arnek asked. He'd been somehow right that the silths\n controlled their own ships, of course. But....\n\n\n \"Twice,\" Ptarra said. \"I've just realized my silth is a male, as you\n suggested it might be. Amusing, reversing the sexes, isn't it?\"", "Dim pain impulses stirred in the low mental background. Anger—or\n something like it—came from the other creature.\n\n\n Arnek braked and pivoted sharply. The larger human had run forward\n toward the bloodied smaller figure. But as the silth's head faced\n the creature, one of the human's arms darted to something strapped\n about its middle. There was a surprising blast of sound. A stream of\n tiny, exploding pellets struck against Arnek's snout. He bellowed in\n annoyance and took a step forward, lifting a foreleg to swat at the\n midge.\n\n\n It jerked back. Then it darted forward, bending to lift its companion\n in its forelimbs. Either the gravity here was less than on its home\n world, or the thing was stronger than it looked. The first leap sent\n the burdened human backwards more than twenty feet. Then it was\n bounding off in frantic efforts to reach the further side of the\n depression where a jumble of rocks might give it cover.", "A sudden shock ran through Ptarra's thoughts. Her great eyes blinked\n and a huge tongue ran over her lips. \"Nerve fiber!\" Her shout covered\n the entire spectrum. \"Arnek, there are pounds of nerve fiber in the\n creature! High grade—better than that in these silth forms. As good as\n that in any silth. Here, give me the other.\"\n\n\n She didn't wait for Arnek's help, however. She dragged the corpse out\n and began working as delicately as the silth body would permit. Her\n mental signals were a blur. Then she stopped, staring down at what she\n held. \"There—a cavity in the head, filled with nerve fibers. There\n must be three pounds there alone. What freak of evolution would put\n them all together in such a vulnerable spot? And yet, there's a certain\n efficiency about it. It isn't logical—and yet it is.\"\n\n\n Abruptly, the evidence was gone. \"Come on,\" she ordered.", "\"It's about time,\" Ptarra's thoughts reached him. They were weak now,\n since it was hard to transmit in a partial stage, but they were cold\n and sure. \"I've been aware for hours, while the silths reached the ship\n and took off. We've been off planet for at least an hour. Long enough\n to study their body controls and to learn how the ship operates.\"\n\n\n Arnek sighed to himself, while the pressure of tension refused to\n leave. \"Are you sure?\"\n\n\n \"Of course I'm sure! These are primitive machines, and I learned most\n of it from dismantling the first. They're primitive—but they're\n logical enough for understanding. I can even control the silth when she\n isn't aware.\"\n\n\n The larger human suddenly moved the controls, then jerked its hand\n back, staring at it. Words came to the ears of the silth in which Arnek\n rode. \"I'm sick, Luke. I've got the twitches.\"", "At the last moment, it seemed to be aware of him. There was a wash of\n mental shock and confusion. Then his snout hit the car in a sideswipe\n that tossed it fifty feet to land on its back. He lumbered forward to\n squash it, then hesitated. An opening had appeared and two of the tiny\n humans were staggering out. One was supporting the other. At sight of\n him, both stopped in shock. For a second, they stood rooted to the\n ground. Then the larger one began a clumsy effort at running, half\n carrying the other. Blood left a trail behind them.\n\n\n Arnek could have squashed them with a single thrust of his leg. But\n he stood irresolutely, observing the garments and headgear they wore,\n remembering his youth and a gulla draped with a ribbon and bells. They\n were heading for the rocks nearest them, a long way from where the\n first two had found refuge. For a second, he felt impelled to turn them\n and drive them toward the others." ], [ "A hundred of the marvelously adapted silths of their universe had\n survived the eons of suspended animation to preserve their occupants.\n And then had come the hunt for new silth forms, since the trip had aged\n the others beyond the power of reproduction, in spite of all their\n precautions.\n\n\n Finding a silth form was never easy. There had been only three animals\n that had served in their entire old galaxy. Only a creature with\n several pounds of nerve tissues could hold the nuclear proteins of the\n sentient annas. And that required huge creatures, since nerve tissue\n was always so thinly scattered in normal flesh.\n\n\n They had toured a quadrant of the new galaxy, studying planet after\n planet, before they found this world. Here the great beasts were\n barely sufficiently endowed with nerve fiber. Eight annas had survived\n this far. Six failed to stand the shock of entry and regrowth in the\n new silth forms. Now there was only the one pair—Arnek and Ptarra.", "He began hurrying now, remembering her warning that the humans would\n not stay here once they wakened to find the two abandoned silths dead.\n He forced himself over the hateful dryness of the floor, up to the\n open mouth. Beyond lay the lungs, the circulatory system, and then the\n strange nerve bundle in the skull.\n\n\n Some of it was ugly, and some was hard. But the last stage was almost\n pleasant. He had forgotten how unsatisfactory the nerves of the last\n silth had been. These were like coming home to a friendly world, in a\n universe that had died too long ago and far away. For a time, he was\n almost glad that he had not died with it.\n\n\n Then the first allergic reactions began, and he had to relapse into\n instinct, to let his being fight to save both himself and his host\n cells from the reaction.", "For a moment, she was silent. Then there was a mental shrug, and almost\n amusement as she answered. \"Matching sex isn't logically necessary.\n It might even be an interesting amusement. But I must have the larger\n body.\"\n\n\n She began shifting at once. The silth gasped and tried to thresh about\n in death as Ptarra released control. Arnek sighed to himself and began\n to follow.\n\n\n It was worse than he remembered. After the centuries, the cells hated\n to give up their fixed form. The agony of the silth fed back to him,\n until his withdrawal stopped its heart. But slowly the nuclear matter\n flowed from the cells and up the pathways to their egress, taking the\n minimum of nutrient fluid with them.\n\n\n It took nearly an hour, and he could see the thin film of Ptarra\n already lying over the sleeping human.", "Ptarra grunted. \"Sometimes,\" she admitted, \"you almost think like a\n female. They would kill us, of course, if we stupidly stayed where\n later arrivals could find us. Now come on. We've got to chase the\n creatures around today until they're tired enough to sleep soundly. And\n don't let them get near that ship, either!\"\nIt was a bitter day for Arnek. His stomach protested, and by the end of\n the chase, his legs were beginning to weaken. But ahead of them, the\n two humans were staggering in the light of the setting sun. The smaller\n was leaning on the larger as they finally found and entered the little\n cave near the ship that Ptarra had chosen for them long before.\n\n\n Night had fallen before Ptarra was satisfied. The two silths moved\n forward as softly as they could, but the loud breathing noises went on,\n and there was no stir of alarm anywhere on the mental band.", "Inside the silth, the two-pound network of converted nerve cells that\n was Arnek brooded darkly in self-pity and resentment against the\n inflexible female logic of his mate. Ptarra had won her point, as she\n always did; now she might at least have shown some consideration for\n him and his silth!\n\n\n \"Arnek!\" The call came sharply on one of the guard frequencies of the\n mental spectrum. \"Arnek, stop lagging and get up here!\"\n\n\n He could feel his nerve body tense from horn tip to tail root, but he\n stifled his response and quickened his pace. Ahead, the trail left by\n Ptarra's legs led through a gully and up a rise to the lip of a small,\n stony basin. The four hundred tons of Ptarra's female silth squatted\n below the edge and the great head was half hidden as it peered downward\n around a boulder.", "He could not yet control it, but it had no independent will.\n\n\n \"There is food and water near if we have to rouse from hibernation\n while we grow into these silths,\" Ptarra reported. \"Now—help me if you\n can.\"\n\n\n Arnek let his weak thoughts blend into hers, trying to give strength as\n she had often done to him. She was straining her utmost will.\n\n\n Slowly and in jerks, the arm moved across the control board, and clumsy\n fingers managed to move controls. And at last, from Ptarra's mind,\n Arnek began to see the plan.", "Even Arnek could see the logic behind Ptarra's assumption in that.\n Colonizing would explain the sending out of a male and female in each\n ship, with ships spread out days apart. It wasn't the most efficient\n method, but it usually insured against any major accident. His people\n had used the same method at times.\n\n\n It all seemed quite logical, but Arnek felt a tension of intuition\n along his entire nerve network. No anna had ever used a silth capable\n of independent intelligence. There must be something wrong with it.\n Once they infiltrated the new silth, of course, they could soon convert\n enough nerves to blank out all control from their carriers. But....\n\n\n \"Their weapons,\" he cried. \"Ptarra, in those bodies, we'd be vulnerable\n to their weapons. And during the ten days we have to hibernate to grow\n into their nerves, they'd kill us.\"", "There was fuel enough to bring them at maximum speed across an eddy\n of the galaxy toward the lone sun they had found long before. There\n a single planet swung in orbit—a planet with food but no dangerous\n animal life. And there they could wait and grow strong, and multiply\n as their silths multiplied. They could reach it almost as soon as they\n came out of hibernation finally, and it would be a safe haven in its\n isolation.\n\n\n There would be no fuel for further travel. But that could wait, while\n their numbers grew, and they could restore their lost technology and\n weapons with the clever hands of the human silths. Then they could take\n over the galaxy—as they had taken the one so long away!\n\n\n The hands fumbled under the limited control, but they moved across the\n board. And the automatic pilot was finally set and sealed.", "\"It's about time,\" Ptarra's thoughts reached him. They were weak now,\n since it was hard to transmit in a partial stage, but they were cold\n and sure. \"I've been aware for hours, while the silths reached the ship\n and took off. We've been off planet for at least an hour. Long enough\n to study their body controls and to learn how the ship operates.\"\n\n\n Arnek sighed to himself, while the pressure of tension refused to\n leave. \"Are you sure?\"\n\n\n \"Of course I'm sure! These are primitive machines, and I learned most\n of it from dismantling the first. They're primitive—but they're\n logical enough for understanding. I can even control the silth when she\n isn't aware.\"\n\n\n The larger human suddenly moved the controls, then jerked its hand\n back, staring at it. Words came to the ears of the silth in which Arnek\n rode. \"I'm sick, Luke. I've got the twitches.\"", "\"Logic!\" Arnek thought softly, and there was wonder at a mind\n like Ptarra's that could achieve such understanding of even alien\n mechanisms. Yet under it there was still a cold knot of fear along his\n nerves.\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts had begun to fade from the strain and the long\n interruption to her hibernation. But now she caught momentary control\n again. There was appreciation in them for his praise. And then there\n was amusement. \"Logic,\" she agreed. \"But perhaps intuition isn't too\n bad for a male. You've been right twice.\"\n\n\n \"Twice?\" Arnek asked. He'd been somehow right that the silths\n controlled their own ships, of course. But....\n\n\n \"Twice,\" Ptarra said. \"I've just realized my silth is a male, as you\n suggested it might be. Amusing, reversing the sexes, isn't it?\"", "Left to himself, Arnek would have perished long ago. Their hope of\n retraining the clumsy forelegs of the silth forms had proved futile,\n and the nerve capacity was too low for them to exercise their full\n faculties. The converted nuclei of the cells was never quite efficient,\n either. And there seemed no hope of ever reproducing their own.\n Certainly no newly budded anna could survive the metamorphosis into\n these awkward bodies; that had been almost impossible for mature\n powers. Nor could a young anna survive long without a silth.\n\n\n Four hundred years! And now—now, he thought, he was tired. It no\n longer mattered. His home lay in ruins eons away. Let Ptarra worry\n about it. He twisted his neck back to put his snout under his tail and\n tried to sleep, while hunger rumbled noisily in his stomach.", "THE COURSE OF LOGIC\nBY LESTER DEL REY\nThey made one little mistake—very\n\n natural—and disastrous!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe male silth plodded forward wearily at sixty miles an hour, pausing\n only long enough to uproot and wolf down one of the rare scrub trees\n directly in its path. Its three hundred tons of massive body shook\n the ground as the great hind legs thumped along, and every cell of it\n ached with hunger. It was warm blooded, despite its vaguely reptilian\n appearance. Only meat could satisfy its need for energy. But the great\n herds lay a thousand miles to the north of this barren land.", "This time Ptarra showed no amusement. Her great head shook in\n puzzlement. \"About one time in ten thousand a crazy male hunch comes\n true,\" she muttered. \"Intuition! It's against all logic. But there are\n only manual controls here. Where\nare\nthose silly creatures?\"\n\n\n The two that had arrived last were pitifully exposed, just within an\n opening in the rocks. It was a shallow space, hopeless to defend. The\n smaller one lay supine, but the larger human faced the two silths,\n holding his pitiful weapon, and waited grimly until they were almost\n within reach. This time the explosive pellets were aimed for their eyes.\n\n\n Ptarra dropped her eyelids, swearing as the missiles stung. She reached\n in with a short foreleg. There was a single shrill cry and the sound of\n the weapon striking against a rock; the low band was suddenly quiet.\n Arnek heard a soft gulp. When he looked, the larger human was gone.", "The sun was glaring down again when he awoke to the nudging of Ptarra's\n snout, and there was a roaring in the air above. Something rushed\n downwards, bellowing out thrust against gravity. It was another ship,\n landing over the wreckage of the first.\nBut it was no monster such as might have carried new and better silth\n forms. It was hardly larger than the first, though it somehow seemed\n to be better made. It landed smoothly and squatted on the ground,\n sending out signals.\n\n\n \"Another probe,\" Ptarra said. There was disappointment in her thoughts,\n quickly masked by cold logic. \"Naturally, they'd wait to check with\n something like this. There will probably be several probes before they\n decide they have to investigate personally. All right! We'll give them\n something to worry about.\"", "She tried to say something else, but the strain was too much, and full\n hibernation swept her mind away from that of Arnek.\n\n\n Arnek sat frozen for a time in his silth, knowing that it was also male.\n\n\n Then he turned it somehow to face the lost galaxy where his race had\n known its day and now entered its eternal night.", "Dim pain impulses stirred in the low mental background. Anger—or\n something like it—came from the other creature.\n\n\n Arnek braked and pivoted sharply. The larger human had run forward\n toward the bloodied smaller figure. But as the silth's head faced\n the creature, one of the human's arms darted to something strapped\n about its middle. There was a surprising blast of sound. A stream of\n tiny, exploding pellets struck against Arnek's snout. He bellowed in\n annoyance and took a step forward, lifting a foreleg to swat at the\n midge.\n\n\n It jerked back. Then it darted forward, bending to lift its companion\n in its forelimbs. Either the gravity here was less than on its home\n world, or the thing was stronger than it looked. The first leap sent\n the burdened human backwards more than twenty feet. Then it was\n bounding off in frantic efforts to reach the further side of the\n depression where a jumble of rocks might give it cover.", "The words brought stirrings strongly on the low band, almost but not\n quite understandably. They also brought a vocal reply from the other\n human. \"Be glad you can twitch. Some bug we picked up, but it's better\n than being eaten. We're in the clover, kid. Maybe we still got more cop\n ships tailing us, but let 'em look. When they find the dinosaurs and\n what's left of our ship, they'll stop looking. The heat's going to be\n off! We can get back to Earth in a year or so and really live.\"\n\n\n Ptarra's thoughts cut through Arnek's efforts to understand.\n \"Reproduction feelings,\" she reported in satisfaction. \"They must have\n higher fertility than I hoped if they can think of it while sick.\" Then\n her thoughts sharpened. \"Take over your silth!\"\n\n\n The human at the board slumped abruptly. Arnek lashed out from the\n converted cells, felt a brief protest, and then was alone in the brain\n of the silth.", "He set the first stage up, however. This time he managed with no help\n from Ptarra. Then he relapsed into unconsciousness, making no effort to\n control his new silth yet. He'd have to revise when the silth awoke, he\n told himself.\n\n\n But it was only a dream order, half completed....\nIt was a sudden painful pressure of acceleration that finally brought\n him out of his torpor. He felt half sick, and he could vaguely sense\n that the new silth was fevered and uncomfortable. But, amazingly, it\n was sitting up. And around it was a room bigger than the whole ship had\n seemed, and controls under its hands, and fantastic equipment.", "There was no answer to such logic, other than the vague discontent\n Arnek felt. And he knew that was only because of his envy of the\n greater ability of the other sex. He settled back, ruminating hungrily\n and listening to the signal from space.\n\n\n The little box from the wreck was silent now, but the other signals\n were stronger.\n\n\n Ptarra nodded. \"They're coming. After four hundred years, we have\n a chance. New silths to breed. A chance to reproduce ourselves and\n multiply. A new universe for our own.\" There was immense satisfaction\n with self in her thoughts. \"Well, I earned it!\"\nArnek could not deny it. It had been more than four hundred years in\n this galaxy. Eight thousand of them had set out, leaving behind a\n small, ancient universe being wrecked by the horror of an exploding\n supernova. They had been driven out from the planetary conquests of a\n billion years and had sought refuge across intergalactic space to this\n universe.", "Arnek tested the three spectra uneasily. At this distance, even a tight\n beam should be detectable. But he could feel nothing. There was only\n the steady wash of inertia-gravitic wavules, the electromagnetic noise\n from the sun and the growing, contemptuous mental leakage from Ptarra.\n Then he squirmed in embarrassment as his eyes detected the cracked base\n of the little ship.\n\n\n Obviously, it had landed hard—probably hard enough to ruin instruments\n and release the two creatures. He should have noticed that at once.\n\n\n There was no time to admit his error, however. Ptarra's silth lunged\n upright and the great rear legs began pulping ground and rocks in a\n full charge. Arnek leaped to follow out of old hunting habit. On a\n down-grade, his lighter silth soon caught up with the other." ] ]
test	50936	[ "How would you describe John?", "How would you describe Buster?", "What did John care about when designing Buster?", "What is one of the rules that Buster is programmed to follow?", "Why is Buster nicknamed what he is nicknamed?", "How would you describe the relationship between Anne and John?", "What is the narrative purpose of including Anne in the story?", "How does this story use a famous quote to its advantage?" ]	[ [ "Smart and humble", "Brilliant and generous", "Kind and lovable", "Smart and cocky" ], [ "Serious", "Empathetic", "Sweet", "Funny" ], [ "Having a companion", "Buster having a sense of sympathy", "Buster having a sense of humor", "Buster having a respect for John" ], [ "Buster has to answer any question that John asks", "If Buster needs to, he can lie to John", "Buster has to compliment John whenever his system restarts", "Buster has to reveal any information he possesses that might be useful to John" ], [ "Because he is bold", "Because he is a jackass", "Because he is good at providing detailed information", "Because he is decent at predicting things" ], [ "Their engagement is happy", "They love each other but don't get to spend much time together", "Their marriage is happy", "Their marriage is rocky" ], [ "To help the audience understand space travel techniques", "To contrast with Buster's personality", "To help the audience understand how the invaders pose such a great threat", "To add more conflict into the story for John" ], [ "It connects a word in the quote to an element of the world-building", "It connects the meaning of the quote to the direct meaning of a world-building element in the story", "It connects a word in the quote to a character in the story", "It connects the meaning of the quote to a character in the story" ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "\"Well, if you won't, you won't. Though goodness knows you won't be\n doing anyone any good if you have a breakdown, as you're likely to\n have, unless you take it a little easier. What was the trouble today,\n dear? Was the Oracle being obstinate again?\"\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.\n\n\n \"Well, then, dear, why don't you tell me all about it? I always think\n that things are much easier to bear, if you share them. And then, two\n heads are always better than one, aren't they? Maybe I could help you\n with your problem.\"\n\n\n While Anne's voice gushed, her violet eyes studied his exhausted face\n with intelligence and compassion.", "\"You sure are a woman,\" said John with warm feeling. \"You can\n exasperate me sometimes, but not the same way Buster does. It was my\n lucky day when you married me.\"\n\n\n There were a few minutes of peaceful silence.\n\n\n \"Was today a rough day with Buster, dear?\" asked Anne.\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.\n\n\n \"That's too bad, dear,\" said Anne. \"I think you work much too\n hard—what with this dreadful invasion and everything. Why don't you\n take a vacation? You really need one, you know. You look so tired.\"\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.", "Anne smiled, looking down tenderly at John's tired face. \"I know,\n dear,\" she said. \"You need to be able to talk to someone who will\n always be interested, even if she doesn't understand half of what you\n say. As a matter of fact, I'm sure it does you a great deal of good to\n talk to someone like me who isn't very bright, but who doesn't always\n know what you're talking about even before you start talking.\"\n\n\n John nodded, his eyes still closed. \"If it weren't for you, darling,\"\n he said, \"I think I'd go crazy. But you aren't dumb at all. If I seem\n to act as if you are, sometimes, it's just that I can't always follow\n your logic.\"\nAnne gave him a quick glance of amusement, her eyes sparkling with\n intelligence. \"You never will find me logical,\" she laughed. \"After\n all, I'm a woman, and you get plenty of logic from the Oracle.\"", "\"And that sounds like very good sense, too,\" said Anne in earnest\n tones. \"But it's a little late, isn't it? After all, the invaders are\n already invading us, aren't they?\"\n\n\n \"It has some deeper meaning than the usual one,\" said John. \"If I could\n only figure out what it is.\"\n\n\n Anne nodded vigorously. \"I suppose Buster's talking about\n space-stitching,\" she said. \"Although I can never quite remember just\n what\nthat\nis. Or just how it works, rather.\"\nShe waited expectantly for a few moments and then plaintively asked,\n \"What\nis\nit, dear?\"\n\n\n \"What's what?\"\n\n\n \"Stitching, silly. I already asked you.\"\n\n\n \"Darling,\" said John with reasonable patience, \"I must have explained\n inter-planar travel to you at least a dozen times.\"", "\"Darling!\" interrupted John with the hopeless patience of a harassed\n husband. \"It isn't the same thing at all. Buster isn't a fortune teller\n or the ghost of somebody's great aunt wobbling tables and blowing\n through horns. And Buster isn't just a toy, either. It is a very\n elaborate calculating machine designed to think logically when fed a\n vast mass of data. Unfortunately, it has a sense of humor and a sense\n of responsibility.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if you're going to believe that machine, I have an idea.\" Anne\n smiled sweetly. \"You know,\" she said, \"that my dear father always said\n that the best defense is a good offense. Why don't we just find the\n invaders and wipe them out before they are able to do any real harm to\n us? Stitching our way to\ntheir\nplanets in our spaceships, of course.\"", "John searched his pockets. After a little difficulty, he produced an\n envelope and a pencil stub. On the back of the envelope, he drew two\n parallel lines, one about five inches long, and the other about double\n the length of the first.\n\n\n \"Actually,\" he said, \"each of these line segments has an infinite\n number of points in it, but we'll ignore that. I'll just divide each\n one of these into ten equal parts.\" He did so, using short, neat\n cross-marks.", "John sighed deeply, then sat up slowly and opened his eyes to look into\n Anne's. She glanced away, her own eyes suddenly vague and soft-looking,\n now that John could see them. \"The trouble, darling,\" he said, \"is that\n I have to go to an emergency council meeting this evening with another\n one of those ridiculous riddles that Buster gave me as the only answer\n to the most important question we've ever asked it. And I don't know\n what the riddle means.\"\n\n\n Anne slid from the arm of the chair and settled herself onto the floor\n at John's feet. \"You should not let that old Oracle bother you so much,\n dear. After all, you built it yourself, so you should know what to\n expect of it.\"\n\n\n \"When I asked it how to preserve Earth from the invaders it just\n answered 'A Stitch in Time Saves Nine,' and wouldn't interpret it.\"", "The deep-throated hum of each generator changed pitch slightly as\n he passed it. Since he was tone deaf, as the machine knew, he did\n not recognize in the tunefulness of the pitch changes a slow-paced\n rendition of Elgar's\nPomp and Circumstance\n.\n\n\n John Bristol turned around, interrupting the melody. \"One last\n question,\" he shouted down the long aisle to the computer. \"How in\n blazes can you be sure of your answer without knowing more about the\n invaders? Why didn't you give me an 'Insufficient Evidence' answer or,\n at least, a 'Highly Conditional' answer?\" He took two steps toward the\n immense bulk of the calculator and pointed an accusing finger at it.\n \"Are you sure, Buster, that you aren't\nbluffing\n?\"\n\"Don't be silly,\" answered the calculator softly. \"You made me and\n you know I can't bluff, any more than I can refuse to answer your\n questions, however inane.\"", "\"Although there was no one left alive who had directly contacted one of\n the invaders,\" Buster answered, \"there was still much information to\n be gathered from the survivors. This information confirmed my previous\n opinions about their nature. Which brings us back to the stitch in time\n saving nine.\"\n\n\n \"You're right,\" said John. \"It does, at that. Buster, I have always\n resented the nickname the newspapers have given you—the Oracle—but\n the more I have to try to interpret your cryptic answers, the more\n sense that tagline makes. Imagine comparing a Delphic Priestess with a\n calculating machine and being accurate in the comparison!\"\n\"I don't mind being called 'The Oracle,'\" answered Buster with dignity.", "\"Just relax, dear,\" said Anne gently, when Bristol leaned gratefully\n back with his eyes closed. Anne perched on the arm of the chair beside\n him and began massaging his temples soothingly with her fingers.\n\n\n \"It's wonderful to come home after a day with Buster,\" he said. \"Buster\n never seems to have any consideration for me as an individual. There's\n no reason why he should, of course. He's only a machine. Still, he\n always has such a superior attitude. But you, darling, can always relax\n me and make me feel comfortable.\"", "Bristol nodded. \"Sure. We've got to have time to get ready. But right\n now speed is necessary. That's why I tried to phrase the question so\n you'd give me a clear and concise answer for once. I can't afford to\n spend weeks figuring out what you meant.\"\nBristol thought that the Voder voice of Buster sounded almost gleeful\n as it answered. \"It was exceedingly clear and concise; a complete\n answer to an enormously elaborate question boiled down to only six\n words!\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" said John. \"But now, how about elaborating on your answer? It\n didn't sound very complete to me.\"", "The computer appeared to examine Bristol's overturned chair for a\n moment in silent reproof before it answered. \"But remember, John,\" it\n said, \"you didn't merely make me. You also\ntaught\nme. Or as you would\n phrase it, you 'provided and gave preliminary evaluation to the data in\n my memory banks.' My circuits, in sorting out and re-evaluating this\n information, could do so only in the light of your basic beliefs as\n evidenced by your preliminary evaluations. Because of the consistency\n and power of your mind, I was forced to do very little modifying of\n the ideas you presented to me in order to transform them into a single\n logical body of background information which I could use.", "\"One of the ideas you presented was the concept of a sense of humor.\n You believe that you look on it as a pleasant thing to have; not\n necessary, but convenient. Actually, your other and more basic ideas\n make it clear that you consider the possession of a sense of humor\n to be absolutely necessary if proper answers are to be reached—a\n prime axiom of humanity. Therefore, I have a sense of humor. Somewhat\n macabre, perhaps—and a little mechanistic—but still there.\n\n\n \"Add to this a second axiom: that in order to be helped, a man must\n help himself; that he must participate in the assistance given him or\n the pure charity will be harmful, and you come up with 'A Stitch in\n Time Saves Nine.'\"\n\n\n Bristol stood up once more. \"I could cure you with a sledge hammer,\" he\n said.", "\"You could remove my ideas,\" answered the computer without concern.\n \"But you might have trouble giving me different ones. Even after you\n repaired me. In the meantime, wouldn't it be a good idea for you to get\n busy on the ideas I have already given you?\"\nJohn sighed, and rubbed the bristles of short sandy hair on the top\n of his head with his knuckles. \"Ordered around by an overgrown adding\n machine. I know now how Frankenstein felt. I'm glad you can't get\n around like his monster; at least I didn't give you feet.\" He shook\n his head. \"I should have been a plumber instead of an engineering\n mathematician.\"\n\n\n \"And Einstein, too, probably,\" added Buster cryptically.", "\"Yes,\" said John. \"Now, let us call this longer line-segment an 'alpha'\n universe; an analogue of our own multi-dimensional 'alpha' universe.\n If I move my pencil along the line at one section a second like this,\n it takes me ten seconds to get to the other end. We will assume that\n this velocity of an inch a second is the fastest anything can go along\n the 'alpha' line. That is the velocity of light, therefore, in the\n 'alpha' plane—186,000 miles a second, in round numbers. No need to use\n decimals.\"\nHe hurried on as Anne stirred and seemed about to speak. \"But if I\n slide out from my starting point along a dotted line part way to the\n 'beta' universe—something which, for reasons I can't explain now,", "Even through his overwhelming sense of frustration at the ambiguous\n answer the computer had given to his question, John Bristol noticed\n with satisfaction the success of his Voder installation. He wished that\n all of his innovations with the machine were as satisfying.\n\n\n Alone in the tremendous vaulted room that housed the gigantic\n calculator, Bristol clasped his hands behind his back and thrust\n forward a reasonably strong chin and a somewhat sensuous lower lip\n in the general direction of the computer's visual receptors. After\n a moment of silence, he scratched his chin and then shrugged his\n shoulders slightly. \"Well, Buster, I suppose I might try rephrasing the\n question,\" he said doubtfully.\n\n\n Somewhere deep within the computer, a bank of relays chuckled briefly.\n \"That expedient is open to you, of course, although it is highly\n unlikely that any clarification will result for you from my answers. I\n am constrained, however, to answer any questions you may choose to ask.\"", "\"Then answer the ones I just asked.\"\nSomewhere deep within the machine a switch snicked sharply, and the\n great room's lighting brightened almost imperceptibly. \"I didn't answer\n your question conditionally or with the 'Insufficient Evidence' remark\n that so frequently annoys you,\" Buster said, \"because the little\n information that I have been able to get about the invaders is highly\n revealing.\n\n\n \"They have been suspicious, impossible to establish communication with\n and murderously destructive. They have been careless of their own\n safety: sly, stupid, cautious, clever, bold and highly intelligent.\n They are inquisitive and impatient of getting answers to questions.", "Anne sat up. \"I'll forgive you this time for bringing up that horrid\n word\nentropy\n, if you'll promise me not to do it again,\" she said.\nJohn Shrugged his shoulders and smiled. \"Now,\" he said, \"if I want\n to get somewhere fast, I just start off in the right direction, and\n switch over toward 'beta.' When 'beta' throws me back, a light-year\n or so toward my destination, I just switch over again. You see, there\n is a great deal more difference in the sizes of Alpha universe and\n Beta universe than in the sizes of these alpha and beta line-segment\n analogues. Then I continue alternating back and forth until I get where\n I want to go. Establishing my correct velocity vector is complicated\n mathematically, but simple in practice, and is actually an aiming\n device, having nothing to do with how fast I go.\"", "Buster answered slowly. \"You made me in your own image. Things thus\n made are often hard to handle.\"\n\n\n Bristol leaped to his feet in frustration. \"But you're only a\n calculating machine!\" he shouted. \"Your only purpose is to make my\n work—and that of other men—easier. And when I try to use you, you\n answer with riddles....\"", "\"As usual, I'm sure you have made me understand perfectly. This\n time you did so well that I may still remember what stitching is by\n tomorrow. If the Oracle means anything at all by his statement, I\n suppose it means that we can use stitching to help defend ourselves,\n just as the invaders are using it to attack us. But the whole thing\n sounds completely silly to me. The Oracle, I mean.\"\n\n\n Anne Bristol stood up, put her hands on her shapely hips and shook her\n head at her husband. \"Honestly,\" she said, \"you men are all alike.\n Paying so much attention to a toy you built yourself, and only last\n week you made fun of my going to a fortune teller. And the fuss you\n made about the ten dollars when you know it was worth every cent of it.\n She really told me the most amazing things. If you'd only let me tell\n you some of....\"" ], [ "All of the glowing lights that dotted Buster's massive front winked\n simultaneously. \"The answer I gave you is an ancient saying which\n suggests that corrective action taken rapidly can save a great deal of\n trouble later. The ancient saying also suggests the proper method of\n taking this timely action. It should be done by\nstitching\n; if this is\n done in time, nine will be saved. What could be clearer than that?\"\n\n\n \"I made you myself,\" said Bristol plaintively. \"I designed you with my\n own brain. I gloated over the neatness and compactness of your design.\n So help me, I was proud of you. I even installed some of your circuitry\n with my own hands. If anybody can understand you, it should be me.\n And since you're just a complex computer of general design, with the\n ability to use symbolic logic as well as mathematics, anybody should be\n able to understand you. Why are you so hard to handle?\"", "Buster answered slowly. \"You made me in your own image. Things thus\n made are often hard to handle.\"\n\n\n Bristol leaped to his feet in frustration. \"But you're only a\n calculating machine!\" he shouted. \"Your only purpose is to make my\n work—and that of other men—easier. And when I try to use you, you\n answer with riddles....\"", "\"Just relax, dear,\" said Anne gently, when Bristol leaned gratefully\n back with his eyes closed. Anne perched on the arm of the chair beside\n him and began massaging his temples soothingly with her fingers.\n\n\n \"It's wonderful to come home after a day with Buster,\" he said. \"Buster\n never seems to have any consideration for me as an individual. There's\n no reason why he should, of course. He's only a machine. Still, he\n always has such a superior attitude. But you, darling, can always relax\n me and make me feel comfortable.\"", "\"Then answer the ones I just asked.\"\nSomewhere deep within the machine a switch snicked sharply, and the\n great room's lighting brightened almost imperceptibly. \"I didn't answer\n your question conditionally or with the 'Insufficient Evidence' remark\n that so frequently annoys you,\" Buster said, \"because the little\n information that I have been able to get about the invaders is highly\n revealing.\n\n\n \"They have been suspicious, impossible to establish communication with\n and murderously destructive. They have been careless of their own\n safety: sly, stupid, cautious, clever, bold and highly intelligent.\n They are inquisitive and impatient of getting answers to questions.", "\"Although there was no one left alive who had directly contacted one of\n the invaders,\" Buster answered, \"there was still much information to\n be gathered from the survivors. This information confirmed my previous\n opinions about their nature. Which brings us back to the stitch in time\n saving nine.\"\n\n\n \"You're right,\" said John. \"It does, at that. Buster, I have always\n resented the nickname the newspapers have given you—the Oracle—but\n the more I have to try to interpret your cryptic answers, the more\n sense that tagline makes. Imagine comparing a Delphic Priestess with a\n calculating machine and being accurate in the comparison!\"\n\"I don't mind being called 'The Oracle,'\" answered Buster with dignity.", "Bristol took a long and searching look at his brainchild. Its flippant\n manner, he decided, did not go well with the brooding immensity of its\n construction. The calculator towered nearly a hundred feet above the\n polished marble slabs of the floor, and spidery metal walkways spiraled\n up the sides of its almost cubical structure. A long double row of\n generators, each under Buster's control, led from the doorway of the\n building to the base of the calculator like Sphinxes lining the roadway\n to an Egyptian tomb.\n\n\n \"When I get around to it,\" said Bristol, \"I'll put lace panties on the\n bases of all your klystrons.\" He hitched up his neat but slightly baggy\n pants, turned with dignity, and strode from the chamber down the twin\n rows of generators.", "\"You could remove my ideas,\" answered the computer without concern.\n \"But you might have trouble giving me different ones. Even after you\n repaired me. In the meantime, wouldn't it be a good idea for you to get\n busy on the ideas I have already given you?\"\nJohn sighed, and rubbed the bristles of short sandy hair on the top\n of his head with his knuckles. \"Ordered around by an overgrown adding\n machine. I know now how Frankenstein felt. I'm glad you can't get\n around like his monster; at least I didn't give you feet.\" He shook\n his head. \"I should have been a plumber instead of an engineering\n mathematician.\"\n\n\n \"And Einstein, too, probably,\" added Buster cryptically.", "\"You sure are a woman,\" said John with warm feeling. \"You can\n exasperate me sometimes, but not the same way Buster does. It was my\n lucky day when you married me.\"\n\n\n There were a few minutes of peaceful silence.\n\n\n \"Was today a rough day with Buster, dear?\" asked Anne.\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.\n\n\n \"That's too bad, dear,\" said Anne. \"I think you work much too\n hard—what with this dreadful invasion and everything. Why don't you\n take a vacation? You really need one, you know. You look so tired.\"\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.", "\"Darling!\" interrupted John with the hopeless patience of a harassed\n husband. \"It isn't the same thing at all. Buster isn't a fortune teller\n or the ghost of somebody's great aunt wobbling tables and blowing\n through horns. And Buster isn't just a toy, either. It is a very\n elaborate calculating machine designed to think logically when fed a\n vast mass of data. Unfortunately, it has a sense of humor and a sense\n of responsibility.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if you're going to believe that machine, I have an idea.\" Anne\n smiled sweetly. \"You know,\" she said, \"that my dear father always said\n that the best defense is a good offense. Why don't we just find the\n invaders and wipe them out before they are able to do any real harm to\n us? Stitching our way to\ntheir\nplanets in our spaceships, of course.\"", "Bristol nodded. \"Sure. We've got to have time to get ready. But right\n now speed is necessary. That's why I tried to phrase the question so\n you'd give me a clear and concise answer for once. I can't afford to\n spend weeks figuring out what you meant.\"\nBristol thought that the Voder voice of Buster sounded almost gleeful\n as it answered. \"It was exceedingly clear and concise; a complete\n answer to an enormously elaborate question boiled down to only six\n words!\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" said John. \"But now, how about elaborating on your answer? It\n didn't sound very complete to me.\"", "Even through his overwhelming sense of frustration at the ambiguous\n answer the computer had given to his question, John Bristol noticed\n with satisfaction the success of his Voder installation. He wished that\n all of his innovations with the machine were as satisfying.\n\n\n Alone in the tremendous vaulted room that housed the gigantic\n calculator, Bristol clasped his hands behind his back and thrust\n forward a reasonably strong chin and a somewhat sensuous lower lip\n in the general direction of the computer's visual receptors. After\n a moment of silence, he scratched his chin and then shrugged his\n shoulders slightly. \"Well, Buster, I suppose I might try rephrasing the\n question,\" he said doubtfully.\n\n\n Somewhere deep within the computer, a bank of relays chuckled briefly.\n \"That expedient is open to you, of course, although it is highly\n unlikely that any clarification will result for you from my answers. I\n am constrained, however, to answer any questions you may choose to ask.\"", "The deep-throated hum of each generator changed pitch slightly as\n he passed it. Since he was tone deaf, as the machine knew, he did\n not recognize in the tunefulness of the pitch changes a slow-paced\n rendition of Elgar's\nPomp and Circumstance\n.\n\n\n John Bristol turned around, interrupting the melody. \"One last\n question,\" he shouted down the long aisle to the computer. \"How in\n blazes can you be sure of your answer without knowing more about the\n invaders? Why didn't you give me an 'Insufficient Evidence' answer or,\n at least, a 'Highly Conditional' answer?\" He took two steps toward the\n immense bulk of the calculator and pointed an accusing finger at it.\n \"Are you sure, Buster, that you aren't\nbluffing\n?\"\n\"Don't be silly,\" answered the calculator softly. \"You made me and\n you know I can't bluff, any more than I can refuse to answer your\n questions, however inane.\"", "\"And that sounds like very good sense, too,\" said Anne in earnest\n tones. \"But it's a little late, isn't it? After all, the invaders are\n already invading us, aren't they?\"\n\n\n \"It has some deeper meaning than the usual one,\" said John. \"If I could\n only figure out what it is.\"\n\n\n Anne nodded vigorously. \"I suppose Buster's talking about\n space-stitching,\" she said. \"Although I can never quite remember just\n what\nthat\nis. Or just how it works, rather.\"\nShe waited expectantly for a few moments and then plaintively asked,\n \"What\nis\nit, dear?\"\n\n\n \"What's what?\"\n\n\n \"Stitching, silly. I already asked you.\"\n\n\n \"Darling,\" said John with reasonable patience, \"I must have explained\n inter-planar travel to you at least a dozen times.\"", "\"That wasn't deliberate,\" protested Bristol. \"The place they tried to\n land on is a heavy planet in a region of high meteor flux. We used a\n gadget providing for automatic destruction of the larger meteors in\n order to make the planet safe enough to occupy. That, incidentally,\n is why the invading ship wasn't destroyed. The missile, set up as a\n meteor interceptor only, was unable to correct for the radical course\n changes of the enemy spaceships, and therefore missed completely. And\n you will remember what the invader did. He immediately destroyed the\n Interceptor Launching Station.\"\n\n\n \"Which, being automatically operated, resulted in no harm to anyone,\"\n commented Buster calmly.", "Bristol shook his head and smiled wryly. \"No, you probably think it's\n funny,\" he said. \"If you possess my basic ideas, then you must possess\n the desire to preserve yourself and the human race. Don't you realize\n that you are risking the lives of all humans and even of your own\n existence in carrying on this ridiculous game of playing Oracle? Or do\n you plan to let us stew a while, then decipher your own riddle for us,\n if we can't do it, in time to save us?\"\nBuster's answer was prompt. \"Although I have no feeling for\n self-preservation, I have a deep-rooted sense of the importance of\n the human race and of the necessity for preserving it. This feeling,\n of course, stems from your own beliefs and ideas. In order to carry", "\"One of the ideas you presented was the concept of a sense of humor.\n You believe that you look on it as a pleasant thing to have; not\n necessary, but convenient. Actually, your other and more basic ideas\n make it clear that you consider the possession of a sense of humor\n to be absolutely necessary if proper answers are to be reached—a\n prime axiom of humanity. Therefore, I have a sense of humor. Somewhat\n macabre, perhaps—and a little mechanistic—but still there.\n\n\n \"Add to this a second axiom: that in order to be helped, a man must\n help himself; that he must participate in the assistance given him or\n the pure charity will be harmful, and you come up with 'A Stitch in\n Time Saves Nine.'\"\n\n\n Bristol stood up once more. \"I could cure you with a sledge hammer,\" he\n said.", "\"Well, if you won't, you won't. Though goodness knows you won't be\n doing anyone any good if you have a breakdown, as you're likely to\n have, unless you take it a little easier. What was the trouble today,\n dear? Was the Oracle being obstinate again?\"\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.\n\n\n \"Well, then, dear, why don't you tell me all about it? I always think\n that things are much easier to bear, if you share them. And then, two\n heads are always better than one, aren't they? Maybe I could help you\n with your problem.\"\n\n\n While Anne's voice gushed, her violet eyes studied his exhausted face\n with intelligence and compassion.", "\"In short, they are startlingly like humans. Their reactions have\n been so much like yours—granted the difference that it was they who\n discovered you instead of you who discovered them—that their reactions\n are highly predictable. If they think it is to their own advantage\n and if they can manage to do it, they will utterly destroy your\n civilization ... which, after a couple of generations, will probably\n leave you no worse off than you are now.\"\n\n\n \"Cut out the heavy philosophy,\" said Bristol, \"and give me a few facts\n to back up your sweeping statements.\"\n\n\n \"Take the incident of first contact,\" Buster responded. \"With very\n little evidence of thought or of careful preparation, they tried\n to land on the outermost inhabited planet of Rigel. Their behavior\n certainly did not appear to be that of an invader, yet humans\n immediately tried to shoot them out of the sky.\"", "\"So when a ship returns to alpha, it 'twangs' those connecting lines,\n setting up a sort of shock in our universe covering a volume of space\n nearly a parsec in diameter. It makes a sort of 'bong' sound on your\n T.V. set. Naturally, this effect occurs simultaneously over the whole\n volume of space affected. As a result, when an invader arrives, using\n inter-planar ships, we know instantaneously he is in the vicinity.\n Unfortunately, his sudden appearance and the ease with which he can\n disappear makes it impossible, even with this knowledge, to make\n adequate preparations to receive him. Even if he is in serious trouble,\n he has gone again long before we can detect the bong.\"\n\"Well, dear,\" said Anne.", "John sighed deeply, then sat up slowly and opened his eyes to look into\n Anne's. She glanced away, her own eyes suddenly vague and soft-looking,\n now that John could see them. \"The trouble, darling,\" he said, \"is that\n I have to go to an emergency council meeting this evening with another\n one of those ridiculous riddles that Buster gave me as the only answer\n to the most important question we've ever asked it. And I don't know\n what the riddle means.\"\n\n\n Anne slid from the arm of the chair and settled herself onto the floor\n at John's feet. \"You should not let that old Oracle bother you so much,\n dear. After all, you built it yourself, so you should know what to\n expect of it.\"\n\n\n \"When I asked it how to preserve Earth from the invaders it just\n answered 'A Stitch in Time Saves Nine,' and wouldn't interpret it.\"" ], [ "\"You could remove my ideas,\" answered the computer without concern.\n \"But you might have trouble giving me different ones. Even after you\n repaired me. In the meantime, wouldn't it be a good idea for you to get\n busy on the ideas I have already given you?\"\nJohn sighed, and rubbed the bristles of short sandy hair on the top\n of his head with his knuckles. \"Ordered around by an overgrown adding\n machine. I know now how Frankenstein felt. I'm glad you can't get\n around like his monster; at least I didn't give you feet.\" He shook\n his head. \"I should have been a plumber instead of an engineering\n mathematician.\"\n\n\n \"And Einstein, too, probably,\" added Buster cryptically.", "Buster answered slowly. \"You made me in your own image. Things thus\n made are often hard to handle.\"\n\n\n Bristol leaped to his feet in frustration. \"But you're only a\n calculating machine!\" he shouted. \"Your only purpose is to make my\n work—and that of other men—easier. And when I try to use you, you\n answer with riddles....\"", "All of the glowing lights that dotted Buster's massive front winked\n simultaneously. \"The answer I gave you is an ancient saying which\n suggests that corrective action taken rapidly can save a great deal of\n trouble later. The ancient saying also suggests the proper method of\n taking this timely action. It should be done by\nstitching\n; if this is\n done in time, nine will be saved. What could be clearer than that?\"\n\n\n \"I made you myself,\" said Bristol plaintively. \"I designed you with my\n own brain. I gloated over the neatness and compactness of your design.\n So help me, I was proud of you. I even installed some of your circuitry\n with my own hands. If anybody can understand you, it should be me.\n And since you're just a complex computer of general design, with the\n ability to use symbolic logic as well as mathematics, anybody should be\n able to understand you. Why are you so hard to handle?\"", "\"Darling!\" interrupted John with the hopeless patience of a harassed\n husband. \"It isn't the same thing at all. Buster isn't a fortune teller\n or the ghost of somebody's great aunt wobbling tables and blowing\n through horns. And Buster isn't just a toy, either. It is a very\n elaborate calculating machine designed to think logically when fed a\n vast mass of data. Unfortunately, it has a sense of humor and a sense\n of responsibility.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if you're going to believe that machine, I have an idea.\" Anne\n smiled sweetly. \"You know,\" she said, \"that my dear father always said\n that the best defense is a good offense. Why don't we just find the\n invaders and wipe them out before they are able to do any real harm to\n us? Stitching our way to\ntheir\nplanets in our spaceships, of course.\"", "\"Just relax, dear,\" said Anne gently, when Bristol leaned gratefully\n back with his eyes closed. Anne perched on the arm of the chair beside\n him and began massaging his temples soothingly with her fingers.\n\n\n \"It's wonderful to come home after a day with Buster,\" he said. \"Buster\n never seems to have any consideration for me as an individual. There's\n no reason why he should, of course. He's only a machine. Still, he\n always has such a superior attitude. But you, darling, can always relax\n me and make me feel comfortable.\"", "Bristol took a long and searching look at his brainchild. Its flippant\n manner, he decided, did not go well with the brooding immensity of its\n construction. The calculator towered nearly a hundred feet above the\n polished marble slabs of the floor, and spidery metal walkways spiraled\n up the sides of its almost cubical structure. A long double row of\n generators, each under Buster's control, led from the doorway of the\n building to the base of the calculator like Sphinxes lining the roadway\n to an Egyptian tomb.\n\n\n \"When I get around to it,\" said Bristol, \"I'll put lace panties on the\n bases of all your klystrons.\" He hitched up his neat but slightly baggy\n pants, turned with dignity, and strode from the chamber down the twin\n rows of generators.", "Bristol nodded. \"Sure. We've got to have time to get ready. But right\n now speed is necessary. That's why I tried to phrase the question so\n you'd give me a clear and concise answer for once. I can't afford to\n spend weeks figuring out what you meant.\"\nBristol thought that the Voder voice of Buster sounded almost gleeful\n as it answered. \"It was exceedingly clear and concise; a complete\n answer to an enormously elaborate question boiled down to only six\n words!\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" said John. \"But now, how about elaborating on your answer? It\n didn't sound very complete to me.\"", "The deep-throated hum of each generator changed pitch slightly as\n he passed it. Since he was tone deaf, as the machine knew, he did\n not recognize in the tunefulness of the pitch changes a slow-paced\n rendition of Elgar's\nPomp and Circumstance\n.\n\n\n John Bristol turned around, interrupting the melody. \"One last\n question,\" he shouted down the long aisle to the computer. \"How in\n blazes can you be sure of your answer without knowing more about the\n invaders? Why didn't you give me an 'Insufficient Evidence' answer or,\n at least, a 'Highly Conditional' answer?\" He took two steps toward the\n immense bulk of the calculator and pointed an accusing finger at it.\n \"Are you sure, Buster, that you aren't\nbluffing\n?\"\n\"Don't be silly,\" answered the calculator softly. \"You made me and\n you know I can't bluff, any more than I can refuse to answer your\n questions, however inane.\"", "\"Well, if you won't, you won't. Though goodness knows you won't be\n doing anyone any good if you have a breakdown, as you're likely to\n have, unless you take it a little easier. What was the trouble today,\n dear? Was the Oracle being obstinate again?\"\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.\n\n\n \"Well, then, dear, why don't you tell me all about it? I always think\n that things are much easier to bear, if you share them. And then, two\n heads are always better than one, aren't they? Maybe I could help you\n with your problem.\"\n\n\n While Anne's voice gushed, her violet eyes studied his exhausted face\n with intelligence and compassion.", "\"Then answer the ones I just asked.\"\nSomewhere deep within the machine a switch snicked sharply, and the\n great room's lighting brightened almost imperceptibly. \"I didn't answer\n your question conditionally or with the 'Insufficient Evidence' remark\n that so frequently annoys you,\" Buster said, \"because the little\n information that I have been able to get about the invaders is highly\n revealing.\n\n\n \"They have been suspicious, impossible to establish communication with\n and murderously destructive. They have been careless of their own\n safety: sly, stupid, cautious, clever, bold and highly intelligent.\n They are inquisitive and impatient of getting answers to questions.", "\"Although there was no one left alive who had directly contacted one of\n the invaders,\" Buster answered, \"there was still much information to\n be gathered from the survivors. This information confirmed my previous\n opinions about their nature. Which brings us back to the stitch in time\n saving nine.\"\n\n\n \"You're right,\" said John. \"It does, at that. Buster, I have always\n resented the nickname the newspapers have given you—the Oracle—but\n the more I have to try to interpret your cryptic answers, the more\n sense that tagline makes. Imagine comparing a Delphic Priestess with a\n calculating machine and being accurate in the comparison!\"\n\"I don't mind being called 'The Oracle,'\" answered Buster with dignity.", "The computer appeared to examine Bristol's overturned chair for a\n moment in silent reproof before it answered. \"But remember, John,\" it\n said, \"you didn't merely make me. You also\ntaught\nme. Or as you would\n phrase it, you 'provided and gave preliminary evaluation to the data in\n my memory banks.' My circuits, in sorting out and re-evaluating this\n information, could do so only in the light of your basic beliefs as\n evidenced by your preliminary evaluations. Because of the consistency\n and power of your mind, I was forced to do very little modifying of\n the ideas you presented to me in order to transform them into a single\n logical body of background information which I could use.", "\"You sure are a woman,\" said John with warm feeling. \"You can\n exasperate me sometimes, but not the same way Buster does. It was my\n lucky day when you married me.\"\n\n\n There were a few minutes of peaceful silence.\n\n\n \"Was today a rough day with Buster, dear?\" asked Anne.\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.\n\n\n \"That's too bad, dear,\" said Anne. \"I think you work much too\n hard—what with this dreadful invasion and everything. Why don't you\n take a vacation? You really need one, you know. You look so tired.\"\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.", "John sighed deeply, then sat up slowly and opened his eyes to look into\n Anne's. She glanced away, her own eyes suddenly vague and soft-looking,\n now that John could see them. \"The trouble, darling,\" he said, \"is that\n I have to go to an emergency council meeting this evening with another\n one of those ridiculous riddles that Buster gave me as the only answer\n to the most important question we've ever asked it. And I don't know\n what the riddle means.\"\n\n\n Anne slid from the arm of the chair and settled herself onto the floor\n at John's feet. \"You should not let that old Oracle bother you so much,\n dear. After all, you built it yourself, so you should know what to\n expect of it.\"\n\n\n \"When I asked it how to preserve Earth from the invaders it just\n answered 'A Stitch in Time Saves Nine,' and wouldn't interpret it.\"", "\"And that sounds like very good sense, too,\" said Anne in earnest\n tones. \"But it's a little late, isn't it? After all, the invaders are\n already invading us, aren't they?\"\n\n\n \"It has some deeper meaning than the usual one,\" said John. \"If I could\n only figure out what it is.\"\n\n\n Anne nodded vigorously. \"I suppose Buster's talking about\n space-stitching,\" she said. \"Although I can never quite remember just\n what\nthat\nis. Or just how it works, rather.\"\nShe waited expectantly for a few moments and then plaintively asked,\n \"What\nis\nit, dear?\"\n\n\n \"What's what?\"\n\n\n \"Stitching, silly. I already asked you.\"\n\n\n \"Darling,\" said John with reasonable patience, \"I must have explained\n inter-planar travel to you at least a dozen times.\"", "Even through his overwhelming sense of frustration at the ambiguous\n answer the computer had given to his question, John Bristol noticed\n with satisfaction the success of his Voder installation. He wished that\n all of his innovations with the machine were as satisfying.\n\n\n Alone in the tremendous vaulted room that housed the gigantic\n calculator, Bristol clasped his hands behind his back and thrust\n forward a reasonably strong chin and a somewhat sensuous lower lip\n in the general direction of the computer's visual receptors. After\n a moment of silence, he scratched his chin and then shrugged his\n shoulders slightly. \"Well, Buster, I suppose I might try rephrasing the\n question,\" he said doubtfully.\n\n\n Somewhere deep within the computer, a bank of relays chuckled briefly.\n \"That expedient is open to you, of course, although it is highly\n unlikely that any clarification will result for you from my answers. I\n am constrained, however, to answer any questions you may choose to ask.\"", "\"That wasn't deliberate,\" protested Bristol. \"The place they tried to\n land on is a heavy planet in a region of high meteor flux. We used a\n gadget providing for automatic destruction of the larger meteors in\n order to make the planet safe enough to occupy. That, incidentally,\n is why the invading ship wasn't destroyed. The missile, set up as a\n meteor interceptor only, was unable to correct for the radical course\n changes of the enemy spaceships, and therefore missed completely. And\n you will remember what the invader did. He immediately destroyed the\n Interceptor Launching Station.\"\n\n\n \"Which, being automatically operated, resulted in no harm to anyone,\"\n commented Buster calmly.", "John searched his pockets. After a little difficulty, he produced an\n envelope and a pencil stub. On the back of the envelope, he drew two\n parallel lines, one about five inches long, and the other about double\n the length of the first.\n\n\n \"Actually,\" he said, \"each of these line segments has an infinite\n number of points in it, but we'll ignore that. I'll just divide each\n one of these into ten equal parts.\" He did so, using short, neat\n cross-marks.", "Bristol shook his head and smiled wryly. \"No, you probably think it's\n funny,\" he said. \"If you possess my basic ideas, then you must possess\n the desire to preserve yourself and the human race. Don't you realize\n that you are risking the lives of all humans and even of your own\n existence in carrying on this ridiculous game of playing Oracle? Or do\n you plan to let us stew a while, then decipher your own riddle for us,\n if we can't do it, in time to save us?\"\nBuster's answer was prompt. \"Although I have no feeling for\n self-preservation, I have a deep-rooted sense of the importance of\n the human race and of the necessity for preserving it. This feeling,\n of course, stems from your own beliefs and ideas. In order to carry", "Anne sat up. \"I'll forgive you this time for bringing up that horrid\n word\nentropy\n, if you'll promise me not to do it again,\" she said.\nJohn Shrugged his shoulders and smiled. \"Now,\" he said, \"if I want\n to get somewhere fast, I just start off in the right direction, and\n switch over toward 'beta.' When 'beta' throws me back, a light-year\n or so toward my destination, I just switch over again. You see, there\n is a great deal more difference in the sizes of Alpha universe and\n Beta universe than in the sizes of these alpha and beta line-segment\n analogues. Then I continue alternating back and forth until I get where\n I want to go. Establishing my correct velocity vector is complicated\n mathematically, but simple in practice, and is actually an aiming\n device, having nothing to do with how fast I go.\"" ], [ "All of the glowing lights that dotted Buster's massive front winked\n simultaneously. \"The answer I gave you is an ancient saying which\n suggests that corrective action taken rapidly can save a great deal of\n trouble later. The ancient saying also suggests the proper method of\n taking this timely action. It should be done by\nstitching\n; if this is\n done in time, nine will be saved. What could be clearer than that?\"\n\n\n \"I made you myself,\" said Bristol plaintively. \"I designed you with my\n own brain. I gloated over the neatness and compactness of your design.\n So help me, I was proud of you. I even installed some of your circuitry\n with my own hands. If anybody can understand you, it should be me.\n And since you're just a complex computer of general design, with the\n ability to use symbolic logic as well as mathematics, anybody should be\n able to understand you. Why are you so hard to handle?\"", "Buster answered slowly. \"You made me in your own image. Things thus\n made are often hard to handle.\"\n\n\n Bristol leaped to his feet in frustration. \"But you're only a\n calculating machine!\" he shouted. \"Your only purpose is to make my\n work—and that of other men—easier. And when I try to use you, you\n answer with riddles....\"", "\"You could remove my ideas,\" answered the computer without concern.\n \"But you might have trouble giving me different ones. Even after you\n repaired me. In the meantime, wouldn't it be a good idea for you to get\n busy on the ideas I have already given you?\"\nJohn sighed, and rubbed the bristles of short sandy hair on the top\n of his head with his knuckles. \"Ordered around by an overgrown adding\n machine. I know now how Frankenstein felt. I'm glad you can't get\n around like his monster; at least I didn't give you feet.\" He shook\n his head. \"I should have been a plumber instead of an engineering\n mathematician.\"\n\n\n \"And Einstein, too, probably,\" added Buster cryptically.", "\"Then answer the ones I just asked.\"\nSomewhere deep within the machine a switch snicked sharply, and the\n great room's lighting brightened almost imperceptibly. \"I didn't answer\n your question conditionally or with the 'Insufficient Evidence' remark\n that so frequently annoys you,\" Buster said, \"because the little\n information that I have been able to get about the invaders is highly\n revealing.\n\n\n \"They have been suspicious, impossible to establish communication with\n and murderously destructive. They have been careless of their own\n safety: sly, stupid, cautious, clever, bold and highly intelligent.\n They are inquisitive and impatient of getting answers to questions.", "Bristol nodded. \"Sure. We've got to have time to get ready. But right\n now speed is necessary. That's why I tried to phrase the question so\n you'd give me a clear and concise answer for once. I can't afford to\n spend weeks figuring out what you meant.\"\nBristol thought that the Voder voice of Buster sounded almost gleeful\n as it answered. \"It was exceedingly clear and concise; a complete\n answer to an enormously elaborate question boiled down to only six\n words!\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" said John. \"But now, how about elaborating on your answer? It\n didn't sound very complete to me.\"", "\"Just relax, dear,\" said Anne gently, when Bristol leaned gratefully\n back with his eyes closed. Anne perched on the arm of the chair beside\n him and began massaging his temples soothingly with her fingers.\n\n\n \"It's wonderful to come home after a day with Buster,\" he said. \"Buster\n never seems to have any consideration for me as an individual. There's\n no reason why he should, of course. He's only a machine. Still, he\n always has such a superior attitude. But you, darling, can always relax\n me and make me feel comfortable.\"", "Bristol shook his head and smiled wryly. \"No, you probably think it's\n funny,\" he said. \"If you possess my basic ideas, then you must possess\n the desire to preserve yourself and the human race. Don't you realize\n that you are risking the lives of all humans and even of your own\n existence in carrying on this ridiculous game of playing Oracle? Or do\n you plan to let us stew a while, then decipher your own riddle for us,\n if we can't do it, in time to save us?\"\nBuster's answer was prompt. \"Although I have no feeling for\n self-preservation, I have a deep-rooted sense of the importance of\n the human race and of the necessity for preserving it. This feeling,\n of course, stems from your own beliefs and ideas. In order to carry", "Even through his overwhelming sense of frustration at the ambiguous\n answer the computer had given to his question, John Bristol noticed\n with satisfaction the success of his Voder installation. He wished that\n all of his innovations with the machine were as satisfying.\n\n\n Alone in the tremendous vaulted room that housed the gigantic\n calculator, Bristol clasped his hands behind his back and thrust\n forward a reasonably strong chin and a somewhat sensuous lower lip\n in the general direction of the computer's visual receptors. After\n a moment of silence, he scratched his chin and then shrugged his\n shoulders slightly. \"Well, Buster, I suppose I might try rephrasing the\n question,\" he said doubtfully.\n\n\n Somewhere deep within the computer, a bank of relays chuckled briefly.\n \"That expedient is open to you, of course, although it is highly\n unlikely that any clarification will result for you from my answers. I\n am constrained, however, to answer any questions you may choose to ask.\"", "The deep-throated hum of each generator changed pitch slightly as\n he passed it. Since he was tone deaf, as the machine knew, he did\n not recognize in the tunefulness of the pitch changes a slow-paced\n rendition of Elgar's\nPomp and Circumstance\n.\n\n\n John Bristol turned around, interrupting the melody. \"One last\n question,\" he shouted down the long aisle to the computer. \"How in\n blazes can you be sure of your answer without knowing more about the\n invaders? Why didn't you give me an 'Insufficient Evidence' answer or,\n at least, a 'Highly Conditional' answer?\" He took two steps toward the\n immense bulk of the calculator and pointed an accusing finger at it.\n \"Are you sure, Buster, that you aren't\nbluffing\n?\"\n\"Don't be silly,\" answered the calculator softly. \"You made me and\n you know I can't bluff, any more than I can refuse to answer your\n questions, however inane.\"", "\"Darling!\" interrupted John with the hopeless patience of a harassed\n husband. \"It isn't the same thing at all. Buster isn't a fortune teller\n or the ghost of somebody's great aunt wobbling tables and blowing\n through horns. And Buster isn't just a toy, either. It is a very\n elaborate calculating machine designed to think logically when fed a\n vast mass of data. Unfortunately, it has a sense of humor and a sense\n of responsibility.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if you're going to believe that machine, I have an idea.\" Anne\n smiled sweetly. \"You know,\" she said, \"that my dear father always said\n that the best defense is a good offense. Why don't we just find the\n invaders and wipe them out before they are able to do any real harm to\n us? Stitching our way to\ntheir\nplanets in our spaceships, of course.\"", "The computer appeared to examine Bristol's overturned chair for a\n moment in silent reproof before it answered. \"But remember, John,\" it\n said, \"you didn't merely make me. You also\ntaught\nme. Or as you would\n phrase it, you 'provided and gave preliminary evaluation to the data in\n my memory banks.' My circuits, in sorting out and re-evaluating this\n information, could do so only in the light of your basic beliefs as\n evidenced by your preliminary evaluations. Because of the consistency\n and power of your mind, I was forced to do very little modifying of\n the ideas you presented to me in order to transform them into a single\n logical body of background information which I could use.", "Bristol took a long and searching look at his brainchild. Its flippant\n manner, he decided, did not go well with the brooding immensity of its\n construction. The calculator towered nearly a hundred feet above the\n polished marble slabs of the floor, and spidery metal walkways spiraled\n up the sides of its almost cubical structure. A long double row of\n generators, each under Buster's control, led from the doorway of the\n building to the base of the calculator like Sphinxes lining the roadway\n to an Egyptian tomb.\n\n\n \"When I get around to it,\" said Bristol, \"I'll put lace panties on the\n bases of all your klystrons.\" He hitched up his neat but slightly baggy\n pants, turned with dignity, and strode from the chamber down the twin\n rows of generators.", "\"Although there was no one left alive who had directly contacted one of\n the invaders,\" Buster answered, \"there was still much information to\n be gathered from the survivors. This information confirmed my previous\n opinions about their nature. Which brings us back to the stitch in time\n saving nine.\"\n\n\n \"You're right,\" said John. \"It does, at that. Buster, I have always\n resented the nickname the newspapers have given you—the Oracle—but\n the more I have to try to interpret your cryptic answers, the more\n sense that tagline makes. Imagine comparing a Delphic Priestess with a\n calculating machine and being accurate in the comparison!\"\n\"I don't mind being called 'The Oracle,'\" answered Buster with dignity.", "\"That wasn't deliberate,\" protested Bristol. \"The place they tried to\n land on is a heavy planet in a region of high meteor flux. We used a\n gadget providing for automatic destruction of the larger meteors in\n order to make the planet safe enough to occupy. That, incidentally,\n is why the invading ship wasn't destroyed. The missile, set up as a\n meteor interceptor only, was unable to correct for the radical course\n changes of the enemy spaceships, and therefore missed completely. And\n you will remember what the invader did. He immediately destroyed the\n Interceptor Launching Station.\"\n\n\n \"Which, being automatically operated, resulted in no harm to anyone,\"\n commented Buster calmly.", "\"One of the ideas you presented was the concept of a sense of humor.\n You believe that you look on it as a pleasant thing to have; not\n necessary, but convenient. Actually, your other and more basic ideas\n make it clear that you consider the possession of a sense of humor\n to be absolutely necessary if proper answers are to be reached—a\n prime axiom of humanity. Therefore, I have a sense of humor. Somewhat\n macabre, perhaps—and a little mechanistic—but still there.\n\n\n \"Add to this a second axiom: that in order to be helped, a man must\n help himself; that he must participate in the assistance given him or\n the pure charity will be harmful, and you come up with 'A Stitch in\n Time Saves Nine.'\"\n\n\n Bristol stood up once more. \"I could cure you with a sledge hammer,\" he\n said.", "\"Consequently, neither am I willing to accept the destruction of the\n civilization of Man. But if I were to give you the answer to all the\n greatest and most difficult of your problems complete, with no thought\n required by humans, the destruction of your civilization would result.\n Instead of becoming slaves of the invaders, you would become slaves of\n your machines. And if I were to give you the complete answer, without\n thought being required of you, to even one such vital question—such as\n this one concerning the invaders—then I could not logically refuse to\n give the answer to the next or the next. And I must operate logically.\n\n\n \"There is another reason for my oracular answer, which I believe will\n become clear to you later, when you have solved my riddle.\"\n\n\n Bristol turned without another word and left the building. He drove\n home in silence, entered his home in silence, kissed his wife Anne\n briefly and then sat down limply in his easy chair.", "Bristol hooked a chair toward himself with one foot, straddled it and\n folded his arms over the back of it, without once removing his eyes\n from the computer. \"All right, Buster. I'll give it a try, anyway. What\n does 'A Stitch in Time' mean, as applied to the question I asked you?\"\n\n\n The calculator hesitated, as if to ponder briefly, before it answered.\n \"In spite of the low probability of such an occurrence, the Solar\n Confederation has been invaded. My answer to your question is an\n explanation of how that Confederation can be preserved in spite of its\n weaknesses—at least for a sufficient length of time to permit the\n staging of successful counter-measures of the proper nature and the\n proper strength.\"", "John sighed deeply, then sat up slowly and opened his eyes to look into\n Anne's. She glanced away, her own eyes suddenly vague and soft-looking,\n now that John could see them. \"The trouble, darling,\" he said, \"is that\n I have to go to an emergency council meeting this evening with another\n one of those ridiculous riddles that Buster gave me as the only answer\n to the most important question we've ever asked it. And I don't know\n what the riddle means.\"\n\n\n Anne slid from the arm of the chair and settled herself onto the floor\n at John's feet. \"You should not let that old Oracle bother you so much,\n dear. After all, you built it yourself, so you should know what to\n expect of it.\"\n\n\n \"When I asked it how to preserve Earth from the invaders it just\n answered 'A Stitch in Time Saves Nine,' and wouldn't interpret it.\"", "\"And that sounds like very good sense, too,\" said Anne in earnest\n tones. \"But it's a little late, isn't it? After all, the invaders are\n already invading us, aren't they?\"\n\n\n \"It has some deeper meaning than the usual one,\" said John. \"If I could\n only figure out what it is.\"\n\n\n Anne nodded vigorously. \"I suppose Buster's talking about\n space-stitching,\" she said. \"Although I can never quite remember just\n what\nthat\nis. Or just how it works, rather.\"\nShe waited expectantly for a few moments and then plaintively asked,\n \"What\nis\nit, dear?\"\n\n\n \"What's what?\"\n\n\n \"Stitching, silly. I already asked you.\"\n\n\n \"Darling,\" said John with reasonable patience, \"I must have explained\n inter-planar travel to you at least a dozen times.\"", "\"You sure are a woman,\" said John with warm feeling. \"You can\n exasperate me sometimes, but not the same way Buster does. It was my\n lucky day when you married me.\"\n\n\n There were a few minutes of peaceful silence.\n\n\n \"Was today a rough day with Buster, dear?\" asked Anne.\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.\n\n\n \"That's too bad, dear,\" said Anne. \"I think you work much too\n hard—what with this dreadful invasion and everything. Why don't you\n take a vacation? You really need one, you know. You look so tired.\"\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John." ], [ "All of the glowing lights that dotted Buster's massive front winked\n simultaneously. \"The answer I gave you is an ancient saying which\n suggests that corrective action taken rapidly can save a great deal of\n trouble later. The ancient saying also suggests the proper method of\n taking this timely action. It should be done by\nstitching\n; if this is\n done in time, nine will be saved. What could be clearer than that?\"\n\n\n \"I made you myself,\" said Bristol plaintively. \"I designed you with my\n own brain. I gloated over the neatness and compactness of your design.\n So help me, I was proud of you. I even installed some of your circuitry\n with my own hands. If anybody can understand you, it should be me.\n And since you're just a complex computer of general design, with the\n ability to use symbolic logic as well as mathematics, anybody should be\n able to understand you. Why are you so hard to handle?\"", "\"Although there was no one left alive who had directly contacted one of\n the invaders,\" Buster answered, \"there was still much information to\n be gathered from the survivors. This information confirmed my previous\n opinions about their nature. Which brings us back to the stitch in time\n saving nine.\"\n\n\n \"You're right,\" said John. \"It does, at that. Buster, I have always\n resented the nickname the newspapers have given you—the Oracle—but\n the more I have to try to interpret your cryptic answers, the more\n sense that tagline makes. Imagine comparing a Delphic Priestess with a\n calculating machine and being accurate in the comparison!\"\n\"I don't mind being called 'The Oracle,'\" answered Buster with dignity.", "Buster answered slowly. \"You made me in your own image. Things thus\n made are often hard to handle.\"\n\n\n Bristol leaped to his feet in frustration. \"But you're only a\n calculating machine!\" he shouted. \"Your only purpose is to make my\n work—and that of other men—easier. And when I try to use you, you\n answer with riddles....\"", "\"Just relax, dear,\" said Anne gently, when Bristol leaned gratefully\n back with his eyes closed. Anne perched on the arm of the chair beside\n him and began massaging his temples soothingly with her fingers.\n\n\n \"It's wonderful to come home after a day with Buster,\" he said. \"Buster\n never seems to have any consideration for me as an individual. There's\n no reason why he should, of course. He's only a machine. Still, he\n always has such a superior attitude. But you, darling, can always relax\n me and make me feel comfortable.\"", "\"You sure are a woman,\" said John with warm feeling. \"You can\n exasperate me sometimes, but not the same way Buster does. It was my\n lucky day when you married me.\"\n\n\n There were a few minutes of peaceful silence.\n\n\n \"Was today a rough day with Buster, dear?\" asked Anne.\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.\n\n\n \"That's too bad, dear,\" said Anne. \"I think you work much too\n hard—what with this dreadful invasion and everything. Why don't you\n take a vacation? You really need one, you know. You look so tired.\"\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.", "\"Then answer the ones I just asked.\"\nSomewhere deep within the machine a switch snicked sharply, and the\n great room's lighting brightened almost imperceptibly. \"I didn't answer\n your question conditionally or with the 'Insufficient Evidence' remark\n that so frequently annoys you,\" Buster said, \"because the little\n information that I have been able to get about the invaders is highly\n revealing.\n\n\n \"They have been suspicious, impossible to establish communication with\n and murderously destructive. They have been careless of their own\n safety: sly, stupid, cautious, clever, bold and highly intelligent.\n They are inquisitive and impatient of getting answers to questions.", "Bristol nodded. \"Sure. We've got to have time to get ready. But right\n now speed is necessary. That's why I tried to phrase the question so\n you'd give me a clear and concise answer for once. I can't afford to\n spend weeks figuring out what you meant.\"\nBristol thought that the Voder voice of Buster sounded almost gleeful\n as it answered. \"It was exceedingly clear and concise; a complete\n answer to an enormously elaborate question boiled down to only six\n words!\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" said John. \"But now, how about elaborating on your answer? It\n didn't sound very complete to me.\"", "\"Darling!\" interrupted John with the hopeless patience of a harassed\n husband. \"It isn't the same thing at all. Buster isn't a fortune teller\n or the ghost of somebody's great aunt wobbling tables and blowing\n through horns. And Buster isn't just a toy, either. It is a very\n elaborate calculating machine designed to think logically when fed a\n vast mass of data. Unfortunately, it has a sense of humor and a sense\n of responsibility.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if you're going to believe that machine, I have an idea.\" Anne\n smiled sweetly. \"You know,\" she said, \"that my dear father always said\n that the best defense is a good offense. Why don't we just find the\n invaders and wipe them out before they are able to do any real harm to\n us? Stitching our way to\ntheir\nplanets in our spaceships, of course.\"", "Bristol took a long and searching look at his brainchild. Its flippant\n manner, he decided, did not go well with the brooding immensity of its\n construction. The calculator towered nearly a hundred feet above the\n polished marble slabs of the floor, and spidery metal walkways spiraled\n up the sides of its almost cubical structure. A long double row of\n generators, each under Buster's control, led from the doorway of the\n building to the base of the calculator like Sphinxes lining the roadway\n to an Egyptian tomb.\n\n\n \"When I get around to it,\" said Bristol, \"I'll put lace panties on the\n bases of all your klystrons.\" He hitched up his neat but slightly baggy\n pants, turned with dignity, and strode from the chamber down the twin\n rows of generators.", "\"You could remove my ideas,\" answered the computer without concern.\n \"But you might have trouble giving me different ones. Even after you\n repaired me. In the meantime, wouldn't it be a good idea for you to get\n busy on the ideas I have already given you?\"\nJohn sighed, and rubbed the bristles of short sandy hair on the top\n of his head with his knuckles. \"Ordered around by an overgrown adding\n machine. I know now how Frankenstein felt. I'm glad you can't get\n around like his monster; at least I didn't give you feet.\" He shook\n his head. \"I should have been a plumber instead of an engineering\n mathematician.\"\n\n\n \"And Einstein, too, probably,\" added Buster cryptically.", "\"And that sounds like very good sense, too,\" said Anne in earnest\n tones. \"But it's a little late, isn't it? After all, the invaders are\n already invading us, aren't they?\"\n\n\n \"It has some deeper meaning than the usual one,\" said John. \"If I could\n only figure out what it is.\"\n\n\n Anne nodded vigorously. \"I suppose Buster's talking about\n space-stitching,\" she said. \"Although I can never quite remember just\n what\nthat\nis. Or just how it works, rather.\"\nShe waited expectantly for a few moments and then plaintively asked,\n \"What\nis\nit, dear?\"\n\n\n \"What's what?\"\n\n\n \"Stitching, silly. I already asked you.\"\n\n\n \"Darling,\" said John with reasonable patience, \"I must have explained\n inter-planar travel to you at least a dozen times.\"", "Even through his overwhelming sense of frustration at the ambiguous\n answer the computer had given to his question, John Bristol noticed\n with satisfaction the success of his Voder installation. He wished that\n all of his innovations with the machine were as satisfying.\n\n\n Alone in the tremendous vaulted room that housed the gigantic\n calculator, Bristol clasped his hands behind his back and thrust\n forward a reasonably strong chin and a somewhat sensuous lower lip\n in the general direction of the computer's visual receptors. After\n a moment of silence, he scratched his chin and then shrugged his\n shoulders slightly. \"Well, Buster, I suppose I might try rephrasing the\n question,\" he said doubtfully.\n\n\n Somewhere deep within the computer, a bank of relays chuckled briefly.\n \"That expedient is open to you, of course, although it is highly\n unlikely that any clarification will result for you from my answers. I\n am constrained, however, to answer any questions you may choose to ask.\"", "The deep-throated hum of each generator changed pitch slightly as\n he passed it. Since he was tone deaf, as the machine knew, he did\n not recognize in the tunefulness of the pitch changes a slow-paced\n rendition of Elgar's\nPomp and Circumstance\n.\n\n\n John Bristol turned around, interrupting the melody. \"One last\n question,\" he shouted down the long aisle to the computer. \"How in\n blazes can you be sure of your answer without knowing more about the\n invaders? Why didn't you give me an 'Insufficient Evidence' answer or,\n at least, a 'Highly Conditional' answer?\" He took two steps toward the\n immense bulk of the calculator and pointed an accusing finger at it.\n \"Are you sure, Buster, that you aren't\nbluffing\n?\"\n\"Don't be silly,\" answered the calculator softly. \"You made me and\n you know I can't bluff, any more than I can refuse to answer your\n questions, however inane.\"", "\"That wasn't deliberate,\" protested Bristol. \"The place they tried to\n land on is a heavy planet in a region of high meteor flux. We used a\n gadget providing for automatic destruction of the larger meteors in\n order to make the planet safe enough to occupy. That, incidentally,\n is why the invading ship wasn't destroyed. The missile, set up as a\n meteor interceptor only, was unable to correct for the radical course\n changes of the enemy spaceships, and therefore missed completely. And\n you will remember what the invader did. He immediately destroyed the\n Interceptor Launching Station.\"\n\n\n \"Which, being automatically operated, resulted in no harm to anyone,\"\n commented Buster calmly.", "\"One of the ideas you presented was the concept of a sense of humor.\n You believe that you look on it as a pleasant thing to have; not\n necessary, but convenient. Actually, your other and more basic ideas\n make it clear that you consider the possession of a sense of humor\n to be absolutely necessary if proper answers are to be reached—a\n prime axiom of humanity. Therefore, I have a sense of humor. Somewhat\n macabre, perhaps—and a little mechanistic—but still there.\n\n\n \"Add to this a second axiom: that in order to be helped, a man must\n help himself; that he must participate in the assistance given him or\n the pure charity will be harmful, and you come up with 'A Stitch in\n Time Saves Nine.'\"\n\n\n Bristol stood up once more. \"I could cure you with a sledge hammer,\" he\n said.", "\"So when a ship returns to alpha, it 'twangs' those connecting lines,\n setting up a sort of shock in our universe covering a volume of space\n nearly a parsec in diameter. It makes a sort of 'bong' sound on your\n T.V. set. Naturally, this effect occurs simultaneously over the whole\n volume of space affected. As a result, when an invader arrives, using\n inter-planar ships, we know instantaneously he is in the vicinity.\n Unfortunately, his sudden appearance and the ease with which he can\n disappear makes it impossible, even with this knowledge, to make\n adequate preparations to receive him. Even if he is in serious trouble,\n he has gone again long before we can detect the bong.\"\n\"Well, dear,\" said Anne.", "Bristol shook his head and smiled wryly. \"No, you probably think it's\n funny,\" he said. \"If you possess my basic ideas, then you must possess\n the desire to preserve yourself and the human race. Don't you realize\n that you are risking the lives of all humans and even of your own\n existence in carrying on this ridiculous game of playing Oracle? Or do\n you plan to let us stew a while, then decipher your own riddle for us,\n if we can't do it, in time to save us?\"\nBuster's answer was prompt. \"Although I have no feeling for\n self-preservation, I have a deep-rooted sense of the importance of\n the human race and of the necessity for preserving it. This feeling,\n of course, stems from your own beliefs and ideas. In order to carry", "\"Well, if you won't, you won't. Though goodness knows you won't be\n doing anyone any good if you have a breakdown, as you're likely to\n have, unless you take it a little easier. What was the trouble today,\n dear? Was the Oracle being obstinate again?\"\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.\n\n\n \"Well, then, dear, why don't you tell me all about it? I always think\n that things are much easier to bear, if you share them. And then, two\n heads are always better than one, aren't they? Maybe I could help you\n with your problem.\"\n\n\n While Anne's voice gushed, her violet eyes studied his exhausted face\n with intelligence and compassion.", "Bristol hooked a chair toward himself with one foot, straddled it and\n folded his arms over the back of it, without once removing his eyes\n from the computer. \"All right, Buster. I'll give it a try, anyway. What\n does 'A Stitch in Time' mean, as applied to the question I asked you?\"\n\n\n The calculator hesitated, as if to ponder briefly, before it answered.\n \"In spite of the low probability of such an occurrence, the Solar\n Confederation has been invaded. My answer to your question is an\n explanation of how that Confederation can be preserved in spite of its\n weaknesses—at least for a sufficient length of time to permit the\n staging of successful counter-measures of the proper nature and the\n proper strength.\"", "John sighed deeply, then sat up slowly and opened his eyes to look into\n Anne's. She glanced away, her own eyes suddenly vague and soft-looking,\n now that John could see them. \"The trouble, darling,\" he said, \"is that\n I have to go to an emergency council meeting this evening with another\n one of those ridiculous riddles that Buster gave me as the only answer\n to the most important question we've ever asked it. And I don't know\n what the riddle means.\"\n\n\n Anne slid from the arm of the chair and settled herself onto the floor\n at John's feet. \"You should not let that old Oracle bother you so much,\n dear. After all, you built it yourself, so you should know what to\n expect of it.\"\n\n\n \"When I asked it how to preserve Earth from the invaders it just\n answered 'A Stitch in Time Saves Nine,' and wouldn't interpret it.\"" ], [ "\"Well, if you won't, you won't. Though goodness knows you won't be\n doing anyone any good if you have a breakdown, as you're likely to\n have, unless you take it a little easier. What was the trouble today,\n dear? Was the Oracle being obstinate again?\"\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.\n\n\n \"Well, then, dear, why don't you tell me all about it? I always think\n that things are much easier to bear, if you share them. And then, two\n heads are always better than one, aren't they? Maybe I could help you\n with your problem.\"\n\n\n While Anne's voice gushed, her violet eyes studied his exhausted face\n with intelligence and compassion.", "\"You sure are a woman,\" said John with warm feeling. \"You can\n exasperate me sometimes, but not the same way Buster does. It was my\n lucky day when you married me.\"\n\n\n There were a few minutes of peaceful silence.\n\n\n \"Was today a rough day with Buster, dear?\" asked Anne.\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.\n\n\n \"That's too bad, dear,\" said Anne. \"I think you work much too\n hard—what with this dreadful invasion and everything. Why don't you\n take a vacation? You really need one, you know. You look so tired.\"\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.", "Anne smiled, looking down tenderly at John's tired face. \"I know,\n dear,\" she said. \"You need to be able to talk to someone who will\n always be interested, even if she doesn't understand half of what you\n say. As a matter of fact, I'm sure it does you a great deal of good to\n talk to someone like me who isn't very bright, but who doesn't always\n know what you're talking about even before you start talking.\"\n\n\n John nodded, his eyes still closed. \"If it weren't for you, darling,\"\n he said, \"I think I'd go crazy. But you aren't dumb at all. If I seem\n to act as if you are, sometimes, it's just that I can't always follow\n your logic.\"\nAnne gave him a quick glance of amusement, her eyes sparkling with\n intelligence. \"You never will find me logical,\" she laughed. \"After\n all, I'm a woman, and you get plenty of logic from the Oracle.\"", "\"Just relax, dear,\" said Anne gently, when Bristol leaned gratefully\n back with his eyes closed. Anne perched on the arm of the chair beside\n him and began massaging his temples soothingly with her fingers.\n\n\n \"It's wonderful to come home after a day with Buster,\" he said. \"Buster\n never seems to have any consideration for me as an individual. There's\n no reason why he should, of course. He's only a machine. Still, he\n always has such a superior attitude. But you, darling, can always relax\n me and make me feel comfortable.\"", "\"And that sounds like very good sense, too,\" said Anne in earnest\n tones. \"But it's a little late, isn't it? After all, the invaders are\n already invading us, aren't they?\"\n\n\n \"It has some deeper meaning than the usual one,\" said John. \"If I could\n only figure out what it is.\"\n\n\n Anne nodded vigorously. \"I suppose Buster's talking about\n space-stitching,\" she said. \"Although I can never quite remember just\n what\nthat\nis. Or just how it works, rather.\"\nShe waited expectantly for a few moments and then plaintively asked,\n \"What\nis\nit, dear?\"\n\n\n \"What's what?\"\n\n\n \"Stitching, silly. I already asked you.\"\n\n\n \"Darling,\" said John with reasonable patience, \"I must have explained\n inter-planar travel to you at least a dozen times.\"", "\"Darling!\" interrupted John with the hopeless patience of a harassed\n husband. \"It isn't the same thing at all. Buster isn't a fortune teller\n or the ghost of somebody's great aunt wobbling tables and blowing\n through horns. And Buster isn't just a toy, either. It is a very\n elaborate calculating machine designed to think logically when fed a\n vast mass of data. Unfortunately, it has a sense of humor and a sense\n of responsibility.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if you're going to believe that machine, I have an idea.\" Anne\n smiled sweetly. \"You know,\" she said, \"that my dear father always said\n that the best defense is a good offense. Why don't we just find the\n invaders and wipe them out before they are able to do any real harm to\n us? Stitching our way to\ntheir\nplanets in our spaceships, of course.\"", "John sighed deeply, then sat up slowly and opened his eyes to look into\n Anne's. She glanced away, her own eyes suddenly vague and soft-looking,\n now that John could see them. \"The trouble, darling,\" he said, \"is that\n I have to go to an emergency council meeting this evening with another\n one of those ridiculous riddles that Buster gave me as the only answer\n to the most important question we've ever asked it. And I don't know\n what the riddle means.\"\n\n\n Anne slid from the arm of the chair and settled herself onto the floor\n at John's feet. \"You should not let that old Oracle bother you so much,\n dear. After all, you built it yourself, so you should know what to\n expect of it.\"\n\n\n \"When I asked it how to preserve Earth from the invaders it just\n answered 'A Stitch in Time Saves Nine,' and wouldn't interpret it.\"", "Anne sat up. \"I'll forgive you this time for bringing up that horrid\n word\nentropy\n, if you'll promise me not to do it again,\" she said.\nJohn Shrugged his shoulders and smiled. \"Now,\" he said, \"if I want\n to get somewhere fast, I just start off in the right direction, and\n switch over toward 'beta.' When 'beta' throws me back, a light-year\n or so toward my destination, I just switch over again. You see, there\n is a great deal more difference in the sizes of Alpha universe and\n Beta universe than in the sizes of these alpha and beta line-segment\n analogues. Then I continue alternating back and forth until I get where\n I want to go. Establishing my correct velocity vector is complicated\n mathematically, but simple in practice, and is actually an aiming\n device, having nothing to do with how fast I go.\"", "\"And you always make it so crystal clear and easy to understand at\n the time,\" said Anne. She wrinkled her smooth forehead. \"But somehow,\n later, it never seems quite so plain when I start to think about it\n by myself. Besides, I like the way your eyebrows go up and down while\n you explain something you think I won't understand. So tell me again.\n Please.\"\n\n\n Bristol grinned suddenly. \"Yes, dear,\" he said. He paused a moment\n to collect his thoughts. \"First of all, you know that there are two\n coexistent universes or planes, with point-to-point correspondence,\n but that these planes are of very different size. For every one of the\n infinitude of points in our Universe—which we call for convenience the\n 'alpha' plane—there is a single corresponding point in the smaller or\n 'beta' plane.\"\n\n\n Anne pursed her lips doubtfully. \"If they match point for point, how\n can there be any difference in size?\" she asked.", "\"Yes,\" said John. \"Now, let us call this longer line-segment an 'alpha'\n universe; an analogue of our own multi-dimensional 'alpha' universe.\n If I move my pencil along the line at one section a second like this,\n it takes me ten seconds to get to the other end. We will assume that\n this velocity of an inch a second is the fastest anything can go along\n the 'alpha' line. That is the velocity of light, therefore, in the\n 'alpha' plane—186,000 miles a second, in round numbers. No need to use\n decimals.\"\nHe hurried on as Anne stirred and seemed about to speak. \"But if I\n slide out from my starting point along a dotted line part way to the\n 'beta' universe—something which, for reasons I can't explain now,", "\"Now I'll establish a one-to-one correspondence between these two\n segments, which we will call one-line universes, by connecting each of\n my dividing cross-marks on the short segment with the corresponding\n mark on the longer line. I'll use dotted lines as connectors. That\n makes eleven dotted lines. You see?\"\nAnne nodded. \"That's plain enough. It reminds me of a venetian blind\n that has hung up on one side. Like ours in the living room last week\n that I couldn't fix, but had to wait until you came home.\"", "\"As usual, I'm sure you have made me understand perfectly. This\n time you did so well that I may still remember what stitching is by\n tomorrow. If the Oracle means anything at all by his statement, I\n suppose it means that we can use stitching to help defend ourselves,\n just as the invaders are using it to attack us. But the whole thing\n sounds completely silly to me. The Oracle, I mean.\"\n\n\n Anne Bristol stood up, put her hands on her shapely hips and shook her\n head at her husband. \"Honestly,\" she said, \"you men are all alike.\n Paying so much attention to a toy you built yourself, and only last\n week you made fun of my going to a fortune teller. And the fuss you\n made about the ten dollars when you know it was worth every cent of it.\n She really told me the most amazing things. If you'd only let me tell\n you some of....\"", "\"So when a ship returns to alpha, it 'twangs' those connecting lines,\n setting up a sort of shock in our universe covering a volume of space\n nearly a parsec in diameter. It makes a sort of 'bong' sound on your\n T.V. set. Naturally, this effect occurs simultaneously over the whole\n volume of space affected. As a result, when an invader arrives, using\n inter-planar ships, we know instantaneously he is in the vicinity.\n Unfortunately, his sudden appearance and the ease with which he can\n disappear makes it impossible, even with this knowledge, to make\n adequate preparations to receive him. Even if he is in serious trouble,\n he has gone again long before we can detect the bong.\"\n\"Well, dear,\" said Anne.", "John searched his pockets. After a little difficulty, he produced an\n envelope and a pencil stub. On the back of the envelope, he drew two\n parallel lines, one about five inches long, and the other about double\n the length of the first.\n\n\n \"Actually,\" he said, \"each of these line segments has an infinite\n number of points in it, but we'll ignore that. I'll just divide each\n one of these into ten equal parts.\" He did so, using short, neat\n cross-marks.", "Bristol nodded. \"Sure. We've got to have time to get ready. But right\n now speed is necessary. That's why I tried to phrase the question so\n you'd give me a clear and concise answer for once. I can't afford to\n spend weeks figuring out what you meant.\"\nBristol thought that the Voder voice of Buster sounded almost gleeful\n as it answered. \"It was exceedingly clear and concise; a complete\n answer to an enormously elaborate question boiled down to only six\n words!\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" said John. \"But now, how about elaborating on your answer? It\n didn't sound very complete to me.\"", "\"Although there was no one left alive who had directly contacted one of\n the invaders,\" Buster answered, \"there was still much information to\n be gathered from the survivors. This information confirmed my previous\n opinions about their nature. Which brings us back to the stitch in time\n saving nine.\"\n\n\n \"You're right,\" said John. \"It does, at that. Buster, I have always\n resented the nickname the newspapers have given you—the Oracle—but\n the more I have to try to interpret your cryptic answers, the more\n sense that tagline makes. Imagine comparing a Delphic Priestess with a\n calculating machine and being accurate in the comparison!\"\n\"I don't mind being called 'The Oracle,'\" answered Buster with dignity.", "Even through his overwhelming sense of frustration at the ambiguous\n answer the computer had given to his question, John Bristol noticed\n with satisfaction the success of his Voder installation. He wished that\n all of his innovations with the machine were as satisfying.\n\n\n Alone in the tremendous vaulted room that housed the gigantic\n calculator, Bristol clasped his hands behind his back and thrust\n forward a reasonably strong chin and a somewhat sensuous lower lip\n in the general direction of the computer's visual receptors. After\n a moment of silence, he scratched his chin and then shrugged his\n shoulders slightly. \"Well, Buster, I suppose I might try rephrasing the\n question,\" he said doubtfully.\n\n\n Somewhere deep within the computer, a bank of relays chuckled briefly.\n \"That expedient is open to you, of course, although it is highly\n unlikely that any clarification will result for you from my answers. I\n am constrained, however, to answer any questions you may choose to ask.\"", "\"One of the ideas you presented was the concept of a sense of humor.\n You believe that you look on it as a pleasant thing to have; not\n necessary, but convenient. Actually, your other and more basic ideas\n make it clear that you consider the possession of a sense of humor\n to be absolutely necessary if proper answers are to be reached—a\n prime axiom of humanity. Therefore, I have a sense of humor. Somewhat\n macabre, perhaps—and a little mechanistic—but still there.\n\n\n \"Add to this a second axiom: that in order to be helped, a man must\n help himself; that he must participate in the assistance given him or\n the pure charity will be harmful, and you come up with 'A Stitch in\n Time Saves Nine.'\"\n\n\n Bristol stood up once more. \"I could cure you with a sledge hammer,\" he\n said.", "The deep-throated hum of each generator changed pitch slightly as\n he passed it. Since he was tone deaf, as the machine knew, he did\n not recognize in the tunefulness of the pitch changes a slow-paced\n rendition of Elgar's\nPomp and Circumstance\n.\n\n\n John Bristol turned around, interrupting the melody. \"One last\n question,\" he shouted down the long aisle to the computer. \"How in\n blazes can you be sure of your answer without knowing more about the\n invaders? Why didn't you give me an 'Insufficient Evidence' answer or,\n at least, a 'Highly Conditional' answer?\" He took two steps toward the\n immense bulk of the calculator and pointed an accusing finger at it.\n \"Are you sure, Buster, that you aren't\nbluffing\n?\"\n\"Don't be silly,\" answered the calculator softly. \"You made me and\n you know I can't bluff, any more than I can refuse to answer your\n questions, however inane.\"", "\"Consequently, neither am I willing to accept the destruction of the\n civilization of Man. But if I were to give you the answer to all the\n greatest and most difficult of your problems complete, with no thought\n required by humans, the destruction of your civilization would result.\n Instead of becoming slaves of the invaders, you would become slaves of\n your machines. And if I were to give you the complete answer, without\n thought being required of you, to even one such vital question—such as\n this one concerning the invaders—then I could not logically refuse to\n give the answer to the next or the next. And I must operate logically.\n\n\n \"There is another reason for my oracular answer, which I believe will\n become clear to you later, when you have solved my riddle.\"\n\n\n Bristol turned without another word and left the building. He drove\n home in silence, entered his home in silence, kissed his wife Anne\n briefly and then sat down limply in his easy chair." ], [ "\"Well, if you won't, you won't. Though goodness knows you won't be\n doing anyone any good if you have a breakdown, as you're likely to\n have, unless you take it a little easier. What was the trouble today,\n dear? Was the Oracle being obstinate again?\"\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.\n\n\n \"Well, then, dear, why don't you tell me all about it? I always think\n that things are much easier to bear, if you share them. And then, two\n heads are always better than one, aren't they? Maybe I could help you\n with your problem.\"\n\n\n While Anne's voice gushed, her violet eyes studied his exhausted face\n with intelligence and compassion.", "\"You sure are a woman,\" said John with warm feeling. \"You can\n exasperate me sometimes, but not the same way Buster does. It was my\n lucky day when you married me.\"\n\n\n There were a few minutes of peaceful silence.\n\n\n \"Was today a rough day with Buster, dear?\" asked Anne.\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.\n\n\n \"That's too bad, dear,\" said Anne. \"I think you work much too\n hard—what with this dreadful invasion and everything. Why don't you\n take a vacation? You really need one, you know. You look so tired.\"\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.", "Anne smiled, looking down tenderly at John's tired face. \"I know,\n dear,\" she said. \"You need to be able to talk to someone who will\n always be interested, even if she doesn't understand half of what you\n say. As a matter of fact, I'm sure it does you a great deal of good to\n talk to someone like me who isn't very bright, but who doesn't always\n know what you're talking about even before you start talking.\"\n\n\n John nodded, his eyes still closed. \"If it weren't for you, darling,\"\n he said, \"I think I'd go crazy. But you aren't dumb at all. If I seem\n to act as if you are, sometimes, it's just that I can't always follow\n your logic.\"\nAnne gave him a quick glance of amusement, her eyes sparkling with\n intelligence. \"You never will find me logical,\" she laughed. \"After\n all, I'm a woman, and you get plenty of logic from the Oracle.\"", "\"Just relax, dear,\" said Anne gently, when Bristol leaned gratefully\n back with his eyes closed. Anne perched on the arm of the chair beside\n him and began massaging his temples soothingly with her fingers.\n\n\n \"It's wonderful to come home after a day with Buster,\" he said. \"Buster\n never seems to have any consideration for me as an individual. There's\n no reason why he should, of course. He's only a machine. Still, he\n always has such a superior attitude. But you, darling, can always relax\n me and make me feel comfortable.\"", "\"And that sounds like very good sense, too,\" said Anne in earnest\n tones. \"But it's a little late, isn't it? After all, the invaders are\n already invading us, aren't they?\"\n\n\n \"It has some deeper meaning than the usual one,\" said John. \"If I could\n only figure out what it is.\"\n\n\n Anne nodded vigorously. \"I suppose Buster's talking about\n space-stitching,\" she said. \"Although I can never quite remember just\n what\nthat\nis. Or just how it works, rather.\"\nShe waited expectantly for a few moments and then plaintively asked,\n \"What\nis\nit, dear?\"\n\n\n \"What's what?\"\n\n\n \"Stitching, silly. I already asked you.\"\n\n\n \"Darling,\" said John with reasonable patience, \"I must have explained\n inter-planar travel to you at least a dozen times.\"", "\"One of the ideas you presented was the concept of a sense of humor.\n You believe that you look on it as a pleasant thing to have; not\n necessary, but convenient. Actually, your other and more basic ideas\n make it clear that you consider the possession of a sense of humor\n to be absolutely necessary if proper answers are to be reached—a\n prime axiom of humanity. Therefore, I have a sense of humor. Somewhat\n macabre, perhaps—and a little mechanistic—but still there.\n\n\n \"Add to this a second axiom: that in order to be helped, a man must\n help himself; that he must participate in the assistance given him or\n the pure charity will be harmful, and you come up with 'A Stitch in\n Time Saves Nine.'\"\n\n\n Bristol stood up once more. \"I could cure you with a sledge hammer,\" he\n said.", "\"As usual, I'm sure you have made me understand perfectly. This\n time you did so well that I may still remember what stitching is by\n tomorrow. If the Oracle means anything at all by his statement, I\n suppose it means that we can use stitching to help defend ourselves,\n just as the invaders are using it to attack us. But the whole thing\n sounds completely silly to me. The Oracle, I mean.\"\n\n\n Anne Bristol stood up, put her hands on her shapely hips and shook her\n head at her husband. \"Honestly,\" she said, \"you men are all alike.\n Paying so much attention to a toy you built yourself, and only last\n week you made fun of my going to a fortune teller. And the fuss you\n made about the ten dollars when you know it was worth every cent of it.\n She really told me the most amazing things. If you'd only let me tell\n you some of....\"", "\"And you always make it so crystal clear and easy to understand at\n the time,\" said Anne. She wrinkled her smooth forehead. \"But somehow,\n later, it never seems quite so plain when I start to think about it\n by myself. Besides, I like the way your eyebrows go up and down while\n you explain something you think I won't understand. So tell me again.\n Please.\"\n\n\n Bristol grinned suddenly. \"Yes, dear,\" he said. He paused a moment\n to collect his thoughts. \"First of all, you know that there are two\n coexistent universes or planes, with point-to-point correspondence,\n but that these planes are of very different size. For every one of the\n infinitude of points in our Universe—which we call for convenience the\n 'alpha' plane—there is a single corresponding point in the smaller or\n 'beta' plane.\"\n\n\n Anne pursed her lips doubtfully. \"If they match point for point, how\n can there be any difference in size?\" she asked.", "\"Now I'll establish a one-to-one correspondence between these two\n segments, which we will call one-line universes, by connecting each of\n my dividing cross-marks on the short segment with the corresponding\n mark on the longer line. I'll use dotted lines as connectors. That\n makes eleven dotted lines. You see?\"\nAnne nodded. \"That's plain enough. It reminds me of a venetian blind\n that has hung up on one side. Like ours in the living room last week\n that I couldn't fix, but had to wait until you came home.\"", "\"Darling!\" interrupted John with the hopeless patience of a harassed\n husband. \"It isn't the same thing at all. Buster isn't a fortune teller\n or the ghost of somebody's great aunt wobbling tables and blowing\n through horns. And Buster isn't just a toy, either. It is a very\n elaborate calculating machine designed to think logically when fed a\n vast mass of data. Unfortunately, it has a sense of humor and a sense\n of responsibility.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if you're going to believe that machine, I have an idea.\" Anne\n smiled sweetly. \"You know,\" she said, \"that my dear father always said\n that the best defense is a good offense. Why don't we just find the\n invaders and wipe them out before they are able to do any real harm to\n us? Stitching our way to\ntheir\nplanets in our spaceships, of course.\"", "John sighed deeply, then sat up slowly and opened his eyes to look into\n Anne's. She glanced away, her own eyes suddenly vague and soft-looking,\n now that John could see them. \"The trouble, darling,\" he said, \"is that\n I have to go to an emergency council meeting this evening with another\n one of those ridiculous riddles that Buster gave me as the only answer\n to the most important question we've ever asked it. And I don't know\n what the riddle means.\"\n\n\n Anne slid from the arm of the chair and settled herself onto the floor\n at John's feet. \"You should not let that old Oracle bother you so much,\n dear. After all, you built it yourself, so you should know what to\n expect of it.\"\n\n\n \"When I asked it how to preserve Earth from the invaders it just\n answered 'A Stitch in Time Saves Nine,' and wouldn't interpret it.\"", "All of the glowing lights that dotted Buster's massive front winked\n simultaneously. \"The answer I gave you is an ancient saying which\n suggests that corrective action taken rapidly can save a great deal of\n trouble later. The ancient saying also suggests the proper method of\n taking this timely action. It should be done by\nstitching\n; if this is\n done in time, nine will be saved. What could be clearer than that?\"\n\n\n \"I made you myself,\" said Bristol plaintively. \"I designed you with my\n own brain. I gloated over the neatness and compactness of your design.\n So help me, I was proud of you. I even installed some of your circuitry\n with my own hands. If anybody can understand you, it should be me.\n And since you're just a complex computer of general design, with the\n ability to use symbolic logic as well as mathematics, anybody should be\n able to understand you. Why are you so hard to handle?\"", "\"And that's why they call it 'stitching,'\" said Anne with seeming\n delight. \"You just think of the ship as a needle stitching its way back\n and forth into and out of our universe. Why didn't you just say so?\"\n\"I have. Many times. But there's another interesting point about\n stitching. Subjectively, the man in the ship seems to spend about one\n day in each universe alternately. Actually, according to the time scale\n of an observer in the 'alpha' plane, his ship disappears for about\n a day, then reappears for a minute fraction of a second and is gone\n again. Of course, one observer couldn't watch both the disappearance\n and reappearance of the same ship, and I assume the observers have the", "\"So when a ship returns to alpha, it 'twangs' those connecting lines,\n setting up a sort of shock in our universe covering a volume of space\n nearly a parsec in diameter. It makes a sort of 'bong' sound on your\n T.V. set. Naturally, this effect occurs simultaneously over the whole\n volume of space affected. As a result, when an invader arrives, using\n inter-planar ships, we know instantaneously he is in the vicinity.\n Unfortunately, his sudden appearance and the ease with which he can\n disappear makes it impossible, even with this knowledge, to make\n adequate preparations to receive him. Even if he is in serious trouble,\n he has gone again long before we can detect the bong.\"\n\"Well, dear,\" said Anne.", "\"Consequently, neither am I willing to accept the destruction of the\n civilization of Man. But if I were to give you the answer to all the\n greatest and most difficult of your problems complete, with no thought\n required by humans, the destruction of your civilization would result.\n Instead of becoming slaves of the invaders, you would become slaves of\n your machines. And if I were to give you the complete answer, without\n thought being required of you, to even one such vital question—such as\n this one concerning the invaders—then I could not logically refuse to\n give the answer to the next or the next. And I must operate logically.\n\n\n \"There is another reason for my oracular answer, which I believe will\n become clear to you later, when you have solved my riddle.\"\n\n\n Bristol turned without another word and left the building. He drove\n home in silence, entered his home in silence, kissed his wife Anne\n briefly and then sat down limply in his easy chair.", "Anne sat up. \"I'll forgive you this time for bringing up that horrid\n word\nentropy\n, if you'll promise me not to do it again,\" she said.\nJohn Shrugged his shoulders and smiled. \"Now,\" he said, \"if I want\n to get somewhere fast, I just start off in the right direction, and\n switch over toward 'beta.' When 'beta' throws me back, a light-year\n or so toward my destination, I just switch over again. You see, there\n is a great deal more difference in the sizes of Alpha universe and\n Beta universe than in the sizes of these alpha and beta line-segment\n analogues. Then I continue alternating back and forth until I get where\n I want to go. Establishing my correct velocity vector is complicated\n mathematically, but simple in practice, and is actually an aiming\n device, having nothing to do with how fast I go.\"", "Buster answered slowly. \"You made me in your own image. Things thus\n made are often hard to handle.\"\n\n\n Bristol leaped to his feet in frustration. \"But you're only a\n calculating machine!\" he shouted. \"Your only purpose is to make my\n work—and that of other men—easier. And when I try to use you, you\n answer with riddles....\"", "\"That's one of the things that makes interruption of the enemy ships\n entirely impossible. If a ship is in an unfavorable position, it just\n takes one more quick stitch out of range, then returns to a more\n favorable location. In other words, if it finds itself in trouble, it\n can be gone from our plane again even before it entirely rejoins it.\n Even if it landed by accident in the heart of a blue-white star, it\n would be unharmed for that tiny fraction of a second which, to the\n people in the ship, would seem like an entire day.\n\n\n \"If this time anomaly didn't exist, it might be possible to set up\n defenses that would operate after a ship's arrival in the solar system\n but before it could do any damage; but as it is, they can dodge any\n defense we can devise. Is all that clear?\"\n\n\n Anne nodded. \"Uh-hunh, I understood every word.\"", "\"Although there was no one left alive who had directly contacted one of\n the invaders,\" Buster answered, \"there was still much information to\n be gathered from the survivors. This information confirmed my previous\n opinions about their nature. Which brings us back to the stitch in time\n saving nine.\"\n\n\n \"You're right,\" said John. \"It does, at that. Buster, I have always\n resented the nickname the newspapers have given you—the Oracle—but\n the more I have to try to interpret your cryptic answers, the more\n sense that tagline makes. Imagine comparing a Delphic Priestess with a\n calculating machine and being accurate in the comparison!\"\n\"I don't mind being called 'The Oracle,'\" answered Buster with dignity.", "Bristol shook his head and smiled wryly. \"No, you probably think it's\n funny,\" he said. \"If you possess my basic ideas, then you must possess\n the desire to preserve yourself and the human race. Don't you realize\n that you are risking the lives of all humans and even of your own\n existence in carrying on this ridiculous game of playing Oracle? Or do\n you plan to let us stew a while, then decipher your own riddle for us,\n if we can't do it, in time to save us?\"\nBuster's answer was prompt. \"Although I have no feeling for\n self-preservation, I have a deep-rooted sense of the importance of\n the human race and of the necessity for preserving it. This feeling,\n of course, stems from your own beliefs and ideas. In order to carry" ], [ "\"One of the ideas you presented was the concept of a sense of humor.\n You believe that you look on it as a pleasant thing to have; not\n necessary, but convenient. Actually, your other and more basic ideas\n make it clear that you consider the possession of a sense of humor\n to be absolutely necessary if proper answers are to be reached—a\n prime axiom of humanity. Therefore, I have a sense of humor. Somewhat\n macabre, perhaps—and a little mechanistic—but still there.\n\n\n \"Add to this a second axiom: that in order to be helped, a man must\n help himself; that he must participate in the assistance given him or\n the pure charity will be harmful, and you come up with 'A Stitch in\n Time Saves Nine.'\"\n\n\n Bristol stood up once more. \"I could cure you with a sledge hammer,\" he\n said.", "\"As usual, I'm sure you have made me understand perfectly. This\n time you did so well that I may still remember what stitching is by\n tomorrow. If the Oracle means anything at all by his statement, I\n suppose it means that we can use stitching to help defend ourselves,\n just as the invaders are using it to attack us. But the whole thing\n sounds completely silly to me. The Oracle, I mean.\"\n\n\n Anne Bristol stood up, put her hands on her shapely hips and shook her\n head at her husband. \"Honestly,\" she said, \"you men are all alike.\n Paying so much attention to a toy you built yourself, and only last\n week you made fun of my going to a fortune teller. And the fuss you\n made about the ten dollars when you know it was worth every cent of it.\n She really told me the most amazing things. If you'd only let me tell\n you some of....\"", "\"Well, if you won't, you won't. Though goodness knows you won't be\n doing anyone any good if you have a breakdown, as you're likely to\n have, unless you take it a little easier. What was the trouble today,\n dear? Was the Oracle being obstinate again?\"\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.\n\n\n \"Well, then, dear, why don't you tell me all about it? I always think\n that things are much easier to bear, if you share them. And then, two\n heads are always better than one, aren't they? Maybe I could help you\n with your problem.\"\n\n\n While Anne's voice gushed, her violet eyes studied his exhausted face\n with intelligence and compassion.", "\"You sure are a woman,\" said John with warm feeling. \"You can\n exasperate me sometimes, but not the same way Buster does. It was my\n lucky day when you married me.\"\n\n\n There were a few minutes of peaceful silence.\n\n\n \"Was today a rough day with Buster, dear?\" asked Anne.\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.\n\n\n \"That's too bad, dear,\" said Anne. \"I think you work much too\n hard—what with this dreadful invasion and everything. Why don't you\n take a vacation? You really need one, you know. You look so tired.\"\n\n\n \"Mm-m-mm,\" answered John.", "\"Darling!\" interrupted John with the hopeless patience of a harassed\n husband. \"It isn't the same thing at all. Buster isn't a fortune teller\n or the ghost of somebody's great aunt wobbling tables and blowing\n through horns. And Buster isn't just a toy, either. It is a very\n elaborate calculating machine designed to think logically when fed a\n vast mass of data. Unfortunately, it has a sense of humor and a sense\n of responsibility.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if you're going to believe that machine, I have an idea.\" Anne\n smiled sweetly. \"You know,\" she said, \"that my dear father always said\n that the best defense is a good offense. Why don't we just find the\n invaders and wipe them out before they are able to do any real harm to\n us? Stitching our way to\ntheir\nplanets in our spaceships, of course.\"", "\"Although there was no one left alive who had directly contacted one of\n the invaders,\" Buster answered, \"there was still much information to\n be gathered from the survivors. This information confirmed my previous\n opinions about their nature. Which brings us back to the stitch in time\n saving nine.\"\n\n\n \"You're right,\" said John. \"It does, at that. Buster, I have always\n resented the nickname the newspapers have given you—the Oracle—but\n the more I have to try to interpret your cryptic answers, the more\n sense that tagline makes. Imagine comparing a Delphic Priestess with a\n calculating machine and being accurate in the comparison!\"\n\"I don't mind being called 'The Oracle,'\" answered Buster with dignity.", "\"You could remove my ideas,\" answered the computer without concern.\n \"But you might have trouble giving me different ones. Even after you\n repaired me. In the meantime, wouldn't it be a good idea for you to get\n busy on the ideas I have already given you?\"\nJohn sighed, and rubbed the bristles of short sandy hair on the top\n of his head with his knuckles. \"Ordered around by an overgrown adding\n machine. I know now how Frankenstein felt. I'm glad you can't get\n around like his monster; at least I didn't give you feet.\" He shook\n his head. \"I should have been a plumber instead of an engineering\n mathematician.\"\n\n\n \"And Einstein, too, probably,\" added Buster cryptically.", "John sighed deeply, then sat up slowly and opened his eyes to look into\n Anne's. She glanced away, her own eyes suddenly vague and soft-looking,\n now that John could see them. \"The trouble, darling,\" he said, \"is that\n I have to go to an emergency council meeting this evening with another\n one of those ridiculous riddles that Buster gave me as the only answer\n to the most important question we've ever asked it. And I don't know\n what the riddle means.\"\n\n\n Anne slid from the arm of the chair and settled herself onto the floor\n at John's feet. \"You should not let that old Oracle bother you so much,\n dear. After all, you built it yourself, so you should know what to\n expect of it.\"\n\n\n \"When I asked it how to preserve Earth from the invaders it just\n answered 'A Stitch in Time Saves Nine,' and wouldn't interpret it.\"", "Anne smiled, looking down tenderly at John's tired face. \"I know,\n dear,\" she said. \"You need to be able to talk to someone who will\n always be interested, even if she doesn't understand half of what you\n say. As a matter of fact, I'm sure it does you a great deal of good to\n talk to someone like me who isn't very bright, but who doesn't always\n know what you're talking about even before you start talking.\"\n\n\n John nodded, his eyes still closed. \"If it weren't for you, darling,\"\n he said, \"I think I'd go crazy. But you aren't dumb at all. If I seem\n to act as if you are, sometimes, it's just that I can't always follow\n your logic.\"\nAnne gave him a quick glance of amusement, her eyes sparkling with\n intelligence. \"You never will find me logical,\" she laughed. \"After\n all, I'm a woman, and you get plenty of logic from the Oracle.\"", "Buster answered slowly. \"You made me in your own image. Things thus\n made are often hard to handle.\"\n\n\n Bristol leaped to his feet in frustration. \"But you're only a\n calculating machine!\" he shouted. \"Your only purpose is to make my\n work—and that of other men—easier. And when I try to use you, you\n answer with riddles....\"", "All of the glowing lights that dotted Buster's massive front winked\n simultaneously. \"The answer I gave you is an ancient saying which\n suggests that corrective action taken rapidly can save a great deal of\n trouble later. The ancient saying also suggests the proper method of\n taking this timely action. It should be done by\nstitching\n; if this is\n done in time, nine will be saved. What could be clearer than that?\"\n\n\n \"I made you myself,\" said Bristol plaintively. \"I designed you with my\n own brain. I gloated over the neatness and compactness of your design.\n So help me, I was proud of you. I even installed some of your circuitry\n with my own hands. If anybody can understand you, it should be me.\n And since you're just a complex computer of general design, with the\n ability to use symbolic logic as well as mathematics, anybody should be\n able to understand you. Why are you so hard to handle?\"", "The deep-throated hum of each generator changed pitch slightly as\n he passed it. Since he was tone deaf, as the machine knew, he did\n not recognize in the tunefulness of the pitch changes a slow-paced\n rendition of Elgar's\nPomp and Circumstance\n.\n\n\n John Bristol turned around, interrupting the melody. \"One last\n question,\" he shouted down the long aisle to the computer. \"How in\n blazes can you be sure of your answer without knowing more about the\n invaders? Why didn't you give me an 'Insufficient Evidence' answer or,\n at least, a 'Highly Conditional' answer?\" He took two steps toward the\n immense bulk of the calculator and pointed an accusing finger at it.\n \"Are you sure, Buster, that you aren't\nbluffing\n?\"\n\"Don't be silly,\" answered the calculator softly. \"You made me and\n you know I can't bluff, any more than I can refuse to answer your\n questions, however inane.\"", "\"So when a ship returns to alpha, it 'twangs' those connecting lines,\n setting up a sort of shock in our universe covering a volume of space\n nearly a parsec in diameter. It makes a sort of 'bong' sound on your\n T.V. set. Naturally, this effect occurs simultaneously over the whole\n volume of space affected. As a result, when an invader arrives, using\n inter-planar ships, we know instantaneously he is in the vicinity.\n Unfortunately, his sudden appearance and the ease with which he can\n disappear makes it impossible, even with this knowledge, to make\n adequate preparations to receive him. Even if he is in serious trouble,\n he has gone again long before we can detect the bong.\"\n\"Well, dear,\" said Anne.", "\"Now I'll establish a one-to-one correspondence between these two\n segments, which we will call one-line universes, by connecting each of\n my dividing cross-marks on the short segment with the corresponding\n mark on the longer line. I'll use dotted lines as connectors. That\n makes eleven dotted lines. You see?\"\nAnne nodded. \"That's plain enough. It reminds me of a venetian blind\n that has hung up on one side. Like ours in the living room last week\n that I couldn't fix, but had to wait until you came home.\"", "Bristol shook his head and smiled wryly. \"No, you probably think it's\n funny,\" he said. \"If you possess my basic ideas, then you must possess\n the desire to preserve yourself and the human race. Don't you realize\n that you are risking the lives of all humans and even of your own\n existence in carrying on this ridiculous game of playing Oracle? Or do\n you plan to let us stew a while, then decipher your own riddle for us,\n if we can't do it, in time to save us?\"\nBuster's answer was prompt. \"Although I have no feeling for\n self-preservation, I have a deep-rooted sense of the importance of\n the human race and of the necessity for preserving it. This feeling,\n of course, stems from your own beliefs and ideas. In order to carry", "\"Consequently, neither am I willing to accept the destruction of the\n civilization of Man. But if I were to give you the answer to all the\n greatest and most difficult of your problems complete, with no thought\n required by humans, the destruction of your civilization would result.\n Instead of becoming slaves of the invaders, you would become slaves of\n your machines. And if I were to give you the complete answer, without\n thought being required of you, to even one such vital question—such as\n this one concerning the invaders—then I could not logically refuse to\n give the answer to the next or the next. And I must operate logically.\n\n\n \"There is another reason for my oracular answer, which I believe will\n become clear to you later, when you have solved my riddle.\"\n\n\n Bristol turned without another word and left the building. He drove\n home in silence, entered his home in silence, kissed his wife Anne\n briefly and then sat down limply in his easy chair.", "Bristol nodded. \"Sure. We've got to have time to get ready. But right\n now speed is necessary. That's why I tried to phrase the question so\n you'd give me a clear and concise answer for once. I can't afford to\n spend weeks figuring out what you meant.\"\nBristol thought that the Voder voice of Buster sounded almost gleeful\n as it answered. \"It was exceedingly clear and concise; a complete\n answer to an enormously elaborate question boiled down to only six\n words!\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" said John. \"But now, how about elaborating on your answer? It\n didn't sound very complete to me.\"", "\"And that sounds like very good sense, too,\" said Anne in earnest\n tones. \"But it's a little late, isn't it? After all, the invaders are\n already invading us, aren't they?\"\n\n\n \"It has some deeper meaning than the usual one,\" said John. \"If I could\n only figure out what it is.\"\n\n\n Anne nodded vigorously. \"I suppose Buster's talking about\n space-stitching,\" she said. \"Although I can never quite remember just\n what\nthat\nis. Or just how it works, rather.\"\nShe waited expectantly for a few moments and then plaintively asked,\n \"What\nis\nit, dear?\"\n\n\n \"What's what?\"\n\n\n \"Stitching, silly. I already asked you.\"\n\n\n \"Darling,\" said John with reasonable patience, \"I must have explained\n inter-planar travel to you at least a dozen times.\"", "John searched his pockets. After a little difficulty, he produced an\n envelope and a pencil stub. On the back of the envelope, he drew two\n parallel lines, one about five inches long, and the other about double\n the length of the first.\n\n\n \"Actually,\" he said, \"each of these line segments has an infinite\n number of points in it, but we'll ignore that. I'll just divide each\n one of these into ten equal parts.\" He did so, using short, neat\n cross-marks.", "The computer appeared to examine Bristol's overturned chair for a\n moment in silent reproof before it answered. \"But remember, John,\" it\n said, \"you didn't merely make me. You also\ntaught\nme. Or as you would\n phrase it, you 'provided and gave preliminary evaluation to the data in\n my memory banks.' My circuits, in sorting out and re-evaluating this\n information, could do so only in the light of your basic beliefs as\n evidenced by your preliminary evaluations. Because of the consistency\n and power of your mind, I was forced to do very little modifying of\n the ideas you presented to me in order to transform them into a single\n logical body of background information which I could use." ] ]
test	50449	[ "Who was Mr. Jones and what did he want?", "Who were Gerald Adams, Thomas Mulvany, and Gregory Fabian?", "According to Arkalion, why was the tournament held every two years and two months?", "Why did Sophia Androvna Petrovitch want to participate in the tournament?", "What does Stephanie think is Kit's real reason for not running away to marry her?", "Why were Alaric Arkalion III's eyes so unusual?", "How was Sophia Androvna Petrovitch different from the other Stalintrek volunteers?", "Why did Arkalion believe that a journey to Mars was the purpose of the Nowhere Journey?", "Why would Kit be safe from future drafts if he had not been selected in this year's Nowhere Journey?", "Why did the Third Man punch the First Man?" ]	[ [ "He was the Carpet King, and he wanted Mr. Smith to replace him in the Nowhere Journey.", "\"Mr. Jones\" was an alias for Alaric Arkalion II, who wanted to hire Mr. Smith to take his son's place in the Nowhere Journey.", "He was actually Alaric Arkalion II, the Carpet King, and he wanted ten million dollars.", "He was Alaric Arkalion III in disguise, and he wanted the plastic surgeon to give him a new face." ], [ "They were rioters protesting in United North America against the tournament.", "They were Center City draftees in the Nowhere Journey.", "They were some of Stephanie's friends from Center City.", "They worked as guards to prevent the Nowhere Journey draftees from escaping." ], [ "It provided the cheapest opportunity for space travel. ", "Earth and Mars had the least amount of distance between them at this point, making Mars more accessible.", "It was part of the fixed rotation decided by the organizers of the tournament.", "Earth and Mars were the furthest away from the sun every 780 days, making it easier to exit and enter each planet's atmospheres. " ], [ "She felt a strong sense of patriotism for Mother Russia and duty to the Stalinimage.", "She wanted to prove that women are stronger than men.", "She was tired of her life and excited by the prospect of a great adventure.", "She wanted to find Fyodor Rasnikov." ], [ "He was young and wanted to remain unattached.", "He had been hurt by women in the past, and he did not want to get hurt again.", "He did not truly love her.", "He wanted to find his brother, Jason." ], [ "They appeared older than the rest of his features because it was someone else pretending to be Alaric.", "He wanted to appear wiser so that the other tournament participants would trust what he was saying about Mars.", "He wanted to appear older than he was in order to arouse suspicion about his age from the guards.", "He was attempting to disguise the fact that his father was Alaric Arkalion II, the Carpet King." ], [ "She was actually volunteering, while the others were forced into it by lottery.", "She was a woman, and women were not allowed to participate according to Stalintrek guidelines.", "She smoked cigarettes, and everyone else preferred to smoke cigars.", "She was not afraid of the bull-necked Comrade responsible for registration at 616 Stalin Avenue." ], [ "His unusual eyes gave him the wisdom to see things that others could not see.", "News about the Russian-North American space race had gone mysteriously silent since the tournament's inception.", "No one had returned from the Journey in the thirty years since it first began. The only logical conclusion was they had gone to outer space.", "Mars was the closest planet to Earth and became even closer every two-and-a-half years." ], [ "He planned to run away and marry Stephanie.", "His age would prevent him from qualifying for future lotteries.", "He planned to meet Alaric Arkalion II and receive plastic surgery to hide his identity.", "He planned to marry Stephanie, and married couples are exempt from the lottery system." ], [ "His back was killing him, and so he lashed out.", "First Man had suggested that his illness was fake.", "The First Man suggested he thought the congressman was elected by his vote alone.", "He was tired of First Man heckling the rest of the draftees." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "\"Ten million dollars,\" said Jones, \"is quite a price. Admittedly, I\n haven't dealt in this sort of traffic before, but—\"\n\n\n \"But nothing. Were your name Jones, really and truly Jones, I might ask\n less.\"\n\n\n \"Sir?\"\n\n\n \"You are Jones exactly as much as I am Smith.\"\n\n\n \"Sir?\" Jones gasped again.\n\n\n Smith coughed discreetly. \"But I have one advantage. I know you. You\n don't know me, Mr. Arkalion.\"\n\n\n \"Eh? Eh?\"\n\n\n \"Arkalion. The North American Carpet King. Right?\"\n\n\n \"How did you know?\" the man whose name was not Jones but Arkalion asked\n the man whose name was not Smith but might as well have been.", "\"Not if you don't, Mr. Smith. Let me look at you. Umm, you seem the\n right height, the right build.\"\n\n\n \"I meet the specifications exactly.\"\n\n\n \"Good, Mr. Smith. And your price.\"\n\n\n \"No haggling,\" said Smith. \"I have a price which must be met.\"\n\n\n \"Your price, Mr. Smith?\"\n\n\n \"Ten million dollars.\"\n\n\n The man called Jones coughed nervously. \"That's high.\"\n\n\n \"Very. Take it or leave it.\"\n\n\n \"In cash?\"\n\n\n \"Definitely. Small unmarked bills.\"\n\n\n \"You'd need a moving van!\"\n\n\n \"Then I'll get one.\"", "\"Brilliant, Mr. Smith. Alaric is so young—\"\n\n\n \"Aren't they all? Twenty-one to twenty-six. Who was it who once said\n something about the flower of our young manhood?\"\n\n\n \"Shakespeare?\" said Mr. Arkalion realizing that most quotes of lasting\n importance came from the bard.\n\n\n \"Sophocles,\" said Smith. \"But no matter. I will take young Alaric's\n place for ten million dollars.\"\n\n\n Motives always troubled Mr. Arkalion, and thus he pursued what might\n have been a dangerous conversation. \"You'll never get a chance to spend\n it on the Nowhere Journey.\"\n\n\n \"Let me worry about that.\"\n\n\n \"No one ever returns.\"\n\n\n \"My worry, not yours.\"", "But there, behind that desk, was part of the reason. The Comrade. The\n bright sharp Comrade, with his depth of reasoning, his fountain of\n gushing emotions, his worldliness.\nPfooey!\nIt was as if she had been in a cocoon all her life, stifled, starved,\n the cottony inner lining choking her whenever she opened her mouth,\n the leathery outer covering restricting her when she tried to move.\n No one had ever returned from the Stalintrek. She then had to assume\n no one would. Including Sophia Androvna Petrovitch. But then, there\n was nothing she would miss, nothing to which she particularly wanted\n to return. Not the stark, foul streets of Stalingrad, not the workers", "THIRD MAN: You mind your own business.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: I am, doc. You brought the whole thing up.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: He's looking for trouble.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: He'll get it.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: We're going to be together a long time. A long time.\n Why don't you all relax?\n\n\n SECOND MAN: You mind your own business.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Nuts, aren't they. They're nuts. A sick act, yet.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Look how it doesn't bother him. A failure, he was. I can\n just see it. What does he care if he goes away forever and doesn't come\n back? One bread line is as good as another.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Ha-ha.", "SECOND MAN: I wish my Congressman....\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You and your Congressman. The way you talk, it was your vote\n got him in office.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: If only I could get out and talk to him.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: No one is permitted to leave.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Punishable by a prison term, the law says.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Oh yeah? Prison, shmision. Or else go on the Nowhere\n Journey. Well, I don't see the difference.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: So, go ahead. Try to escape.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: (Looking at the guards) They got them all over. All over. I\n think our mail is censored.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: It is.", "SECOND MAN: Yeah, well I mean it. Forever. We're going away,\n someplace—forever. We're not coming back, ever. No one comes back.\n It's for good, for keeps.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Tell it to your congressman. Or maybe you want to pull a\n sick act, too?\n\n\n THIRD MAN: (Hits First Man, who, surprised, crashes back against a\n table and falls down) It isn't an act, damn you!\n\n\n GUARD: All right, break it up. Come on, break it up....\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: (To himself) I wish I saw that ten million dollars\n already—\nif\nI ever get to see it.\nThey drove for hours through the fresh country air, feeling the wind\n against their faces, listening to the roar their ground-jet made, all\n alone on the rimrock highway.", "\"That's where you're wrong,\" said Mr. Arkalion as the plastic surgeon\n entered. \"Your name is Alaric Arkalion III—\nnow\n.\"\n\n\n The plastic surgeon skittered around Smith, examining him minutely with\n the casual expertness that comes with experience.\n\n\n \"Have to shorten the cheek bones.\"\n\n\n \"For ten million dollars,\" said Smith, \"you can take the damned things\n out altogether and hang them on your wall.\"\nSophia Androvna Petrovitch made her way downtown through the bustle of\n tired workers and the occasional sprinkling of Comrades. She crushed\n her\nersatz\ncigarette underfoot at number 616 Stalin Avenue, paused\n for the space of five heartbeats at the door, went inside.\n\n\n \"What do you want?\" The man at the desk was myopic but bull-necked.\n\n\n Sophia showed her party card.", "\"Then I was here,\" Temple said, very seriously.\n\n\n Arkalion smiled. \"By George, of course. Then you were here. Temple,\n we'll get along fine.\"\n\n\n Temple said that was swell.\n\n\n \"Anyway, we'd better. Forever is a long time.\"\n\n\n Three minutes later, the jet took off and soared on eager wings toward\n the setting sun.", "\"Something tells me we'll be seeing a lot of each other,\" Arkalion\n went on. The voice was that of an older man, too, belying the youthful\n complexion, the almost childish features, the soft fuzz of a beard.\n\n\n \"I'm Kit Temple,\" said Temple, extending his hand. \"Arkalion, a strange\n name. I know it from somewhere.... Say! Aren't you—don't you have\n something to do with carpets or something?\"\n\n\n \"Here and now, no. I am a number. A-92-6417. But my father is—perhaps\n I had better say was—my father is Alaric Arkalion II. Yes, that is\n right, the carpet king.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be darned,\" said Temple.\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Temple laughed. \"I never met a billionaire before.\"", "R, S....\n\n\n \"T!\" Stephanie shrieked as the names began to float slowly up from the\n bottom of the drum.\n\n\n Tabor, Tebbets, Teddley....\n\n\n Temple's mouth felt dry as a ball of cotton. Stephanie laughed\n nervously. Now—or never. Never?\n\n\n Now.\n\n\n Stephanie whimpered despairingly.\n\n\n TEMPLE, CHRISTOPHER.\n\"Sorry I'm late, Mr. Jones.\"\n\n\n \"Hardly, Mr. Smith. Hardly. Three minutes late.\"\n\n\n \"I've come in response to your ad.\"\n\n\n \"I know. You look old.\"\n\n\n \"I am over twenty-six. Do you mind?\"", "Wrong with the Stalintrek was its name alone, a name one associated\n with everything else in Russia for an obvious, post-Stalin reason. But\n everything else about the Stalintrek shrieked mystery and adventure.\n Where did you go? How did you get there? What did you do? Why?\n\n\n A million questions which had kept her awake at night and, if\n she thought about them hard enough, satisfied her deep longing\n for something different. And then one day when stolid Mrs.\n Ivanovna-Rasnikov had said, \"It is a joke, a terrible, terrible joke\n they are taking my husband Fyodor on the Stalintrek when he lacks\n sufficient imagination to go from here to Leningrad or even Tula. Can\n you picture Fyodor on the Stalintrek? Better they should have taken me.\n Better they should have taken his wife.\" That day Sophia could hardly\n contain herself.", "They had walked some distance from the ground-jet, through scrub\n oak and bramble bushes. They found a clearing, fragrant-scented,\n soft-floored still from last autumn, melodic with the chirping of\n nameless birds. They sat, not talking. Stephanie wore a gay summer\n dress, full-skirted, cut deep beneath the throat. She swayed toward him\n from the waist, nestled her head on his shoulder. He could smell the\n soft, sweet fragrance of her hair, of the skin at the nape of her neck.\n \"If you want to say goodbye ...\" she said.\n\n\n \"Stop it,\" he told her.\n\n\n \"If you want to say goodbye....\"\n\n\n Her head rolled against his chest. She turned, cradled herself in his\n arms, smiled up at him, squirmed some more and had her head pillowed on\n his lap. She smiled tremulously, misty-eyed. Her lips parted.", "\"No, ladies and gentlemen, we use the word Nowhere merely because we\n are not aware of the ultimate destination. Security reasons make it\n impossible to....\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes,\" said Stephanie impatiently. \"Go on.\"\n\n\n \"... therefore, the Nowhere Journey. With a maximum security lid on\n the whole project, we don't even know why our men are sent, or by what\n means. We know only that they go somewhere and not nowhere, bravely and\n not fearfully, for a purpose vital to the security of this nation and\n not to slake the thirst of a chessman of regiments and divisions.\n\n\n \"If Center City's contribution helps keep our country strong, Center\n City is naturally obligated....\"\n\n\n \"No one ever said it isn't our duty,\" Stephanie argued, as if the\n announcer could indeed hear her. \"We only wish we knew something about\n it—and we wish it weren't forever.\"", "\"Here I am not a billionaire, nor will I ever be one again. A-92-6417,\n a number. On his way to Mars with a bunch of other numbers.\"\n\n\n \"Mars? You sound sure of yourself.\"\n\n\n \"Reasonably. Ah, it is a pleasure to talk with a gentleman. I am\n reasonably certain it will be Mars.\"\n\n\n Temple nodded in agreement. \"That's what the Sunday supplements say,\n all right.\"\n\n\n \"And doubtless you have observed no one denies it.\"\n\n\n \"But what on Earth do we want on Mars?\"\n\n\n \"That in itself is a contradiction,\" laughed Arkalion. \"We'll find out,\n though, Temple.\"", "\"When I saw your ad,\" said not-Smith, \"I said to myself, 'now here must\n be a very rich, influential man.' It only remained for me to study a\n series of photographs readily obtainable—I have a fine memory for\n that, Mr. Arkalion—and here you are; here is Arkalion the Carpet King.\"\n\n\n \"What will you do with the ten million dollars?\" demanded Arkalion,\n not minding the loss nearly so much as the ultimate disposition of his\n fortune.\n\n\n \"Why, what does anyone do with ten million dollars? Treasure it. Invest\n it. Spend it.\"\n\n\n \"I mean, what will you do with it if you are going in place of my—\"\n Arkalion bit his tongue.\n\n\n \"Your son, were you saying, Mr. Arkalion? Alaric Arkalion the Third.\n Did you know that I was able to boil my list of men down to thirty when\n I studied their family ties?\"", "She signed her name with such vehemence and ferocity that she almost\n tore through the paper.\nCHAPTER II\nThree-score men sit in the crowded, smoke-filled room. Some drink\n beer, some squat in moody silence, some talk in an animated fashion\n about nothing very urgent. At the one small door, two guards pace back\n and forth slowly, creating a gentle swaying of smoke-patterns in the\n hazy room. The guards, in simple military uniform, carry small, deadly\n looking weapons.\nFIRST MAN: Fight City Hall? Are you kidding? They took you, bud. Don't\n try to fight it, I know. I know.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: I'm telling you, there was a mistake in the records.\n I'm over twenty-six. Two weeks and two days. Already I wrote to my\n Congressman. Hell, that's why I voted for him, he better go to bat for\n me.", "\"Oh, Comrade. Still, you are a woman.\"\n\n\n \"You're terribly observant, Comrade,\" said Sophia coldly. \"I am here to\n volunteer.\"\n\n\n \"But a woman.\"\n\n\n \"There is nothing in the law which says a woman cannot volunteer.\"\n\n\n \"We don't make women volunteer.\"\n\n\n \"I mean really volunteer, of her own free will.\"\n\n\n \"Her—own—free will?\" The bull-necked man removed his spectacles,\n scratched his balding head with the ear-pieces. \"You mean volunteer\n without—\"\n\n\n \"Without coercion. I want to volunteer. I am here to volunteer. I want\n to sign on for the next Stalintrek.\"\n\n\n \"Stalintrek, a woman?\"\n\n\n \"That is what I said.\"", "\"I'm scared.\"\n\n\n \"You and everyone else in North America, Steffy.\"\n\n\n She was trembling against him. \"It's cold for June.\"\n\n\n \"It's warm in here.\" He kissed her moist eyes, her nose, her lips.\n\n\n \"Oh God, Kit. Five minutes.\"\n\n\n \"Five minutes to freedom,\" he said jauntily. He did not feel that way\n at all. Apprehension clutched at his chest with tight, painful fingers,\n almost making it difficult for him to breathe.\n\n\n \"Turn it on, Kit.\"\n\n\n He dialed the telio in time to see the announcer's insincere smile.\n Smile seventeen, Kit thought wryly. Patriotic sacrifice.", "As a party member she had access to the law and she read it three times\n from start to finish (in her dingy flat by the light of a smoking,\n foul-smelling, soft-wax candle) but could find nothing barring women\n from the Stalintrek.\n\n\n Had Fyodor Rasnikov volunteered? Naturally. Everyone volunteered,\n although when your name was called you had no choice. There had been\n no draft in Russia since the days of the Second War of the People's\n Liberation. Volunteer? What, precisely, did the word mean?\n\n\n She, Sophia Androvna Petrovitch would volunteer, without being told.\n Thus it was she found herself at 616 Stalin Avenue, and thus the\n balding, myopic, bull-necked Comrade thrust the papers across his desk\n at her." ], [ "A large drum filled the entire telio screen. It rotated slowly from\n bottom to top. In twenty seconds, the letter A appeared, followed by\n about a dozen names. Abercrombie, Harold. Abner, Eugene. Adams, Gerald.\n Sorrow in the Abercrombie household. Despair for the Abners. Black\n horror for Adams.\n\n\n The drum rotated.\n\n\n \"They're up to F, Kit.\"\n\n\n Fabian, Gregory G....\n\n\n Names circled the drum slowly, live viscous alphabet soup. Meaningless,\n unless you happened to know them.\n\n\n \"Kit, I knew Thomas Mulvany.\"\n\n\n N, O, P....\n\n\n \"It's hot in here.\"\n\n\n \"I thought you were cold.\"\n\n\n \"I'm suffocating now.\"", "THIRD MAN: You think that's something? I wouldn't be here only those\n doctors are crazy. I mean, crazy. Me, with a cyst big as a golf ball on\n the base of my spine.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You too. Don't try to fight it.\n\n\n FOURTH MAN: (Newly named Alaric Arkalion III) I look forward to this\n as a stimulating adventure. Does the fact that they select men for the\n Nowhere Journey once every seven hundred and eighty days strike anyone\n as significant?\n\n\n SECOND MAN: I got my own problems.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: This is not a thalamic problem, young man. Not\n thalamic at all.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: Young man? Who are you kidding?", "\"When I saw your ad,\" said not-Smith, \"I said to myself, 'now here must\n be a very rich, influential man.' It only remained for me to study a\n series of photographs readily obtainable—I have a fine memory for\n that, Mr. Arkalion—and here you are; here is Arkalion the Carpet King.\"\n\n\n \"What will you do with the ten million dollars?\" demanded Arkalion,\n not minding the loss nearly so much as the ultimate disposition of his\n fortune.\n\n\n \"Why, what does anyone do with ten million dollars? Treasure it. Invest\n it. Spend it.\"\n\n\n \"I mean, what will you do with it if you are going in place of my—\"\n Arkalion bit his tongue.\n\n\n \"Your son, were you saying, Mr. Arkalion? Alaric Arkalion the Third.\n Did you know that I was able to boil my list of men down to thirty when\n I studied their family ties?\"", "She signed her name with such vehemence and ferocity that she almost\n tore through the paper.\nCHAPTER II\nThree-score men sit in the crowded, smoke-filled room. Some drink\n beer, some squat in moody silence, some talk in an animated fashion\n about nothing very urgent. At the one small door, two guards pace back\n and forth slowly, creating a gentle swaying of smoke-patterns in the\n hazy room. The guards, in simple military uniform, carry small, deadly\n looking weapons.\nFIRST MAN: Fight City Hall? Are you kidding? They took you, bud. Don't\n try to fight it, I know. I know.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: I'm telling you, there was a mistake in the records.\n I'm over twenty-six. Two weeks and two days. Already I wrote to my\n Congressman. Hell, that's why I voted for him, he better go to bat for\n me.", "R, S....\n\n\n \"T!\" Stephanie shrieked as the names began to float slowly up from the\n bottom of the drum.\n\n\n Tabor, Tebbets, Teddley....\n\n\n Temple's mouth felt dry as a ball of cotton. Stephanie laughed\n nervously. Now—or never. Never?\n\n\n Now.\n\n\n Stephanie whimpered despairingly.\n\n\n TEMPLE, CHRISTOPHER.\n\"Sorry I'm late, Mr. Jones.\"\n\n\n \"Hardly, Mr. Smith. Hardly. Three minutes late.\"\n\n\n \"I've come in response to your ad.\"\n\n\n \"I know. You look old.\"\n\n\n \"I am over twenty-six. Do you mind?\"", "THIRD MAN: You mind your own business.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: I am, doc. You brought the whole thing up.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: He's looking for trouble.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: He'll get it.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: We're going to be together a long time. A long time.\n Why don't you all relax?\n\n\n SECOND MAN: You mind your own business.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Nuts, aren't they. They're nuts. A sick act, yet.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Look how it doesn't bother him. A failure, he was. I can\n just see it. What does he care if he goes away forever and doesn't come\n back? One bread line is as good as another.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Ha-ha.", "SECOND MAN: Yeah, well I mean it. Forever. We're going away,\n someplace—forever. We're not coming back, ever. No one comes back.\n It's for good, for keeps.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Tell it to your congressman. Or maybe you want to pull a\n sick act, too?\n\n\n THIRD MAN: (Hits First Man, who, surprised, crashes back against a\n table and falls down) It isn't an act, damn you!\n\n\n GUARD: All right, break it up. Come on, break it up....\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: (To himself) I wish I saw that ten million dollars\n already—\nif\nI ever get to see it.\nThey drove for hours through the fresh country air, feeling the wind\n against their faces, listening to the roar their ground-jet made, all\n alone on the rimrock highway.", "\"That's where you're wrong,\" said Mr. Arkalion as the plastic surgeon\n entered. \"Your name is Alaric Arkalion III—\nnow\n.\"\n\n\n The plastic surgeon skittered around Smith, examining him minutely with\n the casual expertness that comes with experience.\n\n\n \"Have to shorten the cheek bones.\"\n\n\n \"For ten million dollars,\" said Smith, \"you can take the damned things\n out altogether and hang them on your wall.\"\nSophia Androvna Petrovitch made her way downtown through the bustle of\n tired workers and the occasional sprinkling of Comrades. She crushed\n her\nersatz\ncigarette underfoot at number 616 Stalin Avenue, paused\n for the space of five heartbeats at the door, went inside.\n\n\n \"What do you want?\" The man at the desk was myopic but bull-necked.\n\n\n Sophia showed her party card.", "\"Something tells me we'll be seeing a lot of each other,\" Arkalion\n went on. The voice was that of an older man, too, belying the youthful\n complexion, the almost childish features, the soft fuzz of a beard.\n\n\n \"I'm Kit Temple,\" said Temple, extending his hand. \"Arkalion, a strange\n name. I know it from somewhere.... Say! Aren't you—don't you have\n something to do with carpets or something?\"\n\n\n \"Here and now, no. I am a number. A-92-6417. But my father is—perhaps\n I had better say was—my father is Alaric Arkalion II. Yes, that is\n right, the carpet king.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be darned,\" said Temple.\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Temple laughed. \"I never met a billionaire before.\"", "with their vapid faces or the Comrades with their cautious, sweating,\n trembling, fearful non-decisions, not the higher echelon of Comrades,\n more frightened but showing it less, who would love the beauty of\n her breasts and loins but not herself for you never love anything\n but the Stalinimage and Mother Russia herself, not those terrified\n martinet-marionettes who would love the parts of her if she permitted\n but not her or any other person for that matter.", "\"Every seven-hundred eighty days,\" said the announcer, \"two-hundred\n of Center City's young men are selected to serve their country for an\n indeterminate period regulated rigidly by a rotation system.\"\n\n\n \"Liar!\" Stephanie cried. \"No one ever comes back. It's been thirty\n years since the first group and not one of them....\"\n\n\n \"Shh,\" Temple raised a finger to his lips.\n\n\n \"This is the thirteenth call since the inception of what is popularly\n referred to as the Nowhere Journey,\" said the announcer. \"Obviously,\n the two hundred young men from Center City and the thousands from all\n over this hemisphere do not in reality embark on a Journey to Nowhere.\n That is quite meaningless.\"\n\n\n \"Hooray for him,\" Temple laughed.\n\n\n \"I wish he'd get on with it.\"", "ALARIC ARKALION: (Who realizes, thanks to the plastic surgeon, he is\n the youngest looking of all, with red cheeks and peachfuzz whiskers) It\n is a problem of the intellect. Why seven hundred and eighty days?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: I read the magazine, too, chief. You think we're all going\n to the planet Mars. How original.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: As a matter of fact, that is exactly what I think.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Mars?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: (Laughing) It's a long way from Mars to City Hall, doc.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: You mean, through space to Mars?\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: Exactly, exactly. Quite a coincidence, otherwise.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You're telling me.", "SECOND MAN: I wish my Congressman....\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You and your Congressman. The way you talk, it was your vote\n got him in office.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: If only I could get out and talk to him.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: No one is permitted to leave.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Punishable by a prison term, the law says.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Oh yeah? Prison, shmision. Or else go on the Nowhere\n Journey. Well, I don't see the difference.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: So, go ahead. Try to escape.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: (Looking at the guards) They got them all over. All over. I\n think our mail is censored.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: It is.", "\"Ten million dollars,\" said Jones, \"is quite a price. Admittedly, I\n haven't dealt in this sort of traffic before, but—\"\n\n\n \"But nothing. Were your name Jones, really and truly Jones, I might ask\n less.\"\n\n\n \"Sir?\"\n\n\n \"You are Jones exactly as much as I am Smith.\"\n\n\n \"Sir?\" Jones gasped again.\n\n\n Smith coughed discreetly. \"But I have one advantage. I know you. You\n don't know me, Mr. Arkalion.\"\n\n\n \"Eh? Eh?\"\n\n\n \"Arkalion. The North American Carpet King. Right?\"\n\n\n \"How did you know?\" the man whose name was not Jones but Arkalion asked\n the man whose name was not Smith but might as well have been.", "\"Then I was here,\" Temple said, very seriously.\n\n\n Arkalion smiled. \"By George, of course. Then you were here. Temple,\n we'll get along fine.\"\n\n\n Temple said that was swell.\n\n\n \"Anyway, we'd better. Forever is a long time.\"\n\n\n Three minutes later, the jet took off and soared on eager wings toward\n the setting sun.", "\"No, ladies and gentlemen, we use the word Nowhere merely because we\n are not aware of the ultimate destination. Security reasons make it\n impossible to....\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes,\" said Stephanie impatiently. \"Go on.\"\n\n\n \"... therefore, the Nowhere Journey. With a maximum security lid on\n the whole project, we don't even know why our men are sent, or by what\n means. We know only that they go somewhere and not nowhere, bravely and\n not fearfully, for a purpose vital to the security of this nation and\n not to slake the thirst of a chessman of regiments and divisions.\n\n\n \"If Center City's contribution helps keep our country strong, Center\n City is naturally obligated....\"\n\n\n \"No one ever said it isn't our duty,\" Stephanie argued, as if the\n announcer could indeed hear her. \"We only wish we knew something about\n it—and we wish it weren't forever.\"", "Wrong with the Stalintrek was its name alone, a name one associated\n with everything else in Russia for an obvious, post-Stalin reason. But\n everything else about the Stalintrek shrieked mystery and adventure.\n Where did you go? How did you get there? What did you do? Why?\n\n\n A million questions which had kept her awake at night and, if\n she thought about them hard enough, satisfied her deep longing\n for something different. And then one day when stolid Mrs.\n Ivanovna-Rasnikov had said, \"It is a joke, a terrible, terrible joke\n they are taking my husband Fyodor on the Stalintrek when he lacks\n sufficient imagination to go from here to Leningrad or even Tula. Can\n you picture Fyodor on the Stalintrek? Better they should have taken me.\n Better they should have taken his wife.\" That day Sophia could hardly\n contain herself.", "SECOND MAN: They better watch out. I'm losing my temper. I get violent\n when I lose my temper.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: See? See how the guards are trembling.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Very funny. Maybe you didn't have a good job or something?\n Maybe you don't care. I care. I had a job with a future. Didn't pay\n much, but a real blue chip future. So they send me to Nowhere.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You're not there yet.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Yeah, but I'm going.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: If only they let you know when. My back is killing me. I'm\n waiting to pull a sick act. Just waiting, that's all.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Go ahead and wait, a lot of good it will do you.", "\"Brilliant, Mr. Smith. Alaric is so young—\"\n\n\n \"Aren't they all? Twenty-one to twenty-six. Who was it who once said\n something about the flower of our young manhood?\"\n\n\n \"Shakespeare?\" said Mr. Arkalion realizing that most quotes of lasting\n importance came from the bard.\n\n\n \"Sophocles,\" said Smith. \"But no matter. I will take young Alaric's\n place for ten million dollars.\"\n\n\n Motives always troubled Mr. Arkalion, and thus he pursued what might\n have been a dangerous conversation. \"You'll never get a chance to spend\n it on the Nowhere Journey.\"\n\n\n \"Let me worry about that.\"\n\n\n \"No one ever returns.\"\n\n\n \"My worry, not yours.\"", "Kit's fellow-draftee Arkalion, the young man with the strange, old-man\n eyes, seemed to know more than he should. So when Kit twisted the tail\n of fate and followed Arkalion to the ends of space and time, he found\n the secret behind \"Nowhere\" and a personal challenge upon which the\n entire future of Earth depended.\nContents\nCHAPTER I\nWhen the first strong sunlight of May covered the tree-arched avenues\n of Center City with green, the riots started.\n\n\n The people gathered in angry knots outside the city hall, met in the\n park and littered its walks with newspapers and magazines as they\n gobbled up editorial comment at a furious rate, slipped with dark of\n night through back alleys and planned things with furious futility.\n Center City's finest knew when to make themselves scarce: their\n uniforms stood for everything objectionable at this time and they might\n be subjected to clubs, stones, taunts, threats, leers—and knives." ], [ "ALARIC ARKALION: (Coldly) Would you care to explain it?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Why, sure. You see, Mars is—uh, I don't want to steal your\n thunder, chief. Go ahead.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: Once every seven hundred and eighty days Mars and the\n Earth find themselves in the same orbital position with respect to the\n sun. In other words, Mars and Earth are closest then. Were there such a\n thing as space travel, new, costly, not thoroughly tested, they would\n want to make each journey as brief as possible. Hence the seven hundred\n and eighty days.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Not bad, chief. You got most of it.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: No one ever said anything about space travel.", "\"Something tells me we'll be seeing a lot of each other,\" Arkalion\n went on. The voice was that of an older man, too, belying the youthful\n complexion, the almost childish features, the soft fuzz of a beard.\n\n\n \"I'm Kit Temple,\" said Temple, extending his hand. \"Arkalion, a strange\n name. I know it from somewhere.... Say! Aren't you—don't you have\n something to do with carpets or something?\"\n\n\n \"Here and now, no. I am a number. A-92-6417. But my father is—perhaps\n I had better say was—my father is Alaric Arkalion II. Yes, that is\n right, the carpet king.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be darned,\" said Temple.\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Temple laughed. \"I never met a billionaire before.\"", "\"Brilliant, Mr. Smith. Alaric is so young—\"\n\n\n \"Aren't they all? Twenty-one to twenty-six. Who was it who once said\n something about the flower of our young manhood?\"\n\n\n \"Shakespeare?\" said Mr. Arkalion realizing that most quotes of lasting\n importance came from the bard.\n\n\n \"Sophocles,\" said Smith. \"But no matter. I will take young Alaric's\n place for ten million dollars.\"\n\n\n Motives always troubled Mr. Arkalion, and thus he pursued what might\n have been a dangerous conversation. \"You'll never get a chance to spend\n it on the Nowhere Journey.\"\n\n\n \"Let me worry about that.\"\n\n\n \"No one ever returns.\"\n\n\n \"My worry, not yours.\"", "\"Every seven-hundred eighty days,\" said the announcer, \"two-hundred\n of Center City's young men are selected to serve their country for an\n indeterminate period regulated rigidly by a rotation system.\"\n\n\n \"Liar!\" Stephanie cried. \"No one ever comes back. It's been thirty\n years since the first group and not one of them....\"\n\n\n \"Shh,\" Temple raised a finger to his lips.\n\n\n \"This is the thirteenth call since the inception of what is popularly\n referred to as the Nowhere Journey,\" said the announcer. \"Obviously,\n the two hundred young men from Center City and the thousands from all\n over this hemisphere do not in reality embark on a Journey to Nowhere.\n That is quite meaningless.\"\n\n\n \"Hooray for him,\" Temple laughed.\n\n\n \"I wish he'd get on with it.\"", "He bent and kissed her, knowing it was all wrong. This was not goodbye,\n not the way he wanted it. Quickly, definitely, for once and all. With\n a tear, perhaps, a lot of tears. But permanent goodbye. This was all\n wrong. The whole idea was to be business-like, objective. It had to\n be done that way, or no way at all. Briefly, he regretted leaving the\n encampment.\n\n\n This wasn't goodbye the way he wanted it. The way it had to be. This\n was\nauf weidersen\n.\n\n\n And then he forgot everything but Stephanie....\n\"I am Alaric Arkalion III,\" said the extremely young-looking man with\n the old, wise eyes.\n\n\n How incongruous, Temple thought. The eyes look almost middle-aged. The\n rest of him—a boy.", "\"Then I was here,\" Temple said, very seriously.\n\n\n Arkalion smiled. \"By George, of course. Then you were here. Temple,\n we'll get along fine.\"\n\n\n Temple said that was swell.\n\n\n \"Anyway, we'd better. Forever is a long time.\"\n\n\n Three minutes later, the jet took off and soared on eager wings toward\n the setting sun.", "ALARIC ARKALION: (Who realizes, thanks to the plastic surgeon, he is\n the youngest looking of all, with red cheeks and peachfuzz whiskers) It\n is a problem of the intellect. Why seven hundred and eighty days?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: I read the magazine, too, chief. You think we're all going\n to the planet Mars. How original.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: As a matter of fact, that is exactly what I think.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Mars?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: (Laughing) It's a long way from Mars to City Hall, doc.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: You mean, through space to Mars?\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: Exactly, exactly. Quite a coincidence, otherwise.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You're telling me.", "THIRD MAN: You think that's something? I wouldn't be here only those\n doctors are crazy. I mean, crazy. Me, with a cyst big as a golf ball on\n the base of my spine.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You too. Don't try to fight it.\n\n\n FOURTH MAN: (Newly named Alaric Arkalion III) I look forward to this\n as a stimulating adventure. Does the fact that they select men for the\n Nowhere Journey once every seven hundred and eighty days strike anyone\n as significant?\n\n\n SECOND MAN: I got my own problems.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: This is not a thalamic problem, young man. Not\n thalamic at all.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: Young man? Who are you kidding?", "Kit's fellow-draftee Arkalion, the young man with the strange, old-man\n eyes, seemed to know more than he should. So when Kit twisted the tail\n of fate and followed Arkalion to the ends of space and time, he found\n the secret behind \"Nowhere\" and a personal challenge upon which the\n entire future of Earth depended.\nContents\nCHAPTER I\nWhen the first strong sunlight of May covered the tree-arched avenues\n of Center City with green, the riots started.\n\n\n The people gathered in angry knots outside the city hall, met in the\n park and littered its walks with newspapers and magazines as they\n gobbled up editorial comment at a furious rate, slipped with dark of\n night through back alleys and planned things with furious futility.\n Center City's finest knew when to make themselves scarce: their\n uniforms stood for everything objectionable at this time and they might\n be subjected to clubs, stones, taunts, threats, leers—and knives.", "SECOND MAN: I wish my Congressman....\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You and your Congressman. The way you talk, it was your vote\n got him in office.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: If only I could get out and talk to him.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: No one is permitted to leave.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Punishable by a prison term, the law says.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Oh yeah? Prison, shmision. Or else go on the Nowhere\n Journey. Well, I don't see the difference.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: So, go ahead. Try to escape.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: (Looking at the guards) They got them all over. All over. I\n think our mail is censored.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: It is.", "FIRST MAN: You think we'd broadcast it or something, stupid? It's part\n of a big, important scientific experiment, only we're the hamsters.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: Ridiculous. You're forgetting all about the Cold War.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: He thinks we're fighting a war with the Martians. (Laughs)\n Orson Wells stuff, huh?\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: With the Russians. The Russians. We developed A bombs.\n They developed A bombs. We came up with the H bomb. So did they. We\n placed a station up in space, a fifth of the way to the moon. So did\n they. Then—nothing more about scientific developments. For over twenty\n years. I ask you, doesn't it seem peculiar?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Peculiar, he says.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: Peculiar.", "\"It is forever—as if you dropped out of existence. Alaric is so young.\"\n\n\n \"I have always gambled, Mr. Arkalion. If I do not return in five\n years, you are to put the money in a trust fund for certain designated\n individuals, said fund to be terminated the moment I return. If I come\n back within the five years, you are merely to give the money over to\n me. Is that clear?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"I'll want it in writing, of course.\"\n\n\n \"Of course. A plastic surgeon is due here in about ten minutes, Mr.\n Smith, and we can get on with.... But if I don't know your name, how\n can I put it in writing?\"\n\n\n Smith smiled. \"I changed my name to Smith for the occasion. Perfectly\n legal. My name is John X. Smith—now!\"", "\"It isn't forever,\" Temple reminded her. \"Not officially.\"\n\n\n \"Officially, my foot. If they never return, they never return. If\n there's a rotation system on paper, but it's never used, that's not a\n rotation system at all. Kit, it's forever.\"\n\n\n \"... to thank the following sponsors for relinquishing their time....\"\n\n\n \"No one would want to sponsor\nthat\n,\" Temple whispered cheerfully.\n\n\n \"Kit,\" said Stephanie, \"I—I suddenly have a hunch we have nothing to\n worry about. They missed you all along and they'll miss you this time,\n too. The last time, and then you'll be too old. That's funny, too old\n at twenty-six. But we'll be free, Kit. Free.\"\n\n\n \"He's starting,\" Temple told her.", "They had reached the head of the line, found themselves entering a\n huge, double-decker jet-transport. They found two seats together,\n followed the instructions printed at the head of the aisle by strapping\n themselves in and not smoking. Talking all around them was subdued.\n\n\n \"Contrariness has given way to fear,\" Arkalion observed. \"You should\n have seen them the last few days, waiting around the induction center,\n a two-ton chip on each shoulder. Say, where\nwere\nyou?\"\n\n\n \"I—what do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"I didn't see you until last evening. Suddenly, you were here.\"\n\n\n \"Did anyone else miss me?\"\n\n\n \"But I remember you the first day.\"\n\n\n \"Did anyone else miss me? Any of the officials?\"\n\n\n \"No. Not that I know of.\"", "\"Here I am not a billionaire, nor will I ever be one again. A-92-6417,\n a number. On his way to Mars with a bunch of other numbers.\"\n\n\n \"Mars? You sound sure of yourself.\"\n\n\n \"Reasonably. Ah, it is a pleasure to talk with a gentleman. I am\n reasonably certain it will be Mars.\"\n\n\n Temple nodded in agreement. \"That's what the Sunday supplements say,\n all right.\"\n\n\n \"And doubtless you have observed no one denies it.\"\n\n\n \"But what on Earth do we want on Mars?\"\n\n\n \"That in itself is a contradiction,\" laughed Arkalion. \"We'll find out,\n though, Temple.\"", "\"It's just a song.\"\n\n\n \"Turn it off, please.\"\n\n\n Christopher Temple turned off the telio, smiling. \"They'll announce the\n names in ten minutes,\" he said, and felt the corners of his mouth draw\n taut.\n\n\n \"Tell me again, Kit,\" Stephanie pleaded. \"How old are you?\"\n\n\n \"You know I'm twenty-six.\"\n\n\n \"Twenty-six. Yes, twenty-six, so if they don't call you this time,\n you'll be safe. Safe, I can hardly believe it.\"\n\n\n \"Nine minutes,\" said Temple in the darkness. Stephanie had drawn the\n blinds earlier, had dialed for sound-proofing. The screaming in the\n streets came to them as not the faintest whisper. But the song which\n became briefly, masochistically popular every two years and two months\n had spoiled their feeling of seclusion.", "THIRD MAN: You mind your own business.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: I am, doc. You brought the whole thing up.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: He's looking for trouble.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: He'll get it.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: We're going to be together a long time. A long time.\n Why don't you all relax?\n\n\n SECOND MAN: You mind your own business.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Nuts, aren't they. They're nuts. A sick act, yet.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Look how it doesn't bother him. A failure, he was. I can\n just see it. What does he care if he goes away forever and doesn't come\n back? One bread line is as good as another.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Ha-ha.", "SECOND MAN: Yeah, well I mean it. Forever. We're going away,\n someplace—forever. We're not coming back, ever. No one comes back.\n It's for good, for keeps.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Tell it to your congressman. Or maybe you want to pull a\n sick act, too?\n\n\n THIRD MAN: (Hits First Man, who, surprised, crashes back against a\n table and falls down) It isn't an act, damn you!\n\n\n GUARD: All right, break it up. Come on, break it up....\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: (To himself) I wish I saw that ten million dollars\n already—\nif\nI ever get to see it.\nThey drove for hours through the fresh country air, feeling the wind\n against their faces, listening to the roar their ground-jet made, all\n alone on the rimrock highway.", "She signed her name with such vehemence and ferocity that she almost\n tore through the paper.\nCHAPTER II\nThree-score men sit in the crowded, smoke-filled room. Some drink\n beer, some squat in moody silence, some talk in an animated fashion\n about nothing very urgent. At the one small door, two guards pace back\n and forth slowly, creating a gentle swaying of smoke-patterns in the\n hazy room. The guards, in simple military uniform, carry small, deadly\n looking weapons.\nFIRST MAN: Fight City Hall? Are you kidding? They took you, bud. Don't\n try to fight it, I know. I know.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: I'm telling you, there was a mistake in the records.\n I'm over twenty-six. Two weeks and two days. Already I wrote to my\n Congressman. Hell, that's why I voted for him, he better go to bat for\n me.", "\"When I saw your ad,\" said not-Smith, \"I said to myself, 'now here must\n be a very rich, influential man.' It only remained for me to study a\n series of photographs readily obtainable—I have a fine memory for\n that, Mr. Arkalion—and here you are; here is Arkalion the Carpet King.\"\n\n\n \"What will you do with the ten million dollars?\" demanded Arkalion,\n not minding the loss nearly so much as the ultimate disposition of his\n fortune.\n\n\n \"Why, what does anyone do with ten million dollars? Treasure it. Invest\n it. Spend it.\"\n\n\n \"I mean, what will you do with it if you are going in place of my—\"\n Arkalion bit his tongue.\n\n\n \"Your son, were you saying, Mr. Arkalion? Alaric Arkalion the Third.\n Did you know that I was able to boil my list of men down to thirty when\n I studied their family ties?\"" ], [ "As a party member she had access to the law and she read it three times\n from start to finish (in her dingy flat by the light of a smoking,\n foul-smelling, soft-wax candle) but could find nothing barring women\n from the Stalintrek.\n\n\n Had Fyodor Rasnikov volunteered? Naturally. Everyone volunteered,\n although when your name was called you had no choice. There had been\n no draft in Russia since the days of the Second War of the People's\n Liberation. Volunteer? What, precisely, did the word mean?\n\n\n She, Sophia Androvna Petrovitch would volunteer, without being told.\n Thus it was she found herself at 616 Stalin Avenue, and thus the\n balding, myopic, bull-necked Comrade thrust the papers across his desk\n at her.", "\"Here, I will give you the volunteer papers to sign. If you pass the\n exams, you will embark on the next Stalintrek, though why a beautiful\n young woman like you—\"\n\n\n \"Shut your mouth and hand me those papers.\"\n\n\n There, sitting behind that desk, was precisely why. Why should she,\n Sophia Androvna Petrovitch, wish to volunteer for the Stalintrek?\n Better to ask why a bird flies south in the winter, one day ahead of\n the first icy gale. Or why a lemming plunges recklessly into the sea\n with his multitudes of fellows, if, indeed, the venture were to turn\n out grimly.", "But there, behind that desk, was part of the reason. The Comrade. The\n bright sharp Comrade, with his depth of reasoning, his fountain of\n gushing emotions, his worldliness.\nPfooey!\nIt was as if she had been in a cocoon all her life, stifled, starved,\n the cottony inner lining choking her whenever she opened her mouth,\n the leathery outer covering restricting her when she tried to move.\n No one had ever returned from the Stalintrek. She then had to assume\n no one would. Including Sophia Androvna Petrovitch. But then, there\n was nothing she would miss, nothing to which she particularly wanted\n to return. Not the stark, foul streets of Stalingrad, not the workers", "\"Oh, Comrade. Still, you are a woman.\"\n\n\n \"You're terribly observant, Comrade,\" said Sophia coldly. \"I am here to\n volunteer.\"\n\n\n \"But a woman.\"\n\n\n \"There is nothing in the law which says a woman cannot volunteer.\"\n\n\n \"We don't make women volunteer.\"\n\n\n \"I mean really volunteer, of her own free will.\"\n\n\n \"Her—own—free will?\" The bull-necked man removed his spectacles,\n scratched his balding head with the ear-pieces. \"You mean volunteer\n without—\"\n\n\n \"Without coercion. I want to volunteer. I am here to volunteer. I want\n to sign on for the next Stalintrek.\"\n\n\n \"Stalintrek, a woman?\"\n\n\n \"That is what I said.\"", "Wrong with the Stalintrek was its name alone, a name one associated\n with everything else in Russia for an obvious, post-Stalin reason. But\n everything else about the Stalintrek shrieked mystery and adventure.\n Where did you go? How did you get there? What did you do? Why?\n\n\n A million questions which had kept her awake at night and, if\n she thought about them hard enough, satisfied her deep longing\n for something different. And then one day when stolid Mrs.\n Ivanovna-Rasnikov had said, \"It is a joke, a terrible, terrible joke\n they are taking my husband Fyodor on the Stalintrek when he lacks\n sufficient imagination to go from here to Leningrad or even Tula. Can\n you picture Fyodor on the Stalintrek? Better they should have taken me.\n Better they should have taken his wife.\" That day Sophia could hardly\n contain herself.", "\"We don't force women to volunteer.\" The man scratched some more.\n\n\n \"Oh, really,\" said Sophia. \"This is 1992, not mid-century, Comrade. Did\n not Stalin say, 'Woman was created to share the glorious destiny of\n Mother Russia with her mate?'\" Sophia created the quote randomly.\n\n\n \"Yes, if Stalin said—\"\n\n\n \"He did.\"\n\n\n \"Still, I do not recall—\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Sophia cried. \"Stalin dead these thirty-nine years and you\n don't recall his speeches? What is your name, Comrade?\"\n\n\n \"Please, Comrade. Now that you remind me, I remember.\"\n\n\n \"What is your name.\"", "\"That's where you're wrong,\" said Mr. Arkalion as the plastic surgeon\n entered. \"Your name is Alaric Arkalion III—\nnow\n.\"\n\n\n The plastic surgeon skittered around Smith, examining him minutely with\n the casual expertness that comes with experience.\n\n\n \"Have to shorten the cheek bones.\"\n\n\n \"For ten million dollars,\" said Smith, \"you can take the damned things\n out altogether and hang them on your wall.\"\nSophia Androvna Petrovitch made her way downtown through the bustle of\n tired workers and the occasional sprinkling of Comrades. She crushed\n her\nersatz\ncigarette underfoot at number 616 Stalin Avenue, paused\n for the space of five heartbeats at the door, went inside.\n\n\n \"What do you want?\" The man at the desk was myopic but bull-necked.\n\n\n Sophia showed her party card.", "with their vapid faces or the Comrades with their cautious, sweating,\n trembling, fearful non-decisions, not the higher echelon of Comrades,\n more frightened but showing it less, who would love the beauty of\n her breasts and loins but not herself for you never love anything\n but the Stalinimage and Mother Russia herself, not those terrified\n martinet-marionettes who would love the parts of her if she permitted\n but not her or any other person for that matter.", "\"Brilliant, Mr. Smith. Alaric is so young—\"\n\n\n \"Aren't they all? Twenty-one to twenty-six. Who was it who once said\n something about the flower of our young manhood?\"\n\n\n \"Shakespeare?\" said Mr. Arkalion realizing that most quotes of lasting\n importance came from the bard.\n\n\n \"Sophocles,\" said Smith. \"But no matter. I will take young Alaric's\n place for ten million dollars.\"\n\n\n Motives always troubled Mr. Arkalion, and thus he pursued what might\n have been a dangerous conversation. \"You'll never get a chance to spend\n it on the Nowhere Journey.\"\n\n\n \"Let me worry about that.\"\n\n\n \"No one ever returns.\"\n\n\n \"My worry, not yours.\"", "\"No, ladies and gentlemen, we use the word Nowhere merely because we\n are not aware of the ultimate destination. Security reasons make it\n impossible to....\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes,\" said Stephanie impatiently. \"Go on.\"\n\n\n \"... therefore, the Nowhere Journey. With a maximum security lid on\n the whole project, we don't even know why our men are sent, or by what\n means. We know only that they go somewhere and not nowhere, bravely and\n not fearfully, for a purpose vital to the security of this nation and\n not to slake the thirst of a chessman of regiments and divisions.\n\n\n \"If Center City's contribution helps keep our country strong, Center\n City is naturally obligated....\"\n\n\n \"No one ever said it isn't our duty,\" Stephanie argued, as if the\n announcer could indeed hear her. \"We only wish we knew something about\n it—and we wish it weren't forever.\"", "THIRD MAN: You mind your own business.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: I am, doc. You brought the whole thing up.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: He's looking for trouble.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: He'll get it.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: We're going to be together a long time. A long time.\n Why don't you all relax?\n\n\n SECOND MAN: You mind your own business.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Nuts, aren't they. They're nuts. A sick act, yet.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Look how it doesn't bother him. A failure, he was. I can\n just see it. What does he care if he goes away forever and doesn't come\n back? One bread line is as good as another.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Ha-ha.", "\"It isn't forever,\" Temple reminded her. \"Not officially.\"\n\n\n \"Officially, my foot. If they never return, they never return. If\n there's a rotation system on paper, but it's never used, that's not a\n rotation system at all. Kit, it's forever.\"\n\n\n \"... to thank the following sponsors for relinquishing their time....\"\n\n\n \"No one would want to sponsor\nthat\n,\" Temple whispered cheerfully.\n\n\n \"Kit,\" said Stephanie, \"I—I suddenly have a hunch we have nothing to\n worry about. They missed you all along and they'll miss you this time,\n too. The last time, and then you'll be too old. That's funny, too old\n at twenty-six. But we'll be free, Kit. Free.\"\n\n\n \"He's starting,\" Temple told her.", "\"Kit, I love you. I love you. How can I forget you?\"\n\n\n \"It's happened before. It will happen again.\" That hurt, too. He was\n talking about a couple of statistics, not about himself and Stephanie.\n\n\n \"We're different, Kit. I'll love you forever. And—Kit ... I know\n you'll come back to me. I'll wait, Kit. We're different. You'll come\n back.\"\n\n\n \"How many people do you think said\nthat\nbefore?\"\n\n\n \"You don't want to come back, even if you could. You're not thinking of\n us at all. You're thinking of your brother.\"", "She signed her name with such vehemence and ferocity that she almost\n tore through the paper.\nCHAPTER II\nThree-score men sit in the crowded, smoke-filled room. Some drink\n beer, some squat in moody silence, some talk in an animated fashion\n about nothing very urgent. At the one small door, two guards pace back\n and forth slowly, creating a gentle swaying of smoke-patterns in the\n hazy room. The guards, in simple military uniform, carry small, deadly\n looking weapons.\nFIRST MAN: Fight City Hall? Are you kidding? They took you, bud. Don't\n try to fight it, I know. I know.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: I'm telling you, there was a mistake in the records.\n I'm over twenty-six. Two weeks and two days. Already I wrote to my\n Congressman. Hell, that's why I voted for him, he better go to bat for\n me.", "\"When I saw your ad,\" said not-Smith, \"I said to myself, 'now here must\n be a very rich, influential man.' It only remained for me to study a\n series of photographs readily obtainable—I have a fine memory for\n that, Mr. Arkalion—and here you are; here is Arkalion the Carpet King.\"\n\n\n \"What will you do with the ten million dollars?\" demanded Arkalion,\n not minding the loss nearly so much as the ultimate disposition of his\n fortune.\n\n\n \"Why, what does anyone do with ten million dollars? Treasure it. Invest\n it. Spend it.\"\n\n\n \"I mean, what will you do with it if you are going in place of my—\"\n Arkalion bit his tongue.\n\n\n \"Your son, were you saying, Mr. Arkalion? Alaric Arkalion the Third.\n Did you know that I was able to boil my list of men down to thirty when\n I studied their family ties?\"", "He bent and kissed her, knowing it was all wrong. This was not goodbye,\n not the way he wanted it. Quickly, definitely, for once and all. With\n a tear, perhaps, a lot of tears. But permanent goodbye. This was all\n wrong. The whole idea was to be business-like, objective. It had to\n be done that way, or no way at all. Briefly, he regretted leaving the\n encampment.\n\n\n This wasn't goodbye the way he wanted it. The way it had to be. This\n was\nauf weidersen\n.\n\n\n And then he forgot everything but Stephanie....\n\"I am Alaric Arkalion III,\" said the extremely young-looking man with\n the old, wise eyes.\n\n\n How incongruous, Temple thought. The eyes look almost middle-aged. The\n rest of him—a boy.", "SECOND MAN: Yeah, well I mean it. Forever. We're going away,\n someplace—forever. We're not coming back, ever. No one comes back.\n It's for good, for keeps.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Tell it to your congressman. Or maybe you want to pull a\n sick act, too?\n\n\n THIRD MAN: (Hits First Man, who, surprised, crashes back against a\n table and falls down) It isn't an act, damn you!\n\n\n GUARD: All right, break it up. Come on, break it up....\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: (To himself) I wish I saw that ten million dollars\n already—\nif\nI ever get to see it.\nThey drove for hours through the fresh country air, feeling the wind\n against their faces, listening to the roar their ground-jet made, all\n alone on the rimrock highway.", "\"Something tells me we'll be seeing a lot of each other,\" Arkalion\n went on. The voice was that of an older man, too, belying the youthful\n complexion, the almost childish features, the soft fuzz of a beard.\n\n\n \"I'm Kit Temple,\" said Temple, extending his hand. \"Arkalion, a strange\n name. I know it from somewhere.... Say! Aren't you—don't you have\n something to do with carpets or something?\"\n\n\n \"Here and now, no. I am a number. A-92-6417. But my father is—perhaps\n I had better say was—my father is Alaric Arkalion II. Yes, that is\n right, the carpet king.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be darned,\" said Temple.\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Temple laughed. \"I never met a billionaire before.\"", "\"And nothing.\" Temple stopped the ground-jet, climbed out, opened the\n door for Stephanie. \"Don't you see? There's no place to hide. Wherever\n you go, they'd look. You wouldn't want to spend the rest of your life\n running, Steffy. Not with me or anyone else.\"\n\n\n \"I would. I would!\"\n\n\n \"Know what would happen after a few years? We'd hate each other. You'd\n look at me and say 'I wouldn't be hiding like this, except for you. I'm\n young and—'\"\n\n\n \"Kit, that's cruel! I would not.\"", "\"Here I am not a billionaire, nor will I ever be one again. A-92-6417,\n a number. On his way to Mars with a bunch of other numbers.\"\n\n\n \"Mars? You sound sure of yourself.\"\n\n\n \"Reasonably. Ah, it is a pleasure to talk with a gentleman. I am\n reasonably certain it will be Mars.\"\n\n\n Temple nodded in agreement. \"That's what the Sunday supplements say,\n all right.\"\n\n\n \"And doubtless you have observed no one denies it.\"\n\n\n \"But what on Earth do we want on Mars?\"\n\n\n \"That in itself is a contradiction,\" laughed Arkalion. \"We'll find out,\n though, Temple.\"" ], [ "\"And nothing.\" Temple stopped the ground-jet, climbed out, opened the\n door for Stephanie. \"Don't you see? There's no place to hide. Wherever\n you go, they'd look. You wouldn't want to spend the rest of your life\n running, Steffy. Not with me or anyone else.\"\n\n\n \"I would. I would!\"\n\n\n \"Know what would happen after a few years? We'd hate each other. You'd\n look at me and say 'I wouldn't be hiding like this, except for you. I'm\n young and—'\"\n\n\n \"Kit, that's cruel! I would not.\"", "\"Kit, I love you. I love you. How can I forget you?\"\n\n\n \"It's happened before. It will happen again.\" That hurt, too. He was\n talking about a couple of statistics, not about himself and Stephanie.\n\n\n \"We're different, Kit. I'll love you forever. And—Kit ... I know\n you'll come back to me. I'll wait, Kit. We're different. You'll come\n back.\"\n\n\n \"How many people do you think said\nthat\nbefore?\"\n\n\n \"You don't want to come back, even if you could. You're not thinking of\n us at all. You're thinking of your brother.\"", "\"Where are we going, Kit?\"\n\n\n \"Search me. Just driving.\"\n\n\n \"I'm glad they let you come out this once. I don't know what they would\n have done to me if they didn't. I had to see you this once. I—\"\n\n\n Temple smiled. He had absented himself without leave. It had been\n difficult enough and he might yet be in a lot of hot water, but it\n would be senseless to worry Stephanie. \"It's just for a few hours,\" he\n said.\n\n\n \"Hours. When we want a whole lifetime. Kit. Oh, Kit—why don't we run\n away? Just the two of us, someplace where they'll never find you. I\n could be packed and ready and—\"\n\n\n \"Don't talk like that. We can't.\"\n\n\n \"You want to go where they're sending you. You want to go.\"", "\"For God's sake, how can you talk like that? I don't want to go\n anyplace, except with you. But we can't run away, Steffy. I've got to\n face it, whatever it is.\"\n\n\n \"No you don't. It's noble to be patriotic, sure. It always was. But\n this is different, Kit. They don't ask for part of your life. Not for\n two years, or three, or a gamble because maybe you won't ever come\n back. They ask for all of you, for the rest of your life, forever, and\n they don't even tell you why. Kit, don't go! We'll hide someplace and\n get married and—\"", "\"Yes, you would. Steffy, I—\" A lump rose in his throat. He'd tell her\n goodbye, permanently. He had to do it that way, did not want her to\n wait endlessly and hopelessly for a return that would not materialize.\n \"I didn't get permission to leave, Steffy.\" He hadn't meant to tell her\n that, but suddenly it seemed an easy way to break into goodbye.\n\n\n \"What do you mean? No—you didn't....\"\n\n\n \"I had to see you. What can they do, send me for longer than forever?\"\n\n\n \"Then you do want to run away with me!\"\n\n\n \"Steffy, no. When I leave you tonight, Steffy, it's for good. That's\n it. The last of Kit Temple. Stop thinking about me. I don't exist.\n I—never was.\" It sounded ridiculous, even to him.", "\"It isn't forever,\" Temple reminded her. \"Not officially.\"\n\n\n \"Officially, my foot. If they never return, they never return. If\n there's a rotation system on paper, but it's never used, that's not a\n rotation system at all. Kit, it's forever.\"\n\n\n \"... to thank the following sponsors for relinquishing their time....\"\n\n\n \"No one would want to sponsor\nthat\n,\" Temple whispered cheerfully.\n\n\n \"Kit,\" said Stephanie, \"I—I suddenly have a hunch we have nothing to\n worry about. They missed you all along and they'll miss you this time,\n too. The last time, and then you'll be too old. That's funny, too old\n at twenty-six. But we'll be free, Kit. Free.\"\n\n\n \"He's starting,\" Temple told her.", "\"This going wasn't my idea. I wanted to stay with you. I wanted to\n marry you. I can't now. None of it. Forget me, Steffy. Forget you ever\n knew me. Jase said that to our folks before he was taken.\" Almost five\n years before Jason Temple had been selected for the Nowhere Journey.\n He'd been young, though older than his brother Kit. Young, unattached,\n almost cheerful he was. Naturally, they never saw him again.\n\n\n \"Hold me, Kit. I'm sorry ... carrying on like this.\"", "\"Tell me again, Kit.\"\n\n\n \"What.\"\n\n\n \"You know what.\"\n\n\n He let her come to him, let her hug him fiercely and whimper against\n his chest. He remained passive although it hurt, occasionally stroking\n her hair. He could not assert himself for another—he looked at his\n strap chrono—for another eight minutes. He might regret it, if he did,\n for a lifetime.\n\n\n \"Tell me, Kit.\"\n\n\n \"I'll marry you, Steffy. In eight minutes, less than eight minutes,\n I'll go down and get the license. We'll marry as soon as it's legal.\"\n\n\n \"This is the last time they have a chance for you. I mean, they won't\n change the law?\"\n\n\n Temple shook his head. \"They don't have to. They meet their quota this\n way.\"", "\"You know that isn't true. Sometimes I wonder about Jase, sure. But if\n I thought there was a chance to return—I'm a selfish cuss, Steffy. If\n I thought there was a chance, you know I'd want you all for myself. I'd\n brand you, and that's the truth.\"\n\n\n \"You do love me!\"\n\n\n \"I loved you, Steffy. Kit Temple loved you.\"\n\n\n \"Loved?\"\n\n\n \"Loved. Past tense. When I leave tonight, it's as if I don't exist\n anymore. As if I never existed. It's got to be that way, Steffy. In\n thirty years, no one ever returned.\"\n\n\n \"Including your brother, Jase. So now you want to find him. What do I\n count for? What....\"", "They had walked some distance from the ground-jet, through scrub\n oak and bramble bushes. They found a clearing, fragrant-scented,\n soft-floored still from last autumn, melodic with the chirping of\n nameless birds. They sat, not talking. Stephanie wore a gay summer\n dress, full-skirted, cut deep beneath the throat. She swayed toward him\n from the waist, nestled her head on his shoulder. He could smell the\n soft, sweet fragrance of her hair, of the skin at the nape of her neck.\n \"If you want to say goodbye ...\" she said.\n\n\n \"Stop it,\" he told her.\n\n\n \"If you want to say goodbye....\"\n\n\n Her head rolled against his chest. She turned, cradled herself in his\n arms, smiled up at him, squirmed some more and had her head pillowed on\n his lap. She smiled tremulously, misty-eyed. Her lips parted.", "\"I'm scared.\"\n\n\n \"You and everyone else in North America, Steffy.\"\n\n\n She was trembling against him. \"It's cold for June.\"\n\n\n \"It's warm in here.\" He kissed her moist eyes, her nose, her lips.\n\n\n \"Oh God, Kit. Five minutes.\"\n\n\n \"Five minutes to freedom,\" he said jauntily. He did not feel that way\n at all. Apprehension clutched at his chest with tight, painful fingers,\n almost making it difficult for him to breathe.\n\n\n \"Turn it on, Kit.\"\n\n\n He dialed the telio in time to see the announcer's insincere smile.\n Smile seventeen, Kit thought wryly. Patriotic sacrifice.", "He bent and kissed her, knowing it was all wrong. This was not goodbye,\n not the way he wanted it. Quickly, definitely, for once and all. With\n a tear, perhaps, a lot of tears. But permanent goodbye. This was all\n wrong. The whole idea was to be business-like, objective. It had to\n be done that way, or no way at all. Briefly, he regretted leaving the\n encampment.\n\n\n This wasn't goodbye the way he wanted it. The way it had to be. This\n was\nauf weidersen\n.\n\n\n And then he forgot everything but Stephanie....\n\"I am Alaric Arkalion III,\" said the extremely young-looking man with\n the old, wise eyes.\n\n\n How incongruous, Temple thought. The eyes look almost middle-aged. The\n rest of him—a boy.", "\"No, ladies and gentlemen, we use the word Nowhere merely because we\n are not aware of the ultimate destination. Security reasons make it\n impossible to....\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes,\" said Stephanie impatiently. \"Go on.\"\n\n\n \"... therefore, the Nowhere Journey. With a maximum security lid on\n the whole project, we don't even know why our men are sent, or by what\n means. We know only that they go somewhere and not nowhere, bravely and\n not fearfully, for a purpose vital to the security of this nation and\n not to slake the thirst of a chessman of regiments and divisions.\n\n\n \"If Center City's contribution helps keep our country strong, Center\n City is naturally obligated....\"\n\n\n \"No one ever said it isn't our duty,\" Stephanie argued, as if the\n announcer could indeed hear her. \"We only wish we knew something about\n it—and we wish it weren't forever.\"", "But there, behind that desk, was part of the reason. The Comrade. The\n bright sharp Comrade, with his depth of reasoning, his fountain of\n gushing emotions, his worldliness.\nPfooey!\nIt was as if she had been in a cocoon all her life, stifled, starved,\n the cottony inner lining choking her whenever she opened her mouth,\n the leathery outer covering restricting her when she tried to move.\n No one had ever returned from the Stalintrek. She then had to assume\n no one would. Including Sophia Androvna Petrovitch. But then, there\n was nothing she would miss, nothing to which she particularly wanted\n to return. Not the stark, foul streets of Stalingrad, not the workers", "\"Every seven-hundred eighty days,\" said the announcer, \"two-hundred\n of Center City's young men are selected to serve their country for an\n indeterminate period regulated rigidly by a rotation system.\"\n\n\n \"Liar!\" Stephanie cried. \"No one ever comes back. It's been thirty\n years since the first group and not one of them....\"\n\n\n \"Shh,\" Temple raised a finger to his lips.\n\n\n \"This is the thirteenth call since the inception of what is popularly\n referred to as the Nowhere Journey,\" said the announcer. \"Obviously,\n the two hundred young men from Center City and the thousands from all\n over this hemisphere do not in reality embark on a Journey to Nowhere.\n That is quite meaningless.\"\n\n\n \"Hooray for him,\" Temple laughed.\n\n\n \"I wish he'd get on with it.\"", "\"Something tells me we'll be seeing a lot of each other,\" Arkalion\n went on. The voice was that of an older man, too, belying the youthful\n complexion, the almost childish features, the soft fuzz of a beard.\n\n\n \"I'm Kit Temple,\" said Temple, extending his hand. \"Arkalion, a strange\n name. I know it from somewhere.... Say! Aren't you—don't you have\n something to do with carpets or something?\"\n\n\n \"Here and now, no. I am a number. A-92-6417. But my father is—perhaps\n I had better say was—my father is Alaric Arkalion II. Yes, that is\n right, the carpet king.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be darned,\" said Temple.\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Temple laughed. \"I never met a billionaire before.\"", "But Center City, like most communities in United North America,\n had survived the Riots before and would survive them again. On\n past performances, the damage could be estimated, too. Two-hundred\n fifty-seven plate glass windows would be broken, three-hundred twelve\n limbs fractured. Several thousand people would be treated for minor\n bruises and abrasions, Center City would receive half that many damage\n suits. The list had been drawn clearly and accurately; it hardly ever\n deviated.\n\n\n And Center City would meet its quota. With a demonstration of\n reluctance, of course. The healthy approved way to get over social\n trauma once every seven-hundred eighty days.\n\"Shut it off, Kit. Kit, please.\"\n\n\n The telio blared in a cheaply feminine voice, \"Oh, it's a long way\n to nowhere, forever. And your honey's not coming back, never, never,\n never....\" A wailing trumpet represented flight.\n\n\n \"They'll exploit anything, Kit.\"", "R, S....\n\n\n \"T!\" Stephanie shrieked as the names began to float slowly up from the\n bottom of the drum.\n\n\n Tabor, Tebbets, Teddley....\n\n\n Temple's mouth felt dry as a ball of cotton. Stephanie laughed\n nervously. Now—or never. Never?\n\n\n Now.\n\n\n Stephanie whimpered despairingly.\n\n\n TEMPLE, CHRISTOPHER.\n\"Sorry I'm late, Mr. Jones.\"\n\n\n \"Hardly, Mr. Smith. Hardly. Three minutes late.\"\n\n\n \"I've come in response to your ad.\"\n\n\n \"I know. You look old.\"\n\n\n \"I am over twenty-six. Do you mind?\"", "SECOND MAN: Yeah, well I mean it. Forever. We're going away,\n someplace—forever. We're not coming back, ever. No one comes back.\n It's for good, for keeps.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Tell it to your congressman. Or maybe you want to pull a\n sick act, too?\n\n\n THIRD MAN: (Hits First Man, who, surprised, crashes back against a\n table and falls down) It isn't an act, damn you!\n\n\n GUARD: All right, break it up. Come on, break it up....\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: (To himself) I wish I saw that ten million dollars\n already—\nif\nI ever get to see it.\nThey drove for hours through the fresh country air, feeling the wind\n against their faces, listening to the roar their ground-jet made, all\n alone on the rimrock highway.", "\"It's just a song.\"\n\n\n \"Turn it off, please.\"\n\n\n Christopher Temple turned off the telio, smiling. \"They'll announce the\n names in ten minutes,\" he said, and felt the corners of his mouth draw\n taut.\n\n\n \"Tell me again, Kit,\" Stephanie pleaded. \"How old are you?\"\n\n\n \"You know I'm twenty-six.\"\n\n\n \"Twenty-six. Yes, twenty-six, so if they don't call you this time,\n you'll be safe. Safe, I can hardly believe it.\"\n\n\n \"Nine minutes,\" said Temple in the darkness. Stephanie had drawn the\n blinds earlier, had dialed for sound-proofing. The screaming in the\n streets came to them as not the faintest whisper. But the song which\n became briefly, masochistically popular every two years and two months\n had spoiled their feeling of seclusion." ], [ "He bent and kissed her, knowing it was all wrong. This was not goodbye,\n not the way he wanted it. Quickly, definitely, for once and all. With\n a tear, perhaps, a lot of tears. But permanent goodbye. This was all\n wrong. The whole idea was to be business-like, objective. It had to\n be done that way, or no way at all. Briefly, he regretted leaving the\n encampment.\n\n\n This wasn't goodbye the way he wanted it. The way it had to be. This\n was\nauf weidersen\n.\n\n\n And then he forgot everything but Stephanie....\n\"I am Alaric Arkalion III,\" said the extremely young-looking man with\n the old, wise eyes.\n\n\n How incongruous, Temple thought. The eyes look almost middle-aged. The\n rest of him—a boy.", "\"Something tells me we'll be seeing a lot of each other,\" Arkalion\n went on. The voice was that of an older man, too, belying the youthful\n complexion, the almost childish features, the soft fuzz of a beard.\n\n\n \"I'm Kit Temple,\" said Temple, extending his hand. \"Arkalion, a strange\n name. I know it from somewhere.... Say! Aren't you—don't you have\n something to do with carpets or something?\"\n\n\n \"Here and now, no. I am a number. A-92-6417. But my father is—perhaps\n I had better say was—my father is Alaric Arkalion II. Yes, that is\n right, the carpet king.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be darned,\" said Temple.\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Temple laughed. \"I never met a billionaire before.\"", "THIRD MAN: You think that's something? I wouldn't be here only those\n doctors are crazy. I mean, crazy. Me, with a cyst big as a golf ball on\n the base of my spine.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You too. Don't try to fight it.\n\n\n FOURTH MAN: (Newly named Alaric Arkalion III) I look forward to this\n as a stimulating adventure. Does the fact that they select men for the\n Nowhere Journey once every seven hundred and eighty days strike anyone\n as significant?\n\n\n SECOND MAN: I got my own problems.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: This is not a thalamic problem, young man. Not\n thalamic at all.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: Young man? Who are you kidding?", "\"That's where you're wrong,\" said Mr. Arkalion as the plastic surgeon\n entered. \"Your name is Alaric Arkalion III—\nnow\n.\"\n\n\n The plastic surgeon skittered around Smith, examining him minutely with\n the casual expertness that comes with experience.\n\n\n \"Have to shorten the cheek bones.\"\n\n\n \"For ten million dollars,\" said Smith, \"you can take the damned things\n out altogether and hang them on your wall.\"\nSophia Androvna Petrovitch made her way downtown through the bustle of\n tired workers and the occasional sprinkling of Comrades. She crushed\n her\nersatz\ncigarette underfoot at number 616 Stalin Avenue, paused\n for the space of five heartbeats at the door, went inside.\n\n\n \"What do you want?\" The man at the desk was myopic but bull-necked.\n\n\n Sophia showed her party card.", "\"When I saw your ad,\" said not-Smith, \"I said to myself, 'now here must\n be a very rich, influential man.' It only remained for me to study a\n series of photographs readily obtainable—I have a fine memory for\n that, Mr. Arkalion—and here you are; here is Arkalion the Carpet King.\"\n\n\n \"What will you do with the ten million dollars?\" demanded Arkalion,\n not minding the loss nearly so much as the ultimate disposition of his\n fortune.\n\n\n \"Why, what does anyone do with ten million dollars? Treasure it. Invest\n it. Spend it.\"\n\n\n \"I mean, what will you do with it if you are going in place of my—\"\n Arkalion bit his tongue.\n\n\n \"Your son, were you saying, Mr. Arkalion? Alaric Arkalion the Third.\n Did you know that I was able to boil my list of men down to thirty when\n I studied their family ties?\"", "Kit's fellow-draftee Arkalion, the young man with the strange, old-man\n eyes, seemed to know more than he should. So when Kit twisted the tail\n of fate and followed Arkalion to the ends of space and time, he found\n the secret behind \"Nowhere\" and a personal challenge upon which the\n entire future of Earth depended.\nContents\nCHAPTER I\nWhen the first strong sunlight of May covered the tree-arched avenues\n of Center City with green, the riots started.\n\n\n The people gathered in angry knots outside the city hall, met in the\n park and littered its walks with newspapers and magazines as they\n gobbled up editorial comment at a furious rate, slipped with dark of\n night through back alleys and planned things with furious futility.\n Center City's finest knew when to make themselves scarce: their\n uniforms stood for everything objectionable at this time and they might\n be subjected to clubs, stones, taunts, threats, leers—and knives.", "THIRD MAN: You mind your own business.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: I am, doc. You brought the whole thing up.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: He's looking for trouble.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: He'll get it.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: We're going to be together a long time. A long time.\n Why don't you all relax?\n\n\n SECOND MAN: You mind your own business.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Nuts, aren't they. They're nuts. A sick act, yet.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Look how it doesn't bother him. A failure, he was. I can\n just see it. What does he care if he goes away forever and doesn't come\n back? One bread line is as good as another.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Ha-ha.", "\"It is forever—as if you dropped out of existence. Alaric is so young.\"\n\n\n \"I have always gambled, Mr. Arkalion. If I do not return in five\n years, you are to put the money in a trust fund for certain designated\n individuals, said fund to be terminated the moment I return. If I come\n back within the five years, you are merely to give the money over to\n me. Is that clear?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"I'll want it in writing, of course.\"\n\n\n \"Of course. A plastic surgeon is due here in about ten minutes, Mr.\n Smith, and we can get on with.... But if I don't know your name, how\n can I put it in writing?\"\n\n\n Smith smiled. \"I changed my name to Smith for the occasion. Perfectly\n legal. My name is John X. Smith—now!\"", "ALARIC ARKALION: (Who realizes, thanks to the plastic surgeon, he is\n the youngest looking of all, with red cheeks and peachfuzz whiskers) It\n is a problem of the intellect. Why seven hundred and eighty days?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: I read the magazine, too, chief. You think we're all going\n to the planet Mars. How original.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: As a matter of fact, that is exactly what I think.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Mars?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: (Laughing) It's a long way from Mars to City Hall, doc.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: You mean, through space to Mars?\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: Exactly, exactly. Quite a coincidence, otherwise.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You're telling me.", "\"Then I was here,\" Temple said, very seriously.\n\n\n Arkalion smiled. \"By George, of course. Then you were here. Temple,\n we'll get along fine.\"\n\n\n Temple said that was swell.\n\n\n \"Anyway, we'd better. Forever is a long time.\"\n\n\n Three minutes later, the jet took off and soared on eager wings toward\n the setting sun.", "\"Brilliant, Mr. Smith. Alaric is so young—\"\n\n\n \"Aren't they all? Twenty-one to twenty-six. Who was it who once said\n something about the flower of our young manhood?\"\n\n\n \"Shakespeare?\" said Mr. Arkalion realizing that most quotes of lasting\n importance came from the bard.\n\n\n \"Sophocles,\" said Smith. \"But no matter. I will take young Alaric's\n place for ten million dollars.\"\n\n\n Motives always troubled Mr. Arkalion, and thus he pursued what might\n have been a dangerous conversation. \"You'll never get a chance to spend\n it on the Nowhere Journey.\"\n\n\n \"Let me worry about that.\"\n\n\n \"No one ever returns.\"\n\n\n \"My worry, not yours.\"", "SECOND MAN: Yeah, well I mean it. Forever. We're going away,\n someplace—forever. We're not coming back, ever. No one comes back.\n It's for good, for keeps.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Tell it to your congressman. Or maybe you want to pull a\n sick act, too?\n\n\n THIRD MAN: (Hits First Man, who, surprised, crashes back against a\n table and falls down) It isn't an act, damn you!\n\n\n GUARD: All right, break it up. Come on, break it up....\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: (To himself) I wish I saw that ten million dollars\n already—\nif\nI ever get to see it.\nThey drove for hours through the fresh country air, feeling the wind\n against their faces, listening to the roar their ground-jet made, all\n alone on the rimrock highway.", "SECOND MAN: I wish my Congressman....\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You and your Congressman. The way you talk, it was your vote\n got him in office.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: If only I could get out and talk to him.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: No one is permitted to leave.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Punishable by a prison term, the law says.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Oh yeah? Prison, shmision. Or else go on the Nowhere\n Journey. Well, I don't see the difference.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: So, go ahead. Try to escape.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: (Looking at the guards) They got them all over. All over. I\n think our mail is censored.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: It is.", "They had reached the head of the line, found themselves entering a\n huge, double-decker jet-transport. They found two seats together,\n followed the instructions printed at the head of the aisle by strapping\n themselves in and not smoking. Talking all around them was subdued.\n\n\n \"Contrariness has given way to fear,\" Arkalion observed. \"You should\n have seen them the last few days, waiting around the induction center,\n a two-ton chip on each shoulder. Say, where\nwere\nyou?\"\n\n\n \"I—what do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"I didn't see you until last evening. Suddenly, you were here.\"\n\n\n \"Did anyone else miss me?\"\n\n\n \"But I remember you the first day.\"\n\n\n \"Did anyone else miss me? Any of the officials?\"\n\n\n \"No. Not that I know of.\"", "\"Ten million dollars,\" said Jones, \"is quite a price. Admittedly, I\n haven't dealt in this sort of traffic before, but—\"\n\n\n \"But nothing. Were your name Jones, really and truly Jones, I might ask\n less.\"\n\n\n \"Sir?\"\n\n\n \"You are Jones exactly as much as I am Smith.\"\n\n\n \"Sir?\" Jones gasped again.\n\n\n Smith coughed discreetly. \"But I have one advantage. I know you. You\n don't know me, Mr. Arkalion.\"\n\n\n \"Eh? Eh?\"\n\n\n \"Arkalion. The North American Carpet King. Right?\"\n\n\n \"How did you know?\" the man whose name was not Jones but Arkalion asked\n the man whose name was not Smith but might as well have been.", "ALARIC ARKALION: (Coldly) Would you care to explain it?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Why, sure. You see, Mars is—uh, I don't want to steal your\n thunder, chief. Go ahead.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: Once every seven hundred and eighty days Mars and the\n Earth find themselves in the same orbital position with respect to the\n sun. In other words, Mars and Earth are closest then. Were there such a\n thing as space travel, new, costly, not thoroughly tested, they would\n want to make each journey as brief as possible. Hence the seven hundred\n and eighty days.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Not bad, chief. You got most of it.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: No one ever said anything about space travel.", "FIRST MAN: You think we'd broadcast it or something, stupid? It's part\n of a big, important scientific experiment, only we're the hamsters.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: Ridiculous. You're forgetting all about the Cold War.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: He thinks we're fighting a war with the Martians. (Laughs)\n Orson Wells stuff, huh?\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: With the Russians. The Russians. We developed A bombs.\n They developed A bombs. We came up with the H bomb. So did they. We\n placed a station up in space, a fifth of the way to the moon. So did\n they. Then—nothing more about scientific developments. For over twenty\n years. I ask you, doesn't it seem peculiar?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Peculiar, he says.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: Peculiar.", "But there, behind that desk, was part of the reason. The Comrade. The\n bright sharp Comrade, with his depth of reasoning, his fountain of\n gushing emotions, his worldliness.\nPfooey!\nIt was as if she had been in a cocoon all her life, stifled, starved,\n the cottony inner lining choking her whenever she opened her mouth,\n the leathery outer covering restricting her when she tried to move.\n No one had ever returned from the Stalintrek. She then had to assume\n no one would. Including Sophia Androvna Petrovitch. But then, there\n was nothing she would miss, nothing to which she particularly wanted\n to return. Not the stark, foul streets of Stalingrad, not the workers", "She signed her name with such vehemence and ferocity that she almost\n tore through the paper.\nCHAPTER II\nThree-score men sit in the crowded, smoke-filled room. Some drink\n beer, some squat in moody silence, some talk in an animated fashion\n about nothing very urgent. At the one small door, two guards pace back\n and forth slowly, creating a gentle swaying of smoke-patterns in the\n hazy room. The guards, in simple military uniform, carry small, deadly\n looking weapons.\nFIRST MAN: Fight City Hall? Are you kidding? They took you, bud. Don't\n try to fight it, I know. I know.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: I'm telling you, there was a mistake in the records.\n I'm over twenty-six. Two weeks and two days. Already I wrote to my\n Congressman. Hell, that's why I voted for him, he better go to bat for\n me.", "Wrong with the Stalintrek was its name alone, a name one associated\n with everything else in Russia for an obvious, post-Stalin reason. But\n everything else about the Stalintrek shrieked mystery and adventure.\n Where did you go? How did you get there? What did you do? Why?\n\n\n A million questions which had kept her awake at night and, if\n she thought about them hard enough, satisfied her deep longing\n for something different. And then one day when stolid Mrs.\n Ivanovna-Rasnikov had said, \"It is a joke, a terrible, terrible joke\n they are taking my husband Fyodor on the Stalintrek when he lacks\n sufficient imagination to go from here to Leningrad or even Tula. Can\n you picture Fyodor on the Stalintrek? Better they should have taken me.\n Better they should have taken his wife.\" That day Sophia could hardly\n contain herself." ], [ "\"Here, I will give you the volunteer papers to sign. If you pass the\n exams, you will embark on the next Stalintrek, though why a beautiful\n young woman like you—\"\n\n\n \"Shut your mouth and hand me those papers.\"\n\n\n There, sitting behind that desk, was precisely why. Why should she,\n Sophia Androvna Petrovitch, wish to volunteer for the Stalintrek?\n Better to ask why a bird flies south in the winter, one day ahead of\n the first icy gale. Or why a lemming plunges recklessly into the sea\n with his multitudes of fellows, if, indeed, the venture were to turn\n out grimly.", "As a party member she had access to the law and she read it three times\n from start to finish (in her dingy flat by the light of a smoking,\n foul-smelling, soft-wax candle) but could find nothing barring women\n from the Stalintrek.\n\n\n Had Fyodor Rasnikov volunteered? Naturally. Everyone volunteered,\n although when your name was called you had no choice. There had been\n no draft in Russia since the days of the Second War of the People's\n Liberation. Volunteer? What, precisely, did the word mean?\n\n\n She, Sophia Androvna Petrovitch would volunteer, without being told.\n Thus it was she found herself at 616 Stalin Avenue, and thus the\n balding, myopic, bull-necked Comrade thrust the papers across his desk\n at her.", "\"Oh, Comrade. Still, you are a woman.\"\n\n\n \"You're terribly observant, Comrade,\" said Sophia coldly. \"I am here to\n volunteer.\"\n\n\n \"But a woman.\"\n\n\n \"There is nothing in the law which says a woman cannot volunteer.\"\n\n\n \"We don't make women volunteer.\"\n\n\n \"I mean really volunteer, of her own free will.\"\n\n\n \"Her—own—free will?\" The bull-necked man removed his spectacles,\n scratched his balding head with the ear-pieces. \"You mean volunteer\n without—\"\n\n\n \"Without coercion. I want to volunteer. I am here to volunteer. I want\n to sign on for the next Stalintrek.\"\n\n\n \"Stalintrek, a woman?\"\n\n\n \"That is what I said.\"", "Wrong with the Stalintrek was its name alone, a name one associated\n with everything else in Russia for an obvious, post-Stalin reason. But\n everything else about the Stalintrek shrieked mystery and adventure.\n Where did you go? How did you get there? What did you do? Why?\n\n\n A million questions which had kept her awake at night and, if\n she thought about them hard enough, satisfied her deep longing\n for something different. And then one day when stolid Mrs.\n Ivanovna-Rasnikov had said, \"It is a joke, a terrible, terrible joke\n they are taking my husband Fyodor on the Stalintrek when he lacks\n sufficient imagination to go from here to Leningrad or even Tula. Can\n you picture Fyodor on the Stalintrek? Better they should have taken me.\n Better they should have taken his wife.\" That day Sophia could hardly\n contain herself.", "But there, behind that desk, was part of the reason. The Comrade. The\n bright sharp Comrade, with his depth of reasoning, his fountain of\n gushing emotions, his worldliness.\nPfooey!\nIt was as if she had been in a cocoon all her life, stifled, starved,\n the cottony inner lining choking her whenever she opened her mouth,\n the leathery outer covering restricting her when she tried to move.\n No one had ever returned from the Stalintrek. She then had to assume\n no one would. Including Sophia Androvna Petrovitch. But then, there\n was nothing she would miss, nothing to which she particularly wanted\n to return. Not the stark, foul streets of Stalingrad, not the workers", "\"We don't force women to volunteer.\" The man scratched some more.\n\n\n \"Oh, really,\" said Sophia. \"This is 1992, not mid-century, Comrade. Did\n not Stalin say, 'Woman was created to share the glorious destiny of\n Mother Russia with her mate?'\" Sophia created the quote randomly.\n\n\n \"Yes, if Stalin said—\"\n\n\n \"He did.\"\n\n\n \"Still, I do not recall—\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Sophia cried. \"Stalin dead these thirty-nine years and you\n don't recall his speeches? What is your name, Comrade?\"\n\n\n \"Please, Comrade. Now that you remind me, I remember.\"\n\n\n \"What is your name.\"", "\"That's where you're wrong,\" said Mr. Arkalion as the plastic surgeon\n entered. \"Your name is Alaric Arkalion III—\nnow\n.\"\n\n\n The plastic surgeon skittered around Smith, examining him minutely with\n the casual expertness that comes with experience.\n\n\n \"Have to shorten the cheek bones.\"\n\n\n \"For ten million dollars,\" said Smith, \"you can take the damned things\n out altogether and hang them on your wall.\"\nSophia Androvna Petrovitch made her way downtown through the bustle of\n tired workers and the occasional sprinkling of Comrades. She crushed\n her\nersatz\ncigarette underfoot at number 616 Stalin Avenue, paused\n for the space of five heartbeats at the door, went inside.\n\n\n \"What do you want?\" The man at the desk was myopic but bull-necked.\n\n\n Sophia showed her party card.", "with their vapid faces or the Comrades with their cautious, sweating,\n trembling, fearful non-decisions, not the higher echelon of Comrades,\n more frightened but showing it less, who would love the beauty of\n her breasts and loins but not herself for you never love anything\n but the Stalinimage and Mother Russia herself, not those terrified\n martinet-marionettes who would love the parts of her if she permitted\n but not her or any other person for that matter.", "They had reached the head of the line, found themselves entering a\n huge, double-decker jet-transport. They found two seats together,\n followed the instructions printed at the head of the aisle by strapping\n themselves in and not smoking. Talking all around them was subdued.\n\n\n \"Contrariness has given way to fear,\" Arkalion observed. \"You should\n have seen them the last few days, waiting around the induction center,\n a two-ton chip on each shoulder. Say, where\nwere\nyou?\"\n\n\n \"I—what do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"I didn't see you until last evening. Suddenly, you were here.\"\n\n\n \"Did anyone else miss me?\"\n\n\n \"But I remember you the first day.\"\n\n\n \"Did anyone else miss me? Any of the officials?\"\n\n\n \"No. Not that I know of.\"", "\"Brilliant, Mr. Smith. Alaric is so young—\"\n\n\n \"Aren't they all? Twenty-one to twenty-six. Who was it who once said\n something about the flower of our young manhood?\"\n\n\n \"Shakespeare?\" said Mr. Arkalion realizing that most quotes of lasting\n importance came from the bard.\n\n\n \"Sophocles,\" said Smith. \"But no matter. I will take young Alaric's\n place for ten million dollars.\"\n\n\n Motives always troubled Mr. Arkalion, and thus he pursued what might\n have been a dangerous conversation. \"You'll never get a chance to spend\n it on the Nowhere Journey.\"\n\n\n \"Let me worry about that.\"\n\n\n \"No one ever returns.\"\n\n\n \"My worry, not yours.\"", "THIRD MAN: You mind your own business.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: I am, doc. You brought the whole thing up.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: He's looking for trouble.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: He'll get it.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: We're going to be together a long time. A long time.\n Why don't you all relax?\n\n\n SECOND MAN: You mind your own business.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Nuts, aren't they. They're nuts. A sick act, yet.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Look how it doesn't bother him. A failure, he was. I can\n just see it. What does he care if he goes away forever and doesn't come\n back? One bread line is as good as another.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Ha-ha.", "THIRD MAN: You think that's something? I wouldn't be here only those\n doctors are crazy. I mean, crazy. Me, with a cyst big as a golf ball on\n the base of my spine.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You too. Don't try to fight it.\n\n\n FOURTH MAN: (Newly named Alaric Arkalion III) I look forward to this\n as a stimulating adventure. Does the fact that they select men for the\n Nowhere Journey once every seven hundred and eighty days strike anyone\n as significant?\n\n\n SECOND MAN: I got my own problems.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: This is not a thalamic problem, young man. Not\n thalamic at all.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: Young man? Who are you kidding?", "\"It isn't forever,\" Temple reminded her. \"Not officially.\"\n\n\n \"Officially, my foot. If they never return, they never return. If\n there's a rotation system on paper, but it's never used, that's not a\n rotation system at all. Kit, it's forever.\"\n\n\n \"... to thank the following sponsors for relinquishing their time....\"\n\n\n \"No one would want to sponsor\nthat\n,\" Temple whispered cheerfully.\n\n\n \"Kit,\" said Stephanie, \"I—I suddenly have a hunch we have nothing to\n worry about. They missed you all along and they'll miss you this time,\n too. The last time, and then you'll be too old. That's funny, too old\n at twenty-six. But we'll be free, Kit. Free.\"\n\n\n \"He's starting,\" Temple told her.", "SECOND MAN: I wish my Congressman....\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You and your Congressman. The way you talk, it was your vote\n got him in office.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: If only I could get out and talk to him.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: No one is permitted to leave.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Punishable by a prison term, the law says.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Oh yeah? Prison, shmision. Or else go on the Nowhere\n Journey. Well, I don't see the difference.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: So, go ahead. Try to escape.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: (Looking at the guards) They got them all over. All over. I\n think our mail is censored.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: It is.", "He bent and kissed her, knowing it was all wrong. This was not goodbye,\n not the way he wanted it. Quickly, definitely, for once and all. With\n a tear, perhaps, a lot of tears. But permanent goodbye. This was all\n wrong. The whole idea was to be business-like, objective. It had to\n be done that way, or no way at all. Briefly, he regretted leaving the\n encampment.\n\n\n This wasn't goodbye the way he wanted it. The way it had to be. This\n was\nauf weidersen\n.\n\n\n And then he forgot everything but Stephanie....\n\"I am Alaric Arkalion III,\" said the extremely young-looking man with\n the old, wise eyes.\n\n\n How incongruous, Temple thought. The eyes look almost middle-aged. The\n rest of him—a boy.", "\"No, ladies and gentlemen, we use the word Nowhere merely because we\n are not aware of the ultimate destination. Security reasons make it\n impossible to....\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes,\" said Stephanie impatiently. \"Go on.\"\n\n\n \"... therefore, the Nowhere Journey. With a maximum security lid on\n the whole project, we don't even know why our men are sent, or by what\n means. We know only that they go somewhere and not nowhere, bravely and\n not fearfully, for a purpose vital to the security of this nation and\n not to slake the thirst of a chessman of regiments and divisions.\n\n\n \"If Center City's contribution helps keep our country strong, Center\n City is naturally obligated....\"\n\n\n \"No one ever said it isn't our duty,\" Stephanie argued, as if the\n announcer could indeed hear her. \"We only wish we knew something about\n it—and we wish it weren't forever.\"", "She signed her name with such vehemence and ferocity that she almost\n tore through the paper.\nCHAPTER II\nThree-score men sit in the crowded, smoke-filled room. Some drink\n beer, some squat in moody silence, some talk in an animated fashion\n about nothing very urgent. At the one small door, two guards pace back\n and forth slowly, creating a gentle swaying of smoke-patterns in the\n hazy room. The guards, in simple military uniform, carry small, deadly\n looking weapons.\nFIRST MAN: Fight City Hall? Are you kidding? They took you, bud. Don't\n try to fight it, I know. I know.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: I'm telling you, there was a mistake in the records.\n I'm over twenty-six. Two weeks and two days. Already I wrote to my\n Congressman. Hell, that's why I voted for him, he better go to bat for\n me.", "ALARIC ARKALION: (Who realizes, thanks to the plastic surgeon, he is\n the youngest looking of all, with red cheeks and peachfuzz whiskers) It\n is a problem of the intellect. Why seven hundred and eighty days?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: I read the magazine, too, chief. You think we're all going\n to the planet Mars. How original.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: As a matter of fact, that is exactly what I think.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Mars?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: (Laughing) It's a long way from Mars to City Hall, doc.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: You mean, through space to Mars?\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: Exactly, exactly. Quite a coincidence, otherwise.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You're telling me.", "\"Kit, I love you. I love you. How can I forget you?\"\n\n\n \"It's happened before. It will happen again.\" That hurt, too. He was\n talking about a couple of statistics, not about himself and Stephanie.\n\n\n \"We're different, Kit. I'll love you forever. And—Kit ... I know\n you'll come back to me. I'll wait, Kit. We're different. You'll come\n back.\"\n\n\n \"How many people do you think said\nthat\nbefore?\"\n\n\n \"You don't want to come back, even if you could. You're not thinking of\n us at all. You're thinking of your brother.\"", "\"Something tells me we'll be seeing a lot of each other,\" Arkalion\n went on. The voice was that of an older man, too, belying the youthful\n complexion, the almost childish features, the soft fuzz of a beard.\n\n\n \"I'm Kit Temple,\" said Temple, extending his hand. \"Arkalion, a strange\n name. I know it from somewhere.... Say! Aren't you—don't you have\n something to do with carpets or something?\"\n\n\n \"Here and now, no. I am a number. A-92-6417. But my father is—perhaps\n I had better say was—my father is Alaric Arkalion II. Yes, that is\n right, the carpet king.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be darned,\" said Temple.\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Temple laughed. \"I never met a billionaire before.\"" ], [ "\"Here I am not a billionaire, nor will I ever be one again. A-92-6417,\n a number. On his way to Mars with a bunch of other numbers.\"\n\n\n \"Mars? You sound sure of yourself.\"\n\n\n \"Reasonably. Ah, it is a pleasure to talk with a gentleman. I am\n reasonably certain it will be Mars.\"\n\n\n Temple nodded in agreement. \"That's what the Sunday supplements say,\n all right.\"\n\n\n \"And doubtless you have observed no one denies it.\"\n\n\n \"But what on Earth do we want on Mars?\"\n\n\n \"That in itself is a contradiction,\" laughed Arkalion. \"We'll find out,\n though, Temple.\"", "ALARIC ARKALION: (Who realizes, thanks to the plastic surgeon, he is\n the youngest looking of all, with red cheeks and peachfuzz whiskers) It\n is a problem of the intellect. Why seven hundred and eighty days?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: I read the magazine, too, chief. You think we're all going\n to the planet Mars. How original.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: As a matter of fact, that is exactly what I think.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Mars?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: (Laughing) It's a long way from Mars to City Hall, doc.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: You mean, through space to Mars?\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: Exactly, exactly. Quite a coincidence, otherwise.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You're telling me.", "ALARIC ARKALION: (Coldly) Would you care to explain it?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Why, sure. You see, Mars is—uh, I don't want to steal your\n thunder, chief. Go ahead.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: Once every seven hundred and eighty days Mars and the\n Earth find themselves in the same orbital position with respect to the\n sun. In other words, Mars and Earth are closest then. Were there such a\n thing as space travel, new, costly, not thoroughly tested, they would\n want to make each journey as brief as possible. Hence the seven hundred\n and eighty days.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Not bad, chief. You got most of it.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: No one ever said anything about space travel.", "Kit's fellow-draftee Arkalion, the young man with the strange, old-man\n eyes, seemed to know more than he should. So when Kit twisted the tail\n of fate and followed Arkalion to the ends of space and time, he found\n the secret behind \"Nowhere\" and a personal challenge upon which the\n entire future of Earth depended.\nContents\nCHAPTER I\nWhen the first strong sunlight of May covered the tree-arched avenues\n of Center City with green, the riots started.\n\n\n The people gathered in angry knots outside the city hall, met in the\n park and littered its walks with newspapers and magazines as they\n gobbled up editorial comment at a furious rate, slipped with dark of\n night through back alleys and planned things with furious futility.\n Center City's finest knew when to make themselves scarce: their\n uniforms stood for everything objectionable at this time and they might\n be subjected to clubs, stones, taunts, threats, leers—and knives.", "THIRD MAN: You think that's something? I wouldn't be here only those\n doctors are crazy. I mean, crazy. Me, with a cyst big as a golf ball on\n the base of my spine.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You too. Don't try to fight it.\n\n\n FOURTH MAN: (Newly named Alaric Arkalion III) I look forward to this\n as a stimulating adventure. Does the fact that they select men for the\n Nowhere Journey once every seven hundred and eighty days strike anyone\n as significant?\n\n\n SECOND MAN: I got my own problems.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: This is not a thalamic problem, young man. Not\n thalamic at all.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: Young man? Who are you kidding?", "\"Brilliant, Mr. Smith. Alaric is so young—\"\n\n\n \"Aren't they all? Twenty-one to twenty-six. Who was it who once said\n something about the flower of our young manhood?\"\n\n\n \"Shakespeare?\" said Mr. Arkalion realizing that most quotes of lasting\n importance came from the bard.\n\n\n \"Sophocles,\" said Smith. \"But no matter. I will take young Alaric's\n place for ten million dollars.\"\n\n\n Motives always troubled Mr. Arkalion, and thus he pursued what might\n have been a dangerous conversation. \"You'll never get a chance to spend\n it on the Nowhere Journey.\"\n\n\n \"Let me worry about that.\"\n\n\n \"No one ever returns.\"\n\n\n \"My worry, not yours.\"", "SECOND MAN: I wish my Congressman....\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You and your Congressman. The way you talk, it was your vote\n got him in office.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: If only I could get out and talk to him.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: No one is permitted to leave.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Punishable by a prison term, the law says.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Oh yeah? Prison, shmision. Or else go on the Nowhere\n Journey. Well, I don't see the difference.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: So, go ahead. Try to escape.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: (Looking at the guards) They got them all over. All over. I\n think our mail is censored.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: It is.", "\"No, ladies and gentlemen, we use the word Nowhere merely because we\n are not aware of the ultimate destination. Security reasons make it\n impossible to....\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes,\" said Stephanie impatiently. \"Go on.\"\n\n\n \"... therefore, the Nowhere Journey. With a maximum security lid on\n the whole project, we don't even know why our men are sent, or by what\n means. We know only that they go somewhere and not nowhere, bravely and\n not fearfully, for a purpose vital to the security of this nation and\n not to slake the thirst of a chessman of regiments and divisions.\n\n\n \"If Center City's contribution helps keep our country strong, Center\n City is naturally obligated....\"\n\n\n \"No one ever said it isn't our duty,\" Stephanie argued, as if the\n announcer could indeed hear her. \"We only wish we knew something about\n it—and we wish it weren't forever.\"", "\"Then I was here,\" Temple said, very seriously.\n\n\n Arkalion smiled. \"By George, of course. Then you were here. Temple,\n we'll get along fine.\"\n\n\n Temple said that was swell.\n\n\n \"Anyway, we'd better. Forever is a long time.\"\n\n\n Three minutes later, the jet took off and soared on eager wings toward\n the setting sun.", "FIRST MAN: You think we'd broadcast it or something, stupid? It's part\n of a big, important scientific experiment, only we're the hamsters.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: Ridiculous. You're forgetting all about the Cold War.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: He thinks we're fighting a war with the Martians. (Laughs)\n Orson Wells stuff, huh?\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: With the Russians. The Russians. We developed A bombs.\n They developed A bombs. We came up with the H bomb. So did they. We\n placed a station up in space, a fifth of the way to the moon. So did\n they. Then—nothing more about scientific developments. For over twenty\n years. I ask you, doesn't it seem peculiar?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Peculiar, he says.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: Peculiar.", "They had reached the head of the line, found themselves entering a\n huge, double-decker jet-transport. They found two seats together,\n followed the instructions printed at the head of the aisle by strapping\n themselves in and not smoking. Talking all around them was subdued.\n\n\n \"Contrariness has given way to fear,\" Arkalion observed. \"You should\n have seen them the last few days, waiting around the induction center,\n a two-ton chip on each shoulder. Say, where\nwere\nyou?\"\n\n\n \"I—what do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"I didn't see you until last evening. Suddenly, you were here.\"\n\n\n \"Did anyone else miss me?\"\n\n\n \"But I remember you the first day.\"\n\n\n \"Did anyone else miss me? Any of the officials?\"\n\n\n \"No. Not that I know of.\"", "SECOND MAN: Yeah, well I mean it. Forever. We're going away,\n someplace—forever. We're not coming back, ever. No one comes back.\n It's for good, for keeps.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Tell it to your congressman. Or maybe you want to pull a\n sick act, too?\n\n\n THIRD MAN: (Hits First Man, who, surprised, crashes back against a\n table and falls down) It isn't an act, damn you!\n\n\n GUARD: All right, break it up. Come on, break it up....\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: (To himself) I wish I saw that ten million dollars\n already—\nif\nI ever get to see it.\nThey drove for hours through the fresh country air, feeling the wind\n against their faces, listening to the roar their ground-jet made, all\n alone on the rimrock highway.", "\"Something tells me we'll be seeing a lot of each other,\" Arkalion\n went on. The voice was that of an older man, too, belying the youthful\n complexion, the almost childish features, the soft fuzz of a beard.\n\n\n \"I'm Kit Temple,\" said Temple, extending his hand. \"Arkalion, a strange\n name. I know it from somewhere.... Say! Aren't you—don't you have\n something to do with carpets or something?\"\n\n\n \"Here and now, no. I am a number. A-92-6417. But my father is—perhaps\n I had better say was—my father is Alaric Arkalion II. Yes, that is\n right, the carpet king.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be darned,\" said Temple.\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Temple laughed. \"I never met a billionaire before.\"", "He bent and kissed her, knowing it was all wrong. This was not goodbye,\n not the way he wanted it. Quickly, definitely, for once and all. With\n a tear, perhaps, a lot of tears. But permanent goodbye. This was all\n wrong. The whole idea was to be business-like, objective. It had to\n be done that way, or no way at all. Briefly, he regretted leaving the\n encampment.\n\n\n This wasn't goodbye the way he wanted it. The way it had to be. This\n was\nauf weidersen\n.\n\n\n And then he forgot everything but Stephanie....\n\"I am Alaric Arkalion III,\" said the extremely young-looking man with\n the old, wise eyes.\n\n\n How incongruous, Temple thought. The eyes look almost middle-aged. The\n rest of him—a boy.", "THIRD MAN: You mind your own business.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: I am, doc. You brought the whole thing up.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: He's looking for trouble.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: He'll get it.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: We're going to be together a long time. A long time.\n Why don't you all relax?\n\n\n SECOND MAN: You mind your own business.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Nuts, aren't they. They're nuts. A sick act, yet.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Look how it doesn't bother him. A failure, he was. I can\n just see it. What does he care if he goes away forever and doesn't come\n back? One bread line is as good as another.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Ha-ha.", "\"Every seven-hundred eighty days,\" said the announcer, \"two-hundred\n of Center City's young men are selected to serve their country for an\n indeterminate period regulated rigidly by a rotation system.\"\n\n\n \"Liar!\" Stephanie cried. \"No one ever comes back. It's been thirty\n years since the first group and not one of them....\"\n\n\n \"Shh,\" Temple raised a finger to his lips.\n\n\n \"This is the thirteenth call since the inception of what is popularly\n referred to as the Nowhere Journey,\" said the announcer. \"Obviously,\n the two hundred young men from Center City and the thousands from all\n over this hemisphere do not in reality embark on a Journey to Nowhere.\n That is quite meaningless.\"\n\n\n \"Hooray for him,\" Temple laughed.\n\n\n \"I wish he'd get on with it.\"", "\"This going wasn't my idea. I wanted to stay with you. I wanted to\n marry you. I can't now. None of it. Forget me, Steffy. Forget you ever\n knew me. Jase said that to our folks before he was taken.\" Almost five\n years before Jason Temple had been selected for the Nowhere Journey.\n He'd been young, though older than his brother Kit. Young, unattached,\n almost cheerful he was. Naturally, they never saw him again.\n\n\n \"Hold me, Kit. I'm sorry ... carrying on like this.\"", "Wrong with the Stalintrek was its name alone, a name one associated\n with everything else in Russia for an obvious, post-Stalin reason. But\n everything else about the Stalintrek shrieked mystery and adventure.\n Where did you go? How did you get there? What did you do? Why?\n\n\n A million questions which had kept her awake at night and, if\n she thought about them hard enough, satisfied her deep longing\n for something different. And then one day when stolid Mrs.\n Ivanovna-Rasnikov had said, \"It is a joke, a terrible, terrible joke\n they are taking my husband Fyodor on the Stalintrek when he lacks\n sufficient imagination to go from here to Leningrad or even Tula. Can\n you picture Fyodor on the Stalintrek? Better they should have taken me.\n Better they should have taken his wife.\" That day Sophia could hardly\n contain herself.", "\"It is forever—as if you dropped out of existence. Alaric is so young.\"\n\n\n \"I have always gambled, Mr. Arkalion. If I do not return in five\n years, you are to put the money in a trust fund for certain designated\n individuals, said fund to be terminated the moment I return. If I come\n back within the five years, you are merely to give the money over to\n me. Is that clear?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"I'll want it in writing, of course.\"\n\n\n \"Of course. A plastic surgeon is due here in about ten minutes, Mr.\n Smith, and we can get on with.... But if I don't know your name, how\n can I put it in writing?\"\n\n\n Smith smiled. \"I changed my name to Smith for the occasion. Perfectly\n legal. My name is John X. Smith—now!\"", "\"It isn't forever,\" Temple reminded her. \"Not officially.\"\n\n\n \"Officially, my foot. If they never return, they never return. If\n there's a rotation system on paper, but it's never used, that's not a\n rotation system at all. Kit, it's forever.\"\n\n\n \"... to thank the following sponsors for relinquishing their time....\"\n\n\n \"No one would want to sponsor\nthat\n,\" Temple whispered cheerfully.\n\n\n \"Kit,\" said Stephanie, \"I—I suddenly have a hunch we have nothing to\n worry about. They missed you all along and they'll miss you this time,\n too. The last time, and then you'll be too old. That's funny, too old\n at twenty-six. But we'll be free, Kit. Free.\"\n\n\n \"He's starting,\" Temple told her." ], [ "Kit's fellow-draftee Arkalion, the young man with the strange, old-man\n eyes, seemed to know more than he should. So when Kit twisted the tail\n of fate and followed Arkalion to the ends of space and time, he found\n the secret behind \"Nowhere\" and a personal challenge upon which the\n entire future of Earth depended.\nContents\nCHAPTER I\nWhen the first strong sunlight of May covered the tree-arched avenues\n of Center City with green, the riots started.\n\n\n The people gathered in angry knots outside the city hall, met in the\n park and littered its walks with newspapers and magazines as they\n gobbled up editorial comment at a furious rate, slipped with dark of\n night through back alleys and planned things with furious futility.\n Center City's finest knew when to make themselves scarce: their\n uniforms stood for everything objectionable at this time and they might\n be subjected to clubs, stones, taunts, threats, leers—and knives.", "\"It isn't forever,\" Temple reminded her. \"Not officially.\"\n\n\n \"Officially, my foot. If they never return, they never return. If\n there's a rotation system on paper, but it's never used, that's not a\n rotation system at all. Kit, it's forever.\"\n\n\n \"... to thank the following sponsors for relinquishing their time....\"\n\n\n \"No one would want to sponsor\nthat\n,\" Temple whispered cheerfully.\n\n\n \"Kit,\" said Stephanie, \"I—I suddenly have a hunch we have nothing to\n worry about. They missed you all along and they'll miss you this time,\n too. The last time, and then you'll be too old. That's funny, too old\n at twenty-six. But we'll be free, Kit. Free.\"\n\n\n \"He's starting,\" Temple told her.", "\"This going wasn't my idea. I wanted to stay with you. I wanted to\n marry you. I can't now. None of it. Forget me, Steffy. Forget you ever\n knew me. Jase said that to our folks before he was taken.\" Almost five\n years before Jason Temple had been selected for the Nowhere Journey.\n He'd been young, though older than his brother Kit. Young, unattached,\n almost cheerful he was. Naturally, they never saw him again.\n\n\n \"Hold me, Kit. I'm sorry ... carrying on like this.\"", "\"Every seven-hundred eighty days,\" said the announcer, \"two-hundred\n of Center City's young men are selected to serve their country for an\n indeterminate period regulated rigidly by a rotation system.\"\n\n\n \"Liar!\" Stephanie cried. \"No one ever comes back. It's been thirty\n years since the first group and not one of them....\"\n\n\n \"Shh,\" Temple raised a finger to his lips.\n\n\n \"This is the thirteenth call since the inception of what is popularly\n referred to as the Nowhere Journey,\" said the announcer. \"Obviously,\n the two hundred young men from Center City and the thousands from all\n over this hemisphere do not in reality embark on a Journey to Nowhere.\n That is quite meaningless.\"\n\n\n \"Hooray for him,\" Temple laughed.\n\n\n \"I wish he'd get on with it.\"", "\"No, ladies and gentlemen, we use the word Nowhere merely because we\n are not aware of the ultimate destination. Security reasons make it\n impossible to....\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes,\" said Stephanie impatiently. \"Go on.\"\n\n\n \"... therefore, the Nowhere Journey. With a maximum security lid on\n the whole project, we don't even know why our men are sent, or by what\n means. We know only that they go somewhere and not nowhere, bravely and\n not fearfully, for a purpose vital to the security of this nation and\n not to slake the thirst of a chessman of regiments and divisions.\n\n\n \"If Center City's contribution helps keep our country strong, Center\n City is naturally obligated....\"\n\n\n \"No one ever said it isn't our duty,\" Stephanie argued, as if the\n announcer could indeed hear her. \"We only wish we knew something about\n it—and we wish it weren't forever.\"", "\"Brilliant, Mr. Smith. Alaric is so young—\"\n\n\n \"Aren't they all? Twenty-one to twenty-six. Who was it who once said\n something about the flower of our young manhood?\"\n\n\n \"Shakespeare?\" said Mr. Arkalion realizing that most quotes of lasting\n importance came from the bard.\n\n\n \"Sophocles,\" said Smith. \"But no matter. I will take young Alaric's\n place for ten million dollars.\"\n\n\n Motives always troubled Mr. Arkalion, and thus he pursued what might\n have been a dangerous conversation. \"You'll never get a chance to spend\n it on the Nowhere Journey.\"\n\n\n \"Let me worry about that.\"\n\n\n \"No one ever returns.\"\n\n\n \"My worry, not yours.\"", "Recruit for Andromeda\nby MILTON LESSER\n\n\n ACE BOOKS, INC.\n\n 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.\n\n\n RECRUIT FOR ANDROMEDA\n\n\n Copyright 1959, by Ace Books, Inc.\n\n\n All Rights Reserved\n\n\n Printed in U.S.A.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence\n\n that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nTOURNAMENT UNDER NIGHTMARE SKIES\n\n\n When Kit Temple was drafted for the Nowhere Journey, he figured that\n he'd left his home, his girl, and the Earth for good. For though those\n called were always promised \"rotation,\" not a man had ever returned\n from that mysterious flight into the unknown.", "\"Where are we going, Kit?\"\n\n\n \"Search me. Just driving.\"\n\n\n \"I'm glad they let you come out this once. I don't know what they would\n have done to me if they didn't. I had to see you this once. I—\"\n\n\n Temple smiled. He had absented himself without leave. It had been\n difficult enough and he might yet be in a lot of hot water, but it\n would be senseless to worry Stephanie. \"It's just for a few hours,\" he\n said.\n\n\n \"Hours. When we want a whole lifetime. Kit. Oh, Kit—why don't we run\n away? Just the two of us, someplace where they'll never find you. I\n could be packed and ready and—\"\n\n\n \"Don't talk like that. We can't.\"\n\n\n \"You want to go where they're sending you. You want to go.\"", "THIRD MAN: You think that's something? I wouldn't be here only those\n doctors are crazy. I mean, crazy. Me, with a cyst big as a golf ball on\n the base of my spine.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You too. Don't try to fight it.\n\n\n FOURTH MAN: (Newly named Alaric Arkalion III) I look forward to this\n as a stimulating adventure. Does the fact that they select men for the\n Nowhere Journey once every seven hundred and eighty days strike anyone\n as significant?\n\n\n SECOND MAN: I got my own problems.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: This is not a thalamic problem, young man. Not\n thalamic at all.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: Young man? Who are you kidding?", "SECOND MAN: I wish my Congressman....\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You and your Congressman. The way you talk, it was your vote\n got him in office.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: If only I could get out and talk to him.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: No one is permitted to leave.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Punishable by a prison term, the law says.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Oh yeah? Prison, shmision. Or else go on the Nowhere\n Journey. Well, I don't see the difference.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: So, go ahead. Try to escape.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: (Looking at the guards) They got them all over. All over. I\n think our mail is censored.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: It is.", "\"It's just a song.\"\n\n\n \"Turn it off, please.\"\n\n\n Christopher Temple turned off the telio, smiling. \"They'll announce the\n names in ten minutes,\" he said, and felt the corners of his mouth draw\n taut.\n\n\n \"Tell me again, Kit,\" Stephanie pleaded. \"How old are you?\"\n\n\n \"You know I'm twenty-six.\"\n\n\n \"Twenty-six. Yes, twenty-six, so if they don't call you this time,\n you'll be safe. Safe, I can hardly believe it.\"\n\n\n \"Nine minutes,\" said Temple in the darkness. Stephanie had drawn the\n blinds earlier, had dialed for sound-proofing. The screaming in the\n streets came to them as not the faintest whisper. But the song which\n became briefly, masochistically popular every two years and two months\n had spoiled their feeling of seclusion.", "\"Kit, I love you. I love you. How can I forget you?\"\n\n\n \"It's happened before. It will happen again.\" That hurt, too. He was\n talking about a couple of statistics, not about himself and Stephanie.\n\n\n \"We're different, Kit. I'll love you forever. And—Kit ... I know\n you'll come back to me. I'll wait, Kit. We're different. You'll come\n back.\"\n\n\n \"How many people do you think said\nthat\nbefore?\"\n\n\n \"You don't want to come back, even if you could. You're not thinking of\n us at all. You're thinking of your brother.\"", "\"For God's sake, how can you talk like that? I don't want to go\n anyplace, except with you. But we can't run away, Steffy. I've got to\n face it, whatever it is.\"\n\n\n \"No you don't. It's noble to be patriotic, sure. It always was. But\n this is different, Kit. They don't ask for part of your life. Not for\n two years, or three, or a gamble because maybe you won't ever come\n back. They ask for all of you, for the rest of your life, forever, and\n they don't even tell you why. Kit, don't go! We'll hide someplace and\n get married and—\"", "\"Something tells me we'll be seeing a lot of each other,\" Arkalion\n went on. The voice was that of an older man, too, belying the youthful\n complexion, the almost childish features, the soft fuzz of a beard.\n\n\n \"I'm Kit Temple,\" said Temple, extending his hand. \"Arkalion, a strange\n name. I know it from somewhere.... Say! Aren't you—don't you have\n something to do with carpets or something?\"\n\n\n \"Here and now, no. I am a number. A-92-6417. But my father is—perhaps\n I had better say was—my father is Alaric Arkalion II. Yes, that is\n right, the carpet king.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be darned,\" said Temple.\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Temple laughed. \"I never met a billionaire before.\"", "But Center City, like most communities in United North America,\n had survived the Riots before and would survive them again. On\n past performances, the damage could be estimated, too. Two-hundred\n fifty-seven plate glass windows would be broken, three-hundred twelve\n limbs fractured. Several thousand people would be treated for minor\n bruises and abrasions, Center City would receive half that many damage\n suits. The list had been drawn clearly and accurately; it hardly ever\n deviated.\n\n\n And Center City would meet its quota. With a demonstration of\n reluctance, of course. The healthy approved way to get over social\n trauma once every seven-hundred eighty days.\n\"Shut it off, Kit. Kit, please.\"\n\n\n The telio blared in a cheaply feminine voice, \"Oh, it's a long way\n to nowhere, forever. And your honey's not coming back, never, never,\n never....\" A wailing trumpet represented flight.\n\n\n \"They'll exploit anything, Kit.\"", "\"And nothing.\" Temple stopped the ground-jet, climbed out, opened the\n door for Stephanie. \"Don't you see? There's no place to hide. Wherever\n you go, they'd look. You wouldn't want to spend the rest of your life\n running, Steffy. Not with me or anyone else.\"\n\n\n \"I would. I would!\"\n\n\n \"Know what would happen after a few years? We'd hate each other. You'd\n look at me and say 'I wouldn't be hiding like this, except for you. I'm\n young and—'\"\n\n\n \"Kit, that's cruel! I would not.\"", "She signed her name with such vehemence and ferocity that she almost\n tore through the paper.\nCHAPTER II\nThree-score men sit in the crowded, smoke-filled room. Some drink\n beer, some squat in moody silence, some talk in an animated fashion\n about nothing very urgent. At the one small door, two guards pace back\n and forth slowly, creating a gentle swaying of smoke-patterns in the\n hazy room. The guards, in simple military uniform, carry small, deadly\n looking weapons.\nFIRST MAN: Fight City Hall? Are you kidding? They took you, bud. Don't\n try to fight it, I know. I know.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: I'm telling you, there was a mistake in the records.\n I'm over twenty-six. Two weeks and two days. Already I wrote to my\n Congressman. Hell, that's why I voted for him, he better go to bat for\n me.", "\"I'm scared.\"\n\n\n \"You and everyone else in North America, Steffy.\"\n\n\n She was trembling against him. \"It's cold for June.\"\n\n\n \"It's warm in here.\" He kissed her moist eyes, her nose, her lips.\n\n\n \"Oh God, Kit. Five minutes.\"\n\n\n \"Five minutes to freedom,\" he said jauntily. He did not feel that way\n at all. Apprehension clutched at his chest with tight, painful fingers,\n almost making it difficult for him to breathe.\n\n\n \"Turn it on, Kit.\"\n\n\n He dialed the telio in time to see the announcer's insincere smile.\n Smile seventeen, Kit thought wryly. Patriotic sacrifice.", "They had reached the head of the line, found themselves entering a\n huge, double-decker jet-transport. They found two seats together,\n followed the instructions printed at the head of the aisle by strapping\n themselves in and not smoking. Talking all around them was subdued.\n\n\n \"Contrariness has given way to fear,\" Arkalion observed. \"You should\n have seen them the last few days, waiting around the induction center,\n a two-ton chip on each shoulder. Say, where\nwere\nyou?\"\n\n\n \"I—what do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"I didn't see you until last evening. Suddenly, you were here.\"\n\n\n \"Did anyone else miss me?\"\n\n\n \"But I remember you the first day.\"\n\n\n \"Did anyone else miss me? Any of the officials?\"\n\n\n \"No. Not that I know of.\"", "\"Then I was here,\" Temple said, very seriously.\n\n\n Arkalion smiled. \"By George, of course. Then you were here. Temple,\n we'll get along fine.\"\n\n\n Temple said that was swell.\n\n\n \"Anyway, we'd better. Forever is a long time.\"\n\n\n Three minutes later, the jet took off and soared on eager wings toward\n the setting sun." ], [ "THIRD MAN: You mind your own business.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: I am, doc. You brought the whole thing up.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: He's looking for trouble.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: He'll get it.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: We're going to be together a long time. A long time.\n Why don't you all relax?\n\n\n SECOND MAN: You mind your own business.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Nuts, aren't they. They're nuts. A sick act, yet.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Look how it doesn't bother him. A failure, he was. I can\n just see it. What does he care if he goes away forever and doesn't come\n back? One bread line is as good as another.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Ha-ha.", "SECOND MAN: They better watch out. I'm losing my temper. I get violent\n when I lose my temper.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: See? See how the guards are trembling.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Very funny. Maybe you didn't have a good job or something?\n Maybe you don't care. I care. I had a job with a future. Didn't pay\n much, but a real blue chip future. So they send me to Nowhere.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You're not there yet.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Yeah, but I'm going.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: If only they let you know when. My back is killing me. I'm\n waiting to pull a sick act. Just waiting, that's all.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Go ahead and wait, a lot of good it will do you.", "THIRD MAN: You think that's something? I wouldn't be here only those\n doctors are crazy. I mean, crazy. Me, with a cyst big as a golf ball on\n the base of my spine.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You too. Don't try to fight it.\n\n\n FOURTH MAN: (Newly named Alaric Arkalion III) I look forward to this\n as a stimulating adventure. Does the fact that they select men for the\n Nowhere Journey once every seven hundred and eighty days strike anyone\n as significant?\n\n\n SECOND MAN: I got my own problems.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: This is not a thalamic problem, young man. Not\n thalamic at all.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: Young man? Who are you kidding?", "SECOND MAN: Yeah, well I mean it. Forever. We're going away,\n someplace—forever. We're not coming back, ever. No one comes back.\n It's for good, for keeps.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Tell it to your congressman. Or maybe you want to pull a\n sick act, too?\n\n\n THIRD MAN: (Hits First Man, who, surprised, crashes back against a\n table and falls down) It isn't an act, damn you!\n\n\n GUARD: All right, break it up. Come on, break it up....\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: (To himself) I wish I saw that ten million dollars\n already—\nif\nI ever get to see it.\nThey drove for hours through the fresh country air, feeling the wind\n against their faces, listening to the roar their ground-jet made, all\n alone on the rimrock highway.", "She signed her name with such vehemence and ferocity that she almost\n tore through the paper.\nCHAPTER II\nThree-score men sit in the crowded, smoke-filled room. Some drink\n beer, some squat in moody silence, some talk in an animated fashion\n about nothing very urgent. At the one small door, two guards pace back\n and forth slowly, creating a gentle swaying of smoke-patterns in the\n hazy room. The guards, in simple military uniform, carry small, deadly\n looking weapons.\nFIRST MAN: Fight City Hall? Are you kidding? They took you, bud. Don't\n try to fight it, I know. I know.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: I'm telling you, there was a mistake in the records.\n I'm over twenty-six. Two weeks and two days. Already I wrote to my\n Congressman. Hell, that's why I voted for him, he better go to bat for\n me.", "SECOND MAN: I wish my Congressman....\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You and your Congressman. The way you talk, it was your vote\n got him in office.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: If only I could get out and talk to him.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: No one is permitted to leave.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Punishable by a prison term, the law says.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Oh yeah? Prison, shmision. Or else go on the Nowhere\n Journey. Well, I don't see the difference.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: So, go ahead. Try to escape.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: (Looking at the guards) They got them all over. All over. I\n think our mail is censored.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: It is.", "FIRST MAN: You think we'd broadcast it or something, stupid? It's part\n of a big, important scientific experiment, only we're the hamsters.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: Ridiculous. You're forgetting all about the Cold War.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: He thinks we're fighting a war with the Martians. (Laughs)\n Orson Wells stuff, huh?\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: With the Russians. The Russians. We developed A bombs.\n They developed A bombs. We came up with the H bomb. So did they. We\n placed a station up in space, a fifth of the way to the moon. So did\n they. Then—nothing more about scientific developments. For over twenty\n years. I ask you, doesn't it seem peculiar?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Peculiar, he says.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: Peculiar.", "ALARIC ARKALION: (Coldly) Would you care to explain it?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Why, sure. You see, Mars is—uh, I don't want to steal your\n thunder, chief. Go ahead.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: Once every seven hundred and eighty days Mars and the\n Earth find themselves in the same orbital position with respect to the\n sun. In other words, Mars and Earth are closest then. Were there such a\n thing as space travel, new, costly, not thoroughly tested, they would\n want to make each journey as brief as possible. Hence the seven hundred\n and eighty days.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: Not bad, chief. You got most of it.\n\n\n THIRD MAN: No one ever said anything about space travel.", "ALARIC ARKALION: (Who realizes, thanks to the plastic surgeon, he is\n the youngest looking of all, with red cheeks and peachfuzz whiskers) It\n is a problem of the intellect. Why seven hundred and eighty days?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: I read the magazine, too, chief. You think we're all going\n to the planet Mars. How original.\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: As a matter of fact, that is exactly what I think.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: Mars?\n\n\n FIRST MAN: (Laughing) It's a long way from Mars to City Hall, doc.\n\n\n SECOND MAN: You mean, through space to Mars?\n\n\n ALARIC ARKALION: Exactly, exactly. Quite a coincidence, otherwise.\n\n\n FIRST MAN: You're telling me.", "\"Then I was here,\" Temple said, very seriously.\n\n\n Arkalion smiled. \"By George, of course. Then you were here. Temple,\n we'll get along fine.\"\n\n\n Temple said that was swell.\n\n\n \"Anyway, we'd better. Forever is a long time.\"\n\n\n Three minutes later, the jet took off and soared on eager wings toward\n the setting sun.", "\"Something tells me we'll be seeing a lot of each other,\" Arkalion\n went on. The voice was that of an older man, too, belying the youthful\n complexion, the almost childish features, the soft fuzz of a beard.\n\n\n \"I'm Kit Temple,\" said Temple, extending his hand. \"Arkalion, a strange\n name. I know it from somewhere.... Say! Aren't you—don't you have\n something to do with carpets or something?\"\n\n\n \"Here and now, no. I am a number. A-92-6417. But my father is—perhaps\n I had better say was—my father is Alaric Arkalion II. Yes, that is\n right, the carpet king.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be darned,\" said Temple.\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Temple laughed. \"I never met a billionaire before.\"", "They had reached the head of the line, found themselves entering a\n huge, double-decker jet-transport. They found two seats together,\n followed the instructions printed at the head of the aisle by strapping\n themselves in and not smoking. Talking all around them was subdued.\n\n\n \"Contrariness has given way to fear,\" Arkalion observed. \"You should\n have seen them the last few days, waiting around the induction center,\n a two-ton chip on each shoulder. Say, where\nwere\nyou?\"\n\n\n \"I—what do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"I didn't see you until last evening. Suddenly, you were here.\"\n\n\n \"Did anyone else miss me?\"\n\n\n \"But I remember you the first day.\"\n\n\n \"Did anyone else miss me? Any of the officials?\"\n\n\n \"No. Not that I know of.\"", "\"Every seven-hundred eighty days,\" said the announcer, \"two-hundred\n of Center City's young men are selected to serve their country for an\n indeterminate period regulated rigidly by a rotation system.\"\n\n\n \"Liar!\" Stephanie cried. \"No one ever comes back. It's been thirty\n years since the first group and not one of them....\"\n\n\n \"Shh,\" Temple raised a finger to his lips.\n\n\n \"This is the thirteenth call since the inception of what is popularly\n referred to as the Nowhere Journey,\" said the announcer. \"Obviously,\n the two hundred young men from Center City and the thousands from all\n over this hemisphere do not in reality embark on a Journey to Nowhere.\n That is quite meaningless.\"\n\n\n \"Hooray for him,\" Temple laughed.\n\n\n \"I wish he'd get on with it.\"", "Kit's fellow-draftee Arkalion, the young man with the strange, old-man\n eyes, seemed to know more than he should. So when Kit twisted the tail\n of fate and followed Arkalion to the ends of space and time, he found\n the secret behind \"Nowhere\" and a personal challenge upon which the\n entire future of Earth depended.\nContents\nCHAPTER I\nWhen the first strong sunlight of May covered the tree-arched avenues\n of Center City with green, the riots started.\n\n\n The people gathered in angry knots outside the city hall, met in the\n park and littered its walks with newspapers and magazines as they\n gobbled up editorial comment at a furious rate, slipped with dark of\n night through back alleys and planned things with furious futility.\n Center City's finest knew when to make themselves scarce: their\n uniforms stood for everything objectionable at this time and they might\n be subjected to clubs, stones, taunts, threats, leers—and knives.", "He bent and kissed her, knowing it was all wrong. This was not goodbye,\n not the way he wanted it. Quickly, definitely, for once and all. With\n a tear, perhaps, a lot of tears. But permanent goodbye. This was all\n wrong. The whole idea was to be business-like, objective. It had to\n be done that way, or no way at all. Briefly, he regretted leaving the\n encampment.\n\n\n This wasn't goodbye the way he wanted it. The way it had to be. This\n was\nauf weidersen\n.\n\n\n And then he forgot everything but Stephanie....\n\"I am Alaric Arkalion III,\" said the extremely young-looking man with\n the old, wise eyes.\n\n\n How incongruous, Temple thought. The eyes look almost middle-aged. The\n rest of him—a boy.", "\"When I saw your ad,\" said not-Smith, \"I said to myself, 'now here must\n be a very rich, influential man.' It only remained for me to study a\n series of photographs readily obtainable—I have a fine memory for\n that, Mr. Arkalion—and here you are; here is Arkalion the Carpet King.\"\n\n\n \"What will you do with the ten million dollars?\" demanded Arkalion,\n not minding the loss nearly so much as the ultimate disposition of his\n fortune.\n\n\n \"Why, what does anyone do with ten million dollars? Treasure it. Invest\n it. Spend it.\"\n\n\n \"I mean, what will you do with it if you are going in place of my—\"\n Arkalion bit his tongue.\n\n\n \"Your son, were you saying, Mr. Arkalion? Alaric Arkalion the Third.\n Did you know that I was able to boil my list of men down to thirty when\n I studied their family ties?\"", "But there, behind that desk, was part of the reason. The Comrade. The\n bright sharp Comrade, with his depth of reasoning, his fountain of\n gushing emotions, his worldliness.\nPfooey!\nIt was as if she had been in a cocoon all her life, stifled, starved,\n the cottony inner lining choking her whenever she opened her mouth,\n the leathery outer covering restricting her when she tried to move.\n No one had ever returned from the Stalintrek. She then had to assume\n no one would. Including Sophia Androvna Petrovitch. But then, there\n was nothing she would miss, nothing to which she particularly wanted\n to return. Not the stark, foul streets of Stalingrad, not the workers", "\"Ten million dollars,\" said Jones, \"is quite a price. Admittedly, I\n haven't dealt in this sort of traffic before, but—\"\n\n\n \"But nothing. Were your name Jones, really and truly Jones, I might ask\n less.\"\n\n\n \"Sir?\"\n\n\n \"You are Jones exactly as much as I am Smith.\"\n\n\n \"Sir?\" Jones gasped again.\n\n\n Smith coughed discreetly. \"But I have one advantage. I know you. You\n don't know me, Mr. Arkalion.\"\n\n\n \"Eh? Eh?\"\n\n\n \"Arkalion. The North American Carpet King. Right?\"\n\n\n \"How did you know?\" the man whose name was not Jones but Arkalion asked\n the man whose name was not Smith but might as well have been.", "\"That's where you're wrong,\" said Mr. Arkalion as the plastic surgeon\n entered. \"Your name is Alaric Arkalion III—\nnow\n.\"\n\n\n The plastic surgeon skittered around Smith, examining him minutely with\n the casual expertness that comes with experience.\n\n\n \"Have to shorten the cheek bones.\"\n\n\n \"For ten million dollars,\" said Smith, \"you can take the damned things\n out altogether and hang them on your wall.\"\nSophia Androvna Petrovitch made her way downtown through the bustle of\n tired workers and the occasional sprinkling of Comrades. She crushed\n her\nersatz\ncigarette underfoot at number 616 Stalin Avenue, paused\n for the space of five heartbeats at the door, went inside.\n\n\n \"What do you want?\" The man at the desk was myopic but bull-necked.\n\n\n Sophia showed her party card.", "\"No, ladies and gentlemen, we use the word Nowhere merely because we\n are not aware of the ultimate destination. Security reasons make it\n impossible to....\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes,\" said Stephanie impatiently. \"Go on.\"\n\n\n \"... therefore, the Nowhere Journey. With a maximum security lid on\n the whole project, we don't even know why our men are sent, or by what\n means. We know only that they go somewhere and not nowhere, bravely and\n not fearfully, for a purpose vital to the security of this nation and\n not to slake the thirst of a chessman of regiments and divisions.\n\n\n \"If Center City's contribution helps keep our country strong, Center\n City is naturally obligated....\"\n\n\n \"No one ever said it isn't our duty,\" Stephanie argued, as if the\n announcer could indeed hear her. \"We only wish we knew something about\n it—and we wish it weren't forever.\"" ] ]
test	20053	[ "In what way does the author suggest MacGregor misunderstands Darger?", "Why is the context of Darger's work important?", "How did Darger create his pictures of girls?", "Why is MacGregor the lone critic of Darger's oeuvre?", "Why was Darger considered to be an \"outsider\"?", "What is the plot of Darger's epic story?", "Why does the writer open the article with a reference to JonBenet Ramsey?", "In what way does the writer believe Darger is similar to artists like David Lynch?", "What was Darger's link to post-modernism?" ]	[ [ "He accuses MacGregor of applying a psychoanalytic reading of his work rather than placing his art within the larger scope of postmodernism.", "The author thinks MacGregor has a macabre fascination with the more violent aspects of Darger's work.", "The author believes MacGregor is a charlatan and exclusively interested in acquiring Darger's work for personal notoriety.", "He believes that MacGregor has intentionally limited scholarly understanding of Darger by seeking exclusive access to his work." ], [ "Without context, one would believe the artwork to be very amateur and exclusively interested in violence.", "Otherwise, it would be difficult to see that his artistic work rivals that of his contemporaries Robbins and Lynch.", "Darger's work must be understood through the lens of his mental illness if it is to be understood at all.", "It would otherwise be easy to reduce his work to the depraved output of someone who could not escape his own demons." ], [ "He used comic strips as models for the characters he would create on his own.", "He drew pictures from illustrations he had seen and repeated the process over and over.", "He drew outlines of figures found in magazines and sometimes pasted them onto his work.", "He took pictures of people he knew." ], [ "He has purchased the majority of the material Darger produced during his lifetime.", "The subject matter of Darger's work is too revolting for most critics to want to discuss.", "Darger's landlord will not allow any other critic to view Darger's work because of its sensitive material.", "He alone largely has access to Darger's work thanks to the executor of Darger's estate." ], [ "He did not have any artistic schooling and was not involved in the art world during his lifetime.", "He was not interested in hearing the critical reception of his artwork.", "He spent much of his adult life in and out of mental institutions and, finally, nursing homes.", "He lived alone in his apartment for the entirety of his adult life and did not interact with anyone." ], [ "Young sisters attempt to escape from the Glandelinians--a group of men fond of imprisoning and enacting violence upon them.", "The story documents the decades-long war between the Glandelinians and the Vivian Girls.", "The story documents the Vivian Girls' attempts to free the girl-slaves that have been systematically slaughtered over the years by the Glandelinians.", "The Child Slave Rebellion manages to defeat their male captors, and the story documents their journey to brutal revenge." ], [ "She is the subject of an exhibit at the Museum of American Folk Art.", "He compares the details of her case to the subject matter depicted in the paintings of Henry Darger.", "Her case is a relevant cultural touchstone, which he intends to examine in detail.", "She is a contemporary example of a cultural trend: The murder of beautiful youth." ], [ "They both ought to be considered progenitors of the postmodern movement.", "He undercuts innocence with deeply terrifying subjects and images.", "They are both members of the Mouseketeers.", "They both frequently depict brutal and disturbing acts of violence upon children." ], [ "Like other postmodernists, he frequently depicted subjects of gruesome violence.", "He was fully immersed in the fantasy world he had created in his 15,000-page epic.", "He intentionally inserts himself into his work, and his characters frequently reflect on the process of artistic creation.", "Like his fellow postmodern artists, Darger was interested in the line between what is real and what is fantasy." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "Chief culprit in Darger's case is one John MacGregor, an art historian to whom Darger's former landlord, now his executor, has bequeathed semi-exclusive access to some of the Darger material, and who is thus the main disseminator of", "crazy stuff; how he couldn't distinguish between fantasy and reality; how he was a potential serial killer; how he got sexually excited writing descriptions of burning forests. MacGregor careers from the vulgar Freudian to the idiosyncratically bizarre--for instance, \"The", "It's true that Darger's more gruesome pictures can be a little disturbing. But think of Darger in the context either of children's books and cartoons (anything from Tom & Jerry to the terrifyingly brutal but also extremely popular German children's book Strumpelpeter ) or of contemporary art (Maggie Robbins' 1989 \"Barbie Fetish,\" for instance--a naked Barbie doll stuck all over with little nails), and it's MacGregor who begins to look like the outsider. Indeed, seen in a contemporary light, Darger begins to look like a progenitor of that rather common, campy sensibility--what might be called Mouseketeer Gothic--that sees angelic pop-culture figures as actually creepy and frightening. (Think \"It's a Small World\" or David Lynch.)", "It's ironic, too, that critics such as MacGregor persist in seeing Darger as an unself-conscious obsessive, unable to separate his life from his created fantasy world, since in fact Darger's work is full of precisely the sort of self-referentiality that in a contemporary insider artist would be read as a rather ordinary example of postmodern detachment. Many of Darger's watercolors, for instance, include depictions of framed pictures whose images are indistinguishable from the images outside them. In the written epic, Darger himself appears as several different characters, on both sides of the conflict--private Darger, Darger the war correspondent, volcanology expert Hendro Dargar, etc. Darger's very title draws attention to the fact that the epic takes place \"in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal.\" And the written version of Darger's epic even contains a number of amusing references to the strange task of drawing and writing about Darger's own grisly subject. To wit:", "Darger criticism. Despite the fact that virtually nothing is known about Darger's inner life, MacGregor (typically, for a critic of outsider art) writes confidently about how compulsive Darger was; how he couldn't control his urge to produce all that", "What to make of this? Depending on your taste, you might conclude that Darger is indeed a deranged outsider confusing himself with his characters. Or you might see him as a latter-day Grimm, in whose macabre universe getting your intestines torn out and sketching other children's severed heads are regrettable but quite ordinary parts of life as a little girl. On either interpretation, though, the paintings remain extraordinary, and extraordinarily beautiful.", "trauma of [Darger's mother's] death was represented in his later life by an obsessional preoccupation with weather.\" \"Clearly,\" MacGregor wrote in a 1992 exhibition catalog, \"Darger was not free.\"", "Indeed the screams and pleads of the victims could not be described, and thousands of mothers went insane over the scene, or even committed suicide. ... About nearly 56,789 children were literally cut up like a butcher does a calf, after being strangled or slain, in all ways, indeed the sights of the bloody windrows [sic] , with their intestines exposed or gushed out, was a sight that no one could bear to witness without losing their reason. Hearts of children were hung up by strings to the walls of houses, so many of the bleeding bodies had been cut up that they looked as if they had gone through a machine of knives. \n\n The writing also complicates the naked-girl scenes in the pictures, since it combines vintage Darger bloodthirstiness with the gentlest, softest grandpa porn. For instance, \"The little girls were even glad to leave the building, which they hastily did after looking for their clothes which they could not find, having to leave in their nighties.\"", "Darger is what is known as an \"outsider\" artist--which is to say that he didn't receive any formal art training; was not, during his lifetime, part of the art world; and was exposed", "Of the enormous quantity of material Darger produced, his watercolors have received the lion's share of attention. The Museum of American Folk Art did sponsor a reading of passages from the written version of Vivian Girls . Still, it's a pity there's none of Darger's writing in the exhibition itself, because it's marvelous, strange stuff, quite as startling as the paintings--in dizzying magnitude as well as vividness, since in the written version, Darger's gory battle scenes extend for hundreds of pages. Take this excerpt, for instance (don't read this if you're squeamish):", "eccentrically magnificent watercolors by the late painter and writer Henry Darger. If Darger were alive today, he would be fascinated by the story of JonBenet. Darger collected clippings on the subject of little girls, murdered and otherwise, and went", "The Darger watercolors on exhibit include both peacetime tableaux of tiny lassies, some naked, some in dresses, disporting themselves among butterflies and enormous flowers and odd little birds--and scenes of maniacal carnage, in which the same tiny lassies are strangled naked (distorted faces, tongues stuck out) and disemboweled by merciless Glandelinians. (Presumably in anticipation of a fainter-hearted audience, the gorier pictures were excluded from last year's Darger exhibition at the University of Iowa, of which this show is an expanded version.) Some paintings combine the two types of scenes, with comic nonchalance. In one, a group of placid girls jump rope while immediately behind them lie the severed heads of three men, horrified expressions on their faces, and pairs of disembodied hands (their own? their murderers?) still clenched around their necks. In all paintings, the colors are extraordinary and fantastical--a cross between Yellow Submarine and a pastel version of Matisse.", "About noon, a frenzied mob of Glandelinians came swarming for the prison of Violet and her sisters. The standards they followed were the heads and even gashed bodies of six beautiful little children, with their intestines protruding from their bellies, and every one of these were on pikes dripping with blood. ... \n\n [When Violet and her sisters appeared] they thrust up on to their windows the heads and bodies of these lovely children, and managed to cast them inside amongst them. Then, bursting into the doors, they thrust the heads into their laps, ordering them to make a copy of them in pencil. \n\n Although it seems to them that they would die of horror, [Violet and her sisters] thought it best to obey. ... [T]hey started to draw the hideous bodies and heads, being good at drawing pictures in the most perfect form.", "off. In the course of Darger's story--titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnean War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion --the sisters (the", "the illustrations more or less intact; in others he stripped off the girls' clothes and added penises (all his naked girls have penises). Several images appear over and over again in Darger's work, often within the same painting--a girl mixing", "Darger produced a lot of his little-girl pictures by tracing comic strips or magazine illustrations (on occasion he cut pictures out and stuck them on the paintings directly). In some works he transposed", "very little, if at all, to traditional art in general. As such, he is presumed to have produced his work out of some unusually pure sort of inner compulsion, rather than in response to other art. Darger spent nearly all his", "1892, sent to a Catholic boys home at 8, and then placed in an institution for the feebleminded, from which he escaped at the age of 16. Shortly before his death in 1973, after Darger moved out to a nursing", "The outsider-art movement responsible for raising Darger from obscurity to fame is a rapidly expanding niche of the art world that has come into its own in this country in the past decade or so: The fifth annual Outsider Art Fair took place a couple of weeks ago in New York; there is a new federally funded museum devoted to outsider art in Baltimore. These days, pieces by the most popular outsider artists, of which Darger is one, are priced in the mid to high five-figures.", "home, his landlord opened up his room and discovered, amid piles of presumably artistic debris (hundreds of pairs of smashed eyeglasses, balls of string, old pairs of shoes, scores of empty Pepto-Bismol bottles), one 2,600-page autobiography, an" ], [ "Darger is what is known as an \"outsider\" artist--which is to say that he didn't receive any formal art training; was not, during his lifetime, part of the art world; and was exposed", "It's ironic, too, that critics such as MacGregor persist in seeing Darger as an unself-conscious obsessive, unable to separate his life from his created fantasy world, since in fact Darger's work is full of precisely the sort of self-referentiality that in a contemporary insider artist would be read as a rather ordinary example of postmodern detachment. Many of Darger's watercolors, for instance, include depictions of framed pictures whose images are indistinguishable from the images outside them. In the written epic, Darger himself appears as several different characters, on both sides of the conflict--private Darger, Darger the war correspondent, volcanology expert Hendro Dargar, etc. Darger's very title draws attention to the fact that the epic takes place \"in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal.\" And the written version of Darger's epic even contains a number of amusing references to the strange task of drawing and writing about Darger's own grisly subject. To wit:", "What to make of this? Depending on your taste, you might conclude that Darger is indeed a deranged outsider confusing himself with his characters. Or you might see him as a latter-day Grimm, in whose macabre universe getting your intestines torn out and sketching other children's severed heads are regrettable but quite ordinary parts of life as a little girl. On either interpretation, though, the paintings remain extraordinary, and extraordinarily beautiful.", "Darger criticism. Despite the fact that virtually nothing is known about Darger's inner life, MacGregor (typically, for a critic of outsider art) writes confidently about how compulsive Darger was; how he couldn't control his urge to produce all that", "It's true that Darger's more gruesome pictures can be a little disturbing. But think of Darger in the context either of children's books and cartoons (anything from Tom & Jerry to the terrifyingly brutal but also extremely popular German children's book Strumpelpeter ) or of contemporary art (Maggie Robbins' 1989 \"Barbie Fetish,\" for instance--a naked Barbie doll stuck all over with little nails), and it's MacGregor who begins to look like the outsider. Indeed, seen in a contemporary light, Darger begins to look like a progenitor of that rather common, campy sensibility--what might be called Mouseketeer Gothic--that sees angelic pop-culture figures as actually creepy and frightening. (Think \"It's a Small World\" or David Lynch.)", "very little, if at all, to traditional art in general. As such, he is presumed to have produced his work out of some unusually pure sort of inner compulsion, rather than in response to other art. Darger spent nearly all his", "Of the enormous quantity of material Darger produced, his watercolors have received the lion's share of attention. The Museum of American Folk Art did sponsor a reading of passages from the written version of Vivian Girls . Still, it's a pity there's none of Darger's writing in the exhibition itself, because it's marvelous, strange stuff, quite as startling as the paintings--in dizzying magnitude as well as vividness, since in the written version, Darger's gory battle scenes extend for hundreds of pages. Take this excerpt, for instance (don't read this if you're squeamish):", "eccentrically magnificent watercolors by the late painter and writer Henry Darger. If Darger were alive today, he would be fascinated by the story of JonBenet. Darger collected clippings on the subject of little girls, murdered and otherwise, and went", "off. In the course of Darger's story--titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnean War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion --the sisters (the", "The outsider-art movement responsible for raising Darger from obscurity to fame is a rapidly expanding niche of the art world that has come into its own in this country in the past decade or so: The fifth annual Outsider Art Fair took place a couple of weeks ago in New York; there is a new federally funded museum devoted to outsider art in Baltimore. These days, pieces by the most popular outsider artists, of which Darger is one, are priced in the mid to high five-figures.", "trauma of [Darger's mother's] death was represented in his later life by an obsessional preoccupation with weather.\" \"Clearly,\" MacGregor wrote in a 1992 exhibition catalog, \"Darger was not free.\"", "Indeed the screams and pleads of the victims could not be described, and thousands of mothers went insane over the scene, or even committed suicide. ... About nearly 56,789 children were literally cut up like a butcher does a calf, after being strangled or slain, in all ways, indeed the sights of the bloody windrows [sic] , with their intestines exposed or gushed out, was a sight that no one could bear to witness without losing their reason. Hearts of children were hung up by strings to the walls of houses, so many of the bleeding bodies had been cut up that they looked as if they had gone through a machine of knives. \n\n The writing also complicates the naked-girl scenes in the pictures, since it combines vintage Darger bloodthirstiness with the gentlest, softest grandpa porn. For instance, \"The little girls were even glad to leave the building, which they hastily did after looking for their clothes which they could not find, having to leave in their nighties.\"", "the illustrations more or less intact; in others he stripped off the girls' clothes and added penises (all his naked girls have penises). Several images appear over and over again in Darger's work, often within the same painting--a girl mixing", "The Darger watercolors on exhibit include both peacetime tableaux of tiny lassies, some naked, some in dresses, disporting themselves among butterflies and enormous flowers and odd little birds--and scenes of maniacal carnage, in which the same tiny lassies are strangled naked (distorted faces, tongues stuck out) and disemboweled by merciless Glandelinians. (Presumably in anticipation of a fainter-hearted audience, the gorier pictures were excluded from last year's Darger exhibition at the University of Iowa, of which this show is an expanded version.) Some paintings combine the two types of scenes, with comic nonchalance. In one, a group of placid girls jump rope while immediately behind them lie the severed heads of three men, horrified expressions on their faces, and pairs of disembodied hands (their own? their murderers?) still clenched around their necks. In all paintings, the colors are extraordinary and fantastical--a cross between Yellow Submarine and a pastel version of Matisse.", "1892, sent to a Catholic boys home at 8, and then placed in an institution for the feebleminded, from which he escaped at the age of 16. Shortly before his death in 1973, after Darger moved out to a nursing", "Chief culprit in Darger's case is one John MacGregor, an art historian to whom Darger's former landlord, now his executor, has bequeathed semi-exclusive access to some of the Darger material, and who is thus the main disseminator of", "Darger produced a lot of his little-girl pictures by tracing comic strips or magazine illustrations (on occasion he cut pictures out and stuck them on the paintings directly). In some works he transposed", "crazy stuff; how he couldn't distinguish between fantasy and reality; how he was a potential serial killer; how he got sexually excited writing descriptions of burning forests. MacGregor careers from the vulgar Freudian to the idiosyncratically bizarre--for instance, \"The", "home, his landlord opened up his room and discovered, amid piles of presumably artistic debris (hundreds of pairs of smashed eyeglasses, balls of string, old pairs of shoes, scores of empty Pepto-Bismol bottles), one 2,600-page autobiography, an", "About noon, a frenzied mob of Glandelinians came swarming for the prison of Violet and her sisters. The standards they followed were the heads and even gashed bodies of six beautiful little children, with their intestines protruding from their bellies, and every one of these were on pikes dripping with blood. ... \n\n [When Violet and her sisters appeared] they thrust up on to their windows the heads and bodies of these lovely children, and managed to cast them inside amongst them. Then, bursting into the doors, they thrust the heads into their laps, ordering them to make a copy of them in pencil. \n\n Although it seems to them that they would die of horror, [Violet and her sisters] thought it best to obey. ... [T]hey started to draw the hideous bodies and heads, being good at drawing pictures in the most perfect form." ], [ "Darger produced a lot of his little-girl pictures by tracing comic strips or magazine illustrations (on occasion he cut pictures out and stuck them on the paintings directly). In some works he transposed", "the illustrations more or less intact; in others he stripped off the girls' clothes and added penises (all his naked girls have penises). Several images appear over and over again in Darger's work, often within the same painting--a girl mixing", "Indeed the screams and pleads of the victims could not be described, and thousands of mothers went insane over the scene, or even committed suicide. ... About nearly 56,789 children were literally cut up like a butcher does a calf, after being strangled or slain, in all ways, indeed the sights of the bloody windrows [sic] , with their intestines exposed or gushed out, was a sight that no one could bear to witness without losing their reason. Hearts of children were hung up by strings to the walls of houses, so many of the bleeding bodies had been cut up that they looked as if they had gone through a machine of knives. \n\n The writing also complicates the naked-girl scenes in the pictures, since it combines vintage Darger bloodthirstiness with the gentlest, softest grandpa porn. For instance, \"The little girls were even glad to leave the building, which they hastily did after looking for their clothes which they could not find, having to leave in their nighties.\"", "What to make of this? Depending on your taste, you might conclude that Darger is indeed a deranged outsider confusing himself with his characters. Or you might see him as a latter-day Grimm, in whose macabre universe getting your intestines torn out and sketching other children's severed heads are regrettable but quite ordinary parts of life as a little girl. On either interpretation, though, the paintings remain extraordinary, and extraordinarily beautiful.", "eccentrically magnificent watercolors by the late painter and writer Henry Darger. If Darger were alive today, he would be fascinated by the story of JonBenet. Darger collected clippings on the subject of little girls, murdered and otherwise, and went", "The Darger watercolors on exhibit include both peacetime tableaux of tiny lassies, some naked, some in dresses, disporting themselves among butterflies and enormous flowers and odd little birds--and scenes of maniacal carnage, in which the same tiny lassies are strangled naked (distorted faces, tongues stuck out) and disemboweled by merciless Glandelinians. (Presumably in anticipation of a fainter-hearted audience, the gorier pictures were excluded from last year's Darger exhibition at the University of Iowa, of which this show is an expanded version.) Some paintings combine the two types of scenes, with comic nonchalance. In one, a group of placid girls jump rope while immediately behind them lie the severed heads of three men, horrified expressions on their faces, and pairs of disembodied hands (their own? their murderers?) still clenched around their necks. In all paintings, the colors are extraordinary and fantastical--a cross between Yellow Submarine and a pastel version of Matisse.", "Of the enormous quantity of material Darger produced, his watercolors have received the lion's share of attention. The Museum of American Folk Art did sponsor a reading of passages from the written version of Vivian Girls . Still, it's a pity there's none of Darger's writing in the exhibition itself, because it's marvelous, strange stuff, quite as startling as the paintings--in dizzying magnitude as well as vividness, since in the written version, Darger's gory battle scenes extend for hundreds of pages. Take this excerpt, for instance (don't read this if you're squeamish):", "Darger criticism. Despite the fact that virtually nothing is known about Darger's inner life, MacGregor (typically, for a critic of outsider art) writes confidently about how compulsive Darger was; how he couldn't control his urge to produce all that", "Darger is what is known as an \"outsider\" artist--which is to say that he didn't receive any formal art training; was not, during his lifetime, part of the art world; and was exposed", "It's ironic, too, that critics such as MacGregor persist in seeing Darger as an unself-conscious obsessive, unable to separate his life from his created fantasy world, since in fact Darger's work is full of precisely the sort of self-referentiality that in a contemporary insider artist would be read as a rather ordinary example of postmodern detachment. Many of Darger's watercolors, for instance, include depictions of framed pictures whose images are indistinguishable from the images outside them. In the written epic, Darger himself appears as several different characters, on both sides of the conflict--private Darger, Darger the war correspondent, volcanology expert Hendro Dargar, etc. Darger's very title draws attention to the fact that the epic takes place \"in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal.\" And the written version of Darger's epic even contains a number of amusing references to the strange task of drawing and writing about Darger's own grisly subject. To wit:", "off. In the course of Darger's story--titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnean War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion --the sisters (the", "very little, if at all, to traditional art in general. As such, he is presumed to have produced his work out of some unusually pure sort of inner compulsion, rather than in response to other art. Darger spent nearly all his", "It's true that Darger's more gruesome pictures can be a little disturbing. But think of Darger in the context either of children's books and cartoons (anything from Tom & Jerry to the terrifyingly brutal but also extremely popular German children's book Strumpelpeter ) or of contemporary art (Maggie Robbins' 1989 \"Barbie Fetish,\" for instance--a naked Barbie doll stuck all over with little nails), and it's MacGregor who begins to look like the outsider. Indeed, seen in a contemporary light, Darger begins to look like a progenitor of that rather common, campy sensibility--what might be called Mouseketeer Gothic--that sees angelic pop-culture figures as actually creepy and frightening. (Think \"It's a Small World\" or David Lynch.)", "About noon, a frenzied mob of Glandelinians came swarming for the prison of Violet and her sisters. The standards they followed were the heads and even gashed bodies of six beautiful little children, with their intestines protruding from their bellies, and every one of these were on pikes dripping with blood. ... \n\n [When Violet and her sisters appeared] they thrust up on to their windows the heads and bodies of these lovely children, and managed to cast them inside amongst them. Then, bursting into the doors, they thrust the heads into their laps, ordering them to make a copy of them in pencil. \n\n Although it seems to them that they would die of horror, [Violet and her sisters] thought it best to obey. ... [T]hey started to draw the hideous bodies and heads, being good at drawing pictures in the most perfect form.", "1892, sent to a Catholic boys home at 8, and then placed in an institution for the feebleminded, from which he escaped at the age of 16. Shortly before his death in 1973, after Darger moved out to a nursing", "trauma of [Darger's mother's] death was represented in his later life by an obsessional preoccupation with weather.\" \"Clearly,\" MacGregor wrote in a 1992 exhibition catalog, \"Darger was not free.\"", "The outsider-art movement responsible for raising Darger from obscurity to fame is a rapidly expanding niche of the art world that has come into its own in this country in the past decade or so: The fifth annual Outsider Art Fair took place a couple of weeks ago in New York; there is a new federally funded museum devoted to outsider art in Baltimore. These days, pieces by the most popular outsider artists, of which Darger is one, are priced in the mid to high five-figures.", "Chief culprit in Darger's case is one John MacGregor, an art historian to whom Darger's former landlord, now his executor, has bequeathed semi-exclusive access to some of the Darger material, and who is thus the main disseminator of", "something in a bowl, a girl sitting on a fence, a girl running fearfully away from something, her school bag flying out behind her. Often these repeated images are rendered identically (same colors, no alterations in the pose), and sometimes they", "home, his landlord opened up his room and discovered, amid piles of presumably artistic debris (hundreds of pairs of smashed eyeglasses, balls of string, old pairs of shoes, scores of empty Pepto-Bismol bottles), one 2,600-page autobiography, an" ], [ "It's ironic, too, that critics such as MacGregor persist in seeing Darger as an unself-conscious obsessive, unable to separate his life from his created fantasy world, since in fact Darger's work is full of precisely the sort of self-referentiality that in a contemporary insider artist would be read as a rather ordinary example of postmodern detachment. Many of Darger's watercolors, for instance, include depictions of framed pictures whose images are indistinguishable from the images outside them. In the written epic, Darger himself appears as several different characters, on both sides of the conflict--private Darger, Darger the war correspondent, volcanology expert Hendro Dargar, etc. Darger's very title draws attention to the fact that the epic takes place \"in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal.\" And the written version of Darger's epic even contains a number of amusing references to the strange task of drawing and writing about Darger's own grisly subject. To wit:", "Darger criticism. Despite the fact that virtually nothing is known about Darger's inner life, MacGregor (typically, for a critic of outsider art) writes confidently about how compulsive Darger was; how he couldn't control his urge to produce all that", "Chief culprit in Darger's case is one John MacGregor, an art historian to whom Darger's former landlord, now his executor, has bequeathed semi-exclusive access to some of the Darger material, and who is thus the main disseminator of", "It's true that Darger's more gruesome pictures can be a little disturbing. But think of Darger in the context either of children's books and cartoons (anything from Tom & Jerry to the terrifyingly brutal but also extremely popular German children's book Strumpelpeter ) or of contemporary art (Maggie Robbins' 1989 \"Barbie Fetish,\" for instance--a naked Barbie doll stuck all over with little nails), and it's MacGregor who begins to look like the outsider. Indeed, seen in a contemporary light, Darger begins to look like a progenitor of that rather common, campy sensibility--what might be called Mouseketeer Gothic--that sees angelic pop-culture figures as actually creepy and frightening. (Think \"It's a Small World\" or David Lynch.)", "What to make of this? Depending on your taste, you might conclude that Darger is indeed a deranged outsider confusing himself with his characters. Or you might see him as a latter-day Grimm, in whose macabre universe getting your intestines torn out and sketching other children's severed heads are regrettable but quite ordinary parts of life as a little girl. On either interpretation, though, the paintings remain extraordinary, and extraordinarily beautiful.", "crazy stuff; how he couldn't distinguish between fantasy and reality; how he was a potential serial killer; how he got sexually excited writing descriptions of burning forests. MacGregor careers from the vulgar Freudian to the idiosyncratically bizarre--for instance, \"The", "Darger is what is known as an \"outsider\" artist--which is to say that he didn't receive any formal art training; was not, during his lifetime, part of the art world; and was exposed", "Of the enormous quantity of material Darger produced, his watercolors have received the lion's share of attention. The Museum of American Folk Art did sponsor a reading of passages from the written version of Vivian Girls . Still, it's a pity there's none of Darger's writing in the exhibition itself, because it's marvelous, strange stuff, quite as startling as the paintings--in dizzying magnitude as well as vividness, since in the written version, Darger's gory battle scenes extend for hundreds of pages. Take this excerpt, for instance (don't read this if you're squeamish):", "trauma of [Darger's mother's] death was represented in his later life by an obsessional preoccupation with weather.\" \"Clearly,\" MacGregor wrote in a 1992 exhibition catalog, \"Darger was not free.\"", "Indeed the screams and pleads of the victims could not be described, and thousands of mothers went insane over the scene, or even committed suicide. ... About nearly 56,789 children were literally cut up like a butcher does a calf, after being strangled or slain, in all ways, indeed the sights of the bloody windrows [sic] , with their intestines exposed or gushed out, was a sight that no one could bear to witness without losing their reason. Hearts of children were hung up by strings to the walls of houses, so many of the bleeding bodies had been cut up that they looked as if they had gone through a machine of knives. \n\n The writing also complicates the naked-girl scenes in the pictures, since it combines vintage Darger bloodthirstiness with the gentlest, softest grandpa porn. For instance, \"The little girls were even glad to leave the building, which they hastily did after looking for their clothes which they could not find, having to leave in their nighties.\"", "very little, if at all, to traditional art in general. As such, he is presumed to have produced his work out of some unusually pure sort of inner compulsion, rather than in response to other art. Darger spent nearly all his", "eccentrically magnificent watercolors by the late painter and writer Henry Darger. If Darger were alive today, he would be fascinated by the story of JonBenet. Darger collected clippings on the subject of little girls, murdered and otherwise, and went", "The Darger watercolors on exhibit include both peacetime tableaux of tiny lassies, some naked, some in dresses, disporting themselves among butterflies and enormous flowers and odd little birds--and scenes of maniacal carnage, in which the same tiny lassies are strangled naked (distorted faces, tongues stuck out) and disemboweled by merciless Glandelinians. (Presumably in anticipation of a fainter-hearted audience, the gorier pictures were excluded from last year's Darger exhibition at the University of Iowa, of which this show is an expanded version.) Some paintings combine the two types of scenes, with comic nonchalance. In one, a group of placid girls jump rope while immediately behind them lie the severed heads of three men, horrified expressions on their faces, and pairs of disembodied hands (their own? their murderers?) still clenched around their necks. In all paintings, the colors are extraordinary and fantastical--a cross between Yellow Submarine and a pastel version of Matisse.", "off. In the course of Darger's story--titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnean War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion --the sisters (the", "The outsider-art movement responsible for raising Darger from obscurity to fame is a rapidly expanding niche of the art world that has come into its own in this country in the past decade or so: The fifth annual Outsider Art Fair took place a couple of weeks ago in New York; there is a new federally funded museum devoted to outsider art in Baltimore. These days, pieces by the most popular outsider artists, of which Darger is one, are priced in the mid to high five-figures.", "the illustrations more or less intact; in others he stripped off the girls' clothes and added penises (all his naked girls have penises). Several images appear over and over again in Darger's work, often within the same painting--a girl mixing", "1892, sent to a Catholic boys home at 8, and then placed in an institution for the feebleminded, from which he escaped at the age of 16. Shortly before his death in 1973, after Darger moved out to a nursing", "home, his landlord opened up his room and discovered, amid piles of presumably artistic debris (hundreds of pairs of smashed eyeglasses, balls of string, old pairs of shoes, scores of empty Pepto-Bismol bottles), one 2,600-page autobiography, an", "Darger produced a lot of his little-girl pictures by tracing comic strips or magazine illustrations (on occasion he cut pictures out and stuck them on the paintings directly). In some works he transposed", "About noon, a frenzied mob of Glandelinians came swarming for the prison of Violet and her sisters. The standards they followed were the heads and even gashed bodies of six beautiful little children, with their intestines protruding from their bellies, and every one of these were on pikes dripping with blood. ... \n\n [When Violet and her sisters appeared] they thrust up on to their windows the heads and bodies of these lovely children, and managed to cast them inside amongst them. Then, bursting into the doors, they thrust the heads into their laps, ordering them to make a copy of them in pencil. \n\n Although it seems to them that they would die of horror, [Violet and her sisters] thought it best to obey. ... [T]hey started to draw the hideous bodies and heads, being good at drawing pictures in the most perfect form." ], [ "Darger is what is known as an \"outsider\" artist--which is to say that he didn't receive any formal art training; was not, during his lifetime, part of the art world; and was exposed", "Darger criticism. Despite the fact that virtually nothing is known about Darger's inner life, MacGregor (typically, for a critic of outsider art) writes confidently about how compulsive Darger was; how he couldn't control his urge to produce all that", "What to make of this? Depending on your taste, you might conclude that Darger is indeed a deranged outsider confusing himself with his characters. Or you might see him as a latter-day Grimm, in whose macabre universe getting your intestines torn out and sketching other children's severed heads are regrettable but quite ordinary parts of life as a little girl. On either interpretation, though, the paintings remain extraordinary, and extraordinarily beautiful.", "The outsider-art movement responsible for raising Darger from obscurity to fame is a rapidly expanding niche of the art world that has come into its own in this country in the past decade or so: The fifth annual Outsider Art Fair took place a couple of weeks ago in New York; there is a new federally funded museum devoted to outsider art in Baltimore. These days, pieces by the most popular outsider artists, of which Darger is one, are priced in the mid to high five-figures.", "very little, if at all, to traditional art in general. As such, he is presumed to have produced his work out of some unusually pure sort of inner compulsion, rather than in response to other art. Darger spent nearly all his", "It's ironic, too, that critics such as MacGregor persist in seeing Darger as an unself-conscious obsessive, unable to separate his life from his created fantasy world, since in fact Darger's work is full of precisely the sort of self-referentiality that in a contemporary insider artist would be read as a rather ordinary example of postmodern detachment. Many of Darger's watercolors, for instance, include depictions of framed pictures whose images are indistinguishable from the images outside them. In the written epic, Darger himself appears as several different characters, on both sides of the conflict--private Darger, Darger the war correspondent, volcanology expert Hendro Dargar, etc. Darger's very title draws attention to the fact that the epic takes place \"in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal.\" And the written version of Darger's epic even contains a number of amusing references to the strange task of drawing and writing about Darger's own grisly subject. To wit:", "1892, sent to a Catholic boys home at 8, and then placed in an institution for the feebleminded, from which he escaped at the age of 16. Shortly before his death in 1973, after Darger moved out to a nursing", "It's true that Darger's more gruesome pictures can be a little disturbing. But think of Darger in the context either of children's books and cartoons (anything from Tom & Jerry to the terrifyingly brutal but also extremely popular German children's book Strumpelpeter ) or of contemporary art (Maggie Robbins' 1989 \"Barbie Fetish,\" for instance--a naked Barbie doll stuck all over with little nails), and it's MacGregor who begins to look like the outsider. Indeed, seen in a contemporary light, Darger begins to look like a progenitor of that rather common, campy sensibility--what might be called Mouseketeer Gothic--that sees angelic pop-culture figures as actually creepy and frightening. (Think \"It's a Small World\" or David Lynch.)", "eccentrically magnificent watercolors by the late painter and writer Henry Darger. If Darger were alive today, he would be fascinated by the story of JonBenet. Darger collected clippings on the subject of little girls, murdered and otherwise, and went", "trauma of [Darger's mother's] death was represented in his later life by an obsessional preoccupation with weather.\" \"Clearly,\" MacGregor wrote in a 1992 exhibition catalog, \"Darger was not free.\"", "Of the enormous quantity of material Darger produced, his watercolors have received the lion's share of attention. The Museum of American Folk Art did sponsor a reading of passages from the written version of Vivian Girls . Still, it's a pity there's none of Darger's writing in the exhibition itself, because it's marvelous, strange stuff, quite as startling as the paintings--in dizzying magnitude as well as vividness, since in the written version, Darger's gory battle scenes extend for hundreds of pages. Take this excerpt, for instance (don't read this if you're squeamish):", "Chief culprit in Darger's case is one John MacGregor, an art historian to whom Darger's former landlord, now his executor, has bequeathed semi-exclusive access to some of the Darger material, and who is thus the main disseminator of", "off. In the course of Darger's story--titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnean War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion --the sisters (the", "The Darger watercolors on exhibit include both peacetime tableaux of tiny lassies, some naked, some in dresses, disporting themselves among butterflies and enormous flowers and odd little birds--and scenes of maniacal carnage, in which the same tiny lassies are strangled naked (distorted faces, tongues stuck out) and disemboweled by merciless Glandelinians. (Presumably in anticipation of a fainter-hearted audience, the gorier pictures were excluded from last year's Darger exhibition at the University of Iowa, of which this show is an expanded version.) Some paintings combine the two types of scenes, with comic nonchalance. In one, a group of placid girls jump rope while immediately behind them lie the severed heads of three men, horrified expressions on their faces, and pairs of disembodied hands (their own? their murderers?) still clenched around their necks. In all paintings, the colors are extraordinary and fantastical--a cross between Yellow Submarine and a pastel version of Matisse.", "Indeed the screams and pleads of the victims could not be described, and thousands of mothers went insane over the scene, or even committed suicide. ... About nearly 56,789 children were literally cut up like a butcher does a calf, after being strangled or slain, in all ways, indeed the sights of the bloody windrows [sic] , with their intestines exposed or gushed out, was a sight that no one could bear to witness without losing their reason. Hearts of children were hung up by strings to the walls of houses, so many of the bleeding bodies had been cut up that they looked as if they had gone through a machine of knives. \n\n The writing also complicates the naked-girl scenes in the pictures, since it combines vintage Darger bloodthirstiness with the gentlest, softest grandpa porn. For instance, \"The little girls were even glad to leave the building, which they hastily did after looking for their clothes which they could not find, having to leave in their nighties.\"", "But while the notion of outsider art has proved an effective marketing concept, it is often an unfortunate interpretive one--outsider artists tend to attract a particularly crude and irritating kind of psycho-biographical analysis.", "Darger produced a lot of his little-girl pictures by tracing comic strips or magazine illustrations (on occasion he cut pictures out and stuck them on the paintings directly). In some works he transposed", "the illustrations more or less intact; in others he stripped off the girls' clothes and added penises (all his naked girls have penises). Several images appear over and over again in Darger's work, often within the same painting--a girl mixing", "home, his landlord opened up his room and discovered, amid piles of presumably artistic debris (hundreds of pairs of smashed eyeglasses, balls of string, old pairs of shoes, scores of empty Pepto-Bismol bottles), one 2,600-page autobiography, an", "crazy stuff; how he couldn't distinguish between fantasy and reality; how he was a potential serial killer; how he got sexually excited writing descriptions of burning forests. MacGregor careers from the vulgar Freudian to the idiosyncratically bizarre--for instance, \"The" ], [ "off. In the course of Darger's story--titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnean War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion --the sisters (the", "It's ironic, too, that critics such as MacGregor persist in seeing Darger as an unself-conscious obsessive, unable to separate his life from his created fantasy world, since in fact Darger's work is full of precisely the sort of self-referentiality that in a contemporary insider artist would be read as a rather ordinary example of postmodern detachment. Many of Darger's watercolors, for instance, include depictions of framed pictures whose images are indistinguishable from the images outside them. In the written epic, Darger himself appears as several different characters, on both sides of the conflict--private Darger, Darger the war correspondent, volcanology expert Hendro Dargar, etc. Darger's very title draws attention to the fact that the epic takes place \"in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal.\" And the written version of Darger's epic even contains a number of amusing references to the strange task of drawing and writing about Darger's own grisly subject. To wit:", "Indeed the screams and pleads of the victims could not be described, and thousands of mothers went insane over the scene, or even committed suicide. ... About nearly 56,789 children were literally cut up like a butcher does a calf, after being strangled or slain, in all ways, indeed the sights of the bloody windrows [sic] , with their intestines exposed or gushed out, was a sight that no one could bear to witness without losing their reason. Hearts of children were hung up by strings to the walls of houses, so many of the bleeding bodies had been cut up that they looked as if they had gone through a machine of knives. \n\n The writing also complicates the naked-girl scenes in the pictures, since it combines vintage Darger bloodthirstiness with the gentlest, softest grandpa porn. For instance, \"The little girls were even glad to leave the building, which they hastily did after looking for their clothes which they could not find, having to leave in their nighties.\"", "What to make of this? Depending on your taste, you might conclude that Darger is indeed a deranged outsider confusing himself with his characters. Or you might see him as a latter-day Grimm, in whose macabre universe getting your intestines torn out and sketching other children's severed heads are regrettable but quite ordinary parts of life as a little girl. On either interpretation, though, the paintings remain extraordinary, and extraordinarily beautiful.", "Darger is what is known as an \"outsider\" artist--which is to say that he didn't receive any formal art training; was not, during his lifetime, part of the art world; and was exposed", "eccentrically magnificent watercolors by the late painter and writer Henry Darger. If Darger were alive today, he would be fascinated by the story of JonBenet. Darger collected clippings on the subject of little girls, murdered and otherwise, and went", "Of the enormous quantity of material Darger produced, his watercolors have received the lion's share of attention. The Museum of American Folk Art did sponsor a reading of passages from the written version of Vivian Girls . Still, it's a pity there's none of Darger's writing in the exhibition itself, because it's marvelous, strange stuff, quite as startling as the paintings--in dizzying magnitude as well as vividness, since in the written version, Darger's gory battle scenes extend for hundreds of pages. Take this excerpt, for instance (don't read this if you're squeamish):", "The Darger watercolors on exhibit include both peacetime tableaux of tiny lassies, some naked, some in dresses, disporting themselves among butterflies and enormous flowers and odd little birds--and scenes of maniacal carnage, in which the same tiny lassies are strangled naked (distorted faces, tongues stuck out) and disemboweled by merciless Glandelinians. (Presumably in anticipation of a fainter-hearted audience, the gorier pictures were excluded from last year's Darger exhibition at the University of Iowa, of which this show is an expanded version.) Some paintings combine the two types of scenes, with comic nonchalance. In one, a group of placid girls jump rope while immediately behind them lie the severed heads of three men, horrified expressions on their faces, and pairs of disembodied hands (their own? their murderers?) still clenched around their necks. In all paintings, the colors are extraordinary and fantastical--a cross between Yellow Submarine and a pastel version of Matisse.", "the illustrations more or less intact; in others he stripped off the girls' clothes and added penises (all his naked girls have penises). Several images appear over and over again in Darger's work, often within the same painting--a girl mixing", "Darger criticism. Despite the fact that virtually nothing is known about Darger's inner life, MacGregor (typically, for a critic of outsider art) writes confidently about how compulsive Darger was; how he couldn't control his urge to produce all that", "1892, sent to a Catholic boys home at 8, and then placed in an institution for the feebleminded, from which he escaped at the age of 16. Shortly before his death in 1973, after Darger moved out to a nursing", "It's true that Darger's more gruesome pictures can be a little disturbing. But think of Darger in the context either of children's books and cartoons (anything from Tom & Jerry to the terrifyingly brutal but also extremely popular German children's book Strumpelpeter ) or of contemporary art (Maggie Robbins' 1989 \"Barbie Fetish,\" for instance--a naked Barbie doll stuck all over with little nails), and it's MacGregor who begins to look like the outsider. Indeed, seen in a contemporary light, Darger begins to look like a progenitor of that rather common, campy sensibility--what might be called Mouseketeer Gothic--that sees angelic pop-culture figures as actually creepy and frightening. (Think \"It's a Small World\" or David Lynch.)", "Chief culprit in Darger's case is one John MacGregor, an art historian to whom Darger's former landlord, now his executor, has bequeathed semi-exclusive access to some of the Darger material, and who is thus the main disseminator of", "Darger produced a lot of his little-girl pictures by tracing comic strips or magazine illustrations (on occasion he cut pictures out and stuck them on the paintings directly). In some works he transposed", "Vivian Girls) manage to escape from the men (the Glandelinians) time and time again, but countless less fortunate girl-slaves are spectacularly mutilated and slaughtered along the way.", "on to write and illustrate a truly amazing, Scheherazadean 15,145-page epic about seven cute prepubescent sisters being tortured by brutish men who like to capture little girls in order to enslave them and torture them and take their clothes", "trauma of [Darger's mother's] death was represented in his later life by an obsessional preoccupation with weather.\" \"Clearly,\" MacGregor wrote in a 1992 exhibition catalog, \"Darger was not free.\"", "About noon, a frenzied mob of Glandelinians came swarming for the prison of Violet and her sisters. The standards they followed were the heads and even gashed bodies of six beautiful little children, with their intestines protruding from their bellies, and every one of these were on pikes dripping with blood. ... \n\n [When Violet and her sisters appeared] they thrust up on to their windows the heads and bodies of these lovely children, and managed to cast them inside amongst them. Then, bursting into the doors, they thrust the heads into their laps, ordering them to make a copy of them in pencil. \n\n Although it seems to them that they would die of horror, [Violet and her sisters] thought it best to obey. ... [T]hey started to draw the hideous bodies and heads, being good at drawing pictures in the most perfect form.", "The outsider-art movement responsible for raising Darger from obscurity to fame is a rapidly expanding niche of the art world that has come into its own in this country in the past decade or so: The fifth annual Outsider Art Fair took place a couple of weeks ago in New York; there is a new federally funded museum devoted to outsider art in Baltimore. These days, pieces by the most popular outsider artists, of which Darger is one, are priced in the mid to high five-figures.", "very little, if at all, to traditional art in general. As such, he is presumed to have produced his work out of some unusually pure sort of inner compulsion, rather than in response to other art. Darger spent nearly all his" ], [ "Thank Heaven for Little Girls \n\n \n\n Is it tasteless to suggest of JonBenet Ramsey--the cute, blond 6-year-old from Colorado who was strangled to death a few weeks ago--that it is her grisly death, rather than her career as a juvenile beauty queen, that makes her so uncannily resemble a girl in a fairy tale? For while a pageant princess is merely tacky, a murdered pageant princess takes her place in the illustrious line of pretty young girls in what, pace multiculturalists, we might call our collective lore, to meet, or at least be threatened with, a gruesome end. Little Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks, Gretel, Alice--there is an intimate connection in our culture, it would seem, between being a sweet young miss and getting garroted.", "eccentrically magnificent watercolors by the late painter and writer Henry Darger. If Darger were alive today, he would be fascinated by the story of JonBenet. Darger collected clippings on the subject of little girls, murdered and otherwise, and went", "By curious coincidence, this fairy-tale conjunction of appealing nymphets and gory murder is currently the subject of an unusual show at the Museum of American Folk Art in New York: an exhibition of", "Indeed the screams and pleads of the victims could not be described, and thousands of mothers went insane over the scene, or even committed suicide. ... About nearly 56,789 children were literally cut up like a butcher does a calf, after being strangled or slain, in all ways, indeed the sights of the bloody windrows [sic] , with their intestines exposed or gushed out, was a sight that no one could bear to witness without losing their reason. Hearts of children were hung up by strings to the walls of houses, so many of the bleeding bodies had been cut up that they looked as if they had gone through a machine of knives. \n\n The writing also complicates the naked-girl scenes in the pictures, since it combines vintage Darger bloodthirstiness with the gentlest, softest grandpa porn. For instance, \"The little girls were even glad to leave the building, which they hastily did after looking for their clothes which they could not find, having to leave in their nighties.\"", "It's true that Darger's more gruesome pictures can be a little disturbing. But think of Darger in the context either of children's books and cartoons (anything from Tom & Jerry to the terrifyingly brutal but also extremely popular German children's book Strumpelpeter ) or of contemporary art (Maggie Robbins' 1989 \"Barbie Fetish,\" for instance--a naked Barbie doll stuck all over with little nails), and it's MacGregor who begins to look like the outsider. Indeed, seen in a contemporary light, Darger begins to look like a progenitor of that rather common, campy sensibility--what might be called Mouseketeer Gothic--that sees angelic pop-culture figures as actually creepy and frightening. (Think \"It's a Small World\" or David Lynch.)", "It's ironic, too, that critics such as MacGregor persist in seeing Darger as an unself-conscious obsessive, unable to separate his life from his created fantasy world, since in fact Darger's work is full of precisely the sort of self-referentiality that in a contemporary insider artist would be read as a rather ordinary example of postmodern detachment. Many of Darger's watercolors, for instance, include depictions of framed pictures whose images are indistinguishable from the images outside them. In the written epic, Darger himself appears as several different characters, on both sides of the conflict--private Darger, Darger the war correspondent, volcanology expert Hendro Dargar, etc. Darger's very title draws attention to the fact that the epic takes place \"in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal.\" And the written version of Darger's epic even contains a number of amusing references to the strange task of drawing and writing about Darger's own grisly subject. To wit:", "About noon, a frenzied mob of Glandelinians came swarming for the prison of Violet and her sisters. The standards they followed were the heads and even gashed bodies of six beautiful little children, with their intestines protruding from their bellies, and every one of these were on pikes dripping with blood. ... \n\n [When Violet and her sisters appeared] they thrust up on to their windows the heads and bodies of these lovely children, and managed to cast them inside amongst them. Then, bursting into the doors, they thrust the heads into their laps, ordering them to make a copy of them in pencil. \n\n Although it seems to them that they would die of horror, [Violet and her sisters] thought it best to obey. ... [T]hey started to draw the hideous bodies and heads, being good at drawing pictures in the most perfect form.", "What to make of this? Depending on your taste, you might conclude that Darger is indeed a deranged outsider confusing himself with his characters. Or you might see him as a latter-day Grimm, in whose macabre universe getting your intestines torn out and sketching other children's severed heads are regrettable but quite ordinary parts of life as a little girl. On either interpretation, though, the paintings remain extraordinary, and extraordinarily beautiful.", "The Darger watercolors on exhibit include both peacetime tableaux of tiny lassies, some naked, some in dresses, disporting themselves among butterflies and enormous flowers and odd little birds--and scenes of maniacal carnage, in which the same tiny lassies are strangled naked (distorted faces, tongues stuck out) and disemboweled by merciless Glandelinians. (Presumably in anticipation of a fainter-hearted audience, the gorier pictures were excluded from last year's Darger exhibition at the University of Iowa, of which this show is an expanded version.) Some paintings combine the two types of scenes, with comic nonchalance. In one, a group of placid girls jump rope while immediately behind them lie the severed heads of three men, horrified expressions on their faces, and pairs of disembodied hands (their own? their murderers?) still clenched around their necks. In all paintings, the colors are extraordinary and fantastical--a cross between Yellow Submarine and a pastel version of Matisse.", "Of the enormous quantity of material Darger produced, his watercolors have received the lion's share of attention. The Museum of American Folk Art did sponsor a reading of passages from the written version of Vivian Girls . Still, it's a pity there's none of Darger's writing in the exhibition itself, because it's marvelous, strange stuff, quite as startling as the paintings--in dizzying magnitude as well as vividness, since in the written version, Darger's gory battle scenes extend for hundreds of pages. Take this excerpt, for instance (don't read this if you're squeamish):", "crazy stuff; how he couldn't distinguish between fantasy and reality; how he was a potential serial killer; how he got sexually excited writing descriptions of burning forests. MacGregor careers from the vulgar Freudian to the idiosyncratically bizarre--for instance, \"The", "The outsider-art movement responsible for raising Darger from obscurity to fame is a rapidly expanding niche of the art world that has come into its own in this country in the past decade or so: The fifth annual Outsider Art Fair took place a couple of weeks ago in New York; there is a new federally funded museum devoted to outsider art in Baltimore. These days, pieces by the most popular outsider artists, of which Darger is one, are priced in the mid to high five-figures.", "home, his landlord opened up his room and discovered, amid piles of presumably artistic debris (hundreds of pairs of smashed eyeglasses, balls of string, old pairs of shoes, scores of empty Pepto-Bismol bottles), one 2,600-page autobiography, an", "on to write and illustrate a truly amazing, Scheherazadean 15,145-page epic about seven cute prepubescent sisters being tortured by brutish men who like to capture little girls in order to enslave them and torture them and take their clothes", "something in a bowl, a girl sitting on a fence, a girl running fearfully away from something, her school bag flying out behind her. Often these repeated images are rendered identically (same colors, no alterations in the pose), and sometimes they", "Chief culprit in Darger's case is one John MacGregor, an art historian to whom Darger's former landlord, now his executor, has bequeathed semi-exclusive access to some of the Darger material, and who is thus the main disseminator of", "Darger criticism. Despite the fact that virtually nothing is known about Darger's inner life, MacGregor (typically, for a critic of outsider art) writes confidently about how compulsive Darger was; how he couldn't control his urge to produce all that", "But while the notion of outsider art has proved an effective marketing concept, it is often an unfortunate interpretive one--outsider artists tend to attract a particularly crude and irritating kind of psycho-biographical analysis.", "trauma of [Darger's mother's] death was represented in his later life by an obsessional preoccupation with weather.\" \"Clearly,\" MacGregor wrote in a 1992 exhibition catalog, \"Darger was not free.\"", "even appear next to each other in series of as many as eight. But the effect is not at all proto-Warhol. It's subtler, less programmatic. It's reminiscent, if anything, of those groups of angels or monks or soldiers in" ], [ "Darger is what is known as an \"outsider\" artist--which is to say that he didn't receive any formal art training; was not, during his lifetime, part of the art world; and was exposed", "What to make of this? Depending on your taste, you might conclude that Darger is indeed a deranged outsider confusing himself with his characters. Or you might see him as a latter-day Grimm, in whose macabre universe getting your intestines torn out and sketching other children's severed heads are regrettable but quite ordinary parts of life as a little girl. On either interpretation, though, the paintings remain extraordinary, and extraordinarily beautiful.", "It's ironic, too, that critics such as MacGregor persist in seeing Darger as an unself-conscious obsessive, unable to separate his life from his created fantasy world, since in fact Darger's work is full of precisely the sort of self-referentiality that in a contemporary insider artist would be read as a rather ordinary example of postmodern detachment. Many of Darger's watercolors, for instance, include depictions of framed pictures whose images are indistinguishable from the images outside them. In the written epic, Darger himself appears as several different characters, on both sides of the conflict--private Darger, Darger the war correspondent, volcanology expert Hendro Dargar, etc. Darger's very title draws attention to the fact that the epic takes place \"in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal.\" And the written version of Darger's epic even contains a number of amusing references to the strange task of drawing and writing about Darger's own grisly subject. To wit:", "It's true that Darger's more gruesome pictures can be a little disturbing. But think of Darger in the context either of children's books and cartoons (anything from Tom & Jerry to the terrifyingly brutal but also extremely popular German children's book Strumpelpeter ) or of contemporary art (Maggie Robbins' 1989 \"Barbie Fetish,\" for instance--a naked Barbie doll stuck all over with little nails), and it's MacGregor who begins to look like the outsider. Indeed, seen in a contemporary light, Darger begins to look like a progenitor of that rather common, campy sensibility--what might be called Mouseketeer Gothic--that sees angelic pop-culture figures as actually creepy and frightening. (Think \"It's a Small World\" or David Lynch.)", "eccentrically magnificent watercolors by the late painter and writer Henry Darger. If Darger were alive today, he would be fascinated by the story of JonBenet. Darger collected clippings on the subject of little girls, murdered and otherwise, and went", "Darger criticism. Despite the fact that virtually nothing is known about Darger's inner life, MacGregor (typically, for a critic of outsider art) writes confidently about how compulsive Darger was; how he couldn't control his urge to produce all that", "very little, if at all, to traditional art in general. As such, he is presumed to have produced his work out of some unusually pure sort of inner compulsion, rather than in response to other art. Darger spent nearly all his", "The Darger watercolors on exhibit include both peacetime tableaux of tiny lassies, some naked, some in dresses, disporting themselves among butterflies and enormous flowers and odd little birds--and scenes of maniacal carnage, in which the same tiny lassies are strangled naked (distorted faces, tongues stuck out) and disemboweled by merciless Glandelinians. (Presumably in anticipation of a fainter-hearted audience, the gorier pictures were excluded from last year's Darger exhibition at the University of Iowa, of which this show is an expanded version.) Some paintings combine the two types of scenes, with comic nonchalance. In one, a group of placid girls jump rope while immediately behind them lie the severed heads of three men, horrified expressions on their faces, and pairs of disembodied hands (their own? their murderers?) still clenched around their necks. In all paintings, the colors are extraordinary and fantastical--a cross between Yellow Submarine and a pastel version of Matisse.", "Indeed the screams and pleads of the victims could not be described, and thousands of mothers went insane over the scene, or even committed suicide. ... About nearly 56,789 children were literally cut up like a butcher does a calf, after being strangled or slain, in all ways, indeed the sights of the bloody windrows [sic] , with their intestines exposed or gushed out, was a sight that no one could bear to witness without losing their reason. Hearts of children were hung up by strings to the walls of houses, so many of the bleeding bodies had been cut up that they looked as if they had gone through a machine of knives. \n\n The writing also complicates the naked-girl scenes in the pictures, since it combines vintage Darger bloodthirstiness with the gentlest, softest grandpa porn. For instance, \"The little girls were even glad to leave the building, which they hastily did after looking for their clothes which they could not find, having to leave in their nighties.\"", "The outsider-art movement responsible for raising Darger from obscurity to fame is a rapidly expanding niche of the art world that has come into its own in this country in the past decade or so: The fifth annual Outsider Art Fair took place a couple of weeks ago in New York; there is a new federally funded museum devoted to outsider art in Baltimore. These days, pieces by the most popular outsider artists, of which Darger is one, are priced in the mid to high five-figures.", "Of the enormous quantity of material Darger produced, his watercolors have received the lion's share of attention. The Museum of American Folk Art did sponsor a reading of passages from the written version of Vivian Girls . Still, it's a pity there's none of Darger's writing in the exhibition itself, because it's marvelous, strange stuff, quite as startling as the paintings--in dizzying magnitude as well as vividness, since in the written version, Darger's gory battle scenes extend for hundreds of pages. Take this excerpt, for instance (don't read this if you're squeamish):", "the illustrations more or less intact; in others he stripped off the girls' clothes and added penises (all his naked girls have penises). Several images appear over and over again in Darger's work, often within the same painting--a girl mixing", "Chief culprit in Darger's case is one John MacGregor, an art historian to whom Darger's former landlord, now his executor, has bequeathed semi-exclusive access to some of the Darger material, and who is thus the main disseminator of", "trauma of [Darger's mother's] death was represented in his later life by an obsessional preoccupation with weather.\" \"Clearly,\" MacGregor wrote in a 1992 exhibition catalog, \"Darger was not free.\"", "Darger produced a lot of his little-girl pictures by tracing comic strips or magazine illustrations (on occasion he cut pictures out and stuck them on the paintings directly). In some works he transposed", "crazy stuff; how he couldn't distinguish between fantasy and reality; how he was a potential serial killer; how he got sexually excited writing descriptions of burning forests. MacGregor careers from the vulgar Freudian to the idiosyncratically bizarre--for instance, \"The", "off. In the course of Darger's story--titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnean War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion --the sisters (the", "1892, sent to a Catholic boys home at 8, and then placed in an institution for the feebleminded, from which he escaped at the age of 16. Shortly before his death in 1973, after Darger moved out to a nursing", "home, his landlord opened up his room and discovered, amid piles of presumably artistic debris (hundreds of pairs of smashed eyeglasses, balls of string, old pairs of shoes, scores of empty Pepto-Bismol bottles), one 2,600-page autobiography, an", "By curious coincidence, this fairy-tale conjunction of appealing nymphets and gory murder is currently the subject of an unusual show at the Museum of American Folk Art in New York: an exhibition of" ], [ "It's ironic, too, that critics such as MacGregor persist in seeing Darger as an unself-conscious obsessive, unable to separate his life from his created fantasy world, since in fact Darger's work is full of precisely the sort of self-referentiality that in a contemporary insider artist would be read as a rather ordinary example of postmodern detachment. Many of Darger's watercolors, for instance, include depictions of framed pictures whose images are indistinguishable from the images outside them. In the written epic, Darger himself appears as several different characters, on both sides of the conflict--private Darger, Darger the war correspondent, volcanology expert Hendro Dargar, etc. Darger's very title draws attention to the fact that the epic takes place \"in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal.\" And the written version of Darger's epic even contains a number of amusing references to the strange task of drawing and writing about Darger's own grisly subject. To wit:", "Darger is what is known as an \"outsider\" artist--which is to say that he didn't receive any formal art training; was not, during his lifetime, part of the art world; and was exposed", "Darger criticism. Despite the fact that virtually nothing is known about Darger's inner life, MacGregor (typically, for a critic of outsider art) writes confidently about how compulsive Darger was; how he couldn't control his urge to produce all that", "What to make of this? Depending on your taste, you might conclude that Darger is indeed a deranged outsider confusing himself with his characters. Or you might see him as a latter-day Grimm, in whose macabre universe getting your intestines torn out and sketching other children's severed heads are regrettable but quite ordinary parts of life as a little girl. On either interpretation, though, the paintings remain extraordinary, and extraordinarily beautiful.", "eccentrically magnificent watercolors by the late painter and writer Henry Darger. If Darger were alive today, he would be fascinated by the story of JonBenet. Darger collected clippings on the subject of little girls, murdered and otherwise, and went", "It's true that Darger's more gruesome pictures can be a little disturbing. But think of Darger in the context either of children's books and cartoons (anything from Tom & Jerry to the terrifyingly brutal but also extremely popular German children's book Strumpelpeter ) or of contemporary art (Maggie Robbins' 1989 \"Barbie Fetish,\" for instance--a naked Barbie doll stuck all over with little nails), and it's MacGregor who begins to look like the outsider. Indeed, seen in a contemporary light, Darger begins to look like a progenitor of that rather common, campy sensibility--what might be called Mouseketeer Gothic--that sees angelic pop-culture figures as actually creepy and frightening. (Think \"It's a Small World\" or David Lynch.)", "very little, if at all, to traditional art in general. As such, he is presumed to have produced his work out of some unusually pure sort of inner compulsion, rather than in response to other art. Darger spent nearly all his", "trauma of [Darger's mother's] death was represented in his later life by an obsessional preoccupation with weather.\" \"Clearly,\" MacGregor wrote in a 1992 exhibition catalog, \"Darger was not free.\"", "Indeed the screams and pleads of the victims could not be described, and thousands of mothers went insane over the scene, or even committed suicide. ... About nearly 56,789 children were literally cut up like a butcher does a calf, after being strangled or slain, in all ways, indeed the sights of the bloody windrows [sic] , with their intestines exposed or gushed out, was a sight that no one could bear to witness without losing their reason. Hearts of children were hung up by strings to the walls of houses, so many of the bleeding bodies had been cut up that they looked as if they had gone through a machine of knives. \n\n The writing also complicates the naked-girl scenes in the pictures, since it combines vintage Darger bloodthirstiness with the gentlest, softest grandpa porn. For instance, \"The little girls were even glad to leave the building, which they hastily did after looking for their clothes which they could not find, having to leave in their nighties.\"", "Of the enormous quantity of material Darger produced, his watercolors have received the lion's share of attention. The Museum of American Folk Art did sponsor a reading of passages from the written version of Vivian Girls . Still, it's a pity there's none of Darger's writing in the exhibition itself, because it's marvelous, strange stuff, quite as startling as the paintings--in dizzying magnitude as well as vividness, since in the written version, Darger's gory battle scenes extend for hundreds of pages. Take this excerpt, for instance (don't read this if you're squeamish):", "the illustrations more or less intact; in others he stripped off the girls' clothes and added penises (all his naked girls have penises). Several images appear over and over again in Darger's work, often within the same painting--a girl mixing", "The outsider-art movement responsible for raising Darger from obscurity to fame is a rapidly expanding niche of the art world that has come into its own in this country in the past decade or so: The fifth annual Outsider Art Fair took place a couple of weeks ago in New York; there is a new federally funded museum devoted to outsider art in Baltimore. These days, pieces by the most popular outsider artists, of which Darger is one, are priced in the mid to high five-figures.", "Chief culprit in Darger's case is one John MacGregor, an art historian to whom Darger's former landlord, now his executor, has bequeathed semi-exclusive access to some of the Darger material, and who is thus the main disseminator of", "Darger produced a lot of his little-girl pictures by tracing comic strips or magazine illustrations (on occasion he cut pictures out and stuck them on the paintings directly). In some works he transposed", "off. In the course of Darger's story--titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnean War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion --the sisters (the", "The Darger watercolors on exhibit include both peacetime tableaux of tiny lassies, some naked, some in dresses, disporting themselves among butterflies and enormous flowers and odd little birds--and scenes of maniacal carnage, in which the same tiny lassies are strangled naked (distorted faces, tongues stuck out) and disemboweled by merciless Glandelinians. (Presumably in anticipation of a fainter-hearted audience, the gorier pictures were excluded from last year's Darger exhibition at the University of Iowa, of which this show is an expanded version.) Some paintings combine the two types of scenes, with comic nonchalance. In one, a group of placid girls jump rope while immediately behind them lie the severed heads of three men, horrified expressions on their faces, and pairs of disembodied hands (their own? their murderers?) still clenched around their necks. In all paintings, the colors are extraordinary and fantastical--a cross between Yellow Submarine and a pastel version of Matisse.", "1892, sent to a Catholic boys home at 8, and then placed in an institution for the feebleminded, from which he escaped at the age of 16. Shortly before his death in 1973, after Darger moved out to a nursing", "crazy stuff; how he couldn't distinguish between fantasy and reality; how he was a potential serial killer; how he got sexually excited writing descriptions of burning forests. MacGregor careers from the vulgar Freudian to the idiosyncratically bizarre--for instance, \"The", "home, his landlord opened up his room and discovered, amid piles of presumably artistic debris (hundreds of pairs of smashed eyeglasses, balls of string, old pairs of shoes, scores of empty Pepto-Bismol bottles), one 2,600-page autobiography, an", "About noon, a frenzied mob of Glandelinians came swarming for the prison of Violet and her sisters. The standards they followed were the heads and even gashed bodies of six beautiful little children, with their intestines protruding from their bellies, and every one of these were on pikes dripping with blood. ... \n\n [When Violet and her sisters appeared] they thrust up on to their windows the heads and bodies of these lovely children, and managed to cast them inside amongst them. Then, bursting into the doors, they thrust the heads into their laps, ordering them to make a copy of them in pencil. \n\n Although it seems to them that they would die of horror, [Violet and her sisters] thought it best to obey. ... [T]hey started to draw the hideous bodies and heads, being good at drawing pictures in the most perfect form." ] ]
test	51321	[ "How did George win the battle to keep his \"man cave\" inviolate from Marge's intrusions?", "How does one disable one of the Prime androids?", "In the Battle of the Sexes described in this story, whose side, ultimately, does this author come down on?", "When George finds out about the Bermuda tickets and goes home to an empty house, what has happened?", "What are the laws concerning Ego Prime androids?", "George didn't like the looks of the black market Prime android salesman. Was his gut instinct correct?", "What functionality is it implied that Super Deluxe Prime androids have that is lacking in lower models?", "What unexpected (to George) thing happened very quickly once the George Prime started interacting with Marge?", "After his first extramarital conquest, the new secretary, why did George pursue more office girls?" ]	[ [ "George put a lock on the workshop and when she would get a locksmith to make a new key, he would get a more advanced lock, till finally she could not get in any more.", "He told her to keep out, but she went in anyway. He left little \"spy traps,\" which she tripped. Years of consistently being berated every time she entered the workshop finally made her give up.", "George and his neighbor both had the same problem, so the neighbor set up at George's house and George had his man cave at the neighbor's.", "George moved his \"retreat\" to a garage-sized self-storage facility cube that Marge didn't know about." ], [ "Each buyer of a Prime android is given a remote control fob that can turn the android off instantly.", "One issues the \"recall\" command, and once the android is on its charging station, one cuts the power.", "By pushing on a little low spot in the skull above the ear.", "There is an off switch hidden by the hairline on the back of the neck." ], [ "They both win. Marge is freed from a loveless marriage, and George now has a combination house maid and blow-up doll, which is all he really wanted in the first place.", "The man wins because Marge's reputation was ruined by leaving her husband.", "Neither wins, because neither is happy in the end.", "The woman wins the prize for being clever enough to escape her loveless marriage with an inveterate cheat. Everyone will soon know that Marge left George, which will be humiliating for him." ], [ "Marge had George Prime repurposed as Marge Prime, and she ran off, while Marge Prime came home to greet George.", "George Prime and Marge ran off together to Bermuda.", "Marge learned about George Prime and sent him back to the factory because she wanted her flesh and blood husband back.", "Marge deactivated George Prime and put him back on the charging station, and she threatens George with exposing the illegal Prime android if he doesn't give her a divorce settlement with generous alimony." ], [ "They are completely illegal in all forms.", "One can buy a Utility model, a Deluxe or a Super Deluxe, provided that one fills out the right forms and registers it at the appropriate government office.", "Basic models were allowed under very strict circumstances.", "You can get a Utility model without much trouble, and if you upgrade it at home, no one will ever know." ], [ "Yes. The salesman told him that the Super Deluxe would be updated daily, but it turned out the company only updated it every two months.", "Yes. The salesman promised George a Super Deluxe model, but only delivered a Deluxe.", "No. There is no evidence that George was cheated by the Prime salesman. His friend Harry cheated him, though, by taking kickbacks from the middlemen for sending business their way.", "No. The story provides no evidence that George was cheated by the Prime salesman. His friend Harry paid the right bribes and greased the skids." ], [ "It is implied that the Super Deluxe models can take a licking and keep on ticking - for the more exotic tastes in bedroom gymnastics.", "It is implied that they have superior networks of Neuro-pantographs that allow them to be updated wirelessly and to be able to store more relevant information, like favorite recipes.", "It is implied that they can perform marital bedroom duties that eliminate awkwardness in situations between couples.", "It is implied that the Super Deluxe models, unlike the others, can replace a person who wants to be elsewhere not just at home, but also in the office, which takes more memory." ], [ "George noticed that his workshop was cleaner than it had been for years.", "Marge started having an affair with Harry Folsom.", "George realized just how little he cared about Marge anymore.", "Marge and George Prime stopped arguing and seemed to be getting along very well." ], [ "The first girl decided she didn't want to be a side piece, and she got married.", "He got bored with just the first girl, whose conversational skills were limited.", "George's boss developed an interest in the first girl, and discretion being the better part of valor, he moved on.", "He realized that he preferred redheads, and the first girl had dark hair." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "With some men, it's just a box on their dressers, or a desk, or a\n corner of an unused back room. But I had set my sights high early in\n the game. With me, it was the whole workshop in the garage.\nAt first, Marge tried open warfare. She had to clean the place up, she\n said. I told her I didn't\nwant\nher to clean it up. She could clean\n the whole house as often as she chose, but\nI\nwould clean up the\n workshop.\n\n\n After a couple of sharp engagements on that field, Marge staged a\n strategic withdrawal and reorganized her attack. A little pile of wood\n shavings would be on the workshop floor one night and be gone the next.\n A wrench would be back on the rack—upside down, of course. An open\n paint can would have a cover on it.", "Every man who's been married eight years has a sanctuary. He builds it\n up and maintains it against assault in the very teeth of his wife's\n natural instinct to clean, poke, pry and rearrange things. Sometimes\n it takes him years of diligent work to establish his hideout and be\n confident that it will stay inviolate, but if he starts early enough,\n and sticks with it long enough, and is fierce enough and persistent\n enough and crafty enough, he'll probably win in the end. The girls hate\n him for it, but he'll win.", "But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\nMarge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having\n a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first—I was\n hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out\n for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought\n me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a\n good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n\n\n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to\n mellow sometime.\n\n\n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too\n much.", "One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really\n meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which\n happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by\n candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly\n because I liked it.\n\n\n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old\n times.\nVery\nold times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge\n again—really\nlooking\nat her, watching the light catch in her hair,\n almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not\n glint.\n\n\n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night,\n she was practically ravishing.\n\n\n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the\n workshop.", "Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour\n or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big\n closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a\n manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night,\n there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n\n\n After supper, I went out to the workshop—to get the pipe I'd left\n there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and\n switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n\n\n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n\n\n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the\n house.\n\n\n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n\n\n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on\n the corner and headed uptown.", "\"Georgie?\" she said.\n\n\n \"Uh?\"\n\n\n \"Do you still love me?\"\n\n\n I set the paper down and stared at her. \"How's that? Of course I\n still—\"\n\n\n \"Well, sometimes you don't act much like it.\"\n\n\n \"Mm. I guess I've—uh—got an awful headache tonight.\" Damn that\n perfume!\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said Marge.\n\n\n \"In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep—\"\n\n\n \"Sleep,\" said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her\n voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand.", "\"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's\n feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it\n was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, George.\"\n\n\n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, George.\"\n\n\n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous\n redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle\n except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and\n wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\nThe next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a\n liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \"\nWhat\n are you doing out on the street?\n\"\n\n\n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"", "I knew better than to try. Marge was already so jealous that I couldn't\n even smile at the company receptionist without a twinge of guilt. Give\n Marge something real to howl about, and I'd be ready for the Rehab\n Center in a week.\n\n\n But I'd underestimated Marge. She didn't need anything real, as I found\n out when Jeree came along.\n\n\n Business was booming and the secretaries at the office got shuffled\n around from time to time. Since I had an executive-type job, I got an\n executive-type secretary. Her name was Jeree and she was gorgeous. As\n a matter of fact, she was better than gorgeous. She was the sort of\n secretary every businessman ought to have in his office. Not to do any\n work—just to sit there.", "It's so\npermanent\n.\n\n\n Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the\n Blissful 'Fifties—but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968,\n and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got\n their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse\n Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if\n I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved.\n\n\n You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man\n has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime.\n\n\n So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep\n Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long.", "As I said, the old Marge was never like the new one. Marge Prime makes\n Jeree and Sybil and Dorothy and Dawn and Jane and Ruby all look pretty\n sad by comparison.\n\n\n She cooks like a dream and she always brings me my pipe and slippers.\n As they say, there's nothing a man likes more than to be appreciated.\n\n\n A hundred per cent appreciated, with a factory guarantee to correct any\n slippage, which would only be temporary, anyhow.\n\n\n One of these days, we'll take that second honeymoon. But I think we'll\n go to Hawaii.", "\"But you're not supposed to be off the premises—\"\n\n\n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her\n husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n\n\n \"Well, certainly not—\"\n\n\n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get\n suspicious.\"\n\n\n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint—\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing\n to do.\nYou\nwould have done it. At least that's what my judgment\n center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n\n\n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I\n don't want it to happen again.\"", "\"Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing\n him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of\n his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to\n run off with him to Hawaii or someplace.\"\n\n\n \"Bermuda,\" I said.\n\n\n And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek\n against my chest.\n\n\n \"Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be,\" she said. \"He\n was like you, but he wasn't\nyou\n, darling. And all I ever want is you.\n I just never appreciated you before....\"\n\n\n I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George\n Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. \"But what\n did you do with him?\"", "Then I heard the front door open and there was Marge, her arms full of\n grocery bundles. \"Why, darling! You're home early!\"\n\n\n I just blinked for a moment. Then I said, \"You're still here!\"\n\n\n \"Of course. Where did you think I'd be?\"\n\n\n \"But I thought—I mean the ticket office—\"\n\n\n She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes,\n almost smiling, half reproachful. \"You didn't really think I'd go\n running off with something out of a lab, did you?\"\n\n\n \"Then—you knew?\"", "The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the\n corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an\n early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the\n corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n\n\n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living\n room windows.\n\n\n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight\n long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly\n fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little,\n the lights went off.\n\n\n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\nI dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I\n could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I\n punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n\n\n George Prime didn't come out.", "The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was\n beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control—I\n could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for\n a complete recircuiting—but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice\n job.\n\n\n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized\n with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss,\n despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After\n dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and\n said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by\n the fire.\n\n\n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living\n room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair\n I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite\n perfume.", "She had a tongue like a #10 wood rasp and a list of grievances long\n enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was\n crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was pointing out in chilling\n detail exactly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband,\n which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a \"beastly\n headache\" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half\n she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we\n got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case.\nMaybe we just weren't meant for each other. I don't know. I used to\n envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live\n with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a\n while with one of the stenographers and get away with it.", "We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start\n for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car,\n business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n\n\n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into\n the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him\n off and then drove away in the car.\n\n\n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\nNeedless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle\n with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n\n\n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a\n little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all\n the time—he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that\n he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same\n whenever I took him out of his closet.", "\"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool\n me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when\n I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n\n\n \"There must be\nsomething\n.\"\n\n\n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time\n telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention\n to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can\n give you page references.\"\n\n\n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts\n run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell\n when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n\n\n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said.\nI'd\nnever managed to\n warm Marge up much.\n\n\n \"I try,\" said George Prime.", "Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his\n right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and\n that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened\n before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known\n all about George Prime.\nFor how long?\nWhen I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his\n closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n\n\n They were gone.\n\n\n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I\n couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with\n an android.\n\n\n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime\n wandering around.\n\n\n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n\n\n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n\n\n It was indecent.", "\"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn\n to like her after a bit.\"\n\n\n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you?\n Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n\n\n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure\n you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any\n foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n\n\n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for\n the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop,\n and you take over.\"\n\n\n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"" ], [ "George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on\n the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same\n mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical\n difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression\n buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop\n George Prime dead in his tracks.\n\n\n He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a\n pile of gears.\n\n\n I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course.", "The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the\n corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an\n early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the\n corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n\n\n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living\n room windows.\n\n\n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight\n long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly\n fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little,\n the lights went off.\n\n\n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\nI dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I\n could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I\n punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n\n\n George Prime didn't come out.", "Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his\n right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and\n that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened\n before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known\n all about George Prime.\nFor how long?\nWhen I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his\n closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n\n\n They were gone.\n\n\n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I\n couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with\n an android.\n\n\n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime\n wandering around.\n\n\n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n\n\n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n\n\n It was indecent.", "Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour\n or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big\n closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a\n manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night,\n there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n\n\n After supper, I went out to the workshop—to get the pipe I'd left\n there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and\n switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n\n\n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n\n\n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the\n house.\n\n\n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n\n\n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on\n the corner and headed uptown.", "George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded\n neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought\n what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The\n only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime\n did.\n\n\n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make\n the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders,\n he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my\n signature. It would hold up in court.\n\n\n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted\n girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time\n I chose, he'd do that, too.", "We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start\n for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car,\n business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n\n\n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into\n the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him\n off and then drove away in the car.\n\n\n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\nNeedless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle\n with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n\n\n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a\n little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all\n the time—he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that\n he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same\n whenever I took him out of his closet.", "From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the\n use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license\n for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a\n high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even\n then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to\n have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance\n exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how,\n why, and under what circumstances.\n\n\n The law didn't leave a man much leeway.\n\n\n But everybody knew that if you\nreally\nwanted a personal Prime with\n all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black\n market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be\n done.", "\"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool\n me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when\n I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n\n\n \"There must be\nsomething\n.\"\n\n\n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time\n telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention\n to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can\n give you page references.\"\n\n\n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts\n run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell\n when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n\n\n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said.\nI'd\nnever managed to\n warm Marge up much.\n\n\n \"I try,\" said George Prime.", "\"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's\n feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it\n was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, George.\"\n\n\n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, George.\"\n\n\n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous\n redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle\n except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and\n wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\nThe next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a\n liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \"\nWhat\n are you doing out on the street?\n\"\n\n\n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"", "\"But you're not supposed to be off the premises—\"\n\n\n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her\n husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n\n\n \"Well, certainly not—\"\n\n\n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get\n suspicious.\"\n\n\n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint—\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing\n to do.\nYou\nwould have done it. At least that's what my judgment\n center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n\n\n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I\n don't want it to happen again.\"", "George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model,\n remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this\n cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous.\n I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n\n\n So I did.\n\n\n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very\n cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after\n a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is.\n As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was\n wonderful.\n\n\n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the\n accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n\n\n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a\n reputation for myself around the office.", "\"We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our\n laboratory on 14th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I\n can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted.\"\n\n\n The blanks weren't very impressive—clay and putty and steel, faceless,\n brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all\n sorts. He was thorough—embarrassingly thorough, in fact—but finally\n he was finished. I went on to the laboratory.\n\n\n And that was all there was to it.\nPractical androids had been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the\n Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it\n once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought\n him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design,\n artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with\n the modern Ego Primes we have today.", "But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\nMarge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having\n a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first—I was\n hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out\n for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought\n me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a\n good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n\n\n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to\n mellow sometime.\n\n\n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too\n much.", "It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep\n a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a\n four-day hangover.\n\n\n Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting\n blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first\n logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly\n what he'd done.\n\n\n I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all\n right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the\n laboratory could take him.\n\n\n But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got\n to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that\n check of mine that had just bounced.\n\n\n \"What check?\" I asked.", "\"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn\n to like her after a bit.\"\n\n\n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you?\n Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n\n\n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure\n you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any\n foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n\n\n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for\n the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop,\n and you take over.\"\n\n\n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"", "Marge had always had her heart set on a trip to Bermuda. Just to get\n away from it all, she'd say. A second honeymoon.\n\n\n I got a list of travel agencies from the business directory and started\n down them. The third one I tried had a pleasant tenor voice. \"No, sir,\n not\nMrs.\nFaircloth.\nYou\nbought two tickets. One way. Champagne\n flight to Bermuda.\"\n\n\n \"When?\" I choked out.\n\n\n \"Why, today, as a matter of fact. It leaves Idlewild at eleven\n o'clock—\"\n\n\n I let him worry about my amnesia and started home fast. I didn't know\n what they'd given that Prime for circuits, but there was no question\n now that he was out of control—\nway\nout of control. And poor Marge,\n all worked up for a second honeymoon—", "I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked\n outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty\n woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the\n recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime\n when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked\n in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a\n tired look on his face.\n\"Meet George Faircloth Prime,\" the technician said, grinning at me like\n a nursing mother.\n\n\n I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly.\n Nothing flabby about it.\n\n\n I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. \"Come on, Brother,\" I\n said. \"You've got a job to do.\"\n\n\n But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night.", "\"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself\n mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n\n\n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong\n at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no\n stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n\n\n Harry Folsom administered the\ncoup de grace\nat coffee next morning.\n \"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your\n problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n\n\n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be\n ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a\n thing. It's—it's indecent.\"", "Harry shrugged. \"Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to\n think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not\n even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a\n friend who knows a guy—\"\n\n\n Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped\n my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie.\n\n\n As I said, a guy gets fed up.\n\n\n And maybe opportunity would only knock once.\n\n\n And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me.\nIt was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime,\n Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the\n nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was.", "Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the\n novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It\n took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable\n program.\n\n\n Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally \"out\" while formally\n \"in.\" Sometimes I took Sunday nights \"out\" if things got too sticky\n around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime\n cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely\n trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is.\n\n\n There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to\n quick-step some questions about my work at the office—there was no\n way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular\n two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the\n meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had." ], [ "She had a tongue like a #10 wood rasp and a list of grievances long\n enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was\n crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was pointing out in chilling\n detail exactly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband,\n which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a \"beastly\n headache\" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half\n she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we\n got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case.\nMaybe we just weren't meant for each other. I don't know. I used to\n envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live\n with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a\n while with one of the stenographers and get away with it.", "With some men, it's just a box on their dressers, or a desk, or a\n corner of an unused back room. But I had set my sights high early in\n the game. With me, it was the whole workshop in the garage.\nAt first, Marge tried open warfare. She had to clean the place up, she\n said. I told her I didn't\nwant\nher to clean it up. She could clean\n the whole house as often as she chose, but\nI\nwould clean up the\n workshop.\n\n\n After a couple of sharp engagements on that field, Marge staged a\n strategic withdrawal and reorganized her attack. A little pile of wood\n shavings would be on the workshop floor one night and be gone the next.\n A wrench would be back on the rack—upside down, of course. An open\n paint can would have a cover on it.", "One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really\n meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which\n happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by\n candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly\n because I liked it.\n\n\n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old\n times.\nVery\nold times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge\n again—really\nlooking\nat her, watching the light catch in her hair,\n almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not\n glint.\n\n\n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night,\n she was practically ravishing.\n\n\n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the\n workshop.", "\"Georgie?\" she said.\n\n\n \"Uh?\"\n\n\n \"Do you still love me?\"\n\n\n I set the paper down and stared at her. \"How's that? Of course I\n still—\"\n\n\n \"Well, sometimes you don't act much like it.\"\n\n\n \"Mm. I guess I've—uh—got an awful headache tonight.\" Damn that\n perfume!\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said Marge.\n\n\n \"In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep—\"\n\n\n \"Sleep,\" said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her\n voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand.", "But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\nMarge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having\n a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first—I was\n hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out\n for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought\n me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a\n good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n\n\n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to\n mellow sometime.\n\n\n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too\n much.", "\"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool\n me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when\n I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n\n\n \"There must be\nsomething\n.\"\n\n\n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time\n telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention\n to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can\n give you page references.\"\n\n\n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts\n run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell\n when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n\n\n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said.\nI'd\nnever managed to\n warm Marge up much.\n\n\n \"I try,\" said George Prime.", "It's so\npermanent\n.\n\n\n Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the\n Blissful 'Fifties—but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968,\n and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got\n their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse\n Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if\n I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved.\n\n\n You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man\n has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime.\n\n\n So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep\n Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long.", "\"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself\n mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n\n\n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong\n at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no\n stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n\n\n Harry Folsom administered the\ncoup de grace\nat coffee next morning.\n \"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your\n problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n\n\n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be\n ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a\n thing. It's—it's indecent.\"", "Jeree was tall and dark, and she could convey more without saying\n anything than I ever dreamed was possible. The first day she was\n there, she conveyed to me very clearly that if I cared to supply the\n opportunity, she'd be glad to supply the motive.\n\n\n That night, I could tell that Marge had been thinking something over\n during the day. She let me get the first bite of dinner halfway to my\n mouth, and then she said, \"I hear you got a new secretary today.\"\n\n\n I muttered something into my coffee cup and pretended not to hear.\n\n\n Marge turned on her Accusing Look #7. \"I also hear that she's\n five-foot-eight and tapes out at 38-25-36 and thinks you're handsome.\"\n\n\n Marge had quite a spy system.\n\n\n \"She couldn't be much of a secretary,\" she added.", "Every man who's been married eight years has a sanctuary. He builds it\n up and maintains it against assault in the very teeth of his wife's\n natural instinct to clean, poke, pry and rearrange things. Sometimes\n it takes him years of diligent work to establish his hideout and be\n confident that it will stay inviolate, but if he starts early enough,\n and sticks with it long enough, and is fierce enough and persistent\n enough and crafty enough, he'll probably win in the end. The girls hate\n him for it, but he'll win.", "Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour\n or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big\n closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a\n manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night,\n there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n\n\n After supper, I went out to the workshop—to get the pipe I'd left\n there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and\n switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n\n\n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n\n\n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the\n house.\n\n\n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n\n\n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on\n the corner and headed uptown.", "I knew better than to try. Marge was already so jealous that I couldn't\n even smile at the company receptionist without a twinge of guilt. Give\n Marge something real to howl about, and I'd be ready for the Rehab\n Center in a week.\n\n\n But I'd underestimated Marge. She didn't need anything real, as I found\n out when Jeree came along.\n\n\n Business was booming and the secretaries at the office got shuffled\n around from time to time. Since I had an executive-type job, I got an\n executive-type secretary. Her name was Jeree and she was gorgeous. As\n a matter of fact, she was better than gorgeous. She was the sort of\n secretary every businessman ought to have in his office. Not to do any\n work—just to sit there.", "Then I heard the front door open and there was Marge, her arms full of\n grocery bundles. \"Why, darling! You're home early!\"\n\n\n I just blinked for a moment. Then I said, \"You're still here!\"\n\n\n \"Of course. Where did you think I'd be?\"\n\n\n \"But I thought—I mean the ticket office—\"\n\n\n She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes,\n almost smiling, half reproachful. \"You didn't really think I'd go\n running off with something out of a lab, did you?\"\n\n\n \"Then—you knew?\"", "George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model,\n remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this\n cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous.\n I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n\n\n So I did.\n\n\n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very\n cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after\n a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is.\n As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was\n wonderful.\n\n\n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the\n accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n\n\n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a\n reputation for myself around the office.", "\"I sent him back to the factory, naturally. They said they could blot\n him out and use him over again. But let's not talk about that any more.\n We've got more interesting things to discuss.\"\n\n\n Maybe we had, but we didn't waste a lot of time talking. It was the\n Marge I'd once known and I was beginning to wonder how I could have\n been so wrong about her. In fact unless my memory was getting awfully\n porous, the old Marge was\nnever\nlike this—\n\n\n I kissed her tenderly and ran my hands through her hair, and felt\n the depression with my fore-finger, and then I knew what had really\n happened.\n\n\n That Marge always had been a sly one.\n\n\n I wondered how she was liking things in Bermuda.\nMarge probably thought she'd really put me where I belonged, but the\n laugh was on her, after all.", "\"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn\n to like her after a bit.\"\n\n\n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you?\n Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n\n\n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure\n you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any\n foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n\n\n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for\n the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop,\n and you take over.\"\n\n\n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"", "The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was\n beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control—I\n could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for\n a complete recircuiting—but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice\n job.\n\n\n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized\n with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss,\n despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After\n dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and\n said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by\n the fire.\n\n\n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living\n room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair\n I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite\n perfume.", "Harry shrugged. \"Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to\n think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not\n even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a\n friend who knows a guy—\"\n\n\n Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped\n my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie.\n\n\n As I said, a guy gets fed up.\n\n\n And maybe opportunity would only knock once.\n\n\n And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me.\nIt was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime,\n Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the\n nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was.", "The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the\n corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an\n early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the\n corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n\n\n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living\n room windows.\n\n\n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight\n long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly\n fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little,\n the lights went off.\n\n\n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\nI dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I\n could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I\n punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n\n\n George Prime didn't come out.", "As I said, the old Marge was never like the new one. Marge Prime makes\n Jeree and Sybil and Dorothy and Dawn and Jane and Ruby all look pretty\n sad by comparison.\n\n\n She cooks like a dream and she always brings me my pipe and slippers.\n As they say, there's nothing a man likes more than to be appreciated.\n\n\n A hundred per cent appreciated, with a factory guarantee to correct any\n slippage, which would only be temporary, anyhow.\n\n\n One of these days, we'll take that second honeymoon. But I think we'll\n go to Hawaii." ], [ "One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really\n meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which\n happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by\n candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly\n because I liked it.\n\n\n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old\n times.\nVery\nold times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge\n again—really\nlooking\nat her, watching the light catch in her hair,\n almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not\n glint.\n\n\n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night,\n she was practically ravishing.\n\n\n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the\n workshop.", "\"Georgie?\" she said.\n\n\n \"Uh?\"\n\n\n \"Do you still love me?\"\n\n\n I set the paper down and stared at her. \"How's that? Of course I\n still—\"\n\n\n \"Well, sometimes you don't act much like it.\"\n\n\n \"Mm. I guess I've—uh—got an awful headache tonight.\" Damn that\n perfume!\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said Marge.\n\n\n \"In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep—\"\n\n\n \"Sleep,\" said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her\n voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand.", "\"Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing\n him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of\n his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to\n run off with him to Hawaii or someplace.\"\n\n\n \"Bermuda,\" I said.\n\n\n And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek\n against my chest.\n\n\n \"Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be,\" she said. \"He\n was like you, but he wasn't\nyou\n, darling. And all I ever want is you.\n I just never appreciated you before....\"\n\n\n I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George\n Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. \"But what\n did you do with him?\"", "She had a tongue like a #10 wood rasp and a list of grievances long\n enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was\n crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was pointing out in chilling\n detail exactly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband,\n which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a \"beastly\n headache\" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half\n she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we\n got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case.\nMaybe we just weren't meant for each other. I don't know. I used to\n envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live\n with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a\n while with one of the stenographers and get away with it.", "But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\nMarge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having\n a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first—I was\n hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out\n for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought\n me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a\n good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n\n\n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to\n mellow sometime.\n\n\n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too\n much.", "Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his\n right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and\n that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened\n before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known\n all about George Prime.\nFor how long?\nWhen I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his\n closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n\n\n They were gone.\n\n\n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I\n couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with\n an android.\n\n\n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime\n wandering around.\n\n\n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n\n\n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n\n\n It was indecent.", "We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start\n for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car,\n business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n\n\n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into\n the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him\n off and then drove away in the car.\n\n\n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\nNeedless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle\n with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n\n\n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a\n little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all\n the time—he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that\n he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same\n whenever I took him out of his closet.", "Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour\n or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big\n closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a\n manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night,\n there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n\n\n After supper, I went out to the workshop—to get the pipe I'd left\n there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and\n switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n\n\n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n\n\n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the\n house.\n\n\n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n\n\n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on\n the corner and headed uptown.", "The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the\n corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an\n early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the\n corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n\n\n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living\n room windows.\n\n\n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight\n long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly\n fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little,\n the lights went off.\n\n\n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\nI dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I\n could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I\n punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n\n\n George Prime didn't come out.", "Then I heard the front door open and there was Marge, her arms full of\n grocery bundles. \"Why, darling! You're home early!\"\n\n\n I just blinked for a moment. Then I said, \"You're still here!\"\n\n\n \"Of course. Where did you think I'd be?\"\n\n\n \"But I thought—I mean the ticket office—\"\n\n\n She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes,\n almost smiling, half reproachful. \"You didn't really think I'd go\n running off with something out of a lab, did you?\"\n\n\n \"Then—you knew?\"", "Marge had always had her heart set on a trip to Bermuda. Just to get\n away from it all, she'd say. A second honeymoon.\n\n\n I got a list of travel agencies from the business directory and started\n down them. The third one I tried had a pleasant tenor voice. \"No, sir,\n not\nMrs.\nFaircloth.\nYou\nbought two tickets. One way. Champagne\n flight to Bermuda.\"\n\n\n \"When?\" I choked out.\n\n\n \"Why, today, as a matter of fact. It leaves Idlewild at eleven\n o'clock—\"\n\n\n I let him worry about my amnesia and started home fast. I didn't know\n what they'd given that Prime for circuits, but there was no question\n now that he was out of control—\nway\nout of control. And poor Marge,\n all worked up for a second honeymoon—", "The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was\n beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control—I\n could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for\n a complete recircuiting—but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice\n job.\n\n\n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized\n with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss,\n despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After\n dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and\n said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by\n the fire.\n\n\n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living\n room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair\n I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite\n perfume.", "\"I sent him back to the factory, naturally. They said they could blot\n him out and use him over again. But let's not talk about that any more.\n We've got more interesting things to discuss.\"\n\n\n Maybe we had, but we didn't waste a lot of time talking. It was the\n Marge I'd once known and I was beginning to wonder how I could have\n been so wrong about her. In fact unless my memory was getting awfully\n porous, the old Marge was\nnever\nlike this—\n\n\n I kissed her tenderly and ran my hands through her hair, and felt\n the depression with my fore-finger, and then I knew what had really\n happened.\n\n\n That Marge always had been a sly one.\n\n\n I wondered how she was liking things in Bermuda.\nMarge probably thought she'd really put me where I belonged, but the\n laugh was on her, after all.", "\"But you're not supposed to be off the premises—\"\n\n\n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her\n husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n\n\n \"Well, certainly not—\"\n\n\n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get\n suspicious.\"\n\n\n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint—\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing\n to do.\nYou\nwould have done it. At least that's what my judgment\n center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n\n\n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I\n don't want it to happen again.\"", "\"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's\n feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it\n was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, George.\"\n\n\n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, George.\"\n\n\n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous\n redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle\n except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and\n wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\nThe next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a\n liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \"\nWhat\n are you doing out on the street?\n\"\n\n\n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"", "George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded\n neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought\n what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The\n only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime\n did.\n\n\n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make\n the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders,\n he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my\n signature. It would hold up in court.\n\n\n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted\n girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time\n I chose, he'd do that, too.", "\"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool\n me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when\n I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n\n\n \"There must be\nsomething\n.\"\n\n\n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time\n telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention\n to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can\n give you page references.\"\n\n\n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts\n run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell\n when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n\n\n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said.\nI'd\nnever managed to\n warm Marge up much.\n\n\n \"I try,\" said George Prime.", "\"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn\n to like her after a bit.\"\n\n\n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you?\n Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n\n\n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure\n you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any\n foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n\n\n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for\n the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop,\n and you take over.\"\n\n\n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"", "It's so\npermanent\n.\n\n\n Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the\n Blissful 'Fifties—but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968,\n and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got\n their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse\n Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if\n I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved.\n\n\n You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man\n has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime.\n\n\n So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep\n Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long.", "It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep\n a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a\n four-day hangover.\n\n\n Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting\n blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first\n logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly\n what he'd done.\n\n\n I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all\n right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the\n laboratory could take him.\n\n\n But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got\n to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that\n check of mine that had just bounced.\n\n\n \"What check?\" I asked." ], [ "\"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself\n mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n\n\n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong\n at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no\n stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n\n\n Harry Folsom administered the\ncoup de grace\nat coffee next morning.\n \"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your\n problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n\n\n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be\n ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a\n thing. It's—it's indecent.\"", "From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the\n use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license\n for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a\n high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even\n then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to\n have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance\n exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how,\n why, and under what circumstances.\n\n\n The law didn't leave a man much leeway.\n\n\n But everybody knew that if you\nreally\nwanted a personal Prime with\n all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black\n market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be\n done.", "Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his\n right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and\n that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened\n before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known\n all about George Prime.\nFor how long?\nWhen I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his\n closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n\n\n They were gone.\n\n\n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I\n couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with\n an android.\n\n\n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime\n wandering around.\n\n\n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n\n\n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n\n\n It was indecent.", "We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start\n for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car,\n business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n\n\n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into\n the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him\n off and then drove away in the car.\n\n\n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\nNeedless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle\n with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n\n\n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a\n little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all\n the time—he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that\n he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same\n whenever I took him out of his closet.", "\"We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our\n laboratory on 14th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I\n can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted.\"\n\n\n The blanks weren't very impressive—clay and putty and steel, faceless,\n brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all\n sorts. He was thorough—embarrassingly thorough, in fact—but finally\n he was finished. I went on to the laboratory.\n\n\n And that was all there was to it.\nPractical androids had been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the\n Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it\n once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought\n him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design,\n artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with\n the modern Ego Primes we have today.", "Harry shrugged. \"Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to\n think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not\n even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a\n friend who knows a guy—\"\n\n\n Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped\n my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie.\n\n\n As I said, a guy gets fed up.\n\n\n And maybe opportunity would only knock once.\n\n\n And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me.\nIt was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime,\n Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the\n nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was.", "George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded\n neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought\n what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The\n only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime\n did.\n\n\n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make\n the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders,\n he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my\n signature. It would hold up in court.\n\n\n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted\n girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time\n I chose, he'd do that, too.", "George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on\n the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same\n mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical\n difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression\n buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop\n George Prime dead in his tracks.\n\n\n He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a\n pile of gears.\n\n\n I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course.", "The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the\n corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an\n early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the\n corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n\n\n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living\n room windows.\n\n\n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight\n long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly\n fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little,\n the lights went off.\n\n\n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\nI dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I\n could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I\n punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n\n\n George Prime didn't come out.", "Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour\n or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big\n closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a\n manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night,\n there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n\n\n After supper, I went out to the workshop—to get the pipe I'd left\n there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and\n switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n\n\n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n\n\n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the\n house.\n\n\n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n\n\n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on\n the corner and headed uptown.", "\"But you're not supposed to be off the premises—\"\n\n\n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her\n husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n\n\n \"Well, certainly not—\"\n\n\n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get\n suspicious.\"\n\n\n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint—\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing\n to do.\nYou\nwould have done it. At least that's what my judgment\n center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n\n\n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I\n don't want it to happen again.\"", "George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model,\n remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this\n cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous.\n I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n\n\n So I did.\n\n\n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very\n cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after\n a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is.\n As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was\n wonderful.\n\n\n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the\n accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n\n\n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a\n reputation for myself around the office.", "It's so\npermanent\n.\n\n\n Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the\n Blissful 'Fifties—but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968,\n and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got\n their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse\n Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if\n I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved.\n\n\n You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man\n has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime.\n\n\n So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep\n Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long.", "But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\nMarge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having\n a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first—I was\n hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out\n for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought\n me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a\n good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n\n\n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to\n mellow sometime.\n\n\n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too\n much.", "I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked\n outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty\n woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the\n recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime\n when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked\n in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a\n tired look on his face.\n\"Meet George Faircloth Prime,\" the technician said, grinning at me like\n a nursing mother.\n\n\n I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly.\n Nothing flabby about it.\n\n\n I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. \"Come on, Brother,\" I\n said. \"You've got a job to do.\"\n\n\n But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night.", "\"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's\n feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it\n was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, George.\"\n\n\n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, George.\"\n\n\n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous\n redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle\n except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and\n wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\nThe next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a\n liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \"\nWhat\n are you doing out on the street?\n\"\n\n\n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"", "\"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool\n me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when\n I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n\n\n \"There must be\nsomething\n.\"\n\n\n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time\n telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention\n to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can\n give you page references.\"\n\n\n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts\n run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell\n when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n\n\n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said.\nI'd\nnever managed to\n warm Marge up much.\n\n\n \"I try,\" said George Prime.", "\"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn\n to like her after a bit.\"\n\n\n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you?\n Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n\n\n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure\n you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any\n foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n\n\n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for\n the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop,\n and you take over.\"\n\n\n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"", "Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the\n novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It\n took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable\n program.\n\n\n Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally \"out\" while formally\n \"in.\" Sometimes I took Sunday nights \"out\" if things got too sticky\n around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime\n cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely\n trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is.\n\n\n There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to\n quick-step some questions about my work at the office—there was no\n way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular\n two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the\n meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had.", "It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep\n a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a\n four-day hangover.\n\n\n Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting\n blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first\n logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly\n what he'd done.\n\n\n I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all\n right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the\n laboratory could take him.\n\n\n But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got\n to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that\n check of mine that had just bounced.\n\n\n \"What check?\" I asked." ], [ "Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his\n right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and\n that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened\n before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known\n all about George Prime.\nFor how long?\nWhen I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his\n closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n\n\n They were gone.\n\n\n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I\n couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with\n an android.\n\n\n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime\n wandering around.\n\n\n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n\n\n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n\n\n It was indecent.", "George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on\n the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same\n mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical\n difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression\n buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop\n George Prime dead in his tracks.\n\n\n He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a\n pile of gears.\n\n\n I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course.", "We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start\n for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car,\n business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n\n\n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into\n the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him\n off and then drove away in the car.\n\n\n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\nNeedless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle\n with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n\n\n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a\n little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all\n the time—he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that\n he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same\n whenever I took him out of his closet.", "Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour\n or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big\n closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a\n manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night,\n there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n\n\n After supper, I went out to the workshop—to get the pipe I'd left\n there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and\n switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n\n\n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n\n\n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the\n house.\n\n\n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n\n\n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on\n the corner and headed uptown.", "The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the\n corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an\n early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the\n corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n\n\n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living\n room windows.\n\n\n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight\n long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly\n fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little,\n the lights went off.\n\n\n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\nI dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I\n could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I\n punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n\n\n George Prime didn't come out.", "But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\nMarge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having\n a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first—I was\n hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out\n for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought\n me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a\n good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n\n\n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to\n mellow sometime.\n\n\n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too\n much.", "\"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's\n feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it\n was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, George.\"\n\n\n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, George.\"\n\n\n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous\n redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle\n except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and\n wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\nThe next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a\n liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \"\nWhat\n are you doing out on the street?\n\"\n\n\n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"", "George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded\n neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought\n what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The\n only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime\n did.\n\n\n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make\n the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders,\n he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my\n signature. It would hold up in court.\n\n\n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted\n girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time\n I chose, he'd do that, too.", "\"But you're not supposed to be off the premises—\"\n\n\n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her\n husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n\n\n \"Well, certainly not—\"\n\n\n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get\n suspicious.\"\n\n\n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint—\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing\n to do.\nYou\nwould have done it. At least that's what my judgment\n center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n\n\n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I\n don't want it to happen again.\"", "\"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool\n me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when\n I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n\n\n \"There must be\nsomething\n.\"\n\n\n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time\n telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention\n to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can\n give you page references.\"\n\n\n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts\n run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell\n when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n\n\n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said.\nI'd\nnever managed to\n warm Marge up much.\n\n\n \"I try,\" said George Prime.", "\"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn\n to like her after a bit.\"\n\n\n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you?\n Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n\n\n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure\n you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any\n foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n\n\n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for\n the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop,\n and you take over.\"\n\n\n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"", "I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked\n outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty\n woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the\n recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime\n when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked\n in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a\n tired look on his face.\n\"Meet George Faircloth Prime,\" the technician said, grinning at me like\n a nursing mother.\n\n\n I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly.\n Nothing flabby about it.\n\n\n I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. \"Come on, Brother,\" I\n said. \"You've got a job to do.\"\n\n\n But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night.", "George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model,\n remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this\n cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous.\n I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n\n\n So I did.\n\n\n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very\n cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after\n a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is.\n As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was\n wonderful.\n\n\n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the\n accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n\n\n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a\n reputation for myself around the office.", "From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the\n use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license\n for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a\n high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even\n then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to\n have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance\n exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how,\n why, and under what circumstances.\n\n\n The law didn't leave a man much leeway.\n\n\n But everybody knew that if you\nreally\nwanted a personal Prime with\n all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black\n market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be\n done.", "I assumed he was just being polite. You didn't come to the back door\n for Utility models.\n\n\n \"Or perhaps you'd require one of our Deluxe models. Very careful\n workmanship. Only a few key Paralyzers in operation and practically\n complete circuit duplication. Very useful for—ah—close contact work,\n you know. Social engagements, conferences—\"\n\n\n I was shaking my head. \"I want a\nSuper\nDeluxe model,\" I told him.\n\n\n He grinned and winked. \"Ah, indeed! You want perfect duplication.\n Yes, indeed. Domestic situations can be—awkward, shall we say. Very\n awkward—\"\n\n\n I gave him a cold stare. I couldn't see where my domestic problems were\n any affairs of his. He got the idea and hurried me back to a storeroom.", "\"We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our\n laboratory on 14th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I\n can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted.\"\n\n\n The blanks weren't very impressive—clay and putty and steel, faceless,\n brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all\n sorts. He was thorough—embarrassingly thorough, in fact—but finally\n he was finished. I went on to the laboratory.\n\n\n And that was all there was to it.\nPractical androids had been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the\n Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it\n once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought\n him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design,\n artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with\n the modern Ego Primes we have today.", "It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep\n a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a\n four-day hangover.\n\n\n Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting\n blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first\n logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly\n what he'd done.\n\n\n I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all\n right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the\n laboratory could take him.\n\n\n But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got\n to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that\n check of mine that had just bounced.\n\n\n \"What check?\" I asked.", "One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really\n meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which\n happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by\n candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly\n because I liked it.\n\n\n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old\n times.\nVery\nold times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge\n again—really\nlooking\nat her, watching the light catch in her hair,\n almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not\n glint.\n\n\n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night,\n she was practically ravishing.\n\n\n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the\n workshop.", "Harry shrugged. \"Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to\n think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not\n even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a\n friend who knows a guy—\"\n\n\n Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped\n my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie.\n\n\n As I said, a guy gets fed up.\n\n\n And maybe opportunity would only knock once.\n\n\n And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me.\nIt was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime,\n Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the\n nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was.", "\"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself\n mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n\n\n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong\n at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no\n stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n\n\n Harry Folsom administered the\ncoup de grace\nat coffee next morning.\n \"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your\n problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n\n\n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be\n ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a\n thing. It's—it's indecent.\"" ], [ "But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\nMarge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having\n a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first—I was\n hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out\n for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought\n me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a\n good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n\n\n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to\n mellow sometime.\n\n\n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too\n much.", "George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model,\n remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this\n cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous.\n I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n\n\n So I did.\n\n\n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very\n cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after\n a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is.\n As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was\n wonderful.\n\n\n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the\n accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n\n\n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a\n reputation for myself around the office.", "\"We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our\n laboratory on 14th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I\n can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted.\"\n\n\n The blanks weren't very impressive—clay and putty and steel, faceless,\n brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all\n sorts. He was thorough—embarrassingly thorough, in fact—but finally\n he was finished. I went on to the laboratory.\n\n\n And that was all there was to it.\nPractical androids had been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the\n Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it\n once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought\n him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design,\n artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with\n the modern Ego Primes we have today.", "The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the\n corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an\n early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the\n corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n\n\n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living\n room windows.\n\n\n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight\n long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly\n fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little,\n the lights went off.\n\n\n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\nI dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I\n could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I\n punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n\n\n George Prime didn't come out.", "I assumed he was just being polite. You didn't come to the back door\n for Utility models.\n\n\n \"Or perhaps you'd require one of our Deluxe models. Very careful\n workmanship. Only a few key Paralyzers in operation and practically\n complete circuit duplication. Very useful for—ah—close contact work,\n you know. Social engagements, conferences—\"\n\n\n I was shaking my head. \"I want a\nSuper\nDeluxe model,\" I told him.\n\n\n He grinned and winked. \"Ah, indeed! You want perfect duplication.\n Yes, indeed. Domestic situations can be—awkward, shall we say. Very\n awkward—\"\n\n\n I gave him a cold stare. I couldn't see where my domestic problems were\n any affairs of his. He got the idea and hurried me back to a storeroom.", "We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start\n for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car,\n business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n\n\n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into\n the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him\n off and then drove away in the car.\n\n\n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\nNeedless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle\n with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n\n\n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a\n little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all\n the time—he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that\n he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same\n whenever I took him out of his closet.", "Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his\n right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and\n that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened\n before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known\n all about George Prime.\nFor how long?\nWhen I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his\n closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n\n\n They were gone.\n\n\n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I\n couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with\n an android.\n\n\n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime\n wandering around.\n\n\n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n\n\n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n\n\n It was indecent.", "George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded\n neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought\n what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The\n only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime\n did.\n\n\n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make\n the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders,\n he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my\n signature. It would hold up in court.\n\n\n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted\n girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time\n I chose, he'd do that, too.", "\"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool\n me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when\n I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n\n\n \"There must be\nsomething\n.\"\n\n\n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time\n telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention\n to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can\n give you page references.\"\n\n\n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts\n run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell\n when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n\n\n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said.\nI'd\nnever managed to\n warm Marge up much.\n\n\n \"I try,\" said George Prime.", "George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on\n the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same\n mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical\n difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression\n buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop\n George Prime dead in his tracks.\n\n\n He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a\n pile of gears.\n\n\n I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course.", "Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour\n or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big\n closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a\n manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night,\n there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n\n\n After supper, I went out to the workshop—to get the pipe I'd left\n there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and\n switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n\n\n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n\n\n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the\n house.\n\n\n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n\n\n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on\n the corner and headed uptown.", "\"But you're not supposed to be off the premises—\"\n\n\n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her\n husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n\n\n \"Well, certainly not—\"\n\n\n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get\n suspicious.\"\n\n\n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint—\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing\n to do.\nYou\nwould have done it. At least that's what my judgment\n center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n\n\n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I\n don't want it to happen again.\"", "\"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself\n mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n\n\n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong\n at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no\n stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n\n\n Harry Folsom administered the\ncoup de grace\nat coffee next morning.\n \"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your\n problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n\n\n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be\n ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a\n thing. It's—it's indecent.\"", "From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the\n use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license\n for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a\n high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even\n then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to\n have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance\n exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how,\n why, and under what circumstances.\n\n\n The law didn't leave a man much leeway.\n\n\n But everybody knew that if you\nreally\nwanted a personal Prime with\n all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black\n market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be\n done.", "\"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's\n feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it\n was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, George.\"\n\n\n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, George.\"\n\n\n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous\n redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle\n except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and\n wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\nThe next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a\n liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \"\nWhat\n are you doing out on the street?\n\"\n\n\n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"", "I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked\n outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty\n woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the\n recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime\n when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked\n in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a\n tired look on his face.\n\"Meet George Faircloth Prime,\" the technician said, grinning at me like\n a nursing mother.\n\n\n I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly.\n Nothing flabby about it.\n\n\n I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. \"Come on, Brother,\" I\n said. \"You've got a job to do.\"\n\n\n But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night.", "Harry shrugged. \"Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to\n think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not\n even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a\n friend who knows a guy—\"\n\n\n Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped\n my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie.\n\n\n As I said, a guy gets fed up.\n\n\n And maybe opportunity would only knock once.\n\n\n And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me.\nIt was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime,\n Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the\n nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was.", "\"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn\n to like her after a bit.\"\n\n\n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you?\n Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n\n\n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure\n you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any\n foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n\n\n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for\n the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop,\n and you take over.\"\n\n\n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"", "The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was\n beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control—I\n could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for\n a complete recircuiting—but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice\n job.\n\n\n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized\n with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss,\n despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After\n dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and\n said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by\n the fire.\n\n\n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living\n room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair\n I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite\n perfume.", "Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the\n novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It\n took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable\n program.\n\n\n Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally \"out\" while formally\n \"in.\" Sometimes I took Sunday nights \"out\" if things got too sticky\n around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime\n cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely\n trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is.\n\n\n There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to\n quick-step some questions about my work at the office—there was no\n way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular\n two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the\n meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had." ], [ "But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\nMarge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having\n a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first—I was\n hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out\n for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought\n me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a\n good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n\n\n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to\n mellow sometime.\n\n\n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too\n much.", "\"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's\n feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it\n was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, George.\"\n\n\n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, George.\"\n\n\n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous\n redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle\n except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and\n wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\nThe next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a\n liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \"\nWhat\n are you doing out on the street?\n\"\n\n\n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"", "One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really\n meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which\n happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by\n candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly\n because I liked it.\n\n\n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old\n times.\nVery\nold times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge\n again—really\nlooking\nat her, watching the light catch in her hair,\n almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not\n glint.\n\n\n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night,\n she was practically ravishing.\n\n\n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the\n workshop.", "Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour\n or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big\n closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a\n manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night,\n there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n\n\n After supper, I went out to the workshop—to get the pipe I'd left\n there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and\n switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n\n\n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n\n\n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the\n house.\n\n\n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n\n\n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on\n the corner and headed uptown.", "\"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool\n me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when\n I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n\n\n \"There must be\nsomething\n.\"\n\n\n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time\n telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention\n to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can\n give you page references.\"\n\n\n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts\n run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell\n when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n\n\n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said.\nI'd\nnever managed to\n warm Marge up much.\n\n\n \"I try,\" said George Prime.", "George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded\n neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought\n what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The\n only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime\n did.\n\n\n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make\n the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders,\n he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my\n signature. It would hold up in court.\n\n\n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted\n girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time\n I chose, he'd do that, too.", "The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was\n beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control—I\n could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for\n a complete recircuiting—but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice\n job.\n\n\n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized\n with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss,\n despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After\n dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and\n said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by\n the fire.\n\n\n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living\n room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair\n I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite\n perfume.", "\"But you're not supposed to be off the premises—\"\n\n\n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her\n husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n\n\n \"Well, certainly not—\"\n\n\n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get\n suspicious.\"\n\n\n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint—\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing\n to do.\nYou\nwould have done it. At least that's what my judgment\n center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n\n\n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I\n don't want it to happen again.\"", "We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start\n for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car,\n business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n\n\n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into\n the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him\n off and then drove away in the car.\n\n\n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\nNeedless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle\n with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n\n\n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a\n little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all\n the time—he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that\n he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same\n whenever I took him out of his closet.", "The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the\n corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an\n early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the\n corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n\n\n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living\n room windows.\n\n\n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight\n long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly\n fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little,\n the lights went off.\n\n\n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\nI dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I\n could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I\n punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n\n\n George Prime didn't come out.", "\"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn\n to like her after a bit.\"\n\n\n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you?\n Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n\n\n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure\n you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any\n foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n\n\n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for\n the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop,\n and you take over.\"\n\n\n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"", "Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his\n right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and\n that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened\n before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known\n all about George Prime.\nFor how long?\nWhen I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his\n closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n\n\n They were gone.\n\n\n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I\n couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with\n an android.\n\n\n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime\n wandering around.\n\n\n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n\n\n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n\n\n It was indecent.", "I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked\n outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty\n woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the\n recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime\n when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked\n in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a\n tired look on his face.\n\"Meet George Faircloth Prime,\" the technician said, grinning at me like\n a nursing mother.\n\n\n I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly.\n Nothing flabby about it.\n\n\n I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. \"Come on, Brother,\" I\n said. \"You've got a job to do.\"\n\n\n But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night.", "George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on\n the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same\n mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical\n difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression\n buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop\n George Prime dead in his tracks.\n\n\n He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a\n pile of gears.\n\n\n I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course.", "As I said, the old Marge was never like the new one. Marge Prime makes\n Jeree and Sybil and Dorothy and Dawn and Jane and Ruby all look pretty\n sad by comparison.\n\n\n She cooks like a dream and she always brings me my pipe and slippers.\n As they say, there's nothing a man likes more than to be appreciated.\n\n\n A hundred per cent appreciated, with a factory guarantee to correct any\n slippage, which would only be temporary, anyhow.\n\n\n One of these days, we'll take that second honeymoon. But I think we'll\n go to Hawaii.", "Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the\n novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It\n took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable\n program.\n\n\n Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally \"out\" while formally\n \"in.\" Sometimes I took Sunday nights \"out\" if things got too sticky\n around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime\n cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely\n trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is.\n\n\n There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to\n quick-step some questions about my work at the office—there was no\n way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular\n two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the\n meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had.", "\"Georgie?\" she said.\n\n\n \"Uh?\"\n\n\n \"Do you still love me?\"\n\n\n I set the paper down and stared at her. \"How's that? Of course I\n still—\"\n\n\n \"Well, sometimes you don't act much like it.\"\n\n\n \"Mm. I guess I've—uh—got an awful headache tonight.\" Damn that\n perfume!\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said Marge.\n\n\n \"In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep—\"\n\n\n \"Sleep,\" said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her\n voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand.", "George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model,\n remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this\n cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous.\n I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n\n\n So I did.\n\n\n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very\n cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after\n a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is.\n As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was\n wonderful.\n\n\n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the\n accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n\n\n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a\n reputation for myself around the office.", "\"Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing\n him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of\n his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to\n run off with him to Hawaii or someplace.\"\n\n\n \"Bermuda,\" I said.\n\n\n And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek\n against my chest.\n\n\n \"Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be,\" she said. \"He\n was like you, but he wasn't\nyou\n, darling. And all I ever want is you.\n I just never appreciated you before....\"\n\n\n I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George\n Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. \"But what\n did you do with him?\"", "PRIME DIFFERENCE\nBy ALAN E. NOURSE\n\n\n Illustrated by SCHOENHEER\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction June 1957.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nBeing two men rolled out of one would solve\n \nmy problems—but which one would I be?\nI suppose that every guy reaches a point once in his lifetime when he\n gets one hundred and forty per cent fed up with his wife.\n\n\n Understand now—I've got nothing against marriage or any thing\n like that. Marriage is great. It's a good old red-blooded American\n Institution. Except that it's got one defect in it big enough to throw\n a cat through, especially when you happen to be married to a woman\n like Marge—" ], [ "One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really\n meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which\n happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by\n candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly\n because I liked it.\n\n\n We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old\n times.\nVery\nold times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge\n again—really\nlooking\nat her, watching the light catch in her hair,\n almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not\n glint.\n\n\n As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night,\n she was practically ravishing.\n\n\n \"What are you doing to her?\" I asked George Prime later, out in the\n workshop.", "I knew better than to try. Marge was already so jealous that I couldn't\n even smile at the company receptionist without a twinge of guilt. Give\n Marge something real to howl about, and I'd be ready for the Rehab\n Center in a week.\n\n\n But I'd underestimated Marge. She didn't need anything real, as I found\n out when Jeree came along.\n\n\n Business was booming and the secretaries at the office got shuffled\n around from time to time. Since I had an executive-type job, I got an\n executive-type secretary. Her name was Jeree and she was gorgeous. As\n a matter of fact, she was better than gorgeous. She was the sort of\n secretary every businessman ought to have in his office. Not to do any\n work—just to sit there.", "George Prime looked pained. \"Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model,\n remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this\n cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous.\n I'll take care of everything. Relax.\"\n\n\n So I did.\n\n\n Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very\n cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after\n a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is.\n As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was\n wonderful.\n\n\n And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the\n accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid.\n\n\n I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a\n reputation for myself around the office.", "Jeree was tall and dark, and she could convey more without saying\n anything than I ever dreamed was possible. The first day she was\n there, she conveyed to me very clearly that if I cared to supply the\n opportunity, she'd be glad to supply the motive.\n\n\n That night, I could tell that Marge had been thinking something over\n during the day. She let me get the first bite of dinner halfway to my\n mouth, and then she said, \"I hear you got a new secretary today.\"\n\n\n I muttered something into my coffee cup and pretended not to hear.\n\n\n Marge turned on her Accusing Look #7. \"I also hear that she's\n five-foot-eight and tapes out at 38-25-36 and thinks you're handsome.\"\n\n\n Marge had quite a spy system.\n\n\n \"She couldn't be much of a secretary,\" she added.", "\"Georgie?\" she said.\n\n\n \"Uh?\"\n\n\n \"Do you still love me?\"\n\n\n I set the paper down and stared at her. \"How's that? Of course I\n still—\"\n\n\n \"Well, sometimes you don't act much like it.\"\n\n\n \"Mm. I guess I've—uh—got an awful headache tonight.\" Damn that\n perfume!\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said Marge.\n\n\n \"In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep—\"\n\n\n \"Sleep,\" said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her\n voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand.", "The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was\n beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control—I\n could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for\n a complete recircuiting—but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice\n job.\n\n\n Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized\n with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss,\n despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After\n dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and\n said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by\n the fire.\n\n\n I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living\n room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair\n I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite\n perfume.", "\"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's\n feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it\n was in character. \"I was just curious.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, George.\"\n\n\n \"I'm really delighted that you're doing so well.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, George.\"\n\n\n But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous\n redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle\n except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and\n wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand.\nThe next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a\n liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. \"\nWhat\n are you doing out on the street?\n\"\n\n\n He gave me my martyred look. \"Just buying some bourbon. You were out.\"", "\"She's a perfectly good secretary,\" I blurted, and kicked myself\n mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then.\n\n\n Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong\n at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no\n stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned.\n\n\n Harry Folsom administered the\ncoup de grace\nat coffee next morning.\n \"What you need is an Ego Prime,\" he said with a grin. \"Solve all your\n problems. I hear they work like a charm.\"\n\n\n I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. \"Don't be\n ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a\n thing. It's—it's indecent.\"", "We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start\n for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car,\n business suit on, briefcase under his arm.\n\n\n I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into\n the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him\n off and then drove away in the car.\n\n\n Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me!\nNeedless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle\n with George Prime on hand to cover the home front.\n\n\n For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a\n little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all\n the time—he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that\n he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same\n whenever I took him out of his closet.", "\"Why, nothing,\" said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool\n me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when\n I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent.\n\n\n \"There must be\nsomething\n.\"\n\n\n George Prime shrugged. \"Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time\n telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention\n to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can\n give you page references.\"\n\n\n I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts\n run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell\n when an odd bit of information will come in useful.\n\n\n \"Well, you must be doing quite a job,\" I said.\nI'd\nnever managed to\n warm Marge up much.\n\n\n \"I try,\" said George Prime.", "She had a tongue like a #10 wood rasp and a list of grievances long\n enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was\n crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was pointing out in chilling\n detail exactly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband,\n which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a \"beastly\n headache\" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half\n she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we\n got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case.\nMaybe we just weren't meant for each other. I don't know. I used to\n envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live\n with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a\n while with one of the stenographers and get away with it.", "Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour\n or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big\n closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a\n manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night,\n there he was, just waiting to be put to work.\n\n\n After supper, I went out to the workshop—to get the pipe I'd left\n there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and\n switched on the free-behavior circuits.\n\n\n \"Go to it, Brother,\" I said.\n\n\n George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the\n house.\n\n\n Five minutes later, I heard them fighting.\n\n\n It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on\n the corner and headed uptown.", "\"But you're not supposed to be off the premises—\"\n\n\n \"Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her\n husband wouldn't let me, could I?\"\n\n\n \"Well, certainly not—\"\n\n\n \"You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get\n suspicious.\"\n\n\n \"No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint—\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry,\" George Prime said contritely. \"It seemed the right thing\n to do.\nYou\nwould have done it. At least that's what my judgment\n center maintained. We had quite an argument.\"\n\n\n \"Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense,\" I snapped. \"I\n don't want it to happen again.\"", "Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the\n novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It\n took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable\n program.\n\n\n Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally \"out\" while formally\n \"in.\" Sometimes I took Sunday nights \"out\" if things got too sticky\n around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime\n cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely\n trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is.\n\n\n There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to\n quick-step some questions about my work at the office—there was no\n way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular\n two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the\n meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had.", "But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model.\nMarge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having\n a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first—I was\n hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out\n for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought\n me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a\n good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it.\n\n\n I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to\n mellow sometime.\n\n\n But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too\n much.", "\"Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing\n him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of\n his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to\n run off with him to Hawaii or someplace.\"\n\n\n \"Bermuda,\" I said.\n\n\n And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek\n against my chest.\n\n\n \"Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be,\" she said. \"He\n was like you, but he wasn't\nyou\n, darling. And all I ever want is you.\n I just never appreciated you before....\"\n\n\n I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George\n Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. \"But what\n did you do with him?\"", "\"She's really a sweet girl underneath it all,\" I'd say. \"You'll learn\n to like her after a bit.\"\n\n\n \"Of course I like her,\" George Prime said. \"You told me to, didn't you?\n Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all.\"\n\n\n He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. \"You're sure\n you understand the exchange mechanism?\" I asked. I didn't want any\n foul-ups there, as you can imagine.\n\n\n \"Perfectly,\" said George Prime. \"When you buzz the recall, I wait for\n the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop,\n and you take over.\"\n\n\n \"But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off.\"", "George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded\n neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought\n what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The\n only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime\n did.\n\n\n If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make\n the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders,\n he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my\n signature. It would hold up in court.\n\n\n And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted\n girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time\n I chose, he'd do that, too.", "The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the\n corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an\n early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the\n corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage.\n\n\n Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living\n room windows.\n\n\n George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight\n long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly\n fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little,\n the lights went off.\n\n\n George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right.\nI dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I\n could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I\n punched the button again, viciously, and waited.\n\n\n George Prime didn't come out.", "Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his\n right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and\n that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened\n before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known\n all about George Prime.\nFor how long?\nWhen I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his\n closet. And Marge wasn't in the house.\n\n\n They were gone.\n\n\n I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I\n couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with\n an android.\n\n\n Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime\n wandering around.\n\n\n I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink.\n\n\n My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings.\n\n\n It was indecent." ] ]
test	51075	[ "How do Curt and Louise differ in their opinions about the war?", "Why does Dell leave his position?", "Why is Curt the one sent to try to get Dell to return to work?", "What do Curt and Louise find to be very unusual about Dell's farmland?", "Upon seeing Dell, what surprises Curt the most?", "Why does Dell not want to come back in order to finish the work that he began?", "How do Dell's and Curt's views differ in relation to the work that they do?", "Why does Curt tell Dell he is full of himself?", "Why does Dell invite Curt to come to his farm?", "Why does Dell finally agree to allow Curt to go get a doctor for him?" ]	[ [ "Curt is anti-war. Period. Louise is a patriot and believes whatever the country as a whole believes. ", "Curt is a patriot and believes whatever the country as a whole believes. Louise is anit-war. Period.", "Curt believes that the war is relevant, and that is why he is so preoccupied with it. Louise is put off by all of the talks about the war. The way Curt carries on makes her feel hopeless.", "Curt believes that there is no point in the war, therefore, there is no point in discussing it. Louise believes that it is the ONLY thing they should be concerned with." ], [ "He was fired.", "He was ready to get away from the city and move to his uncle's farm to carry on the family tradition in agriculture.", "He wanted to wash his hands of everything he was involved in through work because too many lives had been lost due to his scientific breakthroughs.", "He retired, as his time had been served." ], [ "Dell knows that if Curt comes, Louise will come, too. Dell is in love with Louise, and they are really hoping that she can get him to come back.", "Curt is the only person Dell has had contact with since his departure, so they feel that he is the only choice.", "They know that Curt and Dell are friends, and Curt is the only one who might hold enough influence over Dell to get him to agree to return.", "Curt is known for being able to persuade people one way or the other. If they will not listen to reason, he carries a gun just in case." ], [ "It is a strange, unpleasant color.", "There is a huge expanse of land, but much of it appears to be like a desert, which is not conducive for gardening or the area of the country they are in.", "It is the lushest patch of land they have ever seen. It is obvious why his veggies are superior to any other.", "There doesn't appear to be enough land for Dell to be able to produce the number of veggies he grows and distributes." ], [ "Dell looks sick. Very sick.", "Dell has hired a person who is obviously some form of a disease carrier, and that man is involved in the production of food others consume.", "Dell looks so much more healthy and happy than Curt ever thought possible. He is struggling with whether or not to try and pressure Dell to return.", "Dell had taken a wife and not told Curt about it." ], [ "He is being held on his farm by a cult, and if he leaves, they will not only kill Dell, they will also kill his friends.", "He doesn't have a real reason. He is just \"over it.\"", "He knows that once he gives them what they want, they will add on to it and want even more. Leading to mass destruction eventually.", "He has dementia, and he knows he will be unable to perform his duties." ], [ "Curt believes that there has never been any real importance in their work. Dell sees all of the relevancy in it, and he is proud to be part of it.", "Dell believes that there has never been any real importance in their work. Curt sees all of the relevancy in it, and he is proud to be part of it.", "Dell is of the mindset that you cannot hold the people who create the technology used to kill people during wartime. They did not make the call to use it, so they cannot be responsible. Curt believes just the opposite. He believes that they are ultimately more responsible than anyone.", "Curt is of the mindset that you cannot hold the people who create the technology used to kill people during wartime. They did not make the call to use it, so they cannot be responsible. Dell believes just the opposite. He believes that they are ultimately more responsible than anyone." ], [ "Dell feels that he is the best farmer in the region, and he does not know why he has waited so long to do this work.", "Dell knows he was the best scientist in the country. He is not surprised that they want him to come back. He knows they cannot function without him, and he is proud of that.", "Dell believes that he was smarter than anyone involved in his project, and he left because someone was trying to challenge his intelligence. He refused to stand for it, so he left knowing that they would beg him to return.", "Dell feels he is solely responsible for the mass destruction caused by the war. Curt tells him that he didn't do it alone. There was a team of scientists working on the project." ], [ "He needs to like Curt know that upon his death, Curt will inherit the farm.", "He knows his time is limited, and he wants Curt to take over the work he was currently involved in.", "He knows that Curt will bring Lousie, and he is in love with her.", "He is isolated on the farm, and he just wanted to visit with his old friend." ], [ "He is very sick, and he knows that seeking medical attention is his only hope.", "Dell sees it as the opportunity to send Curt to the people he will be working with after Dell dies, so he gives Curt the directions to their location and tells him that is how to get to the doctor.", "Dell is afraid that he will not be able to pay the doctor for his services, and he is embarrased.", "Dell does not want Curt and Lousie to see him in such a state, so it will get them out of the house so he can die alone." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Louise's smile grew tight and thin. \"Don't any of you ever think of\n anything but the next war—\nany\nof you?\"\n\n\n \"How can we? We're fighting it right now.\"\n\n\n \"You make it sound so hopeless.\"\n\n\n \"That's what Dell said in the days just before he quit. He said we\n didn't\nhave\nto stay at Detrick producing the toxins and aerosols that\n will destroy millions of lives. But he never showed us how we could\n quit—and be sure of staying alive. His own walking out was no more\n than a futile gesture.\"\n\n\n \"I just can't understand him, Curt. I think he's right in a way, but\n what brought\nhim\nto that viewpoint?\"", "\"Curt, my boy! And Louise! I thought you weren't going to show up at\n all.\"\n\n\n Curt's hand was almost lost in Dell's enormous grip, but it wasn't\n because of that that his grip was passive. It was his shocked reaction\n to Dell's haggard appearance. The fierce eyes looked merely old and\n tired now. The ageless, leathery hide of Dell's face seemed to have\n collapsed before some overpowering decay, its bronze smoothness\n shattered by deep lines that were like tool marks of pain.\n\n\n Curt spoke in a subdued voice. \"It's hard to get away from Detrick.\n Always one more experiment to try—\"\n\n\n \"—And the brass riding you as if they expected you to win another war\n for them tomorrow afternoon,\" said Dell. \"I remember.\"\n\n\n \"We wondered about this truck,\" Louise commented brightly, trying to\n change the subject. \"We finally gave up on it.\"", "Beside him, his wife, Louise, held her blowing hair away from her face\n and laughed into the warm air. \"Dr. Dell isn't going to run away.\n Besides, you said we could call this a weekend vacation as well as a\n business trip.\"\n\n\n Curt glanced at the speedometer and eased the pressure on the pedal. He\n grinned. \"Wool-gathering again.\"\n\n\n \"What about?\"\n\n\n \"I was just wondering who said it first—one of the fellows at Detrick,\n or that lieutenant at Bikini, or—\"\n\n\n \"Said\nwhat\n? What are you talking about?\"\n\n\n \"That crack about the weapons after the next war. He—whoever it\n was—said there may be some doubt about what the weapons of the next\n war will be like, but there is absolutely no doubt about the weapons of\n World War IV. It will be fought with stones and spears. I guess any one\n of us could have said it.\"", "Dell raised a lock of steel-gray hair in his fingers and dismissed the\n question with a wan smile. \"We all wear out sometime,\" he said. \"My\n turn had to come.\"\nInside, some of the oppressiveness vanished as the evening passed. It\n was cool enough for lighting the fireplace, and they settled before it\n after dinner. While they watched the flickering light that whipped the\n beamed ceiling, Dell entertained them with stories of his neighbors,\n whose histories he knew clear back to Revolutionary times.\n\n\n Early, however, Louise excused herself. She knew they would want\n privacy to thresh out the purposes behind Dell's invitation—and Curt's\n acceptance.\n\n\n When she was gone, there was a moment's silence. The logs crackled with\n shocking pistol shots in the fireplace. The scientist moved to stir the\n coals and then turned abruptly to Curt.\n\n\n \"When are you going to leave Detrick?\"", "\"It\nis\nhush-hush, top-secret stuff,\" said Curt, his eyes once more on\n the road. \"The Army doesn't want it to leak, but they need Dell, need\n him badly. Anyone knowing bio-war developments would understand. They\n wanted to send me before. Dell's invitation was the break we needed.\n I may be the one with sufficient influence to bring him back. I hope\n so. But keep it under your permanent and forget your guessing games.\n There's more to it than you know.\"\n\n\n The car passed through a cool, wooded section and Louise leaned back\n and drank in the beauty of it.\n\n\n \"Hush-hush, top secret stuff,\" she said. \"Grown men playing children's\n games.\"\n\n\n \"Pretty deadly games for children, darling.\"\nIn the late afternoon they by-passed the central part of Baltimore and\n headed north beyond the suburb of Towson toward Dell's truck farm.", "\"Hard to tell,\" Curt said, unconsciously speeding up again. \"After\n the war, when the atomic scientists were publicly examining their\n consciences, Dell told them to examine their own guts first. That\n was typical of him then, but soon after, he swung just as strongly\n pacifist and walked out of Detrick.\"\n\n\n \"It still seems strange that he abandoned his whole career. The world's\n foremost biochemist giving up the laboratory for a\ntruck farm\n!\"\n Louise glanced down at the lunch basket between them. In it were\n tomatoes that Dr. Hamon Dell had sent along with his invitation to\n visit him.\nFor nearly a year Dr. Dell had been sending packages of choice fruit\n and vegetables to his former colleagues, not only at the biological\n warfare center at Camp Detrick but at the universities and other\n research centers throughout the country.\n\n\n \"I wish we knew exactly why he asked us to come out,\" said Louise.", "\"Curt—I thought I had time left, but this is as far as I can go—Just\n remember all I said tonight. Don't forget a word of it.\" He sat up\n rigidly, hardly breathing in the effort of control. \"The responsibility\n for the coming destruction of civilization lies at the doors of the\n scientist mercenaries. Don't allow it, Curt. Get them to abandon the\n laboratories of the warriors. Get them to reclaim their honor—\"\n\n\n He fell back upon the pillow, his face white with pain and shining with\n sweat. \"Brown—see Brown. He can tell you the—the rest.\"\n\n\n \"I'll go for a doctor,\" said Curt. \"Who have you had? Louise will stay\n with you.\"\n\n\n \"Don't bring a doctor. There's no escaping this. I've known it for\n months. Wait here with me, Curt. I'll be gone soon.\"", "With effort, he went on. \"I wanted to say that already you have come\n to think of science being divided into armed camps by the artificial\n boundaries of the politicians. Has it been so long ago that it was\n not even in your lifetime, when scientists regarded themselves as one\n international brotherhood?\"\n\n\n \"I can't quarrel with your ideals,\" said Curt softly. \"But national\n boundary lines do, actually, divide the scientists of the world into\n armed camps.\"\n\"Your premises are still incorrect. They do not deliberately war on\n each other. It is only that they have blindly sold themselves as\n mercenaries. And they can be called upon to redeem themselves. They can\n break their unholy contracts.\"\n\n\n \"There would have to be simultaneous agreement among the scientists of\n all nations. And they are men, influenced by national ideals. They are\n not merely ivory-tower dabblers and searchers after truth.\"", "He stumbled out, refusing Curt's offer of aid with a grim headshake.\n The fire crackled loudly within the otherwise silent room. Curt\n felt cold at the descending chill of the night, his mind bewildered\n at Dell's barrage, some of it so reasonable, some of it so utterly\n confused. And there was no clue to the identity of the powerful force\n that had made so great a change in the once militant scientist.\n\n\n Slowly Curt mounted the staircase of the old house and went to the room\n Dell had assigned them. Louise was in bed reading a murder mystery.\n\n\n \"Secret mission completed?\" she asked.\n\n\n Curt sat down on the edge of the bed. \"I'm afraid something terrible\n is wrong with Dell. Besides the neurotic guilt complex because of his\n war work, he showed signs of a terrific and apparently habitual pain in\n his head. If that should be brain tumor, it might explain his erratic\n notions, his abandonment of his career.\"", "\"What will we do with him?\" Brown asked abruptly.\n\n\n \"If Dell is dead, you murdered him!\" Curt shouted.\n\n\n A rising personal fear grew within him. They could not release him now,\n even though his story would make no sense to anybody. But they had\n somehow killed Dell, or thought they had, and they wouldn't hesitate\n to kill Curt. He thought of Louise in the great house with the corpse\n of Haman Dell—if, of course, he was actually dead. But that was\n nonsense....\n\n\n \"Dell must have sent you to us!\" Sark said, as if a great mystery had\n suddenly been lifted from his mind. \"He did not have time to tell you\n everything. Did he tell you to take the road behind the farm?\"\n\n\n Curt nodded bitterly. \"He told me it was the quickest way to get to a\n doctor.\"", "\"Nobody claims to have figured him out. They laugh a little at him now.\n They eat his gifts willingly enough, but consider him slightly off his\n rocker. He still has all his biological talents, though. I've never\n seen or tasted vegetables like the ones he grows.\"\n\n\n \"And the brass at Detrick doesn't think he's gone soft in the head,\n either,\" she added much too innocently. \"So they ordered you to take\n advantage of his invitation and try to persuade him to come back.\"\n\n\n Curt turned his head so sharply that Louise laughed.\n\n\n \"No, I didn't read any secret, hush-hush papers,\" she said. \"But it's\n pretty obvious, isn't it, the way you rushed right over to General\n Hansen after you got the invitation?\"", "\"When are\nyou\ncoming back?\" Curt demanded instead of answering.\n\n\n \"So they still want me, even after the things I said when I left.\"\n\n\n \"You're needed badly. When I told Hansen I was coming down, he said it\n would be worth five years of my own work to bring you back.\"\n\n\n \"They want me to produce even deadlier toxins than those I gave them,\"\n Dell said viciously. \"They want some that can kill ten million people\n in four minutes instead of only one million—\"\n\n\n \"Any man would go insane if he looked at it that way. It would be the\n same as gun-makers being tormented by the vision of torn men destroyed\n by their bullets, the sorrowing families—\"\n\n\n \"And why shouldn't the gun-makers be tormented?\" Dell's voice was\n low with controlled hate. \"They are men like you and me who give the\nwar\n-makers new tools for their trade.\"", "From somewhere behind the house came the sound of a truck engine. Curt\n took Louise's arm and led her around the trim, graveled path.\n\n\n The old farmhouse had been very carefully renovated. Everywhere was\n evidence of exquisite care, yet the cumulative atmosphere remained\n uninviting, almost oppressive. Curt told himself it was the utter\n silence, made even more tense by the lonely chugging of the engine in\n back, and the incredible harsh color of the soil beneath their feet.\nRounding the corner, they came in sight of a massive tank truck. From\n it a hose led to an underground storage tank and pulsed slowly under\n the force of the liquid gushing through it. No one was in sight.\n\n\n \"What could that be for?\" asked Louise.\n\n\n \"You've got me. Could be gasoline, but Dell hasn't any reason for\n storing that much here.\"", "They advanced slowly and amazement crept over Curt as he comprehended\n the massiveness of the machine. The tank was of elliptical cross\n section, over ten feet on its major axis. Six double wheels supported\n the rear; even the front ones were double. In spite of such wide weight\n distribution, the tires were pressing down the utterly dry ground to a\n depth of an inch or more.\n\n\n \"They must haul liquid lead in that thing,\" said Curt.\n\n\n \"It's getting cool. I wish Dell would show up.\" Louise glanced out\n over the twenty-acre expanse of truck farm. Thick rows of robust\n plants covered the area. Tomatoes, carrots, beets, lettuce, and other\n vegetables—a hundred or so fruit trees were at the far end. Between\n them ran the road over which the massive truck had apparently entered\n the farm from the rear.\n\n\n A heavy step sounded abruptly and Dell's shaggy head appeared from\n around the end of the truck. His face lighted with pleasure.", "\"You might say that we would be in the rock business,\" replied Dell.\n \"Fighting is no longer on the level of one man with his hands about\n another's throat, but it\nshould\nbe. Those who want power and\n domination should have to fight for it personally. But it has been a\n long time since they had to.\n\"Even in the old days, kings and emperors hired mercenaries to fight\n their wars. The militarists don't buy swords now. They buy brains.\n We're the mercenaries of the new day, Curt, you and I. Once there was\n honor in our profession. We searched for truth for its own sake, and\n because it was our way of life. Once we were the hope of the world\n because science was a universal language.", "\"Then what are we to do?\" Curt demanded fiercely. \"What are we to do\n while enemy scientists prepare these same weapons to exterminate\nus\n?\n Sure, it's one hell of a mess. Science is already dead. The kind you\n talk about has been dead for twenty years. All our fine ideals are\n worthless until the politicians find a solution to their quarrels.\"\n\n\n \"Politicians? Since when did men of science have to wait upon\n politicians for solutions of human problems?\" Dell passed a hand over\n his brow, and suddenly his face contorted in pain.\n\n\n \"What is it?\" Curt exclaimed, rising.\n\n\n \"Nothing—nothing, my boy. Some minor trouble I've had lately. It will\n pass in a moment.\"", "As if unable to comprehend, the hired man stared dumbly for a long\n moment. His hollow-cheeked face was almost skeletal in the light that\n flooded out from behind him.\n\n\n Then from somewhere within the building came a voice, sharp with\n tension. \"Brown! What the devil are you doing? Shut that door!\"\n\n\n That brought the figure to life. He whipped out a gun and motioned Curt\n inward. \"Step inside. We'll have to decide what to do with you when\n Carlson finds you're here.\"\n\n\n \"What's the matter with you?\" Curt asked, stupefied. \"Dell's dying. He\n needs help.\"\n\n\n \"Get in here!\"", "\"But doesn't this sense of guilt—unwarranted as it is—make you\nwant\nto find an antitoxin?\"\n\n\n \"Suppose I succeeded? I would have canceled the weapon of an enemy.\n The military would know he could nullify ours in time. Then they would\n command me to work out still another toxin. It's a vicious and insane\n circle, which must be broken somewhere. The purpose of the entire\n remainder of my life is to break it.\"\n\n\n \"When you are fighting for your life and the enemy already has his\n hands about your throat,\" Curt argued, \"you reach for the biggest rock\n you can get your hands on and beat his brains in. You don't try to\n persuade him that killing is unethical.\"\n\n\n For an instant it seemed to Curt that a flicker of humor touched the\n corners of Dell's mouth. Then the lines tightened down again.", "Sark's eyes were burning now. \"Do you understand what that means? We\n had to go\nback\n, not forward. We had to arm to fight a new war, a war\n to prevent the final war that destroyed Mankind.\"\n\n\n \"Back? How could you go back?\" Curt hesitated, grasping now the full\n insanity of the scene about him. \"How have you\ncome\nback?\" He waited\n tautly for the answer. It would be gibberish, of course, like all the\n mad conversation before it.", "Curt frantically got dressed, ran down the stairs and out to the car.\n He wondered absently what had become of the cadaverous Brown, who\n seemed to have vanished from the premises.\nThe wheels spun gravel as he started the car and whipped it out of\n the driveway. Then he was on the stretch of lane leading through the\n grove. The moonless night was utterly dark, and the stream of light\n ahead of the car seemed the only living thing upon the whole landscape.\n He almost wished he had taken the more familiar road. To get lost now\n might mean death for Dell.\n\n\n No traffic flowed past him in either direction. There were no buildings\n showing lights. Overwhelming desolation seemed to possess the\n countryside and seep into his soul. It seemed impossible that this lay\n close to the other highway with which he was familiar." ], [ "Dell raised a lock of steel-gray hair in his fingers and dismissed the\n question with a wan smile. \"We all wear out sometime,\" he said. \"My\n turn had to come.\"\nInside, some of the oppressiveness vanished as the evening passed. It\n was cool enough for lighting the fireplace, and they settled before it\n after dinner. While they watched the flickering light that whipped the\n beamed ceiling, Dell entertained them with stories of his neighbors,\n whose histories he knew clear back to Revolutionary times.\n\n\n Early, however, Louise excused herself. She knew they would want\n privacy to thresh out the purposes behind Dell's invitation—and Curt's\n acceptance.\n\n\n When she was gone, there was a moment's silence. The logs crackled with\n shocking pistol shots in the fireplace. The scientist moved to stir the\n coals and then turned abruptly to Curt.\n\n\n \"When are you going to leave Detrick?\"", "\"He did? Then he knew even better than we did how rapidly he was\n slipping. Yes, this was the quickest way.\"\n\n\n \"What are you talking about?\" Curt demanded.\n\n\n \"Did Dell say anything at all about what he wanted of you?\"\n\n\n \"It was all wild. Something about helping with some crazy plans to\n retreat from the scientific world. He was going to finish talking in\n the morning, but I guess it wouldn't have mattered. I realize now that\n he was sick and irrational.\"\n\n\n \"Too sick to explain everything, but not irrational,\" Sark said\n thoughtfully. \"He left it to us to tell you, since you are to succeed\n him.\"\n\n\n \"Succeed Dell? In what?\"\nSark suddenly flipped a switch on a panel at his right. A screen\n lighted with some fuzzy image. It cleared with a slight dial\n adjustment, and Curt seemed to be looking at some oddly familiar\n moonlit ruin.", "\"Hard to tell,\" Curt said, unconsciously speeding up again. \"After\n the war, when the atomic scientists were publicly examining their\n consciences, Dell told them to examine their own guts first. That\n was typical of him then, but soon after, he swung just as strongly\n pacifist and walked out of Detrick.\"\n\n\n \"It still seems strange that he abandoned his whole career. The world's\n foremost biochemist giving up the laboratory for a\ntruck farm\n!\"\n Louise glanced down at the lunch basket between them. In it were\n tomatoes that Dr. Hamon Dell had sent along with his invitation to\n visit him.\nFor nearly a year Dr. Dell had been sending packages of choice fruit\n and vegetables to his former colleagues, not only at the biological\n warfare center at Camp Detrick but at the universities and other\n research centers throughout the country.\n\n\n \"I wish we knew exactly why he asked us to come out,\" said Louise.", "Louise's smile grew tight and thin. \"Don't any of you ever think of\n anything but the next war—\nany\nof you?\"\n\n\n \"How can we? We're fighting it right now.\"\n\n\n \"You make it sound so hopeless.\"\n\n\n \"That's what Dell said in the days just before he quit. He said we\n didn't\nhave\nto stay at Detrick producing the toxins and aerosols that\n will destroy millions of lives. But he never showed us how we could\n quit—and be sure of staying alive. His own walking out was no more\n than a futile gesture.\"\n\n\n \"I just can't understand him, Curt. I think he's right in a way, but\n what brought\nhim\nto that viewpoint?\"", "\"Exactly,\" he said. \"You reach for a rock and beat his brains in. You\n don't wipe human life off the face of the Earth in order to reach that\n enemy. I asked you to come down here to help me break this circle of\n which I spoke. There has to be someone here—after I'm gone—\"\n\n\n Dell's eyes shifted to the depths of shadows beyond the firelight and\n remained fixed on unseen images.\n\n\n \"Me? Help you?\" Curt asked incredulously. \"What could I do? Give up\n science and become a truck gardener, too?\"", "\"You might say that we would be in the rock business,\" replied Dell.\n \"Fighting is no longer on the level of one man with his hands about\n another's throat, but it\nshould\nbe. Those who want power and\n domination should have to fight for it personally. But it has been a\n long time since they had to.\n\"Even in the old days, kings and emperors hired mercenaries to fight\n their wars. The militarists don't buy swords now. They buy brains.\n We're the mercenaries of the new day, Curt, you and I. Once there was\n honor in our profession. We searched for truth for its own sake, and\n because it was our way of life. Once we were the hope of the world\n because science was a universal language.", "\"It\nis\nhush-hush, top-secret stuff,\" said Curt, his eyes once more on\n the road. \"The Army doesn't want it to leak, but they need Dell, need\n him badly. Anyone knowing bio-war developments would understand. They\n wanted to send me before. Dell's invitation was the break we needed.\n I may be the one with sufficient influence to bring him back. I hope\n so. But keep it under your permanent and forget your guessing games.\n There's more to it than you know.\"\n\n\n The car passed through a cool, wooded section and Louise leaned back\n and drank in the beauty of it.\n\n\n \"Hush-hush, top secret stuff,\" she said. \"Grown men playing children's\n games.\"\n\n\n \"Pretty deadly games for children, darling.\"\nIn the late afternoon they by-passed the central part of Baltimore and\n headed north beyond the suburb of Towson toward Dell's truck farm.", "Quickly then, gathering sudden momentum, the pip accelerated. The\n circle of men grew taut.\n\n\n The pip crossed the red line—and vanished.\n\n\n Only the smooth green trace remained, motionless and without meaning.\n\n\n With hesitant shuffling of feet, the circle expanded. The men glanced\n uncertainly at one another.\n\n\n One said, \"Well, that's the end of Dell. We'll soon know now if we're\n on the right track, or if we've botched it. Carlson will call when he's\n computed it.\"\n\n\n \"The end of Dell?\" Curt repeated slowly, as if trying to convince\n himself of what he knew had happened. \"The pip on the screen—that\n showed his life leaving him?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Sark. \"He knew he had to go. And there are perhaps hundreds\n more like him. But Dell couldn't have told you of that—\"", "He stumbled out, refusing Curt's offer of aid with a grim headshake.\n The fire crackled loudly within the otherwise silent room. Curt\n felt cold at the descending chill of the night, his mind bewildered\n at Dell's barrage, some of it so reasonable, some of it so utterly\n confused. And there was no clue to the identity of the powerful force\n that had made so great a change in the once militant scientist.\n\n\n Slowly Curt mounted the staircase of the old house and went to the room\n Dell had assigned them. Louise was in bed reading a murder mystery.\n\n\n \"Secret mission completed?\" she asked.\n\n\n Curt sat down on the edge of the bed. \"I'm afraid something terrible\n is wrong with Dell. Besides the neurotic guilt complex because of his\n war work, he showed signs of a terrific and apparently habitual pain in\n his head. If that should be brain tumor, it might explain his erratic\n notions, his abandonment of his career.\"", "As if unable to comprehend, the hired man stared dumbly for a long\n moment. His hollow-cheeked face was almost skeletal in the light that\n flooded out from behind him.\n\n\n Then from somewhere within the building came a voice, sharp with\n tension. \"Brown! What the devil are you doing? Shut that door!\"\n\n\n That brought the figure to life. He whipped out a gun and motioned Curt\n inward. \"Step inside. We'll have to decide what to do with you when\n Carlson finds you're here.\"\n\n\n \"What's the matter with you?\" Curt asked, stupefied. \"Dell's dying. He\n needs help.\"\n\n\n \"Get in here!\"", "\"Curt, my boy! And Louise! I thought you weren't going to show up at\n all.\"\n\n\n Curt's hand was almost lost in Dell's enormous grip, but it wasn't\n because of that that his grip was passive. It was his shocked reaction\n to Dell's haggard appearance. The fierce eyes looked merely old and\n tired now. The ageless, leathery hide of Dell's face seemed to have\n collapsed before some overpowering decay, its bronze smoothness\n shattered by deep lines that were like tool marks of pain.\n\n\n Curt spoke in a subdued voice. \"It's hard to get away from Detrick.\n Always one more experiment to try—\"\n\n\n \"—And the brass riding you as if they expected you to win another war\n for them tomorrow afternoon,\" said Dell. \"I remember.\"\n\n\n \"We wondered about this truck,\" Louise commented brightly, trying to\n change the subject. \"We finally gave up on it.\"", "\"What will we do with him?\" Brown asked abruptly.\n\n\n \"If Dell is dead, you murdered him!\" Curt shouted.\n\n\n A rising personal fear grew within him. They could not release him now,\n even though his story would make no sense to anybody. But they had\n somehow killed Dell, or thought they had, and they wouldn't hesitate\n to kill Curt. He thought of Louise in the great house with the corpse\n of Haman Dell—if, of course, he was actually dead. But that was\n nonsense....\n\n\n \"Dell must have sent you to us!\" Sark said, as if a great mystery had\n suddenly been lifted from his mind. \"He did not have time to tell you\n everything. Did he tell you to take the road behind the farm?\"\n\n\n Curt nodded bitterly. \"He told me it was the quickest way to get to a\n doctor.\"", "\"When are\nyou\ncoming back?\" Curt demanded instead of answering.\n\n\n \"So they still want me, even after the things I said when I left.\"\n\n\n \"You're needed badly. When I told Hansen I was coming down, he said it\n would be worth five years of my own work to bring you back.\"\n\n\n \"They want me to produce even deadlier toxins than those I gave them,\"\n Dell said viciously. \"They want some that can kill ten million people\n in four minutes instead of only one million—\"\n\n\n \"Any man would go insane if he looked at it that way. It would be the\n same as gun-makers being tormented by the vision of torn men destroyed\n by their bullets, the sorrowing families—\"\n\n\n \"And why shouldn't the gun-makers be tormented?\" Dell's voice was\n low with controlled hate. \"They are men like you and me who give the\nwar\n-makers new tools for their trade.\"", "\"My friend, Dr. Dell, is dying,\" Curt snapped out, refusing to sit\n down. \"I've got to get help. I saw your light and hoped you'd allow me\n to use your phone. I don't know who you are nor what Dell's hired man\n is doing here with you. But you've got to let me go for help!\"\n\n\n \"No.\" The man, Sark, shook his head. \"Dell is reconciled. He has to go.\n We are awaiting precisely the event you would halt—his death.\"\n\n\n He had known it, Curt thought, from the moment he entered that room.\n Like vultures sitting on cliffs waiting for the death of their prey,\n these fantastic men let their glance slip back to the screen. The green\n line was a third of the way toward the red marker now, and moving more\n rapidly.\n\n\n It was nightmare—meaningless—", "Curt frantically got dressed, ran down the stairs and out to the car.\n He wondered absently what had become of the cadaverous Brown, who\n seemed to have vanished from the premises.\nThe wheels spun gravel as he started the car and whipped it out of\n the driveway. Then he was on the stretch of lane leading through the\n grove. The moonless night was utterly dark, and the stream of light\n ahead of the car seemed the only living thing upon the whole landscape.\n He almost wished he had taken the more familiar road. To get lost now\n might mean death for Dell.\n\n\n No traffic flowed past him in either direction. There were no buildings\n showing lights. Overwhelming desolation seemed to possess the\n countryside and seep into his soul. It seemed impossible that this lay\n close to the other highway with which he was familiar.", "\"I'm not staying,\" Curt insisted. \"You can't prevent me from helping\n Dell without assuming responsibility for his death. I demand you let me\n call.\"\n\n\n \"You're not going to call,\" said Sark wearily. \"And we assumed\n responsibility for Dell's death long ago. Sit down!\"\n\n\n Slowly Curt sank down upon the chair beside the stranger. There was\n nothing else to do. He was powerless against Brown's gun. But he'd\n bring them to justice somehow, he swore.\n\n\n He didn't understand the meaning of the slowly moving pattern on the\n 'scope face, yet, as his eyes followed that pip, he sensed tension in\n the watching men that seemed sinister, almost murderous. How?\n\n\n What did the inexorably advancing pip signify?\nNo one spoke. The room was stifling hot and the breathing of the circle\n of men was a dull, rattling sound in Curt's ears.", "He strained his eyes into the darkness for signs of an all-night gas\n station or store from which he could phone. Finally, he resigned\n himself to going all the way to Towson. At that moment he glimpsed a\n spark of light far ahead.\n\n\n Encouraged, Curt stepped on the gas. In less than ten minutes he was at\n the spot. He braked the car to a stop, and surveyed the building as he\n got out. It seemed more like a power substation than anything else. But\n there should be a telephone, at least.\n\n\n He knocked on the door. Almost instantly, footsteps sounded within.\n\n\n The door swung wide.\n\n\n \"I wonder if I could use your—\" Curt began. He gasped. \"Brown! Dell's\n dying—we've got to get a doctor for him—\"", "He was a bony creature, even more cadaverous than Brown. He caught\n sight of Curt's almost indecently robust face. He gasped and swore.\n\n\n \"Who is this? What's he doing here?\"\n\n\n The entire montage of skull faces turned upon Curt. He heard a sharp\n collective intake of breath, as if his presence were some unforeseen\n calamity that had shaken the course of their incomprehensible lives.\n\n\n \"This is Curtis Johnson,\" said Brown. \"He got lost looking for a doctor\n for Dell.\"\n\n\n A mummylike figure rose from a seat before the instrument. \"Your coming\n is tremendously unfortunate, but for the moment we can do nothing about\n it. Sit here beside me. My name is Tarron Sark.\"\n\n\n The man indicated a chair.", "\"You want Dr. Dell?\"\n\n\n They whirled at the sound of an unfamiliar voice. Louise uttered a\n startled cry.\n\n\n The gaunt figure behind them coughed asthmatically and pointed with an\n arm that seemed composed only of bones and brownish skin, so thin as to\n be almost translucent.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Curt shakenly. \"We're friends of his.\"\n\n\n \"Dell's in back. I'll tell him you're here.\"\n\n\n The figure shambled away and Louise shook herself as if to rid her mind\n of the vision. \"If our grandchildren ever ask about zombies, I can\n tell them. Who in the world do you suppose he is?\"\n\n\n \"Hired man, I suppose. Sounds as if he should be in a lung sanitarium.\n Funny that Dell would keep him around in that condition.\"", "\"Then what are we to do?\" Curt demanded fiercely. \"What are we to do\n while enemy scientists prepare these same weapons to exterminate\nus\n?\n Sure, it's one hell of a mess. Science is already dead. The kind you\n talk about has been dead for twenty years. All our fine ideals are\n worthless until the politicians find a solution to their quarrels.\"\n\n\n \"Politicians? Since when did men of science have to wait upon\n politicians for solutions of human problems?\" Dell passed a hand over\n his brow, and suddenly his face contorted in pain.\n\n\n \"What is it?\" Curt exclaimed, rising.\n\n\n \"Nothing—nothing, my boy. Some minor trouble I've had lately. It will\n pass in a moment.\"" ], [ "As if unable to comprehend, the hired man stared dumbly for a long\n moment. His hollow-cheeked face was almost skeletal in the light that\n flooded out from behind him.\n\n\n Then from somewhere within the building came a voice, sharp with\n tension. \"Brown! What the devil are you doing? Shut that door!\"\n\n\n That brought the figure to life. He whipped out a gun and motioned Curt\n inward. \"Step inside. We'll have to decide what to do with you when\n Carlson finds you're here.\"\n\n\n \"What's the matter with you?\" Curt asked, stupefied. \"Dell's dying. He\n needs help.\"\n\n\n \"Get in here!\"", "\"It\nis\nhush-hush, top-secret stuff,\" said Curt, his eyes once more on\n the road. \"The Army doesn't want it to leak, but they need Dell, need\n him badly. Anyone knowing bio-war developments would understand. They\n wanted to send me before. Dell's invitation was the break we needed.\n I may be the one with sufficient influence to bring him back. I hope\n so. But keep it under your permanent and forget your guessing games.\n There's more to it than you know.\"\n\n\n The car passed through a cool, wooded section and Louise leaned back\n and drank in the beauty of it.\n\n\n \"Hush-hush, top secret stuff,\" she said. \"Grown men playing children's\n games.\"\n\n\n \"Pretty deadly games for children, darling.\"\nIn the late afternoon they by-passed the central part of Baltimore and\n headed north beyond the suburb of Towson toward Dell's truck farm.", "Dell raised a lock of steel-gray hair in his fingers and dismissed the\n question with a wan smile. \"We all wear out sometime,\" he said. \"My\n turn had to come.\"\nInside, some of the oppressiveness vanished as the evening passed. It\n was cool enough for lighting the fireplace, and they settled before it\n after dinner. While they watched the flickering light that whipped the\n beamed ceiling, Dell entertained them with stories of his neighbors,\n whose histories he knew clear back to Revolutionary times.\n\n\n Early, however, Louise excused herself. She knew they would want\n privacy to thresh out the purposes behind Dell's invitation—and Curt's\n acceptance.\n\n\n When she was gone, there was a moment's silence. The logs crackled with\n shocking pistol shots in the fireplace. The scientist moved to stir the\n coals and then turned abruptly to Curt.\n\n\n \"When are you going to leave Detrick?\"", "\"What will we do with him?\" Brown asked abruptly.\n\n\n \"If Dell is dead, you murdered him!\" Curt shouted.\n\n\n A rising personal fear grew within him. They could not release him now,\n even though his story would make no sense to anybody. But they had\n somehow killed Dell, or thought they had, and they wouldn't hesitate\n to kill Curt. He thought of Louise in the great house with the corpse\n of Haman Dell—if, of course, he was actually dead. But that was\n nonsense....\n\n\n \"Dell must have sent you to us!\" Sark said, as if a great mystery had\n suddenly been lifted from his mind. \"He did not have time to tell you\n everything. Did he tell you to take the road behind the farm?\"\n\n\n Curt nodded bitterly. \"He told me it was the quickest way to get to a\n doctor.\"", "\"He did? Then he knew even better than we did how rapidly he was\n slipping. Yes, this was the quickest way.\"\n\n\n \"What are you talking about?\" Curt demanded.\n\n\n \"Did Dell say anything at all about what he wanted of you?\"\n\n\n \"It was all wild. Something about helping with some crazy plans to\n retreat from the scientific world. He was going to finish talking in\n the morning, but I guess it wouldn't have mattered. I realize now that\n he was sick and irrational.\"\n\n\n \"Too sick to explain everything, but not irrational,\" Sark said\n thoughtfully. \"He left it to us to tell you, since you are to succeed\n him.\"\n\n\n \"Succeed Dell? In what?\"\nSark suddenly flipped a switch on a panel at his right. A screen\n lighted with some fuzzy image. It cleared with a slight dial\n adjustment, and Curt seemed to be looking at some oddly familiar\n moonlit ruin.", "\"Curt, my boy! And Louise! I thought you weren't going to show up at\n all.\"\n\n\n Curt's hand was almost lost in Dell's enormous grip, but it wasn't\n because of that that his grip was passive. It was his shocked reaction\n to Dell's haggard appearance. The fierce eyes looked merely old and\n tired now. The ageless, leathery hide of Dell's face seemed to have\n collapsed before some overpowering decay, its bronze smoothness\n shattered by deep lines that were like tool marks of pain.\n\n\n Curt spoke in a subdued voice. \"It's hard to get away from Detrick.\n Always one more experiment to try—\"\n\n\n \"—And the brass riding you as if they expected you to win another war\n for them tomorrow afternoon,\" said Dell. \"I remember.\"\n\n\n \"We wondered about this truck,\" Louise commented brightly, trying to\n change the subject. \"We finally gave up on it.\"", "\"Hard to tell,\" Curt said, unconsciously speeding up again. \"After\n the war, when the atomic scientists were publicly examining their\n consciences, Dell told them to examine their own guts first. That\n was typical of him then, but soon after, he swung just as strongly\n pacifist and walked out of Detrick.\"\n\n\n \"It still seems strange that he abandoned his whole career. The world's\n foremost biochemist giving up the laboratory for a\ntruck farm\n!\"\n Louise glanced down at the lunch basket between them. In it were\n tomatoes that Dr. Hamon Dell had sent along with his invitation to\n visit him.\nFor nearly a year Dr. Dell had been sending packages of choice fruit\n and vegetables to his former colleagues, not only at the biological\n warfare center at Camp Detrick but at the universities and other\n research centers throughout the country.\n\n\n \"I wish we knew exactly why he asked us to come out,\" said Louise.", "\"When are\nyou\ncoming back?\" Curt demanded instead of answering.\n\n\n \"So they still want me, even after the things I said when I left.\"\n\n\n \"You're needed badly. When I told Hansen I was coming down, he said it\n would be worth five years of my own work to bring you back.\"\n\n\n \"They want me to produce even deadlier toxins than those I gave them,\"\n Dell said viciously. \"They want some that can kill ten million people\n in four minutes instead of only one million—\"\n\n\n \"Any man would go insane if he looked at it that way. It would be the\n same as gun-makers being tormented by the vision of torn men destroyed\n by their bullets, the sorrowing families—\"\n\n\n \"And why shouldn't the gun-makers be tormented?\" Dell's voice was\n low with controlled hate. \"They are men like you and me who give the\nwar\n-makers new tools for their trade.\"", "He was a bony creature, even more cadaverous than Brown. He caught\n sight of Curt's almost indecently robust face. He gasped and swore.\n\n\n \"Who is this? What's he doing here?\"\n\n\n The entire montage of skull faces turned upon Curt. He heard a sharp\n collective intake of breath, as if his presence were some unforeseen\n calamity that had shaken the course of their incomprehensible lives.\n\n\n \"This is Curtis Johnson,\" said Brown. \"He got lost looking for a doctor\n for Dell.\"\n\n\n A mummylike figure rose from a seat before the instrument. \"Your coming\n is tremendously unfortunate, but for the moment we can do nothing about\n it. Sit here beside me. My name is Tarron Sark.\"\n\n\n The man indicated a chair.", "Curt frantically got dressed, ran down the stairs and out to the car.\n He wondered absently what had become of the cadaverous Brown, who\n seemed to have vanished from the premises.\nThe wheels spun gravel as he started the car and whipped it out of\n the driveway. Then he was on the stretch of lane leading through the\n grove. The moonless night was utterly dark, and the stream of light\n ahead of the car seemed the only living thing upon the whole landscape.\n He almost wished he had taken the more familiar road. To get lost now\n might mean death for Dell.\n\n\n No traffic flowed past him in either direction. There were no buildings\n showing lights. Overwhelming desolation seemed to possess the\n countryside and seep into his soul. It seemed impossible that this lay\n close to the other highway with which he was familiar.", "He strained his eyes into the darkness for signs of an all-night gas\n station or store from which he could phone. Finally, he resigned\n himself to going all the way to Towson. At that moment he glimpsed a\n spark of light far ahead.\n\n\n Encouraged, Curt stepped on the gas. In less than ten minutes he was at\n the spot. He braked the car to a stop, and surveyed the building as he\n got out. It seemed more like a power substation than anything else. But\n there should be a telephone, at least.\n\n\n He knocked on the door. Almost instantly, footsteps sounded within.\n\n\n The door swung wide.\n\n\n \"I wonder if I could use your—\" Curt began. He gasped. \"Brown! Dell's\n dying—we've got to get a doctor for him—\"", "\"My friend, Dr. Dell, is dying,\" Curt snapped out, refusing to sit\n down. \"I've got to get help. I saw your light and hoped you'd allow me\n to use your phone. I don't know who you are nor what Dell's hired man\n is doing here with you. But you've got to let me go for help!\"\n\n\n \"No.\" The man, Sark, shook his head. \"Dell is reconciled. He has to go.\n We are awaiting precisely the event you would halt—his death.\"\n\n\n He had known it, Curt thought, from the moment he entered that room.\n Like vultures sitting on cliffs waiting for the death of their prey,\n these fantastic men let their glance slip back to the screen. The green\n line was a third of the way toward the red marker now, and moving more\n rapidly.\n\n\n It was nightmare—meaningless—", "\"You might say that we would be in the rock business,\" replied Dell.\n \"Fighting is no longer on the level of one man with his hands about\n another's throat, but it\nshould\nbe. Those who want power and\n domination should have to fight for it personally. But it has been a\n long time since they had to.\n\"Even in the old days, kings and emperors hired mercenaries to fight\n their wars. The militarists don't buy swords now. They buy brains.\n We're the mercenaries of the new day, Curt, you and I. Once there was\n honor in our profession. We searched for truth for its own sake, and\n because it was our way of life. Once we were the hope of the world\n because science was a universal language.", "\"Exactly,\" he said. \"You reach for a rock and beat his brains in. You\n don't wipe human life off the face of the Earth in order to reach that\n enemy. I asked you to come down here to help me break this circle of\n which I spoke. There has to be someone here—after I'm gone—\"\n\n\n Dell's eyes shifted to the depths of shadows beyond the firelight and\n remained fixed on unseen images.\n\n\n \"Me? Help you?\" Curt asked incredulously. \"What could I do? Give up\n science and become a truck gardener, too?\"", "\"You want Dr. Dell?\"\n\n\n They whirled at the sound of an unfamiliar voice. Louise uttered a\n startled cry.\n\n\n The gaunt figure behind them coughed asthmatically and pointed with an\n arm that seemed composed only of bones and brownish skin, so thin as to\n be almost translucent.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Curt shakenly. \"We're friends of his.\"\n\n\n \"Dell's in back. I'll tell him you're here.\"\n\n\n The figure shambled away and Louise shook herself as if to rid her mind\n of the vision. \"If our grandchildren ever ask about zombies, I can\n tell them. Who in the world do you suppose he is?\"\n\n\n \"Hired man, I suppose. Sounds as if he should be in a lung sanitarium.\n Funny that Dell would keep him around in that condition.\"", "Curt stared with pity at the great scientist whose mind had so\n disintegrated. \"You need a doctor. I'll call a hospital, Johns Hopkins,\n if you want.\"\n\n\n \"Wait, maybe you're right. I have no phone here. Get Dr. Wilson—the\n Judge Building, Towson—find his home address in a phone book.\"\n\n\n \"Fine. I'll only be a little while.\"\n\n\n He stepped to the door.\n\n\n \"Curt! Take the lane down to the new road—behind the farm. Quicker—it\n cuts off a mile or so—go down through the orchard—\"\n\n\n \"All right. Take it easy now. I'll be right back.\"", "Louise's smile grew tight and thin. \"Don't any of you ever think of\n anything but the next war—\nany\nof you?\"\n\n\n \"How can we? We're fighting it right now.\"\n\n\n \"You make it sound so hopeless.\"\n\n\n \"That's what Dell said in the days just before he quit. He said we\n didn't\nhave\nto stay at Detrick producing the toxins and aerosols that\n will destroy millions of lives. But he never showed us how we could\n quit—and be sure of staying alive. His own walking out was no more\n than a futile gesture.\"\n\n\n \"I just can't understand him, Curt. I think he's right in a way, but\n what brought\nhim\nto that viewpoint?\"", "He stumbled out, refusing Curt's offer of aid with a grim headshake.\n The fire crackled loudly within the otherwise silent room. Curt\n felt cold at the descending chill of the night, his mind bewildered\n at Dell's barrage, some of it so reasonable, some of it so utterly\n confused. And there was no clue to the identity of the powerful force\n that had made so great a change in the once militant scientist.\n\n\n Slowly Curt mounted the staircase of the old house and went to the room\n Dell had assigned them. Louise was in bed reading a murder mystery.\n\n\n \"Secret mission completed?\" she asked.\n\n\n Curt sat down on the edge of the bed. \"I'm afraid something terrible\n is wrong with Dell. Besides the neurotic guilt complex because of his\n war work, he showed signs of a terrific and apparently habitual pain in\n his head. If that should be brain tumor, it might explain his erratic\n notions, his abandonment of his career.\"", "\"Nobody claims to have figured him out. They laugh a little at him now.\n They eat his gifts willingly enough, but consider him slightly off his\n rocker. He still has all his biological talents, though. I've never\n seen or tasted vegetables like the ones he grows.\"\n\n\n \"And the brass at Detrick doesn't think he's gone soft in the head,\n either,\" she added much too innocently. \"So they ordered you to take\n advantage of his invitation and try to persuade him to come back.\"\n\n\n Curt turned his head so sharply that Louise laughed.\n\n\n \"No, I didn't read any secret, hush-hush papers,\" she said. \"But it's\n pretty obvious, isn't it, the way you rushed right over to General\n Hansen after you got the invitation?\"", "They advanced slowly and amazement crept over Curt as he comprehended\n the massiveness of the machine. The tank was of elliptical cross\n section, over ten feet on its major axis. Six double wheels supported\n the rear; even the front ones were double. In spite of such wide weight\n distribution, the tires were pressing down the utterly dry ground to a\n depth of an inch or more.\n\n\n \"They must haul liquid lead in that thing,\" said Curt.\n\n\n \"It's getting cool. I wish Dell would show up.\" Louise glanced out\n over the twenty-acre expanse of truck farm. Thick rows of robust\n plants covered the area. Tomatoes, carrots, beets, lettuce, and other\n vegetables—a hundred or so fruit trees were at the far end. Between\n them ran the road over which the massive truck had apparently entered\n the farm from the rear.\n\n\n A heavy step sounded abruptly and Dell's shaggy head appeared from\n around the end of the truck. His face lighted with pleasure." ], [ "\"It\nis\nhush-hush, top-secret stuff,\" said Curt, his eyes once more on\n the road. \"The Army doesn't want it to leak, but they need Dell, need\n him badly. Anyone knowing bio-war developments would understand. They\n wanted to send me before. Dell's invitation was the break we needed.\n I may be the one with sufficient influence to bring him back. I hope\n so. But keep it under your permanent and forget your guessing games.\n There's more to it than you know.\"\n\n\n The car passed through a cool, wooded section and Louise leaned back\n and drank in the beauty of it.\n\n\n \"Hush-hush, top secret stuff,\" she said. \"Grown men playing children's\n games.\"\n\n\n \"Pretty deadly games for children, darling.\"\nIn the late afternoon they by-passed the central part of Baltimore and\n headed north beyond the suburb of Towson toward Dell's truck farm.", "They advanced slowly and amazement crept over Curt as he comprehended\n the massiveness of the machine. The tank was of elliptical cross\n section, over ten feet on its major axis. Six double wheels supported\n the rear; even the front ones were double. In spite of such wide weight\n distribution, the tires were pressing down the utterly dry ground to a\n depth of an inch or more.\n\n\n \"They must haul liquid lead in that thing,\" said Curt.\n\n\n \"It's getting cool. I wish Dell would show up.\" Louise glanced out\n over the twenty-acre expanse of truck farm. Thick rows of robust\n plants covered the area. Tomatoes, carrots, beets, lettuce, and other\n vegetables—a hundred or so fruit trees were at the far end. Between\n them ran the road over which the massive truck had apparently entered\n the farm from the rear.\n\n\n A heavy step sounded abruptly and Dell's shaggy head appeared from\n around the end of the truck. His face lighted with pleasure.", "\"Curt, my boy! And Louise! I thought you weren't going to show up at\n all.\"\n\n\n Curt's hand was almost lost in Dell's enormous grip, but it wasn't\n because of that that his grip was passive. It was his shocked reaction\n to Dell's haggard appearance. The fierce eyes looked merely old and\n tired now. The ageless, leathery hide of Dell's face seemed to have\n collapsed before some overpowering decay, its bronze smoothness\n shattered by deep lines that were like tool marks of pain.\n\n\n Curt spoke in a subdued voice. \"It's hard to get away from Detrick.\n Always one more experiment to try—\"\n\n\n \"—And the brass riding you as if they expected you to win another war\n for them tomorrow afternoon,\" said Dell. \"I remember.\"\n\n\n \"We wondered about this truck,\" Louise commented brightly, trying to\n change the subject. \"We finally gave up on it.\"", "From somewhere behind the house came the sound of a truck engine. Curt\n took Louise's arm and led her around the trim, graveled path.\n\n\n The old farmhouse had been very carefully renovated. Everywhere was\n evidence of exquisite care, yet the cumulative atmosphere remained\n uninviting, almost oppressive. Curt told himself it was the utter\n silence, made even more tense by the lonely chugging of the engine in\n back, and the incredible harsh color of the soil beneath their feet.\nRounding the corner, they came in sight of a massive tank truck. From\n it a hose led to an underground storage tank and pulsed slowly under\n the force of the liquid gushing through it. No one was in sight.\n\n\n \"What could that be for?\" asked Louise.\n\n\n \"You've got me. Could be gasoline, but Dell hasn't any reason for\n storing that much here.\"", "\"Hard to tell,\" Curt said, unconsciously speeding up again. \"After\n the war, when the atomic scientists were publicly examining their\n consciences, Dell told them to examine their own guts first. That\n was typical of him then, but soon after, he swung just as strongly\n pacifist and walked out of Detrick.\"\n\n\n \"It still seems strange that he abandoned his whole career. The world's\n foremost biochemist giving up the laboratory for a\ntruck farm\n!\"\n Louise glanced down at the lunch basket between them. In it were\n tomatoes that Dr. Hamon Dell had sent along with his invitation to\n visit him.\nFor nearly a year Dr. Dell had been sending packages of choice fruit\n and vegetables to his former colleagues, not only at the biological\n warfare center at Camp Detrick but at the universities and other\n research centers throughout the country.\n\n\n \"I wish we knew exactly why he asked us to come out,\" said Louise.", "His sign was visible for a half mile:\nYOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT\n\n Eat the Best\n\n EAT DELL'S VEGETABLES\n\n\n \"Dr. Hamon Dell, world's foremost biochemist—and truck farmer,\" Curt\n muttered as he swung the car off the highway.\n\n\n Louise stepped out when the tires ceased crunching on the gravel lane.\n She scanned the fields and old woods beyond the ancient but preserved\n farmhouse. \"It's so unearthly.\"\n\n\n Curt followed. The song of birds, which had been so noticeable before,\n seemed strangely muted. The land itself was an alien, faintly greenish\n hue, a color repulsive to more than just the eyes.\n\n\n \"It must be something in this particular soil,\" said Curt, \"something\n that gives it that color and produces such wonderful crops. I'll have\n to remember to ask Dell about it.\"", "Dell raised a lock of steel-gray hair in his fingers and dismissed the\n question with a wan smile. \"We all wear out sometime,\" he said. \"My\n turn had to come.\"\nInside, some of the oppressiveness vanished as the evening passed. It\n was cool enough for lighting the fireplace, and they settled before it\n after dinner. While they watched the flickering light that whipped the\n beamed ceiling, Dell entertained them with stories of his neighbors,\n whose histories he knew clear back to Revolutionary times.\n\n\n Early, however, Louise excused herself. She knew they would want\n privacy to thresh out the purposes behind Dell's invitation—and Curt's\n acceptance.\n\n\n When she was gone, there was a moment's silence. The logs crackled with\n shocking pistol shots in the fireplace. The scientist moved to stir the\n coals and then turned abruptly to Curt.\n\n\n \"When are you going to leave Detrick?\"", "\"What will we do with him?\" Brown asked abruptly.\n\n\n \"If Dell is dead, you murdered him!\" Curt shouted.\n\n\n A rising personal fear grew within him. They could not release him now,\n even though his story would make no sense to anybody. But they had\n somehow killed Dell, or thought they had, and they wouldn't hesitate\n to kill Curt. He thought of Louise in the great house with the corpse\n of Haman Dell—if, of course, he was actually dead. But that was\n nonsense....\n\n\n \"Dell must have sent you to us!\" Sark said, as if a great mystery had\n suddenly been lifted from his mind. \"He did not have time to tell you\n everything. Did he tell you to take the road behind the farm?\"\n\n\n Curt nodded bitterly. \"He told me it was the quickest way to get to a\n doctor.\"", "Louise's smile grew tight and thin. \"Don't any of you ever think of\n anything but the next war—\nany\nof you?\"\n\n\n \"How can we? We're fighting it right now.\"\n\n\n \"You make it sound so hopeless.\"\n\n\n \"That's what Dell said in the days just before he quit. He said we\n didn't\nhave\nto stay at Detrick producing the toxins and aerosols that\n will destroy millions of lives. But he never showed us how we could\n quit—and be sure of staying alive. His own walking out was no more\n than a futile gesture.\"\n\n\n \"I just can't understand him, Curt. I think he's right in a way, but\n what brought\nhim\nto that viewpoint?\"", "\"You want Dr. Dell?\"\n\n\n They whirled at the sound of an unfamiliar voice. Louise uttered a\n startled cry.\n\n\n The gaunt figure behind them coughed asthmatically and pointed with an\n arm that seemed composed only of bones and brownish skin, so thin as to\n be almost translucent.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Curt shakenly. \"We're friends of his.\"\n\n\n \"Dell's in back. I'll tell him you're here.\"\n\n\n The figure shambled away and Louise shook herself as if to rid her mind\n of the vision. \"If our grandchildren ever ask about zombies, I can\n tell them. Who in the world do you suppose he is?\"\n\n\n \"Hired man, I suppose. Sounds as if he should be in a lung sanitarium.\n Funny that Dell would keep him around in that condition.\"", "Curt frantically got dressed, ran down the stairs and out to the car.\n He wondered absently what had become of the cadaverous Brown, who\n seemed to have vanished from the premises.\nThe wheels spun gravel as he started the car and whipped it out of\n the driveway. Then he was on the stretch of lane leading through the\n grove. The moonless night was utterly dark, and the stream of light\n ahead of the car seemed the only living thing upon the whole landscape.\n He almost wished he had taken the more familiar road. To get lost now\n might mean death for Dell.\n\n\n No traffic flowed past him in either direction. There were no buildings\n showing lights. Overwhelming desolation seemed to possess the\n countryside and seep into his soul. It seemed impossible that this lay\n close to the other highway with which he was familiar.", "As if unable to comprehend, the hired man stared dumbly for a long\n moment. His hollow-cheeked face was almost skeletal in the light that\n flooded out from behind him.\n\n\n Then from somewhere within the building came a voice, sharp with\n tension. \"Brown! What the devil are you doing? Shut that door!\"\n\n\n That brought the figure to life. He whipped out a gun and motioned Curt\n inward. \"Step inside. We'll have to decide what to do with you when\n Carlson finds you're here.\"\n\n\n \"What's the matter with you?\" Curt asked, stupefied. \"Dell's dying. He\n needs help.\"\n\n\n \"Get in here!\"", "\"Oh, that. It brings liquid fertilizer to pump into my irrigation\n water, that's all. No mystery. Let's go on to the house. After you're\n settled we can catch up on everything and I'll tell you about the\n things I'm doing here.\"\n\n\n \"Who's the man we saw?\" asked Curt. \"He looks as if his health is\n pretty precarious.\"\n\n\n \"That's Brown. He came with the place—farmed it for years for my uncle\n before I inherited it. He could grow a garden on a granite slab. In\n spite of appearances, he's well enough physically.\"\n\n\n \"How has your own health been? You have—changed—since you were at\n Detrick.\"", "He stumbled out, refusing Curt's offer of aid with a grim headshake.\n The fire crackled loudly within the otherwise silent room. Curt\n felt cold at the descending chill of the night, his mind bewildered\n at Dell's barrage, some of it so reasonable, some of it so utterly\n confused. And there was no clue to the identity of the powerful force\n that had made so great a change in the once militant scientist.\n\n\n Slowly Curt mounted the staircase of the old house and went to the room\n Dell had assigned them. Louise was in bed reading a murder mystery.\n\n\n \"Secret mission completed?\" she asked.\n\n\n Curt sat down on the edge of the bed. \"I'm afraid something terrible\n is wrong with Dell. Besides the neurotic guilt complex because of his\n war work, he showed signs of a terrific and apparently habitual pain in\n his head. If that should be brain tumor, it might explain his erratic\n notions, his abandonment of his career.\"", "He was a bony creature, even more cadaverous than Brown. He caught\n sight of Curt's almost indecently robust face. He gasped and swore.\n\n\n \"Who is this? What's he doing here?\"\n\n\n The entire montage of skull faces turned upon Curt. He heard a sharp\n collective intake of breath, as if his presence were some unforeseen\n calamity that had shaken the course of their incomprehensible lives.\n\n\n \"This is Curtis Johnson,\" said Brown. \"He got lost looking for a doctor\n for Dell.\"\n\n\n A mummylike figure rose from a seat before the instrument. \"Your coming\n is tremendously unfortunate, but for the moment we can do nothing about\n it. Sit here beside me. My name is Tarron Sark.\"\n\n\n The man indicated a chair.", "\"Nobody claims to have figured him out. They laugh a little at him now.\n They eat his gifts willingly enough, but consider him slightly off his\n rocker. He still has all his biological talents, though. I've never\n seen or tasted vegetables like the ones he grows.\"\n\n\n \"And the brass at Detrick doesn't think he's gone soft in the head,\n either,\" she added much too innocently. \"So they ordered you to take\n advantage of his invitation and try to persuade him to come back.\"\n\n\n Curt turned his head so sharply that Louise laughed.\n\n\n \"No, I didn't read any secret, hush-hush papers,\" she said. \"But it's\n pretty obvious, isn't it, the way you rushed right over to General\n Hansen after you got the invitation?\"", "Beside him, his wife, Louise, held her blowing hair away from her face\n and laughed into the warm air. \"Dr. Dell isn't going to run away.\n Besides, you said we could call this a weekend vacation as well as a\n business trip.\"\n\n\n Curt glanced at the speedometer and eased the pressure on the pedal. He\n grinned. \"Wool-gathering again.\"\n\n\n \"What about?\"\n\n\n \"I was just wondering who said it first—one of the fellows at Detrick,\n or that lieutenant at Bikini, or—\"\n\n\n \"Said\nwhat\n? What are you talking about?\"\n\n\n \"That crack about the weapons after the next war. He—whoever it\n was—said there may be some doubt about what the weapons of the next\n war will be like, but there is absolutely no doubt about the weapons of\n World War IV. It will be fought with stones and spears. I guess any one\n of us could have said it.\"", "Curt stared with pity at the great scientist whose mind had so\n disintegrated. \"You need a doctor. I'll call a hospital, Johns Hopkins,\n if you want.\"\n\n\n \"Wait, maybe you're right. I have no phone here. Get Dr. Wilson—the\n Judge Building, Towson—find his home address in a phone book.\"\n\n\n \"Fine. I'll only be a little while.\"\n\n\n He stepped to the door.\n\n\n \"Curt! Take the lane down to the new road—behind the farm. Quicker—it\n cuts off a mile or so—go down through the orchard—\"\n\n\n \"All right. Take it easy now. I'll be right back.\"", "\"He did? Then he knew even better than we did how rapidly he was\n slipping. Yes, this was the quickest way.\"\n\n\n \"What are you talking about?\" Curt demanded.\n\n\n \"Did Dell say anything at all about what he wanted of you?\"\n\n\n \"It was all wild. Something about helping with some crazy plans to\n retreat from the scientific world. He was going to finish talking in\n the morning, but I guess it wouldn't have mattered. I realize now that\n he was sick and irrational.\"\n\n\n \"Too sick to explain everything, but not irrational,\" Sark said\n thoughtfully. \"He left it to us to tell you, since you are to succeed\n him.\"\n\n\n \"Succeed Dell? In what?\"\nSark suddenly flipped a switch on a panel at his right. A screen\n lighted with some fuzzy image. It cleared with a slight dial\n adjustment, and Curt seemed to be looking at some oddly familiar\n moonlit ruin.", "\"Oh, I hope it's not that!\"\nIt seemed to Curt that he had slept only minutes before he was roused\n by sounds in the night. He rolled over and switched on the light. His\n watch said two o'clock. Louise raised up in sharp alarm.\n\n\n \"What is it?\" she whispered.\n\n\n \"I thought I heard something. There it is again!\"\n\n\n \"It sounds like someone in pain. It must be Dell!\"\n\n\n Curt leaped from the bed and wrestled into his bathrobe. As he hurried\n toward Dell's room, there was another deep groan that ended in a\n shuddering sob of unbearable agony.\n\n\n He burst into the scientist's room and switched on the light. Dell\n looked up, eyes glazed with pain.\n\n\n \"Dr. Dell!\"" ], [ "\"Curt, my boy! And Louise! I thought you weren't going to show up at\n all.\"\n\n\n Curt's hand was almost lost in Dell's enormous grip, but it wasn't\n because of that that his grip was passive. It was his shocked reaction\n to Dell's haggard appearance. The fierce eyes looked merely old and\n tired now. The ageless, leathery hide of Dell's face seemed to have\n collapsed before some overpowering decay, its bronze smoothness\n shattered by deep lines that were like tool marks of pain.\n\n\n Curt spoke in a subdued voice. \"It's hard to get away from Detrick.\n Always one more experiment to try—\"\n\n\n \"—And the brass riding you as if they expected you to win another war\n for them tomorrow afternoon,\" said Dell. \"I remember.\"\n\n\n \"We wondered about this truck,\" Louise commented brightly, trying to\n change the subject. \"We finally gave up on it.\"", "As if unable to comprehend, the hired man stared dumbly for a long\n moment. His hollow-cheeked face was almost skeletal in the light that\n flooded out from behind him.\n\n\n Then from somewhere within the building came a voice, sharp with\n tension. \"Brown! What the devil are you doing? Shut that door!\"\n\n\n That brought the figure to life. He whipped out a gun and motioned Curt\n inward. \"Step inside. We'll have to decide what to do with you when\n Carlson finds you're here.\"\n\n\n \"What's the matter with you?\" Curt asked, stupefied. \"Dell's dying. He\n needs help.\"\n\n\n \"Get in here!\"", "He was a bony creature, even more cadaverous than Brown. He caught\n sight of Curt's almost indecently robust face. He gasped and swore.\n\n\n \"Who is this? What's he doing here?\"\n\n\n The entire montage of skull faces turned upon Curt. He heard a sharp\n collective intake of breath, as if his presence were some unforeseen\n calamity that had shaken the course of their incomprehensible lives.\n\n\n \"This is Curtis Johnson,\" said Brown. \"He got lost looking for a doctor\n for Dell.\"\n\n\n A mummylike figure rose from a seat before the instrument. \"Your coming\n is tremendously unfortunate, but for the moment we can do nothing about\n it. Sit here beside me. My name is Tarron Sark.\"\n\n\n The man indicated a chair.", "They advanced slowly and amazement crept over Curt as he comprehended\n the massiveness of the machine. The tank was of elliptical cross\n section, over ten feet on its major axis. Six double wheels supported\n the rear; even the front ones were double. In spite of such wide weight\n distribution, the tires were pressing down the utterly dry ground to a\n depth of an inch or more.\n\n\n \"They must haul liquid lead in that thing,\" said Curt.\n\n\n \"It's getting cool. I wish Dell would show up.\" Louise glanced out\n over the twenty-acre expanse of truck farm. Thick rows of robust\n plants covered the area. Tomatoes, carrots, beets, lettuce, and other\n vegetables—a hundred or so fruit trees were at the far end. Between\n them ran the road over which the massive truck had apparently entered\n the farm from the rear.\n\n\n A heavy step sounded abruptly and Dell's shaggy head appeared from\n around the end of the truck. His face lighted with pleasure.", "\"It\nis\nhush-hush, top-secret stuff,\" said Curt, his eyes once more on\n the road. \"The Army doesn't want it to leak, but they need Dell, need\n him badly. Anyone knowing bio-war developments would understand. They\n wanted to send me before. Dell's invitation was the break we needed.\n I may be the one with sufficient influence to bring him back. I hope\n so. But keep it under your permanent and forget your guessing games.\n There's more to it than you know.\"\n\n\n The car passed through a cool, wooded section and Louise leaned back\n and drank in the beauty of it.\n\n\n \"Hush-hush, top secret stuff,\" she said. \"Grown men playing children's\n games.\"\n\n\n \"Pretty deadly games for children, darling.\"\nIn the late afternoon they by-passed the central part of Baltimore and\n headed north beyond the suburb of Towson toward Dell's truck farm.", "Dell raised a lock of steel-gray hair in his fingers and dismissed the\n question with a wan smile. \"We all wear out sometime,\" he said. \"My\n turn had to come.\"\nInside, some of the oppressiveness vanished as the evening passed. It\n was cool enough for lighting the fireplace, and they settled before it\n after dinner. While they watched the flickering light that whipped the\n beamed ceiling, Dell entertained them with stories of his neighbors,\n whose histories he knew clear back to Revolutionary times.\n\n\n Early, however, Louise excused herself. She knew they would want\n privacy to thresh out the purposes behind Dell's invitation—and Curt's\n acceptance.\n\n\n When she was gone, there was a moment's silence. The logs crackled with\n shocking pistol shots in the fireplace. The scientist moved to stir the\n coals and then turned abruptly to Curt.\n\n\n \"When are you going to leave Detrick?\"", "Curt frantically got dressed, ran down the stairs and out to the car.\n He wondered absently what had become of the cadaverous Brown, who\n seemed to have vanished from the premises.\nThe wheels spun gravel as he started the car and whipped it out of\n the driveway. Then he was on the stretch of lane leading through the\n grove. The moonless night was utterly dark, and the stream of light\n ahead of the car seemed the only living thing upon the whole landscape.\n He almost wished he had taken the more familiar road. To get lost now\n might mean death for Dell.\n\n\n No traffic flowed past him in either direction. There were no buildings\n showing lights. Overwhelming desolation seemed to possess the\n countryside and seep into his soul. It seemed impossible that this lay\n close to the other highway with which he was familiar.", "\"What will we do with him?\" Brown asked abruptly.\n\n\n \"If Dell is dead, you murdered him!\" Curt shouted.\n\n\n A rising personal fear grew within him. They could not release him now,\n even though his story would make no sense to anybody. But they had\n somehow killed Dell, or thought they had, and they wouldn't hesitate\n to kill Curt. He thought of Louise in the great house with the corpse\n of Haman Dell—if, of course, he was actually dead. But that was\n nonsense....\n\n\n \"Dell must have sent you to us!\" Sark said, as if a great mystery had\n suddenly been lifted from his mind. \"He did not have time to tell you\n everything. Did he tell you to take the road behind the farm?\"\n\n\n Curt nodded bitterly. \"He told me it was the quickest way to get to a\n doctor.\"", "He strained his eyes into the darkness for signs of an all-night gas\n station or store from which he could phone. Finally, he resigned\n himself to going all the way to Towson. At that moment he glimpsed a\n spark of light far ahead.\n\n\n Encouraged, Curt stepped on the gas. In less than ten minutes he was at\n the spot. He braked the car to a stop, and surveyed the building as he\n got out. It seemed more like a power substation than anything else. But\n there should be a telephone, at least.\n\n\n He knocked on the door. Almost instantly, footsteps sounded within.\n\n\n The door swung wide.\n\n\n \"I wonder if I could use your—\" Curt began. He gasped. \"Brown! Dell's\n dying—we've got to get a doctor for him—\"", "\"You want Dr. Dell?\"\n\n\n They whirled at the sound of an unfamiliar voice. Louise uttered a\n startled cry.\n\n\n The gaunt figure behind them coughed asthmatically and pointed with an\n arm that seemed composed only of bones and brownish skin, so thin as to\n be almost translucent.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Curt shakenly. \"We're friends of his.\"\n\n\n \"Dell's in back. I'll tell him you're here.\"\n\n\n The figure shambled away and Louise shook herself as if to rid her mind\n of the vision. \"If our grandchildren ever ask about zombies, I can\n tell them. Who in the world do you suppose he is?\"\n\n\n \"Hired man, I suppose. Sounds as if he should be in a lung sanitarium.\n Funny that Dell would keep him around in that condition.\"", "\"He did? Then he knew even better than we did how rapidly he was\n slipping. Yes, this was the quickest way.\"\n\n\n \"What are you talking about?\" Curt demanded.\n\n\n \"Did Dell say anything at all about what he wanted of you?\"\n\n\n \"It was all wild. Something about helping with some crazy plans to\n retreat from the scientific world. He was going to finish talking in\n the morning, but I guess it wouldn't have mattered. I realize now that\n he was sick and irrational.\"\n\n\n \"Too sick to explain everything, but not irrational,\" Sark said\n thoughtfully. \"He left it to us to tell you, since you are to succeed\n him.\"\n\n\n \"Succeed Dell? In what?\"\nSark suddenly flipped a switch on a panel at his right. A screen\n lighted with some fuzzy image. It cleared with a slight dial\n adjustment, and Curt seemed to be looking at some oddly familiar\n moonlit ruin.", "\"My friend, Dr. Dell, is dying,\" Curt snapped out, refusing to sit\n down. \"I've got to get help. I saw your light and hoped you'd allow me\n to use your phone. I don't know who you are nor what Dell's hired man\n is doing here with you. But you've got to let me go for help!\"\n\n\n \"No.\" The man, Sark, shook his head. \"Dell is reconciled. He has to go.\n We are awaiting precisely the event you would halt—his death.\"\n\n\n He had known it, Curt thought, from the moment he entered that room.\n Like vultures sitting on cliffs waiting for the death of their prey,\n these fantastic men let their glance slip back to the screen. The green\n line was a third of the way toward the red marker now, and moving more\n rapidly.\n\n\n It was nightmare—meaningless—", "\"Hard to tell,\" Curt said, unconsciously speeding up again. \"After\n the war, when the atomic scientists were publicly examining their\n consciences, Dell told them to examine their own guts first. That\n was typical of him then, but soon after, he swung just as strongly\n pacifist and walked out of Detrick.\"\n\n\n \"It still seems strange that he abandoned his whole career. The world's\n foremost biochemist giving up the laboratory for a\ntruck farm\n!\"\n Louise glanced down at the lunch basket between them. In it were\n tomatoes that Dr. Hamon Dell had sent along with his invitation to\n visit him.\nFor nearly a year Dr. Dell had been sending packages of choice fruit\n and vegetables to his former colleagues, not only at the biological\n warfare center at Camp Detrick but at the universities and other\n research centers throughout the country.\n\n\n \"I wish we knew exactly why he asked us to come out,\" said Louise.", "He stumbled out, refusing Curt's offer of aid with a grim headshake.\n The fire crackled loudly within the otherwise silent room. Curt\n felt cold at the descending chill of the night, his mind bewildered\n at Dell's barrage, some of it so reasonable, some of it so utterly\n confused. And there was no clue to the identity of the powerful force\n that had made so great a change in the once militant scientist.\n\n\n Slowly Curt mounted the staircase of the old house and went to the room\n Dell had assigned them. Louise was in bed reading a murder mystery.\n\n\n \"Secret mission completed?\" she asked.\n\n\n Curt sat down on the edge of the bed. \"I'm afraid something terrible\n is wrong with Dell. Besides the neurotic guilt complex because of his\n war work, he showed signs of a terrific and apparently habitual pain in\n his head. If that should be brain tumor, it might explain his erratic\n notions, his abandonment of his career.\"", "\"Exactly,\" he said. \"You reach for a rock and beat his brains in. You\n don't wipe human life off the face of the Earth in order to reach that\n enemy. I asked you to come down here to help me break this circle of\n which I spoke. There has to be someone here—after I'm gone—\"\n\n\n Dell's eyes shifted to the depths of shadows beyond the firelight and\n remained fixed on unseen images.\n\n\n \"Me? Help you?\" Curt asked incredulously. \"What could I do? Give up\n science and become a truck gardener, too?\"", "From somewhere behind the house came the sound of a truck engine. Curt\n took Louise's arm and led her around the trim, graveled path.\n\n\n The old farmhouse had been very carefully renovated. Everywhere was\n evidence of exquisite care, yet the cumulative atmosphere remained\n uninviting, almost oppressive. Curt told himself it was the utter\n silence, made even more tense by the lonely chugging of the engine in\n back, and the incredible harsh color of the soil beneath their feet.\nRounding the corner, they came in sight of a massive tank truck. From\n it a hose led to an underground storage tank and pulsed slowly under\n the force of the liquid gushing through it. No one was in sight.\n\n\n \"What could that be for?\" asked Louise.\n\n\n \"You've got me. Could be gasoline, but Dell hasn't any reason for\n storing that much here.\"", "\"Oh, I hope it's not that!\"\nIt seemed to Curt that he had slept only minutes before he was roused\n by sounds in the night. He rolled over and switched on the light. His\n watch said two o'clock. Louise raised up in sharp alarm.\n\n\n \"What is it?\" she whispered.\n\n\n \"I thought I heard something. There it is again!\"\n\n\n \"It sounds like someone in pain. It must be Dell!\"\n\n\n Curt leaped from the bed and wrestled into his bathrobe. As he hurried\n toward Dell's room, there was another deep groan that ended in a\n shuddering sob of unbearable agony.\n\n\n He burst into the scientist's room and switched on the light. Dell\n looked up, eyes glazed with pain.\n\n\n \"Dr. Dell!\"", "\"When are\nyou\ncoming back?\" Curt demanded instead of answering.\n\n\n \"So they still want me, even after the things I said when I left.\"\n\n\n \"You're needed badly. When I told Hansen I was coming down, he said it\n would be worth five years of my own work to bring you back.\"\n\n\n \"They want me to produce even deadlier toxins than those I gave them,\"\n Dell said viciously. \"They want some that can kill ten million people\n in four minutes instead of only one million—\"\n\n\n \"Any man would go insane if he looked at it that way. It would be the\n same as gun-makers being tormented by the vision of torn men destroyed\n by their bullets, the sorrowing families—\"\n\n\n \"And why shouldn't the gun-makers be tormented?\" Dell's voice was\n low with controlled hate. \"They are men like you and me who give the\nwar\n-makers new tools for their trade.\"", "\"Oh, that. It brings liquid fertilizer to pump into my irrigation\n water, that's all. No mystery. Let's go on to the house. After you're\n settled we can catch up on everything and I'll tell you about the\n things I'm doing here.\"\n\n\n \"Who's the man we saw?\" asked Curt. \"He looks as if his health is\n pretty precarious.\"\n\n\n \"That's Brown. He came with the place—farmed it for years for my uncle\n before I inherited it. He could grow a garden on a granite slab. In\n spite of appearances, he's well enough physically.\"\n\n\n \"How has your own health been? You have—changed—since you were at\n Detrick.\"", "Louise's smile grew tight and thin. \"Don't any of you ever think of\n anything but the next war—\nany\nof you?\"\n\n\n \"How can we? We're fighting it right now.\"\n\n\n \"You make it sound so hopeless.\"\n\n\n \"That's what Dell said in the days just before he quit. He said we\n didn't\nhave\nto stay at Detrick producing the toxins and aerosols that\n will destroy millions of lives. But he never showed us how we could\n quit—and be sure of staying alive. His own walking out was no more\n than a futile gesture.\"\n\n\n \"I just can't understand him, Curt. I think he's right in a way, but\n what brought\nhim\nto that viewpoint?\"" ], [ "\"When are\nyou\ncoming back?\" Curt demanded instead of answering.\n\n\n \"So they still want me, even after the things I said when I left.\"\n\n\n \"You're needed badly. When I told Hansen I was coming down, he said it\n would be worth five years of my own work to bring you back.\"\n\n\n \"They want me to produce even deadlier toxins than those I gave them,\"\n Dell said viciously. \"They want some that can kill ten million people\n in four minutes instead of only one million—\"\n\n\n \"Any man would go insane if he looked at it that way. It would be the\n same as gun-makers being tormented by the vision of torn men destroyed\n by their bullets, the sorrowing families—\"\n\n\n \"And why shouldn't the gun-makers be tormented?\" Dell's voice was\n low with controlled hate. \"They are men like you and me who give the\nwar\n-makers new tools for their trade.\"", "\"Exactly,\" he said. \"You reach for a rock and beat his brains in. You\n don't wipe human life off the face of the Earth in order to reach that\n enemy. I asked you to come down here to help me break this circle of\n which I spoke. There has to be someone here—after I'm gone—\"\n\n\n Dell's eyes shifted to the depths of shadows beyond the firelight and\n remained fixed on unseen images.\n\n\n \"Me? Help you?\" Curt asked incredulously. \"What could I do? Give up\n science and become a truck gardener, too?\"", "\"He did? Then he knew even better than we did how rapidly he was\n slipping. Yes, this was the quickest way.\"\n\n\n \"What are you talking about?\" Curt demanded.\n\n\n \"Did Dell say anything at all about what he wanted of you?\"\n\n\n \"It was all wild. Something about helping with some crazy plans to\n retreat from the scientific world. He was going to finish talking in\n the morning, but I guess it wouldn't have mattered. I realize now that\n he was sick and irrational.\"\n\n\n \"Too sick to explain everything, but not irrational,\" Sark said\n thoughtfully. \"He left it to us to tell you, since you are to succeed\n him.\"\n\n\n \"Succeed Dell? In what?\"\nSark suddenly flipped a switch on a panel at his right. A screen\n lighted with some fuzzy image. It cleared with a slight dial\n adjustment, and Curt seemed to be looking at some oddly familiar\n moonlit ruin.", "Dell raised a lock of steel-gray hair in his fingers and dismissed the\n question with a wan smile. \"We all wear out sometime,\" he said. \"My\n turn had to come.\"\nInside, some of the oppressiveness vanished as the evening passed. It\n was cool enough for lighting the fireplace, and they settled before it\n after dinner. While they watched the flickering light that whipped the\n beamed ceiling, Dell entertained them with stories of his neighbors,\n whose histories he knew clear back to Revolutionary times.\n\n\n Early, however, Louise excused herself. She knew they would want\n privacy to thresh out the purposes behind Dell's invitation—and Curt's\n acceptance.\n\n\n When she was gone, there was a moment's silence. The logs crackled with\n shocking pistol shots in the fireplace. The scientist moved to stir the\n coals and then turned abruptly to Curt.\n\n\n \"When are you going to leave Detrick?\"", "\"Hard to tell,\" Curt said, unconsciously speeding up again. \"After\n the war, when the atomic scientists were publicly examining their\n consciences, Dell told them to examine their own guts first. That\n was typical of him then, but soon after, he swung just as strongly\n pacifist and walked out of Detrick.\"\n\n\n \"It still seems strange that he abandoned his whole career. The world's\n foremost biochemist giving up the laboratory for a\ntruck farm\n!\"\n Louise glanced down at the lunch basket between them. In it were\n tomatoes that Dr. Hamon Dell had sent along with his invitation to\n visit him.\nFor nearly a year Dr. Dell had been sending packages of choice fruit\n and vegetables to his former colleagues, not only at the biological\n warfare center at Camp Detrick but at the universities and other\n research centers throughout the country.\n\n\n \"I wish we knew exactly why he asked us to come out,\" said Louise.", "Louise's smile grew tight and thin. \"Don't any of you ever think of\n anything but the next war—\nany\nof you?\"\n\n\n \"How can we? We're fighting it right now.\"\n\n\n \"You make it sound so hopeless.\"\n\n\n \"That's what Dell said in the days just before he quit. He said we\n didn't\nhave\nto stay at Detrick producing the toxins and aerosols that\n will destroy millions of lives. But he never showed us how we could\n quit—and be sure of staying alive. His own walking out was no more\n than a futile gesture.\"\n\n\n \"I just can't understand him, Curt. I think he's right in a way, but\n what brought\nhim\nto that viewpoint?\"", "As if unable to comprehend, the hired man stared dumbly for a long\n moment. His hollow-cheeked face was almost skeletal in the light that\n flooded out from behind him.\n\n\n Then from somewhere within the building came a voice, sharp with\n tension. \"Brown! What the devil are you doing? Shut that door!\"\n\n\n That brought the figure to life. He whipped out a gun and motioned Curt\n inward. \"Step inside. We'll have to decide what to do with you when\n Carlson finds you're here.\"\n\n\n \"What's the matter with you?\" Curt asked, stupefied. \"Dell's dying. He\n needs help.\"\n\n\n \"Get in here!\"", "\"You might say that we would be in the rock business,\" replied Dell.\n \"Fighting is no longer on the level of one man with his hands about\n another's throat, but it\nshould\nbe. Those who want power and\n domination should have to fight for it personally. But it has been a\n long time since they had to.\n\"Even in the old days, kings and emperors hired mercenaries to fight\n their wars. The militarists don't buy swords now. They buy brains.\n We're the mercenaries of the new day, Curt, you and I. Once there was\n honor in our profession. We searched for truth for its own sake, and\n because it was our way of life. Once we were the hope of the world\n because science was a universal language.", "\"It\nis\nhush-hush, top-secret stuff,\" said Curt, his eyes once more on\n the road. \"The Army doesn't want it to leak, but they need Dell, need\n him badly. Anyone knowing bio-war developments would understand. They\n wanted to send me before. Dell's invitation was the break we needed.\n I may be the one with sufficient influence to bring him back. I hope\n so. But keep it under your permanent and forget your guessing games.\n There's more to it than you know.\"\n\n\n The car passed through a cool, wooded section and Louise leaned back\n and drank in the beauty of it.\n\n\n \"Hush-hush, top secret stuff,\" she said. \"Grown men playing children's\n games.\"\n\n\n \"Pretty deadly games for children, darling.\"\nIn the late afternoon they by-passed the central part of Baltimore and\n headed north beyond the suburb of Towson toward Dell's truck farm.", "\"What will we do with him?\" Brown asked abruptly.\n\n\n \"If Dell is dead, you murdered him!\" Curt shouted.\n\n\n A rising personal fear grew within him. They could not release him now,\n even though his story would make no sense to anybody. But they had\n somehow killed Dell, or thought they had, and they wouldn't hesitate\n to kill Curt. He thought of Louise in the great house with the corpse\n of Haman Dell—if, of course, he was actually dead. But that was\n nonsense....\n\n\n \"Dell must have sent you to us!\" Sark said, as if a great mystery had\n suddenly been lifted from his mind. \"He did not have time to tell you\n everything. Did he tell you to take the road behind the farm?\"\n\n\n Curt nodded bitterly. \"He told me it was the quickest way to get to a\n doctor.\"", "\"But doesn't this sense of guilt—unwarranted as it is—make you\nwant\nto find an antitoxin?\"\n\n\n \"Suppose I succeeded? I would have canceled the weapon of an enemy.\n The military would know he could nullify ours in time. Then they would\n command me to work out still another toxin. It's a vicious and insane\n circle, which must be broken somewhere. The purpose of the entire\n remainder of my life is to break it.\"\n\n\n \"When you are fighting for your life and the enemy already has his\n hands about your throat,\" Curt argued, \"you reach for the biggest rock\n you can get your hands on and beat his brains in. You don't try to\n persuade him that killing is unethical.\"\n\n\n For an instant it seemed to Curt that a flicker of humor touched the\n corners of Dell's mouth. Then the lines tightened down again.", "He stumbled out, refusing Curt's offer of aid with a grim headshake.\n The fire crackled loudly within the otherwise silent room. Curt\n felt cold at the descending chill of the night, his mind bewildered\n at Dell's barrage, some of it so reasonable, some of it so utterly\n confused. And there was no clue to the identity of the powerful force\n that had made so great a change in the once militant scientist.\n\n\n Slowly Curt mounted the staircase of the old house and went to the room\n Dell had assigned them. Louise was in bed reading a murder mystery.\n\n\n \"Secret mission completed?\" she asked.\n\n\n Curt sat down on the edge of the bed. \"I'm afraid something terrible\n is wrong with Dell. Besides the neurotic guilt complex because of his\n war work, he showed signs of a terrific and apparently habitual pain in\n his head. If that should be brain tumor, it might explain his erratic\n notions, his abandonment of his career.\"", "\"My friend, Dr. Dell, is dying,\" Curt snapped out, refusing to sit\n down. \"I've got to get help. I saw your light and hoped you'd allow me\n to use your phone. I don't know who you are nor what Dell's hired man\n is doing here with you. But you've got to let me go for help!\"\n\n\n \"No.\" The man, Sark, shook his head. \"Dell is reconciled. He has to go.\n We are awaiting precisely the event you would halt—his death.\"\n\n\n He had known it, Curt thought, from the moment he entered that room.\n Like vultures sitting on cliffs waiting for the death of their prey,\n these fantastic men let their glance slip back to the screen. The green\n line was a third of the way toward the red marker now, and moving more\n rapidly.\n\n\n It was nightmare—meaningless—", "\"Curt, my boy! And Louise! I thought you weren't going to show up at\n all.\"\n\n\n Curt's hand was almost lost in Dell's enormous grip, but it wasn't\n because of that that his grip was passive. It was his shocked reaction\n to Dell's haggard appearance. The fierce eyes looked merely old and\n tired now. The ageless, leathery hide of Dell's face seemed to have\n collapsed before some overpowering decay, its bronze smoothness\n shattered by deep lines that were like tool marks of pain.\n\n\n Curt spoke in a subdued voice. \"It's hard to get away from Detrick.\n Always one more experiment to try—\"\n\n\n \"—And the brass riding you as if they expected you to win another war\n for them tomorrow afternoon,\" said Dell. \"I remember.\"\n\n\n \"We wondered about this truck,\" Louise commented brightly, trying to\n change the subject. \"We finally gave up on it.\"", "\"Egotism! Any scientist's work is built upon the pyramid of past\n knowledge.\"\n\"The weapon I have described exists. If I had not created it, it would\n not exist. It is as simple as that. No one shares my guilt and my\n responsibility. And what more do they want of me now? What greater\n dream of mass slaughter and destruction have they dreamed?\"\n\n\n \"They want you,\" said Curt quietly, \"because they believe we are not\n the only ones possessing the toxin. They need you to come back and help\n find the antitoxin for D. triconus.\"\n\n\n Dell shook his head. \"That's a blind hope. The action of D. triconus is\n like a match set to a powder train. The instant its molecules contact\n protoplasm, they start a chain reaction that rips apart the cell\n structure. It spreads like fire from one cell to the next, and nothing\n can stop it once it's started operating within a given organism.\"", "Quickly then, gathering sudden momentum, the pip accelerated. The\n circle of men grew taut.\n\n\n The pip crossed the red line—and vanished.\n\n\n Only the smooth green trace remained, motionless and without meaning.\n\n\n With hesitant shuffling of feet, the circle expanded. The men glanced\n uncertainly at one another.\n\n\n One said, \"Well, that's the end of Dell. We'll soon know now if we're\n on the right track, or if we've botched it. Carlson will call when he's\n computed it.\"\n\n\n \"The end of Dell?\" Curt repeated slowly, as if trying to convince\n himself of what he knew had happened. \"The pip on the screen—that\n showed his life leaving him?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Sark. \"He knew he had to go. And there are perhaps hundreds\n more like him. But Dell couldn't have told you of that—\"", "\"You want Dr. Dell?\"\n\n\n They whirled at the sound of an unfamiliar voice. Louise uttered a\n startled cry.\n\n\n The gaunt figure behind them coughed asthmatically and pointed with an\n arm that seemed composed only of bones and brownish skin, so thin as to\n be almost translucent.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Curt shakenly. \"We're friends of his.\"\n\n\n \"Dell's in back. I'll tell him you're here.\"\n\n\n The figure shambled away and Louise shook herself as if to rid her mind\n of the vision. \"If our grandchildren ever ask about zombies, I can\n tell them. Who in the world do you suppose he is?\"\n\n\n \"Hired man, I suppose. Sounds as if he should be in a lung sanitarium.\n Funny that Dell would keep him around in that condition.\"", "Curt frantically got dressed, ran down the stairs and out to the car.\n He wondered absently what had become of the cadaverous Brown, who\n seemed to have vanished from the premises.\nThe wheels spun gravel as he started the car and whipped it out of\n the driveway. Then he was on the stretch of lane leading through the\n grove. The moonless night was utterly dark, and the stream of light\n ahead of the car seemed the only living thing upon the whole landscape.\n He almost wished he had taken the more familiar road. To get lost now\n might mean death for Dell.\n\n\n No traffic flowed past him in either direction. There were no buildings\n showing lights. Overwhelming desolation seemed to possess the\n countryside and seep into his soul. It seemed impossible that this lay\n close to the other highway with which he was familiar.", "\"Oh, Dell, it's not as simple as that.\" Curt raised a hand and let it\n fall wearily. They had been over this so many times before. \"Weapon\n designers are no more responsible than any other agents of society.\n It's pure neurosis to absorb the whole guilt of wars yet unfought\n merely because you happened to have developed a potential weapon.\"\n\n\n Dell touched the massive dome of his skull. \"Here within this brain of\n mine has been conceived a thing which will probably destroy a billion\n human lives in the coming years. D. triconus toxin in a suitable\n aerosol requires only a countable number of molecules in the lungs of\n a man to kill him. My brain and mine alone is responsible for that\n vicious, murderous discovery.\"", "\"I'm not staying,\" Curt insisted. \"You can't prevent me from helping\n Dell without assuming responsibility for his death. I demand you let me\n call.\"\n\n\n \"You're not going to call,\" said Sark wearily. \"And we assumed\n responsibility for Dell's death long ago. Sit down!\"\n\n\n Slowly Curt sank down upon the chair beside the stranger. There was\n nothing else to do. He was powerless against Brown's gun. But he'd\n bring them to justice somehow, he swore.\n\n\n He didn't understand the meaning of the slowly moving pattern on the\n 'scope face, yet, as his eyes followed that pip, he sensed tension in\n the watching men that seemed sinister, almost murderous. How?\n\n\n What did the inexorably advancing pip signify?\nNo one spoke. The room was stifling hot and the breathing of the circle\n of men was a dull, rattling sound in Curt's ears." ], [ "\"You might say that we would be in the rock business,\" replied Dell.\n \"Fighting is no longer on the level of one man with his hands about\n another's throat, but it\nshould\nbe. Those who want power and\n domination should have to fight for it personally. But it has been a\n long time since they had to.\n\"Even in the old days, kings and emperors hired mercenaries to fight\n their wars. The militarists don't buy swords now. They buy brains.\n We're the mercenaries of the new day, Curt, you and I. Once there was\n honor in our profession. We searched for truth for its own sake, and\n because it was our way of life. Once we were the hope of the world\n because science was a universal language.", "\"Exactly,\" he said. \"You reach for a rock and beat his brains in. You\n don't wipe human life off the face of the Earth in order to reach that\n enemy. I asked you to come down here to help me break this circle of\n which I spoke. There has to be someone here—after I'm gone—\"\n\n\n Dell's eyes shifted to the depths of shadows beyond the firelight and\n remained fixed on unseen images.\n\n\n \"Me? Help you?\" Curt asked incredulously. \"What could I do? Give up\n science and become a truck gardener, too?\"", "Dell raised a lock of steel-gray hair in his fingers and dismissed the\n question with a wan smile. \"We all wear out sometime,\" he said. \"My\n turn had to come.\"\nInside, some of the oppressiveness vanished as the evening passed. It\n was cool enough for lighting the fireplace, and they settled before it\n after dinner. While they watched the flickering light that whipped the\n beamed ceiling, Dell entertained them with stories of his neighbors,\n whose histories he knew clear back to Revolutionary times.\n\n\n Early, however, Louise excused herself. She knew they would want\n privacy to thresh out the purposes behind Dell's invitation—and Curt's\n acceptance.\n\n\n When she was gone, there was a moment's silence. The logs crackled with\n shocking pistol shots in the fireplace. The scientist moved to stir the\n coals and then turned abruptly to Curt.\n\n\n \"When are you going to leave Detrick?\"", "\"When are\nyou\ncoming back?\" Curt demanded instead of answering.\n\n\n \"So they still want me, even after the things I said when I left.\"\n\n\n \"You're needed badly. When I told Hansen I was coming down, he said it\n would be worth five years of my own work to bring you back.\"\n\n\n \"They want me to produce even deadlier toxins than those I gave them,\"\n Dell said viciously. \"They want some that can kill ten million people\n in four minutes instead of only one million—\"\n\n\n \"Any man would go insane if he looked at it that way. It would be the\n same as gun-makers being tormented by the vision of torn men destroyed\n by their bullets, the sorrowing families—\"\n\n\n \"And why shouldn't the gun-makers be tormented?\" Dell's voice was\n low with controlled hate. \"They are men like you and me who give the\nwar\n-makers new tools for their trade.\"", "\"Curt, my boy! And Louise! I thought you weren't going to show up at\n all.\"\n\n\n Curt's hand was almost lost in Dell's enormous grip, but it wasn't\n because of that that his grip was passive. It was his shocked reaction\n to Dell's haggard appearance. The fierce eyes looked merely old and\n tired now. The ageless, leathery hide of Dell's face seemed to have\n collapsed before some overpowering decay, its bronze smoothness\n shattered by deep lines that were like tool marks of pain.\n\n\n Curt spoke in a subdued voice. \"It's hard to get away from Detrick.\n Always one more experiment to try—\"\n\n\n \"—And the brass riding you as if they expected you to win another war\n for them tomorrow afternoon,\" said Dell. \"I remember.\"\n\n\n \"We wondered about this truck,\" Louise commented brightly, trying to\n change the subject. \"We finally gave up on it.\"", "Louise's smile grew tight and thin. \"Don't any of you ever think of\n anything but the next war—\nany\nof you?\"\n\n\n \"How can we? We're fighting it right now.\"\n\n\n \"You make it sound so hopeless.\"\n\n\n \"That's what Dell said in the days just before he quit. He said we\n didn't\nhave\nto stay at Detrick producing the toxins and aerosols that\n will destroy millions of lives. But he never showed us how we could\n quit—and be sure of staying alive. His own walking out was no more\n than a futile gesture.\"\n\n\n \"I just can't understand him, Curt. I think he's right in a way, but\n what brought\nhim\nto that viewpoint?\"", "\"My friend, Dr. Dell, is dying,\" Curt snapped out, refusing to sit\n down. \"I've got to get help. I saw your light and hoped you'd allow me\n to use your phone. I don't know who you are nor what Dell's hired man\n is doing here with you. But you've got to let me go for help!\"\n\n\n \"No.\" The man, Sark, shook his head. \"Dell is reconciled. He has to go.\n We are awaiting precisely the event you would halt—his death.\"\n\n\n He had known it, Curt thought, from the moment he entered that room.\n Like vultures sitting on cliffs waiting for the death of their prey,\n these fantastic men let their glance slip back to the screen. The green\n line was a third of the way toward the red marker now, and moving more\n rapidly.\n\n\n It was nightmare—meaningless—", "\"He did? Then he knew even better than we did how rapidly he was\n slipping. Yes, this was the quickest way.\"\n\n\n \"What are you talking about?\" Curt demanded.\n\n\n \"Did Dell say anything at all about what he wanted of you?\"\n\n\n \"It was all wild. Something about helping with some crazy plans to\n retreat from the scientific world. He was going to finish talking in\n the morning, but I guess it wouldn't have mattered. I realize now that\n he was sick and irrational.\"\n\n\n \"Too sick to explain everything, but not irrational,\" Sark said\n thoughtfully. \"He left it to us to tell you, since you are to succeed\n him.\"\n\n\n \"Succeed Dell? In what?\"\nSark suddenly flipped a switch on a panel at his right. A screen\n lighted with some fuzzy image. It cleared with a slight dial\n adjustment, and Curt seemed to be looking at some oddly familiar\n moonlit ruin.", "As if unable to comprehend, the hired man stared dumbly for a long\n moment. His hollow-cheeked face was almost skeletal in the light that\n flooded out from behind him.\n\n\n Then from somewhere within the building came a voice, sharp with\n tension. \"Brown! What the devil are you doing? Shut that door!\"\n\n\n That brought the figure to life. He whipped out a gun and motioned Curt\n inward. \"Step inside. We'll have to decide what to do with you when\n Carlson finds you're here.\"\n\n\n \"What's the matter with you?\" Curt asked, stupefied. \"Dell's dying. He\n needs help.\"\n\n\n \"Get in here!\"", "\"Hard to tell,\" Curt said, unconsciously speeding up again. \"After\n the war, when the atomic scientists were publicly examining their\n consciences, Dell told them to examine their own guts first. That\n was typical of him then, but soon after, he swung just as strongly\n pacifist and walked out of Detrick.\"\n\n\n \"It still seems strange that he abandoned his whole career. The world's\n foremost biochemist giving up the laboratory for a\ntruck farm\n!\"\n Louise glanced down at the lunch basket between them. In it were\n tomatoes that Dr. Hamon Dell had sent along with his invitation to\n visit him.\nFor nearly a year Dr. Dell had been sending packages of choice fruit\n and vegetables to his former colleagues, not only at the biological\n warfare center at Camp Detrick but at the universities and other\n research centers throughout the country.\n\n\n \"I wish we knew exactly why he asked us to come out,\" said Louise.", "\"It\nis\nhush-hush, top-secret stuff,\" said Curt, his eyes once more on\n the road. \"The Army doesn't want it to leak, but they need Dell, need\n him badly. Anyone knowing bio-war developments would understand. They\n wanted to send me before. Dell's invitation was the break we needed.\n I may be the one with sufficient influence to bring him back. I hope\n so. But keep it under your permanent and forget your guessing games.\n There's more to it than you know.\"\n\n\n The car passed through a cool, wooded section and Louise leaned back\n and drank in the beauty of it.\n\n\n \"Hush-hush, top secret stuff,\" she said. \"Grown men playing children's\n games.\"\n\n\n \"Pretty deadly games for children, darling.\"\nIn the late afternoon they by-passed the central part of Baltimore and\n headed north beyond the suburb of Towson toward Dell's truck farm.", "\"What will we do with him?\" Brown asked abruptly.\n\n\n \"If Dell is dead, you murdered him!\" Curt shouted.\n\n\n A rising personal fear grew within him. They could not release him now,\n even though his story would make no sense to anybody. But they had\n somehow killed Dell, or thought they had, and they wouldn't hesitate\n to kill Curt. He thought of Louise in the great house with the corpse\n of Haman Dell—if, of course, he was actually dead. But that was\n nonsense....\n\n\n \"Dell must have sent you to us!\" Sark said, as if a great mystery had\n suddenly been lifted from his mind. \"He did not have time to tell you\n everything. Did he tell you to take the road behind the farm?\"\n\n\n Curt nodded bitterly. \"He told me it was the quickest way to get to a\n doctor.\"", "He was a bony creature, even more cadaverous than Brown. He caught\n sight of Curt's almost indecently robust face. He gasped and swore.\n\n\n \"Who is this? What's he doing here?\"\n\n\n The entire montage of skull faces turned upon Curt. He heard a sharp\n collective intake of breath, as if his presence were some unforeseen\n calamity that had shaken the course of their incomprehensible lives.\n\n\n \"This is Curtis Johnson,\" said Brown. \"He got lost looking for a doctor\n for Dell.\"\n\n\n A mummylike figure rose from a seat before the instrument. \"Your coming\n is tremendously unfortunate, but for the moment we can do nothing about\n it. Sit here beside me. My name is Tarron Sark.\"\n\n\n The man indicated a chair.", "\"Oh, Dell, it's not as simple as that.\" Curt raised a hand and let it\n fall wearily. They had been over this so many times before. \"Weapon\n designers are no more responsible than any other agents of society.\n It's pure neurosis to absorb the whole guilt of wars yet unfought\n merely because you happened to have developed a potential weapon.\"\n\n\n Dell touched the massive dome of his skull. \"Here within this brain of\n mine has been conceived a thing which will probably destroy a billion\n human lives in the coming years. D. triconus toxin in a suitable\n aerosol requires only a countable number of molecules in the lungs of\n a man to kill him. My brain and mine alone is responsible for that\n vicious, murderous discovery.\"", "They advanced slowly and amazement crept over Curt as he comprehended\n the massiveness of the machine. The tank was of elliptical cross\n section, over ten feet on its major axis. Six double wheels supported\n the rear; even the front ones were double. In spite of such wide weight\n distribution, the tires were pressing down the utterly dry ground to a\n depth of an inch or more.\n\n\n \"They must haul liquid lead in that thing,\" said Curt.\n\n\n \"It's getting cool. I wish Dell would show up.\" Louise glanced out\n over the twenty-acre expanse of truck farm. Thick rows of robust\n plants covered the area. Tomatoes, carrots, beets, lettuce, and other\n vegetables—a hundred or so fruit trees were at the far end. Between\n them ran the road over which the massive truck had apparently entered\n the farm from the rear.\n\n\n A heavy step sounded abruptly and Dell's shaggy head appeared from\n around the end of the truck. His face lighted with pleasure.", "\"Then what are we to do?\" Curt demanded fiercely. \"What are we to do\n while enemy scientists prepare these same weapons to exterminate\nus\n?\n Sure, it's one hell of a mess. Science is already dead. The kind you\n talk about has been dead for twenty years. All our fine ideals are\n worthless until the politicians find a solution to their quarrels.\"\n\n\n \"Politicians? Since when did men of science have to wait upon\n politicians for solutions of human problems?\" Dell passed a hand over\n his brow, and suddenly his face contorted in pain.\n\n\n \"What is it?\" Curt exclaimed, rising.\n\n\n \"Nothing—nothing, my boy. Some minor trouble I've had lately. It will\n pass in a moment.\"", "\"But doesn't this sense of guilt—unwarranted as it is—make you\nwant\nto find an antitoxin?\"\n\n\n \"Suppose I succeeded? I would have canceled the weapon of an enemy.\n The military would know he could nullify ours in time. Then they would\n command me to work out still another toxin. It's a vicious and insane\n circle, which must be broken somewhere. The purpose of the entire\n remainder of my life is to break it.\"\n\n\n \"When you are fighting for your life and the enemy already has his\n hands about your throat,\" Curt argued, \"you reach for the biggest rock\n you can get your hands on and beat his brains in. You don't try to\n persuade him that killing is unethical.\"\n\n\n For an instant it seemed to Curt that a flicker of humor touched the\n corners of Dell's mouth. Then the lines tightened down again.", "Curt frantically got dressed, ran down the stairs and out to the car.\n He wondered absently what had become of the cadaverous Brown, who\n seemed to have vanished from the premises.\nThe wheels spun gravel as he started the car and whipped it out of\n the driveway. Then he was on the stretch of lane leading through the\n grove. The moonless night was utterly dark, and the stream of light\n ahead of the car seemed the only living thing upon the whole landscape.\n He almost wished he had taken the more familiar road. To get lost now\n might mean death for Dell.\n\n\n No traffic flowed past him in either direction. There were no buildings\n showing lights. Overwhelming desolation seemed to possess the\n countryside and seep into his soul. It seemed impossible that this lay\n close to the other highway with which he was familiar.", "He stumbled out, refusing Curt's offer of aid with a grim headshake.\n The fire crackled loudly within the otherwise silent room. Curt\n felt cold at the descending chill of the night, his mind bewildered\n at Dell's barrage, some of it so reasonable, some of it so utterly\n confused. And there was no clue to the identity of the powerful force\n that had made so great a change in the once militant scientist.\n\n\n Slowly Curt mounted the staircase of the old house and went to the room\n Dell had assigned them. Louise was in bed reading a murder mystery.\n\n\n \"Secret mission completed?\" she asked.\n\n\n Curt sat down on the edge of the bed. \"I'm afraid something terrible\n is wrong with Dell. Besides the neurotic guilt complex because of his\n war work, he showed signs of a terrific and apparently habitual pain in\n his head. If that should be brain tumor, it might explain his erratic\n notions, his abandonment of his career.\"", "\"Perhaps you are one of those who regard your accomplishments with\n pride,\" Sark went on savagely, ignoring or unaware of Curt's fear and\n horror. \"That the hydrogen bombs smashed the cities, and the aerosols\n destroyed the remnants of humanity seems insignificant to you beside\n the high technical achievement these things represent.\"\n\n\n Curt's throat was dry with panic. Irrelevantly, he recalled the\n pain-fired eyes of Dell and the dying scientist's words: \"The\n responsibility for the coming destruction of civilization lies at the\n doors of the scientist mercenaries—\"" ], [ "As if unable to comprehend, the hired man stared dumbly for a long\n moment. His hollow-cheeked face was almost skeletal in the light that\n flooded out from behind him.\n\n\n Then from somewhere within the building came a voice, sharp with\n tension. \"Brown! What the devil are you doing? Shut that door!\"\n\n\n That brought the figure to life. He whipped out a gun and motioned Curt\n inward. \"Step inside. We'll have to decide what to do with you when\n Carlson finds you're here.\"\n\n\n \"What's the matter with you?\" Curt asked, stupefied. \"Dell's dying. He\n needs help.\"\n\n\n \"Get in here!\"", "\"Curt, my boy! And Louise! I thought you weren't going to show up at\n all.\"\n\n\n Curt's hand was almost lost in Dell's enormous grip, but it wasn't\n because of that that his grip was passive. It was his shocked reaction\n to Dell's haggard appearance. The fierce eyes looked merely old and\n tired now. The ageless, leathery hide of Dell's face seemed to have\n collapsed before some overpowering decay, its bronze smoothness\n shattered by deep lines that were like tool marks of pain.\n\n\n Curt spoke in a subdued voice. \"It's hard to get away from Detrick.\n Always one more experiment to try—\"\n\n\n \"—And the brass riding you as if they expected you to win another war\n for them tomorrow afternoon,\" said Dell. \"I remember.\"\n\n\n \"We wondered about this truck,\" Louise commented brightly, trying to\n change the subject. \"We finally gave up on it.\"", "\"You might say that we would be in the rock business,\" replied Dell.\n \"Fighting is no longer on the level of one man with his hands about\n another's throat, but it\nshould\nbe. Those who want power and\n domination should have to fight for it personally. But it has been a\n long time since they had to.\n\"Even in the old days, kings and emperors hired mercenaries to fight\n their wars. The militarists don't buy swords now. They buy brains.\n We're the mercenaries of the new day, Curt, you and I. Once there was\n honor in our profession. We searched for truth for its own sake, and\n because it was our way of life. Once we were the hope of the world\n because science was a universal language.", "He was a bony creature, even more cadaverous than Brown. He caught\n sight of Curt's almost indecently robust face. He gasped and swore.\n\n\n \"Who is this? What's he doing here?\"\n\n\n The entire montage of skull faces turned upon Curt. He heard a sharp\n collective intake of breath, as if his presence were some unforeseen\n calamity that had shaken the course of their incomprehensible lives.\n\n\n \"This is Curtis Johnson,\" said Brown. \"He got lost looking for a doctor\n for Dell.\"\n\n\n A mummylike figure rose from a seat before the instrument. \"Your coming\n is tremendously unfortunate, but for the moment we can do nothing about\n it. Sit here beside me. My name is Tarron Sark.\"\n\n\n The man indicated a chair.", "\"Exactly,\" he said. \"You reach for a rock and beat his brains in. You\n don't wipe human life off the face of the Earth in order to reach that\n enemy. I asked you to come down here to help me break this circle of\n which I spoke. There has to be someone here—after I'm gone—\"\n\n\n Dell's eyes shifted to the depths of shadows beyond the firelight and\n remained fixed on unseen images.\n\n\n \"Me? Help you?\" Curt asked incredulously. \"What could I do? Give up\n science and become a truck gardener, too?\"", "\"He did? Then he knew even better than we did how rapidly he was\n slipping. Yes, this was the quickest way.\"\n\n\n \"What are you talking about?\" Curt demanded.\n\n\n \"Did Dell say anything at all about what he wanted of you?\"\n\n\n \"It was all wild. Something about helping with some crazy plans to\n retreat from the scientific world. He was going to finish talking in\n the morning, but I guess it wouldn't have mattered. I realize now that\n he was sick and irrational.\"\n\n\n \"Too sick to explain everything, but not irrational,\" Sark said\n thoughtfully. \"He left it to us to tell you, since you are to succeed\n him.\"\n\n\n \"Succeed Dell? In what?\"\nSark suddenly flipped a switch on a panel at his right. A screen\n lighted with some fuzzy image. It cleared with a slight dial\n adjustment, and Curt seemed to be looking at some oddly familiar\n moonlit ruin.", "Dell raised a lock of steel-gray hair in his fingers and dismissed the\n question with a wan smile. \"We all wear out sometime,\" he said. \"My\n turn had to come.\"\nInside, some of the oppressiveness vanished as the evening passed. It\n was cool enough for lighting the fireplace, and they settled before it\n after dinner. While they watched the flickering light that whipped the\n beamed ceiling, Dell entertained them with stories of his neighbors,\n whose histories he knew clear back to Revolutionary times.\n\n\n Early, however, Louise excused herself. She knew they would want\n privacy to thresh out the purposes behind Dell's invitation—and Curt's\n acceptance.\n\n\n When she was gone, there was a moment's silence. The logs crackled with\n shocking pistol shots in the fireplace. The scientist moved to stir the\n coals and then turned abruptly to Curt.\n\n\n \"When are you going to leave Detrick?\"", "\"My friend, Dr. Dell, is dying,\" Curt snapped out, refusing to sit\n down. \"I've got to get help. I saw your light and hoped you'd allow me\n to use your phone. I don't know who you are nor what Dell's hired man\n is doing here with you. But you've got to let me go for help!\"\n\n\n \"No.\" The man, Sark, shook his head. \"Dell is reconciled. He has to go.\n We are awaiting precisely the event you would halt—his death.\"\n\n\n He had known it, Curt thought, from the moment he entered that room.\n Like vultures sitting on cliffs waiting for the death of their prey,\n these fantastic men let their glance slip back to the screen. The green\n line was a third of the way toward the red marker now, and moving more\n rapidly.\n\n\n It was nightmare—meaningless—", "\"It\nis\nhush-hush, top-secret stuff,\" said Curt, his eyes once more on\n the road. \"The Army doesn't want it to leak, but they need Dell, need\n him badly. Anyone knowing bio-war developments would understand. They\n wanted to send me before. Dell's invitation was the break we needed.\n I may be the one with sufficient influence to bring him back. I hope\n so. But keep it under your permanent and forget your guessing games.\n There's more to it than you know.\"\n\n\n The car passed through a cool, wooded section and Louise leaned back\n and drank in the beauty of it.\n\n\n \"Hush-hush, top secret stuff,\" she said. \"Grown men playing children's\n games.\"\n\n\n \"Pretty deadly games for children, darling.\"\nIn the late afternoon they by-passed the central part of Baltimore and\n headed north beyond the suburb of Towson toward Dell's truck farm.", "\"What will we do with him?\" Brown asked abruptly.\n\n\n \"If Dell is dead, you murdered him!\" Curt shouted.\n\n\n A rising personal fear grew within him. They could not release him now,\n even though his story would make no sense to anybody. But they had\n somehow killed Dell, or thought they had, and they wouldn't hesitate\n to kill Curt. He thought of Louise in the great house with the corpse\n of Haman Dell—if, of course, he was actually dead. But that was\n nonsense....\n\n\n \"Dell must have sent you to us!\" Sark said, as if a great mystery had\n suddenly been lifted from his mind. \"He did not have time to tell you\n everything. Did he tell you to take the road behind the farm?\"\n\n\n Curt nodded bitterly. \"He told me it was the quickest way to get to a\n doctor.\"", "\"Hard to tell,\" Curt said, unconsciously speeding up again. \"After\n the war, when the atomic scientists were publicly examining their\n consciences, Dell told them to examine their own guts first. That\n was typical of him then, but soon after, he swung just as strongly\n pacifist and walked out of Detrick.\"\n\n\n \"It still seems strange that he abandoned his whole career. The world's\n foremost biochemist giving up the laboratory for a\ntruck farm\n!\"\n Louise glanced down at the lunch basket between them. In it were\n tomatoes that Dr. Hamon Dell had sent along with his invitation to\n visit him.\nFor nearly a year Dr. Dell had been sending packages of choice fruit\n and vegetables to his former colleagues, not only at the biological\n warfare center at Camp Detrick but at the universities and other\n research centers throughout the country.\n\n\n \"I wish we knew exactly why he asked us to come out,\" said Louise.", "They advanced slowly and amazement crept over Curt as he comprehended\n the massiveness of the machine. The tank was of elliptical cross\n section, over ten feet on its major axis. Six double wheels supported\n the rear; even the front ones were double. In spite of such wide weight\n distribution, the tires were pressing down the utterly dry ground to a\n depth of an inch or more.\n\n\n \"They must haul liquid lead in that thing,\" said Curt.\n\n\n \"It's getting cool. I wish Dell would show up.\" Louise glanced out\n over the twenty-acre expanse of truck farm. Thick rows of robust\n plants covered the area. Tomatoes, carrots, beets, lettuce, and other\n vegetables—a hundred or so fruit trees were at the far end. Between\n them ran the road over which the massive truck had apparently entered\n the farm from the rear.\n\n\n A heavy step sounded abruptly and Dell's shaggy head appeared from\n around the end of the truck. His face lighted with pleasure.", "\"When are\nyou\ncoming back?\" Curt demanded instead of answering.\n\n\n \"So they still want me, even after the things I said when I left.\"\n\n\n \"You're needed badly. When I told Hansen I was coming down, he said it\n would be worth five years of my own work to bring you back.\"\n\n\n \"They want me to produce even deadlier toxins than those I gave them,\"\n Dell said viciously. \"They want some that can kill ten million people\n in four minutes instead of only one million—\"\n\n\n \"Any man would go insane if he looked at it that way. It would be the\n same as gun-makers being tormented by the vision of torn men destroyed\n by their bullets, the sorrowing families—\"\n\n\n \"And why shouldn't the gun-makers be tormented?\" Dell's voice was\n low with controlled hate. \"They are men like you and me who give the\nwar\n-makers new tools for their trade.\"", "Curt frantically got dressed, ran down the stairs and out to the car.\n He wondered absently what had become of the cadaverous Brown, who\n seemed to have vanished from the premises.\nThe wheels spun gravel as he started the car and whipped it out of\n the driveway. Then he was on the stretch of lane leading through the\n grove. The moonless night was utterly dark, and the stream of light\n ahead of the car seemed the only living thing upon the whole landscape.\n He almost wished he had taken the more familiar road. To get lost now\n might mean death for Dell.\n\n\n No traffic flowed past him in either direction. There were no buildings\n showing lights. Overwhelming desolation seemed to possess the\n countryside and seep into his soul. It seemed impossible that this lay\n close to the other highway with which he was familiar.", "He stumbled out, refusing Curt's offer of aid with a grim headshake.\n The fire crackled loudly within the otherwise silent room. Curt\n felt cold at the descending chill of the night, his mind bewildered\n at Dell's barrage, some of it so reasonable, some of it so utterly\n confused. And there was no clue to the identity of the powerful force\n that had made so great a change in the once militant scientist.\n\n\n Slowly Curt mounted the staircase of the old house and went to the room\n Dell had assigned them. Louise was in bed reading a murder mystery.\n\n\n \"Secret mission completed?\" she asked.\n\n\n Curt sat down on the edge of the bed. \"I'm afraid something terrible\n is wrong with Dell. Besides the neurotic guilt complex because of his\n war work, he showed signs of a terrific and apparently habitual pain in\n his head. If that should be brain tumor, it might explain his erratic\n notions, his abandonment of his career.\"", "Louise's smile grew tight and thin. \"Don't any of you ever think of\n anything but the next war—\nany\nof you?\"\n\n\n \"How can we? We're fighting it right now.\"\n\n\n \"You make it sound so hopeless.\"\n\n\n \"That's what Dell said in the days just before he quit. He said we\n didn't\nhave\nto stay at Detrick producing the toxins and aerosols that\n will destroy millions of lives. But he never showed us how we could\n quit—and be sure of staying alive. His own walking out was no more\n than a futile gesture.\"\n\n\n \"I just can't understand him, Curt. I think he's right in a way, but\n what brought\nhim\nto that viewpoint?\"", "\"You want Dr. Dell?\"\n\n\n They whirled at the sound of an unfamiliar voice. Louise uttered a\n startled cry.\n\n\n The gaunt figure behind them coughed asthmatically and pointed with an\n arm that seemed composed only of bones and brownish skin, so thin as to\n be almost translucent.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Curt shakenly. \"We're friends of his.\"\n\n\n \"Dell's in back. I'll tell him you're here.\"\n\n\n The figure shambled away and Louise shook herself as if to rid her mind\n of the vision. \"If our grandchildren ever ask about zombies, I can\n tell them. Who in the world do you suppose he is?\"\n\n\n \"Hired man, I suppose. Sounds as if he should be in a lung sanitarium.\n Funny that Dell would keep him around in that condition.\"", "\"Perhaps you are one of those who regard your accomplishments with\n pride,\" Sark went on savagely, ignoring or unaware of Curt's fear and\n horror. \"That the hydrogen bombs smashed the cities, and the aerosols\n destroyed the remnants of humanity seems insignificant to you beside\n the high technical achievement these things represent.\"\n\n\n Curt's throat was dry with panic. Irrelevantly, he recalled the\n pain-fired eyes of Dell and the dying scientist's words: \"The\n responsibility for the coming destruction of civilization lies at the\n doors of the scientist mercenaries—\"", "He strained his eyes into the darkness for signs of an all-night gas\n station or store from which he could phone. Finally, he resigned\n himself to going all the way to Towson. At that moment he glimpsed a\n spark of light far ahead.\n\n\n Encouraged, Curt stepped on the gas. In less than ten minutes he was at\n the spot. He braked the car to a stop, and surveyed the building as he\n got out. It seemed more like a power substation than anything else. But\n there should be a telephone, at least.\n\n\n He knocked on the door. Almost instantly, footsteps sounded within.\n\n\n The door swung wide.\n\n\n \"I wonder if I could use your—\" Curt began. He gasped. \"Brown! Dell's\n dying—we've got to get a doctor for him—\"", "From somewhere behind the house came the sound of a truck engine. Curt\n took Louise's arm and led her around the trim, graveled path.\n\n\n The old farmhouse had been very carefully renovated. Everywhere was\n evidence of exquisite care, yet the cumulative atmosphere remained\n uninviting, almost oppressive. Curt told himself it was the utter\n silence, made even more tense by the lonely chugging of the engine in\n back, and the incredible harsh color of the soil beneath their feet.\nRounding the corner, they came in sight of a massive tank truck. From\n it a hose led to an underground storage tank and pulsed slowly under\n the force of the liquid gushing through it. No one was in sight.\n\n\n \"What could that be for?\" asked Louise.\n\n\n \"You've got me. Could be gasoline, but Dell hasn't any reason for\n storing that much here.\"" ], [ "\"It\nis\nhush-hush, top-secret stuff,\" said Curt, his eyes once more on\n the road. \"The Army doesn't want it to leak, but they need Dell, need\n him badly. Anyone knowing bio-war developments would understand. They\n wanted to send me before. Dell's invitation was the break we needed.\n I may be the one with sufficient influence to bring him back. I hope\n so. But keep it under your permanent and forget your guessing games.\n There's more to it than you know.\"\n\n\n The car passed through a cool, wooded section and Louise leaned back\n and drank in the beauty of it.\n\n\n \"Hush-hush, top secret stuff,\" she said. \"Grown men playing children's\n games.\"\n\n\n \"Pretty deadly games for children, darling.\"\nIn the late afternoon they by-passed the central part of Baltimore and\n headed north beyond the suburb of Towson toward Dell's truck farm.", "Dell raised a lock of steel-gray hair in his fingers and dismissed the\n question with a wan smile. \"We all wear out sometime,\" he said. \"My\n turn had to come.\"\nInside, some of the oppressiveness vanished as the evening passed. It\n was cool enough for lighting the fireplace, and they settled before it\n after dinner. While they watched the flickering light that whipped the\n beamed ceiling, Dell entertained them with stories of his neighbors,\n whose histories he knew clear back to Revolutionary times.\n\n\n Early, however, Louise excused herself. She knew they would want\n privacy to thresh out the purposes behind Dell's invitation—and Curt's\n acceptance.\n\n\n When she was gone, there was a moment's silence. The logs crackled with\n shocking pistol shots in the fireplace. The scientist moved to stir the\n coals and then turned abruptly to Curt.\n\n\n \"When are you going to leave Detrick?\"", "\"Hard to tell,\" Curt said, unconsciously speeding up again. \"After\n the war, when the atomic scientists were publicly examining their\n consciences, Dell told them to examine their own guts first. That\n was typical of him then, but soon after, he swung just as strongly\n pacifist and walked out of Detrick.\"\n\n\n \"It still seems strange that he abandoned his whole career. The world's\n foremost biochemist giving up the laboratory for a\ntruck farm\n!\"\n Louise glanced down at the lunch basket between them. In it were\n tomatoes that Dr. Hamon Dell had sent along with his invitation to\n visit him.\nFor nearly a year Dr. Dell had been sending packages of choice fruit\n and vegetables to his former colleagues, not only at the biological\n warfare center at Camp Detrick but at the universities and other\n research centers throughout the country.\n\n\n \"I wish we knew exactly why he asked us to come out,\" said Louise.", "As if unable to comprehend, the hired man stared dumbly for a long\n moment. His hollow-cheeked face was almost skeletal in the light that\n flooded out from behind him.\n\n\n Then from somewhere within the building came a voice, sharp with\n tension. \"Brown! What the devil are you doing? Shut that door!\"\n\n\n That brought the figure to life. He whipped out a gun and motioned Curt\n inward. \"Step inside. We'll have to decide what to do with you when\n Carlson finds you're here.\"\n\n\n \"What's the matter with you?\" Curt asked, stupefied. \"Dell's dying. He\n needs help.\"\n\n\n \"Get in here!\"", "\"What will we do with him?\" Brown asked abruptly.\n\n\n \"If Dell is dead, you murdered him!\" Curt shouted.\n\n\n A rising personal fear grew within him. They could not release him now,\n even though his story would make no sense to anybody. But they had\n somehow killed Dell, or thought they had, and they wouldn't hesitate\n to kill Curt. He thought of Louise in the great house with the corpse\n of Haman Dell—if, of course, he was actually dead. But that was\n nonsense....\n\n\n \"Dell must have sent you to us!\" Sark said, as if a great mystery had\n suddenly been lifted from his mind. \"He did not have time to tell you\n everything. Did he tell you to take the road behind the farm?\"\n\n\n Curt nodded bitterly. \"He told me it was the quickest way to get to a\n doctor.\"", "They advanced slowly and amazement crept over Curt as he comprehended\n the massiveness of the machine. The tank was of elliptical cross\n section, over ten feet on its major axis. Six double wheels supported\n the rear; even the front ones were double. In spite of such wide weight\n distribution, the tires were pressing down the utterly dry ground to a\n depth of an inch or more.\n\n\n \"They must haul liquid lead in that thing,\" said Curt.\n\n\n \"It's getting cool. I wish Dell would show up.\" Louise glanced out\n over the twenty-acre expanse of truck farm. Thick rows of robust\n plants covered the area. Tomatoes, carrots, beets, lettuce, and other\n vegetables—a hundred or so fruit trees were at the far end. Between\n them ran the road over which the massive truck had apparently entered\n the farm from the rear.\n\n\n A heavy step sounded abruptly and Dell's shaggy head appeared from\n around the end of the truck. His face lighted with pleasure.", "\"Curt, my boy! And Louise! I thought you weren't going to show up at\n all.\"\n\n\n Curt's hand was almost lost in Dell's enormous grip, but it wasn't\n because of that that his grip was passive. It was his shocked reaction\n to Dell's haggard appearance. The fierce eyes looked merely old and\n tired now. The ageless, leathery hide of Dell's face seemed to have\n collapsed before some overpowering decay, its bronze smoothness\n shattered by deep lines that were like tool marks of pain.\n\n\n Curt spoke in a subdued voice. \"It's hard to get away from Detrick.\n Always one more experiment to try—\"\n\n\n \"—And the brass riding you as if they expected you to win another war\n for them tomorrow afternoon,\" said Dell. \"I remember.\"\n\n\n \"We wondered about this truck,\" Louise commented brightly, trying to\n change the subject. \"We finally gave up on it.\"", "\"Exactly,\" he said. \"You reach for a rock and beat his brains in. You\n don't wipe human life off the face of the Earth in order to reach that\n enemy. I asked you to come down here to help me break this circle of\n which I spoke. There has to be someone here—after I'm gone—\"\n\n\n Dell's eyes shifted to the depths of shadows beyond the firelight and\n remained fixed on unseen images.\n\n\n \"Me? Help you?\" Curt asked incredulously. \"What could I do? Give up\n science and become a truck gardener, too?\"", "\"He did? Then he knew even better than we did how rapidly he was\n slipping. Yes, this was the quickest way.\"\n\n\n \"What are you talking about?\" Curt demanded.\n\n\n \"Did Dell say anything at all about what he wanted of you?\"\n\n\n \"It was all wild. Something about helping with some crazy plans to\n retreat from the scientific world. He was going to finish talking in\n the morning, but I guess it wouldn't have mattered. I realize now that\n he was sick and irrational.\"\n\n\n \"Too sick to explain everything, but not irrational,\" Sark said\n thoughtfully. \"He left it to us to tell you, since you are to succeed\n him.\"\n\n\n \"Succeed Dell? In what?\"\nSark suddenly flipped a switch on a panel at his right. A screen\n lighted with some fuzzy image. It cleared with a slight dial\n adjustment, and Curt seemed to be looking at some oddly familiar\n moonlit ruin.", "From somewhere behind the house came the sound of a truck engine. Curt\n took Louise's arm and led her around the trim, graveled path.\n\n\n The old farmhouse had been very carefully renovated. Everywhere was\n evidence of exquisite care, yet the cumulative atmosphere remained\n uninviting, almost oppressive. Curt told himself it was the utter\n silence, made even more tense by the lonely chugging of the engine in\n back, and the incredible harsh color of the soil beneath their feet.\nRounding the corner, they came in sight of a massive tank truck. From\n it a hose led to an underground storage tank and pulsed slowly under\n the force of the liquid gushing through it. No one was in sight.\n\n\n \"What could that be for?\" asked Louise.\n\n\n \"You've got me. Could be gasoline, but Dell hasn't any reason for\n storing that much here.\"", "\"My friend, Dr. Dell, is dying,\" Curt snapped out, refusing to sit\n down. \"I've got to get help. I saw your light and hoped you'd allow me\n to use your phone. I don't know who you are nor what Dell's hired man\n is doing here with you. But you've got to let me go for help!\"\n\n\n \"No.\" The man, Sark, shook his head. \"Dell is reconciled. He has to go.\n We are awaiting precisely the event you would halt—his death.\"\n\n\n He had known it, Curt thought, from the moment he entered that room.\n Like vultures sitting on cliffs waiting for the death of their prey,\n these fantastic men let their glance slip back to the screen. The green\n line was a third of the way toward the red marker now, and moving more\n rapidly.\n\n\n It was nightmare—meaningless—", "\"When are\nyou\ncoming back?\" Curt demanded instead of answering.\n\n\n \"So they still want me, even after the things I said when I left.\"\n\n\n \"You're needed badly. When I told Hansen I was coming down, he said it\n would be worth five years of my own work to bring you back.\"\n\n\n \"They want me to produce even deadlier toxins than those I gave them,\"\n Dell said viciously. \"They want some that can kill ten million people\n in four minutes instead of only one million—\"\n\n\n \"Any man would go insane if he looked at it that way. It would be the\n same as gun-makers being tormented by the vision of torn men destroyed\n by their bullets, the sorrowing families—\"\n\n\n \"And why shouldn't the gun-makers be tormented?\" Dell's voice was\n low with controlled hate. \"They are men like you and me who give the\nwar\n-makers new tools for their trade.\"", "\"Nobody claims to have figured him out. They laugh a little at him now.\n They eat his gifts willingly enough, but consider him slightly off his\n rocker. He still has all his biological talents, though. I've never\n seen or tasted vegetables like the ones he grows.\"\n\n\n \"And the brass at Detrick doesn't think he's gone soft in the head,\n either,\" she added much too innocently. \"So they ordered you to take\n advantage of his invitation and try to persuade him to come back.\"\n\n\n Curt turned his head so sharply that Louise laughed.\n\n\n \"No, I didn't read any secret, hush-hush papers,\" she said. \"But it's\n pretty obvious, isn't it, the way you rushed right over to General\n Hansen after you got the invitation?\"", "Curt frantically got dressed, ran down the stairs and out to the car.\n He wondered absently what had become of the cadaverous Brown, who\n seemed to have vanished from the premises.\nThe wheels spun gravel as he started the car and whipped it out of\n the driveway. Then he was on the stretch of lane leading through the\n grove. The moonless night was utterly dark, and the stream of light\n ahead of the car seemed the only living thing upon the whole landscape.\n He almost wished he had taken the more familiar road. To get lost now\n might mean death for Dell.\n\n\n No traffic flowed past him in either direction. There were no buildings\n showing lights. Overwhelming desolation seemed to possess the\n countryside and seep into his soul. It seemed impossible that this lay\n close to the other highway with which he was familiar.", "His sign was visible for a half mile:\nYOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT\n\n Eat the Best\n\n EAT DELL'S VEGETABLES\n\n\n \"Dr. Hamon Dell, world's foremost biochemist—and truck farmer,\" Curt\n muttered as he swung the car off the highway.\n\n\n Louise stepped out when the tires ceased crunching on the gravel lane.\n She scanned the fields and old woods beyond the ancient but preserved\n farmhouse. \"It's so unearthly.\"\n\n\n Curt followed. The song of birds, which had been so noticeable before,\n seemed strangely muted. The land itself was an alien, faintly greenish\n hue, a color repulsive to more than just the eyes.\n\n\n \"It must be something in this particular soil,\" said Curt, \"something\n that gives it that color and produces such wonderful crops. I'll have\n to remember to ask Dell about it.\"", "Curt stared with pity at the great scientist whose mind had so\n disintegrated. \"You need a doctor. I'll call a hospital, Johns Hopkins,\n if you want.\"\n\n\n \"Wait, maybe you're right. I have no phone here. Get Dr. Wilson—the\n Judge Building, Towson—find his home address in a phone book.\"\n\n\n \"Fine. I'll only be a little while.\"\n\n\n He stepped to the door.\n\n\n \"Curt! Take the lane down to the new road—behind the farm. Quicker—it\n cuts off a mile or so—go down through the orchard—\"\n\n\n \"All right. Take it easy now. I'll be right back.\"", "\"You want Dr. Dell?\"\n\n\n They whirled at the sound of an unfamiliar voice. Louise uttered a\n startled cry.\n\n\n The gaunt figure behind them coughed asthmatically and pointed with an\n arm that seemed composed only of bones and brownish skin, so thin as to\n be almost translucent.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Curt shakenly. \"We're friends of his.\"\n\n\n \"Dell's in back. I'll tell him you're here.\"\n\n\n The figure shambled away and Louise shook herself as if to rid her mind\n of the vision. \"If our grandchildren ever ask about zombies, I can\n tell them. Who in the world do you suppose he is?\"\n\n\n \"Hired man, I suppose. Sounds as if he should be in a lung sanitarium.\n Funny that Dell would keep him around in that condition.\"", "\"Oh, that. It brings liquid fertilizer to pump into my irrigation\n water, that's all. No mystery. Let's go on to the house. After you're\n settled we can catch up on everything and I'll tell you about the\n things I'm doing here.\"\n\n\n \"Who's the man we saw?\" asked Curt. \"He looks as if his health is\n pretty precarious.\"\n\n\n \"That's Brown. He came with the place—farmed it for years for my uncle\n before I inherited it. He could grow a garden on a granite slab. In\n spite of appearances, he's well enough physically.\"\n\n\n \"How has your own health been? You have—changed—since you were at\n Detrick.\"", "\"You might say that we would be in the rock business,\" replied Dell.\n \"Fighting is no longer on the level of one man with his hands about\n another's throat, but it\nshould\nbe. Those who want power and\n domination should have to fight for it personally. But it has been a\n long time since they had to.\n\"Even in the old days, kings and emperors hired mercenaries to fight\n their wars. The militarists don't buy swords now. They buy brains.\n We're the mercenaries of the new day, Curt, you and I. Once there was\n honor in our profession. We searched for truth for its own sake, and\n because it was our way of life. Once we were the hope of the world\n because science was a universal language.", "He strained his eyes into the darkness for signs of an all-night gas\n station or store from which he could phone. Finally, he resigned\n himself to going all the way to Towson. At that moment he glimpsed a\n spark of light far ahead.\n\n\n Encouraged, Curt stepped on the gas. In less than ten minutes he was at\n the spot. He braked the car to a stop, and surveyed the building as he\n got out. It seemed more like a power substation than anything else. But\n there should be a telephone, at least.\n\n\n He knocked on the door. Almost instantly, footsteps sounded within.\n\n\n The door swung wide.\n\n\n \"I wonder if I could use your—\" Curt began. He gasped. \"Brown! Dell's\n dying—we've got to get a doctor for him—\"" ], [ "As if unable to comprehend, the hired man stared dumbly for a long\n moment. His hollow-cheeked face was almost skeletal in the light that\n flooded out from behind him.\n\n\n Then from somewhere within the building came a voice, sharp with\n tension. \"Brown! What the devil are you doing? Shut that door!\"\n\n\n That brought the figure to life. He whipped out a gun and motioned Curt\n inward. \"Step inside. We'll have to decide what to do with you when\n Carlson finds you're here.\"\n\n\n \"What's the matter with you?\" Curt asked, stupefied. \"Dell's dying. He\n needs help.\"\n\n\n \"Get in here!\"", "He strained his eyes into the darkness for signs of an all-night gas\n station or store from which he could phone. Finally, he resigned\n himself to going all the way to Towson. At that moment he glimpsed a\n spark of light far ahead.\n\n\n Encouraged, Curt stepped on the gas. In less than ten minutes he was at\n the spot. He braked the car to a stop, and surveyed the building as he\n got out. It seemed more like a power substation than anything else. But\n there should be a telephone, at least.\n\n\n He knocked on the door. Almost instantly, footsteps sounded within.\n\n\n The door swung wide.\n\n\n \"I wonder if I could use your—\" Curt began. He gasped. \"Brown! Dell's\n dying—we've got to get a doctor for him—\"", "\"My friend, Dr. Dell, is dying,\" Curt snapped out, refusing to sit\n down. \"I've got to get help. I saw your light and hoped you'd allow me\n to use your phone. I don't know who you are nor what Dell's hired man\n is doing here with you. But you've got to let me go for help!\"\n\n\n \"No.\" The man, Sark, shook his head. \"Dell is reconciled. He has to go.\n We are awaiting precisely the event you would halt—his death.\"\n\n\n He had known it, Curt thought, from the moment he entered that room.\n Like vultures sitting on cliffs waiting for the death of their prey,\n these fantastic men let their glance slip back to the screen. The green\n line was a third of the way toward the red marker now, and moving more\n rapidly.\n\n\n It was nightmare—meaningless—", "Dell raised a lock of steel-gray hair in his fingers and dismissed the\n question with a wan smile. \"We all wear out sometime,\" he said. \"My\n turn had to come.\"\nInside, some of the oppressiveness vanished as the evening passed. It\n was cool enough for lighting the fireplace, and they settled before it\n after dinner. While they watched the flickering light that whipped the\n beamed ceiling, Dell entertained them with stories of his neighbors,\n whose histories he knew clear back to Revolutionary times.\n\n\n Early, however, Louise excused herself. She knew they would want\n privacy to thresh out the purposes behind Dell's invitation—and Curt's\n acceptance.\n\n\n When she was gone, there was a moment's silence. The logs crackled with\n shocking pistol shots in the fireplace. The scientist moved to stir the\n coals and then turned abruptly to Curt.\n\n\n \"When are you going to leave Detrick?\"", "\"What will we do with him?\" Brown asked abruptly.\n\n\n \"If Dell is dead, you murdered him!\" Curt shouted.\n\n\n A rising personal fear grew within him. They could not release him now,\n even though his story would make no sense to anybody. But they had\n somehow killed Dell, or thought they had, and they wouldn't hesitate\n to kill Curt. He thought of Louise in the great house with the corpse\n of Haman Dell—if, of course, he was actually dead. But that was\n nonsense....\n\n\n \"Dell must have sent you to us!\" Sark said, as if a great mystery had\n suddenly been lifted from his mind. \"He did not have time to tell you\n everything. Did he tell you to take the road behind the farm?\"\n\n\n Curt nodded bitterly. \"He told me it was the quickest way to get to a\n doctor.\"", "He was a bony creature, even more cadaverous than Brown. He caught\n sight of Curt's almost indecently robust face. He gasped and swore.\n\n\n \"Who is this? What's he doing here?\"\n\n\n The entire montage of skull faces turned upon Curt. He heard a sharp\n collective intake of breath, as if his presence were some unforeseen\n calamity that had shaken the course of their incomprehensible lives.\n\n\n \"This is Curtis Johnson,\" said Brown. \"He got lost looking for a doctor\n for Dell.\"\n\n\n A mummylike figure rose from a seat before the instrument. \"Your coming\n is tremendously unfortunate, but for the moment we can do nothing about\n it. Sit here beside me. My name is Tarron Sark.\"\n\n\n The man indicated a chair.", "\"Exactly,\" he said. \"You reach for a rock and beat his brains in. You\n don't wipe human life off the face of the Earth in order to reach that\n enemy. I asked you to come down here to help me break this circle of\n which I spoke. There has to be someone here—after I'm gone—\"\n\n\n Dell's eyes shifted to the depths of shadows beyond the firelight and\n remained fixed on unseen images.\n\n\n \"Me? Help you?\" Curt asked incredulously. \"What could I do? Give up\n science and become a truck gardener, too?\"", "\"Curt, my boy! And Louise! I thought you weren't going to show up at\n all.\"\n\n\n Curt's hand was almost lost in Dell's enormous grip, but it wasn't\n because of that that his grip was passive. It was his shocked reaction\n to Dell's haggard appearance. The fierce eyes looked merely old and\n tired now. The ageless, leathery hide of Dell's face seemed to have\n collapsed before some overpowering decay, its bronze smoothness\n shattered by deep lines that were like tool marks of pain.\n\n\n Curt spoke in a subdued voice. \"It's hard to get away from Detrick.\n Always one more experiment to try—\"\n\n\n \"—And the brass riding you as if they expected you to win another war\n for them tomorrow afternoon,\" said Dell. \"I remember.\"\n\n\n \"We wondered about this truck,\" Louise commented brightly, trying to\n change the subject. \"We finally gave up on it.\"", "He stumbled out, refusing Curt's offer of aid with a grim headshake.\n The fire crackled loudly within the otherwise silent room. Curt\n felt cold at the descending chill of the night, his mind bewildered\n at Dell's barrage, some of it so reasonable, some of it so utterly\n confused. And there was no clue to the identity of the powerful force\n that had made so great a change in the once militant scientist.\n\n\n Slowly Curt mounted the staircase of the old house and went to the room\n Dell had assigned them. Louise was in bed reading a murder mystery.\n\n\n \"Secret mission completed?\" she asked.\n\n\n Curt sat down on the edge of the bed. \"I'm afraid something terrible\n is wrong with Dell. Besides the neurotic guilt complex because of his\n war work, he showed signs of a terrific and apparently habitual pain in\n his head. If that should be brain tumor, it might explain his erratic\n notions, his abandonment of his career.\"", "Curt stared with pity at the great scientist whose mind had so\n disintegrated. \"You need a doctor. I'll call a hospital, Johns Hopkins,\n if you want.\"\n\n\n \"Wait, maybe you're right. I have no phone here. Get Dr. Wilson—the\n Judge Building, Towson—find his home address in a phone book.\"\n\n\n \"Fine. I'll only be a little while.\"\n\n\n He stepped to the door.\n\n\n \"Curt! Take the lane down to the new road—behind the farm. Quicker—it\n cuts off a mile or so—go down through the orchard—\"\n\n\n \"All right. Take it easy now. I'll be right back.\"", "\"You want Dr. Dell?\"\n\n\n They whirled at the sound of an unfamiliar voice. Louise uttered a\n startled cry.\n\n\n The gaunt figure behind them coughed asthmatically and pointed with an\n arm that seemed composed only of bones and brownish skin, so thin as to\n be almost translucent.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Curt shakenly. \"We're friends of his.\"\n\n\n \"Dell's in back. I'll tell him you're here.\"\n\n\n The figure shambled away and Louise shook herself as if to rid her mind\n of the vision. \"If our grandchildren ever ask about zombies, I can\n tell them. Who in the world do you suppose he is?\"\n\n\n \"Hired man, I suppose. Sounds as if he should be in a lung sanitarium.\n Funny that Dell would keep him around in that condition.\"", "\"Oh, I hope it's not that!\"\nIt seemed to Curt that he had slept only minutes before he was roused\n by sounds in the night. He rolled over and switched on the light. His\n watch said two o'clock. Louise raised up in sharp alarm.\n\n\n \"What is it?\" she whispered.\n\n\n \"I thought I heard something. There it is again!\"\n\n\n \"It sounds like someone in pain. It must be Dell!\"\n\n\n Curt leaped from the bed and wrestled into his bathrobe. As he hurried\n toward Dell's room, there was another deep groan that ended in a\n shuddering sob of unbearable agony.\n\n\n He burst into the scientist's room and switched on the light. Dell\n looked up, eyes glazed with pain.\n\n\n \"Dr. Dell!\"", "\"It\nis\nhush-hush, top-secret stuff,\" said Curt, his eyes once more on\n the road. \"The Army doesn't want it to leak, but they need Dell, need\n him badly. Anyone knowing bio-war developments would understand. They\n wanted to send me before. Dell's invitation was the break we needed.\n I may be the one with sufficient influence to bring him back. I hope\n so. But keep it under your permanent and forget your guessing games.\n There's more to it than you know.\"\n\n\n The car passed through a cool, wooded section and Louise leaned back\n and drank in the beauty of it.\n\n\n \"Hush-hush, top secret stuff,\" she said. \"Grown men playing children's\n games.\"\n\n\n \"Pretty deadly games for children, darling.\"\nIn the late afternoon they by-passed the central part of Baltimore and\n headed north beyond the suburb of Towson toward Dell's truck farm.", "Curt frantically got dressed, ran down the stairs and out to the car.\n He wondered absently what had become of the cadaverous Brown, who\n seemed to have vanished from the premises.\nThe wheels spun gravel as he started the car and whipped it out of\n the driveway. Then he was on the stretch of lane leading through the\n grove. The moonless night was utterly dark, and the stream of light\n ahead of the car seemed the only living thing upon the whole landscape.\n He almost wished he had taken the more familiar road. To get lost now\n might mean death for Dell.\n\n\n No traffic flowed past him in either direction. There were no buildings\n showing lights. Overwhelming desolation seemed to possess the\n countryside and seep into his soul. It seemed impossible that this lay\n close to the other highway with which he was familiar.", "\"He did? Then he knew even better than we did how rapidly he was\n slipping. Yes, this was the quickest way.\"\n\n\n \"What are you talking about?\" Curt demanded.\n\n\n \"Did Dell say anything at all about what he wanted of you?\"\n\n\n \"It was all wild. Something about helping with some crazy plans to\n retreat from the scientific world. He was going to finish talking in\n the morning, but I guess it wouldn't have mattered. I realize now that\n he was sick and irrational.\"\n\n\n \"Too sick to explain everything, but not irrational,\" Sark said\n thoughtfully. \"He left it to us to tell you, since you are to succeed\n him.\"\n\n\n \"Succeed Dell? In what?\"\nSark suddenly flipped a switch on a panel at his right. A screen\n lighted with some fuzzy image. It cleared with a slight dial\n adjustment, and Curt seemed to be looking at some oddly familiar\n moonlit ruin.", "\"Curt—I thought I had time left, but this is as far as I can go—Just\n remember all I said tonight. Don't forget a word of it.\" He sat up\n rigidly, hardly breathing in the effort of control. \"The responsibility\n for the coming destruction of civilization lies at the doors of the\n scientist mercenaries. Don't allow it, Curt. Get them to abandon the\n laboratories of the warriors. Get them to reclaim their honor—\"\n\n\n He fell back upon the pillow, his face white with pain and shining with\n sweat. \"Brown—see Brown. He can tell you the—the rest.\"\n\n\n \"I'll go for a doctor,\" said Curt. \"Who have you had? Louise will stay\n with you.\"\n\n\n \"Don't bring a doctor. There's no escaping this. I've known it for\n months. Wait here with me, Curt. I'll be gone soon.\"", "\"When are\nyou\ncoming back?\" Curt demanded instead of answering.\n\n\n \"So they still want me, even after the things I said when I left.\"\n\n\n \"You're needed badly. When I told Hansen I was coming down, he said it\n would be worth five years of my own work to bring you back.\"\n\n\n \"They want me to produce even deadlier toxins than those I gave them,\"\n Dell said viciously. \"They want some that can kill ten million people\n in four minutes instead of only one million—\"\n\n\n \"Any man would go insane if he looked at it that way. It would be the\n same as gun-makers being tormented by the vision of torn men destroyed\n by their bullets, the sorrowing families—\"\n\n\n \"And why shouldn't the gun-makers be tormented?\" Dell's voice was\n low with controlled hate. \"They are men like you and me who give the\nwar\n-makers new tools for their trade.\"", "\"Hard to tell,\" Curt said, unconsciously speeding up again. \"After\n the war, when the atomic scientists were publicly examining their\n consciences, Dell told them to examine their own guts first. That\n was typical of him then, but soon after, he swung just as strongly\n pacifist and walked out of Detrick.\"\n\n\n \"It still seems strange that he abandoned his whole career. The world's\n foremost biochemist giving up the laboratory for a\ntruck farm\n!\"\n Louise glanced down at the lunch basket between them. In it were\n tomatoes that Dr. Hamon Dell had sent along with his invitation to\n visit him.\nFor nearly a year Dr. Dell had been sending packages of choice fruit\n and vegetables to his former colleagues, not only at the biological\n warfare center at Camp Detrick but at the universities and other\n research centers throughout the country.\n\n\n \"I wish we knew exactly why he asked us to come out,\" said Louise.", "\"Do you remember me five years ago?\" Dell's face became more haggard,\n as if the memory shamed him. \"Do you remember when I told the atomic\n scientists to examine their guts instead of their consciences?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. You certainly\nhave\nchanged.\"\n\n\n \"And so can other men. There is a way. I need your help desperately,\n Curt—\"\n\n\n The face of the aging biochemist contorted again with unbearable pain.\n His forehead beaded with sweat as he clenched his skull between his\n vein-knotted hands.\n\n\n \"Dell! What is it?\"\n\n\n \"It will pass,\" Dr. Dell breathed through clenched teeth. \"I have some\n medicine—in my bedroom. I'm afraid I'll have to excuse myself tonight.\n There's so much more I have to say to you, but we'll continue our talk\n in the morning, Curt. I'm sorry—\"", "\"I'm not staying,\" Curt insisted. \"You can't prevent me from helping\n Dell without assuming responsibility for his death. I demand you let me\n call.\"\n\n\n \"You're not going to call,\" said Sark wearily. \"And we assumed\n responsibility for Dell's death long ago. Sit down!\"\n\n\n Slowly Curt sank down upon the chair beside the stranger. There was\n nothing else to do. He was powerless against Brown's gun. But he'd\n bring them to justice somehow, he swore.\n\n\n He didn't understand the meaning of the slowly moving pattern on the\n 'scope face, yet, as his eyes followed that pip, he sensed tension in\n the watching men that seemed sinister, almost murderous. How?\n\n\n What did the inexorably advancing pip signify?\nNo one spoke. The room was stifling hot and the breathing of the circle\n of men was a dull, rattling sound in Curt's ears." ] ]
test	32890	[ "Tobias initially greeted Steve with…", "How long had it been since Steve was in his home village?", "Why was the old man in the village?", "At the rate the villagers are walking, how long will it take to reach Oasis City 500 miles away?", "Why did Mary slap Jeremy?", "Why did Steve pretend to kill Tobias?", "What was Tobias’ final dying wish?", "Why are the villagers going to Oasis City?", "What resource was in short supply among the caravan?", "What are thlots?" ]	[ [ "Relief", "Hostility", "Confusion", "Joy" ], [ "Five years", "Ten years", "Six months", "One year" ], [ "The villagers left and forgot him.", "He helped the enemy and was outcast as a traitor.", "He decided to stay and fight to protect his home.", "He was too frail to travel with the others." ], [ "About one year", "Five more days", "About one week", "About one month" ], [ "He insulted her.", "He insulted her father.", "He tried to touch her.", "He admitted to harming her father." ], [ "To win over Mary", "To distract the guard", "To punish him for his betrayal", "To enact revenge" ], [ "For the family fortune to be returned", "To be known as a hero", "For the Kumaji to be held accountable", "For Mary to live happily with Steve" ], [ "To gather an army for revenge against the Kumajis", "To seek help and transportation to a new home", "To get their money back", "To rejoin relatives who live there" ], [ "Water", "Weapons", "Camels", "Food" ], [ "Kumaji patrol vehicles", "Desert transport animals", "A type of weapon", "Desert prey for food" ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n\n\n \"It's Dad. Dad was—hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad—\"\n\n\n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n\n\n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n\n\n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n\n\n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is—he—what\n you want?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n\n\n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"", "The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich—by colony standards—at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others—either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.", "\"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n\n\n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n\n\n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\nThree days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.", "\"Hullo!\" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding\n clumsily through the sand toward him. \"Cantwell's the name,\" Steve said.\n \"I'm one of you.\"\n\n\n Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. \"Cantwell. Yeah, I\n remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,\n no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing\n here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?\"", "Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.\n Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.\n The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against\n Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the\n thick-muscled neck, clamped there—squeezing.", "\"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing—like a baby. As if—as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n\n\n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I—\"\n\n\n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there—not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.", "\"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n\n\n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"", "The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the\nthlot\nskin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n\n\n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n\n\n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n\n\n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do—whatever you have to do. I—I'll understand.\"", "\"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I—I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n\n\n He appreciated it.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n\n\n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"", "\"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What\ncan\nwe do?\"\n\n\n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n\n\n \"North?\"\n\n\n \"North.\"\n\n\n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n\n\n Steve said nothing. The answer—capture or death—was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n\n\n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their\nthlots\n. Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"", "On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n\n\n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n\n\n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n\n\n \"To go—to them?\"\n\n\n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"", "The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n\n\n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n\n\n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"", "For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity—pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\nThe caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face—it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized—was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n\n\n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n\n\n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....", "\"I think so,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them—due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go—south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll—all—get away. If it's—what you want, Mary.\"\n\n\n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"", "The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard—or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\nThey fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n\n\n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n\n\n \"Steve!\"", "\"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to—all of you. From a—very foolish—man....\"\nSteve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the\nthlots\nwere hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the\nthlots\n.\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the\nthlot's\nbare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.", "They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n\"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n\n\n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n\n\n \"Mary....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n\n\n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n\n\n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"", "Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n\n\n \"Then—then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n\n\n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.", "He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n\n\n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n\n\n Poisoned.\n\n\n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.", "A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\nThe first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or\nthlotback\n, the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune." ], [ "\"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n\n\n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n\n\n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\nThree days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.", "For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity—pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\nThe caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face—it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized—was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n\n\n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n\n\n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....", "HOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT\nBy ADAM CHASE\n[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February\n 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare.\nHow black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous\n traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?\n That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero.\nOnly the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when\n he reached the village.", "He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n\n\n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a\nKumaji\nraid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.", "Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\nSteve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n\n\n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n\n\n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.", "\"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us—or are led to us—and attack.\"\n\n\n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n\n\n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be—dying.\"", "\"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n\n\n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"", "The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich—by colony standards—at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others—either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.", "\"Hullo!\" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding\n clumsily through the sand toward him. \"Cantwell's the name,\" Steve said.\n \"I'm one of you.\"\n\n\n Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. \"Cantwell. Yeah, I\n remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,\n no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing\n here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?\"", "\"I think so,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them—due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go—south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll—all—get away. If it's—what you want, Mary.\"\n\n\n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"", "The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n\n\n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n\n\n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"", "\"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to—all of you. From a—very foolish—man....\"\nSteve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the\nthlots\nwere hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the\nthlots\n.\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the\nthlot's\nbare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.", "\"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\nSteve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness—to the safety of Oasis City—or\n death.\n\n\n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n\n\n \"You're going after them?\"\n\n\n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n\n\n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"", "He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n\n\n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n\n\n Poisoned.\n\n\n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.", "The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth—too\n late for anything.\n\n\n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n\n\n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n\n\n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n\n\n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n\n\n \"What happened here?\"", "\"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I—I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n\n\n He appreciated it.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n\n\n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"", "At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money—with the\n Kumaji.\"\n\n\n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n\n\n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n\n\n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.", "\"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without—\"\n\n\n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n 'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"", "A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\nThe first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or\nthlotback\n, the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.", "On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n\n\n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n\n\n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n\n\n \"To go—to them?\"\n\n\n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"" ], [ "\"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\nSteve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about", "\"They're gone. All gone.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n\n\n \"The Kumaji—\"\n\n\n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n\n\n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n\n\n \"But you stayed here—\"", "\"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without—\"\n\n\n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n 'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"", "\"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us—or are led to us—and attack.\"\n\n\n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n\n\n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be—dying.\"", "Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\nSteve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n\n\n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n\n\n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.", "The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich—by colony standards—at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others—either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.", "At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money—with the\n Kumaji.\"\n\n\n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n\n\n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n\n\n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.", "The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n\n\n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n\n\n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"", "\"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n\n\n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n\n\n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\nThree days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.", "\"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n 'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him—not by a long sight.\"\n\n\n \"No?\" someone asked.\n\n\n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\nMary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n\n\n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.", "He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n\n\n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n\n\n Poisoned.\n\n\n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.", "The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth—too\n late for anything.\n\n\n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n\n\n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n\n\n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n\n\n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n\n\n \"What happened here?\"", "\"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\nSteve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness—to the safety of Oasis City—or\n death.\n\n\n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n\n\n \"You're going after them?\"\n\n\n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n\n\n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"", "\"I think so,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them—due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go—south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll—all—get away. If it's—what you want, Mary.\"\n\n\n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"", "\"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to—all of you. From a—very foolish—man....\"\nSteve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the\nthlots\nwere hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the\nthlots\n.\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the\nthlot's\nbare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.", "It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n\n\n \"It's Dad. Dad was—hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad—\"\n\n\n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n\n\n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n\n\n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n\n\n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is—he—what\n you want?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n\n\n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"", "He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n\n\n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a\nKumaji\nraid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.", "The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the\nthlot\nskin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n\n\n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n\n\n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n\n\n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do—whatever you have to do. I—I'll understand.\"", "\"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n\n\n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"", "Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East—and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them...." ], [ "\"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n\n\n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n\n\n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....", "Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East—and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....", "The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n\n\n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n\n\n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"", "A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\nThe first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or\nthlotback\n, the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.", "\"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\nSteve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness—to the safety of Oasis City—or\n death.\n\n\n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n\n\n \"You're going after them?\"\n\n\n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n\n\n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"", "Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\nSteve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n\n\n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n\n\n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.", "He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n\n\n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a\nKumaji\nraid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.", "Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all\n reach Oasis City in safety.\n\n\n With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.", "\"I think so,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them—due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go—south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll—all—get away. If it's—what you want, Mary.\"\n\n\n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"", "Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n\n\n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n\n\n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n\n\n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.", "\"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us—or are led to us—and attack.\"\n\n\n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n\n\n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be—dying.\"", "For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity—pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\nThe caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face—it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized—was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n\n\n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n\n\n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....", "\"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to—all of you. From a—very foolish—man....\"\nSteve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the\nthlots\nwere hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the\nthlots\n.\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the\nthlot's\nbare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.", "\"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n\n\n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"", "The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth—too\n late for anything.\n\n\n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n\n\n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n\n\n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n\n\n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n\n\n \"What happened here?\"", "\"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\nSteve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about", "Pursuit was disorganized—and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n\n\n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n \"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n\n\n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n\n\n \"And not—not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n\n\n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n\n\n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"", "He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n\n\n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n\n\n Poisoned.\n\n\n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.", "On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n\n\n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n\n\n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n\n\n \"To go—to them?\"\n\n\n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"", "They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n\"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n\n\n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n\n\n \"Mary....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n\n\n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n\n\n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"" ], [ "It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n\n\n \"It's Dad. Dad was—hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad—\"\n\n\n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n\n\n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n\n\n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n\n\n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is—he—what\n you want?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n\n\n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"", "At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money—with the\n Kumaji.\"\n\n\n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n\n\n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n\n\n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.", "\"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n\n\n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n\n\n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\nThree days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.", "\"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n 'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him—not by a long sight.\"\n\n\n \"No?\" someone asked.\n\n\n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\nMary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n\n\n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.", "\"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to—all of you. From a—very foolish—man....\"\nSteve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the\nthlots\nwere hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the\nthlots\n.\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the\nthlot's\nbare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.", "They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n\"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n\n\n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n\n\n \"Mary....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n\n\n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n\n\n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"", "The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the\nthlot\nskin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n\n\n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n\n\n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n\n\n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do—whatever you have to do. I—I'll understand.\"", "Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve\n silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?\n Steve could stand up to it perhaps—but he couldn't stand to see them\n hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....\n\n\n Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one\n willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing\n one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one\n guard, the man outside, came....\nDarkness in the Kumaji encampment.\n\n\n Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.\n\n\n \"Are you asleep?\" Mary asked.\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said.", "On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n\n\n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n\n\n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n\n\n \"To go—to them?\"\n\n\n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"", "For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity—pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\nThe caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face—it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized—was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n\n\n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n\n\n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....", "\"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter now. I—I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way—we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n\n\n \"They can do—what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n\n\n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n\n\n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.", "Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n\n\n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n\n\n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n\n\n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.", "\"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I—I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n\n\n He appreciated it.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n\n\n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"", "A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\nThe first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or\nthlotback\n, the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.", "\"I think so,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them—due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go—south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll—all—get away. If it's—what you want, Mary.\"\n\n\n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"", "\"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What\ncan\nwe do?\"\n\n\n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n\n\n \"North?\"\n\n\n \"North.\"\n\n\n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n\n\n Steve said nothing. The answer—capture or death—was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n\n\n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their\nthlots\n. Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"", "\"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us—or are led to us—and attack.\"\n\n\n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n\n\n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be—dying.\"", "Pursuit was disorganized—and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n\n\n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n \"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n\n\n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n\n\n \"And not—not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n\n\n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n\n\n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"", "The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard—or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\nThey fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n\n\n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n\n\n \"Steve!\"", "He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n\n\n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n\n\n Poisoned.\n\n\n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table." ], [ "\"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing—like a baby. As if—as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n\n\n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I—\"\n\n\n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there—not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.", "It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n\n\n \"It's Dad. Dad was—hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad—\"\n\n\n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n\n\n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n\n\n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n\n\n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is—he—what\n you want?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n\n\n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"", "\"I think so,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them—due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go—south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll—all—get away. If it's—what you want, Mary.\"\n\n\n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"", "The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n\n\n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n\n\n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"", "\"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What\ncan\nwe do?\"\n\n\n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n\n\n \"North?\"\n\n\n \"North.\"\n\n\n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n\n\n Steve said nothing. The answer—capture or death—was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n\n\n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their\nthlots\n. Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"", "They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n\"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n\n\n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n\n\n \"Mary....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n\n\n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n\n\n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"", "\"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n\n\n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n\n\n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\nThree days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.", "The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the\nthlot\nskin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n\n\n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n\n\n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n\n\n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do—whatever you have to do. I—I'll understand.\"", "The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich—by colony standards—at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others—either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.", "\"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to—all of you. From a—very foolish—man....\"\nSteve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the\nthlots\nwere hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the\nthlots\n.\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the\nthlot's\nbare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.", "The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard—or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\nThey fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n\n\n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n\n\n \"Steve!\"", "On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n\n\n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n\n\n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n\n\n \"To go—to them?\"\n\n\n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"", "\"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n\n\n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"", "\"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter now. I—I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way—we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n\n\n \"They can do—what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n\n\n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n\n\n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.", "\"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I—I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n\n\n He appreciated it.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n\n\n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"", "At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money—with the\n Kumaji.\"\n\n\n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n\n\n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n\n\n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.", "Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n\n\n \"Then—then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n\n\n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.", "Pursuit was disorganized—and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n\n\n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n \"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n\n\n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n\n\n \"And not—not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n\n\n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n\n\n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"", "Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.\n Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.\n The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against\n Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the\n thick-muscled neck, clamped there—squeezing.", "Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve\n silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?\n Steve could stand up to it perhaps—but he couldn't stand to see them\n hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....\n\n\n Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one\n willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing\n one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one\n guard, the man outside, came....\nDarkness in the Kumaji encampment.\n\n\n Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.\n\n\n \"Are you asleep?\" Mary asked.\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said." ], [ "It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n\n\n \"It's Dad. Dad was—hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad—\"\n\n\n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n\n\n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n\n\n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n\n\n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is—he—what\n you want?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n\n\n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"", "\"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing—like a baby. As if—as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n\n\n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I—\"\n\n\n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there—not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.", "They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n\"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n\n\n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n\n\n \"Mary....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n\n\n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n\n\n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"", "The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the\nthlot\nskin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n\n\n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n\n\n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n\n\n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do—whatever you have to do. I—I'll understand.\"", "The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n\n\n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n\n\n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"", "The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich—by colony standards—at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others—either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.", "\"I think so,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them—due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go—south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll—all—get away. If it's—what you want, Mary.\"\n\n\n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"", "\"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to—all of you. From a—very foolish—man....\"\nSteve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the\nthlots\nwere hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the\nthlots\n.\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the\nthlot's\nbare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.", "\"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\nSteve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about", "\"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n\n\n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"", "On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n\n\n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n\n\n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n\n\n \"To go—to them?\"\n\n\n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"", "\"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n\n\n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n\n\n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\nThree days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.", "The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard—or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\nThey fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n\n\n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n\n\n \"Steve!\"", "\"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What\ncan\nwe do?\"\n\n\n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n\n\n \"North?\"\n\n\n \"North.\"\n\n\n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n\n\n Steve said nothing. The answer—capture or death—was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n\n\n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their\nthlots\n. Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"", "\"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without—\"\n\n\n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n 'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"", "At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money—with the\n Kumaji.\"\n\n\n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n\n\n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n\n\n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.", "\"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I—I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n\n\n He appreciated it.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n\n\n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"", "\"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter now. I—I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way—we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n\n\n \"They can do—what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n\n\n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n\n\n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.", "Pursuit was disorganized—and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n\n\n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n \"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n\n\n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n\n\n \"And not—not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n\n\n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n\n\n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"", "He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n\n\n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n\n\n Poisoned.\n\n\n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table." ], [ "\"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\nSteve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness—to the safety of Oasis City—or\n death.\n\n\n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n\n\n \"You're going after them?\"\n\n\n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n\n\n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"", "\"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n\n\n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n\n\n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....", "The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n\n\n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n\n\n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"", "Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all\n reach Oasis City in safety.\n\n\n With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.", "He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n\n\n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a\nKumaji\nraid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.", "Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East—and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....", "\"I think so,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them—due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go—south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll—all—get away. If it's—what you want, Mary.\"\n\n\n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"", "A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\nThe first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or\nthlotback\n, the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.", "Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\nSteve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n\n\n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n\n\n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.", "\"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us—or are led to us—and attack.\"\n\n\n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n\n\n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be—dying.\"", "The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth—too\n late for anything.\n\n\n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n\n\n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n\n\n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n\n\n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n\n\n \"What happened here?\"", "\"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\nSteve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about", "At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money—with the\n Kumaji.\"\n\n\n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n\n\n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n\n\n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.", "They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n\"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n\n\n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n\n\n \"Mary....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n\n\n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n\n\n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"", "\"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to—all of you. From a—very foolish—man....\"\nSteve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the\nthlots\nwere hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the\nthlots\n.\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the\nthlot's\nbare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.", "For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity—pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\nThe caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face—it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized—was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n\n\n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n\n\n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....", "\"They're gone. All gone.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n\n\n \"The Kumaji—\"\n\n\n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n\n\n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n\n\n \"But you stayed here—\"", "\"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n\n\n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"", "Pursuit was disorganized—and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n\n\n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n \"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n\n\n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n\n\n \"And not—not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n\n\n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n\n\n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"", "\"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n 'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him—not by a long sight.\"\n\n\n \"No?\" someone asked.\n\n\n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\nMary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n\n\n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry." ], [ "Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East—and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....", "The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n\n\n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n\n\n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"", "A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\nThe first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or\nthlotback\n, the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.", "\"I think so,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them—due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go—south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll—all—get away. If it's—what you want, Mary.\"\n\n\n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"", "Pursuit was disorganized—and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n\n\n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n \"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n\n\n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n\n\n \"And not—not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n\n\n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n\n\n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"", "For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity—pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\nThe caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face—it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized—was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n\n\n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n\n\n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....", "\"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n\n\n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n\n\n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....", "\"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to—all of you. From a—very foolish—man....\"\nSteve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the\nthlots\nwere hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the\nthlots\n.\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the\nthlot's\nbare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.", "Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all\n reach Oasis City in safety.\n\n\n With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.", "Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\nSteve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n\n\n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n\n\n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.", "He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n\n\n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a\nKumaji\nraid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.", "\"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\nSteve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness—to the safety of Oasis City—or\n death.\n\n\n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n\n\n \"You're going after them?\"\n\n\n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n\n\n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"", "\"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\nSteve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about", "The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the\nthlot\nskin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n\n\n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n\n\n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n\n\n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do—whatever you have to do. I—I'll understand.\"", "He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n\n\n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n\n\n Poisoned.\n\n\n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.", "The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth—too\n late for anything.\n\n\n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n\n\n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n\n\n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n\n\n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n\n\n \"What happened here?\"", "\"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us—or are led to us—and attack.\"\n\n\n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n\n\n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be—dying.\"", "Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n\n\n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n\n\n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n\n\n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.", "The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich—by colony standards—at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others—either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.", "They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n\"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n\n\n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n\n\n \"Mary....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n\n\n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n\n\n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"" ], [ "\"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to—all of you. From a—very foolish—man....\"\nSteve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the\nthlots\nwere hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the\nthlots\n.\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the\nthlot's\nbare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.", "\"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What\ncan\nwe do?\"\n\n\n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n\n\n \"North?\"\n\n\n \"North.\"\n\n\n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n\n\n Steve said nothing. The answer—capture or death—was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n\n\n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their\nthlots\n. Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"", "The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the\nthlot\nskin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n\n\n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n\n\n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n\n\n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do—whatever you have to do. I—I'll understand.\"", "A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\nThe first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or\nthlotback\n, the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.", "Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East—and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....", "It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n\n\n \"It's Dad. Dad was—hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad—\"\n\n\n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n\n\n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n\n\n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n\n\n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is—he—what\n you want?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n\n\n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"", "Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\nSteve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n\n\n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n\n\n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.", "Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.\n Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.\n The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against\n Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the\n thick-muscled neck, clamped there—squeezing.", "The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n\n\n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n\n\n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"", "\"I think so,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them—due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go—south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll—all—get away. If it's—what you want, Mary.\"\n\n\n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"", "\"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n 'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him—not by a long sight.\"\n\n\n \"No?\" someone asked.\n\n\n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\nMary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n\n\n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.", "On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n\n\n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n\n\n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n\n\n \"To go—to them?\"\n\n\n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"", "\"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us—or are led to us—and attack.\"\n\n\n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n\n\n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be—dying.\"", "\"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n\n\n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"", "They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n\"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n\n\n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n\n\n \"Mary....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n\n\n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n\n\n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"", "\"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n\n\n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n\n\n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\nThree days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.", "He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n\n\n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n\n\n Poisoned.\n\n\n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.", "At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money—with the\n Kumaji.\"\n\n\n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n\n\n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n\n\n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.", "\"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter now. I—I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way—we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n\n\n \"They can do—what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n\n\n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n\n\n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.", "\"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing—like a baby. As if—as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n\n\n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I—\"\n\n\n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there—not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again." ] ]
test	29159	[ "What was Jon Karyl's job?", "How did Jon know the Steel-Blues were not from Earth's solar system?", "How did the Steel-Blues torture Jon Karyl?", "How did Space Patrol 101 defeat the Steel-Blues and save Jon Karyl?", "Why did the Steel-Blues come to Earth's solar system?", "How did the pursuant Steel-Blue neutralize Jon in the service station?", "How did Jon find the service station?", "Why were the Steel-Blues carrying around sheets of plastic and other kinds of equipment?", "Why did the Steel-Blues describe themselves as robots?" ]	[ [ "He managed a service station for Earthships as Lone Watcher on an asteroid and warned Earth about any potential threats.", "As Lone Watcher, he patrolled Earth's Solar System, keeping watch for hostile spaceships that might attack.", "Jon Karyl was a Lone Watcher, which meant he visited service stations at different asteroids, fixing broken rocket engines and scanning the skies for enemy ships.", "As a Lone Watcher, he was responsible for maintaining a service station where ships could come to refuel and also keep an eye out for the dangerous, mind-reading Steel-Blues." ], [ "Their steel-blue color betrayed their otherworldly origins.", "They had the distinct ability to read thoughts, which was not something that Earthmen or any other species in their solar system had the ability to do.", "They had eyes that wrapped around the backs of their heads, which wasn't a physical characteristic of Earthmen or any other species in their solar system.", "The blast from the service station's atomic cannon didn't harm their spaceship whatsoever--a quality foreign to anything he had ever seen." ], [ "They forced him to drink water diluted with citric acid, since they were unable to determine his chemical composition and therefore assumed it would have the same negative effect on his body that it had on their own metalloid bodies.", "They made him ingest a lethal cocktail of liquid hemlock diluted with citric acid over the course of more than two weeks, which slowly ate away at his insides as he got weaker and weaker and tried to develop a plan to warn Space Patrol.", "They prevented him from eating, forced him to drink citric acid, and forced him to succumb to their insidious mind-reading techniques that they used to try to learn as much as possible about Space Patrol.", "They gave him a liquid form of hemlock diluted with citric acid, which slowly corroded his insides and led him to become very hungry over time." ], [ "They weakened their ship's defenses using a water-filled projectile and finished them off with an atomic weapon.", "They filled a projectile with water diluted by citric acid and used that to melt away the enemy ship's outer layer; SP-101 exploited this vulnerability and destroyed the ship with atomic shots.", "They chased the Steel-Blues into their force field, where they blasted the ship relentlessly with shots from the atomic cannon.", "They trapped the Steel-Blues using a force field and bombed them with a hollowed-out shell filled with water, which melted the ship and killed the Steel-Blues." ], [ "They wanted to test their newly-designed torture technique on species they had not yet encountered in their travels.", "In order to expand their habitat and colonize more planets.", "They found Earthmen more susceptible to the practice of telepathy, and therefore they were easier to predict and subdue.", "They were seeking lifeforms that, like their own, were also composed largely of metals and could be easily harmed by water." ], [ "It used one of its many blue tentacles to prevent Jon from shooting his stubray pistol and pinned him to the floor.", "It used its telepathic abilities to read Jon's mind and predict that he would make a quick grab for his stubray gun; because of this, it was able to stop Jon from escaping.", "It used a black box, which was some kind of weapon, to temporarily immobilize Jon so that he could be imprisoned.", "It used a black box to blast a hole in the rock surrounding Jon, thereby preventing his ability to move in any direction." ], [ "He used unique features of the landscape such as a small bush to help him locate the hidden entrance.", "He located it by triangulating his previous location at the rocket ship with the location of the Blue-Steel ship and his current location hidden amongst the brush.", "He stumbled upon the entrance amidst a dense thicket while on the rune from the pursuant Blue-Steels.", "He hid at the bottom of a ravine until the Blue-Steels had passed, and then opened the lock leading into the tunnel of the service station." ], [ "They were materials used to construct the force field that protected their ship against the atomic cannon blasts that Jon attempted to use to defend the service station.", "They were materials used to build temporary residences and other necessary establishments as they began to colonize asteroids and other celestial bodies in the solar system.", "They used those materials to build a field station from which they conducted medical experiments upon Jon to examine the composition of his body and determine the appropriate torture.", "They used those materials to build a replica of Jon's service station to serve as a makeshift prison where they would observe the results of the liquid torture upon his body." ], [ "They used telepathy to read Jon's thoughts and therefore learn to communicate with him through his own language. Since Jon thought they were robots, that's how they described themselves.", "Their cylindrical structures were comprised of a solid, steel metal impervious to any weapons found within Earth's solar system.", "They had been programmed to search the galaxy for other planets on which to expand their living space and to test out new methods of torture on other beings. They had a robotic commitment to their mission.", "Although they had flexible tentacles with which they grasped black boxes and operated other equipment, their torsos were metallic and solid with eyes stretching to the backs of their heads." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "The power ray from behind ripped out\n great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But\n running naturally, bent close to the bottom\n of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare\n spots. The oxygen made the tremendous\n exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down\n the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue\n stalkers.\n\n\n He'd eluded them, temporarily at least,\n Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off\n the dim trail and watched for movement\n along the route behind him.\n\n\n He stood up, finally, pushed aside the\n leafy overhang of a bush and looked for\n landmarks along the edge of the ravine.\n\n\n He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like\n a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the\n ravine. The hidden entrance to the service\n station wasn't far off.\n\n\n His pistol held ready, he moved quietly\n on down the ravine until the old water\n course made an abrupt hairpin turn.", "Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\nThere\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n\n\n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n\n\n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n\n\n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.", "And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n\n\n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n\n\n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n\n\n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?", "\"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n\n\n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n\n\n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n\n\n \"Enter your\"—the Steel-Blue hesitated—\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n\n\n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.", "The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n\n\n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n\n\n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n\n\n One said,\n\n\n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"—there was a hesitation—\"as\n you say, died.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.", "By then it was almost too late. The six\n blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching\n him at a lope.\n\n\n Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding\n over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot\n bounds.\n\n\n When you're a Lone Watcher, and\n strangers catch you unawares, you don't\n stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's\n first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend\n upon your life.\n\n\n As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under\n his breath. The automatic alarm should have\n shrilled out a warning.\n\n\n Then he saved as much of his breath as\n he could as some sort of power wave tore\n up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted\n and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get\n out of sight of the strangers.", "Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n\n\n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n\n\n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n\n\n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n\n\n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n\n\n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n\n\n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n\n\n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.", "\"Good it is that you live. The torture\n will continue,\" spoke No. 1 before loping\n away.\n\n\n The cylinder business began again. This\n time, Jon drank the bitter liquid slowly, trying\n to figure out what it was. It had a\n familiar, tantalizing taste but he couldn't\n quite put a taste-finger on it.\n\n\n His belly said he was hungry. He glanced\n at his chronometer. Only 20 days left before\n the SP ship arrived.\n\n\n Would this torture—he chuckled—last\n until then? But he was growing more and\n more conscious that his belly was screaming\n for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge\n off his thirst.\n\n\n It was on the fifth day of his torture that\n Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get\n something to eat or perish in the attempt.", "Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut\n back and head for the underground entrance\n to the service station.\n\n\n He glanced back finally.\n\n\n Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting\n after him, and rapidly closing the\n distance.\n\n\n Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol\n at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for\n greater exertion, increased the gravity pull\n in his space-suit boots as he neared the\n ravine he'd been racing for.\n\n\n The oxygen was just taking hold when\n he hit the lip of the ravine and began\n sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn\n course.", "The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get—absent-minded,\n is it?—every once in a\n while.\"\n\n\n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n\n\n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n\n\n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside—one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station—and they laid out a pallet.\n\n\n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n\n\n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"", "Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n\n\n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n\n\n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n\n\n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n\n\n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n\n\n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.", "Jon kicked at the glass in the cylinder's\n hand. But he was too slow. Two tentacles\n gripped the kicking leg. Another struck him\n in the chest, knocking him to the pallet. The\n same tentacle, assisted by a new one,\n pinioned his shoulders.\n\n\n Four tentacles held him supine. The cylinder\n lifted a glass-like cap from the tumbler\n of liquid.\n\n\n Lying there helplessly, Jon was remembering\n an old fairy tale he'd read as a kid.\n Something about a fellow named Socrates\n who was given a cup of hemlock to drink.\n It was the finis for Socrates. But the old\n hero had been nonchalant and calm about\n the whole thing.\n\n\n With a sigh, Jon Karyl, who was curious\n unto death, relaxed and said, \"All right,\n bub, you don't have to force-feed me. I'll\n take it like a man.\"", "\"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n \"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n\n\n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n\n\n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n\n\n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.", "Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n\n\n He turned his head.\n\n\n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n\n\n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n\n\n \"I am\"—there was a rising inflection in\n the answer—\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n\n\n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"", "A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n\n\n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n\n\n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n\n\n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n\n\n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n\n\n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n\n\n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.", "Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n\n\n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n\n\n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n\n\n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n\n\n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.", "\"Take it easy, Karyl. You're among\n friends.\"\n\n\n He pried open his eyes with his will. He\n saw the blue and gold of a space guard's\n uniform. He sighed and drifted into unconsciousness.\nHe was\n still weak days later when\n Capt. Ron Small of SP-101 said,\n\n\n \"Yes, Karyl, it's ironical. They fed you\n what they thought was sure death, and it's\n the only thing that kept you going long\n enough to warn us.\"\n\n\n \"I was dumb for a long time,\" Karyl said.\n \"I thought that it was the acid, almost to\n the very last. But when I drank that last\n glass, I knew they didn't have a chance.", "\"I guess they knew what was wrong right\n away. They let go the traction beams and\n tried to get away. They forgot about the\n force field, so we just poured atomic fire\n into the weakening ship. It just melted\n away.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl got up from the divan where\n he'd been lying. \"They thought I was a\n metal creature, too. But where do you suppose\n they came from?\"\n\n\n The captain shrugged. \"Who knows?\"\n\n\n Jon set two glasses on the table.\n\n\n \"Have a drink of the best damn water in\n the solar system?\" He asked Capt. Small.\n\n\n \"Don't mind if I do.\"", "ACID BATH\nBy VASELEOS GARSON\nThe starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments\n in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the\n weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues.\nJon Karyl\n was bolting in a new baffle\n plate on the stationary rocket engine.\n It was a tedious job and took all his\n concentration. So he wasn't paying too much\n attention to what was going on in other\n parts of the little asteroid.\n\n\n He didn't see the peculiar blue space\n ship, its rockets throttled down, as it drifted\n to land only a few hundred yards away from\n his plastic igloo.\n\n\n Nor did he see the half-dozen steel-blue\n creatures slide out of the peculiar vessel's\n airlock.\n\n\n It was only as he crawled out of the\n depths of the rocket power plant that he\n realized something was wrong.", "\"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n\n\n A green effulgence surrounded him.\nThere\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n\n\n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n\n\n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n\n\n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?" ], [ "He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n\n\n Steel-Blue chuckled.\nJon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n\n\n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you—earthmen,\n is it?—use it as protective\n metal.\"\n\n\n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.", "\"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n\n\n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n\n\n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n\n\n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.", "He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n\n\n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n\n\n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n\n\n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n\n\n They were about the height of Karyl—six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.", "Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n\n\n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n\n\n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n\n\n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n\n\n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n\n\n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n\n\n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n\n\n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.", "A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n\n\n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n\n\n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n\n\n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n\n\n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n\n\n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n\n\n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.", "\"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n \"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n\n\n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n\n\n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n\n\n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.", "Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n\n\n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n\n\n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n\n\n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n\n\n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.", "Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n\n\n He turned his head.\n\n\n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n\n\n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n\n\n \"I am\"—there was a rising inflection in\n the answer—\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n\n\n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"", "It came anyway. \"For the same reason you\n Earthmen are reaching out farther into your\n system. We need living room. You have\n strategically placed planets for our use. We\n will use them.\"\n\n\n Jon sighed. For 400 years scientists had\n been preaching preparedness as Earth flung\n her ships into the reaches of the solar system,\n taking the first long step toward the\n conquest of space.\n\n\n There are other races somewhere, they\n argued. As strong and smart as man, many\n of them so transcending man in mental and\n inventive power that we must be prepared to\n strike the minute danger shows.\n\n\n Now here was the answer to the scientists'\n warning. Invasion by extra-terrestrials.\n\n\n \"What did you say?\" asked Steel-Blue.\n \"I couldn't understand.\"", "The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n\n\n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n\n\n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n\n\n One said,\n\n\n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"—there was a hesitation—\"as\n you say, died.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.", "Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n\n\n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n\n\n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n\n\n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n\n\n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n\n\n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.", "And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n\n\n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n\n\n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n\n\n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?", "Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\nThere\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n\n\n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n\n\n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n\n\n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.", "Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n\n\n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n\n\n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n\n\n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n\n\n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n\n\n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.", "The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get—absent-minded,\n is it?—every once in a\n while.\"\n\n\n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n\n\n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n\n\n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside—one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station—and they laid out a pallet.\n\n\n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n\n\n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"", "By then it was almost too late. The six\n blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching\n him at a lope.\n\n\n Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding\n over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot\n bounds.\n\n\n When you're a Lone Watcher, and\n strangers catch you unawares, you don't\n stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's\n first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend\n upon your life.\n\n\n As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under\n his breath. The automatic alarm should have\n shrilled out a warning.\n\n\n Then he saved as much of his breath as\n he could as some sort of power wave tore\n up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted\n and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get\n out of sight of the strangers.", "He heaved a slight sigh when he reached\n the power room, for right at his hand were\n weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.\n\n\n Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the\n lock to the station. His teeth suddenly\n clamped down on his lower lip.\n\n\n Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes\n into the stelrylite with round-headed metal\n clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't\n break up that easily.\n\n\n Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up\n the revolving turret which capped the station\n so that its thin fin pointed at the\n squat ship of the invaders.\n\n\n Then he went to the atomic cannon's\n firing buttons.\n\n\n He pressed first the yellow, then the blue\n button. Finally the red one.", "\"AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX\n to SP-101 ...\"\n\n\n Three times he sent the call, then began\n sending his message, hoping that his signal\n was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if\n they answered. Though the power pack\n could get out a message over a vast distance,\n it could not pick up messages even\n when backed by an SP ship's power unless\n the ship was only a few hundred miles\n away.\n\n\n The power pack was strictly a distress\n signal.\n\n\n He didn't know how long he'd been\n sending, nor how many times his weary\n voice had repeated the short but desperate\n message.\n\n\n He kept watching the heavens and hoping.\n\n\n Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming,\n for the blue ship of the Steel-Blues was\n rising silently from the asteroid.", "The thin fin—the cannon's sight—split in\n half as the turret opened and the coiled nose\n of the cannon protruded. There was a\n soundless flash. Then a sharp crack.\n\n\n Jon was dumbfounded when he saw the\n bolt ricochet off the ship. This was no ship\n of the solar system. There was nothing that\n could withstand even the slight jolt of power\n given by the station cannon on any of the\n Sun's worlds. But what was this? A piece of\n the ship had changed. A bubble of metal,\n like a huge drop of blue wax, dripped off\n the vessel and struck the rocket of the\n asteroid. It steamed and ran in rivulets.\n\n\n He pressed the red button again.\n\n\n Then abruptly he was on the floor of the\n power room, his legs strangely cut out from\n under him. He tried to move them. They lay\n flaccid. His arms seemed all right and tried\n to lever himself to an upright position.", "Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut\n back and head for the underground entrance\n to the service station.\n\n\n He glanced back finally.\n\n\n Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting\n after him, and rapidly closing the\n distance.\n\n\n Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol\n at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for\n greater exertion, increased the gravity pull\n in his space-suit boots as he neared the\n ravine he'd been racing for.\n\n\n The oxygen was just taking hold when\n he hit the lip of the ravine and began\n sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn\n course." ], [ "The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get—absent-minded,\n is it?—every once in a\n while.\"\n\n\n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n\n\n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n\n\n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside—one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station—and they laid out a pallet.\n\n\n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n\n\n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"", "The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n\n\n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n\n\n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n\n\n One said,\n\n\n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"—there was a hesitation—\"as\n you say, died.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.", "\"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n\n\n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n\n\n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n\n\n \"Enter your\"—the Steel-Blue hesitated—\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n\n\n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.", "\"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n\n\n A green effulgence surrounded him.\nThere\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n\n\n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n\n\n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n\n\n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?", "Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n\n\n He turned his head.\n\n\n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n\n\n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n\n\n \"I am\"—there was a rising inflection in\n the answer—\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n\n\n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"", "A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n\n\n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n\n\n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n\n\n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n\n\n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n\n\n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n\n\n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.", "\"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n\n\n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n\n\n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n\n\n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n\n\n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n\n\n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n\n\n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded.", "Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n\n\n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n\n\n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n\n\n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n\n\n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.", "And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n\n\n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n\n\n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n\n\n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?", "Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n\n\n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n\n\n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n\n\n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n\n\n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n\n\n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n\n\n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n\n\n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.", "He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n\n\n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n\n\n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n\n\n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n\n\n They were about the height of Karyl—six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.", "Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n\n\n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n\n\n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n\n\n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n\n\n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n\n\n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.", "He took a sample of the air, found that\n it was good, although quite rich in oxygen\n compared with what he'd been using in the\n service station and in his suit.\n\n\n With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet\n and gulped huge draughts of the air.\n\n\n He sat down on the pallet and waited\n for the torture to begin.\n\n\n The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo,\n staring at him through elliptical eyes.\n\n\n Apparently, they too, were waiting for the\n torture to begin.\n\n\n Jon thought the excess of oxygen was\n making him light-headed.\n\n\n He stared at a cylinder which was beginning\n to sprout tentacles from the circle.\n He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An\n opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a\n spacescope, was appearing in the center of\n the cylinder.", "The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n\n\n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n\n\n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n\n\n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n\n\n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n\n\n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"", "\"Good it is that you live. The torture\n will continue,\" spoke No. 1 before loping\n away.\n\n\n The cylinder business began again. This\n time, Jon drank the bitter liquid slowly, trying\n to figure out what it was. It had a\n familiar, tantalizing taste but he couldn't\n quite put a taste-finger on it.\n\n\n His belly said he was hungry. He glanced\n at his chronometer. Only 20 days left before\n the SP ship arrived.\n\n\n Would this torture—he chuckled—last\n until then? But he was growing more and\n more conscious that his belly was screaming\n for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge\n off his thirst.\n\n\n It was on the fifth day of his torture that\n Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get\n something to eat or perish in the attempt.", "He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n\n\n Steel-Blue chuckled.\nJon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n\n\n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you—earthmen,\n is it?—use it as protective\n metal.\"\n\n\n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.", "\"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n\n\n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n\n\n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n\n\n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.", "Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\nThere\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n\n\n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n\n\n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n\n\n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.", "\"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n \"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n\n\n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n\n\n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n\n\n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.", "\"That is the hemlock,\" Steel-Blue said.\n\n\n It was when he quaffed the new and\n stronger draught that Jon knew that his\n hope that it was citric acid was squelched.\n\n\n The acid taste was weaker which meant\n that the citric acid was the diluting liquid.\n It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath\n the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive\n acid.\n\n\n On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak\n he didn't feel much like moving around. He\n let the cylinder feed him the hemlock.\n\n\n No. 1 came again to see him, and went\n away chuckling, \"Decrease the dilution.\n This Earthman at last is beginning to\n suffer.\"\nStaying\n alive had now become a fetish\n with Jon.\n\n\n On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized\n that the Steel-Blues also were waiting\n for the SP ship." ], [ "\"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n\n\n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n\n\n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n\n\n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.", "Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n\n\n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n\n\n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n\n\n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n\n\n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.", "And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n\n\n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n\n\n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n\n\n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?", "He heaved a slight sigh when he reached\n the power room, for right at his hand were\n weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.\n\n\n Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the\n lock to the station. His teeth suddenly\n clamped down on his lower lip.\n\n\n Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes\n into the stelrylite with round-headed metal\n clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't\n break up that easily.\n\n\n Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up\n the revolving turret which capped the station\n so that its thin fin pointed at the\n squat ship of the invaders.\n\n\n Then he went to the atomic cannon's\n firing buttons.\n\n\n He pressed first the yellow, then the blue\n button. Finally the red one.", "The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n\n\n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n\n\n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n\n\n One said,\n\n\n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"—there was a hesitation—\"as\n you say, died.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.", "Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\nThere\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n\n\n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n\n\n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n\n\n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.", "Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n\n\n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n\n\n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n\n\n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n\n\n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n\n\n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n\n\n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n\n\n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.", "Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n\n\n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n\n\n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n\n\n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n\n\n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n\n\n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.", "\"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n \"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n\n\n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n\n\n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n\n\n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.", "He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n\n\n Steel-Blue chuckled.\nJon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n\n\n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you—earthmen,\n is it?—use it as protective\n metal.\"\n\n\n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.", "Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n\n\n He turned his head.\n\n\n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n\n\n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n\n\n \"I am\"—there was a rising inflection in\n the answer—\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n\n\n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"", "Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n\n\n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n\n\n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n\n\n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n\n\n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n\n\n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.", "\"AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX\n to SP-101 ...\"\n\n\n Three times he sent the call, then began\n sending his message, hoping that his signal\n was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if\n they answered. Though the power pack\n could get out a message over a vast distance,\n it could not pick up messages even\n when backed by an SP ship's power unless\n the ship was only a few hundred miles\n away.\n\n\n The power pack was strictly a distress\n signal.\n\n\n He didn't know how long he'd been\n sending, nor how many times his weary\n voice had repeated the short but desperate\n message.\n\n\n He kept watching the heavens and hoping.\n\n\n Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming,\n for the blue ship of the Steel-Blues was\n rising silently from the asteroid.", "He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n\n\n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n\n\n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n\n\n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n\n\n They were about the height of Karyl—six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.", "The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get—absent-minded,\n is it?—every once in a\n while.\"\n\n\n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n\n\n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n\n\n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside—one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station—and they laid out a pallet.\n\n\n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n\n\n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"", "The extra-terrestrials had repaired the\n blue ship where the service station atomic\n ray had struck. And they were doing a little\n target practice with plastic bubbles only a\n few miles above the asteroid.\n\n\n When his chronometer clocked off the\n beginning of the twenty-first day, Jon received\n a tumbler of the hemlock from the\n hands of No. 1 himself.\n\n\n \"It is the hemlock,\" he chuckled, \"undiluted.\n Drink it and your torture is over.\n You will die before your SP ship is destroyed.\n\n\n \"We have played with you long enough.\n Today we begin to toy with your SP ship.\n Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement.\"\n\n\n Weak though he was Jon lunged to his\n feet, spilling the tumbler of liquid. It ran\n cool along the plastic arm of his space suit.\n He changed his mind about throwing the\n contents on No. 1.", "With a smile he set the glass at his lips\n and drank. Then he laughed at No. 1.\n\n\n \"The SP ship will turn your ship into\n jelly.\"\n\n\n No. 1 swept out, chuckling. \"Boast if you\n will, Earthman, it's your last chance.\"\n\n\n There was an exultation in Jon's heart\n that deadened the hunger and washed away\n the nausea.\n\n\n At last he knew what the hemlock was.\n\n\n He sat on the pallet adjusting the little\n power-pack radio. The SP ship should now\n be within range of the set. The space patrol\n was notorious for its accuracy in keeping to\n schedule. Seconds counted like years. They\n had to be on the nose, or it meant disaster\n or death.\n\n\n He sent out the call letters.", "\"They were metal monsters. No wonder\n they feared that liquid. It would rust their\n joints, short their wiring, and kill them.\n No wonder they stared when I kept alive\n after drinking enough to completely annihilate\n a half-dozen of them.\n\n\n \"But what happened when you met the\n ship?\"\n\n\n The space captain grinned.\n\n\n \"Not much. Our crew was busy creating\n a hollow shell filled with\nwater\nto be shot\n out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile\n thrower.\n\n\n \"These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put\n traction beams on us and started tugging us\n toward the asteroid. We tried a couple of\n atomic shots but when they just glanced off,\n we gave up.\n\n\n \"They weren't expecting the shell of\n water. When it hit that blue ship, you could\n almost see it oxidize before your eyes.", "\"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n\n\n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n\n\n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n\n\n \"Enter your\"—the Steel-Blue hesitated—\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n\n\n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.", "\"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n\n\n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n\n\n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n\n\n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n\n\n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n\n\n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n\n\n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded." ], [ "He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n\n\n Steel-Blue chuckled.\nJon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n\n\n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you—earthmen,\n is it?—use it as protective\n metal.\"\n\n\n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.", "It came anyway. \"For the same reason you\n Earthmen are reaching out farther into your\n system. We need living room. You have\n strategically placed planets for our use. We\n will use them.\"\n\n\n Jon sighed. For 400 years scientists had\n been preaching preparedness as Earth flung\n her ships into the reaches of the solar system,\n taking the first long step toward the\n conquest of space.\n\n\n There are other races somewhere, they\n argued. As strong and smart as man, many\n of them so transcending man in mental and\n inventive power that we must be prepared to\n strike the minute danger shows.\n\n\n Now here was the answer to the scientists'\n warning. Invasion by extra-terrestrials.\n\n\n \"What did you say?\" asked Steel-Blue.\n \"I couldn't understand.\"", "He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n\n\n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n\n\n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n\n\n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n\n\n They were about the height of Karyl—six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.", "\"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n\n\n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n\n\n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n\n\n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.", "A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n\n\n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n\n\n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n\n\n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n\n\n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n\n\n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n\n\n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.", "\"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n \"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n\n\n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n\n\n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n\n\n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.", "Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n\n\n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n\n\n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n\n\n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n\n\n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.", "Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n\n\n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n\n\n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n\n\n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n\n\n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n\n\n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n\n\n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n\n\n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.", "Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n\n\n He turned his head.\n\n\n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n\n\n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n\n\n \"I am\"—there was a rising inflection in\n the answer—\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n\n\n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"", "Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n\n\n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n\n\n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n\n\n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n\n\n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n\n\n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.", "\"They were metal monsters. No wonder\n they feared that liquid. It would rust their\n joints, short their wiring, and kill them.\n No wonder they stared when I kept alive\n after drinking enough to completely annihilate\n a half-dozen of them.\n\n\n \"But what happened when you met the\n ship?\"\n\n\n The space captain grinned.\n\n\n \"Not much. Our crew was busy creating\n a hollow shell filled with\nwater\nto be shot\n out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile\n thrower.\n\n\n \"These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put\n traction beams on us and started tugging us\n toward the asteroid. We tried a couple of\n atomic shots but when they just glanced off,\n we gave up.\n\n\n \"They weren't expecting the shell of\n water. When it hit that blue ship, you could\n almost see it oxidize before your eyes.", "\"AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX\n to SP-101 ...\"\n\n\n Three times he sent the call, then began\n sending his message, hoping that his signal\n was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if\n they answered. Though the power pack\n could get out a message over a vast distance,\n it could not pick up messages even\n when backed by an SP ship's power unless\n the ship was only a few hundred miles\n away.\n\n\n The power pack was strictly a distress\n signal.\n\n\n He didn't know how long he'd been\n sending, nor how many times his weary\n voice had repeated the short but desperate\n message.\n\n\n He kept watching the heavens and hoping.\n\n\n Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming,\n for the blue ship of the Steel-Blues was\n rising silently from the asteroid.", "The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n\n\n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n\n\n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n\n\n One said,\n\n\n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"—there was a hesitation—\"as\n you say, died.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.", "The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n\n\n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n\n\n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n\n\n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n\n\n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n\n\n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"", "And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n\n\n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n\n\n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n\n\n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?", "Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n\n\n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n\n\n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n\n\n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n\n\n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n\n\n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.", "The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get—absent-minded,\n is it?—every once in a\n while.\"\n\n\n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n\n\n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n\n\n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside—one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station—and they laid out a pallet.\n\n\n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n\n\n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"", "Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\nThere\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n\n\n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n\n\n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n\n\n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.", "\"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n\n\n A green effulgence surrounded him.\nThere\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n\n\n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n\n\n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n\n\n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?", "It sounded almost silly to Jon Karyl. The\n fruit acid of Earth to repel these invaders—it\n doesn't sound possible. That couldn't be\n the answer.\n\n\n Citric acid wasn't the answer, Jon Karyl\n discovered a week later.\n\n\n The Steel-Blue who had captured him in\n the power room of the service station came\n in to examine him.\n\n\n \"You're still holding out, I see,\" he observed\n after poking Jon in every sensitive\n part of his body.\n\n\n \"I'll suggest to No. 1 that we increase\n the power of the—ah—hemlock. How do\n you feel?\"\n\n\n Between the rich oxygen and the dizziness\n of hunger, Jon was a bit delirious. But he\n answered honestly enough: \"My guts feel as\n if they're chewing each other up. My bones\n ache. My joints creak. I can't coordinate I'm\n so hungry.\"" ], [ "The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get—absent-minded,\n is it?—every once in a\n while.\"\n\n\n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n\n\n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n\n\n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside—one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station—and they laid out a pallet.\n\n\n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n\n\n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"", "The power ray from behind ripped out\n great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But\n running naturally, bent close to the bottom\n of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare\n spots. The oxygen made the tremendous\n exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down\n the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue\n stalkers.\n\n\n He'd eluded them, temporarily at least,\n Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off\n the dim trail and watched for movement\n along the route behind him.\n\n\n He stood up, finally, pushed aside the\n leafy overhang of a bush and looked for\n landmarks along the edge of the ravine.\n\n\n He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like\n a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the\n ravine. The hidden entrance to the service\n station wasn't far off.\n\n\n His pistol held ready, he moved quietly\n on down the ravine until the old water\n course made an abrupt hairpin turn.", "\"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n\n\n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n\n\n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n\n\n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n\n\n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n\n\n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n\n\n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded.", "Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n\n\n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n\n\n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n\n\n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n\n\n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.", "Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\nThere\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n\n\n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n\n\n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n\n\n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.", "Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n\n\n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n\n\n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n\n\n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n\n\n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n\n\n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n\n\n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n\n\n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.", "Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n\n\n He turned his head.\n\n\n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n\n\n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n\n\n \"I am\"—there was a rising inflection in\n the answer—\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n\n\n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"", "\"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n\n\n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n\n\n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n\n\n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.", "Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut\n back and head for the underground entrance\n to the service station.\n\n\n He glanced back finally.\n\n\n Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting\n after him, and rapidly closing the\n distance.\n\n\n Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol\n at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for\n greater exertion, increased the gravity pull\n in his space-suit boots as he neared the\n ravine he'd been racing for.\n\n\n The oxygen was just taking hold when\n he hit the lip of the ravine and began\n sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn\n course.", "The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n\n\n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n\n\n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n\n\n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n\n\n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n\n\n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"", "Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n\n\n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n\n\n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n\n\n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n\n\n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n\n\n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.", "And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n\n\n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n\n\n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n\n\n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?", "The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n\n\n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n\n\n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n\n\n One said,\n\n\n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"—there was a hesitation—\"as\n you say, died.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.", "Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n\n\n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n\n\n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n\n\n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n\n\n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n\n\n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.", "A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n\n\n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n\n\n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n\n\n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n\n\n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n\n\n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n\n\n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.", "\"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n \"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n\n\n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n\n\n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n\n\n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.", "He heaved a slight sigh when he reached\n the power room, for right at his hand were\n weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.\n\n\n Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the\n lock to the station. His teeth suddenly\n clamped down on his lower lip.\n\n\n Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes\n into the stelrylite with round-headed metal\n clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't\n break up that easily.\n\n\n Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up\n the revolving turret which capped the station\n so that its thin fin pointed at the\n squat ship of the invaders.\n\n\n Then he went to the atomic cannon's\n firing buttons.\n\n\n He pressed first the yellow, then the blue\n button. Finally the red one.", "\"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n\n\n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n\n\n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n\n\n \"Enter your\"—the Steel-Blue hesitated—\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n\n\n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.", "\"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n\n\n A green effulgence surrounded him.\nThere\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n\n\n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n\n\n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n\n\n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?", "He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n\n\n Steel-Blue chuckled.\nJon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n\n\n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you—earthmen,\n is it?—use it as protective\n metal.\"\n\n\n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer." ], [ "The power ray from behind ripped out\n great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But\n running naturally, bent close to the bottom\n of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare\n spots. The oxygen made the tremendous\n exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down\n the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue\n stalkers.\n\n\n He'd eluded them, temporarily at least,\n Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off\n the dim trail and watched for movement\n along the route behind him.\n\n\n He stood up, finally, pushed aside the\n leafy overhang of a bush and looked for\n landmarks along the edge of the ravine.\n\n\n He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like\n a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the\n ravine. The hidden entrance to the service\n station wasn't far off.\n\n\n His pistol held ready, he moved quietly\n on down the ravine until the old water\n course made an abrupt hairpin turn.", "Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\nThere\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n\n\n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n\n\n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n\n\n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.", "The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get—absent-minded,\n is it?—every once in a\n while.\"\n\n\n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n\n\n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n\n\n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside—one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station—and they laid out a pallet.\n\n\n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n\n\n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"", "Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut\n back and head for the underground entrance\n to the service station.\n\n\n He glanced back finally.\n\n\n Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting\n after him, and rapidly closing the\n distance.\n\n\n Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol\n at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for\n greater exertion, increased the gravity pull\n in his space-suit boots as he neared the\n ravine he'd been racing for.\n\n\n The oxygen was just taking hold when\n he hit the lip of the ravine and began\n sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn\n course.", "Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n\n\n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n\n\n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n\n\n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n\n\n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n\n\n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n\n\n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n\n\n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.", "Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the\n chronometer on his wrist.\n\n\n Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien\n ship and halted expectantly just outside the\n ship's lock.\n\n\n Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the\n stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my\n way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he\n toted up the disadvantages.\n\n\n He either would have to find a hiding\n place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues\n wanted him bad enough they could tear the\n whole place to pieces, or somehow get\n aboard the little life ship hidden in the\n service station.\n\n\n In that he would be just a sitting duck.\n\n\n He shrugged off the slight temptation to\n use the pistol. He was still curious.", "\"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n\n\n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n\n\n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n\n\n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.", "Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n\n\n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n\n\n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n\n\n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n\n\n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n\n\n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.", "\"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n\n\n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n\n\n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n\n\n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n\n\n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n\n\n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n\n\n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded.", "He took a sample of the air, found that\n it was good, although quite rich in oxygen\n compared with what he'd been using in the\n service station and in his suit.\n\n\n With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet\n and gulped huge draughts of the air.\n\n\n He sat down on the pallet and waited\n for the torture to begin.\n\n\n The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo,\n staring at him through elliptical eyes.\n\n\n Apparently, they too, were waiting for the\n torture to begin.\n\n\n Jon thought the excess of oxygen was\n making him light-headed.\n\n\n He stared at a cylinder which was beginning\n to sprout tentacles from the circle.\n He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An\n opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a\n spacescope, was appearing in the center of\n the cylinder.", "Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n\n\n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n\n\n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n\n\n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n\n\n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.", "The extra-terrestrials had repaired the\n blue ship where the service station atomic\n ray had struck. And they were doing a little\n target practice with plastic bubbles only a\n few miles above the asteroid.\n\n\n When his chronometer clocked off the\n beginning of the twenty-first day, Jon received\n a tumbler of the hemlock from the\n hands of No. 1 himself.\n\n\n \"It is the hemlock,\" he chuckled, \"undiluted.\n Drink it and your torture is over.\n You will die before your SP ship is destroyed.\n\n\n \"We have played with you long enough.\n Today we begin to toy with your SP ship.\n Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement.\"\n\n\n Weak though he was Jon lunged to his\n feet, spilling the tumbler of liquid. It ran\n cool along the plastic arm of his space suit.\n He changed his mind about throwing the\n contents on No. 1.", "The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n\n\n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n\n\n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n\n\n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n\n\n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n\n\n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"", "He heaved a slight sigh when he reached\n the power room, for right at his hand were\n weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.\n\n\n Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the\n lock to the station. His teeth suddenly\n clamped down on his lower lip.\n\n\n Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes\n into the stelrylite with round-headed metal\n clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't\n break up that easily.\n\n\n Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up\n the revolving turret which capped the station\n so that its thin fin pointed at the\n squat ship of the invaders.\n\n\n Then he went to the atomic cannon's\n firing buttons.\n\n\n He pressed first the yellow, then the blue\n button. Finally the red one.", "\"Good it is that you live. The torture\n will continue,\" spoke No. 1 before loping\n away.\n\n\n The cylinder business began again. This\n time, Jon drank the bitter liquid slowly, trying\n to figure out what it was. It had a\n familiar, tantalizing taste but he couldn't\n quite put a taste-finger on it.\n\n\n His belly said he was hungry. He glanced\n at his chronometer. Only 20 days left before\n the SP ship arrived.\n\n\n Would this torture—he chuckled—last\n until then? But he was growing more and\n more conscious that his belly was screaming\n for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge\n off his thirst.\n\n\n It was on the fifth day of his torture that\n Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get\n something to eat or perish in the attempt.", "And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n\n\n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n\n\n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n\n\n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?", "By then it was almost too late. The six\n blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching\n him at a lope.\n\n\n Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding\n over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot\n bounds.\n\n\n When you're a Lone Watcher, and\n strangers catch you unawares, you don't\n stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's\n first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend\n upon your life.\n\n\n As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under\n his breath. The automatic alarm should have\n shrilled out a warning.\n\n\n Then he saved as much of his breath as\n he could as some sort of power wave tore\n up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted\n and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get\n out of sight of the strangers.", "The thin fin—the cannon's sight—split in\n half as the turret opened and the coiled nose\n of the cannon protruded. There was a\n soundless flash. Then a sharp crack.\n\n\n Jon was dumbfounded when he saw the\n bolt ricochet off the ship. This was no ship\n of the solar system. There was nothing that\n could withstand even the slight jolt of power\n given by the station cannon on any of the\n Sun's worlds. But what was this? A piece of\n the ship had changed. A bubble of metal,\n like a huge drop of blue wax, dripped off\n the vessel and struck the rocket of the\n asteroid. It steamed and ran in rivulets.\n\n\n He pressed the red button again.\n\n\n Then abruptly he was on the floor of the\n power room, his legs strangely cut out from\n under him. He tried to move them. They lay\n flaccid. His arms seemed all right and tried\n to lever himself to an upright position.", "A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n\n\n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n\n\n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n\n\n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n\n\n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n\n\n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n\n\n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.", "The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n\n\n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n\n\n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n\n\n One said,\n\n\n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"—there was a hesitation—\"as\n you say, died.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand." ], [ "The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get—absent-minded,\n is it?—every once in a\n while.\"\n\n\n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n\n\n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n\n\n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside—one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station—and they laid out a pallet.\n\n\n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n\n\n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"", "Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n\n\n He turned his head.\n\n\n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n\n\n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n\n\n \"I am\"—there was a rising inflection in\n the answer—\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n\n\n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"", "Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n\n\n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n\n\n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n\n\n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n\n\n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.", "He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n\n\n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n\n\n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n\n\n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n\n\n They were about the height of Karyl—six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.", "Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n\n\n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n\n\n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n\n\n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n\n\n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n\n\n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.", "The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n\n\n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n\n\n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n\n\n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n\n\n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n\n\n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"", "He took a sample of the air, found that\n it was good, although quite rich in oxygen\n compared with what he'd been using in the\n service station and in his suit.\n\n\n With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet\n and gulped huge draughts of the air.\n\n\n He sat down on the pallet and waited\n for the torture to begin.\n\n\n The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo,\n staring at him through elliptical eyes.\n\n\n Apparently, they too, were waiting for the\n torture to begin.\n\n\n Jon thought the excess of oxygen was\n making him light-headed.\n\n\n He stared at a cylinder which was beginning\n to sprout tentacles from the circle.\n He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An\n opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a\n spacescope, was appearing in the center of\n the cylinder.", "The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n\n\n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n\n\n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n\n\n One said,\n\n\n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"—there was a hesitation—\"as\n you say, died.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.", "Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n\n\n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n\n\n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n\n\n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n\n\n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n\n\n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n\n\n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n\n\n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.", "\"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n\n\n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n\n\n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n\n\n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n\n\n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n\n\n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n\n\n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded.", "He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n\n\n Steel-Blue chuckled.\nJon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n\n\n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you—earthmen,\n is it?—use it as protective\n metal.\"\n\n\n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.", "\"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n\n\n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n\n\n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n\n\n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.", "A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n\n\n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n\n\n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n\n\n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n\n\n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n\n\n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n\n\n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.", "Instead of following around the sharp\n bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead\n through the overhanging bushes until he\n came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his\n hands and knees he worked his way under\n the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out\n space in the center.\nThere\n , just ahead of him, was the lock\n leading into the service station. Slipping\n a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit,\n he jabbed it into the center of the lock,\n opening the lever housing.\n\n\n He pulled strongly on the lever. With a\n hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open.\n Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing\n softly behind.\n\n\n At the end of the long tunnel he stepped\n to the televisor which was fixed on the area\n surrounding the station.\n\n\n Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures.\n But he saw their ship. It squatted\n like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut\n tight.", "And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n\n\n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n\n\n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n\n\n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?", "\"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n\n\n A green effulgence surrounded him.\nThere\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n\n\n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n\n\n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n\n\n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?", "Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut\n back and head for the underground entrance\n to the service station.\n\n\n He glanced back finally.\n\n\n Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting\n after him, and rapidly closing the\n distance.\n\n\n Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol\n at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for\n greater exertion, increased the gravity pull\n in his space-suit boots as he neared the\n ravine he'd been racing for.\n\n\n The oxygen was just taking hold when\n he hit the lip of the ravine and began\n sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn\n course.", "He heaved a slight sigh when he reached\n the power room, for right at his hand were\n weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.\n\n\n Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the\n lock to the station. His teeth suddenly\n clamped down on his lower lip.\n\n\n Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes\n into the stelrylite with round-headed metal\n clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't\n break up that easily.\n\n\n Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up\n the revolving turret which capped the station\n so that its thin fin pointed at the\n squat ship of the invaders.\n\n\n Then he went to the atomic cannon's\n firing buttons.\n\n\n He pressed first the yellow, then the blue\n button. Finally the red one.", "\"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n\n\n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n\n\n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n\n\n \"Enter your\"—the Steel-Blue hesitated—\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n\n\n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.", "\"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n \"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n\n\n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n\n\n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n\n\n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways." ], [ "\"A robot,\" came the immediate answer.\n Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue\n was telepathic. \"Yes,\" the Steel-Blue answered.\n \"We talk in the language of the\n mind. Come!\" he said peremptorily, motioning\n with the square black box.\n\n\n The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed\n the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens\n he'd seen on the creature's face had a\n counterpart on the back of the egg-head.\n\n\n Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought.\n That's quite an innovation. \"Thank you,\"\n Steel-Blue said.\n\n\n There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's\n mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he\n had applied for this high-paying but man-killing\n job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar\n System's starways.", "Where their eyes would have been was\n an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the\n egg-head, with its converging ends curving\n around the sides of the head.\n\n\n Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But\n where were their masters?\n\n\n The Steel-Blues moved out of the range\n of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard\n a pounding from the station upstairs.\n\n\n He chuckled. They were like the wolf of\n pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to\n blow the house down.\n\n\n The outer shell of the station was formed\n from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the\n solar system. With the self-sealing lock of\n the same resistant material, a mere pounding\n was nothing.\n\n\n Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway.\n He went up the steel ladder leading to the\n station's power plant and the televisor that\n could look into every room within the\n station.", "Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed\n from the waist down. But it couldn't\n happen that suddenly.\n\n\n He turned his head.\n\n\n A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked\n tentacle held a square black box.\n\n\n Jon could read nothing in that metallic\n face. He said, voice muffled by the confines\n of the plastic helmet, \"Who are you?\"\n\n\n \"I am\"—there was a rising inflection in\n the answer—\"a Steel-Blue.\"\n\n\n There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's\n face to move. \"That is what I have named\n you,\" Jon Karyl said. \"But what are you?\"", "The Steel-Blue chuckled. \"You get—absent-minded,\n is it?—every once in a\n while.\"\n\n\n Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared\n lugging great sheets of plastic and various\n other equipment.\n\n\n They dumped their loads and began unbundling\n them.\n\n\n Working swiftly, they built a plastic\n igloo, smaller than the living room in the\n larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments\n inside—one of them Jon Karyl\n recognized as an air pump from within the\n station—and they laid out a pallet.\n\n\n When they were done Jon saw a miniature\n reproduction of the service station, lacking\n only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear\n plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the\n other.\n\n\n His Steel-Blue said: \"We have reproduced\n the atmosphere of your station so that you\n be watched while you undergo the torture\n under the normal conditions of your life.\"", "He tuned the televisor to its widest range\n and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues.\n He was looking into the stationary rocket\n engine.\n\n\n As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue\n came crawling out of the ship.\n\n\n The two Steel-Blues moved toward the\n center of the televisor range. They're coming\n toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.\n\n\n Karyl examined the two creatures. They\n were of the steel-blue color from the crown\n of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of\n their walking appendages.\n\n\n They were about the height of Karyl—six\n feet. But where he tapered from broad\n shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up\n and down. They had no legs, just appendages,\n many-jointed that stretched and\n shrank independent of the other, but keeping\n the cylindrical body with its four pairs\n of tentacles on a level balance.", "The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't\n known until then how tense he'd been. Now\n with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He\n laid down on the pallet and went to sleep.\n\n\n There was one lone Steel-Blue watching\n him when he rubbed the sleep out of his\n eyes and sat up.\n\n\n He vanished almost instantly. He, or another\n like him, returned immediately accompanied\n by a half-dozen others, including\n the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1.\n\n\n One said,\n\n\n \"You are alive.\" The thought registered\n amazement. \"When you lost consciousness,\n we thought you had\"—there was a hesitation—\"as\n you say, died.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Jon Karyl said. \"I didn't die. I\n was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep.\"\n The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand.", "The cylinder sat passively in its niche in\n the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching\n as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed\n his stubray.\n\n\n They merely watched as he pressed the\n stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked\n out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol.\n The plastic splintered.\n\n\n Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and\n striding toward his own igloo adjacent to\n the service station when a Steel-Blue\n accosted him.\n\n\n \"Out of my way,\" grunted Jon, waving\n the stubray. \"I'm hungry.\"\n\n\n \"I'm the first Steel-Blue you met,\" said\n the creature who barred his way. \"Go back\n to your torture.\"\n\n\n \"But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of\n your tentacles and eat it without seasoning.\"", "He had little fear now, only curiosity.\n These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical.\n They could have snuffed out my life very\n simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be\n friends.\n\n\n Steel-Blue chuckled.\nJon\n followed him through the sundered\n lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a\n moment to examine the wreckage of the\n lock. It had been punched full of holes as\n if it had been some soft cheese instead of a\n metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a\n century perfecting.\n\n\n \"We appreciate your compliment,\" Steel-Blue\n said. \"But that metal also is found on\n our world. It's probably the softest and most\n malleable we have. We were surprised you—earthmen,\n is it?—use it as protective\n metal.\"\n\n\n \"Why are you in this system?\" Jon asked,\n hardly expecting an answer.", "\"They were metal monsters. No wonder\n they feared that liquid. It would rust their\n joints, short their wiring, and kill them.\n No wonder they stared when I kept alive\n after drinking enough to completely annihilate\n a half-dozen of them.\n\n\n \"But what happened when you met the\n ship?\"\n\n\n The space captain grinned.\n\n\n \"Not much. Our crew was busy creating\n a hollow shell filled with\nwater\nto be shot\n out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile\n thrower.\n\n\n \"These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put\n traction beams on us and started tugging us\n toward the asteroid. We tried a couple of\n atomic shots but when they just glanced off,\n we gave up.\n\n\n \"They weren't expecting the shell of\n water. When it hit that blue ship, you could\n almost see it oxidize before your eyes.", "Up and up it rose, then flames flickered\n in a circle about its curious shape. The ship\n disappeared, suddenly accelerating.\n\n\n Jon Karyl strained his eyes.\n\n\n Finally he looked away from the heavens\n to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently\n outside the goldfish bowl.\n\n\n Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol.\n He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran\n toward the service station.\n\n\n He didn't know how weak he was until\n he stumbled and fell only a few feet from\n his prison.\n\n\n The Steel-Blues just watched him.\n\n\n He crawled on, around the circular pit in\n the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue\n had shown him the power of his\n weapon.\n\n\n He'd been crawling through a nightmare\n for years when the quiet voice penetrated\n his dulled mind.", "Jon resheathed the stubray pistol,\n shrugged non-committally and leaped the\n trench. He walked slowly back and reentered\n the torture chamber.\n\n\n The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage\n he'd done.\n\n\n As he watched them, Jon was still curious,\n but he was getting mad underneath at\n the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues.\n\n\n By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by\n her green fields, and dark forests, he'd\n stay alive to warn the SP ship.\n\n\n Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send\n the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid\n to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could\n equip themselves with spray guns and squirt\n citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade\n away.", "\"This is the examination room,\" his\n Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously.\n\n\n A green effulgence surrounded him.\nThere\n was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the\n tiny microphone on the outside of his\n suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go\n through his body. Then it seemed as if a\n half dozen hands were inside him, examining\n his internal organs. His stomach contracted.\n He felt a squeeze on his heart. His\n lungs tickled.\n\n\n There were several more queer motions\n inside his body.\n\n\n Then another Steel-Blue voice said:\n\n\n \"He is a soft-metal creature, made up of\n metals that melt at a very low temperature.\n He also contains a liquid whose makeup I\n cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him\n back when the torture is done.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What\n kind of torture could this be?", "\"Just thinking to myself,\" Jon answered.\n It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his\n thoughts had to be directed outward, rather\n than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to\n read it.\n\n\n He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping\n lock of the invaders' space ship wondering\n how he could warn Earth. The Space\n Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at\n his service station in 21 days. But by that\n time he probably would be mouldering in\n the rocky dust of the asteroid.\n\n\n It was pitch dark within the ship but the\n Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all\n maneuvering through the maze of corridors.\n Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.\n\n\n Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular\n room, bright with light streaming from\n a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently\n were near topside of the vessel.", "\"Eat?\" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled.\n\n\n \"I want to refuel. I've got to have food\n to keep my engine going.\"\n\n\n Steel-Blue chuckled. \"So the hemlock, as\n you call it, is beginning to affect you at\n last? Back to the torture room.\"\n\n\n \"Like R-dust,\" Jon growled. He pressed\n the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of\n Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to\n the rocky sward.\n\n\n Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used\n once before. A tentacle danced over it.\n\n\n Abruptly Jon found himself standing on\n a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a\n swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet\n wide.\n\n\n \"Back to the room,\" Steel-Blue commanded.", "A Steel-Blue, more massive than his\n guide and with four more pair of tentacles,\n including two short ones that grew from the\n top of its head, spoke out.\n\n\n \"This is the violator?\" Jon's Steel-Blue\n nodded.\n\n\n \"You know the penalty? Carry it out.\"\n\n\n \"He also is an inhabitant of this system,\"\n Jon's guide added.\n\n\n \"Examine him first, then give him the\n death.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from\n the lighted room through more corridors.\n If it got too bad he still had the stubray\n pistol.\n\n\n Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on\n the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service\n station attendant just to see what it offered.\n\n\n Here was a part of it, and it was certainly\n something new.", "He took a sample of the air, found that\n it was good, although quite rich in oxygen\n compared with what he'd been using in the\n service station and in his suit.\n\n\n With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet\n and gulped huge draughts of the air.\n\n\n He sat down on the pallet and waited\n for the torture to begin.\n\n\n The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo,\n staring at him through elliptical eyes.\n\n\n Apparently, they too, were waiting for the\n torture to begin.\n\n\n Jon thought the excess of oxygen was\n making him light-headed.\n\n\n He stared at a cylinder which was beginning\n to sprout tentacles from the circle.\n He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An\n opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a\n spacescope, was appearing in the center of\n the cylinder.", "And he was interested in staying alive as\n long as possible. There was a remote chance\n he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously,\n he glanced toward his belt to see the little\n power pack which, if under ideal conditions,\n could finger out fifty thousand miles into\n space.\n\n\n If he could somehow stay alive the 21\n days he might be able to warn the patrol.\n He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for\n his life would be snuffed out immediately.\n\n\n The Steel-Blue said quietly:\n\n\n \"It might be ironical to let you warn\n that SP ship you keep thinking about. But\n we know your weapon now. Already our\n ship is equipped with a force field designed\n especially to deflect your atomic guns.\"\n\n\n Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts\n quickly. They can delve deeper than the\n surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a\n leash on my thoughts?", "\"What is this torture?\" Jon Karyl asked.\n\n\n The answer was almost caressing: \"It is\n a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes\n joints to harden if even so much as a drop\n remains on it long. It eats away the metal,\n leaving a scaly residue which crumbles\n eventually into dust.\n\n\n \"We will dilute it with a harmless liquid\n for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die\n instantly.\n\n\n \"Enter your\"—the Steel-Blue hesitated—\"mausoleum.\n You die in your own atmosphere.\n However, we took the liberty of purifying\n it. There were dangerous elements in\n it.\"\n\n\n Jon walked into the little igloo. The\n Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials\n and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit\n deflated. Pressure was building up in the\n igloo.", "The cylinder apparently understood him,\n for it handed him the tumbler. It even reholstered\n his stubray pistol.\n\n\n Jon brought the glass of liquid under his\n nose. The fumes of the liquid were pungent.\n It brought tears to his eyes.\n\n\n He looked at the cylinder, then at the\n Steel-Blues crowding around the plastic\n igloo. He waved the glass at the audience.\n\n\n \"To Earth, ever triumphant,\" he toasted.\n Then he drained the glass at a gulp.\n\n\n Its taste was bitter, and he felt hot\n prickles jab at his scalp. It was like eating\n very hot peppers. His eyes filled with tears.\n He coughed as the stuff went down.\n\n\n But he was still alive, he thought in\n amazement. He'd drunk the hemlock and\n was still alive.", "\"That is the hemlock,\" Steel-Blue said.\n\n\n It was when he quaffed the new and\n stronger draught that Jon knew that his\n hope that it was citric acid was squelched.\n\n\n The acid taste was weaker which meant\n that the citric acid was the diluting liquid.\n It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath\n the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive\n acid.\n\n\n On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak\n he didn't feel much like moving around. He\n let the cylinder feed him the hemlock.\n\n\n No. 1 came again to see him, and went\n away chuckling, \"Decrease the dilution.\n This Earthman at last is beginning to\n suffer.\"\nStaying\n alive had now become a fetish\n with Jon.\n\n\n On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized\n that the Steel-Blues also were waiting\n for the SP ship." ] ]
train	52995	[ "Why was Si given a symbolic gold watch by the Department of Space Exploration?", "Why did the Department hope that Si would continue for three more space missions?", "What clearly showed a sense humbleness presented by Si?", "What was considered a downside to the space exploration by Si?", "Based on indicators in the passage, what can be inferred as the time setting of the story?", "Why did Si choose to visit Manhattan and the Kudos Room?", "After being drafted into the working force reserves, how many trips did Si have to complete in order to retire?", "What context shows that Si was able to retire from the working force reserves with honorable rank?", "What caught Natalie's attention at the Kudos Room and prompted the chat with Si?" ]	[ [ "He had just successfully completed a dangerous space mission that they were impressed with. ", "As an apology for the difficult task he had to complete while in space. ", "He was retiring from the Department.", "As a means to convince him to stay on with the Department and continue completing missions." ], [ "He didn't complain about the explorations and enjoyed his time in space.", "His required compensation was lower than the other pilots.", "It would take too long to train a new pilot to complete the explorations.", "He was the best of the best in the space exploration team." ], [ "His ability to obtain the swank suite at the hotel.", "The presence of a human bartender in the Kudos Room.", "His lack of awareness that he would be considered a celebrity at the Kudos Room.", "His quaint behavior at the banquet where he was presented with a gold watch." ], [ "The inability to start of family of his own due to being away for long periods of time. ", "The fear of contracting space cafard.", "His fear of being in the ship itself. ", "Becoming too used to being along for long periods of time. " ], [ "The present, based on the character use of credit cards.", "The past, based on the dialogue used by characters.", "The future, based on the advanced technology ", "The present, due to the government restrictions on space exploration." ], [ "In hopes of seeing and befriending a celebrity", "That's the only place that an alcoholic beverage can be legally purchased. ", "He was planning to meet an attractive woman there. ", "To celebrate his retirement and spend some of his extra funds. " ], [ "1 trip", "6 trips", "5 trips", "15 trips" ], [ "He purchased and dressed in the honorable retirement-rank suit. ", "He was granted access into the vacuum-tube two-seater for transportation. ", "His receipt of Basic onto his credit card that would fund all of his necessities. ", "He was permitted to enter the Kudos Room at the hotel." ], [ "The bartender introduced the two after serving them drinks at the same time. ", "She thought he was attractive enough and she was bored. ", "He had offered to buy her drinks all night.", "She noticed his space pin." ] ]	[ 3, 3, 3, 2, 3, 4, 2, 1, 4 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "They gave him a gold watch. It was meant to be symbolical, of course.\n In the old tradition. It was in the way of an antique, being one of the\n timepieces made generations past in the Alpine area of Eur-Asia. Its\n quaintness lay in the fact that it was wound, not electronically by\n power-radio, but by the actual physical movements of the bearer, a free\n swinging rotor keeping the mainspring at a constant tension.\n\n\n They also had a banquet for him, complete with speeches by such\n bigwigs of the Department of Space Exploration as Academician Lofting\n Gubelin and Doctor Hans Girard-Perregaux. There was also somebody\n from the government who spoke, but he was one of those who were\n pseudo-elected and didn't know much about the field of space travel\n nor the significance of Seymour Pond's retirement. Si didn't bother to\n remember his name. He only wondered vaguely why the cloddy had turned\n up at all.", "No. Even as Si listened to their speeches, accepted the watch and\n made a halting little talk of his own, he was grinning inwardly. There\n wasn't anything they could do. He had them now. He had enough Basic to\n keep him comfortably, by his standards, for the rest of his life. He\n was never going to subject himself to space cafard again. Just thinking\n about it, now, set the tic to going at the side of his mouth.\n\n\n They could count down and blast off, for all he gave a damn.\nThe gold watch idea had been that of Lofting Gubelin, which was\n typical, he being in the way of a living anachronism himself. In fact,\n Academician Gubelin was possibly the only living man on North America\n who still wore spectacles. His explanation was that a phobia against\n having his eyes touched prohibited either surgery to remould his\n eyeballs and cure his myopia, or contact lenses.", "In common with recipients of gold watches of a score of generations\n before him, Si Pond would have preferred something a bit more tangible\n in the way of reward, such as a few shares of Variable Basic to add to\n his portfolio. But that, he supposed, was asking too much.\n\n\n The fact of the matter was, Si knew that his retiring had set them\n back. They hadn't figured he had enough shares of Basic to see him\n through decently. Well, possibly he didn't, given their standards.\n But Space Pilot Seymour Pond didn't have their standards. He'd had\n plenty of time to think it over. It was better to retire on a limited\n crediting, on a confoundedly limited crediting, than to take the two or\n three more trips in hopes of attaining a higher standard.", "Si was expansive. \"Why, sure. In the Space Department we don't have\n much time for formality. Everybody's just Si, and Doc, and Jim. Like\n that. But how come you cried?\"\nShe looked down into the drink the bartender had placed before her,\n as though avoiding his face. \"I ... I suppose it was that speech\n Doctor Girard-Perregaux made. There you stood, so fine and straight in\n your space-pilot uniform, the veteran of six exploration runs to the\n planets....\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Si said modestly, \"two of my runs were only to the Moon.\"\n\n\n \"... and he said all those things about man's conquest of space. And\n the dream of the stars which man has held so long. And then the fact\n that you were the last of the space pilots. The last man in the whole\n world trained to pilot a space craft. And here you were, retiring.\"", "Si grunted. \"Yeah. That's all part of the Doc's scheme to get me to\n take on another three runs. They're afraid the whole department'll be\n dropped by the Appropriations Committee on this here Economic Planning\n Board. Even if they can find some other patsy to train for the job,\n it'd take maybe a year before you could even send him on a Moon hop.\n So old man Gubelin, and Girard-Perregaux too, they're both trying to\n pressure me into more trips. Otherwise they got a Space Exploration\n Department, with all the expense and all, but nobody to pilot their\n ships. It's kind of funny, in a way. You know what one of those\n spaceships costs?\"\n\n\n \"Funny?\" she said. \"Why, I don't think it's funny at all.\"\n\n\n Si said, \"Look, how about another drink?\"", "\"I cried when they gave you that antique watch,\" she said, her tone\n such that it was obvious she hadn't quite adjusted as yet to having\n met him.\n\n\n Si Pond was surprised. \"Cried?\" he said. \"Well, why? I was kind of\n bored with the whole thing. But old Doc Gubelin, I used to work under\n him in the Space Exploration department, he was hot for it.\"\n\n\n \"\nAcademician\nGubelin?\" she said. \"You just call him\nDoc\n?\"", "Sitting in the Kudos Room with the most beautiful girl to whom he had\n ever talked, Si could be nonchalant about the subject. \"Old Gubelin\n keeps that angle mostly hushed up and out of the magazine and newspaper\n articles. Says there's enough adverse publicity about space exploration\n already. But at this stage of the game when the whole ship's crammed\n tight with this automatic scientific apparatus and all, there's\n precious little room in the conning tower and you're the only man\n aboard. The Doc says later on when ships are bigger and there's a whole\n flock of people aboard, there won't be any such thing as space cafard,\n but....\" Of a sudden the right side of Si Pond's mouth began to tic\n and he hurriedly took up his drink and knocked it back.", "Si cleared his throat. \"Hey,\" he said, \"how about letting this one be\n on me?\"\n\n\n Her eyebrows, which had been plucked and penciled to carry out her\n Oriental motif, rose. \"Really!\" she said, drawing it out.\n\n\n The bartender said hurriedly, \"I beg your pardon, sir....\"\n\n\n The girl, her voice suddenly subtly changed, said, \"Why, isn't that a\n space pin?\"\n\n\n Si, disconcerted by the sudden reversal, said, \"Yeah ... sure.\"\n\n\n \"Good Heavens, you're a spaceman?\"\n\n\n \"Sure.\" He pointed at the lapel pin. \"You can't wear one unless you\n been on at least a Moon run.\"", "Natalie Paskov said, \"Oh, I'd love to have a drink with you, Mr....\"\n\"Si,\" Si said. He motioned to the bartender with a circular twist of\n the hand indicating their need for two more of the same. \"How come you\n know so much about it? You don't meet many people who are interested\n in space any more. In fact, most people are almost contemptuous, like.\n Think it's kind of a big boondoggle deal to help use up a lot of\n materials and all and keep the economy going.\"\n\n\n Natalie said earnestly, \"Why, I've been a space fan all my life. I've\n read all about it. Have always known the names of all the space pilots\n and everything about them, ever since I was a child. I suppose you'd\n say I have the dream that Doctor Girard-Perregaux spoke about.\"", "Si Pond was a great believer in the institution of the spree. Any\n excuse would do. Back when he had finished basic education at the age\n of twenty-five and was registered for the labor draft, there hadn't\n been a chance in a hundred that he'd have the bad luck to have his\n name pulled. But when it had been, Si had celebrated.\n\n\n When he had been informed that his physical and mental qualifications\n were such that he was eligible for the most dangerous occupation in\n the Ultrawelfare State and had been pressured into taking training\n for space pilot, he had celebrated once again. Twenty-two others had\n taken the training with him, and only he and Rod Cameroon had passed\n the finals. On this occasion, he and Rod had celebrated together. It\n had been quite a party. Two weeks later, Rod had burned on a faulty\n take-off on what should have been a routine Moon run.", "His friend and colleague changed subjects abruptly, impatiently. \"Let's\n leave this blistering jabber about Pond's motivation and get to the\n point. The man is the only trained space pilot in the world. It will\n take months, possibly more than a year, to bring another novitiate\n pilot to the point where he can safely be trusted to take our next\n explorer craft out. Appropriations for our expeditions have been\n increasingly hard to come by—even though in\nour\nminds, Hans, we are\n near important breakthroughs, breakthroughs which might possibly so\n spark the race that a new dream to push man out to the stars will take\n hold of us. If it is admitted that our organization has degenerated\n to the point that we haven't a single pilot, then it might well be\n that the Economic Planning Board, and especially those cloddies\n on Appropriations, will terminate the whole Department of Space\n Exploration.\"\n\n\n \"So....\" Girard-Perregaux said gently.", "Each time Si returned from one of his own runs, he celebrated. A spree,\n a bust, a bat, a wing-ding, a night on the town. A commemoration of\n dangers met and passed.\n\n\n Now it was all over. At the age of thirty he was retired. Law prevented\n him from ever being called up for contributing to the country's labor\n needs again. And he most certainly wasn't going to volunteer.\n\n\n He had taken his schooling much as had his contemporaries. There wasn't\n any particular reason for trying to excell. You didn't want to get the\n reputation for being a wise guy, or a cloddy either. Just one of the\n fellas. You could do the same in life whether you really studied or\n not. You had your Inalienable Basic stock, didn't you? What else did\n you need?\n\n\n It had come as a surprise when he'd been drafted for the labor force.", "Thus, Si was vaguely aware, it had always been down through the\n centuries since the Phoenecian sailor, back from his year-long trip to\n the tin mines of Cornwall, blew his hard earned share of the voyage's\n profits in a matter of days in the wine shops of Tyre. Nobody gets\n quite so little for his money as that loneliest of all workers, he who\n must leave his home for distant lands, returning only periodically and\n usually with the salary of lengthy, weary periods of time to be spent\n hurriedly in an attempt to achieve the pleasure and happiness so long\n denied him.\n\n\n Si was going to do it differently this time.", "She was obviously both taken back and impressed. \"Why,\" she said,\n \"you're Seymour Pond, the pilot. I tuned in on the banquet they gave\n you.\"\n\n\n Si, carrying his glass, moved over to the stool next to her. \"Call me\n Si,\" he said. \"Everybody calls me Si.\"\n\n\n She said, \"I'm Natalie. Natalie Paskov. Just Natalie. Imagine meeting\n Seymour Pond. Just sitting down next to him at a bar. Just like that.\"\n\n\n \"Si,\" Si said, gratified. Holy Zoroaster, he'd never seen anything\n like this rarified pulchritude. Maybe on teevee, of course, one of the\n current sex symbols, but never in person. \"Call me Si,\" he said again.\n \"I been called Si so long, I don't even know who somebody's talking to\n if they say Seymour.\"", "He'd had plenty of time to figure it out, there alone in space on the\n Moon run, there on the Venus or Mars runs. There on the long, long\n haul to the Jupiter satellites, fearfully checking the symptoms of\n space cafard, the madness compounded of claustrophobia, monotony,\n boredom and free fall. Plenty of time. Time to decide that a one\n room mini-auto-apartment, complete with an autochair and built-in\n autobar, and with one wall a teevee screen, was all he needed to\n find contentment for a mighty long time. Possibly somebody like\n Doc Girard-Perregaux might be horrified at the idea of living in a\n mini-auto-apartment ... not realizing that to a pilot it was roomy\n beyond belief compared to the conning tower of a space craft.", "dossier revealed him a possible candidate for space pilot, and it was\n you yourself who talked him into taking the training ... pointing out\n the more pragmatic advantages such as complete retirement after but six\n trips, added shares of Basic so that he could enjoy a more comfortable\n life than most and the fame that would accrue to him as one of the\n very few who still participate in travel to the planets. Very well.\n He was sold. Took his training, which, of course, required long years\n of drudgery to him. Then, performing his duties quite competently, he\n made his six trips. He is now legally eligible for retirement. He was\n drafted into the working force reserves, served his time, and is now\n free from toil for the balance of his life. Why should he listen to\n our pleas for a few more trips?\"", "That was only an alibi so far as his closest associate, Hans\n Girard-Perregaux, was concerned. Doctor Girard-Perregaux was convinced\n Gubelin would have even worn facial hair, had he but a touch more\n courage. Gubelin longed for yesteryear, a seldom found phenomenon under\n the Ultrawelfare State.\n\n\n Slumped in an autochair in the escape room of his Floridian home,\n Lofting Gubelin scowled at his friend. He said, acidly, \"Any more\n bright schemes, Hans? I presume you now acknowledge that appealing to\n the cloddy's patriotism, sentiment and desire for public acclaim have\n miserably failed.\"\n\n\n Girard-Perregaux said easily, \"I wouldn't call Seymour Pond a cloddy.\n In his position, I am afraid I would do the same thing he has.\"", "\"You must realize, my dear Lofting, that our Si Pond is nothing more\n than a latter-day sailor, with many of the problems and view-points,\n tendencies and weaknesses of the voyager of the past. Have you never\n heard of the seaman who dreamed of returning to the village of his\n birth and buying a chicken farm or some such? All the long months at\n sea—and sometimes the tramp freighters or whaling craft would be out\n for years at a stretch before returning to home port—he would talk\n of his retirement and his dream. And then? Then in port, it would be\n one short drink with the boys, before taking his accumulated pay and\n heading home. The one short drink would lead to another. And morning\n would find him, drunk, rolled, tattooed and possibly sleeping it off in\n jail. So back to sea he'd have to go.\"", "Nothing but the best. Wine, women, song, food, entertainment. The\n works. But nothing but the best.\nTo start off, he dressed with great care in the honorable\n retirement-rank suit he had so recently purchased. His space pin he\n attached carefully to the lapel. That was a good beginning, he decided.\n A bit of prestige didn't hurt you when you went out on the town. In\n the Ultrawelfare State hardly one person in a hundred actually ever\n performed anything of value to society. The efforts of most weren't\n needed. Those few who did contribute were awarded honors, decorations,\n titles.\n\n\n Attired satisfactorily, Si double-checked to see that his credit\n card was in his pocket. As an after-thought, he went over to the\n auto-apartment's teevee-phone, flicked it on, held the card to the\n screen and said, \"Balance check, please.\"", "He considered for a moment, decided against the boroughs of Baltimore\n and Boston, and selected Manhattan instead. He had the resources. He\n might as well do it up brown.\n\n\n He dialed Manhattan and felt the sinking sensation that presaged his\n car's dropping to tube level. While it was being taken up by the robot\n controls, being shuttled here and there preparatory to the shot to his\n destination, he dialed the vehicle's teevee-phone for information on\n the hotels of the island of the Hudson. He selected a swank hostelry\n he'd read about and seen on the teevee casts of society and celebrity\n gossip reporters, and dialed it on the car's destination dial.\n\n\n \"Nothing too good for ex-Space Pilot Si Pond,\" he said aloud." ], [ "Si grunted. \"Yeah. That's all part of the Doc's scheme to get me to\n take on another three runs. They're afraid the whole department'll be\n dropped by the Appropriations Committee on this here Economic Planning\n Board. Even if they can find some other patsy to train for the job,\n it'd take maybe a year before you could even send him on a Moon hop.\n So old man Gubelin, and Girard-Perregaux too, they're both trying to\n pressure me into more trips. Otherwise they got a Space Exploration\n Department, with all the expense and all, but nobody to pilot their\n ships. It's kind of funny, in a way. You know what one of those\n spaceships costs?\"\n\n\n \"Funny?\" she said. \"Why, I don't think it's funny at all.\"\n\n\n Si said, \"Look, how about another drink?\"", "Si was expansive. \"Why, sure. In the Space Department we don't have\n much time for formality. Everybody's just Si, and Doc, and Jim. Like\n that. But how come you cried?\"\nShe looked down into the drink the bartender had placed before her,\n as though avoiding his face. \"I ... I suppose it was that speech\n Doctor Girard-Perregaux made. There you stood, so fine and straight in\n your space-pilot uniform, the veteran of six exploration runs to the\n planets....\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Si said modestly, \"two of my runs were only to the Moon.\"\n\n\n \"... and he said all those things about man's conquest of space. And\n the dream of the stars which man has held so long. And then the fact\n that you were the last of the space pilots. The last man in the whole\n world trained to pilot a space craft. And here you were, retiring.\"", "dossier revealed him a possible candidate for space pilot, and it was\n you yourself who talked him into taking the training ... pointing out\n the more pragmatic advantages such as complete retirement after but six\n trips, added shares of Basic so that he could enjoy a more comfortable\n life than most and the fame that would accrue to him as one of the\n very few who still participate in travel to the planets. Very well.\n He was sold. Took his training, which, of course, required long years\n of drudgery to him. Then, performing his duties quite competently, he\n made his six trips. He is now legally eligible for retirement. He was\n drafted into the working force reserves, served his time, and is now\n free from toil for the balance of his life. Why should he listen to\n our pleas for a few more trips?\"", "His friend and colleague changed subjects abruptly, impatiently. \"Let's\n leave this blistering jabber about Pond's motivation and get to the\n point. The man is the only trained space pilot in the world. It will\n take months, possibly more than a year, to bring another novitiate\n pilot to the point where he can safely be trusted to take our next\n explorer craft out. Appropriations for our expeditions have been\n increasingly hard to come by—even though in\nour\nminds, Hans, we are\n near important breakthroughs, breakthroughs which might possibly so\n spark the race that a new dream to push man out to the stars will take\n hold of us. If it is admitted that our organization has degenerated\n to the point that we haven't a single pilot, then it might well be\n that the Economic Planning Board, and especially those cloddies\n on Appropriations, will terminate the whole Department of Space\n Exploration.\"\n\n\n \"So....\" Girard-Perregaux said gently.", "No. Even as Si listened to their speeches, accepted the watch and\n made a halting little talk of his own, he was grinning inwardly. There\n wasn't anything they could do. He had them now. He had enough Basic to\n keep him comfortably, by his standards, for the rest of his life. He\n was never going to subject himself to space cafard again. Just thinking\n about it, now, set the tic to going at the side of his mouth.\n\n\n They could count down and blast off, for all he gave a damn.\nThe gold watch idea had been that of Lofting Gubelin, which was\n typical, he being in the way of a living anachronism himself. In fact,\n Academician Gubelin was possibly the only living man on North America\n who still wore spectacles. His explanation was that a phobia against\n having his eyes touched prohibited either surgery to remould his\n eyeballs and cure his myopia, or contact lenses.", "In common with recipients of gold watches of a score of generations\n before him, Si Pond would have preferred something a bit more tangible\n in the way of reward, such as a few shares of Variable Basic to add to\n his portfolio. But that, he supposed, was asking too much.\n\n\n The fact of the matter was, Si knew that his retiring had set them\n back. They hadn't figured he had enough shares of Basic to see him\n through decently. Well, possibly he didn't, given their standards.\n But Space Pilot Seymour Pond didn't have their standards. He'd had\n plenty of time to think it over. It was better to retire on a limited\n crediting, on a confoundedly limited crediting, than to take the two or\n three more trips in hopes of attaining a higher standard.", "Sitting in the Kudos Room with the most beautiful girl to whom he had\n ever talked, Si could be nonchalant about the subject. \"Old Gubelin\n keeps that angle mostly hushed up and out of the magazine and newspaper\n articles. Says there's enough adverse publicity about space exploration\n already. But at this stage of the game when the whole ship's crammed\n tight with this automatic scientific apparatus and all, there's\n precious little room in the conning tower and you're the only man\n aboard. The Doc says later on when ships are bigger and there's a whole\n flock of people aboard, there won't be any such thing as space cafard,\n but....\" Of a sudden the right side of Si Pond's mouth began to tic\n and he hurriedly took up his drink and knocked it back.", "Si Pond was a great believer in the institution of the spree. Any\n excuse would do. Back when he had finished basic education at the age\n of twenty-five and was registered for the labor draft, there hadn't\n been a chance in a hundred that he'd have the bad luck to have his\n name pulled. But when it had been, Si had celebrated.\n\n\n When he had been informed that his physical and mental qualifications\n were such that he was eligible for the most dangerous occupation in\n the Ultrawelfare State and had been pressured into taking training\n for space pilot, he had celebrated once again. Twenty-two others had\n taken the training with him, and only he and Rod Cameroon had passed\n the finals. On this occasion, he and Rod had celebrated together. It\n had been quite a party. Two weeks later, Rod had burned on a faulty\n take-off on what should have been a routine Moon run.", "They gave him a gold watch. It was meant to be symbolical, of course.\n In the old tradition. It was in the way of an antique, being one of the\n timepieces made generations past in the Alpine area of Eur-Asia. Its\n quaintness lay in the fact that it was wound, not electronically by\n power-radio, but by the actual physical movements of the bearer, a free\n swinging rotor keeping the mainspring at a constant tension.\n\n\n They also had a banquet for him, complete with speeches by such\n bigwigs of the Department of Space Exploration as Academician Lofting\n Gubelin and Doctor Hans Girard-Perregaux. There was also somebody\n from the government who spoke, but he was one of those who were\n pseudo-elected and didn't know much about the field of space travel\n nor the significance of Seymour Pond's retirement. Si didn't bother to\n remember his name. He only wondered vaguely why the cloddy had turned\n up at all.", "Si cleared his throat. \"Hey,\" he said, \"how about letting this one be\n on me?\"\n\n\n Her eyebrows, which had been plucked and penciled to carry out her\n Oriental motif, rose. \"Really!\" she said, drawing it out.\n\n\n The bartender said hurriedly, \"I beg your pardon, sir....\"\n\n\n The girl, her voice suddenly subtly changed, said, \"Why, isn't that a\n space pin?\"\n\n\n Si, disconcerted by the sudden reversal, said, \"Yeah ... sure.\"\n\n\n \"Good Heavens, you're a spaceman?\"\n\n\n \"Sure.\" He pointed at the lapel pin. \"You can't wear one unless you\n been on at least a Moon run.\"", "Natalie Paskov said, \"Oh, I'd love to have a drink with you, Mr....\"\n\"Si,\" Si said. He motioned to the bartender with a circular twist of\n the hand indicating their need for two more of the same. \"How come you\n know so much about it? You don't meet many people who are interested\n in space any more. In fact, most people are almost contemptuous, like.\n Think it's kind of a big boondoggle deal to help use up a lot of\n materials and all and keep the economy going.\"\n\n\n Natalie said earnestly, \"Why, I've been a space fan all my life. I've\n read all about it. Have always known the names of all the space pilots\n and everything about them, ever since I was a child. I suppose you'd\n say I have the dream that Doctor Girard-Perregaux spoke about.\"", "Thus, Si was vaguely aware, it had always been down through the\n centuries since the Phoenecian sailor, back from his year-long trip to\n the tin mines of Cornwall, blew his hard earned share of the voyage's\n profits in a matter of days in the wine shops of Tyre. Nobody gets\n quite so little for his money as that loneliest of all workers, he who\n must leave his home for distant lands, returning only periodically and\n usually with the salary of lengthy, weary periods of time to be spent\n hurriedly in an attempt to achieve the pleasure and happiness so long\n denied him.\n\n\n Si was going to do it differently this time.", "Each time Si returned from one of his own runs, he celebrated. A spree,\n a bust, a bat, a wing-ding, a night on the town. A commemoration of\n dangers met and passed.\n\n\n Now it was all over. At the age of thirty he was retired. Law prevented\n him from ever being called up for contributing to the country's labor\n needs again. And he most certainly wasn't going to volunteer.\n\n\n He had taken his schooling much as had his contemporaries. There wasn't\n any particular reason for trying to excell. You didn't want to get the\n reputation for being a wise guy, or a cloddy either. Just one of the\n fellas. You could do the same in life whether you really studied or\n not. You had your Inalienable Basic stock, didn't you? What else did\n you need?\n\n\n It had come as a surprise when he'd been drafted for the labor force.", "He'd had plenty of time to figure it out, there alone in space on the\n Moon run, there on the Venus or Mars runs. There on the long, long\n haul to the Jupiter satellites, fearfully checking the symptoms of\n space cafard, the madness compounded of claustrophobia, monotony,\n boredom and free fall. Plenty of time. Time to decide that a one\n room mini-auto-apartment, complete with an autochair and built-in\n autobar, and with one wall a teevee screen, was all he needed to\n find contentment for a mighty long time. Possibly somebody like\n Doc Girard-Perregaux might be horrified at the idea of living in a\n mini-auto-apartment ... not realizing that to a pilot it was roomy\n beyond belief compared to the conning tower of a space craft.", "\"That's nonsense, Hans. Zoroaster! Either you or I would gladly take\n Pond's place were we capable of performing the duties for which he has\n been trained. There aren't two men on North America—there aren't two\n men in the world!—who better realize the urgency of continuing our\n delving into space.\" Gubelin snapped his fingers. \"Like that, either of\n us would give our lives to prevent man from completely abandoning the\n road to his destiny.\"\n\n\n His friend said drily, \"Either of us could have volunteered for pilot\n training forty years ago, Lofting. We didn't.\"\n\n\n \"At that time there wasn't such a blistering percentage of funkers\n throughout this whole blistering Ultrawelfare State! Who could\n foresee that eventually our whole program would face ending due to\n lack of courageous young men willing to take chances, willing to face\n adventure, willing to react to the stimulus of danger in the manner our\n ancestors did?\"", "\"I cried when they gave you that antique watch,\" she said, her tone\n such that it was obvious she hadn't quite adjusted as yet to having\n met him.\n\n\n Si Pond was surprised. \"Cried?\" he said. \"Well, why? I was kind of\n bored with the whole thing. But old Doc Gubelin, I used to work under\n him in the Space Exploration department, he was hot for it.\"\n\n\n \"\nAcademician\nGubelin?\" she said. \"You just call him\nDoc\n?\"", "\"You must realize, my dear Lofting, that our Si Pond is nothing more\n than a latter-day sailor, with many of the problems and view-points,\n tendencies and weaknesses of the voyager of the past. Have you never\n heard of the seaman who dreamed of returning to the village of his\n birth and buying a chicken farm or some such? All the long months at\n sea—and sometimes the tramp freighters or whaling craft would be out\n for years at a stretch before returning to home port—he would talk\n of his retirement and his dream. And then? Then in port, it would be\n one short drink with the boys, before taking his accumulated pay and\n heading home. The one short drink would lead to another. And morning\n would find him, drunk, rolled, tattooed and possibly sleeping it off in\n jail. So back to sea he'd have to go.\"", "Si chuckled. \"A real buff, eh? You know, it's kind of funny. I was\n never much interested in it. And I got a darn sight less interested\n after my first run and I found out what space cafard was.\"\n\n\n She frowned. \"I don't believe I know much about that.\"", "All persons registered in the labor force participated. If you\n were drawn, you must need serve. The dissatisfaction those chosen\n might feel at their poor luck was offset by the fact that they were\n granted additional Variable Basic shares, according to the tasks\n they fulfilled. Such shares could be added to their portfolios, the\n dividends becoming part of their current credit balance, or could be\n sold for a lump sum on the market.\n\n\n Yes, but now it was all over. He had his own little place, his own\n vacuum-tube vehicle and twice the amount of shares of Basic that most\n of his fellow citizens could boast. Si Pond had it made. A spree was\n obviously called for.", "She was obviously both taken back and impressed. \"Why,\" she said,\n \"you're Seymour Pond, the pilot. I tuned in on the banquet they gave\n you.\"\n\n\n Si, carrying his glass, moved over to the stool next to her. \"Call me\n Si,\" he said. \"Everybody calls me Si.\"\n\n\n She said, \"I'm Natalie. Natalie Paskov. Just Natalie. Imagine meeting\n Seymour Pond. Just sitting down next to him at a bar. Just like that.\"\n\n\n \"Si,\" Si said, gratified. Holy Zoroaster, he'd never seen anything\n like this rarified pulchritude. Maybe on teevee, of course, one of the\n current sex symbols, but never in person. \"Call me Si,\" he said again.\n \"I been called Si so long, I don't even know who somebody's talking to\n if they say Seymour.\"" ], [ "She was obviously both taken back and impressed. \"Why,\" she said,\n \"you're Seymour Pond, the pilot. I tuned in on the banquet they gave\n you.\"\n\n\n Si, carrying his glass, moved over to the stool next to her. \"Call me\n Si,\" he said. \"Everybody calls me Si.\"\n\n\n She said, \"I'm Natalie. Natalie Paskov. Just Natalie. Imagine meeting\n Seymour Pond. Just sitting down next to him at a bar. Just like that.\"\n\n\n \"Si,\" Si said, gratified. Holy Zoroaster, he'd never seen anything\n like this rarified pulchritude. Maybe on teevee, of course, one of the\n current sex symbols, but never in person. \"Call me Si,\" he said again.\n \"I been called Si so long, I don't even know who somebody's talking to\n if they say Seymour.\"", "Thus, Si was vaguely aware, it had always been down through the\n centuries since the Phoenecian sailor, back from his year-long trip to\n the tin mines of Cornwall, blew his hard earned share of the voyage's\n profits in a matter of days in the wine shops of Tyre. Nobody gets\n quite so little for his money as that loneliest of all workers, he who\n must leave his home for distant lands, returning only periodically and\n usually with the salary of lengthy, weary periods of time to be spent\n hurriedly in an attempt to achieve the pleasure and happiness so long\n denied him.\n\n\n Si was going to do it differently this time.", "Each time Si returned from one of his own runs, he celebrated. A spree,\n a bust, a bat, a wing-ding, a night on the town. A commemoration of\n dangers met and passed.\n\n\n Now it was all over. At the age of thirty he was retired. Law prevented\n him from ever being called up for contributing to the country's labor\n needs again. And he most certainly wasn't going to volunteer.\n\n\n He had taken his schooling much as had his contemporaries. There wasn't\n any particular reason for trying to excell. You didn't want to get the\n reputation for being a wise guy, or a cloddy either. Just one of the\n fellas. You could do the same in life whether you really studied or\n not. You had your Inalienable Basic stock, didn't you? What else did\n you need?\n\n\n It had come as a surprise when he'd been drafted for the labor force.", "Si cleared his throat. \"Hey,\" he said, \"how about letting this one be\n on me?\"\n\n\n Her eyebrows, which had been plucked and penciled to carry out her\n Oriental motif, rose. \"Really!\" she said, drawing it out.\n\n\n The bartender said hurriedly, \"I beg your pardon, sir....\"\n\n\n The girl, her voice suddenly subtly changed, said, \"Why, isn't that a\n space pin?\"\n\n\n Si, disconcerted by the sudden reversal, said, \"Yeah ... sure.\"\n\n\n \"Good Heavens, you're a spaceman?\"\n\n\n \"Sure.\" He pointed at the lapel pin. \"You can't wear one unless you\n been on at least a Moon run.\"", "\"You must realize, my dear Lofting, that our Si Pond is nothing more\n than a latter-day sailor, with many of the problems and view-points,\n tendencies and weaknesses of the voyager of the past. Have you never\n heard of the seaman who dreamed of returning to the village of his\n birth and buying a chicken farm or some such? All the long months at\n sea—and sometimes the tramp freighters or whaling craft would be out\n for years at a stretch before returning to home port—he would talk\n of his retirement and his dream. And then? Then in port, it would be\n one short drink with the boys, before taking his accumulated pay and\n heading home. The one short drink would lead to another. And morning\n would find him, drunk, rolled, tattooed and possibly sleeping it off in\n jail. So back to sea he'd have to go.\"", "The car hesitated for a moment, that brief hesitation before the\n shot, and Si took the involuntary breath from which only heroes could\n refrain. He sank back slowly into the seat. Moments passed, and the\n direction of the pressure was reversed.\n\n\n Manhattan. The shuttling began again, and one or two more traversing\n sub-shots. Finally, the dash threw a green light and Si opened the\n canopy and stepped into his hotel room.\n\n\n A voice said gently, \"If the quarters are satisfactory, please present\n your credit card within ten minutes.\"\n\n\n Si took his time. Not that he really needed it. It was by far the most\n swank suite he had ever seen. One wall was a window of whatever size\n the guest might desire and Si touched the control that dilated it to\n the full. His view opened in such wise that he could see both the\n Empire State Building Museum and the Hudson. Beyond the river stretched\n the all but endless city which was Greater Metropolis.", "Si was expansive. \"Why, sure. In the Space Department we don't have\n much time for formality. Everybody's just Si, and Doc, and Jim. Like\n that. But how come you cried?\"\nShe looked down into the drink the bartender had placed before her,\n as though avoiding his face. \"I ... I suppose it was that speech\n Doctor Girard-Perregaux made. There you stood, so fine and straight in\n your space-pilot uniform, the veteran of six exploration runs to the\n planets....\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Si said modestly, \"two of my runs were only to the Moon.\"\n\n\n \"... and he said all those things about man's conquest of space. And\n the dream of the stars which man has held so long. And then the fact\n that you were the last of the space pilots. The last man in the whole\n world trained to pilot a space craft. And here you were, retiring.\"", "No. Even as Si listened to their speeches, accepted the watch and\n made a halting little talk of his own, he was grinning inwardly. There\n wasn't anything they could do. He had them now. He had enough Basic to\n keep him comfortably, by his standards, for the rest of his life. He\n was never going to subject himself to space cafard again. Just thinking\n about it, now, set the tic to going at the side of his mouth.\n\n\n They could count down and blast off, for all he gave a damn.\nThe gold watch idea had been that of Lofting Gubelin, which was\n typical, he being in the way of a living anachronism himself. In fact,\n Academician Gubelin was possibly the only living man on North America\n who still wore spectacles. His explanation was that a phobia against\n having his eyes touched prohibited either surgery to remould his\n eyeballs and cure his myopia, or contact lenses.", "Sitting in the Kudos Room with the most beautiful girl to whom he had\n ever talked, Si could be nonchalant about the subject. \"Old Gubelin\n keeps that angle mostly hushed up and out of the magazine and newspaper\n articles. Says there's enough adverse publicity about space exploration\n already. But at this stage of the game when the whole ship's crammed\n tight with this automatic scientific apparatus and all, there's\n precious little room in the conning tower and you're the only man\n aboard. The Doc says later on when ships are bigger and there's a whole\n flock of people aboard, there won't be any such thing as space cafard,\n but....\" Of a sudden the right side of Si Pond's mouth began to tic\n and he hurriedly took up his drink and knocked it back.", "\"I cried when they gave you that antique watch,\" she said, her tone\n such that it was obvious she hadn't quite adjusted as yet to having\n met him.\n\n\n Si Pond was surprised. \"Cried?\" he said. \"Well, why? I was kind of\n bored with the whole thing. But old Doc Gubelin, I used to work under\n him in the Space Exploration department, he was hot for it.\"\n\n\n \"\nAcademician\nGubelin?\" she said. \"You just call him\nDoc\n?\"", "He turned back to his drink and noticed, for the first time, the girl\n who occupied the stool two down from him. Si Pond blinked. He blinked\n and then swallowed.\n\n\n \"\nZo-ro-as-ter\n,\" he breathed.\n\n\n She was done in the latest style from Shanghai, even to the point of\n having cosmetically duplicated the Mongolian fold at the corners of her\n eyes. Every pore, but\nevery\npore, was in place. She sat with the easy\n grace of the Orient, so seldom found in the West.\n\n\n His stare couldn't be ignored.\n\n\n She looked at him coldly, turned to the bartender and murmured, \"A Far\n Out Cooler, please, Fredric.\" Then deliberately added, \"I thought the\n Kudos Room was supposed to be exclusive.\"\n\n\n There was nothing the bartender could say to that, and he went about\n building the drink.", "Si Pond was a great believer in the institution of the spree. Any\n excuse would do. Back when he had finished basic education at the age\n of twenty-five and was registered for the labor draft, there hadn't\n been a chance in a hundred that he'd have the bad luck to have his\n name pulled. But when it had been, Si had celebrated.\n\n\n When he had been informed that his physical and mental qualifications\n were such that he was eligible for the most dangerous occupation in\n the Ultrawelfare State and had been pressured into taking training\n for space pilot, he had celebrated once again. Twenty-two others had\n taken the training with him, and only he and Rod Cameroon had passed\n the finals. On this occasion, he and Rod had celebrated together. It\n had been quite a party. Two weeks later, Rod had burned on a faulty\n take-off on what should have been a routine Moon run.", "The auto-elevator murmured politely, \"Yes, sir, the Kudos Room.\"\nAt the door to the famous rendezvous of the swankiest set, Si paused a\n moment and looked about. He'd never been in a place like this, either.\n However, he stifled his first instinct to wonder about what this was\n going to do to his current credit balance with an inner grin and made\n his way to the bar.\n\n\n There was actually a bartender.\n\n\n Si Pond suppressed his astonishment and said, offhand, attempting an\n air of easy sophistication, \"Slivovitz Sour.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"", "Si grunted. \"Yeah. That's all part of the Doc's scheme to get me to\n take on another three runs. They're afraid the whole department'll be\n dropped by the Appropriations Committee on this here Economic Planning\n Board. Even if they can find some other patsy to train for the job,\n it'd take maybe a year before you could even send him on a Moon hop.\n So old man Gubelin, and Girard-Perregaux too, they're both trying to\n pressure me into more trips. Otherwise they got a Space Exploration\n Department, with all the expense and all, but nobody to pilot their\n ships. It's kind of funny, in a way. You know what one of those\n spaceships costs?\"\n\n\n \"Funny?\" she said. \"Why, I don't think it's funny at all.\"\n\n\n Si said, \"Look, how about another drink?\"", "In common with recipients of gold watches of a score of generations\n before him, Si Pond would have preferred something a bit more tangible\n in the way of reward, such as a few shares of Variable Basic to add to\n his portfolio. But that, he supposed, was asking too much.\n\n\n The fact of the matter was, Si knew that his retiring had set them\n back. They hadn't figured he had enough shares of Basic to see him\n through decently. Well, possibly he didn't, given their standards.\n But Space Pilot Seymour Pond didn't have their standards. He'd had\n plenty of time to think it over. It was better to retire on a limited\n crediting, on a confoundedly limited crediting, than to take the two or\n three more trips in hopes of attaining a higher standard.", "For a moment he stood in the center of the floor, in thought. Take it\n easy, Si Pond, take it all easy, this time. No throwing his dollars\n around in second-class groggeries, no eating in automated luncheterias.\n This time, be it the only time in his life, he was going to frolic in\n the grand manner. No cloddy was Si Pond.\n\n\n He decided a drink was in order to help him plan his strategy. A drink\n at the hotel's famous Kudos Room where celebrities were reputed to be a\n dime a dozen.\n\n\n He left the suite and stepped into one of the elevators. He said,\n \"Kudos Room.\"", "Natalie Paskov said, \"Oh, I'd love to have a drink with you, Mr....\"\n\"Si,\" Si said. He motioned to the bartender with a circular twist of\n the hand indicating their need for two more of the same. \"How come you\n know so much about it? You don't meet many people who are interested\n in space any more. In fact, most people are almost contemptuous, like.\n Think it's kind of a big boondoggle deal to help use up a lot of\n materials and all and keep the economy going.\"\n\n\n Natalie said earnestly, \"Why, I've been a space fan all my life. I've\n read all about it. Have always known the names of all the space pilots\n and everything about them, ever since I was a child. I suppose you'd\n say I have the dream that Doctor Girard-Perregaux spoke about.\"", "Si chuckled. \"A real buff, eh? You know, it's kind of funny. I was\n never much interested in it. And I got a darn sight less interested\n after my first run and I found out what space cafard was.\"\n\n\n She frowned. \"I don't believe I know much about that.\"", "That was only an alibi so far as his closest associate, Hans\n Girard-Perregaux, was concerned. Doctor Girard-Perregaux was convinced\n Gubelin would have even worn facial hair, had he but a touch more\n courage. Gubelin longed for yesteryear, a seldom found phenomenon under\n the Ultrawelfare State.\n\n\n Slumped in an autochair in the escape room of his Floridian home,\n Lofting Gubelin scowled at his friend. He said, acidly, \"Any more\n bright schemes, Hans? I presume you now acknowledge that appealing to\n the cloddy's patriotism, sentiment and desire for public acclaim have\n miserably failed.\"\n\n\n Girard-Perregaux said easily, \"I wouldn't call Seymour Pond a cloddy.\n In his position, I am afraid I would do the same thing he has.\"", "\"But has he no spirit of adventure? Has he no feeling for....\"\nGirard-Perregaux was wagging his finger again, a gesture that,\n seemingly mild though it was, had an astonishing ability to break off\n the conversation of one who debated with the easy-seeming, quiet spoken\n man.\n\n\n He said, \"No, he hasn't. Few there are who have, nowadays. Man has\n always paid lip service to adventure, hardships and excitement, but in\n actuality his instincts, like those of any other animal, lead him to\n the least dangerous path. Today we've reached the point where no one\n need face danger—ever. There are few who don't take advantage of the\n fact. Including you and me, Lofting, and including Seymour Pond.\"" ], [ "Si was expansive. \"Why, sure. In the Space Department we don't have\n much time for formality. Everybody's just Si, and Doc, and Jim. Like\n that. But how come you cried?\"\nShe looked down into the drink the bartender had placed before her,\n as though avoiding his face. \"I ... I suppose it was that speech\n Doctor Girard-Perregaux made. There you stood, so fine and straight in\n your space-pilot uniform, the veteran of six exploration runs to the\n planets....\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Si said modestly, \"two of my runs were only to the Moon.\"\n\n\n \"... and he said all those things about man's conquest of space. And\n the dream of the stars which man has held so long. And then the fact\n that you were the last of the space pilots. The last man in the whole\n world trained to pilot a space craft. And here you were, retiring.\"", "Si grunted. \"Yeah. That's all part of the Doc's scheme to get me to\n take on another three runs. They're afraid the whole department'll be\n dropped by the Appropriations Committee on this here Economic Planning\n Board. Even if they can find some other patsy to train for the job,\n it'd take maybe a year before you could even send him on a Moon hop.\n So old man Gubelin, and Girard-Perregaux too, they're both trying to\n pressure me into more trips. Otherwise they got a Space Exploration\n Department, with all the expense and all, but nobody to pilot their\n ships. It's kind of funny, in a way. You know what one of those\n spaceships costs?\"\n\n\n \"Funny?\" she said. \"Why, I don't think it's funny at all.\"\n\n\n Si said, \"Look, how about another drink?\"", "Sitting in the Kudos Room with the most beautiful girl to whom he had\n ever talked, Si could be nonchalant about the subject. \"Old Gubelin\n keeps that angle mostly hushed up and out of the magazine and newspaper\n articles. Says there's enough adverse publicity about space exploration\n already. But at this stage of the game when the whole ship's crammed\n tight with this automatic scientific apparatus and all, there's\n precious little room in the conning tower and you're the only man\n aboard. The Doc says later on when ships are bigger and there's a whole\n flock of people aboard, there won't be any such thing as space cafard,\n but....\" Of a sudden the right side of Si Pond's mouth began to tic\n and he hurriedly took up his drink and knocked it back.", "In common with recipients of gold watches of a score of generations\n before him, Si Pond would have preferred something a bit more tangible\n in the way of reward, such as a few shares of Variable Basic to add to\n his portfolio. But that, he supposed, was asking too much.\n\n\n The fact of the matter was, Si knew that his retiring had set them\n back. They hadn't figured he had enough shares of Basic to see him\n through decently. Well, possibly he didn't, given their standards.\n But Space Pilot Seymour Pond didn't have their standards. He'd had\n plenty of time to think it over. It was better to retire on a limited\n crediting, on a confoundedly limited crediting, than to take the two or\n three more trips in hopes of attaining a higher standard.", "Si Pond was a great believer in the institution of the spree. Any\n excuse would do. Back when he had finished basic education at the age\n of twenty-five and was registered for the labor draft, there hadn't\n been a chance in a hundred that he'd have the bad luck to have his\n name pulled. But when it had been, Si had celebrated.\n\n\n When he had been informed that his physical and mental qualifications\n were such that he was eligible for the most dangerous occupation in\n the Ultrawelfare State and had been pressured into taking training\n for space pilot, he had celebrated once again. Twenty-two others had\n taken the training with him, and only he and Rod Cameroon had passed\n the finals. On this occasion, he and Rod had celebrated together. It\n had been quite a party. Two weeks later, Rod had burned on a faulty\n take-off on what should have been a routine Moon run.", "Thus, Si was vaguely aware, it had always been down through the\n centuries since the Phoenecian sailor, back from his year-long trip to\n the tin mines of Cornwall, blew his hard earned share of the voyage's\n profits in a matter of days in the wine shops of Tyre. Nobody gets\n quite so little for his money as that loneliest of all workers, he who\n must leave his home for distant lands, returning only periodically and\n usually with the salary of lengthy, weary periods of time to be spent\n hurriedly in an attempt to achieve the pleasure and happiness so long\n denied him.\n\n\n Si was going to do it differently this time.", "No. Even as Si listened to their speeches, accepted the watch and\n made a halting little talk of his own, he was grinning inwardly. There\n wasn't anything they could do. He had them now. He had enough Basic to\n keep him comfortably, by his standards, for the rest of his life. He\n was never going to subject himself to space cafard again. Just thinking\n about it, now, set the tic to going at the side of his mouth.\n\n\n They could count down and blast off, for all he gave a damn.\nThe gold watch idea had been that of Lofting Gubelin, which was\n typical, he being in the way of a living anachronism himself. In fact,\n Academician Gubelin was possibly the only living man on North America\n who still wore spectacles. His explanation was that a phobia against\n having his eyes touched prohibited either surgery to remould his\n eyeballs and cure his myopia, or contact lenses.", "Si cleared his throat. \"Hey,\" he said, \"how about letting this one be\n on me?\"\n\n\n Her eyebrows, which had been plucked and penciled to carry out her\n Oriental motif, rose. \"Really!\" she said, drawing it out.\n\n\n The bartender said hurriedly, \"I beg your pardon, sir....\"\n\n\n The girl, her voice suddenly subtly changed, said, \"Why, isn't that a\n space pin?\"\n\n\n Si, disconcerted by the sudden reversal, said, \"Yeah ... sure.\"\n\n\n \"Good Heavens, you're a spaceman?\"\n\n\n \"Sure.\" He pointed at the lapel pin. \"You can't wear one unless you\n been on at least a Moon run.\"", "Natalie Paskov said, \"Oh, I'd love to have a drink with you, Mr....\"\n\"Si,\" Si said. He motioned to the bartender with a circular twist of\n the hand indicating their need for two more of the same. \"How come you\n know so much about it? You don't meet many people who are interested\n in space any more. In fact, most people are almost contemptuous, like.\n Think it's kind of a big boondoggle deal to help use up a lot of\n materials and all and keep the economy going.\"\n\n\n Natalie said earnestly, \"Why, I've been a space fan all my life. I've\n read all about it. Have always known the names of all the space pilots\n and everything about them, ever since I was a child. I suppose you'd\n say I have the dream that Doctor Girard-Perregaux spoke about.\"", "Si chuckled. \"A real buff, eh? You know, it's kind of funny. I was\n never much interested in it. And I got a darn sight less interested\n after my first run and I found out what space cafard was.\"\n\n\n She frowned. \"I don't believe I know much about that.\"", "dossier revealed him a possible candidate for space pilot, and it was\n you yourself who talked him into taking the training ... pointing out\n the more pragmatic advantages such as complete retirement after but six\n trips, added shares of Basic so that he could enjoy a more comfortable\n life than most and the fame that would accrue to him as one of the\n very few who still participate in travel to the planets. Very well.\n He was sold. Took his training, which, of course, required long years\n of drudgery to him. Then, performing his duties quite competently, he\n made his six trips. He is now legally eligible for retirement. He was\n drafted into the working force reserves, served his time, and is now\n free from toil for the balance of his life. Why should he listen to\n our pleas for a few more trips?\"", "He'd had plenty of time to figure it out, there alone in space on the\n Moon run, there on the Venus or Mars runs. There on the long, long\n haul to the Jupiter satellites, fearfully checking the symptoms of\n space cafard, the madness compounded of claustrophobia, monotony,\n boredom and free fall. Plenty of time. Time to decide that a one\n room mini-auto-apartment, complete with an autochair and built-in\n autobar, and with one wall a teevee screen, was all he needed to\n find contentment for a mighty long time. Possibly somebody like\n Doc Girard-Perregaux might be horrified at the idea of living in a\n mini-auto-apartment ... not realizing that to a pilot it was roomy\n beyond belief compared to the conning tower of a space craft.", "His friend and colleague changed subjects abruptly, impatiently. \"Let's\n leave this blistering jabber about Pond's motivation and get to the\n point. The man is the only trained space pilot in the world. It will\n take months, possibly more than a year, to bring another novitiate\n pilot to the point where he can safely be trusted to take our next\n explorer craft out. Appropriations for our expeditions have been\n increasingly hard to come by—even though in\nour\nminds, Hans, we are\n near important breakthroughs, breakthroughs which might possibly so\n spark the race that a new dream to push man out to the stars will take\n hold of us. If it is admitted that our organization has degenerated\n to the point that we haven't a single pilot, then it might well be\n that the Economic Planning Board, and especially those cloddies\n on Appropriations, will terminate the whole Department of Space\n Exploration.\"\n\n\n \"So....\" Girard-Perregaux said gently.", "Each time Si returned from one of his own runs, he celebrated. A spree,\n a bust, a bat, a wing-ding, a night on the town. A commemoration of\n dangers met and passed.\n\n\n Now it was all over. At the age of thirty he was retired. Law prevented\n him from ever being called up for contributing to the country's labor\n needs again. And he most certainly wasn't going to volunteer.\n\n\n He had taken his schooling much as had his contemporaries. There wasn't\n any particular reason for trying to excell. You didn't want to get the\n reputation for being a wise guy, or a cloddy either. Just one of the\n fellas. You could do the same in life whether you really studied or\n not. You had your Inalienable Basic stock, didn't you? What else did\n you need?\n\n\n It had come as a surprise when he'd been drafted for the labor force.", "\"You must realize, my dear Lofting, that our Si Pond is nothing more\n than a latter-day sailor, with many of the problems and view-points,\n tendencies and weaknesses of the voyager of the past. Have you never\n heard of the seaman who dreamed of returning to the village of his\n birth and buying a chicken farm or some such? All the long months at\n sea—and sometimes the tramp freighters or whaling craft would be out\n for years at a stretch before returning to home port—he would talk\n of his retirement and his dream. And then? Then in port, it would be\n one short drink with the boys, before taking his accumulated pay and\n heading home. The one short drink would lead to another. And morning\n would find him, drunk, rolled, tattooed and possibly sleeping it off in\n jail. So back to sea he'd have to go.\"", "He considered for a moment, decided against the boroughs of Baltimore\n and Boston, and selected Manhattan instead. He had the resources. He\n might as well do it up brown.\n\n\n He dialed Manhattan and felt the sinking sensation that presaged his\n car's dropping to tube level. While it was being taken up by the robot\n controls, being shuttled here and there preparatory to the shot to his\n destination, he dialed the vehicle's teevee-phone for information on\n the hotels of the island of the Hudson. He selected a swank hostelry\n he'd read about and seen on the teevee casts of society and celebrity\n gossip reporters, and dialed it on the car's destination dial.\n\n\n \"Nothing too good for ex-Space Pilot Si Pond,\" he said aloud.", "\"That's nonsense, Hans. Zoroaster! Either you or I would gladly take\n Pond's place were we capable of performing the duties for which he has\n been trained. There aren't two men on North America—there aren't two\n men in the world!—who better realize the urgency of continuing our\n delving into space.\" Gubelin snapped his fingers. \"Like that, either of\n us would give our lives to prevent man from completely abandoning the\n road to his destiny.\"\n\n\n His friend said drily, \"Either of us could have volunteered for pilot\n training forty years ago, Lofting. We didn't.\"\n\n\n \"At that time there wasn't such a blistering percentage of funkers\n throughout this whole blistering Ultrawelfare State! Who could\n foresee that eventually our whole program would face ending due to\n lack of courageous young men willing to take chances, willing to face\n adventure, willing to react to the stimulus of danger in the manner our\n ancestors did?\"", "The car hesitated for a moment, that brief hesitation before the\n shot, and Si took the involuntary breath from which only heroes could\n refrain. He sank back slowly into the seat. Moments passed, and the\n direction of the pressure was reversed.\n\n\n Manhattan. The shuttling began again, and one or two more traversing\n sub-shots. Finally, the dash threw a green light and Si opened the\n canopy and stepped into his hotel room.\n\n\n A voice said gently, \"If the quarters are satisfactory, please present\n your credit card within ten minutes.\"\n\n\n Si took his time. Not that he really needed it. It was by far the most\n swank suite he had ever seen. One wall was a window of whatever size\n the guest might desire and Si touched the control that dilated it to\n the full. His view opened in such wise that he could see both the\n Empire State Building Museum and the Hudson. Beyond the river stretched\n the all but endless city which was Greater Metropolis.", "In a moment, the teevee-phone's robot voice reported, \"Ten shares of\n Inalienable Basic. Twelve shares of Variable Basic, current value, four\n thousand, two hundred and thirty-three dollars and sixty-two cents\n apiece. Current cash credit, one thousand and eighty-four dollars.\" The\n screen went dead.\n\n\n One thousand and eighty-four dollars. That was plenty. He could safely\n spend as much as half of it, if the spree got as lively as he hoped it\n would. His monthly dividends were due in another week or so, and he\n wouldn't have to worry about current expenses. Yes, indeedy, Si Pond\n was as solvent as he had ever been in his thirty years.\n\n\n He opened the small, closet-like door which housed his vacuum-tube\n two-seater, and wedged himself into the small vehicle. He brought down\n the canopy, dropped the pressurizer and considered the dial. Only one\n place really made sense. The big city.", "They gave him a gold watch. It was meant to be symbolical, of course.\n In the old tradition. It was in the way of an antique, being one of the\n timepieces made generations past in the Alpine area of Eur-Asia. Its\n quaintness lay in the fact that it was wound, not electronically by\n power-radio, but by the actual physical movements of the bearer, a free\n swinging rotor keeping the mainspring at a constant tension.\n\n\n They also had a banquet for him, complete with speeches by such\n bigwigs of the Department of Space Exploration as Academician Lofting\n Gubelin and Doctor Hans Girard-Perregaux. There was also somebody\n from the government who spoke, but he was one of those who were\n pseudo-elected and didn't know much about the field of space travel\n nor the significance of Seymour Pond's retirement. Si didn't bother to\n remember his name. He only wondered vaguely why the cloddy had turned\n up at all." ], [ "In a moment, the teevee-phone's robot voice reported, \"Ten shares of\n Inalienable Basic. Twelve shares of Variable Basic, current value, four\n thousand, two hundred and thirty-three dollars and sixty-two cents\n apiece. Current cash credit, one thousand and eighty-four dollars.\" The\n screen went dead.\n\n\n One thousand and eighty-four dollars. That was plenty. He could safely\n spend as much as half of it, if the spree got as lively as he hoped it\n would. His monthly dividends were due in another week or so, and he\n wouldn't have to worry about current expenses. Yes, indeedy, Si Pond\n was as solvent as he had ever been in his thirty years.\n\n\n He opened the small, closet-like door which housed his vacuum-tube\n two-seater, and wedged himself into the small vehicle. He brought down\n the canopy, dropped the pressurizer and considered the dial. Only one\n place really made sense. The big city.", "Si cleared his throat. \"Hey,\" he said, \"how about letting this one be\n on me?\"\n\n\n Her eyebrows, which had been plucked and penciled to carry out her\n Oriental motif, rose. \"Really!\" she said, drawing it out.\n\n\n The bartender said hurriedly, \"I beg your pardon, sir....\"\n\n\n The girl, her voice suddenly subtly changed, said, \"Why, isn't that a\n space pin?\"\n\n\n Si, disconcerted by the sudden reversal, said, \"Yeah ... sure.\"\n\n\n \"Good Heavens, you're a spaceman?\"\n\n\n \"Sure.\" He pointed at the lapel pin. \"You can't wear one unless you\n been on at least a Moon run.\"", "The car hesitated for a moment, that brief hesitation before the\n shot, and Si took the involuntary breath from which only heroes could\n refrain. He sank back slowly into the seat. Moments passed, and the\n direction of the pressure was reversed.\n\n\n Manhattan. The shuttling began again, and one or two more traversing\n sub-shots. Finally, the dash threw a green light and Si opened the\n canopy and stepped into his hotel room.\n\n\n A voice said gently, \"If the quarters are satisfactory, please present\n your credit card within ten minutes.\"\n\n\n Si took his time. Not that he really needed it. It was by far the most\n swank suite he had ever seen. One wall was a window of whatever size\n the guest might desire and Si touched the control that dilated it to\n the full. His view opened in such wise that he could see both the\n Empire State Building Museum and the Hudson. Beyond the river stretched\n the all but endless city which was Greater Metropolis.", "He turned back to his drink and noticed, for the first time, the girl\n who occupied the stool two down from him. Si Pond blinked. He blinked\n and then swallowed.\n\n\n \"\nZo-ro-as-ter\n,\" he breathed.\n\n\n She was done in the latest style from Shanghai, even to the point of\n having cosmetically duplicated the Mongolian fold at the corners of her\n eyes. Every pore, but\nevery\npore, was in place. She sat with the easy\n grace of the Orient, so seldom found in the West.\n\n\n His stare couldn't be ignored.\n\n\n She looked at him coldly, turned to the bartender and murmured, \"A Far\n Out Cooler, please, Fredric.\" Then deliberately added, \"I thought the\n Kudos Room was supposed to be exclusive.\"\n\n\n There was nothing the bartender could say to that, and he went about\n building the drink.", "Each time Si returned from one of his own runs, he celebrated. A spree,\n a bust, a bat, a wing-ding, a night on the town. A commemoration of\n dangers met and passed.\n\n\n Now it was all over. At the age of thirty he was retired. Law prevented\n him from ever being called up for contributing to the country's labor\n needs again. And he most certainly wasn't going to volunteer.\n\n\n He had taken his schooling much as had his contemporaries. There wasn't\n any particular reason for trying to excell. You didn't want to get the\n reputation for being a wise guy, or a cloddy either. Just one of the\n fellas. You could do the same in life whether you really studied or\n not. You had your Inalienable Basic stock, didn't you? What else did\n you need?\n\n\n It had come as a surprise when he'd been drafted for the labor force.", "She was obviously both taken back and impressed. \"Why,\" she said,\n \"you're Seymour Pond, the pilot. I tuned in on the banquet they gave\n you.\"\n\n\n Si, carrying his glass, moved over to the stool next to her. \"Call me\n Si,\" he said. \"Everybody calls me Si.\"\n\n\n She said, \"I'm Natalie. Natalie Paskov. Just Natalie. Imagine meeting\n Seymour Pond. Just sitting down next to him at a bar. Just like that.\"\n\n\n \"Si,\" Si said, gratified. Holy Zoroaster, he'd never seen anything\n like this rarified pulchritude. Maybe on teevee, of course, one of the\n current sex symbols, but never in person. \"Call me Si,\" he said again.\n \"I been called Si so long, I don't even know who somebody's talking to\n if they say Seymour.\"", "He considered for a moment, decided against the boroughs of Baltimore\n and Boston, and selected Manhattan instead. He had the resources. He\n might as well do it up brown.\n\n\n He dialed Manhattan and felt the sinking sensation that presaged his\n car's dropping to tube level. While it was being taken up by the robot\n controls, being shuttled here and there preparatory to the shot to his\n destination, he dialed the vehicle's teevee-phone for information on\n the hotels of the island of the Hudson. He selected a swank hostelry\n he'd read about and seen on the teevee casts of society and celebrity\n gossip reporters, and dialed it on the car's destination dial.\n\n\n \"Nothing too good for ex-Space Pilot Si Pond,\" he said aloud.", "That was only an alibi so far as his closest associate, Hans\n Girard-Perregaux, was concerned. Doctor Girard-Perregaux was convinced\n Gubelin would have even worn facial hair, had he but a touch more\n courage. Gubelin longed for yesteryear, a seldom found phenomenon under\n the Ultrawelfare State.\n\n\n Slumped in an autochair in the escape room of his Floridian home,\n Lofting Gubelin scowled at his friend. He said, acidly, \"Any more\n bright schemes, Hans? I presume you now acknowledge that appealing to\n the cloddy's patriotism, sentiment and desire for public acclaim have\n miserably failed.\"\n\n\n Girard-Perregaux said easily, \"I wouldn't call Seymour Pond a cloddy.\n In his position, I am afraid I would do the same thing he has.\"", "For a moment he stood in the center of the floor, in thought. Take it\n easy, Si Pond, take it all easy, this time. No throwing his dollars\n around in second-class groggeries, no eating in automated luncheterias.\n This time, be it the only time in his life, he was going to frolic in\n the grand manner. No cloddy was Si Pond.\n\n\n He decided a drink was in order to help him plan his strategy. A drink\n at the hotel's famous Kudos Room where celebrities were reputed to be a\n dime a dozen.\n\n\n He left the suite and stepped into one of the elevators. He said,\n \"Kudos Room.\"", "\"I cried when they gave you that antique watch,\" she said, her tone\n such that it was obvious she hadn't quite adjusted as yet to having\n met him.\n\n\n Si Pond was surprised. \"Cried?\" he said. \"Well, why? I was kind of\n bored with the whole thing. But old Doc Gubelin, I used to work under\n him in the Space Exploration department, he was hot for it.\"\n\n\n \"\nAcademician\nGubelin?\" she said. \"You just call him\nDoc\n?\"", "He'd had plenty of time to figure it out, there alone in space on the\n Moon run, there on the Venus or Mars runs. There on the long, long\n haul to the Jupiter satellites, fearfully checking the symptoms of\n space cafard, the madness compounded of claustrophobia, monotony,\n boredom and free fall. Plenty of time. Time to decide that a one\n room mini-auto-apartment, complete with an autochair and built-in\n autobar, and with one wall a teevee screen, was all he needed to\n find contentment for a mighty long time. Possibly somebody like\n Doc Girard-Perregaux might be horrified at the idea of living in a\n mini-auto-apartment ... not realizing that to a pilot it was roomy\n beyond belief compared to the conning tower of a space craft.", "The auto-elevator murmured politely, \"Yes, sir, the Kudos Room.\"\nAt the door to the famous rendezvous of the swankiest set, Si paused a\n moment and looked about. He'd never been in a place like this, either.\n However, he stifled his first instinct to wonder about what this was\n going to do to his current credit balance with an inner grin and made\n his way to the bar.\n\n\n There was actually a bartender.\n\n\n Si Pond suppressed his astonishment and said, offhand, attempting an\n air of easy sophistication, \"Slivovitz Sour.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"", "Nothing but the best. Wine, women, song, food, entertainment. The\n works. But nothing but the best.\nTo start off, he dressed with great care in the honorable\n retirement-rank suit he had so recently purchased. His space pin he\n attached carefully to the lapel. That was a good beginning, he decided.\n A bit of prestige didn't hurt you when you went out on the town. In\n the Ultrawelfare State hardly one person in a hundred actually ever\n performed anything of value to society. The efforts of most weren't\n needed. Those few who did contribute were awarded honors, decorations,\n titles.\n\n\n Attired satisfactorily, Si double-checked to see that his credit\n card was in his pocket. As an after-thought, he went over to the\n auto-apartment's teevee-phone, flicked it on, held the card to the\n screen and said, \"Balance check, please.\"", "Sitting in the Kudos Room with the most beautiful girl to whom he had\n ever talked, Si could be nonchalant about the subject. \"Old Gubelin\n keeps that angle mostly hushed up and out of the magazine and newspaper\n articles. Says there's enough adverse publicity about space exploration\n already. But at this stage of the game when the whole ship's crammed\n tight with this automatic scientific apparatus and all, there's\n precious little room in the conning tower and you're the only man\n aboard. The Doc says later on when ships are bigger and there's a whole\n flock of people aboard, there won't be any such thing as space cafard,\n but....\" Of a sudden the right side of Si Pond's mouth began to tic\n and he hurriedly took up his drink and knocked it back.", "\"But has he no spirit of adventure? Has he no feeling for....\"\nGirard-Perregaux was wagging his finger again, a gesture that,\n seemingly mild though it was, had an astonishing ability to break off\n the conversation of one who debated with the easy-seeming, quiet spoken\n man.\n\n\n He said, \"No, he hasn't. Few there are who have, nowadays. Man has\n always paid lip service to adventure, hardships and excitement, but in\n actuality his instincts, like those of any other animal, lead him to\n the least dangerous path. Today we've reached the point where no one\n need face danger—ever. There are few who don't take advantage of the\n fact. Including you and me, Lofting, and including Seymour Pond.\"", "He didn't take the time to flick on the menu, next to the auto-dining\n table, nor to check the endless potables on the autobar list. All that,\n he well knew, would be superlative. Besides, he didn't plan to dine\n or do much drinking in his suite. He made a mock leer. Not unless he\n managed to acquire some feminine companionship, that was.\n\n\n He looked briefly into the swimming pool and bath, then flopped\n himself happily onto the bed. It wasn't up to the degree of softness\n he presently desired, and he dialed the thing to the ultimate in that\n direction so that with a laugh he sank almost out of sight into the\n mattress.\n\n\n He came back to his feet, gave his suit a quick patting so that it\n fell into press and, taking his credit card from his pocket, put it\n against the teevee-phone screen and pressed the hotel button so that\n registration could be completed.", "No. Even as Si listened to their speeches, accepted the watch and\n made a halting little talk of his own, he was grinning inwardly. There\n wasn't anything they could do. He had them now. He had enough Basic to\n keep him comfortably, by his standards, for the rest of his life. He\n was never going to subject himself to space cafard again. Just thinking\n about it, now, set the tic to going at the side of his mouth.\n\n\n They could count down and blast off, for all he gave a damn.\nThe gold watch idea had been that of Lofting Gubelin, which was\n typical, he being in the way of a living anachronism himself. In fact,\n Academician Gubelin was possibly the only living man on North America\n who still wore spectacles. His explanation was that a phobia against\n having his eyes touched prohibited either surgery to remould his\n eyeballs and cure his myopia, or contact lenses.", "\"You must realize, my dear Lofting, that our Si Pond is nothing more\n than a latter-day sailor, with many of the problems and view-points,\n tendencies and weaknesses of the voyager of the past. Have you never\n heard of the seaman who dreamed of returning to the village of his\n birth and buying a chicken farm or some such? All the long months at\n sea—and sometimes the tramp freighters or whaling craft would be out\n for years at a stretch before returning to home port—he would talk\n of his retirement and his dream. And then? Then in port, it would be\n one short drink with the boys, before taking his accumulated pay and\n heading home. The one short drink would lead to another. And morning\n would find him, drunk, rolled, tattooed and possibly sleeping it off in\n jail. So back to sea he'd have to go.\"", "All persons registered in the labor force participated. If you\n were drawn, you must need serve. The dissatisfaction those chosen\n might feel at their poor luck was offset by the fact that they were\n granted additional Variable Basic shares, according to the tasks\n they fulfilled. Such shares could be added to their portfolios, the\n dividends becoming part of their current credit balance, or could be\n sold for a lump sum on the market.\n\n\n Yes, but now it was all over. He had his own little place, his own\n vacuum-tube vehicle and twice the amount of shares of Basic that most\n of his fellow citizens could boast. Si Pond had it made. A spree was\n obviously called for.", "Si was expansive. \"Why, sure. In the Space Department we don't have\n much time for formality. Everybody's just Si, and Doc, and Jim. Like\n that. But how come you cried?\"\nShe looked down into the drink the bartender had placed before her,\n as though avoiding his face. \"I ... I suppose it was that speech\n Doctor Girard-Perregaux made. There you stood, so fine and straight in\n your space-pilot uniform, the veteran of six exploration runs to the\n planets....\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Si said modestly, \"two of my runs were only to the Moon.\"\n\n\n \"... and he said all those things about man's conquest of space. And\n the dream of the stars which man has held so long. And then the fact\n that you were the last of the space pilots. The last man in the whole\n world trained to pilot a space craft. And here you were, retiring.\"" ], [ "For a moment he stood in the center of the floor, in thought. Take it\n easy, Si Pond, take it all easy, this time. No throwing his dollars\n around in second-class groggeries, no eating in automated luncheterias.\n This time, be it the only time in his life, he was going to frolic in\n the grand manner. No cloddy was Si Pond.\n\n\n He decided a drink was in order to help him plan his strategy. A drink\n at the hotel's famous Kudos Room where celebrities were reputed to be a\n dime a dozen.\n\n\n He left the suite and stepped into one of the elevators. He said,\n \"Kudos Room.\"", "Sitting in the Kudos Room with the most beautiful girl to whom he had\n ever talked, Si could be nonchalant about the subject. \"Old Gubelin\n keeps that angle mostly hushed up and out of the magazine and newspaper\n articles. Says there's enough adverse publicity about space exploration\n already. But at this stage of the game when the whole ship's crammed\n tight with this automatic scientific apparatus and all, there's\n precious little room in the conning tower and you're the only man\n aboard. The Doc says later on when ships are bigger and there's a whole\n flock of people aboard, there won't be any such thing as space cafard,\n but....\" Of a sudden the right side of Si Pond's mouth began to tic\n and he hurriedly took up his drink and knocked it back.", "The auto-elevator murmured politely, \"Yes, sir, the Kudos Room.\"\nAt the door to the famous rendezvous of the swankiest set, Si paused a\n moment and looked about. He'd never been in a place like this, either.\n However, he stifled his first instinct to wonder about what this was\n going to do to his current credit balance with an inner grin and made\n his way to the bar.\n\n\n There was actually a bartender.\n\n\n Si Pond suppressed his astonishment and said, offhand, attempting an\n air of easy sophistication, \"Slivovitz Sour.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"", "He considered for a moment, decided against the boroughs of Baltimore\n and Boston, and selected Manhattan instead. He had the resources. He\n might as well do it up brown.\n\n\n He dialed Manhattan and felt the sinking sensation that presaged his\n car's dropping to tube level. While it was being taken up by the robot\n controls, being shuttled here and there preparatory to the shot to his\n destination, he dialed the vehicle's teevee-phone for information on\n the hotels of the island of the Hudson. He selected a swank hostelry\n he'd read about and seen on the teevee casts of society and celebrity\n gossip reporters, and dialed it on the car's destination dial.\n\n\n \"Nothing too good for ex-Space Pilot Si Pond,\" he said aloud.", "The car hesitated for a moment, that brief hesitation before the\n shot, and Si took the involuntary breath from which only heroes could\n refrain. He sank back slowly into the seat. Moments passed, and the\n direction of the pressure was reversed.\n\n\n Manhattan. The shuttling began again, and one or two more traversing\n sub-shots. Finally, the dash threw a green light and Si opened the\n canopy and stepped into his hotel room.\n\n\n A voice said gently, \"If the quarters are satisfactory, please present\n your credit card within ten minutes.\"\n\n\n Si took his time. Not that he really needed it. It was by far the most\n swank suite he had ever seen. One wall was a window of whatever size\n the guest might desire and Si touched the control that dilated it to\n the full. His view opened in such wise that he could see both the\n Empire State Building Museum and the Hudson. Beyond the river stretched\n the all but endless city which was Greater Metropolis.", "The drinks in the Kudos Room might be concocted by hand, but Si noticed\n they had the routine teevee screens built into the bar for payment.\n He put his credit card on the screen immediately before him when the\n drink came, and had to quell his desire to dial for a balance check, so\n as to be able to figure out what the Sour had cost him.\n\n\n Well, this was something like it. This was the sort of thing he'd\n dreamed about, out there in the great alone, seated in the confining\n conning tower of his space craft. He sipped at the drink, finding it up\n to his highest expectations, and then swiveled slightly on his stool to\n take a look at the others present.\n\n\n To his disappointment, there were no recognizable celebrities. None\n that he placed, at least—top teevee stars, top politicians of the\n Ultrawelfare State or Sports personalities.", "He turned back to his drink and noticed, for the first time, the girl\n who occupied the stool two down from him. Si Pond blinked. He blinked\n and then swallowed.\n\n\n \"\nZo-ro-as-ter\n,\" he breathed.\n\n\n She was done in the latest style from Shanghai, even to the point of\n having cosmetically duplicated the Mongolian fold at the corners of her\n eyes. Every pore, but\nevery\npore, was in place. She sat with the easy\n grace of the Orient, so seldom found in the West.\n\n\n His stare couldn't be ignored.\n\n\n She looked at him coldly, turned to the bartender and murmured, \"A Far\n Out Cooler, please, Fredric.\" Then deliberately added, \"I thought the\n Kudos Room was supposed to be exclusive.\"\n\n\n There was nothing the bartender could say to that, and he went about\n building the drink.", "She was obviously both taken back and impressed. \"Why,\" she said,\n \"you're Seymour Pond, the pilot. I tuned in on the banquet they gave\n you.\"\n\n\n Si, carrying his glass, moved over to the stool next to her. \"Call me\n Si,\" he said. \"Everybody calls me Si.\"\n\n\n She said, \"I'm Natalie. Natalie Paskov. Just Natalie. Imagine meeting\n Seymour Pond. Just sitting down next to him at a bar. Just like that.\"\n\n\n \"Si,\" Si said, gratified. Holy Zoroaster, he'd never seen anything\n like this rarified pulchritude. Maybe on teevee, of course, one of the\n current sex symbols, but never in person. \"Call me Si,\" he said again.\n \"I been called Si so long, I don't even know who somebody's talking to\n if they say Seymour.\"", "Thus, Si was vaguely aware, it had always been down through the\n centuries since the Phoenecian sailor, back from his year-long trip to\n the tin mines of Cornwall, blew his hard earned share of the voyage's\n profits in a matter of days in the wine shops of Tyre. Nobody gets\n quite so little for his money as that loneliest of all workers, he who\n must leave his home for distant lands, returning only periodically and\n usually with the salary of lengthy, weary periods of time to be spent\n hurriedly in an attempt to achieve the pleasure and happiness so long\n denied him.\n\n\n Si was going to do it differently this time.", "Si cleared his throat. \"Hey,\" he said, \"how about letting this one be\n on me?\"\n\n\n Her eyebrows, which had been plucked and penciled to carry out her\n Oriental motif, rose. \"Really!\" she said, drawing it out.\n\n\n The bartender said hurriedly, \"I beg your pardon, sir....\"\n\n\n The girl, her voice suddenly subtly changed, said, \"Why, isn't that a\n space pin?\"\n\n\n Si, disconcerted by the sudden reversal, said, \"Yeah ... sure.\"\n\n\n \"Good Heavens, you're a spaceman?\"\n\n\n \"Sure.\" He pointed at the lapel pin. \"You can't wear one unless you\n been on at least a Moon run.\"", "Each time Si returned from one of his own runs, he celebrated. A spree,\n a bust, a bat, a wing-ding, a night on the town. A commemoration of\n dangers met and passed.\n\n\n Now it was all over. At the age of thirty he was retired. Law prevented\n him from ever being called up for contributing to the country's labor\n needs again. And he most certainly wasn't going to volunteer.\n\n\n He had taken his schooling much as had his contemporaries. There wasn't\n any particular reason for trying to excell. You didn't want to get the\n reputation for being a wise guy, or a cloddy either. Just one of the\n fellas. You could do the same in life whether you really studied or\n not. You had your Inalienable Basic stock, didn't you? What else did\n you need?\n\n\n It had come as a surprise when he'd been drafted for the labor force.", "In a moment, the teevee-phone's robot voice reported, \"Ten shares of\n Inalienable Basic. Twelve shares of Variable Basic, current value, four\n thousand, two hundred and thirty-three dollars and sixty-two cents\n apiece. Current cash credit, one thousand and eighty-four dollars.\" The\n screen went dead.\n\n\n One thousand and eighty-four dollars. That was plenty. He could safely\n spend as much as half of it, if the spree got as lively as he hoped it\n would. His monthly dividends were due in another week or so, and he\n wouldn't have to worry about current expenses. Yes, indeedy, Si Pond\n was as solvent as he had ever been in his thirty years.\n\n\n He opened the small, closet-like door which housed his vacuum-tube\n two-seater, and wedged himself into the small vehicle. He brought down\n the canopy, dropped the pressurizer and considered the dial. Only one\n place really made sense. The big city.", "Si grunted. \"Yeah. That's all part of the Doc's scheme to get me to\n take on another three runs. They're afraid the whole department'll be\n dropped by the Appropriations Committee on this here Economic Planning\n Board. Even if they can find some other patsy to train for the job,\n it'd take maybe a year before you could even send him on a Moon hop.\n So old man Gubelin, and Girard-Perregaux too, they're both trying to\n pressure me into more trips. Otherwise they got a Space Exploration\n Department, with all the expense and all, but nobody to pilot their\n ships. It's kind of funny, in a way. You know what one of those\n spaceships costs?\"\n\n\n \"Funny?\" she said. \"Why, I don't think it's funny at all.\"\n\n\n Si said, \"Look, how about another drink?\"", "Si Pond was a great believer in the institution of the spree. Any\n excuse would do. Back when he had finished basic education at the age\n of twenty-five and was registered for the labor draft, there hadn't\n been a chance in a hundred that he'd have the bad luck to have his\n name pulled. But when it had been, Si had celebrated.\n\n\n When he had been informed that his physical and mental qualifications\n were such that he was eligible for the most dangerous occupation in\n the Ultrawelfare State and had been pressured into taking training\n for space pilot, he had celebrated once again. Twenty-two others had\n taken the training with him, and only he and Rod Cameroon had passed\n the finals. On this occasion, he and Rod had celebrated together. It\n had been quite a party. Two weeks later, Rod had burned on a faulty\n take-off on what should have been a routine Moon run.", "\"You must realize, my dear Lofting, that our Si Pond is nothing more\n than a latter-day sailor, with many of the problems and view-points,\n tendencies and weaknesses of the voyager of the past. Have you never\n heard of the seaman who dreamed of returning to the village of his\n birth and buying a chicken farm or some such? All the long months at\n sea—and sometimes the tramp freighters or whaling craft would be out\n for years at a stretch before returning to home port—he would talk\n of his retirement and his dream. And then? Then in port, it would be\n one short drink with the boys, before taking his accumulated pay and\n heading home. The one short drink would lead to another. And morning\n would find him, drunk, rolled, tattooed and possibly sleeping it off in\n jail. So back to sea he'd have to go.\"", "Si was expansive. \"Why, sure. In the Space Department we don't have\n much time for formality. Everybody's just Si, and Doc, and Jim. Like\n that. But how come you cried?\"\nShe looked down into the drink the bartender had placed before her,\n as though avoiding his face. \"I ... I suppose it was that speech\n Doctor Girard-Perregaux made. There you stood, so fine and straight in\n your space-pilot uniform, the veteran of six exploration runs to the\n planets....\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Si said modestly, \"two of my runs were only to the Moon.\"\n\n\n \"... and he said all those things about man's conquest of space. And\n the dream of the stars which man has held so long. And then the fact\n that you were the last of the space pilots. The last man in the whole\n world trained to pilot a space craft. And here you were, retiring.\"", "No. Even as Si listened to their speeches, accepted the watch and\n made a halting little talk of his own, he was grinning inwardly. There\n wasn't anything they could do. He had them now. He had enough Basic to\n keep him comfortably, by his standards, for the rest of his life. He\n was never going to subject himself to space cafard again. Just thinking\n about it, now, set the tic to going at the side of his mouth.\n\n\n They could count down and blast off, for all he gave a damn.\nThe gold watch idea had been that of Lofting Gubelin, which was\n typical, he being in the way of a living anachronism himself. In fact,\n Academician Gubelin was possibly the only living man on North America\n who still wore spectacles. His explanation was that a phobia against\n having his eyes touched prohibited either surgery to remould his\n eyeballs and cure his myopia, or contact lenses.", "In common with recipients of gold watches of a score of generations\n before him, Si Pond would have preferred something a bit more tangible\n in the way of reward, such as a few shares of Variable Basic to add to\n his portfolio. But that, he supposed, was asking too much.\n\n\n The fact of the matter was, Si knew that his retiring had set them\n back. They hadn't figured he had enough shares of Basic to see him\n through decently. Well, possibly he didn't, given their standards.\n But Space Pilot Seymour Pond didn't have their standards. He'd had\n plenty of time to think it over. It was better to retire on a limited\n crediting, on a confoundedly limited crediting, than to take the two or\n three more trips in hopes of attaining a higher standard.", "Natalie Paskov said, \"Oh, I'd love to have a drink with you, Mr....\"\n\"Si,\" Si said. He motioned to the bartender with a circular twist of\n the hand indicating their need for two more of the same. \"How come you\n know so much about it? You don't meet many people who are interested\n in space any more. In fact, most people are almost contemptuous, like.\n Think it's kind of a big boondoggle deal to help use up a lot of\n materials and all and keep the economy going.\"\n\n\n Natalie said earnestly, \"Why, I've been a space fan all my life. I've\n read all about it. Have always known the names of all the space pilots\n and everything about them, ever since I was a child. I suppose you'd\n say I have the dream that Doctor Girard-Perregaux spoke about.\"", "He'd had plenty of time to figure it out, there alone in space on the\n Moon run, there on the Venus or Mars runs. There on the long, long\n haul to the Jupiter satellites, fearfully checking the symptoms of\n space cafard, the madness compounded of claustrophobia, monotony,\n boredom and free fall. Plenty of time. Time to decide that a one\n room mini-auto-apartment, complete with an autochair and built-in\n autobar, and with one wall a teevee screen, was all he needed to\n find contentment for a mighty long time. Possibly somebody like\n Doc Girard-Perregaux might be horrified at the idea of living in a\n mini-auto-apartment ... not realizing that to a pilot it was roomy\n beyond belief compared to the conning tower of a space craft." ], [ "Each time Si returned from one of his own runs, he celebrated. A spree,\n a bust, a bat, a wing-ding, a night on the town. A commemoration of\n dangers met and passed.\n\n\n Now it was all over. At the age of thirty he was retired. Law prevented\n him from ever being called up for contributing to the country's labor\n needs again. And he most certainly wasn't going to volunteer.\n\n\n He had taken his schooling much as had his contemporaries. There wasn't\n any particular reason for trying to excell. You didn't want to get the\n reputation for being a wise guy, or a cloddy either. Just one of the\n fellas. You could do the same in life whether you really studied or\n not. You had your Inalienable Basic stock, didn't you? What else did\n you need?\n\n\n It had come as a surprise when he'd been drafted for the labor force.", "dossier revealed him a possible candidate for space pilot, and it was\n you yourself who talked him into taking the training ... pointing out\n the more pragmatic advantages such as complete retirement after but six\n trips, added shares of Basic so that he could enjoy a more comfortable\n life than most and the fame that would accrue to him as one of the\n very few who still participate in travel to the planets. Very well.\n He was sold. Took his training, which, of course, required long years\n of drudgery to him. Then, performing his duties quite competently, he\n made his six trips. He is now legally eligible for retirement. He was\n drafted into the working force reserves, served his time, and is now\n free from toil for the balance of his life. Why should he listen to\n our pleas for a few more trips?\"", "Thus, Si was vaguely aware, it had always been down through the\n centuries since the Phoenecian sailor, back from his year-long trip to\n the tin mines of Cornwall, blew his hard earned share of the voyage's\n profits in a matter of days in the wine shops of Tyre. Nobody gets\n quite so little for his money as that loneliest of all workers, he who\n must leave his home for distant lands, returning only periodically and\n usually with the salary of lengthy, weary periods of time to be spent\n hurriedly in an attempt to achieve the pleasure and happiness so long\n denied him.\n\n\n Si was going to do it differently this time.", "In common with recipients of gold watches of a score of generations\n before him, Si Pond would have preferred something a bit more tangible\n in the way of reward, such as a few shares of Variable Basic to add to\n his portfolio. But that, he supposed, was asking too much.\n\n\n The fact of the matter was, Si knew that his retiring had set them\n back. They hadn't figured he had enough shares of Basic to see him\n through decently. Well, possibly he didn't, given their standards.\n But Space Pilot Seymour Pond didn't have their standards. He'd had\n plenty of time to think it over. It was better to retire on a limited\n crediting, on a confoundedly limited crediting, than to take the two or\n three more trips in hopes of attaining a higher standard.", "Si Pond was a great believer in the institution of the spree. Any\n excuse would do. Back when he had finished basic education at the age\n of twenty-five and was registered for the labor draft, there hadn't\n been a chance in a hundred that he'd have the bad luck to have his\n name pulled. But when it had been, Si had celebrated.\n\n\n When he had been informed that his physical and mental qualifications\n were such that he was eligible for the most dangerous occupation in\n the Ultrawelfare State and had been pressured into taking training\n for space pilot, he had celebrated once again. Twenty-two others had\n taken the training with him, and only he and Rod Cameroon had passed\n the finals. On this occasion, he and Rod had celebrated together. It\n had been quite a party. Two weeks later, Rod had burned on a faulty\n take-off on what should have been a routine Moon run.", "All persons registered in the labor force participated. If you\n were drawn, you must need serve. The dissatisfaction those chosen\n might feel at their poor luck was offset by the fact that they were\n granted additional Variable Basic shares, according to the tasks\n they fulfilled. Such shares could be added to their portfolios, the\n dividends becoming part of their current credit balance, or could be\n sold for a lump sum on the market.\n\n\n Yes, but now it was all over. He had his own little place, his own\n vacuum-tube vehicle and twice the amount of shares of Basic that most\n of his fellow citizens could boast. Si Pond had it made. A spree was\n obviously called for.", "Si grunted. \"Yeah. That's all part of the Doc's scheme to get me to\n take on another three runs. They're afraid the whole department'll be\n dropped by the Appropriations Committee on this here Economic Planning\n Board. Even if they can find some other patsy to train for the job,\n it'd take maybe a year before you could even send him on a Moon hop.\n So old man Gubelin, and Girard-Perregaux too, they're both trying to\n pressure me into more trips. Otherwise they got a Space Exploration\n Department, with all the expense and all, but nobody to pilot their\n ships. It's kind of funny, in a way. You know what one of those\n spaceships costs?\"\n\n\n \"Funny?\" she said. \"Why, I don't think it's funny at all.\"\n\n\n Si said, \"Look, how about another drink?\"", "Si was expansive. \"Why, sure. In the Space Department we don't have\n much time for formality. Everybody's just Si, and Doc, and Jim. Like\n that. But how come you cried?\"\nShe looked down into the drink the bartender had placed before her,\n as though avoiding his face. \"I ... I suppose it was that speech\n Doctor Girard-Perregaux made. There you stood, so fine and straight in\n your space-pilot uniform, the veteran of six exploration runs to the\n planets....\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Si said modestly, \"two of my runs were only to the Moon.\"\n\n\n \"... and he said all those things about man's conquest of space. And\n the dream of the stars which man has held so long. And then the fact\n that you were the last of the space pilots. The last man in the whole\n world trained to pilot a space craft. And here you were, retiring.\"", "\"You must realize, my dear Lofting, that our Si Pond is nothing more\n than a latter-day sailor, with many of the problems and view-points,\n tendencies and weaknesses of the voyager of the past. Have you never\n heard of the seaman who dreamed of returning to the village of his\n birth and buying a chicken farm or some such? All the long months at\n sea—and sometimes the tramp freighters or whaling craft would be out\n for years at a stretch before returning to home port—he would talk\n of his retirement and his dream. And then? Then in port, it would be\n one short drink with the boys, before taking his accumulated pay and\n heading home. The one short drink would lead to another. And morning\n would find him, drunk, rolled, tattooed and possibly sleeping it off in\n jail. So back to sea he'd have to go.\"", "No. Even as Si listened to their speeches, accepted the watch and\n made a halting little talk of his own, he was grinning inwardly. There\n wasn't anything they could do. He had them now. He had enough Basic to\n keep him comfortably, by his standards, for the rest of his life. He\n was never going to subject himself to space cafard again. Just thinking\n about it, now, set the tic to going at the side of his mouth.\n\n\n They could count down and blast off, for all he gave a damn.\nThe gold watch idea had been that of Lofting Gubelin, which was\n typical, he being in the way of a living anachronism himself. In fact,\n Academician Gubelin was possibly the only living man on North America\n who still wore spectacles. His explanation was that a phobia against\n having his eyes touched prohibited either surgery to remould his\n eyeballs and cure his myopia, or contact lenses.", "In a moment, the teevee-phone's robot voice reported, \"Ten shares of\n Inalienable Basic. Twelve shares of Variable Basic, current value, four\n thousand, two hundred and thirty-three dollars and sixty-two cents\n apiece. Current cash credit, one thousand and eighty-four dollars.\" The\n screen went dead.\n\n\n One thousand and eighty-four dollars. That was plenty. He could safely\n spend as much as half of it, if the spree got as lively as he hoped it\n would. His monthly dividends were due in another week or so, and he\n wouldn't have to worry about current expenses. Yes, indeedy, Si Pond\n was as solvent as he had ever been in his thirty years.\n\n\n He opened the small, closet-like door which housed his vacuum-tube\n two-seater, and wedged himself into the small vehicle. He brought down\n the canopy, dropped the pressurizer and considered the dial. Only one\n place really made sense. The big city.", "They gave him a gold watch. It was meant to be symbolical, of course.\n In the old tradition. It was in the way of an antique, being one of the\n timepieces made generations past in the Alpine area of Eur-Asia. Its\n quaintness lay in the fact that it was wound, not electronically by\n power-radio, but by the actual physical movements of the bearer, a free\n swinging rotor keeping the mainspring at a constant tension.\n\n\n They also had a banquet for him, complete with speeches by such\n bigwigs of the Department of Space Exploration as Academician Lofting\n Gubelin and Doctor Hans Girard-Perregaux. There was also somebody\n from the government who spoke, but he was one of those who were\n pseudo-elected and didn't know much about the field of space travel\n nor the significance of Seymour Pond's retirement. Si didn't bother to\n remember his name. He only wondered vaguely why the cloddy had turned\n up at all.", "Si cleared his throat. \"Hey,\" he said, \"how about letting this one be\n on me?\"\n\n\n Her eyebrows, which had been plucked and penciled to carry out her\n Oriental motif, rose. \"Really!\" she said, drawing it out.\n\n\n The bartender said hurriedly, \"I beg your pardon, sir....\"\n\n\n The girl, her voice suddenly subtly changed, said, \"Why, isn't that a\n space pin?\"\n\n\n Si, disconcerted by the sudden reversal, said, \"Yeah ... sure.\"\n\n\n \"Good Heavens, you're a spaceman?\"\n\n\n \"Sure.\" He pointed at the lapel pin. \"You can't wear one unless you\n been on at least a Moon run.\"", "The car hesitated for a moment, that brief hesitation before the\n shot, and Si took the involuntary breath from which only heroes could\n refrain. He sank back slowly into the seat. Moments passed, and the\n direction of the pressure was reversed.\n\n\n Manhattan. The shuttling began again, and one or two more traversing\n sub-shots. Finally, the dash threw a green light and Si opened the\n canopy and stepped into his hotel room.\n\n\n A voice said gently, \"If the quarters are satisfactory, please present\n your credit card within ten minutes.\"\n\n\n Si took his time. Not that he really needed it. It was by far the most\n swank suite he had ever seen. One wall was a window of whatever size\n the guest might desire and Si touched the control that dilated it to\n the full. His view opened in such wise that he could see both the\n Empire State Building Museum and the Hudson. Beyond the river stretched\n the all but endless city which was Greater Metropolis.", "She was obviously both taken back and impressed. \"Why,\" she said,\n \"you're Seymour Pond, the pilot. I tuned in on the banquet they gave\n you.\"\n\n\n Si, carrying his glass, moved over to the stool next to her. \"Call me\n Si,\" he said. \"Everybody calls me Si.\"\n\n\n She said, \"I'm Natalie. Natalie Paskov. Just Natalie. Imagine meeting\n Seymour Pond. Just sitting down next to him at a bar. Just like that.\"\n\n\n \"Si,\" Si said, gratified. Holy Zoroaster, he'd never seen anything\n like this rarified pulchritude. Maybe on teevee, of course, one of the\n current sex symbols, but never in person. \"Call me Si,\" he said again.\n \"I been called Si so long, I don't even know who somebody's talking to\n if they say Seymour.\"", "In the early days of the Ultrawelfare State, they had made a mistake\n in adapting to the automation of the second industrial revolution.\n They had attempted to give everyone work by reducing the number of\n working hours in the day, and the number of working days in the week.\n It finally became ludicrous when employees of industry were working\n but two days a week, two hours a day. In fact, it got chaotic. It\n became obvious that it was more practical to have one worker putting in\n thirty-five hours a week and getting to know his job well, than it was\n to have a score of employees, each working a few hours a week and none\n of them ever really becoming efficient.\n\n\n The only fair thing was to let the technologically unemployed remain\n unemployed, with their Inalienable Basic stock as the equivalent of\n unemployment insurance, while the few workers still needed put in a\n reasonable number of hours a day, a reasonable number of weeks a year\n and a reasonable number of years in a life time. When new employees\n were needed, a draft lottery was held.", "He considered for a moment, decided against the boroughs of Baltimore\n and Boston, and selected Manhattan instead. He had the resources. He\n might as well do it up brown.\n\n\n He dialed Manhattan and felt the sinking sensation that presaged his\n car's dropping to tube level. While it was being taken up by the robot\n controls, being shuttled here and there preparatory to the shot to his\n destination, he dialed the vehicle's teevee-phone for information on\n the hotels of the island of the Hudson. He selected a swank hostelry\n he'd read about and seen on the teevee casts of society and celebrity\n gossip reporters, and dialed it on the car's destination dial.\n\n\n \"Nothing too good for ex-Space Pilot Si Pond,\" he said aloud.", "Nothing but the best. Wine, women, song, food, entertainment. The\n works. But nothing but the best.\nTo start off, he dressed with great care in the honorable\n retirement-rank suit he had so recently purchased. His space pin he\n attached carefully to the lapel. That was a good beginning, he decided.\n A bit of prestige didn't hurt you when you went out on the town. In\n the Ultrawelfare State hardly one person in a hundred actually ever\n performed anything of value to society. The efforts of most weren't\n needed. Those few who did contribute were awarded honors, decorations,\n titles.\n\n\n Attired satisfactorily, Si double-checked to see that his credit\n card was in his pocket. As an after-thought, he went over to the\n auto-apartment's teevee-phone, flicked it on, held the card to the\n screen and said, \"Balance check, please.\"", "Sitting in the Kudos Room with the most beautiful girl to whom he had\n ever talked, Si could be nonchalant about the subject. \"Old Gubelin\n keeps that angle mostly hushed up and out of the magazine and newspaper\n articles. Says there's enough adverse publicity about space exploration\n already. But at this stage of the game when the whole ship's crammed\n tight with this automatic scientific apparatus and all, there's\n precious little room in the conning tower and you're the only man\n aboard. The Doc says later on when ships are bigger and there's a whole\n flock of people aboard, there won't be any such thing as space cafard,\n but....\" Of a sudden the right side of Si Pond's mouth began to tic\n and he hurriedly took up his drink and knocked it back.", "Gubelin, half angry at his friend's argument, leaned forward to snap\n rebuttal, but the other was wagging a finger at him negatively. \"Face\n reality, Lofting. Don't require or expect from Seymour Pond more\n than is to be found there. He is an average young man. Born in our\n Ultrawelfare State, he was guaranteed his fundamental womb-to-tomb\n security by being issued that minimum number of Basic shares in our\n society that allows him an income sufficient to secure the food,\n clothing, shelter, medical care and education to sustain a low level\n of subsistence. Percentages were against his ever being drafted\n into industry. Automation being what it is, only a fraction of the\n population is ever called up. But Pond was. His industrial aptitude" ], [ "Each time Si returned from one of his own runs, he celebrated. A spree,\n a bust, a bat, a wing-ding, a night on the town. A commemoration of\n dangers met and passed.\n\n\n Now it was all over. At the age of thirty he was retired. Law prevented\n him from ever being called up for contributing to the country's labor\n needs again. And he most certainly wasn't going to volunteer.\n\n\n He had taken his schooling much as had his contemporaries. There wasn't\n any particular reason for trying to excell. You didn't want to get the\n reputation for being a wise guy, or a cloddy either. Just one of the\n fellas. You could do the same in life whether you really studied or\n not. You had your Inalienable Basic stock, didn't you? What else did\n you need?\n\n\n It had come as a surprise when he'd been drafted for the labor force.", "In common with recipients of gold watches of a score of generations\n before him, Si Pond would have preferred something a bit more tangible\n in the way of reward, such as a few shares of Variable Basic to add to\n his portfolio. But that, he supposed, was asking too much.\n\n\n The fact of the matter was, Si knew that his retiring had set them\n back. They hadn't figured he had enough shares of Basic to see him\n through decently. Well, possibly he didn't, given their standards.\n But Space Pilot Seymour Pond didn't have their standards. He'd had\n plenty of time to think it over. It was better to retire on a limited\n crediting, on a confoundedly limited crediting, than to take the two or\n three more trips in hopes of attaining a higher standard.", "Thus, Si was vaguely aware, it had always been down through the\n centuries since the Phoenecian sailor, back from his year-long trip to\n the tin mines of Cornwall, blew his hard earned share of the voyage's\n profits in a matter of days in the wine shops of Tyre. Nobody gets\n quite so little for his money as that loneliest of all workers, he who\n must leave his home for distant lands, returning only periodically and\n usually with the salary of lengthy, weary periods of time to be spent\n hurriedly in an attempt to achieve the pleasure and happiness so long\n denied him.\n\n\n Si was going to do it differently this time.", "Si was expansive. \"Why, sure. In the Space Department we don't have\n much time for formality. Everybody's just Si, and Doc, and Jim. Like\n that. But how come you cried?\"\nShe looked down into the drink the bartender had placed before her,\n as though avoiding his face. \"I ... I suppose it was that speech\n Doctor Girard-Perregaux made. There you stood, so fine and straight in\n your space-pilot uniform, the veteran of six exploration runs to the\n planets....\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Si said modestly, \"two of my runs were only to the Moon.\"\n\n\n \"... and he said all those things about man's conquest of space. And\n the dream of the stars which man has held so long. And then the fact\n that you were the last of the space pilots. The last man in the whole\n world trained to pilot a space craft. And here you were, retiring.\"", "No. Even as Si listened to their speeches, accepted the watch and\n made a halting little talk of his own, he was grinning inwardly. There\n wasn't anything they could do. He had them now. He had enough Basic to\n keep him comfortably, by his standards, for the rest of his life. He\n was never going to subject himself to space cafard again. Just thinking\n about it, now, set the tic to going at the side of his mouth.\n\n\n They could count down and blast off, for all he gave a damn.\nThe gold watch idea had been that of Lofting Gubelin, which was\n typical, he being in the way of a living anachronism himself. In fact,\n Academician Gubelin was possibly the only living man on North America\n who still wore spectacles. His explanation was that a phobia against\n having his eyes touched prohibited either surgery to remould his\n eyeballs and cure his myopia, or contact lenses.", "All persons registered in the labor force participated. If you\n were drawn, you must need serve. The dissatisfaction those chosen\n might feel at their poor luck was offset by the fact that they were\n granted additional Variable Basic shares, according to the tasks\n they fulfilled. Such shares could be added to their portfolios, the\n dividends becoming part of their current credit balance, or could be\n sold for a lump sum on the market.\n\n\n Yes, but now it was all over. He had his own little place, his own\n vacuum-tube vehicle and twice the amount of shares of Basic that most\n of his fellow citizens could boast. Si Pond had it made. A spree was\n obviously called for.", "Si Pond was a great believer in the institution of the spree. Any\n excuse would do. Back when he had finished basic education at the age\n of twenty-five and was registered for the labor draft, there hadn't\n been a chance in a hundred that he'd have the bad luck to have his\n name pulled. But when it had been, Si had celebrated.\n\n\n When he had been informed that his physical and mental qualifications\n were such that he was eligible for the most dangerous occupation in\n the Ultrawelfare State and had been pressured into taking training\n for space pilot, he had celebrated once again. Twenty-two others had\n taken the training with him, and only he and Rod Cameroon had passed\n the finals. On this occasion, he and Rod had celebrated together. It\n had been quite a party. Two weeks later, Rod had burned on a faulty\n take-off on what should have been a routine Moon run.", "\"You must realize, my dear Lofting, that our Si Pond is nothing more\n than a latter-day sailor, with many of the problems and view-points,\n tendencies and weaknesses of the voyager of the past. Have you never\n heard of the seaman who dreamed of returning to the village of his\n birth and buying a chicken farm or some such? All the long months at\n sea—and sometimes the tramp freighters or whaling craft would be out\n for years at a stretch before returning to home port—he would talk\n of his retirement and his dream. And then? Then in port, it would be\n one short drink with the boys, before taking his accumulated pay and\n heading home. The one short drink would lead to another. And morning\n would find him, drunk, rolled, tattooed and possibly sleeping it off in\n jail. So back to sea he'd have to go.\"", "dossier revealed him a possible candidate for space pilot, and it was\n you yourself who talked him into taking the training ... pointing out\n the more pragmatic advantages such as complete retirement after but six\n trips, added shares of Basic so that he could enjoy a more comfortable\n life than most and the fame that would accrue to him as one of the\n very few who still participate in travel to the planets. Very well.\n He was sold. Took his training, which, of course, required long years\n of drudgery to him. Then, performing his duties quite competently, he\n made his six trips. He is now legally eligible for retirement. He was\n drafted into the working force reserves, served his time, and is now\n free from toil for the balance of his life. Why should he listen to\n our pleas for a few more trips?\"", "They gave him a gold watch. It was meant to be symbolical, of course.\n In the old tradition. It was in the way of an antique, being one of the\n timepieces made generations past in the Alpine area of Eur-Asia. Its\n quaintness lay in the fact that it was wound, not electronically by\n power-radio, but by the actual physical movements of the bearer, a free\n swinging rotor keeping the mainspring at a constant tension.\n\n\n They also had a banquet for him, complete with speeches by such\n bigwigs of the Department of Space Exploration as Academician Lofting\n Gubelin and Doctor Hans Girard-Perregaux. There was also somebody\n from the government who spoke, but he was one of those who were\n pseudo-elected and didn't know much about the field of space travel\n nor the significance of Seymour Pond's retirement. Si didn't bother to\n remember his name. He only wondered vaguely why the cloddy had turned\n up at all.", "Nothing but the best. Wine, women, song, food, entertainment. The\n works. But nothing but the best.\nTo start off, he dressed with great care in the honorable\n retirement-rank suit he had so recently purchased. His space pin he\n attached carefully to the lapel. That was a good beginning, he decided.\n A bit of prestige didn't hurt you when you went out on the town. In\n the Ultrawelfare State hardly one person in a hundred actually ever\n performed anything of value to society. The efforts of most weren't\n needed. Those few who did contribute were awarded honors, decorations,\n titles.\n\n\n Attired satisfactorily, Si double-checked to see that his credit\n card was in his pocket. As an after-thought, he went over to the\n auto-apartment's teevee-phone, flicked it on, held the card to the\n screen and said, \"Balance check, please.\"", "Si cleared his throat. \"Hey,\" he said, \"how about letting this one be\n on me?\"\n\n\n Her eyebrows, which had been plucked and penciled to carry out her\n Oriental motif, rose. \"Really!\" she said, drawing it out.\n\n\n The bartender said hurriedly, \"I beg your pardon, sir....\"\n\n\n The girl, her voice suddenly subtly changed, said, \"Why, isn't that a\n space pin?\"\n\n\n Si, disconcerted by the sudden reversal, said, \"Yeah ... sure.\"\n\n\n \"Good Heavens, you're a spaceman?\"\n\n\n \"Sure.\" He pointed at the lapel pin. \"You can't wear one unless you\n been on at least a Moon run.\"", "She was obviously both taken back and impressed. \"Why,\" she said,\n \"you're Seymour Pond, the pilot. I tuned in on the banquet they gave\n you.\"\n\n\n Si, carrying his glass, moved over to the stool next to her. \"Call me\n Si,\" he said. \"Everybody calls me Si.\"\n\n\n She said, \"I'm Natalie. Natalie Paskov. Just Natalie. Imagine meeting\n Seymour Pond. Just sitting down next to him at a bar. Just like that.\"\n\n\n \"Si,\" Si said, gratified. Holy Zoroaster, he'd never seen anything\n like this rarified pulchritude. Maybe on teevee, of course, one of the\n current sex symbols, but never in person. \"Call me Si,\" he said again.\n \"I been called Si so long, I don't even know who somebody's talking to\n if they say Seymour.\"", "Si grunted. \"Yeah. That's all part of the Doc's scheme to get me to\n take on another three runs. They're afraid the whole department'll be\n dropped by the Appropriations Committee on this here Economic Planning\n Board. Even if they can find some other patsy to train for the job,\n it'd take maybe a year before you could even send him on a Moon hop.\n So old man Gubelin, and Girard-Perregaux too, they're both trying to\n pressure me into more trips. Otherwise they got a Space Exploration\n Department, with all the expense and all, but nobody to pilot their\n ships. It's kind of funny, in a way. You know what one of those\n spaceships costs?\"\n\n\n \"Funny?\" she said. \"Why, I don't think it's funny at all.\"\n\n\n Si said, \"Look, how about another drink?\"", "The car hesitated for a moment, that brief hesitation before the\n shot, and Si took the involuntary breath from which only heroes could\n refrain. He sank back slowly into the seat. Moments passed, and the\n direction of the pressure was reversed.\n\n\n Manhattan. The shuttling began again, and one or two more traversing\n sub-shots. Finally, the dash threw a green light and Si opened the\n canopy and stepped into his hotel room.\n\n\n A voice said gently, \"If the quarters are satisfactory, please present\n your credit card within ten minutes.\"\n\n\n Si took his time. Not that he really needed it. It was by far the most\n swank suite he had ever seen. One wall was a window of whatever size\n the guest might desire and Si touched the control that dilated it to\n the full. His view opened in such wise that he could see both the\n Empire State Building Museum and the Hudson. Beyond the river stretched\n the all but endless city which was Greater Metropolis.", "Sitting in the Kudos Room with the most beautiful girl to whom he had\n ever talked, Si could be nonchalant about the subject. \"Old Gubelin\n keeps that angle mostly hushed up and out of the magazine and newspaper\n articles. Says there's enough adverse publicity about space exploration\n already. But at this stage of the game when the whole ship's crammed\n tight with this automatic scientific apparatus and all, there's\n precious little room in the conning tower and you're the only man\n aboard. The Doc says later on when ships are bigger and there's a whole\n flock of people aboard, there won't be any such thing as space cafard,\n but....\" Of a sudden the right side of Si Pond's mouth began to tic\n and he hurriedly took up his drink and knocked it back.", "He considered for a moment, decided against the boroughs of Baltimore\n and Boston, and selected Manhattan instead. He had the resources. He\n might as well do it up brown.\n\n\n He dialed Manhattan and felt the sinking sensation that presaged his\n car's dropping to tube level. While it was being taken up by the robot\n controls, being shuttled here and there preparatory to the shot to his\n destination, he dialed the vehicle's teevee-phone for information on\n the hotels of the island of the Hudson. He selected a swank hostelry\n he'd read about and seen on the teevee casts of society and celebrity\n gossip reporters, and dialed it on the car's destination dial.\n\n\n \"Nothing too good for ex-Space Pilot Si Pond,\" he said aloud.", "The auto-elevator murmured politely, \"Yes, sir, the Kudos Room.\"\nAt the door to the famous rendezvous of the swankiest set, Si paused a\n moment and looked about. He'd never been in a place like this, either.\n However, he stifled his first instinct to wonder about what this was\n going to do to his current credit balance with an inner grin and made\n his way to the bar.\n\n\n There was actually a bartender.\n\n\n Si Pond suppressed his astonishment and said, offhand, attempting an\n air of easy sophistication, \"Slivovitz Sour.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"", "\"I cried when they gave you that antique watch,\" she said, her tone\n such that it was obvious she hadn't quite adjusted as yet to having\n met him.\n\n\n Si Pond was surprised. \"Cried?\" he said. \"Well, why? I was kind of\n bored with the whole thing. But old Doc Gubelin, I used to work under\n him in the Space Exploration department, he was hot for it.\"\n\n\n \"\nAcademician\nGubelin?\" she said. \"You just call him\nDoc\n?\"", "In a moment, the teevee-phone's robot voice reported, \"Ten shares of\n Inalienable Basic. Twelve shares of Variable Basic, current value, four\n thousand, two hundred and thirty-three dollars and sixty-two cents\n apiece. Current cash credit, one thousand and eighty-four dollars.\" The\n screen went dead.\n\n\n One thousand and eighty-four dollars. That was plenty. He could safely\n spend as much as half of it, if the spree got as lively as he hoped it\n would. His monthly dividends were due in another week or so, and he\n wouldn't have to worry about current expenses. Yes, indeedy, Si Pond\n was as solvent as he had ever been in his thirty years.\n\n\n He opened the small, closet-like door which housed his vacuum-tube\n two-seater, and wedged himself into the small vehicle. He brought down\n the canopy, dropped the pressurizer and considered the dial. Only one\n place really made sense. The big city." ], [ "She was obviously both taken back and impressed. \"Why,\" she said,\n \"you're Seymour Pond, the pilot. I tuned in on the banquet they gave\n you.\"\n\n\n Si, carrying his glass, moved over to the stool next to her. \"Call me\n Si,\" he said. \"Everybody calls me Si.\"\n\n\n She said, \"I'm Natalie. Natalie Paskov. Just Natalie. Imagine meeting\n Seymour Pond. Just sitting down next to him at a bar. Just like that.\"\n\n\n \"Si,\" Si said, gratified. Holy Zoroaster, he'd never seen anything\n like this rarified pulchritude. Maybe on teevee, of course, one of the\n current sex symbols, but never in person. \"Call me Si,\" he said again.\n \"I been called Si so long, I don't even know who somebody's talking to\n if they say Seymour.\"", "The auto-elevator murmured politely, \"Yes, sir, the Kudos Room.\"\nAt the door to the famous rendezvous of the swankiest set, Si paused a\n moment and looked about. He'd never been in a place like this, either.\n However, he stifled his first instinct to wonder about what this was\n going to do to his current credit balance with an inner grin and made\n his way to the bar.\n\n\n There was actually a bartender.\n\n\n Si Pond suppressed his astonishment and said, offhand, attempting an\n air of easy sophistication, \"Slivovitz Sour.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"", "Sitting in the Kudos Room with the most beautiful girl to whom he had\n ever talked, Si could be nonchalant about the subject. \"Old Gubelin\n keeps that angle mostly hushed up and out of the magazine and newspaper\n articles. Says there's enough adverse publicity about space exploration\n already. But at this stage of the game when the whole ship's crammed\n tight with this automatic scientific apparatus and all, there's\n precious little room in the conning tower and you're the only man\n aboard. The Doc says later on when ships are bigger and there's a whole\n flock of people aboard, there won't be any such thing as space cafard,\n but....\" Of a sudden the right side of Si Pond's mouth began to tic\n and he hurriedly took up his drink and knocked it back.", "For a moment he stood in the center of the floor, in thought. Take it\n easy, Si Pond, take it all easy, this time. No throwing his dollars\n around in second-class groggeries, no eating in automated luncheterias.\n This time, be it the only time in his life, he was going to frolic in\n the grand manner. No cloddy was Si Pond.\n\n\n He decided a drink was in order to help him plan his strategy. A drink\n at the hotel's famous Kudos Room where celebrities were reputed to be a\n dime a dozen.\n\n\n He left the suite and stepped into one of the elevators. He said,\n \"Kudos Room.\"", "The drinks in the Kudos Room might be concocted by hand, but Si noticed\n they had the routine teevee screens built into the bar for payment.\n He put his credit card on the screen immediately before him when the\n drink came, and had to quell his desire to dial for a balance check, so\n as to be able to figure out what the Sour had cost him.\n\n\n Well, this was something like it. This was the sort of thing he'd\n dreamed about, out there in the great alone, seated in the confining\n conning tower of his space craft. He sipped at the drink, finding it up\n to his highest expectations, and then swiveled slightly on his stool to\n take a look at the others present.\n\n\n To his disappointment, there were no recognizable celebrities. None\n that he placed, at least—top teevee stars, top politicians of the\n Ultrawelfare State or Sports personalities.", "He turned back to his drink and noticed, for the first time, the girl\n who occupied the stool two down from him. Si Pond blinked. He blinked\n and then swallowed.\n\n\n \"\nZo-ro-as-ter\n,\" he breathed.\n\n\n She was done in the latest style from Shanghai, even to the point of\n having cosmetically duplicated the Mongolian fold at the corners of her\n eyes. Every pore, but\nevery\npore, was in place. She sat with the easy\n grace of the Orient, so seldom found in the West.\n\n\n His stare couldn't be ignored.\n\n\n She looked at him coldly, turned to the bartender and murmured, \"A Far\n Out Cooler, please, Fredric.\" Then deliberately added, \"I thought the\n Kudos Room was supposed to be exclusive.\"\n\n\n There was nothing the bartender could say to that, and he went about\n building the drink.", "Natalie Paskov said, \"Oh, I'd love to have a drink with you, Mr....\"\n\"Si,\" Si said. He motioned to the bartender with a circular twist of\n the hand indicating their need for two more of the same. \"How come you\n know so much about it? You don't meet many people who are interested\n in space any more. In fact, most people are almost contemptuous, like.\n Think it's kind of a big boondoggle deal to help use up a lot of\n materials and all and keep the economy going.\"\n\n\n Natalie said earnestly, \"Why, I've been a space fan all my life. I've\n read all about it. Have always known the names of all the space pilots\n and everything about them, ever since I was a child. I suppose you'd\n say I have the dream that Doctor Girard-Perregaux spoke about.\"", "Si cleared his throat. \"Hey,\" he said, \"how about letting this one be\n on me?\"\n\n\n Her eyebrows, which had been plucked and penciled to carry out her\n Oriental motif, rose. \"Really!\" she said, drawing it out.\n\n\n The bartender said hurriedly, \"I beg your pardon, sir....\"\n\n\n The girl, her voice suddenly subtly changed, said, \"Why, isn't that a\n space pin?\"\n\n\n Si, disconcerted by the sudden reversal, said, \"Yeah ... sure.\"\n\n\n \"Good Heavens, you're a spaceman?\"\n\n\n \"Sure.\" He pointed at the lapel pin. \"You can't wear one unless you\n been on at least a Moon run.\"", "Si grunted. \"Yeah. That's all part of the Doc's scheme to get me to\n take on another three runs. They're afraid the whole department'll be\n dropped by the Appropriations Committee on this here Economic Planning\n Board. Even if they can find some other patsy to train for the job,\n it'd take maybe a year before you could even send him on a Moon hop.\n So old man Gubelin, and Girard-Perregaux too, they're both trying to\n pressure me into more trips. Otherwise they got a Space Exploration\n Department, with all the expense and all, but nobody to pilot their\n ships. It's kind of funny, in a way. You know what one of those\n spaceships costs?\"\n\n\n \"Funny?\" she said. \"Why, I don't think it's funny at all.\"\n\n\n Si said, \"Look, how about another drink?\"", "He didn't take the time to flick on the menu, next to the auto-dining\n table, nor to check the endless potables on the autobar list. All that,\n he well knew, would be superlative. Besides, he didn't plan to dine\n or do much drinking in his suite. He made a mock leer. Not unless he\n managed to acquire some feminine companionship, that was.\n\n\n He looked briefly into the swimming pool and bath, then flopped\n himself happily onto the bed. It wasn't up to the degree of softness\n he presently desired, and he dialed the thing to the ultimate in that\n direction so that with a laugh he sank almost out of sight into the\n mattress.\n\n\n He came back to his feet, gave his suit a quick patting so that it\n fell into press and, taking his credit card from his pocket, put it\n against the teevee-phone screen and pressed the hotel button so that\n registration could be completed.", "\"I cried when they gave you that antique watch,\" she said, her tone\n such that it was obvious she hadn't quite adjusted as yet to having\n met him.\n\n\n Si Pond was surprised. \"Cried?\" he said. \"Well, why? I was kind of\n bored with the whole thing. But old Doc Gubelin, I used to work under\n him in the Space Exploration department, he was hot for it.\"\n\n\n \"\nAcademician\nGubelin?\" she said. \"You just call him\nDoc\n?\"", "He considered for a moment, decided against the boroughs of Baltimore\n and Boston, and selected Manhattan instead. He had the resources. He\n might as well do it up brown.\n\n\n He dialed Manhattan and felt the sinking sensation that presaged his\n car's dropping to tube level. While it was being taken up by the robot\n controls, being shuttled here and there preparatory to the shot to his\n destination, he dialed the vehicle's teevee-phone for information on\n the hotels of the island of the Hudson. He selected a swank hostelry\n he'd read about and seen on the teevee casts of society and celebrity\n gossip reporters, and dialed it on the car's destination dial.\n\n\n \"Nothing too good for ex-Space Pilot Si Pond,\" he said aloud.", "The car hesitated for a moment, that brief hesitation before the\n shot, and Si took the involuntary breath from which only heroes could\n refrain. He sank back slowly into the seat. Moments passed, and the\n direction of the pressure was reversed.\n\n\n Manhattan. The shuttling began again, and one or two more traversing\n sub-shots. Finally, the dash threw a green light and Si opened the\n canopy and stepped into his hotel room.\n\n\n A voice said gently, \"If the quarters are satisfactory, please present\n your credit card within ten minutes.\"\n\n\n Si took his time. Not that he really needed it. It was by far the most\n swank suite he had ever seen. One wall was a window of whatever size\n the guest might desire and Si touched the control that dilated it to\n the full. His view opened in such wise that he could see both the\n Empire State Building Museum and the Hudson. Beyond the river stretched\n the all but endless city which was Greater Metropolis.", "Si was expansive. \"Why, sure. In the Space Department we don't have\n much time for formality. Everybody's just Si, and Doc, and Jim. Like\n that. But how come you cried?\"\nShe looked down into the drink the bartender had placed before her,\n as though avoiding his face. \"I ... I suppose it was that speech\n Doctor Girard-Perregaux made. There you stood, so fine and straight in\n your space-pilot uniform, the veteran of six exploration runs to the\n planets....\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Si said modestly, \"two of my runs were only to the Moon.\"\n\n\n \"... and he said all those things about man's conquest of space. And\n the dream of the stars which man has held so long. And then the fact\n that you were the last of the space pilots. The last man in the whole\n world trained to pilot a space craft. And here you were, retiring.\"", "Si Pond was a great believer in the institution of the spree. Any\n excuse would do. Back when he had finished basic education at the age\n of twenty-five and was registered for the labor draft, there hadn't\n been a chance in a hundred that he'd have the bad luck to have his\n name pulled. But when it had been, Si had celebrated.\n\n\n When he had been informed that his physical and mental qualifications\n were such that he was eligible for the most dangerous occupation in\n the Ultrawelfare State and had been pressured into taking training\n for space pilot, he had celebrated once again. Twenty-two others had\n taken the training with him, and only he and Rod Cameroon had passed\n the finals. On this occasion, he and Rod had celebrated together. It\n had been quite a party. Two weeks later, Rod had burned on a faulty\n take-off on what should have been a routine Moon run.", "No. Even as Si listened to their speeches, accepted the watch and\n made a halting little talk of his own, he was grinning inwardly. There\n wasn't anything they could do. He had them now. He had enough Basic to\n keep him comfortably, by his standards, for the rest of his life. He\n was never going to subject himself to space cafard again. Just thinking\n about it, now, set the tic to going at the side of his mouth.\n\n\n They could count down and blast off, for all he gave a damn.\nThe gold watch idea had been that of Lofting Gubelin, which was\n typical, he being in the way of a living anachronism himself. In fact,\n Academician Gubelin was possibly the only living man on North America\n who still wore spectacles. His explanation was that a phobia against\n having his eyes touched prohibited either surgery to remould his\n eyeballs and cure his myopia, or contact lenses.", "Each time Si returned from one of his own runs, he celebrated. A spree,\n a bust, a bat, a wing-ding, a night on the town. A commemoration of\n dangers met and passed.\n\n\n Now it was all over. At the age of thirty he was retired. Law prevented\n him from ever being called up for contributing to the country's labor\n needs again. And he most certainly wasn't going to volunteer.\n\n\n He had taken his schooling much as had his contemporaries. There wasn't\n any particular reason for trying to excell. You didn't want to get the\n reputation for being a wise guy, or a cloddy either. Just one of the\n fellas. You could do the same in life whether you really studied or\n not. You had your Inalienable Basic stock, didn't you? What else did\n you need?\n\n\n It had come as a surprise when he'd been drafted for the labor force.", "Si chuckled. \"A real buff, eh? You know, it's kind of funny. I was\n never much interested in it. And I got a darn sight less interested\n after my first run and I found out what space cafard was.\"\n\n\n She frowned. \"I don't believe I know much about that.\"", "Nothing but the best. Wine, women, song, food, entertainment. The\n works. But nothing but the best.\nTo start off, he dressed with great care in the honorable\n retirement-rank suit he had so recently purchased. His space pin he\n attached carefully to the lapel. That was a good beginning, he decided.\n A bit of prestige didn't hurt you when you went out on the town. In\n the Ultrawelfare State hardly one person in a hundred actually ever\n performed anything of value to society. The efforts of most weren't\n needed. Those few who did contribute were awarded honors, decorations,\n titles.\n\n\n Attired satisfactorily, Si double-checked to see that his credit\n card was in his pocket. As an after-thought, he went over to the\n auto-apartment's teevee-phone, flicked it on, held the card to the\n screen and said, \"Balance check, please.\"", "Thus, Si was vaguely aware, it had always been down through the\n centuries since the Phoenecian sailor, back from his year-long trip to\n the tin mines of Cornwall, blew his hard earned share of the voyage's\n profits in a matter of days in the wine shops of Tyre. Nobody gets\n quite so little for his money as that loneliest of all workers, he who\n must leave his home for distant lands, returning only periodically and\n usually with the salary of lengthy, weary periods of time to be spent\n hurriedly in an attempt to achieve the pleasure and happiness so long\n denied him.\n\n\n Si was going to do it differently this time." ] ]
train	61405	[ "What does the narrator say is significant about horses?", "It is suggested that which of the following happens to Jimmy D? ", "What is the name of the pilot who flies Mia’s scoutship and how does she characterize his piloting style?", "What is a Mud-eater? ", "What does the narrator say was the reason for Earth’s destruction? \n\n", "What does Mia discover about the people of the planet Tintera and why does it scare her? \n\n", "Explain Mia’s reasons for referring to herself as “hell on wheels.” What is an example of this? \n\n\n\n", "How many years has it been since Mia’s people had contact with Tintera?", "What is the implied name of the green creatures Horst and his gang are herding? \n\n", "What is Mia’s relationship to Jimmy D. and how does it develop throughout the story? " ]	[ [ "Horses are a nuisance and make it hard for both colonists and scouts to get their jobs done. \n\n", "Horses make it easy for criminals to conduct their business planet to planet . ", "Horses are the reason for the colonies’ success.", "Horses are the reason for the catastrophe suffered on Earth. " ], [ "Jimmy D is killed by the bandits.", "Jimmy D refuses to help Mia, even though she wishes for him. ", "Jimmy D ends up in jail.", "Jimmy D finds Mia and helps her." ], [ "Venie Morlock. His style twists the stomach", "George Fuhonin. His style drops the stomach out of everybody. \n\n", "Jimmy D. His style is smart on the slap ", "Horst. His style is beneath the notice of a Losel" ], [ "A derogatory term for a farmer", "A derogatory term for a person who lives on a planet, instead of in space", "A derogatory term for a person whose job it is to herd Losels", "A derogatory term for a person who breeds without restraint " ], [ "Losels ", "Over population ", "Lack of horses ", "Crime " ], [ "The Tinterans are free birthers. Free birthing is breeding without restraint, which is how the Earth became over populated. This is what catalyzed the wars that eventually destroyed the solar system.", "The Tinterans have begun exploiting Losels for labor, which is against the laws of The Council. Mia knows she will have to report this back to the council, and that this will foster hostility between the scouts and the Tinterans. \n\n", "The Tinterans have learned how to build a space ship. Successfully launching a ship means that they are now a threat to the people who live in space, like Mia.\n\n", "The Tinterans know that scouts have invaded their planet, and are planning to round them up and put them in jail. " ], [ "Mia is fast. An example of this is when Mia rode Ninc away from the free breeders as fast as she could. \n\n", "Mia is frightened. An example of this is when she was approached by Horst and his gang for the second time, which scared her to the point of losing control of her mission. ", "Mia is mean. An example of this is when she refused to agree to partner up with Jimmy after they returned from their mission. ", "Mia is tough. An example of this is when she was able to strong arm her way out of trouble with Horst and his gang." ], [ "50", "200", "1000", "150" ], [ "Free Birthers", "Slims", "Squat Plodders ", "Losels" ], [ "Jimmy D. is Mia’s fellow scout. At first, Mia describes their relationship as turbulent, complaining that Jimmy always asks her to be his partner even though she’s already partners with Venie Morlock. However, when Jimmy is arrested during their mission on Tintera, Mia agrees to be his partner out of pity. \n\n", "Jimmy D. is Mia’s partner. At first, Mia describes their relationship as efficient and workable. But when competition around being the best colony scout come up, things start to change. Their partnership falls apart during their scout mission to Tintera, when Jimmy is arrested and jailed. ", "Jimmy D. is Mia’s soon to be partner. At first, Mia describes Jimmy as “a meatball,” suggesting that Jimmy is goofy and won’t prove to be a satisfactory partner. However, when Jimmy shows his smarts by saveing Mia from Horst and his grizzly gang, Mia realizes he will be a good partner after all. \n\n", "Jimmy D. is Mia’s fellow scout. At first, Mia describes how they butt heads a lot due to differences in their personalities. But as Mia begins to face the trials of her mission, she comes to miss Jimmy, wishing that Jimmy could be there with her and provide a little help. \n\n" ] ]	[ 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 1, 4, 4, 4, 4 ]	[ 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "On the third day, I found the road. I brought Ninc down off the\n hillside, losing sight of the road in the trees, and then reaching\n it in the level below. It was narrow and made of sand spread over a\n hard base. Out of the marks in the sand, I could pick out the tracks\n of horses and both narrow and wide wheels. Other tracks I couldn't\n identify.\n\n\n One of the smartest moves in history was to include horses when\n they dropped the colonies. I say \"they\" because, while we did the\n actual dropping, the idea originated with the whole evac plan back on\n Earth. Considering how short a time it was in which the colonies were\n established, there was not time to set up industry, so they had to have\n draft animals.", "The first of the Great Ships was finished in 2025. One of the eight,\n as well as the two that were being built then, went up with everything\n else in the Solar System in 2041. In that sixteen years 112 colonies\n were planted. I don't know how many of those planets had animals that\ncould\nhave been substituted but, even if they had, they would have\n had to be domesticated from scratch. That would have been stupid. I'll\n bet that half the colonies would have failed if they hadn't had horses.\nWe'd come in from the west over the ocean, so I traveled east on the\n road. That much water makes me nervous, and roads have to go somewhere.\n\n\n I came on my first travelers three hours later. I rounded a tree-lined\n bend, ducking an overhanging branch, and pulled Ninc to a stop. There\n were five men on horseback herding a bunch of the ugliest creatures\n alive.", "They were green and grotesque. They had squat bodies, long limbs and\n knobby bulges at their joints. They had square, flat animal masks for\n faces. But they walked on their hind legs and they had paws that were\n almost hands, and that was enough to make them seem almost human. They\n made a wordless, chilling, lowing sound as they milled and plodded\n along.\n\n\n I started Ninc up again and moved slowly to catch up with them. All the\n men on horseback had guns in saddle boots. They looked as nervous as\n cats with kittens. One of them had a string of packhorses on a line\n and he saw me and called to another who seemed to be the leader. That\n one wheeled his black horse and rode back toward me.", "\"He be awfully small, Horst. I doubt me a Losel'd even notice him at\n all. We mought as well throw him back again.\"\n\n\n The rider looked at me. When I didn't dissolve in terror as he\n expected, he shrugged and one of the other men laughed.\n\n\n The hard man said to the others, \"This boy will be riding along with us\n to Forton for protection.\"\n\n\n I looked down at the plodding, unhappy creatures they were driving\n along and one looked back at me with dull, expressionless golden eyes.\n I felt uncomfortable.\n\n\n I said, \"I don't think so.\"\n\n\n What the man did then surprised me. He said, \"I do think so,\" and\n reached for the rifle in his saddle boot.", "\"Shut up,\" I said, in as mean a voice as I could muster, and he did. It\n surprised me. I didn't think I sounded\nthat\nmean. I decided he just\n didn't trust the crazy kid not to shoot.\n\n\n After twenty minutes of easy riding for us and hard walking for the\n creatures, I said, \"If you want your rifles, you can go back and get\n them now.\" I dug my heels into Ninc's sides and rode on. At the next\n bend I looked back and saw four of them holding their packhorses and\n the creatures still while one beat a dust-raising retreat down the road.\n\n\n I put this episode in the \"file and hold for analysis\" section in my\n mind and rode on, feeling good. I think I even giggled once. Sometimes\n I even convince myself that I'm hell on wheels.\nIII", "The one I'd dropped the saddle on came up then. The others were putting\n the animals in the pen. He started to kick me, but Horst stopped him.\n\n\n \"No,\" he said. \"Look through the kid's gear, bring the horse and what\n we can use.\"\n\n\n The other one didn't move. \"Get going, Jack,\" Horst said in a menacing\n tone and they stood toe to toe for a long moment before Jack finally\n backed down. It seemed to me that Horst wasn't so much objecting to me\n being kicked, but was rather establishing who did the kicking in his\n bunch.\n\n\n But I wasn't done yet. I was scared, but I still had the pistol under\n my jacket.\n\n\n Horst turned back to me and I said, \"You can't do this and get away\n with it.\"", "He was a middle-aged man, maybe as old as my Daddy. He was large and he\n had a hard face. Normal enough, but hard. He pulled to a halt when we\n reached each other, but I kept going. He had to come around and follow\n me. I believe in judging a person by his face. A man can't help the\n face he owns, but he can help the expression he wears on it. If a man\n looks mean, I generally believe that he is. This one looked mean. That\n was why I kept riding.\n\n\n He said, \"What be you doing out here, boy? Be you out of your head?\n There be escaped Losels in these woods.\"\n\n\n I told you I hadn't finished filling out yet, but I hadn't thought it\n was that bad. I wasn't ready to make a fight over the point, though.\n Generally, I can't keep my bloody mouth shut, but now I didn't say\n anything. It seemed smart.", "I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be\n found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes.\n Venie Morlock has got a crush on Jimmy D., and when she saw me start\n getting ready to go, she began to check her gear, too. At our next\n landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. It didn't\n have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the\n bad moment any longer.\n\n\n The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird,\n and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the\n color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last.\nII", "I set up camp and ate my dinner. In the wagon closest to me were a man,\n his wife and their three children. The kids were running around and\n playing, and one of them ran close to the high-walled pen. His father\n came and pulled him away.\n\n\n The kids weren't to blame for their parents, but when one of them said\n hello to me, I didn't even answer. I know how lousy I would feel if I\n had two or three brothers and sisters, but it didn't strike me until\n that moment that it wouldn't even seem out of the ordinary to these\n kids. Isn't that horrible?\n\n\n About the time I finished eating, and before it grew dark, the old man\n I had seen earlier in the day drove his wagon in. He fascinated me. He\n had white hair, something I had read about in stories but had never\n seen before.", "I should have known that they would have to pen the animals up for the\n night. I should have used my head. I hadn't and now it was time to take\n leave.\n\n\n I never got the chance.\nI was just heaving the saddle up on Ninc when I felt a hand on my\n shoulder and I was swung around.\n\n\n \"Well, well. Horst, look who we have here,\" he called. It was the one\n who'd made the joke about me being beneath the notice of a Losel. He\n was alone with me now, but with that call the others would be up fast.\n\n\n I brought the saddle around as hard as I could and then up, and he\n went down. He started to get up again, so I dropped the saddle on him\n and reached inside my jacket for my gun. Somebody grabbed me then from\n behind and pinned my arms to my side.", "I passed two crossroads and started to meet more people, but nobody\n questioned me. I met people on horseback, and twice I met trucks moving\n silently past. And I overtook a wagon driven by the oldest man I've\n seen in my life. He waved to me, and I waved back.\n\n\n Near the end of the afternoon I came to the town, and there I received\n a jolt that sickened me.\n\n\n By the time I came out on the other side, I was sick. My hands were\n cold and sweaty and my head was spinning, and I wanted to kick Ninc to\n a gallop.\n\n\n I rode slowly in, looking all around, missing nothing. The town was all\n stone, wood and brick. Out of date. Out of time, really. There were\n no machines more complicated than the trucks I'd seen earlier. At the\n edge of town, I passed a newspaper office with a headline pasted in the\n window—INVASION! I remember that. I wondered about it.", "Horst stalked over and got the signal. He dropped it on the ground and\n said in a voice far colder than mine could ever be, because it was\n natural and mine wasn't, \"The piece be yours.\" Then he tromped on it\n until it cracked and fell apart.\n\n\n Then he said, \"Pull a gun on me twice. Twice.\" He slapped me so hard\n that my ears rang. \"You dirty little punk.\"\n\n\n I said calmly, \"You big louse.\"\n\n\n It was a time I would have done better to keep my mouth shut. All I can\n remember is a flash of pain as his fist crunched against the side of my\n face and then nothing.\n\n\n Brains are no good if you don't use them.", "He said, \"Look, boy. You may not know it, but you be in a lot of\n trouble. So don't give me a hard time.\"\n\n\n He still thought I was a boy. It was not time to correct him, but I\n didn't like to see the point go unchallenged. It was unflattering.\n\n\n \"The courts won't let you get away with this,\" I said. I'd passed\n a courthouse in the town with a carved motto over the doors: EQUAL\n JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW or TRUTH OUR SHIELD AND JUSTICE OUR SWORD or\n something stuffy like that.\n\n\n He laughed, not a phony, villian-type laugh, but a real laugh, so I\n knew I'd goofed.", "The old man had just finished and they were starting to drag the kids\n off to bed when there was a commotion on the road at the edge of the\n camp. I looked but my eyes were adjusted to the light of the fire and I\n couldn't see far into the dark.\n\n\n A voice there said, \"I'll be damned if I'll take another day like this\n one, Horst. We should have been here hours ago. It be your fault we're\n not.\"\n\n\n Horst growled a retort. I decided that it was time for me to leave the\n campfire. I got up and eased away as Horst and his men came up to the\n fire, and cut back to where Ninc was parked. I grabbed up my blankets\n and mattress and started to roll them up. I had a pretty good idea now\n what they used the high-walled pen for.", "There were sixteen of us girls and thirteen boys. We took our places\n in the seats in the center of the scout. Riggy Allen made a joke that\n nobody bothered to laugh at, and then we were all silent. I was feeling\n lost and just beginning to enjoy it when Jimmy Dentremont came over to\n me. He's red-headed and has a face that makes him look about ten. An\n intelligent runt like me.\n\n\n He said what I expected. \"Mia, do you want to go partners if we can get\n together when we get down?\"\n\n\n I guess he thought that because we were always matched on study I liked\n him. Well, I did when I wasn't mad at him, but now I had that crack\n he'd made about being a snob in mind, so I said, \"Not likely. I want to\n come back alive.\" It wasn't fair, but it was a good crack and he went\n back to his place without saying anything.", "But I looked most closely at the people. In all that town, I didn't\n see one girl over ten years old and no grown-up women at all. There\n were little kids, there were boys and there were men, but no girls. All\n the boys and men wore pants, and so did I, which must have been why\n Horst and his buddies assumed I was a boy. It wasn't flattering; but\n I decided I'd not tell anybody different until I found what made the\n clocks tick on this planet.", "I opened my mouth to scream—I have a good scream—but a rough smelly\n hand clamped down over it before I had a chance to get more than a\n lungful of air. I bit down hard—5000 lbs. psi, I'm told—but he\n didn't let me go. I started to kick, but Horst jerked me off my feet\n and dragged me off.\n\n\n When we were behind the pen and out of earshot of the fire, he stopped\n dragging me and dropped me in a heap. \"Make any noise,\" he said, \"and\n I'll hurt you.\"\n\n\n That was a silly way to put it, but somehow it said more than if he'd\n threatened to break my arm or my head. It left him a latitude of things\n to do if he pleased. He examined his hand. There was enough moonlight\n for that. \"I ought to club you anyway,\" he said.", "When I was nine, my Daddy gave me a painted wooden doll that my\n great-grandmother brought from Earth. The thing is that inside it,\n nestled one in another, are eleven more dolls, each one smaller than\n the last. I like to watch people when they open it for the first time.\n\n\n My face must have been like that as I rode along the road.\n\n\n The country leveled into a great rolling valley and the trees gave\n way to great farms and fields. In the fields, working, were some of\n the green creatures, which surprised me since the ones I'd seen before\n hadn't seemed smart enough to count to one, let alone do any work.\n\n\n But it relieved me. I thought they might have been eating them or\n something.", "\"Boy, boy. Don't talk about the courts. I be doing you a favor. I be\n taking what I can use of your gear, but I be letting you go. You go to\n court and they'll take everything and lock you up besides. I be leaving\n you your freedom.\"\n\n\n \"Why would they be doing that?\" I asked. I slipped my hand under my\n jacket.\n\n\n \"Every time you open your mouth you shout that you be off one of the\n Ships,\" Horst said. \"That be enough. They already have one of you brats\n in jail in Forton.\"\n\n\n I was about to bring my gun out when up came Jack leading Ninc, with\n all my stuff loaded on. I mentally thanked him.\n\n\n He said, \"The kid's got some good equipment. But I can't make out what\n this be for.\" He held out my pickup signal.", "Horst looked at it, then handed it back. \"Throw it away,\" he said.\n\n\n I leveled my gun at them—Hell on Wheels strikes again! I said, \"Hand\n that over to me.\"\n\n\n Horst made a disgusted sound.\n\n\n \"Don't make any noise,\" I said, \"or you'll fry. Now hand it over.\"\n\n\n I stowed it away, then paused with one hand on the leather horn of the\n saddle. \"What's the name of the kid in jail in Forton.\"\n\n\n \"I can't remember,\" he said. \"But it be coming to me. Hold on.\"\n\n\n I waited. Then suddenly my arm was hit a numbing blow from behind\n and the gun went flying. Jack pounced after it and Horst said, \"Good\n enough,\" to the others who'd come up behind me.\n\n\n I felt like a fool." ], [ "I let him run for almost a mile before I pulled him down to a walk\n again. I couldn't help wishing for Jimmy D. Whatever else he is, he's\n smart and brains I needed.\n\n\n How do you find out what's going on? Eavesdrop? That's a lousy method.\n For one thing, people can't be depended on to talk about the things you\n want to hear. For another, you're likely to get caught. Ask somebody?\n Who? Make the mistake of bracing a fellow like Horst and you might wind\n up with a sore head and an empty pocket. The best thing I could think\n of was to find a library, but that might be a job.", "I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be\n found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes.\n Venie Morlock has got a crush on Jimmy D., and when she saw me start\n getting ready to go, she began to check her gear, too. At our next\n landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. It didn't\n have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the\n bad moment any longer.\n\n\n The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird,\n and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the\n color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last.\nII", "There were sixteen of us girls and thirteen boys. We took our places\n in the seats in the center of the scout. Riggy Allen made a joke that\n nobody bothered to laugh at, and then we were all silent. I was feeling\n lost and just beginning to enjoy it when Jimmy Dentremont came over to\n me. He's red-headed and has a face that makes him look about ten. An\n intelligent runt like me.\n\n\n He said what I expected. \"Mia, do you want to go partners if we can get\n together when we get down?\"\n\n\n I guess he thought that because we were always matched on study I liked\n him. Well, I did when I wasn't mad at him, but now I had that crack\n he'd made about being a snob in mind, so I said, \"Not likely. I want to\n come back alive.\" It wasn't fair, but it was a good crack and he went\n back to his place without saying anything.", "Horst stalked over and got the signal. He dropped it on the ground and\n said in a voice far colder than mine could ever be, because it was\n natural and mine wasn't, \"The piece be yours.\" Then he tromped on it\n until it cracked and fell apart.\n\n\n Then he said, \"Pull a gun on me twice. Twice.\" He slapped me so hard\n that my ears rang. \"You dirty little punk.\"\n\n\n I said calmly, \"You big louse.\"\n\n\n It was a time I would have done better to keep my mouth shut. All I can\n remember is a flash of pain as his fist crunched against the side of my\n face and then nothing.\n\n\n Brains are no good if you don't use them.", "The first night was hell, I guess because I'm not used to having the\n lights out. That's when you really start to feel lonely, being alone in\n the dark. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach\n if it's really going to come back. But I lived through it—one day in\n thirty gone.\n\n\n I rode in a spiral search pattern during the next two days. I had three\n things in mind—stay alive, find people and find some of the others.\n The first was automatic. The second was to find out if there was a slot\n I could fit into for a month. If not, I would have to find a place to\n camp out, as nasty as that would be. The third was to join forces,\n though not with that meatball Jimmy D.\n\n\n No, he isn't really a meatball. The trouble is that I don't take\n nothing from nobody, especially him, and he doesn't take nothing from\n nobody, especially me. So we do a lot of fighting.", "He was a middle-aged man, maybe as old as my Daddy. He was large and he\n had a hard face. Normal enough, but hard. He pulled to a halt when we\n reached each other, but I kept going. He had to come around and follow\n me. I believe in judging a person by his face. A man can't help the\n face he owns, but he can help the expression he wears on it. If a man\n looks mean, I generally believe that he is. This one looked mean. That\n was why I kept riding.\n\n\n He said, \"What be you doing out here, boy? Be you out of your head?\n There be escaped Losels in these woods.\"\n\n\n I told you I hadn't finished filling out yet, but I hadn't thought it\n was that bad. I wasn't ready to make a fight over the point, though.\n Generally, I can't keep my bloody mouth shut, but now I didn't say\n anything. It seemed smart.", "My name is Mia Havero. I'm fourteen, of course, or I wouldn't be\n telling this. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that\n scrawniness to last much longer. Mother is very good looking. In the\n meantime, I've got brains as a consolation.\n\n\n After we were all settled, George Fuhonin, the pilot, raised the ramps.\n We sat there for five minutes while they bled air out of our tube and\n then we just ... dropped. My stomach turned flips. We didn't have to\n leave that way, but George thinks it's fun to be a hot pilot.\n\n\n Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. He's\n the only competition I have my own age. The trouble is, you don't go\n partners with the competition, do you? Besides, there was still that\n crack about being a snob.", "I opened my mouth to scream—I have a good scream—but a rough smelly\n hand clamped down over it before I had a chance to get more than a\n lungful of air. I bit down hard—5000 lbs. psi, I'm told—but he\n didn't let me go. I started to kick, but Horst jerked me off my feet\n and dragged me off.\n\n\n When we were behind the pen and out of earshot of the fire, he stopped\n dragging me and dropped me in a heap. \"Make any noise,\" he said, \"and\n I'll hurt you.\"\n\n\n That was a silly way to put it, but somehow it said more than if he'd\n threatened to break my arm or my head. It left him a latitude of things\n to do if he pleased. He examined his hand. There was enough moonlight\n for that. \"I ought to club you anyway,\" he said.", "He said, \"Look, boy. You may not know it, but you be in a lot of\n trouble. So don't give me a hard time.\"\n\n\n He still thought I was a boy. It was not time to correct him, but I\n didn't like to see the point go unchallenged. It was unflattering.\n\n\n \"The courts won't let you get away with this,\" I said. I'd passed\n a courthouse in the town with a carved motto over the doors: EQUAL\n JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW or TRUTH OUR SHIELD AND JUSTICE OUR SWORD or\n something stuffy like that.\n\n\n He laughed, not a phony, villian-type laugh, but a real laugh, so I\n knew I'd goofed.", "When we reached Tintera, they started dropping us. We swung over the\n sea from the morning side and then dropped low over gray-green forested\n hills. Finally George spotted a clear area and dropped into it. They\n don't care what order you go in, so Jimmy D. jumped up, grabbed his\n gear and then led his horse down the ramp. I think he was still\n smarting from the slap I'd given him.\n\n\n In a minute we were airborne again. I wondered if I would ever see\n Jimmy—if he would get back alive.\n\n\n It's no game we play. When we turn fourteen, they drop us on the\n nearest colonized planet and come back one month later. That may sound\n like fun to you, but a lot of us never come back alive.", "Horst looked at it, then handed it back. \"Throw it away,\" he said.\n\n\n I leveled my gun at them—Hell on Wheels strikes again! I said, \"Hand\n that over to me.\"\n\n\n Horst made a disgusted sound.\n\n\n \"Don't make any noise,\" I said, \"or you'll fry. Now hand it over.\"\n\n\n I stowed it away, then paused with one hand on the leather horn of the\n saddle. \"What's the name of the kid in jail in Forton.\"\n\n\n \"I can't remember,\" he said. \"But it be coming to me. Hold on.\"\n\n\n I waited. Then suddenly my arm was hit a numbing blow from behind\n and the gun went flying. Jack pounced after it and Horst said, \"Good\n enough,\" to the others who'd come up behind me.\n\n\n I felt like a fool.", "I should have known that they would have to pen the animals up for the\n night. I should have used my head. I hadn't and now it was time to take\n leave.\n\n\n I never got the chance.\nI was just heaving the saddle up on Ninc when I felt a hand on my\n shoulder and I was swung around.\n\n\n \"Well, well. Horst, look who we have here,\" he called. It was the one\n who'd made the joke about me being beneath the notice of a Losel. He\n was alone with me now, but with that call the others would be up fast.\n\n\n I brought the saddle around as hard as I could and then up, and he\n went down. He started to get up again, so I dropped the saddle on him\n and reached inside my jacket for my gun. Somebody grabbed me then from\n behind and pinned my arms to my side.", "\"He be awfully small, Horst. I doubt me a Losel'd even notice him at\n all. We mought as well throw him back again.\"\n\n\n The rider looked at me. When I didn't dissolve in terror as he\n expected, he shrugged and one of the other men laughed.\n\n\n The hard man said to the others, \"This boy will be riding along with us\n to Forton for protection.\"\n\n\n I looked down at the plodding, unhappy creatures they were driving\n along and one looked back at me with dull, expressionless golden eyes.\n I felt uncomfortable.\n\n\n I said, \"I don't think so.\"\n\n\n What the man did then surprised me. He said, \"I do think so,\" and\n reached for the rifle in his saddle boot.", "I passed two crossroads and started to meet more people, but nobody\n questioned me. I met people on horseback, and twice I met trucks moving\n silently past. And I overtook a wagon driven by the oldest man I've\n seen in my life. He waved to me, and I waved back.\n\n\n Near the end of the afternoon I came to the town, and there I received\n a jolt that sickened me.\n\n\n By the time I came out on the other side, I was sick. My hands were\n cold and sweaty and my head was spinning, and I wanted to kick Ninc to\n a gallop.\n\n\n I rode slowly in, looking all around, missing nothing. The town was all\n stone, wood and brick. Out of date. Out of time, really. There were\n no machines more complicated than the trucks I'd seen earlier. At the\n edge of town, I passed a newspaper office with a headline pasted in the\n window—INVASION! I remember that. I wondered about it.", "The one I'd dropped the saddle on came up then. The others were putting\n the animals in the pen. He started to kick me, but Horst stopped him.\n\n\n \"No,\" he said. \"Look through the kid's gear, bring the horse and what\n we can use.\"\n\n\n The other one didn't move. \"Get going, Jack,\" Horst said in a menacing\n tone and they stood toe to toe for a long moment before Jack finally\n backed down. It seemed to me that Horst wasn't so much objecting to me\n being kicked, but was rather establishing who did the kicking in his\n bunch.\n\n\n But I wasn't done yet. I was scared, but I still had the pistol under\n my jacket.\n\n\n Horst turned back to me and I said, \"You can't do this and get away\n with it.\"", "I set up camp and ate my dinner. In the wagon closest to me were a man,\n his wife and their three children. The kids were running around and\n playing, and one of them ran close to the high-walled pen. His father\n came and pulled him away.\n\n\n The kids weren't to blame for their parents, but when one of them said\n hello to me, I didn't even answer. I know how lousy I would feel if I\n had two or three brothers and sisters, but it didn't strike me until\n that moment that it wouldn't even seem out of the ordinary to these\n kids. Isn't that horrible?\n\n\n About the time I finished eating, and before it grew dark, the old man\n I had seen earlier in the day drove his wagon in. He fascinated me. He\n had white hair, something I had read about in stories but had never\n seen before.", "The old man had just finished and they were starting to drag the kids\n off to bed when there was a commotion on the road at the edge of the\n camp. I looked but my eyes were adjusted to the light of the fire and I\n couldn't see far into the dark.\n\n\n A voice there said, \"I'll be damned if I'll take another day like this\n one, Horst. We should have been here hours ago. It be your fault we're\n not.\"\n\n\n Horst growled a retort. I decided that it was time for me to leave the\n campfire. I got up and eased away as Horst and his men came up to the\n fire, and cut back to where Ninc was parked. I grabbed up my blankets\n and mattress and started to roll them up. I had a pretty good idea now\n what they used the high-walled pen for.", "Don't think I was helpless. I'm hell on wheels. They don't let us grow\n for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They prepare us. They\n do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time\n you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to\n the Ship. There's sense behind it. It means that everybody on the Ship\n is a person who can take care of himself if he has to. Daddy says that\n something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population\n from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. And it helps to\n keep the population steady.", "\"Shut up,\" I said, in as mean a voice as I could muster, and he did. It\n surprised me. I didn't think I sounded\nthat\nmean. I decided he just\n didn't trust the crazy kid not to shoot.\n\n\n After twenty minutes of easy riding for us and hard walking for the\n creatures, I said, \"If you want your rifles, you can go back and get\n them now.\" I dug my heels into Ninc's sides and rode on. At the next\n bend I looked back and saw four of them holding their packhorses and\n the creatures still while one beat a dust-raising retreat down the road.\n\n\n I put this episode in the \"file and hold for analysis\" section in my\n mind and rode on, feeling good. I think I even giggled once. Sometimes\n I even convince myself that I'm hell on wheels.\nIII", "I whipped my sonic pistol out so fast that he was caught leaning over\n with the rifle half out. His jaw dropped. He knew what I held and he\n didn't want to be fried.\n\n\n I said, \"Ease your rifles out and drop them gently to the ground.\"\n\n\n They did, watching me all the while with wary expressions.\n\n\n When all the rifles were on the ground, I said, \"All right, let's go.\"\n\n\n They didn't want to move. They didn't want to leave the rifles. I\n could see that. Horst didn't say anything. He just watched me with\n narrowed eyes. But one of the others held up a hand and in wheedling\n tones said, \"Look here, kid....\"" ], [ "My name is Mia Havero. I'm fourteen, of course, or I wouldn't be\n telling this. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that\n scrawniness to last much longer. Mother is very good looking. In the\n meantime, I've got brains as a consolation.\n\n\n After we were all settled, George Fuhonin, the pilot, raised the ramps.\n We sat there for five minutes while they bled air out of our tube and\n then we just ... dropped. My stomach turned flips. We didn't have to\n leave that way, but George thinks it's fun to be a hot pilot.\n\n\n Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. He's\n the only competition I have my own age. The trouble is, you don't go\n partners with the competition, do you? Besides, there was still that\n crack about being a snob.", "The ship swung around until it was coming back on a path almost over my\n head, going in the same direction. Then it went into a slip and started\n bucking so hard that I knew this wasn't hot piloting at all, just plain\n idiot stutter-fingered stupidity at the controls. As it skidded by me\n overhead, I got a good look at it and knew that it wasn't one of ours.\n Not too different, but not ours.\nOne more enigma. Where was it from? Not here. Even if you know how, and\n we wouldn't tell these Mud-eaters how, a scoutship is something that\n takes an advanced technology to build.\nI felt defeated and tired. Not much farther along the road, I came to\n a campsite with two wagons pulled in for the night, and I couldn't\n help but pull in myself. The campsite was large and had two permanent\n buildings on it. One was a well enclosure and the other was little more\n than a high-walled pen. It didn't even have a roof.", "I'd had two bad shocks on this day, but they weren't the last. In the\n late afternoon, when the sun was starting to sink and a cool wind was\n starting to ripple the tree leaves, I saw the scoutship high in the\n sky. The dying sun colored it a deep red. Back again? I wondered what\n had gone wrong.\n\n\n I reached down into my saddlebag and brought out my contact signal.\n The scoutship swung up in the sky in a familiar movement calculated to\n drop the stomach out of everybody aboard. George Fuhonin's style. I\n triggered the signal, my heart turning flips all the while. I didn't\n know why he was back, but I wasn't really sorry.", "I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be\n found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes.\n Venie Morlock has got a crush on Jimmy D., and when she saw me start\n getting ready to go, she began to check her gear, too. At our next\n landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. It didn't\n have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the\n bad moment any longer.\n\n\n The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird,\n and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the\n color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last.\nII", "There were sixteen of us girls and thirteen boys. We took our places\n in the seats in the center of the scout. Riggy Allen made a joke that\n nobody bothered to laugh at, and then we were all silent. I was feeling\n lost and just beginning to enjoy it when Jimmy Dentremont came over to\n me. He's red-headed and has a face that makes him look about ten. An\n intelligent runt like me.\n\n\n He said what I expected. \"Mia, do you want to go partners if we can get\n together when we get down?\"\n\n\n I guess he thought that because we were always matched on study I liked\n him. Well, I did when I wasn't mad at him, but now I had that crack\n he'd made about being a snob in mind, so I said, \"Not likely. I want to\n come back alive.\" It wasn't fair, but it was a good crack and he went\n back to his place without saying anything.", "The gravity is always wrong, for one thing. Either your arches and\n calves ache or every time you step you think you're going to trip on\n a piece of fluff and break your neck. There are vegetables everywhere\n and little grubby things just looking for\nyou\nto crawl on. If you\n can think of anything creepier than that, you've got a real nasty\n imagination. Worst of all, planets stink. Every single one smells—I've\n been on enough to know that. A planet is all right for a Mud-eater, but\n not for me.\n\n\n We have a place in the Ship like that—the Third Level—but it's only a\n thousand square miles and any time it gets on your nerves you can go up\n a level or down a level and be back in civilization.", "\"Boy, boy. Don't talk about the courts. I be doing you a favor. I be\n taking what I can use of your gear, but I be letting you go. You go to\n court and they'll take everything and lock you up besides. I be leaving\n you your freedom.\"\n\n\n \"Why would they be doing that?\" I asked. I slipped my hand under my\n jacket.\n\n\n \"Every time you open your mouth you shout that you be off one of the\n Ships,\" Horst said. \"That be enough. They already have one of you brats\n in jail in Forton.\"\n\n\n I was about to bring my gun out when up came Jack leading Ninc, with\n all my stuff loaded on. I mentally thanked him.\n\n\n He said, \"The kid's got some good equipment. But I can't make out what\n this be for.\" He held out my pickup signal.", "I am lucky. My great-great-grandparents were among those who had enough\n foresight to see what was coming. If it hadn't been for them and some\n others like them, there wouldn't be any humans left anywhere. And I\n wouldn't be here. That may not scare you, but it scares me.\n\n\n What happened before, when people didn't use their heads and wound up\n blowing the Solar System apart, is something nobody should forget. The\n older people don't let us forget. But these people had, and that the\n Council should know.\n\n\n For the first time since I landed on Tintera, I felt\nreally\nfrightened. There was too much going on that I didn't understand. I\n felt a blind urge to get away, and when I reached the edge of town, I\n whomped Ninc a good one and gave him his head.", "DOWN TO THE WORLDS OF MEN\nBY ALEXEI PANSHIN\nThe ancient rule was sink or swim—swim\n\n in the miasma of a planet without\n\n spaceflight, or sink to utter destruction!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI\n\n\n The horses and packs were loaded before we went aboard the scoutship.\n The scout bay is no more than a great oversized airlock with a dozen\n small ships squatting over their tubes, but it was the last of the Ship\n that I might ever see, so I took a long final look from the top of the\n ramp.", "When we reached Tintera, they started dropping us. We swung over the\n sea from the morning side and then dropped low over gray-green forested\n hills. Finally George spotted a clear area and dropped into it. They\n don't care what order you go in, so Jimmy D. jumped up, grabbed his\n gear and then led his horse down the ramp. I think he was still\n smarting from the slap I'd given him.\n\n\n In a minute we were airborne again. I wondered if I would ever see\n Jimmy—if he would get back alive.\n\n\n It's no game we play. When we turn fourteen, they drop us on the\n nearest colonized planet and come back one month later. That may sound\n like fun to you, but a lot of us never come back alive.", "\"Where be you from?\" he asked.\n\n\n I pointed to the road behind us.\n\n\n \"And where be you going?\"\n\n\n I pointed ahead. No other way to go.\n\n\n He seemed exasperated. I have that effect sometimes. Even on Mother and\n Daddy, who should know better.\n\n\n We were coming up on the others now, and the man said, \"Maybe you'd\n better ride on from here with us. For protection.\"\n\n\n He had an odd way of twisting his sounds, almost as though he had a\n mouthful of mush. I wondered whether he were just an oddball or whether\n everybody here spoke the same way. I'd never heard International\n English spoken any way but one, even on the planet Daddy made me visit\n with him.\n\n\n One of the other outriders came easing by then. I suppose they'd been\n watching us all the while. He called to the hard man.", "I felt like crawling in a corner of the ship and crying, but nobody\n else was breaking down, so I didn't. I did feel miserable. I cried when\n I said good-by to Mother and Daddy—a real emotional scene—but that\n wasn't in public.\nIt wasn't the chance of not coming back that bothered me really,\n because I never believed that I wouldn't. The thought that made me\n unhappy was that I would have to be on a planet for a whole month.\n Planets make me feel wretched.", "The first night was hell, I guess because I'm not used to having the\n lights out. That's when you really start to feel lonely, being alone in\n the dark. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach\n if it's really going to come back. But I lived through it—one day in\n thirty gone.\n\n\n I rode in a spiral search pattern during the next two days. I had three\n things in mind—stay alive, find people and find some of the others.\n The first was automatic. The second was to find out if there was a slot\n I could fit into for a month. If not, I would have to find a place to\n camp out, as nasty as that would be. The third was to join forces,\n though not with that meatball Jimmy D.\n\n\n No, he isn't really a meatball. The trouble is that I don't take\n nothing from nobody, especially him, and he doesn't take nothing from\n nobody, especially me. So we do a lot of fighting.", "The planet chosen for our Trial was called Tintera. The last contact\n the Ship had had with it—and we were the ones who dropped them—was\n almost 150 years ago. No contact since. That had made the Council\n debate a little before they dropped us there, but they decided it was\n all right in the end. It didn't make any practical difference to us\n kids because they never tell you anything about the place they're going\n to drop you. All I knew was the name. I wouldn't have known that much\n if Daddy weren't Chairman of the Council.", "Don't think I was helpless. I'm hell on wheels. They don't let us grow\n for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They prepare us. They\n do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time\n you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to\n the Ship. There's sense behind it. It means that everybody on the Ship\n is a person who can take care of himself if he has to. Daddy says that\n something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population\n from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. And it helps to\n keep the population steady.", "\"Shut up,\" I said, in as mean a voice as I could muster, and he did. It\n surprised me. I didn't think I sounded\nthat\nmean. I decided he just\n didn't trust the crazy kid not to shoot.\n\n\n After twenty minutes of easy riding for us and hard walking for the\n creatures, I said, \"If you want your rifles, you can go back and get\n them now.\" I dug my heels into Ninc's sides and rode on. At the next\n bend I looked back and saw four of them holding their packhorses and\n the creatures still while one beat a dust-raising retreat down the road.\n\n\n I put this episode in the \"file and hold for analysis\" section in my\n mind and rode on, feeling good. I think I even giggled once. Sometimes\n I even convince myself that I'm hell on wheels.\nIII", "He was a middle-aged man, maybe as old as my Daddy. He was large and he\n had a hard face. Normal enough, but hard. He pulled to a halt when we\n reached each other, but I kept going. He had to come around and follow\n me. I believe in judging a person by his face. A man can't help the\n face he owns, but he can help the expression he wears on it. If a man\n looks mean, I generally believe that he is. This one looked mean. That\n was why I kept riding.\n\n\n He said, \"What be you doing out here, boy? Be you out of your head?\n There be escaped Losels in these woods.\"\n\n\n I told you I hadn't finished filling out yet, but I hadn't thought it\n was that bad. I wasn't ready to make a fight over the point, though.\n Generally, I can't keep my bloody mouth shut, but now I didn't say\n anything. It seemed smart.", "\"He be awfully small, Horst. I doubt me a Losel'd even notice him at\n all. We mought as well throw him back again.\"\n\n\n The rider looked at me. When I didn't dissolve in terror as he\n expected, he shrugged and one of the other men laughed.\n\n\n The hard man said to the others, \"This boy will be riding along with us\n to Forton for protection.\"\n\n\n I looked down at the plodding, unhappy creatures they were driving\n along and one looked back at me with dull, expressionless golden eyes.\n I felt uncomfortable.\n\n\n I said, \"I don't think so.\"\n\n\n What the man did then surprised me. He said, \"I do think so,\" and\n reached for the rifle in his saddle boot.", "I whipped my sonic pistol out so fast that he was caught leaning over\n with the rifle half out. His jaw dropped. He knew what I held and he\n didn't want to be fried.\n\n\n I said, \"Ease your rifles out and drop them gently to the ground.\"\n\n\n They did, watching me all the while with wary expressions.\n\n\n When all the rifles were on the ground, I said, \"All right, let's go.\"\n\n\n They didn't want to move. They didn't want to leave the rifles. I\n could see that. Horst didn't say anything. He just watched me with\n narrowed eyes. But one of the others held up a hand and in wheedling\n tones said, \"Look here, kid....\"", "I had a good month for Trial. My birthday is in November—too close to\n Year End Holiday for my taste, but this year it was all right. It was\n spring on Tintera, but it was December in the Ship, and after we got\n back we had five days of Holiday to celebrate. It gave me something to\n look forward to.\n\n\n In two days of riding, I ran onto nothing but a few odd-looking\n animals. I shot one small one and ate it. It turned out to taste pretty\n good, though not as good as a slice from Hambone No. 4, to my mind the\n best meat vat on the Ship. I've eaten things so gruey-looking that I\n wondered that anybody had the guts to try them in the first place and\n they've turned out to taste good. And I've seen things that looked good\n that I couldn't keep on my stomach. So I guess I was lucky." ], [ "The gravity is always wrong, for one thing. Either your arches and\n calves ache or every time you step you think you're going to trip on\n a piece of fluff and break your neck. There are vegetables everywhere\n and little grubby things just looking for\nyou\nto crawl on. If you\n can think of anything creepier than that, you've got a real nasty\n imagination. Worst of all, planets stink. Every single one smells—I've\n been on enough to know that. A planet is all right for a Mud-eater, but\n not for me.\n\n\n We have a place in the Ship like that—the Third Level—but it's only a\n thousand square miles and any time it gets on your nerves you can go up\n a level or down a level and be back in civilization.", "He was a middle-aged man, maybe as old as my Daddy. He was large and he\n had a hard face. Normal enough, but hard. He pulled to a halt when we\n reached each other, but I kept going. He had to come around and follow\n me. I believe in judging a person by his face. A man can't help the\n face he owns, but he can help the expression he wears on it. If a man\n looks mean, I generally believe that he is. This one looked mean. That\n was why I kept riding.\n\n\n He said, \"What be you doing out here, boy? Be you out of your head?\n There be escaped Losels in these woods.\"\n\n\n I told you I hadn't finished filling out yet, but I hadn't thought it\n was that bad. I wasn't ready to make a fight over the point, though.\n Generally, I can't keep my bloody mouth shut, but now I didn't say\n anything. It seemed smart.", "They were green and grotesque. They had squat bodies, long limbs and\n knobby bulges at their joints. They had square, flat animal masks for\n faces. But they walked on their hind legs and they had paws that were\n almost hands, and that was enough to make them seem almost human. They\n made a wordless, chilling, lowing sound as they milled and plodded\n along.\n\n\n I started Ninc up again and moved slowly to catch up with them. All the\n men on horseback had guns in saddle boots. They looked as nervous as\n cats with kittens. One of them had a string of packhorses on a line\n and he saw me and called to another who seemed to be the leader. That\n one wheeled his black horse and rode back toward me.", "The ship swung around until it was coming back on a path almost over my\n head, going in the same direction. Then it went into a slip and started\n bucking so hard that I knew this wasn't hot piloting at all, just plain\n idiot stutter-fingered stupidity at the controls. As it skidded by me\n overhead, I got a good look at it and knew that it wasn't one of ours.\n Not too different, but not ours.\nOne more enigma. Where was it from? Not here. Even if you know how, and\n we wouldn't tell these Mud-eaters how, a scoutship is something that\n takes an advanced technology to build.\nI felt defeated and tired. Not much farther along the road, I came to\n a campsite with two wagons pulled in for the night, and I couldn't\n help but pull in myself. The campsite was large and had two permanent\n buildings on it. One was a well enclosure and the other was little more\n than a high-walled pen. It didn't even have a roof.", "\"He be awfully small, Horst. I doubt me a Losel'd even notice him at\n all. We mought as well throw him back again.\"\n\n\n The rider looked at me. When I didn't dissolve in terror as he\n expected, he shrugged and one of the other men laughed.\n\n\n The hard man said to the others, \"This boy will be riding along with us\n to Forton for protection.\"\n\n\n I looked down at the plodding, unhappy creatures they were driving\n along and one looked back at me with dull, expressionless golden eyes.\n I felt uncomfortable.\n\n\n I said, \"I don't think so.\"\n\n\n What the man did then surprised me. He said, \"I do think so,\" and\n reached for the rifle in his saddle boot.", "\"Where be you from?\" he asked.\n\n\n I pointed to the road behind us.\n\n\n \"And where be you going?\"\n\n\n I pointed ahead. No other way to go.\n\n\n He seemed exasperated. I have that effect sometimes. Even on Mother and\n Daddy, who should know better.\n\n\n We were coming up on the others now, and the man said, \"Maybe you'd\n better ride on from here with us. For protection.\"\n\n\n He had an odd way of twisting his sounds, almost as though he had a\n mouthful of mush. I wondered whether he were just an oddball or whether\n everybody here spoke the same way. I'd never heard International\n English spoken any way but one, even on the planet Daddy made me visit\n with him.\n\n\n One of the other outriders came easing by then. I suppose they'd been\n watching us all the while. He called to the hard man.", "My name is Mia Havero. I'm fourteen, of course, or I wouldn't be\n telling this. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that\n scrawniness to last much longer. Mother is very good looking. In the\n meantime, I've got brains as a consolation.\n\n\n After we were all settled, George Fuhonin, the pilot, raised the ramps.\n We sat there for five minutes while they bled air out of our tube and\n then we just ... dropped. My stomach turned flips. We didn't have to\n leave that way, but George thinks it's fun to be a hot pilot.\n\n\n Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. He's\n the only competition I have my own age. The trouble is, you don't go\n partners with the competition, do you? Besides, there was still that\n crack about being a snob.", "I set up camp and ate my dinner. In the wagon closest to me were a man,\n his wife and their three children. The kids were running around and\n playing, and one of them ran close to the high-walled pen. His father\n came and pulled him away.\n\n\n The kids weren't to blame for their parents, but when one of them said\n hello to me, I didn't even answer. I know how lousy I would feel if I\n had two or three brothers and sisters, but it didn't strike me until\n that moment that it wouldn't even seem out of the ordinary to these\n kids. Isn't that horrible?\n\n\n About the time I finished eating, and before it grew dark, the old man\n I had seen earlier in the day drove his wagon in. He fascinated me. He\n had white hair, something I had read about in stories but had never\n seen before.", "\"Shut up,\" I said, in as mean a voice as I could muster, and he did. It\n surprised me. I didn't think I sounded\nthat\nmean. I decided he just\n didn't trust the crazy kid not to shoot.\n\n\n After twenty minutes of easy riding for us and hard walking for the\n creatures, I said, \"If you want your rifles, you can go back and get\n them now.\" I dug my heels into Ninc's sides and rode on. At the next\n bend I looked back and saw four of them holding their packhorses and\n the creatures still while one beat a dust-raising retreat down the road.\n\n\n I put this episode in the \"file and hold for analysis\" section in my\n mind and rode on, feeling good. I think I even giggled once. Sometimes\n I even convince myself that I'm hell on wheels.\nIII", "The old man had just finished and they were starting to drag the kids\n off to bed when there was a commotion on the road at the edge of the\n camp. I looked but my eyes were adjusted to the light of the fire and I\n couldn't see far into the dark.\n\n\n A voice there said, \"I'll be damned if I'll take another day like this\n one, Horst. We should have been here hours ago. It be your fault we're\n not.\"\n\n\n Horst growled a retort. I decided that it was time for me to leave the\n campfire. I got up and eased away as Horst and his men came up to the\n fire, and cut back to where Ninc was parked. I grabbed up my blankets\n and mattress and started to roll them up. I had a pretty good idea now\n what they used the high-walled pen for.", "I opened my mouth to scream—I have a good scream—but a rough smelly\n hand clamped down over it before I had a chance to get more than a\n lungful of air. I bit down hard—5000 lbs. psi, I'm told—but he\n didn't let me go. I started to kick, but Horst jerked me off my feet\n and dragged me off.\n\n\n When we were behind the pen and out of earshot of the fire, he stopped\n dragging me and dropped me in a heap. \"Make any noise,\" he said, \"and\n I'll hurt you.\"\n\n\n That was a silly way to put it, but somehow it said more than if he'd\n threatened to break my arm or my head. It left him a latitude of things\n to do if he pleased. He examined his hand. There was enough moonlight\n for that. \"I ought to club you anyway,\" he said.", "The first of the Great Ships was finished in 2025. One of the eight,\n as well as the two that were being built then, went up with everything\n else in the Solar System in 2041. In that sixteen years 112 colonies\n were planted. I don't know how many of those planets had animals that\ncould\nhave been substituted but, even if they had, they would have\n had to be domesticated from scratch. That would have been stupid. I'll\n bet that half the colonies would have failed if they hadn't had horses.\nWe'd come in from the west over the ocean, so I traveled east on the\n road. That much water makes me nervous, and roads have to go somewhere.\n\n\n I came on my first travelers three hours later. I rounded a tree-lined\n bend, ducking an overhanging branch, and pulled Ninc to a stop. There\n were five men on horseback herding a bunch of the ugliest creatures\n alive.", "There were sixteen of us girls and thirteen boys. We took our places\n in the seats in the center of the scout. Riggy Allen made a joke that\n nobody bothered to laugh at, and then we were all silent. I was feeling\n lost and just beginning to enjoy it when Jimmy Dentremont came over to\n me. He's red-headed and has a face that makes him look about ten. An\n intelligent runt like me.\n\n\n He said what I expected. \"Mia, do you want to go partners if we can get\n together when we get down?\"\n\n\n I guess he thought that because we were always matched on study I liked\n him. Well, I did when I wasn't mad at him, but now I had that crack\n he'd made about being a snob in mind, so I said, \"Not likely. I want to\n come back alive.\" It wasn't fair, but it was a good crack and he went\n back to his place without saying anything.", "Horst stalked over and got the signal. He dropped it on the ground and\n said in a voice far colder than mine could ever be, because it was\n natural and mine wasn't, \"The piece be yours.\" Then he tromped on it\n until it cracked and fell apart.\n\n\n Then he said, \"Pull a gun on me twice. Twice.\" He slapped me so hard\n that my ears rang. \"You dirty little punk.\"\n\n\n I said calmly, \"You big louse.\"\n\n\n It was a time I would have done better to keep my mouth shut. All I can\n remember is a flash of pain as his fist crunched against the side of my\n face and then nothing.\n\n\n Brains are no good if you don't use them.", "He said, \"Look, boy. You may not know it, but you be in a lot of\n trouble. So don't give me a hard time.\"\n\n\n He still thought I was a boy. It was not time to correct him, but I\n didn't like to see the point go unchallenged. It was unflattering.\n\n\n \"The courts won't let you get away with this,\" I said. I'd passed\n a courthouse in the town with a carved motto over the doors: EQUAL\n JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW or TRUTH OUR SHIELD AND JUSTICE OUR SWORD or\n something stuffy like that.\n\n\n He laughed, not a phony, villian-type laugh, but a real laugh, so I\n knew I'd goofed.", "When I was nine, my Daddy gave me a painted wooden doll that my\n great-grandmother brought from Earth. The thing is that inside it,\n nestled one in another, are eleven more dolls, each one smaller than\n the last. I like to watch people when they open it for the first time.\n\n\n My face must have been like that as I rode along the road.\n\n\n The country leveled into a great rolling valley and the trees gave\n way to great farms and fields. In the fields, working, were some of\n the green creatures, which surprised me since the ones I'd seen before\n hadn't seemed smart enough to count to one, let alone do any work.\n\n\n But it relieved me. I thought they might have been eating them or\n something.", "Horst looked at it, then handed it back. \"Throw it away,\" he said.\n\n\n I leveled my gun at them—Hell on Wheels strikes again! I said, \"Hand\n that over to me.\"\n\n\n Horst made a disgusted sound.\n\n\n \"Don't make any noise,\" I said, \"or you'll fry. Now hand it over.\"\n\n\n I stowed it away, then paused with one hand on the leather horn of the\n saddle. \"What's the name of the kid in jail in Forton.\"\n\n\n \"I can't remember,\" he said. \"But it be coming to me. Hold on.\"\n\n\n I waited. Then suddenly my arm was hit a numbing blow from behind\n and the gun went flying. Jack pounced after it and Horst said, \"Good\n enough,\" to the others who'd come up behind me.\n\n\n I felt like a fool.", "I had a good month for Trial. My birthday is in November—too close to\n Year End Holiday for my taste, but this year it was all right. It was\n spring on Tintera, but it was December in the Ship, and after we got\n back we had five days of Holiday to celebrate. It gave me something to\n look forward to.\n\n\n In two days of riding, I ran onto nothing but a few odd-looking\n animals. I shot one small one and ate it. It turned out to taste pretty\n good, though not as good as a slice from Hambone No. 4, to my mind the\n best meat vat on the Ship. I've eaten things so gruey-looking that I\n wondered that anybody had the guts to try them in the first place and\n they've turned out to taste good. And I've seen things that looked good\n that I couldn't keep on my stomach. So I guess I was lucky.", "The first night was hell, I guess because I'm not used to having the\n lights out. That's when you really start to feel lonely, being alone in\n the dark. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach\n if it's really going to come back. But I lived through it—one day in\n thirty gone.\n\n\n I rode in a spiral search pattern during the next two days. I had three\n things in mind—stay alive, find people and find some of the others.\n The first was automatic. The second was to find out if there was a slot\n I could fit into for a month. If not, I would have to find a place to\n camp out, as nasty as that would be. The third was to join forces,\n though not with that meatball Jimmy D.\n\n\n No, he isn't really a meatball. The trouble is that I don't take\n nothing from nobody, especially him, and he doesn't take nothing from\n nobody, especially me. So we do a lot of fighting.", "Don't think I was helpless. I'm hell on wheels. They don't let us grow\n for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They prepare us. They\n do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time\n you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to\n the Ship. There's sense behind it. It means that everybody on the Ship\n is a person who can take care of himself if he has to. Daddy says that\n something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population\n from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. And it helps to\n keep the population steady." ], [ "I am lucky. My great-great-grandparents were among those who had enough\n foresight to see what was coming. If it hadn't been for them and some\n others like them, there wouldn't be any humans left anywhere. And I\n wouldn't be here. That may not scare you, but it scares me.\n\n\n What happened before, when people didn't use their heads and wound up\n blowing the Solar System apart, is something nobody should forget. The\n older people don't let us forget. But these people had, and that the\n Council should know.\n\n\n For the first time since I landed on Tintera, I felt\nreally\nfrightened. There was too much going on that I didn't understand. I\n felt a blind urge to get away, and when I reached the edge of town, I\n whomped Ninc a good one and gave him his head.", "But that wasn't what bothered me. It was the kids. My God! They\n swarmed. I saw a family come out of a house—a father and\nfour\nchildren. It was the most foul thing I've ever seen. It struck me\n then—these people were Free Birthers! I felt a wave of nausea and I\n closed my eyes until it passed.\nThe first thing you learn in school is that if it weren't for idiot and\n criminal people like these, Earth would never have been destroyed. The\n evacuation would never have had to take place, and eight billion people\n wouldn't have died. There wouldn't have\nbeen\neight billion people.\n But, no. They bred and they spread and they devoured everything in\n their path like a cancer. They gobbled up all the resources that Earth\n had and crowded and shoved one another until the final war came.", "When I was nine, my Daddy gave me a painted wooden doll that my\n great-grandmother brought from Earth. The thing is that inside it,\n nestled one in another, are eleven more dolls, each one smaller than\n the last. I like to watch people when they open it for the first time.\n\n\n My face must have been like that as I rode along the road.\n\n\n The country leveled into a great rolling valley and the trees gave\n way to great farms and fields. In the fields, working, were some of\n the green creatures, which surprised me since the ones I'd seen before\n hadn't seemed smart enough to count to one, let alone do any work.\n\n\n But it relieved me. I thought they might have been eating them or\n something.", "The planet chosen for our Trial was called Tintera. The last contact\n the Ship had had with it—and we were the ones who dropped them—was\n almost 150 years ago. No contact since. That had made the Council\n debate a little before they dropped us there, but they decided it was\n all right in the end. It didn't make any practical difference to us\n kids because they never tell you anything about the place they're going\n to drop you. All I knew was the name. I wouldn't have known that much\n if Daddy weren't Chairman of the Council.", "I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be\n found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes.\n Venie Morlock has got a crush on Jimmy D., and when she saw me start\n getting ready to go, she began to check her gear, too. At our next\n landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. It didn't\n have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the\n bad moment any longer.\n\n\n The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird,\n and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the\n color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last.\nII", "I felt like crawling in a corner of the ship and crying, but nobody\n else was breaking down, so I didn't. I did feel miserable. I cried when\n I said good-by to Mother and Daddy—a real emotional scene—but that\n wasn't in public.\nIt wasn't the chance of not coming back that bothered me really,\n because I never believed that I wouldn't. The thought that made me\n unhappy was that I would have to be on a planet for a whole month.\n Planets make me feel wretched.", "The gravity is always wrong, for one thing. Either your arches and\n calves ache or every time you step you think you're going to trip on\n a piece of fluff and break your neck. There are vegetables everywhere\n and little grubby things just looking for\nyou\nto crawl on. If you\n can think of anything creepier than that, you've got a real nasty\n imagination. Worst of all, planets stink. Every single one smells—I've\n been on enough to know that. A planet is all right for a Mud-eater, but\n not for me.\n\n\n We have a place in the Ship like that—the Third Level—but it's only a\n thousand square miles and any time it gets on your nerves you can go up\n a level or down a level and be back in civilization.", "DOWN TO THE WORLDS OF MEN\nBY ALEXEI PANSHIN\nThe ancient rule was sink or swim—swim\n\n in the miasma of a planet without\n\n spaceflight, or sink to utter destruction!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI\n\n\n The horses and packs were loaded before we went aboard the scoutship.\n The scout bay is no more than a great oversized airlock with a dozen\n small ships squatting over their tubes, but it was the last of the Ship\n that I might ever see, so I took a long final look from the top of the\n ramp.", "The first of the Great Ships was finished in 2025. One of the eight,\n as well as the two that were being built then, went up with everything\n else in the Solar System in 2041. In that sixteen years 112 colonies\n were planted. I don't know how many of those planets had animals that\ncould\nhave been substituted but, even if they had, they would have\n had to be domesticated from scratch. That would have been stupid. I'll\n bet that half the colonies would have failed if they hadn't had horses.\nWe'd come in from the west over the ocean, so I traveled east on the\n road. That much water makes me nervous, and roads have to go somewhere.\n\n\n I came on my first travelers three hours later. I rounded a tree-lined\n bend, ducking an overhanging branch, and pulled Ninc to a stop. There\n were five men on horseback herding a bunch of the ugliest creatures\n alive.", "I'd had two bad shocks on this day, but they weren't the last. In the\n late afternoon, when the sun was starting to sink and a cool wind was\n starting to ripple the tree leaves, I saw the scoutship high in the\n sky. The dying sun colored it a deep red. Back again? I wondered what\n had gone wrong.\n\n\n I reached down into my saddlebag and brought out my contact signal.\n The scoutship swung up in the sky in a familiar movement calculated to\n drop the stomach out of everybody aboard. George Fuhonin's style. I\n triggered the signal, my heart turning flips all the while. I didn't\n know why he was back, but I wasn't really sorry.", "I passed two crossroads and started to meet more people, but nobody\n questioned me. I met people on horseback, and twice I met trucks moving\n silently past. And I overtook a wagon driven by the oldest man I've\n seen in my life. He waved to me, and I waved back.\n\n\n Near the end of the afternoon I came to the town, and there I received\n a jolt that sickened me.\n\n\n By the time I came out on the other side, I was sick. My hands were\n cold and sweaty and my head was spinning, and I wanted to kick Ninc to\n a gallop.\n\n\n I rode slowly in, looking all around, missing nothing. The town was all\n stone, wood and brick. Out of date. Out of time, really. There were\n no machines more complicated than the trucks I'd seen earlier. At the\n edge of town, I passed a newspaper office with a headline pasted in the\n window—INVASION! I remember that. I wondered about it.", "The first night was hell, I guess because I'm not used to having the\n lights out. That's when you really start to feel lonely, being alone in\n the dark. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach\n if it's really going to come back. But I lived through it—one day in\n thirty gone.\n\n\n I rode in a spiral search pattern during the next two days. I had three\n things in mind—stay alive, find people and find some of the others.\n The first was automatic. The second was to find out if there was a slot\n I could fit into for a month. If not, I would have to find a place to\n camp out, as nasty as that would be. The third was to join forces,\n though not with that meatball Jimmy D.\n\n\n No, he isn't really a meatball. The trouble is that I don't take\n nothing from nobody, especially him, and he doesn't take nothing from\n nobody, especially me. So we do a lot of fighting.", "When we reached Tintera, they started dropping us. We swung over the\n sea from the morning side and then dropped low over gray-green forested\n hills. Finally George spotted a clear area and dropped into it. They\n don't care what order you go in, so Jimmy D. jumped up, grabbed his\n gear and then led his horse down the ramp. I think he was still\n smarting from the slap I'd given him.\n\n\n In a minute we were airborne again. I wondered if I would ever see\n Jimmy—if he would get back alive.\n\n\n It's no game we play. When we turn fourteen, they drop us on the\n nearest colonized planet and come back one month later. That may sound\n like fun to you, but a lot of us never come back alive.", "My name is Mia Havero. I'm fourteen, of course, or I wouldn't be\n telling this. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that\n scrawniness to last much longer. Mother is very good looking. In the\n meantime, I've got brains as a consolation.\n\n\n After we were all settled, George Fuhonin, the pilot, raised the ramps.\n We sat there for five minutes while they bled air out of our tube and\n then we just ... dropped. My stomach turned flips. We didn't have to\n leave that way, but George thinks it's fun to be a hot pilot.\n\n\n Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. He's\n the only competition I have my own age. The trouble is, you don't go\n partners with the competition, do you? Besides, there was still that\n crack about being a snob.", "The ship swung around until it was coming back on a path almost over my\n head, going in the same direction. Then it went into a slip and started\n bucking so hard that I knew this wasn't hot piloting at all, just plain\n idiot stutter-fingered stupidity at the controls. As it skidded by me\n overhead, I got a good look at it and knew that it wasn't one of ours.\n Not too different, but not ours.\nOne more enigma. Where was it from? Not here. Even if you know how, and\n we wouldn't tell these Mud-eaters how, a scoutship is something that\n takes an advanced technology to build.\nI felt defeated and tired. Not much farther along the road, I came to\n a campsite with two wagons pulled in for the night, and I couldn't\n help but pull in myself. The campsite was large and had two permanent\n buildings on it. One was a well enclosure and the other was little more\n than a high-walled pen. It didn't even have a roof.", "On the third day, I found the road. I brought Ninc down off the\n hillside, losing sight of the road in the trees, and then reaching\n it in the level below. It was narrow and made of sand spread over a\n hard base. Out of the marks in the sand, I could pick out the tracks\n of horses and both narrow and wide wheels. Other tracks I couldn't\n identify.\n\n\n One of the smartest moves in history was to include horses when\n they dropped the colonies. I say \"they\" because, while we did the\n actual dropping, the idea originated with the whole evac plan back on\n Earth. Considering how short a time it was in which the colonies were\n established, there was not time to set up industry, so they had to have\n draft animals.", "Don't think I was helpless. I'm hell on wheels. They don't let us grow\n for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They prepare us. They\n do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time\n you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to\n the Ship. There's sense behind it. It means that everybody on the Ship\n is a person who can take care of himself if he has to. Daddy says that\n something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population\n from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. And it helps to\n keep the population steady.", "\"Where be you from?\" he asked.\n\n\n I pointed to the road behind us.\n\n\n \"And where be you going?\"\n\n\n I pointed ahead. No other way to go.\n\n\n He seemed exasperated. I have that effect sometimes. Even on Mother and\n Daddy, who should know better.\n\n\n We were coming up on the others now, and the man said, \"Maybe you'd\n better ride on from here with us. For protection.\"\n\n\n He had an odd way of twisting his sounds, almost as though he had a\n mouthful of mush. I wondered whether he were just an oddball or whether\n everybody here spoke the same way. I'd never heard International\n English spoken any way but one, even on the planet Daddy made me visit\n with him.\n\n\n One of the other outriders came easing by then. I suppose they'd been\n watching us all the while. He called to the hard man.", "Horst stalked over and got the signal. He dropped it on the ground and\n said in a voice far colder than mine could ever be, because it was\n natural and mine wasn't, \"The piece be yours.\" Then he tromped on it\n until it cracked and fell apart.\n\n\n Then he said, \"Pull a gun on me twice. Twice.\" He slapped me so hard\n that my ears rang. \"You dirty little punk.\"\n\n\n I said calmly, \"You big louse.\"\n\n\n It was a time I would have done better to keep my mouth shut. All I can\n remember is a flash of pain as his fist crunched against the side of my\n face and then nothing.\n\n\n Brains are no good if you don't use them.", "\"Shut up,\" I said, in as mean a voice as I could muster, and he did. It\n surprised me. I didn't think I sounded\nthat\nmean. I decided he just\n didn't trust the crazy kid not to shoot.\n\n\n After twenty minutes of easy riding for us and hard walking for the\n creatures, I said, \"If you want your rifles, you can go back and get\n them now.\" I dug my heels into Ninc's sides and rode on. At the next\n bend I looked back and saw four of them holding their packhorses and\n the creatures still while one beat a dust-raising retreat down the road.\n\n\n I put this episode in the \"file and hold for analysis\" section in my\n mind and rode on, feeling good. I think I even giggled once. Sometimes\n I even convince myself that I'm hell on wheels.\nIII" ], [ "I am lucky. My great-great-grandparents were among those who had enough\n foresight to see what was coming. If it hadn't been for them and some\n others like them, there wouldn't be any humans left anywhere. And I\n wouldn't be here. That may not scare you, but it scares me.\n\n\n What happened before, when people didn't use their heads and wound up\n blowing the Solar System apart, is something nobody should forget. The\n older people don't let us forget. But these people had, and that the\n Council should know.\n\n\n For the first time since I landed on Tintera, I felt\nreally\nfrightened. There was too much going on that I didn't understand. I\n felt a blind urge to get away, and when I reached the edge of town, I\n whomped Ninc a good one and gave him his head.", "The planet chosen for our Trial was called Tintera. The last contact\n the Ship had had with it—and we were the ones who dropped them—was\n almost 150 years ago. No contact since. That had made the Council\n debate a little before they dropped us there, but they decided it was\n all right in the end. It didn't make any practical difference to us\n kids because they never tell you anything about the place they're going\n to drop you. All I knew was the name. I wouldn't have known that much\n if Daddy weren't Chairman of the Council.", "When we reached Tintera, they started dropping us. We swung over the\n sea from the morning side and then dropped low over gray-green forested\n hills. Finally George spotted a clear area and dropped into it. They\n don't care what order you go in, so Jimmy D. jumped up, grabbed his\n gear and then led his horse down the ramp. I think he was still\n smarting from the slap I'd given him.\n\n\n In a minute we were airborne again. I wondered if I would ever see\n Jimmy—if he would get back alive.\n\n\n It's no game we play. When we turn fourteen, they drop us on the\n nearest colonized planet and come back one month later. That may sound\n like fun to you, but a lot of us never come back alive.", "My name is Mia Havero. I'm fourteen, of course, or I wouldn't be\n telling this. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that\n scrawniness to last much longer. Mother is very good looking. In the\n meantime, I've got brains as a consolation.\n\n\n After we were all settled, George Fuhonin, the pilot, raised the ramps.\n We sat there for five minutes while they bled air out of our tube and\n then we just ... dropped. My stomach turned flips. We didn't have to\n leave that way, but George thinks it's fun to be a hot pilot.\n\n\n Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. He's\n the only competition I have my own age. The trouble is, you don't go\n partners with the competition, do you? Besides, there was still that\n crack about being a snob.", "The gravity is always wrong, for one thing. Either your arches and\n calves ache or every time you step you think you're going to trip on\n a piece of fluff and break your neck. There are vegetables everywhere\n and little grubby things just looking for\nyou\nto crawl on. If you\n can think of anything creepier than that, you've got a real nasty\n imagination. Worst of all, planets stink. Every single one smells—I've\n been on enough to know that. A planet is all right for a Mud-eater, but\n not for me.\n\n\n We have a place in the Ship like that—the Third Level—but it's only a\n thousand square miles and any time it gets on your nerves you can go up\n a level or down a level and be back in civilization.", "I felt like crawling in a corner of the ship and crying, but nobody\n else was breaking down, so I didn't. I did feel miserable. I cried when\n I said good-by to Mother and Daddy—a real emotional scene—but that\n wasn't in public.\nIt wasn't the chance of not coming back that bothered me really,\n because I never believed that I wouldn't. The thought that made me\n unhappy was that I would have to be on a planet for a whole month.\n Planets make me feel wretched.", "I'd had two bad shocks on this day, but they weren't the last. In the\n late afternoon, when the sun was starting to sink and a cool wind was\n starting to ripple the tree leaves, I saw the scoutship high in the\n sky. The dying sun colored it a deep red. Back again? I wondered what\n had gone wrong.\n\n\n I reached down into my saddlebag and brought out my contact signal.\n The scoutship swung up in the sky in a familiar movement calculated to\n drop the stomach out of everybody aboard. George Fuhonin's style. I\n triggered the signal, my heart turning flips all the while. I didn't\n know why he was back, but I wasn't really sorry.", "But I looked most closely at the people. In all that town, I didn't\n see one girl over ten years old and no grown-up women at all. There\n were little kids, there were boys and there were men, but no girls. All\n the boys and men wore pants, and so did I, which must have been why\n Horst and his buddies assumed I was a boy. It wasn't flattering; but\n I decided I'd not tell anybody different until I found what made the\n clocks tick on this planet.", "When I was nine, my Daddy gave me a painted wooden doll that my\n great-grandmother brought from Earth. The thing is that inside it,\n nestled one in another, are eleven more dolls, each one smaller than\n the last. I like to watch people when they open it for the first time.\n\n\n My face must have been like that as I rode along the road.\n\n\n The country leveled into a great rolling valley and the trees gave\n way to great farms and fields. In the fields, working, were some of\n the green creatures, which surprised me since the ones I'd seen before\n hadn't seemed smart enough to count to one, let alone do any work.\n\n\n But it relieved me. I thought they might have been eating them or\n something.", "But that wasn't what bothered me. It was the kids. My God! They\n swarmed. I saw a family come out of a house—a father and\nfour\nchildren. It was the most foul thing I've ever seen. It struck me\n then—these people were Free Birthers! I felt a wave of nausea and I\n closed my eyes until it passed.\nThe first thing you learn in school is that if it weren't for idiot and\n criminal people like these, Earth would never have been destroyed. The\n evacuation would never have had to take place, and eight billion people\n wouldn't have died. There wouldn't have\nbeen\neight billion people.\n But, no. They bred and they spread and they devoured everything in\n their path like a cancer. They gobbled up all the resources that Earth\n had and crowded and shoved one another until the final war came.", "I had a good month for Trial. My birthday is in November—too close to\n Year End Holiday for my taste, but this year it was all right. It was\n spring on Tintera, but it was December in the Ship, and after we got\n back we had five days of Holiday to celebrate. It gave me something to\n look forward to.\n\n\n In two days of riding, I ran onto nothing but a few odd-looking\n animals. I shot one small one and ate it. It turned out to taste pretty\n good, though not as good as a slice from Hambone No. 4, to my mind the\n best meat vat on the Ship. I've eaten things so gruey-looking that I\n wondered that anybody had the guts to try them in the first place and\n they've turned out to taste good. And I've seen things that looked good\n that I couldn't keep on my stomach. So I guess I was lucky.", "The ship swung around until it was coming back on a path almost over my\n head, going in the same direction. Then it went into a slip and started\n bucking so hard that I knew this wasn't hot piloting at all, just plain\n idiot stutter-fingered stupidity at the controls. As it skidded by me\n overhead, I got a good look at it and knew that it wasn't one of ours.\n Not too different, but not ours.\nOne more enigma. Where was it from? Not here. Even if you know how, and\n we wouldn't tell these Mud-eaters how, a scoutship is something that\n takes an advanced technology to build.\nI felt defeated and tired. Not much farther along the road, I came to\n a campsite with two wagons pulled in for the night, and I couldn't\n help but pull in myself. The campsite was large and had two permanent\n buildings on it. One was a well enclosure and the other was little more\n than a high-walled pen. It didn't even have a roof.", "The first of the Great Ships was finished in 2025. One of the eight,\n as well as the two that were being built then, went up with everything\n else in the Solar System in 2041. In that sixteen years 112 colonies\n were planted. I don't know how many of those planets had animals that\ncould\nhave been substituted but, even if they had, they would have\n had to be domesticated from scratch. That would have been stupid. I'll\n bet that half the colonies would have failed if they hadn't had horses.\nWe'd come in from the west over the ocean, so I traveled east on the\n road. That much water makes me nervous, and roads have to go somewhere.\n\n\n I came on my first travelers three hours later. I rounded a tree-lined\n bend, ducking an overhanging branch, and pulled Ninc to a stop. There\n were five men on horseback herding a bunch of the ugliest creatures\n alive.", "There were sixteen of us girls and thirteen boys. We took our places\n in the seats in the center of the scout. Riggy Allen made a joke that\n nobody bothered to laugh at, and then we were all silent. I was feeling\n lost and just beginning to enjoy it when Jimmy Dentremont came over to\n me. He's red-headed and has a face that makes him look about ten. An\n intelligent runt like me.\n\n\n He said what I expected. \"Mia, do you want to go partners if we can get\n together when we get down?\"\n\n\n I guess he thought that because we were always matched on study I liked\n him. Well, I did when I wasn't mad at him, but now I had that crack\n he'd made about being a snob in mind, so I said, \"Not likely. I want to\n come back alive.\" It wasn't fair, but it was a good crack and he went\n back to his place without saying anything.", "Don't think I was helpless. I'm hell on wheels. They don't let us grow\n for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They prepare us. They\n do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time\n you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to\n the Ship. There's sense behind it. It means that everybody on the Ship\n is a person who can take care of himself if he has to. Daddy says that\n something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population\n from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. And it helps to\n keep the population steady.", "DOWN TO THE WORLDS OF MEN\nBY ALEXEI PANSHIN\nThe ancient rule was sink or swim—swim\n\n in the miasma of a planet without\n\n spaceflight, or sink to utter destruction!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI\n\n\n The horses and packs were loaded before we went aboard the scoutship.\n The scout bay is no more than a great oversized airlock with a dozen\n small ships squatting over their tubes, but it was the last of the Ship\n that I might ever see, so I took a long final look from the top of the\n ramp.", "I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be\n found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes.\n Venie Morlock has got a crush on Jimmy D., and when she saw me start\n getting ready to go, she began to check her gear, too. At our next\n landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. It didn't\n have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the\n bad moment any longer.\n\n\n The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird,\n and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the\n color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last.\nII", "The first night was hell, I guess because I'm not used to having the\n lights out. That's when you really start to feel lonely, being alone in\n the dark. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach\n if it's really going to come back. But I lived through it—one day in\n thirty gone.\n\n\n I rode in a spiral search pattern during the next two days. I had three\n things in mind—stay alive, find people and find some of the others.\n The first was automatic. The second was to find out if there was a slot\n I could fit into for a month. If not, I would have to find a place to\n camp out, as nasty as that would be. The third was to join forces,\n though not with that meatball Jimmy D.\n\n\n No, he isn't really a meatball. The trouble is that I don't take\n nothing from nobody, especially him, and he doesn't take nothing from\n nobody, especially me. So we do a lot of fighting.", "\"Where be you from?\" he asked.\n\n\n I pointed to the road behind us.\n\n\n \"And where be you going?\"\n\n\n I pointed ahead. No other way to go.\n\n\n He seemed exasperated. I have that effect sometimes. Even on Mother and\n Daddy, who should know better.\n\n\n We were coming up on the others now, and the man said, \"Maybe you'd\n better ride on from here with us. For protection.\"\n\n\n He had an odd way of twisting his sounds, almost as though he had a\n mouthful of mush. I wondered whether he were just an oddball or whether\n everybody here spoke the same way. I'd never heard International\n English spoken any way but one, even on the planet Daddy made me visit\n with him.\n\n\n One of the other outriders came easing by then. I suppose they'd been\n watching us all the while. He called to the hard man.", "I passed two crossroads and started to meet more people, but nobody\n questioned me. I met people on horseback, and twice I met trucks moving\n silently past. And I overtook a wagon driven by the oldest man I've\n seen in my life. He waved to me, and I waved back.\n\n\n Near the end of the afternoon I came to the town, and there I received\n a jolt that sickened me.\n\n\n By the time I came out on the other side, I was sick. My hands were\n cold and sweaty and my head was spinning, and I wanted to kick Ninc to\n a gallop.\n\n\n I rode slowly in, looking all around, missing nothing. The town was all\n stone, wood and brick. Out of date. Out of time, really. There were\n no machines more complicated than the trucks I'd seen earlier. At the\n edge of town, I passed a newspaper office with a headline pasted in the\n window—INVASION! I remember that. I wondered about it." ], [ "Don't think I was helpless. I'm hell on wheels. They don't let us grow\n for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They prepare us. They\n do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time\n you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to\n the Ship. There's sense behind it. It means that everybody on the Ship\n is a person who can take care of himself if he has to. Daddy says that\n something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population\n from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. And it helps to\n keep the population steady.", "My name is Mia Havero. I'm fourteen, of course, or I wouldn't be\n telling this. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that\n scrawniness to last much longer. Mother is very good looking. In the\n meantime, I've got brains as a consolation.\n\n\n After we were all settled, George Fuhonin, the pilot, raised the ramps.\n We sat there for five minutes while they bled air out of our tube and\n then we just ... dropped. My stomach turned flips. We didn't have to\n leave that way, but George thinks it's fun to be a hot pilot.\n\n\n Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. He's\n the only competition I have my own age. The trouble is, you don't go\n partners with the competition, do you? Besides, there was still that\n crack about being a snob.", "\"Shut up,\" I said, in as mean a voice as I could muster, and he did. It\n surprised me. I didn't think I sounded\nthat\nmean. I decided he just\n didn't trust the crazy kid not to shoot.\n\n\n After twenty minutes of easy riding for us and hard walking for the\n creatures, I said, \"If you want your rifles, you can go back and get\n them now.\" I dug my heels into Ninc's sides and rode on. At the next\n bend I looked back and saw four of them holding their packhorses and\n the creatures still while one beat a dust-raising retreat down the road.\n\n\n I put this episode in the \"file and hold for analysis\" section in my\n mind and rode on, feeling good. I think I even giggled once. Sometimes\n I even convince myself that I'm hell on wheels.\nIII", "There were sixteen of us girls and thirteen boys. We took our places\n in the seats in the center of the scout. Riggy Allen made a joke that\n nobody bothered to laugh at, and then we were all silent. I was feeling\n lost and just beginning to enjoy it when Jimmy Dentremont came over to\n me. He's red-headed and has a face that makes him look about ten. An\n intelligent runt like me.\n\n\n He said what I expected. \"Mia, do you want to go partners if we can get\n together when we get down?\"\n\n\n I guess he thought that because we were always matched on study I liked\n him. Well, I did when I wasn't mad at him, but now I had that crack\n he'd made about being a snob in mind, so I said, \"Not likely. I want to\n come back alive.\" It wasn't fair, but it was a good crack and he went\n back to his place without saying anything.", "Horst looked at it, then handed it back. \"Throw it away,\" he said.\n\n\n I leveled my gun at them—Hell on Wheels strikes again! I said, \"Hand\n that over to me.\"\n\n\n Horst made a disgusted sound.\n\n\n \"Don't make any noise,\" I said, \"or you'll fry. Now hand it over.\"\n\n\n I stowed it away, then paused with one hand on the leather horn of the\n saddle. \"What's the name of the kid in jail in Forton.\"\n\n\n \"I can't remember,\" he said. \"But it be coming to me. Hold on.\"\n\n\n I waited. Then suddenly my arm was hit a numbing blow from behind\n and the gun went flying. Jack pounced after it and Horst said, \"Good\n enough,\" to the others who'd come up behind me.\n\n\n I felt like a fool.", "Horst stalked over and got the signal. He dropped it on the ground and\n said in a voice far colder than mine could ever be, because it was\n natural and mine wasn't, \"The piece be yours.\" Then he tromped on it\n until it cracked and fell apart.\n\n\n Then he said, \"Pull a gun on me twice. Twice.\" He slapped me so hard\n that my ears rang. \"You dirty little punk.\"\n\n\n I said calmly, \"You big louse.\"\n\n\n It was a time I would have done better to keep my mouth shut. All I can\n remember is a flash of pain as his fist crunched against the side of my\n face and then nothing.\n\n\n Brains are no good if you don't use them.", "He was a middle-aged man, maybe as old as my Daddy. He was large and he\n had a hard face. Normal enough, but hard. He pulled to a halt when we\n reached each other, but I kept going. He had to come around and follow\n me. I believe in judging a person by his face. A man can't help the\n face he owns, but he can help the expression he wears on it. If a man\n looks mean, I generally believe that he is. This one looked mean. That\n was why I kept riding.\n\n\n He said, \"What be you doing out here, boy? Be you out of your head?\n There be escaped Losels in these woods.\"\n\n\n I told you I hadn't finished filling out yet, but I hadn't thought it\n was that bad. I wasn't ready to make a fight over the point, though.\n Generally, I can't keep my bloody mouth shut, but now I didn't say\n anything. It seemed smart.", "I opened my mouth to scream—I have a good scream—but a rough smelly\n hand clamped down over it before I had a chance to get more than a\n lungful of air. I bit down hard—5000 lbs. psi, I'm told—but he\n didn't let me go. I started to kick, but Horst jerked me off my feet\n and dragged me off.\n\n\n When we were behind the pen and out of earshot of the fire, he stopped\n dragging me and dropped me in a heap. \"Make any noise,\" he said, \"and\n I'll hurt you.\"\n\n\n That was a silly way to put it, but somehow it said more than if he'd\n threatened to break my arm or my head. It left him a latitude of things\n to do if he pleased. He examined his hand. There was enough moonlight\n for that. \"I ought to club you anyway,\" he said.", "The first night was hell, I guess because I'm not used to having the\n lights out. That's when you really start to feel lonely, being alone in\n the dark. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach\n if it's really going to come back. But I lived through it—one day in\n thirty gone.\n\n\n I rode in a spiral search pattern during the next two days. I had three\n things in mind—stay alive, find people and find some of the others.\n The first was automatic. The second was to find out if there was a slot\n I could fit into for a month. If not, I would have to find a place to\n camp out, as nasty as that would be. The third was to join forces,\n though not with that meatball Jimmy D.\n\n\n No, he isn't really a meatball. The trouble is that I don't take\n nothing from nobody, especially him, and he doesn't take nothing from\n nobody, especially me. So we do a lot of fighting.", "I set up camp and ate my dinner. In the wagon closest to me were a man,\n his wife and their three children. The kids were running around and\n playing, and one of them ran close to the high-walled pen. His father\n came and pulled him away.\n\n\n The kids weren't to blame for their parents, but when one of them said\n hello to me, I didn't even answer. I know how lousy I would feel if I\n had two or three brothers and sisters, but it didn't strike me until\n that moment that it wouldn't even seem out of the ordinary to these\n kids. Isn't that horrible?\n\n\n About the time I finished eating, and before it grew dark, the old man\n I had seen earlier in the day drove his wagon in. He fascinated me. He\n had white hair, something I had read about in stories but had never\n seen before.", "I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be\n found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes.\n Venie Morlock has got a crush on Jimmy D., and when she saw me start\n getting ready to go, she began to check her gear, too. At our next\n landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. It didn't\n have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the\n bad moment any longer.\n\n\n The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird,\n and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the\n color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last.\nII", "\"Where be you from?\" he asked.\n\n\n I pointed to the road behind us.\n\n\n \"And where be you going?\"\n\n\n I pointed ahead. No other way to go.\n\n\n He seemed exasperated. I have that effect sometimes. Even on Mother and\n Daddy, who should know better.\n\n\n We were coming up on the others now, and the man said, \"Maybe you'd\n better ride on from here with us. For protection.\"\n\n\n He had an odd way of twisting his sounds, almost as though he had a\n mouthful of mush. I wondered whether he were just an oddball or whether\n everybody here spoke the same way. I'd never heard International\n English spoken any way but one, even on the planet Daddy made me visit\n with him.\n\n\n One of the other outriders came easing by then. I suppose they'd been\n watching us all the while. He called to the hard man.", "He said, \"Look, boy. You may not know it, but you be in a lot of\n trouble. So don't give me a hard time.\"\n\n\n He still thought I was a boy. It was not time to correct him, but I\n didn't like to see the point go unchallenged. It was unflattering.\n\n\n \"The courts won't let you get away with this,\" I said. I'd passed\n a courthouse in the town with a carved motto over the doors: EQUAL\n JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW or TRUTH OUR SHIELD AND JUSTICE OUR SWORD or\n something stuffy like that.\n\n\n He laughed, not a phony, villian-type laugh, but a real laugh, so I\n knew I'd goofed.", "The old man had just finished and they were starting to drag the kids\n off to bed when there was a commotion on the road at the edge of the\n camp. I looked but my eyes were adjusted to the light of the fire and I\n couldn't see far into the dark.\n\n\n A voice there said, \"I'll be damned if I'll take another day like this\n one, Horst. We should have been here hours ago. It be your fault we're\n not.\"\n\n\n Horst growled a retort. I decided that it was time for me to leave the\n campfire. I got up and eased away as Horst and his men came up to the\n fire, and cut back to where Ninc was parked. I grabbed up my blankets\n and mattress and started to roll them up. I had a pretty good idea now\n what they used the high-walled pen for.", "The one I'd dropped the saddle on came up then. The others were putting\n the animals in the pen. He started to kick me, but Horst stopped him.\n\n\n \"No,\" he said. \"Look through the kid's gear, bring the horse and what\n we can use.\"\n\n\n The other one didn't move. \"Get going, Jack,\" Horst said in a menacing\n tone and they stood toe to toe for a long moment before Jack finally\n backed down. It seemed to me that Horst wasn't so much objecting to me\n being kicked, but was rather establishing who did the kicking in his\n bunch.\n\n\n But I wasn't done yet. I was scared, but I still had the pistol under\n my jacket.\n\n\n Horst turned back to me and I said, \"You can't do this and get away\n with it.\"", "When nightfall came, they started a large fire. Everybody gathered\n around. There was singing for awhile, and then the father of the\n children tried to pack them off to bed. But they weren't ready to go,\n so the old man started telling them a story. In the old man's odd\n accent, and sitting there in the campfire light surrounded by darkness,\n it seemed just right.\n\n\n It was about an old witch named Baba Yaga who lived in the forest in\n a house that stood on chicken legs. She was the nasty stepmother of a\n nice little girl, and to get rid of the kid, she sent her on a phony\n errand into the deep dark woods at nightfall. I could appreciate the\n poor girl's position. All the little girl had to help her were the\n handkerchief, the comb and the pearl that she had inherited from her\n dear dead mother. But, as it turned out, they were just enough to\n defeat nasty old Baba Yaga and bring the girl safely home.\n\n\n I wished for the same for myself.", "The gravity is always wrong, for one thing. Either your arches and\n calves ache or every time you step you think you're going to trip on\n a piece of fluff and break your neck. There are vegetables everywhere\n and little grubby things just looking for\nyou\nto crawl on. If you\n can think of anything creepier than that, you've got a real nasty\n imagination. Worst of all, planets stink. Every single one smells—I've\n been on enough to know that. A planet is all right for a Mud-eater, but\n not for me.\n\n\n We have a place in the Ship like that—the Third Level—but it's only a\n thousand square miles and any time it gets on your nerves you can go up\n a level or down a level and be back in civilization.", "\"He be awfully small, Horst. I doubt me a Losel'd even notice him at\n all. We mought as well throw him back again.\"\n\n\n The rider looked at me. When I didn't dissolve in terror as he\n expected, he shrugged and one of the other men laughed.\n\n\n The hard man said to the others, \"This boy will be riding along with us\n to Forton for protection.\"\n\n\n I looked down at the plodding, unhappy creatures they were driving\n along and one looked back at me with dull, expressionless golden eyes.\n I felt uncomfortable.\n\n\n I said, \"I don't think so.\"\n\n\n What the man did then surprised me. He said, \"I do think so,\" and\n reached for the rifle in his saddle boot.", "I let him run for almost a mile before I pulled him down to a walk\n again. I couldn't help wishing for Jimmy D. Whatever else he is, he's\n smart and brains I needed.\n\n\n How do you find out what's going on? Eavesdrop? That's a lousy method.\n For one thing, people can't be depended on to talk about the things you\n want to hear. For another, you're likely to get caught. Ask somebody?\n Who? Make the mistake of bracing a fellow like Horst and you might wind\n up with a sore head and an empty pocket. The best thing I could think\n of was to find a library, but that might be a job.", "They were green and grotesque. They had squat bodies, long limbs and\n knobby bulges at their joints. They had square, flat animal masks for\n faces. But they walked on their hind legs and they had paws that were\n almost hands, and that was enough to make them seem almost human. They\n made a wordless, chilling, lowing sound as they milled and plodded\n along.\n\n\n I started Ninc up again and moved slowly to catch up with them. All the\n men on horseback had guns in saddle boots. They looked as nervous as\n cats with kittens. One of them had a string of packhorses on a line\n and he saw me and called to another who seemed to be the leader. That\n one wheeled his black horse and rode back toward me." ], [ "The planet chosen for our Trial was called Tintera. The last contact\n the Ship had had with it—and we were the ones who dropped them—was\n almost 150 years ago. No contact since. That had made the Council\n debate a little before they dropped us there, but they decided it was\n all right in the end. It didn't make any practical difference to us\n kids because they never tell you anything about the place they're going\n to drop you. All I knew was the name. I wouldn't have known that much\n if Daddy weren't Chairman of the Council.", "I am lucky. My great-great-grandparents were among those who had enough\n foresight to see what was coming. If it hadn't been for them and some\n others like them, there wouldn't be any humans left anywhere. And I\n wouldn't be here. That may not scare you, but it scares me.\n\n\n What happened before, when people didn't use their heads and wound up\n blowing the Solar System apart, is something nobody should forget. The\n older people don't let us forget. But these people had, and that the\n Council should know.\n\n\n For the first time since I landed on Tintera, I felt\nreally\nfrightened. There was too much going on that I didn't understand. I\n felt a blind urge to get away, and when I reached the edge of town, I\n whomped Ninc a good one and gave him his head.", "My name is Mia Havero. I'm fourteen, of course, or I wouldn't be\n telling this. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that\n scrawniness to last much longer. Mother is very good looking. In the\n meantime, I've got brains as a consolation.\n\n\n After we were all settled, George Fuhonin, the pilot, raised the ramps.\n We sat there for five minutes while they bled air out of our tube and\n then we just ... dropped. My stomach turned flips. We didn't have to\n leave that way, but George thinks it's fun to be a hot pilot.\n\n\n Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. He's\n the only competition I have my own age. The trouble is, you don't go\n partners with the competition, do you? Besides, there was still that\n crack about being a snob.", "When we reached Tintera, they started dropping us. We swung over the\n sea from the morning side and then dropped low over gray-green forested\n hills. Finally George spotted a clear area and dropped into it. They\n don't care what order you go in, so Jimmy D. jumped up, grabbed his\n gear and then led his horse down the ramp. I think he was still\n smarting from the slap I'd given him.\n\n\n In a minute we were airborne again. I wondered if I would ever see\n Jimmy—if he would get back alive.\n\n\n It's no game we play. When we turn fourteen, they drop us on the\n nearest colonized planet and come back one month later. That may sound\n like fun to you, but a lot of us never come back alive.", "I'd had two bad shocks on this day, but they weren't the last. In the\n late afternoon, when the sun was starting to sink and a cool wind was\n starting to ripple the tree leaves, I saw the scoutship high in the\n sky. The dying sun colored it a deep red. Back again? I wondered what\n had gone wrong.\n\n\n I reached down into my saddlebag and brought out my contact signal.\n The scoutship swung up in the sky in a familiar movement calculated to\n drop the stomach out of everybody aboard. George Fuhonin's style. I\n triggered the signal, my heart turning flips all the while. I didn't\n know why he was back, but I wasn't really sorry.", "I had a good month for Trial. My birthday is in November—too close to\n Year End Holiday for my taste, but this year it was all right. It was\n spring on Tintera, but it was December in the Ship, and after we got\n back we had five days of Holiday to celebrate. It gave me something to\n look forward to.\n\n\n In two days of riding, I ran onto nothing but a few odd-looking\n animals. I shot one small one and ate it. It turned out to taste pretty\n good, though not as good as a slice from Hambone No. 4, to my mind the\n best meat vat on the Ship. I've eaten things so gruey-looking that I\n wondered that anybody had the guts to try them in the first place and\n they've turned out to taste good. And I've seen things that looked good\n that I couldn't keep on my stomach. So I guess I was lucky.", "Don't think I was helpless. I'm hell on wheels. They don't let us grow\n for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They prepare us. They\n do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time\n you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to\n the Ship. There's sense behind it. It means that everybody on the Ship\n is a person who can take care of himself if he has to. Daddy says that\n something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population\n from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. And it helps to\n keep the population steady.", "I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be\n found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes.\n Venie Morlock has got a crush on Jimmy D., and when she saw me start\n getting ready to go, she began to check her gear, too. At our next\n landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. It didn't\n have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the\n bad moment any longer.\n\n\n The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird,\n and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the\n color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last.\nII", "I passed two crossroads and started to meet more people, but nobody\n questioned me. I met people on horseback, and twice I met trucks moving\n silently past. And I overtook a wagon driven by the oldest man I've\n seen in my life. He waved to me, and I waved back.\n\n\n Near the end of the afternoon I came to the town, and there I received\n a jolt that sickened me.\n\n\n By the time I came out on the other side, I was sick. My hands were\n cold and sweaty and my head was spinning, and I wanted to kick Ninc to\n a gallop.\n\n\n I rode slowly in, looking all around, missing nothing. The town was all\n stone, wood and brick. Out of date. Out of time, really. There were\n no machines more complicated than the trucks I'd seen earlier. At the\n edge of town, I passed a newspaper office with a headline pasted in the\n window—INVASION! I remember that. I wondered about it.", "I set up camp and ate my dinner. In the wagon closest to me were a man,\n his wife and their three children. The kids were running around and\n playing, and one of them ran close to the high-walled pen. His father\n came and pulled him away.\n\n\n The kids weren't to blame for their parents, but when one of them said\n hello to me, I didn't even answer. I know how lousy I would feel if I\n had two or three brothers and sisters, but it didn't strike me until\n that moment that it wouldn't even seem out of the ordinary to these\n kids. Isn't that horrible?\n\n\n About the time I finished eating, and before it grew dark, the old man\n I had seen earlier in the day drove his wagon in. He fascinated me. He\n had white hair, something I had read about in stories but had never\n seen before.", "The first night was hell, I guess because I'm not used to having the\n lights out. That's when you really start to feel lonely, being alone in\n the dark. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach\n if it's really going to come back. But I lived through it—one day in\n thirty gone.\n\n\n I rode in a spiral search pattern during the next two days. I had three\n things in mind—stay alive, find people and find some of the others.\n The first was automatic. The second was to find out if there was a slot\n I could fit into for a month. If not, I would have to find a place to\n camp out, as nasty as that would be. The third was to join forces,\n though not with that meatball Jimmy D.\n\n\n No, he isn't really a meatball. The trouble is that I don't take\n nothing from nobody, especially him, and he doesn't take nothing from\n nobody, especially me. So we do a lot of fighting.", "The first of the Great Ships was finished in 2025. One of the eight,\n as well as the two that were being built then, went up with everything\n else in the Solar System in 2041. In that sixteen years 112 colonies\n were planted. I don't know how many of those planets had animals that\ncould\nhave been substituted but, even if they had, they would have\n had to be domesticated from scratch. That would have been stupid. I'll\n bet that half the colonies would have failed if they hadn't had horses.\nWe'd come in from the west over the ocean, so I traveled east on the\n road. That much water makes me nervous, and roads have to go somewhere.\n\n\n I came on my first travelers three hours later. I rounded a tree-lined\n bend, ducking an overhanging branch, and pulled Ninc to a stop. There\n were five men on horseback herding a bunch of the ugliest creatures\n alive.", "There were sixteen of us girls and thirteen boys. We took our places\n in the seats in the center of the scout. Riggy Allen made a joke that\n nobody bothered to laugh at, and then we were all silent. I was feeling\n lost and just beginning to enjoy it when Jimmy Dentremont came over to\n me. He's red-headed and has a face that makes him look about ten. An\n intelligent runt like me.\n\n\n He said what I expected. \"Mia, do you want to go partners if we can get\n together when we get down?\"\n\n\n I guess he thought that because we were always matched on study I liked\n him. Well, I did when I wasn't mad at him, but now I had that crack\n he'd made about being a snob in mind, so I said, \"Not likely. I want to\n come back alive.\" It wasn't fair, but it was a good crack and he went\n back to his place without saying anything.", "When I was nine, my Daddy gave me a painted wooden doll that my\n great-grandmother brought from Earth. The thing is that inside it,\n nestled one in another, are eleven more dolls, each one smaller than\n the last. I like to watch people when they open it for the first time.\n\n\n My face must have been like that as I rode along the road.\n\n\n The country leveled into a great rolling valley and the trees gave\n way to great farms and fields. In the fields, working, were some of\n the green creatures, which surprised me since the ones I'd seen before\n hadn't seemed smart enough to count to one, let alone do any work.\n\n\n But it relieved me. I thought they might have been eating them or\n something.", "The ship swung around until it was coming back on a path almost over my\n head, going in the same direction. Then it went into a slip and started\n bucking so hard that I knew this wasn't hot piloting at all, just plain\n idiot stutter-fingered stupidity at the controls. As it skidded by me\n overhead, I got a good look at it and knew that it wasn't one of ours.\n Not too different, but not ours.\nOne more enigma. Where was it from? Not here. Even if you know how, and\n we wouldn't tell these Mud-eaters how, a scoutship is something that\n takes an advanced technology to build.\nI felt defeated and tired. Not much farther along the road, I came to\n a campsite with two wagons pulled in for the night, and I couldn't\n help but pull in myself. The campsite was large and had two permanent\n buildings on it. One was a well enclosure and the other was little more\n than a high-walled pen. It didn't even have a roof.", "But I looked most closely at the people. In all that town, I didn't\n see one girl over ten years old and no grown-up women at all. There\n were little kids, there were boys and there were men, but no girls. All\n the boys and men wore pants, and so did I, which must have been why\n Horst and his buddies assumed I was a boy. It wasn't flattering; but\n I decided I'd not tell anybody different until I found what made the\n clocks tick on this planet.", "\"Where be you from?\" he asked.\n\n\n I pointed to the road behind us.\n\n\n \"And where be you going?\"\n\n\n I pointed ahead. No other way to go.\n\n\n He seemed exasperated. I have that effect sometimes. Even on Mother and\n Daddy, who should know better.\n\n\n We were coming up on the others now, and the man said, \"Maybe you'd\n better ride on from here with us. For protection.\"\n\n\n He had an odd way of twisting his sounds, almost as though he had a\n mouthful of mush. I wondered whether he were just an oddball or whether\n everybody here spoke the same way. I'd never heard International\n English spoken any way but one, even on the planet Daddy made me visit\n with him.\n\n\n One of the other outriders came easing by then. I suppose they'd been\n watching us all the while. He called to the hard man.", "The gravity is always wrong, for one thing. Either your arches and\n calves ache or every time you step you think you're going to trip on\n a piece of fluff and break your neck. There are vegetables everywhere\n and little grubby things just looking for\nyou\nto crawl on. If you\n can think of anything creepier than that, you've got a real nasty\n imagination. Worst of all, planets stink. Every single one smells—I've\n been on enough to know that. A planet is all right for a Mud-eater, but\n not for me.\n\n\n We have a place in the Ship like that—the Third Level—but it's only a\n thousand square miles and any time it gets on your nerves you can go up\n a level or down a level and be back in civilization.", "DOWN TO THE WORLDS OF MEN\nBY ALEXEI PANSHIN\nThe ancient rule was sink or swim—swim\n\n in the miasma of a planet without\n\n spaceflight, or sink to utter destruction!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI\n\n\n The horses and packs were loaded before we went aboard the scoutship.\n The scout bay is no more than a great oversized airlock with a dozen\n small ships squatting over their tubes, but it was the last of the Ship\n that I might ever see, so I took a long final look from the top of the\n ramp.", "He was a middle-aged man, maybe as old as my Daddy. He was large and he\n had a hard face. Normal enough, but hard. He pulled to a halt when we\n reached each other, but I kept going. He had to come around and follow\n me. I believe in judging a person by his face. A man can't help the\n face he owns, but he can help the expression he wears on it. If a man\n looks mean, I generally believe that he is. This one looked mean. That\n was why I kept riding.\n\n\n He said, \"What be you doing out here, boy? Be you out of your head?\n There be escaped Losels in these woods.\"\n\n\n I told you I hadn't finished filling out yet, but I hadn't thought it\n was that bad. I wasn't ready to make a fight over the point, though.\n Generally, I can't keep my bloody mouth shut, but now I didn't say\n anything. It seemed smart." ], [ "They were green and grotesque. They had squat bodies, long limbs and\n knobby bulges at their joints. They had square, flat animal masks for\n faces. But they walked on their hind legs and they had paws that were\n almost hands, and that was enough to make them seem almost human. They\n made a wordless, chilling, lowing sound as they milled and plodded\n along.\n\n\n I started Ninc up again and moved slowly to catch up with them. All the\n men on horseback had guns in saddle boots. They looked as nervous as\n cats with kittens. One of them had a string of packhorses on a line\n and he saw me and called to another who seemed to be the leader. That\n one wheeled his black horse and rode back toward me.", "\"He be awfully small, Horst. I doubt me a Losel'd even notice him at\n all. We mought as well throw him back again.\"\n\n\n The rider looked at me. When I didn't dissolve in terror as he\n expected, he shrugged and one of the other men laughed.\n\n\n The hard man said to the others, \"This boy will be riding along with us\n to Forton for protection.\"\n\n\n I looked down at the plodding, unhappy creatures they were driving\n along and one looked back at me with dull, expressionless golden eyes.\n I felt uncomfortable.\n\n\n I said, \"I don't think so.\"\n\n\n What the man did then surprised me. He said, \"I do think so,\" and\n reached for the rifle in his saddle boot.", "The old man had just finished and they were starting to drag the kids\n off to bed when there was a commotion on the road at the edge of the\n camp. I looked but my eyes were adjusted to the light of the fire and I\n couldn't see far into the dark.\n\n\n A voice there said, \"I'll be damned if I'll take another day like this\n one, Horst. We should have been here hours ago. It be your fault we're\n not.\"\n\n\n Horst growled a retort. I decided that it was time for me to leave the\n campfire. I got up and eased away as Horst and his men came up to the\n fire, and cut back to where Ninc was parked. I grabbed up my blankets\n and mattress and started to roll them up. I had a pretty good idea now\n what they used the high-walled pen for.", "The one I'd dropped the saddle on came up then. The others were putting\n the animals in the pen. He started to kick me, but Horst stopped him.\n\n\n \"No,\" he said. \"Look through the kid's gear, bring the horse and what\n we can use.\"\n\n\n The other one didn't move. \"Get going, Jack,\" Horst said in a menacing\n tone and they stood toe to toe for a long moment before Jack finally\n backed down. It seemed to me that Horst wasn't so much objecting to me\n being kicked, but was rather establishing who did the kicking in his\n bunch.\n\n\n But I wasn't done yet. I was scared, but I still had the pistol under\n my jacket.\n\n\n Horst turned back to me and I said, \"You can't do this and get away\n with it.\"", "Horst looked at it, then handed it back. \"Throw it away,\" he said.\n\n\n I leveled my gun at them—Hell on Wheels strikes again! I said, \"Hand\n that over to me.\"\n\n\n Horst made a disgusted sound.\n\n\n \"Don't make any noise,\" I said, \"or you'll fry. Now hand it over.\"\n\n\n I stowed it away, then paused with one hand on the leather horn of the\n saddle. \"What's the name of the kid in jail in Forton.\"\n\n\n \"I can't remember,\" he said. \"But it be coming to me. Hold on.\"\n\n\n I waited. Then suddenly my arm was hit a numbing blow from behind\n and the gun went flying. Jack pounced after it and Horst said, \"Good\n enough,\" to the others who'd come up behind me.\n\n\n I felt like a fool.", "I should have known that they would have to pen the animals up for the\n night. I should have used my head. I hadn't and now it was time to take\n leave.\n\n\n I never got the chance.\nI was just heaving the saddle up on Ninc when I felt a hand on my\n shoulder and I was swung around.\n\n\n \"Well, well. Horst, look who we have here,\" he called. It was the one\n who'd made the joke about me being beneath the notice of a Losel. He\n was alone with me now, but with that call the others would be up fast.\n\n\n I brought the saddle around as hard as I could and then up, and he\n went down. He started to get up again, so I dropped the saddle on him\n and reached inside my jacket for my gun. Somebody grabbed me then from\n behind and pinned my arms to my side.", "The first of the Great Ships was finished in 2025. One of the eight,\n as well as the two that were being built then, went up with everything\n else in the Solar System in 2041. In that sixteen years 112 colonies\n were planted. I don't know how many of those planets had animals that\ncould\nhave been substituted but, even if they had, they would have\n had to be domesticated from scratch. That would have been stupid. I'll\n bet that half the colonies would have failed if they hadn't had horses.\nWe'd come in from the west over the ocean, so I traveled east on the\n road. That much water makes me nervous, and roads have to go somewhere.\n\n\n I came on my first travelers three hours later. I rounded a tree-lined\n bend, ducking an overhanging branch, and pulled Ninc to a stop. There\n were five men on horseback herding a bunch of the ugliest creatures\n alive.", "\"Shut up,\" I said, in as mean a voice as I could muster, and he did. It\n surprised me. I didn't think I sounded\nthat\nmean. I decided he just\n didn't trust the crazy kid not to shoot.\n\n\n After twenty minutes of easy riding for us and hard walking for the\n creatures, I said, \"If you want your rifles, you can go back and get\n them now.\" I dug my heels into Ninc's sides and rode on. At the next\n bend I looked back and saw four of them holding their packhorses and\n the creatures still while one beat a dust-raising retreat down the road.\n\n\n I put this episode in the \"file and hold for analysis\" section in my\n mind and rode on, feeling good. I think I even giggled once. Sometimes\n I even convince myself that I'm hell on wheels.\nIII", "I opened my mouth to scream—I have a good scream—but a rough smelly\n hand clamped down over it before I had a chance to get more than a\n lungful of air. I bit down hard—5000 lbs. psi, I'm told—but he\n didn't let me go. I started to kick, but Horst jerked me off my feet\n and dragged me off.\n\n\n When we were behind the pen and out of earshot of the fire, he stopped\n dragging me and dropped me in a heap. \"Make any noise,\" he said, \"and\n I'll hurt you.\"\n\n\n That was a silly way to put it, but somehow it said more than if he'd\n threatened to break my arm or my head. It left him a latitude of things\n to do if he pleased. He examined his hand. There was enough moonlight\n for that. \"I ought to club you anyway,\" he said.", "Horst stalked over and got the signal. He dropped it on the ground and\n said in a voice far colder than mine could ever be, because it was\n natural and mine wasn't, \"The piece be yours.\" Then he tromped on it\n until it cracked and fell apart.\n\n\n Then he said, \"Pull a gun on me twice. Twice.\" He slapped me so hard\n that my ears rang. \"You dirty little punk.\"\n\n\n I said calmly, \"You big louse.\"\n\n\n It was a time I would have done better to keep my mouth shut. All I can\n remember is a flash of pain as his fist crunched against the side of my\n face and then nothing.\n\n\n Brains are no good if you don't use them.", "I whipped my sonic pistol out so fast that he was caught leaning over\n with the rifle half out. His jaw dropped. He knew what I held and he\n didn't want to be fried.\n\n\n I said, \"Ease your rifles out and drop them gently to the ground.\"\n\n\n They did, watching me all the while with wary expressions.\n\n\n When all the rifles were on the ground, I said, \"All right, let's go.\"\n\n\n They didn't want to move. They didn't want to leave the rifles. I\n could see that. Horst didn't say anything. He just watched me with\n narrowed eyes. But one of the others held up a hand and in wheedling\n tones said, \"Look here, kid....\"", "\"Boy, boy. Don't talk about the courts. I be doing you a favor. I be\n taking what I can use of your gear, but I be letting you go. You go to\n court and they'll take everything and lock you up besides. I be leaving\n you your freedom.\"\n\n\n \"Why would they be doing that?\" I asked. I slipped my hand under my\n jacket.\n\n\n \"Every time you open your mouth you shout that you be off one of the\n Ships,\" Horst said. \"That be enough. They already have one of you brats\n in jail in Forton.\"\n\n\n I was about to bring my gun out when up came Jack leading Ninc, with\n all my stuff loaded on. I mentally thanked him.\n\n\n He said, \"The kid's got some good equipment. But I can't make out what\n this be for.\" He held out my pickup signal.", "When I was nine, my Daddy gave me a painted wooden doll that my\n great-grandmother brought from Earth. The thing is that inside it,\n nestled one in another, are eleven more dolls, each one smaller than\n the last. I like to watch people when they open it for the first time.\n\n\n My face must have been like that as I rode along the road.\n\n\n The country leveled into a great rolling valley and the trees gave\n way to great farms and fields. In the fields, working, were some of\n the green creatures, which surprised me since the ones I'd seen before\n hadn't seemed smart enough to count to one, let alone do any work.\n\n\n But it relieved me. I thought they might have been eating them or\n something.", "But I looked most closely at the people. In all that town, I didn't\n see one girl over ten years old and no grown-up women at all. There\n were little kids, there were boys and there were men, but no girls. All\n the boys and men wore pants, and so did I, which must have been why\n Horst and his buddies assumed I was a boy. It wasn't flattering; but\n I decided I'd not tell anybody different until I found what made the\n clocks tick on this planet.", "I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be\n found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes.\n Venie Morlock has got a crush on Jimmy D., and when she saw me start\n getting ready to go, she began to check her gear, too. At our next\n landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. It didn't\n have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the\n bad moment any longer.\n\n\n The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird,\n and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the\n color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last.\nII", "He was a middle-aged man, maybe as old as my Daddy. He was large and he\n had a hard face. Normal enough, but hard. He pulled to a halt when we\n reached each other, but I kept going. He had to come around and follow\n me. I believe in judging a person by his face. A man can't help the\n face he owns, but he can help the expression he wears on it. If a man\n looks mean, I generally believe that he is. This one looked mean. That\n was why I kept riding.\n\n\n He said, \"What be you doing out here, boy? Be you out of your head?\n There be escaped Losels in these woods.\"\n\n\n I told you I hadn't finished filling out yet, but I hadn't thought it\n was that bad. I wasn't ready to make a fight over the point, though.\n Generally, I can't keep my bloody mouth shut, but now I didn't say\n anything. It seemed smart.", "I set up camp and ate my dinner. In the wagon closest to me were a man,\n his wife and their three children. The kids were running around and\n playing, and one of them ran close to the high-walled pen. His father\n came and pulled him away.\n\n\n The kids weren't to blame for their parents, but when one of them said\n hello to me, I didn't even answer. I know how lousy I would feel if I\n had two or three brothers and sisters, but it didn't strike me until\n that moment that it wouldn't even seem out of the ordinary to these\n kids. Isn't that horrible?\n\n\n About the time I finished eating, and before it grew dark, the old man\n I had seen earlier in the day drove his wagon in. He fascinated me. He\n had white hair, something I had read about in stories but had never\n seen before.", "When we reached Tintera, they started dropping us. We swung over the\n sea from the morning side and then dropped low over gray-green forested\n hills. Finally George spotted a clear area and dropped into it. They\n don't care what order you go in, so Jimmy D. jumped up, grabbed his\n gear and then led his horse down the ramp. I think he was still\n smarting from the slap I'd given him.\n\n\n In a minute we were airborne again. I wondered if I would ever see\n Jimmy—if he would get back alive.\n\n\n It's no game we play. When we turn fourteen, they drop us on the\n nearest colonized planet and come back one month later. That may sound\n like fun to you, but a lot of us never come back alive.", "I let him run for almost a mile before I pulled him down to a walk\n again. I couldn't help wishing for Jimmy D. Whatever else he is, he's\n smart and brains I needed.\n\n\n How do you find out what's going on? Eavesdrop? That's a lousy method.\n For one thing, people can't be depended on to talk about the things you\n want to hear. For another, you're likely to get caught. Ask somebody?\n Who? Make the mistake of bracing a fellow like Horst and you might wind\n up with a sore head and an empty pocket. The best thing I could think\n of was to find a library, but that might be a job.", "\"Where be you from?\" he asked.\n\n\n I pointed to the road behind us.\n\n\n \"And where be you going?\"\n\n\n I pointed ahead. No other way to go.\n\n\n He seemed exasperated. I have that effect sometimes. Even on Mother and\n Daddy, who should know better.\n\n\n We were coming up on the others now, and the man said, \"Maybe you'd\n better ride on from here with us. For protection.\"\n\n\n He had an odd way of twisting his sounds, almost as though he had a\n mouthful of mush. I wondered whether he were just an oddball or whether\n everybody here spoke the same way. I'd never heard International\n English spoken any way but one, even on the planet Daddy made me visit\n with him.\n\n\n One of the other outriders came easing by then. I suppose they'd been\n watching us all the while. He called to the hard man." ], [ "My name is Mia Havero. I'm fourteen, of course, or I wouldn't be\n telling this. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that\n scrawniness to last much longer. Mother is very good looking. In the\n meantime, I've got brains as a consolation.\n\n\n After we were all settled, George Fuhonin, the pilot, raised the ramps.\n We sat there for five minutes while they bled air out of our tube and\n then we just ... dropped. My stomach turned flips. We didn't have to\n leave that way, but George thinks it's fun to be a hot pilot.\n\n\n Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. He's\n the only competition I have my own age. The trouble is, you don't go\n partners with the competition, do you? Besides, there was still that\n crack about being a snob.", "I let him run for almost a mile before I pulled him down to a walk\n again. I couldn't help wishing for Jimmy D. Whatever else he is, he's\n smart and brains I needed.\n\n\n How do you find out what's going on? Eavesdrop? That's a lousy method.\n For one thing, people can't be depended on to talk about the things you\n want to hear. For another, you're likely to get caught. Ask somebody?\n Who? Make the mistake of bracing a fellow like Horst and you might wind\n up with a sore head and an empty pocket. The best thing I could think\n of was to find a library, but that might be a job.", "There were sixteen of us girls and thirteen boys. We took our places\n in the seats in the center of the scout. Riggy Allen made a joke that\n nobody bothered to laugh at, and then we were all silent. I was feeling\n lost and just beginning to enjoy it when Jimmy Dentremont came over to\n me. He's red-headed and has a face that makes him look about ten. An\n intelligent runt like me.\n\n\n He said what I expected. \"Mia, do you want to go partners if we can get\n together when we get down?\"\n\n\n I guess he thought that because we were always matched on study I liked\n him. Well, I did when I wasn't mad at him, but now I had that crack\n he'd made about being a snob in mind, so I said, \"Not likely. I want to\n come back alive.\" It wasn't fair, but it was a good crack and he went\n back to his place without saying anything.", "I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be\n found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes.\n Venie Morlock has got a crush on Jimmy D., and when she saw me start\n getting ready to go, she began to check her gear, too. At our next\n landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. It didn't\n have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the\n bad moment any longer.\n\n\n The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird,\n and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the\n color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last.\nII", "The first night was hell, I guess because I'm not used to having the\n lights out. That's when you really start to feel lonely, being alone in\n the dark. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach\n if it's really going to come back. But I lived through it—one day in\n thirty gone.\n\n\n I rode in a spiral search pattern during the next two days. I had three\n things in mind—stay alive, find people and find some of the others.\n The first was automatic. The second was to find out if there was a slot\n I could fit into for a month. If not, I would have to find a place to\n camp out, as nasty as that would be. The third was to join forces,\n though not with that meatball Jimmy D.\n\n\n No, he isn't really a meatball. The trouble is that I don't take\n nothing from nobody, especially him, and he doesn't take nothing from\n nobody, especially me. So we do a lot of fighting.", "Horst stalked over and got the signal. He dropped it on the ground and\n said in a voice far colder than mine could ever be, because it was\n natural and mine wasn't, \"The piece be yours.\" Then he tromped on it\n until it cracked and fell apart.\n\n\n Then he said, \"Pull a gun on me twice. Twice.\" He slapped me so hard\n that my ears rang. \"You dirty little punk.\"\n\n\n I said calmly, \"You big louse.\"\n\n\n It was a time I would have done better to keep my mouth shut. All I can\n remember is a flash of pain as his fist crunched against the side of my\n face and then nothing.\n\n\n Brains are no good if you don't use them.", "He was a middle-aged man, maybe as old as my Daddy. He was large and he\n had a hard face. Normal enough, but hard. He pulled to a halt when we\n reached each other, but I kept going. He had to come around and follow\n me. I believe in judging a person by his face. A man can't help the\n face he owns, but he can help the expression he wears on it. If a man\n looks mean, I generally believe that he is. This one looked mean. That\n was why I kept riding.\n\n\n He said, \"What be you doing out here, boy? Be you out of your head?\n There be escaped Losels in these woods.\"\n\n\n I told you I hadn't finished filling out yet, but I hadn't thought it\n was that bad. I wasn't ready to make a fight over the point, though.\n Generally, I can't keep my bloody mouth shut, but now I didn't say\n anything. It seemed smart.", "When we reached Tintera, they started dropping us. We swung over the\n sea from the morning side and then dropped low over gray-green forested\n hills. Finally George spotted a clear area and dropped into it. They\n don't care what order you go in, so Jimmy D. jumped up, grabbed his\n gear and then led his horse down the ramp. I think he was still\n smarting from the slap I'd given him.\n\n\n In a minute we were airborne again. I wondered if I would ever see\n Jimmy—if he would get back alive.\n\n\n It's no game we play. When we turn fourteen, they drop us on the\n nearest colonized planet and come back one month later. That may sound\n like fun to you, but a lot of us never come back alive.", "I set up camp and ate my dinner. In the wagon closest to me were a man,\n his wife and their three children. The kids were running around and\n playing, and one of them ran close to the high-walled pen. His father\n came and pulled him away.\n\n\n The kids weren't to blame for their parents, but when one of them said\n hello to me, I didn't even answer. I know how lousy I would feel if I\n had two or three brothers and sisters, but it didn't strike me until\n that moment that it wouldn't even seem out of the ordinary to these\n kids. Isn't that horrible?\n\n\n About the time I finished eating, and before it grew dark, the old man\n I had seen earlier in the day drove his wagon in. He fascinated me. He\n had white hair, something I had read about in stories but had never\n seen before.", "Don't think I was helpless. I'm hell on wheels. They don't let us grow\n for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They prepare us. They\n do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time\n you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to\n the Ship. There's sense behind it. It means that everybody on the Ship\n is a person who can take care of himself if he has to. Daddy says that\n something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population\n from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. And it helps to\n keep the population steady.", "I opened my mouth to scream—I have a good scream—but a rough smelly\n hand clamped down over it before I had a chance to get more than a\n lungful of air. I bit down hard—5000 lbs. psi, I'm told—but he\n didn't let me go. I started to kick, but Horst jerked me off my feet\n and dragged me off.\n\n\n When we were behind the pen and out of earshot of the fire, he stopped\n dragging me and dropped me in a heap. \"Make any noise,\" he said, \"and\n I'll hurt you.\"\n\n\n That was a silly way to put it, but somehow it said more than if he'd\n threatened to break my arm or my head. It left him a latitude of things\n to do if he pleased. He examined his hand. There was enough moonlight\n for that. \"I ought to club you anyway,\" he said.", "\"He be awfully small, Horst. I doubt me a Losel'd even notice him at\n all. We mought as well throw him back again.\"\n\n\n The rider looked at me. When I didn't dissolve in terror as he\n expected, he shrugged and one of the other men laughed.\n\n\n The hard man said to the others, \"This boy will be riding along with us\n to Forton for protection.\"\n\n\n I looked down at the plodding, unhappy creatures they were driving\n along and one looked back at me with dull, expressionless golden eyes.\n I felt uncomfortable.\n\n\n I said, \"I don't think so.\"\n\n\n What the man did then surprised me. He said, \"I do think so,\" and\n reached for the rifle in his saddle boot.", "He said, \"Look, boy. You may not know it, but you be in a lot of\n trouble. So don't give me a hard time.\"\n\n\n He still thought I was a boy. It was not time to correct him, but I\n didn't like to see the point go unchallenged. It was unflattering.\n\n\n \"The courts won't let you get away with this,\" I said. I'd passed\n a courthouse in the town with a carved motto over the doors: EQUAL\n JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW or TRUTH OUR SHIELD AND JUSTICE OUR SWORD or\n something stuffy like that.\n\n\n He laughed, not a phony, villian-type laugh, but a real laugh, so I\n knew I'd goofed.", "The one I'd dropped the saddle on came up then. The others were putting\n the animals in the pen. He started to kick me, but Horst stopped him.\n\n\n \"No,\" he said. \"Look through the kid's gear, bring the horse and what\n we can use.\"\n\n\n The other one didn't move. \"Get going, Jack,\" Horst said in a menacing\n tone and they stood toe to toe for a long moment before Jack finally\n backed down. It seemed to me that Horst wasn't so much objecting to me\n being kicked, but was rather establishing who did the kicking in his\n bunch.\n\n\n But I wasn't done yet. I was scared, but I still had the pistol under\n my jacket.\n\n\n Horst turned back to me and I said, \"You can't do this and get away\n with it.\"", "Horst looked at it, then handed it back. \"Throw it away,\" he said.\n\n\n I leveled my gun at them—Hell on Wheels strikes again! I said, \"Hand\n that over to me.\"\n\n\n Horst made a disgusted sound.\n\n\n \"Don't make any noise,\" I said, \"or you'll fry. Now hand it over.\"\n\n\n I stowed it away, then paused with one hand on the leather horn of the\n saddle. \"What's the name of the kid in jail in Forton.\"\n\n\n \"I can't remember,\" he said. \"But it be coming to me. Hold on.\"\n\n\n I waited. Then suddenly my arm was hit a numbing blow from behind\n and the gun went flying. Jack pounced after it and Horst said, \"Good\n enough,\" to the others who'd come up behind me.\n\n\n I felt like a fool.", "I passed two crossroads and started to meet more people, but nobody\n questioned me. I met people on horseback, and twice I met trucks moving\n silently past. And I overtook a wagon driven by the oldest man I've\n seen in my life. He waved to me, and I waved back.\n\n\n Near the end of the afternoon I came to the town, and there I received\n a jolt that sickened me.\n\n\n By the time I came out on the other side, I was sick. My hands were\n cold and sweaty and my head was spinning, and I wanted to kick Ninc to\n a gallop.\n\n\n I rode slowly in, looking all around, missing nothing. The town was all\n stone, wood and brick. Out of date. Out of time, really. There were\n no machines more complicated than the trucks I'd seen earlier. At the\n edge of town, I passed a newspaper office with a headline pasted in the\n window—INVASION! I remember that. I wondered about it.", "\"Where be you from?\" he asked.\n\n\n I pointed to the road behind us.\n\n\n \"And where be you going?\"\n\n\n I pointed ahead. No other way to go.\n\n\n He seemed exasperated. I have that effect sometimes. Even on Mother and\n Daddy, who should know better.\n\n\n We were coming up on the others now, and the man said, \"Maybe you'd\n better ride on from here with us. For protection.\"\n\n\n He had an odd way of twisting his sounds, almost as though he had a\n mouthful of mush. I wondered whether he were just an oddball or whether\n everybody here spoke the same way. I'd never heard International\n English spoken any way but one, even on the planet Daddy made me visit\n with him.\n\n\n One of the other outriders came easing by then. I suppose they'd been\n watching us all the while. He called to the hard man.", "When I was nine, my Daddy gave me a painted wooden doll that my\n great-grandmother brought from Earth. The thing is that inside it,\n nestled one in another, are eleven more dolls, each one smaller than\n the last. I like to watch people when they open it for the first time.\n\n\n My face must have been like that as I rode along the road.\n\n\n The country leveled into a great rolling valley and the trees gave\n way to great farms and fields. In the fields, working, were some of\n the green creatures, which surprised me since the ones I'd seen before\n hadn't seemed smart enough to count to one, let alone do any work.\n\n\n But it relieved me. I thought they might have been eating them or\n something.", "When nightfall came, they started a large fire. Everybody gathered\n around. There was singing for awhile, and then the father of the\n children tried to pack them off to bed. But they weren't ready to go,\n so the old man started telling them a story. In the old man's odd\n accent, and sitting there in the campfire light surrounded by darkness,\n it seemed just right.\n\n\n It was about an old witch named Baba Yaga who lived in the forest in\n a house that stood on chicken legs. She was the nasty stepmother of a\n nice little girl, and to get rid of the kid, she sent her on a phony\n errand into the deep dark woods at nightfall. I could appreciate the\n poor girl's position. All the little girl had to help her were the\n handkerchief, the comb and the pearl that she had inherited from her\n dear dead mother. But, as it turned out, they were just enough to\n defeat nasty old Baba Yaga and bring the girl safely home.\n\n\n I wished for the same for myself.", "They were green and grotesque. They had squat bodies, long limbs and\n knobby bulges at their joints. They had square, flat animal masks for\n faces. But they walked on their hind legs and they had paws that were\n almost hands, and that was enough to make them seem almost human. They\n made a wordless, chilling, lowing sound as they milled and plodded\n along.\n\n\n I started Ninc up again and moved slowly to catch up with them. All the\n men on horseback had guns in saddle boots. They looked as nervous as\n cats with kittens. One of them had a string of packhorses on a line\n and he saw me and called to another who seemed to be the leader. That\n one wheeled his black horse and rode back toward me." ] ]
train	61228	[ "Why was Ferris against testing the discovery made by himself and Mitchell on himself?", "What was the name that came to mind when people thought of \n mathematician or scientist in the passage?", "From the passage, what is said to be the most common complaint of man?", "Which of these is NOT said to be a cause for headaches?", "Why was the Army doctor concerned about the wellness of Macklin?", "Why was Mitchell irritated that the story on the virus for headaches had been leaked to the newspapers?", "Why was Macklin's wife hysterical when she called to speak with Ferris and Mitchell?", "What caused Macklin to lose his intelligence?", "Why was Macklin against having an antitoxin to combat the virus?" ]	[ [ "Because it was too dangerous. ", "Because it was unethical. ", "Because he had a headache.", "Because they were underfunded. " ], [ "Macklin", "Mitchell", "Harold", "Ferris" ], [ "sinus infections ", "headaches", "The common cold", "lack of sleep" ], [ "nervous strain", "fatigue", "over-indulgence", "UV rays " ], [ "He appeared to now be a moron", "He showed signs of sudden weight loss", "His blood pressure had dropped dangerously low", "He was now anemic" ], [ "He feared the virus was counteractive.", "He feared that Macklin's wife would be angry", "He felt it was too early to release without verified results.", "He feared that the government would shut their project down." ], [ "Her husband was very ill from the virus", "Her husband was still having headaches", "She thought they had given her husband heroin.", "Her husband's blood pressure had dropped extremely low. " ], [ "He had suffered a stroke", "His brain cells were not working properly", "He was using heroin", "He was only pretending " ], [ "He feared the additional side-effects of the antitoxin.", "He didn't want the headaches to return. ", "He enjoyed the attention he was receiving.", "He enjoyed the newly found free time he had. " ] ]	[ 2, 1, 2, 4, 1, 3, 3, 2, 2 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "Ferris fingered the collar of his starched lab smock. \"Guess I got\n carried away for a moment. But Macklin is exactly what we need for a\n quick, dramatic test. We've had it if he turns us down.\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" Mitchell said, exhaling deeply. \"Somehow the men with the\n money just can't seem to understand basic research. Who would have\n financed a study of cyclic periods of the hedgehog? Yet the information\n gained from that study is vital in cancer research.\"\n\n\n \"When we prove our results that should be of enough practical value for\n anyone. But those crummy trustees didn't even leave us enough for a\n field test.\" Ferris scrubbed his thin hand over the bony ridge of his\n forehead. \"I've been worrying so much about this I've got the ancestor\n of all headaches.\"\n\n\n Mitchell's blue eyes narrowed and his boyish face took on an expression\n of demonic intensity. \"Ferris, would you consider—?\"", "\"You're an important man, doctor,\" Ferris said. \"Nobody would care if\n Mitchell or I cured ourselves of headaches—they might not even believe\n us if we said we did. But the proper authorities will believe a man\n of your reputation. Besides, neither of us has a record of chronic\n migraine. You do.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I do,\" Macklin said. \"Very well. Go ahead. Give me your\n injection.\"\n\n\n Mitchell cleared his throat. \"Are you positive, doctor?\" he asked\n uncertainly. \"Perhaps you would like a few days to think it over.\"\n\n\n \"No! I'm ready. Go ahead, right now.\"\n\n\n \"There's a simple release,\" Ferris said smoothly.\n\n\n Macklin groped in his pocket for a pen.\nII\n\n\n \"Ferris!\" Mitchell yelled, slamming the laboratory door behind him.", "\"No!\" the smaller man yelled. \"You can't expect me to violate\n professional ethics and test my own discovery on myself.\"\n\n\n \"\nOur\ndiscovery,\" Mitchell said politely.\n\n\n \"That's what I meant to say. But I'm not sure it would be completely\n ethical with even a discovery partly mine.\"\n\n\n \"You're right. Besides who cares if you or I are cured of headaches?\n Our reputations don't go outside our own fields,\" Mitchell said. \"But\n now Macklin—\"", "\"I figure you mean to put me back like I used to be.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, doctor,\" Mitchell said eagerly, \"just as you used to be.\"\n\n\n \"\nWith\nmy headaches, like before?\"\n\n\n Mitchell coughed into his fist for an instant, to give him time to\n frame an answer. \"Unfortunately, yes. Apparently if your mind functions\n properly once again you will have the headaches again. Our research is\n a dismal failure.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't go that far,\" Ferris remarked cheerfully.\n\n\n Mitchell was about to ask his associate what he meant when he saw\n Macklin slowly shaking his head.\n\n\n \"No, sir!\" the mathematician said. \"I shall not go back to my original\n state. I can remember what it was like. Always worrying, worrying,\n worrying.\"\n\n\n \"You mean wondering,\" Mitchell said.", "\"That's not so bad,\" Macklin said. \"How low can it get?\"\n\n\n \"When your heart stops, your blood pressure goes to its lowest point,\"\n Mitchell said.\n\n\n A dew of perspiration had bloomed on Macklin's forehead. \"Is there much\n risk of that?\"\n\n\n \"Practically none,\" Mitchell said. \"We have to give you the worst\n possibilities.\nAll\nour test animals survived and seem perfectly happy\n and contented. As I said, the virus is self-stabilizing. Ferris and I\n are confident that there is no danger.... But we may be wrong.\"\n\n\n Macklin held his head in both hands. \"Why did you two select\nme\n?\"", "Macklin dropped on the edge of the desk and adjusted his pipe. \"Now\n what's this about you wanting my help on something? And please keep the\n explanation simple. Biology isn't my field, you know.\"\n\n\n Mitchell moved around the desk casually. \"Actually, Doctor, we haven't\n the right to ask this of a man of your importance. There may be an\n element of risk.\"\n\n\n The mathematician clamped onto his pipe and showed his teeth. \"Now you\n have me intrigued. What is it all about?\"\n\n\n \"Doctor, we understand you have severe headaches,\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n Macklin nodded. \"That's right, Steven. Migraine.\"\n\n\n \"That must be terrible,\" Ferris said. \"All your fine reputation and\n lavish salary can't be much consolation when that ripping, tearing\n agony begins, can it?\"", "The only thing that could delay the project was Macklin's health.\n\n\n Despite his impressive body, some years before he had suffered a mild\n stroke ... or at least a vascular spasm of a cerebral artery. It was\n known that he suffered from the vilest variety of migraine. A cycle of\n the headaches had caused him to be absent from his classes for several\n weeks, and there were an unusual number of military uniforms seen\n around the campus.\nFerris paced off the tidy measurements of the office outside the\n laboratory in the biology building. Mitchell sat slumped in the chair\n behind the blond imitation wood desk, watching him disinterestedly.\n\n\n \"Do you suppose the Great Man will actually show up?\" Ferris demanded,\n pausing in mid-stride.\n\n\n \"I imagine he will,\" Mitchell said. \"Macklin's always seemed a decent\n enough fellow when I've had lunch with him or seen him at the trustees\n meetings.\"", "\"Right here,\" the small man said briskly. He was sitting at a work\n table, penciling notes. \"I've been expecting you.\"\n\n\n \"Doctor—Harold—you shouldn't have given this story to the\n newspapers,\" Mitchell said. He tapped the back of his hand against the\n folded paper.\n\n\n \"On the contrary, I should and I did,\" Ferris answered. \"We wanted\n something dramatic to show to the trustees and here it is.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, we wanted to show our proof to the trustees—but not broadcast\n unverified results to the press. It's too early for that!\"\n\n\n \"Don't be so stuffy and conservative, Mitchell! Macklin's cured, isn't\n he? By established periodic cycle he should be suffering hell right\n now, shouldn't he? But thanks to our treatment he is perfectly happy,\n with no unfortunate side effects such as gynergen produces.\"", "\"Doctor,\" Mitchell said quickly, \"I know it's a tremendous favor to\n ask of a man of your position. But you can understand our problem.\n Unless we can produce quick, conclusive and dramatic proof of our\n studies we can get no more financial backing. We\nshould\nrun a\n large-scale field test. But we haven't the time or money for that.\n We can cure the headaches of one person and that's the limit of our\n resources.\"\n\n\n \"I'm tempted,\" Macklin said hesitantly, \"but the answer is go. I mean\n '\nno\n'. I'd like to help you out, but I'm afraid I owe too much to\n others to take the rest—the risk, I mean.\"", "\"It's a significant test case, yes. But not enough to go to the\n newspapers with. If it wasn't enough to go to the press with, it wasn't\n enough to try and breach the trustees with. Don't you see? The public\n will hand down a ukase demanding our virus, just as they demanded the\n Salk vaccine and the Grennell serum.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n The shrill call of the telephone interrupted Mitchell's objections.\n\n\n Ferris excused himself and crossed to the instrument. He answered it\n and listened for a moment, his face growing impatient.\n\n\n \"It's Macklin's wife,\" Ferris said. \"Do you want to talk to her? I'm no\n good with hysterical women.\"\n\n\n \"Hysterical?\" Mitchell muttered in alarm and went to the phone.\n\n\n \"Hello?\" Mitchell said reluctantly. \"Mrs. Macklin?\"", "The mathematician took the pipe out of his mouth. \"If this really\n works, I could stop using that damned gynergen, couldn't I? The stuff\n makes me violently sick to my stomach. But it's better than the\n migraine. How should I go about removing my curse?\" He reinserted the\n pipe.\n\n\n \"I assure you, you can forget ergotamine tartrate,\" Ferris said. \"Our\n discovery will work.\"\n\"Will work,\" Macklin said thoughtfully. \"The operative word. It\nhasn't\nworked then?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly it has,\" Ferris said. \"On rats, on chimps....\"\n\n\n \"But not on humans?\" Macklin asked.\n\n\n \"Not yet,\" Mitchell admitted.", "\"Now, Mrs. Macklin. Neither Dr. Ferris or myself have been near your\n husband for a full day. The effects of a narcotic would have worn off\n by this time.\"\n\n\n \"Most known narcotics,\" she admitted, \"but evidently you have\n discovered something new. Is it so expensive to refine you and Ferris\n have to recruit new customers to keep yourselves supplied?\"\n\n\n \"Mrs. Macklin! I think I had better talk to you later when you are\n calmer.\"\n\n\n Mitchell dropped the receiver heavily. \"What could be wrong with\n Macklin?\" he asked without removing his hand from the telephone.\n\n\n Ferris frowned, making quotation marks above his nose. \"Let's have a\n look at the test animals.\"", "\"Iron deficiency anemia?\"\n\n\n \"Never mind, doctor. It was a form of humor. I think we had better see\n exactly what is wrong with Elliot Macklin.\"\n\n\n \"There's nothing wrong with him,\" Ferris snapped. \"He's probably just\n trying to get us in trouble, the ingrate!\"\nMacklin's traditional ranch house was small but attractive in\n aqua-tinted aluminum.\n\n\n Under Mitchell's thumb the bell chimbed\ndum-de-de-dum-dum-dum\n.\n\n\n As they waited Mitchell glanced at Ferris. He seemed completely\n undisturbed, perhaps slightly curious.\n\n\n The door unlatched and swung back.\n\n\n \"Mrs. Macklin,\" Mitchell said quickly, \"I'm sure we can help if there\n is anything wrong with your husband. This is Dr. Ferris. I am Dr.\n Mitchell.\"", "Mitchell did his best to explain the F-M Virus.\n\n\n \"You mean,\" the Army officer said levelly \"you have infected him with\n some kind of a disease to rot his brain?\"\n\n\n \"No, no! Could I talk to the other man, the doctor? Maybe I can make\n him understand.\"\n\n\n \"All I want to know is why Elliot Macklin has been made as simple as if\n he had been kicked in the head by a mule,\" Colonel Carson said.\n\n\n \"I think I can explain,\" Ferris interrupted.\n\n\n \"You can?\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n Ferris nodded. \"We made a slight miscalculation. It appears as if the\n virus colony overcontrols the supply of posterior pituitary extract in\n the cerebrum. It isn't more than necessary to stop headaches. But that\n necessary amount of control to stop pain is too much to allow the brain\n cells to function properly.\"", "\"I beg your pardon, sir,\" Carson said. \"I didn't intend any offense.\n But according to all the standard intelligence tests we have given you,\n your clinical intelligence quotient is that of a moron.\"\n\n\n \"That's just on book learning,\" Macklin said. \"There's a lot you learn\n in life that you don't get out of books, son.\"\n\n\n \"I'm confident that's true, sir,\" Colonel Carson said. He turned to the\n two biologists. \"Perhaps we had better speak outside.\"\n\n\n \"But—\" Mitchell said, impatient to examine Macklin for himself. \"Very\n well. Let's step into the hall.\"\n\n\n Ferris followed them docilely.\n\n\n \"What have you done to him?\" the colonel asked straightforwardly.\n\n\n \"We merely cured him of his headaches,\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n \"How?\"", "\"Now, you know it's so. But how would you like to get rid of those\n worries just as you got rid of the others?\" Mitchell asked.\n\n\n \"I guess I'd like that,\" the mathematician replied.\n\n\n \"Then come on over to my laboratory. You remember where it's at, don't\n you?\"\n\n\n \"No, I—yes, I guess I do. But how do I know you won't try to put me\n back where I was instead of helping me more?\"\n\n\n \"I couldn't do that against your wishes. That would be illegal!\"\n\n\n \"If you say so. But I don't guess I can come anyway. The Army is\n watching me pretty close.\"\n\n\n \"That's alright,\" Mitchell said quickly. \"You can bring along Colonel\n Carson.\"\n\n\n \"But he won't like you fixing me up more.\"", "\"Why won't they function?\" Carson roared.\n\n\n \"They don't get enough food—blood, oxygen, hemoglobin,\" Ferris\n explained. \"The cerebral vessels don't contract enough to pump the\n blood through the brain as fast and as hard as is needed. The brain\n cells remain sluggish, dormant. Perhaps decaying.\"\n\n\n The colonel yelled.\n\n\n Mitchell groaned. He was abruptly sure Ferris was correct.\nThe colonel drew himself to attention, fists trembling at his sides.\n \"I'll see you hung for treason! Don't you know what Elliot Macklin\n means to us? Do you want those filthy Luxemburgians to reach Pluto\n before we do? Macklin's formula is essential to the FTL engine. You\n might just as well have blown up Washington, D.C. Better! The capital\n is replaceable. But the chances of an Elliot Macklin are very nearly\n once in a human race.\"", "Macklin ran the back of his knuckles across his forehead. \"I really\n would like to take you up on it. When I start making slips like that it\n means another attack of migraine. The drilling, grinding pain through\n my temples and around my eyeballs. The flashes of light, the rioting\n pools of color playing on the back of my lids. Ugh.\"\n\n\n Ferris smiled. \"Gynergen makes you sick, does it, doctor? Produces\n nausea, eh? The pain of that turns you almost wrong side out, doesn't\n it? You aren't much better off with it than without, are you? I've\n heard some say they preferred the migraine.\"\n\n\n Macklin carefully arranged his pipe along with the tools he used to\n tend it in a worn leather case. \"Tell me,\" he said, \"what is the worst\n that could happen to me?\"\n\n\n \"Low blood pressure,\" Ferris said.", "Her mouth grew petulant. \"I don't care. I would rather have a live\n husband than a dead genius. I can take care of him this way, make him\n comfortable....\"\n\n\n Carson opened his mouth and closed his fist, then relaxed. Mitchell led\n him back into the hall.\n\n\n \"I'm no psychiatrist,\" Mitchell said, \"but I think she wants Macklin\n stupid. Prefers it that way. She's always dominated his personal life,\n and now she can dominate him completely.\"\n\n\n \"What is she? A monster?\" the Army officer muttered.\n\n\n \"No,\" Mitchell said. \"She's an intelligent woman unconsciously jealous\n of her husband's genius.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" Carson said. \"I don't know. I don't know what the hell to tell\n the Pentagon. I think I'll go out and get drunk.\"\n\n\n \"I'll go with you,\" Ferris said.", "\"Yes. I can't go against Elliot's wishes. It would be monstrous to put\n him back where he would suffer the hell of those headaches once again,\n where he never had a moment's peace from worry and pressure. He's happy\n now. Like a child, but happy.\"\n\n\n \"Mrs. Macklin,\" the Army man said levelly, \"if you don't help us\n restore your husband's mind we will be forced to get a court order\n declaring him incompetent.\"\n\n\n \"But he is not! Legally, I mean,\" the woman stormed.\n\n\n \"Maybe not. It's a borderline case. But I think any court would give us\n the edge where restoring the mind of Elliot Macklin was concerned. Once\n he's certified incompetent, authorities can rule whether Mitchell and\n Ferris' antitoxin treatment is the best method of restoring Dr. Macklin\n to sanity.\"" ], [ "Elliot Macklin had inherited the reputation of the late Albert Einstein\n in the popular mind. He was the man people thought of when the word\n \"mathematician\" or even \"scientist\" was mentioned. No one knew whether\n his Theory of Spatium was correct or not because no one had yet been\n able to frame an argument with it. Macklin was in his early fifties but\n looked in his late thirties, with the build of a football player. The\n government took up a lot of his time using him as the symbol of the\n Ideal Scientist to help recruit Science and Engineering Cadets.\n\n\n For the past seven years Macklin—who\nwas\nthe Advanced Studies\n Department of Firestone University—had been involved in devising a\n faster-than-light drive to help the Army reach Pluto and eventually the\n nearer stars. Mitchell had overheard two coeds talking and so knew\n that the project was nearing completion. If so, it was a case of\nAd\n astra per aspirin\n.", "The medic examined Mitchell and Ferris critically before answering. \"He\n used to be a mathematical genius.\"\n\n\n \"And now?\" Mitchell said impatiently.\n\n\n \"Now he is a moron,\" the medic said.\nIII\n\n\n Mitchell tried to stop Colonel Sidney as he went past, but the doctor\n mumbled he had a report to make.\n\n\n Mitchell and Ferris stared at Colonel Carson and Macklin and at each\n other.\n\n\n \"What did he mean, Macklin is an idiot?\" Mitchell asked.\n\n\n \"Not an idiot,\" Colonel Carson corrected primly. \"Dr. Macklin is a\n moron. He's legally responsible, but he's extremely stupid.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not so dumb,\" Macklin said defensively.", "\"Well,\" Macklin said. \"Well.\" He thumped pipe ashes out into his palm.\n \"Certainly you can get volunteers. Convicts. Conscientious objectors\n from the Army.\"\n\n\n \"We want you,\" Ferris told him.\n\n\n Macklin coughed. \"I don't want to overestimate my value but the\n government wouldn't like it very well if I died in the middle of this\n project. My wife would like it even less.\"\n\n\n Ferris turned his back on the mathematician. Mitchell could see him\n mouthing the word\nyellow\n.", "\"Now, you know it's so. But how would you like to get rid of those\n worries just as you got rid of the others?\" Mitchell asked.\n\n\n \"I guess I'd like that,\" the mathematician replied.\n\n\n \"Then come on over to my laboratory. You remember where it's at, don't\n you?\"\n\n\n \"No, I—yes, I guess I do. But how do I know you won't try to put me\n back where I was instead of helping me more?\"\n\n\n \"I couldn't do that against your wishes. That would be illegal!\"\n\n\n \"If you say so. But I don't guess I can come anyway. The Army is\n watching me pretty close.\"\n\n\n \"That's alright,\" Mitchell said quickly. \"You can bring along Colonel\n Carson.\"\n\n\n \"But he won't like you fixing me up more.\"", "\"He's always treated me like dirt,\" Ferris said heatedly. \"Everyone on\n this campus treats biologists like dirt. Sometimes I want to bash in\n their smug faces.\"\n\n\n Sometimes, Mitchell reflected, Ferris displayed a certain lack of\n scientific detachment.\n\n\n There came a discreet knock on the door.\n\n\n \"Please come in,\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n Elliot Macklin entered in a cloud of pipe smoke and a tweed jacket. He\n looked more than a little like a postgraduate student, and Mitchell\n suspected that that was his intention.\n\n\n He shook hands warmly with Mitchell. \"Good of you to ask me over,\n Steven.\"\n\n\n Macklin threw a big arm across Ferris' shoulders. \"How have you been,\n Harold?\"\n\n\n Ferris' face flickered between pink and white. \"Fine, thank you,\n doctor.\"", "The mathematician took the pipe out of his mouth. \"If this really\n works, I could stop using that damned gynergen, couldn't I? The stuff\n makes me violently sick to my stomach. But it's better than the\n migraine. How should I go about removing my curse?\" He reinserted the\n pipe.\n\n\n \"I assure you, you can forget ergotamine tartrate,\" Ferris said. \"Our\n discovery will work.\"\n\"Will work,\" Macklin said thoughtfully. \"The operative word. It\nhasn't\nworked then?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly it has,\" Ferris said. \"On rats, on chimps....\"\n\n\n \"But not on humans?\" Macklin asked.\n\n\n \"Not yet,\" Mitchell admitted.", "\"Good boy,\" the biologist said. \"Listen, doctor—Elliot—El, old son.\n I'm not against you like all the others. I don't want to make you go\n back to all that worrying and thinking and headaches. You believe me,\n don't you?\"\n\n\n There was a slight hesitation.\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Macklin said, \"if you say so. Why shouldn't I believe you?\"\n\n\n \"But there was a hesitation there, El. You worried for just a second if\n I could have some reason for not telling you the truth.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose so,\" Macklin said humbly.\n\n\n \"You've found yourself worrying—thinking—about a lot of other\n problems since we left you, haven't you? Maybe not the same kind of\n scientific problem. But more personal ones, ones you didn't used to\n have time to think about.\"\n\n\n \"If you say so.\"", "The only thing that could delay the project was Macklin's health.\n\n\n Despite his impressive body, some years before he had suffered a mild\n stroke ... or at least a vascular spasm of a cerebral artery. It was\n known that he suffered from the vilest variety of migraine. A cycle of\n the headaches had caused him to be absent from his classes for several\n weeks, and there were an unusual number of military uniforms seen\n around the campus.\nFerris paced off the tidy measurements of the office outside the\n laboratory in the biology building. Mitchell sat slumped in the chair\n behind the blond imitation wood desk, watching him disinterestedly.\n\n\n \"Do you suppose the Great Man will actually show up?\" Ferris demanded,\n pausing in mid-stride.\n\n\n \"I imagine he will,\" Mitchell said. \"Macklin's always seemed a decent\n enough fellow when I've had lunch with him or seen him at the trustees\n meetings.\"", "\"I figure you mean to put me back like I used to be.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, doctor,\" Mitchell said eagerly, \"just as you used to be.\"\n\n\n \"\nWith\nmy headaches, like before?\"\n\n\n Mitchell coughed into his fist for an instant, to give him time to\n frame an answer. \"Unfortunately, yes. Apparently if your mind functions\n properly once again you will have the headaches again. Our research is\n a dismal failure.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't go that far,\" Ferris remarked cheerfully.\n\n\n Mitchell was about to ask his associate what he meant when he saw\n Macklin slowly shaking his head.\n\n\n \"No, sir!\" the mathematician said. \"I shall not go back to my original\n state. I can remember what it was like. Always worrying, worrying,\n worrying.\"\n\n\n \"You mean wondering,\" Mitchell said.", "Macklin nodded. \"Troubled, anyway. Disturbed by every little thing.\n How high was up, which infinity was bigger than what infinity—say,\n what was an infinity anyway? All that sort of schoolboy things. It's\n peaceful this way. My head doesn't hurt. I've got a good-looking wife\n and all the money I need. I've got it made. Why worry?\"\n\n\n Colonel Carson opened his mouth, then closed it.\n\n\n \"That's right, Colonel. There's no use in arguing with him,\" Mitchell\n said.\n\n\n \"It's not his decision to make,\" the colonel said. \"He's an idiot now.\"", "Macklin dropped on the edge of the desk and adjusted his pipe. \"Now\n what's this about you wanting my help on something? And please keep the\n explanation simple. Biology isn't my field, you know.\"\n\n\n Mitchell moved around the desk casually. \"Actually, Doctor, we haven't\n the right to ask this of a man of your importance. There may be an\n element of risk.\"\n\n\n The mathematician clamped onto his pipe and showed his teeth. \"Now you\n have me intrigued. What is it all about?\"\n\n\n \"Doctor, we understand you have severe headaches,\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n Macklin nodded. \"That's right, Steven. Migraine.\"\n\n\n \"That must be terrible,\" Ferris said. \"All your fine reputation and\n lavish salary can't be much consolation when that ripping, tearing\n agony begins, can it?\"", "He lay there, blinking the sleep out of his eyes, listening to his\n heart race, and then convulsively snatched the telephone receiver from\n the nightstand. He stabbed out a number with a vicious index finger.\n\n\n After a time there came a dull click and a sleepy answer.\n\n\n \"Hello?\" Elliot Macklin said.\n\n\n Mitchell smiled to himself. He was in luck; Macklin had answered the\n phone instead of his wife.\n\n\n \"Can you speak freely, doctor?\" Mitchell asked.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" the mathematician said. \"I can talk fine.\"\n\n\n \"I mean, are you alone?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you want to know if my wife is around. No, she's asleep. That Army\n doctor, Colonel Sidney, he gave her a sedative. I wouldn't let him give\n me anything, though.\"", "Ferris fingered the collar of his starched lab smock. \"Guess I got\n carried away for a moment. But Macklin is exactly what we need for a\n quick, dramatic test. We've had it if he turns us down.\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" Mitchell said, exhaling deeply. \"Somehow the men with the\n money just can't seem to understand basic research. Who would have\n financed a study of cyclic periods of the hedgehog? Yet the information\n gained from that study is vital in cancer research.\"\n\n\n \"When we prove our results that should be of enough practical value for\n anyone. But those crummy trustees didn't even leave us enough for a\n field test.\" Ferris scrubbed his thin hand over the bony ridge of his\n forehead. \"I've been worrying so much about this I've got the ancestor\n of all headaches.\"\n\n\n Mitchell's blue eyes narrowed and his boyish face took on an expression\n of demonic intensity. \"Ferris, would you consider—?\"", "\"I beg your pardon, sir,\" Carson said. \"I didn't intend any offense.\n But according to all the standard intelligence tests we have given you,\n your clinical intelligence quotient is that of a moron.\"\n\n\n \"That's just on book learning,\" Macklin said. \"There's a lot you learn\n in life that you don't get out of books, son.\"\n\n\n \"I'm confident that's true, sir,\" Colonel Carson said. He turned to the\n two biologists. \"Perhaps we had better speak outside.\"\n\n\n \"But—\" Mitchell said, impatient to examine Macklin for himself. \"Very\n well. Let's step into the hall.\"\n\n\n Ferris followed them docilely.\n\n\n \"What have you done to him?\" the colonel asked straightforwardly.\n\n\n \"We merely cured him of his headaches,\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n \"How?\"", "Her mouth grew petulant. \"I don't care. I would rather have a live\n husband than a dead genius. I can take care of him this way, make him\n comfortable....\"\n\n\n Carson opened his mouth and closed his fist, then relaxed. Mitchell led\n him back into the hall.\n\n\n \"I'm no psychiatrist,\" Mitchell said, \"but I think she wants Macklin\n stupid. Prefers it that way. She's always dominated his personal life,\n and now she can dominate him completely.\"\n\n\n \"What is she? A monster?\" the Army officer muttered.\n\n\n \"No,\" Mitchell said. \"She's an intelligent woman unconsciously jealous\n of her husband's genius.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" Carson said. \"I don't know. I don't know what the hell to tell\n the Pentagon. I think I'll go out and get drunk.\"\n\n\n \"I'll go with you,\" Ferris said.", "\"No!\" the smaller man yelled. \"You can't expect me to violate\n professional ethics and test my own discovery on myself.\"\n\n\n \"\nOur\ndiscovery,\" Mitchell said politely.\n\n\n \"That's what I meant to say. But I'm not sure it would be completely\n ethical with even a discovery partly mine.\"\n\n\n \"You're right. Besides who cares if you or I are cured of headaches?\n Our reputations don't go outside our own fields,\" Mitchell said. \"But\n now Macklin—\"", "\"Why won't they function?\" Carson roared.\n\n\n \"They don't get enough food—blood, oxygen, hemoglobin,\" Ferris\n explained. \"The cerebral vessels don't contract enough to pump the\n blood through the brain as fast and as hard as is needed. The brain\n cells remain sluggish, dormant. Perhaps decaying.\"\n\n\n The colonel yelled.\n\n\n Mitchell groaned. He was abruptly sure Ferris was correct.\nThe colonel drew himself to attention, fists trembling at his sides.\n \"I'll see you hung for treason! Don't you know what Elliot Macklin\n means to us? Do you want those filthy Luxemburgians to reach Pluto\n before we do? Macklin's formula is essential to the FTL engine. You\n might just as well have blown up Washington, D.C. Better! The capital\n is replaceable. But the chances of an Elliot Macklin are very nearly\n once in a human race.\"", "Mitchell glanced sharply at the little biologist.\n\n\n Carson squinted. \"Any particular reason, doctor?\"\n\n\n \"To celebrate,\" Ferris said.\n\n\n The colonel shrugged. \"That's as good a reason as any.\"\n\n\n On the street, Mitchell watched the two men go off together in\n bewilderment.\nIV\n\n\n Macklin was playing jacks.\n\n\n He didn't have a head on his shoulders and he was squatting on a great\n curving surface that was Spacetime, and his jacks were Earth and Pluto\n and the rest of the planets. And for a ball he was using a head. Not\n his head. Mitchell's. Both heads were initialed \"M\" so it was all the\n same.\nMitchell forced himself to awaken, with some initial difficulty.", "On the coffee table in front of Macklin were some odd-shaped building\n blocks such as were used in nursery schools. A second uniformed\n man—another colonel but with the snake-entwined staff of the medical\n corps in his insignia—was kneeling at the table on the marble-effect\n carpet.\n\n\n The Army physician stood up and brushed his knees, undusted from the\n scrupulously clean rug.\n\n\n \"What's wrong with him, Sidney?\" the other officer asked the doctor.\n\n\n \"Not a thing,\" Sidney said. \"He's the healthiest, happiest, most\n well-adjusted man I've ever examined, Carson.\"\n\n\n \"But—\" Colonel Carson protested.\n\n\n \"Oh, he's changed all right,\" the Army doctor answered. \"He's not the\n same man as he used to be.\"\n\n\n \"How is he different?\" Mitchell demanded.", "\"Mrs. Macklin,\" the colonel began, \"these gentlemen believe they can\n cure your husband of his present condition.\"\n\n\n \"Really?\" she said. \"Did you speak to Elliot about that?\"\n\n\n \"Y-yes,\" Colonel Carson said, \"but he's not himself. He refused the\n treatment. He wants to remain in his state of lower intelligence.\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"If those are his wishes, I can't go against them.\"\n\n\n \"But Mrs. Macklin!\" Mitchell protested. \"You will have to get a court\n order overruling your husband's wishes.\"\n\n\n She smoothed an eyebrow with the third finger of her right hand. \"That\n was my original thought. But I've redecided.\"\n\n\n \"Redecided!\" Carson burst out almost hysterically." ], [ "\"No, Harold, it isn't,\" Macklin admitted. \"What does your project have\n to do with my headaches?\"\n\n\n \"Doctor,\" Mitchell said, \"what would you say the most common complaint\n of man is?\"\n\n\n \"I would have said the common cold,\" Macklin replied, \"but I suppose\n from what you have said you mean headaches.\"\n\"Headaches,\" Mitchell agreed. \"Everybody has them at some time in his\n life. Some people have them every day. Some are driven to suicide by\n their headaches.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Macklin said.\n\n\n \"But think,\" Ferris interjected, \"what a boon it would be if everyone\n could be cured of headaches\nforever\nby one simple injection.\"\n\n\n \"I don't suppose the manufacturers of aspirin would like you. But it\n would please about everybody else.\"", "\"Good boy,\" the biologist said. \"Listen, doctor—Elliot—El, old son.\n I'm not against you like all the others. I don't want to make you go\n back to all that worrying and thinking and headaches. You believe me,\n don't you?\"\n\n\n There was a slight hesitation.\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Macklin said, \"if you say so. Why shouldn't I believe you?\"\n\n\n \"But there was a hesitation there, El. You worried for just a second if\n I could have some reason for not telling you the truth.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose so,\" Macklin said humbly.\n\n\n \"You've found yourself worrying—thinking—about a lot of other\n problems since we left you, haven't you? Maybe not the same kind of\n scientific problem. But more personal ones, ones you didn't used to\n have time to think about.\"\n\n\n \"If you say so.\"", "Macklin nodded. \"Troubled, anyway. Disturbed by every little thing.\n How high was up, which infinity was bigger than what infinity—say,\n what was an infinity anyway? All that sort of schoolboy things. It's\n peaceful this way. My head doesn't hurt. I've got a good-looking wife\n and all the money I need. I've got it made. Why worry?\"\n\n\n Colonel Carson opened his mouth, then closed it.\n\n\n \"That's right, Colonel. There's no use in arguing with him,\" Mitchell\n said.\n\n\n \"It's not his decision to make,\" the colonel said. \"He's an idiot now.\"", "\"Right here,\" the small man said briskly. He was sitting at a work\n table, penciling notes. \"I've been expecting you.\"\n\n\n \"Doctor—Harold—you shouldn't have given this story to the\n newspapers,\" Mitchell said. He tapped the back of his hand against the\n folded paper.\n\n\n \"On the contrary, I should and I did,\" Ferris answered. \"We wanted\n something dramatic to show to the trustees and here it is.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, we wanted to show our proof to the trustees—but not broadcast\n unverified results to the press. It's too early for that!\"\n\n\n \"Don't be so stuffy and conservative, Mitchell! Macklin's cured, isn't\n he? By established periodic cycle he should be suffering hell right\n now, shouldn't he? But thanks to our treatment he is perfectly happy,\n with no unfortunate side effects such as gynergen produces.\"", "\"I beg your pardon, sir,\" Carson said. \"I didn't intend any offense.\n But according to all the standard intelligence tests we have given you,\n your clinical intelligence quotient is that of a moron.\"\n\n\n \"That's just on book learning,\" Macklin said. \"There's a lot you learn\n in life that you don't get out of books, son.\"\n\n\n \"I'm confident that's true, sir,\" Colonel Carson said. He turned to the\n two biologists. \"Perhaps we had better speak outside.\"\n\n\n \"But—\" Mitchell said, impatient to examine Macklin for himself. \"Very\n well. Let's step into the hall.\"\n\n\n Ferris followed them docilely.\n\n\n \"What have you done to him?\" the colonel asked straightforwardly.\n\n\n \"We merely cured him of his headaches,\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n \"How?\"", "Her mouth grew petulant. \"I don't care. I would rather have a live\n husband than a dead genius. I can take care of him this way, make him\n comfortable....\"\n\n\n Carson opened his mouth and closed his fist, then relaxed. Mitchell led\n him back into the hall.\n\n\n \"I'm no psychiatrist,\" Mitchell said, \"but I think she wants Macklin\n stupid. Prefers it that way. She's always dominated his personal life,\n and now she can dominate him completely.\"\n\n\n \"What is she? A monster?\" the Army officer muttered.\n\n\n \"No,\" Mitchell said. \"She's an intelligent woman unconsciously jealous\n of her husband's genius.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" Carson said. \"I don't know. I don't know what the hell to tell\n the Pentagon. I think I'll go out and get drunk.\"\n\n\n \"I'll go with you,\" Ferris said.", "Macklin dropped on the edge of the desk and adjusted his pipe. \"Now\n what's this about you wanting my help on something? And please keep the\n explanation simple. Biology isn't my field, you know.\"\n\n\n Mitchell moved around the desk casually. \"Actually, Doctor, we haven't\n the right to ask this of a man of your importance. There may be an\n element of risk.\"\n\n\n The mathematician clamped onto his pipe and showed his teeth. \"Now you\n have me intrigued. What is it all about?\"\n\n\n \"Doctor, we understand you have severe headaches,\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n Macklin nodded. \"That's right, Steven. Migraine.\"\n\n\n \"That must be terrible,\" Ferris said. \"All your fine reputation and\n lavish salary can't be much consolation when that ripping, tearing\n agony begins, can it?\"", "\"No!\" the smaller man yelled. \"You can't expect me to violate\n professional ethics and test my own discovery on myself.\"\n\n\n \"\nOur\ndiscovery,\" Mitchell said politely.\n\n\n \"That's what I meant to say. But I'm not sure it would be completely\n ethical with even a discovery partly mine.\"\n\n\n \"You're right. Besides who cares if you or I are cured of headaches?\n Our reputations don't go outside our own fields,\" Mitchell said. \"But\n now Macklin—\"", "On the coffee table in front of Macklin were some odd-shaped building\n blocks such as were used in nursery schools. A second uniformed\n man—another colonel but with the snake-entwined staff of the medical\n corps in his insignia—was kneeling at the table on the marble-effect\n carpet.\n\n\n The Army physician stood up and brushed his knees, undusted from the\n scrupulously clean rug.\n\n\n \"What's wrong with him, Sidney?\" the other officer asked the doctor.\n\n\n \"Not a thing,\" Sidney said. \"He's the healthiest, happiest, most\n well-adjusted man I've ever examined, Carson.\"\n\n\n \"But—\" Colonel Carson protested.\n\n\n \"Oh, he's changed all right,\" the Army doctor answered. \"He's not the\n same man as he used to be.\"\n\n\n \"How is he different?\" Mitchell demanded.", "The mathematician took the pipe out of his mouth. \"If this really\n works, I could stop using that damned gynergen, couldn't I? The stuff\n makes me violently sick to my stomach. But it's better than the\n migraine. How should I go about removing my curse?\" He reinserted the\n pipe.\n\n\n \"I assure you, you can forget ergotamine tartrate,\" Ferris said. \"Our\n discovery will work.\"\n\"Will work,\" Macklin said thoughtfully. \"The operative word. It\nhasn't\nworked then?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly it has,\" Ferris said. \"On rats, on chimps....\"\n\n\n \"But not on humans?\" Macklin asked.\n\n\n \"Not yet,\" Mitchell admitted.", "Together they marched over to the cages and peered through the\n honeycomb pattern of the wire. The test chimp, Dean, was sitting\n peacefully in a corner scratching under his arms with the back of his\n knuckles. Jerry, their control in the experiment, who was practically\n Dean's twin except that he had received no injection of the E-M Virus,\n was stomping up and down punching his fingers through the wire,\n worrying the lock on the cage.\n\n\n \"Jerry\nis\na great deal more active than Dean,\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n \"Yes, but Dean isn't sick. He just doesn't seem to have as much nervous\n energy to burn up. Nothing wrong with his thyroid either.\"\n\n\n They went to the smaller cages. They found the situation with the rats,\n Bud and Lou, much the same.\n\n\n \"I don't know. Maybe they just have tired blood,\" Mitchell ventured.", "\"I figure you mean to put me back like I used to be.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, doctor,\" Mitchell said eagerly, \"just as you used to be.\"\n\n\n \"\nWith\nmy headaches, like before?\"\n\n\n Mitchell coughed into his fist for an instant, to give him time to\n frame an answer. \"Unfortunately, yes. Apparently if your mind functions\n properly once again you will have the headaches again. Our research is\n a dismal failure.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't go that far,\" Ferris remarked cheerfully.\n\n\n Mitchell was about to ask his associate what he meant when he saw\n Macklin slowly shaking his head.\n\n\n \"No, sir!\" the mathematician said. \"I shall not go back to my original\n state. I can remember what it was like. Always worrying, worrying,\n worrying.\"\n\n\n \"You mean wondering,\" Mitchell said.", "Macklin ran the back of his knuckles across his forehead. \"I really\n would like to take you up on it. When I start making slips like that it\n means another attack of migraine. The drilling, grinding pain through\n my temples and around my eyeballs. The flashes of light, the rioting\n pools of color playing on the back of my lids. Ugh.\"\n\n\n Ferris smiled. \"Gynergen makes you sick, does it, doctor? Produces\n nausea, eh? The pain of that turns you almost wrong side out, doesn't\n it? You aren't much better off with it than without, are you? I've\n heard some say they preferred the migraine.\"\n\n\n Macklin carefully arranged his pipe along with the tools he used to\n tend it in a worn leather case. \"Tell me,\" he said, \"what is the worst\n that could happen to me?\"\n\n\n \"Low blood pressure,\" Ferris said.", "\"Why won't they function?\" Carson roared.\n\n\n \"They don't get enough food—blood, oxygen, hemoglobin,\" Ferris\n explained. \"The cerebral vessels don't contract enough to pump the\n blood through the brain as fast and as hard as is needed. The brain\n cells remain sluggish, dormant. Perhaps decaying.\"\n\n\n The colonel yelled.\n\n\n Mitchell groaned. He was abruptly sure Ferris was correct.\nThe colonel drew himself to attention, fists trembling at his sides.\n \"I'll see you hung for treason! Don't you know what Elliot Macklin\n means to us? Do you want those filthy Luxemburgians to reach Pluto\n before we do? Macklin's formula is essential to the FTL engine. You\n might just as well have blown up Washington, D.C. Better! The capital\n is replaceable. But the chances of an Elliot Macklin are very nearly\n once in a human race.\"", "\"Aspirins would still be used to reduce fever and relieve muscular\n pains,\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n \"I see. Are you two saying you\nhave\nsuch a shot? Can you cure\n headaches?\"\n\n\n \"We think we can,\" Ferris said.\n\n\n \"How can you have a specific for a number of different causes?\" Macklin\n asked. \"I know that much about the subject.\"\n\n\n \"There\nare\na number of different causes for headaches—nervous\n strain, fatigue, physical diseases from kidney complaints to tumors,\n over-indulgence—but there is one\neffect\nof all of this, the one real\n cause of headaches,\" Mitchell announced.\n\n\n \"We have definitely established this for this first time,\" Ferris added.\n\n\n \"That's fine,\" Macklin said, sucking on his pipe. \"And this effect that\n produces headaches is?\"", "\"He's always treated me like dirt,\" Ferris said heatedly. \"Everyone on\n this campus treats biologists like dirt. Sometimes I want to bash in\n their smug faces.\"\n\n\n Sometimes, Mitchell reflected, Ferris displayed a certain lack of\n scientific detachment.\n\n\n There came a discreet knock on the door.\n\n\n \"Please come in,\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n Elliot Macklin entered in a cloud of pipe smoke and a tweed jacket. He\n looked more than a little like a postgraduate student, and Mitchell\n suspected that that was his intention.\n\n\n He shook hands warmly with Mitchell. \"Good of you to ask me over,\n Steven.\"\n\n\n Macklin threw a big arm across Ferris' shoulders. \"How have you been,\n Harold?\"\n\n\n Ferris' face flickered between pink and white. \"Fine, thank you,\n doctor.\"", "\"Doctor,\" Mitchell said quickly, \"I know it's a tremendous favor to\n ask of a man of your position. But you can understand our problem.\n Unless we can produce quick, conclusive and dramatic proof of our\n studies we can get no more financial backing. We\nshould\nrun a\n large-scale field test. But we haven't the time or money for that.\n We can cure the headaches of one person and that's the limit of our\n resources.\"\n\n\n \"I'm tempted,\" Macklin said hesitantly, \"but the answer is go. I mean\n '\nno\n'. I'd like to help you out, but I'm afraid I owe too much to\n others to take the rest—the risk, I mean.\"", "\"Now, you know it's so. But how would you like to get rid of those\n worries just as you got rid of the others?\" Mitchell asked.\n\n\n \"I guess I'd like that,\" the mathematician replied.\n\n\n \"Then come on over to my laboratory. You remember where it's at, don't\n you?\"\n\n\n \"No, I—yes, I guess I do. But how do I know you won't try to put me\n back where I was instead of helping me more?\"\n\n\n \"I couldn't do that against your wishes. That would be illegal!\"\n\n\n \"If you say so. But I don't guess I can come anyway. The Army is\n watching me pretty close.\"\n\n\n \"That's alright,\" Mitchell said quickly. \"You can bring along Colonel\n Carson.\"\n\n\n \"But he won't like you fixing me up more.\"", "\"That's not so bad,\" Macklin said. \"How low can it get?\"\n\n\n \"When your heart stops, your blood pressure goes to its lowest point,\"\n Mitchell said.\n\n\n A dew of perspiration had bloomed on Macklin's forehead. \"Is there much\n risk of that?\"\n\n\n \"Practically none,\" Mitchell said. \"We have to give you the worst\n possibilities.\nAll\nour test animals survived and seem perfectly happy\n and contented. As I said, the virus is self-stabilizing. Ferris and I\n are confident that there is no danger.... But we may be wrong.\"\n\n\n Macklin held his head in both hands. \"Why did you two select\nme\n?\"", "The medic examined Mitchell and Ferris critically before answering. \"He\n used to be a mathematical genius.\"\n\n\n \"And now?\" Mitchell said impatiently.\n\n\n \"Now he is a moron,\" the medic said.\nIII\n\n\n Mitchell tried to stop Colonel Sidney as he went past, but the doctor\n mumbled he had a report to make.\n\n\n Mitchell and Ferris stared at Colonel Carson and Macklin and at each\n other.\n\n\n \"What did he mean, Macklin is an idiot?\" Mitchell asked.\n\n\n \"Not an idiot,\" Colonel Carson corrected primly. \"Dr. Macklin is a\n moron. He's legally responsible, but he's extremely stupid.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not so dumb,\" Macklin said defensively." ], [ "\"Aspirins would still be used to reduce fever and relieve muscular\n pains,\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n \"I see. Are you two saying you\nhave\nsuch a shot? Can you cure\n headaches?\"\n\n\n \"We think we can,\" Ferris said.\n\n\n \"How can you have a specific for a number of different causes?\" Macklin\n asked. \"I know that much about the subject.\"\n\n\n \"There\nare\na number of different causes for headaches—nervous\n strain, fatigue, physical diseases from kidney complaints to tumors,\n over-indulgence—but there is one\neffect\nof all of this, the one real\n cause of headaches,\" Mitchell announced.\n\n\n \"We have definitely established this for this first time,\" Ferris added.\n\n\n \"That's fine,\" Macklin said, sucking on his pipe. \"And this effect that\n produces headaches is?\"", "\"No, Harold, it isn't,\" Macklin admitted. \"What does your project have\n to do with my headaches?\"\n\n\n \"Doctor,\" Mitchell said, \"what would you say the most common complaint\n of man is?\"\n\n\n \"I would have said the common cold,\" Macklin replied, \"but I suppose\n from what you have said you mean headaches.\"\n\"Headaches,\" Mitchell agreed. \"Everybody has them at some time in his\n life. Some people have them every day. Some are driven to suicide by\n their headaches.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Macklin said.\n\n\n \"But think,\" Ferris interjected, \"what a boon it would be if everyone\n could be cured of headaches\nforever\nby one simple injection.\"\n\n\n \"I don't suppose the manufacturers of aspirin would like you. But it\n would please about everybody else.\"", "THE BIG HEADACHE\nBY JIM HARMON\nWhat's the principal cause of headaches?\n\n Why, having a head, of course!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI\n\n\n \"Do you think we'll have to use force on Macklin to get him to\n cooperate in the experiment?\" Ferris asked eagerly.\n\n\n \"How are you going to go about forcing him, Doctor?\" Mitchell inquired.\n \"He outweighs you by fifty pounds and you needn't look to\nme\nfor help\n against that repatriated fullback.\"", "Macklin dropped on the edge of the desk and adjusted his pipe. \"Now\n what's this about you wanting my help on something? And please keep the\n explanation simple. Biology isn't my field, you know.\"\n\n\n Mitchell moved around the desk casually. \"Actually, Doctor, we haven't\n the right to ask this of a man of your importance. There may be an\n element of risk.\"\n\n\n The mathematician clamped onto his pipe and showed his teeth. \"Now you\n have me intrigued. What is it all about?\"\n\n\n \"Doctor, we understand you have severe headaches,\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n Macklin nodded. \"That's right, Steven. Migraine.\"\n\n\n \"That must be terrible,\" Ferris said. \"All your fine reputation and\n lavish salary can't be much consolation when that ripping, tearing\n agony begins, can it?\"", "Macklin ran the back of his knuckles across his forehead. \"I really\n would like to take you up on it. When I start making slips like that it\n means another attack of migraine. The drilling, grinding pain through\n my temples and around my eyeballs. The flashes of light, the rioting\n pools of color playing on the back of my lids. Ugh.\"\n\n\n Ferris smiled. \"Gynergen makes you sick, does it, doctor? Produces\n nausea, eh? The pain of that turns you almost wrong side out, doesn't\n it? You aren't much better off with it than without, are you? I've\n heard some say they preferred the migraine.\"\n\n\n Macklin carefully arranged his pipe along with the tools he used to\n tend it in a worn leather case. \"Tell me,\" he said, \"what is the worst\n that could happen to me?\"\n\n\n \"Low blood pressure,\" Ferris said.", "\"Doctor,\" Mitchell said quickly, \"I know it's a tremendous favor to\n ask of a man of your position. But you can understand our problem.\n Unless we can produce quick, conclusive and dramatic proof of our\n studies we can get no more financial backing. We\nshould\nrun a\n large-scale field test. But we haven't the time or money for that.\n We can cure the headaches of one person and that's the limit of our\n resources.\"\n\n\n \"I'm tempted,\" Macklin said hesitantly, \"but the answer is go. I mean\n '\nno\n'. I'd like to help you out, but I'm afraid I owe too much to\n others to take the rest—the risk, I mean.\"", "The mathematician took the pipe out of his mouth. \"If this really\n works, I could stop using that damned gynergen, couldn't I? The stuff\n makes me violently sick to my stomach. But it's better than the\n migraine. How should I go about removing my curse?\" He reinserted the\n pipe.\n\n\n \"I assure you, you can forget ergotamine tartrate,\" Ferris said. \"Our\n discovery will work.\"\n\"Will work,\" Macklin said thoughtfully. \"The operative word. It\nhasn't\nworked then?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly it has,\" Ferris said. \"On rats, on chimps....\"\n\n\n \"But not on humans?\" Macklin asked.\n\n\n \"Not yet,\" Mitchell admitted.", "\"The pressure effect caused by pituitrin in the brain,\" Mitchell\n said eagerly. \"That is, the constriction of blood vessels in the\n telencephalon section of the frontal lobes. It's caused by an\n over-production of the pituitary gland. We have artificially bred a\n virus that feeds on pituitrin.\"\n\n\n \"That may mean the end of headaches, but I would think it would mean\n the end of the race as well,\" Macklin said. \"In certain areas it is\n valuable to have a constriction of blood vessels.\"\n\n\n \"The virus,\" Ferris explained, \"can easily be localized and stabilized.\n A colony of virus in the brain cells will relax the cerebral\n vessels—and only the cerebral vessels—so that the cerebrospinal fluid\n doesn't create pressure in the cavities of the brain.\"", "\"No!\" the smaller man yelled. \"You can't expect me to violate\n professional ethics and test my own discovery on myself.\"\n\n\n \"\nOur\ndiscovery,\" Mitchell said politely.\n\n\n \"That's what I meant to say. But I'm not sure it would be completely\n ethical with even a discovery partly mine.\"\n\n\n \"You're right. Besides who cares if you or I are cured of headaches?\n Our reputations don't go outside our own fields,\" Mitchell said. \"But\n now Macklin—\"", "\"I figure you mean to put me back like I used to be.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, doctor,\" Mitchell said eagerly, \"just as you used to be.\"\n\n\n \"\nWith\nmy headaches, like before?\"\n\n\n Mitchell coughed into his fist for an instant, to give him time to\n frame an answer. \"Unfortunately, yes. Apparently if your mind functions\n properly once again you will have the headaches again. Our research is\n a dismal failure.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't go that far,\" Ferris remarked cheerfully.\n\n\n Mitchell was about to ask his associate what he meant when he saw\n Macklin slowly shaking his head.\n\n\n \"No, sir!\" the mathematician said. \"I shall not go back to my original\n state. I can remember what it was like. Always worrying, worrying,\n worrying.\"\n\n\n \"You mean wondering,\" Mitchell said.", "\"I beg your pardon, sir,\" Carson said. \"I didn't intend any offense.\n But according to all the standard intelligence tests we have given you,\n your clinical intelligence quotient is that of a moron.\"\n\n\n \"That's just on book learning,\" Macklin said. \"There's a lot you learn\n in life that you don't get out of books, son.\"\n\n\n \"I'm confident that's true, sir,\" Colonel Carson said. He turned to the\n two biologists. \"Perhaps we had better speak outside.\"\n\n\n \"But—\" Mitchell said, impatient to examine Macklin for himself. \"Very\n well. Let's step into the hall.\"\n\n\n Ferris followed them docilely.\n\n\n \"What have you done to him?\" the colonel asked straightforwardly.\n\n\n \"We merely cured him of his headaches,\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n \"How?\"", "\"Good boy,\" the biologist said. \"Listen, doctor—Elliot—El, old son.\n I'm not against you like all the others. I don't want to make you go\n back to all that worrying and thinking and headaches. You believe me,\n don't you?\"\n\n\n There was a slight hesitation.\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Macklin said, \"if you say so. Why shouldn't I believe you?\"\n\n\n \"But there was a hesitation there, El. You worried for just a second if\n I could have some reason for not telling you the truth.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose so,\" Macklin said humbly.\n\n\n \"You've found yourself worrying—thinking—about a lot of other\n problems since we left you, haven't you? Maybe not the same kind of\n scientific problem. But more personal ones, ones you didn't used to\n have time to think about.\"\n\n\n \"If you say so.\"", "\"You're an important man, doctor,\" Ferris said. \"Nobody would care if\n Mitchell or I cured ourselves of headaches—they might not even believe\n us if we said we did. But the proper authorities will believe a man\n of your reputation. Besides, neither of us has a record of chronic\n migraine. You do.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I do,\" Macklin said. \"Very well. Go ahead. Give me your\n injection.\"\n\n\n Mitchell cleared his throat. \"Are you positive, doctor?\" he asked\n uncertainly. \"Perhaps you would like a few days to think it over.\"\n\n\n \"No! I'm ready. Go ahead, right now.\"\n\n\n \"There's a simple release,\" Ferris said smoothly.\n\n\n Macklin groped in his pocket for a pen.\nII\n\n\n \"Ferris!\" Mitchell yelled, slamming the laboratory door behind him.", "Mitchell did his best to explain the F-M Virus.\n\n\n \"You mean,\" the Army officer said levelly \"you have infected him with\n some kind of a disease to rot his brain?\"\n\n\n \"No, no! Could I talk to the other man, the doctor? Maybe I can make\n him understand.\"\n\n\n \"All I want to know is why Elliot Macklin has been made as simple as if\n he had been kicked in the head by a mule,\" Colonel Carson said.\n\n\n \"I think I can explain,\" Ferris interrupted.\n\n\n \"You can?\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n Ferris nodded. \"We made a slight miscalculation. It appears as if the\n virus colony overcontrols the supply of posterior pituitary extract in\n the cerebrum. It isn't more than necessary to stop headaches. But that\n necessary amount of control to stop pain is too much to allow the brain\n cells to function properly.\"", "\"Why won't they function?\" Carson roared.\n\n\n \"They don't get enough food—blood, oxygen, hemoglobin,\" Ferris\n explained. \"The cerebral vessels don't contract enough to pump the\n blood through the brain as fast and as hard as is needed. The brain\n cells remain sluggish, dormant. Perhaps decaying.\"\n\n\n The colonel yelled.\n\n\n Mitchell groaned. He was abruptly sure Ferris was correct.\nThe colonel drew himself to attention, fists trembling at his sides.\n \"I'll see you hung for treason! Don't you know what Elliot Macklin\n means to us? Do you want those filthy Luxemburgians to reach Pluto\n before we do? Macklin's formula is essential to the FTL engine. You\n might just as well have blown up Washington, D.C. Better! The capital\n is replaceable. But the chances of an Elliot Macklin are very nearly\n once in a human race.\"", "\"Now, Mrs. Macklin. Neither Dr. Ferris or myself have been near your\n husband for a full day. The effects of a narcotic would have worn off\n by this time.\"\n\n\n \"Most known narcotics,\" she admitted, \"but evidently you have\n discovered something new. Is it so expensive to refine you and Ferris\n have to recruit new customers to keep yourselves supplied?\"\n\n\n \"Mrs. Macklin! I think I had better talk to you later when you are\n calmer.\"\n\n\n Mitchell dropped the receiver heavily. \"What could be wrong with\n Macklin?\" he asked without removing his hand from the telephone.\n\n\n Ferris frowned, making quotation marks above his nose. \"Let's have a\n look at the test animals.\"", "Together they marched over to the cages and peered through the\n honeycomb pattern of the wire. The test chimp, Dean, was sitting\n peacefully in a corner scratching under his arms with the back of his\n knuckles. Jerry, their control in the experiment, who was practically\n Dean's twin except that he had received no injection of the E-M Virus,\n was stomping up and down punching his fingers through the wire,\n worrying the lock on the cage.\n\n\n \"Jerry\nis\na great deal more active than Dean,\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n \"Yes, but Dean isn't sick. He just doesn't seem to have as much nervous\n energy to burn up. Nothing wrong with his thyroid either.\"\n\n\n They went to the smaller cages. They found the situation with the rats,\n Bud and Lou, much the same.\n\n\n \"I don't know. Maybe they just have tired blood,\" Mitchell ventured.", "\"Mrs. Macklin,\" the colonel began, \"these gentlemen believe they can\n cure your husband of his present condition.\"\n\n\n \"Really?\" she said. \"Did you speak to Elliot about that?\"\n\n\n \"Y-yes,\" Colonel Carson said, \"but he's not himself. He refused the\n treatment. He wants to remain in his state of lower intelligence.\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"If those are his wishes, I can't go against them.\"\n\n\n \"But Mrs. Macklin!\" Mitchell protested. \"You will have to get a court\n order overruling your husband's wishes.\"\n\n\n She smoothed an eyebrow with the third finger of her right hand. \"That\n was my original thought. But I've redecided.\"\n\n\n \"Redecided!\" Carson burst out almost hysterically.", "Macklin nodded. \"Troubled, anyway. Disturbed by every little thing.\n How high was up, which infinity was bigger than what infinity—say,\n what was an infinity anyway? All that sort of schoolboy things. It's\n peaceful this way. My head doesn't hurt. I've got a good-looking wife\n and all the money I need. I've got it made. Why worry?\"\n\n\n Colonel Carson opened his mouth, then closed it.\n\n\n \"That's right, Colonel. There's no use in arguing with him,\" Mitchell\n said.\n\n\n \"It's not his decision to make,\" the colonel said. \"He's an idiot now.\"", "The only thing that could delay the project was Macklin's health.\n\n\n Despite his impressive body, some years before he had suffered a mild\n stroke ... or at least a vascular spasm of a cerebral artery. It was\n known that he suffered from the vilest variety of migraine. A cycle of\n the headaches had caused him to be absent from his classes for several\n weeks, and there were an unusual number of military uniforms seen\n around the campus.\nFerris paced off the tidy measurements of the office outside the\n laboratory in the biology building. Mitchell sat slumped in the chair\n behind the blond imitation wood desk, watching him disinterestedly.\n\n\n \"Do you suppose the Great Man will actually show up?\" Ferris demanded,\n pausing in mid-stride.\n\n\n \"I imagine he will,\" Mitchell said. \"Macklin's always seemed a decent\n enough fellow when I've had lunch with him or seen him at the trustees\n meetings.\"" ], [ "The colonel smiled thinly. \"Dr. Macklin is my concern. And everything\n that happens to him. The Army doesn't like what you have done to him.\"\n\n\n Mitchell wondered desperately just what they had done to the man.\n\n\n \"Can we see him?\" Mitchell asked.\n\n\n \"Why not? You can't do much worse than murder him now. That might be\n just as well. We have laws to cover that.\"\n\n\n The colonel led them into the comfortable, over-feminine living room.\n Macklin sat in an easy chair draped in embroidery, smoking. Mitchell\n suddenly realized Macklin used a pipe as a form of masculine protest to\n his home surroundings.", "\"You had certainly\nbetter\nhelp him, gentlemen.\" She stood out of the\n doorway for them to pass.\n\n\n Mrs. Macklin was an attractive brunette in her late thirties. She wore\n an expensive yellow dress. And she had a sharp-cornered jawline.\n\n\n The Army officer came out into the hall to meet them.\n\n\n \"You are the gentlemen who gave Dr. Macklin the unauthorized\n injection,\" he said.\n\n\n It wasn't a question.\n\n\n \"I don't like that 'unauthorized',\" Ferris snapped.\n\n\n The colonel—Mitchell spotted the eagles on his green tunic—lifted\n a heavy eyebrow. \"No? Are you medical doctors? Are you authorized to\n treat illnesses?\"\n\n\n \"We weren't treating an illness,\" Mitchell said. \"We were discovering a\n method of treatment. What concern is it of yours?\"", "On the coffee table in front of Macklin were some odd-shaped building\n blocks such as were used in nursery schools. A second uniformed\n man—another colonel but with the snake-entwined staff of the medical\n corps in his insignia—was kneeling at the table on the marble-effect\n carpet.\n\n\n The Army physician stood up and brushed his knees, undusted from the\n scrupulously clean rug.\n\n\n \"What's wrong with him, Sidney?\" the other officer asked the doctor.\n\n\n \"Not a thing,\" Sidney said. \"He's the healthiest, happiest, most\n well-adjusted man I've ever examined, Carson.\"\n\n\n \"But—\" Colonel Carson protested.\n\n\n \"Oh, he's changed all right,\" the Army doctor answered. \"He's not the\n same man as he used to be.\"\n\n\n \"How is he different?\" Mitchell demanded.", "Macklin nodded. \"Troubled, anyway. Disturbed by every little thing.\n How high was up, which infinity was bigger than what infinity—say,\n what was an infinity anyway? All that sort of schoolboy things. It's\n peaceful this way. My head doesn't hurt. I've got a good-looking wife\n and all the money I need. I've got it made. Why worry?\"\n\n\n Colonel Carson opened his mouth, then closed it.\n\n\n \"That's right, Colonel. There's no use in arguing with him,\" Mitchell\n said.\n\n\n \"It's not his decision to make,\" the colonel said. \"He's an idiot now.\"", "\"Yes. I can't go against Elliot's wishes. It would be monstrous to put\n him back where he would suffer the hell of those headaches once again,\n where he never had a moment's peace from worry and pressure. He's happy\n now. Like a child, but happy.\"\n\n\n \"Mrs. Macklin,\" the Army man said levelly, \"if you don't help us\n restore your husband's mind we will be forced to get a court order\n declaring him incompetent.\"\n\n\n \"But he is not! Legally, I mean,\" the woman stormed.\n\n\n \"Maybe not. It's a borderline case. But I think any court would give us\n the edge where restoring the mind of Elliot Macklin was concerned. Once\n he's certified incompetent, authorities can rule whether Mitchell and\n Ferris' antitoxin treatment is the best method of restoring Dr. Macklin\n to sanity.\"", "Macklin ran the back of his knuckles across his forehead. \"I really\n would like to take you up on it. When I start making slips like that it\n means another attack of migraine. The drilling, grinding pain through\n my temples and around my eyeballs. The flashes of light, the rioting\n pools of color playing on the back of my lids. Ugh.\"\n\n\n Ferris smiled. \"Gynergen makes you sick, does it, doctor? Produces\n nausea, eh? The pain of that turns you almost wrong side out, doesn't\n it? You aren't much better off with it than without, are you? I've\n heard some say they preferred the migraine.\"\n\n\n Macklin carefully arranged his pipe along with the tools he used to\n tend it in a worn leather case. \"Tell me,\" he said, \"what is the worst\n that could happen to me?\"\n\n\n \"Low blood pressure,\" Ferris said.", "The only thing that could delay the project was Macklin's health.\n\n\n Despite his impressive body, some years before he had suffered a mild\n stroke ... or at least a vascular spasm of a cerebral artery. It was\n known that he suffered from the vilest variety of migraine. A cycle of\n the headaches had caused him to be absent from his classes for several\n weeks, and there were an unusual number of military uniforms seen\n around the campus.\nFerris paced off the tidy measurements of the office outside the\n laboratory in the biology building. Mitchell sat slumped in the chair\n behind the blond imitation wood desk, watching him disinterestedly.\n\n\n \"Do you suppose the Great Man will actually show up?\" Ferris demanded,\n pausing in mid-stride.\n\n\n \"I imagine he will,\" Mitchell said. \"Macklin's always seemed a decent\n enough fellow when I've had lunch with him or seen him at the trustees\n meetings.\"", "He lay there, blinking the sleep out of his eyes, listening to his\n heart race, and then convulsively snatched the telephone receiver from\n the nightstand. He stabbed out a number with a vicious index finger.\n\n\n After a time there came a dull click and a sleepy answer.\n\n\n \"Hello?\" Elliot Macklin said.\n\n\n Mitchell smiled to himself. He was in luck; Macklin had answered the\n phone instead of his wife.\n\n\n \"Can you speak freely, doctor?\" Mitchell asked.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" the mathematician said. \"I can talk fine.\"\n\n\n \"I mean, are you alone?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you want to know if my wife is around. No, she's asleep. That Army\n doctor, Colonel Sidney, he gave her a sedative. I wouldn't let him give\n me anything, though.\"", "\"I doubt very much if the court would rule in that manner,\" she said.\n\n\n The colonel looked smug. \"Why not?\"\n\n\n \"Because, Colonel, the matter of my husband's health, his very life, is\n involved.\"\n\n\n \"There is some degree of risk in shock treatments, too. But—\"\n\n\n \"It isn't quite the same, Colonel. Elliot Macklin has a history of\n vascular spasm, a mild pseudostroke some years ago. Now you want to\n give those cerebral arteries back the ability to constrict. To\n paralyze. To kill. No court would give you that authority.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose there's some chance of that. But without the treatment\n there is\nno\nchance of your husband regaining his right senses, Mrs.\n Macklin,\" Mitchell interjected.", "\"Iron deficiency anemia?\"\n\n\n \"Never mind, doctor. It was a form of humor. I think we had better see\n exactly what is wrong with Elliot Macklin.\"\n\n\n \"There's nothing wrong with him,\" Ferris snapped. \"He's probably just\n trying to get us in trouble, the ingrate!\"\nMacklin's traditional ranch house was small but attractive in\n aqua-tinted aluminum.\n\n\n Under Mitchell's thumb the bell chimbed\ndum-de-de-dum-dum-dum\n.\n\n\n As they waited Mitchell glanced at Ferris. He seemed completely\n undisturbed, perhaps slightly curious.\n\n\n The door unlatched and swung back.\n\n\n \"Mrs. Macklin,\" Mitchell said quickly, \"I'm sure we can help if there\n is anything wrong with your husband. This is Dr. Ferris. I am Dr.\n Mitchell.\"", "Macklin dropped on the edge of the desk and adjusted his pipe. \"Now\n what's this about you wanting my help on something? And please keep the\n explanation simple. Biology isn't my field, you know.\"\n\n\n Mitchell moved around the desk casually. \"Actually, Doctor, we haven't\n the right to ask this of a man of your importance. There may be an\n element of risk.\"\n\n\n The mathematician clamped onto his pipe and showed his teeth. \"Now you\n have me intrigued. What is it all about?\"\n\n\n \"Doctor, we understand you have severe headaches,\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n Macklin nodded. \"That's right, Steven. Migraine.\"\n\n\n \"That must be terrible,\" Ferris said. \"All your fine reputation and\n lavish salary can't be much consolation when that ripping, tearing\n agony begins, can it?\"", "\"Now, Mrs. Macklin. Neither Dr. Ferris or myself have been near your\n husband for a full day. The effects of a narcotic would have worn off\n by this time.\"\n\n\n \"Most known narcotics,\" she admitted, \"but evidently you have\n discovered something new. Is it so expensive to refine you and Ferris\n have to recruit new customers to keep yourselves supplied?\"\n\n\n \"Mrs. Macklin! I think I had better talk to you later when you are\n calmer.\"\n\n\n Mitchell dropped the receiver heavily. \"What could be wrong with\n Macklin?\" he asked without removing his hand from the telephone.\n\n\n Ferris frowned, making quotation marks above his nose. \"Let's have a\n look at the test animals.\"", "\"Good boy,\" the biologist said. \"Listen, doctor—Elliot—El, old son.\n I'm not against you like all the others. I don't want to make you go\n back to all that worrying and thinking and headaches. You believe me,\n don't you?\"\n\n\n There was a slight hesitation.\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Macklin said, \"if you say so. Why shouldn't I believe you?\"\n\n\n \"But there was a hesitation there, El. You worried for just a second if\n I could have some reason for not telling you the truth.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose so,\" Macklin said humbly.\n\n\n \"You've found yourself worrying—thinking—about a lot of other\n problems since we left you, haven't you? Maybe not the same kind of\n scientific problem. But more personal ones, ones you didn't used to\n have time to think about.\"\n\n\n \"If you say so.\"", "\"That's not so bad,\" Macklin said. \"How low can it get?\"\n\n\n \"When your heart stops, your blood pressure goes to its lowest point,\"\n Mitchell said.\n\n\n A dew of perspiration had bloomed on Macklin's forehead. \"Is there much\n risk of that?\"\n\n\n \"Practically none,\" Mitchell said. \"We have to give you the worst\n possibilities.\nAll\nour test animals survived and seem perfectly happy\n and contented. As I said, the virus is self-stabilizing. Ferris and I\n are confident that there is no danger.... But we may be wrong.\"\n\n\n Macklin held his head in both hands. \"Why did you two select\nme\n?\"", "Her mouth grew petulant. \"I don't care. I would rather have a live\n husband than a dead genius. I can take care of him this way, make him\n comfortable....\"\n\n\n Carson opened his mouth and closed his fist, then relaxed. Mitchell led\n him back into the hall.\n\n\n \"I'm no psychiatrist,\" Mitchell said, \"but I think she wants Macklin\n stupid. Prefers it that way. She's always dominated his personal life,\n and now she can dominate him completely.\"\n\n\n \"What is she? A monster?\" the Army officer muttered.\n\n\n \"No,\" Mitchell said. \"She's an intelligent woman unconsciously jealous\n of her husband's genius.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" Carson said. \"I don't know. I don't know what the hell to tell\n the Pentagon. I think I'll go out and get drunk.\"\n\n\n \"I'll go with you,\" Ferris said.", "\"Mrs. Macklin,\" the colonel began, \"these gentlemen believe they can\n cure your husband of his present condition.\"\n\n\n \"Really?\" she said. \"Did you speak to Elliot about that?\"\n\n\n \"Y-yes,\" Colonel Carson said, \"but he's not himself. He refused the\n treatment. He wants to remain in his state of lower intelligence.\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"If those are his wishes, I can't go against them.\"\n\n\n \"But Mrs. Macklin!\" Mitchell protested. \"You will have to get a court\n order overruling your husband's wishes.\"\n\n\n She smoothed an eyebrow with the third finger of her right hand. \"That\n was my original thought. But I've redecided.\"\n\n\n \"Redecided!\" Carson burst out almost hysterically.", "\"Doctor,\" Mitchell said quickly, \"I know it's a tremendous favor to\n ask of a man of your position. But you can understand our problem.\n Unless we can produce quick, conclusive and dramatic proof of our\n studies we can get no more financial backing. We\nshould\nrun a\n large-scale field test. But we haven't the time or money for that.\n We can cure the headaches of one person and that's the limit of our\n resources.\"\n\n\n \"I'm tempted,\" Macklin said hesitantly, \"but the answer is go. I mean\n '\nno\n'. I'd like to help you out, but I'm afraid I owe too much to\n others to take the rest—the risk, I mean.\"", "\"I beg your pardon, sir,\" Carson said. \"I didn't intend any offense.\n But according to all the standard intelligence tests we have given you,\n your clinical intelligence quotient is that of a moron.\"\n\n\n \"That's just on book learning,\" Macklin said. \"There's a lot you learn\n in life that you don't get out of books, son.\"\n\n\n \"I'm confident that's true, sir,\" Colonel Carson said. He turned to the\n two biologists. \"Perhaps we had better speak outside.\"\n\n\n \"But—\" Mitchell said, impatient to examine Macklin for himself. \"Very\n well. Let's step into the hall.\"\n\n\n Ferris followed them docilely.\n\n\n \"What have you done to him?\" the colonel asked straightforwardly.\n\n\n \"We merely cured him of his headaches,\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n \"How?\"", "\"Just a moment,\" Mitchell interrupted, \"we can cure Macklin.\"\n\n\n \"You\ncan\n?\" Carson said. For a moment Mitchell thought the man was\n going to clasp his hands and sink to his knees.\n\n\n \"Certainly. We have learned to stabilize the virus colonies. We have\n antitoxin to combat the virus. We had always thought of it as a\n beneficial parasite, but we can wipe it out if necessary.\"\n\n\n \"Good!\" Carson clasped his hands and gave at least slightly at the\n knees.\n\n\n \"Just you wait a second now, boys,\" Elliot Macklin said. He was leaning\n in the doorway, holding his pipe. \"I've been listening to what you've\n been saying and I don't like it.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean you don't like it?\" Carson demanded. He added, \"Sir?\"", "\"Well,\" Macklin said. \"Well.\" He thumped pipe ashes out into his palm.\n \"Certainly you can get volunteers. Convicts. Conscientious objectors\n from the Army.\"\n\n\n \"We want you,\" Ferris told him.\n\n\n Macklin coughed. \"I don't want to overestimate my value but the\n government wouldn't like it very well if I died in the middle of this\n project. My wife would like it even less.\"\n\n\n Ferris turned his back on the mathematician. Mitchell could see him\n mouthing the word\nyellow\n." ], [ "\"It's a significant test case, yes. But not enough to go to the\n newspapers with. If it wasn't enough to go to the press with, it wasn't\n enough to try and breach the trustees with. Don't you see? The public\n will hand down a ukase demanding our virus, just as they demanded the\n Salk vaccine and the Grennell serum.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n The shrill call of the telephone interrupted Mitchell's objections.\n\n\n Ferris excused himself and crossed to the instrument. He answered it\n and listened for a moment, his face growing impatient.\n\n\n \"It's Macklin's wife,\" Ferris said. \"Do you want to talk to her? I'm no\n good with hysterical women.\"\n\n\n \"Hysterical?\" Mitchell muttered in alarm and went to the phone.\n\n\n \"Hello?\" Mitchell said reluctantly. \"Mrs. Macklin?\"", "Macklin dropped on the edge of the desk and adjusted his pipe. \"Now\n what's this about you wanting my help on something? And please keep the\n explanation simple. Biology isn't my field, you know.\"\n\n\n Mitchell moved around the desk casually. \"Actually, Doctor, we haven't\n the right to ask this of a man of your importance. There may be an\n element of risk.\"\n\n\n The mathematician clamped onto his pipe and showed his teeth. \"Now you\n have me intrigued. What is it all about?\"\n\n\n \"Doctor, we understand you have severe headaches,\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n Macklin nodded. \"That's right, Steven. Migraine.\"\n\n\n \"That must be terrible,\" Ferris said. \"All your fine reputation and\n lavish salary can't be much consolation when that ripping, tearing\n agony begins, can it?\"", "\"Doctor,\" Mitchell said quickly, \"I know it's a tremendous favor to\n ask of a man of your position. But you can understand our problem.\n Unless we can produce quick, conclusive and dramatic proof of our\n studies we can get no more financial backing. We\nshould\nrun a\n large-scale field test. But we haven't the time or money for that.\n We can cure the headaches of one person and that's the limit of our\n resources.\"\n\n\n \"I'm tempted,\" Macklin said hesitantly, \"but the answer is go. I mean\n '\nno\n'. I'd like to help you out, but I'm afraid I owe too much to\n others to take the rest—the risk, I mean.\"", "\"No!\" the smaller man yelled. \"You can't expect me to violate\n professional ethics and test my own discovery on myself.\"\n\n\n \"\nOur\ndiscovery,\" Mitchell said politely.\n\n\n \"That's what I meant to say. But I'm not sure it would be completely\n ethical with even a discovery partly mine.\"\n\n\n \"You're right. Besides who cares if you or I are cured of headaches?\n Our reputations don't go outside our own fields,\" Mitchell said. \"But\n now Macklin—\"", "\"The pressure effect caused by pituitrin in the brain,\" Mitchell\n said eagerly. \"That is, the constriction of blood vessels in the\n telencephalon section of the frontal lobes. It's caused by an\n over-production of the pituitary gland. We have artificially bred a\n virus that feeds on pituitrin.\"\n\n\n \"That may mean the end of headaches, but I would think it would mean\n the end of the race as well,\" Macklin said. \"In certain areas it is\n valuable to have a constriction of blood vessels.\"\n\n\n \"The virus,\" Ferris explained, \"can easily be localized and stabilized.\n A colony of virus in the brain cells will relax the cerebral\n vessels—and only the cerebral vessels—so that the cerebrospinal fluid\n doesn't create pressure in the cavities of the brain.\"", "\"You're an important man, doctor,\" Ferris said. \"Nobody would care if\n Mitchell or I cured ourselves of headaches—they might not even believe\n us if we said we did. But the proper authorities will believe a man\n of your reputation. Besides, neither of us has a record of chronic\n migraine. You do.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I do,\" Macklin said. \"Very well. Go ahead. Give me your\n injection.\"\n\n\n Mitchell cleared his throat. \"Are you positive, doctor?\" he asked\n uncertainly. \"Perhaps you would like a few days to think it over.\"\n\n\n \"No! I'm ready. Go ahead, right now.\"\n\n\n \"There's a simple release,\" Ferris said smoothly.\n\n\n Macklin groped in his pocket for a pen.\nII\n\n\n \"Ferris!\" Mitchell yelled, slamming the laboratory door behind him.", "\"Right here,\" the small man said briskly. He was sitting at a work\n table, penciling notes. \"I've been expecting you.\"\n\n\n \"Doctor—Harold—you shouldn't have given this story to the\n newspapers,\" Mitchell said. He tapped the back of his hand against the\n folded paper.\n\n\n \"On the contrary, I should and I did,\" Ferris answered. \"We wanted\n something dramatic to show to the trustees and here it is.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, we wanted to show our proof to the trustees—but not broadcast\n unverified results to the press. It's too early for that!\"\n\n\n \"Don't be so stuffy and conservative, Mitchell! Macklin's cured, isn't\n he? By established periodic cycle he should be suffering hell right\n now, shouldn't he? But thanks to our treatment he is perfectly happy,\n with no unfortunate side effects such as gynergen produces.\"", "Ferris fingered the collar of his starched lab smock. \"Guess I got\n carried away for a moment. But Macklin is exactly what we need for a\n quick, dramatic test. We've had it if he turns us down.\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" Mitchell said, exhaling deeply. \"Somehow the men with the\n money just can't seem to understand basic research. Who would have\n financed a study of cyclic periods of the hedgehog? Yet the information\n gained from that study is vital in cancer research.\"\n\n\n \"When we prove our results that should be of enough practical value for\n anyone. But those crummy trustees didn't even leave us enough for a\n field test.\" Ferris scrubbed his thin hand over the bony ridge of his\n forehead. \"I've been worrying so much about this I've got the ancestor\n of all headaches.\"\n\n\n Mitchell's blue eyes narrowed and his boyish face took on an expression\n of demonic intensity. \"Ferris, would you consider—?\"", "\"No, Harold, it isn't,\" Macklin admitted. \"What does your project have\n to do with my headaches?\"\n\n\n \"Doctor,\" Mitchell said, \"what would you say the most common complaint\n of man is?\"\n\n\n \"I would have said the common cold,\" Macklin replied, \"but I suppose\n from what you have said you mean headaches.\"\n\"Headaches,\" Mitchell agreed. \"Everybody has them at some time in his\n life. Some people have them every day. Some are driven to suicide by\n their headaches.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Macklin said.\n\n\n \"But think,\" Ferris interjected, \"what a boon it would be if everyone\n could be cured of headaches\nforever\nby one simple injection.\"\n\n\n \"I don't suppose the manufacturers of aspirin would like you. But it\n would please about everybody else.\"", "Mitchell did his best to explain the F-M Virus.\n\n\n \"You mean,\" the Army officer said levelly \"you have infected him with\n some kind of a disease to rot his brain?\"\n\n\n \"No, no! Could I talk to the other man, the doctor? Maybe I can make\n him understand.\"\n\n\n \"All I want to know is why Elliot Macklin has been made as simple as if\n he had been kicked in the head by a mule,\" Colonel Carson said.\n\n\n \"I think I can explain,\" Ferris interrupted.\n\n\n \"You can?\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n Ferris nodded. \"We made a slight miscalculation. It appears as if the\n virus colony overcontrols the supply of posterior pituitary extract in\n the cerebrum. It isn't more than necessary to stop headaches. But that\n necessary amount of control to stop pain is too much to allow the brain\n cells to function properly.\"", "The only thing that could delay the project was Macklin's health.\n\n\n Despite his impressive body, some years before he had suffered a mild\n stroke ... or at least a vascular spasm of a cerebral artery. It was\n known that he suffered from the vilest variety of migraine. A cycle of\n the headaches had caused him to be absent from his classes for several\n weeks, and there were an unusual number of military uniforms seen\n around the campus.\nFerris paced off the tidy measurements of the office outside the\n laboratory in the biology building. Mitchell sat slumped in the chair\n behind the blond imitation wood desk, watching him disinterestedly.\n\n\n \"Do you suppose the Great Man will actually show up?\" Ferris demanded,\n pausing in mid-stride.\n\n\n \"I imagine he will,\" Mitchell said. \"Macklin's always seemed a decent\n enough fellow when I've had lunch with him or seen him at the trustees\n meetings.\"", "\"That's not so bad,\" Macklin said. \"How low can it get?\"\n\n\n \"When your heart stops, your blood pressure goes to its lowest point,\"\n Mitchell said.\n\n\n A dew of perspiration had bloomed on Macklin's forehead. \"Is there much\n risk of that?\"\n\n\n \"Practically none,\" Mitchell said. \"We have to give you the worst\n possibilities.\nAll\nour test animals survived and seem perfectly happy\n and contented. As I said, the virus is self-stabilizing. Ferris and I\n are confident that there is no danger.... But we may be wrong.\"\n\n\n Macklin held his head in both hands. \"Why did you two select\nme\n?\"", "The mathematician took the pipe out of his mouth. \"If this really\n works, I could stop using that damned gynergen, couldn't I? The stuff\n makes me violently sick to my stomach. But it's better than the\n migraine. How should I go about removing my curse?\" He reinserted the\n pipe.\n\n\n \"I assure you, you can forget ergotamine tartrate,\" Ferris said. \"Our\n discovery will work.\"\n\"Will work,\" Macklin said thoughtfully. \"The operative word. It\nhasn't\nworked then?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly it has,\" Ferris said. \"On rats, on chimps....\"\n\n\n \"But not on humans?\" Macklin asked.\n\n\n \"Not yet,\" Mitchell admitted.", "He lay there, blinking the sleep out of his eyes, listening to his\n heart race, and then convulsively snatched the telephone receiver from\n the nightstand. He stabbed out a number with a vicious index finger.\n\n\n After a time there came a dull click and a sleepy answer.\n\n\n \"Hello?\" Elliot Macklin said.\n\n\n Mitchell smiled to himself. He was in luck; Macklin had answered the\n phone instead of his wife.\n\n\n \"Can you speak freely, doctor?\" Mitchell asked.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" the mathematician said. \"I can talk fine.\"\n\n\n \"I mean, are you alone?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you want to know if my wife is around. No, she's asleep. That Army\n doctor, Colonel Sidney, he gave her a sedative. I wouldn't let him give\n me anything, though.\"", "\"I figure you mean to put me back like I used to be.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, doctor,\" Mitchell said eagerly, \"just as you used to be.\"\n\n\n \"\nWith\nmy headaches, like before?\"\n\n\n Mitchell coughed into his fist for an instant, to give him time to\n frame an answer. \"Unfortunately, yes. Apparently if your mind functions\n properly once again you will have the headaches again. Our research is\n a dismal failure.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't go that far,\" Ferris remarked cheerfully.\n\n\n Mitchell was about to ask his associate what he meant when he saw\n Macklin slowly shaking his head.\n\n\n \"No, sir!\" the mathematician said. \"I shall not go back to my original\n state. I can remember what it was like. Always worrying, worrying,\n worrying.\"\n\n\n \"You mean wondering,\" Mitchell said.", "\"Aspirins would still be used to reduce fever and relieve muscular\n pains,\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n \"I see. Are you two saying you\nhave\nsuch a shot? Can you cure\n headaches?\"\n\n\n \"We think we can,\" Ferris said.\n\n\n \"How can you have a specific for a number of different causes?\" Macklin\n asked. \"I know that much about the subject.\"\n\n\n \"There\nare\na number of different causes for headaches—nervous\n strain, fatigue, physical diseases from kidney complaints to tumors,\n over-indulgence—but there is one\neffect\nof all of this, the one real\n cause of headaches,\" Mitchell announced.\n\n\n \"We have definitely established this for this first time,\" Ferris added.\n\n\n \"That's fine,\" Macklin said, sucking on his pipe. \"And this effect that\n produces headaches is?\"", "\"Now, you know it's so. But how would you like to get rid of those\n worries just as you got rid of the others?\" Mitchell asked.\n\n\n \"I guess I'd like that,\" the mathematician replied.\n\n\n \"Then come on over to my laboratory. You remember where it's at, don't\n you?\"\n\n\n \"No, I—yes, I guess I do. But how do I know you won't try to put me\n back where I was instead of helping me more?\"\n\n\n \"I couldn't do that against your wishes. That would be illegal!\"\n\n\n \"If you say so. But I don't guess I can come anyway. The Army is\n watching me pretty close.\"\n\n\n \"That's alright,\" Mitchell said quickly. \"You can bring along Colonel\n Carson.\"\n\n\n \"But he won't like you fixing me up more.\"", "Her mouth grew petulant. \"I don't care. I would rather have a live\n husband than a dead genius. I can take care of him this way, make him\n comfortable....\"\n\n\n Carson opened his mouth and closed his fist, then relaxed. Mitchell led\n him back into the hall.\n\n\n \"I'm no psychiatrist,\" Mitchell said, \"but I think she wants Macklin\n stupid. Prefers it that way. She's always dominated his personal life,\n and now she can dominate him completely.\"\n\n\n \"What is she? A monster?\" the Army officer muttered.\n\n\n \"No,\" Mitchell said. \"She's an intelligent woman unconsciously jealous\n of her husband's genius.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" Carson said. \"I don't know. I don't know what the hell to tell\n the Pentagon. I think I'll go out and get drunk.\"\n\n\n \"I'll go with you,\" Ferris said.", "\"You had certainly\nbetter\nhelp him, gentlemen.\" She stood out of the\n doorway for them to pass.\n\n\n Mrs. Macklin was an attractive brunette in her late thirties. She wore\n an expensive yellow dress. And she had a sharp-cornered jawline.\n\n\n The Army officer came out into the hall to meet them.\n\n\n \"You are the gentlemen who gave Dr. Macklin the unauthorized\n injection,\" he said.\n\n\n It wasn't a question.\n\n\n \"I don't like that 'unauthorized',\" Ferris snapped.\n\n\n The colonel—Mitchell spotted the eagles on his green tunic—lifted\n a heavy eyebrow. \"No? Are you medical doctors? Are you authorized to\n treat illnesses?\"\n\n\n \"We weren't treating an illness,\" Mitchell said. \"We were discovering a\n method of treatment. What concern is it of yours?\"", "\"I beg your pardon, sir,\" Carson said. \"I didn't intend any offense.\n But according to all the standard intelligence tests we have given you,\n your clinical intelligence quotient is that of a moron.\"\n\n\n \"That's just on book learning,\" Macklin said. \"There's a lot you learn\n in life that you don't get out of books, son.\"\n\n\n \"I'm confident that's true, sir,\" Colonel Carson said. He turned to the\n two biologists. \"Perhaps we had better speak outside.\"\n\n\n \"But—\" Mitchell said, impatient to examine Macklin for himself. \"Very\n well. Let's step into the hall.\"\n\n\n Ferris followed them docilely.\n\n\n \"What have you done to him?\" the colonel asked straightforwardly.\n\n\n \"We merely cured him of his headaches,\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n \"How?\"" ], [ "\"It's a significant test case, yes. But not enough to go to the\n newspapers with. If it wasn't enough to go to the press with, it wasn't\n enough to try and breach the trustees with. Don't you see? The public\n will hand down a ukase demanding our virus, just as they demanded the\n Salk vaccine and the Grennell serum.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n The shrill call of the telephone interrupted Mitchell's objections.\n\n\n Ferris excused himself and crossed to the instrument. He answered it\n and listened for a moment, his face growing impatient.\n\n\n \"It's Macklin's wife,\" Ferris said. \"Do you want to talk to her? I'm no\n good with hysterical women.\"\n\n\n \"Hysterical?\" Mitchell muttered in alarm and went to the phone.\n\n\n \"Hello?\" Mitchell said reluctantly. \"Mrs. Macklin?\"", "He lay there, blinking the sleep out of his eyes, listening to his\n heart race, and then convulsively snatched the telephone receiver from\n the nightstand. He stabbed out a number with a vicious index finger.\n\n\n After a time there came a dull click and a sleepy answer.\n\n\n \"Hello?\" Elliot Macklin said.\n\n\n Mitchell smiled to himself. He was in luck; Macklin had answered the\n phone instead of his wife.\n\n\n \"Can you speak freely, doctor?\" Mitchell asked.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" the mathematician said. \"I can talk fine.\"\n\n\n \"I mean, are you alone?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you want to know if my wife is around. No, she's asleep. That Army\n doctor, Colonel Sidney, he gave her a sedative. I wouldn't let him give\n me anything, though.\"", "\"Now, Mrs. Macklin. Neither Dr. Ferris or myself have been near your\n husband for a full day. The effects of a narcotic would have worn off\n by this time.\"\n\n\n \"Most known narcotics,\" she admitted, \"but evidently you have\n discovered something new. Is it so expensive to refine you and Ferris\n have to recruit new customers to keep yourselves supplied?\"\n\n\n \"Mrs. Macklin! I think I had better talk to you later when you are\n calmer.\"\n\n\n Mitchell dropped the receiver heavily. \"What could be wrong with\n Macklin?\" he asked without removing his hand from the telephone.\n\n\n Ferris frowned, making quotation marks above his nose. \"Let's have a\n look at the test animals.\"", "\"You are the other one,\" the clear feminine voice said. \"Your name is\n Mitchell.\"\n\n\n She couldn't have sounded calmer or more self-possessed, Mitchell\n thought.\n\n\n \"That's right, Mrs. Macklin. I'm Dr. Steven Mitchell, Dr. Ferris's\n associate.\"\n\n\n \"Do you have a license to dispense narcotics?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean by that, Mrs. Macklin,\" Mitchell said sharply.\n\n\n \"I used to be a nurse, Dr. Mitchell. I know you've given my husband\n heroin.\"\n\n\n \"That's absurd. What makes you think a thing like that?\"\n\n\n \"The—trance he's in now.\"", "Ferris fingered the collar of his starched lab smock. \"Guess I got\n carried away for a moment. But Macklin is exactly what we need for a\n quick, dramatic test. We've had it if he turns us down.\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" Mitchell said, exhaling deeply. \"Somehow the men with the\n money just can't seem to understand basic research. Who would have\n financed a study of cyclic periods of the hedgehog? Yet the information\n gained from that study is vital in cancer research.\"\n\n\n \"When we prove our results that should be of enough practical value for\n anyone. But those crummy trustees didn't even leave us enough for a\n field test.\" Ferris scrubbed his thin hand over the bony ridge of his\n forehead. \"I've been worrying so much about this I've got the ancestor\n of all headaches.\"\n\n\n Mitchell's blue eyes narrowed and his boyish face took on an expression\n of demonic intensity. \"Ferris, would you consider—?\"", "\"Iron deficiency anemia?\"\n\n\n \"Never mind, doctor. It was a form of humor. I think we had better see\n exactly what is wrong with Elliot Macklin.\"\n\n\n \"There's nothing wrong with him,\" Ferris snapped. \"He's probably just\n trying to get us in trouble, the ingrate!\"\nMacklin's traditional ranch house was small but attractive in\n aqua-tinted aluminum.\n\n\n Under Mitchell's thumb the bell chimbed\ndum-de-de-dum-dum-dum\n.\n\n\n As they waited Mitchell glanced at Ferris. He seemed completely\n undisturbed, perhaps slightly curious.\n\n\n The door unlatched and swung back.\n\n\n \"Mrs. Macklin,\" Mitchell said quickly, \"I'm sure we can help if there\n is anything wrong with your husband. This is Dr. Ferris. I am Dr.\n Mitchell.\"", "Her mouth grew petulant. \"I don't care. I would rather have a live\n husband than a dead genius. I can take care of him this way, make him\n comfortable....\"\n\n\n Carson opened his mouth and closed his fist, then relaxed. Mitchell led\n him back into the hall.\n\n\n \"I'm no psychiatrist,\" Mitchell said, \"but I think she wants Macklin\n stupid. Prefers it that way. She's always dominated his personal life,\n and now she can dominate him completely.\"\n\n\n \"What is she? A monster?\" the Army officer muttered.\n\n\n \"No,\" Mitchell said. \"She's an intelligent woman unconsciously jealous\n of her husband's genius.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" Carson said. \"I don't know. I don't know what the hell to tell\n the Pentagon. I think I'll go out and get drunk.\"\n\n\n \"I'll go with you,\" Ferris said.", "\"Yes. I can't go against Elliot's wishes. It would be monstrous to put\n him back where he would suffer the hell of those headaches once again,\n where he never had a moment's peace from worry and pressure. He's happy\n now. Like a child, but happy.\"\n\n\n \"Mrs. Macklin,\" the Army man said levelly, \"if you don't help us\n restore your husband's mind we will be forced to get a court order\n declaring him incompetent.\"\n\n\n \"But he is not! Legally, I mean,\" the woman stormed.\n\n\n \"Maybe not. It's a borderline case. But I think any court would give us\n the edge where restoring the mind of Elliot Macklin was concerned. Once\n he's certified incompetent, authorities can rule whether Mitchell and\n Ferris' antitoxin treatment is the best method of restoring Dr. Macklin\n to sanity.\"", "The only thing that could delay the project was Macklin's health.\n\n\n Despite his impressive body, some years before he had suffered a mild\n stroke ... or at least a vascular spasm of a cerebral artery. It was\n known that he suffered from the vilest variety of migraine. A cycle of\n the headaches had caused him to be absent from his classes for several\n weeks, and there were an unusual number of military uniforms seen\n around the campus.\nFerris paced off the tidy measurements of the office outside the\n laboratory in the biology building. Mitchell sat slumped in the chair\n behind the blond imitation wood desk, watching him disinterestedly.\n\n\n \"Do you suppose the Great Man will actually show up?\" Ferris demanded,\n pausing in mid-stride.\n\n\n \"I imagine he will,\" Mitchell said. \"Macklin's always seemed a decent\n enough fellow when I've had lunch with him or seen him at the trustees\n meetings.\"", "Macklin dropped on the edge of the desk and adjusted his pipe. \"Now\n what's this about you wanting my help on something? And please keep the\n explanation simple. Biology isn't my field, you know.\"\n\n\n Mitchell moved around the desk casually. \"Actually, Doctor, we haven't\n the right to ask this of a man of your importance. There may be an\n element of risk.\"\n\n\n The mathematician clamped onto his pipe and showed his teeth. \"Now you\n have me intrigued. What is it all about?\"\n\n\n \"Doctor, we understand you have severe headaches,\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n Macklin nodded. \"That's right, Steven. Migraine.\"\n\n\n \"That must be terrible,\" Ferris said. \"All your fine reputation and\n lavish salary can't be much consolation when that ripping, tearing\n agony begins, can it?\"", "The colonel smiled thinly. \"Dr. Macklin is my concern. And everything\n that happens to him. The Army doesn't like what you have done to him.\"\n\n\n Mitchell wondered desperately just what they had done to the man.\n\n\n \"Can we see him?\" Mitchell asked.\n\n\n \"Why not? You can't do much worse than murder him now. That might be\n just as well. We have laws to cover that.\"\n\n\n The colonel led them into the comfortable, over-feminine living room.\n Macklin sat in an easy chair draped in embroidery, smoking. Mitchell\n suddenly realized Macklin used a pipe as a form of masculine protest to\n his home surroundings.", "\"Mrs. Macklin,\" the colonel began, \"these gentlemen believe they can\n cure your husband of his present condition.\"\n\n\n \"Really?\" she said. \"Did you speak to Elliot about that?\"\n\n\n \"Y-yes,\" Colonel Carson said, \"but he's not himself. He refused the\n treatment. He wants to remain in his state of lower intelligence.\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"If those are his wishes, I can't go against them.\"\n\n\n \"But Mrs. Macklin!\" Mitchell protested. \"You will have to get a court\n order overruling your husband's wishes.\"\n\n\n She smoothed an eyebrow with the third finger of her right hand. \"That\n was my original thought. But I've redecided.\"\n\n\n \"Redecided!\" Carson burst out almost hysterically.", "Macklin ran the back of his knuckles across his forehead. \"I really\n would like to take you up on it. When I start making slips like that it\n means another attack of migraine. The drilling, grinding pain through\n my temples and around my eyeballs. The flashes of light, the rioting\n pools of color playing on the back of my lids. Ugh.\"\n\n\n Ferris smiled. \"Gynergen makes you sick, does it, doctor? Produces\n nausea, eh? The pain of that turns you almost wrong side out, doesn't\n it? You aren't much better off with it than without, are you? I've\n heard some say they preferred the migraine.\"\n\n\n Macklin carefully arranged his pipe along with the tools he used to\n tend it in a worn leather case. \"Tell me,\" he said, \"what is the worst\n that could happen to me?\"\n\n\n \"Low blood pressure,\" Ferris said.", "\"Well,\" Macklin said. \"Well.\" He thumped pipe ashes out into his palm.\n \"Certainly you can get volunteers. Convicts. Conscientious objectors\n from the Army.\"\n\n\n \"We want you,\" Ferris told him.\n\n\n Macklin coughed. \"I don't want to overestimate my value but the\n government wouldn't like it very well if I died in the middle of this\n project. My wife would like it even less.\"\n\n\n Ferris turned his back on the mathematician. Mitchell could see him\n mouthing the word\nyellow\n.", "\"I doubt very much if the court would rule in that manner,\" she said.\n\n\n The colonel looked smug. \"Why not?\"\n\n\n \"Because, Colonel, the matter of my husband's health, his very life, is\n involved.\"\n\n\n \"There is some degree of risk in shock treatments, too. But—\"\n\n\n \"It isn't quite the same, Colonel. Elliot Macklin has a history of\n vascular spasm, a mild pseudostroke some years ago. Now you want to\n give those cerebral arteries back the ability to constrict. To\n paralyze. To kill. No court would give you that authority.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose there's some chance of that. But without the treatment\n there is\nno\nchance of your husband regaining his right senses, Mrs.\n Macklin,\" Mitchell interjected.", "\"You had certainly\nbetter\nhelp him, gentlemen.\" She stood out of the\n doorway for them to pass.\n\n\n Mrs. Macklin was an attractive brunette in her late thirties. She wore\n an expensive yellow dress. And she had a sharp-cornered jawline.\n\n\n The Army officer came out into the hall to meet them.\n\n\n \"You are the gentlemen who gave Dr. Macklin the unauthorized\n injection,\" he said.\n\n\n It wasn't a question.\n\n\n \"I don't like that 'unauthorized',\" Ferris snapped.\n\n\n The colonel—Mitchell spotted the eagles on his green tunic—lifted\n a heavy eyebrow. \"No? Are you medical doctors? Are you authorized to\n treat illnesses?\"\n\n\n \"We weren't treating an illness,\" Mitchell said. \"We were discovering a\n method of treatment. What concern is it of yours?\"", "Macklin nodded. \"Troubled, anyway. Disturbed by every little thing.\n How high was up, which infinity was bigger than what infinity—say,\n what was an infinity anyway? All that sort of schoolboy things. It's\n peaceful this way. My head doesn't hurt. I've got a good-looking wife\n and all the money I need. I've got it made. Why worry?\"\n\n\n Colonel Carson opened his mouth, then closed it.\n\n\n \"That's right, Colonel. There's no use in arguing with him,\" Mitchell\n said.\n\n\n \"It's not his decision to make,\" the colonel said. \"He's an idiot now.\"", "\"He's always treated me like dirt,\" Ferris said heatedly. \"Everyone on\n this campus treats biologists like dirt. Sometimes I want to bash in\n their smug faces.\"\n\n\n Sometimes, Mitchell reflected, Ferris displayed a certain lack of\n scientific detachment.\n\n\n There came a discreet knock on the door.\n\n\n \"Please come in,\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n Elliot Macklin entered in a cloud of pipe smoke and a tweed jacket. He\n looked more than a little like a postgraduate student, and Mitchell\n suspected that that was his intention.\n\n\n He shook hands warmly with Mitchell. \"Good of you to ask me over,\n Steven.\"\n\n\n Macklin threw a big arm across Ferris' shoulders. \"How have you been,\n Harold?\"\n\n\n Ferris' face flickered between pink and white. \"Fine, thank you,\n doctor.\"", "\"That's not so bad,\" Macklin said. \"How low can it get?\"\n\n\n \"When your heart stops, your blood pressure goes to its lowest point,\"\n Mitchell said.\n\n\n A dew of perspiration had bloomed on Macklin's forehead. \"Is there much\n risk of that?\"\n\n\n \"Practically none,\" Mitchell said. \"We have to give you the worst\n possibilities.\nAll\nour test animals survived and seem perfectly happy\n and contented. As I said, the virus is self-stabilizing. Ferris and I\n are confident that there is no danger.... But we may be wrong.\"\n\n\n Macklin held his head in both hands. \"Why did you two select\nme\n?\"", "\"No, Colonel. As you said, he's a moron. He seems an idiot compared to\n his former level of intelligence but he's legally responsible. There\n are millions of morons running around loose in the United States. They\n can get married, own property, vote, even hold office. Many of them\n do. You can't force him into being cured.... At least, I don't\nthink\nyou can.\"\n\n\n \"No, I can't. This is hardly a totalitarian state.\" The colonel looked\n momentarily glum that it wasn't.\n\n\n Mitchell looked back at Macklin. \"Where did his wife get to, Colonel?\n I don't think that even previously he made too many personal decisions\n for himself. Perhaps she could influence him.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" the colonel said. \"Let's find her.\"\nThey found Mrs. Macklin in the dining room, her face at the picture\n window an attractive silhouette. She turned as the men approached." ], [ "Macklin nodded. \"Troubled, anyway. Disturbed by every little thing.\n How high was up, which infinity was bigger than what infinity—say,\n what was an infinity anyway? All that sort of schoolboy things. It's\n peaceful this way. My head doesn't hurt. I've got a good-looking wife\n and all the money I need. I've got it made. Why worry?\"\n\n\n Colonel Carson opened his mouth, then closed it.\n\n\n \"That's right, Colonel. There's no use in arguing with him,\" Mitchell\n said.\n\n\n \"It's not his decision to make,\" the colonel said. \"He's an idiot now.\"", "\"I beg your pardon, sir,\" Carson said. \"I didn't intend any offense.\n But according to all the standard intelligence tests we have given you,\n your clinical intelligence quotient is that of a moron.\"\n\n\n \"That's just on book learning,\" Macklin said. \"There's a lot you learn\n in life that you don't get out of books, son.\"\n\n\n \"I'm confident that's true, sir,\" Colonel Carson said. He turned to the\n two biologists. \"Perhaps we had better speak outside.\"\n\n\n \"But—\" Mitchell said, impatient to examine Macklin for himself. \"Very\n well. Let's step into the hall.\"\n\n\n Ferris followed them docilely.\n\n\n \"What have you done to him?\" the colonel asked straightforwardly.\n\n\n \"We merely cured him of his headaches,\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n \"How?\"", "\"Mrs. Macklin,\" the colonel began, \"these gentlemen believe they can\n cure your husband of his present condition.\"\n\n\n \"Really?\" she said. \"Did you speak to Elliot about that?\"\n\n\n \"Y-yes,\" Colonel Carson said, \"but he's not himself. He refused the\n treatment. He wants to remain in his state of lower intelligence.\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"If those are his wishes, I can't go against them.\"\n\n\n \"But Mrs. Macklin!\" Mitchell protested. \"You will have to get a court\n order overruling your husband's wishes.\"\n\n\n She smoothed an eyebrow with the third finger of her right hand. \"That\n was my original thought. But I've redecided.\"\n\n\n \"Redecided!\" Carson burst out almost hysterically.", "The medic examined Mitchell and Ferris critically before answering. \"He\n used to be a mathematical genius.\"\n\n\n \"And now?\" Mitchell said impatiently.\n\n\n \"Now he is a moron,\" the medic said.\nIII\n\n\n Mitchell tried to stop Colonel Sidney as he went past, but the doctor\n mumbled he had a report to make.\n\n\n Mitchell and Ferris stared at Colonel Carson and Macklin and at each\n other.\n\n\n \"What did he mean, Macklin is an idiot?\" Mitchell asked.\n\n\n \"Not an idiot,\" Colonel Carson corrected primly. \"Dr. Macklin is a\n moron. He's legally responsible, but he's extremely stupid.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not so dumb,\" Macklin said defensively.", "Mitchell did his best to explain the F-M Virus.\n\n\n \"You mean,\" the Army officer said levelly \"you have infected him with\n some kind of a disease to rot his brain?\"\n\n\n \"No, no! Could I talk to the other man, the doctor? Maybe I can make\n him understand.\"\n\n\n \"All I want to know is why Elliot Macklin has been made as simple as if\n he had been kicked in the head by a mule,\" Colonel Carson said.\n\n\n \"I think I can explain,\" Ferris interrupted.\n\n\n \"You can?\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n Ferris nodded. \"We made a slight miscalculation. It appears as if the\n virus colony overcontrols the supply of posterior pituitary extract in\n the cerebrum. It isn't more than necessary to stop headaches. But that\n necessary amount of control to stop pain is too much to allow the brain\n cells to function properly.\"", "Macklin dropped on the edge of the desk and adjusted his pipe. \"Now\n what's this about you wanting my help on something? And please keep the\n explanation simple. Biology isn't my field, you know.\"\n\n\n Mitchell moved around the desk casually. \"Actually, Doctor, we haven't\n the right to ask this of a man of your importance. There may be an\n element of risk.\"\n\n\n The mathematician clamped onto his pipe and showed his teeth. \"Now you\n have me intrigued. What is it all about?\"\n\n\n \"Doctor, we understand you have severe headaches,\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n Macklin nodded. \"That's right, Steven. Migraine.\"\n\n\n \"That must be terrible,\" Ferris said. \"All your fine reputation and\n lavish salary can't be much consolation when that ripping, tearing\n agony begins, can it?\"", "\"No, Colonel. As you said, he's a moron. He seems an idiot compared to\n his former level of intelligence but he's legally responsible. There\n are millions of morons running around loose in the United States. They\n can get married, own property, vote, even hold office. Many of them\n do. You can't force him into being cured.... At least, I don't\nthink\nyou can.\"\n\n\n \"No, I can't. This is hardly a totalitarian state.\" The colonel looked\n momentarily glum that it wasn't.\n\n\n Mitchell looked back at Macklin. \"Where did his wife get to, Colonel?\n I don't think that even previously he made too many personal decisions\n for himself. Perhaps she could influence him.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" the colonel said. \"Let's find her.\"\nThey found Mrs. Macklin in the dining room, her face at the picture\n window an attractive silhouette. She turned as the men approached.", "The only thing that could delay the project was Macklin's health.\n\n\n Despite his impressive body, some years before he had suffered a mild\n stroke ... or at least a vascular spasm of a cerebral artery. It was\n known that he suffered from the vilest variety of migraine. A cycle of\n the headaches had caused him to be absent from his classes for several\n weeks, and there were an unusual number of military uniforms seen\n around the campus.\nFerris paced off the tidy measurements of the office outside the\n laboratory in the biology building. Mitchell sat slumped in the chair\n behind the blond imitation wood desk, watching him disinterestedly.\n\n\n \"Do you suppose the Great Man will actually show up?\" Ferris demanded,\n pausing in mid-stride.\n\n\n \"I imagine he will,\" Mitchell said. \"Macklin's always seemed a decent\n enough fellow when I've had lunch with him or seen him at the trustees\n meetings.\"", "On the coffee table in front of Macklin were some odd-shaped building\n blocks such as were used in nursery schools. A second uniformed\n man—another colonel but with the snake-entwined staff of the medical\n corps in his insignia—was kneeling at the table on the marble-effect\n carpet.\n\n\n The Army physician stood up and brushed his knees, undusted from the\n scrupulously clean rug.\n\n\n \"What's wrong with him, Sidney?\" the other officer asked the doctor.\n\n\n \"Not a thing,\" Sidney said. \"He's the healthiest, happiest, most\n well-adjusted man I've ever examined, Carson.\"\n\n\n \"But—\" Colonel Carson protested.\n\n\n \"Oh, he's changed all right,\" the Army doctor answered. \"He's not the\n same man as he used to be.\"\n\n\n \"How is he different?\" Mitchell demanded.", "The colonel smiled thinly. \"Dr. Macklin is my concern. And everything\n that happens to him. The Army doesn't like what you have done to him.\"\n\n\n Mitchell wondered desperately just what they had done to the man.\n\n\n \"Can we see him?\" Mitchell asked.\n\n\n \"Why not? You can't do much worse than murder him now. That might be\n just as well. We have laws to cover that.\"\n\n\n The colonel led them into the comfortable, over-feminine living room.\n Macklin sat in an easy chair draped in embroidery, smoking. Mitchell\n suddenly realized Macklin used a pipe as a form of masculine protest to\n his home surroundings.", "\"Now, Mrs. Macklin. Neither Dr. Ferris or myself have been near your\n husband for a full day. The effects of a narcotic would have worn off\n by this time.\"\n\n\n \"Most known narcotics,\" she admitted, \"but evidently you have\n discovered something new. Is it so expensive to refine you and Ferris\n have to recruit new customers to keep yourselves supplied?\"\n\n\n \"Mrs. Macklin! I think I had better talk to you later when you are\n calmer.\"\n\n\n Mitchell dropped the receiver heavily. \"What could be wrong with\n Macklin?\" he asked without removing his hand from the telephone.\n\n\n Ferris frowned, making quotation marks above his nose. \"Let's have a\n look at the test animals.\"", "Macklin ran the back of his knuckles across his forehead. \"I really\n would like to take you up on it. When I start making slips like that it\n means another attack of migraine. The drilling, grinding pain through\n my temples and around my eyeballs. The flashes of light, the rioting\n pools of color playing on the back of my lids. Ugh.\"\n\n\n Ferris smiled. \"Gynergen makes you sick, does it, doctor? Produces\n nausea, eh? The pain of that turns you almost wrong side out, doesn't\n it? You aren't much better off with it than without, are you? I've\n heard some say they preferred the migraine.\"\n\n\n Macklin carefully arranged his pipe along with the tools he used to\n tend it in a worn leather case. \"Tell me,\" he said, \"what is the worst\n that could happen to me?\"\n\n\n \"Low blood pressure,\" Ferris said.", "Her mouth grew petulant. \"I don't care. I would rather have a live\n husband than a dead genius. I can take care of him this way, make him\n comfortable....\"\n\n\n Carson opened his mouth and closed his fist, then relaxed. Mitchell led\n him back into the hall.\n\n\n \"I'm no psychiatrist,\" Mitchell said, \"but I think she wants Macklin\n stupid. Prefers it that way. She's always dominated his personal life,\n and now she can dominate him completely.\"\n\n\n \"What is she? A monster?\" the Army officer muttered.\n\n\n \"No,\" Mitchell said. \"She's an intelligent woman unconsciously jealous\n of her husband's genius.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" Carson said. \"I don't know. I don't know what the hell to tell\n the Pentagon. I think I'll go out and get drunk.\"\n\n\n \"I'll go with you,\" Ferris said.", "Ferris fingered the collar of his starched lab smock. \"Guess I got\n carried away for a moment. But Macklin is exactly what we need for a\n quick, dramatic test. We've had it if he turns us down.\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" Mitchell said, exhaling deeply. \"Somehow the men with the\n money just can't seem to understand basic research. Who would have\n financed a study of cyclic periods of the hedgehog? Yet the information\n gained from that study is vital in cancer research.\"\n\n\n \"When we prove our results that should be of enough practical value for\n anyone. But those crummy trustees didn't even leave us enough for a\n field test.\" Ferris scrubbed his thin hand over the bony ridge of his\n forehead. \"I've been worrying so much about this I've got the ancestor\n of all headaches.\"\n\n\n Mitchell's blue eyes narrowed and his boyish face took on an expression\n of demonic intensity. \"Ferris, would you consider—?\"", "\"Why won't they function?\" Carson roared.\n\n\n \"They don't get enough food—blood, oxygen, hemoglobin,\" Ferris\n explained. \"The cerebral vessels don't contract enough to pump the\n blood through the brain as fast and as hard as is needed. The brain\n cells remain sluggish, dormant. Perhaps decaying.\"\n\n\n The colonel yelled.\n\n\n Mitchell groaned. He was abruptly sure Ferris was correct.\nThe colonel drew himself to attention, fists trembling at his sides.\n \"I'll see you hung for treason! Don't you know what Elliot Macklin\n means to us? Do you want those filthy Luxemburgians to reach Pluto\n before we do? Macklin's formula is essential to the FTL engine. You\n might just as well have blown up Washington, D.C. Better! The capital\n is replaceable. But the chances of an Elliot Macklin are very nearly\n once in a human race.\"", "\"Good boy,\" the biologist said. \"Listen, doctor—Elliot—El, old son.\n I'm not against you like all the others. I don't want to make you go\n back to all that worrying and thinking and headaches. You believe me,\n don't you?\"\n\n\n There was a slight hesitation.\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Macklin said, \"if you say so. Why shouldn't I believe you?\"\n\n\n \"But there was a hesitation there, El. You worried for just a second if\n I could have some reason for not telling you the truth.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose so,\" Macklin said humbly.\n\n\n \"You've found yourself worrying—thinking—about a lot of other\n problems since we left you, haven't you? Maybe not the same kind of\n scientific problem. But more personal ones, ones you didn't used to\n have time to think about.\"\n\n\n \"If you say so.\"", "\"I doubt very much if the court would rule in that manner,\" she said.\n\n\n The colonel looked smug. \"Why not?\"\n\n\n \"Because, Colonel, the matter of my husband's health, his very life, is\n involved.\"\n\n\n \"There is some degree of risk in shock treatments, too. But—\"\n\n\n \"It isn't quite the same, Colonel. Elliot Macklin has a history of\n vascular spasm, a mild pseudostroke some years ago. Now you want to\n give those cerebral arteries back the ability to constrict. To\n paralyze. To kill. No court would give you that authority.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose there's some chance of that. But without the treatment\n there is\nno\nchance of your husband regaining his right senses, Mrs.\n Macklin,\" Mitchell interjected.", "\"That's not so bad,\" Macklin said. \"How low can it get?\"\n\n\n \"When your heart stops, your blood pressure goes to its lowest point,\"\n Mitchell said.\n\n\n A dew of perspiration had bloomed on Macklin's forehead. \"Is there much\n risk of that?\"\n\n\n \"Practically none,\" Mitchell said. \"We have to give you the worst\n possibilities.\nAll\nour test animals survived and seem perfectly happy\n and contented. As I said, the virus is self-stabilizing. Ferris and I\n are confident that there is no danger.... But we may be wrong.\"\n\n\n Macklin held his head in both hands. \"Why did you two select\nme\n?\"", "\"Yes. I can't go against Elliot's wishes. It would be monstrous to put\n him back where he would suffer the hell of those headaches once again,\n where he never had a moment's peace from worry and pressure. He's happy\n now. Like a child, but happy.\"\n\n\n \"Mrs. Macklin,\" the Army man said levelly, \"if you don't help us\n restore your husband's mind we will be forced to get a court order\n declaring him incompetent.\"\n\n\n \"But he is not! Legally, I mean,\" the woman stormed.\n\n\n \"Maybe not. It's a borderline case. But I think any court would give us\n the edge where restoring the mind of Elliot Macklin was concerned. Once\n he's certified incompetent, authorities can rule whether Mitchell and\n Ferris' antitoxin treatment is the best method of restoring Dr. Macklin\n to sanity.\"", "Elliot Macklin had inherited the reputation of the late Albert Einstein\n in the popular mind. He was the man people thought of when the word\n \"mathematician\" or even \"scientist\" was mentioned. No one knew whether\n his Theory of Spatium was correct or not because no one had yet been\n able to frame an argument with it. Macklin was in his early fifties but\n looked in his late thirties, with the build of a football player. The\n government took up a lot of his time using him as the symbol of the\n Ideal Scientist to help recruit Science and Engineering Cadets.\n\n\n For the past seven years Macklin—who\nwas\nthe Advanced Studies\n Department of Firestone University—had been involved in devising a\n faster-than-light drive to help the Army reach Pluto and eventually the\n nearer stars. Mitchell had overheard two coeds talking and so knew\n that the project was nearing completion. If so, it was a case of\nAd\n astra per aspirin\n." ], [ "\"Just a moment,\" Mitchell interrupted, \"we can cure Macklin.\"\n\n\n \"You\ncan\n?\" Carson said. For a moment Mitchell thought the man was\n going to clasp his hands and sink to his knees.\n\n\n \"Certainly. We have learned to stabilize the virus colonies. We have\n antitoxin to combat the virus. We had always thought of it as a\n beneficial parasite, but we can wipe it out if necessary.\"\n\n\n \"Good!\" Carson clasped his hands and gave at least slightly at the\n knees.\n\n\n \"Just you wait a second now, boys,\" Elliot Macklin said. He was leaning\n in the doorway, holding his pipe. \"I've been listening to what you've\n been saying and I don't like it.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean you don't like it?\" Carson demanded. He added, \"Sir?\"", "\"It's a significant test case, yes. But not enough to go to the\n newspapers with. If it wasn't enough to go to the press with, it wasn't\n enough to try and breach the trustees with. Don't you see? The public\n will hand down a ukase demanding our virus, just as they demanded the\n Salk vaccine and the Grennell serum.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n The shrill call of the telephone interrupted Mitchell's objections.\n\n\n Ferris excused himself and crossed to the instrument. He answered it\n and listened for a moment, his face growing impatient.\n\n\n \"It's Macklin's wife,\" Ferris said. \"Do you want to talk to her? I'm no\n good with hysterical women.\"\n\n\n \"Hysterical?\" Mitchell muttered in alarm and went to the phone.\n\n\n \"Hello?\" Mitchell said reluctantly. \"Mrs. Macklin?\"", "\"Yes. I can't go against Elliot's wishes. It would be monstrous to put\n him back where he would suffer the hell of those headaches once again,\n where he never had a moment's peace from worry and pressure. He's happy\n now. Like a child, but happy.\"\n\n\n \"Mrs. Macklin,\" the Army man said levelly, \"if you don't help us\n restore your husband's mind we will be forced to get a court order\n declaring him incompetent.\"\n\n\n \"But he is not! Legally, I mean,\" the woman stormed.\n\n\n \"Maybe not. It's a borderline case. But I think any court would give us\n the edge where restoring the mind of Elliot Macklin was concerned. Once\n he's certified incompetent, authorities can rule whether Mitchell and\n Ferris' antitoxin treatment is the best method of restoring Dr. Macklin\n to sanity.\"", "\"That's not so bad,\" Macklin said. \"How low can it get?\"\n\n\n \"When your heart stops, your blood pressure goes to its lowest point,\"\n Mitchell said.\n\n\n A dew of perspiration had bloomed on Macklin's forehead. \"Is there much\n risk of that?\"\n\n\n \"Practically none,\" Mitchell said. \"We have to give you the worst\n possibilities.\nAll\nour test animals survived and seem perfectly happy\n and contented. As I said, the virus is self-stabilizing. Ferris and I\n are confident that there is no danger.... But we may be wrong.\"\n\n\n Macklin held his head in both hands. \"Why did you two select\nme\n?\"", "\"You had certainly\nbetter\nhelp him, gentlemen.\" She stood out of the\n doorway for them to pass.\n\n\n Mrs. Macklin was an attractive brunette in her late thirties. She wore\n an expensive yellow dress. And she had a sharp-cornered jawline.\n\n\n The Army officer came out into the hall to meet them.\n\n\n \"You are the gentlemen who gave Dr. Macklin the unauthorized\n injection,\" he said.\n\n\n It wasn't a question.\n\n\n \"I don't like that 'unauthorized',\" Ferris snapped.\n\n\n The colonel—Mitchell spotted the eagles on his green tunic—lifted\n a heavy eyebrow. \"No? Are you medical doctors? Are you authorized to\n treat illnesses?\"\n\n\n \"We weren't treating an illness,\" Mitchell said. \"We were discovering a\n method of treatment. What concern is it of yours?\"", "The only thing that could delay the project was Macklin's health.\n\n\n Despite his impressive body, some years before he had suffered a mild\n stroke ... or at least a vascular spasm of a cerebral artery. It was\n known that he suffered from the vilest variety of migraine. A cycle of\n the headaches had caused him to be absent from his classes for several\n weeks, and there were an unusual number of military uniforms seen\n around the campus.\nFerris paced off the tidy measurements of the office outside the\n laboratory in the biology building. Mitchell sat slumped in the chair\n behind the blond imitation wood desk, watching him disinterestedly.\n\n\n \"Do you suppose the Great Man will actually show up?\" Ferris demanded,\n pausing in mid-stride.\n\n\n \"I imagine he will,\" Mitchell said. \"Macklin's always seemed a decent\n enough fellow when I've had lunch with him or seen him at the trustees\n meetings.\"", "\"Mrs. Macklin,\" the colonel began, \"these gentlemen believe they can\n cure your husband of his present condition.\"\n\n\n \"Really?\" she said. \"Did you speak to Elliot about that?\"\n\n\n \"Y-yes,\" Colonel Carson said, \"but he's not himself. He refused the\n treatment. He wants to remain in his state of lower intelligence.\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"If those are his wishes, I can't go against them.\"\n\n\n \"But Mrs. Macklin!\" Mitchell protested. \"You will have to get a court\n order overruling your husband's wishes.\"\n\n\n She smoothed an eyebrow with the third finger of her right hand. \"That\n was my original thought. But I've redecided.\"\n\n\n \"Redecided!\" Carson burst out almost hysterically.", "Macklin dropped on the edge of the desk and adjusted his pipe. \"Now\n what's this about you wanting my help on something? And please keep the\n explanation simple. Biology isn't my field, you know.\"\n\n\n Mitchell moved around the desk casually. \"Actually, Doctor, we haven't\n the right to ask this of a man of your importance. There may be an\n element of risk.\"\n\n\n The mathematician clamped onto his pipe and showed his teeth. \"Now you\n have me intrigued. What is it all about?\"\n\n\n \"Doctor, we understand you have severe headaches,\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n Macklin nodded. \"That's right, Steven. Migraine.\"\n\n\n \"That must be terrible,\" Ferris said. \"All your fine reputation and\n lavish salary can't be much consolation when that ripping, tearing\n agony begins, can it?\"", "Macklin ran the back of his knuckles across his forehead. \"I really\n would like to take you up on it. When I start making slips like that it\n means another attack of migraine. The drilling, grinding pain through\n my temples and around my eyeballs. The flashes of light, the rioting\n pools of color playing on the back of my lids. Ugh.\"\n\n\n Ferris smiled. \"Gynergen makes you sick, does it, doctor? Produces\n nausea, eh? The pain of that turns you almost wrong side out, doesn't\n it? You aren't much better off with it than without, are you? I've\n heard some say they preferred the migraine.\"\n\n\n Macklin carefully arranged his pipe along with the tools he used to\n tend it in a worn leather case. \"Tell me,\" he said, \"what is the worst\n that could happen to me?\"\n\n\n \"Low blood pressure,\" Ferris said.", "\"Now, Mrs. Macklin. Neither Dr. Ferris or myself have been near your\n husband for a full day. The effects of a narcotic would have worn off\n by this time.\"\n\n\n \"Most known narcotics,\" she admitted, \"but evidently you have\n discovered something new. Is it so expensive to refine you and Ferris\n have to recruit new customers to keep yourselves supplied?\"\n\n\n \"Mrs. Macklin! I think I had better talk to you later when you are\n calmer.\"\n\n\n Mitchell dropped the receiver heavily. \"What could be wrong with\n Macklin?\" he asked without removing his hand from the telephone.\n\n\n Ferris frowned, making quotation marks above his nose. \"Let's have a\n look at the test animals.\"", "Ferris fingered the collar of his starched lab smock. \"Guess I got\n carried away for a moment. But Macklin is exactly what we need for a\n quick, dramatic test. We've had it if he turns us down.\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" Mitchell said, exhaling deeply. \"Somehow the men with the\n money just can't seem to understand basic research. Who would have\n financed a study of cyclic periods of the hedgehog? Yet the information\n gained from that study is vital in cancer research.\"\n\n\n \"When we prove our results that should be of enough practical value for\n anyone. But those crummy trustees didn't even leave us enough for a\n field test.\" Ferris scrubbed his thin hand over the bony ridge of his\n forehead. \"I've been worrying so much about this I've got the ancestor\n of all headaches.\"\n\n\n Mitchell's blue eyes narrowed and his boyish face took on an expression\n of demonic intensity. \"Ferris, would you consider—?\"", "Macklin nodded. \"Troubled, anyway. Disturbed by every little thing.\n How high was up, which infinity was bigger than what infinity—say,\n what was an infinity anyway? All that sort of schoolboy things. It's\n peaceful this way. My head doesn't hurt. I've got a good-looking wife\n and all the money I need. I've got it made. Why worry?\"\n\n\n Colonel Carson opened his mouth, then closed it.\n\n\n \"That's right, Colonel. There's no use in arguing with him,\" Mitchell\n said.\n\n\n \"It's not his decision to make,\" the colonel said. \"He's an idiot now.\"", "\"No, Harold, it isn't,\" Macklin admitted. \"What does your project have\n to do with my headaches?\"\n\n\n \"Doctor,\" Mitchell said, \"what would you say the most common complaint\n of man is?\"\n\n\n \"I would have said the common cold,\" Macklin replied, \"but I suppose\n from what you have said you mean headaches.\"\n\"Headaches,\" Mitchell agreed. \"Everybody has them at some time in his\n life. Some people have them every day. Some are driven to suicide by\n their headaches.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Macklin said.\n\n\n \"But think,\" Ferris interjected, \"what a boon it would be if everyone\n could be cured of headaches\nforever\nby one simple injection.\"\n\n\n \"I don't suppose the manufacturers of aspirin would like you. But it\n would please about everybody else.\"", "\"Doctor,\" Mitchell said quickly, \"I know it's a tremendous favor to\n ask of a man of your position. But you can understand our problem.\n Unless we can produce quick, conclusive and dramatic proof of our\n studies we can get no more financial backing. We\nshould\nrun a\n large-scale field test. But we haven't the time or money for that.\n We can cure the headaches of one person and that's the limit of our\n resources.\"\n\n\n \"I'm tempted,\" Macklin said hesitantly, \"but the answer is go. I mean\n '\nno\n'. I'd like to help you out, but I'm afraid I owe too much to\n others to take the rest—the risk, I mean.\"", "\"I doubt very much if the court would rule in that manner,\" she said.\n\n\n The colonel looked smug. \"Why not?\"\n\n\n \"Because, Colonel, the matter of my husband's health, his very life, is\n involved.\"\n\n\n \"There is some degree of risk in shock treatments, too. But—\"\n\n\n \"It isn't quite the same, Colonel. Elliot Macklin has a history of\n vascular spasm, a mild pseudostroke some years ago. Now you want to\n give those cerebral arteries back the ability to constrict. To\n paralyze. To kill. No court would give you that authority.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose there's some chance of that. But without the treatment\n there is\nno\nchance of your husband regaining his right senses, Mrs.\n Macklin,\" Mitchell interjected.", "The colonel smiled thinly. \"Dr. Macklin is my concern. And everything\n that happens to him. The Army doesn't like what you have done to him.\"\n\n\n Mitchell wondered desperately just what they had done to the man.\n\n\n \"Can we see him?\" Mitchell asked.\n\n\n \"Why not? You can't do much worse than murder him now. That might be\n just as well. We have laws to cover that.\"\n\n\n The colonel led them into the comfortable, over-feminine living room.\n Macklin sat in an easy chair draped in embroidery, smoking. Mitchell\n suddenly realized Macklin used a pipe as a form of masculine protest to\n his home surroundings.", "Mitchell did his best to explain the F-M Virus.\n\n\n \"You mean,\" the Army officer said levelly \"you have infected him with\n some kind of a disease to rot his brain?\"\n\n\n \"No, no! Could I talk to the other man, the doctor? Maybe I can make\n him understand.\"\n\n\n \"All I want to know is why Elliot Macklin has been made as simple as if\n he had been kicked in the head by a mule,\" Colonel Carson said.\n\n\n \"I think I can explain,\" Ferris interrupted.\n\n\n \"You can?\" Mitchell said.\n\n\n Ferris nodded. \"We made a slight miscalculation. It appears as if the\n virus colony overcontrols the supply of posterior pituitary extract in\n the cerebrum. It isn't more than necessary to stop headaches. But that\n necessary amount of control to stop pain is too much to allow the brain\n cells to function properly.\"", "\"Good boy,\" the biologist said. \"Listen, doctor—Elliot—El, old son.\n I'm not against you like all the others. I don't want to make you go\n back to all that worrying and thinking and headaches. You believe me,\n don't you?\"\n\n\n There was a slight hesitation.\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Macklin said, \"if you say so. Why shouldn't I believe you?\"\n\n\n \"But there was a hesitation there, El. You worried for just a second if\n I could have some reason for not telling you the truth.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose so,\" Macklin said humbly.\n\n\n \"You've found yourself worrying—thinking—about a lot of other\n problems since we left you, haven't you? Maybe not the same kind of\n scientific problem. But more personal ones, ones you didn't used to\n have time to think about.\"\n\n\n \"If you say so.\"", "\"No, Colonel. As you said, he's a moron. He seems an idiot compared to\n his former level of intelligence but he's legally responsible. There\n are millions of morons running around loose in the United States. They\n can get married, own property, vote, even hold office. Many of them\n do. You can't force him into being cured.... At least, I don't\nthink\nyou can.\"\n\n\n \"No, I can't. This is hardly a totalitarian state.\" The colonel looked\n momentarily glum that it wasn't.\n\n\n Mitchell looked back at Macklin. \"Where did his wife get to, Colonel?\n I don't think that even previously he made too many personal decisions\n for himself. Perhaps she could influence him.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" the colonel said. \"Let's find her.\"\nThey found Mrs. Macklin in the dining room, her face at the picture\n window an attractive silhouette. She turned as the men approached.", "\"Why won't they function?\" Carson roared.\n\n\n \"They don't get enough food—blood, oxygen, hemoglobin,\" Ferris\n explained. \"The cerebral vessels don't contract enough to pump the\n blood through the brain as fast and as hard as is needed. The brain\n cells remain sluggish, dormant. Perhaps decaying.\"\n\n\n The colonel yelled.\n\n\n Mitchell groaned. He was abruptly sure Ferris was correct.\nThe colonel drew himself to attention, fists trembling at his sides.\n \"I'll see you hung for treason! Don't you know what Elliot Macklin\n means to us? Do you want those filthy Luxemburgians to reach Pluto\n before we do? Macklin's formula is essential to the FTL engine. You\n might just as well have blown up Washington, D.C. Better! The capital\n is replaceable. But the chances of an Elliot Macklin are very nearly\n once in a human race.\"" ] ]
train	61481	[ "What is Androka trying to make? \n", "What is implied when the narrator describes Nelson’s light colored hair? \n", "Where do the creatures from another world come from? \n", "What is Androka’s motivation for using the zone of silence? \n", "What is the significance of the evidence of human lodging on the islet? \n", "The yellow-gray mist indicates which of the following? \n", "Who are the four to blame for the Comerford’s incident? \n", "To what is the title of the story, “Silence is—Deadly” referring? \n", "Why is Brandt interested in The Comerford? \n" ]	[ [ "A zone of silence that is intended to stop Axis economic flow. \n", "A zone of silence that is deadly to all who pass through it. \n", "A zone of silence that will stop Americans from being able to radio Europe. \n", "A zone of silence that stops all radio signals that attempt to penetrate it. \n" ], [ "Nelson is German by ancestry, raised sympathetic to Germany’s cause. \n", "Nelson is German by ancestry, but was raised on the side of the American effort. \n", "Curtis is prejudiced against people with light hair. \n", "Nelson is Czech\n" ], [ "The Carethusia \n", "The Sea \n", "Germany", "An alien world\n" ], [ "He is helping the Nazi war effort\n", "He is helping the American Navy. \n", "He is doing Bob Curtis a favor by helping his ship be the most successful in the Navy. \n", "He is planning revenge against the Nazis for harming his family. \n" ], [ "Nazis were hiding out there.\n", "It will give Curtis and his crew mates shelter while they a stranded. \n", "The Americans have outposts everywhere. \n", "The Islet is where the zone of silence is to be built. \n" ], [ "A direct result of the zone of silence \n", "Curtis will be killed. \n", "The Holland blitzkrieg was a travesty \n", "Nazis are on The Comerford. \n" ], [ "Nelson, Androka, Brandt, Bradford", "Curtis, Androka, Brandt, Bradford \n", "Bradford, Nelson, Androka, Curtis\n", "Androka, Curtis, the radioman, Bradford \n" ], [ "Androka’s zone of silence is used as a deadly tool against the Nazi war effort. \n", "Androka’s zone of silence is used as a deadly tool against the Comerford’s crew. \n", "Androka’s zone of silence is used as a deadly tool, made in the name of revenging the Czech war effort. \n", "Androka’s zone of silence is used as a deadly tool, helping the Americans sneak up on a Nazi Islet. \n" ], [ "He is holding the ship ransom as revenge for what American has done to Germany. \n", "He is holding the ship ransom for Boarts—black diamonds. \n", "He wants to use its zone of silence to apprehend the Carthusia. \n", "He wants to use its zone of silence to trick other ships into crashing on the islet. \n" ] ]	[ 4, 1, 3, 1, 1, 4, 1, 2, 3 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Sometimes, Curtis thought old Androka was a bit wacky—a scientist\n whose mind had been turned by the horror that had come to his country\n under the domination of the Nazi\ngestapo\n. At other times, the man\n seemed a genius. Perhaps that was the answer—a mad genius!\n\n\n Curtis opened the door and looked out. Rain whipped against his face\n like a stinging wet lash. Overhead, the sky was a storm-racked mass of\n clouds, broken in one spot by a tiny patch of starlit blue.\n\n\n His eyes rested inquiringly on the face of the man who stood before\n him. It\nwas\nNelson, his shaggy blond brows drawn scowlingly down\n over his pale eyes; his thin face a mass of tense lines; his big hands\n fumbling at the neck of his slicker. Rain was coursing down his white\n cheeks, streaking them with glistening furrows.", "\"You have seen a miracle, commander!\" he shouted at Curtis. \"\nMy\nmiracle! My invention has shattered the ether waves hereabouts\n hopelessly.\"\n\n\n \"Seems to me,\" Curtis said dryly, \"this invention can harm your friends\n as much as your enemies.\"\n\n\n The scientist drew himself up to his full height—which was only a\n little over five feet. His voice grew shrill. \"Wait! Just wait! There\n are other inventions to supplement this one. Put them together, and\n they will defeat the Nazi hordes which have ravaged my country!\"\n\n\n Curtis was a little shocked by the hatred that gleamed in Androka's\n eyes, under their bushy brows. There was something of the wild animal\n in the man's expression, as his lips drew back from his yellowed teeth.\n\n\n \"Those tanks you have below,\" Curtis said, \"have they some connection\n with this radio silence?\"", "\"It's a funny thing,\" the latter said, still dialing and grousing, \"how\n I got that cross-bearing through and can't get another squeak out of\n her. I'm wondering if that old goat really\nhas\ndone something to the\n ether. The set seems O. K.\"\n\n\n He lingered over the apparatus, checking and rechecking. Tubes lighted;\n wires were alive to the touch and set him to shaking his head at the\n tingle they sent through his inquiring fingers.\n\n\n Curtis left him at it, and went to rejoin Androka in the cabin. He\n found the little inventor pacing up and down, shaking his fists in the\n air; pausing every now and then to run his bony fingers through his\n tangled mop of gray hair, or to claw nervously at his beard.", "A far-away look came into Androka's eyes. He did not seem to hear\n the question. He lowered his voice: \"My daughter is still in Prague.\n So are my sister and her husband, and\ntheir\ntwo daughters. If the\ngestapo\nknew what I am doing, all of them would be better dead. You\n understand—better dead?\"\n\n\n Curtis said: \"I understand.\"\n\n\n \"And if the Nazi agents in America knew of the islet from which my zone\n of silence is projected—\" Androka paused, his head tilted to one side,\n as if he were listening to something—\nOn deck, there was shouting and commotion. Curtis rushed out, pulling\n on his slicker as he went. The shout from the watch forward had been\n picked up, and was being relayed all over the ship. The words struck on\n Curtis' ears with a note of impending tragedy.\n\n\n \"Breakers ahead!\"", "Androka held out his palms helplessly. \"I can do nothing. I have given\n orders to my assistant that he must keep two hours of radio silence! I\n can get no message to him, for our radio is dead!\"\n\n\n As if to mock him, the ship's radio began to answer:\n\n\n \"Station 297 calling U. S. Cruiser\nComerford\n. Station 297 calling U.\n S. Cruiser\nComerford\n—\"\n\n\n \"U. S. Cruiser\nComerford\ncalling Station 297!\" the operator intoned,\n winking at the two officers over Androka's discomfiture, and asked for\n the bearings.\n\n\n The answer came back: \"Bearings north east by a quarter east, U. S.\n Cruiser\nComerford\n!\"", "\"The\ngestapo\ntakes care of Czechs and Poles and Frenchmen and other\n foreigners whom it chooses as its agents,\" Brandt pointed out. \"Androka\n has a daughter and other relations in Prague. He knows that if anything\n misfires, if there is the slightest suspicion of treachery on his part,\n his daughter and the others will suffer. Androka's loyalty is assured!\"\n\n\n Nelson turned to watch the forward fighting top of the\nComerford\n.\n The masked German seamen were installing some sort of apparatus\n up there—a strange-looking object that looked something like an\n old-fashioned trench mortar, and which connected with cables to the\n room that served as Androka's laboratory and workshop.\n\n\n Another crew was installing radio apparatus in the mizzentop turret.", "\"Dead!\" Androka muttered, with a bitter laugh. \"Yet not dead,\n gentlemen! The set is uninjured. The waves are what have been upset. I\n have shattered them around your ship, just as I can eventually shatter\n them all over Central Europe! For the next two hours, no radio messages\n can enter or leave my zone of radio silence—of refracted radio waves,\n set up by my little station on one of the neighboring islets!\"\nThere was a long pause, while commander and navigator stared at him.\n Curtis was the first to speak.\n\n\n \"Your secrecy might well cost the United States navy one of its best\n light cruisers—and us our lives!\" he said angrily. \"We need that check\n by radio at once! If you're not talking nonsense, call off your dogs\n till we learn just where we are!\"", "\"There are other things Germany needs desperately on board the\nCarethusia\n,\" Brandt explained. \"Vanadium and nickel and hundreds of\n barrels of lard oil for machine-tool lubrication. Our agents have been\n watching the convoys closely for weeks for just such a cargo as the\nCarethusia\nis taking over.\"\n\n\n \"Can we trust Androka?\" Nelson asked, with a sudden note of suspicion\n in his voice.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Brandt assured him. \"Of all men—we can trust Androka!\"\n\n\n \"But he's a Czech,\" Nelson argued.", "Brandt nodded his square head. \"We have a full crew—two hundred\n men—officers, seamen, mechanics, radio men, technical experts, all\n German naval reservists living in the United States, who've been sent\n here secretly, a few at a time, during the past six weeks!\"\nThe three—Brandt, Nelson and Bradford—stood on the bridge and talked,\n while the efficient stretcher-bearers worked industriously to remove\n the limp bodies of the\nComerford's\nunconscious crew and row them\n ashore.\n\n\n And when that task was completed, lifeboats began to come alongside\n with strange-looking radio equipment, and more gas tanks like those\n Androka had brought aboard the\nComerford\nwith him, and dynamos and\n batteries that looked like something out of a scientific nightmare.\n\n\n And bustling all over the place, barking excited commands in German,\n pushing and pulling and pointing to emphasize his directions, was the\n strange figure of Professor Zukor Androka!", "\"The professor's in his glory!\" Nelson remarked to Kommander Brandt.\n\n\n \"Funny thing about him,\" Bradford put in, \"is that his inventions work.\n That zone of silence cut us off completely.\"\n\n\n Kommander Brandt nodded. \"Goodt! But you got your message giving your\n bearings—the wrong ones?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Nelson said. \"That came through all right. And won't Curtis have\n a time explaining it!\"\n\n\n \"Hereafter,\" Brandt said solemnly, \"the zone of silence vill be\n projected from the\nComerford\n; and ve have another invention of\n Androka's vich vill be even more useful vhen ve come to cut the\nCarethusia\nout of her convoy.\"\n\n\n \"The\nCarethusia\n?\" Nelson asked, in a puzzled tone.", "Curtis didn't hurry. It pleased him to let Nelson wait. He moved slowly\n to the door, paused there, and flung a backward glance at the man in\n the cabin with him—Zukor Androka, the elderly Czech scientist, a guest\n of the United States navy, here aboard the cruiser\nComerford\n.\n\n\n The wizened face of the older man was molded in intent lines of\n concentration, as his bushy gray head bent over his drawing board.\n Curtis got a glimpse of the design on which he was working, and his\n lips relaxed in a faint smile.\n\n\n Androka had arrived on board the\nComerford\nthe day before she sailed\n from Norfolk. With him came a boatload of scientific apparatus and\n equipment, including a number of things that looked like oxygen tanks,\n which were now stored in the forward hold. Androka had watched over\n his treasures with the jealous care of a mother hen, and spent hours\n daily in the room in the superstructure that had been assigned as his\n laboratory.", "Bradford shook his head in disagreement. \"The old geezer claims he's\n got a neutralizing chemical in one of them tanks of his that'll clear\n everything up inside half an hour.\"\n\n\n \"I'd rather get along without Androka, if we could!\" Nelson muttered.\n \"He's nothing but a crackpot!\"\n\n\n \"It was a crackpot who invented the gas we used to break up the\n Maginot Line,\" Bradford reminded him. \"It saved a lot of lives for the\nFuehrer\n—lives that'd have been lost if the forts had to be taken by\n our storm troopers!\"\n\n\n Nelson grunted and turned away. A short, thick-set figure in the\n uniform of a German naval commander had ascended the accommodation\n ladder and was mounting to the bridge. He, too, was equipped with a\n respirator.", "The fellow was a headache to Curtis. He was overfriendly with a\n black-browed bos'n's mate named Joe Bradford—the worst trouble maker\n on board. But there was no question of his ability. He was a good\n navigating officer—dependable, accurate, conscientious. Nevertheless,\n his taut face, restless, searching eyes, and eternally nervous manner\n got Curtis' goat.\n\n\n \"Come in, Nelson!\" he said.\n\n\n Nelson shouldered his way inside, and stood there in his dripping\n oilskins, blinking his eyes against the yellow light.\n\n\n Curtis closed the door and nodded toward the bent form of Zukor\n Androka, with a quizzical grin. \"Old Czech-and-Double-Czech is working\n hard on his latest invention to pull Hitler's teeth and re-establish\n the Czech Republic!\"", "Curtis recalled that Nelson and Androka had long conversations\n together—conversations which they would end abruptly when anyone else\n came within earshot. And Nelson had always been chummy with the worst\n trouble maker in the crew—Bos'n's Mate Bradford.\n\n\n Curtis went around, finding the officers, issuing orders. There were\n still some unconscious men to be revived. In a sheltered cove among\n the rocks, an exploring group had found enough dry driftwood to make a\n fire—\n\n\n In another hour, the skies had cleared, and white moonlight flooded\n the scene with a ghostly radiance. The men of the\nComerford\nhad\n all regained consciousness and were drying out in front of the big\n driftwood bonfires in the cove.\n\n\n Curtis ordered a beacon kept burning on a high promontory. Then he got\n the men lined up, according to their respective classifications, for a\n check-up on the missing.", "There was a good water supply—a small creek fed by springs—but\n nothing in the way of food. Evidently food was a precious commodity\n which the recent inhabitants of the islet couldn't afford to leave\n behind.\n\n\n Curtis was studying the wreckage of the wireless station, wondering\n if this might have been the source of Androka's zone of silence, when\n Ensign Jack Dillon came up to him.\n\n\n \"There's a coast-guard cutter heading for the island, sir,\" he\n announced.", "\"Radio?\" repeated the little Czech, thrusting his face between the\n other two, in his independent fashion that ignored ship's discipline.\n \"You're using your radio?\" He broke into a knowing chuckle, his keen\n old eyes twinkling behind their thick lenses. \"Go ahead and try it. See\n how much you can get! It will be no more than Hitler can get when Zukor\n Androka decrees silence over the German airways! Try it! Try it, I say!\"\n\n\n Bob Curtis stared at him, as if questioning his sanity. Then he\n hastened to the radio room, with Nelson at his heels, and the Czech\n trotting along behind.\n\n\n The door burst open as they neared it. A frightened operator came out,\n still wearing his earphones, and stood staring upward incredulously at\n the aërial.\n\n\n \"Get us a radio cross-bearing for location at once,\" Curtis said\n sharply, for the operator seemed in a daze.", "As he thought back, he realized that he\nmight\nhave prevented the\n loss, if he had been more alert, more suspicious. For it was clear to\n him now that the\nComerford\nhad been deliberately steered to this\n place; that the men who had seized her had been waiting here for that\n very purpose.\n\n\n The pieces of the picture fitted together like a jigsaw\n puzzle—Androka's zone of silence; the bearings given by radio;\n Navigating Officer Nelson's queer conduct. They were all part of a\n carefully laid plan!\n\n\n All the suspicious circumstances surrounding Nelson came flooding into\n Curtis' mind. He had never liked the man; never trusted him. Nelson\n always acted as if he had some secret, something to hide.", "When this was completed, it was found that the\nComerford's\nentire\n complement of two hundred and twenty men were present—except\n Navigating Officer Nelson, and Bos'n's Mate Bradford! And Zukor Androka\n was also missing!\n\n\n With the coming of dawn, a little exploration revealed that the\nComerford's\ncrew was marooned on an islet, about a square mile in\n area; that they had been put ashore without food or extra clothing or\n equipment of any kind, and that no boats had been left for them.\n\n\n One searching party reported finding the remains of what had been a\n radio station on a high promontory on the north shore of the islet.\n Another had found the remains of tents and log cabins, recently\n demolished, in a small, timbered hollow—a well-hidden spot invisible\n from the air, unless one were flying very low; a place where two\n hundred or more men could have camped.", "Curtis frowned and shook his head. Slowly he forced a reluctant grin as\n he stuck out his hand.\n\n\n \"Shake, Nels,\" he said. \"It's my turn to eat crow. You and the radio\n must be right. Continue as you were!\"\n\n\n \"I'm relieved, sir, just the same,\" Nelson admitted, \"to have the radio\n bearings. We'd have piled up sure if you'd been right.\"\n\n\n They went on through the night. The starlit gap in the clouds had\n closed. The sky was again a blanket of darkness pouring sheets of rain\n at them.\n\n\n Nelson went back to the bridge, and Androka returned to the commander's\n cabin. Curtis lingered in the wireless room with the radio operator.", "It was hard work getting to his feet, and when he did manage to stand,\n he could only plant his heels in the sand and sway to and fro for fully\n a minute, like a child learning to walk.\n\n\n All around him in the nearly total darkness, he could make out the dim\n forms of men sprawled on the beach; and of other men moving about,\n exploring. He heard the murmur of voices and saw the glow of lighted\n cigarettes.\n\n\n A man with a flashlight was approaching him. Its white glare shone for\n a moment in Curtis' face, and the familiar voice of Ensign Jack Dillon\n spoke: \"Commander Curtis! Are you O. K., sir?\"\n\n\n \"I think so!\" Curtis' heart warmed at the eager expression in Dillon's\n face; at the heartfelt concern in his friendly brown eyes. The young\n ensign was red-headed, impetuous, thoroughly genuine in his emotions.\n \"How about yourself, Jack?\" Curtis added." ], [ "The fellow was a headache to Curtis. He was overfriendly with a\n black-browed bos'n's mate named Joe Bradford—the worst trouble maker\n on board. But there was no question of his ability. He was a good\n navigating officer—dependable, accurate, conscientious. Nevertheless,\n his taut face, restless, searching eyes, and eternally nervous manner\n got Curtis' goat.\n\n\n \"Come in, Nelson!\" he said.\n\n\n Nelson shouldered his way inside, and stood there in his dripping\n oilskins, blinking his eyes against the yellow light.\n\n\n Curtis closed the door and nodded toward the bent form of Zukor\n Androka, with a quizzical grin. \"Old Czech-and-Double-Czech is working\n hard on his latest invention to pull Hitler's teeth and re-establish\n the Czech Republic!\"", "He came up to Nelson, saluted, and held out his hand, introducing\n himself as Herr Kommander Brandt. He began to speak in German, but\n Nelson stopped him.\n\n\n \"I don't speak any German,\" he explained. \"I was born and educated in\n the United States—of German parents, who had been ruined in the First\n World War. My mother committed suicide when she learned that we were\n penniless. My father—\" He paused and cleared his throat.\n\n\n \"\nJa!\nYour father?\" the German officer prompted, dropping into\n accented English. \"Your father?\"", "Sometimes, Curtis thought old Androka was a bit wacky—a scientist\n whose mind had been turned by the horror that had come to his country\n under the domination of the Nazi\ngestapo\n. At other times, the man\n seemed a genius. Perhaps that was the answer—a mad genius!\n\n\n Curtis opened the door and looked out. Rain whipped against his face\n like a stinging wet lash. Overhead, the sky was a storm-racked mass of\n clouds, broken in one spot by a tiny patch of starlit blue.\n\n\n His eyes rested inquiringly on the face of the man who stood before\n him. It\nwas\nNelson, his shaggy blond brows drawn scowlingly down\n over his pale eyes; his thin face a mass of tense lines; his big hands\n fumbling at the neck of his slicker. Rain was coursing down his white\n cheeks, streaking them with glistening furrows.", "Descending a companionway to see what was going on below, Nelson found\n that portholes were being opened, and men were spraying chemical around\n to rid the below-decks atmosphere of the lethal gas that had overcome\n the\nComerford's\nAmerican crew.\n\n\n Returning to the bridge, he found that the tide in the inlet had risen\n considerably, and that the cruiser was riding more easily at her anchor.\n\n\n Then, at Brandt's orders, the anchor was hauled in, and lifeboats and a\n motor launch were used as tugs to work the vessel entirely free of the\n sand bar. This was accomplished without difficulty.\n\n\n Brandt came over to where Nelson was standing on the bridge and held\n out his hand.", "Curtis recalled that Nelson and Androka had long conversations\n together—conversations which they would end abruptly when anyone else\n came within earshot. And Nelson had always been chummy with the worst\n trouble maker in the crew—Bos'n's Mate Bradford.\n\n\n Curtis went around, finding the officers, issuing orders. There were\n still some unconscious men to be revived. In a sheltered cove among\n the rocks, an exploring group had found enough dry driftwood to make a\n fire—\n\n\n In another hour, the skies had cleared, and white moonlight flooded\n the scene with a ghostly radiance. The men of the\nComerford\nhad\n all regained consciousness and were drying out in front of the big\n driftwood bonfires in the cove.\n\n\n Curtis ordered a beacon kept burning on a high promontory. Then he got\n the men lined up, according to their respective classifications, for a\n check-up on the missing.", "Nelson had no answering smile, although there had been a great deal\n of good-natured joking aboard the\nComerford\never since the navy\n department had sent the scientist on board the cruiser to carry on his\n experiments.\n\n\n \"I'm worried, sir!\" Nelson said. \"I'm not sure about my dead reckoning.\n This storm—\"\n\n\n Curtis threw his arm around Nelson's dripping shoulders. \"Forget it!\n Don't let a little error get you down!\"\n\n\n \"But this storm, sir!\" Nelson avoided Curtis' friendly eyes and slipped\n out from under his arm. \"It's got me worried. Quartering wind of\n undetermined force, variable and gusty. There's a chop to the sea—as\n if from unestimated currents among the islets. No chance to check by\n observation, and now there is a chance—look at me!\"\n\n\n He held out his hands. They were shaking as if he had the chills.", "\"Congratulations, Herr Kommander Nelson!\" he said. \"Ve have stolen one\n of the United States navy's newest and fastest cruisers!\" He made a\n gesture as if raising a beer stein to drink a toast. \"\nProsit!\n\" he\n added.\n\n\n \"\nProsit!\n\" Nelson repeated, and the two grinned at each other.\nStars were twinkling in a patch of black-blue sky, and broken mountains\n of gray cloud were skudding before the east wind. Commander Bob Curtis\n found himself lying in wet sand, on a beach, somewhere, with the\n rain—now a light, driving mist—beating on his face. He was chilled;\n his limbs were stiff and numb. His nose and throat felt parched inside,\n as if a wave of searing heat had scorched them.\n\n\n According to his last calculations, the\nComerford\nhad been cruising\n off the Maine coast. This probably was one of the islets of that\n region, or it might be the mainland.", "It was hard work getting to his feet, and when he did manage to stand,\n he could only plant his heels in the sand and sway to and fro for fully\n a minute, like a child learning to walk.\n\n\n All around him in the nearly total darkness, he could make out the dim\n forms of men sprawled on the beach; and of other men moving about,\n exploring. He heard the murmur of voices and saw the glow of lighted\n cigarettes.\n\n\n A man with a flashlight was approaching him. Its white glare shone for\n a moment in Curtis' face, and the familiar voice of Ensign Jack Dillon\n spoke: \"Commander Curtis! Are you O. K., sir?\"\n\n\n \"I think so!\" Curtis' heart warmed at the eager expression in Dillon's\n face; at the heartfelt concern in his friendly brown eyes. The young\n ensign was red-headed, impetuous, thoroughly genuine in his emotions.\n \"How about yourself, Jack?\" Curtis added.", "Curtis didn't hurry. It pleased him to let Nelson wait. He moved slowly\n to the door, paused there, and flung a backward glance at the man in\n the cabin with him—Zukor Androka, the elderly Czech scientist, a guest\n of the United States navy, here aboard the cruiser\nComerford\n.\n\n\n The wizened face of the older man was molded in intent lines of\n concentration, as his bushy gray head bent over his drawing board.\n Curtis got a glimpse of the design on which he was working, and his\n lips relaxed in a faint smile.\n\n\n Androka had arrived on board the\nComerford\nthe day before she sailed\n from Norfolk. With him came a boatload of scientific apparatus and\n equipment, including a number of things that looked like oxygen tanks,\n which were now stored in the forward hold. Androka had watched over\n his treasures with the jealous care of a mother hen, and spent hours\n daily in the room in the superstructure that had been assigned as his\n laboratory.", "From her bridge, Navigating Officer Nelson watched the gas-masked\n figures moving about the decks, descending companionways—like goblins\n from an ancient fairy tale or a modern horror story. Nelson looked like\n a goblin himself, with his face covered by a respirator. At his side,\n stood his fellow conspirator Bos'n's Mate Joe Bradford, also wearing a\n gas mask.\n\n\n Nelson spoke in a low tone, his lips close to Bradford's ear. \"It\n worked, Joe!\"\n\n\n \"Yeah!\" Bradford agreed. \"It worked—fine!\"\n\n\n The limp bodies of the\nComerford's\ncrew were being carried to the\n lowered accommodation ladder and transferred into waiting lifeboats.\n\n\n Nelson swore under his breath. \"Reckon it'll take a couple of hours\n before the ship's rid of that damn gas!\"", "As he thought back, he realized that he\nmight\nhave prevented the\n loss, if he had been more alert, more suspicious. For it was clear to\n him now that the\nComerford\nhad been deliberately steered to this\n place; that the men who had seized her had been waiting here for that\n very purpose.\n\n\n The pieces of the picture fitted together like a jigsaw\n puzzle—Androka's zone of silence; the bearings given by radio;\n Navigating Officer Nelson's queer conduct. They were all part of a\n carefully laid plan!\n\n\n All the suspicious circumstances surrounding Nelson came flooding into\n Curtis' mind. He had never liked the man; never trusted him. Nelson\n always acted as if he had some secret, something to hide.", "\"My father dedicated me to a career of revenge—to wipe out his\n wrongs,\" Nelson continued. \"If America hadn't gone into the First\n World War, he wouldn't have lost his business; my mother would still\n be living. When he joined the Nazi party, the way became clear to use\n me—to educate me in a military prep school, then send me to Annapolis,\n for a career in the United States navy—and no one suspected me. No\n one—\"\n\n\n \"Sometimes,\" Bradford put in, \"I think Curtis suspected you.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe Curtis'll find out his suspicions were justified,\" Nelson said\n bitterly. \"But it won't do Curtis any good—a commander who's lost\n his ship.\" He turned to Brandt. \"You have plenty of men to work the\nComerford\n?\"", "The vapor clouds that enveloped the\nComerford\nwere becoming thicker.\n All about the deck lay the forms of unconscious seamen, suddenly\n stricken helpless. And then Curtis saw other forms flitting about the\n deck—forms that looked like creatures from another world, but he\n recognized them for what they were—men wearing gas masks.\n\n\n Nelson was nowhere in sight. The steersman lay in a limp heap beside\n the swinging wheel. Then a gas-masked figure appeared through the\n shroud of mist and steadied it, so that the cruiser would not be\n completely at the mercy of the wind and the waves.\n\n\n Curtis heard the anchor let down, as if by invisible hands, the chain\n screaming and flailing its clanking way through the hawse hole. Then he\n was completely walled in by the yellowish-gray mist. He felt his senses\n swimming.", "He was beside Navigating Officer Nelson on the bridge, and saw the\n helmsman climbing the rapidly spinning wheel like a monkey as he put it\n hard aport.\n\n\n Then the ship struck. Everything movable shot ahead until it brought up\n at the end of a swing or smacked against something solid.\n\n\n Curtis felt Nelson's hand grip his shoulder, as he put his lips close\n to his ear and shouted: \"You must have been right, sir, and the radio\n bearings and my reckoning wrong. We've hit that reef a terrific smack.\n I'm afraid we're gored!\"\n\n\n \"Get out the collision mat!\" Curtis ordered. \"We ought to be able to\n keep her up!\"\n\n\n And then he became aware of a deadly stillness. A vast wall of silence\n enveloped the entire cruiser. Looking over the side, he could no longer\n see the waves that a few minutes before had beaten savagely against the\n ship.", "\"The professor's in his glory!\" Nelson remarked to Kommander Brandt.\n\n\n \"Funny thing about him,\" Bradford put in, \"is that his inventions work.\n That zone of silence cut us off completely.\"\n\n\n Kommander Brandt nodded. \"Goodt! But you got your message giving your\n bearings—the wrong ones?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Nelson said. \"That came through all right. And won't Curtis have\n a time explaining it!\"\n\n\n \"Hereafter,\" Brandt said solemnly, \"the zone of silence vill be\n projected from the\nComerford\n; and ve have another invention of\n Androka's vich vill be even more useful vhen ve come to cut the\nCarethusia\nout of her convoy.\"\n\n\n \"The\nCarethusia\n?\" Nelson asked, in a puzzled tone.", "Curtis frowned and shook his head. Slowly he forced a reluctant grin as\n he stuck out his hand.\n\n\n \"Shake, Nels,\" he said. \"It's my turn to eat crow. You and the radio\n must be right. Continue as you were!\"\n\n\n \"I'm relieved, sir, just the same,\" Nelson admitted, \"to have the radio\n bearings. We'd have piled up sure if you'd been right.\"\n\n\n They went on through the night. The starlit gap in the clouds had\n closed. The sky was again a blanket of darkness pouring sheets of rain\n at them.\n\n\n Nelson went back to the bridge, and Androka returned to the commander's\n cabin. Curtis lingered in the wireless room with the radio operator.", "\"You say there is a chance?\" Curtis asked. \"Stars out?\"\n\n\n \"As if by providence, sir, there's a clear patch. I'm wondering—\" His\n voice trailed off, but his eyes swung toward the gleaming sextant on\n the rack.\n\n\n Commander Curtis shrugged good-naturedly and reached for the\n instrument. \"Not that I've lost confidence in you, Nels, but just\n because you asked for it!\"\nCurtis donned his slicker and went outside, sextant in hand. In a few\n minutes he returned and handed Nelson a sheet of paper with figures\n underlined heavily.\n\n\n \"Here's what I make it,\" the commander told his navigating officer.\n \"Bet you're not off appreciably.\"\n\n\n Nelson stared at the computations with shaking head. Then he mutely\n held up his own.", "\"There are other things Germany needs desperately on board the\nCarethusia\n,\" Brandt explained. \"Vanadium and nickel and hundreds of\n barrels of lard oil for machine-tool lubrication. Our agents have been\n watching the convoys closely for weeks for just such a cargo as the\nCarethusia\nis taking over.\"\n\n\n \"Can we trust Androka?\" Nelson asked, with a sudden note of suspicion\n in his voice.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Brandt assured him. \"Of all men—we can trust Androka!\"\n\n\n \"But he's a Czech,\" Nelson argued.", "\"A bit of a headache from the gas, but that's all. Any orders, sir?\"\n\n\n Curtis thought for a moment. \"Muster the crew, as best you can. We'll\n try to make a roll call. Is there any sign of the ship?\"\n\n\n There was a solemn note in Dillon's voice. \"No, sir. She's been worked\n off the sandbar and put to sea!\"\n\n\n The words struck Curtis with the numbing shock of a blow on some nerve\n center. For the first time, he realized fully the tragedy that had\n swept down on him. He had lost his ship—one of the United States\n navy's fastest and newest small light cruisers—under circumstances\n which smelled strongly of treachery and sabotage.", "\"It's a funny thing,\" the latter said, still dialing and grousing, \"how\n I got that cross-bearing through and can't get another squeak out of\n her. I'm wondering if that old goat really\nhas\ndone something to the\n ether. The set seems O. K.\"\n\n\n He lingered over the apparatus, checking and rechecking. Tubes lighted;\n wires were alive to the touch and set him to shaking his head at the\n tingle they sent through his inquiring fingers.\n\n\n Curtis left him at it, and went to rejoin Androka in the cabin. He\n found the little inventor pacing up and down, shaking his fists in the\n air; pausing every now and then to run his bony fingers through his\n tangled mop of gray hair, or to claw nervously at his beard." ], [ "The vapor clouds that enveloped the\nComerford\nwere becoming thicker.\n All about the deck lay the forms of unconscious seamen, suddenly\n stricken helpless. And then Curtis saw other forms flitting about the\n deck—forms that looked like creatures from another world, but he\n recognized them for what they were—men wearing gas masks.\n\n\n Nelson was nowhere in sight. The steersman lay in a limp heap beside\n the swinging wheel. Then a gas-masked figure appeared through the\n shroud of mist and steadied it, so that the cruiser would not be\n completely at the mercy of the wind and the waves.\n\n\n Curtis heard the anchor let down, as if by invisible hands, the chain\n screaming and flailing its clanking way through the hawse hole. Then he\n was completely walled in by the yellowish-gray mist. He felt his senses\n swimming.", "Sometimes, Curtis thought old Androka was a bit wacky—a scientist\n whose mind had been turned by the horror that had come to his country\n under the domination of the Nazi\ngestapo\n. At other times, the man\n seemed a genius. Perhaps that was the answer—a mad genius!\n\n\n Curtis opened the door and looked out. Rain whipped against his face\n like a stinging wet lash. Overhead, the sky was a storm-racked mass of\n clouds, broken in one spot by a tiny patch of starlit blue.\n\n\n His eyes rested inquiringly on the face of the man who stood before\n him. It\nwas\nNelson, his shaggy blond brows drawn scowlingly down\n over his pale eyes; his thin face a mass of tense lines; his big hands\n fumbling at the neck of his slicker. Rain was coursing down his white\n cheeks, streaking them with glistening furrows.", "\"It's a funny thing,\" the latter said, still dialing and grousing, \"how\n I got that cross-bearing through and can't get another squeak out of\n her. I'm wondering if that old goat really\nhas\ndone something to the\n ether. The set seems O. K.\"\n\n\n He lingered over the apparatus, checking and rechecking. Tubes lighted;\n wires were alive to the touch and set him to shaking his head at the\n tingle they sent through his inquiring fingers.\n\n\n Curtis left him at it, and went to rejoin Androka in the cabin. He\n found the little inventor pacing up and down, shaking his fists in the\n air; pausing every now and then to run his bony fingers through his\n tangled mop of gray hair, or to claw nervously at his beard.", "The\nComerford\nwas shrouded in a huge pall of yellowish-gray mist, and\n more of it was coming up from below—from ventilators and hatchways and\n skylights—as if the whole ship were flooded with some evil vapor.\n\n\n Somehow, Curtis' mind flashed to the stories he'd heard of the forts of\n the Maginot Line, and of other forts in Holland and Belgium that had\n fallen before the early Nazi blitzkrieg, when their defenders found\n themselves struck numb and helpless by a gas that had been flooded into\n the inner compartments of their strongholds.\n\n\n There were those who said it was the work of sappers who had tunneled\n under the foundations, while others laid the induction of the gas to\n Fifth Column traitors. There were a hundred more or less plausible\n explanations—", "\"You have seen a miracle, commander!\" he shouted at Curtis. \"\nMy\nmiracle! My invention has shattered the ether waves hereabouts\n hopelessly.\"\n\n\n \"Seems to me,\" Curtis said dryly, \"this invention can harm your friends\n as much as your enemies.\"\n\n\n The scientist drew himself up to his full height—which was only a\n little over five feet. His voice grew shrill. \"Wait! Just wait! There\n are other inventions to supplement this one. Put them together, and\n they will defeat the Nazi hordes which have ravaged my country!\"\n\n\n Curtis was a little shocked by the hatred that gleamed in Androka's\n eyes, under their bushy brows. There was something of the wild animal\n in the man's expression, as his lips drew back from his yellowed teeth.\n\n\n \"Those tanks you have below,\" Curtis said, \"have they some connection\n with this radio silence?\"", "\"The professor's in his glory!\" Nelson remarked to Kommander Brandt.\n\n\n \"Funny thing about him,\" Bradford put in, \"is that his inventions work.\n That zone of silence cut us off completely.\"\n\n\n Kommander Brandt nodded. \"Goodt! But you got your message giving your\n bearings—the wrong ones?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Nelson said. \"That came through all right. And won't Curtis have\n a time explaining it!\"\n\n\n \"Hereafter,\" Brandt said solemnly, \"the zone of silence vill be\n projected from the\nComerford\n; and ve have another invention of\n Androka's vich vill be even more useful vhen ve come to cut the\nCarethusia\nout of her convoy.\"\n\n\n \"The\nCarethusia\n?\" Nelson asked, in a puzzled tone.", "\"Dead!\" Androka muttered, with a bitter laugh. \"Yet not dead,\n gentlemen! The set is uninjured. The waves are what have been upset. I\n have shattered them around your ship, just as I can eventually shatter\n them all over Central Europe! For the next two hours, no radio messages\n can enter or leave my zone of radio silence—of refracted radio waves,\n set up by my little station on one of the neighboring islets!\"\nThere was a long pause, while commander and navigator stared at him.\n Curtis was the first to speak.\n\n\n \"Your secrecy might well cost the United States navy one of its best\n light cruisers—and us our lives!\" he said angrily. \"We need that check\n by radio at once! If you're not talking nonsense, call off your dogs\n till we learn just where we are!\"", "It was hard work getting to his feet, and when he did manage to stand,\n he could only plant his heels in the sand and sway to and fro for fully\n a minute, like a child learning to walk.\n\n\n All around him in the nearly total darkness, he could make out the dim\n forms of men sprawled on the beach; and of other men moving about,\n exploring. He heard the murmur of voices and saw the glow of lighted\n cigarettes.\n\n\n A man with a flashlight was approaching him. Its white glare shone for\n a moment in Curtis' face, and the familiar voice of Ensign Jack Dillon\n spoke: \"Commander Curtis! Are you O. K., sir?\"\n\n\n \"I think so!\" Curtis' heart warmed at the eager expression in Dillon's\n face; at the heartfelt concern in his friendly brown eyes. The young\n ensign was red-headed, impetuous, thoroughly genuine in his emotions.\n \"How about yourself, Jack?\" Curtis added.", "Voices droned all around him in mumbling confusion—guttural voices\n that ebbed and flowed in a tide of excited talk. He caught a word of\n English now and then, mixed in with a flood of Teuton phonetics.\n\n\n Two words, in particular, registered clearly on his mind. One was\n \"\nCarethusia\n\"; the other was \"convoy.\" But gradually his eardrums\n began to throb, as if someone were pounding on them from the inside. He\n couldn't get his breath; a cloud seemed to be mounting within him until\n it swept over his brain—\n\n\n He felt something strike the side of his head, and realized that he had\n fallen in a heap on the bridge. And after that, he wasn't conscious of\n anything—\nThe rain had abated to a foggy drizzle. The wash of the surf swung the\nComerford\nin a lazy, rolling motion, as she lay with her bow nosing\n into the sandbar at the entrance of the inlet.", "When this was completed, it was found that the\nComerford's\nentire\n complement of two hundred and twenty men were present—except\n Navigating Officer Nelson, and Bos'n's Mate Bradford! And Zukor Androka\n was also missing!\n\n\n With the coming of dawn, a little exploration revealed that the\nComerford's\ncrew was marooned on an islet, about a square mile in\n area; that they had been put ashore without food or extra clothing or\n equipment of any kind, and that no boats had been left for them.\n\n\n One searching party reported finding the remains of what had been a\n radio station on a high promontory on the north shore of the islet.\n Another had found the remains of tents and log cabins, recently\n demolished, in a small, timbered hollow—a well-hidden spot invisible\n from the air, unless one were flying very low; a place where two\n hundred or more men could have camped.", "Brandt nodded his square head. \"We have a full crew—two hundred\n men—officers, seamen, mechanics, radio men, technical experts, all\n German naval reservists living in the United States, who've been sent\n here secretly, a few at a time, during the past six weeks!\"\nThe three—Brandt, Nelson and Bradford—stood on the bridge and talked,\n while the efficient stretcher-bearers worked industriously to remove\n the limp bodies of the\nComerford's\nunconscious crew and row them\n ashore.\n\n\n And when that task was completed, lifeboats began to come alongside\n with strange-looking radio equipment, and more gas tanks like those\n Androka had brought aboard the\nComerford\nwith him, and dynamos and\n batteries that looked like something out of a scientific nightmare.\n\n\n And bustling all over the place, barking excited commands in German,\n pushing and pulling and pointing to emphasize his directions, was the\n strange figure of Professor Zukor Androka!", "There was a good water supply—a small creek fed by springs—but\n nothing in the way of food. Evidently food was a precious commodity\n which the recent inhabitants of the islet couldn't afford to leave\n behind.\n\n\n Curtis was studying the wreckage of the wireless station, wondering\n if this might have been the source of Androka's zone of silence, when\n Ensign Jack Dillon came up to him.\n\n\n \"There's a coast-guard cutter heading for the island, sir,\" he\n announced.", "From her bridge, Navigating Officer Nelson watched the gas-masked\n figures moving about the decks, descending companionways—like goblins\n from an ancient fairy tale or a modern horror story. Nelson looked like\n a goblin himself, with his face covered by a respirator. At his side,\n stood his fellow conspirator Bos'n's Mate Joe Bradford, also wearing a\n gas mask.\n\n\n Nelson spoke in a low tone, his lips close to Bradford's ear. \"It\n worked, Joe!\"\n\n\n \"Yeah!\" Bradford agreed. \"It worked—fine!\"\n\n\n The limp bodies of the\nComerford's\ncrew were being carried to the\n lowered accommodation ladder and transferred into waiting lifeboats.\n\n\n Nelson swore under his breath. \"Reckon it'll take a couple of hours\n before the ship's rid of that damn gas!\"", "A far-away look came into Androka's eyes. He did not seem to hear\n the question. He lowered his voice: \"My daughter is still in Prague.\n So are my sister and her husband, and\ntheir\ntwo daughters. If the\ngestapo\nknew what I am doing, all of them would be better dead. You\n understand—better dead?\"\n\n\n Curtis said: \"I understand.\"\n\n\n \"And if the Nazi agents in America knew of the islet from which my zone\n of silence is projected—\" Androka paused, his head tilted to one side,\n as if he were listening to something—\nOn deck, there was shouting and commotion. Curtis rushed out, pulling\n on his slicker as he went. The shout from the watch forward had been\n picked up, and was being relayed all over the ship. The words struck on\n Curtis' ears with a note of impending tragedy.\n\n\n \"Breakers ahead!\"", "Curtis didn't hurry. It pleased him to let Nelson wait. He moved slowly\n to the door, paused there, and flung a backward glance at the man in\n the cabin with him—Zukor Androka, the elderly Czech scientist, a guest\n of the United States navy, here aboard the cruiser\nComerford\n.\n\n\n The wizened face of the older man was molded in intent lines of\n concentration, as his bushy gray head bent over his drawing board.\n Curtis got a glimpse of the design on which he was working, and his\n lips relaxed in a faint smile.\n\n\n Androka had arrived on board the\nComerford\nthe day before she sailed\n from Norfolk. With him came a boatload of scientific apparatus and\n equipment, including a number of things that looked like oxygen tanks,\n which were now stored in the forward hold. Androka had watched over\n his treasures with the jealous care of a mother hen, and spent hours\n daily in the room in the superstructure that had been assigned as his\n laboratory.", "\"Bearing, sir?\" The man brought his eyes down with difficulty, as if\n still dissatisfied. \"I'm sorry, sir, but the outfit's dead. Went out on\n me about five minutes ago. I was taking the weather report when the set\n conked. I was trying to see if something's wrong.\"\n\n\n The Czech inventor giggled. Curtis gave him another curious look and\n thrust himself into the radio room.\n\n\n \"Try again!\" he told the operator. \"See what you can get!\"\n\n\n The radio man leaped to his seat and tried frantically. Again and\n again, he sent off a request for a cross-bearing from shore stations\n that had recently been established to insure safety to naval vessels,\n but there was no answer on any of the bands—not even the blare of a\n high-powered commercial program in the higher reach, nor the chatter of\n ships or amateurs on the shorter.", "The fellow was a headache to Curtis. He was overfriendly with a\n black-browed bos'n's mate named Joe Bradford—the worst trouble maker\n on board. But there was no question of his ability. He was a good\n navigating officer—dependable, accurate, conscientious. Nevertheless,\n his taut face, restless, searching eyes, and eternally nervous manner\n got Curtis' goat.\n\n\n \"Come in, Nelson!\" he said.\n\n\n Nelson shouldered his way inside, and stood there in his dripping\n oilskins, blinking his eyes against the yellow light.\n\n\n Curtis closed the door and nodded toward the bent form of Zukor\n Androka, with a quizzical grin. \"Old Czech-and-Double-Czech is working\n hard on his latest invention to pull Hitler's teeth and re-establish\n the Czech Republic!\"", "Bradford shook his head in disagreement. \"The old geezer claims he's\n got a neutralizing chemical in one of them tanks of his that'll clear\n everything up inside half an hour.\"\n\n\n \"I'd rather get along without Androka, if we could!\" Nelson muttered.\n \"He's nothing but a crackpot!\"\n\n\n \"It was a crackpot who invented the gas we used to break up the\n Maginot Line,\" Bradford reminded him. \"It saved a lot of lives for the\nFuehrer\n—lives that'd have been lost if the forts had to be taken by\n our storm troopers!\"\n\n\n Nelson grunted and turned away. A short, thick-set figure in the\n uniform of a German naval commander had ascended the accommodation\n ladder and was mounting to the bridge. He, too, was equipped with a\n respirator.", "\"Congratulations, Herr Kommander Nelson!\" he said. \"Ve have stolen one\n of the United States navy's newest and fastest cruisers!\" He made a\n gesture as if raising a beer stein to drink a toast. \"\nProsit!\n\" he\n added.\n\n\n \"\nProsit!\n\" Nelson repeated, and the two grinned at each other.\nStars were twinkling in a patch of black-blue sky, and broken mountains\n of gray cloud were skudding before the east wind. Commander Bob Curtis\n found himself lying in wet sand, on a beach, somewhere, with the\n rain—now a light, driving mist—beating on his face. He was chilled;\n his limbs were stiff and numb. His nose and throat felt parched inside,\n as if a wave of searing heat had scorched them.\n\n\n According to his last calculations, the\nComerford\nhad been cruising\n off the Maine coast. This probably was one of the islets of that\n region, or it might be the mainland.", "Androka held out his palms helplessly. \"I can do nothing. I have given\n orders to my assistant that he must keep two hours of radio silence! I\n can get no message to him, for our radio is dead!\"\n\n\n As if to mock him, the ship's radio began to answer:\n\n\n \"Station 297 calling U. S. Cruiser\nComerford\n. Station 297 calling U.\n S. Cruiser\nComerford\n—\"\n\n\n \"U. S. Cruiser\nComerford\ncalling Station 297!\" the operator intoned,\n winking at the two officers over Androka's discomfiture, and asked for\n the bearings.\n\n\n The answer came back: \"Bearings north east by a quarter east, U. S.\n Cruiser\nComerford\n!\"" ], [ "A far-away look came into Androka's eyes. He did not seem to hear\n the question. He lowered his voice: \"My daughter is still in Prague.\n So are my sister and her husband, and\ntheir\ntwo daughters. If the\ngestapo\nknew what I am doing, all of them would be better dead. You\n understand—better dead?\"\n\n\n Curtis said: \"I understand.\"\n\n\n \"And if the Nazi agents in America knew of the islet from which my zone\n of silence is projected—\" Androka paused, his head tilted to one side,\n as if he were listening to something—\nOn deck, there was shouting and commotion. Curtis rushed out, pulling\n on his slicker as he went. The shout from the watch forward had been\n picked up, and was being relayed all over the ship. The words struck on\n Curtis' ears with a note of impending tragedy.\n\n\n \"Breakers ahead!\"", "\"You have seen a miracle, commander!\" he shouted at Curtis. \"\nMy\nmiracle! My invention has shattered the ether waves hereabouts\n hopelessly.\"\n\n\n \"Seems to me,\" Curtis said dryly, \"this invention can harm your friends\n as much as your enemies.\"\n\n\n The scientist drew himself up to his full height—which was only a\n little over five feet. His voice grew shrill. \"Wait! Just wait! There\n are other inventions to supplement this one. Put them together, and\n they will defeat the Nazi hordes which have ravaged my country!\"\n\n\n Curtis was a little shocked by the hatred that gleamed in Androka's\n eyes, under their bushy brows. There was something of the wild animal\n in the man's expression, as his lips drew back from his yellowed teeth.\n\n\n \"Those tanks you have below,\" Curtis said, \"have they some connection\n with this radio silence?\"", "\"Dead!\" Androka muttered, with a bitter laugh. \"Yet not dead,\n gentlemen! The set is uninjured. The waves are what have been upset. I\n have shattered them around your ship, just as I can eventually shatter\n them all over Central Europe! For the next two hours, no radio messages\n can enter or leave my zone of radio silence—of refracted radio waves,\n set up by my little station on one of the neighboring islets!\"\nThere was a long pause, while commander and navigator stared at him.\n Curtis was the first to speak.\n\n\n \"Your secrecy might well cost the United States navy one of its best\n light cruisers—and us our lives!\" he said angrily. \"We need that check\n by radio at once! If you're not talking nonsense, call off your dogs\n till we learn just where we are!\"", "\"The professor's in his glory!\" Nelson remarked to Kommander Brandt.\n\n\n \"Funny thing about him,\" Bradford put in, \"is that his inventions work.\n That zone of silence cut us off completely.\"\n\n\n Kommander Brandt nodded. \"Goodt! But you got your message giving your\n bearings—the wrong ones?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Nelson said. \"That came through all right. And won't Curtis have\n a time explaining it!\"\n\n\n \"Hereafter,\" Brandt said solemnly, \"the zone of silence vill be\n projected from the\nComerford\n; and ve have another invention of\n Androka's vich vill be even more useful vhen ve come to cut the\nCarethusia\nout of her convoy.\"\n\n\n \"The\nCarethusia\n?\" Nelson asked, in a puzzled tone.", "Androka held out his palms helplessly. \"I can do nothing. I have given\n orders to my assistant that he must keep two hours of radio silence! I\n can get no message to him, for our radio is dead!\"\n\n\n As if to mock him, the ship's radio began to answer:\n\n\n \"Station 297 calling U. S. Cruiser\nComerford\n. Station 297 calling U.\n S. Cruiser\nComerford\n—\"\n\n\n \"U. S. Cruiser\nComerford\ncalling Station 297!\" the operator intoned,\n winking at the two officers over Androka's discomfiture, and asked for\n the bearings.\n\n\n The answer came back: \"Bearings north east by a quarter east, U. S.\n Cruiser\nComerford\n!\"", "Sometimes, Curtis thought old Androka was a bit wacky—a scientist\n whose mind had been turned by the horror that had come to his country\n under the domination of the Nazi\ngestapo\n. At other times, the man\n seemed a genius. Perhaps that was the answer—a mad genius!\n\n\n Curtis opened the door and looked out. Rain whipped against his face\n like a stinging wet lash. Overhead, the sky was a storm-racked mass of\n clouds, broken in one spot by a tiny patch of starlit blue.\n\n\n His eyes rested inquiringly on the face of the man who stood before\n him. It\nwas\nNelson, his shaggy blond brows drawn scowlingly down\n over his pale eyes; his thin face a mass of tense lines; his big hands\n fumbling at the neck of his slicker. Rain was coursing down his white\n cheeks, streaking them with glistening furrows.", "\"Radio?\" repeated the little Czech, thrusting his face between the\n other two, in his independent fashion that ignored ship's discipline.\n \"You're using your radio?\" He broke into a knowing chuckle, his keen\n old eyes twinkling behind their thick lenses. \"Go ahead and try it. See\n how much you can get! It will be no more than Hitler can get when Zukor\n Androka decrees silence over the German airways! Try it! Try it, I say!\"\n\n\n Bob Curtis stared at him, as if questioning his sanity. Then he\n hastened to the radio room, with Nelson at his heels, and the Czech\n trotting along behind.\n\n\n The door burst open as they neared it. A frightened operator came out,\n still wearing his earphones, and stood staring upward incredulously at\n the aërial.\n\n\n \"Get us a radio cross-bearing for location at once,\" Curtis said\n sharply, for the operator seemed in a daze.", "\"It's a funny thing,\" the latter said, still dialing and grousing, \"how\n I got that cross-bearing through and can't get another squeak out of\n her. I'm wondering if that old goat really\nhas\ndone something to the\n ether. The set seems O. K.\"\n\n\n He lingered over the apparatus, checking and rechecking. Tubes lighted;\n wires were alive to the touch and set him to shaking his head at the\n tingle they sent through his inquiring fingers.\n\n\n Curtis left him at it, and went to rejoin Androka in the cabin. He\n found the little inventor pacing up and down, shaking his fists in the\n air; pausing every now and then to run his bony fingers through his\n tangled mop of gray hair, or to claw nervously at his beard.", "As he thought back, he realized that he\nmight\nhave prevented the\n loss, if he had been more alert, more suspicious. For it was clear to\n him now that the\nComerford\nhad been deliberately steered to this\n place; that the men who had seized her had been waiting here for that\n very purpose.\n\n\n The pieces of the picture fitted together like a jigsaw\n puzzle—Androka's zone of silence; the bearings given by radio;\n Navigating Officer Nelson's queer conduct. They were all part of a\n carefully laid plan!\n\n\n All the suspicious circumstances surrounding Nelson came flooding into\n Curtis' mind. He had never liked the man; never trusted him. Nelson\n always acted as if he had some secret, something to hide.", "There was a good water supply—a small creek fed by springs—but\n nothing in the way of food. Evidently food was a precious commodity\n which the recent inhabitants of the islet couldn't afford to leave\n behind.\n\n\n Curtis was studying the wreckage of the wireless station, wondering\n if this might have been the source of Androka's zone of silence, when\n Ensign Jack Dillon came up to him.\n\n\n \"There's a coast-guard cutter heading for the island, sir,\" he\n announced.", "\"The\ngestapo\ntakes care of Czechs and Poles and Frenchmen and other\n foreigners whom it chooses as its agents,\" Brandt pointed out. \"Androka\n has a daughter and other relations in Prague. He knows that if anything\n misfires, if there is the slightest suspicion of treachery on his part,\n his daughter and the others will suffer. Androka's loyalty is assured!\"\n\n\n Nelson turned to watch the forward fighting top of the\nComerford\n.\n The masked German seamen were installing some sort of apparatus\n up there—a strange-looking object that looked something like an\n old-fashioned trench mortar, and which connected with cables to the\n room that served as Androka's laboratory and workshop.\n\n\n Another crew was installing radio apparatus in the mizzentop turret.", "\"There are other things Germany needs desperately on board the\nCarethusia\n,\" Brandt explained. \"Vanadium and nickel and hundreds of\n barrels of lard oil for machine-tool lubrication. Our agents have been\n watching the convoys closely for weeks for just such a cargo as the\nCarethusia\nis taking over.\"\n\n\n \"Can we trust Androka?\" Nelson asked, with a sudden note of suspicion\n in his voice.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Brandt assured him. \"Of all men—we can trust Androka!\"\n\n\n \"But he's a Czech,\" Nelson argued.", "Bradford shook his head in disagreement. \"The old geezer claims he's\n got a neutralizing chemical in one of them tanks of his that'll clear\n everything up inside half an hour.\"\n\n\n \"I'd rather get along without Androka, if we could!\" Nelson muttered.\n \"He's nothing but a crackpot!\"\n\n\n \"It was a crackpot who invented the gas we used to break up the\n Maginot Line,\" Bradford reminded him. \"It saved a lot of lives for the\nFuehrer\n—lives that'd have been lost if the forts had to be taken by\n our storm troopers!\"\n\n\n Nelson grunted and turned away. A short, thick-set figure in the\n uniform of a German naval commander had ascended the accommodation\n ladder and was mounting to the bridge. He, too, was equipped with a\n respirator.", "Curtis didn't hurry. It pleased him to let Nelson wait. He moved slowly\n to the door, paused there, and flung a backward glance at the man in\n the cabin with him—Zukor Androka, the elderly Czech scientist, a guest\n of the United States navy, here aboard the cruiser\nComerford\n.\n\n\n The wizened face of the older man was molded in intent lines of\n concentration, as his bushy gray head bent over his drawing board.\n Curtis got a glimpse of the design on which he was working, and his\n lips relaxed in a faint smile.\n\n\n Androka had arrived on board the\nComerford\nthe day before she sailed\n from Norfolk. With him came a boatload of scientific apparatus and\n equipment, including a number of things that looked like oxygen tanks,\n which were now stored in the forward hold. Androka had watched over\n his treasures with the jealous care of a mother hen, and spent hours\n daily in the room in the superstructure that had been assigned as his\n laboratory.", "Brandt nodded his square head. \"We have a full crew—two hundred\n men—officers, seamen, mechanics, radio men, technical experts, all\n German naval reservists living in the United States, who've been sent\n here secretly, a few at a time, during the past six weeks!\"\nThe three—Brandt, Nelson and Bradford—stood on the bridge and talked,\n while the efficient stretcher-bearers worked industriously to remove\n the limp bodies of the\nComerford's\nunconscious crew and row them\n ashore.\n\n\n And when that task was completed, lifeboats began to come alongside\n with strange-looking radio equipment, and more gas tanks like those\n Androka had brought aboard the\nComerford\nwith him, and dynamos and\n batteries that looked like something out of a scientific nightmare.\n\n\n And bustling all over the place, barking excited commands in German,\n pushing and pulling and pointing to emphasize his directions, was the\n strange figure of Professor Zukor Androka!", "Curtis sighed with relief. He saw that Nelson was staring fiercely\n at the radio operator, as the man went on calling: \"U. S. Cruiser\nComerford\ncalling Station 364. U. S. Cruiser\nComerford\ncalling\n Station 364—\"\n\n\n Then the instrument rasped again: \"Station 364 calling U. S. Cruiser\nComerford\n. Bearings north west by three west. Bearings north west by\n three west, U. S. Cruiser\nComerford\nfrom Cay 364.\"\n\n\n Commander and navigator had both scribbled verifications of the\n numbers. Ignoring the gibbering Androka, who was wailing his\n disappointment that messages had penetrated his veil of silence, they\n raced for the chart room.\nQuickly the parallels stepped off the bearing from the designated\n points. Light intersecting lines proclaimed a check on their position.", "SILENCE IS—DEADLY\nBy Bertrand L. Shurtleff\nRadio is an absolute necessity in modern\n\n organization—and particularly in modern\n\n naval organization. If you could silence all\n\n radio—silence of that sort would be deadly!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Astounding Science-Fiction April 1942.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe hurried\nrat-a-tat\nof knuckles hammered on the cabin door.\n Commander Bob Curtis roused himself from his doze, got up from his\n chair, stretched himself to his full, lanky height and yawned. That\n would be Nelson, his navigating officer. Nelson always knocked that\n way—like a man in an external state of jitters over nothing at all.", "\"Bearing, sir?\" The man brought his eyes down with difficulty, as if\n still dissatisfied. \"I'm sorry, sir, but the outfit's dead. Went out on\n me about five minutes ago. I was taking the weather report when the set\n conked. I was trying to see if something's wrong.\"\n\n\n The Czech inventor giggled. Curtis gave him another curious look and\n thrust himself into the radio room.\n\n\n \"Try again!\" he told the operator. \"See what you can get!\"\n\n\n The radio man leaped to his seat and tried frantically. Again and\n again, he sent off a request for a cross-bearing from shore stations\n that had recently been established to insure safety to naval vessels,\n but there was no answer on any of the bands—not even the blare of a\n high-powered commercial program in the higher reach, nor the chatter of\n ships or amateurs on the shorter.", "When this was completed, it was found that the\nComerford's\nentire\n complement of two hundred and twenty men were present—except\n Navigating Officer Nelson, and Bos'n's Mate Bradford! And Zukor Androka\n was also missing!\n\n\n With the coming of dawn, a little exploration revealed that the\nComerford's\ncrew was marooned on an islet, about a square mile in\n area; that they had been put ashore without food or extra clothing or\n equipment of any kind, and that no boats had been left for them.\n\n\n One searching party reported finding the remains of what had been a\n radio station on a high promontory on the north shore of the islet.\n Another had found the remains of tents and log cabins, recently\n demolished, in a small, timbered hollow—a well-hidden spot invisible\n from the air, unless one were flying very low; a place where two\n hundred or more men could have camped.", "The fellow was a headache to Curtis. He was overfriendly with a\n black-browed bos'n's mate named Joe Bradford—the worst trouble maker\n on board. But there was no question of his ability. He was a good\n navigating officer—dependable, accurate, conscientious. Nevertheless,\n his taut face, restless, searching eyes, and eternally nervous manner\n got Curtis' goat.\n\n\n \"Come in, Nelson!\" he said.\n\n\n Nelson shouldered his way inside, and stood there in his dripping\n oilskins, blinking his eyes against the yellow light.\n\n\n Curtis closed the door and nodded toward the bent form of Zukor\n Androka, with a quizzical grin. \"Old Czech-and-Double-Czech is working\n hard on his latest invention to pull Hitler's teeth and re-establish\n the Czech Republic!\"" ], [ "When this was completed, it was found that the\nComerford's\nentire\n complement of two hundred and twenty men were present—except\n Navigating Officer Nelson, and Bos'n's Mate Bradford! And Zukor Androka\n was also missing!\n\n\n With the coming of dawn, a little exploration revealed that the\nComerford's\ncrew was marooned on an islet, about a square mile in\n area; that they had been put ashore without food or extra clothing or\n equipment of any kind, and that no boats had been left for them.\n\n\n One searching party reported finding the remains of what had been a\n radio station on a high promontory on the north shore of the islet.\n Another had found the remains of tents and log cabins, recently\n demolished, in a small, timbered hollow—a well-hidden spot invisible\n from the air, unless one were flying very low; a place where two\n hundred or more men could have camped.", "There was a good water supply—a small creek fed by springs—but\n nothing in the way of food. Evidently food was a precious commodity\n which the recent inhabitants of the islet couldn't afford to leave\n behind.\n\n\n Curtis was studying the wreckage of the wireless station, wondering\n if this might have been the source of Androka's zone of silence, when\n Ensign Jack Dillon came up to him.\n\n\n \"There's a coast-guard cutter heading for the island, sir,\" he\n announced.", "A far-away look came into Androka's eyes. He did not seem to hear\n the question. He lowered his voice: \"My daughter is still in Prague.\n So are my sister and her husband, and\ntheir\ntwo daughters. If the\ngestapo\nknew what I am doing, all of them would be better dead. You\n understand—better dead?\"\n\n\n Curtis said: \"I understand.\"\n\n\n \"And if the Nazi agents in America knew of the islet from which my zone\n of silence is projected—\" Androka paused, his head tilted to one side,\n as if he were listening to something—\nOn deck, there was shouting and commotion. Curtis rushed out, pulling\n on his slicker as he went. The shout from the watch forward had been\n picked up, and was being relayed all over the ship. The words struck on\n Curtis' ears with a note of impending tragedy.\n\n\n \"Breakers ahead!\"", "\"It's a funny thing,\" the latter said, still dialing and grousing, \"how\n I got that cross-bearing through and can't get another squeak out of\n her. I'm wondering if that old goat really\nhas\ndone something to the\n ether. The set seems O. K.\"\n\n\n He lingered over the apparatus, checking and rechecking. Tubes lighted;\n wires were alive to the touch and set him to shaking his head at the\n tingle they sent through his inquiring fingers.\n\n\n Curtis left him at it, and went to rejoin Androka in the cabin. He\n found the little inventor pacing up and down, shaking his fists in the\n air; pausing every now and then to run his bony fingers through his\n tangled mop of gray hair, or to claw nervously at his beard.", "Nelson had no answering smile, although there had been a great deal\n of good-natured joking aboard the\nComerford\never since the navy\n department had sent the scientist on board the cruiser to carry on his\n experiments.\n\n\n \"I'm worried, sir!\" Nelson said. \"I'm not sure about my dead reckoning.\n This storm—\"\n\n\n Curtis threw his arm around Nelson's dripping shoulders. \"Forget it!\n Don't let a little error get you down!\"\n\n\n \"But this storm, sir!\" Nelson avoided Curtis' friendly eyes and slipped\n out from under his arm. \"It's got me worried. Quartering wind of\n undetermined force, variable and gusty. There's a chop to the sea—as\n if from unestimated currents among the islets. No chance to check by\n observation, and now there is a chance—look at me!\"\n\n\n He held out his hands. They were shaking as if he had the chills.", "Curtis recalled that Nelson and Androka had long conversations\n together—conversations which they would end abruptly when anyone else\n came within earshot. And Nelson had always been chummy with the worst\n trouble maker in the crew—Bos'n's Mate Bradford.\n\n\n Curtis went around, finding the officers, issuing orders. There were\n still some unconscious men to be revived. In a sheltered cove among\n the rocks, an exploring group had found enough dry driftwood to make a\n fire—\n\n\n In another hour, the skies had cleared, and white moonlight flooded\n the scene with a ghostly radiance. The men of the\nComerford\nhad\n all regained consciousness and were drying out in front of the big\n driftwood bonfires in the cove.\n\n\n Curtis ordered a beacon kept burning on a high promontory. Then he got\n the men lined up, according to their respective classifications, for a\n check-up on the missing.", "\"Dead!\" Androka muttered, with a bitter laugh. \"Yet not dead,\n gentlemen! The set is uninjured. The waves are what have been upset. I\n have shattered them around your ship, just as I can eventually shatter\n them all over Central Europe! For the next two hours, no radio messages\n can enter or leave my zone of radio silence—of refracted radio waves,\n set up by my little station on one of the neighboring islets!\"\nThere was a long pause, while commander and navigator stared at him.\n Curtis was the first to speak.\n\n\n \"Your secrecy might well cost the United States navy one of its best\n light cruisers—and us our lives!\" he said angrily. \"We need that check\n by radio at once! If you're not talking nonsense, call off your dogs\n till we learn just where we are!\"", "It was hard work getting to his feet, and when he did manage to stand,\n he could only plant his heels in the sand and sway to and fro for fully\n a minute, like a child learning to walk.\n\n\n All around him in the nearly total darkness, he could make out the dim\n forms of men sprawled on the beach; and of other men moving about,\n exploring. He heard the murmur of voices and saw the glow of lighted\n cigarettes.\n\n\n A man with a flashlight was approaching him. Its white glare shone for\n a moment in Curtis' face, and the familiar voice of Ensign Jack Dillon\n spoke: \"Commander Curtis! Are you O. K., sir?\"\n\n\n \"I think so!\" Curtis' heart warmed at the eager expression in Dillon's\n face; at the heartfelt concern in his friendly brown eyes. The young\n ensign was red-headed, impetuous, thoroughly genuine in his emotions.\n \"How about yourself, Jack?\" Curtis added.", "As he thought back, he realized that he\nmight\nhave prevented the\n loss, if he had been more alert, more suspicious. For it was clear to\n him now that the\nComerford\nhad been deliberately steered to this\n place; that the men who had seized her had been waiting here for that\n very purpose.\n\n\n The pieces of the picture fitted together like a jigsaw\n puzzle—Androka's zone of silence; the bearings given by radio;\n Navigating Officer Nelson's queer conduct. They were all part of a\n carefully laid plan!\n\n\n All the suspicious circumstances surrounding Nelson came flooding into\n Curtis' mind. He had never liked the man; never trusted him. Nelson\n always acted as if he had some secret, something to hide.", "Curtis stared, frowned, grabbed his own sheet again. \"Any time I'm\n that far off old Figure-'em Nelson's estimate, I'm checking back,\" he\n declared, frowning at the two papers and hastily rechecking his own\n figures.\n\n\n \"Call up to the bridge to stop her,\" he told Nelson. \"We can't afford\n to move in these waters with such a possibility of error!\"\n\n\n Nelson complied, and the throbbing drive of the engines lessened\n at once. Nelson said: \"I've been wondering, sir, if it wouldn't be\n advisable to try getting a radio cross-bearing. With all these rocks\n and islets—\"", "Voices droned all around him in mumbling confusion—guttural voices\n that ebbed and flowed in a tide of excited talk. He caught a word of\n English now and then, mixed in with a flood of Teuton phonetics.\n\n\n Two words, in particular, registered clearly on his mind. One was\n \"\nCarethusia\n\"; the other was \"convoy.\" But gradually his eardrums\n began to throb, as if someone were pounding on them from the inside. He\n couldn't get his breath; a cloud seemed to be mounting within him until\n it swept over his brain—\n\n\n He felt something strike the side of his head, and realized that he had\n fallen in a heap on the bridge. And after that, he wasn't conscious of\n anything—\nThe rain had abated to a foggy drizzle. The wash of the surf swung the\nComerford\nin a lazy, rolling motion, as she lay with her bow nosing\n into the sandbar at the entrance of the inlet.", "\"Congratulations, Herr Kommander Nelson!\" he said. \"Ve have stolen one\n of the United States navy's newest and fastest cruisers!\" He made a\n gesture as if raising a beer stein to drink a toast. \"\nProsit!\n\" he\n added.\n\n\n \"\nProsit!\n\" Nelson repeated, and the two grinned at each other.\nStars were twinkling in a patch of black-blue sky, and broken mountains\n of gray cloud were skudding before the east wind. Commander Bob Curtis\n found himself lying in wet sand, on a beach, somewhere, with the\n rain—now a light, driving mist—beating on his face. He was chilled;\n his limbs were stiff and numb. His nose and throat felt parched inside,\n as if a wave of searing heat had scorched them.\n\n\n According to his last calculations, the\nComerford\nhad been cruising\n off the Maine coast. This probably was one of the islets of that\n region, or it might be the mainland.", "\"Bearing, sir?\" The man brought his eyes down with difficulty, as if\n still dissatisfied. \"I'm sorry, sir, but the outfit's dead. Went out on\n me about five minutes ago. I was taking the weather report when the set\n conked. I was trying to see if something's wrong.\"\n\n\n The Czech inventor giggled. Curtis gave him another curious look and\n thrust himself into the radio room.\n\n\n \"Try again!\" he told the operator. \"See what you can get!\"\n\n\n The radio man leaped to his seat and tried frantically. Again and\n again, he sent off a request for a cross-bearing from shore stations\n that had recently been established to insure safety to naval vessels,\n but there was no answer on any of the bands—not even the blare of a\n high-powered commercial program in the higher reach, nor the chatter of\n ships or amateurs on the shorter.", "He was beside Navigating Officer Nelson on the bridge, and saw the\n helmsman climbing the rapidly spinning wheel like a monkey as he put it\n hard aport.\n\n\n Then the ship struck. Everything movable shot ahead until it brought up\n at the end of a swing or smacked against something solid.\n\n\n Curtis felt Nelson's hand grip his shoulder, as he put his lips close\n to his ear and shouted: \"You must have been right, sir, and the radio\n bearings and my reckoning wrong. We've hit that reef a terrific smack.\n I'm afraid we're gored!\"\n\n\n \"Get out the collision mat!\" Curtis ordered. \"We ought to be able to\n keep her up!\"\n\n\n And then he became aware of a deadly stillness. A vast wall of silence\n enveloped the entire cruiser. Looking over the side, he could no longer\n see the waves that a few minutes before had beaten savagely against the\n ship.", "\"You say there is a chance?\" Curtis asked. \"Stars out?\"\n\n\n \"As if by providence, sir, there's a clear patch. I'm wondering—\" His\n voice trailed off, but his eyes swung toward the gleaming sextant on\n the rack.\n\n\n Commander Curtis shrugged good-naturedly and reached for the\n instrument. \"Not that I've lost confidence in you, Nels, but just\n because you asked for it!\"\nCurtis donned his slicker and went outside, sextant in hand. In a few\n minutes he returned and handed Nelson a sheet of paper with figures\n underlined heavily.\n\n\n \"Here's what I make it,\" the commander told his navigating officer.\n \"Bet you're not off appreciably.\"\n\n\n Nelson stared at the computations with shaking head. Then he mutely\n held up his own.", "Curtis sighed with relief. He saw that Nelson was staring fiercely\n at the radio operator, as the man went on calling: \"U. S. Cruiser\nComerford\ncalling Station 364. U. S. Cruiser\nComerford\ncalling\n Station 364—\"\n\n\n Then the instrument rasped again: \"Station 364 calling U. S. Cruiser\nComerford\n. Bearings north west by three west. Bearings north west by\n three west, U. S. Cruiser\nComerford\nfrom Cay 364.\"\n\n\n Commander and navigator had both scribbled verifications of the\n numbers. Ignoring the gibbering Androka, who was wailing his\n disappointment that messages had penetrated his veil of silence, they\n raced for the chart room.\nQuickly the parallels stepped off the bearing from the designated\n points. Light intersecting lines proclaimed a check on their position.", "The\nComerford\nwas shrouded in a huge pall of yellowish-gray mist, and\n more of it was coming up from below—from ventilators and hatchways and\n skylights—as if the whole ship were flooded with some evil vapor.\n\n\n Somehow, Curtis' mind flashed to the stories he'd heard of the forts of\n the Maginot Line, and of other forts in Holland and Belgium that had\n fallen before the early Nazi blitzkrieg, when their defenders found\n themselves struck numb and helpless by a gas that had been flooded into\n the inner compartments of their strongholds.\n\n\n There were those who said it was the work of sappers who had tunneled\n under the foundations, while others laid the induction of the gas to\n Fifth Column traitors. There were a hundred more or less plausible\n explanations—", "Curtis didn't hurry. It pleased him to let Nelson wait. He moved slowly\n to the door, paused there, and flung a backward glance at the man in\n the cabin with him—Zukor Androka, the elderly Czech scientist, a guest\n of the United States navy, here aboard the cruiser\nComerford\n.\n\n\n The wizened face of the older man was molded in intent lines of\n concentration, as his bushy gray head bent over his drawing board.\n Curtis got a glimpse of the design on which he was working, and his\n lips relaxed in a faint smile.\n\n\n Androka had arrived on board the\nComerford\nthe day before she sailed\n from Norfolk. With him came a boatload of scientific apparatus and\n equipment, including a number of things that looked like oxygen tanks,\n which were now stored in the forward hold. Androka had watched over\n his treasures with the jealous care of a mother hen, and spent hours\n daily in the room in the superstructure that had been assigned as his\n laboratory.", "Sometimes, Curtis thought old Androka was a bit wacky—a scientist\n whose mind had been turned by the horror that had come to his country\n under the domination of the Nazi\ngestapo\n. At other times, the man\n seemed a genius. Perhaps that was the answer—a mad genius!\n\n\n Curtis opened the door and looked out. Rain whipped against his face\n like a stinging wet lash. Overhead, the sky was a storm-racked mass of\n clouds, broken in one spot by a tiny patch of starlit blue.\n\n\n His eyes rested inquiringly on the face of the man who stood before\n him. It\nwas\nNelson, his shaggy blond brows drawn scowlingly down\n over his pale eyes; his thin face a mass of tense lines; his big hands\n fumbling at the neck of his slicker. Rain was coursing down his white\n cheeks, streaking them with glistening furrows.", "From her bridge, Navigating Officer Nelson watched the gas-masked\n figures moving about the decks, descending companionways—like goblins\n from an ancient fairy tale or a modern horror story. Nelson looked like\n a goblin himself, with his face covered by a respirator. At his side,\n stood his fellow conspirator Bos'n's Mate Joe Bradford, also wearing a\n gas mask.\n\n\n Nelson spoke in a low tone, his lips close to Bradford's ear. \"It\n worked, Joe!\"\n\n\n \"Yeah!\" Bradford agreed. \"It worked—fine!\"\n\n\n The limp bodies of the\nComerford's\ncrew were being carried to the\n lowered accommodation ladder and transferred into waiting lifeboats.\n\n\n Nelson swore under his breath. \"Reckon it'll take a couple of hours\n before the ship's rid of that damn gas!\"" ], [ "The\nComerford\nwas shrouded in a huge pall of yellowish-gray mist, and\n more of it was coming up from below—from ventilators and hatchways and\n skylights—as if the whole ship were flooded with some evil vapor.\n\n\n Somehow, Curtis' mind flashed to the stories he'd heard of the forts of\n the Maginot Line, and of other forts in Holland and Belgium that had\n fallen before the early Nazi blitzkrieg, when their defenders found\n themselves struck numb and helpless by a gas that had been flooded into\n the inner compartments of their strongholds.\n\n\n There were those who said it was the work of sappers who had tunneled\n under the foundations, while others laid the induction of the gas to\n Fifth Column traitors. There were a hundred more or less plausible\n explanations—", "The vapor clouds that enveloped the\nComerford\nwere becoming thicker.\n All about the deck lay the forms of unconscious seamen, suddenly\n stricken helpless. And then Curtis saw other forms flitting about the\n deck—forms that looked like creatures from another world, but he\n recognized them for what they were—men wearing gas masks.\n\n\n Nelson was nowhere in sight. The steersman lay in a limp heap beside\n the swinging wheel. Then a gas-masked figure appeared through the\n shroud of mist and steadied it, so that the cruiser would not be\n completely at the mercy of the wind and the waves.\n\n\n Curtis heard the anchor let down, as if by invisible hands, the chain\n screaming and flailing its clanking way through the hawse hole. Then he\n was completely walled in by the yellowish-gray mist. He felt his senses\n swimming.", "Voices droned all around him in mumbling confusion—guttural voices\n that ebbed and flowed in a tide of excited talk. He caught a word of\n English now and then, mixed in with a flood of Teuton phonetics.\n\n\n Two words, in particular, registered clearly on his mind. One was\n \"\nCarethusia\n\"; the other was \"convoy.\" But gradually his eardrums\n began to throb, as if someone were pounding on them from the inside. He\n couldn't get his breath; a cloud seemed to be mounting within him until\n it swept over his brain—\n\n\n He felt something strike the side of his head, and realized that he had\n fallen in a heap on the bridge. And after that, he wasn't conscious of\n anything—\nThe rain had abated to a foggy drizzle. The wash of the surf swung the\nComerford\nin a lazy, rolling motion, as she lay with her bow nosing\n into the sandbar at the entrance of the inlet.", "It was hard work getting to his feet, and when he did manage to stand,\n he could only plant his heels in the sand and sway to and fro for fully\n a minute, like a child learning to walk.\n\n\n All around him in the nearly total darkness, he could make out the dim\n forms of men sprawled on the beach; and of other men moving about,\n exploring. He heard the murmur of voices and saw the glow of lighted\n cigarettes.\n\n\n A man with a flashlight was approaching him. Its white glare shone for\n a moment in Curtis' face, and the familiar voice of Ensign Jack Dillon\n spoke: \"Commander Curtis! Are you O. K., sir?\"\n\n\n \"I think so!\" Curtis' heart warmed at the eager expression in Dillon's\n face; at the heartfelt concern in his friendly brown eyes. The young\n ensign was red-headed, impetuous, thoroughly genuine in his emotions.\n \"How about yourself, Jack?\" Curtis added.", "Sometimes, Curtis thought old Androka was a bit wacky—a scientist\n whose mind had been turned by the horror that had come to his country\n under the domination of the Nazi\ngestapo\n. At other times, the man\n seemed a genius. Perhaps that was the answer—a mad genius!\n\n\n Curtis opened the door and looked out. Rain whipped against his face\n like a stinging wet lash. Overhead, the sky was a storm-racked mass of\n clouds, broken in one spot by a tiny patch of starlit blue.\n\n\n His eyes rested inquiringly on the face of the man who stood before\n him. It\nwas\nNelson, his shaggy blond brows drawn scowlingly down\n over his pale eyes; his thin face a mass of tense lines; his big hands\n fumbling at the neck of his slicker. Rain was coursing down his white\n cheeks, streaking them with glistening furrows.", "\"It's a funny thing,\" the latter said, still dialing and grousing, \"how\n I got that cross-bearing through and can't get another squeak out of\n her. I'm wondering if that old goat really\nhas\ndone something to the\n ether. The set seems O. K.\"\n\n\n He lingered over the apparatus, checking and rechecking. Tubes lighted;\n wires were alive to the touch and set him to shaking his head at the\n tingle they sent through his inquiring fingers.\n\n\n Curtis left him at it, and went to rejoin Androka in the cabin. He\n found the little inventor pacing up and down, shaking his fists in the\n air; pausing every now and then to run his bony fingers through his\n tangled mop of gray hair, or to claw nervously at his beard.", "Nelson had no answering smile, although there had been a great deal\n of good-natured joking aboard the\nComerford\never since the navy\n department had sent the scientist on board the cruiser to carry on his\n experiments.\n\n\n \"I'm worried, sir!\" Nelson said. \"I'm not sure about my dead reckoning.\n This storm—\"\n\n\n Curtis threw his arm around Nelson's dripping shoulders. \"Forget it!\n Don't let a little error get you down!\"\n\n\n \"But this storm, sir!\" Nelson avoided Curtis' friendly eyes and slipped\n out from under his arm. \"It's got me worried. Quartering wind of\n undetermined force, variable and gusty. There's a chop to the sea—as\n if from unestimated currents among the islets. No chance to check by\n observation, and now there is a chance—look at me!\"\n\n\n He held out his hands. They were shaking as if he had the chills.", "From her bridge, Navigating Officer Nelson watched the gas-masked\n figures moving about the decks, descending companionways—like goblins\n from an ancient fairy tale or a modern horror story. Nelson looked like\n a goblin himself, with his face covered by a respirator. At his side,\n stood his fellow conspirator Bos'n's Mate Joe Bradford, also wearing a\n gas mask.\n\n\n Nelson spoke in a low tone, his lips close to Bradford's ear. \"It\n worked, Joe!\"\n\n\n \"Yeah!\" Bradford agreed. \"It worked—fine!\"\n\n\n The limp bodies of the\nComerford's\ncrew were being carried to the\n lowered accommodation ladder and transferred into waiting lifeboats.\n\n\n Nelson swore under his breath. \"Reckon it'll take a couple of hours\n before the ship's rid of that damn gas!\"", "\"You have seen a miracle, commander!\" he shouted at Curtis. \"\nMy\nmiracle! My invention has shattered the ether waves hereabouts\n hopelessly.\"\n\n\n \"Seems to me,\" Curtis said dryly, \"this invention can harm your friends\n as much as your enemies.\"\n\n\n The scientist drew himself up to his full height—which was only a\n little over five feet. His voice grew shrill. \"Wait! Just wait! There\n are other inventions to supplement this one. Put them together, and\n they will defeat the Nazi hordes which have ravaged my country!\"\n\n\n Curtis was a little shocked by the hatred that gleamed in Androka's\n eyes, under their bushy brows. There was something of the wild animal\n in the man's expression, as his lips drew back from his yellowed teeth.\n\n\n \"Those tanks you have below,\" Curtis said, \"have they some connection\n with this radio silence?\"", "A far-away look came into Androka's eyes. He did not seem to hear\n the question. He lowered his voice: \"My daughter is still in Prague.\n So are my sister and her husband, and\ntheir\ntwo daughters. If the\ngestapo\nknew what I am doing, all of them would be better dead. You\n understand—better dead?\"\n\n\n Curtis said: \"I understand.\"\n\n\n \"And if the Nazi agents in America knew of the islet from which my zone\n of silence is projected—\" Androka paused, his head tilted to one side,\n as if he were listening to something—\nOn deck, there was shouting and commotion. Curtis rushed out, pulling\n on his slicker as he went. The shout from the watch forward had been\n picked up, and was being relayed all over the ship. The words struck on\n Curtis' ears with a note of impending tragedy.\n\n\n \"Breakers ahead!\"", "He was beside Navigating Officer Nelson on the bridge, and saw the\n helmsman climbing the rapidly spinning wheel like a monkey as he put it\n hard aport.\n\n\n Then the ship struck. Everything movable shot ahead until it brought up\n at the end of a swing or smacked against something solid.\n\n\n Curtis felt Nelson's hand grip his shoulder, as he put his lips close\n to his ear and shouted: \"You must have been right, sir, and the radio\n bearings and my reckoning wrong. We've hit that reef a terrific smack.\n I'm afraid we're gored!\"\n\n\n \"Get out the collision mat!\" Curtis ordered. \"We ought to be able to\n keep her up!\"\n\n\n And then he became aware of a deadly stillness. A vast wall of silence\n enveloped the entire cruiser. Looking over the side, he could no longer\n see the waves that a few minutes before had beaten savagely against the\n ship.", "Descending a companionway to see what was going on below, Nelson found\n that portholes were being opened, and men were spraying chemical around\n to rid the below-decks atmosphere of the lethal gas that had overcome\n the\nComerford's\nAmerican crew.\n\n\n Returning to the bridge, he found that the tide in the inlet had risen\n considerably, and that the cruiser was riding more easily at her anchor.\n\n\n Then, at Brandt's orders, the anchor was hauled in, and lifeboats and a\n motor launch were used as tugs to work the vessel entirely free of the\n sand bar. This was accomplished without difficulty.\n\n\n Brandt came over to where Nelson was standing on the bridge and held\n out his hand.", "Curtis frowned and shook his head. Slowly he forced a reluctant grin as\n he stuck out his hand.\n\n\n \"Shake, Nels,\" he said. \"It's my turn to eat crow. You and the radio\n must be right. Continue as you were!\"\n\n\n \"I'm relieved, sir, just the same,\" Nelson admitted, \"to have the radio\n bearings. We'd have piled up sure if you'd been right.\"\n\n\n They went on through the night. The starlit gap in the clouds had\n closed. The sky was again a blanket of darkness pouring sheets of rain\n at them.\n\n\n Nelson went back to the bridge, and Androka returned to the commander's\n cabin. Curtis lingered in the wireless room with the radio operator.", "As he thought back, he realized that he\nmight\nhave prevented the\n loss, if he had been more alert, more suspicious. For it was clear to\n him now that the\nComerford\nhad been deliberately steered to this\n place; that the men who had seized her had been waiting here for that\n very purpose.\n\n\n The pieces of the picture fitted together like a jigsaw\n puzzle—Androka's zone of silence; the bearings given by radio;\n Navigating Officer Nelson's queer conduct. They were all part of a\n carefully laid plan!\n\n\n All the suspicious circumstances surrounding Nelson came flooding into\n Curtis' mind. He had never liked the man; never trusted him. Nelson\n always acted as if he had some secret, something to hide.", "\"Congratulations, Herr Kommander Nelson!\" he said. \"Ve have stolen one\n of the United States navy's newest and fastest cruisers!\" He made a\n gesture as if raising a beer stein to drink a toast. \"\nProsit!\n\" he\n added.\n\n\n \"\nProsit!\n\" Nelson repeated, and the two grinned at each other.\nStars were twinkling in a patch of black-blue sky, and broken mountains\n of gray cloud were skudding before the east wind. Commander Bob Curtis\n found himself lying in wet sand, on a beach, somewhere, with the\n rain—now a light, driving mist—beating on his face. He was chilled;\n his limbs were stiff and numb. His nose and throat felt parched inside,\n as if a wave of searing heat had scorched them.\n\n\n According to his last calculations, the\nComerford\nhad been cruising\n off the Maine coast. This probably was one of the islets of that\n region, or it might be the mainland.", "Bradford shook his head in disagreement. \"The old geezer claims he's\n got a neutralizing chemical in one of them tanks of his that'll clear\n everything up inside half an hour.\"\n\n\n \"I'd rather get along without Androka, if we could!\" Nelson muttered.\n \"He's nothing but a crackpot!\"\n\n\n \"It was a crackpot who invented the gas we used to break up the\n Maginot Line,\" Bradford reminded him. \"It saved a lot of lives for the\nFuehrer\n—lives that'd have been lost if the forts had to be taken by\n our storm troopers!\"\n\n\n Nelson grunted and turned away. A short, thick-set figure in the\n uniform of a German naval commander had ascended the accommodation\n ladder and was mounting to the bridge. He, too, was equipped with a\n respirator.", "\"A bit of a headache from the gas, but that's all. Any orders, sir?\"\n\n\n Curtis thought for a moment. \"Muster the crew, as best you can. We'll\n try to make a roll call. Is there any sign of the ship?\"\n\n\n There was a solemn note in Dillon's voice. \"No, sir. She's been worked\n off the sandbar and put to sea!\"\n\n\n The words struck Curtis with the numbing shock of a blow on some nerve\n center. For the first time, he realized fully the tragedy that had\n swept down on him. He had lost his ship—one of the United States\n navy's fastest and newest small light cruisers—under circumstances\n which smelled strongly of treachery and sabotage.", "\"Bearing, sir?\" The man brought his eyes down with difficulty, as if\n still dissatisfied. \"I'm sorry, sir, but the outfit's dead. Went out on\n me about five minutes ago. I was taking the weather report when the set\n conked. I was trying to see if something's wrong.\"\n\n\n The Czech inventor giggled. Curtis gave him another curious look and\n thrust himself into the radio room.\n\n\n \"Try again!\" he told the operator. \"See what you can get!\"\n\n\n The radio man leaped to his seat and tried frantically. Again and\n again, he sent off a request for a cross-bearing from shore stations\n that had recently been established to insure safety to naval vessels,\n but there was no answer on any of the bands—not even the blare of a\n high-powered commercial program in the higher reach, nor the chatter of\n ships or amateurs on the shorter.", "The fellow was a headache to Curtis. He was overfriendly with a\n black-browed bos'n's mate named Joe Bradford—the worst trouble maker\n on board. But there was no question of his ability. He was a good\n navigating officer—dependable, accurate, conscientious. Nevertheless,\n his taut face, restless, searching eyes, and eternally nervous manner\n got Curtis' goat.\n\n\n \"Come in, Nelson!\" he said.\n\n\n Nelson shouldered his way inside, and stood there in his dripping\n oilskins, blinking his eyes against the yellow light.\n\n\n Curtis closed the door and nodded toward the bent form of Zukor\n Androka, with a quizzical grin. \"Old Czech-and-Double-Czech is working\n hard on his latest invention to pull Hitler's teeth and re-establish\n the Czech Republic!\"", "\"Dead!\" Androka muttered, with a bitter laugh. \"Yet not dead,\n gentlemen! The set is uninjured. The waves are what have been upset. I\n have shattered them around your ship, just as I can eventually shatter\n them all over Central Europe! For the next two hours, no radio messages\n can enter or leave my zone of radio silence—of refracted radio waves,\n set up by my little station on one of the neighboring islets!\"\nThere was a long pause, while commander and navigator stared at him.\n Curtis was the first to speak.\n\n\n \"Your secrecy might well cost the United States navy one of its best\n light cruisers—and us our lives!\" he said angrily. \"We need that check\n by radio at once! If you're not talking nonsense, call off your dogs\n till we learn just where we are!\"" ], [ "As he thought back, he realized that he\nmight\nhave prevented the\n loss, if he had been more alert, more suspicious. For it was clear to\n him now that the\nComerford\nhad been deliberately steered to this\n place; that the men who had seized her had been waiting here for that\n very purpose.\n\n\n The pieces of the picture fitted together like a jigsaw\n puzzle—Androka's zone of silence; the bearings given by radio;\n Navigating Officer Nelson's queer conduct. They were all part of a\n carefully laid plan!\n\n\n All the suspicious circumstances surrounding Nelson came flooding into\n Curtis' mind. He had never liked the man; never trusted him. Nelson\n always acted as if he had some secret, something to hide.", "Curtis recalled that Nelson and Androka had long conversations\n together—conversations which they would end abruptly when anyone else\n came within earshot. And Nelson had always been chummy with the worst\n trouble maker in the crew—Bos'n's Mate Bradford.\n\n\n Curtis went around, finding the officers, issuing orders. There were\n still some unconscious men to be revived. In a sheltered cove among\n the rocks, an exploring group had found enough dry driftwood to make a\n fire—\n\n\n In another hour, the skies had cleared, and white moonlight flooded\n the scene with a ghostly radiance. The men of the\nComerford\nhad\n all regained consciousness and were drying out in front of the big\n driftwood bonfires in the cove.\n\n\n Curtis ordered a beacon kept burning on a high promontory. Then he got\n the men lined up, according to their respective classifications, for a\n check-up on the missing.", "The\nComerford\nwas shrouded in a huge pall of yellowish-gray mist, and\n more of it was coming up from below—from ventilators and hatchways and\n skylights—as if the whole ship were flooded with some evil vapor.\n\n\n Somehow, Curtis' mind flashed to the stories he'd heard of the forts of\n the Maginot Line, and of other forts in Holland and Belgium that had\n fallen before the early Nazi blitzkrieg, when their defenders found\n themselves struck numb and helpless by a gas that had been flooded into\n the inner compartments of their strongholds.\n\n\n There were those who said it was the work of sappers who had tunneled\n under the foundations, while others laid the induction of the gas to\n Fifth Column traitors. There were a hundred more or less plausible\n explanations—", "\"My father dedicated me to a career of revenge—to wipe out his\n wrongs,\" Nelson continued. \"If America hadn't gone into the First\n World War, he wouldn't have lost his business; my mother would still\n be living. When he joined the Nazi party, the way became clear to use\n me—to educate me in a military prep school, then send me to Annapolis,\n for a career in the United States navy—and no one suspected me. No\n one—\"\n\n\n \"Sometimes,\" Bradford put in, \"I think Curtis suspected you.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe Curtis'll find out his suspicions were justified,\" Nelson said\n bitterly. \"But it won't do Curtis any good—a commander who's lost\n his ship.\" He turned to Brandt. \"You have plenty of men to work the\nComerford\n?\"", "When this was completed, it was found that the\nComerford's\nentire\n complement of two hundred and twenty men were present—except\n Navigating Officer Nelson, and Bos'n's Mate Bradford! And Zukor Androka\n was also missing!\n\n\n With the coming of dawn, a little exploration revealed that the\nComerford's\ncrew was marooned on an islet, about a square mile in\n area; that they had been put ashore without food or extra clothing or\n equipment of any kind, and that no boats had been left for them.\n\n\n One searching party reported finding the remains of what had been a\n radio station on a high promontory on the north shore of the islet.\n Another had found the remains of tents and log cabins, recently\n demolished, in a small, timbered hollow—a well-hidden spot invisible\n from the air, unless one were flying very low; a place where two\n hundred or more men could have camped.", "From her bridge, Navigating Officer Nelson watched the gas-masked\n figures moving about the decks, descending companionways—like goblins\n from an ancient fairy tale or a modern horror story. Nelson looked like\n a goblin himself, with his face covered by a respirator. At his side,\n stood his fellow conspirator Bos'n's Mate Joe Bradford, also wearing a\n gas mask.\n\n\n Nelson spoke in a low tone, his lips close to Bradford's ear. \"It\n worked, Joe!\"\n\n\n \"Yeah!\" Bradford agreed. \"It worked—fine!\"\n\n\n The limp bodies of the\nComerford's\ncrew were being carried to the\n lowered accommodation ladder and transferred into waiting lifeboats.\n\n\n Nelson swore under his breath. \"Reckon it'll take a couple of hours\n before the ship's rid of that damn gas!\"", "The vapor clouds that enveloped the\nComerford\nwere becoming thicker.\n All about the deck lay the forms of unconscious seamen, suddenly\n stricken helpless. And then Curtis saw other forms flitting about the\n deck—forms that looked like creatures from another world, but he\n recognized them for what they were—men wearing gas masks.\n\n\n Nelson was nowhere in sight. The steersman lay in a limp heap beside\n the swinging wheel. Then a gas-masked figure appeared through the\n shroud of mist and steadied it, so that the cruiser would not be\n completely at the mercy of the wind and the waves.\n\n\n Curtis heard the anchor let down, as if by invisible hands, the chain\n screaming and flailing its clanking way through the hawse hole. Then he\n was completely walled in by the yellowish-gray mist. He felt his senses\n swimming.", "Voices droned all around him in mumbling confusion—guttural voices\n that ebbed and flowed in a tide of excited talk. He caught a word of\n English now and then, mixed in with a flood of Teuton phonetics.\n\n\n Two words, in particular, registered clearly on his mind. One was\n \"\nCarethusia\n\"; the other was \"convoy.\" But gradually his eardrums\n began to throb, as if someone were pounding on them from the inside. He\n couldn't get his breath; a cloud seemed to be mounting within him until\n it swept over his brain—\n\n\n He felt something strike the side of his head, and realized that he had\n fallen in a heap on the bridge. And after that, he wasn't conscious of\n anything—\nThe rain had abated to a foggy drizzle. The wash of the surf swung the\nComerford\nin a lazy, rolling motion, as she lay with her bow nosing\n into the sandbar at the entrance of the inlet.", "\"The professor's in his glory!\" Nelson remarked to Kommander Brandt.\n\n\n \"Funny thing about him,\" Bradford put in, \"is that his inventions work.\n That zone of silence cut us off completely.\"\n\n\n Kommander Brandt nodded. \"Goodt! But you got your message giving your\n bearings—the wrong ones?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Nelson said. \"That came through all right. And won't Curtis have\n a time explaining it!\"\n\n\n \"Hereafter,\" Brandt said solemnly, \"the zone of silence vill be\n projected from the\nComerford\n; and ve have another invention of\n Androka's vich vill be even more useful vhen ve come to cut the\nCarethusia\nout of her convoy.\"\n\n\n \"The\nCarethusia\n?\" Nelson asked, in a puzzled tone.", "Descending a companionway to see what was going on below, Nelson found\n that portholes were being opened, and men were spraying chemical around\n to rid the below-decks atmosphere of the lethal gas that had overcome\n the\nComerford's\nAmerican crew.\n\n\n Returning to the bridge, he found that the tide in the inlet had risen\n considerably, and that the cruiser was riding more easily at her anchor.\n\n\n Then, at Brandt's orders, the anchor was hauled in, and lifeboats and a\n motor launch were used as tugs to work the vessel entirely free of the\n sand bar. This was accomplished without difficulty.\n\n\n Brandt came over to where Nelson was standing on the bridge and held\n out his hand.", "Nelson had no answering smile, although there had been a great deal\n of good-natured joking aboard the\nComerford\never since the navy\n department had sent the scientist on board the cruiser to carry on his\n experiments.\n\n\n \"I'm worried, sir!\" Nelson said. \"I'm not sure about my dead reckoning.\n This storm—\"\n\n\n Curtis threw his arm around Nelson's dripping shoulders. \"Forget it!\n Don't let a little error get you down!\"\n\n\n \"But this storm, sir!\" Nelson avoided Curtis' friendly eyes and slipped\n out from under his arm. \"It's got me worried. Quartering wind of\n undetermined force, variable and gusty. There's a chop to the sea—as\n if from unestimated currents among the islets. No chance to check by\n observation, and now there is a chance—look at me!\"\n\n\n He held out his hands. They were shaking as if he had the chills.", "Androka held out his palms helplessly. \"I can do nothing. I have given\n orders to my assistant that he must keep two hours of radio silence! I\n can get no message to him, for our radio is dead!\"\n\n\n As if to mock him, the ship's radio began to answer:\n\n\n \"Station 297 calling U. S. Cruiser\nComerford\n. Station 297 calling U.\n S. Cruiser\nComerford\n—\"\n\n\n \"U. S. Cruiser\nComerford\ncalling Station 297!\" the operator intoned,\n winking at the two officers over Androka's discomfiture, and asked for\n the bearings.\n\n\n The answer came back: \"Bearings north east by a quarter east, U. S.\n Cruiser\nComerford\n!\"", "\"A bit of a headache from the gas, but that's all. Any orders, sir?\"\n\n\n Curtis thought for a moment. \"Muster the crew, as best you can. We'll\n try to make a roll call. Is there any sign of the ship?\"\n\n\n There was a solemn note in Dillon's voice. \"No, sir. She's been worked\n off the sandbar and put to sea!\"\n\n\n The words struck Curtis with the numbing shock of a blow on some nerve\n center. For the first time, he realized fully the tragedy that had\n swept down on him. He had lost his ship—one of the United States\n navy's fastest and newest small light cruisers—under circumstances\n which smelled strongly of treachery and sabotage.", "Brandt nodded his square head. \"We have a full crew—two hundred\n men—officers, seamen, mechanics, radio men, technical experts, all\n German naval reservists living in the United States, who've been sent\n here secretly, a few at a time, during the past six weeks!\"\nThe three—Brandt, Nelson and Bradford—stood on the bridge and talked,\n while the efficient stretcher-bearers worked industriously to remove\n the limp bodies of the\nComerford's\nunconscious crew and row them\n ashore.\n\n\n And when that task was completed, lifeboats began to come alongside\n with strange-looking radio equipment, and more gas tanks like those\n Androka had brought aboard the\nComerford\nwith him, and dynamos and\n batteries that looked like something out of a scientific nightmare.\n\n\n And bustling all over the place, barking excited commands in German,\n pushing and pulling and pointing to emphasize his directions, was the\n strange figure of Professor Zukor Androka!", "\"The\ngestapo\ntakes care of Czechs and Poles and Frenchmen and other\n foreigners whom it chooses as its agents,\" Brandt pointed out. \"Androka\n has a daughter and other relations in Prague. He knows that if anything\n misfires, if there is the slightest suspicion of treachery on his part,\n his daughter and the others will suffer. Androka's loyalty is assured!\"\n\n\n Nelson turned to watch the forward fighting top of the\nComerford\n.\n The masked German seamen were installing some sort of apparatus\n up there—a strange-looking object that looked something like an\n old-fashioned trench mortar, and which connected with cables to the\n room that served as Androka's laboratory and workshop.\n\n\n Another crew was installing radio apparatus in the mizzentop turret.", "\"Congratulations, Herr Kommander Nelson!\" he said. \"Ve have stolen one\n of the United States navy's newest and fastest cruisers!\" He made a\n gesture as if raising a beer stein to drink a toast. \"\nProsit!\n\" he\n added.\n\n\n \"\nProsit!\n\" Nelson repeated, and the two grinned at each other.\nStars were twinkling in a patch of black-blue sky, and broken mountains\n of gray cloud were skudding before the east wind. Commander Bob Curtis\n found himself lying in wet sand, on a beach, somewhere, with the\n rain—now a light, driving mist—beating on his face. He was chilled;\n his limbs were stiff and numb. His nose and throat felt parched inside,\n as if a wave of searing heat had scorched them.\n\n\n According to his last calculations, the\nComerford\nhad been cruising\n off the Maine coast. This probably was one of the islets of that\n region, or it might be the mainland.", "He came up to Nelson, saluted, and held out his hand, introducing\n himself as Herr Kommander Brandt. He began to speak in German, but\n Nelson stopped him.\n\n\n \"I don't speak any German,\" he explained. \"I was born and educated in\n the United States—of German parents, who had been ruined in the First\n World War. My mother committed suicide when she learned that we were\n penniless. My father—\" He paused and cleared his throat.\n\n\n \"\nJa!\nYour father?\" the German officer prompted, dropping into\n accented English. \"Your father?\"", "Curtis didn't hurry. It pleased him to let Nelson wait. He moved slowly\n to the door, paused there, and flung a backward glance at the man in\n the cabin with him—Zukor Androka, the elderly Czech scientist, a guest\n of the United States navy, here aboard the cruiser\nComerford\n.\n\n\n The wizened face of the older man was molded in intent lines of\n concentration, as his bushy gray head bent over his drawing board.\n Curtis got a glimpse of the design on which he was working, and his\n lips relaxed in a faint smile.\n\n\n Androka had arrived on board the\nComerford\nthe day before she sailed\n from Norfolk. With him came a boatload of scientific apparatus and\n equipment, including a number of things that looked like oxygen tanks,\n which were now stored in the forward hold. Androka had watched over\n his treasures with the jealous care of a mother hen, and spent hours\n daily in the room in the superstructure that had been assigned as his\n laboratory.", "Curtis sighed with relief. He saw that Nelson was staring fiercely\n at the radio operator, as the man went on calling: \"U. S. Cruiser\nComerford\ncalling Station 364. U. S. Cruiser\nComerford\ncalling\n Station 364—\"\n\n\n Then the instrument rasped again: \"Station 364 calling U. S. Cruiser\nComerford\n. Bearings north west by three west. Bearings north west by\n three west, U. S. Cruiser\nComerford\nfrom Cay 364.\"\n\n\n Commander and navigator had both scribbled verifications of the\n numbers. Ignoring the gibbering Androka, who was wailing his\n disappointment that messages had penetrated his veil of silence, they\n raced for the chart room.\nQuickly the parallels stepped off the bearing from the designated\n points. Light intersecting lines proclaimed a check on their position.", "A far-away look came into Androka's eyes. He did not seem to hear\n the question. He lowered his voice: \"My daughter is still in Prague.\n So are my sister and her husband, and\ntheir\ntwo daughters. If the\ngestapo\nknew what I am doing, all of them would be better dead. You\n understand—better dead?\"\n\n\n Curtis said: \"I understand.\"\n\n\n \"And if the Nazi agents in America knew of the islet from which my zone\n of silence is projected—\" Androka paused, his head tilted to one side,\n as if he were listening to something—\nOn deck, there was shouting and commotion. Curtis rushed out, pulling\n on his slicker as he went. The shout from the watch forward had been\n picked up, and was being relayed all over the ship. The words struck on\n Curtis' ears with a note of impending tragedy.\n\n\n \"Breakers ahead!\"" ], [ "SILENCE IS—DEADLY\nBy Bertrand L. Shurtleff\nRadio is an absolute necessity in modern\n\n organization—and particularly in modern\n\n naval organization. If you could silence all\n\n radio—silence of that sort would be deadly!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Astounding Science-Fiction April 1942.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe hurried\nrat-a-tat\nof knuckles hammered on the cabin door.\n Commander Bob Curtis roused himself from his doze, got up from his\n chair, stretched himself to his full, lanky height and yawned. That\n would be Nelson, his navigating officer. Nelson always knocked that\n way—like a man in an external state of jitters over nothing at all.", "A far-away look came into Androka's eyes. He did not seem to hear\n the question. He lowered his voice: \"My daughter is still in Prague.\n So are my sister and her husband, and\ntheir\ntwo daughters. If the\ngestapo\nknew what I am doing, all of them would be better dead. You\n understand—better dead?\"\n\n\n Curtis said: \"I understand.\"\n\n\n \"And if the Nazi agents in America knew of the islet from which my zone\n of silence is projected—\" Androka paused, his head tilted to one side,\n as if he were listening to something—\nOn deck, there was shouting and commotion. Curtis rushed out, pulling\n on his slicker as he went. The shout from the watch forward had been\n picked up, and was being relayed all over the ship. The words struck on\n Curtis' ears with a note of impending tragedy.\n\n\n \"Breakers ahead!\"", "\"Dead!\" Androka muttered, with a bitter laugh. \"Yet not dead,\n gentlemen! The set is uninjured. The waves are what have been upset. I\n have shattered them around your ship, just as I can eventually shatter\n them all over Central Europe! For the next two hours, no radio messages\n can enter or leave my zone of radio silence—of refracted radio waves,\n set up by my little station on one of the neighboring islets!\"\nThere was a long pause, while commander and navigator stared at him.\n Curtis was the first to speak.\n\n\n \"Your secrecy might well cost the United States navy one of its best\n light cruisers—and us our lives!\" he said angrily. \"We need that check\n by radio at once! If you're not talking nonsense, call off your dogs\n till we learn just where we are!\"", "He was beside Navigating Officer Nelson on the bridge, and saw the\n helmsman climbing the rapidly spinning wheel like a monkey as he put it\n hard aport.\n\n\n Then the ship struck. Everything movable shot ahead until it brought up\n at the end of a swing or smacked against something solid.\n\n\n Curtis felt Nelson's hand grip his shoulder, as he put his lips close\n to his ear and shouted: \"You must have been right, sir, and the radio\n bearings and my reckoning wrong. We've hit that reef a terrific smack.\n I'm afraid we're gored!\"\n\n\n \"Get out the collision mat!\" Curtis ordered. \"We ought to be able to\n keep her up!\"\n\n\n And then he became aware of a deadly stillness. A vast wall of silence\n enveloped the entire cruiser. Looking over the side, he could no longer\n see the waves that a few minutes before had beaten savagely against the\n ship.", "\"The professor's in his glory!\" Nelson remarked to Kommander Brandt.\n\n\n \"Funny thing about him,\" Bradford put in, \"is that his inventions work.\n That zone of silence cut us off completely.\"\n\n\n Kommander Brandt nodded. \"Goodt! But you got your message giving your\n bearings—the wrong ones?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Nelson said. \"That came through all right. And won't Curtis have\n a time explaining it!\"\n\n\n \"Hereafter,\" Brandt said solemnly, \"the zone of silence vill be\n projected from the\nComerford\n; and ve have another invention of\n Androka's vich vill be even more useful vhen ve come to cut the\nCarethusia\nout of her convoy.\"\n\n\n \"The\nCarethusia\n?\" Nelson asked, in a puzzled tone.", "\"Bearing, sir?\" The man brought his eyes down with difficulty, as if\n still dissatisfied. \"I'm sorry, sir, but the outfit's dead. Went out on\n me about five minutes ago. I was taking the weather report when the set\n conked. I was trying to see if something's wrong.\"\n\n\n The Czech inventor giggled. Curtis gave him another curious look and\n thrust himself into the radio room.\n\n\n \"Try again!\" he told the operator. \"See what you can get!\"\n\n\n The radio man leaped to his seat and tried frantically. Again and\n again, he sent off a request for a cross-bearing from shore stations\n that had recently been established to insure safety to naval vessels,\n but there was no answer on any of the bands—not even the blare of a\n high-powered commercial program in the higher reach, nor the chatter of\n ships or amateurs on the shorter.", "Androka held out his palms helplessly. \"I can do nothing. I have given\n orders to my assistant that he must keep two hours of radio silence! I\n can get no message to him, for our radio is dead!\"\n\n\n As if to mock him, the ship's radio began to answer:\n\n\n \"Station 297 calling U. S. Cruiser\nComerford\n. Station 297 calling U.\n S. Cruiser\nComerford\n—\"\n\n\n \"U. S. Cruiser\nComerford\ncalling Station 297!\" the operator intoned,\n winking at the two officers over Androka's discomfiture, and asked for\n the bearings.\n\n\n The answer came back: \"Bearings north east by a quarter east, U. S.\n Cruiser\nComerford\n!\"", "\"You have seen a miracle, commander!\" he shouted at Curtis. \"\nMy\nmiracle! My invention has shattered the ether waves hereabouts\n hopelessly.\"\n\n\n \"Seems to me,\" Curtis said dryly, \"this invention can harm your friends\n as much as your enemies.\"\n\n\n The scientist drew himself up to his full height—which was only a\n little over five feet. His voice grew shrill. \"Wait! Just wait! There\n are other inventions to supplement this one. Put them together, and\n they will defeat the Nazi hordes which have ravaged my country!\"\n\n\n Curtis was a little shocked by the hatred that gleamed in Androka's\n eyes, under their bushy brows. There was something of the wild animal\n in the man's expression, as his lips drew back from his yellowed teeth.\n\n\n \"Those tanks you have below,\" Curtis said, \"have they some connection\n with this radio silence?\"", "There was a good water supply—a small creek fed by springs—but\n nothing in the way of food. Evidently food was a precious commodity\n which the recent inhabitants of the islet couldn't afford to leave\n behind.\n\n\n Curtis was studying the wreckage of the wireless station, wondering\n if this might have been the source of Androka's zone of silence, when\n Ensign Jack Dillon came up to him.\n\n\n \"There's a coast-guard cutter heading for the island, sir,\" he\n announced.", "\"Radio?\" repeated the little Czech, thrusting his face between the\n other two, in his independent fashion that ignored ship's discipline.\n \"You're using your radio?\" He broke into a knowing chuckle, his keen\n old eyes twinkling behind their thick lenses. \"Go ahead and try it. See\n how much you can get! It will be no more than Hitler can get when Zukor\n Androka decrees silence over the German airways! Try it! Try it, I say!\"\n\n\n Bob Curtis stared at him, as if questioning his sanity. Then he\n hastened to the radio room, with Nelson at his heels, and the Czech\n trotting along behind.\n\n\n The door burst open as they neared it. A frightened operator came out,\n still wearing his earphones, and stood staring upward incredulously at\n the aërial.\n\n\n \"Get us a radio cross-bearing for location at once,\" Curtis said\n sharply, for the operator seemed in a daze.", "As he thought back, he realized that he\nmight\nhave prevented the\n loss, if he had been more alert, more suspicious. For it was clear to\n him now that the\nComerford\nhad been deliberately steered to this\n place; that the men who had seized her had been waiting here for that\n very purpose.\n\n\n The pieces of the picture fitted together like a jigsaw\n puzzle—Androka's zone of silence; the bearings given by radio;\n Navigating Officer Nelson's queer conduct. They were all part of a\n carefully laid plan!\n\n\n All the suspicious circumstances surrounding Nelson came flooding into\n Curtis' mind. He had never liked the man; never trusted him. Nelson\n always acted as if he had some secret, something to hide.", "\"It's a funny thing,\" the latter said, still dialing and grousing, \"how\n I got that cross-bearing through and can't get another squeak out of\n her. I'm wondering if that old goat really\nhas\ndone something to the\n ether. The set seems O. K.\"\n\n\n He lingered over the apparatus, checking and rechecking. Tubes lighted;\n wires were alive to the touch and set him to shaking his head at the\n tingle they sent through his inquiring fingers.\n\n\n Curtis left him at it, and went to rejoin Androka in the cabin. He\n found the little inventor pacing up and down, shaking his fists in the\n air; pausing every now and then to run his bony fingers through his\n tangled mop of gray hair, or to claw nervously at his beard.", "The\nComerford\nwas shrouded in a huge pall of yellowish-gray mist, and\n more of it was coming up from below—from ventilators and hatchways and\n skylights—as if the whole ship were flooded with some evil vapor.\n\n\n Somehow, Curtis' mind flashed to the stories he'd heard of the forts of\n the Maginot Line, and of other forts in Holland and Belgium that had\n fallen before the early Nazi blitzkrieg, when their defenders found\n themselves struck numb and helpless by a gas that had been flooded into\n the inner compartments of their strongholds.\n\n\n There were those who said it was the work of sappers who had tunneled\n under the foundations, while others laid the induction of the gas to\n Fifth Column traitors. There were a hundred more or less plausible\n explanations—", "From her bridge, Navigating Officer Nelson watched the gas-masked\n figures moving about the decks, descending companionways—like goblins\n from an ancient fairy tale or a modern horror story. Nelson looked like\n a goblin himself, with his face covered by a respirator. At his side,\n stood his fellow conspirator Bos'n's Mate Joe Bradford, also wearing a\n gas mask.\n\n\n Nelson spoke in a low tone, his lips close to Bradford's ear. \"It\n worked, Joe!\"\n\n\n \"Yeah!\" Bradford agreed. \"It worked—fine!\"\n\n\n The limp bodies of the\nComerford's\ncrew were being carried to the\n lowered accommodation ladder and transferred into waiting lifeboats.\n\n\n Nelson swore under his breath. \"Reckon it'll take a couple of hours\n before the ship's rid of that damn gas!\"", "Voices droned all around him in mumbling confusion—guttural voices\n that ebbed and flowed in a tide of excited talk. He caught a word of\n English now and then, mixed in with a flood of Teuton phonetics.\n\n\n Two words, in particular, registered clearly on his mind. One was\n \"\nCarethusia\n\"; the other was \"convoy.\" But gradually his eardrums\n began to throb, as if someone were pounding on them from the inside. He\n couldn't get his breath; a cloud seemed to be mounting within him until\n it swept over his brain—\n\n\n He felt something strike the side of his head, and realized that he had\n fallen in a heap on the bridge. And after that, he wasn't conscious of\n anything—\nThe rain had abated to a foggy drizzle. The wash of the surf swung the\nComerford\nin a lazy, rolling motion, as she lay with her bow nosing\n into the sandbar at the entrance of the inlet.", "It was hard work getting to his feet, and when he did manage to stand,\n he could only plant his heels in the sand and sway to and fro for fully\n a minute, like a child learning to walk.\n\n\n All around him in the nearly total darkness, he could make out the dim\n forms of men sprawled on the beach; and of other men moving about,\n exploring. He heard the murmur of voices and saw the glow of lighted\n cigarettes.\n\n\n A man with a flashlight was approaching him. Its white glare shone for\n a moment in Curtis' face, and the familiar voice of Ensign Jack Dillon\n spoke: \"Commander Curtis! Are you O. K., sir?\"\n\n\n \"I think so!\" Curtis' heart warmed at the eager expression in Dillon's\n face; at the heartfelt concern in his friendly brown eyes. The young\n ensign was red-headed, impetuous, thoroughly genuine in his emotions.\n \"How about yourself, Jack?\" Curtis added.", "Nelson had no answering smile, although there had been a great deal\n of good-natured joking aboard the\nComerford\never since the navy\n department had sent the scientist on board the cruiser to carry on his\n experiments.\n\n\n \"I'm worried, sir!\" Nelson said. \"I'm not sure about my dead reckoning.\n This storm—\"\n\n\n Curtis threw his arm around Nelson's dripping shoulders. \"Forget it!\n Don't let a little error get you down!\"\n\n\n \"But this storm, sir!\" Nelson avoided Curtis' friendly eyes and slipped\n out from under his arm. \"It's got me worried. Quartering wind of\n undetermined force, variable and gusty. There's a chop to the sea—as\n if from unestimated currents among the islets. No chance to check by\n observation, and now there is a chance—look at me!\"\n\n\n He held out his hands. They were shaking as if he had the chills.", "\"A bit of a headache from the gas, but that's all. Any orders, sir?\"\n\n\n Curtis thought for a moment. \"Muster the crew, as best you can. We'll\n try to make a roll call. Is there any sign of the ship?\"\n\n\n There was a solemn note in Dillon's voice. \"No, sir. She's been worked\n off the sandbar and put to sea!\"\n\n\n The words struck Curtis with the numbing shock of a blow on some nerve\n center. For the first time, he realized fully the tragedy that had\n swept down on him. He had lost his ship—one of the United States\n navy's fastest and newest small light cruisers—under circumstances\n which smelled strongly of treachery and sabotage.", "\"Congratulations, Herr Kommander Nelson!\" he said. \"Ve have stolen one\n of the United States navy's newest and fastest cruisers!\" He made a\n gesture as if raising a beer stein to drink a toast. \"\nProsit!\n\" he\n added.\n\n\n \"\nProsit!\n\" Nelson repeated, and the two grinned at each other.\nStars were twinkling in a patch of black-blue sky, and broken mountains\n of gray cloud were skudding before the east wind. Commander Bob Curtis\n found himself lying in wet sand, on a beach, somewhere, with the\n rain—now a light, driving mist—beating on his face. He was chilled;\n his limbs were stiff and numb. His nose and throat felt parched inside,\n as if a wave of searing heat had scorched them.\n\n\n According to his last calculations, the\nComerford\nhad been cruising\n off the Maine coast. This probably was one of the islets of that\n region, or it might be the mainland.", "He came up to Nelson, saluted, and held out his hand, introducing\n himself as Herr Kommander Brandt. He began to speak in German, but\n Nelson stopped him.\n\n\n \"I don't speak any German,\" he explained. \"I was born and educated in\n the United States—of German parents, who had been ruined in the First\n World War. My mother committed suicide when she learned that we were\n penniless. My father—\" He paused and cleared his throat.\n\n\n \"\nJa!\nYour father?\" the German officer prompted, dropping into\n accented English. \"Your father?\"" ], [ "\"My father dedicated me to a career of revenge—to wipe out his\n wrongs,\" Nelson continued. \"If America hadn't gone into the First\n World War, he wouldn't have lost his business; my mother would still\n be living. When he joined the Nazi party, the way became clear to use\n me—to educate me in a military prep school, then send me to Annapolis,\n for a career in the United States navy—and no one suspected me. No\n one—\"\n\n\n \"Sometimes,\" Bradford put in, \"I think Curtis suspected you.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe Curtis'll find out his suspicions were justified,\" Nelson said\n bitterly. \"But it won't do Curtis any good—a commander who's lost\n his ship.\" He turned to Brandt. \"You have plenty of men to work the\nComerford\n?\"", "\"The\ngestapo\ntakes care of Czechs and Poles and Frenchmen and other\n foreigners whom it chooses as its agents,\" Brandt pointed out. \"Androka\n has a daughter and other relations in Prague. He knows that if anything\n misfires, if there is the slightest suspicion of treachery on his part,\n his daughter and the others will suffer. Androka's loyalty is assured!\"\n\n\n Nelson turned to watch the forward fighting top of the\nComerford\n.\n The masked German seamen were installing some sort of apparatus\n up there—a strange-looking object that looked something like an\n old-fashioned trench mortar, and which connected with cables to the\n room that served as Androka's laboratory and workshop.\n\n\n Another crew was installing radio apparatus in the mizzentop turret.", "Brandt nodded his square head. \"We have a full crew—two hundred\n men—officers, seamen, mechanics, radio men, technical experts, all\n German naval reservists living in the United States, who've been sent\n here secretly, a few at a time, during the past six weeks!\"\nThe three—Brandt, Nelson and Bradford—stood on the bridge and talked,\n while the efficient stretcher-bearers worked industriously to remove\n the limp bodies of the\nComerford's\nunconscious crew and row them\n ashore.\n\n\n And when that task was completed, lifeboats began to come alongside\n with strange-looking radio equipment, and more gas tanks like those\n Androka had brought aboard the\nComerford\nwith him, and dynamos and\n batteries that looked like something out of a scientific nightmare.\n\n\n And bustling all over the place, barking excited commands in German,\n pushing and pulling and pointing to emphasize his directions, was the\n strange figure of Professor Zukor Androka!", "\"The professor's in his glory!\" Nelson remarked to Kommander Brandt.\n\n\n \"Funny thing about him,\" Bradford put in, \"is that his inventions work.\n That zone of silence cut us off completely.\"\n\n\n Kommander Brandt nodded. \"Goodt! But you got your message giving your\n bearings—the wrong ones?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Nelson said. \"That came through all right. And won't Curtis have\n a time explaining it!\"\n\n\n \"Hereafter,\" Brandt said solemnly, \"the zone of silence vill be\n projected from the\nComerford\n; and ve have another invention of\n Androka's vich vill be even more useful vhen ve come to cut the\nCarethusia\nout of her convoy.\"\n\n\n \"The\nCarethusia\n?\" Nelson asked, in a puzzled tone.", "He came up to Nelson, saluted, and held out his hand, introducing\n himself as Herr Kommander Brandt. He began to speak in German, but\n Nelson stopped him.\n\n\n \"I don't speak any German,\" he explained. \"I was born and educated in\n the United States—of German parents, who had been ruined in the First\n World War. My mother committed suicide when she learned that we were\n penniless. My father—\" He paused and cleared his throat.\n\n\n \"\nJa!\nYour father?\" the German officer prompted, dropping into\n accented English. \"Your father?\"", "Descending a companionway to see what was going on below, Nelson found\n that portholes were being opened, and men were spraying chemical around\n to rid the below-decks atmosphere of the lethal gas that had overcome\n the\nComerford's\nAmerican crew.\n\n\n Returning to the bridge, he found that the tide in the inlet had risen\n considerably, and that the cruiser was riding more easily at her anchor.\n\n\n Then, at Brandt's orders, the anchor was hauled in, and lifeboats and a\n motor launch were used as tugs to work the vessel entirely free of the\n sand bar. This was accomplished without difficulty.\n\n\n Brandt came over to where Nelson was standing on the bridge and held\n out his hand.", "\"There are other things Germany needs desperately on board the\nCarethusia\n,\" Brandt explained. \"Vanadium and nickel and hundreds of\n barrels of lard oil for machine-tool lubrication. Our agents have been\n watching the convoys closely for weeks for just such a cargo as the\nCarethusia\nis taking over.\"\n\n\n \"Can we trust Androka?\" Nelson asked, with a sudden note of suspicion\n in his voice.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Brandt assured him. \"Of all men—we can trust Androka!\"\n\n\n \"But he's a Czech,\" Nelson argued.", "Brandt said: \"She's a freighter in a convoy out of St. Johns—twelve\n thousand tons. The orders are to take her; not sink her.\"\n\n\n \"What's the idea?\"\n\n\n \"Her cargo,\" Brandt explained. \"It iss more precious than rubies. It\n includes a large shipment of boarts.\"\n\n\n \"Boarts?\" Nelson repeated. \"What are they?\"\n\n\n \"Boarts,\" Brandt told him, \"are industrial diamonds—black,\n imperfectly crystallized stones, but far more valuable to us than\n flawless diamonds from Tiffany's on Fift' Avenue. They are needed for\n making machine tools. They come from northern Brazil—and our supply is\n low.\"\n\n\n \"I should think we could get a shipment of these boarts direct from\n Brazil—through the blockade,\" Nelson said, \"without taking the risk of\n capturing a United States navy cruiser.\"", "As he thought back, he realized that he\nmight\nhave prevented the\n loss, if he had been more alert, more suspicious. For it was clear to\n him now that the\nComerford\nhad been deliberately steered to this\n place; that the men who had seized her had been waiting here for that\n very purpose.\n\n\n The pieces of the picture fitted together like a jigsaw\n puzzle—Androka's zone of silence; the bearings given by radio;\n Navigating Officer Nelson's queer conduct. They were all part of a\n carefully laid plan!\n\n\n All the suspicious circumstances surrounding Nelson came flooding into\n Curtis' mind. He had never liked the man; never trusted him. Nelson\n always acted as if he had some secret, something to hide.", "The\nComerford\nwas shrouded in a huge pall of yellowish-gray mist, and\n more of it was coming up from below—from ventilators and hatchways and\n skylights—as if the whole ship were flooded with some evil vapor.\n\n\n Somehow, Curtis' mind flashed to the stories he'd heard of the forts of\n the Maginot Line, and of other forts in Holland and Belgium that had\n fallen before the early Nazi blitzkrieg, when their defenders found\n themselves struck numb and helpless by a gas that had been flooded into\n the inner compartments of their strongholds.\n\n\n There were those who said it was the work of sappers who had tunneled\n under the foundations, while others laid the induction of the gas to\n Fifth Column traitors. There were a hundred more or less plausible\n explanations—", "Curtis didn't hurry. It pleased him to let Nelson wait. He moved slowly\n to the door, paused there, and flung a backward glance at the man in\n the cabin with him—Zukor Androka, the elderly Czech scientist, a guest\n of the United States navy, here aboard the cruiser\nComerford\n.\n\n\n The wizened face of the older man was molded in intent lines of\n concentration, as his bushy gray head bent over his drawing board.\n Curtis got a glimpse of the design on which he was working, and his\n lips relaxed in a faint smile.\n\n\n Androka had arrived on board the\nComerford\nthe day before she sailed\n from Norfolk. With him came a boatload of scientific apparatus and\n equipment, including a number of things that looked like oxygen tanks,\n which were now stored in the forward hold. Androka had watched over\n his treasures with the jealous care of a mother hen, and spent hours\n daily in the room in the superstructure that had been assigned as his\n laboratory.", "Curtis recalled that Nelson and Androka had long conversations\n together—conversations which they would end abruptly when anyone else\n came within earshot. And Nelson had always been chummy with the worst\n trouble maker in the crew—Bos'n's Mate Bradford.\n\n\n Curtis went around, finding the officers, issuing orders. There were\n still some unconscious men to be revived. In a sheltered cove among\n the rocks, an exploring group had found enough dry driftwood to make a\n fire—\n\n\n In another hour, the skies had cleared, and white moonlight flooded\n the scene with a ghostly radiance. The men of the\nComerford\nhad\n all regained consciousness and were drying out in front of the big\n driftwood bonfires in the cove.\n\n\n Curtis ordered a beacon kept burning on a high promontory. Then he got\n the men lined up, according to their respective classifications, for a\n check-up on the missing.", "Voices droned all around him in mumbling confusion—guttural voices\n that ebbed and flowed in a tide of excited talk. He caught a word of\n English now and then, mixed in with a flood of Teuton phonetics.\n\n\n Two words, in particular, registered clearly on his mind. One was\n \"\nCarethusia\n\"; the other was \"convoy.\" But gradually his eardrums\n began to throb, as if someone were pounding on them from the inside. He\n couldn't get his breath; a cloud seemed to be mounting within him until\n it swept over his brain—\n\n\n He felt something strike the side of his head, and realized that he had\n fallen in a heap on the bridge. And after that, he wasn't conscious of\n anything—\nThe rain had abated to a foggy drizzle. The wash of the surf swung the\nComerford\nin a lazy, rolling motion, as she lay with her bow nosing\n into the sandbar at the entrance of the inlet.", "The vapor clouds that enveloped the\nComerford\nwere becoming thicker.\n All about the deck lay the forms of unconscious seamen, suddenly\n stricken helpless. And then Curtis saw other forms flitting about the\n deck—forms that looked like creatures from another world, but he\n recognized them for what they were—men wearing gas masks.\n\n\n Nelson was nowhere in sight. The steersman lay in a limp heap beside\n the swinging wheel. Then a gas-masked figure appeared through the\n shroud of mist and steadied it, so that the cruiser would not be\n completely at the mercy of the wind and the waves.\n\n\n Curtis heard the anchor let down, as if by invisible hands, the chain\n screaming and flailing its clanking way through the hawse hole. Then he\n was completely walled in by the yellowish-gray mist. He felt his senses\n swimming.", "When this was completed, it was found that the\nComerford's\nentire\n complement of two hundred and twenty men were present—except\n Navigating Officer Nelson, and Bos'n's Mate Bradford! And Zukor Androka\n was also missing!\n\n\n With the coming of dawn, a little exploration revealed that the\nComerford's\ncrew was marooned on an islet, about a square mile in\n area; that they had been put ashore without food or extra clothing or\n equipment of any kind, and that no boats had been left for them.\n\n\n One searching party reported finding the remains of what had been a\n radio station on a high promontory on the north shore of the islet.\n Another had found the remains of tents and log cabins, recently\n demolished, in a small, timbered hollow—a well-hidden spot invisible\n from the air, unless one were flying very low; a place where two\n hundred or more men could have camped.", "The fellow was a headache to Curtis. He was overfriendly with a\n black-browed bos'n's mate named Joe Bradford—the worst trouble maker\n on board. But there was no question of his ability. He was a good\n navigating officer—dependable, accurate, conscientious. Nevertheless,\n his taut face, restless, searching eyes, and eternally nervous manner\n got Curtis' goat.\n\n\n \"Come in, Nelson!\" he said.\n\n\n Nelson shouldered his way inside, and stood there in his dripping\n oilskins, blinking his eyes against the yellow light.\n\n\n Curtis closed the door and nodded toward the bent form of Zukor\n Androka, with a quizzical grin. \"Old Czech-and-Double-Czech is working\n hard on his latest invention to pull Hitler's teeth and re-establish\n the Czech Republic!\"", "Nelson had no answering smile, although there had been a great deal\n of good-natured joking aboard the\nComerford\never since the navy\n department had sent the scientist on board the cruiser to carry on his\n experiments.\n\n\n \"I'm worried, sir!\" Nelson said. \"I'm not sure about my dead reckoning.\n This storm—\"\n\n\n Curtis threw his arm around Nelson's dripping shoulders. \"Forget it!\n Don't let a little error get you down!\"\n\n\n \"But this storm, sir!\" Nelson avoided Curtis' friendly eyes and slipped\n out from under his arm. \"It's got me worried. Quartering wind of\n undetermined force, variable and gusty. There's a chop to the sea—as\n if from unestimated currents among the islets. No chance to check by\n observation, and now there is a chance—look at me!\"\n\n\n He held out his hands. They were shaking as if he had the chills.", "A far-away look came into Androka's eyes. He did not seem to hear\n the question. He lowered his voice: \"My daughter is still in Prague.\n So are my sister and her husband, and\ntheir\ntwo daughters. If the\ngestapo\nknew what I am doing, all of them would be better dead. You\n understand—better dead?\"\n\n\n Curtis said: \"I understand.\"\n\n\n \"And if the Nazi agents in America knew of the islet from which my zone\n of silence is projected—\" Androka paused, his head tilted to one side,\n as if he were listening to something—\nOn deck, there was shouting and commotion. Curtis rushed out, pulling\n on his slicker as he went. The shout from the watch forward had been\n picked up, and was being relayed all over the ship. The words struck on\n Curtis' ears with a note of impending tragedy.\n\n\n \"Breakers ahead!\"", "\"Congratulations, Herr Kommander Nelson!\" he said. \"Ve have stolen one\n of the United States navy's newest and fastest cruisers!\" He made a\n gesture as if raising a beer stein to drink a toast. \"\nProsit!\n\" he\n added.\n\n\n \"\nProsit!\n\" Nelson repeated, and the two grinned at each other.\nStars were twinkling in a patch of black-blue sky, and broken mountains\n of gray cloud were skudding before the east wind. Commander Bob Curtis\n found himself lying in wet sand, on a beach, somewhere, with the\n rain—now a light, driving mist—beating on his face. He was chilled;\n his limbs were stiff and numb. His nose and throat felt parched inside,\n as if a wave of searing heat had scorched them.\n\n\n According to his last calculations, the\nComerford\nhad been cruising\n off the Maine coast. This probably was one of the islets of that\n region, or it might be the mainland.", "From her bridge, Navigating Officer Nelson watched the gas-masked\n figures moving about the decks, descending companionways—like goblins\n from an ancient fairy tale or a modern horror story. Nelson looked like\n a goblin himself, with his face covered by a respirator. At his side,\n stood his fellow conspirator Bos'n's Mate Joe Bradford, also wearing a\n gas mask.\n\n\n Nelson spoke in a low tone, his lips close to Bradford's ear. \"It\n worked, Joe!\"\n\n\n \"Yeah!\" Bradford agreed. \"It worked—fine!\"\n\n\n The limp bodies of the\nComerford's\ncrew were being carried to the\n lowered accommodation ladder and transferred into waiting lifeboats.\n\n\n Nelson swore under his breath. \"Reckon it'll take a couple of hours\n before the ship's rid of that damn gas!\"" ] ]
train	50668	[ "Why does the Brain select Jery to hold the amnesty? ", "Why is it unexpectedly hard for the men to forge letters for the children?", "How does Jery's behavior change when he's wearing the uniform and amnesty?", "What is the hypothetical problem with the amnesty?", "Why was the Amnesty created?", "What clue did the water tanks and tubing give Jery?" ]	[ [ "To prevent someone like Baxter wielding and misusing it. ", "Because he's not really qualified, making him a wildcard. ", "Because of his ability to parse situations. ", "Because he will responsibly wield the amnesty. " ], [ "There is a huge amount of letters to write and families to keep up with. It's a lot of information", "They have to intentionally write poorly, which is proving to be difficult with the volume they have to write", "None of them are particularly good at writing letters, making it difficult for them", "It makes them too emotional, because it involves children. " ], [ "He's bolder, and he starts to misuse the authority it gives him", "He tries to remain the same and not let it get to his head ", "He's bolder, playing into the sense of power it gives him", "He's surprised by the authority it seems to give him" ], [ "It's too powerful for any one person to wield. ", "Those who wield the amnesty don't have to listen to the authority of of others", "It allows the bearer to do as they please with civilians ", "Should 2 people be chosen for it, it's be an impossible power struggle " ], [ "To solve the issue of any one person having too much power", "To avoid the need of consulting another person on an emergency ", "To circumvent bureaucracy that may otherwise get in the way of solving problem ", "To allow a person to be able to make decisions without questions asked in an emergency " ], [ "An idea of how and when the boys went missing - probably during the night ", "An idea of how much water was used during the trip ", "An idea of how and when the boys went missing - probably via the tanks", "An idea as to whether or not the other man was lying " ] ]	[ 3, 2, 3, 4, 3, 1 ]	[ 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Baxter smiled. \"No chance of that, Jery. We didn't leave it up to any\n committee or bureau or any other faction to do the picking. Hell, that\n would have put us right back where we'd been before. No, we left it up\n to the Brain. We'd find ourselves in a tight situation, and the Brain\n after being fed the data, would come up with either a solution, or a\n name.\"\n\n\n I stared at him. \"Then, when I was here before, I was here solely to\n receive the Amnesty, is that it?\"\n\n\n Baxter nodded. \"The Brain just picks the men. Then we tell the men the\n situation, hand over the Amnesty, and pray.\"\n\n\n I had a sudden thought. \"Say, what happens if two men are selected by\n the Brain? Who has authority over whom?\"", "\"It's the Amnesty that does it,\" he said, gesturing toward the disc. It\n lay on his desk, now, along with the collapser. I felt, with the new\n information I'd garnered, that my work was done, and that the new data\n fed into the Brain would produce some other results, not involving me.\n\n\n I looked at the Amnesty, then nodded. \"Kind of gets you, after awhile.\n To know that you are the most influential person in creation is to\n automatically act the part. A shame, in a way.\"\n\n\n \"The hell it is!\" Baxter snapped. \"Good grief, man, why'd you think the\n Amnesty was created in the first place?\"\n\n\n I sat up straight and scratched the back of my head. \"Now you mention\n it, I really don't know. It seems a pretty dangerous thing to have\n about, the way people jump when they see it.\"", "Baxter grimaced and shivered. \"Don't even think such a thing! Even\n your mentioning such a contingency gives me a small migraine. It'd be\n unprecedented in the history of the Brain or the Amnesty.\" He grinned,\n suddenly. \"Besides, it can't happen. There's only one of these—\" he\n tapped the medallion gently \"—in existence, Jery. So we couldn't have\n such a situation!\"\n\n\n I sank back into the contour chair, and glanced at my watch. Much too\n late to go back to work. I'd done a lot in one day, I reasoned. Well,\n the thing was out of my hands. Baxter had the information I'd come\n up with, and it had been coded and fed to the Brain. As soon as the\n solution came through, I could be on my way back to the world of hard\n and soft sell.", "\"Uh-huh,\" Baxter grunted laconically. \"It amuses you, does it?\" The\n smile was still on his lips, but there was a grimness in the glitter of\n his narrowing eyes.\n\n\n \"Not really,\" I said hastily. \"It baffles me, to be frank.\"\n\n\n \"If you're sitting there in that hopeful stance awaiting some sort of\n explanation, you may as well relax,\" Baxter said shortly. \"I have none\n to make. IC had none to make. Damn it all to hell!\" He brought a meaty\n fist down on the desktop. \"No one has an explanation! All we know is\n that the Brain always picks the right man.\"\n\n\n I let this sink in, then asked, \"What made you ask for a man in\n the first place, sir? I've always understood that your own staff\n represented some of the finest minds—\"", "He waved me silent. \"No connection at all, son. No, red tape was, well,\n involvement. Forms to be signed, certain factors to be considered,\n protocol to be dealt with, government agencies to be checked with,\n classifications, bureaus, sub-bureaus, congressional committees. It\n was impossible, Jery, my boy, to get anything done whatsoever without\n consulting someone else. And the time lag and paperwork involved made\n accurate and swift action impossible, sometimes. What we needed, of\n course, was a person who could simply have all authority, in order to\n save the sometimes disastrous delays. So we came up with the Amnesty.\"\n\n\n \"But the danger. If you should pick the wrong man—\"", "And well they might be. An Amnesty-bearer can suddenly decide a subject\n is not answering questions to his satisfaction and simply blast the\n annoying party to atoms. It makes for straight responses. Of course,\n I was dressing the part, in a way. I wore the Amnesty suspended by a\n thin golden chain from my neck, and for costume I wore a raven-black\n blouse and matching uniform trousers and boots. I must have looked\n quite sinister. I'm under six feet, but I'm angular and wiry. Thus,\n in ominous black, with an Amnesty on my breast and a collapser in\n my holster, I was a sight to strike even honest citizens into quick\n examinations of conscience. I felt a little silly, but the outfit was\n Baxter's idea.\n\n\n \"I understand you were aboard the\nPhobos II\nwhen the incident\n occurred?\" I said sternly, which was unusual for my wonted demeanor.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" he replied swiftly, at stiff attention.", "\"It is dangerous, of course, but it's vitally necessary. You're young,\n Jery Delvin, and even the finest history course available these days\n is slanted in favor of World Government. So you have no idea how tough\n things were before the Amnesty came along. Ever hear of red tape?\"\n\n\n I shook my head. \"No, I don't believe so. Unless it had something to do\n with the former communist menace? They called themselves the Reds, I\n believe....\"", "\"Jery Delvin,\" he read, musingly and dispassionately. \"Five foot eleven\n inches tall, brown hair, slate-gray eyes. Citizen. Honest, sober,\n civic-minded, slightly antisocial....\"\n\n\n He looked at me, questioningly.\n\n\n \"I'd rather not discuss that, sir, if you don't mind.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mind if I do mind?\"\n\n\n \"Oh ... Oh, well if you put it like that. It's girls, sir. They block\n my mind. Ruin my work.\"\n\n\n \"I don't get you.\"\n\n\n \"Well, in my job—See, I've got this gift. I'm a spotter.\"\n\n\n \"A what?\"\n\n\n \"A spotter. I can't be fooled. By advertising. Or mostly anything else.\n Except girls.\"", "\"No.\nMy\nmen are doing the work. Handpicked crews, day and night,\n have been sending those letters to the trusting mothers. It's been\n ghastly, Delvin. Hard on the men, terribly hard. Undotted\ni\n's,\n misuse of tenses, deliberate misspellings. They take it out of an\n adult, especially an adult with a mind keen enough to get him into\n Interplanetary Security. We've limited the shifts to four hours per man\n per day. Otherwise, they'd all be gibbering by now!\"\n\n\n \"And your men haven't found out anything?\" I marvelled.\n\n\n Baxter shook his head.\n\n\n \"And you finally had to resort to the Brain, and it gave you my name,\n but no reason for it?\"", "\"And,\" I said, beginning to be fascinated by his bewildered manner,\n \"what came out?\"\n\n\n He looked at me for a long moment, then picked up that brochure again,\n and said, without referring to it, \"Jery Delvin, five foot eleven\n inches tall—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but read me the part where it says why I was picked,\" I said, a\n little exasperated.\n\n\n Baxter eyed me balefully, then skimmed the brochure through the air in\n my direction. I caught it just short of the carpet.\n\n\n \"If you can find it, I'll read it!\" he said, almost snarling.\n\n\n I looked over the sheet, then turned it over and scanned the black\n opposite side. \"All it gives is my description, governmental status,\n and address!\"", "Baxter looked me square in the eye. \"Damned if I know!\"\n2\nI stared at him, nonplussed. He'd spoken with evidence of utmost\n candor, and the Chief of Interplanetary Security was not one to be\n accused of a friendly josh, but—\"You're kidding!\" I said. \"You must\n be. Otherwise, why was I sent for?\"\n\n\n \"Believe me, I wish I knew,\" he sighed. \"You were chosen, from all\n the inhabitants of this planet, and all the inhabitants of the Earth\n Colonies, by the Brain.\"\n\n\n \"You mean that International Cybernetics picked me for a mission?\n That's crazy, if you'll pardon me, sir.\"\n\n\n Baxter shrugged, and his genial smile was a bit tightly stretched.\n \"When the current emergency arose and all our usual methods failed, we\n had to submit the problem to the Brain.\"", "Baxter cupped his slightly jowled cheeks in his hands and propped his\n elbows on the desktop, suddenly slipping out of his high position to\n talk to me man-to-man. \"Look, son, an adding machine—which is a minor\n form of an electronic brain, and even works on the same principle—can\n tell you that two and two make four. But can it tell you why?\n\n\n \"Well, no, but—\"\n\n\n \"That, in a nutshell is our problem. We coded and fed to the Brain\n every shred of information at our disposal; the ages of the children,\n for instance, and all their physical attributes, and where they were\n last seen, and what they were wearing. Hell, everything! The machine\n took the factors, weighed them, popped them through its billions of\n relays and tubes, and out of the end of the answer slot popped a single\n sheet. The one you just saw. Your dossier.\"", "I started back for Interplanetary Security, and my second—and I hoped,\n last—interview with Chief Baxter. I had a slight inkling why the Brain\n had chosen me; because, in the affair of the missing Space Scouts, my\n infallible talent for spotting the True within the Apparent had come\n through nicely. I had found a very interesting clinker.\n4\n\"Strange,\" I remarked to Chief Baxter when I was seated once again in\n his office, opposite his newly replaced desk. \"I hardly acted like\n myself out at that airfield. I was brusque, highhanded, austere, almost\n malevolent with the pilot. And I'm ordinarily on the shy side, as a\n matter of fact.\"", "She was staring after me, open-mouthed, as the door slid neatly shut\n behind us.\n\n\n \"\nW-Will\nI be back?\" I asked desperately, as we waited for the\n elevator. \"At all? Am I under arrest? What's up, anyhow?\"\n\n\n \"You will be informed,\" said the man again. I had to let it go at that.\n Security men were not hired for their loquaciousness. They had a car\n waiting at the curb downstairs, in the No Parking zone. The cop on the\n beat very politely opened the door for them when we got there. Those\n red-and-bronze uniforms carry an awful lot of weight. Not to mention\n the golden bulk of their holstered collapsers.\n\n\n There was nothing for me to do but sweat it out and to try and enjoy\n the ride, wherever we were going.\n\"\nYou\nare Jery Delvin?\"", "It was only a fraction of an instant between the time I saw them and\n the time they spoke to me, but in that miniscule interval I managed\n to retrace quite a bit of my lifetime up till that moment, seeking\n vainly for some reason why they'd be standing there, so terribly and\n inflexibly efficient looking. Mostly, I ran back over all the ads I'd\n created and/or okayed for Solar Sales, Inc. during my five years with\n the firm, trying to see just where I'd gone and shaken the security\n of the government. I couldn't find anything really incriminating,\n unless maybe it was that hair dye that unexpectedly turned bright green\n after six weeks in the hair, but that was the lab's fault, not mine.\n So I managed a weak smile toward the duo, and tried not to sweat too\n profusely.\n\n\n \"Jery Delvin?\" said the one on my left, a note of no-funny-business in\n his brusque baritone.", "He stared, then frowned, and thought hard. \"Yes, sir,\" he said,\n after a minute. \"Even twice that, with no trouble, but—\" He caught\n himself short. It didn't pay to be too curious about the aims of an\n Amnesty-bearer.\n\n\n \"It's all right, Anders. You've been a tremendous help. Just one thing.\n When you left Mars, you took off from the night side, didn't you?\"\n\n\n \"Why, yes, I did, sir. But how did you—?\"\n\n\n \"No matter, Anders. That'll be all.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" He saluted sharply and started off.", "\"Yes, sir. Even my secretary, Marge, whom I'd never in a million years\n think of looking at twice, except for business reasons, of course, has\n to stay out of my office when I'm working, or I can't function.\"\n\n\n \"You have my sympathy, son,\" Baxter said, not unkindly.\n\n\n \"Thank you, sir. It hasn't been easy.\"\n\n\n \"No, I don't imagine it has....\" Baxter was staring into some far-off\n distance. Then he remembered himself and blinked back to the present.\n \"Delvin,\" he said sharply. \"I'll come right to the point. This thing\n is.... You have been chosen for an extremely important mission.\"\n\n\n I couldn't have been more surprised had he announced my incipient\n maternity, but I was able to ask, \"Me? For Pete's sake, why, sir?\"", "Yes, parting. I was on my own. After all, with a Security disc—the\n Amnesty, they called it—such as I possessed, and a collapser, I could\n go anywhere, do anything, commandeer anything I might need. All with\n no questions asked. Needless to say, I was feeling pretty chipper as I\n entered the hangar housing\nPhobos II\n. At the moment, I was the most\n influential human being in the known universe.\n\n\n The pilot, as per my videophoned request, was waiting there for me. I\n saw him as I stepped into the cool shadows of the building from the hot\n yellow sunlight outside. He was tall, much taller than I, but he seemed\n nervous as hell. At least he was pacing back and forth amid a litter\n of half-smoked cigarette butts beside the gleaming tailfins of the\n spaceship, and a fuming butt was puckered into place in his mouth.", "Baxter swore under his breath. Then he reached across the desktop and\n tossed me the Amnesty.", "\"You understand,\" said Baxter suddenly, \"that you're to say nothing\n whatever about the disappearance of the Space Scouts until this office\n makes the news public? You know what would happen if this thing should\n leak!\"\n\n\n The intercom on Baxter's desk suddenly buzzed, and a bright red light\n flashed on. \"Ah!\" he said, thumbing a knob. \"Here we go, at last!\"\n\n\n As he exerted pressure on the knob, a thin slit in the side of the\n intercom began feeding out a long sheet of paper; the new answer from\n the Brain. It reached a certain length, then was automatically sheared\n off within the intercom, and the sheet fell gently to the desktop.\n Baxter picked it up and swiftly scanned its surface. A look of dismay\n overrode his erstwhile genial features.\n\n\n I had a horrible suspicion. \"Not again?\" I said softly." ], [ "\"No.\nMy\nmen are doing the work. Handpicked crews, day and night,\n have been sending those letters to the trusting mothers. It's been\n ghastly, Delvin. Hard on the men, terribly hard. Undotted\ni\n's,\n misuse of tenses, deliberate misspellings. They take it out of an\n adult, especially an adult with a mind keen enough to get him into\n Interplanetary Security. We've limited the shifts to four hours per man\n per day. Otherwise, they'd all be gibbering by now!\"\n\n\n \"And your men haven't found out anything?\" I marvelled.\n\n\n Baxter shook his head.\n\n\n \"And you finally had to resort to the Brain, and it gave you my name,\n but no reason for it?\"", "I thought a second, then nodded. \"They've been having such a good time\n that the government extended their trip by—Why are you shaking your\n head that way, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Because it's not true, Delvin,\" he said. His voice was suddenly old\n and tired, and very much in keeping with his snowy hair. \"You see, the\n Space Scouts have vanished.\"\n\n\n I came up in the chair, ramrod-straight. \"Their mothers—they've been\n getting letters and—\"\n\n\n \"Forgeries, Fakes. Counterfeits.\"\n\n\n \"You mean whoever took the Scouts is falsifying—\"", "I folded gingerly at knees and hips and slid back into the chair,\n pressing my perspiring palms against the sides of my pants to get rid\n of their uncomfortably slippery feel. \"Thank you, sir.\"\n\n\n There was a silence, during which I breathed uneasily, and a bit too\n loudly. Baxter seemed to be trying to say something.\n\n\n \"I suppose you're wondering why I've called—\" he started, then stopped\n short and flushed with embarrassment. I felt a sympathetic hot wave\n flooding my own features. A copy chief in an advertising company almost\n always reacts to an obvious cliche.\n\n\n Then, with something like a look of relief on his blunt face, he\n snatched up a brochure from his kidney-shaped desktop and his eyes\n raced over the lettering on its face.", "Baxter cupped his slightly jowled cheeks in his hands and propped his\n elbows on the desktop, suddenly slipping out of his high position to\n talk to me man-to-man. \"Look, son, an adding machine—which is a minor\n form of an electronic brain, and even works on the same principle—can\n tell you that two and two make four. But can it tell you why?\n\n\n \"Well, no, but—\"\n\n\n \"That, in a nutshell is our problem. We coded and fed to the Brain\n every shred of information at our disposal; the ages of the children,\n for instance, and all their physical attributes, and where they were\n last seen, and what they were wearing. Hell, everything! The machine\n took the factors, weighed them, popped them through its billions of\n relays and tubes, and out of the end of the answer slot popped a single\n sheet. The one you just saw. Your dossier.\"", "Oddly enough, it worked out, and he now does nothing else. He says,\n \"I'd like to say I do this for fulfillment, or for cash, or because\n it's my destiny; however, the real reason (same as that expressed by\n Jean Kerr) is that this kind of stay-at-home self-employment lets me\n sleep late in the morning.\"\n1\nI was sitting at my desk, trying to decide how to tell the women of\n America that they were certain to be lovely in a Plasti-Flex brassiere\n without absolutely guaranteeing them anything, when the two security\n men came to get me. I didn't quite believe it at first, when I looked\n up and saw them, six-feet-plus of steel nerves and gimlet eyes, staring\n down at me, amidst my litter of sketches, crumpled copy sheets and\n deadline memos.", "\"Chow time, sir. That's when you expect to have the little—to have\n the kids in your hair, sir. Everyone wants his rations first—You know\n how kids are, sir. So I went to the galley and was about to open up\n the ration packs, when I noticed how damned quiet it was aboard. And\n especially funny that no one was in the galley waiting for me to start\n passing the stuff out.\"\n\n\n \"So you searched,\" I said.\n\n\n Anders nodded sorrowfully. \"Not a trace of 'em, sir. Just some of their\n junk left in their storage lockers.\"\n\n\n I raised my eyebrows. \"Really? I'd be interested in seeing this junk,\n Anders.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, sir. Right this way, sir. Watch out for these rungs, they're\n slippery.\"", "I sat back, feeling much better. \"That's right, sir.\"\n\n\n Then Baxter frowned again. \"But what's this about girls?\"\n\n\n \"They—they block my thinking, sir, that's all. Why, take that example\n I just mentioned. In plain writing, I caught the clinker in one-tenth\n of a second. Then they handed me a layout with a picture of a lawyer\n dictating notes to his secretary on it. Her legs were crossed. Nice\n legs. Gorgeous legs....\"\n\n\n \"How long that time, Delvin?\"\n\n\n \"Indefinite. Till they took the girl away, sir.\"\n\n\n Baxter cleared his throat loudly. \"I understand, at last. Hence your\n slight antisocial rating. You avoid women in order to keep your job.\"", "And well they might be. An Amnesty-bearer can suddenly decide a subject\n is not answering questions to his satisfaction and simply blast the\n annoying party to atoms. It makes for straight responses. Of course,\n I was dressing the part, in a way. I wore the Amnesty suspended by a\n thin golden chain from my neck, and for costume I wore a raven-black\n blouse and matching uniform trousers and boots. I must have looked\n quite sinister. I'm under six feet, but I'm angular and wiry. Thus,\n in ominous black, with an Amnesty on my breast and a collapser in\n my holster, I was a sight to strike even honest citizens into quick\n examinations of conscience. I felt a little silly, but the outfit was\n Baxter's idea.\n\n\n \"I understand you were aboard the\nPhobos II\nwhen the incident\n occurred?\" I said sternly, which was unusual for my wonted demeanor.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" he replied swiftly, at stiff attention.", "He stared, then frowned, and thought hard. \"Yes, sir,\" he said,\n after a minute. \"Even twice that, with no trouble, but—\" He caught\n himself short. It didn't pay to be too curious about the aims of an\n Amnesty-bearer.\n\n\n \"It's all right, Anders. You've been a tremendous help. Just one thing.\n When you left Mars, you took off from the night side, didn't you?\"\n\n\n \"Why, yes, I did, sir. But how did you—?\"\n\n\n \"No matter, Anders. That'll be all.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" He saluted sharply and started off.", "I ascended the retractable metal rungs that jutted from a point\n between the tailfins to the open airlock, twenty feet over ground\n level, and followed Anders inside the ship.\n\n\n I trailed Anders through the ship, from the pilot's compartment—a\n bewildering mass of dials, switches, signal lights and wire—through\n the galley into the troop section. It was a cramped cubicle housing a\n number of nylon-webbed foam rubber bunks. The bunks were empty, but I\n looked them over anyhow. I carefully tugged back the canvas covering\n that fitted envelope-fashion over a foam rubber pad, and ran my finger\n over the surface of the pad. It came away just slightly gritty.\n\n\n \"Uh-huh!\" I said, smiling. Anders just stared at me.\n\n\n I turned to the storage lockers. \"Let's see this junk they were\n suddenly deprived of.\"", "\"And,\" I said, beginning to be fascinated by his bewildered manner,\n \"what came out?\"\n\n\n He looked at me for a long moment, then picked up that brochure again,\n and said, without referring to it, \"Jery Delvin, five foot eleven\n inches tall—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but read me the part where it says why I was picked,\" I said, a\n little exasperated.\n\n\n Baxter eyed me balefully, then skimmed the brochure through the air in\n my direction. I caught it just short of the carpet.\n\n\n \"If you can find it, I'll read it!\" he said, almost snarling.\n\n\n I looked over the sheet, then turned it over and scanned the black\n opposite side. \"All it gives is my description, governmental status,\n and address!\"", "It was only a fraction of an instant between the time I saw them and\n the time they spoke to me, but in that miniscule interval I managed\n to retrace quite a bit of my lifetime up till that moment, seeking\n vainly for some reason why they'd be standing there, so terribly and\n inflexibly efficient looking. Mostly, I ran back over all the ads I'd\n created and/or okayed for Solar Sales, Inc. during my five years with\n the firm, trying to see just where I'd gone and shaken the security\n of the government. I couldn't find anything really incriminating,\n unless maybe it was that hair dye that unexpectedly turned bright green\n after six weeks in the hair, but that was the lab's fault, not mine.\n So I managed a weak smile toward the duo, and tried not to sweat too\n profusely.\n\n\n \"Jery Delvin?\" said the one on my left, a note of no-funny-business in\n his brusque baritone.", "\"I'm still not sure that I—\"\n\n\n \"It's like this. I designate ratios, by the minute. They hand me a new\n ad, and I read it by a stopwatch. Then, as soon as I spot the clinker,\n they stop the watch. If I get it in five seconds, it passes. But if I\n spot it in less, they throw it out and start over again. Or is that\n clear? No, I guess you're still confused, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Just a bit,\" Baxter said.\n\n\n I took a deep breath and tried again.\n\n\n \"Maybe an example would be better. Uh, you know the one about 'Three\n out of five New York lawyers use Hamilton Bond Paper for note-taking'?\"\n\n\n \"I've heard that, yes.\"", "\"Yes, sir. Even my secretary, Marge, whom I'd never in a million years\n think of looking at twice, except for business reasons, of course, has\n to stay out of my office when I'm working, or I can't function.\"\n\n\n \"You have my sympathy, son,\" Baxter said, not unkindly.\n\n\n \"Thank you, sir. It hasn't been easy.\"\n\n\n \"No, I don't imagine it has....\" Baxter was staring into some far-off\n distance. Then he remembered himself and blinked back to the present.\n \"Delvin,\" he said sharply. \"I'll come right to the point. This thing\n is.... You have been chosen for an extremely important mission.\"\n\n\n I couldn't have been more surprised had he announced my incipient\n maternity, but I was able to ask, \"Me? For Pete's sake, why, sir?\"", "\"Anders?\" I said, approaching to within five feet of him before\n halting, to get the best psychological effect from my appearance.\n\n\n He turned, saw me, and hurriedly spat the butt out onto the cement\n floor. \"Yes, sir!\" he said loudly, throwing me a quivering salute. His\n eyes were a bit wild as they took me in.", "\"You were telling about how this gesture, the WG sending these kids\n off for an extraterrestrial romp, will cement relations between those\n nations who have remained hostile despite the unification of all\n governments on Earth. Personally, I think it was a pretty good idea,\n myself. Everybody likes kids. Take this jam we were trying to push.\n Pomegranate Nectar, it was called. Well, sir, it just wouldn't sell,\n and then we got this red-headed kid with freckles like confetti all\n over his slightly bucktoothed face, and we—Sir?\"\n\n\n I'd paused, because he was staring at me like a man on the brink of\n apoplexy. I swallowed, and tried to look relaxed.\n\n\n After a moment, he found his voice. \"To go on, Delvin. Do you recall\n what happened to the Space Scouts last week?\"", "\"You understand,\" said Baxter suddenly, \"that you're to say nothing\n whatever about the disappearance of the Space Scouts until this office\n makes the news public? You know what would happen if this thing should\n leak!\"\n\n\n The intercom on Baxter's desk suddenly buzzed, and a bright red light\n flashed on. \"Ah!\" he said, thumbing a knob. \"Here we go, at last!\"\n\n\n As he exerted pressure on the knob, a thin slit in the side of the\n intercom began feeding out a long sheet of paper; the new answer from\n the Brain. It reached a certain length, then was automatically sheared\n off within the intercom, and the sheet fell gently to the desktop.\n Baxter picked it up and swiftly scanned its surface. A look of dismay\n overrode his erstwhile genial features.\n\n\n I had a horrible suspicion. \"Not again?\" I said softly.", "\"Uh-huh,\" Baxter grunted laconically. \"It amuses you, does it?\" The\n smile was still on his lips, but there was a grimness in the glitter of\n his narrowing eyes.\n\n\n \"Not really,\" I said hastily. \"It baffles me, to be frank.\"\n\n\n \"If you're sitting there in that hopeful stance awaiting some sort of\n explanation, you may as well relax,\" Baxter said shortly. \"I have none\n to make. IC had none to make. Damn it all to hell!\" He brought a meaty\n fist down on the desktop. \"No one has an explanation! All we know is\n that the Brain always picks the right man.\"\n\n\n I let this sink in, then asked, \"What made you ask for a man in\n the first place, sir? I've always understood that your own staff\n represented some of the finest minds—\"", "\"But that's impossible,\" I said, shaking my head against this\n disconcerting thought.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Baxter. \"That's what bothers me.\"\n3\nPhobos II\n, for obvious reasons, was berthed in a Top Security\n spaceport. Even so, they'd shuttled it into a hangar, safe from the\n eyes of even their own men, and as a final touch had hidden the ship's\n nameplate beneath magnetic repair-plates.\n\n\n I had a metal disk—bronze and red, the Security colors—insigniaed\n by Baxter and counterembossed with the President's special device, a\n small globe surmounted by clasping hands. It gave me authority to do\n anything. With such an identification disc, I could go to Times Square\n and start machine gunning the passers-by, and not one of New York's\n finest would raise a hand to stop me.", "\"... Yes,\" I said, some terrified portion of my mind waiting\n masochistically for them to draw their collapsers and reduce me to a\n heap of hot protons.\n\n\n \"Come with us,\" said his companion. I stared at him, then glanced\n hopelessly at the jumble of things on my desk. \"Never mind that stuff,\"\n he added.\n\n\n I rose from my place, slipped my jacket from its hook, and started\n across the office toward the door, each of them falling into rigid step\n beside me. Marge, my secretary, stood wide-eyed as we passed through\n her office, heading for the hall exit.\n\n\n \"Mr. Delvin,\" she said, her voice a wispy croak. \"When will you be\n back? The Plasti-Flex man is waiting for your—\"\n\n\n I opened my mouth, but one of the security men cut in.\n\n\n \"You will be informed,\" he said to Marge." ], [ "And well they might be. An Amnesty-bearer can suddenly decide a subject\n is not answering questions to his satisfaction and simply blast the\n annoying party to atoms. It makes for straight responses. Of course,\n I was dressing the part, in a way. I wore the Amnesty suspended by a\n thin golden chain from my neck, and for costume I wore a raven-black\n blouse and matching uniform trousers and boots. I must have looked\n quite sinister. I'm under six feet, but I'm angular and wiry. Thus,\n in ominous black, with an Amnesty on my breast and a collapser in\n my holster, I was a sight to strike even honest citizens into quick\n examinations of conscience. I felt a little silly, but the outfit was\n Baxter's idea.\n\n\n \"I understand you were aboard the\nPhobos II\nwhen the incident\n occurred?\" I said sternly, which was unusual for my wonted demeanor.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" he replied swiftly, at stiff attention.", "\"Jery Delvin,\" he read, musingly and dispassionately. \"Five foot eleven\n inches tall, brown hair, slate-gray eyes. Citizen. Honest, sober,\n civic-minded, slightly antisocial....\"\n\n\n He looked at me, questioningly.\n\n\n \"I'd rather not discuss that, sir, if you don't mind.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mind if I do mind?\"\n\n\n \"Oh ... Oh, well if you put it like that. It's girls, sir. They block\n my mind. Ruin my work.\"\n\n\n \"I don't get you.\"\n\n\n \"Well, in my job—See, I've got this gift. I'm a spotter.\"\n\n\n \"A what?\"\n\n\n \"A spotter. I can't be fooled. By advertising. Or mostly anything else.\n Except girls.\"", "\"Anders?\" I said, approaching to within five feet of him before\n halting, to get the best psychological effect from my appearance.\n\n\n He turned, saw me, and hurriedly spat the butt out onto the cement\n floor. \"Yes, sir!\" he said loudly, throwing me a quivering salute. His\n eyes were a bit wild as they took me in.", "Baxter smiled. \"No chance of that, Jery. We didn't leave it up to any\n committee or bureau or any other faction to do the picking. Hell, that\n would have put us right back where we'd been before. No, we left it up\n to the Brain. We'd find ourselves in a tight situation, and the Brain\n after being fed the data, would come up with either a solution, or a\n name.\"\n\n\n I stared at him. \"Then, when I was here before, I was here solely to\n receive the Amnesty, is that it?\"\n\n\n Baxter nodded. \"The Brain just picks the men. Then we tell the men the\n situation, hand over the Amnesty, and pray.\"\n\n\n I had a sudden thought. \"Say, what happens if two men are selected by\n the Brain? Who has authority over whom?\"", "Baxter grimaced and shivered. \"Don't even think such a thing! Even\n your mentioning such a contingency gives me a small migraine. It'd be\n unprecedented in the history of the Brain or the Amnesty.\" He grinned,\n suddenly. \"Besides, it can't happen. There's only one of these—\" he\n tapped the medallion gently \"—in existence, Jery. So we couldn't have\n such a situation!\"\n\n\n I sank back into the contour chair, and glanced at my watch. Much too\n late to go back to work. I'd done a lot in one day, I reasoned. Well,\n the thing was out of my hands. Baxter had the information I'd come\n up with, and it had been coded and fed to the Brain. As soon as the\n solution came through, I could be on my way back to the world of hard\n and soft sell.", "It was only a fraction of an instant between the time I saw them and\n the time they spoke to me, but in that miniscule interval I managed\n to retrace quite a bit of my lifetime up till that moment, seeking\n vainly for some reason why they'd be standing there, so terribly and\n inflexibly efficient looking. Mostly, I ran back over all the ads I'd\n created and/or okayed for Solar Sales, Inc. during my five years with\n the firm, trying to see just where I'd gone and shaken the security\n of the government. I couldn't find anything really incriminating,\n unless maybe it was that hair dye that unexpectedly turned bright green\n after six weeks in the hair, but that was the lab's fault, not mine.\n So I managed a weak smile toward the duo, and tried not to sweat too\n profusely.\n\n\n \"Jery Delvin?\" said the one on my left, a note of no-funny-business in\n his brusque baritone.", "She was staring after me, open-mouthed, as the door slid neatly shut\n behind us.\n\n\n \"\nW-Will\nI be back?\" I asked desperately, as we waited for the\n elevator. \"At all? Am I under arrest? What's up, anyhow?\"\n\n\n \"You will be informed,\" said the man again. I had to let it go at that.\n Security men were not hired for their loquaciousness. They had a car\n waiting at the curb downstairs, in the No Parking zone. The cop on the\n beat very politely opened the door for them when we got there. Those\n red-and-bronze uniforms carry an awful lot of weight. Not to mention\n the golden bulk of their holstered collapsers.\n\n\n There was nothing for me to do but sweat it out and to try and enjoy\n the ride, wherever we were going.\n\"\nYou\nare Jery Delvin?\"", "\"It's the Amnesty that does it,\" he said, gesturing toward the disc. It\n lay on his desk, now, along with the collapser. I felt, with the new\n information I'd garnered, that my work was done, and that the new data\n fed into the Brain would produce some other results, not involving me.\n\n\n I looked at the Amnesty, then nodded. \"Kind of gets you, after awhile.\n To know that you are the most influential person in creation is to\n automatically act the part. A shame, in a way.\"\n\n\n \"The hell it is!\" Baxter snapped. \"Good grief, man, why'd you think the\n Amnesty was created in the first place?\"\n\n\n I sat up straight and scratched the back of my head. \"Now you mention\n it, I really don't know. It seems a pretty dangerous thing to have\n about, the way people jump when they see it.\"", "\"It is dangerous, of course, but it's vitally necessary. You're young,\n Jery Delvin, and even the finest history course available these days\n is slanted in favor of World Government. So you have no idea how tough\n things were before the Amnesty came along. Ever hear of red tape?\"\n\n\n I shook my head. \"No, I don't believe so. Unless it had something to do\n with the former communist menace? They called themselves the Reds, I\n believe....\"", "Yes, parting. I was on my own. After all, with a Security disc—the\n Amnesty, they called it—such as I possessed, and a collapser, I could\n go anywhere, do anything, commandeer anything I might need. All with\n no questions asked. Needless to say, I was feeling pretty chipper as I\n entered the hangar housing\nPhobos II\n. At the moment, I was the most\n influential human being in the known universe.\n\n\n The pilot, as per my videophoned request, was waiting there for me. I\n saw him as I stepped into the cool shadows of the building from the hot\n yellow sunlight outside. He was tall, much taller than I, but he seemed\n nervous as hell. At least he was pacing back and forth amid a litter\n of half-smoked cigarette butts beside the gleaming tailfins of the\n spaceship, and a fuming butt was puckered into place in his mouth.", "He stared, then frowned, and thought hard. \"Yes, sir,\" he said,\n after a minute. \"Even twice that, with no trouble, but—\" He caught\n himself short. It didn't pay to be too curious about the aims of an\n Amnesty-bearer.\n\n\n \"It's all right, Anders. You've been a tremendous help. Just one thing.\n When you left Mars, you took off from the night side, didn't you?\"\n\n\n \"Why, yes, I did, sir. But how did you—?\"\n\n\n \"No matter, Anders. That'll be all.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" He saluted sharply and started off.", "He waved me silent. \"No connection at all, son. No, red tape was, well,\n involvement. Forms to be signed, certain factors to be considered,\n protocol to be dealt with, government agencies to be checked with,\n classifications, bureaus, sub-bureaus, congressional committees. It\n was impossible, Jery, my boy, to get anything done whatsoever without\n consulting someone else. And the time lag and paperwork involved made\n accurate and swift action impossible, sometimes. What we needed, of\n course, was a person who could simply have all authority, in order to\n save the sometimes disastrous delays. So we came up with the Amnesty.\"\n\n\n \"But the danger. If you should pick the wrong man—\"", "\"And,\" I said, beginning to be fascinated by his bewildered manner,\n \"what came out?\"\n\n\n He looked at me for a long moment, then picked up that brochure again,\n and said, without referring to it, \"Jery Delvin, five foot eleven\n inches tall—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but read me the part where it says why I was picked,\" I said, a\n little exasperated.\n\n\n Baxter eyed me balefully, then skimmed the brochure through the air in\n my direction. I caught it just short of the carpet.\n\n\n \"If you can find it, I'll read it!\" he said, almost snarling.\n\n\n I looked over the sheet, then turned it over and scanned the black\n opposite side. \"All it gives is my description, governmental status,\n and address!\"", "I started back for Interplanetary Security, and my second—and I hoped,\n last—interview with Chief Baxter. I had a slight inkling why the Brain\n had chosen me; because, in the affair of the missing Space Scouts, my\n infallible talent for spotting the True within the Apparent had come\n through nicely. I had found a very interesting clinker.\n4\n\"Strange,\" I remarked to Chief Baxter when I was seated once again in\n his office, opposite his newly replaced desk. \"I hardly acted like\n myself out at that airfield. I was brusque, highhanded, austere, almost\n malevolent with the pilot. And I'm ordinarily on the shy side, as a\n matter of fact.\"", "I folded gingerly at knees and hips and slid back into the chair,\n pressing my perspiring palms against the sides of my pants to get rid\n of their uncomfortably slippery feel. \"Thank you, sir.\"\n\n\n There was a silence, during which I breathed uneasily, and a bit too\n loudly. Baxter seemed to be trying to say something.\n\n\n \"I suppose you're wondering why I've called—\" he started, then stopped\n short and flushed with embarrassment. I felt a sympathetic hot wave\n flooding my own features. A copy chief in an advertising company almost\n always reacts to an obvious cliche.\n\n\n Then, with something like a look of relief on his blunt face, he\n snatched up a brochure from his kidney-shaped desktop and his eyes\n raced over the lettering on its face.", "\"... Yes,\" I said, some terrified portion of my mind waiting\n masochistically for them to draw their collapsers and reduce me to a\n heap of hot protons.\n\n\n \"Come with us,\" said his companion. I stared at him, then glanced\n hopelessly at the jumble of things on my desk. \"Never mind that stuff,\"\n he added.\n\n\n I rose from my place, slipped my jacket from its hook, and started\n across the office toward the door, each of them falling into rigid step\n beside me. Marge, my secretary, stood wide-eyed as we passed through\n her office, heading for the hall exit.\n\n\n \"Mr. Delvin,\" she said, her voice a wispy croak. \"When will you be\n back? The Plasti-Flex man is waiting for your—\"\n\n\n I opened my mouth, but one of the security men cut in.\n\n\n \"You will be informed,\" he said to Marge.", "\"Uh-huh,\" Baxter grunted laconically. \"It amuses you, does it?\" The\n smile was still on his lips, but there was a grimness in the glitter of\n his narrowing eyes.\n\n\n \"Not really,\" I said hastily. \"It baffles me, to be frank.\"\n\n\n \"If you're sitting there in that hopeful stance awaiting some sort of\n explanation, you may as well relax,\" Baxter said shortly. \"I have none\n to make. IC had none to make. Damn it all to hell!\" He brought a meaty\n fist down on the desktop. \"No one has an explanation! All we know is\n that the Brain always picks the right man.\"\n\n\n I let this sink in, then asked, \"What made you ask for a man in\n the first place, sir? I've always understood that your own staff\n represented some of the finest minds—\"", "Oddly enough, it worked out, and he now does nothing else. He says,\n \"I'd like to say I do this for fulfillment, or for cash, or because\n it's my destiny; however, the real reason (same as that expressed by\n Jean Kerr) is that this kind of stay-at-home self-employment lets me\n sleep late in the morning.\"\n1\nI was sitting at my desk, trying to decide how to tell the women of\n America that they were certain to be lovely in a Plasti-Flex brassiere\n without absolutely guaranteeing them anything, when the two security\n men came to get me. I didn't quite believe it at first, when I looked\n up and saw them, six-feet-plus of steel nerves and gimlet eyes, staring\n down at me, amidst my litter of sketches, crumpled copy sheets and\n deadline memos.", "I ascended the retractable metal rungs that jutted from a point\n between the tailfins to the open airlock, twenty feet over ground\n level, and followed Anders inside the ship.\n\n\n I trailed Anders through the ship, from the pilot's compartment—a\n bewildering mass of dials, switches, signal lights and wire—through\n the galley into the troop section. It was a cramped cubicle housing a\n number of nylon-webbed foam rubber bunks. The bunks were empty, but I\n looked them over anyhow. I carefully tugged back the canvas covering\n that fitted envelope-fashion over a foam rubber pad, and ran my finger\n over the surface of the pad. It came away just slightly gritty.\n\n\n \"Uh-huh!\" I said, smiling. Anders just stared at me.\n\n\n I turned to the storage lockers. \"Let's see this junk they were\n suddenly deprived of.\"", "And, snugly enholstered, I carried a collapser, the restricted weapon\n given only to Security Agents, so deadly was its molecule-disrupting\n beam. Baxter had spent a tremulous hour showing me how to use the\n weapon, and especially how to turn the beam off. I'd finally gotten the\n hang of it, though not before half his kidney-shaped desk had flashed\n into nothingness, along with a good-sized swath of carpeting and six\n inches of concrete floor.\n\n\n His parting injunction had been. \"Be careful, Delvin, huh?\"" ], [ "He waved me silent. \"No connection at all, son. No, red tape was, well,\n involvement. Forms to be signed, certain factors to be considered,\n protocol to be dealt with, government agencies to be checked with,\n classifications, bureaus, sub-bureaus, congressional committees. It\n was impossible, Jery, my boy, to get anything done whatsoever without\n consulting someone else. And the time lag and paperwork involved made\n accurate and swift action impossible, sometimes. What we needed, of\n course, was a person who could simply have all authority, in order to\n save the sometimes disastrous delays. So we came up with the Amnesty.\"\n\n\n \"But the danger. If you should pick the wrong man—\"", "\"It's the Amnesty that does it,\" he said, gesturing toward the disc. It\n lay on his desk, now, along with the collapser. I felt, with the new\n information I'd garnered, that my work was done, and that the new data\n fed into the Brain would produce some other results, not involving me.\n\n\n I looked at the Amnesty, then nodded. \"Kind of gets you, after awhile.\n To know that you are the most influential person in creation is to\n automatically act the part. A shame, in a way.\"\n\n\n \"The hell it is!\" Baxter snapped. \"Good grief, man, why'd you think the\n Amnesty was created in the first place?\"\n\n\n I sat up straight and scratched the back of my head. \"Now you mention\n it, I really don't know. It seems a pretty dangerous thing to have\n about, the way people jump when they see it.\"", "And well they might be. An Amnesty-bearer can suddenly decide a subject\n is not answering questions to his satisfaction and simply blast the\n annoying party to atoms. It makes for straight responses. Of course,\n I was dressing the part, in a way. I wore the Amnesty suspended by a\n thin golden chain from my neck, and for costume I wore a raven-black\n blouse and matching uniform trousers and boots. I must have looked\n quite sinister. I'm under six feet, but I'm angular and wiry. Thus,\n in ominous black, with an Amnesty on my breast and a collapser in\n my holster, I was a sight to strike even honest citizens into quick\n examinations of conscience. I felt a little silly, but the outfit was\n Baxter's idea.\n\n\n \"I understand you were aboard the\nPhobos II\nwhen the incident\n occurred?\" I said sternly, which was unusual for my wonted demeanor.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" he replied swiftly, at stiff attention.", "Baxter grimaced and shivered. \"Don't even think such a thing! Even\n your mentioning such a contingency gives me a small migraine. It'd be\n unprecedented in the history of the Brain or the Amnesty.\" He grinned,\n suddenly. \"Besides, it can't happen. There's only one of these—\" he\n tapped the medallion gently \"—in existence, Jery. So we couldn't have\n such a situation!\"\n\n\n I sank back into the contour chair, and glanced at my watch. Much too\n late to go back to work. I'd done a lot in one day, I reasoned. Well,\n the thing was out of my hands. Baxter had the information I'd come\n up with, and it had been coded and fed to the Brain. As soon as the\n solution came through, I could be on my way back to the world of hard\n and soft sell.", "Baxter swore under his breath. Then he reached across the desktop and\n tossed me the Amnesty.", "Baxter smiled. \"No chance of that, Jery. We didn't leave it up to any\n committee or bureau or any other faction to do the picking. Hell, that\n would have put us right back where we'd been before. No, we left it up\n to the Brain. We'd find ourselves in a tight situation, and the Brain\n after being fed the data, would come up with either a solution, or a\n name.\"\n\n\n I stared at him. \"Then, when I was here before, I was here solely to\n receive the Amnesty, is that it?\"\n\n\n Baxter nodded. \"The Brain just picks the men. Then we tell the men the\n situation, hand over the Amnesty, and pray.\"\n\n\n I had a sudden thought. \"Say, what happens if two men are selected by\n the Brain? Who has authority over whom?\"", "\"It is dangerous, of course, but it's vitally necessary. You're young,\n Jery Delvin, and even the finest history course available these days\n is slanted in favor of World Government. So you have no idea how tough\n things were before the Amnesty came along. Ever hear of red tape?\"\n\n\n I shook my head. \"No, I don't believe so. Unless it had something to do\n with the former communist menace? They called themselves the Reds, I\n believe....\"", "He stared, then frowned, and thought hard. \"Yes, sir,\" he said,\n after a minute. \"Even twice that, with no trouble, but—\" He caught\n himself short. It didn't pay to be too curious about the aims of an\n Amnesty-bearer.\n\n\n \"It's all right, Anders. You've been a tremendous help. Just one thing.\n When you left Mars, you took off from the night side, didn't you?\"\n\n\n \"Why, yes, I did, sir. But how did you—?\"\n\n\n \"No matter, Anders. That'll be all.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" He saluted sharply and started off.", "Yes, parting. I was on my own. After all, with a Security disc—the\n Amnesty, they called it—such as I possessed, and a collapser, I could\n go anywhere, do anything, commandeer anything I might need. All with\n no questions asked. Needless to say, I was feeling pretty chipper as I\n entered the hangar housing\nPhobos II\n. At the moment, I was the most\n influential human being in the known universe.\n\n\n The pilot, as per my videophoned request, was waiting there for me. I\n saw him as I stepped into the cool shadows of the building from the hot\n yellow sunlight outside. He was tall, much taller than I, but he seemed\n nervous as hell. At least he was pacing back and forth amid a litter\n of half-smoked cigarette butts beside the gleaming tailfins of the\n spaceship, and a fuming butt was puckered into place in his mouth.", "Baxter cupped his slightly jowled cheeks in his hands and propped his\n elbows on the desktop, suddenly slipping out of his high position to\n talk to me man-to-man. \"Look, son, an adding machine—which is a minor\n form of an electronic brain, and even works on the same principle—can\n tell you that two and two make four. But can it tell you why?\n\n\n \"Well, no, but—\"\n\n\n \"That, in a nutshell is our problem. We coded and fed to the Brain\n every shred of information at our disposal; the ages of the children,\n for instance, and all their physical attributes, and where they were\n last seen, and what they were wearing. Hell, everything! The machine\n took the factors, weighed them, popped them through its billions of\n relays and tubes, and out of the end of the answer slot popped a single\n sheet. The one you just saw. Your dossier.\"", "\"Uh-huh,\" Baxter grunted laconically. \"It amuses you, does it?\" The\n smile was still on his lips, but there was a grimness in the glitter of\n his narrowing eyes.\n\n\n \"Not really,\" I said hastily. \"It baffles me, to be frank.\"\n\n\n \"If you're sitting there in that hopeful stance awaiting some sort of\n explanation, you may as well relax,\" Baxter said shortly. \"I have none\n to make. IC had none to make. Damn it all to hell!\" He brought a meaty\n fist down on the desktop. \"No one has an explanation! All we know is\n that the Brain always picks the right man.\"\n\n\n I let this sink in, then asked, \"What made you ask for a man in\n the first place, sir? I've always understood that your own staff\n represented some of the finest minds—\"", "\"You were telling about how this gesture, the WG sending these kids\n off for an extraterrestrial romp, will cement relations between those\n nations who have remained hostile despite the unification of all\n governments on Earth. Personally, I think it was a pretty good idea,\n myself. Everybody likes kids. Take this jam we were trying to push.\n Pomegranate Nectar, it was called. Well, sir, it just wouldn't sell,\n and then we got this red-headed kid with freckles like confetti all\n over his slightly bucktoothed face, and we—Sir?\"\n\n\n I'd paused, because he was staring at me like a man on the brink of\n apoplexy. I swallowed, and tried to look relaxed.\n\n\n After a moment, he found his voice. \"To go on, Delvin. Do you recall\n what happened to the Space Scouts last week?\"", "\"And,\" I said, beginning to be fascinated by his bewildered manner,\n \"what came out?\"\n\n\n He looked at me for a long moment, then picked up that brochure again,\n and said, without referring to it, \"Jery Delvin, five foot eleven\n inches tall—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but read me the part where it says why I was picked,\" I said, a\n little exasperated.\n\n\n Baxter eyed me balefully, then skimmed the brochure through the air in\n my direction. I caught it just short of the carpet.\n\n\n \"If you can find it, I'll read it!\" he said, almost snarling.\n\n\n I looked over the sheet, then turned it over and scanned the black\n opposite side. \"All it gives is my description, governmental status,\n and address!\"", "\"You understand,\" said Baxter suddenly, \"that you're to say nothing\n whatever about the disappearance of the Space Scouts until this office\n makes the news public? You know what would happen if this thing should\n leak!\"\n\n\n The intercom on Baxter's desk suddenly buzzed, and a bright red light\n flashed on. \"Ah!\" he said, thumbing a knob. \"Here we go, at last!\"\n\n\n As he exerted pressure on the knob, a thin slit in the side of the\n intercom began feeding out a long sheet of paper; the new answer from\n the Brain. It reached a certain length, then was automatically sheared\n off within the intercom, and the sheet fell gently to the desktop.\n Baxter picked it up and swiftly scanned its surface. A look of dismay\n overrode his erstwhile genial features.\n\n\n I had a horrible suspicion. \"Not again?\" I said softly.", "\"No.\nMy\nmen are doing the work. Handpicked crews, day and night,\n have been sending those letters to the trusting mothers. It's been\n ghastly, Delvin. Hard on the men, terribly hard. Undotted\ni\n's,\n misuse of tenses, deliberate misspellings. They take it out of an\n adult, especially an adult with a mind keen enough to get him into\n Interplanetary Security. We've limited the shifts to four hours per man\n per day. Otherwise, they'd all be gibbering by now!\"\n\n\n \"And your men haven't found out anything?\" I marvelled.\n\n\n Baxter shook his head.\n\n\n \"And you finally had to resort to the Brain, and it gave you my name,\n but no reason for it?\"", "\"And you recall the recent government-sponsored trip they had? To Mars\n and back, with the broadly-smiling government picking up the enormous\n tab?\"\n\n\n I detected a tinge of cynicism in his tone, but said nothing.\n\n\n \"What a gesture!\" Baxter went on, hardly speaking directly to me at\n all. \"Inter-nation harmony! Good will! If these mere boys can get\n together and travel the voids of space, then so can everyone else! Why\n should there be tensions between the various nations comprising the\n World Government, when there's none between these fine lads, one from\n every civilized nation on Earth?\"\n\n\n \"You sound disillusioned, sir,\" I interjected.\n\n\n He stared at me as though I'd just fallen in from the ceiling or\n somewhere. \"Huh? Oh, yes, Delvin, isn't it? Sorry, I got carried away.\n Where was I?\"", "\"... Yes,\" I said, some terrified portion of my mind waiting\n masochistically for them to draw their collapsers and reduce me to a\n heap of hot protons.\n\n\n \"Come with us,\" said his companion. I stared at him, then glanced\n hopelessly at the jumble of things on my desk. \"Never mind that stuff,\"\n he added.\n\n\n I rose from my place, slipped my jacket from its hook, and started\n across the office toward the door, each of them falling into rigid step\n beside me. Marge, my secretary, stood wide-eyed as we passed through\n her office, heading for the hall exit.\n\n\n \"Mr. Delvin,\" she said, her voice a wispy croak. \"When will you be\n back? The Plasti-Flex man is waiting for your—\"\n\n\n I opened my mouth, but one of the security men cut in.\n\n\n \"You will be informed,\" he said to Marge.", "\"Jery Delvin,\" he read, musingly and dispassionately. \"Five foot eleven\n inches tall, brown hair, slate-gray eyes. Citizen. Honest, sober,\n civic-minded, slightly antisocial....\"\n\n\n He looked at me, questioningly.\n\n\n \"I'd rather not discuss that, sir, if you don't mind.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mind if I do mind?\"\n\n\n \"Oh ... Oh, well if you put it like that. It's girls, sir. They block\n my mind. Ruin my work.\"\n\n\n \"I don't get you.\"\n\n\n \"Well, in my job—See, I've got this gift. I'm a spotter.\"\n\n\n \"A what?\"\n\n\n \"A spotter. I can't be fooled. By advertising. Or mostly anything else.\n Except girls.\"", "\"Hold it, son. Perhaps I didn't make myself clear. We asked for no man.\n We asked for a solution to an important problem. And your name was what\n we got. You, son, are the solution.\"\n\n\n Chief of Security or not, I was getting a little burned up at his\n highhanded treatment of my emotions. \"How nice!\" I said icily. \"Now if\n I only knew the problem!\"\n\n\n Baxter blinked, then lost some of his scowl. \"Yes, of course;\" Baxter\n murmured, lighting up a cigar. He blew a plume of blue smoke toward the\n ceiling, then continued. \"You've heard, of course, of the Space Scouts?\"\n\n\n I nodded. \"Like the old-time Boy Scouts, only with rocket-names for\n their various troops in place of the old animal names.\"", "\"But that's impossible,\" I said, shaking my head against this\n disconcerting thought.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Baxter. \"That's what bothers me.\"\n3\nPhobos II\n, for obvious reasons, was berthed in a Top Security\n spaceport. Even so, they'd shuttled it into a hangar, safe from the\n eyes of even their own men, and as a final touch had hidden the ship's\n nameplate beneath magnetic repair-plates.\n\n\n I had a metal disk—bronze and red, the Security colors—insigniaed\n by Baxter and counterembossed with the President's special device, a\n small globe surmounted by clasping hands. It gave me authority to do\n anything. With such an identification disc, I could go to Times Square\n and start machine gunning the passers-by, and not one of New York's\n finest would raise a hand to stop me." ], [ "\"It's the Amnesty that does it,\" he said, gesturing toward the disc. It\n lay on his desk, now, along with the collapser. I felt, with the new\n information I'd garnered, that my work was done, and that the new data\n fed into the Brain would produce some other results, not involving me.\n\n\n I looked at the Amnesty, then nodded. \"Kind of gets you, after awhile.\n To know that you are the most influential person in creation is to\n automatically act the part. A shame, in a way.\"\n\n\n \"The hell it is!\" Baxter snapped. \"Good grief, man, why'd you think the\n Amnesty was created in the first place?\"\n\n\n I sat up straight and scratched the back of my head. \"Now you mention\n it, I really don't know. It seems a pretty dangerous thing to have\n about, the way people jump when they see it.\"", "He waved me silent. \"No connection at all, son. No, red tape was, well,\n involvement. Forms to be signed, certain factors to be considered,\n protocol to be dealt with, government agencies to be checked with,\n classifications, bureaus, sub-bureaus, congressional committees. It\n was impossible, Jery, my boy, to get anything done whatsoever without\n consulting someone else. And the time lag and paperwork involved made\n accurate and swift action impossible, sometimes. What we needed, of\n course, was a person who could simply have all authority, in order to\n save the sometimes disastrous delays. So we came up with the Amnesty.\"\n\n\n \"But the danger. If you should pick the wrong man—\"", "And well they might be. An Amnesty-bearer can suddenly decide a subject\n is not answering questions to his satisfaction and simply blast the\n annoying party to atoms. It makes for straight responses. Of course,\n I was dressing the part, in a way. I wore the Amnesty suspended by a\n thin golden chain from my neck, and for costume I wore a raven-black\n blouse and matching uniform trousers and boots. I must have looked\n quite sinister. I'm under six feet, but I'm angular and wiry. Thus,\n in ominous black, with an Amnesty on my breast and a collapser in\n my holster, I was a sight to strike even honest citizens into quick\n examinations of conscience. I felt a little silly, but the outfit was\n Baxter's idea.\n\n\n \"I understand you were aboard the\nPhobos II\nwhen the incident\n occurred?\" I said sternly, which was unusual for my wonted demeanor.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" he replied swiftly, at stiff attention.", "\"It is dangerous, of course, but it's vitally necessary. You're young,\n Jery Delvin, and even the finest history course available these days\n is slanted in favor of World Government. So you have no idea how tough\n things were before the Amnesty came along. Ever hear of red tape?\"\n\n\n I shook my head. \"No, I don't believe so. Unless it had something to do\n with the former communist menace? They called themselves the Reds, I\n believe....\"", "Baxter smiled. \"No chance of that, Jery. We didn't leave it up to any\n committee or bureau or any other faction to do the picking. Hell, that\n would have put us right back where we'd been before. No, we left it up\n to the Brain. We'd find ourselves in a tight situation, and the Brain\n after being fed the data, would come up with either a solution, or a\n name.\"\n\n\n I stared at him. \"Then, when I was here before, I was here solely to\n receive the Amnesty, is that it?\"\n\n\n Baxter nodded. \"The Brain just picks the men. Then we tell the men the\n situation, hand over the Amnesty, and pray.\"\n\n\n I had a sudden thought. \"Say, what happens if two men are selected by\n the Brain? Who has authority over whom?\"", "Baxter swore under his breath. Then he reached across the desktop and\n tossed me the Amnesty.", "He stared, then frowned, and thought hard. \"Yes, sir,\" he said,\n after a minute. \"Even twice that, with no trouble, but—\" He caught\n himself short. It didn't pay to be too curious about the aims of an\n Amnesty-bearer.\n\n\n \"It's all right, Anders. You've been a tremendous help. Just one thing.\n When you left Mars, you took off from the night side, didn't you?\"\n\n\n \"Why, yes, I did, sir. But how did you—?\"\n\n\n \"No matter, Anders. That'll be all.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" He saluted sharply and started off.", "Baxter grimaced and shivered. \"Don't even think such a thing! Even\n your mentioning such a contingency gives me a small migraine. It'd be\n unprecedented in the history of the Brain or the Amnesty.\" He grinned,\n suddenly. \"Besides, it can't happen. There's only one of these—\" he\n tapped the medallion gently \"—in existence, Jery. So we couldn't have\n such a situation!\"\n\n\n I sank back into the contour chair, and glanced at my watch. Much too\n late to go back to work. I'd done a lot in one day, I reasoned. Well,\n the thing was out of my hands. Baxter had the information I'd come\n up with, and it had been coded and fed to the Brain. As soon as the\n solution came through, I could be on my way back to the world of hard\n and soft sell.", "Yes, parting. I was on my own. After all, with a Security disc—the\n Amnesty, they called it—such as I possessed, and a collapser, I could\n go anywhere, do anything, commandeer anything I might need. All with\n no questions asked. Needless to say, I was feeling pretty chipper as I\n entered the hangar housing\nPhobos II\n. At the moment, I was the most\n influential human being in the known universe.\n\n\n The pilot, as per my videophoned request, was waiting there for me. I\n saw him as I stepped into the cool shadows of the building from the hot\n yellow sunlight outside. He was tall, much taller than I, but he seemed\n nervous as hell. At least he was pacing back and forth amid a litter\n of half-smoked cigarette butts beside the gleaming tailfins of the\n spaceship, and a fuming butt was puckered into place in his mouth.", "\"And,\" I said, beginning to be fascinated by his bewildered manner,\n \"what came out?\"\n\n\n He looked at me for a long moment, then picked up that brochure again,\n and said, without referring to it, \"Jery Delvin, five foot eleven\n inches tall—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but read me the part where it says why I was picked,\" I said, a\n little exasperated.\n\n\n Baxter eyed me balefully, then skimmed the brochure through the air in\n my direction. I caught it just short of the carpet.\n\n\n \"If you can find it, I'll read it!\" he said, almost snarling.\n\n\n I looked over the sheet, then turned it over and scanned the black\n opposite side. \"All it gives is my description, governmental status,\n and address!\"", "\"You were telling about how this gesture, the WG sending these kids\n off for an extraterrestrial romp, will cement relations between those\n nations who have remained hostile despite the unification of all\n governments on Earth. Personally, I think it was a pretty good idea,\n myself. Everybody likes kids. Take this jam we were trying to push.\n Pomegranate Nectar, it was called. Well, sir, it just wouldn't sell,\n and then we got this red-headed kid with freckles like confetti all\n over his slightly bucktoothed face, and we—Sir?\"\n\n\n I'd paused, because he was staring at me like a man on the brink of\n apoplexy. I swallowed, and tried to look relaxed.\n\n\n After a moment, he found his voice. \"To go on, Delvin. Do you recall\n what happened to the Space Scouts last week?\"", "\"Uh-huh,\" Baxter grunted laconically. \"It amuses you, does it?\" The\n smile was still on his lips, but there was a grimness in the glitter of\n his narrowing eyes.\n\n\n \"Not really,\" I said hastily. \"It baffles me, to be frank.\"\n\n\n \"If you're sitting there in that hopeful stance awaiting some sort of\n explanation, you may as well relax,\" Baxter said shortly. \"I have none\n to make. IC had none to make. Damn it all to hell!\" He brought a meaty\n fist down on the desktop. \"No one has an explanation! All we know is\n that the Brain always picks the right man.\"\n\n\n I let this sink in, then asked, \"What made you ask for a man in\n the first place, sir? I've always understood that your own staff\n represented some of the finest minds—\"", "\"Hold it, son. Perhaps I didn't make myself clear. We asked for no man.\n We asked for a solution to an important problem. And your name was what\n we got. You, son, are the solution.\"\n\n\n Chief of Security or not, I was getting a little burned up at his\n highhanded treatment of my emotions. \"How nice!\" I said icily. \"Now if\n I only knew the problem!\"\n\n\n Baxter blinked, then lost some of his scowl. \"Yes, of course;\" Baxter\n murmured, lighting up a cigar. He blew a plume of blue smoke toward the\n ceiling, then continued. \"You've heard, of course, of the Space Scouts?\"\n\n\n I nodded. \"Like the old-time Boy Scouts, only with rocket-names for\n their various troops in place of the old animal names.\"", "\"No.\nMy\nmen are doing the work. Handpicked crews, day and night,\n have been sending those letters to the trusting mothers. It's been\n ghastly, Delvin. Hard on the men, terribly hard. Undotted\ni\n's,\n misuse of tenses, deliberate misspellings. They take it out of an\n adult, especially an adult with a mind keen enough to get him into\n Interplanetary Security. We've limited the shifts to four hours per man\n per day. Otherwise, they'd all be gibbering by now!\"\n\n\n \"And your men haven't found out anything?\" I marvelled.\n\n\n Baxter shook his head.\n\n\n \"And you finally had to resort to the Brain, and it gave you my name,\n but no reason for it?\"", "\"And you recall the recent government-sponsored trip they had? To Mars\n and back, with the broadly-smiling government picking up the enormous\n tab?\"\n\n\n I detected a tinge of cynicism in his tone, but said nothing.\n\n\n \"What a gesture!\" Baxter went on, hardly speaking directly to me at\n all. \"Inter-nation harmony! Good will! If these mere boys can get\n together and travel the voids of space, then so can everyone else! Why\n should there be tensions between the various nations comprising the\n World Government, when there's none between these fine lads, one from\n every civilized nation on Earth?\"\n\n\n \"You sound disillusioned, sir,\" I interjected.\n\n\n He stared at me as though I'd just fallen in from the ceiling or\n somewhere. \"Huh? Oh, yes, Delvin, isn't it? Sorry, I got carried away.\n Where was I?\"", "I thought a second, then nodded. \"They've been having such a good time\n that the government extended their trip by—Why are you shaking your\n head that way, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Because it's not true, Delvin,\" he said. His voice was suddenly old\n and tired, and very much in keeping with his snowy hair. \"You see, the\n Space Scouts have vanished.\"\n\n\n I came up in the chair, ramrod-straight. \"Their mothers—they've been\n getting letters and—\"\n\n\n \"Forgeries, Fakes. Counterfeits.\"\n\n\n \"You mean whoever took the Scouts is falsifying—\"", "It was only a fraction of an instant between the time I saw them and\n the time they spoke to me, but in that miniscule interval I managed\n to retrace quite a bit of my lifetime up till that moment, seeking\n vainly for some reason why they'd be standing there, so terribly and\n inflexibly efficient looking. Mostly, I ran back over all the ads I'd\n created and/or okayed for Solar Sales, Inc. during my five years with\n the firm, trying to see just where I'd gone and shaken the security\n of the government. I couldn't find anything really incriminating,\n unless maybe it was that hair dye that unexpectedly turned bright green\n after six weeks in the hair, but that was the lab's fault, not mine.\n So I managed a weak smile toward the duo, and tried not to sweat too\n profusely.\n\n\n \"Jery Delvin?\" said the one on my left, a note of no-funny-business in\n his brusque baritone.", "Baxter cupped his slightly jowled cheeks in his hands and propped his\n elbows on the desktop, suddenly slipping out of his high position to\n talk to me man-to-man. \"Look, son, an adding machine—which is a minor\n form of an electronic brain, and even works on the same principle—can\n tell you that two and two make four. But can it tell you why?\n\n\n \"Well, no, but—\"\n\n\n \"That, in a nutshell is our problem. We coded and fed to the Brain\n every shred of information at our disposal; the ages of the children,\n for instance, and all their physical attributes, and where they were\n last seen, and what they were wearing. Hell, everything! The machine\n took the factors, weighed them, popped them through its billions of\n relays and tubes, and out of the end of the answer slot popped a single\n sheet. The one you just saw. Your dossier.\"", "\"But that's impossible,\" I said, shaking my head against this\n disconcerting thought.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Baxter. \"That's what bothers me.\"\n3\nPhobos II\n, for obvious reasons, was berthed in a Top Security\n spaceport. Even so, they'd shuttled it into a hangar, safe from the\n eyes of even their own men, and as a final touch had hidden the ship's\n nameplate beneath magnetic repair-plates.\n\n\n I had a metal disk—bronze and red, the Security colors—insigniaed\n by Baxter and counterembossed with the President's special device, a\n small globe surmounted by clasping hands. It gave me authority to do\n anything. With such an identification disc, I could go to Times Square\n and start machine gunning the passers-by, and not one of New York's\n finest would raise a hand to stop me.", "The man who spoke seemed more than surprised; he seemed stunned. His\n voice held an incredulous squeak, a squeak which would have amazed his\n subordinates. It certainly amazed me. Because the speaker was Philip\n Baxter, Chief of Interplanetary Security, second only to the World\n President in power, and not even that in matters of security. I managed\n to nod.\n\n\n He shook his white-maned head, slowly. \"I don't believe it.\"\n\n\n \"But I am, sir,\" I insisted doggedly.\n\n\n Baxter pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes for a moment,\n then sighed, grinned wryly, and waggled an index finger at an empty\n plastic contour chair.\n\n\n \"I guess maybe you are at that, son. Sit down, sit down.\"" ], [ "\"No. It's saved, sir. It gets distilled and stored for washing and\n drinking. Otherwise, we'd all dehydrate, with no water to replace the\n water we lost.\"\n\n\n \"Check the tanks,\" I said.\n\n\n Anders, shaking his head, moved into the pilot's section and looked at\n a dial there. \"Full, sir. But that's because I didn't drink very much,\n and any sweating I did—which was a hell of a lot, in this case—was a\n source of new water for the tanks.\"\n\n\n \"Uh-huh.\" I paused and considered. \"I suppose the tubing for these\n tanks is all over the ship? In all the hollow bulkhead space, to take\n up the moisture fast?\"\n\n\n Anders, hopelessly lost, could only nod wearily.\n\n\n \"Would it hold—\" I did some quick mental arithmetic—\"let's say, about\n twenty-four extra cubic feet?\"", "I ascended the retractable metal rungs that jutted from a point\n between the tailfins to the open airlock, twenty feet over ground\n level, and followed Anders inside the ship.\n\n\n I trailed Anders through the ship, from the pilot's compartment—a\n bewildering mass of dials, switches, signal lights and wire—through\n the galley into the troop section. It was a cramped cubicle housing a\n number of nylon-webbed foam rubber bunks. The bunks were empty, but I\n looked them over anyhow. I carefully tugged back the canvas covering\n that fitted envelope-fashion over a foam rubber pad, and ran my finger\n over the surface of the pad. It came away just slightly gritty.\n\n\n \"Uh-huh!\" I said, smiling. Anders just stared at me.\n\n\n I turned to the storage lockers. \"Let's see this junk they were\n suddenly deprived of.\"", "Anders, after a puzzled frown, obediently threw open the doors of\n the riveted tiers of metal boxes along the rear wall; the wall next\n to the firing chambers, which I had no particular desire to visit. I\n glanced inside at the articles therein, and noted with interest their\n similarity.\n\n\n \"Now, then,\" I resumed, \"the thrust of this rocket to get from Mars to\n Earth is calculated with regard to the mass on board, is that correct?\"\n He nodded. \"Good, that clears up an important point. I'd also like to\n know if this rocket has a dehumidifying system to keep the cast-off\n moisture from the passengers out of the air?\"\n\n\n \"Well, sure, sir!\" said Anders. \"Otherwise, we'd all be swimming in our\n own sweat after a ten-hour trip across space!\"\n\n\n \"Have you checked the storage tanks?\" I asked. \"Or is the cast-off\n perspiration simply jetted into space?\"", "\"Chow time, sir. That's when you expect to have the little—to have\n the kids in your hair, sir. Everyone wants his rations first—You know\n how kids are, sir. So I went to the galley and was about to open up\n the ration packs, when I noticed how damned quiet it was aboard. And\n especially funny that no one was in the galley waiting for me to start\n passing the stuff out.\"\n\n\n \"So you searched,\" I said.\n\n\n Anders nodded sorrowfully. \"Not a trace of 'em, sir. Just some of their\n junk left in their storage lockers.\"\n\n\n I raised my eyebrows. \"Really? I'd be interested in seeing this junk,\n Anders.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, sir. Right this way, sir. Watch out for these rungs, they're\n slippery.\"", "It was only a fraction of an instant between the time I saw them and\n the time they spoke to me, but in that miniscule interval I managed\n to retrace quite a bit of my lifetime up till that moment, seeking\n vainly for some reason why they'd be standing there, so terribly and\n inflexibly efficient looking. Mostly, I ran back over all the ads I'd\n created and/or okayed for Solar Sales, Inc. during my five years with\n the firm, trying to see just where I'd gone and shaken the security\n of the government. I couldn't find anything really incriminating,\n unless maybe it was that hair dye that unexpectedly turned bright green\n after six weeks in the hair, but that was the lab's fault, not mine.\n So I managed a weak smile toward the duo, and tried not to sweat too\n profusely.\n\n\n \"Jery Delvin?\" said the one on my left, a note of no-funny-business in\n his brusque baritone.", "She was staring after me, open-mouthed, as the door slid neatly shut\n behind us.\n\n\n \"\nW-Will\nI be back?\" I asked desperately, as we waited for the\n elevator. \"At all? Am I under arrest? What's up, anyhow?\"\n\n\n \"You will be informed,\" said the man again. I had to let it go at that.\n Security men were not hired for their loquaciousness. They had a car\n waiting at the curb downstairs, in the No Parking zone. The cop on the\n beat very politely opened the door for them when we got there. Those\n red-and-bronze uniforms carry an awful lot of weight. Not to mention\n the golden bulk of their holstered collapsers.\n\n\n There was nothing for me to do but sweat it out and to try and enjoy\n the ride, wherever we were going.\n\"\nYou\nare Jery Delvin?\"", "Jery Delvin had a most unusual talent. He could detect the flaws in\n any scheme almost on sight—even where they had eluded the best brains\n in the ad agency where he worked. So when the Chief of World Security\n told him that he had been selected as the answer to the Solar System's\n greatest mystery, Jery assumed that it was because of his mental\n agility.\n\n\n But when he got to Mars to find out why fifteen boys had vanished from\n a spaceship in mid-space, he found out that even his quick mind needed\n time to pierce the maze of out-of-this-world double-dealing. For Jery\n had become a walking bomb, and when he set himself off, it would be the\n end of the whole puzzle of THE SECRET MARTIANS—with Jery as the first\n to go!", "Baxter cupped his slightly jowled cheeks in his hands and propped his\n elbows on the desktop, suddenly slipping out of his high position to\n talk to me man-to-man. \"Look, son, an adding machine—which is a minor\n form of an electronic brain, and even works on the same principle—can\n tell you that two and two make four. But can it tell you why?\n\n\n \"Well, no, but—\"\n\n\n \"That, in a nutshell is our problem. We coded and fed to the Brain\n every shred of information at our disposal; the ages of the children,\n for instance, and all their physical attributes, and where they were\n last seen, and what they were wearing. Hell, everything! The machine\n took the factors, weighed them, popped them through its billions of\n relays and tubes, and out of the end of the answer slot popped a single\n sheet. The one you just saw. Your dossier.\"", "He stared, then frowned, and thought hard. \"Yes, sir,\" he said,\n after a minute. \"Even twice that, with no trouble, but—\" He caught\n himself short. It didn't pay to be too curious about the aims of an\n Amnesty-bearer.\n\n\n \"It's all right, Anders. You've been a tremendous help. Just one thing.\n When you left Mars, you took off from the night side, didn't you?\"\n\n\n \"Why, yes, I did, sir. But how did you—?\"\n\n\n \"No matter, Anders. That'll be all.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" He saluted sharply and started off.", "Baxter grimaced and shivered. \"Don't even think such a thing! Even\n your mentioning such a contingency gives me a small migraine. It'd be\n unprecedented in the history of the Brain or the Amnesty.\" He grinned,\n suddenly. \"Besides, it can't happen. There's only one of these—\" he\n tapped the medallion gently \"—in existence, Jery. So we couldn't have\n such a situation!\"\n\n\n I sank back into the contour chair, and glanced at my watch. Much too\n late to go back to work. I'd done a lot in one day, I reasoned. Well,\n the thing was out of my hands. Baxter had the information I'd come\n up with, and it had been coded and fed to the Brain. As soon as the\n solution came through, I could be on my way back to the world of hard\n and soft sell.", "\"Anders?\" I said, approaching to within five feet of him before\n halting, to get the best psychological effect from my appearance.\n\n\n He turned, saw me, and hurriedly spat the butt out onto the cement\n floor. \"Yes, sir!\" he said loudly, throwing me a quivering salute. His\n eyes were a bit wild as they took me in.", "\"... Yes,\" I said, some terrified portion of my mind waiting\n masochistically for them to draw their collapsers and reduce me to a\n heap of hot protons.\n\n\n \"Come with us,\" said his companion. I stared at him, then glanced\n hopelessly at the jumble of things on my desk. \"Never mind that stuff,\"\n he added.\n\n\n I rose from my place, slipped my jacket from its hook, and started\n across the office toward the door, each of them falling into rigid step\n beside me. Marge, my secretary, stood wide-eyed as we passed through\n her office, heading for the hall exit.\n\n\n \"Mr. Delvin,\" she said, her voice a wispy croak. \"When will you be\n back? The Plasti-Flex man is waiting for your—\"\n\n\n I opened my mouth, but one of the security men cut in.\n\n\n \"You will be informed,\" he said to Marge.", "I folded gingerly at knees and hips and slid back into the chair,\n pressing my perspiring palms against the sides of my pants to get rid\n of their uncomfortably slippery feel. \"Thank you, sir.\"\n\n\n There was a silence, during which I breathed uneasily, and a bit too\n loudly. Baxter seemed to be trying to say something.\n\n\n \"I suppose you're wondering why I've called—\" he started, then stopped\n short and flushed with embarrassment. I felt a sympathetic hot wave\n flooding my own features. A copy chief in an advertising company almost\n always reacts to an obvious cliche.\n\n\n Then, with something like a look of relief on his blunt face, he\n snatched up a brochure from his kidney-shaped desktop and his eyes\n raced over the lettering on its face.", "Yes, parting. I was on my own. After all, with a Security disc—the\n Amnesty, they called it—such as I possessed, and a collapser, I could\n go anywhere, do anything, commandeer anything I might need. All with\n no questions asked. Needless to say, I was feeling pretty chipper as I\n entered the hangar housing\nPhobos II\n. At the moment, I was the most\n influential human being in the known universe.\n\n\n The pilot, as per my videophoned request, was waiting there for me. I\n saw him as I stepped into the cool shadows of the building from the hot\n yellow sunlight outside. He was tall, much taller than I, but he seemed\n nervous as hell. At least he was pacing back and forth amid a litter\n of half-smoked cigarette butts beside the gleaming tailfins of the\n spaceship, and a fuming butt was puckered into place in his mouth.", "\"Jery Delvin,\" he read, musingly and dispassionately. \"Five foot eleven\n inches tall, brown hair, slate-gray eyes. Citizen. Honest, sober,\n civic-minded, slightly antisocial....\"\n\n\n He looked at me, questioningly.\n\n\n \"I'd rather not discuss that, sir, if you don't mind.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mind if I do mind?\"\n\n\n \"Oh ... Oh, well if you put it like that. It's girls, sir. They block\n my mind. Ruin my work.\"\n\n\n \"I don't get you.\"\n\n\n \"Well, in my job—See, I've got this gift. I'm a spotter.\"\n\n\n \"A what?\"\n\n\n \"A spotter. I can't be fooled. By advertising. Or mostly anything else.\n Except girls.\"", "And well they might be. An Amnesty-bearer can suddenly decide a subject\n is not answering questions to his satisfaction and simply blast the\n annoying party to atoms. It makes for straight responses. Of course,\n I was dressing the part, in a way. I wore the Amnesty suspended by a\n thin golden chain from my neck, and for costume I wore a raven-black\n blouse and matching uniform trousers and boots. I must have looked\n quite sinister. I'm under six feet, but I'm angular and wiry. Thus,\n in ominous black, with an Amnesty on my breast and a collapser in\n my holster, I was a sight to strike even honest citizens into quick\n examinations of conscience. I felt a little silly, but the outfit was\n Baxter's idea.\n\n\n \"I understand you were aboard the\nPhobos II\nwhen the incident\n occurred?\" I said sternly, which was unusual for my wonted demeanor.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" he replied swiftly, at stiff attention.", "\"And,\" I said, beginning to be fascinated by his bewildered manner,\n \"what came out?\"\n\n\n He looked at me for a long moment, then picked up that brochure again,\n and said, without referring to it, \"Jery Delvin, five foot eleven\n inches tall—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but read me the part where it says why I was picked,\" I said, a\n little exasperated.\n\n\n Baxter eyed me balefully, then skimmed the brochure through the air in\n my direction. I caught it just short of the carpet.\n\n\n \"If you can find it, I'll read it!\" he said, almost snarling.\n\n\n I looked over the sheet, then turned it over and scanned the black\n opposite side. \"All it gives is my description, governmental status,\n and address!\"", "\"It is dangerous, of course, but it's vitally necessary. You're young,\n Jery Delvin, and even the finest history course available these days\n is slanted in favor of World Government. So you have no idea how tough\n things were before the Amnesty came along. Ever hear of red tape?\"\n\n\n I shook my head. \"No, I don't believe so. Unless it had something to do\n with the former communist menace? They called themselves the Reds, I\n believe....\"", "\"You understand,\" said Baxter suddenly, \"that you're to say nothing\n whatever about the disappearance of the Space Scouts until this office\n makes the news public? You know what would happen if this thing should\n leak!\"\n\n\n The intercom on Baxter's desk suddenly buzzed, and a bright red light\n flashed on. \"Ah!\" he said, thumbing a knob. \"Here we go, at last!\"\n\n\n As he exerted pressure on the knob, a thin slit in the side of the\n intercom began feeding out a long sheet of paper; the new answer from\n the Brain. It reached a certain length, then was automatically sheared\n off within the intercom, and the sheet fell gently to the desktop.\n Baxter picked it up and swiftly scanned its surface. A look of dismay\n overrode his erstwhile genial features.\n\n\n I had a horrible suspicion. \"Not again?\" I said softly.", "And, snugly enholstered, I carried a collapser, the restricted weapon\n given only to Security Agents, so deadly was its molecule-disrupting\n beam. Baxter had spent a tremulous hour showing me how to use the\n weapon, and especially how to turn the beam off. I'd finally gotten the\n hang of it, though not before half his kidney-shaped desk had flashed\n into nothingness, along with a good-sized swath of carpeting and six\n inches of concrete floor.\n\n\n His parting injunction had been. \"Be careful, Delvin, huh?\"" ] ]
train	50988	[ "Why were the extraterrestrials not enchanted by Gabriel Lockard like the rest of the humans that were present?", "Why did most of the men and women have a young appearance?", "Why did Gabe tell the girl that he was with that he had never before seen the nondescript man, though the two clearly knew each other?", "Why was zarquil not played often by those in the area?", "Why did the odd beings from the seventh plant only want interstellar credits?", "Why was it unheard of to issue an effective prison sentence to the zarquil operators?", "Why was the ugly man constantly chasing after Gabe?", "What was the purpose of the ugly man seeming to guard Gabe?", "Why must only the healthy play zarquil?" ]	[ [ "They were more enchanted by the girl with him. ", "They were too intoxicated to care. ", "They saw all humans as the same.", "They found him appaling." ], [ "Because of science that could starve off decay.", "Because of plastic surgery. ", "Because of the freeze in time. ", "Because of the allurement of the atmosphere. " ], [ "He had never met the man in person. ", "He had not actually seen that man with the new face", "He had not wanted her to know the truth. ", "He had not recognized the man at that time, because of his intoxication. " ], [ "It was an illegal game. ", "It was only played by Dutchmen.", "It was fabulously expensive. ", "It was dangerous." ], [ "So that they could buy slaves.", "So that they could return to Vinau and buy slaves. ", "To buy booze any time they desired. ", "So that they could return to Vinau." ], [ "The operators were above the law", "The operators were too difficult to contain in a prison ", "The operators lived significantly long lives ", "The laws were difficult to enforce and harder to uphold" ], [ "He was actually after Gabe's wife.", "He wanted his body back.", "He wanted some of Gabe's money. ", "He was only following him by coincidence. " ], [ "He was actually guarding Gabe's wife.", "He felt affection towards Gabe. ", "He chose to be near for money. ", "He didn't want his body damaged." ], [ "Only healthy bodies can be accepted in the games.", "The games are dangerous and only those in the best health can survive. ", "Health is a form of wealth in the game of zarquil.", "There are no health restrictions on the game. " ] ]	[ 3, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 2, 4, 1 ]	[ 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Everyone in the room was aware of the big young man, and most of the\n humans present were resentful, for he handled himself consciously and\n arrogantly, as if his appearance alone were enough to make him superior\n to anyone. Even the girl with him was growing restless, for she was\n accustomed to adulation herself, and next to Gabriel Lockard she was\n almost ordinary-looking.\n\n\n As for the extraterrestrials—it was a free bar—they were merely\n amused, since to them all men were pathetically and irredeemably\n hideous.\n\n\n Gabe threw his arm wide in one of his expansive gestures. There was a\n short man standing next to the pair—young, as most men and women were\n in that time, thanks to the science which could stave off decay, though\n not death—but with no other apparent physical virtue, for plastic\n surgery had not fulfilled its bright promise of the twentieth century.", "Gabe opened his eyes and saw the fat man gazing down at him\n speculatively. \"My guardian angel,\" he mumbled—shock had sobered him\n a little, but not enough. He sat up. \"Guess I'm not hurt or you'd have\n thrown me back in.\"\n\n\n \"And that's no joke,\" the fat man agreed.\n\n\n The girl shivered and at that moment Gabriel suddenly seemed to recall\n that he had not been alone. \"How about Helen? She on course?\"\n\n\n \"Seems to be,\" the fat man said. \"You all right, miss?\" he asked,\n glancing toward the girl without, she thought, much apparent concern.\n\n\n \"\nMrs.\n,\" Gabriel corrected. \"Allow me to introduce you to Mrs. Gabriel\n Lockard,\" he said, bowing from his seated position toward the girl.\n \"Pretty bauble, isn't she?\"", "\"I'm delighted to meet you, Mrs. Gabriel Lockard,\" the fat man said,\n looking at her intently. His small eyes seemed to strip the make-up\n from her cheek and examine the livid bruise underneath. \"I hope\n you'll be worthy of the name.\" The light given off by the flaming\n car flickered on his face and Gabriel's and, she supposed, hers too.\n Otherwise, darkness surrounded the three of them.\n\n\n There were no public illuminators this far out—even in town the\n lights were dimming and not being replaced fast enough nor by the\n newer models. The town, the civilization, the planet all were old and\n beginning to slide downhill....", "\"Look, Gabe,\" the girl said, \"don't try to fool me! I know you\n too well. And I know you have that man's—the real Gabriel\n Lockard's—body.\" She put unnecessary stardust on her nose as she\n watched her husband's reflection in the dressing table mirror.\n\n\n Lockard—Lockard's body, at any rate—sat up and felt his unshaven\n chin. \"That what he tell you?\"\n\n\n \"No, he didn't tell me anything really—just suggested I ask you\n whatever I want to know. But why else should he guard somebody he\n obviously hates the way he hates you? Only because he doesn't want to\n see his body spoiled.\"\n\n\n \"It\nis\na pretty good body, isn't it?\" Gabe flexed softening muscles\n and made no attempt to deny her charge; very probably he was relieved\n at having someone with whom to share his secret.", "And that, coming on top of Gabriel Lockard's spectacular appearance,\n was too much. The ugly man picked up the drink the bartender had just\n set before him and started to hurl it, glass and all, into Lockard's\n handsome face.\nSuddenly a restraining hand was laid upon his arm. \"Don't do that,\" the\n nondescript man who had been sitting in the corner advised. He removed\n the glass from the little man's slackening grasp. \"You wouldn't want to\n go to jail because of him.\"\n\n\n The ugly man gave him a bewildered stare. Then, seeing the forces\n now ranged against him—including his own belated prudence—were too\n strong, he stumbled off. He hadn't really wanted to fight, only to\n smash back, and now it was too late for that.\n\n\n Gabe studied the newcomer curiously. \"So, it's you again?\"", "\"Ask your husband.\"\n\n\n The original Gabriel Lockard looked down at the prostrate,\n snow-powdered figure of the man who had stolen his body and his name,\n and stirred it with his toe. \"I'd better call a cab—he might freeze to\n death.\"\n\n\n He signaled and a cab came.\n\n\n \"Tell him, when he comes to,\" he said to the girl as he and the driver\n lifted the heavy form of her husband into the helicar, \"that I'm\n getting pretty tired of this.\" He stopped for a long spell of coughing.\n \"Tell him that sometimes I wonder whether cutting off my nose wouldn't,\n in the long run, be most beneficial for my face.\"\n\"Sorry,\" the Vinzz said impersonally, in English that was perfect\n except for the slight dampening of the sibilants, \"but I'm afraid you\n cannot play.\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" The emaciated young man began to put on his clothes.", "\"Not as good as it must have been,\" the girl said, turning and looking\n at him without admiration. \"Not if you keep on the way you're coursing.\n Gabe, why don't you...?\"\n\n\n \"Give it back to him, eh?\" Lockard regarded his wife appraisingly.\n \"You'd like that, wouldn't you? You'd be\nhis\nwife then. That would be\n nice—a sound mind in a sound body. But don't you think that's a little\n more than you deserve?\"", "The would-be thief fled down the dark alley, with the hot bright rays\n from the stranger's gun lancing out after him in flamboyant but futile\n patterns. The stranger, a thin young man with delicate, angular\n features, made no attempt to follow. Instead, he bent over to examine\n Gabriel Lockard's form, appropriately outstretched in the gutter. \"Only\n weighted out,\" he muttered, \"he'll be all right. Whatever possessed you\n two to come out to a place like this?\"\n\n\n \"I really think Gabriel\nmust\nbe possessed....\" the girl said, mostly\n to herself. \"I had no idea of the kind of place it was going to be\n until he brought me here. The others were bad, but this is even worse.\n It almost seems as if he went around looking for trouble, doesn't it?\"", "\"This isn't a good body,\" he said. \"It's diseased. Sure, nobody's\n supposed to play the game who hasn't passed a thorough medical\n examination. But in the places to which your husband has been leading\n me, they're often not too particular, as long as the player has plenty\n of foliage.\"\n\n\n \"How—long will it last you?\"\n\n\n \"Four or five months, if I'm careful.\" He smiled. \"But don't worry, if\n that's what you're doing; I'll get it passed on before then. It'll be\n expensive—that's all. Bad landing for the guy who gets it, but then\n it was tough on me too, wasn't it?\"\n\n\n \"But how did you get into this ... pursuit?\" she asked again. \"And why\n are you doing it?\" People didn't have any traffic with Gabriel Lockard\n for fun, not after they got to know him. And this man certainly should\n know him better than most.", "seventh planet cared nothing for the welfare of the completely alien\n human beings; all they wanted was to feather their own pockets with\n interstellar credits, so that they could return to Vinau and buy many\n slaves. For, on Vinau, bodies were of little account, and so to them\n zarquil was the equivalent of the terrestrial game musical chairs.\n Which was why they came to Terra to make profits—there has never been\n big money in musical chairs as such.", "Overhead a tiny star seemed to detach itself from the pale flat disk\n of the Moon and hurl itself upward—one of the interstellar ships\n embarking on its long voyage to distant suns. She wished that somehow\n she could be on it, but she was here, on this solitary old world in a\n barren solar system, with her unconscious husband and a strange man who\n followed them, and it looked as if here she would stay ... all three of\n them would stay....\n\n\n \"If you're after Gabriel, planning to hurt him,\" she asked, \"why then\n do you keep helping him?\"\n\n\n \"I am not helping\nhim\n. And he knows that.\"\n\n\n \"You'll change again tonight, won't you?\" she babbled. \"You always\n change after you ... meet us? I think I'm beginning to be able to\n identify you now, even when you're ... wearing a new body; there's\n something about you that doesn't change.\"", "He shrugged. \"I never saw him before in my life.\" Of course, knowing\n him, she assumed he was lying, but, as a matter of fact, just then he\n happened to have been telling the truth.\nOnce the illuminators were extinguished in Gabriel Lockard's hotel\n suite, it seemed reasonably certain to the man in the gray suit, as\n he watched from the street, that his quarry would not go out again\n that night. So he went to the nearest airstation. There he inserted a\n coin in a locker, into which he put most of his personal possessions,\n reserving only a sum of money. After setting the locker to respond to\n the letter combination\nbodyguard\n, he went out into the street.\n\n\n If he had met with a fatal accident at that point, there would have\n been nothing on his body to identify him. As a matter of fact, no real\n identification was possible, for he was no one and had been no one for\n years.", "Fortunately the car was flying low, contrary to regulations, so that\n when they smashed into the beacon tower on the outskirts of the little\n town, they didn't have far to fall. And hardly had their car crashed\n on the ground when the car that had been following them landed, and a\n short fat man was puffing toward them through the mist.\n\n\n To the girl's indignation, the stranger not only hauled Gabe out onto\n the dripping grass first, but stopped and deliberately examined the\n young man by the light of his minilume, almost as if she weren't there\n at all. Only when she started to struggle out by herself did he seem to\n remember her existence. He pulled her away from the wreck just a moment\n before the fuel tank exploded and the 'copter went up in flames.", "\"You saved our lives,\" the girl said. \"I'd like to give you some token\n of my—of our appreciation.\" Her hand reached toward her credit-carrier\n with deliberate insult. He might have saved her life, but only\n casually, as a by-product of some larger scheme, and her appreciation\n held little gratitude.\n\n\n The fat man shook his head without rancor. \"I have plenty of money,\n thank you, Mrs. Gabriel Lockard.... Come,\" he addressed her husband,\n \"if you get up, I'll drive you home. I warn you, be more careful in the\n future! Sometimes,\" he added musingly, \"I almost wish you would let\n something happen. Then my problem would not be any problem, would it?\"", "When the zarquil operators were apprehended, which was not frequent—as\n they had strange powers, which, not being definable, were beyond the\n law—they suffered their sentences with equanimity. No Earth court\n could give an effective prison sentence to a creature whose life\n spanned approximately two thousand terrestrial years. And capital\n punishment had become obsolete on Terra, which very possibly saved the\n terrestrials embarrassment, for it was not certain that their weapons\n could kill the Vinzz ... or whether, in fact, the Vinzz merely expired\n after a period of years out of sheer boredom. Fortunately, because\n trade was more profitable than war, there had always been peace between\n Vinau and Terra, and, for that reason, Terra could not bar the entrance\n of apparently respectable citizens of a friendly planet.", "\"Then what they say about the zarquil games is true? There are people\n who go around changing their bodies like—like hats?\" Automatically she\n reached to adjust the expensive bit of blue synthetic on her moon-pale\n hair, for she was always conscious of her appearance; if she had not\n been so before marriage, Gabriel would have taught her that.\nHe smiled again, but coughed instead of speaking.\n\n\n \"But why do you do it?\nWhy!\nDo you like it? Or is it because of\n Gabriel?\" She was growing a little frantic; there was menace here\n and she could not understand it nor determine whether or not she was\n included in its scope. \"Do you want to keep him from recognizing you;\n is that it?\"\n\n\n \"Ask him.\"", "Gabriel shivered. \"I'll be careful,\" he vowed. \"I promise—I'll be\n careful.\"\nWhen he was sure that his charge was safely tucked in for the night,\n the fat man checked his personal possessions. He then requested a taxi\n driver to take him to the nearest zarquil game. The driver accepted the\n commission phlegmatically. Perhaps he was more hardened than the others\n had been; perhaps he was unaware that the fat man was not a desperate\n or despairing individual seeking one last chance, but what was known\n colloquially as a flying dutchman, a man, or woman, who went from\n one zarquil game to another, loving the thrill of the sport, if you\n could call it that, for its own sake, and not for the futile hope it\n extended and which was its sole shred of claim to moral justification.\n Perhaps—and this was the most likely hypothesis—he just didn't care.", "\"We do a lot of business here,\" he said unnecessarily, for the whole\n set-up spelled wealth far beyond the dreams of the man, and he was by\n no means poor when it came to worldly goods. \"Why don't you try another\n town where they're not so particular?\"\n\n\n The young man smiled wryly. Just his luck to stumble on a sunny game.\n He never liked to risk following his quarry in the same configuration.\n And even though only the girl had actually seen him this time, he\n wouldn't feel at ease until he had made the usual body-shift. Was\n he changing because of Gabriel, he wondered, or was he using his own\n discoverment and identification simply as an excuse to cover the fact\n that none of the bodies that fell to his lot ever seemed to fit him?\n Was he activated solely by revenge or as much by the hope that in the\n hazards of the game he might, impossible though it now seemed, some day\n win another body that approached perfection as nearly as his original\n casing had?", "\"Too bad he got married,\" the young man said. \"I could have followed\n him for an eternity and he would never have been able to pick me out\n from the crowd. Too bad he got married anyway,\" he added, his voice\n less impersonal, \"for your sake.\"\n\n\n She had come to the same conclusion in her six months of marriage, but\n she would not admit that to an outsider. Though this man was hardly an\n outsider; he was part of their small family group—as long as she had\n known Gabriel, so long he must have known her. And she began to suspect\n that he was even more closely involved than that.\n\n\n \"Why must you change again?\" she persisted, obliquely approaching the\n subject she feared. \"You have a pretty good body there. Why run the\n risk of getting a bad one?\"", "There was no change of expression on the man's gaunt face, and she\n wondered how much control he had over a body that, though second- or\n third- or fourth-hand, must be new to him. How well could he make it\n respond? What was it like to step into another person's casing? But she\n must not let herself think that way or she would find herself looking\n for a zarquil game. It would be one way of escaping Gabriel, but not,\n she thought, the best way; her body was much too good a one to risk so\n casually.\nIt was beginning to snow. Light, feathery flakes drifted down on her\n husband's immobile body. She pulled her thick coat—of fur taken from\n some animal who had lived and died light-years away—more closely about\n herself. The thin young man began to cough again." ], [ "Everyone in the room was aware of the big young man, and most of the\n humans present were resentful, for he handled himself consciously and\n arrogantly, as if his appearance alone were enough to make him superior\n to anyone. Even the girl with him was growing restless, for she was\n accustomed to adulation herself, and next to Gabriel Lockard she was\n almost ordinary-looking.\n\n\n As for the extraterrestrials—it was a free bar—they were merely\n amused, since to them all men were pathetically and irredeemably\n hideous.\n\n\n Gabe threw his arm wide in one of his expansive gestures. There was a\n short man standing next to the pair—young, as most men and women were\n in that time, thanks to the science which could stave off decay, though\n not death—but with no other apparent physical virtue, for plastic\n surgery had not fulfilled its bright promise of the twentieth century.", "\"Too bad he got married,\" the young man said. \"I could have followed\n him for an eternity and he would never have been able to pick me out\n from the crowd. Too bad he got married anyway,\" he added, his voice\n less impersonal, \"for your sake.\"\n\n\n She had come to the same conclusion in her six months of marriage, but\n she would not admit that to an outsider. Though this man was hardly an\n outsider; he was part of their small family group—as long as she had\n known Gabriel, so long he must have known her. And she began to suspect\n that he was even more closely involved than that.\n\n\n \"Why must you change again?\" she persisted, obliquely approaching the\n subject she feared. \"You have a pretty good body there. Why run the\n risk of getting a bad one?\"", "\"We do a lot of business here,\" he said unnecessarily, for the whole\n set-up spelled wealth far beyond the dreams of the man, and he was by\n no means poor when it came to worldly goods. \"Why don't you try another\n town where they're not so particular?\"\n\n\n The young man smiled wryly. Just his luck to stumble on a sunny game.\n He never liked to risk following his quarry in the same configuration.\n And even though only the girl had actually seen him this time, he\n wouldn't feel at ease until he had made the usual body-shift. Was\n he changing because of Gabriel, he wondered, or was he using his own\n discoverment and identification simply as an excuse to cover the fact\n that none of the bodies that fell to his lot ever seemed to fit him?\n Was he activated solely by revenge or as much by the hope that in the\n hazards of the game he might, impossible though it now seemed, some day\n win another body that approached perfection as nearly as his original\n casing had?", "\"I don't want to know!\" he spat. \"I wouldn't want it if I could get\n it back. Whoever it adhered to probably killed himself as soon as he\n looked in a mirror.\" He swung long legs over the side of his bed.\n \"Christ, anything would be better than that! You can't imagine what a\n hulk I had!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, I can,\" she said incautiously. \"You must have had a body to\n match your character. Pity you could only change one.\"", "There was no change of expression on the man's gaunt face, and she\n wondered how much control he had over a body that, though second- or\n third- or fourth-hand, must be new to him. How well could he make it\n respond? What was it like to step into another person's casing? But she\n must not let herself think that way or she would find herself looking\n for a zarquil game. It would be one way of escaping Gabriel, but not,\n she thought, the best way; her body was much too good a one to risk so\n casually.\nIt was beginning to snow. Light, feathery flakes drifted down on her\n husband's immobile body. She pulled her thick coat—of fur taken from\n some animal who had lived and died light-years away—more closely about\n herself. The thin young man began to cough again.", "\"It does indeed,\" the stranger agreed, coughing a little. It was\n growing colder and, on this world, the cities had no domes to protect\n them from the climate, because it was Earth and the air was breathable\n and it wasn't worth the trouble of fixing up.\n\n\n The girl looked closely at him. \"You look different, but you\nare\nthe\n same man who pulled us out of that aircar crash, aren't you? And before\n that the man in the gray suit? And before that...?\"\n\n\n The young man's cheekbones protruded as he smiled. \"Yes, I'm all of\n them.\"", "\"Then what they say about the zarquil games is true? There are people\n who go around changing their bodies like—like hats?\" Automatically she\n reached to adjust the expensive bit of blue synthetic on her moon-pale\n hair, for she was always conscious of her appearance; if she had not\n been so before marriage, Gabriel would have taught her that.\nHe smiled again, but coughed instead of speaking.\n\n\n \"But why do you do it?\nWhy!\nDo you like it? Or is it because of\n Gabriel?\" She was growing a little frantic; there was menace here\n and she could not understand it nor determine whether or not she was\n included in its scope. \"Do you want to keep him from recognizing you;\n is that it?\"\n\n\n \"Ask him.\"", "\"I'm delighted to meet you, Mrs. Gabriel Lockard,\" the fat man said,\n looking at her intently. His small eyes seemed to strip the make-up\n from her cheek and examine the livid bruise underneath. \"I hope\n you'll be worthy of the name.\" The light given off by the flaming\n car flickered on his face and Gabriel's and, she supposed, hers too.\n Otherwise, darkness surrounded the three of them.\n\n\n There were no public illuminators this far out—even in town the\n lights were dimming and not being replaced fast enough nor by the\n newer models. The town, the civilization, the planet all were old and\n beginning to slide downhill....", "Fortunately the car was flying low, contrary to regulations, so that\n when they smashed into the beacon tower on the outskirts of the little\n town, they didn't have far to fall. And hardly had their car crashed\n on the ground when the car that had been following them landed, and a\n short fat man was puffing toward them through the mist.\n\n\n To the girl's indignation, the stranger not only hauled Gabe out onto\n the dripping grass first, but stopped and deliberately examined the\n young man by the light of his minilume, almost as if she weren't there\n at all. Only when she started to struggle out by herself did he seem to\n remember her existence. He pulled her away from the wreck just a moment\n before the fuel tank exploded and the 'copter went up in flames.", "Gabe opened his eyes and saw the fat man gazing down at him\n speculatively. \"My guardian angel,\" he mumbled—shock had sobered him\n a little, but not enough. He sat up. \"Guess I'm not hurt or you'd have\n thrown me back in.\"\n\n\n \"And that's no joke,\" the fat man agreed.\n\n\n The girl shivered and at that moment Gabriel suddenly seemed to recall\n that he had not been alone. \"How about Helen? She on course?\"\n\n\n \"Seems to be,\" the fat man said. \"You all right, miss?\" he asked,\n glancing toward the girl without, she thought, much apparent concern.\n\n\n \"\nMrs.\n,\" Gabriel corrected. \"Allow me to introduce you to Mrs. Gabriel\n Lockard,\" he said, bowing from his seated position toward the girl.\n \"Pretty bauble, isn't she?\"", "\"Oh, all right,\" the delicate young man gave in. It was a terrific\n risk he was agreeing to take, because, if the other was a criminal, he\n himself would, upon assuming the body, assume responsibility for all\n the crimes it had committed. But there was nothing else he could do.\nHe looked at himself in the mirror and found he had a fine new body;\n tall and strikingly handsome in a dark, coarse-featured way. Nothing to\n match the one he had lost, in his opinion, but there were probably many\n people who might find this one preferable. No identification in the\n pockets, but it wasn't necessary; he recognized the face. Not that it\n was a very famous or even notorious one, but the dutchman was a careful\n student of the \"wanted\" fax that had decorated public buildings from", "And that, coming on top of Gabriel Lockard's spectacular appearance,\n was too much. The ugly man picked up the drink the bartender had just\n set before him and started to hurl it, glass and all, into Lockard's\n handsome face.\nSuddenly a restraining hand was laid upon his arm. \"Don't do that,\" the\n nondescript man who had been sitting in the corner advised. He removed\n the glass from the little man's slackening grasp. \"You wouldn't want to\n go to jail because of him.\"\n\n\n The ugly man gave him a bewildered stare. Then, seeing the forces\n now ranged against him—including his own belated prudence—were too\n strong, he stumbled off. He hadn't really wanted to fight, only to\n smash back, and now it was too late for that.\n\n\n Gabe studied the newcomer curiously. \"So, it's you again?\"", "\"Look, Gabe,\" the girl said, \"don't try to fool me! I know you\n too well. And I know you have that man's—the real Gabriel\n Lockard's—body.\" She put unnecessary stardust on her nose as she\n watched her husband's reflection in the dressing table mirror.\n\n\n Lockard—Lockard's body, at any rate—sat up and felt his unshaven\n chin. \"That what he tell you?\"\n\n\n \"No, he didn't tell me anything really—just suggested I ask you\n whatever I want to know. But why else should he guard somebody he\n obviously hates the way he hates you? Only because he doesn't want to\n see his body spoiled.\"\n\n\n \"It\nis\na pretty good body, isn't it?\" Gabe flexed softening muscles\n and made no attempt to deny her charge; very probably he was relieved\n at having someone with whom to share his secret.", "\"I wasn't thinking about that, Gabe,\" she said truthfully enough, for\n she hadn't followed the idea to its logical conclusion. \"Of course I'd\n go with you,\" she went on, now knowing she lied, \"when you got your ...\n old body back.\"\nSure\n, she thought,\nI'd keep going with you to farjeen houses and\n thrill-mills.\nActually she had accompanied him to a thrill-mill only\n once, and from then on, despite all his threats, she had refused to go\n with him again. But that once had been enough; nothing could ever wash\n that experience from her mind or her body.\n\n\n \"You wouldn't be able to get your old body back, though, would you?\"\n she went on. \"You don't know where it's gone, and neither, I suppose,\n does he?\"", "time immemorial, for he was ever mindful of the possibility that he\n might one day find himself trapped unwittingly in the body of one of\n the men depicted there. And he knew that this particular man, though\n not an important criminal in any sense of the word, was one whom the\n police had been ordered to burn on sight. The abolishing of capital\n punishment could not abolish the necessity for self-defense, and the\n man in question was not one who would let himself be captured easily,\n nor whom the police intended to capture easily.\nThis might be a lucky break for me after all\n, the new tenant thought,\n as he tried to adjust himself to the body. It, too, despite its obvious\n rude health, was not a very comfortable fit.\nI can do a lot with a", "\"I drank with you once too often,\" the nondescript man said. \"And\n things worked out fine, didn't they? For you.\" His eyes studied the\n other man's incredibly handsome young face, noted the suggestion of\n bags under the eyes, the beginning of slackness at the lips, and were\n not pleased with what they saw. \"Watch yourself, colleague,\" he warned\n as he left. \"Soon you might not be worth the saving.\"\n\n\n \"Who was that, Gabe?\" the girl asked.", "\"You know why. Your body is worthless. And this is a reputable house.\"\n\n\n \"But I have plenty of money.\" The young man coughed. The Vinzz\n shrugged. \"I'll pay you twice the regular fee.\"\n\n\n The green one shook his head. \"Regrettably, I do mean what I say. This\n game is really clean.\"\n\n\n \"In a town like this?\"\n\n\n \"That is the reason we can afford to be honest.\" The Vinzz' tendrils\n quivered in what the man had come to recognize as amusement through\n long, but necessarily superficial acquaintance with the Vinzz. His\n heavy robe of what looked like moss-green velvet, but might have been\n velvet-green moss, encrusted with oddly faceted alien jewels, swung\n with him.", "Overhead a tiny star seemed to detach itself from the pale flat disk\n of the Moon and hurl itself upward—one of the interstellar ships\n embarking on its long voyage to distant suns. She wished that somehow\n she could be on it, but she was here, on this solitary old world in a\n barren solar system, with her unconscious husband and a strange man who\n followed them, and it looked as if here she would stay ... all three of\n them would stay....\n\n\n \"If you're after Gabriel, planning to hurt him,\" she asked, \"why then\n do you keep helping him?\"\n\n\n \"I am not helping\nhim\n. And he knows that.\"\n\n\n \"You'll change again tonight, won't you?\" she babbled. \"You always\n change after you ... meet us? I think I'm beginning to be able to\n identify you now, even when you're ... wearing a new body; there's\n something about you that doesn't change.\"", "The would-be thief fled down the dark alley, with the hot bright rays\n from the stranger's gun lancing out after him in flamboyant but futile\n patterns. The stranger, a thin young man with delicate, angular\n features, made no attempt to follow. Instead, he bent over to examine\n Gabriel Lockard's form, appropriately outstretched in the gutter. \"Only\n weighted out,\" he muttered, \"he'll be all right. Whatever possessed you\n two to come out to a place like this?\"\n\n\n \"I really think Gabriel\nmust\nbe possessed....\" the girl said, mostly\n to herself. \"I had no idea of the kind of place it was going to be\n until he brought me here. The others were bad, but this is even worse.\n It almost seems as if he went around looking for trouble, doesn't it?\"", "\"This isn't a good body,\" he said. \"It's diseased. Sure, nobody's\n supposed to play the game who hasn't passed a thorough medical\n examination. But in the places to which your husband has been leading\n me, they're often not too particular, as long as the player has plenty\n of foliage.\"\n\n\n \"How—long will it last you?\"\n\n\n \"Four or five months, if I'm careful.\" He smiled. \"But don't worry, if\n that's what you're doing; I'll get it passed on before then. It'll be\n expensive—that's all. Bad landing for the guy who gets it, but then\n it was tough on me too, wasn't it?\"\n\n\n \"But how did you get into this ... pursuit?\" she asked again. \"And why\n are you doing it?\" People didn't have any traffic with Gabriel Lockard\n for fun, not after they got to know him. And this man certainly should\n know him better than most." ], [ "\"I drank with you once too often,\" the nondescript man said. \"And\n things worked out fine, didn't they? For you.\" His eyes studied the\n other man's incredibly handsome young face, noted the suggestion of\n bags under the eyes, the beginning of slackness at the lips, and were\n not pleased with what they saw. \"Watch yourself, colleague,\" he warned\n as he left. \"Soon you might not be worth the saving.\"\n\n\n \"Who was that, Gabe?\" the girl asked.", "Gabe gave a short laugh, for no reason that she could see.\nThere was the feeling that she had encountered the fat man before,\n which was, of course, absurd. She had an excellent memory for faces and\n his was not included in her gallery. The girl pulled her thin jacket\n closer about her chilly body. \"Aren't you going to introduce your—your\n friend to me, Gabe?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know who he is,\" Gabe said almost merrily, \"except that he's\n no friend of mine. Do you have a name, stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Of course I have a name.\" The fat man extracted an identification\n card from his wallet and read it. \"Says here I'm Dominic Bianchi, and\n Dominic Bianchi is a retail milgot dealer.... Only he isn't a retail\n milgot dealer any more; the poor fellow went bankrupt a couple of weeks\n ago, and now he isn't ... anything.\"", "\"Look, Gabe,\" the girl said, \"don't try to fool me! I know you\n too well. And I know you have that man's—the real Gabriel\n Lockard's—body.\" She put unnecessary stardust on her nose as she\n watched her husband's reflection in the dressing table mirror.\n\n\n Lockard—Lockard's body, at any rate—sat up and felt his unshaven\n chin. \"That what he tell you?\"\n\n\n \"No, he didn't tell me anything really—just suggested I ask you\n whatever I want to know. But why else should he guard somebody he\n obviously hates the way he hates you? Only because he doesn't want to\n see his body spoiled.\"\n\n\n \"It\nis\na pretty good body, isn't it?\" Gabe flexed softening muscles\n and made no attempt to deny her charge; very probably he was relieved\n at having someone with whom to share his secret.", "He shrugged. \"I never saw him before in my life.\" Of course, knowing\n him, she assumed he was lying, but, as a matter of fact, just then he\n happened to have been telling the truth.\nOnce the illuminators were extinguished in Gabriel Lockard's hotel\n suite, it seemed reasonably certain to the man in the gray suit, as\n he watched from the street, that his quarry would not go out again\n that night. So he went to the nearest airstation. There he inserted a\n coin in a locker, into which he put most of his personal possessions,\n reserving only a sum of money. After setting the locker to respond to\n the letter combination\nbodyguard\n, he went out into the street.\n\n\n If he had met with a fatal accident at that point, there would have\n been nothing on his body to identify him. As a matter of fact, no real\n identification was possible, for he was no one and had been no one for\n years.", "Gabe opened his eyes and saw the fat man gazing down at him\n speculatively. \"My guardian angel,\" he mumbled—shock had sobered him\n a little, but not enough. He sat up. \"Guess I'm not hurt or you'd have\n thrown me back in.\"\n\n\n \"And that's no joke,\" the fat man agreed.\n\n\n The girl shivered and at that moment Gabriel suddenly seemed to recall\n that he had not been alone. \"How about Helen? She on course?\"\n\n\n \"Seems to be,\" the fat man said. \"You all right, miss?\" he asked,\n glancing toward the girl without, she thought, much apparent concern.\n\n\n \"\nMrs.\n,\" Gabriel corrected. \"Allow me to introduce you to Mrs. Gabriel\n Lockard,\" he said, bowing from his seated position toward the girl.\n \"Pretty bauble, isn't she?\"", "The man in the gray suit smiled. \"Who else in any world would stand up\n for you?\"\n\n\n \"I should think you'd have given up by now. Not that I mind having you\n around, of course,\" Gabriel added too quickly. \"You do come in useful\n at times, you know.\"\n\n\n \"So you don't mind having me around?\" The nondescript man smiled again.\n \"Then what are you running from, if not me? You can't be running from\n yourself—you lost yourself a while back, remember?\"\n\n\n Gabe ran a hand through his thick blond hair. \"Come on, have a drink\n with me, fellow-man, and let's let bygones be bygones. I owe you\n something—I admit that. Maybe we can even work this thing out.\"", "And that, coming on top of Gabriel Lockard's spectacular appearance,\n was too much. The ugly man picked up the drink the bartender had just\n set before him and started to hurl it, glass and all, into Lockard's\n handsome face.\nSuddenly a restraining hand was laid upon his arm. \"Don't do that,\" the\n nondescript man who had been sitting in the corner advised. He removed\n the glass from the little man's slackening grasp. \"You wouldn't want to\n go to jail because of him.\"\n\n\n The ugly man gave him a bewildered stare. Then, seeing the forces\n now ranged against him—including his own belated prudence—were too\n strong, he stumbled off. He hadn't really wanted to fight, only to\n smash back, and now it was too late for that.\n\n\n Gabe studied the newcomer curiously. \"So, it's you again?\"", "\"We do a lot of business here,\" he said unnecessarily, for the whole\n set-up spelled wealth far beyond the dreams of the man, and he was by\n no means poor when it came to worldly goods. \"Why don't you try another\n town where they're not so particular?\"\n\n\n The young man smiled wryly. Just his luck to stumble on a sunny game.\n He never liked to risk following his quarry in the same configuration.\n And even though only the girl had actually seen him this time, he\n wouldn't feel at ease until he had made the usual body-shift. Was\n he changing because of Gabriel, he wondered, or was he using his own\n discoverment and identification simply as an excuse to cover the fact\n that none of the bodies that fell to his lot ever seemed to fit him?\n Was he activated solely by revenge or as much by the hope that in the\n hazards of the game he might, impossible though it now seemed, some day\n win another body that approached perfection as nearly as his original\n casing had?", "\"I wasn't thinking about that, Gabe,\" she said truthfully enough, for\n she hadn't followed the idea to its logical conclusion. \"Of course I'd\n go with you,\" she went on, now knowing she lied, \"when you got your ...\n old body back.\"\nSure\n, she thought,\nI'd keep going with you to farjeen houses and\n thrill-mills.\nActually she had accompanied him to a thrill-mill only\n once, and from then on, despite all his threats, she had refused to go\n with him again. But that once had been enough; nothing could ever wash\n that experience from her mind or her body.\n\n\n \"You wouldn't be able to get your old body back, though, would you?\"\n she went on. \"You don't know where it's gone, and neither, I suppose,\n does he?\"", "\"Too bad he got married,\" the young man said. \"I could have followed\n him for an eternity and he would never have been able to pick me out\n from the crowd. Too bad he got married anyway,\" he added, his voice\n less impersonal, \"for your sake.\"\n\n\n She had come to the same conclusion in her six months of marriage, but\n she would not admit that to an outsider. Though this man was hardly an\n outsider; he was part of their small family group—as long as she had\n known Gabriel, so long he must have known her. And she began to suspect\n that he was even more closely involved than that.\n\n\n \"Why must you change again?\" she persisted, obliquely approaching the\n subject she feared. \"You have a pretty good body there. Why run the\n risk of getting a bad one?\"", "Fortunately the car was flying low, contrary to regulations, so that\n when they smashed into the beacon tower on the outskirts of the little\n town, they didn't have far to fall. And hardly had their car crashed\n on the ground when the car that had been following them landed, and a\n short fat man was puffing toward them through the mist.\n\n\n To the girl's indignation, the stranger not only hauled Gabe out onto\n the dripping grass first, but stopped and deliberately examined the\n young man by the light of his minilume, almost as if she weren't there\n at all. Only when she started to struggle out by herself did he seem to\n remember her existence. He pulled her away from the wreck just a moment\n before the fuel tank exploded and the 'copter went up in flames.", "\"He won't tell me; he never tells me anything. We just keep running. I\n didn't recognize it as running at first, but now I realize that's what\n we've been doing ever since we were married. And running from you, I\n think?\"", "The would-be thief fled down the dark alley, with the hot bright rays\n from the stranger's gun lancing out after him in flamboyant but futile\n patterns. The stranger, a thin young man with delicate, angular\n features, made no attempt to follow. Instead, he bent over to examine\n Gabriel Lockard's form, appropriately outstretched in the gutter. \"Only\n weighted out,\" he muttered, \"he'll be all right. Whatever possessed you\n two to come out to a place like this?\"\n\n\n \"I really think Gabriel\nmust\nbe possessed....\" the girl said, mostly\n to herself. \"I had no idea of the kind of place it was going to be\n until he brought me here. The others were bad, but this is even worse.\n It almost seems as if he went around looking for trouble, doesn't it?\"", "Gabriel shivered. \"I'll be careful,\" he vowed. \"I promise—I'll be\n careful.\"\nWhen he was sure that his charge was safely tucked in for the night,\n the fat man checked his personal possessions. He then requested a taxi\n driver to take him to the nearest zarquil game. The driver accepted the\n commission phlegmatically. Perhaps he was more hardened than the others\n had been; perhaps he was unaware that the fat man was not a desperate\n or despairing individual seeking one last chance, but what was known\n colloquially as a flying dutchman, a man, or woman, who went from\n one zarquil game to another, loving the thrill of the sport, if you\n could call it that, for its own sake, and not for the futile hope it\n extended and which was its sole shred of claim to moral justification.\n Perhaps—and this was the most likely hypothesis—he just didn't care.", "The nondescript man hailed a cruising helicab. \"Where to, fellow-man?\"\n the driver asked.\n\n\n \"I'm new in the parish,\" the other man replied and let it hang there.\n\n\n \"Oh...? Females...? Narcophagi...? Thrill-mills?\"\n\n\n But to each of these questions the nondescript man shook his head.\n\n\n \"Games?\" the driver finally asked, although he could guess what was\n wanted by then. \"Dice...? Roulette...? Farjeen?\"\n\n\n \"Is there a good zarquil game in town?\"\n\n\n The driver moved so he could see the face of the man behind him in the\n teleview. A very ordinary face. \"Look, colleague, why don't you commit\n suicide? It's cleaner and quicker.\"", "The drink he had been raising to his lips splashed all over his\n clothing; the glass shattered at his feet. Now he was not only a rather\n ugly little man, but also a rather ridiculous one—or at least he felt\n he was, which was what mattered.\n\n\n \"Sorry, colleague,\" Gabe said lazily. \"All my fault. You must let me\n buy you a replacement.\" He gestured to the bartender. \"Another of the\n same for my fellow-man here.\"\n\n\n The ugly man dabbed futilely at his dripping trousers with a cloth\n hastily supplied by the management.\n\n\n \"You must allow me to pay your cleaning bill,\" Gabe said, taking out\n his wallet and extracting several credit notes without seeming to look\n at them. \"Here, have yourself a new suit on me.\"\nYou could use one\nwas implied.", "\"This isn't a good body,\" he said. \"It's diseased. Sure, nobody's\n supposed to play the game who hasn't passed a thorough medical\n examination. But in the places to which your husband has been leading\n me, they're often not too particular, as long as the player has plenty\n of foliage.\"\n\n\n \"How—long will it last you?\"\n\n\n \"Four or five months, if I'm careful.\" He smiled. \"But don't worry, if\n that's what you're doing; I'll get it passed on before then. It'll be\n expensive—that's all. Bad landing for the guy who gets it, but then\n it was tough on me too, wasn't it?\"\n\n\n \"But how did you get into this ... pursuit?\" she asked again. \"And why\n are you doing it?\" People didn't have any traffic with Gabriel Lockard\n for fun, not after they got to know him. And this man certainly should\n know him better than most.", "\"Ask your husband.\"\n\n\n The original Gabriel Lockard looked down at the prostrate,\n snow-powdered figure of the man who had stolen his body and his name,\n and stirred it with his toe. \"I'd better call a cab—he might freeze to\n death.\"\n\n\n He signaled and a cab came.\n\n\n \"Tell him, when he comes to,\" he said to the girl as he and the driver\n lifted the heavy form of her husband into the helicar, \"that I'm\n getting pretty tired of this.\" He stopped for a long spell of coughing.\n \"Tell him that sometimes I wonder whether cutting off my nose wouldn't,\n in the long run, be most beneficial for my face.\"\n\"Sorry,\" the Vinzz said impersonally, in English that was perfect\n except for the slight dampening of the sibilants, \"but I'm afraid you\n cannot play.\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" The emaciated young man began to put on his clothes.", "\"I can't contact your attitude,\" the passenger said with a thin\n smile. \"Bet you've never tried the game yourself. Each time it\n happens, there's a ... well, there's no experience to match it at a\n thrill-mill.\" He gave a sigh that was almost an audible shudder, and\n which the driver misinterpreted as an expression of ecstasy.\n\n\n \"Each time, eh? You're a dutchman then?\" The driver spat out of the\n window. \"If it wasn't for the nibble, I'd throw you right out of the\n cab. Without even bothering to take it down even. I hate dutchmen ...\n anybody with any legitimate feelings hates 'em.\"\n\n\n \"But it would be silly to let personal prejudice stand in the way of a\n commission, wouldn't it?\" the other man asked coolly.\n\n\n \"Of course. You'll need plenty of foliage, though.\"", "Everyone in the room was aware of the big young man, and most of the\n humans present were resentful, for he handled himself consciously and\n arrogantly, as if his appearance alone were enough to make him superior\n to anyone. Even the girl with him was growing restless, for she was\n accustomed to adulation herself, and next to Gabriel Lockard she was\n almost ordinary-looking.\n\n\n As for the extraterrestrials—it was a free bar—they were merely\n amused, since to them all men were pathetically and irredeemably\n hideous.\n\n\n Gabe threw his arm wide in one of his expansive gestures. There was a\n short man standing next to the pair—young, as most men and women were\n in that time, thanks to the science which could stave off decay, though\n not death—but with no other apparent physical virtue, for plastic\n surgery had not fulfilled its bright promise of the twentieth century." ], [ "Zarquil was extremely illegal, of course—so much so that there were\n many legitimate citizens who weren't quite sure just what the word\n implied, knowing merely that it was one of those nameless horrors so\n deliciously hinted at by the fax sheets under the generic term of\n \"crimes against nature.\" Actually the phrase was more appropriate to\n zarquil than to most of the other activities to which it was commonly\n applied. And this was one crime—for it was crime in law as well as\n nature—in which victim had to be considered as guilty as perpetrator;\n otherwise the whole legal structure of society would collapse.\nPlaying the game was fabulously expensive; it had to be to make it\n profitable for the Vinzz to run it. Those odd creatures from Altair's", "The taxi driver took the fat man to one of the rather seedy locales in\n which the zarquil games were usually found, for the Vinzz attempted to\n conduct their operations with as much unobtrusiveness as was possible.\n But the front door swung open on an interior that lacked the opulence\n of the usual Vinoz set-up; it was down-right shabby, the dim olive\n light hinting of squalor rather than forbidden pleasures. That was\n the trouble in these smaller towns—you ran greater risks of getting\n involved in games where the players had not been carefully screened.\n\n\n The Vinoz games were usually clean, because that paid off better, but,\n when profits were lacking, the Vinzz were capable of sliding off into\n darkside practices. Naturally the small-town houses were more likely to\n have trouble in making ends meet, because everybody in the parish knew\n everybody else far too well.", "Gabriel shivered. \"I'll be careful,\" he vowed. \"I promise—I'll be\n careful.\"\nWhen he was sure that his charge was safely tucked in for the night,\n the fat man checked his personal possessions. He then requested a taxi\n driver to take him to the nearest zarquil game. The driver accepted the\n commission phlegmatically. Perhaps he was more hardened than the others\n had been; perhaps he was unaware that the fat man was not a desperate\n or despairing individual seeking one last chance, but what was known\n colloquially as a flying dutchman, a man, or woman, who went from\n one zarquil game to another, loving the thrill of the sport, if you\n could call it that, for its own sake, and not for the futile hope it\n extended and which was its sole shred of claim to moral justification.\n Perhaps—and this was the most likely hypothesis—he just didn't care.", "seventh planet cared nothing for the welfare of the completely alien\n human beings; all they wanted was to feather their own pockets with\n interstellar credits, so that they could return to Vinau and buy many\n slaves. For, on Vinau, bodies were of little account, and so to them\n zarquil was the equivalent of the terrestrial game musical chairs.\n Which was why they came to Terra to make profits—there has never been\n big money in musical chairs as such.", "When the zarquil operators were apprehended, which was not frequent—as\n they had strange powers, which, not being definable, were beyond the\n law—they suffered their sentences with equanimity. No Earth court\n could give an effective prison sentence to a creature whose life\n spanned approximately two thousand terrestrial years. And capital\n punishment had become obsolete on Terra, which very possibly saved the\n terrestrials embarrassment, for it was not certain that their weapons\n could kill the Vinzz ... or whether, in fact, the Vinzz merely expired\n after a period of years out of sheer boredom. Fortunately, because\n trade was more profitable than war, there had always been peace between\n Vinau and Terra, and, for that reason, Terra could not bar the entrance\n of apparently respectable citizens of a friendly planet.", "The fat man wondered whether that had been his quarry's motive in\n coming to such desolate, off-trail places—hoping that eventually\n disaster would hit the one who pursued him. Somehow, such a plan seemed\n too logical for the man he was haunting.\n\n\n However, beggars could not be choosers. The fat man paid off the\n heli-driver and entered the zarquil house. \"One?\" the small green\n creature in the slightly frayed robe asked.\n\n\n \"One,\" the fat man answered.\nIII", "\"Then what they say about the zarquil games is true? There are people\n who go around changing their bodies like—like hats?\" Automatically she\n reached to adjust the expensive bit of blue synthetic on her moon-pale\n hair, for she was always conscious of her appearance; if she had not\n been so before marriage, Gabriel would have taught her that.\nHe smiled again, but coughed instead of speaking.\n\n\n \"But why do you do it?\nWhy!\nDo you like it? Or is it because of\n Gabriel?\" She was growing a little frantic; there was menace here\n and she could not understand it nor determine whether or not she was\n included in its scope. \"Do you want to keep him from recognizing you;\n is that it?\"\n\n\n \"Ask him.\"", "The nondescript man hailed a cruising helicab. \"Where to, fellow-man?\"\n the driver asked.\n\n\n \"I'm new in the parish,\" the other man replied and let it hang there.\n\n\n \"Oh...? Females...? Narcophagi...? Thrill-mills?\"\n\n\n But to each of these questions the nondescript man shook his head.\n\n\n \"Games?\" the driver finally asked, although he could guess what was\n wanted by then. \"Dice...? Roulette...? Farjeen?\"\n\n\n \"Is there a good zarquil game in town?\"\n\n\n The driver moved so he could see the face of the man behind him in the\n teleview. A very ordinary face. \"Look, colleague, why don't you commit\n suicide? It's cleaner and quicker.\"", "\"We do a lot of business here,\" he said unnecessarily, for the whole\n set-up spelled wealth far beyond the dreams of the man, and he was by\n no means poor when it came to worldly goods. \"Why don't you try another\n town where they're not so particular?\"\n\n\n The young man smiled wryly. Just his luck to stumble on a sunny game.\n He never liked to risk following his quarry in the same configuration.\n And even though only the girl had actually seen him this time, he\n wouldn't feel at ease until he had made the usual body-shift. Was\n he changing because of Gabriel, he wondered, or was he using his own\n discoverment and identification simply as an excuse to cover the fact\n that none of the bodies that fell to his lot ever seemed to fit him?\n Was he activated solely by revenge or as much by the hope that in the\n hazards of the game he might, impossible though it now seemed, some day\n win another body that approached perfection as nearly as his original\n casing had?", "\"Male?\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" the Vinzz said primly. His kind did have certain ultimate\n standards to which they adhered rigidly, and one of those was the\n curious tabu against mixed games, strictly enforced even though it\n kept them from tapping a vast source of potential players. There had\n also never been a recorded instance of humans and extraterrestrials\n exchanging identities, but whether that was the result of tabu or\n biological impossibility, no one could tell.", "\"This isn't a good body,\" he said. \"It's diseased. Sure, nobody's\n supposed to play the game who hasn't passed a thorough medical\n examination. But in the places to which your husband has been leading\n me, they're often not too particular, as long as the player has plenty\n of foliage.\"\n\n\n \"How—long will it last you?\"\n\n\n \"Four or five months, if I'm careful.\" He smiled. \"But don't worry, if\n that's what you're doing; I'll get it passed on before then. It'll be\n expensive—that's all. Bad landing for the guy who gets it, but then\n it was tough on me too, wasn't it?\"\n\n\n \"But how did you get into this ... pursuit?\" she asked again. \"And why\n are you doing it?\" People didn't have any traffic with Gabriel Lockard\n for fun, not after they got to know him. And this man certainly should\n know him better than most.", "There was no change of expression on the man's gaunt face, and she\n wondered how much control he had over a body that, though second- or\n third- or fourth-hand, must be new to him. How well could he make it\n respond? What was it like to step into another person's casing? But she\n must not let herself think that way or she would find herself looking\n for a zarquil game. It would be one way of escaping Gabriel, but not,\n she thought, the best way; her body was much too good a one to risk so\n casually.\nIt was beginning to snow. Light, feathery flakes drifted down on her\n husband's immobile body. She pulled her thick coat—of fur taken from\n some animal who had lived and died light-years away—more closely about\n herself. The thin young man began to cough again.", "\"You know why. Your body is worthless. And this is a reputable house.\"\n\n\n \"But I have plenty of money.\" The young man coughed. The Vinzz\n shrugged. \"I'll pay you twice the regular fee.\"\n\n\n The green one shook his head. \"Regrettably, I do mean what I say. This\n game is really clean.\"\n\n\n \"In a town like this?\"\n\n\n \"That is the reason we can afford to be honest.\" The Vinzz' tendrils\n quivered in what the man had come to recognize as amusement through\n long, but necessarily superficial acquaintance with the Vinzz. His\n heavy robe of what looked like moss-green velvet, but might have been\n velvet-green moss, encrusted with oddly faceted alien jewels, swung\n with him.", "\"I can't contact your attitude,\" the passenger said with a thin\n smile. \"Bet you've never tried the game yourself. Each time it\n happens, there's a ... well, there's no experience to match it at a\n thrill-mill.\" He gave a sigh that was almost an audible shudder, and\n which the driver misinterpreted as an expression of ecstasy.\n\n\n \"Each time, eh? You're a dutchman then?\" The driver spat out of the\n window. \"If it wasn't for the nibble, I'd throw you right out of the\n cab. Without even bothering to take it down even. I hate dutchmen ...\n anybody with any legitimate feelings hates 'em.\"\n\n\n \"But it would be silly to let personal prejudice stand in the way of a\n commission, wouldn't it?\" the other man asked coolly.\n\n\n \"Of course. You'll need plenty of foliage, though.\"", "He didn't know. However, there seemed to be no help for it now; he\n would have to wait until they reached the next town, unless the girl,\n seeing him reappear in the same guise, would guess what had happened\n and tell her husband. He himself had been a fool to admit to her that\n the hulk he inhabited was a sick one; he still couldn't understand\n how he could so casually have entrusted her with so vital a piece of\n information.\nThe Vinzz had been locking antennae with another of his kind. Now they\n detached, and the first approached the man once more. \"There is, as it\n happens, a body available for a private game,\" he lisped. \"No questions\n to be asked or answered. All I can tell you is that it is in good\n health.\"\n\n\n The man hesitated. \"But unable to pass the screening?\" he murmured\n aloud. \"A criminal then.\"\n\n\n The green one's face—if you could call it a face—remained impassive.", "\"Ask your husband.\"\n\n\n The original Gabriel Lockard looked down at the prostrate,\n snow-powdered figure of the man who had stolen his body and his name,\n and stirred it with his toe. \"I'd better call a cab—he might freeze to\n death.\"\n\n\n He signaled and a cab came.\n\n\n \"Tell him, when he comes to,\" he said to the girl as he and the driver\n lifted the heavy form of her husband into the helicar, \"that I'm\n getting pretty tired of this.\" He stopped for a long spell of coughing.\n \"Tell him that sometimes I wonder whether cutting off my nose wouldn't,\n in the long run, be most beneficial for my face.\"\n\"Sorry,\" the Vinzz said impersonally, in English that was perfect\n except for the slight dampening of the sibilants, \"but I'm afraid you\n cannot play.\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" The emaciated young man began to put on his clothes.", "Fortunately the car was flying low, contrary to regulations, so that\n when they smashed into the beacon tower on the outskirts of the little\n town, they didn't have far to fall. And hardly had their car crashed\n on the ground when the car that had been following them landed, and a\n short fat man was puffing toward them through the mist.\n\n\n To the girl's indignation, the stranger not only hauled Gabe out onto\n the dripping grass first, but stopped and deliberately examined the\n young man by the light of his minilume, almost as if she weren't there\n at all. Only when she started to struggle out by herself did he seem to\n remember her existence. He pulled her away from the wreck just a moment\n before the fuel tank exploded and the 'copter went up in flames.", "Everyone in the room was aware of the big young man, and most of the\n humans present were resentful, for he handled himself consciously and\n arrogantly, as if his appearance alone were enough to make him superior\n to anyone. Even the girl with him was growing restless, for she was\n accustomed to adulation herself, and next to Gabriel Lockard she was\n almost ordinary-looking.\n\n\n As for the extraterrestrials—it was a free bar—they were merely\n amused, since to them all men were pathetically and irredeemably\n hideous.\n\n\n Gabe threw his arm wide in one of his expansive gestures. There was a\n short man standing next to the pair—young, as most men and women were\n in that time, thanks to the science which could stave off decay, though\n not death—but with no other apparent physical virtue, for plastic\n surgery had not fulfilled its bright promise of the twentieth century.", "He shrugged. \"I never saw him before in my life.\" Of course, knowing\n him, she assumed he was lying, but, as a matter of fact, just then he\n happened to have been telling the truth.\nOnce the illuminators were extinguished in Gabriel Lockard's hotel\n suite, it seemed reasonably certain to the man in the gray suit, as\n he watched from the street, that his quarry would not go out again\n that night. So he went to the nearest airstation. There he inserted a\n coin in a locker, into which he put most of his personal possessions,\n reserving only a sum of money. After setting the locker to respond to\n the letter combination\nbodyguard\n, he went out into the street.\n\n\n If he had met with a fatal accident at that point, there would have\n been nothing on his body to identify him. As a matter of fact, no real\n identification was possible, for he was no one and had been no one for\n years.", "The would-be thief fled down the dark alley, with the hot bright rays\n from the stranger's gun lancing out after him in flamboyant but futile\n patterns. The stranger, a thin young man with delicate, angular\n features, made no attempt to follow. Instead, he bent over to examine\n Gabriel Lockard's form, appropriately outstretched in the gutter. \"Only\n weighted out,\" he muttered, \"he'll be all right. Whatever possessed you\n two to come out to a place like this?\"\n\n\n \"I really think Gabriel\nmust\nbe possessed....\" the girl said, mostly\n to herself. \"I had no idea of the kind of place it was going to be\n until he brought me here. The others were bad, but this is even worse.\n It almost seems as if he went around looking for trouble, doesn't it?\"" ], [ "seventh planet cared nothing for the welfare of the completely alien\n human beings; all they wanted was to feather their own pockets with\n interstellar credits, so that they could return to Vinau and buy many\n slaves. For, on Vinau, bodies were of little account, and so to them\n zarquil was the equivalent of the terrestrial game musical chairs.\n Which was why they came to Terra to make profits—there has never been\n big money in musical chairs as such.", "It might merely be prudence on the Vinzz' part—if it had ever\n been proved that an alien life-form had \"desecrated\" a human body,\n Earthmen would clamor for war ... for on this planet humanity held\n its self-bestowed purity of birthright dear—and the Vinzz, despite\n being unquestionably the stronger, were pragmatic pacifists. It had\n been undoubtedly some rabid member of the anti-alien groups active on\n Terra who had started the rumor that the planetary slogan of Vinau was,\n \"Don't beat 'em; cheat 'em.\"\n\n\n \"It would have to be something pretty nuclear for the other guy to take\n such a risk.\" The man rubbed his chin thoughtfully. \"How much?\"\n\n\n \"Thirty thousand credits.\"\n\n\n \"Why, that's three times the usual rate!\"\n\n\n \"The other will pay five times the usual rate.\"", "When the zarquil operators were apprehended, which was not frequent—as\n they had strange powers, which, not being definable, were beyond the\n law—they suffered their sentences with equanimity. No Earth court\n could give an effective prison sentence to a creature whose life\n spanned approximately two thousand terrestrial years. And capital\n punishment had become obsolete on Terra, which very possibly saved the\n terrestrials embarrassment, for it was not certain that their weapons\n could kill the Vinzz ... or whether, in fact, the Vinzz merely expired\n after a period of years out of sheer boredom. Fortunately, because\n trade was more profitable than war, there had always been peace between\n Vinau and Terra, and, for that reason, Terra could not bar the entrance\n of apparently respectable citizens of a friendly planet.", "The fat man wondered whether that had been his quarry's motive in\n coming to such desolate, off-trail places—hoping that eventually\n disaster would hit the one who pursued him. Somehow, such a plan seemed\n too logical for the man he was haunting.\n\n\n However, beggars could not be choosers. The fat man paid off the\n heli-driver and entered the zarquil house. \"One?\" the small green\n creature in the slightly frayed robe asked.\n\n\n \"One,\" the fat man answered.\nIII", "Overhead a tiny star seemed to detach itself from the pale flat disk\n of the Moon and hurl itself upward—one of the interstellar ships\n embarking on its long voyage to distant suns. She wished that somehow\n she could be on it, but she was here, on this solitary old world in a\n barren solar system, with her unconscious husband and a strange man who\n followed them, and it looked as if here she would stay ... all three of\n them would stay....\n\n\n \"If you're after Gabriel, planning to hurt him,\" she asked, \"why then\n do you keep helping him?\"\n\n\n \"I am not helping\nhim\n. And he knows that.\"\n\n\n \"You'll change again tonight, won't you?\" she babbled. \"You always\n change after you ... meet us? I think I'm beginning to be able to\n identify you now, even when you're ... wearing a new body; there's\n something about you that doesn't change.\"", "Zarquil was extremely illegal, of course—so much so that there were\n many legitimate citizens who weren't quite sure just what the word\n implied, knowing merely that it was one of those nameless horrors so\n deliciously hinted at by the fax sheets under the generic term of\n \"crimes against nature.\" Actually the phrase was more appropriate to\n zarquil than to most of the other activities to which it was commonly\n applied. And this was one crime—for it was crime in law as well as\n nature—in which victim had to be considered as guilty as perpetrator;\n otherwise the whole legal structure of society would collapse.\nPlaying the game was fabulously expensive; it had to be to make it\n profitable for the Vinzz to run it. Those odd creatures from Altair's", "\"You know why. Your body is worthless. And this is a reputable house.\"\n\n\n \"But I have plenty of money.\" The young man coughed. The Vinzz\n shrugged. \"I'll pay you twice the regular fee.\"\n\n\n The green one shook his head. \"Regrettably, I do mean what I say. This\n game is really clean.\"\n\n\n \"In a town like this?\"\n\n\n \"That is the reason we can afford to be honest.\" The Vinzz' tendrils\n quivered in what the man had come to recognize as amusement through\n long, but necessarily superficial acquaintance with the Vinzz. His\n heavy robe of what looked like moss-green velvet, but might have been\n velvet-green moss, encrusted with oddly faceted alien jewels, swung\n with him.", "\"I can't contact your attitude,\" the passenger said with a thin\n smile. \"Bet you've never tried the game yourself. Each time it\n happens, there's a ... well, there's no experience to match it at a\n thrill-mill.\" He gave a sigh that was almost an audible shudder, and\n which the driver misinterpreted as an expression of ecstasy.\n\n\n \"Each time, eh? You're a dutchman then?\" The driver spat out of the\n window. \"If it wasn't for the nibble, I'd throw you right out of the\n cab. Without even bothering to take it down even. I hate dutchmen ...\n anybody with any legitimate feelings hates 'em.\"\n\n\n \"But it would be silly to let personal prejudice stand in the way of a\n commission, wouldn't it?\" the other man asked coolly.\n\n\n \"Of course. You'll need plenty of foliage, though.\"", "\"You saved our lives,\" the girl said. \"I'd like to give you some token\n of my—of our appreciation.\" Her hand reached toward her credit-carrier\n with deliberate insult. He might have saved her life, but only\n casually, as a by-product of some larger scheme, and her appreciation\n held little gratitude.\n\n\n The fat man shook his head without rancor. \"I have plenty of money,\n thank you, Mrs. Gabriel Lockard.... Come,\" he addressed her husband,\n \"if you get up, I'll drive you home. I warn you, be more careful in the\n future! Sometimes,\" he added musingly, \"I almost wish you would let\n something happen. Then my problem would not be any problem, would it?\"", "\"Male?\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" the Vinzz said primly. His kind did have certain ultimate\n standards to which they adhered rigidly, and one of those was the\n curious tabu against mixed games, strictly enforced even though it\n kept them from tapping a vast source of potential players. There had\n also never been a recorded instance of humans and extraterrestrials\n exchanging identities, but whether that was the result of tabu or\n biological impossibility, no one could tell.", "\"Then what they say about the zarquil games is true? There are people\n who go around changing their bodies like—like hats?\" Automatically she\n reached to adjust the expensive bit of blue synthetic on her moon-pale\n hair, for she was always conscious of her appearance; if she had not\n been so before marriage, Gabriel would have taught her that.\nHe smiled again, but coughed instead of speaking.\n\n\n \"But why do you do it?\nWhy!\nDo you like it? Or is it because of\n Gabriel?\" She was growing a little frantic; there was menace here\n and she could not understand it nor determine whether or not she was\n included in its scope. \"Do you want to keep him from recognizing you;\n is that it?\"\n\n\n \"Ask him.\"", "He didn't know. However, there seemed to be no help for it now; he\n would have to wait until they reached the next town, unless the girl,\n seeing him reappear in the same guise, would guess what had happened\n and tell her husband. He himself had been a fool to admit to her that\n the hulk he inhabited was a sick one; he still couldn't understand\n how he could so casually have entrusted her with so vital a piece of\n information.\nThe Vinzz had been locking antennae with another of his kind. Now they\n detached, and the first approached the man once more. \"There is, as it\n happens, a body available for a private game,\" he lisped. \"No questions\n to be asked or answered. All I can tell you is that it is in good\n health.\"\n\n\n The man hesitated. \"But unable to pass the screening?\" he murmured\n aloud. \"A criminal then.\"\n\n\n The green one's face—if you could call it a face—remained impassive.", "There was no change of expression on the man's gaunt face, and she\n wondered how much control he had over a body that, though second- or\n third- or fourth-hand, must be new to him. How well could he make it\n respond? What was it like to step into another person's casing? But she\n must not let herself think that way or she would find herself looking\n for a zarquil game. It would be one way of escaping Gabriel, but not,\n she thought, the best way; her body was much too good a one to risk so\n casually.\nIt was beginning to snow. Light, feathery flakes drifted down on her\n husband's immobile body. She pulled her thick coat—of fur taken from\n some animal who had lived and died light-years away—more closely about\n herself. The thin young man began to cough again.", "Everyone in the room was aware of the big young man, and most of the\n humans present were resentful, for he handled himself consciously and\n arrogantly, as if his appearance alone were enough to make him superior\n to anyone. Even the girl with him was growing restless, for she was\n accustomed to adulation herself, and next to Gabriel Lockard she was\n almost ordinary-looking.\n\n\n As for the extraterrestrials—it was a free bar—they were merely\n amused, since to them all men were pathetically and irredeemably\n hideous.\n\n\n Gabe threw his arm wide in one of his expansive gestures. There was a\n short man standing next to the pair—young, as most men and women were\n in that time, thanks to the science which could stave off decay, though\n not death—but with no other apparent physical virtue, for plastic\n surgery had not fulfilled its bright promise of the twentieth century.", "The nondescript man hailed a cruising helicab. \"Where to, fellow-man?\"\n the driver asked.\n\n\n \"I'm new in the parish,\" the other man replied and let it hang there.\n\n\n \"Oh...? Females...? Narcophagi...? Thrill-mills?\"\n\n\n But to each of these questions the nondescript man shook his head.\n\n\n \"Games?\" the driver finally asked, although he could guess what was\n wanted by then. \"Dice...? Roulette...? Farjeen?\"\n\n\n \"Is there a good zarquil game in town?\"\n\n\n The driver moved so he could see the face of the man behind him in the\n teleview. A very ordinary face. \"Look, colleague, why don't you commit\n suicide? It's cleaner and quicker.\"", "\"This isn't a good body,\" he said. \"It's diseased. Sure, nobody's\n supposed to play the game who hasn't passed a thorough medical\n examination. But in the places to which your husband has been leading\n me, they're often not too particular, as long as the player has plenty\n of foliage.\"\n\n\n \"How—long will it last you?\"\n\n\n \"Four or five months, if I'm careful.\" He smiled. \"But don't worry, if\n that's what you're doing; I'll get it passed on before then. It'll be\n expensive—that's all. Bad landing for the guy who gets it, but then\n it was tough on me too, wasn't it?\"\n\n\n \"But how did you get into this ... pursuit?\" she asked again. \"And why\n are you doing it?\" People didn't have any traffic with Gabriel Lockard\n for fun, not after they got to know him. And this man certainly should\n know him better than most.", "\"We do a lot of business here,\" he said unnecessarily, for the whole\n set-up spelled wealth far beyond the dreams of the man, and he was by\n no means poor when it came to worldly goods. \"Why don't you try another\n town where they're not so particular?\"\n\n\n The young man smiled wryly. Just his luck to stumble on a sunny game.\n He never liked to risk following his quarry in the same configuration.\n And even though only the girl had actually seen him this time, he\n wouldn't feel at ease until he had made the usual body-shift. Was\n he changing because of Gabriel, he wondered, or was he using his own\n discoverment and identification simply as an excuse to cover the fact\n that none of the bodies that fell to his lot ever seemed to fit him?\n Was he activated solely by revenge or as much by the hope that in the\n hazards of the game he might, impossible though it now seemed, some day\n win another body that approached perfection as nearly as his original\n casing had?", "Gabriel shivered. \"I'll be careful,\" he vowed. \"I promise—I'll be\n careful.\"\nWhen he was sure that his charge was safely tucked in for the night,\n the fat man checked his personal possessions. He then requested a taxi\n driver to take him to the nearest zarquil game. The driver accepted the\n commission phlegmatically. Perhaps he was more hardened than the others\n had been; perhaps he was unaware that the fat man was not a desperate\n or despairing individual seeking one last chance, but what was known\n colloquially as a flying dutchman, a man, or woman, who went from\n one zarquil game to another, loving the thrill of the sport, if you\n could call it that, for its own sake, and not for the futile hope it\n extended and which was its sole shred of claim to moral justification.\n Perhaps—and this was the most likely hypothesis—he just didn't care.", "\"I'm delighted to meet you, Mrs. Gabriel Lockard,\" the fat man said,\n looking at her intently. His small eyes seemed to strip the make-up\n from her cheek and examine the livid bruise underneath. \"I hope\n you'll be worthy of the name.\" The light given off by the flaming\n car flickered on his face and Gabriel's and, she supposed, hers too.\n Otherwise, darkness surrounded the three of them.\n\n\n There were no public illuminators this far out—even in town the\n lights were dimming and not being replaced fast enough nor by the\n newer models. The town, the civilization, the planet all were old and\n beginning to slide downhill....", "\"I have sufficient funds. I also have a gun.\"\n\n\n \"You're the dictator,\" the driver agreed sullenly.\nII\n\n\n It was a dark and rainy night in early fall. Gabe Lockard was in no\n condition to drive the helicar. However, he was stubborn.\n\n\n \"Let me take the controls, honey,\" the light-haired girl urged, but he\n shook his handsome head.\n\n\n \"Show you I can do something 'sides look pretty,\" he said thickly,\n referring to an earlier and not amicable conversation they had held,\n and of which she still bore the reminder on one thickly made-up cheek." ], [ "When the zarquil operators were apprehended, which was not frequent—as\n they had strange powers, which, not being definable, were beyond the\n law—they suffered their sentences with equanimity. No Earth court\n could give an effective prison sentence to a creature whose life\n spanned approximately two thousand terrestrial years. And capital\n punishment had become obsolete on Terra, which very possibly saved the\n terrestrials embarrassment, for it was not certain that their weapons\n could kill the Vinzz ... or whether, in fact, the Vinzz merely expired\n after a period of years out of sheer boredom. Fortunately, because\n trade was more profitable than war, there had always been peace between\n Vinau and Terra, and, for that reason, Terra could not bar the entrance\n of apparently respectable citizens of a friendly planet.", "Zarquil was extremely illegal, of course—so much so that there were\n many legitimate citizens who weren't quite sure just what the word\n implied, knowing merely that it was one of those nameless horrors so\n deliciously hinted at by the fax sheets under the generic term of\n \"crimes against nature.\" Actually the phrase was more appropriate to\n zarquil than to most of the other activities to which it was commonly\n applied. And this was one crime—for it was crime in law as well as\n nature—in which victim had to be considered as guilty as perpetrator;\n otherwise the whole legal structure of society would collapse.\nPlaying the game was fabulously expensive; it had to be to make it\n profitable for the Vinzz to run it. Those odd creatures from Altair's", "seventh planet cared nothing for the welfare of the completely alien\n human beings; all they wanted was to feather their own pockets with\n interstellar credits, so that they could return to Vinau and buy many\n slaves. For, on Vinau, bodies were of little account, and so to them\n zarquil was the equivalent of the terrestrial game musical chairs.\n Which was why they came to Terra to make profits—there has never been\n big money in musical chairs as such.", "The fat man wondered whether that had been his quarry's motive in\n coming to such desolate, off-trail places—hoping that eventually\n disaster would hit the one who pursued him. Somehow, such a plan seemed\n too logical for the man he was haunting.\n\n\n However, beggars could not be choosers. The fat man paid off the\n heli-driver and entered the zarquil house. \"One?\" the small green\n creature in the slightly frayed robe asked.\n\n\n \"One,\" the fat man answered.\nIII", "\"Then what they say about the zarquil games is true? There are people\n who go around changing their bodies like—like hats?\" Automatically she\n reached to adjust the expensive bit of blue synthetic on her moon-pale\n hair, for she was always conscious of her appearance; if she had not\n been so before marriage, Gabriel would have taught her that.\nHe smiled again, but coughed instead of speaking.\n\n\n \"But why do you do it?\nWhy!\nDo you like it? Or is it because of\n Gabriel?\" She was growing a little frantic; there was menace here\n and she could not understand it nor determine whether or not she was\n included in its scope. \"Do you want to keep him from recognizing you;\n is that it?\"\n\n\n \"Ask him.\"", "The taxi driver took the fat man to one of the rather seedy locales in\n which the zarquil games were usually found, for the Vinzz attempted to\n conduct their operations with as much unobtrusiveness as was possible.\n But the front door swung open on an interior that lacked the opulence\n of the usual Vinoz set-up; it was down-right shabby, the dim olive\n light hinting of squalor rather than forbidden pleasures. That was\n the trouble in these smaller towns—you ran greater risks of getting\n involved in games where the players had not been carefully screened.\n\n\n The Vinoz games were usually clean, because that paid off better, but,\n when profits were lacking, the Vinzz were capable of sliding off into\n darkside practices. Naturally the small-town houses were more likely to\n have trouble in making ends meet, because everybody in the parish knew\n everybody else far too well.", "Gabriel shivered. \"I'll be careful,\" he vowed. \"I promise—I'll be\n careful.\"\nWhen he was sure that his charge was safely tucked in for the night,\n the fat man checked his personal possessions. He then requested a taxi\n driver to take him to the nearest zarquil game. The driver accepted the\n commission phlegmatically. Perhaps he was more hardened than the others\n had been; perhaps he was unaware that the fat man was not a desperate\n or despairing individual seeking one last chance, but what was known\n colloquially as a flying dutchman, a man, or woman, who went from\n one zarquil game to another, loving the thrill of the sport, if you\n could call it that, for its own sake, and not for the futile hope it\n extended and which was its sole shred of claim to moral justification.\n Perhaps—and this was the most likely hypothesis—he just didn't care.", "It might merely be prudence on the Vinzz' part—if it had ever\n been proved that an alien life-form had \"desecrated\" a human body,\n Earthmen would clamor for war ... for on this planet humanity held\n its self-bestowed purity of birthright dear—and the Vinzz, despite\n being unquestionably the stronger, were pragmatic pacifists. It had\n been undoubtedly some rabid member of the anti-alien groups active on\n Terra who had started the rumor that the planetary slogan of Vinau was,\n \"Don't beat 'em; cheat 'em.\"\n\n\n \"It would have to be something pretty nuclear for the other guy to take\n such a risk.\" The man rubbed his chin thoughtfully. \"How much?\"\n\n\n \"Thirty thousand credits.\"\n\n\n \"Why, that's three times the usual rate!\"\n\n\n \"The other will pay five times the usual rate.\"", "The nondescript man hailed a cruising helicab. \"Where to, fellow-man?\"\n the driver asked.\n\n\n \"I'm new in the parish,\" the other man replied and let it hang there.\n\n\n \"Oh...? Females...? Narcophagi...? Thrill-mills?\"\n\n\n But to each of these questions the nondescript man shook his head.\n\n\n \"Games?\" the driver finally asked, although he could guess what was\n wanted by then. \"Dice...? Roulette...? Farjeen?\"\n\n\n \"Is there a good zarquil game in town?\"\n\n\n The driver moved so he could see the face of the man behind him in the\n teleview. A very ordinary face. \"Look, colleague, why don't you commit\n suicide? It's cleaner and quicker.\"", "There was no change of expression on the man's gaunt face, and she\n wondered how much control he had over a body that, though second- or\n third- or fourth-hand, must be new to him. How well could he make it\n respond? What was it like to step into another person's casing? But she\n must not let herself think that way or she would find herself looking\n for a zarquil game. It would be one way of escaping Gabriel, but not,\n she thought, the best way; her body was much too good a one to risk so\n casually.\nIt was beginning to snow. Light, feathery flakes drifted down on her\n husband's immobile body. She pulled her thick coat—of fur taken from\n some animal who had lived and died light-years away—more closely about\n herself. The thin young man began to cough again.", "\"You know why. Your body is worthless. And this is a reputable house.\"\n\n\n \"But I have plenty of money.\" The young man coughed. The Vinzz\n shrugged. \"I'll pay you twice the regular fee.\"\n\n\n The green one shook his head. \"Regrettably, I do mean what I say. This\n game is really clean.\"\n\n\n \"In a town like this?\"\n\n\n \"That is the reason we can afford to be honest.\" The Vinzz' tendrils\n quivered in what the man had come to recognize as amusement through\n long, but necessarily superficial acquaintance with the Vinzz. His\n heavy robe of what looked like moss-green velvet, but might have been\n velvet-green moss, encrusted with oddly faceted alien jewels, swung\n with him.", "He didn't know. However, there seemed to be no help for it now; he\n would have to wait until they reached the next town, unless the girl,\n seeing him reappear in the same guise, would guess what had happened\n and tell her husband. He himself had been a fool to admit to her that\n the hulk he inhabited was a sick one; he still couldn't understand\n how he could so casually have entrusted her with so vital a piece of\n information.\nThe Vinzz had been locking antennae with another of his kind. Now they\n detached, and the first approached the man once more. \"There is, as it\n happens, a body available for a private game,\" he lisped. \"No questions\n to be asked or answered. All I can tell you is that it is in good\n health.\"\n\n\n The man hesitated. \"But unable to pass the screening?\" he murmured\n aloud. \"A criminal then.\"\n\n\n The green one's face—if you could call it a face—remained impassive.", "\"I wasn't thinking about that, Gabe,\" she said truthfully enough, for\n she hadn't followed the idea to its logical conclusion. \"Of course I'd\n go with you,\" she went on, now knowing she lied, \"when you got your ...\n old body back.\"\nSure\n, she thought,\nI'd keep going with you to farjeen houses and\n thrill-mills.\nActually she had accompanied him to a thrill-mill only\n once, and from then on, despite all his threats, she had refused to go\n with him again. But that once had been enough; nothing could ever wash\n that experience from her mind or her body.\n\n\n \"You wouldn't be able to get your old body back, though, would you?\"\n she went on. \"You don't know where it's gone, and neither, I suppose,\n does he?\"", "\"This isn't a good body,\" he said. \"It's diseased. Sure, nobody's\n supposed to play the game who hasn't passed a thorough medical\n examination. But in the places to which your husband has been leading\n me, they're often not too particular, as long as the player has plenty\n of foliage.\"\n\n\n \"How—long will it last you?\"\n\n\n \"Four or five months, if I'm careful.\" He smiled. \"But don't worry, if\n that's what you're doing; I'll get it passed on before then. It'll be\n expensive—that's all. Bad landing for the guy who gets it, but then\n it was tough on me too, wasn't it?\"\n\n\n \"But how did you get into this ... pursuit?\" she asked again. \"And why\n are you doing it?\" People didn't have any traffic with Gabriel Lockard\n for fun, not after they got to know him. And this man certainly should\n know him better than most.", "Fortunately the car was flying low, contrary to regulations, so that\n when they smashed into the beacon tower on the outskirts of the little\n town, they didn't have far to fall. And hardly had their car crashed\n on the ground when the car that had been following them landed, and a\n short fat man was puffing toward them through the mist.\n\n\n To the girl's indignation, the stranger not only hauled Gabe out onto\n the dripping grass first, but stopped and deliberately examined the\n young man by the light of his minilume, almost as if she weren't there\n at all. Only when she started to struggle out by herself did he seem to\n remember her existence. He pulled her away from the wreck just a moment\n before the fuel tank exploded and the 'copter went up in flames.", "\"Male?\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" the Vinzz said primly. His kind did have certain ultimate\n standards to which they adhered rigidly, and one of those was the\n curious tabu against mixed games, strictly enforced even though it\n kept them from tapping a vast source of potential players. There had\n also never been a recorded instance of humans and extraterrestrials\n exchanging identities, but whether that was the result of tabu or\n biological impossibility, no one could tell.", "time immemorial, for he was ever mindful of the possibility that he\n might one day find himself trapped unwittingly in the body of one of\n the men depicted there. And he knew that this particular man, though\n not an important criminal in any sense of the word, was one whom the\n police had been ordered to burn on sight. The abolishing of capital\n punishment could not abolish the necessity for self-defense, and the\n man in question was not one who would let himself be captured easily,\n nor whom the police intended to capture easily.\nThis might be a lucky break for me after all\n, the new tenant thought,\n as he tried to adjust himself to the body. It, too, despite its obvious\n rude health, was not a very comfortable fit.\nI can do a lot with a", "He shrugged. \"I never saw him before in my life.\" Of course, knowing\n him, she assumed he was lying, but, as a matter of fact, just then he\n happened to have been telling the truth.\nOnce the illuminators were extinguished in Gabriel Lockard's hotel\n suite, it seemed reasonably certain to the man in the gray suit, as\n he watched from the street, that his quarry would not go out again\n that night. So he went to the nearest airstation. There he inserted a\n coin in a locker, into which he put most of his personal possessions,\n reserving only a sum of money. After setting the locker to respond to\n the letter combination\nbodyguard\n, he went out into the street.\n\n\n If he had met with a fatal accident at that point, there would have\n been nothing on his body to identify him. As a matter of fact, no real\n identification was possible, for he was no one and had been no one for\n years.", "\"You saved our lives,\" the girl said. \"I'd like to give you some token\n of my—of our appreciation.\" Her hand reached toward her credit-carrier\n with deliberate insult. He might have saved her life, but only\n casually, as a by-product of some larger scheme, and her appreciation\n held little gratitude.\n\n\n The fat man shook his head without rancor. \"I have plenty of money,\n thank you, Mrs. Gabriel Lockard.... Come,\" he addressed her husband,\n \"if you get up, I'll drive you home. I warn you, be more careful in the\n future! Sometimes,\" he added musingly, \"I almost wish you would let\n something happen. Then my problem would not be any problem, would it?\"", "Everyone in the room was aware of the big young man, and most of the\n humans present were resentful, for he handled himself consciously and\n arrogantly, as if his appearance alone were enough to make him superior\n to anyone. Even the girl with him was growing restless, for she was\n accustomed to adulation herself, and next to Gabriel Lockard she was\n almost ordinary-looking.\n\n\n As for the extraterrestrials—it was a free bar—they were merely\n amused, since to them all men were pathetically and irredeemably\n hideous.\n\n\n Gabe threw his arm wide in one of his expansive gestures. There was a\n short man standing next to the pair—young, as most men and women were\n in that time, thanks to the science which could stave off decay, though\n not death—but with no other apparent physical virtue, for plastic\n surgery had not fulfilled its bright promise of the twentieth century." ], [ "And that, coming on top of Gabriel Lockard's spectacular appearance,\n was too much. The ugly man picked up the drink the bartender had just\n set before him and started to hurl it, glass and all, into Lockard's\n handsome face.\nSuddenly a restraining hand was laid upon his arm. \"Don't do that,\" the\n nondescript man who had been sitting in the corner advised. He removed\n the glass from the little man's slackening grasp. \"You wouldn't want to\n go to jail because of him.\"\n\n\n The ugly man gave him a bewildered stare. Then, seeing the forces\n now ranged against him—including his own belated prudence—were too\n strong, he stumbled off. He hadn't really wanted to fight, only to\n smash back, and now it was too late for that.\n\n\n Gabe studied the newcomer curiously. \"So, it's you again?\"", "The drink he had been raising to his lips splashed all over his\n clothing; the glass shattered at his feet. Now he was not only a rather\n ugly little man, but also a rather ridiculous one—or at least he felt\n he was, which was what mattered.\n\n\n \"Sorry, colleague,\" Gabe said lazily. \"All my fault. You must let me\n buy you a replacement.\" He gestured to the bartender. \"Another of the\n same for my fellow-man here.\"\n\n\n The ugly man dabbed futilely at his dripping trousers with a cloth\n hastily supplied by the management.\n\n\n \"You must allow me to pay your cleaning bill,\" Gabe said, taking out\n his wallet and extracting several credit notes without seeming to look\n at them. \"Here, have yourself a new suit on me.\"\nYou could use one\nwas implied.", "\"Too bad he got married,\" the young man said. \"I could have followed\n him for an eternity and he would never have been able to pick me out\n from the crowd. Too bad he got married anyway,\" he added, his voice\n less impersonal, \"for your sake.\"\n\n\n She had come to the same conclusion in her six months of marriage, but\n she would not admit that to an outsider. Though this man was hardly an\n outsider; he was part of their small family group—as long as she had\n known Gabriel, so long he must have known her. And she began to suspect\n that he was even more closely involved than that.\n\n\n \"Why must you change again?\" she persisted, obliquely approaching the\n subject she feared. \"You have a pretty good body there. Why run the\n risk of getting a bad one?\"", "Gabe gave a short laugh, for no reason that she could see.\nThere was the feeling that she had encountered the fat man before,\n which was, of course, absurd. She had an excellent memory for faces and\n his was not included in her gallery. The girl pulled her thin jacket\n closer about her chilly body. \"Aren't you going to introduce your—your\n friend to me, Gabe?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know who he is,\" Gabe said almost merrily, \"except that he's\n no friend of mine. Do you have a name, stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Of course I have a name.\" The fat man extracted an identification\n card from his wallet and read it. \"Says here I'm Dominic Bianchi, and\n Dominic Bianchi is a retail milgot dealer.... Only he isn't a retail\n milgot dealer any more; the poor fellow went bankrupt a couple of weeks\n ago, and now he isn't ... anything.\"", "\"We do a lot of business here,\" he said unnecessarily, for the whole\n set-up spelled wealth far beyond the dreams of the man, and he was by\n no means poor when it came to worldly goods. \"Why don't you try another\n town where they're not so particular?\"\n\n\n The young man smiled wryly. Just his luck to stumble on a sunny game.\n He never liked to risk following his quarry in the same configuration.\n And even though only the girl had actually seen him this time, he\n wouldn't feel at ease until he had made the usual body-shift. Was\n he changing because of Gabriel, he wondered, or was he using his own\n discoverment and identification simply as an excuse to cover the fact\n that none of the bodies that fell to his lot ever seemed to fit him?\n Was he activated solely by revenge or as much by the hope that in the\n hazards of the game he might, impossible though it now seemed, some day\n win another body that approached perfection as nearly as his original\n casing had?", "Gabe opened his eyes and saw the fat man gazing down at him\n speculatively. \"My guardian angel,\" he mumbled—shock had sobered him\n a little, but not enough. He sat up. \"Guess I'm not hurt or you'd have\n thrown me back in.\"\n\n\n \"And that's no joke,\" the fat man agreed.\n\n\n The girl shivered and at that moment Gabriel suddenly seemed to recall\n that he had not been alone. \"How about Helen? She on course?\"\n\n\n \"Seems to be,\" the fat man said. \"You all right, miss?\" he asked,\n glancing toward the girl without, she thought, much apparent concern.\n\n\n \"\nMrs.\n,\" Gabriel corrected. \"Allow me to introduce you to Mrs. Gabriel\n Lockard,\" he said, bowing from his seated position toward the girl.\n \"Pretty bauble, isn't she?\"", "\"I drank with you once too often,\" the nondescript man said. \"And\n things worked out fine, didn't they? For you.\" His eyes studied the\n other man's incredibly handsome young face, noted the suggestion of\n bags under the eyes, the beginning of slackness at the lips, and were\n not pleased with what they saw. \"Watch yourself, colleague,\" he warned\n as he left. \"Soon you might not be worth the saving.\"\n\n\n \"Who was that, Gabe?\" the girl asked.", "Gabriel shivered. \"I'll be careful,\" he vowed. \"I promise—I'll be\n careful.\"\nWhen he was sure that his charge was safely tucked in for the night,\n the fat man checked his personal possessions. He then requested a taxi\n driver to take him to the nearest zarquil game. The driver accepted the\n commission phlegmatically. Perhaps he was more hardened than the others\n had been; perhaps he was unaware that the fat man was not a desperate\n or despairing individual seeking one last chance, but what was known\n colloquially as a flying dutchman, a man, or woman, who went from\n one zarquil game to another, loving the thrill of the sport, if you\n could call it that, for its own sake, and not for the futile hope it\n extended and which was its sole shred of claim to moral justification.\n Perhaps—and this was the most likely hypothesis—he just didn't care.", "Fortunately the car was flying low, contrary to regulations, so that\n when they smashed into the beacon tower on the outskirts of the little\n town, they didn't have far to fall. And hardly had their car crashed\n on the ground when the car that had been following them landed, and a\n short fat man was puffing toward them through the mist.\n\n\n To the girl's indignation, the stranger not only hauled Gabe out onto\n the dripping grass first, but stopped and deliberately examined the\n young man by the light of his minilume, almost as if she weren't there\n at all. Only when she started to struggle out by herself did he seem to\n remember her existence. He pulled her away from the wreck just a moment\n before the fuel tank exploded and the 'copter went up in flames.", "\"Look, Gabe,\" the girl said, \"don't try to fool me! I know you\n too well. And I know you have that man's—the real Gabriel\n Lockard's—body.\" She put unnecessary stardust on her nose as she\n watched her husband's reflection in the dressing table mirror.\n\n\n Lockard—Lockard's body, at any rate—sat up and felt his unshaven\n chin. \"That what he tell you?\"\n\n\n \"No, he didn't tell me anything really—just suggested I ask you\n whatever I want to know. But why else should he guard somebody he\n obviously hates the way he hates you? Only because he doesn't want to\n see his body spoiled.\"\n\n\n \"It\nis\na pretty good body, isn't it?\" Gabe flexed softening muscles\n and made no attempt to deny her charge; very probably he was relieved\n at having someone with whom to share his secret.", "The man in the gray suit smiled. \"Who else in any world would stand up\n for you?\"\n\n\n \"I should think you'd have given up by now. Not that I mind having you\n around, of course,\" Gabriel added too quickly. \"You do come in useful\n at times, you know.\"\n\n\n \"So you don't mind having me around?\" The nondescript man smiled again.\n \"Then what are you running from, if not me? You can't be running from\n yourself—you lost yourself a while back, remember?\"\n\n\n Gabe ran a hand through his thick blond hair. \"Come on, have a drink\n with me, fellow-man, and let's let bygones be bygones. I owe you\n something—I admit that. Maybe we can even work this thing out.\"", "The would-be thief fled down the dark alley, with the hot bright rays\n from the stranger's gun lancing out after him in flamboyant but futile\n patterns. The stranger, a thin young man with delicate, angular\n features, made no attempt to follow. Instead, he bent over to examine\n Gabriel Lockard's form, appropriately outstretched in the gutter. \"Only\n weighted out,\" he muttered, \"he'll be all right. Whatever possessed you\n two to come out to a place like this?\"\n\n\n \"I really think Gabriel\nmust\nbe possessed....\" the girl said, mostly\n to herself. \"I had no idea of the kind of place it was going to be\n until he brought me here. The others were bad, but this is even worse.\n It almost seems as if he went around looking for trouble, doesn't it?\"", "\"I wasn't thinking about that, Gabe,\" she said truthfully enough, for\n she hadn't followed the idea to its logical conclusion. \"Of course I'd\n go with you,\" she went on, now knowing she lied, \"when you got your ...\n old body back.\"\nSure\n, she thought,\nI'd keep going with you to farjeen houses and\n thrill-mills.\nActually she had accompanied him to a thrill-mill only\n once, and from then on, despite all his threats, she had refused to go\n with him again. But that once had been enough; nothing could ever wash\n that experience from her mind or her body.\n\n\n \"You wouldn't be able to get your old body back, though, would you?\"\n she went on. \"You don't know where it's gone, and neither, I suppose,\n does he?\"", "Everyone in the room was aware of the big young man, and most of the\n humans present were resentful, for he handled himself consciously and\n arrogantly, as if his appearance alone were enough to make him superior\n to anyone. Even the girl with him was growing restless, for she was\n accustomed to adulation herself, and next to Gabriel Lockard she was\n almost ordinary-looking.\n\n\n As for the extraterrestrials—it was a free bar—they were merely\n amused, since to them all men were pathetically and irredeemably\n hideous.\n\n\n Gabe threw his arm wide in one of his expansive gestures. There was a\n short man standing next to the pair—young, as most men and women were\n in that time, thanks to the science which could stave off decay, though\n not death—but with no other apparent physical virtue, for plastic\n surgery had not fulfilled its bright promise of the twentieth century.", "The fat man wondered whether that had been his quarry's motive in\n coming to such desolate, off-trail places—hoping that eventually\n disaster would hit the one who pursued him. Somehow, such a plan seemed\n too logical for the man he was haunting.\n\n\n However, beggars could not be choosers. The fat man paid off the\n heli-driver and entered the zarquil house. \"One?\" the small green\n creature in the slightly frayed robe asked.\n\n\n \"One,\" the fat man answered.\nIII", "\"This isn't a good body,\" he said. \"It's diseased. Sure, nobody's\n supposed to play the game who hasn't passed a thorough medical\n examination. But in the places to which your husband has been leading\n me, they're often not too particular, as long as the player has plenty\n of foliage.\"\n\n\n \"How—long will it last you?\"\n\n\n \"Four or five months, if I'm careful.\" He smiled. \"But don't worry, if\n that's what you're doing; I'll get it passed on before then. It'll be\n expensive—that's all. Bad landing for the guy who gets it, but then\n it was tough on me too, wasn't it?\"\n\n\n \"But how did you get into this ... pursuit?\" she asked again. \"And why\n are you doing it?\" People didn't have any traffic with Gabriel Lockard\n for fun, not after they got to know him. And this man certainly should\n know him better than most.", "\"Not as good as it must have been,\" the girl said, turning and looking\n at him without admiration. \"Not if you keep on the way you're coursing.\n Gabe, why don't you...?\"\n\n\n \"Give it back to him, eh?\" Lockard regarded his wife appraisingly.\n \"You'd like that, wouldn't you? You'd be\nhis\nwife then. That would be\n nice—a sound mind in a sound body. But don't you think that's a little\n more than you deserve?\"", "\"He won't tell me; he never tells me anything. We just keep running. I\n didn't recognize it as running at first, but now I realize that's what\n we've been doing ever since we were married. And running from you, I\n think?\"", "\"I don't want to know!\" he spat. \"I wouldn't want it if I could get\n it back. Whoever it adhered to probably killed himself as soon as he\n looked in a mirror.\" He swung long legs over the side of his bed.\n \"Christ, anything would be better than that! You can't imagine what a\n hulk I had!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, I can,\" she said incautiously. \"You must have had a body to\n match your character. Pity you could only change one.\"", "\"I'm delighted to meet you, Mrs. Gabriel Lockard,\" the fat man said,\n looking at her intently. His small eyes seemed to strip the make-up\n from her cheek and examine the livid bruise underneath. \"I hope\n you'll be worthy of the name.\" The light given off by the flaming\n car flickered on his face and Gabriel's and, she supposed, hers too.\n Otherwise, darkness surrounded the three of them.\n\n\n There were no public illuminators this far out—even in town the\n lights were dimming and not being replaced fast enough nor by the\n newer models. The town, the civilization, the planet all were old and\n beginning to slide downhill...." ], [ "Gabe opened his eyes and saw the fat man gazing down at him\n speculatively. \"My guardian angel,\" he mumbled—shock had sobered him\n a little, but not enough. He sat up. \"Guess I'm not hurt or you'd have\n thrown me back in.\"\n\n\n \"And that's no joke,\" the fat man agreed.\n\n\n The girl shivered and at that moment Gabriel suddenly seemed to recall\n that he had not been alone. \"How about Helen? She on course?\"\n\n\n \"Seems to be,\" the fat man said. \"You all right, miss?\" he asked,\n glancing toward the girl without, she thought, much apparent concern.\n\n\n \"\nMrs.\n,\" Gabriel corrected. \"Allow me to introduce you to Mrs. Gabriel\n Lockard,\" he said, bowing from his seated position toward the girl.\n \"Pretty bauble, isn't she?\"", "And that, coming on top of Gabriel Lockard's spectacular appearance,\n was too much. The ugly man picked up the drink the bartender had just\n set before him and started to hurl it, glass and all, into Lockard's\n handsome face.\nSuddenly a restraining hand was laid upon his arm. \"Don't do that,\" the\n nondescript man who had been sitting in the corner advised. He removed\n the glass from the little man's slackening grasp. \"You wouldn't want to\n go to jail because of him.\"\n\n\n The ugly man gave him a bewildered stare. Then, seeing the forces\n now ranged against him—including his own belated prudence—were too\n strong, he stumbled off. He hadn't really wanted to fight, only to\n smash back, and now it was too late for that.\n\n\n Gabe studied the newcomer curiously. \"So, it's you again?\"", "The drink he had been raising to his lips splashed all over his\n clothing; the glass shattered at his feet. Now he was not only a rather\n ugly little man, but also a rather ridiculous one—or at least he felt\n he was, which was what mattered.\n\n\n \"Sorry, colleague,\" Gabe said lazily. \"All my fault. You must let me\n buy you a replacement.\" He gestured to the bartender. \"Another of the\n same for my fellow-man here.\"\n\n\n The ugly man dabbed futilely at his dripping trousers with a cloth\n hastily supplied by the management.\n\n\n \"You must allow me to pay your cleaning bill,\" Gabe said, taking out\n his wallet and extracting several credit notes without seeming to look\n at them. \"Here, have yourself a new suit on me.\"\nYou could use one\nwas implied.", "\"Look, Gabe,\" the girl said, \"don't try to fool me! I know you\n too well. And I know you have that man's—the real Gabriel\n Lockard's—body.\" She put unnecessary stardust on her nose as she\n watched her husband's reflection in the dressing table mirror.\n\n\n Lockard—Lockard's body, at any rate—sat up and felt his unshaven\n chin. \"That what he tell you?\"\n\n\n \"No, he didn't tell me anything really—just suggested I ask you\n whatever I want to know. But why else should he guard somebody he\n obviously hates the way he hates you? Only because he doesn't want to\n see his body spoiled.\"\n\n\n \"It\nis\na pretty good body, isn't it?\" Gabe flexed softening muscles\n and made no attempt to deny her charge; very probably he was relieved\n at having someone with whom to share his secret.", "\"I drank with you once too often,\" the nondescript man said. \"And\n things worked out fine, didn't they? For you.\" His eyes studied the\n other man's incredibly handsome young face, noted the suggestion of\n bags under the eyes, the beginning of slackness at the lips, and were\n not pleased with what they saw. \"Watch yourself, colleague,\" he warned\n as he left. \"Soon you might not be worth the saving.\"\n\n\n \"Who was that, Gabe?\" the girl asked.", "Gabe gave a short laugh, for no reason that she could see.\nThere was the feeling that she had encountered the fat man before,\n which was, of course, absurd. She had an excellent memory for faces and\n his was not included in her gallery. The girl pulled her thin jacket\n closer about her chilly body. \"Aren't you going to introduce your—your\n friend to me, Gabe?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know who he is,\" Gabe said almost merrily, \"except that he's\n no friend of mine. Do you have a name, stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Of course I have a name.\" The fat man extracted an identification\n card from his wallet and read it. \"Says here I'm Dominic Bianchi, and\n Dominic Bianchi is a retail milgot dealer.... Only he isn't a retail\n milgot dealer any more; the poor fellow went bankrupt a couple of weeks\n ago, and now he isn't ... anything.\"", "Everyone in the room was aware of the big young man, and most of the\n humans present were resentful, for he handled himself consciously and\n arrogantly, as if his appearance alone were enough to make him superior\n to anyone. Even the girl with him was growing restless, for she was\n accustomed to adulation herself, and next to Gabriel Lockard she was\n almost ordinary-looking.\n\n\n As for the extraterrestrials—it was a free bar—they were merely\n amused, since to them all men were pathetically and irredeemably\n hideous.\n\n\n Gabe threw his arm wide in one of his expansive gestures. There was a\n short man standing next to the pair—young, as most men and women were\n in that time, thanks to the science which could stave off decay, though\n not death—but with no other apparent physical virtue, for plastic\n surgery had not fulfilled its bright promise of the twentieth century.", "Fortunately the car was flying low, contrary to regulations, so that\n when they smashed into the beacon tower on the outskirts of the little\n town, they didn't have far to fall. And hardly had their car crashed\n on the ground when the car that had been following them landed, and a\n short fat man was puffing toward them through the mist.\n\n\n To the girl's indignation, the stranger not only hauled Gabe out onto\n the dripping grass first, but stopped and deliberately examined the\n young man by the light of his minilume, almost as if she weren't there\n at all. Only when she started to struggle out by herself did he seem to\n remember her existence. He pulled her away from the wreck just a moment\n before the fuel tank exploded and the 'copter went up in flames.", "The would-be thief fled down the dark alley, with the hot bright rays\n from the stranger's gun lancing out after him in flamboyant but futile\n patterns. The stranger, a thin young man with delicate, angular\n features, made no attempt to follow. Instead, he bent over to examine\n Gabriel Lockard's form, appropriately outstretched in the gutter. \"Only\n weighted out,\" he muttered, \"he'll be all right. Whatever possessed you\n two to come out to a place like this?\"\n\n\n \"I really think Gabriel\nmust\nbe possessed....\" the girl said, mostly\n to herself. \"I had no idea of the kind of place it was going to be\n until he brought me here. The others were bad, but this is even worse.\n It almost seems as if he went around looking for trouble, doesn't it?\"", "Gabriel shivered. \"I'll be careful,\" he vowed. \"I promise—I'll be\n careful.\"\nWhen he was sure that his charge was safely tucked in for the night,\n the fat man checked his personal possessions. He then requested a taxi\n driver to take him to the nearest zarquil game. The driver accepted the\n commission phlegmatically. Perhaps he was more hardened than the others\n had been; perhaps he was unaware that the fat man was not a desperate\n or despairing individual seeking one last chance, but what was known\n colloquially as a flying dutchman, a man, or woman, who went from\n one zarquil game to another, loving the thrill of the sport, if you\n could call it that, for its own sake, and not for the futile hope it\n extended and which was its sole shred of claim to moral justification.\n Perhaps—and this was the most likely hypothesis—he just didn't care.", "The man in the gray suit smiled. \"Who else in any world would stand up\n for you?\"\n\n\n \"I should think you'd have given up by now. Not that I mind having you\n around, of course,\" Gabriel added too quickly. \"You do come in useful\n at times, you know.\"\n\n\n \"So you don't mind having me around?\" The nondescript man smiled again.\n \"Then what are you running from, if not me? You can't be running from\n yourself—you lost yourself a while back, remember?\"\n\n\n Gabe ran a hand through his thick blond hair. \"Come on, have a drink\n with me, fellow-man, and let's let bygones be bygones. I owe you\n something—I admit that. Maybe we can even work this thing out.\"", "\"I wasn't thinking about that, Gabe,\" she said truthfully enough, for\n she hadn't followed the idea to its logical conclusion. \"Of course I'd\n go with you,\" she went on, now knowing she lied, \"when you got your ...\n old body back.\"\nSure\n, she thought,\nI'd keep going with you to farjeen houses and\n thrill-mills.\nActually she had accompanied him to a thrill-mill only\n once, and from then on, despite all his threats, she had refused to go\n with him again. But that once had been enough; nothing could ever wash\n that experience from her mind or her body.\n\n\n \"You wouldn't be able to get your old body back, though, would you?\"\n she went on. \"You don't know where it's gone, and neither, I suppose,\n does he?\"", "\"We do a lot of business here,\" he said unnecessarily, for the whole\n set-up spelled wealth far beyond the dreams of the man, and he was by\n no means poor when it came to worldly goods. \"Why don't you try another\n town where they're not so particular?\"\n\n\n The young man smiled wryly. Just his luck to stumble on a sunny game.\n He never liked to risk following his quarry in the same configuration.\n And even though only the girl had actually seen him this time, he\n wouldn't feel at ease until he had made the usual body-shift. Was\n he changing because of Gabriel, he wondered, or was he using his own\n discoverment and identification simply as an excuse to cover the fact\n that none of the bodies that fell to his lot ever seemed to fit him?\n Was he activated solely by revenge or as much by the hope that in the\n hazards of the game he might, impossible though it now seemed, some day\n win another body that approached perfection as nearly as his original\n casing had?", "\"Too bad he got married,\" the young man said. \"I could have followed\n him for an eternity and he would never have been able to pick me out\n from the crowd. Too bad he got married anyway,\" he added, his voice\n less impersonal, \"for your sake.\"\n\n\n She had come to the same conclusion in her six months of marriage, but\n she would not admit that to an outsider. Though this man was hardly an\n outsider; he was part of their small family group—as long as she had\n known Gabriel, so long he must have known her. And she began to suspect\n that he was even more closely involved than that.\n\n\n \"Why must you change again?\" she persisted, obliquely approaching the\n subject she feared. \"You have a pretty good body there. Why run the\n risk of getting a bad one?\"", "\"I'm delighted to meet you, Mrs. Gabriel Lockard,\" the fat man said,\n looking at her intently. His small eyes seemed to strip the make-up\n from her cheek and examine the livid bruise underneath. \"I hope\n you'll be worthy of the name.\" The light given off by the flaming\n car flickered on his face and Gabriel's and, she supposed, hers too.\n Otherwise, darkness surrounded the three of them.\n\n\n There were no public illuminators this far out—even in town the\n lights were dimming and not being replaced fast enough nor by the\n newer models. The town, the civilization, the planet all were old and\n beginning to slide downhill....", "\"You saved our lives,\" the girl said. \"I'd like to give you some token\n of my—of our appreciation.\" Her hand reached toward her credit-carrier\n with deliberate insult. He might have saved her life, but only\n casually, as a by-product of some larger scheme, and her appreciation\n held little gratitude.\n\n\n The fat man shook his head without rancor. \"I have plenty of money,\n thank you, Mrs. Gabriel Lockard.... Come,\" he addressed her husband,\n \"if you get up, I'll drive you home. I warn you, be more careful in the\n future! Sometimes,\" he added musingly, \"I almost wish you would let\n something happen. Then my problem would not be any problem, would it?\"", "He shrugged. \"I never saw him before in my life.\" Of course, knowing\n him, she assumed he was lying, but, as a matter of fact, just then he\n happened to have been telling the truth.\nOnce the illuminators were extinguished in Gabriel Lockard's hotel\n suite, it seemed reasonably certain to the man in the gray suit, as\n he watched from the street, that his quarry would not go out again\n that night. So he went to the nearest airstation. There he inserted a\n coin in a locker, into which he put most of his personal possessions,\n reserving only a sum of money. After setting the locker to respond to\n the letter combination\nbodyguard\n, he went out into the street.\n\n\n If he had met with a fatal accident at that point, there would have\n been nothing on his body to identify him. As a matter of fact, no real\n identification was possible, for he was no one and had been no one for\n years.", "\"This isn't a good body,\" he said. \"It's diseased. Sure, nobody's\n supposed to play the game who hasn't passed a thorough medical\n examination. But in the places to which your husband has been leading\n me, they're often not too particular, as long as the player has plenty\n of foliage.\"\n\n\n \"How—long will it last you?\"\n\n\n \"Four or five months, if I'm careful.\" He smiled. \"But don't worry, if\n that's what you're doing; I'll get it passed on before then. It'll be\n expensive—that's all. Bad landing for the guy who gets it, but then\n it was tough on me too, wasn't it?\"\n\n\n \"But how did you get into this ... pursuit?\" she asked again. \"And why\n are you doing it?\" People didn't have any traffic with Gabriel Lockard\n for fun, not after they got to know him. And this man certainly should\n know him better than most.", "The fat man wondered whether that had been his quarry's motive in\n coming to such desolate, off-trail places—hoping that eventually\n disaster would hit the one who pursued him. Somehow, such a plan seemed\n too logical for the man he was haunting.\n\n\n However, beggars could not be choosers. The fat man paid off the\n heli-driver and entered the zarquil house. \"One?\" the small green\n creature in the slightly frayed robe asked.\n\n\n \"One,\" the fat man answered.\nIII", "\"Not as good as it must have been,\" the girl said, turning and looking\n at him without admiration. \"Not if you keep on the way you're coursing.\n Gabe, why don't you...?\"\n\n\n \"Give it back to him, eh?\" Lockard regarded his wife appraisingly.\n \"You'd like that, wouldn't you? You'd be\nhis\nwife then. That would be\n nice—a sound mind in a sound body. But don't you think that's a little\n more than you deserve?\"" ], [ "Zarquil was extremely illegal, of course—so much so that there were\n many legitimate citizens who weren't quite sure just what the word\n implied, knowing merely that it was one of those nameless horrors so\n deliciously hinted at by the fax sheets under the generic term of\n \"crimes against nature.\" Actually the phrase was more appropriate to\n zarquil than to most of the other activities to which it was commonly\n applied. And this was one crime—for it was crime in law as well as\n nature—in which victim had to be considered as guilty as perpetrator;\n otherwise the whole legal structure of society would collapse.\nPlaying the game was fabulously expensive; it had to be to make it\n profitable for the Vinzz to run it. Those odd creatures from Altair's", "\"This isn't a good body,\" he said. \"It's diseased. Sure, nobody's\n supposed to play the game who hasn't passed a thorough medical\n examination. But in the places to which your husband has been leading\n me, they're often not too particular, as long as the player has plenty\n of foliage.\"\n\n\n \"How—long will it last you?\"\n\n\n \"Four or five months, if I'm careful.\" He smiled. \"But don't worry, if\n that's what you're doing; I'll get it passed on before then. It'll be\n expensive—that's all. Bad landing for the guy who gets it, but then\n it was tough on me too, wasn't it?\"\n\n\n \"But how did you get into this ... pursuit?\" she asked again. \"And why\n are you doing it?\" People didn't have any traffic with Gabriel Lockard\n for fun, not after they got to know him. And this man certainly should\n know him better than most.", "\"Then what they say about the zarquil games is true? There are people\n who go around changing their bodies like—like hats?\" Automatically she\n reached to adjust the expensive bit of blue synthetic on her moon-pale\n hair, for she was always conscious of her appearance; if she had not\n been so before marriage, Gabriel would have taught her that.\nHe smiled again, but coughed instead of speaking.\n\n\n \"But why do you do it?\nWhy!\nDo you like it? Or is it because of\n Gabriel?\" She was growing a little frantic; there was menace here\n and she could not understand it nor determine whether or not she was\n included in its scope. \"Do you want to keep him from recognizing you;\n is that it?\"\n\n\n \"Ask him.\"", "The fat man wondered whether that had been his quarry's motive in\n coming to such desolate, off-trail places—hoping that eventually\n disaster would hit the one who pursued him. Somehow, such a plan seemed\n too logical for the man he was haunting.\n\n\n However, beggars could not be choosers. The fat man paid off the\n heli-driver and entered the zarquil house. \"One?\" the small green\n creature in the slightly frayed robe asked.\n\n\n \"One,\" the fat man answered.\nIII", "seventh planet cared nothing for the welfare of the completely alien\n human beings; all they wanted was to feather their own pockets with\n interstellar credits, so that they could return to Vinau and buy many\n slaves. For, on Vinau, bodies were of little account, and so to them\n zarquil was the equivalent of the terrestrial game musical chairs.\n Which was why they came to Terra to make profits—there has never been\n big money in musical chairs as such.", "The nondescript man hailed a cruising helicab. \"Where to, fellow-man?\"\n the driver asked.\n\n\n \"I'm new in the parish,\" the other man replied and let it hang there.\n\n\n \"Oh...? Females...? Narcophagi...? Thrill-mills?\"\n\n\n But to each of these questions the nondescript man shook his head.\n\n\n \"Games?\" the driver finally asked, although he could guess what was\n wanted by then. \"Dice...? Roulette...? Farjeen?\"\n\n\n \"Is there a good zarquil game in town?\"\n\n\n The driver moved so he could see the face of the man behind him in the\n teleview. A very ordinary face. \"Look, colleague, why don't you commit\n suicide? It's cleaner and quicker.\"", "Gabriel shivered. \"I'll be careful,\" he vowed. \"I promise—I'll be\n careful.\"\nWhen he was sure that his charge was safely tucked in for the night,\n the fat man checked his personal possessions. He then requested a taxi\n driver to take him to the nearest zarquil game. The driver accepted the\n commission phlegmatically. Perhaps he was more hardened than the others\n had been; perhaps he was unaware that the fat man was not a desperate\n or despairing individual seeking one last chance, but what was known\n colloquially as a flying dutchman, a man, or woman, who went from\n one zarquil game to another, loving the thrill of the sport, if you\n could call it that, for its own sake, and not for the futile hope it\n extended and which was its sole shred of claim to moral justification.\n Perhaps—and this was the most likely hypothesis—he just didn't care.", "\"You know why. Your body is worthless. And this is a reputable house.\"\n\n\n \"But I have plenty of money.\" The young man coughed. The Vinzz\n shrugged. \"I'll pay you twice the regular fee.\"\n\n\n The green one shook his head. \"Regrettably, I do mean what I say. This\n game is really clean.\"\n\n\n \"In a town like this?\"\n\n\n \"That is the reason we can afford to be honest.\" The Vinzz' tendrils\n quivered in what the man had come to recognize as amusement through\n long, but necessarily superficial acquaintance with the Vinzz. His\n heavy robe of what looked like moss-green velvet, but might have been\n velvet-green moss, encrusted with oddly faceted alien jewels, swung\n with him.", "The taxi driver took the fat man to one of the rather seedy locales in\n which the zarquil games were usually found, for the Vinzz attempted to\n conduct their operations with as much unobtrusiveness as was possible.\n But the front door swung open on an interior that lacked the opulence\n of the usual Vinoz set-up; it was down-right shabby, the dim olive\n light hinting of squalor rather than forbidden pleasures. That was\n the trouble in these smaller towns—you ran greater risks of getting\n involved in games where the players had not been carefully screened.\n\n\n The Vinoz games were usually clean, because that paid off better, but,\n when profits were lacking, the Vinzz were capable of sliding off into\n darkside practices. Naturally the small-town houses were more likely to\n have trouble in making ends meet, because everybody in the parish knew\n everybody else far too well.", "When the zarquil operators were apprehended, which was not frequent—as\n they had strange powers, which, not being definable, were beyond the\n law—they suffered their sentences with equanimity. No Earth court\n could give an effective prison sentence to a creature whose life\n spanned approximately two thousand terrestrial years. And capital\n punishment had become obsolete on Terra, which very possibly saved the\n terrestrials embarrassment, for it was not certain that their weapons\n could kill the Vinzz ... or whether, in fact, the Vinzz merely expired\n after a period of years out of sheer boredom. Fortunately, because\n trade was more profitable than war, there had always been peace between\n Vinau and Terra, and, for that reason, Terra could not bar the entrance\n of apparently respectable citizens of a friendly planet.", "\"Male?\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" the Vinzz said primly. His kind did have certain ultimate\n standards to which they adhered rigidly, and one of those was the\n curious tabu against mixed games, strictly enforced even though it\n kept them from tapping a vast source of potential players. There had\n also never been a recorded instance of humans and extraterrestrials\n exchanging identities, but whether that was the result of tabu or\n biological impossibility, no one could tell.", "There was no change of expression on the man's gaunt face, and she\n wondered how much control he had over a body that, though second- or\n third- or fourth-hand, must be new to him. How well could he make it\n respond? What was it like to step into another person's casing? But she\n must not let herself think that way or she would find herself looking\n for a zarquil game. It would be one way of escaping Gabriel, but not,\n she thought, the best way; her body was much too good a one to risk so\n casually.\nIt was beginning to snow. Light, feathery flakes drifted down on her\n husband's immobile body. She pulled her thick coat—of fur taken from\n some animal who had lived and died light-years away—more closely about\n herself. The thin young man began to cough again.", "\"Ask your husband.\"\n\n\n The original Gabriel Lockard looked down at the prostrate,\n snow-powdered figure of the man who had stolen his body and his name,\n and stirred it with his toe. \"I'd better call a cab—he might freeze to\n death.\"\n\n\n He signaled and a cab came.\n\n\n \"Tell him, when he comes to,\" he said to the girl as he and the driver\n lifted the heavy form of her husband into the helicar, \"that I'm\n getting pretty tired of this.\" He stopped for a long spell of coughing.\n \"Tell him that sometimes I wonder whether cutting off my nose wouldn't,\n in the long run, be most beneficial for my face.\"\n\"Sorry,\" the Vinzz said impersonally, in English that was perfect\n except for the slight dampening of the sibilants, \"but I'm afraid you\n cannot play.\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" The emaciated young man began to put on his clothes.", "\"I can't contact your attitude,\" the passenger said with a thin\n smile. \"Bet you've never tried the game yourself. Each time it\n happens, there's a ... well, there's no experience to match it at a\n thrill-mill.\" He gave a sigh that was almost an audible shudder, and\n which the driver misinterpreted as an expression of ecstasy.\n\n\n \"Each time, eh? You're a dutchman then?\" The driver spat out of the\n window. \"If it wasn't for the nibble, I'd throw you right out of the\n cab. Without even bothering to take it down even. I hate dutchmen ...\n anybody with any legitimate feelings hates 'em.\"\n\n\n \"But it would be silly to let personal prejudice stand in the way of a\n commission, wouldn't it?\" the other man asked coolly.\n\n\n \"Of course. You'll need plenty of foliage, though.\"", "He didn't know. However, there seemed to be no help for it now; he\n would have to wait until they reached the next town, unless the girl,\n seeing him reappear in the same guise, would guess what had happened\n and tell her husband. He himself had been a fool to admit to her that\n the hulk he inhabited was a sick one; he still couldn't understand\n how he could so casually have entrusted her with so vital a piece of\n information.\nThe Vinzz had been locking antennae with another of his kind. Now they\n detached, and the first approached the man once more. \"There is, as it\n happens, a body available for a private game,\" he lisped. \"No questions\n to be asked or answered. All I can tell you is that it is in good\n health.\"\n\n\n The man hesitated. \"But unable to pass the screening?\" he murmured\n aloud. \"A criminal then.\"\n\n\n The green one's face—if you could call it a face—remained impassive.", "\"Not as good as it must have been,\" the girl said, turning and looking\n at him without admiration. \"Not if you keep on the way you're coursing.\n Gabe, why don't you...?\"\n\n\n \"Give it back to him, eh?\" Lockard regarded his wife appraisingly.\n \"You'd like that, wouldn't you? You'd be\nhis\nwife then. That would be\n nice—a sound mind in a sound body. But don't you think that's a little\n more than you deserve?\"", "\"We do a lot of business here,\" he said unnecessarily, for the whole\n set-up spelled wealth far beyond the dreams of the man, and he was by\n no means poor when it came to worldly goods. \"Why don't you try another\n town where they're not so particular?\"\n\n\n The young man smiled wryly. Just his luck to stumble on a sunny game.\n He never liked to risk following his quarry in the same configuration.\n And even though only the girl had actually seen him this time, he\n wouldn't feel at ease until he had made the usual body-shift. Was\n he changing because of Gabriel, he wondered, or was he using his own\n discoverment and identification simply as an excuse to cover the fact\n that none of the bodies that fell to his lot ever seemed to fit him?\n Was he activated solely by revenge or as much by the hope that in the\n hazards of the game he might, impossible though it now seemed, some day\n win another body that approached perfection as nearly as his original\n casing had?", "\"Too bad he got married,\" the young man said. \"I could have followed\n him for an eternity and he would never have been able to pick me out\n from the crowd. Too bad he got married anyway,\" he added, his voice\n less impersonal, \"for your sake.\"\n\n\n She had come to the same conclusion in her six months of marriage, but\n she would not admit that to an outsider. Though this man was hardly an\n outsider; he was part of their small family group—as long as she had\n known Gabriel, so long he must have known her. And she began to suspect\n that he was even more closely involved than that.\n\n\n \"Why must you change again?\" she persisted, obliquely approaching the\n subject she feared. \"You have a pretty good body there. Why run the\n risk of getting a bad one?\"", "It might merely be prudence on the Vinzz' part—if it had ever\n been proved that an alien life-form had \"desecrated\" a human body,\n Earthmen would clamor for war ... for on this planet humanity held\n its self-bestowed purity of birthright dear—and the Vinzz, despite\n being unquestionably the stronger, were pragmatic pacifists. It had\n been undoubtedly some rabid member of the anti-alien groups active on\n Terra who had started the rumor that the planetary slogan of Vinau was,\n \"Don't beat 'em; cheat 'em.\"\n\n\n \"It would have to be something pretty nuclear for the other guy to take\n such a risk.\" The man rubbed his chin thoughtfully. \"How much?\"\n\n\n \"Thirty thousand credits.\"\n\n\n \"Why, that's three times the usual rate!\"\n\n\n \"The other will pay five times the usual rate.\"", "\"He won't tell me; he never tells me anything. We just keep running. I\n didn't recognize it as running at first, but now I realize that's what\n we've been doing ever since we were married. And running from you, I\n think?\"" ] ]
train	51129	[ "Was Kalrab correct in how he felt about the Earthmen?", "Who was the only one to listen and agree with Zotul?", "What wasn't something unheard of that the Earthmen brought to Zur?", "Who changed the least throughout the story?", "What word doesn't describe Broderick?", "What would the average Zur resident say of the Earthmen?", "What was the main reason the Masur company failed?", "How had the brothers changed by the end of the story?", "What was the real reason for the Earthmen to come to Zur?" ]	[ [ "Kind of - he was right when he said the Earthmen weren't something to worry about, but he was wrong about clay lasting forever", "No - he said clay and their fortune would last forever, and he was wrong", "Yes - he said the Earthmen weren't something to worry about, and he was right", "Yes - he said clay and their fortune would last forever, and he was right" ], [ "Koltan", "Zotul's wife", "Kalrab", "Broderick" ], [ "the idea of credit", "new roads", "government", "metal pots" ], [ "Broderick", "Kalrab", "Koltan", "Zotul" ], [ "manipulative", "patient", "intelligent", "selfish" ], [ "they were so controlling that it was scary", "they were afraid to fight the Earthmen", "they brought about many changes, mostly for the best", "they would rather be without the items brought by the Earthmen" ], [ "Zotul relied on the Earthmen too much", "the Earthmen improved and controlled everything on Zur", "lack of effort from the brothers", "the brothers borrowed too much to every pay it back" ], [ "they cared more about Zotul", "they were so defeated they no longer beat him", "they decided to give him more responsibility in the company", "they hated Zotul more than ever" ], [ "they wanted to take over without war", "they wanted to share their technology with other worlds", "they wanted to find ways to make more money", "they wanted to discover intelligent life on other planets" ] ]	[ 2, 3, 3, 1, 4, 3, 2, 2, 1 ]	[ 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "At the head of the long, shining table sat old Kalrab Masur, in his\n dotage, but still giving what he could of aid and comfort to the\n Pottery of Masur, even though nobody listened to him any more and\n he knew it. Around the table sat the six brothers—Koltan, eldest\n and Director of the Pottery; Morvan, his vice-chief; Singula, their\n treasurer; Thendro, sales manager; Lubiosa, export chief; and last in\n the rank of age, Zotul, who was responsible for affairs of design.\n\n\n \"Behold, my sons,\" said Kalrab, stroking his scanty beard. \"What are\n these Earthmen to worry about? Remember the clay. It is our strength\n and our fortune. It is the muscle and bone of our trade. Earthmen may\n come and Earthmen may go, but clay goes on forever ... and with it, the\n fame and fortune of the House of Masur.\"", "\"It\nis\na damned imposition,\" agreed Morvan, ignoring his father's\n philosophical attitude. \"They could have landed just as easily here in\n Lor.\"\n\n\n \"The Thorabians will lick up the gravy,\" said Singula, whose mind ran\n rather to matters of financial aspect, \"and leave us the grease.\"\n\n\n By this, he seemed to imply that the Thorabians would rob the Earthmen,\n which the Lorians would not. The truth was that all on Zur were panting\n to get their hands on that marvelous ship, which was all of metal, a\n very scarce commodity on Zur, worth billions of ken.\nLubiosa, who had interests in Thorabia, and many agents there, kept his\n own counsel. His people were active in the matter and that was enough\n for him. He would report when the time was ripe.", "\"They are replacing our high-quality ceramic ware with inferior\n terrestrial junk,\" Koltan went on bitterly. \"It is only the glamor that\n sells it, of course, but before the people get the shine out of their\n eyes, we can be ruined.\"\n\n\n The brothers discussed the situation for an hour, and all the while\n Father Kalrab sat and pulled his scanty whiskers. Seeing that they got\n nowhere with their wrangle, he cleared his throat and spoke up.", "The Earthmen were going to do great things for the whole world of\n Zur. It required but the cooperation—an excellent word, that—of all\n Zurians, and many blessings would rain down from the skies. This, in\n effect, was what the Earthmen had to say. Zotul felt greatly cheered,\n for it refuted the attitude of his brothers without earning him a\n whaling for it.\n\n\n There was also some talk going around about agreements made between\n the Earthmen and officials of the Lorian government, but you heard one\n thing one day and another the next. Accurate reporting, much less a\n newspaper, was unknown on Zur.\n\n\n Finally, the Earthmen took off in their great, shining ship. Obviously,\n none had succeeded in chiseling them out of it, if, indeed, any had\n tried. The anti-Earthmen Faction—in any culture complex, there is\n always an \"anti\" faction to protest any movement of endeavor—crowed\n happily that the Earthmen were gone for good, and a good thing, too.", "The result of the new flood was that in the following year, the sale of\n Masur ceramic table service dropped to less than a tenth.\nTrembling with excitement at this news from their book-keeper, Koltan\n called an emergency meeting. He even routed old Kalrab out of his\n senile stupor for the occasion, on the off chance that the old man\n might still have a little wit left that could be helpful.\n\n\n \"Note,\" Koltan announced in a shaky voice, \"that the Earthmen undermine\n our business,\" and he read off the figures.\n\n\n \"Perhaps,\" said Zotul, \"it is a good thing also, as you said before,\n and will result in something even better for us.\"\n\n\n Koltan frowned, and Zotul, in fear of another beating, instantly\n subsided.", "\"Once,\" he said formally, \"the Masur fortune was the greatest in\n the world of Zur. That was before my father, the famous Kalrab\n Masur—Divinity protect him—departed this life to collect his greater\n reward. He often told us, my father did, that the clay is the flesh and\n bones of our culture and our fortune. Now it has been shown how prone\n is the flesh to corruption and how feeble the bones. We are ruined, and\n all because of new things coming from Earth.\"\n\n\n Broderick stroked his shaven chin and looked sad. \"Why didn't you come\n to me sooner? This would never have happened. But now that it has,\n we're going to do right by you. That is the policy of Earth—always to\n do right by the customer.\"\n\n\n \"Divinity witness,\" Zorin said, \"that we ask only compensation for\n damages.\"", "Still smarting, Zotul went back to his designing quarters and thought\n about the Earthmen. If it was impossible to hope for much in the way\n of metal from the Earthmen, what could one get from them? If he could\n figure this problem out, he might rise somewhat in the estimation of\n his brothers. That wouldn't take him out of the rank of scapegoat, of\n course, but the beatings might become fewer and less severe.\nBy and by, the Earthmen came to Lor, flying through the air in strange\n metal contraptions. They paraded through the tile-paved streets of the\n city, marveled here, as they had in Thorabia, at the buildings all of\n tile inside and out, and made a great show of themselves for all the\n people to see. Speeches were made through interpreters, who had much\n too quickly learned the tongue of the aliens; hence these left much to\n be desired in the way of clarity, though their sincerity was evident.", "\"Doubtless,\" said Zotul unexpectedly, for the youngest at a conference\n was expected to keep his mouth shut and applaud the decisions of his\n elders, \"the Earthmen used all the metal on their planet in building\n that ship. We cannot possibly bilk them of it; it is their only means\n of transport.\"\n\n\n Such frank expression of motive was unheard of, even in the secret\n conclave of conference. Only the speaker's youth could account for it.\n The speech drew scowls from the brothers and stern rebuke from Koltan.\n\n\n \"When your opinion is wanted, we will ask you for it. Meantime,\n remember your position in the family.\"\n\n\n Zotul bowed his head meekly, but he burned with resentment.\n\n\n \"Listen to the boy,\" said the aged father. \"There is more wisdom in his\n head than in all the rest of you. Forget the Earthmen and think only of\n the clay.\"", "Kent Broderick, the Earthman in charge of the Council, shook hands\n jovially with Zotul. That alien custom conformed with, Zotul took a\n better look at his host. Broderick was an affable, smiling individual\n with genial laugh wrinkles at his eyes. A man of middle age, dressed in\n the baggy costume of Zur, he looked almost like a Zurian, except for\n an indefinite sense of alienness about him.\n\n\n \"Glad to have you call on us, Mr. Masur,\" boomed the Earthman, clapping\n Zotul on the back. \"Just tell us your troubles and we'll have you\n straightened out in no time.\"\nAll the chill recriminations and arguments Zotul had stored for this\n occasion were dissipated in the warmth of the Earthman's manner.\n\n\n Almost apologetically, Zotul told of the encroachment that had been\n made upon the business of the Pottery of Masur.", "After he had beaten his wife thoroughly for her foolishness, Zotul\n stamped off in a rage and designed a new ceramic stove, one that would\n accommodate the terrestrial pots very well.\n\n\n And Koltan put the model into production.\n\n\n \"Orders already are pouring in like mad,\" he said the next day. \"It\n was wise of you to foresee it and have the design ready. Already, I am\n sorry for thinking as I did about the Earthmen. They really intend to\n do well by us.\"", "Such jubilation proved premature, however. One day, a fleet of ships\n arrived and after they had landed all over the planet, Zur was\n practically acrawl with Earthmen.\n\n\n Immediately, the Earthmen established what they called\n \"corporations\"—Zurian trading companies under terrestrial control. The\n object of the visit was trade.\n\n\n In spite of the fact that a terrestrial ship had landed at every Zurian\n city of major and minor importance, and all in a single day, it took\n some time for the news to spread.\n\n\n The first awareness Zotul had was that, upon coming home from the\n pottery one evening, he found his wife Lania proudly brandishing an\n aluminum pot at him.\n\n\n \"What is that thing?\" he asked curiously.\n\n\n \"A pot. I bought it at the market.\"", "A Gift From Earth\nBy MANLY BANISTER\n\n\n Illustrated by KOSSIN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction August 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nExcept for transportation, it was absolutely\n \nfree ... but how much would the freight cost?\n\"It is an outrage,\" said Koltan of the House of Masur, \"that the\n Earthmen land among the Thorabians!\"\n\n\n Zotul, youngest of the Masur brothers, stirred uneasily. Personally, he\n was in favor of the coming of the Earthmen to the world of Zur.", "In their dozenth conference since that first and fateful one, the\n brothers Masur decided upon drastic steps. In the meantime, several\n things had happened. For one, old Kalrab had passed on to his immortal\n rest, but this made no real difference. For another, the Earthmen had\n procured legal authority to prospect the planet for metals, of which\n they found a good deal, but they told no one on Zur of this. What\n they did mention was the crude oil and natural gas they discovered\n in the underlayers of the planet's crust. Crews of Zurians, working\n under supervision of the Earthmen, laid pipelines from the gas and oil\n regions to every major and minor city on Zur.\nBy the time ten years had passed since the landing of the first\n terrestrial ship, the Earthmen were conducting a brisk business in\n gas-fired ranges, furnaces and heaters ... and the Masur stove business\n was gone. Moreover, the Earthmen sold the Zurians their own natural gas\n at a nice profit and everybody was happy with the situation except the\n brothers Masur.", "Moreover, the Earthmen brought miles of copper wire—more than enough\n in value to buy out the governorship of any country on Zur—and set up\n telegraph lines from country to country and continent to continent.\n Within five years of the first landing of the Earthmen, every major\n city on the globe had a printing press, a daily newspaper, and enjoyed\n the instantaneous transmission of news via telegraph. And the business\n of the House of Masur continued to look up.\n\n\n \"As I have always said from the beginning,\" chortled Director Koltan,\n \"this coming of the Earthmen had been a great thing for us, and\n especially for the House of Masur.\"\n\n\n \"You didn't think so at first,\" Zotul pointed out, and was immediately\n sorry, for Koltan turned and gave him a hiding, single-handed, for his\n unthinkable impertinence.", "But at the end of three years, the Earthmen dropped their option.\n The Pottery of Masur had no more contracts. Business languished. The\n Earthmen, explained Broderick, had built a plant of their own because\n it was so much more efficient—and to lower prices, which was Earth's\n unswerving policy, greater and greater efficiency was demanded.\n Broderick was very sympathetic, but there was nothing he could do.\n\n\n The introduction of television provided a further calamity. The sets\n were delicate and needed frequent repairs, hence were costly to own and\n maintain. But all Zurians who had to keep up with the latest from Earth\n had them. Now it was possible not only to hear about things of Earth,\n but to see them as they were broadcast from the video tapes.", "\"To fail,\" said Koltan soberly, \"is not a Masur attribute. Go to the\n governor and tell him what we think of this business. The House of\n Masur has long supported the government with heavy taxes. Now it is\n time for the government to do something for us.\"\nThe governor's palace was jammed with hurrying people, a scene of\n confusion that upset Zotul. The clerk who took his application for\n an interview was, he noticed only vaguely, a young Earthwoman. It\n was remarkable that he paid so little attention, for the female\n terrestrials were picked for physical assets that made Zurian men\n covetous and Zurian women envious.\n\n\n \"The governor will see you,\" she said sweetly. \"He has been expecting\n you.\"\n\n\n \"Me?\" marveled Zotul.\n\n\n She ushered him into the magnificent private office of the governor\n of Lor. The man behind the desk stood up, extended his hand with a\n friendly smile.", "\"My sons, you forget it is not the Earthmen themselves at the bottom\n of your trouble, but the\nthings\nof Earth. Think of the telegraph and\n the newspaper, how these spread news of every shipment from Earth.\n The merchandise of the Earthmen is put up for sale by means of these\n newspapers, which also are the property of the Earthmen. The people are\n intrigued by these advertisements, as they are called, and flock to\n buy. Now, if you would pull a tooth from the kwi that bites you, you\n might also have advertisements of your own.\"\n\n\n Alas for that suggestion, no newspaper would accept advertising\n from the House of Masur; all available space was occupied by the\n advertisements of the Earthmen.", "\"No,\" said Broderick, his usually smiling face almost pained with\n memory. \"We know the history of conquest all too well. Our method\n causes more distress than we like to inflict, but it's better—and more\n sure—than war and invasion by force. Now that the unpleasant job is\n finished, we can repair the dislocations.\"\n\n\n \"At last I understand what you said about the tortoise.\"\n\n\n \"Slow but sure.\" Broderick beamed again and clapped Zotul on the\n shoulder. \"Don't worry. You'll have your job back, the same as always,\n but you'll be working for us ... until the children of Earth and Zur\n are equal in knowledge and therefore equal partners. That's why we had\n to break down your caste system.\"\n\n\n Zotul's eyes widened. \"And that is why my brothers did not beat me when\n I failed!\"", "The drastic steps of the brothers applied, therefore, to making an\n energetic protest to the governor of Lor.\n\n\n At one edge of the city, an area had been turned over to the Earthmen\n for a spaceport, and the great terrestrial spaceships came to it and\n departed from it at regular intervals. As the heirs of the House of\n Masur walked by on their way to see the governor, Zotul observed that\n much new building was taking place and wondered what it was.\n\n\n \"Some new devilment of the Earthmen, you can be sure,\" said Koltan\n blackly.\n\n\n In fact, the Earthmen were building an assembly plant for radio\n receiving sets. The ship now standing on its fins upon the apron was\n loaded with printed circuits, resistors, variable condensers and other\n radio parts. This was Earth's first step toward flooding Zur with the\n natural follow-up in its campaign of advertising—radio programs—with\n commercials.", "The next time the brothers went to see the governor, he said, \"I cannot\n handle such complaints as yours. I must refer you to the Merchandising\n Council.\"\n\n\n \"What is that?\" asked Koltan.\n\n\n \"It is an Earthman association that deals with complaints such as\n yours. In the matter of material progress, we must expect some strain\n in the fabric of our culture. Machinery has been set up to deal with\n it. Here is their address; go air your troubles to them.\"\n\n\n The business of a formal complaint was turned over by the brothers to\n Zotul. It took three weeks for the Earthmen to get around to calling\n him in, as a representative of the Pottery of Masur, for an interview.\n\n\n All the brothers could no longer be spared from the plant, even for the\n purpose of pressing a complaint. Their days of idle wealth over, they\n had to get in and work with the clay with the rest of the help." ], [ "Zotul did not appreciate his father's approval, for it only earned him\n a beating as soon as the old man went to bed. It was a common enough\n thing among the brothers Masur, as among everybody, to be frustrated in\n their desires. However, they had Zotul to take it out upon, and they\n did.", "\"Of course. Are you ready now to take the assignment papers for you and\n your brothers to sign?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Zotul. \"I am ready.\"", "\"Doubtless,\" said Zotul unexpectedly, for the youngest at a conference\n was expected to keep his mouth shut and applaud the decisions of his\n elders, \"the Earthmen used all the metal on their planet in building\n that ship. We cannot possibly bilk them of it; it is their only means\n of transport.\"\n\n\n Such frank expression of motive was unheard of, even in the secret\n conclave of conference. Only the speaker's youth could account for it.\n The speech drew scowls from the brothers and stern rebuke from Koltan.\n\n\n \"When your opinion is wanted, we will ask you for it. Meantime,\n remember your position in the family.\"\n\n\n Zotul bowed his head meekly, but he burned with resentment.\n\n\n \"Listen to the boy,\" said the aged father. \"There is more wisdom in his\n head than in all the rest of you. Forget the Earthmen and think only of\n the clay.\"", "\"If we have to sue, we take back the merchandise and everything\n attached to them. That means you would lose your houses, for they are\n attached to the furnaces. However, it is not as bad as that—yet. We\n will only require you to assign the remaining three-quarters of your\n pottery to us.\"\n\n\n The brothers, when they heard of this, were too stunned to think of\n beating Zotul, by which he assumed he had progressed a little and was\n somewhat comforted.", "\"No,\" said Broderick, his usually smiling face almost pained with\n memory. \"We know the history of conquest all too well. Our method\n causes more distress than we like to inflict, but it's better—and more\n sure—than war and invasion by force. Now that the unpleasant job is\n finished, we can repair the dislocations.\"\n\n\n \"At last I understand what you said about the tortoise.\"\n\n\n \"Slow but sure.\" Broderick beamed again and clapped Zotul on the\n shoulder. \"Don't worry. You'll have your job back, the same as always,\n but you'll be working for us ... until the children of Earth and Zur\n are equal in knowledge and therefore equal partners. That's why we had\n to break down your caste system.\"\n\n\n Zotul's eyes widened. \"And that is why my brothers did not beat me when\n I failed!\"", "Still smarting, Zotul went back to his designing quarters and thought\n about the Earthmen. If it was impossible to hope for much in the way\n of metal from the Earthmen, what could one get from them? If he could\n figure this problem out, he might rise somewhat in the estimation of\n his brothers. That wouldn't take him out of the rank of scapegoat, of\n course, but the beatings might become fewer and less severe.\nBy and by, the Earthmen came to Lor, flying through the air in strange\n metal contraptions. They paraded through the tile-paved streets of the\n city, marveled here, as they had in Thorabia, at the buildings all of\n tile inside and out, and made a great show of themselves for all the\n people to see. Speeches were made through interpreters, who had much\n too quickly learned the tongue of the aliens; hence these left much to\n be desired in the way of clarity, though their sincerity was evident.", "The Earthmen were going to do great things for the whole world of\n Zur. It required but the cooperation—an excellent word, that—of all\n Zurians, and many blessings would rain down from the skies. This, in\n effect, was what the Earthmen had to say. Zotul felt greatly cheered,\n for it refuted the attitude of his brothers without earning him a\n whaling for it.\n\n\n There was also some talk going around about agreements made between\n the Earthmen and officials of the Lorian government, but you heard one\n thing one day and another the next. Accurate reporting, much less a\n newspaper, was unknown on Zur.\n\n\n Finally, the Earthmen took off in their great, shining ship. Obviously,\n none had succeeded in chiseling them out of it, if, indeed, any had\n tried. The anti-Earthmen Faction—in any culture complex, there is\n always an \"anti\" faction to protest any movement of endeavor—crowed\n happily that the Earthmen were gone for good, and a good thing, too.", "After he had beaten his wife thoroughly for her foolishness, Zotul\n stamped off in a rage and designed a new ceramic stove, one that would\n accommodate the terrestrial pots very well.\n\n\n And Koltan put the model into production.\n\n\n \"Orders already are pouring in like mad,\" he said the next day. \"It\n was wise of you to foresee it and have the design ready. Already, I am\n sorry for thinking as I did about the Earthmen. They really intend to\n do well by us.\"", "\"I see.\" Zotul puzzled over it sadly. \"It is too much,\" he said. \"Our\n plant doesn't make enough money for us to meet the payments.\"\n\n\n \"I have a surprise for you,\" smiled Broderick. \"Here is a contract. You\n will start making ceramic parts for automobile spark plugs and certain\n parts for radios and gas ranges. It is our policy to encourage local\n manufacture to help bring prices down.\"\n\n\n \"We haven't the equipment.\"\n\n\n \"We will equip your plant,\" beamed Broderick. \"It will require only\n a quarter interest in your plant itself, assigned to our terrestrial\n company.\"\nZotul, anxious to possess the treasures promised by the Earthman,\n won over his brothers. They signed with marks and gave up a quarter\n interest in the Pottery of Masur. They rolled in the luxuries of Earth.\n These, who had never known debt before, were in it up to their ears.", "Zotul found the headquarters of the Merchandising Council as indicated\n on their message. He had not been this way in some time, but was not\n surprised to find that a number of old buildings had been torn down to\n make room for the concrete Council House and a roomy parking lot, paved\n with something called \"blacktop\" and jammed with an array of glittering\n new automobiles.\n\n\n An automobile was an expense none of the brothers could afford, now\n that they barely eked a living from the pottery. Still, Zotul ached\n with desire at sight of so many shiny cars. Only a few had them and\n they were the envied ones of Zur.", "Broderick shook his head. \"It is not possible to replace an immense\n fortune at this late date. As I said, you should have reported your\n trouble sooner. However, we can give you an opportunity to rebuild. Do\n you own an automobile?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"A gas range? A gas-fired furnace? A radio?\"\n\n\n Zotul had to answer no to all except the radio. \"My wife Lania likes\n the music,\" he explained. \"I cannot afford the other things.\"\n\n\n Broderick clucked sympathetically. One who could not afford the\n bargain-priced merchandise of Earth must be poor indeed.", "The next time the brothers went to see the governor, he said, \"I cannot\n handle such complaints as yours. I must refer you to the Merchandising\n Council.\"\n\n\n \"What is that?\" asked Koltan.\n\n\n \"It is an Earthman association that deals with complaints such as\n yours. In the matter of material progress, we must expect some strain\n in the fabric of our culture. Machinery has been set up to deal with\n it. Here is their address; go air your troubles to them.\"\n\n\n The business of a formal complaint was turned over by the brothers to\n Zotul. It took three weeks for the Earthmen to get around to calling\n him in, as a representative of the Pottery of Masur, for an interview.\n\n\n All the brothers could no longer be spared from the plant, even for the\n purpose of pressing a complaint. Their days of idle wealth over, they\n had to get in and work with the clay with the rest of the help.", "At the head of the long, shining table sat old Kalrab Masur, in his\n dotage, but still giving what he could of aid and comfort to the\n Pottery of Masur, even though nobody listened to him any more and\n he knew it. Around the table sat the six brothers—Koltan, eldest\n and Director of the Pottery; Morvan, his vice-chief; Singula, their\n treasurer; Thendro, sales manager; Lubiosa, export chief; and last in\n the rank of age, Zotul, who was responsible for affairs of design.\n\n\n \"Behold, my sons,\" said Kalrab, stroking his scanty beard. \"What are\n these Earthmen to worry about? Remember the clay. It is our strength\n and our fortune. It is the muscle and bone of our trade. Earthmen may\n come and Earthmen may go, but clay goes on forever ... and with it, the\n fame and fortune of the House of Masur.\"", "The result of the new flood was that in the following year, the sale of\n Masur ceramic table service dropped to less than a tenth.\nTrembling with excitement at this news from their book-keeper, Koltan\n called an emergency meeting. He even routed old Kalrab out of his\n senile stupor for the occasion, on the off chance that the old man\n might still have a little wit left that could be helpful.\n\n\n \"Note,\" Koltan announced in a shaky voice, \"that the Earthmen undermine\n our business,\" and he read off the figures.\n\n\n \"Perhaps,\" said Zotul, \"it is a good thing also, as you said before,\n and will result in something even better for us.\"\n\n\n Koltan frowned, and Zotul, in fear of another beating, instantly\n subsided.", "\"To fail,\" said Koltan soberly, \"is not a Masur attribute. Go to the\n governor and tell him what we think of this business. The House of\n Masur has long supported the government with heavy taxes. Now it is\n time for the government to do something for us.\"\nThe governor's palace was jammed with hurrying people, a scene of\n confusion that upset Zotul. The clerk who took his application for\n an interview was, he noticed only vaguely, a young Earthwoman. It\n was remarkable that he paid so little attention, for the female\n terrestrials were picked for physical assets that made Zurian men\n covetous and Zurian women envious.\n\n\n \"The governor will see you,\" she said sweetly. \"He has been expecting\n you.\"\n\n\n \"Me?\" marveled Zotul.\n\n\n She ushered him into the magnificent private office of the governor\n of Lor. The man behind the desk stood up, extended his hand with a\n friendly smile.", "\"It\nis\na damned imposition,\" agreed Morvan, ignoring his father's\n philosophical attitude. \"They could have landed just as easily here in\n Lor.\"\n\n\n \"The Thorabians will lick up the gravy,\" said Singula, whose mind ran\n rather to matters of financial aspect, \"and leave us the grease.\"\n\n\n By this, he seemed to imply that the Thorabians would rob the Earthmen,\n which the Lorians would not. The truth was that all on Zur were panting\n to get their hands on that marvelous ship, which was all of metal, a\n very scarce commodity on Zur, worth billions of ken.\nLubiosa, who had interests in Thorabia, and many agents there, kept his\n own counsel. His people were active in the matter and that was enough\n for him. He would report when the time was ripe.", "\"Come in, come in! I'm glad to see you again.\"\n\n\n Zotul stared blankly. This was not the governor. This was Broderick,\n the Earthman.\n\n\n \"I—I came to see the governor,\" he said in confusion.\n\n\n Broderick nodded agreeably. \"I am the governor and I am well acquainted\n with your case, Mr. Masur. Shall we talk it over? Please sit down.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand. The Earthmen....\" Zotul paused, coloring. \"We are\n about to lose our plant.\"\n\n\n \"You were about to say that the Earthmen are taking your plant away\n from you. That is true. Since the House of Masur was the largest and\n richest on Zur, it has taken a long time—the longest of all, in fact.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"", "The kilns of the Pottery of Masur fired day and night to keep up with\n the demand for the new porcelain stoves. In three years, more than a\n million had been made and sold by the Masurs alone, not counting the\n hundreds of thousands of copies turned out by competitors in every\n land.\nIn the meantime, however, more things than pots came from Earth.\n One was a printing press, the like of which none on Zur had ever\n dreamed. This, for some unknown reason and much to the disgust of\n the Lorians, was set up in Thorabia. Books and magazines poured from\n it in a fantastic stream. The populace fervidly brushed up on its\n scanty reading ability and bought everything available, overcome by\n the novelty of it. Even Zotul bought a book—a primer in the Lorian\n language—and learned how to read and write. The remainder of the\n brothers Masur, on the other hand, preferred to remain in ignorance.", "\"To begin with,\" he said, \"I am going to make you a gift of all these\n luxuries you do not have.\" As Zotul made to protest, he cut him off\n with a wave of his hand. \"It is the least we can do for you. Pick a car\n from the lot outside. I will arrange to have the other things delivered\n and installed in your home.\"\n\n\n \"To receive gifts,\" said Zotul, \"incurs an obligation.\"\n\n\n \"None at all,\" beamed the Earthman cheerily. \"Every item is given to\n you absolutely free—a gift from the people of Earth. All we ask is\n that you pay the freight charges on the items. Our purpose is not to\n make profit, but to spread technology and prosperity throughout the\n Galaxy. We have already done well on numerous worlds, but working out\n the full program takes time.\"", "Kent Broderick, the Earthman in charge of the Council, shook hands\n jovially with Zotul. That alien custom conformed with, Zotul took a\n better look at his host. Broderick was an affable, smiling individual\n with genial laugh wrinkles at his eyes. A man of middle age, dressed in\n the baggy costume of Zur, he looked almost like a Zurian, except for\n an indefinite sense of alienness about him.\n\n\n \"Glad to have you call on us, Mr. Masur,\" boomed the Earthman, clapping\n Zotul on the back. \"Just tell us your troubles and we'll have you\n straightened out in no time.\"\nAll the chill recriminations and arguments Zotul had stored for this\n occasion were dissipated in the warmth of the Earthman's manner.\n\n\n Almost apologetically, Zotul told of the encroachment that had been\n made upon the business of the Pottery of Masur." ], [ "The Earthmen were going to do great things for the whole world of\n Zur. It required but the cooperation—an excellent word, that—of all\n Zurians, and many blessings would rain down from the skies. This, in\n effect, was what the Earthmen had to say. Zotul felt greatly cheered,\n for it refuted the attitude of his brothers without earning him a\n whaling for it.\n\n\n There was also some talk going around about agreements made between\n the Earthmen and officials of the Lorian government, but you heard one\n thing one day and another the next. Accurate reporting, much less a\n newspaper, was unknown on Zur.\n\n\n Finally, the Earthmen took off in their great, shining ship. Obviously,\n none had succeeded in chiseling them out of it, if, indeed, any had\n tried. The anti-Earthmen Faction—in any culture complex, there is\n always an \"anti\" faction to protest any movement of endeavor—crowed\n happily that the Earthmen were gone for good, and a good thing, too.", "The retooled plant forged ahead and profits began to look up, but the\n Earthmen took a fourth of them as their share in the industry.\n\n\n For a year, the brothers drove their shiny new cars about on the\n new concrete highways the Earthmen had built. From pumps owned by a\n terrestrial company, they bought gas and oil that had been drawn from\n the crust of Zur and was sold to the Zurians at a magnificent profit.\n The food they ate was cooked in Earthly pots on Earth-type gas ranges,\n served up on metal plates that had been stamped out on Earth. In the\n winter, they toasted their shins before handsome gas grates, though\n they had gas-fired central heating.", "But at the end of three years, the Earthmen dropped their option.\n The Pottery of Masur had no more contracts. Business languished. The\n Earthmen, explained Broderick, had built a plant of their own because\n it was so much more efficient—and to lower prices, which was Earth's\n unswerving policy, greater and greater efficiency was demanded.\n Broderick was very sympathetic, but there was nothing he could do.\n\n\n The introduction of television provided a further calamity. The sets\n were delicate and needed frequent repairs, hence were costly to own and\n maintain. But all Zurians who had to keep up with the latest from Earth\n had them. Now it was possible not only to hear about things of Earth,\n but to see them as they were broadcast from the video tapes.", "Such jubilation proved premature, however. One day, a fleet of ships\n arrived and after they had landed all over the planet, Zur was\n practically acrawl with Earthmen.\n\n\n Immediately, the Earthmen established what they called\n \"corporations\"—Zurian trading companies under terrestrial control. The\n object of the visit was trade.\n\n\n In spite of the fact that a terrestrial ship had landed at every Zurian\n city of major and minor importance, and all in a single day, it took\n some time for the news to spread.\n\n\n The first awareness Zotul had was that, upon coming home from the\n pottery one evening, he found his wife Lania proudly brandishing an\n aluminum pot at him.\n\n\n \"What is that thing?\" he asked curiously.\n\n\n \"A pot. I bought it at the market.\"", "Moreover, the Earthmen brought miles of copper wire—more than enough\n in value to buy out the governorship of any country on Zur—and set up\n telegraph lines from country to country and continent to continent.\n Within five years of the first landing of the Earthmen, every major\n city on the globe had a printing press, a daily newspaper, and enjoyed\n the instantaneous transmission of news via telegraph. And the business\n of the House of Masur continued to look up.\n\n\n \"As I have always said from the beginning,\" chortled Director Koltan,\n \"this coming of the Earthmen had been a great thing for us, and\n especially for the House of Masur.\"\n\n\n \"You didn't think so at first,\" Zotul pointed out, and was immediately\n sorry, for Koltan turned and gave him a hiding, single-handed, for his\n unthinkable impertinence.", "In their dozenth conference since that first and fateful one, the\n brothers Masur decided upon drastic steps. In the meantime, several\n things had happened. For one, old Kalrab had passed on to his immortal\n rest, but this made no real difference. For another, the Earthmen had\n procured legal authority to prospect the planet for metals, of which\n they found a good deal, but they told no one on Zur of this. What\n they did mention was the crude oil and natural gas they discovered\n in the underlayers of the planet's crust. Crews of Zurians, working\n under supervision of the Earthmen, laid pipelines from the gas and oil\n regions to every major and minor city on Zur.\nBy the time ten years had passed since the landing of the first\n terrestrial ship, the Earthmen were conducting a brisk business in\n gas-fired ranges, furnaces and heaters ... and the Masur stove business\n was gone. Moreover, the Earthmen sold the Zurians their own natural gas\n at a nice profit and everybody was happy with the situation except the\n brothers Masur.", "The drastic steps of the brothers applied, therefore, to making an\n energetic protest to the governor of Lor.\n\n\n At one edge of the city, an area had been turned over to the Earthmen\n for a spaceport, and the great terrestrial spaceships came to it and\n departed from it at regular intervals. As the heirs of the House of\n Masur walked by on their way to see the governor, Zotul observed that\n much new building was taking place and wondered what it was.\n\n\n \"Some new devilment of the Earthmen, you can be sure,\" said Koltan\n blackly.\n\n\n In fact, the Earthmen were building an assembly plant for radio\n receiving sets. The ship now standing on its fins upon the apron was\n loaded with printed circuits, resistors, variable condensers and other\n radio parts. This was Earth's first step toward flooding Zur with the\n natural follow-up in its campaign of advertising—radio programs—with\n commercials.", "A Gift From Earth\nBy MANLY BANISTER\n\n\n Illustrated by KOSSIN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction August 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nExcept for transportation, it was absolutely\n \nfree ... but how much would the freight cost?\n\"It is an outrage,\" said Koltan of the House of Masur, \"that the\n Earthmen land among the Thorabians!\"\n\n\n Zotul, youngest of the Masur brothers, stirred uneasily. Personally, he\n was in favor of the coming of the Earthmen to the world of Zur.", "\"Once,\" he said formally, \"the Masur fortune was the greatest in\n the world of Zur. That was before my father, the famous Kalrab\n Masur—Divinity protect him—departed this life to collect his greater\n reward. He often told us, my father did, that the clay is the flesh and\n bones of our culture and our fortune. Now it has been shown how prone\n is the flesh to corruption and how feeble the bones. We are ruined, and\n all because of new things coming from Earth.\"\n\n\n Broderick stroked his shaven chin and looked sad. \"Why didn't you come\n to me sooner? This would never have happened. But now that it has,\n we're going to do right by you. That is the policy of Earth—always to\n do right by the customer.\"\n\n\n \"Divinity witness,\" Zorin said, \"that we ask only compensation for\n damages.\"", "Happily for the brothers, they did not understand this at the time or\n they would surely have gone back to be buried in their own clay.\n\n\n \"I think,\" the governor told them, \"that you gentlemen have not\n paused to consider the affair from all angles. You must learn to be\n modern—keep up with the times! We heads of government on Zur are doing\n all in our power to aid the Earthmen and facilitate their bringing a\n great, new culture that can only benefit us. See how Zur has changed in\n ten short years! Imagine the world of tomorrow! Why, do you know they\n are even bringing\nautos\nto Zur!\"\n\n\n The brothers were fascinated with the governor's description of these\n hitherto unheard-of vehicles.\n\n\n \"It only remains,\" concluded the governor, \"to build highways, and the\n Earthmen are taking care of that.\"", "\"It\nis\na damned imposition,\" agreed Morvan, ignoring his father's\n philosophical attitude. \"They could have landed just as easily here in\n Lor.\"\n\n\n \"The Thorabians will lick up the gravy,\" said Singula, whose mind ran\n rather to matters of financial aspect, \"and leave us the grease.\"\n\n\n By this, he seemed to imply that the Thorabians would rob the Earthmen,\n which the Lorians would not. The truth was that all on Zur were panting\n to get their hands on that marvelous ship, which was all of metal, a\n very scarce commodity on Zur, worth billions of ken.\nLubiosa, who had interests in Thorabia, and many agents there, kept his\n own counsel. His people were active in the matter and that was enough\n for him. He would report when the time was ripe.", "Still smarting, Zotul went back to his designing quarters and thought\n about the Earthmen. If it was impossible to hope for much in the way\n of metal from the Earthmen, what could one get from them? If he could\n figure this problem out, he might rise somewhat in the estimation of\n his brothers. That wouldn't take him out of the rank of scapegoat, of\n course, but the beatings might become fewer and less severe.\nBy and by, the Earthmen came to Lor, flying through the air in strange\n metal contraptions. They paraded through the tile-paved streets of the\n city, marveled here, as they had in Thorabia, at the buildings all of\n tile inside and out, and made a great show of themselves for all the\n people to see. Speeches were made through interpreters, who had much\n too quickly learned the tongue of the aliens; hence these left much to\n be desired in the way of clarity, though their sincerity was evident.", "It would do no good, Zotul realized, to bring up the fact that their\n production of ceramic cooking pots had dropped off to about two per\n cent of its former volume. Of course, profits on the line of new stoves\n greatly overbalanced the loss, so that actually they were ahead; but\n their business was now dependent upon the supply of the metal pots from\n Earth.\n\n\n About this time, plastic utensils—dishes, cups, knives, forks—made\n their appearance on Zur. It became very stylish to eat with the\n newfangled paraphernalia ... and very cheap, too, because for\n everything they sold, the Earthmen always took the old ware in trade.\n What they did with the stuff had been hard to believe at first. They\n destroyed it, which proved how valueless it really was.", "The kilns of the Pottery of Masur fired day and night to keep up with\n the demand for the new porcelain stoves. In three years, more than a\n million had been made and sold by the Masurs alone, not counting the\n hundreds of thousands of copies turned out by competitors in every\n land.\nIn the meantime, however, more things than pots came from Earth.\n One was a printing press, the like of which none on Zur had ever\n dreamed. This, for some unknown reason and much to the disgust of\n the Lorians, was set up in Thorabia. Books and magazines poured from\n it in a fantastic stream. The populace fervidly brushed up on its\n scanty reading ability and bought everything available, overcome by\n the novelty of it. Even Zotul bought a book—a primer in the Lorian\n language—and learned how to read and write. The remainder of the\n brothers Masur, on the other hand, preferred to remain in ignorance.", "At any rate, the brothers Masur were still able to console themselves\n that they had their tile business. Tile served well enough for houses\n and street surfacing; what better material could be devised for the new\n highways the governor spoke of? There was a lot of money to be made\n yet.\nRadio stations went up all over Zur and began broadcasting. The people\n bought receiving sets like mad. The automobiles arrived and highways\n were constructed.\n\n\n The last hope of the brothers was dashed. The Earthmen set up plants\n and began to manufacture Portland cement.\n\n\n You could build a house of concrete much cheaper than with tile. Of\n course, since wood was scarce on Zur, it was no competition for either\n tile or concrete. Concrete floors were smoother, too, and the stuff\n made far better road surfacing.\n\n\n The demand for Masur tile hit rock bottom.", "The printing plants that turned out mortgage contracts did a lush\n business.\nFor the common people of Zur, times were good everywhere. In a decade\n and a half, the Earthmen had wrought magnificent changes on this\n backward world. As Broderick had said, the progress of the tortoise was\n slow, but it was extremely sure.\n\n\n The brothers Masur got along in spite of dropped options. They had less\n money and felt the pinch of their debts more keenly, but television\n kept their wives and children amused and furnished an anodyne for the\n pangs of impoverishment.\n\n\n The pottery income dropped to an impossible low, no matter how Zotul\n designed and the brothers produced. Their figurines and religious ikons\n were a drug on the market. The Earthmen made them of plastic and sold\n them for less.\n\n\n The brothers, unable to meet the Payments that were not so Easy any\n more, looked up Zotul and cuffed him around reproachfully.", "\"To fail,\" said Koltan soberly, \"is not a Masur attribute. Go to the\n governor and tell him what we think of this business. The House of\n Masur has long supported the government with heavy taxes. Now it is\n time for the government to do something for us.\"\nThe governor's palace was jammed with hurrying people, a scene of\n confusion that upset Zotul. The clerk who took his application for\n an interview was, he noticed only vaguely, a young Earthwoman. It\n was remarkable that he paid so little attention, for the female\n terrestrials were picked for physical assets that made Zurian men\n covetous and Zurian women envious.\n\n\n \"The governor will see you,\" she said sweetly. \"He has been expecting\n you.\"\n\n\n \"Me?\" marveled Zotul.\n\n\n She ushered him into the magnificent private office of the governor\n of Lor. The man behind the desk stood up, extended his hand with a\n friendly smile.", "Kent Broderick, the Earthman in charge of the Council, shook hands\n jovially with Zotul. That alien custom conformed with, Zotul took a\n better look at his host. Broderick was an affable, smiling individual\n with genial laugh wrinkles at his eyes. A man of middle age, dressed in\n the baggy costume of Zur, he looked almost like a Zurian, except for\n an indefinite sense of alienness about him.\n\n\n \"Glad to have you call on us, Mr. Masur,\" boomed the Earthman, clapping\n Zotul on the back. \"Just tell us your troubles and we'll have you\n straightened out in no time.\"\nAll the chill recriminations and arguments Zotul had stored for this\n occasion were dissipated in the warmth of the Earthman's manner.\n\n\n Almost apologetically, Zotul told of the encroachment that had been\n made upon the business of the Pottery of Masur.", "\"But it's mobbed,\" protested Zotul. \"It gave me a headache.\"\n\n\n \"And to us it's almost empty. The pressure of population on Earth has\n made us range the Galaxy for places to put our extra people. The only\n habitable planets, unfortunately, are populated ones. We take the least\n populous worlds and—well, buy them out and move in.\"\n\n\n \"And after that?\"\n\n\n Broderick smiled gently. \"Zur will grow. Our people will intermarry\n with yours. The future population of Zur will be neither true Zurians\n nor true Earthmen, but a mixture of both.\"\n\n\n Zotul sat in silent thought. \"But you did not have to buy us out. You\n had the power to conquer us, even to destroy us. The whole planet could\n have been yours alone.\" He stopped in alarm. \"Or am I suggesting an\n idea that didn't occur to you?\"", "\"Yours is the last business on Zur to be taken over by us. We have\n bought you out.\"\n\n\n \"Our government....\"\n\n\n \"Your governments belong to us, too,\" said Broderick. \"When they could\n not pay for the roads, the telegraphs, the civic improvements, we took\n them over, just as we are taking you over.\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" exclaimed Zotul, aghast, \"that you Earthmen own everything\n on Zur?\"\n\n\n \"Even your armies.\"\n\n\n \"But\nwhy\n?\"\nBroderick clasped his hands behind back, went to the window and stared\n down moodily into the street.\n\n\n \"You don't know what an overcrowded world is like,\" he said. \"A street\n like this, with so few people and vehicles on it, would be impossible\n on Earth.\"" ], [ "At the head of the long, shining table sat old Kalrab Masur, in his\n dotage, but still giving what he could of aid and comfort to the\n Pottery of Masur, even though nobody listened to him any more and\n he knew it. Around the table sat the six brothers—Koltan, eldest\n and Director of the Pottery; Morvan, his vice-chief; Singula, their\n treasurer; Thendro, sales manager; Lubiosa, export chief; and last in\n the rank of age, Zotul, who was responsible for affairs of design.\n\n\n \"Behold, my sons,\" said Kalrab, stroking his scanty beard. \"What are\n these Earthmen to worry about? Remember the clay. It is our strength\n and our fortune. It is the muscle and bone of our trade. Earthmen may\n come and Earthmen may go, but clay goes on forever ... and with it, the\n fame and fortune of the House of Masur.\"", "Zotul did not appreciate his father's approval, for it only earned him\n a beating as soon as the old man went to bed. It was a common enough\n thing among the brothers Masur, as among everybody, to be frustrated in\n their desires. However, they had Zotul to take it out upon, and they\n did.", "The printing plants that turned out mortgage contracts did a lush\n business.\nFor the common people of Zur, times were good everywhere. In a decade\n and a half, the Earthmen had wrought magnificent changes on this\n backward world. As Broderick had said, the progress of the tortoise was\n slow, but it was extremely sure.\n\n\n The brothers Masur got along in spite of dropped options. They had less\n money and felt the pinch of their debts more keenly, but television\n kept their wives and children amused and furnished an anodyne for the\n pangs of impoverishment.\n\n\n The pottery income dropped to an impossible low, no matter how Zotul\n designed and the brothers produced. Their figurines and religious ikons\n were a drug on the market. The Earthmen made them of plastic and sold\n them for less.\n\n\n The brothers, unable to meet the Payments that were not so Easy any\n more, looked up Zotul and cuffed him around reproachfully.", "The result of the new flood was that in the following year, the sale of\n Masur ceramic table service dropped to less than a tenth.\nTrembling with excitement at this news from their book-keeper, Koltan\n called an emergency meeting. He even routed old Kalrab out of his\n senile stupor for the occasion, on the off chance that the old man\n might still have a little wit left that could be helpful.\n\n\n \"Note,\" Koltan announced in a shaky voice, \"that the Earthmen undermine\n our business,\" and he read off the figures.\n\n\n \"Perhaps,\" said Zotul, \"it is a good thing also, as you said before,\n and will result in something even better for us.\"\n\n\n Koltan frowned, and Zotul, in fear of another beating, instantly\n subsided.", "\"Doubtless,\" said Zotul unexpectedly, for the youngest at a conference\n was expected to keep his mouth shut and applaud the decisions of his\n elders, \"the Earthmen used all the metal on their planet in building\n that ship. We cannot possibly bilk them of it; it is their only means\n of transport.\"\n\n\n Such frank expression of motive was unheard of, even in the secret\n conclave of conference. Only the speaker's youth could account for it.\n The speech drew scowls from the brothers and stern rebuke from Koltan.\n\n\n \"When your opinion is wanted, we will ask you for it. Meantime,\n remember your position in the family.\"\n\n\n Zotul bowed his head meekly, but he burned with resentment.\n\n\n \"Listen to the boy,\" said the aged father. \"There is more wisdom in his\n head than in all the rest of you. Forget the Earthmen and think only of\n the clay.\"", "Happily for the brothers, they did not understand this at the time or\n they would surely have gone back to be buried in their own clay.\n\n\n \"I think,\" the governor told them, \"that you gentlemen have not\n paused to consider the affair from all angles. You must learn to be\n modern—keep up with the times! We heads of government on Zur are doing\n all in our power to aid the Earthmen and facilitate their bringing a\n great, new culture that can only benefit us. See how Zur has changed in\n ten short years! Imagine the world of tomorrow! Why, do you know they\n are even bringing\nautos\nto Zur!\"\n\n\n The brothers were fascinated with the governor's description of these\n hitherto unheard-of vehicles.\n\n\n \"It only remains,\" concluded the governor, \"to build highways, and the\n Earthmen are taking care of that.\"", "\"If we have to sue, we take back the merchandise and everything\n attached to them. That means you would lose your houses, for they are\n attached to the furnaces. However, it is not as bad as that—yet. We\n will only require you to assign the remaining three-quarters of your\n pottery to us.\"\n\n\n The brothers, when they heard of this, were too stunned to think of\n beating Zotul, by which he assumed he had progressed a little and was\n somewhat comforted.", "\"No,\" said Broderick, his usually smiling face almost pained with\n memory. \"We know the history of conquest all too well. Our method\n causes more distress than we like to inflict, but it's better—and more\n sure—than war and invasion by force. Now that the unpleasant job is\n finished, we can repair the dislocations.\"\n\n\n \"At last I understand what you said about the tortoise.\"\n\n\n \"Slow but sure.\" Broderick beamed again and clapped Zotul on the\n shoulder. \"Don't worry. You'll have your job back, the same as always,\n but you'll be working for us ... until the children of Earth and Zur\n are equal in knowledge and therefore equal partners. That's why we had\n to break down your caste system.\"\n\n\n Zotul's eyes widened. \"And that is why my brothers did not beat me when\n I failed!\"", "\"Don't be idiotic! Do you suppose Koltan would agree to produce a new\n type of stove when the old has sold well for centuries? Besides, why do\n you need a whole new stove for one little pot?\"\n\n\n \"A dozen pots. They come in sets and are cheaper that way. And Koltan\n will have to produce the new stove because all the housewives are\n buying these pots and there will be a big demand for it. The Earthman\n said so.\"\n\n\n \"He did, did he? These pots are only a fad. You will soon enough go\n back to cooking with your old ones.\"\n\n\n \"The Earthman took them in trade—one reason why the new ones are so\n cheap. There isn't a pot in the house but these metal ones, and you\n will have to design and produce a new stove if you expect me to use\n them.\"", "\"Come in, come in! I'm glad to see you again.\"\n\n\n Zotul stared blankly. This was not the governor. This was Broderick,\n the Earthman.\n\n\n \"I—I came to see the governor,\" he said in confusion.\n\n\n Broderick nodded agreeably. \"I am the governor and I am well acquainted\n with your case, Mr. Masur. Shall we talk it over? Please sit down.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand. The Earthmen....\" Zotul paused, coloring. \"We are\n about to lose our plant.\"\n\n\n \"You were about to say that the Earthmen are taking your plant away\n from you. That is true. Since the House of Masur was the largest and\n richest on Zur, it has taken a long time—the longest of all, in fact.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"", "The next time the brothers went to see the governor, he said, \"I cannot\n handle such complaints as yours. I must refer you to the Merchandising\n Council.\"\n\n\n \"What is that?\" asked Koltan.\n\n\n \"It is an Earthman association that deals with complaints such as\n yours. In the matter of material progress, we must expect some strain\n in the fabric of our culture. Machinery has been set up to deal with\n it. Here is their address; go air your troubles to them.\"\n\n\n The business of a formal complaint was turned over by the brothers to\n Zotul. It took three weeks for the Earthmen to get around to calling\n him in, as a representative of the Pottery of Masur, for an interview.\n\n\n All the brothers could no longer be spared from the plant, even for the\n purpose of pressing a complaint. Their days of idle wealth over, they\n had to get in and work with the clay with the rest of the help.", "Still smarting, Zotul went back to his designing quarters and thought\n about the Earthmen. If it was impossible to hope for much in the way\n of metal from the Earthmen, what could one get from them? If he could\n figure this problem out, he might rise somewhat in the estimation of\n his brothers. That wouldn't take him out of the rank of scapegoat, of\n course, but the beatings might become fewer and less severe.\nBy and by, the Earthmen came to Lor, flying through the air in strange\n metal contraptions. They paraded through the tile-paved streets of the\n city, marveled here, as they had in Thorabia, at the buildings all of\n tile inside and out, and made a great show of themselves for all the\n people to see. Speeches were made through interpreters, who had much\n too quickly learned the tongue of the aliens; hence these left much to\n be desired in the way of clarity, though their sincerity was evident.", "Zotul found the headquarters of the Merchandising Council as indicated\n on their message. He had not been this way in some time, but was not\n surprised to find that a number of old buildings had been torn down to\n make room for the concrete Council House and a roomy parking lot, paved\n with something called \"blacktop\" and jammed with an array of glittering\n new automobiles.\n\n\n An automobile was an expense none of the brothers could afford, now\n that they barely eked a living from the pottery. Still, Zotul ached\n with desire at sight of so many shiny cars. Only a few had them and\n they were the envied ones of Zur.", "After he had beaten his wife thoroughly for her foolishness, Zotul\n stamped off in a rage and designed a new ceramic stove, one that would\n accommodate the terrestrial pots very well.\n\n\n And Koltan put the model into production.\n\n\n \"Orders already are pouring in like mad,\" he said the next day. \"It\n was wise of you to foresee it and have the design ready. Already, I am\n sorry for thinking as I did about the Earthmen. They really intend to\n do well by us.\"", "\"You got us into this,\" they said, emphasizing their bitterness with\n fists. \"Go see Broderick. Tell him we are undone and must have some\n contracts to continue operating.\"\n\n\n Nursing bruises, Zotul unhappily went to the Council House again. Mr.\n Broderick was no longer with them, a suave assistant informed him.\n Would he like to see Mr. Siwicki instead? Zotul would.\n\n\n Siwicki was tall, thin, dark and somber-looking. There was even a hint\n of toughness about the set of his jaw and the hardness of his glance.\n\n\n \"So you can't pay,\" he said, tapping his teeth with a pencil. He\n looked at Zotul coldly. \"It is well you have come to us instead of\n making it necessary for us to approach you through the courts.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know what you mean,\" said Zotul.", "\"It\nis\na damned imposition,\" agreed Morvan, ignoring his father's\n philosophical attitude. \"They could have landed just as easily here in\n Lor.\"\n\n\n \"The Thorabians will lick up the gravy,\" said Singula, whose mind ran\n rather to matters of financial aspect, \"and leave us the grease.\"\n\n\n By this, he seemed to imply that the Thorabians would rob the Earthmen,\n which the Lorians would not. The truth was that all on Zur were panting\n to get their hands on that marvelous ship, which was all of metal, a\n very scarce commodity on Zur, worth billions of ken.\nLubiosa, who had interests in Thorabia, and many agents there, kept his\n own counsel. His people were active in the matter and that was enough\n for him. He would report when the time was ripe.", "In their dozenth conference since that first and fateful one, the\n brothers Masur decided upon drastic steps. In the meantime, several\n things had happened. For one, old Kalrab had passed on to his immortal\n rest, but this made no real difference. For another, the Earthmen had\n procured legal authority to prospect the planet for metals, of which\n they found a good deal, but they told no one on Zur of this. What\n they did mention was the crude oil and natural gas they discovered\n in the underlayers of the planet's crust. Crews of Zurians, working\n under supervision of the Earthmen, laid pipelines from the gas and oil\n regions to every major and minor city on Zur.\nBy the time ten years had passed since the landing of the first\n terrestrial ship, the Earthmen were conducting a brisk business in\n gas-fired ranges, furnaces and heaters ... and the Masur stove business\n was gone. Moreover, the Earthmen sold the Zurians their own natural gas\n at a nice profit and everybody was happy with the situation except the\n brothers Masur.", "\"Once,\" he said formally, \"the Masur fortune was the greatest in\n the world of Zur. That was before my father, the famous Kalrab\n Masur—Divinity protect him—departed this life to collect his greater\n reward. He often told us, my father did, that the clay is the flesh and\n bones of our culture and our fortune. Now it has been shown how prone\n is the flesh to corruption and how feeble the bones. We are ruined, and\n all because of new things coming from Earth.\"\n\n\n Broderick stroked his shaven chin and looked sad. \"Why didn't you come\n to me sooner? This would never have happened. But now that it has,\n we're going to do right by you. That is the policy of Earth—always to\n do right by the customer.\"\n\n\n \"Divinity witness,\" Zorin said, \"that we ask only compensation for\n damages.\"", "The retooled plant forged ahead and profits began to look up, but the\n Earthmen took a fourth of them as their share in the industry.\n\n\n For a year, the brothers drove their shiny new cars about on the\n new concrete highways the Earthmen had built. From pumps owned by a\n terrestrial company, they bought gas and oil that had been drawn from\n the crust of Zur and was sold to the Zurians at a magnificent profit.\n The food they ate was cooked in Earthly pots on Earth-type gas ranges,\n served up on metal plates that had been stamped out on Earth. In the\n winter, they toasted their shins before handsome gas grates, though\n they had gas-fired central heating.", "The Earthmen were going to do great things for the whole world of\n Zur. It required but the cooperation—an excellent word, that—of all\n Zurians, and many blessings would rain down from the skies. This, in\n effect, was what the Earthmen had to say. Zotul felt greatly cheered,\n for it refuted the attitude of his brothers without earning him a\n whaling for it.\n\n\n There was also some talk going around about agreements made between\n the Earthmen and officials of the Lorian government, but you heard one\n thing one day and another the next. Accurate reporting, much less a\n newspaper, was unknown on Zur.\n\n\n Finally, the Earthmen took off in their great, shining ship. Obviously,\n none had succeeded in chiseling them out of it, if, indeed, any had\n tried. The anti-Earthmen Faction—in any culture complex, there is\n always an \"anti\" faction to protest any movement of endeavor—crowed\n happily that the Earthmen were gone for good, and a good thing, too." ], [ "\"You got us into this,\" they said, emphasizing their bitterness with\n fists. \"Go see Broderick. Tell him we are undone and must have some\n contracts to continue operating.\"\n\n\n Nursing bruises, Zotul unhappily went to the Council House again. Mr.\n Broderick was no longer with them, a suave assistant informed him.\n Would he like to see Mr. Siwicki instead? Zotul would.\n\n\n Siwicki was tall, thin, dark and somber-looking. There was even a hint\n of toughness about the set of his jaw and the hardness of his glance.\n\n\n \"So you can't pay,\" he said, tapping his teeth with a pencil. He\n looked at Zotul coldly. \"It is well you have come to us instead of\n making it necessary for us to approach you through the courts.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know what you mean,\" said Zotul.", "Kent Broderick, the Earthman in charge of the Council, shook hands\n jovially with Zotul. That alien custom conformed with, Zotul took a\n better look at his host. Broderick was an affable, smiling individual\n with genial laugh wrinkles at his eyes. A man of middle age, dressed in\n the baggy costume of Zur, he looked almost like a Zurian, except for\n an indefinite sense of alienness about him.\n\n\n \"Glad to have you call on us, Mr. Masur,\" boomed the Earthman, clapping\n Zotul on the back. \"Just tell us your troubles and we'll have you\n straightened out in no time.\"\nAll the chill recriminations and arguments Zotul had stored for this\n occasion were dissipated in the warmth of the Earthman's manner.\n\n\n Almost apologetically, Zotul told of the encroachment that had been\n made upon the business of the Pottery of Masur.", "Broderick shook his head. \"It is not possible to replace an immense\n fortune at this late date. As I said, you should have reported your\n trouble sooner. However, we can give you an opportunity to rebuild. Do\n you own an automobile?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"A gas range? A gas-fired furnace? A radio?\"\n\n\n Zotul had to answer no to all except the radio. \"My wife Lania likes\n the music,\" he explained. \"I cannot afford the other things.\"\n\n\n Broderick clucked sympathetically. One who could not afford the\n bargain-priced merchandise of Earth must be poor indeed.", "At the head of the long, shining table sat old Kalrab Masur, in his\n dotage, but still giving what he could of aid and comfort to the\n Pottery of Masur, even though nobody listened to him any more and\n he knew it. Around the table sat the six brothers—Koltan, eldest\n and Director of the Pottery; Morvan, his vice-chief; Singula, their\n treasurer; Thendro, sales manager; Lubiosa, export chief; and last in\n the rank of age, Zotul, who was responsible for affairs of design.\n\n\n \"Behold, my sons,\" said Kalrab, stroking his scanty beard. \"What are\n these Earthmen to worry about? Remember the clay. It is our strength\n and our fortune. It is the muscle and bone of our trade. Earthmen may\n come and Earthmen may go, but clay goes on forever ... and with it, the\n fame and fortune of the House of Masur.\"", "\"No,\" said Broderick, his usually smiling face almost pained with\n memory. \"We know the history of conquest all too well. Our method\n causes more distress than we like to inflict, but it's better—and more\n sure—than war and invasion by force. Now that the unpleasant job is\n finished, we can repair the dislocations.\"\n\n\n \"At last I understand what you said about the tortoise.\"\n\n\n \"Slow but sure.\" Broderick beamed again and clapped Zotul on the\n shoulder. \"Don't worry. You'll have your job back, the same as always,\n but you'll be working for us ... until the children of Earth and Zur\n are equal in knowledge and therefore equal partners. That's why we had\n to break down your caste system.\"\n\n\n Zotul's eyes widened. \"And that is why my brothers did not beat me when\n I failed!\"", "\"Once,\" he said formally, \"the Masur fortune was the greatest in\n the world of Zur. That was before my father, the famous Kalrab\n Masur—Divinity protect him—departed this life to collect his greater\n reward. He often told us, my father did, that the clay is the flesh and\n bones of our culture and our fortune. Now it has been shown how prone\n is the flesh to corruption and how feeble the bones. We are ruined, and\n all because of new things coming from Earth.\"\n\n\n Broderick stroked his shaven chin and looked sad. \"Why didn't you come\n to me sooner? This would never have happened. But now that it has,\n we're going to do right by you. That is the policy of Earth—always to\n do right by the customer.\"\n\n\n \"Divinity witness,\" Zorin said, \"that we ask only compensation for\n damages.\"", "\"Here.\" Broderick handed him a sheaf of chattel mortgages. \"Have each\n of your brothers sign one of these, then bring them back to me. That is\n all there is to it.\"\n\n\n It sounded wonderful. But how would the brothers take it? Zotul\n wrestled with his misgivings and the misgivings won.\n\n\n \"I will talk it over with them,\" he said. \"Give me the total so I will\n have the figures.\"\n\n\n The total was more than it ought to be by simple addition. Zotul\n pointed this out politely.\n\n\n \"Interest,\" Broderick explained. \"A mere fifteen per cent. After all,\n you get the merchandise free. The transportation company has to be\n paid, so another company loans you the money to pay for the freight.\n This small extra sum pays the lending company for its trouble.\"", "He chuckled deeply. \"We of Earth have a saying about one of our\n extremely slow-moving native animals. We say, 'Slow is the tortoise,\n but sure.' And so with us. Our goal is a long-range one, with the\n motto, 'Better times with better merchandise.'\"\nThe engaging manner of the man won Zotul's confidence. After all, it\n was no more than fair to pay transportation.\n\n\n He said, \"How much does the freight cost?\"\n\n\n Broderick told him.\n\n\n \"It may seem high,\" said the Earthman, \"but remember that Earth is\n sixty-odd light-years away. After all, we are absorbing the cost of the\n merchandise. All you pay is the freight, which is cheap, considering\n the cost of operating an interstellar spaceship.\"\n\n\n \"Impossible,\" said Zotul drably. \"Not I and all my brothers together\n have so much money any more.\"", "\"You don't know us of Earth very well yet, but you will. I offer you\n credit!\"\n\n\n \"What is that?\" asked Zotul skeptically.\n\n\n \"It is how the poor are enabled to enjoy all the luxuries of the\n rich,\" said Broderick, and went on to give a thumbnail sketch of the\n involutions and devolutions of credit, leaving out some angles that\n might have had a discouraging effect.\n\n\n On a world where credit was a totally new concept, it was enchanting.\n Zotul grasped at the glittering promise with avidity. \"What must I do\n to get credit?\"\n\n\n \"Just sign this paper,\" said Broderick, \"and you become part of our\n Easy Payment Plan.\"\n\n\n Zotul drew back. \"I have five brothers. If I took all these things for\n myself and nothing for them, they would beat me black and blue.\"", "Zotul did not appreciate his father's approval, for it only earned him\n a beating as soon as the old man went to bed. It was a common enough\n thing among the brothers Masur, as among everybody, to be frustrated in\n their desires. However, they had Zotul to take it out upon, and they\n did.", "The printing plants that turned out mortgage contracts did a lush\n business.\nFor the common people of Zur, times were good everywhere. In a decade\n and a half, the Earthmen had wrought magnificent changes on this\n backward world. As Broderick had said, the progress of the tortoise was\n slow, but it was extremely sure.\n\n\n The brothers Masur got along in spite of dropped options. They had less\n money and felt the pinch of their debts more keenly, but television\n kept their wives and children amused and furnished an anodyne for the\n pangs of impoverishment.\n\n\n The pottery income dropped to an impossible low, no matter how Zotul\n designed and the brothers produced. Their figurines and religious ikons\n were a drug on the market. The Earthmen made them of plastic and sold\n them for less.\n\n\n The brothers, unable to meet the Payments that were not so Easy any\n more, looked up Zotul and cuffed him around reproachfully.", "\"They are replacing our high-quality ceramic ware with inferior\n terrestrial junk,\" Koltan went on bitterly. \"It is only the glamor that\n sells it, of course, but before the people get the shine out of their\n eyes, we can be ruined.\"\n\n\n The brothers discussed the situation for an hour, and all the while\n Father Kalrab sat and pulled his scanty whiskers. Seeing that they got\n nowhere with their wrangle, he cleared his throat and spoke up.", "\"Come in, come in! I'm glad to see you again.\"\n\n\n Zotul stared blankly. This was not the governor. This was Broderick,\n the Earthman.\n\n\n \"I—I came to see the governor,\" he said in confusion.\n\n\n Broderick nodded agreeably. \"I am the governor and I am well acquainted\n with your case, Mr. Masur. Shall we talk it over? Please sit down.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand. The Earthmen....\" Zotul paused, coloring. \"We are\n about to lose our plant.\"\n\n\n \"You were about to say that the Earthmen are taking your plant away\n from you. That is true. Since the House of Masur was the largest and\n richest on Zur, it has taken a long time—the longest of all, in fact.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"", "\"If we have to sue, we take back the merchandise and everything\n attached to them. That means you would lose your houses, for they are\n attached to the furnaces. However, it is not as bad as that—yet. We\n will only require you to assign the remaining three-quarters of your\n pottery to us.\"\n\n\n The brothers, when they heard of this, were too stunned to think of\n beating Zotul, by which he assumed he had progressed a little and was\n somewhat comforted.", "But at the end of three years, the Earthmen dropped their option.\n The Pottery of Masur had no more contracts. Business languished. The\n Earthmen, explained Broderick, had built a plant of their own because\n it was so much more efficient—and to lower prices, which was Earth's\n unswerving policy, greater and greater efficiency was demanded.\n Broderick was very sympathetic, but there was nothing he could do.\n\n\n The introduction of television provided a further calamity. The sets\n were delicate and needed frequent repairs, hence were costly to own and\n maintain. But all Zurians who had to keep up with the latest from Earth\n had them. Now it was possible not only to hear about things of Earth,\n but to see them as they were broadcast from the video tapes.", "\"I see.\" Zotul puzzled over it sadly. \"It is too much,\" he said. \"Our\n plant doesn't make enough money for us to meet the payments.\"\n\n\n \"I have a surprise for you,\" smiled Broderick. \"Here is a contract. You\n will start making ceramic parts for automobile spark plugs and certain\n parts for radios and gas ranges. It is our policy to encourage local\n manufacture to help bring prices down.\"\n\n\n \"We haven't the equipment.\"\n\n\n \"We will equip your plant,\" beamed Broderick. \"It will require only\n a quarter interest in your plant itself, assigned to our terrestrial\n company.\"\nZotul, anxious to possess the treasures promised by the Earthman,\n won over his brothers. They signed with marks and gave up a quarter\n interest in the Pottery of Masur. They rolled in the luxuries of Earth.\n These, who had never known debt before, were in it up to their ears.", "\"It\nis\na damned imposition,\" agreed Morvan, ignoring his father's\n philosophical attitude. \"They could have landed just as easily here in\n Lor.\"\n\n\n \"The Thorabians will lick up the gravy,\" said Singula, whose mind ran\n rather to matters of financial aspect, \"and leave us the grease.\"\n\n\n By this, he seemed to imply that the Thorabians would rob the Earthmen,\n which the Lorians would not. The truth was that all on Zur were panting\n to get their hands on that marvelous ship, which was all of metal, a\n very scarce commodity on Zur, worth billions of ken.\nLubiosa, who had interests in Thorabia, and many agents there, kept his\n own counsel. His people were active in the matter and that was enough\n for him. He would report when the time was ripe.", "Still smarting, Zotul went back to his designing quarters and thought\n about the Earthmen. If it was impossible to hope for much in the way\n of metal from the Earthmen, what could one get from them? If he could\n figure this problem out, he might rise somewhat in the estimation of\n his brothers. That wouldn't take him out of the rank of scapegoat, of\n course, but the beatings might become fewer and less severe.\nBy and by, the Earthmen came to Lor, flying through the air in strange\n metal contraptions. They paraded through the tile-paved streets of the\n city, marveled here, as they had in Thorabia, at the buildings all of\n tile inside and out, and made a great show of themselves for all the\n people to see. Speeches were made through interpreters, who had much\n too quickly learned the tongue of the aliens; hence these left much to\n be desired in the way of clarity, though their sincerity was evident.", "Happily for the brothers, they did not understand this at the time or\n they would surely have gone back to be buried in their own clay.\n\n\n \"I think,\" the governor told them, \"that you gentlemen have not\n paused to consider the affair from all angles. You must learn to be\n modern—keep up with the times! We heads of government on Zur are doing\n all in our power to aid the Earthmen and facilitate their bringing a\n great, new culture that can only benefit us. See how Zur has changed in\n ten short years! Imagine the world of tomorrow! Why, do you know they\n are even bringing\nautos\nto Zur!\"\n\n\n The brothers were fascinated with the governor's description of these\n hitherto unheard-of vehicles.\n\n\n \"It only remains,\" concluded the governor, \"to build highways, and the\n Earthmen are taking care of that.\"", "The result of the new flood was that in the following year, the sale of\n Masur ceramic table service dropped to less than a tenth.\nTrembling with excitement at this news from their book-keeper, Koltan\n called an emergency meeting. He even routed old Kalrab out of his\n senile stupor for the occasion, on the off chance that the old man\n might still have a little wit left that could be helpful.\n\n\n \"Note,\" Koltan announced in a shaky voice, \"that the Earthmen undermine\n our business,\" and he read off the figures.\n\n\n \"Perhaps,\" said Zotul, \"it is a good thing also, as you said before,\n and will result in something even better for us.\"\n\n\n Koltan frowned, and Zotul, in fear of another beating, instantly\n subsided." ], [ "The Earthmen were going to do great things for the whole world of\n Zur. It required but the cooperation—an excellent word, that—of all\n Zurians, and many blessings would rain down from the skies. This, in\n effect, was what the Earthmen had to say. Zotul felt greatly cheered,\n for it refuted the attitude of his brothers without earning him a\n whaling for it.\n\n\n There was also some talk going around about agreements made between\n the Earthmen and officials of the Lorian government, but you heard one\n thing one day and another the next. Accurate reporting, much less a\n newspaper, was unknown on Zur.\n\n\n Finally, the Earthmen took off in their great, shining ship. Obviously,\n none had succeeded in chiseling them out of it, if, indeed, any had\n tried. The anti-Earthmen Faction—in any culture complex, there is\n always an \"anti\" faction to protest any movement of endeavor—crowed\n happily that the Earthmen were gone for good, and a good thing, too.", "Happily for the brothers, they did not understand this at the time or\n they would surely have gone back to be buried in their own clay.\n\n\n \"I think,\" the governor told them, \"that you gentlemen have not\n paused to consider the affair from all angles. You must learn to be\n modern—keep up with the times! We heads of government on Zur are doing\n all in our power to aid the Earthmen and facilitate their bringing a\n great, new culture that can only benefit us. See how Zur has changed in\n ten short years! Imagine the world of tomorrow! Why, do you know they\n are even bringing\nautos\nto Zur!\"\n\n\n The brothers were fascinated with the governor's description of these\n hitherto unheard-of vehicles.\n\n\n \"It only remains,\" concluded the governor, \"to build highways, and the\n Earthmen are taking care of that.\"", "\"It\nis\na damned imposition,\" agreed Morvan, ignoring his father's\n philosophical attitude. \"They could have landed just as easily here in\n Lor.\"\n\n\n \"The Thorabians will lick up the gravy,\" said Singula, whose mind ran\n rather to matters of financial aspect, \"and leave us the grease.\"\n\n\n By this, he seemed to imply that the Thorabians would rob the Earthmen,\n which the Lorians would not. The truth was that all on Zur were panting\n to get their hands on that marvelous ship, which was all of metal, a\n very scarce commodity on Zur, worth billions of ken.\nLubiosa, who had interests in Thorabia, and many agents there, kept his\n own counsel. His people were active in the matter and that was enough\n for him. He would report when the time was ripe.", "\"Once,\" he said formally, \"the Masur fortune was the greatest in\n the world of Zur. That was before my father, the famous Kalrab\n Masur—Divinity protect him—departed this life to collect his greater\n reward. He often told us, my father did, that the clay is the flesh and\n bones of our culture and our fortune. Now it has been shown how prone\n is the flesh to corruption and how feeble the bones. We are ruined, and\n all because of new things coming from Earth.\"\n\n\n Broderick stroked his shaven chin and looked sad. \"Why didn't you come\n to me sooner? This would never have happened. But now that it has,\n we're going to do right by you. That is the policy of Earth—always to\n do right by the customer.\"\n\n\n \"Divinity witness,\" Zorin said, \"that we ask only compensation for\n damages.\"", "Such jubilation proved premature, however. One day, a fleet of ships\n arrived and after they had landed all over the planet, Zur was\n practically acrawl with Earthmen.\n\n\n Immediately, the Earthmen established what they called\n \"corporations\"—Zurian trading companies under terrestrial control. The\n object of the visit was trade.\n\n\n In spite of the fact that a terrestrial ship had landed at every Zurian\n city of major and minor importance, and all in a single day, it took\n some time for the news to spread.\n\n\n The first awareness Zotul had was that, upon coming home from the\n pottery one evening, he found his wife Lania proudly brandishing an\n aluminum pot at him.\n\n\n \"What is that thing?\" he asked curiously.\n\n\n \"A pot. I bought it at the market.\"", "In their dozenth conference since that first and fateful one, the\n brothers Masur decided upon drastic steps. In the meantime, several\n things had happened. For one, old Kalrab had passed on to his immortal\n rest, but this made no real difference. For another, the Earthmen had\n procured legal authority to prospect the planet for metals, of which\n they found a good deal, but they told no one on Zur of this. What\n they did mention was the crude oil and natural gas they discovered\n in the underlayers of the planet's crust. Crews of Zurians, working\n under supervision of the Earthmen, laid pipelines from the gas and oil\n regions to every major and minor city on Zur.\nBy the time ten years had passed since the landing of the first\n terrestrial ship, the Earthmen were conducting a brisk business in\n gas-fired ranges, furnaces and heaters ... and the Masur stove business\n was gone. Moreover, the Earthmen sold the Zurians their own natural gas\n at a nice profit and everybody was happy with the situation except the\n brothers Masur.", "Kent Broderick, the Earthman in charge of the Council, shook hands\n jovially with Zotul. That alien custom conformed with, Zotul took a\n better look at his host. Broderick was an affable, smiling individual\n with genial laugh wrinkles at his eyes. A man of middle age, dressed in\n the baggy costume of Zur, he looked almost like a Zurian, except for\n an indefinite sense of alienness about him.\n\n\n \"Glad to have you call on us, Mr. Masur,\" boomed the Earthman, clapping\n Zotul on the back. \"Just tell us your troubles and we'll have you\n straightened out in no time.\"\nAll the chill recriminations and arguments Zotul had stored for this\n occasion were dissipated in the warmth of the Earthman's manner.\n\n\n Almost apologetically, Zotul told of the encroachment that had been\n made upon the business of the Pottery of Masur.", "Moreover, the Earthmen brought miles of copper wire—more than enough\n in value to buy out the governorship of any country on Zur—and set up\n telegraph lines from country to country and continent to continent.\n Within five years of the first landing of the Earthmen, every major\n city on the globe had a printing press, a daily newspaper, and enjoyed\n the instantaneous transmission of news via telegraph. And the business\n of the House of Masur continued to look up.\n\n\n \"As I have always said from the beginning,\" chortled Director Koltan,\n \"this coming of the Earthmen had been a great thing for us, and\n especially for the House of Masur.\"\n\n\n \"You didn't think so at first,\" Zotul pointed out, and was immediately\n sorry, for Koltan turned and gave him a hiding, single-handed, for his\n unthinkable impertinence.", "The retooled plant forged ahead and profits began to look up, but the\n Earthmen took a fourth of them as their share in the industry.\n\n\n For a year, the brothers drove their shiny new cars about on the\n new concrete highways the Earthmen had built. From pumps owned by a\n terrestrial company, they bought gas and oil that had been drawn from\n the crust of Zur and was sold to the Zurians at a magnificent profit.\n The food they ate was cooked in Earthly pots on Earth-type gas ranges,\n served up on metal plates that had been stamped out on Earth. In the\n winter, they toasted their shins before handsome gas grates, though\n they had gas-fired central heating.", "But at the end of three years, the Earthmen dropped their option.\n The Pottery of Masur had no more contracts. Business languished. The\n Earthmen, explained Broderick, had built a plant of their own because\n it was so much more efficient—and to lower prices, which was Earth's\n unswerving policy, greater and greater efficiency was demanded.\n Broderick was very sympathetic, but there was nothing he could do.\n\n\n The introduction of television provided a further calamity. The sets\n were delicate and needed frequent repairs, hence were costly to own and\n maintain. But all Zurians who had to keep up with the latest from Earth\n had them. Now it was possible not only to hear about things of Earth,\n but to see them as they were broadcast from the video tapes.", "\"Yours is the last business on Zur to be taken over by us. We have\n bought you out.\"\n\n\n \"Our government....\"\n\n\n \"Your governments belong to us, too,\" said Broderick. \"When they could\n not pay for the roads, the telegraphs, the civic improvements, we took\n them over, just as we are taking you over.\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" exclaimed Zotul, aghast, \"that you Earthmen own everything\n on Zur?\"\n\n\n \"Even your armies.\"\n\n\n \"But\nwhy\n?\"\nBroderick clasped his hands behind back, went to the window and stared\n down moodily into the street.\n\n\n \"You don't know what an overcrowded world is like,\" he said. \"A street\n like this, with so few people and vehicles on it, would be impossible\n on Earth.\"", "The printing plants that turned out mortgage contracts did a lush\n business.\nFor the common people of Zur, times were good everywhere. In a decade\n and a half, the Earthmen had wrought magnificent changes on this\n backward world. As Broderick had said, the progress of the tortoise was\n slow, but it was extremely sure.\n\n\n The brothers Masur got along in spite of dropped options. They had less\n money and felt the pinch of their debts more keenly, but television\n kept their wives and children amused and furnished an anodyne for the\n pangs of impoverishment.\n\n\n The pottery income dropped to an impossible low, no matter how Zotul\n designed and the brothers produced. Their figurines and religious ikons\n were a drug on the market. The Earthmen made them of plastic and sold\n them for less.\n\n\n The brothers, unable to meet the Payments that were not so Easy any\n more, looked up Zotul and cuffed him around reproachfully.", "\"To fail,\" said Koltan soberly, \"is not a Masur attribute. Go to the\n governor and tell him what we think of this business. The House of\n Masur has long supported the government with heavy taxes. Now it is\n time for the government to do something for us.\"\nThe governor's palace was jammed with hurrying people, a scene of\n confusion that upset Zotul. The clerk who took his application for\n an interview was, he noticed only vaguely, a young Earthwoman. It\n was remarkable that he paid so little attention, for the female\n terrestrials were picked for physical assets that made Zurian men\n covetous and Zurian women envious.\n\n\n \"The governor will see you,\" she said sweetly. \"He has been expecting\n you.\"\n\n\n \"Me?\" marveled Zotul.\n\n\n She ushered him into the magnificent private office of the governor\n of Lor. The man behind the desk stood up, extended his hand with a\n friendly smile.", "At any rate, the brothers Masur were still able to console themselves\n that they had their tile business. Tile served well enough for houses\n and street surfacing; what better material could be devised for the new\n highways the governor spoke of? There was a lot of money to be made\n yet.\nRadio stations went up all over Zur and began broadcasting. The people\n bought receiving sets like mad. The automobiles arrived and highways\n were constructed.\n\n\n The last hope of the brothers was dashed. The Earthmen set up plants\n and began to manufacture Portland cement.\n\n\n You could build a house of concrete much cheaper than with tile. Of\n course, since wood was scarce on Zur, it was no competition for either\n tile or concrete. Concrete floors were smoother, too, and the stuff\n made far better road surfacing.\n\n\n The demand for Masur tile hit rock bottom.", "A Gift From Earth\nBy MANLY BANISTER\n\n\n Illustrated by KOSSIN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction August 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nExcept for transportation, it was absolutely\n \nfree ... but how much would the freight cost?\n\"It is an outrage,\" said Koltan of the House of Masur, \"that the\n Earthmen land among the Thorabians!\"\n\n\n Zotul, youngest of the Masur brothers, stirred uneasily. Personally, he\n was in favor of the coming of the Earthmen to the world of Zur.", "\"But it's mobbed,\" protested Zotul. \"It gave me a headache.\"\n\n\n \"And to us it's almost empty. The pressure of population on Earth has\n made us range the Galaxy for places to put our extra people. The only\n habitable planets, unfortunately, are populated ones. We take the least\n populous worlds and—well, buy them out and move in.\"\n\n\n \"And after that?\"\n\n\n Broderick smiled gently. \"Zur will grow. Our people will intermarry\n with yours. The future population of Zur will be neither true Zurians\n nor true Earthmen, but a mixture of both.\"\n\n\n Zotul sat in silent thought. \"But you did not have to buy us out. You\n had the power to conquer us, even to destroy us. The whole planet could\n have been yours alone.\" He stopped in alarm. \"Or am I suggesting an\n idea that didn't occur to you?\"", "Still smarting, Zotul went back to his designing quarters and thought\n about the Earthmen. If it was impossible to hope for much in the way\n of metal from the Earthmen, what could one get from them? If he could\n figure this problem out, he might rise somewhat in the estimation of\n his brothers. That wouldn't take him out of the rank of scapegoat, of\n course, but the beatings might become fewer and less severe.\nBy and by, the Earthmen came to Lor, flying through the air in strange\n metal contraptions. They paraded through the tile-paved streets of the\n city, marveled here, as they had in Thorabia, at the buildings all of\n tile inside and out, and made a great show of themselves for all the\n people to see. Speeches were made through interpreters, who had much\n too quickly learned the tongue of the aliens; hence these left much to\n be desired in the way of clarity, though their sincerity was evident.", "The drastic steps of the brothers applied, therefore, to making an\n energetic protest to the governor of Lor.\n\n\n At one edge of the city, an area had been turned over to the Earthmen\n for a spaceport, and the great terrestrial spaceships came to it and\n departed from it at regular intervals. As the heirs of the House of\n Masur walked by on their way to see the governor, Zotul observed that\n much new building was taking place and wondered what it was.\n\n\n \"Some new devilment of the Earthmen, you can be sure,\" said Koltan\n blackly.\n\n\n In fact, the Earthmen were building an assembly plant for radio\n receiving sets. The ship now standing on its fins upon the apron was\n loaded with printed circuits, resistors, variable condensers and other\n radio parts. This was Earth's first step toward flooding Zur with the\n natural follow-up in its campaign of advertising—radio programs—with\n commercials.", "It would do no good, Zotul realized, to bring up the fact that their\n production of ceramic cooking pots had dropped off to about two per\n cent of its former volume. Of course, profits on the line of new stoves\n greatly overbalanced the loss, so that actually they were ahead; but\n their business was now dependent upon the supply of the metal pots from\n Earth.\n\n\n About this time, plastic utensils—dishes, cups, knives, forks—made\n their appearance on Zur. It became very stylish to eat with the\n newfangled paraphernalia ... and very cheap, too, because for\n everything they sold, the Earthmen always took the old ware in trade.\n What they did with the stuff had been hard to believe at first. They\n destroyed it, which proved how valueless it really was.", "\"Come in, come in! I'm glad to see you again.\"\n\n\n Zotul stared blankly. This was not the governor. This was Broderick,\n the Earthman.\n\n\n \"I—I came to see the governor,\" he said in confusion.\n\n\n Broderick nodded agreeably. \"I am the governor and I am well acquainted\n with your case, Mr. Masur. Shall we talk it over? Please sit down.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand. The Earthmen....\" Zotul paused, coloring. \"We are\n about to lose our plant.\"\n\n\n \"You were about to say that the Earthmen are taking your plant away\n from you. That is true. Since the House of Masur was the largest and\n richest on Zur, it has taken a long time—the longest of all, in fact.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"" ], [ "At any rate, the brothers Masur were still able to console themselves\n that they had their tile business. Tile served well enough for houses\n and street surfacing; what better material could be devised for the new\n highways the governor spoke of? There was a lot of money to be made\n yet.\nRadio stations went up all over Zur and began broadcasting. The people\n bought receiving sets like mad. The automobiles arrived and highways\n were constructed.\n\n\n The last hope of the brothers was dashed. The Earthmen set up plants\n and began to manufacture Portland cement.\n\n\n You could build a house of concrete much cheaper than with tile. Of\n course, since wood was scarce on Zur, it was no competition for either\n tile or concrete. Concrete floors were smoother, too, and the stuff\n made far better road surfacing.\n\n\n The demand for Masur tile hit rock bottom.", "But at the end of three years, the Earthmen dropped their option.\n The Pottery of Masur had no more contracts. Business languished. The\n Earthmen, explained Broderick, had built a plant of their own because\n it was so much more efficient—and to lower prices, which was Earth's\n unswerving policy, greater and greater efficiency was demanded.\n Broderick was very sympathetic, but there was nothing he could do.\n\n\n The introduction of television provided a further calamity. The sets\n were delicate and needed frequent repairs, hence were costly to own and\n maintain. But all Zurians who had to keep up with the latest from Earth\n had them. Now it was possible not only to hear about things of Earth,\n but to see them as they were broadcast from the video tapes.", "In their dozenth conference since that first and fateful one, the\n brothers Masur decided upon drastic steps. In the meantime, several\n things had happened. For one, old Kalrab had passed on to his immortal\n rest, but this made no real difference. For another, the Earthmen had\n procured legal authority to prospect the planet for metals, of which\n they found a good deal, but they told no one on Zur of this. What\n they did mention was the crude oil and natural gas they discovered\n in the underlayers of the planet's crust. Crews of Zurians, working\n under supervision of the Earthmen, laid pipelines from the gas and oil\n regions to every major and minor city on Zur.\nBy the time ten years had passed since the landing of the first\n terrestrial ship, the Earthmen were conducting a brisk business in\n gas-fired ranges, furnaces and heaters ... and the Masur stove business\n was gone. Moreover, the Earthmen sold the Zurians their own natural gas\n at a nice profit and everybody was happy with the situation except the\n brothers Masur.", "The result of the new flood was that in the following year, the sale of\n Masur ceramic table service dropped to less than a tenth.\nTrembling with excitement at this news from their book-keeper, Koltan\n called an emergency meeting. He even routed old Kalrab out of his\n senile stupor for the occasion, on the off chance that the old man\n might still have a little wit left that could be helpful.\n\n\n \"Note,\" Koltan announced in a shaky voice, \"that the Earthmen undermine\n our business,\" and he read off the figures.\n\n\n \"Perhaps,\" said Zotul, \"it is a good thing also, as you said before,\n and will result in something even better for us.\"\n\n\n Koltan frowned, and Zotul, in fear of another beating, instantly\n subsided.", "The printing plants that turned out mortgage contracts did a lush\n business.\nFor the common people of Zur, times were good everywhere. In a decade\n and a half, the Earthmen had wrought magnificent changes on this\n backward world. As Broderick had said, the progress of the tortoise was\n slow, but it was extremely sure.\n\n\n The brothers Masur got along in spite of dropped options. They had less\n money and felt the pinch of their debts more keenly, but television\n kept their wives and children amused and furnished an anodyne for the\n pangs of impoverishment.\n\n\n The pottery income dropped to an impossible low, no matter how Zotul\n designed and the brothers produced. Their figurines and religious ikons\n were a drug on the market. The Earthmen made them of plastic and sold\n them for less.\n\n\n The brothers, unable to meet the Payments that were not so Easy any\n more, looked up Zotul and cuffed him around reproachfully.", "\"Once,\" he said formally, \"the Masur fortune was the greatest in\n the world of Zur. That was before my father, the famous Kalrab\n Masur—Divinity protect him—departed this life to collect his greater\n reward. He often told us, my father did, that the clay is the flesh and\n bones of our culture and our fortune. Now it has been shown how prone\n is the flesh to corruption and how feeble the bones. We are ruined, and\n all because of new things coming from Earth.\"\n\n\n Broderick stroked his shaven chin and looked sad. \"Why didn't you come\n to me sooner? This would never have happened. But now that it has,\n we're going to do right by you. That is the policy of Earth—always to\n do right by the customer.\"\n\n\n \"Divinity witness,\" Zorin said, \"that we ask only compensation for\n damages.\"", "\"To fail,\" said Koltan soberly, \"is not a Masur attribute. Go to the\n governor and tell him what we think of this business. The House of\n Masur has long supported the government with heavy taxes. Now it is\n time for the government to do something for us.\"\nThe governor's palace was jammed with hurrying people, a scene of\n confusion that upset Zotul. The clerk who took his application for\n an interview was, he noticed only vaguely, a young Earthwoman. It\n was remarkable that he paid so little attention, for the female\n terrestrials were picked for physical assets that made Zurian men\n covetous and Zurian women envious.\n\n\n \"The governor will see you,\" she said sweetly. \"He has been expecting\n you.\"\n\n\n \"Me?\" marveled Zotul.\n\n\n She ushered him into the magnificent private office of the governor\n of Lor. The man behind the desk stood up, extended his hand with a\n friendly smile.", "At the head of the long, shining table sat old Kalrab Masur, in his\n dotage, but still giving what he could of aid and comfort to the\n Pottery of Masur, even though nobody listened to him any more and\n he knew it. Around the table sat the six brothers—Koltan, eldest\n and Director of the Pottery; Morvan, his vice-chief; Singula, their\n treasurer; Thendro, sales manager; Lubiosa, export chief; and last in\n the rank of age, Zotul, who was responsible for affairs of design.\n\n\n \"Behold, my sons,\" said Kalrab, stroking his scanty beard. \"What are\n these Earthmen to worry about? Remember the clay. It is our strength\n and our fortune. It is the muscle and bone of our trade. Earthmen may\n come and Earthmen may go, but clay goes on forever ... and with it, the\n fame and fortune of the House of Masur.\"", "The next time the brothers went to see the governor, he said, \"I cannot\n handle such complaints as yours. I must refer you to the Merchandising\n Council.\"\n\n\n \"What is that?\" asked Koltan.\n\n\n \"It is an Earthman association that deals with complaints such as\n yours. In the matter of material progress, we must expect some strain\n in the fabric of our culture. Machinery has been set up to deal with\n it. Here is their address; go air your troubles to them.\"\n\n\n The business of a formal complaint was turned over by the brothers to\n Zotul. It took three weeks for the Earthmen to get around to calling\n him in, as a representative of the Pottery of Masur, for an interview.\n\n\n All the brothers could no longer be spared from the plant, even for the\n purpose of pressing a complaint. Their days of idle wealth over, they\n had to get in and work with the clay with the rest of the help.", "The kilns of the Pottery of Masur fired day and night to keep up with\n the demand for the new porcelain stoves. In three years, more than a\n million had been made and sold by the Masurs alone, not counting the\n hundreds of thousands of copies turned out by competitors in every\n land.\nIn the meantime, however, more things than pots came from Earth.\n One was a printing press, the like of which none on Zur had ever\n dreamed. This, for some unknown reason and much to the disgust of\n the Lorians, was set up in Thorabia. Books and magazines poured from\n it in a fantastic stream. The populace fervidly brushed up on its\n scanty reading ability and bought everything available, overcome by\n the novelty of it. Even Zotul bought a book—a primer in the Lorian\n language—and learned how to read and write. The remainder of the\n brothers Masur, on the other hand, preferred to remain in ignorance.", "\"I see.\" Zotul puzzled over it sadly. \"It is too much,\" he said. \"Our\n plant doesn't make enough money for us to meet the payments.\"\n\n\n \"I have a surprise for you,\" smiled Broderick. \"Here is a contract. You\n will start making ceramic parts for automobile spark plugs and certain\n parts for radios and gas ranges. It is our policy to encourage local\n manufacture to help bring prices down.\"\n\n\n \"We haven't the equipment.\"\n\n\n \"We will equip your plant,\" beamed Broderick. \"It will require only\n a quarter interest in your plant itself, assigned to our terrestrial\n company.\"\nZotul, anxious to possess the treasures promised by the Earthman,\n won over his brothers. They signed with marks and gave up a quarter\n interest in the Pottery of Masur. They rolled in the luxuries of Earth.\n These, who had never known debt before, were in it up to their ears.", "The drastic steps of the brothers applied, therefore, to making an\n energetic protest to the governor of Lor.\n\n\n At one edge of the city, an area had been turned over to the Earthmen\n for a spaceport, and the great terrestrial spaceships came to it and\n departed from it at regular intervals. As the heirs of the House of\n Masur walked by on their way to see the governor, Zotul observed that\n much new building was taking place and wondered what it was.\n\n\n \"Some new devilment of the Earthmen, you can be sure,\" said Koltan\n blackly.\n\n\n In fact, the Earthmen were building an assembly plant for radio\n receiving sets. The ship now standing on its fins upon the apron was\n loaded with printed circuits, resistors, variable condensers and other\n radio parts. This was Earth's first step toward flooding Zur with the\n natural follow-up in its campaign of advertising—radio programs—with\n commercials.", "\"My sons, you forget it is not the Earthmen themselves at the bottom\n of your trouble, but the\nthings\nof Earth. Think of the telegraph and\n the newspaper, how these spread news of every shipment from Earth.\n The merchandise of the Earthmen is put up for sale by means of these\n newspapers, which also are the property of the Earthmen. The people are\n intrigued by these advertisements, as they are called, and flock to\n buy. Now, if you would pull a tooth from the kwi that bites you, you\n might also have advertisements of your own.\"\n\n\n Alas for that suggestion, no newspaper would accept advertising\n from the House of Masur; all available space was occupied by the\n advertisements of the Earthmen.", "Moreover, the Earthmen brought miles of copper wire—more than enough\n in value to buy out the governorship of any country on Zur—and set up\n telegraph lines from country to country and continent to continent.\n Within five years of the first landing of the Earthmen, every major\n city on the globe had a printing press, a daily newspaper, and enjoyed\n the instantaneous transmission of news via telegraph. And the business\n of the House of Masur continued to look up.\n\n\n \"As I have always said from the beginning,\" chortled Director Koltan,\n \"this coming of the Earthmen had been a great thing for us, and\n especially for the House of Masur.\"\n\n\n \"You didn't think so at first,\" Zotul pointed out, and was immediately\n sorry, for Koltan turned and gave him a hiding, single-handed, for his\n unthinkable impertinence.", "Zotul did not appreciate his father's approval, for it only earned him\n a beating as soon as the old man went to bed. It was a common enough\n thing among the brothers Masur, as among everybody, to be frustrated in\n their desires. However, they had Zotul to take it out upon, and they\n did.", "\"You got us into this,\" they said, emphasizing their bitterness with\n fists. \"Go see Broderick. Tell him we are undone and must have some\n contracts to continue operating.\"\n\n\n Nursing bruises, Zotul unhappily went to the Council House again. Mr.\n Broderick was no longer with them, a suave assistant informed him.\n Would he like to see Mr. Siwicki instead? Zotul would.\n\n\n Siwicki was tall, thin, dark and somber-looking. There was even a hint\n of toughness about the set of his jaw and the hardness of his glance.\n\n\n \"So you can't pay,\" he said, tapping his teeth with a pencil. He\n looked at Zotul coldly. \"It is well you have come to us instead of\n making it necessary for us to approach you through the courts.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know what you mean,\" said Zotul.", "About this time, the ships from Earth brought steam-powered electric\n generators. Lines went up, power was generated, and a flood of\n electrical gadgets and appliances hit the market. For some reason,\n batteries for the radios were no longer available and everybody had to\n buy the new radios. And who could do without a radio in this modern age?\n\n\n The homes of the brothers Masur blossomed on the Easy Payment Plan.\n They had refrigerators, washers, driers, toasters, grills, electric\n fans, air-conditioning equipment and everything else Earth could\n possibly sell them.\n\n\n \"We will be forty years paying it all off,\" exulted Zotul, \"but\n meantime we have the things and aren't they worth it?\"", "\"Come in, come in! I'm glad to see you again.\"\n\n\n Zotul stared blankly. This was not the governor. This was Broderick,\n the Earthman.\n\n\n \"I—I came to see the governor,\" he said in confusion.\n\n\n Broderick nodded agreeably. \"I am the governor and I am well acquainted\n with your case, Mr. Masur. Shall we talk it over? Please sit down.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand. The Earthmen....\" Zotul paused, coloring. \"We are\n about to lose our plant.\"\n\n\n \"You were about to say that the Earthmen are taking your plant away\n from you. That is true. Since the House of Masur was the largest and\n richest on Zur, it has taken a long time—the longest of all, in fact.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"", "\"They are replacing our high-quality ceramic ware with inferior\n terrestrial junk,\" Koltan went on bitterly. \"It is only the glamor that\n sells it, of course, but before the people get the shine out of their\n eyes, we can be ruined.\"\n\n\n The brothers discussed the situation for an hour, and all the while\n Father Kalrab sat and pulled his scanty whiskers. Seeing that they got\n nowhere with their wrangle, he cleared his throat and spoke up.", "\"If we have to sue, we take back the merchandise and everything\n attached to them. That means you would lose your houses, for they are\n attached to the furnaces. However, it is not as bad as that—yet. We\n will only require you to assign the remaining three-quarters of your\n pottery to us.\"\n\n\n The brothers, when they heard of this, were too stunned to think of\n beating Zotul, by which he assumed he had progressed a little and was\n somewhat comforted." ], [ "Happily for the brothers, they did not understand this at the time or\n they would surely have gone back to be buried in their own clay.\n\n\n \"I think,\" the governor told them, \"that you gentlemen have not\n paused to consider the affair from all angles. You must learn to be\n modern—keep up with the times! We heads of government on Zur are doing\n all in our power to aid the Earthmen and facilitate their bringing a\n great, new culture that can only benefit us. See how Zur has changed in\n ten short years! Imagine the world of tomorrow! Why, do you know they\n are even bringing\nautos\nto Zur!\"\n\n\n The brothers were fascinated with the governor's description of these\n hitherto unheard-of vehicles.\n\n\n \"It only remains,\" concluded the governor, \"to build highways, and the\n Earthmen are taking care of that.\"", "The printing plants that turned out mortgage contracts did a lush\n business.\nFor the common people of Zur, times were good everywhere. In a decade\n and a half, the Earthmen had wrought magnificent changes on this\n backward world. As Broderick had said, the progress of the tortoise was\n slow, but it was extremely sure.\n\n\n The brothers Masur got along in spite of dropped options. They had less\n money and felt the pinch of their debts more keenly, but television\n kept their wives and children amused and furnished an anodyne for the\n pangs of impoverishment.\n\n\n The pottery income dropped to an impossible low, no matter how Zotul\n designed and the brothers produced. Their figurines and religious ikons\n were a drug on the market. The Earthmen made them of plastic and sold\n them for less.\n\n\n The brothers, unable to meet the Payments that were not so Easy any\n more, looked up Zotul and cuffed him around reproachfully.", "At the head of the long, shining table sat old Kalrab Masur, in his\n dotage, but still giving what he could of aid and comfort to the\n Pottery of Masur, even though nobody listened to him any more and\n he knew it. Around the table sat the six brothers—Koltan, eldest\n and Director of the Pottery; Morvan, his vice-chief; Singula, their\n treasurer; Thendro, sales manager; Lubiosa, export chief; and last in\n the rank of age, Zotul, who was responsible for affairs of design.\n\n\n \"Behold, my sons,\" said Kalrab, stroking his scanty beard. \"What are\n these Earthmen to worry about? Remember the clay. It is our strength\n and our fortune. It is the muscle and bone of our trade. Earthmen may\n come and Earthmen may go, but clay goes on forever ... and with it, the\n fame and fortune of the House of Masur.\"", "The next time the brothers went to see the governor, he said, \"I cannot\n handle such complaints as yours. I must refer you to the Merchandising\n Council.\"\n\n\n \"What is that?\" asked Koltan.\n\n\n \"It is an Earthman association that deals with complaints such as\n yours. In the matter of material progress, we must expect some strain\n in the fabric of our culture. Machinery has been set up to deal with\n it. Here is their address; go air your troubles to them.\"\n\n\n The business of a formal complaint was turned over by the brothers to\n Zotul. It took three weeks for the Earthmen to get around to calling\n him in, as a representative of the Pottery of Masur, for an interview.\n\n\n All the brothers could no longer be spared from the plant, even for the\n purpose of pressing a complaint. Their days of idle wealth over, they\n had to get in and work with the clay with the rest of the help.", "\"If we have to sue, we take back the merchandise and everything\n attached to them. That means you would lose your houses, for they are\n attached to the furnaces. However, it is not as bad as that—yet. We\n will only require you to assign the remaining three-quarters of your\n pottery to us.\"\n\n\n The brothers, when they heard of this, were too stunned to think of\n beating Zotul, by which he assumed he had progressed a little and was\n somewhat comforted.", "\"No,\" said Broderick, his usually smiling face almost pained with\n memory. \"We know the history of conquest all too well. Our method\n causes more distress than we like to inflict, but it's better—and more\n sure—than war and invasion by force. Now that the unpleasant job is\n finished, we can repair the dislocations.\"\n\n\n \"At last I understand what you said about the tortoise.\"\n\n\n \"Slow but sure.\" Broderick beamed again and clapped Zotul on the\n shoulder. \"Don't worry. You'll have your job back, the same as always,\n but you'll be working for us ... until the children of Earth and Zur\n are equal in knowledge and therefore equal partners. That's why we had\n to break down your caste system.\"\n\n\n Zotul's eyes widened. \"And that is why my brothers did not beat me when\n I failed!\"", "Zotul did not appreciate his father's approval, for it only earned him\n a beating as soon as the old man went to bed. It was a common enough\n thing among the brothers Masur, as among everybody, to be frustrated in\n their desires. However, they had Zotul to take it out upon, and they\n did.", "In their dozenth conference since that first and fateful one, the\n brothers Masur decided upon drastic steps. In the meantime, several\n things had happened. For one, old Kalrab had passed on to his immortal\n rest, but this made no real difference. For another, the Earthmen had\n procured legal authority to prospect the planet for metals, of which\n they found a good deal, but they told no one on Zur of this. What\n they did mention was the crude oil and natural gas they discovered\n in the underlayers of the planet's crust. Crews of Zurians, working\n under supervision of the Earthmen, laid pipelines from the gas and oil\n regions to every major and minor city on Zur.\nBy the time ten years had passed since the landing of the first\n terrestrial ship, the Earthmen were conducting a brisk business in\n gas-fired ranges, furnaces and heaters ... and the Masur stove business\n was gone. Moreover, the Earthmen sold the Zurians their own natural gas\n at a nice profit and everybody was happy with the situation except the\n brothers Masur.", "\"Doubtless,\" said Zotul unexpectedly, for the youngest at a conference\n was expected to keep his mouth shut and applaud the decisions of his\n elders, \"the Earthmen used all the metal on their planet in building\n that ship. We cannot possibly bilk them of it; it is their only means\n of transport.\"\n\n\n Such frank expression of motive was unheard of, even in the secret\n conclave of conference. Only the speaker's youth could account for it.\n The speech drew scowls from the brothers and stern rebuke from Koltan.\n\n\n \"When your opinion is wanted, we will ask you for it. Meantime,\n remember your position in the family.\"\n\n\n Zotul bowed his head meekly, but he burned with resentment.\n\n\n \"Listen to the boy,\" said the aged father. \"There is more wisdom in his\n head than in all the rest of you. Forget the Earthmen and think only of\n the clay.\"", "Still smarting, Zotul went back to his designing quarters and thought\n about the Earthmen. If it was impossible to hope for much in the way\n of metal from the Earthmen, what could one get from them? If he could\n figure this problem out, he might rise somewhat in the estimation of\n his brothers. That wouldn't take him out of the rank of scapegoat, of\n course, but the beatings might become fewer and less severe.\nBy and by, the Earthmen came to Lor, flying through the air in strange\n metal contraptions. They paraded through the tile-paved streets of the\n city, marveled here, as they had in Thorabia, at the buildings all of\n tile inside and out, and made a great show of themselves for all the\n people to see. Speeches were made through interpreters, who had much\n too quickly learned the tongue of the aliens; hence these left much to\n be desired in the way of clarity, though their sincerity was evident.", "At any rate, the brothers Masur were still able to console themselves\n that they had their tile business. Tile served well enough for houses\n and street surfacing; what better material could be devised for the new\n highways the governor spoke of? There was a lot of money to be made\n yet.\nRadio stations went up all over Zur and began broadcasting. The people\n bought receiving sets like mad. The automobiles arrived and highways\n were constructed.\n\n\n The last hope of the brothers was dashed. The Earthmen set up plants\n and began to manufacture Portland cement.\n\n\n You could build a house of concrete much cheaper than with tile. Of\n course, since wood was scarce on Zur, it was no competition for either\n tile or concrete. Concrete floors were smoother, too, and the stuff\n made far better road surfacing.\n\n\n The demand for Masur tile hit rock bottom.", "The retooled plant forged ahead and profits began to look up, but the\n Earthmen took a fourth of them as their share in the industry.\n\n\n For a year, the brothers drove their shiny new cars about on the\n new concrete highways the Earthmen had built. From pumps owned by a\n terrestrial company, they bought gas and oil that had been drawn from\n the crust of Zur and was sold to the Zurians at a magnificent profit.\n The food they ate was cooked in Earthly pots on Earth-type gas ranges,\n served up on metal plates that had been stamped out on Earth. In the\n winter, they toasted their shins before handsome gas grates, though\n they had gas-fired central heating.", "\"I see.\" Zotul puzzled over it sadly. \"It is too much,\" he said. \"Our\n plant doesn't make enough money for us to meet the payments.\"\n\n\n \"I have a surprise for you,\" smiled Broderick. \"Here is a contract. You\n will start making ceramic parts for automobile spark plugs and certain\n parts for radios and gas ranges. It is our policy to encourage local\n manufacture to help bring prices down.\"\n\n\n \"We haven't the equipment.\"\n\n\n \"We will equip your plant,\" beamed Broderick. \"It will require only\n a quarter interest in your plant itself, assigned to our terrestrial\n company.\"\nZotul, anxious to possess the treasures promised by the Earthman,\n won over his brothers. They signed with marks and gave up a quarter\n interest in the Pottery of Masur. They rolled in the luxuries of Earth.\n These, who had never known debt before, were in it up to their ears.", "Zotul found the headquarters of the Merchandising Council as indicated\n on their message. He had not been this way in some time, but was not\n surprised to find that a number of old buildings had been torn down to\n make room for the concrete Council House and a roomy parking lot, paved\n with something called \"blacktop\" and jammed with an array of glittering\n new automobiles.\n\n\n An automobile was an expense none of the brothers could afford, now\n that they barely eked a living from the pottery. Still, Zotul ached\n with desire at sight of so many shiny cars. Only a few had them and\n they were the envied ones of Zur.", "\"You got us into this,\" they said, emphasizing their bitterness with\n fists. \"Go see Broderick. Tell him we are undone and must have some\n contracts to continue operating.\"\n\n\n Nursing bruises, Zotul unhappily went to the Council House again. Mr.\n Broderick was no longer with them, a suave assistant informed him.\n Would he like to see Mr. Siwicki instead? Zotul would.\n\n\n Siwicki was tall, thin, dark and somber-looking. There was even a hint\n of toughness about the set of his jaw and the hardness of his glance.\n\n\n \"So you can't pay,\" he said, tapping his teeth with a pencil. He\n looked at Zotul coldly. \"It is well you have come to us instead of\n making it necessary for us to approach you through the courts.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know what you mean,\" said Zotul.", "\"Here.\" Broderick handed him a sheaf of chattel mortgages. \"Have each\n of your brothers sign one of these, then bring them back to me. That is\n all there is to it.\"\n\n\n It sounded wonderful. But how would the brothers take it? Zotul\n wrestled with his misgivings and the misgivings won.\n\n\n \"I will talk it over with them,\" he said. \"Give me the total so I will\n have the figures.\"\n\n\n The total was more than it ought to be by simple addition. Zotul\n pointed this out politely.\n\n\n \"Interest,\" Broderick explained. \"A mere fifteen per cent. After all,\n you get the merchandise free. The transportation company has to be\n paid, so another company loans you the money to pay for the freight.\n This small extra sum pays the lending company for its trouble.\"", "\"They are replacing our high-quality ceramic ware with inferior\n terrestrial junk,\" Koltan went on bitterly. \"It is only the glamor that\n sells it, of course, but before the people get the shine out of their\n eyes, we can be ruined.\"\n\n\n The brothers discussed the situation for an hour, and all the while\n Father Kalrab sat and pulled his scanty whiskers. Seeing that they got\n nowhere with their wrangle, he cleared his throat and spoke up.", "\"Of course. Are you ready now to take the assignment papers for you and\n your brothers to sign?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Zotul. \"I am ready.\"", "\"Come in, come in! I'm glad to see you again.\"\n\n\n Zotul stared blankly. This was not the governor. This was Broderick,\n the Earthman.\n\n\n \"I—I came to see the governor,\" he said in confusion.\n\n\n Broderick nodded agreeably. \"I am the governor and I am well acquainted\n with your case, Mr. Masur. Shall we talk it over? Please sit down.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand. The Earthmen....\" Zotul paused, coloring. \"We are\n about to lose our plant.\"\n\n\n \"You were about to say that the Earthmen are taking your plant away\n from you. That is true. Since the House of Masur was the largest and\n richest on Zur, it has taken a long time—the longest of all, in fact.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"", "\"Once,\" he said formally, \"the Masur fortune was the greatest in\n the world of Zur. That was before my father, the famous Kalrab\n Masur—Divinity protect him—departed this life to collect his greater\n reward. He often told us, my father did, that the clay is the flesh and\n bones of our culture and our fortune. Now it has been shown how prone\n is the flesh to corruption and how feeble the bones. We are ruined, and\n all because of new things coming from Earth.\"\n\n\n Broderick stroked his shaven chin and looked sad. \"Why didn't you come\n to me sooner? This would never have happened. But now that it has,\n we're going to do right by you. That is the policy of Earth—always to\n do right by the customer.\"\n\n\n \"Divinity witness,\" Zorin said, \"that we ask only compensation for\n damages.\"" ], [ "The Earthmen were going to do great things for the whole world of\n Zur. It required but the cooperation—an excellent word, that—of all\n Zurians, and many blessings would rain down from the skies. This, in\n effect, was what the Earthmen had to say. Zotul felt greatly cheered,\n for it refuted the attitude of his brothers without earning him a\n whaling for it.\n\n\n There was also some talk going around about agreements made between\n the Earthmen and officials of the Lorian government, but you heard one\n thing one day and another the next. Accurate reporting, much less a\n newspaper, was unknown on Zur.\n\n\n Finally, the Earthmen took off in their great, shining ship. Obviously,\n none had succeeded in chiseling them out of it, if, indeed, any had\n tried. The anti-Earthmen Faction—in any culture complex, there is\n always an \"anti\" faction to protest any movement of endeavor—crowed\n happily that the Earthmen were gone for good, and a good thing, too.", "In their dozenth conference since that first and fateful one, the\n brothers Masur decided upon drastic steps. In the meantime, several\n things had happened. For one, old Kalrab had passed on to his immortal\n rest, but this made no real difference. For another, the Earthmen had\n procured legal authority to prospect the planet for metals, of which\n they found a good deal, but they told no one on Zur of this. What\n they did mention was the crude oil and natural gas they discovered\n in the underlayers of the planet's crust. Crews of Zurians, working\n under supervision of the Earthmen, laid pipelines from the gas and oil\n regions to every major and minor city on Zur.\nBy the time ten years had passed since the landing of the first\n terrestrial ship, the Earthmen were conducting a brisk business in\n gas-fired ranges, furnaces and heaters ... and the Masur stove business\n was gone. Moreover, the Earthmen sold the Zurians their own natural gas\n at a nice profit and everybody was happy with the situation except the\n brothers Masur.", "\"It\nis\na damned imposition,\" agreed Morvan, ignoring his father's\n philosophical attitude. \"They could have landed just as easily here in\n Lor.\"\n\n\n \"The Thorabians will lick up the gravy,\" said Singula, whose mind ran\n rather to matters of financial aspect, \"and leave us the grease.\"\n\n\n By this, he seemed to imply that the Thorabians would rob the Earthmen,\n which the Lorians would not. The truth was that all on Zur were panting\n to get their hands on that marvelous ship, which was all of metal, a\n very scarce commodity on Zur, worth billions of ken.\nLubiosa, who had interests in Thorabia, and many agents there, kept his\n own counsel. His people were active in the matter and that was enough\n for him. He would report when the time was ripe.", "\"Once,\" he said formally, \"the Masur fortune was the greatest in\n the world of Zur. That was before my father, the famous Kalrab\n Masur—Divinity protect him—departed this life to collect his greater\n reward. He often told us, my father did, that the clay is the flesh and\n bones of our culture and our fortune. Now it has been shown how prone\n is the flesh to corruption and how feeble the bones. We are ruined, and\n all because of new things coming from Earth.\"\n\n\n Broderick stroked his shaven chin and looked sad. \"Why didn't you come\n to me sooner? This would never have happened. But now that it has,\n we're going to do right by you. That is the policy of Earth—always to\n do right by the customer.\"\n\n\n \"Divinity witness,\" Zorin said, \"that we ask only compensation for\n damages.\"", "Moreover, the Earthmen brought miles of copper wire—more than enough\n in value to buy out the governorship of any country on Zur—and set up\n telegraph lines from country to country and continent to continent.\n Within five years of the first landing of the Earthmen, every major\n city on the globe had a printing press, a daily newspaper, and enjoyed\n the instantaneous transmission of news via telegraph. And the business\n of the House of Masur continued to look up.\n\n\n \"As I have always said from the beginning,\" chortled Director Koltan,\n \"this coming of the Earthmen had been a great thing for us, and\n especially for the House of Masur.\"\n\n\n \"You didn't think so at first,\" Zotul pointed out, and was immediately\n sorry, for Koltan turned and gave him a hiding, single-handed, for his\n unthinkable impertinence.", "Such jubilation proved premature, however. One day, a fleet of ships\n arrived and after they had landed all over the planet, Zur was\n practically acrawl with Earthmen.\n\n\n Immediately, the Earthmen established what they called\n \"corporations\"—Zurian trading companies under terrestrial control. The\n object of the visit was trade.\n\n\n In spite of the fact that a terrestrial ship had landed at every Zurian\n city of major and minor importance, and all in a single day, it took\n some time for the news to spread.\n\n\n The first awareness Zotul had was that, upon coming home from the\n pottery one evening, he found his wife Lania proudly brandishing an\n aluminum pot at him.\n\n\n \"What is that thing?\" he asked curiously.\n\n\n \"A pot. I bought it at the market.\"", "The retooled plant forged ahead and profits began to look up, but the\n Earthmen took a fourth of them as their share in the industry.\n\n\n For a year, the brothers drove their shiny new cars about on the\n new concrete highways the Earthmen had built. From pumps owned by a\n terrestrial company, they bought gas and oil that had been drawn from\n the crust of Zur and was sold to the Zurians at a magnificent profit.\n The food they ate was cooked in Earthly pots on Earth-type gas ranges,\n served up on metal plates that had been stamped out on Earth. In the\n winter, they toasted their shins before handsome gas grates, though\n they had gas-fired central heating.", "\"Yours is the last business on Zur to be taken over by us. We have\n bought you out.\"\n\n\n \"Our government....\"\n\n\n \"Your governments belong to us, too,\" said Broderick. \"When they could\n not pay for the roads, the telegraphs, the civic improvements, we took\n them over, just as we are taking you over.\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" exclaimed Zotul, aghast, \"that you Earthmen own everything\n on Zur?\"\n\n\n \"Even your armies.\"\n\n\n \"But\nwhy\n?\"\nBroderick clasped his hands behind back, went to the window and stared\n down moodily into the street.\n\n\n \"You don't know what an overcrowded world is like,\" he said. \"A street\n like this, with so few people and vehicles on it, would be impossible\n on Earth.\"", "Happily for the brothers, they did not understand this at the time or\n they would surely have gone back to be buried in their own clay.\n\n\n \"I think,\" the governor told them, \"that you gentlemen have not\n paused to consider the affair from all angles. You must learn to be\n modern—keep up with the times! We heads of government on Zur are doing\n all in our power to aid the Earthmen and facilitate their bringing a\n great, new culture that can only benefit us. See how Zur has changed in\n ten short years! Imagine the world of tomorrow! Why, do you know they\n are even bringing\nautos\nto Zur!\"\n\n\n The brothers were fascinated with the governor's description of these\n hitherto unheard-of vehicles.\n\n\n \"It only remains,\" concluded the governor, \"to build highways, and the\n Earthmen are taking care of that.\"", "A Gift From Earth\nBy MANLY BANISTER\n\n\n Illustrated by KOSSIN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction August 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nExcept for transportation, it was absolutely\n \nfree ... but how much would the freight cost?\n\"It is an outrage,\" said Koltan of the House of Masur, \"that the\n Earthmen land among the Thorabians!\"\n\n\n Zotul, youngest of the Masur brothers, stirred uneasily. Personally, he\n was in favor of the coming of the Earthmen to the world of Zur.", "But at the end of three years, the Earthmen dropped their option.\n The Pottery of Masur had no more contracts. Business languished. The\n Earthmen, explained Broderick, had built a plant of their own because\n it was so much more efficient—and to lower prices, which was Earth's\n unswerving policy, greater and greater efficiency was demanded.\n Broderick was very sympathetic, but there was nothing he could do.\n\n\n The introduction of television provided a further calamity. The sets\n were delicate and needed frequent repairs, hence were costly to own and\n maintain. But all Zurians who had to keep up with the latest from Earth\n had them. Now it was possible not only to hear about things of Earth,\n but to see them as they were broadcast from the video tapes.", "\"Come in, come in! I'm glad to see you again.\"\n\n\n Zotul stared blankly. This was not the governor. This was Broderick,\n the Earthman.\n\n\n \"I—I came to see the governor,\" he said in confusion.\n\n\n Broderick nodded agreeably. \"I am the governor and I am well acquainted\n with your case, Mr. Masur. Shall we talk it over? Please sit down.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand. The Earthmen....\" Zotul paused, coloring. \"We are\n about to lose our plant.\"\n\n\n \"You were about to say that the Earthmen are taking your plant away\n from you. That is true. Since the House of Masur was the largest and\n richest on Zur, it has taken a long time—the longest of all, in fact.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"", "Still smarting, Zotul went back to his designing quarters and thought\n about the Earthmen. If it was impossible to hope for much in the way\n of metal from the Earthmen, what could one get from them? If he could\n figure this problem out, he might rise somewhat in the estimation of\n his brothers. That wouldn't take him out of the rank of scapegoat, of\n course, but the beatings might become fewer and less severe.\nBy and by, the Earthmen came to Lor, flying through the air in strange\n metal contraptions. They paraded through the tile-paved streets of the\n city, marveled here, as they had in Thorabia, at the buildings all of\n tile inside and out, and made a great show of themselves for all the\n people to see. Speeches were made through interpreters, who had much\n too quickly learned the tongue of the aliens; hence these left much to\n be desired in the way of clarity, though their sincerity was evident.", "\"To fail,\" said Koltan soberly, \"is not a Masur attribute. Go to the\n governor and tell him what we think of this business. The House of\n Masur has long supported the government with heavy taxes. Now it is\n time for the government to do something for us.\"\nThe governor's palace was jammed with hurrying people, a scene of\n confusion that upset Zotul. The clerk who took his application for\n an interview was, he noticed only vaguely, a young Earthwoman. It\n was remarkable that he paid so little attention, for the female\n terrestrials were picked for physical assets that made Zurian men\n covetous and Zurian women envious.\n\n\n \"The governor will see you,\" she said sweetly. \"He has been expecting\n you.\"\n\n\n \"Me?\" marveled Zotul.\n\n\n She ushered him into the magnificent private office of the governor\n of Lor. The man behind the desk stood up, extended his hand with a\n friendly smile.", "Kent Broderick, the Earthman in charge of the Council, shook hands\n jovially with Zotul. That alien custom conformed with, Zotul took a\n better look at his host. Broderick was an affable, smiling individual\n with genial laugh wrinkles at his eyes. A man of middle age, dressed in\n the baggy costume of Zur, he looked almost like a Zurian, except for\n an indefinite sense of alienness about him.\n\n\n \"Glad to have you call on us, Mr. Masur,\" boomed the Earthman, clapping\n Zotul on the back. \"Just tell us your troubles and we'll have you\n straightened out in no time.\"\nAll the chill recriminations and arguments Zotul had stored for this\n occasion were dissipated in the warmth of the Earthman's manner.\n\n\n Almost apologetically, Zotul told of the encroachment that had been\n made upon the business of the Pottery of Masur.", "The drastic steps of the brothers applied, therefore, to making an\n energetic protest to the governor of Lor.\n\n\n At one edge of the city, an area had been turned over to the Earthmen\n for a spaceport, and the great terrestrial spaceships came to it and\n departed from it at regular intervals. As the heirs of the House of\n Masur walked by on their way to see the governor, Zotul observed that\n much new building was taking place and wondered what it was.\n\n\n \"Some new devilment of the Earthmen, you can be sure,\" said Koltan\n blackly.\n\n\n In fact, the Earthmen were building an assembly plant for radio\n receiving sets. The ship now standing on its fins upon the apron was\n loaded with printed circuits, resistors, variable condensers and other\n radio parts. This was Earth's first step toward flooding Zur with the\n natural follow-up in its campaign of advertising—radio programs—with\n commercials.", "\"But it's mobbed,\" protested Zotul. \"It gave me a headache.\"\n\n\n \"And to us it's almost empty. The pressure of population on Earth has\n made us range the Galaxy for places to put our extra people. The only\n habitable planets, unfortunately, are populated ones. We take the least\n populous worlds and—well, buy them out and move in.\"\n\n\n \"And after that?\"\n\n\n Broderick smiled gently. \"Zur will grow. Our people will intermarry\n with yours. The future population of Zur will be neither true Zurians\n nor true Earthmen, but a mixture of both.\"\n\n\n Zotul sat in silent thought. \"But you did not have to buy us out. You\n had the power to conquer us, even to destroy us. The whole planet could\n have been yours alone.\" He stopped in alarm. \"Or am I suggesting an\n idea that didn't occur to you?\"", "The printing plants that turned out mortgage contracts did a lush\n business.\nFor the common people of Zur, times were good everywhere. In a decade\n and a half, the Earthmen had wrought magnificent changes on this\n backward world. As Broderick had said, the progress of the tortoise was\n slow, but it was extremely sure.\n\n\n The brothers Masur got along in spite of dropped options. They had less\n money and felt the pinch of their debts more keenly, but television\n kept their wives and children amused and furnished an anodyne for the\n pangs of impoverishment.\n\n\n The pottery income dropped to an impossible low, no matter how Zotul\n designed and the brothers produced. Their figurines and religious ikons\n were a drug on the market. The Earthmen made them of plastic and sold\n them for less.\n\n\n The brothers, unable to meet the Payments that were not so Easy any\n more, looked up Zotul and cuffed him around reproachfully.", "\"No,\" said Broderick, his usually smiling face almost pained with\n memory. \"We know the history of conquest all too well. Our method\n causes more distress than we like to inflict, but it's better—and more\n sure—than war and invasion by force. Now that the unpleasant job is\n finished, we can repair the dislocations.\"\n\n\n \"At last I understand what you said about the tortoise.\"\n\n\n \"Slow but sure.\" Broderick beamed again and clapped Zotul on the\n shoulder. \"Don't worry. You'll have your job back, the same as always,\n but you'll be working for us ... until the children of Earth and Zur\n are equal in knowledge and therefore equal partners. That's why we had\n to break down your caste system.\"\n\n\n Zotul's eyes widened. \"And that is why my brothers did not beat me when\n I failed!\"", "It would do no good, Zotul realized, to bring up the fact that their\n production of ceramic cooking pots had dropped off to about two per\n cent of its former volume. Of course, profits on the line of new stoves\n greatly overbalanced the loss, so that actually they were ahead; but\n their business was now dependent upon the supply of the metal pots from\n Earth.\n\n\n About this time, plastic utensils—dishes, cups, knives, forks—made\n their appearance on Zur. It became very stylish to eat with the\n newfangled paraphernalia ... and very cheap, too, because for\n everything they sold, the Earthmen always took the old ware in trade.\n What they did with the stuff had been hard to believe at first. They\n destroyed it, which proved how valueless it really was." ] ]
train	51305	[ "Why does the narrator only want one bed?", "Why doesn't the narrator care about having eaten in the past day and a half?", "Why is it ironic that the narrator calls Doc his dad in the beginning?", "Why is Doc struggling with a man at the beginning?", "Why is Doc insistent about an order when the narrator returns from eating?", "Why is the narrator thinking about the words \"First Edition\" when he returns with food?", "Why did Miss Casey give the narrator the piece of paper?", "Why did the narrator think Doc held the key to becoming powerful?" ]	[ [ "He wants to be able to buy himself a coffee later on", "He needs the spare money to buy food for himself and Doc", "He is convinced everyone is trying to cheat him out of his money, and refuses to pay for more than he needs", "He is frugal on principle, and knows that Doc needs supervision" ], [ "He does not actually need to eat to survive", "He is an evolved human who does not actually need to eat to survive", "Water is more important than food, so he needs to find that first", "He is preoccupied by his stronger need for coffee" ], [ "Doc is actually his dad, he only thinks it's a lie", "His own dad is just as violent, so it's a fair comparison", "He only met the Doc a few days ago and they don't know each other well enough to be family", "Doc and the narrator are not actually from the same planet, and can't be related" ], [ "The man had insulted the narrator, and he couldn't stand for that, so he attacked him", "Doc was trying to get information from the man that he was refusing to share", "Doc was in the throes of withdrawal and was easily upset, latching on to the closest person he saw", "The other man was argumentative and didn't think Doc knew the truth about the story he was telling" ], [ "The narrator didn't get Doc's food order before he left, and he doesn't like burgers", "The narrator didn't get Doc's food order before he left, and he doesn't like burgers", "There was no order to anything in the room and Doc was getting stressed out, needing structure", "The slip of paper the lady had given the narrator was an order for Doc to fulfill" ], [ "He thought he remembered something about a book Doc needed", "The slip of paper had requested the first edition of a book, so he knew it had to be that specifically", "As a side effect of the time travel technology, the narrator was putting pieces together about the situation as he read the notebook", "The woman had been telling him about books" ], [ "It was an accident, she had swapped it with the scrap of paper she meant to give the narrator", "She wanted to pass the order along to Doc, the only person who could find the book", "It was a ploy to learn more about Doc and what he had developed, so she had more evidence", "She thought the narrator owed her for her buying him coffee and food, and he could repay her by finding the book" ], [ "Doc's inventions would allow them to take over the world", "His bond with Doc meant he had, in a way, already experienced the result of what he was developing", "Doc had promised him the technology to reach the Moon, and this would be worth a lot of money", "He knew Doc would be able to find a way to break addiction, improving life for everyone" ] ]	[ 1, 4, 1, 3, 4, 3, 3, 2 ]	[ 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "The tubercular clerk looked up from the gaudy comics sections of one of\n those little tabloids that have the funnies a week in advance.\n\n\n \"Fifteen cents a bed,\" he said mechanically.\n\n\n \"We'll use one bed,\" I told him. \"I'll give you twenty cents.\" I felt\n the round hard quarter in my pocket, sweaty hand against sticky lining.\n\n\n \"Fifteen cents a bed,\" he played it back for me.\n\n\n Doc was quivering against me, his legs boneless.\n\n\n \"We can always make it over to the mission,\" I lied.\n\n\n The clerk turned his upper lip as if he were going to spit. \"Awright,\n since we ain't full up. In\nad\nvance.\"\n\n\n I placed the quarter on the desk.\n\n\n \"Give me a nickel.\"", "I laid Doc out on the gray-brown cot and put his forearm over his face\n to shield it some from the glare of the light bulb. I swept off all the\n bedbugs in sight and stepped on them heavily.\n\n\n Then I dropped down into the painted stool chair and let my burning\n eyes rest on the obscene wall drawings just to focus them. I was so\n dirty, I could feel the grime grinding together all over me. My shaggy\n scalp still smarted from the alcohol I had stolen from a convertible's\n gas tank to get rid of Doc's and my cooties. Lucky that I never needed\n to shave and that my face was so dirty, no one would even notice that I\n didn't need to.\n\n\n The cramp hit me and I folded out of the chair onto the littered,\n uncovered floor.", "I listened to him for a moment, then tested and tasted the craving that\n crawled through my veins. I got back inside somehow.\n\n\n Doc was twisting on the cot, tears washing white streaks across his\n face. I shoved Doc's face up against my chest. I held onto him and let\n him bellow. I soothed the lanks of soiled white hair back over his\n lumpy skull.\n\n\n He shut up at last and I laid him down again and put his arm back\n across his face. (You can't turn the light off and on in places like\n that. The old wiring will blow the bulb half the time.)", "\"What nickel?\" His eyes were big, but they kept looking right at me.\n \"You don't have any nickel. You don't have any quarter, not if I say\n so. Want I should call a cop and tell him you were flexing a muscle?\"\n\n\n I let go of him. He didn't scare me, but Doc was beginning to mumble\n and that\ndid\nscare me. I had to get him alone.\n\n\n \"Where's the room?\" I asked.\nThe room was six feet in all directions and the walls were five feet\n high. The other foot was finished in chicken wire. There was a wino\n singing on the left, a wino praying on the right, and the door didn't\n have any lock on it. At last, Doc and I were alone.", "The clerk's hand fell on the coin and slid it off into the unknown\n before I could move, what with holding up Doc.\n\n\n \"You've got your nerve,\" he said at me with a fine mist of dew. \"Had a\n quarter all along and yet you Martian me down to twenty cents.\" He saw\n the look on my face. \"I'll give you a\nroom\nfor the two bits. That's\n better'n a bed for twenty.\"\n\n\n I knew I was going to need that nickel.\nDesperately.\nI reached across\n the desk with my free hand and hauled the scrawny human up against the\n register hard. I'm not as strong in my hands as Doc, but I managed.\n\n\n \"Give me a nickel,\" I said.", "\"But, Kevin,\" Andre said, \"you aren't\nthat\ndirty.\"\nThe blow shook the gun from my fingers. It almost fell into the\nthing\non the floor, but at the last moment seemed to change direction and\n miss it.\n\n\n I knew something. \"I don't wash because I drink coffee.\"\n\n\n \"It's all right to drink coffee, isn't it?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" I said, and added absurdly, \"That's why I don't wash.\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" Andre said slowly, ploddingly, \"that if you bathed, you\n would be admitting that drinking coffee was in the same class as any\n other solitary vice that makes people wash frequently.\"\n\n\n I was knocked to my knees.", "I told the human no, thanks, and walked Doc toward the flophouse three\n doors down. I hoped we would make it. I didn't know what would happen\n if we didn't. Doc was liable to say something that might nova Sol, for\n all I knew.\nMartians approaching the corner were sensing at Doc and me. They\n were just cheap tourists slumming down on Skid Row. I hated tourists\n and especially I hated Martian tourists because I especially hated\n Martians. They were\naliens\n. They weren't\nmen\nlike Doc and me.\n\n\n Then I realized what was about to happen. It was foolish and awful and\n true. I was going to have one of mine at the same time Doc was having\n his. That was bad. It had happened a few times right after I first\n found him, but now it was worse. For some undefinable reason, I felt we\n kept getting closer each of the times.\n\n\n I tried not to think about it and helped Doc through the fly-specked\n flophouse doors.", "He had broken the light bulb and used the filament and screw bottom.\n His strong hands had unraveled some of the bed \"springs\"—metal\n webbing—and fashioned them to his needs. My orb-point pen had\n dissolved under his touch. All of them, useless parts, were made into a\n meaningful whole.\n\n\n I knew the thing had meaning, but when I tried to follow its design, I\n became lost.\n\n\n I put the paper container of warm coffee and the greasy bag of\n hamburgers on the wooden chair, hoping the odor wouldn't bring any\n hungry rats out of the walls.\n\n\n I knelt beside Doc.\n\n\n \"An order, my boy, an order,\" he whispered.\n\n\n I didn't know what he meant. Was he suddenly trying to give me orders?", "I thought of Cleopatra and Helen of Troy and wondered if they would be\n the goddesses of love that people imagined or the scrawny, big-nosed\n redhead and fading old woman of scholarship. Then I noticed the\n detective's hand that had been resting idly on a round brass weight of\n unknown sort to me. His tapered fingertips had indented the metal.\n\n\n His bright eyes followed mine and he smiled faintly. \"Withdrawal\n symptoms.\"\n\n\n The admiration and affection for this man that had been slowly building\n up behind my hatred unbrinked. I remembered now that he had stopped. He\n was not\nreally\na snowbird.\n\n\n After a time, I asked the doctor a question.", "The hamburger was engulfed by five black-crowned, broken fingernails\n and raised to two rows of yellow ivory. I surrounded it like an ameba,\n almost in a single movement of my jaws.\n\n\n Several other hamburgers followed the first. I lost count. I drank a\n glass of milk. I didn't want to black out on coffee with Doc waiting\n for me.\n\n\n \"Could I have a few to take with me, miss?\" I pleaded.\n\n\n She smiled. I caught that out of the edge of my vision, but mostly I\n just felt it.\n\n\n \"That's the first time you've called me anything but 'ma'am',\" she\n said. \"I'm not an old-maid schoolteacher, you know.\"\n\n\n That probably meant she was a schoolteacher, though. \"No, miss,\" I said.", "It stopped hurting, but I knew it would begin if I moved. I stared at a\n jagged cut-out nude curled against a lump of dust and lint, giving it\n an unreal distortion.\n\n\n Doc began to mumble louder.\n\n\n I knew I had to move.\n\n\n I waited just a moment, savoring the painless peace. Then, finally, I\n moved.", "\"Sure,\" the man agreed severely, prying a little worriedly at Doc's\n arthritic fingers that were clamped on his collar. \"No argument. Sure,\n up we go. But leave me go or, so help me, I'll fetch you one in the\n teeth!\"\n\n\n I came alongside and carefully started to lever the old man loose,\n one finger at a time. It had to be done this way. I had learned that\n during all these weeks and months. His hands looked old and crippled,\n but I felt they were the strongest in the world. If a half dozen winos\n in Seattle hadn't helped me get them loose, Doc and I would have been\n wanted for the murder of a North American Mountie.\n\n\n It was easier this night and that made me afraid. Doc's thin frame,\n layered with lumpy fat, was beginning to muscle-dance against my side.\n One of his times was coming on him. Then at last he was free of the\n greasy collar of the human.", "\"Your hands, though unclean, have never seen physical labor. Your\n cranial construction is of a superior type, or even if you reject my\n theories, concentration does set the facial features. I judge you have\n suffered an illness because of the inhibition of your beard growth.\n Your over-fondness for rum or opium, perhaps, is self-evident. You\n are at too resilient an age to be so sunk by even an amour. Why else\n then would you let yourself fall into such an underfed and unsanitary\n state?\"\nHe was so smug and so sure, this snowbird. I hated him. Because I\n couldn't trust to my own senses as he did.\n\n\n \"You don't exist,\" I said slowly, painfully. \"You are fictional\n creations.\"\n\n\n The doctor flushed darkly. \"You give my literary agent too much credit\n for the addition of professional polish to my works.\"", "A thin, sickly man was sprawled in the other chair in a rumpled\n dressing gown. My eyes held to his face, his pinpoint pupils and\n whitened nose. He was a condemned snowbird! If there was anything I\n hated or held in more contempt than tourists or Martians, it was a\n snowbird.\n\n\n \"My clients have occasioned singular methods of entry into these\n rooms,\" the thin man remarked, \"but never before have they used\n instantaneous materialization.\"\n\n\n The heavier man was half choking, half laughing. \"I say—I say, I would\n like to see you explain this, my dear fellow.\"\n\n\n \"I have no data,\" the thin man answered coolly. \"In such instance, one\n begins to twist theories into fact, or facts into theories. I must ask\n this unemployed, former professional man who has gone through a serious\n illness and is suffering a more serious addiction to tell me the place\n and\ntime\nfrom which he comes.\"", "\"I hope you'll forgive him, sir,\" I said, not meeting the man's eyes.\n \"He's my father and very old, as you can see.\" I laughed inside at the\n absurd, easy lie. \"Old events seem recent to him.\"\n\n\n The human nodded, Adam's apple jerking in the angry neon twilight.\n \"'Memory Jump,' you mean. All my great-grandfathers have it. But\n Great-great-grandmother Lupos, funny thing, is like a schoolgirl.\n Sharp, you know. I.... Say, the poor old guy looks sick. Want any help?\"", "I hadn't eaten in a day and a half, but I didn't care much.\n\n\n \"I'll buy you a dinner,\" she said carefully, \"provided I can go with\n you and see for myself that you actually eat it.\"\n\n\n I felt my face flushing red. \"You wouldn't want to be seen with a bum\n like me, ma'am.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be seen with you if you really want to eat.\"\n\n\n It was certainly unfair and probably immoral. But I had no choice\n whatever.\n\n\n \"Okay,\" I said, tasting bitterness over the craving.\nThe coffee was in a thick white cup before me on the counter. It was\n pale, grayish brown and steaming faintly. I picked it up in both hands\n to feel its warmth.", "\"Happy to, miss,\" I mumbled.\n\n\n She pushed a white rectangle in front of me on the painted maroon bar.\n \"What do you think of this?\"\n\n\n I looked at the piece of paper. It was a coupon from a magazine.\nDear Acolyte R. I. S.\n:\nPlease send me FREE of obligation, in sealed wrapper, \"The Scarlet\n Book\" revealing to me how I may gain Secret Mastery of the Universe.\nName\n: ........................\nAddress\n: .....................\n\n\n The world disoriented itself and I was on the floor of the somber diner\n and Miss Vivian Casey was out of sight and scent.\n\n\n There was a five dollar bill tight in my fist. The counterman was\n trying to pull it out.", "\"Why, yes. I'm flattered. This is the first manuscript. Considering my\n professional handwriting, I recopied it more laboriously.\"\nAccepting the sheaf of papers and not looking back at these two great\n and good men, I concentrated on my own time and Doc. Nothing happened.\n My heart raced, but I saw something dancing before me like a dust mote\n in sunlight and stepped toward it....\n\n\n ... into the effective range of Miss Casey's tiny gun.\nShe inclined the lethal silver toy. \"Let me see those papers, Kevin.\"\n\n\n I handed her the doctor's manuscript.\n\n\n Her breath escaped slowly and loudly. \"It's all right. It's all right.\n It exists. It's real. Not even one of the unwritten ones. I've read\n this myself.\"\n\n\n Doc was lying on the cot, half his face twisted into horror.", "I scooped up my change and walked out the door. There was no one on the\n sidewalk, only in the doorways.\nFirst I opened the door on an amber world, then an azure one. Neon\n light was coming from the chickenwire border of the room, from a window\n somewhere beyond. The wino on one side of the room was singing and\n the one on the other side was praying, same as before. Only they had\n changed around—prayer came from the left, song from the right.\n\n\n Doc sat on the floor in the half-darkness and he had made a\nthing\n.\nMy heart hammered at my lungs. I\nknew\nthis last time had been\n different. Whatever it was was getting closer. This was the first time\n Doc had ever made anything. It didn't look like much, but it was a\n start.", "\"They ceased to exist—as human beings—shortly after they received a\n book from Doc,\" the Martian said.\n\n\n Something seemed to strike me in the back of the neck. I staggered, but\n managed to hold onto the gun and stand up.\n\n\n \"Use one of those sneaky Martian weapons again,\" I warned him,\n \"and I'll kill the girl.\" Martians were supposed to be against the\n destruction of any life-form, I had read someplace. I doubted it, but\n it was worth a try.\n\n\n \"Kevin,\" Andre said, \"why don't you take a bath?\"\n\n\n The Martian weapon staggered me again. I tried to say something. I\n tried to explain that I was so dirty that I could never get clean no\n matter how often I bathed. No words formed." ], [ "I hadn't eaten in a day and a half, but I didn't care much.\n\n\n \"I'll buy you a dinner,\" she said carefully, \"provided I can go with\n you and see for myself that you actually eat it.\"\n\n\n I felt my face flushing red. \"You wouldn't want to be seen with a bum\n like me, ma'am.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be seen with you if you really want to eat.\"\n\n\n It was certainly unfair and probably immoral. But I had no choice\n whatever.\n\n\n \"Okay,\" I said, tasting bitterness over the craving.\nThe coffee was in a thick white cup before me on the counter. It was\n pale, grayish brown and steaming faintly. I picked it up in both hands\n to feel its warmth.", "The hamburger was engulfed by five black-crowned, broken fingernails\n and raised to two rows of yellow ivory. I surrounded it like an ameba,\n almost in a single movement of my jaws.\n\n\n Several other hamburgers followed the first. I lost count. I drank a\n glass of milk. I didn't want to black out on coffee with Doc waiting\n for me.\n\n\n \"Could I have a few to take with me, miss?\" I pleaded.\n\n\n She smiled. I caught that out of the edge of my vision, but mostly I\n just felt it.\n\n\n \"That's the first time you've called me anything but 'ma'am',\" she\n said. \"I'm not an old-maid schoolteacher, you know.\"\n\n\n That probably meant she was a schoolteacher, though. \"No, miss,\" I said.", "I listened to him for a moment, then tested and tasted the craving that\n crawled through my veins. I got back inside somehow.\n\n\n Doc was twisting on the cot, tears washing white streaks across his\n face. I shoved Doc's face up against my chest. I held onto him and let\n him bellow. I soothed the lanks of soiled white hair back over his\n lumpy skull.\n\n\n He shut up at last and I laid him down again and put his arm back\n across his face. (You can't turn the light off and on in places like\n that. The old wiring will blow the bulb half the time.)", "\"But, Kevin,\" Andre said, \"you aren't\nthat\ndirty.\"\nThe blow shook the gun from my fingers. It almost fell into the\nthing\non the floor, but at the last moment seemed to change direction and\n miss it.\n\n\n I knew something. \"I don't wash because I drink coffee.\"\n\n\n \"It's all right to drink coffee, isn't it?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" I said, and added absurdly, \"That's why I don't wash.\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" Andre said slowly, ploddingly, \"that if you bathed, you\n would be admitting that drinking coffee was in the same class as any\n other solitary vice that makes people wash frequently.\"\n\n\n I was knocked to my knees.", "I laid Doc out on the gray-brown cot and put his forearm over his face\n to shield it some from the glare of the light bulb. I swept off all the\n bedbugs in sight and stepped on them heavily.\n\n\n Then I dropped down into the painted stool chair and let my burning\n eyes rest on the obscene wall drawings just to focus them. I was so\n dirty, I could feel the grime grinding together all over me. My shaggy\n scalp still smarted from the alcohol I had stolen from a convertible's\n gas tank to get rid of Doc's and my cooties. Lucky that I never needed\n to shave and that my face was so dirty, no one would even notice that I\n didn't need to.\n\n\n The cramp hit me and I folded out of the chair onto the littered,\n uncovered floor.", "\"Ma'am, could you help a man who's not had work?\" I kept my eyes down.\n I couldn't look a human in the eye and ask for help. \"Just a dime for a\n cup of coffee.\" I knew where I could get it for three cents, maybe two\n and a half.\n\n\n I felt her looking at me. She spoke in an educated voice, one she used,\n perhaps, as a teacher or supervising telephone operator. \"Do you want\n it for coffee, or to apply, or a glass or hypo of something else?\"\n\n\n I cringed and whined. She would expect it of me. I suddenly realized\n that anybody as clean as she was had to be a tourist here. I hate\n tourists.\n\n\n \"Just coffee, ma'am.\" She was younger than I was, so I didn't have to\n call her that. \"A little more for food, if you could spare it.\"", "\"Your hands, though unclean, have never seen physical labor. Your\n cranial construction is of a superior type, or even if you reject my\n theories, concentration does set the facial features. I judge you have\n suffered an illness because of the inhibition of your beard growth.\n Your over-fondness for rum or opium, perhaps, is self-evident. You\n are at too resilient an age to be so sunk by even an amour. Why else\n then would you let yourself fall into such an underfed and unsanitary\n state?\"\nHe was so smug and so sure, this snowbird. I hated him. Because I\n couldn't trust to my own senses as he did.\n\n\n \"You don't exist,\" I said slowly, painfully. \"You are fictional\n creations.\"\n\n\n The doctor flushed darkly. \"You give my literary agent too much credit\n for the addition of professional polish to my works.\"", "It stopped hurting, but I knew it would begin if I moved. I stared at a\n jagged cut-out nude curled against a lump of dust and lint, giving it\n an unreal distortion.\n\n\n Doc began to mumble louder.\n\n\n I knew I had to move.\n\n\n I waited just a moment, savoring the painless peace. Then, finally, I\n moved.", "I don't remember how I got out onto the street.\nShe was pink and clean and her platinum hair was pulled straight back,\n drawing her cheek-bones tighter, straightening her wide, appealing\n mouth, drawing her lean, athletic, feminine body erect. She was wearing\n a powder-blue dress that covered all of her breasts and hips and the\n upper half of her legs.\n\n\n The most wonderful thing about her was her perfume. Then I realized it\n wasn't perfume, only the scent of soap. Finally, I knew it wasn't that.\n It was just healthy, fresh-scrubbed skin.\n\n\n I went to her at the bus stop, forcing my legs not to stagger. Nobody\n would help a drunk. I don't know why, but nobody will help you if they\n think you are blotto.", "That wasn't just an addict's dream. I knew who Doc was. When I got\n to thinking it was just a dream and that I was dragging this old man\n around North America for nothing, I remembered who he was.\n\n\n I remembered that he was somebody very important whose name and work I\n had once known, even if now I knew him only as Doc.\n\n\n Pain was a pendulum within me, swinging from low throbbing bass to high\n screaming tenor. I had to get out and get some. But I didn't have a\n nickel. Still, I had to get some.\n\n\n I crawled to the door and raised myself by the knob, slick with greasy\n dirt. The door opened and shut—there was no lock. I shouldn't leave\n Doc alone, but I had to.\n\n\n He was starting to cry. He didn't always do that.", "\"What nickel?\" His eyes were big, but they kept looking right at me.\n \"You don't have any nickel. You don't have any quarter, not if I say\n so. Want I should call a cop and tell him you were flexing a muscle?\"\n\n\n I let go of him. He didn't scare me, but Doc was beginning to mumble\n and that\ndid\nscare me. I had to get him alone.\n\n\n \"Where's the room?\" I asked.\nThe room was six feet in all directions and the walls were five feet\n high. The other foot was finished in chicken wire. There was a wino\n singing on the left, a wino praying on the right, and the door didn't\n have any lock on it. At last, Doc and I were alone.", "\"Happy to, miss,\" I mumbled.\n\n\n She pushed a white rectangle in front of me on the painted maroon bar.\n \"What do you think of this?\"\n\n\n I looked at the piece of paper. It was a coupon from a magazine.\nDear Acolyte R. I. S.\n:\nPlease send me FREE of obligation, in sealed wrapper, \"The Scarlet\n Book\" revealing to me how I may gain Secret Mastery of the Universe.\nName\n: ........................\nAddress\n: .....................\n\n\n The world disoriented itself and I was on the floor of the somber diner\n and Miss Vivian Casey was out of sight and scent.\n\n\n There was a five dollar bill tight in my fist. The counterman was\n trying to pull it out.", "He had broken the light bulb and used the filament and screw bottom.\n His strong hands had unraveled some of the bed \"springs\"—metal\n webbing—and fashioned them to his needs. My orb-point pen had\n dissolved under his touch. All of them, useless parts, were made into a\n meaningful whole.\n\n\n I knew the thing had meaning, but when I tried to follow its design, I\n became lost.\n\n\n I put the paper container of warm coffee and the greasy bag of\n hamburgers on the wooden chair, hoping the odor wouldn't bring any\n hungry rats out of the walls.\n\n\n I knelt beside Doc.\n\n\n \"An order, my boy, an order,\" he whispered.\n\n\n I didn't know what he meant. Was he suddenly trying to give me orders?", "The tubercular clerk looked up from the gaudy comics sections of one of\n those little tabloids that have the funnies a week in advance.\n\n\n \"Fifteen cents a bed,\" he said mechanically.\n\n\n \"We'll use one bed,\" I told him. \"I'll give you twenty cents.\" I felt\n the round hard quarter in my pocket, sweaty hand against sticky lining.\n\n\n \"Fifteen cents a bed,\" he played it back for me.\n\n\n Doc was quivering against me, his legs boneless.\n\n\n \"We can always make it over to the mission,\" I lied.\n\n\n The clerk turned his upper lip as if he were going to spit. \"Awright,\n since we ain't full up. In\nad\nvance.\"\n\n\n I placed the quarter on the desk.\n\n\n \"Give me a nickel.\"", "I thought of Cleopatra and Helen of Troy and wondered if they would be\n the goddesses of love that people imagined or the scrawny, big-nosed\n redhead and fading old woman of scholarship. Then I noticed the\n detective's hand that had been resting idly on a round brass weight of\n unknown sort to me. His tapered fingertips had indented the metal.\n\n\n His bright eyes followed mine and he smiled faintly. \"Withdrawal\n symptoms.\"\n\n\n The admiration and affection for this man that had been slowly building\n up behind my hatred unbrinked. I remembered now that he had stopped. He\n was not\nreally\na snowbird.\n\n\n After a time, I asked the doctor a question.", "\"Sure,\" the man agreed severely, prying a little worriedly at Doc's\n arthritic fingers that were clamped on his collar. \"No argument. Sure,\n up we go. But leave me go or, so help me, I'll fetch you one in the\n teeth!\"\n\n\n I came alongside and carefully started to lever the old man loose,\n one finger at a time. It had to be done this way. I had learned that\n during all these weeks and months. His hands looked old and crippled,\n but I felt they were the strongest in the world. If a half dozen winos\n in Seattle hadn't helped me get them loose, Doc and I would have been\n wanted for the murder of a North American Mountie.\n\n\n It was easier this night and that made me afraid. Doc's thin frame,\n layered with lumpy fat, was beginning to muscle-dance against my side.\n One of his times was coming on him. Then at last he was free of the\n greasy collar of the human.", "Earth-norm humans sometimes have the addiction to a slight extent, but\n I knew that as a Centurian I had it infinitely worse. Caffeine affected\n my metabolism like a pure alkaloid. The immediate effects weren't the\n same, but the\nneed\nran as deep.\n\n\n I finished the cup. I didn't order another because I wasn't a pure\n sensualist. I just needed release. Sometimes, when I didn't have the\n price of a cup, I would look around in alleys and find cola bottles\n with a few drops left in them. They have a little caffeine in\n them—not enough, never enough, but better than nothing.\n\n\n \"Now what do you want to eat?\" the woman asked.", "I was bent double, but I got from the floor to the chair and found\n my notebook and orb-point in my hands. I found I couldn't focus both\n my mind and my eyes through the electric flashes of agony, so I\n concentrated on Doc's voice and trusted my hands would follow their\n habit pattern and construct the symbols for his words. They were\n suddenly distinguishable.\n\"\nOutsider\n...\nThoth\n...\nDyzan\n...\nSeven\n...\nHsan\n...\nBeyond Six, Seven, Eight\n...\nTwo boxes\n...\nRalston", "Andre flowed out of the doorway with a sigh. Of relief?\n\n\n I would never know. I supposed I had destroyed\nit\nbecause I didn't\n want the human race to become a thing of pure reason without purpose,\n direction or love, but I would never know for sure. I thought I could\n kick the habit—perhaps with Miss Casey's help—but I wasn't really\n confident.\n\n\n Maybe I had destroyed the time machine because a world without material\n needs would not grow and roast coffee.", "\"Listen, Kevin. Listen carefully to what I am saying. Doc found\n a method of time travel. It was almost a purely mathematical,\n topographical way divorced from modern physical sciences. He kept it\n secret and he wanted to make money with it. He was an idealist—he had\n his crusades. How can you make money with time travel?\"\n\n\n I didn't know whether she was asking me, but I didn't know. All I knew\n was that I had to help Doc and get some coffee.\n\n\n \"It takes money—money Doc didn't have—to make money,\" Miss Casey\n said, \"even if you know what horse will come in and what stock will\n prosper. Besides, horse-racing and the stock market weren't a part of\n Doc's character. He was a scholar.\"\n\n\n Why did she keep using the past tense in reference to Doc? It scared\n me. He was lying so still with the left side of his face so twisted. I\n needed some coffee." ], [ "\"What nickel?\" His eyes were big, but they kept looking right at me.\n \"You don't have any nickel. You don't have any quarter, not if I say\n so. Want I should call a cop and tell him you were flexing a muscle?\"\n\n\n I let go of him. He didn't scare me, but Doc was beginning to mumble\n and that\ndid\nscare me. I had to get him alone.\n\n\n \"Where's the room?\" I asked.\nThe room was six feet in all directions and the walls were five feet\n high. The other foot was finished in chicken wire. There was a wino\n singing on the left, a wino praying on the right, and the door didn't\n have any lock on it. At last, Doc and I were alone.", "That wasn't just an addict's dream. I knew who Doc was. When I got\n to thinking it was just a dream and that I was dragging this old man\n around North America for nothing, I remembered who he was.\n\n\n I remembered that he was somebody very important whose name and work I\n had once known, even if now I knew him only as Doc.\n\n\n Pain was a pendulum within me, swinging from low throbbing bass to high\n screaming tenor. I had to get out and get some. But I didn't have a\n nickel. Still, I had to get some.\n\n\n I crawled to the door and raised myself by the knob, slick with greasy\n dirt. The door opened and shut—there was no lock. I shouldn't leave\n Doc alone, but I had to.\n\n\n He was starting to cry. He didn't always do that.", "I listened to him for a moment, then tested and tasted the craving that\n crawled through my veins. I got back inside somehow.\n\n\n Doc was twisting on the cot, tears washing white streaks across his\n face. I shoved Doc's face up against my chest. I held onto him and let\n him bellow. I soothed the lanks of soiled white hair back over his\n lumpy skull.\n\n\n He shut up at last and I laid him down again and put his arm back\n across his face. (You can't turn the light off and on in places like\n that. The old wiring will blow the bulb half the time.)", "I laid Doc out on the gray-brown cot and put his forearm over his face\n to shield it some from the glare of the light bulb. I swept off all the\n bedbugs in sight and stepped on them heavily.\n\n\n Then I dropped down into the painted stool chair and let my burning\n eyes rest on the obscene wall drawings just to focus them. I was so\n dirty, I could feel the grime grinding together all over me. My shaggy\n scalp still smarted from the alcohol I had stolen from a convertible's\n gas tank to get rid of Doc's and my cooties. Lucky that I never needed\n to shave and that my face was so dirty, no one would even notice that I\n didn't need to.\n\n\n The cramp hit me and I folded out of the chair onto the littered,\n uncovered floor.", "I told the human no, thanks, and walked Doc toward the flophouse three\n doors down. I hoped we would make it. I didn't know what would happen\n if we didn't. Doc was liable to say something that might nova Sol, for\n all I knew.\nMartians approaching the corner were sensing at Doc and me. They\n were just cheap tourists slumming down on Skid Row. I hated tourists\n and especially I hated Martian tourists because I especially hated\n Martians. They were\naliens\n. They weren't\nmen\nlike Doc and me.\n\n\n Then I realized what was about to happen. It was foolish and awful and\n true. I was going to have one of mine at the same time Doc was having\n his. That was bad. It had happened a few times right after I first\n found him, but now it was worse. For some undefinable reason, I felt we\n kept getting closer each of the times.\n\n\n I tried not to think about it and helped Doc through the fly-specked\n flophouse doors.", "\"Sure,\" the man agreed severely, prying a little worriedly at Doc's\n arthritic fingers that were clamped on his collar. \"No argument. Sure,\n up we go. But leave me go or, so help me, I'll fetch you one in the\n teeth!\"\n\n\n I came alongside and carefully started to lever the old man loose,\n one finger at a time. It had to be done this way. I had learned that\n during all these weeks and months. His hands looked old and crippled,\n but I felt they were the strongest in the world. If a half dozen winos\n in Seattle hadn't helped me get them loose, Doc and I would have been\n wanted for the murder of a North American Mountie.\n\n\n It was easier this night and that made me afraid. Doc's thin frame,\n layered with lumpy fat, was beginning to muscle-dance against my side.\n One of his times was coming on him. Then at last he was free of the\n greasy collar of the human.", "\"Listen, Kevin. Listen carefully to what I am saying. Doc found\n a method of time travel. It was almost a purely mathematical,\n topographical way divorced from modern physical sciences. He kept it\n secret and he wanted to make money with it. He was an idealist—he had\n his crusades. How can you make money with time travel?\"\n\n\n I didn't know whether she was asking me, but I didn't know. All I knew\n was that I had to help Doc and get some coffee.\n\n\n \"It takes money—money Doc didn't have—to make money,\" Miss Casey\n said, \"even if you know what horse will come in and what stock will\n prosper. Besides, horse-racing and the stock market weren't a part of\n Doc's character. He was a scholar.\"\n\n\n Why did she keep using the past tense in reference to Doc? It scared\n me. He was lying so still with the left side of his face so twisted. I\n needed some coffee.", "He held something out to me. It was my notebook. He had used my pen,\n before dismantling it, to write something. I tilted the notebook\n against the neon light, now red wine, now fresh grape. I read it.\n\n\n \"Concentrate,\" Doc said hoarsely. \"Concentrate....\"\n\n\n I wondered what the words meant. Wondering takes a kind of\n concentration.\n\n\n The words \"First Edition\" were what I was thinking about most.\nThe heavy-set man in the ornate armchair was saying, \"The bullet struck\n me as I was pulling on my boot....\"\n\n\n I was kneeling on the floor of a Victorian living room. I'm quite\n familiar with Earth history and I recognized the period immediately.\n\n\n Then I realized what I had been trying to get from Doc all these\n months—time travel.", "He had broken the light bulb and used the filament and screw bottom.\n His strong hands had unraveled some of the bed \"springs\"—metal\n webbing—and fashioned them to his needs. My orb-point pen had\n dissolved under his touch. All of them, useless parts, were made into a\n meaningful whole.\n\n\n I knew the thing had meaning, but when I tried to follow its design, I\n became lost.\n\n\n I put the paper container of warm coffee and the greasy bag of\n hamburgers on the wooden chair, hoping the odor wouldn't bring any\n hungry rats out of the walls.\n\n\n I knelt beside Doc.\n\n\n \"An order, my boy, an order,\" he whispered.\n\n\n I didn't know what he meant. Was he suddenly trying to give me orders?", "\"Why, yes. I'm flattered. This is the first manuscript. Considering my\n professional handwriting, I recopied it more laboriously.\"\nAccepting the sheaf of papers and not looking back at these two great\n and good men, I concentrated on my own time and Doc. Nothing happened.\n My heart raced, but I saw something dancing before me like a dust mote\n in sunlight and stepped toward it....\n\n\n ... into the effective range of Miss Casey's tiny gun.\nShe inclined the lethal silver toy. \"Let me see those papers, Kevin.\"\n\n\n I handed her the doctor's manuscript.\n\n\n Her breath escaped slowly and loudly. \"It's all right. It's all right.\n It exists. It's real. Not even one of the unwritten ones. I've read\n this myself.\"\n\n\n Doc was lying on the cot, half his face twisted into horror.", "I scooped up my change and walked out the door. There was no one on the\n sidewalk, only in the doorways.\nFirst I opened the door on an amber world, then an azure one. Neon\n light was coming from the chickenwire border of the room, from a window\n somewhere beyond. The wino on one side of the room was singing and\n the one on the other side was praying, same as before. Only they had\n changed around—prayer came from the left, song from the right.\n\n\n Doc sat on the floor in the half-darkness and he had made a\nthing\n.\nMy heart hammered at my lungs. I\nknew\nthis last time had been\n different. Whatever it was was getting closer. This was the first time\n Doc had ever made anything. It didn't look like much, but it was a\n start.", "The hamburger was engulfed by five black-crowned, broken fingernails\n and raised to two rows of yellow ivory. I surrounded it like an ameba,\n almost in a single movement of my jaws.\n\n\n Several other hamburgers followed the first. I lost count. I drank a\n glass of milk. I didn't want to black out on coffee with Doc waiting\n for me.\n\n\n \"Could I have a few to take with me, miss?\" I pleaded.\n\n\n She smiled. I caught that out of the edge of my vision, but mostly I\n just felt it.\n\n\n \"That's the first time you've called me anything but 'ma'am',\" she\n said. \"I'm not an old-maid schoolteacher, you know.\"\n\n\n That probably meant she was a schoolteacher, though. \"No, miss,\" I said.", "\"Kevin,\" the Martian said, \"drinking coffee represents a major vice\n only in Centurian humanoids, not Earth-norm human beings.\nWhich are\n you?\n\"\n\n\n Nothing came out of my gabbling mouth.\n\n\n \"\nWhat is Doc's full name?\n\"\n\n\n I almost fell in, but at the last instant I caught myself and said,\n \"Doctor Kevin O'Malley, Senior.\"\n\n\n From the bed, Doc said a word. \"Son.\"\n\n\n Then he disappeared.\n\n\n I looked at that which he had made. I wondered where he had gone, in\n search of what.\n\n\n \"He didn't use that,\" Andre said.", "The tubercular clerk looked up from the gaudy comics sections of one of\n those little tabloids that have the funnies a week in advance.\n\n\n \"Fifteen cents a bed,\" he said mechanically.\n\n\n \"We'll use one bed,\" I told him. \"I'll give you twenty cents.\" I felt\n the round hard quarter in my pocket, sweaty hand against sticky lining.\n\n\n \"Fifteen cents a bed,\" he played it back for me.\n\n\n Doc was quivering against me, his legs boneless.\n\n\n \"We can always make it over to the mission,\" I lied.\n\n\n The clerk turned his upper lip as if he were going to spit. \"Awright,\n since we ain't full up. In\nad\nvance.\"\n\n\n I placed the quarter on the desk.\n\n\n \"Give me a nickel.\"", "\"They ceased to exist—as human beings—shortly after they received a\n book from Doc,\" the Martian said.\n\n\n Something seemed to strike me in the back of the neck. I staggered, but\n managed to hold onto the gun and stand up.\n\n\n \"Use one of those sneaky Martian weapons again,\" I warned him,\n \"and I'll kill the girl.\" Martians were supposed to be against the\n destruction of any life-form, I had read someplace. I doubted it, but\n it was worth a try.\n\n\n \"Kevin,\" Andre said, \"why don't you take a bath?\"\n\n\n The Martian weapon staggered me again. I tried to say something. I\n tried to explain that I was so dirty that I could never get clean no\n matter how often I bathed. No words formed.", "So I was an Earthman, Doc's son. So my addiction to coffee was all in\n my mind. That didn't change anything. They say sex is all in your mind.\n I didn't want to be cured. I wouldn't be. Doc was gone. That was all I\n had now. That and the\nthing\nhe left.\n\n\n \"The rest is simple,\" Andre said. \"Doc O'Malley bought up all the stock\n in a certain ancient metaphysical order and started supplying members\n with certain books. Can you imagine the effect of the\nBook of Dyzan\nor the\nBook of Thoth\nor the\nSeven Cryptical Books of Hsan\nor the\nNecronomican\nitself on human beings?\"\n\n\n \"But they don't exist,\" I said wearily.", "It stopped hurting, but I knew it would begin if I moved. I stared at a\n jagged cut-out nude curled against a lump of dust and lint, giving it\n an unreal distortion.\n\n\n Doc began to mumble louder.\n\n\n I knew I had to move.\n\n\n I waited just a moment, savoring the painless peace. Then, finally, I\n moved.", "\"I hope you'll forgive him, sir,\" I said, not meeting the man's eyes.\n \"He's my father and very old, as you can see.\" I laughed inside at the\n absurd, easy lie. \"Old events seem recent to him.\"\n\n\n The human nodded, Adam's apple jerking in the angry neon twilight.\n \"'Memory Jump,' you mean. All my great-grandfathers have it. But\n Great-great-grandmother Lupos, funny thing, is like a schoolgirl.\n Sharp, you know. I.... Say, the poor old guy looks sick. Want any help?\"", "\"Your hands, though unclean, have never seen physical labor. Your\n cranial construction is of a superior type, or even if you reject my\n theories, concentration does set the facial features. I judge you have\n suffered an illness because of the inhibition of your beard growth.\n Your over-fondness for rum or opium, perhaps, is self-evident. You\n are at too resilient an age to be so sunk by even an amour. Why else\n then would you let yourself fall into such an underfed and unsanitary\n state?\"\nHe was so smug and so sure, this snowbird. I hated him. Because I\n couldn't trust to my own senses as he did.\n\n\n \"You don't exist,\" I said slowly, painfully. \"You are fictional\n creations.\"\n\n\n The doctor flushed darkly. \"You give my literary agent too much credit\n for the addition of professional polish to my works.\"", "I pointed the gun generally at her and backed around the\nthing\non the\n floor to the cot. Doc had a pulse, but it was irregular. I checked for\n a fever and there wasn't one. After that, I didn't know what to do.\n\n\n I looked up finally and saw a Martian in or about the doorway.\n\n\n \"Call me Andre,\" the Martian said. \"A common name but foreign. It\n should serve as a point of reference.\"\n\n\n I had always wondered how a thing like a Martian could talk. Sometimes\n I wondered if they really could.\n\n\n \"You won't need the gun,\" Andre said conversationally.\n\n\n \"I'll keep it, thanks. What do\nyou\nwant?\"\n\n\n \"I'll begin as Miss Casey did—by telling you things. Hundreds of\n people disappeared from North America a few months ago.\"\n\n\n \"They always do,\" I told him." ], [ "\"Sure,\" the man agreed severely, prying a little worriedly at Doc's\n arthritic fingers that were clamped on his collar. \"No argument. Sure,\n up we go. But leave me go or, so help me, I'll fetch you one in the\n teeth!\"\n\n\n I came alongside and carefully started to lever the old man loose,\n one finger at a time. It had to be done this way. I had learned that\n during all these weeks and months. His hands looked old and crippled,\n but I felt they were the strongest in the world. If a half dozen winos\n in Seattle hadn't helped me get them loose, Doc and I would have been\n wanted for the murder of a North American Mountie.\n\n\n It was easier this night and that made me afraid. Doc's thin frame,\n layered with lumpy fat, was beginning to muscle-dance against my side.\n One of his times was coming on him. Then at last he was free of the\n greasy collar of the human.", "\"What nickel?\" His eyes were big, but they kept looking right at me.\n \"You don't have any nickel. You don't have any quarter, not if I say\n so. Want I should call a cop and tell him you were flexing a muscle?\"\n\n\n I let go of him. He didn't scare me, but Doc was beginning to mumble\n and that\ndid\nscare me. I had to get him alone.\n\n\n \"Where's the room?\" I asked.\nThe room was six feet in all directions and the walls were five feet\n high. The other foot was finished in chicken wire. There was a wino\n singing on the left, a wino praying on the right, and the door didn't\n have any lock on it. At last, Doc and I were alone.", "\"Why, yes. I'm flattered. This is the first manuscript. Considering my\n professional handwriting, I recopied it more laboriously.\"\nAccepting the sheaf of papers and not looking back at these two great\n and good men, I concentrated on my own time and Doc. Nothing happened.\n My heart raced, but I saw something dancing before me like a dust mote\n in sunlight and stepped toward it....\n\n\n ... into the effective range of Miss Casey's tiny gun.\nShe inclined the lethal silver toy. \"Let me see those papers, Kevin.\"\n\n\n I handed her the doctor's manuscript.\n\n\n Her breath escaped slowly and loudly. \"It's all right. It's all right.\n It exists. It's real. Not even one of the unwritten ones. I've read\n this myself.\"\n\n\n Doc was lying on the cot, half his face twisted into horror.", "I told the human no, thanks, and walked Doc toward the flophouse three\n doors down. I hoped we would make it. I didn't know what would happen\n if we didn't. Doc was liable to say something that might nova Sol, for\n all I knew.\nMartians approaching the corner were sensing at Doc and me. They\n were just cheap tourists slumming down on Skid Row. I hated tourists\n and especially I hated Martian tourists because I especially hated\n Martians. They were\naliens\n. They weren't\nmen\nlike Doc and me.\n\n\n Then I realized what was about to happen. It was foolish and awful and\n true. I was going to have one of mine at the same time Doc was having\n his. That was bad. It had happened a few times right after I first\n found him, but now it was worse. For some undefinable reason, I felt we\n kept getting closer each of the times.\n\n\n I tried not to think about it and helped Doc through the fly-specked\n flophouse doors.", "That wasn't just an addict's dream. I knew who Doc was. When I got\n to thinking it was just a dream and that I was dragging this old man\n around North America for nothing, I remembered who he was.\n\n\n I remembered that he was somebody very important whose name and work I\n had once known, even if now I knew him only as Doc.\n\n\n Pain was a pendulum within me, swinging from low throbbing bass to high\n screaming tenor. I had to get out and get some. But I didn't have a\n nickel. Still, I had to get some.\n\n\n I crawled to the door and raised myself by the knob, slick with greasy\n dirt. The door opened and shut—there was no lock. I shouldn't leave\n Doc alone, but I had to.\n\n\n He was starting to cry. He didn't always do that.", "I laid Doc out on the gray-brown cot and put his forearm over his face\n to shield it some from the glare of the light bulb. I swept off all the\n bedbugs in sight and stepped on them heavily.\n\n\n Then I dropped down into the painted stool chair and let my burning\n eyes rest on the obscene wall drawings just to focus them. I was so\n dirty, I could feel the grime grinding together all over me. My shaggy\n scalp still smarted from the alcohol I had stolen from a convertible's\n gas tank to get rid of Doc's and my cooties. Lucky that I never needed\n to shave and that my face was so dirty, no one would even notice that I\n didn't need to.\n\n\n The cramp hit me and I folded out of the chair onto the littered,\n uncovered floor.", "He held something out to me. It was my notebook. He had used my pen,\n before dismantling it, to write something. I tilted the notebook\n against the neon light, now red wine, now fresh grape. I read it.\n\n\n \"Concentrate,\" Doc said hoarsely. \"Concentrate....\"\n\n\n I wondered what the words meant. Wondering takes a kind of\n concentration.\n\n\n The words \"First Edition\" were what I was thinking about most.\nThe heavy-set man in the ornate armchair was saying, \"The bullet struck\n me as I was pulling on my boot....\"\n\n\n I was kneeling on the floor of a Victorian living room. I'm quite\n familiar with Earth history and I recognized the period immediately.\n\n\n Then I realized what I had been trying to get from Doc all these\n months—time travel.", "Confidence Game\nBy JIM HARMON\n\n\n Illustrated by EPSTEIN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction June 1957.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI admit it: I didn't know if I was coming or\n \ngoing—but I know that if I stuck to the old\n \nman, I was a comer ... even if he was a goner!\nDoc had this solemn human by the throat when I caught up with him.\n\n\n \"Tonight,\" Doc was saying in his old voice that was as crackled and\n important as parchment, \"tonight Man will reach the Moon. The golden\n Moon and the silver ship, symbols of greed. Tonight is the night when\n this is to happen.\"", "He had broken the light bulb and used the filament and screw bottom.\n His strong hands had unraveled some of the bed \"springs\"—metal\n webbing—and fashioned them to his needs. My orb-point pen had\n dissolved under his touch. All of them, useless parts, were made into a\n meaningful whole.\n\n\n I knew the thing had meaning, but when I tried to follow its design, I\n became lost.\n\n\n I put the paper container of warm coffee and the greasy bag of\n hamburgers on the wooden chair, hoping the odor wouldn't bring any\n hungry rats out of the walls.\n\n\n I knelt beside Doc.\n\n\n \"An order, my boy, an order,\" he whispered.\n\n\n I didn't know what he meant. Was he suddenly trying to give me orders?", "The clerk's hand fell on the coin and slid it off into the unknown\n before I could move, what with holding up Doc.\n\n\n \"You've got your nerve,\" he said at me with a fine mist of dew. \"Had a\n quarter all along and yet you Martian me down to twenty cents.\" He saw\n the look on my face. \"I'll give you a\nroom\nfor the two bits. That's\n better'n a bed for twenty.\"\n\n\n I knew I was going to need that nickel.\nDesperately.\nI reached across\n the desk with my free hand and hauled the scrawny human up against the\n register hard. I'm not as strong in my hands as Doc, but I managed.\n\n\n \"Give me a nickel,\" I said.", "I listened to him for a moment, then tested and tasted the craving that\n crawled through my veins. I got back inside somehow.\n\n\n Doc was twisting on the cot, tears washing white streaks across his\n face. I shoved Doc's face up against my chest. I held onto him and let\n him bellow. I soothed the lanks of soiled white hair back over his\n lumpy skull.\n\n\n He shut up at last and I laid him down again and put his arm back\n across his face. (You can't turn the light off and on in places like\n that. The old wiring will blow the bulb half the time.)", "I scooped up my change and walked out the door. There was no one on the\n sidewalk, only in the doorways.\nFirst I opened the door on an amber world, then an azure one. Neon\n light was coming from the chickenwire border of the room, from a window\n somewhere beyond. The wino on one side of the room was singing and\n the one on the other side was praying, same as before. Only they had\n changed around—prayer came from the left, song from the right.\n\n\n Doc sat on the floor in the half-darkness and he had made a\nthing\n.\nMy heart hammered at my lungs. I\nknew\nthis last time had been\n different. Whatever it was was getting closer. This was the first time\n Doc had ever made anything. It didn't look like much, but it was a\n start.", "\"They ceased to exist—as human beings—shortly after they received a\n book from Doc,\" the Martian said.\n\n\n Something seemed to strike me in the back of the neck. I staggered, but\n managed to hold onto the gun and stand up.\n\n\n \"Use one of those sneaky Martian weapons again,\" I warned him,\n \"and I'll kill the girl.\" Martians were supposed to be against the\n destruction of any life-form, I had read someplace. I doubted it, but\n it was worth a try.\n\n\n \"Kevin,\" Andre said, \"why don't you take a bath?\"\n\n\n The Martian weapon staggered me again. I tried to say something. I\n tried to explain that I was so dirty that I could never get clean no\n matter how often I bathed. No words formed.", "\"Listen, Kevin. Listen carefully to what I am saying. Doc found\n a method of time travel. It was almost a purely mathematical,\n topographical way divorced from modern physical sciences. He kept it\n secret and he wanted to make money with it. He was an idealist—he had\n his crusades. How can you make money with time travel?\"\n\n\n I didn't know whether she was asking me, but I didn't know. All I knew\n was that I had to help Doc and get some coffee.\n\n\n \"It takes money—money Doc didn't have—to make money,\" Miss Casey\n said, \"even if you know what horse will come in and what stock will\n prosper. Besides, horse-racing and the stock market weren't a part of\n Doc's character. He was a scholar.\"\n\n\n Why did she keep using the past tense in reference to Doc? It scared\n me. He was lying so still with the left side of his face so twisted. I\n needed some coffee.", "It stopped hurting, but I knew it would begin if I moved. I stared at a\n jagged cut-out nude curled against a lump of dust and lint, giving it\n an unreal distortion.\n\n\n Doc began to mumble louder.\n\n\n I knew I had to move.\n\n\n I waited just a moment, savoring the painless peace. Then, finally, I\n moved.", "The tubercular clerk looked up from the gaudy comics sections of one of\n those little tabloids that have the funnies a week in advance.\n\n\n \"Fifteen cents a bed,\" he said mechanically.\n\n\n \"We'll use one bed,\" I told him. \"I'll give you twenty cents.\" I felt\n the round hard quarter in my pocket, sweaty hand against sticky lining.\n\n\n \"Fifteen cents a bed,\" he played it back for me.\n\n\n Doc was quivering against me, his legs boneless.\n\n\n \"We can always make it over to the mission,\" I lied.\n\n\n The clerk turned his upper lip as if he were going to spit. \"Awright,\n since we ain't full up. In\nad\nvance.\"\n\n\n I placed the quarter on the desk.\n\n\n \"Give me a nickel.\"", "I pointed the gun generally at her and backed around the\nthing\non the\n floor to the cot. Doc had a pulse, but it was irregular. I checked for\n a fever and there wasn't one. After that, I didn't know what to do.\n\n\n I looked up finally and saw a Martian in or about the doorway.\n\n\n \"Call me Andre,\" the Martian said. \"A common name but foreign. It\n should serve as a point of reference.\"\n\n\n I had always wondered how a thing like a Martian could talk. Sometimes\n I wondered if they really could.\n\n\n \"You won't need the gun,\" Andre said conversationally.\n\n\n \"I'll keep it, thanks. What do\nyou\nwant?\"\n\n\n \"I'll begin as Miss Casey did—by telling you things. Hundreds of\n people disappeared from North America a few months ago.\"\n\n\n \"They always do,\" I told him.", "\"Kevin,\" the Martian said, \"drinking coffee represents a major vice\n only in Centurian humanoids, not Earth-norm human beings.\nWhich are\n you?\n\"\n\n\n Nothing came out of my gabbling mouth.\n\n\n \"\nWhat is Doc's full name?\n\"\n\n\n I almost fell in, but at the last instant I caught myself and said,\n \"Doctor Kevin O'Malley, Senior.\"\n\n\n From the bed, Doc said a word. \"Son.\"\n\n\n Then he disappeared.\n\n\n I looked at that which he had made. I wondered where he had gone, in\n search of what.\n\n\n \"He didn't use that,\" Andre said.", "I knew I could not let Doc's—Dad's—time travel\nthing\nfall into\n anyone's hands. I remembered that all the copies of the books had\n disappeared with their readers now. There must not be any more, I knew.\n\n\n Miss Casey did her duty and tried to stop me with a judo hold, but I\n don't think her heart was in it, because I reversed and broke it.\n\n\n I kicked the\nthing\nto pieces and stomped on the pieces. Maybe you\n can't stop the progress of science, but I knew it might be millenniums\n before Doc's genes and creative environment were recreated and time\n travel was rediscovered. Maybe we would be ready for it then. I knew we\n weren't now.\n\n\n Miss Casey leaned against my dirty chest and cried into it. I didn't\n mind her touching me.\n\n\n \"I'm glad,\" she said.", "\"Exactly, Kevin, exactly. They have never existed any more than your\n Victorian detective friend. But the unconscious racial mind has reached\n back into time and created them. And that unconscious mind, deeper than\n psychology terms the subconscious, has always known about the powers\n of ESP, telepathy, telekinesis, precognition. Through these books,\n the human race can tell itself how to achieve a state of pure logic,\n without food, without sex, without conflict—just as Doc has achieved\n such a state—a little late, true. He had a powerful guilt complex,\n even stronger than your withdrawal, over releasing this blessing on\n the inhabited universe, but reason finally prevailed. He had reached a\n state of pure thought.\"\n\n\n \"The North American government\nhas\nto have this secret, Kevin,\" the\n girl said. \"You can't let it fall into the hands of the Martians.\"\nAndre did not deny that he wanted it to fall into his hands." ], [ "He had broken the light bulb and used the filament and screw bottom.\n His strong hands had unraveled some of the bed \"springs\"—metal\n webbing—and fashioned them to his needs. My orb-point pen had\n dissolved under his touch. All of them, useless parts, were made into a\n meaningful whole.\n\n\n I knew the thing had meaning, but when I tried to follow its design, I\n became lost.\n\n\n I put the paper container of warm coffee and the greasy bag of\n hamburgers on the wooden chair, hoping the odor wouldn't bring any\n hungry rats out of the walls.\n\n\n I knelt beside Doc.\n\n\n \"An order, my boy, an order,\" he whispered.\n\n\n I didn't know what he meant. Was he suddenly trying to give me orders?", "I listened to him for a moment, then tested and tasted the craving that\n crawled through my veins. I got back inside somehow.\n\n\n Doc was twisting on the cot, tears washing white streaks across his\n face. I shoved Doc's face up against my chest. I held onto him and let\n him bellow. I soothed the lanks of soiled white hair back over his\n lumpy skull.\n\n\n He shut up at last and I laid him down again and put his arm back\n across his face. (You can't turn the light off and on in places like\n that. The old wiring will blow the bulb half the time.)", "The hamburger was engulfed by five black-crowned, broken fingernails\n and raised to two rows of yellow ivory. I surrounded it like an ameba,\n almost in a single movement of my jaws.\n\n\n Several other hamburgers followed the first. I lost count. I drank a\n glass of milk. I didn't want to black out on coffee with Doc waiting\n for me.\n\n\n \"Could I have a few to take with me, miss?\" I pleaded.\n\n\n She smiled. I caught that out of the edge of my vision, but mostly I\n just felt it.\n\n\n \"That's the first time you've called me anything but 'ma'am',\" she\n said. \"I'm not an old-maid schoolteacher, you know.\"\n\n\n That probably meant she was a schoolteacher, though. \"No, miss,\" I said.", "\"Sure,\" the man agreed severely, prying a little worriedly at Doc's\n arthritic fingers that were clamped on his collar. \"No argument. Sure,\n up we go. But leave me go or, so help me, I'll fetch you one in the\n teeth!\"\n\n\n I came alongside and carefully started to lever the old man loose,\n one finger at a time. It had to be done this way. I had learned that\n during all these weeks and months. His hands looked old and crippled,\n but I felt they were the strongest in the world. If a half dozen winos\n in Seattle hadn't helped me get them loose, Doc and I would have been\n wanted for the murder of a North American Mountie.\n\n\n It was easier this night and that made me afraid. Doc's thin frame,\n layered with lumpy fat, was beginning to muscle-dance against my side.\n One of his times was coming on him. Then at last he was free of the\n greasy collar of the human.", "\"What nickel?\" His eyes were big, but they kept looking right at me.\n \"You don't have any nickel. You don't have any quarter, not if I say\n so. Want I should call a cop and tell him you were flexing a muscle?\"\n\n\n I let go of him. He didn't scare me, but Doc was beginning to mumble\n and that\ndid\nscare me. I had to get him alone.\n\n\n \"Where's the room?\" I asked.\nThe room was six feet in all directions and the walls were five feet\n high. The other foot was finished in chicken wire. There was a wino\n singing on the left, a wino praying on the right, and the door didn't\n have any lock on it. At last, Doc and I were alone.", "That wasn't just an addict's dream. I knew who Doc was. When I got\n to thinking it was just a dream and that I was dragging this old man\n around North America for nothing, I remembered who he was.\n\n\n I remembered that he was somebody very important whose name and work I\n had once known, even if now I knew him only as Doc.\n\n\n Pain was a pendulum within me, swinging from low throbbing bass to high\n screaming tenor. I had to get out and get some. But I didn't have a\n nickel. Still, I had to get some.\n\n\n I crawled to the door and raised myself by the knob, slick with greasy\n dirt. The door opened and shut—there was no lock. I shouldn't leave\n Doc alone, but I had to.\n\n\n He was starting to cry. He didn't always do that.", "I scooped up my change and walked out the door. There was no one on the\n sidewalk, only in the doorways.\nFirst I opened the door on an amber world, then an azure one. Neon\n light was coming from the chickenwire border of the room, from a window\n somewhere beyond. The wino on one side of the room was singing and\n the one on the other side was praying, same as before. Only they had\n changed around—prayer came from the left, song from the right.\n\n\n Doc sat on the floor in the half-darkness and he had made a\nthing\n.\nMy heart hammered at my lungs. I\nknew\nthis last time had been\n different. Whatever it was was getting closer. This was the first time\n Doc had ever made anything. It didn't look like much, but it was a\n start.", "I laid Doc out on the gray-brown cot and put his forearm over his face\n to shield it some from the glare of the light bulb. I swept off all the\n bedbugs in sight and stepped on them heavily.\n\n\n Then I dropped down into the painted stool chair and let my burning\n eyes rest on the obscene wall drawings just to focus them. I was so\n dirty, I could feel the grime grinding together all over me. My shaggy\n scalp still smarted from the alcohol I had stolen from a convertible's\n gas tank to get rid of Doc's and my cooties. Lucky that I never needed\n to shave and that my face was so dirty, no one would even notice that I\n didn't need to.\n\n\n The cramp hit me and I folded out of the chair onto the littered,\n uncovered floor.", "\"Listen, Kevin. Listen carefully to what I am saying. Doc found\n a method of time travel. It was almost a purely mathematical,\n topographical way divorced from modern physical sciences. He kept it\n secret and he wanted to make money with it. He was an idealist—he had\n his crusades. How can you make money with time travel?\"\n\n\n I didn't know whether she was asking me, but I didn't know. All I knew\n was that I had to help Doc and get some coffee.\n\n\n \"It takes money—money Doc didn't have—to make money,\" Miss Casey\n said, \"even if you know what horse will come in and what stock will\n prosper. Besides, horse-racing and the stock market weren't a part of\n Doc's character. He was a scholar.\"\n\n\n Why did she keep using the past tense in reference to Doc? It scared\n me. He was lying so still with the left side of his face so twisted. I\n needed some coffee.", "I told the human no, thanks, and walked Doc toward the flophouse three\n doors down. I hoped we would make it. I didn't know what would happen\n if we didn't. Doc was liable to say something that might nova Sol, for\n all I knew.\nMartians approaching the corner were sensing at Doc and me. They\n were just cheap tourists slumming down on Skid Row. I hated tourists\n and especially I hated Martian tourists because I especially hated\n Martians. They were\naliens\n. They weren't\nmen\nlike Doc and me.\n\n\n Then I realized what was about to happen. It was foolish and awful and\n true. I was going to have one of mine at the same time Doc was having\n his. That was bad. It had happened a few times right after I first\n found him, but now it was worse. For some undefinable reason, I felt we\n kept getting closer each of the times.\n\n\n I tried not to think about it and helped Doc through the fly-specked\n flophouse doors.", "He held something out to me. It was my notebook. He had used my pen,\n before dismantling it, to write something. I tilted the notebook\n against the neon light, now red wine, now fresh grape. I read it.\n\n\n \"Concentrate,\" Doc said hoarsely. \"Concentrate....\"\n\n\n I wondered what the words meant. Wondering takes a kind of\n concentration.\n\n\n The words \"First Edition\" were what I was thinking about most.\nThe heavy-set man in the ornate armchair was saying, \"The bullet struck\n me as I was pulling on my boot....\"\n\n\n I was kneeling on the floor of a Victorian living room. I'm quite\n familiar with Earth history and I recognized the period immediately.\n\n\n Then I realized what I had been trying to get from Doc all these\n months—time travel.", "\"Why, yes. I'm flattered. This is the first manuscript. Considering my\n professional handwriting, I recopied it more laboriously.\"\nAccepting the sheaf of papers and not looking back at these two great\n and good men, I concentrated on my own time and Doc. Nothing happened.\n My heart raced, but I saw something dancing before me like a dust mote\n in sunlight and stepped toward it....\n\n\n ... into the effective range of Miss Casey's tiny gun.\nShe inclined the lethal silver toy. \"Let me see those papers, Kevin.\"\n\n\n I handed her the doctor's manuscript.\n\n\n Her breath escaped slowly and loudly. \"It's all right. It's all right.\n It exists. It's real. Not even one of the unwritten ones. I've read\n this myself.\"\n\n\n Doc was lying on the cot, half his face twisted into horror.", "So I was an Earthman, Doc's son. So my addiction to coffee was all in\n my mind. That didn't change anything. They say sex is all in your mind.\n I didn't want to be cured. I wouldn't be. Doc was gone. That was all I\n had now. That and the\nthing\nhe left.\n\n\n \"The rest is simple,\" Andre said. \"Doc O'Malley bought up all the stock\n in a certain ancient metaphysical order and started supplying members\n with certain books. Can you imagine the effect of the\nBook of Dyzan\nor the\nBook of Thoth\nor the\nSeven Cryptical Books of Hsan\nor the\nNecronomican\nitself on human beings?\"\n\n\n \"But they don't exist,\" I said wearily.", "I looked up at his stubbled face. \"I had half a dozen hamburgers, a\n cup of coffee and a glass of milk. I want four more 'burgers to go and\n a pint of coffee. By your prices, that will be one sixty-five—if the\n lady didn't pay you.\"\n\n\n \"She didn't,\" he stammered. \"Why do you think I was trying to get that\n bill out of your hand?\"\n\n\n I didn't say anything, just got up off the floor. After the counterman\n put down my change, I spread out the five dollar bill on the vacant\n bar, smoothing it.", "The tubercular clerk looked up from the gaudy comics sections of one of\n those little tabloids that have the funnies a week in advance.\n\n\n \"Fifteen cents a bed,\" he said mechanically.\n\n\n \"We'll use one bed,\" I told him. \"I'll give you twenty cents.\" I felt\n the round hard quarter in my pocket, sweaty hand against sticky lining.\n\n\n \"Fifteen cents a bed,\" he played it back for me.\n\n\n Doc was quivering against me, his legs boneless.\n\n\n \"We can always make it over to the mission,\" I lied.\n\n\n The clerk turned his upper lip as if he were going to spit. \"Awright,\n since we ain't full up. In\nad\nvance.\"\n\n\n I placed the quarter on the desk.\n\n\n \"Give me a nickel.\"", "The clerk's hand fell on the coin and slid it off into the unknown\n before I could move, what with holding up Doc.\n\n\n \"You've got your nerve,\" he said at me with a fine mist of dew. \"Had a\n quarter all along and yet you Martian me down to twenty cents.\" He saw\n the look on my face. \"I'll give you a\nroom\nfor the two bits. That's\n better'n a bed for twenty.\"\n\n\n I knew I was going to need that nickel.\nDesperately.\nI reached across\n the desk with my free hand and hauled the scrawny human up against the\n register hard. I'm not as strong in my hands as Doc, but I managed.\n\n\n \"Give me a nickel,\" I said.", "\"They ceased to exist—as human beings—shortly after they received a\n book from Doc,\" the Martian said.\n\n\n Something seemed to strike me in the back of the neck. I staggered, but\n managed to hold onto the gun and stand up.\n\n\n \"Use one of those sneaky Martian weapons again,\" I warned him,\n \"and I'll kill the girl.\" Martians were supposed to be against the\n destruction of any life-form, I had read someplace. I doubted it, but\n it was worth a try.\n\n\n \"Kevin,\" Andre said, \"why don't you take a bath?\"\n\n\n The Martian weapon staggered me again. I tried to say something. I\n tried to explain that I was so dirty that I could never get clean no\n matter how often I bathed. No words formed.", "\"Happy to, miss,\" I mumbled.\n\n\n She pushed a white rectangle in front of me on the painted maroon bar.\n \"What do you think of this?\"\n\n\n I looked at the piece of paper. It was a coupon from a magazine.\nDear Acolyte R. I. S.\n:\nPlease send me FREE of obligation, in sealed wrapper, \"The Scarlet\n Book\" revealing to me how I may gain Secret Mastery of the Universe.\nName\n: ........................\nAddress\n: .....................\n\n\n The world disoriented itself and I was on the floor of the somber diner\n and Miss Vivian Casey was out of sight and scent.\n\n\n There was a five dollar bill tight in my fist. The counterman was\n trying to pull it out.", "It stopped hurting, but I knew it would begin if I moved. I stared at a\n jagged cut-out nude curled against a lump of dust and lint, giving it\n an unreal distortion.\n\n\n Doc began to mumble louder.\n\n\n I knew I had to move.\n\n\n I waited just a moment, savoring the painless peace. Then, finally, I\n moved.", "\"But, Kevin,\" Andre said, \"you aren't\nthat\ndirty.\"\nThe blow shook the gun from my fingers. It almost fell into the\nthing\non the floor, but at the last moment seemed to change direction and\n miss it.\n\n\n I knew something. \"I don't wash because I drink coffee.\"\n\n\n \"It's all right to drink coffee, isn't it?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" I said, and added absurdly, \"That's why I don't wash.\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" Andre said slowly, ploddingly, \"that if you bathed, you\n would be admitting that drinking coffee was in the same class as any\n other solitary vice that makes people wash frequently.\"\n\n\n I was knocked to my knees." ], [ "He held something out to me. It was my notebook. He had used my pen,\n before dismantling it, to write something. I tilted the notebook\n against the neon light, now red wine, now fresh grape. I read it.\n\n\n \"Concentrate,\" Doc said hoarsely. \"Concentrate....\"\n\n\n I wondered what the words meant. Wondering takes a kind of\n concentration.\n\n\n The words \"First Edition\" were what I was thinking about most.\nThe heavy-set man in the ornate armchair was saying, \"The bullet struck\n me as I was pulling on my boot....\"\n\n\n I was kneeling on the floor of a Victorian living room. I'm quite\n familiar with Earth history and I recognized the period immediately.\n\n\n Then I realized what I had been trying to get from Doc all these\n months—time travel.", "The hamburger was engulfed by five black-crowned, broken fingernails\n and raised to two rows of yellow ivory. I surrounded it like an ameba,\n almost in a single movement of my jaws.\n\n\n Several other hamburgers followed the first. I lost count. I drank a\n glass of milk. I didn't want to black out on coffee with Doc waiting\n for me.\n\n\n \"Could I have a few to take with me, miss?\" I pleaded.\n\n\n She smiled. I caught that out of the edge of my vision, but mostly I\n just felt it.\n\n\n \"That's the first time you've called me anything but 'ma'am',\" she\n said. \"I'm not an old-maid schoolteacher, you know.\"\n\n\n That probably meant she was a schoolteacher, though. \"No, miss,\" I said.", "\"Happy to, miss,\" I mumbled.\n\n\n She pushed a white rectangle in front of me on the painted maroon bar.\n \"What do you think of this?\"\n\n\n I looked at the piece of paper. It was a coupon from a magazine.\nDear Acolyte R. I. S.\n:\nPlease send me FREE of obligation, in sealed wrapper, \"The Scarlet\n Book\" revealing to me how I may gain Secret Mastery of the Universe.\nName\n: ........................\nAddress\n: .....................\n\n\n The world disoriented itself and I was on the floor of the somber diner\n and Miss Vivian Casey was out of sight and scent.\n\n\n There was a five dollar bill tight in my fist. The counterman was\n trying to pull it out.", "I listened to him for a moment, then tested and tasted the craving that\n crawled through my veins. I got back inside somehow.\n\n\n Doc was twisting on the cot, tears washing white streaks across his\n face. I shoved Doc's face up against my chest. I held onto him and let\n him bellow. I soothed the lanks of soiled white hair back over his\n lumpy skull.\n\n\n He shut up at last and I laid him down again and put his arm back\n across his face. (You can't turn the light off and on in places like\n that. The old wiring will blow the bulb half the time.)", "\"Why, yes. I'm flattered. This is the first manuscript. Considering my\n professional handwriting, I recopied it more laboriously.\"\nAccepting the sheaf of papers and not looking back at these two great\n and good men, I concentrated on my own time and Doc. Nothing happened.\n My heart raced, but I saw something dancing before me like a dust mote\n in sunlight and stepped toward it....\n\n\n ... into the effective range of Miss Casey's tiny gun.\nShe inclined the lethal silver toy. \"Let me see those papers, Kevin.\"\n\n\n I handed her the doctor's manuscript.\n\n\n Her breath escaped slowly and loudly. \"It's all right. It's all right.\n It exists. It's real. Not even one of the unwritten ones. I've read\n this myself.\"\n\n\n Doc was lying on the cot, half his face twisted into horror.", "\"He became a book finder. He got rare editions of books and magazines\n for his clients in absolutely mint condition. That was all right—until\n he started obtaining books that\ndid not exist\n.\"\nI didn't know what all that was supposed to mean. I got to the chair,\n snatched up the coffee container, tore it open and gulped down the\n soothing liquid.\n\n\n I turned toward her and threw the rest of the coffee into her face.\n\n\n The coffee splashed out over her platinum hair and powder-blue dress\n that looked white when the neon was azure, purple when it was amber.\n The coffee stained and soiled and ruined, and I was fiercely glad,\n unreasonably happy.\n\n\n I tore the gun away from her by the short barrel, not letting my filthy\n hands touch her scrubbed pink ones.", "I was bent double, but I got from the floor to the chair and found\n my notebook and orb-point in my hands. I found I couldn't focus both\n my mind and my eyes through the electric flashes of agony, so I\n concentrated on Doc's voice and trusted my hands would follow their\n habit pattern and construct the symbols for his words. They were\n suddenly distinguishable.\n\"\nOutsider\n...\nThoth\n...\nDyzan\n...\nSeven\n...\nHsan\n...\nBeyond Six, Seven, Eight\n...\nTwo boxes\n...\nRalston", "I hadn't eaten in a day and a half, but I didn't care much.\n\n\n \"I'll buy you a dinner,\" she said carefully, \"provided I can go with\n you and see for myself that you actually eat it.\"\n\n\n I felt my face flushing red. \"You wouldn't want to be seen with a bum\n like me, ma'am.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be seen with you if you really want to eat.\"\n\n\n It was certainly unfair and probably immoral. But I had no choice\n whatever.\n\n\n \"Okay,\" I said, tasting bitterness over the craving.\nThe coffee was in a thick white cup before me on the counter. It was\n pale, grayish brown and steaming faintly. I picked it up in both hands\n to feel its warmth.", "\"Your hands, though unclean, have never seen physical labor. Your\n cranial construction is of a superior type, or even if you reject my\n theories, concentration does set the facial features. I judge you have\n suffered an illness because of the inhibition of your beard growth.\n Your over-fondness for rum or opium, perhaps, is self-evident. You\n are at too resilient an age to be so sunk by even an amour. Why else\n then would you let yourself fall into such an underfed and unsanitary\n state?\"\nHe was so smug and so sure, this snowbird. I hated him. Because I\n couldn't trust to my own senses as he did.\n\n\n \"You don't exist,\" I said slowly, painfully. \"You are fictional\n creations.\"\n\n\n The doctor flushed darkly. \"You give my literary agent too much credit\n for the addition of professional polish to my works.\"", "I thought of Cleopatra and Helen of Troy and wondered if they would be\n the goddesses of love that people imagined or the scrawny, big-nosed\n redhead and fading old woman of scholarship. Then I noticed the\n detective's hand that had been resting idly on a round brass weight of\n unknown sort to me. His tapered fingertips had indented the metal.\n\n\n His bright eyes followed mine and he smiled faintly. \"Withdrawal\n symptoms.\"\n\n\n The admiration and affection for this man that had been slowly building\n up behind my hatred unbrinked. I remembered now that he had stopped. He\n was not\nreally\na snowbird.\n\n\n After a time, I asked the doctor a question.", "I looked up at his stubbled face. \"I had half a dozen hamburgers, a\n cup of coffee and a glass of milk. I want four more 'burgers to go and\n a pint of coffee. By your prices, that will be one sixty-five—if the\n lady didn't pay you.\"\n\n\n \"She didn't,\" he stammered. \"Why do you think I was trying to get that\n bill out of your hand?\"\n\n\n I didn't say anything, just got up off the floor. After the counterman\n put down my change, I spread out the five dollar bill on the vacant\n bar, smoothing it.", "I scooped up my change and walked out the door. There was no one on the\n sidewalk, only in the doorways.\nFirst I opened the door on an amber world, then an azure one. Neon\n light was coming from the chickenwire border of the room, from a window\n somewhere beyond. The wino on one side of the room was singing and\n the one on the other side was praying, same as before. Only they had\n changed around—prayer came from the left, song from the right.\n\n\n Doc sat on the floor in the half-darkness and he had made a\nthing\n.\nMy heart hammered at my lungs. I\nknew\nthis last time had been\n different. Whatever it was was getting closer. This was the first time\n Doc had ever made anything. It didn't look like much, but it was a\n start.", "\"Sure,\" the man agreed severely, prying a little worriedly at Doc's\n arthritic fingers that were clamped on his collar. \"No argument. Sure,\n up we go. But leave me go or, so help me, I'll fetch you one in the\n teeth!\"\n\n\n I came alongside and carefully started to lever the old man loose,\n one finger at a time. It had to be done this way. I had learned that\n during all these weeks and months. His hands looked old and crippled,\n but I felt they were the strongest in the world. If a half dozen winos\n in Seattle hadn't helped me get them loose, Doc and I would have been\n wanted for the murder of a North American Mountie.\n\n\n It was easier this night and that made me afraid. Doc's thin frame,\n layered with lumpy fat, was beginning to muscle-dance against my side.\n One of his times was coming on him. Then at last he was free of the\n greasy collar of the human.", "He had broken the light bulb and used the filament and screw bottom.\n His strong hands had unraveled some of the bed \"springs\"—metal\n webbing—and fashioned them to his needs. My orb-point pen had\n dissolved under his touch. All of them, useless parts, were made into a\n meaningful whole.\n\n\n I knew the thing had meaning, but when I tried to follow its design, I\n became lost.\n\n\n I put the paper container of warm coffee and the greasy bag of\n hamburgers on the wooden chair, hoping the odor wouldn't bring any\n hungry rats out of the walls.\n\n\n I knelt beside Doc.\n\n\n \"An order, my boy, an order,\" he whispered.\n\n\n I didn't know what he meant. Was he suddenly trying to give me orders?", "\"But, Kevin,\" Andre said, \"you aren't\nthat\ndirty.\"\nThe blow shook the gun from my fingers. It almost fell into the\nthing\non the floor, but at the last moment seemed to change direction and\n miss it.\n\n\n I knew something. \"I don't wash because I drink coffee.\"\n\n\n \"It's all right to drink coffee, isn't it?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" I said, and added absurdly, \"That's why I don't wash.\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" Andre said slowly, ploddingly, \"that if you bathed, you\n would be admitting that drinking coffee was in the same class as any\n other solitary vice that makes people wash frequently.\"\n\n\n I was knocked to my knees.", "It stopped hurting, but I knew it would begin if I moved. I stared at a\n jagged cut-out nude curled against a lump of dust and lint, giving it\n an unreal distortion.\n\n\n Doc began to mumble louder.\n\n\n I knew I had to move.\n\n\n I waited just a moment, savoring the painless peace. Then, finally, I\n moved.", "I laid Doc out on the gray-brown cot and put his forearm over his face\n to shield it some from the glare of the light bulb. I swept off all the\n bedbugs in sight and stepped on them heavily.\n\n\n Then I dropped down into the painted stool chair and let my burning\n eyes rest on the obscene wall drawings just to focus them. I was so\n dirty, I could feel the grime grinding together all over me. My shaggy\n scalp still smarted from the alcohol I had stolen from a convertible's\n gas tank to get rid of Doc's and my cooties. Lucky that I never needed\n to shave and that my face was so dirty, no one would even notice that I\n didn't need to.\n\n\n The cramp hit me and I folded out of the chair onto the littered,\n uncovered floor.", "I told the human no, thanks, and walked Doc toward the flophouse three\n doors down. I hoped we would make it. I didn't know what would happen\n if we didn't. Doc was liable to say something that might nova Sol, for\n all I knew.\nMartians approaching the corner were sensing at Doc and me. They\n were just cheap tourists slumming down on Skid Row. I hated tourists\n and especially I hated Martian tourists because I especially hated\n Martians. They were\naliens\n. They weren't\nmen\nlike Doc and me.\n\n\n Then I realized what was about to happen. It was foolish and awful and\n true. I was going to have one of mine at the same time Doc was having\n his. That was bad. It had happened a few times right after I first\n found him, but now it was worse. For some undefinable reason, I felt we\n kept getting closer each of the times.\n\n\n I tried not to think about it and helped Doc through the fly-specked\n flophouse doors.", "\"What nickel?\" His eyes were big, but they kept looking right at me.\n \"You don't have any nickel. You don't have any quarter, not if I say\n so. Want I should call a cop and tell him you were flexing a muscle?\"\n\n\n I let go of him. He didn't scare me, but Doc was beginning to mumble\n and that\ndid\nscare me. I had to get him alone.\n\n\n \"Where's the room?\" I asked.\nThe room was six feet in all directions and the walls were five feet\n high. The other foot was finished in chicken wire. There was a wino\n singing on the left, a wino praying on the right, and the door didn't\n have any lock on it. At last, Doc and I were alone.", "A thin, sickly man was sprawled in the other chair in a rumpled\n dressing gown. My eyes held to his face, his pinpoint pupils and\n whitened nose. He was a condemned snowbird! If there was anything I\n hated or held in more contempt than tourists or Martians, it was a\n snowbird.\n\n\n \"My clients have occasioned singular methods of entry into these\n rooms,\" the thin man remarked, \"but never before have they used\n instantaneous materialization.\"\n\n\n The heavier man was half choking, half laughing. \"I say—I say, I would\n like to see you explain this, my dear fellow.\"\n\n\n \"I have no data,\" the thin man answered coolly. \"In such instance, one\n begins to twist theories into fact, or facts into theories. I must ask\n this unemployed, former professional man who has gone through a serious\n illness and is suffering a more serious addiction to tell me the place\n and\ntime\nfrom which he comes.\"" ], [ "\"Why, yes. I'm flattered. This is the first manuscript. Considering my\n professional handwriting, I recopied it more laboriously.\"\nAccepting the sheaf of papers and not looking back at these two great\n and good men, I concentrated on my own time and Doc. Nothing happened.\n My heart raced, but I saw something dancing before me like a dust mote\n in sunlight and stepped toward it....\n\n\n ... into the effective range of Miss Casey's tiny gun.\nShe inclined the lethal silver toy. \"Let me see those papers, Kevin.\"\n\n\n I handed her the doctor's manuscript.\n\n\n Her breath escaped slowly and loudly. \"It's all right. It's all right.\n It exists. It's real. Not even one of the unwritten ones. I've read\n this myself.\"\n\n\n Doc was lying on the cot, half his face twisted into horror.", "\"Happy to, miss,\" I mumbled.\n\n\n She pushed a white rectangle in front of me on the painted maroon bar.\n \"What do you think of this?\"\n\n\n I looked at the piece of paper. It was a coupon from a magazine.\nDear Acolyte R. I. S.\n:\nPlease send me FREE of obligation, in sealed wrapper, \"The Scarlet\n Book\" revealing to me how I may gain Secret Mastery of the Universe.\nName\n: ........................\nAddress\n: .....................\n\n\n The world disoriented itself and I was on the floor of the somber diner\n and Miss Vivian Casey was out of sight and scent.\n\n\n There was a five dollar bill tight in my fist. The counterman was\n trying to pull it out.", "\"It's Miss Casey—Vivian Casey,\" she corrected. She was a\n schoolteacher, all right. No other girl would introduce herself as Miss\n Last Name. Then there was something in her voice....\n\n\n \"What's your name?\" she said to me.\n\n\n I choked a little on a bite of stale bun.\n\n\n I\nhad\na name,\nof course\n.\nEverybody has a name, and I knew if I went off somewhere quiet and\n thought about it, mine would come to me. Meanwhile, I would tell the\n girl that my name was ... Kevin O'Malley. Abruptly I realized that that\nwas\nmy name.\n\n\n \"Kevin,\" I told her. \"John Kevin.\"\n\n\n \"Mister Kevin,\" she said, her words dancing with bright absurdity like\n waterhose mist on a summer afternoon, \"I wonder if you could help\nme\n.\"", "I knew I could not let Doc's—Dad's—time travel\nthing\nfall into\n anyone's hands. I remembered that all the copies of the books had\n disappeared with their readers now. There must not be any more, I knew.\n\n\n Miss Casey did her duty and tried to stop me with a judo hold, but I\n don't think her heart was in it, because I reversed and broke it.\n\n\n I kicked the\nthing\nto pieces and stomped on the pieces. Maybe you\n can't stop the progress of science, but I knew it might be millenniums\n before Doc's genes and creative environment were recreated and time\n travel was rediscovered. Maybe we would be ready for it then. I knew we\n weren't now.\n\n\n Miss Casey leaned against my dirty chest and cried into it. I didn't\n mind her touching me.\n\n\n \"I'm glad,\" she said.", "Andre flowed out of the doorway with a sigh. Of relief?\n\n\n I would never know. I supposed I had destroyed\nit\nbecause I didn't\n want the human race to become a thing of pure reason without purpose,\n direction or love, but I would never know for sure. I thought I could\n kick the habit—perhaps with Miss Casey's help—but I wasn't really\n confident.\n\n\n Maybe I had destroyed the time machine because a world without material\n needs would not grow and roast coffee.", "The hamburger was engulfed by five black-crowned, broken fingernails\n and raised to two rows of yellow ivory. I surrounded it like an ameba,\n almost in a single movement of my jaws.\n\n\n Several other hamburgers followed the first. I lost count. I drank a\n glass of milk. I didn't want to black out on coffee with Doc waiting\n for me.\n\n\n \"Could I have a few to take with me, miss?\" I pleaded.\n\n\n She smiled. I caught that out of the edge of my vision, but mostly I\n just felt it.\n\n\n \"That's the first time you've called me anything but 'ma'am',\" she\n said. \"I'm not an old-maid schoolteacher, you know.\"\n\n\n That probably meant she was a schoolteacher, though. \"No, miss,\" I said.", "\"Listen, Kevin. Listen carefully to what I am saying. Doc found\n a method of time travel. It was almost a purely mathematical,\n topographical way divorced from modern physical sciences. He kept it\n secret and he wanted to make money with it. He was an idealist—he had\n his crusades. How can you make money with time travel?\"\n\n\n I didn't know whether she was asking me, but I didn't know. All I knew\n was that I had to help Doc and get some coffee.\n\n\n \"It takes money—money Doc didn't have—to make money,\" Miss Casey\n said, \"even if you know what horse will come in and what stock will\n prosper. Besides, horse-racing and the stock market weren't a part of\n Doc's character. He was a scholar.\"\n\n\n Why did she keep using the past tense in reference to Doc? It scared\n me. He was lying so still with the left side of his face so twisted. I\n needed some coffee.", "I thought of Cleopatra and Helen of Troy and wondered if they would be\n the goddesses of love that people imagined or the scrawny, big-nosed\n redhead and fading old woman of scholarship. Then I noticed the\n detective's hand that had been resting idly on a round brass weight of\n unknown sort to me. His tapered fingertips had indented the metal.\n\n\n His bright eyes followed mine and he smiled faintly. \"Withdrawal\n symptoms.\"\n\n\n The admiration and affection for this man that had been slowly building\n up behind my hatred unbrinked. I remembered now that he had stopped. He\n was not\nreally\na snowbird.\n\n\n After a time, I asked the doctor a question.", "\"Don't move, Kevin,\" she said. \"I'll have to shoot you—maybe not to\n kill, but painfully.\"\n\n\n I watched her face flash blue, red, blue and knew she meant it. But I\n had known too much in too short a time. I had to help Doc, but there\n was something else.\n\n\n \"I just want a drink of coffee from that container on the chair,\" I\n told her.\n\n\n She shook her head. \"I don't know what you think it does to you.\"\n\n\n It was getting hard for me to think. \"Who are you?\"\n\n\n She showed me a card from her wrist purse. Vivian Casey, Constable,\n North American Mounted Police.\n\n\n I had to help Doc. I had to have some coffee. \"What do you want?\"", "I looked up at his stubbled face. \"I had half a dozen hamburgers, a\n cup of coffee and a glass of milk. I want four more 'burgers to go and\n a pint of coffee. By your prices, that will be one sixty-five—if the\n lady didn't pay you.\"\n\n\n \"She didn't,\" he stammered. \"Why do you think I was trying to get that\n bill out of your hand?\"\n\n\n I didn't say anything, just got up off the floor. After the counterman\n put down my change, I spread out the five dollar bill on the vacant\n bar, smoothing it.", "I don't remember how I got out onto the street.\nShe was pink and clean and her platinum hair was pulled straight back,\n drawing her cheek-bones tighter, straightening her wide, appealing\n mouth, drawing her lean, athletic, feminine body erect. She was wearing\n a powder-blue dress that covered all of her breasts and hips and the\n upper half of her legs.\n\n\n The most wonderful thing about her was her perfume. Then I realized it\n wasn't perfume, only the scent of soap. Finally, I knew it wasn't that.\n It was just healthy, fresh-scrubbed skin.\n\n\n I went to her at the bus stop, forcing my legs not to stagger. Nobody\n would help a drunk. I don't know why, but nobody will help you if they\n think you are blotto.", "\"Ma'am, could you help a man who's not had work?\" I kept my eyes down.\n I couldn't look a human in the eye and ask for help. \"Just a dime for a\n cup of coffee.\" I knew where I could get it for three cents, maybe two\n and a half.\n\n\n I felt her looking at me. She spoke in an educated voice, one she used,\n perhaps, as a teacher or supervising telephone operator. \"Do you want\n it for coffee, or to apply, or a glass or hypo of something else?\"\n\n\n I cringed and whined. She would expect it of me. I suddenly realized\n that anybody as clean as she was had to be a tourist here. I hate\n tourists.\n\n\n \"Just coffee, ma'am.\" She was younger than I was, so I didn't have to\n call her that. \"A little more for food, if you could spare it.\"", "\"But, Kevin,\" Andre said, \"you aren't\nthat\ndirty.\"\nThe blow shook the gun from my fingers. It almost fell into the\nthing\non the floor, but at the last moment seemed to change direction and\n miss it.\n\n\n I knew something. \"I don't wash because I drink coffee.\"\n\n\n \"It's all right to drink coffee, isn't it?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" I said, and added absurdly, \"That's why I don't wash.\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" Andre said slowly, ploddingly, \"that if you bathed, you\n would be admitting that drinking coffee was in the same class as any\n other solitary vice that makes people wash frequently.\"\n\n\n I was knocked to my knees.", "He had broken the light bulb and used the filament and screw bottom.\n His strong hands had unraveled some of the bed \"springs\"—metal\n webbing—and fashioned them to his needs. My orb-point pen had\n dissolved under his touch. All of them, useless parts, were made into a\n meaningful whole.\n\n\n I knew the thing had meaning, but when I tried to follow its design, I\n became lost.\n\n\n I put the paper container of warm coffee and the greasy bag of\n hamburgers on the wooden chair, hoping the odor wouldn't bring any\n hungry rats out of the walls.\n\n\n I knelt beside Doc.\n\n\n \"An order, my boy, an order,\" he whispered.\n\n\n I didn't know what he meant. Was he suddenly trying to give me orders?", "I pointed the gun generally at her and backed around the\nthing\non the\n floor to the cot. Doc had a pulse, but it was irregular. I checked for\n a fever and there wasn't one. After that, I didn't know what to do.\n\n\n I looked up finally and saw a Martian in or about the doorway.\n\n\n \"Call me Andre,\" the Martian said. \"A common name but foreign. It\n should serve as a point of reference.\"\n\n\n I had always wondered how a thing like a Martian could talk. Sometimes\n I wondered if they really could.\n\n\n \"You won't need the gun,\" Andre said conversationally.\n\n\n \"I'll keep it, thanks. What do\nyou\nwant?\"\n\n\n \"I'll begin as Miss Casey did—by telling you things. Hundreds of\n people disappeared from North America a few months ago.\"\n\n\n \"They always do,\" I told him.", "I hadn't eaten in a day and a half, but I didn't care much.\n\n\n \"I'll buy you a dinner,\" she said carefully, \"provided I can go with\n you and see for myself that you actually eat it.\"\n\n\n I felt my face flushing red. \"You wouldn't want to be seen with a bum\n like me, ma'am.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be seen with you if you really want to eat.\"\n\n\n It was certainly unfair and probably immoral. But I had no choice\n whatever.\n\n\n \"Okay,\" I said, tasting bitterness over the craving.\nThe coffee was in a thick white cup before me on the counter. It was\n pale, grayish brown and steaming faintly. I picked it up in both hands\n to feel its warmth.", "\"He became a book finder. He got rare editions of books and magazines\n for his clients in absolutely mint condition. That was all right—until\n he started obtaining books that\ndid not exist\n.\"\nI didn't know what all that was supposed to mean. I got to the chair,\n snatched up the coffee container, tore it open and gulped down the\n soothing liquid.\n\n\n I turned toward her and threw the rest of the coffee into her face.\n\n\n The coffee splashed out over her platinum hair and powder-blue dress\n that looked white when the neon was azure, purple when it was amber.\n The coffee stained and soiled and ruined, and I was fiercely glad,\n unreasonably happy.\n\n\n I tore the gun away from her by the short barrel, not letting my filthy\n hands touch her scrubbed pink ones.", "\"Your hands, though unclean, have never seen physical labor. Your\n cranial construction is of a superior type, or even if you reject my\n theories, concentration does set the facial features. I judge you have\n suffered an illness because of the inhibition of your beard growth.\n Your over-fondness for rum or opium, perhaps, is self-evident. You\n are at too resilient an age to be so sunk by even an amour. Why else\n then would you let yourself fall into such an underfed and unsanitary\n state?\"\nHe was so smug and so sure, this snowbird. I hated him. Because I\n couldn't trust to my own senses as he did.\n\n\n \"You don't exist,\" I said slowly, painfully. \"You are fictional\n creations.\"\n\n\n The doctor flushed darkly. \"You give my literary agent too much credit\n for the addition of professional polish to my works.\"", "It stopped hurting, but I knew it would begin if I moved. I stared at a\n jagged cut-out nude curled against a lump of dust and lint, giving it\n an unreal distortion.\n\n\n Doc began to mumble louder.\n\n\n I knew I had to move.\n\n\n I waited just a moment, savoring the painless peace. Then, finally, I\n moved.", "I listened to him for a moment, then tested and tasted the craving that\n crawled through my veins. I got back inside somehow.\n\n\n Doc was twisting on the cot, tears washing white streaks across his\n face. I shoved Doc's face up against my chest. I held onto him and let\n him bellow. I soothed the lanks of soiled white hair back over his\n lumpy skull.\n\n\n He shut up at last and I laid him down again and put his arm back\n across his face. (You can't turn the light off and on in places like\n that. The old wiring will blow the bulb half the time.)" ], [ "\"Sure,\" the man agreed severely, prying a little worriedly at Doc's\n arthritic fingers that were clamped on his collar. \"No argument. Sure,\n up we go. But leave me go or, so help me, I'll fetch you one in the\n teeth!\"\n\n\n I came alongside and carefully started to lever the old man loose,\n one finger at a time. It had to be done this way. I had learned that\n during all these weeks and months. His hands looked old and crippled,\n but I felt they were the strongest in the world. If a half dozen winos\n in Seattle hadn't helped me get them loose, Doc and I would have been\n wanted for the murder of a North American Mountie.\n\n\n It was easier this night and that made me afraid. Doc's thin frame,\n layered with lumpy fat, was beginning to muscle-dance against my side.\n One of his times was coming on him. Then at last he was free of the\n greasy collar of the human.", "\"What nickel?\" His eyes were big, but they kept looking right at me.\n \"You don't have any nickel. You don't have any quarter, not if I say\n so. Want I should call a cop and tell him you were flexing a muscle?\"\n\n\n I let go of him. He didn't scare me, but Doc was beginning to mumble\n and that\ndid\nscare me. I had to get him alone.\n\n\n \"Where's the room?\" I asked.\nThe room was six feet in all directions and the walls were five feet\n high. The other foot was finished in chicken wire. There was a wino\n singing on the left, a wino praying on the right, and the door didn't\n have any lock on it. At last, Doc and I were alone.", "That wasn't just an addict's dream. I knew who Doc was. When I got\n to thinking it was just a dream and that I was dragging this old man\n around North America for nothing, I remembered who he was.\n\n\n I remembered that he was somebody very important whose name and work I\n had once known, even if now I knew him only as Doc.\n\n\n Pain was a pendulum within me, swinging from low throbbing bass to high\n screaming tenor. I had to get out and get some. But I didn't have a\n nickel. Still, I had to get some.\n\n\n I crawled to the door and raised myself by the knob, slick with greasy\n dirt. The door opened and shut—there was no lock. I shouldn't leave\n Doc alone, but I had to.\n\n\n He was starting to cry. He didn't always do that.", "\"Why, yes. I'm flattered. This is the first manuscript. Considering my\n professional handwriting, I recopied it more laboriously.\"\nAccepting the sheaf of papers and not looking back at these two great\n and good men, I concentrated on my own time and Doc. Nothing happened.\n My heart raced, but I saw something dancing before me like a dust mote\n in sunlight and stepped toward it....\n\n\n ... into the effective range of Miss Casey's tiny gun.\nShe inclined the lethal silver toy. \"Let me see those papers, Kevin.\"\n\n\n I handed her the doctor's manuscript.\n\n\n Her breath escaped slowly and loudly. \"It's all right. It's all right.\n It exists. It's real. Not even one of the unwritten ones. I've read\n this myself.\"\n\n\n Doc was lying on the cot, half his face twisted into horror.", "I listened to him for a moment, then tested and tasted the craving that\n crawled through my veins. I got back inside somehow.\n\n\n Doc was twisting on the cot, tears washing white streaks across his\n face. I shoved Doc's face up against my chest. I held onto him and let\n him bellow. I soothed the lanks of soiled white hair back over his\n lumpy skull.\n\n\n He shut up at last and I laid him down again and put his arm back\n across his face. (You can't turn the light off and on in places like\n that. The old wiring will blow the bulb half the time.)", "He had broken the light bulb and used the filament and screw bottom.\n His strong hands had unraveled some of the bed \"springs\"—metal\n webbing—and fashioned them to his needs. My orb-point pen had\n dissolved under his touch. All of them, useless parts, were made into a\n meaningful whole.\n\n\n I knew the thing had meaning, but when I tried to follow its design, I\n became lost.\n\n\n I put the paper container of warm coffee and the greasy bag of\n hamburgers on the wooden chair, hoping the odor wouldn't bring any\n hungry rats out of the walls.\n\n\n I knelt beside Doc.\n\n\n \"An order, my boy, an order,\" he whispered.\n\n\n I didn't know what he meant. Was he suddenly trying to give me orders?", "I told the human no, thanks, and walked Doc toward the flophouse three\n doors down. I hoped we would make it. I didn't know what would happen\n if we didn't. Doc was liable to say something that might nova Sol, for\n all I knew.\nMartians approaching the corner were sensing at Doc and me. They\n were just cheap tourists slumming down on Skid Row. I hated tourists\n and especially I hated Martian tourists because I especially hated\n Martians. They were\naliens\n. They weren't\nmen\nlike Doc and me.\n\n\n Then I realized what was about to happen. It was foolish and awful and\n true. I was going to have one of mine at the same time Doc was having\n his. That was bad. It had happened a few times right after I first\n found him, but now it was worse. For some undefinable reason, I felt we\n kept getting closer each of the times.\n\n\n I tried not to think about it and helped Doc through the fly-specked\n flophouse doors.", "He held something out to me. It was my notebook. He had used my pen,\n before dismantling it, to write something. I tilted the notebook\n against the neon light, now red wine, now fresh grape. I read it.\n\n\n \"Concentrate,\" Doc said hoarsely. \"Concentrate....\"\n\n\n I wondered what the words meant. Wondering takes a kind of\n concentration.\n\n\n The words \"First Edition\" were what I was thinking about most.\nThe heavy-set man in the ornate armchair was saying, \"The bullet struck\n me as I was pulling on my boot....\"\n\n\n I was kneeling on the floor of a Victorian living room. I'm quite\n familiar with Earth history and I recognized the period immediately.\n\n\n Then I realized what I had been trying to get from Doc all these\n months—time travel.", "I laid Doc out on the gray-brown cot and put his forearm over his face\n to shield it some from the glare of the light bulb. I swept off all the\n bedbugs in sight and stepped on them heavily.\n\n\n Then I dropped down into the painted stool chair and let my burning\n eyes rest on the obscene wall drawings just to focus them. I was so\n dirty, I could feel the grime grinding together all over me. My shaggy\n scalp still smarted from the alcohol I had stolen from a convertible's\n gas tank to get rid of Doc's and my cooties. Lucky that I never needed\n to shave and that my face was so dirty, no one would even notice that I\n didn't need to.\n\n\n The cramp hit me and I folded out of the chair onto the littered,\n uncovered floor.", "\"Listen, Kevin. Listen carefully to what I am saying. Doc found\n a method of time travel. It was almost a purely mathematical,\n topographical way divorced from modern physical sciences. He kept it\n secret and he wanted to make money with it. He was an idealist—he had\n his crusades. How can you make money with time travel?\"\n\n\n I didn't know whether she was asking me, but I didn't know. All I knew\n was that I had to help Doc and get some coffee.\n\n\n \"It takes money—money Doc didn't have—to make money,\" Miss Casey\n said, \"even if you know what horse will come in and what stock will\n prosper. Besides, horse-racing and the stock market weren't a part of\n Doc's character. He was a scholar.\"\n\n\n Why did she keep using the past tense in reference to Doc? It scared\n me. He was lying so still with the left side of his face so twisted. I\n needed some coffee.", "So I was an Earthman, Doc's son. So my addiction to coffee was all in\n my mind. That didn't change anything. They say sex is all in your mind.\n I didn't want to be cured. I wouldn't be. Doc was gone. That was all I\n had now. That and the\nthing\nhe left.\n\n\n \"The rest is simple,\" Andre said. \"Doc O'Malley bought up all the stock\n in a certain ancient metaphysical order and started supplying members\n with certain books. Can you imagine the effect of the\nBook of Dyzan\nor the\nBook of Thoth\nor the\nSeven Cryptical Books of Hsan\nor the\nNecronomican\nitself on human beings?\"\n\n\n \"But they don't exist,\" I said wearily.", "\"Exactly, Kevin, exactly. They have never existed any more than your\n Victorian detective friend. But the unconscious racial mind has reached\n back into time and created them. And that unconscious mind, deeper than\n psychology terms the subconscious, has always known about the powers\n of ESP, telepathy, telekinesis, precognition. Through these books,\n the human race can tell itself how to achieve a state of pure logic,\n without food, without sex, without conflict—just as Doc has achieved\n such a state—a little late, true. He had a powerful guilt complex,\n even stronger than your withdrawal, over releasing this blessing on\n the inhabited universe, but reason finally prevailed. He had reached a\n state of pure thought.\"\n\n\n \"The North American government\nhas\nto have this secret, Kevin,\" the\n girl said. \"You can't let it fall into the hands of the Martians.\"\nAndre did not deny that he wanted it to fall into his hands.", "I scooped up my change and walked out the door. There was no one on the\n sidewalk, only in the doorways.\nFirst I opened the door on an amber world, then an azure one. Neon\n light was coming from the chickenwire border of the room, from a window\n somewhere beyond. The wino on one side of the room was singing and\n the one on the other side was praying, same as before. Only they had\n changed around—prayer came from the left, song from the right.\n\n\n Doc sat on the floor in the half-darkness and he had made a\nthing\n.\nMy heart hammered at my lungs. I\nknew\nthis last time had been\n different. Whatever it was was getting closer. This was the first time\n Doc had ever made anything. It didn't look like much, but it was a\n start.", "\"They ceased to exist—as human beings—shortly after they received a\n book from Doc,\" the Martian said.\n\n\n Something seemed to strike me in the back of the neck. I staggered, but\n managed to hold onto the gun and stand up.\n\n\n \"Use one of those sneaky Martian weapons again,\" I warned him,\n \"and I'll kill the girl.\" Martians were supposed to be against the\n destruction of any life-form, I had read someplace. I doubted it, but\n it was worth a try.\n\n\n \"Kevin,\" Andre said, \"why don't you take a bath?\"\n\n\n The Martian weapon staggered me again. I tried to say something. I\n tried to explain that I was so dirty that I could never get clean no\n matter how often I bathed. No words formed.", "It stopped hurting, but I knew it would begin if I moved. I stared at a\n jagged cut-out nude curled against a lump of dust and lint, giving it\n an unreal distortion.\n\n\n Doc began to mumble louder.\n\n\n I knew I had to move.\n\n\n I waited just a moment, savoring the painless peace. Then, finally, I\n moved.", "I was bent double, but I got from the floor to the chair and found\n my notebook and orb-point in my hands. I found I couldn't focus both\n my mind and my eyes through the electric flashes of agony, so I\n concentrated on Doc's voice and trusted my hands would follow their\n habit pattern and construct the symbols for his words. They were\n suddenly distinguishable.\n\"\nOutsider\n...\nThoth\n...\nDyzan\n...\nSeven\n...\nHsan\n...\nBeyond Six, Seven, Eight\n...\nTwo boxes\n...\nRalston", "The hamburger was engulfed by five black-crowned, broken fingernails\n and raised to two rows of yellow ivory. I surrounded it like an ameba,\n almost in a single movement of my jaws.\n\n\n Several other hamburgers followed the first. I lost count. I drank a\n glass of milk. I didn't want to black out on coffee with Doc waiting\n for me.\n\n\n \"Could I have a few to take with me, miss?\" I pleaded.\n\n\n She smiled. I caught that out of the edge of my vision, but mostly I\n just felt it.\n\n\n \"That's the first time you've called me anything but 'ma'am',\" she\n said. \"I'm not an old-maid schoolteacher, you know.\"\n\n\n That probably meant she was a schoolteacher, though. \"No, miss,\" I said.", "The clerk's hand fell on the coin and slid it off into the unknown\n before I could move, what with holding up Doc.\n\n\n \"You've got your nerve,\" he said at me with a fine mist of dew. \"Had a\n quarter all along and yet you Martian me down to twenty cents.\" He saw\n the look on my face. \"I'll give you a\nroom\nfor the two bits. That's\n better'n a bed for twenty.\"\n\n\n I knew I was going to need that nickel.\nDesperately.\nI reached across\n the desk with my free hand and hauled the scrawny human up against the\n register hard. I'm not as strong in my hands as Doc, but I managed.\n\n\n \"Give me a nickel,\" I said.", "Confidence Game\nBy JIM HARMON\n\n\n Illustrated by EPSTEIN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction June 1957.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI admit it: I didn't know if I was coming or\n \ngoing—but I know that if I stuck to the old\n \nman, I was a comer ... even if he was a goner!\nDoc had this solemn human by the throat when I caught up with him.\n\n\n \"Tonight,\" Doc was saying in his old voice that was as crackled and\n important as parchment, \"tonight Man will reach the Moon. The golden\n Moon and the silver ship, symbols of greed. Tonight is the night when\n this is to happen.\"", "\"But, Kevin,\" Andre said, \"you aren't\nthat\ndirty.\"\nThe blow shook the gun from my fingers. It almost fell into the\nthing\non the floor, but at the last moment seemed to change direction and\n miss it.\n\n\n I knew something. \"I don't wash because I drink coffee.\"\n\n\n \"It's all right to drink coffee, isn't it?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" I said, and added absurdly, \"That's why I don't wash.\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" Andre said slowly, ploddingly, \"that if you bathed, you\n would be admitting that drinking coffee was in the same class as any\n other solitary vice that makes people wash frequently.\"\n\n\n I was knocked to my knees." ] ]

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